'Come on, hurry,' urged Uriel, desperate to keep Leonid out of the way of the Heart of Blood's murderous rampage. The mighty, armoured daemon was making sport in the centre of the lake of blood, ripping gold-robed sorcerers from their exsanguination coffins, toying with them in numerous terrible ways before slaughtering them with its axe or powerful, fanged maw.
It waded through the blood, letting the terrified magickers tear themselves to pieces as they desperately fought to free themselves from their coffins. Not one amongst them survived the daemon's predatory malice and it inhaled their deaths like a fine wine.
'Psykers!' it bellowed. 'The food of the gods!'
Uriel returned his attention to the wan, lean-faced woman Leonid had rescued from the clutches of the daemonic armour. Her hair was long, lank and falling out in patches, while her features spoke of horrors endured and a mind on the very brink of sanity.
'All dead, all dead, all dead, all dead…' she repeated, over and over.
'Who is she?' asked Pasanius.
Leonid fished out rusted dogtags from beneath her uniform jacket and turned them over to examine them in the chamber's dim light.
'Her name is Lieutenant Larana Utorian of the 383rd Jouran Dragoons,' he said proudly.
'Do you know her?'
Leonid shook his head. 'No, I don't. Her tags say she was part of Tedeski's lot in Battalion A and he didn't like other officers mingling with his soldiers. He was old school you see.'
'How in the Emperor's name did she end up here?'
'I don't know,' wept Leonid, holding her in a tight embrace. 'Perhaps the God-Emperor didn't want me to die alone without someone from the old homeworld next to me.'
Uriel nodded and locked eyes with Pasanius as he gripped his sword hilt tightly. 'Aye, perhaps you're right, my friend. If a man has to die, it should be with his friends.'
The dead, white sky burned with magickal energies, whipping plumes of blue fire shooting up into the heavens from the geomantic towers Toramino's sorcerers had constructed around Khalan-Ghol. Monstrously powerful energies had been unleashed, and now that the eternal barrier that had kept Honsou's fortress safe from the fell powers of the warp was no more, it suffered terribly under the immaterial assault.
Black lightning speared from the cloudless sky, blasting colossal slabs of rock from the mountain and fearsome red storms of bruised, weeping clouds hammered the few remaining towers and bastions with mutating rains that dissolved fortifications which had stood invincible for ten thousand years.
Great, ravening beasts of the warp swooped and dived around the high reaches of the fortress, tearing apart the flying creatures that circled the topmost towers, and a fog of magickal energies enveloped the redoubts and bunkers that Honsou had only recently rebuilt in the wake of his victory over Lord Berossus.
Nor was the fortress attacked only by sorcerous powers, for Toramino's grand artillery batteries were finally unleashed to bring explosive ruin upon the mountain of their master's enemy. Thousands of tonnes of ordnance rained down on Khalan-Ghol, smashing apart the very mountain itself.
Huge columns of soldiers and an entire grand company of Iron Warriors, led by Toramino himself, marched upon Khalan-Ghol, a host of thousands that would destroy whatever of the half-breed's force might survive the furious assault now wracking the mountain. Khalan-Ghol's final doom was upon it.
Uriel felt a familiar churning sensation in his stomach, hearing a chiming, splintering sound of glass breaking, and a terrible sensation of powerlessness gripped him. He experienced sickening vibrations deep in his bones as a restlessness rippled through the ground. A powerful vision of jagged stumps of bone jutting through the ground gripped him, and a mad howling built from the air, piercing and vile, with an unimaginable thirst for revenged.
He blinked as a fiercely painful sensation built within his skull, as though hot needles were being pushed out through his eyeballs.
'Oh, no…' he whispered, as he realised what was happening, and looked up into the face of Leonid, whose gaze betrayed the same knowledge that had just come to Uriel.
'God-Emperor, no,' wept Leonid. 'Not again, please no, not again!'
'What is it?' said Pasanius.
Before Uriel could answer, they heard the Heart of Blood roar in sudden awareness, sounding like a cry of unexpected pleasure.
'My old nemesis…' it rasped as the very air in the chamber became saturated with an electric tang of ozone and sulphur. Uriel felt his stomach heave and gripped onto the side of the bulldozer as the Hall of the Savage Morticians seemed to… shift…
The ground now felt soft and loamy underfoot, a weeping red fluid seeping upwards where his weight had forced it from the dark earth. Uriel looked up, already knowing what he would see.
Above him, a lacerated crimson sky, flecked with cancerous, melanoma clouds boiled, wheeling carrion creatures circling and awaiting their chance to feed. A familiar mad screaming, like the wails of the damned, echoed painfully, but it was nothing compared to the misery he had already seen in this place, and he pushed it aside.
Fleshless, bony hands reached up through the dark earth and Leonid kept his eyes shut tightly, holding onto Larana Utorian. Rippling spirals of reflective light coiled from the walls of the chamber, twisting the image of the rock behind like a warped lens. The walls seemed to stretch, as though being sucked into an unseen vortex behind, Until there was nothing left but a rippling veil of impenetrable darkness, a tunnel into madness ringed with screaming faces.
Brazen rail tracks coated in crusted blood ran from the previously impermeable walls of the chamber, streamers of multi-coloured matter oozing from the cracked rock.
With no eternal barrier to stop it from reaching its hated rival, the Omphalos Daemonium manifested within the walls of Khalan-Ghol.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Roaring from the mouth of the tunnel like a dark force of nature, the Omphalos Daemonium thundered into the Halls of the Savage Morticians. The armoured leviathan's mad structure was doubly hateful to Uriel now that a suspicion that had been nagging at the back of his head was horribly confirmed.
'It knew…' he snarled.
'Knew what?' said Pasanius, shouting to be heard over the howling roar of the Omphalos Daemonium's arrival. Uriel ducked back as the swirling red tendrils of smoke that were the hallmarks of the Sarcomata slashed past, carried onwards by the passing of the colossal daemon engine. It came to a halt before a newly-raised platform of bloodstained rockcrete with the sound of squealing iron and brazen roars, hissing souls escaping from its billowing stacks in shrieking waves of pain.
'It knew we would try to defy it,' said Uriel, sick with the realisation that they had been used. 'It knew we would try and destroy the Heart of Blood.'
'Then why did it send us here?'
'Because now that the psychic barrier Obax Zakayo spoke of is down, it can manifest within Khalan-Ghol. Remember the tale Seraphys told us? These daemons are ancient enemies and now the Omphalos Daemonium will wreak its vengeance upon the Heart of Blood for trapping it within that daemon engine.'
Pasanius turned as the Heart of Blood stepped from the crimson lake, its slaughter of Honsou's psykers complete and the promise of battle with its ancestral foe drawing it towards the seething engine. The brazen machine heaved with power and red mist writhed around its thick plates as the heavy door to the interior heaved open and the Slaughterman stepped onto the platform, the thick, clanking iron plates of his armour dripping with a black, oily residue.