Path of the Renegade

by Andy Chambers

  The holy mountain was safe, the World Shrine buried at its roots beneath hundreds of metres of solid rock. A small honour guard had remained there but most of the clan warriors had gone to help fight against the invaders. Those that had been left behind were surly and nervous as they stood fingering their double-handed clanths of star-metal and their laser lances. They whispered among themselves with mind speech when they thought Laryin wasn’t paying attention. Dark Kin! The soulthieves had come to Lileathanir!

  Many of the guards had secretly laughed at the wardens’ dire warnings of the Dark Kin, and questioned the necessity for their endless vigil. Keeping watch for a threat unseen in living memory seemed foolish to the clan warriors. Life was hard enough on a maiden world and the Exodites chose to live there for precisely that reason. It bred a people shorn of temptation by the day-to-day necessities of survival, the kind of society which set little value on ancient lore.

  The World Shrine itself was, of course, naturalistic in its aspect. Living rock formed its sweeping buttresses and towering pillars, water rushed from cracks in the stone to form glittering waterfalls and deep, clear pools. The ancients had seen fit to seed tiny crystal suns in the upper reaches of the shrine so living things grew there too, from simple ferns and mosses to miniature Eloh trees and gloryvine. The rich veins of minerals and fantastic crystal growths that glittered along the walls added a fey sheen to the pools and grottoes.

  Here and there polished sections of stone were carved with runes that pulsed with their own phosphorescent witch-light. Laryin moved from one to another of these attempting to calm the spirits of the wild flowing through the holy mountain, singing to them quietly of love and harmony and the hope of better days to come. She welcomed the souls of her own kind that had been violently loosed into the world serpent by the coming of the Dark Kin, mourning their passing and weaving songs of their rebirth. She had felt death many times before, the cycle of life inevitably passed through death like the turning of a great wheel, but she found that this was different. Lives were being cut short, souls being snuffed out as the flame of war was carried into their land.

  A discordant noise suddenly diverted her attention from her work. Something unusual had sounded over the gentle tinkling of water and the whispering susurration of mind-voices. Laryin looked about her and realised she was alone. The honour guards that had been nearby a moment ago had vanished. She wiped her hands on homespun robes as she looked around in momentary annoyance, expecting some adolescent prank. As she did so a wave of sickness began to spread through her, a creeping sensation of violation and horror.

  Strange shadows were moving in the lower grotto, the imprint of their alien psyches invading her mind with the stench of their murderlust. An impossibility: the Children of Khaine had entered the sanctuary of Isha! She wanted to run, to cry out a warning to her unseen guards, but horror clogged her throat and bound her limbs in icy manacles. A nightmarish feeling pervaded the scene, as if the slightest sound from her would bring the sinister shadows to her hiding place.

  The world serpent was roaring in her ears. Unbridled now and roused further by the Children of Khaine it was manifesting into its Dragon aspect. The shrine trembled in sympathy and shook loose a shower of dust and stones from the ceiling that rattled down in a hard rain. The creeping shadows had reached the foot of the ramp that would lead them up to her. They paused for a moment during the tremor and then began to move up the ramp. Laryin’s stifled voice finally loosed itself in an endless scream.

  At that instant violence blossomed within the shrine like a physical punch to Laryin’s guts. Hissing lines of ruby light raked the shadows as her hidden guards fired their lances. A whirling, half-naked she-devil charged into sight, leaping over the sweeping beams and running along the tips of stalagmites. A towering, one-eyed, automaton-like figure reared up suddenly beside one of the distracted lancers and killed him with a single sweep of its enormous blade. Laryin gasped as she felt the guard’s soul flee his body and plunge headlong into the world serpent as if being cast into a rushing river. The flow of spirits was changed in that moment, uncounted souls becoming angrier, wilder as they understood that their sanctuary was under attack.

