Xyriadh eventually reappeared, her chameleonic armour making her appear as a disembodied head when she removed her helm. Her features bore a close resemblance to Vyril’s, an effect intensified by her shaven head. Xagor believed them cousins, Aez’ashya brother and sister, Kharbyr reckoned them a mother and daughter-disguised-as-son but he had a taste for melodramatic theatre like Ursyllas’s Dispossessions. Morr had kept his own counsel and neither of Yllithian’s agents had been forthcoming on the subject. Xyriadh certainly took the role of senior partner when she spoke, as she did now.
‘The meeting stone is up ahead, no sign of our contact but I didn’t get close enough to be sure before coming back.’
‘Why?’ demanded Morr.
‘Because it seemed more important to let you know we were close than to walk into a potential trap alone,’ Xyriadh replied levelly.
‘If we must proceed without this “contact” to what degree will our chance of success be compromised?’ Morr asked.
‘Completely. I doubt we can even find the World Shrine without his help. I su–’
Morr hefted his huge blade onto his shoulder and tramped off in the direction Xyriadh had come from without another word. The rest of them hurried to catch up.
The meeting stone Xyriadh had spoken of was a titanic boulder of quartz that jutted out of the forest floor like a broken tooth. Timeworn carvings crawled across its faces, alien sigils that resembled those of the eldar but were far more eldritch in origin. A small clearing surrounded the stone, as though the trees feared to crowd in too closely around the alien thing in their midst. A stillness hung about the place that contrasted strongly with the riot of fecundity around it.
Morr strode forward with no pretence of subtlety, his blank-faced helm turning back and forth as if he scanned the undergrowth. Aez’ashya stepped lightly up to the stone and studied the sigils without comprehension.
‘Who made these marks?’ she demanded.
One of the glassy shadows slithering nearby replied – whether it was Xyriadh or Vyril speaking was hard to tell. ‘They look like Old One sigils to me. They must have made this place long ago.’
‘It is a key stone,’ rumbled Morr without looking around from where he stood surveying the jungle. ‘The mystic energies of this world pass through this point and others around its circumference.’
Aez’ashya seemed encouraged by her success in getting anything out of the normally taciturn incubus and favoured him with a mischievous smile.
‘Morr, you surprise me. How could you know of such things?’ she asked with disarming innocence.
‘I am older than you know,’ Morr said quietly, as if speaking to himself.
‘So we just wait now?’ Kharbyr whined and pulled his cloak more tightly about him. ‘We sit here and hope your mystery contact shows up before She Who Thirsts gnaws us down to our bones?’
‘Yes. Yes, agreed. Back before dawn the master said!’ Xagor nodded frantically.
‘Irrelevant. I can find the World Shrine alone,’ Morr said.
There was a sharp cracking sound and Morr’s eyepiece exploded into tiny shards of broken crystal. The towering incubus swayed for a moment and then he toppled like a felled tree. The others were too surprised to move for a heartbeat. Another sharp crack sounded and Xyriadh’s – or perhaps Vyril’s – head dissolved in a spray of crimson.
‘Ambush!’ Aez’ashya shouted as she raced for the treeline.
She caught sight of a glimmer of movement up in the canopy, a telltale glassy shifting in the foliage. Another crack sounded as the sniper took a shot at her but she was moving too fast to be hit. Answering splinter fire from behind her chopped into the branches and sent the chameleon shape scurrying deeper into cover. A shot struck the ground ahead of her, kicking up a spurt of grass and leaves. That one came from across the clearing from somewhere behind her, confirming at least two snipers had her in their sights.
Aez’ashya plunged into the undergrowth beneath the sniper she had seen and trusted to the others to handle the rest. Life in the dark city honed its citizens’ fighting instincts virtually from birth. A daily diet of violence and bloodshed imbued them with a preternatural ability to take the best course of action in a crisis like getting caught in an ambush with an unknown number of assailants. Where an elite military unit would have been pinned down and chopped to pieces Commorrites turned on their attackers like rats in a trap. Her part was to run down the one she had seen, and she would think about helping her erstwhile allies later, perhaps…
She ran up the closest trunk and sprang nimbly onto its lower branches. She scanned the dark canopy intensely, looking for a patch of distorted starlight that would betray her prey’s hiding place. There – a fork in a tree barely twenty metres away. Aez’ashya could see the outline of a cloaked figure lifting a long, slender rifle, aiming not at her but away into the clearing. She moved silently closer, padding along slender limbs with barely a sound.
