Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  The long chains of Black Heart Raiders began to split up as they plunged down into the darkened streets, fanning out as they went. The destruction was more obvious here than it had been up in Sorrow Fell. Tumbled slabs choked the canyon-like gaps between the flanks of the spires. Streets and walkways had collapsed onto one another to produce a complex, multi-levelled maze. Jumbled spars, statues and metalwork shaken loose from the higher levels completed the tangle. Vaellienth and his followers eventually had to disembark from their Raider to make their way deeper into the mess on foot.

  Thousands of metres above, most of the Black Heart kabal forces would be closing in around the White Flames fortress. Rumour had it that Archon Yllithian had turned traitor and would defy their approach. Vaellienth was not sad to be assigned to probing the depths instead. Any fighting at the White Flames fortress would be dominated by vast, unleashed energies and titanic machineries of destruction. The opportunities for personal skill and daring to make a difference in such an environment would be virtually non-existent, while the chances of sudden annihilation stood immeasurably high. Vaellienth felt better to be below on a battlefield where a quick blade and a steady aim could still win the day.

  They found their way down into a more-or-less intact boulevard that had been unevenly roofed by fallen debris but not entirely blocked. Broken pipes burbled foul effluent into black, reflecting puddles in places where the tiled pavement had cracked. A few dim lights showed in places but the darkness beyond their reach was absolute. As Vaellienth and his warriors advanced along it he suddenly spotted a huge, bestial shape standing motionless in the shadows. He raised his rifle instinctively but in the same instant some sixth sense told him that what he was looking at was not alive.

  Vaellienth advanced cautiously and realised that the shape was actually a statue of some sort that had been meticulously woven out of sections of pipe and lengths of wire. It was a depiction of a giant, antelope-like creature with spiral horns that had been partially crushed by fallen masonry so that it now looked as if it were supporting part of the sloping ceiling. A little further on there was another statue of a crouching predator about to spring. Nearby a tangle of limbs and part of a horned head protruded from beneath a pile of rubble marking where a prey-animal had stood. Now he knew what to look for Vaellienth realised they stood within a frozen zoo of off-world beasts. The whole boulevard must have been festooned with them before the Dysjunction.

  He wondered briefly if the creations were the work of pureblood Commorrites or slaves. He decided the animal motif spoke of slaves trying to recreate something vaguely familiar from their home world in the harsh, alien environment of Commorragh. The existence of the works indicated that some petty archon in this area had indulged in letting his or her slaves be creative for a time. It had probably been a piece of studied cruelty in loosening their bondage just a little before reapplying it again with double force. Possibly the unknown archon had simply liked the things – there was a kind of crude exuberance about them that was appealing.

  Vaellienth snapped alert as he heard the sound of running feet in the distance. He gestured sharply and his clique went into cover on both sides of the boulevard with their weapons at the ready. Vaellienth remained standing in plain sight as he listened to the running feet getting closer. He heard the footsteps splashing through a pool, stumbling on the other side and then the distinctive whip-crack sounds of splinter pistol-fire. Three wyches suddenly sprinted into view with blades and pistols in hand. They were glancing fearfully back over their shoulders in the direction they had come from. The leading wych suddenly saw Vaellienth and started to shout.

  ‘Don’t!’ was all she managed to yell before Vaellienth shot her in the mouth, the hypervelocity splinter round partly decapitating her as it opened a grotesque second mouth in the nape of her neck. The rest of his clique opened fire a split second later and cut the other two wyches down in their tracks. They had been sprinting so hard that their lifeless bodies slid along the tiled pavement for a few paces even after the splinter rounds knocked them off their feet.

  ‘Huh,’ Vaellienth opined vacantly as he allowed the muzzle of his rifle to drop. He had expected the wyches to come straight at him with their knives out for his blood. Instead they had seemed almost relieved to see someone else in the Stygian darkness of the boulevard. It was bizarre behaviour even for wyches. He swung his rifle up onto his shoulder for a moment as he looked over at the fallen bodies again. Something looked wrong with them but it was too dark to see exactly what.

  He was walking closer for a better look when a new sound caught his attention. It was a sort of susurration, a long, drawn-in sound like an intake of breath, which emanated from further along the boulevard. The sound was soft but it seemed loud as if it came from many places at once. Vaellienth’s rifle was in his hands and aimed along the boulevard in a flash. Behind him he heard the muted rattle as his clique also pointed their weapons into the pitch-darkness. From ahead of them there came a waft of a stench so foul it made Vaellienth’s eyes water.

  He realised with the slightest qualm of panic that despite his preternaturally excellent night vision it seemed to be getting darker even while he was standing there. Details he could make out before – chunks of rubble, wire statues, dark puddles – were becoming blurred and indistinct as though a mist were rising even though there was no mist. The shadows seemed to ripple as they deepened before his eyes. The sound came again, the shuddering hiss of air being drawn into hundreds of quivering scent-pits.

