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Garro – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

Mark of the Sigillite
Calth ablaze
Brothers in arms

All about him, the grey terrain of the Sea of Crises glowed monochrome, draining the colour from everything. Through towering windows of once bright glassaic pitted and misted by centuries of micrometeorite strikes, the stark beauty of Luna’s landscape reflected back a hard, uniform light that seemed to cast no shadows.

The illumination gave nowhere to hide; something in that truth stirred a sense of rightness in Nathaniel Garro. That was how it should be. But in that truth, there was also an edge of sorrow, a longing that he had – so far – been prevented from addressing.

Since his arrival in the Solar System aboard the starship Eisenstein, since the conclusion of his calamitous mission to bring a warning to his Emperor, Terra’s moon had become Garro’s prison in all but name. Hanging there in the black sky, his birthworld seemed fated to be forever in sight, but beyond his reach.

How long had he been here? The days blurred into one another, and without purpose they were torture. He frowned, ignoring a twist of pain from his augmetic leg, and glared out into the dark. The bionic limb was a recent addition to his flesh, and in quieter moments Garro would admit to himself that he still felt ill at ease with the replacement. It was no lie for him to say that he had truly left a part of himself back in the Isstvan System, in both flesh and in spirit.

Garro’s gaze slipped from Terra’s occluded ochre sphere, and he let it be drawn towards the darkness beyond. Somewhere out there in the black and fathomless void, a newborn war was raging, but for Garro and the men who had joined him in his mission, there was only the hush of the Somnus Citadel.

Here in the domain of the Sisters of Silence, under his house arrest by any other name, the absolute absence of sound had no end to it. With each turning of the world in that black sky, he felt as if the silence dissolved a fresh measure of his soul. To a legionary, this enforced inaction was poison.

How long? The question pressed at his thoughts. How long will I remain here? Until the sky is cut by fire and the enemy is at the very gate?

‘Battle-Captain Garro.’ The words came at a low register, barely a whisper, but in the tranquility of the citadel they carried like a crack of thunder.

He turned to the sound of the voice. A hooded figure was silently crossing the chamber, and Garro was certain he had been alone here only a moment before. He knew the voice, however, and that explained it all.

‘Great Malcador.’ Garro bowed slightly towards the Regent of Terra as the new arrival passed over a floor of abstract black-and-white tiles. The iron staff in his hand cast a soft glow from the flames that muttered in the basket atop it, flickering with each footfall; and yet, Garro noted, the Regent did not seem to cast any shadow where he walked. ‘I came at your summons, Lord Sigillite,’ continued the legionary. ‘How may I serve you?’

Malcador gave a thin smile that cut through Garro’s rote greeting. There had never been any question, of course, that his summons would not be obeyed. He gestured at the glassy walls. ‘I recall that the last time we met here, you were angry with me. I saw the colours of your fury like an aurora. Strong and bright.’

Garro’s memory kindled a brief echo of that rage and he stiffened. ‘Can you blame me? I crossed the light years in a stolen warship, faced the guns of my own battle-brothers, and for what? To bring you warning of a treachery you had already foreseen. To face distrust and suspicion. Forgive me if I remain in ill humour.’

The words balanced on the edge of insubordination and the Sigillite’s smile widened. Garro felt the gossamer trace of a psychic touch passing over him. After the Emperor Himself, Malcador was the most powerful human psyker alive, and to be stood before him was to be as glass. Just as the sunlight scoured the lunar surface leaving nothing hidden, so Garro faced the telepathic probe and did not flinch. He had nothing to hide.

Malcador saw the truth of him. Once a company captain of the XIV Legiones Astartes – the unstoppable Death Guard under the primarch Mortarion – Garro had become a man lost. His oaths remained unbroken, while those around him had been shattered. When his master and his kinsmen declared their loyalty to the renegade Warmaster Horus, it was Garro who had dared to refuse. Garro, who made a desperate voyage across space to carry word of this terrible sedition back to the Emperor.

‘You have paid a high price for your fealty, Nathaniel. Your Legion. Your brotherhood. The lives of your men. Yet you still remain.’

‘I am the Emperor’s hand.’ The answer came without hesitation. Did Malcador think he wished for some kind of reward for doing his duty? Garro wanted nothing so trivial. He sought only to return to what he was best at, what he was made for. ‘I could not turn from that,’ he added.

