Vaanes held his hand out for a second longer before accepting that Uriel was not going to take it and dropped it to his side. He nodded. 'Some call us that, yes.'
Pasanius stood next to Uriel and said, 'Others call you traitor.'
Vaanes's eyes narrowed. 'Perhaps they do, but only once.'
The three Space Marines stared at one another in silence for long seconds before Vaanes shrugged and walked past them towards the wrecked camp.
'Wait.' said Uriel, turning and following the renegade. 'I don't understand. How is it you come to be here?'
'That, Uriel Ventris, is a long story.' replied Vaanes, as they passed through the gate into the blazing camp. 'But we should destroy this place and be gone from here soon. The Unfleshed are close and the scent of death will draw them here quickly.'
'What about all these people?' asked Pasanius, sweeping his arm around to encompass the weeping prisoners outside the camp.
'What about them?'
'How are we going to get them out of here?'
'We're not.' said Vaanes.
'You're not?' snapped Uriel. 'Then why did you come to rescue them?'
'Rescue them?' said Vaanes, gesturing to his warriors, who began methodically working their way around the warehouse buildings and placing explosive charges. 'We didn't come to rescue them, we came to destroy this camp and that is all. These people are nothing to me.'
'How can you say that? Look at them!'
'If you want to rescue them, then good luck to you, Uriel Ventris. You will need it.'
'Damn you, Vaanes, have you no honour?'
'None to speak of, no.' snapped Vaanes. 'Look at them, these precious people you want to save. They are worthless. Most do not survive to reach the skinning chasm anyway and the ones that do soon wish they had not.'
'But you can't just abandon them.' pressed Uriel.
'I can and I will.'
'What is this camp anyway?' asked Pasanius. 'A prison? A death camp?'
Vaanes shook his head. 'No, nothing so mundane. It is much worse than that.'
'Then what?'
Vaanes grabbed the handles of the roller shutter door of the nearest warehouse and hauled it open, saying, 'Why don't you find out?'
Uriel shared a wary glance with Pasanius as Ardaric Vaanes gestured that they should enter the building. A powerful reek of human waste gusted from within, mixed with the stench of rotted flesh and the stink of desperation. Flickering lights sputtered within and a low sobbing drifted on the stinking air.
Uriel stepped into the brick building, his eyes quickly adjusting to the gloom within. Inside, the warehouse was revealed to be a mechanised factory facility, with iron girders running the length of the building fitted with dangling chains and heavy pulley mechanisms on greased runners. Mesh cages on raised platforms ran along the left-hand side of the building, a mass of pale flesh filling each one, with gurgling pipes and tubes drooping from bulging feed sacks suspended from the roof.
A trough that reeked of human faeces ran beneath the cages, clogged and buzzing with waste-eating insects. Uriel covered his mouth and nose, even his prodigious metabolism struggling to protect him from the awful stench. He walked forwards, his boots ringing on the grilled floor as he approached the first cage.
Inside was a naked man, though to call him such was surely to stretch the term. His form was immense, bloated and flabby, and his skin had the colour and texture of bile, with a horrid, clammy gleam to it. Rusted clamps held his jaw open while ribbed tubing pulsed with a grotesque peristaltic motion as nutrients and foodstuffs laced with growth hormones were pumped into him as another tube carried away his waste. Coloured wires and augmetic plugs pierced the flesh of his sagging chest, no doubt artificially regulating his heart and preventing the cardiac arrest that his vast bulk should have long ago brought on.
His limbs were thick, doughy lumps of grey flesh, held immobile by tight snares of wire, his features lost in the flabby immensity of his skull, his eyes telling of a mind that had long since taken refuge in madness. Uriel felt an immense sadness and horror at the man's plight - what manner of monster could do this to a human being?
He moved on to the next cage, finding a similar sight within, this time a naked woman, her body also bloated and obscene, her belly scarred and ravaged by what looked like repeated and unnecessary surgery. Unlike the occupant of the previous cage, her eyes had a vestige of sanity and they spoke eloquently to Uriel of her torment.
