Motley wiped tears from his eyes and calmed himself. ‘Ah, excuse me for that, things had been getting so grim lately that I’d almost forgotten why I came… and it’s almost here – the big show! No time for you to reach your seats now without a little help. Luckily for you helping is my business.’
He will swallow your soul, Bellathonis. You’re damned by even talking to him. Accept no help from this creature and move on.+
Reverse psychology? It seemed so crude on Angevere’s part that it gave Bellathonis pause for thought. ‘Tell me your intentions more plainly,’ he told the chuckling Harlequin. ‘What do you mean by “the big show”? Why are you saying we’re too late?’
Motley pointed up into the skies high above the Iconoclast’s mound, up past Port Carmine to the spiretops of High Commorragh where the Ilmaea shone clearly. There was turmoil in the upper air, vast numbers of objects swirling and crackling with distant lightning.
‘The overture is beginning,’ Motley said, suddenly serious. ‘I’ll help you to reach Corespur in the blink of an eye – it’s dangerous, but what isn’t right now? I’ll even make sure you can meet with Vect and explain yourself to him, cut a deal, fall on his non-existent mercy – whatever it is you hope to do.’
‘Why?’ Bellathonis’s question was flat and suspicious-sounding. Motley’s lips quirked into a smile before he answered.
‘Because I’m Vect’s agent!’ Motley cried pompously. ‘Or so some would have me believe, but mostly because if the supreme overlord has you to focus on then maybe, just maybe, he might relent and stop the slaughter.’
‘Hmm, so what you are really saying is that you intend to take me before Vect whether I like it or not,’ Bellathonis said and gripped his pistol more tightly.
It was a futile gesture, he knew; everything he’d ever read about Harlequins emphasised how dangerous they were beneath their exterior projection of fun and frivolity. Coming from scholars with a fine interest in dangerous psychopaths such conclusions could not be dismissed lightly.
‘Am I?’ Motley pondered the notion for a moment and then looked back at Bellathonis without any trace of humour in his eyes.
‘I am,’ the Harlequin announced firmly.
Chapter 24
WHITE FLAMES, BLACK HEART
Valossian Sythrac gazed hatefully across the smoking plain at the shimmering walls and high-peaked roofs of the White Flames fortress. All efforts to take the place had been suspended on the supreme overlord’s orders, the latest in a stream of nonsensical and seemingly contradictory instructions coming down from Vect’s ziggurat. Frustrated, Sythrac was reduced to drifting slowly around the perimeter of the siege in a Raider in the hopes that Yllithian and his lackeys would seize the opportunity to sally out and attack him. His menagerie of captured souls babbled and shifted restlessly on the edge of his consciousness, seeming to feed on his discontent.
Sythrac still had faith in Vect – no doubt the supreme overlord was preparing something he simply did not need to know about in order to perform his function. He told himself he accepted that blindness being imposed on him as necessary to enact Vect’s will, but a small part of him questioned that necessity.
The ravaged plain around the White Flames fortress had become a killing field for both sides. The surrounding spires had all fallen, the foundation strata was full of rents and gouges so deep that in five spots they went all the way through to the lower city. Despite all the violence the White Flames fortress still stood proud and defiant behind fields of seemingly impenetrable force. Anything moving in the open plain was annihilated by the emplaced weapons of the fortress or by the surrounding Black Heart forces hovering just beyond the fortress’s range. They were deadlocked.
As a result the fighting had become desultory, limited to squads picking their way through the tunnels in the foundation strata or attempting to dig new ones. Desperate, frenzied battles between groups of mandrakes, Castigators, kabalites and ur-ghuls were taking place just a few metres beneath the surface in spaces barely big enough to swing a weapon. The mandrakes and ur-ghuls were still massing, their numbers increasing by the hour. The arrival of the Castigators had acted to stabilise the situation but had done nothing to alleviate it.
Sieges, stalemate, tunnelling, stagnation – none of it was the Commorrite way. Sythrac’s early successes had given his force momentum and instilled a sense of purpose. The longer they sat still besieging the White Flames the more that energy drained away and left them vulnerable. Every kabal in the city was watching the siege and in their eyes the mere fact that Vect was not winning it meant that he was losing it.
