Path of the Incubus

by Andy Chambers

  Mexzchior felt both thrilled and nervous. Thrilled because the intimate secretary had entrusted him with a vital task, selecting him above all the other secret masters. The secretary had ordered him to send his engines into the Dysjunction-wracked city to find a very specific target. A pouch at Mexzchior’s waist carried the vital imprint materials that would lead his engines straight to their target. The wracks carried a large supply of the vital fluids and nutrients the engines would need while they undertook their task. When they reached the periphery of the labyrinth they would be refilled and then released. That independence was what made Mexzchior nervous. The intimate secretary’s instruction had been very precise, indeed exacting, on the subject once released the engines would operate without assistance as they hunted down their prey.

  The intimate secretary had implied that the engines should simply be released into the labyrinth the moment that they were ready. Mexzchior could not bring himself to do that and so he had stretched the secretary’s orders somewhat to guide his children out of the labyrinth before sending them on their way. One last drink and then they would fly the nest to strike and return. They would return, he told himself, some engines went rogue but not his children. They would return to him with evidence of their success and Mexzchior would be finally be exalted by the Black Descent for his true genius.

  Mexzchior had briefly wondered who the target might be before thrusting such thoughts from his mind. Someone important and well guarded, clearly, or both engines would not have been demanded. Ultimately it did not matter whether it was a personal enemy of the intimate secretary or a foe of the entire coven, Vhi and Cho would end their existence this very night.

  Among the trackless paths of the webway warlock Caraeis paused at a confluence and pondered for a time. The skein of probabilities was tightening inexorably but he was confounded by this particular juncture. Each path led forward but only one of them would bring him to the optimum location in time and space. He reached down into his satchel and brought forth a rune, releasing it from his fingers without looking at it first – a forgivable transgression of Form, so he told himself, under such circumstances of heightened emergency.

  The rune of weaving hung before him again, just as he had known it would. It dipped and swayed towards one of the filaments of the confluence, its psycho-sensitive material reacting to the faint trace left behind by the dark kin. The rune of weaving had come to his hand so many times now that he felt a special kinship with it, almost as if it guided him personally. The rune drew him ever onward and showed him paths of destiny he had not dared to even dream of. The skeins of fate were tightening to a point where he would be at the confluence of events, the key piece in a great change that would touch the lives of billions.

  Caraeis recaptured the rune and returned it to his satchel as Aiosa, the leader of his bodyguards, approached. Beneath his masked helm Caraeis grimaced unhappily. The Aspect Warriors were coolly professional in their demeanour yet Caraeis could not escape the impression that they had been assigned to watch him as much as to watch over him. If their exarch was making a point to speak to him directly it was unlikely to be good news.

  ‘You overstepped your mark with the promises you made on Lileathanir,’ Aiosa said without preamble. ‘Your dishonesty could impugn the honour of the Just Vengeance shrine.’

  ‘There was no dishonesty,’ Caraeis replied while carefully keeping his voice even and reasonable. ‘I merely made no definition of how swiftly we would return. Naturally I omitted to mention that our first duty would be to return to the council and seek their judgment in the matter.’

  ‘You deliberately misled the Exodites’ representative.’

  ‘I gave her hope. There is every reason to believe that the farseers will accept my proposal for action. I am confident that it will prove to be the correct course.’

  ‘And if they do not? The Exodites’ hope will be in vain and they will perish awaiting succour that cannot come.’

  ‘Such a decision falls to hands and minds other than my own. The council is beyond our questions and fears.’

  ‘Yet you still attempt to manipulate their decision.’

  ‘Of course, just as they, in turn, manipulate our decisions. Everything is manipulation.’

  ‘It sits poorly with me to see you manipulate the people of Lileathanir.’

  ‘They have chosen to hide themselves from the universe. There are limits to how far we can protect them when the universe finds them.’

  ‘That is a harsh judgement.’

  ‘The universe is a harsh place, as we well know and would do well to remember. I must note that you made no effort to intercede at the time, has your disquiet over my words only developed recently?’

  The exarch looked at Caraeis silently for a moment, the tall crest and helm she wore lending her an aura of imperious disdain. Not for the first time was Caraeis reminded that in some regards there was but a wing beat between the Aspect Warriors of the craftworld shrines and the incubi of the dark city. Some even whispered that there was common ancestry between the two. Certainly a warrior code bound them both, the assumption of a strength greater than themselves to make them able to endure the terrible things they must do. One of Caraeis’s colleagues had opined that the difference between Aspect Warriors and incubi was only one of degree, and that where exarchs entered the equation the line blurred almost completely.

  ‘You should know that I intend to report your actions to the council of seers,’ Aiosa pronounced flatly.

  Caraeis mastered his voice carefully before responding. ‘It is your right to do so. I am confident that they will support my decisions. In the meantime may I rely on your continued protection and support?’

  ‘We will continue to discharge our duties with honour until such time as justice is done or we are recalled.’ The response was passionless and robotic, a rote recitation of dogma. Caraeis accepted it as being as much as he could hope to get.

  ‘Then… we must continue on our way. The one we seek is close, the action of capture will be challenging in the extreme.’

