Silence descended again between the two. Bellathonis turned away and idly rummaged through some small objects scattered on a lacquered bureau. At the motion a row of carnivorous plants in a trough nearby began to writhe and snap hungrily. The tall haemonculus quietly admonished them for their greediness.
‘Hmm. I think that you’re just fishing again, Syiin,’ Bellathonis said eventually, ‘and that you have no intention of going to Malixian with what you have, which is nothing. If you had some evidence of these outrageous claims you would present it rather than try to blackmail me with vague innuendos.’
Syiin licked his lips. Bellathonis was right, he had nothing he could take to Malixian that would prove his claims. That didn’t really matter, the accusation alone could make heads roll, but in the absence of damning proof Syiin was just as likely to feel the edge of a blade as Bellathonis.
Fortunately it didn’t matter.
Syiin had all the readings he needed. Just by looking at his wasp-waisted frame Syiin could tell that Bellathonis had indeed altered himself, eliminating several organs and reconfiguring others. With the pulse echo, thermal imprint and voice patterns he now had it would be simplicity itself to set the triggers on the dark gate to precisely fit Bellathonis’s profile. The jar with its concealed payload lay below with his wracks. He would configure the triggering devices to Bellathonis’s bio-signs and leave one of his wracks behind to ensure delivery once the trap was properly set. Bellathonis was as good as dead.
‘You know I can’t escape the feeling that you don’t really have Yllithian’s best interests at heart, Syiin,’ Bellathonis said mildly.
It was too much for Syiin, and his thin veil of civility dropped suddenly. ‘He wants to spawn an abomination and you want to help him!’ Syiin snarled.
‘You don’t think that perhaps your own jealousy and ambition are clouding your judgement?’
‘No! If you’d read the lore of The Black Descent as you should you’d know the risks yourself! My judgement is not the one in question here!’
‘Oh, I really think it is,’ said Bellathonis softly and held up a shining object in his hand.
The reflected light was impossibly bright. It seemed to expand before Syiin’s eyes until it was as if he stood on a limitless white plain. White light blinded his eyes, shining through him from a hundred different directions at once, inside and out. Only then did he realise the source of it and begin to scream.
Bellathonis dropped the Shattershard in his hand and quickly ground it beneath his heel, the thick crystal readily breaking into pieces with a brittle crack. Syiin quite literally shattered at the same moment, his hunchbacked shape flying apart with a flash. The jagged chunks winked out of existence as whatever was left of Syiin was sent to a thousand different places at once by the collapsing fragments of the dimensional mirror. Bellathonis found it all very satisfactory and clapped his long-fingered hands in delight.
‘There now, what did I tell you?’ Bellathonis smiled to the empty chamber. ‘Your judgement was impaired.’
‘That’s close enough,’ the warrior said. Kharbyr caught the slight catch in the way he said it that told him that the speaker wasn’t the leader of the group. He wondered which one it was, smart enough to lead but not strong enough to do so openly.
‘By what right do you bar our passage?’ Morr rumbled.
‘Nothing leaves Iron Thorn by order of the supreme overlord, Asdrubael Vect, may he forever reign eternal,’ came the arrogant reply.
Morr took another step forwards and lowered his klaive to rest point first on the ground as though it wearied him to carry it further.
‘I had heard no such ordinance before we came here,’ the incubus stated flatly.
‘I told you!’ shrilled Aez’ashya, turning on him viciously. ‘You wouldn’t listen and now we’re stuck here!’ The lithe succubus contemptuously turned her back and stormed away, coincidentally bringing herself closer to the knot of warriors. Kharbyr scurried after her, solicitously trying to calm the fiery wych. She struck at him, forcing him to skip back in the direction of the warriors to avoid the blow. The kabalite warriors’ levelled weapons were wavering and lowering a little as they enjoyed the unfolding drama.
The Raider’s gunner suddenly cried out and clapped both hands to his face before toppling out of sight. The warriors were distracted for barely a heartbeat and their reaction was instantaneous – they opened fire in unison.
