Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  Motley looked about from his rooftop perch. He had come up a long way, so far that he was now perhaps halfway up the side of one of the taller spires at a point where a canyon-like gulf separated the spire from its neighbour with several hundred metres of open air. The titanic structures were striated with tiers and terraces bearing wild-looking parks and ornate formal gardens. Off to one side he could make out the reflective expanse of a lake curving away around the flank of the neighbouring spire.

  In between every one of these open areas was an eclectic array of buildings warring for space like weeds fighting for sunlight. Towers, turrets, cupolas, mezzanines, balconies, domes, lesser spires, statues, steeples, arches, bridges and stairways were piled one on top of the other without apparent rhyme or reason. Great swaths of the buildings had been damaged by the Dysjunction and a few had completely collapsed, tearing ragged holes in the cityscape. For all the destruction the scene was oddly peaceful. No fighting could be seen on the terraces and the narrow skies seemed clear save for the occasional speeding grav-craft or winged scourge.

  Motley’s attention was drawn to one particular crevasse in the spire opposite. A cold, blue light shone from within its depths that seemed at odds with everything else around it. The slight Harlequin shrugged off the sensation at first, telling himself that when confronted with such enormous vistas it was perhaps natural for the mind to seek a point of easy distinction to use as a reference point. He looked up again to see if he could sight Vect’s great armada but found his attention kept being drawn back to that blue light. Something about it made his nape-hairs crawl and put an itch in between his shoulder blades.

  ‘All right, all right,’ the Harlequin muttered to himself in exasperation, ‘the pretty blue bauble demands attention, I see that now, but how to go about consummating such fervent desires, hmm? Too far to leap across the gap, so how’s a poor performer supposed to satisfy his idle curiosity?’

  The Harlequin looked around for a way to get across to the adjacent spire. The flip-belt could carry him sailing across the gulf in a single leap, of course, but at a cost of losing a great deal of height. He’d be back down among the coiling shadows of Aelindrach and lose sight of his objective. Several bridges appeared to have spanned the gap until they had collapsed or been smashed by falling debris in the Dysjunction. Now all that remained of them were projecting stubs in the spire wall, roadways to nowhere.

  There was a broken spider’s web of chains and cables still stretched across the chasm in a few places. The more tenuous links had survived thanks to their inherent flexibility and they still formed a potential bridge that Motley could use. He leapt upwards to catch a wire that was still under tension and swung himself atop it. He ran forwards along the swaying, finger-thick line on quick, sure feet over the kilometre-deep gulf yawning hungrily below him.

  As he drew closer to the curious blue-lit crevasse Motley perceived the life-sparks of patient sentinels hiding amid the ruined buildings at its lip. He went forwards cautiously, easing between shadows and slipping along roundabout routes to work himself closer to what they guarded. The watchers were kabalites with calm, disciplined minds who seemed well settled in their positions, as if they had been in place for some time. The kabalites’ vigilance was unwavering but they were definitely bored.

  Motley’s natural inquisitiveness had been excited before; discovering something that apparently warranted guarding made his nosiness become positively uncontrollable.

  Quiet as a ghost Motley pulled himself up to a shattered window ledge so that he could peep through it at the closest kabalite. He was careful to wait until their attention was elsewhere before taking a long, hard snoop. He saw a warrior in jade-green armour wearing the sigil of a black rose made up of petals that were individually reminiscent of knife blades. Motley dropped back out of sight to ponder for a moment. A cheery hello would probably be greeted by gunfire. On the other hand trying to sneak past shouldn’t be too hard. The problem with that was he would have no idea what he was sneaking into, while angry people with weapons would then be positioned between himself and the exit.

  There was another approach and it appealed to Motley from the moment it popped into his mind.

  Ozarhylh shifted slightly and adjusted his grip on his splinter rifle. It had been hours without word and he was starting to wonder if Khromys had made it back from Corespur at all. What they’d found might well be sufficiently sensitive to get the whole kabal killed to keep its presence hidden.

