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The Buried Dagger – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Interval I

Ante Mortem

[The planet Ynyx; now]

The Reaper of Men had grown weary of the screaming.

The cries from a million throats, the ceaseless cacophony of it, now fatigued him. He had long since become jaded with the pleas of those he killed, be they babbling streams of words as the doomed begged for pity, the foolish and furious curses of the fatally enraged or the endless, irritating wail of those who wept brokenly.

There was, at least, a small mercy to be had here on the surface of Ynyx. The monstrously poisonous atmosphere of the manufactory planet meant that every soul who toiled upon the world had no mouth with which to cry out. From the instant of their birth, the machines of the magos biologis sealed shut the apertures upon the faces of the human populace, organo-printing protective membrane masks over lips and nostrils. The workers were implanted with grilles and nutrient intakes, along with countless chem shunts and protective grafts, these enhancements and alterations sufficient to make them immune to the toxic fog that belched continuously from the core of the mineral-rich world. The people of Ynyx could only communicate via vox transmission, their voices muted in all other senses, and so it was that the Reaper of Men could walk in silence among them if he simply tuned them out.

The only sound was the rumble of the planet’s breath, forcing its way up through geothermal vents in the black landscape all around him, that and the steady crunch of brittle glass beneath his heavy plasteel boots. Scattered all over the battlefield, more numerous than the ragged remnants of dead bodies from the pre-invasion shelling, were endless numbers of empty cylindrical vials. Drug ampoules by the thousand, discarded by the Ynyxian defenders. Whatever effect they had brought – blissful oblivion, docility or merely resistance against the swirling churn of atmospheric contaminants – it counted for nothing. This world’s populace would be dead by nightfall, and it would not matter.

The cold ember of his familiar, obdurate resentment pushed him forward, one heavy and echoing step after the other, over the oily ebon sand towards the great citadel that was his objective. At the edges of his supremely genhanced vision, the Reaper of Men was aware of his praetorians marching in lockstep with him, each at a distance of seven by seven paces, all carrying their weapons across their chests in a blank mirror of his own aspect.

Held at rest against one of his shoulders was a skeletal scythe that was sooty with dried blood and tainted fluids. His other gauntleted hand wandered often to the heavy, drum-like shape of a unique, master-crafted energy gun hanging at his hip. Like the warrior himself, everything about his weapons was beyond human scale, built for the grasp of giants and demigods. Even his chosen guard, huge as they were, could not match his scale. Only two beings had ever stood taller than the Reaper of Men; the first had died at the hands of the second. As to the fate of the second…

In time, that question would be answered. The old, bitter ember stirred anew at the thought, but the giant stifled it before it could grow. Such things were a distraction. His mind was supposed to be here, at the march through Ynyx’s polluted dusk, not picking at this deep-rooted, forever unhealed wound. There would be time enough to nurse his lingering hate in the days ahead.

He cast a glance over his shoulder plates. Out past his hooded bodyguards, marching in lines behind them, came the body of his war band. Battle-captains and commanders, the striding forms of Dreadnoughts and Terminators, and rank after rank of legionaries in grimy, slate-coloured armour. He advanced with them at his heels, for they would never dare to march into battle without him at their head, even on as pitiful a killing ground as this one.

His Legion. His Death Guard. His unbroken blades.

They were all that occupied him now. His sons were the only thing he saw clearly, as the haze of the great insurrection led by his brother seemed to coil ever thicker around every deed, every thought in mind of the Reaper of Men. With his warriors, in battle, he came closest to clarity – or something like it.

He marched on, into the twilight and towards the great shadow cast by the citadel. The tallest structure for kilometres in every direction, it protruded from a great axial canyon that ringed the upper hemisphere of Ynyx. Thousands of such depthless chasms fractured the planet’s surface, vanishing into hellish pits kilometres deep where toxic smoke exhaled from the roiling core. The ashen matter vomited up from below was the source of the world’s fortune, laden with rare and precious heavy metallic elements that the manufactora of the Imperium sucked in and reprocessed. The refinery engines – lumbering city-sized arachnids of tarnished brass and grey iron – sat atop the richest of the vents for decades at a time, draining them dry before moving on to fresh pastures.

Few places on Ynyx had any permanence except the great citadel, built on the ancient site of the planet’s first colony landing. Formed of sapphire-dark stone dragged up from the abyssal depths, it was both palace and monument. The blocky, brutalist architecture of its design was as stark as a grave marker, its mere presence acting as a statement to the universe beyond. We have built in this unliveable place and ripped out the riches at its heart, said the citadel. We have done this in the name of the Emperor and Terra.

The Reaper of Men had his orders to cast it down, of course, but Mortarion would do so more because he wanted to. Because to do so would be to destroy one more possession belonging to his absent father, and in the act, find a few grains of satisfaction.

Movement at the edge of his helm’s auto-senses brought the primarch of the XIV Legion back to the moment, and he looked in the direction of the alert icon. Curious, he stepped off the line and wandered towards an impact crater blasted into the dense, clumped basalt sand. Behind him, he heard the clatter of a thousand troops halting, but he paid it no mind.

In the crater there were three humans who against all odds were still alive. Ynyxians, and not soldiers but civilians. Their physical alterations meant it was difficult for Mortarion to tell which of the genders they fell into or how old they were. Each wore the hood and eye-mask typical of their people, the feed tubules of their sealed mouths coiled in bunches against spoiled nutri-feed packs they carried around their necks.

