by Henry Zou
She did not feel fear – only indignity. Snarling, she stalked through the ruins. Occasionally she stopped to crack her whip meaningfully, with a belligerent pop. It was a declaratory snap and most knew to run when they heard it.
‘You can’t hide from me,’ she sang.
She had always been the predator. Ever since her young maiden years, Moribeth had accompanied her cousins on slave raids. This was second nature to her. In her free hand, hidden behind her back, was a neural blade gifted to her by her kabal’s mistress. The poison it secreted overloaded the pain nerves in living creatures. She pitied anything that crossed her path.
‘Come out, come out,’ she cooed.
‘Here I am.’ The voice sounded like slabs of rockcrete grinding together. A shadow fell across her.
Moribeth turned and her confidence dissipated. She slashed her neural whip low, but the tip snapped listlessly as it connected with ceramite.
With a speed that surprised her, the horned warrior slapped the top of her head with his palm. There was a pop as her spine compressed and vertebrae slipped out of joint. Moribeth died still believing herself a predator.
Vhaal, second-born son of Gil’Ghorad’s Kabal, heard the death-screams of his fellows. They were loud, even though he was inside the road train’s sealed interior. The sound rattled the iron walls, producing an eerie, acoustic vibration. In some parts, the train’s ancient glass windows had been replaced by wooden frames with hand-painted paper awnings. The paper fluttered fitfully, the watercoloured scenery shaking ever so slightly.
Vhaal had been skinning trophies with a scalpel when he heard it, but the sound spooked him. Carefully he placed the scalpel on the floor and pulled a blanket over his project.
With a snap of his hands, wrist blades swung out from his vambraces like unfolding guillotines. He retrieved his splinter rifle, propped up against the iron carriage, and hopped down the short rungs. Outside he could see no signs of life. Not his father’s soldiers, and certainly not plainsmen.
‘Show yourself!’ he commanded.
He knew something was out there. He began to fire his splinter rifle. The gun’s purr grew into a shrill whine as it spat a tight spread of toxic barbs. It threw up a line of powdered dirt to his front, knocking down the remains of a painted hand cart.
‘Come and face me! I am second-born!’ he howled.
Pride and familial name were things most fiercely venerated in his society. Vhaal imagined himself to look quite intimidating. Hooked armour curling on his skeletal frame, swing-blades creaking from his forearms, he was in the full regalia of a dark eldar raider. His hair was brought up into an oiled topknot, laced through with silver filigree and virgin sinew. He wore a cape of sewn skin fashionably off one shoulder, stitched together from the faces of vanquished foes. He was second-born of Gil’Ghorad.
‘Face me!’ Vhaal howled, raising his arms into the air in challenge.
A muzzle flashed in the distance. Low and muffled. The bolter’s bark.
Vhaal, second son of the kabal, fell unceremoniously through a screen paper window, his feet stiffening awkwardly in the air. He was already dead before he landed, felled by a single shot.
Sindul hissed, baring his teeth. He crouched low on his haunches, his arms spread for balance, lacerator gloves rearing like coiled serpents.
The mon-keigh warrior appeared indifferent to his threats. He walked into and through the caprid fence that separated them, splintering the wood with his shins and thighs.
‘Catch me to kill me!’ Sindul spat. He leapt up against the sheer rock wall behind him, limbs splayed against the surface, and began to scarper up the vertical drop. He used his lacerator gloves, dragging the hooked claws of his fists for purchase. He shot up the wall like a rodent, scaling twelve metres in a matter of seconds before bounding backwards into the air.
A bolter round missed him as he leapt. He landed behind the mon-keigh, slashing his lacerators as he sailed overhead. But the horned warrior was faster than Sindul had estimated. It was a grave error. The mon-keigh spun with practiced fluidity, pouncing with all the weight and drive of a quarter-tonne primate. Sindul rolled aside, but not fast enough. The mon-keigh snagged him with its paw and dragged him to the ground by his ankles. Sindul tried to regain his gyroscopic balance, but his thin ankle was locked in a hammer grip of ceramite.
