Garro

by James Swallow

  Fires burned everywhere, and each one of the shrieking torches was a human being engulfed by cruel witchflame. They were not allowed to die quickly. Whatever brutal animal instinct drove the fire-serpents unleashed by the gun, they clearly liked the taste of pain.

  Garro ignored the agony around him and broke towards the assassin as he reeled around to bring his accursed weapon to bear. The legionary had no time to make a definitive killing blow; the angle was wrong and the moment off-kilter. All he could manage was a sweeping backhand that clipped the killer and sent him spinning up and away. The assassin landed hard atop a line of cracked wooden pews and tumbled across them.

  The strike dislodged the killer’s battle-damaged mask and Garro came storming towards him, sweeping low to scoop it up as he approached. The corroded, stained metal of the faceplate made it resemble an object centuries old. Garro sneered and crushed the mask in his hand, shattering delicate crystal circuits and visi-lenses. ‘Let me see your true face,’ he spat, as the assassin rose shakily to his feet.

  The legionary’s sword was rooted in the wall, across the chaotic, smoke-wreathed chamber and well beyond his reach. But no matter; Garro would end this wretch without it if he had to.

  The assassin glared at him, and Garro saw an angular, unkempt face that was a mess of hatred and grim determination. If not for the hell-gun in his hand and the wraiths of morbid light it cast across his features, the killer could have been mistaken for a vagrant pulled from the foetid alleys of some overcrowded hive city.

  Garro closed the distance. ‘I gave you a chance. You should have taken it.’

  The assassin did not grace him with a reply. He fired.

  A gush of volcanic flame erupted from the yawning maw of the glassy pistol, opening into a multitude of blazing streamers that flicked towards the legionary. Garro thought he saw dark spots at the tips of the fire-streaks, reminiscent of arachnid eyes. Then the weapon’s war shot was striking him and he staggered into the infernal deluge. A conflagration hotter than any natural flame he had ever encountered bent and moved around him, holding close to Garro in a tormented embrace. He felt the material of his robes crisp and catch alight, polymerised synthetic plasti-threads flexible enough to turn a knife blow now burning like a common weave. The hood rolled at his back spat and burned, searing the fuzz of shorn hair on his scarred scalp.

  Garro forced himself to advance, step upon step towards the gunman, hands raised to protect his face. The halo of flames sang as they consumed the air around him, filling his lungs with choking smoke. He uttered the Warmaster’s name as the curse it had become, and snatched handfuls of his burning robes. With a grunt of effort, Garro ripped the flaming material from his back and flung it away. Beneath, he had only the form-fitting body-sheath that he would have worn under his Mark VI Corvus-pattern battleplate, the connector ports to his implanted black carapace glittering in the muddy firelight.

  He shrugged off his own tide of fire, a terrible phoenix intent only on stopping cold this killer’s mission. Leaping at him, Garro grabbed the assassin’s gun hand and forced it up and away, his other hand snatching at the greasy tunic his target wore.

  The legionary lifted his foe easily off the deck and shook him hard, but the obscene pistol would not be dislodged from the assassin’s grip. From the corner of his eye, Garro saw that the daemon weapon appeared to be a seamless part of the man’s hand, the glassy matter of the breech, grip and barrel morphing out of flesh, bone and blood. Aimed uselessly at the ceiling, the muzzle grunted and flexed like a gasping mouth.

  ‘Why did you turn?’ Garro bit out the words as he increased pressure with his other hand, feeling ribs crack and grind on one another beneath his implacable grip. ‘What did they offer you?’

  The uncertainty curdled in his throat. It was a question he could never answer for himself, one that troubled him deeply. So many of his battle-brothers in the Death Guard – led, to his eternal shame, by their gene-sire Mortarion himself – had made the same pact as this man, surrendering their honour to Horus Lupercal’s new vision.

  ‘What could be enough?’ he roared, anger fuelling him as much as the pain from his burned flesh.

  ‘…Truth,’ said the assassin, forcing out the reply.

  ‘What?’ The word hit Garro like a slap in the face, and there was an instant when he lost focus. ‘What truth? Speak it!’

