Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  ‘You should cut me free, little clown,’ Morr rumbled. ‘I would prefer to die on my feet.’

  ‘Oh I will in just a moment, when it’s safer,’ Motley whispered back comfortingly. Morr laughed humourlessly as another burst of rounds sang past only millimetres away.

  The exarch and Caraeis looked to have been concocting a counter attack. All five Aspect Warriors suddenly sprang to their feet and made a concerted rush into the ruins, their shuriken catapults spitting coordinated bursts as they ran. Caraeis followed with his Witchblade crawling with chained lightning, one hand upthrust to shed a bright, cold light over the Aspect Warriors’ advance. The moment they vanished into the darkness Motley set to work cutting the straps restraining Morr to the bier, his curved blade quick and deft as it sliced through them one after another. Morr’s klaive fell free as the incubus surged up into a sitting position, arms still bound by manacles behind his back.

  ‘Release me!’ Morr said, his voice thick with emotion. Motley pressed his Harlequin’s kiss to the manacles, its looping monofilament wires instantly rending their locks to dust. As the chains fell away Morr swept up his klaive with reverence, a terrible, feral smile splitting his face as he did so. A barrage of stunning flashes erupted in the direction the Aspect Warriors had taken, sending shadows leaping across the scene. Morr poised the great two-metre arc of the klaive and looked towards Motley meditatively.

  ‘Come on, we don’t have much time,’ Motley cried as he started running in the opposite direction taken by the Aspect Warriors. ‘You can always kill me later!’

  Morr glanced uncertainly towards the weapons fire and explosions for a heartbeat. The firefight seemed to be drifting further away, tailing off to occasional whickering cracks in the distance. Reaching a decision, the incubus turned and loped away along the path taken by the fleet-footed Harlequin.

  Bellathonis’s torture-laboratories were buried within a honeycomb of hidden chambers and secret ways touching on the White Flames’ territory in High Commorragh. The main area had originally comprised a wide, high chamber with rows of cells along one dripping wall and a cracked floor. Now it was more than half-ruined. The floor had split open and tumbled the cells into a slope of broken rubble. Chunks of stone and piles of gritty dust were scattered everywhere.

  A handful of Bellathonis’s faithful wrack servants were digging through fallen debris looking for equipment that had survived the tremors unleashed by the Dysjunction. Several work-tables had been turned upright and bore neat rows of gleaming tools. A glass fronted sarcophagus hung from the ceiling on chains, although its twin lay smashed on the floor below it. At the centre of the reduced room an examination table bore a metre-high cylinder of burnished metal with a handle at the top. The metal casing was hinged at the front to reveal it guarded a cylinder of crystal filled with colourless fluid. The object floating in the liquid was almost hidden by long, dark hair that coiled slowly around it, but it was undeniably a severed head.

  A shape moved at the entryway to the lab, staggering abruptly into the light. A nearby wrack whirled in alarm and dropped the tray of instruments he was holding with a crash.

  ‘Master! What happened?’ the wrack cried in dismay.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Bellathonis gasped as he waved the minion away. ‘Don’t fuss.’

  ‘Bu-but master, your–’

  A synthesised voice cut through the wrack’s jabbering. The voice sighed like the wind through winter-stripped branches.

  ‘You appear to have lost an arm since the last time I saw you, Bellathonis, how very careless of you.’

  Bellathonis wagged the stump of one shoulder ruefully. ‘As I said, it’s nothing that can’t be fixed in a trice,’ he grinned disturbingly, ‘and better than the immediate alternative, believe me.’

  ‘I have heard tales of animals that will gnaw off their own limbs to escape a trap,’ the voice whispered. ‘The fates are closing in around you, renegade master, your death is inevitable.’

  Bellathonis walked over to the cylindrical container and peered directly at its occupant. A pale, waxy feminine face with stitched-shut eyes and mouth seemed to peer blindly back at him between the coiling locks. ‘Always ready to lighten the mood, Angevere,’ the haemonculus said with deceptive sweetness. ‘That’s what I like best about you.’

