bond showed promise. The aspirant endured months of torture on the operating slabs, his body sent into shock by the process of plasma binding, until he emerged as a young charge of the great Gammadin. For the next three thousand, six hundred and fifty‐one years, Sabtah the Older had become Gammadin’s brother, growing stronger and wiser through their synergy.
And now Gammadin was dead.
THE MAZE OF Acts Martial, a sixty‐hectare section of interior combat facilities set beneath the engine decks of the Cauldron Born, was littered with corpses. Narrow ossuaries meandered into charnel houses where the bones of slain ‘training prey’ filled the walls. These macabre displays formed neat lattices, while bare skulls of all species formed low pyramids. Even the floors were snowy with a build‐up of bone powder. Each time prey was released into the maze, the Blood Gorgons interred them where they fell, and in the preceding centuries, the Blood Gorgons trained often.
‘Push to the left. The prey is on your left, at thirty degrees,’ Sargaul whispered into his vox‐link.
But Barsabbas didn’t need to hear the command. He could already judge by the way Sargaul stood, the angle of his helmet and the urgency in his voice, that their prey was on his left. Such was the shared experience of a blood bond that Barsabbas fired before he took aim through his bolter scope, so sure was he of Sargaul’s warning.
The termagant was shredded by the salvo of shots. The plates on its forehead crumbled away as its frontal lobe exploded. Its bulbous hind legs loosened out from underneath it and the creature collapsed, its thick tail straightening. As it died, its thigh muscles continued to work, twitching and kicking the last of its life away.
A kill counter chimed in the corridor, signalling a successful training shot. ‘Perfect,’
Sargaul said, slapping the back of Barsabbas’s bulky power pack. ‘But next time, do not wait. Aim your shot if you can spot it. Our blood bond allows us to kill efficiently together, not through some rigid singularity.’
Barsabbas nodded intently as his blood bond spoke. Bond‐Brother Sargaul was an experienced warrior with almost six decades of service to his trophy racks and although Barsabbas had been bonded to him since his early days as a neophyte, they were markedly different. Barsabbas was young, at least for a Traitor Marine. He had been plucked from his family as a child and survived the test and ordeals required to become a neophyte. At the cusp of adulthood he had been selected to bond with Sargaul and survived the ritual of excise that transplanted their major organs and homogenised their blood. Since then, he had only served as a fully fledged bond‐brother on two major tours and a dozen minor raids.
Physically too, Barsabbas differed from his bond. Where Sargaul reached almost two hundred and fifty centimetres tall in bare feet, Barsabbas was short for a Traitor Marine, 14
topping out at two metres thirty in plated height. While Sargaul was long in the hamstrings and forearms, Barsabbas was wide and thick in the legs. Although their differences would go unnoticed among humans, who viewed all Astartes as uniform giants, a Space Marine perceived such subtle differences in stature and interpreted accordingly. Theirs was a martial culture and Barsabbas had often felt the lesser of the bond. The pair were anything but the same.
‘That was sharp, brothers,’ said Sergeant Sica. ‘Gather on me for post‐training evaluation.’
The six Traitor Marines of Squad Besheba took a knee and began to break down the entire training session, from movement formations and firing patterns down to the finite details of xenos psychology and communications theory.
As the youngest of the squad, Barsabbas scribbled notes on a data‐slate while the others listened with the casual confidence of experience. There was the pair Hadius and Cython, impetuous and helmet‐less, both displaying knife scars on their cheeks and nose bridges, mirror images that perfectly aligned. There was stern Sergeant Sica with his chainaxe slung across his shoulders. Crouched next to him was Sica’s bond, Bael‐Shura, clacking his metal jaw, an augmetic replacement that had been purposely left jagged and rough‐cut. The downward point of his stalactite chin cemented Bael‐Shura’s face into a morose, forlorn grimace.
The sirens in the ossuary blared again, signalling the end of the session. Having dispatched the last of their prey, the six members of Squad Besheba picked their way down the corridor towards the caged exits.
They followed the trail of dead, the remains of those they had felled that day.