Garro

by James Swallow

  Sigismund’s jaw clenched. ‘You know better than to say such a thing, Death Guard.’

  ‘I have not been a Death Guard for quite some time,’ he replied. ‘The insurrection has changed many things. Perhaps your master’s countenance is among them.’

  ‘I will choose to believe you are testing me,’ growled the Imperial Fist. ‘And poorly at that. The alternative is that you impugn the honour of the Seventh Legion, and were that to be so, it would go badly for you.’ He pulled a device from a pouch at his waist and Garro saw it was a handheld auspex unit. Sigismund tossed it to him, and he caught it easily. ‘Listen,’ he told him.

  Garro turned the device over in his hands and found that the display screen showed a blinking rune to indicate it carried an audio recording in its memory. He pressed the button to replay the data file, and for a few brief moments the interior of the troop bay echoed with sounds of screaming and the voices of the dead.

  He listened to a man whose words were distorted with terror and feedback as he shouted into a vox-pickup, desperate for someone to hear him, pleading for rescuers to come and save them. The accent was thick and several of the words were from Afrik dialects Garro did not know, but the intent of the message was clear. It had been sent as the killing was in progress, as whatever force had come to murder the sanctuary had done its swift and merciless work. The recording cut off suddenly in the middle of a panicked shout.

  ‘That was picked up on one of the common distress wavelengths,’ Sigismund explained. ‘We came to investigate.’

  ‘And your men thought I was the cause?’

  The First Captain looked away. ‘They reacted with poor judgement. Inaction has made them lax. They’ll be chastised for acting without thinking.’

  Garro realised that was the closest he would get to any kind of an apology. Sigismund went on.

  ‘What are you doing, battle-captain? I have heard tell that you were at large. But why here, and why today?’

  ‘Both our missions have altered,’ Garro offered, at length. ‘Since the Eisenstein.’

  Sigismund nodded. ‘You are Malcador’s attack dog now. With armour that bears no sigil or livery. What is it that you are called? A Knight Errant?’

  Garro bristled at the off-hand description of his status. ‘There is more to it than that.’

  ‘Where the Sigillite is concerned, I have no doubt,’ Sigismund shot back. ‘He would build a scheme with a thousand players just to fetch him a cup of amasec.’ He leaned back and cocked his head. ‘But I wager he did not send you to this place. Have you escaped his employ, Garro?’ He nodded at the sword. ‘You’ve left your nameless armour behind. If not for that weapon, I might ask if you had decided to give up the warrior’s calling in hopes of a monastic life.’

  ‘I am here on a duty of my own, not by Malcador’s orders,’ Garro allowed. ‘I came to the sanctuary looking for information.’

  ‘About this?’ Sigismund reached for something and threw a wad of burned devotional papers on the deck, across the sheathed sword.

  Garro ignored the question and kept his eyes fixed on the Imperial Fist. ‘If I am Malcador’s attack dog,’ he began, ‘one might say that you are Lord Dorn’s. What was the name they gave you? The Templar, I recall.’ He gestured at the black cross on Sigismund’s tabard. ‘We both serve masters who seek to safeguard Terra and the Imperium.’

  For the first time, Sigismund’s expression shifted, and Garro saw a cold twist of humourless amusement on his lips. ‘We are alike, is that what you wish me to believe? You, a man who moves in shadows under the aspect of a ghost, are the same as I? Who stands for all to see, his duty clear as daybreak?’

  The First Captain’s blunt truth cut Garro more deeply than he expected. ‘I did not choose the path I am on,’ he said tersely. ‘But we each fight the battle we have, not the battle we want…’ His words faded as a suspicion crystallised, one that had been gnawing at him since the moment the Imperial Fists had arrived. ‘You answered that distress call.’

  ‘Aye.’

  Garro leaned forward. ‘You did. Captain Sigismund, commander of the First Company of the Imperial Fists, defender of this planet… You brought two drop-ships and a detachment of Space Marines into the desert for… what? The sake of a garbled message from some luckless civilian? There was nothing in that signal to warrant the deployment of such a force. Why not leave it to the local garrison instead?’