They were so very afraid of him. He imagined that he could taste the odour of it in the ashen air. Mortarion had deliberately left his breath filters open wide so that he could drink in the noxious atmosphere of the spoiled world, and now he took in a great gale of it, feeling the subtle burn of the pollutants as they attempted to scar his mighty lungs. Unprotected, the weak bodily tissues of these humans would have melted to slurry before they could fully inhale, but for the Reaper of Men, the lethal air of Ynyx was no distraction.

He watched them, looking through the lenses of his helm, searching their faces for an understanding that would never emerge. It was a fruitless endeavour; these pitiful creatures were no different from the others. No matter how many he found on whatever planets, none of them could see past the fear. That same terror, buoyed up by the same hate simmering away just below it. They would never know him. They could not.

In those desperate, beseeching faces, he saw something familiar – the stirrings of a memory recalled by similarity. The Reaper of Men quickly smothered the moment, irritated by the conceit of it.

Mortarion moved, letting the action happen of its own accord. His free hand drew the heavy energy weapon from its holster, and the device reacted, powering up the moment its gene-lock registered his touch. The Lantern, as the gun had been named, turned towards the figures cowering in the pit. They reacted, silently raising their hands in a gesture of warding. If they were screaming, he did not hear it.

A brief pulse of searing white light erased them from existence, their bodies becoming a faint trace of vapour in the moment of discharge. The Lantern’s shrieking power atomised the survivors and turned the surface layer of the crater into a bowl of fused fulgurite. He turned and marched away, leaving the newly formed glass crackling and hissing as it cooled.

What he had done for them was a mercy, a quick death. He knew all the kinds of dying, and to end by the Lantern’s flame was a better way than many. Mortarion had given them a gift.

He forgot the humans as he marched on, the image of them slipping away as his thoughts returned to more martial matters. The primarch allowed his gaze to rise along the line of the darkened, windowless citadel, and the questions that had been nagging at him since the Death Guard arrived on Ynyx returned.

Why did Horus send me here?

Mortarion drew in another deep, tainted breath. There was little of tactical value to the manufactory world and the storehouse moons that orbited it, and less still to the other spheres of rock that circled the watery white light of Ynyx’s sun. The Death Guard had found the chem-loaded combat helots who defended the planet to be a perfunctory and unchallenging foe, rolling over their positions with the Legion’s signature tactic of inexorable advance. Tearing this planet from the control of the Imperium and denying it to the Emperor was a task that could have been accomplished by a handful of battle cruisers and lesser companies. The vast force and numbers that the Warmaster had bid Mortarion to bring to Ynyx was nothing short of overkill.

It vexed the Reaper of Men to be ignorant of Horus’ true reasoning, and in the void where answers ran out, he was wont to fill the gap with suspicion.

Mortarion knew of Horus’ dalliances with the beings of the warp, the things that called themselves the Ruinous Powers. These monstrous intelligences craved gifts of death and bloodletting, and while Mortarion did not speak openly of it, he was aware that among his rebellious brothers there were some who were all too eager to appease them. Worlds burned in mass sacrifices, and arcane horrors were committed as if such acts could court the favour of these… things.

He wondered, had Horus sent the Death Guard to exterminate the population of Ynyx as part of such a bargain?

Am I simply his tool in this?

Behind his breath mask, Mortarion’s pallid lips twisted in a grimace. Once, it would have been nigh-impossible for the primarch to think ill of Horus Lupercal. Now, his corrosive distrust had eaten away at that certainty. And perhaps that was fated. Over countless years and hard-won, bitter experience, the Reaper of Men had learned that in the end, he could only completely trust his own counsel.

The more he dwelt on the possibility, the more it seemed to grow to fit the facts. Mortarion himself had dared to peer into the lore of these warp-beings, the creatures that some named daemons.

In the skies above the ruins of glorious Terathalion, he had looked into the face of such a monster for the first time, named it and interrogated it, for what little that had been worth. That had been the turning point, he reflected, the moment when he could no longer dismiss these aberrations out of hand.

The primarch’s long-dead foster father – the corrupted and callous being who had named him, the one he thought of when that notion came to mind – had taught him many lessons as he grew to adulthood, not least of which was the value of knowledge as well as endurance.

If you know the truth of something, then you can destroy it, his foster father had said. And that is all you need to hold true power.

Mortarion was learning a new truth, page by page, step by step, scroll by scroll. The witchery and sorcerous cankers he hated so much were widespread in this new and changed war, employed openly by Horus, that arrogant braggart Magnus and the rest of them. He detested the psykers and the warp-things with such an inchoate fury that it was impossible for him to find words to encompass the emotion, and he loathed his brother primarchs for lowering themselves to have congress with such creatures.

But Mortarion was a child of blighted Barbarus, and no sons and daughters of that death world lived long enough to walk erect if they were not pragmatists. Hate was all well and good, but it could not outdo obstinate reality. Hate alone did not make walls fall. And so, in the space between his repugnance for things tainted by the immaterium’s gelid hand and his need to win the war inside his own soul, Mortarion had grudgingly found a place to accommodate these horrors.

One of them, in particular, that wore the face of an old friend.

Mortarion paused once again as he entered the remains of a rubble-strewn plaza before the citadel, and his thoughts returned to his grand shuttle, moored a few kilometres away in the blasted landing zone where the Legion’s invasion force had made planetfall. The vessel, a war-barge named Greenheart, was a segment of his flagship that could operate as an autonomous command-and-control nexus if the mission required it. It could be parked in orbit and set to direct bombardments or pacifications, hard-landed in target zones or, as in this day’s circumstances, used to light the way towards a decapitation strike.

