Path of the Renegade

by Andy Chambers

  The Handmaid vanished like a blown-out candle, and as the shadows crowded in closer the sudden absence of her light seemed blinding.

  CHAPTER 12

  A RESURRECTION

  El’Uriaq! El’Uriaq!

  Shaa-dom was his realm.

  How proud he stood! How low he fell!

  El’Uriaq! El’Uriaq!

  Felt Vect’s blade and went to hell!

  – The March of the Vanquished

  A breathless air of anticipation hung about the shadowy chamber. The worldsinger Laryin lay captive on the examination table at its centre, unrestrained but seemingly pinned beneath the unwinking glare of a dozen harsh spotlights. A diadem of cold metal pressed at her brow, its silky leads trailing off to sinister-looking boxes of equipment to one side. The gaunt scarecrow figure of Bellathonis bent over them, his white, long-fingered hands like anxious birds flitting across the polished controls. Twin crystal-fronted sarcophagi overhung the scene like the faces of eldritch gods sitting in judgment.

  ‘There,’ the master haemonculus said to Laryin, ‘we are almost ready to begin. You must forgive the lack of physical restraints – as I mentioned a sense of utter helplessness does sometimes have its part to play.’ He delicately raised one of her slender wrists between thumb and forefinger before allowing it to drop limply back onto the slab. ‘Have you ever heard of a weapon called a terrorfex, my dear? I suppose it would be surprising if you had, it’s an extremely rare device even here in the eternal city. A terrorfex is made out of wraithbone, you see, and that’s hard to find as it cannot be made in Commorragh. Wraithbone has to be… harvested from the divergent branches of the eldar, like the craftworlders and your own people. We have a lot of other uses for that resource I can assure you, and hence few terrorfexes are made these days. Sad to see such an elegant device fall out of use, but I digress.

  ‘The way the terrorfex works is by psychically inducing visions so nightmarish that the victim is rendered helpless. The wraithbone is imbued with negative energy to act as a sort of catalyst. All it does really is to blow open the gates, so to speak, and allow your own worst fears to reign supreme. You’re placed into a personal hell of your own making.’ The haemonculus paused and turned to smile at her. ‘Quite delicious really.’

  He stepped across to look closely into Laryin’s face. She had spent hours in his presence and not once had he done anything directly to harm her. If anything he had been unctuously charming throughout. She was unable to move but her very psyche still flinched instinctively from his hooded malice, trying to crawl away into some safe inner haven. Bellathonis chuckled.

  ‘I have been working for some time,’ he continued, ‘on isolating the principles of the noble but sadly neglected terrorfex. I believe I can employ those principles in a more carefully metered form suitable for my own purposes. My initial tests have been most promising, and in your case I believe I have hit upon the perfect means to exercise full control.

  ‘Physical pain has its limitations, you see. The body is most wonderfully equipped to inure itself to physical pain, and the mind is equipped to achieve a state of dull acceptance – some would maintain a transcendence – with a rapidity that is really most unhelpful. Mental anguish, on the other hand, is always fresh, immediate and utterly inescapable.’

  ‘Is your creature liable to actually do something anytime soon, Nyos?’ Xelian asked languidly.

  Yllithian shifted uncomfortably beside Xelian where they stood in the shadows watching the haemonculus at work.

  ‘Certain preparations have to be completed in the correct order and at their own pace,’ Yllithian replied, stifling his own irritation at the haemonculus’s lengthy discourses. ‘Such great undertakings cannot be expedited on account of our own level of boredom or discomfort, more’s the pity.’

  Xelian remained petulant. ‘El’Uriaq is unlikely to be impressed by resurrection into a dank hole like this one, you know. You could have at least supplied some refreshments or better entertainment than this.’

  In truth Yllithian was beginning to regret choosing what was in effect a deep, dank sub-cellar to conduct these affairs. He’d had several surrounding chambers refurbished and used as stockpiles and armouries, but his fantasies about it being a secret base of operations did nothing to dispel the pervasive miasma of decay.

  ‘What we begin here will be a slow process,’ he explained with a patience he didn’t feel. ‘It could take months, years even, before El’Uriaq is able to fully emerge from his sarcophagus. I’ll move him to suitably salubrious surroundings before that day comes. For the present privacy is more important than an impressive or especially comfortable locale, noble lady.’

