Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  ‘The haemonculus?’ Morr rumbled uncertainly.

  ‘No, no, no! The worldsinger – you know, the muddy-footed primitive with supposedly nothing to offer to the magnificent grandeur that is Commorragh. They needed her to make their scheme work and they went to considerable efforts to get her because she could do something that no one in Commorragh could do. Doesn’t tell you that the Exodites are far from being beneath your contempt? That they have achieved something in their own right worthy of praise and emulation?’

  ‘No, it denotes that they can be uniquely useful slaves at times.’

  ‘Morr, I do believe that you are being deliberately obtuse for your own amusement – which is something that in an odd sort of way I find to be very encouraging. Let’s take a different example instead – you and me. At the point where you discovered that Kraillach had been corrupted you called for my help. You knew that no Commorrite could be trusted to see the job done without exploiting the situation and most likely being corrupted in turn. Have I or have I not been a trustworthy and valuable ally ever since?’

  ‘You have,’ Morr admitted grudgingly.

  ‘And yet I am not from Commorragh, and I have no vested interest at stake in it or you.’

  ‘That… is not true,’ Morr said with a grim smile. The incubus looked as if he had just solved a complex puzzle that had been nagging at him for a long time. Motley frowned, seemingly discomfitted by the change in the incubus’s demeanour.

  ‘You’re implying that I have a vested interest? Do tell, please.’

  ‘Of course you have. It’s me.’

  Motley only smiled in response, motioning politely for Morr to continue.

  ‘You need me because you need a dragon slayer.’

  Bellathonis rubbed his hands together – both of them, new and old. One was delicate and long-fingered, the other stubby and dark. Well you couldn’t have everything, he consoled himself, the acuity of his new digits seemed fine and that was the important thing. Dust flaked down from the ceiling and over his bloody instruments in a most unsatisfactory way that ruined Bellathonis’s marginally improved mood. Tremors again, closer this time than the last series. The lab was becoming decidedly unsafe and he couldn’t return to the White Flames fortress without running the risk that something worse than Venomyst infiltrators would be there waiting for him.

  The haemonculus looked around the chamber, his gaze taking in the three wracks hurrying to pile boxes of equipment onto a crude sled, the sarcophagus they were sadly going to have to abandon, the examination tables with their aggregation of dirt and debris. It was a melancholy sight. He reached down and pulled the fourth of his wracks upright from where he had been lying on one of the tables. Bellathonis fondly dusted the leather-clad, bloodied minion down and set him onto his feet.

  ‘Now go and help the others and take care not to pull those sutures out,’ Bellathonis admonished.

  ‘Yes, master, thank you, master,’ the one-armed wrack replied unsteadily before staggering away to the sled.

  ‘Death is coming,’ Angevere whispered at Bellathonis’s elbow. He frowned at her tone, there was something off about it: not jubilant or mocking or sneering this time, just fearful.

  ‘That’s enough from you, old crone,’ Bellathonis said decisively and snapped the cylinder containing the witch’s head shut. He hauled the container over to the sled and stowed it carefully among the piles of boxes, cases and jars already there. The wracks milled uncertainly around their master awaiting orders, sensing his distress at having to abandon the lab but unable to offer any help. Bellathonis turned to them and spread his hands philosophically.

  ‘My faithful acolytes,’ Bellathonis said. ‘It falls to us that we must move on once again. Though we were here only a brief time it’s my belief that great things were achieved in this place, and I shall al–’

  The slope of rubble that had buried the cells was shifting, individual chunks of it slipping and rolling down to the floor. A dull spot of cherry red appeared in the midst of the fallen masonry, brightening through orange to yellow to white within a few heartbeats. Waves of palpable heat flowed from the glowing spot and an awful grinding noise could be heard behind it. Bellathonis and the four wracks instinctively began to back away.

  ‘I think we’d best–’ was all that Bellathonis could say before the rubble slope exploded in a shower of molten rock and something sleek came surging through the white-hot debris. Bellathonis had only the briefest impression of a silvery carapace and scorpion-like tail before he darted out of sight behind the sled. The wracks cried out in alarm and threw themselves at the intruder without hesitation, which Bellathonis considered a creditable show of fervour if not wisdom.

