Yllithian took his place amid the assembled archons ranging themselves in a half-moon before the steps to Vect’s throne. The dais itself was raised, appearing as a cylinder of metal extending up to the ceiling like a thick-bodied pillar. Moments passed in uncomfortable silence with only the crackle of distant thunder for accompaniment as the archons waited. The tramp of armoured feet came to their ears as Black Heart kabalite warriors filed into the auditorium and took up positions around the dais and along the walls. A number of Vect’s courtiers and playthings swept in to arrange themselves decoratively on the dais steps before, as a final touch, a troupe of trained slaves were lined up to sing an interlude passage of the Rhanas Dreay – the coming of the Overlord.
As the slaves’ voices reached a crescendo of pain the dais slid downwards as smoothly as a piston until it became level with the steps. A hemispherical shield of entropic energy atop the dais swirled and dissipated to reveal a throne. The throne was a dark, ugly thing of sharp angles and gleaming blades. It was an artefact that looked savage and unworthy of the elegance of true eldar culture – meaning that it was a statement of intent for those wise enough to read it. It squatted on the dais with an undisguised malevolence that well suited its occupant. The Supreme Overlord of Commorragh gazed down from his bladed throne and favoured each of the assembled greater archons with a lingering look.
Vect’s milk-white skin was as smooth and unlined as a child’s yet his void-black eyes glowed with millennias-old hatred and unimaginably devious intelligence. The proud archons met the supreme overlord’s gaze without flinching (as they knew they must or die), but not one of them did not tremble a little inside. Vect’s sharp-featured face was normally redolent of the uncounted centuries of unbridled wickedness he had inflicted on others for his own pleasure. The supreme overlord normally projected amusement, or self-satisfaction or insufferable confidence by turns. Now his mouth was drawn into a bitter scowl.
‘My poor, beautiful city,’ said Asdrubael Vect at last, his rich voice sonorous with melancholy. ‘Why is it that everyone conspires to destroy it?’
The cracked black expanse of the auditorium shivered again and flakes of the artfully decorated ceiling fluttered down like baroque snow. The archons stood silent and waited, none of them fool enough to try and answer. The Supreme Overlord of Commorragh stepped down from his throne and began to walk slowly around the vast hall.
All about him, above him and behind him bodies swung on chains suspended from the ceiling. Most were still alive, but they hung silently in their agonies. Their screams had been paralyzed along with their vocal cords at Vect’s command when he tired of their repetitious and entirely pointless pleas for mercy.
The great tyrant paused before one of his ‘guests’ that was hanging head down and covered in gore. This had once been Archon Gharax of the Kabal of the Crimson Blossom. Like the others he had been the ambitious leader of a minor kabal possessing only a few handfuls of warriors until a few hours ago. Now he was reduced to an example, part of a display created by Vect to impress upon the greater archons the true gravity of the situation. Vect ran a long-nailed finger through the dangling strips of flesh his haemonculi had expertly flensed from the unfortunate archon’s frame.
Vect’s words were not truly directed at the ruin of flesh and bone hanging before him. Archon Gharax suffered on in induced silence. His eyes radiated pain and burning hatred for his supreme overlord. By all accounts Gharax had been completely loyal to Vect, or at least as completely loyal as any Commorrite archon could claim to be, but Vect did not care. Gharax’s puny handful of warriors had pledged their loyalty directly to him now. A time of Dysjunction was not one to allow the minnows to swim freely.
‘I’ve pondered this often down the ages, you know,’ Vect told Archon Gharax. ‘In fact I believe I can say that it is a topic that has occupied my attention beyond all others – and there are always so many, many other matters that demand my constant attention.’
Yllithian and the greater archons watched impassively as Vect paced onward through the grisly display. It was rare to see the great tyrant in the flesh, and rarer still to do so in the presence of so many other archons – hanging from chains or otherwise. Yllithian calculated that over a hundred archons were present in the chamber in one state or another. United they could easily kill Vect and finally free Commorragh from his wicked rulership and millennia-long oppression.
