More tales of the eldar from Black Library

THE MASQUE OF VYLE
A Warhammer 40,000 novella

PATH OF THE ELDAR OMNIBUS
Contains the novels Path of the Warrior, Path of the Seer and Path of the Outcast.

VALEDOR
A Warhammer 40,000 novel

TANTALUS
A Warhammer 40,000 Quick Read

FACES
A Warhammer 40,000 Quick Read

THE VICTIM’S DANCE
A Warhammer 40,000 Quick Read

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It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

THE TREASURES OF BIEL-TANIGH

Atop the White Flames fortress in High Commorragh lay the pleasure gardens of Archon Yllithian. There, dense banks of dream poppy and lotus blooms breathed a heady musk into the cold air of Corespur. Glittering pathways of crushed sapphires led between ever-changing fractal sculptures starkly gleaming beneath the wan, poisonous light of the Ilmaea, the captive suns above. Ordinarily the pleasure gardens were a place of quiet introspection and less visceral pleasures, but now they were a scene of carnage, plagued by howling destroyers intent on further mayhem.

Archon Yllithian himself stood on a terrace safely above the action, coolly watching as two packs of reavers swooped along the pathways and around the sculptures like brightly patterned, blade-limbed hornets. With both sides mounted on jetbikes, the action was fast and furious, blurs of colour briefly intermingling and bursting into fountains of crimson. The two packs were both pledged to him, but their rivalry had grown to the point of inconvenience of late. Yllithian’s judgement had been simple: they would resolve their differences in combat until he was satisfied that their bravado had been suitably quelled. There was no sign of this happening so far. The two packs broke apart and swept together again with mercurial swiftness.

Two figures joined Yllithian on the terrace. A male and female, as alike as brother and sister, dressed in simple, form-fitting armour that was the colour of smoke beneath cloaks and hoods of an umbral weave that drank light and voided shadow. They bore the weapons of assassins – long nosed pistols, monofilament garrottes and knives of many kinds – yet Yllithian’s silent incubi bodyguards paid them no heed. These were Yllithian’s creatures, two beings grown from a single cell by the haemonculus Syiin, a pair-bond bred for obedience and loyalty.

Yllithian winced theatrically as a head-on collision occurred in the gardens below, the belch of flames lighting his face momentarily with a diabolic cast. Turning his back on the ongoing melee in the pleasure garden he addressed the two newcomers.

‘Vyriadh and Xyril, my two light-fingered hands,’ he said. ‘You’ve brought me many gifts before now, lives and baubles plucked from the spires of Commorragh. Are you ready to go further?’

‘Always, my archon,’ Xyril said softly.

‘We live to serve,’ affirmed Vyriadh.

Silence lay between them for a moment, broken only by the howl and scream of jetbikes in the gardens beyond.

‘There is a place, ‘ Yllithian said, ‘beyond the Thorn Gate, where the Livisia meets the Rhozokian Fields, where there is a hidden portal. It is known to only the most ancient inhabitants of Commorragh, and long forgotten by most. This portal leads to Biel-Tanigh, a sub-realm resting like a pearl between the folds of warp and the material universe.

‘Now, down the long ages Biel-Tanigh has served as a secret repository for all manner of artefacts from before the Fall. The guardians of that place are friends to no one, but they protect certain items that Asdrubael Vect has placed there to put them out of reach of his rivals. It is one of these items that you will retrieve for me.’

‘How does the item appear?’ asked Xyril.

‘An opal, no greater than the size of a clenched fist. It may show motes of light moving within it with apparent purpose. Pay these no heed.’

‘How is it guarded?’ asked Vyriadh.

‘The dwellers of Biel-Tanigh set traps and patrols to catch interlopers. They are a benighted offshoot of our species that abandoned the true ways of the eldar long ago. They pursue an esotericism it would be too tiresome to describe and their outlook is so extreme that they have alienated their fellows and separated their sub-realm from the greater whole. Kill any you find, but be warned that they are said to be surpassingly puissant.’

Another sudden impact in the gardens hurled the flaming carcass of a jetbike high into the air. It described an elegant arc with its trail of smoke and flames as it curved upward and then down towards the terrace where Yllithian stood motionless.

‘My archon…’ Xyril said, watching the tumbling wreckage fall towards them.

‘Fear not, child, all eventualities have been accounted for,’ Yllithian said. A bolt of vivid energy leapt from a nearby tower to touch the tumbling wreck, and it vaporised instantly with a retina-burning flash of dark energy. Under cover of the sensor-blinding aftermath, Yllithian spoke several more terse instructions to his agents before he turned back to watch the ongoing combat. He waved the pair away with a final warning. ‘And don’t return until you’ve got what I want.’

Vyriadh and Xyril passed along their ways to the place their archon had described to them. They were more alike than twins, more than brother and sister, bred and raised together, trained to work as a team for one purpose. The eldar of Commorragh, the true eldar as they would have it said, suppressed their own, naturally strong, psychic powers. They had to do so because they lived on the edge of precipice, with the eternal hunger of She Who Thirsts always at their back. It was death, and more than death, for them to flagrantly use mind powers like telepathy which otherwise would be as natural as breathing.

Not so for bonded pairs like Xyril and Vyriadh. Their lifelong bond cultivated an empathic link between that enabled them to function with perfect synchronicity, each aware of the other’s thoughts and actions even as they formed them. Their souls were so enmeshed that such subtle dalliances between them passed below the attention of most daemonic entities.

Pair-bonding was a rarity in Commorragh, and not without its perils. Each half of the whole knew the other could die at any moment and the fear of separation could come to overshadow their lives. Suicide pacts between pair-bonds were common, and murder-suicides not unknown. Still, pair-bonds could be trained in psychometry, the art of tracing a psychically charged object by its unique ‘scent’, making them excellent hunters, assassins and thieves.

Like twinned shadows, they descended from the spires to Corespur, and thence to the sprawling, anarchic districts of Low Commorragh. Bloodshed and murder were daily occurrences in Corespur but it still was a place of calm in comparison to Low Commorragh. Here, slaves and fleshborn rubbed shoulders in pursuit of illicit pleasures. Lime-lit signs and cages of light proclaimed paths to oblivion or sensory overload powerful enough to obliterate the miseries of wicked, eternal Commorragh… at least for a little while.

The pair-bonded twins slunk past all such temptations without a backward glance. Their only pleasure lay in fulfilling the wishes of their master. They skirted around street brawls and skirmishes, weaving through back alleys and across rooftops as they slipped through the shadows towards their goal. They passed the great barbed edifice of the Thorn Gate unseen by its silent watchers and came at last to the stagnant flow known as the Livisia.

The Livisia twisted through an acid-cut channel crusted with millennia of filth, a slow-moving ribbon of emerald ooze half-choked with crumbling bones and other less identifiable detritus. Xyril and Vyriadh clambered along its banks like dark-limbed spiders and so passed beneath slave tenements and flesh farms on their way to the Rhozokian fields.

+We’re so close!+ Vyriadh’s mind sang.

+Only to the portal, then we must be extra careful,+ Xyril’s mind cautioned.

+Extra careful then, careful now,+ Vyriadh’s mind echoed.

They climbed up onto the Rhozokian Fields, a kilometre-wide pan of dirt mounds and reedy pools wedged between two out-thrust spurs of the city. The area was devoid of even slave shacks due to skulking ur-ghuls, the whip-thin horrors making it too dangerous for an unarmed group to enter.

+Up high, the portal,+ Vyriadh’s mind called.

Xyril saw the inset slab of metal, seemingly no different from a hundred others lining the spur foundations hanging over them. Almost at the same instant she heard the hiss of indrawn breath through quivering scent-pits, the sound of an ur-ghul on the hunt. Vyriadh was already climbing, flowing up the ridged buttresses at an easy walking pace. Xyril sprang up after him and caught his outstretched hand even as she drew her pistol and fired down without looking. The poisoned sliver caught an onrushing ur-ghul, unseen by Xyril but clearly visible to Vyriadh above, on the top of its eyeless cranium just as it was grasping for her ankle. The ur-ghul collapsed on stiffening limbs as Vyriadh drew Xyril up beside him. A second and then a third of the troglodytic creatures burst into view, their scent-pits wide at the smell of blood. Xyril and Vyriadh shot them down with negligent efficiency and climbed up to the portal together.

The webway tunnels beyond the portal were filmy and insubstantial, ghostly filaments undulating in the void. Rents and tears in the walls afforded stomach-roiling glimpses of oily hues swirling beyond, the colours of Chaos visible in all their inchoate glory. The chill breath of She Who Thirsts could be felt as Xyril and Vyriadh moved cautiously deeper inside – daemons had stalked these paths, the wardings that held them in check were tattered and broken. It seemed impossible that this section of the webway had survived at all, and only after long wandering along its dangerous passages did they discover the reason why.

It appeared a savage shrine at first, a ziggurat built of horned skulls and twisted bones in honour of savage gods. Closer inspection revealed its meticulous construction and runes of dire portent burned into it. Not a shrine but a warning, a display of past transgressors to frighten off would-be explorers or invaders. Here was the portal to Biel-Tanigh itself, cloaked in the bones of the damned. Xyril and Vyriadh remained undaunted and set to uncovering the ancient portal hidden beneath.

‘Less than welcoming,’ said Xyril as she pried a skull loose.

‘To be expected,’ said Vyriadh as he caught it and laid it to one side.

Xyril suddenly cursed and leapt aside, pulling down Vyriadh with her. An instant later the bone-shrine detonated in a blinding flash of light. Smoking shards scythed across the pair, whirring off their armour and slicing through their cloaks. The thunderclap detonation echoed along the tunnels like distant laughter. Looking up, Vyriadh saw the portal fully revealed and apparently intact, a leaf-shaped arch of copper-coloured metal covered in sinuous inscriptions.

‘Crude,’ complained Xyril, sweeping a handful of smoking fragments from her lap.

‘Effective,’ admitted Vyriadh as he pulled a piece of bone from his scalp.

‘Not so, as we are still alive,’ corrected Xyril.

No two sub-realms are identical. Each is its own world, a bubble of reality afloat in the seething tides of warp space. Most were constructed by the eldar in ancient times at the height of their power. Fortresses, ports, pleasure palaces, exotic gardens, secret lairs: all were hewn from the shifting tides of the warp, with the port-city of Commorragh being the greatest sub-realm of them all. Biel-Tanigh was a sub-realm of a different sort, one that was quite possibly never raised by eldar hands.

The sky of Biel-Tanigh was a dull, unrelieved crimson, lit by a distant silver sun that scintillated in a manner disturbing to look upon. Tall, jagged towers of black metal rose on every side, their darkly gleaming flanks netted by immense briar-like growths. Shafts of silver sunlight moved across the scene like questing fingers, their motions so precise that it implied a guiding intelligence controlled them.

The pair lowered themselves into the briar-choked avenues between the towers, dwarfed by the alien immensity surrounding them. The thick briars, all covered with span-wide thorns, shifted with lazy but undeniable purpose as they passed, coiling slowly to try and catch a hand or foot, or creeping closer whenever they halted in one spot for more than a moment.

Xyril and Vyriadh pushed deeper, following their master’s cryptic directions through the labyrinthine streets and seeking the peculiar psychic spoor of the artefact he sought. They saw no living thing, all was still and empty save for the lazy, predatory briars and the silently sweeping sun beams. The jagged towers opened onto the streets at apparently random intervals, their dark maws set at ground level or high on their flanks and surrounded by coldly burning runes.

‘All of them portals, you think? Is this a city of portals?’ Vyriadh wondered.

‘Concentrate on finding what our archon wants.’ Xyril scolded. ‘Nothing else matters!’

A movement ahead made both twins freeze instinctively. A long-limbed figure had emerged from a tower and was striding towards them. Metre-long blades curved from its four upper limbs; its body and head were abstract sculptures of curved armour with only the vaguest implication of humanoid shape.

A thorned briar brushed against Xyril’s ankle and she sprang forward to escape it, racing seemingly heedlessly into the clutches of the scimitar-limbed myrmidon.

Deadly blows rained down like thunderbolts, sending Xyril leaping, twisting and rolling through the clutching briars to evade them. Vyriadh landed on the thing’s back in accordance with their unspoken plan and plunged twin daggers into its neck joint. Its four scimitar limbs instantly reversed and swept backwards to encase Vyriadh in a bladed cage. He slithered free as Xyril punched a knife up to its hilt through the warrior’s curved breastplate, the corrosive poison on her weapon blackening metal with every hissing drop. She left the blade in place as she rolled away from a scything counter-attack and circled warily with Vyriadh as their opponent staggered and thrashed. The thing, the automaton as she now realised it to be, weakened and collapsed in lifelike fashion, its blades shuddering as the corrosive poisons ate out its heart.

‘Disappointing, scarcely puissant,’ sniffed Vyriadh.

‘Perhaps when seen in greater numbers–’ Xyril said before she looked up at Vyriadh in sudden recognition that the air was brightening around them. A white haze engulfed one end of the street, growing in intensity until a beam of silver incandescence swept into view, making the dark avenue blaze with light.

They instinctively ran together, making for the entry the automaton had emerged from as the one piece of cover nearby. The briars were writhing and knotting as if in pain at the coming of the light, forcing Vyriadh and Xyril to leap over and under the looping tendrils as they ran. They dived inside the entry, only steps ahead of the moving beam front, the baleful, silver light casting grotesque shadows as it swept past their hiding place and halted briefly over the fallen warrior.

+I fear the sun spies on us,+ Vyriadh’s mind whispered after a moment.

+I fear the sun is not a sun at all,+ Xyril whispered back.

After a drawn out, horrible moment, the light dimmed as the questing beam moved on. The hissing, twisting briars quieted once more and the pair risked a glance outside. The wrecked warrior was gone, the whole area where it had fallen swept clean as if by a giant broom. At their backs, the featureless black metal walls of a corridor disappeared into the utter darkness.

+Out or in?+ Vyriadh wondered silently.

+Out, we still must find the archon’s desire,+ thought Xyril. +And safety will not be found inside.+

The entry began to seal as if in response to the thought, leaves of metal sliding into place across it with unhurried fluidity. They darted through the narrowing gap before it could trap them inside, the entry sealing itself behind them with an audible snap. Outside, the dark, angular towers reared up all around them, enigmatic and indecipherable. They pushed onward through them, now watching the skies for questing beams, now dodging predatory briars. At last, they paused.

+There! I feel it!+ Vyriadh thought triumphantly.

+Perhaps,+ Xyril concurred after a moment. +I hear its call too. Numberless voices like surf on a beach, cheering.+

+Or screaming in a fire,+ Vyriadh laughed.

They followed the psychic spoor among the metal canyons, wary in case they came upon more warrior machines. Eventually a citadel of black metal rose ahead, squat and multi-peaked in comparison to its neighbours, half-hidden beneath a mass of trailing briars, thicker than the others they’d passed, with a pair of gleaming guardians standing guard outside it. Somewhere high up, among the barbed minarets of the citadel’s crown, was the object that Archon Yllithian desired.

+Death to climb it,+ Xyril sighed, kicking aside a tendril of briar that was creeping closer.

+Not if we cross from another spot,+ Vyriadh thought, showing in her mind an image of another tower that leaned close to their objective. In one place it virtually overhung a broad balcony near the top and looked relatively briar-free.

+Good enough, if we can climb that tower,+ Xyril judged.

+Only one way to find out,+ concluded Vyriadh.

Swift and silent as shadows, they worked their way around to the overhanging tower. Contact grip pads, formed on palms and toes by their armour, proved equal to the task of adhering to the dark metal, and they began to climb, inch by inch, up its surface. Their progress was slow, many times delayed by having to move crabwise to avoid lengths of dangling briar. Vyriadh and Xyril froze a third of the way up as a questing, silvery beam of light swept silently past, their eyes smarting in the monochromatic glare. As they climbed higher they found that the breeze, unnoticeable at street level, grew stronger and began to pluck at their limbs and cloaks with increasing tenacity.

The gradient steepened inexorably as they climbed above a hundred metres, the tower’s overhang glowering above them. One of Vyriadh’s grip pads slipped as he reached upwards, leaving him hanging in space by one hand and foot as his body weight swung dangerously outwards. Xyril caught at his flailing arm and slapped it onto the metal surface to steady him almost without thought. They both paused for a moment, breathing hard.

+We’re high enough already, look,+ Xyril thought.

Vyriadh saw that it was true. A drop of some ten metres onto the balcony lay behind them – with a horizontal gap at least as far between tower and citadel.

+One good leap will be enough,+ Vyriadh thought boldly, tensing his body to hurl himself outwards.

+Stop!+ Xyril warned. Vyriadh instantly froze.

+What is it?+ Vyriadh asked.

+A trap for the unwary. See it?+ Xyril showed him the balcony again. Something barely perceptible overlaid the balcony, a cross-hatching of pencil-thin lines that was only visible from certain angles.

+Monofilament wire,+ realised Vyriadh and shuddered.

+Enough to turn a plunging body into goo,+ Xyril agreed. The molecule-thick entanglement would have sliced them limb from limb if they so much as brushed against it, let alone jumped into it.

+I still have corrosives. Most of yours went into the disappointing warrior,+ Vyriadh observed.

Braced by both toe grips and one hand, Xyril reached over, unclipped an emerald-hued bulb of poison from Vyriadh’s belt and tossed it unerringly towards the balcony. It burst into an evil-looking green cloud just above the ground; faint traceries of lines showed where it was eating into the wire. In seconds the taut web had collapsed, completely consumed by the powerful acid-based toxin. In a few moments more the breeze dispersed the cloud, leaving only a handful of blackened streaks behind.

Xyril and Vyriadh leapt together, somersaulting to land on the balcony. The psychic spoor of their prize was stronger here, much stronger.

The pounding rush of it in her mind made Xyril sway for a moment. Vyriadh looked at her oddly.

+It is nothing!+ Xyril’s mind snarled. +Focus!+

Triple arches led from the balcony, peeking out from beneath a veil of briars. Xyril stepped to the centre arch and quickly cut back the briars with quick, efficient slashes of her blade. The crashing psychic pulse of their prize washed over them again, and this time it was Vyriadh who shook visibly at the onslaught.

+Such pain and anger!+ Vyriadh’s mind muttered uncertainly. +Perhaps we should not–+

+Don’t even think it. We live to serve!+ Xyril commanded, her thoughts edged with fear.

Vyriadh nodded silently and drew himself together, his mental defences hardening against the crash and roar they had so eagerly sought when they first entered Biel-Tanigh. Beyond the arch a corridor sloped away, curving back upon itself to spiral down to the next level. They proceeded cautiously down it, wary for traps at every step. The corridor led them around in one circuit and then its walls disappeared so it became a curved ramp descending into the open space below.

They found themselves in a wide hall, gloomily lit so that its far walls were lost in shadow. Angular plinths rose from the floor at various intervals. Many were empty, but others bore a strange variety of objects: skulls, sword hilts and pieces of armour were among the more identifiable things, others seemed like interlocking whorls of metal or complex nests of frozen light. The roaring surf-song of the archon’s prize emanated from a plinth towards the back wall, drawing Xyril and Vyriadh onwards with scarcely a glance at the esoteric artefacts around them.

The jewel Yllithian had described lay upon a plinth, quiescent and seemingly mundane in comparison to its neighbours. A fist-sized stone very much like an opal, but with flecks of light floating in its depths.

Xyril and Vyriadh glanced at each other in triumph. Xyril started to reach for the stone and then paused as Vyriadh sprinkled sensor-blinding dust over the plinth to disclose any final traps. Xyril’s fingers closed around the stone and her mind was buffeted by the outpouring of empathic energies.

‘Death! Ruin! Revenge!’ The silent shouts pulsed inside her temples. She staggered again and almost dropped the opal, Vyriadh’s grip steadying her as she rode the emotional wave. There was fear and anger and hatred and pride and triumph, all melded into one great ululating psychic cry of outrage. Xyril’s mind was assailed by images of another place at another time, of towers falling in flames, shrieking daemons blackening the skies, a tidal flood of dark energy rushing outward, reality itself cracking asunder.

+Strong! We must be strong!+ Vyriadh’s mind shouted through the maelstrom and Xyril draw strength from his certainty. Her sense of self emerged like a bubble from the whirlpool of tumbling psychic images and she straightened, gripping the opal harder as the visions faded.

‘You should put that back,’ a strangely accented voice said from the gloom.

Vyriadh and Xyril drew their weapons with eye-blurring swiftness, simultaneously moving to place themselves back to back as they strained to identify the speaker. They saw several figures emerging from among the plinths, moving into the chamber with a stealthy tread that Vyriadh and Xyril would have found hard to believe was possible a moment before.

‘No,’ Xyril said distinctly, her little-used voice a harsh croak beside the lilting tones of the newcomers. The pair-bond sidled towards the ramp as she spoke the word, tensing to make a dash for freedom at the first opportunity. Four graceful, thorn-skinned eldar closed in on them, masked in black and bearing whips of dark metal shaped like writhing briars.

‘It will bring great woe upon your people,’ one warned as it flicked its lash at Vyriadh’s ankle.

‘The accursed halls of Shaa-dom must remain forever sealed,’ said another as its briar-whip whistled toward Xyril’s neck.

The pair-bond exploded into action, diving one over the other to avoid their incoming attacks. Vyriadh’s pistol spat poisoned slivers into one masked face and sent the assailant tumbling away. Xyril parried a strike at Vyriadh’s arm, but she was encumbered, still gripping the opal in one hand. Their assailants whirled into the shadows, their outlines shattering into patches of fluttering darkness.

A frightened part of them both knew that her holding onto the stone was crippling their chances of survival, let alone escape, but Xyril couldn’t let it go. It was as if a hot coal was burning in her hand and welding her fingers shut. The surging roar of its psychic pulse was trying to pull her away, up the ramp to freedom without thought for friends or enemies. She had to fight the urge in order to stay and protect Vyriadh.

With Xyril half-crippled, Vyriadh was struggling against their flitting attackers. He parried another strike from a half-seen enemy and fired his pistol again, this time his target darted out of sight before the trigger was even pulled. Two whips scythed out of the darkness simultaneously. Xyril managed to block one, but the other wrapped around Vyriadh’s hand, lacerating it cruelly as the barbs tore through his armour as if it were no more than silk. Vyriadh’s pistol clattered away from his grip as the whip pulled back and almost yanked him off his feet. Xyril could feel Vyriadh’s stab of panic as more whips whistled at him, but she was already sprinting away up the ramp.

Vyriadh’s rage, terror and understanding pursued her, yet even that life-long bond was all but extinguished by the beating pulse of the opal in her fevered grasp. All that mattered now was getting to Yllithian; the uncounted dead of Shaa-dom demanded it, implored it, even at the price that half her soul must be left dying behind her. She burst onto the balcony, knowing that Vyriadh was still fighting defensively on the ramp, doing everything he could to delay her pursuers.

She ran for the edge, using her free hand to ready a zipline equipped with a tiny gravitic grapnel at one end. Just as she leapt into space, she felt Vyriadh die. A part of herself was extinguished, a void opened where his fleeing soul once was.

Xyril gasped, abandoning herself to the fall as the pain of loss stabbed into her like a physical injury. Some baser instinct of preservation made her fling out the looping zipline towards the face of the tower now rushing past. The gravitic anchor caught, jerking her to a halt so sharply that she almost dislocated her shoulder. She rapidly slid down the few remaining metres to the ground. She wasted no time looking back at the citadel or retrieving the zipline. As soon as her feet touched the ground she ran, driven by the stone in her hand and pursued by her own guilt.

She ran, and they hunted her. Thorn-skinned eldar and warrior machines and silvery beams like spears stabbing down from above. They hunted her through the coiling briars and labyrinthine streets, beneath angular eaves and between barbed minarets, but they could not find her. The dead guided her now and saved her a hundred times even as they drove onward. Darting flecks of light swarmed inside the opal, its psychic pulse virtually dragging Xyril from one hiding place to another as the denizens of Biel-Tanigh hunted for her. She allowed it to guide her running feet, too numb with shock and loss to resist the silent urging. It soothed her, filling the lacerated space in her soul where Vyriadh had been torn away from her. She found that she hated it and loved it all at once.

Step by step, they crept together to the portal where Xyril and Vyriadh had entered the strange, terrible city what seemed to be so little time before. Xyril could feel that she was dying, her grief was a mortal wound that was sapping her will to live. Her limbs moved mechanically, acting only in anticipation of soon being able to rest forever. Climbing the tower was hard with only one hand but pocketing the stone never even crossed her mind. Slowly, painfully, she dragged herself up to the portal and activated it.

The tattered, ghostly webway seemed icy cold after Biel-Tanigh; the spectral gale blowing through its rents and tears stroked frozen fingers along Xyril’s spine. The opal, so blazing hot before, chilled to a lifeless lump and dropped from her nerveless fingers. Part of Xyril’s mind remembered vaguely that there was something important about the stone, but it was too hard to think about. Bending down to retrieve it would be an incredible amount of effort, enough to snap her thin thread of existence. Nothing really mattered any more.

Something drew her attention. It was a twisting thread of warmth or a familiar scent – she couldn’t quite tell which. The icy breeze bore with it some trace of familiarity. Xyril staggered towards it, closer to the torn edges of the webway tunnel. Something outside was calling to her.

In High Commorragh, atop the White Flames fortress, Archon Yllithian frowned with annoyance as a jewel at his wrist flashed twice and then dimmed. Looking away from the sslyth wrestling match for a moment, Yllithian gestured languidly to a dark, twisted individual who was lurking among the archon’s otherwise glittering entourage. The stooped figure hurried forward and abased itself, its curving spine imparting a curious rolling motion to the action.

‘Ready another pair-bond, Syiin. Your last ones failed me,’ Yllithian ordered.

Syiin blanched at his words, the tiny amount of colour in his already pale flesh rapidly draining away.

‘Are there improvements I could make?’ Syiin asked ingratiatingly. ‘My first priority is always to serve you as well as possible, my archon.’

Yllithian gave him a baleful look. ‘Do as I command or I will feed you to the sslyth here and now, am I clear?’

‘At once, my archon,’ the haemonculus simpered before rapidly retreating.

Yllithian gave his attention back to the multi-armed ophidians crushing one another for his pleasure as his mind worked over schemes to overcome this failure in his carefully laid plans. Patience was important. He had always known there was only a small chance of retrieving the key to Shaa-dom so easily. Patience and persistence would bring it to his hands eventually, and then the grand plan could begin.

MIDNIGHT ON THE STREET OF KNIVES

Commorragh is a city like no other in the universe. It exists outside space and time in the unknowable depths of the Sea of Souls, the realm beyond our realm that idiot savants argue gave birth to all that we know. Commorragh’s makers, or rather architects as they would claim, did not fashion the city as one place. Rather each of them used ways unimaginable to lesser beings to fashion their own secret enclaves out of the Immaterial Realm to serve as fortress, sanctum, pleasure palace or arena according to their whim. In time the hubris of these ‘architects’ grew so great that they created something that breached the very walls between realms. As all crashed into ruins they fled to their enclaves like rats into their holes. In time, as they grew ever more fearful of the dreadful child they had sired together, those that survived the tempest strove to connect their realms. So steeped in torture and murder were they that they had no choice. They must do so to feed one upon another and whomever else they could bring beneath their hand. And so the eternal city was born.

– Adept Xalinis Huo, Hereticus Majoris.

It was midnight on the Street of Knives when Kharbyr spotted his mark heading straight towards him not six stalls up. The street was dark and crooked but it was virtually deserted and the gaunt figure of Bellathonis’s servant stood out in freeze-frame in the stark flicker of the furnaces. Kharbyr had been lucky, oh yes, but he’d made the right choice of where to hunt in the first place and that made him feel extremely smug. He was cleverer than the others and he would be the one to claim the promised reward. He treated himself to a pinch of agarin while he waited, savouring the clean bite of it in his nostrils and the shiver it sent down his spine. Oh, this was going to be fun.

The whisper had come that Bellathonis’s servant had left the Red House carrying the package in a hurry and, most importantly, alone. When he’d heard that, Kharbyr had gambled that the haemonculus’s minion would cut through here. The Street of Knives was a safe run for as long as it lasted, at least as safe as it got anywhere in the city. The archon of Metzuh suffered no fractious incidents here that might impede the productivity of her weaponsmiths and artisans.

To underscore her displeasure at such activities, the Street of Knives was patrolled by her incubi, their mere presence enough to deter most troublemakers. The initial excitement of seeing his prey had sent Kharbyr’s hand shooting toward his blade of its own volition, but a pair of grim, armoured incubi already had him under scrutiny as if they could sense his intentions. The bodies of the truly foolhardy young blades – the ones who just couldn’t take a hint – were hanging on chains from the jagged eaves of the weapon shops. They were left there as hellion-bait to clarify the point to others to curb their instincts in this part of the city.

With a conscious effort of will, Kharbyr unwrapped his fingers from the polished bone grip and calmly turned to examine a display of wickedly curved hydraknives as the servant hurried past. Naturally, fighting still occurred this close to the archon’s palace, but only over matters of import that were orders of magnitude above this one.

Kharbyr got his first good look at the servant as he passed: a pale, haggard face with red, staring eyes, a heavy jaw and a morose scowl that looked to be a permanent fixture. It was a fitting face for the minion of a haemonculus, a creature of vivisections and interrogations. Thick brows beneath the servant’s hairless pate were currently knotted with concern and a kind of mulish determination.

A long, ribbed coat of dark hide flapped from the servant’s narrow shoulders with all the panache of partially sloughed skin. No weapons were obvious, but he was clutching the package so fiercely that it looked as if he feared it might make a break for freedom at any moment. He was also muttering incoherently and smelled appallingly of ether and offal. The servant was certainly going to be easy to shadow. Kharbyr let the noisome fool get a little further ahead and then wandered innocently after him.

Xagor clutched the hide-wrapped jar of pineal glands tighter to his chest. As he scurried along he tried to balance speed against drawing too much attention to himself. It was unlikely anyone would try to steal the jar here, but the master would not happy if Xagor so much as let it out of his sight or, worse still, he lost it. Those that displeased the master were soon begging for death. Xagor knew this for certain as he’d attended them himself on many occasions. With a haemonculus as skilled as the master, death was always a long time coming. No, handling the jar was bad enough, but what he’d heard while he was getting it at the Red House made it all so much worse.

Master Bellathonis was always hungry for news. He instructed all his servants most specifically on the importance of relaying to him any scrap of information, speculation, gossip or rumour as soon as it reached their lowly ears. The master had even gone so far as to demonstrate the alterations he made to servants who proved too slow or stupid to abide by this simple but cardinal rule.

Yes, Master Bellathonis took news very seriously indeed and now Xagor had suffered the misfortune of being told a piece of news that could change everything. A Dysjunction! His hand gripped the neck of the jar tighter as he fantasised about choking the life out of Matsilier for telling him in the first place. The crones predicted a Dysjunction before the year was out. The idiot had been so full of himself he couldn’t wait to share a secret and show how important he was. That had made it even worse. Who knew how many others he’d told, or how soon it would get back to the master or whether it had already done so and he, Xagor, the best and most trusted of the master’s servants, would presently be excreting from all the wrong orifices.

So here he was, scurrying down the Street of Knives, frantically trying to work out how to get this unwelcome lump of knowledge and an intact jar of glands to the master’s manse before someone else got there first. It was big news. A Dysjunction would send the fragile peace in the city tumbling into anarchy, the wardings would all shift and whole tiers could be inundated. It could even be the big one, the end of the city itself. His guts twisted queasily at the prospect. Everyone in Commorragh knew that they lived on the edge of the abyss, but chose to ignore it in a very determined fashion. Being confronted with the fact was an uncomfortable sensation.

Xagor briefly toyed with the idea of fleeing on the assumption that it was already too late, but he prided himself on having a more pragmatic viewpoint. If there was one thing that all the fickle masters of Commorragh could agree upon, it was that runaways were singled out for especially imaginative punishment in order to set an example. In a society that had whiled away countless millennia raising the infliction of pain and misery to a high art form, that meant things far worse than one of Master Bellathonis’ comparatively mild bouts of scatological humour. In this regard Xagor had to concede the policy was effective.

No, the correct course was to obey his first instinct and hurry back to face the consequences. If he was too late, well, the master could be almost… indulgent in his punishments if he believed you had tried your best. The master might even reward him. Xagor also prided himself on his sense of optimism. Sadly, that was sorely tested by the idea of Dysjunction. They had occurred before, though not in Xagor’s lifetime, and the idea that something as permanent as the city could have whole tiers shift and revolve like some great orrery was anathema to him. The master would surely know what to do.

Unfortunately in another sixty paces the Street of Knives would split into three diverging alleyways. These quickly mired themselves in the under-warren beneath the slave mills like streams entering a swamp. The marginal safety afforded by the incubi terminated there. Entering the under-warren alone was a tacit admission that you were tired of life and expected to be relieved of it soon. It was something that the lurking mandrakes to be found there would apply themselves to most industriously for only the scant payment of your death scream.

There was nothing for it but to take the Short Stairs to the canal and gamble on reaching the Beryl Gate. If he were lucky he’d just be ignored, but the epicureans were always so unpredictable.

Kharbyr glided along on the trail of the oblivious servant. He felt elated, almost giddy, as he slipped through the shadows. He had to fight the urge to skip forward and plunge his blade between those unsuspecting shoulder blades. The dead swung on their chains above him and grinned down with their rictus grins approvingly. Come and join us, they seemed to smile, we couldn’t master our murder-lust either. Always room for one more.

Kharbyr swallowed and tried to focus. The instructions had been regarding the package. There was no smear of shame in trailing the mark to watch and listen while he carried it. Many had an interest in Bellathonis and wanted to hear about the comings and goings of his minions. There might be a meeting or exchange that he could report back on.

Still, something in Kharbyr chafed at such a dull assignment. Perhaps if the servant were carrying something important then murdering him could pay off anyway, or he might be forced to divulge something useful before he expired. Unfortunately, a haemonculus’s servant would doubtless laugh at the kind of excruciations Kharbyr could inflict on the spot in some alley, but if he could be kidnapped…

Kharbyr was so caught up in his musings that it took him a moment to register that the servant had vanished. Momentary panic edged with irrational fury swept over him. Fool! Strike when you can – never hesitate!

Xagor went bounding down the elegantly sculpted Short Stairs like a goat down a mountainside, clinging to his jar for dear life as he took the curving steps three at time. Just before he’d turned off, he’d had the unpleasant feeling that someone really was following him and that it was not just his well-developed paranoia at work this time. The stairs would be a good place to try and lose any shadows, providing he didn’t do so at the cost of breaking his own neck.

The Short Stairs wandered between gates into the Hy’Kran and Metzuh tiers of the city in a fanciful curlicue of stone, metal and glass that jutted right out over the smooth, dark silk of the Metzuh’s Grand Canal in several places. Other steps, spirals and esplanades branched irregularly from it following their own unfathomable logic. They were called the Short Stairs because they only connected two tiers, whereas the Long Stairs beyond Hy’Kran crossed half a dozen. Xagor had heard a story once that the Short Stairs formed a word or message when seen from a distance, but no one seemed to agree on what it said.

Xagor was soon forced to moderate his pace. There were plenty of open landings where the Short Stairs simply stopped in open air to afford a stunning view of the Grand Canal and its drifting pleasure barges. A much closer view of the canal awaited those who neglected to spot such sudden drop-offs. On the positive side, there were more subjects here and that was what he needed right now. He slowed right down as he started to pass amongst them, trying not to imagine what would happen on the Short Stairs during the Dysjunction when the tiers began to move.

He was among slaves here, or valued servants like himself hurrying after their master or mistress’s bidding. But there were highborn here too, strolling individually and in groups. The crisscrossing streams of slaves and servants parted around the highborn like water around stones, carefully keeping out of immediate striking range. Xagor adjusted his descent to head toward two of the larger groups of highborn coming up from below.

Kharbyr sprinted heedlessly back along the Street of Knives, casting around for Bellathonis’s servant. The two incubi were regarding him with distinct interest by the time he came to steps leading down. He darted onto the Short Stairs and stopped short, regarding the noisome masses he found there with disdain. Scrawny, half-naked slaves were streaming up and down it like rats.

He could see the servant, heading down towards a fistful of warriors bearing marks of the Scarlet Edge. Kharbyr found himself sprinting again, furious that this stupid, easy-to-follow piece of dross was being such a pain. He had to accept a galling loss of face as he passed other highborn and they made cutting remarks about him to his back. In their place he would have done the same, but letting the taunts go unanswered was a humiliation almost too much to be borne. He cut down a particularly dim-witted slave that couldn’t move out of the way fast enough and that made him feel slightly better. The loathsome haemonculus’s creature was going to die for this, Bellathonis’s servant or not. He could worry about the consequences later.

It was dark by the canal, so dark that Xagor had to navigate last spiral of the stair virtually by touch, all the time terrified that a misstep would make him drop the jar. The gaily-lit pleasure barges outside seemed to emphasise rather than mitigate the gloom as they glided past.

The Grand Canal ran in a broad, lazy circuit all the way around Metzuh tier, bounded by the warding on one bank and the palaces of Metzuh on the other. Supposedly, the canal had once been filled with a pure, sweet-smelling narcotic oil but now it was such a strange mélange of drugs, wastes, chemicals and excreta that it defied classification. The scent alone could be overpoweringly hallucinogenic, a dip in the stuff brought madness or oblivion.

The promenade along the canal bank had long since become the exclusive territory of those Metzuh highborn most given to hedonism and sensuality as their current diversion of choice – the epicureans. Any slave foolish enough to venture down here would be taken for sport in the blink of an eye and it was not a wise place for servants to tarry. Opulent dens and flesh halls cluttered the bottom of the tier and sprawled out across the broad tiles of the promenade very much like their patrons. The odd docks and piers periodically jutting out from the canal side played host to a number of fanciful craft.

Beyond the curve of the canal and out of sight at present, Xagor knew there was a slender bridge that pierced the warding at the Beryl Gate. Through the gate were the Aviaries of Malixian, who some called ‘the Mad’. The noble Archon Malixian was one of Bellathonis’s most favoured patrons, in no small part thanks to the suite of laboratories the archon had granted him. Such was a true mark of distinction when so many haemonculi had to make do with whatever garret or basement they could find to set up shop. The Aviaries would give safe passage all the way to the Screaming Tower where Bellathonis currently conducted his work.

Kharbyr paused to let a pair of masked revellers move past before swarming down a trellis into the welcoming darkness on the promenade. He sank himself deeper into the shadows while he looked around for signs of his mark. The gloom fitted his mood. He was coming to the disquieting realisation that he had lost the trail. If the servant was meeting someone along the canal, he could be hidden inside any one of a dozen salons or dens by now. He might have even boarded a barge and be so well out of reach he may as well have grown wings and flown away.

Weighing the options, Kharbyr considered what little he knew. The servant had left the Red House carrying something he hadn’t had when he arrived. He’d been alone and he’d left in a hurry. The last two facts didn’t really fit with him going to meet someone. He wouldn’t be hurrying if things had been pre-planned and Bellathonis was unlikely to entrust anything important to a lone servant in any event. Something unexpected must have happened inside the Red House to send the servant haring off like that without waiting for an escort. So where would the servant really be going? Kharbyr felt his spirits lift at the realisation.

The servant was running straight to his master.

Xagor hugged the jar to himself and strode along with what he hoped looked like a purposeful gait. His hands were sending sharp needles of pain up his arms with every step but he welcomed them. Those who would serve pain must first learn how to endure it and then how to love it, so said Bellathonis as he had tortured Xagor for the first time. To some a haemonculus is nothing but a torturer, but those with the calling know that even the lowliest of them aspires to something much greater.

The promenade was almost quiet. High pitched wails and screams floated down from above, seemingly muffled by billows of sweetly-scented mist from the canal. Xagor had already slipped past one duel between two highborn and a less formal affair between two groups of revellers over some real or imagined slight, but that was quiet by the standards of the area. The high-arched bridge to the Beryl Gate was coming into sight but the loose groups of epicureans were coalescing more and more into a crowd. There was some kind of disturbance up ahead that seemed to be getting closer. A barbed metal spine could be seen rising above even the tallest highborn in that direction and it was steadily forging a path through the mass towards him.

Kharbyr carefully made his way along the canal edge blending in as best he could. He struggled not to sneer at the antics of the epicureans every time he saw them fighting with one another. Their skills were like those of children in their fifth year of training, all showy hack and slash with no hint of finesse. He was sure he could take any of them easily and was sorely tempted to try his hand, but there wasn’t time. He had to get to the bridge and through the gate. A small bribe to the guards would soon tell him if the servant had got there first and if he hadn’t then Kharbyr could simply slip inside and choose his spot for ambush.

A commotion behind him made him turn and stop in his tracks. A murder engine was edging out onto the promenade, its jewelled snout swinging back and forth like a beast searching for spoor. Epicureans flinched away with unseemly haste as the hideous contraption approached. Kharbyr wondered if it had been set on the trail of anyone in particular or had just slipped its leash to inflict some random carnage of its own volition. As the epicureans scattered, one figure stood unmoving. With a shock Kharbyr realised that it was his mark, the haemonculus’s servant, who was just standing there holding the package and gaping at the multi-bladed death machine gliding smoothly towards him.

Xagor recognised the workmanship of the barbed sting even before he could see the magnificent engine itself. It was one of Vlokarion’s Coven of Thirteen, a matched set of Talos built for the amusement of Archon Yrdiir Xun by the legendary haemonculus Vlokarion four millennia ago. The device whispered forward on unseen grav-motors, evidently searching for a new client to embrace inside its cage of filigreed bone. Jointed, insectile-looking arms rose from its flanks, poised with exquisite malice to display their array of blades, saws, hooks and probes. Most of the highborn moved more discreetly out of its path, not wishing to attract its attention now it was fixed on him. Xagor simply stood mesmerised by the glittering beauty of it.

It drifted closer, seemingly intrigued by his immobility. Theoretically, a Talos was nothing more than a mobile torture machine with no mind of its own. Its sentience, its anima was drawn entirely from the client it embraced and kept in a permanent state of agony. The symbiosis was complete: the Talos gained awareness and personality from the client, the client gained the will and the ability to share their suffering with whomever the Talos chose. Xagor could see that the current client was coming to the end of their journey and wondered how long they had been incarcerated. A well-made Talos was as skilful as a surgeon in its work. Those built by Vlokarion were said to keep their clients alive for centuries. They were also said to have grown to have their own strange kind of sentience in the millennia since their creator’s demise.

Now the machine floated there before him and seemed to regard him with its gleaming sensors. The pitiable-looking client shifted and mewled feebly within their cage. Without thinking, Xagor slowly prised one hand away from his jar to reach out and stroke the curving metal prow. Weapons slid partway from pits in the Talos’s gleaming skin and then back again uncertainly as his hand came close.

Kharbyr slipped deeper into the crowd. Once a healthy space had been cleared, there were plentiful spectators jostling to watch the torture engine go to work. In what was sure to be a disappointment to them, but a relief for Kharbyr, the thing hadn’t started ripping the little idiot in front of it into confetti yet. He was going to lose his mark – and the package too – once the murder machine got going. Right now it seemed bemused that anyone would have the temerity to just stand there in front of it when it was on the hunt, but that wasn’t going to last.

He surreptitiously felt through his belt loops for a vial containing faerun. When used on a blade, faerun would make even shallow cuts inflict such nerve-shredding agony that the recipient would be utterly terrorised. Typically, he would use it on someone already restrained because it was liable make a victim run like the hounds of hell were after them.

Luck was with him and he found he still had a few drops of faerun left. He used it lavishly on his blade in a quick, practised move while glancing around for a likely victim. There was a youngish-looking female nearby, pierced, tattooed and naked to the waist. Kharbyr sauntered past and delivered a quick slice across her unprotected ribs without even breaking his stride. Only then did it strike him that the effects of the faerun might get totally altered by whatever concoctions were already coursing through the epicurean’s system

He heard a gasp and a little cry as he let the crowd swallow him up, but not the kind of shrieks he had hoped would distract the torture engine. Just then the crowd scattered as the machine rose higher and then surged forward as the girl started running. His mark was left standing there, dumbly watching the machine go. Kharbyr decided to keep the fool in sight from now on; who knew how many other ways the servant might find to get himself killed while Kharbyr was waiting to kill him in the Aviaries?

Xagor wistfully watched the Talos leave. To be excruciated by such a device would have been a life-long honour for a devotee of pain like him. Tragically, that made Xagor a most unsuitable client from the Talos’s point of view.

Xagor realised that something was wrong as he climbed the arching bridge towards the Beryl Gate and what should be sanctuary. The warding between Metzuh and the Aviaries was clearly visible this close to the gate, a swirling, translucent boundary of sickly colours curving away in all directions. The high, caged peaks of the largest Aviaries could be seen beyond, rendered hazy by the warding as if they had been sunk underwater. Xagor twisted his jar between aching hands and kept going. He was so close now that he had to go on; the only alternative way to the master’s tower from here didn’t bear contemplation.

Traffic seemed unusually sparse and that was worrying. He was a lot closer to the gate before he realised that everyone ahead of him was being turned back and a corner of his mind started gibbering with panic. A knot of Archon Malixian’s warriors were standing in front of the gate in full panoply and letting no one through, as far as Xagor could tell. He considered asking one of those being sent back what was going on, but he decided that would just make him look suspicious and anger the warriors. Malixian’s followers often shared the archon’s distaste for what most in Commorragh would commonly frame as ‘sanity.’

He licked his lips and approached the warriors. They didn’t swing the jagged maws of their splinter rifles to cover him so that was a good sign. They weren’t moving out of the way either, so that was not so good. He stopped respectfully a few paces short of them.

‘I–’ Was all Xagor got out before one of the warriors laconically cut him off.

‘None may pass.’

‘I’m about my master’s business, it’s very urgent,’ Xagor wheedled with an uncomfortable feeling of taking his life in his hands.

‘None. May. Pass.’

The warrior’s face was unreadable behind his masked helm, but he spread his fingers upright as he spoke and ticked off the words with his fingers to create a crude gesture for emphasis. The other warriors sniggered and aimed their splinter rifles at him.

‘I serve Master Bellathonis!’ Xagor squeaked.

‘Well that makes all the difference, doesn’t it? In you go,’ the warrior said with disarming civility. He stepped aside and the jagged weapon maws dropped away. Xagor sensed a trap.

‘Might I ask what’s going on, why you’re turning the other people back?’ Xagor asked as politely as he could manage. Archon Malixian and the master had been as thick as thieves recently, hopefully that still held true.

‘You might, and if you did I’d tell you that you don’t want to be in the Aviaries right now.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘It’s going on right now? It isn’t about to start or nearly over?’ Xagor held onto a shred of hope; they might escort him if he was lucky.

‘Not a chance, if anything the blood’s going to be well and truly up by now.’

‘But I have to get to my master’s tower right away! I’m sure he’d reward you!’

‘Not. A. Chance.’ He did the finger thing again before thoughtfully adding, ‘I’m sure the Aviatrix will welcome the extra meat if you fancy your chances of getting through on foot.’

The Beryl Gate was misnamed really, Kharbyr mused. The tonnes of silvery metal used in its construction heavily outweighed the twisted ornamental pillars that gave it its name. Kharbyr hung back while the servant talked to the warriors at the gate. Eventually they let the servant through, although the servant looked reluctant to go on. After a few heartbeats Kharbyr headed over to the warriors himself. Kharbyr weighed his chances against them if it came to a fight. They had rifles and that would count against them up close, but that probably wouldn’t be enough to offset their numbers and protection.

‘None may pass.’

When the challenge came the warriors seemed wary. Had that servant said something to set them on edge? Told them he was being pursued? Kharbyr suddenly felt like a slave being pinned out for examination. He decided to take the offensive.

‘Out of my way, I have important business in the Aviaries,’ he said.

The warriors looked at each other with theatrical surprise at his boldness. One of them spoke up.

‘With who?’

Kharbyr’s mind raced with possibilities. He plumped for sticking with the easiest lie.

‘On behalf of the haemonculus Bellathonis, I was engaged to protect his servant.’

Some subtle body language passed between the warriors at that, but Kharbyr couldn’t read it. They stepped aside and one of them waved him through the gate with a mocking bow.

‘Then go along inside. I’m sure you’ll join him presently,’ the way the warrior said it implied a permanent and fatal appointment awaited them both. Kharbyr scrunched his face up sourly. There must be a hunt in progress.

Xagor shivered behind a bush and listened to the hideous calls wafting through the Aviary spires that rose on every side of him. A few moments later he saw the silhouettes of a pair of hellions slicing through the air high above. There was a hunt going on all right, and it sounded like a lively one.

Archon Malixian’s fondness for flying beasts of all kinds was legendary, and on occasion he saw fit to exercise his pets. A few score of slaves would be released into the Aviaries’ grounds and allowed to scatter, and then the cages would be opened to release clawed, fanged and poisoned death in a variety of winged guises. The archon’s kabal would go aloft with their master to enjoy the pain and terror of the dying slaves as the hunt proceeded. They also dealt with any prey deluded enough to try to hide or desperate enough to fight back.

He made a dash for another dark corner closer to his goal. He tried to move in short dashes. Running in the open made him conscious of being precisely the sort of tasty morsel being hunted and the cumbersome jar was starting to weigh heavily in his hands. As he caught his breath he started to worry about running into released slaves. They would be looking for the darkest corners to hide in too, and Archon Malixian liked to use healthy specimens so that his pets would get a proper workout. An inhuman shriek cut through the darkness, closer than any he’d heard so far. He was more worried still when he heard some rustling in the bushes nearby.

A few desperate slaves would ordinarily be no concern, but under the circumstances Xagor was extremely vulnerable. He couldn’t defend himself while encumbered with the jar, and any noise might attract the attention of far deadlier foes from above. Malixian’s kabal wasn’t likely to recognise a stray servant of Bellathonis when their bloodlust was in full swing, and his pets wouldn’t care.

Xagor was about to move again when the flap and snap of leathery wings made him freeze. A half dozen arrow-headed predators were rising in a lazy spiral from behind a building-sized cage on his left. The long dark shape of a raider craft slid smoothly after them, its crew clearly visible hanging over its open sides as they scanned the ground beneath.

Kharbyr was sweating despite himself. Each time he readied himself to sprint out of cover and take the servant unawares, the damned fool would run off ahead of him. The idea of capturing the servant had re-occurred to him but that was looking worse and worse. At this rate the mark was going to simply slip through his fingers yet again and leave him with nothing for his efforts. That was all assuming that they could both stay clear of Malixian’s pets and cronies.

The distant crack of weapon fire gave him the answer. The blade was always more satisfying but Kharbyr did carry a long, elegant splinter pistol of his own. He would shoot the servant down with it and quickly search the body. The package the servant was carrying might go some way towards repaying the indignities Kharbyr had suffered in the pursuit. If not, then at least vengeance would have been meted out and he could get out of here with some sense of pride intact.

He drew his pistol and aimed it at the servant. Between the range and the gloom it was going to be a difficult shot. The servant suddenly froze as a Raider hove into view, and Kharbyr inwardly cursed. The raider’s crew would spot the flash of a shot for sure. Anyone on ground level was going to be prey to them and prey armed with a pistol was liable to bring the whole kabal down to investigate. With a long-suffering sigh he drew his knife in his other hand and started creeping closer again.

A shrill whistle went up and the predator flock darted downwards. The raider shot after them, disappearing out of sight again behind the cages. Flashes licked behind the bars and the distant crackle of splinter fire reached Xagor just a moment later. Someone must be getting feisty. He almost jumped out of his skin when a shot smacked into the cage right beside him. He spun around, bobbling the jar in his surprise. There was a figure in a dark cloak not thirty paces away pointing something glittery at him. Xagor ran for his life.

The pistol cracked twice more and a splinter shrieked past, close enough to feel its passage. Xagor skidded around a corner to put something between himself and his attacker before desperately looking around. He spotted a low bridge between two vast cages up ahead and ran for the inviting shadows to be found underneath it.

Xagor was trying to look in all directions at once, so he stumbled right over the body in the mouth of the tunnel. The jar flew out of his hands as if it had been greased and went pin-wheeling off into the darkness. His cry of despair morphed into one of terror as clawed shapes rose up and reached for him out of the shadows. His last thoughts were of surprise that mandrakes would be bold enough to conduct their own hunt in the Aviaries of Malixian the Mad.

Kharbyr had fired his pistol almost by reflex when he heard shots nearby, but he told himself that taking a snap shot was weighed against the sound of it being hidden by the other firing. Whatever dark fates were conspiring against him meant he missed his mark and only gave away his presence instead. The servant gaped at him stupidly and then took off running for his life. Kharbyr took careful aim and pulled the trigger again just as something smashed into him from behind.

Kharbyr was sent sprawling by the blow but a lifetime of experience rolled him into a ball that brought him back onto his feet in a heartbeat. Another blow, sensed more than seen, came swinging out of the darkness. He ducked under it and fired his pistol into the half-seen shape before him. It gave a surprised grunt and fell away in a hot spray of blood.

Another attacker came for him then and he realised that they were slaves, naked and armed only with whatever crude weapons they had been able to find. Contempt boiled up inside him, contempt and a spurt of fury at their temerity in attacking him. He laid open the second slave’s arm from wrist to elbow and the faerun made the ugly thing scream like its arm had been dipped in molten metal. Kharbyr had the presence of mind to cut the slave’s legs out from under it before it could start to run.

The slave’s suffering was just too delicious and Kharbyr lingered for a moment to properly appreciate it. Its face contorted fantastically and its soul gave a little shiver as it struggled free. Kharbyr drank it all in greedily and abandoned himself to let the anguish wash away his ennui for a few precious seconds.

Composing himself, Kharbyr saw no sign of his mark nor of Malixian’s hunters closing in. He hurried to the corner where the servant had disappeared. Peering cautiously around it, he saw nothing but an apparently empty lawn between several huge cages beyond. Then he spied a dark tunnel mouth between two of the cages, exactly the kind of place an idiot on the run would make for.

He smelled blood before he reached the shadows, and that made him pull up short and advance more warily. Dark shapes were moving in the tunnel, something only visible as blacker silhouettes in the gloom – mandrakes. One was crouched over what was unmistakably the body of the Haemonculus’s servant; more of them lurked beyond, and they had seen him just as he saw them. Kharbyr levelled his pistol and fired without hesitation. Quite apart from the fact that the mandrakes had stolen his mark, they would most likely try to take Kharbyr himself for dessert.

Kharbyr’s shots failed to connect with anything substantial in the gloom. They did, however, bring one of the mandrakes out into the open to challenge him. A smoky, half-seen shape that seemed to flicker and shift constantly stepped forth. Kharbyr went after the thing with his blade. If this one could be beaten, the others might give up their kill; then he could at least search the servant’s body and retrieve the package.

It was like fighting smoke. Every cut he made only showed the mandrake to be somewhere else. Its own attacks seemed to come out of nowhere and it took every ounce of Kharbyr’s skill to keep them at bay. Even then it felt uncomfortably as if he were being toyed with, and that was not a sensation Kharbyr enjoyed. He realised that the mandrake was gradually driving him toward the tunnel mouth, backing him towards where the other mandrakes were waiting in ambush.

A piercing shriek suddenly intruded into their duel and Kharbyr saved his own life by instantly diving to one side. Razor-sharp blades whickered past him not a hand’s span away as a hellion shrieked by. Kharbyr rolled desperately as a second hellion swept down to take a cut at him with a hooked glaive. Sparks flew from the hellion’s armour as he desperately snap-fired a barrage of splinters at it. One of the tiny slivers found a weak point and punched through.

The hellion pitched backward and its skyboard ploughed into the ground a few strides away. Kharbyr leapt for it desperately. The mandrake had disappeared but the first hellion was curving back around for another attack run. Odds were that the rest of Malixian’s kabal wouldn’t be far behind.

Kharbyr clamped his feet into the skyboard’s restraints and took to the air with a cry of anguish on his lips. Everything had gone wrong; all was lost and now he had to hope that he could escape with his life. At least the worthless servant was dead. He could console himself with that.

A mandrake was crouched on Xagor’s chest, one razor-sharp claw resting lightly against his throat. He desperately wanted to swallow, but dared not. Shapes moved around him in the darkness and then the mandrake suddenly dropped flat on top of him. Xagor was too shocked to react, unable to believe that the mandrakes were going to abuse him on the spot. A crackle of splinter shots a moment later confused him even more. All he could think to do was to close his eyes. More shots and the ringing of blades came to his ears.

A long time seemed to pass before the weight eased from his chest with no apparent harm done. Xagor opened his eyes cautiously. The mandrake was squatting nearby watching him. It laid one long finger where its lips would be to shush him and pointed out of the tunnel mouth. Xagor craned around to look with hope rushing unbidden into his heart. The cloaked figure that had been chasing him was out there, mounting a stolen skyboard and racing away. The air was filled with the high-pitched whine of anti-grav units as Malixian’s kabal took up the chase. Xagor was saved.

Or not. Of course the mandrakes might think that it was Xagor’s bodyguard that had just fled and left him to their tender ministrations. They might simply be mocking him in their weird, silent way. He looked back at the mandrake for a clue, but its shadow-skinned face was unreadable. A second mandrake seemed to coalesce out of the darkness. It was carrying something in one hand that it extended towards him and Xagor tensed involuntarily. With a shock he realised that it was handing him his jar back.

The Screaming Tower had never felt more like a sanctuary. Xagor entered as quietly as he could, so as to not disturb the master – an infraction that carried its own considerable risks. The tall, lanky form of Bellathonis was bent over some consoles that spilled a profusion of wiring connected to three subjects strapped into examination frames. Bellathonis straightened and pressed a control. All three subjects simultaneously erupted in modulated howls of pain.

‘What do you have for me, Xagor? The materials I wanted from the Red House, I trust?’ Bellathonis said without looking around.

Xagor was taken off guard and quailed a little in spite of himself. The master was fond of modification and had recently implanted extra eyes with fully functioning optic nerves into his shoulder-blades. ‘All the better to watch my rivals with’ he had said. The idea that the master could be looking at you when his back was turned was somehow deeply disturbing to Xagor.

‘I have the jar from the Red House, master,’ Xagor called, ‘but also news of tremendous import.’

That caught the master’s attention in no uncertain terms. His hooked nose and sharp chin turned to Xagor and made him feel like he was back in the Aviaries being regarded as a morsel to be consumed by one of Malixian’s pets.

‘I’ll be the judge of its import, Xagor, and if it’s truly important you’d better not have tarried on your way back to me.’ Bellathonis’s tone was jocular but the cruel glitter in his eyes told a different story.

‘A Dysjunction, master. Matsilier at the Red House talks to all the clients and he told me that the crones have predicted a Dysjunction in the city. Soon!’ Xagor finished in a rush.

‘A Dysjunction, eh? Oh, how very interesting. Our lovely crones have read the fates and seen that our little abode of the damned is due for a shake up. It must be all over the city by now.’ The last was sharp; Xagor wondered how much Bellathonis already knew.

‘I came straight back, master! I didn’t even wait for a guard. I was pursued, there was a Talos and a-a hunt…’ It all sounded like an increasingly weak string of excuses to Xagor’s soon-to-be-modified ears.

‘Yes, yes,’ Bellathonis waved away his excuses. ‘But here you are, so the mandrakes I sent looking for you obviously did their job.’

Xagor gawped. He had never heard the master talk of employing mandrakes before. Bellathonis elegantly plucked the jar from his nerveless hands.

‘Don’t look so surprised. I knew there was a hunt in the Aviaries and it seemed likely that you would go that way with the “news” you were so desperate to bring to me.’

‘You already knew, master?’ A crushing weight descended on Xagor as Bellathonis let the moment stretch out. The Haemonculus eventually gave him a chilling smile.

‘Only suspected, oh faithful servant. Certain factions have been making preparations and it seemed likely that you would hear something at the Red House. Well done, this is very important news. A Dysjunction will change all the old alliances and rivalries beyond recognition, something which has long been overdue. I’ve only witnessed three in my considerable lifespan and they all made for very interesting times, let me tell you.’ Bellathonis continued as he unsealed the lid of the jar. ‘Yes, you’ve done well by bringing this to my attention so promptly, Xagor. I do believe you’ve earned yourself a reward. Extra pineal gland, perhaps?’

Bellathonis dipped a long-fingered hand into the jar, but what emerged looked suspiciously like a dripping, shrunken head to Xagor. Bellathonis held it by snaky black locks and tutted as he wiped slime from the face of the thing.

‘Master, I don’t understand.’

‘Allow me to introduce you. Xagor, this is Angevere – Angevere, this is Xagor.’

Bellathonis held the head out for Xagor to see. The face was pinched and lined. The eyes and lips were crudely sutured shut but Xagor could see that they were still moving, the face contorting.

‘Angevere the crone,’ Bellathonis murmured as he connected the head to one of the consoles he’d been working on as Xagor entered. ‘Now come over here and when I nod to you, twist this dial half a turn to the right and then back again.’

Xagor’s heart swelled with pride. He was being asked to assist! Just him and the master, working together like old comrades. The other servants would be incandescent with jealousy. Bellathonis pushed a final needle into the neck stump of Angevere and nodded to Xagor, who twisted the dial with gusto. A triple scream burst from the three subjects again, this time curiously intermingled as if they cried out with one voice. As Xagor twisted the dial back to its start position the three subjects spoke for the first time.

‘What have you done to me?’ they said together.

‘Made you my guest, you dreadful old monster,’ Bellathonis cackled with radiant self-satisfaction. ‘For the duration of the Dysjunction at least, or perhaps longer if you misbehave. We can while away the time delightfully with these three fresh subjects I’ve connected you to.’

Bellathonis’s nod was almost imperceptible but Xagor was drinking in every moment and he caught it. He twisted the dial clinically and was rewarded by another chorus of screams and a faint smile from the master.

‘What do you want?’ the three voices gasped.

‘Ah, the correct question – and there’s nothing so precious in any discussion. We’ll talk about the future and what you know about it in due course, Angevere.’

‘There will be consequences,’ the voices said.

‘Desperate times mean desperate measures, witch. If I’m right, it won’t matter soon,’ Bellathonis said with an air of finality. He turned to his servant with a look of apparently genuine concern. ‘Poor Xagor, you look exhausted. There’s a young man out in the vestibule waiting to see me, ask him to step in here and then go straight to your quarters. Get some rest – we’re going to be very busy later.’

‘They tore my face!’ the young man shouted.

‘So they did. Dear me, I should take a look at that,’ said Bellathonis. ‘Take a seat.’

‘Damn right you’ll fix it! I was about your business and I demand some kind of recompense for this farce.’

‘Of course, getting this injury does mean that you got outwitted by birds, doesn’t it?’ Bellathonis remarked as he selected something long and sharp from a tray. ‘And my business, as I recall, was receipt of a package that got here with precious little help from you – apart from the Talos, of course.’

‘I–’

‘Hush now, Kharbyr, and let’s see what we can do with that face.’

‘Consider the moment of godhood. The desires of an entire race meeting and merging, caught and reflected endlessly in the Sea of Souls. Think of the billions upon billions of psyches merging in impossible depths, drawn together by the deadly undertow of their own lusts to meet and intertwine, finally awakening to become something Other.

‘Imagine the moment of merged consciousness awakening, tearing free from the last bonds of sanity. Picture the glory of release, the unbridled forces of the id ripping open the walls of reality and feasting upon the shattered ruins of the super-ego.

‘Ultimate ascension awaits the ravening meta-entity, a place in a pantheon of ruling powers as old as the stars themselves. In the fever realms of otherspace it becomes as a god fuelled by the death-screams of its progenitors. Reality is breached, godhood achieved and the cosmic balance tilts yet further against the fragile substance of reality and order.

‘Mourn, if you will, for an entire civilisation so cruelly snuffed out at the height of their power, and then begin to consider what manner of survivors such a cataclysm might breed.’

– The Dark Mirror,
by Veslyin the Anchorite

PROLOGUE

Rain.

Rain encompassed the world, it thundered down in a ceaseless torrent, cascading from the treetops in twisting waterfalls. All that could be seen was greenery distorted by a wall of water. Sindiel had never experienced anything like it. He huddled miserably in the bole of a titanic hardwood tree wrapped in his camouflage cape as he had done for three days now, suffering through periodic downpours and the steaming tropical humidity that followed them. Three days also spent enduring the biting insects and inquisitive predators that seemed drawn magnetically to him, to the point where Sindiel had simply given up on trying to remove his flexmetal gloves or hood for relief. Now he endured the cloying sweat-slicked touch of his armour and tried to be patient.

He squinted through his scopesight at the gate in a futile effort to see it through the torrential rain. He didn’t need to see the gate to picture it accurately, the two primitive-looking upright stones and capping lintel etched firmly into his mind. Night, day, rain, shine he had watched the gate with the others for three days and seen absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

Sindiel wasn’t overly fond of patience, and his limited supply of it was rapidly becoming exhausted. He was seriously considering petitioning Linthis again that they should move on. The dark kin weren’t coming here, despite what her complex lunar calculations said about the inactive gate they’d found. Corallyon and Belth couldn’t be any happier than he was, although in the end they were bound to align themselves with whatever Linthis wanted just like they always did.

Sindiel had found himself starting to question all the half-hushed whispers he had heard about stopping the wicked soul thieves. All the talk of secret lore and hidden paths had come to this: sitting in a sodden jungle watching an inactive gate and hoping they would show – or rather hoping that they didn’t but hanging around just in case they did. It was pathetic, and Sindiel felt more pathetic for allowing himself to be trapped by his ego into staying. Leaving now meant proving himself to be less tough than the other rangers, the old hands, and that simply stuck in his throat too much to be borne.

The rain eventually stopped as suddenly as if it had been turned off at a tap, leaving the jungle fresh and dripping. Within minutes steam was rising from the forest floor where a hundred tiny pools and rills glittered in shafts of light that pierced the high canopy. Sindiel looked at the gate again. It was still there, still exactly as he had seen it a hundred times before; a silvery rivulet of water was running through it, quite picturesque.

A brightly coloured tree snake slithered into Sindiel’s hiding place, seemingly intent on making its way into his lap in a friendly yet determined fashion. Sindiel evicted the venomous reptile as gently as he could, earning a few dry bites to his gauntleted hands in the process.

He looked at the gate again. It had changed. Silver now filled the entire space between the uprights and the lintel, a shimmering wall of mercury. Spiral markings on the stones were glowing with a faint inner light as the webway portal aligned and reopened for the first time in three hundred years.

+–l’s active,+ Linthis’s voice whispered in his mind. He was so intent on the active gateway the interruption made him flinch.

+Say again?+ Sindiel thought back. +Yes, the portal’s active, I can see it. What do I do?+

It wasn’t clear if Linthis’s response was just to Sindiel or to the whole group. It was flat and emotionless. +Shoot anything that comes out of it.+

Sindiel fumbled to focus his scope and disable the safety locks on his long rifle, his hands and mind disjointed and disobedient in his sudden panic.

Shapes were emerging from the silver wall. Lithe humanoids clad in darkly burnished armour stepped forth, their weapons jagged with blades and barbs. The nightmarish figures swept their avaricious, red-eyed gaze over the virgin forest in anticipation of new conquest.

+Shoot!+ came the hard, clipped thought of his leader.

Sindiel sighted on a masked helm and fired, jerking the shot so badly in his eagerness and panic that he missed it altogether. He saw two of the soul thieves drop so suddenly it seemed as if the earth had swallowed them up; probably Linthis and Belth getting the kill shots they were always so quietly competitive about.

The dark kin’s reaction was instantaneous. Half of them turned their weapons on the tree-line and rip-sawed at the foliage with streams of poison-laced hypervelocity splinters. The others grabbed their fallen comrades and dragged them unceremoniously back through the portal. The shooters put up a creditable enough suppressing fire that Sindiel only got off a few snapshots at them before they also ducked and weaved their way into the portal a few seconds later. A sudden silence descended on the scene as the whip-crack echoes of the brief firefight faded away.

‘Close in,’ Linthis whispered. Sindiel reluctantly slithered closer, barely hearing any sound as the other rangers moved in behind him. He kept expecting the nightmarish figures to erupt from the portal at any moment, a feeling that got stronger the closer he got to it. He noticed blood sprays where two of the dark kin had fallen. They were bright, arterial and definitively fatal. He found he wondered at why the cruel, sadistic soul thieves would risk themselves to recover their dead.

He noticed something else, a small polished sphere half-buried in the mud that looked as if it had been dropped by the fleeing soul thieves. His heart froze when he realised he could be looking at a grenade. No, it was too big for that, and what kind of grenade looked like stone banded in different colours? He realised it was something else entirely just in time to hide it beneath his foot when Corallyon wandered over to find out what was so interesting. Linthis and Belth were busy doing something to the gate to shut it down.

‘They took their dead with them,’ Sindiel offered by way of explanation. ‘I wasn’t sure if they were really dead but see,’ he pointed to the bloodstains and drag marks, ‘dead. We would just take the spirit stones, why bother with empty vessels?’

He’d given Corallyon exactly what she wanted, an opportunity to illustrate her superior knowledge. Sindiel had joined Linthis’s band years ago, only a short time after Corallyon, but as an even fractionally senior member Corallyon took pains to belittle Sindiel as a newblood as often as she could. It was the great cycle of life. Eventually a new recruit would come along and it would become Sindiel’s privilege to make them miserable in their turn.

‘They don’t have spirit stones, lackwit,’ Corallyon said with relish. ‘They go off to the daemon city to get brought back to life in a test tube.’ Sindiel felt his own waystone give a cold pulse of warning. The empathic gem had been with him his whole life, it was his soul-anchor, his moral compass. To live without one was so unthinkably dangerous that it was just… well, unthinkable. A private part of him found the thought thrilling.

‘Don’t talk like that, Corallyon,’ Linthis said as she walked up, her silvery hair floating free after its confinement beneath mask and hood. Behind her the portal was closed, and the ancient arch had returned to looking as it had done for centuries. ‘It’s no daemon city that they come from, it’s a real place and they certainly do not suffer daemons to rule there.

‘They eke out eternal lives by preying on the souls of others, taking back what they lose with pain and torture. That’s why we work against them. But they aren’t daemons, not yet. In some ways I think they’re worse.’

The rounded shape beneath Sindiel’s foot felt as if it were going to explode after all. He was experiencing the wildest vicarious thrill of his life just by hiding it from Linthis and her pompous little band. It was all he could do to keep from laughing out loud at them. He shifted his weight, pushing the sphere completely out of sight beneath the mud.

‘Why didn’t you just destroy the gate,’ Sindiel asked innocently, ‘if you knew they were going to use it to come here and steal people?’

When Linthis replied she spoke as if to a child. ‘Because that would damage the webway just that little bit more, Sindiel, and another piece of it would be forever lost.’

‘It seems like they get more use out of it than we do,’ Sindiel persisted truculently.

‘Of course they do, they live in it!’ Corallyon blurted.

‘That’s enough, Corallyon,’ Linthis admonished. ‘We do not speak of such things. All you need know is that our work here is done. We repelled the dark kin and now we move on.’

‘Where next?’ Corallyon asked, suitably chastened.

‘To another maiden world named Lileathanir, a place very much like this one. Our cousins there have also grown lax and all but forgotten the peril of the gates.’

Sindiel reflected that they hadn’t so much repelled the soul thieves here as given them a slight pause. Four snipers would not have held them back for long if they had only realised how few stood against them. They were simply lucky that Linthis had the craft to shut the gate from this side before they returned in greater numbers. Most likely once they had gone the dark kin would come creeping back anyway; as Corallyon had said, they knew more about the labyrinth dimension because they lived in it.

He decided he would return to the spot later, alone, and see if the object he’d hidden was really what he hoped it was. He felt sure he’d seen that kind of striped banding before on spheres held by old statues on his craftworld. He remembered it was reckoned a symbolic object, like a crown for rulership or a spear for hunting. The sphere represented speech with distant stars.

CHAPTER 1

THE ACCURSED HALLS OF SHAA-DOM

‘Do you know what it is when you must question your every action in light of what punishment it may bring? Do you understand what it is to feel the eyes of your owner upon you even when he is not present? That is what it is to live in fear, to live the life of a slave. You tell me to beware of raising up that which I cannot then put down. I tell you that I will make any pact or bargain to gain the strength to free myself from the clutches of the tyrant. I will have my freedom, no matter the cost.’

– Archon Ysclyth of Talon Cyriix, as quoted in The Articles of Hubris

Walking is controlled falling. Every step means abandoning oneself to gravity and then trusting that an outstretched leg will prevent disaster. Nyos Yllithian felt as if he were falling towards his destiny, being drawn inexorably onwards as if in a dream. He was in the dark places under the world, walking cautiously through worming corridors of scratched and mouldering stonework. Shadows gave back reluctantly before him and came clustering in behind him as he passed. He walked cautiously because ur-ghuls and carrion slaves still lurked in these tunnels, although even alone as he was he had little to fear from them. The dark, secret places of the eternal city always had their perils and he was well armed against such mundane foes.

In truth his caution was born of an uncharacteristic tinge of fear at what lay ahead of him. Everything he’d done up until now was deniable, excusable, explainable, and perhaps even laudable once garnished with a little bluster and bribery. Even if he were caught right now, sneaking through the catacombs of Talon Cyriix, there was no crime in that in the tyrant’s laws. Not yet. Talon Cyriix was certainly an ill-starred locale to be found in, the scene of an invasion and dreadful massacre in times past, but the eternal city of Commorragh had many, many places that could fit that description.

However, what lay ahead was a blatant act of betrayal if the great tyrant should ever come to know of it. Yllithian consoled himself that caution, and even some fear, was an appropriate response to that state of affairs. Betraying the great tyrant of the eternal city bore all the consequences that might be imagined to extend from that distinguished title. Death was the least uncomfortable prospect, and inevitably one that would be long deferred in favour of far more visceral punishments.

The great tyrant had disposed of a vast number of would-be rivals down the ages, including several of Nyos’s own ancestors in the coup when Vect first seized power. The scrofulous slums Nyos was now entering had once belonged to Archon Ysclyth of Talon Cyriix, a great house almost as old as his own, until only a few centuries ago. Ysclyth had broken Vect’s laws and made pacts with unspeakable, otherworldly entities to overthrow the tyrant. When he made his own coup attempt Archon Ysclyth was aided by an unstoppable legion of daemons from beyond the veil.

Unfortunately for the ambitious archon he had reckoned without the tyrant’s command of ancient failsafes within the city. Before the horde could debouch into other districts the whole of Talon Cyriix spur was sealed off from the rest of Commorragh by impenetrable shields of energy. Trapped, denied the blood and souls they had been promised, Ysclyth’s untrustworthy daemonic allies turned on him and sated themselves on his holdfast before disappearing whence they came. Now the ravaged halls of Talon Cyriix stood abandoned and silent, fit only for skulking wretches and slaves that would dare the unclean spirits said to lurk there. The tyrant’s sycophants still celebrated the ironic downfall of the faithless Archon Ysclyth in poem and song, praising the just punishment meted out by their master.

Nyos emerged into an open courtyard between broken towers. High above him he could glimpse a patch of dark sky, an oily shimmer that was barely lighter than the deep gloom all around him. He sought and found the rambling outline of a mansion that occupied one edge of the court. Whatever grandeur the building had once possessed had been ripped away, daemon-fouled and defiled to leave it a mouldering corpse reminiscent of some long-dead sea-monster. A dull miasma of old horror hung over the place, an indelible psychic taint left by the abhorrent feasts that had been enacted there. Yllithian steeled himself and pressed on inside.

He found himself in a hallway lined with plinths. Once they had supported lifelike busts of the proud antecedents of Archon Ysclyth, carved with cunning artistry in stone so pure and white that it seemed luminous. Now most of the heads lay smashed and broken, while the survivors still on their plinths had been obscenely mutilated by daemonic claws sharper than steel knives. Thousands of years of pure-blooded lineage had been wiped out by the misplaced hubris of one descendant. Ysclyth’s line had ended here and although Yllithian cared not one whit about that, save perhaps for rejoicing in the removal of a potential rival, the loss of Talon Cyriix grieved him on some level. Such a loss could never be recovered, and through it the majesty of the eternal city was lessened just a little more, driven further down the paths of entropy and ultimate dissolution.

In some ways Ysclyth had got off lightly. Neither Ysclyth, Nyos nor the tyrant himself were members of the crude and lumpen race called men. They were eldar, members of a race of beings incomparably superior to those insane barbarians currently most prevalent in the Great Wheel. As such the tyrant’s punishments were imaginative, protracted and ultimately fatal. The tortures the tyrant reserved for traitors had been honed to arts of screaming perfection down the thousands of years he had reigned. As eldar perfection was their birthright in all things, so Nyos could expect nothing less at the hands of the great tyrant, Asdrubael Vect. The shrieking agony that Ysclyth had endured at the end of his life had been mercifully brief by comparison.

As Nyos himself would be quick to inform those ignorant of such manifest facts, eldar are beautiful, lithe and quick, keen-eyed, sharply-sensed, long-lived and highly intelligent beings. In every conceivable realm the eldar stand as proud adults above the idiot children of the younger races, whether it be the arts, culture, aesthetics, wisdom, intellect, technology, subtlety, majesty, morality or, naturally, cruelty. The games that the trueborn eldar played with one another were deadly, the stakes total. A single missed step meant the long fall into oblivion had begun.

He moved deeper into the manse, wary of traps as his routes of advance narrowed inexorably the closer he got to his objective. He sought steps that would take him downwards, moving from one wrecked chamber to another, searching carefully. As he found none his anxiety grew. Nyos had a great many enemies that would relish the opportunity to catch him alone like this. He was confident in his abilities, a trained warrior from birth and a master of the blade, but he was cunning enough to understand his own mortality and that his own skills must be measured against a city filled with peerless killers. Secrecy had been paramount and so he had come alone, but the longer his fruitless search went on the more the fear grew in him… a false lead… enemies closing in. He’d dispatched some of his own enemies in the same way.

He spotted steps leading downwards in the kitchens and his paranoid fantasies evaporated like mist. He still went warily, but the debris partially blocking the stairway seemed undisturbed and masked assassins in singularly short supply. He found an archway opening into a low cellar, where a gleam of silver at the far end made his heart race.

He stopped himself from rushing forwards to investigate. This was the danger point: in sight of the objective, when the quarry was distracted and focusing on the wrong thing. He looked around the cellar, trying to pierce the gloom. Crumbling columns supported the sagging roof and broken, unidentifiable detritus lay scattered all over the floor. He stepped out, ready to spring back into cover in an instant. Nothing moved. He worked his way carefully around the angles of the pillars, ensuring he was completely alone before reaching what he’d come to find, a simple silver loop that hung from the cellar’s far wall.

A point that Nyos would be more loath to concede about the eldar was that despite all their glittering prowess there was one realm in which they fell short of their promise of greatness: that of power. Once upon a time the whole Great Wheel of the galaxy had been the plaything of the eldar and a portal like this could have led anywhere, connecting to others like it on a million different worlds. Those times were long past. Now the scattered survivors of the eldar race were in bitter, squabbling factions clinging to their sanctuaries while the universe passed them by. The once-great splendour of the eldar was forced to skulk miserably in the shadows and scheme for a return to past glories.

Nyos spoke the words to activate the portal. This portal only led to one place now, an accursed place forbidden to the citizens of Commorragh on pain of death. That was the tyrant’s law.

A fact Nyos also less habitually shared with others was that he had grown determined to lead his soon-to-be grateful and obedient kin into another golden age. That golden age could only begin with the removal of the great tyrant, and on that Yllithian had sworn his near-immortal life.

Although unassuming in his current appearance, Nyos Yllithian was possessed of considerable resources to bring about a resurgence of his kind. He was of a proud, pure bloodline that could be traced unbroken to before the Fall of the eldar race. He held the title of Archon of the White Flames, making him the feared and beloved head of one of the oldest and most noble kabals in all of the eternal city of Commorragh, the last bastion of true eldar culture in a benighted universe. The White Flames for their part controlled an entire tier of the mighty port-city with their own docks and shipyards, armouries and training grounds.

Despite all this, Nyos Yllithian’s personal power, like the power of every other archon across the sprawling city, was but a grain of sand beside the mountain that was the great tyrant, Asdrubael Vect.

For generations Vect had kept his place by ensuring the intrigues of the archons were directed against each other, picking off rivals before they grew powerful enough to challenge him. From the outset the tyrant’s reign had been founded on bloodshed and betrayal of the basest kind. It was easy to see that as long as Commorragh remained in Vect’s grasp the eldar race would continue to slide ever deeper into obscurity as they expended their energies in internecine bickering.

Yllithian had spent many, many years quietly intriguing to align the forces he required. There had been the most delicate business of seeking allies, of which there were potentially many but only a few that could be trusted in their turn. Then had come endless sifting through the web of lies surrounding Asdrubael Vect to seek some clue as to how he could be defeated. Now Nyos’s determination to unseat the tyrant had led him to a forgotten slum in Talon Cyriix in the decaying underbelly of Commorragh. Here, it was whispered, a way to topple Vect might be found.

Nyos gazed at the mirror-like surface of the active portal before him as if it might betray what lay beyond. There had been rumours that Ysclyth had delved deep to find the forbidden sorceries that became his undoing. Even now there was a chance that Nyos had been tricked into walking blithely to his own doom. As Ysclyth and others had illustrated, Vect was particularly fond of dispatching opponents by using their own hubris against them. But Nyos Yllithian had been very careful, only using the most obtuse and roundabout sources to find the information he was now trusting his life to. In all the subtle checking and crosschecking there had been no inconsistencies or telltale signs of a trap.

This portal led to accursed Shaa-dom, that was certain, and he bore a psychically-charged opal the size of his fist that should serve to take him to the individual he needed to find there. Entry to Shaa-dom broke the tyrant’s laws; indeed even the mention of that place was a crime. Yet this formed the next step in the conspiracy he had planned so long for. Once he passed through the portal there would be no turning back.

All that remained was to see if he had the strength to survive the horrors that lay within the accursed halls of Shaa-dom. Yllithian had dressed for the occasion in a suit of angular black armour that was possessed of its own fierce little war spirit. It was clever enough to extrude monomolecular blades on command or playfully nip off a crippled limb to save its wearer’s life. He kept it unadorned for now, and vanity forbade wearing a helmet. He armed himself with a long, thin blade keen enough to cut stone, summoned up his courage and stepped through the portal.

Nyos’s first impression was of a breathless moment of cold and then a sultry heat. He was standing at the edge of a thoroughfare after emerging from an arch. The elegant flagstones were blackened and cracked, the decorative trees and statues lining it were twisted, skeletal remnants that seemed to claw at the roiling skies in agony. Away beyond the blasted facades Nyos could sense the epicentre of the destruction of Shaa-dom. There, he knew, there was a rift where unnatural fires still burned in the aftermath of the cataclysm that had occurred here. Warp-taint hung heavy in the air and reality itself had a sickly, greasy feel to it. The subtle thrill of She Who Thirsts sucking away at his life, always present but carefully controlled within Commorragh, gusted through him and he realised with a chill that just to remain here for too long could be deadly. He had thought Talon Cyriix terrible but it was a child’s playground, a slave’s copy, when compared to Shaa-dom.

This was the horror the great tyrant had unleashed when he was challenged in the past. All his immeasurable power was used not to glorify the eldar but instead to destroy them, dragging them ever further down the path to oblivion. Generations ago the prosperous satellite realm of Shaa-dom had grown too proud for Asdrubael Vect to overawe and too powerful for him to humble. When El’Uriaq, the archon of all Shaa-dom, gathered his forces and declared himself emperor, Vect had publicly vowed that all of Shaa-dom would feel the edge of his blade and this was the result. Genocide unleashed on an already dying race.

Nyos regarded the smooth gem he was holding carefully. Bright motes wavered and darted within it as if battered by spectral winds. With agonising slowness they coalesced into a single brighter spark that floated at one edge of the gem in a determined fashion. Nyos set out in the direction indicated, finding himself drawn along the thoroughfare and crunching through occasional drifts of fragile bone, pitiful remnants of the widows and orphans that had suffered in the aftermath of Vect’s retribution.

The legends told that El’Uriaq had laughed at Vect’s posturing when he heard of it. His forces were well-armed and outnumbered Vect’s. Few of the other kabals would commit themselves to fight on behalf of the tyrant while many had sent secret emissaries to El’Uriaq. The emperor of Shaa-dom had returned to the completion of his plans to conquer Commorragh confident in the knowledge that any attack made by Vect would only play into his hands. A few days later the blade of Vect arrived in the form of a burning, crashing starship lurching suddenly into reality above Shaa-dom.

The glowing spark was leading him at a tangent to the impact site near the centre of Shaa-dom. He quickly came to what had been a covered avenue with a ribwork of high arches that once held panes of coloured crystal. Glittering shards scattered over the pavement added an incongruous splash of vibrancy to the hollow-eyed dwellings on either hand. Nyos advanced warily along the avenue, his superb senses taking in every facet of his environment. He reassured himself that here at the periphery of Shaa-dom the risks of encountering a denizen from beyond the veil should be slight, although an unwelcome part of his mind whispered that they would be certain to voraciously seek him out if they should sense his presence.

The vessel that struck Shaa-dom was one of those built by the upstart younger races – huge and crudely made, armoured in thick slabs of ignorance and wishful thinking. It tore through the supposedly unbreakable wardings between El’Uriaq’s realm and the Sea of Souls like a bull charging through cobwebs. El’Uriaq and the core of his warrior elite were immolated instantly when the ship crashed into his palace, but what came after proved to be the worse fate. The open breach left behind in the warding attracted a swarm of horrors from beyond. Shaa-dom was ravaged even more thoroughly than the unfortunate Talon Cyriix, the gusting energies of the breach sustaining a plague of daemons that harried the pitiful survivors without respite. The tyrant ordered the whole realm of Shaa-dom sealed off to protect the rest of the city. The wretches left inside who had somehow survived the catastrophe and the daemons that came afterwards were damned to a lingering demise as their trapped souls were relentlessly drained away by She Who Thirsts.

So had ended Shaa-dom.

The scuff of a footfall whipped Nyos’s attention to one side of the avenue. He caught a pale flicker of movement at a window and flourished his blade aggressively at the hidden watcher. This could be no daemon hiding and skulking with a tasty soul so close at hand. It could only be some twisted remnant of an eldar devoured by She Who Thirsts, a soulless and mindless wretch, ever hungry and driven only by instinct. One alone could pose no threat and it wisely stayed hidden from sight. Nyos pointedly turned away and moved on down the avenue, listening carefully for stealthy sounds of pursuit.

At the end of the avenue steps led upwards to a tall building that must once have impressively overlooked the covered avenue below. Now it appeared crumpled and sagged in upon itself as if its internal structure had been warped. The spark in the gem Nyos was holding strained strongly in that direction. As he set out again he could feel the fatigue in his limbs as She Who Thirsts sapped his life away. He set himself to hurry despite his fears, even though at every step it felt like an insidious marsh lay beneath his feet waiting to suck him under.

Nyos’s mighty ancient kin had long ago mastered the other realm – the Sea of Souls, the Realm of Chaos, the immaterium, the warp or whatever else anyone cared to call it. The great city of Commorragh and its satellite realms were testimonies to a time when the eldar created their own enclaves in the warp and connected them with a fantastic skein of interdimensional pathways encompassing the whole galaxy. The predatory denizens of that other realm were kept safely sealed away, bound and constrained by eldar power and wisdom.

The Fall had brought an end to all that and thereafter the theme of daemons feasting upon souls had become a distressingly recurrent one in eldar histories. She Who Thirsts was the greatest daemon-goddess of them all, and She was ever-hungry for the souls of the race that some believed had created Her.

Whatever doors had closed off the building at the top of the steps had been torn away, and inside an atrium lay half-choked with rubble. Entering it Nyos stiffened as he heard a faint voice sound above him, an echoing whisper.

‘He comes!’

Nyos stepped into the shadows by the shattered doorway with a speed that belied the fluid elegance of the motion. He waited tensely for the first crash of weapons-fire or a rush of enemies. The seconds dragged out longer but nothing came. He caught the same voice again, scratchy whispers that groped their way into the atrium, definitely coming from above.

‘Only the first, the visionary.’

The bright spark in the gem he held strained towards the sound of the voice. Nyos made an instant decision and regally stalked out into full view in the atrium before looking upwards. A handful of tiered balconies rose toward another shattered crystal roof, brutally opened now to show the roiling clouds above. Withered vegetation overhung the balconies and trailed artistically down pillars; on the lowest balcony, a darker shape lurked among the shadows.

Seeing no other way upwards Nyos sheathed his sword and secured the gem before climbing nimbly up the cracked stonework. He studiously avoided the treacherous streamers of dead vegetation and their spurious promise of a secure handhold. Swinging himself suddenly over the cracked balustrade he confronted the whisperer.

At first glance it looked like a pile of black rags, but a lustrous river of long, black hair spilled from beneath a cowl where the head would be. Skeletal spider-like hands emerged from the rags to wander between a scattering of small bone-white objects on the floor. It lifted one and showed it to him with a titter: a tiny rendition of the rune of vision.

Nyos’s guts churned with instinctive disgust. The manifold gifts of the eldar extended to very considerable psychic prowess and their ancient civilisation had been built as much with thoughts as with hands. But after the Fall the use of psychic powers became a sure way to attract daemons, effectively signing the sorcerer’s death warrant along with any other unfortunates in the vicinity.

It was a hard vice to resist, akin to losing a limb, but the eldar kindred of Commorragh and its satellites soon learned to shun their psychic gifts, and to destroy those that pursued them despite the consequences. Now every scrap of their mental training focused on internalising their powers and hiding their presence from She Who Thirsts. The few that still pursued such knowledge, like Archon Ysclyth, usually came to a sticky end however clever they thought they were. Some still dabbled in the meaner warp-arts, using cards and grimoires and other fetishes to protect themselves. Rune-casting to see the future was another crime replete with its own set of horrid punishments for anyone involved in it.

+He’s afraid now that he’s found what he’s looking for,+ the warp-dabbler said and tittered again.

‘Be careful, Angevere, your soul is still precious to you or you would have been devoured long ago,’ Nyos replied coolly. ‘If you wish to retain it you’ll obey me or I’ll send you to your richly deserved appointment with She Who Thirsts without further delay.’ He was gratified that the witch drew back a little at that. She still knew fear.

‘That is your name, isn’t it? Angevere, who was once handmaid to Dyreddya, concubine of El’Uriaq?’ Nyos spoke with mocking politeness, mercilessly pressing his advantage. ‘You’re looking surprisingly sprightly, all things considered.’

+I apologise, my lord, I meant no disrespect,+ the wretched thing whispered in his mind.

‘Better. Now prove yourself by telling me the reason I chose to visit this charming locale.’

The spider-like hands crawled obediently among the scattered runes, gathering them up before casting them again. The bone-white sigils clicked and clattered unnaturally together as they fell, twitching slightly as they struck the ground as if imbued with a life of their own. Once the runes had stilled the wretched crone reached out and touched the closest to her.

+Salvation inverted, for one who passes from light into darkness,+ she whispered before touching another and then another. +In the skein of desire: freedom, meaning transcendence and victory. In the place of the enemy stands the rune of mastery. You seek to overthrow your master.+

Nyos bridled at the description of the great tyrant as his master, but could not deny it.

‘Simple guesswork any street entertainer could mimic. If you wish to continue your miserable existence you must do better, crone,’ he said, and drew his fine, keen sword. The crone appeared to ignore him as she continued fondling the scattered runes.

+Here in the line of kinship are pleasure inverted to denote suffering or pain, and generosity inverted to indicate the miser. Both are touching the rune of brotherhood. You have two allies that share your goals sufficiently to trust, at least until the objective is achieved.+

That was interesting, Nyos thought to himself. The crone had accurately divined traits of his two strongest supporters, confirming Nyos’s premonition that this little interchange could only end one way once he had all the information he needed.

‘Very good, or very lucky,’ Nyos sneered. ‘Now tell me what I came here to find out. How can I fulfil my heart’s desire and rid my people of Asdrubael Vect?’

The crone hissed at that name, although whether in pain or anger Nyos could not tell. She turned her face to him for the first time, silken hair falling back to reveal a visage out of a fevered nightmare. The face was gaunt and deeply lined. Its eyes and lips were crudely stitched shut, but he still felt the weight of her blind eyes gazing upon him. Nyos had witnessed many greater horrors, and inflicted not a few of them himself, but his spine still conveyed an icy stab of fear as she mind-spoke to him again.

+And what horrors would you unleash to rid yourself of him?+ The crone’s mind-voice seemed stronger now, an unwelcome pressure against his thoughts. ‘How far will your lust for power carry you in your endeavour? Vect has slain all that opposed him. You stand amid the ruin he makes of his enemies!’

Nyos replied with fervour. ‘Vect is a parasite, bloated on the blood of the true people. I would gladly break the Great Wheel itself if I could bury him in its downfall!’ He had seldom dared to utter such words while in Commorragh, even while dealing with the most solicitous of his allies, and it felt deliciously liberating to speak them now. The crone remained silent but seemed to approve, the spider hands stretched out again to gather up the little runes into her gnarled fist.

Click, clack. The runes fell to the ground once more. The crone moved to touch them but drew back suddenly as if they burned her hand. A tiny wail of distress keened through Nyos’s consciousness.

‘What is it? What do you see?’ Nyos demanded, placing the flat of his keen blade upon her shoulder for emphasis. A simple flick of his wrist and she would be a head shorter.

With shaking hands she reached out to the runes again. Reluctantly they moved from one rune to another as her scratchy mind-voice intoned the symbolic meanings before her.

+The end of your heart’s desire is beyond sight, unachievable with your current means, but the pathway towards it is littered with many portents. Here is the Solitaire, the rune of the soulless, sign of the living dead but also the symbol of hope or rescue when inverted. Connected with it are the runes of the world spirit and history, symbols of the forgotten and of escape, these in turn point to the runes of phoenix for renewal or rebirth, salvation and then freedom again–+

‘Then my heart’s desire will be achieved somehow,’ Nyos said bluntly, ‘Why do you hesitate? Advise me of the course I must take succinctly and immediately, I grow weary of your endless prevarication.’

Even with death at her throat the crone hesitated before replying. +The line you follow eventually leads to the rune of Dysjunction – unthinkable entropy and change will come about should you follow this path. Commorragh will be torn asunder and remade.+

The crone’s hands hovered above the rune as if fearing to touch it. Nyos pondered finding such a calamitous portent. Beyond the metaphysical implications the concept of Dysjunction had a very real meaning for the denizens of Commorragh. Their city rested in a delicate balance between the material and immaterial worlds. Dysjunctions had occurred in the past when reality rippled and the unthinking energies of the warp crowded in close to bend themselves to the unmaking of the eternal city. Chaos and disaster attended such events, and only through the most strenuous efforts had Commorragh and its sub-realms avoided sharing the fate of Shaa-dom. Nyos concluded that the crone was trying to frighten him and brushed aside such thoughts as more psyker mummery.

‘I should expect so,’ Nyos replied impatiently. ‘Interpret the rest of this mess or I’ll have your head.’ Some of Nyos’s fellow archons held that threats were a crude and inelegant form of inducement to employ, but in Nyos’s experience they were highly effective providing that the promised retribution materialised in a timely fashion. He twitched his blade back in anticipation.

+You must look to the past,+ the crone whispered. +Return the one that challenged Vect so closely that the most desperate measures were used to destroy him. To destroy Vect you must rebirth the shade of Archon El’Uriaq, the emperor of Shaa-dom–+

‘Impossible, El’Uriaq was consumed when his fortress was destroyed,’ Nyos snapped, but he found there was doubt in his words. The eldar of Commorragh had discovered many ways to conquer death. Over the centuries the cult of haemonculi, the artist-surgeons and torture-scientists of the dark city, had perfected unnatural methods to preserve themselves against the tide of years and to be remade from even the smallest morsel of their flesh. True death was a rarity among the highborn, and all the more feared because of it. Who knew what the practitioners of the arts of flesh might be able to achieve?

+No. A part of him still dwells in his ruined domain. A pure heart could still call him back from the abyss.+

Nyos lowered his blade as his mind weighed the possibilities. El’Uriaq had failed to topple Vect, but he had come so very close that the tyrant had been forced to destroy an entire satellite realm to thwart him. The secret pacts and alliances El’Uriaq had made among the kabals were ancient history now, but the legend of Vect’s retribution upon Shaa-dom formed a substantial part of the invisible web of intrigue that protected the tyrant to this day. The re-emergence of Vect’s old rival would be a crippling blow to Vect’s prestige. The intellect and experience of such a co-conspirator would be worth legions of troops in its own right.

‘It sounds far-fetched, Angevere. Where might I find this part of El’Uriaq and the pure heart? Your seeings are useless without that knowledge.’

+El’Uriaq lies at the breach where he fell. A pure heart you will not find here nor anywhere else in Commorragh. Beyond that I cannot say, the way is hidden.+

‘I see. Presumably you’ve divined how our little consultation is going to end, Angevere?’

Her reply was reluctant. +Yes.+

‘And you’re saying you can tell me no more?’

+You will bring about a Dysjunction. Turn aside from your path before it is too late.+

‘I think not. Farewell, Angevere.’ Nyos flicked his wrist and the crone’s head smoothly parted company from her body as the monomolecular blade swished through her neck. Nyos felt only the very slightest shiver of her passing soul and looked down in bemusement at the severed head where it lay among the scattering of runes in a spreading pool of blood.

The stitched mouth still writhed and the eyes rolled sluggishly beneath their sutured lids, eliciting an admiring grunt from Nyos. He reached down and carefully retrieved the head by its now blood-slicked black locks. The crone might have further uses after all.

The sickly sweet caress of She Who Thirsts was still sucking at his soul, piling up subjective years of ageing. It was time to leave.

Outside the crone’s dwelling ancient, unseen eyes watched Nyos Yllithian flee from Shaa-dom. They followed his progress with unnatural intensity and an unspeakable humour. The first piece was in place, the first motion had begun. Threads of fate were tightening towards an act of vengeance three millennia in the making, their mesh becoming inescapable. All that remained was to save what could be saved and destroy the rest. Beyond the veil hungry predators began to gather in anticipation of the feast to come.

CHAPTER 2

THE ARTS OF FLESH

‘So many believe that pain is inflicted only by the physical application of torment. Blades, hooks, chains, racks – these are all crude physical tools that serve their part in mortifying the flesh. Anticipation, repetition, conciliation and hope – these are the finer instruments to be wielded when it comes to the mortification of the soul.’

– Master haemonculus Bellathonis

Nyos Yllithian returned by secret ways to his fortress-palace on Corespur, deep among the soaring central spires of High Commorragh. Yllithian’s domain was an ancient one, an heirloom of his noble house that had been doggedly carved out and protected against usurpers since before the Fall. Nyos’s ancestor, Dralydh Yllithian, had first expanded and fortified his family’s spire-top manse by seizing the adjacent levels and incorporating them into his holdfast. After six centuries’ worth of skirmishing, intriguing and intimidating, Nyos’s great-grandfather, Zovas Yllithian, completed the conquest of the whole spire by driving out the last of the Archon Uziiak’s poisonous kabal from the lower levels. The fortress had been the White Flames’ exclusive territory ever since. Petty archons might have to rub shoulders with one another by sharing territory within a single tier but not Archon Yllithian of the White Flames.

The sloping, armoured eaves of the fortress’s precipitous rooftops overhung a three-kilometre drop on two sides to where its gnarled foundations abutted onto Ashkeri Talon and the docking ring. Two of the three closest spires were controlled by kabals Yllithian rated as vassals or allies to his own. The remaining spire, a skeletal affair of dark metal, was home to Archon Uziiak’s surviving offspring and a number of other petty archons hostile to Yllithian.

He was little troubled by their proximity. Decorative barbs, columns, rosettes and statues scattered artfully across the surface of the White Flames’ palace concealed a profusion of detection arrays and extremely potent weaponry. The palace was continuously patrolled by kabalite warriors and a hundred invisible eyes followed every occurrence inside its precincts, whispering constantly to Yllithian about what they saw.

Secure again on the White Flames’ tier of the city amidst his warriors and slaves Nyos Yllithian rapidly recouped the strength he’d lost in Shaa-dom through the suffering of his minions. No doubt the spies of the great tyrant that Nyos suspected to be in his household reported on his brief absence but he had few concerns about that. He kept his activities secretive as a matter of course just as all archons did. Assassination by ambitious underlings or jealous rivals was a risk so commonplace that it was seen as a form of natural selection in the eternal city.

Some days after his return Nyos summoned the chief of the haemonculi in service to the White Flames kabal, a twisted individual known as Syiin. Nyos ordinarily had little to do with haemonculi save to secure the pacts required to ensure rebirth in the unfortunate event of his death. He found the delicate artistry of the practitioners of the arts of flesh too dispassionate and academic to truly admire and too time-consuming to usefully employ. Nonetheless it was a foolish archon that did not keep haemonculi in their employ.

Syiin was deep in the bowels of the White Flames’ fortress when he received the archon’s summons. He and his underlings dwelled in a saw-edged spiral labyrinth of cells and torture-surgeries where they pursued their art. Here dozens of strangely altered captives howled, screamed, tittered and mewled within their razor-lined oubliettes, a bizarre cross-section of practice subjects and ongoing experiments. At the time Syiin was in the process of completing a new face he had sculpted for himself by extending his bones to stretch the pallid skin into a taut, flat circle. Like all haemonculi Syiin had made many alterations to himself in the lifelong pursuit of his art. His abnormally lengthened limbs would have made him tall were it not for a curving spine that bent him almost double. Instead he tended to the appearance of some four-limbed creature walking on its hind legs with elbows to knees and a leering, moon-like face twisted to look up from beneath an impressively hunched back.

He hurriedly garbed himself in the traditional stitched hides of his victims to present himself properly before Archon Yllithian. The garment comprised hundreds of soft vellum-like patches sewn together to make a mosaic of past suffering, all keepsakes from victims driven to a perfect pitch of agony. Donning it helped to settle his concerns a little, for it was rare for the archon to consult him directly and not a little worrisome to receive such a summons. He went as quickly as his bent body would allow by narrow, twisting walkways lit by corpse-eyes, worming up from the depths like an obscene insect wriggling its way out of a rotting log.

Syiin blinked when he emerged into the unaccustomed light and space of the upper palace. There seemed to be more warriors than he had recalled seeing before. Everywhere he looked he saw black-armoured figures poised on guard or patrolling the corridors. The final ascent to the archon’s audience chamber was up a long flight of steps carved of an alabaster-like stone so pure it seemed to glow with an inner light. Every third step was occupied by pairs of guards armed with ceremonial lances hung with icons of the White Flames. Syiin found himself wondering whether this show of power was being made for his benefit but dismissed the thought. Archon Yllithian was scarcely likely to be trying to impress his chief haemonculus with a show of force. Syiin decided that the rumours he’d heard of the archon’s absence of late must have some substance to them and that he was none-too-subtly reasserting his authority over the palace. The bent-backed haemonculus laboured up the steps as swiftly as he could, filled with foreboding at what such signs might portend for him personally.

One of the Ilmaea, Commorragh’s captive suns, was casting a wan, poisonous light through the wide embrasures of the archon’s audience chamber as it slowly died in its distant sub-realm high above. Elegantly twisted pillars of polished porphyry marched in a double rank along both sides of the processional, casting purple-black shadows across the exquisite mosaic floor. At the head of the processional Nyos Yllithian lounged upon a bladed throne forged by Zovas Yllithian from the broken weapons of his enemies. The archon appeared distracted and was viewing the scene outside with apparent disinterest as Syiin entered the chamber.

Blank-helmed incubi regarded the haemonculus from both sides, their great curved klaives held upright before them ready to end his life at the merest twitch of Yllithian’s finger. Brightly garbed courtiers drew a menagerie of exotic beasts on gilded leashes into the shadows: snuffling, whip-thin ur-ghuls whined piteously, sinuous haemovores writhed as their lamprey-like mouths quested for blood and golden-eyed androgynes watched with inhuman interest. A coterie of sensuously painted Lhamaean concubines, each ritually bathed in aconite and perfumed with extract of hellebore, giggled languidly at Syiin as he approached to a respectful distance from his archon and abased himself before the throne.

Nyos ignored the kneeling haemonculus and continued to gaze outside. Syiin stole a glance towards what seemingly occupied his archon’s attention. Beyond the black sun multi-coloured veils could be seen betraying the presence of the outer wardings that protected the city. They formed a shifting canvas of faerie fire criss-crossed by the drive flares of distant star craft. Nothing unusual was to be seen there, so Syiin settled himself to wait.

In the case of any other minion Yllithian would have heightened their discomfort by keeping them waiting longer before deigning to acknowledge their presence. He knew that such subtleties were wasted on haemonculi, however, as they valued patience to a degree that most true eldar found perverse. Instead he addressed his assembled court.

‘Leave us,’ Nyos said. ‘The words I speak are for Syiin’s ears only.’ His command started a small, but richly appointed avalanche of warriors, concubines, pets and slaves hurriedly leaving the audience chamber. The incubi were the last to leave, only removing themselves after they had assured that the archon’s orders had been obeyed. Once they were alone and the gilded doors had silently closed Nyos turned his attention to the haemonculus cowering before him.

‘I have questions pertaining to the arts of flesh for you to answer,’ Nyos said without preamble. ‘If you cannot answer them I will require you to find me someone that can, do I make myself clear?’

‘Absolutely, my archon, how may I assist you?’ Syiin’s tone was respectful, even obsequious; but his words implied Nyos would owe him a debt for answering, a concept the archon did not relish.

‘You will not “assist” me, you will obey me by answering my questions or seek service elsewhere,’ he snapped.

‘Apologies, my archon. How may I serve you?’ Syiin fawned.

‘Better. Now tell me: how would you remake a highborn who had been lost for a very long time – centuries, perhaps even millennia?’

Syiin’s taut face creased in a slight frown as he weighed up how far he could lie. ‘A complex process, my archon. The fresher the remnant the more quickly and safely regeneration of the whole can be achieved.’

‘I see. Without a “fresh remnant”, as you put it, what conditions would be most conducive to success?’

Syiin’s thin lips puckered with distress. Discussing such secrets even with an archon made him uncomfortable.

The haemonculus’s distress was an unexpected pleasure for Nyos. He rose from his bladed throne and stalked toward Syiin to savour the sensation more closely.

‘The more potent the – ah – catalyst the better the chances, my archon, but to bring back one who was lost thousands of years ago…’

Nyos sensed Syiin’s weakness and pounced. ‘You mean victim when you say catalyst, don’t you? A powerful enough sacrifice would be needed.’

Syiin squirmed slightly within his hide robe as Nyos began to circle him. He made a feeble attempt to change the direction the discussion was taking.

‘There are risks, my archon, with returning the long dead, risks which do not exist with the remaking of those newly passed.’ Syiin wet his thin lips with an obscenely pink tongue. ‘Terrible risks.’ The archon paused for a moment at that and Syiin somewhat daringly sought to press the point further.

‘Some among my brotherhood hold that the efforts to return Vlokarion directly contributed to the fifth Dysjunction, my archon,’ Syiin whispered, fearful. A dreadful secret to share but Syiin was desperate. Now it was Nyos’s turn to frown as he recalled the crone’s warnings about Dysjunction. Even so something about Syiin’s evasive answers still troubled him.

‘Such things can only be known,’ Nyos said slowly, ‘because some of your kin have attempted it before. Tell me of them, tell me who can fill the gaping void that evidently exists in your knowledge.’

That barb struck true. Syiin’s discomfort stemmed from not wishing to admit that others knew more than he did. Nyos chuckled to himself; ever-reliable hubris was a weakness even among haemonculi it seemed. Perhaps especially among haemonculi. He waited to see if Syiin would try to lie outright and deny such a manifest fact.

Syiin squirmed under his relentless gaze before finally giving up a piece of information he would soon come to regret.

‘There is one among our brotherhood who has delved deep into such matters,’ Syiin admitted reluctantly, ‘a master by the name of Bellathonis. I understand he dwells in the Aviaries of Archon Malixian beyond Metzuh tier–’

Nyos silenced the haemonculus with an upraised hand, denying Syiin even the opportunity to save face by telling him more. ‘Go now, Syiin, your “assistance” is no longer required here,’ he said carelessly. He waited until Syiin had almost reached the threshold before calling out to him again.

‘One more thing, Syiin,’ said Nyos pleasantly. The haemonculus tensed at the archon’s words, but Nyos only smiled his most charming smile and said, ‘It goes without saying that you will not share this precious little moment of ours with others. I would hate to have to find a new chief haemonculus for my kabal.’

Syiin’s round face nodded silently in understanding of the implicit threat. Nyos consoled himself that it would have to suffice. Haemonculi were a notoriously clannish lot and having one of their number killed out of hand would sit poorly with the rest of that strange brotherhood. Instead Syiin would be left to scuttle back to his sunken maze of pain and contemplate his failure to adequately satisfy his archon.

After Syiin had left, Nyos took a stroll through the palace, his incubi bodyguard closing protectively around him and heralds scurrying ahead to ensure that everything possible was being done to avoid the archon’s displeasure. Nyos meandered through blazing weapons forges where sweating slaves laboured beneath the lash, he sniffed narcotic blooms in his pleasure gardens, toured exercise yards where his warriors practised their deadly skills and promenaded beneath erotic fractal sculptures that merged and coupled with a life of their own. At every turn a gratifying thrill of fear shot through his minions at his presence, enervating Nyos delightfully with their negative emotional energy. He distributed punishments and favours according to his whims, leaving a trail of pain, disruption and jealousy through his household.

Once he had satisfied himself that his earlier consultation with Syiin would be buried beneath a dozen other inconsequential reports from the tyrant’s spies he made his way to a docking port in the highest reaches of his domain. Here, the titanic vista of Commorragh beneath its circling crown of captive suns could be viewed in some small part. Impossibly high structures of metal, crystal, flesh, bone and polished stone rose at every side; thousand-metre images of kabalite archons seemed to battle against spiralling starscrapers that clawed their way upwards from the depths.

Barbed spires and blade-like spines were crowded together as if straining toward the light of the Ilmaea, each interconnected by a profusion of slender arches and jagged bridges that sprang impossibly across the dizzying void. Everywhere the air was filled by speeding grav-vehicles, the winged figures of scourges high above and hellions recklessly careening on their skyboards far below.

‘I think I shall tour the city for a while,’ Nyos mused to no one in particular, his silent incubi bodyguard knowing better than to reply. ‘Ready my personal barque and rouse some of those worthless scourges to escort us.’

Nyos’s personal grav craft was a creation of quite stunning beauty. The curving armoured plates of its fiercely jutting prow were inlaid with ruby and alabaster depicting the White Flames. The graceful lines of its long, narrow-waisted hull swept majestically backwards before flaring to accommodate the pods containing gravitic engines at the rear. Nyos mounted the open platform at the centre of the barque and settled himself in a richly appointed throne that was twin to the one in his audience chamber. His incubi moved to take their positions at long-throated splinter cannon and disintegrators ranged on mountings around the hull. At a nod to his steersman Nyos’s craft smoothly ascended and slid away from the docking port.

A flock of winged figures descended towards them, prompting the incubi to swing their cannon to menace the potential threat. They cared not that these scourges were a part of the Kabal of the White Flames, many an archon had fallen prey to his own supposedly loyal troops. Only the watchful incubi could ever be truly trusted, thanks to their monkish warrior codes of duty and honour; the loyalty of others had to be bought or imposed.

The scourges arrogantly dived past the craft before spiralling outwards to form a wheeling defensive sphere surrounding it. The hiss and snap of their altered wings was clearly audible through the layered shields protecting the barque. Many scourges had gone further than merely altering themselves to have wings of sculpted flesh, some had bird-like feet or heads of raptors, and the hands that gripped their weapons were often clawed. Each one had pursued their personal vision of taking flight – most with leathery pinions, but some with insectoid wings and many in hawk or eagle feathers.

‘Take us to Metzuh tier, let’s see what pleasures are to be found along the Grand Canal,’ Nyos said to the steersman and the craft dipped obediently. Jagged spires and barbed steeples whipped past in ever-greater profusion as the barque descended into the depths. The titanic spires now formed glittering canyon walls connected by bridges and arches that flashed towards them like giant blades. The steersman weaved expertly through the chaotic tangle, always descending into shadow. The scourges kept pace, their powerful wings beating lazily.

‘Faster,’ Nyos ordered.

The canyon walls became a blur, the giant blades leaping out of the gathering gloom without warning, and the steersman had to haul mightily to control the speeding craft. The scourges were working harder now, their great wings beating the air as they hurled themselves forwards to follow the barque’s descent. The faintest breeze blew through the barque’s protective fields from the rushing winds outside. Nyos gestured to the steersman, Faster.

Even the peerless dampening fields of the barque could not entirely shield its occupants at such speeds. The incubi braced themselves and swayed with the craft’s motion as they careened past obstacles close enough to touch. The scourges were truly racing now, with only the strongest keeping pace. Nyos chuckled at the sight of one slamming headlong into a razor-edged archway. The impact reduced it to nothing but a cloud of blood and a scattering of severed limbs.

The lower reaches of Commorragh were spreading out before them now, the spire canyons giving way to the old trade districts and docking spurs that clustered around the feet of High Commorragh. In the spires this was known as the Ynnealidh, the necropolis below, where the uncounted billions of the dark city laboured, sweated and died. Tiny stars of light picked out endless tangled streets and plazas. The fungus-like mat of a thousand different architectural styles marked the flesh markets and barter shops where the miserable underlife of Commorragh strove to eke out their existence.

It could be dangerous for one of Nyos’s status to enter Low Commorragh. It was easier for enemies to muster strong forces there where the streets were always so rife with agents and desperate mercenaries. The sudden, apparently unplanned arrival of Nyos’s retinue would help preclude such unpleasant surprises materialising, but he would still need to conclude his business quickly and be gone before assassins started crawling out of every hole and underpass.

Nyos’s craft was curving around the mountain-like flank of one particular spire now, rapidly dropping past Hy’kan tier to reach Metzuh tier at its very bottom. A thin black line running around Metzuh tier thickened into an oily-looking canal with a handful of brightly lit pleasure craft winking on its smooth, dark expanse. The steersman braked to glide just above the pitch-black surface with evident relief.

‘Grand Canal, Metzuh tier, my archon,’ he intoned solemnly.

Nyos eyed the scourges circling above him with distaste.

‘I feel dissatisfied with the performance of our scourges, they seem lacklustre, do they not?’ Nyos opined aloud. The steersman was quick enough to pick up on the proffered opportunity to agree with him.

‘They do indeed, my archon, distinctly lacklustre,’ the steersman echoed obediently.

‘If only I could consult a worthy individual with expertise in the field,’ Nyos sighed and gazed out over the velvet expanse surrounding them, ‘I’m sure they would be invaluable in rectifying such matters.’ It was a gamble but the steersman was eager to please. Nyos waited to see if he would take the bait. He was not disappointed.

‘If I may offer a suggestion for the archon’s consideration?’ the steersman asked meekly. Nyos favoured him with a curt nod.

‘By great good fortune we are very close to the Aviaries of Malixian, my archon. It’s said that Archon Malixian has an unsurpassed passion for all creatures of the air and many scourges in his kabal. Malixian the Mad some call him,’ the steersman added in a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Without doubt he would be a worthwhile consultant in such matters.’

‘Fascinating. Dispatch some of our worthless escort to the Aviaries immediately. Instruct them to convey my compliments to the noble Malixian and most humbly seek an audience with him.’ The steersman’s carefully composed face twitched a little with surprise at that but he complied without question. Almost immediately a smaller group of scourges broke away from the wheeling flock above and disappeared along the canal. The steersman hauled his ornate tiller bar and brought the barque around to follow them a few seconds later.

The Grand Canal twisted around the base of Metzuh tier, bounded by the outer wardings on one bank and the notorious pleasure palaces of Metzuh on the other. There were stories that the canal had once been filled with a pure, sweet-smelling narcotic oil acquired in limitless quantities from some enslaved alien world. Now it was a black morass of nameless excreta, wastes and compounds that some swore had gained a strange, sluggish sentience of its own. Even the mists emitted by the weirdly altered substance were hallucinogenic, and its touch brought madness or oblivion. Commorragh’s jaded denizens still came by their thousands in pursuit of hedonism in the flesh shops and drug dens along its serpentine course. Metzuh’s main claim to fame was that it formed a natural crossroads of sorts thanks to its possession of several of the larger dimensional gates leading to the satellite realms of Commorragh.

Nyos always contemplated the satellite realms with some ambivalence. Commorragh had originally been just one of the extradimensional enclaves made by the eldar. There had been numerous other port-cities, fortresses and private estates created. Over the centuries Commorragh had reached out across the webway and subsumed one after another of them like a slowly spreading parasitic growth. The conquered satellite realms were slaved to Commorragh, their gates locked permanently open to allow the eternal city to plunder their contents at will. Shaa-dom was one of the few that had raised a creditable attempt at secession, but the tyrant was too strong and too ruthless to let anything go once it was in his grasp.

The satellite realms seemed to breed a special kind of madness notable even in the dark city. Those at the fringes of Commorragh appeared most readily afflicted by the medium surrounding it, the limitless energies of the warp breeding strange obsessions and weirdly altered states of being down the centuries. In Aelindrach the very shadows flowed and writhed with a life of their own, in Maelyr’Dum the spirits of the dead could return to confront their killers, and in Xae’Trenneayi time itself jumped back and forth with scant regard for subjective continuity. The archons of the periphery were contemptuously regarded as idiot yokels by those of High Commorragh, fools saddled with unproductive domains, but they were also unpredictable and surprisingly powerful.

After he seized control Vect’s laws demanded only the mightiest should rule the kabals, his cynical attempt to wipe away the nobility and replace it with some grubby meritocracy. Beaten and bloodied by Vect’s betrayal the noble houses had dutifully transformed themselves into kabals but even under that guise the purest blood came to the fore.

The house of Yllithian lived on through the White Flames, just as their ancient allies of Xelian and Kraillach lived on through the Blades of Desire and the Realm Eternal. Among the satellite realms no such genteel rules of privilege and status existed; raw ambition and deadly ability drove their archons to the fore and struck them down just as readily. ‘Mad’ Malixian had outlasted most of his contemporaries and fed plenty of his rivals to his famed collection of airborne predators.

