When El’Uriaq didn’t respond the crone persisted. ‘Will you not permit her to sing? If not for yourself then perhaps for the sake of the last of your poor, lost handmaids, Angevere?’
Laryin’s knees were shaking. Angevere had told her not to be afraid, that fear is the mind-killer. Easy for her to say, being a thing of nightmare herself. El’Uriaq seemed to loom over her, an impossibly tall silhouette in the harsh lights behind him. She tried to focus on the one Angevere had called Yllithian instead. Without his crow mask the dark kin was bland and unassuming except for his eyes. They were as black and merciless as gun barrels, and they were trained on her.
‘Please,’ Laryin said piteously to El’Uriaq. ‘In my… realm it is traditional for the bride to bring a dowry to her betrothed. My father is dead and I have only this small thing I can give, but give it I must.’
El’Uriaq turned to Yllithian and raised his brows quizzically. ‘What say you, Nyos?’ he said to his companion. ‘Should we permit this barbaric nuptial display in my hall?’
Yllithian coughed politely before answering. ‘I don’t believe that it will impugn the dignity of your palace or office, no,’ he replied levelly. El’Uriaq laughed uproariously at that and clapped him on the back, making the small archon stagger.
‘Traces of a spine, Nyos!’ El’Uriaq smiled. ‘We’ll make a true leader out of you yet! I was beginning to worry that too much time spent conspiring had softened your bones.’
‘They remain yours to crush at will, apparently,’ Yllithian said ruefully while rubbing his shoulder. ‘I, at least, would like to hear our captive bird sing. Just as the girl said it would be a unique experience even here in Commorragh, the city of a thousand and one delights. It might go some way to repaying the considerable difficulties in procuring her – above and beyond the resurrection of your inestimable self and the sadly departed Kraillach, of course.’
‘Of course,’ El’Uriaq nodded. Turning to Laryin he said, ‘Very well, as an indulgence to my friend here I will listen for a while. Ensure it’s sweet to my ears or I’ll soon have you singing a different tune.’
Laryin nodded nervously and knelt quickly to put down the casket she held before rising again, seeming to grow in confidence as she did so. She drew in breath once, twice, thrice and began her song alone and unaccompanied, somehow weaving it gently into the background clamour of the amphitheatre. It began with a thin, tremulous refrain that twisted to and fro, always questing, seeking like the first shoots of new growth.
Her song was a thing of beauty woven of sound and psychic energy in equal parts, tickling empathically like mind speech, affecting the body on an almost cellular level as it responded to the forgotten sounds of creation. The background noise seemed to fall away as Laryin’s voice grew stronger, breaking to the surface with the joy of new awakening.
Yllithian basked in the glow of her power. It felt very much like it had at the resurrection but now the energy Bellathonis had wrung from her with his torture engines was being freely given. There was the slightest tingling sensation on his skin, as though every fine hair were straining to stand on end. Alarm registered in his satiated mind and then was swept away by a wave of pleasure as Laryin struck a high note, as clear and perfect as pure crystal.
El’Uriaq seemed enraptured, a horrible thing to behold as his face was written with all the lust, possessiveness and violence this bright, quivering spark of soul-life aroused in him. The worldsinger sang on, but she was not looking at the monster leering over her. She gazed full at Yllithian and something in her clear eyes held both a warning and a plea.
Yllithian suddenly understood and stumbled away, almost falling on the steps of the dais. The world song rolled around him, rich and potent. Laryin sang of flourishing life, bursting forth upon the canvas of creation, shaping it and changing it with endless potential. The tingling on Yllithian’s skin had increased to a prickling. He staggered past unmasked guests and naked slaves, all seemingly frozen and silently gazing up at the dais. He desperately forced his stiffening limbs to carry him toward the servant’s entrance he’d spied earlier.
The song swept over him, powerful and dirge-like now as it sang of death. It seemed too powerful, too sonorous to be coming from the little white witch on the dais, as though she had evoked an otherworldly choir of roaring spirits. His skin was burning, and he looked down in horror at his hands. A film of black-green crystal was creeping across his skin, starting at his fingertips and already grown back as far as the second knuckle. Yllithian gave a little shriek and found that his face and lips were frighteningly immobile. He lurched through the skin curtains ahead of him, battering them frantically aside with rigid hands.