He turned away, appalled at such hideousness, seeing that there were hundreds of such cages within this darkened hell. Repulsed beyond words, yet drawn to explore further, he crossed the chamber to see what lay on the other side of the building. More cages occupied the right-hand side of the building, but these were narrower, occupied by splayed individuals who looked like the poor wretches Uriel had once seen on a hive world that had been cut off from the agri world it had relied upon for foodstuffs. Starving men and women were hung from iron hooks, wired to machines that kept them in a hellish limbo between life and death as their body fat was forcibly sucked from them by hissing pumps and industrial irrigation equipment.
Their skin hung loose on their bodies and drooped from their emaciated frames in purulent sheets. Uriel now knew the fate of those in the cages behind him. Fattened up artificially so the skin might stretch to obscene proportions, then ultra-rapidly divested of their bulk that they might be skinned to provide swathes of fresh skin.
But why? Why would anyone go to such lengths to harvest such vast quantities of human skin? The answer eluded Uriel and he felt an all-consuming pity well up within him at the plight of these prisoners.
'You see?' said Ardaric Vaanes, standing behind him. There is nothing you can do for them. Freeing these... things is pointless and their death will be a blessed release.'
'Sweet Emperor.' whispered Uriel. 'What purpose does this cruelty serve?'
Vaanes shrugged. 'I do not know, nor do I care. The Iron Warriors have built dozens of these camps in the mountains over the last few months. They are of importance to the Iron Warriors, so I destroy them. The "why" of it is irrelevant.'
'Are all the buildings like this one?' asked Pasanius, his face lined with sorrow.
'They are.' confirmed Vaanes. 'We have already destroyed two such camps, and they were all like this. We must destroy it now, for if we do not, the Unfleshed will come and there will be a feasting and a slaughter the likes of which you cannot imagine.'
'I do not understand.' said Uriel. 'The Unfleshed? What are they?'
'Beasts from your worst nightmares.' said Vaanes. 'They are the by-blows of the Iron Warriors, abortions given life who escaped the vivisectoria of the Savage Morticians to roam the mountains. They are many and we are few. Now, come, it is time we were gone.'
Uriel nodded wearily, barely listening to Vaanes, and followed the renegade back out into the remains of the camp. Numbly he took in the scale of the camp: two dozen of these buildings filled it, each one a darkened hell for those farmed within them. For all that he hated to admit it, Vaanes was right, the sooner this facility and all within it were destroyed the better.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Galvanised by the urgency in the renegade's tone, Uriel quickly followed him through the camp as the first of the charges detonated with a hollow boom. Debris and flesh rained down as one of the human battery farms exploded, freeing the prisoners from their agonies in a fiery wash of release.
More charges blew and more of the infernal buildings collapsed inwards. Uriel prayed that the souls within them would forgive them and find their way to the Emperor's side. Flames and smoke billowed from the blazing wreckage of the camp as it was destroyed and the Space Marines ran for the safety of the mountains.
Uriel and Pasanius followed Ardaric Vaanes and his renegades southwards, climbing away from the camp as Uriel heard a mad chorus of howls from the mountains either side of them.
The breath caught in his throat and his pace slowed at the sight of the Unfleshed as th
ey shambled from the mountains towards the burning camp with a twisted, lop-sided gait. Monstrously huge, they were a riot of anatomies, a carnival of the grotesque with no two alike in size or shape. Hugely built and massively tall, they were grossly swollen, glistening red and wet, the rippling form of their exposed musculature out of all proportion to their bodies. Uriel saw that, over and above their enormity and lack of skin, every one of them was deformed in other nightmarish ways, resembling the leavings from a mad sculptor-surgeon's table.
Here was a creature with two heads, fused at the jawbone, with a quartet of cataracted eyes that had run together into one misshapen orb. Another bore a monstrous foetal twin from its stomach, withered, and metastasised arms gripping its parent tightly.
Yet another shambled downhill using piston-like arms, its legs atrophied to little more than grasping claws. A trio of beasts, perhaps related somehow, shared a similarity in their deformities, with each clad in flapping sheets of leathery skin. Their skulls were swollen and distended with long fangs, and bony crests erupted from their flesh all across their bodies.