Greenheart carried cannons more powerful than most ships its size, volkite tech and displacer guns that could batter cities, but Mortarion rarely used them. His thoughts held not on the potential of those devices, but on the power of the weapon chained up in a stasis-null cage on the barge’s lower decks.

Even now, the primarch was uncertain that he had made the right call in bringing the caged beast with him, wondering if it would have been more prudent to leave the thing in the dungeons of his flagship, the Endurance.

It had begged, in the end. Begged him to take it along, begged Mortarion to drop it from the sky and let it eat all life it found on Ynyx, just as it had done so well during the battle for Molech.

‘Let me serve you,’ it said, in a grotesque parody of the warrior-son Mortarion had once known. ‘Let me kill them for you, gene-father.’

He refused, of course. That would have been too easy. What value would there have been to bring his Legion here, only to let the daemon with the face of Ignatius Grulgor do the deed for them?

Was that part of the plan? A manoeuvre to push Mortarion closer to the path laid out by the Ruinous Powers?

The creature, twice dead and resurrected by his primarch’s own hand, was a weapon unlike any the Death Guard had ever employed, even at the height of their powers in toxin warfare. Wherever it walked, life turned to blackened ruin and disease. A tempting dagger to wield, Mortarion told himself. Far too tempting.

Perhaps, when this day was done, he might abandon the daemon with Grulgor’s face on this cracked and broken world. Perhaps he might gather the papers and scrolls, every pict-slate and data crystal containing the lore of these warp-things, and pour them into the abyss of Ynyx’s deepest chasm. Be rid of the ideal of them and fight on to Terra as he was meant to.

We could return to the purity of warfare, he told himself. As the inexorable, unstoppable force that makes the galaxy tremble to hear our approach.

But even as the possibility crossed his thoughts, Mortarion knew it was already being betrayed. Pragmatism did not flinch from using the most horrific of tools, even if the abhorrence of such works was great. The ends justified the means, and there would eventually come a day when such tools were no longer needed.

Then, they would not merely be discarded. They would be expunged from existence.

‘My lord?’ The voice did not come over the vox-network, but was instead carried by the thick, foetid air.

The Reaper of Men turned and with a nod from his tarnished helm, his Deathshroud praetorians parted to allow a lone figure in battleplate to approach him.

The primarch’s equerry inclined his head as a wary salute and paused, eyeing the citadel tower.

‘Speak,’ rasped Mortarion.

‘The enemy appear in no rush to meet us.’ Caipha Morarg gestured towards the great obelisk. ‘Auspex readings show no visible entrances around the lower level of the citadel, and no signs of enemy activity. I would ask, lord, how you would have us proceed.’

‘You are mistaken,’ he told the legionary. ‘They are here. They are watching us.’ As the hoarse words left his mouth, Mortarion took a step further into the empty plaza, and deliberately triggered the ambush he knew was waiting for them.

All around, the fractured flagstones and the clogged black sand ranging beyond them trembled and shook underfoot. Clawed fingers sheathed in polycarbonate burst forth like the shoots of obscene plants seeking sunlight, and human bodies shelled by carapace armour and deep-pressure mining rigs erupted from where they had been buried. The last battalions of Ynyx’s defenders had willingly allowed themselves to be interred beneath the metallic sands so that they might spring this trap upon the Death Guard.

What foolish ideal do they cling to? Mortarion gave a grave shake of the head. Did they actually believe I would not intuit their plans? Do they think they have a chance?

He had no need to give the order to fire. His legionaries were already killing, the rancid air vibrating with the smacking concussion of bolter fire. At his side, Morarg used his pistol to behead a human in a mining exo-frame, blasting flesh and skull into crimson slurry through the heavy rad-plates of the machine the attacker wore like an oversuit. Spinning drills and whirling cutters buzzed and clattered as the mechanism stumbled on a few more steps, sporadic neural impulses from the dead man within still pushing it forward.

Mortarion gave it a desultory backhand blow with the flat of Silence’s blade, his towering scythe flashing briefly in the bleak daylight. The exo-frame cannoned away under the force of the impact, ricocheting off the high outer wall of the citadel. It sank to the flagstones in a sizzling heap, leaving inky marks on the rock.

He ignored the storm of bolter fire and clashing metal at his back and marched on, meeting nothing he considered to be resistance as he crossed the last few metres to the wall. Surrounding him, his Deathshroud wove shapes in the air as their blades cleaved any of the Ynyxian troopers who dared to stray into range. Emerald-hued lances of fire rippled from flame projectors mounted on their gauntlets, as powerful chem-munitions discharged into the mass of the enemy ambushers and melted them where they stood.

Morarg trailed at the primarch’s heels, his helmet bobbing as he looked to and fro. They reached the foot of the impregnable citadel, and if there had ever been an entrance to the tower here, it had been sealed away so cleanly that the rock appeared to be carved from a single gigantic piece of obsidian.

‘There is no way in…’ muttered the equerry.

‘Patience, Caipha,’ admonished Mortarion, reaching up to detach a handful of globe-like censers from a bandolier that hung across the brass-and-steel expanse of his chest-plate. Each of the orbs was drilled with thousands of holes, and within alchemical philtres and fluids of great potency nestled in permeable sacs.

Mortarion brought the cluster of globes up to the breath mask that covered the lower part of his gaunt, pallid features, and rolled them in his long fingers, stirring the volatiles within. Wisps of thin white smoke issued from the pits in their surfaces, and he inhaled them, savouring the lethal bite of the chemicals. Then, with a flick of his wrist, the Reaper of Men hurled the orbs at the wall of the citadel and watched them shatter against the stone.

