Vaanes also leapt to attack, jumping onto the creature's arched back as it reared away from Uriel's blow. He hammered one clawed fist through its neck and held on with the other as the thrashing monster attempted to dislodge him. Hooks hanging from the structure surrounding the arena slammed into him, but he grimly held on, stabbing his claws through the Savage Mortician's body again and again.
The Savage Mortician shrieked in pain and he tumbled from the beast's back as Ventris chopped its convulsing legs from under it. Vaanes rolled away from its monstrous body as it thrashed and jerked on the ground, dying in agony as Ventris stabbed and stabbed and stabbed at its loathsome corpse.
'Ventris!' he called. 'It's dead. Come on, let's get the hell out of here!'
The Ultramarine stabbed the creature's chest one last time, taking huge, rasping breaths and looking more like one of the followers of the Blood God as he revelled in the slaughter he had just perpetrated.
'Uriel, come on!' urged Pasanius. 'We have to go now. There's bound to be more of these things coming!'
Ventris nodded, joining Vaanes and Pasanius and gathering up their weapons from where the Savage Morticians had dumped them. The bloody Space Marine sheathed his sword and hefted his bolter when Leonid shouted, 'Wait! Don't go, don't leave us!'
'Why?' asked Vaanes.
'Why?' snapped Ellard, amazed that such a question had even been asked. 'We'll die otherwise!'
'What's the use in freeing you? You're going to die anyway,' said Vaanes, turning away and gathering up his own guns.
'Uriel!' cried Leonid. 'You can't mean to leave us here? Please!'
Ventris said nothing for long seconds, his chest still heaving with the thrill and adrenaline of combat. Vaanes moved past him, but Ventris gripped his arm and locked eyes with him, slowly shaking his head.
'We leave no one behind,' he said firmly.
'We don't have time for this!' snapped Vaanes. 'They won't make it, but we might!'
'I think I was wrong about you, Vaanes,' said Uriel sadly. 'I thought you still had courage and honour, but your heart is dead inside. This place has destroyed your soul.'
'If we don't go now, we'll all die, Ventris, cut to bloody rags by more of those things!'
'Everyone who serves the Emperor dies bloody, Vaanes,' said Uriel. 'All we get to do is choose how and where. Every warrior deserves that, and I'm not leaving without them.'
Ventris turned and ran back into the arena, and with Pasanius's help, began freeing the pitiful remainder of their once-proud warrior band.
'If they don't kill you, follow my tracks!' called Vaanes. 'Sabatier said something about all the filth of Khalan-Ghol being flushed out into the mountains, so there's got to be a way out of here!'
Ventris nodded, too busy to answer, as the shrieks of approaching enemies drew nearer.
Cursing the Ultramarine for a fool, Vaanes set off into the depths of the cavern.
Uriel freed Leonid and Ellard, the coughing Guardsmen nodding their thanks as they clambered free and gathered up their own weapons. Soon they had freed the surviving members of the warrior band and set off into the macabre wilderness of the chamber, the great heartbeat and the screams of both victims and pursuers echoing weirdly from the rocky walls of the cavern.
Vaanes's trail was not hard to follow: the cloven bodies of mutants and overturned surgical tables clearly marking his passage through the cavern. The sounds of pursuit drew ever closer, their ragtag band weary to the point of collapse through a combination of sheer physical exhaustion and terror.
The sound of rushing fluids came from ahead and Uriel staggered into a vast, open sluice chamber filled with a multitude of filth-encrusted chutes and aqueducts that either pierced the walls of the cavern, rose up from below the ground or sluiced down from the upper tiers of the daemonculaba. The roaring noise of tonnes of excrement, waste matter and dead flesh rivalled the thudding of the Heart of Blood. Everything washed into a pool of stinking effluent that in turn poured through a colossal pipeway in the cavern wall.
A waterfall of filth, body parts, corpses and decomposing foetal matter poured from the cavern and away from the fortress. A way out…
Dead mutants littered the chamber, hacked in two by Vaanes's mad dash for freedom, and Uriel saw that there was only one way they would get out of this damnable place.
'We cannot fight them here! Into the tunnel!' he shouted and set off through the pool, wading thigh-deep in the bobbing detritus of surgical waste matter. He had no idea where the wide tunnel led or even if their situation would be improved by jumping in, but it had to be better than this.
The going was slow, but as he looked back over his shoulder to see a dozen or more of the Savage Morticians emerge into the sluice chamber, he pushed forward through the sludge with renewed vigour, sheathing his sword as he went.
The warrior band reached the churning, roaring waterfall of the tunnel and, one by one, leapt into its stinking darkness. Uriel heard the splash of thick, mechanical limbs entering the water behind him, and without a backwards glance, leapt in after his warriors.
Rushing filth enfolded him, its repulsive contents buffeting him as he tumbled downwards. Darkness and half-light warred with one another, and as he slipped beneath the surface of the scummy fluid, he was grateful for the shadows that hid the dead horrors flushed from the Halls of the Savage Morticians.
The roar of the tunnel was deafening, its slope too precipitous and the waters too deep to gain any handholds. He fought to the surface, gasping for breath and swallowing mouthfuls of foetid, frothing matter. The thunder of great pumps and the whining of enormous filters echoed from the encrusted walls and Uriel felt his skin burning with the pollutants and toxic discharge.
He slammed into the tunnel wall as it bent to one side, losing his grip on his bolter and watching as it spun off into the water. His fingers scrabbled for purchase, but he was being carried along too fast to find any kind of grip. Huge blades churned the water, hurling severed body parts and disembowelled carcasses into the air and Uriel desperately kicked out to avoid them. A rusted spar of sharpened metal slashed the water next to him and stinging water blinded him as he was carried along by the torrent, spinning him beneath the water.
As his head broke the surface, Uriel saw a huge foaming mass of spuming effluent ahead and heard the thunderous crash of water falling hundreds of metres. Jagged archipelagos of ruined flesh and foetal islands had agglomerated into decaying masses at the edge of a waterfall, and Uriel fought against the immense flow of the river of waste to direct his frenetic course towards one.
The roar of the waterfall and the stench of rotten flesh and organic waste matter filled his senses, threatening to overwhelm him. As the current hurled him onwards, he gave one last desperate kick and thrust his hands out to grip the mass of body parts before him. His hands closed on the clammy, greasy flesh, his fingers breaking the surface and spilling a mass of rotted innards into the water. Dead eyes and glassy features stared at him from the lifeless mounds as the sodden flesh disintegrated beneath his grip. He tumbled away, spinning around and cried out as he was swept over the edge of the waterfall.
Suddenly Uriel was in freefall, hurtling downwards through the air and tumbling end over end into the unknown depths. His limbs flailed uselessly as he fell and he roared in defiance at the darkness below. Was this how it was to end? Dying, broken to pieces within the refuse of the Iron Warriors?
He caught a glimmer of light on the fractured glass surface of water below and straightened his body to reduce the coming impact. His body knifed into the water, the filthy murk closing over him as he plunged into its inky black depths. Drowned corpses swirled in the cold darkness with him, rotted arms wrapping around him and eyeless skulls mocking him with their sightless gazes.