He dropped his lasgun, hands flying to his head as the world spun crazily and bright starbursts exploded before his eyes. The ground rushed up to meet him and he slammed into the hard rockcrete, closing his eyes as he waited for the killing blow to land.
The shadow of something hot and heavy fell across him and warm blood splashed him.
He opened his eyes and shook his head, regretting it the moment he felt hammerblows of concussion reverberate inside his skull. The Lord of the Unfleshed towered above him, his thickly-muscled body pierced by a score of long blades and burned by innumerable lasburns. The creature reached down to lift him to his feet, and Leonid saw the bodies of those who had been about to kill him.
They looked like an explosion in an anatomist’s collection, a mass of severed limbs and burst-open bodies.
‘Thank you,’ managed Leonid, wiping blood from the side of his head and bending to retrieve his fallen weapon.
‘You Tribe,’ replied the Lord of the Unfleshed as though no other explanation was needed. Without another word, the creature hurled itself back into the fray. Scores of the Unfleshed were dead, but the remainder fought on, unrelenting in their savagery. More and more of their foes were pouring into the chamber and Leonid knew it would not be long until they were overwhelmed.
He looked up towards the gantries surrounding the chamber, willing Uriel and Pasanius to hurry.
THE VEINS ON Uriel’s arms stood out like steel hawsers as he pulled on the chain. Bracing themselves against the raised edge of the scaffolding before him, they hauled with all their might on the chain.
Uriel’s booted feet slipped and he spread his stance to gain better leverage. The grinding pain in his chest and neck from his cracked bones tore into him as he pulled, but he focussed his mind, using all the discipline he had been taught at Agiselus and in the Temple of Hera to shut it out.
‘Come on, damn you!’ he yelled at the chain, hearing the ferocious sounds of battle and knowing that the Unfleshed were dying for him.
He could not let them down, and redoubled his efforts.
Pasanius strained at the chain also, sweat popping from his brow as he hauled on the chain. The sergeant was much stronger than Uriel, but had only one arm with which to heave at the chain.
Together, they put every ounce of their hatred for the Iron Warriors into their efforts.
Uriel roared in pain and frustration as he kept on pulling.
And suddenly he felt give…
Yelling in triumph, the two Ultramarines pulled even harder, feeling tendons tear in their shoulders and arms, but pushing their bodies to the limits of power.
Without warning, the awl-chain tore loose and Uriel saw a flaring spurt of white fire as the silver spike ripped free of the ancient daemon’s flesh.
The red-scaled creature dropped, silver-white flashes exploding against its body where its falling weight tore the other two silver awls from its body.
It landed in the lake of blood with an enormous splash, sending a tidal wave of crimson spilling throughout the chamber. It vanished beneath the churning surface of the lake and Uriel felt a prescient sense of inevitability seize him as he watched the hissing red pool.
‘We did it!’ shouted Pasanius.
‘Yes,’ agreed Uriel, watching as the surface of the lake parted and the massive daemon reared up to its full height, arc lightning playing about its lustrous, scarlet flesh, ‘I am beginning to wonder if we should have.’
HIGH UP IN the tower of iron, Onyx cried out as though struck and dropped to his knees, clutching his head as his soulless silver eyes blazed with sudden awareness. Honsou saw the movement and looked up, irritated at having his battle-planning with Cadaras Grendel interrupted.
Then he saw the look of alarm on Onyx’s face.
‘What is it?’ he demanded.
‘The Heart of Blood!’ hissed the daemonic symbiote.
‘What about it?’
‘It’s free…’ said Onyx.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE HEART OF Blood threw back its horned skull and roared in lunatic pain, its bellow of rage and madness filling the chamber at a pitch that pierced the soul and drew screams of primal fear from almost every living thing within it. The lake of blood boiled where it stood and its eyes burned with white fire that blazed with ancient malice.
Its shaggy, horned head twisted as it surveyed its surroundings, as though seeing them for the first time, and its bloated body threw off great bolts of dark lightning that exploded with red fire.
The Heart of Blood’s flesh was scaled and thick tufts of shaggy, matted hair ran down the length of its spine. The great wounds on its back, where the Savage Morticians had removed its wings, smoked with a liquid, red bloom, like a cloud of ink released underwater.
