'It is good to see you smile again, my friend,' said Uriel.
'Aye, it's been a while since I've felt like it.'
'Our honour is restored,' said Uriel.
'You know,' said Pasanius. 'I don't think we ever really lost it.'
'Perhaps not,' agreed Uriel. 'If only there was some way we could tell them that on Macragge.'
'I don't suppose they'll ever hear of what happened here.'
'No, I do not suppose they will,' said Uriel. 'But that does not matter. We know, and that is enough.'
'Aye, I think you're right, captain.'
'I told you before, you do not need to call me that.'
'Not before,' pointed out Pasanius, 'but we've honoured our death oath, and you are my captain again.'
Uriel nodded. 'I suppose I am at that.'
The two warriors shook hands, pleased to be alive and enjoying the sensation of having achieved what they set out to do. No matter that they were still trapped on a nightmarish daemon world, thousands of light years from home. Their success felt good by the simple virtue of its accomplishment.
No matter what happened now, they were done. It was over.
The Lord of the Unfleshed approached, thick ropes of clotted blood dangling from his jutting, fanged jaws.
'We go now?' he said. 'Leave now?'
'Leave?' said Uriel. 'How? There is nowhere to go. The passage to the elevator cage is impassable and hundreds of tonnes of rock have shut off the outflow pipe. There is no way out.'
The Lord of the Unfleshed gave him a lopsided look, as though he couldn't believe that Uriel was being so dense. He pointed over Uriel's shoulder and said, 'Big iron man's machine leaves!'
For a second, Uriel was mystified until he followed the Lord of the Unfleshed's pointing finger and saw the dark shape of the armoured leviathan that had carried the Slaughterman here. It ground towards one of the skull-wreathed tunnels it had created to manifest within the cavern. The red-lit door to its interior was still open and though the masterless machine was slowly building speed, there was still time get aboard.
'Brought big iron man here,' said the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'Take us away too!'
Uriel shared a look with Pasanius.
'What do you think?' said Uriel, a ghost of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
'I think that wherever the thing takes us, it's got to better than here, captain,' said Pasanius, pushing off the rocks and clutching his wounds.
'I hope you're right.'
'Well, it's either that or we stay and get flattened by Toramino's artillery.'
'Good point,' agreed Uriel, turning to the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'Gather the Tribe. We are leaving.'
The Lord of the Unfleshed nodded, its massive shoulders heaving with the motion. It threw back its head and let out a rising howl.
Within seconds, the Unfleshed broke off from their grisly feasting and joined their leader. Less than a dozen of them still lived, and Uriel was shocked at how few had survived the mission to Khalan-Ghol. Ardaric Vaanes had been right when he said that most, if not all, of them would die here.
Uriel nodded. 'All right, let's get the hell out of here.'
For a moment Honsou thought he was dead. Once he realised he wasn't, he thought he was blind.
All he could feel was pain and all he could hear were heavy thumps of artillery impacting somewhere above him. He sat up, feeling a stinging in his eyes and reached up to the vacuum seals on his armour's gorget. They were cracked and useless, so he wrenched his helmet off, realising that he wasn't blind after all, but simply had clotted lumps of blood in his eyes.
Honsou scooped the clumps of sticky matter from his face and spat out a mouthful of dirt.
He wiped his face again, angry that he still couldn't see out of one eye. As he probed further he realised there a was good reason for this. Part of his head had been pulverised by the impact of the bolt round, and the left side of his face was a burned and bloody ruin, his eye a glutinous, fused mess.
Dizziness and nausea swamped him, but he put his silver arm out to steady himself, giving a short bark of laughter as he saw that it was smooth and unblemished despite the fury of the battles he had fought since it had been grafted to him.
'Damn you, Ventris, that's twice you've blinded me with my own blood.'
Honsou clambered to his knees, trying to piece the last few moments of the battle together. He remembered facing Ventris, and the Ultramarines' desperate charge that had ended in a hail of bolter fire.
Or, at least, it should have ended that way. The luck of the damned was with them and they had survived long enough to kill a pair of his warriors. As foolishly heroic as their charge had been, it had bought them moments at best.
But then the monsters had attacked.
Honsou still felt a shiver of revulsion as he thought back to their unimaginable hideousness. Their corpses were strewn all around him and as he pulled himself free of the rubble that buried his legs and swayed unsteadily to his feet, he was amazed that such incredibly abhorrent creatures could live.
He had heard of the Unfleshed, but had never dreamed they could have been so fearsome as to almost be his undoing.
The last thing he remembered was catching a snapshot of Ventris aiming a bolter for his head and twisting to get out of the way. Honsou remembered seeing the muzzle flash, a sensation of bright, burning pain in his face, then… then nothing until this moment.
'Iron within!' he shouted.
There was no answer and he knew that all the warriors who had accompanied him to the Halls of the Savage Morticians were dead. He put them from his mind and admiringly surveyed the destruction around him.
Nothing remained of the chamber, its entire structure laid waste by the daemonic battle and the continuous bombardment from Toramino's grand batteries.
A flash of movement caught his eye and he picked up his axe before making his way unsteadily towards its source. An Iron Warrior, trapped beneath the half-devoured corpse of another, moaned in pain.
Honsou lifted the body from the buried Iron Warrior and saw that it was his newest lieutenant, Cadaras Grendel. The armour of the warrior's legs had been torn away and great bites had ripped away a chunk of his quadriceps muscle.
'Still alive, Cadaras Grendel?' said Honsou.
'Aye,' replied the warrior. 'I don't die easily. Help me up.'
Honsou reached down and pulled Cadaras Grendel to his feet. The grim-faced killer retrieved his weapon from the ground and checked its action before saying. 'It's over then?'
Honsou shrugged. 'Maybe. I don't know. It looks like it, though.'
Cadaras Grendel nodded. 'What about Toramino?'
'What about him?'
'I still want to kill him.'
'Don't we all?' said Honsou, looking through a great rent torn in the side of the mountain. Blue fire still hammered his fortress from the sorcerous towers that surrounded it. Toramino's artillery captains were thorough, thought Honsou, to have broken open a mountain.
He turned towards a gleaming pile of twitching metal lying beside the entrance to the passageway that had led to the elevator cage. Recognising a discarded set of bronze claws that lay beside the pile, he strode over towards the jumble of metal.
As he drew closer he saw that it was no simple debris, but the still-living remains of his champion. Onyx lay twitching on the ground, his black armour cracked and shorn from his body, his daemonic flesh ripped from the metal of his skeleton by the monsters.
The daemonic symbiote's immaterial flesh had housed a scion of the warp and without a body, it had been cast from its shell. All that remained of Honsou's champion was a collection of loosely connected, silvered limbs, brass pistons and a bronze skull with a slowly dulling silver light weeping from the eye-sockets.