Path of the Renegade

by Andy Chambers

  Yllithian found himself nodding with agreement, all thoughts of the haemonculus’s fate temporarily forgotten under the spell of El’Uriaq’s charisma. Yllithian felt elated again. Everything was coming together perfectly.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE REALM ETERNAL

  The dream had changed for Kraillach. He still saw Commorragh as he’d seen it before: a glittering crown of spires surrounded by a jewelled diadem of serenely orbiting sub-realms. Now his dream-self reached out for a passing gem as it swung close by, knowing that if he could only hide it in his palm he could draw it away from the dark city and cherish it all for his own. Often he hesitated at the last moment, confounded by the bright moving shapes, or was seized by a sudden and unaccountable fear, but each night his hand crept inexorably closer to his goal.

  The result was always the same. Even as his fingers closed around the bauble it blackened and cracked, slipping away into the void. As it fell ripples of entropy spread, racing through the sub-realms with hurricane force, sending them clashing like beads on a wire. The mountainous spires of High Commorragh shivered and groaned, its jagged minarets and barbed steeples swaying like trees in a storm. Debris rained down: tiny, fluttering petals in his dream-sight but in reality gigantic avalanches of metal and ceramic destined to wipe out tens of thousands on their arrival in Low Commorragh. The sub-realms spun wildly, scattering outwards as fire and lightning wreathed the glittering crown.

  Kraillach stirred peevishly in his nest of golden silks. The preceding night of exhausting and ultimately unsatisfying entertainments had taxed his newborn vigour. For a brief time he had almost felt like his old sybaritic self, but somehow the moment had never quite arrived. He had wanted to punish a few of his minions to excise his frustration and spur the rest to greater efforts, but he could muster little enthusiasm even for that diversion at present.

  He had retired into his inner sanctum in the hopes that it would bring him some sense of serenity in the unfulfilled aftermath of his orgiastic pursuits as it had done so many times in the past. Today the walls of unbreakable stone and their linings of unbreachable metal were availing him nothing of the sort. His enemies were already inside, masked little conspirators of doubt and fear that were stalking around in the dark recesses of his mind.

  He could not understand it. Everything should be perfect. The Realm Eternal had rebounded from its internal machinations and was growing more strongly than ever. Kraillach had always kept the kabal’s recruiting policies as open as polite etiquette made possible, following the maxim that quantity has a quality all of its own. Lately he had been forced to consider becoming more selective just to cull the herd as the Realm Eternal’s ranks swelled.

  He found that he liked the idea and made a mental note to discuss it with Morr. Stringent controls would go some way to whipping the kabal into a more formidable military force over the long term. He briefly indulged himself in a fantasy of commanding powerful, disciplined forces rather than the armed rabble currently at his disposal. With sufficient force he could impose his commands on lesser kabals, seize more territory and make the Realm Eternal a name to be properly feared.

  At least the bloating numbers had brought with them a shower of wealth that warmed even what passed for Kraillach’s shrivelled black heart. Riches were flowing into his coffers from a variety of lucrative tithes and trades, erasing all of Kraillach’s concerns about his future fortunes.

  Yes, everything was perfect, everything for once seemed to be going his way. His new body was young and vital as it had not been in centuries, his appetites were if anything redoubled and yet… And yet it seemed, despite everything being so perfect, he could never quite quench his inner thirst. It was as if a hole had been made in his soul, or rather that the existing one had been widened from a keyhole to a gaping portal. He could never stop feeling hollow inside, almost as if every morsel fell straight through into an empty, unfillable void.

  Something had been done to him during his rebirth, he felt sure of it. Trapped in his sarcophagus, metres away from the old emperor’s resurrection, he had felt the monstrous, naked presence of the entity that settled on the frantically reknitting bones and sinews. He had perceived El’Uriaq’s unthinkable hunger before it was clothed by flesh and hidden away from mortal eyes. The experience had marked Kraillach then and it still marked him now, as if El’Uriaq had pierced him with an icy lance that was still in the wound. He found himself trembling at the thought.

