Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  She surveyed the dozen assembled wyches with a critical eye. They were exclusively female fighters in half-armour or less, although none had quite gone the whole way to being entirely skyclad. All of them were possessed of the subtle grace only an eldar female trained rigorously from birth could aspire to, they could run on spear points or dance on a blade’s edge – a matter that was about to be put to the test. These were her chosen, her hekatrix, the keenest blades at her command. Aez’ashya would have been among them once, the apple of Xelian’s eye before Yllithian’s scheming had ruined her.

  The crown of thorns floated before them, a hundred metres across and filling the practice space virtually wall-to-wall as it slowly contra-rotated in a mesmerising lattice of sharp edges and needle-points. The pulse of it seemed to fill the air, relentless and implacable as the beat of a giant’s heart. They mounted light grav platforms to elevate themselves to its upper surface before stepping off onto a shifting toroidal landscape of dully-gleaming blades. She gazed around at her hekatrix and raised her voice above the low whisper of the thorn-blades cutting through the air.

  ‘To first blood.’ Xelian found she savoured the word so unexpectedly that it made her hesitate for a moment before she recovered her poise.

  ‘Begin.’

  The wyches whirled into action, sprinting across the surface of the crown in a blur of flashing limbs. The unspoken rules of engagement were that everyone fought for themselves, but that meant temporary alliances of weaker fighters as they attempted to overwhelm the strongest. Xelian quickly had three of her wyches pressing at her defences. She ran along the blade she stood upon with quick, sure strides and sprang to another sliding past five metres away, daring her assailants to emulate her feat.

  The first wych to try to follow her met her knives and slid into the maze of edged metal below, ending her short, painful journey impaled on an upward-tilting point. The other two thought better of making the jump and ran back to find a surer way around.

  Xelian had problems of her own. She was caught blind-side by another opponent, a wych named Lorys recently risen from the Cult of Strife. Lorys’s determined attack drove Xelian step-by-step to the very tip of the thorn she stood upon. There she turned at bay, her knives weaving a bright web that struck sparks from Lorys’s thrusts.

  The crown lurched slightly beneath Xelian’s feet as its rotation began to speed up. Just as it did so one of Lorys’s whistling blows slipped under her guard and creased her ribs, slicing though skin and muscle with surgical precision. The kiss of cold steel thrilled through Xelian’s nerves and finally dispelled her fugue of doubts and concerns. She was totally in the moment at last, the dance of blades becoming her entire world. Lorys relaxed fractionally at the sight of blood, thinking her archon would stand down as the rules of the bout dictated.

  ‘More!’ Xelian shouted, whirling her knives furiously onto the attack.

  Xelian’s ferocious counter-assault caught Lorys off guard, driving her back down the gleaming thorn. She was soon bleeding freely from a score of nicks to her arms and legs as she fought desperately to keep her archon in check. The bloodshed seemed to drive Xelian into even more of a frenzy, raining her attacks down with no thought to her own defence. Lorys was soon reeling beneath the rain of blows, barely able stave off an inevitable deathblow.

  The two wyches Xelian had evaded earlier suddenly rejoined the fray, leaping from blade to blade to attack Xelian’s flanks. She turned on them with a scream of pure hatred, the glittering fangs of her knives carving into them with predatory swiftness.

  ‘You are such a wild beast, Xelian.’

  Xelian tore open a face and sent one of her chosen companions screaming into the soughing blades. A stroke like white lightning came from her flank and sheared through her upper arm, the red lips of the wound parting obscenely as the bicep flopped loose. She laughed in wild ecstasy and pivoted to impale her other attacker on twin fangs, driving them deep into her body before ripping upwards with horrible strength. Bloody viscera slithered down her arms and painted them a fetching crimson.

  ‘I swear that the bloodletting is all that truly interests you.’

  A knife was sunk into her back, a penetrating shard of bright pain probing up under ribs and lungs for the heart. She allowed the weight of the eviscerated corpse on her own knives to carry her forwards, half-turning to smash Lorys’s face with her elbow. They were falling, falling into the moving skein of bright edges.