But supreme amongst the tide of roaring horrors charging towards the camp was a gargantuan beast that led them. Taller and broader than all the others, its physique was greater even than the largest of its monstrous followers, its lumpen head hunched low between its shoulders. Though some distance from Uriel, its skinless features bore the unmistakable gleam of feral intelligence, and the thought of such a creature possessing even the barest glimmer of self-awareness repulsed Uriel beyond reason.
'Come on, Ultramarine.' shouted Vaanes. 'No time to gawp at the monsters!'
Uriel ignored Vaanes and stared at the creatures as they smashed their way through the razorwire fence, unheeding of the barbs that tore at their red-wet bodies. Were they impervious to pain, wondered Uriel?
'What are they?' he said.
'I told you.' shouted back Vaanes. 'Come on! There's enough meat down there to keep them busy for a while, but once they've eaten their fill, they'll try to hunt us. If you don't come now, we will leave you here for them.'
Uriel continued to stare at the grisly spectacle below with morbid fascination, watching as the Unfleshed ripped their way through the ruins of the warehouses, tossing aside massive girders like matchwood and gorging on the scorched meat within. Horrific sounds of snapping bone and tearing flesh sounded from below as the Unfleshed fell upon the prisoners who had remained outside the camp when the renegades had first attacked.
Most died in the first instants of the attack, torn to pieces in a frenzy by the Unfleshed. Others were devoured alive, limbs and slabs of meat flying as the monsters fought for every morsel, their terrible roars of loathsome appetite echoing from the mountains.
Pasanius gripped his arm and said, 'We have to go, Uriel!'
'We let them die.' said Uriel darkly. We abandoned them. We might as well have killed them ourselves.'
'We couldn't have saved them, but we can avenge them.'
'How?' said Uriel.
'By living.' answered Pasanius.
Uriel nodded and turned away from the hideous spectacle below, shutting out the roaring feasting and orgiastic howls of pleasure, and feeling a part of his heart grow colder and harder as he left these people to die.
Khalan-Ghol was in flames. Its spires were in ruins and its bastions pounded to dust by the relentless bombardment. Square kilometres burned in the fires of Berossus's shelling, but it was still the merest fraction of the scale of the fortress. Unnatural darkness swathed the fortress, black clouds of lightning-shot smoke hanging low and blotting out the dead whiteness of the sky for leagues around. Snaking kilometres of trenches topped with razorwire surrounded the darkened peak, newly constructed redoubts, bunkers, pillboxes and towers whose mighty guns deafeningly shelled Honsou's fastness, strobing the landscape with their red fire.
Belching manufactorum had been erected on the plains and the pounding clang of industry was a constant refrain in the air. Glowing, orange-lit forges constandy churned out shells, guns and the materiel of war, and Honsou knew that their production rates would put the finest Imperial forge world to shame. He saw the huge silhouettes of Titans on the horizon, their diabolical forms dwarfing everything around them. They could do little but act as gun platforms for now, the leviathans unable to climb the mountainous slopes of Khalan-Ghol until the massive ramp Berossus was building was complete.
He and a hand-picked cadre of his finest warriors clambered down the jagged slopes towards the forces arrayed below them. Honsou slid down a fallen pile of broken boulders, rotted, skeletal arms jutting from the cracks between them, but whether they belonged to one of his warriors or one of his foes he neither knew nor cared.
Berossus had been nothing if not thorough in his attentions: the lower bastions were gone, shelled until it was as though they had never existed, and the outer ring of forts had fallen before his onslaught.
Tens of thousands had already died in the battle, but Berossus had not been so stupid as to waste his best warriors in the battle thus far. Chaff, slaves and rabble bound to the service of Chaos, had charged his walls only to be met and hurled back by fire and steel.
Combined with the soldiery of Toramino's grand company, the two warsmiths had enough manpower to drag down the walls of Khalan-Ghol eventually: it was simply a matter of time.
Time Honsou did not intend to give them.
'Berossus is a fool.' he had said, when broaching the plan that now saw him cautiously approaching the sentry lines of the enemy's furthest advanced trenches. 'We will take the fight to him.'
'Beyond the walls?' asked Obax Zakayo.