Its chest heaved violently, the thudding echoes of its heartbeat filling the chamber as it ripped away the pulsing red tube that pierced its chest and fed it the tainted blood of psykers. The flood of vital fluid gushed into the lake.
‘Guilliman preserve us!’ breathed Pasanius as the daemon stepped forwards, striding purposefully to the shore, the spark of its hoofed feet on the lakebed throwing up gouts of flaming blood.
‘A daemon,’ said Uriel. ‘One of the fell princes of Chaos…’
‘What do we do?’ said Pasanius.
Uriel drew his sword as the huge daemon reached the edge of the lake of blood and reared up to its full height.
‘We ready our souls for the end,’ he said simply.
HONSOU WATCHED THE sky around his fortress burn with an actinic blue light. Hundreds of pillars of pellucid blue flame surrounded Khalan-Ghol, spearing kilometres upwards from the plain below, like oil-wells gushing with precious fuel. The azure fire seethed and Honsou could see living nightmares swirling within the flames, the dreadful power and malice of the warp contained within them.
‘What’s happening?’ he demanded.
‘The towers!’ said Onyx.
‘Towers? What towers?’
‘The ones we saw when we made that sortie into Berossus’s camp,’ said Onyx. ‘Tall, baroque towers of iron that were saturated with psychic energy. You remember?’
Honsou nodded, recalling the unsettling sight of their arcane geometries and the chanting groups of gold-robed figures who danced around them, anointing them with the blood of sacrifices. He had put them from his mind after the raid, confident that the power of the Heart of Blood could resist their magicks.
He rounded on Onyx, raising his axe and saying, ‘You told me that no sorcerous powers could defeat the Heart of Blood!’
‘And none can, but it is free now and not bound to Khalan-Ghol any more.’
‘We are defenceless?’ asked Cadaras Grendel.
Onyx shook his head. ‘No. The fortress’s own sorcerers can maintain the barrier for a while, but without the power of the Heart of Blood, it is only a matter of time until Toramino’s magicks break through and destroy us.’
‘Blood of Chaos!’ swore Honsou, heading for the great doors that led from his inner sanctum and waving his chosen warriors to follow him. ‘How could the daemon get free?’
‘The warsmith bound the Heart of Blood with three defiled awls, and it could only be freed if someone were to remove them.’
‘But who would dare risk such a thing?’
Honsou pulled up short as Onyx said, ‘Ventris and his warrior band?’
‘Of course!’ snapped Honsou. ‘I should have known Toramino would never have stooped so low as to employ renegades just to fight for him. He and Ventris must have planned this whole thing! Free the Heart of Blood and then destroy us with sorcery. I’ll have those bastards’ entrails fed a piece at a time to the Exuviae.’
‘Then Toramino never intended to blood his army here!’ snarled Cadaras Grendel.
‘No,’ agreed Onyx. ‘It would seem not.’
‘How long do we have before the barrier falls?’ demanded Honsou, setting off into the darkness of the
tower of iron and t
owards the Halls of die Savage Morticians.
His warriors followed him, bolters and swords at the ready.
‘I do not know for sure,’ admitted Onyx, ‘but it will not be long.’
‘Then we’d better hurry!’ said Honsou. ‘I want to kill Ventris before Toramino brings Khalan-Ghol to ruin!’
URIEL DROPPED TO the gantry that ran the circumference of the chamber, thumbing the activation rune on his sword’s hilt and slashing its bright blade through the air. Pasanius landed beside him and together they hurriedly made their way to the chamber’s floor as the Heart of Blood stepped from the lake, red liquid running from its crimson body in grisly runnels.
It towered above them, fully four or five metres tall, its powerfully muscled physique running with hot streamers of light that snaked beneath its flesh like fiery veins. It looked down on the bloody ground before it – at the corpses of the Unfleshed, the Savage Morticians and their servants – and a bloody leer split its bestial face. The surviving mutants fled before its terrifying power and even those Savage Morticians the Unfleshed had not killed backed away from this diabolical presence in their midst.