  ‘Oh really? And what measures have you taken to silence wagging tongues, Nyos? Aez’ashya can be trusted of course, but Morr is with the Realm Eternal and I see one of the haemonculus’s scrofulous underlings here in this very room. Where’s the other? And the renegade? Considering a loose word from any of these individuals could bring the tyrant down upon us in full fury, your requirements for privacy don’t seem to have extended far enough to my mind.’

  ‘The sell-sword, Kharbyr, is being watched and may have an unfortunate accident very soon, although Bellathonis has some unfathomable attachment to the scum so I have held back my hand thus far. The young renegade, Sindiel, is busy learning to appreciate the pleasures that indulgence can bestow and his loyalty is cheaply bought. All is under control, Xelian, do relax and try to enjoy the moment.’

  Bellathonis glanced somewhat sharply at them both before stepping over sulkily to stand by his torture devices, waiting for permission to proceed. Seeing that the moment was upon them Yllithian raised his chin arrogantly and spoke.

  ‘Begin.’

  Bellathonis made the tiniest of adjustments to the engine and Laryin was instantly plunged into soul-searing horror. She relived her awakening in Bellathonis’s torture laboratory for the first time breath for breath, feeling every pin-point prickle of sweat on her limbs. Her sense of helplessness and sick fear shone so bright and sharp in her mind that it made her gasp. The moment repeated, focused, stabilised and then went on and on and on.

  ‘Perfect,’ a distant voice said. It seemed a complete irrelevance amidst the crashing waves of terror.

  In a flash the memory was gone. The metal diadem pressed coldly against her brow and she fancied she could almost feel it inside her skull, a twisted interloper riffling through her memories. Shame, disgust, humiliation writhed inside her and she could no longer tell if they were creations of her own mind.

  ‘Now that we have a baseline we can proceed,’ the voice went on, sounding pedantic but excited now, almost gleeful.

  The World Shrine rose about her, the dank torture chamber rolling back like stage scenery to be replaced with walls of living rock and gently tinkling waterfalls. She relived the sensations of violation and horror as the Children of Khaine crept into the sanctum. Once again she was paralysed by her own fear, rooted to the spot as the killers moved in and forced to watch as they slew the guards that had given up their lives to protect her. Her fault, her shame, her punishment.

  The twisting rope of psychic energy passing before Kraillach’s sarcophagus thickened into a river, aetheric ambrosia that laved his raw body and fed his parched soul. The breath of true life gusted through him, satiating him in a way he had not known in a thousand years. New skin, fresh and pink as a newborn’s, was already spreading over his red-boned hands. He mewled with pleasure as he basked in the suffering of a pure heart.

  Suddenly Kraillach felt that something was wrong. Very wrong. A… presence was growing close by, a faint trace of spirit that he had originally dismissed as irrelevant. He felt it become stronger, forming a hole like a chink in reality that widened inexorably. The flowing river of revivifying energy was being drawn into it like a whirlpool, torn away from Kraillach to feed the burgeoning entity. He whimpered helplessly as he was starved of the essence he so desperately wanted, but his attempts to attract the att
ention of the dimly perceived minions below were once again ignored. Worse still, he felt the presence coming to full sentience like the slow unfolding of a dreadful flower.

  No.

  Laryin’s mind reformed around the syllable and clung to it as a rock in the midst of a raging flood. No. She grasped the tiny shred of self, struggling to free her psyche from the mire. No. The deaths and suffering were not her fault, the Children of Khaine had slain them, not her.

  Bellathonis cursed softly as the dark energy pouring out of the girl wavered and dropped to a tenth of what it had been. He adjusted, searching through her consciousness to find new vulnerabilities. Something from her earliest childhood memories perhaps, where reason could less effectively raise blocks. Maiden worlds came with a fine pedigree of voracious, primitive arthropods that could be encountered by a young Exodite… A few seconds of fine-tuning and the full flow of Laryin’s fear was released once more by a tide of bloodsucking ticks that were each larger than one of her young hands.

