Amazed that he still lived, he circled in the water, searching for other members of the warrior band.

'Pasanius!' he yelled. 'Vaanes!'

.His voice echoed from the dripping walls of the tunnel, but there was no response to his call and he despaired at seeing any survivors. Had they all been chopped to unrecognisable hunks of meat by the filtering blades of the tunnel?

Now that his immediate danger had passed, Uriel wondered where this tunnel eventually led. He had no way of knowing for sure, but felt that he must have travelled for many kilometres through these hellish passages. Where then did it empty?

Even as he formed the thought, he felt the speed of the water increase and saw a bright dot of white light up ahead. Once more, he heard the roaring crash of a waterfall, but this time there were no potentially life-saving archipelagos to cling to and Uriel was carried towards the tunnel mouth at greater and greater speed.

The white sky through the opening before him grew rapidly in size, until he was finally swept through into the open air.

Mountains soared above him and the dead sky spread its hateful whiteness above the dark rocks of Medrengard as Uriel was spat out of Khalan-Ghol hundreds of metres above the ground.

He tumbled downwards through the air towards a repulsive, scum-frothed pool, catching a glimpse of armoured warriors crawling from the water as he fell. The breath was driven from him by the impact as he slammed into the surface of the pool and he swallowed great mouthfuls of rank water.

Uriel spun through the murky liquid, kicking out, though he had no idea of which direction was up and which was down. He felt hands upon him and surrendered to their grip, feeling himself hauled upwards and dragged from the water. He retched, spewing huge mouthfuls of foamed, oily water and rolled onto his side as hands slapped him on the back.

He looked up to see the filthy, streaked face of Ardaric Vaanes, bleeding and battered.

'You made it out then?'

'Only just,' coughed Uriel, feeling as though he had done a dozen sparring sessions with Captain Agemman, leader of the Ultramarines veterans company. He sat up, feeling a measure of his strength returning with each stale breath he took. He took a moment to survey his surroundings, seeing that the deep pool sat in a high-sided basin of rock at the base of a tall peak of glistening rock, the water-bubbling and swirling with treacherous currents. One side of the basin was a sheer face of smooth rockcrete, a vertical slab of stone with the pouring outflow they had fallen from hundreds of metres above them.

He looked around to see who else had survived the horror of Khalan-Ghol, feeling a cold hate suffuse him as he saw that the escape from the dungeons of the Iron Warriors had cost them clear. Ardaric Vaanes had survived, as had two other Space Marines, a Wolf Brother named Svoljard and a White Consul, whose name Uriel did not know. He let out a great sigh of relief as he saw Pasanius sitting on the wet rocks at the side of the pool. Such was his joy that it took him a moment to realise that his sergeant's arm ended just above the elbow, that his forearm had been removed. A crusted mass of knotted scar tissue graced the stump of his arm, and though the wound must surely have been painful, Pasanius gave no sign of it.

'What happened to you?' he asked.

'Those monsters cut it off,' said Pasanius. 'Hurt like a bastard.'

Despite himself, Uriel laughed at such masterful understatement.

Leonid and Ellard were also amongst the living, but Uriel could see that Sergeant Ellard was grievously wounded, a terrible gash running across his stomach. Uriel was no Apothecary, but even he could see the wound would soon be mortal.

'You are a survivor, colonel.'

'I would be dead were it not for Pasanius,' said Leonid, cradling Ellard's head and staring at his friend's terrible wound. 'But I don't think…'

Uriel nodded in understanding and said, 'No… but I am glad you are alive.'

Putting the wounded sergeant from his mind for now, Uriel turned to face Ardaric Vaanes. 'Where are we? Do you know this place?'

'Aye,' said Vaanes, 'and we should be away quickly.'

'Why?'

'Because this is the hunting ground of the Unfleshed,' said Vaanes, looking to the ridges surrounding the pool.

Uriel felt a thrill of fear as he remembered the malformed, red-skinned monsters that had devoured the wretched inhabitants of the Iron Warriors' flesh camp.

'You're right,' he said, pushing himself unsteadily to his feet and gripping the filmy hilt of his golden sword. 'We need to get out of here.'

'Too late,' said Leonid, pointing towards the ridge that ran along the circumference of the basin. 'They're already here…'

Uriel followed Leonid's pointing finger to the top of the ridge and the breath caught in his throat as he saw the silhouetted forms of perhaps a hundred of the Unfleshed surrounding them.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Uriel watched the silhouetted shapes resolve into clarity as they descended the high slopes of the ridge above. They came quickly, scrambling their way over the jagged rocks with great speed despite their horrifically malformed limbs. Great intakes of breath heaved from wide chests as they scented their prey on the air and drooling jaws parted to reveal huge, yellowed fangs. Blackened claws slid from meaty fingers.

As hideously deformed as the beasts they had seen attack the flesh camp, these monsters were a similar horror of insane anatomies. Limbs turned inside out, pulsing organs grown and mutated through warped external skeletons, heads and chests fused with metastasised bone sinews, Siamese twins wrapped together with fleshy streamers and some with grossly swollen bellies that resembled the daemonic mothers that had brought them into being.

'From one death sentence to another,' observed Ardaric Vaanes sourly, unsheathing his lightning claws.

'Shut up, Vaanes!' snapped Uriel as he drew his sword and the blade leapt to fiery life. The members of the warrior band who had retained hold of their weapons drew them and readied themselves for battle. It would be an uneven fight, but it was a fight they would make nonetheless. Leonid left the wounded Ellard and picked up a jagged rock.

The Unfleshed closed the noose about them, grotesquely muscled and swollen limbs propelling them rapidly across the rocky floor of the basin, hungry for the taste of warm, bloody meat in their mouths. The nearest beast splashed into the foetid water of the pool, the noise of the waterfall from the outflow not enough to cover its bestial grunts of monstrous appetite. Its muscled forelimbs formed powerful fists as it prepared to attack. Uriel and the others formed a circle as the creatures loped forwards, ready to die on their feet, facing their deaths like warriors.

'You meat…' hissed the Unfleshed as it waded through the water towards them.

Uriel started in surprise, amazed the creature could speak. Vaanes had told him that these beasts were the by-blows of the Iron Warriors and until now he had believed them to be nothing more than failed experiments carried out by the Savage Morticians, similar to the creature, Sabatier.

But seeing them up close and having been fed to the wombs of the daemonculaba himself, he now knew better. He pictured the children being sutured into the daemon wombs alongside him and knew that such an imperfect method of hot-housing Chaos Space Marines must result in more failures than successes…

'Emperor's blood,' whispered Uriel as the realisation of his shared kinship with the Unfleshed sank in. He glanced up at the outflow pipe high on the rockface above them, understanding how these beasts came to be in the mountains.

He returned his attention to the Unfleshed as the beast reared up to its full height and bellowed its challenge. Uriel felt a burst of adrenaline dump into his system at the size of the thing. Its barrel chest was crisscrossed with imperfectly grafted folds of skin, pinned to its muscular frame by shards of bone and its head was a vast, hydrocephalic nightmare with multiple, yellowed eyes and a distended jaw filled with blunt fangs. Perfect for grinding his bones to digestible mush.