  The one-armed wrack barely even got to swing his cleaver before a nest of barbed chains flailed around his neck and bloodily pulled his head straight off his shoulders. The second wrack managed to snap his dagger’s blade against the foe’s adamantium hull with an enthusiastic but ill-considered lunge. Two sets of shears caught the wrack at shoulder and crotch before hurling him bodily across the chamber in a hideous show of strength. The unfortunate wrack struck the far wall in three separate pieces.

  Bellathonis recognised the assailant as a Talos pain engine. It was smallish, perhaps half the size of full-sized engine, but it had a definitively assassin-like cast to its design. The finest Talos engines were mobile monuments to pain and slaughter, more living works of art than mechanisms with purpose. Bellathonis found the concept of this Talos rather contemptible, akin to hobbling one’s offspring so that the resulting pygmies would make better servants.

  The two remaining wracks hesitated for a split second and then ran in opposite directions around the Talos. The barbed sting atop the invader’s tail flashed and one wrack’s torso simply vanished in a mass of flames. The other wrack took advantage of the momentary distraction to charge in behind their metallic assailant and jam a gnarled-looking agoniser rod under its carapace. Lightning flared at the juncture and the machine jerked violently before whipping around with eye-blurring speed to confront the source of its pain. Even machine-life could be hurt with an agoniser, circuits as well as nerves could be induced to a pitch of screaming pain by its touch. The Talos did not allow the wrack to strike again, using its whirling chain-flails to flay the flesh from the wrack’s bones with machine-precision.

  With all four of its attackers neutralised in a matter of seconds, Vhi turned and came for Bellathonis.

  Kharbyr awoke to the popping and creaking sounds of cooling metal. The air was filled with a hot, ozone-tainted smell. He tried to move but that set off fireworks of pain throughout his body and he groaned involuntarily. There were broken parts inside that refused to do anything he told them, most especially down around his legs. He tried to remember how he got there – the last thing he remembered was a speeding Raider with him braced at the tiller… the floor of the tunnel coming up fast towards them. Them? Yes, he remembered now, there had been others aboard the Raider: Bezieth and Xagor, where were they? Why weren’t they helping him? He tried to call out their names and that hurt too.

  He looked around, moving his head cautiously to keep a foaming black sea of nausea at bay. He was trapped in the wreckage of the Raider. The mast had fallen across his legs, pinning them against the deck. Only the wrist-thick tiller bar had saved his torso from being completely pulped, and now that bar was now bent across him forming part of the wreckage that held him in place. Tatters of the orange and yellow aethersail hung everywhere like bunting, a bizarrely cheery-looking sight against the dark, mangled hull of the Raider.

  He called out again. He was helpless to do anything else. Even the act of breathing made the nausea rise and fall in waves. At least he was still breathing, it was starting to seem like Xagor and Bezieth hadn’t survived. Kharbyr struggled to remember the crash in more detail. He’d been hauling the Raider across to a branching tunnel, desperately trying to check th
eir headlong descent down a horizontal shaft and turn, turn, turn. A chill came over Kharbyr as he remembered the roiling darkness below, a darkness that every instinct told him to avoid. He’d hauled for the side tunnel thinking they weren’t going to make it in time. The prow came up and then he’d seen… he’d seen what?

  Kharbyr stiffened, involuntarily hissing with pain. There had been a whisper of sound out in the darkness, the gentle hiss of something gliding stealthily through the air. He didn’t call out again. There was something sinister and insidious about the sound that did not presage the arrival of help. A sudden clangour nearby made Kharbyr recoil and set off explosions of pain in his legs that brought him close to retching. Through the haze of agony he saw the familiar, barred mask of Xagor thrust over the edge of the Raider.

  Kharbyr croaked wordlessly in relief as the wrack hauled himself over the Raider’s twisted gunwales and squatted down beside him. There were fresh wounds on the wrack that oozed sluggishly, deep abrasions that had scoured through his ribbed, hide-like robes and into his equally gnarled, hide-like skin.

  ‘Bad landing,’ the wrack said, making no move to help.

  ‘Not… my… fault,’ Kharbyr grated through clenched teeth. ‘Something… hit us!’

  Xagor sniffed and cocked his head to one side as if listening. ‘Not by our stalker. It still follows,’ the wrack said cryptically after a moment.