Yllithian had to repress a snort of derision at the thought. Out of all the fearless warriors present in that great chamber no one was about to risk making the first move. As ever, the archons watched one another and looked only for an opportunity to strike down their rivals instead of the insidious puppet master that controlled all their destinies.
It was enough to make one weep, or to laugh hysterically – another urge that Yllithian was forced to quell. Something told him that if he began laughing he wouldn’t be able to stop. Laughter without end until even the madness of the Laughing God seemed logical and sane. No one moved and no one spoke. Yllithian and the greater archons remained as silent as Vect’s hanging victims while they patiently awaited the supreme overlord’s command. A time of Dysjunction was no time to show weakness.
Finally Vect stalked back to his throne and sat before he spoke again. ‘Naturally I have summoned you all here to discuss the current Dysjunction. Such occurrences are not without precedent just as such occurrences do not occur without cause. Rest assured that those responsible for this attempt to destroy us all will be found and will be punished for their crimes. Upon this you can rely.’
The auditorium shook violently. From beyond its walls a thunderous cracking sound assailed the ears and the soul in equal measure. Vect paused and looked outward into the raging storm, a feat that few would dare to emulate. Yllithian thought he saw fear in the tyrant’s eyes. This ageless god of the eternal city could see the end of his rule written in the roiling energies outside. Yllithian suppressed an urge to flee, to hurl himself to the ground and cover his ears or, worse still, admit all and beg forgiveness.
He was the one responsible. His actions had brought about the Dysjunction – that he was sure of. His scheming with Xelian and Kraillach had unleashed the forces now battering remorselessly at Commorragh. Such bitter irony that a scheme to unseat Asdrubael Vect had now brought Yllithian to within striking distance of the tyrant himself. It was all irrelevant now. Xelian and Kraillach were already dead and gone, consumed by those same terrible forces leaving only Yllithian to bear the responsibility that Vect had so darkly alluded to.
If Vect were ever to divine Yllithian’s culpability in the cataclysm currently enfolding Commorragh it would be the end of him. The fate of the lesser archons would be a truly blessed release in comparison to the horrors that Vect would inflict upon Yllithian for his crimes. The fear in the pit of Yllithian’s stomach was a familiar one. He had plotted for long enough against Vect to weigh all the consequences. Even so, standing before the tyrant himself, with all his plans ruined and allies destroyed it was all Yllithian could do not to soil himself. Despite his fears Yllithian had to comport himself with the same aloofness as the other greater archons, each pretending they were careless about the current situation and its implications. To do any less would provoke the supreme overlord’s suspicions.
Asdrubael Vect drew in a sharp breath and continued.
‘For the present the city must be protected, a responsibility that I charge each and every one of you with from this moment forth.’
Vect stood again, his restlessness betraying an anxiety Yllithian would never have believed possible in the saturnine supreme overlord. As the tyrant strode through the hanging bodies again he seemed to draw new energy, his voice echoing unnaturally through the great space.
‘All incursions from beyond the veil must be eliminated! Open portals will be sealed! The possessed destroyed! Many of you will believe that this is an ideal time to settle old scores and eliminate you
r rivals – quite rightly so – however I warn you that if your games further imperil the city you will answer to me directly… and I also warn you that I am far from being in a forgiving mood.’
As if to underline Vect’s words another thunderous boom rattled the auditorium. The tyrant’s frown deepened into an angry grimace.
‘Enough talk. Go. Get out of my sight. Your districts of responsibility will be assigned to you,’ he spat. ‘Go and do what you must to save our home.’
The archons filed out in silence. Each was consumed with their own thoughts, no doubt planning how to feed each other to the raging entities loose in the city while remaining… well, innocent would be the wrong term… more like blameless. Yllithian eyed the others with interest as they broke into cliques en route to their own transports. Surreptitious glances and minute gestures indicated predator and prey to the practiced eye. In a time of Dysjunction all bets were off. All previous alliances were in ruins, old rivalries temporarily set aside and new accommodations made while the political landscape of Commorragh shifted as suddenly and as violently the city itself as the storms engulfed it. The thought rallied Yllithian immeasurably. His own plans might be in ruins but so were the plans of every other potential rival.
