Motley backed out of the blue-lit vault feeling very much alone and very much a coward for doing so. There was a dreadful wrong here but he could not – dare not – do anything to try and rectify it. To his surprise he found the kabalite was still waiting for him outside. Motley could see from the look in the warrior’s eyes that his courage had failed him and he hadn’t been able to follow the Harlequin inside.
‘How many are there?’ Motley asked again numbly. It was all he could think to ask, his mind was still too overwhelmed with sorrow at what he’d seen. The kabalite seemed to misunderstand the question.
‘At least twenty,’ the kabalite said. ‘There’s more being dug out on the lower tiers. Most of the ones up top were intact so we got through those more quickly.’
‘Twenty?’ Motley repeated in confusion. There were many more than twenty constructs in the vault.
‘Twenty vaults – including this one, I mean.’
Motley blinked and then cleared his throat a few times as he absorbed the news. ‘Do you know what’s in them?’ he asked finally.
‘Of course, they’re Vect’s Castigators,’ the kabalite said with certainty. ‘Nobody had seen one in a hundred years. Who’d have guessed they were right here in the city all that time? And so damn many of them, too…’
The kabalite smiled and Motley had an urge to kill him for it. A smug, stupid child so pleased with his cruelty deserved to be wiped from existence. The Harlequin took a quick step forwards before he could quash the desire. The kabalite flinched then glared back defiantly.
‘We’ve done what the supreme overlord commanded, we’ve done our part!’ the kabalite snarled. ‘If you don’t like it then go talk to Vect!’
‘I may just do that,’ Motley replied icily. ‘Now, tell me precisely where they all came from?’
The kabalite looked confused and glanced towards the vault. ‘How should I know? Craftworlds? Someone must have plundered a fair few to get all that together.’
Motley tasted bile at the thought. He remembered dead craftworlds adrift in the void, stripped of the souls that had once thronged their infinity circuits. He remembered the terrible acts of vengeance that had been undertaken against the perpetrators of such loathsome acts, but to punish was not to prevent and not every act could be punished. Over the millennia the dark eldar had still preyed upon their craftworld kin just as they preyed on every other living thing in the galaxy. Asdrubael Vect had gathered the fruits of their labours and turned them into weapons to keep his own people under control.
Vect.
Always Vect.
Motley had felt that he’d begun to understand the great tyrant, just a little – perhaps even had a sneaking respect for the absolute righteousness of Vect’s certainty in himself. Vect did not need the city but the city certainly needed him to keep it going. Without Vect Commorragh would have fallen to Chaos and catastrophe millennia ago. Undeniably it was Vect’s power that kept Commorragh alive, but Motley couldn’t feel anything other than hatred for him at that moment.
‘I must go,’ Motley said. ‘I…’
The Harlequin’s next words were cut off by a deafening noise from the vault behind him. A string of loud reports made him flinch and spin round with the expectation of witnessing gunfire. Instead he saw that the huge locking mechanism set into the vault doors was turning, dust spraying from its concentric metal rings as they aligned themselves with a series of resounding metallic clangs. Motley turned back to the kabalite and shouted one word to him over the tumult: ‘Run!’
Chapter 19
SHADOW AND FLAME
Lady Malys returned to Corespur with a sadly reduced coterie of her kabalites. Their Raiders and Venoms slunk into the gaping ports on the fortress’s flanks without fanfare or welcome. All eyes were currently focused elsewhere on the siege of the White Flames fortress and the rise of Aelindrach. Those few who noticed Malys’s Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue nosing into docking cradles gave them little heed. They gave the handful of prisoners she’d brought back with her even less.
Despite the apparent indifference of Vect’s lackeys to her arrival Malys found she was summoned into the tyrant’s presence within minutes of setting foot in Corespur. She felt chagrined that her hopes for her own rather minor task to be overlooked in the greater sweep of events had been optimistic, just as she had known they would be. Her mission to Valzho Sinister had been a disappointment as far as she was concerned. She shared none of the apparent eagerness of the supreme overlord to discuss its outcome. Heavily armed squads of Black Heart kabalites arrived to take away the prisoners and escort Malys to the supreme overlord without delay.
