Leonid ducked back as the traitor dropped to one knee.
A group of scrawny slaves clambered across the engine block of the lead trough-hauler, dragging the masked creatures from within and bludgeoning them with jagged lumps of hardened ore. The daemon forge howled in glee at the slaughter, its wailings rising to a screaming gale.
Gunshots filled the forge and a handful of slaves went down. Blood spurted, spilling into the hissing weapon moulds and filling the air with its stink. Mutants tried to reverse the remaining two trough-haulers, but the enraged slaves were upon them, tearing them apart with a fury borne from months and months of systematic abuse and torture.
Sergeant Ellard reacted first, running over to join the slaves clambering across the nearest trough-hauler.
‘Turn it around!’ he bellowed, pointing to the forge’s main doors, which were being dragged shut by gangs of twisted mutants. Leonid grinned ferally, realising that this was their chance, when a powerful spasm tore through his stomach and doubled him up in pain. He dropped to his knees and vomited the putrid gruel he had eaten, feeling his stomach contract as it tried to expel his stomach lining.
A fierce madness seized the slaves as they beat their tormenters to bloody ruin, tears of released horror streaking their filth-encrusted faces. Giant cauldrons of molten metal passed overhead as one of the Jouran slaves finally managed to take control of the lumbering vehicle. The trough-hauler lurched forwards, its tracks spinning clouds of choking ash into the air.
Leonid watched as the cheering slaves clambered aboard, whooping in savage joy as it headed towards the exit and the burning white sky beyond.
Then Obax Zakayo regained his feet and raised his arm, a mass of twisting pipes, hissing vents and gun barrels. Leonid tried to shout a warning, but the pain in his belly had stolen his voice. Foot-long tongues of flame blasted from Obax Zakayo’s arm, explosive bolts ripping across the side of the trough-hauler, spilling slaves and blood to the ground. Screams and cries of pain echoed through the forge as the Iron Warrior worked the killing fire of his weapon over the slaves.
‘No!’ cried Leonid. ‘Stop!’
Obax Zakayo laughed in the face of Leonid’s protestations, reaching down to haul the former lieutenant colonel to his feet to better witness the slaughter. Blood and viscera coated the sides of the trough hauler as it slewed over to the side of the forge, the top of its driver’s head blasted clear. Slaves scattered before the Iron Warrior’s lethal retaliation, abandoning the trough-hauler to find cover.
Leonid twisted in his captor’s grip, watching as the trough-hauler slammed into the stanchions supporting the greased rails carrying the vast cauldrons of molten metal. The vehicle wasn’t moving quickly, but its sheer mass was enough to rip the stanchion from its moorings and crumple it with its momentum. The cauldron currently traversing the forge swayed in slow motion, tipping slowly to one side before toppling from the rails and dropping to the floor.
A wave of fiery liquid spilled out, magma-hot ore turning flesh, bone and metal to stinking clouds of vapour in a heartbeat. Scores of slaves perished in seconds, the trough-hauler dissolving into hissing molten slag. Rivers of red-hot metal rolled onwards in a deadly tide, the intricately carved runes of embossed gold on the floor flashing to steam under the heat.
As the river of molten metal rolled onwards to the forge mouth, yet more of the runes were obliterated and the roaring of the bound daemon in the forge rose to fresh heights of relish as more and more of the wards imprisoning it were destroyed.
Suddenly realising what must happen, Obax Zakayo dropped Leonid and ran for the forge’s exit, leaving the gasping Jouran coughing and spluttering as the hissing metal began cooling and slowing its advance.
But by then the damage was done.
The last rune dissolved and the daemon broke free.
Imprisoned for millennia, the scion of the warp was in no mood to be merciful and lashed out in blind fury, a frothing miasma of black light with a swirling vortex of forms and geometries twisting through its nebulous matter. Those closest to the daemon drew breath to scream, but did not have time to do so the flesh sloughed from their bones.
Leonid rolled aside as a dark tendril slashed the ground, leaving a hissing residue in its wake. A whipping, octopoid form writhed in the dark light, feeding on the powerful energies of fear and hate swirling around the inside of the forge. Streamers of black, oily matter whiplashed around the forge, slicing men to bloody ribbons and lifting others high into the air.