  A distant part of her mind was screaming that this was relevant somehow and that falling demanded action, but the all-consuming bloodlust that had been unleashed in her soul blotted it out completely. She twisted and caught Lorys on her fangs to drag her close for a final, deadly embrace as the churning blades rushed up to meet them. Blood sprayed over her, embracing her in a crimson flood of joy. The last blood Xelian saw being shed was her own.

  CHAPTER 15

  A CONFESSION

  ‘I raised a pillar above Cyllidh’s city gate and I flayed all of the dracons who had revolted, and I hung the pillar with their skins. Some I sealed at the base of the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on barbs, and others I bound round about the pillar with chains of burning ice… And I cut the limbs of the officers, of the noble officers who had rebelled… Many captives I burned with fire and many others I took as living slaves into my own house. From some I took their fingers and toes, from others noses and tongues, of many I put out the eyes so that all might know the hand of Vect.’

  – Asdrubael Vect

  Yllithian hurried along through the secret ways beneath his palace, his mind racing furiously. He had been summoned by El’Uriaq, called like a slave to attend on his master. The thought provoked the taste of bile in his mouth but behind it lay the omnipresent taint of fear. Xelian and Kraillach both lay dead at the hands of their own retainers. It was no coincidence that both of his old, most trusted allies had suddenly succumbed to plots after centuries of leading their kabals. Fear of assassination had grown to encompass every moment of Yllithian’s waking life. Even his dreams were haunted by stealthy murderers that wore the faces of his most trusted servants.

  By all accounts El’Uriaq seemed to thrive on danger. In the months since his resurrection he had survived no less than fourteen attempts on his life without so much as a scratch. His assailants were able to claim no such happy condition. El’Uriaq wielded raw psychic power with an effortless ease that was as terrifying to witness for those around him as it was brutally effective at crushing any threat to his person. Many of his most fervent followers had taken to hailing him as a demi-god. Just how the old emperor of Shaa-dom could wield such powers while avoiding any repercussions from beyond the veil was a matter of great interest to Yllithian, but it was immaterial at present. The simple truth was that El’Uriaq was in control and seemingly unassailable. Whatever hand had struck down Kraillach and Xelian seemed unable to harm El’Uriaq and, for some reason, had passed Yllithian by.

  At first Yllithian had believed that Vect had become aware of their plot, that despite all possible precautions the tyrant had divined that El’Uriaq had returned. Then he began to fear that Vect was trying to turn El’Uriaq against him by deliberately targeting the others while leaving Yllithian himself conspicuously unchallenged. Lately Yllithian had come to the conclusion that El’Uriaq himself had to be behind the assassinations. His spies in the city had heard not a whisper, nor a breath of rumour that could betray El’Uriaq’s return in the months since his resurrection, nor any indication that Vect was aware of it.

  So it was that when El’Uriaq called for his presence, Yllithian, great and noble archon of the White Flames, came running. Yllithian had always prided himself upon, among other things, his clear insight. He could see the way that his allies had been swept away when they exhausted their usefulness and he was determined not to follow them into oblivion. For now he must play the devoted follower until he could find El’Uriaq’s weakness.
Yllithian consoled himself that he already had reason to believe the old emperor of Shaa-dom was not quite as resourceful as recent events might indicate.

  Yllithian stopped short, pulled out of his ruminations to wonder at the sight before him. He’d heard that at El’Uriaq’s instruction slaves had been labouring to break open new areas of the catacombs beneath. Yllithian had given little thought to the reports when he heard them, imagining only that El’Uriaq sought to open up a little more living space for himself while he plotted Vect’s demise. It seemed the work being undertaken was more extensive than he had imagined.

  Where there had previously been only a narrow corridor, rock-cut galleries now rose out of sight on either side. In each gallery gangs of slaves were toiling beneath the lash to widen the excavations further. It was still a hole, of course, in comparison to the sweeping grandeur of High Commorragh, but it was hard to deny that El’Uriaq’s works radiated a crude strength and purpose not to be found in the glittering spires above.

