Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  They followed the psychic spoor among the metal canyons, wary in case they came upon more warrior machines. Eventually a citadel of black metal rose ahead, squat and multi-peaked in comparison to its neighbours, half-hidden beneath a mass of trailing briars, thicker than the others they’d passed, with a pair of gleaming guardians standing guard outside it. Somewhere high up, among the barbed minarets of the citadel’s crown, was the object that Archon Yllithian desired.

  Death to climb it,+ Xyril sighed, kicking aside a tendril of briar that was creeping closer.

  Not if we cross from another spot,+ Vyriadh thought, showing in her mind an image of another tower that leaned close to their objective. In one place it virtually overhung a broad balcony near the top and looked relatively briar-free.

  Good enough, if we can climb that tower,+ Xyril judged.

  Only one way to find out,+ concluded Vyriadh.

  Swift and silent as shadows, they worked their way around to the overhanging tower. Contact grip pads, formed on palms and toes by their armour, proved equal to the task of adhering to the dark metal, and they began to climb, inch by inch, up its surface. Their progress was slow, many times delayed by having to move crabwise to avoid lengths of dangling briar. Vyriadh and Xyril froze a third of the way up as a questing, silvery beam of light swept silently past, their eyes smarting in the monochromatic glare. As they climbed higher they found that the breeze, unnoticeable at street level, grew stronger and began to pluck at their limbs and cloaks with increasing tenacity.

  The gradient steepened inexorably as they climbed above a hundred metres, the tower’s overhang glowering above them. One of Vyriadh’s grip pads slipped as he reached upwards, leaving him hanging in space by one hand and foot as his body weight swung dangerously outwards. Xyril caught at his flailing arm and slapped it onto the metal surface to steady him almost without thought. They both paused for a moment, breathing hard.

  We’re high enough already, look,+ Xyril thought.

  Vyriadh saw that it was true. A drop of some ten metres onto the balcony lay behind them – with a horizontal gap at least as far between tower and citadel.

  One good leap will be enough,+ Vyriadh thought boldly, tensing his body to hurl himself outwards.

  Stop!+ Xyril warned. Vyriadh instantly froze.

  What is it?+ Vyriadh asked.

  A trap for the unwary. See it?+ Xyril showed him the balcony again. Something barely perceptible overlaid the balcony, a cross-hatching of pencil-thin lines that was only visible from certain angles.

  Monofilament wire,+ realised Vyriadh and shuddered.

  Enough to turn a plunging body into goo,+ Xyril agreed. The molecule-thick entanglement would have sliced them limb from limb if they so much as brushed against it, let alone jumped into it.

  I still have corrosives. Most of yours went into the disappointing warrior,+ Vyriadh observed.

  Braced by both toe grips and one hand, Xyril reached over, unclipped an emerald-hued bulb of poison from Vyriadh’s belt and tossed it unerringly towards the balcony. It burst into an evil-looking green cloud just above the ground; faint traceries of lines showed where it was eating into the wire. In seconds the taut web had collapsed, completely consumed by the powerful acid-based toxin. In a few moments more the breeze dispersed the cloud, leaving only a handful of blackened streaks behind.

  Xyril and Vyriadh leapt together, somersaulting to land on the balcony. The psychic spoor of their prize was stronger here, much stronger.

  The pounding rush of it in her mind made Xyril sway for a moment. Vyriadh looked at her oddly.

  It is nothing!+ Xyril’s mind snarled. +Focus!+

  Triple arches led from the balcony, peeking out from beneath a veil of briars. Xyril stepped to the centre arch and quickly cut back the briars with quick, efficient slashes of her blade. The crashing psychic pulse of their prize washed over them again, and this time it was Vyriadh who shook visibly at the onslaught.

  Such pain and anger!+ Vyriadh’s mind muttered uncertainly. +Perhaps we should not–+

  Don’t even think it. We live to serve!+ Xyril commanded, her thoughts edged with fear.

  Vyriadh nodded silently and drew himself together, his mental defences hardening against the crash and roar they had so eagerly sought when they first entered Biel-Tanigh. Beyond the arch a corridor sloped away, curving back upon itself to spiral down to the next level. They proceeded cautiously down it, wary for traps at every step. The corridor led them around in one circuit and then its walls disappeared so it became a curved ramp descending into the open space below.

