cursed himself inwardly for he remembered they were mostly dead. Those sitting around him were mere carrion kings, propped up between living vassals. Among the hundreds of guests, more than half were corpses set into place by their household servants.
Those who were yet living regarded the xenos in their midst with weary resignation. He remembered that these barons had once been puritanical men. Now they were nothing but puppets of Nurgle. They regarded him with suspicion, and rightly so.
One of the barons leaned over and laid a chubby paw on Sindul’s shoulders. His nails were yellowed from malnutrition. Sweaty, yet oddly soft with fat, he smiled at the dark eldar. When he did so, a varicose ulcer on his cheek fluttered tentatively like the heartbeat of a tiny bird.
‘If you are hungry, feel free to dine on our departed guests,’ the baron suggested, handing him a carving knife.
For a second, Sindul contemplated driving the fork in his hand straight into the man’s face. He pondered the after‐effect of fork against flesh. The baron was a moist, breathy man and Sindul wondered if he might simply deflate with a burp of corpse gas. The concept intrigued him.
But before Sindul could be tempted to respond, a sentry of Ur began to blast discordant, human music from a crude horn. At the summons, Barsabbas was wheeled in on a stone carriage, his limbs bound to the edges of a circular yoke. They had cleaned him and polished him like a trophy, scouring away the dirt to reveal the rich umber ceramite beneath.
Sindul looked away, feigning disinterest, as other nobles rose from their seats and stole closer to the living trophy.
Finally, almost reluctantly, Sindul mopped the corners of his mouth with coarse cloth and pushed his chair back with a squeal. Now was his chance.
Sindul stole close to Barsabbas. He pretended to marvel at the Traitor Marine’s power armour, tracing the enamel and filigree with his hands. Deftly, he slipped a filing spike down Barsabbas’s elbow joint.
‘I’ll find you in the asylum,’ Sindul whispered.
Barsabbas nodded imperceptibly.
150
Touching his cheek gingerly, Sindul moved away from Barsabbas as the nobles closed around him, touching, prodding and gasping in fascination.
AFTER THE IGNOMINY of the banquet, Barsabbas was wheeled into a low‐ceilinged room. They closed the door behind them with a krr‐chunk of a wheeled lock, sealing him in a cubicle of stone. Claystone floor, the same ruddy red on the walls. Marks had been made there, the ant‐like scrawl of previous prisoners, scratched, chipped and scraped into the clay brick. He could make out Imperial prayers in the mortar, written in a bastardised Low Gothic. Last testimonies, letters to loved ones, lamentations.
It very slowly dawned on him that those words etched in the stone were the scrawls of dead men. There was a finality to the lines that sat heavily on Barsabbas’s heart as he read them. He became convinced, by virtue of those lamentations, that he was now in an execution chamber.
This was where many had spent their last hours.
Renewed with sudden urgency, Barsabbas began to work the file out from his gauntlet.
He wriggled his wrists, nudging the blade file out by friction, trying to bend his fingers towards his palm to catch its tip.
It slid out ever so slightly. Barsabbas changed the angle of his wrist, allowing the file to slide further out from the vambrace. It shifted, slipped out of his grasp and, to his sinking horror, fell to the floor. Barsabbas blinked in disbelief, looking at the file. He struggled for a while, straining against the shipping chain, whipping taut the bindings of his wrist. On board the Cauldron Born’s palaestras, it was not uncommon for Barsabbas to press three hundred and eighty kilograms of loaded kettles overhead, unarmoured. Yet the chain did not yield in the slightest.
Finally, with a last look of resignation, Barsabbas began to bite at the chains on his wrists. They were thick industrial links. At first the shock of cold metal against his teeth alarmed him, but he worked through the pain and continued to chew at the metal. A Space Marine’s teeth, although heavy and calcified in order to chew indigestible proteins and fibre, could not manage iron. But by the time his calcified enamel was beginning to crack, Barsabbas had mostly lost feeling in his mouth anyway. He salivated, allowing his Betcher’s gland to drool acidic mucus as he worked. He savaged the links at his wrist.
Finally the metal, softened by acid, gave way with a snap