The Ultramarines Omnibus

by Graham McNeill

  But the Heart of Blood was not to be cheated of victory and its whip lashed out, snapping around the armoured daemon’s arm and tearing it off in a fountain of black blood. The Omphalos Daemonium fell to its knees and bellowed in angry defiance, but it was in vain as the Heart of Blood stepped close and hammered its axe down against its shoulder, cleaving its head from its body with one mighty blow.

  The armoured daemon collapsed, a flood of gore spilling from the mortal wound and the Heart of Blood raised its weapons to the heavens with an ear-splitting roar of triumph to the Blood God that shook the very walls of the chamber.

  Dark energies swirled from the destroyed daemon and the Heart of Blood convulsed as it drank of the essence of its ancient foe, its limbs shuddering with the inherited power.

  Even as it savoured the spoils of its victory, the red sky that had come into being at the arrival of the Omphalos Daemonium began to fade and the screaming souls trapped in the damned metal of its engine howled with renewed vigour.

  Hissing bone-pistons ground upwards as the monstrous daemon engine built power to escape its dying master and the collapsing cavern.

  Then, as though the battle and sheer power its victory had unleashed were too much for the terrible creature, it dropped to its knees, sated and overwhelmed with dark energies. The axe and whip fell from the Heart of Blood’s clawed hands as it toppled onto its side, the lustre of its red flesh deepening to a hot vermilion that smoked and hissed like that of an electrocution victim.

  With the collapse of the two abominations, the discordant shriek of clashing daemon weapons was silenced, replaced by the omnipresent thunder of artillery from outside. The battle within Khalan-Ghol might be over for now, but the violence unleashed by Toramino was still very much ongoing.

  Uriel held his breath, afraid that even the slightest motion would bring the daemon surging to their feet again. But nothing of the sort happened and he let out a great, shuddering breath as the Lord of the Unfleshed

  limped over to him and leaned down so that its head was level with his.

  ‘We kill iron men!’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Uriel, wearily. ‘We did.’

  ‘Emperor happy?’

  Uriel looked around the ruins of the Halls of the Savage Morticians, seeing that there was nothing recognisable left of it, everything had been destroyed in the cataclysmic battle of the two daemons. The surgical horrors enacted here were gone, the suffering victims of the bizarre experimentations finally granted the Emperor’s peace. The lake of blood was now nothing more than a dusty crater, the gantries where the daemonculaba had been housed reduced to twisted masses of mangled iron.

  Of the daemonculaba themselves, there was nothing but sad piles of ruined flesh and Uriel felt a great weight lift from his shoulders as he saw that their death oath had been fulfilled. The creatures Tigurius had seen in his vision and Marneus Calgar had charged them to destroy were no more.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Uriel. ‘The Emperor is happy. You made the Emperor very happy.’

  The Lord of the Unfleshed reared up to his full height and beat his chest with his massive fists. The few of his surviving brethren did likewise and howled their joy to the fading red skies.

  ‘Tribe! Tribe! Tribe!’ they shouted, over and over.

  Uriel nodded and copied the enormous creature, hammering his fists on his chest and yelling, ‘Tribe! Tribe! Tribe!’ at the top of his voice. Pasanius looked oddly at him, but Uriel was too caught up in the primal exultation of the Unfleshed to care.

  As the chant faded, the Lord of the Unfleshed returned his attention to the few surviving Iron Warriors who began picking themselves up now that the fury of the bloodstorm had abated.

  The Lord of the Unfleshed twisted his hungry head towards Uriel and asked, ‘Meat?’

  Uriel’s heart hardened as he slowly nodded.

  ‘Meat,’ he agreed.

  These Iron Warriors had been the mightiest of Honsou’s grand company, but even they could not stand before the fully-unleashed savagery of the Unfleshed. The ground was littered with the dead, both Iron Warriors and their monstrous by-blows, but it was only a taster of the slaughter that followed.

  Armour was broken open and limbs were torn from their sockets as the Unfleshed feasted on the still-living bodies of their hated creators.