The ghosts swirled again, unable to conceal their awareness of a new development. A flicker of movement near the base of the fortress caught Sythrac’s attention. A moment later his warriors on the Raider saw it too, pointing and crying the alarm. Lines of tiny figures were debouching from gates in the fortress that were level with the blasted plain. As Sythrac watched docks in the upper towers opened up too. The lean bodies of Raiders and Ravagers began to slide out of them with their aethersails spread for combat.
The White Flames forces began forming up in the plain. They were careful to remain safely under the protection of the fortress guns and out of range, but otherwise they were clear in their intent to offer battle. Sythrac wondered what sort of madness had gripped Yllithian. As impressive as the White Flames numbers looked the Black Heart kabal easily outnumbered them by five to one. A feint then, an attempt to draw Sythrac in just as he had hoped to draw Yllithian out.
The ghost of Daryvitch Helstrab, who had once been the grand marshal of a sixty-year campaign across the Platea Rift, whispered of an alternative scenario to Sythrac. A relief force was coming. Sythrac dragged his attention away from the White Flames’ distracting little parade out on the plain and squinted towards Ashkeri Talon and the docking ring. Sure enough a swarm of distant specks was coming into view and becoming denser by the second. The disembodied voices of his spies whispered in his ear describing the approach of multiple grav-craft with no positive identification displayed as yet.
Sythrac cursed and sent word of his intentions to Vect’s floating citadel. He also requested the help of the Castigators, but he did not wait for a response. He divided his forces, one part moving to intercept the relieving force while the greater part remained to guard the fortress and prepare to meet any sally by its defenders. The odds were shifting in Yllithian’s favour. The situation was still far from being critical but the trend was a disturbing one. Sythrac felt eager to rectify that fact.
Xelian felt the wind whipping through her hair and laughed as they plunged towards the White Flames fortress. Her personal Venom transport clove through the air eagerly, bucking beneath her feet as the pilot sent it hurtling through the thin air of High Commorragh towards her date with destiny. Around her packs of reavers and hellions raced to overtake one another (although they never, ever passed her, she would have killed them if they tried). Behind her the sky was dark with more Venoms plus Raiders full of wyches and beastmasters with their savage pets. Razorwings and Voidravens circled overhead giving them top cover.
It was an impressive showing, better than she’d hoped for. Every member of the Blades of Desire that could walk or hold a weapon was crammed onboard the transports or piloting one of the craft within the swarm. Xelian had left her fortress empty and virtually unguarded to bring everything to the fight. Leaving forces behind to keep an open line of retreat would only signal weakness to her followers. This was the point of decision, all or nothing.
They had swung out high and wide around the docking ring to avoid attention until they turned in towards their objective. Xelian led the swarm in a sweeping turn to place the city squarely in front of them. The stacked tiers of foundation strata and spires expanded before them, revealing a circular gap in the spire tops with the ivory spike of the White Flames fortress at its centre. Smoke and flames wreathed the fortress
but it still stood unbroken. Around it a slowly rotating storm cell of grav-craft and scourges wheeled endlessly at a safe distance, too cowardly to take on Yllithian’s guns – just as he’d said they would be.
They swooped in towards the battleground, the Razorwings and Voidravens surging ahead to begin their complex dance with their opposite numbers in Vect’s forces. Missiles rippled from the flyers’ wings as the two sides closed in. A chain of brief flashes marked the deaths of pilots and machines just before the survivors converged into an inextricable, constantly twisting knot of hunters and hunted.
Xelian’s remaining forces slipped beneath the airborne melee without slowing. Her own pilots could only keep Vect’s busy for so long before numbers began to tell and she intended to capitalise fully on that time. Part of the outer ring of Vect’s besiegers was peeling off to meet her. They were ragged and slow but evidently determined to make Xelian fight before she could gain the support of her allies inside the fortress. Again, just as Yllithian had predicted.
