Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  The crystals of the scrying chamber remained just as opaque as ever but now it was clear in Vect’s mind where the daemon-seed admitted by the Dysjunction had taken root. This rising darkness could only be coming from Aelindrach. The mysterious shadow-realm had long been a part of Vect’s acquisitions, but too strange, too alien to properly assimilate with the rest of the city. The mandrakes made useful agents but their reticence about their place of origin was always universal and virtually unbreakable. They were lawless and clannish by nature, yet someone or something in Aelindrach was making a concerted effort to expand the shadow-realm and absorb all of Commorragh. That could not be countenanced.

  Vect moved back to his throne and began bringing the lesser wardings into action. At one point the mastery of the wardings had been a jealously guarded secret fragmented among ancient, noble families. Vect had threatened and tortured his way to full understanding, eliminating each former possessor of it as he went. In time the last few bearing any scraps of knowledge came forward to teach him willingly in the hopes that he might spare them. They were proved wrong. Now the secret was Vect’s alone and he held it as part of his great armoury of weapons for use against those that might oppose him.

  The greater wardings girdled the entire city, eldritch barriers of force that kept the restless tides of the warp in check and prevented them from swamping the reality that was Commorragh. The lesser wards were originally intended as an additional safety feature that subdivided the city itself. They were capable of placing additional, temporary barriers between the city’s innumerable tiers and districts in case of a breach. Their deployment placed a small but noticeable additional strain on the nigh-infinite energy reservoirs of Commorragh and Vect proceeded with care by only erecting a few carefully selected wardings. Sealing off the whole city would not serve his purposes; it could even have quite disastrous results.

  The work was almost complete when he heard the doors of the scrying chamber opening. He glanced to one side to look at the crystal dedicated to the chamber itself. The individual that he saw to be approaching assuaged his mood somewhat and he settled himself on his throne to await their arrival.

  ‘Archon Khromys,’ he said just before the leader of the Obsidian Rose came into view. The Medusae retreated behind the throne as the renowned artificer strode forwards to kneel before him. She wore a kilt of blades that seemed to float cooperatively with her movements and baroque-looking gauntlets of green glass. The plates of her shoulder armour mimicked the curves of rose petals, black and razor-edged.

  ‘Supreme overlord, I have done as you bid me to do,’ Archon Khromys said.

  ‘Then rise and report. You found the vaults I directed you to, that much is clear. Tell me about their condition.’

  ‘Twelve were completely untouched, seven showed signs of exterior damage but no breaches. I was unable to reach the others as they had been buried by debris that will take time to clear. My kabal are working on those even as we speak.’

  The archon of the Obsidian Rose was keeping something from him, he was sure. Vect’s gaze was penetrating as he interrogated her further, ‘You must have discovered the contents of the vaults – one with your skills would not be able to resist looking inside. Speak and tell me what you saw, and do not insult me by attempting to lie to me.’

  Khromys went pale. ‘No! I could clearly see they were stasis-locked. Only a great fool would tamper with that, and only a greater fool would return to their owner and report on it. I input the codes you supplied, examined the vaults for damage and came straight back.’

  Vect sat back and steepled his fingers ruminatively. Khromys was young for an archon, a relative newcomer to the ever-changing inner circle of Corespur. She played on that sometimes by acting the innocent – which was an almost laughable conceit to place before anyone who knew Khromys’s personal history in detail. As a newcomer she was also one of the less reliable archons in his court.

  ‘Very well,’ Vect said dismissively, ‘you may go. Report to me again when the remaining vaults have been uncovered.’ Khromys nodded, puzzled but relieved, bowed deeply to cover her relief and turn to leave. Vect let her get a half-dozen paces away before he called out to her again.

  ‘You have a celebrated intellect, Archon Khromys, tell me what you deduced was inside those vaults.’

  Khromys froze. She knew that she could not leave the chamber without answering. ‘Weapons,’ she said after a moment. ‘Something too destructive to leave out in the open.’

  ‘You can do better than that,’ Vect purred.