  ‘My name… is Eristede Kell.’ The assassin choked in the legionary’s death-grasp. ‘Your God-Emperor took… everything from me. Your Sigillite sent… sent me to die.’ He showed a mouth of blood-flecked teeth and shouted back at Garro. ‘Horus set me free!’

  The daemon-gun was an impossible weapon, and so its next transformation, the act sudden and ugly, was no shock to Garro. He saw it happening and realised that this man Kell had drawn him in, used a moment of hesitation against him.

  The weapon and the hand that gripped its blocky, crystalline form both dissembled into a pulse of seething black smoke that remade the component parts. Bone and glass, blood and mist, fed by hatred. In the blink of an eye, the gun was Kell’s hand and Kell’s hand was the gun, shifting and moving, a writhing eel-thing that bent itself out of Garro’s grip. It turned back along an axis that no bones could have accepted without shattering, to aim point blank at his face.

  Garro had no choice but to let go, arms coming up once more to shield himself. A breath of white-hot plasma ignited before him and shrieking overpressure blasted the legionary back into a mass of blackened corpses and smouldering matter.

  He lost precious seconds reeling from the fiery shock front. Garro’s skin sizzled and cracked where the bite of the flames marked him, and had it not been for the autonomic nerve-shunts and the agony inhibitors generated by his bio-implants, every breath would have been misery for the legionary.

  He was back on his feet, flexing his hands into fists, when a voice cried out his name. ‘Nathaniel! Here! Look to me!’

  Garro turned and saw old Sindermann staggering towards him. The elderly iterator was dragging something behind him, all his strength put into hauling his burden across the chamber.

  Libertas. Somehow the old man had managed to dislodge it from the wall where the thrown sword had embedded itself, and was attempting to bring it to him. Conflicted thoughts crossed Garro’s mind – respect for the aging preacher that he could do such a thing, even though he was bruised and bleeding; annoyance that the old fool was putting himself in harm’s way. He let the latter take the lead.

  Garro dived towards the iterator and shoved him to the floor, pulling the blow as best he could. Even as he moved, he felt new surges of witchfire at his back. The assassin Kell would not stop until he had reduced the legionary to ashes. Sindermann went down in a heap as Garro snatched back the hilt of his power sword. A surge of confidence bloomed as the familiar weight of the weapon settled into his hand. He had always felt a special bond with the blade, something above and beyond the simple equation of warrior and weapon. A bright object clattered about Libertas’ cross guard and Garro saw a golden chain wrapped around it, the links ending in an icon of a two-headed eagle. The Emperor protects, aye, he thought. But today, that responsibility falls to me.

  Kell shouted a foul curse and Garro reacted without hesitation. He dragged Sindermann close and shielded the iterator’s body as a new wave of murderous flame bathed them both. A hiss of pain escaped the warrior’s lips as the outer layer of skin across his back was burned away, exposing the plasti-form sheath of his black carapace implant. The torrent of heat seemed to go on forever, and not even the legionary’s pain blocks were enough to dam the flow of raw, searing torture.

  Then at last it ceased, but Garro knew it would only be a few moments before Kell fired again, unleashing another blazing serpent-thing from the immaterium even as the echo of the last shots faded.

  Drawing a breath laced with the sweet stink of burned human meat, Garro forced himself to his feet.
Sindermann lay on the deck before him, white as milk and trembling in terror. ‘Get her out of here,’ Garro growled, forcing the words out of his damaged throat. ‘There’s a dock platform at the edge of the district. Go now, and stop for nothing.’

  As Sindermann nodded, a question fell from him. ‘Can that witch-gun kill you?’

  ‘I will find out,’ Garro managed. He came about, each step jamming razors into the dozens of open wounds across his torso and his limbs, and advanced on the assassin through the wreaths of dirty smoke.

  Sickly vapour streamed from the mouth of the glittering glass pistol as Kell brandished it towards him. ‘I think I understand how the Clade Eversor find such joy in their kills,’ he said, as if speaking to some unseen audience. ‘Every murder I made before, it was distant and cold. I saw their faces but I never really knew the moment of death.’ He showed Garro the daemonic gun. ‘This makes it different. When you are close, you can taste it. It allows you to love the act.’