The hyperacidic fluids within spattered across the black rock, instantly softening the surface into something waxy and frangible. Mortarion counted silently to seven and struck the weakened wall with the heavy pommel at the base of Silence’s shaft. The stone cracked like glass. He hit it again and again, until the blow had torn open a ragged gash large enough for two Dreadnoughts to walk through abreast.

‘Follow,’ growled Mortarion, and he advanced once more, his pace as careful and as steady as it had been during the march from the landing zone.

Morarg knew well enough to stay clear of the arc of Silence’s wicked reach, remaining near to his primarch but beyond the singing silver streaks of Mortarion’s murderous scythe. They plunged through the mass of common troopers crammed into the main atrium of the citadel and the Reaper of Men moved among them with an almost machine-like action, cutting them down in their hundreds with each back-and-forth sweep of the mighty sickle blade.

Morarg busied himself with killing any who survived the kiss of Silence’s edge, but he had sparse trade. Such was Mortarion’s unflinching aim and dogged advance that barely a handful of souls did not immediately die from contact with him, and those that endured the first blow did not live long. Meanwhile, the equerry and the Deathshroud mopped up whatever forces tried to flank them from the echoing arcades along the sides of the atrium, blasting them apart against the spindly, fluted columns that held up the vaulted roof far above.

Pulses of laser fire spat down in a crimson rain from balconies and glassed-in galleries hundreds of metres overhead, drawing his attention. Morarg fired back, then barked out orders to the Death Guard line legionaries pouring in through the breach their liege lord had made. He blink-clicked target icons to the vision blocks of the squad commanders and they answered by ranging their guns up. A screaming salvo of concentrated firepower obliterated the platforms where the Ynyx las-sniper battalion was concealed, and the bodies of the sharpshooters came raining down around him to crack against the marble floor, along with shattered bricks and shards of crystalflex.

The Lantern’s distinctive song keened its banshee wail, and Morarg picked his way through the dead to where Mortarion stood. The Reaper of Men used the energy weapon to burn off the thick hinges of a huge brass hatch set in a raised dais. As the metal turned molten and drooled away, the door slumped and slid back to reveal a descending passage. Searing, fume-laden air gushed out.

‘We go down,’ said the primarch. ‘The day’s work ends below.’

Morarg nodded, and turned back to the warriors behind him. ‘Secure the building and terminate all remaining targets!’ He paused, then turned back to Mortarion. ‘My lord, do you wish to–?’

But the Reaper of Men had not waited, and was already descending. His seven Deathshroud fell into formation behind and followed. Morarg nodded to himself, then went on.

‘Keep me apprised of any developments,’ he said into the vox-net, knowing that his orders would be relayed to Greenheart and from there to the Death Guard fleet in orbit. ‘Lord Mortarion wishes to conclude the battle by his own hand.’

Morarg took a moment to reload the sickle magazine in his bolter and jogged down the wide stairwell in the wake of the primarch’s praetorians. He suspected his presence would not be needed in the fight to come, but he had been in this circumstance before, reduced to standing back and acting as witness to the unchained maelstrom that was Mortarion’s cold wrath. If that was to be his function today, then so be it. He would take pride in the deed.

Caipha Morarg was a Pale Son, a Death Guard born of stock from the Legion’s home world of Barbarus and not, as some were, sired by tribes from Terra. For many among the brotherhood there would always be a schism, a rivalry in place between the ‘original’ warriors of the XIV Legion – the ones who had been known as the Dusk Raiders, who had come to Barbarus when the Emperor arrived there to find His lost son – and the common men whom Mortarion had uplifted from his ragged Death Guard into the Legion’s number, and in whose honour it had been renamed.

The memories of that auspicious day were hazy but they still existed in the equerry’s distant recall. He cut off the recollection, lest he lose his focus in a moment of reverie, and kept his attention on the descent.

Ahead, gunfire and screaming sounded off the curved walls of the wide stairwell as Mortarion and his personal guard dispatched all those who were too slow to flee the reach of their manreapers. Their pace did not slow as they went.

The unspeaking Deathshroud mimicked the primarch in some aspects, not just with the design of their modified Terminator armour and the war-scythes they wielded, but with their shadowed reaper’s hoods, dark cloaks and the heavy plasteel helmets that covered their faces and aped the impassive aspect of Mortarion’s own portcullis mask. The Deathshroud never uttered a word, communicating only through battle-sign or audial break codes on the rare occasions they were required to transmit a message via vox. There were always seven of them at the primarch’s hand, never straying more than seven by seven paces from his side at all times. The repeated number was said to be an auspicious one, an old belief dating back to before the seeding of human colonies on Barbarus, but it had lost its superstitious taint over the years and was now seen as a simple tactical nicety.

Morarg had never given it much thought, at least not until recent times. Some of the warriors he conversed with in the Davinite Lodges talked about the number with reverence; they spoke of the power of such symbols and how they could affect things in the real world. The equerry found these notions intriguing, but little more. He was, and always had been, a man of uncomplicated paths. The numinous and the uncanny were anathema to him, an ingrained reaction born of a taught hate for the creatures who embodied such ideas. He had lived to kill such things, back on Barbarus, back when he had been just a man. But like the tale of the numbers and their powers, the longer Morarg lived, the more that too seemed like a story he had once been told and not something he had actually experienced.

