Garro did as he was ordered, trailing warily after the psyker, into the gloom of depthless shadows cast by the curve of a half-furled solar shield. Malcador briefly vanished into the shade like a scrap of cloth sinking into an ocean of ink, and Garro heard clanking mechanical footfalls cross the floor, hissing pistons grinding to a halt.
An eyeless humanoid form, far more machine than flesh, presented itself. A blinded tech-adept of the Mechanicum, the Mars-born had a face made of metal plates and nothing that Garro could see in the form of sensors. Yet it approached him as if it saw clearly, opening up tool arms and bunches of serpentine mechadendrites in his direction.
The Sigillite turned back towards him and the stark white light reflected from the lunar landscape made Malcador’s face seem spectral and serene. He gestured. ‘Kneel, Nathaniel. Let the adept do his duty.’
‘As you wish.’ Garro reluctantly obeyed, frowning as he bent down on one knee, the joints of his bionic limb clicking. He placed his sheathed sword upon the tiled floor and held his war helmet to his chest, looking the Sigillite in the eye as the Mechanicum adept leaned in.
The legionary smelled the tang of bitter bio-lubricants and machine oil. Heat flared over the bare skin on his neck as fat yellow sparks leapt and sizzled. He heard the grinding hiss of a meson lance as it cut into the plates of his armour, the particle stream layering levels of infinitely complex nano-scale circuitry into the ceramite.
‘With this mark, you swear fealty to me,’ said Malcador. ‘You will obey my orders without question, to the bitter end.’
The warrior’s eyes narrowed. ‘I will obey,’ he countered, ‘as long as it serves the Emperor.’
‘It will.’ Garro felt the psyker’s mind press into his, and he steeled himself, even as he knew he would not be able to resist the Sigillite’s harrowing inner gaze.
‘I see the fury again, Nathaniel.’ Malcador cocked his head, studying the play of psychic streams that only he could perceive. ‘But now it is directed outwards. It burns in you, the need to deliver reprisal to your traitorous brothers. You seek to give censure to your former comrade Calas Typhon. Perhaps even to challenge your primarch Mortarion, for daring to believe he might turn you.’
‘Aye.’ He bit out the word, holding cold anger in his heart. ‘I will not deny it.’
Malcador gave a grim nod. ‘The time for vengeance will come. But this day hear my orders. Hold your enmity in check. Your mission comes first.’
The legionary accepted this without comment. Just as before, on the deck of the starship Eisenstein, when he sacrificed everything he knew to carry the warning of Horus’ treachery to Terra, the mission was his first, his only concern. If history was to recur, if it was his lot to play that same role, he would do it willingly, in the Emperor’s name.
The lance fell silent, and the scent of superheated ceramite was sharp in the air. Garro listened to the crackle of the cooling brand as the adept backed away, head bobbing respectfully. The mark was made, the deed done. Whatever came next, he was committed to it.
Metal rang on metal, as with care Malcador worked to draw the blade Libertas from its sheath. Garro saw him strain to hold it steady. The great sword was not meant for human hands. The Sigillite pointed the tip of the mighty weapon at the floor, turning it to present the flat of the blade to the warrior.
‘The oath, then.’
Garro removed a single gauntlet and placed his bare hand on the naked blade. With this act, he crossed the point of no return.
The Sigillite went on. ‘Nathaniel Garro. Do you accept your role in this? Will you dedicate yourself to my orders, and put aside all other claims upon your honour? Do you pledge yourself in this oath of moment?’
Garro nodded once. ‘By this matter and this weapon, I so swear. In His name.’
The Sigillite raised an eyebrow at his choice of words, but made no remark upon them. Rising to his full height once more, Garro took back his sword and bowed low, catching sight of himself in the towering windows. As good as it felt to be back in his armour and eagle cuirass after so long, it was still strange to see the new colours that Malcador had bade him wear.
Gone was the old Death Guard livery, the icon of the skull upon a six-pointed black star. There instead was a featureless ghost-grey that could have been slate or silver, or a shade in between. It stirred an odd emotion in Garro’s chest, one that he could not quantify.