The most public entrance to Malixian’s realm lay over a slender silver bridge across the canal that terminated at the Beryl Gate. The hedonists and epicureans that thronged the Grand Canal often frequented the Aviaries of Malixian to marvel at his exotic collection of avians brought together at unthinkable cost from every part of the Great Wheel. Some visitors had the great fortune to see the majestic white rukhs or darting shaderavens in their famed hunts, some of the less fortunate visitors in their turn became the hunted instead. Malixian had a well-deserved reputation for having a capricious nature even by the warped standards of Commorragh. The tyrant often indulged the mad archon in his insane vendettas for his own amusement, the volatile nature of Malixian making him an ideal tool of retribution when one was needed.

Beneath the steersman’s sure hand the Beryl Gate soon slid into view as the barque rose silently to the level of the bridge to meet it.

Bellathonis was a haemonculus who had emerged from the benighted torture pits beneath Corespur centuries ago to make his own way in the city above. Thus far his skills had sufficed to find him patronage with a variety of archons including, most recently, the Archon Malixian of the Ninth Raptrex. The haemonculi covens below continually dogged him to align with one or another of them on a permanent basis, muttering darkly about the disrespect shown by his dilettante pursuit of the arts of flesh. Bellathonis professed to care nothing for their criticisms, although he had found it necessary to take increasing steps to ensure his privacy and safety of late.

Archon Malixian’s generous offer of a tower within his satellite realm for Bellathonis’s personal use had done a great deal to ease both issues, sparking something akin to gratitude in the master haemonculus’s withered black heart. So when Bellathonis received a summons to attend to Archon Malixian he came forth willingly enough even though he anticipated another interminable discussion on the virtues of differing flight musculature.

Bellathonis instructed his assistants to shut down the apparatus he was testing and made his way up from the torture laboratories in the base of his tower. Outside a grav skiff manned by Malixian’s kabalite warriors awaited him. He mounted and gripped on tightly as the warriors shot skywards with a bone-cracking jolt of acceleration. Bellathonis’s modest tower lay on the outskirts of the Aviaries of Malixian and even at such speeds it would take several minutes to reach Malixian’s eyrie at the centre. Titanic cages and enclosures reared up higher and higher as they flew up towards the heart of Malixian’s realm, the lean grav skiff straining for height with every ounce of its considerable power.

The cages of the Aviaries swam past in a baroque panoply. Simple pagoda-like cages of gilded bars shouldered against immense wire spheres, leaded glass cubes and cones of interwoven bone. Their numbers belied their scale, each one a skyscraper-sized habitat for a unique winged life form plucked from some far-off world. Breaching through the mass was Malixian’s eyrie, a single spike of silver rearing up to scrape the heavens. As the grav craft strained higher the tip of the spike resolved itself into a silver sphere, a pierced bead a hundred paces across, more empty space than metal but with landing points and railless walkways for the convenience of those that strode upon two legs.

As they swept in to land Bellathonis noted an unfamiliar and rich-looking grav vessel already docked at the eyrie. He regarded it more closely as he disembarked, and saw the symbol displayed on its bow. Malixian had company it seemed, and Bellathonis recognised the kabalite icon at once. The White Flames were a High Commorragh kabal that had remained rich and powerful thanks to their noble origins, and the noble kabals were forever scheming against the supreme overlord Asdrubael Vect. Intrigued, Bellathonis made his way along the curving pathways of the eyrie to its heart.

The master haemonculus was momentarily confused when he beheld Malixian talking with another eldar dressed in simple black. Beside Malixian in his spun-gold raptor mask and his feathered cloak of semi-sentient eyes – one of Bellathonis’s finer creations, he noted proudly – the interloper looked like a mere warrior. The eldar in black turned to gaze at Bellathonis and in that moment he understood. The stranger’s eyes declared him to be the archon he evidently was – proud, cynical, utterly ruthless and accustomed to absolute obedience. More than that, the newcomer’s glance was lit with a kind of visionary fervour and radiant sense of command as if he were already wearing an invisible crown. This one had great ambition for certain, Bellathonis thought to himself as he lowered his eyes deferentially.

‘Ah, here is my master flesh-sculptor now,’ Malixian trilled on catching sight of him. ‘Come forward, Bellathonis, and meet the noble Archon Yllithian!’

Aside from his chalk-white skin the master haemonculus Bellathonis appeared physically different to Syiin in almost every way. Where Syiin was permanently stooped Bellathonis stood rigidly upright. In place of Syiin’s moon-like face Bellathonis’s features were angular and sharp. Syiin’s loose hide robes were replaced with Bellathonis’s glossy black ribbed skinsuit. It was their eyes that marked their brotherhood: Bellathonis’s eyes were black and glittering orbs that had drunk in torments of unimaginable cruelty and malice.

Bellathonis approached and abased himself with a formality that seemed to please Archon Yllithian. Malixian appeared to be in what Bellathonis thought of as one of his gregarious moods. Energetic and excitable, he was constantly bobbing up and down on the anti-gravitic spikes he wore to keep him permanently raised a few inches above the floor.

‘Old Yllithian here felt his scourges were getting soft so he brought them to me to test against my own winged warriors!’ Malixian’s eyes glittered with amusement behind the raptor mask. ‘A useless flock they were too! Couldn’t win a single race!’

If Yllithian felt embarrassment at the performance of his minions he didn’t show it, he merely nodded in rueful agreement.

‘I fear the noble Malixian is correct, but he was generous enough to suggest that I might be able to engage your renowned services to rectify the matter, Master Bellathonis.’ Yllithian said smoothly. ‘He was extremely effusive about your skills when it comes to the reconfiguration of beings to enable flight.’

Bellathonis smiled ingratiatingly and bowed again. ‘Archon Malixian is too kind. In truth, what mean skills I have were only honed to usefulness by access to the incomparable resources here in the Aviaries.’

‘Indeed?’ Yllithian seemed intrigued by the thought. ‘So in the past you have honed other areas of your art with equal skill?’

Bellathonis looked to Malixian for approval before replying, acutely aware that he didn’t wish to appear as trying to be a more interesting or accomplished companion than the mad archon. Malixian twitched his head marginally to signal him to proceed.

‘I have had the great good fortune to study the arts of flesh beneath a variety of patrons,’ Bellathonis replied carefully. ‘Each had their own interests and I consider it simple courtesy to learn all I can to please them in the subject of their heart’s desire.’

‘Fascinating. My own haemonculi would do well to share your attitudes rather than frittering away their energies to inconsequentialities,’ Yllithian said with feeling. Bellathonis found it hard to believe that this hard-eyed archon of the White Flames could be so indulgent of any inconsequential activity.

‘Archon Malixian suggested that I might tour your workshops and discuss with you the alteration of the scourges under my control,’ Yllithian continued.

‘I would be most greatly honoured, Archon Yllithian,’ Bellathonis responded obediently, all the while wondering what it was that Nyos Yllithian really wanted to discuss.

Nyos allowed the haemonculus to lead him through his untidy little tower full of torture implements. The tall, thin creature apologised continuously for his lack of preparedness for the visit of his august personage, lashing its own servants, his wracks as they were properly termed, into a positive frenzy for their tardiness. Bellathonis demonstrated the alterations he was making to turn imprisoned slaves into the twisted monsters known as grotesques, the haemonculus’s long-fingered hands deftly wielding scalpel and flesh welder to sculpt their shuddering bodies. Nyos was shown whip-thin, skinless predators suitable for hunting and ursine-looking brutes being broken for the arena.

Members of the Ninth Raptrex who were undergoing the transformation into scourges were demonstrated to him in great detail. Their bodies were stretched on suspended frames as they painstakingly grew the bone, muscle and cartilage necessary for their new forms. Bellathonis launched into what sounded an erudite dissertation on the finer points of flight musculature but quickly subsided when Nyos showed little interest in the topic. Nyos was pleased to note that the haemonculus’s attitude shifted slightly at that, as if he had confirmed a suspicion.

Finally Bellathonis led Nyos into a central area filled with a variety of pain racks and examination tables and directed his attention upwards. Dozens of crystal-fronted sarcophagi were arrayed in concentric circles disappearing up into the gloom above their heads. A handful of the sarcophagi were occupied by the semi-cocooned figures of eldar, the yellow-white bones showing on some contrasting with the raw red meat evident on others. The latter, Bellathonis explained, were fallen warriors that were close to reaching the conclusion of their regenerative process while the former unfortunates were only beginning theirs. The haemonculus then lapsed into silence as if waiting, his piercing gaze directed squarely, and somewhat impertinently, at Nyos.

‘And so, most honoured guest, how is it that I may truly assist you?’ Bellathonis asked eventually.

Nyos smiled thinly. Now they came to the meat of it.

‘I was advised to seek you out in a matter my own haemonculi were unable resolve satisfactorily,’ he said. ‘Your reputation as a reanimator precedes you, it seems.’

‘How very flattering, might I enquire which of my brothers brought my unworthy self to the archon’s attention?’ Bellathonis replied, and there was steel in the words. It seemed that Bellathonis had little love for his brother haemonculi, or possibly archons.

‘We can discuss that later in concordance with my level of satisfaction in your highly lauded knowledge,’ Nyos countered to regain control of the discussion. ‘Now – tell me how the process is performed. I have been told it is complex and has many pitfalls – you cannot return one lost for more than a day, for example.’

There was a long pause before the master haemonculus replied.

‘At its most elemental level the process is simple,’ Bellathonis said emphatically, eyes shining with black intensity. ‘My brother haemonculi insist on mystifying the procedure but only two steps are required.’ Nyos could sense he was hearing an old argument being played out to a new audience. The master haemonculus raised a corpse-white hand with two fingers extended.

‘Firstly the body must be regrown. For this, the smallest fragment of the subject can be used – even ashes will suffice,’ Bellathonis said as one obscenely long, thin finger was lowered.

‘Secondly – the animating spirit must be recalled into the body and then nourished with sufficient pain and suffering of another.’ The second horrid digit lowered to join its twin.

‘If these two requirements are fulfilled it is my belief that any regeneration may be performed. Death cannot hold us with either weight of years or violence if we have but the will to survive!’ Bellathonis’s fist was gripped tightly by now. Nyos found himself nodding, old Syiin had put him on the right track after all – probably by accident in all honesty, but the right track nonetheless.

‘I was led to understand there were terrible risks involved, that overly ambitious attempts had triggered Dysjunctions in the past,’ Nyos said. Bellathonis’s sharp features curled in disgust.

‘Fear leads my brethren to create connections where none exist,’ the tall haemonculus replied dismissively. ‘The key to restoring the long-dead is a secret they all seek – after all, what greater power could a coven wield than life or death itself? Their future would be assured for all eternity. So each coven pursues its own ends and tries to foil the attempts of the others, not least through stories of dreadful failures and dire consequences. Pure hypocrisy.’

‘Fascinating. So if you were provided with the requisite means – a viable fragment and a sufficient source of suffering – you believe you could return one lost for hundreds or even thousands of years?’

Bellathonis paused before replying, weighing Nyos’s words carefully.

‘The resonance of dark energies required to return one so far behind the veil would be immense. The empathic connection to the source could be nothing less than perfect…’ the master haemonculus mused.

‘An individual of “pure heart” could make the connection,’ Nyos prompted. ‘Someone not to be found in Commorragh.’

Bellathonis looked at him sharply again, calculating.

‘You are surprisingly well informed, archon. You are correct in surmising that, to put it in crude terms, quality and not quantity is required for the undertaking. A single subject of the right characteristics would bring better chances of success than a pen full of slaves… Yes, a pure heart…’

‘You do not know where such an individual might be found?’ Nyos asked. ‘If not in the eternal city, then where?’

Bellathonis’s face was growing taut with excitement, his dark eyes glittering with the thrill of the hunt for new knowledge. Nyos was beginning to see why the other haemonculi shunned this individual. It appeared Bellathonis took entirely too much pleasure in the exchange of thoughts and ideas for their tastes.

‘Such questions have plagued the covens of the haemonculi for years without number, noble archon. Some have sought increasingly esoteric subjects, particularly among the human chattel, but thus far without success. Others have attempted to substitute quantity with notably disastrous outcomes. I have theorised for some time and to any that would listen that the lesser races lack a powerful enough connection to the Sea of Souls to serve such a purpose.’

‘It would appear that despite your obvious eminence your colleagues failed to see the wisdom of your words.’

Bellathonis’s eyes glittered darkly. ‘They had no taste for the conclusions I had drawn, no, merely carping criticisms of the impossibility of obtaining appropriate subjects.’

‘Oh? And what manner of subjects would these be?’

Bellathonis abruptly turned on his heel without a word and entered a doorway leading off the main chamber, leaving an astonished Archon Yllithian behind. The tall haemonculus returned a few seconds later bearing a huge, hide-bound tome that was fully half his height. Thumping it down on the notched surface of an examination table Bellathonis began to rapidly leaf through its man-skin pages. Obscene anatomical sketches, runic inscriptions and esoteric diagrams flicked past, the thin pages rustling unnaturally as if angry at their disturbance. Bellathonis paused at a certain page, reading intently with one long finger tracing the silvery runes.

‘Vlokarion believed…’ Bellathonis checked himself and began again, ‘Vlokarion was one of the greatest haemonculi ever to grace the dark city. His achievements have only been equalled by the great Urien Rakarth in recent centuries and they have never been surpassed. Vlokarion was fascinated by the muddy branches of our race that turned aside from the true way to mire themselves in primitivism and monasticism.’

Bellathonis swivelled the tome towards Nyos to point to elements of a complex diagram picked out in silvery ink on the pale skin of the pages as he continued.

‘See here the unbroken line of the ancients leading to their inheritors in Commorragh. See here the twin branching paths of the sterile eldar of the craftworlds and the simpleton followers of Isha, the Exodites.’ In truth Nyos could only vaguely follow the branches Bellathonis was pointing to: the lines intersected, parted, curved around one another and reconnected in a dizzying profusion.

‘Vlokarion believed that during the Fall the racial soul of the eldar was divided like colourless light striking a prism. The division led to each branch of our race embracing, or rather expressing, different parts of our nature to the exclusion of others.’

The broad, straight path leading from the ancients to Commorragh bore a version of the mark of Khaela Mensha Khaine, the dragon-rune denoting Fury. Bellathonis pointed out a prominent rune on the craftworld path, a variant of the sign of Asuryan – Discipline. Finally he pointed to a different rune on the Exodite path, this one showing the sign of Isha – Purity.

‘Vlokarion proved on many occasions that the quantity of dark energy that could be harvested from eldar subjects exceeded that of the slave races many times over,’ Bellathonis explained, ‘and the Exodites most of all. He speculated that with a pure enough specimen to work with he could resurrect the greatest legends of eldar history.’

Bellathonis heaved the tome shut before resting his hands meditatively on the embossed cover.

‘A pure heart could be found on a maiden world, among the Exodite clans. The Exodites bind their souls to what they call the world spirit of their home planet in order to escape She Who Thirsts, just as our deluded kin on the craftworlds hide their dead from Her by binding them into the very fabric of their vessel.’

Nyos’s lip curled in disgust at the concept. The eldar of the craftworlds chose to hide forever, clinging to their psychic gifts in sterile little facsimiles of the home worlds and never venturing forth. The regressive Exodites were no better than those of the craftworlds, living in the mud of a single world and calling that their whole universe. True eldar, the ones the milksop eldar of the craftworlds called the dark kin, chose to live forever and took what they needed from the slave races to survive.

‘You said that this individual could be found among the Exodite clans, not that any one of them would do. On a planet full of savages how could this singular pure heart be found?’

Bellathonis grinned in triumph, a dreadful and menacing shark-like smile. ‘You are most incisive. In the course of my studies I have discovered a caste that would be ideally suited for our purposes, ascetic warp-shapers that form a life-long spiritual bond with their home world. Once removed from that… embryonic environment I believe a member of this caste could be employed as a living conduit of dark energy.’

Nyos arched his brows thoughtfully. He’d spent a long lifetime keeping his position by being able to read what others sought to conceal. His finely tuned senses could detect the distinct taint of omission in the haemonculus’s words now.

‘If such individuals exist and you know of them why has none been secured before? It’s not as if the Exodites could prevent us from taking whatever we want from them. I fear you’re not being entirely forthright with me, Bellathonis.’

The master haemonculus paused and bowed his head. ‘Forgive me, noble archon, my enthusiasm perhaps runs ahead of me. The caste in question is seldom mentioned even in the oldest records, and to the best of my knowledge no member of it has been brought to the eternal city alive.’

The master haemonculus reached out to caress the embossed surface of the great tome on the table before him. ‘Some claim that their existence is entirely mythical,’ Bellathonis continued, ‘possibly even a concoction by Vlokarion to misguide his rivals. However, Vlokarion himself mentions that they seldom leave their shrines buried deep in the heart of their worlds, and that these places are normally completely inaccessible to outsiders.’

The haemonculus raised his head and locked his disquieting gaze on Nyos. ‘But if you could find such a worldsinger and bring them to me I feel confident that I could resurrect Eldanesh himself.’

‘I admire your hyperbole, Bellathonis, but the firstborn of our kind is not quite who I had in mind,’ Nyos said. ‘Make such preparations as are necessary and I will find a way to supply you with the means to make a dark miracle the like of which this city has never seen.’

Bellathonis bowed deeply ‘I am greatly honoured, archon, but beginning the preparations would be a great undertaking to make on faith alone. I sense that such activities would be best pursued outside the Aviaries of Malixian and beyond the sight of the tyrant’s agents or you would have been more forthright already. Are such costs and risks to be accepted entirely without compensation?’

Nyos was taken aback by the sudden twist of acquisitiveness, thinking that he had already snared Bellathonis through his own thirst for knowledge. ‘I would imagine the promise of participating in such great endeavours would be spur enough for one such as yourself, haemonculus,’ Nyos replied dangerously, before checking himself. Bellathonis would be key to the scheme ahead so placating him was best. Full accounts could be made for impudence later. Nyos smiled disarmingly ‘However, I am a generous patron and I do have a plaything in my possession that would handsomely recompense any marginal inconvenience that such activities might incur on your part.’

Bellathonis’s brows arched with obvious interest and Nyos knew that he had him.

When Yllithian’s barque returned to the fortress of the White Flames the hunch-backed haemonculus Syiin had emerged from his pits and was lurking at the docking port to dutifully give voice to his joy at his archon’s safe passage. He was left behind as Yllithian and his retinue swept into the palace, lingering to talk with the steersman and his crew, plying them with elixirs distilled in the pits below.

Syiin was particularly attentive to the steersman’s stories of their journey to the Grand Canal and the Aviaries of Malixian the Mad, congratulating him on his perspicacity in suggesting such a rewarding diversion to Yllithian. Syiin commiserated with the flightmaster at the losses to his scourges, and listened patiently to his distraught excuses as to why his winged charges had performed so poorly when put to the test. His broad, moon-like face smiled disarmingly as he pieced together his archon’s activities one by one and saw them for what they were.

Syiin’s mind clicked through the calculations like a wicked old abacus. Yllithian had gone virtually straight to Bellathonis. Despite all the archon’s smoke clouds and misdirection Syiin could see through them to what lay at their heart. He had gone to meet with Bellathonis and… what? That precise piece of data was missing and known only to Bellathonis and Yllithian, forcing Syiin to speculate in a most unsatisfactory fashion.

The archon had asked Syiin about a dangerous brand of necromancy. Returning an individual thousands of years dead wasn’t just dangerous, it was impossible as best as the moon-faced haemonculus knew. He wasn’t about to go asking opinions from others of his calling. Covens and individual haemonculi guarded their secrets carefully, exchanging their knowledge only with a chosen few when there was profit to be made.

When Syiin had suggested Bellathonis he had hoped that the master haemonculus might find himself landed with an impossible request, and at the very least be discomfited by having to disabuse Yllithian of his half-crazed notions. Now Syiin found himself wondering if Bellathonis had, in fact, accepted the seemingly impossible task and what would become of his own tenure with Yllithian if his rival should somehow succeed at it.

Syiin returned slowly to the pits, ruminating on how best to be alert for signs of further contact between Bellathonis and Yllithian. Whatever mad schemes the archon might come up with they could do little harm as long as no haemonculi indulged him. But Bellathonis could be dangerous, he was a renegade after his own fashion that belonged to no coven and had no permanent ties to a single kabal. While it was not unprecedented for a master haemonculus to pursue their arts that way such behaviour spoke volumes of his overweening ego. It might fall to Syiin to rouse his coven-mates into finally doing something about the upstart Bellathonis.

CHAPTER 3

A THOUSAND SOULS TO QUENCH

‘What could be finer than the soughing kiss of blade on flesh? Come to me and I will love you with such strokes as will make you swoon. We will dance and caress with edges so fine the very stars themselves are sundered by their divine movements.’

– Qa’leh, Mistress of Blades, to Duke Vileth, in Ursyllas’s Dispossessions

Among the spires of High Commorragh the great citadel of the Blades of Desire kabal held a special place in the dark hearts of many Commorrites. Its gigantic arenas played host to elaborate displays of fighting prowess unmatched anywhere in the universe, carnivals of blood and suffering honed to artistic perfection. The arenas fulfilled a vital role in Commorragh society. The miasma of pain and fear they generated, the excitement of murder and wanton slaughter witnessed at close hand invigorated and rejuvenated the spectators. This is no mere pastime or simple diversion for the jaded hosts of the dark city. Without the crimson displays of the arena Commorragh would soon collapse in upon itself to slake its eternal thirst for suffering. The archons had a term for it: Llith’antu Klavu, the knife that stays the blade.

Many spires featured arenas of their own – toroidal raceways, multi-layered platforms or specialised environments – but few rivalled those of the Blades of Desire for sheer scale and complexity. Archon Xelian, mistress of the Blades of Desire, conducted endless realspace raids to fill the slaughter pits with fresh victims and offered patronage to any wych cult or hellion gang of sufficient stature to meet her famously high standards. Every day thousands of slaves and beasts flowed into her arenas to be gorily sliced apart for the pleasure of the crowd, but today was different.

Today’s events marked the culmination of a six-day orgy of carnage fuelled by Archon Xelian’s most recent raid. The foray had netted unexpected jewels in the form of Imperial Guard troopers. Commorraghan experience of the human warriors of the Imperium’s shield could be divided into two flavours: terrified conscripts unable to quite believe the nightmare they had fallen into, and seen-it-all veterans that didn’t realise the nightmare they had fallen into until it was too late. The latter variety were much more entertaining.

Xelian herself was already fully recovered from her taxing sojourn in realspace, her body firm and supple beneath hooked breastplate and razor-edged greaves, her lips full and red beneath her half-masked helm. She strode through the training complex beneath the arena primus with an ornate agoniser whip gripped in her hand. Anyone crossing her path was lashed aside with a wordless snarl, the agoniser’s neuronic circuitry leaving a trail of writhing, screaming victims in her wake. She forged her way to the confinement cells in a fury, barely sparing a glance for the wyches at practice in blade-filled chambers and gut-wrenching gravity anomalies all around her. Her beastmaster, Varidh, quailed at her coming, as well he might.

‘You said they were ready!’ Xelian thrust the agoniser whip at him accusingly.

‘They will be, my archon! I swear it!’ Varidh yelped.

‘That’s not what I was told. Explain!’ The whip lowered to her side but still lashed like the tail of an angry cat.

‘The scenario will still be played out, it is only that the turncoat became unreliable and had to be replaced. Please, my archon, observe if you will.’ Varidh turned and touched the wall before gesturing towards it in an expansive fashion as he quietly backed out of lashing range. The wall shimmered and vanished to reveal the interior of a large confinement cell where they could observe the inhabitants unseen from outside.

A group of hairy, lumpen-looking humans were in the act of rising from equally lumpen-looking beds as a door opened to admit a human female bearing a tray. An eldar warrior in armour stood in the doorway as the sow distributed some sort of disgusting food to the others. Xelian smiled to see the simple plot playing out. The guard was lax and disinterested – in point of fact he was a drug-addled criminal recruited specifically for the task. The sow exchanged little knowing looks and whispered words of encouragement to the brutes as she moved among them.

The men were suspicious and wary but they couldn’t seem to quite quell the tiny spark of hope that she kindled in them. Eventually the sow withdrew and the guard shut the door, leaving the brutes huddled together croaking and grunting in their crude tongue as they doubtless planned their imminent escape. Xelian’s full red lips smiled cruelly.

At the appointed time the turncoat would return and open the cell. From that point the drama could be orchestrated in many ways: the heroic escape might begin there and degenerate into a nightmarish pursuit through the training complexes, the slaves might seem to fight their way through impossible odds to reach a portal or a ship. The turncoat might be taken away and tortured to induce guilt, or given a weapon and instructed to slay the leader of the escapers to induce horror and a sense of betrayal. In every one of the well-worn scenarios the escapers eventually found themselves emerging into the arena proper to meet their final fate.

So simple yet so glorious. It always worked the best with veterans as they were the ones with the arrogance to truly believe that they could escape in the first place. The enormity of the jest being made at their expense always hit them the hardest of all.

Xelian felt satisfied enough to leave the quailing Varidh to complete his preparations in peace and moved on to terrorise her other beastmasters. In truth the trip to the confinement cells had only been a diversion to take her mind from the imminent meeting with her allies. The thought of dealing with Kraillach always drove her into a vindictive frenzy that could only be quenched with suffering.

As the hour of the games approached deep-throated horns and sirens began to sound high above to summon the highborn citizenry to the feast. Xelian cursed and abandoned the gibbering slave she was scourging, stalking off to a bank of gravitic risers that would bring her to the observation tiers. While the invisible energies of the riser pushed her upwards Xelian tried to centre herself and bring her irritation under control. Kraillach was a disgusting worm, but he was a necessity. Without the backing of Yllithian’s White Flames and Kraillach’s kabal, the Realm Eternal, Xelian’s most recent raid could never have succeeded. Much as it galled her to admit it the wonderful events she was staging today were as much to honour the Realm Eternal and the White Flames as the Blades of Desire.

The observation tier felt cool and clinical after the heat and sweat of the training complex below. Curving terraces of pale stone reared up, like frozen waves caught breaking over a floating central platform with thirteen surrounding satellites. At present the platforms were empty save for a few slaves scattering shovelfuls of glittering white sand over their surface. The sand was a traditionalist touch that Xelian insisted on despite the inconvenience; nothing else quite showed the loops and whorls of spurting arterial blood so artfully. Xelian took a pipe of vreld and settled herself into an unadorned throne of black metal to watch the spectators assemble.

Elegantly sculpted grav craft and darting individual skimmers were already arriving in some numbers. They settled on to the terraces like a rapacious flock of predators descending on a kill. The approaching culmination of the past six days of carnage was a highly anticipated event and a febrile thread of excitement ran through the growing throng. Kabals from all across High Commorragh were in evidence: preening catamites of the Baleful Gaze reclined beside ornately armoured mechanicians of the Obsidian Rose, masked terror-scions of the Broken Sigil claimed their places alongside steely-eyed warriors of the Last Hatred.

The icon of Vect’s lackeys, the Kabal of the Black Heart, could be seen everywhere, outnumbering all the other kabals present. Xelian’s delicately pointed teeth ground in impotent fury at the sight of the swaggering warriors so proudly bearing the supreme overlord’s mark. She would have slaughtered them all if she could.

Rank upon rank, row upon row of fantastically armed and armoured warriors from a hundred different kabals flowed into the arena. Nowhere else in Commorragh would so many kabalite warriors lay aside blood feuds and honour debts to gather for a single purpose. Nonetheless quick, bloody duels, stealthy murders and acts of perfidy still occurred, thrilling the growing crowds as their tiny tableaux played out against the backdrop of the greater event. It was to be expected that the crowd would entertain themselves while they were waiting; nowhere in Commorragh was ever truly safe.

The horns and sirens sounded again with a higher, sweeter pitch that was redolent of howling madmen and screaming infants. The second summons was for the archons and their cliques to enable them to arrive at the last possible moment with fashionable tardiness. The rapidly filling terraces quieted in anticipation of their coming. The notes still hung in their air as the first arrived.

Archon Khromys of the Obsidian Rose, the self-styled Queen of Splinters, rode in upon a heavily beweaponed and razorthorn-encrusted Ravager craft to be greeted by a thunderous cacophony from her warriors clashing their weapons together. Archon Xerathis of the Broken Sigil swept over the arena on a spoked wheel festooned with the mnemonic projectors and psychic amplifiers he used to convey his messages of terror and discord to the trembling populations that fell beneath his hand. A succession of other fantastic, threatening and sometimes gaudy craft slid into view across the open top of the arena, each archon greeted by a bestial roar of approbation from their followers.

Some of the craft hung motionless in the air while others descended to debouch their passengers onto terraces. The dimension-warping properties of the observation tiers would ensure that every viewer in the arena could witness the action from scant metres away. Some preferred to do so from the isolation of their personal craft, while others trusted their bodyguards sufficiently to rub shoulders with their kabalite warriors on the terraces. After the archons had settled into their places two final craft nosed their way over the rim of the arena. From one hand came the sleek barque of Yllithian of the White Flames, from the other the mollusc-like golden chariot of Kraillach.

Xelian stood up from her throne as Yllithian stepped nimbly from his craft surrounded by a small cadre of incubi. She stood up straight as a rod to force him up on to his tiptoes in order to kiss her cheek in ritual greeting.

‘Xelian, you are as magnificent as ever,’ Yllithian murmured appreciatively.

‘Yllithian, you remain… unchanged,’ Xelian replied coldly.

Fans of golden metal slid back on Kraillach’s craft to reveal a sumptuous interior of silks and exotic fur before the view was obscured by disembarking incubi. Kraillach’s chief executioner, a giant incubus warrior known as Morr, led his brethren as they spread out and suspiciously eyed Xelian and Yllithian. Only when Morr was satisfied did the emaciated figure of Kraillach himself emerge from the opulent depths of his craft.

Kraillach was so wizened that he looked like a dried-out mummy. Deep lines and creases marked skin stretched so thin it seemed a miracle it didn’t tear open and spill his yellowed bones onto the ground. The impressive vermillion robes he wore only served emphasise the tremulous decrepitude of their occupant. His eyes seemed to be the only part of him that were truly alive, glittering chips of onyx trapped in a crumbling face of shale.

Kraillach was old, one of the few members of his noble house that survived when Vect took control of the city. Eternal, unblemished youth was the aim of every Commorrite but even for one so wealthy and powerful as Kraillach the growing weight of years could not be easily turned aside. Over the centuries more and more suffering was needed to fill the unceasing hunger inside, and the restorative properties of the process became increasingly short-lived. Kraillach lived his life in an unceasing cycle of orgies and debasement, feeding almost continuously on wretched slaves and unsatisfactory underlings. His current state had no doubt been induced by the lack of sufficient stimulation during his journey from his palace.

Unsurprisingly Kraillach was keen for events to begin and eyed the still-empty display platforms hungrily.

‘Xelian, Yllithian,’ he acknowledged each of them with the barest nod.

‘Kraillach.’

‘Kraillach.’

Two identical black thrones were brought forwards and Xelian’s guests seated themselves to each side without further ceremony. Xelian strode to the front of the dais to address the restless crowd, her presence carried before every viewer with perfect clarity. She had posed the scene carefully, herself standing tall and magnificent between trailing banners with Yllithian and Kraillach lounging in their thrones behind her.

‘Welcome, friends!’ She kept her voice low and thrilling. ‘Be most welcome and partake in the fruits of the labour of our three kabals: the Blades of Desire, the White Flames and the Realm Eternal.’

Xelian allowed that to sink in for a moment. By presenting a solid front the kabals that had grown out of the old noble houses were reaping rich rewards. It was a fact that was pulling not only wych cults but whole kabals into their orbit. Xelian raised her voice as she continued. An atavistic sense of hunger and anticipation was filling the giant arena, an almost palpable tension that crackled in the air.

‘We come to the sixth and final day of our events. As befits any great occasion we have saved the best until last for your entertainment and delight. Today we shall finally see the so-called deathworlders find the true meaning of betrayal. Today they will see the pilgrims they sought to protect die screaming, and today they will join them!’

A low murmur of appreciation and avid desire rippled through the crowds.

‘We dedicate these gifts to the greater glory and everlasting majesty of our ancient city of Commorragh, may it ever stand eternal.

‘Let the games begin!’

The horns and sirens sounded out in a shriek that rose into ultrasonics before crashing out in a explosion of bass. White light flared on the thirteen rotating outer platforms before dying away to reveal thirteen slaves. Some wailed and gibbered, others dashed around helplessly, some prayed and others stood defiantly screaming. Young, old, fat, thin, male, female, they all swung smoothly around the central stage in their individual bubbles of captivity.

The platforms began to float higher or sink lower in response to the audience’s interest in them. Those the audience found most intriguing would be matched against combatants by the beastmasters. The least interesting would be fed to warp beasts if their platforms sank low enough, something that often increased their number of viewers markedly.

After a few seconds the occupant of the highest platform – a hook-armed, red-furred specimen – vanished and reappeared on the central stage to be met by a single wych a moment later. The nearly naked wych looked slender when measured against the brutish human but she moved with a fluid grace that made the human look positively comical. The wych picked up on the possibilities and led the lumpy human around like a shambling ogre chasing a nymph. She improvised a series of slick engagements that sliced the man up so slowly that he wound down like a clockwork toy, quick trysts that left him only kissed by the edge of the blade each time.

Before she could finish him a white flash erupted and another slave appeared. This one was a shaven-headed, tattooed fanatic that rushed straight at her with a hooked knife held low. The wych pirouetted lazily out of reach before lunging just the tip of her blade into the fanatic’s eye socket. He screamed and staggered, dropping the knife. Flash. A third slave appeared and was hamstrung a heartbeat later. Flash. The wych seemed to barely avoid the sweep of a cleaver; her counter left her opponent dragging his entrails in the sand. Flash. A second wych joined the first, the two of them leaping and cavorting together like lost lovers reunited as they ripped through the injured slaves. Flash. More slaves. Flash. More blood.

The voice of the crowd rose and fell like surf against a shore, enraptured as they drank in wave after wave of pain and suffering. The first batch of slaves had vanished from the outer platforms, one way or another, and were rapidly replaced. Five wyches were working the central stage by now and they left an ever-speeding influx of slaves leaking their lifeblood out on the sand. Xelian felt satisfied that the opening warm-up was well under way and turned her attention to her two allies.

Kraillach looked somewhat recovered, his lined face showing patrician features instead of the death mask of a mummy. Yllithian was hunched forwards, careless of the entertainment but obviously eager to talk. The dimension-warping technologies artfully concealed within the arena structure permitted a spectator to cast their presence into the midst of the action, feeling the blood drops on their face and hearing the death-screams ringing in their ears. They also permitted Xelian, Kraillach and Yllithian to converse together inside a co-sensual reality safe from outside observation.

‘I have found the key to ridding ourselves of Vect,’ Yllithian began without preamble. ‘The answer lies in Shaa-dom as I suspected.’

‘How can you know this? Are you telling me you went there yourself?’ Kraillach sniffed derisively.

‘I did go there, as you well know from your own spies.’

‘Well, I don’t believe it. You’re still alive after all.’

‘Enough,’ grated Xelian. She promised herself that one day there would be a reckoning for moments like these. ‘Speak. Tell us what you found out on your… expedition, Nyos.’

‘With the right preparations it may be possible to recall El’Uriaq from beyond the veil.’

‘El’Uriaq!’ Kraillach spat, his face blanching at the name. ‘What madness is this? The old emperor of Shaa-dom has been dead for three millennia!’

‘It can be done,’ Yllithian insisted with surprising vehemence, ‘and it is our path to victory. With one of Vect’s most deadly enemies at our side the kabals would abandon the tyrant in droves. The value of someone who has defied the tyrant previously cannot be overestimated.’ The sudden tirade seemed to wear Kraillach out and he fell back in his throne waving one hand feebly as if to brush Yllithian away.

Yllithian lapsed into silence. On the central stage the wyches’ dance of death was almost over. Now they skirmished with each other over the crimson dunes of sliced meat they had made, skipping grotesquely over the still screaming, quivering piles of maimed slaves.

Her favourite, a highly ranked succubus named Aez’ashya, was taking on two other wyches at once. Her knives blurred in gleaming arcs as she pressed them back with a lightning fast flurry of blows. One of her foes was a yraqnae with an electrified shardnet and impaler but Aez’ashya gave him no space to make a cast. Her other enemy tried to slide around behind her and come at her unprotected back while she was occupied.

‘He failed, Nyos,’ Xelian said. ‘Vect crushed him and his entire realm in a single night. I’m not much given to recruiting failures be they living or dead.’

The crowd gasped as Aez’ashya suddenly dropped, but the shardnet flew through the space she had occupied and wrapped itself inexorably around the wych behind her. Aez’ashya flipped back onto her feet and resumed her assault with a lusty peal of laughter. The netless yraqnae had only sharp-tined impalers left to defend himself with and quickly succumbed to the dancing knives of the lithe succubus.

‘El’Uriaq’s only failure was underestimating Vect’s desperation and lack of imagination!’ Yllithian snapped. ‘Our own illustrious forebears fell to the same ruse, only in El’Uriaq’s case the tyrant dispensed with the artifice of using a foreign vessel as a distraction and crashed it on his damned head instead.’

Yllithian’s barb about their illustrious forebears was well-placed. The noble houses that once ruled Commorragh were virtually annihilated by invaders deliberately provoked into attacking the city by Vect. While the lords of High Commorragh fought to protect their holdings Asdrubael Vect and his allies had picked them off one by one on the battlefield. By the time the invaders were driven out Vect was well placed to fill the power vacuum left by the recently deceased high archons. In the centuries of anarchy that followed the old order was swept away and Vect instituted his new system of kabalite law.

Kraillach grimaced. He had been only a child when Imperial Space Marines smashed through his family’s quarter of High Commorragh but he recalled the night all too well. The leaping, hissing flames and the distinctive staccato roar of boltguns in the shattered streets had never left him. He remembered the running and the hiding, the shock of hearing that the high archon was dead, killed by the blast of a dark lance from his own ranks, though by accident or design no one knew…

‘Vect must pay,’ Kraillach said bitterly. ‘The tyrant has to suffer for his crimes against the city and my house.’

On the central stage haemonculi were moving through the drifts of injured. They bore gravitic wands that they used to pull glistening loops of viscera from the fallen and send them skywards in dancing arches and whorls. Some of the haemonculi raised up red and screaming almost-whole victims to be artfully vivisected for the entertainment and edification of the crowd. Others stabilised the dying and roused the insensible with elixirs and pain goads. From the terraces thousands of eyes watched every move hungrily, savouring the dregs of the first course and whetting their appetites for the next.

‘The tyrant became so and remains so because he’s willing to use the biggest weapon he can find,’ Yllithian said. ‘If he’s threatened he’ll use it to strike without hesitation or warning. We need our own weapon, we cannot defeat him otherwise. We need an unthinkable weapon and the will to wield it, if the tyrant has taught us nothing else he has taught us that. Both of you may carp and complain about my plans but where are your own? We all desire this thing, we are all bound together by blood and vengeance.’

The outer platforms of the arena were reconfiguring themselves, flowing like mercury to touch one another until they formed a continuous strip hanging scant metres from the fluted stonework of the terraces. The Reaver race was about to begin.

‘What do you say, Kraillach?’ said Xelian. ‘I want to at least hear Yllithian’s idea in full. None of us is getting any younger.’

‘Subtle as ever, Xelian. Very well Yllithian, make your case.’

‘We can effect the return of El’Uriaq with two simple steps. First we raid a maiden world with its own crop of Exodites and seize one of their worldsingers to act as a catalyst. Second we retrieve a fragment of El’Uriaq’s body from Shaa-dom. I have secured the services of a master haemonculus to undertake the task and he assures me that it is perfectly viable.’

Yllithian timed his deposition nicely with the beginning of the race. A cluster of lean, predatory-looking jetbikes and their half-wild riders had snarled into place both above and below the race strip, preparing to race in opposite directions. An expectant hush fell over the crowd as every eye strained to Xelian awaiting the signal to begin. Xelian raised a gloved hand imperiously and paused for a moment before letting it drop. The bikes instantly leapt away with a multi-throated howl and shot off along the course at an eye-watering rate of acceleration.

The Reavers expertly threw themselves around the curved track at breakneck speeds, only their extraordinary reflexes preventing them from smashing into the arena walls or each other. After the first lap obstacles began to appear: saw-edged teeth protruding from the track, moving blades sweeping out from the arena walls, drifting gravitic anomalies and monofilament nets.

The appearance of the death traps was also the sign for a general melee to break out among the Reavers. They began to side-swipe one another with their bladevanes and loose off blasts at the leading bikes with their built-in weaponry. The dance was a deadly one. Every Reaver had a mass of hooked, razor-sharp knives mounted on their craft in their own customised array. All too often a quick twist and roll brought an incautious attacker onto an impaling dagger before they could make their own blades connect.

‘If this thing can be achieved, how do you propose to control El’Uriaq?’ Kraillach said, ‘He was renowned for being proud and wilful. We would simply exchange one tyrant for another.’

‘Aside from El’Uriaq’s obvious common cause with us the haemonculus has assured me that certain… checks and balances can be introduced into his regenerating body that will afford us complete control if we deem it necessary. We would hold his life in our hands and we could dispose of him at any time. Such a puppet tyrant might even help to ease the transition of the city back under the rule of the noble houses.’

Below them the race was entering its final stages. The contra-rotating packs of Reavers had thinned to include only the luckiest and most skilful riders. The gleaming strip of the raceway began to ripple and twist to test their nerve and coordination even more, sending the speeding jetbikes even closer to the cliff-like walls. One Reaver was struck by splinter fire from behind and careened straight into the crowd, plunging into the screaming mass like a fiery comet before exploding in a shower of white-hot fragments. Xelian yawned.

‘Interesting,’ she said with a smile, ‘and just what steps do we take to avoid Vect divining our plans?’

‘One among the tyrant’s own pets will be the one to suggest the maiden world raid and our forces will simply offer to join it. During the raid itself an elite clique of our agents will slip away to abduct the worldsinger in the confusion. Only when the worldsinger is secure do we move to reclaim a physical link to El’Uriaq from Shaa-dom.’

The vicious g-forces exerted by the twisting track were now flinging out both packs of riders so far that they passed through each other before plunging on their separate courses. Explosions of blood and viscera marked each pass. Some machines plunged straight into each other and fell locked together as a single flaming mass of tangled wreckage.

Soon only two Reavers were left, a jade-green carapaced jetbike with a bare-headed rider that threw itself against a glittering black one in a rolling dive. Bladevanes flashed as the two came together head-on, the jade-green vehicle jinking at the last second to sweep a sharpened wing above the other’s curving prow. The black-clad Reaver had anticipated the move and jerked below the onrushing jetbike, laying open the guts of his enemy with an upthrust dorsal blade. The jade-green cycle spiralled away spitting smoke and flames, disappearing out of sight. The victor roared around the track in triumph accepting the acclaim of the bloodthirsty crowd.

‘Truly you have all the answers, Yllithian,’ Kraillach sneered. ‘All we need do is trust that honeyed tongue of yours and we’ll be wafted to happy golden uplands in no time at all.’

Xelian had an impulse to attack the wizened archon there and then, sating her growing ire with a gush of blood. Kraillach’s chief executioner, Morr, shifted subtly behind his master’s throne in a tacit admission that the silent incubus had picked up on Xelian’s impulse even if his archon had not. Xelian forced herself to relax and focus. She had her own doubts about Yllithian’s scheme but Kraillach’s opposition was relentlessly driving her towards embracing it. Was Kraillach manipulating her? No it was more likely Yllithian’s doing. He was always a clever one.

Xelian gave her attention to the next performance now starting in the arena while turning over Yllithian’s insane plan in her mind.

The central stage was empty again, its white sands perfect and unblemished. A rapidly flickering holo-radiant hung above them now. It retold the story of the raid in a breakneck kaleidoscope of jump-cut imagery: black, hook-winged craft plummeting through atmosphere, a night-time scene of a primitive settlement, missiles flashing upwards, disintegrators flaring in reply, terrified families fleeing into a night that suddenly blossomed into fire and steel.

The content was of little interest to the restless crowd and some jeered at it with a crass lack of finesse. Xelian had insisted that they retain a context for the exhibition of the deathworlders that even now the turncoat would be releasing from their cell.

The last scenes of the holo-radiant montage showed the last stand of the settlement’s defenders. They fought a brave but futile battle against eldar superiority in both numbers and technology that supplied a few images worth showing: a howling, bearded human thrusting a bayonet into the guts of a kabalite warrior, a barrage of laser bolts knocking another eldar off his feet. Haywire grenades crackled and a rush of wyches stormed a shot-scarred building that formed the last node of resistance.

The holo-radiant shifted to a direct sensory implant woven into the turncoat’s nervous system, just the first of several such carefully prepared viewing points. A hundred thousand hungry souls rode behind the human sow’s eyes as she hurried to open the locks to the deathworlders’ cell. They felt her fear and avarice for the reward she had been promised burning inside her as she pulled the door open. The hairy, ugly deathworlders were ready and waiting. Two of them slipped out into the corridor while their evident leader took his betrayer protectively under his arm. The two scouts found the coast was clear and the rest filed out silently to follow them.

‘What really makes you think this plan of yours will work, Yllithian?’ Xelian said. ‘I’d like to offer my whole-hearted support but I can’t shake the sense that you aren’t being entirely open with me.’

Although they were primitives the humans clearly thought they were both skilled and stealthy. Despite their wariness they were surprised by their guard blundering into them – as scheduled – from an unseen entryway. They reacted with deadly speed to the threat, one grabbing for the guard’s splinter rifle while the other dived at his back.

The first lost fingers on the rifle’s monomolecular blades but got a grip somehow and held fast even after the guard reversed his grip and punched a curved blade into his attacker’s guts. The second assailant dragged the guard to the decking and after a brief, vicious struggle broke his neck.

A vicarious thrill shivered through the watching audience. Xelian relished the rush of excitement, and the undercurrent of loathing for the dangerous brutes that swept in after it. As she’d hoped, sacrificing one of their own had made the drama a hundred times more visceral.

‘Securing a worldsinger is apparently a delicate matter, although I have assets in place that will smooth the way,’ Yllithian said carefully, but Xelian simply stared at him waiting for the rest. Sensing the impending battle of wills the archon of the White Flames gave a small shrug and surrendered gracefully. ‘It’s also possible that returning El’Uriaq will bring about a Dysjunction in the city, although it’s my belief that with our forewarning of the occurrence we can use this to our advantage.’

‘Aha, you mean you’d hoped to use it to your own advantage while telling us nothing!’ Kraillach said. Xelian found to her distaste that she was actually inclined to agree with the withered old fossil about something.

The deathworlders were fleeing now. Alarms sounded shrilly all around them and lights were strobing at an oscillation chosen to induce panic in humans. The turncoat ran with them, always being held protectively in their midst – the deathworlders desperately wanted to believe that they had found a friend. The one that had been injured fighting the guard was left behind with a captured splinter pistol to hold off pursuit as long as he could.

The injured deathworlder’s end came ignominiously at the jaws of hunting beasts set on their trail. He managed to shoot the first but the others patiently crept up on him as he struggled to stay conscious through shock and blood loss. The howling beasts were soon back on the trail of the dead man’s friends. Yllithian and Kraillach continued their bickering without regard to the unfolding drama.

‘A Dysjunction could wreck the city!’

‘The city has survived worse. The tyrant would be the one to suffer the most harm.’

‘Madness to take such risks.’

‘Madness to expect change will occur by sitting idly by.’

‘Hush now,’ Xelian said dangerously. ‘Our guests are about to arrive and I want to enjoy the moment.’

The deathworlders had reached a deserted-looking oval bay dominated by a bronze metal arch at the far end. The turncoat had been instructed to tell them that the portal visible as a shimmering curtain inside the arch led back to realspace and safety. She had not been forewarned about the ambush.

Kabalite warriors emerged from hiding and shot their splinter rifles at the deathworlders with a startlingly poor show of accuracy. Shots flew everywhere, smacking into walls, ceiling and floor. Xelian grimaced unhappily; the warriors were supposed to drive the deathworlders through the portal but they were overdoing it with their obvious ineptitude. She needn’t have worried. After a moment of confusion the deathworlders stampeded headlong for the arch while diving, darting and rolling for all they were worth.

Xelian withdrew her attention from the sensory link and focused on the central stage. The deathworlders flared into existence still running. They stumbled to a halt on the white sands as they took in their surroundings. As the hapless primitives finally apprehended the joke being played on them gales of cruel laughter echoed around the arena from the watching crowd. Some of the deathworlders stood dumbfounded, others fell to their knees or cursed their tormentors in their primitive, grunting language.

The psychic malaise of their despair was utterly delightful – so pure and natural that it had a kind of lost innocence to it. The primitives had been convinced the universe worked a certain way, that they were the heroes in their own tale of derring-do. The last shreds of their ego had finally been stripped away, revealing them to be the playthings of older, darker powers utterly inimical to humankind.

Xelian rose to make a final address to the crowd before the last act was played out. She had a hand-picked coterie of wyches standing by to fight the deathworlders in one-on-one combat. The primitives would be armed and permitted to fight their hardest for the pleasure of the crowd. More layers of self-belief would be destroyed as they discovered just how laughable their much-vaunted fighting skills were when compared to the grace and speed of a knife-wielding wych. Talos torture-engines were standing by to take what quivering remnants were left and commit them to an eternity of suffering inside their adamantium ribs. Xelian stood proudly and pointed to the filthy primitives on the central stage.

‘Here are the beasts that have declared themselves rulers of the Great Wheel! See them grovel before you, my brothers and sisters! They thought to deny our greatness, to defy our glory–’

The whole arena trembled slightly and Xelian paused. An involuntary chill ran through her. Dysjunction already? Surely not, there would have been some warning from the crones and card-fondlers of Low Commorragh at least.

A vast, jagged ziggurat of black metal was rising over the rim of the arena and blotting out the light of the captured suns above. Hovering grav-craft overhead scattered before it like a cloud of insects. Long shadows raced across the white sands towards Xelian’s dais and swallowed the forgotten deathworlders completely. The assembled crowd fell to their knees like wheat falling before a scythe, abasing themselves as if they were themselves primitives intent on worshipping some strange new moon. Xelian grimaced and reluctantly went down on one knee. Behind her she could hear a silent Yllithian and a protesting Kraillach doing the same.

They had no choice. The tyrant was at hand.

Thorn-like probes and antennae on the underside of the ziggurat flared into life. Shafts of greenish lightswept through the crowds like searching fingers before closing together into a luminous inverted pyramid. A face the size of a mountainside flickered into being, the visage of the creature that had held the dark city in thrall for six millennia. Asdrubael Vect, Supreme Overlord of Commorragh.

The arena echoed with the cheers of the kabalite warriors present, a bestial roaring that rose and fell around the terraces with a life of its own. When the face finally spoke it was with a voice of falling glaciers and grinding ice floes that stilled every throat.

‘My apologies for interrupting your little soirée, children, the necessity for tiresome public rudeness is one of the burdens I was forced to shoulder when I became custodian of this peerless city. I can assure you that scheduled events will proceed momentarily.’

A deathly silence hung over the arena. Vect hadn’t come to spectate, he had come for someone there. A traitor had been named and Vect had come to punish them. Every archon present felt a momentary gust of fear that some disloyal scheme of theirs, real or imagined, had come to the attention of the great tyrant. By long habit each of them strove to cultivate an attitude of nonchalant disinterest. Such tests of nerve were frequent steps on the path of the archon. The coward and the fool did not prosper in Commorrite society for long.

Vect evidently decided to be true to his word and did not keep the crowd in suspense for long. The stab-lights flicked out again, this time focused on a single point on the terraces.

‘NARTHELLYON! You stand accused!’ the god-voice roared.

Ninety-nine per cent of the arena’s occupants allowed themselves to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Narthellyon’s retinue closed around him protectively but it was looking to be a futile display. Hundreds of Vect’s followers, warriors of the Kabal of the Black Heart, had already surrounded them in response to some hidden signal from their overlord. The renegade archon made some unheard reply to Vect, prompting a terrifying rumble of laughter from the great tyrant.

‘I’m not sure that’s anatomically possible, Narthellyon, but my haemonculi will be perfectly willing to test the theory on you. Seize him – alive, if you please.’

Xelian watched in helpless fury as fighting erupted in the baleful glare of the stab-lights. Wickedly curved blades flashed and poison-laced splinters whickered across the pale stonework. Vect’s black-armoured warriors struggled to bring their superior numbers to bear against the tight knot of Narthellyon’s followers immediately, forming a dense thorny ring as they fought to close in. Shots flew wild, bystanders were hit and soon several more battles broke out elsewhere on the terraces as the retinues of different archons took the opportunity to even old scores amidst the resulting chaos.

It appeared that Narthellyon had been expecting some kind of trouble during the day’s events and had come prepared – so he thought – for it. Energy weapons suddenly flared through the struggling mass of warriors, the vivid emerald stars of disintegrators firing on full automatic. Screaming, kicking bodies could be seen as glowing after-images as they burned like candles in the hellish glare. Gaps were torn in the ring of Vect’s kabalite warriors and the struggle hung momentarily in the balance.

A Raider craft bravely swept in to try and pick up Narthellyon. Lances of dark energy stabbed out from the ziggurat and crucified the sleek craft before it even got close. It was unclear whether they hoped to drive it off or to exact some measure of revenge for the fallen Raider, but Narthellyon’s disintegrators targeted the ziggurat next.

Livid green sparks of high-energy plasma ricocheted off the imperturbable dark metal without so much as scorching the surface. Despite the lack of visible effect the feeble attack was apparently enough to exhaust Vect’s patience. Disintegrators and dark lances studding the ziggurat abruptly swept the terrace with the fury of an angry god. Entropic darklight beams and plasma bolts rained down and obliterated the scene. All that was left of Narthellyon, his retinue and the Black Heart kabalite warriors fighting them, was a patina of blackened holes punched into the stonework. The awesome display of firepower did much to quiet the fighting in other parts of the arena. The tyrant’s visage appeared again, leering at the carnage with a cruel smile on his lips.

‘Such a shame,’ the glacial tones said without any hint of regret. ‘Now we shall have to wait to rebirth Narthellyon before we can have any fun together. Enjoy the rest of your event, Xelian, I do hope I didn’t disrupt things too much.’

The black metal ziggurat rose silently and drifted away. As the shadow slid back across the sands the torn bodies of the deathworlders came into view. Xelian bowed again and attempted to keep her face impassive as she boiled internally with impotent rage. It was possible, just possible, that the deathworlders had been accidental victims of the crossfire, but Xelian felt sure that there was nothing accidental about their demise. Vect had timed his arrival and triggered the fighting specifically to upstage the culmination of Xelian’s entertainment in the worst possible way.

She turned back slowly to her two allies. Yllithian met her gaze unflinchingly, a supercilious smile playing about his lips as he tried his best not to bait her when she was in a killing mood. Kraillach quailed backwards in his throne at what he saw in her eyes.

‘No more games. No more bickering and manipulation. We move forwards with Yllithian’s plan immediately.’

‘I... I–’ Kraillach stammered.

‘If you are not with us on this you are against us. Kraillach, are you against us?’ Xelian spoke with cold precision. If Kraillach objected he would not be leaving the dais alive, bodyguards or no, and he knew it. The wizened old archon wisely kept his silence. Xelian turned around to survey the smoking ruins of the terraces.

‘Vect must die. Everyone that supports him must die. I don’t care if we have to burn the whole city to do it. The tyrant must be destroyed.’

CHAPTER 4

THE HUNTERS

‘In the time before the fall of Shaa-dom, it is said that El’Uriaq’s favoured concubine Dyreddya had seven handmaidens all of unsurpassed youth and purity. Each complemented El’Uriaq’s mistress in one of the arts, and assisted by their tender ministrations Dyreddya was always able to quicken her lord’s heart to flame. Some say that when disaster befell Shaa-dom the handmaids’ souls were carried off directly to She Who Thirsts, such choice and delectable sweetmeats were they. Others say that She was so delighted with their delicate promise that She clasped them to Her bosom and remade them into something as dark as they were once light. Some even believe that the handmaids were carried away not by daemons but by the Dark Muse Lhilitu and escaped the wreck of Shaa-dom to become part of her strange pantheon. All the legends agree that the cleverest handmaid hid herself by stitching shut her eyes and mouth to thwart the searching daemons. The hellish minions returned to their mistress and shamefacedly admitted they could find no breath nor sight of the one they called Angevere.’

– Veslyin the Anchorite, The Sudden Fall of Shaa-dom

Some days after the events at the arena of the Blades of Desire, Bellathonis summoned one of his wrack servants to him: an individual named Xagor, a promising and earnest pupil in the arts of pain. Xagor duly appeared, breathless and pleasantly apprehensive at why his master might call for him personally. Unmasked the wrack showed a pale, haggard face to the world, with red, staring eyes, a heavy jaw and a determined scowl that looked to be a permanent fixture. The thick brows beneath Xagor’s glistening, naked skull were knotted with worry. A long, ribbed coat of dark hide flapped from the wrack’s shoulders as he rushed into Bellathonis’s cluttered quarters with unseemly haste to grovel before him.

Bellathonis was busy feeding a selection of his carnivorous plants, the last survivors of hybridisation experiments on behalf of Archon Pyrllivyn a number of years ago. Although the experiments had generally been another of many disappointments Bellathonis had grown attached to the fleshy little monsters it produced. He continued to drop fragments of raw meat into their snapping mouth-parts as he talked to Xagor, his long fingers too quick and sure to be caught by their thorn-edged jaws.

‘Ah, Xagor, there you are. Is everything all right? You seem a little… rushed,’ Bellathonis smiled. He did so enjoy the earnestness of the young, and tormenting them for it. In truth his wracks had good cause to fear him. Each of them had sworn themselves to him utterly in exchange for their apprenticeship in the arts of flesh. Part of that apprenticeship was to experience Bellathonis’s cruel skills at work on their own bodies. As he always told them, a would-be haemonculus had to first know pain before they could bestow pain.

‘M-master, your faithful servant Xagor came as quickly as he could!’ the wrack gibbered with his face pressed into the rich carpets.

‘Oh don’t worry, Xagor, I haven’t called you to punish you, do get up. In fact I have a reward for you, isn’t that nice?’

‘Yes-yes, very nice!’ squeaked Xagor in confusion as he struggled to his feet.

‘Yes, you have been so diligent of late that I have a special task for you. Complete it to my satisfaction and I will look upon you with favour, do you understand?’

Xagor understood all too well what that really meant – pain and death would attend any failure to fulfil the task to Bellathonis’s complete satisfaction. The wrack nodded frantically.

‘Excellent. My first instruction is that you are to tell no one else of this task either now or later. You will proceed to the flesh markets of Metzuh in Low Commorragh and go to one of the most reputed exchanges there, a place known as the Red House, close by the Street of Knives. Do you know the place?’

‘Yes-yes, master!’ Xagor stammered. ‘Xagor has visited the Red House many times. Matsilier, who is a gourmand there, is my batch-brother.’

‘Excellent, I’m pleased you did not try and lie to me by denying it,’ Bellathonis murmured as he dropped another morsel of meat into the straining jaws beneath his fingertips.

‘I have a very important package at the Red House that must be delivered to me in person. You will collect this package – a jar – and return it to me here at the tower intact and unopened. That part of the task is simple enough but absolutely critical – intact and unopened – do you understand?’

Xagor nodded obediently. Bellathonis could almost see the words ‘intact and unopened’ etching themselves into the wrack’s brain in fiery letters. The haemonculus nodded back in satisfaction. He’d thought of a way to implant a suitable cover story that might also serve a useful dual purpose.

‘The other important part of your task is to keep your ears open while you’re in the flesh markets. I need information of the kind you can only get from Low Commorragh – find out what the dabblers and charlatans are saying when they try to foretell the future, see what ridiculous rumours the slaves have been cooking up lately – there’s a grain of truth at the bottom of each one. Something’s in the wind, Xagor, I just know it!’

Xagor nodded with barely repressed excitement at Bellathonis’s somewhat fanciful oratory. He had been elevated from courier and potential victim to co-conspirator in a single stroke, an exciting development in his young life.

‘All clear? Very good, then run along. Bring me the jar and any juicy rumours you hear, I’m hungry for news.’

Once Xagor had left the master haemonculus sent some discreet messages to his agents in Low Commorragh alerting them to follow the wrack’s progress and, most importantly of all, to ensure the jar containing Yllithian’s gift arrived in his hands intact and unopened. A single wrack should not overly excite the interest of his rivals in the haemonculi covens and Bellathonis was gambling on the fact to ensure the prize would not be intercepted before it was in his grasp. Nonetheless the decrepit warren of streets and alleys around the flesh markets had plentiful predators of their own to contend with. Ordinarily the servant of a haemonculus would enjoy a certain measure of protection, but the omnipresent pulse of violence and desperation in the city had been growing stronger of late. Something bad was coming and the masses could feel it.

Bellathonis had barely completed his arrangements and turned back to the clients on his tables when a summons arrived from Malixian. He had heard little from the mad archon since his meeting with Yllithian and wondered if this missive heralded some new burst of manic activity on Malixian’s part. After a moment’s thought Bellathonis dispatched one more message before he left, this time to agents in Aelindrach that he was normally loath to call upon. Although the cost would be high Bellathonis wanted absolute certainty that he could collect on Yllithian’s payment.

One of Bellathonis’s sometime agents and occasional informers was crouching on a half-eroded roof beam in an abandoned slave mill when the call came. He had spent days staking out the crumbling structure deep in the sprawling inner districts of Low Commorragh waiting for his mark to show up. Now just as the overseer was finally meeting with his cronies the agent’s tell-tale pulsed with the whisper of a new and potentially lucrative mission.

The agent, a slender young eldar named Kharbyr, cursed inwardly at his misfortune. The overseer and his little gang of cohorts were mere slaves, ordinarily dirt beneath Kharbyr’s recognition. Nonetheless someone had posted a small murder-fee for this overseer, and despite his pride Kharbyr was also very, very hungry. It was probably other slaves that found themselves under the overseer’s too-ready lash that had pooled their miserable resources to rid themselves of their oppressor once and for all. The reward for this kill was paltry, but Kharbyr had not quenched his murderlust in several days and was loath to let his mark escape him now. A victim in hand was worth two on the loose, as the saying went.

Gazing down on the small circle of slaves below Kharbyr fancied he could take them all at once. Two with the pistol, three with the knife; it would all be over before they could wipe the stupefied expressions from their faces. A seldom-used, cautious part of his mind held him back. The slaves were wary, burly and crudely but effectively armed with metal cudgels and scrap-knives. He couldn’t be sure that one of them wouldn’t get in a lucky blow that would leave him open to getting overwhelmed by the rest. He fondled his favourite blade disappointedly. The half-metre curve of razor-sharp metal would not taste warm blood after all, just as Kharbyr would not get to quench his own unending thirst.

As Kharbyr fretted, the meeting broke up. The overseer and his friends split, each making their own way out of the decrepit structure. Kharbyr’s heart sang with joy and he ran light-footed along the corrosion-furred roof beams to get ahead of his mark. Through a shattered window he watched the overseer leave the abandoned mill and cross a filthy, refuse-strewn alley to enter a crumbling row of storage barns on the opposite side. Kharbyr slid after him soft and silent as a shadow.

Only rats and peeling walls confronted him inside. At some point the interior of the barn had been partitioned off with sheets of a cheap, resinous compound. The walls had split in some places and fallen in others turning the place into a crumbling, unstable maze. Kharbyr crept along listening intently for a sound of his quarry. He felt sure the overseer was still somewhere in the building, but he couldn’t hear anything but his own quiet breaths. Rounding a corner he found a set of rickety-looking steps that led upwards. He crept up them cursing internally at the slight creaks and groans made by his progress.

As his head came level with the floor above he stopped and cautiously scrutinised the part of the landing he could see. Nothing was in sight and the floor was in a ruinous state. If the overseer had come this way, Kharbyr decided, he would have heard him on the stairs anyway. The lean assassin turned and descended to the floor below as gracefully as he could.

A slight creak made him spin around in surprise. The overseer was right behind him! The big slave had crawled silently down the steps and was stretched out preparing to plunge a rusty scrap-knife into Kharbyr’s exposed back. The overseer thrust desperately when he saw he had been spotted but the blow was weak and awkward from his semi-prone position. Startled by the sudden turnaround in fortunes the assassin leapt back and fled out of sight around a corner in a momentary panic. The overseer jumped to his feet with a roar and charged in pursuit.

At the third twist in the maze the overseer was brought to an abrupt halt by Kharbyr’s outstretched blade sheathing itself in his guts. Choking on his own blood, the slave tried to bring his knife to bear but found his wrist gripped by steely fingers.

‘Not so easy, is it?’ Kharbyr whispered to his struggling victim as he dragged the half-metre of sharpened metal up to the slave’s sternum. Blood and viscera sprayed over his pointed boots and he cursed again; he always forgot to step back at the correct moment. He ignored the momentary distraction and drank hungrily from the departing soul as it suffered on his blade, quenching but not satiating his eternal thirst.

He used his tell-tale to burn his kill mark on the twitching corpse. He couldn’t take the time to drag it somewhere where it was more likely to be found, he’d just have to rely on someone reporting it for the finder’s bounty. The idea of collecting payment was already fuzzy and half-forgotten in his mind anyway, he’d got what he wanted when he made the kill. This job for the haemonculus though, if he could find the courier first, promised almost unbelievable riches. He wondered whether he should take the ‘important package’ and deliver it himself or see if he could sell it to someone else.

Find the courier first, Kharbyr decided, then worry about the package once he’s dead. He licked his lips with anticipation.

A sleek grav craft was waiting outside Bellathonis’s tower to sweep him skywards to Malixian’s eyrie. The pierced sphere atop its impossibly tall silver spike was the centre of a veritable hive of activity. A small armada of aerial craft jockeyed for position among a halo of swooping hellions and wheeling scourges. It looked to Bellathonis like the whole kabal of the Ninth Raptrex was airborne.

Bellathonis’s craft didn’t enter the eyrie itself, instead it angled higher still to slide in beside a large, sleek Raider craft presumably bearing the archon himself. Malixian’s war craft was slender and skeletal like the polished chromium bones of some aerial giant, and featured more open space than solid platform in its design. Malixian’s warriors ran along its palm-wide spars and curving blades to take their positions with startling agility.

Bellathonis had long since evicted all traces of emotions akin to fear from his strictly ordered persona, but even so he felt an unpleasant instant of vertigo as he stepped across the kilometres-deep gulf between the two craft. The vessel he stepped from bobbed alarmingly as he pushed off from it, but Malixian’s Raider was as solid and immovable as a rock. Malixian himself was dangling precariously from the Raider’s spritsail as he hungrily drank in the sight of his assembled forces, and he was not alone. Bellathonis eyed the newcomer with professional discourtesy. Syiin’s round moon-face blinked back at him innocently, the crook-backed haemonculus seeming to be fully engaged in clutching at one of the Raider’s slender guard rails and not looking down.

‘Ah, Bellathonis, my master shaper! I’m so glad you could come!’ Malixian trilled happily, apparently forgetting that Bellathonis valued his life too much to ignore a summons from his archon. ‘You know of Syiin, Yllithian’s flesh carver? He came by to offer compliments on your fine work with the scourges so I thought he should come along too!’

‘My heartfelt gratitude for that kind indulgence, my archon,’ Bellathonis replied, somewhat pointedly looking at Syiin. ‘May I enquire as to the occasion?’

‘A hunt, my dear Bellathonis, a hunt!’ Malixian crowed. ‘After that business in the arena I picked up a job lot of Xelian’s slaves. It seems the pain lady has some rebuilding to do and had to liquidate some of her assets – or rather that’s what I’m about to do for her.’

A maggot of concern wriggled to the surface of Bellathonis’s mind. Syiin’s presence was unwelcome but not unexpected. Yllithian’s chief haemonculus was inevitably going to start sniffing around at some point. His appearance just as Bellathonis was looking to take delivery of a reward from Yllithian was suspiciously timely, but what truly dropped the clawed fiend into the slave pit was Malixian’s sudden impulse to hold a hunt.

Malixian liked to keep his winged pets well fed and exercised. On occasion a few score of slaves would be released into the Aviaries’ grounds and allowed to scatter. Some time later the cages would be opened to release their flocks of aerial terrors – skinwings, bloodtalons, Iridian pteraclaws, vespids, rare white ruhks, shaderavens, poisonous Ymgarl shrikes and many more. The Ninth Raptrex would ride aloft with their archon to enjoy the pain and terror of the dying slaves as the hunt proceeded. They would also deal with any of their prey that were impolite enough to hide too successfully or desperate enough to fight back.

Anything on foot in the Aviaries during the hunt was fair game. If a warrior fell from their craft or a hellion became dismounted they became more prey alongside the hapless slaves. The barely restrained anarchy of Malixian’s legendary hunts brought great numbers of scourges and hellions into his kabal, the wild warriors finding a common kinship in their contempt for their earthbound kin. Ordinarily Bellathonis would have been delighted to see Malixian’s menagerie at play, but now Xagor’s innocuous-seeming mission was apt to meet its end at the razor-sharp talons of the mad archon’s pets when the wrack returned.

‘I am deeply honoured, Archon Malixian,’ said Bellathonis, while covering his dismay with a bow. ‘We are particularly fortunate to have one of my colleagues here to enjoy the festivities too.’

‘Hoo, it’s nothing, you’ll find it informative to see what you’ve been working on so diligently finally get into action. I’d been meaning to do something for a time, but Syiin’s arrival clinched it – it’s been too long since we shook out our wings and took to the skies!’

‘Isn’t it wonderful? Your kind archon indulging us in this way, Bellathonis? simpered Syiin. ‘Lowly haemonculi like ourselves so seldom get a chance to know our place in the grand schemes of our betters. When such opportunities come along we really should seize on them so we can learn how to serve their best interests all the better. Don’t you agree?’

‘Why yes, Syiin, keeping our place is ever at the forefront of our minds, is it not?’ Bellathonis replied tartly.

Bellathonis had to admit his curiosity was genuinely piqued by the idea of a hunt despite his more pressing concerns. The fate of the earnest young Xagor was out of his hands anyway. He was effectively trapped on board Malixian’s hunting-chariot with Syiin and the archon for the duration of the hunt. Bellathonis consoled himself that if the jar survived and was delivered to him the loss of Xagor was regrettable but scarcely germane to the greater objective.

The master haemonculus rejected the passing notion of letting Malixian in on the secret of Xagor’s mission. With Syiin present it was out of the question, and beside that the mad archon would be in no mood for objective discussions while his blood sang with the joy of the hunt. No, Xagor would have to take his chances and Bellathonis must be ready to pick up the pieces later – literally as well as figuratively – if matters were to go awry. Bellathonis silently blessed the streak of paranoia that had prompted him to seek help from his seldom-called allies.

With an imperious gesture Malixian sent his Raider plummeting earthwards, apparently the signal for a mass descent as the air around them was filled with pinioned scourges, hellions, jetbikes, Raiders and Venoms as if they were in the midst of a glittering waterfall. They levelled off above the highest peaks of the cages and the kabal slowly dispersed over the area in some pre-arranged scheme. Below them Bellathonis could see streamers of winged shapes emerging from their places of confinement like traceries of windblown smoke. The flicker of rainbow scales among the closest marked them as Iridian pteraclaws but further away he could discern the slow-beating wings of white ruhk and whirring clouds of shaderavens.

Malixian raised a long silver tube to his lips and blew through it to produce a low, shrilling whistle that carried through the armada and was taken up in many places. In response the deadly flocks descended into the canyons between the aviary cages to begin hunting for the slaves that were no doubt fleeing for their lives somewhere below.

Malixian’s Raider flashed downwards in pursuit of some pteraclaws. Their frantically beating wings indicated they had spotted prey and they hissed at one another excitedly as they chased it down. Though the Raider could have easily overtaken the reptilian predators it hung back once they had caught up to them. Hellions dropped into place like outriders around their archon and a pack of jetbikes closed in to circle protectively high above their stern. As the Raider settled on its course Syiin just managed to nerve himself to creep, hand over hand, along the railing to come closer to Bellathonis.

‘Why do they trouble to guard against attacks from above?’ Syiin hissed urgently as he gazed up the circling Reavers. ‘Surely we’re not also at risk from the archon’s marvellous pets?’

‘The Ninth Raptrex use their hunts not just for pleasure but to practise the arts of war,’ Bellathonis replied, relishing the opportunity to lecture the other haemonculus, ‘a noble tradition that dates back to the earliest days of our species. In the course of the hunt the kabal learns to choreograph the diverse elements of Raiders, Reavers, hellions and scourges in all three dimensions with all the natural fluidity that serves them so well on the battlefield. Hence the Reavers position themselves as if an enemy may come upon the archon unexpectedly because it is natural for them to do so even when no danger threatens.’

He was distracted by the excited cry of Malixian. The pteraclaws were folding their wings and diving on their prey. The areas between the aviary cages were parklands of manicured lawns and decorative arbours. Three or four dark smudges on the ground were hurrying away from the winged doom descending upon them. They moved pitifully slowly in comparison to the pteraclaws, like insects trying to crawl away across a tabletop. The predators dived on them in packs, striking down first one slave and then another with their razor-edged claws. More of the pteraclaws dropped on the fallen figures, ripping and tearing at them hungrily.

They were lower now and Bellathonis’s cat-like eyesight picked out one of the fleeing slaves quite distinctly. It turned and flung itself at one of the squabbling packs, swinging a crude weapon it had fashioned in a futile effort to save one of its fallen comrades. The pteraclaws flapped backwards with a burst of outraged hissing, the slave yelling wordlessly as it belaboured them with its club.

A second later the brave but foolhardy slave was crushed beneath the plummeting delta shape of a white ruhk swooping on it from above. The ruhk was huge, fully three times the height of the mangled slave it was now pinning beneath one claw as it tore off its bloody limbs to feed. The pteraclaws continued hissing at the new arrival but stayed safely out of striking range while the white ruhk imperiously ignored them and continued consuming its freshly killed meal.

The Raider coasted slowly above the noisily feasting creature. Malixian grinned back at Bellathonis and Syiin appreciatively.

‘My beautiful white ruhks always love to take down the ones that try to fight. I think they take any kind of challenge as something of a personal affront,’ Malixian chuckled.

‘Quite magnificent,’ muttered Syiin weakly. Bellathonis was pleased to note that Malixian’s aerial antics seemed to have a distinctly detrimental effect on Syiin’s physiology. His stretched, circular face looked distinctly green around the edges.

‘I was surprised to see one slave going back to try to save another like that, they must have been a bonded pair of some sort,’ Bellathonis remarked.

‘Perhaps,’ Malixian said dismissively. ‘The first kills in every hunt are the stupid ones – ones that have no better plan than to try to run. The clever ones are in hiding right now and the true hunt will begin when we start flushing them out of their holes.’

‘Do any ever escape?’ Bellathonis’s question formed in his mind and popped out of his lips before he even considered the potential tantrum it might trigger in Malixian. He cursed himself inwardly for his distracted mind. Fortunately Malixian appeared to be in too good a mood to be upset by impertinent questions.

‘My Aviatrix swears up and down that none of them escape, but I’ve got my doubts about that. I mean, the shaderavens will leave nothing but a wet smear when they’ve finished feeding – how can we be sure that the slaves are all accounted for without bodies? Sieve through their droppings?’

Malixian cackled appreciatively at the thought. It was quite within his power to order such a thing, but it simply hadn’t occurred to him before now. ‘No, I’m sure some of them do survive,’ he continued ‘but I say good luck to them if they can get out of the Aviaries alive under their own power. I don’t begrudge them thinking they have a chance, it makes them run all the harder before they get caught.’

‘Very true, noble archon!’ Syiin said. ‘Why, in my personal experience keeping a subject alive long enough to extract the maximum dark energy from them is impossible unless you somehow make them cling to a shred of hope – release, rescue, death, whatever it may be.’

Bellathonis nodded politely at Syiin’s doggerel. It was true enough, without hope slaves plucked from realspace sickened and died far too quickly to be useful. He made a mental note to mention the phenomena to Yllithian, it would be an important factor for his schemes. Bellathonis was shocked out of his reverie at Malixian’s next words.

‘I have some news I’ve been meaning to share with you, Bellathonis, and you too, Syiin, since you’re here,’ Malixian said. ‘I’ve persuaded Archon Yllithian to plan a joint raid on a place held by our grass-chewing simpleton cousins, the Exodites.’

‘Indeed?’ was the best Bellathonis could manage by way of reply at first. He darted a glance at Syiin but his flat face was unreadable. Bellathonis’s mind raced wondering what kind of inducements and blandishments Yllithian had used to make Malixian think he was the one persuading Yllithian instead of vice-versa. Of course it was most likely that he’d simply played on Malixian’s most obvious weakness.

‘I imagine that there are some fantastic specimens to be found for your collection upon maiden worlds, my archon,’ Bellathonis said.

‘Just so! Did you know Exodites ride giant pterasaurs on some worlds? They make my white ruhks look like midgets. It’s a long time since I’ve seen that.’

The smaller pteraclaws had finished their meal and now rose into the air with a thunderous whirl of iridescent wings. The white ruhk was left still feasting alone. As the Raider moved to follow the disappearing pteraclaw flock one of its escorting hellions caught sight of something on the ground. The lightly armoured warrior’s knees bent and then braced as he pitched his skyboard over into a vertical dive. As he dropped the hellion brought up his hellglaive and triggered the splinter pods on his skyboard, spraying a stream of near-invisible hyper-velocity splinters from its built-in weaponry.

Below they saw a slave roll desperately out of the brush where it had been hiding to avoid the burst. It immediately broke into a run straight towards where the white ruhk was still perching on the remnants of its victim. As the slave no doubt intended the hellion was forced to shear off his attack for fear of hitting one of the archon’s prized specimens.

As it ran forwards the slave levelled a lance of its own, some piece of piping or tree branch it had torn free, a pitifully tiny weapon to match against something as huge as a white ruhk. The tall, angular-looking creature twisted its head around to watch the little thing rushing towards it inscrutably. The three-metre-long bone-white beak of the ruhk suddenly clacked shut on the slave’s head and torso before it got into striking range with its puny spear.

The creature lifted its helpless victim into the air with arms and legs kicking feebly before tipping its head back to swallow its catch whole. The white ruhk looked obscenely pleased with itself for getting second helpings without even having to move.

‘Hoo, that one’s going to be useless now – it’ll be moping around digesting for the rest of the hunt now it ate a whole one, the greedy monster!’ Malixian fretted. ‘Speaking of greedy monsters an interesting thought struck me when Yllithian said yes to the idea of a raid – no one normally wants to go after the annoying tree huggers because they’re so hard to pin down. No profit in it.’

Bellathonis wrenched his attention away from his own feeding on the pain and suffering being inflicted by Malixian’s pets. The spear-wielding slave was still alive down there, being digested in the white ruhk’s gullet. Syiin wore a frightened look; Bellathonis strove to make sure his own face didn’t mirror it.

‘You suspect that Yllithian has ulterior motives for the raid, my archon?’ Bellathonis asked delicately. He disliked the direction Malixian’s line of thinking was taking him.

‘You can’t normally interest a soul in the maiden worlds and now Yllithian’s keen to throw in with his own kabal and his friends too? Smells strange to me. He didn’t mention anything to either of you by any chance?’ Malixian’s voice was silky smooth and dangerous.

Bellathonis suddenly felt very alone on the archon’s craft surrounded by Malixian’s warriors. He glanced at Syiin and found him looking panicked. Evidently this was no scheme of Syiin’s to win Malixian’s favour, he had just found himself suddenly caught in one of Malixian’s random bouts of paranoia. Bellathonis badly needed something to distract the mad archon with and something Yllithian had mentioned did come to mind, just a possibility but too perfect a foil to neglect.

‘It has come to my attention that there are rumours of a coming Dysjunction, my archon,’ Bellathonis offered. ‘Yllithian’s interest may be related to that.’ He glared at Syiin to prompt him into some sort of affirmation. The haemonculus’s moon-face lifted to look at him intently when he mentioned Dysjunction, like a sensor dish locking onto a signal.

‘My – ah – my archon is ever cautious in safeguarding his assets,’ Syiin eventually bleated.

‘Dysjunction, you say?’ Malixian echoed. Bellathonis felt as if the silent, immobile warriors on the archon’s craft were hanging on his every word.

‘I’d not thought to raise the matter with you before as there are little more than rumours at present, although I’m seeking to have them confirmed,’ Bellathonis lied glibly.

‘Hoo, a Dysjunction could have serious consequences here in the Aviaries, Bellathonis, very serious consequences.’ Malixian gazed sadly out over the artificial mountain range of cages as if already seeing them broken and tumbled into ruins.

Bellathonis desperately wanted to take this chance to reveal that his faithful wrack, Xagor, could soon be returning with definitive news. A deep well of suspicion and paranoia stopped him. If Xagor were to arrive after Bellathonis had made such a revelation Malixian would want to meet with him and question him, and the jar would be mentioned. Malixian would want to know what was in it and then he might find out who it came from. Perhaps that was precisely what Syiin had come to find out, some clue as to the private plans of his own archon.

If that happened the whole scheme could unravel by linking Bellathonis back to the suspicious-seeming Yllithian at a most inopportune moment. Ultimately Malixian was one of the tyrant’s favourites, albeit in a distant and half-joking fashion, and if his suspicions were aroused then Vect’s could soon follow suit with deadly result. Once again the mental equation of cold logic clicked out the same result. Xagor would have to take his chances alone and Syiin would have to keep fishing for answers without any help from Bellathonis.

‘Please do not allow such matters to interfere with your enjoyment of your sport, my archon,’ Bellathonis said soothingly. ‘I should know more soon and then I can perhaps advise you on the validity of these claims of imminent disaster. They will doubtless prove to be without foundation.’ To Bellathonis’s relief Malixian nodded.

‘Yes, first things first hey? I promised you a demonstration and you shall have one.’ Malixian gestured to his steersman and the Raider shot away, quickly leaving the satiated white ruhk and still-hunting pteraclaws far behind.

They approached an open space where the omnipresent cages only formed a jumbled horizon in the distance. Around a great park, howling jetbikes and hellions were driving a herd of running slaves to a point beneath a circle of flying scourges.

‘Here now, watch this, Bellathonis, Syiin,’ Malixian trilled, hopping to the bowsprit again.

As the slaves came close the winged figures swooped down on them like avenging angels. Many of the scourges had their feet grown into powerful avian claws and simply latched onto their victims’ shoulders before carrying them aloft. Others used shardnet launchers or agoniser rounds to disable their victims before seizing them and bearing them away. Within a few seconds from when the whirling circle had begun to dip into the herd the scourges had carried every single slave screaming into the sky.

With their victims gathered the scourges began to play, dropping them and racing to catch them, taking a limb each and tearing them apart. More blood and viscera showered down when the hellions and jetbikes darted in trying to hook away victims for themselves. They were seldom able to win such bouts, the scourges were simply too strong and too agile for the machines to beat however skilfully they were piloted. Bellathonis had to admit it was a crude but impressive display. All the more impressive given that the number of scourges present represented only a fraction of those the master haemonculus had enhanced on behalf of Malixian over the preceding months.

‘Magnificent work, Bellathonis!’ applauded Syiin, his thin hands rattling together like bundles of twigs. ‘I find myself in awe of the skills you show in this field. You seem to have found yourself a perfect niche.’

‘I have to say they make a fine sight, my archon,’ Bellathonis said dryly. ‘Truly none can hope to escape your mighty winged warriors.’

‘Cursed mud-dwelling Exodites might if they’re dug in deep enough,’ Malixian remarked sourly.

‘I understood that our rustic inferiors were more given to running away and hiding than confrontation, so that stealth and speed were the only viable techniques for capture?’

‘No, they’re unpredictable, wild. They’ll fight sometimes if their settlements and shrines are threatened.’

The Raider was drawing away from the scourges’ massacre, drifting higher again. Malixian gazed out over the jagged landscape as if he was seeing another one from his past, the primordial realm of a maiden world.

‘Woods full of beasts, traps and snipers, everyone else barricaded in their holes waiting for the clans to gather. Once they do everything on the planet that walks, crawls or flies will be looking to take a chunk out of you. That’s why a stealthy snatch is the most viable technique, because they know our kind can’t stay for too long once they make a fight of it.’ Malixian shook himself, his feathered cloak rustling mournfully, before lapsing into a brooding silence.

Bellathonis nodded. Regressive as they were Exodites were not stupid and they had their legends about the dark kin who came by night to steal the souls of the unwary. The eldar of the craftworlds also had some proprietary sense of duty to the maiden worlds. They would often come creeping through the labyrinth dimension to appear in their defence at the most inopportune moments. Yllithian’s real objective for the raid of seizing a worldsinger, surely a member of one of the Exodites’ most prized and protected castes, was beginning to sound like an extremely thorny prospect.

Malixian cocked his head to one side as if listening to invisible voices. He gestured sharply to the steersman and the Raider immediately slid away towards the outer edge of the Aviaries, picking up speed as it angled towards where Bellathonis’s tower lay.

‘Well, Bellathonis, it seems that not one but two of your servants have opted to enter the Beryl Gate on foot while the hunt is in progress,’ Malixian said as he perked up with a nasty grin. ‘I thought we could go and see if they make it home or not.’

The maggot of concern that been boring patiently away at Bellathonis’s mind metamorphosed into a buzzing fly of panic that he strove unsuccessfully to crush. Syiin was watching him with interest; it was obvious now that he knew or guessed that Bellathonis’s servants were returning from some task related to Yllithian’s visit. Silence seemed the best and only option under the circumstances and Bellathonis strove to maintain a slightly shaky expression of polite disinterest.

The skies were noticeably quieter on the outskirts of the Aviaries. A few scouting hellions zipped back and forth and the occasional spiral of flying creatures emerged from the cage canyons to seek for new prey. Malixian pointed silently downward into the deep shadows lining the avenue below. Bellathonis saw movement and picked out Xagor, easily recognisable by the flapping of his hide coat as he dashed comically from one hedge to another. The wrack loped along awkwardly, desperately clutching something to his chest. Bellathonis hoped for his sake that it was the jar he had been sent to collect.

‘Taking delivery of something, Bellathonis?’ Syiin whispered conspiratorially. ‘It must be important to risk–’ Malixian angrily shushed the haemonculus into silence before again drawing their attention below.

Malixian’s eyesight must have verged on the preternatural. His semi-sentient cloak of eyes combined with the image enhancement augmetics in his bird mask certainly gave him the kind of visual acuity his beloved pets could only dream of. The mad archon pointed out another individual a dozen paces behind Xagor that was moving with a feline grace that Bellathonis’s own enhanced eyes could barely pick out in the gloom. One of the agents he had engaged? He looked like he was stalking Xagor rather than protecting him. Perhaps it was a catspaw of Syiin’s sent to waylay Xagor and only claiming to be Bellathonis’s servant in order to access the Aviaries?

Syiin seemed to lack the gloating air Bellathonis would have expected if that were the case. On balance, Bellathonis recalled, his instructions had only extended to ensuring safe delivery of the prize rather than protection of the courier. It seemed more likely the agent had interpreted that to include murdering the unfortunate Xagor and delivering what he carried in person. Bellathonis stifled a cruel laugh.

‘Look,’ Malixian whispered as he pointed again, ‘our two star-crossed lovers have additional suitors.’

The hunter was himself being hunted. Invisible to the agent but clear from above once Malixian pointed them out, the shapes of several slaves could be seen. They were creeping towards the agent while his attention was fixed on Xagor. The three factions formed a perfect little tableau: Xagor hesitating at a corner as the agent raised a pistol to gun him down as the slaves rushed at his unguarded back. It was like seeing an allegorical triptych on one of the thirteen foundations of vengeance. Bellathonis, Syiin and Malixian drifted god-like above the scene, dispassionately awaiting its outcome.

The pistol spat and the tiny flash broke the moment. Xagor panicked and fled, the cloaked agent’s aim being spoiled as he momentarily disappeared beneath a rush of club-wielding slaves. His swift fall elicited a disappointed hoot from Malixian, but the archon’s dismay proved premature. A moment later the struggling figures broke apart with both slaves down and writhing in their own blood. However incautious the agent might be when it came to watching his back his reflexes were apparently beyond reproach. Sadly his indiscipline showed again as he paused to satiate himself on the slaves’ death agonies before sprinting around the corner in pursuit of Xagor.

‘He’s a lively one. Must be a stripling,’ Malixian whispered as the Raider silently drifted down the avenue to follow him. There was no chance of being heard down below but the mad archon seemed to be enjoying the artifice of being hidden observers watching animals at a watering hole.

‘Yes, it would appear he has much potential but also much to learn,’ Bellathonis murmured darkly. ‘Although naturally I’m glad that he’s offering my archon and my esteemed colleague such impromptu entertainment.’

‘It’s all quite fascinating, Bellathonis, I can assure you,’ whispered Syiin. ‘A real insight.’

As Bellathonis fought with the momentary urge to push the hunchbacked figure off the Raider a pistol cracked several more times from around the corner. The sharp sound attracted the attention of a pair of passing hellions, who rapidly arced their skyboards around to go and investigate.

Malixian gestured sharply for the Raider to follow them, the steersman sending the long craft shooting forwards with a sudden burst of power. They breasted the flank of an enormous, pagoda-like enclosure and swung around its edge in time to see the pair of hellions sweeping down upon the lone agent in an attack run. Once again his reflexes saved him, sending him rolling out of the path of the first hellion’s bladed skyboard and punching the second from his mount with an accurate burst of splinter fire. Malixian seemed so delighted he neglected to whisper.

‘Hoo! That’s a lively one all right! After him!’

As if striving for an encore the agent now sprang onto the fallen skyboard and fled with the first hellion in hot pursuit. There was no sign of Xagor but Bellathonis thought he’d caught the telltale flicker of shadows oozing away beneath an underpass when the hellions made their attack. Nothing that Syiin or Malixian would have noticed with any luck because they were too busy watching the agent fight the hellions, but something Bellathonis had been half-expecting and half-hoping to see.

His allies had responded to his call. Shadow-skinned mandrakes were gliding silently through the Aviaries at his behest to ensure the prize would still come to him despite all the caprices of the mad archon and the interferences of Syiin. Inwardly the haemonculus heaved a gigantic sigh of relief. Now all that remained was to see if this worthless agent of his would have the wherewithal to escape Malixian or at least the good grace to die in the attempt.

The racing agent quickly outpaced Malixian’s Raider by plunging into narrow places it couldn’t follow. The hellion pursued him avidly, bobbing and weaving expertly through the gruelling course the agent set. The hellion only became unstuck when he attempted to trigger his skyboard’s splinter pods to shoot his quarry in the back.

The tiniest miscalculation and one of the skyboard’s forward-thrust blades kissed a cage bar as the hellion slalomed past it. The hellion was instantly hurled off, his body pinwheeling helplessly away into the darkness as the skyboard careened into the bars with a vivid red flash. Malixian roared with laughter at that. Now there would be another new client to be placed in one of Bellathonis’s crystal-fronted sarcophagi, trapped there until they could painfully re-knit their shattered bones. The thought sparked an idea.

‘Perhaps I should go and attend to the preparations necessary to reviving your hellions, my archon?’ Bellathonis ventured, attempting to sound contrite.

‘Hoo, I suppose so, I want everyone fit for when we go to the planet of the mud people. Mind you give that servant of yours my regards if he makes it back to you, Bellathonis. He bested two of my hellions and I won’t grudge him due praise.’

‘My thanks, my archon. Should he survive both your hunters and my displeasure I will be sure to pass that along to him.’

‘By all means. You can also add that if I catch him in my Aviaries again I’ll feed him to my white ruhk personally.’

Syiin chortled in appreciation. ‘May I offer my assistance, Bellathonis? It would be a pleasure to visit your tower and discuss matters of the art at your leisure.’

‘Perhaps another time would be more appropriate for visitations. With the unexpected news of the coming raid I have many matters to attend to – as do you, I would imagine. Also I would not wish to deprive my archon of your scintillating company for the remainder of the hunt, I believe there will be some considerable hours for it still to run. Until we meet again. Archon. Syiin.’

Bellathonis bowed to them both. Although no signal had been given a leaner, simpler Raider craft was already silently drawing alongside. The master haemonculus crossed to the smaller craft and it bore him swiftly away towards his humble tower. He felt a moment of misgiving at leaving Malixian and Syiin together. Yllithian’s haemonculus could become tiresome if he kept sniffing around, potentially dangerous if he latched onto something incriminating. The removal of a fellow haemonculus was never to be undertaken lightly, but extraordinary times could sometimes require extraordinary measures.

As the Raider cut swiftly through the air the thought of the prize awaiting him soon erased Bellathonis’s immediate concerns about Syiin. He passed inside his tower barely able to suppress his anticipation. He was very much looking forward to getting his hands on the prize that Yllithian had dangled so artfully before him, a reward so secret and forbidden that it had to be transported across the city concealed inside an innocuous-looking jar. Yes, he was very much looking forward to meeting the severed and yet apparently undying head of the crone, Angevere.

CHAPTER 5

THE UNEXPECTED GIFT

‘The moment can never equal the anticipation of the moment. The perfection envisaged by the mind is never matched by the body, the high hopes that consciousness has raised are dashed beneath the inevitable weight of mortal clay. Yet our city embraces that moment of anticipation drawn out through eternity. We accept the flawed nature of our materials and yet raise towering edifices with them if only for the space of a single breath. Knowing that our tools will ever break beneath our hands we pursue the ideal moment and refuse to turn away from the dark splendour of godhood – however fleeting it may be.’

– The philosopher-poet Pso’kobor, The Forbidden Ambitions

Kraillach had dreamed of Commorragh many times in his life. He felt the great port-city could only be fully appreciated in a dream. Certainly, it was possible to view Corespur from near-space, where one could see the thrusting spires of High Commorragh, the sprawling mills and tenements of Low Commorragh, the outstretched docking talons, the endless succession of tiers. These things could be seen by the eye well enough to confound the mind with the sheer enormity of their expanse, but in truth they formed only the tip of the iceberg of what was the eternal city.

Only in a dream was it possible to perceive the sub-realms of Commorragh that lay strung about it like a jewelled necklace. A thousand realities that were scattered throughout the infinitude of the labyrinth dimension were at the same time shackled to the eternal city through open gates and impervious wards.

In his dreams Kraillach saw each sub-realm with its own hue: deep amber, smoky russet, jade green, opalescent white, they swung by in stately procession. The tyrant had pulled them all into the inescapable orbit of Commorragh during his reign, thrall states to be slowly sucked dry by the eternal, parasitic city. He coveted those precious baubles and the power they represented with an obscene yearning. Sometimes he even dreamt of stealing them for himself.

Archon Luquix Borr Kraillach, eight hundred and eighty-ninth pure-blooded and trueborn ascendant of the Kraillach dynasty and absolute ruler of the Kabal of the Realm Eternal, stirred and stretched luxuriantly in his nest of golden silks. Bulbous censers floating nearby responded by switching from narcotic smoke to a stimulant mist with a faint chime. Kraillach enjoyed a rare moment of serenity. He was safe at last within his inner sanctum after being exposed to the energising but frankly frightening death and destruction at Xelian’s arena the day before. He was safe in his sanctum and able to finally relax behind walls of unbreakable stone lined with unbreachable metal. A faint, subsonic buzz gave him a comforting reassurance that the hermetic shields surrounding the chamber were still in place and still fully functional.

He glanced around. The blood-daubed sigils covering the walls, floor and ceiling were unbroken and unchanged from the night before, evidence that nothing from beyond the veil had attempted to breach the arcane wardings. The only entrance to the sanctum, a metre-thick iris valve of baroquely inscribed metal, was sealed shut and guarded by the room’s only other occupant – Kraillach’s chief executioner, Morr. The armoured incubus stood resting both hands lightly on his immense klaive, a deadly double-handed power weapon that had dispatched thousands at Kraillach’s command. Morr’s stance was unchanged from when Kraillach had closed his eyes hours before and he had no doubt that the fearsome warrior had stood statue-like watching over him for the entire time.

Kraillach fully intended to live forever. Commorragh might be a deadly snake pit of enemies and She Who Thirsts might be waiting to consume any soul that fell into Her daemonic clutches but Kraillach was clever and Kraillach was very, very careful. Should the whole of Commorragh have the mischance to fall to some unthinkable, reality-mangling catastrophe Kraillach could most likely survive the cataclysm in his sanctum and be left floating through the ruins.

‘Greetings, Morr,’ Kraillach said as he stifled a yawn. ‘What news?’

The burning slits of Morr’s ornate tormentor helm turned to regard him balefully once Kraillach acknowledged his presence and gave him permission to speak. Like all incubi in Kraillach’s experience Morr had little passion for dialogue other than commands or acknowledgements. Incubi preferred sepulchral silence while they meditated on the ways of war and bloodshed.

‘No news, my archon,’ Morr intoned solemnly. ‘All is well.’

‘Excellent, have a slave brought to me so that I may break my fast.’

‘As you command, my archon.’

Morr turned to the sealed portal and his gauntleted hands moved across its surface pressing various points on the inscriptions that covered it in a complex sequence known only to himself and Kraillach. The leaves of the iris valve slid back to reveal the shimmering surface of the open portal behind. Morr stepped through and vanished without another word, the leaves scissoring back together silently behind him.

At the exact centre of the sanctum floor there lay a sunken bath set into a sunburst of polished onyx. Kraillach disrobed and settled his withered body into the warm, scented waters and contemplated the day ahead. At the top of his agenda was determining whether to betray his two noble allies to the tyrant or not. Kraillach feared and hated Asdrubael Vect as much as any of them but he had also lived longer than all of them. Yllithian and Xelian were pure-blooded descendants of the noble houses eliminated by Vect during his rise to power, but only Kraillach had actually lived through those dreadful times.

A loose opposition to Vect and a desire to regain past glories united the noble families and made them natural allies but Kraillach had doubts about the sanity of the others. Xelian was little better than a wild beast ever hungry for blood and Yllithian’s schemes always had the sharp scent of danger about them – resurrections, Dysjunctions, returning the old emperor of Shaa-dom… It was all too much, too fantastical to place any faith in.

Unfortunately, as Kraillach sourly reflected, the sad truth was that he was bound to his allies just as Yllithian had said. His noble house, his kabal in the contemptible modern parlance adopted by Vect, was slowly but surely outstripping his resources. Decade by decade, century by century the once fabulous wealth of House Kraillach was being leached away just as his own vitality was being drained away by the eternal hunger of She Who Thirsts.

The orgies and debauches he needed to partake in to slake his own thirst grew ever more extreme and frequent as the centuries rolled by despite his best efforts to control the process. He could perceive a chilling point in his future where his existence could no longer maintained and Kraillach would be drained away to a pathetic, soulless thing, driven out to lurk in the deepest recesses of Low Commorragh with the rest of the Parched.

Whatever reward Vect might deign to bestow for his betrayal would inevitably fall far short of the resources he gained through his alliance with Yllithian and Xelian. It was more likely that Vect would take the opportunity to rid himself of all three kabals at once if they showed any signs of disunity. The Realm Eternal still enjoyed the reputation of vast wealth – even if its coffers were almost empty – and its sybaritic ways attracted many hedonistic devotees, but without Xelian’s lethal wyches and Yllithian’s cunning warriors it would be too weak to stand in battle against the tyrant.

Kraillach found himself wondering if Yllithian had engineered Vect’s intercession at the arena in some fashion. It seemed unlikely but Yllithian had a well-deserved reputation as a master manipulator. Predictably enough events at the arena had driven Xelian into one of her tiresome murderous rages and gained her easy acquiescence to Yllithian’s plans. Now Kraillach was left with little choice other than to join the others or else forfeit the protection of their alliance. It rankled Kraillach to be manoeuvred so adroitly. Ultimately, though, he needed to win more power and influence to stay alive and staying alive was all that mattered. Certainly Vect might catch them plotting against him and punish them in the worst ways imaginable for their trouble, but better that than the slow, dwindling death the future held in store right now.

The portal slid open and Morr reappeared bearing a flat-faced little slave effortlessly in one hand. He brought the slave to edge of the bath and secured him there with silver jaws that rose from slots in the stone.

‘Shall I fetch your instruments, my archon?’ Morr asked when he was finished, gazing across to a side table where a scattering of hooked and straight blades, vials, syringes and elegant little saws lay.

‘No, you do it, Morr. I always enjoy seeing you use that great blade of yours like a paring knife.’

‘Thank you, my archon.’

Morr unlimbered his two-metre-long blade and left it unpowered as he set about his work, using just its razor-sharp edges to efficiently flense the howling slave. Blood swirled pleasingly in the waters of the bath, forming submerged cloudscapes of pink and red as it had done a thousand times before. Kraillach sighed as he settled back and drank in the quick repast. The slave’s lusty screaming was quite musical in its aspect and Kraillach found himself humming along with it, eventually fitting it into a few bars of Velqyul’s eighth sonata.

Kraillach strode into his palace proper much revitalised, moving through colonnaded halls and arched chambers scattered with the detritus of the previous night’s excesses. Supine bodies, both living and dead, lay in secluded boudoirs and public pleasure pits while slaves scurried back and forth frantically trying to clean up the palace and, in some cases, its occupants. As he walked a crowd of sycophants and hangers-on gravitated into his wake, each fluttering over fresh quips and newly minted gossip to ingratiate themselves. Morr followed him like a shadow, his threatening presence serving to keep the swarming courtiers at a respectful distance.

Once he was satisfied with the size of his gathered entourage Kraillach swept into his great hall to take his place on the multi-faceted throne of splendours, a relic from the earliest days of Commorragh and the golden age of the eldar race. Each facet of the throne shifted constantly between different heroic images of the past deeds of House Kraillach and the Realm Eternal, some animated and others still, some of them artistic representations and others that were actual recordings of events. The images were chosen by some not-entirely-random internal artifice and were held by many to be prophetic in nature, showing hints at potential futures with images torn from the past.

As he approached he could see that the throne was displaying stark images of battling figures high up in a war-torn sky. One facet displayed flights of scourges diving like renegade angels between tiny, embattled islands of archaic grav craft that had locked together in combat. Another facet showed one of the black suns so close that it was just a blazing arc on one side of the image. Periodically a blinding flare of plasma punched out from the sun to incinerate a flotilla of jet cycles racing past in an endless loop.

These and other images shown on the throne were from the War of the Sun and Moon, an era over eight thousand years ago and centuries before even Kraillach’s birth. Solar cults that controlled the dark city’s stolen suns had tried to topple the noble houses. For centuries aerial warfare raged through the upper gulfs of Commorragh before the solar cults were crushed. It had been a great triumph for the high archons. The eternal night that enfolded the city thereafter was admittedly in part due to the destruction wrought, but also an abiding symbol of their mastery over heaven and earth.

Kraillach seated himself amid the tumbling images and pondered the portents. The noble houses had triumphed in the War of the Sun and Moon, certainly; they had endured for another two millennia before Vect felled them in turn. A mixed sign at best, a veiled warning at worst. Yllithian and Xelian might succeed in their schemes only to be overthrown later. It was all most distressing, so he ordered his entourage to perform for him and distract him for a time. They set to with a will, giving and receiving pain, straining, dancing and teasing for his pleasure. He envied their youth and energy but felt little moved by what was on display.

Kraillach was about to send for a troupe of more entertaining professionals when Morr signalled minutely for his attention.

‘What is it, Morr? Can’t you see I’m busy?’ Uninteresting as it was the crude orgy developing undoubtedly held more interest than whatever Morr wanted to bring up.

‘Forgive me, my archon, a matter has arisen that requires your direct attendance.’ Morr was apparently not above reminding his archon that however disinteresting his news might be it was important. Kraillach sighed.

‘Go on.’

‘A deputation has arrived from the Blades of Desire, my archon. They claim to bear a gift from Archon Xelian for your personal delectation.’

‘Really? That is more intriguing than I had hoped for, but where is the issue that requires my personal attention?’

‘They insist the gift may only be given into your hands, on express orders from their mistress.’

The images on the throne of splendours were changing. They tumbled in a monochromatic snowstorm all about him, seeming unable to hold a single form for more than a second. Kraillach decided that was certainly not a good sign.

‘What kind of fool accepts a gift with terms attached? Did not Archon Kelithresh perish to a singularity inside a casket presented to him as a tithe?’

‘Indeed, my archon, he and his whole sub-realm with him. They say it was Vect’s work.’

‘Everything is, my dear Morr, everything is.’

To return the gift unopened might be seen as a potential deadly insult by the mistress of the Blades of Desire, especially if it were some sort of conciliatory gesture for her shambles at the arena. Even so, caution was more than a watchword for Kraillach, it was a religion. A nasty concern creased Kraillach’s brow.

‘Where is this “gift” now?’

‘Held in the vestibule with the party that brought it. Suppressors are in place and the package has been examined remotely. No overtly dangerous elements have been revealed, though that in itself means nothing, my archon.’

Another not-so subtle reminder from Morr that Kraillach did not require. Brilliant minds in Commorragh had spent thousands of years devising peerless tools for stealthy sabotage and assassination. Compounds of poison and explosive that were to all intents and purposes undetectable had been perfected long since. Nonetheless the vestibule itself was a richly appointed but heavily armoured blast chamber cunningly designed to baffle and deflect unwelcome energies away from the body of the palace. The damage that could be caused in the vestibule was severely limited without resorting to a dimensional warp or singularity, and those could be detected with ease.

‘Very well. Relay my gracious thanks and my regrets that I cannot receive their gift in person at this time. They can leave it behind in the vestibule and return to their mistress.’

Morr’s helm tilted in acquiescence as he conveyed Kraillach’s orders to the unseen guards in the vestibule.

An instant later the stonework of the great hall shook slightly with the impact of a distant explosion. Alarms warbled hysterically. Kraillach enjoyed a moment of smug vindication.

‘Ah ha, so they thought to bring me some crude bomb after all! Xelian must be mad to–’

‘Forgive me, my archon, but that was only a small breaching charge. The assailants have broken out of the vestibule and entered the palace.’

‘What! How many? How armed?’

‘A dozen attackers, lightly armed. If you will proceed to your sanctum I will take charge of hunting them down once you are in a place of safety.’

Kraillach desperately wanted to follow Morr’s advice but could not countenance the loss of face that would be involved. To bolt for his sanctum when his palace was being invaded by such a tiny force was too craven an act to contemplate. Archons had to be bold and fearless, or at least appear so, if they wanted to avoid assassination by their own kabal. Fear was a weakness and showing weakness was invariably a fatal mistake in Commorrite society. Kraillach scowled theatrically.

‘I won’t flee from these whelps that dare to assault the Realm Eternal! Bring me my armour and weapons so that I can drive them from my house!’

A slightly ragged cheer rose from the assembled entourage of hedonists and sycophants. Some brandished hooks and whips in what they imagined to be a warlike fashion. Morr’s shoulders may have slumped by the tiniest amount but he remained taciturn.

Minutes later Kraillach led fifty or more of his kabalite warriors towards the ruined vestibule. He now wore a form-fitting augmetic suit of jewel-like armour plates that shimmered richly behind iridescent force fields. As Kraillach walked he was surrounded by perfect Kraillach doppelgängers created by the protective fields, a host of illusory projections of himself that made it impossible to tell his true location. He bore Quasili, a metre-long blade of living metal that was old when Commorragh was first founded; a relic of the Golden Age, it could split the very vault of heaven.

The attacking group had not penetrated far past the vestibule. A vicious firefight had developed in the atrium just beyond it as Kraillach’s guards sought to keep the incursion in check. Choking black smoke was drifting through the cavernous chamber and bodies lay sprawled across the decorative tilework floor where they had been mercilessly cut down in the opening seconds of the attack. Xelian’s small force had almost overwhelmed the last of the atrium guards by the time Kraillach and his reinforcements arrived.

A wicked barrage of splinter fire drove the attackers back into cover as Kraillach’s followers spilled into the room. He got his first look at his would-be murderers as he strode in after the initial rush with more outward confidence than he truly felt. Lithe, half-naked wyches somersaulted away from the deadly streams of hyper-velocity splinter rounds sweeping across the scene. In retrospect the atrium had been built with too much of an eye for aesthetics and not enough consideration for defence. Its wide-based pillars, low walls and trellis-work bowers provided entirely too many hiding spots for the wyches to vanish into. Hunting them down was going to demand the kind of close quarters fighting wyches excelled at.

Kraillach’s warriors slowed and went more cautiously, spreading out into cover to try and pinch the attackers in a crossfire. They were quickly driven back into hiding as shots whipped back at them across the chamber from a dozen angles. Three kabalite warriors broke cover and sprinted forwards to take station behind a pillar. They retreated just as quickly when several small, oval plasma grenades came looping out of the smoke to land at their feet.

Morr and a pair of incubi broke the deadlock by ploughing forwards, whirling their immense klaives in bright arcs of coruscating energy. Desultory splinter fire from the trapped wyches ricocheted from the flickering weapons as the incubi advanced. Kraillach took the opportunity to leap heroically forwards into some better cover, his spectral cohort of images drawing fire from all quarters. The wyches didn’t wait to get picked off individually in their hiding places and came bounding forward en masse towards Kraillach.

A warrior beside him collapsed with splinter rounds in his throat, the virulent toxins coating the crystalline splinters killing him before he hit the ground. A dense spray of monofilament wire from a shredder sliced through another nearby warrior, reducing him to a cloud of fine red mist. Suddenly Kraillach found himself alone and darted back behind a statue made more obscene by its half-shattered form. A wych leapt out of the smoke and ran at him swinging a wickedly curved falchion at his neck. The blurring blade swept through a ghost image harmlessly and Kraillach countered. The wych spun her blade expertly to deflect the dozen striking blades of Kraillach and his images but his sword easily shore the falchion in two before plunging on into pale, vulnerable flesh.

Two more wyches darted forwards flailing wildly at the many Kraillachs before them. The images languidly shot one of the wyches with a dozen long-muzzled blast pistols before a resurgent charge by a group of his warriors impaled the other on their combat blades. Kraillach beheaded the dying wych with a backhand blow just to be sure. As the headless corpse flopped to the ground the sounds of combat faded away save for the moans of the fallen. Kraillach’s fawning entourage chanted his name with gratifying enthusiasm.

Kraillach caught sight of Morr through the confusion and smiled patronisingly.

‘These fools barely raised my pulse, Morr,’ Kraillach gloated. ‘This has to be the poorest assassination attempt in the long history of our fair city.’

‘That is what worries me, my archon,’ Morr replied with tedious pedantry, ‘I fear that–’

The chief executioner paused, his slit-eyed helm swivelling to regard a bare-headed warrior standing nearby. The warrior was in obvious distress. He clutched at the neck joint of his armour with eyes staring wildly. There was a crash as another warrior dropped his rifle and fell to his knees with a look of horror on his face. Morr’s masked visage swung sharply back to Kraillach.

‘Contaminants! Get to safety, my archon! Quickly!’

Kraillach could see the spreading circle of evidence for himself. Every warrior that had entered the atrium helmetless or only partially armoured was showing signs of contamination. The veins beneath the victim’s skin were turning black even as he watched, spreading to form inky cobwebs over rapidly darkening flesh. Kraillach backed away with a sick feeling of horror.

He was not wearing a helmet himself.

He turned and ran as quickly as the augmented leg musculature of his armour would carry him.

As he fled Kraillach passed dozens more of his subjects writhing in the grip of the unseen killer. It was spreading as fast as he could move, if not faster, striking down anyone not in full armour. He wondered why he had not already fallen prey and felt every twinge in his body as another harbinger of doom. When he reached the great hall the throne of splendours was showing a new kaleidoscopic array of images. An array of tortured eldar faces predominated, each exquisitely sculpted from some black, glass-like crystal.

Kraillach slowed to a halt as recognition dawned on him. He croaked out a harsh laugh and sat down wearily on the multi-faceted throne.

Some time later Morr came to him with the final tally of casualties. Several hundred assorted warriors, slaves, houris, pets and courtiers had fallen victim to the attack, including the entire group that had carried it into the palace in the first place. This frustrating twist left him with no prisoners to interrogate and precious little material evidence to examine. The contaminant had been identified, confirming what Kraillach had already seen in the throne of splendours – it was the glass plague.

Close to a thousand years before the fall of Shaa-dom a celebrated sculptor named Jalaxlar had enjoyed fantastic acclaim when he revealed his latest works in Commorragh. His amazingly life-like renditions displayed eldar caught in various poses of shock and horror rendered in a black, glass-like crystal. Jalaxlar earned immediate patronage from some of the most powerful kabals but incurred fierce rivalry from others. The very same evening his studio-laboratories were raided and smashed apart. Among the ruins Jalaxlar’s secret was revealed.

The insane sculptor-scientist had isolated a viral helix that was capable of rapidly vitrifying living tissue, transforming warm flesh into cold, crystalline glass within a few heartbeats. His stunning display of artfully posed statues were in point of fact made with the unwilling assistance of his first victims – friends, callers and assistants. The virus was accidentally released in the destruction of Jalaxlar’s workshops and spread through the city with frightening speed. Thousands of Commorrites fell victim to the resulting ‘plague of glass’ before a haemonculi coven known as the Hex succeeded in releasing an anti-virus to quell it.

Naturally the glass plague had gone on to be weaponised and used in many guises, occasionally re-emerging naturally as a rogue mutation that temporarily defied the common anti-viral agents before they could be adjusted. The strain that had been released inside the palace was an obscure one. Several quarts of it had been concealed in liquid form inside the ‘gift’: a stone urn designed to release it as an aerosol when triggered. The black smoke they had seen came not from the explosion as Kraillach had supposed, but from the virus battling anti-viral agents in the air of the palace. In this case the anti-viral agents had failed and those without their own inoculations of defensive nanophages had fallen prey to the vitrifying plague.

The glass plague meant true death. There was no rebirth from it as no cell of living tissue survived for the body to be remade from. The precious soul was denied the slightest grip on life and slipped easily out of the altered vessel into the waiting maw of She Who Thirsts. True death had stalked into his palace and Kraillach had only survived thanks to his secret regimen of protective elixirs and anti-agathics. In spite of the apparent clumsiness of the attack Xelian had almost succeeded in killing him. Kraillach suppressed a shudder.

‘What are your thoughts, Morr?’

‘The attack seems… indirect given its alleged origins.’

‘Explain.’

‘Archon Xelian is direct in her approach. She establishes dominance and exerts her will through strength.’

‘You’re saying this is beneath her? I think you’re sadly mistaken, Morr.’

‘Her first attack would be one she was sure would succeed.’

‘Ahh, you’re saying she wouldn’t betray her intentions so easily’

‘Indeed, my archon.’

Morr might be correct, of course. Xelian would certainly prefer to simply come in with all guns blazing and make it a fight to the death. She lacked the kind of subtlety and experience to pursue the sort of double-bluff strategy shown by the assassination attempt. But if not her then who? From Xelian the circle of suspects widened to include the bland, scheming Yllithian and the great tyrant himself, Asdrubael Vect.

Yllithian was capable of any kind of underhanded skulduggery to get his way but it was hard to see what he could gain through Kraillach’s death. Perhaps he hoped to manoeuvre a more tractable archon into control over the Realm Eternal. Dragging Xelian into the fight by setting him against her would make sense then; either Kraillach dies or he retaliates against Xelian, making it win-win. Again, though, why? The alliance between their houses propped up all three of them to some extent. Infighting among them would only serve the best interests of Vect.

Indeed Asdrubael Vect was the one with the reputation for bestowing surprise gifts on those he wished to be rid of. He would surely like to see the noble houses at each other’s throats and any attempt to drive a wedge between them could have his hand behind it. Ultimately it didn’t matter. Regardless of just who had sent the assassins Kraillach was still trapped by their public declaration of themselves as Xelian’s followers. By now the word would have spread throughout Commorragh that Xelian had made an attack on Kraillach. Now Kraillach must confront Xelian in some fashion or lose face with the other archons.

‘Gather up the household troops, Morr, I believe we need to pay Xelian a visit.’

‘I will go at once, m–,’ Morr began.

‘Oh no, I shall be going myself, I must be seen out there alive and well cursing Xelian or the other kabals will smell blood in the water.’

‘My archon, forgive me but I must object. It’s far too dangerous.’

‘Agreed and forgiven, it is far too dangerous, but you know as well as I that excess caution now will put a hundred daggers at my back instead of just one to my front.’

‘One of the thirteen foundations of vengeance,’ Morr said almost humbly. ‘You are correct of course, my archon.’

Morr moved away as he relayed Kraillach’s orders. Xelian’s forces could easily overwhelm those of the Realm Eternal in close-quarter fighting, but not if Kraillach dictated how and where the confrontation took place. Wealth had its privileges.

‘…and send for my spymasters. I want to know what ships are docked on the Blades of Desire’s spur.’

‘At once, my archon.’

Above the palace of the Realm Eternal a golden armada of pleasure craft began to assemble. Raiders and sinuously twisting Venoms ferried Kraillach’s warriors from the rooftops to man their weapons, scalloped gun ports slid open and ornate cannon were run out. Soon dozens of thorn-armoured kabalites lined the baroque-fashioned rails of the waiting barges, horned helms, flamboyant crests and bare heads jostling in a bright panoply of red and burnished gold. Finally Kraillach rode aloft in his own sky chariot to take his place at the heart of the armada. Rippling shields of energy around the archon’s craft made it appear like a strange egg in the midst of brightly jewelled ornaments.

Flying scourges and lurking grav craft from a dozen other kabals took note of the movement and sent hurried word to their masters that Kraillach was moving against Xelian.

CHAPTER 6

THE BLADES OF DESIRE

‘Friends and allies you call them? Black-hearted traitors one and all, I say! My reputation and my honour take precedence over their carping concerns. I will pursue my vendettas as I will for I am Vileth and I will not be constrained in my vengeance.’