Behind him Laryin sang of sadness and loss, of life returning to the dark place beneath the world. Her voice cracked, and she trailed off, unable to continue. Silence fell across the amphitheatre. The silence of death.
Her audience sat or stood or lay unmoving all around, frozen in the vitrifying grip of the glass plague. What had been a place of horrors now seemed like a work of stunning artistry, the faceless dark crystal rendering its victims into a form of transcendent unity. Deathly silence hung over the whole tableau.
‘Are they really…?’
‘Dead. Yes, their souls are flown.’
Laryin looked at El’Uriaq on his throne, caught leaning forwards, eyes wide, mouth set in an avaricious leer. He seemed to be gazing back at her, and she shuddered.
‘Horrible, I didn’t think I could do it. How could you know?’
‘The viral helix is highly mutable, a living thing seeking to spread and flourish, to overcome the barriers to its growth. The protection they had against the glass plague was a physical thing, tiny machines that destroyed the virus before it could grow. It was only a hope that you could help it grow fast enough to overwhelm the machines, but it was the best hope we could find.’
Laryin wasn’t so sure that it had worked. The silence that had descended over the frozen scene didn’t feel like ending, it was more like watchful imminence. The amphitheatre swam before her eyes as bonecrushing weariness swept over her.
‘Laryin!’ came a cry from the back of the shadowed amphitheatre. Shapes were moving there on the entry ramp. A detachment of armoured warriors spread out cautiously with weapons at the ready. Rushing from their midst came Sindiel, with a pistol in hand and his fine armour hacked and slashed in a dozen places.
To Laryin’s surprise the grim-looking warriors didn’t shoot Sindiel down in his tracks, instead they moved to protect his back. Sindiel ran to the foot of the dais and stopped, gazing up at the worldsinger uncertainly.
‘It’s you,’ she prompted.
‘I… it’s me, I came to rescue you,’ Sindiel stammered gallantly. ‘It seems I’m a little late.’
Laryin glanced at the ominous crystal-glass statue of El’Uriaq. ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ she said shakily, ‘your timing couldn’t be better.’ She rattled the chain at her throat helplessly and said, ‘Could you…?’
Sindiel mounted the steps and gently took her wrist, guiding the Harlequin’s kiss to the adamantine links. A whisper of motion too quick to see and the chains fell away. Laryin leaned on Sindiel, suddenly exhausted and finding herself barely able to stand.
‘How did you get those others to come?’ Laryin managed to ask as Sindiel half-carried her down the dais steps.
The renegade glanced back at the knot of warriors reforming at the ramp. ‘They’re from my ships. I told them we were going to kidnap a great prize from fat and wealthy archons.’
‘But why did you come back?’ Laryin’s vision was dimming, Sindiel’s face was becoming a blur, but it seemed desperately important to hear him out.
‘Because of what you said. I decided to forgive myself and act in the way I truly wanted to.’
‘You would have been crushed.’
Sindiel was silent for a long time before he said event
ually, ‘I know… but I had to try.’
In the silent amphitheatre El’Uriaq sat frozen among his departed minions. The slightest discoloration could be seen spreading across his form, the subtlest marbling that spoke of changes occurring within. Its enemies had trapped it but they had not destroyed it. They had underestimated how tenaciously the entity could cling to even the slightest fragment of physicality, adjusting its own extradimensional lattice to fit inside the smallest space. Its bridgehead into the dark city had been reduced but not removed. With time it would alter this vessel until it could seek out a new host.
Even trapped as it was, the entity possessing El’Uriaq still had the senses to tell that it was not alone. A figure had entered the amphitheatre and was limping its way slowly to the throne.
‘I thought you’d never come,’ whispered Angevere from beside the throne.
‘I had to wait for the foundling and his merry band to get out of the way,’ Bellathonis wheezed reproachfully. ‘They took the pure heart with them?’