‘What would you have me do?’
The Regent’s steady gaze did not waver. ‘Plans are being drawn. Another of my agents has drafted a list of names. You will leave the Somnus Citadel and travel the galaxy to seek the first of these individuals out.’
‘Another agent?’ Garro echoed, musing upon the rumours he had heard. ‘The Luna Wolf, Severian, perhaps?’
Malcador’s eyes narrowed at the legionary’s insight, but he neither confirmed nor denied his suspicions. ‘Twenty warriors from across all the Legions, both loyalist and traitor,’ he continued. ‘You will find them and bring them to me. You will do this, and leave no mark where you pass.’
Garro’s fingers tightened around the hilt of his sword. ‘For what cause?’
Malcador turned his back on him and looked out at the clouded orb of Terra, raised high in the lunar night. ‘For the future, Nathaniel.’
Calth was a world ablaze.
Deep in the Veridian System, beneath the hard light of a wounded sun, war like no other had come to the planet. A war that sounded its echoes across the galaxy. A war that would change the face of humankind forever.
Grim thunder roared over the distant howl of gunfire. Across the dying fields of blackened grasses, in the rubble of silent cities, through canyons of dark rock and ice-rimed sands, brother fought brother.
The Ultramarines, the sons of the great tactician primarch Roboute Guilliman, had come to the Veridian System to marshal their forces for battle. Their commander, ever the loyal warrior of the Imperium, massed the best of the XIII Legion, and their soldiers from the Ultramar regiments of the Imperial Auxilia. This he did under the orders of his brother, the Warmaster Horus Lupercal. This, Guilliman did without doubt or question.
His fealty was repaid with treason of the most odious stripe. The battle to come – the battle Horus had bade him prepare for – instead arrived shrieking from the skies on trails of blood and murder. The warriors of Lorgar’s XVII Legion, the zealot Word Bearers, had come to kill. And with their oaths to the Emperor of Mankind broken, their new turncoat loyalty to Horus still painted fresh upon their blood-dark armour, the Word Bearers stabbed their brothers in the back, and scattered the Ultramarines to the points of the compass.
Now, fire cradled Calth in molten talons of churning gas, great streams of glowing colour that reached around the latitudes and raked the heavens. The aftershock of massed salvoes of thermoplasma weapons and fusion bombs had torn into the planet’s atmosphere. The thin layer of fragile sky was broken, and the damage irreversible. No untainted breath of Calth’s air would remain, as each new dawn brought it closer to death.
Amid the flames, Lieutenant Olen wondered if he would live to meet the next sunrise. Like his men, Olen was born on Espandor, which along with Calth was one of many worlds in the Ultramar Coalition. And like many souls upon them, he had shared the desire to stand in defence of his Imperium and his Emperor.
Olen wore the sigils of the aquila and of Ultramar with pride. While he had not had the fortitude to become a legionary of the Ultramarines, he did his part nonetheless. And somehow, even in the darkest of days during the battles of the Great Crusade, Olen had never been in fear for his life. He did not consider this arrogance. It was only that he had never confronted an enemy so powerful that it could not be defeated by Ultramar courage. At least, not until this day. Olen had not faced a legionary in battle before, and there had never been cause to consider that such a thing might even occur. The mere thought of it was… foolis
h. That a single Space Marine might rebel against his liege lord was nigh-impossible to comprehend. And to suggest that an entire Legion, or even a primarch, could turn upon the Emperor for their own glory… If any of his troopers had said such a thing, Olen’s laughter would have drowned them out.
The only laughter now came from their killers.
When the Word Bearers arrived, they carried destruction with them. Olen saw hundreds of men die in that first barrage. He saw Ultramarines, weapons slung as they moved to greet the surprise arrival of their kinsmen, slaughtered where they stood in a flash of treachery. Ultramar’s finest warriors, human and legionary alike, reeled beneath a blow struck from nowhere.
They scattered across Calth in disarray even as Lorgar’s sons tore into the planet, and put it to the torch. It was as if the whole world and every living thing on it were to be some vast burned offering.