One of the Deathshroud glanced back towards him, then away. It was difficult to tell them apart at the best of times. Morarg had no idea what faces were concealed behind those sealed masks. The Reaper of Men himself personally chose the legionaries who were granted the shroud and told no other of his selections. When one of Mortarion’s praetorians fell in battle, the armour was said to consume the body within. The warrior then picked to replace the lost would himself be declared dead on the field of battle, and entered into the lists as if he had fallen to enemy action – but in reality, he would strip himself of all identity and become Deathshroud, there to carry the honour of standing at Mortarion’s side, as close as any Death Guard could ever come to being considered a confidante of their liege lord.

Would I ever be worthy of such a tribute? Morarg entertained the thought briefly, then shook it off. He already carried a high accolade of his own. The primarch had plucked him from his posting in the Breachers and made him his factotum.

His witness, Morarg amended. There had never been any lore keepers or remembrancers in the Death Guard, only those like him – battle-brothers with keen memories and sharp eyes. If I am to document all that befalls my Legion and my master, then so be it. That is as good a calling as any.

Ahead, the stairwell widened still further to deposit them in a chamber dominated by two semicircular doors in the far wall. The sheer amount of visible opulence, from the rich carpets and thick tapestries adorning the support columns to the gilded objects and artworks in every alcove, spoke of this place as the domain of an aggrandised ruler. Morarg’s trigger finger twitched. He saw the lavish, self-indulgent affluence of it all and immediately wanted to destroy it.

Pillars of toxin-laced steam and damp, oppressive heat climbed through ventilation grilles in the floor, and a sullen orange illumination channelled up along vast light traps gave everything an infernal glow. Morarg heard a strange echo behind the march of his boots and tensed. The chamber had the feel of an arena, despite all attempts to make it seem otherwise.

The Deathshroud appeared to sense the same portent, and they moved into a protective formation around Mortarion’s flanks. Only the Reaper of Men was unmoved by the air of ready threat in the chamber. He gave Silence a shake, flicking off the blood of those it had cut down, and kneaded the haft.

Morarg heard the clacking of great metal claws on the marble then, a scraping and clashing noise like a hundred swords being dragged across the tiles. His auto-senses picked out two hulking forms as they burst through searing walls of steam, man-shaped things that stormed across the floor towards Mortarion, each bearing an orchard of blades and buzzing beam emitters where they should have had arms. A jangling disharmony of bell tones sounded from thousands of rattling injector ampoules jammed into the bare flesh of their torsos and thighs. The hulking forms were some kind of altered human, ogre-like with their chemically forced gigantism. It struck the Death Guard that they were what someone inexpert might have created had they tried to duplicate a warrior of the Legiones Astartes. Twinned freaks powered by cocktails of metatropic drugs, set loose to act as gate guardians for whoever waited in the chamber beyond this one.

The first strike came in a flash of quick moves. Mortarion raised a hand, a simple order to the Deathshroud to stand back and not intervene, and then with a pivot so quick that Morarg barely registered it happening, the Reaper of Men spun Silence around to invert the great scythe and kiss the head of the blade across the marble floor. White sparks flew where the scythe touched the ground, and the primarch thundered forward to meet the leading guardian-creature. He closed the distance in the blink of an eye, and Silence rose in a spinning arc.

Morarg smiled behind his helmet as the curved blade opened the first of the guardians from crotch to throat. Momentum kept the chem-altered mutant stumbling forward as its body opened like an overripe fruit, belching ropes of intestine and organ matter onto the marble in a red gush. Silence was still moving, coming around, and the Death Guard heard the air sing as the blade cut again before the guardian could register that it had already been killed. The scythe took the creature’s head off at the neck, and it tumbled through the air to land with a wet thud.

The second guardian fired a sheeting wave of energy beams across the chamber, burning blue rods that melted stone where they touched and boiled off the grubby patina of the primarch’s battleplate.

Mortarion didn’t attempt to dodge the attack. With an arm across his face to protect himself from the beam-fire, he planted Silence in the ground, ramming it into the marble with enough force to keep it upright. Then he advanced directly into the assault, snatching at his own energy weapon. The Lantern almost leapt into his grip, and the primarch lit the gun, drawing a black trench down the distance to his attacker as the beam from the giant pistol melted marble and metal before finally reaching the guardian. He carved off a leg and an arm from the creature before releasing the trigger.

Morarg inhaled the stench of burned, spoiled meat, and his smile grew. It was always an education to watch the Reaper of Men at his art.

Mortarion went to the second guardian – it was still alive, but not for long – holstering the Lantern as he walked. He gathered a great knot of the fleshy wattles around the mutant’s throat and hauled it off the ground where it had fallen. With a grunt of sour disdain, the primarch pitched the creature into the sealed doors at the far end of the chamber. The collision was of such force that it shattered the guardian’s body and rammed open the doors to reveal the throne room beyond.

‘Who pretends to rule here?’ growled Mortarion, pitching the question into the ill-lit space ahead of them. ‘Present yourself.’ He retrieved Silence from where he had left it, made another small motion with his hand, and immediately the Deathshroud were moving again, coming up to trail him through the broken doors.

Morarg took a step forward, then hesitated as a data-feed spooled past his eyes, a line of text projected on the inside of his helmet’s lenses. It was an alert message, a high-priority code routed to him from an officer on board Greenheart. Several ships had been detected approaching Ynyx, angling to make orbit. But no arrivals were expected at this time, and to confuse the matter, the new craft were sporting the Death Guard’s aura-identifier pennants.

How is that possible? The whereabouts of all the Legion’s ships are known… The equerry stopped himself. Well, that isn’t exactly true. Not all our ships. Morarg didn’t dare to consider what the alternative might mean, but he did his duty and called out to his master, relaying the message.

