Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  ‘As I thought, you see that this is the only way. Activate your device and proceed with the questioning at once.’

  Bellathonis nodded and made the appropriate connections. The hanging bodies of the pain-proxies stirred as if they were ruffled by a spectral breeze.

  ‘Yllithian, my slayer, returns to ask forgiveness? Bellathonis and I were just – Saasaaaaahhhhh!!!!’

  Yllithian glared at Bellathonis darkly. ‘Apologies, my archon, momentary feedback on the regulator,’ Bellathonis said contritely.

  Yllithian turned his attention back to the crone. ‘Tell me what occurred in the World Shrine on Lileathanir during our recent raid,’ he ordered.

  ‘I cannot see beyond these walls, your own blade ensured that.’

  Yllithian gestured to Bellathonis and triple-voiced shrieks ripped through the narrow cell. He gestured again and the nerve-tearing flow of pain was halted.

  ‘Do not lie to me, Angevere, the knowledge is there. All you must do is reach out for it. Consider for a while the momentary dangers of this small thing when weighed against an eternity of pain.’

  Bellathonis moved the regulator to its highest setting and waited with Yllithian while the resultant screams became hoarse.

  CHAPTER 10

  ESCAPING DEATH

  Morr forged a straight path towards the highest of the skeletal shapes rearing up out of the red murk of Iron Thorn. His sabatons left deep imprints in the scrubby grass as though he were crunching through hoarfrost and tiny puffs of rust billowed up from each footfall. Xyriadh pushed ahead to scout, followed by Aez’ashya and Kharbyr. Eventually Morr seemed content to fall back to act as rearguard with Sindiel while Xagor continued to carry the worldsinger.

  The smog became denser, filling their mouths and noses with a sharp metallic tang as they pushed deeper into it. The ground levelled out and they began to pass irregularly jutting shapes that might once have been trees and bushes, now rendered into corroded masses of thorn-like spars. Occasionally the ground trembled and they heard distant gurgling sounds somewhere beneath their feet as though they were walking on the belly of some giant. Rhythmic hammering drifted into their hearing and faded out again, only to return redoubled a few minutes later.

  They slithered through the choking smog as quickly and quietly as they could but they soon spotted silent watchers paralleling their course. Luminous eyes glittered in the red mist and weirdly distorted shadows limped in their wake. The strange denizens of Iron Thorn were gathering, one by one at first and then by the dozen. The presence of life seemed to draw them forth, the hated biological excrescence within their realm pulling them in like white blood cells fighting an infection. Fear was keeping them at bay for the present but their unthinkable lust to destroy would soon overcome it. The remade half-life of Iron Thorn had long since learned to hate the biologicals that invaded their realm.

  Kharbyr suspected that the fear that held the shuffling multitude in check was not inspired by their scurrying quarry but by mightier hunters that were abroad somewhere in the sub-realm. He couldn’t shake the feeling that some vast, cool intellect perceived their progress, something that brought with it a twisted sense of wrongness that resonated through the whole sub-realm. The presence felt close, as if its chill breath were already on the nape of their necks. Its chosen instruments had found the spoor and were remorselessly closing in on their prey. It might be better to take his own life now, rather than wait to be hunted down and torn apart by iron fingers…

  Aez’ashya reached over and slapped Kharbyr around the side of the head. ‘Focus!’ she hissed. ‘We aren’t caught yet.’ He realised with a shock that the blade gripped in his hand had been creeping towards his throat, seemingly of its own volition. He gazed in confusion at his companions and wondered how many of them were being assailed by insidious thoughts that were not their own.

  Ahead of them the vague distortion that marked Xyriadh’s progress slithered to an abrupt halt.

  ‘No way forwards,’ Xyriadh’s voice hissed anxiously in their ears.

  ‘Explain,’ rumbled Morr.

  ‘Dozens of those things up ahead, maybe hundreds. They’re blocking our path forwards.’

  ‘What are they doing?’ asked Sindiel.

  ‘Standing there, swaying. I’d say they were singing, but there’s no sound coming out.’