The Sigillite nodded. ‘But without a purpose, a legionary is nothing. A warrior without a war… is no warrior at all.’

Despite himself, Garro felt his annoyance returning. ‘I have a purpose,’ he insisted. ‘Whatever force drives us, be it human will, fate or some higher power, I know that. There is reason for me to live. Just as there was for me to bring the warning, to stand alone as my kindred took rebellion to their hearts.’ He gestured around, no longer able to stand rigid at attention, advancing towards the Regent. ‘But as long as you keep me corralled here, you deny me the chance to find it!’

The moment the words left his mouth, some part of him wanted to call them back. Few could speak in such a way to the Sigillite and not fear chastisement because of it. But it was done, and he meant everything he had said.

When Malcador met his gaze, Garro felt a chill pass through him, like a shadow cast across his soul. In that moment it came to him why the Sigillite had suddenly demanded his presence here.

‘We shall see what purpose you will serve,’ intoned the great psyker. ‘You are a legionary, indeed, and that will never alter. But you are of the Death Guard no longer. You are a ghost.’ Malcador put hard emphasis on the word, cutting him with it. ‘You are a figure that stands between light and dark, trapped amid the grey…’

Garro found himself nodding. It was true. He had fallen into the cracks of this insurrection, and feared the abyss might swallow him whole.

But Malcador’s next words offered a lifeline. ‘I have need of such a man.’

His head snapped up. ‘Then task me, Sigillite. I ask only for that, and nothing more. Let me fulfil my purpose.’

A slow smile crossed that ancient, thoughtful face. ‘For your sins, Nathaniel Garro, I will give you exactly what you have asked for.’ He beckoned him with his other hand. ‘Come. Follow me.’

Garro did as he was ordered, trailing warily after the psyker, into the gloom of depthless shadows cast by the curve of a half-furled solar shield. Malcador briefly vanished into the shade like a scrap of cloth sinking into an ocean of ink, and Garro heard clanking mechanical footfalls cross the floor, hissing pistons grinding to a halt.

An eyeless humanoid form, far more machine than flesh, presented itself. A blinded tech-adept of the Mechanicum, the Mars-born had a face made of metal plates and nothing that Garro could see in the form of sensors. Yet it approached him as if it saw clearly, opening up tool arms and bunches of serpentine mechadendrites in his direction.

The Sigillite turned back towards him and the stark white light reflected from the lunar landscape made Malcador’s face seem spectral and serene. He gestured. ‘Kneel, Nathaniel. Let the adept do his duty.’

‘As you wish.’ Garro reluctantly obeyed, frowning as he bent down on one knee, the joints of his bionic limb clicking. He placed his sheathed sword upon the tiled floor and held his war helmet to his chest, looking the Sigillite in the eye as the Mechanicum adept leaned in.

The legionary smelled the tang of bitter bio-lubricants and machine oil. Heat flared over the bare skin on his neck as fat yellow sparks leapt and sizzled. He heard the grinding hiss of a meson lance as it cut into the plates of his armour, the particle stream layering levels of infinitely complex nano-scale circuitry into the ceramite.

‘With this mark, you swear fealty to me,’ said Malcador. ‘You will obey my orders without question, to the bitter end.’

The warrior’s eyes narrowed. ‘I will obey,’ he countered, ‘as long as it serves the Emperor.’

‘It will.’ Garro felt the psyker’s mind press into his, and he steeled himself, even as he knew he would not be able to resist the Sigillite’s harrowing inner gaze.

‘I see the fury again, Nathaniel.’ Malcador cocked his head, studying the play of psychic streams that only he could perceive. ‘But now it is directed outwards. It burns in you, the need to deliver reprisal to your traitorous brothers. You seek to give censure to your former comrade Calas Typhon. Perhaps even to challenge your primarch Mortarion, for daring to believe he might turn you.’

‘Aye.’ He bit out the word, holding cold anger in his heart. ‘I will not deny it.’

Malcador gave a grim nod. ‘The time for vengeance will come. But this day hear my orders. Hold your enmity in check. Your mission comes first.’

