and held out his wrists to Gumede. ‘Bind me,’ he ordered.
The plainsman hesitantly looped one of the dark eldar’s barbed slave cuffs around Barsabbas’s forearms. His movements were clumsy and fearful, as if he did not want to touch the Godspawn. He cinched the noose tight around both of Barsabbas’s hands.
Gumede peered outside the ship’s viewing ports as Ur rose above them. ‘I am not sure this will work,’ he said wearily, with the voice of a man resigned to death.
Barsabbas shook his head. ‘It will work, as long as you both play your part.’
The plan was simple. They would enter Ur and tell the truth, or at least a version of the truth. The dark eldar mercenaries had ambushed a lone Blood Gorgon survivor and captured him. Sindul, acting on behalf of the kabal, had come to negotiate a price for their Traitor Marine captive. Gumede, of course, was Sindul’s personal slave, a trophy from Hauts Bassiq.
The plan was not without risks, but Barsabbas saw no other way of locating the gene-seeds or any other Blood Gorgon survivors. Ur was vast and to find a prisoner he would have to become one. Once imprisoned, Sindul would have no choice but to find and free him, lest he risk birthing a slave‐scarab.
Crossing over to the pilot’s seat with his hands bound, Barsabbas slapped the side of Sindul’s face. The dark eldar screamed in shock, the craft jinking as he flinched. A flesh scarab latched onto his milky skin and burrowed under the flesh, creating a bulge before disappearing into the muscle layers.
‘Why?’ Sindul hissed.
‘Do you need to ask?’
‘How can the plan work if I die? You need me to free you once you are captured,’ Sindul shot back.
‘That’s exactly why I’ve marked you. To ensure you do come back for me,’ Barsabbas replied.
Sindul had nothing else to say. He simply touched his cheek where the flesh scarab had left a neat, red incision in his white skin.
‘You are a traitor, like all of your kind,’ Barsabbas said flatly. ‘You have five hours to come for me. So you best keep alert.’
Those were the last words he said as the Impaler shot into the wall and into the city of Ur itself.
146
COMPARED TO THE plains of Hauts Bassiq, the city of Ur seemed like a different world. Sealed within its void shields and walls, it existed as a self‐contained ecosystem.
Long ago prospectors, those who did not wish to wander the wastelands as nomads, had retreated to this place. They hoarded the last of the industrial engines with them and constructed the ziggurat – an ancestral symbol of human engineering. It was a construct of simple necessity, a sturdy monument of utility that has held a place within human history.
They hid there. Away from the agonising climate, away from their wayward kin.Hiding, even, from the Imperium itself who had long since assigned the status of Hauts Bassiq as
‘inhospitable’ and tucked the notation away in forgotten archives.
There, left to isolation, the ancestors of Ur devolved. Insular and inbred, her people became sickly and viciously paranoid. They diverged into their own puritan Imperial Cult, believing the preservation of their isolation the key to resisting corruption.
They became obsessed with locking out the exterior. They raised mighty walls and developed stout shields. All their industry, their resources, all of their salvaged technology was devoted to isolation. To them, the world outside Ur was a hellish, primordial place.
They emerged intermittently to trade with the distant nomads, and even then only for necessities which could not be synthetically produced in Ur’s industrial mills and foundries.
Beyond that, Ur had remained sealed to the outside.
Refineries in the lowest portions of the city‐stack fed electricity and fuel into the city above, appropriately serving as its foundations. Pipe systems large enough to convey steam engines coiled around the bottom stacks like a nest of metal pythons. The refineries cooled the city with cyclopean turbines, recycled water and powered the void shields. The columns of smoke stacks coughed exhaust into the atmosphere, steaming the void shields with their pollutant heat.
Above this, the city itself rose in neat, geometric stacks. Brown‐, red‐ and dust‐coloured brickwork rose up in tetric tessellation, as if the buildings were blocks that slotted into each other. No bolt, nail or adhesive could be found. Like the sealed city itself, the architecture was raw and unadorned, shocking in its gigantic scale – blunt and imposing and entirely interlocked.
THE HARVESTER LANDED in the open plaza of the apex palace. From within