Crimson Tears by Ben Counter

Author:Ben Counter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2011-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Saretha the Bitch-Queen, the Whore-Priestess of the Dark Prince of Chaos, did not believe in leading from the front.

‘Onward! For lust and the end of their world!’ she hissed, a spell woven around her words that sent them darting into the minds of her slave-warriors. Around her, leather-clad cultists surged forwards, muscling through the lower reaches of the storm drains towards the surface.

The filthy water in the conduit was chest-high but Saretha was held well above it by her cultists, who would rather die a hundred deaths than allow indignity to touch the skin of their mistress. They loved her, every one of them. And love, like every emotion, created ripples in the warp where her lord Slaanesh lived. The love her cultists had for her was so strong that it created a billowing tide of emotion in the warp, enough for Slaanesh himself to notice it and give His blessing to Saretha. It was why she had been gifted with sorcery, a subtle magic that wormed its way into the minds of men and women and convinced them that they had loved her all along.

The conduit sloped upwards and Saretha saw the drain covers ripped from the concrete by the strong hands of her most able assault-cultists, and the human tide swarmed out of them. She was carried along on that tide, the stench of the sewers mingling with the ever-present sweat and gun smoke on the surface, clashing with her perfumed oils. The voices of her cultists were raised in wordless praise of the Dark Prince and Saretha echoed them, shrieking with lust as she was carried out onto the surface and through the grand entrance gates of Gravenhold’s arena.

In a very literal sense, the Imperial Guard of the Seleucaian Fourth Division never knew what hit them.

The arena’s many entrances, broad archways around the outer edge of the coliseum, were barricaded against attacks but none of them had been built to withstand a tide of thousands of men and women who were desperate to die. Coils of razor wire were crushed beneath dozens of bodies, all writhing and squealing at the novelty of such pain. The sentries manned mounted heavy bolters to send chains of massive-calibre fire through the horde of cultists, but they just kept on coming, howling with joy as their bodies were blown wide open. The stitches in their lips were torn open as they were finally permitted to scream their pleasure to the sky.

Those gunners who saw Highmistress Saretha could not bear to shoot at her. They could never fire upon something of such overwhelming beauty, something too pure to ever harm. So they fired into the swarm of cultists even as the entranceways were choked with bodies that toppled like a landslide over their guard posts.

These were not just Gravenholders. These cultists mixed the blind fanaticism of the city’s slave-soldiers with martial prowess and brute strength. Lasgun fire rattled back from the centre of the hordes as the crowd pressed against the barricades, streaking the old sandstone walls with trails of las-fire.

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