The legionary accepted this without comment. Just as before, on the deck of the starship Eisenstein, when he sacrificed everything he knew to carry the warning of Horus’ treachery to Terra, the mission was his first, his only concern. If history was to recur, if it was his lot to play that same role, he would do it willingly, in the Emperor’s name.

The lance fell silent, and the scent of superheated ceramite was sharp in the air. Garro listened to the crackle of the cooling brand as the adept backed away, head bobbing respectfully. The mark was made, the deed done. Whatever came next, he was committed to it.

Metal rang on metal, as with care Malcador worked to draw the blade Libertas from its sheath. Garro saw him strain to hold it steady. The great sword was not meant for human hands. The Sigillite pointed the tip of the mighty weapon at the floor, turning it to present the flat of the blade to the warrior.

‘The oath, then.’

Garro removed a single gauntlet and placed his bare hand on the naked blade. With this act, he crossed the point of no return.

The Sigillite went on. ‘Nathaniel Garro. Do you accept your role in this? Will you dedicate yourself to my orders, and put aside all other claims upon your honour? Do you pledge yourself in this oath of moment?’

Garro nodded once. ‘By this matter and this weapon, I so swear. In His name.’

The Sigillite raised an eyebrow at his choice of words, but made no remark upon them. Rising to his full height once more, Garro took back his sword and bowed low, catching sight of himself in the towering windows. As good as it felt to be back in his armour and eagle cuirass after so long, it was still strange to see the new colours that Malcador had bade him wear.

Gone was the old Death Guard livery, the icon of the skull upon a six-pointed black star. There instead was a featureless ghost-grey that could have been slate or silver, or a shade in between. It stirred an odd emotion in Garro’s chest, one that he could not quantify.

‘What would you have me do?’

The Regent’s steady gaze did not waver. ‘Plans are being drawn. Another of my agents has drafted a list of names. You will leave the Somnus Citadel and travel the galaxy to seek the first of these individuals out.’

‘Another agent?’ Garro echoed, musing upon the rumours he had heard. ‘The Luna Wolf, Severian, perhaps?’

Malcador’s eyes narrowed at the legionary’s insight, but he neither confirmed nor denied his suspicions. ‘Twenty warriors from across all the Legions, both loyalist and traitor,’ he continued. ‘You will find them and bring them to me. You will do this, and leave no mark where you pass.’

Garro’s fingers tightened around the hilt of his sword. ‘For what cause?’

Malcador turned his back on him and looked out at the clouded orb of Terra, raised high in the lunar night. ‘For the future, Nathaniel.’

Calth was a world ablaze.

Deep in the Veridian System, beneath the hard light of a wounded sun, war like no other had come to the planet. A war that sounded its echoes across the galaxy. A war that would change the face of humankind forever.

Grim thunder roared over the distant howl of gunfire. Across the dying fields of blackened grasses, in the rubble of silent cities, through canyons of dark rock and ice-rimed sands, brother fought brother.

The Ultramarines, the sons of the great tactician primarch Roboute Guilliman, had come to the Veridian System to marshal their forces for battle. Their commander, ever the loyal warrior of the Imperium, massed the best of the XIII Legion, and their soldiers from the Ultramar regiments of the Imperial Auxilia. This he did under the orders of his brother, the Warmaster Horus Lupercal. This, Guilliman did without doubt or question.

His fealty was repaid with treason of the most odious stripe. The battle to come – the battle Horus had bade him prepare for – instead arrived shrieking from the skies on trails of blood and murder. The warriors of Lorgar’s XVII Legion, the zealot Word Bearers, had come to kill. And with their oaths to the Emperor of Mankind broken, their new turncoat loyalty to Horus still painted fresh upon their blood-dark armour, the Word Bearers stabbed their brothers in the back, and scattered the Ultramarines to the points of the compass.

Now, fire cradled Calth in molten talons of churning gas, great streams of glowing colour that reached around the latitudes and raked the heavens. The aftershock of massed salvoes of thermoplasma weapons and fusion bombs had torn into the planet’s atmosphere. The thin layer of fragile sky was broken, and the damage irreversible. No untainted breath of Calth’s air would remain, as each new dawn brought it closer to death.

