Dozens of dark shoals like Yllithian’s waited in the shadows of Corespur: aethersails of crimson, purple, poisonous green, acidic yellow were on every side, serpent prows with jewelled eyes thrust alongside of gilded harpies and jagged rams, chain-snares and trophies swung beneath bladevanes and serrated keels as the host silently drifted in unaccustomed quiescence. Countless different icons marked out the host of different kabals that had been summoned by the supreme overlord. The opportunities for them all to gain some advantage in the chaos were virtually limitless and they began right now. In the hours to come a single missed order might send an archon or a whole kabal crashing into ruin in a heartbeat.
Another reality-shaking storm was breaking across the city. World-shattering bolts of multi-coloured lightning lashed down from the warding into the spires below with terrifying violence. The strikes were so frequent that at times it seemed as if there was a forest of flickering pillars spread across the city that barely supported the sagging, raging vault of heaven. Fires licked everywhere and fully half of Sorrow Fell seemed to be burning, its sullen red glow warring with the vivid aurora above.
Periodically groups of sleek craft would slide out of the host and descend into the maelstrom as they received their orders. Yllithian continued to divert himself by imagining the difficulties inherent in communicating with such a disparate horde. This was no raid into realspace where a plan could be pre-made, roles assigned and each part then trusted to work within the greater whole. Vect seemed to be biding his time, waiting to see where the worst eruptions were occurring while he fed kabals into the blaze one by one, but perhaps it was just the physical difficulty of actually telling them all what to do.
The problem rested squarely with the inherent deviousness of the Commorrites themselves. In realspace everyone focused on working together as smoothly possible, the city-games were suspended for a time in the interests of efficiency. In Commorragh itself even something as simple as a rival receiving a message offered boundless opportunities for mischief. Because of that signals had to be routinely encrypted, decrypted, re-encrypted, quarantined and subject to the equivalent of red-hot pokers and pincers before they could be safely brought anywhere near the attention of a living recipient. Even then there were no guarantees that some slippery foe hadn’t found some new and exciting way of getting something past your defences. It all took up an inordinate amount of time and added uncertainty to a situation that was already dangerously fluid.
A beat of dark wings above caught Yllithian’s attention as the lone scourge he had been half-expecting, half-dreading descended onto the deck of the barque. The altered messenger was prominently wearing the mark of the Kabal of the Black Heart to show he was one of Vect’s own (although that in itself meant little, flying false colours was a trick older than Commorragh itself). The scourge furled its gorgeous, feathered wings ostentatiously and knelt in front Yllithian offering up a narrow wafer of crystal for Yllithian’s inspection.
Messages delivered by hand avoided many problems while introducing a few new ones, but at least you could identify the origin more readily and, if the situation warranted it, literally shoot the messenger. As it was Yllithian took the crystal from the scourge’s clawed fingertips without a second glance, shooing the feathered warrior away with his other hand. The scourge bounded to its feet and leapt away into space, the unfurling snap of its wings doing little to conceal its cynical, cawing laugh as it departed.
Yllithian examined the flat crystal plaque and turned it over in his hands: a biphase lattice genecoded to a single sender and recipient – unbreakable, unforgeable and unalterable – theoretically at least. It bore the mark of Vect and it no doubt contained his orders, sealed in such a way that they could quite literally be seen by Yllithian’s eyes only. He was hesitant about unsealing them – it felt very much like donning a leash. No doubt many other archons had felt the same way but the truth was that the leash was already around their necks and what they were feeling was Vect jerking it to bring them to heel.
He slid one finger along the top of the wafer and a row of unambiguous, angular ideograms swam into view within the crystal. Yllithian read it, and then read it again before crumpling the thing in his fist. It crushed into fine, glittering dust, slipping away instantly between Yllithian’s fingers in a twinkling cascade. He meditated for a moment on the missive’s contents, thinking that unseen eyes would be watching and waiting for his reaction. He hesitated for only a heartbeat, what choice was there but to obey? For now at least… At his gesture the shoal of White Flames grav-craft slid away from the slope of Corespur and set course into the maelstrom.
