Blood Gorgons

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE BADLANDS OF the north appeared as a monotonous, featureless land to Barsabbas, an uninspired painting rendered in a repetitive sequence. But to the plainsmen braves, the terrain was an open book, every tree or stone a page mark for another narrative.

They rode for six kilometres with desperate haste, until they reached the stump of a brittle acacia. The tree looked no different to the sparse, withered things that he had seen standing like lonely fence posts on the horizon. Yet the tree was of some significance to the plainsmen. Barsabbas listened patiently, logging pieces of intelligence into his helmet’s data feed.

The tree, he was told, marked a well‐known walking path – a line in the sand that was barely visible until they pointed it out to him. Apparently satisfied that neither the walking dead nor the Septic had used the track for some time, they continued on.

As they scouted, the braves, some as young as ten, began to point out the prints of various animals: the splayed bird feet of talon squalls, the crescent prints of the caprid, curving belly marks of a brown‐backed serpent. Simply from the depth and size of the tracks, they deduced the animals’ gender and age. From this tiny fragment of information, they could tell whether the animals’ natural habitat had been disturbed and, if so, in what way.

Two hours into their patrol of their surroundings, Gumede indicated a series of splayed prints in the sand, sprinting in the opposite direction. Judging by the spacing of their strides, Gumede knew many of them were injured by the way some of them left unevenly distributed prints, or dragged the knuckles of their feet.

‘Injuries,’ Gumede said, running a finger through the prints. ‘Many injuries.’

‘Tell me what that means,’ said Barsabbas, deferring to the plainsman’s experience.

Barsabbas was an expert tracker. Memo‐therapy had imparted into his hippocampus knowledge of wilderness survival across seventy‐eight different forms of terrain. This, however, was beyond even his considerable skill.

‘Birds are predators. They are rarely injured, and if so, never so many. They were attacked,’ said Gumede. ‘See here? Running tracks. The birds are running away from something to the north. There are fewer males running with the flock too, far too many chicks and females. It tells me that many of the males were killed protecting the flock.’

‘These tracks are fresh?’

‘No more than one day old. I would guess whatever attacked the birds is roughly two days’ travel from here. Maybe less.’

Barsabbas understood. Out in the badlands, nothing would attack a flock of apex predators, except for something far more dangerous. It was likely something had fired upon the flock, or engaged them in a brief skirmish. The predators, defeated, had fled southwards, away from their attackers.

‘Then we do not have much time. The enemy are close,’ Barsabbas said.

‘We should warn the camp.’

Barsabbas smiled and hefted his boltgun. ‘We will return to the muster.’

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THE PLAINSMEN WERE ready when they came. Through the low, bulbous fields of cacti the enemy approached. Four thousand Septic infantry, accompanied by light, sand‐trawling gun platforms. The keening squeal of hydraulics and the clatter of engines echoed across the badlands. Behind them, with almost no urgency, marched a company of Plague Marines.

Twenty‐eight warriors in all, a procession that followed the heavy banner of Nurgle.

Barsabbas had brought the road trains into a crescent‐shaped wall, a silver ridge of carriages almost one kilometre in length, girded by mountains on either flank and fields of cacti to the fore. Behind them the sprawling tents and lean‐tos of the kinships took shelter.

Barsabbas did not expect the line to hold. The thin skin of a steel carriage would not resist bolter shot.

Drawn out in front of the camp, standing in a thin line, came two thousand Bassiq braves. They faced the enemy, standing against them with bow and arrow, throwing hatchet and firing their heirloom rifles. They were crested with massive feathers, quivering fans of squall pinion atop heads and shoulders. Their faces were painted red, like their brightly coloured shukas. The red would make them fearless, or so Barsabbas had been told.

The enemy advanced steadily. Their boots and tracks crushed the cactus fields. The engines became a monotone growl.

Anxious and rightfully frightened, the kinships dug deep within the sheltered encampment. They were vulnerable. Mothers hid their children under beaded blankets.

The old men sat together and spoke of younger days and death. Many more – tens of thousands of people – crowded behind the parked road trains, peering between boarded windows and carriage gaps for a glimpse of the battleline beyond. Far deeper into the camp, the sickened and infected began to spasm, as if sensing great evil.

Higher up, on the lower ridges of the mountain, Barsabbas signalled for Gumede to raise the totem standard. Each of the waiting flocks returned signal with their own kinship totems. There were almost sixteen thousand riders up there. Sixteen thousand birds clacked and cawed, waiting to stampede down the slope.

‘Weep not. Everything must have its day,’ said Barsabbas, leaning down from his quad-cage to shout at Gumede above the stormy clash of sound. ‘The mettle of your entire culture will be measured in this one engagement.’

The chief seemed to understand. He raised his lasrifle and lanced the signal upwards. A red beam, straight and true, pierced the sky. With a roar, sixteen thousand voices raised as one, the plainsmen charged down the mountain.

THE SEPTIC INFANTRY began to fire, just three hundred metres distant from the plainsmen.

Las‐shots and solid slugs came whistling through the organ pipe cactus. They were horrible, rapid fire volleys that cut through the braves in droves. A line of dust plumes kicked up in front of the road trains as dozens upon dozens of unarmoured braves writhed and buckled beneath the firestorm. Support weapons punched clean holes through the carriages behind them, landing ordnance and incendiary directly into the camp itself.