  Again and again he found himself thinking about Dysjunction. He had lived through Dysjunctions before, witnessed the anarchy that ensued in their aftermath. They were dark and terrible times when feral necessity swept away the sophisticated face of Commorraghan politics and revealed the howling savage lurking just below the surface. There was another Dysjunction coming, he felt sure, just as Yllithian had said there would be. He already fancied he could almost feel the stresses developing and hear the distant creak of sub-realms straining at their connections to the core.

  Kraillach glanced suspiciously around the chamber. Beyond his inner feelings of disquiet, something external was troubling him. Some element of the reassuring tableau of his inner sanctum was missing. Kraillach looked about with increasing alarm as he considered carefully what it might be.

  The blood-daubed sigils covering the walls, floor and ceiling were fresh and unbroken. The censers hung about his bed silently dispensing their metered narcotics. The hermetic shields buzzed quietly at the edge of perception as they always did. The metre-thick iris valve of inscribed metal still sealed the only entrance to the sanctum and… Kraillach did a double-take.

  The entrance was sealed but Morr was not in front of it.

  Kraillach struggled to remember a time when he had awoken to find Morr absent, and failed. The towering incubus was such a fixture of the scene that now Kraillach was alerted to his absence he could virtually see a Morr-shaped hole where his chief executioner should be standing.

  Kraillach rose quickly, gathering his robes about him as he walked hesitantly to the sealed portal. Morr would surely only have left under the most dire of circumstances and even then why did he not awaken his master to ask for permission before leaving his side? He called out, on all channels, but received no response.

  Wracked by indecision, Kraillach retreated to the edge of his bath. A frightened part of his mind told him to arm himself and don the rainbow-hued armour standing nearby without delay. Another part of him quailed at the mockery he would glean by leaping out fully armed from his sanctuary if nothing truly threatened. The assassination attempt and the duel with Xelian had already hurt his reputation badly enough that he was sensitive to anything that might make matters worse. As the kabal grew it became more tempestuous, drama-filled and harder to control. Whatever his inner fears might be he had to present a composed, relaxed face full of confidence to the world. In Commorragh, living in fear of assassins was virtually guaranteed to bring them to the door.

  He plucked a belt of linked metal plates from a table. He had grown wary of trusting to his doppelganger field to protect him after the fight with Xelian. He’d had this new protective device made by his artisans, a phasing shield that converted potentially deadly amounts of incoming energy into heat and light that was reflected outwards at the attacker. Kraillach cast the intricate belt back on the table petulantly. While it made for an excellent defence against high-energy weapon strikes, the shield was nowhere near as effective against the slow assassin’s blade.

  Swallowing his fear, Kraillach decided he was being ridiculous. Clearly something was amiss, the absence of Morr and any form of communication were quite alarming enough to warrant taking basic precautions like wearing armour. He started donning the rainbow-hued plates with fumbling hands, unaccustomed as he was to arming himself without assistance.

  He had a nasty moment when the portal refused to open. The considerable irony to be had from simply trapping Kraillach inside his lair to starve to death had never really crossed his mind before. Sure enoug
h he had victuals on hand to live for a while, but what if they ran out and he was still trapped? He steadied his nerves with a stiff drink and keyed the runic sequence again just to be sure. The iris slid open this time as it should, filling Kraillach with relief. At least something still worked. The shimmering surface of the portal was revealed and he waited a moment to see if enemies came plunging out of it. Seconds stretched by and nothing happened. Kraillach took another drink, snorted a large pinch of agarin and ventured out.

  The halls of the palace were dim and quiet. The night before the halls had been filled with chattering crowds of brightly dressed revellers, but now Kraillach walked through echoing corridors devoid of any living thing. He had never seen his own palace so empty; the huge numbers of slaves, retainers, guards, sycophants, concubines and courtiers around him at all times had long since attained the status of ambulatory furniture in Kraillach’s mind. He noticed their individual presence or absence no more than divans, hangings and ornaments. He now perceived just how much servile activity had surrounded every moment of his waking life, only becoming apparent by its complete absence.