  Kraillach recoiled as the psychic torrent was unleashed again. For a few precious moments the hideous presence opposite him had receded as the energy flow dropped away. Now it was back, more voracious than ever. The vortex reopened and the awful sentience behind it leapt to full life.

  Newly-formed eyes pierced Kraillach from all directions at once, inside and outside and from angles that have no name. It perceived every part of him, every moment of his long life from birth to death was examined, mercilessly turning him inside out in a horrific spiritual vivisection. A conclusion was reached, septic energies narrowing their focus and erupting into Kraillach’s quivering form, psychic pus from cancerous realms outside reality jetting into his hollow soul. Life-matrices were remade and altered accordingly, the daemonic loom of fate howling as it shuttled out his new destiny with feverish intensity. Caught inside his crystal-faced tomb, Kraillach writhed in eight dimensions as he was reborn from within.

  With its seed planted, the multi-dimensional sentience set to completing reconstruction of its own form. Reaching into the energy flow it wrapped itself in the necessary trappings, transfiguring raw warp-stuff into cohesive matter. Bones reknitted, sheathed themselves with cartilage, tendons and ligaments whipped into place and muscle tissue flowed to cover new-formed limbs and torso like hardening wax. Within seconds skin was spreading over the manikin-like cadaver, ballooning to accommodate thickening muscles and a deepening chest. Fingers flexed with new life, balled into fists.

  Yllithian could feel the backwash of psychic energy from the worldsinger even with most of it being channelled to the sarcophagi above. Spectral fingers plucked at his mind, bringing an unbidden smile to his lips. Xelian gave a little moan of pleasure beside him as the flow increased, the ghostly fingers becoming a thrilling caress. Static electricity sparked from every piece of exposed metal and glowing witchfires crawled around the hanging sarcophagi. He felt some alarm, but the sensation transformed into a throb of pleasure.

  Every moment, every detail was pleasurable – the wracks rushing around clownishly in their rubberised coats, the gleam of the lights, the white-faced haemonculus intent at his engine, the pallid pain-bride on her slab and the hungry not-quite-dead raging in their coffins above. It seemed pure theatre being played out for his benefit, comical manikins scurrying on a tiny stage for his pleasure.

  The sense of alarm returned, surfacing from the wave of pleasure like a dark rock at low tide. Too fast. He locked onto the thought and clung to it. Too fast. He had believed the process would be long and tedious, only being begun today and achieving its end at some unforeseen point in the future. Feeling the power unleashed made him know he was wrong. Yllithian was no master Chaotician, his studies of the veil were limited to what was most useful to him. Even so he could feel the strain on reality building up in the chamber. The energy could not continue to flow at this rate, it had to be stopped before disaster struck.

  He opened his mouth to call on Bellathonis to halt the procedure. Before the words could form, the crystal front of one of the sarcophagi burst in a shattering explosion and simultaneously every light in the room went out. Shouts of dismay went up from the wracks, quickly silenced by a snarl from Bellathonis.

  ‘Lights, quickly!’ Yllithian commanded. Some hand-lamp was kindled and the shadows fled from it grotesquely. In their dim illumination a new figure could be seen beside the slab in the centre of the chamber. Broad-shouldered and golden-haired, it was still slick from the sarcophagus’s amniotic fluids and covered in superficial cuts from the broken crystal.

  He was crouched beside the worldsinger and he was stroking her wide-eyed face. When he glanced up everyone in the chamber was frozen in place for a moment, feeling that he looked straight at them, reading them personally and learning more of them than they knew of themselves.

  ‘She’s been hurt,’ he said in a rich, mellifluous voice. ‘Help her.’

  Fallen shards of crystal had pierced the worldsinger’s pale flesh, and she lay now in a spreading pool of crimson. Wracks tumbled to obey, hurrying forwards with dressings and syringes in an unseemly rush. The newcomer rose and strode confidently to Yllithian and Xelian; completely ignoring, Yllithian noticed, the tumbled shards that cut his feet as he walked across them.

  Yllithian scrabbled for some sense of control over the situation. This was not, in even the vaguest sense, going according to plan. Majesty radiated from the newcomer, a sense of confidence and nobility that inspired admiration and commanded instant obedience. Obedience, thought Yllithian sourly, born not out of fear but from a desire to please him and, perhaps by working long and diligently, earn his praise. Even now, clad only in smeared ichor and his own blood, the stranger dominated the room as if he wore a hidden crown. Yllithian found he hated him immediately.

