Garro

by James Swallow

Garro looked away. ‘You speak of what I glimpsed on Saturn’s moon.’

  Malcador shook his head. ‘It began long before you ventured to places that are outside your purview.’ The Sigillite wandered to the edge of the pit and looked down, taking in the gloomy settlement far below. ‘You went to the Riga orbital plate at your own bidding. You have been casting out feelers in the time between your missions, looking for something. Someone.’

  Garro became very still. Of course Malcador knows, he told himself. How could I have believed he would not see the pattern?

  ‘Yes,’ continued the Sigillite. ‘I am aware of the Lectitio Divinitatus and the believers who have read Lorgar’s book.’

  ‘Lord Aurelian? The Word Bearer…?’ Garro’s brow furrowed, unsure if he had heard Malcador correctly.

  The Sigillite went on. ‘I know they think of our Emperor as a living deity, despite all his words to the contrary.’ He took a step back. ‘And I know of the woman, Euphrati Keeler. The mere remembrancer who is now revered as a living saint.’

  The question slipped out of Garro’s mouth before he could stop himself from uttering it. ‘Where is she?’

  Malcador gave a rueful smile. ‘Not everything is clear to me, Nathaniel. Even if that is the image I like to project. Some things…’ The smile became brittle. ‘Some places, even I cannot reach. As curious as that is.’

  ‘But if you know of them, why do you allow the gatherings to go on unchecked?’

  ‘There are so many, and more with each passing month.’ The Sigillite opened his arms to the sky. ‘But perhaps you have forgotten that we are embroiled in a war that threatens to consume the galaxy? There are many things of far greater import before me. They are not like the lodges that Horus used to suborn the legions. These believers are little more than groups of worried people drawing solace from the pages of a fanatic’s scribblings.’ He paused, thinking. ‘That book proves my earlier point, when I spoke of malleable loyalty. Lorgar Aurelian was so very faithful when he wrote it. And look at him now.’

  Garro nodded. ‘I saw the Seventeenth Legion before Ullanor, and then after Isstvan. Like day and night, they were – but still a commonality of mad zeal in each incarnation.’ He paused, marshalling his words. ‘But I am not a Word Bearer. I am not even a Death Guard any more. I am only the Emperor’s sword, and that I will remain until the day I die.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Malcador repeated. ‘But even the best of blades can become blunted and careworn if left untended. It is clear that you cannot function fully as my Agentia Primus while you remain distracted by other concerns.’ The Sigillite’s tone hardened, and Garro found himself unconsciously taking up a combat stance.

  His war-implants flexed and came alive, as they would if he were about to engage a foe. The very real possibility that Malcador was going to end him sang through Garro’s nerves.

  ‘You are of no use to me if you are preoccupied. I need agents who are here, in the moment. I need weapons and tools, if I am to end the war before it blackens Terra’s skies.’

  ‘Speak plainly, then,’ Garro demanded. If the worst were to come, he would meet it head on; this was not the first time he had been ready for such an outcome.

  Malcador sighed. ‘After much consideration, I have decided to grant you a leave of absence, of a sort.’ He gestured at the sky, the floating city still blotting out the weak sun above them. ‘Go and find your answers, Nathaniel. Wherever they may lie.’

  It was the last thing Garro had expected from the Sigillite. Censure and reprimand, indeed… But not permission. ‘You would allow that?’

  ‘I spoke the words. I have granted it.’ Malcador eyed him. ‘But there are certain conditions. You will leave behind your wargear, your power armour, your weapons. And more importantly, you will go without the authority I have conferred upon you. In this, you will be only Nathaniel Garro, late of the Death Guard Legiones Astartes. Whatever you want, you will find it on your own.’

  In the distance, Garro heard the sound of powerful engines on a fast approach. A drop-ship was coming in. The warrior reached for his sword and removed it, scabbard and all, from his armour. ‘I will not leave Libertas in the hands of another,’ he intoned. ‘All else, I agree to.’

  ‘And still you challenge me, even in this…’ Malcador folded his arms. ‘Very well. Keep the sword. Perhaps you will need it.’