The last contact Olen’s unit made with an allied squad came from an armoured patrol moving north towards Numinus, the capital. The tank crews told the troopers of forces regrouping in the cavern cities, places where they might survive the souring of Calth’s atmosphere beneath miles of rock and steel. And so Olen and his troops broke out, intent on a fast march across the Plains of Dera to the caves.
It was a good plan. It had failed when the monsters came. They boiled out of the icy gloom, rising from their concealment among the ruins of a burning starport.
Olen had fought aliens, and these were no strain of xenos that he could recall. They were rippling, changing things that hooted and brayed, dragging clawed tentacles and bearing lamprey mouths. They drooled venoms that melted men, glared with orchards of eyes that froze your heart with a look. And some of them – the worst of them – seemed in part to resemble human beings, but seen through a hellish lens of madness and horror.
As they came again, he thought of a word that few would ever speak in these secular days of human empire. A word he had once heard his late grandfather utter in a moment of senility – or, perhaps, of clarity.
Daemon.
In his prime, the old man had been a starship officer, and in the madness of warp space he had glimpsed secrets that had followed him to his grave. He had died a little before young Olen’s eyes just to say that word.
Surveying the dwindling charge on his laspistol with grim understanding, Olen knew that he would very soon be joining his elder. The creatures advanced, and he gathered the last of his strength, casting around to his troops.
‘Every shot counts!’ He roared his final orders, determined not to go quietly. ‘Make them pay for all they take!’
The attack began anew. The nightmare spawn ripped into the troopers like a hurricane, cutting them down, eating them raw. Olen’s gun ran red-hot in his hand, but they did not drop. The largest of them rasped and screamed as they feasted on the fallen, and little by little the soldiers were forced into a collapsing ring as their number diminished. Death was moments away now.
Then, from above, deliverance arrived on wings of grey steel. A Stormbird drop-ship, falling from the fiery clouds as though it were some great eagle, casting a shadow over the fight, turning in place as spears of white flame held it aloft.
Olen’s attention was seized for a brief moment. The ship was clearly Legion-issue, and yet, try as he might, he could not recognise the livery. It was neither the deep arterial-red of the traitor Word Bearers nor the striking blue of the Ultramarines. It was the colour of ghosts.
He watched as a brass-leaf hatch snapped open, and from it fell a giant figure in armour the same shade as the ship. As the craft powered away, the hulking warrior landed with a thunderous impact, killing a handful of the fanged monsters with the force of his arrival. Olen saw a shimmer of light on a vast sword as tall as a man, as the grey figure drew it from the scabbard on his back. Then, with a black-enamelled boltgun in his other hand, the warrior threw himself into the melee.
The sword rose and fell, rose and fell. The bolter crashed, each hammering discharge blasting the freakish creatures into gobbets of ragged, bleeding matter. As one, the bestial things turned on the warrior, sensing where the greatest threat to them lay. But this was no soldier, no common man. The figure in grey ceramite was a legionary, and he strode through the ranks of his enemies as an angel of death.
In his wake there were no screams. He left nothing but clean kills, thinning the lines of the monsters as they hurled themselves at him. Olen called out orders to his troops, and bade them support the warrior’s fight, but the legionary did not need it. Alone, he did what more than a dozen soldiers had perished attempting. He won.
When it was over, the warrior advanced on them, and Olen could not help but draw back. He had seen legionaries on the field of battle many times, but never this close. Never like this, looming over him, the emerald lenses of a scowling battle helmet measuring him with cold intent.
The warrior gave his sword a cursory flick to shake off the tainted blood marring the blade, and returned it to the scabbard. Olen saw a word in High Gothic burned into the metal before it disappeared out of sight. Libertas.
‘You are in command here.’ It was not a question. Olen gave a stiff nod, kneading the grip of his laspistol. He was afraid to attempt to holster the weapon, for fear the legionary might think any sudden motion was an attack, and react in kind. ‘I need information, lieutenant,’ continued the masked figure.
