Aez’ashya broke from the wavering ranks as a fast-moving blur that seemed to step under, over and around the hosing streams of explosive bolts as if they were stationary. She sprang up the ramp and vanished into the knot of bestial Chaos warriors at the top, their muzzle flares crisscrossing as they disastrously tried to follow her progress. A rush of fleet-footed wyches overtook Yllithian and plunged in after their mistress, their blades slashing in an intricate ballet of pain.
By the time Yllithian and his warriors arrived at the top of the ramp only twitching corpses lay strewn around in the chamber above with no sign of Aez’ashya and the wyches. The ramp debouched into the centre of a windowless, triangular chamber with more spiralling ramps going upward in each of its corners. Yllithian redirected a few cliques of his followers to go back down and start sweeping the lower floors but his instincts told him the main fighting still lay above. Taking the bulk of his warriors with him he selected the ramp with the most bodies heaped on it and headed up. From above he could soon hear the sounds of combat.
CHAPTER 23
INTO THE DRAGON’S LAIR
Morr waded through rushing melt water that had a rank, sulphurous smell to it as he followed the arched crack into the ice. The walls soon turned to black rock slick with moisture and gravel crunched beneath his armoured boots. As he moved forward the red glow ahead of him grew ever more intense and sullen. The slick, black walls opened out until he was descending a rough slope into a vast cavern where the far walls were shrouded in darkness and the floor seemed a shifting, bloody sea. A rumbling, subsonic hiss overlaid all other sounds in the cavern, the noise of an unthinkably gigantic serpent or a great host of people muttering and whispering. Morr knew it to be one in the same.
As he descended further into the cavern huge pillars of twisted basalt rose up on all sides to lose their lofty crowns in the gloom overhead. The bases of the pillars were clearly visible. Serpentine coils of crimson energy twisted across the floor of the cavern and around the pillars to form a multi-dimensional cat’s cradle of living light. The crimson coils pulsed with vitality: roiling, knotting and shifting as they wound restlessly back and forth.
Morr halted, gripping his klaive in both hands as he readied himself and drew on his last reserves of energy for the battle ahead. He knew that he was confronted not by a physical opponent this time but a metaphysical one. The manifestation of the enraged, dead spirits of Lileathanir lay before him in the cavern, visible now as it coalesced in the broken vessel of the World Shrine. His own perceptions fluttered between interpreting it as the coils of a vast wyrm, a foaming cataract of blood and a blazing river of fire. He was less than a speck beside the all-encompassing power of the world spirit. He was no more capable of harming it than a mosquito is capable of harming an elephant.
The one advantage he held was the composite nature of his foe. The world spirit combined the psychic energy of every living thing that had crossed over into the Lileathanir matrix at the point of its death: Exodites, birds, beasts. The resultant gestalt entity was primal and atavistic, driven by instincts that were by turns nurturing and destructive. Those instincts had pushed it into the dragon aspect of its nature, but there would always be countless spirits pulling it in a myriad of different directions. That was a weakness to be exploited.
He reached up to his trophy rack and lifted from it thes incubus helm he had taken at the shrine of Arhra. That fight seemed so long ago, so important at the time but so trivial now. He gazed into its blank-faced mask for a moment, remembering, before turning it around and slowly lowering the bloodied casque over his own skull. The fit was poor, the internal sensors did not mate properly with his fighting suit, the copper tang of clotted blood assailed his nostrils, but Morr cared not at all. A sense of wholeness and wellbeing flowed into him as he locked the helm in place. He grinned fiercely beneath the mask and raised his voice in challenge, mounting a rocky promontory to whirl his klaive so that it flashed brilliantly in the crimson light.
‘I have returned and I challenge you again! Come! Come and match your fury against mine! Never forgive! Never forget! Arhra remembers and now so will you!’
The reaction was immediate, the gestalt consciousness of the dragon suddenly becoming aware of the miniscule speck in its midst that squeaked with outrageous defiance. A vast, triangular shape reared up from the crimson murk. There was the vaguest suggestion of a head with burning spheres like green lamps where eyes could be. Great exhalations of raw emotion gusted from the impossible maw of the being. Morr felt an expanding bubble of conscious recognition sweep over him, the sharp prickle of poisonous hate, the familiar hot wash of rage.