There was barely time to identify the enemies rising to meet them. Distant Raiders and Ravagers swelled rapidly. In the course of a few seconds they grew from miniscule dark scratches outlined against the battle plain into baroquely bladed swords aiming straight for the heart of Xelian’s swarm. A lethal web of darklight beams, disintegrator pulses and hyper-velocity splinters criss-crossed between the two forces in the instant before impact. Reavers exploded, Raiders gouted flames and fell away before Xelian’s force smashed into their challengers with a physical shock that resounded throughout the spires of High Commorragh.
Reaver bladevanes tore through metal and flesh as they careened through the enemy ranks close enough to touch. Wyches dived from their hurtling Venoms onto the pitching decks of enemy craft as they swept past. Hellions slashed at warriors and were blasted from their skyboards in return. The aerial battle rapidly devolved into a swirling mass of attacking craft, falling bodies and flaming debris.
At her command Xelian’s Venom dived into the fray and grazed past the prow of a Ravager that was firing furiously in all directions. She leapt off into the midst of the Ravager’s startled crew with two short, straight swords in her hands. This was butcher’s work, close and deadly with no time for finesse, so she had armed herself accordingly. Within seconds the Ravager was awash with blood and piled corpses, wallowing helplessly with its guns silent. Xelian snatched a second to look around for her next victims.
Her own Raiders, being slightly slower than the vanguard of Venoms and reavers, were just now entering the battle. The lean grav-craft grappled with those of the enemy to drag themselves together into temporary, shifting battlegrounds where warriors and wyches slaughtered one another with glorious abandon. Khymerae and clawed fiends were urged into battle by the beastmasters, sweeping across the interlocked islands of craft like a tide of nightmares.
Their victories proved short-lived as the foe turned their guns against the captured craft to send them and their captors plummeting in flames. Far below on the ravaged plain around Yllithian’s fortress Xelian could see that the White Flames forces were on the move. A wedge was forming to thrust against the encircling ring where it would break through to link up with her own forces. The Black Heart kabalites were responding as they must – by tightening the ring to threaten the fortress and the sallying force with their whole weight. Even Vect’s darkly gleaming ziggurat was closing in on the fortress at the head of a mass of Ravagers.
Xelian’s Venom returned and she leapt easily across to its rear deck as it passed. She directed her pilot to a substantial tangle of interlocked Raiders nearby, where combatants were still struggling hand to hand. There was time to wet her blades perhaps once or twice more before it was time to withdraw. Xelian and her Blades of Desire had done their part, now it was down to Yllithian and his shadowy allies to do the rest.
Vect watched the battle develop, ignoring the pleas and entreaties of the archons to take action. The battlefield appeared as a roiling cauldron of violence: frothing and bubbling, with black and red jets flaring between a thousand chained lightnings. Hundreds of predatory machines dived to their doom carrying their fragile cargoes of flesh with them. Energies were unleashed that atomised metal and burned the air itself. Brave warriors and cowards alike were blasted, stabbed and shredded out of existence in their thousands by the impartial whims of fate. Vect smiled to see it all, a fitting final act.
Sythrac had moved to intercept the rebels that were attempting to break the siege and now the traitor Yllithian moved his troops to intercede in that fight. Move and counter-move. The fools had matched themselves against a master and already they had shown their hand. Every rebellious kabalite that Yllithian could call into play was here, drawn in by the inescapable gravity of the siege. They had all come to fight on the game board Yllithian and Vect had created between them. Move and countermove. But Yllithian and his rebels had made a fatal error by moving too soon – they were not strong enough to prevail.
Vect gave an order. The Kabal of the Black Heart and its allies – Malys’s Poisoned Tongue, Malixian’s Ninth Raptrex, Khromys’s Obsidian Rose, Xerathis’s Broken Sigil, entire regiments of Castigators – swept into the fortress’s killing field to come to grips with Yllithian’s White Flames.
They were greeted by a storm of fire that dwarfed anything seen in the battle so far. The White Flames fortress blazed like a false sun, momentarily outshining the Ilmaea with its fatal corona. Spears of all-destroying plasma and massed darklight beams slashed through the air to tear smouldering gaps in Vect’s forces. Again and again the gaps were closed in the ranks as Vect’s kabals plunged onwards in an unstoppable wave.