  The voice sighed from a narrow grille in the base of the cylinder and while the lips did not, could not move, the face twitched with the semblance of life.

  ‘I warned you to destroy Yllithian when you had the chance, now he plots against you. He wishes to become your destroyer, not your ally.’

  ‘That would seem uncommonly foolish of him when I hold his life in my hands.’

  ‘No longer. You have granted him new life and even now he uses it to betray you.’

  Bellathonis’s black eyes glowed dangerously at the crone’s words. Angevere hated Yllithian with a passion and not without reason. The White Flames archon was the one that had found and decapitated her after she had survived for centuries alone in the daemon-haunted ruins of accursed Shaa-dom. Finding that the crone still somehow clung to life Yllithian had then traded her severed head to Bellathonis as a curio to excite his interest in the wider, more dangerous schemes the White Flames archon was brewing. Yet Angevere also had the gift of warp-sight and not everything she said could be dismissed as self-serving doom saying.

  ‘Well we can see about that,’ Bellathonis announced. ‘If it is true then Yllithian has underestimated me quite badly.’

  Bellathonis awkwardly dug through several pouches one-handed before eventually retrieving a thumb-sized crimson jewel with many facets. He tapped it on the table three times and laid it flat on the surface, all the while reciting the name ‘Nyos Yllithian’ over it as if it were an incantation. A small, red-tinted image sprang into being above the jewel, a hazy viewpoint in the first person perspective. Bellathonis watched and listened as Yllithian (for it was his viewpoint) harangued his warriors and set out for Corespur.

  ‘You can read Yllithian’s thoughts? How so?’

  ‘Unfortunately I can’t read his mind, but I can see what he sees, hear what he hears and hence also hear what he says. It’s in the blood, you might say… That is an awfully large number of daemons up there.’

  ‘Dysjunction opens the cracks in our reality into doorways, there are many outside eager enough to press inside for the feast.’

  ‘Hmm I understand that perfectly well, but what’s to be done about it?’

  ‘It is out of your hands, or rather hand I should say.’

  ‘That is a very unsatisfactory answer, Angevere, perhaps you should reconsider it,’ Bellathonis said archly. ‘My resources may be limited at present but they could certainly accommodate one of your equally limited stature.’

  The stitched-shut face flinched at the prospect of excruciation by Bellathonis. From prior experience she knew he was right, the haemonculus was reckoned a master in his art with good cause. The speaker grille rasped almost plaintively.

  ‘Two wandering souls lost in the webway approach their final destination. Dark and light, it will be their sacrifice that determines the outcome of the Dysjunction. They are beyond your reach now, or the reach of anyone in Commorragh, even Asdrubael Vect himself.’

  ‘Hmm, better I suppose but I still don’t like it,’ Bellathonis muttered, bending his attention to the image again. ‘So, it seems that our Yllithian has been placed on assignment for the immediate future. He’s going to be busy for a while.’

  ‘It will not matter. Your doom has already been unleashed.’

  ‘Yes, yes, doom, gloom and so forth. You really are tiresomely repetitive at times. Oh wait who’s this? Zykleiades, you old monster – ah, I see you’ve made patriarch noctis now. Standards must have slipped even further since I parted ways with the Black Descent.’

  ‘You see? Yllithian offers you up to this Zykleiades without
even troubling to ask for a price. The archon wishes you dead.’

  ‘If only it were so simple,’ Bellathonis sighed meditatively. ‘Zykleiades will want me dead and disappeared, but I suspect if Yllithian is truly out for vengeance he would much rather I were alive and suffering for a suitably protracted period of time. He does tend to be very thorough. That’s a terrible shame, I’d thought Yllithian more progressive in character.’

  ‘All hands are turned against you now, you cannot escape your fate.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know about that, Angevere, after all just look at you. You should have died centuries ago in the fall of Shaa-dom and yet here you are. Contingencies can be a wonderful thing.’

  ‘The price was more terrible than you can imagine.’