‘Yes! Me, here I am! I’m the one! I defied you then and I defy you now!’ Morr shouted into the earth-shaking hiss. ‘Now come! Fight me! Learn what Arhra knows!’
Hellfire came raining down and Morr ran for his life, racing downward for the heart of the crimson coils. Beneath the psychic lash of the dragon’s fury the rocky slope around him exploded into an avalanche of molten debris. It was impossible to stay ahead of that tidal wave of destruction, the blast wave of it swept him up in giant hands and threatened to smash him down into oblivion. Morr was hurled headlong into the ghostly coils, his klaive carving a ruddy arc as he unleashed his own fury upon the souls of the restless dead.
Caraeis had stepped from the portal into the frozen World Shrine of Lileathanir with Aiosa at his heels. The four Dire Avengers that made up the rest of the squad followed and immediately fanned out flawlessly into overwatch positions around the rough little cave. Their long-necked star throwers covered individual fire arcs that all intersected on the two figures that stood waiting for them at the entrance.
‘You!’ Caraeis snarled, little troubling to conceal his anger.
‘Yes, me again I’m afraid,’ Motley replied nonchalantly, ‘I thought you’d be here sooner than this, trouble with the runes again?’
Caraeis did not respond to the taunt, though the lenses of the warlock’s helm that glared at the Harlequin were lit with baleful amber fire. Aiosa cut in to ask bluntly:
‘What are you doing here and why did you assist the fugitive in his escape?’
‘Because this is the place that he was meant to come to,’ Motley replied airily, ‘and that is my answer to both of those questions.’
‘Then where is the incubus now?’ Caraeis snapped, rounding on Sardon. ‘And why do you, world-singer, now stand beside this… this meddler!’
Sardon blinked in surprise at the warlock’s venom. ‘The wanderer and his kind have come to Lileathanir since its first settlement,’ she said mildly. ‘The people of the craftworlds are thought of as our guardians, but children of the Laughing God are known as our friends. In our time of need he has come to us and offered help, a potential solution. What do you bring to the World Shrine? Anger? Recrimination? We have more than enough of that already, we need no more brought to us by outsiders.’
‘Solution? What solution?’ Caraeis spluttered, fixing his amber-eyed gaze on Motley again. ‘My runecastings indicated none of this.’
‘The worst kind of solution as far as you’re concerned,’ Motley taunted with a wide smile. ‘One that doesn’t involve you: No rung up the ladder to the seer council. No expanded recruitment from the grateful survivors of Lileathanir. No fame. No glory. No praises sung in the infinity circuit of Biel-Tan for all eternity. Nothing.’
Motley felt he had judged the warlock’s true motivations nicely, probably better than Caraeis had ever admitted them to himself. Caraeis’s shoulders shook with suppressed emotion as he took a step towards Motley. Aiosa put up a hand to stop him and regarded the Harlequin coolly from beneath her impassive mask.
‘You charge that Caraeis has been led by ambition? That… desire… has overcome his wisdom?’ the exarch asked deliberately.
‘It’s not my place to charge anyone with anything,’ Motley smiled. ‘I’m merely putting together e
verything I’ve seen and making an observation. I have to ask as a point of interest – what was the plan when and if you finally got around to bringing Morr back to Lileathanir? You were intending to solve the situation how exactly? Tossing him down a crevasse bound hand and foot perhaps? A living sacrifice to appease the dragon?’
‘This is ridiculous!’ Caraeis shouted. ‘You have no right to interfere! You’ve blackened your hands with the dark kin and now you seek to drag me down into the mire with you. We did not do this!’ Caraeis swept out his arms dramatically to encompass the shrine, and by extension the whole world.
‘No, but you sought to capitalise on it. The dark kin, as you like to call them, were ignorant of the consequences of their actions. If they knew the damage they could cause themselves in the long run they would never have acted in the way they did. Not that ignorance excuses it, of course… it’s just that you have no such excuse.’
Sardon looked at the Harlequin in shock. ‘What do you mean?’ she gasped.
‘That our friend Caraeis and all of his seer kind could have foreseen the violation of the shrine and the outcome. They could have acted to prevent it and yet they did not.’