The cloaked figure fired and turned to shift to a new position. Aez’ashya was waiting behind the sniper with the bright glitter of knives bared in her hands
‘Greetings, cousin,’ she purred as she took the sniper in her razor-edged embrace.
Xagor and Kharbyr had dived for cover before the first bodies hit the ground. Xagor cowered beneath a log with a snub-nosed splinter pistol clutched in his hand. Kharbyr drew an elegant, long-barrelled pistol and rolled onto his belly to loose off a quick volley of shots before leaping up and sprinting for the forest.
Kharbyr dodged across the open ground counting himself lucky that their enemies were using needle rifles. The single-shot weapons made superlative sniper rifles but under the circumstances automatic fire would have served their attackers better. The distinctive cracking sound made by the toxin-coated slivers breaking the sound barrier told him he was dealing with amateurs. Experienced assassins always dialled down the muzzle velocity of their weapons to ensure there would be no such telltale giveaways.
He ducked behind a tree trunk as more shots whined at him. The soft, fibrous trunk shivered as needles thunked into it. He rolled out and came up firing, pelting the canopy with streams of splinter fire to momentarily distract his attackers. He darted back into cover again without waiting to see the result. At least two snipers were tracking him, their deadly rounds coming closer each time he showed his face.
Crashing footsteps whipped his attention back to the clearing and his jaw sagged open in surprise at what he saw. Morr was on his feet and heading past Kharbyr at a lumbering run. The incubus swung his huge klaive aloft and whirled it through the trunk of a nearby tree, carving out a giant wedge of it in two quick cuts. The tree fell with a groan of protest, moving slowly at first but rapidly gathering pace until it struck the ground with a resounding crash. The air was filled with tumbling leaves in the aftermath, and through them Kharbyr saw two vagrant flickers of motion struggling to get clear.
Morr and Kharbyr sprang forward to confront their assailants at close quarters. Their cameleoline robes had become disordered in the fall and revealed flashes of lightly armoured hands and masked faces. Kharbyr’s knife was in his hand as he sprinted forwards, a curved half metre of razor-edged steel poised for an eviscerating thrust. Morr bore down on the pair like a vengeful one-eyed god as he cleaved a path towards them through the shattered limbs.
Seeing they were trapped one of the snipers turned and raised their rifle to shoot. To Kharbyr’s surprise the other plunged a dagger into their comrade’s exposed back before stepping back and raising open hands in surrender. Their victim gave a disbelieving cry and fell face-forwards, clawing helplessly at the dagger’s protruding hilt. Kharbyr could sense their agonised soul slipping into the spiritstone they wore at their neck, a passing ripe with a sickly sweet scent of betrayal. The body twitched once more and lay still.
The other was babbling something, eyes fixed on the corpse. Kharbyr had to tear his attention away from the ripe, delicious soul waiting to be plucked to understand what they were saying
.
‘–serve Yllithian! I’m Sindiel! I’m his agent!’
A deceptive calm had fallen across the clearing. Kharbyr looked to Morr for guidance. The towering incubus had stopped a decapitating strike in mid-swing. He studied the stranger from beneath his poised blade for a long moment before lowering it.
‘Speak. Your life hangs in the balance,’ Morr said distinctly.
The stranger’s accent was strange and formal-sounding as he replied. He pulled back his hood and tore off his mask, throwing it from him in apparent disgust. The face revealed looked soft and pinkish to Kharbyr’s eyes, like that of a newborn. Something familiar lurked behind the dark eyes, though, a gleam of murderlust and lasciviousness that could be seen openly on every face in the dark city.
‘I am Sindiel, an agent of Archon Yllithian of the White Flames Kabal,’ the stranger said. ‘Forgive me. I was to meet with you alone but my… former companions followed me here. I think they believed they were saving me.’
He gave a shaky laugh. He was speaking quickly and excitedly, constantly glancing back at his slain companion. Complex emotions chased across his face.
