Uriel shook his head. 'If you love the Emperor, you will not eat this meat.'
'Love the Emperor!' bellowed the Lord of the Unfleshed and Uriel winced, thinking that the creature's voice could be heard even through the fury of a battle.
'Many iron men dead,' growled the Lord of the Unfleshed, angrily. 'Much meat.'
'Yes, but we are not here for meat,' said Uriel. 'We are here to kill iron men and flesh mothers, yes?'
The Lord of the Unfleshed looked set to argue the point, but with an angry snarl dropped the half-eaten body and said, 'Kill iron men now?'
'Yes, kill iron men,' said Uriel as he heard the sound of approaching engines from within the fortress. 'But we need to get to the heart of the fortress first.'
Uriel turned as Pasanius and Leonid approached, bearing guns, ammunition and grenades. Pasanius unslung a bolter from his shoulder and handed it to Uriel together with several magazines of shells.
'It galls me that we must use the weapons of the Enemy,' said Uriel as he slammed a magazine home in the bolter.
'I suppose there's a certain poetic justice in using their own guns against them,' said Pasanius as he awkwardly loaded and cocked the weapon.
'What's that noise?' asked Leonid as he finally heard the rumbling engine sound drawing yet closer.
'It is our way in,' said Uriel, gesturing to the bodies surrounding them. 'I want you to conceal yourself amongst the dead Iron Warriors. We will lie close to one another, but must make sure we're amongst the dead.'
Uriel turned to face the Lord of the Unfleshed and hurriedly said, 'Have the tribe lie down with the dead iron men. You understand? Lie with the dead.'
'Lie down with meat?'
'Yes,' confirmed Uriel. 'Lie down with the iron men, and when we get up we will be where we need to be.'
The Lord of the Unfleshed nodded slowly and made his way through the tribe, grunting and pointing to piles of corpses.
As the Unfleshed began lying down amongst the dead Chaos Space Marines, Pasanius said, 'You know they'll feed on the bodies.'
'I know,' said Uriel, 'but there is little we can do about it.'
'Truly the Emperor does work in mysterious ways,' added Leonid.
Uriel tried to put aside the thought of the Unfleshed's cannibalistic tendencies as they located a group of shredded Iron Warriors arranged on the edges of a shell crater, and secreted themselves amongst their corpses.
Even as he dragged an Iron Warrior's body over his own he saw their way into the fortress emerge from the rolling banks of smoke that hugged the ground.
Huge bulldozers, red and hateful, with tall banner poles hung with eight-pointed stars and iron tenders hitched behind them came from the Halls of the Savage Morticians.
They came to gather up the dead for crushing and feeding to the daemonculaba.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dead eyes in a skull with the top blown off stared at him, sightless and fixed in an expression of surprise. No matter where Uriel turned in the blood-filled container, he could not escape the staring eyes of the dead. Scooped up with the rest of the corpses by the daemonic bulldozers, he had been unceremoniously dumped in the tender by the growling machine as it performed its automated and graceless coroner's task.
Bodies piled upon bodies, blood and entrails spilling to the sloshing floor and Uriel fought to claw his way to the surface, lest he drown in the stagnant blood of the fallen. He coughed red as he pushed his way clear of the bodies, keeping his head below the level of the tender's railings for fear of discovery.
The hot stink of blood filled his nostrils and slippery bodies jostled him as the trailer bumped over the uneven ground. He rolled onto his back, craning his neck left and right to see as much as he could without raising his head too far. He saw the shattered remains of a high wall pass, its fabric riddled with shell impacts and looking as though it had been struck by an orbital bombardment. Smoke curled, fat and black, from pyres and Uriel could hear chanting voices shouting from afar.
They had penetrated the walls of Khalan-Ghol and now just had to stay concealed until these bulldozers took them back to the nightmare Halls of the Savage Morticians and the daemonculaba.
A cadaver bobbed from beneath the blood and Uriel made to push it away when it blinked at him.
'Imperator! I thought you were a corpse!' exclaimed Uriel when he saw it was Pasanius.
'Not yet,' grinned Pasanius, spitting blood.
'Where is Leonid?'
'Here,' said a voice from the other side of the tender. 'By the High Lord's balls, this is almost worse than being flushed from the chambers below.'
Uriel raised an eyebrow and Leonid shrugged. 'Well, maybe not.'
'If I'm right, these will take us right where we want to go,' said Uriel. 'We just have to bear it for a little longer.'
'How long do you think it'll take to get there?' asked Leonid, almost afraid of the answer.
Uriel shook his head. 'I do not know for sure, but I do not believe these machines will be confounded by the magicks protecting this place, so not long would be my guess.'
Leonid nodded resignedly and shut his eyes, trying to block out the dreadful smell of the dead bodies.
As it transpired, the bulldozers' journey through the twisting interior of Khalan-Ghol took perhaps another hour, travelling along grisly thoroughfares of sacrificial altars, winding between dark-armoured bunkers and through the maze of manufactorum that the warrior band had become so lost in.
The vast shadow of the gate of the tower of iron at the centre of the fortress passed over them, and once again they were deep in the heart of Honsou's lair. Distant hammer blows and the grinding clanking of nearby machines filled the gloom, and Uriel heard the clicking footsteps of unseen creatures as they filed past the growling bulldozers. Sickly yellow light came and went as they passed along wide, rockcrete tunnels lit by flickering lumo-strips.
Eventually, Uriel heard the thudding beat of a monstrous heart growing louder and shared an uneasy glance with his companions. The booming bass note was all too familiar.
'The Heart of Blood,' said Pasanius.
Uriel nodded, his muscles tensing as he heard clicking and wheezing mechanical footsteps approaching. The bulldozer ground to a halt with a juddering lurch. A tall silhouette loomed over the edge of the tender and Uriel snapped his eyes shut, recognising the dead skin features of one of the Savage Morticians.
He remained utterly immobile as he felt metal pincers jab into the tender. Hissing claws turned bodies within the pooled and now sticky blood. Corpses rolled and flopped in the tender as the Savage Mortician inspected the dead for some unknown purpose.
He fought back a gasp of revulsion as he felt a claw close on his leg and turn him over, fighting to remain still as his flesh was jabbed and probed.
The Savage Mortician clicked and whistled in its incomprehensible language, presumably to another of its fell, surgical kin, before releasing his limb and clanking off on some other errand. Uriel kept his eyes shut and his breathing shallow until the bulldozer set off once again and they had put some distance between them and the hellish surgeons.
'Holy Throne,' he whispered, sickened by the Savage Mortician's touch.
Their nightmarish journey continued into the chamber of screams, the terrible beat of the daemonic Heart of Blood dulling his senses once more. Even over the heavy thuds of the Heart of Blood, Uriel heard the rumbling whine of heavy machinery as well as the grinding crack of bones and wet squelch of pulverised flesh.
'Be ready!' he hissed. 'I think we have arrived!'
Pasanius and Leonid nodded as Uriel slid himself over the carpet of bodies and raised his head slowly over the edge of the tender.