'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 fell 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.