'Unclean, unclean!' chorused the adjutant, ripping herself from the grip of Hakur's trooper. 'I have seen it! Inside the eyes!' She tore wildly at her face, ripping the skin and drawing blood. 'You see it too!

The woman threw herself at Garro with furious speed, and before he could deflect her, the adjutant impaled herself upon the hissing blade of his power sword.

Garro jerked back, but it was too late. The adjutant, a Navigator tertius in service to the senioris Sever-naya, pressed into him and raked bloody fingers over his torso. 'You see!' she gasped. 'Soon the end comes! All will wither.'

The end comes. Once more, the words of the jorgalli child fluttered through his thoughts like a dying raptor, falling and screaming. Garro's skin went hot with the flush of blood through his veins, his throat tightening in just the manner it had when he had taken

the draught from the cups with Mortarion. He trembled, suddenly unable to speak. The woman's upturned face became paper, aged and crumbling. She slid away from him, off the tip of Libertas, turning into rags of meat and dead flesh, ash and then nothing.

'My lord?' Hakur's words were slow and thick, as if they were echoing through liquid. Garro turned to face his trusted sergeant and recoiled. Creeping decomposition was washing over Hakur and the other men, and none of them seemed to be aware of it. The resplendent marble-white of their armour bled away to become discoloured by a feeble, sickly green the shade of new death. The ceramite warped and became rippled, merging with their flesh until it strained and throbbed. Parasites and bloated organs pulsed within, and in some places wounds opened like new mouths, red-lipped with tongues of distended bowel and duct.

Pus, thick and pasty, leaked from every joint and orifice with streaks of brown rust and black ooze. Flies floated in halos around the misshapen heads of the plagued Astartes. Garro's disgust rooted him to the spot. The malformed shapes of his warriors crowded in, words falling from their crackled, lisping maws. Upon their shoulders, Garro saw the skull and star of the Death Guard gone, replaced with three dark discs. His attention was drawn up and away. Beyond the men he saw a ghostly form towering above them, too tall to fit in the cramped corridor yet there before him, beckoning with skeletal claws.

'Mortarion?' he asked.

The twisted image of his primarch nodded, the figure's blackened hood dipping in sluggish acknowledgement. What Garro could see of his

primarch's armour was no longer shining with steel and brass, but discoloured and corroded like old copper, wound with soiled bandages and scored with rust. The Death Lord was no more and in his place stood a creature of pure corruption.

'Come, Nathaniel.' The voice was a whisper of wind through dead trees, a breath from a sepulchre. 'Soon we will all know the embrace of the Lord of Decay'

The end comes. The words tolled in his mind like a bell and Garro looked down at his hands. His gauntlets were powder, flesh was sloughing off his fingers, bones emerging and turning into blackened twigs. 'No!' he forced the denial from his throat. 'This will not be!'

'My lord?' Hakur tapped him on the shoulder, concern on his face. 'Are you all right?'

Garro blinked and saw the dead woman lying on the deck, her body still intact. He cast around. The horrific vision was gone, burst like a bubble. Decius and the others eyed him with obvious concern.

'You... seemed to leave us for a moment, captain,' said Hakur.

He forced the turmoil of emotion from his mind. 'This is not over,' Garro insisted. 'Worse is to come.'

Decius tapped his helmet. 'Sir, a signal from Voyen, on the lower tiers. Something is happening on the gunnery decks'

IN THE WARP, it was said, all things in the material realm were echoed: the emotions of men, their wishes and their bloodlusts, the yearning for change and the cycle of life from death. Logicians and thinkers throughout the Imperium meditated on the mercurial and unknowable nature of the imma-terium, desperately trying to create cages of words for

something that could only be experienced, not understood. Some dared to suggest that there might be life, of a sort, within the warp, perhaps even intelligence after a fashion. There were even those, the ones who gathered in secret places and spoke in hushed awe, who were bold enough to venture the idea that these dark powers might possibly be superior to humanity.

If these men could have known the truth, it would have broken them. In the gathering hell-light that thundered around the tiny sliver of starship that was the Eisenstein, a vast and hateful intellect gave the ship the smallest portion of its attention. A gossamer touch was all that was needed, spilling the raw power of decay over the frigate's protective sphere. It reached inside through gaps in causality and found corpse-flesh in abundance, pleasing in the ripe putrefaction of the diseased and dead. A diversion was presented here, the opportunity to play a little and experiment with things that might be done on larger scales at later times. Gently, as matters elsewhere drew it away the power stroked at what it had found and granted a thin conduit to itself.

THE BLAST DOORS sealing in the toxic section of the gunnery deck had yet to be reopened. Issues of greater import had taken the attention of the frigate's crew as they fled from Isstvan, and the clearing of the dead had become of secondary consideration.

The Life-Eater virus was long gone. Powerful and deadly, the microbes were nevertheless short-lived, and Captain Garro's quick actions in purging the bay's atmosphere to the void had stopped the bane from running its full course. The virus could not live without air to carry it, and so it had perished, but the

destruction it had wreaked in the meantime remained. Corpses in varying states of decomposition lay scattered about the decking, men and Astartes lying where they had fallen as the germs tore through the defences of their bodies. The vacuum of space had preserved them in their grotesque tableau of death, some frozen with mouths open in endless screams, others little more than a slurry of jellied bones and human effluent.

It was in this state that the touch found them. Riven with rotten flesh, life flensed from them, for something born within the ever-changing rebirth of the warp, it was easy to distort and remould them. With a careful placing of marks, the injection of new, more virulent clades than the human-borne virus. Death became fresh life, although not in a form pleasing to the eye of man.

In the airless silence, fingers frozen to the decking by rimes of ice twitched and moved, shaking off cowls of frost. The essence of decay flowed, rust and age caking the mechanisms of the blast doors, making them brittle. Those who were favoured walked once more, eschewing mortality for a transformed existence.

THE EISENSTEIN HAD two long promenade corridors that ran the length of the frigate's port and starboard flanks, punctuated every few metres by thin observation slits that cast blades of light down across the polished steel decking. It was in this place, on the port side some ten or so strides from the ninety-seventh hull frame, that Death Guard met Death Guard in open conflict.

Garro saw the misshapen things from a distance and thought that the strange, plague-bearing

creatures they encountered at the navis sanctorum were before them once more, but he realised quickly that the size was wrong, that these diseased freaks were the match in height for the Astartes. When they hove into the light, what he saw sent him skidding to a halt, his free hand coming to his mouth in shock.

'In the Emperor's name,' choked Hakur, 'what horror is this?'

Garro's blood turned to ice in his veins. The awful vision that seemed to transmit itself from the dying adjutant was suddenly here before him, written in reality over the mutated, swollen parodies of Death Guard warriors: the same corpse-pallor green of their battle armour, the same slack faces rippled with growths of broken tooth and horn, flesh stretched tight over bodies teeming with colonies of maggots. Voyen had joined Garro and the others at the entrance to the corridor and even the Apothecary, hardened to sights of disease and malady, retched at the sight of the twisted man-things.