  A Thunderhawk in unadorned grey livery crested the far ridgeline and tore over the pit, slowing to a hover on jets of flame. It pivoted in place as the pilot looked for somewhere to set down. Garro had done nothing to summon the drop-ship, nor seen Malcador do likewise, and yet here it was.

  ‘They will take you where you want to go,’ said the Sigillite, his words carrying over the howl of the engines. Garro raised a hand to shield his face as the Thunderhawk settled on the wide crag, the down-draft blasting a spray of rainwater up and about him. ‘But do not tarry. Horus is coming and we must be ready. I will array every servant of the Emperor in preparation to resist him, and you are counted in that number. Am I clear?’

  Garro nodded as the Thunderhawk’s thrusters fell to an idling growl. ‘Aye,’ he replied, turning back to look at the Sigillite. ‘It is–’

  He stood alone on the ridge, as the rain began to fall once again.

  Nathaniel Garro, Agentia Primus of the Sigillite

  Sixteen

  Sanctuary

  Last words

  Confrontation

  Ndole cast a nervous glance over his shoulder, towards the back of the ground-effect truck where the big man sat cloaked in shadows. He was large enough to fill the cargo bed of the hovercraft, even bent forward with his head turned down. The big man’s eyes were closed, but Ndole knew he wasn’t sleeping. His kind weren’t capable of that, so someone had once told him.

  The driver’s lips thinned and he forced himself to concentrate on the path ahead. A haze of displaced sand moved in a constant wave front before the vehicle. Kicked up by its screaming blowers, the microscopic particles of rusty metal and mineral glass forever scoured at the truck’s exterior. Ndole leaned in and out of shallow, drifting turns as he guided them over the desert landscape. He kept them on rivers of sand that snaked through the larger pieces of debris that studded the terrain; here the remains of a massive bat-winged stratocarrier from the Unification Wars, there a beached ocean liner half-buried under the skeleton of a derelict arcology dome. Smaller clumps of metallic waste formed hillocks of corroded iron, all of it the collapsed remains of civilisations that had died before the Age of the Imperium.

  He knew he had to keep his attention on the journey, because at the speed they were travelling across an area this cluttered, even a glancing collision could tear the truck in two and leave them stranded out here. Ndole had no doubt the big man would survive something like that, but he rated his own chances far lower.

  It was hard not to keep stealing a peek, though. He had never seen a legionary close at hand before, and to think one of them was here, in his vehicle… Was it a dream or a nightmare? He hoped neither, and reflected on how he had come to give the warrior passage.

  It wasn’t as if the big man had threatened Ndole to make him obey. It wasn’t as if he had to. Back at the border settlement, where the Wasted Ranges ended and the Nordafrik Territories really began, every­one in the tap house had heard the screech of the drop-ship passing overhead. It worried them all. Ndole listened to the server fret about how it could mean the bastard archtraitor was finally here, but he knew that it would not be a ship that came to warn them of that. Ndole fully expected his first sign of Horus’ invasion to be the sky catching fire.

  The drop-ship must have let the big man out at the edge of the settlement, because a few seconds later, two panicked youths in rad-capes came hurtling through, falling over themselves to warn of the new arrival.

  He came in only a moment after them. Curious, it was, the sight of a legionary
without his power armour, but no less intimidating. At first, he had thought the man might have been a genhanced worker from the breaker’s station, but something in his bearing – and myriad scars – spoke otherwise. Even in the hooded grey cloak, the warrior blocked the doorway with his bulk, and had to lower his head in order to enter. As he did that, the gigantic sword on his back briefly became visible and panic exploded. Everyone ran, fleeing for the rear exit. They did not do it because of anything the big man said or did, but because the sheer fact of his presence broke their nerve. And when one fled, all fled.

  Except Ndole. He was too slow, too surprised by the new arrival to make his feet work.

  His lip curling in irritation, the legionary surveyed the now-empty tap house and settled on the shabby, rail-thin driver. He evaluated him with a cursory glance, spying the tarnished neural jacks on his bare arms.

