Garro

by James Swallow

  The driver turned his head and retched into the dust. He made an attempt to recover and Garro heard him call out, doubtless trying to find someone still alive.

  The legionary left him to it, instead raising the stubber to his nose, snapping open the weapon’s breech. There was no smell of cordite. It had not been fired. He pulled the gun’s drum magazine and confirmed it was still fully loaded. Garro repeated his actions with two more of the dead, and saw there were no signs of spent shell casings anywhere nearby. Five armed guards, and whomever had killed them burned them alive before anyone could let off a single round.

  ‘Do you see that?’ said the trembling driver. He was pointing with both hands, down at more heat-swollen corpses clustered in the lee of a tent pole. ‘The… the path between the bodies?’

  Garro nodded. A dry, inky pattern of burned ground seemed to join all the dead, as if the fire that killed them was a snake moving from one to another, scorching the earth in its wake.

  ‘Oh, fate,’ whimpered the other man. ‘Dead. Dead. They’re all burned and murdered.’

  ‘Not all,’ Garro began, his acute hearing picking up something deeper into the stale gloom of the camp. But the driver wasn’t listening to him, and he staggered back towards the mouth of the camp, rubbing frantically at his face.

  ‘In the air, that’s all of them,’ he gasped, his chest heaving. ‘I can taste them in my mouth, it’s in my lungs… The smoke. That’s all that is left.’ The driver’s eyes were wide with panic. He threw Garro a look and made a split-second decision, choosing the terror that had wrought this destruction as the greater of the things he feared.

  The legionary made no move to stop him as he ran away, and presently the thrusters of the hover-truck spun up to full power. Garro watched the vehicle bolt back in the direction they had come. He waited for the sound of the engines to grow fainter, and listened carefully.

  Yes. There. Something shifted position, moving against loose rocks. Garro tightened his grip on Libertas and moved deeper into the foetid haze.

  There was no end to the horror that confronted the legionary in the charnel house that the sanctuary had become. Cruel flames had killed and destroyed here, yet the patterns of the fire were strange and irregular. The burning was unnatural. There was no other word for it.

  Garro scowled. With each passing year in Horus’ declared war, the legionary saw more that could fall into that category. The alien, that was something that the former Death Guard had faced on countless occasions, and no matter how grotesque and inhuman it was, there was some rationality to such a foe. But he swiftly came to the understanding that whatever powers the Warmaster had allied himself to, they were beyond reason. He took each step with care, ready to face anything.

  Horus. For who else could have ordered this massacre? Who else would profit from sowing chaos on Terra?

  Garro’s question briefly illuminated another, more sinister answer, and the Sigillite’s face rose in his thoughts. He pushed it away, silencing the treasonous impulse before it could fully form. That Malcador was not to be trusted, that was true. That Malcador had an agenda only he could see, and that it might not be in full synchrony with the Emperor’s Will, that also was very possible. But Garro did not wish to believe that the Regent of Terra would permit the kind of unbounded malice that had been wrought on these civilians.

  Malcador would do what he believed was for the good of the Imperium. Garro could not square that with this horror. No, another hand was at work here, and it sickened the legionary to know he had come too late to stop it.

  He approached the centre of the settlement, finding an open space between the support poles and generator pods. A ring of salvaged chairs, cushions and pews in dozens of different designs clustered to form a kind of amphitheatre. There were hundreds of bodies here, fallen atop one another where they had gathered to face their attacker and died for it.

  The wind caught a drift of scattered leaflets and whipped them up and past Garro’s face, tugging on the folds of his robe. He snatched one out of the air with his free hand and the burned plaspaper crumbled into flakes – but not before he glimpsed a dense block of words written in common Low Gothic, the ink as red as blood.

  He recognised phrases from the documents he had found in the personal affects of Kaleb Arin, the man who had once been Garro’s housecarl. Poor Kaleb, dead and cast away to the screaming void of the warp. He had been a steadfast one, a weakling in the eyes of some because of his failure to pass the aspirant trials of the Death Guard legion, but strong by Garro’s lights in how he endured and continued to serve.