'Aye.' replied Honsou. 'Right to the very heart of his army.'
'Madness.' said Zakayo.
'Exactly.' grinned Honsou. 'Which is why Berossus will never expect it. You know Berossus! To him, sieges are simply a matter of logistics. As a former vassal of Forrix, I would have thought you would have appreciated that, Zakayo.'
'I do, but to leave the protection of our walls...'
'Berossus is a slave to the mechanics of a siege. This course of action results in that result - that's how he thinks. He is too hidebound by the grand tradition of battle from the ancient days to think beyond the purity of an escalade, to expect the unexpected.' .
'It has not failed him before.' pointed out Obax Zakayo.
'He hasn't fought me before.' said Honsou.
The trenches ahead were lit by drumfires, and the clang of digging shovels and the rumble of earth-moving machines was all but obscured by the thunder of guns.
'Onyx.' whispered Honsou, unsheathing his black bladed axe. 'Go.'
Onyx nodded, a fluid shadow and all but invisible in the darkness, slithering on his belly towards the trenchline, his outline blurring and merging with the night. Obax Zakayo said, 'If he is discovered, we will all die here.'
'Then we die.' snarled Honsou. 'Now be silent or I will kill you myself.'
Suitably chastened, Obax Zakayo said nothing more as he heard the sound of gurgling cries and slashing blades from ahead. Honsou saw a fountain of blood spurt above the line of the trench and knew that it was now safe to approach.
He crawled to where Onyx had cut a path through the razorwire and dropped into the trench. A score of corpses filled the trench and adjacent dugout, blood, glistening and oily in the firelight, coating the walls and seeping between the well laid duckboards. Each body lay sprawled at an unnatural angle, as though every bone had been broken. Each bore a long gash up the centre of their backs where their spinal column had been ripped out. Onyx himself stood immobile in the centre of the trench, slowly sheathing bronze claws into the grey flesh of his hands as the silver fire of his veins burned even brighter than normal. The daemon within him revelled in the slaughter and allowed the human part of him to return to the surface once more.
'Good kills.' said Honsou as his Iron Warriors dropped into the trench, spreading out and securing their entry point. He ran over to the communications tren
ch at the back of this widened area and ducked his head around the corner. Just as he had expected, he could only see partway along it, the trench following a standard zigzagging course. Further down its length, he could see red-liveried soldiers and slaves.
'Have you no imagination, Berossus?' he chuckled to himself. 'You make this too easy.'
He turned away and gathered his warriors about him. 'It is time. Let's go, and remember, as far as anyone here knows, we are loyal Iron Warriors of Berossus. Let no one challenge that.'
His warriors nodded and, with Honsou in the lead, they set off down the communication trench. They walked with the confident, easy swagger of warriors who know they are without equal, and all the human and mutant labourers of Berossus abased themselves before them as they passed.
They passed dugouts filled with twisted mutant creatures gathered in chanting groups around shrines to the Dark Gods, their mutterings overseen by sorcerers in golden robes. None questioned them, none had any reason to, honoured to have ancient warriors of Chaos pass by. Honsou saw bright arc lights suspended on baroque towers of iron that reared into the night and were hung with all manner of bloody trophies. Chanting groups of robed figures surrounded them, Honsou stopped and asked, 'Zakayo, what are these towers? This doesn't look like something Berossus would do.'
'I am not sure.' replied Obax Zakayo. 'I have never seen their like.'
'They seek to break the walls of Khalan-Ghol with sorcery.' said Onyx. 'The towers are saturated with mystical energy. I can feel it, and the daemon within me bathes in it.'
'What?' hissed Honsou, suddenly wary. 'Are their magicks strong enough to overcome the kabal and the Heart of Blood?'
'No.' said Onyx. 'Not even close. There is great power here, but the Heart of Blood has endured for an eternity and no power wielded by a mortal can defeat it.'
Honsou nodded, reassured that the mystical defences of his fortress would hold. He glanced at the towers.
'This smells of Toramino.' he said. 'Berossus would not have thought of it.'
Warhammer - Ultramarines 03 - Dead Sky, Black Sun (McNeill, Graham) Page 10