  Uriel helped Pasanius to his feet as he saw the daemon-thing, Onyx, surrounded by a pack of the Unfleshed. The dark-armoured warrior cut and stabbed with furious speed, but the Unfleshed fought on, uncaring of wounds that would have slain a lesser opponent thrice over.

  Uriel felt no pity for Onyx, it was a thing of the warp, an abomination and, as it was borne to the ground beneath a roaring mass of the Unfleshed, he turned away.

  ‘SO WHAT DO we do now?’ asked Pasanius, leaning against a shattered pile of rockcrete slabs and wiping dust and blood from his face.

  ‘I am not sure,’ answered Uriel honestly. ‘We did what we set out to do. We fulfilled our death oath.’

  Despite his obvious pain, Pasanius smiled, and the sullen weight his friend had carried since the last days on Tarsis Ultra seemed to slide from his face. .

  ‘It is good to see you smile again, my friend,’ said Uriel.

  ‘Aye, it’s been a while since I’ve felt like it.’

  ‘Our honour is restored,’ said Uriel.

  ‘You know,’ said Pasanius. ‘I don’t think we ever really lost it.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ agreed Uriel. ‘If only there was some way we could tell them that on Macragge.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they’ll ever hear of what happened here.’

  ‘No, I do not suppose they will,’ said Uriel. ‘But that does not matter. We know, and that is enough.’

  ‘Aye, I think you’re right, captain.’

  ‘I told you before, you do not need to call me that.’

  ‘Not before,’ pointed out Pasanius, ‘but we’ve honoured our death oath, and you are my captain again.’

  Uriel nodded. ‘I suppose I am at that.’

  The two warriors shook hands, pleased to be alive and enjoying the sensation of having achieved what they set out to do. No matter that they were still trapped on a nightmarish daemon world, thousands of light years from home. Their success felt good by the simple virtue of its accomplishment.

  No matter what happened now, they were done. It was over.

  The Lord of the Unfleshed approached, thick ropes of clotted blood dangling from his jutting, fanged jaws.

  ‘We go now?’ he said. ‘Leave now?’

  ‘Leave?’ said Uriel. ‘How? There is nowhere to go. The passage to the elevator cage is impassable and hundreds of tonnes of rock have shut off the outflow pipe. There is no way out.’

  The Lord of the Unfleshed gave him a lopsided look, as though he couldn’t believe that Uriel was being so dense. He pointed over Uriel’s shoulder and said, ‘Big iron man’s machine leaves!’

  For a second, Uriel was mystified until he followed the Lord of the Unfleshed’s pointing finger and saw the dark shape of the armoured leviathan that had carried the Slaughterman here. It ground towards one of the skull-wreathed tunnels it had created to manifest within the cavern. The red-lit door to its interior was still open and though the masterless machine was slowly building speed, there was still time get aboard.

  ‘Brought big iron man here,’ said the Lord of the Unfleshed. ‘Take us away too!’

  Uriel shared a look with Pasanius.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Uriel, a ghost of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘I think that wherever the thing takes us, it’s got to better than here, captain,’ said Pasanius, pushing off the rocks and clutching his wounds.

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  ‘Well, it’s either that or we stay and get flattened by Toramino’s artillery.’

  ‘Good point,’ agreed Uriel, turning to the Lord of the Unfleshed. ‘Gather the Tribe. We are leaving.’

  The Lord of the Unfle
shed nodded, its massive shoulders heaving with the motion. It threw back its head and let out a rising howl.

  Within seconds, the Unfleshed broke off from their grisly feasting and joined their leader. Less than a dozen of them still lived, and Uriel was shocked at how few had survived the mission to Khalan-Ghol. Ardaric Vaanes had been right when he said that most, if not all, of them would die here.

  Uriel nodded. ‘All right, let’s get the hell out of here.’

  FOR A MOMENT Honsou thought he was dead. Once he realised he wasn’t, he thought he was blind.

  All he could feel was pain and all he could hear were heavy thumps of artillery impacting somewhere above him. He sat up, feeling a stinging in his eyes and reached up to the vacuum seals on his armour’s gorget. They were cracked and useless, so he wrenched his helmet off, realising that he wasn’t blind after all, but simply had clotted lumps of blood in his eyes.

