Garro

by James Swallow

  The fight blew up in an instant. Haln fought off the gang’s lesser members, giving the assassin the chance to step in and ‘assist’ the thug in disposing of this mouthy interloper. He made it look convincing – too convincing, in fact – and ended up pitching Haln out of a window towards what would seem to be his grisly death.

  In fact, Haln scrambled out across the underside of the ramshackle construction and waited there, clinging on with a web of cables while the assassin ingratiated himself with his new best friend. He observed through the remote eye, which he had deftly dropped into the killer’s jacket pocket while they struggled.

  The plan had made Haln nervous when the assassin described it, but now it was in play, it proceeded exactly as expected. Another surprise, he considered.

  Hanging there, with the wind pulling at him and the thud of worker books drumming through the deck over his head, Haln eavesdropped on the lie the assassin unfolded for the thug.

  He hadn’t been totally honest. He wasn’t just someone passing through. The truth was, he was here as a servant of the Emperor himself, oh yes. As an agent of the Legio Custodes, the Emperor’s personal guard, no less. Hard to believe? But true, a truth that could only be told to a patriot. Someone like you. And that Space Marine, that enormous freak that had dared to kill your friends and sully your city with his presence? He was here to hunt it down.

  Haln could not deny that the assassin knew how to play his part. The thug’s reaction was lamentably predictable. His initial wariness was soon overridden by greed, vanity, and no small amount of self-preservation. He had to know his newfound status was shaky, but what better way to cement his role than by ending the threat that had already claimed the lives of his betters? Someone more intelligent, less desperate, might have questioned it a little more. But the thug wanted it to be true, and Haln knew that the fictions most easily imposed were the ones that were willingly swallowed.

  Of course, the only way to locate this monstrous traitor-kin will be to find the place where these fanatics are hiding their filthy place of worship… But who could know where that might be?

  The thug was not intelligent enough to realise that he had been guided to his answer before he gave it.

  The pilgrims, of course! They had to have some idea, didn’t they? All it would take was someone to cut on them for a time, and the location would be freely given…

  He was telling the assassin where to find them as Haln began to navigate a slow and careful path across the underside of the platform and back to the decks of the lower levels. By the time he had made it to safety, Haln witnessed the two men speaking in coarse good humour like they were old friends.

  The spy found a good place to wait, a short way from the cantina, and settled in to prepare for the next phase of the deception. He didn’t have to linger too long; the tattooed thug, a couple of his cohorts and the assassin emerged on one of the swaying gangways and set off towards a satellite platform, connected to the main bulk of Hesperides Plate by a series of interwoven conduits.

  Haln followed at a distance, still listening to the feed being transmitted to the short-range receiver implanted in his skull. The mutter of their conversation echoed through his mastoid bone, and he listened for the trigger word.

  Lupercal. The assassin said it twice so that Haln didn’t miss the moment. The spy burst into a run, drawing his shimmerknife as he came out of the shadows.

  He put the blade across the backs of the thug’s men in two short sweeping motions, the weapon’s aura-generating edge slashing through bone and nerve and flesh to sever their spinal columns. They fell screaming and he sneered. Their tradecraft was appalling, barely the smallest inkling of situational awareness that dull, almost bovine reactions did nothing to improve. He declined to give them mercy-kills to end their lives swiftly, and let them bleed out as they lay paralysed and screaming.

  Haln saw the assassin raise his hand as the tattooed man’s face twisted in shock and surprise, and for a moment he was afraid the killer would conjure his daemon weapon there in broad daylight. But something odd flashed over the assassin’s face instead. The open hand became a heavy fist, and he sent it crashing into the thug’s jaw. The man went down, and more blows rained upon him. Each time the assassin struck, a spasmodic feedback pulse went through the thug’s electoos and they gave off a desultory flicker of light.

  The assassin lost himself in beating the thug to a pulp, and Haln hesitated, unsure if he should intervene. Raw emotion twisted the killer’s expression into something filled with rage and pain. Haln heard him cursing the thug – who by now was quite dead, his nasal bone having been smashed into the front of his brain – and saying a woman’s name, over and over.

