The old sigil of the Death Guard Legion.
He looked away, and with mounting dread, saw what at first he had thought to be more drifts of blasted rubble were actually the scattered remains of legionary wargear, left to rust and decay. Garro’s fingers tightened into fists, and he felt the mirror of Varren’s cold fury rise in him.
‘I know where we stand, World Eater. This place, this graveyard… This is where my battle-brothers perished at Horus Lupercal’s command. Here they died when Mortarion – my own primarch! – gave them up.’ He swallowed a surge of powerful sorrow. ‘You said we should not stir the ashes of the dead, Varren. You are mistaken. We need to hear them. We must listen to the tales of their deaths. And then, on the day the turncoat Warmaster is given his due, we will be their voices.’
The Codicier gave a curt nod, the soft glow of his psychic hood framing his face. ‘I hear them, even now. At the edge of my senses, like the rush of the wind–’
Rubio did not complete his thought. Instead, he suddenly turned in place, bringing up his bolter to the ready, aiming into the gloom. Garro and Varren did the same, ready to face whatever danger the psyker had intuited.
They came out of the smoke-haze slowly and carefully, making every effort to show no fear, and failing with it. What weapons they had were meagre and barely enough to scratch the armour of the legionaries. There were fewer than twenty of them, a haggard and dispirited flock. Young and old, male and female, their bodies malnourished and their faces hollowed with hunger and fatigue.
Varren was incredulous. ‘Survivors? Here? And common men at that! It’s not possible…’
‘It would seem otherwise,’ said Rubio. ‘If they had made it to a refuge, waited until the bio-agents dissipated…’ He trailed off, examining their faces.
‘Do not underestimate the will to live,’ added Garro. ‘You need not be a legionary to possess that trait.’ He turned to address the survivors. ‘Lower your weapons in the presence of the Emperor’s Space Marines, or answer for it.’
A mutter of surprise passed through the group. An older man in a torn military jumpsuit stepped forwards and gestured for the others to do as Garro had commanded. Doffing his forage cap, he took a few paces closer. ‘Space Marines, you say? Of what Legion are you, lord? Your colours are unfamiliar.’ His accent had the distinctive tones of a Cambric-born, a people of hardy stock from a system in the Segmentum Solar.
‘You dare to question us?’ Varren hissed. ‘We carry the Mark of the Sigillite!’
‘All you need know is that we serve the Emperor of Mankind,’ Garro told him.
‘Not Horus Lupercal?’ The Cambrican asked the question with raw fear in his eyes.
Garro gave him a pitiless glare. ‘The oath-breaker Horus, and all those who side with him, have been declared Excommunicate Traitoris by the Council of Terra. Now you will answer my questions. Who are you, and how did you survive the virus bombs?’
The man told them his name was Arcudi. He had been a deck-captain in the motive crew aboard a Titan, Arc Bellus, but the war machine had been crippled and beheaded early in the battle with the traitors. Arcudi explained how he and some of his men escaped into the city even as the bombardment began. They took shelter in a series of underground transit tunnels, moving to the deepest levels as the bombs fell. By sheer, blind luck they had become sealed in down there, buried under tons of rockcrete and stone. Many had perished as they worked to dig themselves out, and in the months that passed, the battle above their heads burned itself out. The turncoats had moved on.
‘We have been crossing the great span of the city on foot, but the passage has taken a long time,’ he went on. ‘We move only at the speed of our slowest. We are searching for a way to flee this dead world. A ship, if such a thing can be found intact. But our morale and our strength runs thin, my lord. We endured such hardships… Such horrors…’
Varren’s lip curled. ‘We cannot help you. We have a mission here. Your circumstances are not part of it.’
‘You would leave them to die?’ snapped Rubio, dismayed by the World Eater’s callous words.
Arcudi held out his hands in entreaty. ‘Please, help us! If you truly are loyal to Terra… I have always believed, the Emperor protects…’ Tears filled his rheumy eyes. ‘The Emperor protects!’