‘Yes, it was all very moving.’
‘Let’s hope our heroic idiot has the wherewithal to get her out of the city before more damage is done.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Finish this so that we can be gone.’
‘Tsk, tsk, Angevere. This is a historic moment whether we like it or not. It should be treated with sufficient gravitas.’
‘There’s no reason to relish it. The cost will be high.’
‘Vengeance is vengeance, my dear, doesn’t the tyrant teach us that we must strike down those that wrong us no matter the cost? Isn’t that a moment to be relished? And gloried in?’ Bellathonis chuckled dryly. ‘Besides which, there’s no other way. To finish this a price must be paid. Now hush or I won’t take you with me when I leave.’
Bellathonis dragged his crooked legs up the steps to the figure on the throne. He held a hide-wrapped jar in his hands.
‘I too have a gift for you, noble El’Uriaq,’ he said to the dark crystal form. ‘A little something a colleague had thought to bestow upon me.’ He placed the jar reverentially at El’Uriaq’s feet, picked up the casket containing the head of Angevere and backed away.
The somewhat dimmed sentience of the entity still invested in the form of El’Uriaq registered the close presence of the dark gate with a sensation akin to fear. It represented a dimensional trap to it, a black hole in miniature that led to an oubliette crammed with starved remnants of its own ilk. It could feel them, beating hungrily at the thin membrane encompassed inside the runic tetrahedron. It grew very still and waited.
‘My colleague placed a number of discreet triggers on the device he constructed,’ Bellathonis called out as he shuffled away between the ranked tables. ‘It was to be specifically attuned for my bio-signature, you see? But I destroyed him when he tried to get the readings he needed to calibrate the device. Rather ironic, no? I confess that I simplified his rather magnificently useless attempt by substituting a single trigger of quite mundane sort…’
Bellathonis reached the exit ramp and paused to look back at the frozen tableau for one last time.
‘A timer.’
At the top of the dais reality cracked open for a fraction of a second as the dark gate activated. Purple-black light welled forth with retina-searing intensity and a clap of thunder rolled around the amphitheatre. For one dreadful moment it seemed as if El’Uriaq was enthroned in leaping purple flames. Then the sight was obscured by frantically looping darkness, half-seen ectoplasmic tendrils that writhed with eye-blurring swiftness. Writhing, looping, contracting. A flash and another peal of thunder and that too was gone, the very rock trembling with the sudden impact. The glass tableau in the amphitheatre shattered into a glittering cloud of shards as the shockwave hit it, the reverberating echoes booming from the walls like titanic laughter.
Bellathonis clutched at the wall for support. The trembling did not lessen, rather it intensified. Flakes of stone rained down, soon pursued by larger chunks. A chandelier of woven ribs crashed to the ground, smashing several victims of the glass plague into tinkling ruin. The haemonculus staggered away into the catacombs but he knew it was already too late to escape, nowhere in the city would be safe.
Even now ripples of entropy from the event were racing ahead of him to crash against the complex system of psychic wards holding together Commorragh and its sub-realms. Across the city formerly inactive portals would be flaring into life, while other vital arteries were being cut. The very foundations of the eternal city were shaking.
The Dysjunction had begun.
PROLOGUE
Welcome fellow traveller, welcome! Whether you are a simple observer or perhaps an unwitting participant in the unfolding drama before us please be most welcome. Unfortunately I must begin by breaking with some of the ordinary dramatic conventions at this juncture. You see this is the second of a series of three parts, a triptych if you will. Hence we must perforce begin with a recap, a résumé and a reappraisal of what has already occurred, as tiresome as that seems.
Those of you who have followed this darkling tale thus far will already know most of these facts and so I hope you can forgive my indulgence of those only lately arrived. If you are confident in your recollections then I invite you to proceed without diversion. However, some perspective is useful both for those ignorant of prior machinations and for those many great minds that failed to grasp their immediate import at the time.
