THEIR VOICES WERE frantic. ‘He is out! The monster is out!’
Barsabbas could hear them echo in the corridors. He could hear the clumsy drone of footfalls as the sentries gathered to find him. They would be checking each of the doors along the passage, checking their prisoners were still contained, all of the mutants, the murderers – the high threats. In their voices he heard panic and the slowed vowels of confusion.
Barsabbas knew the sentries were outmatched. This was not their game. Until several months ago, before the taking of Hauts Bassiq, these men served cloistered military tenures. Raised within the sealed city, most of these men had never heard of a Traitor Marine before, and could have no idea of their capabilities.
Barsabbas rounded a corner, looking for a weapon. He almost walked straight into a quartet of sentries. Before they could finish their initial screams of surprise, Barsabbas swept his forearm and pinned the closest against the wall, crushing his spine. The rest backed away, yelling loud, panicked words. One of them began to fumble with a lasrifle, but he was unfamiliar with it beyond ceremonial purpose. He attempted to fire on Barsabbas with the safety still caught.
Like a great fish breaking the surface, Barsabbas tossed a sentry away and flung him down the corridor. Hastily lashed shock mauls bounced off his unyielding hide. The remaining three men were tossed about like bushels of grain. Each surge of Barsabbas’s steel‐bound limbs threw them from wall to wall, bouncing them, breaking them. The Blood Gorgon was simply playing with them.
Finally tired of his sport, Barsabbas left the four broken sentries and kicked down the nearest door. The asylum inmates were agitated by the commotion and they had begun to keen and howl, making nonsense noise through the tiny slits of their armoured doors.
Within the cell Barsabbas had opened was a bookish‐looking man. Slender from malnutrition and pale from confinement, he had a dash of handsome white hair punctuated with almost neon blue eyes.
As Barsabbas lowered his head to peer through the door, the man struck at him, hacking at his neck seal with the snapped handle of a chamber brush. Before his attack landed, Barsabbas pushed him aside contemptuously.
‘Do that again and there will be no turning back,’ Barsabbas growled. He should have killed the man for his mistake but he had a use for him yet.
‘You are free. Go and kill. Now,’ Barsabbas commanded.
Go. Kill. The slender man understood him perfectly. Without another word, the man squirmed through the door past Barsabbas and disappeared, screaming in glee down the hall. By now the asylum was ringing with the shrill bells of disaster. Sentries huddled behind shields and shock mauls advanced in formation down the hall, three abreast. It would not be long before the Plague Marines responded in force. Barsabbas heard the sentries yell warnings. Something about ‘priority inmate’. He did not know who the priority inmate was, but he noted the consternation in their tone.
He began to bash through each door he came across, punching the metal plates off their hinges. There were all kinds in there: murderers, lunatics, an ox‐necked man with a hammerhead for a hand, an elderly female who appeared entirely harmless. None attacked him, as if they were minor predators cowed by a far greater threat. Some paused to thank 153
him briefly, awed by his physical size and appearance, before sprinting away to wreak havoc on their gaolers.
Barsabbas followed a sandstone drawbridge that extended across to an otherwise inaccessible door high in the wall. The door was almost invisible in the brickwork, placed in the centre of a wall perhaps forty metres high, as if the sentries had wanted to forget about the inmate within. Judging by the hysteria of the sentries that pursued him, Barsabbas guessed the door to be of some significance. The guards tried to retract the drawbridge, grinding the ancient mechanical gears slowly. Barsabbas leapt the gap with ease as the drawbridge continued to edge back. A las‐shot sparked over his head and another missed him by a wide berth. Snorting with disdain, Barsabbas ignored the sentries.
Beyond them, the last door was reinforced with thick brass bands. Not a door but a true vault seal much like the one where he himself had been confined. A coiled nest of pipes was funnelled into the door. They writhed with pumped gases, and Barsabbas scented the sugary smell of nitrous oxide and barbitane. Whatever was inside was kept in a