‘What did you say?’ Garro strode over to the old soldier, and he stiffened in fear. Arcudi did not resist as the warrior took his arm and pulled back the ragged, torn sleeve of his tunic. There, about the soldier’s wrist, was a gold chain with an icon of an aquila. Garro gently released his grip. ‘The Emperor protects. He does indeed. And here and now, we three are the instruments of His will. You will come with us.’
Varren’s craggy face creased in a frown. ‘This is a mistake. We are not here to rescue a litter of wounded strays!’
Garro gave the other warrior a hard look. ‘You do not know the letter of Malcador’s orders for this mission. Or do you believe you would be more suited to direct this duty than I?’
Varren said nothing, and at length shook his head. Still, his soured expression spoke volumes. On some level, Garro knew the other legionary was correct, but it was clear that Arcudi and many of his group were also followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus. And whatever duty the battle-captain had to the Sigillite, his faith in the Emperor transcended it.
Arcudi saw something in his eyes and spoke to him in careful, conspiratorial tones. ‘He sent you. I prayed and He sent you. The moment we saw daylight again, I knew we would be delivered… If only we could escape the beast…’
‘Beast?’ Varren caught the scent of terror around the word and eyed the old man.
‘Explain yourself, deck-captain,’ Garro prompted.
A new fear, strong and potent, shimmered in the soldier’s eyes, and he threw a worried glance over his shoulder. ‘There is a revenant that prowls the ruins of the city, lords. A terrible, monstrous thing. It has been stalking us. I have seen it. A hulking form, wreathed in a tattered cloak, stinking of blood and death. It has already killed many of us, returning again and again to prey upon our numbers. I fear it will end us all before we can find safety.’
Arcudi’s terror lingered in the air like the dust in the wind, and something in his description sounded a cold, steady clarion in Garro’s mind. When he spoke again, he spoke to all. ‘This revenant. If it is beyond you to defeat it, then we will do so in your stead. We will not wait for an attack to come.’ He glanced towards Varren and Rubio. ‘Brothers, ready yourselves. We will take the fight to this beast. We will battle it on our terms.’
‘Every man who has tried has perished,’ Arcudi warned.
Garro nodded. ‘We are not men. We are legionaries.’ He pointed back towards the ruins. ‘Show us where to find this thing.’
In the centre of the city, a building that had once defied the beauty of the heavens now lay collapsed in upon itself. A basilica of stately and imposing character, now reduced to a hill of dust-caked rubble and broken glassaic.
Inside the fallen structure, there were still cavernous spaces, slope-shouldered voids where support columns of marble had fractured but not fallen. Successive damage wrought by fires and the sluice of acidic rains made the bombed-out building a dangerous place.
Any mistake of footing could bring down a precariously supported wall or swallow a gap in a heartbeat. And yet the warrior returned to the basilica time and again, drawn back here by a compulsion he could neither understand nor deny.
Cerberus picked his way across the rubble, in the gloom and the damp air, returning to the place of his rebirth. A silent, ruined figure in scarred armour waited there, slumped against the remains of a broken lectern.
‘I am here once more, brother. Cerberus is here. Will you speak to me this day?’
There was no reply. There was no sound but the drip of water on stone.
It was here that he had died. Here, tha
t he had reawakened, buried beneath the debris and the stone. It was here in this memorial to wanton destruction that he had dug himself out, driven by a single-mindedness that bordered on lunacy.
‘If you will not speak to me, brother, I will talk to you. I will tell the tale again, and take the pain. Do you remember it? I know you do. How many times must I ask you to share the moment with me? I search my own thoughts and there are voids. Dark places. Broken shards of memory. Jagged, and harsh.’
He gave a low moan of pain. All attempt at recollection brought agony unlike any other. Razors, clawing across the surface of his mind. Fire enveloping his soul.
And yet, he still tried to grasp it.
As Cerberus struggled to pull the memories out of his tortured thoughts, the phantom traces of gunfire, of screams, rose with them. He experienced anew the clash of sword on sword, the shriek of falling bombs. ‘I will see! You and I in these halls… The traitors at the lectern… The hate in them! The Ruinous Powers! The sword… This sword in my hand. Stop! Stop! You must not! Stay your hand!’ He collapsed to his knees, feeling the misery of those moments anew in a flash of brutal, terrible empathy. ‘Do not do this!’