  Khromys looked back at him with a spark of defiance in her eyes, ‘I think it’s where you’ve been hiding your Castigators. I think you sent me to prepare them to be unleashed. Like I said before, weapons.’

  Vect’s answering smile was merciless.

  Chapter 13

  OVERTHROW

  Kheradruakh listened to the whispers on the ever-changing night breezes of Aelindrach. He heard the two rival brothers arming for their war to determine who should rule over a place which could never be ruled. He listened as Xhakoruakh’s outsider allies bred monsters for his shadow war. He listened as Azoruakh bartered souls for weaponry from beyond Aelindrach, the secret shipments entering through a gate known only to him. As the Decapitator’s alien senses caressed the shadow-skein he learned their deepest desires and the true sources of their mutual rivalry.

  Xhakoruakh had lied when he told his outsider allies that secrets could not be kept hidden in the shadow-realm. In fact it took a rare gift to ferret out a secret within the deceptive tangle of shadows and angles that was Aelindrach. Few might boast the tenacity and skill required to make the effort, while the number of secrets to be found was very, very large. However, once the taste of conspiracy was on the Decapitator’s tongue he could hunt it down effectively through the skein. The ghosts of recently made pacts still echoed there, and within them was an interlocking puzzle box of motivations, actions and influences that opened at his touch.

  Kheradruakh slid from shadow to shadow, always unseen. He whetted his blade and bided his time. The moment would come soon, whirring past on the raven wings of fate. He would be ready and waiting when it did.

  While Xhakoruakh held court in a palace of shadows, his brother Azoruakh ruled from the top of a mountain.

  As they approached the place it seemed to be a solid curtain of blackness rising up beyond the boundaries of perception. As they came closer it was possible to tell that Azoruakh’s fortress leapt upwards in a succession of tiers that mounted threateningly overhead like angular storm clouds rendered in obsidian. The ledges and angles of it were seething with the followers of Azoruakh. The silent, shadowy garrison awaited the approach of Xhakoruakh’s horde with weapons in hand; the dull patina of smooth bone on the saw-toothed hooks, sickles and knives that they bore seemed to gleam in the Stygian darkness of Aelindrach.

  Xhakoruakh’s minions outnumbered those serving his brother many times over, but Azoruakh’s followers had the advantage of position. As the horde surged against the obsidian walls Azoruakh revealed another advantage he had held in secret against the day when his sibling returned to reclaim his throne. Strange and terrible weapons were unleashed to rain destruction down upon the shadow horde. Lucent beams played across the charging ranks disintegrating everything they touched as the killing began in earnest.

  It had begun with the braying of horns echoing through Xhakoruakh’s palace, deep-throated bellows that hung on a single flat note which resonated in every nook and cranny. The signal was pre-arranged yet Bellathonis still experienced a curious tightening in his guts at the sound. The limited time he’d had for preparation was at an end and ready or not his offspring were going to be tested in the crucible of battle.

  The grotesques he had bred were, to Bellathonis’s mind, not yet fully grown. Their musculature was underdeveloped due the paucity of the specimens he’d had to work with, the bony growths prot
ruding from their spines, craniums and shoulders were as hard and sharp as flint, but equally brittle. They were quicker than ordinary grotesques and exhibited a sort of feral rapaciousness that was unusual for their kind. All in all Bellathonis was proud of them. The horns blared incessantly as if to hurry him along, their unwavering tone reverberating through the fabric of Aelindrach as they announced Xhakoruakh’s challenge.

  Bellathonis and Xagor emerged from their womb-like cave under the palace with his battalion of grotesques to muster with Xhakoruakh’s other forces. The multitudes of dark angles in the cracked plain surrounding the palace were filled with them: mandrakes, ur-ghuls, crawlers, creepers and other nameless things summoned from the depths of the shadow-realm. Bellathonis’s iron-masked grotesques drooled and whined as they were driven into position within the multitude. In comparison to the other creatures present the grotesques were thunderous slabs of moving muscle and bone. They surged through the flitting entities like ships crossing a sea of shadows. The resonant horns stopped abruptly. In the oppressive silence that crowded in with their absence the only sound was the hiss of an icy breeze scouring the plain.