Amid the flames, Lieutenant Olen wondered if he would live to meet the next sunrise. Like his men, Olen was born on Espandor, which along with Calth was one of many worlds in the Ultramar Coalition. And like many souls upon them, he had shared the desire to stand in defence of his Imperium and his Emperor.

Olen wore the sigils of the aquila and of Ultramar with pride. While he had not had the fortitude to become a legionary of the Ultramarines, he did his part nonetheless. And somehow, even in the darkest of days during the battles of the Great Crusade, Olen had never been in fear for his life. He did not consider this arrogance. It was only that he had never confronted an enemy so powerful that it could not be defeated by Ultramar courage. At least, not until this day. Olen had not faced a legionary in battle before, and there had never been cause to consider that such a thing might even occur. The mere thought of it was… foolish. That a single Space Marine might rebel against his liege lord was nigh-impossible to comprehend. And to suggest that an entire Legion, or even a primarch, could turn upon the Emperor for their own glory… If any of his troopers had said such a thing, Olen’s laughter would have drowned them out.

The only laughter now came from their killers.

When the Word Bearers arrived, they carried destruction with them. Olen saw hundreds of men die in that first barrage. He saw Ultramarines, weapons slung as they moved to greet the surprise arrival of their kinsmen, slaughtered where they stood in a flash of treachery. Ultramar’s finest warriors, human and legionary alike, reeled beneath a blow struck from nowhere.

They scattered across Calth in disarray even as Lorgar’s sons tore into the planet, and put it to the torch. It was as if the whole world and every living thing on it were to be some vast burned offering.

The last contact Olen’s unit made with an allied squad came from an armoured patrol moving north towards Numinus, the capital. The tank crews told the troopers of forces regrouping in the cavern cities, places where they might survive the souring of Calth’s atmosphere beneath miles of rock and steel. And so Olen and his troops broke out, intent on a fast march across the Plains of Dera to the caves.

It was a good plan. It had failed when the monsters came. They boiled out of the icy gloom, rising from their concealment among the ruins of a burning starport.

Olen had fought aliens, and these were no strain of xenos that he could recall. They were rippling, changing things that hooted and brayed, dragging clawed tentacles and bearing lamprey mouths. They drooled venoms that melted men, glared with orchards of eyes that froze your heart with a look. And some of them – the worst of them – seemed in part to resemble human beings, but seen through a hellish lens of madness and horror.

As they came again, he thought of a word that few would ever speak in these secular days of human empire. A word he had once heard his late grandfather utter in a moment of senility – or, perhaps, of clarity.

Daemon.

In his prime, the old man had been a starship officer, and in the madness of warp space he had glimpsed secrets that had followed him to his grave. He had died a little before young Olen’s eyes just to say that word.

Surveying the dwindling charge on his laspistol with grim understanding, Olen knew that he would very soon be joining his elder. The creatures advanced, and he gathered the last of his strength, casting around to his troops.

‘Every shot counts!’ He roared his final orders, determined not to go quietly. ‘Make them pay for all they take!’

The attack began anew. The nightmare spawn ripped into the troopers like a hurricane, cutting them down, eating them raw. Olen’s gun ran red-hot in his hand, but they did not drop. The largest of them rasped and screamed as they feasted on the fallen, and little by little the soldiers were forced into a collapsing ring as their number diminished. Death was moments away now.

Then, from above, deliverance arrived on wings of grey steel. A Stormbird drop-ship, falling from the fiery clouds as though it were some great eagle, casting a shadow over the fight, turning in place as spears of white flame held it aloft.

Olen’s attention was seized for a brief moment. The ship was clearly Legion-issue, and yet, try as he might, he could not recognise the livery. It was neither the deep arterial-red of the traitor Word Bearers nor the striking blue of the Ultramarines. It was the colour of ghosts.

He watched as a brass-leaf hatch snapped open, and from it fell a giant figure in armour the same shade as the ship. As the craft powered away, the hulking warrior landed with a thunderous impact, killing a handful of the fanged monsters with the force of his arrival. Olen saw a shimmer of light on a vast sword as tall as a man, as the grey figure drew it from the scabbard on his back. Then, with a black-enamelled boltgun in his other hand, the warrior threw himself into the melee.