Only the Unfleshed stood their ground, too ignorant of the horrifying power of a daemon prince to fear it. Though they felt its abominable power, they had no concept of the threat it represented.
The Lord of the Unfleshed stood before the mighty daemon, his chest puffed out in challenge, and it regarded him with as much interest as a man might notice an ant. The Lord of the Unfleshed roared and charged the daemon, but before he could so much as land a blow, the Heart of Blood swatted him aside with a casual flick of its scaled arm.
The monstrous leader of the Unfleshed smashed into the side of the cavern with a bone-crunching thud and Uriel knew that the force of the impact must have shattered every bone in his body.
Seeing their leader so easily defeated, the Unfleshed howled and scattered before the horrendous daemon, seeking shelter in the dark nooks and crannies of the deathly cavern.
Uriel and Pasanius watched as the Heart of Blood turned from the fleeing Unfleshed, the tremendous booming of its vital organ diminishing now that sorcerous magicks were no longer pouring into it. Uriel felt his senses becoming sharper, the smothering numbness lifted now that the daemon was free.
Leonid hurried over to where they stood and shouted, ‘I thought it was supposed to be destroyed when the awls came out!’
‘So did I,’ replied Uriel as the Heart of Blood threw back its head and gave vent to a terrible roaring that overwhelmed the senses, not through its volume, but by the sheer sense of loss and fury that it contained. Its hunger pierced the wall of the dimensions and echoed across the vast gulf that separated universes.
Uriel and every living thing in the chamber fell to the ground, shaken to the very core of their being by the daemon’s cry.
‘What’s it doing?’ yelled Leonid.
‘Emperor alone knows!’ cried Pasanius.
Uriel picked himself up, his hands clamped to the side of his head in an effort to shut out the monstrous noise of the daemon’s howl. Something in the tone of the long, ululating cry spoke to Uriel of things lost and things to be called back. He realised what it was as he saw a twisting blob of dark light appear in the air before the daemon.
‘It is a cry of summoning…’ he said.
Pasanius and Leonid looked strangely at him as the daemon’s roar ceased and the fragile veil of reality pulled apart with a dreadful ripping sound, as of tearing meat. A black gouge in the walls separating realities opened, filling the air with sickening static, as though a million noxious flies had flown through from some vile, plague dimension.
Awful knowledge flooded Uriel as he stared into the portal opened in the fabric of the universe. He saw galaxies of billions upon billions of souls harvested and fed to the Lord of Skulls, the Blood God.
‘Emperor’s mercy,’ wept Uriel as he felt each of these deaths lodge like a splinter in his heart. New life and new purpose had once filled these galaxies, but now all was death, slaughtered to sate the hunger of the Blood God… whose fell name was a dark presence staining the coppery wind that blew from the portal, a stench of deepest, darkest red, whose purpose was embodied in but a single rune and a legend of simple devotion: Blood for the Blood God… Khorne… Khorne… Khorne…
A single shriek of dark and bloody kinship, a pact of hate and death. It echoed from the portal and grew to shake the dust from the ceiling. And there was an answering roar of bloody welcome, torn from the Heart of Blood’s brazen throat.
Light blazed from the portal as an armoured giant, clad in burnished iron plates of ancient power armour stamped down into the chamber, the portal sealing shut behind it as it marched to stand before the Heart of Blood.
Taller than a Space Marine, its vile presence was unmistakable, its malice incalculable. White light, impure and corrupt, spilled like droplets of spoiled milk from beneath its horned helmet and its shoulder guards bore stained chevrons that marked the figure as an Iron Warrior.
The daemonic warrior carried a great, saw-toothed blade and a gold-chased pistol, both weapons redolent with the slaughter they had inflicted. Powerful and darkly magnificent, Uriel knew that this… thing was the most consummate killer imaginable.
Uriel caught a glimpse of a shambling shape limping towards the passageway that led from the cavern, recognising it as the vile creature, Sabatier. Barely had he registered its presence when the iron-armoured warrior snapped up its pistol and fired.
The bolt caught Sabatier high in the back, exploding through its chest and blasting a great crater in its body. Sabatier grunted and toppled over and Uriel felt sorry that it hadn’t suffered more before it died.
