The Sixth Plague Company bears two names. To the Legion they are the Ferrymen, wardens of the Death Guard's vast and rotting fleets; to those who have heard the buzzing that precedes their coming, they are the Brethren of the Fly. Theirs is the duty of the void war, and they garrison the plague-hulks and grand cruisers that carry Mortarion's pestilence from one condemned system to the next.
The Ferrymen are gatherers as much as warriors. Where a fresh vessel drifts, crippled or unwary, they come alongside in boarding torpedoes and press their claim, filling its corridors with spores and slaughter until the ship itself is remade in Nurgle's image and added to the Plague Fleets. Over the long centuries their armadas have swollen into a drifting continent of corroded steel, each hull a coffin-world of festering holds and choir-decks gone silent.
Yet the company carries its own curse. A parasite the Ferrymen name the Droning has taken deep root among them, worming into the warplate of their Terminators and filling their skulls with an endless, humming chorus. Rather than fight the affliction, the Brethren embrace it as a blessing, and their Blightlords advance to the sound of a thousand droning wings, borne ever onward toward the next world to be ferried into death.
Death Guard
Order of battle
The The Ferrymen field the units of the Death Guard — a detachment from the roster:
Kindred formations
Other Death Guard formations
The HarbingersThe First Plague Company and the vanguard of the Legion, the Harbingers are those who arrive before the war truly begins. They are seeders of pestilence and heralds of ruin, slipping onto doomed worlds to spread contagion long before the main host makes planetfall. By the time defenders realise a Death Guard invasion is underway, the Harbingers have already ensured the outcome.
The InexorableThe Inexorable are the Death Guard distilled to a single grim principle: advance and never stop. This Company specialises in siege and grinding assault, marching into the teeth of the heaviest defences and simply absorbing everything hurled against it. They are the anvil upon which enemy armies break, an unbreakable tide of rusted plate that arrives slowly and cannot be turned aside.
The Mouth of NurgleA Plague Company defined by voracious, all-consuming appetite, the Mouth of Nurgle exists to devour. Its warriors fall upon besieged worlds like locusts, stripping them of resources, life, and hope, and rendering everything down into raw material for the Grandfather's garden. Where they pass, little is left but ruin, rot, and the buzzing of flies.
The PoxmongersThe Poxmongers are the Fifth Plague Company of the Death Guard, artificers of ruin who march to war behind a groaning host of daemon engines. Where they pass, the sky chokes with exhaust and the ground trembles beneath rusting tracks, every machine a shrine to Nurgle's ceaseless labour.