Battered, without weapons and heads bowed in defeat, the Space Marines and Guardsmen were herded through darkened, dusty corridors - though Pasanius kept his distance from Uriel and would not meet his eyes. Such passivity chafed on Uriel's sense of honour, but to attack their captors now would see them all slaughtered. And while he still had a death oath to fulfil and continued to draw breath, he knew there would be time enough to fight.
Their march led ever onwards to what Honsou had called the Halls of the Savage Morticians, where dwelt the Savage Morticians. Uriel had caught more than a little fear at the mention of these individuals, and did not relish discovering the reason for that fear. Was the creature that had tried to take them from Onyx as they had entered the tower one of these beings? Uriel had a horrible suspicion they would find out all too soon.
Their march came to an abrupt end when Obax Zakayo hesitantly approached a low, red-lit archway, its edges delineated with hooks, long needles and gory meat racks hung with cuts of dressed human flesh. Plaintive cries and the hiss of sizzling meat gusted from within, carried upon the stench of blood and despair. Something moved within the glowing arch, a shambling, misshapen thing.
Obax Zakayo hesitated before passing beneath the archway, the click, click of metal claws on stone and the echoes of a booming heartbeat echoing from the dripping archway ahead. The Iron Warriors' apprehension was plain to see. Onyx displayed no such hesitancy, passing the threshold into the domain of the Savage Morticians without fear.
Uriel felt foetid warmth as he passed through the arch, glancing around to see what could so discomfit the Iron Warriors. The silver fire of Onyx's eyes and veins cast a faint glow around the chamber, and Uriel was suddenly grateful for the dimness of the light as he saw macabre hints of all manner of grotesque experimentation hung from the walls and displayed within jars of milky fluid. The chamber's occupant limped towards Obax Zakayo, its every step obviously painful.
Uriel saw its naked body was a melange of limbs and appendages from Emperor alone knew how many other bodies. Its head was stitched on backwards, with rusted copper augmetics replacing its eyes and ears. It bore itself up on legs that had obviously belonged to two people of greatly differing size and its torso was a spiderweb of poorly healed surgical scars. Perhaps it had once had a gender, but nothing remained of its groin to tell. The thing's arms dangled before its chest in an asymmetrical loop, its hands grafted together in one lumpen mass of fused flesh and bone.
'What want you?' it slurred from a mouth thick with ropes of drool. 'Not welcome.'
'Sabatier.' said Onyx. 'We bring offerings for your masters. New flesh.'
The creature named Sabatier transferred its gaze from Onyx to the warrior band and dragged itself painfully towards Ardaric Vaanes. It reached up to rub its fused fists against his face, but Vaanes pulled away from its bruised flesh before it could touch him.
'Don't touch me, you monster.' he snarled.
Sabatier chuckled - or gargled, it was hard to be sure - and turned back to Onyx.
'Defiant.' it said as Vaanes lunged forwards and grabbed its neck, twisting its head around with a loud crack of bone. It sighed once and dropped to the ground. Obax Zakayo stepped in and gripped Vaanes's armour with his mechanised claws, lifting him from the ground with a roar of anger.
'And strong...' said Sabatier from the ground as it awkwardly picked itself up. Its head lolled on its shoulders, a sharp-edged shard of bone jutting from its patchwork skin.
It waved the fleshy loop of its arms at Obax Zakayo. 'Leave him be, masters always prefer flesh be strong, than weak, starved things normally get. Maybe defiant one get lucky and masters make him like me. Dead, but not cold in ground.'
'He should be so lucky.' said Obax Zakayo, dropping Vaanes back to the ground.
'No, will not be.' said Sabatier, raising its head and speaking a guttural incantation.
At the sound of its phlegm-filled voice, the far wall of the archway shimmered and vanished, the noise of screams and the pounding heartbeat filling the chamber. A great, iron-meshed cage lay beyond, and the Iron Warriors pushed them into its centre with brutal clubbings from their bolters.
Once they and their captors had entered the cage, Sabatier looped its arms around a yellow and black chevroned bar and, with some difficulty, pulled it shut across the cage's door. As the door clanged shut, the cage lurched and a grinding squeal built from above as ancient mechanisms engaged and the cage began to descend into the depths of the tower.