‘You can guide us to the World Shrine?’
‘Yes! Oh yes! That’s why I’m here,’ the turncoat almost babbled in relief.
‘Then be welcome, Sindiel,’ Morr intoned with a formality that surprised Kharbyr. ‘How many followed you exactly? We must ensure that no survivors escape.’
‘Three, just three others. I think your friends got Corallyon and Belth already.’ He tapped one ear nervously. ‘I heard them die.’
Aez’ashya reappeared, drenched in blood and looking pleased with herself. She seemed fascinated by Sindiel and flirted with him shamelessly, much to his alternating delight and embarrassment. When Xyriadh emerged she was less amenable to their newfound companion, her proud face filled with barely repressed fury at the death of Vyril. Xagor merely sniffed at the newcomer and asked him for a skin sample. Once all of them were together again Morr turned his one-eyed gaze on Sindiel.
‘We must move on,’ Morr said, ‘our time here is finite. How long will the journey to the World Shrine take?’
Sindiel gestured grandly to the sigil-marked quartz boulder at the centre of the clearing.
‘No time at all. In fact we stand before the doorway right now.’
A thousand kilometres to the north, Malixian gave forth a scream of pleasure as his murderous flock dived into the attack. The giant pterasaurs beneath them swirled and scattered across the fantastic cloudscape croaking hoarse cries of alarm. Their Exodite riders were barely visible, flea-like as they scurried around on the broad backs of their mounts. They aimed slender lances upwards and the air was suddenly criss-crossed with streaks of ruby laser light. Caught in the net, a Raider belched flame and rolled over, its cargo of warriors tipped out screaming into the void. The other Raiders pulled up sharply out of range, momentarily frustrated.
A rush of hellions plummeted past the web of fire spitting splinters in return, one expertly tearing through the wing membrane of a pterasaur with his hooked hellglaive. A second hellion attempted the same feat but was swept from his skyboard by a gigantic, gnarled claw. Other hellions fell as flaming cinders as the lancers on the pterasaurs’ backs ruthlessly burned them down. Malixian was careless of their casualties; the hellions had served their purpose by drawing the enemy fire.
Scourges swept down on the distracted Exodite riders in a thunder of wings. Swarms of Malixian’s alien pets were flying at their clawed heels. He’d brought razorwings and bloodtalons on this occasion – they were easily replaceable and more than deadly enough to kill mud dwellers.
The Exodites were armoured, after a fashion, in hide and scale but it availed them little against the whirlwind of claws and talons that engulfed them. Their firing faltered and Malixian led the charge of heavier grav craft down on the demoralised survivors. He leapt onto the pitching back of a pterasaur where a knot of the skin-clad primitives were attempting to make a last stand.
The riders were fighting well, warriors every one of them. They had been raised in a harsh environment, trained in the arts of war with all the phenomenal focus of their eldar minds and bodies and blooded in inter-clan feuds. Malixian still ripped through them as if they were cattle, beating aside their swords and lances in a fury of razor-edged talons. In moments the blood-drenched pterasaur was swept clear of Exodites and the prize was in his grasp.
Scourges with nerve goads ruthlessly took control of the riderless pterasaur and drove it north. The scene was repeated on other pterasaurs and soon half a dozen of the great beasts were flapping ponderously eastwards, a good haul. They would be stunned and taken aboard the ships in due course when Yllithian brought them in for the rendezvous.
Malixian privately wondered if the giant pterasaurs could ever be persuaded to hunt something as small and insignificant as a slave. He felt some confidence that in conjunction with his beastmasters Bellathonis would find a way to spur the great beasts into appropriately murderous action, although the master haemonculus had seemed rather distracted of late.
Shrill cries drew his attention to the sight of more pterasaurs labouring up through the clouds. More and more of the cruciform shapes emerged into view. At first a dozen could be seen, then two dozen, then the skies below were filling up with the inexorable ripple and snap of enormous wings beating. Malixian watched them with frank admiration for a few seconds before ordering his Ravagers to open fire. Destroying beams lanced down and caressed the magnificent, impractical beasts. First one, then another and another were sent plummeting in flames.