  ‘Who is Jenniker?’ He asked the question without thinking.

  The assassin let the thug drop to the deck amid a pool of his own blood. ‘What are you talking about?’ His expression was stony once more, and he fished in a pocket to find the spare bionic eye. ‘You don’t know that name.’ He tossed the eye at Haln, who snatched it out of the air. ‘Why are you asking me pointless questions?’

  Haln’s lips thinned. Was his charge losing clarity of mind again, so soon? Perhaps that was the price of having such a horror of a weapon bound to him by that gruesome scar. ‘It doesn’t matter. You know where the pilgrims are being held?’

  ‘We’ll need another story to tell, if we are to find the target. Torture will take too long, and we’ve wasted too much time already on this effluent.’ He gave the dead thug a kick, gaining a dull blink of light in return.

  ‘I have a suggestion,’ Haln ventured. ‘The same game we played in the cantina, but for a different audience.’

  ‘As long as there will be kills for me,’ muttered the assassin.

  ‘Soon enough,’ promised Haln. ‘Soon enough.’

  The woman called Zeun grudgingly found Garro some privacy in a meditation cell of sorts, cut out of the side of a feeder pipe. Her distrust of him hung in the air like acrid smoke, but he made no effort to assuage it. The legionary was tired of having to answer every single challenge made to his character, no matter how large or how small. If this woman thought ill of him, then so be it. All that mattered was the Saint, and what she would tell him.

  Garro had a very real sense that he was reaching the end of a chapter of his life, turning a page from what he was now to what he would be next. It had happened before, this profound state of transition – when he was a youth, recruited to become a neophyte of the Dusk Raiders, again when his Legion had bent the knee to Mortarion and become the Death Guard, then on Luna when Malcador had spoken to him… But this time there was something more. A feeling, not of dread or anxiety, but of grim understanding. A sense, perhaps, that the next chapter of his life might be the last.

  ‘So serious,’ said a light, warm voice, and Garro turned to see that Zeun was long gone and Euphrati Keeler stood in her stead. ‘And so troubled. Sometimes I wonder what your face would look like if your heart was lighter.’ She cocked her head, studying him. ‘You’d make a good subject.’

  He frowned. ‘For what?’

  Keeler smiled, holding up her hands, thumbs and forefingers making a rectangular frame that she held in front of her. ‘A pict-image or three. That used to be my canvas, Nathaniel. I miss those days, sometimes. When all I had to do was capture a moment of time.’ She let her hands fall. ‘The language of an image can be understood by anyone, anywhere. It’s timeless. It can communicate so much… I wish it were so easy for me to pass on the message I carry now.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand…’ he began.

  ‘I can show you.’ Keeler moved towards him, and unaccountably, Garro retreated a step, motivated by something that he could not quantify. ‘What’s wrong? You’ve come so far, but now you have doubts?’

  ‘I have come this far precisely because I have doubts!’ he retorted. ‘It is a state that is anathema to me. I am
a legionary and I was made to be certain. It eats at me that I am not.’

  ‘The curse of the intelligent man,’ she offered. ‘To question all things, while those less gifted act without hesitation.’

  On an impulse he couldn’t explain, Garro surged forward and grabbed her wrist. ‘Then answer the question,’ he demanded. Keeler’s forearm seemed a tiny, fragile thing like spun glass, and he knew that with the slightest pressure he could crush her bones to powder.

  The Saint showed no reaction to what he had done. Instead, her other hand snaked down and found his, gripping it gently but firmly. Garro felt a strange, electric thrill run though his nerves. ‘Let me show you the gallery,’ she told him. ‘The place where I hang all the images that come to me.’

  Keeler’s voice was melodic and strangely distant. Garro felt a chill crawl over his bare arms beneath his travelling robes. He tried to speak, but the action was difficult to complete.

  He blinked, and a shade had been drawn across the world. The room looked different, the light of it falling in odd ways, as if through a prism.