– Duke Vileth to the fool Mecuto, in Ursyllas’s Dispossessions

Nyos Yllithian sped towards Xelian’s fortress-arena at the head of a flying wedge of Raiders and Ravagers filled with White Flames warriors. He paced the narrow deck of his racing barque impatiently and his crew took pains to avoid his gaze. They knew that news of the attack on Kraillach had been unforgivably, indeed suspiciously slow in reaching their archon’s ordinarily acute ears and he was apt to be looking for scapegoats.

The jagged cityscape slid past looking cold and merciless in the light of the stolen suns. The skies were ominously empty. All that could be seen were a handful of Reavers and scourges steadily pacing Yllithian’s force. They always stayed some distance below and behind them, slipping through the inky shadows between the spires of High Commorragh like a pack of scavengers following a predator. They were undoubtedly spies from other kabals sent to watch the White Flames’ part in the unfolding drama.

The initial reports Yllithian had received alleged that Kraillach was dead but hard on their heels had come word that Kraillach was, in fact, alive and leading his forces against Xelian. So far there had been no response to his efforts to communicate with either faction – more evidence if any were needed that a subtle hand was working against them.

The reaction of the noble houses in the next hours would be studied and dissected in the minutest detail by the watching kabals. A poised and effective recovery from the challenge would enhance all of their reputations immensely; a descent into bloody chaos would signal to the scavengers that it was time to sharpen their knives and join the feast.

Yllithian felt fury at his allies for falling for such an obvious ploy. A moment’s thought should tell them that this could only be the tyrant’s work, an effort to pull apart their alliance before it became threatening to his position. Yllithian had been left with no recourse but to set out with the White Flames forces he had available to seek Kraillach and Xelian in person. He had to bring them to their senses before all three houses were doomed by their mutual display of hubris and stupidity.

Nyos’s steersman shouted a warning and pointed ahead. A shoal of hellions were curving into sight around the sheer flank of a nearby spire with obvious hostile intent, the razor edges of their skyboards flashing as they angled to attack. Three sleek, dark shapes shot out from concealing shadows at another angle and swung onto an interception course. Muzzle flashes twinkled along their hulls as darklight beams and streams of venomous splinters leapt across the rapidly closing gap.

Xelian’s fortress was built as a volcano-like mass with the arena itself nestling inside the central cone. Heroically proportioned images graven in the appearance of wych gladiators hundreds of metres tall studded the outer slopes. There had once been open spaces around each of them given over to parks and public plazas but the mistress of the Blades of Desire had little patience for such pretensions. Under her rule they had become dusty training grounds and slave pens for the lowliest of her chattels.

Kraillach’s armada swept in low over the training fields, their hulls blotting out the light as they slid overhead. Slaves and slavemasters alike gaped upwards in fear at what their coming portended. The voice of the archon of the Realm Eternal cracked across the pregnant silence.

‘Xelian! Your followers broke into my house! They slew my servants! What treachery is this? Come forth and explain yourself!’

Total confusion reigned below. Slaves ran for cover, slavemasters alternated between beating slaves and running themselves. Some slaves raised their shackles and greeted the skyborne host as liberators.

At least they did until the shooting started.

It was unclear who shot first. A small pack of Reaver jetbikes had just risen from the arena cone as the Realm Eternal arrived. When the Reavers dived on the pleasure craft some of Kraillach’s followers decided it was an attack and filled the sky with looping streamers of fire to greet them. At about the same time one of the many armoured barbettes sunk into the flanks of the fortress came to life and spat a flurry of incandescent bolts into the floating armada. Within seconds every vessel in Kraillach’s force was cutting loose with their considerable firepower at anything that moved.

The temporary nature of the slave pens made them vulnerable to attack and they bore the brunt of the Realm Eternal’s retaliatory blow. Energy beams and disintegrator bolts cut through thin metal and ceramic sheeting, immolating those huddling inside. Spurting streams of splinters chased running slaves and dropped them in their tracks, writhing horribly as the venom took hold.

Soon a mass of sullenly smoking shelters and charred bodies lay where they had been cut down from above. The scene was interspersed with the brighter blazes of wrecked jetbikes and a handful of pleasure craft brought down in the fighting. Intensifying fire from the fortress defences gradually pushed the armada back out of range, where they began regrouping and bragging about their exploits. A pregnant silence fell over the scene as both sides licked their wounds and planned their next moves.

Aboard his heavily-shielded sky chariot Kraillach grimaced sourly and wondered how to extricate himself from the situation with both hide and honour intact.

The confusion that had broken out when Kraillach’s aerial armada swept in over the training grounds strongly implied that Xelian had not been a party to the assassination attempt made in her name. The realisation had come too late and what Kraillach had intended as a display of power had predictably devolved into a chaotic murder spree. The bloodlust of his warriors had temporarily outrun his ability to control them. Several of the burning craft they’d left behind were the result of the disciplinary measures that were necessary to bring them back into the fold.

Now the skies above Xelian’s palace were a hornet’s nest of twisting Reavers and hellions aligned with the Blades of Desire. The golden cloud of Kraillach’s craft hung close by, lit by the occasional false lightning of weapons-fire when Xelian’s agitated sky warriors strayed within range.

Kraillach consoled himself that at least the situation had devolved into a stalemate for the present. Even aside from the Reavers and hellions too many of the weapon positions studding the towering flanks of the fortress had survived the initial assault. Now that the fortress was fully alerted the Realm Eternal would have to suffer heavy losses to press an attack.

That suited Kraillach fine. No one could call him a coward for staying just out of range and awaiting developments. Xelian was blockaded, effectively besieged as long as the Realm Eternal kept up their vigil outside her fortress.

The problem was that Kraillach couldn’t keep his followers in place indefinitely – sooner or later they would start to drift off looking for more stimulating pursuits. Equally Xelian could not afford to stay cooped up inside her demesne for too long. All that remained was to see who would blink first.

Xelian herself was stalking through the austere porcelain corridors of her fortress like a caged tiger. Kraillach’s attack had come as a complete surprise. She had to admit, privately at least, that she rather admired the audacity of the old archon’s sudden assault. It was weak but completely unexpected and had caught her with many warriors and wyches out on the docking spur loading onto ships for a new slave raid. Communications were down, jammed or sabotaged by enemy agents, so the forces at the docking spur could not be recalled. A rigorous and painful interrogation of her technicians was already under way, their thin wails of pain one of the few highlights in an otherwise grim day.

More Ravagers and Reavers were on the way. Xelian intended to lead a breakout when they arrived. She would take them into the centre of Kraillach’s force and rip out his heart with her own hands. There would be a bloodbath, certainly, but Xelian was quite willing to gamble that her highly trained followers would have far more stomach for that than Kraillach’s assembly of decadents. The prospect of the coming battle was enthralling for Xelian, it was something she had found herself wanting for long time and there was a kind of glorious relief in casting away the pretence of treating Kraillach as an ally.

There was only one annoying detail that still niggled at the back of her mind. Xelian couldn’t fathom what had set Kraillach on the warpath. Reportedly he had made some pronouncements, hurling insults at the walls of fortress as he screeched about attacks and treachery. He seemed intent on portraying himself as the victim, justifying his unprovoked attack with lies. Not a surprising ploy but Xelian still found herself wondering if there were some grain of truth in his words. For the old fossil to stir himself into action like this was uncharacteristic. Also, Kraillach simply wasn’t the type to launch a serious attack without dragging his allies in with him, so where was Yllithian?

Darklight beams scored the shields of Yllithian’s barque leaving retina-burning entropic blooms as they were barely shunted aside by the straining projectors. Yllithian’s incubi loosed rippling volleys of splinter cannon fire in return, sending shapes tumbling from the attacking Raiders.

‘On! Past them!’ Yllithian shouted to his steersman before realising that the steersman was shorter by a head, decapitated in the crossfire. Yllithian leapt to take the tiller bar himself, swinging the elegant craft to point head-on into the diving hellions. He twisted at the power coupling ring savagely to set maximum speed and the barque leapt forwards in response.

The White Flames craft swung with him, each hosing fire into the three attacking Raiders as they sped past in echelon. A Ravager impaled the lead attacker with bolts of dark lance fire, its silhouette momentarily transfixed by twin beams of ravening destruction before it burst into flames and broke into pieces.

‘Fire forward! All weapons!’ Yllithian yelled, with a sick feeling that he had given the command too late.

The pack of hellions came hurtling in like a swarm of bats. Questing fingers of splinter fire chased them, disintegrator pulses flashed out and turned speeding bodies into plummeting corpses. The barque shuddered as an injured hellion ploughed headlong into the larger craft, her skyboard exploding into fragments as the barque’s armoured prow sheared straight through it. Other hellions jinked and twisted aside desperately to avoid a similar fate.

Yllithian ducked beneath blurring wing-blades as more hellions shot past less than a metre above the deck. Some of his incubi were less quick and lost heads or limbs to the hurtling shoal of blades in sudden bursts of crimson. An instant later they were through the pack and in to the suddenly empty air beyond. Ahead of them the glittering flank of a spire-mountain was rushing closer by the second. Without a course change they would smash straight into it. Yllithian was turning to heave the tiller bar when a flicker of movement at the prow warned him of a new peril.

‘Repel boarders!’

Out of either desperation or mad courage several hellions had managed to hurl themselves aboard Yllithian’s craft as they passed. Now they leapt lithely forwards swinging powered halberds and knives to be met by Yllithian’s surviving incubi bodyguards. Swift and deadly blade work soon showed the armoured incubi to be the masters, their mighty klaives beating aside the hellions’ wild strikes and carving into their lightly armoured bodies. In moments the hellions were driven howling over the sides and the deck was clear.

Ahead of them a titanic effigy of the long-dead Archon Xelicedes reared out of the spire wall as if trying to swat the barque out of the air with an outthrust sword the width of a highway. Yllithian grasped the tiller and hauled desperately to bring the speeding grav craft back onto a safe course, the colossal blade of Archon Xelicedes sweeping past just metres away.

Glancing behind he saw that the bulk of his followers were still with him, albeit with a few ragged holes in their previously pristine formation. The hellions swirled impotently in their wake, only a handful turning in time to pursue Yllithian’s craft. They were soon chased away or killed by long range fire as they strained to overhaul the flying wedge of Raiders and Ravagers. Ahead thin plumes of smoke could be seen rising from among the jagged tangle of spires – Xelian’s fortress was near.

Kraillach watched the growing swarm of light craft above Xelian’s fortress with a matching sense of alarm. Their strength had tripled within the last hour and more kept arriving. Kraillach had swung from a sense of complacency about his armada being able to easily fight off such lowly trash to a fear that his beautiful pleasure craft would be wrecked by gangs of flying hooligans.

An even more disturbing development was the Venom heavy bikes now rising from the fortress, each with a cluster of wych gladiators crouched on their rear decks. Xelian was intending to make a fight of it. Kraillach was astonished. He’d expected some kind of communication from Xelian at least decrying his claims by now, but she seemed to care not a whit for talk. Just as Morr had said, she would seize her chance at victory with both hands and with no hesitation.

Kraillach wanted very much to blink now, to turn his armada for home and flee for his sanctum while he still could, but he was trapped. Quite apart from the loss of face involved in backing down, the skies were full of hostile Reaver gangs. If they were harried every step of the way back to the Realm Eternal’s fortress, the losses would be catastrophic. Retreating would be a disaster, attacking would be a worse disaster and waiting to be attacked could be a disaster. Kraillach opted for the only course that held just the seeds of disaster instead of its ripe and bitter fruit. He waited.

Xelian clutched the curved rail on the open rear platform of a Venom jetbike as its rider, hunched beneath his crystal canopy, accelerated out of the pits beneath the arena floor at blistering speed. As they rose above the fortress she gazed out at the distant cloud of Kraillach’s armada shining like motes in a sunbeam.

It was an impressive-looking array, hundreds of individual craft stacked high and deep to maximise their interlocking fields of fire. There would be little manoeuvring on Kraillach’s part once battle was joined; the Blades of Desire would have to drive the action by tearing into their formation like a pack of predators plunging into a herd of prey. The Reavers and hellions would swirl around the lumbering barges to distract their fire while Venoms ran in close and dropped their deadly cargoes of wyches onto their open decks. That was the plan.

Xelian had instructed her wyches to attack and move on quickly, or to at least to turn captured guns on their former owners if they could not reach another craft. The wyches on a single Venom could easily overwhelm a single pleasure craft, but there were far too few Venoms to go around. Xelian didn’t really care; her craft was flanked by two more sleek-bodied Venoms armed with dark lances to knock down the shields on Kraillach’s chariot. As long as she got within arm’s reach of Kraillach the rest of the battle was irrelevant to her.

Off to one side a tight wedge of speeding grav craft breached the jagged horizon and raced towards the fortress. Xelian paused from giving her final orders to study the newcomers. The leading craft bore the icon of the White Flames. So here was Yllithian at last, come to join Kraillach for the final battle.

Interestingly he wasn’t heading toward Kraillach’s armada but for a point halfway between them and the fortress. Requests began to flood in from the fortress guns for permission to open fire as Yllithian came with range. Xelian angrily denied them all; it seemed that Yllithian was uncommitted for now. No sense in driving him into Kraillach’s arms just yet.

Kraillach watched the arrival of Yllithian with unmitigated relief. He was slightly nonplussed when Yllithian’s flight of Raiders steered a course keeping well clear of his armada and slowing to a stop midway to Xelian’s fortress. A single sleek-hulled vessel detached itself from the formation and glided down to land amid the ruined training grounds. Image enhancement showed Yllithian dismounting from the craft and wandering alone for a distance before settling himself to wait at the foot of a shot-scarred statue.

The implication was obvious enough. Yllithian wanted to parley. It could be a ploy to draw him out, but right now Kraillach was desperate enough to take that chance. Besides, he had considerable confidence in the defences of his own craft. Neither Xelian’s fortress guns nor Yllithian’s vessels would be able to stop him reaching safety, and if the whelp Yllithian intended treachery the trap would rebound back on him badly.

Kraillach brought his golden sky chariot gliding down to join Yllithian with the fiercest of imprecations to his minions not to follow.

Yllithian waited patiently beneath the colossal shadow of the statue. The titanic carving had been blurred by age even before Kraillach’s followers had hosed it with weapons-fire. Now it was impossible to tell if the wych it had portrayed were even male or female. It had been posed heroically with one arm thrust upwards and legs akimbo. The arm was broken off at the elbow lending an unspoken mystery to what the monumental wych had originally held aloft. A weapon? A severed head? An enemy’s heart? There was a kind of irony to the dramatically posed form being robbed of its focal point. Yllithian felt as if he were witnessing some form of allegorical warning.

A single craft, rendered egg-shaped by its layers of protective energy fields, was descending from the golden cloud of Kraillach’s forces. Before it had reached Yllithian a single hornet-like Venom peeled off from the swarm buzzing protectively around Xelian’s fortress. The Venom plummeted down towards him in marked contrast to the sedate descent of Kraillach’s craft. It pulled up sharply and flared to a stop a second later, the shapely form of Xelian vaulting from it to land lightly in the dust a short distance away.

‘Xelian,’ Yllithian said equitably.

‘Yllithian,’ Xelian replied tensely.

Kraillach’s craft glided to a halt and layers of shields and armour slowly peeled back. When she caught sight of the wizened archon Xelian took a half-step forwards before checking herself. A wild notion of killing both Yllithian and Kraillach kept skittering through her mind – it was seductive and unworkable but now that her blood was up the pleasing idea simply wouldn’t go away.

‘Kraillach,’ said Yllithian as if greeting an old friend.

Kraillach’s gaze darted between the dapper little black-clad figure of Yllithian and the intimidating warrior-woman Xelian. She looked ready to kill him right now.

‘Someone,’ Yllithian began, ‘is trying to make fools out of all of us–’

‘A small achievement in Kraillach’s case,’ Xelian snapped.

Kraillach started to object but Yllithian confidently overrode his words with silky platitudes that broached entirely new heights of patronising intent.

‘Please, Xelian, poor Kraillach here has been the victim of an assassination attempt in his own house by attackers that entered under your name. Then I was assailed on my way here to play the role of negotiator in the resulting little spat. Someone has been playing us, and I don’t need to tell you who.’

‘You were also attacked?’ Xelian’s feline gaze was suddenly locked onto Yllithian.

‘They were waiting for me to come riding to your rescue, dear heart. I suspect the attack on Kraillach was only intended to set the pieces in motion,’

‘You think you were the intended target? They released the glass plague in my palace!’ Kraillach shouted the words, unable to contain his repugnance and outrage any longer.

‘And your best response was to attack me? You’re a fool, Kraillach!’ Xelian spat.

‘And you’re naïve, Xelian!’ Kraillach replied. ‘They came under your name! If you had even the vaguest sense of etiquette you’d know I had no choice but to act as I did!’

‘Just so you see,’ Yllithian purred, ‘by Vect’s laws someone has to pay the price for an attack, and they have to do so publicly. That’s how the strong must rule.’

Yllithian looked significantly out over the training grounds. Rows of slave pens were still burning nearby and pathetically huddled mounds in the dust marked the bodies of their occupants.

‘Harm has been duly inflicted on both sides. I think we can all go home now,’ he said. ‘Honour has been satisfied. Perhaps we can turn our energies to raiding a certain maiden world before any other misfortunes befall us.’

Kraillach was maintaining a pose of slightly shaky hauteur but there was a look in his eye that signalled desperate agreement with Yllithian. Yllithian enjoyed a warm glow of success at manoeuvring Kraillach into a tacit compact to join the raid.

‘No,’ said Xelian distinctly.

‘No?’

‘No, I am not satisfied. I made no attack on Kraillach and I won’t be a scapegoat for his own bungling incompetence.’

‘I suppose you want compensation,’ Kraillach blustered. ‘Well, I–’

‘I demand blood! Here and now! If you will not fight my kabal then you must fight me. Kraillach, if you want to quote laws and traditions I invoke my right to challenge you to a duel – for my honour!’

Kraillach took a step back, appalled. Yllithian was afraid he was going to bolt straight for his chariot and flee. Fortunately Kraillach had more sense than that and quickly mastered his fear. Once challenged to a duel before a witness of equal standing there was no backing down for an archon. They might cheat in any number of ways, have their opponent assassinated or exploit the event in the most perfidious fashion to emerge victorious but they couldn’t back down once challenged, not without losing every shred of status. This was Vect’s law, survival of the fittest, the law of the jungle. There was a long pause before the old archon spoke again.

‘Very well…’ Kraillach began. ‘At a time and place of–’

‘No. Here and now. Yllithian can bear witness, and we have–’ Xelian gestured to the swarming skies above them ‘–plenty of seconds on hand.’

Kraillach’s lips compressed into a thin line. He was trapped.

Yllithian coolly appraised the unexpected turn of events, wondering what Xelian intended. She was a deadly swordmistress in her own right, magnificent and pantherish, but she wore only the scantiest mockery of armour, with the porcelain flesh of her thighs, arms and midriff bare. Kraillach was fully armoured in a gleaming panoply that Yllithian knew from his own spy reports was full of its own tricks and traps in addition to its augmented musculature. A single strike from the ancient weapon that Kraillach bore and the mistress of the Blades of Desire would be no more.

‘Take your places and we’ll begin,’ Yllithian said.

The duellists stood ten paces apart in the drifting dust. Overhead the skies were filled by the whirling insect swarm of Xelian’s followers on one hand and the drifting pleasure craft of Kraillach’s on the other.

‘Begin,’ Yllithian said.

The two began to circle warily, first one way and then another as they sought a weakness in poise or balance that would provide an opening. Kraillach attacked first, suddenly triggering his doppelganger images and driving forwards with his crackling blade swinging in a deadly arc.

Xelian darted back out of range, momentarily confused by Kraillach’s defences. Then she laughed and bounded back into the fray, whirling her knives into steely fans. The deadly brand of Kraillach darted at her in a dozen hands but she evaded them all, spinning beneath their reaching blades to deliver eviscerating blows that flashed through the incorporeal images like lightning.

Kraillach recoiled and cut at her wildly. Xelian made the instinctive mistake of parrying the myriad of slashing blades. There was a peal of thunder and one of her knives shivered into fragments, hurling Xelian backwards into the dust. Kraillach croaked in triumph and pressed his attack.

Xelian rolled in the dirt and back to her feet so smoothly it looked like part of a dance. Kraillach’s thrusts seemed slow and clumsy as they quested after her, as if she occupied a skein of reality a beat out of phase with his own. Wherever his blade was, she was not. Her single knife kept slicing, darting out to touch one image after another as if she were counting them.

At least until she struck sparks from an image and found the real Kraillach.

The darting Kraillach phantoms swirled desperately around her trying to obscure their master, but it was all to no avail. Xelian ignored them as she concentrated on the true Kraillach, clinging to him doggedly as he retreated. He fought harder and more skilfully now, his blade weaving a shimmering web about him. Xelian stayed close, ducking and diving with her knife held ready as she waited for him to tire.

Kraillach’s offensive slowed down inexorably like a clockwork toy. The augmentations of his jewel-bright armour could grant him speed and strength but not true stamina. With a sudden twist Xelian lashed out. Armour split beneath her flashing blade and Kraillach’s hand fell away with a welter of blood as she severed it at the wrist. His ancient, deadly blade fell to the dust still gripped in his spasming fingers. Kraillach cried out in horror and staggered back, almost falling. Xelian pounced and drove her knife into his torso up to its ornate hilt.

Kraillach swayed, held up only by the eviscerating blade. Xelian laughed cruelly and twisted the knife, carving through heart and lungs in a crimson spray. She jerked the blade free and stepped back with a satisfied air. Kraillach coughed blood and collapsed, writhing, into the dirt. Xelian knelt on his chest and pressed the bloody knife to his face.

‘I want you to know you’re going to need help coming back from this, Kraillach,’ she whispered venomously as she started cutting. ‘You’re going to need more help from Yllithian’s “pure heart” to come back than El’Uriaq himself!’

By the time Xelian stood back Kraillach was left as red ruin, a raw, squamous meat thing that still somehow writhed with hideous life. Kraillach’s haemonculi hurried forwards from his sky chariot. The hunched, hide-clad figures squatted over their master like vampire bats as they pinched off veins and arteries, collecting the pieces left scattered around by Xelian as she slaked her bloodlust. Overhead the satiated cloud of pleasure craft was breaking up, drifting away between the spires to seek other diversions.

‘Very nice, Xelian,’ Yllithian said, applauding gently. ‘Did you mean what you said?’

She tossed her head back provocatively, the blood still slicking her pale limbs and full mouth. If he was aroused by her he did not show it. The murderlust was strong on her, seductive and dangerous as a razor’s edge. She smiled, white teeth on red.

‘Kraillach was never going to agree to our plan on his own. Now he has an incentive. His own haemonculi can bring him back but it’ll take too long. They’ll come crawling to us and asking for our help as soon as he grows his tongue back.’

Kinship is not an emotion common to citizens of the dark city, even less so an archon of High Commorragh, but Yllithian felt something akin to it when Xelian spoke of ‘our’ plan. A heartbeat later, well-schooled centuries of paranoia crowded in at the heels of the unfamiliar sensation.

‘All very tidy,’ he said. ‘So were you the one that sent assassins after Kraillach… and me?’

‘That would be telling,’ she mocked, smiling capriciously with sharp white teeth. ‘Would you think badly of me if I did? And if I denied it would you ever really believe me?’

‘I don’t believe that you did send them. I think that Vect did.’

‘You flatter me with your nobility, Lord Yllithian.’

‘It is my honour to do so, Lady Xelian.’

‘I feel a day of celebration of my victory is in order. Stay and… entertain me for a while.’

‘I regret, my lady, that if we have only a day before the raid occurs many arrangements need to be made so I must forbear the undoubted pleasure.’

Xelian laughed and lifted her arms to the circling Reavers and hellions. Venom jetbikes broke from the pack and dived towards her.

‘Then you should be about it, Nyos. It doesn’t pay to wait around – just ask Kraillach.’

She ran lithely and made an astounding leap, catching onto a passing Venom and swinging herself aboard it in a single fluid motion. Yllithian gazed after her as she vanished towards the fortress, looked around at the bloodied circle where the duel had been fought, and sniffed meditatively. Xelian had never thought to ask him if he had been the one that sent the assassins.

CHAPTER 7

RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW

‘You are all the children of destiny, red in tooth and claw. Do not think that their mayfly lives are less precious than your old wickedness in the eyes of the universe. Who can say who will prevail this day? Not I, and not you. Go forth and reap your souls, but beware the darts of the enemy for you are not yet immortal…’

– The red crone Hekatii to Duke Vileth, in Ursyllas’s Dispossessions

The White Flames kabal controlled docking rights along the Ashkeri Talon, reserving fully eighteen of the kilometres-long anchorage-spines for the exclusive use of themselves and their allies. Life among the crowded spires of Commorragh made it easy to forget that the city was originally built as a transit point, a nexus in the webway with hundreds of thousands of connections to skeins of that curious sub-realm.

The rise of the White Flames’ fortunes had been in direct correlation to their expansion through the Ashkeri Talon and the docking facilities therein. When Nyos Yllithian assassinated his predecessor and rose to archon the White Flames had controlled just three anchorages along the talon. One of Yllithian’s first acts had been to destroy or subvert the lesser kabals controlling the docking spines adjacent to his own. His reasoning was simple. The sprawling city consumed resources at a ravenous rate, and every day thousands of ships had to disgorge stolen cargoes to slake its hunger. By controlling even a fraction of the docking facilities around the city as he did, immeasurable wealth flowed into the White Flames’ coffers.

Ashkeri Talon was normally bustling with slavers and traders, even occasional xenos ships paying their way into the dark city through Yllithian’s domain. Today the anchorage-spines were occupied solely by warships. Gigantic, shark-like Torture-class cruisers took up entire spines all to themselves, greedily swallowing lines of warriors into their open maws. Smaller Corsair-class frigates were jostling together among other anchorages, loading their own payloads of torpedoes and strike craft.

The ships of many different kabals were present and tensions were running high, but with a sense of excitement and energy underlying it all. Slights and misunderstandings that would have brought violence on the streets of Commorragh were temporarily put aside. The kabalites were on their best behaviour, as if they were attending a party and didn’t want to embarrass themselves in front of the host.

Xagor and Kharbyr eyed one another dubiously as they slipped through the crowds together. They were hunting for the ship of the archon of the White Flames on the express instructions of Master Bellathonis, the haemonculus’s perverse sense of humour having dubbed them ideal candidates to work as a team. Kharbyr suspected he was being punished after the events at the Aviaries. He was itching to stick a knife in Xagor the moment the wrack’s back was turned, but the master haemonculus had been particularly vivid in his descriptions of the torments awaiting either one of them should they return without the other. Xagor had accepted the situation with the same dull resignation he appeared to apply to most of his life.

‘Many ships, more than Xagor has ever seen,’ the wrack complained.

‘Just look for biggest ones, stupid. The archons will be on those. When we find a big one with a white flame on the side that’s our stop.’

‘Yes, yes. Very obvious.’

Yllithian watched the war host prepare from the bridge of his command ship, an ancient vessel with a revered name that would translate roughly as Intemperate Angel in lesser tongues. The Ninth Raptrex had come in force, easily visible by the distinctive feather patterns that marked their Razorwing fighters and Voidraven bombers as they flew into the open bays of the ships. The nominal raid leader, Malixian the Mad was aboard his own vessel, the Death Strike, impatiently waiting for departure. One of the cruisers was from the Realm Eternal, resplendent in the faded grandeur of lost ages. Morr was lurking aboard it, commanding in absentia for his injured master, Kraillach. As Xelian had predicted, Kraillach’s regrowth was proving slow and painful. He had sent word from his regeneration crypt virtually begging to participate in seizing a worldsinger – on the condition that he would also benefit. Xelian’s own hard-edged, hook-winged destroyers shared berths alongside Yllithian’s black-carapaced Corsairs. Ships from a host of lesser kabals squeezed in where they could.

Despite the smoothness of preparations for the raid Yllithian felt dissatisfied. The warriors were loading, the weapons were arming, the military component of the raid was coming together with all the efficiency Commorrites typically exhibited around the business of taking slaves. But the raid ultimately was a sham, an irrelevance in comparison to the true mission to capture a worldsinger, and that part of the mission was not going at all according to plan.

Yllithian turned to reappraise the motley assortment of individuals that had presented themselves before him for inclusion in his supposedly secret mission.

Xelian had sent her own agent, a lithe succubus named Aez’ashya, to ‘make sure everything went smoothly’. She stood brazenly on Yllithian’s command deck eyeing him with frank insolence. She knew he could not deny her a role in the mission. Xelian’s part in the conspiracy was simply too critical to risk alienating her mistress. Like all of her brother and sister wyches, Aez’ashya was quick and deadly so she was at least something of an asset. The two others that had lately arrived before him could claim no such distinction.

Bellathonis had insisted that two of his agents needed to go on the mission to capture the worldsinger ‘to ensure the subject came to him intact.’ It was a piece of staggering impudence that the master haemonculus had justified by ‘the special requirements of the operation.’ The two of them, a shivering little masked wrack and a shifty-looking sell-steel, did not engender much confidence. They stank of cheap drugs and excreta underscored with a sharp tang of chemicals and fear. He was currently weighing whether to accede to the haemonculus’s request or simply have the pair of them flung out of the nearest airlock.

Perhaps most worryingly Kraillach’s executioner, Morr, had been making rumbling noises about going on the mission himself ‘for the sake of my archon’, apparently driven by some incomprehensible sense of duty to see his archon restored.

Incubi were supposed to possess considerable stealth skills, but a huge, heavily armoured warrior with a two-metre-long blade still did not strike Yllithian as an ideal candidate for an infiltration mission deep into the heart of enemy territory. Once again, however, he would be hard put to deny Kraillach’s chief executioner his wishes if he were pressed. It was to be expected that Yllithian’s allies would be alert for signs of him entirely taking over control and eager to push their own people into the heart of things, but it was getting tiresome to say the least.

Sadly the succession of troublesome unknown quantities attaching themselves to his carefully planned mission were not the greatest of Yllithian’s grievances.

Yllithian’s own primary agent, the individual that the entire effort hinged upon, was nowhere to be found. The elusive agent had been out of contact for several days after promising to scout the target. It was safe to assume that he was dead by now but the preparations for the raid had ground relentlessly forwards once the wheels started turning.

With Yllithian’s agent gone the entire mission became a shot in the dark. It was a shot still worth taking in Yllithian’s opinion on the off-chance that it succeeded, but one to perhaps limit his losses on. He addressed his visitors with ill-disguised distaste.

‘Aez’ashya, be most welcome. Felicitations to your mistress, dear friend that she is to us,’ Yllithian said silkily. ‘Pray take charge of these two… individuals and remove them from my presence.’

‘And then?’ Aez’ashya arched her brows coquettishly.

‘Keep them by your side, they will accompany you on the mission later.’

Bellathonis’s agents looked scared. Aez’ashya looked by turns annoyed and disappointed. Yllithian felt a little better.

As preparations for the raid proceeded above, Yllithian’s chief haemonculus, Syiin, was busy below, burrowing his way deeper beneath Corespur. By crooked paths he went down into the most ancient pits beneath the city where the haemonculi covens had dwelt for countless centuries. Through a maze of cells and oubliettes he followed chalk marks and fetishes made in the spiralling circle that marked the seal of the Black Descent, passing along razor-edged walkways and across iron bridges as he went down, always down into the depths where his coven masters dwelt. He passed into regions where light was a defeated foe and age-long pain and misery accreted on the walls like dark clay. At last he came to the slowly-turning, trap-filled labyrinth that was the coven’s lair. Here he went more slowly, stopping often to rub his hands and lick his lips as he negotiated the twists and turns. It was a long time since he had come below to seek his hidden masters and he struggled to recall the precise route.

Monofilament lines as thin as spider silk bisected the air, gravity traps lurked beneath innocuous-looking flagstones; agoniser wings, semi-sentient venom clouds and a myriad of other deadly devices were concealed behind the walls. It was clearly not a time to be imprecise. He congratulated himself that he had brought an elixir with him for just such an eventuality, a substance distilled from the synapses of a slave-scholar. He fumbled through his hide robes before triumphantly bringing forth a tiny crystal vial. Unscrewing the stopper he allowed a single drop of the viscous liquid to fall on his quivering pink tongue.

Syiin was still savouring the zesty taste when the correct route through the labyrinth came to him as if it had been sketched in lambent neon in his mind’s eye. He moved along the complex, weaving path as if it were dance steps – forwards three, left one, forwards five, turn right… So by spiralling, circuitous routes Syiin made his way slowly but surely into the Chamber of Craft, where coven members of the Black Descent impatiently awaited him.

Four were present, two of them secret masters hooded and masked in bone, a third in the viridian and black robes of an intimate secretary. The fourth coven member remained hidden in the shadows, an ominous presence concealed by interference fields that easily defeated Syiin’s augmented eyes.

‘You’re late!’ the secretary snarled. ‘The coven is not yours to command, how dare you keep us waiting?’

‘Humble apologies, secretary, masters,’ Syiin puffed, bobbing bows to everyone present.

‘We are only present because you promised word of Bellathonis,’ one of the secret masters said peevishly in a thin, high voice.

‘Quite,’ said the secretary brusquely. ‘So out with it, what have you found?’

Syiin waited for them to be quiet. They might outrank him, noticeably so in the case of the intimate secretary, but Syiin held the cards in this meeting with his fresh news. As such he took his time before replying.

‘Your honours, I’m certain that the renegade Bellathonis is undertaking forbidden work on behalf of Archon Yllithian.’

‘Oh really?’ drawled the secretary with avid interest. ‘And what do you have as proof of this?’

Syiin licked his lips uncomfortably. Proof had been in extremely short supply. He brazenly presented his suppositions as facts instead.

‘Yllithian has met with Bellathonis, and subsequent to that he sent a gift to him by roundabout means. Furthermore I have reason to believe that the renegade is creating a hidden workshop somewhere in the city.’

‘I hear conjecture but not evidence,’ the secretary sneered. ‘What was this gift? By your coy references it seems safe to presume you did not intercept it and learn of its contents, no more than you can precisely locate this phantom workshop. You bring us nothing.’

‘Ah, but everything is in the context of these seemingly small happenings,’ Syiin said smoothly before playing his trump card. ‘This very hour Yllithian sets out in concert with his allies to raid a maiden world. Archon Malixian acts as patron but I have no doubt that Yllithian put him up to it, and by extension the raid was originally Bellathonis’s idea.’

Syiin let that settle in for a moment, turning his round, stretched face back and forth to peer at the assembled coven members. He was enjoying himself considerably making them feel uncomfortable.

‘It’s my belief that Yllithian is seeking a pure heart.’

The distortion-cloaked fourth member of the coven, silent and motionless until now, reacted sharply at his words. A distorted whisper echoed about the chamber, the sound of a blade being honed on a whetstone.

‘Leave us,’ it said.

The masked Hidden Masters and the green-robed intimate secretary turned on their heels and left immediately, vanishing into shadowy openings so quickly they seemed to have been swallowed up in a single gulp. Syiin looked on interestedly as the blurred shape resolved into a darker solid, a tall and hatchet-faced haemonculus wearing the slate grey of a master elect of nine. Syiin was quietly impressed with himself. He had just jumped up a full three degrees in dealing with the labyrinthine hierarchy of the Black Descent.

‘An unfortunate business,’ the stone-on-steel voice said, ‘but one inside your own demesne. The renegade makes his new lair beneath the White Flames’ fortress at the invitation of your master, Archon Yllithian.’

Syiin spluttered with outrage, feeling his stretched face become flush. That Yllithian would take up with the vagrant Bellathonis was bad enough, that he had invited the dog into his house was worse. Haemonculi were slow to anger, ridiculously slow by Commorrite standards, but once their cold, bright fury was sparked it was almost impossible to quench. Syiin felt the first stirrings of that anger kindling inside him now.

‘This cannot be borne!’ Syiin hissed. ‘Bellathonis insults this coven, all of us! He tramples our teachings and mocks our scriptures. He endangers the city! He must be struck down!’

The master elect was nodding thoughtfully. Flat plates of black crystal had been used to replace his eyes and they winked at Syiin fitfully in the dim light.

‘You are filled with the spirit of righteous retribution. This is good,’ the master elect grated. ‘But is your hate enough to carry you to the next degree of the descent?’

Syiin blinked in surprise. Another degree of descent would make him a master, equivalent in rank to Bellathonis before he abandoned the coven. There were few things that Syiin wouldn’t do to achieve that.

‘I hate Bellathonis,’ he said and found that saying the words thrilled him. ‘I hate him and I wish to destroy him.’ The master elect nodded and extended a small object to him, a key with an ornate barrel that was fluted with many sharp tines.

‘Take this to the forty-ninth interstices and open the chamber there. Your enemy has a weakness for gifts, and you may find something fitting for him inside. Do not tarry overlong. I sense you have little time left. Take it and go.’

Syiin accepted the key with shaking hands and set out through the labyrinth. He began laboriously pacing out the memorised pattern to reach the forty-ninth interstices, sparing another drop of the precious elixir to keep himself on the correct course. In these depths most of the labyrinth was entirely lightless; only strict adherence to the mnemonically implanted routes known by a coven member could prevent fatal disorientation in the inky blackness. Syiin kept his head down and his eyes closed as he took the forty-nine necessary steps.

He opened his eyes to find himself in a stretch of passage that was octagonal in cross-section, and lit by a coldly glowing amethyst crystal overhead. His path was blocked by a heavy-looking circular silver door. Spiralling inscriptions across its surface emanated from a large, central keyhole. Syiin inserted the key the master elect had given him and then stopped.

What if this were a test? Or a trap? Perhaps some coven members were using his distraction with Bellathonis as a way to dispose of him… Syiin’s fingers caressed the key uncertainly where it stood proud of the lock. Then he thought again of the insults Yllithian had heaped upon him. Syiin could never hope to strike at his archon and live, but with the coven’s blessing he could still strike at his rival haemonculus.

He seized the key and twisted. It moved reluctantly at first and then more smoothly before vanishing entirely into the hole. For a few heartbeats nothing happened, and then Syiin saw that grooves were forming in the solid-seeming surface of the door, splitting it into concentric rings. The rings began to rotate and align themselves, twisting independently before folding up neatly inside one another to open a path within. A breath of stale air wafted outwards, making Syiin sneeze. The chamber must have been sealed for hundreds of years. Despite his fears no void-born entity rushed out to attack him, or to damn him by fulfilling his every wish. A half-seen glimmer from inside drew him onwards into a small octagonal chamber mostly filled by shelves made of thin sheets of crystal. Syiin emitted a little gasp when he saw what was arrayed upon them.

All manner of arcane paraphernalia was on display: bejewelled boxes, ornately bladed caskets, runic tetrahedrons, tightly-coiled spheres of shining metal, pots, amphorae, censers and crucibles. Precious treasures they seemed, certainly. They were richly made with fine if sinister artistry, but only a haemonculus could appreciate their true value. The contents of the chamber would have beggared a kabal to collect, the wealth it represented could have purchased a fleet or bribed a fortress. These rare and deadly treasures were examples of the very finest devices of excruciation.

The spheres were Animus Vitae, sentient ribbons of razor-edged metal tightly wound together. At a command, they would explode outwards to ensnare a victim before contracting again just as quickly to slice apart their helpless prey with delightful precision. Sadly Bellathonis would recognise one of those distinctive devices long before it could be brought close enough to him to do its lethal work…

Syiin’s eyes strayed to a small, black box with ornamental blades projecting from each corner. He recognised it as a Casket of Flensing. Opening it with the correct command words would unleash a host of invisible assassins upon the target, gnawing through armour and flesh alike in a whirlwind of unseen teeth. Syiin had even heard tales that the ethereal creatures in the casket would bring the skull of their victim back to their master when the work was complete, the brain inside still delectably intact.

The moon-faced haemonculus pondered. Most of the tales featuring a Casket of Flensing portrayed it as a device of punishment and terror rather than execution, ghoulishly emphasising the agonised struggles of the helpless victim. Syiin needed a device that would reliably destroy Bellathonis completely in a single strike with no chance of survival. He regretfully discarded the idea of using the casket and moved on.

A shard of thick, angular crystal lay on a shelf close by. Syiin hissed when he saw it, moving carefully to ensure his reflection wasn’t caught in the shard’s mirrored surface. It was a Shattershard, legendary creation of the demented genius Vorsch. Each Shattershard had been made from a remnant of a complex dimensional gateway called the Mirror of Planes. After the portal’s destruction Vorsch had painstakingly tracked down every fragment and weaponised it. By some strange dimensional sympathy understood only by Vorsch, catching a victim’s reflection in the shard and then shattering it would cause the victim to shatter into pieces too. Syiin had believed there to be few, if any, Shattershards left in the city but here one lay. Perhaps this one was fated to be the doom of Bellathonis?

Syiin frowned. A Shattershard needed a courageous, deft minion to employ it successfully. He could rely on none of his wracks for that, and he could scarcely expose himself to make the attempt in person. Besides which he wasn’t sure he entirely trusted an esoteric dimensional shattering as a way of permanently removing his rival. On a visceral level he really would like to see a body – irretrievably destroyed, of course, but preferably in a red and messy fashion. The thirteen foundations of vengeance had very specific instructions about that – an enemy can never be presumed dead unless their body is found. He licked his thin lips at the thought. It was a rare pleasure to strike down another haemonculus – the covens spent most of their time working to suppress such internal conflicts, rather than enable them. As such, whatever attack Syiin chose had to be totally unexpected and instantly lethal.

He ignored more caskets, orbs and crucibles, all of them devices of psychic torment that would only titillate a master haemonculus like Bellathonis. He was about to turn back to the Casket of Flensing again when his gaze fell on the dullest and most unimpressive item he had seen so far. It was a little three-sided pyramid no taller than his thumb, made of a dull, coarse material akin to charred bone. Silvery runes etched into its surface warned of the dire consequences of activation.

It was a runic gate, a portable key for entering the webway, but this particular gate led to a fragment of the labyrinth dimension that had fallen into madness and dissolution. Syiin had seen one like it used in his days of apprenticeship. His old master Rhakkar had unleashed a dark gate during the sack of a slave world. Syiin could see it in his mind’s eye even now. The slaves’ leaders had taken refuge in one of their larger hutches with many of their armed followers guarding them. Desperation was making the slaves fractious, even to the point of driving back the archon’s warriors with their wild firing. Careless of their shots Rhakkar had stalked forwards and cast a small, dark tetrahedron into the slaves’ midst.

Syiin had witnessed only a black-purple flash that disappeared in the blink of an eye – the gate opening for a fraction of a second – before the tetrahedron dropped to the ground inert and lifeless. In that brief instant every slave within a dozen paces of the spot was smashed into bloody pulp, crushed into walls and floor that were rent and scored as if they had been raked by monstrous claws. The slaves’ will to resist was broken immediately and the survivors took their place in the proper order of things by running and screaming until they were rounded up.

Rhakkar, in a rare moment of lucidity and expansiveness, had explained the dark gate’s operation to Syiin afterwards. Impossible entities thrived in the forbidden places, he had said, things that would use an open gate to reach out and lash at anything within grasp of their pseudopods. By setting the gate to open just a chink for a fraction of a second an unwelcome lengthier incursion was avoided and the gate became an effective weapon. Rhakkar had been jealous of his dark gate and never trusted it to his minions, in fact Syiin had never seen him use it again.

Syiin licked his lips and smiled a thin smile. There was poetic justice in destroying Bellathonis with a small taste of the kind of destruction he risked unleashing on the city. A simple device to trigger, with a wide area of effect and enough lethality to ensure the job was done. Perfect.

He reached out to take the little tetrahedron with trembling hands. It felt heavier than it should and was chill to the touch as he lifted it. He left the chamber and the door silently unfurled itself to seal away its contents for another hundred years. Syiin set himself to recalling the steps necessary to get back to the Chamber of Craft and from there out of the labyrinth of the Black Descent.

Only later, once he was safely ensconced in his own lair, would he give thought to how exactly to present Bellathonis with a very special gift.

The combined war fleet made a brave sight as it pulled away from Ashkeri Talon. Corsairs trailed after the sedately moving cruisers in darting shoals. Their shadow fields flickered through fantastical falsehoods as they flew, turning them into mythical beasts, clouds of fire and lightning, fey castles or alien vessels at their master’s whims.

The true enormity of Commorragh could only be appreciated from the void surrounding it. Only in the relatively narrow envelope between the city itself and the wardings that separated it from the roiling energies of the warp was it possible to look back and see the face of the dark city.

Perspective shrank the kilometres-long anchorages to thin fingers and then fine bristles and still the city expanded around them. The ships of the fleet flew out between the docking talons to where streams of ships moved constantly inbound and outbound, feeding the hungry city. An endless vista of lights gleamed in the darkness behind them, the city glowing like a faery fortress in the darkness. Toward its heart the spires, minarets and steeples of High Commorragh seemed to thrust upwards in mad profusion as they strained towards the crown of captured suns. The barbed spires seemed slender and fanciful from this distance, their mountainous girth rendered needle-like in the greater panorama.

Below the profusion of towers that marked High Commorragh lay the wide-flung disk of docking talons, their craggy knuckles thrusting out into the void. The tiers and districts of Low Commorragh grew in the gaps between them like plates of fungus sprouting between the gnarled roots of a tree. Below the level of the docking talons the troglodytic cousins of the upper spires hung like stalactites into the eternal cave of night. Slave mills, haemonculi pits, flesh farms and inverted tenements dangled in a dark fog of their own excrescences, lit only by the greenly glowing corpse-light of flaring gases. This was the port-city of Commorragh seen from the outside, an effect not unlike seeing an impossibly vast, spiny sea-creature feeding in the depths.

A circle of green flame appeared before the leading vessels of the fleet like an eye opening onto an infernal realm. One by one the ships of the war fleet slipped through the waiting portal and into the labyrinth dimension. In moments the entire fleet had been swallowed up and the circle vanished, leaving the eternal night around the city unchallenged once more.

Inside the webway the kabalite ships slipped rapidly along a curving tunnel of iridescent energy, its walls rippling with solid colours. Flashes of starlit sky appeared and disappeared through the shifting veil. The webway was an extradimensional marvel engineered by entities that pre-dated even the eldar. Its lattice was formed out of the very stuff of the warp and it burrowed between the material and immaterial worlds, part of both and yet separated from either. The eldar had discovered the webway early in their history, their quick minds soon learning its labyrinthine paths and mastering its ways. At its height eldar civilisation had built great port-cities, palaces and secret realms at interstices of the network, and in so doing it had unwittingly created the final strongholds it would occupy after the Fall.

At certain points the tunnel branched, splitting through immense hanging gateways of wraithbone and golden metal inscribed with eldritch runes of channelling and protection. They passed many smaller passageways leading off the major route, entrances only large enough for foot troops and light vehicles to reach some planet-based web portal. Much of the labyrinth dimension was only accessible thus; the greater ship-bearing arteries were rarer and infinitely more precious.

The webway of modern times had altered drastically since those golden days of empire. It had been torn open by war and disaster in a thousand places. Whole regions had been rendered inaccessible by the splintering of the pathways, while in other areas the wardings had collapsed, admitting strange beings from different realities. Travelling the labyrinth dimension was inherently dangerous in modern times. It took skill, intellect and experience learned through countless millennia to chart a safe course through the multi-dimensional maze of arteries and capillaries formed by the interdimensional network.

The raiding kabalite ships flew with an air of arrogant confidence through the labyrinth dimension. The eldar of Commorragh had become the masters of the webway, it was their hunting ground and their limitless domain. They slew any that they found within its fabric, although its infinite dimensions meant that it was rare to encounter such impudence. The eldar of the craftworlds still dared to use the labyrinth dimension on occasion, but they hurried quickly from one sanctuary to another only at times of need. The young races lacked the wit and sophistication to enter the webway; indeed many of its portals in the realspace carried deadly safeguards against their interference.

The greatest threat in the labyrinth dimension was from warp entities, daemons from beyond the veil that swarmed and hammered incessantly at the psychic wardings that held its arteries frustratingly just out of reach. In several places vast spirals of psychically active wraithbone surrounded the ethereal tunnels, repairing and reinforcing it against the insubstantial claws forever scrabbling at the outer walls.

Passage to the maiden world of Lileathanir could not be completed entirely within the webway. The ships would halt to disgorge their cargo of weapons and warriors into the lesser passages before moving onward to seek a transient portal into realspace believed to lie near enough to the planet to be used at this juncture. The arcane calculations required to determine that piece of information had been one of the more challenging aspects of planning so far. The difficulty of reaching Lileathanir was one of the reasons Yllithian had subtly prodded Malixian to select it as a target. His spy had found just one webway portal on the surface and had reported that to be long disused and virtually unguarded. No true eldar had set foot on this particular maiden world in centuries, so there was a very good chance that the short-lived Exodites had forgotten what kind of peril that portal represented.

The fleet reached the junction without incident, slowing to permit streams of grav craft to leave their bays and disappear into the narrower opening. Morr contacted the Intemperate Angel as it unloaded, his blank-masked helm suddenly filling every one of the curved viewing screens around the bridge.

‘Archon Yllithian, with Archon Malixian’s consent I have decided to accompany the expedition to Lileathanir’s surface.’

Yllithian stifled a sigh and attempted to appeal to reason.

‘Are you sure your presence will be essential, Morr? It would seem that coordinating strategy from the ships should demand your full attention.’

‘My place is wherever I can serve my archon’s best interests. Under these circumstances that will be at the forefront of actions occurring on the surface.’

At least Morr was making an effort to not just blurt out his real reasons. Ultimately Yllithian could not prevent him going; even being informed of his decision was a simple matter of courtesy.

‘Well good hunting then, Morr, I’m sure your renowned good sense and discretion will serve you admirably.’

If Morr understood the sarcasm and the veiled warning behind Yllithian’s words he did not deign to respond to it.

‘Thank you, Archon Yllithian. Morr out.’

Yllithian turned back to consideration of his own hand-picked group. Originally he had intended to send six of his most skilled operatives to meet his agent at a pre-arranged spot on the surface of Lileathanir. With four others now joining the mission and his own agent unaccounted for Yllithian had reduced his own contribution accordingly. Two of his kabal members would accompany the others to seek out the missing agent, no more than that. The mission would succeed with six operatives or not at all.

The stiletto shapes of Raiders and Ravagers could still be seen streaming from the open bays of the ships and into the nearby sub-conduit. Their progress would be slow in comparison to the ships but the fleet had considerably further to go before it reached its own exit point from the webway.

According to Yllithian’s calculations the ships would be on hand at just the right moment, no more than a few hours after the raid began on the planet’s surface. It was slightly risky but Malixian had been unwilling to wait for the fleet to be in position before launching his attack on the surface. So the ships would arrive later, ready to fill their holds with whatever meagre selection of slaves Malixian might net from the raid while he wasn’t being distracted by oversized avians.

It mattered little as long as Malixian created a big enough diversion. From what the mad archon had excitedly told Yllithian about his plans there would be no issues on that front at all.

Despite the claims of Yllithian’s spy, the Exodite clans of Lileathanir had not entirely forgotten the tales of their dark kin. Their ancestors had sensibly buried the only functional webway portal on the planet beneath a titanic mound of earth and stones to prevent its easy use. A select brotherhood of wardens kept a strict vigil at the site year after year, century after century, in case the dark ones ever returned. Latterly the wardens’ role had devolved increasingly into forbidding curious younglings from investigating the great annulus and telling horrifying stories about fiends that came in the night.

Few truly took the warnings seriously any more and the wardens themselves had become something of a joke. Within the anarchistic, agrarian culture they lived in there was always more work to be done and always too few hands to do it. A caste of custodians that performed no visible function were viewed as an indulgence by some of their fellows. In what passed for Exodite society any form of indulgence was viewed with scepticism and more than a little disgust.

Nevertheless the wardens took note when the great earthwork mound covering the gate shivered during the night as if struck by a curiously localised tremor. Runners were dispatched immediately to the nearest settlements to give warnings – that were generally ignored – and the next day tripwires were strung and crumbling stone-faced pits uncovered for the first time in centuries. The wardens’ Exodite kin clicked their tongues and sighed to see such wasted effort. Lileathanir was still a young world and earth tremors were common, they said. The wardens’ actions reeked of a kind of desperation to prove their worth.

The wardens were denied whatever vindication they might have felt when the Commorrites really did come a few nights later. Molecular de-bonders planted in advance of the raid instantaneously vaporised the great shielding mound and a kilometre of surrounding jungle. The ancient order of wardens that had faithfully guarded the portal for centuries vanished in the blink of an eye. A vast torus of glowing plasma was still rising into the air above the spot as the first Raider craft emerged from the newly reopened portal and sped away into the night. More and more of the waspish vessels appeared through the glowing portal, forming a continuous wyrm-like stream of bladed darkness as they glided aloft into the night sky.

The wyrm swept westwards spreading ripples of terrified alarm through the natives of Lileathanir. Flames split the darkness as the first wave of attackers ripped into the closest settlements and brushed aside what scattered opposition the stunned Exodites could muster. Clusters of slender towers toppled and fell beneath the destructive double kiss of shatterfield missiles, the Voidraven bombers that launched them invisible as they swooped away into the night sky. Beastmasters descended from the Raiders and unleashed nightmarish khymerae packs upon the stunned survivors, the twisted warp beasts bounding across the forest floor howling with bloodlust.

The Exodites fought back bravely but their cause was hopeless from the outset. Wherever knots of warriors tried to make a stand deadly accurate splinter fire slashed through their ranks from above. The proud feral warriors were quickly reduced to heaps of twitching, helpless victims by the sharp bite of paralytic toxins. Wyches darted into the tumbled ruins shrieking like children as they raced with the khymerae to root out the pitiful survivors still in hiding. Within minutes all resistance had ceased.

The Commorrites started to spread out as they hunted the handful of Exodites that had fled into the jungle at the first sign of attack. Flights of Reavers and hellions sped on ahead to seek more prey while Raider craft slid beneath the forest canopy with capture nets at the ready. Red flames leapt up in the distance where another settlement had been found. A lone Raider, unremarkable save for its passengers, split away from the main body and took a heading northwards, quickly leaving the chaos behind.

Archon Malixian rode at the head of the kabalite horde aboard his glittering skeletal Raider. Throughout the night his forces harried the Exodites without mercy, smashing one settlement after another with their lightning-fast advance. Resistance was light and wherever it flared up it was quickly snuffed out by the Commorrites’ superior firepower. Nonetheless Malixian listened to the reports and slave tallies coming in and grew increasingly disconsolate as the night wore on with no indication of what he was waiting for. It was only as the first fingers of dawn began to thrust over the rim of the world that he caught sight of something that made his heart sing.

Mighty wings beat in the distance, catching flickers of sunlight on sail-wide pinions. He smiled happily at the thought of the mud dwellers rising to the occasion after all. A moment later keening whistles sounded and the Ninth Raptrex surged forwards to accept the challenge and begin their aerial hunt, all thoughts of the mundane, earthbound business of slave-taking temporarily forgotten.

Life. The very air of the maiden world was thick with it. Life sprang from the earth and flew through air. Life swam in tinkling streams and deep pools. Faint starlight picked out enormous trees rising from the forest floor, their wide trunks and high canopy rendering it into a vast, cathedral-like space crowded with living, growing things in every direction. Brightly flowered, fleshy-looking creepers entwined trees and writhed across the ground to form dense, springy mats underfoot. Crawling things writhed through the rich loam at their feet, munched the leaves on the trees and were in their turn consumed by small winged creatures that whirred through the canopy overhead and darted expertly between the densely twined limbs. Bright-eyed, long-tailed marsupials took fright and fled crashing through the undergrowth at the approach of interlopers. Life was everywhere.

‘It’s disgusting,’ said one of Bellathonis’s agents, the sell-steel named Kharbyr.

‘Yes, yes. Agreed. Extremely unhygienic,’ sniffed Bellathonis’s other agent, the wrack called Xagor.

‘Silence,’ said Morr. ‘Communicating your unworthy thoughts is of no value.’

Morr was not in charge of the operation, in theory none of them were, but Morr’s natural gravitas made him hard to ignore. Xagor cringed but Aez’ashya seemed to care little for the towering incubus’s warning.

‘Can’t you feel it? This place is so different, the city never felt like this.’

‘Life in our home is ordered, nurtured and properly utilised. This is nothing but anarchy,’ replied one of Yllithian’s people, a shaven-headed, hawk-featured warrior called Vyril. He wore a chameleonic body suit that made it appear as if he were made of glass.

Yllithian’s other agent, a noble-looking female called Xyriadh, was off ahead somewhere scouting out their route. To the disgust of Aez’ashya and Kharbyr the pair had insisted the group abandon their Raider shortly after they separated from the main body of the kabalite force.

Morr had quelled any argument by pointing out that despite their avowed primitivism Exodites were quite capable of detecting a lone Raider’s energy signature at a considerable distance. Their favoured guerrilla tactics meant that a vehicle travelling alone was almost certain to be ambushed. Since then the group had tramped on foot for hours through a seemingly endless jungle devoid of any trace of landmarks or civilisation. The soul-sapping effects of being in realspace could be felt by all of them and tempers were growing short.

Xyriadh eventually reappeared, her chameleonic armour making her appear as a disembodied head when she removed her helm. Her features bore a close resemblance to Vyril’s, an effect intensified by her shaven head. Xagor believed them cousins, Aez’ashya brother and sister, Kharbyr reckoned them a mother and daughter-disguised-as-son but he had a taste for melodramatic theatre like Ursyllas’s Dispossessions. Morr had kept his own counsel and neither of Yllithian’s agents had been forthcoming on the subject. Xyriadh certainly took the role of senior partner when she spoke, as she did now.

‘The meeting stone is up ahead, no sign of our contact but I didn’t get close enough to be sure before coming back.’

‘Why?’ demanded Morr.

‘Because it seemed more important to let you know we were close than to walk into a potential trap alone,’ Xyriadh replied levelly.

‘If we must proceed without this “contact” to what degree will our chance of success be compromised?’ Morr asked.

‘Completely. I doubt we can even find the World Shrine without his help. I su–’

Morr hefted his huge blade onto his shoulder and tramped off in the direction Xyriadh had come from without another word. The rest of them hurried to catch up.

The meeting stone Xyriadh had spoken of was a titanic boulder of quartz that jutted out of the forest floor like a broken tooth. Timeworn carvings crawled across its faces, alien sigils that resembled those of the eldar but were far more eldritch in origin. A small clearing surrounded the stone, as though the trees feared to crowd in too closely around the alien thing in their midst. A stillness hung about the place that contrasted strongly with the riot of fecundity around it.

Morr strode forward with no pretence of subtlety, his blank-faced helm turning back and forth as if he scanned the undergrowth. Aez’ashya stepped lightly up to the stone and studied the sigils without comprehension.

‘Who made these marks?’ she demanded.

One of the glassy shadows slithering nearby replied – whether it was Xyriadh or Vyril speaking was hard to tell. ‘They look like Old One sigils to me. They must have made this place long ago.’

‘It is a key stone,’ rumbled Morr without looking around from where he stood surveying the jungle. ‘The mystic energies of this world pass through this point and others around its circumference.’

Aez’ashya seemed encouraged by her success in getting anything out of the normally taciturn incubus and favoured him with a mischievous smile.

‘Morr, you surprise me. How could you know of such things?’ she asked with disarming innocence.

‘I am older than you know,’ Morr said quietly, as if speaking to himself.

‘So we just wait now?’ Kharbyr whined and pulled his cloak more tightly about him. ‘We sit here and hope your mystery contact shows up before She Who Thirsts gnaws us down to our bones?’

‘Yes. Yes, agreed. Back before dawn the master said!’ Xagor nodded frantically.

‘Irrelevant. I can find the World Shrine alone,’ Morr said.

There was a sharp cracking sound and Morr’s eyepiece exploded into tiny shards of broken crystal. The towering incubus swayed for a moment and then he toppled like a felled tree. The others were too surprised to move for a heartbeat. Another sharp crack sounded and Xyriadh’s – or perhaps Vyril’s – head dissolved in a spray of crimson.

‘Ambush!’ Aez’ashya shouted as she raced for the treeline.

She caught sight of a glimmer of movement up in the canopy, a telltale glassy shifting in the foliage. Another crack sounded as the sniper took a shot at her but she was moving too fast to be hit. Answering splinter fire from behind her chopped into the branches and sent the chameleon shape scurrying deeper into cover. A shot struck the ground ahead of her, kicking up a spurt of grass and leaves. That one came from across the clearing from somewhere behind her, confirming at least two snipers had her in their sights.

Aez’ashya plunged into the undergrowth beneath the sniper she had seen and trusted to the others to handle the rest. Life in the dark city honed its citizens’ fighting instincts virtually from birth. A daily diet of violence and bloodshed imbued them with a preternatural ability to take the best course of action in a crisis like getting caught in an ambush with an unknown number of assailants. Where an elite military unit would have been pinned down and chopped to pieces Commorrites turned on their attackers like rats in a trap. Her part was to run down the one she had seen, and she would think about helping her erstwhile allies later, perhaps…

She ran up the closest trunk and sprang nimbly onto its lower branches. She scanned the dark canopy intensely, looking for a patch of distorted starlight that would betray her prey’s hiding place. There – a fork in a tree barely twenty metres away. Aez’ashya could see the outline of a cloaked figure lifting a long, slender rifle, aiming not at her but away into the clearing. She moved silently closer, padding along slender limbs with barely a sound.

The cloaked figure fired and turned to shift to a new position. Aez’ashya was waiting behind the sniper with the bright glitter of knives bared in her hands

‘Greetings, cousin,’ she purred as she took the sniper in her razor-edged embrace.

Xagor and Kharbyr had dived for cover before the first bodies hit the ground. Xagor cowered beneath a log with a snub-nosed splinter pistol clutched in his hand. Kharbyr drew an elegant, long-barrelled pistol and rolled onto his belly to loose off a quick volley of shots before leaping up and sprinting for the forest.

Kharbyr dodged across the open ground counting himself lucky that their enemies were using needle rifles. The single-shot weapons made superlative sniper rifles but under the circumstances automatic fire would have served their attackers better. The distinctive cracking sound made by the toxin-coated slivers breaking the sound barrier told him he was dealing with amateurs. Experienced assassins always dialled down the muzzle velocity of their weapons to ensure there would be no such telltale giveaways.

He ducked behind a tree trunk as more shots whined at him. The soft, fibrous trunk shivered as needles thunked into it. He rolled out and came up firing, pelting the canopy with streams of splinter fire to momentarily distract his attackers. He darted back into cover again without waiting to see the result. At least two snipers were tracking him, their deadly rounds coming closer each time he showed his face.

Crashing footsteps whipped his attention back to the clearing and his jaw sagged open in surprise at what he saw. Morr was on his feet and heading past Kharbyr at a lumbering run. The incubus swung his huge klaive aloft and whirled it through the trunk of a nearby tree, carving out a giant wedge of it in two quick cuts. The tree fell with a groan of protest, moving slowly at first but rapidly gathering pace until it struck the ground with a resounding crash. The air was filled with tumbling leaves in the aftermath, and through them Kharbyr saw two vagrant flickers of motion struggling to get clear.

Morr and Kharbyr sprang forward to confront their assailants at close quarters. Their cameleoline robes had become disordered in the fall and revealed flashes of lightly armoured hands and masked faces. Kharbyr’s knife was in his hand as he sprinted forwards, a curved half metre of razor-edged steel poised for an eviscerating thrust. Morr bore down on the pair like a vengeful one-eyed god as he cleaved a path towards them through the shattered limbs.

Seeing they were trapped one of the snipers turned and raised their rifle to shoot. To Kharbyr’s surprise the other plunged a dagger into their comrade’s exposed back before stepping back and raising open hands in surrender. Their victim gave a disbelieving cry and fell face-forwards, clawing helplessly at the dagger’s protruding hilt. Kharbyr could sense their agonised soul slipping into the spirit stone they wore at their neck, a passing ripe with a sickly sweet scent of betrayal. The body twitched once more and lay still.

The other was babbling something, eyes fixed on the corpse. Kharbyr had to tear his attention away from the ripe, delicious soul waiting to be plucked to understand what they were saying.

‘–serve Yllithian! I’m Sindiel! I’m his agent!’

A deceptive calm had fallen across the clearing. Kharbyr looked to Morr for guidance. The towering incubus had stopped a decapitating strike in mid-swing. He studied the stranger from beneath his poised blade for a long moment before lowering it.

‘Speak. Your life hangs in the balance,’ Morr said distinctly.

The stranger’s accent was strange and formal-sounding as he replied. He pulled back his hood and tore off his mask, throwing it from him in apparent disgust. The face revealed looked soft and pinkish to Kharbyr’s eyes, like that of a newborn. Something familiar lurked behind the dark eyes, though, a gleam of murderlust and lasciviousness that could be seen openly on every face in the dark city.

‘I am Sindiel, an agent of Archon Yllithian of the White Flames kabal,’ the stranger said. ‘Forgive me. I was to meet with you alone but my… former companions followed me here. I think they believed they were saving me.’

He gave a shaky laugh. He was speaking quickly and excitedly, constantly glancing back at his slain companion. Complex emotions chased across his face.

‘You can guide us to the World Shrine?’

‘Yes! Oh yes! That’s why I’m here,’ the turncoat almost babbled in relief.

‘Then be welcome, Sindiel,’ Morr intoned with a formality that surprised Kharbyr. ‘How many followed you exactly? We must ensure that no survivors escape.’

‘Three, just three others. I think your friends got Corallyon and Belth already.’ He tapped one ear nervously. ‘I heard them die.’

Aez’ashya reappeared, drenched in blood and looking pleased with herself. She seemed fascinated by Sindiel and flirted with him shamelessly, much to his alternating delight and embarrassment. When Xyriadh emerged she was less amenable to their newfound companion, her proud face filled with barely repressed fury at the death of Vyril. Xagor merely sniffed at the newcomer and asked him for a skin sample. Once all of them were together again Morr turned his one-eyed gaze on Sindiel.

‘We must move on,’ Morr said, ‘our time here is finite. How long will the journey to the World Shrine take?’

Sindiel gestured grandly to the sigil-marked quartz boulder at the centre of the clearing.

‘No time at all. In fact we stand before the doorway right now.’

A thousand kilometres to the north, Malixian gave forth a scream of pleasure as his murderous flock dived into the attack. The giant pterasaurs beneath them swirled and scattered across the fantastic cloudscape croaking hoarse cries of alarm. Their Exodite riders were barely visible, flea-like as they scurried around on the broad backs of their mounts. They aimed slender lances upwards and the air was suddenly criss-crossed with streaks of ruby laser light. Caught in the net, a Raider belched flame and rolled over, its cargo of warriors tipped out screaming into the void. The other Raiders pulled up sharply out of range, momentarily frustrated.

A rush of hellions plummeted past the web of fire spitting splinters in return, one expertly tearing through the wing membrane of a pterasaur with his hooked hellglaive. A second hellion attempted the same feat but was swept from his skyboard by a gigantic, gnarled claw. Other hellions fell as flaming cinders as the lancers on the pterasaurs’ backs ruthlessly burned them down. Malixian was careless of their casualties; the hellions had served their purpose by drawing the enemy fire.

Scourges swept down on the distracted Exodite riders in a thunder of wings. Swarms of Malixian’s alien pets were flying at their clawed heels. He’d brought razorwings and bloodtalons on this occasion – they were easily replaceable and more than deadly enough to kill mud dwellers.

The Exodites were armoured, after a fashion, in hide and scale but it availed them little against the whirlwind of claws and talons that engulfed them. Their firing faltered and Malixian led the charge of heavier grav craft down on the demoralised survivors. He leapt onto the pitching back of a pterasaur where a knot of the skin-clad primitives were attempting to make a last stand.

The riders were fighting well, warriors every one of them. They had been raised in a harsh environment, trained in the arts of war with all the phenomenal focus of their eldar minds and bodies and blooded in inter-clan feuds. Malixian still ripped through them as if they were cattle, beating aside their swords and lances in a fury of razor-edged talons. In moments the blood-drenched pterasaur was swept clear of Exodites and the prize was in his grasp.

Scourges with nerve goads ruthlessly took control of the riderless pterasaur and drove it north. The scene was repeated on other pterasaurs and soon half a dozen of the great beasts were flapping ponderously eastwards, a good haul. They would be stunned and taken aboard the ships in due course when Yllithian brought them in for the rendezvous.

Malixian privately wondered if the giant pterasaurs could ever be persuaded to hunt something as small and insignificant as a slave. He felt some confidence that in conjunction with his beastmasters Bellathonis would find a way to spur the great beasts into appropriately murderous action, although the master haemonculus had seemed rather distracted of late.

Shrill cries drew his attention to the sight of more pterasaurs labouring up through the clouds. More and more of the cruciform shapes emerged into view. At first a dozen could be seen, then two dozen, then the skies below were filling up with the inexorable ripple and snap of enormous wings beating. Malixian watched them with frank admiration for a few seconds before ordering his Ravagers to open fire. Destroying beams lanced down and caressed the magnificent, impractical beasts. First one, then another and another were sent plummeting in flames.

Their companions bore stoically onwards through the barrage, and looking below them Malixian saw the reason for their doggedness. They were only the first wave. More and more beating wings broached the cloud tops as far as the eye could see and Malixian began to feel a first insidious thrill of fear.

The maiden world, Sindiel had explained, was functionally its own universe on certain metaphysical levels. The flow of elemental forces through focal nodes in its crust effectively gave the planet its own webway. With the correct triggers a portal could be opened from one place on the surface to another; even from, for example, the nearby meeting stone to the World Shrine itself. The triggers themselves were a jealously guarded secret kept by a select few. The band of ‘rangers’ Sindiel claimed to have joined were among the few to hold forbidden knowledge about this and many other subtle paths in the greater webway.

‘How long were you with these ranger friends of yours?’ Aez’ashya had asked.

‘Years, half a lifetime it seemed. I started out believing they were free-thinkers, dangerous radicals treading the path of the outcast,’ Sindiel replied, ‘I was wrong.’

Sindiel’s bitterness seemed to surprise even him. He had tried to explain what life on a claustrophobic craftworld was like with its myriad restrictions and unwritten laws. Resolving conflicts through confrontation, for example, was anathema in a society where everyone was guided through every step of their lives. Each life, every experience they had, was pigeonholed and mapped out almost from birth. Failure to conform to the constant subtle pressures to fit in with the other castaways led to censure in the form of a kind of living social death.

‘No one understands that the seers have made us prisoners of the future. The only “path” they offer is rooted in fear of the past.’

‘And you’re going to show them they’re wrong?’ Kharbyr had mocked.

‘I can’t change the society of my craftworld and I don’t want to either,’ Sindiel replied seriously. ‘I just know that it isn’t how I want to live. The paths they follow are hardly like living at all.’

The newcomer was certainly clever. He hid himself on the far side of the meeting stone so that they could not observe him activating the gate. When he reappeared, the broken tooth of quartz was broken no longer, its upper part made whole again by the appearance of a grey, misty-looking portal. They clambered up to it and Sindiel was about to cross its wavering boundary when Morr clamped a gauntleted hand onto his shoulder.

‘Unwise. You have led enemies to us once already. Do not imagine you will be permitted to do so again,’ Morr said.

‘Kill him now, Morr!’ Xyriadh spat venomously. ‘We don’t need him any more.’

‘Have you been inside the World Shrine before?’ Sindiel squawked. ‘I didn’t think so. Well, I have! I can take you right to where you need to go.’

Morr did not relax his grip, but he did not raise his killing blade either.

‘Also… before you decide to kill me later you might want to consider the value of the hidden webway paths I know about. Lord Yllithian would be displeased to lose access to those secrets, I should think.’

‘No secret exists that the haemonculi can’t tear from you,’ said Xyriadh.

‘Another telling argument in favour of not killing me then. I must be alive for them to do so, presumably?’

‘Not necessarily,’ responded Xagor quietly. He was ignored. Morr suddenly released Sindiel, who rubbed his shoulder gratefully.

‘Lead us there,’ Morr said, ‘and know that I am watching.’

Entering the portal was like and yet unlike entering the webway. The shifting walls were shadowy and indistinct. Out in the darkness beyond the twisting pathway there was a sense of vast presences lurking, as if huge beasts slept all around them just out of sight.

They followed the pallid silver of the path as it crooked and curved, Sindiel leading them silently past innumerable forks and branches. He had not lied, they would have never found their own way through the gleaming paths. The pale light they followed gradually grew stronger as they approached the core.

CHAPTER 8

THE HEART OF THE WORLD

The World Shrine of Lileathanir was called Lil’esh Eldan Ay’Morai; ‘Holy mountain of dawn’s light first gleaming’. It lay thousands of kilometres away from the webway portal, marking the termination of a mystic spiral that girdled the entire planet. For the past several hours Laryin Sil Cadaiyth had been there trying to soothe the raging world spirit as it shuddered and rebelled in response to the incursion of outsiders. Laryin was young as eldar count such things, and she had never before experienced the level of discord that now flowed through the psychic conduits of her world. In concord with the disturbed spirits she herself felt angry and frightened.

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 notice 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.

‘Unwise,’ said Morr as he knocked her hand aside. She spun with an oath to strike at the incubus but found her wrist caught in a vice-like grip. ‘Observe,’ Morr intoned calmly and turned her back to face Vyril.

Looking now she saw the hand extended to her was in reality a grasping claw, and the face behind it was not that of Vyril but some saucer-eyed, fang-mouthed daemon. Xyriadh recoiled in horror. An agonised howl from close by broke into insane, tittering laughter.

‘Bravo, that was a close-run thing,’ said a new voice. Morr released Xyriadh and spun to face the newcomer with blade at the ready. A slight figure dressed in motley garments stepped into sight.

‘Oh, put away your over-sized cutlery, incubus, no one is dining just yet,’ the stranger responded airily.

The individual had the appearance of an eldar dressed in an archaic-looking doublet and hose made with so many variegated colours that from a distance they appeared to be grey. A black and white domino mask hid the upper part of his face, but the mouth and chin beneath it looked full and mobile. Right now the full mouth was grinning impudently with its red lips and white teeth.

‘Do not toy with me, apparition,’ Morr rumbled dangerously.

‘You are a fierce one, aren’t you?’ The newcomer’s accent was strange, neither a High Commorrite cant nor Low Commorrite vulgarity, but somewhere between the two. ‘Well, fear not, I bear no weapons and I bear you no ill intent either, I was merely surprised to see fellow travellers abroad… and why, hello, Sindiel! I didn’t see you lurking back there!’

Morr wheeled to glare at Sindiel. The grey figure took advantage of the momentary distraction to slip over to where Xagor and Kharbyr stood. The motley-clad individual smoothly disappeared and reappeared as if he had moved in one extraordinarily long step. The domino mask peered at the worldsinger slung over Xagor’s shoulder appraisingly.

‘You’ve been busy, I see. Recent events make a lot more sense with that little piece of information. Thank you.’

Morr snarled and whirled his deadly blade through the grey figure in a decapitating arc. His target seemed only to bow courteously and razor-edged destruction flew through the space where it had been.

‘I’d love to dance, Morr, really I would, but we simply don’t have the time,’

‘Identify this… individual, Sindiel,’ Morr said.

‘Pish posh, I can speak for myself. I’m the one that gave Sindiel the little bauble that brought you here.’

‘It’s true,’ admitted Sindiel. ‘Linthis introduced us.’

‘And how is Linthis, hmm?’ asked the grey one brightly. ‘In fact how are all your little woodland friends, Sindiel? Did they help you find what you were looking for? I’m thinking that your new friends indicate that they did not.’

‘No. Linthis was just as hollow and full of lies as all the rest,’ Sindiel said quietly.

‘Enough,’ said Morr. ‘Assist us or leave at once.’

‘Oh, I’ll help you. Don’t you worry. The world-singer can’t go back and you can’t stay here, so you all have to go forwards along the path you’ve made for yourselves…’

The motley one paused and stood on tiptoe for a moment, hand cupped to one ear in a pantomime of listening. The howling burst forth anew, and monstrously misshapen silhouettes could be glimpsed sliding through the translucent blocks all around them.

‘…There will be a small price, of course,’ the grey figure continued. ‘Tiresome, but there are certain customs and traditions that have to be obeyed.’

‘Name it!’ cried Sindiel, ‘whatever it is!’

‘Three guesses.’

‘The worldsinger?’

‘No, no, I already told you I can’t take her back. Guess again.’

‘Me?’ Sindiel swallowed.

The motley one laughed musically in response. ‘Oh you don’t understand the joke at all, do you? Poor Sindiel. Last try.’

‘The… spirit stones,’ Sindiel said, sounding ashamed.

‘Yes! I’ll be taking the spirit stones you filched from Corallyon, Linthis and Belth, I think. Their souls deserve a better fate than to be taken to the dark city, I’ll see that they get home.’

Kharbyr, Aez’ashya and Morr, with more or less reluctance respectively, gave over the spirit stones they had taken from the rangers slain on Lileathanir. The small gems shone with a lambent amethyst glow as they were brought out, the trapped souls within them seeming to blaze like stars in the darkness. The grey-clad one tucked them away carefully and the gloom rushed in again.

‘You have your payment,’ Morr rumbled. ‘Now do your part. Lead us to Commorragh with no more games.’

‘Lead you? Oh no, I never lead anyone anywhere – quite the reverse in fact. I simply make you aware of the paths available. Whether you go down them or not is up to you. We’ll discuss this further at another time, but time is pressing so listen to this. Lil’ashya nois shaa oum.’

The words rang in the air like clear bells. Enraged, inhuman voices burst out all around the agents, giving tongue to their frustration at their prey slipping away. The landscape of mist and translucent shards dissolved around them and was replaced by a timeless sensation of falling. A merciless black void rushed in from all sides to engulf them, dragging them deeper into the undertow.

They found themselves crouching upon a bleak heath that sloped downwards into roiling clouds of rust-red smog. Tilted shapes towered out of the smog like skeletal titans, the remains of machines or buildings long since rotted to their bare framework. Wan, ruddy light filtered from above, the pervasive smog turning the sky into an upturned bowl of blood.

‘Iron Thorn,’ breathed Morr, making the name sound like a curse or a prayer.

CHAPTER 9

PACTS AND BARGAINS

‘Author of evil, unknown till thy revolt! These acts of hateful strife – hateful to all save thee and thy foul adherents – disturb our most holy peace. How hast thou instilled thy malice into thousands? Those once upright and faithful are now proved false and all is despair.’

– The Broken King to Duke Vileth, in Ursyllas’s Dispossessions

The raiding forces were returning from Lileathanir in triumph. The barbed, predatory ships raced one another exuberantly along the webway back to Commorragh. Their crews were drunk with bloodletting and cruelty and their holds were packed to bursting with slaves, raw materials, exotic lifeforms and other plunder for the ever-hungry markets of the eternal city.

Of course a raid returning to Commorragh was always a triumph for the leaders of an expedition, or at least it was depicted as such if it could be viewed as anything short of the most unmitigated disaster. A failed raid reflected badly on every participant from top to bottom and so there were no failed raids. Everything from exaggerations to outright lies were expected and frankly encouraged on the part of all involved from the lowliest returning warriors to the highest commanding archons.

In the final measurement Malixian had escaped with his crop of captured beasts and his life intact so he was more-or-less happy. Xelian would be equally pleased with the selection of dangerous carnosaurs and over-sized invertebrates procured from the reeking jungles of the maiden world for her arena bouts. Even the lesser archons would make a small profit in addition to enhancing their reputation by participating. The value of eldar slaves, even regressionists like Exodites, far outweighed that of any lesser species by a hundred to one. That would go some way to compensating for the relative paucity of the harvest from such a large undertaking.

Soon enough the crews coming off the sleek and deadly ships would tell outrageous stories of their vicious cunning and derring-do. As the vessels disgorged their cargoes of bewildered slaves onto Ashkeri Talon tales would be told of the bloody massacres and mass suicides that were the reason that so few had been taken alive. By the time the wretched Exodites were being hauled onto the auction blocks in the flesh markets lurid stories would be circulating about the annihilation of their maiden world home.

Yllithian on the other hand, pacing impatiently on the elegantly appointed bridge of the Intemperate Angel, was distinctly displeased by the outcome of the raid. His agents had failed to return or give any other indication of their survival so their mission had evidently failed. That was a minor disaster in its own right and annoying if not entirely unanticipated. It was the continued absence of Kraillach’s chief executioner that was proving unexpectedly problematic.

Without Morr to act as de facto head of the Realm Eternal the whole kabal was in danger of collapsing in on itself in a furore of backstabbing and politicking. The kabal’s ships and warriors accompanying the raid were already showing signs of internal strife that boded ill for their return to Commorragh. Kraillach was in danger of revivifying as an archon without a kabal.

Beyond such entirely practical considerations Yllithian also needed to know just what had happened at the World Shrine so that he could ensure nothing could be traced back to him. There could be no disguising the unusually bitter fighting during the latter stages of the raid, nor the seemingly unleashed fury of the planet itself. The spontaneous eruption of dozens of volcanoes that filled the atmosphere with choking ash was bound to be an event worthy of note even among the jaded citizenry of Commorragh. The rakes and sybarites would soon turn their attention to other gossip but for the present Malixian’s raid was bound to become a hot topic.

The causes of such an event would become the object of much speculation over the days that followed, some of it accurate, some of it wildly fanciful. The absence of Morr would be noted by some, perhaps connected by others and then the pieces would begin to fall into place. As such Yllithian had every desire to get ahead of any rumours and have his story straight before the tyrant’s spies became too interested in precisely what had happened on Lileathanir and why. The failed mission should be easy enough to cover up as long as Yllithian could reassure himself that there were no inconveniently surviving witnesses.

Among all the many subtle resources at his command Yllithian could think of only one that might pierce the veil and give him the knowledge he sought. He ordered the helmsman to bring his ship up to full speed and promised a rich reward if they were the first to dock at Commorragh.

Within the dark pits below the White Flames’ palace Syiin was busily hurrying to complete his own preparations before Archon Yllithian returned to the city. His workbench was strewn with tools and components that made a dully gleaming landscape over the stained metal surface. The object of his attentions rose in the midst of it all, a miniature palace above a shanty town of cogs and wires.

He had taken the runic tetrahedron so generously donated by the coven of the Black Descent and placed it within a framework of four tiny suspensor units. These in turn were held in place by an open egg-like contrivance of slender struts and tubes. Four different trigger sensors, motion, pressure, heat and aural, were suspended from the egg. Syiin had configured the sensors to trip if the master haemonculus Bellathonis were detected within five metres, easily close enough to ensure his annihilation. Once the sensors were tripped the suspensors acted as blunt fingers to make the movements necessary to open the gate. That had been the hardest part to pull off by far and now, after much cursing and spitting along the way, Syiin was rather proud of the results.

The distinctly sinister looking device Syiin had built was going to be concealed inside an altogether more innocuous container. With the correct inducement the gourmand at the Red House had yielded a full description of the jar retrieved from there previously by one of Bellathonis’s wracks. Now, outwardly at least, its twin stood before Syiin. In this case the hide-wrapped vessel also concealed a tiny mimic field built into its base that would defeat all but the most careful examination of its contents. The very esoteric nature of the threat itself would evade most tell-tales and detectors better than molecular explosives or binary poisons ever could, and the mimic field would render it completely undetectable.

In many ways hiding the dark gate was the easy part. Persuading Bellathonis to actually accept the gift would be the real trick. Syiin was counting on the confusion of Yllithian’s return to be the right moment to strike. The archon would be flushed with success and fully engaged with his sycophants for a time after his arrival. Bellathonis, on the other hand, would be anxiously awaiting word of the capture of a pure heart and expecting a message or package from Yllithian.

Syiin licked his thin lips and smiled, picturing Bellathonis lifting up the jar triumphantly and unstoppering its lid moments before he was obliterated. Would the master haemonculus have long enough to realise how thoroughly he had been duped? Syiin hoped so. He had tried to imagine a way to be present at Bellathonis’s death but decided it was simply too risky. Syiin’s presence would make Bellathonis even more suspicious than usual, and the… event itself might be dangerously unpredictable. He was going to have to console himself with reports after the fact, and perhaps a little pilgrimage to the scoured circle left by the activation of the gate at some later date.

And yet… He was still concerned about the calibration of the triggering sensors. During his last meeting with Malixian and Bellathonis he’d had the presence of mind to surreptitously read Bellathonis’s vital signs and file them away for just such an eventuality. The problem was that haemonculi altered their bodies so frequently that such information had a distinctly limited shelf-life.

Syiin could broaden the parameters used by the sensors to account for a potential shift in morphology on Bellathonis’s part, but that would increase the chances of accidental activation before the gate reached its intended target. As it stood Syiin had left the sensors tightly bound to Bellathonis’s last recorded imprint, but he kept wondering uncomfortably about the wisdom of that decision.

Ideally he would have liked another reading to cross-reference against, but Bellathonis was nowhere to be found at present. The master haemonculus had vanished the moment Yllithian and Malixian left the city. He was not on the ships – Syiin’s spies had been certain of that. No, Bellathonis was almost certainly hidden away in his secret laboratory in the catacombs, probably not far from Syiin’s own domain. The thought enraged him and he snarled at one of his wracks, bringing the masked apprentice running over.

‘What news of the raid?’ Syiin demanded. ‘How soon will the Lord Yllithian return?’

‘The wager-slaves are giving the best odds for a return within the next six hours, master,’ the wrack rasped after a moment. ‘They say a signal announcing Malixian’s triumph was received late yesterday. Crowds are gathering at Ashkeri Talon to welcome back the fleet.’

‘To beg for scraps more like, and to do their utmost to separate our brave warriors from their new-found wealth before it can be brought into the city,’ Syiin murmured cynically as he peered through a magnifying lens to make a final adjustment.

‘Master?’ the wrack asked in confusion.

‘Nothing, wait there a moment,’ Syiin grunted and turned his attention back to the device, tapping one of his tools meditatively. Wherever Bellathonis might be right now he would soon need to be on hand to welcome Malixian back to the Aviaries. Syiin could send the jar there and be fairly certain it would cross paths with the target, but would the triggers prove reliable? Without another reading it was impossible to be sure, but the attempt had to be made now when Bellathonis resurfaced – any later might be too late.

Syiin lifted the delicate egg-shaped mechanism carefully by its uppermost struts. He moved it slowly over the mouth of the jar before lowering it inside. The framework expanded with a soft pneumatic hiss as it touched the bottom of the jar so that the device was snugly cradled within. He stoppered the jar, binding the lid in place with hide thongs. Finally he released a breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding.

‘Take six of your brethren and ensure this jar is delivered to the Aviaries of Malixian the Mad, intact and unopened, for the immediate attention of the master haemonculus Bellathonis,’ Syiin said crisply.

The wrack gingerly lifted the jar with both hands. He was ignorant of the exact contents but he was fearful after seeing the care his master took with it. He started to leave the low-domed workroom but Syiin’s voice stopped him.

‘Wait,’ the haemonculus said and stood from his bench, muttering. ‘This won’t do it, won’t do it at all,’ he said before raising his voice to the wrack. ‘Are you aware of the thirteen foundations of vengeance? Could you name each of them to me?’

‘Of course, master, though I’ve heard many more than thirteen maxims claimed as foundations.’

‘Yes, yes, but are you aware of the one pertaining to individual as opposed to collective effort?’

The masked wrack appeared to ponder for a moment. ‘If you want something attending to satisfactorily you must attend to it yourself?’ came his eventual reply.

‘Just so,’ said Syiin. ‘And as such I’m coming with you.’

Bellathonis had begun surreptitiously moving some of his most vital pieces of equipment out of the Aviaries several weeks prior to the raid on Lileathanir. Deliveries were quietly redirected and devices disassembled to be placed into ‘storage’, ostensibly to make room for examining one of the giant pterasaurs Malixian planned to bring back from the maiden world. The normally cramped confines of the tower occupied by Bellathonis and his wracks were beginning to feel distinctly roomy.

Bellathonis had waited until Malixian and the bulk of the Ninth Raptrex were safely out of the way before moving the most sensitive items. His new torture-laboratories were buried within a honeycomb of hidden chambers and secret ways that touched on the White Flames’ territory in High Commorragh. The main area comprised a wide, high chamber with rows of cells along one dripping wall and a cracked floor. Very safe, very secure – if lacking a little of the ambience of the old tower.

Bellathonis stood in the echoing space directing his wracks as they wheeled in examination tables and resurrection sarcophagi, lugged around jars filled with chemicals and less readily identifiable substances, connected cables to energy generators and strung lights. The master haemonculus ensured two sarcophagi were hoisted into place overlooking the examination table at the centre of the chamber. Archon Yllithian had indicated that Archon Kraillach would also need to be revivified when the Exodite catalyst was secured. This was in addition to resurrecting the mysterious and long-dead worthy that was the true subject of their bargain.

At any rate Yllithian appeared to think it was a mystery and thus far Bellathonis had chosen not to disabuse him of that notion. The master haemonculus took personal charge of the installation of a very special experiment in one of the smaller cells. Here three nerve-meshed subjects were hung together from chains to form a triptych of pain. A waist-high plinth installed before them accepted a special case Bellathonis carried there personally. The haemonculus locked the cylindrical case into place before releasing catches along its sides. Inside was the head of Angevere, quite Bellathonis’s favourite experiment ever since he had procured it from Yllithian in exchange for his services.

The triple voice sighed in unison as Bellathonis connected the subject’s speech centres to the crone to enable her to speak. Yllithian had told him that Angevere had spoken to him with her mind before he decapitated her. Bellathonis had little desire to have to speak to the creature mind-to-mind and so had devised this method to give her a voice. Pain receptors connected to the subjects also enabled the crone to be excruciated by proxy, a convenient arrangement that did not risk any lasting damage. All-in-all Bellathonis was extremely pleased with the experiment and considering its more general application.

‘There we are, Angevere,’ he fondly told the disembodied head, ‘your new home.’

‘It is no different from the last,’ the subject’s voices chorused petulantly. ‘Promises were made – restitution and release.’

‘All in good time, my dear lady, all in good time.’

‘Then what is it you wish of me? You only give me voice to torment me and question me, what is it you want this time?’

Bellathonis twisted a dial on the plinth that elicited a shout of agony from the dangling triptych of pain-proxies. The sound rang loudly in the narrow cell before it was instantly cut off as he twisted the dial back again.

‘Firstly a little reminder to watch your manners, Angevere,’ Bellathonis murmured as he worked. ‘You are a guest and in no position to make demands of your host.’ He fussed over the neural connections for several more minutes, fastidiously adjusting them until he was entirely satisfied.

‘There. Now, tell me some more about this El’Uriaq character our mutual friend Yllithian is so keen to revivify.’

‘What is there to tell? He was a great lord, he opposed Vect. He was destroyed.’

‘Oh, you can do better than that,’ Bellathonis said, sending the slightest trickle of energy through the pain amplifier.

‘Sssaaahhhh! He was prince! A general! An intriguer! The pacts he made outlive him still, the oaths he took transcend life or death. Even now some in Commorragh still owe secret allegiance to the old emperor of Shaa-dom, and are bound to him forever by the most terrible vows!’

‘Interesting, it certainly provides insight as to why the tyrant was so keen to be rid of him. Secret allies count for nothing while you’re dead. Very well, then tell me more about this Dysjunction you claim to have predicted for Yllithian.’

‘Dysjunction lay along the path from El’Uriaq’s return, inescapable. When I beheld the sign of it I was suddenly afraid of the future the visionary sought. The visionary fears not to tear the universe asunder to make his ideal into a reality. I too would see Vect destroyed to avenge Shaa-dom but the price… the price…’

A hesitant rap at the cell door brought a frown of annoyance to Bellathonis’s sharp features. He turned and plucked open the door to reveal one of his wrack servants almost literally crawling on his belly.

‘Forgive me, master!’ The wrack wrung his hands contritely. ‘But we have received word that the raiding force has returned. The Archon Yllithian has already disembarked and is on his way here!’

‘Coming here?’ Bellathonis said with some surprise. ‘That is… uncharacteristically direct for one usually so circumspect. Hmm.’

He emerged from the cell and shut the door firmly behind him. Two possibilities suggested themselves to the master haemonculus. Either the mission had been a success and Yllithian was bringing the world-singer directly to him, or the plan had miscarried in some fashion and he wished to discuss alternatives.

Neither possibility seemed to adequately explain Yllithian taking the risk and inconvenience of a personal visit. Time was short. Malixian would not be much slower than Yllithian in disembarking, although transporting his prizes to the Aviaries should delay him for a while. Bellathonis hoped that he could deal with Yllithian quickly enough to return to the Aviaries before Malixian thought to wonder where his pet haemonculus had disappeared to. On consideration Bellathonis decided that it would be best to treat Yllithian’s impending arrival as good news. He clapped his hands for attention, freezing the scurrying wracks in their tracks.

‘Places everyone, we must be completely ready to begin the procedure when the noble archon arrives!’

The cavern-like chamber dissolved into a frenzy of activity.

Once Asdrubael Vect had brought the great port-city of Commorragh to heel in his coup over the noble houses he turned his attention to conquering all the other sub-realms in the webway. Most fought and were crushed by the seemingly inexhaustible resources of the dark city. Some capitulated, thinking themselves able to buy their safety at the price of their freedom. Some realms were so wracked with their own internal dissension and disasters that they, at first, welcomed their invaders as saviours. Many sub-realms were found to be already dead, their inhabitants killed in the Fall or the privations that followed after it. Iron Thorn was one of the latter.

It appeared that the inhabitants of what came to be called Iron Thorn had been few and found themselves completely trapped in their sub-realm by the cataclysmic damage inflicted on the labyrinth dimension during the Fall. Some emergency or critical shortage of resources had forced them to take desperate measures to ensure their survival. In the end, either by accident or design, they had introduced a form of aggressively replicating nano-machinery into the environment of their sub-realm.

By the time the portals to Iron Thorn had been forced open by Vect’s forces no one could tell how long the tiny machines had been at work or what their original purpose had really been. It was only apparent that some weird strain of accelerated machine evolution had occurred over the centuries in Iron Thorn. The practical outcome was that the nano-machines had gradually converted almost everything in the sub-realm to a skeletal framework of pure iron. The original inhabitants of Iron Thorn had survived after a fashion, although the curious machine half-life they exhibited bore little resemblance to that of their previous forms.

The tyrant’s warriors had ruthlessly hunted down the ferric abominations and exterminated them wherever they could be found, but the altered beings had steadfastly refused to remain dead. Eventually Vect had nominally incorporated the sub-realm into Commorragh simply to save face and sent his frustrated archons elsewhere to conquer more rewarding lands. Iron Thorn had become another of the many strange sub-realms of Commorragh that were generally shunned by the citizens of the eternal city. Expeditions that entered such places were normally well-armed and of short duration.

Sindiel was horrified by the tale. ‘Aren’t we at risk, too?’ he asked.

‘Only if we remain here for a thousand years or so,’ laughed Aez’ashya. ‘This isn’t the glass plague we’re talking about.’

‘The glass what?’

Sindiel was even more horrified by the tale of Jalaxlar the sculptor and his vitrifying helix.

‘Gates must exist connecting this sub-realm to Corespur,’ Xyriadh said. ‘For that matter, where’s the gate we arrived from? There’s nothing here.’

Morr ignored her and addressed Xagor instead. The worldsinger looked fragile in the wrack’s arms. The ruddy light of Iron Thorn cast a pinkish pallor over her features and touched fire from the blonde hair that spilled over Xagor’s shoulder in a river of gold.

‘Is your prisoner intact, wrack?’

‘Yes, yes. Without consciousness, but most healthy.’

‘Why not waken her?’ Kharbyr said with a leer. ‘She should be enjoying the scenery with the rest of us.’

‘No, no. The master said to bring her to him unknowing of her fate,’ Xagor said emphatically. Kharbyr mouthed a silent ‘oh’ and said nothing more on the matter.

‘We will proceed to the gate,’ Morr rumbled, swinging his blade up onto his shoulder.

‘And which way would that be?’ Sindiel called to Morr’s retreating back as he tramped off into the red smog. The incubus did not respond and they hurried to catch up with him before he vanished from sight.

Yllithian took more than an hour to reach Bellathonis’s hidden lab, having first to accept the plaudits of the common dross that flocked to Ashkeri Talon on hearing news of a returning raid. The word had spread with the wildfire speed of all gossip. There were cheering crowds of wretched, toothless slaves completely covering the docking talon before Yllithian’s vessel even lowered its boarding ramps.

Standing proud and haughty at the prow of his personal barque Yllithian drifted slowly over the teeming masses. Inner turmoil clawed at him with the desire to depart directly but it was equally important for his face to be seen and for his personal legend to be enhanced just a little more. There goes the archon of the White Flames, they would say, see how powerful he’s become.

Some of the wretches had seized several of their number and hung them up by the wrists to impress the archons with their fervour. As Yllithian passed metal-bladed whips were being used on them, beginning at the shins and working their way upwards. The surging crowd revelled in the crude display of pain and cruelty, shouting curses at the victims and laughing at their agonised screams. Blood and viscera flew, splattering from the barque’s protective shields like rain.

It was a gratifying diversion certainly, but of little direct benefit to his current machinations. After a cursory parade, Yllithian’s barque swept away towards his palace in the spires of High Commorragh at its highest speed.

He came to Bellathonis’s new laboratory by hidden ways from the White Flames’ palace, negotiating the labyrinth alone as he would trust none of his own retinue with the secret. The laboratory chamber was much changed from his last visitation. Harsh lights had been strung from the walls that seemed to emphasise rather than relieve the gloom. Two crystal-fronted sarcophagi dangled from the unseen ceiling by chains. The equipment and stores piled along the walls had a sinister aspect to them, some gleam of sharp edges and oiled metal that spoke of cutting and crushing. A table had been placed in the exact centre of the chamber, scrubbed and horrid in its clinical simplicity.

Bellathonis was waiting for him, the haemonculus’s wrack servants lined up behind him like a class of nervous schoolchildren. He took one look at Yllithian and then dismissed the wracks so that they could continue their work. It was self-evident that the worldsinger was not present and the mission had been a failure. The master haemonculus bowed deeply.

‘Archon Yllithian, I am honoured that you grace us with your presence. My apologies that we are not fully prepared to receive the catalyst at this time.’

Yllithian accepted the proffered bait graciously. ‘Fear not, Bellathonis, I am not fully prepared to supply it at this time,’ he said.

Bellathonis’s brows rose marginally at the news. ‘Oh? How regrettable. I presume that the mission was unsuccessful?’

‘That is… undetermined as yet,’ Yllithian glanced around at the masked wracks now hard at work. ‘I would speak to you of this matter privately. Not to impugn the trustworthiness of your minions, but I trust no one.’

‘Of course, my archon, very wise.’ Bellathonis clapped his hands and the wracks fled from the chamber at once. Yllithian waited until they were alone before he spoke again.

‘Something unusual certainly occurred on Lileathanir, it’s my belief that the World Shrine was breached by my agents.’ He went on to tell Bellathonis briefly about the raid and its outcome. The haemonculus stroked his long chin and nodded in sympathy.

‘Very disappointing. No agents and no worldsinger either. I see your dilemma but I confess myself at a loss as to how I can assist you in resolving it.’

‘I do not require your assistance, Bellathonis, I require access to Angevere. Don’t insult my intelligence by denying that you’ve perfected a way of interrogating her by now.’

Bellathonis made the briefest of internal calculations before replying. It would be unwise to let Yllithian know how much of his plan had already been revealed by Angevere. ‘Of course, my archon, it was an intriguing diversion. I have had little opportunity to exercise the array but it is fully functional. If you would be so kind as to step this way…’

The crone and her three pain-proxies were unchanged from when Bellathonis had left them earlier. Yllithian took in the arrangement with a single glance as he stepped into the cell with the haemonculus.

‘I’m afraid I still fail to understand,’ said Bellathonis. ‘A warp-dabbler casts runes or cards or bones to tell the future. This one has no hands.’

‘I’m surprised at you, Bellathonis,’ Yllithian admonished. ‘Had you pursued your arcane studies sufficiently you would know those are only safeguards – psychic fuses, if you will. Angevere can peep beyond the veil all on her own with sufficient inducement.’

Bellathonis smiled grimly. ‘Ordinarily the existence of safeguards implies an increased risk is incurred by their absence.’

‘A risk I’m prepared to take under the circumstances. I need to know what happened, whether any of the agents survived and, if so, where they are now. If you can offer me an alternate method of securing that information I’m quite prepared to consider it.’

Bellathonis remained silent. Like all Commorrites he had a deep repugnance spiced with a mixture of terrible fascination and atavistic fear when it came to the warp-touched. All eldar possessed an intuitive psychic ability; it built their first golden empire and almost destroyed them by creating She Who Thirsts. Most in Commorragh used drugs and intensive training to seal off the dangerous psychic conduits in their minds. Some broke Vect’s laws by embracing their gifts and flirting with them briefly – typically to the great woe of anyone in the vicinity – before being consumed by She Who Thirsts, if Vect’s castigators didn’t find them first. Only a bare few survived long enough to gain any true insight. Yllithian chose to interpret Bellathonis’s silence as acquiescence.

‘As I thought, you see that this is the only way. Activate your device and proceed with the questioning at once.’

Bellathonis nodded and made the appropriate connections. The hanging bodies of the pain-proxies stirred as if they were ruffled by a spectral breeze.

‘Yllithian, my slayer, returns to ask forgiveness? Bellathonis and I were just – Saasaaaaahhhhh!!!!’

Yllithian glared at Bellathonis darkly. ‘Apologies, my archon, momentary feedback on the regulator,’ Bellathonis said contritely.

Yllithian turned his attention back to the crone. ‘Tell me what occurred in the World Shrine on Lileathanir during our recent raid,’ he ordered.

‘I cannot see beyond these walls, your own blade ensured that.’

Yllithian gestured to Bellathonis and triple-voiced shrieks ripped through the narrow cell. He gestured again and the nerve-tearing flow of pain was halted.

‘Do not lie to me, Angevere, the knowledge is there. All you must do is reach out for it. Consider for a while the momentary dangers of this small thing when weighed against an eternity of pain.’

Bellathonis moved the regulator to its highest setting and waited with Yllithian while the resultant screams became hoarse.

CHAPTER 10

ESCAPING DEATH

Morr forged a straight path towards the highest of the skeletal shapes rearing up out of the red murk of Iron Thorn. His sabatons left deep imprints in the scrubby grass as though he were crunching through hoarfrost and tiny puffs of rust billowed up from each footfall. Xyriadh pushed ahead to scout, followed by Aez’ashya and Kharbyr. Eventually Morr seemed content to fall back to act as rearguard with Sindiel while Xagor continued to carry the worldsinger.

The smog became denser, filling their mouths and noses with a sharp metallic tang as they pushed deeper into it. The ground levelled out and they began to pass irregularly jutting shapes that might once have been trees and bushes, now rendered into corroded masses of thorn-like spars. Occasionally the ground trembled and they heard distant gurgling sounds somewhere beneath their feet as though they were walking on the belly of some giant. Rhythmic hammering drifted into their hearing and faded out again, only to return redoubled a few minutes later.

They slithered through the choking smog as quickly and quietly as they could but they soon spotted silent watchers paralleling their course. Luminous eyes glittered in the red mist and weirdly distorted shadows limped in their wake. The strange denizens of Iron Thorn were gathering, one by one at first and then by the dozen. The presence of life seemed to draw them forth, the hated biological excrescence within their realm pulling them in like white blood cells fighting an infection. Fear was keeping them at bay for the present but their unthinkable lust to destroy would soon overcome it. The remade half-life of Iron Thorn had long since learned to hate the biologicals that invaded their realm.

Kharbyr suspected that the fear that held the shuffling multitude in check was not inspired by their scurrying quarry but by mightier hunters that were abroad somewhere in the sub-realm. He couldn’t shake the feeling that some vast, cool intellect perceived their progress, something that brought with it a twisted sense of wrongness that resonated through the whole sub-realm. The presence felt close, as if its chill breath were already on the nape of their necks. Its chosen instruments had found the spoor and were remorselessly closing in on their prey. It might be better to take his own life now, rather than wait to be hunted down and torn apart by iron fingers…

Aez’ashya reached over and slapped Kharbyr around the side of the head. ‘Focus!’ she hissed. ‘We aren’t caught yet.’ He realised with a shock that the blade gripped in his hand had been creeping towards his throat, seemingly of its own volition. He gazed in confusion at his companions and wondered how many of them were being assailed by insidious thoughts that were not their own.

Ahead of them the vague distortion that marked Xyriadh’s progress slithered to an abrupt halt.

‘No way forwards,’ Xyriadh’s voice hissed anxiously in their ears.

‘Explain,’ rumbled Morr.

‘Dozens of those things up ahead, maybe hundreds. They’re blocking our path forwards.’

‘What are they doing?’ asked Sindiel.

‘Standing there, swaying. I’d say they were singing, but there’s no sound coming out.’

‘They are emitting ultrasonics intended to disrupt our cognitive processes,’ said Morr.

‘Or they’re supplicating the master of this place and begging to be given our souls,’ suggested Aez’ashya. ‘Either way I honestly don’t think we’re going to be friends.’

The sense of wrongness wafted more strongly around them, like a foetid breeze. The smog rippled and the harsh lines of the skeletal ruins wavered for a moment before solidifying into subtly altered shapes. The rhythmic hammering rose in intensity, now accompanied by an endless squealing as of great wheels turning. The hunters were coming.

‘Defensive positions,’ Morr ordered. ‘Get out of the open.’

The towering incubus took the lead and battered his way into a row of ferric shrubs that resembled spear-pointed railings more than vegetation. The strange entities in the mist seemed emboldened by cornering their prey and quickly pushed in closer to surround them. As they did so, the cursed dead of Iron Thorn became clearly visible for the first time.

They were hollow, mannequin-like forms that mocked life with their mismatched limbs and patchwork bodies. A hideous, sighing moan could be heard from the things as they pressed in closer around the makeshift fortress. Step by step the agents moved back into a defensive ring, confronting the creatures across bulwarks of rusting, twisted iron. With nowhere else to go they halted and readied themselves for the inevitable attack.

‘From peril, into peril they flee, carrying with them the pure heart. Into the lands of the lost they travel, hunted by many enemies. The Masquerade follows their every move but will not aid them, save with a clean end if they should fall.’

The temperature in the cell had dipped sharply as the head of Angevere began to speak through its pain-proxies. Glittering hoarfrost bloomed up the walls and a chill breeze had sprung seemingly from nowhere. Yllithian paced in the narrow confines of the cell, a sign of frustration he seldom permitted himself.

‘This talk about lands of the lost tells us nothing!’ he snapped. ‘Where can they be found now? How can the pure heart be secured?’

The crone’s voice changed, distorted into a coarse grumble. ‘What is “now”? From one moment to the next is a skipping stone, our lives mere ripples intersecting.’ The voice changed to a high, nasal whine. ‘They remake their future with every movement. The pure heart! Everything around it is distorted, a mirror. Hatred begets hatred!’

Bellathonis looked at Yllithian questioningly. The haemonculus did not look frightened, but seemed intensely wary and curious. This sort of warp-babble was entirely outside his experience and Yllithian’s own studies extended more to control and manipulation than interpretation… Yllithian stopped pacing and cursed himself for his own ignorance.

At some unheard signal the thornlings suddenly attacked. Four wedges of them pushed their way through the barriers in a flailing mass. Hinged blade-arms thrashed and peg-toothed jaws snapped as the horde rushed in. They were so closely packed that they resembled rust-coloured worms as they squeezed through the breaches in the iron hedge.

Morr’s blade swept ruin through them with hurricane force, hurling about heads and limbs as if they were confetti. Aez’ashya’s knives wove a deadly web, quickly piling up a drift of flopping, clattering bodies around her feet. Kharbyr lashed out wildly at the tide of iron limbs threatening to engulf them, Sindiel and Xyriadh fought desperately with knives and pistols, their rifles rendered useless at such close quarters. Xagor crouched in the centre protecting his prisoner as if his life depended on it, which in point of fact it did.

The thornlings were quick and strong but they made awkward fighters. More often than not their own numbers impeded them in the confined space. Nonetheless if they felt pain or fatigue they did not show it, and their extremities had a disturbing tendency to continue attacking mindlessly even once they had been separated from their owners. Sindiel and Xyriadh soon began to busy themselves by grabbing severed clockwork limbs and tossing them outside the improvised barricade.

The rust-red tide suddenly ebbed away, stumbling back from the relentless blades of Morr and Aez’ashya. The survivors rallied amid the newly created junkheaps and began refitting lost limbs to shattered stumps, their cold and unblinking eyes lit with the promise of renewed violence. Morr watched them for a few seconds before hefting his blade and striding out to confront the half-made horde.

‘Allow them no chance to recover,’ he said simply.

Aez’ashya needed no second invitation and leapt forwards to add her knives again to the devastating arcs carved by Morr’s klaive. The others followed more slowly, kicking away the limbless torsos and chattering skulls left in Morr and Aez’ashya’s wake. The surviving thornlings limped away into the choking smog to escape the merciless assault, suddenly seeming more like living creatures for an instant as they fled. The ground shook and gurgled beneath their feet in impotent protest.

‘Ha!’ spat Aez’ashya. ‘Not so–’

Something big and fast came hurtling out of the murk and leapt straight at Morr. Spike-studded wheels tore at him as he was borne backwards, knocking his great blade from his grasp. The thing was a chimerical offspring of predatory cat and cycle, its piston-like fore and hind limbs twisted to hold scythed wheels beneath a curving armoured back. Another machine roared in and tried to sideswipe Aez’ashya but the nimble wych was too quick to be caught by its blades, somersaulting over the machine at the last moment. Xyriadh ran out of the path of a third set of eye-lights, chased by chattering trails of solid slugs that stitched through the earth at her feet.

Morr was wrestling with the beast machine that had pinned him, holding its madly spinning fore-wheel away from his body. Bloodstone tusks on the incubus’s helm suddenly spat a pulse of ruddy energy into the guts of the machine that struck sparks and flame from its innards. He twisted and threw the thing aside with a mighty heave, sending it crashing into the ground where it lay with wheels spinning feebly. Eye-lights stabbed through the murk as the rest of the hunting pack came roaring back around for another attack.

Aez’ashya immediately turned and sprinted away from the scant protection of her comrades. The beast machines swung aside to run down the fleeing figure, dirt spraying from their hind wheels as they accelerated after her. She dodged aside from their whirling spikes at the last instant, slapping one palm down on a machine as she vaulted over it. The machine was spinning around to chase her when the device she had attached to it detonated. Lightning burst from it, enveloping its entire body in crackling skeins of electricity. Fat blue sparks flew and the beast machine toppled over helplessly. Its companions slewed aside and vanished into the all-enveloping red smog with a despairing shriek.

‘Haywire grenade,’ Aez’ashya said with a wicked grin. ‘These have to be some of the stupidest ideas for death machines I’ve ever seen. What use is something that can’t stop without falling over?’

Morr bent and retrieved his klaive. His armour was dented and scored in a dozen places but he showed no signs of harm, save perhaps for moving a little more stiffly than normal.

‘We must continue. This resistance is intended to keep us from the gate,’ he said.

‘Veslyin the Anchorite said that time has no meaning in the Sea of Souls. The warp can give glimpses of the past, the future and the present because within it they are all one. According to him when dealing with its denizens trying to attribute events to a timeframe in terms of past, present or future, is pointless – they must be addressed in terms of absolute actions.

‘With that in mind tell me this, crone, where will my agents carrying the pure heart re-enter the city?’

‘They will return in triumph at the feet of giants if they return at all. The guardians of the gate must be defeated first, and that outcome is unknowable.’

The gate towered five stories high, gnarled metal pillars supported a thick lintel inset with wraithbone. It was open, the portal’s mirrored surface clearly visible shimmering between the uprights. It was also guarded. A squad of Black Heart kabalite warriors lounged insouciantly in front of the gate with their Raider craft landed so that it restricted entry. They were heavily armed and despite their relaxed demeanour they looked ready to spring into action at the first sign of trouble.

‘Vect’s curs, what a coincidence,’ Xyriadh said when she concluded her scouting report. ‘Do you think they’re here on our account?’

‘Unlikely,’ replied Morr. ‘They guard the gate to prevent the denizens of Iron Thorn troubling the city.’

‘Why even bother keeping it open at all?’ Sindiel asked. ‘There’s nothing here!’

His naïveté prompted a laugh from the towering incubus, a short cough of levity that burst and then swiftly vanished like a bubble emerging from tar.

‘You have much to learn of our ways, foundling,’ Morr said. ‘On this occasion I shall instruct you. The gate remains open because this sub-realm belongs to the tyrant. If it were closed he could no longer claim to dominate it as he does all the others. Some of the other sub-realms make this one seem a pleasure garden. Vect lays claim to them all. They are territory, and territory within the webway is finite.’

Sindiel blinked, slightly rocked by the incubus’s intimidating declamation.

‘Why not simply guard the other side then?’ the renegade ventured. ‘That would be safer than risking it out here, surely?’

‘Truly you have much to learn,’ Morr intoned and said no more.

‘The risk is the whole point, Sindiel,’ Aez’ashya whispered conspiratorially. ‘If there were no risk they wouldn’t stay on guard at all, they’d go and find something more exciting to do. They probably haven’t even been ordered to guard the gate, they’re just here because they feel it needs doing and they think that doing it might win them some favour.’

Sindiel’s mind whirled at the thought of such ill discipline.

‘Can’t we just wait until they wander off then?’ he asked.

‘Could be an hour, could be a week. We don’t have the time to wait,’ Xyriadh said with an air of finality.

‘We lack the strength for a direct assault. We must employ subterfuge,’ Morr said. ‘Sindiel, Xyriadh, move forward to hidden positions with sight lines to the Raider crew. Kharbyr and Aez’ashya will accompany me. Xagor will remain here with the prisoner.’

‘What’s the plan?’ asked Xyriadh.

‘We will approach them and negotiate,’ Morr replied.

‘And what happens when they’ve decided to kill us because we’re so weak that we tried to negotiate?’

‘We will already be close enough that their considerable advantage in ranged weaponry will be negated.’

The incubus hefted his klaive on to his shoulder, the single eye in his blank-faced helm glaring around at them in challenge. Sindiel and Xyriadh obediently took up their rifles and crept off towards the gate.

Bellathonis crouched uncomfortably on the open deck of a dart-like Venom grav craft as it hurtled through Low Commorragh carrying him back to his tower in the Aviaries. Fascinating as it had been to witness Yllithian at work, it had delayed Bellathonis’s departure to an almost critical degree. In the end he’d had to leave Yllithian alone with some basic instructions on how to operate the array, make his apologies and leave.

It went against every instinct for a haemonculus to leave one of the uninitiated to conduct their own procedures, let alone using experimental equipment, but self-preservation had to come first. Yllithian’s description of the raid made Bellathonis fear that Malixian might be returning in less than ideal humour. Under those circumstances attracting questions about Bellathonis’s own whereabouts and activities could prove decidedly fatal.

Slipstream clawed at him as the Venom dipped between domes and needle-pointed antennae to intersect with the Beryl Gate on the Grand Canal. This close to them a trick of the wardings made it appear as if the Aviaries really existed in a pocket of reality just beyond their thick, oily membrane instead of an unguessable distance away in a different part of the webway. Bellathonis’s hire-pilot descended slowly to the gate, finding it open and guarded by a handful of warriors eagerly awaiting Malixian’s return.

Arriving at his tower Bellathonis found another craft already docked there, a Raider bearing the icon of the White Flames. Absurdly he thought for a moment that Yllithian had arrived ahead of him, but that was impossible. He entered his tower warily but was greeted by his two door-grotesques with the usual slobbering joy he would expect from the slab-muscled brutes. One of his wracks, Menetis, stood wringing his hands in the entry hall.

‘Master! Guests arrived in your absence!’ Menetis bleated. A nasty stab of concern shot through Bellathonis’s mind.

‘I hope you were not indiscreet enough to mention I was not at home?’ Bellathonis said gently.

‘No! Master, no! They were told only that you were busy and could not be disturbed. They elected to wait until you became available.’

‘Ah, I see. And just who might these guests be, hmm? An essential point that I note you’ve so far failed to communicate.’

Menetis looked horrified. ‘The haemonculus Syiin and seven of his attending wracks are here, master!’ he blurted. Bellathonis smiled disconcertingly at that news.

‘Is he really? That’s extremely interesting,’ the master haemonculus purred. He pondered for a moment. ‘Tell Syiin he may come and see me in my private quarters presently if he’ll forbear bringing his attendants with him, we do have some private matters to discuss.’

Sindiel could count ten warriors through the scope of his needle rifle. They wore black armour burnished to a high gloss with functional-looking spikes and blades protruding from shoulders and elbows. They had caught some wretched denizen of the sub-realm and were amusing themselves by blasting parts off it then waiting for it to struggle back to a semblance of life before blasting it to pieces again.

The warriors tensed as they sighted Morr and his two companions moving forwards. Ten weapon muzzles simultaneously rose to aim at them as they approached. Morr held up an open hand to show he intended no violence and kept coming. This was the danger point. Morr had to lead his party blithely across the open ground and gamble that the warriors’ curiosity would stay their hand. Sindiel’s role was to target the Raider’s gunner, Xyriadh was covering the steersman perched at the back of the ornate craft from another position a hundred metres away.

The gunner was a difficult shot because the target was half-hidden behind curving prow armour and pintle-mounted weapon. Sindiel carefully placed a targeting reticule on the gunner’s face and then zoomed the scope view out so that he could see Morr and the others. A mental impulse was all it would take to fire the needle rifle and send its deadly shard of poison hurtling across the intervening space. He slowed his breathing and waited for the signal.

Morr tramped forwards, relentlessly closing the distance. One of the warriors lowered his rifle and raised one hand in an obvious ‘stop’ gesture while the incubus and his two companions were still a dozen metres away. Sindiel readied himself, his world focusing down to the pinpoint of the targeting reticule on his target. The progress of Morr and the others receded to barely float at the edge of his consciousness.

His concentration was shattered when a powerful grip unexpectedly fastened onto his ankle.

‘Ah, Syiin, how good to see you.’

‘Bellathonis. You appear in the very prime of health.’

