Yllithian managed to spot the Razorwings again as they looped up and over to begin another strafing pass. His force had been almost halved by the first attack and the dispersed survivors were still trying to get back into a defensive formation. Thick, shaky lines of static were crawling across the ordinarily invisible sphere of energy that protected his personal craft. Yllithian reckoned it would not withstand another hit. Should two of the Razorwings decide to target his barque it would all be over. He settled back into his throne to await whatever fate had in store for him, staring defiantly at the fast-approaching jetfighters.
A blaze of energy from the fortress swept abruptly across the sky. Two of the attacking Razorwings blossomed into rapidly expanding balls of fire and debris. The remaining three veered sharply aside as dark spirals rose above the fortress – its garrison of scourges taking flight to confront the airborne intruders. Individually the winged warriors could pose little danger to the speeding jetfighters, but they had the true agility of flying creatures and outnumbered the Razorwings by more than twenty to one. Cheated of their prey for a second time the Razorwings turned tail and vanished as quickly as they had come.
Yllithian permitted himself a small, triumphant smile as his barque slid into a docking port low down on the flank of the fortress along with the remnants of his battered escort. Inside there were White Flames warriors clustered along the quaysides suspiciously covering the new arrivals with splinter rifles and disintegrators. Or rather they were suspicious only until they caught sight of Yllithian standing in his barque. To his astonishment the archon of the White Flames found himself greeted by salutes and cheers from his troops, in a tide of excitement and noise that seemed to rise until it echoed through the entire mighty fortress.
They were relieved, Yllithian realised, relieved that he was alive, so they could continue to follow him through the terrible crisis of the Dysjunction rather than think for themselves. Yllithian had always worked hard to be feared rather than loved by his followers and yet it seemed that sufficient terror from outsiders was enough to make them love him anyway. He smiled graciously and raised a hand to acknowledge the unexpected approbation.
Looking at the thronging warriors Yllithian also realised that he had been wrong. He had sufficient leadership and strength to unify the lesser kabals against Vect. He hadn’t considered the true depths of fear and desperation that the Dysjunction had brought to Commorragh. All he had to do was exploit it as thoroughly as he would exploit any other resource. He clenched his raised hand into a fist and the cheers of his followers roared louder still.
Chapter 3
INTO THE SHADOW-REALM
Commorragh is not a single city any more than it is a single place. Over the course of its existence many times many pockets of reality have been subsumed into the fabric of the eternal city. These sub-realms – Shaa-Dom, Iron Thorn, the Sable Marches, Malixian’s Aviaries and a thousand more – exist just around a multi-dimensional corner from the twisted heart of Commorragh. In metaphysical terms the sub-realms of Commorragh exist behind a door, through an arch, beyond a looking glass or – in the case of Aelindrach – within the darkest shadows.
At this moment, deep within the shadow-realm of Aelindrach a darkling creature squats and gazes at the unexpected culmination of its efforts. This being might once have been of the eldar race but if it were then time and strange tides have changed it greatly. Its skin is as black as pitch, its eyes are merely empty sockets of deeper shadow, its hair is as pallid as cobwebs, an additional pair of long, sinewy arms sprout from its shoulders and cradle a straight, sharp sword of dark metal. This is Kheradruakh, ‘he who hunts heads’, who is also called the Decapitator.
Even among the mandrakes the Decapitator is a dark legend and a patron saint of stealthy murder. Kheradruakh has collected heads for time immemorial, serving no master but his own strange agenda. He kills lowborn and highborn without prejudice. He even hunts among the slave races, searching for suitable additions to his collection. Not one in a thousand of his victims does Kheradruakh deem perfect enough to be emplaced in his inner sanctum. This vast, hemispherical chamber is lined with the flensed skulls of his victims, each one carefully placed so that their empty sockets are focused at a point in space before Kheradruakh’s dais.