  The captain had not thought of the man for some time, and now he did, Garro felt a knife of sorrow turn in his gut. Kaleb’s death had been a lesson for the warrior, and the price the housecarl paid to show it could never be forgotten. Like those who lay dead and scattered around Garro’s feet, Kaleb had believed in the words of the Lectitio Divinitatus, believed it with all his heart. His soul too, reflected the warrior. But what do I believe?

  The empty question echoed in his thoughts, and Garro’s frown deepened as he surveyed the bodies, hoping that the one face he sought would not be among them. If Euphrati Keeler were here, if the Saint had perished among her faithful… Even the mere contemplation of that dark possibility made the legionary’s breath catch in his throat.

  He shook his head. He had not come all this way only to find a corpse.

  The Saint was out there, he knew it in his marrow. In recent months, Garro had stolen time to take his leave unbidden and search for the woman, knowing that she too was somewhere on or near Terra. His quest to find her had taken him to secret places hidden in the cracks of the Imperial Throneworld – the derelict Vostok Hives, the Mothyards, the Nihon Peaks and Riga Suborbital – and each time he had been a day late, finding only traces, happening upon unexpected challenges.

  And now here, in this sanctuary, where those who believed as Kaleb did had gathered. The Saint had been in this place, just as she had been at all the others. She had stood on these sands and read from that book. If Keeler was dead, Garro would know it. Feel it, even if he could not explain how.

  He heard the sound of movement once again, and this time he knew for certain where it had come from. Stepping over the smashed remains of broken benches, he came upon a survivor.

  The man was young and fit, and that had been some of what saved him. The other factor was the poor fools who lay dead about him, each of them burned and flayed like the militiamen out by the entrance. They had taken the brunt of the inferno meant to end them all, and the survivor’s loss had been one half of his body. On one side, his right arm and leg were withered things, black and red with new agony. In his gaze, there was such pain as could drive a man mad. Yet he still held on, quivering as his undamaged hand grasped a torn Divinitatus tract like it was his salvation.

  The young man was beyond help, and Garro turned his sword in his hand, considering where best to place the edge that he might end the lad’s agony with some measure of mercy.

  ‘Who did this?’ he asked.

  The man’s single unblinded eye refocused and found him. He took a shuddering breath. ‘Serpents.’ His voice was thick with fluid, and beads of dark arterial blood gathered at the corner of his lips as he spoke. ‘Burning. Turned them loose among us.’ He shook and began to sob.

  ‘Who?’ Garro repeated. ‘Describe them.’

  The survivor’s head rocked back and forth in jerking motions. ‘No. No. Not enough time.’ His crippled gaze bored into Garro’s. ‘She told me we would meet. She did not know how or when.’

  ‘Keeler…’

  He managed a nod. ‘We matter not. Only the truth. They seek her now… Serpents…’ His voice was faltering, drowning in itself. ‘Find her. Do not let her perish. Else we are lost.’

  ‘Where is the Saint, lad?’ Garro asked him, leaning close to catch what he knew would be the young man’s
final breath. ‘Say it!’

  ‘I know–’

  The light and the sound came from nowhere. Above the sheath protecting the sanctuary, powerful daggers of radiance blazed down, drenching everything in stark white illumination. Screaming engines added their own cries to the winds, buffeting the cloth with a hurricane of jet wash, and Garro heard the familiar weighty thuds of heavy bolter cannons being primed for firing.

  He looked up, the nictating membranes in his ocular implants flicking into place to stop the legionary from being blinded. Blocky avian shadows moved up there, searching for targets.

  When Garro looked back, the survivor was dead.

  The legionary pivoted on his heel and brought up his power sword, as six cloaked figures came falling through the canopy, tearing it apart with their violent descent.

  That they were Space Marines was not in doubt. Even in the smoke-wreathed dimness of the encampment, Garro could not mistake the familiar tread of ceramite boots and the whine of servos. But as to their allegiance and the identity of their legion, he could only guess. They did not give him time to speak. It was an assault without question.

