Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  Lady Malys’s blade shivered aside at the last instant as it was deflected by a short, curved blade that appeared in Motley’s hand as if by magic.

  ‘So you do come armed after all,’ Malys mocked as she flicked her steel fan at his wrist to sever the tendons. ‘So small though – you must feel inadequate around the incubi with their great klaives.’

  The Harlequin knocked aside the razor-edged fan and ducked beneath Malys’s follow-through swing with her sword, rolling beneath the hissing blade to gain a pace back onto the shaky framework. ‘I find it adequate for my needs,’ he explained equably as he parried another of her attacks, ‘although I always consider my wits, limited as they are, to be a better weapon.’

  The course of any battle between a long blade and a short one wielded by fighters of equivalent skill would inevitably be dictated by the individual with the greater reach. At least so Motley had been taught when he learned to handle a blade from beings that had spent whole lifetimes in the contemplation of such things. He tried to keep her talking to distract her while he kept his distance.

  ‘For example, it seems obvious to me now that you must have been the one I was following down from the upper city,’ Motley remarked brightly. ‘You’re off on a little job of your own, aren’t you? Patently with Vect’s blessing since you made no secret of your departure from his armada of doom.’

  She rushed at him again and he gave ground. The blade-masters had taught him patience. Attempts by a combatant with lesser reach to push for a resolution would almost certainly have a fatal outcome for them rather than their opponent. Patience was key.

  ‘Your wits must be as limited as your blade if it’s taken you this long to reach that conclusion,’ Malys laughed as she cut and thrust at him mercilessly. ‘When my kabalites reported we were being followed I was delighted to hear by whom. I decided that I simply must meet you myself. Ha!’

  Motley sprang back from an eviscerating cut that left Malys wide open to a counter blow. The only real recourse for the short-blade wielder was to defend until their adversary was generous enough to supply them with an opening by overreaching – like Malys had just done. Motley ignored the opportunity and danced away instead, sketching a courtly bow as Malys rushed after him.

  ‘I regret our lack of a formal introduction, dear lady,’ Motley said. ‘I’m called Motley and it’s a great pleasure to meet you, Lady Aurelia Malys of the Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ Malys laughed as she cut at him again, ‘and I know that you went to visit dear Asdrubael. What did you tell him when you were there? Share it with me and I might let you live… perhaps only shorn of a limb or two.’

  Malys’s sword missed Motley by millimetres. Again he was forced to deflect it at the last instant with his knife. To some extent a knifeman’s decisions became easier in a fight like this. A full defence would keep even a mediocre fighter alive for a limited time. It was the urge to attack, to take the offensive, that killed even the most skilful combatants in the end.

  ‘No secret there,’ Motley grinned at her. ‘I’ll happily share intimate details of my conversation with the supreme overlord – I warned him of dangers from the so-called gods of Chaos, that there had been schemes set in motion to allow their influence into the city. He told me that he believed what I had to say.’

  ‘Very good,’ Malys said without any apparent care for the message Motley had brought to Vect, ‘so why did he order you to follow me?’

  ‘He didn’t–’ Motley replied without thought as he ducked another swing.

  Malys gave a radiant smile of triumph. ‘Then he can’t complain about me killing his agent, can he?’ she said and came after him again with redoubled fury. This time her strikes relied on strength rather than skill as she pressed her full advantage in reach and leverage. She was actively mocking him by taking his unwillingness to strike back and rubbing it in his face.

  Motley ducked, dived and parried as the framework beneath them made ever more distressed imprecations protesting of imminent collapse. He concentrated his considerable skills on protecting himself and hoped that she would tire.

  The lessons of the blade-masters about patient defence were further reinforced by the fact that Motley had no desire to kill his assailant on this occasion. However, he was fast reaching the point where he could foresee himself trying to hurt her simply to stay alive. If the ferocity of her attacks didn’t subside soon he felt as if he would be the first one to tire.