  Honsou scooped the clumps of sticky matter from his face and spat out a mouthful of dirt.

  He wiped his face again, angry that he still couldn’t see out of one eye. As he probed further he realised there a was good reason for this. Part of his head had been pulverised by the impact of the bolt round, and the left side of his face was a burned and bloody ruin, his eye a glutinous, fused mess.

  Dizziness and nausea swamped him, but he put his silver arm out to steady himself, giving a short bark of laughter as he saw that it was smooth and unblemished despite the fury of the battles he had fought since it had been grafted to him.

  ‘Damn you, Ventris, that’s twice you’ve blinded me with my own blood.’

  Honsou clambered to his knees, trying to piece the last few moments of the battle together. He remembered facing Ventris, and the Ultramarines’ desperate charge that had ended in a hail of bolter fire.

  Or, at least, it should have ended that way. The luck of the damned was with them and they had survived long enough to kill a pair of his warriors. As foolishly heroic as their charge had been, it had bought them moments at best.

  But then the monsters had attacked.

  Honsou still felt a shiver of revulsion as he thought back to their unimaginable hideousness. Their corpses were strewn all around him and as he pulled himself free of the rubble that buried his legs and swayed unsteadily to his feet, he was amazed that such incredibly abhorrent creatures could live.

  He had heard of the Unfleshed, but had never dreamed they could have been so fearsome as to almost be his undoing.

  The last thing he remembered was catching a snapshot of Ventris aiming a bolter for his head and twisting to get out of the way. Honsou remembered seeing the muzzle flash, a sensation of bright, burning pain in his face, then… then nothing until this moment.

  ‘Iron within!’ he shouted.

  There was no answer and he knew that all the warriors who had accompanied him to the Halls of the Savage Morticians were dead. He put them from his mind and admiringly surveyed the destruction around him.

  Nothing remained of the chamber, its entire structure laid waste by the daemonic battle and the continuous bombardment from Toramino’s grand batteries.

  A flash of movement caught his eye and he picked up his axe before making his way unsteadily towards its source. An Iron Warrior, trapped beneath the half-devoured corpse of another, moaned in pain.

  Honsou lifted the body from the buried Iron Warrior and saw that it was his newest lieutenant, Cadaras Grendel. The armour of the warrior’s legs had been torn away and great bites had ripped away a chunk of his quadriceps muscle.

  ‘Still alive, Cadaras Grendel?’ said Honsou.

  ‘Aye,’ replied the warrior. ‘I don’t die easily. Help me up.’

  Honsou reached down and pulled Cadaras Grendel to his feet. The grim-faced killer retrieved his weapon from the ground and checked its action before saying,’ It’s over then?’

  Honsou shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. It looks like it, though.’

  Cadaras Grendel nodded. ‘What about Toramino?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I still want to kill him.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ said Honsou, looking through a great rent torn in the side of the mountain. Blue fire still hammered his fortress from the sorcerous towers that surrounded it. Toramino’s artillery captains were thorough, thought Honsou, to have broken open a mountain.

  He turned towards a gleaming pile of twitching metal lying beside the entrance to the passageway that had led to the elevator cage. Recognising a discarded set of bronze claws that lay beside the pile, he strode over towards the jumble of metal.

  As he drew closer he saw that it was no simple debris, but the still-living remains of his champion. Onyx lay twitching on the ground, his black armour cracked and shorn from his body, his daemonic flesh ripped from the metal of his skeleton by the monsters.

  The daemonic symbiote’s immaterial flesh had housed a scion of the warp and without a body, it had been cast from its shell. All that remained of Honsou’s champion was a collection of loosely connected, silvered limbs, brass pistons and a bronze skull with a slowly dulling silver light weeping from the eye-sockets.

  ‘Are you in there, Onyx?’ asked Honsou.

  ‘For now,’ answered Onyx, his voice little more than a rasping whisper.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘The monsters…’ hissed the creature, only just holding off its dissolution. They unfleshed me, gave the daemon in me nowhere to hide. It fled and left me like this…’

  Cadaras Grendel joined Honsou and said, ‘This the daemon thing you wanted me to watch out for?’