She was led onto a spiralling ramp of quicksilver that transported her down into the bowels of the great fortress in a blur of speed. Malys was intrigued by the change in venue. Corespur – as befitted usual fortress anatomy – had its lower areas given over to armouries, dungeons, torture chambers and pits. Every time she had met with Vect it had been somewhere in the upper reaches. She’d begun to suspect that Vect enjoyed the god-like disassociation to be found in ruling from the literal top of the world. Something had happened to propel the supreme overlord out of his usual haunts.
The uncomfortable, obvious conclusion was that she was being brought below for punishment or, at the very least, censure of some kind. Malys disciplined herself mentally for the ordeal to come. There was no escaping it, she’d allowed herself to get distracted by the Harlequin for too long and Vect was undoubtedly well aware of the fact. Why he’d set her up to fail was impossible to determine – a test of some kind probably. If that were the case then she had at least partially passed it by coming back to Corespur at all.
She found Vect in a low-vaulted chamber that was entirely dominated by a three-dimensional representation of Commorragh traced with floating skeins of light. Vect stood in the midst of it all like some unthinkably vast monster wading through the thousands of cubic kilometres of volume it represented.
‘You’ve returned,’ Vect stated without looking up, ‘and with precious little to show for your efforts from what I’m told.’
Malys sighed volubly. ‘Yes, I’m back with little to show for it. For what it’s worth I brought back all of the survivors from Valzho Sinister alive and unspoiled just as you ordered.’
Vect appeared to ignore her, his attention focused on a tiny point inside his city of light. Malys took in some of the details being displayed as a matter of course, but found a number of annotations were strange to her. The whole city was shown in all of its spiny, eclectic glory; a moderately flattened sea-urchin with the twisted horn of Corespur at the top and the blunt claws formed by the docking spurs spaced around its circumference.
Coloured areas indicated districts according to their allegiance. Corespur and most of Sorrow Fell were tinted purple. One tiny section of High Commorragh glowed a persistent, angry-looking red where the White Flames fortress continued to defy Sythrac. The dissonance was repeated by a number of bright embers in the otherwise grey mid-tiers – the known rebel kabals opportunistic enough to declare themselves openly. The lower two-thirds of the city were shown in darkness, a skeletal wireframe of the known topography of Low Commorragh that was virtually bereft of the usual indicators. Malys noted that Valzho Sinister, a hanging spindle located on the underside of the city and invisible at this scale, was located somewhere deep within the darkened territories.
‘I’m sure that you have a number of excuses that you want to share with me,’ Vect murmured disinterestedly as he focused his attention on another speck. ‘Get on with it.’
Malys knew that ‘excuses’ were what Asdrubael called facts that he didn’t like. Invoking the word wasn’t necessarily fatal in itself – there were good excuses and bad excuses in the world according to Vect. The supreme overlord was, however, letting her know that she was already standing on shaky ground.
‘The inmates breached their cells duri
ng the Dysjunction. A… riot had ensued that was further enlivened by a few entities from beyond the veil getting involved. When I got there only a few inmates were still alive, the rest were already dead or too insane to be useful.’
Vect shot her a cold glance, locking eyes with her for the first time. ‘I am disappointed that you felt the need to take that decision on my behalf,’ he said. Malys thought he looked tired, old even, but his eyes still blazed with dark ferocity. After a moment the supreme overlord looked back to his miniature city and muttered, ‘Continue.’
‘Asdrubael, the crazed ones were literally chewing off their own limbs or setting themselves on fire,’ Malys said with some exasperation. ‘They were void-touched, believe me, you wouldn’t have wanted them in Corespur. Anyway, we got the rest out despite the bowels of Aelindrach opening to vomit up every mandrake in creation into our laps.’
