Exocytosis Read online

  Typhon roared and stiffened, standing in place as Vastobal lost his grip on the sword and fell back once again. It was a deadly wound, one that even a warrior of the Legiones Astartes would be hard pressed to shrug off.

  But instead of the torrent of pain he expected, Typhon experienced a boiling, churning corpse-cold at the site of the stabbing. He looked down and saw a dark red shimmer creeping along the fraction of the broken longsword’s blade that was still visible to him.

  At first he thought it to be blood, but Typhon did not bleed that colour.

  It was rust. In the blink of an eye, corrosion spread over the weapon – across the blade, hilt, pommel and all – and Vastobal’s sword turned to gritty powder, the metal exhibiting a thousand years of age in an instant.

  Vastobal’s face remained hidden behind the black of his battle-helm’s visor, but his reaction was clear through the motion of his body, his hands rising in an unconscious gesture of warding.

  ‘What have you brought here, Death Guard?’ he whispered.

  Typhon opened his mouth to reply, but the only sound that escaped his lips was the echo of the droning buzz inside him.

  He gave in to the act he was longing to complete. Manreaper glittered once more against the sun, and when its wide and lightning-fast arc was at an end, Captain Vastobal’s helm – his head still contained within – rolled a metre from the Dark Angel’s twitching corpse.

  The old woman knelt before the Death Guard, and every one of the pilgrims did the same, pressing their scabrous foreheads to the mud amidst the opened bodies of their kindred. Together, they uttered a single word in a breathy rush – ‘Typhus’ – and then fell silent.

  Typhon trembled with unchained energy, and it took a physical effort to reel himself back in. His hand went to his torso, where the ragged rent in his armour was still gaping. The edges of it were damp with clear mucus, but there was no pain. Only a cold, clammy sensation, the same as he had felt around the clusters of lesions elsewhere on his body.

  The change, he realised. This is no malaise. It is improving me.

  The old woman looked up at him, as if she caught the echo of his thoughts. Her smile was all black, rotted teeth and the bloom of new undeath.

  ‘First Captain!’

  Typhon spun around as the veteran sergeant he had left on the battlements came striding towards him, a trio of Grave Wardens in close formation behind.

  ‘My lord, are you injured?’

  Typhon slowly shook his head. ‘Sergeant, what did you see?’

  The Death Guard pointed his bolter at the beheaded Dark Angel. ‘He came from nowhere! We saw him attack you without provocation and kill the civilians…’

  ‘Is that all you saw?’ Typhon’s gaze bored into him, the air turning metallic as his hidden preternatural senses reached out.

  ‘My lord?’ The sergeant seemed confused by the question.

  Typhon waved him away. ‘Never mind.’ His hands flexed around the hilt of his power scythe and he took a step towards Vastobal’s body. The buzzing pressure at his back had returned – or had it ever really left? – and he let it gently push at him. Black flies darted around in the sudden stillness, dipping down to gorge themselves on the spill of rich legionary blood soaking into the earth at his feet.

  ‘What are we to do with the body?’ said one of the other warriors.

  Typhon glanced at the old woman, who gave him a demure, conspiratorial nod. ‘

  ‘It will be dealt with,’ he replied.

  Luther’s gaze tracked back and forth across the chart table as data scrolled from one side of the glassy surface to the other, the arrival of each new pane of text signalled by a quiet bell chime. It was a march of interminable information, bulletin after bulletin pertaining to the logistics and minutiae of maintaining a fighting force upon a newly conquered planet. While the Grand Master had adjutants to whom he could turn this task, there was a part of him that was always drawn back to peer over their shoulders. Some seed of disquiet that something vital might be missed if he did not personally cast an eye over all aspects of his new fleet and his centurions.

  Behind him, the command centre’s hatch dilated and Cypher stepped through, a mordant cast to his face. He had been about his own tasks for the past few days, since before Luther had granted Captain Vastobal leave to covertly observe the Death Guard, and he suspected that Cypher had also been using his own subtle methods to spy on Typhon and his Grave Wardens.

