Uriel's hand shot out and caught Honsou's descending fist.
'I would have my honour and my faith!' he spat, lashing out with his other fist and smashing Honsou aside. Uriel rolled to his feet and staggered to join the remainder of the warrior band. The Space Marines and the two Guardsmen formed a circle of defiance before the Iron Warriors. Uriel spat blood and teeth, leaning on Pasanius for support.
'You had me worried there for a moment,' said Pasanius. His tone was light, but even in his battered state, Uriel caught the concern in his friend's tone.
'I am a warrior of the Emperor, my friend,' he gasped. 'I would never turn to the Dark Powers, you know that.'
'I know that,' agreed Pasanius.
'Well you certainly had that bastard fooled,' said Vaanes, moving to stand beside them, his lightning claws sliding from his gauntlet. 'And me too. Damn it, Ventris, I won't die like this!'
'Neither will I, if I can help it,' said Uriel.
The Iron Warriors surrounded them, bolters aimed at their hearts as Honsou rose, wiping blood from his face.
'I'll make sure you're broken in two, Ventris,' he promised. 'I'll let them feed you the filth of the daemonculaba then have you thrown to the Unfleshed. Let's see how your precious ideals hold up then.'
'Nothing you can do will ever break my faith in the Emperor,' said Uriel.
'Faith?' scoffed Honsou. 'What is that but hopeful ignorance? The Iron Warriors once had faith, but where did that get them? Betrayed by the Emperor and cast into the Eye of Terror. If that's what faith in the Emperor gets you, then to hell with it, you're welcome to it!'
Pasanius roared in anger and leapt for Honsou's throat, but again Onyx darted in to protect his master, hammering his bronze claws towards his throat. For such a big man, Pasanius moved surprisingly swiftly and he batted aside Onyx's blow, backhanding his massive fist into the daemon symbiote's face.
Onyx roared and fell back, silver fire spurting from his ruptured flesh. Pasanius gripped Honsou's armour, drawing back his gleaming fist to deliver a killing blow.
But before he could strike, a biting claw closed on his arm and Obax Zakayo wrenched him back. The hydraulic claw snapped shut on Pasanius's forearm, crushing the limb and virtually severing it completely. Obax Zakayo lashed out with his sledgehammer fist and smashed the sergeant from his feet, closing to finish the fallen sergeant with his own dread axe. He raised the weapon high, but the blow never landed, the Iron Warrior incredulous as what he saw before him.
Uriel watched in horror and amazement as the crushed and mangled metal of Pasanius's arm ran like liquid mercury and the destruction Obax Zakayo had done to it vanished utterly, every single dent, scrape and imperfection renewed until the arm was as unblemished as the day it had first been grafted to the sergeant's stump of an elbow.
'Pasanius…' breathed Uriel. 'What… how?'
His friend rolled onto his side, hiding his newly healed silver arm from Uriel's sight.
'I'm so sorry…' he wept. 'I should have…'
Honsou loomed over Pasanius, pulling the sergeant's silver arm away from his chest where he cradled it. He slid his own augmetic fingers across the silver perfection of Pasanius's mechanised arm and looked at his own glossy, mechanical limb in leering anticipation.
'Take them to the Halls of the Savage Morticians and give them to the Savage Morticians, but tell them to keep this one alive… I want this arm.'
Honsou rose and walked over to Uriel, his features twisted in betrayed anger. 'But give Ventris to the daemonculaba, he's not worth anything else. Let them abuse his body and take what they want from him before shitting him out.'
The journey to the Halls of the Savage Morticians was as fraught with insane visions and delirious apparitions as the one towards its inner sanctum. The interior of the tower flaunted the laws of nature and physics with nauseating perspectives and impossible angles that fought the evidence of Uriel's senses.
They descended winding spiral stairs that looped around others in a dizzying double helix pattern, with shuffling slaves, gold-robed acolytes and Iron Warriors climbing or descending - Uriel wasn't sure which - above them in defiance of gravity.
Obax Zakayo, Onyx and the forty Iron Warriors had marched the warrior band from Honsou's chambers, back through the chasm-split chamber and Titans towards the dirge-echoing cloisters of the tower. Beyond that, Uriel could not say what route their captors led them, the chaotic architecture of the tower defeating his every attempt to remember their route of travel.
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.