  ‘They are emitting ultrasonics intended to disrupt our cognitive processes,’ said Morr.

  ‘Or they’re supplicating the master of this place and begging to be given our souls,’ suggested Aez’ashya. ‘Either way I honestly don’t think we’re going to be friends.’

  The sense of wrongness wafted more strongly around them, like a foetid breeze. The smog rippled and the harsh lines of the skeletal ruins wavered for a moment before solidifying into subtly altered shapes. The rhythmic hammering rose in intensity, now accompanied by an endless squealing as of great wheels turning. The hunters were coming.

  ‘Defensive positions,’ Morr ordered. ‘Get out of the open.’

  The towering incubus took the lead and battered his way into a row of ferric shrubs that resembled spear-pointed railings more than vegetation. The strange entities in the mist seemed emboldened by cornering their prey and quickly pushed in closer to surround them. As they did so, the cursed dead of Iron Thorn became clearly visible for the first time.

  They were hollow, mannequin-like forms that mocked life with their mismatched limbs and patchwork bodies. A hideous, sighing moan could be heard from the things as they pressed in closer around the makeshift fortress. Step by step the agents moved back into a defensive ring, confronting the creatures across bulwarks of rusting, twisted iron. With nowhere else to go they halted and readied themselves for the inevitable attack.

  ‘From peril, into peril they flee, carrying with them the pure heart. Into the lands of the lost they travel, hunted by many enemies. The Masquerade follows their every move but will not aid them, save with a clean end if they should fall.’

  The temperature in the cell had dipped sharply as the head of Angevere began to speak through its pain-proxies. Glittering hoarfrost bloomed up the walls and a chill breeze had sprung seemingly from nowhere. Yllithian paced in the narrow confines of the cell, a sign of frustration he seldom permitted himself.

  ‘This talk about lands of the lost tells us nothing!’ he snapped. ‘Where can they be found now? How can the pure heart be secured?’

  The crone’s voice changed, distorted into a coarse grumble. ‘What is “now”? From one moment to the next is a skipping stone, our lives mere ripples intersecting.’ The voice changed to a high, nasal whine. ‘They remake their future with every movement. The pure heart! Everything around it is distorted, a mirror. Hatred begets hatred!’

  Bellathonis looked at Yllithian questioningly. The haemonculus did not look frightened, but seemed intensely wary and curious. This sort of warp-babble was entirely outside his experience and Yllithian’s own studies extended more to control and manipulation than interpretation… Yllithian stopped pacing and cursed himself for his own ignorance.

  At some unheard signal the thornlings suddenly attacked. Four wedges of them pushed their way through the barriers in a flailing mass. Hinged blade-arms thrashed and peg-toothed jaws snapped as the horde rushed in. They were so closely packed that they resembled rust-coloured worms as they squeezed through the breaches in the iron hedge.

  Morr’s blade swept ruin through them with hurricane force, hurling about heads and limbs as if they were confetti. Aez’ashya’s knives wove a deadly web, quickly piling up a drift of flopping, clattering bodies around her feet. Kharbyr lashed out wildly at the tide of iron limbs threatening to engulf them, Sindiel and Xyriadh fought desperately with knives and pistols, their rifles rendered useless at such close quarters. Xagor crouched in the centre protecting his prisoner as if his life depended on it, which in point of fact it did.

 
The thornlings were quick and strong but they made awkward fighters. More often than not their own numbers impeded them in the confined space. Nonetheless if they felt pain or fatigue they did not show it, and their extremities had a disturbing tendency to continue attacking mindlessly even once they had been separated from their owners. Sindiel and Xyriadh soon began to busy themselves by grabbing severed clockwork limbs and tossing them outside the improvised barricade.

  The rust-red tide suddenly ebbed away, stumbling back from the relentless blades of Morr and Aez’ashya. The survivors rallied amid the newly created junkheaps and began refitting lost limbs to shattered stumps, their cold and unblinking eyes lit with the promise of renewed violence. Morr watched them for a few seconds before hefting his blade and striding out to confront the half-made horde.

  ‘Allow them no chance to recover,’ he said simply.