For a moment, Morarg thought that the Reaper of Men had not heard him speak, but then his primarch gave him a sideways look. ‘One matter at a time.’

The throne room was a bowl of reinforced crystalflex built into the roof of a cavern, and far below it churned a shimmering lake of fire. Jets of steam spat from the turbulent magma field, and an observer could have picked out hundreds of machine-slave diggers in their protective suits, still working at drills or syphons in their endless labours to gather Ynyx’s mineral bounty.

That sight slipped past Mortarion’s gaze without register. It was the throne that brought him up short.

Placed in the centre of the room, at the bowl’s lowest point, the throne of the governor of Ynyx was a scaled-down representation of a great seat that Mortarion had once glimpsed before, in the days when his father had taken him back to Terra to see His Palace and look upon the works within it.

‘Such arrogance,’ he breathed, as much to those in the chamber with him as to that faded memory of the Emperor’s studied magnificence. Mortarion peered into the shadows of the chamber, sensing other beings in there with the Death Guard, but nothing that appeared to be a threat. ‘Do not make me ask again. Where is your ruler?’

‘Here.’ The voice was artificial, broadcast from a vocoder module. It emanated from a cylindrical tank floating just above the seat of the ersatz throne. The object was the size of a man, made of faceted crystal framed in gold, inlaid with precious gemstones. It swayed gently on a throbbing suspensor module, held up by contra-gravity technology. ‘I will not surrender to you, rebel,’ it added.

Mortarion stood and watched as the tank drifted away from the throne, becoming better defined by the orange light thrown by the magma fires. Inside the tank was a bubbling potion of thick, clear oil. At its centre there was a clump of whorled grey matter adorned with delicate circuitry and feeder implants. Wires came at it from every angle, connecting the blob of organic material to the systems of the floating container.

‘I am Magister Greaterex Nalthusian the Forty-Fifth,’ it went on, in stentorian tones. ‘I own this system by order of the Emperor of Mankind–’

‘You are a few kilos of stale meat in a jar,’ Mortarion interrupted, a faint note of disgust entering his voice. ‘And your existence… such as it is… is forfeit.’ He rocked off his heels and strode forward. His irritation at this useless, waste of time of a mission bubbled to the surface, and the Reaper of Men reached out a hand. He would crush this thing and be done–

–Something there?

A wall of hurricane-hard force struck him from out of the darkness. Mortarion was lifted off his feet and blasted, along with the Deathshroud and his equerry, into the crystalflex panels of the throne room.

Mortarion reacted, using the crook of Silence’s blade to snag a support pillar, arresting his motion. Morarg and the seven Deathshroud were scattered about the chamber. Two of the praetorians took the brunt of the phantom blow and were blasted clear through the crystalflex, both of them spinning silently away to vanish into the magma lake below.

He scrambled back to his feet, and tasted a greasy, acidic tang in the air. Witchery. Mortarion knew that hated odour only too well.

A piece of the shadows behind the throne detached and a skein of darkness fell away, revealing a hollow-eyed youth whose face was half hidden behind a mess of long white hair. He grinned behind his bio-mask, unafraid of the legionaries or the primarch.

Somehow, the psyker had concealed himself from all of them, but now he was revealed, Mortarion sensed the raw power crackling around his form. It was a pressure in his head, the feeling of a storm about to break. The Reaper of Men had faced this kind of kinetipath many times before, in the Overlord Wars on Barbarus and later in the battles of the Great Crusade.

He knew enough to be wary. Physically, the psyker was a skinny wretch, weak enough that Mortarion would have been able to break him in two without an iota of effort. But psionically, the youth was as dangerous as a melta bomb, a raw elemental power barely contained.

The witchkin called upon that vitality, conjuring a torrent of force that gathered up loose fragments of metal and crystalflex, throwing them at the Death Guard in a storm of shrapnel.

Mortarion grimaced and set himself in slow progress, one foot in front of the other, pushing against the barrage flooding from the youth’s outstretched hands. Frost formed around the psyker as he desperately drew in energy to oppose the primarch’s steps, growing more frantic by the moment as the Reaper of Men drew closer. The ripping, tearing wind burned at Mortarion’s armour.

He ignored everything else. They were in the teeth of the psychokinetic hurricane, witch and witch-killer, psyker and posthuman, enemy and enemy.

I have killed a hundred thousand of you. Mortarion let the declaration shine at the forefront of his thoughts. If the youth could read his mind, then he would hear this. You will perish at the hands of the Death Guard. He leaned forward, step after punishing step, almost close enough to strike. The hate I have for you is greater than any other.

‘That is not so.’

The ghostly reply was almost lost in the wind, and Mortarion hesitated for an instant, uncertain if he had truly heard it or if it was a trick of the mind. Then the moment broke as an emerald flash illuminated the throne room from the far side of the chamber.

When the light faded, shapes in heavy Cataphractii battleplate were suddenly there, moving lightning-fast, and the psyker was distracted. The ethereal wind faltered, and it was enough for the closest warrior to sweep in and take the kill that was the primarch’s due.

A manreaper blade – a sibling weapon to those held by his Deathshroud – cut the psyker in half with a diagonal downward stroke. Bloody segments tumbled to the floor, the brief enclosed storm dying as suddenly as its creator.

Mortarion glowered at the new arrivals, feeling the still-fading crackle of a teleport effect in the close, dense air of the chamber. He instinctively knew whose face he would see before the lead figure stepped into the light. ‘Calas.’

