Yllithian could not shake the image from his mind. Just for an instant the fortress seemed to hang there, frozen among the towering fires, and then it disintegrated into a billion flaming fragments. The solid-looking lines of alabaster walls and towers flew apart like sand before a hurricane. Yllithian’s imagination was set reeling by the power displayed, for an entire spire-fortress – reinforced, armoured and shielded with the very best that Commorragh’s artisans could fashion – to be wiped out in a single moment… and Yllithian’s heart was broken in that same instant.
The archon of the White Flames sagged, black depression gibbering in his tortured mind. With the loss of the fortress he was bereft; thousands of years of accumulated wealth and history gone, his followers, his slaves… In an instant his strength had been reduced to that of a petty archon from the mid-tiers, just the few warriors that were with him, his incubi bodyguards and a small legion of agents scattered around Commorragh who, by their nature, would turn traitor at the first opportunity.
A shouted warning brought Yllithian to his senses. His crew had spotted a swarm of grav-craft moving swiftly through the jagged spire-scape. Their course was parallel with Yllithian’s, their objective unknown. He raised the scope once more in his trembling hand and looked for colours or insignia. A wave of relief washed over him as he identified them as Xelian’s Blades of Desire – he even caught a glimpse of Xelian herself on the rear deck of a Venom.
He ordered his helmsman to set a converging course with the fast-moving Blades. He needn’t have bothered, they were spotted immediately and the whole swarm altered course to intercept him. Within moments they were engulfed by a restless cloud of snarling reavers and hellions that circled menacingly just beyond pistol-shot. The Blades’ battered collection of surviving Raiders and Venoms swept in close behind and joined the throng. A single Venom sped out of the mass and slewed to a halt beside Yllithian’s craft. Xelian sprang lightly across from the Venom to his Raider.
She was, Yllithian noted, still covered in blood from fighting in the aerial battle over the fortress. Two short, wide-bladed swords hung negligently from Xelian’s hands, also caked in gore. Yllithian moved to place himself out of easy striking distance while his three incubi quietly placed themselves in position to guard him. This was a delicate moment, as Xelian’s force critically outnumbered Yllithian’s handful of White Flames. She might decide that betrayal was the logical choice, that their attempts to unseat Vect were finished.
‘We still have a choice,’ Yllithian told her, confidently taking the initiative to head off any traitorous notions. ‘We can flee the city in our remaining ships or take to Low Commorragh where we can evade Vect’s kabalites successfully. In either case we’ll need to regroup and rally our supporters.’
Xelian stared back at him with a calculating, hungry gaze like a hunting cat sizing up its next meal. ‘You’ve failed, Yllithian,’ she growled throatily. ‘Your keenest supporters all just got immolated along with your entire kabal. You’ve got nothing left that’s worth a damn.’
‘But we’re so close!’ Yllithian cried passionately. ‘Look around you. Vect has pulled every trick he could and left the city in ruins! He’s crumbling, Xelian! His support is slipping away! One more push and we can take him down.’
‘I don’t think so. At the start of this you talked about Vect always using the best weapons he could get hold of. I think he’s just proved that he can find bigger weapons than you. That isn’t going to change.’
Yllithian opened his mouth to retort but Xelian was already moving, her limbs a blur. The two short swords thrust through the gorgets of the closest incubi, wedging the wide points firmly into their spinal columns. Xelian swung herself forwards, feet first, using the sword hilts for leverage as she delivered a double kick to the chest of the third incubus. The impact sent the heavily armoured guard sprawling over the railing of the Raider and plummeting to his death below.
Xelian’s attack took only a split second, but Yllithian had his sword and pistol out before the last of his incubi fell. Around him he could hear crashes and screams as the Blades of Desire took apart the rest of his warriors. Despair burned hot in his mind, but there was defiance with it and a determination to make Xelian pay for her treachery.
She looked at him and smiled rapaciously. ‘Just the way I’ve always wanted to see you, broken but still with a hint of defiance. This will be a pleasure.’
Yllithian was a highly trained swordsman, a fine fighter by even Commorragh’s unforgiving standards. Xelian beat him as easily as she would have defeated a child.