  ‘We were passing through the area. It seemed expedient.’

  Garro snorted. ‘You do not lie well, cousin.’ He pieced the facts together. ‘The Imperial Fists were already monitoring this place. It is the only explanation that fits. My question is, for what reason?’ He saw a flicker of doubt in Sigismund’s eyes and chased it down. ‘Or am I mistaken? These warriors are not here at Lord Dorn’s behest… they are here at yours.’

  Sigismund’s face turned to stone, and it was then Garro knew he was right.

  ‘When I first met you,’ said the other captain, after a long moment, ‘I thought you a deluded fool. We pulled you and your fellow refugees from that frozen hulk, dead in space, and you stood before my gene-father with stories about treachery and betrayal. I knew they were lies. Knew it… until the very moment that remembrancer Oliton showed us her memories.’ Sigismund shook his head. ‘Emperor’s Blood, Garro… Do you realise what damage you wrought with your flight?’

  ‘More than you can know. I took no pleasure in it,’ Garro said quietly, and he felt the shadow of that moment pass over him once again. It was not untrue to say that Nathaniel carried resentment for the burden that had been forced on him at Isstvan. ‘I curse Horus Lupercal every day for forcing me to make the choices I did.’

  The Templar looked away. ‘The woman, Keeler. You know what she is.’ It wasn’t a question.

  Garro frowned. ‘I…’ He halted, unable to frame his thoughts. ‘We have spoken. I was… illuminated by her insights.’ He nodded in the direction of the burned-out settlement. ‘I hoped to find her here so we might talk again.’

  ‘She spoke to me,’ said Sigismund, and Garro could tell that the admission was a hard one for the Imperial Fist to voice. ‘Told me things. Showed me things.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes. She has a way about her.’ Garro thought back on the counsel Keeler had given him when he felt lost and rudderless. That she had become connected to some greater actuality, perhaps some fragment of the Emperor’s manifested will, had never been in doubt. It came as no surprise to him that the so-called Saint shared that counsel with others. He looked at Sigismund with fresh eyes, assimilating this new truth.

  It was as if he had given the First Captain permission to unburden himself. As he went on, hesitantly at first, Sigismund leaned close in the manner of a brother sharing a confidence. He described how he had crossed paths with Keeler aboard the Phalanx, and spoke of the futures she had laid out before him – one, to perish forgotten and alone under an alien sun; the other, to stand at Dorn’s side when the inevitable invasion of Terra took place. Sigismund told him of his own grave choice, to go back on his primarch’s command to lead a chastisement force against Horus, and beg a different posting closer to home.

  Suddenly, Garro understood why the Imperial Fist had ordered his men to leave them aboard the Thunderhawk. He did not want anyone else to hear this, to glimpse what some might see as a fissure of weakness in the man’s otherwise granite-hard exterior. If the Knight Errant ever spoke of what was said here, he knew he would be ignored and derided by Sigismund’s brethren.

  As Garro had become Malcador’s agent in acts of preparation and retribution, so Sigismund had been tasked by Dorn along the same lines. The First Captain purged the Solar System of Horus’ spies wherever he could find them – and Garro had frequently seen the results of his work from the sidelines as their missions crossed one another, always in parallel but never in unity.

  But there had come a moment w
hen Sigismund could no longer keep his secrets from his gene-father. That bleak mien Garro had seen pass over the Imperial Fist’s face before returned, and he saw it for what it was – great sorrow and regret. Sigismund confessed to Dorn, and in turn his primarch tore him down for it. The master of the VII Legion decried Keeler as a charlatan trading in worthless religionist dogma, and reprimanded his son for allowing himself to be swayed by her.

  Garro said nothing. Inwardly, he thought that it was Dorn who did not see clearly. It had been clear to him at their first meeting when he revealed Horus’ perfidy, and then again when he stole aboard the Phalanx on a mission to recruit one of the Fists’ psykers. The latter sortie had ultimately failed, but on both occasions Garro had known that for all his greatness, Rogal Dorn’s rigidity of mind was a flaw. As much as stone may endure, he thought, it cannot bend and so it may shatter. He only had to look Sigismund in the eye to see that truth reflected in the Templar’s troubled thoughts.