  ‘Only because you made the mistake of paying it yourself,’ the haemonculus sneered. ‘Speaking of which I really should get myself fixed up. You there! Come over here where I can see you better – ah yes, that’s a very fine pair of arms I see you’ve got there…’

  The slave quarters came to an end where the parkland’s boundary had originally been. The architecture of the buildings changed abruptly from a maze of flimsy boards with mud underfoot into slab-sided monoliths of obsidian, steel and granite that were spaced out along wide boulevards of springy turf that had been richly fertilised with crushed bone. The blocky structures varied in size but those closest were only a few storeys high, rising higher the further they went from the park. All were richly decorated with carvings and columns around cavernous doorways and empty windows. Some featured living displays of moving light that portrayed their occupants, most showed impassive, sculpted renditions of their long-dead faces to the world. These were Ynnealxias – mausoleums for glorious ancestors, or more accurately monuments to them as none contained a trace of mortal remains.

  The ironic contrast of slave slums being crammed alongside the array of splendid, empty edifices he now moved through never even crossed his mind. In a society devoid of gods the Ynnealxias were the closest things to temples to be found in Commorragh, empty houses for the dead that celebrated their achievements in life. Kharbyr advanced along the edge of a deserted boulevard feeling uncomfortably exposed. He tried to keep his eyes downward and not stare up into the maddening skies, even as a tiny, mad part of himself told him to do it. He could feel pressure bearing down on him from way up there, a sickening sensation of alien heat that made his skin crawl. The urge to look at it again was almost overwhelming, even now he could still swear that he saw flashes of unearthly colour wherever he looked.

  The eldar gods had all been destroyed, so the story went, consumed by She Who Thirsts in the Fall: Asuryan, Khaela Mensha Khaine, Vaul, Kurnous, Lileath, all of them. Commorrite families of any breeding and history now venerated themselves, or rather their illustrious predecessors, instead of their contemptible failed gods. In High Commorragh the noble families erected kilometre-high statues to themselves and dedicated entire wings of their manses to the accumulation of the lore of their bloodline. Here on Hy’kran in the lower tiers the trueborn could not indulge themselves so fully in their necropoli and must perforce make do with humbler temples to their own vanity.

  In the middle distance the knees of Azkhorxi tier rose above the rooftops, a jagged fence made of polished towers of obsidian and amethyst. Somewhere close to the foot of those towers, Bezieth had assured them, there would be access to the foundation layer and its vein-like substrata of tubes and capillaries. Kharbyr hoped she was right; he had an almost animalistic sense of being stalked through the mausoleums. The dark, open doorways seemed poised to suck him inside at any moment and trap him within their sterile luxury for all eternity.

  Of course every trueborn lived with the avowed intent that no such house of the dead would ever be built for them. Through the intercession of the haemonculi any trueborn could return from death provided the smallest part of their mortal remains could be saved. Yet death still came for some: by all-consuming fire, by destroying energies, by deadly toxin, by enigmatic disappearance or plain perfidy over the centuries the number of monuments inexorably multiplied. The houses were decorated with trophies accumulated across centuries of reaving: the crystal encased skulls of notable enemies, the prows of captured ships, suits of barbaric armour, exotic weapons, statues and artworks stolen from a hundred thousand different worlds. Vainglorious inscriptions declared their achievements:

  ‘Quiver before the might that was Vylr’ak Ak Menshas who was called the Shrike Lord by his victims. So strong his blade that he would plunge it through three bodies at once, so swift his Raider that in a thousand hunts not one slave ever evaded his grasp.’

  ‘See here arrayed the riches of Oxchradh Lyr Hagorach Kaesos, the Soul Thief. Young or old all submitted beneath his savage caresses in the end. On the world of Sharn a hundred settlements fell to him in a single night and he declared himself not yet sated.’

  ‘Witness the death house of Kassais, who needs no other name. Beneath a dozen suns his reavers did bloody work to his instruction, leaving slaves with one eye and one hand only to record his passing.’