Their companions bore stoically onwards through the barrage, and looking below them Malixian saw the reason for their doggedness. They were only the first wave. More and more beating wings broached the cloud tops as far as the eye could see and Malixian began to feel a first insidious thrill of fear.
The maiden world, Sindiel had explained, was functionally its own universe on certain metaphysical levels. The flow of elemental forces through focal nodes in its crust effectively gave the planet its own webway. With the correct triggers a portal could be opened from one place on the surface to another; even from, for example, the nearby meeting stone to the World Shrine itself. The triggers themselves were a jealously guarded secret kept by a select few. The band of ‘Rangers’ Sindiel claimed to have joined were among the few to hold forbidden knowledge about this and many other subtle paths in the greater webway.
‘How long were you with these Ranger friends of yours?’ Aez’ashya had asked.
‘Years, half a lifetime it seemed. I started out believing they were free-thinkers, dangerous radicals treading the path of the outcast,’ Sindiel replied, ‘I was wrong.’
Sindiel’s bitterness seemed to surprise even him. He had tried to explain what life on a claustrophobic craftworld was like with its myriad restrictions and unwritten laws. Resolving conflicts through confrontation, for example, was anathema in a society where everyone was guided through every step of their lives. Each life, every experience they had, was pigeonholed and mapped out almost from birth. Failure to conform to the constant subtle pressures to fit in with the other castaways led to censure in the form of a kind of living social death.
‘No one understands that the seers have made us prisoners of the future. The only “path” they offer is rooted in fear of the past.’
‘And you’re going to show them they’re wrong?’ Kharbyr had mocked.
‘I can’t change the society of my craftworld and I don’t want to either,’ Sindiel replied seriously. ‘I just know that it isn’t how I want to live. The paths they follow are hardly like living at all.’
The newcomer was certainly clever. He hid himself on the far side of the meeting stone so that they could not observe him activating the gate. When he reappeared, the broken tooth of quartz was broken no longer, its upper part made whole again by the appearance of a grey, misty-looking portal. They clambered up to it and Sindiel was about to cross it
s wavering boundary when Morr clamped a gauntleted hand onto his shoulder.
‘Unwise. You have led enemies to us once already. Do not imagine you will be permitted to do so again,’ Morr said.
‘Kill him now, Morr!’ Xyriadh spat venomously. ‘We don’t need him any more.’
‘Have you been inside the World Shrine before?’ Sindiel squawked. ‘I didn’t think so. Well, I have! I can take you right to where you need to go.’
Morr did not relax his grip, but he did not raise his killing blade either.
‘Also… before you decide to kill me later you might want to consider the value of the hidden webway paths I know about. Lord Yllithian would be displeased to lose access to those secrets, I should think.’
‘No secret exists that the haemonculi can’t tear from you,’ said Xyriadh.
‘Another telling argument in favour of not killing me then. I must be alive for them to do so, presumably?’
‘Not necessarily,’ responded Xagor quietly. He was ignored. Morr suddenly released Sindiel, who rubbed his shoulder gratefully.
‘Lead us there,’ Morr said, ‘and know that I am watching.’
Entering the portal was like and yet unlike entering the webway. The shifting walls were shadowy and indistinct. Out in the darkness beyond the twisting pathway there was a sense of vast presences lurking, as if huge beasts slept all around them just out of sight.
They followed the pallid silver of the path as it crooked and curved, Sindiel leading them silently past innumerable forks and branches. He had not lied, they would have never found their own way through the gleaming paths. The pale light they followed gradually grew stronger as they approached the core.
CHAPTER 8
THE HEART OF THE WORLD
The World Shrine of Lileathanir was called Lil’esh Eldan Ay’Morai; ‘Holy mountain of dawn’s light first gleaming’. It lay thousands of kilometres away from the webway portal, marking the termination of a mystic spiral that girdled the entire planet. For the past several hours Laryin Sil Cadaiyth had been there trying to soothe the raging world spirit as it shuddered and rebelled in response to the incursion of outsiders. Laryin was young as eldar count such things, and she had never before experienced the level of discord that now flowed through the psychic conduits of her world. In concord with the disturbed spirits she herself felt angry and frightened.
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