  ‘You have a vehicle capable of ground transit.’ The voice that emerged from the giant sounded almost high-born to Ndole’s ears, and the words were less a question, more a statement. He was nodding before he realised it. ‘You will take me into the scraplands.’

  Ndole had to work hard to find his voice. ‘W-will you kill me if I don’t? Kill me if I do?’

  ‘Why would I do that?’ The warrior gave a curt shake of the head. ‘But understand, I have no currency to pay you for the work.’

  Despite the utter terror rooting Ndole to the spot, it was a credit to his avaricious nature that he actually frowned at that, and the question what’s in it for me? danced on his lips, though he never dared give it voice.

  The warrior answered him anyway. ‘I will owe you a favour. I think a man in a town like this one, known to be in the debt of a Space Marine, would grow considerably in stature. Yes?’

  Ndole nodded again, and smiled a little. Money was good, but reputation – that was better.

  ‘Where do you want to go? There’s nothing out there but rusted hulks and mutants.’ That wasn’t altogether true, though.

  ‘I am looking for a place that has many names,’ replied the big man. ‘Asiel. Salvaguardia. Heilgtum. Muqaddas Jagah. Sanctuary.’ He came closer, looming over Ndole. ‘You know it, don’t you?’

  The driver considered continuing the casual lie, and then discarded the thought as idiotic. ‘Some pass across the border looking for it. Those names are not often spoken.’

  ‘You will take me,’ the warrior repeated.

  And of course, he had.

  Everyone gathered across the street from the tap house when Ndole and the giant walked out the front door, and he heard them all whispering. Most of them were taking bets on how he would be killed. He kept a brave face, trying to project an aura of calm, as if he did this every day.

  Only when the hover-truck was long past the settlement’s outskirts did he entertain the thought that the warrior could be insincere. He’d heard the reports on the watch-wire of the Warmaster’s perfidy and the warnings from the Lords of Terra to be wary of spies in their midst. He screwed up his courage and spoke for the first time in hours, shouting to be heard over the engine noise. ‘What do you hope to find out here, with the… With those people?’

  The warrior leaned forward, his massive head uncomfortably close to Ndole’s in the close confines of the truck’s cab. ‘Answers. You know why they hide out here, I think. I am not the first you have brought to them.’

  ‘Not the first pilgrim,’ admitted the driver. ‘But the first of you.’

  ‘Pilgrim…’ The giant weighed the meaning of the word. ‘Do you know what they believe?’

  ‘Aye, lord.’ Ndole was suddenly sweating, despite the actions of the coolsuit he habitually wore beneath his crew gear. ‘They say the Emperor is a god. The only real one, not like those out of the dead churches.’

  ‘Is a being a god if it is more than a man?’ The warrior’s question seemed directed at nothing. ‘How much more than human must one be, to be thought of as such?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ndole felt compelled to answer, and nervously ran a hand over his shorn scalp. He dared another look at the warrior, seeing again the web-work of old scars that marred his pale face.

  ‘What do you believe?’ said the giant.

  Terror bloomed inside Ndole and he cursed himself for a fool. If he gave the wrong reply now, this war-angel would kill him with a flick of its wrist and it would all be because of his weakness, his greed, his curiosity.

  The legionary reached past him and pointed at something on the control panel on the roof of the hover-truck’s cab. A tarnished brass charm on a length of grimy string, dangling from an inert flip-switch. The little aquila seemed to float in the air as the vehicle bounced over the rises in the dunes. ‘Where did you get that?’

  Ndole found his voice again. ‘A pilgrim gave it to me. A-and some papers.’

  ‘A book in crimson ink?’

  He nodded. ‘I didn’t read it!’

  ‘You should.’

  ‘What?’ Ndole blinked, and for the second time that day he felt as if he had barely escaped execution. ‘But they say the book is dangerous. And the speaker, the one who goes from place to place and reads it… The Emperor is displeased with her.’

  ‘Is he?’ The warrior seemed troubled. ‘How would we know?’ His every word was filled with conflict, and if anything that frightened Ndole most of all. If this being, one of the Emperor’s Angels of Death, could not navigate such questions, then what chance did a commoner have? ‘I must find her,’ the giant continued. ‘I must know the truth.’

