before he landed, felled by a single shot.
SINDUL HISSED, BARING his teeth. He crouched low on his haunches, his arms spread for balance, lacerator gloves rearing like coiled serpents.
The mon‐keigh warrior appeared indifferent to his threats. He walked into and through the caprid fence that separated them, splintering the wood with his shins and thighs.
‘Catch me to kill me!’ Sindul spat. He leapt up against the sheer rock wall behind him, limbs splayed against the surface, and began to scarper up the vertical drop. He used his lacerator gloves, dragging the hooked claws of his fists for purchase. He shot up the wall like a rodent, scaling twelve metres in a matter of seconds before bounding backwards into the air.
A bolter round missed him as he leapt. He landed behind the mon‐keigh, slashing his lacerators as he sailed overhead. But the horned warrior was faster than Sindul had estimated. It was a grave error. The mon‐keigh spun with practiced fluidity, pouncing with all the weight and drive of a quarter‐tonne primate. Sindul rolled aside, but not fast enough.
The mon‐keigh snagged him with its paw and dragged him to the ground by his ankles.
Sindul tried to regain his gyroscopic balance, but his thin ankle was locked in a hammer grip of ceramite.
‘I don’t need to kill you yet,’ growled the Traitor Marine as Sindul thrashed like a hooked fish.
Dragging his splinter pistol free from its chest holster, the dark eldar began to fire. The first shot hammered a toxic splinter into heavy chest plate. The mon‐keigh dodged the second with a little dip of his head.
‘Stop, now.’
76
With that, the mon‐keigh backhanded him with steel‐bound hands. Sindul’s head snapped violently off to the right and he blacked out.
WHEN THE DARK eldar came to, he began to curse in his sepulchral tongue.
He was bound, his wrists anchored by heavy chain that looped up to his neck and head.
A muslin bag used to ferment milk curds was wrapped around his face and the chain tightened around it, biting into the flesh of his cheeks and forehead. The bag reeked strongly of sour, human smells that disturbed him.
When the captive tried to move, Barsabbas placed a boot on his chest.
‘Tell me your name, darkling.’
The captive tried to writhe. Barsabbas stepped harder. The pressure elicited a mild curse from the struggling captive.
‘I am Sindul,’ he gasped as the air was pushed from his lungs.
Barsabbas knelt, peering closely at the dark eldar, studying the odd shapes of his insectoid carapace. Everything about the creature was alien, as if the angles and planes of his attire were beyond the conceptual design of a human mind. He did not belong on Hauts Bassiq.
‘Why do you trespass, darkling?’
‘I will not speak to you,’ Sindul replied, his words muffled by the muslin.
‘That is not your choice to make.’
‘There are others,’ Sindul began. ‘There are more of us. We will come for you.’
‘I’ve made them all dead, you know,’ Barsabbas replied flatly. He stood up and walked to where a row of thin, frail corpses lay amidst the ash and charred earth. The carrion flies were already swarming over their glazed eyes and open mouths. ‘I count fourteen. There are no more. Is that true?’ Barsabbas asked.
The fact was confirmed by Sindul’s silence.
Barsabbas walked back to his captive. ‘You will talk,’ he said. He released and slid open a hatch on his thigh plate, revealing a half‐dozen steel syringes, stacked like rocket pods.
Upon hearing the metallic click, Sindul began to laugh. ‘You can try to torture me. But you are truly of diminished wit if you try,’ the dark eldar declared in stilted Low Gothic. ‘We relish pain.’
Barsabbas already knew this. The dark eldar species was entirely devoted to the cult of pleasure. Psychologically, they were nihilistic, pleasure‐driven and irrational. Heightened sensations such as pain would only elevate them to a state of adrenal euphoria. For once, violence would yield nothing.
‘Do your worst,’ Sindul goaded, almost tauntingly.
Barsabbas extracted a syringe from its sheath. It was a barbarous thing, a pneumatic-gauge needle designed to punch through the thick skin of a Space Marine.
‘This is tetrotoxillyn. An anaesthetic, a nerve‐killing extract. My constitution inhibits the majority of chemicals from affecting my body. But this…’ Barsabbas said, holding up the syringe. ‘A dose of one‐sixteenth is potent enough to serve as a local anaesthetic for a standard Space Marine. One quarter dose is enough to cause permanent paralysis in a young adult human.’
‘We may not be robust in stature, but I assure you, we eldar