‘Of course.’ He nodded. ‘You have our gratitude. Are you here as part of a reinforcement detail or–’
The warrior held up a hand to silence him. ‘The Twenty-First Company of the Ultramarines, under the command of Brother-Captain Erikon Gaius. You will tell me where to find them.’
The legionary did not raise his voice, and yet Olen’s hand was already beckoning to the squad’s vox-tech before he realised he was obeying the order. He halted, hesitating. ‘Can you tell us what is happening? The Word Bearers… They attacked us. The signals we have intercepted… People are saying that Lorgar and his warriors have turned against the Emperor.’ As he said it out loud, the full horror of the situation finally struck Olen and he shivered.
The reply cemented that cold dread in place. ‘It is worse than you know. Now tell me. Where is Captain Gaius?’
The lieutenant gave up the data. The 21st Company had last been sighted on the western outskirts of Numinus, and after a moment to glance over Olen’s fragmentary data-map, the legionary favoured him with a terse nod of thanks and walked away.
Abruptly, Olen realised he was leaving them behind. ‘Sir? Wait…’
Something about the legionary and his armour had sounded a wrong note in the lieutenant’s mind, and as he looked on him again, he saw why. The warrior’s wargear bore an ornate cuirass dressed in brass and gold. Across his chest was the head of a fierce eagle, and rising up behind his helm was a heavy plate of armour that was cut into another raptor-shape. But what seemed strange was the absence of all other detail. The Legiones Astartes bore their colours proudly, and carried the symbol of their brotherhood on the pauldron of their armour. This warrior had none. Aside from a few flashes of dark-coloured trim, his armour was a uniform stone-grey from helm to boot, bereft of iconography.
‘Who are you?’ The question was snatched away by the winds, but the legionary heard it and he halted. ‘Can you tell me that?’ Olen pressed on. ‘Before you go, at least let me know the name and the Legion of the warrior who saved our lives.’
For a moment, the armoured figure paused. Then he reached up and removed his helmet. A pale, patrician face, shorn and scarred, looked back at Olen with ancient, troubled eyes. ‘My name is Nathaniel Garro,’ he said, the words heavy with regret. ‘And I am a Legion of one.’
The Ultramarines of the 21st had been dug in for days, and if truth were told, they were now a company in name only. They had been at the forefront of the first Word Bearers’ assault, and it had been their sufferance to witness the deaths of too m
any battle-brothers. The captain – hero of the Haddir Uprising, Gaius the Strong, Gaius the Unflinching – had rallied them in the face of the brutal losses. With words and deeds he led them into the fray, and they claimed back in blood a price from the traitors. But not enough. Not yet enough.
Now they were here, cut off from contact with their kinsmen, holding one of the railroad approaches to Numinus City. Waiting for this new war to reach out to them once again.
Brother Rubio took a moment to shift his stance. On the captain’s orders, he had allowed his catalepsean node neural implant to dismiss the need for sleep, standing watchful and immobile among the lines of makeshift barricades. Before him, highways of plasteel rail reached away, some threading out across the landscape, others vanishing into underground passages. The rails were part of the infrastructure of Calth’s society, connecting their network of cities both above the earth and below. Behind him, a wide, yawning tunnel mouth bored into a shield wall of sheer black rock, and far past it lay the capital. The remnants of the 21st Company stood astride a path that any foe would have to take, if they were intent on the capture of Numinus.
And the foe had tried. They began with massed forces of human soldiers, cultists gathered by the Word Bearers from distant worlds, whipped into a kill-frenzy and set loose against the legionaries. These slaves called themselves the Brotherhood of the Knife, and for all their ill discipline, they were many. The killing ground beyond the line of the barricades was carpeted with their bodies. Corpses clad in hooded robes that recalled monastic figures of old idolatry, their burned skin bearing ritualistic tattoos of lines and stars.
The Ultramarines had culled them, cutting them down as they ran heedless into their guns, trampling their fallen into the bloody mud. The attack had been broken, but not without its cost. Rubio glimpsed movement and inclined his head. His commander emerged from the shadows of an overturned cargo hauler.
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