In another section of the waiting host Aez’ashya stood on the small, open deck of her Venom sky-chariot reading her own crystal-encased message. A wry smile played across her lips as she did so. At her call the Blades of Desire began rousing their skycraft, the high whine of booster engines rising around her moment by moment. She swept her arm forward and the Venom shot away following the course Yllithian had taken, a snarling swarm of reavers and hellions at her back.
CHAPTER 20
ESCAPE ATTEMPTS
‘They’re coming,’ Motley called suddenly, still running. ‘I’d hoped they would take longer to decide on what to do but apparently we’ve been fated to be disappointed in that regard.’
Morr, loping beside him tirelessly, glanced at the Harlequin without questioning how he knew what actions the craftworlders were taking. They had been running for minutes through the glittering ruins and the place they had escaped from was well out of sight in the darkness by now.
‘Will your allies be able to intercede again?’
Motley shook his head regretfully. ‘They’ve already done more than I should ask, and besides I think Caraeis will be wise to their tricks now.’
‘How far is it to the nearest gate?’
‘Too far unless we can think up a way to throw them off our trail,’ Motley grimaced. ‘Those Dire Avengers run quicker than hunting hounds.’
‘Alone you are considerably faster than me. You could easily reach the gate ahead of them and open it,’ Morr pointed out.
‘That wouldn’t h– oh I see what you mean,’ Motley said with a grin. ‘I’ll see you again shortly.’
The two runners separated, their courses diverging as Motley put on an impressive spurt of speed. The slight Harlequin bounded across the tops of broken pillars, flipped over gaping craters and danced through the ruins with a speed and grace that few living creatures could equal. In a few seconds he was entirely lost amid the rushing darkness. Morr kept doggedly running at his best pace and curved his course off into densest ruins he could see, his klaive held balanced low at his side.
Caraeis ran lightly through the forest of broken stone and twisted metal. He was as deft and agile as any of his race, battle-trained for many differing environments yet he was still struggling to keep Aiosa and the Aspect Warriors in sight. When they had agreed to pursue the incubus he had assumed Aiosa would need him to use his rune sight to follow the Commorrite’s black aura. Instead the Dire Avengers had sprung away without a moment’s hesitation, almost vanishing before he even began to move. They intended to make the capture alone, Caraeis was sure of it, no doubt as another way to embarrass him before the council when Aiosa made her report.
It had taken him a little while to work out how the Aspect Warriors were tracking the incubus before he realised they were literally, physically, tracking him. Once he recognised the mundane source of their information he began to notice the tracks himself, unmistakeable large, armoured boot prints filling slowly with blown dust. The fugitive was obviously running with no attempt at concealment at all, the prints were widely spaced, digging deep at the toe as they pushed off. Even so the incubus’s lead could only be measured in minutes and judging by the speed the Dire Avengers were moving it must be shrinking rapidly. The incubus’s trail pointed unerringly towards the nearest gate, a reality-dis
torting knot that Caraeis could sense at the edge of his consciousness. There were other gates in the vicinity but this was the strongest focus by far, the obvious escape route.
Caraeis cursed mentally at the perfidy of Commorrites, Harlequins and Aspect Warriors equally. He, Caraeis, had seen the crisis-pattern first, and he, Caraeis, had been the one who had calculated precisely how to manipulate it to the best advantage of Biel-Tan. Yet when he put his finely-considered plan into action all the mechanisms he had so carefully wrought span out of control at the first instance, evincing an animus and taste for self-direction he had never anticipated. No calculation he had made indicated that the hidebound pride of the Dire Avengers exarch would be a factor, or that the wandering followers of Cegorach would become involved.
He had tried to dismiss the incident of the warlock and Harlequin runes colliding in his earlier casting. Such unfavourable portents often happened due to malign influences – it was precisely the kind of thing the runes were meant to defuse and could usually be safely ignored. Now he was beginning to wonder whether it had been a more literal omen of their course towards mutual destruction.
