Their march led ever onwards to what Honsou had called the Halls of the Savage Morticians, where dwelt the Savage Morticians. Uriel had caught more than a little fear at the mention of these individuals, and did not relish discovering the reason for that fear. Was the creature that had tried to take them from Onyx as they had entered the tower one of these beings? Uriel had a horrible suspicion they would find out all too soon.
Their march came to an abrupt end when Obax Zakayo hesitantly approached a low, red-lit archway, its edges delineated with hooks, long needles and gory meat racks hung with cuts of dressed human flesh. Plaintive cries and the hiss of sizzling meat gusted from within, carried upon the stench of blood and despair. Something moved within the glowing arch, a shambling, misshapen thing.
Obax Zakayo hesitated before passing beneath the archway, the click, click of metal claws on stone and the echoes of a booming heartbeat echoing from the dripping archway ahead. The Iron Warriors' apprehension was plain to see. Onyx displayed no such hesitancy, passing the threshold into the domain of the Savage Morticians without fear.
Uriel felt foetid warmth as he passed through the arch, glancing around to see what could so discomfit the Iron Warriors. The silver fire of Onyx's eyes and veins cast a faint glow around the chamber, and Uriel was suddenly grateful for the dimness of the light as he saw macabre hints of all manner of grotesque experimentation hung from the walls and displayed within jars of milky fluid. The chamber's occupant limped towards Obax Zakayo, its every step obviously painful.
Uriel saw its naked body was a melange of limbs and appendages from Emperor alone knew how many other bodies. Its head was stitched on backwards, with rusted copper augmetics replacing its eyes and ears. It bore itself up on legs that had obviously belonged to two people of greatly differing size and its torso was a spiderweb of poorly healed surgical scars. Perhaps it had once had a gender, but nothing remained of its groin to tell. The thing's arms dangled before its chest in an asymmetrical loop, its hands grafted together in one lumpen mass of fused flesh and bone.
'What want you?' it slurred from a mouth thick with ropes of drool. 'Not welcome.'
'Sabatier,' said Onyx. 'We bring offerings for your masters. New flesh.'
The creature named Sabatier transferred its gaze from Onyx to the warrior band and dragged itself painfully towards Ardaric Vaanes. It reached up to rub its fused fists against his face, but Vaanes pulled away from its bruised flesh before it could touch him.
'Don't touch me, you monster,' he snarled.
Sabatier chuckled - or gargled, it was hard to be sure - and turned back to Onyx.
'Defiant,' it said as Vaanes lunged forwards and grabbed its neck, twisting its head around with a loud crack of bone. It sighed once and dropped to the ground. Obax Zakayo stepped in and gripped Vaanes's armour with his mechanised claws, lifting him from the ground with a roar of anger.
'And strong…' said Sabatier from the ground as it awkwardly picked itself up. Its head lolled on its shoulders, a sharp-edged shard of bone jutting from its patchwork skin.
It waved the fleshy loop of its arms at Obax Zakayo. 'Leave him be, masters always prefer flesh be strong, than weak, starved things normally get. Maybe defiant one get lucky and masters make him like me. Dead, but not cold in ground.'
'He should be so lucky,' said Obax Zakayo, dropping Vaanes back to the ground.
'No, will not be,' said Sabatier, raising its head and speaking a guttural incantation.
At the sound of its phlegm-filled voice, the far wall of the archway shimmered and vanished, the noise of screams and the pounding heartbeat filling the chamber. A great, iron-meshed cage lay beyond, and the Iron Warriors pushed them into its centre with brutal clubbings from their bolters.
Once they and their captors had entered the cage, Sabatier looped its arms around a yellow and black chevroned bar and, with some difficulty, pulled it shut across the cage's door. As the door clanged shut, the cage lurched and a grinding squeal built from above as ancient mechanisms engaged and the cage began to descend into the depths of the tower.
Uriel looked down through the grilled floor of the cage, seeing only a dimly glowing shaft constructed of oily sheets of beaten iron. The bottom was lost to perspective, and Uriel saw that there was no way that this shaft could be physically contained within the tower. The fact of the shaft's spatial impossibility did not surprise him any more.
Vaanes sidled close to Uriel as the shaft continued its descent, gaining speed as it went until the metal sides were screaming past.
'We have to get out of here soon. I don't like the sound of these Savage Morticians.'
'Nor I,' agreed Uriel. 'Anything that worries an Iron Warrior cannot be good.'
'Perhaps your sergeant with that self-repairing arm can fight his way clear. Where in the hell did he get that?'
'I wish I knew…' said Uriel as the speeding cage finally slowed before coming to a juddering halt. Sabatier hauled open the doors on the opposite side of the cage.
The Iron Warriors beat them from the cage into a gradually widening tunnel hacked through the rock. At its end was a pulsing red glow, a chorus of screams, hissing, clanging and thumping engines. But drowning everything beneath its thudding, regular hammering was the pounding of a deafening heartbeat.
The red glow and hateful cacophony of noise swelled until they passed into the colossal cavern beyond.
'Oh, no…' breathed Uriel as he finally laid eyes upon the Halls of the Savage Morticians.
'What the hell… ?' said Vaanes, his face lit by the diabolical, blood-red glow of the cavern.
Its far side was lost to sight, the ribbed iron walls soaring to distant heights where throbbing machines and mighty turbines roared and seethed. Great cables and looping tubes ran across the walls and curving ceiling, dripping a fine mist of bodily fluids to the stinking rocky floor. Tiered levels of darkened cages, similar to the ones Uriel had seen in the mountain flesh camp, circled the walls of the cavern, troughs running below each one and pipes running from heavy bladders suspended from the roof.
As he was forced into the cavern, Uriel felt a sudden dullness assault his senses, feeling as though under the effects of a massively powerful pain balm. Everything seemed bleached of its colour and taste and smell, as though every sensory apparatus of his body was being smothered.
The floor of the cavern was rough and irregular, random structures and gibbets built upon one another with mortuary tables - some occupied, some not - scattered in a haphazard fashion around the chamber. Drawn by the noise of the elevator cage, black-robed monsters threaded their way through the cavern, scuttling forwards on an assortment of wildly differing forms of locomotion. Some came on spidery limbs, others on long assemblies of stilts, while others rumbled forwards on spiked track units. Their waving arms were an eclectic mix of blades, claws, clamps, bone saws and whirring cranial drills. No two were alike, but each one bore the scars of massive, self-inflicted surgeries, their forms repugnant and evil.
Each displayed a corrupted version of the skull and cog symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus upon its robes, though Uriel found it hard to reconcile these abominations with the priests of the Machine God. Their skins were dead and they babbled in a series of unintelligible clicks that sounded like gibberish to Uriel.
Onyx stepped into the cavern, closely followed by Sabatier. The Savage Morticians quickly surrounded them, prodding Onyx with pincer arms and stabbing at him with needles.