Torgaddon nodded and said, ‘Hold on, the Legio’s coming again.’
Loken gripped onto a more solid piece of debris, as the Titans began yet another deadly strafing run through the mass of rotted monsters. Like the monstrous giants said to haunt the mists of Barbarus, the Titans emerged from the fog with fists of thunder and fire. Wet explosions mushroomed from the swamp as high explosives hurled the cadavers into the air and the crashing steps of the mighty war machines crashed them to ooze beneath their hammer-blow footsteps.
The very air thrummed with the vibrations of the Titans’ attack, avalanches of debris and mud sliding from the
Glory of Terra
with each explosion and titanic footstep. The dead things had gained the slopes of rubble and detritus that led into the starship three times; and three times had they sent them back, first with gunfire, and, when the ammunition had ran out, with blades and brute strength. Each time they killed hundreds of their enemies, but each time a handful of Astartes was dragged down and pulled beneath the waters of the swamp.
Under normal circumstances, the Astartes would have had no trouble in dealing with these abominations, but with the Warmaster’s fate unknown they were brittle and on edge, unable to think or fight with their customary ferocity. Loken knew exactly what they were feeling, because he felt it too.
Unable to raise the Warmaster, Aximand or Abaddon, the warriors outside the hulk were left paralysed and in disarray without their beloved leader.
‘T
EMBA
,’
SAID
THE
Warmaster, rising to his feet and marching towards his erstwhile planetary governor. With each step, he saw further evidence of Eugan Temba’s treachery, clotted blood on the edge of his sword and a fierce grin of anticipation. Where once had been the loyal and upright follower, Horus now saw only a filthy traitor who deserved the most painful of deaths. A fell light grew around Temba, further revealing the corruption of his flesh, and Horus knew that nothing of his former friend was left in the diseased shell that stood before him.
Horus wondered if this was what Loken had experienced beneath the mountains of Sixty-Three Nineteen: the horror of a former comrade succumbing to the warp. Horus had known of the bad blood between Jubal and Loken, now understanding that such enmity, however trivial, had been the chink in Jubal’s armour by which the warp had taken him.
What flaw had been Temba’s undoing? Pride, ambition, jealousy?
The bloated monster that had once been Eugan Temba looked up from the corpse of Verulam Moy and smiled, thoroughly pleased with its work.
‘Warmaster,’ said Temba, each syllable glottal and wet, as though spoken through water.
‘Do not dare to address me by such a title, abomination,’
‘Abomination?’ hissed Temba, shaking his head. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’
‘No,’ said Horus. ‘You’re not Temba, you’re warp-spawned filth, and I’m here to kill you,’
‘You are wrong, Warmaster,’ it laughed. ‘I am Temba. The so-called friend you left behind. I am Temba, the loyal follower of Horus you left to rot on this backwater world while you went on to glory,’
Horus approached the dais of the captain’s throne and dragged his eyes from Temba to the body of Verulam Moy. Blood streamed from a terrible wound in his side, pumping energetically onto the stained floor of the bridge. The flesh of his throat was purple and black, a lump of broken bone pushing at the bruised skin where his neck had been snapped.
‘A pity about Moy,’ said Temba. ‘He would have been a fine convert.’
‘Don’t say his name,’ warned Horus. ‘You are not fit to give it voice.’
‘If it consoles you, he was loyal until the end. I offered him a place at my side, with the power of Nurghleth filling his veins with its immortal necrosis, but he refused. He felt the need to try to kill me; foolish really. The power of the warp fills me and he had no chance at all, but that didn’t stop him. Admirable loyalty, even if it was misplaced.’
Horus placed a foot on the first step of the dais, his golden sword held out before him, his fury at this beast drowning out all other concerns. All he wanted to do was throttle the life from this treacherous bastard with his bare hands, but he retained enough sense to know that if Moy had been killed with such apparent ease, then he would be a fool to discard his weapon.
‘We don’t have to be enemies, Horus,’ said Temba. ‘You have no idea of the power of the warp, old friend. It is like nothing we ever saw before. It’s beautiful really.’