Uriel looked down through the grilled floor of the cage, seeing only a dimly glowing shaft constructed of oily sheets of beaten iron. The bottom was lost to perspective, and Uriel saw that there was no way that this shaft could be physically contained within the tower. The fact of the shaft's spatial impossibility did not surprise him any more.
Vaanes sidled close to Uriel as the shaft continued its descent, gaining speed as it went until the metal sides were screaming past.
'We have to get out of here soon. I don't like the sound of these Savage Morticians.'
'Nor I.' agreed Uriel. 'Anything that worries an Iron Warrior cannot be good.'
'Perhaps your sergeant with that self-repairing arm can fight his way clear. Where in the hell did he get that?'
'I wish I knew...' said Uriel as the speeding cage finally slowed before coming to a juddering halt. Sabatier hauled open the doors on the opposite side of the cage.
The Iron Warriors beat them from the cage into a gradually widening tunnel hacked through the rock. At its end was a pulsing red glow, a chorus of screams, hissing, clanging and thumping engines. But drowning everything beneath its thudding, regular hammering was the pounding of a deafening heartbeat.
The red glow and hateful cacophony of noise swelled until they passed into the colossal cavern beyond.
'Oh, no...' breathed Uriel as he finally laid eyes upon the Halls of the Savage Morticians.
'What the hell... ?' said Vaanes, his face lit by the diabolical, blood-red glow of the cavern.
Its far side was lost to sight, the ribbed iron walls soaring to distant heights where throbbing machines and mighty turbines roared and seethed. Great cables and looping tubes ran across the walls and curving ceiling, dripping a fine mist of bodily fluids to the stinking rocky floor. Tiered levels of darkened cages, similar to the ones Uriel had seen in the mountain flesh camp, circled the walls of the cavern, troughs running below each one and pipes running from heavy bladders suspended from the roof.
As he was forced into the cavern, Uriel felt a sudden dullness assault his senses, feeling as though under the effects of a massively powerful pain balm. Everything seemed bleached of its colour and taste and smell, as though every sensory apparatus of his body was being smothered.
The floor of the cavern was rough and irregular, random structures and gibbets built upon one another with mortuary tables - some occupied, some not -scattered in a haphazard fashion around the chamber. Drawn by the noise of the elevator cage, black-robed monsters threaded their way through the cavern, scuttling forwards on an assortment of wildly differing forms of locomotion. Some came on spidery limbs, others on long assemblies of stilts, while others rumbled forwards on spiked track units. Their waving arms were an eclectic mix of blades, claws, clamps, bone saws and whirring cranial drills. No two were alike, but each one bore the scars of massive, self-inflicted surgeries, their forms repugnant and evil.
Each displayed a corrupted version of the skull and cog symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus upon its robes, though Uriel found it hard to reconcile these abominations with the priests of the Machine God. Their skins were dead and they babbled in a series of unintelligible clicks that sounded like gibberish to Uriel.
Onyx stepped into the cavern, closely followed by Sabatier. The Savage Morticians quickly surrounded them, prodding Onyx with pincer arms and stabbing at him with needles.
'A gift from Lord Honsou.' said the daemon symbiote, ignoring the examination. Finding nothing of worth on his daemonic frame, the fe
ll surgeons moved on, approaching the warrior band with a sick, skeletal lust in their soulless eyes. One of the nightmare monsters turned back to Onyx and Uriel recognised it as the one they had seen upon entering the tower. Its mouth opened and a hissing, clicking language emerged.
'Your gift acceptable.' translated Sabatier. 'You get to leave unsurgeried.'
Onyx nodded, as Uriel took in more of the dark wonders displayed throughout the cavern. But immediate and terrifying as the forms of the Savage Morticians were, it was to the centre of the chamber that Uriel's gaze was irresistibly drawn.
Held suspended over a bubbling lake of blood by a trio of thick chains and gleaming silver awls piercing its chest and torso was a bloated red daemon, ancient and swollen with crackling energies. The flesh of its body was scaled and thick tufts of shaggy, matted hair ran from its horned skull down the length of its back. Its cloven hooves clawed the air and as it thrashed impotently against its fetters, Uriel could see great wounds on its back where a pair of wings had been surgically removed. Its chest heaved violently in time with the booming echo that filled the chamber and Uriel knew that this imprisoned daemon must be the source of the noise.