‘Every strand of fate cannot be followed,’ Caraeis replied with a quiver in his voice. ‘Only certain junctions, extraordinary nexii can be affected with the correct application of–’
‘Oh please! Stop!’ Motley laughed mockingly. ‘The strands of fate bend towards a great cataclysm that affects the webway itself and you claim that it was too obscure to foresee, too complex to affect? If that’s true you have little value in your current calling and should give serious consideration to finding another path – perhaps pottery, or food preparation.’
‘Enough!’ Caraeis snarled. ‘Where is the incubus? Speak now or–’
Caraeis’s impending threat was cut short by a thunderous roar from the depths of the shrine. The rock walls shook and ice fell in splintering sheets as the roaring went on and on; an inchoate, hissing bellow of rage that crashed thought the shrine and made the stones quiver like a living thing. Motley grinned maniacally and shouted above the tumult.
‘There! That’ll be him, in the very heart of the shrine!’ the Harlequin yelled wildly. ‘And I do believe he’s ready to receive you now!’
Without a word Caraeis plunged into the World Shrine with his witchblade in hand. After a split second of hesitation the Aspect Warriors followed, Aiosa giving Motley a long, hard look as she ran past him. Sardon wrung her hands in dismay.
‘You’re letting them go? They’ll be killed!’
‘No. Stop. Don’t go in there. You’ll all be killed,’ Motley murmured sardonically as the last of the Aspect Warriors vanished into the quaking shrine. The Harlequin’s lips were drawn into an unhappy frown, the very picture of sadness and dejection, but behind the mask his eyes glittered with dark, unfathomable amusement.
Xagor and Bellathonis saw the murder engine approaching, its wasp-like form gleaming in the semi-darkness of the travel tube as it swept down on them from above. The engine was unhurried, confident that it had its prey cornered, and descended slowly enough to allow them plenty of time to realise the hopelessness of their situation. Being devotees of the arts of flesh Xagor and Bellathonis recognised its type immediately: a Cronos parasite engine, a time-thief. Bellathonis recognised more than that, a signature workmanship that he had also seen back at his hidden lab on the miniature Talos engine that attacked him there. He found himself having to grant that a twinned pair of such dwarfs had a certain artistic integrity that he had felt lacking in the singular entity. It still smacked a little of toy-making as far as Bellathonis was concerned.
Xagor was caught still in the act of diving across Bellathonis in a vain attempt to shield his master when the negative feedback loop was established. Dark energies bathed them both, utterly indifferent to the wrack’s desperate act of self-sacrifice. Kharbyr – now Bellathonis’s – flesh was sinking onto his bones, his face becoming a skull wrapped in papyrus with his dark, shrunken eyes blazing as his vitality was drained away. The haemonculus had never imagined that it would end like this. The very least of his kind were unnaturally long-lived – nigh immortal – and his newly stolen body had been young and fit. Even so the relentless vortex produced by the spirit syphon was stripping away centuries of Bellathonis’s lifespan in seconds. Seconds more and he would be nothing but dust and mouldering bones.
The feedback loop ceased abruptly, leaving Bellathonis and Xagor feebly groaning in an advanced state of decrepitude. Bellathonis blinked rheumy eyes and tried to focus on the hovering Cronos engine to see why it had stopped. Perhaps it was going to take its time after all, he thought, indulge in a little torture before it got on with the murder part. Part of him approved.
Curiously the wasp-like engine seemed to have sprouted a distinctly humanoid-looking pair of legs beneath it. Bellathonis realised belatedly that there was a torso too, connected to a pair of arms that had impaled the underside of the Cronos engine with a large, baroque-looking sword. He vaguely recognised the distinctively scarred arms somehow, a petty archon he’d dealt with in Metzuh? Bellathonis couldn’t remember anymore, everything seemed dim and half-forgotten. He looked again, unable to shake the feeling that something important was happening.
The murder machine was hanging at an angle with its claws waving frantically, its array of sensor probes and vanes fluttering wildly like a trapped bird. Sparks were pouring out of it where the sword had plunged into its vitals. It seemed unable to move, only bobbing in the air as the sword was ripped free in a disembowelling deluge of components. The gleaming machine sank slowly as if the sword had been its only means of support, guttering and sparking as it rolled over onto its side, lifeless. It was then that a dark miracle occurred, or so it seemed to Bellathonis.