  The rumours kept rolling in from both above and below: stories of battles up in High Commorragh between the Black Heart and rebel kabals led by Nyos Yllithian, panicky reports of the lower city being overrun by mandrakes and worse, news that the internal wardings had been raised, cutting off whole districts, word that escaped slaves had taken over one of the ports, speculation that the supreme overlord had gone mad, or been consumed by daemons, or had fled the city entirely.

  The craziest rumour that Ozarhylh had heard personally was that El’Uriaq himself had risen from his grave in Shaa-Dom to rain vengeance down on the city that killed him… although in truth nothing seemed completely impossible right now. With all this happening around them they were all stuck guarding the broken vault like a bunch of fools waiting to get picked off. Their archon was nowhere to be found and there was plenty of grumbling that they should pick up and move to somewhere more defensible until things quietened down.

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ a cheery voice announced from behind him. ‘It’s certainly exciting times in the dark city right now.’

  Ozarhylh whipped around with the speed of a striking snake, his rifle raised. He gained a brief glimpse of a slight, grey-clad figure crouching on a block of rubble behind him. Then the rifle was torn from Ozarhylh’s hands and slammed back into his forehead with stunning force. The ground seemed to lurch under his feet and he fell over backwards. As he did so a dutiful yet interminably slow part of his brain tried to get his hands to function and claw out his pistol. The grey figure casually kicked the pistol out of Ozarhylh’s grasp as soon as it cleared the holster and then planted an elegantly pointed shoe on his chest when he tried to rise.

  ‘Please don’t get up on my account,’ the newcomer smiled, his tone jovial. ‘I’d much rather we just talked – is that all right with you?’

  ‘Rhzevia! Komarch!’ Ozarhylh yelled. ‘We’re under attack!’

  The grey-clad figure watched him curiously. Ozarhylh could see now that it wore archaic-looking clothes and a domino half-mask above a wide, friendly smile. He tried to surge up suddenly and knock his attacker off his feet. He might have had more success trying to rise with a neutron star sitting on his chest.

  ‘I’m afraid your friends can’t hear you,’ the slight figure said contritely. ‘They’re taking a nap for the present. I’ve, ah, interfered with your communications too, so it’s really just the two of us. Feel free to keep yelling if it makes you more comfortable, but I confess that you might attract something even less desirable than my company.’

  ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ Ozarhylh grated furiously.

  ‘That’s the spirit! Asking the right questions! Now calm down and you can guess the answers for yourself – I’ll help you with clues and we’ll play a little game together – won’t that be fun? Let’s start with “Who am I?” I’ll give you a hint – do you think I’m from Commorragh?’

  ‘No…’ Ozarhylh admitted. A Commorrite would have killed him by now, or at the very least started torturing him for the answers this intruder obviously wanted. He looked at the stranger’s attire again and realised that what he’d seen as grey was a dense pattern of black and white diamonds. The half-mask and smiling lips dredged up a memory of outsiders, of elaborate dances, of acrobatic entertainers shrouded with mystery and dogged by disquieting legends despite their apparently harmless profession.

  ‘You’re a Harlequin,’ Ozarhylh concluded with disdain.

 
‘That’s right! I am a Harlequin, but you can call me Motley,’ the Harlequin chattered effusively. ‘This is wonderful! See how well you’re doing? Now for question number two things get a lot more difficult. “What do I want?” Well that could include all manner of things – peace, prosperity, love, laughter and the leisure in which to enjoy them. All sorts of things! No, I think to be fair we’ll have to restrain ourselves to “What do I want right now?”, don’t you think?’

  Ozarhylh glared back in silence. He wouldn’t play this clown’s game any further. This Motley character could only be there for the vault – precisely the kind of intruder that Khromys had placed them there to guard against. His life was already forfeit, either the Harlequin or his archon wouldn’t hesitate to take it once their curiosity had been satisfied.