Vect reached out to touch a series of gem-like points of brightness that hung within the topographical map of Commorragh with his long-nailed hands. Tiny strings of glyphs unrolled beneath his fingertips. ‘You exaggerate, of course,’ the supreme overlord said, ‘although I’ll grant you that Aelindrach has grown prominent as a threat recently. In point of fact every mandrake in creation was certainly not in your lap, I’d say the vast bulk of them are in mine. Continue.’
‘That’s all there is to it,’ Malys replied cautiously. ‘I’ve done as you ordered and returned, also as ordered… You really believe the mandrakes are capable of anything?’
‘Normally, no. But my beliefs don’t come into it – they are a threat because they have come to believe in something else. The Fool was right about that.’
‘The Harlequin? You sent him after me – was he trying to warn me? If so, then thank you, Asdrubael, I didn’t think you still cared.’
Vect shot her a withering glance, his fingers still busy in the map. ‘No, I didn’t send him to warn you. Nor did I send him to cross blades with you, you undertook to do that on your own account.’
Malys realised that Vect was trying to keep her on the defensive, distracting her from… what? ‘The Fool was following me,’ she responded with a touch of outrage. ‘I couldn’t have that now, could I? I was protecting the security of my mission and by extension the security of your plans, supreme overlord.’
Vect shrugged disinterestedly and turned back to the points of light. Malys could see that perhaps twenty of them seemed to be the focus of the tyrant’s interest. One by one the tiny lights were changing from being amber-coloured to pulsing blue. The lights flashed in unison so as more of them changed over it became increasingly obvious just how many of them there were, a cascade of nodal points in the three-dimensional space. Malys realised there were more than twenty lights; there were dozens, hundreds maybe, all the way from Corespur into the city depths beneath Low Commorragh.
‘What are you doing, Asdrubael?’ Malys asked with a trace of alarm creeping into her voice. ‘You’re not planning to destroy the city are you? The fight isn’t over yet, so there’s no need to be quite so drastic.’
Her protest actually drew a chuckle out of Vect. ‘No there isn’t,’ he admitted, ‘not yet. This is something marginally more targeted than demolishing all of Commorragh.’
The great tyrant stepped back out of the floating image of the city and swept an arm through it in a grandiose gesture. The flashing pills of light steadied into a uniform constellation of icy-blue sparks. As they did so Malys felt the floor begin to tremble beneath her feet.
‘Marginally more targeted,’ Vect reiterated with some relish, ‘and considerably more efficacious.’
With Vect’s gesture in Corespur hundreds of stasis-sealed vaults across the city responded to the final input of their fail-safe codes. Monolithic mag-locks that had not moved in centuries rotated in their housings before slamming open with a sound like the tolling of sombre bells. Metre-thick doors began to grind slowly open with a low, rolling thunder that reverberated from the heights of Corespur down into the depths of Low Commorragh. Within the vaults thousands of smooth-skinned war machines shook themselves into wakefulness. The tortured, insane ghosts inhabiting their shells awoke to the light of another dawn that was to be marked only by perfidy and horror.
Ancient heroes, ordinary citizens, traumatised veterans, innocents, criminals, the insane; all became one inside the nightmarish mannequins they had been sealed into. As they were roused into wakefulness their composite personalities were goaded on by falsehoods and lies. The unending wars they fought were each their own version of reality. Some saw themselves emerging from their vaults into a shining city bathed in golden sunlight beset by nightmarish monstrosities. Others saw only a smoke-wreathed battlefield refilled with mortal enemies from the past. Some of the captive spirits believed that they fought to protect their long-dead loved ones, others that their opportunity for vengeance had come at last, for others unreasoning fear or rampant murder-lust were motivation enough to lash out at the living.
The gleaming constructs marched from their vaults and out into the city, their long limbs moving with the fluid assurance of living creatures. Resistance came immediately; diseased ur-ghuls, pitch-black mandrakes, rebel kabalites and escaped slaves instinctively turned their attacks against the new enemy rising amongst them. At first Vect’s enemies fought and died without understanding what came against them.