  Bolters crashed and chewed up the gritty earth beneath Garro’s feet. He leapt forward into a tumbling roll that took him over a broken pew and out of the line of fire. They came after him in a charge, breaking to the left and the right in an attempt to herd him and block off any routes of escape.

  Flight, however, was the farthest thing from Nathaniel Garro’s mind. Was he facing the same killers who had murdered all the devoted in the sanctuary? Had the arrival of the hover-truck somehow drawn their attention? Perhaps they had come back to make certain of their work, or to ensure that the legionary did not live to tell of it.

  His jaw set as he spun about to face the intruders. No-one was left to speak for these poor souls, and so Garro would speak for them. He would let Libertas be their voice.

  The mighty blade flashed blue-white as power pulsed through it, and Garro threw a hooked kick at a discarded water barrel lying near his feet. The empty container clanged as his foot connected with it, and flew up and at the nearest of the hooded warriors. By reflex, the cloaked figure opened fire and shredded the barrel with a burst of full-auto fire.

  Garro used the split-second distraction to launch himself at one of the long tent poles that supported the fabric roof above their heads, and with a two-handed swing, he cut it clean through. The pole quivered and fell, dragging a swathe of camo-cloth, cables and other detritus on to the heads of the new arrivals.

  As he planned, they broke apart from their careful formation, allowing him to pick single targets of opportunity rather than face a united force. But still, his improvised strategy did not go exactly as he wished. Even as they reacted on instinct, the attackers were still precisely ordered, moving with great economy of motion. There was no wasted effort here, no hesitation. A sudden sense of the familiar prickled Garro’s thoughts, but he was not given time to consider it. Bolters barked and he moved again, falling on the nearest of his enemies.

  From beneath the hood, he caught the briefest glimpse of a blunt-faced helmet, a war-mask that resembled a fortress wall lit by glowing eye slits. Then Garro was swinging the pommel of his sword in a hard cross that raked across at head height.

  The tungsten hemisphere at the base of the blade struck the helm with a sound like the peal of a dull bell, and the impact shock travelled up Garro’s arm. Out of his wargear, he had sparred with other legionaries in the training cages, and in full armour it had been his grim duty to battle turncoats in theirs – but Garro had never had cause to fight like this, bare genhanced flesh against power-assisted ceramite and plasteel. He had agility and speed on his foes, but they had the advantage of numbers and endurance. One well-aimed bolt shell could end him instantly from range, whereas Garro needed to be close to use his sword at full lethality.

  The warrior he targeted stumbled and went down, caught by the uneven ground underfoot. Garro wanted to grab for his bolter, but he couldn’t pause, not even for a second. Instead, the legionary burst into a sprint, spinning Libertas around in a web of crackling power. Bolt rounds deflected off the flashing edge of the weapon as Garro scrambled up a half-collapsed habitat cube and made a diving attack at the next closest target. This one carried a smaller bolt pistol, and he panned it up to meet Garro with a shot in the chest.

  At the last second, the legionary jack-knifed and fell on the attacker with his sword aimed down. The tip of the blade almost hit the mark, a fraction of a centimetre from the point where the neck-ring of the attacker’s armour joined the helmet seal. Had it fallen true, Libertas would have sliced down inside his collarbone, bursting through lung and primary heart. Instead, the sword tip slashed away hood and cloak, screeching down the chest plate to leave a sparking gouge in the ceramite.

  In the bright aura of the power sword, Garro saw the colour of his adversary’s wargear for the first time. A matt yellow-gold that could only belong to one legion.

  He disengaged, reeling back. ‘The Fists?’

  In answer, a mailed gauntlet rocketed out of nowhere and stuck Garro in the side of the head, the shock and the force of it so great that he almost lost his balance. The few moments the surprise cost him were more than enough for the other warriors to close on him, and a savage kick to the back of Garro’s knees planted him in the soot-caked dirt. A heavy boot clanged down on the blade of his sword, and Garro shook off the pain. When he looked up, he was ringed with the yawning mouths of bolters at point-blank range.