  ‘Keeler showed me a vision of arcane horrors,’ Sigismund concluded. ‘And I have since seen them with my own eyes. You have too.’

  ‘Aye.’ Garro nodded grimly. ‘That I have.’

  ‘Then you know her gift is not worthless.’ It was a hard admission for the Imperial Fist to make, to suggest that his liege-lord could be so mistaken. He took a long breath. ‘I do not profess to know how all… this… is supposed to work. But I know the woman is important. With that in mind, I have watched over her from a distance, as best I could. I have used the assets of my Legion and the Imperial Court to track her movements.’ He shook his head. ‘She and her devotees have not made it simple. There are many gaps, many unknowns. It speaks to a great network of believers in existence, far larger than any of us suspected.’

  Garro pressed him for more. ‘But you knew she would be here, or was here, at the sanctuary?’

  ‘Yes. As you surmised, I had the location monitored. One of many, in fact. When the call for help came, so did I.’ Sigismund paused. ‘Garro, you know how Horus’ turncoats operate. Like the hydra of myth, we sever one head and two more rise to take its place. For all that we root out, others still lurk unseen. I believe that Keeler may perish at their hands if we do not prevent it.’

  ‘The killings here, they show that the archtraitor is getting close to her…’

  He nodded. ‘She must be protected.’ The Templar rose to his feet. ‘But I have reached the limits of my agency. Tonight, I exceeded authority to come out here and Dorn will learn of it. He will be displeased once again. You see that the Imperial Fists do not have the freedoms of Malcador’s Knights Errant. I can go no further with this.’ He fixed Garro with a hard look. ‘But you can. It is clear to me now that you are the only option.’

  Sigismund reached down and took the auspex unit from Garro’s hand and raised it to his face, allowing a retinal aura-reader to scan his eye. ‘Identify me. Ex-load storage stack. Codeword Iconoclast. Unlock,’ he told it. The device chimed and he passed it back.

  Where before the unit’s memory had been almost empty, there were now dozens of other files revealed – surveillance intercepts, intelligence files and more.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ said Garro.

  ‘All that I have gleaned about Euphrati Keeler’s movements over the past months. You may be able to fill in the gaps. I believe it will help you to predict where she will go next.’

  ‘You are trusting me with this,’ said Garro warily.

  ‘We have to keep her safe, Nathaniel,’ Sigismund replied. ‘As much as I wish to, I can go no further. So the duty falls to you.’ Some of the chilly fire of his earlier manner returned to his voice, and his next words were very much a warning. ‘Do not fail.’

  The Imperial Fists called in a cohort of servitors to catalogue and then bury the dead, but Garro was gone before the first of them arrived. It took him the better part of a day to walk back across the scraplands, and the passage gave him the time he needed to digest the import of his conversation with the Templar.

  As he walked, he pored over the content of the auspex, using hypno­gogics to flash-read the vital data as a starving man might gorge himself on a banquet. As he expected from an Imperial Fist, Sigismund’s record-keeping was precise and bereft of anything but cold fact.

  The files tracked dozens of reports of illegal Lectitio Divinitatus gatherings, partial scans from sightings of women who matched Keeler’s description, and dozens of other vectors, collating them into something that resembled a pattern. He found strings of intelligence that connected with his own research, including the same blind lead that months before had sent him to the Riga platform on what turned out to be a fool’s errand. Although the journey to Riga led Garro to other things – and eventually to the uncovering of a secret the Sigillite had wanted to keep from him – the legionary found no traces of Keeler’s passage.

  She moved from place to place, slipping in and out of hive cities and metroplexes, space stations and orbital plates, never once being captured despite the iron grip the Imperium kept on the Throneworld and its satellites. What did that suggest, Garro wondered? Did Keeler’s preternatural abilities enable her to weave through the security net that grew ever tighter as the Warmaster’s threat encroached? Or was the truth more prosaic than that, was it that her association of followers was so large that those devoted to her simply looked away as she passed?