Chapter 26
THE DEATH OF HOPE
When the Dysjunction first struck Commorragh, Asdrubael Vect had called together the High Archons, including Yllithian, to the supreme overlord’s grand auditorium in Corespur. There Vect had flayed several dozen archons and hung them from the roof in chains to emphasise the gravity of the situation to the rest. They took Yllithian back there for his final humiliation.
Xelian had kept him alive and delivered him unharmed directly to Vect. He had been stripped and imprisoned but his wait had been a short one – just long enough for the crushing gravity of the situation to set in. Yllithian could almost have forgiven Xelian for doing it – if the roles were reversed he would have done the same thing – almost, but not quite. He hoped that Vect would wreak his vengeance upon her too. Something every bit as dire as the fate the tyrant no doubt had planned for him.
Suicide whispered seductively at the edges of his consciousness, just as it had during his hopeless fight with Xelian. He still recoiled from it in horror, knowing it for the siren call of She Who Thirsts, ever hungry for his soul. No, he refused to give up his life when his one remaining dignity might be having it forcibly taken from him, with him biting and clawing to the last.
They dragged him to be displayed before Vect, stripped and in chains, and placed him between the horns of a half-moon of archons arranged before the steps to Vect’s throne. The dais itself was raised, a thick-bodied pillar of metal extending up to the ceiling.
Sitting directly in front of the dais, only a few metres from Yllithian, was a waist-high irregular-looking lump of something hidden beneath a black silk sheet. The sight of it gave Yllithian an ugly premonition it would be involved in whatever torment lay ahead, but its nature he could not even guess at. Moments passed with only the howl of distant winds for accompaniment as the archons waited in silence.
A hundred archons had been present at Vect’s first audience; Yllithian noted that barely a score stood at the foot of the dais now. All of Vect’s favoured were there, though: Sythrac, Malys, Khromys, Malixian and Xerathis. Treacherous Xelian was present too, although Yllithian did enjoy the fact that no other archon would apparently stand close to her.
The light leaking into the auditorium through its high windows was wan and poisonous-looking, the stolen suns once more sealed back into their sub-realm vessels and leaking the barest possible illumination across the eternal city. For a moment Yllithian wished he could cruise the upper air just once more with the city spread out beneath him, dreaming of days when he would dominate it.
The wait was ended abruptly by the tramp of Black Heart kabalite warriors filing into the auditorium and taking position around the dais or along the walls. A number of Vect’s courtiers and playthings swept in to arrange themselves on the dais steps. Among them Yllithian saw Bellathonis’s two minions, Kharbyr and Xagor, in the company of a capering, masked fellow dressed in grey. He wondered briefly which one of them was really Bellathonis before deciding he was too tired to really care.
A troupe of slaves was lined up to sing a passage of the Maldhys Uzkch Vect – the triumph of Vect – under the exacting ministrations of two haemonculi. As the slaves’ voices reached a crescendo of pain the dais slid downwards as smoothly as a piston until it became level with the steps. A hemispherical shield of entropic energy atop the dais swirled and dissipate
d to reveal a dark, ugly throne occupied by Asdrubael Vect. The supreme overlord of Commorragh favoured the archons with a broad, malevolent smile.
‘Yllithian, I’m so glad you could join us,’ Vect said with levity. ‘I feel that today’s lesson is going to be made invaluable by your presence.’
‘The lesson is that you’re vulnerable, Asdrubael Vect,’ Yllithian replied, twisting to address the archons too. ‘You can kill me, but another will take my place. One day you’ll fall and I’ve brought that day closer!’
Vect raised his brows quizzically and rose from his throne. ‘Your defiance sounds weak and desperate, Yllithian,’ the tyrant said as he descended to the cloth-covered lump before the dais. ‘It would be more effective for you to beg me for your life – I’m inclined to grant it.’
Yllithian blinked with surprise. Even though he knew that Vect was toying with him he couldn’t prevent a spark of hope kindling in his breast. The supreme overlord saw it and smirked.