The two haemonculi regarded each other for a moment across the riotous clutter of Bellathonis’s private quarters. Tables, divans and bureaus peeked from beneath a thick layer of spilled vellum sheets, metal models, jars, vials, surgical tools and open tomes. Syiin’s gaze was particularly searching as he looked at the taller master haemonculus. It was Bellathonis that first spoke again to break the silence.

‘So to what do I owe the pleasure, Syiin? I regret that I’ve been unavailable of late but my Archon Malixian is a demanding one. At this very moment I should be making preparations for his triumphant return.’

‘Yes. Your archon, Malixian,’ Syiin mused. ‘I wonder how he would respond to the knowledge that he’s being cuckolded by another? One with ambitions that would bring terrible woes down upon the city.’

Bellathonis appeared genuinely taken aback by the statement. What had Syiin’s determined digging turned up? He answered carefully.

‘If such a theoretical situation were to occur I’m sure the consequences would be dire, an effect that I’m equally sure would be felt in various reciprocating quarters.’

‘You think that Yllithian would avenge you?’ Syiin said with the delighted incredulity normally reserved for the antics of particularly naïve children. ‘I’m afraid you’re sadly mistaken in that regard, he is a far from sentimental individual. I suspect he would be too concerned about the tyrant’s castigators sniffing around.’

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 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 us,’ 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.’

Yllithian fought with the urge to strike the renegade. The easy familiarity he spoke with and his professed ignorance were insults a kabalite would have suffered grievously for. Yllithian quelled his feelings carefully before responding. The whelp was fresh and it was not the proper time to begin his re-education.

‘I shall make enquiries from sources that may prove more educational,’ he said acidly. ‘For the present it is my belief that we must proceed with the next phase of my plan immediately. Between this Motley character and the guards that escaped you in Iron Thorn we must assume that the tyrant has heard of your mission by now.

‘Therefore we must act before Vect can start imagining what uses we might have for a captive worldsinger. He need only demand her as tribute and the whole scheme is ruined. In order to prevent the plan being further compromised it’s my intention to use the group of you for this next phase. With the exception of Xyriadh you are not of my kabal and I cannot compel you to go on what will certainly be another dangerous mission, but know that your perseverance will be repaid a thousandfold should you succeed.’

Yllithian paused and looked around at the agents levelly before continuing. ‘Also know that if you refuse to go you will earn my eternal displeasure.’ Morr was the first to break the resulting pall of silence.

‘When will Archon Kraillach be restored?’ he said.

‘Bellathonis tells me that he cannot begin the process until the second phase of the plan is completed.’

‘And what does that entail?’ Sindiel asked, earning himself a sharp look from Yllithian.

‘The recovery of a relic,’ Morr said, ‘from a highly dangerous place. That is all you need to know.’

‘Just so,’ said Yllithian smoothly. ‘Preparations have been made that will ensure your success. There is no cause for delay.’

‘I will go,’ Morr said immediately, to Yllithian’s surprise.

‘In your case you might better serve your archon by ensuring the Realm Eternal doesn’t tear itself apart in your continued absence.’

‘Unnecessary. I will issue orders to my brothers in Kraillach’s service and they will keep the peace until I return with my archon restored.’

One by one the others assented to go: Xyriadh out of loyalty, Aez’ashya out of curiosity, Sindiel and the rest out of fear of Yllithian’s displeasure.

‘Very well then.’ Yllithian gestured and his guards brought forward a slim black case. He opened it to reveal a row of silver amulets. Each comprised a simple chain holding a smooth gem in an ornate, clawed mounting. Soft inner lights swam in the depths of the gems and they exuded the unmistakable allure of captured souls.

‘Spirit stones…’ Sindiel whispered in dismay.

‘Just so,’ replied Yllithian, openly enjoying the renegade’s discomfort before shutting the case with a snap. ‘Attuned so that their contents will mask your presence and completely protect you from the… influences of the place where you must go. My guards will guide you to the appropriate portal as soon as you are fit to travel. Mind that you do not tarry here overlong.’

Yllithian swept out, leaving the case of amulets and a dozen kabalite trueborn to ‘guide’ the agents on the next part of their journey. He wondered briefly whether the half-finished amulets he was pressing into service would actually prove to be of any help whatsoever when put to the test. It was a gamble, only the latest in a succession of gambles he was being forced to make. He consoled himself that if the amulets only persuaded his agents to enter Shaa-dom by convincing them that they stood a chance of survival then they had served a substantial part of their purpose.

Kraillach stared hungrily down at the white form on the slab below him with his regrown eyes. His raw-meat hands grasped for her warmth but met only cold, unyielding crystal now fouled by his own pale blood. He sensed a thin etheric twist of life and energy emanating from her, squeezed out by her trepidation and discomfort.

Kraillach lapped thirstily at the psychic stream, aching for the full richness of life he could sense contained in the frail body below. In his weakened state it seemed like the promise of paradise lay there, a warm and sensuous ocean into which he ached to plunge and achieve rebirth. He beat his raw-meat fists uselessly against the crystal in frustration, croaking feeble imprecations. The black-clad haemonculus and his scurrying wrack servants paid him no heed.

‘What made all these scratches on the walls? They’re everywhere.’

‘Daemons. The archon of Talon Cyriix tried making a pact with daemons to help him overthrow the tyrant. The tables were turned when he got trapped in here with them.’

‘That’s… that’s, gods, that’s awful. Did everyone die?’

Aez’ashya snorted. ‘Only the lucky ones.’

Sindiel absorbed that piece of information in silence. The worming passages they were following had seemed claustrophobic before and they felt doubly so now. He was starting to realise that the wisdom of Commorragh, such as it was, was entirely communicated through grisly tales of failed plots and successful ones, incautious leaders and vengeful families. Their lore was to be found in a dark tapestry of plots and counter-plots that had been weaving through the city for ten thousand years.

He had been doing his best to befriend Aez’ashya. Initially it had been out of sheer cupidity. No eldar female he’d ever met was as alive and passionate as she was and it kindled a feeling in him he’d never encountered before – the desire to possess something and deny it to all others. Aez’ashya knowingly welcomed his attentions, getting seemingly endless pleasure out of alternately encouraging him and mocking his virginal awkwardness. That had bothered Sindiel at first until he noticed that she acted in almost exactly the same way towards any male, including the hard-faced youth, Kharbyr, and the terrifying incubus, Morr. She assiduously ignored the ugly servant that hung around with Kharbyr as if he were beneath her attention, which was entirely possible given the way the servant grovelled to her all the time.

Aez’ashya was a mine of information on the realities of living in the dark city and seemed to actively enjoy educating Sindiel. However he was beginning to find all of her answers about Commorragh quite predictably coloured by an underlying ethos.

When he asked why they didn’t use a portal or a flyer to reach Talon Cyriix she’d laughed at him. ‘If we want everyone in the city to know where we’re going there’d be easier ways to announce it. Yllithian’s enemies would try to interfere with us just on principle. All craft leaving the White Flames’ fortress are watched and all portals are guarded, so we walk. That’s just the way it is.’

That’s just the way it is. Even the rich and powerful had to live like hunted animals, because they truly were hunted by those with less power than themselves. The entire hierarchy of the dark city seethed constantly as those on top repressed those below, while those below rebelled in every fashion they could.

Aez’ashya’s personality was as smooth and as impenetrable as a river-smoothed stone. She apparently lived entirely in the moment with no thoughts of the future beyond the immediate consequences of her actions, and that only in a limited sense. As best Sindiel could tell she was motivated by a kind of restlessness that would culminate in her sticking knives in people if she drummed her heels for too long. She was constantly looking for the next fix of adrenaline. Sindiel’s attraction to her had begun to fade but he still found he liked her.

‘So… this place where we’re going now, it’s supposed to be worse than here?’

‘Much worse. They say that after Vect wrecked Shaa-dom the daemons never left it.’

There was a breathless moment of cold and then a rush of sultry heat. Yllithian’s agents found themselves standing at the edge of a thoroughfare. Blackened flagstones lay beneath their feet and the twisted remnants of trees and statues clawed at the roiling skies. Warp-taint hung heavy in the air and reality itself had a sickly, greasy feel to it. The horizon was lit by unearthly fires and flakes of ash drifted in the air.

Kharbyr could barely make out the shell the protective amulet cast about him, it was a faint sheen that barely flickered on the edge of perception and failed to engender much confidence. He looked around at the others and found them all glancing around nervously with the exception of Morr. He seemed as imperturbable as ever regardless of the freakishness of his environment.

‘The palace of El’Uriaq lies at the heart of the conflagration,’ the incubus rumbled. ‘We must move swiftly before our arrival is noticed.’

‘Do we have anything even resembling a plan?’ asked Sindiel with shaky levity.

‘Get to the palace without being torn apart by daemons, after that we wing it,’ Aez’ashya told him sweetly.

Their course was not hard to set; the invisible heat of the breach beat upon their faces even at a distance, and the eternal fires lit their way. The group made their way cautiously along ruined thoroughfares and boulevards trying to balance speed and stealth. The way became progressively more difficult as they moved forwards, and they increasingly had to backtrack from rubble-choked streets as they sought a clear path. The ravaged city appeared to be deserted but the sensation of being watched remained unshakeable.

Xyriadh was the first to spot one of the soulless. It was a wretchedly emaciated figure squatting on the curb ahead of them, arms locked around knees and rocking gently.

It raised its face at their approach, its luminous, hungry eyes searching hopelessly, slack jaw working mindlessly. It could sense a presence nearby but did not seem able to perceive them properly. It whined in frustration as it cast about seeking the souls it could feel nearby. They edged around the creature and moved onwards with many backward glances from Sindiel.

‘That’s what happens if your soul is taken by… Her… isn’t it?’ he whispered to Aez’ashya.

‘If you’re lucky,’ she replied. ‘That one must have had some shred of intelligence left to it. Most don’t have so much self-possession.’

Sindiel shuddered. At the edge of his consciousness he could sense a dull, keening wail that seemed caught forever on the verge of rising to a shriek. His sense of vulnerability constantly left him weak at the knees as he trudged onwards. He couldn’t shake the idea from his mind that the times of the Fall must have been something like this, only infinitely worse. The feelings of bravado that had driven him here had evaporated and now he clung to his sinister companions desperately, terrified of being left behind.

Soon they encountered more soulless wretches wandering aimlessly through the streets, clustering in small groups here and there. The structures around them were becoming more ruinous as they wormed their way into the guts of the slaughtered city; increasing numbers of them were just empty shells staring hollow-eyed across blasted lots. The flames on the horizon were closer now, forming an eerie blue-green aurora that covered half the sky.

Many of the soulless seemed to be pathetically re-enacting parts of their lost lives, strolling with dead friends, visiting destroyed bazaars. As the warp-taint blew stronger reality flickered with fragments of memory: clean white streets, multi-coloured minarets, children at play. The vision blew away like smoke just as quickly as it came, scraps of it stuttering and recurring again and again in a hundred variations.

Morr had led them with certainty thus far, but now he stopped, seemingly confounded by the twisting realities. The sky cracked and fragments of twisted stone whirled past above them in striated bands. Shadow-forms in the crackling atmosphere above erected palaces and towers in mockery of the shattered street beneath, the dark stones flowing together and spinning apart to reform again in a thousand different shapes.

‘Something’s happening up ahead,’ gasped Xyriadh.

‘Handmaiden,’ Morr warned.

The soulless were gathering, seeming to ooze from the shadows. They were clustering about a lambent figure at a crossroads, kneeling and fawning before it. The entity moved among them enveloped in a golden glow, astral fires chasing across its limbs and brow. It was a perfectly formed eldar female in shape and stature, but its shining eyes spoke of nothing mortal. Tiny sparks of light dripped from its extended fingers, sending the soulless into paroxysms of ecstasy. It gestured beatifically with a cruel half-smile on its lips as it scattered its bounty, exactly like a farmer feeding their livestock.

The agents froze in place, melding themselves into whatever cover they could find. The shining eyes swept languidly in their direction and away again. Long moments dragged past before the glowing figure moved away and disappeared from sight still trailed by a body of soulless supplicants.

‘Handmaiden?’ Sindiel whispered fearfully.

‘A corrupted vessel,’ Morr answered. ‘There are said to be seven of them if the legends are to be believed. They minister to the outer precincts.’

‘How do we fight them?’

‘We do not unless we have to.’

‘And if we have to?’

‘We must destroy their bodies completely.’

‘Is that why you made me bring this?’ Sindiel hefted a stubby-looking blaster he carried that seemed to be entirely constructed of hooks and blades. Xyriadh had also exchanged her splinter rifle for a monomolecular shredder, a similarly dangerous looking weapon that projected clouds of monofilament mesh.

‘Excessive questioning, in particular on the subject of the obvious, becomes tiresome. Be silent.’

The agents proceeded in silence, bypassing the crossroads where they had seen the Handmaiden and cutting through a rubble-choked alley. Reality shuddered again and for an instant they found themselves walking beneath balconies garlanded with flowers. Noble lords and ladies called languidly down to them with offers of entertainment and companionship. The bubble of unreality burst as quickly as it had come and they found themselves back beneath crumbled walls and a bruised-looking sky. They came to a great crack that spread across the street from building to building, almost three metres wide at its narrowest point and unguessably deep. Blue and purple vapours rose from the depths, twisting unnaturally together into half-formed faces or limbs that chased one another upwards until they were obliterated by the invisible pressures of the breach.

‘It’s blocked! We’ll have to turn back and find another way!’ said Sindiel with some relief. Something about the vapours was deeply disturbing to him, altogether too reminiscent of the hungry flames of a funeral pyre.

Morr merely glanced at him contemptuously before backing up a few paces and running forwards. He leapt across the yawning gulf and landed on the other side with an echoing crash, the vapours writhing in agitation about him as he stood. Aez’ashya was close behind, executing a flip halfway across as she made light work of the jump. Kharbyr and Xyriadh were less certain, in particular Kharbyr took an excessively long run-up before he made his leap. Xagor hurled himself at the jump resignedly, evidently expecting to plummet to his doom. The wrack jumped too soon and landed right at the crumbling edge of the precipice. His arms flailed hopelessly for a moment as he teetered backwards on the edge, his companions watching dispassionately to see if he fell. At the last possible moment Kharbyr seemed to relent and leaned forwards to grasp Xagor by the shoulder to pull him to safety.

Sindiel was left on the wrong side of the crack, wondering how long the others would wait for him. If his understanding of Aez’ashya was anything to go by it would not be long. Once again the terrors of being alone in this daemon-haunted place drove him forwards. His legs pumped maniacally as he sprinted forwards, determined not to repeat Xagor’s mistake by jumping too soon. Instead he almost left it too late; as he pushed off from the near edge he felt the stones crumbling away beneath his feet, robbing him of the vital push he needed to cross the gap. The multi-coloured vapours issuing from the crack hissed and spluttered about him, tangling his limbs and miring his thoughts. There was a timeless moment as he realised he wasn’t going to make it, and his mind filled with giggling, whispering, insinuating voices that were not his own.

The far edge of the crack rose up and smashed him in the midriff, knocking the wind out of him. His hands scrabbled desperately for grip among the broken stones as he slid backwards, his legs kicking into empty space devoid of any footholds.

‘Help me!’ he gasped to the others, the words contorting the vapours around him into mocking, screaming faces. No one moved. Sindiel slipped a few centimetres further as he tried to lever himself forwards with his elbows. Still no one moved to help him and Sindiel suddenly understood a new truth about the dark city. None of them, not even Aez’ashya, valued him enough to take the small risk involved in pulling him to safety. They would stand and watch him die, feeding on his desperation to the last moment rather than lift a finger to help him.

Sindiel cursed and kicked out to one side, catching his feet at last. Little by little he managed to scrabble over the edge in an undignified heap, experiencing a horrible sensation of vertigo at the last moment as he feared he was about to push himself back into the chasm by accident. He lay on his back panting, feeling the bright torch of hate truly kindle in his heart for the first time. He’d felt a spark of it before when he killed Linthis, a quick pulse as he excised all his anger at her in a single blow that saved his own life by taking hers. This was different: deeper, more affecting. He had sold his soul to join these people, given everything to be with them, little realising how twisted they truly were or how little value they placed on him. He nurtured his hate and allowed it into his heart, the heat of it anchoring him amidst the swirling madness. After a moment he wordlessly picked himself up and rejoined the others, still feeling the pitiless intensity of their gaze upon him.

The agents had emerged onto the edge of an open space, perhaps once a wide promenade or a parade ground but now only a wilderness of cracked stone and windblown dust. Soulless wandered here and there among the ruins, picking listlessly at the bones of their lost world. In the distance to their right the twisted remnants of a mighty palace clawed out of the earth, its melted towers of quartz tilted over sagging walls of obsidian and alabaster. Strains of weird music drifted from the place, a convocation of shrieking laughter and sobbing misery. Above it loomed a horrible black cloud ripped by bursts of multi-coloured fire, writhing snakelike and revealing sudden flashes larger than lightning.

‘It looks more inviting than I’d imagined,’ whispered Aez’ashya. ‘How are we going to find anything in that?’

‘El’Uriaq was no fool, the roots of his palace burrow deep,’ replied Xyriadh. ‘I’ll wager his bones are underground.’

Morr shook his head. ‘We see only ruins now,’ the incubus said. ‘Closer to the breach things will be… different.’

Morr hefted his blade and moved forwards more cautiously than the others had seen him wont to do in the past. The towering incubus moved with surprising grace, gliding through the expanse of tumbled stone with barely a sound. The others followed, emulating his stealth with more or less success. They skirted open areas and worked their way carefully forwards. The first few soulless they encountered still seemed to be unaware of their presence, but as they came closer to the hydra-headed storm cloud marking the breach the wretches began sensing a disturbance. The emaciated figures started to lurch around randomly, heads twisting as if they were casting about for a scent.

‘The amulets are failing!’ hissed Kharbyr. ‘We’ll never make it!’

‘Silence,’ said Morr. ‘Retreat is not an option.’

They could all feel the sinister thrill of She Who Thirsts brushing at their souls by now. The faint fish-scale shimmer that had surrounded them when they first entered Shaa-dom had intensified into a solid glow. The spirit stones they wore around their necks shone like red embers.

‘No, no. Not failing,’ muttered Xagor quietly. ‘Straining, working hard.’

‘Well, that’s reassuring,’ said Aez’ashya. ‘Like Morr said, there’s no use talking about going back, Yllithian will feed us to the daemons personally if we fail him now.’ Her voice sounded brittle, apt to break into hysterics at any moment.

Ahead of them the palace was breaking up into fractal landscapes of possibilities. Towers reared and fell, walls crumbled and rebuilt themselves. Warring shards of possibility inverted the topography at will, doorways opened on empty air and stairs spiralled through impossible geometries.

Gazing into the maelstrom Sindiel felt a persistent part of his mind gibbering at him to flee, but the terror of having to do so alone still kept him trapped in lockstep with the others. His companions might not help him survive individually but they would defend themselves as a group, knowing that therein lay their only chance of survival. He felt a strange mixture of admiration and abhorrence for the dark kin in that moment, even though the torch of his hatred for them was undimmed. That they could be so seemingly undaunted by such a place almost defied his belief. It was as if they were all deaf and he was the only one that could hear the roaring, snorting monstrosity that was treading at their heels.

Each step they took brought the confused whirl ahead into sharper focus, slowly resolving into what was at once a parody of what had been the palace of El’Uriaq and an outraged denial of what had become of it. Its walls reared above them like a giant’s castle, decked with kilometre-long banners proclaiming the ascendance of the emperor of Shaa-dom. Horrid seneschals mounted on strange beasts stood guard before a gate shaped like an open maw. The change in perspective reduced the agents to crawling insects inching below the titanic fortifications as they made for the gate. The seneschals regarded their slow approach with amused disdain.

Without doubt these were daemons of the old tales, sinister and beautiful in some lights but hideously twisted in others. The slender arms terminated in long crab-like claws and their knowing smiles revealed rows of sharpened fangs. Six of them sat before the gate upon sinuous bipedal beasts with curiously equine heads that tasted the air with obscenely long pink tongues. As the agents came closer the daemons chattered excitedly among themselves in a dark tongue that hurt the ears and seemed to brand the air with its eldritch tones. One more supremely hideous and beautiful than the others spurred her mount forwards and called out in a honeyed travesty of the ancient eldar tongue.

‘Welcome, brothers and sisters!’ the thing said. ‘You’ve chosen to cast aside those tiresome bonds of mortality and join us at last. Your coming will be exalted until the stars burn out! A billion slaves will scream your praises for all eternity!’

The agents felt joy at the warmth and friendship in the thing’s words and at the thrilling, secret promise that lay beneath every syllable. Morr’s voice croaked unpleasantly by comparison, filled with doom and woe.

‘Our business is with El’Uriaq and not for the likes of you. Stand aside and let us pass,’ the incubus intoned.

The daemon licked its fangs lasciviously. ‘I think not. One of you must remain with us for our mutual satisfaction, and know that once you enter the palace you will not be permitted to leave it under any circumstances.’ The agents glanced around at one another wondering who might be chosen, and Kharbyr took an excited half-step forwards before Morr’s grating voice halted him.

‘I will not bargain with you, daemon,’ the incubus said. His words were still hanging in the turgid air when his two-metre blade flicked out like a serpent’s tongue. The daemon’s headless mount began collapsing, almost unravelling as the energies holding it together flew apart. Morr neatly caught the daemon on his outstretched weapon as it fell forwards, and flung its thrashing, disintegrating shape into the path of its compatriots as they spurred in to attack.

The glamour of the daemon’s words fell away as violence flared. Xyriadh’s shredder immediately puffed out a cloud of harmless-looking gossamer strands that carved apart one charging mount and rider as if they had run headlong into a wall of rotating blades. Sindiel’s blaster burped out a gob of emerald fire that ate straight through another daemon. Aez’ashya and Kharbyr leapt forwards to fight off the questing tongues of the mounts and the flashing claws of their riders.

An obscene tongue wrapped around Kharbyr’s ankle, writhing up his leg like a constricting snake. The pain of his recent wound rekindled into an incandescent ecstasy that made him howl like an animal. Aez’ashya’s knives lashed out and cut him free. The sellsword rolled on the ground moaning as the succubus stood over him with her blades carving a protective web.

Morr’s blade crashed through another mount and rider in a single stroke, just as Aez’ashya’s knives slashed across an equine face and sent a mount rearing backwards. A cloud of monofilament strands from Xyriadh’s shredder engulfed a daemon rider before it could bring its mount back under control.

Kharbyr recovered sufficiently to redeem some shred of his ego by shooting the last daemon in the face. Psychically infused splinters from his pistol cratered its head as if it were made of soft clay, the daemon collapsing into a cloud of sickly sweet vapour. Morr dispatched the remaining riding beasts with economic sweeps of his great blade.

‘Daemons,’ Morr spat with contempt. ‘Come, we must move on. They will soon reconstitute themselves and return with others.’ He turned and vanished into the shadows that clustered within the maw-like gate.

‘You never even considered accepting their bargain?’ asked Sindiel as he hurried after the disappearing incubus.

‘Daemons always lie,’ Morr said with finality.

Beyond the gate lay a restless columned hall, at one moment the pillars standing proud and upright to support the high roof like mature trees, the next tumbled like the vanquished ranks of a defending army. Ghostly shapes moved through the hall, servants, guards, courtiers and patricians faded into view and vanished again, spirit shadows left behind when the blade of Vect plunged into the heart of the palace and annihilated them in a nuclear inferno. The agents’ amulets blazed brighter than ever, painting the scene with a lurid ruddy hue. At the end of the shuddering hall double doors ran from the mosaiced floor to the high-groined roof. The mind’s eye sometimes caught the unbreakable panels of the doors being hurled to the floor bent and twisted by unthinkable fury, chunks of frescoed ceiling raining down from above.

They stepped through the doors into a vast amphitheatre hung with a galaxy of golden lamps. Another glance saw a blast crater, glowing shrapnel caught in a timeless moment, spinning in place as it blossomed outwards in an imperfect sphere. At its centre a handsome eldar knight sat deep in thought upon the steps of a mountainous throne. From a different angle the throne was a kilometres-high mass of blackened wreckage and the pondering knight was a grinning crimson skull that peeked from the edge of it, preserved from the annihilating fires that had consumed its owner. A raging darkness split the air above the throne-wreck, the breach itself rippling and convulsing as it fed raw warp energy into the corrupted sub-realm.

To speak, even to think so close to the breach was almost impossible. Words took flight as half-formed living things, ideas became jerky flick-book montages of potential outcomes. Yet when three red-eyed, black armoured shapes rose to bar their path the intent of the guardians was clear.

You will not disturb our archon, the shadow-incubi seemed to say. Long have we watched over him in this place, our souls forever bound to him. You shall not have him now or ever.

The figures hefted great two-handed klaives that were cousins to that borne by Morr and strode forwards. At first they were insubstantial, but warp-stuff wove about them as they walked, lending substance to their tenebrous limbs. Morr roared an inarticulate challenge that formed a spectral dragon-head, hissing and spitting flames. He charged into the fray hammering at their blades as a smith hammers on an anvil. Sparks flew as their weapons clashed, carving out arcs of destruction that in this energised air could level mountains or cleave rivers.

A hissing blade swept down at Kharbyr and sent him sprawling, his knife half-melted by a foolhardy attempt to parry. The others fell back firing their weapons desperately, unable to stand before the tsunami power of the shadow-guardians’ rush. Green fire from Sindiel’s blaster splashed harmlessly from the black carapace of one red-eyed fiend. Xyriadh’s shredder proved equally ineffective, its deadly strands passing through the guardian’s armour like smoke. Splinters from Xagor and Kharbyr rattled off the impervious figures to no avail.

Aez’ashya sprang forwards with a bright laugh of discovery. Darting beneath a scything blow she struck out with her knives. The gleaming blades sank into the guardian’s armour and tore a ragged wound, its flapping lips drooling multi-hued warp-stuff. Spinning and dodging, the succubus continued to worry at her foe, a slice here and a thrust there, always one step ahead of the swinging blade. Thunder crashed as Morr duelled the other two guardians, the blows they exchanged sending shock waves booming through the amphitheatre.

Xagor leapt forward with desperate courage, rushing past Sindiel and Xyriadh and their useless weapons before jumping at the guardian attempting to swat Aez’ashya. The wrack grasped the thing’s arm, his hands sizzling at the contact, and wrestled frantically. He might as well have been wrestling a pillar of iron for the impact he made. The red-eyed helm turned towards Xagor and he was flung aside with a contemptuous gesture.

The momentary distraction was all the opportunity Aez’ashya needed. She leapt and plunged both knives into the thing’s neck with her whole weight behind them. Lightning flashed from the wounds, the invulnerable-seeming guardian lurching backwards and unravelling before the agents’ eyes.

Xyriadh dropped her shredder and ran towards Morr to help him. However the same trick would not work twice on such superlative opponents. A spinning blade caught Xyriadh and opened her up from shoulder to hip before she could react. She might have survived even such a terrible blow to be rebirthed later, but the scything blade tore away her spirit stone amulet. Xyriadh only had the time for one piteous shriek before her soul was shorn from her body and sucked away into the raging breach. Sindiel, about to follow Xyriadh’s rush, reeled away from her eviscerated corpse with a look of horror on his face.

More practically minded, Kharbyr, Aez’ashya and Xagor scrambled after the skull at the foot of the wreckage-throne. This proved to be a better distraction than Xyriadh’s unfortunate demise. One of the shadow-incubi fighting Morr attempted to break away, plunging after the thieves before they could lay hands on his master. The creature either underestimated Morr’s speed or overestimated its companion’s ability to keep the towering incubus at bay. It did not get more than one pace away before Morr’s blade separated the fiend’s head from its shoulders.

The lone survivor wove a dazzling web of defence as it backed towards the throne, but Morr was in full fury now and not to be denied. He beat aside the shadow-incubus’s blade and sent its owner back to hell with a disembowelling sweep of his mighty klaive. Xagor grasped the skull of El’Uriaq with his burned hands and wrenched it forth with a croak of triumph that disintegrated into a rain of crowned frogs. He found the skull to be smooth and heavy as if it had been re-cast in some strange, red metal.

Images filled Xagor’s mind when he lifted it – parades and palaces, skulduggery and secret pacts, a thousand schemes and plans of the old emperor. With a tiny shriek that fluttered away as birds Xagor stuffed the skull into a casket he had brought for the purpose of containing any relics they might find.

As the lid clicked shut a tremble ran through the amphitheatre and the raging breach swelled with redoubled fury. The agents turned and ran.

A slow-spreading dawn dogged their heels, a hideous rising light of destruction that pursued them into the columned hall outside. The crowding ghosts perceived them now and they reacted with anger and alarm: spectral fists were raised against them, voiceless mouths opened calling for guards. The agents swept through the ethereal host scattering them like leaves. Bright light burned at their backs, heat and sound seeming to crawl behind it in slow motion, bursting apart the shifting columns and consuming the phantom court. They burst out of the maw-like gate as the fantasy palace of El’Uriaq collapsed in on itself, slumping into a mass of tumbled walls and shattered stone.

Morr paused after they passed the threshold, gazing back into the heart of the warp breach dancing triumphantly over the ruins.

‘What happened?’ asked Aez’ashya.

Morr was silent for a long moment before he replied. ‘The bones of El’Uriaq anchored this shadowplay. His ruined palace, his dead courtiers and all the rest of it endured only by his will. With his absence they are lost.’

‘Wait, what?’ gasped Sindiel. ‘He’s dead! How can he have willed anything?’

‘No, no. Mistaking dead flesh for dead mind,’ whispered Xagor, holding the casket containing the skull at arm’s length from himself.

Sindiel remained unconvinced. ‘How can his soul have survived? You saw what happened to Xyriadh!’

‘Well, maybe you can ask him when we get out of here,’ Aez’ashya replied flippantly, ‘which we had better do soon if we don’t want to stay permanently.’

Morr straightened as if shaking off a deep reverie. ‘Yes. We must leave now. Prepare yourselves, the return journey will not be so easy.’

Rushing winds were birthing in the wastes, rapidly growing from vagrant zephyrs to a yelling torrent that beat against their faces as they struggled into the teeth of the tempest. Periodically, soulless wretches blew past, flailing idiotically, their flickering life sparks sucked voraciously into the screaming void. Slowly they struggled towards the shelter of the surrounding ruins, pulling free step-by-step from the kraken-like embrace of the breach.

‘Oh no!’ Sindiel gasped, pointing frantically. Riders on sinuous bipedal mounts could be glimpsed in the distance behind them, while ahead of them an emergent glow was painting the shattered walls with reflected glory.

The Handmaid swept into view, her delicate feet walking on air and with banners of aetheric fire wreathing her limbs. A stillness surrounded her, her own personal eye in the hurricane force of the winds. There was no doubt she perceived them this time. Bright, inhuman eyes looked down on the agents with deliberation. Lambent power flowed from her, forming an incandescent rosette in the darkness. When she spoke her voice was chimes and bird calls, infinitely sweeter than the sickly, persuasive words of daemons.

‘What noble suitors are these, that would brave the perils of Shaa-dom?’

‘We came to rescue the bones of your old master, El’Uriaq, that he might live again and avenge himself at last. Let us pass and we would leave this place without delay,’ said Morr carefully.

Complex emotions chased across the Handmaid’s too-beautiful face at Morr’s words. Rage and sadness were there in equal measure and it was a bold heart that did not quail before the sight of her passions aroused. The moment passed as quickly as it had come, and when she addressed them again it was with unreadable serenity.

‘You are bold indeed to make such claims. Grant me but one simple boon, noble knight, and I will let you pass.’

The agents tensed for sudden violence, watching Morr carefully for their cue. To their surprise the incubus did not move.

‘What is your desire?’ he asked.

She smiled with hellfire burning in her eyes. ‘Show him to me.’

Morr gestured Xagor forwards and with shaking knees the wrack complied. He lifted the casket he bore and opened it to reveal the polished red skull of El’Uriaq. The Handmaid crouched in genuflection, a tragic smile on her ethereal features.

‘Long has it been, my lord, since we danced and sang for your pleasure. Do recall it? Endless nights in gardens wrapped in the scents of asphodel and nenuphar. How we loved you and your lady! You were our sun and moon! I’m saddened to see there’s no pleasure left in you now.’

The too-bright eyes looked away before rising to examine them again, dangerous fires smouldering in their depths.

‘Go. Take your prize,’ the Handmaid said. ‘I will spare you in honour of him. Revel in your lives while you still have them, my gift to you for bringing him back into the world. Remember, if you can, that he was once greater than you can know. Remember also that you chose this path for yourselves, wherever it might eventually lead.’

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 attention 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.’

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 enough 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.’

‘What do you mean I’m no longer Kraillach! I’m me! You’re my chief executioner! Protect me, curse you!’

Morr hesitated and for a moment Kraillach dared to hope that his chief executioner, the most loyal and trusted of all his minions, would have a change of heart. ‘I regret this has to be done, my archon, I regret all that has been done… I found out too late to prevent the outcome. If I had known my actions would bring this ending…’

Taking full advantage of the momentary distraction Kraillach whipped out his blast pistol and fired. The shot caught the incubus high in the chest, punching a ragged hole in his armour and spinning him about with the impact. Morr crashed into a table and fell on it, splintering the ornately carved wood into flinders. The giant two-metre klaive spun from his grasp and clattered across the chamber floor with its power field spitting angrily

‘You’ve no idea what I’ve become!’ Kraillach spat, his voice altering with each word. Worms of warp-spawned energy were writhing in his gut, transforming his flesh into a suitable vessel to accommodate a presence from beyond the veil. It was too soon, too soon by far. It had hoped to grow much stronger before emerging, but with its Kraillach-vessel under threat it had to come forth and protect its investment. The psychic seed planted during Kraillach’s resurrection blossomed to began to bear horrid fruit. Pulsating energy flowed into his limbs and body, filling him with the fever-life of the possessed.

‘All my new converts gone, you piece of dung!’ roared the Daemon-Kraillach. ‘You’ll pay for that!’ The air was buzzing with a demented choir of lost souls; obscenities were beginning to crawl forth unbidden from the dark recesses of consciousness. Quicker than thought the Daemon-Kraillach reached out with newly-formed claws to grasp at Morr. A shiver of anticipation ran through its multi-dimensional sensory lattice at the prospect of tearing the incubus limb from limb and consuming his soul.

‘Thank you, my archon,’ Morr whispered, ‘for the gift of vindication.’

Too late the Daemon-Kraillach saw the belt of linked plates grasped in the incubus’s first. The descending claws were met by a blaze of heat and a flash of light that violently threw them back. The warped entity staggered, struggling to control its new form in the blast of unexpected stimulus. Morr tossed away the smoking shield generator and painfully retrieved his fallen klaive, rising unsteadily to confront his daemonically-possessed master.

‘Forgive me, my archon,’ Morr intoned. The thing that Kraillach had become screamed with laughter as it swung its claws down in a killing arc.

The two-metre blade in Morr’s hands swept up to sever the downrushing claws with a single, clean cut. The Daemon-Kraillach reeled back trumpeting in outrage, warp-spawned energy drooling from its wounds like white-hot liquid magma. Morr’s horizontal return stroke severed the creature’s horned head at the neck, the thrashing body falling at the edge of the sunken bath.

The bloated, altered corpse visibly deflated as the stolen warp energies fled from it in tongues of aetheric fire. Soon only the wizened, headless and handless corpse of Kraillach was left behind. His blood swirled into the waters of the bath forming submerged cloudscapes of pink and red, as it had done a thousand times before.

Polite applause echoed around the half-ruined chamber. A grey figure stood by the portal that a moment ago had been closed. Morr swayed and lowered his blade.

‘Heroically executed, if I may say so!’ exclaimed Motley. ‘Bravo!’

The incubus inclined his head minutely, his contempt for the grey-clad interloper apparent in even that small gesture. Motley seemed hurt by this cold reception and became serious.

‘Now finish it properly,’ he said primly, ‘and burn the body.’

In the catacombs beneath High Commorragh a triple-threaded voice spoke in its dripping cell. ‘The seed has been destroyed. The children of fury cleansed it from within before it could bear fruit. Its sire still remains, and his roots burrow deeper every day. The Realm Eternal crumbles but El’Uriaq’s other schemes carry forward unchecked.’

‘Oh, but his time will come, Angevere, his time will come,’ a crooked figure wheezed as it shuffled through the crone’s cell. ‘We must watch and wait as we prepare our plan. Our opportunity will arise and we must be ready for it when it does. The plan will work. It has to work.’

CHAPTER 14

DESIRES OF THE BLADE

Xelian stalked through the bowels of the practice chambers below her fortress followed by a cautious trail of sycophants and supplicants. In recent weeks the Blades of Desire had become favourites in the Commorrite arena circuit. Every wych cult, Reaver pack and hellion gang in the city had been clamouring for a chance to fight for Xelian’s approval to enter her arena. Every day was marked with souls being quenched by the thousand for the vicarious pleasure of the kabals crammed onto her terraces. The roar of the crowd was an almost constant presence in the fortress now, echoing down from the arena above and giving the place an almost palpable pulse of excitement and energy.

The fortress was buzzing with purpose, minions leapt at her command, but Xelian felt curiously disassociated from it all. Beneath the sure hand of El’Uriaq’s guidance, her kabal was flourishing. She suddenly had connections all over the city, a hidden network that greased palms and removed obstacles seemingly at will. Despite the great tyrant’s increasing suspicions everything had become so easy that it bothered her. She had started to feel unnecessary.

At times she had begun to feel as if her minions were merely humouring her, exchanging little knowing looks behind her back. The thought of it drove her into a vindictive frenzy, and had sent her lashing out at them so often that they now stayed well clear of their archon except at the most pressing need. Xelian’s sense of isolation was increasing daily, in pace with the growing fear that hidden hands were slowly but surely wresting control of her own kabal away from her.

Seemingly overnight her favourite, Aez’ashya, had been catapulted to stardom and attracted her own following, and a cult was forming around her. The succubus still professed undying loyalty to Xelian of course, but all the warning signs were there. The day was coming when Aez’ashya would have to take her Hydra cult and leave the fortress to carve out her own territory.

Or not.

If Xelian were removed Aez’ashya could fight her way to the top of the Blades of Desire easily enough. She might even make a direct challenge, although it would be a bold move on her part to test her skills against her archon. Some, like Kraillach, might spend their fortunes on tricks and artifices in place of martial ability but Xelian kept her own counsel. Her fighting capabilities were honed to perfection through endless practice both public and private. She had always kept her grip on the Blades of Desire through the strength of her own arm and welcomed open challenges over slinking conspiracies anytime.

No, what troubled Xelian the most about the amorphous tentacles she could feel closing around her was that there was nothing to fasten on to and attack. At first she had begun to imagine that she was sensing Vect at work, subtly undermining her kabal from within. Lately she had come to believe otherwise. Something about the subtly dismissive manner of El’Uriaq in their last encounter had resonated with her, as if he had come to view her as an obstacle rather than an ally.

‘You are such a wild beast, Xelian,’ El’Uriaq had joked lightly in that oh-so warm and friendly way of his. ‘I swear that the bloodletting is all that truly interests you. There’s more to vengeance than simply throwing your enemy into the arena to become blade-fodder.’ At the time it had seemed like a fine jest, but looking back now there was an undertone that the joke was on her. She found she was clenching her fists at the thought and briefly wished she had claws so that she could flex them.

Whether it was Vect or El’Uriaq, something was out there working against her. Something insidious, invisible and untouchable. The situation made her dangerously frustrated and spoiling for a fight. In an effort to work out some of her ire she had summoned her inner circle of wyches and succubi for a practice bout in a newly built chamber of her own design. Some blade work might just give her the clarity she needed to dispel the clouds of paranoia and uncertainty that had begun to loom so large in her mind.

She descended a broad ramp to evade her fluttering suitors, disappearing into a series of low-ceilinged, cavern-like chambers filled with workshops and noisy activity to escape their platitudes. Here slaves were feverishly preparing grav-vehicles of various types for the coming day’s aerial bouts. Power units were being tuned, weapons loaded and bladevanes were being sharpened. The actinic glare of fusion torches lit the scene where the damage from previous skirmishes was being rapidly repaired. In another area piles of notched weapons and dented armour were being reconditioned for the use of fresh teams of doomed slaves.

Xelian had been secretly rather flattered by the notoriety she’d gained of late, even while she outwardly claimed it as her natural birthright. Some of the long-standing, infamous groupings of Commorragh had sent representatives to test the mettle of Xelian’s patronage. From the Cult of Strife had come virtually legions of wyches eager to test the dire arts they learned among the Bone Middens on the outskirts of Aelindrach. The Crimson Ascension had dispatched a squadron of blood-red riders from their eternal battles among the upper spires of High Commorragh, and the hellions of the Savage Caress had followed them to carry their eternal enmity into a new realm.

Xelian left the workshops to see the fruits of their labour in action. From a windswept ledge on the inner edge of the arena she watched red-painted Reavers duelling with fang-winged hellions over the fathoms-deep gulf. The angry swarm snarled back and forth in constant motion, the incredible agility of the hellions countered by the weight and acceleration of the jetbikes. The skills being displayed were nothing less than breathtaking, the expert riders flipping and whirling their machines through the air with reckless agility. These were legendary contenders from gangs that had torn themselves apart and been reborn, phoenix-like, from the ashes a thousand times over. When the time came for war their loyalty would be invaluable.

She allowed her gaze to wander upwards to take in the jagged bulk of Vect’s ziggurat where it hung, dark and ominously silent, above her fortress. It had arrived unheralded within hours of the first news of Kraillach’s assassination. Xelian had been summoned to stand before the titanic projected face of the tyrant and be questioned like some errant slave, an experience that still made Xelian grind her teeth with fury.

‘I’m sure you’ve heard about the passing of our mutual friend Archon Kraillach, Xelian,’ Vect had boomed down at her. ‘Given that you had a recent and well-publicised disagreement with him it seems pertinent to discover your thoughts on the affair.’

‘I had no part in it, supreme overlord,’ Xelian had replied, truthfully for once. ‘I heard that Kraillach fell to enemies within his own kabal, therefore he was weak and couldn’t keep his own retinue under control.’

Dark eyes wider than windows regarded Xelian with ageless wisdom and bottomless malice. ‘Weak? Perhaps he was,’ the tyrant’s voice rumbled, ‘but old Kraillach was also terribly, terribly cautious. Losing one of his pedigree is a rarity, he wasn’t like you youngsters that rely on luck and a quick blade to stay on top. I must say I’m even slightly moved at his loss.’ The cliff-like visage broke into a terrible smile at that thought. ‘But only slightly,’ the tyrant amended.

‘Why concern yourself at all, great tyrant?’ Xelian had shouted back, refusing to be daunted by Vect’s tricks. ‘Your laws have been kept. Kraillach failed to protect himself and his position so he paid the price. I had no hand in it but I applaud those that did the deed and I would give them a place in my own kabal without hesitation. They would find neither softness nor weakness in the Blades of Desire.’

‘A fine speech, Xelian, I am warmed by your appreciation of the correctness of my laws and their manifest benefits. I think I shall keep a presence here for a time where I can fully appreciate that loyalty and strength through closer examination. Excitement does seem to attend your works here, I trust that you won’t disappoint.’

With that the face of tyrant had winked out and had not returned. The ziggurat had remained hanging like a brooding sentinel over the games and bloodletting ever since, always silently observing. It galled her a little that the tyrant’s scrutiny was probably at the root of some of her current notoriety but she had determined to brazen it out. Xelian’s schemes were not going to be easy to uncover, and she had taken the ominous presence of the ziggurat as a sign of how little Vect knew, rather than how much.

Xelian returned inside and wove her way deeper into the bowels of the practice levels. She called her newest training area the crown of thorns. It was dominated by an interwoven ring made up of forty-metre-long spines tapering to razor-sharp points. Fighting inside or atop the ring took extraordinary nerves and footwork, with any slip in the mass of sharp points and honed edges liable to cost an inept fighter dearly. It was an energising experience in its own right that could be further heightened with gravity inversions and pressure waves. Xelian had hopes to perfect a larger version of it for use in the arena one day, although it was too deadly to be practical for most slave species. Still, their hopeless attempts to keep their footing on the sharp spines might well have some comedy value, particularly in combination with a pursuit by suitably agile predators of some sort, ur-ghuls or loxatl perhaps…

She surveyed the dozen assembled wyches with a critical eye. They were exclusively female fighters in half-armour or less, although none had quite gone the whole way to being entirely skyclad. All of them were possessed of the subtle grace only an eldar female trained rigorously from birth could aspire to, they could run on spear points or dance on a blade’s edge – a matter that was about to be put to the test. These were her chosen, her hekatrix, the keenest blades at her command. Aez’ashya would have been among them once, the apple of Xelian’s eye before Yllithian’s scheming had ruined her.

The crown of thorns floated before them, a hundred metres across and filling the practice space virtually wall-to-wall as it slowly contra-rotated in a mesmerising lattice of sharp edges and needle-points. The pulse of it seemed to fill the air, relentless and implacable as the beat of a giant’s heart. They mounted light grav platforms to elevate themselves to its upper surface before stepping off onto a shifting toroidal landscape of dully-gleaming blades. She gazed around at her hekatrix and raised her voice above the low whisper of the thorn-blades cutting through the air.

‘To first blood.’ Xelian found she savoured the word so unexpectedly that it made her hesitate for a moment before she recovered her poise.

‘Begin.’

The wyches whirled into action, sprinting across the surface of the crown in a blur of flashing limbs. The unspoken rules of engagement were that everyone fought for themselves, but that meant temporary alliances of weaker fighters as they attempted to overwhelm the strongest. Xelian quickly had three of her wyches pressing at her defences. She ran along the blade she stood upon with quick, sure strides and sprang to another sliding past five metres away, daring her assailants to emulate her feat.

The first wych to try to follow her met her knives and slid into the maze of edged metal below, ending her short, painful journey impaled on an upward-tilting point. The other two thought better of making the jump and ran back to find a surer way around.

Xelian had problems of her own. She was caught blind-side by another opponent, a wych named Lorys recently risen from the Cult of Strife. Lorys’s determined attack drove Xelian step-by-step to the very tip of the thorn she stood upon. There she turned at bay, her knives weaving a bright web that struck sparks from Lorys’s thrusts.

The crown lurched slightly beneath Xelian’s feet as its rotation began to speed up. Just as it did so one of Lorys’s whistling blows slipped under her guard and creased her ribs, slicing though skin and muscle with surgical precision. The kiss of cold steel thrilled through Xelian’s nerves and finally dispelled her fugue of doubts and concerns. She was totally in the moment at last, the dance of blades becoming her entire world. Lorys relaxed fractionally at the sight of blood, thinking her archon would stand down as the rules of the bout dictated.

‘More!’ Xelian shouted, whirling her knives furiously onto the attack.

Xelian’s ferocious counter-assault caught Lorys off guard, driving her back down the gleaming thorn. She was soon bleeding freely from a score of nicks to her arms and legs as she fought desperately to keep her archon in check. The bloodshed seemed to drive Xelian into even more of a frenzy, raining her attacks down with no thought to her own defence. Lorys was soon reeling beneath the rain of blows, barely able stave off an inevitable deathblow.

The two wyches Xelian had evaded earlier suddenly rejoined the fray, leaping from blade to blade to attack Xelian’s flanks. She turned on them with a scream of pure hatred, the glittering fangs of her knives carving into them with predatory swiftness.

‘You are such a wild beast, Xelian.’

Xelian tore open a face and sent one of her chosen companions screaming into the soughing blades. A stroke like white lightning came from her flank and sheared through her upper arm, the red lips of the wound parting obscenely as the bicep flopped loose. She laughed in wild ecstasy and pivoted to impale her other attacker on twin fangs, driving them deep into her body before ripping upwards with horrible strength. Bloody viscera slithered down her arms and painted them a fetching crimson.

‘I swear that the bloodletting is all that truly interests you.’

A knife was sunk into her back, a penetrating shard of bright pain probing up under ribs and lungs for the heart. She allowed the weight of the eviscerated corpse on her own knives to carry her forwards, half-turning to smash Lorys’s face with her elbow. They were falling, falling into the moving skein of bright edges.

A distant part of her mind was screaming that this was relevant somehow and that falling demanded action, but the all-consuming bloodlust that had been unleashed in her soul blotted it out completely. She twisted and caught Lorys on her fangs to drag her close for a final, deadly embrace as the churning blades rushed up to meet them. Blood sprayed over her, embracing her in a crimson flood of joy. The last blood Xelian saw being shed was her own.

CHAPTER 15

A CONFESSION

‘I raised a pillar above Cyllidh’s city gate and I flayed all of the dracons who had revolted, and I hung the pillar with their skins. Some I sealed at the base of the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on barbs, and others I bound round about the pillar with chains of burning ice… And I cut the limbs of the officers, of the noble officers who had rebelled… Many captives I burned with fire and many others I took as living slaves into my own house. From some I took their fingers and toes, from others noses and tongues, of many I put out the eyes so that all might know the hand of Vect.’

– Asdrubael Vect

Yllithian hurried along through the secret ways beneath his palace, his mind racing furiously. He had been summoned by El’Uriaq, called like a slave to attend on his master. The thought provoked the taste of bile in his mouth but behind it lay the omnipresent taint of fear. Xelian and Kraillach both lay dead at the hands of their own retainers. It was no coincidence that both of his old, most trusted allies had suddenly succumbed to plots after centuries of leading their kabals. Fear of assassination had grown to encompass every moment of Yllithian’s waking life. Even his dreams were haunted by stealthy murderers that wore the faces of his most trusted servants.

By all accounts El’Uriaq seemed to thrive on danger. In the months since his resurrection he had survived no less than fourteen attempts on his life without so much as a scratch. His assailants were able to claim no such happy condition. El’Uriaq wielded raw psychic power with an effortless ease that was as terrifying to witness for those around him as it was brutally effective at crushing any threat to his person. Many of his most fervent followers had taken to hailing him as a demi-god. Just how the old emperor of Shaa-dom could wield such powers while avoiding any repercussions from beyond the veil was a matter of great interest to Yllithian, but it was immaterial at present. The simple truth was that El’Uriaq was in control and seemingly unassailable. Whatever hand had struck down Kraillach and Xelian seemed unable to harm El’Uriaq and, for some reason, had passed Yllithian by.

At first Yllithian had believed that Vect had become aware of their plot, that despite all possible precautions the tyrant had divined that El’Uriaq had returned. Then he began to fear that Vect was trying to turn El’Uriaq against him by deliberately targeting the others while leaving Yllithian himself conspicuously unchallenged. Lately Yllithian had come to the conclusion that El’Uriaq himself had to be behind the assassinations. His spies in the city had heard not a whisper, nor a breath of rumour that could betray El’Uriaq’s return in the months since his resurrection, nor any indication that Vect was aware of it.

So it was that when El’Uriaq called for his presence, Yllithian, great and noble archon of the White Flames, came running. Yllithian had always prided himself upon, among other things, his clear insight. He could see the way that his allies had been swept away when they exhausted their usefulness and he was determined not to follow them into oblivion. For now he must play the devoted follower until he could find El’Uriaq’s weakness. Yllithian consoled himself that he already had reason to believe the old emperor of Shaa-dom was not quite as resourceful as recent events might indicate.

Yllithian stopped short, pulled out of his ruminations to wonder at the sight before him. He’d heard that at El’Uriaq’s instruction slaves had been labouring to break open new areas of the catacombs beneath. Yllithian had given little thought to the reports when he heard them, imagining only that El’Uriaq sought to open up a little more living space for himself while he plotted Vect’s demise. It seemed the work being undertaken was more extensive than he had imagined.

Where there had previously been only a narrow corridor, rock-cut galleries now rose out of sight on either side. In each gallery gangs of slaves were toiling beneath the lash to widen the excavations further. It was still a hole, of course, in comparison to the sweeping grandeur of High Commorragh, but it was hard to deny that El’Uriaq’s works radiated a crude strength and purpose not to be found in the glittering spires above.

Yllithian walked on more slowly, cultivating an air of bored disinterest as he observed the work in progress. The slaves were all fresh, their limbs hale and straight, their skins little marked by the sores and scars they soon accumulated. Yllithian wondered what had happened to all the previous gangs of slaves swallowed up by El’Uriaq’s lair. He moved deeper, pondering the latest nugget of information he had uncovered about Kraillach’s death.

There was no doubt that Morr had been the one behind the fall of the Realm Eternal. Scandalously the incubus, a faithful servant since before anyone seemed able to remember, had turned on his master and his whole kabal. Yllithian’s spies had reported to him that the slaughter had been merciless. Kraillach’s kabal was a broken reed now, its scattered survivors staying but one step ahead of avaricious rivals intent on carving up their remaining assets. Kraillach himself had met true death, his body utterly destroyed.

Morr had subsequently vanished without trace. In Yllithian’s secret consultations with Angevere she had said that Morr had returned to the hidden shrine of Arhra, Father of Scorpions. It was a reference to the legendary place where all incubi were said to learn their killing arts. Yllithian set little store in the existence of such a mythical location and took her meaning to be a metaphorical one – Morr had sought shelter among the ranks of his fellow incubi. Yllithian would have given a great deal to know just why the incubi had chosen to overlook Morr’s blatant betrayal of their professed tenets of obedience and loyalty to their archons. Sadly that particular piece of information was also hidden from him, and if the crone knew more about it she refused to say.

Nonetheless logic dictated that if Morr had acted at the behest of El’Uriaq, why had he not come forth to claim his reward? It was an altogether more likely scenario that Morr had slaughtered his archon for transgressing one of the incubi’s obscure ascetic beliefs. His flight to the incubi implied that some matter of honour was at stake. The Realm Eternal had been meekly falling in line with El’Uriaq’s machinations but now it was lost to him. That spoke to Yllithian of some other hidden hand at work. He could only hope that it was not the hand of Asdrubael Vect.

Beyond the galleries the passage narrowed to the more familiar catacombs again, but even here new cross-passages had been made. Everywhere he could hear the buzz of low voices and the sound of hurried footsteps. Three times Yllithian was stopped by arrogant trueborn warriors and forced to explain his business there. When he named himself and his business they were deferential enough but the incidents chafed at Yllithian’s already raw temper even further. He carefully kept his emotions in check; Xelian’s recent fall from grace was still sharp in his mind.

Opinions varied as to whether the Blades of Desire had survived as a kabal because of or despite the tyrant’s scrutiny at an especially vulnerable time. A new archon had been raised with a minimal amount of bloodletting after Xelian’s death. Dark rumours persisted of Xelian being seized by a fit of madness immediately before her demise but the extreme damage her body had sustained precluded any practical attempt at investigation. Her resurrection was proving unfeasibly prolonged for a variety of ill-explained reasons. It had reached a point where Yllithian was beginning to suspect Xelian’s haemonculi had been bribed to prevent, or at least delay, her return.

Yllithian was regretting the loss of the services of Bellathonis, himself incarcerated in one of his own sarcophagi since he had displeased El’Uriaq. Apparently the master haemonculus had sustained dreadful injuries during the resurrection, his own splintered bones piercing his organs in many places. Weeks of regrowth, Bellathonis’s wracks had told him, would be required and they refused to rouse their master ahead of time. Yllithian had sensed deception from the wracks, a fearful taint that they were hiding something. No doubt they too were in El’Uriaq’s employ.

Bellathonis would have been able to get to the bottom of things, or at the very least get Xelian back in the running. To Yllithian’s practiced eye the changeover at the Blades of Desire had been altogether too smooth, a sure sign that someone had worked hard behind the scenes to make it so. He had little doubt that the new archon of the Blades of Desire owed her allegiance to El’Uriaq body and soul. Xelian had so effectively eliminated rivals from her own bloodline that the remnants of her house were now helpless pawns and figureheads. It would be long – if ever – before House Xelian rose to any form of prominence in Commorragh again. In the old alliance of the noble houses that left only Yllithian and his White Flames free to act.

As free as fear would allow.

Yllithian passed beneath what had been a low opening that was now an arch three stories high. Beyond it the way opened into an amphitheatre with a tall throne on a stepped dais at its centre. Yllithian followed a wide ramp down to the floor of the amphitheatre, noting how crude and unfinished everything looked; the ramp was rough and uneven, the angles of the stepped terraces mismatched. Slaves were scattered everywhere chipping miserably at the rock while being alternately harassed, goaded or abused by scores of guards with nothing better to do with their time. Messengers dashed in and out vying for attention with extravagantly costumed victuallers that were intent on displaying their wares: spice wines and stem meads that had been distilled from whole settlements, the cured flesh and pickled organs of extinct species, or the last living examples of endangered ones. Jewels and the richest finery lay in heaps like a mythical dragon’s horde.

At the centre of this great constellation of activity was El’Uriaq himself. His personal gravity was such that it made every occurrence in the wide amphitheatre orbit around him. The guards abused the slaves for his pleasure, the piles of treasure were his tribute, the messengers clamoured for his ear, the hustlers showed their goods to win his favour. Yllithian approached the dais feeling lonely and vulnerable, a dark-clad non-entity in the multitude. As the proud archon of the White Flames he had already had to accept that his only protection against El’Uriaq was his continued usefulness. If that ever failed him neither guards nor walls would keep him safe, as Kraillach and Xelian had discovered to their cost. Even so it was still a test for his nerve to appear before the old emperor of Shaa-dom shorn of any such artifices and depend solely on El’Uriaq’s good favour not to be killed on a whim.

El’Uriaq wore an open-fronted robe of pale silver over a suit of shining bronze-coloured body armour. His head bore a crown adorned with eight stars of shifting hues and his hand bore a sceptre carved from a single ruby. So had high archons appeared in the days before the rise of Vect, a wordless claim to nobility of a lost age – a time that Shaa-dom in point of fact was never a part of. Such panoply left little doubt as to El’Uriaq’s ambitions to rule Commorragh in the tyrant’s stead. Despite the crowd El’Uriaq sensed Yllithian’s arrival immediately, turning to him with a delighted expression as if at the return of an old friend that had been long absent.

‘Nyos! My thanks for accepting my invitation, I’m so glad you could come!’ El’Uriaq called, his rich voice full of warmth and welcome.

‘It was my honour, El’Uriaq, to be invited to your hidden kingdom,’ Yllithian said as he looked about him pointedly. ‘Your security is not a concern any more, I assume?’

‘Fear not, everyone here can be trusted to take their own life before revealing my secrets to our enemies.’

‘Reassuring. I would include myself in that pool of happy martyrs, of course.’

‘Your devotion to our common cause is beyond question, Nyos, I know that,’ El’Uriaq replied with heartfelt conviction. What did he know that Yllithian didn’t? The thought was chilling.

‘Which is why I have invited you here to come and share your thoughts about the unfortunate demise of Kraillach.’

Yllithian’s mind went through an instantaneous flip. El’Uriaq was asking him for theories on Kraillach’s murder? Perhaps the plan was to entrap him with a false accusation of complicity?

‘I understand that Kraillach’s own chief executioner, an incubus named Morr, was behind the heinous crime in question. He has evaded justice ever since as best I know.’

El’Uriaq was watching him carefully, weighing the truth or falsehood behind every word.

‘Yes, that much is common gossip, so I hear,’ said El’Uriaq lightly. ‘The burning question is why the executioner slew his master. Why do you think he did it, Nyos? What was the motive?’

‘I had assumed he was in the employ of our enemies,’ Yllithian lied, noting that El’Uriaq didn’t seem to require any theories about Xelian’s passing. He decided to risk a probe in that direction. ‘Perhaps this was an attempt to weaken our alliance, given the recent… disruption within the Blades of Desire. Our enemies sought to remove the Realm Eternal as a viable power block too.’

El’Uriaq did not rise to the bait, still seeming to weigh Yllithian’s answer. No doubt El’Uriaq already knew more than Yllithian did about Kraillach’s death and was feeling him out. No theories were really needed, merely an insight into how much Yllithian knew or guessed at. The true question now was whether an excess of knowledge or ignorance would be the fatal factor on Yllithian’s part.

Yllithian decided he would rather be damned for knowing too much than too little, adding: ‘Of course for an incubus, especially one of Morr’s standing, such a betrayal is virtually unprecedented. And if one such as he betrayed us to our enemies how can we still be at liberty to be having this conversation? Vect’s castigators would already be at our door.’

‘Quite,’ El’Uriaq nodded.

‘So if not at the behest of Vect, then who?’

‘Just so, Nyos, there are other forces at work here. The tyrant is still ignorant of my return, I’m sure of that, but I confess that Kraillach’s passing is troubling to me.’

‘With the perpetrator apparently vanished I’m afraid that I find it difficult to suggest a productive course of action.’

‘Wheels are in motion, Nyos. My foes will find me harder to be rid of this time around.’ El’Uriaq smiled lightly as he said the words but Yllithian caught a dangerous light glowing in his eyes.

‘But let us lay aside such grim talk. There is another matter I wished to speak with you about, a lighter one than the tragic demise of Kraillach. The time has come for a gathering of forces, for the conspirators to take binding oaths together and dedicate themselves fully to the cause.’ El’Uriaq’s gaze was far away, as though he saw another time and place in his mind’s eye.

‘Three days hence I will call together our chief supporters for a celebratory banquet, a show of strength so that they may take heart at their numbers and also a warning when they witness the fate of the traitors I’ve discovered among them. You will attend I hope, Yllithian. I owe you so much that it simply wouldn’t be the same without you.’

El’Uriaq’s solicitous invitation seemed so coy that Yllithian wondered if he were being mocked. ‘Of course, it’ll be my great pleasure to attend,’ he replied mechanically as he wondered if he was being invited to his own public execution.

‘Wonderful, it really was too kind of you to come and visit in person. You must forgive the disarray, there’s still so much to do.’

Yllithian recognised that he was being politely invited to leave. He bowed. ‘My thanks for finding the time to speak with me, El’Uriaq. It was an illuminating experience, as ever.’ El’Uriaq nodded and smiled, and Yllithian backed away until the old emperor was swallowed up again by his constellation of followers. He swallowed dryly, but the taste of bile wouldn’t leave the back of his throat.

Yllithian hurried up the ramp and out into the tunnels before his sense of impotent rage overwhelmed his discipline. Having to virtually abase himself before the creature he had helped to create vexed him sorely. He was so wrapped in his own thoughts that he barely gave heed to the crooked figure that followed him from the amphitheatre. He wound his way past the tirelessly working slave gangs to places where the sound of their tools and snap of whips receded into the distance. The walls of passages gradually narrowed to little more than shoulder-width and the turnings became fewer. The sepulchral quiet of the deep catacombs reasserted itself as his feet carried him automatically along memorised paths towards his palace above.

Only there, when he was upon paths seldom trod by guards and slaves, did he become aware that he was no longer alone. He turned at once and laid a hand on the hilt of his blade as he called a challenge.

‘Who are you that dares to dog the steps of an archon? Come out and show yourself!’

A crooked figure limped painfully out of the shadows and into the light of a solitary gem overhead. It was a gaunt, black scarecrow-like figure that was bent unnaturally in back and limb.

‘It is I, Bellathonis, my archon, and I would have words with you.’

‘Bellathonis?’ Yllithian exclaimed in disbelief. ‘But your wracks told me that you were in the process of rebirth!’

‘Forgive the deception, my archon,’ the master haemonculus wheezed as he came closer. ‘I have forgone more permanent restitution of bodily function for the present. There simply seemed too much to do and being thought of as… unavailable has allowed me freedoms I might otherwise have not enjoyed.’

Yllithian looked at the haemonculus more carefully. A host of slender rods had been drilled through his flesh into his bones. These were being held immobile by external clamps to brace his shattered limbs. A small pharmacopoeia made up of canisters and bags hung about his neck with lines running from it to feed needles pushed beneath his grey, waxy-looking skin. Pale blood oozed from the wounds and the haemonculus’s eyes were fever-bright.

‘I applaud your dedication,’ Yllithian said, somewhat repelled at the thought. ‘And what have you been doing with all the copious free time afforded to you by not being dead?’

‘Trying to understand what happened when we brought back El’Uriaq,’ Bellathonis said as he limped forwards. ‘Trying to understand what happened to Archon Kraillach and Archon Xelian.’ The twisted haemonculus leaned in closer and his voice dropped to a harsh whisper. ‘Trying to understand what we called up, Yllithian, and how we can dispose of it.’

Yllithian drew back involuntarily at the implication. ‘Are you mad?’ he hissed angrily. ‘It is death to speak such words and yet you speak them here, in his very domain?’

The haemonculus smiled at him apologetically. ‘Better here than your own throne room, archon, you know yourself that the taint has spread that far. Why else would you come alone? You know that your warriors would follow El’Uriaq’s commands rather than your own. You know that his very presence sways hearts and commands minds to do his bidding.’

Yllithian looked around the shadowed, empty passageway, self-consciously reassuring himself that they were alone. His hand flexed on the hilt of his sword with the momentary urge to draw it and slash the haemonculus’s smiling face into red ruin. Yllithian mastered the urge and unwrapped his fingers with a conscious effort. Bellathonis was right, there was no denying it. The sense of helplessness he was feeling stemmed from the simple fact he could trust no one to obey him.

‘Very well, I’m listening. But choose your words with care, crooked one, I’m not about to betray our beloved El’Uriaq no matter what your inducements.’

Bellathonis nodded slowly, recognising the old formulas of denial in his words.

‘You’ve gone to speak with Angevere many times, but she is obstinate, is she not? I can assure you that a more certain hand at the controls has her singing like a bird. Add to that some investigations of my own and… well, here we are.’

Bellathonis sighed, his steel-pinned limbs winking in the dim light as he moved. ‘You see, even with the worldsinger’s power the regeneration couldn’t be instantaneous – for that to happen it needed even more energy coming in from outside.

‘When we recalled El’Uriaq something else found the crack in reality and came back with him, a great revenant from beyond the veil. It wears El’Uriaq like a mask, hidden for now but guiding his every action.’

‘For now?’ Yllithian asked warily, his face stony and unreadable.

‘Yes, until it gains a strong enough foothold in our reality that it can emerge fully and open a permanent breach,’ Bellathonis said, cocking his head bird-like at Yllithian as if he expected him to already know the answer.

‘In many ways it’s a perfect symbiosis,’ Bellathonis continued. ‘El’Uriaq’s residual personality and self-belief create an ideal framework for the entity to attach itself to. As his ambitions grow it grows with him, continually feeding him more power from the outside. It’s a familiar pattern among the slave races. We set little value by their lore but in this area their experiences are in some ways more extensive than our own.’

The silence that fell between the archon and haemonculus was broken only by the drip of moisture and the sigh of a foetid breeze blowing through the tunnels. Yllithian was carefully weighing what secrets he could learn against the price of discovery. His curiosity gradually edged ahead of his caution. He could always present everything he was told to El’Uriaq and denounce Bellathonis later, although if the haemonculus was correct Yllithian held out little hope that would save his life.

‘This is why Morr turned against his master? You’re saying that Kraillach was… tainted by his association by El’Uriaq?’ he eventually asked.

‘Yes,’ the haemonculus wheezed regretfully. ‘In some fashion the entity that entered El’Uriaq also infected Kraillach during the resurrection. Through Kraillach’s influences the Realm Eternal was being brought firmly under El’Uriaq’s control – that is until their chief executioner saw the peril for what it was and took action. The Realm Eternal was always in danger of collapsing into a pleasure cult. Kraillach was preparing to take them the whole way.’

‘So now the incubi shield him,’ interrupted Yllithian, ‘oathbreaker and traitor that he is. Few archons will trust that silent brotherhood again if word of this gets out.’ Vague schemes for blackmail flourished in Yllithian’s mind unbidden. To gain a hold over the incubi would be a fine prize indeed…

‘Not when the whole of this sad tale is known, my archon,’ Bellathonis replied, dashing cold water on the half-formed plans. ‘As I understand it the incubi pledge themselves to serve their living lord and not some daemonically-corrupted imposter.’

‘And what of Xelian?’ Yllithian prompted. ‘I can only assume that your grand conspiracy theory incorporates her death too.’

‘Denial of the obvious is indeed the last refuge of the desperate mind, my archon, as I have seen on my examination tables many times.’ Bellathonis smiled ingratiatingly. ‘I was unsurprised that she, too, fell into El’Uriaq’s web. In many ways the more surprising thing is that you have survived thus far, unharmed and untainted as best as I can discover. He finds you useful, Yllithian, more useful than your noble allies.

‘Much like Kraillach, Xelian carried the seeds of her own destruction inside her, albeit in less spectacular fashion. It’s my belief that the thing posing as El’Uriaq found Xelian too proud and intractable to be a useful tool. In order to remove her it tended those seeds of weakness until they blossomed and brought about her own death. The thirst for blood was ever at the fore of Xelian’s mind. El’Uriaq’s subtle promptings cultivated that thirst until it consumed her.’

‘What are you saying that you believe we’ve unleashed?’

‘An old doom, my archon, one that has been unleashed and contained many times before in our city. Fear not, we are more cunning than our foes know. Our enemy still believes that his purpose is hidden, and although he wonders about Kraillach’s destruction his fears are formless as yet.’

‘You would be telling me none of this unless you needed my help. What is it you expect me to do?’

‘A trifle only, I would not ask you to act directly against him. If El’Uriaq’s personality is strengthened the entity will find it increasingly difficult to control his actions. It so happens that we have an artefact of El’Uriaq’s past life in our hands, one that might focus his mind on the present juncture in a highly successful fashion–’

‘The head of the crone,’ Yllithian said flatly.

‘Just so. Angevere knew El’Uriaq of old. I have no doubt that contact with her will trigger all kinds of memories. If you were to present the head to him as a gift and a keepsake at this gathering he’s planning, El’Uriaq will not be able to refuse it.’

‘Because naturally you wouldn’t have infested it with something deadly, or simply turned it into a bomb. Crude, Bellathonis. I can’t believe that you’re serious. I’ll not be your delivery slave.’

‘Of course you will be able to fully examine the head before taking it, and I assure you that no assassination device will be carried within it or upon it in any fashion. I honestly imagine the gift will win great favour from both El’Uriaq and his hidden master.’

‘How so?’ Yllithian asked warily. He found that he was taking the haemonculus’s proposition seriously despite his reflexive scepticism. He didn’t doubt that Bellathonis had some ulterior motive behind the idea, but if he could discomfit El’Uriaq without openly dirtying his hands too much the idea appealed to him.

‘Of El’Uriaq’s seven handmaids, only Angevere escaped the daemons in the fall of Shaa-dom. Restoring her to him, even in such an attenuated form, will stimulate El’Uriaq’s residual personality magnificently. The possessing entity will also be delighted to finally have her within its grasp and may not appreciate the danger of letting its disguise slip in its moment of triumph. I don’t doubt for a moment that the entity is one of those that participated in the sack of Shaa-dom when the breach was made there.’

‘But you’re saying this gift won’t harm El’Uriaq directly in any way.’

‘It will not directly harm him, no, my archon.’

‘Very well, then I accept your proposal. I trust I need not emphasise the consequences attached to lying to me or attempting to make me your dupe, Bellathonis. I do not accept your wild allegations about El’Uriaq, Xelian or Kraillach. More likely we’re seeing the tyrant’s hand at work. You see, you listen to the crone entirely too much, perhaps she’s the true source of diabolical influences you perceive in every mishap. You forget she has already been proven wrong on one key point.’

Bellathonis was genuinely perplexed. Yllithian’s dart was well-placed. Perhaps he had been entirely too reliant on Angevere for her interpretation of events…

‘To – ah – to which key point do you refer, my archon?’ Bellathonis asked humbly.

‘Why the Dysjunction, of course! She firmly predicted one would occur if we resurrected El’Uriaq and yet here we stand with no ill-effects felt beyond incessant rumours and the baseless predictions of the warp-dabblers. I’ll be doing you a great service by taking the crone’s head back and gifting it to El’Uriaq: I’ll be saving you from her insidious lies. Follow me no further, haemonculus, or I’ll give you additional reasons to enter a resurrection crypt.’

Yllithian turned and stalked away without another word. Bellathonis watched him vanish down the ill-lit passage towards his own fortress, no doubt to huddle there in mortal fear of his own retainers. Behind him the shadows shifted restlessly, a sibilant whisper forming in the air.

‘Of course he suspects something,’ Bellathonis grumbled to the darkness. ‘He always suspects everyone and everything all of the time – that’s his nature. But he’ll do it when the time comes, he’s desperate to take back some control in any way he can.’

The broken figure of the haemonculus shuffled away, with dark shapes flitting at his heels.

‘Now we must put our trust in the worldsinger,’ he wheezed to the slinking shadows. ‘Everything hinges on her.’

More urgent whispers hissed from the darkness.

‘Dysjunction? Don’t doubt it’s still coming in spite of Yllithian’s claims,’ Bellathonis snorted. ‘It is inevitable now.’

CHAPTER 16

THE PATH OF THE RENEGADE

Sindiel crept fearfully along the ill-lit corridors of El’Uriaq’s hidden domain. He was richly dressed in shimmering Eol-fur and sun-spider silk, with precious metal and rainbow gems adorning his hands and throat. He was armed with a sinuously beautiful splinter pistol and the Dai Saoith, a long, straight blade that apparently had an ancient pedigree much finer than his own. The weapons were mostly for show, to be expected on a highborn of Commorragh. The mostly deadly device he carried was currently concealed at his wrist beneath the voluminous lace at his cuffs. He was hoping that he would not have call to use that weapon, but he’d also found that he felt desperate enough to bring it with him – just in case.

It was all so unfair. Despite being bedecked like some barbaric princeling Sindiel’s external wealth did nothing to protect him from the internal sense of destitution he felt. His star had risen swiftly under the direct patronage of Yllithian and the indirect favours of El’Uriaq. He had already gained control of a squadron of sleek Corsairs berthed at Ashkeri Talon and a palatial manse to dwell in nearby. He had warriors at his command that knelt before him and called him dracon, he had the choice of slaves taken from a million worlds to do with as he would. Now he could explore every fantasy and indulge every hidden vice in a society that did not judge nor even care how its members behaved. The archon’s rewards had been everything promised and for Sindiel, a relative newcomer to the concepts of ownership and property, quite dizzying.

Nonetheless he had felt himself slowly coming to an uncomfortable revelation about the dark kin. It was the kind of thought that once it had formed simply wouldn’t go away. In their own way the eldar of Commorragh were just as stunted and narrowed as the eldar of the craftworlds or, for that matter, the Exodites. They were also denying a part of themselves in their bid for immortality, trying to turn a blind eye to their psychic nature in the hopes of cheating She Who Thirsts. He was secretly starting to wonder if the daemon-goddess had allowed some of the eldar race to escape simply to enjoy their self-imposed suffering as they eternally twisted and turned trying to evade Her claws.

He crept along with his heart in his mouth, unable to quite decide whether he should try to stroll brazenly or not. This part of the catacombs beneath the White Flames’ fortress, roughly delineated as it was, had been taken over by El’Uriaq and his minions as their makeshift palace. He’d been told the foundation plates of the great port-city were riddled with secret ways, hideouts, mines and countermines constructed by competing kabals down the long centuries. The old emperor of Shaa-dom had declared himself happy enough with these troglodytic quarters and now seldom issued forth. Slaves disappeared into El’Uriaq’s den with voracious regularity, but apparently in Commorragh this in itself was not worthy of any great excitement or interest.

Sindiel could not shake the sense that a lurking horror had manifested itself down here, and that it was growing stronger by the day. Although he often felt naïve and ignorant among the darkly brilliant citizens of the eternal city he was sure of one thing – that their psychic senses were dulled to the point of blindness. They saw the warp in terms of forces to be manipulated and refused to see that it was also manipulating them in return.

The sound of approaching footsteps interrupted his troubling thoughts. He turned and fled into a darkened cross-passage before pressing himself into the shadows behind a mouldering buttress. The measured tread of two pairs of armoured feet steadily approached the cross-passage and halted briefly before moving on. Sindiel crept cautiously back to the main path in time to see the backs of two kabalite warriors disappearing in the direction he had just come from.

He moved the opposite way, reflecting bitterly on how, once again, providence had demonstrated its habit of pitching him into situations he was ill prepared for. He had come to El’Uriaq’s lair with no clear objective in mind; only some vague notion of seeing how it felt, as if that would confirm or dispel his fears, with an underlying idea that he would improvise heroically from there. Now he had wandered inside an area that was being actively patrolled with no adequate explanation for what he was doing here. Destiny had left him with no choice but to sneak in further, if only to look for another way out.

It always happened like this. Sindiel had never thought of himself as a renegade, indeed he felt he had laboured long and hard to try and find purpose in his life. He had come to believe that his being birthed on a craftworld was a matter of mischance and concluded that he had never really been intended for such a hard, narrow life until some hiccup in destiny had cast him into it. He had rebelled often and joyously against the strictures of the seers and moralising dogma of his companions, conceiving it as his adoptive destiny to mix things up a little.

The few pranks he had played and the lessons he had attempted to teach to his moribund fellow travellers on the craftworld had done little to endear him to them or vice versa. Slowly but surely he had been expelled into the chilly outer darkness of social seclusion, there to watch others undertake their meaningless journeys along different paths; gardener, sculptor, entertainer, philosopher, artisan, warrior, on and on. It appeared to him that their aim was a lifetime of well-rounded mediocrity and he despised them for it.

He had briefly flirted with the warrior path but found it to be the most tiresomely restrictive and ritualised of them all. Everything on the warrior path seemed focused on how to stop being a warrior, how to deny that part of the psyche that lusted for violence. When he was offered the opportunity to leave his beautiful prison and escape into the wider universe he’d jumped at the chance – even now he remembered the weary shrug the seer had given when Sindiel asked him what would happen if he chose not to go.

For the most part the great and wonderful universe had proved to be nothing but mud and squalor warring with ignorance and stubbornness. His supposedly disaffected ranger companions proved to be merely tourists with a taste for the outdoors and a fondness for meddling in the affairs of others. None of them had the slightest intention of questioning their way of life or attempting to forge their own path. They were simply bored and disaffected so they took the prescribed craftworld path of life that was labelled ‘for the bored and the disaffected’. Sindiel had wanted more out of life than that.

Well, he’d certainly found it now, and damned his immortal soul into the bargain. Listening to seers prattle about the perils of the warp and the spirit-self was one thing, entering the daemon-haunted ruins of Shaa-dom had been quite another. He found he now believed in the existence of his immortal soul as he had never done before.

He could also blame Motley for that. Ever since Iron Thorn the grey one’s words kept coming back to haunt him. Sindiel had almost died of fright when his ankle was grabbed as he lay waiting near the gate, then grown furious when he saw the grinning half-masked face bending over him.

‘Don’t think that this is The End,’ the masked one had said. ‘You have more choices, more chances ahead of you than you can ever know. Your path will always be your own to make no matter what they tell you. Remember that it’s never too late to try and reclaim your soul.’

The nagging idea that he could still do… something to recover himself had stayed with him ever since. He’d thought himself committed to the dark path, that he’d finally spat in the face of the universe once and for all and sworn himself to win power by any means. Now he had it he found that the power he’d sought was meaningless. He could feel the first tendrils of the empty hunger of the Commorrites kindling inside him and he did not like it one bit. He was starting to understand the unremitting fury of the dark city and its need to consume everything that it touched. If they stopped for even a moment the yawning void that was constantly at their heels would engulf them all. Now that an eternal life of parasitism and exploitation was laid out before him he found the idea repellent.

So, Sindiel the fool had come wandering into the monster’s lair without a plan, as if a single idiotic act could redeem the murder of companions and the betrayal of secrets he had sworn to keep for all eternity. It struck him that perhaps he was being motivated by some self-destructive urge to court death in an effort to assuage his guilt. He found the idea oddly cheering and pushed on with a lighter step.

By now his feet had carried him to a bell-shaped chamber with three other passages leading out of it. Down the left passage he could hear distant sounds like shrieks or skirling music or some mixture of both. From directly ahead blew warm, moist air that was heavy with the sickly-sweet scents of roasting meat. Neither sounds, smells nor lights emanated from the right-hand path, and after a moment’s hesitation Sindiel turned and went in that direction.

The passage twisted and sloped downwards, the rough-hewn walls occasionally lit by a dully-gleaming light gem. The walls sweated moisture that dribbled down into a small rivulet that was slowly eroding a channel in the centre of the passage. Sindiel avoided the sluggish liquid with distaste, trying not to think about what manner of effluvia might have seeped its way down here over the millennia.

He already felt he could confirm his worst fears. There was definitely a pervasive sense of wrongness in the catacombs, and it was more than just paranoia that was making Sindiel fear some hideous monstrosity lurked in every shadow. He stopped in his tracks, trying to make out the blurred form he could just see up ahead. The corridor appeared to open out and there was… something just visible where the light grew dimmer. It looked uncomfortably like an uneven, vaguely conical boulder made of flesh.

Sindiel turned to retreat but a sound made him stop short. Thin and distant, it plucked at his consciousness, sounding as much in his mind as in his ears. His first flush of terror drained away as he listened. It was a song being sung without words. There was nothing insidious or threatening about it as he had first feared, it was no net for the mind or soul except in the subtlest sense. It was a song filled with sadness and longing, with a faint but lingering undercurrent of hope.

Sindiel’s mind staggered. Surely only one soul in Commorragh could give voice to its suffering so poignantly as this. A pure heart. He had convinced himself that she had been killed and her soul devoured in some hideous orgy by Yllithian and his cohorts long ago, never quite knowing if he should hope that the worldsinger was really dead or not. He had not heard the worldsinger’s voice since Linthis had first introduced them at the World Shrine on Lileathanir. Happier times, of course, before he had decided to sell her into slavery for his own gain.

It had all seemed like a game at first, with Sindiel destined to be the winner. He couldn’t believe his luck when he’d found the message sphere, apparently dropped in haste during the aftermath of a sharp skirmish with the dark kin. Lately he found he wondered about that seemingly chance discovery, knowing the depths of Commorrite cunning as he did now. Without really knowing why he’d concealed the smooth sphere of chalcedony from his companions and began to study it without their knowledge. After much secret experimentation he’d found the sphere allowed him to communicate with an earnest-seeming prince from the dark city, a semi-legendary place of wickedness and depravity that had always exerted a deadly fascination on Sindiel.

Archon Yllithian had made Commorragh seem romantically dangerous and alluring. He made no attempt to conceal the fierce competition and the high stakes, nor the boldness and determination needed to thrive there. It had all been music to Sindiel’s jaded ears – freedom at last! An opportunity to live life to the full! Sindiel bitterly realised now that Yllithian had been artfully manipulating him, stringing him along with hints of the forbidden pleasures that came with mastery over others as he decried the dull, monastic strictures of the craftworlds.

Sindiel wondered how many other disaffected eldar had been drawn in by the siren call of Commorragh in similar ways down the centuries. Many, it seemed. Commorragh seethed with teeming multitudes more numerous than a thousand craftworlds, a million. From Sindiel’s perspective it seemed as if his entire race was gathered in this one city, the craftworlds and Exodites merely country cousins that were indulged despite their introverted ways. The proud remnants of eldar power and majesty resided firmly in Commorragh, dark though it might be.

When Yllithian had asked for something it was always a trifle, merely warnings of where the rangers travelled to avoid accidentally clashing with his warriors or news on where the resource-starved city could find certain ores and minerals it required. In exchange Yllithian took Sindiel into his confidence and explained his hopes of reuniting the disparate branches of the eldar; a process that must be begun by confronting the cruel and terrible tyrant that ruled Commorragh, Asdrubael Vect, and making him mend his wicked ways.

One day Yllithian had told him that the dark city needed a sacrifice to usher in the new age, a sacrifice that they could not make themselves. Commorragh needed a martyr to break its chains and only he, Sindiel, had the strength and clarity to help his enslaved brethren in their hour of need. From there Sindiel had done most of the work by convincing himself that one life being sacrificed to save billions was a small price to pay. At the time it had seemed an absurdly simple conclusion to reach, so clear. Only later did Sindiel, fool that he was, begin to understand the dark schemes he’d become ensnared in.

He’d thought they had killed the worldsinger in some daemon’s bargain to bring back El’Uriaq. But the worldsinger was alive, at least in some sense of the word. Sindiel wondered with sick horror whether she had been transformed into the lump of flesh ahead of him. That was apparently exactly the kind of twisted thing the haemonculi did with their spare time.

It took a long time for Sindiel to screw up enough courage to move forwards and investigate. He could think of a hundred reasons to retreat and only one to go on, but that one beat the rest hands down. He simply had to know. Eventually he drew his pistol for a little moral support and crept down the passage. He reached a point where he could see that the passage became a causeway across a darkly glistening pool. In the distance a single, broad pillar wider than a tower reared up to support a ceiling lost in the shadows above.

The fleshy boulder he had seen sat halfway between Sindiel and the pillar. He realised with a rush of relief that it seemed as if the singing was coming from beyond, from the tower-like pillar in the distance. Watching the disturbing object before him more closely Sindiel became convinced that it was a creature of some kind, a guardian sculpted by the haemonculi from living flesh. He could make out scarred skin stretched over bunched shoulders and thick haunches. The thing was squatting in the centre of the causeway, head tucked down and out of sight beneath slab-like arms. A miniature forest sprouted from its thick spine, rows of syringes and bio-pumps that were burbling quietly as they circulated whatever acidic ichor had been used to replace its blood. Sindiel felt absurdly relieved that he couldn’t see the thing’s face.

Sindiel edged out on to the causeway, his courage growing slightly when the thing didn’t react to the movement. He walked closer slowly, placing each foot carefully to produce not a whisper of sound. The guardian-creature shifted slightly and Sindiel froze. The worldsinger’s lament continued to weave through the still air, telling of a place where all life came together within the world spirit, where all anguish was eased and all enmities forgotten. Several deep breaths huffed from beneath the creature’s arms before the thing settled down again into what Sindiel hoped was a deeper slumber.

There was barely enough room on either edge of the causeway to squeeze past the creature without touching it but Sindiel wasn’t prepared to try wading into the pool instead. Something about the dark, still expanse seemed more dangerous to him than the guardian squatting before him on the causeway. The enigmatic tower and the plaintive sounds of the worldsinger’s song drew him onwards.

He moved with painstaking precision, mastering his fear to walk softly past the thing. He reached the halfway point safely and drew a little courage from that, horribly aware of the animal warmth and closeness of the guardian. He had just stepped onto the causeway beyond the creature when the singing stopped. Sindiel froze again, willing himself to become invisible.

The mountain of flesh beside him erupted with a roar, its tree-trunk arms flailing at the causeway with hammer-like blows. A face masked in black iron glared out at Sindiel from beneath hulking shoulders, its red, soulless eyes aflame with hatred of all living things. Sindiel shrieked and leapt backwards, his heels skidding at the brink of the sinister pool.

With a motion almost too quick to see the thing grabbed for him with spade-like hands. Sindiel tried to hurl himself to one side but couldn’t make his limbs move fast enough to evade the rampaging creature. It seized him and pulled him close to its scarred chest in a bone-crushing embrace. Iron-fanged jaws scraped through his rich clothing to reveal the fine mesh armour he wore beneath. A few seconds more and the clashing fangs would bite through into his flesh.

Sindiel’s pistol had flown from his hand in the instant he was grabbed. Now in desperation he tried to punch forwards with his pinned arm. The feeble impact of his knuckles barely scuffed the iron-hard flesh that they struck, but the device still bound to his wrist was infinitely more effective. Invisible strands of gossamer wire shot out of the concealed weapon, slipping through his sleeve, through the creature’s scarred hide and into its flesh as easily as if they were all made of water. The guardian roared again and dropped Sindiel, bruised and bleeding, onto the causeway so that it could clutch at the tiny wound he’d succeeded in making in its side. Syringes in its spine hissed as they began automatically injecting coagulants to seal the minor breach and stimulants to provoke the grotesque guardian into a berserker frenzy.

But the wound was deceptive. Sindiel’s hidden weapon was Motley’s parting gift to him in Iron Thorn: an ancient type seldom seen in the later ages of the eldar, called a Harlequin’s kiss. In the brief instant that the kiss touched the guardian’s flesh, metres-long monomolecular filaments were sent looping throughout its body. As tough as it was the altered creature could not survive having its insides reduced to the consistency of soup by the unfurling wires. The hulking guardian sagged and then toppled from the causeway with a final, despairing groan, disappearing into the dark pool with barely a ripple.

Sindiel lay where he had fallen, gasping for breath. He waited helplessly for a rush of running feet and hands roughly seizing him, but no one came. Slowly his heart stopped hammering and he began to recover his wits. He cautiously moved his limbs one by one to find if any of them were broken. Wrenched and painful as they all were everything seemed to be fully functional, although his ribs were aflame with agony at every breath he took. After some minutes he rolled over and cautiously levered himself upright. He stood gazing along the remaining strip of causeway to the tower, wondering if the unseen worldsinger had deliberately tried to bring about his death. He tottered forwards, unsure whether he now sought absolution or vengeance.

A rough stair had been hacked out of the dull stone of the pillar. The stair rose in a precipitous spiral from its base and quickly disappeared from sight. Sindiel wearily began to climb upwards almost on hands and knees, his torn clothes flapping about him.

After a seemingly endless climb the stair opened onto a low landing that had been made by widening a great horizontal crack in the pillar. Many lamps were hung within, illuminating the grotto-like crack with a wash of soft white light. Of the few furnishings to be found there the only one of note was a richly carved bed of dark wood, or more accurately its occupant. The worldsinger Laryin sat in the bed watching Sindiel struggle up the last few steps into view. She was bound at the neck by a metal collar with a chain attached that was in turn stapled to the wall. Otherwise she appeared unharmed, though her eyes seemed like limpid pools of misery. All thoughts of vengeance fled from him at the sight.

‘It’s you,’ she said.

‘That’s right, me. The one that got you into this. I–’ Sindiel fell silent, unable to meet her eyes. He had rehearsed many scenarios in his mind but found them all in tatters now that he had reached the moment of truth.

‘I–I’m sorry,’ was all he could think to say.

To his surprise she laughed, not with bitterness or mockery but with a pure sound of joy that seemed like a breath of spring in that dark place. Sindiel blinked at her in surprise and that made her laugh again. He wondered if she had been driven insane by her experiences.

‘After all you’ve done you’re still an innocent,’ she said at last. ‘That gives me hope. You’re wondering if I’ve gone mad – no I haven’t. They can hurt me but they can’t touch me.’

‘Then we can escape! I’ll take you away from here!’ Sindiel said, his mind whirling with schemes to escape the catacombs and reach a webway portal unseen. But then what?

Laryin was shaking her head sadly, soft golden hair brushing the dark metal collar at her throat. ‘There’s no escape for me now. I’m committed to this path. I’ve become Morai-Heg and given birth to a monster. Without me to nurture him who knows what he might become?’

‘Nurture? How can you say such things?’ Sindiel choked. ‘Motley said there were always more choices, more chances to take…’

‘And I choose to stay. What El’Uriaq takes from me would otherwise come from a hundred thousand of my brothers and sisters. I’ve accepted that burden in their stead. The thing that is El’Uriaq owns me now. We are bound together as tyrant and pain-bride.’

Sindiel’s face was ashen, all the hopes that had blossomed in him a moment before withered utterly. The worldsinger looked at him sympathetically with eyes that seemed too old for her youthful-looking face.

‘Don’t be sad, Sindiel,’ she said earnestly. ‘I brought him to life and I hope to see him returned to death, for is that not the cycle of life? Birth and death? Your part in this is over, you should save yourself if you still can.’

‘You’re going to try and kill him?’ Sindiel asked in wonder.

‘I wouldn’t know how. His is the power of domination and destruction while mine is in the nurture of growing things. But life will find a way to end in death as it always will, and when it does I will be there to mourn its passing and sing of the hope of a happier rebirth.’

‘I was given this as a gift,’ Sindiel said as he came to a decision, ‘but I think that it was really meant to be given to you.’ He unstrapped the Harlequin’s kiss from his wrist and laid it on the edge of the bed. ‘Press the narrowest part of it against the target and the weapon will do the rest.’

Laryin looked at the elongated black diamond shape but did not touch it. ‘Is that what you used to kill the guardian?’ she asked eventually.

‘Yes. Did you use the guardian to try to kill me?’

‘No, it was just in such torment that I sang to soothe it. When I sensed someone coming near with purpose in their heart I stopped and hoped they would put it out of its misery.’ The worldsinger smiled sweetly up at Sindiel. ‘And you did. I’m sorry if it hurt you.’

‘Should I put you out of your misery too?’ he asked her quietly.

‘No! My ending now won’t solve what has been begun. I will follow the path to the end, bitter though it might be.’

Sindiel looked away for a long time in silence, only finding the bravery to meet her eyes when his own were blurred with tears. ‘How is it that you can forgive me after what I’ve done?’

Laryin was silent for a long while before answering.

‘You know I can’t forgive you, Sindiel, you’re the only one that can do that.’

But Sindiel, with the last of his courage spent, had already fled.

CHAPTER 17

A TRIUMPHAL BANQUET (THE HANDMAID’S PROMISE)

‘Don’t speak ill of father Shaimesh, he is a friend and ally to all in need. The old and the weak he lends his strength to equally, and lovers too call upon him at need. Where would the widow and the orphan find their bite if not in his fangs? He is the gate keeper and the path maker, and he holds the key to many paths to oblivion, full as many as his forked tongues…’

– The fool Mecuto to the Broken King, in Ursyllas’s Dispossessions

To descend into El’Uriaq’s realm was to enter a land of faerie. For weeks slaves had been feverishly gnawing floatstone and cracking bedrock to enact a transformation of the darkling catacombs that almost beggared belief. Where there had been narrow paths and blind ways there were now wide halls and passages opening to richly appointed chambers furnished with delicate chairs and tables of ivory. Lofty ceilings were supported by tapering pillars that reached up into the darkness, sloping runoffs had been cut into low steps, bottomless pits had been bridged. A hundred thousand lamps were suspended in the air lighting the way, their brilliance pushing back the reluctant shadows behind translucent hangings of many soft hues. In their golden glow El’Uriaq’s excavations seemed rich and welcoming, a place of wonder and miracles.

The slaves that had laboured so diligently to effect the metamorphosis of foetid dungeon to noble palace were still present, after a fashion. Their hides hung from the walls in stunning profusion, their bones had been cunningly wrought into new forms to serve their master in death as they had in life. Of their flesh, their blood and their souls there was no sign, but an aura of death and suffering clung to the golden halls of El’Uriaq’s hidden kingdom.

For months now the subtle tendrils of El’Uriaq’s influence had glided outwards into the eternal city. His faceless agents had been moving among esoteric cults and obscure kabals reminding them of their forgotten duties. Guarded approaches had been made to the power-hungry and leaders had been bribed or replaced by the hundred. A thousand delicate movements were orchestrated to shift power or allegiance away from Asdrubael Vect. The great tyrant still knew nothing of El’Uriaq’s return, but he had certainly sensed the movement of another predator in Commorragh’s political jungle. Recently inter-kabal fighting had intensified as Vect sought to reassert control. Vect struck blindly but often, and some of his blows fell true upon the slaves and property of El’Uriaq’s followers. Fear gripped the city, and El’Uriaq’s cohorts most of all. Just as the noose started to tighten the old emperor of Shaa-dom sent the coded call for his chosen to come to him.

El’Uriaq’s secret followers trickled in from every corner of Commorragh both high and low. Petty archons came striding in the midst of their silent bodyguards, armoured sybarites rubbed shoulders with light-stepping succubi, mechanists walked beside beastmasters, gang lords exchanged taunts with flesh traders. All wore masks to conceal their identities, although some chose to flaunt themselves openly by wearing the barest mockeries of silk or crystal. The poet-philosopher Aclyriid duelled the philosopher-poet Pso’kobor with barbed words and mockeries, while the vivisectionist Zeelatar pointed out distinctive hides hanging from the walls and held forth on the virtues of the different slave races under varying states of duress.

‘Sunlight! A lack of sunlight for greenskins, oh yes! All that vaunted toughness becomes as soft and malleable as boiled tubers!’

Many that came wondered at their numbers, the strength that they were a part of never made manifest to them before now. Each had thought themselves privy to secrets held by few others and now they found themselves in a company hundreds strong. A glittering river of warriors, assassins, leaders and spymasters flowed ever deeper into the golden halls, gathering rivulets and tributaries to itself as it drew nigh to the great amphitheatre below.

There waited El’Uriaq in his court, decked in the radiant finery of an earlier age. His robe of shifting midnight hues was slit at the chest and wrist to reveal glimpses of the bright armour he wore beneath as if he were clad in storm clouds that flashed with lightning. The crown of eight stars was upon his head and the ruby sceptre was in his hand and he looked lordly indeed, kingly even although the eldar had foresworn having kings long before. On the steps of the dais was a veiled female clad all in dazzling white, with a chain running from a collar at her throat to the foot of the throne as though she were an intractable pet or dangerous beast. Whispers flew through the throng at the sight of the veiled woman. Surely this was El’Uriaq’s pain-bride, the pure heart rumoured to grant true immortality to whomsoever could master her.

Ranked tables about El’Uriaq’s throne groaned beneath the weight of assembled provender. Plunder from a million worlds had been gathered for his guests: star-metal casks winked alongside spun crystal bottles, heaped trenchers of squamous ocean world delicacies wobbled beside platters of rare meats taken from every part of the Great Wheel, euphoric tinctures and narcotic powders were there in plenty.

‘Welcome, my friends!’ El’Uriaq called to the masked multitude as they spilled in. ‘Kindly find the places appointed to you! Hurry now! I am anxious to begin the evening’s entertainments!’

Entertainments were also there in plenty: musicians and dancers waited at the margins, along with savage looking slave-gladiators, orators and mimes, restrained slaves to torment in situ and loose ones to dominate at leisure. As the guests filed among the tables they found individual settings with plaques inscribed with messages thus:

‘The Aphor of the eleventh district’

‘The right hand of Xarlon’

‘The master of the stone road’

Each held a clue that would be understood only by the conspirator and El’Uriaq himself, a reference to a coded missive from their past communications, in some cases now made dreadfully clear. Some took their seats with relief, flattered by the personal attention and evocation of past success, others sat filled with foreboding as they recognised their messages as inferring some oversight or failure on their part.

‘The broken promise of the sprawls’

‘The Fortress Unvanquishable, save for Sacnoth’

‘He who loved well, if not wisely, Cymbelline’

Some were reluctant to take their places at first, but as more and more of their compatriots were seated they found themselves alone. Beneath El’Uriaq’s searing gaze they hurried to comply until all of the assembled host sat at their tables at last. Archon Yllithian, clad in subtly differing lustres of black and wearing a crow mask, had found his setting to read:

‘Beloved primogenitor and primus’

Which he took to be a moderately encouraging sign, unless El’Uriaq believed that like the titans of old he should consume his parent. He placed the cylindrical container he was carrying beside a spindly bone chair and took a seat before glancing around disinterestedly at his table partners. He recognised several petty archons among them but the bulk seemed to be lowborn scum of one sort or another. Nyos wondered if El’Uriaq was deliberately insulting him by placing him in such company. At his side a rough-handed warrior wearing a mask with bulging jewelled insect eyes looked around with interest.

‘What’ve you got there, brother? Something to share and share alike?’ he said, gesturing at the container jocularly.

‘Nothing for the likes of you,’ Yllithian replied with contempt. His neighbour seemed to be under the mistaken impression that he was at some kind of social event to make friends. Yllithian was labouring under no such delusions. El’Uriaq bringing together so many of his followers could only mean one thing – that he was ready to act. The conspirators’ banquet was an old institution in Commorrite lore, a final step to cement the plotters’ commitment and weed out any naysayers. Not all of those that had entered the amphitheatre were going to leave it alive; instead they would become examples of the price of disloyalty in order to bind the rest together.

As the last guests were seated a fanfare of horns and trumpets blew to silence their chatter. El’Uriaq stood up proud and splendid upon the steps of his throne and spoke to the throng. By some artifice of the amphitheatre or his own powers his words were carried clearly to every ear as if he stood close at hand. They were low and thrilling, replete with all the power and confidence of his magnetic personality.

‘Do you feel it, my friends? Do you feel history being made? This is a moment that will be cherished in our fine city for generations to come. They will look back upon this night with reverence, the night when the first blows were struck against the shackles of tyranny encompassing their lives.

‘The tyrant told you that I, El’Uriaq, had fallen beneath his blade. He lied. He told you that no rival could match his guile and purpose. He lied again. He told you the city would flourish beneath his rule. He lied once more. Who here still believes in the lies of Asdrubael Vect?’

A chorus of denouncements and vitriolic curses at the perfidy of the tyrant echoed around the amphitheatre from the assembled guests. Many of the lowborn drew weapons and clashed them together ferociously, eager to show their hatred and contempt for Vect. El’Uriaq smiled radiantly as he allowed the clamour to die away.

‘So! Now I bid you feast and take your ease, for we have hard fighting ahead of us if our city is to be freed from bondage. I will speak with each of you to hear your concerns and further share my plans. For now, relax and enjoy the hospitality of my court. To the future! To the doom of Vect!’

Another, perhaps more heartfelt, cheer erupted, drums thundered and pipes skirled in the tumult. Dancers stepped lightly among the tables to perform as the music calmed to a more languorous refrain. Yllithian turned his attention to a plate of jellied pin-stars harvested from sunless seas, pushing the luminous echinoderms around with a silver-tined fork. The accoutrements of each table were rich and finely crafted; the plates, bottles, chalices, goblets, bowls, the multitudinous and highly specialised knives, forks and spoons – all were made with fantastic artistry and skill, but all were mismatched with one another. No artisan of Commorragh had made these things to unify form and purpose as only eldar hands might do, rather they were articles of plunder taken from a million worlds. El’Uriaq’s feasting tables had all the riotous barbarity of a pirate’s lair.

The thought depressed Yllithian. Were there not artisans enough in the dark city to make goods of their own aesthetic? He already knew the sad truth. The kabals prized plunder more highly – what could be taken had become worth more than what could be made with their own hands. The chaotic diversity hid a message for the keen observer – El’Uriaq had reach. Even from hiding he could pluck treasures from anywhere in the galaxy at his whim and scatter them before his followers. Yllithian had no doubt that it was a display that impressed the lowborn members of the assembly, but it left him feeling cold.

Hoots and cheers drew his attention to where two gangly slave-gladiators were hacking bloody chunks out of one another in an impromptu bout between two tables. Beak-faced and quill-haired, the avian-looking creatures wielded hook-tipped staves with creditable gusto, hissing and screeching as they gave and received wounds. One eventually pinned the other down and tore out its still-pulsing heart before consuming it, to the great amusement of the immediate onlookers.

Sudden awareness of a presence at his elbow made him glance around sharply. An obese castrato in a furred animal mask stood beside him.

‘Lord El’Uriaq bidth that you may attend on him now,’ the castrato lisped, holding out his fat white hands to gesture towards the throne. Yllithian saw that a triumvirate of warriors in bull masks were stepping down from the dais after speaking with El’Uriaq. His time had come. He picked up the container beside his chair and pushed his way between the revellers towards the throne.

From beneath gauzy veils of white Laryin watched the dark kin at their sport, forcing herself to take it in. Her whole body ached and she wanted nothing more than to crouch down and block everything out but she stood stiff and silent as the nightmare washed over her. She liked to think that it was pride that kept her so upright and unbending, that she simply could not give in to the urge to grovel before them. Fear of punishment was most likely the true motivator. She’d been ordered to stand and so stand she must. She’d also been shown that her body was capable of betraying her will in the most craven fashion and she’d found she hated that part of herself more than the pain. Against her wrist a hard, elongated diamond shape was digging into her flesh, surprisingly warm, almost pleasant to the touch.

A smallish dark kin wearing black with a crow mask was approaching the throne. Laryin’s attention was caught by the container he carried, a cylinder of burnished metal with a handle at the top. El’Uriaq actually rose and descended the steps to greet this one of his followers; he was obviously a valued minion. Laryin wondered what was in the tithe he’d brought. Something about it fascinated her, a forgotten sense of insight that tickled at the back of her skull.

‘Ah, my primus!’ El’Uriaq roared in delight, sweeping up his smaller follower with a hug that evidently terrified him. The crow-mask recovered quickly after El’Uriaq released him, bowing low and making his offering.

‘What’s this?’ smiled El’Uriaq with his eyes glittering more sharply than his eight-starred crown. ‘A gift for me?’

‘Indeed, a memento of past times,’ Crow-mask replied with an impish grin, ‘the contents being perfectly harmless of course, as I’m sure you’re quite aware.’

Laryin could see that the grin was just as much a mask as the beak and feathers worn above it. Hard, calculating eyes behind the mask flicked at her for an instant before returning to El’Uriaq.

‘Naturally,’ El’Uriaq said soothingly. ‘Allow me to reframe my question – whose head do you bring to me?’

Crow-mask opened the container with a flourish, hinging open a curved lid to reveal another thing out of nightmare. The metal casing held a cylinder of crystal filled with colourless fluid. What was in the liquid was almost hidden by long, dark hair that floated slowly around it, but it was undeniably a severed head. Laryin took an involuntarily half-step back, the chain at her throat clinking gently as she did so. El’Uriaq turned and hissed at her playfully, freezing her with terror.

‘Don’t be like that, Laryin, you have more in common with Angevere than you might think.’ He turned back to crow-mask, smiling broadly. ‘Quite wonderful. May I?’ El’Uriaq took the container and lifted it to stare at the contents more closely. Crow-mask was watching El’Uriaq’s face intently as he did so, so intently that curiosity overwhelmed Laryin’s usual fear and she looked too.

She was surprised by what she saw on the monster’s too-handsome features. Warmth and tenderness were written there, fond memories and sad recollections. She had never seen him look so… mortal before, even vulnerable. In that instant she also saw the thing that looked out through El’Uriaq’s eyes. She saw it only for a moment, a flash of the terrible all-consuming fire that dwelt within his soul, an entity that gazed out at the world with obscene triumph and unspeakable malice. Laryin swayed and almost stumbled at the sight, the amphitheatre seeming to pitch beneath her feet. Crow-mask and the monster were speaking in low tones but she barely heard them over the pulse of blood in her ears.

The diamond shape against Laryin’s wrist ached warmly. Despite her brave words to the renegade she wasn’t sure that she had the strength to endure the river of fate flowing over her. The weapon he’d left gnawed at her mind constantly. One blow and it could be ended. She had made no conscious decision to bring the weapon with her or to use it but a part of her mind still clung to it like a talisman. It represented having some kind of choice for her now. The only choice she could still make.

Yllithian saw the beast unmasked in El’Uriaq too, only for an instant but that was all it took. The flash of it seared his mind and it took all of his considerable will not to draw back immediately. Fortunately El’Uriaq seemed too enraptured by his gift to sense anything amiss – just as the damned haemonculus had predicted. Yllithian felt as if ice water were flooding into his veins, his knees suddenly seemed treacherously weak. The thing was talking to him, and a part of his mind was screaming at him to respond.

‘–she speak?’ asked the thing that looked like El’Uriaq.

‘Indeed she does,’ Yllithian replied, his well-worn instincts for dissimulation mastering his fear and rushing to the fore to save him. ‘The – ah – haemonculi fitted a vocal synthesiser to the casket. She had a nasty habit of using mind speech she had to be cured of before she’d use it.’

The El’Uriaq-thing laughed heartily. ‘Well now,’ it said to the head, ‘all your running and cleverness brought you to this, Angevere? I never imagined I would become better looking than you.’

Angevere’s synthesised voice sighed like the wind through winter-stripped branches. ‘My life is fulfilled knowing that you are complete once more, my immortal lord,’ she said.

‘Indeed it is, we’ll have a great deal to talk about, you and I, when time permits. For the present speak me a prediction, since now you have become a crone and I’ll hear your sweet voice no more.’

In the amphitheatre El’Uriaq’s guests were beginning to slake their lusts in ever more outrageous fashion. Pipes skirled hauntingly over the clamour of cries and screams. As Angevere spoke her thin, insidious whisper seemed to mute the sounds of revelry.

‘The Dysjunction approaches, the city will be riven asunder. Blood shall wash the spires and beasts shall stalk the streets. As they suffer beneath the lash of destiny the citizens will cry out for salvation but they will have no succour. Three shall rise but only one will endure.’

El’Uriaq smiled again, the picture of indulgence. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘Everything I would hope for from a doomsayer.’ He glanced about and then looked at Laryin with a knowing smirk. ‘Come here, darling, I have a special job for you.’

Laryin walked forwards unwillingly. The diamond shape on her wrist burned like a brand. She took another step, almost within arm’s reach of the daemon meat-puppet and the monstrous thing it held out to her. Now that the time had come she found that her choice was already made. She tensed her arm to lash out, probably the last action she would ever take. Her mind’s eye expanded with the skein of possible outcomes. El’Uriaq slain, standing over his body splashed with crimson… El’Uriaq alive, seizing her wrist and twisting it back… Laryin dead, white dress blotched pink with leaking lifeblood… The drums pulsed louder in her ears, matching the rhythm of her heart.

+Don’t.+

Mind speech. Laryin hesitated. It was the first time she had heard it used in the dark city; even the renegade had not dared to use it when he was alone with her. El’Uriaq looked at her sharply, his eyes seeming to pierce the veils and bore straight into her quivering soul… searching… probing. Crow-mask cleared his throat suddenly.

‘Perhaps we should move on to more pressing matters, honoured host? I did not intend to distract you from your other entertainments this evening, forgive me if gift-giving was inappropriate.’

El’Uriaq’s attention shifted to the eldar dressed in black and the moment was broken, his good humour returning flawlessly. ‘Not at all, my friend, you’ve made me very happy,’ he said. Laryin hurriedly reached out and took the horrid casket from him before backing away. Any excuse to move out of his immediate presence was welcome. El’Uriaq was deep in conversation with crow-mask and ignored her.

+Very good,+ the voice came into her mind again, stronger now but still only the barest whisper. +Remain calm. He needs fear to read you clearly.+

+Who are you? Where are you?+ Laryin thought back softly, whispering inside the monster’s lair.

+The answer is in your hands, don’t pretend you hadn’t already guessed.+

Laryin had guessed. She nerved herself to lift the casket up and look at the face in its drifting nest of hair. El’Uriaq had called her Angevere. The crow-masked one was turning to leave and Laryin felt an illogical stab of loss at his going. He had helped her, probably saved her.

+Shed no tears for Yllithian, he’s the one that brought you here in the first place. You and me, together, have made this abomination but he’s the one that made it all possible.+

‘Do try the haemovore cutlets at your table, they’ll go well with those pin-stars you were trying,’ El’Uriaq said to the departing Yllithian. When he was gone El’Uriaq glanced over at Laryin again, and raised his voice to speak to her over the tumult in the background.

‘Have Angevere tell you of her services to me in Shaa-dom. You will soon be emulating them,’ he said before turning away with a laugh. He went back to sit on his throne as a long-limbed, spidery-looking individual in a silvered skull-mask came forward and made obeisance.

+It wears the shape of my lord well, doesn’t it? For now at least. Oh, but he’s close to his dark apotheosis. It could be tonight or it could be in a hundred years but he’s close.+

+Then why did you stop me?+ Laryin thought. +I might have ended it.+

The crone’s laughter rustled through her mind, dry and dead. +I thought you had become Morai-Heg? Weren’t you destined to succour your frightful offspring? Child! No assassin’s tool will end this, not even one supplied by a broken heart.+

+What then! My life was forfeit, I accepted that. But when I saw it I knew… I knew that it had to be ended.+

+Very good. You understand. There is a way if you are strong enough and clever enough. Shall I tell you what it is?+

Laryin looked around, struggling to keep calm as the crone had told her to do. Knives were out in the amphitheatre, their savage caress eliciting piercing shrieks that merged with the infernal piping and pulsing drums. Writhing knots of figures swayed through coloured smoke, dancing and fighting and copulating in equal measure. All the worst legends of her people about the decadence before the Fall and the cruelty of the dark kin were being played out before her eyes.

+Just tell me how I can end this.+

The low, dry whisper of Angevere’s speech in her mind told her what she must do.

Yllithian moved as artfully as he could towards the exit. The shape of the amphitheatre meant that El’Uriaq could see any part of it from his throne at the centre. If he were watching he might realise that Yllithian was trying to leave. Nyos slipped around groups, politely refused invitations, exchanged pleasantries and ignored challenges as he worked his way to the ramp leading out of the amphitheatre. He was finally stopped by a troupe of dancing Lhamaeans and their wide circle of onlookers barring his path. The sharp musk of their poisoned perfumes filled the air as their tattooed limbs flashed in a fantastic, gyrating display that held their slack-jawed audience enthralled. Beyond them Yllithian could see the ramp was filled with masked guards anyway. There was no way out there.

He looked around casually, apparently busy fastidiously stripping the spicy flesh from a haemovore cutlet. El’Uriaq’s gastronomic advice at least seemed excellent; the blood-soaked meat nicely offset the jellied echinoderms he’d dined on earlier. El’Uriaq himself still sat upon his throne receiving supplicants in the midst of the feast, an island of light in the dark revelry surrounding him. To one side of him the veiled worldsinger stood like a pale flame, gripping the casket with the crone’s head. Yllithian experienced a moment of vertigo as he looked at her, the same sensation he’d had during the resurrection. He could almost feel reality straining. Eldritch voices seemed to be whispering and cackling at the edge of his consciousness. Something very bad was about to happen and he needed to get out before it was too late.

The serving slaves and courtesans had not entered down the ramp as the guests had. There had to be other exits to the amphitheatre. Yllithian watched carefully and spotted three slaves bearing away a huge salver piled with gnawed bones. They slipped behind skin curtains to one side and did not return until a short time later with a new salver bearing a steaming heap of broiled limbs. Yllithian calmly started making his way over to the spot the slaves had emerged from.

He could smell the heady scents of the kitchens when crashing drums and braying trumpets stopped him short of his goal. El’Uriaq was rising from his throne as the din in the amphitheatre was momentarily silenced by the savage fanfare. All eyes were drawn to him. The old emperor of Shaa-dom – or rather the thing that wore his flesh, as Yllithian now knew – gazed around triumphantly. His voice boomed through the amphitheatre with no artifice of personalisation for his listeners this time. This was the voice of a prophet addressing his believers.

‘My friends, the time has come to strip fear from your heart and cast aside veils of anonymity. We are bonded together in the single, unshakeable purpose of overthrowing the tyrant. Therefore those gathered here have nothing to fear from one another and so I bid you now to remove your masks.’

An involuntary gasp rippled through the throng at the implication. Each of them would hold the lives of the others in their hands. Even one traitor in their midst could doom the whole conspiracy. Some threw off their masks joyfully, crying out their loyalty to El’Uriaq. Yllithian, like many others, was more reluctant but the implication was clear – anyone unwilling to remove their mask would stand revealed as just such a potential traitor. No doubt El’Uriaq was paying close heed to just who was quick and who was slow to obey him. It was a masterful stroke in its own way, self-preservation would enforce loyalty. Yllithian quickly removed his crow-mask before El’Uriaq thought to look in his direction.

‘There. Excellent. Very good,’ El’Uriaq said soothingly as his guests divested themselves of their masks and gazed around at their co-conspirators. ‘There really is nothing to fear. To show you that I’d like to introduce the great friend and ally that has made all of this possible – Archon Yllithian of the White Flames.’ The monster was looking straight at him as he said it.

Yllithian felt blood rushing to his cheeks. Suddenly exposed, literally standing in the stablights as he was, he forced a smile onto his face. ‘Come down here, Nyos!’ called El’Uriaq. ‘Come stand at my side!’

Some uncertain cheers with a polite smattering of applause followed Yllithian as he forced his unwilling feet to carry him back into the monster’s lair. El’Uriaq greeted him warmly once more and embraced him. Every ounce of Yllithian’s considerable self-control was necessary to keep himself from flinching. El’Uriaq whispered enigmatically: ‘I do hope you tried the cutlets, Nyos,’ before he continued to address his guests.

‘Yllithian here is a student of antiquities, a great raconteur in matters of the past – which I’m sure is why he took an interest in me.’ Dutiful laughter fluttered in response. ‘As such Yllithian here recalls many of the old traditions that have slipped away in modern times. For example I’ll wager that Yllithian remembers the Feast of Shaimesh, an archaic practice long forgotten by some.’

Yllithian’s mind raced. The black arts of Shaimesh pertained to poisons and toxins of all kinds. The greatest practitioners of the art were the Lhamaeans, courtesan-poisoners who could bring a lover to the edge of ecstasy with their virulent brews – or snuff out their life like a candle. But the Feast of Shaimesh? A poison banquet… Fear clutched at Yllithian’s belly as El’Uriaq spoke again.

‘Shaimesh, father of poisons, taught us that everything can be a poison in the correct dosage and that the little kiss of death we find there is what adds spice to life. The students of Shaimesh would gather for a feast and test their skills against one another, poisoning each dish a little differently.’

A deathly hush had fallen over the amphitheatre, his fearful audience hanging on every word. The low, rhythmic pulse of the drums continued, never speeding or slowing.

‘The poisons would be too subtle to detect, too mild and innocuous in effect to even classify as dangerous – on their own, that is. The combinations were the key, you see. Some compounds would cancel each other out… while others would combine and magnify their effects a thousand times.’

A groan and a crash sounded out in the stillness of the amphitheatre. El’Uriaq continued unperturbed. ‘It is possible to predict the effects of resulting necrolixirs with astounding accuracy, even down to the second of demise. I have looked into your hearts this night. Those of you with faith and obedience have nothing to fear, but those that would betray us, those that would crawl on their bellies before the tyrant and sell their comrades to lick a few crumbs from his hands…’

El’Uriaq’s voice had been rising, growing stronger with each word. Now he stood from his throne and roared, ‘Now is the time you pay for your crimes!’

Pandemonium erupted throughout the amphitheatre. Not one in ten of the guests fell prey to the dreadful vitriolic compounds they had drunk or ingested, but those that had been targeted died in the most spectacular and painful ways. The dark kin’s horrid talents had devised countless deadly effects down the ages.

The philosopher-poet Pso’kobor, replete after unknowingly dining on pantopherol and tocotheric, simultaneously ruptured every blood vessel in his body with explosive force. He exsanguinated himself in a fine, red mist.

