Nor was the fortress attacked only by sorcerous powers, for Toramino's grand artillery batteries were finally unleashed to bring explosive ruin upon the mountain of their master's enemy. Thousands of tonnes of ordnance rained down on Khalan-Ghol, smashing apart the very mountain itself.

Huge columns of soldiers and an entire grand company of Iron Warriors, led by Toramino himself, marched upon Khalan-Ghol, a host of thousands that would destroy whatever of the half-breed's force might survive the furious assault now wracking the mountain. Khalan-Ghol's final doom was upon it.

Uriel felt a familiar churning sensation in his stomach, hearing a chiming, splintering sound of glass breaking, and a terrible sensation of powerlessness gripped him. He experienced sickening vibrations deep in his bones as a restlessness rippled through the ground. A powerful vision of jagged stumps of bone jutting through the ground gripped him, and a mad howling built from the air, piercing and vile, with an unimaginable thirst for revenged.

He blinked as a fiercely painful sensation built within his skull, as though hot needles were being pushed out through his eyeballs.

'Oh, no…' he whispered, as he realised what was happening, and looked up into the face of Leonid, whose gaze betrayed the same knowledge that had just come to Uriel.

'God-Emperor, no,' wept Leonid. 'Not again, please no, not again!'

'What is it?' said Pasanius.

Before Uriel could answer, they heard the Heart of Blood roar in sudden awareness, sounding like a cry of unexpected pleasure.

'My old nemesis…' it rasped as the very air in the chamber became saturated with an electric tang of ozone and sulphur. Uriel felt his stomach heave and gripped onto the side of the bulldozer as the Hall of the Savage Morticians seemed to… shift…

The ground now felt soft and loamy underfoot, a weeping red fluid seeping upwards where his weight had forced it from the dark earth. Uriel looked up, already knowing what he would see.

Above him, a lacerated crimson sky, flecked with cancerous, melanoma clouds boiled, wheeling carrion creatures circling and awaiting their chance to feed. A familiar mad screaming, like the wails of the damned, echoed painfully, but it was nothing compared to the misery he had already seen in this place, and he pushed it aside.

Fleshless, bony hands reached up through the dark earth and Leonid kept his eyes shut tightly, holding onto Larana Utorian. Rippling spirals of reflective light coiled from the walls of the chamber, twisting the image of the rock behind like a warped lens. The walls seemed to stretch, as though being sucked into an unseen vortex behind, Until there was nothing left but a rippling veil of impenetrable darkness, a tunnel into madness ringed with screaming faces.

Brazen rail tracks coated in crusted blood ran from the previously impermeable walls of the chamber, streamers of multi-coloured matter oozing from the cracked rock.

With no eternal barrier to stop it from reaching its hated rival, the Omphalos Daemonium manifested within the walls of Khalan-Ghol.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Roaring from the mouth of the tunnel like a dark force of nature, the Omphalos Daemonium thundered into the Halls of the Savage Morticians. The armoured leviathan's mad structure was doubly hateful to Uriel now that a suspicion that had been nagging at the back of his head was horribly confirmed.

'It knew…' he snarled.

'Knew what?' said Pasanius, shouting to be heard over the howling roar of the Omphalos Daemonium's arrival. Uriel ducked back as the swirling red tendrils of smoke that were the hallmarks of the Sarcomata slashed past, carried onwards by the passing of the colossal daemon engine. It came to a halt before a newly-raised platform of bloodstained rockcrete with the sound of squealing iron and brazen roars, hissing souls escaping from its billowing stacks in shrieking waves of pain.

'It knew we would try to defy it,' said Uriel, sick with the realisation that they had been used. 'It knew we would try and destroy the Heart of Blood.'

'Then why did it send us here?'

'Because now that the psychic barrier Obax Zakayo spoke of is down, it can manifest within Khalan-Ghol. Remember the tale Seraphys told us? These daemons are ancient enemies and now the Omphalos Daemonium will wreak its vengeance upon the Heart of Blood for trapping it within that daemon engine.'

Pasanius turned as the Heart of Blood stepped from the crimson lake, its slaughter of Honsou's psykers complete and the promise of battle with its ancestral foe drawing it towards the seething engine. The brazen machine heaved with power and red mist writhed around its thick plates as the heavy door to the interior heaved open and the Slaughterman stepped onto the platform, the thick, clanking iron plates of his armour dripping with a black, oily residue.

The daemonic Iron Warrior was as huge as Uriel remembered it, its bulk made all the more massive by the extra plates of armour welded and bound to its fabric over the millennia. It still wore its charred and blackened apron, stiffened with ancient blood and reeking of cooked flesh and blood.

A crown of dark horns sprouted from its battered helmet and Uriel was not surprised to see that it still carried its murderous, iron-hafted billhook, the blade broad and crusted with aeons of bloodshed.

The Heart of Blood roared with mirth as the Slaughterman stepped into the Hall of the Savage Morticians.

'Is this what you are reduced to?' it bellowed. 'To wear the flesh of your gaoler?'

'Only live flesh left to me,' barked the Slaughterman. 'Enough words. I rip your warpself apart!'

The Heart of Blood broadened its stance and raised its enormous axe, cracking its whip and roaring its bloody challenge to the Slaughterman. Thick red tendrils of smoke coalesced around the gigantic Iron Warrior, becoming solid things of dead flesh and immaterial energies.

'Sarcomata!' snarled Uriel, seeing the featureless daemon creatures that had carried them aboard the Omphalos Daemonium's horrific daemon engine. Eight of them attended their daemonic master, each wearing a grey, featureless boiler-suit and knee high boots with rusted greaves protecting their shins. They carried knives, hooks and saws and, from the loathsome snapping of their jaws, looked eager to use them.

Their disgusting faces were red and raw, like the Unfleshed, but where the Unfleshed still possessed qualities that were human, even if they were only rudimentary, the Sarcomata were utterly flensed of the mask of humanity. Their eyeless faces were crisscrossed with crude stitches above their fanged mouths, and their narrow, questing tongues licked the air.

Uriel expected some form of retort from the Heart of Blood, but words were not part of the equation when it came to daemons of the Blood God. The Heart of Blood cracked its whip again, the barbed tip scoring across the Slaughterman's chest in a slash of sparks. The iron-armoured daemon roared and hurled itself from the platform and the Heart of Blood leapt to meet it, the two mighty creatures hammering together in a blazing corona of fiery warp energy.

Machinery was crushed and great, iron pillars were smashed aside as the two powerful daemons tore at one another with a hate that had burned for uncounted aeons. Deafening shrieks of diabolical weapons echoed as the cavern shook with the violence of their battle.

Uriel hunkered down against the bulldozer, realising that more than just the daemonic battle was destroying this place. He felt a bass thump, thump of impacts against the rock and smiled to himself as he knew what was happening.

'Honsou's fortress is under yet another bombardment,' he shouted.

Pasanius looked doubtful. 'The shelling must be incredible to be felt this deep.'