On the docking ring the port of lost souls had been overrun by escaped slaves. Several barges full of them had been in the process of unloading as the Dysjunction struck, including thousands of trained fighters that had been captured expressly for use in the arena. These proved to be a formidable force when united by desperation, opportunity and their mutual hatred for the Commorrites. Opportunistic kabals looking to recapture the port for themselves made several probing attacks. Each was firmly rebuffed by masses of wild-eyed, half-naked primitives armed with rifles and blades torn from the dead hands of their captors.
Vect’s Castigators seemed drawn to the port as if the unconscious pull of killing non-eldar foes governed their actions. The slaves’ captured weapons could do little to harm the metal-skinned war machines, while the Castigators’ own distortion whips and mono-claws tore easily through their ranks. Discipline, such as it was, broke and the slaves fled in all directions, some barricaded themselves inside the port, others split into bands to try and escape from it. A few attempted to surrender to the long-limbed, blood-slicked constructs. The Castigators hunted down and executed every one of them.
On Yolosc tier Archon Xhubael had declared her intention to follow Yllithian’s leadership to her coterie of petty archons. Not all had welcomed it and some had to be silenced because of that. A brief, vicious skirmish ensued through the chambers and corridors of Xhubael’s demesne that left her warriors scattered and disorganised. Xhubael had never known that the foundations of her stronghold on Yolosc abutted a long-buried Castigator vault. Her walls shook and crumbled as the war machines blasted their way to the surface. Xhubael’s last sight as she lay pinned beneath the fallen rubble was of steel warriors with arms and legs like knife blades climbing out of the pit to end her life.
In the shadowed depths claimed by Aelindrach, mandrakes and ur-ghuls pounced on the deadly automata from ambush again and again. Each outcome was the same – swarming shadow creatures cut down in droves, a desperate struggle in hand-to-hand combat with implacable, untiring enemies. Numbers alone brought some successes with individual Castigators dragged down and torn apart, but the price paid for each small victory was too horrible for even the ur-ghuls to bear. In the upper city the lesser wardings erected by Vect kept the children of Aelindrach penned inside an invisible maze. The Castigators’ remorseless assault drove them into the killing fields of the White Flames fortress and the blood-soaked foundation strata beneath it.
Everywhere the defeated fighters cursed the terrible weapons wielded by the new army, and their seemingly unstoppable resolve. Word soon began
to spread that Vect had called upon the unquiet dead to become his foot soldiers against the living.
Bellathonis became instantly wary when the first vibrations from the vaults’ opening reached him. He and Xagor were driving his grotesques towards the White Flames fortress, picking their way through the vastly complex interweaving of pipes, conduits, tunnels, tubes, channels, and cracks that made up the foundation strata. He had hopes of reaching not the fortress itself, but his temporary laboratory beneath it.
He’d told Xhakoruakh that he needed better equipment, and that until the shadow-king secured the facilities of the Black Descent there was little else he could usefully do. Unfortunately when Xhakoruakh agreed he also set one of his nightfiends and clutch of mandrakes to ‘protect’ the haemonculus while he was in Commorragh. Most of Bellathonis’s thoughts had subsequently been occupied with just how he could rid himself of his troublesome and unwanted bodyguards.
The tunnel they were in shook for half a minute before falling ominously still again. Bellathonis glanced at Xagor for confirmation and saw the wrack nod. He’d felt it too. Time spent in Aelindrach had taught Bellathonis to rely on his non-visual perception overly much and now he was having trouble adjusting back to normality. By the disturbed flitting of the mandrakes they were also aware that something was amiss. The grotesques simply stood and drooled. Within the foundation strata, sound was a strange and inconstant mechanism; the weaving tunnels could carry noises from kilometres away or muffle ones from nearby so it became impossible to tell how close they were.
The unmistakable sound of metal striking stone filtered through the darkness, a beat repeated many times over. It was regular, unhurried and seemed to come from all directions. Bellathonis called back his grotesques and addressed the nameless nightfiend leading his guards.
‘We need to get out of here right now,’ Bellathonis said hurriedly, his voice a raw whisper. ‘Xhakoruakh needs to hear about what’s just happened.’
Path of the Dark Eldar Page 90