  Aez’ashya needed no second invitation and leapt forwards to add her knives again to the devastating arcs carved by Morr’s klaive. The others followed more slowly, kicking away the limbless torsos and chattering skulls left in Morr and Aez’ashya’s wake. The surviving thornlings limped away into the choking smog to escape the merciless assault, suddenly seeming more like living creatures for an instant as they fled. The ground shook and gurgled beneath their feet in impotent protest.

  ‘Ha!’ spat Aez’ashya. ‘Not so–’

  Something big and fast came hurtling out of the murk and leapt straight at Morr. Spike-studded wheels tore at him as he was borne backwards, knocking his great blade from his grasp. The thing was a chimerical offspring of predatory cat and cycle, its piston-like fore and hind limbs twisted to hold scythed wheels beneath a curving armoured back. Another machine roared in and tried to sideswipe Aez’ashya but the nimble wych was too quick to be caught by its blades, somersaulting over the machine at the last moment. Xyriadh ran out of the path of a third set of eye-lights, chased by chattering trails of solid slugs that stitched through the earth at her feet.

  Morr was wrestling with the beast machine that had pinned him, holding its madly spinning fore-wheel away from his body. Bloodstone tusks on the incubus’s helm suddenly spat a pulse of ruddy energy into the guts of the machine that struck sparks and flame from its innards. He twisted and threw the thing aside with a mighty heave, sending it crashing into the ground where it lay with wheels spinning feebly. Eye-lights stabbed through the murk as the rest of the hunting pack came roaring back around for another attack.

  Aez’ashya immediately turned and sprinted away from the scant protection of her comrades. The beast machines swung aside to run down the fleeing figure, dirt spraying from their hind wheels as they accelerated after her. She dodged aside from their whirling spikes at the last instant, slapping one palm down on a machine as she vaulted over it. The machine was spinning around to chase her when the device she had attached to it detonated. Lightning burst from it, enveloping its entire body in crackling skeins of electricity. Fat blue sparks flew and the beast machine toppled over helplessly. Its companions slewed aside and vanished into the all-enveloping red smog with a despairing shriek.

  ‘Haywire grenade,’ Aez’ashya said with a wicked grin. ‘These have to be some of the stupidest ideas for death machines I’ve ever seen. What use is something that can’t stop without falling over?’

  Morr bent and retrieved his klaive. His armour was dented and scored in a dozen places but he showed no signs of harm, save perhaps for moving a little more stiffly than normal.

  ‘We must continue. This resistance is intended to keep us from the gate,’ he said.

  ‘Veslyin the Anchorite said that time has no meaning in the Sea of Souls. The warp can give glimpses of the past, the future and the present because within it they are all one. According to him when dealing with its denizens trying to attribute events to a timeframe in terms of past, present or future, is pointless – they must be addressed in terms of absolute actions.

  ‘With that in mind tell me this, crone, where will my agents carrying the pure heart re-enter the city?’

  ‘They will return in triumph at the feet of giants if they return at all. The guardians of the gate must be defeated first, and that outcome is unknowable.’

  The gate towered five stories high, gnarled metal pillars supported a thick lintel inset with wraithbone. It was open, the portal’s mirrored surface clearly visible shimmering between the uprights. It was also guarded. A squad of Black Heart kabalite warriors lounged insouciantly in front of the gate with their Raider craft landed so that it restricted entry. They were heavily armed and despite their relaxed demeanour they looked ready to spring into action at the first sign of trouble.

  ‘Vect’s curs, what a coincidence,’ Xyriadh said when she concluded her scouting report. ‘Do you think they’re here on our account?’

  ‘Unlikely,’ replied Morr. ‘They guard the gate to prevent the denizens of Iron Thorn troubling the city.’

  ‘Why even bother keeping it open at all?’ Sindiel asked. ‘There’s nothing here!’

  His naïveté prompted a laugh from the towering incubus, a short cough of levity that burst and then swiftly vanished like a bubble emerging from tar.