  ‘What is it?’ Luther demanded, sensing the onset of a new problem in the other warrior’s manner.

  Cypher offered Luther a data-slate by way of an answer. Displayed upon it was a god’s-eye pict-capture from one of the constellation of scrying satellites orbiting above Zaramund. It showed a dozen false-colour blurs caught in motion over the curve of the planet below. Starships, he guessed, captured in the act of breaking orbit at combat velocity.

  ‘The Death Guard are gone,’ explained the Lord Cypher. ‘All of them. No word to our stations. No thanks.’ He spat the word bitterly. ‘They simply boarded their vessels in the hours of darkness and then broke for the system’s Mandeville point at full burn.’

  Luther raised an eyebrow. ‘And the repair camp?’

  ‘Empty.’ The other warrior leaned in. ‘We should have listened to Vastobal.’

  ‘And where is the good captain?’ Luther glanced around the echoing command chamber, his eyes never finding the centurion he sought. ‘Seek him out for me. I would know why he did not report their preparations for departure.’

  ‘He may have tried,’ said Cypher darkly.

  Luther met his gaze, and an unwelcome chill prickled at the base of his spine. A low chime sounded from the screen-table before him and, by reflex, the Grand Master glanced down at the display.

  The newly-arrived datum was a minor alert; a civilian medicae in one of the outlying colonial settlements was requesting assistance from an Apothecary of the Legion, to deal with an unidentified infection that had arisen in the community.

  Luther dismissed the data pane with a flick of his hand and looked back at Cypher, brooding on what as-yet-unseen effects his generosity towards Typhon’s warriors would leave behind.

  Typhon did not need to look up at the great portal across the compartment to know that the Terminus Est and his fleet had just entered the warp.

  He smiled to himself as he walked to the ornate cabinet in the corner of the meeting chamber, the pistons in his heavy armour gasping quietly with each movement. He could feel the empyrean realm out there, the thud and heartbeat pulsing of it washing against the Geller fields of his ship. Typhon imagined it as an endless, protean ocean of blood in which the vessel was now submerged. Alive and restless, calling out to him.

  He wondered what would happen if he ordered the protecting energy sheath to be shut off.

  What would I allow in? What would emerge out of myself in order to meet it?

  The smile grew as he arranged a series of pressure-sealed flasks in a row. Typhon was experiencing something that had always seemed impossible to hold on to. Clarity. That was the only word for it. He almost chuckled. It was some cosmic joke, a great irony. All his life, from his tormented youth on Barbarus to his redemption in Mortarion’s ranks and beyond, to this day, Calas Typhon had been reaching for understanding. Now he saw that it had been a part of him from the very beginning.

  Those who had hated the pallid, hollow-eyed boy that he had been, the ones who shunned him and named him half-breed and witchkin, perhaps they were the ones with the most insight. In their dull way, they had seen a fraction of Typhon’s true potential.

  What was the word that old hag used? She called me the herald…

  He liked the cadence of that title. It had import to it, the weight and moment of greater things at hand.

  Herald.

  It spoke of one bearing the undeniable truth, one who carried the harshest reality for all to hear.

  And Typhon found himself knowing that truth, fully and completely. He was Death Guard, and had always been so. Alive but forever dead. Moving and never halting. Held in abeyance between the pulse of life and the cold embrace of the grave. Others would see this as contradictory, but not he, not now.

  They are the same, he told himself. Until Zaramund, I lacked the perspective to see it. Now he was beyond the moment, it seemed odd to think of any other state of mind.

  It was as if he had always known.

  Typhon removed seven baroque steel bowls from a compartment in the cabinet and counted them out. As he did so, his free hand drifted to the place where Vastobal’s broken longsword had penetrated his armour. He paused, glancing down. The ceramite there was soft, like new flesh, but the rent in the plate was gone. Healing, like an extension of the body beneath.