‘It is power,’ agreed Horus, climbing another step, ‘elemental and uncontrollable and therefore not to be trusted,’
‘Elemental? Perhaps, but it is far more than that,’ said Temba. ‘It seethes with life, with ambition and desire. You think it’s a wasteland of raging energy that you bend to your will, but you have no idea of the power that lies there: the power to dominate, to control and to rule.’ ‘I have no desire for such things,’ said Horus. ‘You lie,’ giggled Temba. ‘I can see it in your eyes, old friend. Your ambition is a potent thing, Horus. Do not be afraid of it. Embrace it and we will not be enemies, we will be allies, embarking upon a course that will see us masters of the galaxy.’
‘This galaxy already has a master, Temba. He is called the Emperor.’
‘Then where is he? He blundered across the cosmos in the manner of the barbarian tribes of ancient Terra, destroying anyone who would not submit to his will, and then left you to pick up the pieces. What manner of leader is that? He is but a tyrant by another name.’
Horus took another step, and was almost at the top of the dais, almost within striking distance of this traitor who dared to profane the name of the Emperor.
‘Think about it, Horus,’ urged Temba. ‘The whole history of the galaxy has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect an underlying destiny. That destiny is Chaos.’
‘Chaos?’
‘Yes!’ shouted Temba. ‘Say it again, my friend. Chaos is the first power in the universe and it will be the last. When the first ape creatures bashed each other’s brains out with bones, or cried to the heavens in the death throes of plague, they fed and nurtured Chaos. The blissful release of excess and the glee of intrigue – all is grist for the soul mills of Chaos. So long as Man endures, so too does Chaos.’
Horus reached the top of the dais and stood face to face with Temba, a man he had once counted as his friend and comrade in this great undertaking. Though the thing spoke with Temba’s voice and its stretched features were still those of his comrade, there was nothing left of that fine man, only this wretched creature of the warp.
‘You have to die,’ said Horus.
‘No, for that is the glory of Nurghleth,’ chuckled Temba. ‘I will never die.’
‘We’ll soon see about that,’ snarled Horus, and drove his sword into Temba’s chest, the golden blade easily sliding through the layers of blubber towards the traitor’s heart.
Horus ripped his sword free in a wash of black blood and stinking pus, the stench almost too much for even him to bear. Temba laughed, apparently untroubled by such a mortal wound, and brought up his own sword, its glinting, fractured blade like patterned obsidian.
He brought the blade to his blue lips and said, ‘The Warmaster Horus.’
With a speed that was unnatural in its swiftness, the tip of the blade speared for the Warmaster’s throat.
Horus threw up his sword, deflecting Temba’s weapon barely a centimetre from his neck, and took a step backwards as the traitor lurched towards him. Recovering from the surprise attack, Horus gripped his sword two-handed, blocking every lethal thrust and cut that Temba made.
Horus fought like never before, his every move to parry and defend. Eugan Temba had never been a swordsman, so where this sudden, horrifying skill came from Horus had no idea. The two men traded blows back and forth across the command deck, the bloated form of Eugan Temba moving with a speed and dexterity quite beyond anything that should have been possible for someone of such vast bulk. Indeed, Horus had the distinct impression that it was not Temba’s skill with a blade that he was up against, but the blade itself.
He ducked beneath a decapitating strike and spun inside Temba’s guard, slashing his sword through his opponent’s belly, a thick gruel of infected blood and fat spilling onto the deck. The dark blade darted out and struck his shoulder guard, ripping it from his armour in a flash of purple sparks.
Horus danced back from the blow as the return stroke arced towards his head. He dropped and rolled away as Temba turned his bloody, carven body back towards him. Any normal man would have died a dozen times or more, but Temba seemed untroubled by such killing wounds.
Temba’s face shone with glistening sweat, and Horus blinked as the monster’s outline wavered, like those of the cyclopean monsters that he had fought in the ship’s central spine. Frantic motion shimmered and he could see something deep within the monstrously swollen body, the faint outline of a screaming man, his hands clasped to his ears and his face twisted in a rictus grin of horror.
Trailing his innards like gooey ropes, Eugan Temba descended the steps of the dais like a socialite making her entrance at one of the Merican balls. Horus saw the cursed sword gleaming with a terrible hunger, its edges twitching in Temba’s hand, as though aching to bury itself in his flesh.
‘It doesn’t have to end this way, Horus,’ gurgled Temba. ‘We need not be enemies.’
‘Yes,’ said Horus. ‘We do. You killed my friend and you betrayed the Emperor. It can be no other way.’