The ebon corridors around the auditorium were filling up with more functionaries, representatives and yet more Black Heart kabalites from all over the city. Yllithian reflected that Vect probably had many more groups to harangue and threaten into obedience over the next few hours. Mandrake nightfiends lurked in the shadows between silver sconces guttering with ghostly witchfire, incubi klaivex pushed past arguing helliarchs and syrens beneath arches of black opal, groups of haemonculi clustered together like colonies of bats displaying the seals of their different covens – the Hex, the Prophets of Flesh, the Dark Creed, the Black Descent.
Yllithian paused and looked at the Black Descent representative more closely. His white, glistening face was altered into a wide, permanent smile amid hanging jowls that twisted into a beard-like mass of purple tendrils at his chin. Black, ribbed robes concealed the haemonculus’s surprisingly corpulent body. A pointed demi-hood rose from the nape of his neck to frame his ugly visage. The creature caught Yllithian’s glance and turned to him seeming to smile, if it were possible, all the wider.
‘You’re here to represent the Black Descent to the supreme overlord,’ Yllithian declared.
‘I have that honour, archon,’ the haemonculus agreed slightly cautiously. The haemonculus took note of the White Flames icon on Yllithian’s armour and his eyes narrowed shrewdly. His permanent smile seemed a little strained for a moment.
‘Then we also have some mutual matters to discuss,’ Yllithian told him frankly.
‘You are… quite correct, Archon Yllithian,’ the haemonculus nodded. ‘We do have a great deal to discuss. Sadly I regret that this is neither the time nor the place to do so.’
‘Quite. Let it be known that I am amenable to a resolution that would satisfy all parties,’ Yllithian said nonchalantly as he turned and began to walk away, calling over his shoulder, ‘and do send me word of your intentions at your first convenience.’
Zykleiades, patriarch noctis of the Black Descent, watched silently as the White Flames archon moved away through the throng. The patriarch’s mind was still racing through all the implications of the seemingly chance encounter with Yllithian. Zykleiades was old even as haemonculus count their years, which is to say infrequently. He had grown to be old by being extremely cautious about the unexpected and examining new information from all angles before committing himself.
According to the reports he’d received from his underlings the renegade Bellathonis had already been dealt with, and yet here was the archon clearly implying that their mutual ‘problem’ was an ongoing one. That fact alone would be the source of some very great distress to those underlings later, and new plans would be needed to rectify the situation if it proved to be true.
Yllithian’s averred amiability for a resolution was a coded way of saying that he would be disposed to help the Black Descent to kill Bellathonis. That of itself was potentially helpful and yet extremely disturbing at the same time. It implied that Yllithian knew more than was entirely healthy, which in turn meant another death that would have to be arranged to completely cover the trail leading back to the Black Descent – the death of Yllithian himself. The archon of the White Flames was high profile and consummately well protected against such an undertaking so it would certainly be no easy matter to remove him.
Zykleiades shook his head in dismay at the timing of such a critical distraction. It could even be the case that Yllithian was setting up an elaborate ruse to implicate the Black Descent so that any action by them against him would serve to confirm the coven’s culpability in the Dysjunction. It could equally be the case that Yllithian was simply trying to throw the patriarch off his game in the hopes that he would blunder in front of Vect.
Cymbals crashed and horns blew to summon the waiting throng inside the auditorium. The patriarch tried to focus on clearing his mind of any trace of guilt or fear that could give him away when he stood before the supreme overlord. There were times when he simply couldn’t understand how the archons did it.
CHAPTER 18
CAUDOELITH AND OTHER CEMETERIES
The world beyond the next gate was dark as night and as tumultuous as a storm. Black tongues of vapour howled past driven by a relentless, battering wind. No sun or stars gleamed from above so Caraeis raised his witchblade and called forth a wan, bluish light from it to help them find their way. The landscape was made up of glittering, blackened rubble interspersed with twisted branches of silver thrust upward like fire-blasted trees. The previous world had been bitterly cold, this one was as hot and choking as a fever dream. The ground underfoot exuded an unhealthy heat as though fires were still burning deep inside the rubble. The gate they emerged from was blackened too, its silver-chased wraithbone overlaid with a patina of blasted carbon.