  How far does the word of the Lectitio Divinitatus reach? Garro had no answer for that question, and it troubled him. The Imperium of Man was just that, and it had gone so far to stamp out the falsehood of religion, imposing secularity wherever its shadow fell – but what if that was impossible? What if there was something in the nature of humankind that meant they always needed something greater than themselves to believe in?

  He scowled and displaced the nagging thought. For the moment, he cared not for what other men might think, feel or believe. He only knew what Nathaniel Garro felt… and that was loss.

  ‘Where is this leading me?’ he asked the air. The winds gave him no answer.

  Garro returned to the data, moving from past records to present ones. According to Sigismund’s sources, there were rumours that Keeler had visited the sanctuary less than four days ago – the closest Garro had been to her in a long time. There were a dozen other possible locations that the Saint could have journeyed to on the next step of her endless pilgrimage, but he quickly considered and discarded all but one. The guess was part instinct, part calculation.

  Hesperides.

  Garro halted and looked up into the night sky, craning his neck until he found a particular shadow off towards the south-eastern horizon. From here, it was little more than a blue-black smudge against a rare starry evening, low against the sallow glow of Luna. The orbital plate was one of the older aertropolis platforms, and he recalled it was an insula minoris that served Terra as a dioxide refinery and tertiary shipping hub. It was an ideal place upon which to deliver a sermon; much of the population were transients, system crews and unskilled labourers who moved as needed on contract indentures to Venus, Mercury and the teeming null-grav work yards of the Belt. The kind of men and women, Garro reasoned, who would have empty lives overshadowed by the insurrection. The kind of people who, if so enticed by the Lectitio Divinitatus, could carry word of it to all corners of the Solar System.

  A day later, Garro dropped from the wheel well of an automated cargo barge and fell a hundred feet to a landing deck on the western arc of the floating city. At a distance, Hesperides Plate recalled the shape and form of a great pipe organ, buoyant on a cushion of dirty clouds and wreathed in grey haze. Up close, the imagined form gave way to a less attractive reality, a great convoluted knot of tarnished tubes and gargantuan bell-mouths that resembled the fatal collision of a thousand giant brass instruments, crushed into a clump by the hand of a mad god.

  Nowhere on Hesperides could one find silence. Every passage and walkway was walled in by lines
of rattling, echoing pipes that hummed and gurgled with chemical reaction. Deep in the bowels of the platform, engines that had operated for centuries sucked in polluted air and fractioned it into its component elements, desperately trying to salvage some breath of purity from the wounded atmosphere of the planet.

  The constant noise made it difficult for Garro to extend his battle-senses to the full, and he mentally recalibrated the parameters of his actions. A place like this would make it harder to see an enemy coming, and the confined byways were perfect territory for ambushes, choke-points and murder boxes.

  Pulling his hood down and his robes close, Garro made sure his sword was hidden where none could see it, and ventured deeper into the endless range of narrow alleyways.

  Hesperides had never been designed to be a city – it was a glorified atmosphere processor with a few support modules bolted on – but someone had neglected to reveal that to the people who lived there. Humanity crammed itself into every nook and cranny of the structure, with ramshackle hovels built around spaces between the great brass tubes that snaked this way and that. Parts of the makeshift city were permanently cold, platforms rimed with hoarfrost from the chilly aura of vast coolant towers. Others were always tropical-hot and damp from the steaming output of chemical fractionators. Frequently, both extremes could be found within a few hundred yards of one another.

  Poverty was rife here. The legionary saw no souls who were not clothed in shabby, grimy cuts of worker garb, and their hollow faces and averted gazes spoke to him of people who were beaten down, who hung on by their fingertips. Unseen, he grimaced in the shadows of his hood. It seemed wrong that here, above the planet that was the bright heart of the Imperium, citizens had no taste of the glorious future the Emperor wanted for them all.

  Garro pushed the thought away as he came upon what he was looking for – a ‘village square’ for want of a better term, a larger open space between two towering smokestacks that the locals had repurposed into a marketplace and meeting point. The legionary found a shaded perch above from which he could observe the area and scanned the milling crowd for his targets.