The sword rose and fell, rose and fell. The bolter crashed, each hammering discharge blasting the freakish creatures into gobbets of ragged, bleeding matter. As one, the bestial things turned on the warrior, sensing where the greatest threat to them lay. But this was no soldier, no common man. The figure in grey ceramite was a legionary, and he strode through the ranks of his enemies as an angel of death.

In his wake there were no screams. He left nothing but clean kills, thinning the lines of the monsters as they hurled themselves at him. Olen called out orders to his troops, and bade them support the warrior’s fight, but the legionary did not need it. Alone, he did what more than a dozen soldiers had perished attempting. He won.

When it was over, the warrior advanced on them, and Olen could not help but draw back. He had seen legionaries on the field of battle many times, but never this close. Never like this, looming over him, the emerald lenses of a scowling battle helmet measuring him with cold intent.

The warrior gave his sword a cursory flick to shake off the tainted blood marring the blade, and returned it to the scabbard. Olen saw a word in High Gothic burned into the metal before it disappeared out of sight. Libertas.

‘You are in command here.’ It was not a question. Olen gave a stiff nod, kneading the grip of his laspistol. He was afraid to attempt to holster the weapon, for fear the legionary might think any sudden motion was an attack, and react in kind. ‘I need information, lieutenant,’ continued the masked figure.

‘Of course.’ He nodded. ‘You have our gratitude. Are you here as part of a reinforcement detail or–’

The warrior held up a hand to silence him. ‘The Twenty-First Company of the Ultramarines, under the command of Brother-Captain Erikon Gaius. You will tell me where to find them.’

The legionary did not raise his voice, and yet Olen’s hand was already beckoning to the squad’s vox-tech before he realised he was obeying the order. He halted, hesitating. ‘Can you tell us what is happening? The Word Bearers… They attacked us. The signals we have intercepted… People are saying that Lorgar and his warriors have turned against the Emperor.’ As he said it out loud, the full horror of the situation finally struck Olen and he shivered.

The reply cemented that cold dread in place. ‘It is worse than you know. Now tell me. Where is Captain Gaius?’

The lieutenant gave up the data. The 21st Company had last been sighted on the western outskirts of Numinus, and after a moment to glance over Olen’s fragmentary data-map, the legionary favoured him with a terse nod of thanks and walked away.

Abruptly, Olen realised he was leaving them behind. ‘Sir? Wait…’

Something about the legionary and his armour had sounded a wrong note in the lieutenant’s mind, and as he looked on him again, he saw why. The warrior’s wargear bore an ornate cuirass dressed in brass and gold. Across his chest was the head of a fierce eagle, and rising up behind his helm was a heavy plate of armour that was cut into another raptor-shape. But what seemed strange was the absence of all other detail. The Legiones Astartes bore their colours proudly, and carried the symbol of their brotherhood on the pauldron of their armour. This warrior had none. Aside from a few flashes of dark-coloured trim, his armour was a uniform stone-grey from helm to boot, bereft of iconography.

‘Who are you?’ The question was snatched away by the winds, but the legionary heard it and he halted. ‘Can you tell me that?’ Olen pressed on. ‘Before you go, at least let me know the name and the Legion of the warrior who saved our lives.’

For a moment, the armoured figure paused. Then he reached up and removed his helmet. A pale, patrician face, shorn and scarred, looked back at Olen with ancient, troubled eyes. ‘My name is Nathaniel Garro,’ he said, the words heavy with regret. ‘And I am a Legion of one.’

The Ultramarines of the 21st had been dug in for days, and if truth were told, they were now a company in name only. They had been at the forefront of the first Word Bearers’ assault, and it had been their sufferance to witness the deaths of too many battle-brothers. The captain – hero of the Haddir Uprising, Gaius the Strong, Gaius the Unflinching – had rallied them in the face of the brutal losses. With words and deeds he led them into the fray, and they claimed back in blood a price from the traitors. But not enough. Not yet enough.

Now they were here, cut off from contact with their kinsmen, holding one of the railroad approaches to Numinus City. Waiting for this new war to reach out to them once again.