  A single black fly crawled across the surface of his wargear, but he paid it no mind. There was a brief flicker of concern that died out almost as quickly. When was the last time I took off my armour? He dismissed the question. It was unimportant.

  From the flasks, he poured measures of poisons and toxins that swirled around the bowls to become powerful, lethal brews. Vapours that would kill on contact coiled in the air, and the First Captain drew them in like they were fine perfume.

  Lord Typhus.

  He heard the voice behind him and turned. Vioss stood in the hatchway that opened on to the anteroom beyond. ‘What did you say?’ Typhon asked him.

  ‘Lord Typhon,’ Vioss repeated, his helmet cradled in the crook of his arm. ‘I have assembled the senior officers as requested. Your Grave Wardens await you.’

  He beckoned with one armoured gauntlet. ‘Bring them in. I would speak with my kindred.’

  Vioss gave a shallow bow, and presently he returned with a cohort of five more legionaries, each one a battle-tested veteran of countless wars throughout the Great Crusade.

  Typhon knew them all, knew the colour of their hearts and the secrets of their souls. He wanted to show them the truth that he knew, and in time he would. But for now, for today, he would help them take the first step.

  ‘I have considered much in our time on Zaramund,’ he began, ‘and I believe we have reached the end of this chapter.’ Typhon bade them take up the stance of the Seven, each warrior falling into rote positions from the old Dusk Raiders battle formation. They left a place for him in the middle of the group, waiting patiently and silently for the First Captain to continue. ‘Brothers, today we end this journey as a splinter fleet of the Fourteenth. I know now we must reunite with our Legion and our primarch.’

  He saw some of the Grave Wardens exchange wary glances, but none of them dared speak out at his words.

  ‘We are stronger in union,’ Typhon went on. ‘Unbreakable.’ He looked away, turning his back on them to make the last preparations for the Cups. ‘There is much we can give to our kinsmen. I know that now. I needed distance from our gene-father to see that. So we will reunite. This will be my order.’

  Unseen by the others, Typhon reached up to the mark that Vastobal had given him upon his chin. He reopened the wound and it slowly wept fluid into the matt of his thick beard. The First Captain allowed the cut to leak into the palm of his gauntlet. Black, oily liquid gathered there.

  ‘We are to return to the main body of the Legion, then?’ Vioss ventured the question. ‘We will stand beneath Lord Mortarion’s standard?’

  ‘Aye. I wish it.’ Typhon let his gauntlet pass over each metal bowl, allowing a single drop of his dark and tainted blood to fall into the infusion. ‘Join me now, brothers. Take the Cups with me, and seal our intent.’

  He stepped aside, and each warrior came forward to take his offering before returning to his assigned place. Vioss was last, and he hesitated before picking up the vessel. Typhon took the last one and saluted him with it.

  Something uncertain flickered in the Grave Warden’s eyes, but then it was gone. Vioss walked back to his position, and Typhon stepped into the space that had been left for him.

  ‘Drink with me,’ he said. ‘Join me.’ Typhon raised the cup to his mouth and drained the contents in one single draught.

  At his sides, his men did the same, opening themselves to change and to truth.

  About the Author

  James Swallow is best known for being the author of the Horus Heresy novels Fear to Tread and Nemesis, which both reached the New York Times bestseller lists, The Flight of the Eisenstein and a series of audio dramas featuring the character Nathaniel Garro. For Warhammer 40,000, he is best known for his four Blood Angels novels, the audio drama Heart of Rage, and his two Sisters of Battle novels. His short fiction has appeared in Legends of the Space Marines and Tales of Heresy.

  The First Legion go to war, and their primarch’s brutal actions threaten to tear apart the fragile alliance of Imperium Secundus.

  A Black Library Publication

  Published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,

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  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

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  ISBN: 978-1-78572-275-2

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