Blood Gorgons - By Henry Zou Page 0,107

a high forehead. The brow ridge was scarred and shelf‐like, furrowed over a long, battered face. The bare skin was pitted like gravel. Dark eyes squinted at the light, as if breaking the wards had awoken their owner from some deep, dreadful sleep.

‘Lord Gammadin,’ Barsabbas cried, falling to his knees.

‘None of that,’ Gammadin intoned. The Ascendant Champion seemed to flex beneath his cocoon as his dampened mind began to rouse. In a rapidly unwinding spool, the chains fell away. Beneath was the leviathan bulk of horn and plate – the hulking body of Lord Gammadin, thick in the shoulder and heavy in the hands, with its ursine profile. The recognition brought a flutter of thrill to Barsabbas’s stomach.

‘It is I, Bond‐Brother Barsabbas,’ Gammadin replied in measured tones. ‘Lower your weapon.’

Outside the vault, the sound of footfalls became urgently incisive. A great number of hostiles was gathering outside, yet Gammadin was not at all hastened. Sighing slowly, he shook his head. ‘Squad Besheba have fallen, then. I do not feel their presence.’

‘They have. I carry the name of Besheba on my shoulders.’

‘That is a heavy burden, Barsabbas. After the shame of Govina, the other squads already see you as a weaker pack,’ Gammadin said, his neutral tone not at all accusatory.

A small detonation shook the adjacent chambers. Shouts and commands, closer now.

Barsabbas heard the bellow of Nurgle trumpet voxes, crackling with coordinates and field reports.

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Yet still Gammadin seemed unaffected. He shook out his arms, flexing his one hand.

‘How did you arrive?’

‘By aerial craft. I have memorised the route from the hangar by retina overlay–’

Barsabbas was cut off as a gunshot echoed from the entrance hall. An arm‐sized sliver of wall was gouged out by the slashing bolter‐round. Sinking to one knee, Barsabbas returned two shots on instinct.

Ponderously, almost like a mountain harassed into motion, Gammadin met the enemy.

WHEN GAMMADIN MOVED, he did so with an unstoppable momentum. He housed so much physical power that it took him some time to pick up speed, like a rolling avalanche, but when he began to move he did not seem capable of slowing.

Plague Marines shot at him. Those shots that Gammadin did not slap out of the air, he took against his shoulder plates. Shrapnel puffed against him. He rose in his full armour, for it had become fused to his muscle and bone, the ceramite laced throughout his entire body.

Barsabbas could not even tell where Gammadin’s armoured suit ended and his own flesh began. According to Barsabbas’s thermal imaging, Gammadin simply appeared as a solid block of ceramite with arterial warmth running through the deepest core. The data calculated Gammadin at seventy‐six per cent metal density. By his memory, even a standard template Rhino tank stood at only sixty per cent metallic composition.

As Gammadin howled and bolt shot powdered against his thickened hide, Barsabbas realised how truly destructive his lord could be.

Bodies were tossed aside. Flesh impacted violently with stone. Gammadin simply walked into and through the walls. Small‐arms fire glanced against him. Contemptuous, Gammadin pushed his hand through the brick walls like damp card. He was entirely fixated upon moving.

‘Lord Gammadin,’ Barsabbas called. ‘I have an escape route prepared in the city’s flight docks.’

With grinding deliberation, Gammadin wrenched a vault seal off its hydraulic hinges.

‘Go then, brother. I will follow.’

A CHANGING OF heart. Perhaps that was the one true flaw of the dark eldar race.

Try as he might, Sindul knew no other way. Deceit was like a game to him. It was a constant, never‐ending puzzle that he constructed in his mind, whenever he felt himself drifting away. As a culture, the eldar saw cunning as a manifestation of culture and intellect.

It was a desired trait in any courtship; indeed, an evolutionary aspect of their entire culture.

Those who could not scheme were seen as dull‐witted, pen’shaar’ul, which meant

‘waiting to be murdered’.

Sindul did not consider himself pen’shaar’ul. He had been scheming the moment he and Gumede reached the Harvester. The vessel was docked in an open courtyard and had been left unguarded. Septic foot squads passed them, too rushed to give Sindul and his slave any notice.

By Sindul’s reckoning, Barsabbas was free. His thoughts were confirmed when there was a distant thrum a hundred metres above. Looking up, Sindul saw puffs of gritty smoke drifting from the distant minarets.

‘We must stay and wait for de koag,’ Gumede declared, as if sensing Sindul’s intentions.

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Sindul cast him a sidelong glance, smiling softly.

‘We wait,’ Gumede repeated firmly. ‘You will not do to me again what you