Vect laughed at the destruction. It mattered not to him how many lived or died on the field of battle, only that the bloodied survivors pledged fealty to him alone.
The wave crashed upon the fortress and the troops isolated outside it in a shuddering foam of violence. Raiders and Venoms disgorged squads of kabalites and Castigators onto the ravaged foundation strata to take on Yllithian’s warriors. Others surged onwards to assault the shot-starred walls of the White Flames fortress itself. A blistering firefight encompassed the scene, the energy flashes and explosions merging into a continuous howl as if a legion of mad gods had been set loose upon the city.
Eager to witness the carnage, Vect ordered his mobile fortress closer. The multi-tiered ziggurat of darkly gleaming metal drifted slowly towards the fighting under the watchful protection of a squadron of a hundred Ravagers. As they began to move reports reached Vect of kabals approaching from the mid and lower tiers of the city. Tiny, desperate knots of Commorrites had heard about the battle and were coming to make their own marks on the city’s future. Their true allegiance was anyone’s guess, some motivated by opportunism or greed, some by idealism. Most would be driven by an inflated idea of their own importance. Vect ordered some of his Castigators and Ravagers to keep them back. This struggle would be decided without their last-minute interference.
Yllithian’s forces were failing, the White Flames warriors outside the fortress cut off and surrounded by a fast flowing whirlpool of Vect’s kabalites. Those of his minions assaulting the walls, however, were failing in their attempts. Every slit and cupola in the high white walls flared with violent energies that were exacting a dreadful toll from the attackers. Vect ordered his ziggurat closer still with the intention of employing its formidable firepower to force a breach. Yllithian’s fortress was mighty, but the fury of Vect was mightier still.
The fortress gunners recognised the threat, shifting their aim to engulf the ziggurat in a storm of fire as it came within range. Rippling shields of pure energy shrugged off the shower of blasts and bolts as if it were only a light summer rain. Vect’s escorting squadron of open-decked Ravagers fared worse in the firestorm but doggedly maintained station with their supreme overlord. As the ziggurat began to cross the ravaged plain its shadow fell across the deep pits in the f
oundation strata. A change occurred, a roiling in the darkness itself as though it had suddenly gained substance. Crooked, pitch-black figures with bone-white blades in hand began pouring out onto the plain like ants boiling from a nest.
The Ravager escort was rapidly overwhelmed, the long-bodied gunships sinking beneath the weight of struggling mandrakes and crew. Vect’s ziggurat seemed to stagger in the air as scores of shadow-stepping mandrakes swarmed aboard it. They were led by a giant figure armed with a rusted scythe that it wielded with unstoppable strength. Blood flowed freely in the ziggurat’s narrow, armoured corridors as the Black Heart kabalites fought desperately to keep the mandrakes from their prize.
They failed.
Yllithian watched the battle develop from afar, drifting inconspicuously aboard a commandeered Raider and surrounded by a small escort. The sight of the White Flames fortress still glittering and defiant provoked an almost sentimental mood in him. Of all the things he had gambled in his pursuit of power his ancestral fortress was the most precious. To see it still unbroken after he had emerged from the labyrinth was a source of indescribable relief.
Bereft of any superior means of observation on this occasion Yllithian had to rely on boosted optics in the shape of a small hand-held telescope to observe what he could of the fighting. He watched Xelian’s Blades of Desire appear over the rim of High Commorragh and race into battle, drawing off a sizeable contingent of besiegers. He saw his own warriors struggling to link up with her and becoming cut off outside the fortress.
In that moment Yllithian wished he could have been closer to the forefront of the action, waiting with Xhakoruakh in the pits beneath the plain or standing on the walls surrounded by his troops so that he could watch the trap unfold. Vect’s Castigators had driven the mandrake-king’s forces back into the shadows and culled their numbers significantly, but, as the stinking giant had revealed, they still did not understand how numerous their enemies remained.
Path of the Dark Eldar Page 95