  The only ghosts here were memories, yet Kharbyr could feel his nape-hairs rising as though a hungry gaze followed his progress. Amid all the background turmoil and horror of the city something was singling him out for its attention, something dreadful. He stopped and glanced back uncertainly at Bezieth and Xagor following a few paces behind him. His fears suddenly seemed too stupid and groundless to voice when he met the archon’s impatient gaze.

  ‘What is it?’ Bezieth hissed.

  ‘I… nothing, I just felt like I… like we were being watched,’ Kharbyr stammered.

  ‘I feel it too,’ the archon declared. ‘There’s something following us, has been since the park if not earlier.’

  ‘Do we try and catch it?’ Kharbyr said softly with a sense of relief. He’d begun to fear he was going mad. Bezieth shook her head.

  ‘No. Keep going, if it doesn’t want to tangle with us there’s no reason to tangle with it unless we have to. We’ll try and lose it in the shafts.’

  Kharbyr nodded and crept stealthily onward. The boundary towers of Azkhorxi were much closer now, dominating even the tallest of the nearby Ynnealxias, a fact that was no doubt the source of great ire to the Hy’kran trueborn. The ground ahead sloped downward towards a row of angular buttresses protruding from the closely set towers. Between the buttresses could be seen the raised lips of three silver rings set into the ground, each wide enough to swallow a Raider whole. These would be vertical mouths of travel tubes that emerged into Hy’kran from beneath the core.

  Kharbyr increased his pace a little, eager for a chance to quit the open skies for somewhere more comfortably enclosed. As he got closer a flicker of movement among the buttresses caught his attention. He silently dropped into a crouch and strained to pierce the shadows for several minutes, long enough for Bezieth to come crawling forward to look too. She cursed viciously.

  ‘Ur-ghuls,’ she spat.

  The lip of the travel tubes was swarming with the whip-thin, troglodytic horrors. They were crawling up from below like an infestation of lice looking for a new host. Their blind heads quested back and forth as their rows of scent-pits tasted the air.

  Kharbyr nodded. ‘They seem to be heading this way, it looks like that big pile of carrion back in the slave town has a claimant after all. There’s something weird about them, though, I think they’ve been warp-touched.’

  Bezieth grunted and looked again. It was hard to tell at such a distance but there was something unusual about the creatures. It took her a few seconds to realise what it was. Some of the ur-ghuls were missing limbs, and all of them seemed torn up in some gruesome fashion or other.

  ‘Don’t they usually eat each other if they’re given half a chance?’ Kharbyr asked.

  ‘Cannibals, yes,’ Xagor chirped. ‘Somaphages.’

  ‘So why aren’
t the ones with missing limbs in the bellies of the other ones,’ Bezieth said grimly.

  ‘More to the point how can we get through them? Will your blade carve through them like it did on the Grand Canal?’

  ‘No, and ur-ghuls are strong and fast enough that I’d normally hesitate to fight more than three at once without a squad of warriors at my back. There’s got to be more than thirty down there and more coming. I don’t think we can get through them, I think we have to get out of their way and hope they don’t scent us.’

  Xagor wrung his hand and claw miserably. ‘Highly efficient olfactory organs,’ the wrack whispered fearfully. ‘Most effective hunters.’

  ‘Then we get into a doorway where they can only come a few at a time and… wait what’s that? Looks like we’re in luck, not everyone’s left yet.’

  A sleek, angular shape had come drifting silently out of the shadows above the swarming ur-ghuls, a shape with a jutting, armoured prow that thrust out below bellying aether-sails of orange and green. It was a Raider with its narrow deck tightly packed with kabalite warriors. The ur-ghuls milled in confusion, their scent-pits flaring at the nearness of prey but as yet unable to locate its source.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Kharbyr said.

  ‘Having some fun cleaning up,’ Bezieth replied.

  A shower of tiny objects dropped from the Raider into the seething mass, metal seeds that blossomed into fiery gouts of plasma wherever they landed. Whip-thin bodies flashed to fire in the sudden glare, then withered into ash in a heartbeat. Merciless fingers of splinter fire lashed down at the survivors, cratering flesh and splintering eyeless skulls.