  ‘You are quite mad,’ spat Garro. ‘Horus did that? Or did he just make use of it?’

  Kell’s face twisted. ‘He let me see. And I’ve seen you dead, Death Guard. Your heart broken and bleeding black.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he allowed, fighting back a weariness that reached up from the darkness. ‘But it will not be your hand behind it, murderer.’

  The assassin bared yellowed teeth in a feral snarl and took the daemon weapon in a two-handed grip, bracing to aim towards him. The square-cut shape of the muzzle undulated and snapped open into a glass flower, its maw widening in a funnel of crystal petals. Garro saw baleful fire shimmer within the impossible spaces of the gun’s interior a split-second before it vomited forth a great comet of flames. The air screamed as it was torn open by the power of such elemental horror forcing its way into reality.

  A mass of living fire, dancing and swooping above him, came at Garro in a blinding rush. It had no shape that could be held in the mind for more than a few moments, shifting between forms that could have been avian, arachnid or humanoid.

  There might have been a time – before becoming a Knight Errant, before the Warmaster’s betrayal – when Nathaniel Garro would have beheld this horror and wondered how he would fight something so utterly unreal. He was no longer that man.

  This war – Horus’ war – had changed him in ways he had never expected, and in this second Garro realised that whatever doubts he had were now ashes. They had burned away, just like the skin across his body. He was free of them.

  He did not question how he would fight the daemon. He would destroy it as he had every other enemy put before him. With the weapon in my hand and the strength of my soul.

  Garro triggered the power field surrounding Libertas’ blade at its maximum potentiality. Lethal jags of captured lightning scintillated along the length of the sword, generated and collimated by ancient, time-lost technology. This weapon had brought down tyrants, it had slaughtered rampaging beasts, ended the lives of traitors and, when called upon, given the Emperor’s Peace. One more monster would not be its match.

  Ignoring all sense of caution, Garro threw himself at the fire-form as it swept down on him. Raising his power sword high into a jousting thrust, he pushed himself past the pain from the lashes of flame bombarding his tormented body and let the point of the blade find the pulsing heart of the daemon. The creature, a primitive predator-form from the abyssal deeps of the immaterium, did not possess the wit to realise that the legionary had used its own momentum against it.

  Libertas plunged into the core of the abhorrent form and the energy resonating through its blade flashed free in a catastrophic shock of unleashed power. Unknowable science from the age of Old Night met unreal anti-life from another dimension and cancelled out its existence. Blue aurorae rippled through the fire-daemon, and with a cry that chilled the blood it combusted into a haze of orange-black embers. Whatever malevolent quintessence had motivated the creature was sent screaming back to the warp, and Garro’s sword became dead metal once again, its power drained for now.

  ‘No!’ Kell shook his head wildly, whatever brief clarity his tortured mind had known now dispersed like the daemon. He raised the gun again, aiming at Garro’s chest. ‘You should die! You are supposed to die, that is how it will be, I have done it before, I will do it again–’

  ‘Enough,’ snarled the legionary, and Libertas sang through the choking air on a downward arc. Powered or not, the age-old sword was still a formidable tool of battle. The cut cleanly severed Kell’s hand at the wrist, the shock knocking him back as the lump of flesh and glass spun to the deck.

  The assassin’s howls echoed off the curved walls, but Garro ignored him. He watched as the severed hand flopped back and forth of its own accord like a landed fish, dragging the profane crystal mass of the gun with it. Meat and bone became molten, changing shape once more. The weapon took control of the flesh and remade itself into a form that resembled a scarab beetle, grimy fingers for legs and a vitreous block for a shell.

  Garro stepped to the thing and impaled it on the tip of his sword before it could completely reconfigure itself. It burst in a welter of blood, oil and silvery pus. For good measure, the legionary stamped what remained into the deck plates, grinding it to nothing beneath his heel.

  A trail of dark fluid led him to the assassin, as the man stumbled across the makeshift chapel towards the altar. ‘She is gone,’ Garro called after him. ‘You failed in your mission.’