First then, our stage: Commorragh, the eternal city. Dark, terrible, delicious Commorragh, where pain and subjugation are the meat and drink of ageless creatures of unfathomable wickedness. To fully understand Commorragh one must understand the wider universe that bore it. So, to begin with here is a secret that if properly understood might change your perception forever. All of reality, everything we see as static, safe and secure, is in fact in constant flux. The grains of sand on the beach demonstrate more solidity and longevity than the cherished absolutes of the worlds we believe in.
You see our material universe is born of Chaos and our reality is nothing more than a passing fancy of the Dark Gods; an infinitely short moment when anarchy is frozen for long enough for us, myopic and stunted as we are, to perceive substance and believe that there is such a thing as ‘natural order’ in the universe.
Such hilarious conceit! What amazing hubris!
Mighty Commorragh is a facet of reality born out of hubris, and a very different one to the random dross thrown up by nature. It is a pearl consciously aggregated out of the spittle of creation by ancient, mortal minds that thought themselves the equal of the gods. And what a place they made for themselves.
Beyond Commorragh and its enslaved sub-realms the material universe moves on: civilizations rise and fall, stars implode and the whole rough scrimmage over ownership of the galaxy continues apace. Within Commorragh a long, dark midnight reigns that has gone on unchallenged for millennia. Its inhabitants eternally cheat death and avoid their ultimate fate at the claws of She Who Thirsts, the daemon-goddess of their own creation. Sensuous, sadistic, pleasure seeking, these are the dark eldar, last remnants of an empire that spanned the galaxy in its time. Few have fallen as far as the inhabitants of Commorragh without being destroyed utterly.
Still, pity the poor Commorrites, trapped upon a stage of their own making. They can take brief forays in the material realm to assuage their gnawing hunger, snatching what they can to carry it back to their eternal city, but they remain ever-hungry. Every day She Who Thirsts drinks a little more of their soul and that growing emptiness can only be filled with the suffering of others.
The players: A group of Commorrite nobles intent on reclaiming lost glories in one of the endless power plays of the eternal city. These were unified by their ancient bloodlines and a contempt for the new order imposed after their forefathers had been overthrown. Incidental characters included: the master haemonculus Bellathonis employed to effect a proscribed resurre
ction, Lileath a young Exodite worldsinger kidnapped to be used as pain-bride for the operation, and Sindiel, a craftworld renegade who was eventually persuaded to save her. Perhaps most significant of all at this point in events was a bodyguard and executioner by the name Morr, a member of that curious warrior cult known as the incubi.
To their scheme, then. The primary obstacle in the noble’s path to glory was, as ever, the Supreme Overlord of Commorragh, the great tyrant himself, Asdrubael Vect. Alas, the nobles could match Vect with neither brute power nor subtle intrigue. Confronted with these facts the leader of the conspiracy, one Archon Yllithian, persuaded his co-conspirators into a singularly dangerous course of action.
As they were unable to overcome Vect themselves the nobles would attempt to raise one of the tyrant’s more successful prior opponents, a lord called El’Uriaq, from the dead to guide them to victory. Predictably their scheme miscarried and they instead raised something beyond their power to control – the soul of this great noble corrupted by an entity native to the ever-changing realms of Chaos. This composite entity – quite possibly an emissary of She Who Thirsts – appeared wrapped in the seeming of the leader they sought.
The consequences fell thus. Of the nobles but one survived the immediate aftermath. The bodyguard Morr, to his great distress slew his own noble master, Archon Kraillach, when he realised that Kraillach had become corrupted by the entity. The entity itself murdered the third noble, Archon Xelian, with a memetic curse when she proved intractable to its aims. Yllithian proved clever enough to be useful to the thing he had unleashed and so survived only to be near-fatally struck down during the monster’s destruction.
These consequences alone are, of course, really quite inconsequential when compared to the harm that all of these dramatic events conspired to inflict on the metaphysical fabric of Commorragh itself.
Here another brief moment of explanation is in order. It is best to imagine Commorragh as a bubble maintained by equal pressure across its entire membrane. If the membrane is breached the external pressure forces what is without to come within to the great detriment of anyone in the vicinity at the time.
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