  ‘Just… help… me!’ Kharbyr snarled.

  Xagor shrugged, fishing a small device out of his belt pouches that he pressed against the side of Kharbyr’s neck. The pain and nausea vanished as instantly as if a door had been slammed. A vague sense of discomfort was all Kharbyr could feel from his trapped body and legs.

  ‘Now, that’s better,’ Kharbyr blurted in heartfelt relief. He tried to move again but the discomfort flared alarmingly and he quickly abandoned the effort.

  ‘Nerves blocked, not better,’ Xagor said as he started levering the fallen mast out of the way in a surprising show of strength.

  ‘Where’s Bezieth?’ Kharbyr asked.

  ‘This one does not know,’ Xagor grunted shortly. ‘Gone.’

  The mast shifted with a complaining screech and Kharbyr was free. Xagor reached down and dragged him clear with scant regard for his battered limbs. The wrack set him down and set to work on his injuries, meticulously straightening bones and stitching ripped flesh as he went.

  ‘You – ah – seem to have a lot of experience at that,’ Kharbyr gasped.

  ‘A wrack has no worth if he cannot mend broken clients for his master,’ Xagor muttered. To Kharbyr it sounded as if the wrack was quoting someone else, Bellathonis probably.

  Kharbyr could see over Xagor’s shoulder to where the ribbed wall of the tunnel rose a dozen metres away. A few scattered lamps hung from the wall and shed a dim light over the scene. As Kharbyr watched he saw one the lights momentarily eclipsed by something moving across it, a silver crescent that gleamed briefly and was gone again before Kharbyr could be sure he hadn’t just imagined it. Kharbyr decided that he didn’t need to be sure

  ‘There’s something out there, Xagor,’ Kharbyr hissed. ‘I heard it just before you came. I think I just saw it.’

  ‘Yes. Stalker. Is hunting us,’ the wrack said nervously as he looked around. He gave a slight shiver before returning to his work.

  ‘What is it? You said it didn’t hit us, what did?’

  ‘This one is not sure…’ Xagor said quietly as if the same answer applied to both questions. Kharbyr glared at him silently waiting for a proper answer.

  ‘The… the darkness,’ Xagor said after a moment. ‘The darkness reached for us, Kharbyr could not see because he was looking ahead, but Xagor saw. It came for us from below.’

  Kharbyr’s mouth went dry at the wrack’s words. ‘That was back in the vertical shaft, so what’s hunting us now?’

  ‘This one does not know,’ Xagor repeated.

  Kharbyr thought he glimpsed the silver crescent again, high on the wall. This time he heard the swish of air displaced by a flying body as it vanished from view.

  ‘Why doesn’t it attack? We’re in no position to stop it dancing on our skulls if it wanted.’

  ‘This one–’

  ‘–does not know, yes I get it, thanks for nothing.’

  A fierce tingling started without warning on Kharbyr’s chest. At first he though it must be something Xagor was doing but the wrack was busy working on his legs. The tingling grew into a sensation of heat as if someone was holding a flame close to Kharbyr’s flesh.

  ‘Xagor! I can feel something! The nerve block isn’t – ahhh!’

  Kharbyr’s body contorted, back arching and limbs flailing as the pain blazed up into an inferno. The injuries from the crash had been sickening but this was far, far worse, something beyond physical hurt that clawed at Kharbyr’s soul. Xagor leapt back in alarm as a bright glow began to crawl across Kharbyr’s flesh, radiating outward from a pentagonal spot on his chest to encompass his writhing form. Kharbyr unleashed a long, ululating scream that tailed off into grim silence as his thrashing body finally became still. Xagor edged closer uncertainly.

  ‘Kharbyr is–?’ Xagor said plaintively just as another spasm gripped the prone form, arching it almost double and sending the wrack scurrying back again. Kharbyr’s ragged breaths were just audible, but after a second they changed, becoming a coughing, sobbing sound. Little by little that changed into a burbling chuckle and then what could only be wheezing laughter. Kharbyr sat up suddenly despite his injuries and looked Xagor straight in the eye.

  ‘Excellent. Excellent and distinctly well-timed too,’ Kharbyr said with a distinctly un-Kharbyr-like inflection in his voice. ‘Oh Xagor, do stop acting so shocked.’ Xagor recognised the admonishing tones instantly.