Even before the words were out of his mouth, the smoky grey blade streaked towards him, and Horus threw himself back as the razor-sharp edge grazed his breastplate and cut into the ceramite. Horus backed away from Temba, hearing twin cracks as the monstrously bloated traitor’s anklebones finally snapped under his weight.
Horus watched as Temba dragged himself forwards unsteadily, the splintered ends of bone jutting from the bloody flesh of his ankles. No normal man could endure such agony, and Horus felt a flickering ember of compassion for his former friend stir within his breast. No man deserved to be abused so, and Horus vowed to end Temba’s suffering, seeing again the jagged after-image sputtering within the alien flesh of the warp. ‘I should have listened to you, Eugan,’ he whispered. Temba didn’t reply. The glimmering blade wove bright patterns in the air, but Horus ignored it, too seasoned a warrior to be caught by such an elementary trick.
Once again, Temba’s blade reached out for him, but Horus was now gaining a measure of its hunger to do him harm. It attacked without thought or reason, only the simple lust to destroy. He looped his own blade around the quillons of Temba’s sword and swept his arm out in a disarming move, before closing to deliver the deathblow.
Instead of releasing the blade for fear of a shattered wrist, however, Temba retained his grip on the sword, its tip twisting in the air and plunging towards Horus’s shoulder.
Both blades pierced flesh at the same instant, Horus’s tearing through his foe’s chest and into his heart and lungs, as Temba’s stabbed into the muscle of Horus’s shoulder where his armour had been torn away.
Horus yelled in sudden pain, his arm burning with the shimmering sword’s touch, and reacted with all the speed the Emperor had bred into him. His golden sword slashed out, severing Temba’s arm just above the elbow and the sword clanged to the deck where it twitched in the grip of the severed arm with a loathsome life of its own.
Temba wavered and fell to his knees with a cry of agony, and Horus reared above his foe with his sword upraised. His shoulder ached and bled, but victory was now his and he roared with anger, as he stood ready to enact his vengeance.
Through the red mist of anger and hurt, he saw the pathetic, weeping and soiled form of Eugan Temba stripped of the loathsome power of the warp that had claimed him. Still bloated and massive, the dark light in his eyes was gone, replaced by tears and pain as the enormity of his betrayal crashed down upon him.
‘What have I done?’ asked Temba, his voice little more than a whisper.
The anger went out of Horus in an instant and he lowered his sword, kneeling beside the dying man that had once been his trusted friend.
Juddering sobs of agony and remorse wracked Temba’s body and he reached up with his remaining hand to grip the Warmaster’s armour.
‘Forgive me, my friend,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know. None of us did.’
‘Hush now, Eugan,’ soothed Horus. ‘It was the warp. The tribes of the moon must have used it against you. They would have called it magic.’
‘No… I’m so sorry,’ wept Temba, his eyes dimming as death reached up to claim him. ‘They showed us what it could do and I saw the power of it. I saw beyond and into the warp. I saw the powers that dwell there and, Emperor forgive me, I still said yes to it.’
‘There are no powers that dwell there, Eugan,’ said Horus. ‘You were deceived.’
‘No!’ said Temba, gripping Horus’s arm tightly. ‘I was weak and I fell willingly, but it is done with me now. There is great evil in the warp and I need you to know the truth of Chaos before the galaxy is condemned to the fate that awaits it.’
‘What are you talking about? What fate?’
‘I saw it, Warmaster, the galaxy as a wasteland, the Emperor dead and mankind in bondage to a nightmarish hell of bureaucracy and superstition. All is grim darkness and all is war. Only you have the power to stop this future. You must be strong, Warmaster. Never forget that…’
Horus wanted to ask more, but watched impotently as the spark of life fled Eugan Temba.
His shoulder still burning with fire, Horus rose to his feet and marched over to the rewired consoles and the throbbing bundle of cables that reached up to the chamber’s roof.
With an aching cry of loss and anger, he severed the cables with one mighty blow of his sword. They flopped and spun like landed fish, sparks and green fluids spurting from internal tubes and cables, and Horus could tell that the damnable vox transmission had ceased.
Horus dropped his sword and, clutching his injured shoulder, sat on the deck next to Eugan Temba’s dead body and wept for his lost friend.