  ‘See here, Nathaniel. In this one, I am killed.’ Keeler was showing him a still image, sharper than any hololith or high-definition pict, brighter and more detailed than reality itself. It engulfed him. He could not look away from the hyper-saturated, overwhelming composition of it. ‘I don’t care for it myself,’ she said.

  Somehow, in this non-moment, he was inside the image with her, both of them observers who had stepped into this trick of the mind. The transition had been so subtle, so easy, that Garro had barely felt it happen.

  He beheld a tragic scene. Keeler, draped across ouslite steps that were pock-marked with bolter hits, surrounded by common soldiery and weeping helots. She was quite dead, but angelic in her repose. ‘Where… is this?’ he asked.

  ‘The Annapurna Gate of the Imperial Palace. This is one of my fates.’ She paused. ‘Here, another.’

  Darkness eclipsed the moment and it became another time and place. A near-lightless dungeon, all sallow illumination coming from the glow-flash of a meltagun about to discharge. It was impossible to see the hand on the weapon, but the shadow behind it was a hulking one, unquestionably a Space Marine. Keeler knelt on the stony floor before the muzzle of the weapon, still meditating in the split second before the beam destroyed her.

  ‘Another,’ Keeler went on. This time, in the hold of a shuttlecraft that was on fire around her. ‘Another.’ At the foot of the Byzant Minaret beyond the Petitioner’s City, a sword at her neck. ‘Another.’ Desperate hands dragging away mounds of rubble, finding beneath them the hem of her tattered robes. ‘Another.’ Garro saw himself cradling her limp body in his arms, his face and his shattered grey armour a monu­ment to the hardest-fought battle of his life.

  On and on it went, visions of futures that might come to pass, a cascade of unhappened days where the only constant was Euphrati Keeler’s death. He thought he glimpsed other places he knew – the Somnus Citadel on Luna, the tacticarium of the Phalanx, even the nave of the makeshift chapel.

  ‘Stop!’ he demanded. ‘Why are you showing me this?’

  The Saint looked up into his eyes and the sorrow he saw there was pure and endless. ‘These are the lives that extend out before me, dear Nathaniel. I capture glimpses of them, and fate ends my life again and again.’

  ‘I reject that,’ Garro snarled. ‘There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. Nothing is pre-ordained. If destiny exists, it is to guide us, not yoke us!’

  ‘And yet, I perish,’ said Keeler. ‘Here, and here and here and here…’ She paused. ‘In all skeins of time I am dead… save one.’ She shook her head as all around them became darkness. ‘And that place, I have not seen.’

  Garro blinked as she released her grip on his hand, and he let go of her arm. All was as it had been, and they stood unmoved from the anteroom beyond the makeshift church. Keeler’s ‘gallery’ faded from his memory like a sunset. ‘You must not die like that.’

  She smiled gently. ‘I won’t live forever, Nathaniel. None of us will. Only the God-Emperor has that gift… That curse.’

  We have to keep her safe, Nathaniel. Sigismund’s solemn words tolled through his thoughts, and suddenly Garro’s own troubles seemed small and inconsequential. ‘You bring hope to millions in these darkest of days. I can’t let you be killed.’ He shook his head. ‘The Templar was right. I let my own uncertainties cloud the duty before me. You must be protected.’ He nodded to himself as the doubt that had plagued him suddenly melted away. ‘I wasn’t certain what that purpose was… I think I am now.’ The clarity was stark and dazzling.

  But then the Saint shook her head. ‘You see and you still do not see.’

  Garro stiffened. ‘You must leave Hesperides immediately.’

  ‘No, battle-captain. I will not.’

  ‘You shall leave!’ Garro barked, and his shout drew Sindermann’s attention, the iterator dashing back through the blackout cloths with a look of fear on his lined face.

  ‘What is going on–?’ he began, but Garro spoke over him.

  ‘You are exposed, Euphrati,’ the legionary insisted, forcing himself to meter his tone. ‘This place is not safe. Horus sent killers for you at the sanctuary, and they hunt you still. I know a place where we can protect you, a remote outpost in the Ishtar Range…’

  ‘On Venus?’ interrupted Sindermann.