  At first he went by secret ways, going by the hidden stairways and concealed doors littered throughout his demesne. Kraillach had grown up in this palace and he knew them all, including the many additions of his own down the centuries. Each passage was decorated with the bones of the slaves that built it. Their skulls grinned down silently at him as he crept between spy holes, their lips forever sealed.

  He stopped abruptly, nostrils flaring at a familiar scent. Turning aside from the narrow corridor he was following he moved to a hidden entrance to one of the many boudoirs scattered along its length. Deep shadows lurked within and limp hangings obscured his view through the spy hole until he gave up and pushed his way inside. The smell was stronger now and it overwhelmed the scents of sweat, musk and perfume he expected to find.

  It was the coppery tang of freshly spilt blood that he had smelled. The floor was swimming with the stuff and the hangings were soaked with it. Kraillach was well aware of the extravagant-seeming quantities of blood to be found in an individual. He was in no doubt that several people had messily died here and yet there was no trace of bodies among the blood-soaked furnishings. He backed out of the intimate little charnel house into the colonnaded hallway outside, leaving a trail of crimson bootprints behind him.

  Panic tried to lift his feet and propel him back to his inner sanctum but fear, mixed with morbid curiosity, held him back. The image of being trapped inside his sanctum kept resurfacing in his mind and would not leave it. He walked further down the hall to check an adjoining niche and found a similar scene of carnage. Again there were no bodies or even parts of bodies to be seen, but copious quantities of blood had sprayed everywhere with appalling vigour. Part of his mind couldn’t stop wondering how all the bodies could be gone without leaving any trace of it in the hall.

  He spun suddenly at a sound, the faintest breath of chittering laughter. Shadows, emptiness confronted him. He was alone.

  He found all the bodies eventually, as he knew he would. They had been brought to the great hall and arranged around the throne of splendours. The vast space of the hall was covered in a pallid carpet of corpses, naked, white and drained of every drop of their blood. Most had been placed to make it appear as if they were sleeping or copulating, casually intertwined with their heads gently at rest on outstretched hands or cold shoulders. Others were placed as if they had been sitting up carousing together and momentarily drifted off into slumber. Others were caught in the act of murdering one another with slack hands around bruised throats or disembowelling daggers. Every single white corpse bore a red-lipped wound somewhere on their person, a yawning throat, a split back or an opened chest that spoke of their death blow.

  Some sixth sense drew Kraillach’s attention to the throne. It had been empty when he first approached, tumbling with kaleidoscopic images on every facet.

  It was occupied now.

  ‘Consequences,’ the figure on the throne said distinctly. Kraillach’s heart jumped into his mouth.

  ‘Consequences,’ the grey figure said again. ‘There are always consequences for everything we do, for every step we take. It always saddens me immensely but here we are.’

  Kraillach struggled to regain some hint of composure. He looked around fearfully, expecting an attack at any moment. The figure on the throne did not move and no hidden confederates sprang into view. After a few seconds Kraillach recovered sufficiently to ask: ‘Who are you, why…?’

  ‘Why, forgive me! I’m forgetting my manners!’ The figure rose and moved towards him, dancing a few half-steps with an imaginary partner along the way. It was an eldar dressed in an archaic-looking doublet and hose made with so many variegated colours that from a distance the cloth appeared grey. A black and white domino mask hid the upper part of his face, and the mouth beneath the mask was twisted into a mournful, comically unhappy frown.

  ‘You can call me Motley and it’s my pleasure to make your acquaintance, Archon Kraillach.’ The figure sketched out a mockery of a deep bow. ‘But you’re mistaken thinking that I did all this on my own. I admire the artistry immensely, of course, and I wish that I could claim all of the credit for it, but the truth is that all of this,’ Motley gestured vaguely to encompass the evidence of massacre spread beneath their feet, ‘was of your making. I may have wielded the blade in part but you were the one to press it into my hand, even though in truth I had considered myself only…’ the figure poised and tilted its half-masked face in consideration, ‘…an interested observer.’