  The giant figure of the shadow-king emerged from the heart of his palace into the expectant silence. He was surrounded by nightfiends bearing tall banners marked with twisting sigils of green witch-fire. A rippling intake of breath swept over the horde as they basked in the presence of their lord, Xhakoruakh. Bellathonis took in a sharp breath too. It seemed to him that he could feel the fever-heat of Xhakoruakh’s bloated form against his skin even from a distance. The shadow-king flourished a monstrous, rusted scythe above his head and cried out in a voice that rolled like deep thunder.

  ‘My restless children of Aelindrach! The time has come to take back what is rightfully mine. Trophies and riches will be yours for the taking when we unseat my treacherous brother! All those who take the road to victory with me shall reign as lords over the broken slaves of Azoruakh!’

  The crude promises elicited an eerie, hungering moan from the assembled horde, but Bellathonis had eyes only for the weapon the shadow-king was holding. He could see that even Xhakoruakh’s brawny arms were knotted with the effort of keeping the heavy scythe aloft. It stood taller than the giant shadow-king, while its blade was close to a metre wide and two metres long. Its workmanship was crude, like that of a tool rather than a weapon, with some portions unfinished. The metal it was made from was so heavily corroded that it looked as if it had been lost underwater for centuries. Vivid green slime oozed from the scythe’s blade but the inscriptions carved into it were still sharp and well-defined enough that Bellathonis could recognise them. They were inscriptions in Chaos runes, the language of the damned.

  Bellathonis knew the script from dusty tomes he had studied in the past as he delved into the nature of souls, books that had been filled with the esoteric warnings of long-dead scholars. Now that he stood with the shadow-king’s sighing horde in the icy wind on a cracked plain in Aelindrach the warnings seemed less obscure and more relevant. Any remaining doubts in the haemonculus’s mind that Xhakoruakh had been tainted by powers from beyond the veil evaporated completely in that moment.

  There was a kind of blindness Commorrites suffered in relation to the Chaos gods, Bellathonis thought. She Who Thirsts had such a claim on their souls that it occupied all of their thoughts on the subject – when they gave it any thought at all, which was rarely if it could be helped. Every waking moment was dedicated to eluding the grasp of the daemon-queen and restoring the vitality she drained constantly from every living eldar in Commorragh. Small wonder that she should dominate their world-view.

  The other Chaos gods were known to be older than She Who Thirsts. They were ancient, atavistic deities from the dawn of time and seen as being almost as irrelevant by Commorrites as the dead gods of the eldar. That was a conceit, but not too far from the truth under ordinary circumstances. Commorragh had been designed and built specifically to exclude the influences of entities like the decrepit gods of Chaos under normal circumstances. The wardings were supposed to keep Commorragh hermetically sealed from the surging tides of the warp – the preferred playground of the Chaos gods – so that its citizens could exist without succumbing to madness and mutation. That was how the wardings were supposed to work, but during a Dysjunction they could be compromised and what was without could find its way within.

  Xhakoruakh raised a mighty shout over his shadow horde and they replied with a whispering sibilance that held words in tongues seldom heard among the living. The rise and fall of their eldritch chanting crashed like waves against a shingly shore as the horde stirred with common purpose. It dispersed into a hundred separate spills and runnels and began flowing away from the palace as the tide of shadow-skinned creatures flooded across the plain.

  Bellathonis whipped the grotesques viciously to get them lumbering forwards in the same general direction. The slab-muscled beasts were showing entirely too much imbecilic fascination with Xhakoruakh and the monstrous scythe for Bellathonis’s liking. He glanced over at Xagor to see if the wrack had noticed anything amiss about Xhakoruakh. Recently Xagor’s duty to Bellathonis had taken him into Shaa-Dom and some of the less stable parts of the webway. The wrack had witnessed something of the power of the warp unchained and could probably read the signs of it here, too. Part of Bellathonis still wanted to be wrong, to write off his fears as a product of the strange sub-realm of Aelindrach tricking his senses. The frightened eyes that he could sense peering from behind Xagor’s mask told Bellathonis everything he needed to know.

