Gralgor sneered. 'Garro has a steel rod up his backside. He would break before he would bend his knee to anything but the rule of Terra.'
'All the more reason for the primarch to keep a close eye on him.' Typhon's gruff voice became a rough whisper. 'I, however, see the reality in your viewpoint, Ignatius, and when the moment of choice comes and Garro does not fall in to line-'
'You might require the services of a blunt instrument, yes?'
A nod. 'Just so.'
The commander showed his teeth in a feral smile. Thank you, first captain,' he said, in a louder voice. 'Your counsel has been most soothing to my ill-humour.'
Endurance tore itself from the mad fury of the warp and crashed into corporeal reality once more, leading the Death Guard flotilla into the wide-open diamond formation of the 63rd Expedition fleet. Garro, once again in his full battle armour and honour kit, stood behind and off to the side of his primarch as Mortar-ion observed the Warmaster's forces from the assembly hall. Flanked by the Deathshroud, Garro's commander stood with one hand pressed to the thick armourglass window that formed the right eye socket of the giant stone skull on the ship's bow.
'My brother seeks to impress us,' Mortarion said to the air. The Sons of Horns have indeed assembled a mighty force in this place.'
Garro had to admit that he had rarely seen the like, not since the days when the Emperor himself led the Great Crusade. The darkness was thick with ships of every type and tonnage, and the space between them swarmed with auxiliary craft, shuttles and fighters on perimeter patrols. The arrowhead arrangement of the green and grey liveried Death Guard ships slipped carefully into a pattern cleared for just that purpose. To the far starboard, across the bow of Typhon's flagship, the Terminus Est, he spied the ornate purple and gold filigree of a cruiser from the III Legion, the Emperor's Children, and high above at a different anchor, blue and red trimmed craft from the XII Legion, the World Eaters.
But what caught his attention and held it firmly was the single great battleship that orbited ahead of them all, isolated in its own halo of open space and screened by a wall of sleek Raven-class interceptors. A heavy ingot of fashioned iron, the Warmaster's Vengeful Spirit radiated quiet power. Even from this distance, Garro could see hundreds of gun turrets and the slender rods of massive accelerator cannons that were twice the length of the Endurance. Where the Death Guard ship displayed a skull and star sigil, Horus's flagship had a massive golden ring bisected by a slim ellipse. The eye of the Warmaster himself, unblinking and open to see all that transpired. Soon, Garro was to set foot aboard that vessel, carrying the honour of his company with him.
Repeater lights set into a control panel beneath the windows clicked and changed, signalling that the Endurance had come to her station. Garro looked up at
his primarch. 'My lord, a Stormbird has been prepared in die launch bay for your egress. We are ready to answer die Warmaster's summons at your discretion.'
Mortarion nodded and remained where he was, observing silently.
After a moment, Garro felt compelled to speak again. 'Lord, are we not ordered to attend the War-master the moment we arrive?'
The primarch grinned in a flash of rictus. 'Ah, captain, we move from the battlefield to the arena of politics. It would be impolite of us to arrive too soon. We are the XIV Legion, and so we must respect the numbering of our brethren. The Emperor's Children and the World Eaters must be allowed to arrive first, or else I would earn the ire of my brothers'
'We are Death Guard/ Garro blurted. 'We are second to none!'
Mortarion's smile widened. 'Of course,' he agreed, 'but you must understand that it is sometimes tactful to let our comrades think that is not so.'
'I… I do not see the merit in it, lord/ Garro admitted.
The primarch turned away from the viewport. 'Then watch and learn, Nathaniel.'
In the confines of the Stormbird's spartan crew compartment, Garro once again felt dwarfed by his commander. Mortarion sat across the gangway from him, hunched forward so that his head was only a hand's span from the battle-captain's. The Death Lord spoke in a fatherly tone. Garro listened intently, absorbing every word as the small ship crossed the void between the Endurance and the Vengeful Spirit.