‘I don’t need to kill you yet,’ growled the Traitor Marine as Sindul thrashed like a hooked fish.
Dragging his splinter pistol free from its chest holster, the dark eldar began to fire. The first shot hammered a toxic splinter into heavy chest plate. The mon-keigh dodged the second with a little dip of his head.
‘Stop, now.’
With that, the mon-keigh backhanded him with steel-bound hands. Sindul’s head snapped violently off to the right and he blacked out.
When the dark eldar came to, he began to curse in his sepulchral tongue.
He was bound, his wrists anchored by heavy chain that looped up to his neck and head. A muslin bag used to ferment milk curds was wrapped around his face and the chain tightened around it, biting into the flesh of his cheeks and forehead. The bag reeked strongly of sour, human smells that disturbed him.
When the captive tried to move, Barsabbas placed a boot on his chest.
‘Tell me your name, darkling.’
The captive tried to writhe. Barsabbas stepped harder. The pressure elicited a mild curse from the struggling captive.
‘I am Sindul,’ he gasped as the air was pushed from his lungs.
Barsabbas knelt, peering closely at the dark eldar, studying the odd shapes of his insectoid carapace. Everything about the creature was alien, as if the angles and planes of his attire were beyond the conceptual design of a human mind. He did not belong on Hauts Bassiq.
‘Why do you trespass, darkling?’
‘I will not speak to you,’ Sindul replied, his words muffled by the muslin.
‘That is not your choice to make.’
‘There are others,’ Sindul began. ‘There are more of us. We will come for you.’
‘I’ve made them all dead, you know,’ Barsabbas replied flatly. He stood up and walked to where a row of thin, frail corpses lay amidst the ash and charred earth. The carrion flies were already swarming over their glazed eyes and open mouths. ‘I count fourteen. There are no more. Is that true?’ Barsabbas asked.
The fact was confirmed by Sindul’s silence.
Barsabbas walked back to his captive. ‘You will talk,’ he said. He released and slid open a hatch on his thigh plate, revealing half a dozen steel syringes, stacked like rocket pods.
Upon hearing the metallic click, Sindul began to laugh. ‘You can try to torture me. But you are truly of diminished wit if you try,’ the dark eldar declared in stilted Low Gothic. ‘We relish pain.’
Barsabbas already knew this. The dark eldar species was entirely devoted to the cult of pleasure. Psychologically, they were nihilistic, pleasure-driven and irrational. Heightened sensations such as pain would only elevate them to a state of adrenal euphoria. For once, violence would yield nothing.
‘Do your worst,’ Sindul goaded, almost tauntingly.
Barsabbas extracted a syringe from its sheath. It was a barbarous thing, a pneumatic-gauge needle designed to punch through the thick skin of a Space Marine.
‘This is tetrotoxillyn. An anaesthetic, a nerve-killing extract. My constitution inhibits the majority of chemicals from affecting my body. But this...’ Barsabbas said, holding up the syringe. ‘A dose of one-sixteenth is potent enough to serve as a local anaesthetic for a Space Marine. One quarter dose is enough to cause permanent paralysis in a young adult human.’
‘We may not be robust in stature, but I assure you, we eldar are very chemically resilient,’ Sindul retorted.
He was right, and Barsabbas knew this too. The dark eldar, despite their frail appea
rance, had a certain tolerance for toxins and chemicals, a tolerance built up through a dark culture of substance abuse. By his calculations, Barsabbas would need to quadruple the human dose.
Without warning, Barsabbas wrenched his captive up by the head, exposing his neck, and drilled the needle deep into the carotid artery. He injected a fractional dose, a mere droplet.
‘This is an ion channel blocker. It is not meant for non-Astartes. It will stop your brain from receiving nerve signals. Can you feel numbness running down your spinal column? It will only be temporary but it signifies the early stages of nerve damage,’ Barsabbas said.
Sindul screamed. He began to thrash, his legs windmilling for purchase as Barsabbas restrained him with a knee on his back.
‘I could inject you with more. A triple dose and you may begin losing finger dexterity. I’m afraid that would be permanent.’ Barsabbas placed the cold steel of the pneumatic needle against Sindul’s neck. ‘I ask you again – what are you doing here?’