Skeletal husks dropped to the floor, bled dry of their souls and Leonid scrambled onto a growling piece of machinery to escape the creeping tide of cooling – though still fearsomely hot – molten metal. Throughout the forge, slaves scrambled for high ground, fighting like animals to secure their safety. Men hurled one another into the fires in desperate attempts to prolong their own lives.
The darkness flailed like madness given form, expanding and solidifying tentacles of dark matter smashing through the walls and roof of the forge as easily as a man might destroy a doll’s house. With a tortured shriek of shearing metal, the latticed girders of the roof and far wall buckled and tumbled to the floor. Leonid covered his head with his arms as smaller fragments and sheets of corrugated iron crashed down around him, praying to the God-Emperor that he might survive this carnage.
Long seconds passed before he realised that he was still alive and the screaming daemon was silent. He risked a glance through his fingers, seeing the burning white sky through the giant tear the vengeful daemon had ripped through the walls of the forge. Of the daemon itself, there was no sign, save a spot of darkness flaring into the sky.
Leonid grimaced in pain. Staring too long at that impossible sky was like staring directly into the sun, and he wrenched his gaze from its hateful brightness.
Little remained of the trough-haulers save hissing piles of molten metal. Here and there flames licked across the bones and charred limbs of slaves and mutants protruding from the hissing ore. The dull throbbing of the forge faded as the daemon-powered engines slowly ground to a halt, the hammers and pistons starved and useless.
As Leonid took stock of the devastation the escaped daemon had wreaked, he was relieved to see Sergeant Ellard pull himself from behind the ruins of a giant milling machine.
Scores had died in the abortive – and unplanned – escape attempt, and those who had survived were too stupefied to take advantage of the momentary lack of overseers.
Leonid knew he had seconds at best to capitalise on the situation when the forge doors crashed open and a dozen Iron Warriors were thrown into stark relief by the bone-white sky.
Whatever chance they might once have had vanished like ash on the wind.
Leonid kept his eyes glued to the bleak, grey rockcrete platform, whorls of dust and ash describing wind-blown spirals before him. He tried to shut out the hateful screams of the sleepers as the burning sky blazed white above them, beating down with fierce brightness, the dark hole of the sun rippling like a baleful eye. Fellow slaves and Jourans were pressed tightly around him, the stench of unwashed bodies, blood and fear mingling to create a heady cocktail of aromas.
The former lieutenant colonel shivered as daemonic scents gusted through them, expelled like corpse-breath from the newly formed tunnel mouths.
He risked a glance into its haunted blackness, feeling a splintering pain in his head as his limited senses tried to comprehend the shifting images of multiple realities intersecting with the sound of clashing blades and bells.
He felt every molecule in his body vibrate as the resonant frequencies of this dimensional abscess widened, rippling waves of sickness and filth spreading from this wound in space-time.
He could feel a terrible imminence, like the tension in the fabric of the sky before a storm. Something was coming. Something so dark and ancient that his mind could not even begin to comprehend the scope of its evil.
Then Obax Zakayo moved between him and the tunnel and its spell was broken.
/> ‘You sense it’s coming intersection don’t you, slave? The Omphalos Daemonium.’
Leonid did not answer, his guts clamping in pain at the sound of such damned syllables given voice and wishing again that he had died on the journey to this cursed place.
The failed escape attempt in the forge had been paid for in the blood of his former soldiers. Obax Zakayo strode through the cowering survivors of the daemon’s escape, clubbing slaves to death with each sweep of his fist. Slaves were dragged from their hiding places and hurled onto spinning lathes, pressed into crushers or lowered into steaming vats of ore. Limbs were ground to gory stumps and bones crushed to powder within the jellied ruin of their flesh. No pain went unexplored and no form of suffering was omitted from the Iron Warriors’ retribution. Within minutes, hundreds were dead, slaughtered to sate the traitors’ lust for pain and humiliation.
Obax Zakayo had lifted Leonid from the ground and held him before his battered visor.
‘You are their leader.’