  They found themselves in a wide hall, gloomily lit so that its far walls were lost in shadow. Angular plinths rose from the floor at various intervals. Many were empty, but others bore a strange variety of objects: skulls, sword hilts and pieces of armour were among the more identifiable things, others seemed like interlocking whorls of metal or complex nests of frozen light. The roaring surf-song of the archon’s prize emanated from a plinth towards the back wall, drawing Xyril and Vyriadh onwards with scarcely a glance at the esoteric artefacts around them.

  The jewel Yllithian had described lay upon a plinth, quiescent and seemingly mundane in comparison to its neighbours. A fist-sized stone very much like an opal, but with flecks of light floating in its depths.

  Xyril and Vyriadh glanced at each other in triumph. Xyril started to reach for the stone and then paused as Vyriadh sprinkled sensor-blinding dust over the plinth to disclose any final traps. Xyril’s fingers closed around the stone and her mind was buffeted by the outpouring of empathic energies.

  ‘Death! Ruin! Revenge!’ The silent shouts pulsed inside her temples. She staggered again and almost dropped the opal, Vyriadh’s grip steadying her as she rode the emotional wave. There was fear and anger and hatred and pride and triumph, all melded into one great ululating psychic cry of outrage. Xyril’s mind was assailed by images of another place at another time, of towers falling in flames, shrieking daemons blackening the skies, a tidal flood of dark energy rushing outward, reality itself cracking asunder.

  Strong! We must be strong!+ Vyriadh’s mind shouted through the maelstrom and Xyril draw strength from his certainty. Her sense of self emerged like a bubble from the whirlpool of tumbling psychic images and she straightened, gripping the opal harder as the visions faded.

  ‘You should put that back,’ a strangely accented voice said from the gloom.

  Vyriadh and Xyril drew their weapons with eye-blurring swiftness, simultaneously moving to place themselves back to back as they strained to identify the speaker. They saw several figures emerging from among the plinths, moving into the chamber with a stealthy tread that Vyriadh and Xyril would have found hard to believe was possible a moment before.

  ‘No,’ Xyril said distinctly, her little-used voice a harsh croak beside the lilting tones of the newcomers. The pair-bond sidled towards the ramp as she spoke the word, tensing to make a dash for freedom at the first opportunity. Four graceful, thorn-skinned eldar closed in on them, masked in black and bearing whips of dark metal shaped like writhing briars.

  ‘It will bring great woe upon your people,’ one warned as it flicked its lash at Vyriadh’s ankle.

  ‘The accursed halls of Shaa-dom must remain forever sealed,’ said another as its briar-whip whistled toward Xyril’s neck.

  The pair-bond exploded into action, diving one over the other to avoid their incoming attacks. Vyriadh’s pistol spat poisoned slivers into one masked face and sent the assailant tumbling away. Xyril parried a strike at Vyriadh’s arm, but she was encumbered, still gripping the opal in one hand. Their assailants whirled into the shadows, their outlines shattering into patches of fluttering darkness.

  A frightened part of them both knew that her holding onto the stone was crippling their chances of survival, let alone escape, but Xyril couldn’t let it go. It was as if a hot coal was burning in her h
and and welding her fingers shut. The surging roar of its psychic pulse was trying to pull her away, up the ramp to freedom without thought for friends or enemies. She had to fight the urge in order to stay and protect Vyriadh.

  With Xyril half-crippled, Vyriadh was struggling against their flitting attackers. He parried another strike from a half-seen enemy and fired his pistol again, this time his target darted out of sight before the trigger was even pulled. Two whips scythed out of the darkness simultaneously. Xyril managed to block one, but the other wrapped around Vyriadh’s hand, lacerating it cruelly as the barbs tore through his armour as if it were no more than silk. Vyriadh’s pistol clattered away from his grip as the whip pulled back and almost yanked him off his feet. Xyril could feel Vyriadh’s stab of panic as more whips whistled at him, but she was already sprinting away up the ramp.