  The Harlequin frowned and said in answer to Ozarhylh’s unspoken thoughts, ‘Not at all – you need to think more clearly. We’re both on the same side or I would, in your world-view, simply torture you and kill you to get what I want. Here, I’ll give you another hint – do you think an outsider like me would be permitted to just walk around freely in the city during a Dysjunction? Who would make such a call?’

  Ozarhylh’s skin felt suddenly cold and clammy as the Harlequin’s implication sank in. Only one power in the city could claim authority over something like that – Asdrubael Vect himself. ‘You’re an agent for the supreme overlord?’ he whispered fearfully.

  ‘You said it, not me,’ Motley said with a malicious grin, ‘but anyway that’s cheating – I’m supposed to be the one asking questions in our little game, so let’s try again.’ The slight figure leaned closer and whispered in Ozarhylh’s ear, ‘What do I want?’

  ‘You’ve come to check on the contents of the vault,’ Ozarhylh said shakily. ‘You want to know if anybody else has been here or knows what’s happening. They don’t, no one’s alive nearby – we used nerve gas to make sure. We can’t do anything about the flyers, but none of them seem to have noticed anything yet.’

  He was babbling and he knew it, the mere invocation of Vect’s name having robbed him of all his courage. Khromys had boasted about speaking with the supreme overlord one to one in Corespur when she got her orders, but Ozarhylh hadn’t really believed her at the time. Now he did believe her, because suddenly it looked like they were involved in one of Vect’s schemes up to their armpits. This could mean that a great elevation for the Kabal of the Obsidian Rose was in the works or it could equally well prove to be a disaster.

  Motley watched him with his head cocked to one side as though listening. The Harlequin seemed to come to a decision and removed his foot from Ozarhylh’s chest before handing him back his rifle.

  ‘Show me,’ Motley said.

  Ozarhylh stood quickly and made to point the rifle at Motley before thinking better of it and letting the weapon hang at his side. ‘There’s an easy way to get down over there,’ Ozarhylh said, pointing, ‘but I’m not going back inside the vault for any price. Too many ghosts.’

  Motley frowned unhappily and shot Ozarhylh a mournful, pleading look. For all the cheap theatrics Ozarhylh understood that the Harlequin was telling him to come along now or suffer retribution later.

  ‘All right! All right!’ Ozarhylh cried in exasperation and started to lead him down the path they’d made through the debris when they’d found the place earlier.

  Motley followed the kabalite warrior down a narrow trail leading deeper into the rubble. It brought them to the top of a jumbled slope made up of fallen masonry and twisted metal. Towards the bottom of the slope an intense blue light was shining that cast long, hard-edged shadows towards them. In the glare Motley could see an immense, metallic hand half buried in the debris. The hand was broken off at the wrist and seemed to be gripping the hilt of an enormous sword.

  ‘We reckon it came from that statue of Archon Hiyurlarx up on the red raven’s spire,’ the kabalite offered by way of explanation. ‘Not sure if the whole thing went over or just this part of it. Either way Belian Hiyurlarx would be laughing right now if he could see the damage he’s done.’

  The kabalite began to pick his way down the slope with a long-suffering sigh. The titanic piece of falling statuary had gouged a ragged wound in the cityscape that was over a hundred metres deep and almost twice as long. On the far slope Motley could see torn rooms and sliced corridors that had been left open to the air by the subsequent collapse.

  Motley started to follow but hesitated for a moment as he sensed unquiet spirits in the chasm below. The low psychic moan of anguish was completely unexpected after the virtual silence of Commorragh and its close-minded inhabitants. This was no daemonic howling or the buzz of void-born predators – it was the suffering of eldar souls in torment. Motley shook his head and summoned up his courage. He had experienced things infinitely more disquieting than this in his time. If anything he was now absolutely determined to find out what the kabalites had been guarding.

  As they reached the bottom of the crevasse Motley could see precisely where the light was coming from. A pair of immensely thick, heavy doors dominated one end of the chasm. The doors were sealed by a circular magnetic locking mechanism that stood a good deal taller than the slight Harlequin could have reached on his tiptoes. The giant falling sword of Archon Hiyurlarx had struck just a hand’s-breadth from the left-hand edge of the heavy doors. The impact had opened a split in the wall of the vault and it was from this that the light shone.

