The Dysjunction was an awe-inspiring example of the power intrinsic to the warp, a terrifying demonstration of the forces surrounding Commorragh. Yllithian had sought out such power all his life and now he saw how it had always surrounded him: vast, untameable and unattainable. Even so, it had been Yllithian’s schemes that had unleashed the current cataclysm upon Commorragh. He had forced Asdrubael Vect to summon his archons and engage his wicked intellect solely in defence of the city for a while. Yllithian smiled to think of the opportunities that would open up in the immediate future. New territories could be claimed, rivals eliminated and vendettas slaked under the guise of executing the supreme overlord’s orders. With all that Yllithian knew there was a chance that he could do something to stop the Dysjunction, but the more he thought on it the more he could see no reason to do so.
Between the crash of thunder the shrill cries on the wind became louder, more excited. Yllithian’s incubi bodyguard swivelled their weapons back and forth as they scanned for the source, the long muzzles of their cannon hunting the skies relentlessly. There! A twisting funnel descending towards them, a mass of dark-winged specks dropping from clouds the colour of bruised meat. Streams of hyper velocity splinters and darklight beams from Yllithian’s retinue converged on the approaching mass and blocked it as thoroughly as if an invisible wall had been thrown up in its path.
In the daemonic hierarchies, Yllithian knew, these manifestations were little more than vermin, lesser entities that were slipping through the connection between the Ilmaean sub-realms and Commorragh itself. The great, open portals that ordinarily allowed the wan heat and illumination of the stolen suns to filter down on the city had become porous under the strain of the Dysjunction. The etheric energies leaking in around the Ilmaea sustained these lesser daemons in great flocks. Yllithian was gambling that they could not stray far from the stolen sun’s immediate vicinity for long without becoming critically weakened.
Yet more dark shapes were descending on all sides, wings beating frantically as they closed in on the flying White Flames Raiders and their escorts. Most of the assailants were twisted, naked humanoids that were winged and clawed in varied fashion. A great many appeared as vast, bloated flies, darting eel-like worms or other less easily identifiable creatures. Yllithian’s kabalites kept up a withering fire as the hordes approached, bursting daemons like overripe fruit wherever their shots struck true. The Raiders pulled tightly together to intensify their firepower, while the scourges, hellions and reavers snarled around the periphery in a defensive wheel. The daemons ploughed into the barrage of fire relentlessly, utterly careless of their casualties in their attempts to reach the succulent souls they could perceive.
Now the hellions and reavers were fighting hand to hand against the first wave of attackers, their hellglaives and bladevanes against fangs and claws as the daemons tried to drag the escorts from their mounts. Yllithian saw a hellion plucked from his skyboard and borne aloft to be torn apart in seconds, he saw winged scourges plummeting in a death grip with what seemed their own dark reflections, reavers being buried beneath leathery wings. He stood from his throne and drew his sword. His gamble wasn’t working, the daemons were too strong, the skies were still black with them.
Shrieking, bat-faced entities dived on the Raiders and tried to seize their occupants. Yllithian slashed at reaching claws and fanged faces as they flashed past. Several of his incubi were forced to abandon their cannon and take up their klaives to defend themselves as daemons clawed their way across the bulwarks and onto the fighting platform. Yllithian led a charge to clear the deck and the twisted entities’ croaks of triumph soon turned into shrieks of alarm. Yllithian paused in the slaughter long enough to snap an order to his steersman.
‘Activate the shock prow!’
The curving, armoured prow of Yllithian’s craft instantly crackled with power, fat sparks dripping from it as it projected a directional wave of electromagnetic force ahead of the racing barque, an atom-splitting ram-blade of force. Daemons caught in the path of the ram decohered instantly, exploding in bright webs of lightning as it plowed forward relentlessly through the infernal flock. Shrieking daemons wheeled aside only to be caught in the Raider’s crossfire and torn to pieces. Yllithian permitted himself a self-indulgent grin of triumph, the shock prow was a recent addition made at his own instigation after recent events. He was gratified to see it working so well.
