'He wasn't alone,' said Uriel. 'You were with him at the end.'

'It's not right though,' whispered Leonid. 'To have survived so much and then to die like this.'

'A man seldom has the choice in the manner of his death,' said Uriel, 'It is the manner in which he lives that is the mark of a warrior. I did not know Ellard well, but I believe he will find a place at the Emperor's side.'

'I hope so,' agreed Leonid. 'Oh, and you're wrong, by the way.'

'About what?'

'About having to get back into Khalan-Ghol on your own. I will come with you.'

Uriel felt his admiration for Leonid soar and said, 'You are an exceptional man, colonel, and I accept your pledge of courage. Though you should know that Vaanes is almost certainly right, this will, in all likelihood, be the death of us.'

Leonid shrugged. 'I don't care any more. I have been living on borrowed time ever since the 383rd was ordered to Hydra Cordatus, so I plan to spit in death's eye before he takes me.'

A slow clapping sounded and Uriel's anger flared as he saw Vaanes sneering at them. The renegade Raven Guard shook his head.

'You are all fools,' he said. 'I will say a prayer for you if we don't get killed by these monsters.'

'Be silent!' hissed Uriel. 'I will not have any prayers from the likes of you, Vaanes. You are not a Space Marine any more, you are not even a man. You are a coward and a traitor!'

Vaanes surged to his feet, hate flaring in his violet eyes and his lightning claws snapped from his gauntlet. 'I told you that people never called me that twice!'

Before blood could be spilled, a great shadow fell across the company and the mighty form of the Lord of the Unfleshed blotted out the light. A coterie of hideously deformed creatures accompanied him, and a hunchbacked monster with its head fused into its spine limped towards Ellard's corpse.

It dipped a long talon into the sergeant's torn belly and raised its bloody digit to its slit of a mouth.

'Deadflesh,' it said. 'Still warm.'

The Lord of the Unfleshed nodded its thick head. 'Take it. Meat for Tribe.'

'No!' shouted Leonid, as the hunchback effortlessly lifted the sergeant's body.

Pasanius reached out with his remaining arm and held Leonid back, hissing, 'No, don't. That's not your friend any more, it's just the flesh he wore. He's with the Emperor and there's nothing these monsters can do to him now. You will only get yourself killed needlessly.'

'But they are going to eat him!'

'I know,' said Uriel, standing before the struggling man. 'But you have pledged yourself to our death oath and if you break it, you break it for all of us.'

'What?' spluttered Leonid.

'Aye,' nodded Uriel. 'We are all bound to this quest now. Pasanius, me and now you.'

Leonid looked set to argue, but Uriel could see that the fight had gone out of the man as he realised the pact he had made with the Ultramarines. He nodded numbly and his struggles ceased as the Lord of the Unfleshed loomed above them.

'You come now,' said the monster.

'Where?' said Uriel.

'To the Emperor. He decide whether you die or not.'

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Emperor's armour was filthy, stained with the residue of uncounted millennia of industry, the eagle on his breastplate a series of rusted bronze strips. Beaten metal shoulder guards hung from his mighty shoulders and a pair of beatific wings of stained metal flared from his back. Over twenty metres tall and suspended by thick, iron chains within the great pit at the centre of the manufactory, it was a creation of supreme devotion.

Uriel felt like a child against its immensity, remembering the first time he had seen a statue of the Emperor in the Basilica Konor on Calm. Though the statue there had been masterfully carved from beautifully veined marble quarried from the deep wells of Calth, this one - for all its crudity - was no less impressive.

The Unfleshed's Emperor hung over the blackness of the pit, its armour and limbs fashioned from whatever scrap and machinery had been left behind when the manufactory had been abandoned.

Whereas some zealous preachers of the Ministorum might find it blasphemous that such hideous creatures had created such a crude idol of the Emperor, Uriel found it curiously touching that they had done so.

'May the Emperor preserve us!' hissed Pasanius as he laid eyes upon the suspended statue.

'Well we're about to find out,' replied Uriel as he realised his first impression had been correct when he had felt like a child before this idol.

Who knew how long the Unfleshed had lived beneath the surface of Medrengard or what their memories were of the time before their abduction and implantation within the horror of the daemonculaba?

But one thing was clear: of the innocent children who had been transformed into the Unfleshed, one memory had survived - constant and enduring: the immortal and beneficent Emperor of Mankind.

Through all the vileness that had befallen the Unfleshed, they still remembered the love of the Emperor and Uriel felt an immense sadness at their fate. No matter that they had been horrifically altered to become monsters, they still remembered the Emperor and fashioned his image to watch over them.

Uriel and the others were pushed roughly to the edge of the great pit as the Unfleshed painfully drew near. Uriel saw that there were hundreds of them - many unable to walk on their mutated legs, corkscrewed bones or fleshy masses that had once been limbs, and so were helped by their brethren.

'God-Emperor, look at them!' said Vaanes. 'How can such things be allowed to live?'

'Shut up, Vaanes,' said Uriel sadly. 'They are kin to you and I, do not forget that. The flesh of the Emperor is within them.'

'You can't be serious,' said Vaanes. 'Look at them. They're evil.'

'Are they? I'm not so sure.'

A ripple of hunger and self-loathing went round the pit as the Lord of the Unfleshed turned and drew himself up to his full height. He reached back and pulled Uriel forwards, lifting him easily from the ground. Powerless to resist, Uriel felt the ground beneath him fall away as he was dangled over the bottomless pit.

'Smelled mother's meat on you,' roared the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'You washed out from mountain of iron men, fell from the Wall. But you not look like us. Why you have skin?'

Uriel's mind raced as he tried to guess what response would not see him cast into the pit. The yellowed eyes of the monster bored into his and Uriel saw a desperate longing within them, a childlike need for… for what?

'Yes!' he yelled. 'We came from the mountain of the Iron Warriors, but we are their enemies.'

'You are Unwanted too? Not friends with iron men?'

'No!' cried Uriel, shouting so that the Unfleshed around the pit could hear him. 'We hate the iron men, came to destroy them!'

'Saw you before,' snarled the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'Saw you kill iron men in mountains. We took much meat then.'

'I know. I saw.'

'You kill iron men?'

'Yes!'

'Mother's meat on you, yes?'

Uriel nodded as the creature spoke again. 'Iron men's flesh mothers made us ugly like this, but Emperor not hate us like iron men, he still love us. Iron men try to kill us. But we strong and not die, though dying be good thing for us. Pain stop, Emperor make pain go away and make us whole again.'

'No,' said Uriel, finally understanding a measure of this creature that, for all its massive strength and colossal size, was but a child within its monstrously swollen skull. It spoke with a child's simplicity and clarity of the Emperor's love, and as Uriel looked into its eyes, he saw its deathly craving to atone for its hideousness.

'The Emperor loves you,' he said. 'He loves all his children.'

'Emperor speaks to you?' said the Lord of the Unfleshed.