  ‘Traitor swine,’ came a snarl, as the warrior with the torn cloak angrily shook it off. His free hand traced the scratch Libertas had made down his chest. ‘You’ll pay for daring to come here.’ Now revealed, Garro saw that the Imperial Fist was of sergeant’s rank, and marked with many honours from countless campaigns.

  ‘I am no traitor,’ Garro retorted, turning his head to spit out a glob of blood, fighting off the ringing in his ears.

  ‘He is of a Legion,’ said one of the others. ‘That much is plain. What is he doing here?’

  ‘He fought us,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘You attacked me,’ Garro corrected. ‘Have you been waiting on the walls of the Imperial Palace so long that your trigger slips at the first hint of an adversary?’ For a moment he was a battle-captain again, a command officer berating a lower rank for an error of judgement. ‘Your primarch Lord Dorn would be displeased.’

  The Imperial Fists stiffened, and Garro knew he had touched a raw nerve.

  ‘This place is outside the law,’ said the sergeant, his voice low and cold. ‘Those settling here have no protection under Imperial edict, yet still we came. And we find you, without apparent purpose or sigil, armed and dangerous among hundreds of the dead. Give me a reason why I should not execute you and learn your name from your corpse.’

  Garro hesitated. He had become used to the weight of the Sigillite’s mark, of the doors that it could open for him as Agentia Primus, and it felt odd to suddenly be without it. He took a deep breath and stood up, the guns still tracking him. ‘I am Nathaniel Garro. I was once a captain of the Fourteenth Legion–’

  ‘Death Guard?’ The other Imperial Fist who had spoken flinched at the name and aimed his bolter right at Garro’s temple. ‘Mortarion’s accursed sons! How did–?’

  The sergeant reached out a hand and pushed the muzzle of the weapon away. ‘I have heard that name before, from my captain. You are Garro of the Eisenstein.’

  He nodded. ‘Aye, the very same.’

  ‘I have also heard that he and his kinsmen, the ones who came to Terra after the archtraitor’s defiance, are prisoners upon Luna. Held there until trust can be verified, or blame laid.’ There was no ease in the words, not the smallest ember of credence. ‘How have you come to be here?’

  Garro frowned. ‘There is more to the matter than what you have heard, sergeant,’ he said carefully.
‘I came to find this outpost… these people. But their deaths were not by my hand.’

  ‘We are to take the word of a turncoat Legion’s son?’ said another of the Imperial Fists. ‘I say we finish what we started.’

  But before the sergeant could decide on a course of action, heavy footfalls signified the approach of more armoured figures. The drop-ships that had circled overhead had since drifted away to make landings, and now more of Dorn’s warriors were entering the desolated settlement.

  A legionary with captain’s laurels came into view. Garro saw he wore a heavy tabard of white ballistic cloth covered in jet-black detail, and chains about his wrist-guards. The device of a black cross, repeated on the armour of all the Imperial Fists, featured prominently upon him. This new arrival reached up to remove his helm and in a gesture of obedience, the sergeant did the same.

  The captain’s blond hair framed a face that Garro had seen before, what seemed like an age ago, in a meeting aboard the star-fortress Phalanx.

  ‘He is who he says,’ said the warrior, his eyes narrowing. ‘Let him be.’

  Garro gave a nod. ‘First Captain Sigismund. Well met.’

  Sigismund’s cold gaze raked over him. ‘That remains to be seen.’

  Seventeen

  The Templar

  Hesperides

  Tracking

  They sat across from one another in the troop bay of one of the grounded Thunderhawks, alone after the First Captain had barked an order to clear the ship so that they might have some privacy.

  The act seemed unusual to Garro. Knowing the character of Dorn’s stone men as he did, the legionary expected to be clapped in irons and subjected to arrest. Instead, Sigismund reached forward with Garro’s sword and scabbard, briefly confiscated by his subordinates, and laid the weapon on the deck between them.

  Garro made no move to pick it up. His steady gaze held. ‘Did your gene-father order that?’ He tilted his head in the direction of the ruined settlement.