  ‘Just sheer bad luck really,’ the kabalite said uneasily. ‘If the sword hadn’t come down point first it wouldn’t even have nicked the walls. They’re made of some seriously tough stuff – fortress grade – but you’d know more about that than me.’

  Motley smiled knowingly and moved up to a position where he could peep inside. The blue light was all-pervasive, as if the very air was infused with it. A low mist obscured the floor and was spilling out of the crack in faint streamers. Inside the Harlequin could see the silhouettes of giant figures, smooth-limbed and metallically gleaming.

  ‘Gods, no,’ Motley whispered in horror. ‘It can’t be.’

  The figures had the distinctive curving forms of wraithguard and wraithlords – the animated guardian-constructs built by craftworld eldar to carry the souls of their dead. Motley squeezed through the cracked wall in a daze. As the trapped souls within sensed his presence the swell of grieving mind-voices grew more frantic. Motley resolutely tried to block them out.

  With closer examination he recognised that the machines were not craftworlder wraithguard and wraithlords. They embodied many of the same aesthetics but had undoubtedly been constructed by Commorrite hands. The ordinarily fine, clean lines of the craftworlder’s designs had been weighted down with masses of additional armour and weaponry. Many had had some of their long limbs amputated in order to keep them quick and agile despite their extra burdens of blades and energy projectors, sacrificing their traditionally compact eldar-like forms for greater performance. Everything about the Commorrite copies seemed to add a vicious tension to the original designs.

  The machines were constructed out of wraithbone and other psychoplastic materials Motley would have expected to see on a craftworld. The dark kin had no ability to create wraithbone for themselves and only limited ability to shape it. However, the unique properties of craftworlder materials meant they were highly prized by Commorrites. Every piece of wraithbone used for the constructs had to have been stolen from the craftworlds or the webway itself. The contents of the vault represented an unimaginable horde of plunder in Commorragh, but that was not what Motley found most horrifying about it.

  There were clusters of spirit stones embedded into the constructs’ carapaces. Each of the war engines had a dozen or more of the glowing gems sunk into their gleaming metal bodies around their foreheads and shoulders. Motley knew that every one of the stones contained a soul caught at the moment of death to keep it safe from the clutches of She Who Thirsts
. The spirit stones represented a most despicable theft from their resting place, an act that went beyond grave-robbing to the literal enslavement of the dead.

  It was not without precedent, certainly, for spirit stones were a rare and precious commodity in Commorragh, just like wraithbone. They were stolen, hoarded and fought over, twisted into psychically attuned artefacts that the Commorrites could create by no other means.

  ‘How… how many are there?’ the Harlequin asked in bewilderment. Ranks of the gleaming constructs stretched away into the depths of the vault. The war machines closest to the damaged wall where he was standing had been knocked over by the impact and now lay in a tangled sprawl of curved limbs and jutting weapons. Beyond them the blue light and mist made it hard to see exactly how many more still stood further inside. There might be hundreds of them in there, thousands even.

  Motley’s query was met with silence. He realised that the kabalite had not entered with him and was nowhere to be seen outside. Motley shook his head, trying to keep the insistent, tortured voices of the dead at bay so that he could think clearly. The crushing truth was that he could not do anything to help the captured spirits. Filling every pocket he had wouldn’t have emptied a thousandth of the spirit stones from their settings, and the kabalites certainly weren’t going to let him saunter out carrying even such a small fraction of the fortune on display.

  Motley was suddenly struck by what Lady Malys had told him during their duel below the firefalls – ‘Asdrubael Vect is partial to weapons. He likes unexpected, devastating, irresistible weapons best of all.’

  Weapons. The war-constructs arrayed before him (Motley refused to think of the twisted perversions as wraithguard) would certainly be unexpected and devastating. Many of the Commorrites’ weapons would be ineffectual against enemies that neither bled nor felt pain or fear.