The xeno-trader Mayylaenidian Vir twisted horribly as his bones were broken by his own spasming muscles. He howled wildly as his spine curved so far backwards his head emerged from between his knees before a final sickening crack made him silent. Even afterwards the muscles of the corpse continued to writhe and twist with a life of their own.

The myrmidon Kolaxian burst into flames, spontaneously combusting like a tallow candle beneath a blowtorch. Flaming drips of fat showered as the luckless warrior staggered between tables and was fended off by his compatriots.

The overseer Azurnal fell to a creeping vari-form of the glass plague, having had his own phagic inoculations against the deadly viral helix selectively neutralised by the delicious mirepoix he had tasted earlier. Sheets of black crystal shot through with lambent green slithered languorously down his legs and arms as he screamed for help that would not come.

The archon Slithiyyius collapsed in the midst of his bodyguards, fallen prey to a foe their blades could not stop. Skin sloughed off him in untidy lumps as he rapidly turned into a pile of corroding bones and necrotising flesh.

There were a dozen more equally horrifying deaths ranged around the amphitheatre, all of the guests seeing the price of disloyalty firsthand. Shrieks and laughter rang out in equal measure. El’Uriaq’s surviving faithful gratefully warmed themselves at the dying soul sparks all about them, an unexpectedly rich and generous feast. On the dais at the centre of it all Yllithian felt as if reality were stretching still thinner, a balloon ready to burst.

‘A fine jest, my host,’ he dared to whisper. ‘What other surprises might be in store, I wonder?’

El’Uriaq grinned wolfishly, his eyes flashing dangerously with excitement. ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ he confided in Yllithian. ‘There may be a really big surprise still to come.’

The entity was there again, staring out at him through El’Uriaq’s eyes. It knew. It knew Yllithian had seen it and it didn’t care. It would continue to use him anyway, right until his usefulness was all wrung out, and only then would it end him. What alternative did he have but to play along – apart from making the fatal mistake of seeking help from Asdrubael Vect? Yllithian was trapped, he was bound to the monster he’d created and they both knew it.

‘M… my lord?’ a small, frightened voice said from close at hand.

El’Uriaq looked around at the speaker in some surprise. It was the worldsinger, her veils thrown back to show her pale face and vivid bruises. She cradled Angevere’s head in its casket as if it were a babe in arms.

‘My lord, may I speak?’ Laryin asked sweetly. Intrigued, El’Uriaq nodded brusquely.

‘I have a gift for you too, sire, if you’ll accept it. I have little to give you but it is something unique in the dark city, and perhaps of passing interest even to one as knowledgeable as yourself.’

‘A riddle? Quite charming. Very well, I accept and surrender; tell me of this mysterious gift that only you can bestow upon me.’

‘A song, my lord, such as we sing in the World Shrine on Lileathanir at the birth of new life to welcome it into the world of growing things. I will sing in honour of your return, if you will permit me to.’

El’Uriaq’s face was sour. ‘If I want to hear wailing slaves I can make my own music quite successfully.’

Angevere’s dry, rustling voice came from between Laryin’s arms. ‘Not a slave giving voice in terror, my archon, a pure heart rendering up her joy at your victories. Such sweetness as you have not heard since the fall of Shaa-dom when my sisters were all taken.’

When El’Uriaq didn’t respond the crone persisted. ‘Will you not permit her to sing? If not for yourself then perhaps for the sake of the last of your poor, lost handmaids, Angevere?’

Laryin’s knees were shaking. Angevere had told her not to be afraid, that fear is the mind-killer. Easy for her to say, being a thing of nightmare herself. El’Uriaq seemed to loom over her, an impossibly tall silhouette in the harsh lights behind him. She tried to focus on the one Angevere had called Yllithian instead. Without his crow mask the dark kin was bland and unassuming except for his eyes. They were as black and merciless as gun barrels, and they were trained on her.

‘Please,’ Laryin said piteously to El’Uriaq. ‘In my… realm it is traditional for the bride to bring a dowry to her betrothed. My father is dead and I have only this small thing I can give, but give it I must.’

El’Uriaq turned to Yllithian and raised his brows quizzically. ‘What say you, Nyos?’ he said to his companion. ‘Should we permit this barbaric nuptial display in my hall?’

Yllithian coughed politely before answering. ‘I don’t believe that it will impugn the dignity of your palace or office, no,’ he replied levelly. El’Uriaq laughed uproariously at that and clapped him on the back, making the small archon stagger.

‘Traces of a spine, Nyos!’ El’Uriaq smiled. ‘We’ll make a true leader out of you yet! I was beginning to worry that too much time spent conspiring had softened your bones.’

‘They remain yours to crush at will, apparently,’ Yllithian said ruefully while rubbing his shoulder. ‘I, at least, would like to hear our captive bird sing. Just as the girl said it would be a unique experience even here in Commorragh, the city of a thousand and one delights. It might go some way to repaying the considerable difficulties in procuring her – above and beyond the resurrection of your inestimable self and the sadly departed Kraillach, of course.’

‘Of course,’ El’Uriaq nodded. Turning to Laryin he said, ‘Very well, as an indulgence to my friend here I will listen for a while. Ensure it’s sweet to my ears or I’ll soon have you singing a different tune.’

Laryin nodded nervously and knelt quickly to put down the casket she held before rising again, seeming to grow in confidence as she did so. She drew in breath once, twice, thrice and began her song alone and unaccompanied, somehow weaving it gently into the background clamour of the amphitheatre. It began with a thin, tremulous refrain that twisted to and fro, always questing, seeking like the first shoots of new growth.

Her song was a thing of beauty woven of sound and psychic energy in equal parts, tickling empathically like mind speech, affecting the body on an almost cellular level as it responded to the forgotten sounds of creation. The background noise seemed to fall away as Laryin’s voice grew stronger, breaking to the surface with the joy of new awakening.

Yllithian basked in the glow of her power. It felt very much like it had at the resurrection but now the energy Bellathonis had wrung from her with his torture engines was being freely given. There was the slightest tingling sensation on his skin, as though every fine hair were straining to stand on end. Alarm registered in his satiated mind and then was swept away by a wave of pleasure as Laryin struck a high note, as clear and perfect as pure crystal.

El’Uriaq seemed enraptured, a horrible thing to behold as his face was written with all the lust, possessiveness and violence this bright, quivering spark of soul-life aroused in him. The worldsinger sang on, but she was not looking at the monster leering over her. She gazed full at Yllithian and something in her clear eyes held both a warning and a plea.

Yllithian suddenly understood and stumbled away, almost falling on the steps of the dais. The world song rolled around him, rich and potent. Laryin sang of flourishing life, bursting forth upon the canvas of creation, shaping it and changing it with endless potential. The tingling on Yllithian’s skin had increased to a prickling. He staggered past unmasked guests and naked slaves, all seemingly frozen and silently gazing up at the dais. He desperately forced his stiffening limbs to carry him toward the servant’s entrance he’d spied earlier.

The song swept over him, powerful and dirge-like now as it sang of death. It seemed too powerful, too sonorous to be coming from the little white witch on the dais, as though she had evoked an otherworldly choir of roaring spirits. His skin was burning, and he looked down in horror at his hands. A film of black-green crystal was creeping across his skin, starting at his fingertips and already grown back as far as the second knuckle. Yllithian gave a little shriek and found that his face and lips were frighteningly immobile. He lurched through the skin curtains ahead of him, battering them frantically aside with rigid hands.

Behind him Laryin sang of sadness and loss, of life returning to the dark place beneath the world. Her voice cracked, and she trailed off, unable to continue. Silence fell across the amphitheatre. The silence of death.

Her audience sat or stood or lay unmoving all around, frozen in the vitrifying grip of the glass plague. What had been a place of horrors now seemed like a work of stunning artistry, the faceless dark crystal rendering its victims into a form of transcendent unity. Deathly silence hung over the whole tableau.

‘Are they really…?’

‘Dead. Yes, their souls are flown.’

Laryin looked at El’Uriaq on his throne, caught leaning forwards, eyes wide, mouth set in an avaricious leer. He seemed to be gazing back at her, and she shuddered.

‘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.

PROLOGUE

Welcome fellow traveller, welcome! Whether you are a simple observer or perhaps an unwitting participant in the unfolding drama before us please be most welcome. Unfortunately I must begin by breaking with some of the ordinary dramatic conventions at this juncture. You see this is the second of a series of three parts, a triptych if you will. Hence we must perforce begin with a recap, a résumé and a reappraisal of what has already occurred, as tiresome as that seems.

Those of you who have followed this darkling tale thus far will already know most of these facts and so I hope you can forgive my indulgence of those only lately arrived. If you are confident in your recollections then I invite you to proceed without diversion. However, some perspective is useful both for those ignorant of prior machinations and for those many great minds that failed to grasp their immediate import at the time.

First then, our stage: Commorragh, the eternal city. Dark, terrible, delicious Commorragh, where pain and subjugation are the meat and drink of ageless creatures of unfathomable wickedness. To fully understand Commorragh one must understand the wider universe that bore it. So, to begin with here is a secret that if properly understood might change your perception forever. All of reality, everything we see as static, safe and secure, is in fact in constant flux. The grains of sand on the beach demonstrate more solidity and longevity than the cherished absolutes of the worlds we believe in.

You see our material universe is born of Chaos and our reality is nothing more than a passing fancy of the Dark Gods; an infinitely short moment when anarchy is frozen for long enough for us, myopic and stunted as we are, to perceive substance and believe that there is such a thing as ‘natural order’ in the universe.

Such hilarious conceit! What amazing hubris!

Mighty Commorragh is a facet of reality born out of hubris, and a very different one to the random dross thrown up by nature. It is a pearl consciously aggregated out of the spittle of creation by ancient, mortal minds that thought themselves the equal of the gods. And what a place they made for themselves.

Beyond Commorragh and its enslaved sub-realms the material universe moves on: civilizations rise and fall, stars implode and the whole rough scrimmage over ownership of the galaxy continues apace. Within Commorragh a long, dark midnight reigns that has gone on unchallenged for millennia. Its inhabitants eternally cheat death and avoid their ultimate fate at the claws of She Who Thirsts, the daemon-goddess of their own creation. Sensuous, sadistic, pleasure seeking, these are the dark eldar, last remnants of an empire that spanned the galaxy in its time. Few have fallen as far as the inhabitants of Commorragh without being destroyed utterly.

Still, pity the poor Commorrites, trapped upon a stage of their own making. They can take brief forays in the material realm to assuage their gnawing hunger, snatching what they can to carry it back to their eternal city, but they remain ever-hungry. Every day She Who Thirsts drinks a little more of their soul and that growing emptiness can only be filled with the suffering of others.

The players: A group of Commorrite nobles intent on reclaiming lost glories in one of the endless power plays of the eternal city. These were unified by their ancient bloodlines and a contempt for the new order imposed after their forefathers had been overthrown. Incidental characters included: the master haemonculus Bellathonis employed to effect a proscribed resurrection, Lileath a young Exodite worldsinger kidnapped to be used as pain-bride for the operation, and Sindiel, a craftworld renegade who was eventually persuaded to save her. Perhaps most significant of all at this point in events was a bodyguard and executioner by the name Morr, a member of that curious warrior cult known as the incubi.

To their scheme, then. The primary obstacle in the noble’s path to glory was, as ever, the Supreme Overlord of Commorragh, the great tyrant himself, Asdrubael Vect. Alas, the nobles could match Vect with neither brute power nor subtle intrigue. Confronted with these facts the leader of the conspiracy, one Archon Yllithian, persuaded his co-conspirators into a singularly dangerous course of action.

As they were unable to overcome Vect themselves the nobles would attempt to raise one of the tyrant’s more successful prior opponents, a lord called El’Uriaq, from the dead to guide them to victory. Predictably their scheme miscarried and they instead raised something beyond their power to control – the soul of this great noble corrupted by an entity native to the ever-changing realms of Chaos. This composite entity – quite possibly an emissary of She Who Thirsts – appeared wrapped in the seeming of the leader they sought.

The consequences fell thus. Of the nobles but one survived the immediate aftermath. The bodyguard Morr, to his great distress slew his own noble master, Archon Kraillach, when he realised that Kraillach had become corrupted by the entity. The entity itself murdered the third noble, Archon Xelian, with a memetic curse when she proved intractable to its aims. Yllithian proved clever enough to be useful to the thing he had unleashed and so survived only to be near-fatally struck down during the monster’s destruction.

These consequences alone are, of course, really quite inconsequential when compared to the harm that all of these dramatic events conspired to inflict on the metaphysical fabric of Commorragh itself.

Here another brief moment of explanation is in order. It is best to imagine Commorragh as a bubble maintained by equal pressure across its entire membrane. If the membrane is breached the external pressure forces what is without to come within to the great detriment of anyone in the vicinity at the time.

Over the centuries Commorragh has incorporated many other little pearls into its bubble, encrusting itself with a hundred stolen realities to be enslaved and exploited. Ripples in the surface of the membrane can also dislodge these satellites realms, setting them free to drift and realign chaotically.

These phenomena are collectively known to the inhabitants of Commorragh as a ‘Dysjunction’, and most rightly feared. This tale revolves around the Dysjunction the noble’s schemes accidentally brought about, its effects and its resolution.

So, now you know all that brought the tale to this point. Invaluable knowledge that will pay dividends later, I feel sure, although I promise there will be no quizzes. And who am I? Player or narrator or both, I don’t doubt that it will become readily apparent as the drama unfolds. For the present it would be boorish to take centre stage if only for fear you might think this tale is about me. The correct questions for you to address to yourself at this time are these: What do I want? How will I get it? What stands in my way?

CHAPTER 1

CONSEQUENCES

The colony had existed forever. Cradled in darkness the feeders lurked awaiting the call to hunt, the breeders quietly gestated future generations after receiving the caustic seed of the patriarch. The younglings suckled and worried at the feeder’s veins in blind hunger while they impatiently grew and grew to become something other.

The colony lived in eternal night, a soft umbral world made in equal parts from their environment and the woven excrescence of generation after generation of feeders and breeders living and dying. Beneath the colony flowed the river of life, a viscous and unchanging ribbon that gurgled along between the walls of the universe. Food came via the river, sometimes cold and soft as it drifted just beneath the surface, at other times warm and upright as it waded in the gentle current. The feeder’s sensitive spiracles scented every morsel, living or dead, and their ultrasonic shrieks summoned their broodmates to come join the feast before it left the colonies’ world.

Recently, for the first time in uncounted generations, change had come upon the colony. It was something unknown even to the patriarch with all his long-digested wisdom. The breeders trembled with fear and trepidation. The feeders fluttered angrily this way and that, seeking the source of disruption, but the source lay beyond their world and seemingly beyond the walls of the universe. Those seemingly impenetrable walls shook like a birthing breeder and strange, alien sensations swept through the densely clustered bodies of the colony. Food was becoming plentiful, particularly the cold and soft kind, but the colony was not thriving. Madness had gripped some of its members and sent them fleeing into the great unknown. The remainder clustered more tightly than ever, their fear bringing them closer together in the patriarch’s sinewy embrace.

Now a new stimulus had entered the colony’s consciousness. Lights bobbed and slid along the river of life. Light, that hateful invader, meant only one thing – that it was time for the feeders to broach forth in a fluttering wave and quench it with their leathery bodies and their hooked claws. Sometimes light brought food: hot blood to be drunk and raw flesh to be torn and consumed. Other lights were hard and inedible, useless to the colony and only a source of distress until the river bore them away into the great unknown. In either case the feeders would clutch and worry at the source until it was gone and the comforting darkness closed in once more. Individuals mattered not at all – the continuation of the colony was everything.

The powered edge of the blade was inactive but its inherent weight and molecule-sharp edge still sheared through flesh and bone as though it was little more than wet tissue paper. The victim gave a last, despairing high-pitched shriek as it tumbled to its death. This small drama did not serve to silence the speaker for moment.

‘Really? This is the only way out of Commorragh that you could think of on short notice? Even in the midst of an imminent Dysjunction there must be better paths to follow.’

‘Your presence is not required,’ the towering incubus named Morr grunted in response. The incubus viciously swatted at another gloomwing with his great double-handed blade, his klaive to use its correct title. Morr was very keen on being correct, Motley knew, and that was probably the only thing that was preventing the incubus from attacking him. The tunnel was wide but the ceiling was low – Morr could have laid a gauntleted hand flat against the filth-encrusted roof without stretching. Even so the incubus wielded his two-metre long blade in the constricted space with consummate skill and precision, keeping it in constant motion as he tracked his elusive attackers.

His unwanted companion, a slight figure dressed in stylish, if archaic-appearing grey, skipped nimbly to one side as the flying gloomwing flopped into the viscous sludge flowing around Morr’s ankles in two neatly bisected pieces. It joined the pieces of at least a dozen other hook-winged predator-scavengers that had already whirled out of the darkness to attack and found Morr’s klaive waiting for them instead. The simple beasts seemed not to realise the dangerous nature of the prey they were trying to drag down with their numbers so they simply kept coming. What light there was showed an incessant flutter of dark wings circling determinedly just out of reach.

‘Oh come come,’ said the one in grey. ‘We’re on the verge of becoming such fast friends. It would be truly tragic to cut short our glittering association now, surely?’

Morr reversed his klaive and whirled it with both hands, grunting as he slashed out at another darting shape. Traditionally all klaives feature an impaling spike or disembowelling hook projecting forward a hand’s span or so from their flat tip. Morr used his klaive’s hook to snag the gloomwing and drag it within range for a lightning-quick downward stroke. The unfortunate creature tumbled to join its bisected fellows in the muck.

The incubus’s companion swayed negligently to one side to avoid another diving gloomwing but never stopped talking. ‘I confess I’m a little hurt by that, Morr, I mean after all we’ve been through together you might at least indulge me with a verbal response rather than grunting at me…’

The incubus ignored the speaker and waded forwards, slashing left and right in a continuous figure of eight. The other skipped after him keeping up a continuous chatter. ‘I came all this way, after all. Found you in that dank hole you were hiding in and warned you we had to get out while we still could. The thanks I get is you stomping off into what can only be described as a sewer without a word… besides which, you still need my help. Who else can testify on your behalf when there were no other witnesses to Kraillach’s death?’

Morr paused and turned to face the grey-clad figure, swinging his klaive without a glance to skewer another leather-winged assailant as it flew at his back. Morr’s blank-faced helm regarded his companion with unmistakable malevolence. When viewed at close quarters it became clear that the other’s clothing was not grey but a form of motley, tiny diamond panes of black and white that endlessly repeated. The too-mobile face below the domino mask was bright and smooth like that of a painted doll.

In contrast the incubus was covered in dark armour from head to foot with scant decoration saving short horns and tusks curving from its sinister, narrow-slotted helm. There was something about the incubus’s resolutely taciturn nature that implied that, by extension, he found this loquacious individual irritating in the extreme. Morr’s klaive twitched involuntarily as if he were only barely manageing to suppress the urge to strike down his companion through a heroic exertion of willpower. For once the armoured warrior broke his customary silence in what amounted, for him, to a lengthy declamation.

‘I cannot prevent you accompanying me… Motley, and I do owe you… a debt,’ Morr admitted reluctantly, ‘but do not imagine I need you or want you to help me again. The hierarchs shall be the final judge of my actions and they will hear no testimony but my own.’

Motley frowned sadly. ‘I’m afraid that despite your cogent disputations destiny has yet to have her wicked way with us both. Even were we parted I feel positive we would be cast back together again momentarily until the Dysjunction is resolved – you know it’s no coincidence that the masque sent me to you in your hour of need.

‘All is not lost, Morr, but only if we play out our roles in the drama together. There are forces that you do not, indeed cannot, know of in the greater universe that are moving speedily towards a resolution that will bode very ill indeed for Commorragh if it transpires as they would have it. If you’ll just accept my help again I can guide you to a better future.’

The incubus gazed at Motley silently for a moment more before turning and stomping away through the ooze without further comment. The sudden movement scattered a handful of gathering gloomwings like leaves. The motley-clad one pursed full red lips beneath its domino-mask and then followed with a sigh. Further back along the tunnel, unnoticed by either the incubus or his unwanted companion, stealthy figures dogged their steps.

Archon Aez’ashya stood upon a narrow path of silver above the kilometres-deep caldera of the volcano-like arena of the Blades of Desire. The thin, cold air of High Commorragh blew chill against her exposed flesh and the captive suns, the Ilmaea, circling above seemed to give little warmth. The uppermost edges of the arena were etched with gleaming white stone terraces where she could see a sparse-looking gathering of shivering spectators. Distance and the size of the arena made the numbers deceptive at first glance. In reality hundreds of kabal members had come to see the challenge in person, and many more were watching by indirect means. She could feel their presence hovering around her like a pack of silent, hungry ghosts.

The silver path ran from one edge of the rim to the other, leaping arrow-straight over the centre of the hollow cone at the heart of the fortress. Anything falling from here would have an unbroken plunge until it hit monofilament nets strung above the forges, cell blocks and practice areas at the bottom of the pit. At its mid-point the path widened into a disc no wider than Aez’ashya’s outstretched arms from its centre to its periphery. Her challenger was already waiting there for her with readied weapons gleaming. Aez’ashya strode out confidently and brusquely acknowledged the cheers of her followers on the terraces. The cheers of her loyal kabalites seemed somewhat muted and in this case it wasn’t only the distance that was to blame.

Aez’ashya had no illusions – she was archon of the Blades of Desire only because another had made it so. There were plenty who doubted her ability to hold onto the position, and some who hoped to gain it in her stead. To truly rule the kabal Aez’ashya knew she was going to have to prove herself over and over again. The very smallest beginning of that was disposing of her immediate challengers, three so far, four including her current opponent, Sybris.

Sybris had been member of the clique of hekatrix bloodbrides who were present at Archon Xelian’s ‘accidental’ death. Previously Sybris had been well favoured, well enough to aspire to replacing Aez’ashya as succubus until Xelian’s sudden fall had frustrated her ambitions. That frustration had quickly flared into open antagonism when Aez’ashya was thrust into the position of archon in Xelian’s stead. Aez’ashya knew Sybris well, they had sported together both on the battlefield and off it in the past. In fact Aez’ashya knew enough about Sybris’s style and methods to have a small qualm of doubt about the upcoming bout.

Sybris favoured two half-moon shaped blades that she used with a hip-swinging, straight-armed, momentum-driven technique she’d learned from Quist disciples in Port Carmine. The blades were heavy enough to smash through a parrying blade and Sybris was agile enough to snap them outward to catch a would-be dodge with eye-blurring speed. But it wasn’t her enemy’s weapons that particularly concerned Aez’ashya. It wasn’t even Sybris’s lustrous, wire-strung braid of hair. The braid was tricked out as a flexible weapon some two-metres long and tipped with barbs and blades. Aez’ashya knew that Sybris could seamlessly work strikes with that braid into her other attacks. One flick of her neck just so and Sybris could cripple or kill an opponent. An unexpected slash from the side or below… those half-moon blades whirling up for a decapitating strike and it was all over. But that wasn’t what was giving Aez’ashya doubts either.

Before every other challenge someone had sent Aez’ashya advice on how to defeat her opponent: a weakness pointed out, a poison suggested, a habitual manoeuvre to avoid. This time there had been nothing, no sly messenger with words of wisdom and so Aez’ashya was truly on her own. She repeated to herself that it didn’t matter, and that it didn’t mean that Sybris had received a message of her own that revealed the secret of how to defeat Aez’ashya.

It didn’t matter. Aez’ashya was wearing a pair of hydra gauntlets, skin-tight armoured gloves that sprouted a profusion of lethal crystalline blades from fists, forearms and elbows. She could feel the sharp tingle of the drug serpentin coursing through her veins, the mélange of hormonal extracts heightening awareness and sharpening her already preternaturally quick reflexes even further. She would overcome this challenge with or without outside help.

All these thoughts had raced through Aez’ashya’s mind as she walked out along the narrow silver path. Now she was within a dozen strides of the centre disk and Sybris raised her twin moon-blades in salute. The movement seemed a little awkward, shading just beneath the fluidity and poise that could be expected of a hekatrix bloodbride. Aez’ashya kept her face in a cold, haughty sneer but she laughed warmly inside. Others might be unwilling to help but she still had her own tricks to deploy, as Sybris would discover to her dismay very soon.

The slave’s fingers had been cut down to little more than stumps. Burn tissue on its hands and face made it look like it had been a necessary surgical procedure, but most probably it wasn’t. Kharbyr still found himself vaguely admiring the deft agility the slave demonstrated in chopping and weighing powders, the thick stumps gripping the narrow blade and handling the thin twists of paper with easy familiarity. Kharbyr looked at the slave’s horribly burnt face disinterestedly for a moment and yawned, wondering when his contact would arrive. He was waiting beneath an awning fashioned in the appearance of trailing orchids of silver and gold outside a drug den on the Grand Canal and his patience was rapidly running out.

Once upon a time a wide promenade of polished stone tiles a hundred strides across had separated the black, sinuous loop of the Grand Canal from the lower palaces of Metzuh tier. Over time the drug dens and flesh halls of Metzuh had sprawled out to clutter the open space with furnishings, slave cages, awnings and apparatus. Each expansion had been the subject of a bitterly fought turf war between neighbouring establishments, forming an untidy patchwork of feuds and vendettas as varied as the objects themselves. The slave’s little hutch off to one side of the entrance had probably cost a thousand lives in duels and murders over the years, the silver and gold awning had been around for so long that it had probably cost a million.

The battles for ownership of the banks of the Grand Canal were a crucible that had done much to form the network of petty kabals making up the current power structure of lower Metzuh. Eventually a point of equilibrium had been reached where no one dared to claim the last twenty paces up to the canal’s edge for fear of upsetting one or other of the self-proclaimed lords of lower Metzuh. The uneasy peace was normally good for business yet right now the slave was bereft of customers. The miserable creature still kept cutting, re-cutting and weighing its wares with all the eagerness of a pet performing a trick. Kharbyr, for his part, had already sampled all that the slave had on offer and decided he would rather stay sober.

He glanced up and down the empty canal bank for the hundredth time and considered whether to bother keeping his rising anger in check any longer. There was no sign of anyone watching him right now, but that meant nothing. There had been an indefinable sense of someone or something following him for days now, and Kharbyr had taken elaborate measures to shake off any stealthy bloodhounds on his way to the meeting. The fact he could sense nothing now could just mean they were being more careful. It didn’t help that the wrack he was here to meet was late, again, and his choice of meeting place was a reminder of past transgressions that Kharbyr had worked hard to overlook. He had a dozen other places to be that all promised better entertainment and profit than this particular corner of Commorragh. The only thing keeping him here was that the wrack, Xagor, only ever ran errands on his master’s account and that meant it was probably important to find out what he wanted.

Most of the epicureans were out holding a noisy processional along the open space at the bank of the Grand Canal. It was partially a diversion for bored pleasure seekers and partially a display of power – an implicit warning to the adjacent districts not to mess with lower Metzuh. The city had been tense of late, taut with anticipation of… something. There was change in the air, a forest-fire scent of imminent disaster that the inhabitants of Commorragh were always quick to sense and react to. Rumours were rife about murders and skulduggery up in High Commorragh and it was said that the great tyrant was distracted by sinister machinations even his castigators could not seem to fathom. In back alleys and hidden souks soothsayers and rune casters muttered of dire portents. The desperate and the dispossessed were gathering in dark corners and plotting how to seize advantage in the coming troubles.

So it was that the Epicurean Lords had summoned their coteries for a show of strength. All over Commorragh similar scenes were being played out as restless cults, covens and kabals gathered to promote their claims to dominance in the prevailing climate uncertainty. Kharbyr could have confirmed a lot of their worst fears based on what he’d witnessed in person over the past weeks, but he chose to stay in the shadows and smirk at their posturing instead.

First came rows of oiled and naked slaves of a variety of races holding the leashes of the Epicurean’s pets. Slinking sabercats snarled at imperturbable massiths, blade-legged helspiders marched beside drooling, heavily sedated bhargesi. A kaleidoscopic display of fur, feathers and scales was guided slowly along by the sweating slaves under the watchful eyes of the beastmasters. Occasionally a sudden disturbance in the ranks marked where an irritated pet had turned on their handler, but the steady flow of exotic beasts never halted.

Behind the pets came the favoured slaves. Most of them had been freakishly altered by the flesh-carving arts of the haemonculi into walking sculptures of bone and meat. A few opulently dressed turncoats moved among the staggering, skittering throng and shouted grovelling praises to their masters for their continued existence. It was hard to tell if the braying and moaning of their heavily altered compatriots signified their agreement or disapproval.

Next came the artisans: cadaverous haemonculi with their wrack servants in their barred masks, they mixed freely with master weaponsmiths and forge overseers resplendent in their kilts of blades, gravity sculptors walking with wheels of knives spinning above their heads. Here and there gaudy mixologists and painted Lhamaens warred with another to produce the most overwhelming musks and pheromones. Brightly coloured clouds leapt in to the air from their flasks and vials like flights of escaping birds.

The artisans were favoured enough to wear the sigils of their sponsors, all being members of the host of minor Epicurean kabals that passed for authority in lower Metzuh tier. Here was the triple slash of the Soul Cutters, there the rearing serpent of the Venom Brood, or the sickle blade of the Shadow Reapers or a score of others. The artisans mingled despite their temporary allegiances. Their skills were in such great demand among the epicureans that their loyalties shifted frequently, and for them today’s rival might become tomorrow’s ally in the anarchic lower courts. False flattery and insincerity thrummed through their ranks as they greeted one another over and over again with the most extravagant courtesies.

Kharbyr tensed. The feeling of being watched was back, as sudden and direct as if someone was standing right behind him and breathing down his neck. He anxiously scanned the slowly moving column trying to identify the source. There, a masked wrack still quite far away down the procession, just occasionally bobbing into view among other apprentices and journeymen. But that particular iron-barred masked looked too frequently towards the awning where Kharbyr stood for it to be coincidence. Was this his contact finally approaching or an imposter? Anything was credible right now. Kharbyr loosened his knife in its sheath before settling back into the shadows to wait and find out.

CHAPTER 2

THE QUESTION OF ESCAPE

The gloomwings became progressively less numerous while at the same time becoming larger and more corpulent. Some were big enough to engulf a person whole, but they were much slower and less aggressive than the rest. Large or small, Morr tirelessly slaughtered everything that came within reach of his klaive and drove the remnants before him in a shrieking, chittering wave.

Eventually a break among the filth-encrusted walls showed an unfamiliar gleam of metal. Closer examination showed a low side-shaft sloping upward at a gentle angle. It had once been guarded by a grillwork of bars, but time and the gloomwings had eaten away at the soft metal to leave only broken stubs like rotten teeth in an open mouth. Morr crawled inside without hesitation, using his klaive to lever himself up against the slippery walls and rapidly disappearing from sight.

The motley one sniffed and peered after the incubus with comical dismay. ‘Really?’ he called. ‘I say again, this is really the best you could come up with?’ Stubborn silence met his jibe and after a while, and with an audible sigh, he bent down and followed.

The shaft proved to be short, no more than a dozen metres long, before it emerged into the side of another, larger, sloping shaft at right angles. The filth here was so prevalent that it was pitch dark, almost like swimming in black water. Rustling, chittering noises echoed weirdly around the shaft, along with the scraping sounds of something big moving around.

‘Morr, is that you I can hear?’

Guided by instinct alone the motley one skipped aside as something came rushing out of the blackness. Its impact against the wall of the shaft was shattering, a thunderclap sound in the enclosed space.

‘Oh enough is enough!’ The motley one muttered as he threw a small object on the ground. The inky blackness was riven by a flash of light so bright it was as though a sun had blinked into existence for a microsecond and engulfed that dark hole in its brilliant photosphere. The momentary glare revealed a monstrous, cloaked figure poised over something that thrashed and struggled in the leaping shadows. A flock of tiny gloomwings overhead shrieked and died in the flash, their nerveless bodies tumbling down like a sudden storm of black snowflakes.

Darkness swiftly descended again, but only for an instant. Red lightning flared from where the cloaked figure had stood, followed by the pure white flash of a power weapon strike. The armoured figure of Morr wielding his klaive was revealed in the actinic afterimage. He seemed poised in the act of striking at rippling curtains of dark flesh surrounding him. Another strike flashed followed by another, the flickering stop-motion progress of the incubus’s assault speeding up into a continuous blur of light.

The monstrous figure was revealed as not cloaked but winged – many-winged, in fact – as was shown when it reared back to try and escape its tormentor. It gave a deep, ululating cry of despair as the klaive bit deep into its flesh again and opened its body sac to disgorge a tidal wave of offal. The thing collapsed into a writhing mass, its fleshy wings flailing at the stone with horrid strength. Morr dodged through the thrashing mass to cleave through its primary nerve stem, reducing its dying spasms to a few shuddering twitches.

Morr eventually rose from the centre of the dying mass like a gore-smeared phoenix, his klaive sizzling and steaming with caustic ichor. Motley applauded him lightly.

‘Bravo, Morr, once again you prove more than equal to the challenges set before you!’ Motley smiled before coughing theatrically into his sleeve. ‘Though of course we mustn’t overlook the small contributions made by your gallant companion.’

Morr glared at the implication. ‘The creature was under control before your intrusion,’ he argued hotly. ‘It may have hastened matters but it did not change the outcome.’

‘Well time is of the essence so you are welcome anyway, my friend, we’ve only a short while before Commorragh becomes isolated by the Dysjunction and we’re stuck here among a lot of people that want you dead,’ Motley said brightly as he nudged an outflung wing with one elegantly pointed toe. ‘So… I assume this is why not many people come this way?’

Morr snarled something unintelligible and stomped off up the sloping tunnel. Motley edged carefully around the dying creature that had once been known as patriarch to a thousand offspring and skipped nimbly after him.

The tunnel levelled out ten metres before it, and the roof opened to admit another vertical shaft with no visible means of climbing it. The tunnel itself came to a dead end dominated by a wide ellipse of sparkling metal and silvery stone that was reminiscent of the outline of a great eye. Blank stone showed behind the structure and it seemed to hang in the air unsupported by any of the tunnel walls. There was an aura of quiescent power about it, as though a swift, silent river was flowing nearby.

‘Ah ha!’ exclaimed Motley. ‘This looks like an old ship gate, well a smallish one anyway. That’s why I love this city you know, Morr? Turn a corner and you never know what you might stumble across.’

Morr directed a withering gaze at him in return. ‘Archon Kraillach secured this gate long ago to be his own secret means of entrance and egress to the city. It is not locked to a destination, nor is it monitored in any way.’ Motley blanched a little at the incubus’s words.

‘With a Dysjunction imminent doesn’t that mean…?’ Motley asked.

Morr continued as if Motley had not spoken at all. ‘When the Dysjunction occurs this gate may collapse altogether. It will certainly be forced open for a time and anything that finds it might come through into the city. We must be far from here before that happens.’

‘We? Oh Morr, I didn’t know you cared!’ effused Motley. ‘You see? We’re becoming such good pals already!’

‘I cannot prevent your unwanted attentions, I must endure the inevitable consequences of my actions,’ Morr intoned. The words seemed to form a personal mantra for him and he repeated them quietly. ‘I must endure the inevitable consequences of my actions.’

‘Not merely endure. I’m afraid, my old friend, that you must atone for them too,’ Motley said sympathetically, ‘and not just the actions you’re thinking about.’ Morr turned his blank helm to face Motley, its crystal eyepieces seeming to flash with red flames. Motley obediently lapsed into silence for a moment before changing the subject.

‘So is it safe to assume you know how to activate the gate? Is there a mechanism for sealing it behind us?’

Morr grunted and turned his attention to a panel on the lower edge of the gate. Initially Motley took a mild interest in Morr activating the gate but became increasing distracted by the tunnel behind them. He glanced back several times before wandering aimlessly a short distance away from where Morr crouched with head tilted as if listening. Motley suddenly snapped his fingers together, plucking something out of the air in a half-seen blur of movement. He examined his prize with interest.

‘Oh, interesting,’ Motley said. ‘I think you should look at this, Morr.’ He thrust something tiny towards Morr, something small enough that it was barely visible pinched between Motley’s gloved thumb and forefinger. An insect, seemingly, but surely no living insect was ever spun so finely from metal and crystal as the spying device Motley held.

‘The flare must have blacked out their primary sources so they had to send up back-ups at short notice, no doubt there’s more of them around.’ For a moment Motley’s voice held none of its usual levity or hidden jests, then he brightened again and smiled capriciously. ‘Someone is watching us, my friend,’ Motley said and turned the device towards himself before enunciating clearly into it. ‘I do hope they just watch and don’t intend to do anything to interfere, that would be unfortunate,’ Motley crushed the spy fly between his fingertips and blew away the dust of its wreckage.

‘Let us find out what our watchers intend,’ Morr said ominously, straightening and stepping back from the gate. A curtain of shimmering energy began to coalesce within the gate. At first it was made of pure silver light but as the curtain strengthened it became shot through with flashes of gold and umber. After a moment coiling threads of green and blue snaked across the surface. There was something venomous-looking about the portal, an intrinsic malevolence that made both Morr and Motley take another involuntary step back from it.

‘Is it…?’ Morr began, but left the thought unfinished.

‘The Dysjunction. Yes,’ Motley said hurriedly, his ordinarily light demeanour suddenly serious. ‘It must be only moments away. We have to leave right now or at best we’ll be trapped here for the duration. At worst, in about five minutes, we’ll be up to our ears in daemons.’

A weight appeared to lift from Morr’s shoulders. He took up his klaive and went to stand facing the centre of the gate. ‘Then let them come,’ he intoned. ‘I am ready.’

Motley goggled incredulously at the incubus. ‘Now is not the time to make the supreme sacrifice trying to hold this one portal in a city of a million portals!’ he shrilled desperately. ‘Go to your hierarchs if you must, but we must tackle the root cause of this Dysjunction together and quickly! We have to go!’

Morr shook himself reluctantly out of the death-fantasy. It was so much easier to seek atonement through self-destruction than by facing his crimes that it seemed unfair to be robbed of the chance. The fact it was easier would have convinced him that it was the wrong path to take even without Motley’s screeching imprecations. The portal throbbed and shimmered before them both uncertainly, a threshold to the webway, itself a path to a billion other places known and unknown, hidden and obvious, open and forbidden. The place Morr must go to was well hidden, but forbidden to none. Any might seek the hidden shrine of Arhra; the true question was whether they would survive to leave it. Morr took a single step towards the open portal with Motley close at his heels before a harsh shout from behind caused them both to halt abruptly and turn.

‘Stop right there! You’re not permitted to leave the city!’

‘Last chance, Sybris,’ Aez’ashya said as she stepped onto the platform. ‘Back down and join with me. I’ll even make you one of my succubae if you still want it.’

Sybris’s braided hair gave her an angular, statuesque profile above her high-necked skinsuit. She raised her chin defiantly and shot Aez’ashya a look of withering disdain.

‘An honour that should already rightfully be mine,’ Sybris spat. ‘You offer me scraps from your table when you aren’t even fit to be an archon, let alone a ynnitach in High Commorragh.’

Ynnitach, bride of death. So be it, Aez’ashya thought, as she raised her hydra gauntlets and closed her fists. The crystalline shards protruding from her wrists and elbows crackled as they grew outward into wickedly hooked blades. Sybris needed no more invitation than that to launch into her attack. She pirouetted lazily towards Aez’ashya, her half-moon blades swinging out like pendulums.

Aez’ashya ducked beneath the glittering arc of the first blade, then sidestepped away from the second to reach the centre of the disk. Sybris instantly reversed her motion with a high kick and came after Aez’ashya hard. The deadly spirals of Sybris’s sweeping blades tightened inexorably to make a double strike on Aez’ashya. The blades sliced down with unstoppable power as the hekatrix threw her full body weight behind them. Aez’ashya rolled away from the attack, snapping up to her feet at the edge of the disk. She was just in time to catch Sybris’s counter-swing on one of her gauntlet-blades and twist it savagely.

Sybris backflipped to avoid having her weapon wrenched out of her grasp and Aez’ashya easily avoided a backhanded blow as Sybris fought to recover. The razor edges of the hydra gauntlets whispered within millimetres of the silky surface of Sybris’s skin as she twisted away, swiftly pirouetting again to build her momentum back up. Aez’ashya grinned wolfishly.

Every one of Sybris’s moves was just a fraction slower than they should be, a fact that Sybris herself didn’t seem to be aware of just yet. She swung in again, straight arms sweeping the blades at Aez’ashya’s exposed throat and belly. This time Aez’ashya stood her ground and struck out at the slashing blades, not aiming to block them but merely redirecting them so that they sailed harmlessly past her. One of Aez’ashya’s gauntlet blades seemed to glide across Sybris’s midriff as she returned to a guard position, carving a crimson line through skinsuit and flesh. The tip of the blade broke off in the wound with a high-pitched crackling sound and Sybris gasped as she jerked back.

Sybris’s blade-tipped braid whipped forward like a striking snake. There was no fractional delay to the move and it caught Aez’ashya by surprise. A bunched fist of scalpel-sharp, finger-long blades came swinging at her eyes, provoking an immediate and instinctive reaction. Aez’ashya grabbed the braid and pulled, forcing Sybris to backflip over her. Aez’ashya drew one of her elbow blades across Sybris’s flashing thigh, carving another red trail and leaving another crystalline shard behind to work its way into the wound. Sybris swung viciously at Aez’ashya’s imprisoning gauntlet, forcing her to relinquish her grasp. Aez’ashya let go and allowed Sybris to spin away from her, re-occupying her position at the centre of the disk.

It all came down to the planning, as Aez’ashya had come to appreciate after recent events, preparation meant victory. The old Aez’ashya would simply have taken up this challenge with whatever was at hand and wherever was convenient. The new Aez’ashya understood the value of picking your ground and choosing your weapons carefully. The fighting area was just a little too constricted for Sybris to build up to her full speed, the gravity in it just a shade heavier than Sybris was used to. Aez’ashya was of the firm opinion that too many wyches trained in low gravity environs, that many became seduced by the more spectacular fighting styles they permitted. Sybris was living proof of the fact.

Now it was only a matter of time. The crystalline blades of Aez’ashya’s gauntlets had already regrown. Fragments that they had left in Sybris’s wounds would keep them bleeding freely despite the best efforts of her skinsuit to seal the cuts. Sybris’s style relied on momentum, now that constant motion was causing her to bleed out all the faster. Aez’ashya settled herself to wait for the inevitable opening.

The masked wrack separated from the Epicurean’s procession and approached openly. As he did so Kharbyr surreptitiously drew his knife and held it ready beneath his cloak. The wrack held up both hands to show they were empty of weapons, although the curved, bird-like claw grafted in place of the wrack’s right hand would have made a passable weapon on its own. A new addition, Kharbyr judged by the way the wrack struggled with it while removing his mask. The thick-browed and morose face that was revealed looked familiar enough – but that meant nothing in Commorragh where flesh could be twisted and reshaped for the price of a hot meal. Kharbyr smiled insincerely and spoke first.

‘Greetings,“Xagor”. How many daemons at the gate?’

‘Six, and Kharbyr was almost taken,’ the wrack responded evenly.

Kharbyr’s face flushed angrily at the memory. ‘Very clever, now what is it you want?’ he snapped.

‘Too open here. Inside?’

Xagor stepped towards the entrance to the den, perhaps a little too eagerly, but Kharbyr stopped him with an outstretched arm.

‘Out here is fine. No one is going to be paying any attention to us with all this going on.’

He nodded toward the canal bank where lines of warriors were now filing past to the accompaniment of thundering drums and clashing cymbals. They were irregularly armed and armoured in a dark, curvaceous style that was barbed and bladed in a fashion that would put a scorpion to shame. Several of the warriors bore trophy poles hung with brightly coloured, almost spherical, helmets and a variety of shrunken heads like obscene gourds. The warriors kept to rigid files dictated by their kabals and woe betide any of them that should step into the path of their rivals. In contrast to the mercurial artisans a faithless warrior was worthless, a weapon that could not be trusted. It was better for warriors to die than betray their sworn masters (at least according to the masters). Kharbyr mused uneasily that there might be a lesson to be learned there somewhere.

Xagor’s forehead furrowed unhappily, but the wrack stayed obediently where he was and settled for expressing himself in a hoarse, ear-grabbing whisper in order to maintain his ham-fisted attempts at intrigue.

‘The master… sends greetings.’

‘That’s nice,’ Kharbyr sneered, without bothering to drop his voice. ‘Where is he?’

Xagor, if it was Xagor, hedged for a moment and Kharbyr grew even more suspicious. Even the trooping warriors seemed wary, their masked helms turning constantly as they scanned blindly for threats. Omnipresent suspicion and a simmering undercurrent of suppressed violence swept along with the warrior’s section of the processional like a glowering thunderhead.

‘Secret… the master has had much work to do.’

‘So I can see, although I can’t say I’m too impressed by the work he’s done so far on you.’

Xagor’s ordinarily dull eyes flashed with anger at the jibe. ‘Do not mock the master!’ he snarled, momentarily forgetting his ridiculous stage-whispers act. The slave over in his hutch paid absolutely no heed and Kharbyr laughed derisively in the wrack’s face.

‘He can’t protect us!’ Kharbyr hissed. ‘He can’t protect himself! We should just run–’

‘The master said Kharbyr would want to run,’ Xagor interrupted hotly. ‘The master said it was a good idea. Run far! Hide well.’ The wrack turned suddenly to leave. Kharbyr was astonished by the turn of events.

‘Wait, what? You can’t just leave!’ Kharbyr stepped in close and grabbed the front of Xagor’s robes, holding his naked blade to the wrack’s neck. ‘I’m told nothing and expected to perform like a pet on command! I’m being followed – you know that? I am, and they’ll be catching up pretty soon so tell me what’s going on or I’ll slit your throat here and now!’

The wrack grinned back at him triumphantly. ‘The master said that when Kharbyr wanted to run Xagor should leave and see what Kharbyr does next. If Kharbyr then follows and demands answers then the master asks Kharbyr to guard something while he runs. Bad times are coming very soon and Kharbyr must protect this.’

The wrack was suddenly holding an object in its normal hand, a flat, finger-thick metal pentagon with a spiralling groove in its surface.

‘What is it?’ Kharbyr eyed the thing suspiciously and didn’t touch it. It didn’t even look valuable to him, but he also knew that in Commorragh looks could be deceptive. An object that small could still hold the compressed form of something much, much bigger. Like a small starship, or a portal to another world, or a bomb large enough to ensure that no part of Kharbyr would ever be recovered.

‘It is a secret…that Xagor does not know.’ The wrack glanced at Kharbyr almost with embarrassment as he said this. The implication seemed to be that threatening or torturing Xagor, as much as Xagor might enjoy it, would not reveal anything more.

‘Then… how does it help anything?’ Kharbyr said as he lowered his blade with a sense of resignation.

‘The master says it will,’ Xagor said soothingly.

‘There had better be a reward in this.’

‘The master said to remind Kharbyr that the master’s patronage is worth Kharbyr’s life many times over.’

‘Much good it has done me so far,’ Kharbyr muttered bitterly.

‘The master also said he has already done more for you than you know.’

‘Apparently Bel–,’ in his anger Kharbyr barely stopped himself from mentioning the master haemonculus by name. ‘Apparently the master says a lot, only not to me.’ Kharbyr fumed, chewing at his lip uncertainly. As he looked up he saw the end of the Epicurean’s processional was coming into view. Last of all (saving for a rearguard of more warriors, even epicureans having some sense of self-preservation) came lower Metzuh’s petty archons and nobility of mixed blood. They came two and three abreast in an order of precedence that had probably been the source of much bickering and infighting. As it was Lord Naxipael of the Venom Brood led alongside Bezieth of the Hundred Scars, archon of the Soul Cutters. Both were lesser archons that Kharbyr recognised and had had some peripheral dealings with. Ornate palanquins and biers bore the Epicurean lords along elevated above a throng made up of their immediate cliques of bodyguards, confidants, lackeys and hangers-on.

For all his flippancy the patronage of the master haemonculus Bellathonis was worth more to Kharbyr than he cared to admit. It had already cowed enemies and opened doors for him that had never existed before. Recently Kharbyr had changed the cliques he moved in and begun to ascend no small distance up the slippery slopes of kabalite politics despite his lowly blood. If he ever hoped to ride on one of those palanquins himself he needed powerful allies like Bellathonis. The wrack was waiting with a smug grin on his face, holding the metal thing out as if he expected Kharbyr to take it, but Kharbyr still hesitated. He could never aspire to anything by endlessly serving others; somehow he had to take control of the situation himself.

The noise of the processional made it hard to think: horns blared and drums beat incessantly, the sound of skirling pipes carried back from the artisans, shrieks and screams filtered back from the pets. The warriors were silent now, their tramping steps their only accompaniment. Over all the background noise Kharbyr’s ears caught a distinctive high-pitched sound that grabbed his attention immediately. He turned back to Xagor and took the metal pentagon from his hand.

‘I think,’ Kharbyr said hurriedly, ‘we had better go inside after all.’

CHAPTER 3

DYSJUNCTION

‘Who is it that dares to impede an incubus in his work?’ intoned Morr slowly and dangerously. ‘Show yourself and I’ll judge your worth to give me commands.’

Mocking laughter came out of the darkness. ‘We’ll stay where we are, thanks, being not such great fools as to come within reach of your klaive nor the clown’s blade.’

‘Oh?’ said Motley as he stepped forward as lightly as a dancer. ‘Then how do you plan on doing any impeding at all, friends? We need but take two steps and we are gone from here. How do you intend to allow or disallow that?’

‘You aren’t the only one with grenades, fool.’

If the assailants hadn’t bragged they might have been more successful in their efforts. As it was Motley spotted the first tiny bulb of metal tumbling through the air, caught it and threw it back in one fluid motion. A blast of static lightning lit the tunnel where it landed that illuminated running figures in its crawling afterglow. Haywire, Motley opined to himself, they were using Haywire grenades to try to knock out the gate. Any moment now they would think to throw more than one at a time. Motley glanced backwards to find Morr and shout a warning.

There was no sign of the towering incubus and the gate was in the process of powering down.

Motley took in the whole scene within a frozen instant of panic. Time slowed, stretched while each intimate detail imposed itself. Angry red lines were spreading across the metal and stone of the gate’s structure. It was intended to be a permanent shutdown, one that would leave behind nothing but a pile of useless slag. The veil of shimmering energy was still held within the gate for the present, swirling and opalescent now, but it was thinning by the moment. Motley darted for the dying portal just as a shower of small grenades came tinkling down in his wake.

A vicious pattern of detonations raged around the gateway, electro-magnetic discharges and gouts of plasma (some of the assailants having already escalated their intentions from capturing to killing) intermingling in a catastrophic storm of energised particles. In the aftermath the gate was gone, just a fused and twisted mass was left in its place. Of the incubus and the Harlequin there was no sign.

The agents poked, prodded and analysed the area in a desultory fashion but it was clear there was nothing more that could be done. They consoled themselves that their master was currently otherwise engaged and unreachable. The unpleasant task of informing him about their lost quarry could be safely deferred for another time.

Had the agents but known it their master was not far away at that moment. Archon Nyos Yllithian of the Kabal of the White Flames was staggering through the worming guts of the Commorragh’s vast foundational strata. He was now only minutes away from the Dysjunction he’d unwittingly had such a large hand in bringing about. Judgment, seemingly, had already caught up with him. He rebounded from moist stone walls in the near darkness as he desperately sought a way out, his numbing hands stretched out before him as he fumbled along dank, slimy tunnels. Kilometres above him there were silver towers taller than mountains, manses the size of cities, fortress-like continents and island-palaces of surpassing beauty and grandeur. His own fortress lay agonisingly close by, filled with retainers and warriors and slaves to do his bidding. But Archon Yllithian was alone, trapped in the foetid entrails of the world and he was dying.

By his nature Yllithian was not a creature given to regrets. All in all he shared the almost pathologically forward-facing attitude of his race. The past was the past and nothing more could be said; such was the healthy attitude of the average Commorrite – saving, perhaps, for the propensity to recall slights, vendettas and feuds with crystal clarity. Even so Yllithian felt the bitterest regret now. Not regret for unleashing otherworldly forces beyond his capacity to control by resurrecting the beast El’Uriaq. Not regret for the overweening hubris that had caused the deaths of his allies, nor for the mass murder in the accursed El’Uriaq’s banquet hall left now so ominously silent behind him. No, Yllithian’s only regret was that he had been unlucky enough to get caught up in El’Uriaq’s downfall.

Yllithian had to admit to himself that it had been a pretty scheme to destroy El’Uriaq. He had only recognised the true danger of it in the last moments, and even then he’d chosen to flee instead of trying to warn El’Uriaq or prevent it. Too slow, too slow by far and now his skin was vitrifying before his rapidly clouding eyes, turning to a lustrous jade colour that would soon darken to black. The master haemonculus, Bellathonis, had contrived to release the glass plague upon El’Uriaq and his guests. It was a viral helix created to turn living flesh in glass, meaning a true death for a Commorrite as their body was completely destroyed in the process. No regeneration, no resurrection was possible from the glass plague and so any Commorrite of any value was normally immunised against it. That had been the clever part – the haemonculus had persuaded the Exodite witch, the worldsinger, to turn the plague into something that could overcome any form of defence. Being able to communicate with lower forms of life seemed such a safely mundane ability until someone used it to bypass your immune system. Yllithian knew he was as good as dead.

The archon of the White Flames still drove his stiffening limbs forward, some animal instinct for self-preservation bright in his mind. A coolly logical part of it was telling him it was hopeless, that he should lie down and preserve his remaining energy. There was a distant siren whisper of She Who Thirsts in that call for surrender, she eagerly awaited his soul and all woes, all cares would be obliterated in her all-consuming embrace. Yllithian croaked defiance through stiffened lips and tottered onward.

Bellathonis and the crone, Angevere, they were the ones to blame. They had made El’Uriaq’s ill-starred return possible in the first place. Yllithian had seen himself as directing events, making the plans and gathering the resources. Now it was clear he was the one that had been directed all along… No, that wasn’t right – Bellathonis had been as surprised as anyone, and in fact almost fatally injured by the newly risen El’Uriaq. The crone and the Exodite, then, some scheme of theirs to bring ruin to Commorragh, poisoning all of Yllithian’s plans with their sorcery. That seemed closer to the mark, but even then it didn’t seem quite right. Some greater architect had been at work, he sensed now, a being unconstrained by time or space that apparently had nothing better to do with its energies than bring about Yllithian’s downfall.

The archon’s dying mind continued churning with recriminations and paranoia as it had done all his life. For perhaps the first time in his existence he was denied any means to exact vengeance or even level his accusations. He had already been caught and killed by his invisible slayer, he was just not quite dead yet.

His dimming senses alerted him to a trembling, as if the floor of the tunnel was vibrating like a taut wire. The crone had been right after all, may Lhilitu eat her stitched-shut eyes, a Dysjunction was really coming.

Sybris’s sinuous grace was faltering. She spun like a broken toy around the edges of the disc, worrying constantly at Aez’ashya’s guard but always finding it impenetrable without throwing her whole strength against it, which now she dare not do. The silver surface was crisscrossed with crimson rivulets and smears. Not much longer now. Aez’ashya was anticipating a final, despairing assault before Sybris endurance leaked away completely. She flexed her razor-edged hydra gauntlets in anticipation of the moment.

The end came with a violent lunge from Sybris. She flung herself forward to smash at Aez’ashya with full force, her half-moon blades seeming to blur into a solid ribbon of steel. Aez’ashya gave ground before the onslaught, ducking or redirecting strikes with both fists and forearms. In truth Aez’ashya had little choice, Sybris’s eyes were glassy and beads of foam flecked her mouth – sure signs that she’d used a dose of Splintermind to maintain her fury. Aez’ashya found herself being driven to the edge of the platform with a kilometres-deep drop yawning at her heels.

Aez’ashya delivered a sudden kick to Sybris’s hip that sent the hekatrix reeling. She quickly followed through pivoting and stepping inside Sybris’ superior reach. The hydra gauntlet’s fist blades crunched below Sybris’s sternum, parting her steely bodice and ripping open the smooth, white flesh beneath. Sybris eyes flew wide open, she staggered and coughed blood before lashing back viciously at Aez’ashya. This was the danger point, the time when an opponent knew they were already dying and would suffer anything to drag their killer down with them.

Aez’ashya caught Sybris’s descending wrist and used it to swing her out toward the edge of the disc-shaped platform. A desperate slash from Sybris’s other blade was contemptuously knocked aside as Aez’ashya relentlessly bore the hekatrix over the edge. Sybris screamed as her feet lost their grip and kicked helplessly over emptiness. Aez’ashya smiled and let Sybris flail desperately for a moment before reaching a quick decision, abruptly grabbing her by the throat and dragging her back from the brink.

‘You know what, Sybris?’ Aez’ashya panted. ‘I think I’m actually grateful to you. I’d had my own doubts about whether I could prevail as archon and now you’ve confirmed that I can. Now the question is – can you be clever enough to accept that?’

Sybris nodded numbly. There was little else she could do with Aez’ashya’s blades at her throat. There was no doubt that Sybris would go on to cause more trouble, that she would attract other malcontents and plotters into her sphere. Aez’ashya now realised there was value in that too. Sybris was a known quantity that Aez’ashya could defeat one to one if need be. If Sybris also became a lightning rod for other schemers then so much the better, they would be that much easier to identify and deal with. Aez’ashya released Sybris’s throat and grabbed her by the braid instead.

‘You get to live this time, Sybris, for old time’s sake and because you’ve helped to prove me worthy,’ Aez’ashya said, ‘but I’ll be keeping this as a souvenir!’ She sliced off Sybris’s braid close to the scalp and held it aloft to show off to the distant spectators. To her annoyance Aez’ashya noticed that Sybris was no longer looking up at her. The hekatrix was gazing off into the upper air of High Commorragh, her attention focused somewhere above Aez’ashya’s shoulder with a look of horror growing upon her face. A small tremor ran through the platform beneath their feet. Wary of a trick, Aez’ashya glanced quickly in the direction Sybris was looking. What she saw almost froze her heart.

High above them the circling Ilmaea were changing. The black suns were outlined by crawling circles of white fire, whip-thin solar flares curled outward from them like slow lightning. The sun’s light glinted poisonously and washed everything with an oily, unclean look. Something was very, very wrong.

The black velvet surface of the Grand Canal bore a small armada of pleasure barges following the epicureans’ procession. The crafts’ occupants called out encouragements or mockery according to their mood, played music and danced. Most gained their sport from trying to lasciviously tempt those on the bank to plunge into the Grand Canal and swim out to them. It was cruel game considering that the curious mixture of narcotics, wastes and other chemicals that made up the ‘waters’ of the canal promised madness or oblivion to any that touched them. All in all, Bezieth, Naxipael and the other lords of the epicureans could reflect that things were going well.

Too well in the eyes of some of their watchers. The first herald of trouble came in the high-pitched snarl of multiple engines. A welter of wasp-like jetbikes with wild looking riders swiftly followed the sound, swooping down onto the processional from above. The bikes screamed low over the heads of the kabalites, wheeled, looped and returned in less time than it takes to tell it. This time their hooked bladevanes swept past within a hand’s breadth of the epicureans. Crests were parted, trophies were shredded and a handful of the unlucky tallest slaves decapitated by the reavers’ second pass.

The ranks of pets snarled and reared dangerously at the intrusion, the warriors flourished their weapons defiantly and the artisans carefully watched the unfolding events. As the reavers reached the rear of the procession Bezieth reared up from her palanquin with an inarticulate roar, seeming ready to swat the interlopers out of the air with her djin-blade. Violence shivered in the air. Its imminence was almost palpable, crystallised and ready to fly apart into a frenzy of action at any moment.

A few sharp words from Lord Naxipael seemed to abruptly quell Bezieth’s ire. She sat down with a thump as the reaver pack raced away over the canal and scattered upward like windblown leaves.

‘They’re nothing but bait,’ Naxipael hissed.

And so they were. A few moments later a second, and far larger, pack of reavers droned overhead with insouciant slowness as they trailed after the first. The first group had been a decoy to provoke an attack and draw fire while the real threat manoeuvred for position above. Someone was trying to draw the epicureans into a messy brawl along the Grand Canal – doubtless a setback intended to illustrate to the individual kabals that their loose coalition offered no real protection. A simple test passed just as simply by not rising to the bait.

However, the procession remained stationary even after the reavers departed. Every eye was drawn to the warding where it rose from the far bank of the Grand Canal. The warding extended as far as the eye could perceive, a swirling, darkly opalescent boundary that curved away in all directions. Beyond it lay the untamed energies of the void held forever in check by arcane technologies. Nearby a slender bridge curved across the canal to seemingly pierce the warding at the Beryl Gate, a permanent portal to the sub-realm of the Aviaries of Malixian. Hazy images of other realms occasionally swam into view within the warding, visions of fey towers or strange landscapes, but to the inhabitants of lower Metzuh the shimmering energy was a boundary as solid and unremarkable as a stone wall.

Now it was obvious that something was changing.

The oily, sickly colours of the void were swirling faster, now whirling into impossible new shapes, now pulsating as if shot through with lightning. A spider’s web of bright and terrible light was slowly spreading outwards over the surface of the warding from the beryl gate, chinks of a deadly effulgence leaking in from realities beyond Commorragh. A low, animalistic moan of terror swept through the procession at the sight. Some individuals broke and ran for the palaces but it was already too late for anyone to save themselves. The Dysjunction had begun.

The first shock was physical; the city shook as if it were in the grip of an angry giant. The canal churned to froth as shockwaves ran through it. Pleasure craft were upended and tipped their occupants into waters where their screams were rapidly stilled. On the bank people were thrown off their feet as chasms yawned in the polished stone that swallowed parts of the procession whole. Stone split and metal screamed as portions of the lower palaces gave way and toppled outward to crush those unlucky enough to be beneath them.

On the heels of the first physical shock a psychic shock came blasting through the warding, a wave of empyrean energy that twisted reality itself before it.

Some simply went mad as the stones rippled beneath their feet and sprouted screaming faces or clutching hands. These tore at one another like wild beasts, snarling wordlessly as they clawed and bit. Others cast themselves into the churning canal, screaming with laughter as the black, viscid ooze closed over them. Some died where they stood, bursting into incandescent flames, or being torn asunder by lightning, or ravaged by invisible claws or melted like hot wax. These were all the lucky ones. The rest, by far the bulk of those present, survived the immediate shock only to attract the attention of other, more sentient entities as they breached the warding.

These predatory beings feasted on souls and the raw suffering of mortals. In some ways they were very much like the Commorrites themselves, but where the methods of Commorrites were refined to a high art of sensuous cruelty, these beings were crude and atavistic. Their manifestations were the stuff of nightmares – pincer clawed temptresses, whirligigs of living flames, foetid cadaverous things lurching on stick-thin limbs and a hundred other daemonic terrors made real. Their appearance was accompanied by waves of sickness, fever-dream emotions and hysteria. The spectral horde coalesced, spread and tainted the air before it like ink dropped into a pail of clear water. They tore into the epicureans with joyous abandon and weapons flashed as the Commorrites tried to defend themselves, but for each abomination that was shredded or blasted apart a dozen more crowded forward to take its place.

At the rear of the procession Bezieth of the Hundred Scars wielded her djin-blade with desperate skill. No daemon-spawn could lay a claw upon her as she hacked her way free of the struggling mass at the head of a handful of other survivors. For once the angry sentience of the djin-blade seemed to be entirely on her side with none of the unexpected twists and turns it liked to make at inopportune moments. The enraged spirit of the previous archon of the Soul Cutters, Axhyrian, was trapped within the crystalline djin-blade and made a ready source of energy for Bezieth to call upon when she needed it. Axhyrian’s rage could make for a treacherous weapon, but right now Bezieth needed every advantage she could lay her hands on. Lord Naxipael followed closely in Bezieth’s wake felling invaders left and right with a pair of finely crafted blast pistols. Behind him a loose wedge of retainers was forming, but their numbers were thinning by the second.

‘It seems our superiors in High Commorragh have truly given us the “noble treatment” this time!’ Naxipael cried over the screams.

‘No time for talking, snake!’ Bezieth replied furiously. ‘Just… kill!’

The other members of the procession had completely disappeared under a mass of writhing, feasting daemons. A continuous stream of snapping, clawing monstrosities came against Bezieth and Naxipael as she cut her way towards the ruined palaces hoping to find a place to make a stand. It was only a hundred paces from the canal side to the lower palaces yet it seemed more like a hundred miles. The ghostly energies flowing through the breach in the warding brushed constantly across her mind. They spawned strange visions and alien emotions there: spiralling iron towers that reached up into infinity, skies of blood and rivers of entrails, meadows of fingertips and clouds of lies. Tiny static-like shocks of joy warred with darting release and morbid satisfaction for the contents of her soul.

A quartet of single-horned, cyclopean daemons with rusting swords came lurching at her out of the kaleidoscopic mental fog, their drooling maws emitting the buzzing of flies. She hacked them down with short, chopping strokes as if she were cutting wood. Their obscene bodies yielded readily to the djin-blade and split like ripe fruit wherever it fell.

A sixth sense sent her diving to one side just as a barbed and serrated mass of metal crashed down where she had stood a moment before. A glance upwards showed more fragments of pillars, colonnades, statues, minarets and arches tumbling down from high above. Flights of multi-coloured fireballs swept past overhead and plunged into the lower palaces, the dancing flames eating unnaturally into the ruins with joyous screams. Bezieth found that she had made her way to a twisted pile of slave cages and decided that was her best place to turn at bay.

It was a timely decision. Behind her the ravening horde of entities was spreading out to seek more prey. They had finished feasting on the procession, which by now was just a mess of tattered banners and gory debris, and were looking hungrily towards the palaces and, coincidentally, Bezieth and the other survivors. She spat defiance at the daemons as they bounded forward, seeing them skittering and squabbling with one another over these fresh morsels. The rotting ones and the fiery ones seemed at odds, as apt to attack each other as come for her; a fact she immediately used to her best advantage.

Bezieth’s djin-blade snarled and sheared through tentacles, claws, tongues and pseudopods with equal abandon. Retina-scarring flashes from Naxipael’s pistols burst more of the running bodies and for a brief instant the area around Bezieth was cleared. The creatures seemed to be becoming weak and uncoordinated. A change was sweeping through them and they were beginning to show the first signs of fear. Now Bezieth felt as if she was cutting at smoke, each sweep of her blade seemed to dissipate half a dozen of the entities at a time.

The pulsing, crackling spider web of light around the Beryl Gate was dimming. Bezieth glanced up to see images in the warding, like great towers or tentacles or tornadoes, vast, titanic forces that were all thrusting blindly at the gate from impossible angles. She forced herself to look away before her sanity unhinged completely, focusing on what was close by and material before she lost her mind to the enormity of the forces raging beyond her reality. The awful light was continuing to dim despite their attempts to bludgeon their way through; the glowing cracks were fading as if they were composed of cooling metal. The daemonic horde wavered in and out of existence as the aeons-old failsafes of the warding struggled to seal the breach. One by one the temptresses, lurching corpses and dancing flames collapsed in on themselves or vanished like wind blown flames.

An awful not-quite silence descended over the scene. There still sounded in the distance wrenching, grinding and screams beyond number, but a momentary bubble of comparative calm seemed to have encompassed the canal bank in the absence of the screeching, whirling daemon horde. The Beryl Gate was gone, replaced by a shifting, multi-hued star that now doubtless led to many places other than the Aviaries of Malixian the Mad. Too many places. The void beyond the warding looked bloated and menacing, storm clouds ready to break. The shrunken band of survivors grouped around Bezieth and Naxipael looked at each other uncertainly. There were many unfamiliar faces among them.

‘Is it over?’ one said.

‘Over? It has barely begun!’ Naxipael hissed angrily. ‘Until all the gates are sealed–’ As if to underline his words Archon Naxipael was interrupted as another tremor ran through the canal bank. The multi-hued star that had once been the Beryl Gate twinkled ominously. Naxipael refused to be daunted ‘–until all of the gates are locked there will be more incursions, more daemons!’

‘That seems like a handy blade to have at a time like this,’ a voice close behind Bezieth remarked casually.

Bezieth whipped around to cut down the speaker for his impudence, the razor edge of the djin-blade singing through the air. Then it happened, the grim inevitability of it unfurling before her very eyes. The blade was stronger than ever, glutted on stolen daemonic power. It twisted treacherously in her tired grip, the razor-edge slipping sidewise to bite deeply into her thigh. Bezieth felt the sudden, cold rush of adrenaline from a really serious injury. She felt her leg begin to buckle beneath her and fought to push the djin-blade away from her throat as the ground rushed up to meet her. The pounding blood in her ears sounded like the laughter of Axhyrian.

CHAPTER 4

THE GLASS PRINCE

Guided as much by good fortune as quick reflexes, Motley emerged into the webway in an untidy heap but thankfully unharmed. There was no mistaking that it was the webway he’d landed in (which was a relief in itself): the strangeness, the sense of unreality, the feeling that the surrounding gossamer walls were just barely stretched over infinity and that if you peeked behind one you would see the whole universe laid out before you. Motley picked himself up and dusted himself down fastidiously even though there was no dust, dirt or anything else so crude and elemental to be seen. The webway tunnel surrounding him was made up of all-encompassing, hazy whiteness that seemed to slide away from the eye when viewed directly.

Only as Motley started to walk along did the view resolve itself into wide, almost circular tunnel that undulated gently before him. Behind him there was no sign at all of Kraillach’s secret gate to Commorragh. Ahead of him the pure whiteness stretched away to some infinitely distant vanishing point. The purity was marred only by a stark, black shape that wavered and jumped in the middle distance, no more than finger-tall and fast vanishing from sight altogether. Motley sprinted rapidly after it.

The distance proved deceptive and Motley soon caught up to Morr, who was striding along with his klaive over one shoulder. As Motley approached Morr seemed to hunch over a little and begin striding faster.

‘Fear not, Morr, your trusty companion is unhurt and ready to accompany you once more,’ Motley said brightly to Morr as he jogged up level with him. The spoken words seemed curiously flat and hollow in the webway, as though their tiny noise was lost in the vastness surrounding them. Morr growled deep in his throat, and the guttural sound seemed to be more successful in making an impact.

‘So, a ship tunnel, then?’ Motley chattered on. ‘Your archon was an uncannily canny fellow. I don’t suppose he also hid a ship around here too, did he? I have no objections to strolling, but time–’

‘Is of the essence. This has been already said,’ Morr said heavily. ‘Repetition of tropes will not serve to endear you to me. No ship exists that can travel to where we must go.’

‘Hmm, that’s true enough – though I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that you said “we” again.’

‘I have come to accept the burden of your presence as part of my punishment.’

‘That’s true enough too, if a little self-castigating, but I think you have cause and effect about right.’

Morr stopped abruptly and turned to face Motley, swinging his klaive from his shoulder in an easy, practiced motion. ‘You admit that you are here solely to punish me?’ Morr’s question was devoid of all emotion, a dead thing that hung in the air between them. Motley wrung his hands miserably as he stepped adroitly back out of immediate reach.

‘No! No! Not at all. I came to help you, Morr. You were the one that asked for help dealing with your archon and his kabal, and I was the one sent to help!’

The klaive raised fractionally, a movement more subtle than the tremble of an insect’s wing but Motley saw it immediately. He was supremely confident in his ability to avoid Morr’s attacks should it come to that, but the incubus had proved himself quite shockingly quick and possessed of a reach with the massive, two metre-long klaive that was hard to overestimate. Motley took another step back just to be safe as he kept talking.

‘Think, Morr! Without my help the corruption would have spread further, more kabals would have fallen under its sway, who knows what might have happened! Your archon was already lost, gone, you only acted because you had to… to…’

‘To preserve his memory,’ Morr finished quietly. ‘As he was, not as he became.’

‘Yes, yes and you did the right thing, no matter what the hierarchs may say to you when, and if, we reach the shrine of Arhra. Kraillach was already dead, you only killed the thing that was inhabiting his corpse…’ Morr’s klaive twitched at the thought and Motley decided that Kraillach’s death was a bad topic to pursue altogether.

‘Look…’ Motley said, moistening his lips and putting on his most earnest expression. ‘You have to see beyond those immediate consequences now and remember that Commorragh itself is at risk!’

The klaive slowly lowered again. Motley made a mental note to make more capital out of Morr’s sense of duty. Morr’s blank-faced helm turned to Motley, seeming to see him for the first time. Motley kept talking, the words bubbling out of him like a clear flowing brook.

‘The city needs your help, Morr! A Dysjunction won’t simply end of its own accord, oh no. That would be too simple! A Dysjunction will only be resolved by identifying the root cause and acting upon it–’

‘Do not think to lecture me,’ Morr interrupted. ‘You might have wandered further in the webway than most, but it belongs to Commorragh. Always and forever. These things are known.’

‘I don’t doubt the archons will be scratching their heads and looking around for someone to blame, or that Vect is about to make one of those terribly overt demonstrations he is so fond of. None of it will change anything, don’t you see? The Dysjunction will continue until the real source of the disruption is found, and they won’t be able to find it.’

Morr simply looked at him, unmoving and unreadable in his dark armour as he lowered his klaive to rest on the hazy, white ground. Motley shut his mouth, conscious that he had probably said too much already. The towering incubus was unwilling to let him off so easily. Long seconds drew out before Morr spoke again, when he did the single word that emerged from his speaker grille was freighted with threat.

‘Why?’

Yllithian had initially been dashed to the floor by the shock of the Dysjunction, the impact triggering howling agony as his skin splintered and drove glass shards into his living flesh. It proved to be just the first in a series of shocks that made the tunnel jump and writhe like a frightened animal. Yllithian could do nothing more than clutch ineffectually at the stonework and try to scream as the roots of the world were shaken.

An interminable period seemed to pass before the immediate violence of the Dysjunction had quieted to an infrequent trembling. Yllithian found he was lying where he had fallen and was unable to rise. His limbs were now too stiff and heavy to move. One eye was completely blind, and the other dimmed by a layer of glass spreading across it. Despite such impediments Yllithian could sense the Dysjunction was far from over. A sense of wrongness and change pervaded the air that was as distinct and dangerous as the sulphurous fumes of a volcano. Periodically shockwaves ran through the foundation strata, either more of the city wardings being breached or the unthinkable megatonne impacts of falling debris that had been shaken loose from High Commorragh.

Yllithian was surprised to discover that he could still hear sounds. At first he thought the sense of hearing the distant, thunderous shocks as they occurred was an illusion created by his vitrifying body. Perhaps, he’d thought, a sympathetic resonance of some kind was generated as even unliving matter recoiled from the distant violence being done to its fellow matter. His chuckle came out as a staccato hiss and he knew then that he could still hear. He wondered if this was to be his perverse fate, to be frozen into immobility and able only to hear the world dying around him.

Yllithian’s growing self-pity was interrupted by awareness of a small, regular sound approaching him. Slow, shuffling footsteps that came closer with agonising deliberation, as if belonging to someone badly hurt or heavily burdened. Yllithian tried to twist around to see from his one, dimmed eye but he could not turn his neck. He tried to speak but only a whistle of air escaped from his rigid lips. Suddenly a dark, spider-like shape crouched before him, metal glimmering on its stick-thin limbs. Yllithian could only watch helplessly as it darted some sort of stinging barb into his prone body three or four times, each penetration felt as a dull, distant impact.

More time passed. The enigmatic figure remained squatting over Yllithian’s recumbent form and more details emerged about it little by little. The face was a pallid blur, the body wasp-waisted and narrow shouldered, with finger-thick metal pins protruding from its limbs and spine. Long white hands searched over his body assuredly, stopping here and there to brush away flakes of black glass. Tingling spread gradually through Yllithian’s limbs and face. Recognition dawned suddenly and he tried to speak again.

‘B-B-hronss,’ Yllithian managed.

‘Ah very good, my archon, mobility returns,’ the spindle-limbed figure replied. ‘It is indeed I, loyal Bellathonis, come to your succour in your hour of need – a fact that I would ask you to recall later when we achieve happier circumstances.’

‘K-K-K–’ Yllithian struggled to get anything out of his frozen lips. The indignity of his situation was coming close to driving him insane but he persevered doggedly. Bellathonis watched him with ill-concealed amusement. ‘K-Ku-Kurd?’ Yllithian said at last.

‘Ah. Not entirely, for now the plague has been placed into temporary remission by the antigens I was fortuitously carrying about my person. We must seek a more permanent solution at my laboratory, or whatever is left of it. In the meantime there will be considerable discomfort, I’m afraid, as the irreversibly transformed tissue sloughs away.’

‘Y-yu-yuh-you…’ the word came out as a satisfactorily low, threatening growl. Yllithian revelled in his tiny triumph. Bellathonis seemed to be less impressed.

‘Oh come now, Yllithian, don’t be disagreeable. If you really blamed all this on me you’d scarcely be warning me about it now, would you? Most certainly not at the moment when I hold your life literally in my hands. You and I both know you’re cleverer than that. Please accord me the same courtesy.’

Yllithian’s next attempts at framing words became incomprehensible as the glass plague loosened its grip enough to enable him to scream. One thought kept his sanity intact through the molten crucible of pain. No matter how clever, how courteous Bellathonis thought himself, he would receive this agony a thousand times over when Yllithian finally took his revenge.

Aez’ashya sprinted along the narrow silver path with Sybris’ braid still fluttering, forgotten, in one of her fists. The path bucked and jinked treacherously beneath her flying feet as tremors ran through the fortress walls. Shrill, unearthly cries could be heard coming from above, and an awful tearing sound that seemed to stretch endlessly like the turning of a great wheel. She did not look up.

The poisonous light of the Ilmaea was brightening unbearably, turning the silver path to a molten strip of white light. Aez’ashya narrowed her eyes and powered forward, bounding metres at a time as she left the zone of heightened gravity behind. She was still not moving fast enough to reach safety before the first real impact hit. The very air flared into luminosity with a thunderclap suddenness that heralded a shockwave of devastating intensity. Aez’ashya was pitched screaming into the abyss as the path shattered beneath her, falling amid a storm of bright shards.

In sheer desperation she kept moving, running, leaping, swarming through the air from one tumbling shard to the next. It was a show of preternatural agility that would have put her trainers to shame but it was still not enough. The termination of her fall into the monofilament nets was only seconds away.

Something shot upward past Aez’ashya, a winged, flying figure followed by another and another. A pack of scourges were beating upwards on their powerful wings, flying desperately to escape the debris tumbling down from above. Aez’ashya hurled herself outward without hesitation, kicking off from the falling ruin of the path to arc down onto the last scourge in the pack with arms outstretched and the hook-like blades of her hydra gauntlets fully extended.

The scourge caught a glimpse of her form plummeting towards him at the last moment and tried to twist aside to no avail. Aez’ashya caught the scourge in her bladed embrace and pulled him to her like a long-lost lover. Wings beat furiously, buffeting Aez’ashya as the scourge fluttered helplessly in her grip. The scourge was dying, streamers of arterial blood flying from its body as it struggled, but its instinctive efforts to stay aloft were enough to slow Aez’ashya’s fall. She rode the winged warrior unmercifully, using her weight to pull the falling, fluttering pair of them towards the fortress’s inner wall. Instinct kept the scourge’s wings beating right up to the moment that Aez’ashya released him to crash into the wall as she leapt free.

She landed on a sloping expanse of fluted metal and dug her hydra gauntlets into its surface as the scourge flopped and rolled past before disappearing from sight over the edge. Shortly afterwards several of the crystalline blades on the hydra gauntlets snapped clean away and sent her slithering several metres down the slope after him. Aez’ashya punched down desperately and managed to bring the movement to a scraping, screeching halt, but her hold still felt horribly precarious. She paused for a moment to gather her senses. Her heart was still pounding and limbs shaking from the adrenaline coursing through her system. There was no sense of fear, she was pleased to find, only tremulous excitement.

She glanced about her, trying to make sense of where she had landed. Above her the sky was a circle of white fire pressing down above the glowering walls of the fortress. Falling debris roared as it plunged past her en route to the bottom. Rumbles and shocks ran through the metal beneath her hands and feet. The air seemed full of tumbling detritus and the tiny, flying figures of scourges, hellions, reavers and others trying to escape the mayhem. A score of metres up the sloping surface she was on became a vertical wall with a row of narrow windows looking out. Aez’ashya tried to crawl towards them but only succeeded in almost losing her grip and fractionally sliding backwards. With their frangible crystal blades the hydra gauntlets were ill-suited to this kind of work, and Aez’ashya fervently wished she had her ordinary knives to use instead.

She noticed with amusement that Sybris’s braid was still fluttering around her fist, caught on the crystal hooks there. A thought struck her as she looked at the braid and she cautiously disengaged one gauntlet from the slope in order to grasp the dangling tip. The blade was still attached, a hand-long, serrated fang of monomolecular-edged steel. Aez’ashya grinned and plunged the blade into the metal beneath her, the molecule-fine tip shearing through it just as readily as if it were soft flesh. With a firm handhold to work with she began to work her way slowly upwards to safety.

Bezieth could tell immediately that she was close to death. She could feel the warmth and life readily draining out of her through the self-inflicted gash in her thigh and leaving a terrible, paralyzing weakness in their wake. Somewhere in the distance she could sense malignant forces gathering. They seemed to be watching her slow demise with hungry eyes as they waited impatiently for her soul to slip from her body. The djin-blade still lay nearby on the cracked stones, vibrating gently. No one seemed willing to pick it up after what they had seen it do to Bezieth.

Archon Naxipael hovered anxiously at the edge of her dimming vision, unwilling to stoop to helping her himself but also unwilling to entirely abandon one of his doubtless few surviving allies. The snake-archon’s narrow eyes suddenly locked onto a member of the small band of survivors surrounding them.

‘You there!’ Naxipael snapped. ‘Yes you wearing the wrack mask. I hope for your own sake that you’re the real thing. Tend to her wound immediately, I want her able to fight! The rest of you – we’ll be moving out in five minutes. Search the fallen for anything useful.’

Part of Bezieth’s mind was nodding with approval even while another was planning how to survive what came next. Naxipael was taking charge, giving the survivors something to do so that they wouldn’t start to think about what was happening, but Bezieth understood that there was a new kabal forming here and now, with Archon Naxipael at its head. Naxipael was going to look for other survivors to assimilate them into his ever-strengthening group. They would likely be glad to join him, for the most part, to enhance their continuing chances of survival. Anyone intractable enough to refuse would become another victim of the catastrophe. Depending on how the fates fell Archon Naxipael might come out of the whole disaster immensely stronger than he was before. He might even push his way up into High Commorragh in the chaos.

A darkly robed figure was obediently shuffling across to squat down next to Bezieth. She fixed her gaze on the wrack’s grilled mask as he bent to start examining her injury. Naxipael saw her as an asset still but that wouldn’t last. Soon he would start wondering why he should risk keeping her around…

‘What’s your name?’ she demanded imperiously. She didn’t feel imperious. She felt as if she were trapped at the bottom of a well with the wrack’s mask hovering above her, blotting out the sky.

‘Xagor. This one’s name is Xagor, Archon Bezieth,’ the wrack said meekly. Well, that was something at least. An uncomfortable heat was rising in her wounded thigh as the wrack worked, but she doggedly showed no sign of discomfort. She found that it helped to have something to focus on, a tiny measure of control to exert.

‘Who is your master?’ she asked more reasonably.

‘Master… Bellathonis,’ the wrack replied a little hesitantly, an odd detail that Bezieth filed away for later.

‘Who else do you know here?’

‘No one, Xagor only came to witness the procession,’ the wrack murmured, intent on whatever he was doing to the wound now. Bezieth looked at him shrewdly.

‘Why would you do that? Bellathonis hasn’t served anyone in the lower courts for years, he thinks he’s too good for us no-oww!’ Fire unexpectedly lanced through the wound and set Bezieth’s teeth on edge. For an instant it felt as if it was being opened up anew.

‘All finished,’ the wrack said hurriedly as he stood up and backed away.

Bezieth cursed him ferociously and levered herself up onto her feet. The wound subsided to a dull throb but her whole leg felt stiff and wooden. She tested her weight on it a few times with an angry grimace before bending down to scoop up the untouched djin-blade. The febrile energy Axhyrian’s spirit had demonstrated before seemed gone for now, the sword nothing more than inanimate object. Naxipael glanced over and nodded approvingly. Yes, she thought as she turned the blade warily in her hand, still an asset.

She looked around the canal bank, now a wasteland of fallen masonry and shattered slabs tilting drunkenly at all angles. A handful of heavily armed survivors were in view picking over the remnants of the procession. Naxipael was in the process of haranguing them to find a functional palanquin, but everything of that ilk looked to be mangled or half-melted into useless scrap. In the distance the multi-hued star still shimmered over the canal like the eye of a baleful god. It was time to get to work.

‘Forget all that, we have to get moving,’ she said as she walked over to him, striving not to limp. She jabbed an accusing finger towards the broken gate. ‘We can’t stay near that thing a moment longer.’ Naxipael’s face showed a momentary irritation that was quickly smoothed over.

‘Are you sure you’re fit enough to walk?’ Naxipael asked solicitously. ‘I had thought to find some means to carry you.’ An unlikely story, Bezieth thought, more likely Naxipael was seeking a quick means to enhance his prestige.

‘I can walk, and I can fight too. We must go. Now.’ Bezieth realised it wasn’t just bravado that was making her push Naxipael to leave. She really did have a sense of mounting dread, she could see it in the nervous faces around her too. Something about the light itself was disquieting. It was as if it cast an invisible, profane heat against both mind and soul. It was a sensation that made Bezieth want to run away and hide somewhere deep and dark.

Naxipael had the common sense to detect the prevailing mood and soon led his small group into the ruins, clambering across splintered stonework and twisted metal. The fascia of the palaces was a hollow-eyed mockery of its former grandeur, yet most of the damage was superficial. Decorative colonnades and balconies had fallen by the thousand but the underlying structures were built of more solid stuff. Darkened corridors and tilted steps led inside. A scattered detritus of cups, vials and crystals crunched beneath their feet as they advanced. Periodic bursts of screams and howls echoed from deeper within, accompanied by weird, plaintive strains of music that drifted in and out of perception. The survivors clutched their weapons and advanced warily.

Towards the back of the loose column Kharbyr walked cautiously alongside Xagor. The haemonculus’s pentagonal talisman of metal was hidden away inside his bodysuit, as cold and lifeless as it had been when he first took it from the wrack. When the Dysjunction struck Kharbyr had hoped the thing was meant to protect him somehow and had clutched at it desperately but to no visible benefit. Instead he’d had to fight for his life alongside Xagor, and only their shared experiences in Shaa-Dom enabled them to survive the tidal wave of extra-dimensional filth that came washing through the warding. Then Bezieth and Naxipael had showed up cutting their way through the mess. Sticking with them had been an easy, and wise, decision at the time. Less so once Bezieth turned on him and tried to cut him down on the spot with that insane sword of hers.

‘We should strike out on our own, go and look for Bellathonis,’ Kharbyr whispered to Xagor.

‘The master will find us when we are needed,’ Xagor replied with an irritating degree of confidence.

‘And in the meantime we tramp around in the guts of lower Metzuh helping Naxipael and Bezieth build an army?’

‘Xagor wishes to know the alternatives.’

‘Strike out on our own and hide out somewhere.’

‘There is safety in numbers.’

Insane laughter came rattling down the broken corridor from somewhere ahead of them. Firelight, or something very like it, was painting dancing shadows on the ceiling and walls. As they got closer to its source it became clear that the corridor opened out into a larger hall. Figures could sometimes be briefly glimpsed cavorting inside.

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Kharbyr said grimly.

CHAPTER 5

A TALE OF ORIGINS

On the hundredth day after the calamity on the maiden world of Lileathanir the survivors of the bright lakes clan finally came within sight of the Lil’esh Eldan Ay’Morai – the ‘Holy Mountain of dawn’s light first gleaming’. The survivor’s journey across the riven face of the maiden world of Lileathanir had been a hard one. What little food had been saved from the initial raid had been lost in the calamity that followed it and so privation had tormented them every step of the way. The clan’s ablest leaders and warriors had fallen in the great sky battle against the dark kin. Those brave warriors had given their lives to drive away the slaver-takers even as catastrophe struck the land, and by so doing they had left their people leaderless in the dreadful aftermath. So it was that the pilgrimage north to seek the World Shrine began as a straggling crowd of mostly the young and the old, the infirm and the cowardly.

They had looked to Sardon Tir Laniel for guidance at the beginning. She was tall and unbowed by her many winters, her hair still the colour of ripe corn. Her service as a protector and a worldsinger a half-century before had been much admired among her clan so it was natural that they sought her leadership at a moment of crisis. The only thing Sardon could think to do was to journey to the World Shrine and seek help. At first she had intended to travel alone but the other survivors would hear none of it; the ghost paths were too dangerous to enter, they said, and the land was in turmoil. The great pterosaurs refused to fly and the pack beasts quickly sickened in the ash-choked air. A journey to the World Shrine on foot would take months. The frightened survivors raised all these objections and more, but no one argued against making the journey only about who should go. In the end the whole clan, all that was left of it, simply picked up their meagre possessions and joined her in walking north.

The great forests of Lileathanir had burned like torches in its oxygen-rich air. Far off on the horizon to the south and east the sullen glow of distant fires continued to light the sky. The fires remained visible throughout the survivors’ march, but the regions they passed through were already dead and cooling. In many places the cloud-scraping trunks of mighty trees still stood upright like cities of blackened towers, at other spots violent earth shocks had uprooted hundreds of the forest giants and created impenetrable mazes of charred timber. Thick drifts of grey ash lay across everything that muffled all sound and kicked up choking clouds with each step. Periodically they had to divert around shuddering clefts in the earth or sluggish flows of lava from the host of young volcanoes rising across the land.

On the eleventh day they had found other survivors. They were members of the fen clans that had hidden themselves in underground holdfasts until the trembling of the earth drove them to the surface. They found the world transformed. As the days drew into weeks they found other survivors or were found by them. Singly or in small groups they drifted in day after day, shocked, confused, and increasingly malnourished. The lake clan took all of them in and cared for them as best they could, although they had precious little to share. Other than the steady trickle of fellow survivors, they saw virtually nothing else alive in all of the regions they travelled through – every creature still able to move had long since fled or given up its bones to join the blackened pyres scattered across the forest floor.

At the time of the calamity the skies had closed over with thick, ominous clouds and the temperature had begun to drop. The sun became visible only at dawn and dusk, red and bulbous as it peered out briefly beneath a solid roof of heavy cloud. The trapped heat from the forest fires and volcanoes had compensated at first with an unhealthy, bonfire-scented breeze but this subsided as the fires marched away south and east. Three weeks after the march had begun the morning dew settled as frost and brought a blessed respite from the omnipresent ash. From the fortieth day onward they began to encounter snow. These were real crystals of frozen water that were totally unlike the flakes of settling ash that had become such a part of their daily misery. A few nights later the first deaths began to occur as the bone-wracking chill and malnutrition took their toll. Their path north became marked by lonely little cairns of stones thrown up over the bodies of those that succumbed each night.

Some had left the march, dropped out to find their own ways and hack out a new existence from the world that had so suddenly turned against them. More joined to take their place, and still more, until the tiny rivulet of lake clan members became an intermingled stream with other clans and then a flood of the surviving peoples of Lileathanir. Most of the travellers seemed to be motivated by the urge to cling together and to reassure themselves that they were still part of a greater whole. All craved some understanding of what had occurred to their world. Some sought a means to avenge themselves upon the guilty. At some point it had taken on the aspect of a pilgrimage with the normally fractious clans of Lileathanir bonding together in the face of their common adversity. That was when Sardon had started to become afraid.

Sardon certainly believed the journey had taken on a higher meaning for the people, yet as the weeks passed she had become increasingly frightened by what she might find at the holy mountain. She could still feel her connection to the world spirit lurking the edge of her consciousness. The presence that had been with her from childhood was still there but not as she remembered it. The collective essence of the world spirit had encompassed many aspects: playful, nurturing, protective, wise, but its beneficent presence was a constant source of joy and reassurance to all. Now that had changed. A twisting serpent of atavistic rage boiled at the back of her mind: furious, negative, destructive, terrifying. All of them could feel the change yet none of them dared speak of it. They all looked to Sardon with pleading eyes as if somehow, miraculously, she could mend the unmendable and set the world to rights.

The burden on her soul had grown heavier with each step that she took towards her destination. When the holy mountain came in to sight many of the pilgrims danced and sang at the prospect of an end to their journey. Sardon did not rejoice with them, it felt to her too much like her journey was only just beginning.

Lil’esh Eldan Ay’Morai was a truly titanic peak. Its flattened top was normally wreathed in a permanent cloud layer that laced its flanks with rainbow-girt waterfalls and sparkling rivulets. Now it seemed as black and frozen as the dead forests below, with leprous-looking snow banks dotted across its jagged rock face like growths of mould. A series of black-mouthed openings had been torn into the mountain by the violence of the earth. Vapours issued from them as if a whole nest of dragons was laired below. The World Shrine had existed within the roots of the mountain safely protected by hundreds of metres of solid rock. It had been only reachable through the most secret of the ghost paths with no physical connection to the outside world. Sardon had dared to hope that the World Shrine would still be unreachable but looking at the broken mountain she knew with a grim sense of inevitability that there would be a path down to the World Shrine through one of those fissures.

Sardon eventually took her leave of her companions and set out on the last leg alone. They tearfully bid her farewell but none of them tried to follow her. They understood that one must go alone to confront the dragon spirit, they would wait at the foot of the holy mountain until she returned or the cold and hunger took them. Sardon clambered inexpertly away under a crushing sense of responsibility towards her people. She slowly edged her way towards the lowest opening she had seen from below, crawling across rocks, pulling herself up ridges and jumping across crevasses. The mountain trembled beneath her feet and hands constantly, often dislodging gravel and stones that rattled and chattered dangerously past her head.

Many times the opening was lost from her view but the plumes of vapour rising from it guided her inexorably towards it. As she got closer she began to appreciate just how big the opening really was. Seen from miles away it had looked like a thin black crack, up close it yawned across a vast swathe of the mountainside, higher than a carnosaur and wide enough for a whole clan to march inside shoulder to shoulder. Sardon slithered across the last few fallen stones to reach the ledge jutting out before the entrance and peered uncertainly inside.

Hot, sulphurous breath washed across her face, a stiff, constant breeze coming up from below. Distant grinding, hissing sounds welled up from the depths in a fearsome medley. Sardon nerved herself as best she could and began her descent.

Simply, and with what he felt to be creditable brevity Motley explained the cause of the Dysjunction wracking Commorragh and Morr’s own role in creating it. The incubus had received the news in silence and then continued on his way as if Motley did not exist. In truth it was a better reaction than Motley had hoped for.

Morr’s silence had stretched out for what seemed to be aeons while they marched through the webway. Motley chattered, observed and even sang at times to fill the emptiness but he could draw nothing from the towering incubus he followed. Motley took Morr’s lack of overt hostility as a positive sign and simply smiled through it. The incubus had, after all, asked him for a direct answer and it wasn’t Motley’s concern if he didn’t like what he heard. The webway flowed smoothly past as they took smaller and smaller filaments, the incubus seemingly sure of his path at every turn. The curving etheric walls became increasingly tenuous as they advanced into regions where the cohesion of the webway had become broken and discontinuous. There Morr stopped, turned to Motley and finally spoke again.

‘I have considered your premise,’ Morr said slowly, ‘and I find it… feasible… that you may be correct.’

Motley smiled with genuine warmth. ‘Then things may still be rectified! Come with me and, while I can’t guarantee all will be forgiven and forgotten, you can most certainly save Commorragh.’

‘I cannot,’ said Morr.

Motley’s smile vanished as quickly as the sun going behind a cloud. He sighed heavily. ‘You still feel you must go to the shrine of Arhra and atone for killing your archon. This, of course, before you’ll even consider going about the clearly less pressing business of saving your city from imminent destruction. Predictable enough, I suppose.’

Morr nodded solemnly.

‘And you still feel the need to present yourself for judgment before these hierarchs of yours at the shrine even though you know that they will probably kill you for what you’ve done.’

Morr nodded solemnly again. Motley rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said somewhat desperately, ‘that you’ve con–’

‘I ask that you accompany me to the shrine,’ Morr said.

Motley shut his mouth in surprise, but only for a moment. ‘Well, I’m flattered, Morr, not as a sacrifice, I hope, or perhaps a scapegoat?’

Motley’s impudence had no visible effect on the armoured incubus. ‘I see now that should the hierarchs see fit not to end my existence that I may need you,’ Morr continued imperturbably, ‘and it would be expeditious for you to be close at hand.’

‘And what if the hierarchs should see fit to try to end my existence on, oh I don’t know, some obscure point of principle?’

‘As to the chance of that I cannot say.’

‘Hmmph, well regardless of that possibility I will be delighted to accompany you to the dance, Morr,’ Motley said brightly. ‘It makes me very happy that we’re becoming such good friends, companions, and, if I may say it, scions of a better future battling in the face of adversity.’

‘Do not mistake an alliance of convenience for friendship, little clown.’

‘All right, all right don’t worry I won’t,’ Motley replied a little peevishly. ‘I sought only to elevate our unique association as it rightly deserves, knowing that I could trust you to once more lower our collective expectations almost immediately.’

‘Very well. Then follow and do not stray from the path I tread.’

‘You don’t have to tell me that, of all people,’ Motley sniffed, and followed closely on the incubus’s heels.

Before them the webway opened out into a hazy tangle of criss-crossing filaments, some wavering in an ethereal wind, some ragged and showing glimpses of multi-hued colour spilling through. The overall impression was that of a vast cave filled with phosphorescent webs swaying in the spectral breeze. Morr led the way toward a rippling fringe of colour that was alternately shot through with ochre, amber and jade. A broken portal, now a multi-dimensional weak spot that still connected to many other paths and realities, but in an uncertain and capricious fashion.

‘Does this lead to the shrine?’ Motley asked as his curiosity got the better of him. ‘We need to be sure of where we’re going before we pass through or we might end up, you know, absolutely anywhere.’ At closer range fine threads of green and blue could also be seen coiling hypnotically in the veil, evidence that the Dysjunction in distant Commorragh had subtle effects reaching even here.

‘No, I must retrace my steps to return to the shrine. We must go back to the beginning.’

Morr swiftly waded into the veil of colours like some titan striding into an ocean. Motley huddled in closely behind the incubus as the swirling energies rose to engulf them. Cross currents tugged fiercely at them as disassociating realities stripped them down into fundamental blocks and whirled the pieces back together again. Floods of alien concepts and strange stimuli washed across them both only to flash away in the instant that they were perceived. Through the horrid rending, tearing, soul-ripping experience Morr’s continuity of purpose drove forward with Motley cowering in his slipstream. Morr’s self-belief was overwhelming, it bent and twisted the vagrant realities to his will. There was a moment of weightlessness as the portal grudgingly surrendered and ejected them…elsewhere.

They stood upon an expanse of white sand that had the crystalline brilliance of fresh snow. It was night time but the darkness was lit by continuous flashes from horizon to horizon. A staccato drumbeat of explosions melded together into a continuous thunder that rolled back and forth in the sky. In the middle-distance ominous, hulking shapes the size of mountains leapt and shifted in the uncertain light.

‘What is this place?’ Motley asked in quiet awe.

‘Somewhere that no longer exists, a land of ghosts,’ Morr rumbled enigmatically as he set off across the white sands. Winds had sculpted the sand into a series of perfect ripples across their path. Morr tramped up the ridges and slithered down their opposite sides without breaking stride. The flickering hell-light of explosions and the rolling thunder never lessened.

‘Can I at least ask who is, or rather was, fighting then?’ Motley asked after they reached the third such ridge (he ran easily up and down each of them, leaving no imprint). ‘Call me an incurable historian if you will.’

‘A people that should have known better are fighting against themselves,’ Morr intoned. ‘Their petty dispute has been entirely resolved now.’

Motley caught no small sense of satisfaction in Morr’s words. He surveyed the flicker-lit horizon. ‘Why is it that I imagine that there has not been a happy outcome for them?’ he wondered aloud.

Morr said nothing in reply. He was busy scanning the leaping shadows in the middle distance. The incubus jabbed out an armoured finger, pointing into the darkness. ‘There I am,’ Morr said. ‘Follow, but do not approach too closely and do not speak.’

Motley obediently followed the dark silhouette of the incubus into the shadows. Morr’s helm and shoulders were hard edged with the reflected glare from the distant barrage but otherwise he was only a blacker shape amid blackness. As they left the wave-like ridges of sand behind them the mass of hunched, mountainous shapes ahead resolved themselves as titanic growths of brain-like coral. A row of calcified ribs protruded from the sand nearby, the self-made tombstones of some megalithic beast. Two shapes were moving in the shadows between the ribs. Morr slowed his pace, dawdling to ensure that both got well ahead before moving after them.

To describe Motley’s sight as cat-like or hawk-like would do disservice to all of the noble beasts involved. Suffice to say that his vision was of a fine acuity and ranged into wavelengths not normally enjoyed by either mammalian or avian life. He watched the shapes ahead of them carefully, resolving them into: first and closest to the path Morr so carefully tread upon – a young, lanky-looking eldar splashed with blood. The youth was haggard and near-naked, clad only in rags and holding one arm awkwardly as if it were injured. The youth’s other hand clutched a curved cudgel with its ball-like head caked with gore.

The youth crept after a second figure that could barely be glimpsed with clarity; a night-black armoured warrior whose many-bladed helm would have over-reached even Morr’s lofty height. The figure seemed out of place and unearthly even in this strange setting. Motley gained the impression of burning eyes as it gazed back once before continuing to move unhurriedly in the direction of the coral bluffs. The youth seemed drawn after the armoured figure, fearful yet determined as he crept along in its footsteps.

Motley glanced from the gangling youth over to Morr and back again, suddenly understanding. ‘There I am,’ Morr had said. His earlier self still lived here where the infinite possibilities of Chaos spilled into the broken coherence of the webway. The frozen instants of Morr’s first steps towards his initiation as an incubus still existed as a shard of memory, a moment to be replayed so that the same path could be found again – a path to the hidden shrine of Arhra.

Motley wondered if what they saw leading the younger Morr was an avatar of Arhra made manifest. Legends about the father of the incubi were manifold. Most of them were false or contradictory but all agreed on one key point – that Arhra himself was destroyed long ago, and that the foundation of the incubi was his one abiding legacy. More likely they simply saw what the boy saw, or believed that he saw, reflected in this recreation of that explosion-wracked night.

The coral began to rise in frowning cliffs above them as they drew closer. At the foot of the folded, curving masses of pale stone lay the vast wreck of a vessel. Blunt ribs of rusting iron poked through a patchy hide of rotting armour plates along its broken-backed kilometre of length. Great turret housings on the upper surface of the wreck pointed the frozen fingers of their cannon seemingly at random into the sky. As the dark figure and the youth vanished around the cloven bows of the great wreck Morr increased his pace again to close the distance.

Motley became aware of more and more detritus lying in the sands at the bottom the coral canyons; metal components mangled and rusted beyond recognition, the half-buried wreckage of many smaller machines ranging in size and design from skeletal-winged flyers to smaller cousins of the great vessel they were approaching. And bones. Bones and teeth were everywhere, sometimes in such density that they covered the sand completely. Thousands, perhaps millions, of bones stretching as far as the eye could see.

They rounded the bows of the great wreck and ahead Motley could see the sands bulked up higher, forming a saddle between two cliffs. Beyond the saddle the inferno of bombardment could clearly be seen lighting the sky. Long, grotesque shadows leapt out behind the armoured figure and the youth as they climbed upward seemingly heedless of the danger. Morr strode forwards, attention locked on the distant figures as they vanished from view over the top of the saddle.

The steep slope shook with the fury of the barrage on the other side. Morr forged upward through continual small avalanches of loosened sand. A rank smell of burning hung in the air from the bombardment. It was punctuated by blasts of hot wind being blown into their faces by the crisscrossing pressure waves of the closest impacts.

Morr and Motley reached the ridge-like saddle together and stopped. Before them spread a vision of hell. A pockmarked plain alive with gouts of flame and whirring traceries of light. No living thing could be seen below but the leaping fires gave an illusion of life given triumphant, elemental form as they cavorted over the tortured sands. A single flame of jade held bright and steady on the horizon, a spear point of green light that had been dug into the earth.

Morr’s helm turned back and forth frantically looking for his earlier self, but there was no visible sign of the would-be neophyte or his mysterious patron.

‘No! This is wrong!’ Morr roared in disbelief above the cacophony of detonations.

‘What? Where should we be?’ shouted Motley.

Morr pointed to the unwavering green flame that hung on the horizon. ‘The gate,’ the incubus said grimly.

CHAPTER 6

NEW ARRIVALS

Despite its subterranean location the World Shrine of Lileathanir had been a pleasing and naturalistic place. Sardon remembered that the living rock had formed sweeping buttresses and towering pillars that gave the caves an open-air feeling, as if the viewer had wandered into a narrow valley beneath a starlit sky. Glittering waterfalls had rushed from cracks in the stone to fill plunge pools so crystal clear that they could seem like empty clefts at first glance. The stars in the upper reaches of the shrine had been made with a forgotten craft and shed light wholesome enough for living things to grow there far from the sun and sky. The whole shrine was alive with greenery from simple ferns and mosses to miniature eloh trees and gloryvine. Mineral veins and crystal outcrops that twinkled among the pools and grottoes had lent the place an aura of fey otherworldliness as though shy magical beings gambolled just out of sight.

The altered shrine had few, if any, of its original characteristics intact. Sardon had to squeeze along a narrowing crack to even reach it, not the broad and welcoming path she had imagined. Instead the jagged edges of the volcanic rock lacerated her hands and knees unmercifully. Eventually she was forced to wriggle on her belly like a snake before finally dropping out of a metre-wide fissure and into the shrine in an undignified heap. Hissing and bubbling surrounded her, the sounds magnified by the enclosed space. Not two metres from her outstretched hand a pool of boiling mud spat dollops of caustic slime, and there were palls of smoke and vapour wreathing a dozen similar spots. The floor had been tilted and torn open. Great fissures lit by inner fires gusted hot air into the chamber like a hellish furnace. In places the roof had collapsed into a jumbled mass of slabs where a handful of the fallen stars still glowed from their recesses like evil eyes.

The World Shrine represented the symbolic and metaphysical confluence of a planet-wide system of psychic conduits. The disruption of its material fabric was symptomatic of a far greater underlying harm. The psychic aura of the place was a sickening miasma of impotent rage, a swirling hate so strong that it had turned inward and poisoned its source. Sardon wept to feel it so closely, the world spirit a raging monster pounding at the walls of her sanity and threatening to suck her into its whirlpool of fury and loss.

Every living thing on Lileathanir was connected to the world spirit, and at their passing they joined its essence and strengthened it. It felt as if all of the mass deaths of the cataclysm had fed only the most dangerous aspect of the world spirit: the dragon. The dragon was the destroyer, the force that swept the slate clean to allow new growth. He was the forest fire and the great storm, his fury raised mountains and drank seas. Sardon honoured the dragon, and admitted the necessity of such forces having to exist but she had no love for it. Now the dragon was unleashed and consuming all of Lileathanir in its fury.

After what seemed a long time weeping in the semi-darkness Sardon finally levered herself to her feet, coughing in the acrid fumes. She wavered about what to do next. Seeing the shrine had confirmed her worst fears, but did nothing to resolve them. She could return to the refugees outside and see their hopeful faces drop as she told them that there was nothing to be done. She could remain sitting inside and weep until she choked on the fumes or she could try to investigate further, however futile that might be. Demonstrating the inherent resilience of her people she opted to investigate.

Here and there polished sections of stone were carved with complex runes that pulsed with their own phosphorescent witch-light. None of these had been touched by the convulsions, their connections to other mystic sites on the planet remained intact. Sardon could not dare herself to reach out and use the runes to connect with the world spirit fully. She tried to sing a soothing chant as she had been taught in her days as a worldsinger, her song seemed nothing but a hollow and lifeless mockery screeched by a crone. Afterwards she felt a distinct feeling of resentment gathering about her and the walls shook disapprovingly. She determined to try and sing no more.

As she stumbled across sloping stones she came across a skeleton wedged between two slabs. The body belonged to one of the shrine wardens judging by his aggressive-looking male attire. The warden had been crushed, but that had happened later. Falling stones or boiling mud had not killed him. Straight-edged knife cuts covered his bones from virtually head to toe, none of them deep enough to be immediately fatal. Such flagrant cruelty could only mean one thing – the dark kin must have penetrated the World Shrine itself. Sardon’s mind whirled at the concept and the rush of sick relief that she felt come close on its heels. Someone else did this, not us.

It had always been too great a coincidence to imagine that the slave-takers raid was unrelated to the cataclysm that followed it. But in her worst imaginings Sardon had never truly entertained the idea that the Children of Khaine might have actually penetrated the World Shrine. Everything made sense now. The rage of the dragon had not been unleashed by the clans as she’d feared, but by the vile depredations of the dark kin in the very heart of the world. Sardon could conceive of no reason why they should come and violate the World Shrine, but she could conceive of no reason why they did any of the nightmarish things that were attributed to them. Evil, pure and simple, seemed their only motivation.

Sardon spat in an attempt to get the noxious taint of death out of her mouth but it lingered stubbornly as she tried to think. The lower caves of the shrine had held gates to the spirit paths… and a secret that had been forgotten by many. She began to work her way downward as far as she could get, trying to mesh together in her mind’s eye the layout of the shrine as it was now in comparison to how it had been fifty years before. She eventually found a sloping ramp that was only half-choked with debris and followed it. At the bottom it opened into a domed chamber that was riven with cracks and slicked with drying mud but otherwise miraculously intact.

Seven arches were carved into the chamber’s stonework, doorways that opened onto only blank walls behind. The runes carved around their edges seemed dim and lifeless but Sardon could sense their latent energies flowing just out of reach. She moved to the central arch of the seven, one that was just a shade larger than the others. The twining runes on the central arch were more intricate too, older looking than their siblings to either side. Sardon struggled to recall her teacher’s lesson from five decades before.

‘In time of most dire need the attention of the far-wanderers can be summoned to this place. They are haughty and judgemental but their powers are great and it is said they will help if they perceive the need.’

The words were there, but the instructions were not. A sequence of runes touched in the proper order would send out the call, but Sardon could not remember what the sequence was. She turned away and attempted to centre herself, closing her eyes and clearing her thoughts with a moment of meditation. Her eyes flew open after only a second, the relentless beat of the dragon’s fury too strong in her mind to concentrate. Her memory kept returning the teacher’s warning, an unnecessarily dour admonishment as she had thought it at the time.

‘Lileathanir has not called out to the far-wanderers for succour in a hundred centuries – give thanks that it is so and never think to call upon them lightly. The wings of war beat ever at their backs.’

Sardon was suddenly startled to realise she could see her own shadow. It was stretching across the muddy floor and back to the ramp as light grew stronger behind her. She hesitantly turned to look at the source, one hand raised to shield her eyes against the glare. The central arch was filled with silver light, its framework of runes blazing with internal fire. A figure was silhouetted against the arch, unnaturally tall and misshapen-looking. Antlers spread from the figure’s bulbous head and it gripped a blade almost as tall as itself that crackled with etheric energies. Sardon’s knees wobbled treacherously beneath her as she stifled a cry. The newcomer swept its blazing, amber-eyed gaze over her and advanced with one empty hand raised. More figures were emerging from the arch behind it, skinny, straight-limbed and even taller than the first.

‘Peace,’ the word sounded in Sardon’s mind like the tolling of a bell. She felt her fears begin ebbing away at the mental touch, but she angrily shook it off. The dragon was too strong here to be assuaged by such a simple trick. It boiled with outrage in a corner her mind, converting her momentary fear into fury.

‘Speak your words openly, invader,’ Sardon bristled, ‘and declare yourself before I call for the Shrine Wardens to eject you.’

The figure halted and lowered its arm before sketching a bow that seemed devoid of mockery.

‘Forgive me,’ the figure said in a rich, mellifluous voice of pleasing timbre. ‘I sought only to reassure, not to offend.’

The light dimmed as the arch reverted back to an unremarkable stone carving. Six figures now stood in the domed chamber with Sardon. She could see that the first to emerge and the one that had spoken was swathed in tawny robes from neck to ankles, its head enclosed by an amber-lensed helm affixed with thick bone-coloured antlers. The robes were covered with austere looking battle-runes of fortune and protection with an ornate chest guard of woven wraithbone. The long, straight sword in the figure’s hands bore still more runes, these of destruction and of the witch path. This could only be one of the fabled warlocks of the far-wanderers, a battle-seer of the craftworld clans and something that had been unseen on Lileathanir in hundreds of years.

The other five newcomers remained silent, their attitudes ones of alert watchfulness. Each of them wore sapphire-tinted armour of subtly varying design, but all were well-proportioned and heroic-looking like animate statues. Their full-faced helms were adorned with tall crests marked in alternating bands of blue, white and yellow. They carried long-necked ancient weapons Sardon knew only as Tueleani – star throwers that were reputedly able to slice through a pack of charging carnosaurs or the bole of a forest giant with equal alacrity.

The warlock reached into a satchel at his side and drew forth a miniature carving of a rune. He released it in the air between them and it hung there, slowly spinning. The rune of weaving.

‘My name is Caraeis. I tread the Path of the Seer. I have come at your call,’ the warlock intoned. ‘This path was so ordained.’

Caraeis reached into his satchel again and drew forth another rune. He placed it in conjunction with the rune of weaving and it span around it in an erratic orbit. This was the jagged, scimitar-like rune of the dark kin. The world spirit came next, and then the profane shape of the soul-drinker. Finally there was Dysjunction. The twisting, spinning runes formed a pattern in the air that was painful to Sardon’s eyes. She held up her hands and looked away.

‘Enough tricks,’ she said. ‘You know of our pain, you know of our world spirit’s pain. I believe you. Can you help us?’

‘The pain of Lileathanir is felt far and wide,’ the warlock said. ‘It must be healed before it can cause yet greater harm.’

‘How can all this be healed?’ Sardon murmured in disbelief. ‘The very core of the world is violated, the spirits hunger only for bloodshed and revenge.’

‘Precisely,’ said Caraeis. He released another rune above the whirling confluence and it steadied the dissonant patterns immediately. The rune of vengeance. ‘I have tested a thousand other variants,’ the warlock said, ‘each with the same result. This is the only path forward.’

‘Vengeance?’ Sardon cried bitterly. ‘How can we avenge ourselves against what we cannot reach? With so few of us left, how can we even think of fighting back?’

‘I ask only that you permit us to be your instrument in this. Allow my companions and I to bring the perpetrator of this heinous crime to justice.’

Sardon blinked in disbelief. ‘You-you could do that?’ she stammered, daring to hope for an instant. ‘Find them and punish them?’

The warlock’s antlered helm nodded solemnly. ‘It is within my power to trace the destinies of the dark kin that came here and violated the shrine. The pattern is shifting and diffuse, but there are junctures yet to come where decisive action can be taken. Do you give your permission for this to occur?’

Punishment, vengeance. Ugly words to Sardon, but what she had seen in the World Shrine had shaken the very core of her beliefs. If the warlock was right and they were the things to begin the healing process who was she to deny the dragon its due? A part of her wished she could consult her people and hear their wishes, another part knew precisely what they would be. The hard life of the Exodite clans gave them an uncompromising view of justice – an eye of an eye, blood for blood. It would be hard to restrain their basest instincts after all they had suffered.

Sardon wasn’t even sure she could find her way back down the mountain in her weakened state. Would the warlock be prepared to sit by while the trail grew colder and she wrangled with the clans? Probably not. He stood patiently watching her, the pattern of runes rotating between them silently as he waited for her response.

‘Very well. Bring them to me, I ask this of you, Caraeis.’

‘You wish to render judgement yourself?’

‘I want to look them in the eye before I give them to the dragon,’ Sardon said with finality.

The flickering light and close horizon made it hard to judge how far away the gate truly lay across the ravaged plain. Perhaps as little as a few thousand metres, perhaps as much as twice that.

‘Will they actively try to hit us or is it in the hands of lady luck?’ Motley demanded.

Morr looked across at his slight companion with a sharp movement that denoted surprise. ‘I do not know,’ he admitted, ‘but the weapons are crude and highly inaccurate, they rely on blast and impact.’

‘And real? Here and now real, I mean!’ Motley yelled.

‘Very real.’

‘All right, then I’ll try to draw their fire while you make for the gate,’ Motley shouted over the shell impacts. ‘Don’t. Leave. Without. Me.’ With that final admonishment Motley ran swiftly down the slope and out onto the plain. As the slender grey figure ran its silhouette flew into a storm of brightly coloured shards that whirled and darted capriciously. A new multi-coloured, kaleidoscopic explosion leapt up among its sullen cousins of orange and red, and it danced among them.

The traceries of fire were the first things to react to the upstart presence. They whipped around to chase after the dancing motes of light as they raced away across the plain. Moments later the explosions came crowding in, their roar and tumult overlapping as they sought to crush the newcomer.

Morr struck out towards the gate across sands that were still warm from the pounding of the bombardment. Tiny, twisted fragments of smoking metal lay everywhere – shrapnel to give it the properly archaic term. Occasionally there were fragments of what used to be living things too, chunks of meat and bone barely recognisable as having once been part of a greater whole. Blackened pits showed where larger shells had landed in contrast to the almost comically small scorch marks from smaller bombs. Not all of the incoming rounds were chasing after the madly running Harlequin. The heaviest of them continued to rain down on the plain seemingly at random, each one shaking the ground with its impact and throwing up a huge plume of dust. Morr bent low and pushed on toward his goal, the drifting clouds of dust soon swallowing him completely.

The ground shivered beneath Motley’s flying feet. The air was filled with the whoops, whistles and shrieks of flying metal. He listened intently for the distinctive slobbering noise each shell made as it flew through the air incoming, and the dopplering whine of the shrapnel outgoing from each impact. He twisted back and forth to spoil the aim of his unseen attackers, dancing through the inferno with seemingly reckless abandon. His domino field dispersed his image and made it impossible to pinpoint him exactly. Unfortunately most of the primitive weaponry being used did not need to pinpoint him exactly – in fact it only needed to get lucky once. The slow-seeming swarms of tracer fire would have been the most dangerous without the field, however, and even with its help he had to skid aside or leap over its questing fingers a dozen times.

