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The Sanguinalia Day Massacre – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Pitboss Barras was the meanest bastard you could find in the underhive, but he allowed himself a few luxuries, and the dish of void-primate brain was one.

It had been nearly a year since Ship-Captain Chois had sent word that his agents had managed to procure a live specimen of Barras’ favourite edible creature – and now its quivering pink brain was exposed in the hole in the table before him.

He tied the starched white napkin about his neck. The serried amphitheatre of Blood-Pit Seven had been filling to capacity all day. Hawkers squeezed along the levels with trays of wild snake sherbet and pickled slab for sale.

The excitement was a thunderous hubbub. There had to be ten thousand bodies inside. The air was humid with anticipation, the spotlights steaming as the lesser bouts ran their gory course.

The bloodlust of the crowd was building steadily. He was almost as excited as they, he thought, as he picked up the serrated spoon and prepared to start. This day was all coming together to be an exquisite combination of personal and public pleasures.

‘More amasec?’ one of his liveried staff said – a pretty little thing with hair cut straight across her brows. She was new and he had his eye on her as she reached forward to take his glass.

She let out a shriek.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said as she mopped up the spilt amasec and gestured towards the bound primate. ‘The primate moved.’

‘Of course it moved,’ he snapped. ‘It would be no fun if it was dead.’ He lifted up his spoon and took a scoop. While he savoured the fatty brain the crowd began to roar as the spotlights swung together and focused on the final bout.

Three giants, stiff in their hulking yellow armour, strode into the ring.

Barras grinned.

His Space Marines had arrived.

Their shoulder pauldrons were marked with Barra’s badge, a red fist holding a sheaf of credits, and underneath were the lurid adverts of affluent sponsors. They were not real Adeptus Astartes, of course, but Goliaths tricked out in moulded carapace and pumped up with enough stimms to stop the heart of a grox bull.

Barras had set them up with some chaff to cut through before the big showdown. Mining thralls, recently acquired prisoners – a splatter of blood to get everyone’s heart rate up.

Barras had finished scraping out the inside of the primate’s skull cavity by the time the Astartes had filled the ring with dying bodies and lumps of steaming human meat.

The lumens dimmed. Spotlights swept back and forth. Ominous music began as the resplendent Space Marines strutted about shaking their crackling power axes in the air.

There was a certain artistry, Barras thought, to the whipping up of a crowd’s emotions, as howls and boos of hatred and derision filled the chamber and the spotlights illuminated the arrival of the pit fighters everyone loved to hate.

Thrax’s Mob were the hungriest low-hive scum – all killers and deviants who had a score of vendettas and feud killings to their names. Dark and dirty, they dressed in little more than rags, and sleeves and skirts of salvaged ring mail. In their naked fists were a motley collection of blades, punch-knives, neuro-whips and snarling chainblades. They stalked in, low, wary, hungry and opportunist as hyenas.

Barras signalled to the girl. She brought the amasec bottle over and refilled his glass. ‘You can take that away now,’ he said and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve.

She wheeled the table away with an appalled look as the two gangs came together in a flurry of blades. Barras tore the napkin from his neck and crumpled it in his lap as the crowd roared. The fight went on at a breathless pace. There were feints and parries, grunts and kicks.

First blood went to the giants. Two of Thrax’s Mob were butchered by a single swipe of a power axe. Seconds later the Space Marines cut a third warrior in half and in the desperate fight for the body, one of the giants stumbled. He went down with a crunch of yellow armour and once he was down he was dead meat.

Thrax’s Mob were on him. Punch-knives plunged into the weaker joints of groin and armpits.

On the giant pict screens above the pit the odds were immediately recalculated. Barras kept one eye on the data-slate in front of him. The crowd were throwing a fortune down on this game.

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A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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The Sanguinalia Day Massacre © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. The Sanguinalia Day Massacre, Necromunda, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78999-237-3

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