  There was a rapid scrabbling rattle of claws on stone as the darkness came alive with the needle-fanged, whip-thin forms of hundreds of ur-ghuls rushing towards him. Vaellienth yelled and reflexively shot down the first in his sights, but there were a dozen more behind it. Sybarite Vaellienth and his clique of Black Heart kabalites were still shooting wildly into the dark tide of troglodytic monsters as it rolled over them in an unstoppable wave.

  Chapter 11

  THE BLACK DESCENT

  Kharbyr was gradually getting used to the body that he had inherited from Bellathonis. He still didn’t like it much. The sense of it being a gangling mismatch of pieces cobbled together like a puppet master’s marionette never seemed to go away, but gradually he was getting used to it. Some of the strangeness was definitely useful in its own, twisted way. He never seemed to get tired or hungry, for example, and pain of any sort seemed to be only an interesting and not at all disagreeable sensation. Try as he might, however, Kharbyr couldn’t force himself to get used to having subsidiary eyes in his shoulder blades however useful they might turn out to be in the long run.

  They were descending again. Kharbyr had been launched up to the top of the White Flames fortress for his brief talk with Yllithian like a cork popping out of a bottle. Now he was being hustled back to the base of the fortress to re-enter the foundation layer he’d emerged from in accordance with Angevere’s directions only an hour before. Four White Flames warriors arranged in a tight diamond around Kharbyr steered him almost, but not quite, by the elbows between successive anti-gravity drop tubes and flight after flight of seemingly endless, winding steps.

  The steps gradually changed from being white marble, sweeping and magnificent near the top of the fortress, to being mean, narrow and steep towards the bottom. The warriors allowed Kharbyr no time for gawking along the way but he could see clearly that the fortress was being locked down even more thoroughly than it had been before. Squads of armoured warriors were rushing everywhere, and there was a general clangour of shutters being sealed and gateways being closed.

  Yllithian’s people really were getting ready to fight Asdrubael Vect. Kharbyr had grown up in a part of the city where that sort of thinking was the punch line to innumerable jokes. Nobody went up against the tyrant and lived – those were the legends you heard in Low Commorragh. Up here closer to the top of the food chain in Sorrow Fell things were obviously seen a little differently.

  There
was a sense of… excitement in the air as if the warriors were engaging in the fulfilment of a day that they had long looked forward to. Say what you would about Yllithian, the support of his own kabal seemed to be as solid as a rock. It made Kharbyr wonder a little about Yllithian and his apparently remorseless ambition. Perhaps the archon of the White Flames was really a product of his environment; maybe that was what made him so mad and power-grasping that he would try to match wits with the supreme overlord.

  Nyos Yllithian climbed to the top of his house over the bodies of his murdered siblings. Nothing was forced on him – he was the one that undertook to do anything and everything in the pursuit of power.+ Angevere’s dry whisper was in his mind again, temperamental and pedantic-sounding. She still hadn’t forgiven him for breaking with her ridiculous script and inadvertently inviting Yllithian along with them to the labyrinth of the Black Descent. Now instead of being able to dictate events they were being swept along by them – as personified by the four White Flames warriors marching him so resolutely down into the bowels of the fortress.

  Do you even know anything about the Black Descent? Don’t worry, I can see from your empty memories that you don’t. Of course you scarcely know anything about haemonculi or their covens at all, do you child? I forget, sometimes, how young and impoverished you truly are.+

  Kharbyr sighed internally. He’d already found to his cost that he couldn’t seem to block Angevere out or even reply to her directly through his thoughts. Speaking aloud worked but he couldn’t do that while Yllithian’s warriors were watching him. He was being incessantly nagged by an invisible ghost that took pleasure in picking fault with everything he did. The agony was that he daren’t simply ditch her and be done with it. Angevere represented the one slender hope he had of regaining his old body and avenging himself on Bellathonis, however tenuous that hope might be. The idea that he might find himself stuck inside Bellathonis’s mismatched, cast-off skin for the rest of his existence was simply unthinkable. Kharbyr was finding that his revenge fantasies were starting to widen to include Yllithian and Angevere, too. He tried his best to keep that particular thought hidden from the witch.

  They had reached the bottom of the steps and debouched into an area of crooked corridors and dank, moisture-streaked walls. Angevere’s whispers continued while they marched through the corridors and she forced knowledge into his unwilling head.

  The haemonculi were in Commorragh even before the Fall. You might say that the city gave birth to them and that in their own way the haemonculi contributed to the destruction of the eldar race, too, but there are altogether too many culprits for that crime. Just prior to the Fall the eldar had become a divided people. They were divided because the realisation had come upon them that their power was effectively limitless. Their culture and technology had reached such a pitch that they were like unto gods. They could create or destroy simply through the application of their will. The realisation of that power brought about a great schism because some embraced it whilst others were repelled by it.+

  The warriors were leading Kharbyr down a ladder into a cistern that had been recently drained. Green slime clung to the walls and floor of the otherwise unadorned and empty cubic space. At the bottom of the ladder the four of them stopped for a moment and just stood there, waiting, with Kharbyr effectively imprisoned in between them. Kharbyr had an unpleasantly queasy premonition that they had brought him all the way down there just to execute him somewhere quiet and out of the way.

