‘Horrible, I didn’t think I could do it. How could you know?’
‘The viral helix is highly mutable, a living thing seeking to spread and flourish, to overcome the barriers to its growth. The protection they had against the glass plague was a physical thing, tiny machines that destroyed the virus before it could grow. It was only a hope that you could help it grow fast enough to overwhelm the machines, but it was the best hope we could find.’
Laryin wasn’t so sure that it had worked. The silence that had descended over the frozen scene didn’t feel like ending, it was more like watchful imminence. The amphitheatre swam before her eyes as bonecrushing weariness swept over her.
‘Laryin!’ came a cry from the back of the shadowed amphitheatre. Shapes were moving there on the entry ramp. A detachment of armoured warriors spread out cautiously with weapons at the ready. Rushing from their midst came Sindiel, with a pistol in hand and his fine armour hacked and slashed in a dozen places.
To Laryin’s surprise the grim-looking warriors didn’t shoot Sindiel down in his tracks, instead they moved to protect his back. Sindiel ran to the foot of the dais and stopped, gazing up at the worldsinger uncertainly.
‘It’s you,’ she prompted.
‘I… it’s me, I came to rescue you,’ Sindiel stammered gallantly. ‘It seems I’m a little late.’
Laryin glanced at the ominous crystal-glass statue of El’Uriaq. ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ she said shakily, ‘your timing couldn’t be better.’ She rattled the chain at her throat helplessly and said, ‘Could you…?’
Sindiel mounted the steps and gently took her wrist, guiding the harlequin’s kiss to the adamantine links. A whisper of motion too quick to see and the chains fell away. Laryin leaned on Sindiel, suddenly exhausted and finding herself barely able to stand.
‘How did you get those others to come?’ Laryin managed to ask as Sindiel half-carried her down the dais steps.
The renegade glanced back at the knot of warriors reforming at the ramp. ‘They’re from my ships. I told them we were going to kidnap a great prize from fat and wealthy archons.’
‘But why did you come back?’ Laryin’s vision was dimming, Sindiel’s face was becoming a blur, but it seemed desperately important to hear him out.
‘Because of what you said. I decided to forgive myself and act in the way I truly wanted to.’
‘You would have been crushed.’
Sindiel was silent for a long time before he said eventually, ‘I know… but I had to try.’
In the silent amphitheatre El’Uriaq sat frozen among his departed minions. The slightest discoloration could be seen spreading across his form, the subtlest marbling that spoke of changes occurring within. Its enemies had trapped it but they had not destroyed it. They had underestimated how tenaciously the entity could cling to even the slightest fragment of physicality, adjusting its own extradimensional lattice to fit inside the smallest space. Its bridgehead into the dark city had been reduced but not removed. With time it would alter this vessel until it could seek out a new host.
Even trapped as it was, the entity possessing El’Uriaq still had the senses to tell that it was not alone. A figure had entered the amphitheatre and was limping its way slowly to the throne.
‘I thought you’d never come,’ whispered Angevere from beside the throne.
‘I had to wait for the foundling and his merry band to get out of the way,’ Bellathonis wheezed reproachfully. ‘They took the pure heart with them?’
‘Yes, it was all very moving.’
‘Let’s hope our heroic idiot has the wherewithal to get her out of the city before more damage is done.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Finish this so that we can be gone.’
‘Tsk, tsk, Angevere. This is a historic moment whether we like it or not. It should be treated with sufficient gravitas.’
‘There’s no reason to relish it. The cost will be high.’
‘Vengeance is vengeance, my dear, doesn’t the tyrant teach us that we must strike down those that wrong us no matter the cost? Isn’t that a moment to be relished? And gloried in?’ Bellathonis chuckled dryly. ‘Besides which, there’s no other way. To finish this a price must be paid. Now hush or I won’t take you with me when I leave.’
Bellathonis dragged his crooked legs up the steps to the figure on the throne. He held a hide-wrapped jar in his hands.
‘I too have a gift for you, noble El’Uriaq,’ he said to the dark crystal form. ‘A little something a colleague had thought to bestow upon me.’ He placed the jar reverentially at El’Uriaq’s feet, picked up the casket containing the head of Angevere and backed away.
The somewhat dimmed sentience of the entity still invested in the form of El’Uriaq registered the close presence of the dark gate with a sensation akin to fear. It represented a dimensional trap to it, a black hole in miniature that led to an oubliette crammed with starved remnants of its own ilk. It could feel them, beating hungrily at the thin membrane encompassed inside the runic tetrahedron. It grew very still and waited.
‘My colleague placed a number of discreet triggers on the device he constructed,’ Bellathonis called out as he shuffled away between the ranked tables. ‘It was to be specifically attuned for my bio-signature, you see? But I destroyed him when he tried to get the readings he needed to calibrate the device. Rather ironic, no? I confess that I simplified his rather magnificently useless attempt by substituting a single trigger of quite mundane sort…’
Bellathonis reached the exit ramp and paused to look back at the frozen tableau for one last time.
‘A timer.’
At the top of the dais reality cracked open for a fraction of a second as the dark gate activated. Purple-black light welled forth with retina-searing intensity and a clap of thunder rolled around the amphitheatre. For one dreadful moment it seemed as if El’Uriaq was enthroned in leaping purple flames. Then the sight was obscured by frantically looping darkness, half-seen ectoplasmic tendrils that writhed with eye-blurring swiftness. Writhing, looping, contracting. A flash and another peal of thunder and that too was gone, the very rock trembling with the sudden impact. The glass tableau in the amphitheatre shattered into a glittering cloud of shards as the shockwave hit it, the reverberating echoes booming from the walls like titanic laughter.
Bellathonis clutched at the wall for support. The trembling did not lessen, rather it intensified. Flakes of stone rained down, soon pursued by larger chunks. A chandelier of woven ribs crashed to the ground, smashing several victims of the glass plague into tinkling ruin. The haemonculus staggered away into the catacombs but he knew it was already too late to escape, nowhere in the city would be safe.
Even now ripples of entropy from the event were racing ahead of him to crash against the complex system of psychic wards holding together Commorragh and its sub-realms. Across the city formerly inactive portals would be flaring into life, while other vital arteries were being cut. The very foundations of the eternal city were shaking.
The Dysjunction had begun.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andy Chambers is a veteran writer for the Warhammer 40,000 universe with more than twenty years experience creating worlds dominated by giant robots, spaceships and dangerous aliens. He worked at Games Workshop as lead designer of the Warhammer 40,000 miniatures game for three editions before moving to the PC gaming market to work on the hit real time strategy game Starcraft2 by Blizzard Entertainment. Andy has written several short stories and two novels for Black Library, Survival Instinct and Path of the Renegade. Andy has recently returned to the UK and is living in Nottingham.
Dedicated to Jes Goodwin and Phil Kelly for bringing the dark city to life, to my mum and dad for being awesome and to my wife, Jessica, for being even more awesome.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
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