Suddenly they were breaking through the clouds of flying daemons as the defeated remnants fluttered upward. Sorrow Fell was spread out again before them, its light and spires seeming earthly and welcoming after the horrors of the skies. Corespur reared up in the distance as a dark, jagged mountain lit only by the flashes of thunderbolts.
A hazy ring of green light surrounded the base of the promontory that formed Corespur. In its poisonous illumination thirteen titanic statues could be seen standing sentinel over Sorrow Fell. The hated visage of Asdrubael Vect glowered down from every statue, each holding a different ritualised pose or accoutrements that represented one of the thirteen foundations of vengeance. Vect had placed these monuments to his ego to stand watch over Sorrow Fell long ago. They were a permanent reminder of the ascendance of his own power over all the aristocratic families of High Commorragh. It was a calculated affront amid a landscape with more than its share of huge statues of commemorating the deeds of noble-blooded Commorrites both living and dead.
Vect’s monstrosities stood on pedestals that placed them higher than the tallest spires. Their dimensions dwarfed even the thousand metre high representations of Commorragh’s heroic forebears so that they were quite literally placed in Vect’s shadow. It was said that nothing that occurred within the statues’ gaze escaped the attention of Vect himself. Yllithian knew from personal experience that they screamed constantly – a hideous stentorian howl that had rendered the part of Sorrow Fell closest to Corespur virtually uninhabitable. Each statue projected a standing sound wave of misery and terror that intensified the closer one came to Corespur.
Search beams quested the skies around the statues endlessly, ethereal columns of greenish light that swept back and forth like ghostly fingers. As Yllithian and his retinue approached they were caught and held by one such beam and the deck of the barque flooded instantly with its veridian glow. Yllithian instructed his steersman to slow to a crawl as they were assessed. A voice spoke out of empty air beside Yllithian.
‘Identify,’ the voice chimed.
‘Archon Yllithian of the White Flames,’ he replied boldly, reflecting that now the authenticity of Bellathonis’s blood-work would truly be put to the test. Vect would care not one jot if the leadership of the White Flames had changed hands, but it would indicate a potential vulnerability that Yllithian was loath to reveal to the supreme overlord. Moments ticked by beneath the unwinking beam, Yllithian could feel his nape hairs rising as invisible waves probed deeper into the very fabric of the craft and its occupants: measuring, comparing, categorising.
‘Confirmed. Proceed,’ the voice said.
Yllithian nodded to the steersman and they smoothly accelerated toward Corespur with his reduced retinue trailing behind. They were rising now, the prow tipping up to catch the sloping promontory beneath the anti-gravity ribbing on the barque’s underside. Rising tiers of blade-topped towers, saw-edged battlements and angular gables slid past beneath their hull. Endless ranks of dark, empty windows gazed out across Sorrow Fell like lidless eyes. Shoals of dark-hulled Raiders and Ravagers followed their movements from a discreet distance. These were Vect’s Black Heart kabalites alert for any sign of treachery, numerous and seemingly untouched by the city’s agonies as they patrolled their master’s stronghold. Fortress, armoury, lair, command centre, prison by equal parts – this was Corespur, the very center of Asdrubael Vect’s power. Truly Yllithian was entering the belly of the beast.
Kharbyr sprinted through emerald fronds and trailing ivy. Splinter rounds hissed past him, chopping
viciously through the greenery like invisible shears. He veered into a hedgerow and burst through it in a storm of snow-white petals. He could hear running steps behind him, and voices cursing at him. These only served to lend wings to his flying feet as he ran for his life. This was certainly not the outcome he had been hoping for, but it was the kind of outcome he had been half-expecting.
Like all plans, it had seemed a good one at the time – logical. He’d strolled up to listen to the argument between Bezieth, Naxipael and Sotha. Sure enough the Dracon Sotha wanted to get back to his archon and report the Azkhorxi treachery. Naxipael would hear nothing of it and imperiously commanded, with an increasingly heavy garnish of threats, that the dracon and his warriors accompany him to Sorrow Fell. Bezieth seemed just about ready to kill both sides equally.
