'A gift from Lord Honsou,' said the daemon symbiote, ignoring the examination. Finding nothing of worth on his daemonic frame, the fell surgeons moved on, approaching the warrior band with a sick, skeletal lust in their soulless eyes. One of the nightmare monsters turned back to Onyx and Uriel recognised it as the one they had seen upon entering the tower. Its mouth opened and a hissing, clicking language emerged.
'Your gift acceptable,' translated Sabatier. 'You get to leave unsurgeried.'
Onyx nodded, as Uriel took in more of the dark wonders displayed throughout the cavern. But immediate and terrifying as the forms of the Savage Morticians were, it was to the centre of the chamber that Uriel's gaze was irresistibly drawn.
Held suspended over a bubbling lake of blood by a trio of thick chains and gleaming silver awls piercing its chest and torso was a bloated red daemon, ancient and swollen with crackling energies. The flesh of its body was scaled and thick tufts of shaggy, matted hair ran from its horned skull down the length of its back. Its cloven hooves clawed the air and as it thrashed impotently against its fetters, Uriel could see great wounds on its back where a pair of wings had been surgically removed. Its chest heaved violently in time with the booming echo that filled the chamber and Uriel knew that this imprisoned daemon must be the source of the noise.
'"You will know it when you see it…"' said Pasanius.
'What?'
'That's what the Omphalos Daemonium told us, isn't it?'
'About what?' asked Uriel.
'The Heart of Blood,' said Pasanius. '"You will know it when you see it."'
Uriel looked up at the bound daemon, realising that Pasanius was right. This could be none other than theHeart of Blood, the daemon thing that according to the tale Seraphys had told, had outwitted the Omphalos Daemonium and bound it to an eternity of torment within the firebox of a terrifying daemon engine.
Surrounding the lake of blood were hundreds of upright coffins of black iron with gurgling red tubes piercing their tops. In each coffin lay a chanting, gold-robed sorcerer, their withering bodies pierced by scores of exsanguination needles that fed the hissing lake beneath the imprisoned daemon with their blood. A pulsing tube rose from the lake, penetrating the daemon's chest as the psykers' blood was forced into its immaterial flesh. The daemon writhed in agony above the lake, a rippling haze of psychically dead air rising from the warp entity's skull and filling the pinnacle of the chamber. The daemon's torment at its confinement was plain and now that he focussed on it, Uriel could clearly see that this was the source of his deadened senses.
'Lord Honsou requests that this one,' said Onyx, indicating Uriel, 'be fed to the daemonculaba, while the one with the silver arm has it removed and brought to his inner sanctum. Is this acceptable?'
The creature lurched forwards, lifting Pasanius with a hissing claw that sprouted from its pneumatic leg assembly. A whining blade snapped from the armature on its wrist and with brutally efficient cuts, sawed the armour from Pasanius's upper arm, exposing the muscled flesh of his bicep and the junction of flesh and metal.
'Put me down, Chaos filth!' yelled Pasanius, kicking out at the withered chest of the Savage Mortician. It hissed, as though unused to such defiance and a thick needle extended from beneath the saw-blade and stabbed through Pasanius's breastplate. Within seconds the sergeant's struggles had ceased and the monster handed him on to another of its surgical brethren.
Uriel surged forward as Pasanius was borne away, but his lethargic senses slowed him and Onyx stopped him with a bronze blade at his neck.
'Don't,' he said simply. 'His fate will be nothing next to yours.'
Uriel said nothing as the Savage Morticians surrounded them and gathered them up in their mechanical claws.
'I will kill you,' promised Uriel as he was lifted, struggling, from the ground. 'You had best shoot me now, for I will see you dead if you do not.'
'If the powers decree that is my fate, then so be it, but I think you are wrong. You will die in this place, Uriel Ventris,' shrugged Onyx before turning on his heel and re-entering the tunnel that led to the elevator cage with a grateful-looking Obax Zakayo.
Uriel fought uselessly against the claws of the Savage Mortician, but its strength was enormous and he could not move. Its dead face hissed as it examined his body in detail. Gleaming arms of bronze held him immobile while pincers and needles pierced his flesh.
A clicking arrangement of spindly rods extended from the monster's hood, telescoping outwards and bearing a meshed mouthpiece that snicked into place before its toothy jaws. Sharp drill-bits clicked from the mouthpiece and burrowed into the Savage Mortician's metal jaw, sending dusty flurries of metallic flesh flying.
The mesh unit hissed with static and the Savage Mortician said, 'You are to be fed to daemonculaba. Waste of flesh. Much surgeries could be done with you. Things unknown become known. Others will do.'
'What are you going to do with us?' shouted Vaanes, struggling helplessly in the grip of a tall, black-robed monster that travelled on hissing mechanical legs, reverse jointed like those of a Sentinel.
'We are the surgeons of demise,' said the monster. 'Monarchs to the kingdom of the dead. Will show you the meaning of pain. Abacinate you then open you up with knives. Take what we want. Make your flesh our own.'
The dark priests of flesh and machine stalked off through the red-lit cavern, carrying the members of the warrior band towards the experimentation tables, animatedly discussing their proposed surgeries with one another in their clicking, machine language.
The Savage Mortician holding Uriel set off in a different direction entirely, its rolling, multi-legged stride carrying it swiftly through the chamber. Uriel saw horrific sights as he was borne through the hellish cavern: stripped down bodies, chains of prisoners sewn together, screaming madmen with their skulls pumped full of fluid, the internal pressure forcing it through their bulging eyes.
Men and women turned above slow-roasting fires, burning flesh dripping away and hissing on the iron skillets below. More mutants like Sabatier, deformed and reassembled without reason or recourse to the laws of anatomy, tended to the more mundane experiments, feeding on the screams of their subjects and recording every aspect of their suffering on long sheaves of parchment.
Several times they were forced to make diversions through the cavern to avoid the hateful red bulldozers he had seen from atop the stairs that led down into the fortress. They still hauled the blood-sloshing tenders filled with the corpses of Iron Warriors behind them, and threaded their way through the experimentation chamber taking the bodies to some unknown destination.
Uriel lost sight of the bulldozers as the Savage Mortician climbed a long grilled ramp that led up to the first tier of cages that ran around the circumference of the chamber. A number of conduits suspended on cruel iron hooks followed the curve of the cavern walls, laden with groaning, spitting pipes, crackling electrical cables and a clear tube filled with a viscous, gristly substance. As they reached the top of the ramp, Uriel saw that the cages were indeed filled with hideous victims that resembled those poor unfortunates who had died in the flesh camp in the mountains. But as horrific as that had been, this was a horror beyond anything he had seen before.
Each vast, bloated creature in these cages was female, their bodies swollen beyond all resemblance to humanity. Shackled into their cages, they gurgled and drooled in voiceless madness and torment, their vocal chords having long since been cut. Engorged as they were by unnatural means, Uriel saw that their size was not simply due to monstrous infusions of growth hormones and dark magicks.