‘No,’ gasped Leonid. ‘I told you, I don’t–’
‘They still look at you as their leader,’ interrupted the Iron Warrior. ‘For this I will kill some of them now. Keep your men in line or I will kill all of them. Not you, though. Just them. All of them.’
‘But-‘
‘Silence,’ snarled Obax Zakayo. ‘Just do it. You are no use here now that the daemon has gone. You are to be taken to the Warsmith Honsou and put to work in his weapon-shops. Try and escape from him and you will not be dealt with so lightly.’
Marched from the devastated forge, those slaves not fed inch by inch to the machines had been driven out into a twisting labyrinth of fortifications crowned with blades and kilometres of deep trenches lined with corrugated sheets of metal. Forests of razorwire linked armoured blockhouses and pillboxes bristling with heavy artillery pieces and guns that defied all proportion and reason.
The rumble of artillery fire was a constant drone at the edge of hearing, but who was fighting and why was a mystery. Dozens of slaves died en route to whatever fate awaited them at the hands of the Warsmith Honsou, dropping in exhaustion or starvation or from the merciless beatings and random killings inflicted by Obax Zakayo.
The gruelling death march continued for days though on a world such as this, where the sun never set and the skies never darkened, time was an absurd notion. Each day brought fresh horrors and new obscenities: roads lined with eviscerated bodies – human, alien and some so grossly misshapen as to defy any classification of form. Towers of skulls, harvest fields of billowing flesh and great monoliths raised with the scrimshawed bones of the dead.
Leonid saw that each step brought them closer to a range of brooding, smoke wreathed mountains, their topmost peaks lost in the brightness of the sky and obscured by a layer of dark clouds. Pillars of coiling, sentient smoke rose from the plains around the mountains, called by some nameless attraction to conceal whatever terrors and wonders lurked above in the darkness.
No matter their course, the sinister mountains always drew closer and Leonid knew with dreadful certainty that they were their destination. In the same realisation, he also knew that none of them would survive to reach the heights of those dreadful peaks.
Each glimpse of the desolate mountains through the twisting circumvallation simultaneously fascinated and repulsed him. The citadel of Hydra Cordatus had been constructed by an unknown genius of military architecture, though compared to the monstrous fortifications raised on this world, it was a mere trifle – a footnote to the dark grandeur of this world’s defences. Leonid doubted that anything could penetrate these redoubts or that any foe could cast down its walls.
Finally, their march had come to an end. A barbed gate of bronze led into a rectangular, earthen arena, fully a kilometre wide and twice that in length. From somewhere nearby he could hear screaming; wails of the damned in torment that set his teeth on edge and seemed to pierce his skull with lancing, glass shards of pain. The ground underfoot was surprisingly soft and loamy, crimson liquid oozing from the water-logged earth. As Leonid looked more closely, he saw that the ground was not water-logged, but soaked in fresh-spilled blood, bones and grinning skulls gleaming whitely through the red ground.
His mind reeled at the prospect. How many must have been drained of their lifeblood to irrigate such a vast space so thoroughly? How many arteries had been emptied to satiate the vile thirst of this dark, dark earth?
Leonid’s stomach knotted in disgust, but he had nothing in his belly to expel and dry heaved as the awful stench of fresh blood filled his senses. Sergeant Ellard held him upright as they marched across thick, timber duckboards to the centre of this place, this killing ground.
Was that it? Was this a place of execution? Had they been brought here so that their blood might mingle with the thousands who had already been drained?
He shook off Ellard’s hand, determined to meet whatever fate the Iron Warriors had planned for them on his feet and unaided. As they drew nearer to the centre of the arena, Leonid saw a long strip of rockcrete had been built atop the blood-soaked ground and dull, bloody rail tracks laid, running across the middle of the arena and ending at opposite walls. As they mounted the steps to the rockcrete platform, the source of the screaming was finally revealed to the Jouran slaves.
Each sleeper laid between the rail tracks writhed in agony; a jigsaw of bodies and limbs knotted together by some dark sorcery, screaming in lunatic fever-dreams, their cries like a choir of banshees. Eyes and mouths churning in the fluid matter of each sleeper gave piteous voice to their suffering before being forced from form to formlessness that another soul might vent its endless purgatory.