In the fraction of a second they had available Kharbyr and Aez’ashya had already closed the range to arm’s length, hurling themselves into the warriors’ midst to impede their fire. Poison-laced splinters ricocheted from Morr’s armour as he strode forward and gutted a warrior who was struggling to bring a cumbersome dark lance to bear. The Raider’s steersman was pitched over the side of his craft by another unseen shot just as two warriors ran to mount it. The warriors had to leap aside to avoid the Raider as it swung out of control and buried itself nose-first in the dirt.
Surprised and suddenly cornered by a rush of foes at close quarters the kabalite warriors leapt into the counter-attack without hesitation. They still outnumbered their enemies and they were battle-hardened, well-armed and better armoured. It was a dreadful miscalculation.
Morr’s blade rose and fell with the mechanical precision of a metronome, carving straight through parrying splinter rifles and the armoured limbs that held them. Any warrior that jumped out of the path of the rampaging incubus found the blades of Aez’ashya and Kharbyr at their backs. One warrior that succeeded in gaining enough space to bring his own rifle to bear for a shot found the unseen snipers waiting to pick him off.
In a few seconds only a handful of the Black Heart warriors remained standing. They broke and fled for the open portal behind them. Kharbyr moved to pursue but staggered and clamped one hand over his blood-drenched thigh when he tried. Aez’ashya was able to bring down one warrior with a thrown knife but the remaining two vanished into the shimmering surface like divers entering a pool.
A combat blade had opened a wound in Kharbyr’s leg that had gone unnoticed in the rush of combat. It proved to be as long as his hand and more than finger-deep. He struggled to apply a heal patch over it while Aez’ashya stood by coolly watching him, offering no help and waiting to see if he would collapse from blood loss. Morr moved around methodically dispatching the injured kabalites in silence.
First Xyriadh came up, then Xagor joined them carrying the prisoner, and eventually they were followed by a limping, pasty-faced Sindiel.
‘You shot prematurely!’ accused Xyriadh as soon as Sindiel was in sight. ‘And then didn’t shoot again at all. It’s your fault two of them escaped!’
‘It isn’t my fault!’ whined Sindiel. ‘One of those… dead things must have followed us, it attacked me! I was fighting for my life!’ His lightly armoured boot was indeed scratched and scored as if lifeless hands had clawed at it. Morr’s single eye gazed at him for moment, judging… measuring.
‘Unfortunate,’ he said eventually. ‘Get onto the Raider. I will steer us to the corespur.’
‘I’ll steer,’ said Xyriadh. ‘It might be best if the one doing the steering had some depth perception.’
The Raider was undamaged and slowly rose in response to Xyriadh’s tentative movements of the tiller. The agents climbed aboard and Xyriadh smoothly brought the grav-craft around before sending it shooting through the gate.
The transition took only a second and they emerged thankfully into the familiar light of the Ilmaea. The very air around the Raider seemed cold and bright after the ruddy smog of Iron Thorn. An obsidian roadway stretched away below them supported on either hand by angular towers. Each tower was topped by a titanic statue, blank faced and highly stylised. Each statue’s pose was subtly different but all of them held vast oval mirrors over the roadway.
‘I know this place,’ said Kharbyr weakly. ‘It’s the Eidolons’ Pavane, we’re on the tip of Ghulen spur.’
‘I can’t see the warriors that ran from u
s,’ Sindiel reported as the Raider sped along the roadway. Their own images raced with them, caught and reflected in the giants’ mirrors above. A mismatched and beaten group they looked too, stained and weary as they fled through the darkness aboard their stolen craft.
‘Don’t look at the reflections for too long,’ Kharbyr admonished. ‘That can be… bad.’
Xyriadh shouted a warning as a swirl of specks came into view, racing along the obsidian strip towards them. Hellions, at least a score of them, were arrowing towards the lone Raider. They split and drifted to either side of the craft to look over its occupants from beyond weapons range. Seemingly satisfied that there was sport to be had, the pack rejoined in the Raider’s wake, curving around and rapidly accelerating to pursue it.
‘How long to reach Nightsound Ghulen?’ called Aez’ashya. The sloping tiers of that outer district could offer some shelter from the hellion’s slashing attacks.