The Decapitator has laboured remorselessly down long millennia to complete this macabre collection. Each chosen skull holds an echo of its former occupant, a soul fragment caught and pinned in place by Kheradruakh for his own ends in a grand design only the Decapitator understands. Of the bare handful that know of Kheradruakh’s strange, eldritch obsession, some believe that the skulls’ collective gaze is aligned on a single spot to slowly wear a hole in reality. They say that with each new addition the knots of creation loosen a little more at the point where their empty gazes rest.
Now Kheradruakh gazes with his own sightless eyes at the changes wrought in the fabric of reality with what, in his alien suite of emotions, might be termed as incredulity and shock. The eye is opening. It has come too soon, the collection is incomplete and yet the conduit has been formed…
Xagor tumbled helplessly through gossamer sheets of blackness with bright spots dancing before his eyes. The master still clung to Xagor’s back as they fell together, the master’s new, sinewy arms twisted so tightly around Xagor’s neck they were almost choking him. Xagor held on to the flapping, useless legs the master had recently inherited as tightly as he dared to, but they were inexorably slipping away from him. They were dropping quickly, more quickly than Xagor had thought they would fall and yet still less quickly than an outright plummet should have been. It was also getting colder.
‘Not long now, Xagor,’ the master’s new-old voice whispered hoarsely in his ear. ‘We’re approaching the umbral nadir.’
For all the master’s calming words Xagor was close to panic. He did cry out in fear when the arms around his neck abruptly loosened and the master’s legs slipped away from his grasp. More blackness clutched at his vision, denser now as though he fell through layers of rustling silk. Xagor wailed in terror when he felt his progress begin to slow as he crashed through the insubstantial barriers. His mind filled with the image of a gigantic, shadowy web with himself plunging ever deeper into its snares. At the centre, his terrified subconscious gibbered, was the dark and monstrous spider that had spun all this. Xagor would be cocooned in shadows to be drained until he was a frozen husk.
Xagor: a so-called wrack, a faithful servant to his master, the haemonculus Bellathonis, apprentice in the arts of sculpting flesh, an accomplished torturer and murderer in his own right. He still screamed like one of his own victims as he finally struck a soft, yielding surface and fell no more. The master’s laughter cut through Xagor’s unreasoning panic like an icy blade. It lacked something of the wicked, inhuman liquidity of the master’s old laughter, but it had a younger, wilder edge that chilled the soul just as effectively.
‘Open your eyes and look about you, Xagor!’ the master commanded. ‘We have arrived.’
Cautiously Xagor opened one eye and then the other, then shut and opened them again to make sure of what he was seeing. The darkness around them was so complete that it was impossible to tell if his eyes were open or shut. He could feel the moisture of his breath forming inside his mask in the frigid air, he could hear his wheezing lungs, but he could see absolutely nothing at all.
‘Aelindrach… is here?’ Xagor weakly asked of the blackness.
‘More precisely, we have passed into Aelindrach,’ Bellathonis said from somewhere ahead (or above? Xagor could not tell), ‘although you are also quite correct in saying that Aelindrach is here – it didn’t used to be, so in a sense it has come to us as much as we to it. A fascinating development, although not one without precedent.’
The master’s voice was strange-sounding, echoing and yet muted at the same time. Xagor could no longer tell how far away the master was, or in which direction. Panic stir
red in him again.
‘Xagor cannot find the master,’ Xagor wailed a little petulantly.
‘Try focusing on the sound of my voice and relying less on your eyes,’ the master said dismissively. ‘Your senses are still trying to adjust to the shadow-realm. Physical laws are different here and it takes a certain… realignment of perception to get used to it.’
Although the disembodied voice remained muted Xagor found that the echoing effect was fading as the master spoke. This in turn made it easier for Xagor to locate the source of his master’s voice. Turning his head from side to side he caught a glimmer of greyness in the dark and tried to concentrate on it.
