Dead fluids and long-decayed skin flew as its own fist ripped its head to rotten shards. Desiccated flesh and bone sprayed, and its howls were silenced as it slumped forward with a long death rasp.
'Pasanius!' shouted Vaanes. 'Release me! Hurry!'
Pasanius looked as though he were about to take on the second Mortician alone, but nodded, backing away towards Vaanes as it leapt forwards on its long legs. He dodged the first slash of its blades, ducking below a high sweep of a second. Its leg hammered out and slammed into his stomach, doubling him up with a whooshing intake of breath.
Pasanius rolled aside as its blades stabbed the bloody ground and Vaanes saw that the sergeant would not be able to avoid its attacks for much longer. Sabatier ran from the dissection theatre as fast as his mutated gait allowed him. It screamed for aid and Vaanes knew that unless Pasanius could free him quickly, they were as good as dead.
Pasanius surged to his feet, leaping for the restraints holding Vaanes to the mortuary table. He lunged for the bolt at Vaanes's arm, his fingers connecting with the bolt and closing on the metal as another thumping blow sent him flying through the air. Pasanius landed with a steel crash on the table of saws, scalpels and their weapons, scattering bolters and Uriel's golden-hilted sword to the floor.
But Vaanes saw that the sergeant's effort had been enough. The bolt had been hauled clear as Pasanius had been kicked away and, with a feral roar of hate, Vaanes ripped his arm free and unsheathed his crackling lightning claws. With a few quick blows, the remainder of his restraints were hacked clear and he dropped from the mortuary table, bellowing a challenge to the Savage Mortician as it towered over Pasanius's battered form.
But before he could do more than take a single step towards the looming monster, a bloody, reeking figure vaulted onto an empty mortuary table and leapt for its terrible form. The figure held a long halberd above its head, with the wickedly hooked blade aimed towards the Savage Mortician's torso. He landed on the creature's back, driving the halberd deep into the monster's spine, the blade erupting in a flood of stinking, yellow fluids and gasses from its chest.
As terrible a wound as it was, the creature made no sound, but twisted on some internal axis to dislodge its gore-smeared attacker, while leaving the halberd embedded in its body.
'Uriel!' shouted Pasanius, hurling the golden-bladed sword towards him, and Vaanes was shocked to see that this wild, animalistic figure was none other than the former Ultramarines captain.
Ventris caught the sword on its downward arc, the blade flaring to life as he thumbed the activation rune. Without words, Uriel and Vaanes moved left and right, the Savage Mortician ripping the halberd from its body and tossing it aside, a blaring shriek of warning blasting from the vox-units on its throat.
'We have to finish this thing!' shouted Vaanes.
Ventris did not reply, darting in to slash at the Mortician's legs. It dodged back, stabbing for him with a roaring saw blade, longer than the largest eviscerator. Ventris rolled beneath its screaming arc and hacked his sword upwards through the arm, severing it in a wash of blue sparks.
Vaanes also leapt to attack, jumping onto the creature's arched back as it reared away from Uriel's blow. He hammered one clawed fist through its neck and held on with the other as the thrashing monster attempted to dislodge him. Hooks hanging from the structure surrounding the arena slammed into him, but he grimly held on, stabbing his claws through the Savage Mortician's body again and again.
The Savage Mortician shrieked in pain and he tumbled from the beast's back as Ventris chopped its convulsing legs from under it. Vaanes rolled away from its monstrous body as it thrashed and jerked on the ground, dying in agony as Ventris stabbed and stabbed and stabbed at its loathsome corpse.
'Ventris!' he called. 'It's dead. Come on, let's get the hell out of here!'
The Ultramarine stabbed the creature's chest one last time, taking huge, rasping breaths and looking more like one of the followers of the Blood God as he revelled in the slaughter he had just perpetrated.
'Uriel, come on!' urged Pasanius. 'We have to go now. There's bound to be more of these things coming!'
Ventris nodded, joining Vaanes and Pasanius and gathering up their weapons from where the Savage Morticians had dumped them. The bloody Space Marine sheathed his sword and hefted his bolter when Leonid shouted, 'Wait! Don't go, don't leave us!'
'Why?' asked Vaanes.
'Why?' snapped Ellard, amazed that such a question had even been asked. 'We'll die otherwise!'
'What's the use in freeing you? You're going to die anyway,' said Vaanes, turning away and gathering up his own guns.
'Uriel!' cried Leonid. 'You can't mean to leave us here? Please!'
Ventris said nothing for long seconds, his chest still heaving with the thrill and adrenaline of combat. Vaanes moved past him, but Ventris gripped his arm and locked eyes with him, slowly shaking his head.
'We leave no one behind,' he said firmly.
'We don't have time for this!' snapped Vaanes. 'They won't make it, but we might!'
'I think I was wrong about you, Vaanes,' said Uriel sadly. 'I thought you still had courage and honour, but your heart is dead inside. This place has destroyed your soul.'
'If we don't go now, we'll all die, Ventris, cut to bloody rags by more of those things!'
'Everyone who serves the Emperor dies bloody, Vaanes,' said Uriel. 'All we get to do is choose how and where. Every warrior deserves that, and I'm not leaving without them.'
Ventris turned and ran back into the arena, and with Pasanius's help, began freeing the pitiful remainder of their once-proud warrior band.
'If they don't kill you, follow my tracks!' called Vaanes. 'Sabatier said something about all the filth of Khalan-Ghol being flushed out into the mountains, so there's got to be a way out of here!'
Ventris nodded, too busy to answer, as the shrieks of approaching enemies drew nearer.
Cursing the Ultramarine for a fool, Vaanes set off into the depths of the cavern.
Uriel freed Leonid and Ellard, the coughing Guardsmen nodding their thanks as they clambered free and gathered up their own weapons. Soon they had freed the surviving members of the warrior band and set off into the macabre wilderness of the chamber, the great heartbeat and the screams of both victims and pursuers echoing weirdly from the rocky walls of the cavern.
Vaanes's trail was not hard to follow: the cloven bodies of mutants and overturned surgical tables clearly marking his passage through the cavern. The sounds of pursuit drew ever closer, their ragtag band weary to the point of collapse through a combination of sheer physical exhaustion and terror.
The sound of rushing fluids came from ahead and Uriel staggered into a vast, open sluice chamber filled with a multitude of filth-encrusted chutes and aqueducts that either pierced the walls of the cavern, rose up from below the ground or sluiced down from the upper tiers of the daemonculaba. The roaring noise of tonnes of excrement, waste matter and dead flesh rivalled the thudding of the Heart of Blood. Everything washed into a pool of stinking effluent that in turn poured through a colossal pipeway in the cavern wall.
A waterfall of filth, body parts, corpses and decomposing foetal matter poured from the cavern and away from the fortress. A way out…
Dead mutants littered the chamber, hacked in two by Vaanes's mad dash for freedom, and Uriel saw that there was only one way they would get out of this damnable place.
'We cannot fight them here! Into the tunnel!' he shouted and set off through the pool, wading thigh-deep in the bobbing detritus of surgical waste matter. He had no idea where the wide tunnel led or even if their situation would be improved by jumping in, but it had to be better than this.