Typhon, First Captain of the Death Guard, saluted with his bloody scythe and bowed as well as he could in his heavy armour. ‘My Lord Mortarion. Well met.’

Mortarion refused to answer the ritual hail. ‘Those are your ships up there.’ He walked over to the reproduction throne, not waiting for a confirmation. The floating tank and the brain of the planetary governor within it was babbling a stream of panicked words, as Morarg and the Deathshroud set about executing any retainers in the chamber who were still alive. Without halting to listen to what was being said, Mortarion punched through the tank and crushed the organ inside to paste, before angrily tossing the remains away. ‘You chose this moment to show your face again.’

‘It was opportune,’ Typhon offered, nodding at the dead psyker.

‘The psyker didn’t see you coming.’

‘No.’ The First Captain smiled slightly, and Mortarion saw his teeth had yellowed, his skin drawn, as if he had been recent victim to a powerful malaise. ‘You know I have gifts. Stealth is one of them.’

The primarch scowled at the suggestion behind those words. The witchery he so detested ran strong in Typhon’s blood, a legacy that his First Captain had refused to completely eschew, much to Mortarion’s displeasure. ‘Why return to us now? You broke away from the Legion, took your own fleet to seek… What? Answers?’

‘You have sought me, have you not?’ Typhon took a step closer, deflecting the question with one of his own. ‘And it is time, my lord. It is time for the Death Guard to be united in full once more. The final day is almost upon us, and we must be ready.’

Mortarion’s irritation deepened. He had no patience for those who spoke in vagaries, and would not tolerate it among his commanders. ‘Speak plainly or not at all,’ he demanded. ‘Why did you come back?’

‘I have the answers I want,’ Typhon replied. ‘I would have come back, even without the orders.’

‘What orders?’ The primarch eyed him.

Typhon gave a nod, the smile widening, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘The Warmaster calls us to the greatest battle, my lord. The invasion of Terra will soon begin.’

Typhon felt the citadel’s end rumble through the black ground beneath his feet, and watched the fortress crumble with a jaundiced eye. The great construct’s sad destruction put him in mind of a dying man, slumping and collapsing in on itself as the earth it stood on gave way.

Geoformer charges left behind by Legion Tactical Support squads fired in concussive sequence, blasting apart the supporting structures that had held up the citadel for thousands of years. The tower sank into a roiling stir of heavy dust, disappearing through the thick mantle to fall into the magmatic underground lake beneath it. The final act was the ejection of a column of dark ash and superheated steam – the last, fading grave marker for the rulers of Ynyx.

A sombre wind brought him the sound of distant thrusters. Looking up, Typhon spotted the metallic darts of Stormbirds racing away before vanishing into the low, foul clouds. Mortarion had dispatched search teams to conduct a final sweep over the planet’s surface, just to be certain all life upon it had been expunged. But Typhon felt the certainty in his dark and tainted blood. Nothing lived on this world but the forces of the XIV Legion. Every settlement and city was a mouldering heap of corpses, the dead discarded and decaying.

A perfect garden of death from which new things will be born, he told himself. Typhon turned his gauntlet over, absently studying the pattern of the plates across his palm and his fingers. A tiny speck emerged from one of the knuckle joints – a black-silver fly with an oily body – and he watched it take flight and buzz away.

Behind him, heavy boots crunched on the ebon sand, and he turned, half bowing as his primarch approached.

Mortarion gave him a dismissive, irritable gesture. ‘Stop. Do not bow and scrape.’ Unhooded now, his gaunt aspect remained set in its accustomed scowl. ‘I seek truth, not obeisance.’

Typhon was aware of the Deathshroud standing at their full permitted distance of forty-nine paces, away on the rise of the black basalt dunes. Mortarion would have ordered them to stay back, he guessed, so as to keep what was spoken of between the primarch and the First Captain private.

‘Much has changed since we parted ways, brother.’ Typhon dared to be informal with his Legion master, knowing that to do so would summon memories of their shared past. ‘I tell you with all honesty that when the Warmaster declared his insurrection, I was uncertain of the path I should take.’ He saw Mortarion’s eyebrow rise questioningly, and headed off his primarch’s train of thought before he could voice it. ‘I do not speak of holding Terra’s banner. I mean my path.’ Typhon beat a fist against his chest-plate, above the site of his primary heart. ‘I broke away because I needed that distance to see clearly.’

At the edges of his vision, Typhon glimpsed the now familiar black-silver flicker of insect wings, and in the deep registers of his hearing he sensed the drone of invisible flies. His primarch remained oblivious to them, but they comforted Typhon, in their own way. He held back a smile. There was so much he wanted to share with Mortarion, so many things he needed to say.

I was right all along. I promised you, and I was right.

But it was too soon. He needed only to study the face of his liege lord to know that the time was not at hand. The moment was close, though, closer than it had ever been before. The embrace would come when due. Nothing could stop that from happening.

Mortarion’s gaze suddenly flicked up, as if he had seen something hidden to all other observers. His eyes narrowed.

Does he sense it? Typhon pulled at the question. Can he hear it too? The coming change…

Perhaps he did, even if he could not articulate it. Typhon could taste the psychic stain in the air around the primarch, the spoor left behind by his deliberate contact with the warp. For all Mortarion’s hatred of the immaterium and the forces that swam in its depths, he had willingly exposed himself to such powers. Typhon had talked to chattering messenger-monsters in ghostly unplaces, heard them speak of how the Reaper of Men had defied his own revulsion to satiate his desire for knowledge.