  The shrine shook again with greater violence. Larger rocks clattered to the floor and caromed into pools. Two guardians ran forwards to fight the murderous cyclops with their energised clanths trailing lightning. They were cut down in turn by the figure’s inexorable blade as though they were nothing more than children. The she-devil flung herself on a surviving lancer as he struggled to bring his unwieldy weapon to bear. She took the luckless guardian in a lover’s embrace, satiating her wild lust in ways Laryin witnessed with horrifying vividness through the psychic mirror of the world spirit.

  Laryin’s heart began to beat again and her limbs stirred. Her rational mind knew there was no escape, but her soul just wanted to flee. Part of her wanted to leap into the river of souls that flowed through the shrine and by destroying herself merge completely with it. She could not escape physically but she could rejoin her ancestors within the world spirit and escape the horrors of the material realm that way. She would dissolve into the greater gestalt until the wheel turned and she was born anew. It would take just one step from the ledge where she stood to fall to the sharp rocks below…

  ‘No, no. Unacceptable,’ a dry, frog-like voice said behind her. A sharp sting in her back flashed tendrils of fire through Laryin’s body. Her treacherous limbs folded beneath her again but strong hands caught her before she could fall.

  The Dragon’s roar was in her ears, rising to a triumphant scream as it broke free.

  Skimming high above the cloud tops, Malixian was having to face up to some unpleasant facts – namely that they were the ones being chased. The Ninth Raptrex was being pushed inexorably in front of a solid wall of pterasaurs like a sailing ship running before a storm. His surviving hellions and Reavers skirmished and fenced with the leading edge of the mud dwellers when they got too close but Malixian simply couldn’t afford to get entangled with the whole horde. His warriors had burned at least a hundred pterasaurs but the Exodites’ numbers seemed to keep increasing.

  Reports coming from the green hell below told a similar story; the tree huggers had brought their biggest animal friends out to play. Huge packs of carnosaurs had appeared and savagely attacked anyone they found on the ground. After the raid’s initial successes further slave taking had become virtually impossible. By unspoken consent all elements of the raiding force were now either heading north to rendezvous with the ships or fighting their way back to the webway portal where they had first arrived.

  Malixian told himself that there was no shame in declaring the raid over and its objectives complete. According to the plan he would have been moving to rendezvous with the ships by now anyway. Being pushed there still galled him on a deeply irrational level – the very level of himself that Malixian liked best. He crouched at the keel of his skeletal Raider, watching the trailing pterasaurs and muttering imprecations. As such, he was well-placed to observe a change suddenly come over the Exodite horde.

  A ripple passed through the pursuing ranks and they came to a halt, milling in confusion. Even Malixian felt a ghost of something changing despite his utterly atrophied sense of empathy. A few seconds later the wall of beating wings was suddenly slumping away as the pterasaurs folded their great pinions and dived for the forest below. A scalp-tingling sense of imminence hung across the world, as if it had paused and sucked in its breath for a primal scream.

  Beneath Malixian’s craft the leafy canopy was tossing like the sea in a storm. A great crack suddenly split the ground from east to west, leaping from horizon to horizon like a jagged black lightning bolt. Fire and stone shot skywards from the crack, followed by an expanding bubble of volcanic ash that came roiling out to engulf both land and sky. Static lightning flickered around the cloud as it raced forwards, swallowing the few grav craft near it even as they turned to try and flee.

  Hissing
rocks and lava scoured the skies with the deadly effectiveness of anti-air batteries. A house-sized boulder rose directly in front of Malixian’s Raider. As it reached the top of its parabolic arc it hung there for a moment before slowly rolling over like a beaching whale and plummeting earthwards trailing sparks and fumes. Malixian sent his vessel scooting after it, falling like a leaf in its slipstream. At the last instant his craft pulled out of the dive and shot away to the north like an arrow.

  The holy mountain groaned and shook beneath the fury of the unleashed world spirit. Morr had his klaive raised and was attempting to advance on Sindiel. The floor was pitching so violently that the towering incubus had to alternately brace himself and stagger forwards as if he were on the deck of a ship in a storm. The delay probably saved Sindiel’s life.

  ‘Wait! It’s not too late! I can still get us out of here!’ he yelled desperately.