And yet, for all the agony he endured, his fractured mind could not bring him the understanding he so desperately wanted. No measure of truth made itself clear to him. The precious, ephemeral knowledge of himself remained forever out of reach. This death-that-was-no-death had done that to him. The betrayal and the fire, the blades and the bombs, the wounds they gave him bled out his spirit into the stones. Lost and forgotten. He lived through that moment once more.
‘Betrayal… Madness and betrayal…’ Each word was agony for him. ‘The red god… And darkness… Darkness…’
He collapsed, fighting to breathe like a drowning man pulled from a lake. In that death, the warrior had been broken inside. Some vital part of the man he was had been torn open, the fragments of him spilling into the dust.
Ruined and burned, time held him in its cradle as the war passed about him. The line of flame moved on, and he was left behind. Discarded by the turncoats in the ashen wastes.
‘Brother… Kinsman! Each time the death cuts closer, but still I am rejected. You know why. Will you not tell me?’ Hand over hand, he dragged himself across the rubble. ‘Death took you! Why not me? Why not me?!’ With a sudden burst of furious energy, he launched himself across the broken stones, to where the other figure lay slumped upon the lectern. ‘Speak to me!’
But no answer would ever come. The warrior’s brother lay dead and mouldering, as he had every day since the ignition of the rebellion. His kinsman’s neck ended in a bloody stump, his severed head lying in his lap. Blackened crusts of dried fluid surrounded the pale, bloodless lips. Sightless eyes, set in a ruined face tended by flies and slow rot, stared out at nothing.
‘I am sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I wish I could remember your name, brother. Please forgive me.’ The warrior looked down at his hands. His body seemed disconnected from his thoughts, as if they belonged to some other being. And in that instant, he felt the briefest touch of lucidity. ‘What has been done to me? Who–’
A rattle of stones sounded across the broken chamber as rocks were dislodged by the shifting of weight. The warrior fell silent, sensing movement somewhere above, and the moment was gone.
‘Who dares?’ he growled, rising to his feet, drawing his battered chainsword and finding the answer to his own question. ‘Intruders.’
Night had fallen across the shattered cityscape, and the broken spires and toppled towers became a nest of shadows and darkened spaces. Acres of windowless voids glared out like black, predatory eyes, and the wind never ceased.
Garro led the others on their approach, but at distance the old soldier skidded to a halt and refused to go any closer. ‘This is the place. The beast is in there.’
‘Are you certain?’ asked Varren.
Arcudi nodded nervously as Rubio studied the fallen structure. ‘It appears to be the remains of an official building.’
‘I saw ten men enter with intent to kill the beast,’ said the old man. ‘I heard them dying only seconds later. This is where the killer hides. On some nights, the screams of torment it makes are carried to us on the wind.’
Garro’s hand went to the hilt of Libertas. ‘Return to the rest of your group,’ he ordered. ‘Varren, go with him.’
‘What?’ The World Eater glared at him, affronted. ‘You put me aside?’
The two legionaries locked gazes, and Garro lowered his voice. ‘I give you a command, brother. Remain here. Watch Arcudi and his people. Be on the alert.’
Varren’s reply, when it came, was cold and sullen. ‘As you wish.’
Garro watched him go, then turned to Rubio. ‘What do you see?’
The psyker studied the tumbledown remnants of the building, peering into the stone, measuring the telepathic resonance of the air around them. His face was lit by the glow of his hood’s crystalline mechanism. ‘I am uncertain,’ he admitted. ‘Emotion clouds this place like smoke. It is difficult to filter out the noise. So many died here. So many voices.’
‘I only need you to find one.’
Rubio nodded and closed his eyes, the blue aura of the psy-matrix casting strange, jumping shadows. Garro felt the air tingle with a metallic tang, the trace of psionic spoor, a tiny measure of the immaterium crossing into the real world.
