James Swallow - The Flight of the Eisenstein

'A storm is coming,' said the captain to the air, hold­ing Kaleb's brass icon of the Emperor before him.

There were always two paths. The first was wet with blood and he had already stumbled a good way down it. At the end point, always visible but forever out of reach, there was release, painlessness and the sweet nectar of rebirth.

The other route was made of knives and it was agony and torture and grief without respite, with only

greater suffering heaped upon those that already wracked his mind and body. There was no conclusion to this route, no oblivion, only an endless loop, a Mobius strip cut from hell.

Solun Decius was Astartes, and against an unrefined man among the billions of the Imperium, his kind were the sons of war-gods; but even a being of such strength has its limits.

The wound grew to become a fanged maw that chewed upon him, biting and drawing his essence from the Death Guard's body. Where Grulgor's plague knife had sunk through his armour and into his flesh, Decius was invaded by a virus that was all viruses, a malady that was every disease that man had encountered and more that it had yet to face. There was no cure, how could there be? The germs were made from the living distillate of corruption in its rawest form, a writhing pattern of tri-fold and eight-pointed microbes that disintegrated everything they came into contact with. These invisible weapons were the foot soldiers of the Great Destroyer, each of them stamped with the indelible mark of the Lord of Decay.

'Help me!' He would have screamed those words if only he could have opened his rictus-locked jaws, if he could have parted his dry, gummed lips, if his throat could have channelled anything but a thick paste of blood-darkened mucus. Decius writhed on the support cradle, livid bruises forming about his body where flesh went dull with infection. He clawed at the glass walls around him, arms like brittle sticks in bags of stringy muscle and pallid flesh. Things that looked like maggots with three black eyes bored through the meat of his torso, raking him with tiny whips of poisonous cilia. There was so much pain,

and every time Decius imagined he had reached the peaks of each new agony, a fresh one was brought to him.

He so wanted death. Nothing else mattered to him. Decius wanted death so much he prayed for it, Impe­rial truth be damned and burned! He had no other recourse. If peace would not be granted by any source in this world, what entreaty did he have left but to beg the realms beyond the real?

From the agony, came laughter, mocking at first, then gradually softening, becoming gentle. An intelli­gence measured him, considering, finally seeing something in the youth, a chance to refine an art only recently discovered: the art of remaking men.

Sorrow flowed over him. How terribly sad it was that the men Decius had called brother and lord ignored his pain, how cruel of them to let him suffer and suffer while the malaise burrowed deeper into his heart. He had given so much to them, had he not? Fought in battle at their sides. Saved their lives with no thought for his own. Become the very best Death Guard he could be… and for what? So they could seal him inside a glass jar and watch him slowly choke on the fumes of his own decay? Did he deserve this? What wrong had he com­mitted? None] Nothing! They had forsaken him\ He hated them for that! Hated theml

They had made him weak. Yes, that was the answer. In all this vacillation over Horus and his machina­tions, Decius had let himself become weak and indecisive! He never would have suffered Grulgor's blow if his mind had been clear and focused.

Yes, through the burning pain it became clear. His error traced its roots to one place, to a single point. He had bowed to Garro's orders. Despite the way in which it chafed upon him, Solun had let himself

believe he was still raw and untested, let himself think that Garro's way was best. But the truth? That was not the truth. Garro was irresolute. His mentor had lost his killer instinct. Horus… Horus! There was a warrior who knew the nature of strength. He was mighty. He had turned primarchs to his banner, Mor-tarion included! Decius thought he could stand against that? What madness must have possessed him?

Do you want death? The question echoed in him, the agony suddenly abating. Or will you grasp new life? A new strength that cannot be made vulnerable? The voice that was no voice whispered, dank and rancid in his thoughts.

Yes!' Decius spat bile and black ichor. 'Yes, damn them all! I will never be weak again! I choose life! Give me life!'

The dark laughter returned. And so I will.

What ripped itself from the medicae cradle was no longer Solun Decius, naked and close to the ragged edge of torment. It was alike to an Astartes, but only in the ways that it was a brutal parody of their noble form. Across rotten bones and raw, pustulant skin grew chitinous planes of greenish-black armour, gleaming like spilled oil beneath the light of the biol-umes. Eyes that had shrivelled to knots of dead jelly erupted into gelid sapphires, multi-faceted orbs that massed across a wrecked face and set into the bone. Mandibles joined brown, cracked teeth in the mouth. A stump reached up and batted away the glass rigs of potion bottles, growing and malforming as it did into a clawed limb with too many joints. The serrated fin­gers inflated and hardened into solid knives of bony carapace the colour of sword beetles. What was no

longer Solun Decius opened its mouth and roared, and from bleeding, suppurating lips spewed a cloud of insects that raced around the shivering body in a living shroud, a cape of beating, swarming wings.

On newly clawed feet, the Lord of the Flies raised himself up and shattered the armourglass walls of his confinement, and began a search for something to kill.

SIXTEEN

Lord of the Flies

Silence

In His Name

Tollen Sender stepped off the gravity disc as the floating platform reached the infirmary level. The oval plate hovered for a second after he departed, then drew silently away, up one of the many vertical shafts that cut through the interior spaces of the Somnus Citadel. His lip curled. The tower had a peculiar array of scents to it that the Death Guard found off-putting. Different levels had different odours, cast out from censers and odd mechanical devices that resembled steel flowers. It was some element of the Silent Sisterhood's discipline, a way of patterning the women used to mark out quadrants of the building. Similar methods were used for the blind astropaths on some starships and orbital platforms. Perhaps it was this unwelcome similarity that made Sendek uncomfortable. He disliked all things about the psyker arts, and all things that connected to them. Such realms were at odds with his rational,

reductionist view of the universe. Sendek believed in the cold, hard light of science and the Imperial truth. The freakish facilities that verged on the edges of sorcery were disquieting to him. Such things were for the Emperor to understand, not for those with minds of lesser breadth.

But the smell… today it was different. Before it had been like roses, collecting at the edge of his senses. Now it was strange, sweeter than before, but with a sour metal taste beneath it. He kept walking.

Without making an order of it, or with anything approaching official sanction, the men of the seventy started a watch. They had nothing to do inside the citadel but drill and spar in the cramped quarters a few levels up the length of the tower, and the waiting, the inaction, chafed at them. So they took it in turns to keep the watch on their fallen comrade. Iacton Qruze was not expected to participate – Decius was a Death Guard and Qruze was not – but all the other men under Garro's command automatically accepted and understood what was required of them. Quietly, they made sure that there was never a moment that passed when a warrior of the XIV Legion was not attending the sick bed of Solun Decius. That the young warrior was destined to die was not questioned by any one of them, but it became an unspoken imperative that he would not die alone.