Even Motley’s preternatural agility had its limits. He was forced into doubling back as the fire became too intense to go on. Unfortunately that placed him in just as much danger of running back beneath a stray salvo behind him. A chain of explosions erupted within a dozen metres and threw Motley off his feet. Shrapnel whirred around him like a swarm of angry bees busily stinging at his chest and upper arms. He tumbled instinctively with the blow, bouncing to his feet and coming up running. Within a few paces he staggered, still dazed from the impact and almost fell.

‘No time for a sit-down right now, old boy,’ he told himself drunkenly, tittering as he mastered his wobbling legs, got them beneath him and ran on. A cold ache was spreading across his chest, never a good sign. Motley decided that he’d had enough of playing at being a target, the audience seemed unappreciative and surely Morr was approaching the gate by now. He deactivated the domino field and became an invisible flicker of grey among the flames as he sprinted off on a straight course for the gate.

Morr emerged from drifting curtains of dust onto a beaten circle of dirt surrounding the gate. It loomed over him from a hundred metres away, an angular-looking sheet of jade six stories high that shone with its own inner light. With the barrage shifted away in pursuit of Motley’s distraction the area seemed almost peaceful for a moment. Morr’s headed snapped up at the sound of rifle fire crackling close by. He wasn’t the only one taking advantage of the distraction.

The barrage raged impotently behind Motley, blindly smashing down on where he had been rather than where he was or (better yet) where he would be. However some of the tracer-gunners kept coming uncomfortably close as they sent their bursts of fire after his flitting grey shape. Motley increased his pace, each bounding stride taking him five or more metres at a time. Ahead and to the side he could see a flickering of tiny sparks on the ground. Two groups were firing rifles at each other as they tried to creep closer to the gate. Beyond them he could see the tiny figure of Morr standing beside the gate itself.

Motley grappled with the moral implications of the situation for an instant before reactivating his domino field. His running form splintered again into an explosion of light, a stained-glass image that flew apart virtually above the riflemen’s heads. Bullets zinged past him as they fired wildly at the swirling motes but he sprinted through their positions without a scratch. Whips of tracer-fire pursued him as the unseen gunners re-acquired him. Seconds later the first slobbering sound of an incoming round could be heard.

Up ahead Motley saw Morr turn and quite deliberately enter the gate without him. Motley cursed in a rich and scorching stream as he flung himself after the treacherous incubus. A sheer face of glowing jade reared up before him even as the first multi-throated howl of the barrage was renewed behind him.

CHAPTER 7

AN INTERLUDE IN THE DEPTHS

The haemonculi are the final arbiters of life and death in the eternal city, gaunt gatekeepers to the great beyond. With their blessings no wound is fatal and any fatality short of complete destruction can be undone. They are essential to the ageless rulers of Commorragh. Only with the help of the haemonculi can they continue to cheat death and spin out their long, wicked existences. Such power could surely allow the haemonculi to rule Commorragh if they desired it, and if any of its inhabitants would countenance it, but their true passion lies only in the pursuit of their arts. Or at least so they would have it believed.

In the lightless pits beneath Low Commorragh lie the lairs of the haemonculi covens. It is there that this dark brotherhood of flesh sculptors and pain artists practice their arts in the most diabolical ways imaginable. A thick miasma of anguish pervades the narrow cells and crooked passages that make up their demesnes. Here altered throats gabble in endless torment as base flesh is sculpted and re-sculpted over and over, twisted and cracked into endless new forms of suffering. In this benighted realm the haemonculi covens each plot their own aggrandisement and the downfall their rivals, hatching centuries-long schemes of genetic blackmail and manipulation to secure their access to the most powerful and influential kabals.

The Coven of the Black Descent lies within a twisting labyrinth of utter blackness filled with traps for the uninitiated. It is said that the depths of their labyrinth extend beyond Commorragh and into the webway itself, touching on split filaments and crushed strands long since abandoned by those whole and sane. Members of the Black Descent are taught the routes they must use to navigate the labyrinth between separate ‘interstices’ step-by-step according to a strict order of precedence. At the lowest ranks wrack apprentices know only the route necessary to reach the first interstices. As a coven member descends through the ranks more routes are revealed, the correct paths towards the second, third and fourth interstices where the true labyrinth begins. A Perfect Master must learn dozens of individual routes, an intimate secretary has memorised hundreds, while a patriarch noctis knows thousands.

A single misstep along these memorised routes would bring a messy death or, at the very least, violent dismemberment upon the transgressor. Just one step need be miscommunicated to send the victim off-course into a maze of monofilament nets, singularity traps, blood wasp collectives and corrosive mists from which there will be no return. The number of times this technique has been used by members of the coven to dispose of undesirable rivals would fill volumes, so much so that it has acquired the status of a tradition.

At the sixty-fourth interstice of the labyrinth a gathering of coven members was taking place. Four masked secret masters stood in attendance on a fifth, one in the viridian and black of an intimate secretary. By accident or design the sixty-fourth interstice was a pentagonal chamber with archways entering through each of its five walls. Each member of the gathering had stepped from a separate arch into the space only moments before as if summoned by a single call. Even the emotionally-neutered haemonculi could sense the miasma of rage built up within the chamber. It pressed on the subconscious like an inaudible, endless scream of inchoate fury.

A glass-fronted sarcophagus stood upright in the exact centre of the chamber, its contents invisible due to a blood-red mist swirling within. Several chains of dark metal enwrapped the sarcophagus and connected to rings set into the floor. It appeared an extreme measure of security in view of the already sturdy construction of the sarcophagus, a heavy, unlovely thing of ochre-coloured stone only rudely given humanoid shape. Nonetheless the assembled coven members appeared to view the chained artefact with exaggerated caution.

‘Check the restraints again,’ said the intimate secretary to the secret master to his right.

‘Secretary?’ the sable-masked haemonculus responded nervously.

‘If I have to repeat myself I’ll shear those deaf ears from your head. Do it. Now.’

The secret master stepped forward reluctantly and began to examine the chains, twisting them expertly to test their flexibility and strength. The masked haemonculus tested all five ringbolts first but eventually he could not avoid moving closer to the sarcophagus to check the chains wrapped around it. The red mist inside swirled rapidly in response, its tendrils seeming to jab towards the secret master only to dash themselves against the impermeable barrier between them.

‘There is some exceptional wear apparent, secretary,’ the secret master pronounced after a brief examination. ‘I find it hard to ex–’

Two skeletal red claws slammed against the glass with sudden violence, making the secret master recoil with a curse. The claws scraped down the glass for a second and then withdrew to be replaced by a face in the mist. It was hideous, grinning mockery of a face. Red flesh stretched into a facsimile of cheeks and lips, open wet pits instead of eyes. The coven members gathered to look upon the ghastly apparition with wonder.

‘How-how can this be?’ stammered one of the secret masters.

‘Impossible!’ exclaimed another.

‘Silence!’ hissed the intimate secretary. ‘You chatter like slaves!’ The secret masters quieted at once and obediently turned their masked faces toward him.

‘This function now exceeds your degree in the descent. Leave now and speak to no one of this. I have summoned the master elect of nine. He will determine the correct course of action. Remember, tell no one! Your lives depend on it!’

The secret masters were eager to leave that accursed place and fled through their respective archways without further comment. The intimate secretary smoothed his robes and stared back steadily at the impossible face grinning at him from behind the glass.

‘I confess I don’t know how you’ve managed to recover so quickly either, but it will do you no good,’ he told the face primly. ‘When the master elect arrives we will simply determine a new way of restraining you here.’

Fastidiousness and a general distrust of underlings had done much to gain the intimate secretary his current rank. It wasn’t long before he began testing the chains for himself while he awaited the arrival of the master elect of nine. The secretary’s taut, viridian-stained lips twitched and writhed as he whispered to himself and his captive.

‘The instructions were precise on that point, very precise. There can be no escape, no resurrection except under specific conditions. You will not be leaving us just yet.’

The chains were slack and the secretary found himself wondering uneasily how they had got into such a state without visibly loosening at all. Re-tensioning the chains would require releasing one chain from its floor-set ring to draw more links through. He glanced back at the sarcophagus but the face had vanished and once again nothing but roiling mist could be seen inside. He reached out hesitantly to unhitch the chain from its ring.

‘Don’t touch that,’ said a voice behind him.

The intimate secretary whirled to find himself face to face with the hatchet-faced master elect of nine. The master elect’s eyes had been replaced with plates of black crystal that winked ominously at the secretary.

‘Assuming you wish to live, of course,’ grated the master elect. His voice was a special torture, a grinding sound of sharpening blades, shrieking wheels and saws cutting through bone. To hear it was to have ears and senses mercilessly flensed by its hideous timbre. The intimate secretary recoiled as if he had been burned.

‘Forgive me, master elect!’ babbled the secretary. ‘I sought only to undertake necessary preventative maintenance while I was awaiting your arrival.’

‘Not a threat, secretary, merely an observation,’ the master elect grated pedantically. ‘In point of precision, you were trying to let her out. You simply didn’t realise it.’

The master elect stepped closer to the sarcophagus and gazed at its contents before moving out to circle the chamber and examine each of the tethering chains in turn. He tested nothing, touched nothing, the haemonculus keeping his hands tucked within the sleeves of his slate-grey robe at all times. He walked with a curiously precise, stiff-legged gait as though his limbs were constructed of wheels and steel rods. The sickening psychic miasma within the chamber seemed to be thickening into a palpable aura that beat upon the mind in waves. The intimate secretary found that he was sweating despite the chill air. A faint tremor ran through the floor when the master elect finally turned back to the intimate secretary at last.

‘There is danger here, but not from the source you perceive. This is ultimately Bellathonis’s doing. The bitter fruits of his labour, the Dysjunction is fuelling this one’s efforts to revive. Her desire is strong and draws strength to it.’

The master elect paused as another tremor ran through chamber, longer and more distinct than the first.

‘Bring acid to refill the sarcophagus and enough wracks to keep her distracted while we do it.’

‘Very good, master elect,’ the intimate secretary grovelled before daring a question. ‘It-it is certain then? Bellathonis initiated the Dysjunction?’

‘Certain.’ The word fell from the master elect’s lips like the blade of a guillotine. The intimate secretary paled visibly at the prospect before his face contorted with fear as another ramification dawned upon him.

‘If the supreme overlord learns of Bellathonis’s involvement…’ he whispered.

‘Dissolution of the coven. Exile or true death to its membership for their crime of association with the culprit.’ The master elect’s tones cut the word association into screaming fragments steeped in an acid bath of revulsion. ‘There is precedent for this on the basis of prior events.’

‘But Bellathonis is a renegade!’ the intimate secretary screeched. ‘He fled from our ranks! We gave him no succour!’

‘Irrelevant. Supreme Overlord Asdrubael Vect will mete out punishments regardless of the culpability of the recipients. The guilt of past association will be more than sufficient pretext to make the Coven of the Black Descent a target.’ The master elect was dispassionate, almost mechanical in his dissection of the likely future of the coven. Fear and vindictive rage warred for possession of the intimate secretary’s face. Rage quickly won.

‘This cannot be borne!’ the intimate secretary spat. ‘Bellathonis is the one responsible, he should be the one to pay! We must silence him before he is taken by Vect!’

‘Such words have been spoken before,’ grated the master elect. ‘The one who spoke them was sent against the renegade and failed in his task. It is believed that Bellathonis has destroyed him.’

‘Then another must be sent! And another! Until…’ the intimate secretary suddenly understood the path he was being led down and baulked, stammering. ‘I mean… with respect, master elect, I meant no–’

‘Your enthusiasm and loyalty is warmly noted,’ the master elect smiled with no discernable trace of warmth. ‘You may begin your preparations immediately.’

CHAPTER 8

INHERITANCE

A blinding flash, a wrench of disassociation and for a moment Motley found himself falling into a green pool. No, the pool was behind him, and he was falling away from it. Up and Down fought a brief civil war over their respective claims for territory while Motley tumbled helplessly between their frontlines. Armistice only occurred when the green pool was declared the sovereign territory of Down and Motley obediently began falling towards it. The numbing pain in his chest and arm throbbed in anticipation of a return to its point of origin. His fall back into the pool was abruptly halted by an armoured arm that reached out to seize Motley’s limp body and drag him aside.

Motley blinked up gratefully at Morr towering over him. Over to one side of them lay a flat pool that spilled jade light into what appeared to be a cave. Motley puffed and blew for a second before bounding onto his feet with exuberant energy. He then struck a warlike pose with a slight wince.

‘Brothers in arms!’ he declared with bravado. ‘Equal to any and all challenges precisely as previously advertised!’

Motley abruptly slid back down onto his haunches with a bump and looked back up at the incubus. ‘Don’t you think?’ he said a little plaintively after a moment. Bright beads of red showed on his clothing where the shrapnel had pierced it. The holes themselves had already been knitted over by its clever fibres even as they set to work on the torn flesh beneath.

‘That was as brave an act as any that I have seen,’ the incubus said thoughtfully. ‘I was… surprised by your survival.’

‘I thought you’d left me behind again.’

‘There was no time to explain that the emergence would be vertical. Once I was sure that you would follow I entered the gate to ensure I would be in a position to prevent you falling back.’

‘That world was your home once upon a time, wasn’t it, Morr?’

The silence stretched for long moments before the incubus answered.

‘That was my home long ago,’ Morr said slowly. ‘Ushant, a maiden world. It is my eternal shame that I was born there of Exodite blood.’ Morr paused again and gazed down at Motley, his blank-faced helm studying the Harlequin for indications of judgment or contempt. Motley smiled back uncertainly and feebly waved a hand for the incubus to continue. Morr snorted.

‘Perhaps you had imagined all maiden worlds to be virginal paradises like Lileathanir? Not so, Ushant. My elders told me that the world was once covered by mighty oceans, but in my time they had become little more than deserts. The Exodite clans were hardy and endured, some even thrived. They remained numerous if not prosperous throughout the slow draining of the seas. Fourteen centuries before my birth the clans gathered to fight off an invasion entering Ushant through the gate that we just used.’ Morr nodded across to the greenly glowing pool and lapsed into silence.

‘Were they victorious?’ Motley prompted. ‘The peace they won would seem to have been sadly temporary if they did.’

‘The clans were victorious but they became cursed in the process. In the conflict they learned new ways of making war from their enemies. Crude, indiscriminate, effective ways. Once the immediate threat was overcome the clans turned their war machines on each other.’

‘What?’ Motley was incredulous. ‘Why would they do that?’

‘Honour, pride and stupidity in equal measure. The dispute began over which clan should control the gate and guard against future incursions. The strongest clans – the Far Light and the Many Islands – each opposed the other gaining the prestige of controlling the gate. The two sides’ blood-kin and allies aligned with them in pressing their claims. Many had become so invested in making war during the conflict with the invaders, so my elders said, that they were loathe to give it up when peace was won.’

‘Tragic,’ Motley frowned unhappily. ‘I’m ashamed no one came to intercede and make peace between the clans.’

Morr laughed, a mordant cough of humour soaked in bile and bitterness. ‘Oh, they came. Many times. Finely dressed ascetics came from those drifting cradles we call craftworlds to tell us how to improve our lot. They hid behind their masks and shed crocodile tears at our misfortunes while discomforting themselves not one iota to help. In my own time they came once again and sat in judgment of us like celestial beings that had reluctantly descended into the common muck. They had finally tired of the dispute and announced their intention to give their support to the survivors of the Far Light clan.’

Motley pursed his lips but did not speak as he wondered which craftworld it was that had so thoroughly bungled their guardianship of Ushant. Each craftworld accepted nominal responsibility for a number of the maiden worlds scattered across the Great Wheel. Some viewed the maiden worlds as the hope for the future of the eldar race, the seeds from which the eldar might once more grow to prominence on the galactic stage. Other craftworlds viewed the maiden worlds as no more than a burden, mere primitive backwaters, the resource-sucking wreckage left behind by a failed survival plan.

‘Instead of quelling the conflict the decision lent it renewed vigour. The Many Islands clan attacked the Far Light and their craftworld patrons that very night… they appeared to be surprised by this turn of events. They defended themselves poorly.’ Morr’s helm tilted up at the memory, its bloodstone tusks catching the light and creating the illusion that they were slicked with fresh gore.

‘Is that when you saw the figure that you followed?’

‘Arhra,’ Morr spoke the name with conviction. ‘Make no mistake – it was Arhra himself that came to me then. He told me without words that I was worthy to test my strength at his shrine. He challenged me to do so.’

‘The legends say that Arhra was destroyed.’

‘Nothing ever truly dies.’

‘Perhaps the legends meant that he was changed beyond recognition.’

‘Tread carefully, little clown. You know nothing about what you speak of.’

‘My profuse apologies. I am cursed with a propensity for asking impertinent questions at inopportune moments. Forgive me.’

Morr grunted and walked away. Motley saw that the incubus was making for an exit from the cave, a ragged gash in the stone that showed a pale hint of daylight beyond. Motley wearily pushed himself to his feet and began to follow. The gash opened out into a narrow cleft in bare rock that soon became a treacherous ledge. One wall disappeared to reveal an almost sheer drop into a valley on that side, the other wall extending up in a cliff face softened in places by moisture-dripping clumps of grass and lichens. Above that was a golden haze of indeterminate source, sunlight with no sun. Below them the ledge descended towards a layer of coiling mist that covered the land like a blanket. There was a suggestion of the skeletal silhouettes of trees poking up through the mist, but they shifted and wavered uncertainly in a sea of whiteness.

‘Would it be impertinent to ask where we are and where we’re going?’ Motley said hopefully as he skipped nimbly down uneven steps after Morr.

‘We come to journey’s end,’ the incubus said eventually. ‘The shrine of Arhra lies in the valley below.’

Motley began brushing fastidiously at the dried blood on his tunic, even though it was fast becoming invisible against the cloth anyway. ‘Well that was a good deal easier to reach than expected,’ Motley exclaimed a little unconvincingly. ‘Always a positive sign, I say, smooth sailing ahead!’

‘The swamp is not without challenges,’ Morr cautioned pedantically. His tone could not disguise that even his melancholy spirit seemed to have risen fractionally.

Bezieth edged carefully forward, aware of the dull ache in her leg and the way everyone else was clustering behind her as if she were some sovereign shield of protection. There was music playing ahead of her, a wild, disquieting tune that skirled and whined in a way that set her teeth on edge. There had been doors at the end of the corridor, ornate sheets of precious metal pierced and worked into the form of twin phoenixes. These had been twisted and thrown aside with unthinkable force. Shadows from within flickered and danced across the opening, the music twisted and contorting around their shambolic rhythms. Bezieth of the Hundred Scars feared nothing living or dead, but even she hesitated to look inside.

She could feel the pressure of a dozen eyes on her back willing her to step forward, while the amorphous, unknown horror ahead of her held her back. The pressures were equal for a moment, but pride drove her relentlessly forwards to look around the door jamb and reveal the scene. The floor was made up of runnelled porcelain tiles leading to hexagonal, silver-topped drains. These, the clustered stab-lights overhead, and the hanging chains showed the place had been a slaughter faire where passing denizens could enjoy exhibitions of the public torture and humiliation of slaves and eager masochists.

Now the chains hung empty and the only light came from acrid bonfires that had been rudely piled around the hall out of debris. Figures cavorted madly around the flames in time to the piping music. Most of them appeared to be slaves, looking even more twisted and ugly than usual, but there was also a smattering of pure-blooded Commorrites leaping and capering with uncommon vigour.

At the centre of it all lay the source of the madness – a great mound of pink and blue flesh with only vague approximations of limbs and a head. It writhed and wriggled obscenely like a questing maggot while rows of flaring, hollow spines opened up and down its length emitting the hideous, piping music. The revellers danced around it, dashed offerings of wine and food over it, suckled on it and screamed out their devotion. Periodically the skirling pipes became insistent, almost whining. At this the dancers would seize one of their own number and hurl them onto the fleshy mass. The piping became ecstatic as the mound closed over the sacrificial victim like a blunt-fingered hand. In the last moments the victims would suddenly snap out of their ecstatic revelry and scream piteously in the grip of the thing. The insane piping interwove mockingly with their dying howls.

Bezieth had seen enough, the piping was starting to get to her too. She pulled her head back behind the ruined door jamb. Naxipael looked at her questioningly. She shrugged slightly and nodded back the way they had come. Naxipael shook his head in irritation and raised his blast pistols, his motion silently echoed by the other survivors. They were feeling frightened, angry and powerless – they all wanted to fight something. Bezieth rolled her eyes and gingerly hefted her djin-blade too. It emitted a chafing whine as if irritated by the hideous fluting sound ahead. Bezieth held it out before her and virtually let it lead the charge into the room.

She attacked silently, cutting down two of the dancers before they even registered her presence. Darklight beams suddenly slashed across two more of them, vaporising the leaping bodies in nebula-dark explosions of matter. Naxipael tried to hit the piping beast but revellers hurled themselves in his path to make a living shield of themselves. He laughed cynically as he blasted his way through them one by one.

Bezieth carved her way forward too, outpacing Naxipael as she waded through the minions striking left and right almost disinterestedly as she concentrated her energies on limping towards the beast. Too slowly. The piping was changing, becoming a shrilling saw upon the ears as it called its children to war. The remaining dancers turned on Naxipael and Bezieth with hostility written over their mad faces. Pallid fires glowed in every eye, and phosphorescent drool fell from every lip. The marks of corruption could already be seen: flesh melting into tendrils or fur or feathers or scales, limbs that were strangely twisted and a distinct surfeit of orifices was in evidence.

Hypervelocity splinters and disintegrator bolts ravened across the chamber as the rest of the Metzuh survivors opened fire, mercilessly cutting down the revellers where they stood. Some of those hit vanished like hydrogen-filled balloons sent alight, the skin peeling back as its contents ignited in a multi-coloured flash. Most of those struck accepted the wounds as stolidly as if they were made of clay rather than living flesh. The pink, fleshy craters that opened on their bodies dripped the same phosphorescent slime as drooled in ropy tendrils from their lips.

The piping beast’s minions raced forward, their outstretched hands flashing with etheric flames. Fire leapt up around Bezieth and Naxipael, deceptively vaporous pink and blue gossamer blazes that seared armour and charred flesh at the slightest touch. Both archons were forced onto the defensive, concentrating only on trying to fend off the capering horrors that leapt around them. Shrill screams sounded from behind as some of the survivors trying to push into the hall were consumed by the scorching blasts. Bezieth saw one warrior burning like a torch, still firing his splinter rifle as he was overwhelmed. The fires leapt higher still, creating the illusion that the entire hall had become a pavilion of woven flames.

Bezieth sheared through a leering face, ducked a gobbet of multi-coloured fire and cut off the arm that spit it at her. Axhyrian’s captured spirit energised her through the channel of the djin-blade, obedient and deadly in her hands for the present. Her enemies fought with no method, they leapt back and forth randomly, tumbling over each other in their haste to grasp and burn. She doggedly fought her way closer to Naxipael, who was reaping a great ruin of his foes but had been badly burned over his chest and back.

The other survivors were formed in a tight knot just behind them and were likewise badly beset on all sides so she could expect no help from them. The numbers of their attackers did not seem to be lessening at all, if anything there seemed more of them now than when Bezieth had entered the hall. The shrill piping was becoming triumphant, a mad cackling sound that drove against the soul.

A hoarse cry made her twist around to look back at the other survivors again and she gaped at what she saw. The wrack that had tended her, Xagor, was being hoisted onto their shoulders while the rest were fighting almost back-to-back to protect the execution of this peculiar manoeuvre. The wrack was in the process of awkwardly trying to level a long, thick-barrelled rifle.

Bezieth understood what they were trying to do. The survivors were lifting up the wrack up to get a clear shot over the heads of the capering minions at their daemonic master beyond. The wrack’s heavy rifle wobbled around alarmingly in the melee and the flame-handed dancers leapt madly everywhere, obscuring his target. The long-barrelled rifle finally spat once to no visible effect. To attempt such a thing only showed the survivors’ desperation. They had taken a fool’s chance, a futile last throw of the dice before the end came and it had failed.

The horrific fluting suddenly oscillated wildly, wailing up and down scales with agonising swiftness. The dancers whirled away clutching flame-wreathed hands to their heads, staggering even as Bezieth, Naxipael and the other survivors fought back a wave of sickness. The fires guttered out and the beast was revealed to be rearing and bucking, seemingly twisting in pain as its flesh rippled obscenely. With a final heave the fleshy mound split from end to end, unleashing a wave of bile, maggots, foulness and corroded bones across the floor. The mad piping ceased abruptly. The dancers wavered and collapsed into sacs of deflating skin. Naxipael and the impromptu pyramid of survivors fell too, depositing the wrack unceremoniously on the floor. Bezieth stood speechless for a moment, waiting to see if some new horror was about to burst forth. The hall remained silent and dark.

Bezieth noticed the wrack was quick to scurry after his dropped rifle, cradling it to himself protectively as if it were a cherished pet. To her surprise one of the other survivors offered his hand to help pull the wrack to his feet. Now several more clapped the wrack on the back and congratulated him as if he were one of their own pulling off a tricky shot, rather than the surgically-altered meat puppet of a mad torturer-scientist. Bezieth shook her head. Part of the curse of the Dysjunction was to create strange bedfellows out of necessity, ripping apart the societal fabric of the city as well as its physical one.

There were only seven survivors left now, not including herself and Naxipael. The odds against his ascension to High Commorragh had lengthened considerably and he was not happy about it. She looked toward Naxipael and called the wrack to attend him, her voice a whip-crack of discipline. The wrack jumped to obey, almost dropping his beloved rifle again in the process.

‘Possessed!’ Naxipael raved. ‘Traitors all, every damn one of them! Giving their own flesh away! Bah!’

The wrack hurried up and carefully laid his weapon on the floor before seeing to Naxipael’s injuries.

‘We were too late,’ Bezieth shrugged. ‘Whatever got in there first was nasty enough to hold on when the warding closed. Every major daemon within a league probably squeezed itself into the first warm body it could find to avoid being drawn back. We can expect to see more possessed.’

‘I bow to your superior expertise in the field, Bezieth,’ Naxipael said through gritted teeth.

‘That’s right, I didn’t get a hundred scars in Necropolis street fights.’

As with Bezieth the wrack’s methods were not kind but they were quickly effective. Raw wounds that were showing through Naxipael’s partially melted armour quickly scabbed over. Naxipael’s face took on a mask-like grimace of pain and he cursed volubly.

‘With respect,’ the wrack said deferentially, ‘this one would ask why no possessed were at the canal.’

Bezieth regarded the wrack coolly for a moment before coming to a decision. ‘Because the big ones, which is to say the smarter ones, don’t stop for a feast as soon as they get inside the warding,’ she said, her eyes momentarily unfocused and distant with the memory. ‘They go deep and bury themselves somewhere where they can find sustenance, somewhere they can grow like a cancer.’ The wrack nodded while bowing and scraping so low that it was virtually banging its head on the tiles. Naxipael was muttering again as the scabs flaked off him to reveal patches of pink, new skin.

‘Xagor, isn’t it? Tell me about the weapon, Xagor,’ Bezieth said, looking at the rifle more closely. It was an ugly thing, owing more to the aesthetics of a butcher’s tool or a collection of tubes than the elegantly sculpted lines of a Commorrite weapon.

‘This device is called the hex-rifle, honoured one,’ the wrack said with some pride. ‘Acothyst’s weapon, Xagor found it in the processional among the entourage of Master Re’ryrinx. Most unfortunate.’

‘Never mind that. What does it fire?’

‘Cylinder impregnated with accelerated viral compound, normally glass plague. Xagor does not know what compound this device uses, perhaps mutagenic, perhaps not. Xagor has fired only one shot with it and suggests finding more test subjects for more accurate analysis.’

‘Well whatever it is it works, keep it by you in case we need it again,’ Bezieth said before pushing down her distaste and clapping the wrack on its leather-clad shoulder. ‘And nice shot, by the way.’

Naxipael seemed more aware of his surroundings again, his cursing tailed off into a string of short expletives as he stood up somewhat shakily. He gave Bezieth a peculiar look and then shrugged painfully.

‘All right, Bezieth, I’ll listen to your suggestion of what to do next,’ Naxipael said with equanimity.

‘Then make for Sorrow Fell,’ Bezieth said, ‘and do it quickly.’

‘Reason?’

‘Things have been stable for a little while but that won’t last, it’ll get worse. Sorrow Fell surrounds Corespur and it’s the only tier that will be organised enough to survive the worst, Vect will keep it that way.’

‘You’re assuming our glorious and beloved supreme overlord has survived,’ Naxipael sneered. ‘Some revenant might be eating his entrails at this very moment.’

‘More likely some High Commorragh pureblood is trying to stick a knife in his back, but I don’t find either possibility very likely. Vect still lives, you know he does. When the universe ends Vect will still be alive in the nothingness that comes after, floating in an unbreachable bubble of his own deviousness and sense of self-satisfaction.’

Naxipael scowled but didn’t deny it. Asdrubael Vect had ruled Commorragh with an iron fist for six millennia. The supreme overlord had maintained his rule through disasters, rebellions, civil wars, alien invasions and Dysjunctions before. If anything Vect seemed to thrive on the experience, emerging stronger and with notably fewer opponents after each one. Naxipael had to grant that Bezieth’s plan had merit, contrawise to ordinary times it would actually be wise to seek protection from Vect’s presence rather than stay away from it.

Between them Bezieth and Naxipael managed to get the survivors moving again, haranguing them for their laziness and threatening the tardy with lurid punishments. There were three warriors left, each from three different lesser kabals so they watched each other suspiciously at all times. There were a pair of Ethondrian Seekers in maroon cloaks and hoods, their half-seen faces constantly questing back and forth like weasels. They stayed close together and guarded one another’s backs religiously. Finally there was the wrack and a ragged-looking sell-sword that she vaguely recognised.

They were sullen and unwilling to move, but all of them understood the peril they were in and obeyed after some grumbling. Not much of a force to take into Sorrow Fell, Bezieth thought, but any of them that could make it through the ruins of Low Commorragh should be able to find ready employment among the high archons at a time like this. Ready employment and relative safety until the Dysjunction was over.

At least so she hoped.

The images on the wall flickered, and the soft, amber light in the room fluctuated unpredictably. Distant, disturbing sounds flickered at the edge of hearing (or perhaps the edge of consciousness) but they seemed reassuringly far away for the present. It was still possible for the occupants of the chamber to set concerns of the Dysjunction aside for a moment and concentrate on their vital work.

One of the images was briefly outlined and expanded to fill the wall, the face of a somewhat slack jawed, flat-faced, raven-haired specimen of Commorrite nobility. One of the room’s occupants spoke up as twisting skeins of data unfurled around the image.

‘This is Kvaisor Yllithian, eleventh sibling on the Mol’zinyear branch, my archon.’

‘Too ugly,’ the room’s only other occupant snapped. ‘Next.’

A different image promptly replaced the first, this one closely resembled Nyos Yllithian save for a certain dissipated look and what looked to be a permanently distracted expression.

‘Razicik Yllithian, seventy-third sibling on the Vatinyr branch, my archon.’

‘Seventy-third? Are you insane?’

‘There is a strong matrilineal quantum on the Vatinyr side of the family, my archon.’

‘You are insane. Next.’

Face after face, name after name. All of them sharp featured, haughty, gazing at the viewer with naked contempt. There were certainly variations: pallid skins and dark ones, flamboyantly flowing manes or close cropped skull-caps, but every face bore a familial resemblance to Nyos Yllithian that was unmistakable. The master haemonculus Bellathonis stood nearby, scrolling through the ancient records of the noble house of Yllithian as they attempted to find a suitable candidate.

Despite all of the haemonculus’s allegedly best efforts Yllithian was still dying. The glass plague was mutating aggressively, marching across his skin like a conquering army. His hands could no longer grip, his legs could not walk and he could only speak thanks to a succession of temporary skin grafts and devices. The plague had bound itself inside Yllithian’s own body in a way that made it impossible to completely eradicate. Perhaps as little as days remained to him but he’d thought it would be enough time to find the right individual to use as his successor. A message he had just received denied him even that, now he had only hours.

‘What about that one?’

‘Zarils Yllithian, second sibling on the Oanisis branch, my archon. According to this you strangled him with your own hands and then cast his body into the void.’

‘Ah yes. I knew there was a reason he looked so promising.’

‘If I may make a suggestion, my archon?’

‘You may,’ Yllithian sighed. ‘Apparently I shan’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Nothing too pressing on my mind.’

‘Well quite. It strikes me that with the limited time we have available it may be best to set aside aesthetic concerns and concentrate on finding a… robust enough character to survive the transmigration of power. Physical appearance is, after all, mutable,’ Bellathonis smiled his disturbingly shark-like smile at this and cocked his head to show off his own sharply altered profile with its long, pointed chin and hooked nose. ‘No additional charge, of course.’

‘The face and the blood is everything, Bellathonis,’ Yllithian told him pedantically. ‘I would be a fool to trust my household’s future to the vagaries of your knives however talented you may claim them to be. This must be perfection itself.’

Asdrubael Vect, the supreme overlord, had called a convocation of the surviving archons. Any kabal that failed to send its leader to Corespur forthwith would be judged rebellious and destroyed on sight. Vect must be desperate if he was taking such steps, or so Nyos fervently hoped. Unfortunately attending the convocation in his current state would be worse than suicide and so for the sake of the noble house of Yllithian he must find a successor.

‘Well if the face must take precedence then the blood must suffer,’ Bellathonis continued smoothly. ‘That, too can always be rectified, of course.’

‘You make your points with the subtlety of a pit slave, Bellathonis, do you know that? I just find it hard to believe that among my vast, extended and frankly bloated bloodline not one of them is suitable to take my place.’

‘If I may say so, at the risk of exhibiting the subtlety of a pit slave once again, you may have been entirely too successful in securing your own position to leave any viable contenders for your replacement. More bluntly still – you already killed them all. Furthermore these are only the blood-kin in the fortress itself. So many are missing in the Dysjunction that the pool is distinctly shallow at present.’

‘Tell me again why you aren’t growing me a new body right now.’

‘Aside from the fantastically high chance it would be subject to possession at a time of Dysjunction, my archon? The other reason is that it could not possibly be ready in time. A third reason, if you desire it, is that it would have to be vat-grown and you have already made your feelings on that subject perfectly clear.’

Yllithian snarled something incomprehensible.

‘I’m sorry, my archon, could you repeat that?’

‘I said send for young Razicik then, currently seventy-third in line to absolutely nothing. His fortunes are about to change drastically.’

CHAPTER 9

THE HUNTERS

Morr and Motley descended through the banks of mist until it became a low overcast above their heads. In the valley before them the shrine of Arhra rose tier upon tier to where its conical spires vanished into the golden haze. Pillars and archways of obsidian clustered upon its faces in dizzying profusion, all enwrapped by trailing nets of parasitic vines and extravagantly flowering greenery. A heavy, humid atmosphere hung about the place creating thin tendrils of mist that flowed from the darkened entrances and down its cracked steps. Plinths dividing the steps at irregular intervals bore eroded statues; some of the carvings still recognisable as warriors and beasts while others formed bizarre and otherworldly shapes born of madness and decay.

The land surrounding the shrine gleamed with low-lying waters. The rearing shapes of mangroves bearded with hanging streamers of moss and lichen jutted out of the murk. Insects buzzed industriously and a few winged shapes wheeled high above. Beyond these few signs of life no other creatures were to be seen near the shrine. A pregnant sense of watchfulness pervaded it as if hidden eyes gazed upon the newcomers from its deeply shadowed recesses.

‘Here I was reborn,’ intoned Morr with reverence. ‘The child that escaped the prison of its birth learned the true path to destiny and honour in this place.’

Motley glanced at the incubus with frank surprise but did not speak. Morr’s words were clearly not intended for him and to respond to them might only drive the incubus back into his shell. It was remarkable enough that this living weapon had found a voice of its own if only for a moment. Morr hefted his blade and strode away, picking his way over mossy stones towards a causeway that led across the swamp. The path was treacherous in the extreme but Morr never so much as glanced downward. His gaze was locked on the distant spires of the shrine. Motley skipped after the incubus with his heart full of foreboding.

‘Morr… Does it strike you as unusual that this place does not appear to have been affected by the Dysjunction in any way?’

Morr seemed puzzled by the question. ‘Why should it be? There is no direct connection to Commorragh.’

‘True, but the effects of the Dysjunction are being propagated elsewhere throughout the webway, I would expect to see… to feel some evidence of its impact even here.’

‘Many are the shrines to Arhra, but it said that he gave up his mortality in this place, and that this shrine was forged from his flesh and bones. His spirit is certainly strong here, perhaps it is strong enough to protect the shrine.’

‘Perhaps that’s it… I, well I’m sure that you’re correct.’

Morr halted and swivelled to regard Motley balefully. ‘You sound as though you fear some lurking corruption. There is nothing to fear in this place for those who come to it untainted by weakness.’

‘Weakness in this case including concepts such as empathy, charity or mercy I would imagine,’ Motley replied somewhat tartly. Morr only grunted in response before turning back to continue his journey.

As he did so he stopped short. A figure now stood on the causeway ahead of them, waiting. It was clad in green-black armour and rested a double-handed klaive on the ground before it. After a moment Morr addressed the apparition cautiously.

‘Greetings, brother, I seek passage to the shrine. Have you come forth to greet us?’

The figure remained silent and made no movement, it may as well have been carven of green-black stone for all the signs of life it betrayed.

‘If you will not speak then stand aside and let us pass, or there will be a passage of arms between us that you may regret.’

By way of reply the figure swung its weapon to a guard position. Morr automatically reflected the movement by raising his own klaive in both hands and taking a step forward.

‘Are you sure you are entirely welcome in your old haunts, Morr?’ Motley asked impertinently from behind him. ‘This fellow seems to think you are not.’ A short, curved blade and a long, elegant pistol had appeared in the Harlequin’s hands as if by magic.

‘Stay out of this, little clown,’ Morr warned as he continued to advance on the silent sentinel.

A battle between two incubi is a formidable sight to behold. Both wear armour capable of warding off any but the strongest blows, yet they wield weapons capable of tearing through that self-same armour like paper. Against skilled but lesser armoured opponents an incubus must fight warily – constantly on the move, feinting and shifting to keep their comparatively slow, heavy klaive balanced and ready to unleash a killing strike. Against a horde of unskilled foes an incubus can concentrate on maintaining a steady rhythm, overpowering and overawing their enemies before they use their weight of numbers to advantage. In either case the incubus can rely also on fists, knees and feet to deal crippling damage, moves that against a fellow incubus would leave them as a pile of severed limbs in moments.

Between two incubi the contest becomes one more of speed, strength and endurance. They trade blows and counters faster than the eye can follow, each swing perfectly directed at a vulnerable spot, most often the wrists, head or neck. Each parry must be delivered with just enough power to deflect a descending klaive but not so much that the defender overextends and drops their guard to the inevitable counter swing. Maintaining the momentum of the moving blades while interweaving strikes and parries is key, the first fighter to slow or falter is apt to lose their head.

Morr and his opponent stood almost toe-to-toe, their klaives carving glittering arcs as they swept together, clashed and whirled away to attack again. Morr used his greater height to rain down blows like thunderbolts, causing his enemy to sway and finally take a step back to escape from beneath the storm. His foe responded by redoubling his attack and unleashed a rapid series of eviscerating strikes from left and right.

Morr was put on the defensive, his grip spaced widely on his klaive as he blocked one strike after another. Suddenly the towering incubus was staggered by an unexpected overhead swing that he barely managed to block with his upraised klaive. Morr fell back a pace and his opponent rushed forward to keep up the pressure, hammering at his guard without respite.

Morr’s klaive flicked out to snare his advancing foe’s weapon with its hooked tip as he tried to buy time to recover. Instantly both warriors spun their klaives to gain the necessary leverage to drag their opponent’s weapon out of their hands. Neither of them succeeded but Morr’s opponent momentarily lost control of his klaive as it was flung outward from his body. Morr’s recovery was quicker and he instantly slammed a blow into his enemy with his full weight behind it. His opponent blocked the strike just in time, but could not fully deflect it. The two warriors were left locked blade to crackling blade for instant before, with a mighty heave of his shoulders, Morr hurled his enemy back with brute strength alone.

The other incubus was thrown off his feet but reacted with cat-like quickness by rolling into a crouch. Morr’s klaive sang as it flashed down, being only partially deflected by a weak, cross-armed parry before its hooked tip gouged into his opponent’s thigh. Morr tugged the blade free in a shower of armour fragments and gore, leaving red ruin in its wake. His foe lurched up to make a desperate riposte that Morr caught easily on his klaive. He stripped the blade from his opponent’s grasp with a practiced twist, leaving the other incubus completely defenceless.

Morr swung again without hesitation, a horizontal cut at the neck with every ounce of his weight and every iota of his strength behind it. The other incubus had been raising his arms, perhaps in an effort to catch the swinging blade, or to ward off the blow or perhaps even to plead for mercy. It mattered not one jot. The monomolecular edge of the klaive flared with power as it crashed through both armoured wrists and neck without slowing. A handless, headless puppet sprayed crimson as it toppled to the causeway with its strings cut. The helmed head clattered down several yards away and rolled, splashing tiny carmine spirals in its wake.

Morr grunted with satisfaction and went to retrieve the helmet and severed hands. Motley blanched as Morr produced a spool of wire from his belt and threaded the grisly trophies together prior to hanging them from the skeletal rack that rose behind his shoulders for just such a purpose.

‘Is that really necessary?’ Motley protested. ‘Is it not enough to take a life in honest combat that you must play the ghoul afterwards?’

Morr stood and looked at Motley through glittering crystal lenses, his face unreadable behind his blank-faced helm. Motley regretted his outburst immediately. He had allowed himself to forget that Morr was a denizen of the dark city where grisly trophies are always at the height of fashion. Hearing the story of Morr’s maiden world origins had softened Motley’s already somewhat empathetic view of the incubus’s plight even further. He told himself to recall this moment if he found himself making the same slip again. To Motley’s surprise when Morr spoke it was without any trace of rancour.

‘If one brother opposes my approach to the shrine then there is a high chance there will be others that feel the same way,’ the incubus intoned. ‘The sight of their predecessor’s remains may give them pause.’

‘Surely the hierarchs won’t tolerate any such interference?’ Motley asked. ‘You’ve come here to seek their judgment, how can they accept such disregard for their authority as waylaying plaintiffs before they can even reach the judge?’

‘The right of one Incubus to challenge another is sacrosanct. It is a law beyond the authority of any hierarch to overturn. Thus it has always been.’

‘So you’re saying you may face a succession of challengers then?’ Motley snorted. ‘The path to the shrine will be littered with their corpses at this rate.’

‘It is more likely the remainder would attack as a group, and from positions of ambush,’ Morr said imperturbably, ‘there is no ordinance that the challenges must occur singly or openly.’

‘But why would they be so set against you seeking judgment?’

Morr was silent for a long moment before answering. ‘They believe, rightly, that my guilt is manifest and incontrovertible,’ Morr said, ‘I killed my liege lord and there is no denying the fact. For them that is the end of the matter. They believe that there is no possible mitigation for the actions I have taken and that I will dishonour the hierarchs by even bringing the case before them.’

‘So they want to stop you reaching the shrine before anyone’s feathers get ruffled or any awkward questions get asked?’ Motley asked incredulously. Morr nodded solemnly in response.

‘If they come at us again there will be no discrimination,’ the incubus said, ‘they will try to kill you as well as me. Turn back if you wish, you are not beholden to me to continue.’

Motley grinned wolfishly at the notion. ‘More fool them, I’m not just a pretty face, a fantastic wit and an inordinately good dancer, you know.’ He skipped energetically through the first few steps of a complex pavane to illustrate his conjecture. ‘So do I have your permission to get involved next time?’ Motley asked brightly. ‘Defend my honour and, coincidentally, my life and all that?’

Morr nodded again and turned to continue down the causeway without another word.

‘Of course there is one other possibility, Morr,’ Motley called after him. ‘They might think you’re the one that’s been corrupted – you know, got the story backwards. Happens all the time.’

Morr made no response. Motley hurried to catch up with the towering incubus before he vanished into the coiling mist.

The intimate secretary was furious. It was not an uncommon state of mind for him, although ordinarily it derived from less certain causes and felt empowering rather than emasculating as it did now. This was a truly impotent fury and it tasted bitter on the secretary’s serrated tongue. The master elect of nine had given him with the task of dealing with Bellathonis, before Asdrubael Vect learned of the role the renegade had played in triggering the Dysjunction. No doubt by doing so the master elect had fulfilled his own instructions from a deeper degree of the Black Descent – a patriarch noctis or perhaps even a Grand Reeve – to ‘do something’ about the renegade master before the coven suffered Vect’s wrath. It left the intimate secretary with little choice to obey and get it done right after Syiin’s prior failure to do so. Unfortunately the intimate secretary found himself quite unable to devise any suitably cunning schemes at present because he was fully engaged in staying alive.

The intimate secretary was concentrating on creeping through the spiralling labyrinth of the Black Descent. He was moving through the seven hundred and ninety-one motions necessary to travel from the sarcophagus chamber at the sixty-fourth interstice across to the twenty-ninth interstice where his own workshop-laboratories lay. Ordinarily this would have given him no cause for concern. The steps necessary to navigate the labyrinth were etched into his memory in symbols of indelible fire – but that was before the Dysjunction. The Dysjunction had riven the labyrinth just as badly as the city above. Traps had been triggered, hostile organisms had been released and whole sections were rumoured to have collapsed into the oubliettes below. The wracks that had returned from investigating had reported traps completely choked with fiends, ur-ghuls and a thousand other wretches that had broken loose from their cells.

Even so it was necessary to go through all the necessary motions to reach the interstice. Many of the labyrinth’s traps reset automatically, and some would work as efficiently as ever no matter what happened as they were inimical to life by their very nature. The intimate secretary fumed and ground his filed teeth together at the delay as he ducked beneath an invisible monofilament web that might, or might not, still be in place to slice through an unwary explorer at waist height. There were better, faster routes with few or no traps that could take him to his destination, but his degree of advancement in the coven was insufficient for him to know them. He moved six more paces and sidestepped to avoid a pressure plate connected to a trap alleged to be so heinous that he had never been informed of its function. He could not tell if the stupid thing had been triggered or not.

He had to improvise the next ten motions, hidden spigots overhead had cracked and deposited their loads of organic acid onto the plain basalt floor below. The black rock still bubbled and spat where the acid had touched it and was forming searing puddles that stank evilly. The intimate secretary climbed along the wall with spider-like agility to avoid the whole mess, stepping back onto the floor to perform the six hundred and eighteenth through to six hundred and thirty-first motions required to avoid a sequence of moving gravitic anomalies along the next stretch of corridor. Another sidestep to avoid a timed flame funnel and he was at the entrance to the twenty-ninth interstice. He cautiously stepped inside and surveyed the chamber.

To his relief he found two hulking grotesques were stationed guarding the entrance, blocking the entry as effectively as a pair of thick, fleshy doors. Their puny heads covered by their black iron helms seemed like afterthoughts amid thick ridges of bulging muscle and sharp bony growths. The hunched giants drooled as they recognised him, their thick, ropy spittle dangling down from their grilled masks like jellied worms. The intimate secretary cursed the brutes and drove them back with blows from his short rod of office in order to get past.

Beyond the grotesques low walls divided a long, gloomy hall up into stalls occupied by various wracks working at benches and the handful of haemonculi that were directing their efforts. The benches groaned beneath a collection of multi-coloured glassware, bubbling retorts, jars, assorted metallic plates and components, surgical blades, organs pinned to boards, crackling wires and runic grimoires. Hisses, pops and bangs accompanied their work and combined to produce a drifting miasma of choking vapour and noxious fumes.

The intimate secretary ignored all of the activity for a time as he pondered. Syiin had attempted to use subterfuge to eliminate Bellathonis. Clearly the time for subtlety was past. The wracks and haemonculi in their stalls were all busily preparing weapons. All the deadliest creations of the haemonculi were present: virulent toxins, viral swarms, liquifier guns and needle-fingered flesh gauntlets, agoniser-flails and hex-rifles, traps for the soul and devices to destroy the mind were all here.

The secretary gnawed his lips as he sought the answer. Weapons were all well and good with someone to carry them. Perhaps a sudden rush of grotesques and wracks armed for slaughter? But how would they find their quarry and who would lead them? If a member of the coven was sent they might inadvertently draw the tyrant’s eye to precisely what they sought to hide and that would not do at all.

As he thought his eye was drawn to a particular stall where no activity appeared to be occurring. This area was occupied not by benches and wracks but by a pair of curved two-metre high, three-metre long objects currently hidden beneath dirty grey cloths. The moment he saw it his fury rekindled, here was the answer – discarded and forgotten! He stalked across to the stall with all of the dignity he could muster.

‘Ah intimate secretary, you have returned!’ a secret master said ingratiatingly as he came forward from an adjacent stall. This master was masked in steel and adamantium, his smooth, oval head craning out on a thin neck above robes of layered metal mesh. A cluster of tiny lenses over one of the master’s eye-holes rotated spastically until it settled on a satisfactory configuration.

‘Why are these engines not functional? Are they damaged?’ the secretary snapped impatiently, jerking his head sharply at the cloth-covered shapes.

‘Not as far as I am aware, secretary,’ the master replied warily. ‘I have not tested them since… the event began, there should be no reason to believe them otherwise, that is–’

‘Then ready them for action immediately!’ the secretary almost shrieked.

Somewhat nonplussed the secret master tilted his smooth head enquiringly. ‘To what purpose, secretary?’ he asked carefully. ‘By which I mean what configuration should be used?’

The intimate secretary half-raised his rod of office to strike the secret master but mastered himself. It was not truly an unreasonable question – how best to ensure Bellathonis’s death? The secretary thought quickly.

‘They must be self-directing,’ the secretary said. ‘Able to hunt down their quarry independently. Their target will be an individual, when they find the target they must destroy every atom of it.’

‘I understand, secretary,’ the secret master nodded, ruminating. ‘A psychic trace will be sufficient to find the individual if an imprint can be supplied.’

‘It can,’ the secretary sniffed.

‘And the capabilities of the target?’ the secret master asked patiently, as if ticking off articles on a mental checklist. ‘Would they be a runner or a fighter by nature?’

The intimate secretary paused and considered. From what he knew Bellathonis could be either, but if he tried to run from the engines while the city was in the grip of a Dysjunction he was unlikely to survive the experience.

‘A fighter, with a high chance of being in a defended location,’ the secretary declared confidently.

‘Very good, secretary,’ the secret master said with satisfaction. ‘I’ll begin the preparations to receive the imprint immediately.’

The secret master turned and nimbly flicked the cloths away from the front of one the hidden shapes to reveal a curved, gleaming prow of metal. A nest of knives and needles could be glimpsed tucked up underneath it, a set of jointed metal limbs folded as neatly as insect legs.

The intimate secretary stared thoughtfully at the engines that would encompass Bellathonis’ inescapable doom. His taut, viridian lips pulled back into a disquieting smile as he found himself warming to his scheme. It would work, it had to work.

‘Dispatch them the moment they are ready,’ the intimate secretary instructed. ‘The imprint will be supplied momentarily.’ The secret master nodded silently, already busy with his work. The intimate secretary moved on to find sufficient acid and enough wracks to quell the occupant of the sarcophagus at the sixty-fourth interstice.

CHAPTER 10

ANOTHER SORT OF INHERITANCE

Young Razicik Yllithian was hunting in the lower halls of the White Flames fortress when the archon’s summons came. Some Venomyst infiltrators had been found sneaking their way up from the catacombs shortly after the Dysjunction so Razicik and his clique had taken it upon themselves to hunt down more of the vermin. It had been a frustrating business with scant diversion to it. The infiltrators set traps and ambushes, ran away like slaves and were generally annoying about the whole affair. It wasn’t too surprising really, the Venomyst were just a remnant and more used to running than fighting. The late, great Zovas Yllithian had forced the last vestiges of Archon Uziiak’s Venomyst kabal out of the fortress centuries ago. The Venomyst had been forced to scrape an existence among the somaphages and starvelings in an adjacent spire as their fortunes sank ever lower. It was debatable, really, whether the Venomyst were attempting to invade the fortress or just trying to escape from whatever hell-pit their own spire had become.

So the arrival of the message gave Razicik an opportunity to bow out from the frustrating hunt with good grace by casually mentioning that the archon was calling for him in person and so he must go at once. He suspected a trick at first, some cheap attempt by his siblings to jump him when he was alone, but the message carried the personal sigil of Nyos Yllithian, archon of the White Flames. There was no doubt as to its authenticity. Razicik left his companions to their poor sport and began springing up the first of the innumerable stairs he would have to climb in order to reach the top of the fortress with youthful exuberance. Now was not a time to trust one’s fate to malfunctioning grav risers and definitely not to portals so the whole climb would perforce have to be made on foot.

Razicik thought briefly about trying to secure transport to fly around the outside of the fortress instead. The sloping, armoured eaves of the fortress’s precipitous rooftops overhung a three-kilometre drop on two sides to where its foundations abutted onto Ashkeri Talon and the docking ring. The closest two spires on the remaining sides were controlled by kabals nominally allied to the White Flames. Archon Uziiak’s poisonous offspring and a number of other petty archons dwelled in a skeletal spire of dark metal close by, but they posed no threat out in the open. The profusion of decorative barbs, columns, rosettes and statues that encrusted the exterior of the White Flames’ palace concealed Dark lances and disintegrator cannon by the score.

The immediate vicinity should be safe and it would be quicker and much easier on the knees. Of course under the circumstances those very same disintegrator batteries might well pick off anything they detected flying close to the fortress quite regardless of its allegiance. The anarchy of the Dysjunction had wrought a sense of febrile excitement in the air, a feeling that anything could happen and probably would. It prompted a distinct inclination to shoot first and ask questions not at all. Such an unfortunate ‘accident’ would be too convenient for some of Razicik’s siblings to resist arranging it, and so the stairs it must be.

Razicik was amused to note how quickly the stairs altered as he climbed up through the fortress. At its lowest levels the stairways were narrow and twisting with the steps worn to almost U-shaped declivities in cheap, porous rock or corroding metal. Climbing upward they straightened out and became noticeably wider and more richly appointed. Here the steps were unblemished and made of gleaming metal or polished stone.

Razicik couldn’t remember the last time he had met the archon, old Nyos Yllithian, face to face. Most of his blood siblings felt it was generally safest to steer clear of the old schemer and avoid drawing excessive attention to oneself. Old Nyos could be positively restrained in comparison to some of his peers, but he was still a cold-blooded killer with no compunction about strangling a potential rival at birth. It dawned on Razicik that Nyos might want to do away with him, but summoning him to do the deed seemed unnecessarily convoluted unless some personal affront was involved. Razicik wracked his memory for anything he might have done to arouse the archon’s ire. He could think of nothing and failing to appear would mean a death sentence anyway so he continued to climb, albeit less exuberantly than before.

Higher still and the stairways became sweeping curves of alabaster and onyx that were festooned with decorative balustrades and finials of frozen flame. On these levels Razicik encountered two of the archon’s incubi standing waiting for him. They directed him to an antechamber with an entry arch that was sculpted in the shape of great overlapping wings of platinum, gold and silver.

The incubi did not accompany Razicik inside and as he passed the entrance the sculpted wings animated and folded into place across it, leaving him in semi-darkness. The walls were exquisitely decorated with frescoes of White Flames victories and hangings made from the skins and banners of fallen foes. As Razicik’s eyes adjusted to the dim light he beheld a small circular table in the centre of the room. A simple throne at the far side of the chamber was its only other furnishing. Razicik realised with a start that a cowled figure appeared to be slumped in the throne. As he stepped forward to investigate the figure shifted slightly and spoke.

‘Ah Razicik, you’re here at lasst,’ the voice was that of the archon but twisted somehow, sibilant sounding. Ghostly fingers of fear brushed Razicik’s spine for the first time. What was going on?

‘I am here, my archon, at your command,’ Razicik replied uncomfortably. ‘How may I serve you?’

‘I have dedicated my life to this kabal, Razicik, I’ve laboured endlessly to ressstore the noble housess. Every action I take iss born out of the love I bear for my housse and for the presservation of all our futuress, but now my time iss done. Do you understand? Thiss body of mine can sstand it no longer…’

Razicik was both shocked and delighted. There had been rumours that the archon had been injured and was incapable, but to have face-to-face admission of the fact meant two things – the archon was taking him into his confidence, and that old Nyos was weak and vulnerable. Razicik eagerly stepped closer.

‘No! Say it isn’t so!’ Razicik protested convincingly. ‘Oh my beloved archon, what cruel fate has befallen you?’

‘Sspare me your condolencess!’ the archon spat. ‘Like every other member of my bloodline you are unworthy of the name Yllithian! Sslack, ssybaritic, sself-indulgement ingratess – every one of you! None of you are worthy to lead this housse!’’

‘I regret not conforming to your ideals better, archon,’ Razicik replied icily as Nyos’s rant subsided into a medley of hissing and hacking coughs. Razicik still carried his sword and pistol from hunting in the catacombs and the incubi had not thought to disarm him. He wondered how quickly he could cross the chamber and plunge the blade into the archon’s heart. Pretty quickly, he decided. He sidled a little to one side to get an angle around the table in the centre of the room. As he did so he noticed that there was a gleaming object on the table. It was a crown of dark metal with two points elongated so that they would protrude like horns on the wearer’s brow.

‘Yess, the crown,’ the archon said quietly. ‘You can kill me momentarily, but you musst hear of thiss firsst–’

‘Oh I don’t think so!’ Razicik cried, ripping out his sword and lunging forward. To his surprise the archon didn’t move, staying seated even as the point of the blade crunched home. The first thrust felt like it didn’t penetrate flesh at all, some kind of armour perhaps? Razicik didn’t waste time pondering it, he thrust again and again into the unyielding body. The thrill of murder-lust gripped him and he started hacking madly at the figure on the throne until it toppled over with a despairing hiss.

He stopped hacking and started laughing, panting and laughing again as his hands shook with the burst of adrenaline. He’d expected the incubi to come charging in at any second, but they hadn’t. Now he, Razicik, was archon and those incubi were his to command along with every other soul in the White Flames fortress. Where to begin? Gifts for his friends and retribution on his enemies would be a good start. He caught sight of the crown still lying on the table. Actually, that was a good place to start.

Razicik picked up the crown and felt its weight for a moment as he marvelled at its workmanship. Doubtless Nyos had intended to pass along a symbol of ancient rulership that would show the kabal that its new leader had his blessing. Razicik laughed again at the old archon’s hubris, fancy thinking that kind of thing even mattered any more. Still, as a trophy it had intrinsic value, and wearing it would always remind Razicik of this glorious moment. He slowly placed the crown on his head, feeling himself growing into the role of archon even as he did so. He would be a fearsome archon, fearsome and mighty and… memorable.

Unbearable pain lanced through Razicik’s temples, a searing hot whiteness that burned out all thought, all volition except for the need to scream. He frantically tore at the crown but it stayed firmly in place as if it had been welded onto his head. There was a wrenching sensation, deep rooted as though something at the very core of his being was twisted free. If Razicik could have still seen he would have witnessed twisting tendrils of light extending from his eyes and mouth to the fallen corpse of his archon at the foot of the throne. If he could have still discerned sounds he would have heard his own screaming rise to an indescribable intensity before falling suddenly and ominously silent.

The tendrils of light faded away, leaving the chamber in semi-darkness once more. Razicik swayed for long seconds, staggered abruptly but did not fall. He gazed about him uncomprehendingly for a moment and then cursed richly.

‘Thank you so much for doing absolutely nothing while the little bastard was stabbing me,’ he called out angrily.

The master haemonculus Bellathonis appeared from behind a hanging holding an over-sized syringe full of red fluid in one long-fingered hand and a curious looking helix-barrelled pistol in the other. Bellathonis showed no chagrin at the other’s outburst as he hooked the unused pistol back onto his waist harness, if anything faint amusement was playing around the Haemoculus’s withered lips.

‘I told you from the outset that the best chance for the device to function correctly was for the subject to don it voluntarily,’ the haemonculus said mildly. ‘I felt it probable he would still do so in his moment of triumph despite his rather egregious diversion off-script.’

‘Probable? Have you ever been stabbed, Bellathonis?’

‘Many times, my archon,’ Bellathonis murmured as he advanced and plunged the needle of the syringe deep into Razicik – now Nyos’s – neck and slowly depressed the plunger.

‘Well it’s not something I enjoy, even with the vitrified flesh,’ Nyos Yllithian snarled.

Inwardly Nyos was thrilled to feel his lips and cheeks moving freely again, he grinned, frowned, yawned and snarled again in quick succession. It felt good despite the ongoing ache of the injection. Bellathonis finally withdrew the syringe and looked at Nyos’s new face appraisingly.

‘I would not have believed it when Razicik first entered the room,’ the master haemonculus opined, ‘but he really does look like you now. Something about the eyes.’

‘A sense of determination and the vaguest whiff of intellect, haemonculus, nothing more.’

Nyos bent down and scooped up Razicik’s sword from where it had fallen from his grasp. Having a weapon in his hand felt good too. He thrust it savagely into the fallen body that was now the repository of Razicik’s worthless soul. An agonised hiss emerged from it that was all too familiar to Nyos’s ears. He bent down to look into the ruined face of his old body.

‘Still with us Razicik? Good – I know you can hear me,’ Nyos murmured as he slowly twisted the blade. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll master being able to talk again in what little time you have left – or at the very least I guarantee you’ll master being able to scream.’

A wretched, hissing burble was all Razicik could manage at present. Lots of room for improvement there, Nyos thought to himself. He left the sword protruding from the body and turned back to the haemonculus with something like appreciation on his face. ‘Come with me,’ he said simply before turning to press down on one arm of the throne. A section of the wall slid up to reveal another, larger chamber behind it.

‘And what of the young pretender here?’ Bellathonis said, nudging the glassy mass with his foot.

‘Leave him for now – you can freeze him or something? Extend his life somehow?’

‘Of course, I’ll save him for you until you have the time for a proper audience,’ the master haemonculus said. He drew forth another vial, of greenish fluid this time, and fitted it into the syringe. Kneeling down, Bellathonis punched the needle into the vitrifying body in several spots.

‘Excellent. Now come – I must prepare myself.’

The room revealed beyond was much wider than the first, which was evidently little more than a vestibule to this one. It was so wide that the ceiling seemed low and its corners were lost in shadow. The only illumination came from one wall which was curved and made of glass-like bricks each a metre across laid many courses deep. The view it gave onto the outside appeared astoundingly clear, the light that was filtering in brightened and dimmed anarchically in time with lightning flickering outside. A mismatch of cabinets, divans, tables and other furnishings were revealed scattered rather forlornly around the space in a way that only served to emphasise its shadowy emptiness. What Bellathonis at first took to be ornamental pillars near the wall of glass proved to be a row of gnarled black trees with drooping fronds sitting in metallic urns.

Yllithian began stripping off his garments as he crossed to one of the cabinets. He stood naked as a newborn as he reached inside and drew out fresh clothing of unornamented black. Bellathonis stepped closer to the glass wall to look outside, just like they always did. Yllithian smiled to himself, it was all too easy.

‘What do you intend to do with yourself now?’ Yllithian asked casually as he dressed himself and watched the potted trees silently extending their fronds towards the haemonculus. ‘And be careful of the black eloh trees, by the way,’ he added maliciously at the last possible moment. ‘They bite.’

Bellathonis turned and batted away a questing tendril fondly. ‘Oh I’m well aware of the proclivities of the species, my archon. I am greatly impressed by the breadth of your accomplishments – I hadn’t taken you for a fellow enthusiast of carnivorous horticulture.’

Yllithian shrugged and waved away the compliment with unconvincing humility as he reflected that he had been right, the master haemonculus was never going to be caught out so easily. ‘Only a passion of my great-grandfather Zovas Yllithian,’ Nyos told Bellathonis. ‘I merely honour his memory by keeping them alive. To be honest they remind me of him a little – grasping and eternally hungry.’

Now that he was closer to the glass wall Bellathonis could truly see outside the spire that formed the White Flames’ fortress. The view was astonishing. Ashkeri Talon stretched out far below him, its sharp angles and innumerable jutting spines vanishing off into the distance. The point where it joined the artificial horizon formed by the city’s immense docking ring was virtually lost in the gloom yet it still showed as a pale line to the unaided eye. Three kilometres below him the juncture between talon and spire was covered with the leprous districts of Low Commorragh growing over each other like competing patches of fungus. Despite the sweeping curve of the glass wall no other High Commorragh spires were visible from this angle, which was probably the only reason such a structural weak spot had been permitted to exist.

Ordinarily the vista below would be bustling: ships moving to and fro on the docking spines, shipments of slaves being brought into the city and raiding forces heading outward in endless caravan. Now the only things moving were fires burning out of control. In the multi-hued void a thousand more rosettes of flame burned brightly – the hulls of shattered ships being consumed by their own fusion fires as they drifted helplessly. The insipid light cast by the Ilmaea over the scene was shifting constantly as if they were obstructed by clouds where no clouds could possibly be. Some part of Bellathonis hesitated to look up to see what was making the fluctuations and he obeyed the instinct, fixing his gaze outward instead.

The shifting veil of the void beyond the wardings was normally diaphanous, sometimes opalescent but most commonly dark with only a hint of shifting, nacreous colour. Now it was vivid and poisonous looking, a storm-wracked sky filled with angry, competing thunderheads of blue and deep green interspersed with spears of flickering, multi-dimensional lightning. The ominous thunderheads seemed to be rolling ever closer, piling up above the height of the spire, above all of High Commorragh and above the entire city like a frozen tidal wave… Bellathonis realised that Yllithian had stopped part way through pulling on a pair of iron-grey sabatons and was waiting for his answer.

‘Forgive my distraction, my archon, the scenes outside are rather… dramatic. With your permission I had hoped to remain in the comfortable, and safe, environs of your fortress for a while.’

‘Oh did you now?’ Yllithian smiled. ‘That hadn’t really crossed my mind. I suppose you could always take over Syiin’s old quarters temporarily. If I gave my permission, of course.’

‘Of course.’

Yllithian lifted a black, glossy cuirass from a stand and fitted around his torso. The armour sighed lightly as it gently enfolded him and moulded itself perfectly to the contours of his body. ‘There’s been no sign of Syiin for quite some time,’ Yllithian remarked idly. ‘A curious business, that.’

Bellathonis failed to rise to the bait. Both of them knew full well that Yllithian’s previous haemonculus, Syiin, had been murdered by none other than Bellathonis himself. However High Commorrite etiquette, after countless centuries of scheming and backstabbing, had come to eschew outright commentary on such things as a sign of being excessively gauche or obtuse.

‘It would seem unlikely that he will turn up again at this point,’ Bellathonis mused, still gazing distractedly outside. One of Bellathonis’s favourite personal modifications had been to implant a pair of stolen eyes into his bony shoulder blades. By concentrating on a corner of his mind he could enjoy a fully panoramic view of his surroundings and so keep an eye on Yllithian even while he looked out at the destruction. The scenes below were no doubt being replicated a thousand times over around Commorragh. An almost palpable sense of suffering was in the air and Bellathonis found it was most intoxicating.

He stroked another questing eloh frond under its ventral vein to make it curl up involuntarily as he considered his options. Yllithian was fishing for more information about the clash between himself and Syiin, a line of inquiry that seemed unlikely to be in Bellathonis’s own best interests. On the other hand Yllithian could grant security for the immediate future on a whim, or, if it came down to it, he could simply summon a fortress full of retainers to exercise his will. Bellathonis decided it was probably wise to give the archon something.

‘It is perhaps possible,’ Bellathonis said, ‘that Syiin’s jealousy over my association with your noble self drove him into a fit of madness, causing him to undertake acts eventually harmful to himself.’

Yllithian was attaching the second of two barbed pauldrons to his shoulders. He pulled on a pair of gauntlets attached to hooked vambraces that covered his arms from wrist to elbow. ‘It’s true that Syiin seldom seemed to have the best interests of his archon at heart,’ Yllithian said. ‘I have wondered if his coven had some hand in his disappearance. He was a member of the Black Descent wasn’t he? Just like you?’

And there it was. Not a difficult thing to find out, but it proved that Yllithian had been doing his homework. Bellathonis began to worry that he had underestimated Yllithian’s resourcefulness. He turned to look at the archon directly. Yllithian was now resplendent in full war armour and vermillion cloak, with a tall helm held in the crook of one arm, a sword at his side and the horned crown on his head. Bellathonis had to admit that he looked every inch an archon. Yllithian’s steady gaze held no hint of softness, indecision or mercy as he awaited Bellathonis’s answer.

‘I parted ways with the Black Descent quite some time ago, my archon,’ Bellathonis said carefully. ‘It was the subject of some acrimony at the time – a trifling business really. I suppose it’s possible that the Black Descent eliminated Syiin in retribution for his association with me. I understand that he did draw your attention to my abilities in the first place.’

Yllithian watched the haemonculus’s face carefully as he spoke, trying to judge his veracity through the mask-like distortions of countless surgeries. Not an outright lie, Yllithian thought, but a half-truth at best. Bellathonis certainly seemed to think the Black Descent had some hand in the matter, which was an interesting fact that Yllithian mentally filed away for later examination. Right now more pressing matters demanded his attention, even more pressing than vengeance on the haemonculus that had crippled his former body. The thrice-cursed supreme overlord Asdrubael Vect could not be kept waiting.

‘Very well, you have my permission to occupy Syiin’s quarters until further notice,’ Yllithian said, waving away the haemonculus’s grateful bow. ‘I must go to Corespur and attend to the supreme overlord’s wishes. Ensure that you are still here when I return, we will have more to discuss.’

Yllithian ignored Bellathonis’s acquiescing bow and stalked out of the conservatory with his cloak billowing impressively. The haemonculus hurried to exit close at his heels – perhaps fearing to be trapped inside the hidden chamber. A sudden thought struck Yllithian as he reached the vestibule.

‘What became of the crone’s head, Bellathonis? I carried the damned thing to El’Uriaq’s banquet as you suggested but I left it there. Do you know where it is?’

‘I do not, my archon,’ Bellathonis replied just a shade too quickly. ‘I could initiate a search for it if you wish, although I fear it will have been destroyed in the Dysjunction.’

Lie. Lie. Lie. Yllithian felt radiantly good, as if his machinatory powers were returning to him in blazing flashes of insight. There was no doubt in his mind that Bellathonis still held the crone, Angevere, within his power. By extension that meant she was still in Yllithian’s power too.

CHAPTER 11

THE MANY BLADES OF ARHRA

Motley was the first to sense something wrong. In truth a sick feeling of disquiet had crept into his belly after the first duel and stayed there. The bloody-handed code of honour of the incubi had seemed somehow laudable within the confines Commorragh, but out in the webway it seemed a very different thing. It was like seeing some predatory undersea creature that can be admired for its deadly beauty in its own environment. When that same creature is removed and examined under the harsh light and differing pressure of the world above it is revealed as something foul and monstrous, an aberration.

The Harlequin found himself wondering if the sub-realm of the shrine was really a sub-realm at all, or the dreams of Arhra made solid. What Motley truly knew of Arhra could be comfortably inscribed on a napkin while leaving enough room for a sonnet or two, but he mentally reviewed the little he did know. Arhra, so the legends recounted, was one of the legendary Phoenix Lords that had appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Fall. As the scattered, pitiful remnants of the eldar race struggled to survive in a hostile universe the Phoenix Lords had come to teach them the ways of war.

Different branches of the eldar told different tales of the origins of the Phoenix Lords. Some believed them to be the last fragments of the gods, driven like Khaela Mensha Khaine into taking mortal form to escape the depredations of Slaanesh, the entity that the eldar call She Who Thirsts. Others maintain the Phoenix Lords were the ancestor spirits of the mightiest eldar warriors to ever live, called forth to save their people once more. Yet others believe they were something new, beings sprung from those that lived through the Fall and became something greater. Gods, demi-gods or ghosts, the Aspect Warriors they trained never spoke of their mysteries.

Arhra was known as the Father of Scorpions, and his disagreements with the other Phoenix Lords were said to be deep and vitriolic. The Phoenix Lords preached discipline and caution, a slow rebuilding around the preserved kernel of the eldar of the craftworlds. They foresaw that the heightened passions of war could destroy what was left of the eldar in the centuries that followed. Motley knew that Aspect Warriors learned to adopt a persona, a ‘war aspect’ that could insulate their souls from the carnage and prevent them developing a taste for it. As with so many other things, the craftworld eldar saw the allure of bloodletting and senseless violence as a gateway for Chaos to enter their hearts and complete their ruination. What Arhra believed was a secret known only to his followers, the incubi.

‘Morr, would you tell me more about Arhra?’ Motley ventured finally. ‘As we’re going to his shrine I feel I should know more about him. I’ve heard what the craftworlds have to say, but I suspect their version may be a little biased.’

Morr snorted. ‘I’m sure they portray him only as a fallen paragon, another one of their lessons about the dangers of Chaos. Very well, I will tell you of Arhra as it is told to postulants at the shrine. You may judge the truth for yourself.’

The causeway was slick with slime, its tilted slabs occasionally disappearing entirely into pools of flatulent mud. The lower-lying mists were thicker here. They hung across the path in moist tendrils, and made the trees appear to be flat, two-dimensional images like scenery on a stage. Morr’s voice was the only disturbance in the silent marsh as he paced along telling the story of Arhra.

‘After the great cataclysm of the Fall the eldar peoples were left scattered and leaderless. Debauchery and hedonism had eroded any form of discipline they had and left little knowledge of how to defend themselves. The eldar survivors were preyed upon by the slave races and driven from one place to another as they wavered on the verge of extinction. Finally a group of heroes arose who could stand against the enemies of the people. These were the Phoenix Lords the craftworlders speak of, some called them heroes that because they believed them to be reborn of the essence of their dead gods. Asurmen was the first but others quickly followed, including Arhra himself.

‘The heroes fought on behalf of the people, and they taught others to fight to protect themselves. Each hero gained a following of devotees committed to their particular style of combat: Asurmen’s warriors were fleet of foot and deadly in their aim, Baharroth’s hawks took wing and fought from above, Maugan Ra’s killers reaped souls from afar, while Arhra’s followers learned to fight with the true gift of fury.

‘Arhra taught his followers how to direct their fury with discipline, how to harness the power of their rage and strike out with it. Soon none could stand before them. The other heroes quarrelled with Arhra’s methods. They wished the people to learn to lay down and take up the role of warrior at need as if donning a mantle, they wished to abandon the peoples of Commorragh and fight only for the craftworlds. Arhra saw that the long fight against Chaos would require true devotion from all of the peoples, not weak compromise for the benefit of a few. He refused to accept the heroes’ ideals and went his own way.

‘Followers flocked to Arhra’s shrines and he tested them for their worth. The weak and corrupt he slew, he taught discipline and martial skill only to those possessed of sufficient fury to stand against him. Where Chaos threatened Arhra always stood against it. It is told that in his final battle Arhra stood alone and without respite through days and nights when the other heroes failed to come to his aid. At last Arhra was pierced through the heart by the dark light of Chaos. What returned to the shrine showed Arhra’s face yet burned with an unholy fire that drove Arhra’s students into terror and madness.

‘When all seemed lost the students heard their master’s voice from amid the flames. It bid them to marshal their fury and stand against him, that now was the ultimate test of their discipline. Such was their devotion that they obeyed despite their terror. They slew Arhra’s corrupted mortal form and partook of his untouched spirit, taking it into themselves so that the way of Arhra should endure for ever more.’

Morr fell into silence and Motley wondered where the truth lay between the legends told in the craftworlds and those of the shrine of Arhra. Both seemed to agree he had fought against Chaos and fallen to it, but the stories diverged in regards to the outcome thereafter.

It was almost a perfect ambush. The trees had begun to cluster more closely around the causeway as they got closer to the shrine, and they became bigger, and more gnarled with great exposed root systems that arched completely over the path itself in some places. The assailants had chosen a spot that was not so obvious as a passage beneath roots or through a particularly dense section. When Morr and Motley came to the natural amphitheatre created by four especially large trees they had already passed through a dozen similar sites already, and many better ones for assailants to lurk in waiting so they thought nothing of it. The spot was unremarkable rather than the perfect spot for an ambush, and because of that it came that much closer to succeeding.

Motley stepped lightly along the causeway behind Morr with weapons out, projecting more confidence than he felt. He was straining every sense, probing the dark, misty hollows and tree boles around them. The great black mass of the shrine of Arhra had vanished behind the trees but he could still feel its presence, weighty and ominous, ahead of them. Suddenly as Motley looked forward on the causeway he caught sight of a darker shape in the mist. A flicker of movement and it was gone, but that was more than sufficient for Motley to cast caution to the winds and shout a warning.

‘Look out, Morr!’ Motley screamed. As the words left his lips a rustling and cracking of branches sounded all around. Four incubi sprang into view, surrounding them, two dropping from the overarching canopy like ugly spiders just as two burst out from behind concealing barriers of roots with flashing sweeps of their klaives. The black and green warriors were upon them in an instant, their double-handed klaives raised to hack and slay. Three closed in on Morr while the remaining one came for Motley with an easy slowness that betrayed his contempt for his allotted task.

As quick as thought the bloodstone tusks affixed to Morr’s helm flashed with baleful energy. Spears of ruddy light transfixed one of the advancing incubi and sent them reeling back in the grip of a palsied shiver. Morr lunged forward to strike his incapacitated attacker, but his other two opponents quickly rushed forward and drove him onto the defensive. Klaives streaked through the air back and forth, block and counter, too fast for the eye to follow as Morr tried to hold his ground in the clash.

The fourth incubus hefted his klaive to cut down Motley with a single stroke from neck to crotch. The long-barrelled pistol in Motley’s hand spat twice, striking sparks from the incubus’s warsuit but not materially impeding his progress. The klaive swept downward in an unstoppable killing blow and Motley seemed to explode into blinding shards of light. The incubus’s strike fell on empty air as Motley whirled away from beneath it, entirely hidden for a second by the activation of his Domino field. The incubus twisted his downward cut into a disembowelling swing, the two-metre blade sweeping after the frenetically dancing blur of colours.

Motley leapt upwards and flipped himself backwards over the klaive as it rushed by beneath him. He got an inverted glance at Morr as he did so. Morr was lunging for one of his attackers again, but he had to turn and defend himself as the other immediately came at his back. The two incubi were circling to keep the towering incubus flanked while the third recovered from Morr’s opening blast of neural energy. The incubi would overwhelm Morr in seconds once all three came against him at once. Their three klaives to his one would beat down his guard, tear through his armour and spray his lifeblood across the causeway.

Motley planted one foot on the flat of the blurring klaive and used it to boost off for a kick into his assailant’s face. His soft shoe did no damage at all to the incubus’s rigid war helm, but the buffet was enough to disorient the warrior for a split second while Motley leapt completely over him. The Harlequin landed behind the incubus’s back and spun to tap him lightly on the shoulder. The incubus roared in frustration and twisted to bring his klaive whistling around. As the incubus turned his arm was raised shoulder-high to drag the klaive in its glittering arc. Motley punched into the incubus’s armpit with deadly precision, striking for the chink where the armour plates separated for an instant.

The incubus staggered at the seemingly weak blow and the klaive fell from his hands. The warrior reeled for a second more before collapsing back with blood leaking from every joint and seal in his armour. He was a victim of the Harlequin’s kiss – a simple, deadly weapon unobtrusively strapped to Motley’s forearm. The tubular device contained a hundred metres of monomolecular wire tightly wound like a spring. By punching forward the monomolecular filaments were sent looping outward and then instantly withdrawn. If the tip of the wire pierced a target’s flesh the unfurling wires would turn their innards into the consistency of soup in a split second.

Motley wasted no time in mourning his opponent’s messy demise. He snapped his attention back to where Morr was fighting for his life against the other three attackers. Morr had succeeded in driving one of his foes into the marsh at the edge of the causeway. He was keeping the other at bay with vicious swipes of his klaive in between hammering blows down on the one he had trapped, but his third opponent had recovered and was re-entering the fray. As Morr turned to hurl one last, desperate blow against his foe in the marsh the others seized their chance and leapt forward with klaives swinging for Morr’s back. Motley was already moving, his pistol levelling for a shot into the swirling melee that could not possibly change the outcome.

Too late Morr’s attackers realised they had been duped. The towering incubus altered his klaive’s direction at the last moment and he swung with it, spinning aside with the momentum to bring the deadly blade looping around into the two behind him. The blow was wild and poorly-aimed, either one of the incubi would have dodged or parried it alone. But the two close together, one with reflexes still slowed by neural bombardment, interfered with one another’s defences fatally. The hooked tip of Morr’s klaive crunched home and wrenched free in a bloody spray. One of the incubi fell back with a partially severed arm flopping grotesquely.

Motley bounded across the intervening space, the pistol in his hands pumping shots into the injured incubus almost as an afterthought. He hoped that Morr would understand what he was attempting to do and not accidentally eviscerate him with a wild swing. The towering incubus appeared completely focused on his duel and the glittering arcs of swinging klaives bisected the air without cease. Motley angled off the causeway and into the marsh, his light steps leaving no imprint in the quagmire as he ran.

The incubus that Morr had driven back was struggling his way out of the morass when he saw Motley closing in on him as a scintillating blur of colour. His klaive came up defensively and Motley slid in beneath it, creating a small tidal wave of muck as the Harlequin skidded inside the incubus’s guard. Motley struck faster than a snake, punching his Harlequin’s kiss up where the incubus’s helm met his cuirass – precisely at the point where the weaker neck seal could not resist the deadly, unfurling wire. The incubus’s head left his body in a spectacular gout of crimson, the gore-slicked, hair-fine medusa’s nest of coiling wire visible for a fraction of a second before it retracted inside the Harlequin’s kiss.

Motley turned to see Morr hacking at the two remaining incubi with a lethal onslaught of blows. The injured one was struggling to wield his klaive one-handed as Morr relentlessly drove him into his compatriot in an effort to entangle them both. Recognising the danger the surviving incubus ruthlessly cut down his companion without a second’s thought. Motley tensed to leap to Morr’s aid but then stopped himself. Morr would never accept his help in a one-on-one fight without resentment. Instead Motley forced himself to stand quietly to watch the dazzling storm of blades, allowing himself to enjoy its lethal precision for a moment.

Back and forth the blades swung, tireless as metronomes. Morr’s greater size and reach was slowly wearing his opponent down, but Morr, too, was tiring. The frenetic energy Morr had used in defending himself against multiple opponents was taking its toll. His klaive was moving a fraction slower, his parries were a modicum less sure. His opponent sensed the change and settled into a punishing rhythm intended to leach away the last of Morr’s endurance. Whenever Morr tried to give ground to buy himself respite his opponent followed up relentlessly. Morr circled to avoid being driven off the causeway and countered with a murderous assault of his own, flinging back his smaller foe with a flurry of blows that used the last dregs of his strength.

Only at the last moment did Motley realise what Morr was trying to do. Intent on Morr, the other incubus had his back to Motley and Morr’s assault was pushing him virtually into the Harlequin’s arms. Morr’s blank-faced helm glowered straight at Motley for a moment and then he understood. Motley exploded into action, leaping forward to punch his Harlequin’s kiss down into the nape of the incubus’s neck. The last assailant jerked once spasmodically and collapsed like a puppet with its string cut. An eerie silence descended over the bloodstained scene.

‘Sorry,’ Motley panted. ‘Didn’t realise you’d want me interfering in your little duel at the end there.’

‘Fair fights are for fools and romances,’ Morr grated, his voice still taut with bloodlust.

‘But you said before… Well, never mind I suppose,’ Motley said. ‘I’m just glad there were only four of them.’

‘There was a fifth,’ Morr stated flatly. ‘I do not know why they did not engage us, it would have tipped the odds in their favour.’

Motley recalled the flicker of movement he had seen before the trap was sprung. Morr was right, none of their four assailants had come from the same direction. Someone was still ahead of them on the causeway, between them and the shrine.

‘It would seem the odds were already in their favour, my old friend, but no match for us,’ Motley preened. ‘I’m happy I could be of assistance.’

Morr grunted and hefted his klaive on to his shoulder. He started to walk away along the causeway and then paused for a moment in uncharacteristic indecision. The blank-faced helm half-turned towards Motley.

‘I was grateful for your help,’ Morr said slowly. ‘I have underestimated you in the past. I will not do so again.’

Morr quickly turned and strode onward before Motley could respond. The Harlequin trailed after the towering incubus wondering if he had been complimented or threatened, or both. He decided not to ask Morr exactly what he had seen along the causeway, it was unlikely the incubus’s visual acuity was better than Motley’s own. Aside from that Motley was unsure just how Morr would react if he knew that Motley had caught, just for an instant, the distinct impression of burning eyes set into a many-bladed helm before the mysterious figure vanished into the mist.

In the lightless pits beneath Commorragh a curious procession was cautiously worming its way through the labyrinth of the Black Descent. A secret master masked in metal led two creatures made of metal. They glided easily through the air at the master’s heels like obedient hounds, small for their kind but still as sleek and deadly as hornets. Behind them a group of wracks struggled along bowed down by the weight of cables, tripods and fluid-filled alembics. The secret master leading them, a haemonculus known as Mexzchior, loved the engines like a father – and they were indeed his children, after a fashion.

From his earliest days Mexzchior had developed a supreme fascination with metal in all its aspects, its purity and malleability. He had dedicated himself to finding ways of imbuing metal with life, transforming life into metal and, most of all, teaching metal how to scream.

The two engines that accompanied him, entities Mexzchior designated as Vhi and Cho, were living beings with spirit, direction and purpose – of that he had no doubt. They represented the pinnacle of his art, part organic and part mechanical. Pain engines of their ilk had been built in many forms by many different haemonculi over the millennia, everything from the unlovely chainghouls of the Prophets of Flesh to the intricate masterworks of the legendary master haemonculus, Vlokarian. Despite this Mexzchior liked to believe that his creations were truly unique.

It was true that there were many larger engines, the segmented carapaces of Vhi and Cho were narrower and shorter than most. They slipped silently through the air a scant half-metre above the ground with their scorpion-like tails curving up to just above head-height. Some had mocked his creations as being puny but Mexzchior had quickly silenced them when he demonstrated the speed and agility gained through their design. Very few of the critics had survived the demonstration.

Mexzchior had configured Vhi closely after the classic Talos pain engine style. Its scorpion tail mounted a heat lance for a barb while its underbelly was a swinging mass of chain-flails, razor-edged pincers and surgical saws. Vhi could burn through bulkheads, burst in doors, crush, maim and disembowel with a fierce glee that was a pleasure to behold. Cho was more esoteric in her outfitting, closer to the Cronos parasite engine in function. Cho attacked its victim’s vitality in an altogether different fashion than Vhi. Its weapon were fluted, crystalline devices of sinister import, its armoured shell was covered in bristling antenna and twitching resonator-vanes.

Mexzchior would have been hard put to choose one of his children over the other, but if the great tyrant were to descend from Corespur and demand that one of his engines be destroyed he would have to keep Cho. She had developed a distinctive personality in Mexzchior’s mind, subtle and almost playful in comparison to the brash, direct Vhi. Cho was a time-thief rather than a destroyer, a macabre hunter that could drain the very life-essence from its victims leaving them as nothing more than wizened husks.

Mexzchior felt both thrilled and nervous. Thrilled because the intimate secretary had entrusted him with a vital task, selecting him above all the other secret masters. The secretary had ordered him to send his engines into the Dysjunction-wracked city to find a very specific target. A pouch at Mexzchior’s waist carried the vital imprint materials that would lead his engines straight to their target. The wracks carried a large supply of the vital fluids and nutrients the engines would need while they undertook their task. When they reached the periphery of the labyrinth they would be refilled and then released. That independence was what made Mexzchior nervous. The intimate secretary’s instruction had been very precise, indeed exacting, on the subject once released the engines would operate without assistance as they hunted down their prey.

The intimate secretary had implied that the engines should simply be released into the labyrinth the moment that they were ready. Mexzchior could not bring himself to do that and so he had stretched the secretary’s orders somewhat to guide his children out of the labyrinth before sending them on their way. One last drink and then they would fly the nest to strike and return. They would return, he told himself, some engines went rogue but not his children. They would return to him with evidence of their success and Mexzchior would be finally be exalted by the Black Descent for his true genius.

Mexzchior had briefly wondered who the target might be before thrusting such thoughts from his mind. Someone important and well guarded, clearly, or both engines would not have been demanded. Ultimately it did not matter whether it was a personal enemy of the intimate secretary or a foe of the entire coven, Vhi and Cho would end their existence this very night.

Among the trackless paths of the webway warlock Caraeis paused at a confluence and pondered for a time. The skein of probabilities was tightening inexorably but he was confounded by this particular juncture. Each path led forward but only one of them would bring him to the optimum location in time and space. He reached down into his satchel and brought forth a rune, releasing it from his fingers without looking at it first – a forgivable transgression of Form, so he told himself, under such circumstances of heightened emergency.

The rune of weaving hung before him again, just as he had known it would. It dipped and swayed towards one of the filaments of the confluence, its psychosensitive material reacting to the faint trace left behind by the dark kin. The rune of weaving had come to his hand so many times now that he felt a special kinship with it, almost as if it guided him personally. The rune drew him ever onward and showed him paths of destiny he had not dared to even dream of. The skeins of fate were tightening to a point where he would be at the confluence of events, the key piece in a great change that would touch the lives of billions.

Caraeis recaptured the rune and returned it to his satchel as Aiosa, the leader of his bodyguards, approached. Beneath his masked helm Caraeis grimaced unhappily. The Aspect Warriors were coolly professional in their demeanour yet Caraeis could not escape the impression that they had been assigned to watch him as much as to watch over him. If their exarch was making a point to speak to him directly it was unlikely to be good news.

‘You overstepped your mark with the promises you made on Lileathanir,’ Aiosa said without preamble. ‘Your dishonesty could impugn the honour of the Just Vengeance shrine.’

‘There was no dishonesty,’ Caraeis replied while carefully keeping his voice even and reasonable. ‘I merely made no definition of how swiftly we would return. Naturally I omitted to mention that our first duty would be to return to the council and seek their judgment in the matter.’

‘You deliberately misled the Exodites’ repre-sentative.’

‘I gave her hope. There is every reason to believe that the farseers will accept my proposal for action. I am confident that it will prove to be the correct course.’

‘And if they do not? The Exodites’ hope will be in vain and they will perish awaiting succour that cannot come.’

‘Such a decision falls to hands and minds other than my own. The council is beyond our questions and fears.’

‘Yet you still attempt to manipulate their decision.’

‘Of course, just as they, in turn, manipulate our decisions. Everything is manipulation.’

‘It sits poorly with me to see you manipulate the people of Lileathanir.’

‘They have chosen to hide themselves from the universe. There are limits to how far we can protect them when the universe finds them.’

‘That is a harsh judgement.’

‘The universe is a harsh place, as we well know and would do well to remember. I must note that you made no effort to intercede at the time, has your disquiet over my words only developed recently?’

The exarch looked at Caraeis silently for a moment, the tall crest and helm she wore lending her an aura of imperious disdain. Not for the first time was Caraeis reminded that in some regards there was but a wing beat between the Aspect Warriors of the craftworld shrines and the incubi of the dark city. Some even whispered that there was common ancestry between the two. Certainly a warrior code bound them both, the assumption of a strength greater than themselves to make them able to endure the terrible things they must do. One of Caraeis’s colleagues had opined that the difference between Aspect Warriors and incubi was only one of degree, and that where exarchs entered the equation the line blurred almost completely.

‘You should know that I intend to report your actions to the council of seers,’ Aiosa pronounced flatly.

Caraeis mastered his voice carefully before responding. ‘It is your right to do so. I am confident that they will support my decisions. In the meantime may I rely on your continued protection and support?’

‘We will continue to discharge our duties with honour until such time as justice is done or we are recalled.’ The response was passionless and robotic, a rote recitation of dogma. Caraeis accepted it as being as much as he could hope to get.

‘Then… we must continue on our way. The one we seek is close, the action of capture will be challenging in the extreme.’

‘We are equal to the task. Proceed.’

Caraeis turned and led the way into the confluence. The narrow-minded pride of Aspect Warriors was none of his concern. Soon, he thought, very soon his auguries would be completely vindicated.

CHAPTER 12

THE DREAMS OF DRAGONS

In the acrid, trembling World Shrine of Lileathanir Sardon, the unwilling messiah of her Exodite people, slept a sleep of pure exhaustion and dreamed of the dragon.

She had spent her energies attempting to cleanse the shrine and set it to some sort of order even though it seemed like a hopeless task. In the end she had settled for concentrating on disposing of the remains she had found. One-by-one she had dragged seven sets of skeletal remains to the edge of a fiery crevasse before carefully rolling them in.

Unlike more ‘civilised’ societies, Exodites have no horror of death, they live side by side with the raw thews of nature where death is a daily occurrence. The fleshy vessel in which the spirit had resided was of little consequence to an Exodite like Sardon once the spirit had fled. No, handling the dead did not trouble her, but the sight of their terrible injuries did. A handful had seen quick, clean deaths, sheared into pieces as neatly as if giant shears had shut on them. Most were more like the first she had found. They had been crippled and then carved like joints of meat. It sickened her to imagine the pain that had been so gratuitously inflicted upon them.

Most troubling to Sardon was that she had found no female remains. The body of the shrine’s worldsinger was missing. Sardon had imagined that it could have been buried in one of the collapsed areas of the shrine, or even that the worldsinger had cast herself into a pit to end her own life rather than fall prey to the Children of Khaine. Deep down she knew that neither was the truth. There was a keen sense of loss in the dragon’s rage that she had struggled to understand at first, now she believed she understood. The young worldsinger who was present at the shrine when the cataclysm began had been taken. She had been kidnapped and dragged off into bondage by a pack of the most evil, sadistic violators imaginable.

Once the thought had entered her mind it would not leave. Physically and emotionally exhausted Sardon had curled up on a flat slab of fallen stone, shoulders quivering as she allowed herself to weep for wardens and their lost worldsinger. Sleep came as a mercy, her brain finally blotting out the horror beneath a wave of sweet oblivion. But the restful darkness did not endure for her. Freed of their conscious bonds her dreams flew free and became intertwined with those of a greater being. She found herself dreaming the dreams of the world spirit itself.

At first she saw herself lying in a cave, her pale form looking soft and vulnerable amid the black, jagged rocks. The cave was like and yet unlike the World Shrine. This World Shrine was a vast, shadowy space that was old beyond reckoning, older than the stars themselves. Its wall crumbled and fell back to reveal caverns and tunnels beyond that were beyond numbering. The openings stretched impossibly into the distance. Some held glimpses of other places and other times, bright tableaux that formed for an instant and then were gone. Others moved through stately cycles of ruin and regrowth before Sardon’s dreaming vision.

Sardon became aware of the invisible conduits of power running through the place, the pulsating life force of the planet whirling past on its eternal loop through the foci spread across its surface. Barrows and cairns and obelisks knit the psychic flow into a lattice, a self-propagating diamond compounded of the spirits of every being that had ever lived and died on Lileathanir. Their essence girdled the world, insulating it from the hostile universe beyond with a psychic shield so dense that no corruption could breach it. The world spirit of Lileathanir had become a mighty thing, the land had become it and it had become the land.

Hubris. Sardon could sense the bitter reek of it everywhere. The world spirit had become mighty, a nascent godling in its own self-contained universe. In its pride it had overlooked the threat from beyond, trusting that its strength in the metaphysical realm would apply in the material realm also. Instead it had been hurt in a way it could barely understand and now it raged with puerile petulance. In a distant corner of the caverns flames licked hungrily as the dragon grumbled and hissed in its slumber. Sardon’s dream-self quailed. She did not want to get caught in the dreams of the dragon. Its rage would consume her, burn her to ash like the broken lands beyond the holy mountain. Sardon tried to master her fears, to direct herself and travel through the dream as she had been taught long ago.

Her disquiet made the place she was in even more frightening, solidifying the caverns into dripping walls black with moisture. Stalagmites and stalactites crowded everywhere like petrified piles of dung and hanging slabs of meat. Beyond and around them roamed the hiss and whisper of dead spirits, their dry voices rustling horribly on the edge of perception. The billions of dead souls trapped in the Lileathanir matrix flowed around her like smoke, individually no stronger than any single mortal but collectively… Collectively they became the world spirit and a gestalt psychic power capable of so much more.

Sardon found herself before a crack in the weeping rock wall, wide and low like the one in the mountainside she’d had to crawl through to reach the real World Shrine. She pushed inside, crawling into the narrowing split towards a chink of light on the far side. The roof and floor pressed so closely together that she had to force herself between them, edging forward with shoulders flat and head turned to one side to get closer to the light. Claustrophobia gibbered at the edge of her dream-consciousness, threatening to send her into a blind panic thrashing against the implacable rock. She stopped, and breathed deep (mentally, at least) to quell the emotion. Finally she wriggled herself close enough to bring her eye to where she could peer through the chink.

Beyond it lay the World Shrine as it had been before the cataclysm, full of light and life. Sardon’s point of view was constrained, seeming to come from high up at one moment, then through the eyes of a different Shrine Warden in the next. Every point of view told the same story with more or less grisly detail. Sardon soon became sickened by the violence and tried to crawl away. She found that she could not back out of the crack. The rock seemed to have closed up even more closely and held her as if petrified. She was constrained to watch the violation of the shrine enacted over and over again.

A small group in black appearing suddenly, shifting and barely seen… sharp blades glittering as the Shrine Wardens were butchered like children… The worldsinger captured just as she attempted to take her own life… her limp form carried off through a portal into the webway… and the world spirit, for all its metaphysical strength, helpless to intervene.

It had tried, its attempts wrecked first the shrine and then the world as it lashed blindly at the attackers. It was all for naught. The perpetrators slipped away into the webway like thieves in the night and beyond the reach of the world spirit of Lileathanir almost before it had perceived them. An entity that had dreamed for aeons was stung into wakeful wrath, and the vengeful fury of the dragon found full expression in that waking. The stones around Sardon’s body still shook with the memory of it.

A sinister, imposing figure in all-enclosing armour had directed the dark kin, its red-eyed helm tusked and horned like a beast. It bore a terrible double-handed blade that was the ruin of all who came before it. This one was the last to leave, turning before the portal to sweep its gaze around the shuddering shrine. The burning eyes seemed to look straight at Sardon and the figure spoke with a voice like the tolling of a great bell.

‘Only the naïve try to forgive and forget!’ the voice roared. ‘Arhra remembers.’ As the words were spoken the rock holding Sardon began to move, grinding slowly shut like huge, black jaws. She felt a horrible sensation of compression, suffocation and finally… blackness.

Sardon awoke in the hot, foetid darkness of the World Shrine gasping for breath.

‘Sorrow Fell?’ Kharbyr muttered to Xagor. ‘Just how the hell are we going to get all the way up there on foot?’

‘This one does not know,’ the wrack responded mournfully. ‘These were the archon’s words, not Xagor’s.’

In the baroque, anarchic geography of Commorragh, lowly Metzuh tier was about as far as you could get from Sorrow Fell without disappearing into the pits beneath. Even before the Dysjunction no direct connection had existed between the two districts. The rare physical interactions between their denizens meant chancing a flight through the hostile upper airs or using a well-guarded portal.

‘The long stairs might still be standing, I suppose,’ Kharbyr said uncertainly. ‘If we can find our way up to Hy’kran somehow.’

‘This one does not know,’ Xagor repeated. The wrack’s passivity was starting to irritate Kharbyr immensely. Given even the most basic leadership the wrack seemed content to go along unquestioningly with whatever he was ordered to do.

Led by Naxipael and Bezieth, the small band of survivors seemed to be pushing towards the core. They had left the slaughter faire and taken to the covered streets and wider passageways of Metzuh, occasionally crossing open plazas that were eerily devoid of people and mounting stairways more or less choked with debris. As they moved further from the Grand Canal there was less evidence of intrusion. The bodies they found increasingly showed signs that they had died at the hands of mortal foes rather than twisted entities from beyond the veil.

Always inward, always upward. Kharbyr began to suspect that the archons didn’t really know where they were going and were just making a confident show of following their noses. Kharbyr took another pinch of agarin to clear his head, savouring the clean bite of it and the shiver it sent down his spine. The one bright side of recent events was that Kharbyr’s pouches were now bulging with looted stimulants and narcotics. If he lived through this he would be rich, or at the very least well supplied. The flat metal pentagon Xagor had given to him still rode inside one of his inner pockets. It had remained dead and lifeless but it gave him a vague sense of protection that he was happy to accept under the circumstances. Touching it made him think of a new angle to take in prodding Xagor into action.

‘Xagor, we just need to find a good place to hide until this blows over,’ Kharbyr said in what he hoped were his most reasonable and persuasive tones. ‘We both have a duty to protect what the master gave me – it simply isn’t safe to be wandering around with it like this.’

That made Xagor hesitate for a moment. Kharbyr knew the wrack was dedicated to his master with a kind of pet-like devotion that he found hard to fathom. The very suggestion that Xagor might be in danger of failing Master Bellathonis in some way was enough to give the wrack pause for thought.

‘This one is not so sure,’ Xagor admitted eventually, ‘that Sorrow Fell will be safer for anyone except archons.’

‘You see! Now you get it!’ Kharbyr hissed. ‘If we show up at Sorrow Fell we’ll just get thrown back into whatever mess happens next, and the one after that, and the one after that until we’re dead!’

Kharbyr shut up quickly when he saw Bezieth look sharply back in his direction. He prayed she hadn’t overheard his words – Bezieth was looking dangerously frustrated and in need of something to take it out on by way of diversion. The survivors walked on in complete silence for a time accompanied only by the creaks, crashes and distant screams of the disaster-wracked city.

Eventually Xagor dared to whisper, ‘We two are not strong enough to survive alone,’

‘I have a plan,’ Kharbyr said smugly. ‘You just need to stick close and follow my lead when I make my move.’

Xagor looked at him uncertainly for a moment and then shrugged fatalistically. ‘Xagor will remain with the master’s gift. If need be this one must be on hand to retrieve it.’

‘Eh? What do you mean “retrieve it”?’

‘If Kharbyr dies, Xagor must retrieve the gift. The master indicated the gift would survive extremely high temperatures, entropic energies and significant crushing forces unharmed.’

‘Oh. Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

They had come to another shattered street, this one open above to a view of luridly tainted skies. Needle-fine streaks of fire and false lightning flared on high. Their passage traced battles taking place kilometres up in the air at a distance too great to discern the antagonists by anything other than their weapon discharges. Whoever was doing the fighting it seemed very lively up there, reflected Kharbyr. His plans for just stealing a jetbike or skyboard from somewhere and making off suddenly seemed less appealing. The plan had been vague on the where to go part anyway, but the hostile skies definitely weren’t the place to be right now.

The street ahead widened into an open space, a courtyard the width of a parade ground where broken fountains leaked sluggishly across the flagstones in several places. Three sides of the court held an assortment of tumbled buildings and blocked street entrances. The far side of the court was delineated by an iron-grey wall that rose for half a dozen metres up to a jagged, crenellated top. A good way beyond the fang-like merlons at the top of the wall another sloping face could be seen off in the distance, this one of deeply grooved silver that ran upwards until it vanished from sight. The grey wall had a suspiciously uniform-looking gap running along its base rather than a foundation, and no gate or bridge in evidence. On seeing this Kharbyr suddenly realised at once where they were.

‘Latiya’s steps,’ he muttered to himself. ‘It seems our archons knew what they were about after all.’

Latiya’s steps were an interconnected series of moving platforms that gave access to the higher tiers of Commorragh around Ashkeri Talon. The stories said that long ago Archon Latiya had been so deathly afraid of flying that she had caused the steps to be built to give herself easier access to the upper tiers. It was a farfetched tale but stranger things had happened in Commorragh in the past, and much worse legacies had been left behind by less mundane phobias. The steps were simply considered quaint and old fashioned in modern times, typically well guarded but seldom used for anything practical. Kharbyr had heard the steps operated by some kind of fluid metal under pressure moving the platforms. He’d never considered that they might still be working.

The survivors moved warily into the open space, spreading out instinctively to present a less tempting target for any lurking snipers. When they were part way across the court Kharbyr spotted a flicker of movement between the crenellations and shouted a warning. All nine survivors vanished behind pieces of shattered stonework in the twinkling of any eye. No matter how skilful a fighter was they all knew that a lance blast or disintegrator bolt could end their life in an instant.

Kharbyr was crouched behind a bitten-off half moon of fountain bowl. Xagor lay a few metres away behind a chunk of fallen rock barely big enough to hide him. The wrack poked out his ridiculous rifle to scan the battlements and Kharbyr watched with interest to see whether Xagor would get shot. Being armed with only a pistol he felt justified in hanging back out of sight for now. Not for the first time he regretted not picking up something heavier back at the processional, but it had looked like a lot of extra weight to be dragging around at the time. Xagor was not shot or even shot at. After a few seconds Kharbyr called softly to the wrack.

‘What can you see?’

‘Some few heads bobbing,’ Xagor said before adding unnecessarily. ‘No shoot yet.’

Kharbyr peeped over the rim of the bowl and caught sight of four helmeted heads and gun barrels between the battlements. Nothing bigger than a rifle was in evidence and they were all angled to point at no one in particular – either a good sign or part of a very elaborate trap. Kharbyr ducked back down and checked the streets behind him. A band of warriors (or truth be told even a band of small children) bursting out on them now would put the survivors into a deadly trap. Nothing could be seen or heard in that direction either, but a spot between Kharbyr’s shoulder blades that he’d learned to respect in the past still felt itchy. Something was surely amiss. Naxipael stood up in full view and called out in a commanding voice.

‘I am Lord Naxipael of the Venom Brood. Who is it that speaks for you? Come down and join us, our strength must be combined.’

There was a pause before a shout came back – not from one of the exposed warriors, Kharbyr noted wryly, but from someone keeping out of sight. He wondered how many more of them were hidden behind the wall.

‘Venom Brood is lower courts dreck, you shouldn’t even be out of Metzuh,’ came the sneering response.

That was interesting and said a lot about the respondent. Not from Metzuh or affiliated with the lower courts, that was for sure. The tier rivalry sounded like something Hy’kranite, they always had special contempt for Metzuh being directly beneath them, just as Azkhorxi had nothing but contempt for Hy’kran and so on all the way up to Sorrow Fell and Corespur. Just as importantly, the hidden speaker didn’t feel strong enough to face a petty archon or command him to leave, a fact that was not lost on Naxipael. He laughed cynically.

‘You can’t come down, can you? You’re stuck up there because the controls are locked. Guess who has the key?’

A faint horizontal line had appeared on the silver slope beyond the battlements, descending at a deceptively unhurried pace, thickening and darkening swiftly as it came. Naxipael saw it and jabbed a finger towards the approaching apparition.

‘You’d best join me while you still can, you’ve got company coming,’ Naxipael shouted merrily. ‘Or perhaps they’ll turn out to be more amenable to using common sense in a crisis.’

Curses and the rattle of armoured figures running sounded behind the wall as the helmeted heads vanished. The descending line had resolved into another battlemented wall, this one gunmetal in colour and lined with warriors. The sharp crack of splinter fire intermingled with the throatier bark of disintegrators indicated that there was going to be no negotiation with the newcomers. The answering fire from their superior location was immediate and intense.

‘All right!’ the voice shouted with a new edge of desperation to it. ‘Help us and we’ll join you!’

Naxipael sang out five oddly twisting words and, after a slight quiver, the whole iron-grey wall began to descend. First the gap at its base narrowed and vanished, while the battlements kept sliding downwards until they became little more than a row of sharp teeth across the courtyard that could be stepped between. Beyond the row Kharbyr could see a dozen bronze and green warriors crouching behind scanty barricades they had thrown up from fallen rubble. The gunmetal wall was still a dozen metres up, the underside of it clearly showing where its risers connected to the grooved slope.

‘Everybody on!’ ordered Naxipael. The survivors scrambled to obey – except Kharbyr and Xagor. They hesitated for a moment, each looking at the other. This would be the ideal time to split from Naxipael and Bezieth’s clique before they got into another pointless fight at bad odds. On the other hand Xagor was right, just two of them left alone on daemon-haunted Metzuh tier might not stand much of a chance.

‘You two! Come on or I’ll kill you myself!’ Naxipael shouted, already waiting at the first row of battlements with his blast pistols leveled meaningfully. The momentary thoughts of escape vanished and Kharbyr ran over to the archon with Xagor close behind. The moment they passed between the crenellations Naxipael called out four words and the iron-grey platform began to ascend. High velocity splinters were tearing chips from the scant cover available on the platform, a dark lance beam flashed and shriveled a warrior along with the stone he hid behind in its awful glare of anti-light.

The distance to the top of the gunmetal wall was shrinking rapidly as their platform rose to meet it. Kharbyr guessed that it had already halved, just a few more seconds and they would come level. Grenades flew back and forth seeding bright blossoms of plasma fire on both sides of the wall. With three metres to go Kharbyr ran forward, dodging and leaping for all he was worth as envenomed splinters and raging energy bolts hissed around his ears. Two metres to go and he could see their enemies clearly now, Azkhorxi warriors in black and purple, their helms crested with a half moon of silver. Kharbyr rolled aside from a burst of splinters and darted for a point on the wall where a grenade had just detonated on the far side. One metre to go and Kharbyr leapt up, springing nimbly between the sharp teeth and hoping fervently that he wasn’t the only one doing so.

CHAPTER 13

ASCENSION

The sculpted face of the shrine of Arhra rose before Morr and Motley like a cliff. Tier upon crusted tier of frowning archways were shadowed by thickly clustered columns. Steeply sloping flights of steps interwove among crumbling plinths weighed down with a wide variety of grotesque statuary. The shrine was built of darkly lustrous obsidian that seemed to suck up the light falling upon it. A riot of foliage was festooned around the lower reaches of the shrine, a green wave frozen at the point of breaking across a black mountain. The fleshy looking creepers and bright blooming lianas softened the brooding edifice somewhat, but their verdant fecundity contrasted so sharply with the lightless stone that it lent the whole an alien, intrusive air that sickened the stomach.

Motley expected some kind of final challenge as Morr approached, but the towering incubus mounted the first steps without incident. The shrine was silent as a tomb, even the natural sounds of the surrounding swamps seemed muted in its presence. The sense of brooding watchfulness he had sensed from far off was overwhelming this close, as though every shadowed archway hid a silent sentinel. As Motley placed his first foot on the steps he felt an empathic chill run up his spine. Passion and murder-lust were etched into the very stones of this place, an echo of millennia of bloodshed and violence being honed to an artform with the kind of depth and clarity that only the eldar race could achieve.

Morr climbed steadily, seemingly confident of where he was going as he passed the first tier of archways and kept moving upwards. Motley forced himself to follow, passing plinths with their crouching beasts and towering warriors. There was a strong preference for low slung, multi-legged monstrosities that Motley assumed were scorpions from different worlds and realities. Some exhibited disturbingly humanoid characteristics: hands instead of claws, saucer-eyed faces. Unlike just about every other shrine Motley had ever seen all of the statues faced inward towards the structure itself, rather than out to the world.

Three tiers up and Morr vanished inside one of the archways without so much as a backward glance. As the incubus disappeared from sight a bell tolled once from deep within the shrine, the dolorous tone of it seeming to hang in the still air. Motley hurried up but then paused on the threshold despite himself, poised for a moment between the world of light outside and the darkness within. A cold breath seemed to blow into his face, a thing welling up from deep in the underworld and before him lay only shadows. Motley finally screwed up his courage and stepped inside the archway. No peal of the great bell greeted him, which was a fact he found to be disquieting and reassuring in more or less equal measure.

Within a few steps from the archway the path twisted and darkness became complete, Motley could barely see his own hand when he fluttered it in front of his eyes. The urge to kindle a light was strong, almost overwhelming, and yet it felt as if it would be somehow… profane and unwelcome to do so. An oppressive presence hung in the darkness and some deeply primal part of Motley had no wish to see it revealed. He decided this was a wise piece of counsel and perforce had to feel his way forward as the path twisted and twisted again between pillars. Sometimes the stone beneath his feet was level, sometimes it sloped roughly downward, but never up. The only sounds were of clattering, verminous things that scuttled or slithered amid the shadows, giving way ahead of Motley and trailing faithfully behind.

The sensory deprivation made it feel like hours were passing when it could only be minutes. An unmistakeable sensation began to seize Motley that he was descending into an open grave, a charnel house with no escape. The taint of death was so pervasive it felt as if it were burying him alive. After what seemed an interminable period Motley perceived a faint vertical line of light ahead of him. A feeble spray of photons was managing to edge past an obsidian pillar and give relief to the inky blackness.

Motley eagerly took a step towards the light before a slight breeze against his face stopped him short of taking another. He looked down. A pit gaped at his feet, a headlong fall into darkness for any that rushed forward at this particular point, complete with superfluous-looking spikes glinting a long way down at the bottom.

‘Rather mean,’ Motley complained as he sprang across without difficulty and, coming to the pillar he had seen, found himself looking out into a long hall.

The floor was sunken, with steps leading down to it on all four sides. Many of its slabs appeared to have fallen into a chamber below, creating an irregular pattern of smooth-sided pits throughout the hall. Motley was willing to bet they all had spikes at the bottom too. There were many other archways leading into the hall, open mouths of darkness lurking behind a forest of black stone pillars. More massive columns supported a roof that was lost in shadow. The only light came from a scattering of tallow candles on the steps, simple things that would have been in keeping with stone knives and bearskins. In their fitful illumination two things were apparent: First that Morr was there, standing facing away from Motley and towards the far end of the hall. Second, that the far end of the hall was dominated by the enormous figure of what could only be Arhra.

The legend stood easily a hundred metres tall in his many-bladed helm and ancient armour, a great klaive held at the ready to destroy. The statue’s gigantic ruby eyes gleamed down from high above, the tiny, moving flames of the candles lending them a frightful semblance of life. Motley paused, unwilling to precipitate any violence by his sudden appearance. He was about to clear his throat to politely to announce his presence when Morr spoke.

‘You may enter here, little clown,’ the incubus said. ‘This is the hall of testing. By tradition it is open to any worthy supplicant. You have already proved yourself worthy to tread these stones.’

Motley stepped into the hall and approached warily. Something was amiss, the incubus’s words were edged with bitterness. This was apparently not the homecoming Morr had sought.

‘Where are the hierarchs?’ Motley ventured.

‘Where indeed?’ rumbled Morr. ‘A worthy supplicant would be received by them in this place, a wandering incubus of the brotherhood would be welcomed here by the hierarchs no matter what shrine he hailed from. For me: Nothing. They hide from me.’

‘So… what now?’

‘I will go to the inner sanctum and confront them,’ Morr said with icy deliberation. ‘I’ll tear down this shrine stone by stone if I must. Their cowardice insults the Dark Father and proves them unworthy to carry forward his creed.’ Morr took a step forward and then stiffened. Within the flicker of a candle flame a figure had appeared in the hall, or perhaps been revealed where it hid in plain sight all along.

A tall warrior in segmented and bladed amour of an ancient pattern now stood between Morr and the statue. The newcomer was armed with the metre-long hooked-tipped double swords that the incubus call demi-klaives, held now loosely at his sides.

‘Stay back!’ Morr warned Motley. ‘Raise no weapon if you value your life!’

Although the incubus barring Morr’s path stood perfectly motionless there was a poised readiness to his attitude that spoke of explosive action less than a heartbeat away.

‘What’s happening here?’ Motley whispered. ‘Who’s that?’

‘He has no name for he never speaks. We call him Drazhar – the living sword,’ Morr said with something like reverence. ‘He is the deadliest of our brotherhood, the undefeated, the true master of blades.’

‘Not a hierarch then?’ Motley asked a little hopefully.

‘No. Drazhar has slain hierarchs but he does not claim their place. Some say he is Arhra reborn and yet he slays those who attempt to venerate him. Drazhar exists only to kill.’

Motley made a silent ‘O’ of dismay. Morr addressed the silent warrior directly.

‘Drazhar! You bar my path but you do not attack. Have the hierarchs sent you to keep me from their door?’

A miniscule tilt of the horned helm of the incubus affirmed that he had been sent for precisely that purpose.

‘Morr! Don’t take the bait!’ Motley hissed urgently. ‘They want you to destroy yourself. It’d make a tidy solution to a problem they don’t want!’

Morr hesitated; the Harlequin was right. The hierarchs were against him, and so by extension his whole brotherhood of bloody-handed killers. His life was truly over.

If anything the hot coal of rage he had nourished in his heart for his entire existence burned even brighter at the thought. It was a monstrous injustice for the hierarchs to turn their faces from him when had held absolutely true to the central tenets of Arhra’s teachings.

The reek of political expediency clung to the hierarch’s actions, or rather the want of any action at all: to punish Morr for destroying his Chaos-corrupted archon would be to fly in the face of everything that Arhra had taught to the incubi – even at the cost of his own mortal existence. To exonerate Morr would send a tacit message to every archon in Commorragh that the day could come when their own incubi bodyguards could turn against them, citing the edicts of a long-dead Phoenix Lord as justification.

The entire relationship of the incubi to the myriad other entities in Commorragh’s power structure would be irrevocably altered in either case, the brotherhood would be weakened, fractured by the schisms already becoming apparent. Better if the problem simply didn’t exist at all, then the hierarch’s judgment could never be questioned.

‘I see it now,’ Morr said to Motley. ‘To save the brotherhood I must be destroyed. Not for the sake of honour or vengeance, but for convenience.’

‘Oh Morr,’ Motley replied sadly. ‘You’ll always find such noble concepts as honour become increasingly rare as you ascend through the ranks. The pursuit of power virtually requires the abandonment of resolution for pragmatism, cooperation for coercion and principle for convenience. Sadly it’s the way of these things.’

Morr tore his gaze away from the figure of Drazhar, still patiently waiting, to regard the slight figure in motley beside him.