  There was a cracking sound and a circular section of the floor began to drop away in neatly divided segments to create a spiral stair. Wan yellow light shone up out of the hole along with the murmur of voices swiftly stilled. Kharbyr and his guards descended into a roughly cut chamber filled with dozens more warriors all wearing the sigil of the Black Heart. Kharbyr was chilled to the core by the sight – members of Vect’s own kabal were here in the very heart of the fortress! Then he smiled at his own foolishness. It was a trick all right, just not the kind of trick he’d thought of at first.

  Yes, they’re Yllithian’s followers. They’re wearing Vect’s sigil in the hope that they can bluff their way past the Black Heart’s roving patrols. Pay no attention to them and listen to me. What I have to tell you is important and it will affect your chances of survival when you meet the Black Descent.+

  A circular, hatch-like door occupied most of one of the chamber’s walls, while narrow passageways entered via the other three. The stir caused by Kharbyr’s entry soon settled down and the spiral stair retracted silently upwards to lie flush with the ceiling. The warriors in the chamber were fully armed and armoured. Kharbyr noticed a preponderance of heavier portable weapons than normal among them; snub-nosed monofilament shredders and darklight blasters seemed a particular favourite.

  A large part of the schism from before the Fall was centred around the concept of Form. The conservatives saw their form as being something inviolable, the pinnacle achievement of evolutionary forces reaching back to the birth of the universe itself. The radicals believed that the form a soul took was not predetermined but a matter of cosmic accident. They saw no harm in changing their form as they willed once they had access to the technology for doing so. The most extreme transmigrated themselves into animals, ships, structures or even entire sub-realms.+

  The warriors were awaiting the call to action and were evidently anxious to be about their business. However, first and foremost they were disciplined warriors and in Kharbyr’s experience that meant they were used to having to wait. He stood to one side while they busied themselves with endlessly checking and rechecking their wargear. Meanwhile Angevere’s scratchy voice wittered on inside Kharbyr’s skull without pause.

  Far more people took to physical modification of a more limited sort. Improved genes, faster reflexes, enhanced senses, regenerative cells, all that kind of thing – on and on ‘improving’ the evolutionary process. This is where what we now call haemonculi come in to play. They started as a sort of loose society of surgeons and scientists who arose to pioneer the most extreme kind of work. For a variety of reasons – most of them ethical and legal – many of them chose to make their homes in the port-city of Commorragh and other sub-realms in the webway.+

  Just a few days in the past Kharbyr would not have cared less about some dusty old argument about the residence of souls. Such things had no relevance for him then, but now the subject had a deeply personal aspect. He perked up a little as Angevere seemed to be winding her way closer to some sort of point.

  Those who would become the first haemonculi performed some truly radical experiments of their own over time. They created artificial races and adapted existing ones to their purposes. The most stable proved to be the scourges, a transformation that could be undertaken by anyone with the urge to soar on their own wings. It’s entirely possible that some even less savoury creations were brought into being at the same time – like the mandrakes, for example, and a variety of deranged creatures that are now purely the preserve of the beastmasters.+

  Body-sculpting, alteration, eugenics – these proto-haemonculi raced to outdo one another in their pursuit of entirely amoral science even as the rest of the eldar race slid into anarchy. Ah, Yllithian is arriving, we must continue your education a little later.+

  At that moment the hatch-like door began rolling to one side and the warriors turned to face it as one body. Through it Archon Yllithian entered the chamber surrounded by his incubi bodyguards. He was resplendent in his exquisitely finished armour and wargear, fully armed and accoutred for battle. The assembled warriors gave no overt sign of recognition, no martial salutes or cheers, but a perceptible change ran through them all like a jolt of electricity. Shoulders were squared and chins rose proudly in the presence of the archon. The atmosphere in the chamber had been tense while the warriors were waiting, now it veritably crackled with expectation. Yllithian looked around at them with pride shining from his face. One of the warriors k
nelt before him and delivered a brief, muttered report.

  ‘Good, good,’ Yllithian murmured in response. ‘And the second group were dealt with too… We’re all set then.’

  The archon of the White Flames glanced sharply over at Kharbyr before speaking to his troops. ‘The stage has been set for us to proceed. Move out by squads and in Lhitiu’s name maintain your intervals correctly. I will be right behind you – with Bellathonis at my side – until we reach the sluices in the third strata. We’ll consolidate our forces again once we’re there. Now go.’

  Yllithian strode over to where Kharbyr was standing as the first squad of warriors departed the chamber through one of the adjoining tunnels. ‘My dear Bellathonis, you look terrible,’ Yllithian smiled but his eyes were bright and hard, ‘as if you’re going to your own execution. You should exhibit a little more confidence if only for the sake of the troops.’

  ‘I have every confidence in your preparations, Archon Yllithian,’ Kharbyr said quickly. ‘They’re very… impressive.’

  Yllithian looked a little disappointed. ‘“Thorough” is the word I would have preferred to hear. Still I suppose you are entirely ignorant of the minor miracle involved in both anticipating this requirement and acting upon it in the ludicrously short period of time available.’

  ‘Requirement?’ Kharbyr echoed.