Garro: Knight Of Grey by James Swallow

Author:James Swallow
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2022-12-14T13:26:25+00:00

INTERVAL II

The planet Barbarus: after reunion

The shuttles touched down in an area beyond a city the locals called Safehold, in a sector of cleared grasslands that helots were busily turning into the planet’s first starport. A sleeting deluge of black rain was falling, hissing where it landed, giving everything a bone-deep chill.

Nathaniel Garro was the last to descend the ramp of his transport, letting the others file out before him, a handful of warriors among a mass of human auxiliaries brought down from the fleet in high orbit. He saw other figures disembarking from the rest of the craft in the shuttle flight – more towering legionaries like him, clad in newly forged, newly liveried armour.

When the majority of them had left the surface of this planet over a solar year ago, they had walked with the tread of men. Now they returned as transhumans, reforged by the great science of the Emperor of Mankind and His scienticians. Garro heard them laughing and calling out to people in the crowds who waited for them, the prodi­gal sons returning to the death world that had borne them.

Not all of those taken from Barbarus to be uplifted had survived the process. Many perished passing through the gauntlet of the change, their bodies rejecting the implants with terminal effect. In the usual scheme of things, neophyte legionaries underwent the implantation regimen and enhancile conditioning over a cycle of several years, and at a far younger age – this had been Garro’s lot, plucked as a stringy youth from the Albian outlands on Terra when he was only thirteen winters old, for induction into the Legion. The new intake had no such consideration, forced through a crash-course process that turned these men into Legiones Astartes with uncommon rapidity.

Some said that it was only the Emperor’s personal intervention in the programme that had kept the Barbaruns from dying to a man, but Garro thought otherwise. After a year in their company, he was firmly convinced that the sons of this blighted world were too stubborn to die easily.

The process of reunion was well under way. After finding and ­reuniting with his lost son Mortarion, the Emperor had presented the primarch with the war fleet and the warriors that were his bequest – the XIV Legion, known since their inception as the Dusk Raiders. Mortarion’s first act had been to cast that name aside and rechristen them as the Death Guard, in echo of the fighters he had led in his rebellion against Barbarus’ cruel rulers, the Overlords.

Garro was no longer conscious of the new insignia on his armour, the white skull upon a six-pointed star rendered in dark green. Like many things, it was another change to take on and assimilate before the Legion returned to their first calling – the prosecution of the Emperor’s Great Crusade.

Taking his first step onto the surface of the planet, Garro looked across a bleak landscape of grey hills, past granite tors and distant mountains, and up at the soured sky.

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