Caraeis became aware that the Dire Avengers’ course was changing, curving away from a straight path towards the gate. He looked down and saw that the trail they followed was curving too. The incubus must have given up on trying to escape that way. Between the flying wracks of dark vapour blown on the winds it was apparent that the land ahead rose precipitously. Terraces of broken marble and jade frowned down like broken cliffs. They would soon be climbing rather than running if this course held true.
Caraeis thought selfishly that the incubus’s tracks would become invisible over such ground, and Aiosa would need him after all. Then he suddenly felt the gate, now off to one side, begin opening and panic thrilled through him to his very core.
‘Aiosa! It’s a trick!’ he mind-shouted desperately to the distant sapphire figure of the exarch. ‘The gate is opening! This must be a false trail!’
Aiosa’s head snapped towards him and the Dire Avengers paused, as still as statues. ‘Can you stop it?’ her clipped mindspeech responded immediately.
Caraeis was already bending his will in that direction, trying to prevent reality and webway aligning within the psychically charged arch of the gate. It was like wrestling with a huge door, struggling to keep it shut as unimaginable forces pushed at it from the other side.
‘Yes! N-not for long,’ Caraeis gasped with the effort. ‘Get to the gate! Quickly!’
The Dire Avengers sped away, their armoured forms slipping easily through the ruins. Caraeis clenched his jaw and sank his whole concentration into keeping the gate shut. The pressure was relentless, if he had been in proximity he could have closed the gate with a word but at this distance he could only use his will to hold the winding threads of etheric energy apart. The effort involved made seconds feel like hours, beads of sweat stood out on the warlock’s face inside his mask and he ground his teeth together until they felt as if they must break.
Despite his best efforts the portal was still grinding open little by little with unstoppable, machine-like certainty. A few more moments and Caraeis would not be able to stop the gate fully forming. He prayed that Aiosa and her Aspect Warriors were almost there, that they could prevent the fugitive escaping into the trackless infinitude of webway…
‘There’s no one here,’ Aiosa’s mindspeech announced abruptly.
Caraeis had a brief impression of a towering arch, multi-coloured energy swirling between its uprights, the gate itself still unstable and unusable. But the dust around the gate was empty, no incubus warrior stood at bay, no simpering Harlequin companion was on hand trying to interfere again. Caraeis’s concentration collapsed, the gate instantly forming as the impediment to its opening was removed.
In that same instant he became aware of another portal nearby, a temporary manifestation so weak that he had failed to notice it while he was battling to keep the other gate closed. Almost as soon as he became aware of it the new portal vanished again, and with it went any psychic sense of the incubus’s presence on Caudoeltih.
Caraeis’s mind-scream of frustration was not good to hear.
The ribbed arches of the travel tube flashed past scant metres away. Kharbyr had pushed the booster-engines to their maximum and trimmed the triangular sail of the captured raider to catch the best of the powerful, erratic etheric winds swirling down from above. Now he stood braced at the tiller simultaneously trying to control the racing craft and not reveal how close he was to soiling himself.
Fortunately the tube was wide at this point, easily wide enough to accommodate a Raider careening prow first towards city bottom. The soiling parts came from spars, bridges and other obstructions that projected at random from the sides of the tube. Yes, people needed places to dock and perhaps cross over the vertical tube but Kharbyr was finding it hard to believe they needed quite so cursed many of them.
It took every ounce of Kharbyr’s skill to sweep the Raider over, under and around these random obstructions at breakneck speed. He dared not back his speed down even for instant because he was all too keenly aware of the whip-thin shapes of ur-ghuls that could be glimpsed clinging everywhere. Bezieth stood just before the mast, legs braced wide as she toted a splinter rifle she had found in one of the Raiders’ weapon racks. She was taking potshots at the crawling ur-ghuls but Kharbyr was far too busy controlling the plummeting craft to see whether she actually hit anything. Xagor was crouched beside Kharbyr’s feet in the stern of the Raider watching the metal walls whip past as if he were hypnotised by them.