His face pressed into the soupy clay and dung, the dark eldar finally relented. ‘Collecting slaves. Nothing more,’ Sindul spat.
Barsabbas detected the slightest tremor of panic in his voice, but also defiance. The dark eldar were a notoriously proud race and dignity meant more to them than death.
‘There’s so much more,’ Barsabbas said, injecting him again. ‘You are in league with the Death Guard.’
Sindul writhed in numb agony. Although the dose of anaesthetic was considerably less than a Space Marine’s standard amount for field application, it was enough to cause him significant nerve trauma. Already Sindul’s left arm had begun to twitch involuntarily.
‘They allowed us here. They let us take the slaves.’
‘Your reward was to plunder the land? Our land? What right have the Death Guard to reward you with property that was not theirs? These slaves are our slaves,’ Barsabbas barked, withdrawing the needle.
‘Mercy. Mercy. Do not inject me any more,’ Sindul whimpered.
Barsabbas ignored him, his attention already drifting away from the pathetic thing writhing in his grasp. The notion that the capricious dark eldar raiders would ally with the Sons of Nurgle was monumental. It did not bode well for the Blood Gorgons. He would need answers. Almost carelessly, Barsabbas began to pump anaesthetic into his captive.
The dark eldar’s pupils dilated with chemical shock.
‘We are mercenaries, no more! We want nothing of the fight between you and your brethren.’
‘Why are you here?’ Barsabbas roared, suddenly forceful. The needle snapped. He unsheathed a new one.
Sindul shook his head. ‘I can’t...’
‘If I overdose you, it will cause permanent muscular paralysis. You will not feel anything. You will not move anything. You will become a slab of meat. Imprisoned within your own body until you wither away.’
At this, Sindul began to howl, like an animal caged before slaughter.
That was no mere threat for a dark eldar. They were a long-lived race, and that could mean thousands of years, trapped within his own unresponsive body, unable to move or feel. During the Chirurgeon’s initial experiments a slave subject had been induced into a paralytic coma for twenty-two years, unable to even open his eyes. The slave had gone mad, of course. But several thousand years of physical and visual deprivation…
A dark eldar could suffer no worse fate than that.
‘We were paid by a person called Muhr.’
‘Muhr? What does Muhr know of the Plague Marines?’
‘I don’t know. But they are allies, in league. They paid for the head of Gammadin, they needed a neutral third party to dispose of your Champion. That was us.’
Barsabbas considered injecting the entire tenfold dose into the creature then and there.
‘You killed Gammadin? How could you kill Gammadin?’ Barsabbas asked accusingly. He kicked the dark eldar dismissively, as if disgusted by his lie.
‘Not I! Not I! The kabal disposed of him. I know nothing of that! I am only here to claim the kabal’s reward. Slavery rights on Bassiq.’
‘The right to harvest slaves from our territory? You slew Gammadin for that?’ Barsabbas was possessed by sudden fury. He punched the needle into the dark eldar’s wrist. Sindul would never again feel anything in his right hand. No pain, nor cold, nor heat or any sensation.
‘That is my luchin hand! I will never ply my craft again!’ shrieked the captive.
‘And I will take your other hand for good measure,’ Barsabbas stated calmly.
As his captive began to hyperventilate, almost choking in discomfort, Barsabbas sat down and began to think. Muhr, the dark eldar and a cult of Nurgle were in allegiance; they were somehow the source of strife on Hauts Bassiq.
‘What did the dark eldar have to gain?’
‘As I said. We took slaves. We are not a large kabal. We only sealed our part of the deal in disposing of Gammadin. Hauts Bassiq means nothing to us, except for raiding rights granted by the Plague Marines.’
‘Rights. They have no rights.’
‘They say Hauts Bassiq is their world.’
‘You must have contact with them then. Where are they?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where?’ Barsabbas said. He approached Sindul and placed the cold steel of the syringe against the nape of his neck.
He felt Sindul’s shoulders slump and his body sag in defeat. ‘North. They are gathering for a great war to the north. The native mon-keigh prepare for war against the decaying ones.’