  ‘We are equal to the task. Proceed.’

  Caraeis turned and led the way into the confluence. The narrow-minded pride of Aspect Warriors was none of his concern. Soon, he thought, very soon his auguries would be completely vindicated.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Dreams of Dragons

  In the acrid, trembling World Shrine of Lileathanir Sardon, the unwilling messiah of her Exodite people, slept a sleep of pure exhaustion and dreamed of the dragon.

  She had spent her energies attempting to cleanse the shrine and set it to some sort of order even though it seemed like a hopeless task. In the end she had settled for concentrating on disposing of the remains she had found. One-by-one she had dragged seven sets of skeletal remains to the edge of a fiery crevasse before carefully rolling them in.

  Unlike more ‘civilised’ societies, Exodites have no horror of death, they live side by side with the raw thews of nature where death is a daily occurrence. The fleshy vessel in which the spirit had resided was of little consequence to an Exodite like Sardon once the spirit had fled. No, handling the dead did not trouble her, but the sight of their terrible injuries did. A handful had seen quick, clean deaths, sheared into pieces as neatly as if giant shears had shut on them. Most were more like the first she had found. They had been crippled and then carved like joints of meat. It sickened her to imagine the pain that had been so gratuitously inflicted upon them.

  Most troubling to Sardon was that she had found no female remains. The body of the shrine’s worldsinger was missing. Sardon had imagined that it could have been buried in one of the collapsed areas of the shrine, or even that the worldsinger had cast herself into a pit to end her own life rather than fall prey to the children of Khaine. Deep down she knew that neither was the truth. There was a keen sense of loss in the dragon’s rage that she had struggled to underst
and at first, now she believed she understood. The young worldsinger who was present at the shrine when the cataclysm began had been taken. She had been kidnapped and dragged off into bondage by a pack of the most evil, sadistic violators imaginable.

  Once the thought had entered her mind it would not leave. Physically and emotionally exhausted Sardon had curled up on a flat slab of fallen stone, shoulders quivering as she allowed herself to weep for wardens and their lost worldsinger. Sleep came as a mercy, her brain finally blotting out the horror beneath a wave of sweet oblivion. But the restful darkness did not endure for her. Freed of their conscious bonds her dreams flew free and became intertwined with those of a greater being. She found herself dreaming the dreams of the world spirit itself.

  At first she saw herself lying in a cave, her pale form looking soft and vulnerable amid the black, jagged rocks. The cave was like and yet unlike the World Shrine. This World Shrine was a vast, shadowy space that was old beyond reckoning, older than the stars themselves. Its wall crumbled and fell back to reveal caverns and tunnels beyond that were beyond numbering. The openings stretched impossibly into the distance. Some held glimpses of other places and other times, bright tableaux that formed for an instant and then were gone. Others moved through stately cycles of ruin and regrowth before Sardon’s dreaming vision.

  Sardon became aware of the invisible conduits of power running through the place, the pulsating life force of the planet whirling past on its eternal loop through the foci spread across its surface. Barrows and cairns and obelisks knit the psychic flow into a lattice, a self-propagating diamond compounded of the spirits of every being that had ever lived and died on Lileathanir. Their essence girdled the world, insulating it from the hostile universe beyond with a psychic shield so dense that no corruption could breach it. The world spirit of Lileathanir had become a mighty thing, the land had become it and it had become the land.

  Hubris. Sardon could sense the bitter reek of it everywhere. The world spirit had become mighty, a nascent godling in its own self-contained universe. In its pride it had overlooked the threat from beyond, trusting that its strength in the metaphysical realm would apply in the material realm also. Instead it had been hurt in a way it could barely understand and now it raged with puerile petulance . In a distant corner of the caverns flames licked hungrily as the dragon grumbled and hissed in its slumber. Sardon’s dream-self quailed. She did not want to get caught in the dreams of the dragon. Its rage would consume her, burn her to ash like the broken lands beyond the holy mountain. Sardon tried to master her fears, to direct herself and travel through the dream as she had been taught long ago.

  Her disquiet made the place she was in even more frightening, solidifying the caverns into dripping walls black with moisture. Stalagmites and stalactites crowded everywhere like petrified piles of dung and hanging slabs of meat. Beyond and around them roamed the hiss and whisper of dead spirits, their dry voices rustling horribly on the edge of perception. The billions of dead souls trapped in the Lileathanir matrix flowed around her like smoke, individually no stronger than any single mortal but collectively… Collectively they became the world spirit and a gestalt psychic power capable of so much more.

  Sardon found herself before a crack in the weeping rock wall, wide and low like the one in the mountainside she’d had to crawl through to reach the real World Shrine. She pushed inside, crawling into the narrowing split towards a chink of light on the far side. The roof and floor pressed so closely together that she had to force herself between them, edging forward with shoulders flat and head turned to one side to get closer to the light. Claustrophobia gibbered at the edge of her dream-consciousness, threatening to send her into a blind panic thrashing against the implacable rock. She stopped, and breathed deep (mentally, at least) to quell the emotion. Finally she wriggled herself close enough to bring her eye to where she could peer through the chink.