'"You will know it when you see it..."' said Pasanius.
'What?'
'That's what the Omphalos Daemonium told us, isn't it?'
'About what?' asked Uriel.
'The Heart of Blood.' said Pasanius. '"You will know it when you see it."'
Uriel looked up at the bound daemon, realising that Pasanius was right. This could be none other than theHeart of Blood, the daemon thing that according to the tale Seraphys had told, had outwitted the Omphalos Daemonium and bound it to an eternity of torment within the firebox of a terrifying daemon engine.
Surrounding the lake of blood were hundreds of upright coffins of black iron with gurgling red tubes piercing their tops. In each coffin lay a chanting, gold-robed sorcerer, their withering bodies pierced by scores of exsanguination needles that fed the hissing lake beneath the imprisoned daemon with their blood. A pulsing tube rose from the lake, penetrating the daemon's chest as the psykers' blood was forced into its immaterial flesh. The daemon writhed in agony above the lake, a rippling haze of psychically dead air rising from the warp entity's skull and filling the pinnacle of the chamber. The daemon's torment at its confinement was plain and now that he focussed on it, Uriel could clearly see that this was the source of his deadened senses.
'Lord Honsou requests that this one.' said Onyx, indicating Uriel, 'be fed to the daemonculaba, while the one with the silver arm has it removed and brought to his inner sanctum. Is this acceptable?'
The creature lurched forwards, lifting Pasanius with a hissing claw that sprouted from its pneumatic leg assembly. A whining blade snapped from the armature on its wrist and with brutally efficient cuts, sawed the armour from Pasanius's upper arm, exposing the muscled flesh of his bicep and the junction of flesh and metal.
'Put me down, Chaos filth!' yelled Pasanius, kicking out at the withered chest of the Savage Mortician. It hissed, as though unused to such defiance and a thick needle extended from beneath the saw-blade and stabbed through Pasanius's breastplate. Within seconds the sergeant's struggles had ceased and the monster handed him on to another of its surgical brethren.
Uriel surged forward as Pasanius was borne away, but his lethargic senses slowed him and Onyx stopped him with a bronze blade at his neck.
'Don't.' he said simply. 'His fate will be nothing next to yours.'
Uriel said nothing as the Savage Morticians surrounded them and gathered them up in their mechanical claws.
'I will kill you.' promised Uriel as he was lifted, struggling, from the ground. 'You had best shoot me now, for I will see you dead if you do not.'
'If the powers decree that is my fate, then so be it, but I think you are wrong. You will die in this place, Uriel Ventris.' shrugged Onyx before turning on his heel and re-entering the tunnel that led to the elevator cage with a grateful-looking Obax Zakayo.
Uriel fought uselessly against the claws of the Savage Mortician, but its strength was enormous and he could not move. Its dead face hissed as it examined his body in detail. Gleaming arms of bronze held him immobile while pincers and needles pierced his flesh.
A clicking arrangement of spindly rods extended from the monster's hood, telescoping outwards and bearing a meshed mouthpiece that snicked into place before its toothy jaws. Sharp drill-bits clicked from the mouthpiece and burrowed into the Savage Mortician's metal jaw, sending dusty flurries of metallic flesh flying.
The mesh unit hissed with static and the Savage Mortician said, 'You are to be fed to daemonculaba. Waste of flesh. Much surgeries could be done with you. Things unknown become known. Others will do.'
'What are you going to do with us?' shouted Vaanes, struggling helplessly in the grip of a tall, black-robed monster that travelled on hissing mechanical legs, reverse jointed like those of a Sentinel.
'We are the surgeons of demise.' said the monster. 'Monarchs to the kingdom of the dead. Will show you the meaning of pain. Abacinate you then open you up with knives. Take what we want. Make your flesh our own.'
The dark priests of flesh and machine stalked off through the red-lit cavern, carrying the members of the warrior band towards the experimentation tables, animatedly discussing their proposed surgeries with one another in their clicking, machine language.