‘Now will you please come with me to Lileathanir?’ Motley asked somewhat petulantly. ‘You did agree to do it if you survived coming to the shrine and look – here were we are, surviving.’

After a moment Morr turned back to face the master of blades. ‘Survival alone is not enough,’ Morr said slowly. ‘I learned this on Ushant before I ever saw the wider universe. Life without purpose has no intrinsic value.’

‘You have a purpose! You can save Commorragh from the Dysjunction!’

‘No.’ Morr intoned as his blank-faced helm swiveled back to Motley. The bloodstone tusks of Morr’s helm suddenly flared with ruby energy that burst upon the unsuspecting Harlequin in a tsunami of red-edged pain. Caught completely unawares by the treacherous strike Motley fell to the flagstones twisting in agony. Every nerve was jangling as if fire raced along it. Paralysed, Motley could only look on with anguished horror as the towering incubus bent over him.

‘My path is clear to me now. Farewell, Motley.’

Kharbyr shot the first black and purple figure he saw then ran forward to plunge his blade into another that was leaning over the battlements to shoot. He caught sight of Bezieth hacking her way into a group of three, the gore flying from her djin-blade as it sheared through armour and flesh. He just had time to think that they had the numbers over the Azkhorxi before one of them almost skewered him with rifle-blade. He twisted aside from the thrusting point and shot the owner in the face. Murder-lust gripped Kharbyr as he jammed the curved half-metre of razor sharp metal that was his own blade up under the warrior’s chin and into their brain. He pulled the blade free in a shower of crimson before plunging it beneath the warrior’s chest plate again and again.

Something slammed into Kharbyr’s shoulder, instantly knocking the breath out of him. Pain lanced through his nervous system like white fire, ripping a horrific scream from his lungs. Kharbyr wheeled around to see another warrior in black and purple calmly shooting into the melee from a short distance away. Kharbyr’s pistol hand shook as if he were palsied, but he raised it and shot back wildly in desperation. The warrior collapsed as if poleaxed – cut down by either Kharbyr’s uncertain rounds or someone else’s blind shot in the whickering crossfire. Suddenly it seemed there were no more black and purple warriors left standing. Naxipael’s ragtag clique had triumphed again. Kharbyr’s knees buckled beneath him as poison raced through his veins.

Xagor was at his side almost before he could draw breath for another scream. The wrack still laid his stupid rifle down with the most infuriating care before looking at Kharbyr’s wound. Xagor’s bird-like metal claw clamped onto Kharbyr’s shoulder authoritatively and elicited a blistering series of imprecations from him.

‘Kharbyr squirms like a child,’ Xagor admonished. ‘Only splinter-kissed, no major tissue loss.’

‘Poison you idiot!’ Khabryr shrieked. ‘I’m poisoned!’

Xagor had produced an ugly-looking metal syringe in his gloved hand. The wrack made a disparaging noise as he dug its thick needle around in the wound.

‘Bloodsong and sournyl – neurotoxins like faerun, but cheap and nasty,’ the wrack said with elaborate disdain. ‘Easily fixed.’

The fire in Kharbyr’s veins was abruptly washed away as if by a dash of ice water. In the aftermath of it his limbs started trembling and his shoulder began to ache abominably. The wrack sprayed some sort of sealant over the wound to prevent it bleeding.

‘Xagor thinks Kharbyr needs to wear armour in future,’ Xagor suggested. Kharbyr treated him to a withering look in return.

‘Armour won’t save you from anything that’ll kill outright,’ Kharbyr replied through gritted teeth. ‘Being quick on your feet will!’ It was something of a personal philosophy for him, but it was rapidly assuming the dimensions of a full and comprehensive explanation for his dislike of being weighed down. Xagor made the disparaging noise again.

‘Kharbyr trusts his skills too much, skill cannot protect against luck. Fate is stronger.’

The wrack picked up his rifle and hurried off to tend more of the injured. Kharbyr sat up cautiously and looked about him. The meeting of the two sections of the steps had formed another broad courtyard with a row of gun metal teeth across it. To either side broad archways led away into parkland. Judging by the scatter of bodies the Hy’kranii had taken the worst of the casualties in the Azkhorxi attack. The survivors from Metzuh had lost just one of their number, some nameless warrior lay nearby torn in two by a disintegrator blast. The archons Bezieth and Naxipael had a prisoner, or rather an enemy who hadn’t died of his injuries yet. Kharbyr edged a little closer to better overhear their questioning.

‘Who holds the other steps?’ Bezieth shouted, one foot on the prisoner’s chest.

‘Take a ride up and find out!’ the prisoner managed to spit before his voice rose in a yell of agony. ‘I don’t know! Archon Jhyree sent us to seize the lower steps from the Hy’kranii.’

‘Oh? And why should she do that?’ Naxipael asked almost gently. ‘Was she under orders from Corespur?’

‘Ask him why!’ the prisoner shrieked, gesturing towards Kharbyr. Both archons glanced at him with disturbing intensity as he struggled to make sense of the accusation. He realised that the prisoner was indicating not him but a Hy’kranii warrior in ornate armour standing nearby. Judging by his green and bronze battle gear this was a dracon or at least a trueborn kabalite. He was probably the one in charge of the guards on the first step that had joined themselves to Naxipael. The Venom Brood archon arched his brows inquiringly. The dracon, if such he was, shuffled his feet a little uncomfortably at all the attention he was suddenly getting.

‘Well?’ Naxipael prompted. ‘And why is it we should we ask you, Sotha?’

Dracon Sotha shrugged expansively. ‘Archon Osxia held the view that Metzuh was already lost and had plans afoot to quarantine the whole tier.’

‘Hmm, quarantine sounds like a nice euphemism doesn’t it?’ Naxipael mused to Bezieth. ‘We can safely assume Osxia means “lock it down until everyone inside is dead” by that.’

‘Osxia is slippery and has no love for Metzuh,’ replied Bezieth, ‘but I’ll wager there’s more to it than our new friend here is letting on.’

The half-forgotten prisoner beneath Bezieth’s heel was laughing, a horrible choking sound as he drowned in his own fluids. ‘You should tell them the rest!’ the prisoner coughed. ‘It’s a fine jest and well-deserved.’

‘What did you do, Sotha?’ Naxipael’s tone was icy.

‘I did nothing!’ the dracon spluttered. ‘Osxia sent the word to Vect, I had no part of it.’

‘What word?’

‘That Metzuh was completely lost and… needed to be purged.’

The prisoner laughed again, blood bubbling from his mouth in a pink froth. ‘We intercepted your messenger!’ he babbled in a rush of words. ‘We sent it upward with an addition of our own and now Vect thinks Hy’kran is lost too. You’re all as good as dead!’ The prisoner coughed, convulsed and then loudly expired with wild laughter etched on his blood-flecked lips.

Bezieth and Naxipael exchanged an inscrutable glance before stepping away from the corpse of the prisoner to discuss the revelation with more privacy. Kharbyr could guess what they were thinking. If the supreme overlord received word that entire tiers of Low Commorragh were lost he would activate certain ancient failsafes. These served to lock areas off from the rest of the city with impenetrable fields of energy. Vect had used them before when incursions from beyond the veil grew to the point where they threatened the city.

Assuming the outer wardings held the entities would be trapped, growing progressively weaker as they destroyed all the living creatures capable of sustaining them. When the time was ripe the overlord’s forces would re-enter the sealed area and make it a point to hunt down anyone still alive on the not unreasonable assumption that they must have been possessed to survive. Talon Cyriix had met a similar fate back in the day when one of its archons decided that allying with daemons was a good way to overthrow the supreme overlord.

That was if the outer wardings held. If they didn’t then the sealed areas would become living hells like accursed Shaa-dom – lost forever to the anarchic energies of the void. Would Asdrubael Vect even get the message? If he did, would he believe it? Kharbyr had no clue, but the great tyrant had a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness that would certainly encompass sealing off whole tiers of the city if he believed they constituted a threat. He caught sight of Xagor returning from tending the other injured, the wrack glared with professional disdain at the corpse of the prisoner as he passed it.

‘Amateur talents,’ Xagor sniffed quietly as he looked at the archons still deep in conference.

‘They got what they needed,’ Kharbyr said. ‘Apparently word has gone up to the tyrant to seal off both Metzuh and Hy’kran.’ Xagor shivered visibly at the thought.

‘Lies come easily from dying lips,’ Xagor said. ‘The master teaches us to return to the same question over and again without death interceding.’

‘I’m sure he does, but right now even the possibility that it’s true is enough to kill us all, so in this case I’d take the risk of believing a dead informant.’

‘This one thinks it is not his choice to make.’

‘You need to think about what the master wants more,’ Kharbyr sneered. ‘Us caught in the middle of inter-kabal wars or us hiding out somewhere safe.’

‘Let this one know when you find that place,’ Xagor nodded eagerly. ‘Xagor cannot cure whole kabals of clients, too many hurts in each fight.’

Kharbyr gazed up the grooved slope to where the next step lay out of sight. If he remembered correctly the next step was copper-coloured, the one after that was bronze, then silver and then gold for Dhaelthrasz just one tier beneath Sorrow Fell itself. Unconsciously he rubbed at the flat metal pentagon in its hidden pocket again and a thought struck him.

‘We’re going the wrong way,’ Kharbyr muttered to himself. ‘We need to be going down, not up.’

‘This one does not understand: death above, death below, death wherever we might go,’ Xagor half-sang in his flat, monotonous voice.

‘Look – the upper tiers are full of kabalites on high alert, the whole place is in anarchy right now and getting mixed up in their fighting is going to be nasty. The lower tiers might get completely sealed off. What’s a place that’s always in anarchy, even without a Dysjunction?’

‘Sec Magera,’ Xagor replied promptly.

‘That’s right, Sec Magera – Null City. We go there and join whoever’s strongest.’

‘Xenos and outcasts,’ Xagor spat with surprising distaste.

‘Which is why they’ll be concentrating on just surviving, not treachery and revenge like the kabalites are doing. Besides I have friends there that can help us if they’re still alive.’

Xagor nodded slowly at Kharbyr’s words. ‘How to escape without consequence?’

Kharbyr looked over to where Naxipael was arguing with the Hy’kran dracon, Sotha. Bezieth stood nearby looking thunderously angry. The other survivors from Metzuh and the remaining Hy’kranii warriors had picked up on what was going on and were clustering around the archons in two discrete groups. The nearest arch into the parkland adjoining Latiya’s steps on this tier was less than hundred metres away.

‘Now is as good a time as any,’ Kharbyr said, tilting his head towards the arch. ‘Move that way like you’re checking the bodies or something then just walk out quick and quiet. I’ll follow you in a moment.’

Xagor immediately sidled off with exaggerated nonchalance, poking and prodding at the fallen Azkhorxi as he went. Kharbyr turned back to where Naxipael and Bezieth were now arguing with Sotha. The followers of both sides were eyeing their opposite numbers resentfully and violence was in the air. Kharbyr started pondering how he could turn that into a big enough distraction to secure his own getaway.

CHAPTER 14

THE LIVING SWORD

Morr turned his back on the collapsed Harlequin and took a step towards the colossal statue of Arhra looming at the end of the hall. Drazhar responded instantly, racing forward and bounding over the intervening pits faster than a running Gyfrlion. An instant later he landed before Morr, physically barring his path with demi-klaives held ready to strike. The two incubi stood in frozen tableau like twin colosii with tension crackling in the air. Neither moved, staring rigidly at one another as they locked in a silent battle of wills. Moments seemed to draw into minutes and still neither twitched so much as a muscle.

The tableau shattered into sudden violence without warning. The swiftness and ferocity of the first exchange was too quick to follow with the naked eye, with no hint of who had been the first to strike. Only glittering after-images were left by the ballet of leaping blades: Morr’s klaive licking downward, one of Drazhar’s demi-klaives deflecting the blow even as he whirled to unleash a devastating riposte with the other. Drazhar’s twin blades hewing, mantis-like, Morr leaping aside to avoid being driven back into a pit.

Motley finally began to regain some control of his treacherous limbs after Morr’s paralysing nerve-jolt. He still felt sick to his stomach as he pulled his legs beneath him and shakily stood. The duelling incubi paid him no heed. They were caught in their own universe where there was only Morr and Drazhar, like twin neutron stars whirling around a common axis. Any attempt to interfere in their contest now would be instantly fatal. All hope was lost, Motley was forced to admit, and all he could do was watch the tragedy unfold while marvelling at the deadly skill of the combatants.

Both were masters, of that there could be no doubt. The difference in armaments made the contest one of speed against strength. Even mighty Drazhar, the living sword, could not block Morr’s heavier klaive as it swept through its lethal arcs. Neither could Morr match the darting speed of Drazhar’s demi-klaives. The battle was constantly shifting, always moving, always dodging among the irregular patchwork of open pits and solid slabs without so much as a downward glance. The footwork and agility alone was breathtaking, the scream of their blades tearing through the air was terrifying.

The fight raged back and forth through the hall, around and across the pits, up to the feet of Arhra and back again. Grotesque shadows cast by the duellists capered and leapt around the walls as if an army of daemons fought through the hall, all eerily silent except for the scuff of armoured sabatons against stone and the soughing clash of blades.

The two incubi broke apart after a particularly furious passage of arms, frozen once again in tableau. Drazhar crouched with demi-klaives held at the ready, one arced overhead like a scorpion’s sting, the other pointed unwaveringly at his opponent’s heart. Morr’s armour was mauled and he dripped crimson from a score of small wounds. The towering incubus swayed alarmingly for a moment and Drazhar rushed forward to deliver the coup-de-grace against his weakened opponent… and almost lost his own head in the attempt. Morr’s klaive hissed forward faster than a striking snake. With an unbelievable twist Drazhar caught the hurtling klaive on both of his blades and was physically driven back, heels scraping, across the stones.

But that was the last of Morr’s strength, a last gasp. His recovery was slow and sloppy as Drazhar – relentless as ever – came bounding straight back onto the attack. The demi-klaives rained down like a hammer on an anvil, sparks flying as Morr’s klaive swept aside each attack in turn, but each defense was a little slower now, a little weaker as Morr’s lifeblood drained from him, and with it his prodigious strength.

Motley saw the death blow coming in the most vivid detail, unfurling with agonising slowness. Morr’s klaive hooked out too far to return by Drazhar’s first strike, the second strike coming as an uppercut. The hooked tip of the demi-klaive gleaming as it curved up in a perfect parabola and caught Morr beneath the chin. A flash and Morr hurled back as if he had been launched. Morr landed at the edge of a pit with a crash, his shattered helm spinning away into the darkness, his klaive skittering across the flagstones as it fell from nerveless fingers. Drazhar leapt on his fallen enemy, his merciless blades raised for a decapitating strike. Motley covered his face with his hands and turned away, unable to watch what would come next.

To live as a true eldar is to live on a knife edge, to live as an archon is to live at the very point of the knife. Yllithian repeated the catechism to himself as he mounted the steps to the landing field at the top of the White Flames’ fortress. So the insufferable tyrant Vect had summoned him like a slave – Yllithian would go and brazen it out like the pureblooded Commorrite that he was with a smile on his face and murder in his heart. Survival was important now, survival so that he could set about wreaking the most consummate revenge.

Yllithian had ordered the seneschal to assemble all the warriors and auxiliaries that could be spared from the immediate defense of the fortress. Without counting his personal barque it came to just five Raiders full of warriors with an untidy mix of scourges, hellions and reavers to escort them. It was a substantial enough force for a time like this, but certainly not enough to rescue him from Corespur if Vect knew more than Yllithian hoped he did. Then again, the supreme overlord was always careful to ensure that no single force in Commorragh could hope to assail Corespur under the best of circumstances. The White Flames’ fortress, mighty and storied as it was, was nothing more than a child’s model in comparison to the enormity of the supreme overlord’s demesne. The forces on hand would have to suffice.

Looking over the warriors Yllithian noticed a certain air of reluctance about them – downcast eyes, backward glances, a nervousness that was readily spreading to the undisciplined hellions and reavers. He thought it appropriate to address his retinue and remind them of their obligations so he raised his voice so that it would carry to all of those assembled.

‘Hear me! Our city is in peril and our supreme overlord calls for our aid in setting all to rights – as well he should, knowing the power of the White Flames! We go now to Corespur to hear his counsel and accept his just commandments. Now is not a time for fear, now is a time for strength and rigor of the highest order, any who stand before us are abominations to be destroyed, any who fall along the way are lost. Now I bid you by my lawful command as your archon and master in all things, obey me now or I shall end your existence before you take your next breath. Look up! Look up and gaze upon what we must overcome ere we reach our destination this day!’

As one they looked up into the hellish, vaulted skies over High Commorragh and beheld a scene from nightmares. The Ilmaea were weeping black tears. The stolen sun’s ragged coronae flared with multi-hued energies from beyond the veil and dripped foulness. The suns gazed down from the heavens like monstrous burning eyes in whose awful light there could be seen twisting clouds of their pinioned offspring. What could be glimpsed of the warding beyond the now twice-stolen suns was a vivid riot of colour: thick brush strokes of blue and purple clashing against swirls of jade and emerald, lugubrious clouds of grey and brown swelling out of nowhere only to be dispersed by flickering storms of blue-white static.

Another storm was about to break upon them. Etheric energies crackled through the air, ghostly fire danced on pinnacles and livid thunderbolts made the whole fortress quiver with their impact. Harsh cries and screams were carried on the rushing winds, alien tongues crying out in languages that were forgotten before the eldar race ever took to the stars. Yllithian gazed upward without fear and noted with pride that his kabalites obeyed promptly and without question. A few individuals had fallen to the ground convulsing horribly at the sight, it was true, but they were weaklings best disposed of now before they failed him later.

Satisfied, Yllithian stepped aboard his personal barque, a singular grav-craft of quite stunning beauty. Its fiercely jutting prow was inlaid with ruby and alabaster depicting the icon of the White Flames. The graceful lines of the barque’s narrow hull swept majestically backward from the prow before flaring to accommodate pods containing gravitic engines at the rear. Yllithian mounted the open platform at the centre of the barque and settled himself into a richly appointed throne. His incubi bodyguards moved to take their positions at long-throated splinter cannon and disintegrators ranged on mountings along the barque’s bulwarks. At a nod to his steersman Yllithian’s craft smoothly ascended from the landing field. A swirl of Raiders, scourges, jetbikes and skyboards rose below his craft and swiftly oriented themselves around the barque. Yllithian gestured again and the barque shot forward like an arrow released from a bow.

The jagged landscape of High Commorragh lay before them, its dark towers, bladed spires and sharp-spined steeples pushing upwards in mad profusion. Fires were burning in many places, the winds pushing dirty streamers of smoke outward like tattered banners. Partially collapsed towers and ruined manses jutted out of the haze like broken teeth. Here and there the flash of weapons fire lit the darker recesses between mountainous spires. Vicious battles were being fought, no doubt, neighbours exorcising their pent-up frustrations and ambitions against neighbours, kin set against kin. Some of Yllithian’s own allies were fighting down there, but in comparison to the awesome energies roiling overhead their squabbles seemed petty and inconsequential. Yllithian and his retinue swept implacably onwards across Sorrow Fell.

Yllithian indicated for his steersman to climb higher to avoid weapons fire striking at them from below. It was a calculated risk to accept the greater odds of lightning strikes and flying daemons coming against them but Yllithian knew all too well the awful accuracy and potency of the armaments in use by the warring kabals. He would take his chances with daemon claws rather than suffer his meagre force being gutted by a burst of well-directed lance fire from ambush. As they rose thunderbolts smote the air with retina-burning strokes of raw energy all about them. The crash and roar of the storm shook every cell in the body, jarred the skeleton and made the ears quail at the unleashed violence. There was blinding flash and a pair of hellions simply vanished, their racing skyboards instantly smashed into flaming fragments falling away from the formation.

Yllithian’s retinue raced on through the tumult, throttles open to the maximum and engines screaming. A reaver was transfixed by another spear of lightning, its power plant detonating instantly in a silent blossom of orange fire. A sleek-hulled Raider was struck and dropped away trailing smoke and flames. Tiny, flailing bodies spilled from its deck as its steersman fought for control. The Raider disappeared amidst the jutting spines and towers beneath with no sign of recovery.

Yllithian’s retinue began bobbing and weaving instinctively – as if they could somehow spoil the aim of the random discharges. Yllithian rebuked his steersman for his stupidity while inwardly reflecting that he had personally experienced artillery barrages that were less terrifying in their intensity. The untutored mind always refuses to believe that it cannot somehow avert the random strokes of fate. Yllithian had taught himself better than that. His barque had inbuilt force fields that would shrug off the lightning if he had the misfortune to be struck. His only concern, and it was a slight one, was that a sufficient fraction of his force would survive the ordeal to be of use to him in what was to come.

Bellathonis made his way down through the White Flames’ fortress quite openly. He leaned on Yllithian’s patronage shamelessly to get him past the obstructive incubi, paranoid warriors and overly-inquisitive trueborn that he encountered along the way. The mere mention of the archon seemed enough quell any desire to impede him, so it was really all quite gratifying. The lower reaches of the fortress were in a shambles. Fewer and fewer White Flames kabalites were to be seen, and those that were flitted cautiously through the shadows. The smell of burning was everywhere and Bellathonis came across occasional bodies scattered through the twisting corridors and deep cellars. Psychic phenomena began to manifest as he went lower still: walls that wept crimson tears, hazes of frost and oily mists that muttered and sang in alien tongues.

Bellathonis sighed and finally resigned himself to draw his own weapon. It was something he ordinarily felt was almost demeaning to do, a sign of poor planning. He consoled himself that the circumstances were far from ordinary. Yllithian had bid him take up residence in Syiin’s old quarters in the pits but Bellathonis found himself rapidly souring on the notion. Who knew what half-finished experiments and maddened, uncaged grotesques roamed free in Syiin’s little kingdom? Before Bellathonis could venture into the pits he would need reinforcements of similar ilk.

Coming to a decision he turned aside down a little-used stair at the next junction. The narrow stair twisted tortuously towards one of the fortress cisterns, a lapping subterranean lake of ooze and foulness. Within that chamber, Bellathonis knew, lay a certain alcove containing a hidden door that would take him beyond the confines of the fortress. It was a risk, but certainly no greater than counting on the obedience of Syiin’s surviving wracks to the murderer of their master.

Bellathonis paused at the archway into the cistern, listening intently for any sound that might betray occupants. He heard nothing but the slap of wavelets against stone and stepped cautiously within. Piers of mottled rock reached out over a vast black expanse that was barely visible in the dim light. Countless identical, featureless alcoves etched the walls to either hand. Bellathonis counted his way along to the alcove he and Yllithian had used to enter the fortress after he had discovered the White Flames archon dying of the glass plague in the tunnels below.

The Haemoculus slid one long-fingered hand along the apex of the alcove until he found a series of tiny projections almost impossible to distinguish from the surrounding stonework. As he was about to press them he caught a flicker of movement in his all-round peripheral vision. He focused on it without turning by giving full attention to the eyes implanted into his shoulder blades. He saw two tattooed eldar no more than a dozen metres away creeping silently towards him. They were naked save for fanged helms and scaled loin cloths, their limbs and chests covered by spiralling rows of tooth-like dags. Their bare feet made not a whisper of sound as they advanced and both clutched poison-streaked daggers that promised a quick death with a single scratch. These must be the Venomysts that the guards in the upper part of the fortress had warned him against.

Bellathonis lowered his arm and turned slowly to face them, clearing his throat as he did so. The two Venomysts froze like statues as if their immobility would somehow render them invisible.

‘I really have no argument with you,’ Bellathonis said reasonably. ‘By all means run along and go find yourselves some White Flames to kill.’

One of the Venomysts glanced minutely to the other one for guidance. Bellathonis raised his pistol and shot that one first, his spiral-barreled stinger pistol emitting only a slight hiss as it punched a toxin-filled glass needle into the Venomyst’s chest. In the twinkling of an eye the Venomyst’s tattooed flesh swelled outward like a balloon, expanding around the wound site to become a sphere that encompassed the unfortunate eldar’s entire body. There was a creak of straining skin and then a snap as the flesh-balloon popped messily to shower his compatriot with gore.

‘That one was a compound called Bloatwrack, boring but effective and… so very quick! You might want to run now,’ Bellathonis suggested as he levelled his pistol at the second Venomyst. To the haemonculus’s surprise the Venomyst did nothing of the sort, instead hurling his dagger with deadly accuracy. The stinger pistol fired almost accidentally, Bellathonis’s reflexive shot zipping off into the darkness a hand-span from the Venomyst’s masked face. The haemonculus tried to dodge the spinning blade but he was no wych gladiator that could pluck knives from the air. The dagger took him in the shoulder, provoking a curse of mixed pain and surprise.

The surviving Venomyst took off running, his bare feet slapping on the stones as he disappeared into the gloom before the haemonculus could fire another shot. Bellathonis gritted his teeth and concentrated on pulling the dagger from his shoulder. He had to admire how quickly the lips of the fresh wound were blackening. The Venomysts may have lost their sartorial sensibilities but they lived up to their name when it came to poisons. He tasted the blade tentatively with his black, pointed tongue and grimaced a little. It was a necrotising soporific, something intended to make you lie down and quietly rot to death. A composite toxin, one with overlapping effects and probably some unpleasant surprises that were only activated by trying to use the appropriate anti-venoms.

Bellathonis’s gaze swam alarmingly and he dropped the dagger to brace himself against the corner of the alcove in order to avoid falling. The blade striking the stone echoed weirdly in his ears, a stretched and dream-like ringing. The haemonculus tried to summon the will to reach up and trigger the latch to the hidden door, but it suddenly seemed horribly far away.

Free to chase and hunt at last, the terror engines Vhi and Cho found their way up from the pits into a region known as Splinterbone. Their exit brought them out into the flow of an acid-green subterranean river that wound its way around and through the outermost districts from the Corespur. The engine’s implanted memory engrams told them that this would serve as ideal cover for an approach and the quickest route to their prey’s immediate vicinity. The river’s twisting course was shrouded in darkness and hung with toxic clouds as it slipped beneath arches and through ducts between a series of chambers and atriums that had long since been abandoned by all but the desperate and the wretched.

The two wasp-like engines sped along just above the river’s toxic surface, the imprint of their gravitic impellers leaving perfect V-shaped wakes behind them. The psychic scent of the prey was weak at this point, but it exerted a definite tug on the engines’ narrow consciousness. Right now the faint spoor could belong any one of the millions of lifeforms detected in the direction the engines were taking. As they drew closer the trace would intensify to the point where they would discern their target as an individual, track its movements and discover its lair. All this was pre-determined, a set of absolutes imprinted into their higher cortex functions that was as inescapable as death itself.

But they still had autonomy, that most precious of gifts to automata. Cho wove back and forth happily on the spurious justification of testing attitude controls. Vhi aggressively probed the surrounding substrata for information nodes and test-fired its weaponry with joyous abandon at anything that moved. They remained unimpeded in their progress, flashing past a few shattered grav-craft that were drifting lazily in the flow but finding all to be devoid of detectable life signs. Vhi detected ongoing seismic damage to the surrounding structure and advised abandonment of the projected route, citing a high probability of blockage. Cho resisted the proposal, citing the enhanced speed achieved by following the river course as far as possible. Vhi agreed and the pair swept onward together towards Ashkeri Talon.

Vhi and Cho were soon cruising slowly through the ruins of Lower Metzuh, crossing and re-crossing the psychic spoor they were seeking. The source was close, or had been close to this area in the recent past yet there was confusion in the readings. Cho was the more sensitive of the two and could detect recent indicators that were an acceptable match for their target. Vhi had found older traces that matched the parameters exactly, but that were quickly lost as they entered the vicinity of an uncontrolled webway juncture. They argued silently about their findings, Vhi being quickly overthrown in his proposal to enter the juncture due to the poor probability of re-acquiring the trace on the other side.

Cho fluttered vanes and sensor rods in agitation. Logic dictated pursuing the most recent traces of the target but Vhi stubbornly refused to accept the validity of Cho’s findings. Vhi proposed backtracking the trails he had detected for further investigation while Cho advocated pursuit of the existing traces before they became diffuse. No precedence had been placed on accuracy over expedience, only blanket elimination protocols applied and so the two engines found themselves to be deadlocked.

After a few moments of drifting silently in cogitation Cho proposed the solution of exercising the autonomy they had been granted to the fullest. They would split up: Vhi would follow his trace, Cho would follow hers. In the event of both trails leading back to a single lair they would combine their efforts to eliminate the target. In the event that one of the targets was found to be a false positive it would be eliminated and the engine responsible would rejoin the other as quickly as possible. Cho advocated this as the absolutely optimal solution to the problem.

Vhi pondered the proposal for a considerable time. Core combat algorithms warned of the undesirability of force dispersal, yet a line of reasoning that might be termed ‘experience’ or ‘confidence’ in a living organism encouraged Vhi to accept Cho’s proposal.

The two engines went their separate ways, Cho nosing deeper into the wreckage beside the Grand Canal while Vhi followed the psychic trace he had detected aloft. The trail had been confused and muddied by the events in the city but Vhi was drawn upward as if by invisible threads. Vhi experienced a rush of conflicting data that a mortal creature would have described as ‘excitement’. The hunt had become a contest between the two engines each following their own course to success or failure. Their beloved creator would be proud.

CHAPTER 15

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

Seconds passed and Motley heard nothing. No final curse from the fallen incubus as his doom descended upon him, no meat slicing sound of Drazhar removing Morr’s head for a trophy. The Harlequin peeked between his fingers cautiously. The scene before him was virtually unchanged, Morr lay on the flagstones, with his helm-less head and one shoulder dangling over a pit, his great klaive out of reach. Drazhar was now poised above him like a great, armoured mantis with his demi-klaives crossed at Morr’s throat. A simple twitch of the wrists and Morr would be decapitated in an instant, yet the twin blades were held back, unmoving.

After a long moment Drazhar slowly withdrew his demi-klaives and straightened. He took a step back, still regarding Morr, nodded curtly and turned away. Within a few steps the master of blades was lost in shadows, vanishing into the darkness as if he had never existed. Motley darted to where Morr lay, hope blossoming in his heart as he saw the towering incubus was still moving. Unmasked, Morr’s pale face turned to Motley with anguish written in every line.

‘Even honourable death is denied!’ Morr snarled. ‘Defeated by the master of blades who leaves none alive, yet he leaves me to suffer in my shame!’

It was an old face, lined and scarred by countless conflicts. Lank, pallid hair framed a strong visage with a sharp jaw line jutting pugnaciously below fierce dark eyes. The passions that had always lurked behind his blank-faced helm now blazed forth like a living thing.

‘No!’ Motley snapped. ‘Drazhar shows more wisdom than you do. He sees that you still have a greater role to play even if you will not accept it! You said that Drazhar defies the hierarchs, slays his venerators and does as he wishes, witness him doing just that by sparing your life – he found you worthy, Morr! Worthy to live and play your part!’

Morr fell back with a groan, fingers clawing at the floor in his anguish. To live, reflected Motley impertinently, after being so resigned to death must be a great inconvenience and perhaps the thing requiring greater bravery. From deep in the shrine a bell tolled once, twice, thrice, the deep, rich tones rolling one over the other. The vibrations seem to emanate from the very stones beneath their feet. Motley cocked his head to one side, wondering what the tolling meant, swiftly concluding that it was probably nothing good under the current circumstances.

One of the fat tallow candles on the steps guttered and expired, the shadows crowding closer about them. Many of the candles were out now, Motley realised, only a handful of them still illuminating the hall.

‘Morr, I feel your pain but I really think it’s time for us to leave now.’

Morr levered himself painfully into a sitting position, elbows on knees and face in his hands. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why leave this place now? I should remain until I starve to death. It would be a fitting end.’

Another candle expired. The shadows deepened further. The great statue of Arhra was now only a menacing shape in the darkness. Motley sensed the vaguest hint of movement at one of the many archways that entered the hall, and then another. Red eyes glittered back at him from the blackness beyond the arch.

‘A pointless ending, an unworthy one!’ Motley cried as he tried to look in every direction at once. ’Also quite possibly not an option – look! Drazhar might feel himself strong enough to defy your hierarchs, but they still want you dead and they send others take his place!’

There were pairs of red eyes within the shadowed archways all around Morr and Motley. The cruel, pitiless gaze of the incubi surrounded them. Morr rose unsteadily, snarling at Motley when he attempted to help. Even without his tall helm the incubus towered head and shoulders above the slight Harlequin, a grim spectre in his riven and bloodstained armour. He gazed around the hall with contempt blazing from his eyes.

‘So, now you come to offer me at the idol of Khaine?’ Morr muttered to himself, swaying as he bent to retrieve his fallen klaive. ‘You would burn me like a failed supplicant?’. The incubus seemed to draw strength from his grip on the weapon, straightening with new defiance etched on his face. Another candle guttered and went out. There were only three candles left now, three wan pools of light in a sea of darkness.

‘No, Morr!’ implored Motley. ‘We have to leave! Is this how you want to be remembered? Struck down in your own shrine to no purpose when you could have saved billions?’

Morr hesitated for a moment and glanced at Motley uncertainly. The agony of indecision was writ large in his face. Another candle went out, leaving long shadows between them as Motley pressed his advantage unmercifully.

‘Because I’ll make sure of it,’ Motley whispered venomously. ‘For all the centuries to come I’ll make sure that everyone will remember Morr only as the incubus that failed. He failed his lord, failed his shrine, failed his people!’

Morr roared and swung at Motley, the klaive hissing through the air between them. Motley negligently stepped back out of reach, theatrically stifling a yawn as he did so.

‘In the state you’re in you can’t even fight, look at you! You can barely lift that oversised butcher-blade you’re so fond of,’ Motley said sardonically. ‘Have you survived a battle with Drazhar only to fall to lesser blades this day? Is that honour? Is that the perfection you’ve spent your whole life pursuing?’

Morr’s klaive paused. Motley’s stinging darts had drained the rage from his face, leaving only hollow-eyed emptiness and pain in its wake. The towering incubus lowered his blade and looked around the darkened hall as if truly seeing it for the first time. Implacable red eyes glittered at him from the shadows, jackals closing in around a wounded lion.

‘No,’ Morr grated. ‘This is not the perfection I sought.’

‘Then come with me now and we’ll make a worthy legend of you yet!’ Motley said passionately. ‘And future generations will marvel at the path of the incubus and the strength of Morr who stayed the truest to Arhra’s teachings – the most perfect killer of all.’

Another candle flickered and died, leaving only one feeble puddle of light to hold back the encroaching darkness. Morr turned slowly to face the monstrous statue of Arhra, almost invisible now in the gloom save for the malevolent gleam of its ruby eyes. The bloodied incubus raised his klaive in solemn salute to the apparition.

‘I understand your lesson, master!’ Morr cried aloud, his harsh tones chasing echoes from the walls. ‘I shall carry your word to where uncorrupted ears will hear it. Your ways will not be forgotten by the faithful. This is I swear to you!’

Morr lowered his klaive with something of his old precision. The red-eyed shadows of the incubi were closer now, ranged all about Morr and Motley in the dying light of the last candle. If the incubi heard Morr’s words, approved or disapproved of them, they gave no sign. The razor-edges of their klaives glinted with sinister intent.

‘Do you have a plan, little clown?’ Morr said quietly.

‘It’s your shrine so I was rather hoping you had one,’ Motley replied softly.

‘Then we will die together,’ Morr said with grim finality. ‘The hierarchs will not permit you to live after what you have seen and heard.’

Motley could almost swear that Morr sounded happy at the prospect.

Archon Yllithian had made it his business to understand what kind of monstrous entity he, Kraillach and Xelian had allowed into Commorragh. In the months after raising the thing they initially believed to be Vect’s deadliest old enemy, El’Uriaq, Yllithian had applied himself dilligently to finding out just how deep a pit he had dug himself into. The study of the void had always been something of a passion for him and he had thrown himself into the pursuit with a renewed fervour that even his jaded peers found almost unspeakably perverse. For Commorrites the forces of Chaos were something best viewed from the corner of the eye, something to be denied and ignored as much as possible. Much as a race of clifftop dwellers might try not to address too much thought to the mechanics of plunging to their own death, Commorrites tended to confine their thinking rather to ways to avoid such a fate than the details of it.

Not so for Yllithian, and his knowledge had kept him alive as El’Uriaq destroyed Xelian and Kraillach. Yllithian had gazed into the Sea of Souls and come to understand the limitless power that lay there, and something more of its monstrous perils. He had also come to understand more about its denizens – at least as far as the manifestations of madness and terror that the daemons represented could be understood by a coherent mind. Thus he knew that the daemons would be coming for them soon, unable to resist the bright sparks of the eldar souls flickering past so close below.

The Dysjunction was an awe-inspiring example of the power intrinsic to the warp, a terrifying demonstration of the forces surrounding Commorragh. Yllithian had sought out such power all his life and now he saw how it had always surrounded him: vast, untameable and unattainable. Even so, it had been Yllithian’s schemes that had unleashed the current cataclysm upon Commorragh. He had forced Asdrubael Vect to summon his archons and engage his wicked intellect solely in defence of the city for a while. Yllithian smiled to think of the opportunities that would open up in the immediate future. New territories could be claimed, rivals eliminated and vendettas slaked under the guise of executing the supreme overlord’s orders. With all that Yllithian knew there was a chance that he could do something to stop the Dysjunction, but the more he thought on it the more he could see no reason to do so.

Between the crash of thunder the shrill cries on the wind became louder, more excited. Yllithian’s incubi bodyguard swivelled their weapons back and forth as they scanned for the source, the long muzzles of their cannon hunting the skies relentlessly. There! A twisting funnel descending towards them, a mass of dark-winged specks dropping from clouds the colour of bruised meat. Streams of hyper velocity splinters and darklight beams from Yllithian’s retinue converged on the approaching mass and blocked it as thoroughly as if an invisible wall had been thrown up in its path.

In the daemonic hierarchies, Yllithian knew, these manifestations were little more than vermin, lesser entities that were slipping through the connection between the Ilmaean sub-realms and Commorragh itself. The great, open portals that ordinarily allowed the wan heat and illumination of the stolen suns to filter down on the city had become porous under the strain of the Dysjunction. The etheric energies leaking in around the Ilmaea sustained these lesser daemons in great flocks. Yllithian was gambling that they could not stray far from the stolen sun’s immediate vicinity for long without becoming critically weakened.

Yet more dark shapes were descending on all sides, wings beating frantically as they closed in on the flying White Flames Raiders and their escorts. Most of the assailants were twisted, naked humanoids that were winged and clawed in varied fashion. A great many appeared as vast, bloated flies, darting eel-like worms or other less easily identifiable creatures. Yllithian’s kabalites kept up a withering fire as the hordes approached, bursting daemons like overripe fruit wherever their shots struck true. The Raiders pulled tightly together to intensify their firepower, while the scourges, hellions and reavers snarled around the periphery in a defensive wheel. The daemons ploughed into the barrage of fire relentlessly, utterly careless of their casualties in their attempts to reach the succulent souls they could perceive.

Now the hellions and reavers were fighting hand to hand against the first wave of attackers, their hellglaives and bladevanes against fangs and claws as the daemons tried to drag the escorts from their mounts. Yllithian saw a hellion plucked from his skyboard and borne aloft to be torn apart in seconds, he saw winged scourges plummeting in a death grip with what seemed their own dark reflections, reavers being buried beneath leathery wings. He stood from his throne and drew his sword. His gamble wasn’t working, the daemons were too strong, the skies were still black with them.

Shrieking, bat-faced entities dived on the Raiders and tried to seize their occupants. Yllithian slashed at reaching claws and fanged faces as they flashed past. Several of his incubi were forced to abandon their cannon and take up their klaives to defend themselves as daemons clawed their way across the bulwarks and onto the fighting platform. Yllithian led a charge to clear the deck and the twisted entities’ croaks of triumph soon turned into shrieks of alarm. Yllithian paused in the slaughter long enough to snap an order to his steersman.

‘Activate the shock prow!’

The curving, armoured prow of Yllithian’s craft instantly crackled with power, fat sparks dripping from it as it projected a directional wave of electromagnetic force ahead of the racing barque, an atom-splitting ram-blade of force. Daemons caught in the path of the ram decohered instantly, exploding in bright webs of lightning as it plowed forward relentlessly through the infernal flock. Shrieking daemons wheeled aside only to be caught in the Raider’s crossfire and torn to pieces. Yllithian permitted himself a self-indulgent grin of triumph, the shock prow was a recent addition made at his own instigation after recent events. He was gratified to see it working so well.

Suddenly they were breaking through the clouds of flying daemons as the defeated remnants fluttered upward. Sorrow Fell was spread out again before them, its light and spires seeming earthly and welcoming after the horrors of the skies. Corespur reared up in the distance as a dark, jagged mountain lit only by the flashes of thunderbolts.

A hazy ring of green light surrounded the base of the promontory that formed Corespur. In its poisonous illumination thirteen titanic statues could be seen standing sentinel over Sorrow Fell. The hated visage of Asdrubael Vect glowered down from every statue, each holding a different ritualised pose or accoutrements that represented one of the thirteen foundations of vengeance. Vect had placed these monuments to his ego to stand watch over Sorrow Fell long ago. They were a permanent reminder of the ascendance of his own power over all the aristocratic families of High Commorragh. It was a calculated affront amid a landscape with more than its share of huge statues of commemorating the deeds of noble-blooded Commorrites both living and dead.

Vect’s monstrosities stood on pedestals that placed them higher than the tallest spires. Their dimensions dwarfed even the thousand metre high representations of Commorragh’s heroic forebears so that they were quite literally placed in Vect’s shadow. It was said that nothing that occurred within the statues’ gaze escaped the attention of Vect himself. Yllithian knew from personal experience that they screamed constantly – a hideous stentorian howl that had rendered the part of Sorrow Fell closest to Corespur virtually uninhabitable. Each statue projected a standing sound wave of misery and terror that intensified the closer one came to Corespur.

Search beams quested the skies around the statues endlessly, ethereal columns of greenish light that swept back and forth like ghostly fingers. As Yllithian and his retinue approached they were caught and held by one such beam and the deck of the barque flooded instantly with its veridian glow. Yllithian instructed his steersman to slow to a crawl as they were assessed. A voice spoke out of empty air beside Yllithian.

‘Identify,’ the voice chimed.

‘Archon Yllithian of the White Flames,’ he replied boldly, reflecting that now the authenticity of Bellathonis’s blood-work would truly be put to the test. Vect would care not one jot if the leadership of the White Flames had changed hands, but it would indicate a potential vulnerability that Yllithian was loath to reveal to the supreme overlord. Moments ticked by beneath the unwinking beam, Yllithian could feel his nape hairs rising as invisible waves probed deeper into the very fabric of the craft and its occupants: measuring, comparing, categorising.

‘Confirmed. Proceed,’ the voice said.

Yllithian nodded to the steersman and they smoothly accelerated toward Corespur with his reduced retinue trailing behind. They were rising now, the prow tipping up to catch the sloping promontory beneath the anti-gravity ribbing on the barque’s underside. Rising tiers of blade-topped towers, saw-edged battlements and angular gables slid past beneath their hull. Endless ranks of dark, empty windows gazed out across Sorrow Fell like lidless eyes. Shoals of dark-hulled Raiders and Ravagers followed their movements from a discreet distance. These were Vect’s Black Heart kabalites alert for any sign of treachery, numerous and seemingly untouched by the city’s agonies as they patrolled their master’s stronghold. Fortress, armoury, lair, command centre, prison by equal parts – this was Corespur, the very center of Asdrubael Vect’s power. Truly Yllithian was entering the belly of the beast.

Kharbyr sprinted through emerald fronds and trailing ivy. Splinter rounds hissed past him, chopping viciously through the greenery like invisible shears. He veered into a hedgerow and burst through it in a storm of snow-white petals. He could hear running steps behind him, and voices cursing at him. These only served to lend wings to his flying feet as he ran for his life. This was certainly not the outcome he had been hoping for, but it was the kind of outcome he had been half-expecting.

Like all plans, it had seemed a good one at the time – logical. He’d strolled up to listen to the argument between Bezieth, Naxipael and Sotha. Sure enough the Dracon Sotha wanted to get back to his archon and report the Azkhorxi treachery. Naxipael would hear nothing of it and imperiously commanded, with an increasingly heavy garnish of threats, that the dracon and his warriors accompany him to Sorrow Fell. Bezieth seemed just about ready to kill both sides equally.

Nerves were on edge and weapons were being fingered as the two groups of survivors from Metzuh and Hy’kran watched their leaders squabble. It was a simple matter for Kharbyr to shout out a warning, whip out his pistol and put a few shots into the Hy’kranii. The scene exploded into violence as both sides let rip at point blank range. Kharbyr didn’t wait around to see the results, he simply turned and ran.

Kharbyr angled down a pathway between grassy embankments starred with flowers of crimson and gold. The declivity took him out of the immediate line of fire of his pursuers so he concentrated on pouring on more straight-line speed in order to outdistance them. This was when you got to be glad you weren’t wearing armour, he reflected, when you were running from people who were wearing it. He didn’t know Hy’kran tier as well as he would have liked but he knew that the parklands stretched for kilometres. All he had to do was lose himself among the foliage and his pursuers would never find him.

He wondered briefly what had happened to Xagor. When Kharbyr had turned to run Xagor was already nowhere to be seen. It was an impressive trick for the bumbling wrack to pull off although Kharbyr didn’t have much of a chance to analyse it at the time. He had got within a dozen steps of the arch into the parkland by the time both sides had stopped shooting at each other and all started shooting at him instead – or at least that was what it had felt like. Pure luck had kept him alive through that first burst of fire, splinters and energy bolts knocking chunks out of the parkland arch even as he ran beneath it.

He darted off the path, hurdled a fallen log and dived headlong into a copse of flowering Loganiaceae. He slithered beneath drooping boughs heavy with orange flowers to find a small hollow beneath the shrubs where he was hidden from the path yet could still peep out between the leaves to watch for pursuit. He lay still and tried to moderate his breathing, convinced that the pounding of his heart was audible across the entire park. Minutes passed and then he saw Naxipael stalking furiously along the path with the two Ethondrian Seekers in their maroon cloaks and hoods trailing behind him. The Seekers constantly bent to sniff at the ground like hounds, questing back and forth as they followed Kharbyr’s trail.

Kharbyr experienced a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He’d forgotten about the Seekers. Ethondrian Seekers could track a scourge through the turbulent upper airs, there was no reason they couldn’t track him straight to his hiding place. The Seekers were approaching the point where he had left the path and in a few seconds they would direct Naxipael straight to him. The Venom Brood archon did not look to be in a forgiving mood. Kharbyr tensed his legs to get ready to run again. Just then Bezieth emerged onto the path behind Naxipael and called out to him.

‘The traitor must have doubled back or we’d have him by now,’ she said. ‘We have to get moving, Naxipael, we don’t have time to waste on this.’

Bezieth vanished again. Naxipael snarled something incoherent and turned back to follow her. The Seekers whined discontentedly as they were dragged away from their quarry. Within a few moments the path was empty again and Kharbyr allowed himself to breathe once more. He started to think frantically about how he could disguise his trail if the Seekers came back. It struck him then that Naxipael and Bezieth had probably already caught Xagor and didn’t care so much about finding him anyway. The wrack could fix wounds and keep them patched up. Kharbyr was just a nameless loose cannon to them, a traitor. Just leave him to die on his own.

Kharbyr got up, determined to put more distance between him and the Seekers just in case. Perhaps if he could find some water he could obscure his trail for a while. He froze as he realised there was someone else coming down the path. Xagor came into view, creeping along with his rifle slung over his back and looking fearful. The wrack glanced around, left the path and headed straight towards his hiding place. Kharbyr grimaced and stepped into view brushing dirt from his clothes.

‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he said casually. Xagor seemed genuinely startled, as if he hadn’t really expected to see Kharbyr step out from behind a bush.

‘Well we made our escape, what’s wrong now?’ Kharbyr asked peevishly.

‘Perhaps it’s the fact that your friend is just acting as a decoy,’ Bezieth said from behind him.

CHAPTER 16

CAPTURE

The ring of red-eyed incubi had closed completely around Morr and Motley in the shrine of Arhra. Unwounded, Morr might have been able to hold off so many for some time, and even prevail against more than a few of them before they took his life. Yet Morr’s wounds still dripped crimson, and he held his great klaive upright only by an effort of will. Motley had proved himself more than equal to individual incubi but against so many, in the darkness of their own holy place, they would quickly drag him down too.

‘Speeded by wings of desperation a plan does occur to me,’ Motley said quickly, ‘but I shall require a moment I doubt these eager young gentlemen will grant us.’

‘Then I suggest using the same ruse that you used against the gloomwings,’ Morr said somewhat reluctantly.

‘Ah! Good plan! Yes! Now!’

Motley hurled a photonic flare that split the stygian vault with a blazing white thunderbolt. Even through closed eyes purple spots danced in his vision, for the armoured incubi the effect was multiplied a thousandfold. With their senses unexpectedly blasted by their cornered prey the iron ring of incubi staggered and broke for a moment. Mustering a supreme effort, Morr leapt among them with his deadly klaive lashing right and left with all the fury of a wounded tiger. In the confusion klaives swung so wildly that some of the incubi wounded one another.

Meanwhile Motley cast a small silver spindle into the air that hung in place and spun around its axis emitting a trilling whine. The Harlequin sang desperately, pitching his tones within the shrill warbling of the spindle. A swirling purple teardrop wavered into focus beneath it and expanded rapidly like a slit pupil opening. Morr charged through the open gate without bidding with a dozen vengeful klaives at his back. Motley gave a jaunty wave and slipped through just before retribution arrived, the gate closing instantly behind him with an audible snap.

Morr awaited the Harlequin on the other side, leaning heavily on his klaive with a look of horror on his pallid face as he gazed about him. They stood among picturesque ruins, elegant pillars and porticos of undoubtedly eldar design that were overgrown with moss and briars. Fragments of statues lay underfoot, and the cracked flagstones sprouted with dry, coarse grass. The genteel-looking decay was illusory, and came to an abrupt halt at a cliff edge a hundred metres away in each direction. Beyond that torn islands of rock, some the size of continents, whirled and somersaulted through a pulsating, multi-coloured sky.

‘Is this…?’ Morr seemed unable bring himself to ask the question.

‘Lileathanir?’ Motley said. ‘Thankfully no, not yet anyway. Relax, we should be safe here for the moment.’

Morr sagged, seating himself on a fallen stone with his klaive across his knees. The incubus truly looked old now, worn out. Motley decided it might be best to give him a moment to collect himself before journeying onward. Morr gazed down at the shattered face of a statue curiously, its single eye gazed blankly back at him.

‘What is this place if it is not the maiden world?’ the incubus asked.

‘This was Ashnerryl’ti, just an outpost of the old empire before the Fall. A garden world, really, a retreat of sorts or so I’m led to believe, but a populous enough one to call down its own doom when She Who Thirsts awoke. It was caught on the peripheries of the great upheaval – touched by the trailing edge of Her cloak, as it were, and pulled beyond the veil. It was enough to shatter Ashnerryl’ti into a thousand pieces and irrevocably alter every single one of its inhabitants – in point of fact we’re standing on what remains of some of them right now. They were all quite literally petrified by the sight of Her awful majesty, or so the story goes.’

Morr gazed at the tumbling sky for a moment and then at the ruins some more. He stood suddenly.

‘Why did you bring me here?’ the incubus asked with a strange edge to his voice.

‘I didn’t choose it,’ Motley replied defensively. ‘It was the easiest place to reach in a hurry where I knew we would be safe. Few know how to find this place, and even fewer choose to come here.’

‘Then who are they?’ Morr said, pointing.

Five figures in sapphire armour of a design vaguely reminiscent of the incubi were emerging from hiding behind the ruins around them. Motley recognised them instantly as craftworld Aspect Warriors of the Dire Avengers shrine. These warriors seemed slighter than incubi, well-proportioned and heroic-looking, like animated statues. Their full-faced helms were adorned with tall crests marked in alternating bands of blue, white and yellow. They carried long-necked shuriken catapults that they kept levelled at Morr and Motley at all times.

A sixth figure emerged from the ruins, this one swathed in rune-covered robes and with its head enclosed by a bulbous, insect-like helm that was affixed with antlers of wraithbone. The warlock, for such it was, bore a witchblade that was as tall as himself. It seemed a curiously delicate-looking, academic weapon in comparison to Morr’s brutal klaive.

‘A curious sight,’ the robed figure said equably, ‘to find entertainer and murderer travelling as boon companions together.’

Morr laughed mordantly. ‘“Murderer”? Come closer, little seer, and I’ll add another to my tally. In your case it would be my pleasure.’

Motley stepped quickly to interpose himself between the warlock and the injured incubus. ‘What brings you here, fellow travellers?’ the Harlequin asked brightly. ‘This is a secluded, not to say delicate, spot. I hope everyone can be relied upon to behave themselves. Why don’t we introduce ourselves, my angry friend here is Morr, you can call me Motley – now what should I should call you?’

‘My name is Caraeis, I tread the Path of the Seer,’ the warlock said reasonably. ‘We have come for your companion, he is to be taken before the council of seers and punished for his crimes.’

‘Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself there, Caraeis?’ Motley asked acidly. ‘Surely there’d be all that trial and judgement stuff first, an opportunity to answer the accusation thrown in there somewhere, evidence, impartiality and suchlike and so forth before we arrive at any talk of punishment?’

‘This is none of your affair unless you would fight against us on his behalf,’ the warlock said with a trace of irritation in his voice. ‘If that is the case I’ll have to regretfully order the Avengers to cut you down where you stand.’ Motley noticed that his words provoked the slightest of head twitches from the Dire Avenger exarch leading the squad of Aspect Warriors. She evidently disapproved of the warlock’s actions in some way.

‘I would rather see the best possible outcome for everyone involved,’ Motley replied carefully. ‘At this very moment we are on our way to Lileathanir to attempt to rectify matters, you’d be welcome to accompany us.’

‘So you do admit the culpability of your companion after all,’ Caraeis said with some relish. ‘Under the circumstances I think you had best accompany us to the council too, so that you can fully explain yourself and your role in the affair on Lileathanir.’

‘Explain myself? I am no more beholden to your council of seers than my dear friend Morr is,’ Motley responded with some heat. ‘By what right do you claim to order us around like captives? Are we your captives, do you think?’

The slight Harlequin stepped closer to the warlock, seeing how the robed battle-seer flinched ever so slightly as he did so. This one was full of fear and ambition, a nasty combination. Two of the Dire Avengers pointedly swivelled their shuriken catapults to cover Motley while the other three remained locked unwaveringly onto Morr. Motley stepped back again with open hands and a wide grin to show he meant no harm.

‘The incubus is my prisoner,’ the warlock said smugly. ‘If you wish to remain with him you must also become my prisoner.’

‘Motley,’ Morr said quietly, ‘this is not your battle, none of it has been your battle from the moment we met. Now it is time to leave me to my fate.’

Motley turned to look up at the unmasked face of the incubus now standing close behind him with his klaive in his hands. Morr’s lank, pale hair had fallen forward to hide his features but the fierce, mad gleam of his eyes still glittered between the strands. Motley could see a taste for self-destruction burning there, the exultation of slaughter to come even if it was his own.

The Dire Avengers could cut Morr down before he took a single step, the warlock could boil the incubus’s brain inside his thick skull just by looking at him – but Morr still wanted to fight them. The incubus must be seeing this as his reprieve, a chance to go out fighting against a properly hated foe instead of the brotherhood of his shrine.

‘I cannot do that, Morr, as much as you’d like me to. Not while there’s still the faintest shred of hope left,’ Motley said heavily, ‘and I am truly sorry for this. I only hope you can forgive me for it later.’

Motley snapped his leg up and out so fast that even the Aspect Warriors didn’t have time to react. A perfectly executed nerve-kick to Morr’s temple dropped the towering incubus like a felled tree – a slight sway and then a gathering rush before he crashed to the ground.

Motley turned back to the warlock with a heavy sigh. ‘There, now you can’t “accidentally” kill my friend while apprehending him. I think I will come along with you, just to make sure everything stays nice and friendly.’

The warlock inclined his bulbous helm sardonically, seemingly well pleased by the outcome. The Dire Avengers came forward warily, three covering the fallen warrior as one of their number brought out a set of heavy manacles. The Dire Avenger exarch was watching Motley with her beautifully crafted star thrower held at ease in what was probably intended to be interpreted as a conciliatory gesture.

‘You have not spoken of the craftworld you hail from,’ Motley remarked. ‘Where do we have the honour of travelling to?’

‘Biel-Tan,’ the exarch said before the warlock could intercede and stop her. The warlock glared at the exarch and Motley sensed some silent exchange was taking place between the two.

‘Ah, that explains a lot,’ Motley interrupted. ‘As I recall Biel-Tan claims jurisdiction over a great many maiden worlds.’

‘They are the future of our race,’ the warlock said sharply.

‘Not to mention excellent recruiting grounds for Biel-Tan’s efforts to reforge the old empire,’ Motley remarked impertinently. ‘Lots of eager young Exodites ready to fight and die for a great cause with the right grooming. You should be careful, Caraeis – your bias is showing.’

The amber lenses of the warlock’s bulbous helm regarded the Harlequin silently for a moment before the seer turned and stalked away. Motley looked back to the exarch and her squad. Her warriors had shackled Morr’s arms behind his back and strapped him to a collapsible bier that floated a half-metre above the ground. The Dire Avengers had evidently come prepared to take a living prisoner and transport him back, which Motley took to be an encouraging sign in some regards. To Motley’s relief the Aspect Warriors also retrieved Morr’s klaive and strapped it onto the bier alongside the thoroughly restrained incubus.

‘We would have taken him alive,’ the exarch told Motley. ‘There was no need for you interfere.’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt that a group of finely honed Aspect Warriors like yourselves would have executed the plan perfectly,’ Motley replied with a frown. ‘It’s your warlock friend over there that I’m concerned about.’

The warlock had moved off among the ruins to an intact arch of pale lavender stone. He stood facing it for a considerable time, muttering and making passes through the air with his hands. Eventually a sheen of silver drifted into being inside the arch, wavered and then strengthened into a rippling veil. Motley noted with dismay that blue and green threads coiled within the veil – even here the Dysjunction could be felt. Its effects were flooding the entire webway. The four Aspect Warriors took up positions at each corner of the bier carrying Morr. With the exarch leading they began guiding the bier to the gate. The warlock held up a hand to stop them as they approached.

‘There is a disturbance in the webway,’ the warlock said. ‘A direct link is impossible. I must make a rune casting to divine our best path forward.’

‘Well yes, that would be entirely the issue wouldn’t it?’ Motley snorted derisively. ‘The disturbance will only get worse the longer that we stay away from Lileathanir.’

The warlock ignored him, concentrating fully on bringing forth tiny wraithbone runes from his satchel with quick, practised movements. He placed each into a growing, spinning array suspended in the air before him.

The correct interpretation of rune casting is a nuanced art form that takes quite literally a lifetime to master, as evinced by the craftworld eldar in their Path of the Seer. Eldar runes embody symbolic concepts deeply rooted in ancient mythology and philosophical schools of thought that were already old when the eldar race was young. Runecasting came down fundamentally to interpreting the alignment of the psycho-active wraithbone runes when they were set ‘adrift in the ether’ to reproduce in microcosm an idea of the emergent patterns in the macrocosm.

It took no special expertise to see that the warlock’s reading was erratic, the broken orrery of runes twisting around one another chaotically. The warlock flinched as two of the runes actually touched, the resultant discharge of psychic energy blasting them apart with a crackle of static. Both runes dropped to the ground charred and smoking.

‘Not that way, I’m thinking,’ Motley suggested helpfully. The warlock only emitted a low growl in response before focusing his concentration back onto the rune casting. The wheeling runes slowed a little, re-aligned and several of them reversed direction. The warlock kept reaching into his satchel and pulling out more runes as if trying to balance the casting. Motley tried to make sense of the runes being shown to him.

There was the rune for Anarchy/Disorder/Entropy most prominent orbiting at the outermost reach of the casting, encompassing everything within it. To Motley’s mind that could only represent the Dysjunction in this case, its erratic influence affecting all the other elements. His eye was drawn to the rune of weaving as it looped back and forth within the orbit of the Dysjunction, seeming to shepherd the other runes before it. It fluttered unnaturally between the jagged, scimitar-like rune of the dark kin and the serpent-like rune of the world spirit as they swung through perilously close gyrations. It sped around the dire portent of the soul-drinker rotating around the bottom of casting, and encompassed salvation orbiting the top. Numerous lesser runes wove back and forth between the major ones: the sun, the moon, the scorpion, the devoured and more. At times the rune of weaving darted between them all.

‘You know I could always lead you to Biel-Tan if you like,’ Motley said hurriedly. ‘No one knows their paths through the webway better than me, well nothing mortal anyway.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ the warlock announced sharply. ‘I see the way forward clearly enough.’

Motley pursed his lips uncertainly, darting a quick look at the exarch. She stood as still and imperturbable as a statue, her tall crested helm turned to the gate. Aspect Warriors, Motley lamented to himself, were always so hard to read. Caraeis was retrieving his runes now, capturing them one by one and returning them to his satchel. The moment he had the last rune secured the warlock unsheathed his witchblade and stepped through the gate. The exarch followed, then the bier carrying Morr and its four attendant Aspect Warriors.

Motley hurried to follow as it really wouldn’t do to lose them now. As he passed the spot where Caraeis had performed his rune casting he saw the two blackened, twisted runes that had struck one another were still lying ground untouched and abandoned by the warlock. They were damaged but still recognisable before they crumbled to dust when Motley tried to touch them. They were the rune of the Seer and the rune of the Laughing God or, to put it more commonly, the runes used to represent the warlock and the Harlequin.

‘Oh dear,’ Motley muttered to himself as he stepped quickly through gate at the heels of the Aspect Warriors. If he could read those runes then Caraeis had most certainly seen them too. That didn’t bode well at all.

‘Turn around very slowly,’ Bezieth said.

Kharbyr did as he was told, turning slowly to find Bezieth’s djin-blade levelled at his throat. Somehow she had got right behind him, crept up through the loganiaceae shrubs without a sound while he was watching Xagor coming down the path. The tip of her blade was vibrating with a high, keening whine, as if it wanted to lunge forward of its own volition. Kharbyr’s mouth was suddenly very dry. He was dead, he’d seen Bezieth of the Hundred Scars fight and she could carve a gutter-rat like him into pieces one-on-one without even breaking a sweat. Xagor whimpered pathetically behind him, making Kharbyr reflect grimly that he could expect no help from the wrack either.

‘You had better have a more detailed plan in mind than “run away into the park”,’ Bezieth said eventually and lowered her blade. Kharbyr experienced a giddy rush of relief.

‘You’re not taking us back to Naxipael?’ he blurted in disbelief.

‘Or killing you,’ the archon reminded him pointedly, ‘even though you’ve already shown yourself to be faithless and untrustworthy. You’re lucky you have a useful friend to speak up on your behalf.’

Kharbyr glanced back at Xagor, who was nodding emphatically. ‘Don’t look at him!’ Bezieth snapped. ‘Look at me! That’s better. Now, tell me all about your genius plan to get out of this.’

‘By going down, not up. Down to Null City,’ Kharbyr said reluctantly. ‘The xenos and mercs down in Null City will be pulling together at a time like this, not pulling apart at the seams like they are in High Commorragh. I know people that’ll help,’ he ended weakly. It didn’t sound like such a good plan anymore, not with Bezieth’s eyes boring into his as she searched for any hint of evasion. He felt particularly weak and stupid beneath that pitiless gaze.

‘And just how were you planning to get there?’ Bezieth asked impatiently.

‘I was going to find some transport and use the… travel tubes,’ Kharbyr replied, even as the words left his mouth he knew that he had probably just signed his own death warrant. Anything capable of moving under its own power would be long gone from Hy’kran and probably everywhere else within a hundred leagues by now. The tubes would be blocked by debris and who-knows-what crawling out of the pits to join the fun. It was a weak plan, doomed to failure before it even began. Bezieth held his gaze for a long, painful moment before she spoke again.

‘Not bad, but your chances of finding transport just lying around rest somewhere between slim and none. We’ll have to steal it or do without.’

Kharbyr grinned stupidly. ‘You want to go with my plan? What about Naxipael?’

‘Naxipael will most likely get shot the moment he tries to set foot in Sorrow Fell. They won’t be taking in any waifs and strays up there,’ Bezieth said carelessly. ‘If I ever see him again I’ll claim we got separated in the park and I couldn’t find my back to him. Believe me he won’t push the point – especially if no one is stupid enough to try and contradict me.’

Kharbyr glanced at Xagor again despite himself. The wrack merely shrugged helplessly. He was right, it didn’t matter what reasons Bezieth had for splitting with Naxipael – it wasn’t like they had a choice whether she came along or not. Besides, her sword arm and that nasty blade of hers would be a real boon if they ran into trouble again. Bezieth seemed to be amused by watching him working it all out.

‘Listen. It’s Kharbyr, isn’t it?’ she said reasonably. ‘Listen, Kharbyr, and I’ll tell you the same thing I told your friend. In every crisis there’s opportunity, you just have to make sure you survive the crisis for long enough to take advantage of it. I intend to survive this crisis and personally I rate Naxipael’s chances of surviving as being significantly worse than my own. That assessment extends to the people with him. Don’t you agree?’

‘This one agrees, mistress!’ Xagor squawked obediently.

‘As does this one,’ Kharbyr assented.

‘Good, because by extension the people that stay with me have a better chance of survival too. Now let’s get going, you first Kharbyr – and try not to get distracted.’

Archon Yllithian exuded confidence as he unhurriedly mounted a set of low, wide steps that swept up to the doors to the grand auditorium in Corespur. He took note of the host of greater archons assembled there also awaiting audience with the supreme overlord. They were strung out along the steps in cliques and clumps, the leaders of the most powerful kabals in Commorragh standing around waiting at the overlord’s door for their instructions like expectant slaves. Many he recognised, some he acknowledged with a nod, others he greeted warmly or pointedly ignored.

Fear lurked behind every face. It was masked by bravado or pugnacity or humour or boredom, but fear hid behind the hard, black eyes of every archon present. The assembled host were the ones who stood to lose the most in the Dysjunction. They had unleashed unspeakable terrors on the slave-races across the galaxy, revelled in inflicting exquisite pain and suffering for centuries beyond numbering yet now they were the ones in fear. Anarchy had broken upon their own strongholds and they found it had an entirely different timbre when it was raging so close to home. Yllithian recognised the fact that there were no archons present from the satellite realms, presumably because the portals were still too unstable to find them. More pointedly every archon present was either from Sorrow Fell or one of the upper tiers, a fact which did not bode at all well for the status of Low Commorragh.

Yllithian came to an individual that he recognised, but not one that he acknowledged as a great archon. His surprise caused him to pause for a moment. The lithe succubus Aez’ashya stood before him, looking magnificent in skin-tight flex-metal and bladed shoulder guards that spread fans of knives at her back. Yllithian recalled that this erstwhile archon that had been propelled into leadership of the Blades of Desire after the fall of his ally, Xelian.

Yllithian had distinctly mixed feelings about Aez’ashya. She was trueborn but of inferior stock without a trace of noble blood. She had unwittingly become El’Uriaq’s catspaw when he had decided to rid himself of Xelian and now she was left a puppet without a puppet master. He wondered how she was managing to maintain her control over the notoriously fickle Blades of Desire. Yllithian smiled and addressed her warmly.

‘Why if it isn’t Aez’ashya. What an unexpected surprise to find you here,’ Yllithian said with mocking gallantry. ‘I am delighted to find you weathering these difficult times so well – a true test of leadership even for experienced hands like mine.’

‘The pleasure is mutual, Yllithian,’ Aez’ashya purred. ‘It seems so little time since I was undertaking missions on behalf of Archon Xelian, and by extension her close allies like Archon Kraillach and your good self, of course. Missions of the most delicate nature, or so it seemed at the time. Now I send my own minions to do my work for me.’

Yllithian smiled with his lips but not with his eyes. She was warning him in subtle terms not to push too far. What Aez’ashya had witnessed in the accursed halls of Shaa-dom was enough to damn Yllithian five times over if she brought it before the supreme overlord. It felt oddly refreshing to be on the receiving end of blackmail for once. Of course such a revelation would bring doom on Aez’ashya too – entry to Shaa-dom was forbidden on pain of death, so it was a case of mutually assured destruction.

‘Quite so, it must all seem so very new to you now. This will be your first meeting with Asdrubael Vect in person, will it not?’ he chuckled. ‘Given the circumstances he will be in rare form today, you’re in for a treat.’

‘Speaking of rare form I had heard rumour that you had fallen prey to a wasting disease, but I confess you look better than ever. Even a little younger perhaps.’

‘Too kind, too kind,’ Yllithian replied smoothly. ‘It’s truly a wonder what the haemonculi can achieve when all seems lost. I still await the return of my dear friend Xelian with an almost breathless anticipation.’

‘Oh? I had hoped to ask you if there had been word on Xelian’s whereabouts. I’m told that her most dedicated hekatrix stole away her corpse before it could be tended to. No sign has been discovered of it since, personally I fear that the noble Xelian may be lost forever.’

‘I have indeed heard such tales being told.’ Yllithian smiled again, sympathetically this time. ‘But I have complete faith in Xelian’s unconquerable spirit. That she will be found, in some form, is not a subject of doubt in my mind.’

‘Perhaps you’re right. All natural laws are turned on their head at present, so why not in this matter also I–’

A hideous crash of cymbals and screech of horns abruptly rent the air, rendering any further verbal sparring impossible rather to Yllithian’s regret. At the top of the steps two vast, engraved doors were grinding inward to reveal a dark space beyond that was broken occasionally by an ominous, flickering light. One by one the great archons turned and walked inside in answer to the summons. The supreme overlord was ready to receive them now.

INTERLUDE

We become such slaves to continuity, insisting that we receive our portions of beginning, middle and end dished up to us in our trencher in order to feel that our repast has substantive significance. A story most particularly is expected to slide from gate to gate with the orderly precision of public transport. All aboard… on your left you’ll see… on your right you’ll see… and so on until the end of the line, please ensure you take all belongings with you when exiting the vehicle.

Of all the mortal constructs this one is perhaps the most pernicious. Our efforts to impose structure mean that things have to have a beginning, a middle and an end, that they must unroll with visible cause and effect, not to mention a sprinkling of moral lessons and insightful observation along the way. Our existence is spent crafting our own stories into a suitable lifetime, categorising every experience to fit them into self-imposed contexts, trying to write ourselves towards an ending that we don’t really want to reach.

Reality is not like this. Reality is spontaneous and unknowable, chaotic, abrupt, wonderful, terrible and most of all unpredictable. The sad truth is Things Just Happen. Plans go awry, unforeseen elements prove pivotal and unrelated events combine in the most unexpected ways.

That is to say unexpected to some at any rate. There are powers in the universe that see all possibilities and endlessly try to shift the balance towards their own ends: a nudge here, a push there and all will be as they desire it. Little do they know that powers above them also nudge and push them in turn.

It’s said that when mortals try to plan that the gods laugh. Thus we come to where we are now. Morr and Motley both frustrated in their efforts by an unexpected third party, the world spirit still bent upon revenge against Commorragh, the inhabitants of the dark city struggling and failing to survive (and, in some cases, prosper) in a catastrophe unleashed by powers beyond their reckoning. Events still continue to spiral out of control, creating more debris as they fall into anarchy. Is there still hope for a gratifying resolution and perhaps a moral lesson or two? It’s difficult to say at this juncture. Time is most certainly running out.

CHAPTER 17

TRANSITION

Motley emerged into an all-too-familiar landscape. Bleached dunes of dust lay all about them lit by a single, lonely-looking sun that was little more than a chilly red disk hanging high overhead. The air was bitterly cold and infected with an unpleasant acidic tang that invaded through the nostrils and sat on the back of the tongue. It was familiar as a generality rather than as a specific, hundreds of worlds bearing gates to the webway were virtually identical to this one – blasted wastelands devoid of all life. Motley looked back to see that they had emerged from a five metre tall wraithbone arch protruding incongruously from the face of a dust dune. The warlock, Caraeis, was leading the squad of Dire Avengers and the bier carrying Morr away across the dunes on an arrow straight course presumably towards another gate.

The warlock was playing it safe, taking the long way around by moving from planet to planet to keep their journey outside the webway as much as possible. Motley felt his lip curl involuntarily a little. Time was of the essence yet Caraeis was acting as if he could take all the time in the world. An unwelcome thought that had already been lurking at the edge of Motley’s mind settled into a fully-developed suspicion. He fished a small object from his sleeve, a thin oblong of crystal embossed with stylised masks that laughed and cried. He surreptitiously breathed on it once, polished it and then flipped it back through the gateway where it vanished like a puff of smoke.

The Harlequin turned and ran lightly after the Aspect Warriors until he caught up with them. Morr was conscious now, glaring silently at Motley as he passed. Motley liked to think there was more despair in the look than hatred, and he gave Morr an encouraging grin and wink anyway. He was most certainly going to need the towering incubus’s support soon. Caraeis was already vanishing down the opposite slope of a dust dune, sending tiny avalanches downward with each footfall. Motley called out to him.

‘Caraeis? I’m still not really sure about your direction here. Are you intending to take us all the way around the Great Wheel just to get back to Biel-Tan?’

‘You well know the webway is too unstable to risk traversing long sections of it at present,’ the warlock replied testily. ‘Your disregard for your own safety and that of others does you no credit.’

‘The safety of “others” is actually at the foremost in my mind,’ Motley said brightly, ‘probably more so than yours. The difference lies in who those “others” are. From your outlook you would regard two thirds of our race as not being worth taking any risks for.’

Caraeis stopped to face him evidently needled by Motley’s implication. ‘Pure hyperbole,’ the warlock said. ‘You would accuse me of caring nothing for the Exodites – that is untrue.’

‘Oh, so just one third are disposable then? Who set you up as judge, Caraeis?’ Motley asked in outrage. ‘Of course the webway is a little unstable – that’s because Commorragh is in the process of being broken apart! Meanwhile you delay and prevaricate to do your best to ensure that the process is completed!’

The warlock did not even trouble to deny the accusation. ‘It’s true I would not risk a single life to see the dark city continue,’ he said. ‘The foul perversion of Commorragh has gone on too long already, I would rejoice to see it ended in my lifetime.’

‘And so you would sacrifice Lileathanir too?’ Motley mocked. ‘Because that’s what Commorragh will take with it at the very least. More likely is that the entire webway finally unravels, and our race is left stranded, scattered through the stars as we finally fade away into nothing.

‘You want to know something interesting, Caraeis? Commorrites refer to themselves as “true eldar”. The way they see things they have continuity with the pre-Fall days that neither the craftworlds or the Exodites can lay claim to. If you really want to reforge the empire you should ask the dark kin, they’re the ones that really remember it.’

Motley was acutely aware of the Dire Avengers, and especially their exarch, standing stock still behind him. The sort of accusations the Harlequin was cheerfully throwing at Caraeis verged on blasphemy in polite craftworld society. They were deadly insults for one on the Path of the Warrior and a matter to be settled by open conflict if honour was to be maintained. The Harlequin was gambling that the Aspect Warriors would not leap to the warlock’s defence because they already suspected his motives in some fashion. The internal conflict that was evident between Caraeis and the Dire Avengers was only going to be intensified the more they saw him failing to live up to their standards.

‘Does he speak the truth, Caraeis?’ the exarch said. ‘Is there a risk to the webway as a whole?’

‘No,’ the warlock snapped irritably. ‘Again hyperbole and exaggeration, the current… ah… flexing will rectify itself with time.’

‘You mean you hope it will!’ exclaimed Motley. ‘You can’t know that’s true!’

‘Wiser minds than mine have studied the problem,’ Caraeis said more evenly, ‘and I agree with their conclusions.’

‘What a shame these august authorities aren’t on hand to support your claims,’ Motley remarked acidly. ‘I, on the other hand, speak from considerable personal experience. I can take you straight to Lileathanir right now if you’ll just let–’

‘Your life of… vagrancy and your foolish doom-saying do not make you an authority on anything!’ Caraeis thundered in response, he caught himself and checked his anger before continuing shakily. ‘Our actions have been planned and foreseen, directed by the highest minds towards a path most conducive to the continued existence of our craftworld. You act only to provoke me and waste the time you claim is so precious in pointless argument. I will hear no more of this.’

With that Caraeis turned and stalked away down the dune. After a moment of hesitation the Dire Avengers followed him with their prisoner still in their midst. Motley followed and attempted to provoke the warlock further with a few more choice observations but got no response. Caraeis was right that Motley was trying to delay him. It was, however, a far from pointless exercise. Another tall wraithbone arch was coming into view atop the next dune. Motley hoped he had bought enough time for his message to get through.

Kharbyr soon abandoned the idea of stealing transportation; the place seemed a city of ghosts. As they moved coreward the parkland quickly gave way to tightly packed slave quarters that had encroached into the manicured lawns and hidden arbours. The narrow, crooked streets were barely shoulder wide in places to give protection against marauding gangs of hellions and reavers. Scourges were usually to be found in the uppermost and outermost parts of the city, but packs of wild riders of skyboards and jetbikes were a peril just about anywhere. They saw it as a personal challenge to take their machines through the tightest streets, down inaccessible pipes and along the faces of the spires themselves when they took a mind to. Wires and chains were strung between the overhanging eaves of the slave quarters so that even riders wild enough to try their luck in the twisting streets would soon catch a swift death instead.

It hadn’t saved the inhabitants. Dead slaves lay everywhere, sprawled in doorways, piled in the streets in an untidy mixture of races and sexes. They had all been cut down by splinter fire from above, probably a Raider full of warriors moving above the rooftops. Plentiful pockmarks and puncture holes in the flimsily constructed buildings showed that the slaves that had tried to remain inside hadn’t fared any better than the ones that tried to run.

‘Why kill them all like this?’ he asked Bezieth.

‘You’re a pretty little idiot aren’t you, Kharbyr?’ she told him. ‘The answer’s as plain as the nose on your face. Think. Why execute the slaves?’

‘Well the old joke is because they’re revolting,’ Kharbyr said in confusion, ‘but these don’t have any weapons so they didn’t plan it very well.’

‘Seriously? Look above your head, boy!’ Bezieth snarled in exasperation. Kharbyr looked up without thinking, up through the narrow gap between the buildings to where vivid, ugly colours were being visibly plastered across the sky from moment to moment. The sight wrenched at the soul, as if he were seeing the bones of creation were being laid bare in all their base simplicity. What was worse was the feeling that he was also seeing familiar reality being rewritten into new and alien forms before his very eyes. He looked away stifling a curse.

‘All it takes is one of these idiots to think he’s seen god or salvation or his great, hirsute, uncle Uggi up there and we could have a whole new problem on our hands. Belief, desire, worship – the daemons would be feeding on it like a swarm of locusts,’ Bezieth explained heavily. ‘Not the smartest move leaving a heap of potential meat-puppets like this, but I imagine whoever did it came through here in a hurry.’

Bezieth noticed that Xagor was looking back curiously in the direction they had come from, even though the black, narrow street seemed empty save for the dead. ‘What is it, Xagor?’ she snapped. The wrack jumped reflexively in response.

‘Sounds, quiet sounds!’ Xagor babbled. ‘Gone now, but whisper-quiet!’

Bezieth frowned and looked back along the street too. Still nothing moved and nothing could be heard above the distant roar of infernal winds. She looked to Kharbyr who returned her gaze with a shrug before circling his temple with one finger to indicate his judgement on Xagor’s sanity.

‘Well there’s nothing there now, keep moving and stay alert,’ Bezieth said with more certainty than she felt.

A few hundred metres away, hidden by a trellis of climbing rose in an artfully-placed gazebo Cho studied the input of her twitching sensor vanes and needle-fine probes with some confusion. The trace to the target had been present, a strong trail existed and was developing moment by moment, and yet the target itself was not present. No comparable scenarios existed within Cho’s frame of reference and it was making the data extremely difficult to analyse.

On one logic path she had now followed the trace to its termination point and not found the target she was looking for. Therefore she must turn around and rejoin Vhi to investigate his trace, and so in effect cede defeat. Another logic path took into account the additional factor that the trace was still developing, the psychic spoor appearing in the ether like oil spontaneously appearing in water. Pursuit of this ongoing development might yet lead to the target, and the contest with Vhi would remain in contention.

Taking both logic strands and twisting them together produced two potential conclusions. In the first the target was present but using an unknown technique to mask its exact whereabouts. The technique did not eliminate the spoor entirely but rendered the target, in effect, invisible to Cho. In the second a form of decoy was being used to lay false trails. Both conclusions had precedent, although neither equated exactly to the phenomena being demonstrated in this precise example. Cho fluttered her sensor spines in something akin to frustration.

Attacking a decoy would undoubtedly compromise her chances of success by forewarning the real target. Such a scenario even held the potential of incurring the level of structural damage that could critically impair Cho’s functionality. This outcome held a strong negative reinforcement, elimination of the target superceded all self-preservation considerations but that only applied once the target was positively acquired. In other words Cho was quite ready to get hurt and possibly die, but not against the wrong target. This was the kind of logic that Vhi seemed to interpret as a form of cowardice.

The other engine was undoubtedly taking the most direct and bloody route possible in his pursuit of the target. That was simply the way they had been made: Vhi for speed and strength, Cho for agility and cleverness. Part of Cho was being constantly distracted by not having her companion engine close at hand, missing its brainless certainty and the enhancement of their collective capabilities when they were together.

Correct psychic parameters or not Cho could still detect four living minds moving together through the park and generating the correct psychic trace as they went. Logic dictated that they had strong probability of connection to the target even if they were only being used as decoys. Cho concluded that patient stalking/hunting protocols might reveal more information. If necessary a direct attack strategy could be used to force a decision later, but only once Cho could determine whether that was liable to drive the target into the open or deeper under cover.

The sleek machine-form of Cho rose up on whisper-quiet impellers and slid forward on the trail of the lifeforms with all the focused intensity of a stalking panther.

The light leaking into the auditorium through its high windows was awful to look upon. Livid, angry colours swirled within it; bruised purples, sullen reds, diseased yellows, poisonous blues and nauseous greens fought to overwhelm the eye and baffle the mind. Its brightness jumped and leapt capriciously from moment to moment. Periodically an all-enshrouding gloom would fill the great hall in defiance of its many lamps. In the next moment retina-burning flashes sent grotesque shadows darting across its trembling flagstones from the forest of chains hanging down from above. Each chain bore a body that had been hung up like freshly killed meat, although many of them still quivered or twisted in silent agony.

Yllithian took his place amid the assembled archons ranging themselves in a half-moon before the steps to Vect’s throne. The dais itself was raised, appearing as a cylinder of metal extending up to the ceiling like a thick-bodied pillar. Moments passed in uncomfortable silence with only the crackle of distant thunder for accompaniment as the archons waited. The tramp of armoured feet came to their ears as Black Heart kabalite warriors filed into the auditorium and took up positions around the dais and along the walls. A number of Vect’s courtiers and playthings swept in to arrange themselves decoratively on the dais steps before, as a final touch, a troupe of trained slaves were lined up to sing an interlude passage of the Rhanas Dreay – the coming of the Overlord.

As the slaves’ voices reached a crescendo of pain the dais slid downwards as smoothly as a piston until it became level with the steps. A hemispherical shield of entropic energy atop the dais swirled and dissipated to reveal a throne. The throne was a dark, ugly thing of sharp angles and gleaming blades. It was an artefact that looked savage and unworthy of the elegance of true eldar culture – meaning that it was a statement of intent for those wise enough to read it. It squatted on the dais with an undisguised malevolence that well suited its occupant. The Supreme Overlord of Commorragh gazed down from his bladed throne and favoured each of the assembled greater archons with a lingering look.

Vect’s milk-white skin was as smooth and unlined as a child’s yet his void-black eyes glowed with millennias-old hatred and unimaginably devious intelligence. The proud archons met the supreme overlord’s gaze without flinching (as they knew they must or die), but not one of them did not tremble a little inside. Vect’s sharp-featured face was normally redolent of the uncounted centuries of unbridled wickedness he had inflicted on others for his own pleasure. The supreme overlord normally projected amusement, or self-satisfaction or insufferable confidence by turns. Now his mouth was drawn into a bitter scowl.

‘My poor, beautiful city,’ said Asdrubael Vect at last, his rich voice sonorous with melancholy. ‘Why is it that everyone conspires to destroy it?’

The cracked black expanse of the auditorium shivered again and flakes of the artfully decorated ceiling fluttered down like baroque snow. The archons stood silent and waited, none of them fool enough to try and answer. The Supreme Overlord of Commorragh stepped down from his throne and began to walk slowly around the vast hall.

All about him, above him and behind him bodies swung on chains suspended from the ceiling. Most were still alive, but they hung silently in their agonies. Their screams had been paralyzed along with their vocal cords at Vect’s command when he tired of their repetitious and entirely pointless pleas for mercy.

The great tyrant paused before one of his ‘guests’ that was hanging head down and covered in gore. This had once been Archon Gharax of the Kabal of the Crimson Blossom. Like the others he had been the ambitious leader of a minor kabal possessing only a few handfuls of warriors until a few hours ago. Now he was reduced to an example, part of a display created by Vect to impress upon the greater archons the true gravity of the situation. Vect ran a long-nailed finger through the dangling strips of flesh his haemonculi had expertly flensed from the unfortunate archon’s frame.

Vect’s words were not truly directed at the ruin of flesh and bone hanging before him. Archon Gharax suffered on in induced silence. His eyes radiated pain and burning hatred for his supreme overlord. By all accounts Gharax had been completely loyal to Vect, or at least as completely loyal as any Commorrite archon could claim to be, but Vect did not care. Gharax’s puny handful of warriors had pledged their loyalty directly to him now. A time of Dysjunction was not one to allow the minnows to swim freely.

‘I’ve pondered this often down the ages, you know,’ Vect told Archon Gharax. ‘In fact I believe I can say that it is a topic that has occupied my attention beyond all others – and there are always so many, many other matters that demand my constant attention.’

Yllithian and the greater archons watched impassively as Vect paced onward through the grisly display. It was rare to see the great tyrant in the flesh, and rarer still to do so in the presence of so many other archons – hanging from chains or otherwise. Yllithian calculated that over a hundred archons were present in the chamber in one state or another. United they could easily kill Vect and finally free Commorragh from his wicked rulership and millennia-long oppression.

Yllithian had to repress a snort of derision at the thought. Out of all the fearless warriors present in that great chamber no one was about to risk making the first move. As ever, the archons watched one another and looked only for an opportunity to strike down their rivals instead of the insidious puppet master that controlled all their destinies.

It was enough to make one weep, or to laugh hysterically – another urge that Yllithian was forced to quell. Something told him that if he began laughing he wouldn’t be able to stop. Laughter without end until even the madness of the Laughing God seemed logical and sane. No one moved and no one spoke. Yllithian and the greater archons remained as silent as Vect’s hanging victims while they patiently awaited the supreme overlord’s command. A time of Dysjunction was no time to show weakness.

Finally Vect stalked back to his throne and sat before he spoke again. ‘Naturally I have summoned you all here to discuss the current Dysjunction. Such occurrences are not without precedent just as such occurrences do not occur without cause. Rest assured that those responsible for this attempt to destroy us all will be found and will be punished for their crimes. Upon this you can rely.’

The auditorium shook violently. From beyond its walls a thunderous cracking sound assailed the ears and the soul in equal measure. Vect paused and looked outward into the raging storm, a feat that few would dare to emulate. Yllithian thought he saw fear in the tyrant’s eyes. This ageless god of the eternal city could see the end of his rule written in the roiling energies outside. Yllithian suppressed an urge to flee, to hurl himself to the ground and cover his ears or, worse still, admit all and beg forgiveness.

He was the one responsible. His actions had brought about the Dysjunction – that he was sure of. His scheming with Xelian and Kraillach had unleashed the forces now battering remorselessly at Commorragh. Such bitter irony that a scheme to unseat Asdrubael Vect had now brought Yllithian to within striking distance of the tyrant himself. It was all irrelevant now. Xelian and Kraillach were already dead and gone, consumed by those same terrible forces leaving only Yllithian to bear the responsibility that Vect had so darkly alluded to.

If Vect were ever to divine Yllithian’s culpability in the cataclysm currently enfolding Commorragh it would be the end of him. The fate of the lesser archons would be a truly blessed release in comparison to the horrors that Vect would inflict upon Yllithian for his crimes. The fear in the pit of Yllithian’s stomach was a familiar one. He had plotted for long enough against Vect to weigh all the consequences. Even so, standing before the tyrant himself, with all his plans ruined and allies destroyed it was all Yllithian could do not to soil himself. Despite his fears Yllithian had to comport himself with the same aloofness as the other greater archons, each pretending they were careless about the current situation and its implications. To do any less would provoke the supreme overlord’s suspicions.

Asdrubael Vect drew in a sharp breath and continued.

‘For the present the city must be protected, a responsibility that I charge each and every one of you with from this moment forth.’

Vect stood again, his restlessness betraying an anxiety Yllithian would never have believed possible in the saturnine supreme overlord. As the tyrant strode through the hanging bodies again he seemed to draw new energy, his voice echoing unnaturally through the great space.

‘All incursions from beyond the veil must be eliminated! Open portals will be sealed! The possessed destroyed! Many of you will believe that this is an ideal time to settle old scores and eliminate your rivals – quite rightly so – however I warn you that if your games further imperil the city you will answer to me directly… and I also warn you that I am far from being in a forgiving mood.’

As if to underline Vect’s words another thunderous boom rattled the auditorium. The tyrant’s frown deepened into an angry grimace.

‘Enough talk. Go. Get out of my sight. Your districts of responsibility will be assigned to you,’ he spat. ‘Go and do what you must to save our home.’

The archons filed out in silence. Each was consumed with their own thoughts, no doubt planning how to feed each other to the raging entities loose in the city while remaining… well, innocent would be the wrong term… more like blameless. Yllithian eyed the others with interest as they broke into cliques en route to their own transports. Surreptitious glances and minute gestures indicated predator and prey to the practiced eye. In a time of Dysjunction all bets were off. All previous alliances were in ruins, old rivalries temporarily set aside and new accommodations made while the political landscape of Commorragh shifted as suddenly and as violently the city itself as the storms engulfed it. The thought rallied Yllithian immeasurably. His own plans might be in ruins but so were the plans of every other potential rival.

The ebon corridors around the auditorium were filling up with more functionaries, representatives and yet more Black Heart kabalites from all over the city. Yllithian reflected that Vect probably had many more groups to harangue and threaten into obedience over the next few hours. Mandrake nightfiends lurked in the shadows between silver sconces guttering with ghostly witchfire, incubi klaivex pushed past arguing helliarchs and syrens beneath arches of black opal, groups of haemonculi clustered together like colonies of bats displaying the seals of their different covens – the Hex, the Prophets of Flesh, the Dark Creed, the Black Descent.

Yllithian paused and looked at the Black Descent representative more closely. His white, glistening face was altered into a wide, permanent smile amid hanging jowls that twisted into a beard-like mass of purple tendrils at his chin. Black, ribbed robes concealed the haemonculus’s surprisingly corpulent body. A pointed demi-hood rose from the nape of his neck to frame his ugly visage. The creature caught Yllithian’s glance and turned to him seeming to smile, if it were possible, all the wider.

‘You’re here to represent the Black Descent to the supreme overlord,’ Yllithian declared.

‘I have that honour, archon,’ the haemonculus agreed slightly cautiously. The haemonculus took note of the White Flames icon on Yllithian’s armour and his eyes narrowed shrewdly. His permanent smile seemed a little strained for a moment.

‘Then we also have some mutual matters to discuss,’ Yllithian told him frankly.

‘You are… quite correct, Archon Yllithian,’ the haemonculus nodded. ‘We do have a great deal to discuss. Sadly I regret that this is neither the time nor the place to do so.’

‘Quite. Let it be known that I am amenable to a resolution that would satisfy all parties,’ Yllithian said nonchalantly as he turned and began to walk away, calling over his shoulder, ‘and do send me word of your intentions at your first convenience.’

Zykleiades, patriarch noctis of the Black Descent, watched silently as the White Flames archon moved away through the throng. The patriarch’s mind was still racing through all the implications of the seemingly chance encounter with Yllithian. Zykleiades was old even as haemonculus count their years, which is to say infrequently. He had grown to be old by being extremely cautious about the unexpected and examining new information from all angles before committing himself.

According to the reports he’d received from his underlings the renegade Bellathonis had already been dealt with, and yet here was the archon clearly implying that their mutual ‘problem’ was an ongoing one. That fact alone would be the source of some very great distress to those underlings later, and new plans would be needed to rectify the situation if it proved to be true.

Yllithian’s averred amiability for a resolution was a coded way of saying that he would be disposed to help the Black Descent to kill Bellathonis. That of itself was potentially helpful and yet extremely disturbing at the same time. It implied that Yllithian knew more than was entirely healthy, which in turn meant another death that would have to be arranged to completely cover the trail leading back to the Black Descent – the death of Yllithian himself. The archon of the White Flames was high profile and consummately well protected against such an undertaking so it would certainly be no easy matter to remove him.

Zykleiades shook his head in dismay at the timing of such a critical distraction. It could even be the case that Yllithian was setting up an elaborate ruse to implicate the Black Descent so that any action by them against him would serve to confirm the coven’s culpability in the Dysjunction. It could equally be the case that Yllithian was simply trying to throw the patriarch off his game in the hopes that he would blunder in front of Vect.

Cymbals crashed and horns blew to summon the waiting throng inside the auditorium. The patriarch tried to focus on clearing his mind of any trace of guilt or fear that could give him away when he stood before the supreme overlord. There were times when he simply couldn’t understand how the archons did it.

CHAPTER 18

CAUDOELITH AND OTHER CEMETERIES

The world beyond the next gate was dark as night and as tumultuous as a storm. Black tongues of vapour howled past driven by a relentless, battering wind. No sun or stars gleamed from above so Caraeis raised his witchblade and called forth a wan, bluish light from it to help them find their way. The landscape was made up of glittering, blackened rubble interspersed with twisted branches of silver thrust upward like fire-blasted trees. The previous world had been bitterly cold, this one was as hot and choking as a fever dream. The ground underfoot exuded an unhealthy heat as though fires were still burning deep inside the rubble. The gate they emerged from was blackened too, its silver-chased wraithbone overlaid with a patina of blasted carbon.

Motley genuinely recognised this place; he had travelled here before a long, long time ago. This was Caudoelith, sometimes jokingly called Vaul’s workshop – one of several worlds that had claim to that title before the Fall. Caudoelith was already a battleground before She Who Thirsts awoke with competing eldar factions fighting to secure the part-built craftworld the inhabitants were constructing for their escape from the imminent cataclysm. In one of the bitter morality plays that war is so apt to generate the unfinished craftworld was destroyed in the fighting, its blazing remnants tumbling down to spread ruin on the planet below. Few eldar had survived to be consumed by the very doom they had fought to escape.

The warlock and the Aspect Warriors advanced warily across the blasted landscape. No eldar on Caudoelith had survived the birth scream of She Who Thirsts, but in the subsequent centuries all manner of alien scavengers had tried to gain a foothold here. Wars had been fought not only by the eldar against scavengers but scavenger against scavenger and even, tragically, eldar against eldar for possession of the planet. Motley himself had come to fight an infestation of orks, but he’d heard stories that at some point the world had played host to every race in the galaxy with opposable digits.

Legends of Vaul, the smith-god, were known even beyond the eldar race and the idea that some great treasure was still hidden on Caudoelith seemed to be unshakable. Not a generation could go by without some dusty scholar or avaricious pirate arriving to stake their claim. The fact that the eldar fought to protect the planet only confirmed the myths. The truth was that there was a treasure on Caudoelith, just not of a kind that other races would value. Caudoelith of old had tens, if not hundreds of thousands of individual portals into the webway. Everything from huge ship gates capable of accepting the most grandious of aether-sailing vessels to interconnected individual portals that allowed instantaneous travel to any corner of the galaxy within a few steps.

The fighting and the Fall had put an end to all that. Only a handful of the original gates had survived but that still made Caudoelith a vital nexus in the material universe, a connection point between innumerable strands of the webway that were normally inaccessible from one another. Small wonder that Caraeis had brought them here. Despite Motley’s earlier mockery there were few places inaccessible from the gates of Caudoelith. It was even possible that the warlock could bring them directly to Biel-Tan from this cemetery-world.

They trudged onward into the teeth of the rushing, black winds. The glittering terrain varied little: tumbled slabs of jade, marble and moonstone, wrecked machineries of gold and platinum, silver-filigreed rubble all clutched in a mutual embrace and all slowly eroding into powder. A dozen more millennia and Caudoelith might resemble the world they had just left, a dune sea made of the decayed remains of a forgotten civilisation.

Motley caught the faintest flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, something not of the billowing blackness but solid and man-like. He remained silent and waited to see if the movement was repeated. He was rewarded by a another fleeting glimpse of motion beside a tumbled slab. Still the Harlequin held his tongue and only moved to get a little closer to Morr. The Dire Avengers seemed oblivious, the warlock had his attention fixed on guiding them to the next gate. He was frequently consulting a single rune held in his cupped hands, seeming to be now a little confused by its indications.

Weapons fire burst upon them without warning, trails of spurting dirt stitching through the party from multiple sources. The Dire Avengers reacted flawlessly, darting into cover and returning fire in a single fluid movement. Caraeis looked at the rune in his hands again in apparent surprise before finally obeying the exarch’s decidedly forceful injunction to take cover. Motley dived over to Morr’s bier and dragged it down to the ground where the incubus would have a modicum of protection from the hissing crossfire.

Their attackers had a decisive edge in firepower, any move from the Dire Avengers provoked a hornet swarm of rounds zipping and splattering into the stones about them. Every few moments there would be silence for a second and then fire would come snapping in from a different angle. Motley was stuck lying at full stretch next to Morr and became acutely aware that the majority of his own cover was provided by the body of the incubus beside him.

‘You should cut me free, little clown,’ Morr rumbled. ‘I would prefer to die on my feet.’

‘Oh I will in just a moment, when it’s safer,’ Motley whispered back comfortingly. Morr laughed humourlessly as another burst of rounds sang past only millimetres away.

The exarch and Caraeis looked to have been concocting a counter attack. All five Aspect Warriors suddenly sprang to their feet and made a concerted rush into the ruins, their shuriken catapults spitting coordinated bursts as they ran. Caraeis followed with his Witchblade crawling with chained lightning, one hand upthrust to shed a bright, cold light over the Aspect Warriors’ advance. The moment they vanished into the darkness Motley set to work cutting the straps restraining Morr to the bier, his curved blade quick and deft as it sliced through them one after another. Morr’s klaive fell free as the incubus surged up into a sitting position, arms still bound by manacles behind his back.

‘Release me!’ Morr said, his voice thick with emotion. Motley pressed his Harlequin’s kiss to the manacles, its looping monofilament wires instantly rending their locks to dust. As the chains fell away Morr swept up his klaive with reverence, a terrible, feral smile splitting his face as he did so. A barrage of stunning flashes erupted in the direction the Aspect Warriors had taken, sending shadows leaping across the scene. Morr poised the great two-metre arc of the klaive and looked towards Motley meditatively.

‘Come on, we don’t have much time,’ Motley cried as he started running in the opposite direction taken by the Aspect Warriors. ‘You can always kill me later!’

Morr glanced uncertainly towards the weapons fire and explosions for a heartbeat. The firefight seemed to be drifting further away, tailing off to occasional whickering cracks in the distance. Reaching a decision, the incubus turned and loped away along the path taken by the fleet-footed Harlequin.

Bellathonis’s torture-laboratories were buried within a honeycomb of hidden chambers and secret ways touching on the White Flames’ territory in High Commorragh. The main area had originally comprised a wide, high chamber with rows of cells along one dripping wall and a cracked floor. Now it was more than half-ruined. The floor had split open and tumbled the cells into a slope of broken rubble. Chunks of stone and piles of gritty dust were scattered everywhere.

A handful of Bellathonis’s faithful wrack servants were digging through fallen debris looking for equipment that had survived the tremors unleashed by the Dysjunction. Several work-tables had been turned upright and bore neat rows of gleaming tools. A glass fronted sarcophagus hung from the ceiling on chains, although its twin lay smashed on the floor below it. At the centre of the reduced room an examination table bore a metre-high cylinder of burnished metal with a handle at the top. The metal casing was hinged at the front to reveal it guarded a cylinder of crystal filled with colourless fluid. The object floating in the liquid was almost hidden by long, dark hair that coiled slowly around it, but it was undeniably a severed head.

A shape moved at the entryway to the lab, staggering abruptly into the light. A nearby wrack whirled in alarm and dropped the tray of instruments he was holding with a crash.

‘Master! What happened?’ the wrack cried in dismay.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Bellathonis gasped as he waved the minion away. ‘Don’t fuss.’

‘Bu-but master, your–’

A synthesised voice cut through the wrack’s jabbering. The voice sighed like the wind through winter-stripped branches.

‘You appear to have lost an arm since the last time I saw you, Bellathonis, how very careless of you.’

Bellathonis wagged the stump of one shoulder ruefully. ‘As I said, it’s nothing that can’t be fixed in a trice,’ he grinned disturbingly, ‘and better than the immediate alternative, believe me.’

‘I have heard tales of animals that will gnaw off their own limbs to escape a trap,’ the voice whispered. ‘The fates are closing in around you, renegade master, your death is inevitable.’

Bellathonis walked over to the cylindrical container and peered directly at its occupant. A pale, waxy feminine face with stitched-shut eyes and mouth seemed to peer blindly back at him between the coiling locks. ‘Always ready to lighten the mood, Angevere,’ the haemonculus said with deceptive sweetness. ‘That’s what I like best about you.’

The voice sighed from a narrow grille in the base of the cylinder and while the lips did not, could not move, the face twitched with the semblance of life.

‘I warned you to destroy Yllithian when you had the chance, now he plots against you. He wishes to become your destroyer, not your ally.’

‘That would seem uncommonly foolish of him when I hold his life in my hands.’

‘No longer. You have granted him new life and even now he uses it to betray you.’

Bellathonis’s black eyes glowed dangerously at the crone’s words. Angevere hated Yllithian with a passion and not without reason. The White Flames archon was the one that had found and decapitated her after she had survived for centuries alone in the daemon-haunted ruins of accursed Shaa-dom. Finding that the crone still somehow clung to life Yllithian had then traded her severed head to Bellathonis as a curio to excite his interest in the wider, more dangerous schemes the White Flames archon was brewing. Yet Angevere also had the gift of warp-sight and not everything she said could be dismissed as self-serving doom saying.

‘Well we can see about that,’ Bellathonis announced. ‘If it is true then Yllithian has underestimated me quite badly.’

Bellathonis awkwardly dug through several pouches one-handed before eventually retrieving a thumb-sized crimson jewel with many facets. He tapped it on the table three times and laid it flat on the surface, all the while reciting the name ‘Nyos Yllithian’ over it as if it were an incantation. A small, red-tinted image sprang into being above the jewel, a hazy viewpoint in the first person perspective. Bellathonis watched and listened as Yllithian (for it was his viewpoint) harangued his warriors and set out for Corespur.

‘You can read Yllithian’s thoughts? How so?’

‘Unfortunately I can’t read his mind, but I can see what he sees, hear what he hears and hence also hear what he says. It’s in the blood, you might say… That is an awfully large number of daemons up there.’

‘Dysjunction opens the cracks in our reality into doorways, there are many outside eager enough to press inside for the feast.’

‘Hmm I understand that perfectly well, but what’s to be done about it?’

‘It is out of your hands, or rather hand I should say.’

‘That is a very unsatisfactory answer, Angevere, perhaps you should reconsider it,’ Bellathonis said archly. ‘My resources may be limited at present but they could certainly accommodate one of your equally limited stature.’

The stitched-shut face flinched at the prospect of excruciation by Bellathonis. From prior experience she knew he was right, the haemonculus was reckoned a master in his art with good cause. The speaker grille rasped almost plaintively.

‘Two wandering souls lost in the webway approach their final destination. Dark and light, it will be their sacrifice that determines the outcome of the Dysjunction. They are beyond your reach now, or the reach of anyone in Commorragh, even Asdrubael Vect himself.’

‘Hmm, better I suppose but I still don’t like it,’ Bellathonis muttered, bending his attention to the image again. ‘So, it seems that our Yllithian has been placed on assignment for the immediate future. He’s going to be busy for a while.’

‘It will not matter. Your doom has already been unleashed.’

‘Yes, yes, doom, gloom and so forth. You really are tiresomely repetitive at times. Oh wait who’s this? Zykleiades, you old monster – ah, I see you’ve made patriarch noctis now. Standards must have slipped even further since I parted ways with the Black Descent.’

‘You see? Yllithian offers you up to this Zykleiades without even troubling to ask for a price. The archon wishes you dead.’

‘If only it were so simple,’ Bellathonis sighed meditatively. ‘Zykleiades will want me dead and disappeared, but I suspect if Yllithian is truly out for vengeance he would much rather I were alive and suffering for a suitably protracted period of time. He does tend to be very thorough. That’s a terrible shame, I’d thought Yllithian more progressive in character.’

‘All hands are turned against you now, you cannot escape your fate.’

‘Oh I don’t know about that, Angevere, after all just look at you. You should have died centuries ago in the fall of Shaa-dom and yet here you are. Contingencies can be a wonderful thing.’

‘The price was more terrible than you can imagine.’

‘Only because you made the mistake of paying it yourself,’ the haemonculus sneered. ‘Speaking of which I really should get myself fixed up. You there! Come over here where I can see you better – ah yes, that’s a very fine pair of arms I see you’ve got there…’

The slave quarters came to an end where the parkland’s boundary had originally been. The architecture of the buildings changed abruptly from a maze of flimsy boards with mud underfoot into slab-sided monoliths of obsidian, steel and granite that were spaced out along wide boulevards of springy turf that had been richly fertilised with crushed bone. The blocky structures varied in size but those closest were only a few storeys high, rising higher the further they went from the park. All were richly decorated with carvings and columns around cavernous doorways and empty windows. Some featured living displays of moving light that portrayed their occupants, most showed impassive, sculpted renditions of their long-dead faces to the world. These were Ynnealxias – mausoleums for glorious ancestors, or more accurately monuments to them as none contained a trace of mortal remains.

The ironic contrast of slave slums being crammed alongside the array of splendid, empty edifices he now moved through never even crossed his mind. In a society devoid of gods the Ynnealxias were the closest things to temples to be found in Commorragh, empty houses for the dead that celebrated their achievements in life. Kharbyr advanced along the edge of a deserted boulevard feeling uncomfortably exposed. He tried to keep his eyes downward and not stare up into the maddening skies, even as a tiny, mad part of himself told him to do it. He could feel pressure bearing down on him from way up there, a sickening sensation of alien heat that made his skin crawl. The urge to look at it again was almost overwhelming, even now he could still swear that he saw flashes of unearthly colour wherever he looked.

The eldar gods had all been destroyed, so the story went, consumed by She Who Thirsts in the Fall: Asuryan, Khaela Mensha Khaine, Vaul, Kurnous, Lileath, all of them. Commorrite families of any breeding and history now venerated themselves, or rather their illustrious predecessors, instead of their contemptible failed gods. In High Commorragh the noble families erected kilometre-high statues to themselves and dedicated entire wings of their manses to the accumulation of the lore of their bloodline. Here on Hy’kran in the lower tiers the trueborn could not indulge themselves so fully in their necropoli and must perforce make do with humbler temples to their own vanity.

In the middle distance the knees of Azkhorxi tier rose above the rooftops, a jagged fence made of polished towers of obsidian and amethyst. Somewhere close to the foot of those towers, Bezieth had assured them, there would be access to the foundation layer and its vein-like substrata of tubes and capillaries. Kharbyr hoped she was right; he had an almost animalistic sense of being stalked through the mausoleums. The dark, open doorways seemed poised to suck him inside at any moment and trap him within their sterile luxury for all eternity.

Of course every trueborn lived with the avowed intent that no such house of the dead would ever be built for them. Through the intercession of the haemonculi any trueborn could return from death provided the smallest part of their mortal remains could be saved. Yet death still came for some: by all-consuming fire, by destroying energies, by deadly toxin, by enigmatic disappearance or plain perfidy over the centuries the number of monuments inexorably multiplied. The houses were decorated with trophies accumulated across centuries of reaving: the crystal encased skulls of notable enemies, the prows of captured ships, suits of barbaric armour, exotic weapons, statues and artworks stolen from a hundred thousand different worlds. Vainglorious inscriptions declared their achievements:

‘Quiver before the might that was Vylr’ak Ak Menshas who was called the Shrike Lord by his victims. So strong his blade that he would plunge it through three bodies at once, so swift his Raider that in a thousand hunts not one slave ever evaded his grasp.’

‘See here arrayed the riches of Oxchradh Lyr Hagorach Kaesos, the Soul Thief. Young or old all submitted beneath his savage caresses in the end. On the world of Sharn a hundred settlements fell to him in a single night and he declared himself not yet sated.’

‘Witness the death house of Kassais, who needs no other name. Beneath a dozen suns his reavers did bloody work to his instruction, leaving slaves with one eye and one hand only to record his passing.’

The only ghosts here were memories, yet Kharbyr could feel his nape-hairs rising as though a hungry gaze followed his progress. Amid all the background turmoil and horror of the city something was singling him out for its attention, something dreadful. He stopped and glanced back uncertainly at Bezieth and Xagor following a few paces behind him. His fears suddenly seemed too stupid and groundless to voice when he met the archon’s impatient gaze.

‘What is it?’ Bezieth hissed.

‘I… nothing, I just felt like I… like we were being watched,’ Kharbyr stammered.

‘I feel it too,’ the archon declared. ‘There’s something following us, has been since the park if not earlier.’

‘Do we try and catch it?’ Kharbyr said softly with a sense of relief. He’d begun to fear he was going mad. Bezieth shook her head.

‘No. Keep going, if it doesn’t want to tangle with us there’s no reason to tangle with it unless we have to. We’ll try and lose it in the shafts.’

Kharbyr nodded and crept stealthily onward. The boundary towers of Azkhorxi were much closer now, dominating even the tallest of the nearby Ynnealxias, a fact that was no doubt the source of great ire to the Hy’kran trueborn. The ground ahead sloped downward towards a row of angular buttresses protruding from the closely set towers. Between the buttresses could be seen the raised lips of three silver rings set into the ground, each wide enough to swallow a Raider whole. These would be vertical mouths of travel tubes that emerged into Hy’kran from beneath the core.

Kharbyr increased his pace a little, eager for a chance to quit the open skies for somewhere more comfortably enclosed. As he got closer a flicker of movement among the buttresses caught his attention. He silently dropped into a crouch and strained to pierce the shadows for several minutes, long enough for Bezieth to come crawling forward to look too. She cursed viciously.

‘Ur-ghuls,’ she spat.

The lip of the travel tubes was swarming with the whip-thin, troglodytic horrors. They were crawling up from below like an infestation of lice looking for a new host. Their blind heads quested back and forth as their rows of scent-pits tasted the air.

Kharbyr nodded. ‘They seem to be heading this way, it looks like that big pile of carrion back in the slave town has a claimant after all. There’s something weird about them, though, I think they’ve been warp-touched.’

Bezieth grunted and looked again. It was hard to tell at such a distance but there was something unusual about the creatures. It took her a few seconds to realise what it was. Some of the ur-ghuls were missing limbs, and all of them seemed torn up in some gruesome fashion or other.

‘Don’t they usually eat each other if they’re given half a chance?’ Kharbyr asked.

‘Cannibals, yes,’ Xagor chirped. ‘Somaphages.’

‘So why aren’t the ones with missing limbs in the bellies of the other ones,’ Bezieth said grimly.

‘More to the point how can we get through them? Will your blade carve through them like it did on the Grand Canal?’

‘No, and ur-ghuls are strong and fast enough that I’d normally hesitate to fight more than three at once without a squad of warriors at my back. There’s got to be more than thirty down there and more coming. I don’t think we can get through them, I think we have to get out of their way and hope they don’t scent us.’

Xagor wrung his hand and claw miserably. ‘Highly efficient olfactory organs,’ the wrack whispered fearfully. ‘Most effective hunters.’

‘Then we get into a doorway where they can only come a few at a time and… wait what’s that? Looks like we’re in luck, not everyone’s left yet.’

A sleek, angular shape had come drifting silently out of the shadows above the swarming ur-ghuls, a shape with a jutting, armoured prow that thrust out below bellying aether-sails of orange and green. It was a Raider with its narrow deck tightly packed with kabalite warriors. The ur-ghuls milled in confusion, their scent-pits flaring at the nearness of prey but as yet unable to locate its source.

‘What are they doing?’ Kharbyr said.

‘Having some fun cleaning up,’ Bezieth replied.

A shower of tiny objects dropped from the Raider into the seething mass, metal seeds that blossomed into fiery gouts of plasma wherever they landed. Whip-thin bodies flashed to fire in the sudden glare, then withered into ash in a heartbeat. Merciless fingers of splinter fire lashed down at the survivors, cratering flesh and splintering eyeless skulls.

The ur-ghul pack went wild, running and leaping in all directions with horrid agility. By some sixth sense several leaped directly up at the Raider, their hooked claws outstretched, but the Raider’s steersman had judged his height nicely and it bobbed just out of reach. The one-sided battle continued with the kabalites gunning down the ur-ghuls at their leisure. The pack was dispersing now, most trying to find places to hide even as some continued to hurl themselves pointlessly at their flying tormentor. The Raider turned to pursue a handful of ur-ghuls that were fleeing directly towards where Kharbyr, Bezieth and Xagor were hiding.

‘Something’s definitely sending good fortune our way,’ Bezieth murmured quietly. ‘Let’s not disappoint it. Xagor, do you think you can hit their steersman with that rifle of yours?’

Xagor shook his head frantically, hunching his shoulders helplessly as the Raider chased the berserk pack of ur-ghuls closer.

‘Let me rephrase that,’ Bezieth said coldly. ‘Xagor, you will hit the steersman with your first shot or I will gut you like a fish.’

CHAPTER 19

THE POWER OF MISDIRECTION

Motley did not stop running and stretched his lead ahead of Morr as they raced away through the rushing darkness. They dodged between broken walls of lapis lazuli and down blackened alabaster streets, wove between piles of scintillating rubble and across fields of shattered crystal, the Harlequin’s gazelle-like agility always keeping him ahead of Morr’s pantherish, loping strides. After a time Motley perceived that Morr seemed to be content to follow, and had no trace of insane murder-lust in his eye. He dropped back to run alongside him, glancing up at the incubus’s exposed face.

‘Are you tired? We can rest a little if you like but we have to keep moving. Caraeis will be able to track us like a hound so we have to keep moving faster than they can catch up with us.’

‘I am well rested,’ Morr rumbled. ‘Those prancing fools gave me ample opportunity to regain my strength, it chafes my heart to leave them alive.’

‘They would shoot you full of holes first and you know it. So… you’re not mad at me for knocking you out like that? I confess I thought there would be more running and shouting involved before we made our peace.’

Morr laughed, a peal of manic sound that was lost in the battering winds. ‘Little clown, you have moved among us in the eternal city yet you are still blind to our ways. That trick is so old that it has its own name. It is called a Roc’chsa when two slaves turn on one another in order to gain favour with their new master. I approved of your quick thinking.’

‘Oh. I never thought of it like that,’ Motley said, slightly perturbed. ‘I suppose that should make me feel better about it, but somehow it doesn’t.’

‘Why do you not simply make a gate now as you did in the shrine?’

‘The warlock, Caraeis, would sense it instantly, and he could block its formation for long enough for the Dire Avengers to reach us.’

‘So where do we run to?’

‘A permanent gate, I think, is somewhere close by. If we can reach that and enter the webway I can get us to Lileathanir.’

‘Surely the warlock will hold that shut against us also.’

‘It will be much harder for him to do with a permanent gate. You’ll have to allow me some leeway here, I’m sort of inventing this as I go.’

‘Then tell me who attacked the craftworlders and by what happy coincidence they came to help our escape.’

That… is my little secret to keep for now, just know that we have friends as well as enemies in this particular production.’

‘Gone!’ Caraeis snarled. He kicked at the broken shackles angrily and fought with a desire to tear off his masked helm so that he could fill his lungs and scream into the howling winds in frustration. Aiosa, the Dire Avengers exarch, stood to one side watching him rage, her own impassive mask coolly inscrutable beneath its tall crest.

‘Calm yourself,’ she said to him with mindspeech. ‘Your passion has no place here, remember your Path!’

The warlock tried to check his emotions and fought to breathe more calmly. Caraeis’s personal investment in this mission had become like a living thing dwelling inside his chest, gnawing to break free. He ran through the thousand and one mantras he had been taught about the hideous dangers that were inherent to uncontrolled passions for a psyker.

The runes, the mask, the Path of the Seer itself, all were ways of insulating him against the perils of the warp and lending him enough protection to safely wield the limitless power it represented. If his underlying will lacked focus and discipline it meant that nothing could protect him. If his connection with the warp became too personal, if he bared his soul even once to the daemons then he was lost and his time on the Path of the Seer would be over. He quieted the beast within his breast only with great difficulty.

‘Why was no guard left behind?’ he asked eventually, his tone remarkably steady in his own ears.

‘I instructed you to remain on guard,’ Aiosa replied. ‘Why did you not do so?’

‘I… that is not what I heard,’ Caraeis said in confusion. ‘I heard you instruct me to follow.’

Aiosa gazed at him silently, waiting for an explanation with not a shred of doubt in her demeanour that Caraeis had made an error. Caraeis searched his memory carefully, Aiosa’s mind-speech had seemed a little garbled at the time but he had put it down to the confusion of the firefight. He had definitely had the strong impression of the word ‘follow’ being in it, although now he came to analyse it, he was unsure precisely who had said it. A cornerstone of Caraeis self-assurance crumbled perceptibly – was it possible he had been duped? As he wrestled with the implications a Dire Avenger approached and dropped several objects into the dust at Aiosa’s feet with evident disgust.

‘Exarch, we found these at the battle site. dark kin were here.’