  ‘I’ve been… polite enough to grant… full disclosure,’ Motley panted after a seemingly endless period amid the deadly dance of blades. ‘Why not indulge a poor, doomed fool by doing the same? Where is it you were going to?’

  Lady Malys’s lips quirked in a mischievous smile. ‘You think I overlook my objective? I may choose to dally with you but my kabalites aren’t sitting on their hands waiting for me to finish. In fact they should be almost there by now…’

  She paused abruptly in her attack and smoothly took up a guard stance. She looked poised and magnificent against the firefalls as she stood and regarded him coolly. Motley, however, thought he could detect the slightest tremor in her blade as though her grip was becoming weakened by fatigue. It appeared she was not entirely indefatigable after all. He forced himself not to relax his own guard. With a Commorrite appearances could be deceptive and anything could be a trick.

  ‘Asdrubael would say that the better question to ask is not “where am I going?”’ Malys offered with a sly glance, ‘but rather “why am I being sent there?”. I’ll admit that I can provide you with no satisfactory answer to that question. Our supreme overlord treats information as his most precious treasure and he’s overly miserly with it. He commands. We obey.’

  ‘I’d not believed the archons of Commorragh to be such blindly obedient drones,’ Motley replied tartly, ‘I’m sure you have at least an idea of what you’re about – that would seem in keeping with your purported predilection for precocious cunning.’

  She shook her head in response, glanced up and then began to circle him very slowly. ‘Flattery does become you, fool, but I won’t tell you my suspicions. I’m as miserly as Asdrubael when it comes to information. I will, however, offer you a few observations I’ve made just for the entertainment you’ve provided me with so far.

  ‘First – I won’t be the only one that Asdrubael’s sent out on a special task. He never has just one scheme in motion. He’ll have several plans going that are all capable of destroying his opponents because he trusts no single element to succeed. What I’m doing could be a ruse, a secondary objective or a vital cog in whatever infernal scheme he’s building up to next. Regardless, there will be others being readied, you can count on it.

  ‘Second – Asdrubael Vect is partial to weapons. He likes unexpected, devastating, irresistible weapons best of all. It’s not like he’s incapable of subtlety, quite the reverse. But unlike a lot of us here in Commorragh – and I’m including myself in that sweeping statement – he understands when the time for subtlety is over. When that happens he gets the biggest weapon he can find and ends the fight before anyone else has a chance to realise how far he’s about to escalate it.

  ‘Third and last is that I was wrong about you not being Vect’s agent. If he’s seen you and then let you get out of his sight alive while the city’s in this state you’re working for him whether you know it or not–’

  At that moment Fate took an unexpected hand in affairs. A great gob of liquid fire dislodged from higher up dropped towards them like a slow meteor falling to earth. Motley leapt back and felt the grating he landed upon tilt at a crazy angle. Smoke and flames erupted across his view as the fireball crashed into the already mangled framework and carried what remained of it away into the depths with a terrifying scream of tortured metal.

  Motley turned and ran up the tilted grating as he felt it beginning to drop away beneath his feet. The tiny bo
ost he could get from sprinting on such treacherous ground made his leap feeble even after the assistance of the flip-belt. He fell short of the protruding metal stanchion he was aiming for and was sent skipping down the wall. An angular wedge of stone struck at his falling shins and almost sprawled him onto a narrow ledge that had been invisible from higher up.

  He twisted himself in midair to grasp at the ledge with a grateful sigh of relief. Looking up, he saw dangling remnants of the framework where he had fought with Lady Malys. His sharp eyes picked out a figure holding on to a piece of the wreckage, her long sword still in hand. He waved and called out as she started her long climb to safety.

  ‘The third act in your drama of seduction and slash-or-murder?’ Motley yelled glibly up to her. ‘You never said what it was!’

  Lady Malys laughed musically, the sweet sound of it drifting down to Motley across the hiss and crackle of the surrounding firefalls.

  ‘The final act,’ she called, ‘is the fulfilment of all that expectation and passion. Two entities are brought together, for better or worse, and become intimately entwined. Neither of them walks away entirely unchanged!’