‘Too long, they’ll overhaul us before we’re halfway there,’ said Kharbyr resignedly.
‘Sindiel, Xyriadh, take up your rifles,’ said Morr. ‘Kharbyr will steer.’
‘And just what are you going to do?’ Aez’ashya asked impertinently.
‘I will bring the forward weapon to bear.’
‘They aren’t stupid enough to come in at us from that angle,’ Kharbyr snorted. ‘That’s half the reason they’re chasing us instead of going head on.’
‘No matter,’ Morr said. He took hold of the dark lance at the prow and, with a heave, tore it free from its mounting.
Sindiel and Xyriadh took down a hellion each before the others realised they were being fired on. Morr’s dark lance shots were horribly inaccurate but they kept the rest of the pack more concerned with dodging and weaving than returning fire. However, once a few more of their compatriots were punched off their skyboards by Sindiel and Xyriadh’s accurate rifle fire the survivors decided their best chances, in fact, lay in shooting back.
Splinters ricocheted wildly from the Raider’s stern as the hellions opened fire, driving Sindiel and Xyriadh back into the scant cover available behind the stern. Morr resolutely stood his ground and reduced a hellion to a flaring cinder with a lucky bolt of entropic energy. One of the Raider’s engines coughed and died immediately afterwards, causing the speeding grav-craft to lurch alarmingly.
‘Can’t take much more of this!’ Kharbyr yelled.
‘Set it down,’ answered Morr.
‘Madness!’ shouted Xyriadh. ‘They’ll tear us apart on the ground!’
‘We cannot risk a crash. Set it down. Now’
The Raider slid inelegantly down onto the obsidian road, trailing sparks and flames as its drives failed at the last moment and it kissed the smooth black stone. The hellion pack shot past, decelerating rapidly as they readied their hellglaives for the altogether more satisfactory work of chopping off heads and limbs. The agents abandoned the dubious cover of their wrecked grav-vehicle and made a rush for the nearest tower a hundred metres away. The dozen or so surviving hellions swirled around and came plummeting down to finish off their fleeing prey.
To Kharbyr, falling ever further behind as he tried to force his stiffened leg to function, the rush to the tower looked futile. He knew just how quickly a fighter on a skyboard could run down some fool on foot, he’d done it himself on many occasions.
He turned and flourished his long-barrelled pistol, preparing to sell himself as dearly as he could. He could see every detail of the hellions as they dived towards him; he could make out the wild faces yelling and screaming with pleasure, the pieced-together array of armour and stolen finery that marked the gang as being real steeple-scum, opportunistic scavengers of the kind he had run with in his formative years. He felt bitterness that he was fated to fall beneath the blades of such sky-pirates now.
Kharbyr was thus perfectly placed to witness streams of splinter cannon fire suddenly rip into the diving hellions from above. Riders were pulped like ripe fruit and skyboards detonated under the vicious barrage. The hellions broke off their attack and scattered like windblown leaves.
Three Raiders packed full of kabalite warriors dropped into view, sliding smoothly down to surround the fugitives. Kharbyr recognised the sigil on their prows with an almost palpable sense of relief. They were in the custody of the White Flames.
CHAPTER 11
THE COURT OF THE BROKEN KING
Laryin awoke in a strange, cold place. Returning consciousness brought hard on its heels the realisation of just where she was, and pure panic flooded in after that. She wanted to curl in on herself and vanish, flee, die, anything but remain where she was. She could do none of these things. She was restrained by hard circles that cut into her flesh, chaining her like an animal. A darkly melodious voice spoke from close by.
‘Physical restraints are always best,’ the voice said. ‘We could simply disable motor control and trap you inside your own unresponsive body, but that is less effective. The primitive part of the brain, the animal part which I’m sure you’re well-acquainted with, my dear, thrives on the physical sensation. Internalised horror has a disappointing passivity to it, although that too has its place, of course. Now open your eyes or I shall be forced to cut away the lids, and I do not wish to do that. If you open your eyes now I promise no harm will come to you.’