  Beyond it lay the World Shrine as it had been before the cataclysm, full of light and life. Sardon’s point of view was constrained, seeming to come from high up at one moment, then through the eyes of a different Shrine Warden in the next. Every point of view told the same story with more or less grisly detail. Sardon soon became sickened by the violence and tried to crawl away. She found that she could not back out of the crack. The rock seemed to have closed up even more closely and held her as if petrified. She was constrained to watch the violation of the shrine enacted over and over again.

  A small group in black appearing suddenly, shifting and barely seen… sharp blades glittering as the Shrine Wardens were butchered like children… The worldsinger captured just as she attempted to take her own life… her limp form carried off through a portal into the webway… and the world spirit, for all its metaphysical strength, helpless to intervene.

  It had tried, its attempts wrecked first the shrine and then the world as it lashed blindly at the attackers. It was all for naught. The perpetrators slipped away into the webway like thieves in the night and beyond the reach of the world spirit of Lileathanir almost before it had perceived them. An entity that had dreamed for aeons was stung into wakeful wrath, and the vengeful fury of the dragon found full expression in that waking. The stones around Sardon’s body still shook with the memory of it.

  A sinister, imposing figure in all-enclosing armour had directed the dark kin, its red-eyed helm tusked and horned like a beast. It bore a terrible double-handed blade that was the ruin of all who came before it. This one was the last to leave, turning before the portal to sweep its gaze around the shuddering shrine. The burning eyes seemed to look straight at Sardon and the figure spoke with a voice like the tolling of a great bell.

  ‘Only the naïve try to forgive and forget!’ the voice roared. ‘Arhra remembers.’ As the words were spoken the rock holding Sardon began to move, grinding slowly shut like huge, black jaws. She felt a horrible sensation of compression, suffocation and finally… blackness.

  Sardon awoke in the hot, foetid darkness of the World Shrine gasping for breath.

  ‘Sorrow Fell?’ Kharbyr muttered to Xagor. ‘Just how the hell are we going to get all the way up there on foot?’

  ‘This one does not know,’ the wrack responded mournfully. ‘These were the archon’s words, not Xagor’s.’

  In the baroque, anarchic geography of Commorragh, lowly Metzuh tier was about as far as you could get from Sorrow Fell without disappearing into the pits beneath. Even before the Dysjunction no direct connection had existed between the two districts. The rare physical interactions between their denizens meant chancing a flight through the hostile upper airs or using a well-guarded portal.

  ‘The long stairs might still be standing, I suppose,’ Kharbyr said uncertainly. ‘If we can find our way up to Hy’kran somehow.’

  ‘This one does not know,’ Xagor repeated. The wrack’s passivity was starting to irritate Kharbyr immensely. Given even the most basic leadership the wrack seemed content to go along unquestioningly with whatever he was ordered to do.

  Led by Naxipael and Bezieth, the small band of survivors seemed to be pushing towards the core. They had left the slaughter faire and taken to the covered streets and wider passageways of Metzuh, occasionally crossing open plazas that were eerily devoid of people and mounting stairways more or less choked with debris. As they moved further from the Grand Canal there was less evidence of intrusion. The bodies they found increasingly showed signs that they had died at the hands of mortal foes rather than twisted entities from beyond the veil.

  Always inward, always upward. Kharbyr began to suspect that the archons didn’t really know where they were going and were just making a confident show of following their noses. Kharbyr took another pinch of Agarin to clear his head, savouring the clean bite of it and the shiver it sent down his spine. The one bright side of recent events was that Kharbyr’s pouches were now bulging with looted stimulants and narcotics. If he lived through this he would be rich, or at the very le
ast well supplied. The flat metal pentagon Xagor had given to him still rode inside one of his inner pockets. It had remained dead and lifeless but it gave him a vague sense of protection that he was happy to accept under the circumstances. Touching it made him think of a new angle to take in prodding Xagor into action.

  ‘Xagor, we just need to find a good place to hide until this blows over,’ Kharbyr said in what he hoped were his most reasonable and persuasive tones. ‘We both have a duty to protect what the master gave me – it simply isn’t safe to be wandering around with it like this.’

  That made Xagor hesitate for a moment. Kharbyr knew the wrack was dedicated to his master with a kind of pet-like devotion that he found hard to fathom. The very suggestion that Xagor might be in danger of failing Master Bellathonis in some way was enough to give the wrack pause for thought.

  ‘This one is not so sure,’ Xagor admitted eventually, ‘that Sorrow Fell will be safer for anyone except archons.’

  ‘You see! Now you get it!’ Kharbyr hissed. ‘If we show up at Sorrow Fell we’ll just get thrown back into whatever mess happens next, and the one after that, and the one after that until we’re dead!’

  Kharbyr shut up quickly when he saw Bezieth look sharply back in his direction. He prayed she hadn’t overheard his words – Bezieth was looking dangerously frustrated and in need of something to take it out on by way of diversion. The survivors walked on in complete silence for a time accompanied only by the creaks, crashes and distant screams of the disaster-wracked city.

  Eventually Xagor dared to whisper, ‘We two are not strong enough to survive alone,’