‘There are some things that should be kept,’ said Sarkis. ‘Remember your position, Felix. I would prefer it if, a century from now, when I call upon the Ultramarines it is you I deal with, and not some warrior I do not know who has your place owing to your needless emotional attachments.’

They locked eyes for a long moment.

Spoken like a Medusan, thought Felix, but left these words unsaid. ‘I thank you for your concern, lieutenant,’ he said instead.

Sarkis stared at him a moment longer, released him and departed.

As Sarkis’ bionic grip left his arm, Felix knew for certain that he would never be returning to the Rudense. That part of his life was now over for good.

‘Fight well, my brothers!’ he called to those remaining, holding his fist aloft in salute. ‘I shall see you again when victory in Ultramar is ours!’

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen

Ku’gath’s Cavalcade

In parody of the great voidships of the Imperium, giant plague arks came floating through the strange sky of the Garden of Nurgle. There were seven of them all told, Nurgle’s sacred number, sailing serenely towards the rift as stately as pleasure barques upon a perfect sea.

They had been living things. Perhaps they lived still, held to a hideous existence by the will of the Plague God, for they sang with awful sorrow, though their tails and flukes hung limply and their bodies were decomposed as a corpse too long in the water. Their skin hung in great swags from muscles writhing with frantic life; the thick fats underneath had decayed into fur-like expanses playing host to a multiplicity of parasites. Ribs the size of docking spars framed dark, stinking interiors. Open wounds dripped viscid matter, and slurry falls of rotten blood and excrement fell from orifices widened by the relentless feeding of carrion. Encircling these meatships were shifting black veils: flies by the billion, fat-bodied and voracious.

Rot had made these craft barely recognisable, but they were the rancid carcasses of void whales dragged into the Realm of Chaos during the Noctis Aeterna, hollowed out by disease and infested by supernatural vermin until they were suitable to carry the legions of Nurgle into the material realm.

The first came to the rift some way ahead of the others. The bony beak of its exposed jawbones pushed at the quivering meniscus separating the material world from the realm of souls. An oil-scum iridescence rippled out from the contact, stretching at first without giving. But Nurgle would not be denied, and the bone pierced the barrier with an audible wet tearing. This last barrier penetrated, the carcass-ship heaved out like a rotting stillbirth, mobbed by its escort of flies.