'Our role at this war council is an important one/ Mortarion said. 'The data you hold in your hand is
the lit taper for the inferno that is about to engulf the Isstvan system.' At this, Garro opened his palm and studied the thick spool of memory-wire there. We bear the responsibility of bringing the news of this perfidy to the Warmaster's ears, as it was our battle-brothers who came across the warning that Isstvan has turned from the Emperor.'
Garro examined the coil. It was so innocuous an object to contain so volatile a potential. The little device hardly seemed capable of representing the death warrant of entire worlds. Before they had departed the Endurance, the primarch had shown Nathaniel the pict record contained on the spool, and the images left him with a chill that he found difficult to shake off.
He saw it again, the recall fresh and close to the surface. Garro had watched the terrified face of a woman loom in the assembly hall's hololithic tank, a shape of haze and shade like some mythical spirit bent on haunting the living. She was a minor officer of the army, a major. At least, she was somebody wearing the uniform of one. Garro saw glimpses of a stone stockade's walls among the jumping shadows, the dance of orange light from a chemical candle. Perspiration made her sallow face gleam, and the slender tongue of flame reflected from her anxious green eyes. When she spoke, it was with the voice of a person broken by horrors that no mortal should ever have lived to witness.
'It's revolution/ she began, pushing the words from her lips like a desperate curse. She rambled on, speaking of'rejection' and of'superstition', of things a line soldier like her had never believed could be real. 'Praal has gone mad/ she growled, 'and the Warsingers are with him.'
Garro's brow furrowed at the names and his master halted the replay, providing an explanation. The noble Baron Vardus Praal is the Emperor's Designate Imperi-alis on the capital world of the system, Isstvan III.'
'He… She means to say the governor of an entire world broke with the rale of Terra to throw in with some pagan idolaters?' Nathaniel blinked, the idea unconscionable from a man of such significant rank within the Imperium. 'Why? What madness could compel such a thing?'
'That is what my brother, Horas, will have us learn,' intoned the primarch.
The Astartes studied the woman's face, blurred in mid-motion as she turned to look at something out of view of her picter's lens. 'The other word, "Warsinger", my lord, I am unfamiliar with it' He wondered if it were some kind of colloquial name, perhaps some sort of honorific.
'They were a local myth, according to the records of the 27th Expedition that enforced compliance here over a decade ago, a cadre of fantastical shaman warriors. Nothing but anecdotal evidence of their existence was ever found.' Garro's master was circumspect, and he tapped the hololith controls with a slender finger, letting the recording ran on.
With abrupt violence, the woman drew a heavy stub pistol, and shot and killed something indistinct at the margins of the image pick-up. She hove back into view, filling the screen, her unchained panic leaching out through the hologram. 'Send someone, anyone/ she pleaded. 'Just make this stop-'
Then there was the scream.
The sheer wrongness of the noise, the utterly alien nature of it made Garro's gut knot, and his fingers tightened reflexively around a bolter trigger that was
not there. The impact of the sound beat the woman down and shredded the picter's image control, shifting the replay into a stuttering series of blink fast flash frames. Nathaniel saw blood, stone, torn skin, and then silent darkness.
'No word from the Isstvan system followed this/ said Mortarion quietly, allowing Garro to measure and understand what he had just viewed. 'No vox transmissions, no picter relays, no astropathic broadcasts'
The battle-captain gave a stiff nod. The scream had cut though him like a knife-edge, the echo of it a weapon turning to pierce his heart. Garro shook off the eerie sensation and turned back to his liege lord. Mortarion explained that by pure chance, the distress signal had been picked up by the crew of the Valley of Haloes, a supply hauler in service to the XIV Legion. Suffering a dangerous Geller Field fluctuation while in transit to the Death Guard's Sixth Company flotilla at Arcturan, the Valley had emerged from the imma-terium to effect emergency repairs.
There, as the ship drifted in space at the edge of the Isstvanian ecliptic plane, the desperate message had found purchase. Data addressing the rate of energy decay, pattern attenuation and the like were scrutinised by tech-adepts, revealing that the transmission had been flung into the ether more than two years previously. Garro considered the frightened officer he had seen on the hololith and wondered about her fate. Her last, awful moments of life were frozen and preserved forever while her bones lay out there somewhere, forgotten and decaying.