  Garro went on, formulating the plan as he spoke. ‘There are automated cargo ships that ply the run to the Venusian protectorate. It’s isolated, lightly populated, and you will be out of harm’s way. From there, we will be able to gain passage from the Solar System and out across the segmentum.’

  A flash of disappointment crossed Keeler’s face. ‘Why would I ever want to flee, Nathaniel?’

  How could she not comprehend this? ‘Because if you stay on Terra, you will die here! Your own insight showed you that!’

  ‘I have you to protect me.’ Keeler turned away from him. ‘And you should know by now – nothing is that simple.’

  A cloud of conflicted emotions swirling about him, Garro strode out to the gantry beyond the chapel of the followers and scowled at the night sky. He struggled to process the churn of his thoughts.

  ‘I am of purpose,’ he muttered.

  For too long, he had vexed himself over what the meaning of those words might be. For a time, he had thought that purpose was the same as the Sigillite’s plan, but events had shown him otherwise. Garro wondered if there really was a kind of fate, and if it were playing him for a fool.

  Keeler was the hub around which his future was turning. He saw that now, looking back at the path his life had taken. The escape of the starship Eisenstein had not just been about his passage from last loyal son to Knight Errant, or the warning brought to Terra – it had been the Saint’s journey as well. It fell to him to keep her safe, and he had done so. Now that duty was coming full circle and the undeniable realities of those grim futures Keeler showed him could not be ignored.

  ‘Sigismund…’ For a moment, Garro wished the Imperial Fist could hear his words. ‘You were more correct than you realised…’

  ‘Do you know yourself now, Captain?’ Garro turned as he heard Sindermann approaching him. ‘Those cross words in the chapel, I admit I did not expect–‘

  ‘I don’t remember her being that wilful,’ he snapped.

  The iterator chuckled. ‘Then you have not spent enough time in the Saint’s presence.’ He folded his arms. ‘She’s much more than she was last time you saw her. The changes the Saint has been through… Can you imagine what it must be like for her? To awaken one day and know that you have been chosen as a vessel for the will of a higher being?’

  ‘I am a legionary,’ Garro said simply. ‘That is every day for me. Or it was once.’

  Sindermann came to the guide rail where Garro stood and looked out at the same sky. �
�She’s more than just a symbol of hope for those who believe. She is the embodiment of that potential. The Imperial Truth…the real Imperial Truth.’

  ‘That makes her dangerous,’ Garro insisted. ‘It puts her at risk.’ He shook his head. ‘Ever since Isstvan I have been searching for a true reason to keep on going, to keep fighting and striving. She may be it, Sindermann. I should have seen it all along. I can protect her. If she will only let me.’

  ‘But are you certain you know what you are protecting her from?’

  Garro shot him an acid glare. ‘This is not a moment to give me riddles, iterator. My patience wears thin! Speak plainly or not at all.’

  He sighed. ‘The Saint is a flashpoint, Captain. Her life or death will affect the course of this war, even if it seems like great hubris to say so. If the Warmaster’s agents reach her now, while the word of the Lectitio Divinitatus is still finding its level, it could trigger a religious uprising here on Terra. That is what Horus wants. The commoners touched by the words of the book finding cause for fury… It could destabilise the planet, perhaps the whole star system, ahead of any invasion. Think of it… While Lord Dorn toils building a fortress and hemming in Mars, while Malcador schemes and the God-Emperor faces what we cannot in the secret realms of His palace, as each of them is distracted the book could sour the common people without the Saint’s guidance. Chaos, Captain Garro. The seeds of chaos would bloom.’

  ‘I can prevent that,’ said the legionary. ‘I’ve seen the weapons the Warmaster uses, with blood in their teeth and murder in their eyes. I know how to kill them.’

  ‘But Horus Lupercal is not the only one with designs upon the Saint,’ Sindermann replied, watching him intently. ‘The Sigillite is not ignorant of her potential. A man like him… How could he not be concerned by what she might become?’

  ‘I am not here as Malcador’s instrument,’ said Garro firmly.

  Sindermann waved away that notion. ‘Of course not. No one thinks that.’