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Rhinos too. They had been defaced by blasphemous symbols and had dozer-blades fitted to their front ends.
    In between the machines, he saw hunched, shambling figures, wielding shovels and pickaxes. Filthy, ragged clothing hung from their bodies; diseased skin was peeling from their bones. Their eyes, their expressions, were vacant; they tackled their labours lethargically, like failing automata, only going through the motions.
    He realised what the shambling creatures were: the former farmers of Orath, along with their wives and children. Their bodies and minds had been ravaged by disease. They looked as if they should be dead, and perhaps they were.
    Was this the fate that awaited him too, he wondered?
    The creatures – the zombies – worked under the direction of a force of Death Guard. Plague Marines. Their armoured suits were neglected, rusted to the point where it seemed impossible that they could still function, although they did. Their original colours were long lost in a murky morass of greens and browns.
    One of their number seemed to stand above the others. His armour had a greater number of adornments – presumably, his sick idea of battle honours – including a belt of human skulls slung low about his hips. His head was uncovered and looked hardly more healthy than the dead, rotting skulls did. He was missing an eye and a nose; fat, wriggling maggots had infested the empty sockets. Occasionally, a maggot would pop out of its crowded nest, bounce off its host’s chestplate and burst as it hit the ground.
    Chelaki trained his auto-senses on the ghoulish figure. According to his range finder, he was half a kilometre away. Too far for a kill shot to that tempting bare head, even if he had a working bolter with him. And, with the zombies and the Plague Marines in between them, he knew he would never reach him.
    He could still see dark, flying shapes through the ever-present haze, further from him now than they had been before. He glimpsed a pair of shapes larger than the others with jagged, razor-edged wings, leaving smoke trails, and he remembered the machine-creature – the fire-belching daemon engine – that had wrenched him out of the sky.
    The bulk of the Death Guard army, Chelaki supposed, would be marching beneath their fliers, to the north-west, closing with the Imperial forces that had landed in that direction. He could hear the grinding engines of their tanks and even glimpse the backs of some of them as they set up a defensive line in front of the excavation site.
    Chelaki and his brothers had been charged with protecting this world. They had failed, and this part of it at least had been claimed by Chaos. But the Emperor had given him a chance to expunge his shame; Chelaki had no doubt that he had been spared and placed here in this spot at this time for a reason.
    Now, he only had to work out what he was meant to do; how best to utilise the fragile gift that he had been given. He had to make the rest of his life count for something.
    ‘I have eyes on the enemy, sergeant,’ reported Corbin.
    ‘I see them too,’ Arkelius growled. ‘Maintain formation. Turn us six – no, seven – degrees to port and ease up on the pedal a little.’
    They were just about visible through his forward vision slit: the first ranks of the plague army who were grotesque, man-sized daemon creatures, grey-skinned and so badly deformed that from this distance it was hard to tell where one of them ended and the next one began.
    They were like a tidal wave of putrid flesh, crashing over the horizon, and Arkelius knew from the vox-chatter that filled his helmet – from the reports of the Ultramarines Stormtalon and Thunderhawk pilots – that there were worse horrors to come behind them.
    Ashen-skinned daemons were appearing in the gloomy sky too. They were riding on the backs of huge, hideous winged insects, wielding swords.
    Arkelius heard the familiar rattle of autocannon fire. The sound was muted by the Scourge of the