'Did the crewmen of the Valley detect anything else of import, master?' he asked. 'Perhaps if the men aboard the transport were fully debriefed-'
Mortarion glanced away, then back. 'The Valley of Haloes was a casualty at the Arcturan engagement. It was lost with all hands. Fortunately, this recording of the Isstvan signal was conveyed to the Terminus Est before that regrettable event.' The primarch spoke with a leaden finality on the matter that Garro felt compelled to accept.
The Death Lord placed the spool in the battle-captain's hand. 'Carry this burden for me, Nathaniel. And remember, watch and learn.'
Inside, the Vengeful Spirit was no less impressive than it had been from a distance, the vast open space of the landing bay so wide and long that Garro imagined it would be possible to dock a starship the size of a small cutter in here with room to spare. An honour guard slammed their fists to attention in the old martial manner, saluting with hand to breast instead of the usual crossed palms of the aquila.
The battle-captain kept pace behind the Deathshroud and Mortarion, while Garro in turn was followed by a contingent of warriors from Typhon's First Company, their lockstep footfalls pulsing like ready thunder as the XIV Legion's contingent marched on to the Warmaster's flagship. Garro could not help but glance around, taking in as much as he could of Horus's vessel, committing everything he saw to memory. He noticed other Stormbirds on landing cradles in the process of refuelling for return flights, one adorned with the snarling fanged mouth of the World Eaters and another trimmed in regal purple with the golden wings of the Emperor's Children.
'My brother, Fulgrim, has not graced us with his presence/ murmured Mortarion, casually dismissing
the purple Stormbird with thinly veiled sarcasm. 'How like him.' Garro peered closer and saw that the ship did not fly the pennants associated with the carriage of a primarch. Indeed, he recalled that there had been no sign of the Firebird, Fulgrim's assault ship, among the war fleet.
He found himself wondering if this was some element of the politics that his master had spoken of before. Garro frowned. He had always fancied that the primarchs were an inviolate fraternity, comrades of such exalted status that they were beyond any petty emotions like rivalry or contention, but suddenly such thoughts seemed naive. Astartes warriors like Garro and Grulgor were raised above normal men, and yet they still disagreed in their manners, more often than Nathaniel would have liked. Would it be surprising then to learn that the primarchs, who stood above the Astartes as much as the Astartes stood above mortal men, were also prey to the same differences?
Perhaps it was a good thing, Garro decided. If the primarchs were elevated too far towards godhood, they might lose sight of the fact that this was the Imperium of Man, and it was for the good of the common people of the galaxy that they served the Emperor.
With a silent member of the Sons of Horns leading their party, the Death Guard contingent moved across the cavernous bay to where a pneu-train carriage awaited to speed Mortarion to the bow decks of the Vengeful Spirit and the Lupercal's Court. Garro let his gaze turn upward, to the maze of skeletal gantries and walkways overhead, some heavy with cranes and weapons pallets, others ringed with catwalks for servitors and crewmen. It seemed oddly static up there for
a working starship in preparation for a major combat operation. The battle-captain had expected dozens of figures clustering in the metal galleries to observe the arrival of the primarchs. Even aboard so illustrious a ship as the Warmaster's personal barge, it would have been a rare occurrence for parties from not two, but three other Legions to be aboard at one time. He looked hard, expecting to see men from Horus's Legion watching the proceedings, but saw only a handful, a scattering of deckhands and nothing else. Garro shook his head. Had the circumstances been reversed and the war council been taking place on Endurance, he would warrant that every Astartes on the ship would have come to see. It seemed as if something were missing.
'What troubles you, Nathaniel?' The primarch had halted at the pneu-train and was studying him.
Garro took a breath and the nagging thoughts in his mind abruptly crystallised. 'I had been told, lord, that the 63rd Fleet carried a substantial contingent of remembrancers with it. Considering the import of this day's meeting, it seems strange to me that I see not a single one of them hereabouts to record it.' He cast around with open hands.