  ‘M-master?’ the wrack asked cautiously.

  ‘Welcome offerings!’ the machine-enhanced voice cracked across the terrace like synthesised thunder, cutting across the barrage of weapons fire with a wall of noise. A corpulent champion of Chaos heavily armoured in bile-green plating that leaked pus from prominent boils brandished a rusting sword at the approaching dark eldar. ‘YOUR SACRIFICE IS EAGERLY AWAITED,’ the voice boomed. ‘THE LORD OF DECAY EMBRACES YOUR FURY AND RETURNS IT A THOUSANDFOLD! THIS IS A GLORIOUS DAY!’

  There was more of the same, much more and Yllithian instructed his armour to block it out. Their enemies comprised two distinct forces – three if you counted the flying daemons, which Yllithian decided could be safely ignored for now. Compared to what they had found at the tower orbiting Gorath the flying daemons were an irrelevance.

  Their ground-bound enemies were split into a shambolic horde of possessed and a lesser number of thick-bodied figures in filth-encrusted heavy armour. The latter moved with a singular lack of grace and a kind of crude stolidity no eldar could ever emulate. Mere dogs of the Ruinous Powers, Yllithian told himself, the sort of crudely augmented warriors that the lesser slave races produced and expended by the million. The lie tasted bitter on his tongue. His studies of the daemonic powers had warned of the Traitor Legions and their corruption by the Dark Gods. The legionaries had become champions of Chaos that enjoyed the fickle favour of their deity, and to find them abroad within Commorragh was a dire portent indeed.

  Unfortunately they were also very heavily armed. Explosive bolts roared across the open terrace and tore bloody holes in the ranks of Yllithian’s disembarking forces. A missile flew up and gutted an incoming Raider in a dirty yellow explosion. Yllithian called in his reavers and hellions to distract the opposing firepower while he led his warriors directly against the onrushing possessed.

  Splinter fire scythed down the shambling, putrescent figures like ripe wheat. The hell-born vitality of the fiends availed them little protection against the kind of poisons the White Flames warriors were using: fleshrot, inkblind, scald-lotus, wryther and a dozen other deadly toxins
burned, blinded and twisted the stolen bodies of the possessed into useless, fleshy prisons. Warriors armed with shredders were moving up to liquidate the surviving possessed even as Yllithian’s incubi bodyguard cut a path through the flopping, flailing mass.

  As they broke through Yllithian saw instantly that his reavers and hellions had failed to break the phalanx of Chaos warriors clustered at the base of the tower. Crumpled bodies, burning jetbikes and broken skyboards scattered across the terrace gave mute testimony to their efforts. The survivors were scattering, jinking and dodging desperately to evade the withering fire coming at them from below.

  Yllithian cursed, realising there was still over a hundred metres to go into the teeth of ruinous firepower before his forces could close. The Chaos warriors had already realised the possessed were falling faster than they had thought possible. The wide maws of their big, ugly guns were swinging around, levelling for a salvo that would tear Yllithian’s lightly armoured foot troops to pieces.

  The howl of engines from above presaged a sudden deluge of sickle-winged shapes diving straight into the Chaos ranks. Hellions, reavers and Venoms swept past at breakneck speed, impaling and decapitating with their bladevanes and hellglaives. For an instant Yllithian thought his own auxiliaries had rallied and returned to the fray before realising his error. The newcomers were from another kabal entirely, their colours familiar to him even in the heat of battle. The Blades of Desire had arrived.

  Frenzied wyches leapt down directly into hand-to-hand combat from the decks of speeding Venoms. Yllithian, never one to miss an opportunity, led his incubi into the heart of the struggling mass while the Chaos warriors were distracted. He ducked a snarling chainsword and cut the arm from its wielder with a quick riposte. Rotting faceplates whirled before him as the Chaos warriors fought back with stubborn tenacity.

  The hulking warriors were horribly strong and seemed virtually immune to pain. Yllithian saw slender eldar snapped like twigs in their gauntleted grasp, whirling chainblades driven with unstoppable force through the writhing bodies of wyches and bloodied, roaring giants that fought on when they had been virtually cut to pieces.