  ‘Welcome–’ Yllithian began before the stranger cut him off.

  ‘Please, before you speak allow me to give my thanks to you both for my safe return. Without your help I would still be trapped in Shaa-dom. How long has passed?’

  ‘Three thousand years,’ Xelian said with a knowing smile.

  ‘Small wonder I feel so parched! And Vect still rules, I take it?

  ‘Why would you say that?’ asked Yllithian, sounding sharper than he had intended. El’Uriaq threw his head back and laughed. It was the honest laughter of a joke shared between friends.

  ‘Why else would you need me?’ he said ‘Only Vect’s enemies would want me back, and that means Vect has to be alive. If Vect is alive he must still rule.’

  ‘All too true,’ Yllithian said bitterly. ‘Then I’ll be direct – will you join us and help to overthrow the tyrant? Will you dedicate yourself to it?’

  To Yllithian’s astonishment the tall eldar hugged him, the movement so quick and the grip so inescapable that he momentarily feared for his life.

  El’Uriaq stared into his eyes intensely and said, ‘I will reforge your armies into engines of destruction that will conquer each and every one of your foes, I will subvert your enemies and bring such a reckoning down among your friends that they will never again question their loyalty to you. I will help you to ascend to the very zenith of your power and together we will destroy the tyrant as I should have done so long ago. I would promise you this simply out of love for you after what you’ve done for me, but I’ll swear to it on the lives of the very people that Vect murdered in my realm. This time I will strike first. This time Vect will feel my blade.’

  El’Uriaq released him and Yllithian took a half-step back, dazed. Bellathonis was nearby, becoming increasingly agitated as he tried to get Yllithian’s attention. It didn’t look like he had good news. Yllithian seized on the opportunity to tear his attention away from the emotional whirlpool of El’Uriaq.

  ‘What is it, Bellathonis?’ Yllithian snapped, finding most of his irritation had now zeroed in on the master haemonculus as being its source. He could see that the wracks had lowered Kraillach’s sarcophagus on its chains and were removing his fresh, pink body from its nest
of tubes, filaments and sloshing amniotic fluids inside. The archon of the Realm Eternal looked like a newborn with his eyes squeezed tightly shut.

  ‘I need to discuss some… anomalies that may have occurred with you, my archon,’ Bellathonis said between bowing and scraping frantically. The master haemonculus must have been deeply upset about something to risk the archon’s anger so thoughtlessly.

  ‘Out with it, haemonculus,’ Yllithian said coldly. ‘We have a great deal of work ahead of us and I don’t have the time to tarry here. What of Kraillach? Is he properly reborn?’ He noticed that the master haemonculus was taking pains not to look directly at El’Uriaq.

  ‘Yes, my archon, but that’s just it: the issue, the anomaly. Altogether too rapid. Both were impossibly fast. By my calculations–’

  ‘Enough!’ roared El’Uriaq. Bellathonis was suddenly flung aside as if he had been swatted by an invisible fist. The lanky haemonculus’s body crunched into the chamber wall five metres away with a bone-snapping impact before slithering down it to lie, unmoving, in a crumpled heap at the bottom. Psychic energy crackled through the chamber and El’Uriaq’s eyes glowed with inner fires in the aftermath. All present froze in shock at witnessing such power used so flagrantly.

  Yllithian gasped as one of Bellathonis’s wracks, the one named Xagor, hurled himself at the reborn archon with a knife naked in his fist. His hand darted for his own weapon to cut down the deranged fool before he could harm El’Uriaq. He was too slow to affect the outcome. A single glance from El’Uriaq and the weapon in the wrack’s hand flashed into a mass of molten metal. The wrack screamed and collapsed, his hand burned away to the wrist. The undercurrent of psychic energy in the chamber thickened until it seemed to drip from the air, dense and treacle-like.

  ‘You’re right,’ El’Uriaq said with icy calm, ‘we have a great deal of work ahead of us, my friends, far too much to be distracted by trivialities. I have waited long enough already. Let’s be about it with no more delays.’