The Buried Dagger by James Swallow

Author:James Swallow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2019-01-10T15:08:35+00:00

Interval V

Undying

[The warp; now]

There was a compartment within the hull spaces of the war-barge Greenheart that none but the primarch himself could unlock. The entire chamber was an isolated module, so that if need arose, Mortarion could have it completely ejected into space. In addition, there were a series of powerful graviton charges mounted in the framework, each one equipped with enough destructive potential to crush a Rhino personnel carrier into wreckage when triggered.

These were the logical, practical safeguards he had put in place. Then there were the more esoteric precautions – the strange icons and psychogrammetric wards etched into the plasteel walls by laser beam, their shapes and forms copied from the pages of the daemonology lore Mortarion had gathered in his quest to better know this unfathomable power.

He entered Greenheart from the Terminus Est’s landing bay and made certain that the crew aboard the command shuttle knew not to disturb him. Sealing all hatches behind him, Mortarion made his way to the shadow compartment. His final order was to command the warriors of the Deathshroud to stand guard outside. He sensed their reluctance to obey, but did not comment on it. They would do as he told them.

What would happen next was something the primarch wished no others to witness. Removing one great gauntlet, he pressed his hand to a bio-reader and let it scan his genetic print. Dense phase-iron locks on the heavy hatch opened once his identity had been affirmed, and he passed inside and then locked it.

The prisoner was waiting where Mortarion had left it, held inside a great tank of reinforced armourglass, which itself was set behind a barrier of heavy, electro-charged mesh. Robotic autoguns dithered at the cardinal points of the compartment, briefly scanning the primarch to determine his identity, before snapping back to track the prisoner. They moved where it – where he – moved, following the sluggish and fish-belly-white creature as it shambled endlessly around the perimeter of the confinement.

Mortarion smelled decay and foetor in the air, and he saw where the glass tank was soiled and discoloured. Toxic mucus stained the deck where the prisoner’s bloated feet passed. The materials that comprised the compartment had been newly fabricated when assembled a few solar months earlier, but now they exhibited decades, if not centuries, of rot and ruin.

‘Ah,’ gurgled the captive, pausing to make an exaggerated bow. ‘What great honour is this? My commander graces me with his presence.’ Hands of pallid corpse-flesh spread in a gesture of obedience across a grotesquely obese humanoid form clad in scraps of corroded, distorted battle armour. ‘How may I serve you, Lord of Death?’

‘Did you ever truly serve me, Life-Eater?’ Mortarion did not address the creature by the name of the warrior it had once been. Ignatius Grulgor was the captain of the Death Guard’s Second Great Company, but that was before the betrayal at Isstvan and the mass murder that had taken place as a world was consumed and sacrificed. The legionary that

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