  ‘Explain!’ the giant incubus roared above the thunder of shuddering rock all around them.

  ‘I can use a temporary burrowing to enter the webway! There’s a hidden path!’

  ‘Don’t be stupid! The world spirit will destroy us!’ screamed Xyriadh.

  ‘No,’ Sindiel said with a guilty glance at the slender form slung over Xagor’s shoulder. ‘Not while we’ve got her.’

  Phantasmal tendrils were beginning to manifest in the air, the opalescent strands questing blindly for the invaders. Instinctively they drew closer together around the unconscious worldsinger, either to protect her or be protected by her proximity. Cracks started spreading across the floor, slowly yawning open to reveal bottomless pits at their feet.

  ‘What choice do we have?’ shouted Sindiel. Without waiting for an answer he drew a small object from his cameleoline robes and cast it into the air. It hung there, turning slowly at head height, a multi-faceted spindle of caged wraithbone. Sindiel sang desperately to the thing as it spun, now slower, now faster, in time with his tune. A silver teardrop wavered into focus beneath it and expanded, seeming as fragile and insubstantial as a soap bubble.

  ‘As good as it gets! Go!’ shouted Sindiel and leapt into the temporary portal. One after another the others scrambled after him. Finally only Morr remained, his single eye glaring balefully around the desecrated shrine.

  ‘Only the naïve try to forgive and forget!’ he snarled to the raging spirits. He spat two more words before contemptuously turning his back and stepping through the portal. The portal vanished, leaving only the incubus’s final words to resonate around the shrine like the tolling of a great bell.

  ‘Arhra remembers.’

  The ships of the raiding force rode in low orbit over Lileathanir’s terminator, their long, jagged hulls precisely bisecting the border of night and day as the maiden world turned. Yllithian had been observing the course of the raid from aboard the Intemperate Angel ever since his ships had slipped into the outer reaches of the system through a little-used gateway. Naturally he had heard nothing from his agents as yet, he would only know if they had succeeded if and when they returned to the ship.

  The fleet’s approach to the planet had been stealthy and silent. There were no signs of planetary defences or, worse yet, interfering craftworld eldar forces. Yllithian suspected that the alarm had gone out; a faint ripple detected in realspace shortly after they had emerged from the labyrinth dimension probably indicated a scout vessel fleeing back to its home craftworld with the news. That mattered little, the raid would be long over before the fools had finished debating and runecasting to determine if they should get involved.

  Yllithian had heard that the craftworld eldar relied completely on seers to steer their destiny, forever trying to tighten the weave of fate toward some indeterminate future. If that were true they seldom chose to put themselves in the path of the true eldar. Perhaps they recognised a stronger destiny than their own.

  The first ships had begun to dip into the atmosphere, rendezvousing with Raider-borne parties of kabalite warriors in the thin upper air. Freshly taken slaves were transferred aboard, comparatively few for a raid of this size but that was only to be expected when hunting Exodites. Yllithian received reports that several large avians were being taken aboard the Ninth Raptrex ships so presumably Malixian was happy, or at least he would be if he weren’t mired in some huge aerial battle kilometres away from the rendezvous coordinates…

  Yllithian focused more closely on the sensory feeds emanating from Malixian’s personal forces. He saw the seemingly endless waves of fliers pursuing them with crystal clarity. He saw, also, the flapping pterasaurs suddenly retreat moments before the world seemingly went insane. A dozen sullen glows kindled on the nightside of the planet within as many minutes, while on the dayside huge plumes of volcanic ash could be seen climbing into the stratosphere. Fantastic cloud formations coiled around the eruptions forming concentric rings where storm-force winds were kindling. Calls for retrieval from the surface doubled and redoubled, sending more ships hurrying down into the ash-choked upper gulfs.

  Riding high above it all, Nyos Yllithian watched the spreading chaos with clinical detachment. He wondered only whether it indicated success or failure on the part of his agents.