  Vyriadh’s rage, terror and understanding pursued her, yet even that life-long bond was all but extinguished by the beating pulse of the opal in her fevered grasp. All that mattered now was getting to Yllithian; the uncounted dead of Shaa-dom demanded it, implored it, even at the price that half her soul must be left dying behind her. She burst onto the balcony, knowing that Vyriadh was still fighting defensively on the ramp, doing everything he could to delay her pursuers.

  She ran for the edge, using her free hand to ready a zipline equipped with a tiny gravitic grapnel at one end. Just as she leapt into space, she felt Vyriadh die. A part of herself was extinguished, a void opened where his fleeing soul once was.

  Xyril gasped, abandoning herself to the fall as the pain of loss stabbed into her like a physical injury. Some baser instinct of preservation made her fling out the looping zipline towards the face of the tower now rushing past. The gravitic anchor caught, jerking her to a halt so sharply that she almost dislocated her shoulder. She rapidly slid down the few remaining metres to the ground. She wasted no time looking back at the citadel or retrieving the zipline. As soon as her feet touched the ground she ran, driven by the stone in her hand and pursued by her own guilt.

  She ran, and they hunted her. Thorn-skinned eldar and warrior machines and silvery beams like spears stabbing down from above. They hunted her through the coiling briars and labyrinthine streets, beneath angular eaves and between barbed minarets, but they could not find her. The dead guided her now and saved her a hundred times even as they drove onward. Darting flecks of light swarmed inside the opal, its psychic pulse virtually dragging Xyril from one hiding place to another as the denizens of Biel-Tanigh hunted for her. She allowed it to guide her running feet, too numb with shock and loss to resist the silent urging. It soothed her, filling the lacerated space in her soul where Vyriadh had been torn away from her. She found that she hated it and loved it all at once.

  Step by step, they crept together to the portal where Xyril and Vyriadh had entered the strange, terrible city what seemed to be so little time before. Xyril could feel that she was dying, her grief was a mortal wound that was sapping her will to live. Her limbs moved mechanically, acting only in anticipation of soon being able to rest forever. Climbing the tower was hard with only one hand but pocketing the stone never even crossed her mind. Slowly, painfully, she dragged herself up to the portal and activated it.

  The tattered, ghostly webway seemed icy cold after Biel-Tanigh; the spectral gale blowing through its rents and tears stroked frozen fingers along Xyril’s spine. The opal, so blazing hot before, chilled to a lifeless lump and dropped from her nerveless fingers. Part of Xyril’s mind remembered vaguely that there was something important about the stone, but it was too hard to think about. Bending down to retrieve it would be an incredible amount of effort, enough to snap her thin thread of existence. Nothing really mattered any more.

  Something drew her attention. It was a twisting thread of warmth or a familiar scent – she couldn’t quite tell which. The icy breeze bore with it some trace of familiarity. Xyril staggered towards it, closer to the torn edges of the webway tunnel. Something outside was calling to her.

  In High Commorragh, atop the White Flames fortress, Archon Yllithian frowned with annoyance as a jewel at his wrist flashed twice and then dimmed. Looking away from the sslyth wrestling match for a moment, Yllithian gestured languidly to a dark, twisted individual who was lurking among the archon’s otherwise glittering entourage. The stooped figure hurried forward and abased itself, its curving spine imparting a curious rolling motion to the action.

  ‘Ready another pair-bond, Syiin. Your last ones failed me,’ Yllithian ordered.

  Syiin blanched at his words, the tiny amount of colour in his already pale flesh rapidly draining away.

  ‘Are there improvements I could make?’ Syiin asked ingratiatingly. ‘My first priority is always to serve you as well as possible, my archon.’

  Yllithian gave him a baleful look. ‘Do as I command or I will feed you to the sslyth here and now, am I clear?’

  ‘At once, my archon,’ the haemonculus simpered before rapidly retreating.

  Yllithian gave his attention back to the multi-armed ophidians crushing one another for his pleasure as his mind worked over schemes to overcome this failure in his carefully laid plans. Patience was important. He had always known there was only a small chance of retrieving the key to Shaa-dom so easily. Patience and persistence would bring it to his hands eventually, and then the grand plan could begin.