Nerves were on edge and weapons were being fingered as the two groups of survivors from Metzuh and Hy’kran watched their leaders squabble. It was a simple matter for Kharbyr to shout out a warning, whip out his pistol and put a few shots into the Hy’kranii. The scene exploded into violence as both sides let rip at point blank range. Kharbyr didn’t wait around to see the results, he simply turned and ran.
Kharbyr angled down a pathway between grassy embankments starred with flowers of crimson and gold. The declivity took him out of the immediate line of fire of his pursuers so he concentrated on pouring on more straight-line speed in order to outdistance them. This was when you got to be glad you weren’t wearing armour, he reflected, when you were running from people who were wearing it. He didn’t know Hy’kran tier as well as he would have liked but he knew that the parklands stretched for kilometres. All he had to do was lose himself among the foliage and his pursuers would never find him.
He wondered briefly what had happened to Xagor. When Kharbyr had turned to run Xagor was already nowhere to be seen. It was an impressive trick for the bumbling wrack to pull off although Kharbyr didn’t have much of a chance to analyse it at the time. He had got within a dozen steps of the arch into the parkland by the time both sides had stopped shooting at each other and all started shooting at him instead – or at least that was what it had felt like. Pure luck had kept him alive through that first burst of fire, splinters and energy bolts knocking chunks out of the parkland arch even as he ran beneath it.
He darted off the path, hurdled a fallen log and dived headlong into a copse of flowering Loganiaceae. He slithered beneath drooping boughs heavy with orange flowers to find a small hollow beneath the shrubs where he was hidden from the path yet could still peep out between the leaves to watch for pursuit. He lay still and tried to moderate his breathing, convinced that the pounding of his heart was audible across the entire park. Minutes passed and then he saw Naxipael stalking furiously along the path with the two Ethondrian Seekers in their maroon cloaks and hoods trailing behind him. The Seekers constantly bent to sniff at the ground like hounds, questing back and forth as they followed Kharbyr’s trail.
Kharbyr experienced a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He’d forgotten about the Seekers. Ethondrian Seekers could track a scourge through the turbulent upper airs, there was no reason they couldn’t track him straight to his hiding place. The Seekers were approaching the point where he had left the path and in a few seconds they would direct Naxipael straight to him. The Venom Brood archon did not look to be in a forgiving mood. Kharbyr tensed his legs to get ready to run again. Just then Bezieth emerged onto the path behind Naxipael and called out to him.
‘The traitor must have doubled back or we’d have him by now,’ she said. ‘We have to get moving, Naxipael, we don’t have time to waste on this.’
Bezieth vanished again. Naxipael snarled something incoherent and turned back to follow her. The Seekers whined discontentedly as they were dragged away from their quarry. Within a few moments the path was empty again and Kharbyr allowed himself to breathe once more. He started to think frantically about how he could disguise his trail if the Seekers came back. It struck him then that Naxipael and Bezieth had probably already caught Xagor and didn’t care so much about finding him anyway. The wrack could fix wounds and keep them patched up. Kharbyr was just a nameless loose cannon to them, a traitor. Just leave him to die on his own.
Kharbyr got up, determined to put more distance between him and the Seekers just in case. Perhaps if he could find some water he could obscure his trail for a while. He froze as he realised there was someone else coming down the path. Xagor came into view, creeping along with his rifle slung over his back and looking fearful. The wrack glanced around, left the path and headed straight towards his hiding place. Kharbyr grimaced and stepped into view brushing dirt from his clothes.
‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he said casually. Xagor seemed genuinely startled, as if he hadn’t really expected to see Kharbyr step out from behind a bush.
‘Well we made our escape, what’s wrong now?’ Kharbyr asked peevishly.
‘Perhaps it’s the fact that your friend is just acting as a decoy,’ Bezieth said from behind him.