‘Here sight, sound and indeed all of the other senses become co-mingled,’ the master’s voice continued, ‘perhaps in the same way that light becomes one with its absence in this environment. Substance is a more tenuous proposition here, for bereft of our usual visual and tactile certainties it becomes difficult to decide what is and is not real in an environment where either is very much possible. Will is a more important attribute than perceptions of physical solidity under such circumstances: I live, I breathe, I am real, I exist here because it is my desire to do so. By my self-belief I am not absorbed into the shadow even as I become one with it in order to exist in this realm. Do you understand, Xagor? It may be the death of you if you don’t.’
The greyness had taken on a form to Xagor’s senses. It was little more than a rough sketching of blurred lines and indistinct, smudged highlights but his warped senses could tell that the master was speaking to him from a short distance away. Furthermore he perceived that the master had a form that was upright, somehow standing on legs that had been crippled in a Raider crash before they had entered the shadow-realm.
‘Xagor sees you now, master – no, Xagor senses you now. How does the master stand on shattered limbs?’
‘Because my substance is subject to my will and it is my will that I am able to provide my own locomotion in this place.’
Xagor looked down at himself and realised he was standing too, even though he had no recollection of getting up. What had seemed impenetrable blackness around him a moment ago had texture now, a thousand subtly different variations of shadow. There was the soft brush of sable and moleskin, the gritty density of basalt, the close-grained hardness of teak, the clinging liquidity of oil. With a start Xagor realised that they were in an open area, the vaguest hint of curved walls suggesting itself at the edge of his perception.
‘Master said that Aelindrach had come to us and we to it. This one would ask, in that case, where are we now?’
‘The shadow-realm has expanded its boundaries to encompass a greater part of Commorragh than is normal for it to interact with,’ Bellathonis replied. ‘I can only assume that the Dysjunction has… unshackled it somehow. This area was part of the travel tubes we were moving through previously, but this section has been consumed by Aelindrach.’
‘This one is confused,’ Xagor said sadly. ‘Thought Aelindrach was a place and not a monster gobbling up Commorragh.’
The grey wisp that was Bellathonis seemed to be shrinking and Xagor realised that it was moving further away from him. He hurried after it before it could fade entirely into the all-encompassing shadows. Bellathonis’s voice continued to drift back to him. ‘In essence Aelindrach is a sub-realm, just like any other,’ the master lectured distantly, ‘and like any other sub-realm it exhibits its own peculiar traits. In the case of Aelindrach, however, the differences are more grossly obvious. For one thing the boundary between Aelindrach and Commorragh is more… permeable than that of most other sub-realms, as we’ve already seen. I’ve heard it said that all the gateways to Aelindrach have collapsed and that is why its borders are so ill-defined. I confess that I’m not entirely convinced by that argument.’
Bellathonis had reached what Xagor could perceive as a curved, charcoal-black expanse of wall. At this distance (angle? It was all so confusing) he could tell there were even darker blots that showed openings in the wall. The blurred shape of the haemonculus merged smoothly into one of the openings, the grey emanation of its presence subtly altering the quality of it as Bellathonis moved inwards. Xagor drifted obediently behind him and noted the slightly denser grain of the shadowy medium they now traversed. For all the apparent solidity of the landscape around him Xagor felt as if he could simply push through it if he desired.
‘This one wonders…’ Xagor began before stopping as he realised the disquieting way that the sound of his voice brought their surroundings into sharper focus. He began again, whispering more quietly this time. ‘What Aelindrach turns to shadow – can it be returned?’
Bellathonis’s laughter was a tiny, tinkling storm that swiftly dissipated. ‘You mean can we return, don’t you, Xagor? The simple answer is yes. The insubstantiality of shadow intersects both our realm and this one under normal conditions – after all, it only takes the application of light to show that shadow is all around us. Also consider the mandrakes – they are creatures of Aelindrach that dwell here yet can travel to Commorragh or indeed elsewhere in the universe if they have a mind to go. We may yet become fully consumed by Aelindrach, but for now we are free to come and go as we please.’