Without Cho’s consciousness to control them her capacitor-valves tripped open and all the vitality she had stolen poured out through her resonator vanes at once. The rich, dark prize of spirit-essence she had taken, all the nourishment that should have been presented triumphantly to her creator was instead released back to her prey and her killer. It was macabre feast for Bellathonis, Xagor and Bezieth, a bathing of stolen life-energy that made them young and vital again in accordance with the dark and terrible rites of the eternal city.
In moments flesh filled out and became firm once more, wrinkled skin smoothed and showed the first blush of youth, limbs regained their strength and vigour with the unwitting gift the pain-engine had supplied. It was a long time before any of them spoke.
‘Bezieth!’ Bellathonis exclaimed finally, still basking royally in the dying radiance. ‘I remember now, I helped you against the Scarlet Edge not so very long ago!’
Bezieth squinted at him uncertainly. ‘It is master Bellathonis! Is mi–’ Xagor announced proudly before Bezieth raised a hand to cut him off.
‘What do you mean? This is Kharbyr, I remember Bellathonis and this isn’t him.’
‘All possible through the magic of the art, my dear archon,’ Bellathonis said with insufferable smugness. ‘Forgive me if I don’t explain the whole thing over again. We must all keep our little trade secrets, after all. Most fundamentally I must thank you for your timely intervention against the Cronos parasite, I am in your debt and I do not take that lightly. I must ask – how did you manage to surprise it?’
‘You certainly sound like Bellathonis, you use too many words like he does.’ Bezieth said and shrugged indifferently. Stranger things had happened in Commorragh and especially ones involving haemonculi. ‘Your wrack there came up with the idea. We knew that we were being followed by something too wary to attack all three of us together. After the crash we decided to try and use the opportunity to trap it. Xagor gave me something to put me in a kind of trance so that I’d appear dead while he was tending Kharbyr. It took some trust on my part, but Xagor was right – the thing was so busy going after him and you that it mis
sed me altogether. I walked right up behind it and gutted it.’
‘Bravo Xagor, very well done,’ Bellathonis smiled indulgently. ‘And bravo Bezieth, that was no mean feat to pull off.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Bezieth said impatiently, ‘but it doesn’t get us anywhere. I’m expecting the motherlode of ur-ghuls to come sniffing around this crash at any moment, and we’re still barely halfway to Sec Magera – unfortunately your predecessor in that body destroyed our only transport and I’m still wondering whether I should take that out on your hide.’
‘Hmm, three things occur to me,’ Bellathonis said, apparently disconcerted not at all by Bezieth’s threat. ‘First: ur-ghuls? That doesn’t bode well for the state of the portal to Shaa-dom. Second: That going to Sec Magera is a terrible idea, I can take you somewhere much safer and much closer. Third: That Kharbyr probably didn’t crash without some help – he is, or rather was, too good a pilot for that.’
Bezieth frowned. ‘In that case what happened?’
‘Kharbyr-before-Bellathonis said the craft was struck,’ Xagor offered. ‘This one saw something come up from below. Darkness reaching.’
‘Ah. Well then it’s probably easier to show you than explain,’ Bellathonis said, ‘if we can go to the place where it happened.’
Bezieth jammed a thumb towards where the tunnel had branched. ‘Back that way, where the ur-ghuls are at.’
‘Splendid,’ Bellathonis said imperturbably. He attempted to stand but found his damaged limbs still too unserviceable to support him. At his call Xagor obediently scurried forward to lift his master onto his back, useless legs dangling and arms clutched around the wrack’s neck.
‘Onward!’ Bellathonis called cheerily, and with Bezieth leading they began to pick their way along the travel tube back to the fork.
Archon Yllithian and his White Flames warriors stalked warily up the ramps to the higher levels of the tower. The wraithbone walls showed spider web traceries of cracks that wept pus and foul-smelling ooze. The tower itself shook in the grip of the Ilmaea Gorath, the captive sun now so close to freedom. They eventually emerged into another vaulted chamber where open arches on all sides led out onto slender bridges. A profusion of inscribed plinths and jewel-encrusted pillars within the chamber indicated that it had been some form of control room, with the emphasis on had been before Aez’ashya and her wyches had burst onto the scene. Now bolter rounds criss-crossed the space like tiny meteors blasting craters in flesh, metal and stone with equal abandon. Half-seen figures dashed through the smoke and flames, struggling and hewing at each other maniacally.
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