Ehrlen shook his head. They got us. We thought we'd taken this city and they got us.'
'None of us could have known,’ said Tarvitz.
'No. There are no excuses,’ Ehrlen's face hardened. 'The World Eaters must always go further than the enemy. Wheivthey attack, we charge right back at them. When they dig in, we dig them out. When they kill our warriors, we kill their cities, but this time, the enemy went further than we did. We attacked their city, and they destroyed it to take us with them,’
"We were all caught out, captain,’ said Tarvitz. The Emperor's Children, too,’
'No, Tarvitz, this was our fight. The Emperor's Children and the Sons of Horus were to behead the beast, but we were sent to cut its heart out. This was an enemy that could not be scared away or thrown into confusion. The Isstvanians had to be killed. Whether the other Legions acknowledge it or not, the World Eaters were the ones who had to win this city, and we take responsibility for our failures,’ 'It's not your responsibility,’ said Tarvitz. 'A lesser soldier pretends that his failures are those of his commanders,’ said Ehrlen. 'An Astartes realises they are his alone,’ 'No, captain, said Tarvitz. You don't understand. I
mean-' 'Got something,’ said Wrathe from the corner of
the bunker. The Sons of Horus?' asked Ehrlen.
Wrathe shook his head. 'Death Guard. They took cover in the bunkers further west,’
'What do they say?'
That the virus is dying down,’
Then we could be out there again soon,’ said Ehrlen with relish. 'If the Isstvanians come to take their city back, they'll find us waiting for them,’
'No,’ said Tarvitz. There's one more stage of the viral attack still to come,’
What's that?' demanded Ehrlen.
The firestorm,’ said Tarvitz.
'You see now,' said Horus to the assembled remembrancers. This is war. This is cruelty and death. This is what we do for you and yet you turn your face from it,’
Weeping men and women clung to one another in the wake of such monstrous genocide, unable to comprehend the scale of the slaughter that had just been enacted in the name of the Imperium.
You have come to my ship to chronicle the Great Cmsade and there is much to be said for what you have achieved, but things change and times move on,’ continued Horus as the Astartes warriors along the flanks of the chamber closed the doors and stood before them with their bolters held across their chests.
The Great Crusade is over,’ said Horus, his voice booming with power and strength. The ideals it once stood for are dead and all we have fought for has been a lie. Until now. Now I will bring the
Crusade back to its rightful path and rescue the galaxy from its abandonment at the hands of the Emperor.'
Astonished gasps and wails spread around the chamber at Horus's words and he relished the freeВdom he felt in saying them out loud. The need for secrecy and misdirection was no more. Now he could unveil the grandeur of his designs for the galaxy and cast aside his false facade to reveal his true purpose.
'You cry out, but mere mortals cannot hope to comprehend the scale of my plans,’ said Horus, savouring the looks of panic that began to spread around the audience chamber.
No iterator could ever have had a crowd so comВpletely in the palm of his hand.
'Unfortunately, this means that there is no place for the likes of you in this new crusade. I am to embark on the greatest war ever unleashed on the galaxy, and I cannot be swayed from my course by those who harbour disloyalty.' Horus smiled.
The smile of an angelic executioner. 'Kill them,’ he said. 'All of them,’ • Bolter fire stabbed into the crowd at the Warmas-ter's order. Flesh burst in wet explosions and a hundred bodies fell in the first fusillade. The screaming began as the crowd surged away from the Astartes who marched into their midst. But there was no escape. Guns blazed and roaring chainswords rose and fell.
The slaughter took less than a minute and Horus turned away from the killing to watch the final death throes of Isstvan III. Abaddon emerged from the shadows where he and Maloghurst had watched the slaughter of the remembrancers.
'My lord,’ said Abaddon, bowing low.
'What is it, my son?'
'Ship surveyors report that the virus has mostly burned out,’
And the gaseous levels?'
'Off the scale, my lord,’ smiled Abaddon. The gunners await your orders,’
Horus watched the swirling, noxious clouds enveloping the planet below.
All it would take was a single spark.
He imagined the planet as the frayed end of a fuse, a fuse that would ignite the galaxy in a searing conflagration and would lead to an inexorable conВclusion on Terra.
'Order the guns to fire,’ said Horus, his voice cold. 'Let the galaxy burn!'
'Emperor preserve us,' whispered Moderati Cassar, unable to hide his horror and not caring who heard him. The miasma of rancid, putrid gasses still hung thickly around the Titan and he could only dimly see the trenches again, along with the Death Guard emerging from the bunkers. Shortly after the order to seal the Titan had been given, the Death Guard had taken cover, clearly in receipt of the same order as the Dies Irae.
The Isstvanians had received no such order. The Death Guard's withdrawal had drawn the Isstvan-ian soldiers forwards and they had borne the full brunt of the bio-weapon.
Masses of mucus-like flesh choked the trenches, half-formed human corpses looming from them, faces melted and rot-bloated bodies split open. Thousands upon thousands of Isstvanians lay in rotting heaps and thick streams of sluggish black corruption ran the length of the trenches.
Beyond the battlefield, death had consumed the forests that lay just outside the Choral City's limits, now resembling endless graveyards of blackened trunks, like scorched skeletal hands. The earth beneath was saturated with biological death and the air was thick with foul gasses released by the oceans of decaying matter.
'Report,’ said Princeps Turnet, re-entering the cockpit from the Titan's main dorsal cavity.
'We're sealed,’ said Moderati Aruken on the other side of the bridge. 'The crew's fine and I have a zero reading of contaminants,’
'The virus has burned itself out,’ said Turnet. 'Cas-sar, what's out there?'
Cassar took a moment to gather his thoughts, still struggling with the hideous magnitude of death that he couldn't have even imagined had he not seen it through the eyes of the Dies Irae.
'The Isstvanians are… gone,’ he said. He peered through the swirling clouds of gas at the mass of the city to one side of the Titan. 'All of them,’
The Death Guard?'
Cassar looked closer, seeing segments of gun-metal armour partially buried in gory chokepoints, marking where Astartes had fallen.
'Some of them were caught out there,’ he said. 'A lot of them are dead, but the order must have got to most of them in time,’
The order?'
Yes, princeps. The order to take cover,’
Turnet peered through the Titan's eye on Aruken's side of the bridge, seeing Death Guard warriors through the greenish haze securing the trenches around their bunkers and treading through the foul remains of the Isstvanians.