Brother Rubio took a moment to shift his stance. On the captain’s orders, he had allowed his catalepsean node neural implant to dismiss the need for sleep, standing watchful and immobile among the lines of makeshift barricades. Before him, highways of plasteel rail reached away, some threading out across the landscape, others vanishing into underground passages. The rails were part of the infrastructure of Calth’s society, connecting their network of cities both above the earth and below. Behind him, a wide, yawning tunnel mouth bored into a shield wall of sheer black rock, and far past it lay the capital. The remnants of the 21st Company stood astride a path that any foe would have to take, if they were intent on the capture of Numinus.

And the foe had tried. They began with massed forces of human soldiers, cultists gathered by the Word Bearers from distant worlds, whipped into a kill-frenzy and set loose against the legionaries. These slaves called themselves the Brotherhood of the Knife, and for all their ill discipline, they were many. The killing ground beyond the line of the barricades was carpeted with their bodies. Corpses clad in hooded robes that recalled monastic figures of old idolatry, their burned skin bearing ritualistic tattoos of lines and stars.

The Ultramarines had culled them, cutting them down as they ran heedless into their guns, trampling their fallen into the bloody mud. The attack had been broken, but not without its cost. Rubio glimpsed movement and inclined his head. His commander emerged from the shadows of an overturned cargo hauler.

‘Brother.’ Captain Gaius beckoned him from his post. ‘It is time.’

Suddenly, Rubio felt a tightness in his chest. A regret. ‘Someone must stand watch, captain.’

Gaius’ face reflected a shared moment of sorrow, his breath curling from his lips in a thin wisp of vapour. ‘Someone will. But first we must pay our brother his due.’

Rubio gave a solemn nod and shouldered his bolter, falling in to follow the captain deeper into the tunnel, where the glow of lumoglobes cast pools of weak yellow light.

There, surrounded by a circle of his kinsmen, Brother Mieles lay at rest. The Apothecary’s white armour, stark in contrast to the deep blue wargear of the warriors standing about him, was marred by streaks of dried blood. The wound that had killed him was an angry rip across his torso, the gift of a cultist who had broken the line and destroyed himself using a vest packed with impact charges. Mieles was the most recent of them to perish, and his death had come without warning. The Apothecary had been a man of great character and good humour, a friend to all. His loss cut the warriors of the 21st as keenly as every one that had come before.

‘For Ultramar and for duty,’ said Gaius, speaking the words he had repeated many times before in this grim obligation. ‘For past and for future. For Terra and the Emperor. No brother falls forgotten.’ Then, with care, the captain applied the reductor to Mieles’ corpse, reverently extracting the progenoid gene-seed glands that would be carried back to the fortress on Macragge. There they would be added to the Legion’s store of genetic material, the bequest of the next generation of Ultramarines.

In this way, Mieles would live on; but at this moment all Rubio could see was death and darkness. Silently he made his farewell to his comrade, and cursed the sons of Lorgar once again for their perfidy. When he looked up, Rubio found Captain Gaius watching him intently. The captain spoke to them all.

‘Kinsmen. We are being tested. We cannot know what madness has overcome Lorgar and the Warmaster. We do not know the fate of our brothers and our primarch. But what we do know is duty.’ He gestured around. ‘Our duty is to hold this approach to the city, to deny it to the enemy. These were Guilliman’s last words to us. Mieles gave his life in service of that command, and if called, then so shall we.’

Inwardly, Rubio seethed with cold anger. His fury was directionless, railing at the mindless insanity of the suicidal cultists, the traitorous Word Bearers, the oath-breaker Horus – even at himself, for his failure to protect his battle-brother.

But he was an Ultramarine, and to speak openly of such things was beneath him. Instead he kept his silence and only nodded.

Garro moved swiftly across the scarred wilderness, his gene-enhanced lungs drawing in the cold, corrupted air of Calth’s dying day. The faraway shouts of heavy weapons and the cries of the injured and the dying were a constant refrain, carried to him on the harsh winds.

In the distance, he saw the glitter of habitat towers and hive stacks rising over cliffs of dark stone. Numinus City reached as high into the sky as it did into the caverns below the planet’s surface, yet even as the warrior approached it, he saw the once-proud minarets wreathed in plasma fires, and the bright pinpricks of long-range laser bombardment.