‘Your optimism is quite admirable, but I imagine that’s what brought you to this point in the first place. Optimism and hubris – oh, and lots of luck, we shouldn’t forget about that…’
Vect whipped away the silk sheet with a flourish. Under it was revealed a life-like statue of a crouching figure rendered in black glass. Yllithian recognised it instantly – it was his old body, discarded and forgotten since he had escaped from it and the vitrifying glass plague that was destroying it. The blood drained from his face and sweat sprang from every pore.
‘You never asked me why I should want to spare your life,’ Vect said. ‘Ask me now.’
‘Why…?’ was all that Yllithian could manage to croak, his throat dry with fear.
‘Because you’ve been touched by the gods, Yllithian,’ Vect said with cruel mockery. ‘There are powers with such investment in you that separating your soul from your body will have consequences best avoided… for now.’
‘Powers?’ Yllithian repeated in confusion.
Vect looked at Yllithian with his black, penetrating eyes, the twin orbs blazing with malicious intent. ‘That you do not even guess is the ultimate irony, I suppose,’ Vect observed coldly. ‘The Fool said it was so, yet I found it hard to credit. You have been made into a pawn, Yllithian, a servant of hidden masters. Your overweening ambition called forth the Architect of Fate and that fickle entity guided your quests for forbidden knowledge and ultimate power. Your strength, such as it is, has never been your own. It was granted to you from an arcane source, and for now that deity has abandoned you.’
Outrage surged through every fibre of Yllithian’s being. He was no pawn of eldritch powers! His motivations were his own! Vect grinned openly as he drank in the anguish. Beneath the fierce twist of emotions Yllithian felt the first worms of doubt begin writhing. How often had a miraculous piece of luck furthered his plans? How often had his enemies looked the wrong way? The very possibility was soul-crushing.
Seeing that Yllithian had reached his nadir Vect appeared to tire of his plaything. The supreme overlord went back to his throne, turned to his courtiers and twitched a single, long finger to summon one of them forwards. It was the individual that Yllithian had known as Kharbyr, bony-looking and white-faced now – evidently this was the real Bellathonis, in the throes of transforming himself to show his old face. The haemonculus was carrying a silvery crown with tall points like horns at the brow. Yllithian recognised that, too. He shrieked and tried to flinch before he was restrained. Helpless, he could only watch and curse as Bellathonis jammed the crown firmly onto his head.
Crippling agony stabbed at Yllithian’s temples, a searing hot pain that burned out all thought, all volition except for the need to scream. There was a wrenching sensation, deep rooted as though something at the very core of his being was twisted free. There was a sickening sense of transition and Yllithian found himself paralysed, blinded and nearly deaf save for the very faintest echoes of his own screams fading away in his vitrified ears.
Motley watched the gruesome theatre as the rebel archon was publically tortured by Vect. As the tyrant had said, it was an object lesson, a demonstration to the other archons of what lay in wait for them if they followed a similar course. The screams abruptly faded away as Yllithian’s soul was migrated into the barely living receptacle of glass that had been his previous body. Motley shivered involuntarily at what was to come. The threat was not over yet.
Bellathonis stepped back as the process was completed and the two Yllithians, glass and flesh, were dragged away. One might become the new archon of a re-forged White Flames kabal if any survived Vect’s murderous pogrom. Equally he might be consigned to a horrible death at the tyrant’s whim. The other, the true Yllithian, Motley hoped was destined for a long and fruitless existence extended for as long as possible by the haemonculi. He’d witnessed what could happen to a soul marked by the Chaos gods at the moment of death in the World Shrine of Lileathanir and it was not a pretty sight. The memory of it made what he had to do next all the harder.
‘Motley. Xelian. Kneel before me,’ Vect intoned from his dark throne. ‘Come and beg my forgiveness. Your respective gifts were pleasing to me, but I still want to hear reasons to grant your continued existence.’