Horus Lupercal’s bloody schism had changed so much in its wake, from the great to the small. Typhon wondered if Mortarion would ever have dared to walk in the shallows of the Formless Seas, if his brother had not first broken the unbreakable faith of the Legions in so shattering a manner.

Mortarion was on the cusp, ready to be guided over the edge, even if he was not aware of it. Typhon knew of the primarch’s fateful conversation with Lermenta, the mantis-crone the Death Guard had taken on Terathalion, and his wild success binding the daemon-tied essence of that braggart Ignatius Grulgor.

The latter was a challenge that few would have been able to accomplish with such scant experience, and yet Typhon’s liege lord had managed it with the barest knowledge of the ways of witchery. Given the mercurial and wicked manners of the Ruinous Powers, Typhon had to wonder if they had eased the path for Grulgor’s capture, deliberately pitching the act against Mortarion’s hatred of them.

The more he loathes them, the sweeter his assimilation will taste, thought Typhon. But the path to the fall was not flowing as it should have. He should have used the Eater of Life on this wretched ball of dust. It was the ideal weapon.

Erebus had told him as much. Speaking through his ruin of a face, the Word Bearers legionary had promised it. Erebus told Typhon that he would return to his Legion and find them willing and ready to take the Cups. To drink deep of the new way.

But Mortarion – stubborn and unyielding in all things – resisted the inevitable, as he always did.

‘And now you come back,’ the primarch was saying, ‘and all is forgiven?’

‘I will submit myself to any censure you deem fit,’ Typhon replied, inclining his head. ‘I only ask that you delay such judgement until we can regroup for the mission ahead.’

‘Yes.’ Mortarion glanced away again, towards the rest of his forces mustering in the blasted wasteland. ‘The mission. Morarg brought me word from the Endurance that confirms what you said. The Warmaster wishes us to unite for the final invasion.’ He paused, his frown deepening. ‘His twisted equerry, Maloghurst, told me that we would be the first to attack the walls of the Imperial Palace. My brother, it seems, was unwilling to give me that command in person.’ Typhon sensed irritation in his words. ‘Did you speak to him?’

Typhon shook his head, again seeing Erebus’ torn aspect in his recollection. ‘No, only an emissary.’ The First Captain did not mention what else the Word Bearers legionary had given him – a velvet bag of hololithic diamonds encoded with dense fields of encrypted data. One of the gemstones was in an equipment pouch on his hip, and his hand strayed towards it. The others were already in the process of being secretly distributed throughout the command ships of the Death Guard flotilla. They were, in their own way, utterly priceless.

‘The home world…’ said Mortarion, pausing again to frame his words. ‘Barbarus. You are aware?’

Typhon nodded. ‘It is no more.’ He had been thinking on this moment ever since Erebus had told him of the planet’s destruction, and now it was here, the First Captain did not know what face to wear before his commander. Should he be morose over the loss of that blighted sphere? Furious? Or coldly dismissive? He was unsure which expression would be best suited to mimic Mortarion’s thoughts.

‘The Dark Angels destroyed it to punish us,’ Mortarion went on. ‘I should hate them all the more for this deed but I cannot.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I have always detested the Sons of Caliban. The chasm of my enmity is as deep as it ever was.’ His tone was level, distant. ‘They will pay along with the others.’

Typhon decided to keep his own counsel with regard to his recent contact with factions of the Lion’s Legion on Zaramund. If he spoke of it now, it would only cloud matters, and the First Captain’s Grave Wardens knew better than to volunteer the information. ‘Barbarus was our cradle, brother,’ offered Typhon. ‘Aye, the Death Guard were born there, but we were always meant to abandon it.’ He let his gaze drop, to appear sorrowful. ‘We passed beyond it long ago. We left behind our errant fathers and eclipsed them.’

The primarch nodded once. ‘This is truth. You have always cut to the core of things, Typhon. But there are many among my sons who do not share your… clarity.’

‘Of course.’ He had no doubt that amid the rank and file, there were Barbarun-born legionaries whose rage was stoked high by the thought of that hell-world cracking beneath a bombardment of planet-killers. There would be the need for revenge against the First Legion, and calls both private and public to find the Dark Angels and punish them. Once, Typhon reflected, he would have been shouting loudest among those voices, but not any more. On Zaramund, he had finally found the perspective that had been beyond him for so long.

The mission before Typhon was far more important than the fate of one toxic cloud-wreathed world and its populace of primitive mud farmers. The future of the Death Guard, and their role in the galaxy’s savage destiny was at stake. The two things were so unlike in significance that they could not even share the same scale.

‘I say this,’ Typhon went on. ‘If it is bloody vengeance that is required, then there is one certain place where we will have it. Terra.’

Mortarion gave a grunt of reluctant agreement. ‘The Lion’s whelps will be there, if they do not hold their honour cheap. We shall trample them upon my father’s doorstep. It will be a fitting end for the First.’

Typhon smiled slightly. ‘When he has the Golden Throne, we can bid Horus to give us Caliban… and then take our payment from it, over centuries if we see fit.’

‘Yes.’ The primarch’s head bobbed. That was the kind of justice that appealed to Mortarion, the kind that only someone who had been hated and rejected could espouse. Typhon knew this truth because he shared it. Not for the first time, he reflected on how alike the two of them were. Shared pain, shared hate, he thought. In that, we both spring from the same dark well.

He had to restrain the smile on his lips from growing any wider. It was going to work – it was all going to work, and Typhon would be at the centre of it.

Click here to buy The Buried Dagger.

For Lindsey and Marc, with thanks.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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