Men dropped to their knees, weeping at this fresh vileness, the frayed ends of their sanity unable to bear any more. Obax Zakayo hurled them from the platform, spinning the gibbering madmen to land in red splashes. No sooner had they landed than fleshless, bony hands reached up through the dark earth, clawing and grasping at their bodies and dragging them below the surface to whatever fate awaited them beneath.
Leonid tried to shut out the gurgling cries of the doomed men who drowned in the bloody ground to feed the rapacious souls beneath.
He shut his eyes…
Splintering crystals of alternate existences clash and jangle, detaching from the walls of one plane and shifting their position to resonate at a different frequency. Echoes in time allow the planes to shift and change; altering the angles of reality to allow the dimensions to unlock, dancing in a ballet of all possibilities.
…and cried out, his eyes snapping open again, dizzy and disorientated. He reached out to grab Ellard, steadying himself on his sergeant.
‘Sir?’
‘Emperor’s blood!’ hissed Leonid, looking around the death arena. He felt a sickening vibration deep in his bones as a restlessness rippled through the ground. The jagged stumps of bone jutting through the ground retreated into its sanguineous depths and the screaming sleepers howled with renewed anguish.
Where the rail tracks vanished into the walls of this vast courtyard, streamers of multi-coloured matter were oozing from the stonework.
Rippling spirals of reflective light coiled from the mortar, twisting the image behind like a warped lens. The walls seemed to stretch, as though being sucked into an unseen vortex behind, until there was nothing left but a rippling veil of impenetrable darkness, a tunnel into madness ringed with screaming faces.
Warped realms, a universe and lifetimes distant, flow together, joining all points in time on the bronze bloodtracks. On a journey that leads everywhere and begins nowhere, the Omphalos Daemonium pushes itself from nothingness to form. Snaking from its daemonic womb and leaving nothing but barren rape and death in its wake.
Obax Zakayo laughed, though Leonid could feel the fear that lurked beneath.
And the Omphalos Daemonium came.
Though his screaming flesh had warned him of the might and power of its evil, it had been but the merest hints of the thing’s diaboli
cal majesty. Roaring from the tunnel mouth like a brazen juggernaut of the end times, the Omphalos Daemonium shrieked along the bloodtracks towards the horrified slaves.
Some tried to run: they were struck down. Some dropped dead with fright while others curled into foetal balls and soiled themselves like newborns.
Leonid dropped to his knees at the sight of the monstrous daemon engine.
‘It is fitting that you give homage,’ nodded Obax Zakayo.
Vast bone-pistons drove it forward, iron and steel flanks heaving with immaterial energies. Bloody steam leaked from every demented, skull-faced rivet as wheels of tortured souls ground the tracks beneath it to feast on the oozing blood of the dead earth.
Deep within its insane structure, it might have once resembled an ancient steam-driven locomotive, but unknown forces and warped energies had transformed it into something else entirely. The thunder of its arrival could be felt by senses beyond the pitiful five known to humankind, echoing through the planes of reality that existed and intersected within the Eye of Terror, where such things were the norm rather than the incredible.
Behind it came a tender of dark iron and a juddering procession of boxcars, their timbers stained with aeons of blood and ordure. Leonid knew somehow how that millions had been carried to their deaths in these hellish containers; carried to whatever loathsome destination this horrifying machine desired and then exterminated. The Omphalos Daemon-ium slowed, the sleepers driven beyond sound in their torment as the towering daemon engine halted at the edge of the platform.
Leonid wept tears of blood, his bladder and bowel voiding as the power and evil of the daemon engine swept through him. He thought he heard booming laughter and the grinding squeal of warped timber doors sliding open on runners rusted with blood.
He rolled onto his back, seeing gusts of blood-laced steam hiss from the armoured hide of the Omphalos Daemonium. Brazen laughter rippled through the tendrils of steam as they writhed on some evil business of their own. Each tendril thickened and became more solid as they wormed through the writhing forms of the slaves on the platform.
Iron Warriors - The Omnibus Page 34