False Gods

splash of warriors from Luc Sedirae's men, far to his right. Of course he couldn't see them through the yellow mist, so each company kept in regular vox contact to try and ensure they weren't separating.

Loken wasn't sure it was helping though. Strange groans and hisses, like the expelled breath of a corpse, bubbled from the ground and blurred shadow forms moved in the mist. Each time he raised his bolter to take aim in readiness, the mist would part and an armoured figure in the green of the Sons of Horus or the steel grey of the Word Bearers would be revealed. Erebus had led his warriors to Davin's moon in support of the Warmas­ter and Horus had welcomed their presence.

The mist gathered in thickness with unsettling speed, slowly swallowing them up until all Loken could see were warriors from his own company. They passed through a dark forest of leafless, dead trees, the bark glis­tening and wet looking. Loken paused to examine one, pressing his gauntlet against the tree's surface and gri­macing as its bark sloughed off in wet chunks. Writhing maggots and burrowing creatures curled and wriggled within the rotten sapwood.

'These trees…' he said.

'What about them?' asked Vipus.

'I thought they were dead, but they're not.'

'No?'

'They're diseased. Rotten with it.'

Vipus shrugged and carried onwards, and once again Loken was struck by the certainty that something terrible had happened here. And looking at the diseased heart-wood of the tree, he wasn't sure that it was over. He wiped his stained gauntlet on his leg armour and set off after Vipus.

The eerily silent march continued through the fog and, assisted by the servo muscles of their armour, the Astartes quickly began to outpace the soldiers of the

Imperial Army, who were finding the going much more difficult.

'Mournival,’ said Loken over the inter-suit link. We need to slow our advance, we're leaving too big a gap between ourselves and the Army detachments,’

Then they need to pick up the pace,' returned Abad­don. 'We don't have time to wait for lesser men. We're almost at the source of the vox.'

'Lesser men,' said Aximand. 'Be careful, Ezekyle, you're starting to sound a little like Eidolon now.'

'Eidolon? That fool would have come down here on his own to gain glory,’ snarled Abaddon. 'I'll not be com­pared to him!'

'My apologies, Ezekyle. You're obviously nothing like him,’ deadpanned Aximand.

Loken listened with amusement to his fellow Mourni-val's bantering, which, together with the quiet of Davin's moon began to reassure him that his concerns over their deployment here might be unfounded. He lifted his armoured boot from the swamp and took another step forward, this time feeling something crack under his step. Glancing down, he saw something round and greenish white bob upwards in the water.

Even without turning it over he could see it was a skull, the paleness of bone wreathed in necrotic strands of rotted flesh and muscle. A pair of shoulders rose from the depths behind it, the spinal column exposed beneath a layer of bloated green flesh.

Loken's lip curled in disgust as the decomposed corpse rolled onto its back, its sightless eye sockets filled with mud and weeds. Even as he saw the rotted cadaver, more bobbed to the surface, no doubt disturbed from their resting places on the bottom of the swamps by the foot­falls of the Titans.

He called a halt and opened the link to his fellow commanders once again as yet more bodies, hundreds

now, floated to the surface of the swamp. Grey and life­less meat still clung to their bones and the imparts of the Titans' footfalls gave their dead limbs a horrid anima­tion.

This is Loken,’ he said. 'I've found some bodies,’

Are they Temba's men?' asked Horus.

'I can't tell, sir,’ answered Loken. They're too badly decomposed. It's hard to tell. I'm checking now,’

He slung his bolter and leaned forwards, gripping the nearest corpse and lifting it from the water. Its bloated, rancid flesh was alive with wriggling motion, burrowing carrion insects and larvae nesting within it. Sure enough, mouldering scraps of a uniform hung from it and Loken wiped a smear of mud from its shoulder.

Barely legible beneath the scum and filth of the swamps he found a sewn patch bearing the number sixty-three emblazoned over the outline of a snarling wolfs head.

'Yes, 63rd Expedition,’ confirmed Loken. They're Temba's, but I-'

Loken never finished the sentence as the bloated body suddenly reached up and fastened its bony fingers around his neck, its eyes filled with lambent green fire.

'Loken?' said Horus as the link was suddenly cut off. 'Loken?'

'Something amiss?' asked Torgaddon.

'I don't know yet, Tarik,’ answered the Warmaster.

Suddenly the hard bangs of bolter fire and the whoosh of flame units could be heard from all around them.

'Second Company!' shouted Torgaddon. 'Stand to, weapons free!'

'Where's it coming from?' bellowed Horus.

'Can't say,’ replied Torgaddon. The mist's playing merry hell with the acoustics,’

'Find out,’ ordered the Warmaster.

Torgaddon nodded, demanding contact reports from all companies. Garbled shouts of impossible things came over the link, along with the louder bark of heavy bolter fire.

Gunfire sounded to his left and he spun to face it, his bolter raised before him. He could see nothing but the staccato flashes of weapon fire and the occasional blue streak of a plasma shot. Even the external senses of his armour were unable to penetrate the creeping mist.

'Sir, I think we-'

Without warning the swamp exploded as something vast and bloated erupted from the water before him. Its gan­grenous, rotten flesh barrelled into him, its bulk sufficient to knock him onto his back and into the swamp.

Before he went under the dark water, Torgaddon had the fleeting impression of a yawning mouth filled with hun­dreds of fangs and a glaucous, cyclopean eye beneath a horn of yellowed bone.

'I don't know. The command net just went crazy,' said Moderati Primus Aruken in response to Princeps Turner's question. The external surveyors had suddenly and shock­ingly filled with returns that hadn't been there a second ago and his princeps had demanded to know what was going on.

'Well find out, damn you!' ordered Tumet. The War-master's out there.'

'Main guns spooled up and ready to fire,' reported Moderati Primus Titus Cassar.

'We need a damn target first, I'm not about to fire into that mess without knowing what I'm shooting at,’ said Tur-net. 'If it was Army I'd risk it, but not Astartes.'

The bridge of the Dies Irae was bathed in a red light, its three command officers seated upon their control seats on a raised dais before the green glow of the tactical plot. Wired into the very essence of the Titan, they could feel its every motion as though it were their own.

Despite the mighty war machine beneath him, Jonah Aruken suddenly felt powerless as this unknown enemy arose to engulf the Sons of Horus. Expecting armoured opposition and an enemy they could see, they had been little more than a focus for the Imperial forces to rally around so far. For all the Titan's overwhelming superior­ity in firepower, there was little they could do to aid their fellows.