  MIDNIGHT ON THE STREET OF KNIVES

  Commorragh is a city like no other in the universe. It exists outside space and time in the unknowable depths of the Sea of Souls, the realm beyond our realm that idiot savants argue gave birth to all that we know. Commorragh’s makers, or rather architects as they would claim, did not fashion the city as one place. Rather each of them used ways unimaginable to lesser beings to fashion their own secret enclaves out of the Immaterial Realm to serve as fortress, sanctum, pleasure palace or arena according to their whim. In time the hubris of these ‘architects’ grew so great that they created something that breached the very walls between realms. As all crashed into ruins they fled to their enclaves like rats into their holes. In time, as they grew ever more fearful of the dreadful child they had sired together, those that survived the tempest strove to connect their realms. So steeped in torture and murder were they that they had no choice. They must do so to feed one upon another and whomever else they could bring beneath their hand. And so the eternal city was born.

  – Adept Xalinis Huo, Hereticus Majoris.

  It was midnight on the Street of Knives when Kharbyr spotted his mark heading straight towards him not six stalls up. The street was dark and crooked but it was virtually deserted and the gaunt figure of Bellathonis’s servant stood out in freeze-frame in the stark flicker of the furnaces. Kharbyr had been lucky, oh yes, but he’d made the right choice of where to hunt in the first place and that made him feel extremely smug. He was cleverer than the others and he would be the one to claim the promised reward. He treated himself to a pinch of agarin while he waited, savouring the clean bite of it in his nostrils and the shiver it sent down his spine. Oh, this was going to be fun.

  The whisper had come that Bellathonis’s servant had left the Red House carrying the package in a hurry and, most importantly, alone. When he’d heard that, Kharbyr had gambled that the haemonculus’s minion would cut through here. The Street of Knives was a safe run for as long as it lasted, at least as safe as it got anywhere in the city. The archon of Metzuh suffered no fractious incidents here that might impede the productivity of her weaponsmiths and artisans.

  To underscore her displeasure at such activities, the Street of Knives was patrolled by her incubi, their mere presence enough to deter most troublemakers. The initial excitement of seeing his prey had sent Kharbyr’s hand shooting toward his blade of its own volition, but a pair of grim, armoured incubi already had him under scrutiny as if they could sense his intentions. The bodies of the truly foolhardy young blades – the ones who just couldn’t take a h
int – were hanging on chains from the jagged eaves of the weapon shops. They were left there as hellion-bait to clarify the point to others to curb their instincts in this part of the city.

  With a conscious effort of will, Kharbyr unwrapped his fingers from the polished bone grip and calmly turned to examine a display of wickedly curved hydraknives as the servant hurried past. Naturally, fighting still occurred this close to the archon’s palace, but only over matters of import that were orders of magnitude above this one.

  Kharbyr got his first good look at the servant as he passed: a pale, haggard face with red, staring eyes, a heavy jaw and a morose scowl that looked to be a permanent fixture. It was a fitting face for the minion of a haemonculus, a creature of vivisections and interrogations. Thick brows beneath the servant’s hairless pate were currently knotted with concern and a kind of mulish determination.

  A long, ribbed coat of dark hide flapped from the servant’s narrow shoulders with all the panache of partially sloughed skin. No weapons were obvious, but he was clutching the package so fiercely that it looked as if he feared it might make a break for freedom at any moment. He was also muttering incoherently and smelled appallingly of ether and offal. The servant was certainly going to be easy to shadow. Kharbyr let the noisome fool get a little further ahead and then wandered innocently after him.

  Xagor clutched the hide-wrapped jar of pineal glands tighter to his chest. As he scurried along he tried to balance speed against drawing too much attention to himself. It was unlikely anyone would try to steal the jar here, but the master would not happy if Xagor so much as let it out of his sight or, worse still, he lost it. Those that displeased the master were soon begging for death. Xagor knew this for certain as he’d attended them himself on many occasions. With a haemonculus as skilled as the master, death was always a long time coming. No, handling the jar was bad enough, but what he’d heard while he was getting it at the Red House made it all so much worse.