‘Kharbyr! Up ahead!’ Bezieth shouted, her voice ringing with alarm.
The vertical tube forked ahead, one branch turning abruptly through ninety degrees to become a horizontal tunnel while the other branch continued down into inky darkness. Kharbyr cursed himself for getting drawn into watching for obstacles instead of the course of tube ahead. He was hard over against the wall of the tube, with the horizontal branch coming up fast on its far side. Something about the black pit they were heading into filled Kharbyr with unreasoning fear, the darkness had an unnatural, surging quality about it that every instinct told him to avoid.
Kharbyr cursed again and hauled desperately for the horizontal tunnel, dragging the prow of the Raider up towards the rapidly approaching opening. Even the craft’s gravitic compensators could not eliminate all of the crushing g-forces generated by the manoeuvre and his vision darkened as the sleek craft reluctantly obeyed. The branch was sweeping towards them far too quickly, the Raider’s hull creaking and groaning as it struggled to level out. Kharbyr cut the engines and furled the aethersail, but the craft’s hurtling momentum was threatened to pull it apart if he slowed down too quickly. They weren’t going to make it.
To Kharbyr’s terrified perception events were unfurling with glacial slowness. The tunnel branch was rushing up inexorably towards them, the black pit was now directly below the Raider’s keel and the horizontal tunnel visible ahead. They were going to clear the lip of the branch but not by enough to make the turn into the horizontal tunnel immediately afterwards. He shed speed as hard as he dared, and then harder still. He felt something give and the Raider bucked viciously before it began trying to twist out of his hands into a corkscrew dive. The tunnel floor rose to meet and it was all Kharbyr could do prevent them from hitting it inverted and being crushed like insects under the Raider’s sliding hull.
‘Hang on!’ he shouted uselessly and then all sound was lost in a grinding, hideous cacophony of agonised metal.
Cho had briefly experienced a sensation akin to panic when the lifeforms she was tracking suddenly became embroiled with a number of others. The psychic trace was still present – admittedly diffuse but undeniably present – yet now its potential source, her target, was more obscured than ever in what amounted to a crowd of false suspects. An initial instinct to classify each of the new contacts indivi
dually and examine their life-sparks carefully to differentiate them from the initial four contacts resulted in a logjam that virtually paralysed Cho for a split second. Then, from the depths of her memory engrams, emerged a broadly matching universal fit for the majority of the new contacts – ur-ghuls. The target was categorically not an ur-ghul and so all lifeforms fitting that designation were henceforth ignored.
Cho had watched carefully from the flat roof of a structure while a grav-craft bearing eight more anomalous contacts closed in on the first four. Cho’s fluted, crystalline spirit syphon had dipped in and out of its housing like an insect’s sting as she calculated the potential for her target being revealed by the imminent meeting. Disappointingly the eight new contacts had only hunted the lifeforms designated as ur-ghuls and then been ambushed by the initial four contacts Cho was designating A through D.
The temptation to enter the engagement had been almost overwhelming. Life energies were being spilled before her sensors rods, utterly wasted when she could have drawn them into herself and fed on them to grow so much stronger. However caution was still too deeply rooted in her protocols to simply plunge into the fray and risk everything in an orgy of violence. She continued to watch and wait as the fighting lapped aboard the grav-craft (confirmed designation: Raider). Contacts A through D were soon alone aboard the Raider with contacts E through L extinguished or struggling on the ground below.
The target was not revealed. No changes occurred in lifeforms A through D other than elevated heart rates. The whole engagement was highly puzzling and unsatisfactory in its outcome. It was only when the Raider came sharply about and raced for the distant travel tubes that Cho realised she had made an error by hanging back. The psychic spoor now trailed behind the moving grav-craft like a fuel cell pollutant, the source accelerating at a rate greater than she could equal. Cho poured enough energy into her impellers to push them to integrity-endangering levels of thrust as she swept out of hiding in pursuit of the Raider.
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