  Chapter 16

  XHAKORUAKH’S ASCENT

  The first brother was destined to fall into his grasp as easily as overripe fruit, the Decapitator could feel it in his bones. The battle beyond the walls formed the perfect distraction as Kheradruakh slipped between shadows and angles to gain entry. While the brother’s minions crashed and struggled against one another the Decapitator quietly slipped through their ranks and made his way to the vault of ascension. There he settled into the deeper darkness as patiently as a spider in its web. He would wait until the time was right.

  Waiting for the precise moment to strike was not only a matter of form. The power-play of energies unleashed by the rival siblings had confirmed the Decapitator’s most dolorous assessments about the forces at work in Aelindrach. The brother he had chosen to stalk first had struck unholy pacts with forces outside Aelindrach for the strength to keep his throne. The challenger outside had sunk just as low for a chance to usurp it.

  Kheradruakh’s lips curled back over his yellowed fangs at the thought of such shameful compromise. The tainted thinking of the outsiders pervaded everything the brothers did: power, possessions and rulership were their goals even if they had to bend their knee to eldritch gods to get them.

  This was not the way of Aelindrach. The shadow-realm was a dark lover to be embraced, a cruel paramour to be coaxed and worshipped in its own right. It was a place where the purity of darkness and fear compacted like a diamond into something so hard-edged and beautiful that it scarred the mind to grasp it. The idea that Aelindrach could be tamed and exploited by naked ambition was a truly offensive concept to him. Kheradruakh found he gripped his long, sharp blade tightly as he waited in the shadows and wondered at the stirring of passions he had long thought to be extinguished.

  The shadow-skein tightened inescapably towards a conclusion. With his forces facing disaster the defeated king sought to take the coward’s path and flee. No guards were in the vault to impede Kheradruakh’s progress as he unfolded from his hiding place and struck. He caught the deposed king just as he began to climb the chains to escape. His falling body became tangled in the dark metal links where it jerked like a grotesque puppet. The Decapitator ignored it as he scooped up his prize and stepped back into the shadows. He was just in time. The chamber doors burst asunder as the other brother stormed in to claim his worthless throne.

  Kheradruakh did not wait to see the outcome. He was already speeding to his hidden place, his secret ossuary deep in the heart of Aelindrach. He would strip the flesh from his prize, taste of the skull and examine it with his own sightless eyes to judge its worth. Then it would join his collection and give proper praise to the dark for all eternity, or if it proved unworthy it would be discarded.

  Then and only then would he return for the other brother.

  The dark was rising in Low Commorragh. From the armoured flanks of the port of lost souls to the jagged eaves of Nightsound Ghulen the shadow-stuff of Aelindrach bled into Commorragh and claimed it for its own. The dark was like a palpable, living thing that oozed out of drains and through culverts to lurk in the shattered ruins left by the Dysjunction. In the narrow streets and crooked alleys the darkness spread and multiplied as it infested everything at the foot of the spires. The creeping shadows swallowed up whole groups of survivors that had endured the psychic shock of the Dysjunction and then the citywide quakes and daemonic incursions of its aftermath. Their very fear seemed to feed the encroaching dark and call forth its slinking denizens to quell their unthinkable hunger.

  Bloated packs of diseased ur-ghuls swarmed through Low Commorragh like plague-rats slick with the foul ordure of their own corruption. Hooked claws scrabbled across broken stone and scent-pits hissed in the dark as thousands of the frenzied horrors hunted down anything too slow or too weak to escape from them. The eyeless predators were well suited to the narrow, shadowed streets and they quickly emptied them of prey. Still ravenous, the packs pressed onwards, always following the spreading stain leaking out of the shadow-realm of Aelindrach. Their unquenchable thirst drove the ur-ghuls ever upwards to places where other predators lurked.