Garro watched Rubio work his art, the psyker’s hands moving as if feeling in the dark for something unseen. The talents of espers, psychics and warp-seers had always seemed strange and alien to him, even in the days when he had fought as a battle-captain in the Great Crusade. The Sigillite had given Garro leave to employ Rubio’s prohibited skills as he saw fit, with no word of censure. What that meant for the future, Garro could only guess at.
‘Something… Someone is here with us,’ said Rubio, breaking the silence. ‘But the shadow of the mind is unusual. In the past, I have read those recently dead and seen the echoes of who they were, like the rifleman. This is the same, but it is a mind that yet lives. Almost as if his thoughts are caught between life and death.’
‘We shall find him, then, and learn to which extreme he lies. Come with me.’
But Rubio held out a hand and halted Garro before he could enter the ruins. ‘And what will you tell this tortured soul when we find him? The Emperor protects?’
‘If you have something to say to me, brother, I would hear it,’ Garro said sharply.
The psyker’s hand dropped away, but he held the former Death Guard’s steady gaze. ‘Varren was correct. Arcudi and the survivors are not our concern. Our duty is our sole focus. I learned that hard lesson when you recruited me on Calth.’
‘I give the orders. Lord Malcador chose me as his Agentia Primus.’
‘Aye, he did,’ agreed Rubio. ‘But this is not the first time I have heard you say those words, Garro. The Emperor protects. They have more meaning than you will admit to. And those aquila icons, too. They are more than mere trinkets.’
Garro said nothing, watching the younger legionary carefully. Was Rubio probing his surface thoughts even as he spoke? How would he react to learn that Nathaniel Garro, hero of the Eisenstein, chosen of the Sigillite, dallied with belief in a deity?
The psyker answered the question. ‘It matters little to me what you may hide, Garro. We each have our daemons and our secrets. But be sure that you do not allow your agenda to come into conflict with our sworn oath.’
‘That will never come to pass,’ he insisted.
Rubio drew his weapons and pointed with his battle sword. ‘Lead the way, then.’
Amid the ashes of Isstvan III, Cerberus endures
Ten
Legion of one
Maelstrom
True name
Garro led the way into the fallen basilica with Libertas held out before him, and Rubio followed clo
se behind. His eyes narrowed as they picked out shadows among the broken stonework. Here and there, bottomless black pits fell away into the spaces below the massive building, where sublevels had collapsed into one another.
Taking care with his footing, Garro cast a look down at an electromatic device hanging from his belt, and frowned. ‘Readings from the auspex are confused. The metals within the wreckage fog the sensors. Do you have anything, Rubio?’
The Codicier heard his own voice, as if it were coming to him from a great distance away. ‘There are ghosts in this place. Be content you do not hear them.’ The echoes of the dead were everywhere, thick as mist.
‘What do they say?’
‘What all ghosts say. They want revenge.’
Garro studied the other warrior for a moment, and Rubio could tell he was uncertain if the psyker was telling the truth or mocking him. Ultimately, he decided not to press the matter and turned away, spying something in the shadows.
Rubio saw it too, a distinctly human silhouette amid the broken beams and cracked supports. He recognised the familiar shape of Maximus-pattern battle armour. Garro approached the figure, sword raised. ‘You. Stand and face us.’
‘It would be a horror if he did so,’ Rubio told him, reaching out with his mind and finding nothing. ‘No spirit remains in that one. He is long dead.’
‘You are regrettably correct,’ Garro allowed, moving closer. What at first appeared to be a bowed head was in fact the ragged stub of a neck. He looked away, disgust colouring his expression. ‘This is no way for a legionary to be remembered,’ he added.
As Rubio’s gaze cast around, searching in the damp corners of the chamber, Garro examined the damaged armour. ‘Blast marks here. The gouges are from the edge of a power blade.’ He paused, then brushed at the surface of the cracked ceramite. ‘The livery… Beneath the dust, the colours and insignia are still visible. This warrior was a captain of the Sixteenth Legion.’
Garro Page 17