For the first time in his life, Barsabbas felt the fear of facing superior forces. He understood now what his foes had felt when they faced the overwhelming might of an Astartes battle force. Yet he waited, despite the carnage, waiting for the enemy to grow eager, to become lustful in the excitement of slaughter. On the slopes below them, braves 107

continued to die, odd arrows hissing fitfully in reply. Barsabbas waited, waited more, until the enemy drew level in the fields below.

And then they charged.

They charged, and what a stampede it was. Like a rolling avalanche, sixteen thousand talon squalls came. One‐tonne beasts, axe‐beaks snapping, pumping thighs slamming the dirt with black avian nails. They gathered a wild, heedless momentum.

A rolling tide swallowed the Septic battle line from the flank. The talon squalls crashed into and over the infantry platoons, rolling, tumbling, thrashing. Bodies were trampled.

Shots were fired at close range. Hatchets rose and fell. The men in ghastly hoods fought back with bayonets and pistols, but the crushing juggernaut birds simply ran over them.

Talon squalls sprinted onto the gun platforms. The birds began to peck at the fighting vehicles like shelled prey, clambering atop the chassis to snap at the crew compartments with their long necks and plucking them out like morsels with their clawed feet.

Engaged to the front and suddenly outflanked, the companies of Septic infantry buckled.

Their firing lost all focus and coordination. A young brave, no more than sixteen, pounced his bird atop an autocannon trailer, holding two bloodied sacks in one hand as trophies, a slick hatchet whirling in his other.

Surveying the field, Barsabbas dared to think that perhaps the braves might yet send the enemy into retreat.

Then the Plague Marines engaged.

They waded into the fray slowly, as if boredom had finally compelled them to action.

They were massive, as tall as a mounted rider and broader than the breast of a talon squall rooster. Incarnations of pestilence, they seemed invincible. Hatchets and arrows skipped off the dirty white surface of their plate, barely scratching the lime green bacterial colonies that beveined the enamel. Helmets with wide, trumpet‐like rebreathers and ugly, mismatched goggles encased their heads. They leaked grey and yellow fluid when pierced but showed little reaction to any wounds inflicted.

In their plated gauntlets and thick, rubberised combat gloves, they fired boltguns. They favoured knives as heavy as short swords; rusted chopping blades that parted flesh crudely. Every stroke of the knife or squeeze of the trigger killed men. Onwards they came, and Barsabbas moved to meet them.

BARSABBAS VAULTED OFF the quad‐motor as las‐shots raked across its fender. The flimsy vehicle was not fit for a bond‐brother. He kicked the roll cage away and began to pick careful shots with his boltgun. His leash chain looped around Barsabbas’s wrist, Sindul began to shriek in panic. Hooded and bound, the dark eldar could only squirm in terror as the battle raged blindly around him.

A platoon of Septic infantry appeared out of the rising dust. Thirty or forty soldiers in baggy, hooded masks, advancing in a loose spread. He heard their shouts of alarm as they spotted him.

Barsabbas reacted as he was drilled, pressuring them with a wide spread of automatic fire. The sudden volley of crackling bolt shells cut out in a semicircle. Rounds so heavy that even their passing shockwave haemorrhaged the brains and organs of any target in a one-metre radius. Enemy infantry sprawled, fell and dived under the burst of fire. It was what Barsabbas needed to close the distance.

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As the enemy went to ground to escape the initial onslaught, Barsabbas charged and fell amongst them. Now he was in his element and superior enemy numbers did not faze him.

At the edge of his visor, he saw a Septic thrust a bayonet towards him. Using his great armspan, Barsabbas lashed his mace over the Septic’s rifle and caved in his hooded mask.

He fell sideways, lurching into another Septic. Barsabbas killed that one too, breaking his neck with a quick backstroke. So absorbed was he in the practice of death‐dealing that Barsabbas had to remind himself that this was not his fight. It was a diversion for him to slip north, past the bulk of the Nurgle armies. He had to keep himself alive. Finding Sargaul was the objective. He had to remind himself of that just to keep his battle rage in check. The nostril‐flaring lust to kill almost overwhelmed his logic and conditioning.

‘Attack the gaps in his armour!’ shouted a Septic officer.

But Barsabbas would not stand still long enough to allow it. Three Septics harried him, surrounding him and trying to slip a bayonet into the gaps of his knee joint. Barsabbas moved faster than they thought he could. Over three hundred kilos of an explosively-moving steel‐shod body crushed the nearest Septic. Sindul was dragged along with him, the chain snapping taut and almost decapitating another Septic. Barsabbas felt bayonets snap against his unyielding plate.

Glancing sideways, Barsabbas saw the charge of the mounted braves stalling. They were engaged in a grinding close‐quarter melee. Gun shots ruptured the air. Above that could be heard the distinctly hollow chopping of hatchet through bone. Garbled screams rose from both sides and the warm‐blooded croak of dying birds floated above the clamour.

It was a messy, discordant battle and Barsabbas allowed himself to indulge slightly, exulting in the violence that he had created.

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