  The strongest and most astute Commorrites had long since fought their way into defensible locations. They had barricaded and secured them with everything available, then recruited or murdered any latecomers, or else been murdered by them in turn and so, by the feral laws of Commorragh, forfeited their right to security. In many cases the improvised strongholds had already made tentative alliances with their nearest neighbours against mutual foes. Many were giving heed to the rumours of the White Flames’ rebellion and weighing the gains to be made versus the risks to be run by taking on the mantle of loyalist or rebel.

  As the dark rose around these tiny survivor-fortresses their inhabitants did not feel fear. Instead they congratulated themselves on their foresight in protecting themselves. They sealed off the entry points and set lamps to keep the shadows at bay. They patrolled their corridors and landings as they kept a close watch. When the hissing tide of ur-ghuls crashed against their doors they took up weapons and threw them back so that they stood as unconquered islands of light in a midnight sea.

  Lady Malys’s Poisoned Tongue kabalites fought their way down to Valzho Sinister and only just made it to the brass-bound portals of that particular underworld ahead of packs of ravening ur-ghuls. Around the labyrinth of the Black Descent swarms of the foul troglodytes gave up their obsessive efforts to pierce the deadly maze and began to climb for the upper city in unprecedented numbers.

  As the creatures began to broach High Commorragh and the fringes of Sorrow Fell their advance became frustrated. Shimmering boundaries of force were in place that blocked off streets, avenues and entire districts. The flood of ur-ghuls was split and redirected, channelled and dammed as they became caught up in a confusing maze that had been called into being by Vect from his throne in distant Corespur.

  Such tricks were not designed to keep the tenebrous, plague-ridden hordes at bay forever. Some sent packs of ur-ghuls into box canyons and dead ends overlooked by enough firepower to wipe them out in an instant. Others took them out into open courts and plazas where they became prey for marauding gangs of reavers, hellions or scourges.

  However, by far the majority of the invaders from Aelindrach were gradually directed into a single area of High Commorragh – the broad swath of wrecked wasteland surrounding the White Flames fortress. Patient observers from Valossian Sythrac’s besiegers took note of the fortress weaponry as it visited high-energy carnage upon the skulking ur-ghuls. The survivors were driven below into the tunnels of the foundation strata, where they posed an entirely new problem for the defenders of the White Flames fortress.

  The dark was rising, yet it had reached its limits, so it seemed. The ur-ghuls, unable to make an impressio
n on the upper towers of Commorragh, slunk back into the shadows. For the thousands of survivor-fortresses clinging on in Low Commorragh it seemed a victory, a moment of respite amidst the disaster-strewn times of the Dysjunction.

  So it seemed until the coming of the mandrakes.

  ‘I remember the first time I saw this place,’ Xhakoruakh rumbled contemplatively. ‘He who spawned my brother and I showed it to us long ago. He promised it would be the wellspring of future greatness for Aelindrach. In truth it has changed little beneath Azoruakh’s rulership. I shall eclipse his reign.’

  ‘In this fond memory of yours your brother would not happen to be headless, I assume?’ Bellathonis snapped with a trace of irritation. Emotional self-indulgence annoyed him at the best of times.

  They were standing in the throne room and watching as the lifeless corpse of Azoruakh was lowered from the hanging chains and borne away. Recent experiences had caused the haemonculus to conclude that he generally disliked mysteries, and mysteriously headless bodies doubly so. Xhakoruakh seemed to have become even more bloated than before and the ugly rusted scythe in his hands was emitting the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh. The shadow-king appeared to be introspective in his moment of victory.

  Xhakoruakh continued as if Bellathonis had not spoken. ‘We were young then, barely suckled at Aelindrach’s teat, yet even then we knew we would be rivals one day – that this moment would come. I think our maker intended it to be that way.’

  ‘You don’t find it troubling to find your brother like this?’ Bellathonis insisted. ‘That someone entered the chamber, removed his head and then exited with it while we were standing right outside the door?’

  Bellathonis was disturbed by the way that Xhakoruakh’s minions were reacting to the death of Azoruakh. He would expect to see shock and fear. Instead they whispered among themselves excitedly, nodding wisely as if the event had been entirely foreseeable or even pre-ordained.