War. That was exactly what Barsabbas needed to hear. War meant the forces of Nurgle would amass. It was not much, but it was better than nothing.
‘Good. You will take me there.’ With that, Barsabbas hauled on his captive’s neck chain, dragging him up like a disobedient dog. ‘We go north.’
The shame of defeat was a heavy mantle and one that Barsabbas could not shake off. He stood in the heat but did not seek shelter. He did not deserve it. The discomfort reminded him of his mistake. Everything he did reminded him of his mistake.
The captive was staked down a distance away, under the shade of a lean-to, a blanket that was secured to a carriage window and pegged to the dirt. As much as Barsabbas would have preferred staking him out under the sun, for now he needed the creature alive. His leash chain was bound to a carriage wheel and his head was secured with yet more chain. Every so often, the captive tested his patience with whimpers of pain.
Barsabbas ignored the dark eldar’s pleas and drew a long-distance voxsponder, a small, hand-cranked device, from a flak pouch on his waist. He only logged several words into the machine, for the micro-device could not hold much in its memory and the transmission had to travel far.
‘The soldiery of Nurgle has taken Hauts Bassiq, and Muhr has sold us to them. Muhr has sold Bassiq to them. He has betrayed us.’
It was a simple message. There could be no mistaking it. Even in his desperate state, Barsabbas remembered to encrypt the message for Sabtah only. He could not be sure that any other Blood Gorgon could be trusted.
By nightfall, the tiny voxsponder had received a return transmission from the orbiting Chapter hulk. The distance it travelled had been great and interference had robbed the spoken message of much clarity. Through the garbled static, Barsabbas could make out the words.
‘Return to dropsite. Return to Chapter. Immediate.’
The vox message had been sealed with Sabtah’s personal decryption code.
Barsabbas stared at the voxsponder for a while before he crushed the device in his palm.
Chapter Ten
Behind the moon of Hauts Bassiq, the Cauldron Born remained a lurker, its leviathan bulk anchored behind the rock’s spheric shadow. The hour was past end-night and the halls were still but for the tread of sentries. Night menials emerged to prepare the morning gruel and the ship’s s
leepless maintenance crews worked softly, but it did not dispel the quiet. All the blood brethren had retired for their nightly circadian rest, allowing their bodies to knit and heal for another day’s training. All, except a few.
Sabtah awaited the reports of his deployment, poised with the apprehension of a predator in hiding. He knew the Dreadclaws had missed their dropsites by a wide margin. He knew the five squads had engaged enemy combatants: plague victims as the reports confirmed. But then he heard nothing. Sabtah began to fear the worst until Captain Hazareth requested his presence.
In one of the many exterior citadels that studded the ship’s upper deck, Hazareth had taken charge of the foreship’s amplified vox-transmitter. It was a frontier-grade machine, capable of burst transmissions to surrounding, intra-system receivers.
‘We have a long-burst data receipt from Hauts Bassiq, Squad Besheba. It is coded urgent and encrypted to you only, Brother-Master,’ Hazareth said, keying the console.
Sabtah ungloved his hand and placed his palm flat across the vox’s mainframe panel. There was a compliant click as the vox-transmitter accepted Sabtah’s genecode and began to unscramble the data burst.
‘I will take my leave,’ Hazareth said, bowing.
‘No, captain. You can stay for this,’ Sabtah said as he adjusted the volume dial on the transmitter. Trust was not much of a concept amongst Chaos Space Marines, for whom abrupt violence was an integral part of their warrior culture. But Sabtah knew Hazareth had principles. He was a soldier who would not fail his brethren.
There was a gurgle of audio, almost completely buried by interference. The Cauldron Born lay at high anchor ghosting the orbit of Hauts Bassiq, but the moon they hid behind was causing the transmission to lose clarity.
Sabtah adjusted the volume higher and played the message again. The vox squeaked with feedback.
‘The soldiery of Nurgle has taken Hauts Bassiq, and Muhr has sold us to them. Muhr has sold Bassiq to them. He has betrayed us.’