CHAPTER 16
CAPTURE
The ring of red-eyed incubi had closed completely around Morr and Motley in the shrine of Arhra. Unwounded, Morr might have been able to hold off so many for some time, and even prevail against more than a few of them before they took his life. Yet Morr’s wounds still dripped crimson, and he held his great klaive upright only by an effort of will. Motley had proved himself more than equal to individual incubi but against so many, in the darkness of their own holy place, they would quickly drag him down too.
‘Speeded by wings of desperation a plan does occur to me,’ Motley said quickly, ‘but I shall require a moment I doubt these eager young gentlemen will grant us.’
‘Then I suggest using the same ruse that you used against the gloomwings,’ Morr said somewhat reluctantly.
‘Ah! Good plan! Yes! Now!’
Motley hurled a photonic flare that split the stygian vault with a blazing white thunderbolt. Even through closed eyes purple spots danced in his vision, for the armoured incubi the effect was multiplied a thousandfold. With their senses unexpectedly blasted by their cornered prey the iron ring of incubi staggered and broke for a moment. Mustering a supreme effort, Morr leapt among them with his deadly klaive lashing right and left with all the fury of a wounded tiger. In the confusion klaives swung so wildly that some of the incubi wounded one another.
Meanwhile Motley cast a small silver spindle into the air that hung in place and spun around its axis emitting a trilling whine. The Harlequin sang desperately, pitching his tones within the shrill warbling of the spindle. A swirling purple teardrop wavered into focus beneath it and expanded rapidly like a slit pupil opening. Morr charged through the open gate without bidding with a dozen vengeful klaives at his back. Motley gave a jaunty wave and slipped through just before retribution arrived, the gate closing instantly behind him with an audible snap.
Morr awaited the Harlequin on the other side, leaning heavily on his klaive with a look of horror on his pallid face as he gazed about him. They stood among picturesque ruins, elegant pillars and porticos of undoubtedly eldar design that were overgrown with moss and briars. Fragments of statues lay underfoot, and the cracked flagstones sprouted with dry, coarse grass. The genteel-looking decay was illusory, and came to an abrupt halt at a cliff edge a hundred metres away in each direction. Beyond that torn islands of rock, some the size of continents, whirled and somersaulted through a pulsating, multi-coloured sky.
‘Is this…?’ Morr seemed unable bring himself to ask the question.
‘Lileathanir?’ Motley said. ‘Thankfully no, not yet anyway. Relax, we should be safe here for the moment.’
Morr sagged, seating himself on a fallen stone with his klaive across his knees. The incubus truly looked old now, worn out. Motley decided it might be best to give him a moment to collect himself before journeying onward. Morr gazed down at the shattered face of a s
tatue curiously, its single eye gazed blankly back at him.
‘What is this place if it is not the maiden world?’ the incubus asked.
‘This was Ashnerryl’ti, just an outpost of the old empire before the Fall. A garden world, really, a retreat of sorts or so I’m led to believe, but a populous enough one to call down its own doom when She Who Thirsts awoke. It was caught on the peripheries of the great upheaval – touched by the trailing edge of Her cloak, as it were, and pulled beyond the veil. It was enough to shatter Ashnerryl’ti into a thousand pieces and irrevocably alter every single one of its inhabitants – in point of fact we’re standing on what remains of some of them right now. They were all quite literally petrified by the sight of Her awful majesty, or so the story goes.’
Morr gazed at the tumbling sky for a moment and then at the ruins some more. He stood suddenly.
‘Why did you bring me here?’ the incubus asked with a strange edge to his voice.
‘I didn’t choose it,’ Motley replied defensively. ‘It was the easiest place to reach in a hurry where I knew we would be safe. Few know how to find this place, and even fewer choose to come here.’
‘Then who are they?’ Morr said, pointing.
Five figures in sapphire armour of a design vaguely reminiscent of the incubi were emerging from hiding behind the ruins around them. Motley recognised them instantly as craftworld Aspect Warriors of the Dire Avengers shrine. These warriors seemed slighter than incubi, well-proportioned and heroic-looking, like animated statues. Their full-faced helms were adorned with tall crests marked in alternating bands of blue, white and yellow. They carried long-necked shuriken catapults that they kept levelled at Morr and Motley at all times.
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