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Exocytosis – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Exocytosis

James Swallow

Dawn came to Zaramund in slow ranges of colour, yellowed streaks the shade of bruised flesh rising up across the vault of the sky and bringing with them gradual changes that crept across the dense, forested landscape.

Calas Typhon stood upon the ridge above the encampment and watched it come, his helmet dangling at the end of his arm and the low, cold breeze plucking at the matted hair of his unkempt beard. He imagined himself a fixed point in space and time, around which the cycle of Zaramund moved endlessly, his presence changeless and constant.

Dawn and dusk, night and day, these things were trivial and distant concepts to a legionary, trimmed from Typhon’s existence along with hundreds of other small human things that his kind lost when they were transformed. He had no need to sleep or to fuel his body in human ways, and it had been so long since he had known need of these things that they had become alien in concept. In his deep past, the man who was now First Captain of the Death Guard Legion had progressed through a state-change that irrevocably rewrote his physical nature.

A dawning of my better self, he considered, with a brief, bleak smile.

The moment of amusement guttered out like a snuffed candle as his usual dour mien replaced it. Typhon’s brow furrowed as he tried to grasp the ephemeral edges of the thought that had been tormenting him ever since they had arrived on Zaramund – even before that, if he were honest with himself. He could almost form the idea, but every time he reached for it, it retreated. It was like running his fingers through the flow of a river, seeking one single ebb of current. The truth was infuriatingly beyond his reach, a phantom retreating into the warp, and even after the hours Typhon had spent up here in isolation and self-reflection, it still escaped him.

He let the moment of reverie crumble and his gaze tracked a heavy shuttle as it lifted off from one of the temporary landing pads on the south side of the encampment. The brick-shaped craft rose into the lightening sky on crackling thruster bells, carrying aboard it new components and equipment for the repairs to the Terminus Est and the other vessels in his flotilla. Typhon watched the shuttle shrink to a dot, and high above he picked out the constellation of bright morning stars that were his battle barge and its sister-ships, drifting up there in a low geostationary orbit.

The warship had suffered greatly, and there had been a moment when Typhon feared that Zaramund might become her grave marker. But the fates had a way of confounding a warrior’s expectations. Instead of battle, the Terminus Est had found a safe harbour and an unusual welcome from a quarter that Typhon had never expected: Luther and his renegade Dark Angels, planting their standard next to that of the Warmaster Horus Lupercal…

As much as this turn of events was welcome to the Death Guard, Typhon could not help but be suspicious of it. But then, was that not the nature of the sons of Barbarus? To distrust all that could not be seen and touched and broken?

Typhon shook off the thought with a flick of his head, removing a gauntlet and raising a hand to run it over his close-cropped temple. Luther’s generosity was, like it or not, sorely needed by the First Captain and his Grave Wardens. Expedience overruled distrust.

For the moment.

The thought faded as Typhon’s fingers found a new lesion on his scalp, hidden in the greasy layers of his hair. He tried not to dwell upon it, but his hand slipped to the back of his neck where the mottling of his skin had begun several weeks earlier. There was a cluster of livid boils there, a triad of them that were strangely cold to the touch. Other marks elsewhere on his body, similar in kind but better hidden in the crevices of his musculature, were slowly growing more numerous.

And yet, they caused him no pain. If anything, Typhon felt physically stronger than he ever had, as if he were improving with each passing day. Am I unwell? The question echoed in his mind, and it seemed ridiculous. Inconceivable! I am a Death Guard, the obdurate and unrelenting. There is no known toxin or sickness that can lay us low.

He wanted to laugh off the thought, but it nagged at him. Typhon became aware of a few tiny, black flies circling his head, little things barely larger than motes of dust, and he swatted lazily at them as he spied a figure approaching up the incline of the ridge.

The other Death Guard removed his helmet as he approached and halted a few metres away, giving a shallow bow. Hadrabulus Vioss was a captain of Typhon’s Grave Wardens, and his master’s right hand. ‘My lord,’ he began, ‘you have been vox-silent for some time. Your communications circuit registers as deactivated.’

Typhon glanced down at his helm, then away. ‘I required some time to think, nothing more. What is it that you want, kinsman?’

‘Not I, First Captain.’ The Grave Warden’s shorn scalp bobbed. ‘The Dark Angel, Luther. He wishes to speak with you.’

‘Reasons?’

Vioss’ lips thinned. ‘Are you asking me to guess?’

Typhon made a gesture for him to continue, and his second-in-command took a breath.

‘I think he wants us to stand with him. To speak well of him, to the Warmaster.’

‘Luther is gauging the price he will ask in return for aiding us.’

Vioss nodded. ‘Aye.’

Typhon pushed away the thoughts that had been clouding his mind and took a step forward. The synthetic musculature beneath the heavy ceramite planes of his Terminator armour hissed gently, and he turned his helmet in his hands as he reactivated its systems.

‘He is a warrior of Caliban, after all,’ he added, after a long moment. ‘They all have a hunter’s eye for the calculations of warfare.’

‘We will owe him a debt,’ noted Vioss.

‘Indeed,’ Typhon allowed, and started down the ridge towards the camp. ‘But there are other scales that need to be balanced before his.’

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