Motley genuinely recognised this place; he had travelled here before a long, long time ago. This was Caudoelith, sometimes jokingly called Vaul’s workshop – one of several worlds that had claim to that title before the Fall. Caudoelith was already a battleground before She Who Thirsts awoke with competing eldar factions fighting to secure the part-built craftworld the inhabitants were constructing for their escape from the imminent cataclysm. In one of the bitter morality plays that war is so apt to generate the unfinished craftworld was destroyed in the fighting, its blazing remnants tumbling down to spread ruin on the planet below. Few eldar had survived to be consumed by the very doom they had fought to escape.
The warlock and the Aspect Warriors advanced warily across the blasted landscape. No eldar on Caudoelith had survived the birth scream of She Who Thirsts, but in the subsequent centuries all manner of alien scavengers had tried to gain a foothold here. Wars had been fought not only by the eldar against scavengers but scavenger against scavenger and even, tragically, eldar against eldar for possession of the planet. Motley himself had come to fight an infestation of orks, but he’d heard stories that at some point the world had played host to every race in the galaxy with opposable digits.
Legends of Vaul, the smith-god, were known even beyond the eldar race and the idea that some great treasure was still hidden on Caudoelith seemed to be unshakable. Not a generation could go by without some dusty scholar or avaricious pirate arriving to stake their claim. The fact that the eldar fought to protect the planet only confirmed the myths. The truth was that there was a treasure on Caudoelith, just not of a kind that other races would value. Caudoelith of old had tens, if not hundreds of thousands of individual portals into the webway. Everything from huge ship gates capable of accepting the most grandious of aether-sailing vessels to interconnected individual portals that allowed instantaneous travel to any corner of the galaxy within a few steps.
The fighting and the Fall had put an en
d to all that. Only a handful of the original gates had survived but that still made Caudoelith a vital nexus in the material universe, a connection point between innumerable strands of the webway that were normally inaccessible from one another. Small wonder that Caraeis had brought them here. Despite Motley’s earlier mockery there were few places inaccessible from the gates of Caudoelith. It was even possible that the warlock could bring them directly to Biel-Tan from this cemetery-world.
They trudged onward into the teeth of the rushing, black winds. The glittering terrain varied little: tumbled slabs of jade, marble and moonstone, wrecked machineries of gold and platinum, silver-filigreed rubble all clutched in a mutual embrace and all slowly eroding into powder. A dozen more millennia and Caudoelith might resemble the world they had just left, a dune sea made of the decayed remains of a forgotten civilisation.
Motley caught the faintest flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, something not of the billowing blackness but solid and man-like. He remained silent and waited to see if the movement was repeated. He was rewarded by a another fleeting glimpse of motion beside a tumbled slab. Still the Harlequin held his tongue and only moved to get a little closer to Morr. The Dire Avengers seemed oblivious, the warlock had his attention fixed on guiding them to the next gate. He was frequently consulting a single rune held in his cupped hands, seeming to be now a little confused by its indications.
Weapons fire burst upon them without warning, trails of spurting dirt stitching through the party from multiple sources. The Dire Avengers reacted flawlessly, darting into cover and returning fire in a single fluid movement. Caraeis looked at the rune in his hands again in apparent surprise before finally obeying the exarch’s decidedly forceful injunction to take cover. Motley dived over to Morr’s bier and dragged it down to the ground where the incubus would have a modicum of protection from the hissing crossfire.
Their attackers had a decisive edge in firepower, any move from the Dire Avengers provoked a hornet swarm of rounds zipping and splattering into the stones about them. Every few moments there would be silence for a second and then fire would come snapping in from a different angle. Motley was stuck lying at full stretch next to Morr and became acutely aware that the majority of his own cover was provided by the body of the incubus beside him.
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