The Savage Mortician holding Uriel set off in a different direction entirely, its rolling, multi-legged stride carrying it swiftly through the chamber. Uriel saw horrific sights as he was borne through the hellish cavern: stripped down bodies, chains of prisoners sewn together, screaming madmen with their skulls pumped full of fluid, the internal pressure forcing it through their bulging eyes.
Men and women turned above slow-roasting fires, burning flesh dripping away and hissing on the iron skillets below. More mutants like Sabatier, deformed and reassembled without reason or recourse to the laws of anatomy, tended to the more mundane experiments, feeding on the screams of their subjects and recording every aspect of their suffering on long sheaves of parchment.
Several times they were forced to make diversions through the cavern to avoid the hateful red bulldozers he had seen from atop the stairs that led down into the fortress. They still hauled the blood-sloshing tenders filled with the corpses of Iron Warriors behind them, and threaded their way through the experimentation chamber taking the bodies to some unknown destination.
Uriel lost sight of the bulldozers as the Savage Mortician climbed a long grilled ramp that led up to the first tier of cages that ran around the circumference of the chamber. A number of conduits suspended on cruel iron hooks followed the curve of the cavern walls, laden with groaning, spitting pipes, crackling electrical cables and a clear tube filled with a viscous, gristly substance. As they reached the top of the ramp, Uriel saw that the cages were indeed filled with hideous victims that resembled those poor unfortunates who had died in the flesh camp in the mountains. But as horrific as that had been, this was a horror beyond anything he had seen before.
Each vast, bloated creature in these cages was female, their bodies swollen beyond all resemblance to humanity. Shackled into their cages, they gurgled and drooled in voiceless madness and torment, their vocal chords having long since been cut. Engorged as they were by unnatural means, Uriel saw that their size was not simply due to monstrous infusions of growth hormones and dark magicks.
These gargantuan females were pregnant.
No normal pregnancies though, saw Uriel. Their swollen bellies rippled with numerous tumescent growths, giant squirming things, easily the size of a Space Marine...
With repulsed horror, Uriel realised that he looked on the daemonculaba, vile, terrible, daemonic wombs from which were ripped newly created Chaos Space Marines. Each cage was filled with these horribly pregnant monsters and Uriel wept at their terrible fate.
Here was the ultimate goal of his death oath, the destruction of which would see him
restored in the grace of his Chapter. He struggled harder in the grip of the Savage Mortician as it began cutting his armour from his body with a brutally efficient mix of blades and plasma cutters.
This was no delicate surgery, and he screamed as his flesh was cut, pierced and burned black by the procedure. Shards of his armour clanged to the floor and he wept for the violation done to its spirit. First his breastplate was split apart, his gorget torn off and his shoulder guards broken in two before being ripped asunder.
'Not struggle.' warned the monster. 'You be fed to daemonculaba.'
'Get your damn, dirty hands off me, daemon spawn!' shouted Uriel.
The irritated beast slammed a heavy fist against Uriel's head and blood streamed down his forehead, bright flashes of pain bursting before his eyes. The robed creature carried him further around the tier of battery cages, blood dripping into his eyes as he was turned around to find himself looking through the mesh floor.
Below him, he saw a great rumbling machine with a blood-smeared conveyor laden with bullet-riddled bodies or corpses with limbs missing. Great rollers and crushers awaited the bodies of the fallen Iron Warriors and each was ground to a thick paste within the machine before being carried along pulsing pipes to the cages of the daemonculaba.
Together with the gene-seed Honsou had taken from Hydra Cordatus, Uriel saw that this must be how the traitors managed to reharvest their gene-seed for rebirth. This blasphemy against such a sacred and precious symbol of the Space Marines was almost too much to bear and he swore he would kill Honsou with his bare hands.
At last he was turned upright once more, seeing a number of other black-robed morticians working on convulsing daemonculaba. These sorry specimens had their bellies cut open and spread wide, pale pink folds of fatty flesh held open with clamps as the deformed mutants placed the panicked bodies of adolescent children within the opened wombs.
Warhammer - Ultramarines 03 - Dead Sky, Black Sun (McNeill, Graham) Page 19