'I saved his life, Death Guard/ came the terse reply. 'You should be thanking me. I did your job for you.'
Voyen cocked his fist in anger, but Decius stopped him halfway. 'Brother/ he began, turning to the other man, 'thank you. Will he survive?'
'Get him to an infirmary within the hour and he may live to fight another day.'
Then he will.' The young Astartes saluted in the old martial fashion. 'I am Decius of the Seventh. My company is in your debt.'
The Apothecary gave a slight smile to Voyen and made to leave. 'Fabius, Apothecary to the Emperor's Children. Consider my care of your captain a gift among comrades/
Voyen's words dripped venom as the Astartes left. 'Arrogant whelp. How dare he-'
"Voyen, snapped Decius, silencing the other man. 'Help me carry him/
Garro was falling forever.
The warm void around him was thick and heavy. It was an ocean of thin, clear oil, as deep as memory, and beyond his ability to know its edge. He sank into it, the warmth wrapping around him in gossamer threads, in through his mouth and nostrils, filling his lungs and gullet, weighing him down. Down and down, deeper. Falling. Still falling.
He was aware of his injuries in a vague, disconnected way. Parts of his body were blacked out in his sensorium, nerve clusters dark and silent while the patient engines of his Astartes physiology went to work on keeping him alive. 'My wounds will never heal/ he said aloud, and the words bubbled past him, solidifying. Why had he said that? Where had that come from? Garro wondered with elephantine slowness and pushed at the thoughts in his mind, but they were impossible to shift, large as glaciers and ice-cold to the touch.
The trance. Part of his brain eventually provided him with this small fragment of data. Yes, of course.
His body had closed its borders and sealed him inside it, all other concerns and outside interests forgotten as his implants worked in concert to stop an encroaching death. The Astartes was in stasis, of a kind: Not the artificially generated fashion, where flesh was chilled down and chemical anti-crystallisation agents were pumped into the bloodstream for long-duration, low-consumable starflight. This was the semi-death of the wounded man and the near killed.
Odd how he could be at once so aware of it and yet so unaware as well. This was the function of the catalepsean node implanted in his brain, switching off sections of his cerebellum as a servitor might douse lamps in the unused rooms of a house. Garro had been here before, during the Pasiphae Uprising, after a suicide attack on the Stalwart's pod decks had ripped the flank of the battle-barge open and tossed a hundred unprotected men into space. He had survived that, awaking with new scars and months of missing time.
Would he live through this? Garro tried to probe his thoughts for an exact recall of his last conscious moments, and found rough, broken perceptions and spikes of brutal pain. Tarvitz. Yes, Saul Tarvitz had been there, and the lad Decius as well. And before that… Before that there was only the humming echo of white noise and heart-shrinking pain. He let himself drop away, let the agony shadow fade. Would he live through this? Garro would only know when it happened. Otherwise, he would fall and fall, sink and sink, and the captain of the Seventh would become another soul lost, a steel skull-shaped stud the size of his thumbnail hammered into the iron Wall of Memory on Barbarus.
He found he did not have a will to fight. Here, in this non-place, coiled inside himself, he only was. Marking time, waiting, healing; that was how it had been after Pasiphae, and so that was how it should be now.
How it should be.
But he knew something was different even as the thought drifted through him. That shattering pain down in the dome, that had been like nothing he had ever experienced before. Hundreds of years of warfare had not prepared him for the Warsinger's brutal kiss. Garro knew now, too late, after the fact, that she had been an enemy of a kind he had never before encountered. Where her power sprang from, what form it took… These were things new to him in a universe where the Astartes had thought himself incapable of being surprised. That would teach him not to be complacent.
In his own way, the battle-captain marvelled at the play of events. It was incredible that he had survived to fall into a healing trance after challenging the Warsinger. Other Death Guard, other Emperor's Children, had also met her might and died of it. He thought of poor Rahl, crushed like a spent ration can. There would be no more wagers or games for him. As those brothers lay dead, Garro lived still, clinging to the raw edge of life. 'Why?' he demanded. 'Why me and not them? Why Nathaniel Garro and not Pyr Rahl?'
Who made the choice? What scales were balanced by a man's death or his life? The questions hooked into him and pulled the Astartes back and forth, burrowing deep. It was such foolishness to ask these poindess things of an uncaring universe. What scales? There were no scales, no great arbiter of fates! It was pagan
idolatry to consider such notions, to insist that the lives of men ran in some kind of clockwork beneath the winding fingers of a deity. No: here was truth, Imperial truth. The stars turned and men died without a creator's plan for them. There were no gods, no here-fores and hereafters, no futures but those we made for ourselves. Garro and his kinsmen simply were.
And yet…
In this place of death sleep, where things were at once murky and clearer, there seemed instances where Nathaniel Garro felt a pressure upon him that came from a place far distant, beyond himself. At the corners of his sensorium, he might perceive a small fragment of brilliance thrown across countless light-years, the merest suggestion of interest from an intellect that towered over his. Cold logic told him that this was wishful, desperate thinking dredged up from the crude animal core of his hindbrain. But Garro could not quite let go of the feeling, of the raw hope that the will of something greater than he was acting upon him. If he was not dead, then perhaps he had been spared. It was a giddy, perilous thought.