  Yllithian walked on more slowly, cultivating an air of bored disinterest as he observed the work in progress. The slaves were all fresh, their limbs hale and straight, their skins little marked by the sores and scars they soon accumulated. Yllithian wondered what had happened to all the previous gangs of slaves swallowed up by El’Uriaq’s lair. He moved deeper, pondering the latest nugget of information he had uncovered about Kraillach’s death.

  There was no doubt that Morr had been the one behind the fall of the Realm Eternal. Scandalously the incubus, a faithful servant since before anyone seemed able to remember, had turned on his master and his whole kabal. Yllithian’s spies had reported to him that the slaughter had been merciless. Kraillach’s kabal was a broken reed now, its scattered survivors staying but one step ahead of avaricious rivals intent on carving up their remaining assets. Kraillach himself had met true death, his body utterly destroyed.

  Morr had subsequently vanished without trace. In Yllithian’s secret consultations with Angevere she had said that Morr had returned to the hidden shrine of Arhra, Father of Scorpions. It was a reference to the legendary place where all incubi were said to learn their killing arts. Yllithian set little store in the existence of such a mythical location and took her meaning to be a metaphorical one – Morr had sought shelter among the ranks of his fellow incubi. Yllithian would have given a great deal to know just why the incubi had chosen to overlook Morr’s blatant betrayal of their professed tenets of obedience and loyalty to their archons. Sadly that particular piece of information was also hidden from him, and if the crone knew more about it she refused to say.

  Nonetheless logic dictated that if Morr had acted at the behest of El’Uriaq, why had he not come forth to claim his reward? It was an altogether more likely scenario that Morr had slaughtered his archon for transgressing one of the incubi’s obscure ascetic beliefs. His flight to the incubi implied that some matter of honour was at stake. The Realm Eternal had been meekly falling in line with El’Uriaq’s machinations but now it was lost to him. That spoke to Yllithian of some other hidden hand at work. He could only hope that it was not the hand of Asdrubael Vect.

  Beyond the galleries the passage narrowed to the more familiar catacombs again, but even here new cross-passages had been made. Everywhere he could hear the buzz of low voices and the sound of hurried footsteps. Three times Yllithian was stopped by arrogant trueborn warriors and forced to explain his business there. When he named himself and his business they were deferential enough but the incidents chafed at Yllithian’s already raw temper even further. He carefully kept his emotions in check; Xelian’s recent fall from grace was still sharp in his mind.

  Opinions varied as to whether the Blades of Desire had survived as a kabal because of or despite the tyrant’s scrutiny at an especially vulnerable time. A new archon had been raised with a minimal amount of bloodletting after Xelian’s death. Dark rumours persisted of Xelian being seized by a fit of madness immediately before her demise but the extreme damage her body had sustained precluded any practical attempt at investigation. Her resurrection was proving unfeasibly prolonged for a variety of ill-explained reasons. It had reached a point where Yllithian was beginning to suspect Xelian’s haemonculi had been bribed to prevent, or at least delay, her return.

  Yllithian was regretting the loss of the services of Bellathonis, himself incarcerated in one of his own sarcophagi since he had displeased El’Uriaq. Apparently the master haemonculus had sustained dreadful injuries during the resurrection, his own splintered bones piercing his organs in many places. Weeks of regrowth, Bellathonis’s wracks had told him, would be required and they refused to rouse their master ahead of time. Yllithian had sensed deception from the wracks, a fearful taint that they were hiding something. No doubt they too were in El’Uriaq’s employ.

  Bellathonis would have been able to get to the bottom of things, or at the very least get Xelian back in the running. To Yllithian’s practiced eye the changeover at the Blades of Desire had been altogether too smooth, a sure sign that someone had worked hard behind the scenes to make it so. He had little doubt that the new archon of the Blades of Desire owed her allegiance to El’Uriaq body and soul. Xelian had so effectively eliminated rivals from her own bloodline that the remnants of her house were now helpless pawns and figureheads. It would be long – if ever – before House Xelian rose to any form of prominence in Commorragh again. In the old alliance of the noble houses that left only Yllithian and his White Flames free to act.

