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'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.

Where the genetic material fed to the daemonculaba would pass to the implanted children within…

The children screamed at the monsters, begging for their lives or their mothers, but the black-robed monsters paid them no heed and continued their macabre procedures.

Uriel twisted in his captor's grip, fighting desperately as he saw the opened belly of a daemonculaba before him.

'No!' he roared. 'Don't!'