  ‘Not the first time,’ gasped Kell, refusing to accept defeat. ‘No.’

  Fatigue pulled at Garro, and he knew it was his body’s energy racing to repair the grievous damage wrought by the witchfire. He shook it off and aimed a finger at the other man. ‘Eristede Kell. I name you traitor. Stand and answer for your crime.’

  ‘Traitor?’ echoed the assassin. ‘We are all traitors in the end, legionary! We are all betrayed and then the betrayer… You are no different than I!’

  Garro’s lip curled. ‘I did not swear fealty to the first primarch to turn against his father!’

  ‘But you did turn against your father!’ Kell shot back, cradling the bloody stump of his wrist close to his chest. ‘Your kinsmen too! Traitor… What does the word mean? It changes colour depending on where you stand… All that anyone can know is that we will eventually be betrayed…’ His words trailed off into a painful wheeze. ‘Are you prepared to save her?’

  The question came from nowhere. ‘Save who?’

  ‘You know! Are you ready to surrender everything for her?’ Kell looked away, his watery gaze suddenly lost and distant. ‘I was. All for nothing.’

  Garro’s sword turned in his hand, shifting to a backhand grip as he closed the distance between them. ‘This ends now.’ He raised the weapon, point downward.

  ‘It won’t,’ said Kell, but then the blade dropped through his clavicle and down inside his ribcage, cutting his heart in two and freeing the assassin from whatever bargain he had made with the Warmaster.

  Alone now, with only the murdered and the ashen fires surrounding him, Garro withdrew the sword from the corpse and watched it fall.

  Twenty-One

  Betrayal

  Of purpose

  Never seen

  The burn-pain lingered along with the stench of the dead, pressing into Garro with a throbbing ache. A cursory search of the makeshift chapel found not a single follower there still alive, and with a grim cast to his face, the legionary left it behind.

  He crossed through the blackout sails and followed a route through the derelict overflow conduits, the path that he had ordered Sindermann to take towards the upper tiers of Hesperides. With each step, he wondered if he would come across more flame-crisped bodies like those killed by the daemon-serpents. His thoughts tormented him as he walked, suggesting ways of death for the Saint and the others that were manifold and horrible.

  He recalled Sigismund, and the Imperial Fist’s e
ntreaty to protect Keeler at all costs. If she perished under his watch, Garro knew that the Templar would hunt him down and see him pay for her loss.

  These were the thoughts that plagued him as he ascended a vent shaft by means of an iron ladder. Wan light streamed down on him from an open grille at the shaft’s exit, and presently Garro emerged on to a shadowed landing platform that extended out from the western side of the orbital plate.

  He took a deep breath of damp air, and there was faint, brackish moisture on his face. A fine rain was falling. The industrial aertropolis’ weather screen was poorly maintained, and as Hesperides skirted a dense cloud formation, some of it wandered in past the city limits. Garro nodded to himself. That would be useful; it could cover an escape.

  ‘Sindermann.’ He spoke the iterator’s name aloud, and the word was a husky growl from his smoke-scarred throat. ‘Show yourself.’

  He glanced around, finding a pair of stubby oxy-tankers parked line abreast in the middle of the platform, little more than clusters of spherical pressure tanks in winged frames with gravitic motors to get them in the air. They would do as a way off this wretched place.

  Garro sensed the survivors before he saw them, hearing the rattle and creak of their footsteps over the rusting deck. Limping badly, Kyril Sindermann emerged from the shadows. He was leaning heavily on a young man, one of the armed posse of believers that had surrounded Garro when he first arrived. With them were a handful of others who crowded an unseen figure in the middle of their group. Zeun was leading these followers, and she was almost corpse-pale, her tunic covered with drying blood. Still, she walked towards him with brittle strength, those hard eyes once more daring him to cross her.

  ‘You live, then,’ he said, with a nod. ‘I thought I saw Kell’s accomplice take you down.’

  ‘Kell?’ she echoed, making it a challenge. She waved a hand in front of her face, mimicking a mask. ‘That one?’