  As free as fear would allow.

  Yllithian passed beneath what had been a low opening that was now an arch three stories high. Beyond it the way opened into an amphitheatre with a tall throne on a stepped dais at its centre. Yllithian followed a wide ramp down to the floor of the amphitheatre, noting how crude and unfinished everything looked; the ramp was rough and uneven, the angles of the stepped terraces mismatched. Slaves were scattered everywhere chipping miserably at the rock while being alternately harassed, goaded or abused by scores of guards with nothing better to do with their time. Messengers dashed in and out vying for attention with extravagantly costumed victuallers that were intent on displaying their wares: spice wines and stem meads that had been distilled from whole settlements, the cured flesh and pickled organs of extinct species, or the last living examples of endangered ones. Jewels and the richest finery lay in heaps like a mythical dragon’s horde.

  At the centre of this great constellation of activity was El’Uriaq himself. His personal gravity was such that it made every occurrence in the wide amphitheatre orbit around him. The guards abused the slaves for his pleasure, the piles of treasure were his tribute, the messengers clamoured for his ear, the hustlers showed their goods to win his favour. Yllithian approached the dais feeling lonely and vulnerable, a dark-clad non-entity in the multitude. As the proud archon of the White Flames he had already had to accept that his only protection against El’Uriaq was his continued usefulness. If that ever failed him neither guards nor walls would keep him safe, as Kraillach and Xelian had discovered to their cost. Even so it was still a test for his nerve to appear before the old emperor of Shaa-dom shorn of any such artifices and depend solely on El’Uriaq’s good favour not to be killed on a whim.

  El’Uriaq wore an open-fronted robe of pale silver over a suit of shining bronze-coloured body armour. His head bore a crown adorned with eight stars of shifting hues and his hand bore a sceptre carved from a single ruby. So had high archons appeared in the days before the rise of Vect, a wordless claim to nobility of a lost age – a time that Shaa-dom in point of fact was never a part of. Such panoply left little doubt as to El’Uriaq’s ambitions to rule Commorragh in the tyrant’s stead. Despite the crowd El’Uriaq sensed Yllithian’s arrival immediately, turning to him with a delighted expression as if at the return of an old friend that had been long absent.

  ‘Nyos! My thanks for accepting my invitation, I’m so glad you could come!’ El’Uriaq called, his rich voic
e full of warmth and welcome.

  ‘It was my honour, El’Uriaq, to be invited to your hidden kingdom,’ Yllithian said as he looked about him pointedly. ‘Your security is not a concern any more, I assume?’

  ‘Fear not, everyone here can be trusted to take their own life before revealing my secrets to our enemies.’

  ‘Reassuring. I would include myself in that pool of happy martyrs, of course.’

  ‘Your devotion to our common cause is beyond question, Nyos, I know that,’ El’Uriaq replied with heartfelt conviction. What did he know that Yllithian didn’t? The thought was chilling.

  ‘Which is why I have invited you here to come and share your thoughts about the unfortunate demise of Kraillach.’

  Yllithian’s mind went through an instantaneous flip. El’Uriaq was asking him for theories on Kraillach’s murder? Perhaps the plan was to entrap him with a false accusation of complicity?

  ‘I understand that Kraillach’s own chief executioner, an incubus named Morr, was behind the heinous crime in question. He has evaded justice ever since as best I know.’

  El’Uriaq was watching him carefully, weighing the truth or falsehood behind every word.

  ‘Yes, that much is common gossip, so I hear,’ said El’Uriaq lightly. ‘The burning question is why the executioner slew his master. Why do you think he did it, Nyos? What was the motive?’

  ‘I had assumed he was in the employ of our enemies,’ Yllithian lied, noting that El’Uriaq didn’t seem to require any theories about Xelian’s passing. He decided to risk a probe in that direction. ‘Perhaps this was an attempt to weaken our alliance, given the recent… disruption within the Blades of Desire. Our enemies sought to remove the Realm Eternal as a viable power block too.’