  Motley began to dance slowly around the throne in courtly fashion, bowing to his imaginary partner and rising on tiptoe to lift their imaginary arms before spinning them lazily. Kraillach watched him carefully.

  ‘I know of your kind. By what right does the Masque deign to interfere in my affairs?’ Kraillach whined. ‘Or do you simply come to revel in my downfall?’

  ‘Oh don’t be so coy, archon, you know what’s happening better than almost anyone – you must suspect what’s gestating inside you.’ Motley shrugged. ‘And if things had continued the way they were I would have arrived at your door at some point.’

  Motley halted his pavane and pirouetted to face Kraillach. ‘As it stands that’s become irrelevant as I was invited in early to prevent a tragedy becoming a catastrophe. Or was it a calamity becoming a cataclysm? I don’t recall.

  ‘If you want to find the real sculptor of this particular exhibit you’ll need to look closer to home than my good self, I think. He seemed a joyless fellow when I first met him, but now I can see that he really has a poet’s soul beneath all that gruff. He’s waiting for you, I believe. Perhaps you should be running along before his other friends come back?’

  Motley gazed pointedly toward the far end of the hall. Shadows were oozing out of the corners and slithering along the walls towards them. Kraillach fled.

  At first Kraillach had tried to make his way to the docking ports in the upper levels of the palace but restless shadows dogged his heels at every turn. They trailed him unerringly through the secret paths he took and lurked in wait for him at concealed portals they could not possibly have known about. He knew that he was being deliberately hemmed in and driven back towards his sanctum, but he couldn’t muster the courage to turn and face the sinister, slinking shapes – not yet. The sick fear of being trapped was back again, edged with gibbering panic at being hunted through his own realm. He kept hoping to find some of his retainers alive, some embattled pocket of resistance somewhere in the palace that he could shelter in. His feet clattered along empty corridors, the lonely noise only serving to emphasise the complete absence of other sounds.

  Suddenly the portal to his sanctum lay before him, two upright copper-coloured trees of fantastic craftsmanship that curved together to intertwine at the apex of an open oval formed between their trunks. Kraillach looked around desperately. He’d lost his way somehow, and force of habit had brought him
unerringly back to the spot he had intended to avoid. The bright shimmer of the portal itself glowed between the shining trunks promising a false hope of safety. Desperate courage made Kraillach turn at bay before it, flourishing his blade at his shadowy pursuers.

  ‘I’ll not be driven into a trap like an animal! Come out and face me!’ he shouted with more bravery than he truly felt. The corridor behind him was clotted with darkness, a gloomy stygian wall that denied the existence of anything but Kraillach, the portal and itself. The darkness rippled with silent movement and figures began to detach themselves from its embrace. Kraillach gripped his blade and wet his lips. They were mandrakes, umbral assassins from the depths of Aelindrach. Shadow-skinned and faceless, there seemed to be at least a dozen of them but there could have been a thousand lurking beyond the light and it would have been impossible to tell.

  Sensing a presence at his shoulder he whirled suddenly, barely avoiding a sickle of etched bone that came slicing at his neck. He jumped back instinctively to avoid another half-seen movement at his side and found himself plunging through the portal.

  With a flash he was inside his sanctum. The inscribed leaves of the iris door scissored shut behind him with a grim sound of finality. He blinked in the soft light, only now realising how truly dark it had been in the palace. He saw that he was not alone.

  ‘Morr! Where have you been?’ Kraillach babbled in relief, ‘I am assailed! Assassins are at my very door!’

  Morr’s double-handed klaive came flashing down and tore Kraillach’s blade from his hands.

  ‘No!’ Kraillach screamed, reeling back in horror. ‘Not you! You’re trustworthy! Loyal! All the years you served me…’

  The towering incubus slowly circled his archon, blade at the ready for a killing stroke. When he spoke his voice was dispassionate, even disappointed.

  ‘I am loyal, my archon. I served your father and his father before him. I am loyal to House Kraillach, and to the Realm Eternal as it has become. By my life or death I would have saved you if I could, but you are no longer Kraillach.’