In the rush of strangeness surrounding their arrival Xagor had forgotten about the mandrakes. The shadow-skinned slayers were rightly feared by Commorrites and the subject of endless blood-freezing tales about their stealthy murders and inscrutable ways. They were entities that were generally shunned, yet they could be bargained with by those brave or foolish enough to risk their soul in doing so. Xagor recalled his last encounter with mandrakes with a chilling sensation. He had been captured by them while on an important mission for the master. He had only survived the experience with his skin intact because–
‘The master is friends with mandrakes!’ Xagor blurted suddenly. The statement expanded like a bubble, coating the thick grain of the tunnel walls momentarily before fading away. Bellathonis stopped and turned to face him so that Xagor was able to perceive his master’s face clearly in the gloom.
‘Only some mandrakes,’ Bellathonis hissed, ‘or to be specific only one – and I’d very much hesitate to call our mutually beneficial arrangement a friendship. With the city in tumult and enemies hard on my heels I’ve come here with the slender hope that the arrangement we have can be extended to my protection.’
The haemonculus fell silent and turned his face away before beginning to move again. ‘You need to calm yourself, Xagor,’ the master murmured back over an insubstantial-looking shoulder, ‘or your continuing presence may become an impediment.’
Bellathonis’s implied threat seemed to hang in the air between them for a long time. Xagor gave himself over to resolute silence thereafter. They travelled for what felt like an eternity through the freezing darkness in complete silence. Xagor was distressed to find that moving through the shadow-realm still required effort, since it took an application of willpower to force himself through the darkness. He had also started to become aware of the effort that it took him simply to prevent himself falling. Xagor had a suspicion that the simple act of falling might have dire consequences in Aelindrach. From what the master had said it would quite possibly mean losing all sense of direction in the interwoven mesh of shadows – sinking into a sea of darkness with no hope of escape.
Bellathonis drifted tirelessly ahead while Xagor struggled to keep up. Fear of being left behind, lost and alone in the dark, kept the wrack moving. Despite his almost animalistic loyalty to his master, Xagor held no illusions about the renegade haemonculus. Bellathonis would abandon Xagor without a second thought if he lagged too far behind.
They emerged from narrow spaces into what seemed to be a more open region. Icy breezes that had previously seemed to toy with Xagor became savage creatures that were forever howling and tearing at his exposed flesh with frigid claws. Dark gulfs appeared to either side of their path, standing cyclones of
shadow that plunged to impossible depths. Ebon strands of solidity formed criss-crossed patterns around them like ramshackle scaffolds or the winter-stripped branches of dead trees.
Xagor wondered if they were still within Commorragh at all or whether they had crossed the hazy boundaries into Aelindrach proper. The paths they were treading reminded him horribly of the riven sections of webway he had traversed to escape the maiden world of Lileathanir, and of the daemon-haunted ziggurats of accursed Shaa-Dom. The unfettered power of the warp was closer here than it was within carefully warded Commorragh, an energising tingle that excited and repelled at the same time. The fateful, siren call of She Who Thirsts was present too, a deadly undertow that could draw a soul into the all-consuming depths if it weakened and heeded it for even a moment.
There were the first signs of life – of a kind – that Xagor had seen since entering Aelindrach; furtive scurrying, half-perceived movement flickering between deeper tracts of shadow. Xagor’s nape-hairs rose when he realised that ghostly markings were appearing on what he thought of as the ground beneath his feet and the walls around him. As Xagor turned his head to look at the markings they seemed to vanish before reappearing as he turned away. He decided to risk pausing for a moment to study one set of the marks more closely. They were illegible, a collection of cryptic-looking scratches similar to runes of some kind. Perceived at precisely the right angle the scratches glowed with pallid witchfire that made them highly noticeable in the shadow-stuff of Aelindrach. Xagor looked up to tell Bellathonis but found that the haemonculus was already hovering close by, examining the sigils for himself.
Path of the Dark Eldar Page 71