  ‘You have much to learn of our ways, foundling,’ Morr said. ‘On this occasion I shall instruct you. The gate remains open because this sub-realm belongs to the tyrant. If it were closed he could no longer claim to dominate it as he does all the others. Some of the other sub-realms make this one seem a pleasure garden. Vect lays claim to them all. They are territory, and territory within the webway is finite.’

  Sindiel blinked, slightly rocked by the incubus’s intimidating declamation.

  ‘Why not simply guard the other side then?’ the renegade ventured. ‘That would be safer than risking it out here, surely?’

  ‘Truly you have much to learn,’ Morr intoned and said no more.

  ‘The risk is the whole point, Sindiel,’ Aez’ashya whispered conspiratorially. ‘If there were no risk they wouldn’t stay on guard at all, they’d go and find something more exciting to do. They probably haven’t even been ordered to guard the gate, they’re just here because they feel it needs doing and they think that doing it might win them some favour.’

  Sindiel’s mind whirled at the thought of such ill discipline.

  ‘Can’t we just wait until they wander off then?’ he asked.

  ‘Could be an hour, could be a week. We don’t have the time to wait,’ Xyriadh said with an air of finality.

  ‘We lack the strength for a direct assault. We must employ subterfuge,’ Morr said. ‘Sindiel, Xyriadh, move forward to hidden positions with sight lines to the Raider crew. Kharbyr and Aez’ashya will accompany me. Xagor will remain here with the prisoner.’

  ‘What’s the plan?’ asked Xyriadh.

  ‘We will approach them and negotiate,’ Morr replied.

  ‘And what happens when they’ve decided to kill us because we’re so weak that we tried to negotiate?’

  ‘We will already be close enough that their considerable advantage in ranged weaponry will be negated.’

  The incubus hefted his klaive on to his shoulder, the single eye in his blank-faced helm glaring around at them in challenge. Sindiel and Xyriadh obediently took up their rifles and crept off towards the gate.

  Bellathonis crouched uncomfortably on the open deck of a dart-like Venom grav craft as it hurtled through Low Commorragh carrying him back to his tower in the Aviaries. Fascinating as it had been to witness Yllithian at work, it had delayed Bellathonis’s departure to an almost critical degree. In the end he’d had to leave Yllithian alone with some basic instructions on how to operate the array, make his apologies and leave.

  It went against every instinct for a haemonculus to leave one of the uninitiated to conduct their own procedures, let alone using experimental equipment, but self-preservation had to come first. Yllithian’s description of the raid made Bella
thonis fear that Malixian might be returning in less than ideal humour. Under those circumstances attracting questions about Bellathonis’s own whereabouts and activities could prove decidedly fatal.

  Slipstream clawed at him as the Venom dipped between domes and needle-pointed antennae to intersect with the Beryl Gate on the Grand Canal. This close to them a trick of the wardings made it appear as if the Aviaries really existed in a pocket of reality just beyond their thick, oily membrane instead of an unguessable distance away in a different part of the webway. Bellathonis’s hire-pilot descended slowly to the gate, finding it open and guarded by a handful of warriors eagerly awaiting Malixian’s return.

  Arriving at his tower Bellathonis found another craft already docked there, a Raider bearing the icon of the White Flames. Absurdly he thought for a moment that Yllithian had arrived ahead of him, but that was impossible. He entered his tower warily but was greeted by his two door-grotesques with the usual slobbering joy he would expect from the slab-muscled brutes. One of his wracks, Menetis, stood wringing his hands in the entry hall.

  ‘Master! Guests arrived in your absence!’ Menetis bleated. A nasty stab of concern shot through Bellathonis’s mind.

  ‘I hope you were not indiscreet enough to mention I was not at home?’ Bellathonis said gently.

  ‘No! Master, no! They were told only that you were busy and could not be disturbed. They elected to wait until you became available.’

  ‘Ah, I see. And just who might these guests be, hmm? An essential point that I note you’ve so far failed to communicate.’

  Menetis looked horrified. ‘The haemonculus Syiin and seven of his attending wracks are here, master!’ he blurted. Bellathonis smiled disconcertingly at that news.