  ‘We all want that.’ The words escaped Ndole, coming from nowhere. ‘But it is different for you, yes?’

  He tried to find a way to express his thoughts, but the driver was a simple man and not given to great articulation. A Space Marine is born of the Emperor’s sons, he told himself, so he’s blood-kin to the Master of Terra, one step removed. Surely one so close to such magnificence could know the world better than a truck-hand raised in poverty?

  The warrior’s scarred face told a different story. He nodded towards a shape looming out of the sands. ‘Is that it?’

  Ndole blinked and refocused, his jacks clattering against the steering yoke. He saw a cracked minaret pointing skyward at a crooked angle – a thin tower that had once been covered in mirrors, now only a hollow skeleton that sang as the winds whistled through it. The ‘sanctuary’ hid at its base, clustered in a crater of fused glass beneath a skein of mimetic camouflage. Unless one knew where to look, it would have been nigh-invisible.

  Or so it was on most days. Issuing out of the skein, pennants of black fire smoke were being pulled away on the stiff breeze, monstrous dark arrows frozen in flight above the settlement.

  Ndole flinched and reflexively eased back on the throttle, but in the next second, the warrior’s hand had enveloped his shoulder with firm, unyielding pressure.

  ‘Get me there,’ he commanded. ‘Now.’

  Garro kicked open the gate at the back of the truck and leapt down into the settling dust cloud, the keening whine of the hovercraft’s engines falling away to nothing.

  His battle-honed senses built an image of the site in less than a second. The crackle of fires and the acrid stink of burning plastic; spilled blood, still soaking into the sands where it fell; the snap and rustle of torn pergolas catching the mournful wind. He drew his sword and rested his thumb on the activator stud, stalking forward.

  The driver clambered out of the cab, almost falling over himself as he squeezed out from beneath an arching gull wing door. His dark face was stiff with fear. ‘This is not right,’ he muttered. ‘What happened…?’

  The legionary scanned the encampment. The great sail of energy-deadening cloth that concealed the sanctuary hid dozens of smaller tents, yurts and prefabricated dwelling cubes. Cables webbed the open spaces between them, some festooned with bio-lume clusters for lighting, others leading to dewcatchers for
water reclamation. Most of the tents were blackened rags, a few patches of fire still burning here or there among them.

  The first citizen of this refuge Garro encountered was a female, or rather what was left of her. He could only tell this by the dimensions of the skeleton that remained, crouched in a dark halo of thermal damage. As he approached, he could hear the hissing, ticking sound of something cooling, like metal taken too soon from a forge.

  It was the bones. Fused solid into a sculpture that captured the dead woman’s perfect agony, they had been transformed into dirty black glass.

  He examined the seared skeleton, wondering. Garro had witnessed the effects of many kinds of weapons, from volkite ray guns to microwave throwers, and this was dissimilar to any of them. The threads of heat that radiated off the body were intense, enough that in any normal circumstance there should have been naught but a pile of grey ashes.

  Behind him, the driver’s boots crunched on the silicate floor of the crater. Garro shot him a look. ‘Keep your distance,’ he ordered, getting a wooden nod in return.

  By the pattern of the thermal shock, Garro guessed the woman had been killed as she fell while trying to flee. He mentally tracked back to the place where her killer would have been standing and found a group of several more bodies. These ones were also burned, but in a different way. A group of irregular militiamen, he guessed, by the piecemeal soldier’s attire they wore and the weapons still clutched in their rigor-stiffened hands.

  It was impossible to tell what gender or ethnicity the five of them had been while they were alive. Their bodies were all uniform in the same terrible fashion – bloated and flayed by incredible heat, reeking meat in the form of human beings. Garro knelt by the closest one, the gears of his bionic leg clicking as it worked, and broke off its fingers so he could take the heavy stubber rifle the militiaman had been carrying. The charred sticks of flesh snapped easily, and where there should have been white bone, only grains of black powder spilled out.

  ‘Their bone. It burned,’ he said aloud. ‘Burned them from within.’