  A flicker of otherworldly chill and suddenly Morr was standing beside the others. Something immediately seemed very wrong. Mist swirled knee-deep around them and the familiar tube-like passages of the webway were nowhere to be seen. Instead a deep pall of gloom clustered closely in all directions as if they stood in the midst of a dark forest. Straining eyes vaguely hinted at paler shapes like trees or pillars that seemed to lie just beyond their immediate circle of vision.

  Xyriadh was screaming at Sindiel, Kharbyr was squabbling with Xagor and Aez’ashya was egging on both pairs even-handedly.

  ‘Silence,’ ordered Morr, cutting through the arguments. The incubus turned his implacable one-eyed gaze on Sindiel.

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘We – ah, we may be a little off course.’

  ‘Lost!’ shouted Xyriadh. ‘The whelp has only lost us beyond the veil!’

  ‘We’re in the webway,’ Sindiel insisted, ‘but we’ve become caught in deformed strata of it.’

  ‘In other words we’re lost!’

  ‘No–’

  ‘Can you point which way to go?

  ‘No–’

  ‘Then we’re lost!’

  A savage, hopeless howl, more felt than heard, keened distantly in the darkness. It was taken up by other strange voices, some closer, some farther off.

  ‘Fun as this is, we had better get moving,’ Aez’ashya observed. ‘No point in making it easy to find us.’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘I doubt it matters. Anywhere but here.’

  A great weariness quickly stole upon them as they slogged through the clinging mist. The unholy thrill of She Who Thirsts was strong in this twilight realm and it inexorably sucked the strength from their limbs. The desolate howls seemed to grow more distant but the pale tree-pillars never seemed to get any closer. After a few minutes it became apparent that the mysterious shapes were too irregular to be pillars or trees. Kharbyr swore that they moved whenever he looked away – twisting, changing position, creeping closer by the time he looked back.

  Eventually Kharbyr glimpsed something that stopped him looking out into the gloom altogether. He grew quiet for a time and concentrated on putting one fog-shrouded foot in front of another. Xagor walked beside him carrying the worldsinger. Kharbyr’s previous attempts to murder the wrack in the Aviaries seemed all but forgotten in their current peril.

  ‘Observed something, yes?

  ‘I thought it was lightning out there at first, echoes of it or something, and that’s why it moved. It isn’t lightning.’

  ‘Sharp eyes. Good, good. Sharp eyes see what?’

  ‘More like whirlwinds made out of little motes of light.’

  Xagor pondered this for a moment. He shifted the recumbent worldsinger over his shoulder into a more comfortable position, though he seemed to barely noti
ce her slight weight.

  ‘Souls being taken,’ he concluded flatly.

  Kharbyr nodded unhappily. ‘They all seemed to connect at one point off in the distance. I was afraid to look at what was there.’

  ‘Wise, I think.’

  After a timeless period, obstacles began to rise in the gloom before them. Jutting translucent shards were scattered chaotically about the mist cape, initially no more than waist high but rearing up to tower overhead as they travelled further. The shards looked solid, but there was something glistening and gelatinous about their consistency that made them suggestive of mucus.

  The howling keened behind them, still distant but getting closer. Something was following their trail. By common consent they silently pushed onwards through the shard-ruins looking for a means of escape or, failing that, somewhere to make a stand.

  ‘What is this place?’ Aez’ashya asked.

  Sindiel, eager to re-establish his credentials with his new allies, rushed to answer. ‘I think we’re in the region of a destroyed gate. We’re looking at fragments of the wreckage.’

  ‘Wreckage? The gate must have been huge.’

  ‘No, there are still traces of the psychic wardings in place on most of the pieces. Trapped warp energy accretes around them and forms something like cysts in the contextual reality of the–’

  ‘Vyril?’ Xyriadh said in disbelief, stepping closer to the nearest glistening obelisk.

  Beneath its surface a humanoid shape moved sluggishly. Vyril’s shaven head turned to face them with his mouth open in a silent scream. His limbs thrashed slowly as if he were drowning in clear gel, one hand stretched imploringly towards Xyriadh. The female warrior reached forwards to grasp his hand without hesitation.