  ‘Aye,’ nodded Honsou.

  ‘Don’t look like much now.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t, does he?’ said Honsou, turning away and limping towards the centre of the chamber.

  ‘What you want me to do with it?’ shouted Cadaras Grendel after his retreating back.

  ‘Get rid of it,’ said Honsou with a dismissive wave.

  He clambered painfully over the many piles of rabble and bodies that littered the cavern, hearing the hot flash of Cadaras Grendel’s melta gun and knowing that Onyx was no more.

  The centre of the cavern looked like the epicentre of some great orbital bombardment, the ground torn up and gouged with the fury of the battle that had taken place. Bodies and wreckage filled the place, so smashed and unrecognisable as to give no clue as to what they had been in life.

  A shorn suit of power armour, gigantic in its proportions, lay at the edge of a deep crater and before it lay the Heart of Blood. The massive daemon’s body was a dull, smouldering red, the colour of threatening embers that can leap to life in an instant. Its chest heaved with sated lust and as Honsou watched, the fiery streaks of its veins pulsed with renewed life.

  The axe lying next to the daemon was twice as tall as Honsou and though he knew it was unfeasible, he felt an undeniable urge to try and lift it. His own axe growled in his hand and he knew that it was the daemonic presence within the Heart of Blood’s weapon that was calling to him.

  Honsou marched over to the Heart of Blood’s recumbent body and delivered a thunderous boot to its horned skull.

  ‘Come on!’ he yelled. ‘You are free now, and there are sorcerers to kill! Up!’

  The daemon’s lava-hot veins flared and its eyes flickered open, a soulless white fire, like dying suns, burning from its skull. Shaking off the satiety of its victorious engorgement, the Heart of Blood raised itself to its full height, its gargantuan axe and whip leaping to its great, taloned hands.

  ‘That’s better,’ snarled Honsou as the daemon towered above him.

  ‘Who dares rouse me from my blood-reverie?’ bellowed the daemon.

  ‘I am Honsou. Half-breed. Master of Khalan-Ghol.’

  The colossal daemon loomed over Honsou, but he stood his ground, determined that he would show no fear before this creature.

  ‘You are touched by the warp,’ said the Heart of Blood. ‘You have been flesh for one of my kind.’

  Ho
nsou nodded. ‘Yes, I was once briefly blessed with the touch of a daemon of Chaos.’

  ‘I still smell sorcery upon this place,’ growled the daemon.

  ‘You do,’ said Honsou. ‘My enemies wield powerful magicks against me and seek to destroy my fortress.’

  ‘You are the master of this place?’

  ‘For the moment, yes,’ confirmed Honsou.

  ‘Where are these enemies that stoop to the use of foul sorcery?’ demanded the daemon.

  Honsou looked out through the great breach torn in the side of the mountain and pointed to the crackling blue fires beyond.

  ‘Out there,’ he said. The warlord who commands the host that attacks my fortress is a sorcerer and has many magickers attending him.’

  ‘I will kill him and rend his soul for all eternity!’ promised the Heart of Blood, turning and smashing its way through the tear in the mountain of Khalan-Ghol before disappearing from sight.

  Honsou clambered over to the crack torn in the rock and looked out over the smoke-wreathed mountainside, watching with undisguised amusement as the unstoppable daemon smashed into the front line of Toramino’s army.

  ‘Yes,’ he laughed. ‘You go do that…’

  EPILOGUE

  THE SANCTUARY ECHOED with the ghosts of the dead, its empty blockhouses and bunkers deserted and abandoned. It had been that way when they had first found the place of course, but now it felt truly empty, as though the warrior band’s brief occupancy had been nothing more than its last gasp of purpose.

  Ardaric Vaanes knew they could not stay here now.

  This place was forever tainted in his memory.

  It had been here that Ventris had foisted his lie upon him and his men.

  The lie of honour. The same lie that had seen him cast from his Chapter in the first place. The same lie that had almost seen him dead on this bleak, miserable shithole of a world.

  Honour… What was the use of such a thing when all it got you was death and suffering? Thirty warriors had lived and fought from this place, fighting their enemies and surviving… always surviving.

  Until Ventris came.