'His hand lies upon all of us, and every one of us owes Him our devotion.'
Who spoke those words? Was it Garro or someone else? They seemed strange and new, echoing from a distance.
'He guides us, teaches us, exhorts us to become more than we are,' said the colourless voice, 'but most of all, the Emperor protects.'
The words disturbed Nathaniel. They made him turn and shift in the thick sea, his comfort fading. He sensed the pressure of dark storms brewing out in the impossible spaces around him, the visions of them coming to his mind through someone else's eyes;
through a soul not far from his, yes, bright like the distant watcher, but only a single candle against the greater light's burning sun; black clouds of churning emotion, seething and pushing at the warp and weft of space, looking for a weak point through which they could flow. The storm front was coming, inexorable, unstoppable. Garro wanted to turn away but there was no place in the drifting fall where he did not find them. He wanted to rise up and fight it, but he had no hands, no face, no flesh.
There were shapes in the gloomy shifting coils that rose and fell, some resembling the spirals of symbols he had seen inside the dome on Isstvan Extremis, others he had glimpsed on the uncommon banners of the Lupercal's Court, and repeating, over and over, a three-fold icon that seemed to be seeking him out wherever his attention moved: a triad of skulls, a pyramid of screaming faces, three black discs, a trio of bleeding bullet wounds, and other variations, but always the same arrangement of shapes.
'The Emperor protects,' said a woman, and Garro felt her hands upon his cheek, the salt tang of her fallen tears on her lips. The sensations came to him from far, far away, drawing him to them and out of the haze of the threatening storms.
Nathaniel was rising now, faster and faster, the warmth turning chill upon him, the pain coiling around his legs and stomach. There was… there was a woman, a head of short hair framed in a penitent's hood and…
And agony, awakening.
'Eyes of Terra!' gasped Kaleb, 'he's alive! The captain lives!'
* * *
'I would like to see him,' said Temeter stiffly.
Sergeant Hakur frowned. 'Lord, my captain is in no state to-'
Temeter silenced him with an upraised hand. 'Hakur, old blade, out of respect to you for your service and record, I won't consider your obstreperous manner to be discourteous to my rank, but do not mistake what I just said for a request. Get out of my way, sergeant.'
Hakur gave a shallow bow. 'Of course, captain. I forget myself
Temeter stepped around the veteran and strode purposefully into the Endurance's tertiary infirmary, throwing nods to men from his own company who were still healing from wounds taken on the jorgall world-ship. Most would not return to combat status, but would suffer the comparative ignominy of becoming permanently stationed as ship crew, or else return to Barbarus to live out their days as commandant-instructors to the noviciates. Ullis Temeter hoped that Garro would not share such a fate. The day that the battle-captain was forced to step off the battle line would be the day the man's spirit perished.
He entered a cordoned-off medicae cell and found his comrade there in a support throne, surrounded by brass technologies and glass jars of fluids piping gently into the sockets of Garro's implanted carapace. The battle-captain's housecarl jumped as Temeter swept in and came to his feet in a jerk of shocked motion. Kaleb clutched a fist of inky papers to his chest and blinked with watery eyes. Temeter immediately had the sense that he had caught the serf doing something wrong, but he decided not to press the matter.
'Has he said anything?'
Kaleb nodded, tucking the papers into an inner pocket in his tunic. 'Yes, sir. While the captain was healing, he spoke several times. I couldn't divine the meaning of it all, but I heard him speak names, the Emperor's chief among them.' The housecarl was anxious. 'He has not been in contact with anyone else beyond the medicae staff and myself since his healing coma concluded.'
Temeter looked at Garro and leaned closer. 'Nathaniel? Nathaniel, you old fool. If you're done sleeping, there's a crusade on, or haven't you noticed?' He kept a note of good humour, masking his own concern. His smile became genuine when Garro's eyes fluttered open and fixed on him.
'Ullis, can't you handle a fight without me?'
'Ha,' said Temeter. 'Your wounds haven't dulled that wit of yours, then.' He laid a hand on Garro's shoulder. 'Word from that peacock Saul Tarvitz. He's back on the Andronius, but he wanted to thank you for softening up the Warsinger for him.'
The captain grunted in amusement, but said nothing.
Your lads were concerned,' Temeter continued. 'I hear Hakur was afraid he might have to step up and take the eagle cuirass.'
'I can still carry it, if only these sawbones would let me go.' Garro winced as a wave of pain shocked through him. 'I heal better standing up.'
Temeter shot a look out into the infirmary proper where Voyen hovered silently. He took a breath. 'How's the leg, Nathaniel?'
Garro's face went a little grey as he looked down the chair. His right limb was misshapen and out of place. Instead of a form of strong, firm muscle and sinew, there was a skeletal construct of dense steel and plates