Xelian strode out brazenly and knelt before Vect with her head bowed. Motley wandered forwards more hesitantly, keenly aware of the predatory gaze of the Commorrites fastened on him from every side. He got to his knees beside Xelian, acutely conscious of her almost animalistic presence so close, and a faint musk like the scent of blood…
Motley suddenly thrust his arm sideways with the speed of a striking snake, seeming barely to touch Xelian’s throat with the heel of his palm. Xelian collapsed, her body instantly consumed from within by the writhing monofilaments of the Harlequin’s kiss that had been concealed at Motley’s wrist.
Vect’s courtiers cried out in dismay and scattered. archons and guards surged forwards with weapons in hand. Vect merely held up a hand for silence and continued to watch the Harlequin from his throne with dark intensity. Motley ignored them all as he crouched over Xelian’s rapidly liquefying remains with a small, dimly glowing gem in his hand. The gem swiftly brightened and gained a vivid, crimson hue. Motley stood and held up the ruddy jewel between his thumb and forefinger for Vect’s appraisal.
‘Forgive me, dreadful lord,’ Motley began. ‘Where one god comes the others will surely follow. That’s what makes the power of Chaos so dangerous. We used to think we understood them, before the Fall. We used to laugh at how bombastic and primitive they were, but they know how to persist better than any mortal and how to take advantage of the smallest opening. Xelian was becoming a vessel for the blood god, her soul was tainted – the stone doesn’t lie.’
Vect waved away Motley’s explanation disinterestedly. ‘If you’re correct in your supposition that means there have been Chosen of three out of the four Chaos gods at work in my city. By your own admission where one comes the others will follow and yet we’ve seen no agent of She Who Thirsts. Interesting that you prosecute the others so readily but not those of our nemesis, the bane of our kind.’
The Harlequin pursed his lips, but did not answer until the spirit stone between his fingers had vanished with some adroit sleight of hand. ‘One might argue,’ Motley said cautiously, ‘that we are all her agents – all the eldar who survived the Fall, I mean, and all the generations afterwards – we granted Her existence and now we are pledged to Her before we even take our first breath. On that basis my hands would be permanently crimson if I pursued them all.’
Vect laughed cynically. ‘You’re evading, Fool. Your recriminatory self-examinations are of no interest to me. There is a great deal of work still to be done and you’re a dangerous distraction from that. Take your prize and get out of my sight. If you come before me again I will not be so gentle.’
Motley bowed low before the supreme overlord and hurried away from his dark, dire court be
fore Vect could change his mind. It was a victory, of sorts, and Motley decided to be simply glad he’d had a part to play in it without paying the ultimate price.
Deep within the shadow-realm of Aelindrach the Decapitator squats in his sanctum turning over the bulbous skull of Xhakoruakh in his hands. He minutely examines it with his twisted senses, tasting the shadow-skein clinging to its calciferous ridges and bony orbits. At last he is satisfied and climbs the rows of skulls forming the inner wall of his dome-like sanctum. Kheradruakh feels his way to the correct niche and carefully pushes the shadow-king’s skull into position. It comes as no surprise that the appointed spot for Xhakoruakh’s skull is directly opposite that of his twin brother, Azoruakh, their opposing hatreds balanced perfectly.
Kheradruakh returns to his dais and squats again, his sightless eyes gazing at the hole being worn in reality by the dead gaze of his amassed victims. The eye has closed again, the false-conduit is no more and yet the Decapitator believes he senses a stirring at the place between worlds. He waits and dreams of dark days yet to come.
Epilogue
So, dear companion, we come to the end of my tale, the termination of a journey through three stories of the eternal city woven around the advent of the Dysjunction and its aftermath. As narrator I stand revealed as the Harlequin, with small parts to play in the first, a starring role for the second and stumbling through increasingly reckless improvisations for the third.
In the passage of this adventure, the Path of the Archon, I learned something from Commorragh. It was a pearl of wisdom I had often witnessed but never truly grasped until I fell under the tutelage of Asdrubael Vect. Simply put it is this: to become the leader of many is to become something other, a being both greater and lesser than the ordinary mortals they rule over. Like the gods of Chaos our leaders are constrained to fulfil the roles we imagine for them. Our leaders, our tyrants, our overlords, our despots, call them what you will – they impose their will with the force that we grant them in the mortal realm just as daemons do in the immortal realm of the warp.
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