‘We can’t fight both of them,’ said Pasanius.
‘No,’ agreed Uriel, ‘but maybe we will not have to. Look!’
The armoured figure dropped to its knees before the Heart of Blood, but Uriel could see that it was no simple a gesture of abasement. The daemonic Iron Warrior dropped its weapons and raised its arms, a blood-red glow spilling from every joint of its armour and bathing the Heart of Blood in its light.
‘I return to you!’ shouted a high voice from beneath the armoured warrior’s helmet.
The Heart of Blood raised its arms, mimicking the warrior’s pose and, piece-by-piece, the iron armour detached from the kneeling figure and floated through the air towards the massive daemon.
‘Now what the hell’s it doing?’ said Leonid, barely keeping the terror from his voice.
‘Oh no…’ whispered Uriel as he remembered a tale he had been told not so long ago by Seraphys of the Blood Ravens in the mountains. A tale of how the Heart of Blood had forged for itself a suit of armour into which it had poured all of its malice, all of its hate and all of its cunning, a suit of armour so full of fury that even the blows of its enemies would strike them down.
Truly it was the avatar of Khorne, the Blood God’s most favoured disciple of death.
Iron armour floated from the figure who now diminished as each piece deserted it. Though the Heart of Blood was larger by far than the armoured warrior, each piece somehow moulded itself to the daemon’s form, darkening from the colour of iron to a dark and loathsome brass. Its greaves and breastplate clanged into place and, unbidden, the warrior’s weapons leapt from the ground, writhing in midair to change from a pistol and sword to a moaning axe and snaking whip of rippling, studded leather.
Lastly, the iron helm was snatched by invisible hands from the warrior’s head and placed upon the Heart of Blood’s great, horned skull.
Where once had knelt a fearsome, armoured giant, there was now only a waif-like figure of a woman in a filthy and tattered sky-blue uniform of the Imperial Guard.
‘383rd!’ exclaimed Leonid.
‘What?’
‘That jacket,’ pointed Leonid. ‘It’s the uniform of my regiment!’
‘It can’t be,’ said Uriel. ‘Here?’
‘I know my own regiment, da
mn it,’ snapped Leonid. ‘I’m going to get her!’
‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Pasanius, gripping Leonid’s jacket.
‘No!’ protested Leonid, struggling in the sergeant’s grip. ‘Don’t you understand? Along with me, she’s probably the last survivor of the 383rd! I have to go!’
‘You’ll die,’ said Uriel.
‘So? I’m dying anyway,’ shouted Leonid. ‘And if I have to end my days here, I want it to be with a fellow Jouran. Remember your words, Uriel! We all die bloody, all we get to do is choose where and when!’
Uriel nodded, now understanding Leonid’s desperation, and said, ‘Let him go.’
Pasanius released his grip on Leonid, and they watched as he ran towards the swaying woman, gathering her up in his arms as another set of thick, curling, bronze-tipped horns ripped through the metal of the daemon’s helmet. The Heart of Blood’s eyes shone with renewed purpose and awareness as it lifted its head and sniffed the air, grinning with terrible appetite.
‘Psykers…’ it roared, turning towards the upright iron sarcophagi that surrounded the lake of blood.
THE IRON-MESHED cage sped downwards into the depths of Khalan-Ghol, ancient mechanisms and sorcerous artifice combining to make the journey as quick as possible, oily sheets of beaten iron slicing past at tremendous speed. But Honsou knew it was still not fast enough. The mystical barrier protecting his fortress was still holding firm against Toramino’s sorcerers, but it wouldn’t last much longer unless they could somehow re-imprison the Heart of Blood.
He and his chosen warriors, deadly killers loyal only to him, journeyed into the depths of the fortress, ready to kill whatever they encountered. Onyx stood backed into the corner of the speeding elevator cage, his silver eyes and veins dulled and sluggish in his features.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ snapped Honsou as the daemonic symbiote moaned.
‘The Heart of Blood is powerful…’ hissed Onyx.
‘And?’
‘It could snuff out my essence in the blink of an eye,’ snarled Onyx, his dead eyes shining with murderous lustre. ‘And if it commanded me, I could not resist its imperatives.’
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