  The road to Azoruakh’s mountain-fortress had been no road at all. It was a trackless wasteland of rippling darkness that rose and fell in frozen waves as jagged and angular as the teeth on a saw-blade. It was not without opposition either. There were skirmishes and ambushes, murdered guards and mutilated scouts. All of them carried out with the vicious glee the denizens of Aelindrach reserved for striking from the shadows. Both sides fought in the same fashion, unseen and unheard until a blade kissed flesh or hooked claws wrapped around a throat.

  Bellathonis did his best to keep himself, Xagor and the grotesques out of reach of such games by resolutely sticking with the largest groups of Xhakoruakh’s followers that he could find. Whenever Xagor and Bellathonis needed to rest, the haemonculus ordered the grotesques into a circle facing outwards, packed so that they were shoulder to shoulder and formed a living palisade of flesh, blood and bone. The precautions seemed to work well enough to keep Xagor and Bellathonis alive as they listened to the blood-chilling shrieks and howls from the skirmishes occurring around them.

  Ultimately Xhakoruakh’s followers had the strength to push through his brother’s delaying tactics and the horde steadily approached the mountain-fortress. At first it was only a dark blur on the edge of consciousness but it grew ever greater as they approached. Just short of the mountain Xhakoruakh halted and sensibly brought his streams of followers together into a single body before advancing further. However, the shadow-king gave his minions no time to rest and instead drove them forwards with bellowed imprecations as soon as sufficient numbers were gathered. The horde of Xhakoruakh lurched forwards against his brother’s fortress and into a hell-storm.

  Bellathonis had kept his charges back from the front lines while he assessed the situation. When the all-destroying lucent beams wielded by Azoruakh’s defenders stabbed down from the cliffs for the first time he was initially dazzled and then fascinated by them. The energies being employed clove smoking trails through the very fabric of Aelindrach; even the ground beneath the victim’s feet was blasted upwards in sooty columns at the beam’s touch. Such power was entirely in keeping with the effects of disintegrators and darklight weapons in more normal surroundings, but the shadow-realm was notoriously opaque to those kinds of high-energy discharges.

  There was movement in the serried terraces that etched the cliffs. Shadows were descending from them like crawling bats. Some of Azoruak
h’s followers were seemingly so confident of victory that they were keen to come to grips with the pitiful handful of Xhakoruakh’s minions that had reached the bottom of the cliffs so far. Further from the cliff the burning rays probed back and forth like restless fingers of light searching for those that had gone to ground to escape their lethal luminosity. Wherever one of them latched onto to a huddled knot of mandrakes or ur-ghuls more swung across to annihilate them in focused radiance.

  Bellathonis looked around for Xhakoruakh but among the flashing beams and fractured darkness he could see no sign of the giant shadow-king. He did see a wall of mist that was rolling towards the cliffs with unnatural speed. The death-beams gouged hungrily through the mist, tearing it into tatters and revealing the shadow-king and his cadre of nightfiends charging towards the fortress.

  For an instant Bellathonis believed his problems would be solved there and then. However, as the beams moved to sweep over the group they were held back by a shimmering emerald dome of force. Xhakoruakh’s charge was slowed to a crawl as he and his minions battled their way forwards. They suffered as they did so, their bodies smoking and thrashing beneath the attenuated yet still potent blaze of Azoruakh’s arcane weapons. Xhakoruakh pushed onwards with the strength of desperation, yet his nightfiends were falling one by one.

  Bellathonis snapped his attention back to the grotesques drooling unconcernedly nearby and Xagor, who was shivering in anticipation of his imminent demise. ‘Quickly now, Xagor!’ Bellathonis called over the shriek of the destroying beams. ‘Help me ready the grotesques while there’s still a distraction going on.’ In a few words he quickly explained what he needed the wrack to do. Despite his terror Xagor was obedient enough to carry out the necessary tasks without question.