Blood Gorgons - By Henry Zou Page 0,30

polearms suggested that it would be no quick, frontal assault. There was no preponderance of boarding pikes to be re‐toothed as there often would be before a boarding raid. Lighter weapons meant utility.

Perhaps a long‐distance campaign?A planet of smouldering fields and ash plains? Linus remembered distant planets, exotic in plant life and fauna. He remembered when he was younger, the fields outside his hab had been covered in green grass and the swaying growth of trees. But try as he might, he could not remember what they smelled like or how they felt to the touch. He knew only the Cauldron Born now and nothing else.

Linus sighed. He often wondered where these Traitor Marines went – even if they were horrifying warzones. Surely anything would be better than a lifetime of enslavement, subsisting on gruel and watery yoghurt?

BARSABBAS AND SARGAUL summoned their retinue sometime around mid‐cycle.

Situated in the Cauldron Born’s middle decks the Blood Gorgons’ interior citadels rose along the cliffs and numberless ramparts of the ship’s interior structure. Turreted proto-fortresses loomed along the dark rises and shelves of the superstructure, each housing one pair of bonded brethren. Lighting their way with lamps, the personal slaves went quickly and urgently, together in a hurried flock.

There were the two black turbans in their brass armour, Ashar and Dao, striding imperiously in their upturned and pointed boots. The helm bearers came next, little more than young boys in stiffly embroidered tabards. A train of munitions and armament servitors clattered behind, guarded by a trio of scale hounds. Behind them, appearing unrushed, came the litter of pleasure pets, collected from a double dozen planets, each of the women chosen on the nine Slaaneshi principles of exotic beauty.

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The fortresses remained unconnected; the chain‐link walkways that had connected them had been destroyed centuries ago and never rebuilt. The Blood Gorgons had not always been a unified Chapter before the reign of Gammadin. During the early stages of their excommunication, intra‐Chapter conflict had reduced them to little more than a band of thieves escaping together for survival. It had been a time of turmoil, during which the Blood Gorgons had turned upon one another and walled themselves up within their drifting fortress. Even after Gammadin united the Chapter after the Reforging, the citadels remained as a memorial of past failings.

The retinue of Barsabbas and Sargaul arrived at a grated walkway. Beyond them, spanning an abyssal drop, the walkway led towards blast shutters set in a wall that dropped away like a cliff edge. Swathes of rust honeycombed the citadel across the pit. Flat and imposing, it swept four hundred metres down into shadows and dim pinpricks of strobe lighting.

By the time the retinue had cleared the muzzled gun servitors at the entry shutters, they were already late. Barsabbas and Sargaul had begun their anointments and the seven rituals of predomination were about to begin.

Barsabbas met them at the draw gates, unarmoured and imposing. ‘Do not be late.

Tardiness erodes my efficiency. Entirely erodes it. Understand?’

‘Yes,’ the slaves said, bowing and hurrying to their positions.

Each slave within the retinue had a personal task in the pre‐deployment rituals.

Gammadin had coined them ‘the Sacrifices of War’, but Barsabbas had quietly referred to them as ‘the Tedium before Battle’.

With a dismissive wave from Sargaul, the sacrifices began without much fanfare. To Barsabbas, it was slightly deflating. The rituals grew tiresome to him. He attributed the tedium to the reverence in which the senior Blood Gorgons held the rituals. The veterans built up such a sense of solemnity and ceremony that when the younger ranks performed it, half‐hearted in youth, the sacrifices seemed to lose all meaning.

Barsabbas sighed wearily. First, he and Sargaul reswore their oaths of brotherhood. The Astartes implant known as the omophagea allowed for learning by eating. Through the implant they were able to ‘read’ or absorb genetic material that they consumed, the omophagea transmitting the gained information to the brain as a set of memories or experiences. The Blood Gorgons remembered a time when they had fought against one another. Although they had always been one Chapter, the Reforging was part of their Chapter history. The oaths reminded them of this, or so the veterans said.

Barsabbas could not remember the Reforging. That was before his time and no more than a curious relic of history.

Barsabbas cut a small piece of flesh from inside his cheek while Sargaul sliced open the meat of his right thumb. A tiny sample of blood and flesh was collected into a brass bowl