'A daemon,' said Uriel. 'One of the fell princes of Chaos…'
'What do we do?' said Pasanius.
Uriel drew his sword as the huge daemon reached the edge of the lake of blood and reared up to its full height.
'We ready our souls for the end,' he said simply.
Honsou watched the sky around his fortress burn with an actinic blue light. Hundreds of pillars of pellucid blue flame surrounded Khalan-Ghol, spearing kilometres upwards from the plain below, like oil-wells gushing with precious fuel. The azure fire seethed and Honsou could see living nightmares swirling within the flames, the dreadful power and malice of the warp contained within them.
'What's happening?' he demanded.
'The towers!' said Onyx.
'Towers? What towers?'
'The ones we saw when we made that sortie into Berossus's camp,' said Onyx. 'Tall, baroque towers of iron that were saturated with psychic energy. You remember?'
Honsou nodded, recalling the unsettling sight of their arcane geometries and the chanting groups of gold-robed figures who danced around them, anointing them with the blood of sacrifices. He had put them from his mind after the raid, confident that the power of the Heart of Blood could resist their magicks.
He rounded on Onyx, raising his axe and saying, 'You told me that no sorcerous powers could defeat the Heart of Blood!'
'And none can, but it is free now and not bound to Khalan-Ghol any more.'
'We are defenceless?' asked Cadaras Grendel.
Onyx shook his head. 'No. The fortress's own sorcerers can maintain the barrier for a while, but without the power of the Heart of Blood, it is only a matter of time until Toramino's magicks break through and destroy us.'
'Blood of Chaos!' swore Honsou, heading for the great doors that led from his inner sanctum and waving his chosen warriors to follow him. 'How could the daemon get free?'
'The warsmith bound the Heart of Blood with three defiled awls, and it could only be freed if someone were to remove them.'
'But who would dare risk such a thing?'
Honsou pulled up short as Onyx said, 'Ventris and his warrior band?'
'Of course!' snapped Honsou. 'I should have known Toramino would never have stooped so low as to employ renegades just to fight for him. He and Ventris must have planned this whole thing! Free the Heart of Blood and then destroy us with sorcery. I'll have those bastards' entrails fed a piece at a time to the Exuviae.'
'Then Toramino never intended to blood his army here!' snarled Cadaras Grendel.
'No,' agreed Onyx. 'It would seem not.'
'How long do we have before the barrier falls?' demanded Honsou, setting off into the darkness of the tower of iron and towards the Halls of die Savage Morticians.
His warriors followed him, bolters and swords at the ready.
'I do not know for sure,' admitted Onyx, 'but it will not be long.'
'Then we'd better hurry!' said Honsou. 'I want to kill Ventris before Toramino brings Khalan-Ghol to ruin!'
Uriel dropped to the gantry that ran the circumference of the chamber, thumbing the activation rune on his sword's hilt and slashing its bright blade through the air. Pasanius landed beside him and together they hurriedly made their way to the chamber's floor as the Heart of Blood stepped from the lake, red liquid running from its crimson body in grisly runnels.
It towered above them, fully four or five metres tall, its powerfully muscled physique running with hot streamers of light that snaked beneath its flesh like fiery veins. It looked down on the bloody ground before it - at the corpses of the Unfleshed, the Savage Morticians and their servants - and a bloody leer split its bestial face. The surviving mutants fled before its terrifying power and even those Savage Morticians the Unfleshed had not killed backed away from this diabolical presence in their midst.
Only the Unfleshed stood their ground, too ignorant of the horrifying power of a daemon prince to fear it. Though they felt its abominable power, they had no concept of the threat it represented.
The Lord of the Unfleshed stood before the mighty daemon, his chest puffed out in challenge, and it regarded him with as much interest as a man might notice an ant. The Lord of the Unfleshed roared and charged the daemon, but before he could so much as land a blow, the Heart of Blood swatted him aside with a casual flick of its scaled arm.
The monstrous leader of the Unfleshed smashed into the side of the cavern with a bone-crunching thud and Uriel knew that the force of the impact must have shattered every bone in his body.
Seeing their leader so easily defeated, the Unfleshed howled and scattered before the horrendous daemon, seeking shelter in the dark nooks and crannies of the deathly cavern.
Uriel and Pasanius watched as the Heart of Blood turned from the fleeing Unfleshed, the tremendous booming of its vital organ diminishing now that sor-cerous magicks were no longer pouring into it. Uriel felt his senses becoming sharper, the smothering numbness lifted now that the daemon was free.
Leonid hurried over to where they stood and shouted, 'I thought it was supposed to be destroyed when the awls came out!'
'So did I,' replied Uriel as the Heart of Blood threw back its head and gave vent to a terrible roaring that overwhelmed the senses, not through its volume, but by the sheer sense of loss and fury that it contained. Its hunger pierced the wall of the dimensions and echoed across the vast gulf that separated universes.
Uriel and every living thing in the chamber fell to the ground, shaken to the very core of their being by the daemon's cry.
'What's it doing?' yelled Leonid.
'Emperor alone knows!' cried Pasanius.
Uriel picked himself up, his hands clamped to the side of his head in an effort to shut out the monstrous noise of the daemon's howl. Something in the tone of the long, ululating cry spoke to Uriel of things lost and things to be called back. He realised what it was as he saw a twisting blob of dark light appear in the air before the daemon.
'It is a cry of summoning…' he said.
Pasanius and Leonid looked strangely at him as the daemon's roar ceased and the fragile veil of reality pulled apart with a dreadful ripping sound, as of tearing meat. A black gouge in the walls separating realities opened, filling the air with sickening static, as though a million noxious flies had flown through from some vile, plague dimension.
Awful knowledge flooded Uriel as he stared into the portal opened in the fabric of the universe. He saw galaxies of billions upon billions of souls harvested and fed to the Lord of Skulls, the Blood God.
'Emperor's mercy,' wept Uriel as he felt each of these deaths lodge like a splinter in his heart. New life and new purpose had once filled these galaxies, but now all was death, slaughtered to sate the hunger of the Blood God… whose fell name was a dark presence staining the coppery wind that blew from the portal, a stench of deepest, darkest red, whose purpose was embodied in but a single rune and a legend of simple devotion: Blood for the Blood God… Khome… Khorne… Khorne…
A single shriek of dark and bloody kinship, a pact of hate and death. It echoed from the portal and grew to shake the dust from the ceiling. And there was an answering roar of bloody welcome, torn from the Heart of Blood's brazen throat.
Light blazed from the portal as an armoured giant, clad in burnished iron plates of ancient power armour stamped down into the chamber, the portal sealing shut behind it as it marched to stand before the Heart of Blood.
Taller than a Space Marine, its vile presence was unmistakable, its malice incalculable. White light, impure and corrupt, spilled like droplets of spoiled milk from beneath its horned helmet and its shoulder guards bore stained chevrons that marked the figure as an Iron Warrior.