As he walked, Garro wondered how long the battle would rage across Calth. The extremist Word Bearers had picked a fight here that would test them to the limit. The Ultramarines were no easy target. They were among the most finely drilled and highly competent warriors of the Legiones Astartes, a firm match for the ruthless, fanatical zeal of the primarch Lorgar’s warriors on any battleground. On Calth, Horus Lupercal’s civil war was raging in microcosm, but, like the larger conflict written across the stars, there could be no certainty as to how it might play out.

But the fate of Calth was not why Nathaniel Garro had come to this world. His mission here served another purpose.

His gaze dropped from the towers and searched the landscape, until he found the trail he was seeking.

Deep inside the tunnel, in the cold and echoing space, Rubio’s gaze turned inwards. In his mind’s eye he saw the moment of his battle-brother’s death. In the rush of Calth’s howling winds, he heard the echo of Mieles as the Apothecary called out a warning, a heartbeat before the crashing detonation that tore him open and ended his life.

Rubio had seen the cultist coming, caught sight of the madman just as his bolter ran dry. In those precious seconds, as he raced to slam a fresh magazine home into the breech and bring it to bear, he had been too slow to save his friend. The moment burned like a livid brand, acid guilt searing him. The tragedy of it was, he could have stopped the cultist, boltgun or not. Rubio could have done it with a thought. But such a thing was now forbidden.

Once – in what seemed like another life – Rubio had been more than this. Now he wore the sigils of a Tactical line legionary, but before…

Before he had proudly carried upon his shoulder plate the skull-and-scroll device of a ranked Codicier, the badge of a psyker-warrior in service to the Ultramarines. Once, the company of Rubio and his kind had been feared across every battlefield, and even his fellow legionaries had taken pause at his presence. Once, the power of the warp had coursed from his fingertips, the actinic glow of telekinetic lightning laying waste to the enemies of mankind. Countless foes blasted apart by the sheer power of his mind.

But not now. Not since the gathering at Nikaea, and the passing of the Emperor’s Decree Absolute. Many said that those with Rubio’s gift – or as some would have it, his curse – were only one step removed from sorcerers, their minds open doors to ruinous powers ready to reach from the darkness and consume them. At Nikaea, out of fear or of jealousy, those voices had finally held sway.

At a conclave of his primarch sons, the Emperor of Mankind had ordered that all psykers among the Legions, every Epistolary, Codicier and Lexicanium, were to abstain from the use of their abilities and return to line duty with their battle-brothers. Rubio was faithful and obedient, and he did as he was commanded, giving up his psychic hood and his force sword. His former status nulled, he accepted redeployment and did not question.

At least, not at first. But now the death of Mieles had set him at odds with his orders. Rubio knew with every fibre of his being that the Apothecary would still be alive, if only he had been given free rein to use his preternatural powers. And how many others? he wondered. What deaths might have been avoided, what adversaries felled, had they been able to call upon the might of a psyker?

He heard the approach of armoured footsteps and Rubio looked up from his introspection to find Captain Gaius standing over him. ‘Are you troubled, brother?’

‘It is nothing of import, captain.’ It was a poor lie, and his captain saw through it.

‘I know where your thoughts are, my friend. I also know that you are one of the finest Ultramarines it has been my privilege to command. No matter where your talents are applied.’ Gaius placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Courage and honour, brother. We follow the words of the Emperor and Guilliman, unto death.’

‘Courage and honour, brother-captain,’ repeated the Codicier, but the axiom rang hollow in his ears. He took a breath. ‘It is only that I–’

The words he was about to speak faded in his throat as a sentry called out a warning from the far end of the tunnel. The sudden cry of alarm out at the barricades echoed down to them.

‘Report!’ Gaius barked the order into the vox-bead at his throat.

‘Intruder sighted,’ came the reply. ‘A single legionary approaching our lines. He comes with a weapon drawn.’

‘One of our kinsmen?’

‘It would appear not.’

The captain did not wait to learn more, breaking into a run. Rubio went after him, bringing his bolter to the ready. ‘To arms,’ shouted Gaius, as they sprinted towards the tunnel mouth. ‘Prepare for enemy contact!’

Click here to buy Garro.

For Toby and Neil, who make me sound good and look good.

A Black Library Publication

Published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover and internal artwork by Neil Roberts.

Garro © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. Garro, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-545-6

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

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