Blood Gorgons - By Henry Zou Page 0,106
human Barsabbas had ever seen. At first the man seemed naked: so much flesh did he possess that his bib‐and-brace did not trail down past the rolls of his knees or cover the fleshy mountains of his breast. He was easily shoulders, traps, neck and head taller than the guards and weighed perhaps in the mid‐three hundred kilos. They had housed most of his torso in riveted metal sheets like a submariner’s rig and his paws ended in studded spheres of solid black metal –
wrecking balls, pitted, spherical and brutally physical. Barsabbas gathered that this was
‘Babalu’ – the thing responsible for their so‐called ‘tier market massacres’.
Babalu turned on his gaolers first, crashing his sledgehammer fists into their soft, yielding bodies. It was only then that Barsabbas realised the guards had been terrified not of him, but of their own weapon. Cringing, the Urite sentries pressed themselves against the walls as Babalu crushed his way through them to lunge at Barsabbas. Some Urites drew their knees to their chests and simply lay down, their will to fight having long deserted their hands and hearts.
The killer issued a challenge, unimpressed by Barsabbas’s stature. He clashed his kettled hands together, sounding out his strength and stomped his legs to establish his girth. He postured, flexing the rolling orbs of his biceps. He had the gall to roar at Barsabbas with his quivering jowls.
Barsabbas slapped Babalu’s head: a casual, insulting blow that bounced his skull against the wall and it cut the killer’s raging screams short. Pressing up close, Barsabbas slapped him again, snake fast. The blow broke Babalu’s jaw and he fell, his insensate head lolling to the side. His fat bunched obligingly as he dropped, his bulk jammed against the corridor.
Dragging him by his belt, Barsabbas hauled the feared killer aside and did not bother looking at him again. He guessed the man was dead, but he did not really care.
Unnerved by Barsabbas’s warpath, Gumede and Sindul followed behind, cautious of the Traitor Marine’s volatile strength. As they picked their way through the antechamber, the chief stole glances at the cowering sentries and felt a deep understanding of their fear.
Barsabbas was not an enemy, yet Gumede’s manner was nonetheless furtive in his monstrous presence. Barsabbas was running roughshod over everything that stood before him.
The room beyond was a cavernous cell plated in sheet alloy. The reflective floor stretched far out into the distance and the inward‐slanting walls warped the reflections back and forth in a nauseating mess of images. There were no seams nor rivets to the coppery compound; the chamber appeared as if it had been hollowed out from a monolithic block of metal, and the asylum had simply been built up, brick by brick, around the maddening metal core.
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The prisoner, large though he was, was buried in a cocoon of chains. They had bound him from his head to his shins in the centre of the chamber, anchoring him in mid‐air with an archaic winch. Glyphs and ward runes radiated out from him in concentric circles and overlapping hexagons, poured onto the floor with red sand. Barsabbas was not well versed in daemonology, but he recognised the runes of binding and psychic dampening directly beneath the oubliette.
+ Who is that? You are familiar. I have met you before, brother+
The words brushed across Barsabbas’s mind in a quietly commanding manner. He felt compelled to answer, but realised the prisoner would not be able to hear him through the solid ball of chains.
Possessed by a sudden conviction he could not rationalise, Barsabbas kicked and brushed through the wards, sweeping the red sand away. He felt the psychic power emanating more strongly from the prisoner.
+ Lower the winch, brother+
The voice resonated with Barsabbas. He felt compelled to obey, and indeed found himself doing so on muscle impulse. Eagerly, Barsabbas began to unwind the chains.
Outside the chamber, the pandemonium sounded like the roar of ocean waves. The military force of Nurgle would respond soon if they had not already. Barsabbas knew his time was limited.
+ Yes. We do not have long. I can feel the Plague followers coming closer now. Many of them, like a seething tide+
Barsabbas tore at the chains with his fingers, snapping the links and shredding the metal fragments with his gauntlet tips. An involuntary cry of triumph escaped his lips: beneath was a corpse‐white powder that was familiar to him, the very same pigment with which Blood Gorgons dyed their skin.
He tore at the cheeks to unveil kohled eyepits and