Laryin’s eyes flew open of their own volition and she found herself staring into a face from nightmare. Dead white porcelain skin stretched tautly over a pointed nose and chin before flaring out to accommodate gaunt, lined cheeks and a high brow. The cheeks were dimpled to accommodate an impossibly shark-like smile. The eyes seemed completely black, visible only by a few vagrant glitters of reflected light that escaped their hungry depths.
‘There now,’ the nightmarish face said. ‘I am Master Bellathonis and you are in my charge. We are going to make such miracles, you and I, that our names shall be remembered in future aeons. You shall become like your precious Isha at my hands, my dear, giving birth to new life.’
The face stared pointedly upwards for a moment and Laryin followed his gaze with trepidation. Above her hung what looked like two cabinets with glass fronts to them. One was empty, the other held a red-raw skeleton covered with scraps of flesh, like something left behind by scavengers. The dead held no intrinsic terrors for Laryin; death was part of the cycle of life. However when the dead thing moved and flopped its raw-meat hands against the crystal she shrieked like a terrified infant, earning a dark chuckle from Bellathonis.
‘Well, strictly speaking we’ll be giving rebirth to old life I suppose,’ he admitted. ‘But don’t mind Archon Kraillach there. He’s been very impatient for us to begin.’
Laryin’s lips worked as she struggled to find her voice. The haemonculus turned his gaze back to her.
‘You have a question, my dear?’ he asked with disarming politeness, ‘or a request? Ask and it shall be yours, saving for your freedom I’m afraid.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked with child-like naïveté. Any but the blackest heart would have been crushed by her innocence. Bellathonis was possessed of the very blackest of hearts and even his reply was surprisingly kindly-sounding.
‘A range of reasons to go with a range of individuals, my dear: some wish to restore lost glories, some wish to alter the status quo, some wish to bring harm to others. In my case I do it for the most personal of reasons – because I like it and because I can.’
Yllithian looked around at the survivors from the Lileathanir mission with mixed emotions after hearing their report. He’d had them brought to a hidden annex close to Bellathonis’s newly installed laboratory. Once the haemonculus’s wracks had hurried off carrying the captive worldsinger, Yllithian had arrived to listen while the agents were having their injuries tended. What they told him gave him a great deal to ponder. He clinically studied the knot of emotions inside, surgically stripping them down to their essentials.
There was certainly relief, mostly relief that he no longer had to take account of
the agents’ whereabouts or concern himself about who might have captured them. There was pride too that his plan had succeeded and secured the catalyst the master haemonculus required. Despite the manifold obstacles the unlikely group had overcome them successfully, although in many cases it sounded more by luck than judgment. Unfortunately underpinning that feeling of relief was a growing sense of concern.
It was not so much concern about the destruction wrought on the maiden world that troubled him. Yllithian cared not one whit that the desecration of the World Shrine on Lileathanir had induced convulsions in the planet that probably set its carefully metered development back by thousands of years. Truth be told he took some pride in having a hand in that atrocity, albeit unrecognised. No, what was concerning him was the scale of forces that had been unleashed seemingly so readily. For the first time Yllithian was gaining some real sense of the power that Bellathonis was intent on tapping into for the purpose of rebirthing El’Uriaq. Again the crone’s warnings of Dysjunction came back to haunt him. Hearing the stories from Lileathanir made it suddenly seem a lot more possible.
Yllithian sighed inwardly, keeping his face carefully neutral. One of the thirteen foundations of vengeance equated to ‘once committed, do not fear the blade’. Yllithian himself had berated his allies on the need to wield the biggest weapons they could find without hesitation, yet now he found he hesitated. He sought after something to distract himself from the thought, a niggling piece of the puzzle that had been incongruous at the time.
‘And what of this individual that helped you in the webway?’ Yllithian asked. ‘They witnessed you carrying off the worldsinger and yet they live. Why so? Who are they?’
‘I don’t know his name, my archon,’ Sindiel replied promptly, lingering over the honorific as if tasting something for the first time. ‘I don’t even know if it’s a he or a she, really; the Rangers knew it. When they talked about it, which wasn’t often, they called it Motley, as if that said everything you needed to know about it.’
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