A barbed, wicked-looking pistol and a tall, dark helm surmounted by a crescent moon lay in the drifting dust. Both showed signs of recent damage, shurikens had torn into the helm and the pistol had a broken barrel.

‘Nothing else?’ Aiosa asked. ‘No blood, no bodies?’

‘Nothing, exarch, no tracks either – although the ground was unsuitable for them.’

‘Very well, return to overwatch positions.’

Aiosa turned back to Caraeis. ‘Well?’ she asked as if no interruption had occurred.

‘Someone told me to follow, but I don’t think it was you. I was tricked.’

‘I see,’ the exarch said clinically. ‘Tell me your opinion of these artefacts.’ Caraeis had a momentary impression that he was being addressed by an automaton, that if he peered inside Aiosa’s armoured suit he would find it empty. He shook his head and tried to focus on the helm and pistol, he held a gloved hand over them, cautiously feeling for their psychometry. He shivered unexpectedly and pulled his hand back.

‘There is no doubt that they are of Commorrite manufacture. The pistol has been fired recently, before it was broken. The impressions were… too chaotic to read anything beyond that. What do you think?’

‘That someone is trying to mislead us again by laying a false trail back to the dark city. We were left these clues to find.’

‘That seems very convoluted,’ Caraeis said dubiously.

‘We were not attacked by dark kin, our supposed foes went out of their way to avoid harming us.’

‘Then who?’

‘The answer is obvious. The Harlequin called in more members of his masque and they led us in a merry dance while he escaped with our quarry.’

‘What?’ Caraeis spluttered, animal outrage scratching inside his chest again. ‘That’s monstrous! Why would they favour the dark kin so flagrantly? They’re supposed to be jealous of their beloved neutrality!’

‘You told the Harlequin that he was also your prisoner. I believe they could convincingly argue that you committed the first affront and they acted only to rectify it.’

Caraeis fell silent. Aiosa was correct, in his hubris he had given the Harlequin grounds to argue he’d been compelled to accompany them against his will. Caraeis had been so sure that his path would lead straight to the council chamber on Biel-Tan that he hadn’t stopped to consider that someone would work so actively to divert him. He felt shock that events, so neatly mapped out in previous rune castings, were spiralling out of control.

‘If an entire masque is against us our mission will fail unless we declare war,’ Aiosa said flatly. ‘And that I will not do.’

‘There’s no evidence of that being the case,’ Caraeis retorted with something of his old assurance. ‘We-we must reassess the situation based on what we know, not just what we suppose. The prisoner has escaped us temporarily, but I do not sense that he has left this world as yet. He has accomplices but he hasn’t gone far. The incubus can be recaptured with the forces we have on hand. The Harlequin knows he cannot intercede directly without entering the conflict and now we know that too.’

Aiosa’s mask stared back inscrutably at him as if suggesting that she had known that particular fact all along.

The Raider slewed alarmingly as its steersman exploded messily across its stern. The fleeing ur-ghuls, somehow sensing the sudden change, immediately turned and leapt up at the wallowing grav-craft like grotesque frogs. In a flash a trio of the needle-toothed horrors were scrambling over the gunwales and clutching at the kabalite warriors aboard. Stabbing combat blades and point blank range splinter shots hurled off the creatures in short order, but not before their combined weight had tilted the Raider so that it sank even lower to the ground. More ur-ghuls leapt aboard and the Raider’s blood-slicked deck quickly became a struggling mass of hook-clawed fiends and bronze-armoured warriors fighting for survival.

Bezieth led Kharbyr and Xagor in a silent rush towards the stricken craft. An ur-ghul hissed and turned on her with rows of scent pits flaring. Bezieth’s djin-blade crunched through the creature’s dome-like skull without her even breaking stride. Aboard the Raider a warrior made a desperate leap to grasp its curving tiller bar and bring the craft under control. He was instantly tackled by the frenzied grey-green shape of an ur-ghul and the struggling pair tumbled overboard to fall to the ground with a bone-snapping crunch.

Kharbyr made an agile leap that put even the ur-ghuls to shame, swinging himself up onto one of the Raider’s blade-like outriggers. Xagor was plying his hex-rifle indiscriminately, kabalites and ur-ghuls were swelling and popping obscenely left and right. Kharbyr ran along the outrigger and jumped across to the narrow deck near the stern. A Hy’kran kabalite, wheeling to face him in surprise, met Kharbyr’s curved blade as it crunched point-first into his throat. Kharbyr wrenched his knife free and hacked off a clutching, hook-clawed hand even as he turned and sprang for the tiller bar with the speed of desperation.

Bezieth thrust her keening djin-blade through another disgusting, whip-thin body with such ferocity that it virtually sheared the ur-ghul in twain. Another leapt at her and she cut it out of the air in twitching fragments. Axhyrian’s spirit was obedient in her hands, the djin-blade light as a wand as she cut and thrust. She glanced up to see Kharbyr braced at the tiller bar with it clamped beneath one arm as if he were steering the Raider through a storm. Kharbyr heaved the curving control bar hard over to tilt the wallowing grav-craft almost onto its side. Kabalite warriors and ur-ghuls, unprepared for the sudden shift, came tumbling off the deck in shrieking clumps. Bezieth grinned appreciatively and ran forward to catch at a tilted railing, hurling herself aboard the Raider as Kharbyr brought the craft upright again.

Almost as her feet hit the deck another needle-fanged horror came clambering over the railing opposite. Bezieth’s sword flashed across the intervening space like lightning and sent the creature flying backwards in an explosion of black ichor. She turned to Kharbyr and shouted.

‘What are you waiting for? Go! Now!’

‘But… Xagor!’

Bezieth glanced below to where the wrack was struggling with an ur-ghul that had its claws wrapped around his rifle. Needle fangs champed for his throat as the horrible strength of the creature relentlessly bore him down. An instant of calculation flickered through Bezieth’s mind, save the wrack or abandon him to his fate? If it had been Kharbyr down there the conclusion would have been instant – even though the skinny assassin had just raised his worth a notch or two in her estimation – but the wrack was actually useful. She leapt down from the Raider with a long suffering sigh, her djin-blade licking out to decapitate the ur-ghul pinning down Xagor. More ur-ghuls circled, but with easier prey at hand in the form of hapless fallen kabalites than an armed and aware opponent they warily kept their distance.

Kharbyr dipped the Raider as she pulled the wrack to his feet so that she could virtually throw Xagor straight onboard. She caught a look of calculation on Kharbyr’s face as he manoeuvred the craft and swarmed swiftly aboard herself before he could form any bright ideas of his own about leaving her behind. The Raider’s angular nose came up and they rose quickly upwards out of reach of the struggling ur-ghuls and warriors beneath.

‘That was… nicely done,’ Bezieth admitted.

‘Thanks,’ Kharbyr grinned, elated with his success. He felt like he was actually starting to like Bezieth on some levels. Despite the scars and rough manner she was turning out to be the most reasonable, down-to-earth archon he’d ever encountered. It was a very odd feeling for him and it didn’t last long.

‘Don’t get too close to those towers,’ Bezieth snapped. ‘The Azkhorxi will burn us down just for fun if you give them the chance.’

‘Where to then?’ Kharbyr asked sulkily.

‘Into the tubes, the plan hasn’t changed.’

‘What about the ur-ghuls?’

‘Just don’t stop to pick up any more passengers,’ Bezieth told him acidly.

Vhi was becoming dangerously frustrated. Impatience, his memory engrams told him, was often the cause of mission failure but that piece of wisdom did not seem to help right now. The psychic trail was fresh and distinct. There was no doubt that the target had passed this way recently not just once but several times. The narrow substrata tunnels Vhi was now investigating were rank with the spoor of the target and it was absolutely clear that its lair must be nearby.

However, try as he might, Vhi could locate neither the target or the lair and was now finding himself crossing the same spots over and over again. When Vhi had first hit upon the fresh trail he had experienced a desire for communication capability so that he could illustrate his manifestly superior hunting skills to Cho by sharing the knowledge. Now he experienced a similar desire for communication capability so that he could consult Cho on the findings. It was most puzzling and Cho was too far out of range to ask. The enhanced sensing capabilities of the Cho engine were something his protocols now told him were sorely missed.

Vhi stalked back and forth on whisper-quiet impellers through the tangle web of sub-surface tunnels, drifting through the darkness in silence as he analysed his sensor returns. Available information bore no indication of the tunnels’ existence and so he had to painstakingly map them as he went, laboriously cross-referencing that information with the confusion of multiple target trails he could also sense. It didn’t help that the layout of the tunnels seemed to be random and followed no discernible pattern on either the horizontal or vertical plane.

Vhi gradually came to realise that the randomness of the tunnels was because structural damage had occurred in them recently. Some had collapsed entirely, others were partially blocked, voids and crevices had opened up to make connections between sections that hadn’t existed previously. The psychic spoor led straight up to walls of fallen debris in several places, yet as the three dimensional map Vhi was building grew he could see that the trails continued beyond the blockages. Clearly these trails were older and had been made before the structural damage occurred. With a rush of excitement Vhi flagged all such interrupted trails as older data and eliminated them from his calculations.

Sure enough the remaining psychic traces formed a distinct nexus, a knot of activity that could only denote the location of the target’s lair. Vhi rotated his hull smoothly in place to point directly towards the area in question. His segmented tail curved forward over his carapace and the heat lance mounted on it glowed with ruby energy. A fiery line connected the lance with the tunnel wall for the briefest instant before the dense matter of the wall began to soften and drop away in viscid blobs. Vhi modified the output of the heat lance and began pushing slowly forward into the resulting hole. Vhi was done with creeping around through tunnels, he had decided, cutting a direct course for the target’s lair would achieve maximum surprise and in the meantime it was a gratifyingly destructive path to take.

Yllithian stood on the deck of his barque pondering the complex vagaries of so simple a matter as sending a message in Commorragh. Secure communications were always problematic in the eternal city. Even after millennia of dedicated efforts by paranoid archons to find ways to prevent it any signal could be intercepted or blocked or broken by a clever enough foe. Even supposedly unbreakable line of sight energy pulses could be interfered with, redirected or eavesdropped on.

Assuming you could get over those difficulties the simple fact of accepting any kind of communication also accepted the possibility that it had been tainted in some fashion. An innocent-seeming message might, for example, be corrupted to introduce a command into your armour systems to cut your own head off, as occurred most notably to the unfortunate Resy’nari Kraillach on receiving what was ostensibly a report of his victory over Ly’lendel the scrivener. How can you communicate when you don’t trust one another or anyone else? It was a pretty problem however you sliced it.

Yllithian was diverting himself while waiting patiently to receive notification of his assigned district from Vect – however that might be achieved. Around him were arrayed his somewhat reduced band of warriors. Their reaver and hellion auxiliaries were huddled in tight around the surviving Raiders, all silently holding station together like a shoal of sleek, predatory fish. The dark, jagged slope of Corespur swept away below them to where the titanic, screaming statues of Vect stared out over the distant spires of Sorrow Fell.

Dozens of dark shoals like Yllithian’s waited in the shadows of Corespur: aethersails of crimson, purple, poisonous green, acidic yellow were on every side, serpent prows with jewelled eyes thrust alongside of gilded harpies and jagged rams, chain-snares and trophies swung beneath bladevanes and serrated keels as the host silently drifted in unaccustomed quiescence. Countless different icons marked out the host of different kabals that had been summoned by the supreme overlord. The opportunities for them all to gain some advantage in the chaos were virtually limitless and they began right now. In the hours to come a single missed order might send an archon or a whole kabal crashing into ruin in a heartbeat.

Another reality-shaking storm was breaking across the city. World-shattering bolts of multi-coloured lightning lashed down from the warding into the spires below with terrifying violence. The strikes were so frequent that at times it seemed as if there was a forest of flickering pillars spread across the city that barely supported the sagging, raging vault of heaven. Fires licked everywhere and fully half of Sorrow Fell seemed to be burning, its sullen red glow warring with the vivid aurora above.

Periodically groups of sleek craft would slide out of the host and descend into the maelstrom as they received their orders. Yllithian continued to divert himself by imagining the difficulties inherent in communicating with such a disparate horde. This was no raid into realspace where a plan could be pre-made, roles assigned and each part then trusted to work within the greater whole. Vect seemed to be biding his time, waiting to see where the worst eruptions were occurring while he fed kabals into the blaze one by one, but perhaps it was just the physical difficulty of actually telling them all what to do.

The problem rested squarely with the inherent deviousness of the Commorrites themselves. In realspace everyone focused on working together as smoothly possible, the city-games were suspended for a time in the interests of efficiency. In Commorragh itself even something as simple as a rival receiving a message offered boundless opportunities for mischief. Because of that signals had to be routinely encrypted, decrypted, re-encrypted, quarantined and subject to the equivalent of red-hot pokers and pincers before they could be safely brought anywhere near the attention of a living recipient. Even then there were no guarantees that some slippery foe hadn’t found some new and exciting way of getting something past your defences. It all took up an inordinate amount of time and added uncertainty to a situation that was already dangerously fluid.

A beat of dark wings above caught Yllithian’s attention as the lone scourge he had been half-expecting, half-dreading descended onto the deck of the barque. The altered messenger was prominently wearing the mark of the Kabal of the Black Heart to show he was one of Vect’s own (although that in itself meant little, flying false colours was a trick older than Commorragh itself). The scourge furled its gorgeous, feathered wings ostentatiously and knelt in front Yllithian offering up a narrow wafer of crystal for Yllithian’s inspection.

Messages delivered by hand avoided many problems while introducing a few new ones, but at least you could identify the origin more readily and, if the situation warranted it, literally shoot the messenger. As it was Yllithian took the crystal from the scourge’s clawed fingertips without a second glance, shooing the feathered warrior away with his other hand. The scourge bounded to its feet and leapt away into space, the unfurling snap of its wings doing little to conceal its cynical, cawing laugh as it departed.

Yllithian examined the flat crystal plaque and turned it over in his hands: a biphase lattice genecoded to a single sender and recipient – unbreakable, unforgeable and unalterable – theoretically at least. It bore the mark of Vect and it no doubt contained his orders, sealed in such a way that they could quite literally be seen by Yllithian’s eyes only. He was hesitant about unsealing them – it felt very much like donning a leash. No doubt many other archons had felt the same way but the truth was that the leash was already around their necks and what they were feeling was Vect jerking it to bring them to heel.

He slid one finger along the top of the wafer and a row of unambiguous, angular ideograms swam into view within the crystal. Yllithian read it, and then read it again before crumpling the thing in his fist. It crushed into fine, glittering dust, slipping away instantly between Yllithian’s fingers in a twinkling cascade. He meditated for a moment on the missive’s contents, thinking that unseen eyes would be watching and waiting for his reaction. He hesitated for only a heartbeat, what choice was there but to obey? For now at least… At his gesture the shoal of White Flames grav-craft slid away from the slope of Corespur and set course into the maelstrom.

In another section of the waiting host Aez’ashya stood on the small, open deck of her Venom sky-chariot reading her own crystal-encased message. A wry smile played across her lips as she did so. At her call the Blades of Desire began rousing their skycraft, the high whine of booster engines rising around her moment by moment. She swept her arm forward and the Venom shot away following the course Yllithian had taken, a snarling swarm of reavers and hellions at her back.

CHAPTER 20

ESCAPE ATTEMPTS

‘They’re coming,’ Motley called suddenly, still running. ‘I’d hoped they would take longer to decide on what to do but apparently we’ve been fated to be disappointed in that regard.’

Morr, loping beside him tirelessly, glanced at the Harlequin without questioning how he knew what actions the craftworlders were taking. They had been running for minutes through the glittering ruins and the place they had escaped from was well out of sight in the darkness by now.

‘Will your allies be able to intercede again?’

Motley shook his head regretfully. ‘They’ve already done more than I should ask, and besides I think Caraeis will be wise to their tricks now.’

‘How far is it to the nearest gate?’

‘Too far unless we can think up a way to throw them off our trail,’ Motley grimaced. ‘Those Dire Avengers run quicker than hunting hounds.’

‘Alone you are considerably faster than me. You could easily reach the gate ahead of them and open it,’ Morr pointed out.

‘That wouldn’t h– oh I see what you mean,’ Motley said with a grin. ‘I’ll see you again shortly.’

The two runners separated, their courses diverging as Motley put on an impressive spurt of speed. The slight Harlequin bounded across the tops of broken pillars, flipped over gaping craters and danced through the ruins with a speed and grace that few living creatures could equal. In a few seconds he was entirely lost amid the rushing darkness. Morr kept doggedly running at his best pace and curved his course off into densest ruins he could see, his klaive held balanced low at his side.

Caraeis ran lightly through the forest of broken stone and twisted metal. He was as deft and agile as any of his race, battle-trained for many differing environments yet he was still struggling to keep Aiosa and the Aspect Warriors in sight. When they had agreed to pursue the incubus he had assumed Aiosa would need him to use his rune sight to follow the Commorrite’s black aura. Instead the Dire Avengers had sprung away without a moment’s hesitation, almost vanishing before he even began to move. They intended to make the capture alone, Caraeis was sure of it, no doubt as another way to embarrass him before the council when Aiosa made her report.

It had taken him a little while to work out how the Aspect Warriors were tracking the incubus before he realised they were literally, physically, tracking him. Once he recognised the mundane source of their information he began to notice the tracks himself, unmistakeable large, armoured boot prints filling slowly with blown dust. The fugitive was obviously running with no attempt at concealment at all, the prints were widely spaced, digging deep at the toe as they pushed off. Even so the incubus’s lead could only be measured in minutes and judging by the speed the Dire Avengers were moving it must be shrinking rapidly. The incubus’s trail pointed unerringly towards the nearest gate, a reality-distorting knot that Caraeis could sense at the edge of his consciousness. There were other gates in the vicinity but this was the strongest focus by far, the obvious escape route.

Caraeis cursed mentally at the perfidy of Commorrites, Harlequins and Aspect Warriors equally. He, Caraeis, had seen the crisis-pattern first, and he, Caraeis, had been the one who had calculated precisely how to manipulate it to the best advantage of Biel-Tan. Yet when he put his finely-considered plan into action all the mechanisms he had so carefully wrought span out of control at the first instance, evincing an animus and taste for self-direction he had never anticipated. No calculation he had made indicated that the hidebound pride of the Dire Avengers exarch would be a factor, or that the wandering followers of Cegorach would become involved.

He had tried to dismiss the incident of the warlock and Harlequin runes colliding in his earlier casting. Such unfavourable portents often happened due to malign influences – it was precisely the kind of thing the runes were meant to defuse and could usually be safely ignored. Now he was beginning to wonder whether it had been a more literal omen of their course towards mutual destruction.

Caraeis became aware that the Dire Avengers’ course was changing, curving away from a straight path towards the gate. He looked down and saw that the trail they followed was curving too. The incubus must have given up on trying to escape that way. Between the flying wracks of dark vapour blown on the winds it was apparent that the land ahead rose precipitously. Terraces of broken marble and jade frowned down like broken cliffs. They would soon be climbing rather than running if this course held true.

Caraeis thought selfishly that the incubus’s tracks would become invisible over such ground, and Aiosa would need him after all. Then he suddenly felt the gate, now off to one side, begin opening and panic thrilled through him to his very core.

‘Aiosa! It’s a trick!’ he mind-shouted desperately to the distant sapphire figure of the exarch. ‘The gate is opening! This must be a false trail!’

Aiosa’s head snapped towards him and the Dire Avengers paused, as still as statues. ‘Can you stop it?’ her clipped mindspeech responded immediately.

Caraeis was already bending his will in that direction, trying to prevent reality and webway aligning within the psychically charged arch of the gate. It was like wrestling with a huge door, struggling to keep it shut as unimaginable forces pushed at it from the other side.

‘Yes! N-not for long,’ Caraeis gasped with the effort. ‘Get to the gate! Quickly!’

The Dire Avengers sped away, their armoured forms slipping easily through the ruins. Caraeis clenched his jaw and sank his whole concentration into keeping the gate shut. The pressure was relentless, if he had been in proximity he could have closed the gate with a word but at this distance he could only use his will to hold the winding threads of etheric energy apart. The effort involved made seconds feel like hours, beads of sweat stood out on the warlock’s face inside his mask and he ground his teeth together until they felt as if they must break.

Despite his best efforts the portal was still grinding open little by little with unstoppable, machine-like certainty. A few more moments and Caraeis would not be able to stop the gate fully forming. He prayed that Aiosa and her Aspect Warriors were almost there, that they could prevent the fugitive escaping into the trackless infinitude of webway…

‘There’s no one here,’ Aiosa’s mindspeech announced abruptly.

Caraeis had a brief impression of a towering arch, multi-coloured energy swirling between its uprights, the gate itself still unstable and unusable. But the dust around the gate was empty, no incubus warrior stood at bay, no simpering Harlequin companion was on hand trying to interfere again. Caraeis’s concentration collapsed, the gate instantly forming as the impediment to its opening was removed.

In that same instant he became aware of another portal nearby, a temporary manifestation so weak that he had failed to notice it while he was battling to keep the other gate closed. Almost as soon as he became aware of it the new portal vanished again, and with it went any psychic sense of the incubus’s presence on Caudoeltih.

Caraeis’s mind-scream of frustration was not good to hear.

The ribbed arches of the travel tube flashed past scant metres away. Kharbyr had pushed the booster-engines to their maximum and trimmed the triangular sail of the captured raider to catch the best of the powerful, erratic etheric winds swirling down from above. Now he stood braced at the tiller simultaneously trying to control the racing craft and not reveal how close he was to soiling himself.

Fortunately the tube was wide at this point, easily wide enough to accommodate a Raider careening prow first towards city bottom. The soiling parts came from spars, bridges and other obstructions that projected at random from the sides of the tube. Yes, people needed places to dock and perhaps cross over the vertical tube but Kharbyr was finding it hard to believe they needed quite so cursed many of them.

It took every ounce of Kharbyr’s skill to sweep the Raider over, under and around these random obstructions at breakneck speed. He dared not back his speed down even for instant because he was all too keenly aware of the whip-thin shapes of ur-ghuls that could be glimpsed clinging everywhere. Bezieth stood just before the mast, legs braced wide as she toted a splinter rifle she had found in one of the Raiders’ weapon racks. She was taking potshots at the crawling ur-ghuls but Kharbyr was far too busy controlling the plummeting craft to see whether she actually hit anything. Xagor was crouched beside Kharbyr’s feet in the stern of the Raider watching the metal walls whip past as if he were hypnotised by them.

‘Kharbyr! Up ahead!’ Bezieth shouted, her voice ringing with alarm.

The vertical tube forked ahead, one branch turning abruptly through ninety degrees to become a horizontal tunnel while the other branch continued down into inky darkness. Kharbyr cursed himself for getting drawn into watching for obstacles instead of the course of tube ahead. He was hard over against the wall of the tube, with the horizontal branch coming up fast on its far side. Something about the black pit they were heading into filled Kharbyr with unreasoning fear, the darkness had an unnatural, surging quality about it that every instinct told him to avoid.

Kharbyr cursed again and hauled desperately for the horizontal tunnel, dragging the prow of the Raider up towards the rapidly approaching opening. Even the craft’s gravitic compensators could not eliminate all of the crushing g-forces generated by the manoeuvre and his vision darkened as the sleek craft reluctantly obeyed. The branch was sweeping towards them far too quickly, the Raider’s hull creaking and groaning as it struggled to level out. Kharbyr cut the engines and furled the aethersail, but the craft’s hurtling momentum was threatened to pull it apart if he slowed down too quickly. They weren’t going to make it.

To Kharbyr’s terrified perception events were unfurling with glacial slowness. The tunnel branch was rushing up inexorably towards them, the black pit was now directly below the Raider’s keel and the horizontal tunnel visible ahead. They were going to clear the lip of the branch but not by enough to make the turn into the horizontal tunnel immediately afterwards. He shed speed as hard as he dared, and then harder still. He felt something give and the Raider bucked viciously before it began trying to twist out of his hands into a corkscrew dive. The tunnel floor rose to meet and it was all Kharbyr could do prevent them from hitting it inverted and being crushed like insects under the Raider’s sliding hull.

‘Hang on!’ he shouted uselessly and then all sound was lost in a grinding, hideous cacophony of agonised metal.

Cho had briefly experienced a sensation akin to panic when the lifeforms she was tracking suddenly became embroiled with a number of others. The psychic trace was still present – admittedly diffuse but undeniably present – yet now its potential source, her target, was more obscured than ever in what amounted to a crowd of false suspects. An initial instinct to classify each of the new contacts individually and examine their life-sparks carefully to differentiate them from the initial four contacts resulted in a logjam that virtually paralysed Cho for a split second. Then, from the depths of her memory engrams, emerged a broadly matching universal fit for the majority of the new contacts – ur-ghuls. The target was categorically not an ur-ghul and so all lifeforms fitting that designation were henceforth ignored.

Cho had watched carefully from the flat roof of a structure while a grav-craft bearing eight more anomalous contacts closed in on the first four. Cho’s fluted, crystalline spirit syphon had dipped in and out of its housing like an insect’s sting as she calculated the potential for her target being revealed by the imminent meeting. Disappointingly the eight new contacts had only hunted the lifeforms designated as ur-ghuls and then been ambushed by the initial four contacts Cho was designating A through D.

The temptation to enter the engagement had been almost overwhelming. Life energies were being spilled before her sensors rods, utterly wasted when she could have drawn them into herself and fed on them to grow so much stronger. However caution was still too deeply rooted in her protocols to simply plunge into the fray and risk everything in an orgy of violence. She continued to watch and wait as the fighting lapped aboard the grav-craft (confirmed designation: Raider). Contacts A through D were soon alone aboard the Raider with contacts E through L extinguished or struggling on the ground below.

The target was not revealed. No changes occurred in lifeforms A through D other than elevated heart rates. The whole engagement was highly puzzling and unsatisfactory in its outcome. It was only when the Raider came sharply about and raced for the distant travel tubes that Cho realised she had made an error by hanging back. The psychic spoor now trailed behind the moving grav-craft like a fuel cell pollutant, the source accelerating at a rate greater than she could equal. Cho poured enough energy into her impellers to push them to integrity-endangering levels of thrust as she swept out of hiding in pursuit of the Raider.

The lifeforms designated as ur-ghuls attempted to impede Cho’s progress, leaping at her wasp-like hull as she raced overhead. The impacts of the bodies could do no damage to her armoured, curving carapace, but they clawed and bit at exposed vanes and probes with a strength which indicated they had the potential to inflict harm on her. Quite apart from that factor their attacks were slowing her pursuit of the target by a perceptible margin. Cho quickly reclassified the ur-ghuls as hostile and thrilled as she unsheathed her sting-like spirit syphon.

Baleful energies suddenly played ahead of her hull, a teardrop-shaped negative feedback loop that sucked the very life out of the ur-ghuls caught in its grasp. The wiry troglodytes simply withered in that awful glare. At its touch they shrivelled up into doll-like cadavers of stretched-taut skin holding together mouldering bone as centuries of ageing took place in moments. The survivors broke and fled croaking in terror from the death machine in their midst and she pursued them a short distance seeking satiation. It was weak, vermin-like fare for Cho to feast upon, so unlike the rich-bodied fullness of a living eldar. Yet quantity had a quality of its own and Cho’s capacitors drank in the stolen vitality readily, setting her whole resonation array alive with coursing energy.

Emboldened, she sped away, curving her course to plunge into the open mouth of the travel tubes in the wake of the rapidly vanishing Raider. The craft was plunging vertically down the shaft with reckless haste, still outpacing Cho’s maximum speed. Reluctantly Cho reduced power to her impellers back within safe parameters. There was always the psychic trail to follow. Even if the lifeforms moved fast enough to escape her immediate sensor sweeps the trail would inevitably bring her to the target.

Imagine a lantern. It’s an old kind of lantern containing a flame for light, with glass walls and a wire cage to hold them in place. Now imagine that the flame is a dying sun, fat and sullen, caught between walls not of glass but of extra-dimensional force that have pulled it outside the material universe and into the shadow-realm of Commorragh. The lantern’s cage is now of steely webs endlessly spun by countless spider-constructs. These webs hold in place distant, horn-like towers that regulate the unthinkable cosmic flux to keep the whole ensemble under control. This is an Ilmaea, a black sun, and such is what the dark kin use to light their eternal city.

Several such captured suns orbitted Commorragh, artefacts of past ages when eldar power waxed so strong that such prodigious feats were no great undertaking. In realspace a single Ilmaea could swallow all the vastness of the eternal city at a single gulp, but each is constrained like a prisoner bound in a cell with only a single chink opening into the world. Their baleful glare lights the frosty spires of High Commorragh and lends a sullen, animal heat to Low Commorragh even as their dying agonies are tapped to supply limitless energy to their captors. Thus even the stars themselves are slaves to the eternal city, bound and exploited like every other resource.

In the context of a Dysjunction the Ilmaea formed vast, open portals that had the potential to turn into giant fusion bombs without warning – a very bad combination indeed. The ordinarily feeble solar flares of the captive suns sped into torrents of blazing plasma that curled across the heavens and fell upon the city leaving only devastation in their wake. Yllithian had seen the other danger with his own eyes (technically they were his eyes now, possession being nine-tenths of the lore). Countless entities from beyond the veil were leaking into the city from the Ilmaea’s unstable portals and darkening the skies around them with their obscene swarms. Regaining control of the black suns was vital to the survival of the city during a Dysjunction, vital and incredibly dangerous. That Yllithian had been selected for such an honour made him strongly suspect that the supreme overlord desired his death.

He had been assigned the Ilmaea Gora’thynia’dhoad, commonly known as Gorath, currently in the seventy-seventh gradient over the city. His orders had been as brief as that with no indication of reinforcements that might be available or what actions it might be wise to take in order to regain ‘control’ of a rogue star. Yllithian had decided to focus his efforts on the towers surrounding Gorath, seeing no gains to be made in even approaching the extra-dimensional walls of the prison itself. His force flew through flickering, vivid skies of a thousand unearthly hues with gigantic thunderbolts flashing down all about them. His followers had learned their earlier lesson well and spread out to take their chances, racing along at top speed towards their destination.

‘We’re being followed, my archon,’ called Yllithian’s steersman shortly after Corespur fell away behind their stern. Yllithian twisted around on his throne to view the crazed skies in their wake. After a moment he saw them, a host of black dots cutting steadily through the air on the White Flames’ trail. That was no pack of winged daemons, Yllithian reckoned, it looked like another kabal was trailing him – but there was no guessing to what purpose. Yllithian could only hope they were reinforcements as turning around to confront them in the teeth of the storm was simply not an option.

Constrained though it might be, Gorath still swelled enormously as the White Flames force approached the captive star, becoming a huge black orb set among a billowing backdrop of multi-hued clouds. Tendrils of ebon fire twisted back and forth around the Ilmaea like a nest of snakes. Between them ominous-looking clouds of dark fragments swirled between the flames, winged shapes dancing restlessly through the infernal maelstrom that lashed about them.

‘There’s another group coming up behind us, my archon,’ the steersman warned. ‘They’re fast – already overhauling the first group now.’

Yllithian looked back, startled by the development and nursing just the tiniest thimbleful of hope. The newcomers were larger and few in number, their distant profile jagged and blade-like as they pushed past the swarm of smaller craft that were trailing the White Flames. They were closing with Yllithian’s craft so quickly that they made him feel as if he were standing still. The dagger-shapes rapidly filled out to reveal scimitar-sharp wings hung with missiles, pulsing engines and crystal canopies. It was a flight of Razorwing jetfighters that swept arrogantly past on trails of blue fire to leave Yllithian’s craft bouncing through the turbulence in their wake.

Timing, Yllithian thought to himself. For all the difficulties involved it represented a nice piece of timing on Vect’s part to have the Razorwings arrive just before Yllithian’s group. That or it was merely a happy coincidence that the Razorwings happened by at the right moment but that seemed too unlikely to credit.

The Razorwings quickly shrank into the distance and became visible only by their engine-fires as they closed in on the black sun. The flight broke up abruptly, needle-thin traceries showing a starburst of divergent courses as they went in to the attack. Each fiery pinpoint seemed to give birth to a litter of tiny offspring as they launched their missiles. Bright, brief stars of light flickered through the flapping hordes before winking out with deadly finality.

Gorath was becoming massive now, its bloated form filling half the sky. Details of the surrounding structures were visible: a faint, gauzy glitter of spun steel and bone-white spines that appeared little bigger than Yllithian’s finger joint at this distance. These latter were in fact the kilometres-tall towers that controlled the cosmic forces holding the black sun in check. There were over a hundred such structures around Gorath – far too many for Yllithian to even dream of taking them all. No, the only logical choice was to board the primary tower and see if it could be used to bring the others back under control.

Without warning a river of black fire swept down from above. The rogue solar flare crackled and roared in raging torrent as it curled past within a few hundred metres of the White Flames’ craft. The raw heat of it beat on the decks in searing waves that raised blisters and spontaneously ignited anything flammable. Yllithian’s force scattered away from the titanic conduit of flame as it twisted and bucked indecisively for few heartstopping seconds before rushing onward to claw out a new path of destruction elsewhere.

‘How much longer to the nearest tower?’ Yllithian shouted to the steersman.

‘Two minutes, less!’ yelled the steersman over the howling slipstream.

‘Make it less,’ Yllithian snarled.

The double-bladed silhouette of a Razorwing flashed past with a twisting funnel of flapping shapes in pursuit. As Yllithian watched a second Razorwing swept down on the horde and tore ragged holes in it with a burst of fire. A few stray daemons darted towards the White Flames and were met with a withering hail of splinters and darklight beams. The wind roared and crackled like a living flame as Gorath filled more and more of the sky.

‘One minute!’ the steersman called desperately.

The tower was visible up ahead. It was oriented with its crown towards him and its base pointed towards the black sun. The web around the tower gleamed like delicate brushstrokes of silver against the boiling dark mass of Gorath in the background. He spared a glance behind him to see if they were still being followed and saw that they were, although the pursuing swarm definitely seemed to have thinned. The tower grew from palm-sized disk into a huge, intricate structure that was more like a cluster of barbed towers interconnected by slender arches and flying buttresses than a single edifice.

Yllithian’s force dived down towards a wide terrace that clung between the cliff-like flanks of the tower, re-orienting themselves at the last second to place the terrace under their keels. Yllithian experienced a brief moment of vertigo as the barque flipped through ninety degrees and the wall that had been rushing towards them became ground beneath them. Then he was leaping from his barque in the midst of his incubi bodyguards and surveying the chaos around him. Black armoured warriors were jumping down from their Raiders on all sides, hellions and reavers wheeling overhead giving them cover.

Splinter fire crackled out suddenly and Yllithian snapped his attention to the source in time to see distant white figures pouring from doorways in the tower onto the terrace. There was a new sound mixed in with the familiar snap and hiss of eldar weaponry, a deeper, throatier roar of projectile weapons that Yllithian had not heard in a long, long time. It was the sound of bolter fire.

CHAPTER 21

BAD LANDINGS

‘What is this place?’ Morr grated in a tone of bemused contempt.

‘You have your memories, I have mine,’ Motley said defensively. ‘I just needed somewhere safe to get my bearings and rest for a moment. This was the best place to come at short notice.’

They stood on a narrow terrace overlooking an azure lagoon with slender towers of orange-glazed ceramic flanking them to either side. Gaudy streamers floated from a balustrade at the edge of the terrace and banners fluttered from the tower walls in the salt-scented breeze coming off the water. A yellow sun high overhead warmed the air and scattered scintillating diamonds of light across the deep blue water. On the beach below them Morr could see brightly garbed people strolling casually past, chattering and laughing together apparently in complete ignorance of the grim incubus glowering down on them from above.

‘I hope you don’t want to go back to Caudoelith instead,’ Motley remarked pointedly.

‘No. I was satisfied to leave that place and our pursuers behind.’

‘Hmm, I should think so too, you know you could always try being just a little bit grateful for me getting you out of these frequent jams.’

Morr tore his gaze from the people below and gave Motley a withering look. Motley spread his hands deferentially. ‘Mind you it’s just a suggestion.’

Morr turned back to the sunlit lagoon. ‘You have never fully explained your stake in helping me,’ the incubus rumbled. ‘To save the city, you say, but you are no citizen of Commorragh. Your kind only wander into the eternal city to perform your morality plays or mythic cycles and then leave, you have no commitment to it or its survival. So why do you so smilingly offer to help me at every turn? Where lies your advantage in all this?’

Motley gazed up at Morr’s face helplessly. The incubus looked shockingly aged in the warm sunlight: his cheeks were sunken and cadaverous, the creases around his mouth and brow were more deeply defined, his skin dry and lifeless, the dark wells of his eyes were lit by disturbing gleams of hunger and madness. It was as if Morr had aged fifty years within the last few hours in the webway. The incubus caught Motley’s expression and smiled mirthlessly.

‘The hunger is upon me. She Who Thirsts demands her due. Soon I must slay to renew myself or I will become one of the Parched, a mewling half-minded thing existing only on what scraps She might choose to let fall from her table.’ Morr eyed the peaceful strollers with intent and then grimaced. ‘You said this place is from your memories, so the people are ghosts. None of this is real.’

Motley sighed. ‘It was real, and the people were real and so it is still real to those who remember it – which in this case is mostly each other. To put it another way these people are real and we’re the ghosts here. You cannot harm them and even if you could I would not permit it.’

‘Bold words. Do not imagine I have been weakened by my trials, little clown,’ Morr sneered. ‘if anything, my inner fires blaze all the stronger.’

‘Well… that’s good. You’ll need everything you can muster for Lileathanir, although there won’t be any slaying to be had there either. Sorry.’

‘We shall see. You still have not answered my question – why should you care what happens on Lileathanir or Commorragh for that matter? What is it to you?’

Motley pondered on how to explain the concept of altruism to someone who has done nothing but claw and fight for every possible advantage throughout their life. Morr’s loyalties extended only as far as himself. He had abandoned his clan on Ushant for the Shrine of Arhra. Duty had bonded him to Kraillach and by extension Commorragh at large but he had turned on Kraillach when the archon fell to corruption. All that held meaning for Morr was the savage code of Arhra, to slay or be slain without morality or compunction, even unto a student slaying their teacher if he saw them weaken. The silence between Morr and Motley drew out painfully until it was clear that Morr was not going to go one step further without an answer that fit into his own peculiar code of ethics.

‘Isn’t it enough that we both want to save Commorragh that we should act in concert?’ the Harlequin demanded.

‘I accept my duty to Commorragh because my actions on Lileathanir led to the Dysjunction,’ Morr replied. ‘I will rectify them because should Commorragh fall to entropy the incubi will be destroyed and Arhra’s teachings will be lost. You have no such motivation and even less to help me. So explain to me what you gain from all of this or we go no further.’

‘Because…’ Motley began helplessly before inspiration struck him. ‘Because the eldar race is more than just the sum of its parts. After the Fall three completely different societies emerged from the wreckage of what came before: Commorragh, the craftworlds and the maiden worlds. Each of them has preserved some part of what was lost – yes, even Commorragh as much as many would wish to deny it. Each branch has prospered in its own way, or at least not collapsed totally, over all the centuries since the Fall and that tells you something in its own right – these are stable societies. Each has learned to adapt to a terrible new universe that has no rightful place for them in it.’

‘So you believe that each should be preserved,’ Morr grunted. ‘How very noble of you.’

‘Oh it extends beyond mere preservation, my dear, cynical friend. There is a fatal flaw present in all three of our societies – all of them look only inward and believe themselves to possess the one, true path forward. If they plan for the future at all it’s only with their own people in mind and most can’t even think that far. Survival has become the absolute watchword of the eldar race, a sort of siege mentality that has ruled over us for the last hundred centuries. It’s leading to stagnation, a polar opposite from the excess that brought forth She Who Thirsts, and so now instead of entropy we fall prey to stasis – a slow, cold death.

‘Not everyone thinks that way, of course, there are some in each generation that look up from the mire created by their forefathers and glimpse the stars again. We can still learn from one another, support one another. A shred of hope still exists,’ Motley looked out over the lagoon wistfully for a moment.

‘So now you declare that you are making a better future,’ Morr said flatly. ‘I have heard such protestations many times. As chief executioner to Archon Kraillach I sent thousands of similar claimants to their final reward.’

‘No doubt, but I’m not talking about overthrowing an archon here,’ Motley replied wearily. ‘I am talking about reunification of the eldar race.’

Morr snorted with derision at the idea of any true eldar of Commorragh mingling with the pale aesthetes of the craftworlds or the half-bestial Exodites of the maiden worlds. Motley looked up at the incubus curiously, head cocked to one side as he waited to see if Morr could recognise the hypocrisy of his attitude. The incubus gave no indication that it was going to happen anytime soon. Motley rallied himself for one more effort.

‘Simply look at our own experiences,’ Motley said. ‘Archon Kraillach, along with Yllithian and Xelian, wanted to bring someone back who was long-dead – impossibly long-dead. Yes it went horribly wrong but how did they do it? By going to someone who had the power to achieve the impossible–’

‘The haemonculus?’ Morr rumbled uncertainly.

‘No, no, no! The worldsinger – you know, the muddy-footed primitive with supposedly nothing to offer to the magnificent grandeur that is Commorragh. They needed her to make their scheme work and they went to considerable efforts to get her because she could do something that no one in Commorragh could do. Doesn’t tell you that the Exodites are far from being beneath your contempt? That they have achieved something in their own right worthy of praise and emulation?’

‘No, it denotes that they can be uniquely useful slaves at times.’

‘Morr, I do believe that you are being deliberately obtuse for your own amusement – which is something that in an odd sort of way I find to be very encouraging. Let’s take a different example instead – you and me. At the point where you discovered that Kraillach had been corrupted you called for my help. You knew that no Commorrite could be trusted to see the job done without exploiting the situation and most likely being corrupted in turn. Have I or have I not been a trustworthy and valuable ally ever since?’

‘You have,’ Morr admitted grudgingly.

‘And yet I am not from Commorragh, and I have no vested interest at stake in it or you.’

‘That… is not true,’ Morr said with a grim smile. The incubus looked as if he had just solved a complex puzzle that had been nagging at him for a long time. Motley frowned, seemingly discomfitted by the change in the incubus’s demeanour.

‘You’re implying that I have a vested interest? Do tell, please.’

‘Of course you have. It’s me.’

Motley only smiled in response, motioning politely for Morr to continue.

‘You need me because you need a dragon slayer.’

Bellathonis rubbed his hands together – both of them, new and old. One was delicate and long-fingered, the other stubby and dark. Well you couldn’t have everything, he consoled himself, the acuity of his new digits seemed fine and that was the important thing. Dust flaked down from the ceiling and over his bloody instruments in a most unsatisfactory way that ruined Bellathonis’s marginally improved mood. Tremors again, closer this time than the last series. The lab was becoming decidedly unsafe and he couldn’t return to the White Flames fortress without running the risk that something worse than Venomyst infiltrators would be there waiting for him.

The haemonculus looked around the chamber, his gaze taking in the three wracks hurrying to pile boxes of equipment onto a crude sled, the sarcophagus they were sadly going to have to abandon, the examination tables with their aggregation of dirt and debris. It was a melancholy sight. He reached down and pulled the fourth of his wracks upright from where he had been lying on one of the tables. Bellathonis fondly dusted the leather-clad, bloodied minion down and set him onto his feet.

‘Now go and help the others and take care not to pull those sutures out,’ Bellathonis admonished.

‘Yes, master, thank you, master,’ the one-armed wrack replied unsteadily before staggering away to the sled.

‘Death is coming,’ Angevere whispered at Bellathonis’s elbow. He frowned at her tone, there was something off about it: not jubilant or mocking or sneering this time, just fearful.

‘That’s enough from you, old crone,’ Bellathonis said decisively and snapped the cylinder containing the witch’s head shut. He hauled the container over to the sled and stowed it carefully among the piles of boxes, cases and jars already there. The wracks milled uncertainly around their master awaiting orders, sensing his distress at having to abandon the lab but unable to offer any help. Bellathonis turned to them and spread his hands philosophically.

‘My faithful acolytes,’ Bellathonis said. ‘It falls to us that we must move on once again. Though we were here only a brief time it’s my belief that great things were achieved in this place, and I shall al–’

The slope of rubble that had buried the cells was shifting, individual chunks of it slipping and rolling down to the floor. A dull spot of cherry red appeared in the midst of the fallen masonry, brightening through orange to yellow to white within a few heartbeats. Waves of palpable heat flowed from the glowing spot and an awful grinding noise could be heard behind it. Bellathonis and the four wracks instinctively began to back away.

‘I think we’d best–’ was all that Bellathonis could say before the rubble slope exploded in a shower of molten rock and something sleek came surging through the white-hot debris. Bellathonis had only the briefest impression of a silvery carapace and scorpion-like tail before he darted out of sight behind the sled. The wracks cried out in alarm and threw themselves at the intruder without hesitation, which Bellathonis considered a creditable show of fervour if not wisdom.

The one-armed wrack barely even got to swing his cleaver before a nest of barbed chains flailed around his neck and bloodily pulled his head straight off his shoulders. The second wrack managed to snap his dagger’s blade against the foe’s adamantium hull with an enthusiastic but ill-considered lunge. Two sets of shears caught the wrack at shoulder and crotch before hurling him bodily across the chamber in a hideous show of strength. The unfortunate wrack struck the far wall in three separate pieces.

Bellathonis recognised the assailant as a Talos pain engine. It was smallish, perhaps half the size of full-sized engine, but it had a definitively assassin-like cast to its design. The finest Talos engines were mobile monuments to pain and slaughter, more living works of art than mechanisms with purpose. Bellathonis found the concept of this Talos rather contemptible, akin to hobbling one’s offspring so that the resulting pygmies would make better servants.

The two remaining wracks hesitated for a split second and then ran in opposite directions around the Talos. The barbed sting atop the invader’s tail flashed and one wrack’s torso simply vanished in a mass of flames. The other wrack took advantage of the momentary distraction to charge in behind their metallic assailant and jam a gnarled-looking agoniser rod under its carapace. Lightning flared at the juncture and the machine jerked violently before whipping around with eye-blurring speed to confront the source of its pain. Even machine-life could be hurt with an agoniser, circuits as well as nerves could be induced to a pitch of screaming pain by its touch. The Talos did not allow the wrack to strike again, using its whirling chain-flails to flay the flesh from the wrack’s bones with machine-precision.

With all four of its attackers neutralised in a matter of seconds, Vhi turned and came for Bellathonis.

Kharbyr awoke to the popping and creaking sounds of cooling metal. The air was filled with a hot, ozone-tainted smell. He tried to move but that set off fireworks of pain throughout his body and he groaned involuntarily. There were broken parts inside that refused to do anything he told them, most especially down around his legs. He tried to remember how he got there – the last thing he remembered was a speeding Raider with him braced at the tiller… the floor of the tunnel coming up fast towards them. Them? Yes, he remembered now, there had been others aboard the Raider: Bezieth and Xagor, where were they? Why weren’t they helping him? He tried to call out their names and that hurt too.

He looked around, moving his head cautiously to keep a foaming black sea of nausea at bay. He was trapped in the wreckage of the Raider. The mast had fallen across his legs, pinning them against the deck. Only the wrist-thick tiller bar had saved his torso from being completely pulped, and now that bar was now bent across him forming part of the wreckage that held him in place. Tatters of the orange and yellow aethersail hung everywhere like bunting, a bizarrely cheery-looking sight against the dark, mangled hull of the Raider.

He called out again. He was helpless to do anything else. Even the act of breathing made the nausea rise and fall in waves. At least he was still breathing, it was starting to seem like Xagor and Bezieth hadn’t survived. Kharbyr struggled to remember the crash in more detail. He’d been hauling the Raider across to a branching tunnel, desperately trying to check their headlong descent down a horizontal shaft and turn, turn, turn. A chill came over Kharbyr as he remembered the roiling darkness below, a darkness that every instinct told him to avoid. He’d hauled for the side tunnel thinking they weren’t going to make it in time. The prow came up and then he’d seen… he’d seen what?

Kharbyr stiffened, involuntarily hissing with pain. There had been a whisper of sound out in the darkness, the gentle hiss of something gliding stealthily through the air. He didn’t call out again. There was something sinister and insidious about the sound that did not presage the arrival of help. A sudden clangour nearby made Kharbyr recoil and set off explosions of pain in his legs that brought him close to retching. Through the haze of agony he saw the familiar, barred mask of Xagor thrust over the edge of the Raider.

Kharbyr croaked wordlessly in relief as the wrack hauled himself over the Raider’s twisted gunwales and squatted down beside him. There were fresh wounds on the wrack that oozed sluggishly, deep abrasions that had scoured through his ribbed, hide-like robes and into his equally gnarled, hide-like skin.

‘Bad landing,’ the wrack said, making no move to help.

‘Not… my… fault,’ Kharbyr grated through clenched teeth. ‘Something… hit us!’

Xagor sniffed and cocked his head to one side as if listening. ‘Not by our stalker. It still follows,’ the wrack said cryptically after a moment.

‘Just… help… me!’ Kharbyr snarled.

Xagor shrugged, fishing a small device out of his belt pouches that he pressed against the side of Kharbyr’s neck. The pain and nausea vanished as instantly as if a door had been slammed. A vague sense of discomfort was all Kharbyr could feel from his trapped body and legs.

‘Now, that’s better,’ Kharbyr blurted in heartfelt relief. He tried to move again but the discomfort flared alarmingly and he quickly abandoned the effort.

‘Nerves blocked, not better,’ Xagor said as he started levering the fallen mast out of the way in a surprising show of strength.

‘Where’s Bezieth?’ Kharbyr asked.

‘This one does not know,’ Xagor grunted shortly. ‘Gone.’

The mast shifted with a complaining screech and Kharbyr was free. Xagor reached down and dragged him clear with scant regard for his battered limbs. The wrack set him down and set to work on his injuries, meticulously straightening bones and stitching ripped flesh as he went.

‘You – ah – seem to have a lot of experience at that,’ Kharbyr gasped.

‘A wrack has no worth if he cannot mend broken clients for his master,’ Xagor muttered. To Kharbyr it sounded as if the wrack was quoting someone else, Bellathonis probably.

Kharbyr could see over Xagor’s shoulder to where the ribbed wall of the tunnel rose a dozen metres away. A few scattered lamps hung from the wall and shed a dim light over the scene. As Kharbyr watched he saw one the lights momentarily eclipsed by something moving across it, a silver crescent that gleamed briefly and was gone again before Kharbyr could be sure he hadn’t just imagined it. Kharbyr decided that he didn’t need to be sure

‘There’s something out there, Xagor,’ Kharbyr hissed. ‘I heard it just before you came. I think I just saw it.’

‘Yes. Stalker. Is hunting us,’ the wrack said nervously as he looked around. He gave a slight shiver before returning to his work.

‘What is it? You said it didn’t hit us, what did?’

‘This one is not sure…’ Xagor said quietly as if the same answer applied to both questions. Kharbyr glared at him silently waiting for a proper answer.

‘The… the darkness,’ Xagor said after a moment. ‘The darkness reached for us, Kharbyr could not see because he was looking ahead, but Xagor saw. It came for us from below.’

Kharbyr’s mouth went dry at the wrack’s words. ‘That was back in the vertical shaft, so what’s hunting us now?’

‘This one does not know,’ Xagor repeated.

Kharbyr thought he glimpsed the silver crescent again, high on the wall. This time he heard the swish of air displaced by a flying body as it vanished from view.

‘Why doesn’t it attack? We’re in no position to stop it dancing on our skulls if it wanted.’

‘This one–’

‘–does not know, yes I get it, thanks for nothing.’

A fierce tingling started without warning on Kharbyr’s chest. At first he though it must be something Xagor was doing but the wrack was busy working on his legs. The tingling grew into a sensation of heat as if someone was holding a flame close to Kharbyr’s flesh.

‘Xagor! I can feel something! The nerve block isn’t – ahhh!’

Kharbyr’s body contorted, back arching and limbs flailing as the pain blazed up into an inferno. The injuries from the crash had been sickening but this was far, far worse, something beyond physical hurt that clawed at Kharbyr’s soul. Xagor leapt back in alarm as a bright glow began to crawl across Kharbyr’s flesh, radiating outward from a pentagonal spot on his chest to encompass his writhing form. Kharbyr unleashed a long, ululating scream that tailed off into grim silence as his thrashing body finally became still. Xagor edged closer uncertainly.

‘Kharbyr is–?’ Xagor said plaintively just as another spasm gripped the prone form, arching it almost double and sending the wrack scurrying back again. Kharbyr’s ragged breaths were just audible, but after a second they changed, becoming a coughing, sobbing sound. Little by little that changed into a burbling chuckle and then what could only be wheezing laughter. Kharbyr sat up suddenly despite his injuries and looked Xagor straight in the eye.

‘Excellent. Excellent and distinctly well-timed too,’ Kharbyr said with a distinctly un-Kharbyr-like inflection in his voice. ‘Oh Xagor, do stop acting so shocked.’ Xagor recognised the admonishing tones instantly.

‘M-master?’ the wrack asked cautiously.

‘Welcome offerings!’ the machine-enhanced voice cracked across the terrace like synthesised thunder, cutting across the barrage of weapons fire with a wall of noise. A corpulent champion of Chaos heavily armoured in bile-green plating that leaked pus from prominent boils brandished a rusting sword at the approaching dark eldar. ‘YOUR SACRIFICE IS EAGERLY AWAITED,’ the voice boomed. ‘THE LORD OF DECAY EMBRACES YOUR FURY AND RETURNS IT A THOUSANDFOLD! THIS IS A GLORIOUS DAY!’

There was more of the same, much more and Yllithian instructed his armour to block it out. Their enemies comprised two distinct forces – three if you counted the flying daemons, which Yllithian decided could be safely ignored for now. Compared to what they had found at the tower orbiting Gorath the flying daemons were an irrelevance.

Their ground-bound enemies were split into a shambolic horde of possessed and a lesser number of thick-bodied figures in filth-encrusted heavy armour. The latter moved with a singular lack of grace and a kind of crude stolidity no eldar could ever emulate. Mere dogs of the Ruinous Powers, Yllithian told himself, the sort of crudely augmented warriors that the lesser slave races produced and expended by the million. The lie tasted bitter on his tongue. His studies of the daemonic powers had warned of the Traitor Legions and their corruption by the Dark Gods. The legionaries had become champions of Chaos that enjoyed the fickle favour of their deity, and to find them abroad within Commorragh was a dire portent indeed.

Unfortunately they were also very heavily armed. Explosive bolts roared across the open terrace and tore bloody holes in the ranks of Yllithian’s disembarking forces. A missile flew up and gutted an incoming Raider in a dirty yellow explosion. Yllithian called in his reavers and hellions to distract the opposing firepower while he led his warriors directly against the onrushing possessed.

Splinter fire scythed down the shambling, putrescent figures like ripe wheat. The hell-born vitality of the fiends availed them little protection against the kind of poisons the White Flames warriors were using: fleshrot, inkblind, scald-lotus, wryther and a dozen other deadly toxins burned, blinded and twisted the stolen bodies of the possessed into useless, fleshy prisons. Warriors armed with shredders were moving up to liquidate the surviving possessed even as Yllithian’s incubi bodyguard cut a path through the flopping, flailing mass.

As they broke through Yllithian saw instantly that his reavers and hellions had failed to break the phalanx of Chaos warriors clustered at the base of the tower. Crumpled bodies, burning jetbikes and broken skyboards scattered across the terrace gave mute testimony to their efforts. The survivors were scattering, jinking and dodging desperately to evade the withering fire coming at them from below.

Yllithian cursed, realising there was still over a hundred metres to go into the teeth of ruinous firepower before his forces could close. The Chaos warriors had already realised the possessed were falling faster than they had thought possible. The wide maws of their big, ugly guns were swinging around, levelling for a salvo that would tear Yllithian’s lightly armoured foot troops to pieces.

The howl of engines from above presaged a sudden deluge of sickle-winged shapes diving straight into the Chaos ranks. Hellions, reavers and Venoms swept past at breakneck speed, impaling and decapitating with their bladevanes and hellglaives. For an instant Yllithian thought his own auxiliaries had rallied and returned to the fray before realising his error. The newcomers were from another kabal entirely, their colours familiar to him even in the heat of battle. The Blades of Desire had arrived.

Frenzied wyches leapt down directly into hand-to-hand combat from the decks of speeding Venoms. Yllithian, never one to miss an opportunity, led his incubi into the heart of the struggling mass while the Chaos warriors were distracted. He ducked a snarling chainsword and cut the arm from its wielder with a quick riposte. Rotting faceplates whirled before him as the Chaos warriors fought back with stubborn tenacity.

The hulking warriors were horribly strong and seemed virtually immune to pain. Yllithian saw slender eldar snapped like twigs in their gauntleted grasp, whirling chainblades driven with unstoppable force through the writhing bodies of wyches and bloodied, roaring giants that fought on when they had been virtually cut to pieces.

Yllithian found himself beginning to see why such warriors made such popular arena slaves. They could absorb punishment like Donorian fiends, and took full advantage of the fact. Time and again the hulking warriors shrugged off fatal wounds and unleashed a deadly counterattack. But the Chaos warriors were also fatally slow and clumsy in comparison to the eldar. When a bare-headed warrior grasped at him with lightning-sheathed claws Yllithian simply sidestepped and decapitated his attacker with a backhand flick of his sword. Another attacker came surging forward only to find Yllithian’s blade sheathed in his eye socket before he could swing his own rust-covered sword. At Yllithian’s signal his incubi bodyguards closed protectively around him, carving him a space in the melee with sweeps of their mighty klaives.

Yllithian glanced around to assess the battle beyond his immediate vicinity. The enemy seemed heavily outnumbered, islands of resistance in a mounting sea. With their formation broken the invaders stood no chance against the ravening dark eldar attacking from all sides. The hulking, armoured figures were dragged down one by one in a frenzy of bloodlust; dismembered and decapitated by the bright, deadly blades of the wyches and Yllithian’s incubi.

Across the carnage he saw Aez’ashya weaving a sinuous dance of death through the last handful of foes. She was wielding twin daggers that shone like crimson ribbons as she carved a bloody swathe through their thickly armoured hides. She laughed lasciviously as she caught his glance, revelling in her moment as a terrible, magnificent goddess of murder unleashed.

Yllithian had a chill premonition as he looked upon her. There was death for him, too, laughing in that unguarded glance – a delectable thirst for his own murder that had yet to be quenched. Vect had sent the new mistress of the Blades of Desire to fight at his side, but under what orders?

CHAPTER 22

RETURN TO LILEATHANIR

The travellers stepped away from the portal, the silver light of its activation draining away to be replaced by the flickering glow of ice-trapped fires. The travellers’ breath steamed in the sub-zero air and the frozen mud beneath their feet was as hard as iron. Around them the living rock walls of the World Shrine had been transformed into a fractured landscape of ice. A pitiful figure was huddled on the slope above, crouching in an attitude that indicated it had waited long at that spot watching the portals for any sign of life.

‘It’s… it’s you? I-I’d never thought to see you again,’ the wretch said in a tone of wonder that cracked into hysteria at the sight of the second traveller. ‘You and… him!’

‘Hush now, Sardon Tir Laniel,’ Motley said gently. ‘He’s come here to help and so have I. I’m sorry it’s taken so long.’

The current worldsinger of Lileathanir raked back her greying locks to stare at the shrine’s violator unmasked. Here was the one that had defiled the World Shrine and stolen her predecessor, the one who had unleashed such a cataclysm on her world that barely one in ten lived through it. She could feel a gathering rush of emotions in her belly: rage, fear, hate all boiling together into something foul and potent. The shrine shook in empathy, the rock trembling in subliminal response to her anger as hissing flames leapt up behind the ice. Morr returned her gaze steadily, his pitiless black eyes showing no glimmer of sympathy or remorse.

‘Sardon!’ Motley said less gently. ‘It’s not your place to judge him for his actions. He’s come here to set things right willingly, we can’t expect contrition as well.’

Sardon blinked, looked at the warrior again and saw him more clearly: battered, bloodied, a face etched with an awful hunger that could not hide the weariness and desperation in is soul. It was a figure to be pitied rather than hated, a hollowed out, broken puppet propped up only by its vainglorious pride. She had boasted to Caraeis that she would feed the defilers of the shrine to the dragon in vengeance for what they’d done. Confronted with the reality of it she realised there was an all-consuming sickness in the cycle of vengeance. Vengeance begets hatred, hatred begets vengeance. The warrior at Motley’s side was as much a victim of it as any. After a moment the trembling of the shrine subsided and the flames sank lower as the dragon spirit returned to a fitful slumber.

‘Well then, dark one,’ Sardon said eventually as she painfully pushed herself upright on half-frozen limbs. ‘You should come and see what you’ve made.’

Great ice sheets sheathed the World Shrine of Lileathanir. Thick, glassy bulwarks hid the scorched rock and steaming crevasses, fringes of icicles hung from fuming chimneys and frost-rimed boulders. Impossibly, fires still burned just behind the ice. The frozen flames that gleamed through it with undimmed fury, held in check for the present but trembling at the point of bursting into new life.

‘You’re too late,’ the worldsinger said hopelessly. ‘I had to do something… I couldn’t just sit and wait. I tried to heal it myself, soothe the dragon, but it only grew fiercer. In the end I was just trying to contain it and I couldn’t even do that. Look.’

They looked to where Sardon was pointing. In the depths of the shrine a rough arch pierced the ice sheets, a blackened scar running from floor to roof that oozed smoke and noxious fumes. Red, poisonous light leaked through the crack as if coming from otherworldly depths. In it something was stirring, something vast and unthinkably primordial.

‘Ah well, that’s… to be expected I suppose,’ Motley muttered uneasily before rallying to say, ‘but it’s never too late! You did a good thing and bought us some time and that’s a precious commodity right now!’

Morr ignored both of them, his eyes fixed rigidly on the ominous-looking arch at the far end of the ice-gripped cavern. Without a word he gripped his klaive in both hands and started marching resolutely towards the entrance.

‘What is he–?’ Sardon gasped before Motley shushed her and whispered in her ear:

‘He knows he helped to turn your world spirit to its dragon aspect by stoking all that unreasoning fury and vengeance into what it is now – a raging beast with quite staggering potential to do harm or, worse still, metamorphose into a form that the Ruinous Powers would welcome as their new plaything. You’ve been able to quiet the worst of the dragon’s effect here temporarily, but ripples of that fury are still causing immense harm elsewhere. Morr has, very bravely in my opinion, volunteered to help quell the dragon in the only way he knows how.’

Morr was wading through a stream of bubbling meltwater up to the crack in the ice. Its vast size was more and more apparent the closer he got to it. His tiny, doll-like figure was visible for just an instant between the roiling fumes before he vanished inside. Sardon drew back and stared at Motley in mixed wonder and disbelief.

‘He’s going to try and kill it?’ she said incredulously.

Motley sighed and shrugged his narrow shoulders pensively. ‘He’s going to try, yes.’

‘But that’s impossible!’ Sardon cried. ‘And what happens if this death dealer does find a way to kill the dragon? What will happen to Lileathanir then? Without the world spirit to protect us we will be left naked to the universe. The daemons will come for us and nothing will be there to stop them.’

Motley spread his hands helplessly. ‘I can only believe it’s highly unlikely that he’ll succeed. All I can tell you is that he’ll try. If he fails and the dragon destroys him then it’s going to be satiated, its lust for vengeance at least partially fulfilled. That will buy us more time to take further measures.’

‘A living sacrifice? That’s repugnant. Barbaric.’

Motley looked at the dirty, dishevelled worldsinger in her rough homespun robes and bare feet and he smiled warmly.

‘I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that, Sardon,’ the Harlequin said without irony. ‘However, it might shock you to know that such practices are more widespread and well-established than you might think… in fact I do believe some of its practitioners are just about to arrive, shall we?’

Motley nodded back towards the chamber of portals. When Sardon looked around she could just see the silver glimmer of their activation.

The Raider wreckage was still cooling and creaking around Xagor and Kharbyr. A few dim red telltales on the craft’s controls picked out highlights on Xagor’s barred mask as he leaned in close over Kharbyr’s limp form.

‘Kharbyr is true-dead gone?’ the wrack asked.

What-had-been-Kharbyr flapped its limbs distractedly like a puppet master testing them for function. It flailed at the nerve block on its neck and eventually pried it loose. It grimaced and then thrust Kharbyr’s chin forward aggressively and grinned.

‘Ah, that’s better. Xagor, when are you going to understand that it’s all just meat?’ it said in a voice that sounded more and more like Bellathonis with every word. ‘Just meat that we push around with our willpower until it doesn’t work any more. I’ve heard that once upon a time and long ago when the meat stopped working that was just The End. One day it was farewell, so long, so-sorry-but-you’re-dead-now. Your will to survive counted for absolutely nothing once your personally apportioned slice of meat was dead, rotting – can you imagine it? Well those days are gone and now everyone can live forever if they simply plan ahead properly.’

Xagor shook his head. ‘This one still does not understand, very sorry, master.’

‘All right, very simply and in short words then: You gave Kharbyr a sort of psychic homing device. I used it to transfer my soul into his body. His soul has gone into my body which is very unfortunate for him because mine is dead meat right about now.’

‘Is possible?’ the wrack seemed stunned by the concept and sat back on his haunches, masked face cocked to one side. ‘The master is beyond mighty, beyond death!’ Xagor crowed, exulting for a moment before growing very still again. ‘Wait… what thing dared kill the master’s old body?’

‘It was a Talos engine, a very mean little one I was in no position to deal with at the time. It’ll be from the Black Descent. Unlike you, Xagor, they refuse to acknowledge my majestic superiority…’

‘Master! There is still danger! Xagor has heard Talos hunting close.’

‘That couldn’t possibly be true… unless there were two machines…’

Bellathonis heard the now-familiar whine of gravitic impellers and caught sight of a flicker of movement above them.

‘Oh.’

Cho drifted down towards the target fully confident of her acquisition. A rush of pride and accomplishment ran through her, extending every vane and sensor probe involuntarily to drink in the revised image of the target. Designated target C now fulfilled the precise metaphysical identification parameters stored in her emgrams. Cho had watched the change take place and listened to the target boast of its accomplishment afterwards. Better yet there was a high probability that the target had been fleeing from Vhi at the moment of attack, unaware that he fled directly into the claws of Cho.

The target was aware of Cho’s presence now, as was designated target D crouching at his side. This was irrelevant as Cho had already scanned them both for weaponry and found none capable of breaching her spun-metal hide. Designated targets A and B were inactive flatlines, lying together in a crumpled heap beside the wreck of the Raider. At this close range Cho could determine that target B was in fact a contained essence, a life-without-body in a metal prison. No other threats or potential escape routes could be detected within Cho’s considerable sensor range, the target was completely trapped with barely enough control of its body to stand up, let alone flee.

Cho slowly extended her spirit syphon. She took pleasure in considering whether to destroy the primary target first and then hunt designated target D afterwards for sport, or whether to simply drain them both with a single wide-setting, maximum-strength feedback loop. Caution came to the fore once again. Designated target D could not be allowed to become a distraction. She should attempt to rejoin the doubtless frustrated Vhi-engine as soon as possible and share knowledge of the kill. Their creator would be proud and recognise Cho’s accomplishment. The bothersome fact that Vhi’s attack had precipitated Cho’s opportunity meant he could still claim a victory of sorts. It mattered not at all. Vhi could maintain his rude pride and sense of superiority while Cho would know that whatever Vhi’s claims she was the one that had made the kill.

The calculation had taken only a fraction of a second. Satisfied with her conclusions Cho struck. Baleful energies played over the targets, relentlessly sucking away their life essence. Their bodies began shrivelling as if the march of decades was passing within seconds. Vitality surged into Cho’s capacitor-valves in a flood of dark energy – a fine, fortified wine in comparison to the small beer of the ur-ghuls’ crude, short lives. Cho crooned with pleasure as she drank it in.

The foot of the tower above Gorath was a charnel house. Eldar, possessed and Chaos warriors littered the flagged terrace two and three deep in many places. Even with the timely arrival of the Blades of Desire the toll of the fighting had been heavy and barely half of Yllithian’s White Flames kabalites were still on their feet. Overhead a swirl of hellions, reavers and Venoms snarled around the tower answering any shots from the defenders on the upper levels with a storm of fire. Aez’ashya – Archon Aez’ashya as Yllithian reminded himself – sauntered over to him with a hip-swinging gait that was filled with ribald mockery.

‘Nice work, Yllithian, you distracted them long enough for my blades to do all the work,’ she smiled.

‘This kind of butcher’s work you are very welcome to,’ Yllithian said coldly, ‘but sadly I expect our opponents haven’t been helpful enough to commit their entire force to be cut up out here in the open.’ He gazed up at the enormity of the tower and the ongoing skirmish significantly. Aez’ashya merely shrugged.

‘I’m happy to defer to your superior knowledge of our opponent’s dispositions,’ she said, ‘even if I find it a more than a little curious you’re so well-informed – these aren’t more friends of yours, are they Yllithian?’

‘Simple logic, no more,’ Yllithian snapped. He kicked at one the bulky corpses littering the terrace. It split open, leaking foul ichor and a sickening stench. ‘See? These are mortal servants of the Ruinous Powers – devotees of the entity we know as Nurgle. An incursion by the followers the plague lord is not just another random manifestation from beyond the veil. If they came here with a purpose I’ll wager that it had nothing to do with standing around waiting to get attacked by us. We need to organise our forces and start clearing the rest of the tower from top to bottom. We have to find out what they’re doing and put a stop to it.’

‘Oh we do, do we?’ Aez’ashya purred coolly, deliberately goading him. ‘I don’t believe that I’m under your command, Yllithian, my orders from the supreme overlord said nothing at all about that.’

‘Just what did your orders say, Aez’ashya?’ Yllithian replied acidly. ‘Something along the lines of “follow Yllithian and support him until”… Oh I don’t know, let’s just say… “until further notice?” How close does that sound?’ He noticed Aez’ashya’s eyebrows twitch upward slightly in surprise and knew that his barb was close to the mark. The pertinent question was really whether Aez’ashya’s other orders were to wait for an opportune moment to kill him, but even Aez’ashya wasn’t going to be naïve enough to give away that little nugget of information.

Yllithian hesitated momentarily as he tried to decide what to do. He desperately wanted to be away from here as quickly as possible, but leaving before the Ilmaea was stabilised would be a virtual death sentence that Aez’ashya would no doubt be happy to execute. If the forces of Chaos could take over the stolen suns during the Dysjunction then all of Commorragh would be finished anyway, doomed to drown beneath a tide of daemonic filth from above. There was really no option except to go onward.

Just as Yllithian reached his conclusion the tower trembled slightly, a momentary, vertiginous ripple across the entire structure that hinted at the massive forces being focused upon it from elsewhere in the universe. The terrace suddenly lurched beneath their feet and cracked, fissures opening in its surface as whole chunks of it fell away into the blazing inferno of Gorath below. There was a general rush for the towers with White Flames warriors and Blades of Desire wyches elbowing each other aside to get up the shallow steps at their base. As befitted the true state of Commorrite politics Yllithian and Aez’ashya led the charge, their differences and suspicions temporarily forgotten in the face of a common threat.

A set of recessed archways in the flanks of the tower opened into a lofty chamber similarly pierced on all sides. The space was dominated by a wide, spiralling ramp that disappeared up into the ceiling and down through the floor. Muzzle flashes stabbed at the top of the ramp and a spray of explosives bolts bit chunks out of the floor at their feet.

‘Up!’ both archons cried in unison and led their combined forces storming up the ramp. Through the arches Yllithian glimpsed the last vestiges of the terrace outside collapsing, the air above it filled with a chaotic, spiralling swarm of reavers, Raiders and hellions as the stonework fell away. He was stranded in the tower, at least temporarily, until another platform could be found for disembarkation. He glanced up to see the top of the ramp crowded with hulking green-armoured shapes, muzzle flashes stabbed down at the running eldar like the opening of a set of fanged-filled jaws.

A chain of explosions whipped across Yllithian’s shadow field. Dark ink-blots enveloped each impact as the entropic forces of the field dissipated the energy into shadows and dust. Other eldar around him were not so well protected and detonated in bright crimson novas as the mass-reactive rounds penetrated their bodies. The rush of eldar hesitated for an instant as those coming the head of the ramp flinched in the onslaught.

Aez’ashya broke from the wavering ranks as a fast-moving blur that seemed to step under, over and around the hosing streams of explosive bolts as if they were stationary. She sprang up the ramp and vanished into the knot of bestial Chaos warriors at the top, their muzzle flares crisscrossing as they disastrously tried to follow her progress. A rush of fleet-footed wyches overtook Yllithian and plunged in after their mistress, their blades slashing in an intricate ballet of pain.

By the time Yllithian and his warriors arrived at the top of the ramp only twitching corpses lay strewn around in the chamber above with no sign of Aez’ashya and the wyches. The ramp debouched into the centre of a windowless, triangular chamber with more spiralling ramps going upward in each of its corners. Yllithian redirected a few cliques of his followers to go back down and start sweeping the lower floors but his instincts told him the main fighting still lay above. Taking the bulk of his warriors with him he selected the ramp with the most bodies heaped on it and headed up. From above he could soon hear the sounds of combat.

CHAPTER 23

INTO THE DRAGON’S LAIR

Morr waded through rushing melt water that had a rank, sulphurous smell to it as he followed the arched crack into the ice. The walls soon turned to black rock slick with moisture and gravel crunched beneath his armoured boots. As he moved forward the red glow ahead of him grew ever more intense and sullen. The slick, black walls opened out until he was descending a rough slope into a vast cavern where the far walls were shrouded in darkness and the floor seemed a shifting, bloody sea. A rumbling, subsonic hiss overlaid all other sounds in the cavern, the noise of an unthinkably gigantic serpent or a great host of people muttering and whispering. Morr knew it to be one in the same.

As he descended further into the cavern huge pillars of twisted basalt rose up on all sides to lose their lofty crowns in the gloom overhead. The bases of the pillars were clearly visible. Serpentine coils of crimson energy twisted across the floor of the cavern and around the pillars to form a multi-dimensional cat’s cradle of living light. The crimson coils pulsed with vitality: roiling, knotting and shifting as they wound restlessly back and forth.

Morr halted, gripping his klaive in both hands as he readied himself and drew on his last reserves of energy for the battle ahead. He knew that he was confronted not by a physical opponent this time but a metaphysical one. The manifestation of the enraged, dead spirits of Lileathanir lay before him in the cavern, visible now as it coalesced in the broken vessel of the World Shrine. His own perceptions fluttered between interpreting it as the coils of a vast wyrm, a foaming cataract of blood and a blazing river of fire. He was less than a speck beside the all-encompassing power of the world spirit. He was no more capable of harming it than a mosquito is capable of harming an elephant.

The one advantage he held was the composite nature of his foe. The world spirit combined the psychic energy of every living thing that had crossed over into the Lileathanir matrix at the point of its death: Exodites, birds, beasts. The resultant gestalt entity was primal and atavistic, driven by instincts that were by turns nurturing and destructive. Those instincts had pushed it into the dragon aspect of its nature, but there would always be countless spirits pulling it in a myriad of different directions. That was a weakness to be exploited.

He reached up to his trophy rack and lifted from it thes incubus helm he had taken at the shrine of Arhra. That fight seemed so long ago, so important at the time but so trivial now. He gazed into its blank-faced mask for a moment, remembering, before turning it around and slowly lowering the bloodied casque over his own skull. The fit was poor, the internal sensors did not mate properly with his fighting suit, the copper tang of clotted blood assailed his nostrils, but Morr cared not at all. A sense of wholeness and wellbeing flowed into him as he locked the helm in place. He grinned fiercely beneath the mask and raised his voice in challenge, mounting a rocky promontory to whirl his klaive so that it flashed brilliantly in the crimson light.

‘I have returned and I challenge you again! Come! Come and match your fury against mine! Never forgive! Never forget! Arhra remembers and now so will you!’

The reaction was immediate, the gestalt consciousness of the dragon suddenly becoming aware of the miniscule speck in its midst that squeaked with outrageous defiance. A vast, triangular shape reared up from the crimson murk. There was the vaguest suggestion of a head with burning spheres like green lamps where eyes could be. Great exhalations of raw emotion gusted from the impossible maw of the being. Morr felt an expanding bubble of conscious recognition sweep over him, the sharp prickle of poisonous hate, the familiar hot wash of rage.

‘Yes! Me, here I am! I’m the one! I defied you then and I defy you now!’ Morr shouted into the earth-shaking hiss. ‘Now come! Fight me! Learn what Arhra knows!’

Hellfire came raining down and Morr ran for his life, racing downward for the heart of the crimson coils. Beneath the psychic lash of the dragon’s fury the rocky slope around him exploded into an avalanche of molten debris. It was impossible to stay ahead of that tidal wave of destruction, the blast wave of it swept him up in giant hands and threatened to smash him down into oblivion. Morr was hurled headlong into the ghostly coils, his klaive carving a ruddy arc as he unleashed his own fury upon the souls of the restless dead.

Caraeis had stepped from the portal into the frozen World Shrine of Lileathanir with Aiosa at his heels. The four Dire Avengers that made up the rest of the squad followed and immediately fanned out flawlessly into overwatch positions around the rough little cave. Their long-necked star throwers covered individual fire arcs that all intersected on the two figures that stood waiting for them at the entrance.

‘You!’ Caraeis snarled, little troubling to conceal his anger.

‘Yes, me again I’m afraid,’ Motley replied nonchalantly, ‘I thought you’d be here sooner than this, trouble with the runes again?’

Caraeis did not respond to the taunt, though the lenses of the warlock’s helm that glared at the Harlequin were lit with baleful amber fire. Aiosa cut in to ask bluntly:

‘What are you doing here and why did you assist the fugitive in his escape?’

‘Because this is the place that he was meant to come to,’ Motley replied airily, ‘and that is my answer to both of those questions.’

‘Then where is the incubus now?’ Caraeis snapped, rounding on Sardon. ‘And why do you, world-singer, now stand beside this… this meddler!’

Sardon blinked in surprise at the warlock’s venom. ‘The wanderer and his kind have come to Lileathanir since its first settlement,’ she said mildly. ‘The people of the craftworlds are thought of as our guardians, but children of the Laughing God are known as our friends. In our time of need he has come to us and offered help, a potential solution. What do you bring to the World Shrine? Anger? Recrimination? We have more than enough of that already, we need no more brought to us by outsiders.’

‘Solution? What solution?’ Caraeis spluttered, fixing his amber-eyed gaze on Motley again. ‘My runecastings indicated none of this.’

‘The worst kind of solution as far as you’re concerned,’ Motley taunted with a wide smile. ‘One that doesn’t involve you: No rung up the ladder to the seer council. No expanded recruitment from the grateful survivors of Lileathanir. No fame. No glory. No praises sung in the infinity circuit of Biel-Tan for all eternity. Nothing.’

Motley felt he had judged the warlock’s true motivations nicely, probably better than Caraeis had ever admitted them to himself. Caraeis’s shoulders shook with suppressed emotion as he took a step towards Motley. Aiosa put up a hand to stop him and regarded the Harlequin coolly from beneath her impassive mask.

‘You charge that Caraeis has been led by ambition? That… desire… has overcome his wisdom?’ the exarch asked deliberately.

‘It’s not my place to charge anyone with anything,’ Motley smiled. ‘I’m merely putting together everything I’ve seen and making an observation. I have to ask as a point of interest – what was the plan when and if you finally got around to bringing Morr back to Lileathanir? You were intending to solve the situation how exactly? Tossing him down a crevasse bound hand and foot perhaps? A living sacrifice to appease the dragon?’

‘This is ridiculous!’ Caraeis shouted. ‘You have no right to interfere! You’ve blackened your hands with the dark kin and now you seek to drag me down into the mire with you. We did not do this!’ Caraeis swept out his arms dramatically to encompass the shrine, and by extension the whole world.

‘No, but you sought to capitalise on it. The dark kin, as you like to call them, were ignorant of the consequences of their actions. If they knew the damage they could cause themselves in the long run they would never have acted in the way they did. Not that ignorance excuses it, of course… it’s just that you have no such excuse.’

Sardon looked at the Harlequin in shock. ‘What do you mean?’ she gasped.

‘That our friend Caraeis and all of his seer kind could have foreseen the violation of the shrine and the outcome. They could have acted to prevent it and yet they did not.’

‘Every strand of fate cannot be followed,’ Caraeis replied with a quiver in his voice. ‘Only certain junctions, extraordinary nexii can be affected with the correct application of–’

‘Oh please! Stop!’ Motley laughed mockingly. ‘The strands of fate bend towards a great cataclysm that affects the webway itself and you claim that it was too obscure to foresee, too complex to affect? If that’s true you have little value in your current calling and should give serious consideration to finding another path – perhaps pottery, or food preparation.’

‘Enough!’ Caraeis snarled. ‘Where is the incubus? Speak now or–’

Caraeis’s impending threat was cut short by a thunderous roar from the depths of the shrine. The rock walls shook and ice fell in splintering sheets as the roaring went on and on; an inchoate, hissing bellow of rage that crashed thought the shrine and made the stones quiver like a living thing. Motley grinned maniacally and shouted above the tumult.

‘There! That’ll be him, in the very heart of the shrine!’ the Harlequin yelled wildly. ‘And I do believe he’s ready to receive you now!’

Without a word Caraeis plunged into the World Shrine with his witchblade in hand. After a split second of hesitation the Aspect Warriors followed, Aiosa giving Motley a long, hard look as she ran past him. Sardon wrung her hands in dismay.

‘You’re letting them go? They’ll be killed!’

‘No. Stop. Don’t go in there. You’ll all be killed,’ Motley murmured sardonically as the last of the Aspect Warriors vanished into the quaking shrine. The Harlequin’s lips were drawn into an unhappy frown, the very picture of sadness and dejection, but behind the mask his eyes glittered with dark, unfathomable amusement.

Xagor and Bellathonis saw the murder engine approaching, its wasp-like form gleaming in the semi-darkness of the travel tube as it swept down on them from above. The engine was unhurried, confident that it had its prey cornered, and descended slowly enough to allow them plenty of time to realise the hopelessness of their situation. Being devotees of the arts of flesh Xagor and Bellathonis recognised its type immediately: a Cronos parasite engine, a time-thief. Bellathonis recognised more than that, a signature workmanship that he had also seen back at his hidden lab on the miniature Talos engine that attacked him there. He found himself having to grant that a twinned pair of such dwarfs had a certain artistic integrity that he had felt lacking in the singular entity. It still smacked a little of toy-making as far as Bellathonis was concerned.

Xagor was caught still in the act of diving across Bellathonis in a vain attempt to shield his master when the negative feedback loop was established. Dark energies bathed them both, utterly indifferent to the wrack’s desperate act of self-sacrifice. Kharbyr – now Bellathonis’s – flesh was sinking onto his bones, his face becoming a skull wrapped in papyrus with his dark, shrunken eyes blazing as his vitality was drained away. The haemonculus had never imagined that it would end like this. The very least of his kind were unnaturally long-lived – nigh immortal – and his newly stolen body had been young and fit. Even so the relentless vortex produced by the spirit syphon was stripping away centuries of Bellathonis’s lifespan in seconds. Seconds more and he would be nothing but dust and mouldering bones.

The feedback loop ceased abruptly, leaving Bellathonis and Xagor feebly groaning in an advanced state of decrepitude. Bellathonis blinked rheumy eyes and tried to focus on the hovering Cronos engine to see why it had stopped. Perhaps it was going to take its time after all, he thought, indulge in a little torture before it got on with the murder part. Part of him approved.

Curiously the wasp-like engine seemed to have sprouted a distinctly humanoid-looking pair of legs beneath it. Bellathonis realised belatedly that there was a torso too, connected to a pair of arms that had impaled the underside of the Cronos engine with a large, baroque-looking sword. He vaguely recognised the distinctively scarred arms somehow, a petty archon he’d dealt with in Metzuh? Bellathonis couldn’t remember anymore, everything seemed dim and half-forgotten. He looked again, unable to shake the feeling that something important was happening.

The murder machine was hanging at an angle with its claws waving frantically, its array of sensor probes and vanes fluttering wildly like a trapped bird. Sparks were pouring out of it where the sword had plunged into its vitals. It seemed unable to move, only bobbing in the air as the sword was ripped free in a disembowelling deluge of components. The gleaming machine sank slowly as if the sword had been its only means of support, guttering and sparking as it rolled over onto its side, lifeless. It was then that a dark miracle occurred, or so it seemed to Bellathonis.

Without Cho’s consciousness to control them her capacitor-valves tripped open and all the vitality she had stolen poured out through her resonator vanes at once. The rich, dark prize of spirit-essence she had taken, all the nourishment that should have been presented triumphantly to her creator was instead released back to her prey and her killer. It was macabre feast for Bellathonis, Xagor and Bezieth, a bathing of stolen life-energy that made them young and vital again in accordance with the dark and terrible rites of the eternal city.

In moments flesh filled out and became firm once more, wrinkled skin smoothed and showed the first blush of youth, limbs regained their strength and vigour with the unwitting gift the pain-engine had supplied. It was a long time before any of them spoke.

‘Bezieth!’ Bellathonis exclaimed finally, still basking royally in the dying radiance. ‘I remember now, I helped you against the Scarlet Edge not so very long ago!’

Bezieth squinted at him uncertainly. ‘It is master Bellathonis! Is mi–’ Xagor announced proudly before Bezieth raised a hand to cut him off.

‘What do you mean? This is Kharbyr, I remember Bellathonis and this isn’t him.’

‘All possible through the magic of the art, my dear archon,’ Bellathonis said with insufferable smugness. ‘Forgive me if I don’t explain the whole thing over again. We must all keep our little trade secrets, after all. Most fundamentally I must thank you for your timely intervention against the Cronos parasite, I am in your debt and I do not take that lightly. I must ask – how did you manage to surprise it?’

‘You certainly sound like Bellathonis, you use too many words like he does.’ Bezieth said and shrugged indifferently. Stranger things had happened in Commorragh and especially ones involving haemonculi. ‘Your wrack there came up with the idea. We knew that we were being followed by something too wary to attack all three of us together. After the crash we decided to try and use the opportunity to trap it. Xagor gave me something to put me in a kind of trance so that I’d appear dead while he was tending Kharbyr. It took some trust on my part, but Xagor was right – the thing was so busy going after him and you that it missed me altogether. I walked right up behind it and gutted it.’

‘Bravo Xagor, very well done,’ Bellathonis smiled indulgently. ‘And bravo Bezieth, that was no mean feat to pull off.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Bezieth said impatiently, ‘but it doesn’t get us anywhere. I’m expecting the motherlode of ur-ghuls to come sniffing around this crash at any moment, and we’re still barely halfway to Sec Magera – unfortunately your predecessor in that body destroyed our only transport and I’m still wondering whether I should take that out on your hide.’

‘Hmm, three things occur to me,’ Bellathonis said, apparently disconcerted not at all by Bezieth’s threat. ‘First: ur-ghuls? That doesn’t bode well for the state of the portal to Shaa-dom. Second: That going to Sec Magera is a terrible idea, I can take you somewhere much safer and much closer. Third: That Kharbyr probably didn’t crash without some help – he is, or rather was, too good a pilot for that.’

Bezieth frowned. ‘In that case what happened?’

‘Kharbyr-before-Bellathonis said the craft was struck,’ Xagor offered. ‘This one saw something come up from below. Darkness reaching.’

‘Ah. Well then it’s probably easier to show you than explain,’ Bellathonis said, ‘if we can go to the place where it happened.’

Bezieth jammed a thumb towards where the tunnel had branched. ‘Back that way, where the ur-ghuls are at.’

‘Splendid,’ Bellathonis said imperturbably. He attempted to stand but found his damaged limbs still too unserviceable to support him. At his call Xagor obediently scurried forward to lift his master onto his back, useless legs dangling and arms clutched around the wrack’s neck.

‘Onward!’ Bellathonis called cheerily, and with Bezieth leading they began to pick their way along the travel tube back to the fork.

Archon Yllithian and his White Flames warriors stalked warily up the ramps to the higher levels of the tower. The wraithbone walls showed spider web traceries of cracks that wept pus and foul-smelling ooze. The tower itself shook in the grip of the Ilmaea Gorath, the captive sun now so close to freedom. They eventually emerged into another vaulted chamber where open arches on all sides led out onto slender bridges. A profusion of inscribed plinths and jewel-encrusted pillars within the chamber indicated that it had been some form of control room, with the emphasis on had been before Aez’ashya and her wyches had burst onto the scene. Now bolter rounds criss-crossed the space like tiny meteors blasting craters in flesh, metal and stone with equal abandon. Half-seen figures dashed through the smoke and flames, struggling and hewing at each other maniacally.

There were many of the green-armoured Chaos warriors in the chamber, and perhaps an equal number of wyches playing a deadly game of hide and seek among the plinths and pillars. It was easy to see what they were fighting for control over. In the centre of the space a huge crystal floated above the chaos with multi-coloured light leaking from its every facet. Smoky, pulsating tendrils extended from the crystal to penetrate pillars and plinths all around the room. There was a distinct sense of wrongness about the crystal, a poisonous alien taint that flowed off it in palpable waves. It didn’t belong in the chamber any more than the hulking invaders did. The White Flames hesitated for a moment on the threshold, an instinctive fear of the warp-spawned gripping even the most hardened reavers among them.

‘Shoot it, you fools!’ Yllithian snarled. ‘Your tormentor stands before you! Shoot!’

In an instant splinter weapons, disintegrator pulses, monomolecular nets and darklight beams slashed upwards. In truth Yllithian had little hope that the floating crystal would prove vulnerable to mundane weapons, but the crystal surprised him by instantly exploding under the barrage, the glittering shards of it scything through the chamber like shrapnel. For the briefest instant Yllithian caught sight of the abomination that had been metamorphosing inside the crystal, a being that seemed too monstrously huge to have possibly fitted within its confines. Yllithian was inured to the worst of horrors but even his black soul was scarred by the sight of the thing, at the terrible sense of closeness of an entity so utterly alien. Waves of sickness radiated from the entity as it writhed. It was attempting to complete its transition into the shadow-realm of Commorragh, to birth itself fully through the rapidly shrinking rents in the Wardings. Yllithian’s followers needed no prompting to open fire again.

The tower made a sickening lurch as a torrent of writhing foulness splattered onto the ground beneath where the crystal had floated a moment before. Leech-like, putrid vestiges of the crystal-encased entity went wriggling in all directions like animated offal, hungrily flowing over fallen bodies and struggling fighters alike. Above them blackened remnants of the entity folded back into unseen dimensions like a burned limb being withdrawn.

Bloated, shambolic monstrosities of dead flesh lurched forward to drag the living eldar into their foetid embrace. Once cut off from their progenitor the vestiges of the entity instinctively sought to grow and multiply like microbes. Fire, as ever, proved to be an invaluable ally against the more obscene manifestations from beyond the veil. The bright flare of plasma grenades cut through the murk as Yllithian’s warriors fought back against the new menace. The remnants were blasted, burned and hacked into oblivion in a matter of moments, a following rush of clumsily reanimated Chaos warriors meeting with a similar fate. As the last corpse stopped twitching silence descended across the room.

Just a summoning then, Yllithian thought to himself as he led his incubi into the chamber. The pawns of the Ruinous Powers had tried to bring something more powerful through from beyond the veil, a prince or patron from their insane daemonic court. Yllithian’s studies of forbidden lore told him that if one Chaos power was intent on Commorragh as a prize then there would be others too. The Ruinous Powers regarded the mortal realms as little more than game boards upon which to play out their endless rivalries. If Nurgle, a force of morbidity and stasis, sought a foothold in the dark city it would automatically be opposed by Tzeentch, the lord of change and vice versa. The Ruinous Powers had been stopped in time though at least here. Yllithian allowed himself to relax fractionally and looked around for Aez’ashya.

It was then that Aez’ashya’s wyches attacked Yllithian’s warriors. A sudden shout went up and the two forces were instantly at one another’s throats. The White Flames found themselves at a disadvantage in the confines of the chamber where the close and bloody fighting favoured the lightning-fast wyches. Yllithian glimpsed Aez’ashya racing towards him through the warring throng with a clutch of her hekatrix bloodbrides close at her back. He quickly backed up a pace to let his incubi form a solid wall in front of him and found himself on one of the bridges leading out of the chamber. The dark, hellish surface of Gorath raged far below and Yllithian could see that the intervening space was filled with darting, swirling Raiders and reavers battling beyond the tower’s walls.

Hekatrix and incubi clashed in a deadly fury of swinging klaives and darting blades. One of the hekatrix gave up her life to force an opening for her archon to exploit, dragging aside a klaive for a critical instant even as it slashed open her midriff. Aez’ashya shot through the gap and sprang towards Yllithian with a wild shout of laughter, her knives twin bright blurs as they sought his life.

CHAPTER 24

SACRIFICE

The floor of the World Shrine on Lileathanir tilted and shook like a ship caught in the teeth of a storm. Rocks and ice rained from above and dashed themselves to pieces all around the group as they ran. Molten rock jetted up in glowing geysers, bulwarks of ice flashed into clouds of steam that hissed and screamed in counterpoint to the thunderous roars coming from ahead.

‘By all the gods what has he done?’ Caraeis raged as he plunged beneath the arch at the heart of the World Shrine. Close behind him the sapphire figures of the Dire Avengers kept pace warily, their exarch silent as they followed the warlock into the dragon’s lair.

Caraeis stumbled through the quivering tunnel with witchblade in hand, the chained lightning of his own power coiled and ready to strike. A psychic storm of crimson fury raged ahead of him, and it was soul-shaking in its intensity. His own senses, physical and metaphysical, were deafened and blinded by the dragon’s anger but he pushed forward guided by instinct alone.

The warlock emerged from the tunnel onto a slope still smoking and scarred by the sullen glow of cooling rock. Below him was a great cavern in tumult where coils of crimson light twisted and thrashed like a gargantuan nest of snakes. Caraeis could perceive a moving speck of darkness within the energised mass, something constantly tossed back and forth but always at the epicentre of maelstrom. Here was the incubus! Here was the violator that had been sought for so long! The dark one was goading the world spirit into unthinking fury, recreating his crime and magnifying it a thousand times over!

Caraeis plunged a hand into his satchel of runes, grasping one and bringing it forth to hold aloft like an icon. He would destroy the incubus, annihilate the violator utterly and save the world spirit of Lileathanir. It was hard to grasp his own powers and marshal them in the face of the turmoil all around him but grasp them he did. He poured every ounce of his ability into summoning the deadliest manifestation of psychic power that he knew of – the eldritch storm.

A lenticular blaze of blue-white lightning ravened across the cavern, bright bolts crashing into the looping coils as they sought out the dark speck within them with unstoppable force. The rune between Caraeis’s fingers blazed with light, growing hotter and brighter by the second as he channelled unimaginable energy through it. The lightning of the eldritch storm clashed with the unleashed fury of the dragon, provoking an earth-shattering howl that bludgeoned the mind and blasted the senses. The rune was shining like a star, its retina-burning image piercing the amber lenses of Caraeis’s mask.

It was only then that he realised he had made a mistake.

He had sought the rune of vengeance, he felt sure that was what he had drawn forth from the satchel, but the image burned into his sight was that of the rune of weaving. His concentration was shattered by the shock of recognition, the eldritch storm dissipating in an instant. He flung the treacherous rune away, his mind filling with horror at the implications.

The rune of weaving had many meanings but behind them all lay the weaver of Fate, also known as the Chaos power Tzeentch, the Lord of Change…

Into his mind there came unbidden the hundreds of times that the rune of weaving had led him upon this path. A push here, a shove there. The guiding rune always twisting at the center of it all, seeming to feed on his ambitions after he first perceived the coming crisis. He felt all the passionate emotion that had raced through his mind in times when he had thought himself calm, the sick realisation that he had been closer to the edge of his sanity than he believed and that he had now passed beyond it.

It was already too late, something was rising from the coils of crimson light, a dark, broken body splayed out as if on a rack. It rose at the head of a serpentine coil of crimson energy, questing, turning back and forth before it fixed upon Caraeis. Momentary silence fell across the cavern, an indrawn breath in the midst of a primal scream. The incubus laughed mercilessly down at him from the head of the crimson serpent before he spoke in a voice like the dry whisper of billon dead souls.

‘Fool. Fool to come here. Fool to use your powers against the dragon. Your hubris has become your undoing.’

Somehow Caraeis found a voice in his terror. ‘This… this is impossible, how– ‘

Morr’s laughter was a roll of distant thunder. Crimson energies writhed around his limbs, poured from his fingertips in rippling falls of flames. He brought his palms together and a whirling ball of fire sprang into being between them.

‘I long since learned to master my rage, to make a weapon of it,’ the incubus whispered. He opened his arms wider, the ball of fire growing into a miniature star. ‘At Arhra’s knee I learned its direction and purpose. I cannot master the dragon, but I can help channel its fury. You angered it and so now I can direct its rage into you… and through your sacrifice this world shall be made whole again.’

Morr opened his arms and the fiery nova swept down on Caraeis with elemental quickness. The warlock marshalled his defences into a sparkling hemisphere of counter-force that sprang into being around him. The barrier shivered with the impact yet it held. An inferno of flames washed over it and it crackled like frosted glass as it resisted the crude, powerful attack. Caraeis enjoyed a brief moment of hope. The incubus was no battle-seer. Even with the limitless potential of the world spirit fuelling the dark one Caraeis still might gain victory with a well-timed counter blow.

Yet the blast did not end, instead it intensified into a roaring firestorm. Caraeis sweated beneath his mask as he hurled all of his psychic strength into maintaining the barrier. He felt as if he were braced against a fortress door that was shaking beneath the assault of a monster outside. He began to pull runes from his satchel to help weave the protective barriers of force more tightly, fumbling as he built a constellation of tiny floating runes around himself. The runes sparked wildly as they sought to dissipate the dangerous levels of etheric energy leaking past the barrier.

Still the assault continued to rage and roar with undimmed intensity. Gibbering in desperation Caraeis reached deeper within himself, beyond himself, for the strength to endure. From somewhere deep and forbidden in his mind he heard an answering whisper from a presence he now realised had always been with him. A rushing enormity swelled in his mind, something unutterable, ancient and eldritch. He felt himself begin to expand in readiness to receive it; an arrival that he realised would obliterate him like a wind-blown candle. The idea filled his breaking mind with idiotic joy.

‘Caraeis! No!’ Aiosa shouted above the fury.

The mind-shout was close by, it was from a familiar source but such things were irrelevant to Caraeis now. His mind had shrunk to a bisected circle containing only the need to maintain the barrier and an indescribable, almost orgasmic anticipation of the arrival of the Lord of Change. He did not look with his altering eyes to see the sapphire-armoured Dire Avengers level their star throwers at his back, did not feel their monomolecular discs spinning through his mutating flesh as Aiosa ordered her Aspect Warriors to cut down the abomination he was becoming.

Mere physical injury could no longer kill Caraeis. He had become a conduit for something too great to be stopped so easily. But even so he could still be distracted by the external input of severed nerves and gouting blood, the circle of his concentration broken by mortal instincts. The psychic barrier wavered as it stood momentarily unsupported by his will. The mountainous pressures of the world spirit’s attack – strengthened now through its fear and anger at the approach of the Lord of Change – needed no more than that sliver of hesitation to begin overwhelming Caraeis’s defences.

The psychic barrier collapsed sending soul-born fires sweeping down on Caraeis and his constellation of orbiting runes. Rage and burning hate were channelled against the warlock, an endless outpouring that was quelled and dissipated in part by each of the layers of protection Caraeis’s had wrapped around his soul. Each defensive rune absorbed unthinkable amounts of psychic power as it flared and failed, enough to destroy cities and continents, but the rage of Lileathanir was an unstoppable, insatiable thing. Layer by layer, rune by rune the defences were stripped away. At last the quailing, tainted soul of the warlock was laid bare and utterly destroyed with a triumphant, earth-shivering roar.

Aiosa and the stunned Dire Avengers fled from the quaking chamber pursued by a rain of rocks and lava. The walls of the exit tunnel shivered as they ground slowly together, seemingly determined to crush the Aspect Warriors in their implacable embrace. Aiosa urged her squad onward, driving them before her like frightened animals until they tumbled out into the World Shrine.

Behind them, sealed in the deep chamber, the lambent tide of violence began to recede, flowing away down the slope and dimming as it went. The looping crimson coils in the cavern were slowed and dissipated by the touch of the returning tide. A rippling colour change was taking place in the insubstantial tendrils as they retreated, a gradual fading through purples and blues to a clear, wholesome green. Where Caraeis had stood was now only a scar in the rock lit by dancing fires. No trace of either the warlock or the incubus remained to be seen.

For the first time in many moons a hushed silence fell across the World Shrine of Lileathanir. Beyond the holy mountain the clans saw stars again in the night sky and the moving stars that were ships in the firmament coming to their aid.

Despite Bezieth’s warnings they encountered no ur-ghuls in the tunnel. She couldn’t shake the impression that they had all been spooked by something and cleared out. Perhaps the little murder engine had frightened them all off, but the troglodytic predators didn’t scare easily. Once they got closer to the vertical shaft Kharbyr had been so desperately trying to avoid she could see a more probable cause.

Vast, shadowy pseudopods were thrusting up from below, probing at the mouth of the shaft almost tenderly. Bellathonis directed Xagor to carry him right over to the edge without any regard for the sinister ink-black tentacles sweeping past only metres away. Bezieth joined them reluctantly, experiencing a rare twinge of vertigo as she peered over the edge into the kilometres-deep drop. The tentacles seemed to stretch up to impossible lengths from a roiling pit of darkness at the bottom.

‘Look at it,’ Bellathonis said. ‘Aelindrach, the shadow-realm. It has expanded during the Dysjunction by swallowing up more of the city into itself.’

‘Then we should be going the other way!’ Bezieth snarled, raising her djin-blade meaningfully.

‘No, not at all, my dear archon,’ Bellathonis said imperturbably. ‘I have friends in Aelindrach, contacts even with the ear of the mandrake kings. What you thought was an attack was them reaching out for me, or what they thought was me at the time. The shadow-realm offers sanctuary for all of us during a Dysjunction, trust me on this.’

‘With mandrakes? They’ll drink our blood and use our skulls for ornaments–’ Bezieth said.

‘Well the choice is yours,’ Bellathonis replied. ‘You must either trust me and follow or make your own way, it is all the same to me – Xagor, go ahead.’

The wrack turned and stepped over the edge without hesitation with Bellathonis still clutching his back. The two vanished from view instantly, swept up effortlessly by one of the questing tentacles. Bezieth hung back uncertainly for moment, watching for any glimpse of their falling bodies and listening for screams. She saw and heard nothing.

‘Oh to hell with that,’ Bezieth muttered to herself as she stalked away from the pit. ‘I’d rather take my chances with the ur-ghuls.’ She was reduced to being a kabal of one, two if you counted the spirit of Axhyrian and she didn’t. Sec Megara wouldn’t be such a bad place to start recruiting, certainly a damn sight better than Aelindrach.

Yllithian teetered on the precipice; thousands of kilometres beneath his heels the stolen sun Gorath blazed hungrily, a medusa’s-nest of black, twisting fires waiting for him below. Aez’ashya’s relentless attack was forcing him back step by step to the edge of the bridge, his blade weaving desperately as he attempted to keep her at bay. Yllithian was a master swordsman in his own right yet he was badly outmatched by her and he knew it.

Only his shadow field had kept him alive so far, a dozen times the inky swirl of darkness had blocked a speeding knife or turned aside a disembowelling thrust. Aez’ashya would know that it was only a matter of time before the energy field failed completely, all she had to do was just keep battering at it for long enough. Yllithian kept expecting his incubi to come up and save him but he was still utterly alone, trapped within an unbreakable web of steel that was tightening by the moment.

Yllithian glimpsed something behind Aez’ashya that surprised him so much it made him momentarily drop his guard. Aez’ahya instantly sprang back out of reach suspecting some sort of a trick. Then she saw it too and her relentless knives hesitated in their courses.

‘Is that–?’

The hideous, vibrant colours that had smeared the wardings since the beginning of the Dysjunction were fading. They were dimming and scattering moment by moment like a storm blown away by a fresh wind. Below their feet Gorath was calming as its fiery corona began shrinking back within its normal parameters.

‘Yes, it’s ending. The Dysjunction is over,’ Yllithian said, sidling carefully away from the edge of the bridge as he spoke. Aez’ashya watched him coolly.

‘You think this changes anything?’ she said.

‘Of course it does! It changes everything!’ Yllithian exclaimed passionately. ‘Clearly our brave assault on the Ilmaea has met with stunning success and put an end to the menace. We should be praised and rewarded to the highest degree for our efforts, don’t you think? Although naturally that will only work if we’re both around corroborate one another’s story to Vect.’

Aez’ashya considered this for a moment and laughed.

‘I like your thinking, Yllithian,’ she smiled nastily, flourishing her daggers, ‘but I think that Vect will reward me quite adequately enough when I bring him your head!’

Yllithian took another step back as Aez’ashya tensed to spring. Over the succubus’s bladed shoulder he could see his incubi bodyguards pounding down the bridge toward them.

‘Then I’m afraid you’ll have to see how he responds when you report your failure instead. Vect’s terribly unforgiving of that kind of thing as you’ll soon come to learn.’

Aez’ashya caught his glance and heard the approaching clatter of their armoured sabatons at the same moment. Yllithian was thrilled to see the anguish in her eyes as she realised she had failed. A few more heartbeats and the mistress of the Blades of Desire would be the one losing her head. He was surprised by the fierce grin she gave him.

‘Until next time, Yllithian,’ Aez’ashya said spitefully, ‘be a darling and try to become more of a worthy opponent by then, won’t you?’ So saying she turned and leapt from the bridge to apparently certain death in the embrace of Gorath.

Yllithian knew better and cursed as he bounded to the edge to see her fate. He was just in time to see the blur of a fast moving Venom transport come curving around the tower and intersect with the falling form before speeding away. He was still nodding in admiration when his incubi arrived. He noted with chagrin that only three of them had survived their battle with hekatrix.

‘Better late than never, I suppose,’ he commented acidly. ‘I believe I’ve found myself the motivation to ensure Xelian returns to lead the Blades of Desire, I like not their new archon.’

Aiosa, her armour riven and scored in a dozen places, found the Harlequin waiting for her in the World Shrine with a relieved-looking smile on his face. It took all of her considerable self-control not to lay hands upon him and shake him until his neck snapped.

‘What did you do?’ the exarch snarled dangerously.

‘Do? I did nothing but bring people together so that they could mitigate a threat to all of us. Everyone played their appointed part beautifully and now the threat is over. I’m spectacularly happy that you and your warriors survived, and very sorry if I offended you along the way.’

‘You sent Caraeis to his death!’

Motley frowned unhappily at the accusation, stepping back with his hands spread helplessly. ‘No. He found a doom that has been waiting for him for quite some time. I merely ensured that his sacrifice aided the eldar race instead of the Chaos powers. Caraeis’s overweening ambition did not come entirely from within, Aiosa, surely you must have sensed that.’

Aiosa shook her helm grimly before stopping herself and reconsidering. The tension she’d felt had been real, a sense that the warlock was overstepping boundaries and flaunting traditions without thought. She had repeatedly put it down to youthfulness and arrogance but it had been very real.

‘And the incubus?’ she said more slowly. ‘He was trying to slay the dragon spirit, an impossible task. Did you tell him that he would succeed?’

‘I never lied to him, if that’s what you mean, he took on the task willingly enough for the sake of his honour and his adopted city. He knew if he went in there he wasn’t coming out and that’s what I call bravery no matter where you hail from. He should be mourned rather than vilified.’

‘He created the situation,’ Aiosa said flatly. ‘He led the Commorrites that violated the shrine and they brought their doom upon themselves.’

‘Morr was a weapon wielded by others,’ Motley said wearily. ‘He was no more culpable than a gun can be guilty of murder… May I tell you a fundamental truth, Aiosa?’

The proud mask of the exarch inclined minutely and Motley was struck once again by how much like Morr she looked in that moment.

‘When I became old enough – and I am very, very old despite my youthful appearance – there came a point when I began to question how many lives a difference in philosophy is truly worth. Upon reaching that point and asking myself that question I started to consider just whom all the death and destruction that is visited upon our fractured race really serves.’

The slight Harlequin looked up into the hard, crystalline eyes of the exarch for some glimmer of understanding. He found none.

EPILOGUE

And so I stand revealed at the end of my tale. I, the one called Motley, player and orchestrator both. It would be false to claim that I foresaw every outcome, but it would be fair to say I predicted more rightly than wrongly.

It comes to this – the great cosmic joke. All we do is fight against ourselves. The material existence we defer to and rely upon and believe in is illusory; it gives the impression of solidity when in point of fact there’s nothing in the universe more destructible and short-lived. It appears from nothing and it goes to nothing while only the soul endures.

And you see that’s really the key: Immortal souls adrift in an endless sea of aeons eternally at war with themselves, being driven by passions so strong, so primal they have become entities we have come to call gods. Little do those poor souls know that it’s their own belief that gives shape to what oppresses them and that they lend it their strength with every struggle. Poor, lost, immortal souls; they can be crushed, they can be consumed, they can be enslaved, they can be corrupted, but they can never, ever be completely destroyed.

And souls can always be reborn.

BELLATHONIS AND THE SHADOW KING

Even among the jaded citizenry of Commorragh, the Aviaries of Archon Malixian, whom some unkind souls call ‘Malixian the Mad,’ are a place of dark wonder. In the Aviaries sculpted parklands of exquisitely-cut topiary and soft green sward extend between steep-walled structures of a thousand different designs. At first glance there appears to be a host of strangely-wrought cathedrals, tenements, domes and towers rising from the sumptuous gardens, a city reproduced in miniature within the greater city of Commorragh. Closer inspection reveals that every tower and dome is a cage, and that their inhuman inhabitants are all captives of Archon Malixian’s singular obsession.

The cages of the Aviaries range from simple pagoda-like cages of gilded bars to immense wire spheres, leaded glass cubes and cones of interwoven bone. Their numbers beggar belief, each one a skyscraper-sized habitat for a unique winged life form plucked from some far-off world. Above it all lies Malixian’s eyrie, a single spike of silver thrust up to scrape the heavens. The spike is tipped with a silver sphere a hundred paces across. It is a structure more of empty space than metal yet it has landing points and unrailed walkways for the convenience of those that must stride upon two legs. Here Archon Malixian holds his court.

It was to the Court of Malixian that the Master Haemonculus Bellathonis fled when he was driven out of Lower Metzuh. On this day, not long after his arrival, Bellathonis and a pair of his wrack servants emerged from the modest tower Malixian had graciously granted him as a place of sanctuary. It was the first time Bellathonis had taken his servants into the parklands between the cages and the wracks seemed nervous, weighed down as they were with hooked poles and grapnel chains.

To enter the Aviaries was to enter an alien world where the air was filled with the competing squawks, songs, trills and cries from a billion different species of avian. Within the gigantic cages wings flapped and fluttered endlessly, the polished beaks and beady eyes of creatures from a million different worlds flashing in the light. Archon Malixian’s greatest passion was the flying predator in all its forms, from slow-flying arcotheurs to lithe stingwings, from majestic white ruhks to darting shaderavens. He had dedicated his long life to amassing his collection from all corners of the galaxy and even in Commorragh it remained worthy of the term ‘exotic.’

The master haemonculus found what he was looking for just a few hundred paces away from his new quarters. Near the base of a golden-barred tower filled with crimson pteraclaws he directed his wracks to pry up an ornate grating set into the turf. An impressively foul stench emanated from the shaft that was revealed; so impressive that Bellathonis had to inflict some sharp physical punishments to induce his wracks to climb down it.

The master haemonculus stood and waited, passing the time by watching the pteraclaws cavort on leathery pinions hundreds of metres above him. The reptilian predators seemed particularly agitated for some reason. They kept forming into cawing spirals, only to break up and reform moments later. Bellathonis only understood the import of all the activity when none other than Archon Malixian himself came strolling around the corner of the pteraclaws’ cage and directly towards him.

The archon was tall and long-legged. He wore an iridescent cloak of feathers and walked with a curiously stiff-legged gait that gave him the undeniable aspect of a great raptor stalking forward. A group of heavily-armed warriors followed Archon Malixian at a respectful distance, their heads constantly swivelling as they searched for potential threats. Bellathonis was acutely conscious of the open grating on the ground behind him. It was a mute accusation that Malixian’s newest guest was already poking his nose into places he probably shouldn’t.

‘Greetings, Bellathonis. I trust you are settling into your new demesne satisfactorily?’ Archon Malixian said breezily enough as he came closer.

‘I am, although I still lack certain materials to begin my work for you,’ Bellathonis replied cautiously. ‘I must confess I find myself surprised to see you afoot in the parks, my archon. Certain doubtless wild and unfounded rumours purported you had foresworn the touch of doleful earth once and for all.’

Malixian’s eyes twinkled merrily. ‘Oh it was so for a few centuries – I thought that to truly appreciate my magnificent collection that I must become more like them by endlessly sailing the upper airs and spurning the ground.’

‘May I ask what changed?’ Bellathonis said promptly. He was pleased to be able to so easily divert Malixian’s attention away from the accusatory grate behind him.

‘I came to understand that many gifted with wings also touch upon the ground often. Xhaloic butchers fly only when they move from one ambush spot to another. Myvigian death runners certainly glide aloft to locate their prey they but choose to land to chase it down. So you see, the true airborne predator does not spurn the earth but uses it at his convenience – as do I.’

‘And what is it that brings you forth into your beautiful gardens this day, my archon?’ Bellathonis asked.

Malixian’s smiling face clouded suddenly at his words.

‘Your questions are becoming tiresome, Bellathonis. I am master here and I will pass to and fro as I see fit without recourse to your inquisitions,’ Malixian said icily. A moment later the archon was all smiles again and Bellathonis experienced a curious roiling sensation as he saw how quickly the transformations of Malixian’s mood came and went. The archon truly was insane.

‘I came looking for you, you silly haemonculus,’ Malixian continued. ‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’

Bellathonis glanced at the open grate as if only just remembering its existence. ‘The materials I mentioned as lacking – my wracks are below searching for them. I needed basic clay to work with, bio-mass if you will, and had none readily available.’

Malixian’s head cocked to one side in a mannerism that could only have been copied from the avians he loved so much. Bellathonis realised the archon was waiting for a better explanation.

‘Corpse-fishing,’ the Haemonculus said with some relish. ‘My wracks are below in the waste-tubes dredging them for any usable flesh and bone that may float by.’

Malixian grinned widely and then began laughing in an uproarious hooting that his attendant bodyguards dutifully joined. Bellathonis smiled thinly as he waited to find out the joke being played at his expense. Malixian eventually wiped his eyes and calmed himself to mere chuckling.

‘Hoo, I’m sorry Bellathonis, your servants won’t find anything of the sort down there. Dead flesh doesn’t get thrown out in the waste here at my aviaries.’

Malixian turned to gesture up at the crimson pteraclaws. As he did so, the reptilian creatures whirled upwards into another tight spiral inside their golden cage. The whipping and snapping of their blood-coloured wings was deafening.

‘Everything gets fed to something in here,’ Malixian said over the noise. ‘Bone and sinew, grist and offal – it’s all a delicacy to something in my collection. In fact some of my charges will only eat what’s been excreted by other ones.’

‘Then I ask that you forgive my trespass, my archon,’ Bellathonis said humbly. ‘My unforgiveable ignorance led me to believe I would be performing a useful service for you by unblocking the pipes while at the same time gaining what I needed to begin my work for you. I was mistaken.’

Malixian waved away the master haemonculus’s contrition carelessly. Bellathonis was fascinated to see how the pteraclaws swirled back and forth in response to the gesture. The creatures definitely recognized the mad archon; doubtless they expected to be fed when he was present.

‘I’ll have some slaves sent to you later,’ the archon said. ‘But that isn’t why I sought you out. Come and walk with me, Bellathonis.’

They wandered among immaculately cut hedges and across lawns as soft as a newborn’s blanket while Malixian told Bellathonis what he wanted of him. By the time the mad archon was finished Bellathonis had begun to wish he had stayed in Lower Metzuh.

As the supreme genetic manipulators, drug distillers and flesh sculptors to be found in the dark city, the skills of individual haemonculi are always in great demand among the Commorrite kabals. To avoid excessive coercion or outright assassination, like-minded haemonculi traditionally band together into covens for mutual benefit and protection. The rivalry between some of these covens extends back for millennia although it must be said disputes between haemonculi tend toward wicked, slowly-maturing schemes rather than paroxysms of outright conflict. The covens demand absolute fealty from their members and always mask their activities with utmost secrecy.

For centuries the haemonculi covens have had their own territories in the razor-edged pits beneath the Core of Commorragh and in those benighted realms even death itself offers no escape. Oubliettes and torture cells exist in the pits that can defer the point of termination indefinitely. There are also haemonculi who live to exercise their arts with surgical precision in pursuit of finding the perfect scream. It is an unlucky soul that finds itself in the pits of the haemonculi, and woe to any that should stray into them without the protection of a coven.

It was into these pits that Bellathonis was forced to come at Malixian’s behest. The master haemonculus crept along narrow walkways over black gulfs and through twisting corridors piled high with detritus as he wormed down into the guts of the dark city. As he progressed he looked for signs of a spiral symbol on the corrosion-stained walls. In some places he found it in faded paint, in others fresh chalk, at other times grim fetishes of twisted bone and sinew in the familiar spiral led him onwards. The symbols led him ever deeper towards the territories of the coven known as the Black Descent.

The covens guarded their territories according to their individual credos: To wander into the pits claimed by the Prophets of Flesh would have been to court mutilation by the most brutal grotesques and vicious chainghouls. Violating the outer seals of the realm of the Hex would have brought a swift doom from mutant pathogens so potent that they lasted only seconds outside those rarified halls. The Black Descent guarded itself with an eternally revolving labyrinth filled with traps of fiendish complexity and diabolic variety.

Each coven had its own method for granting safe passage to its members: The Hex gave precise instructions of the necessary body modifications necessary to survive the attentions of their microscopic pets. The Prophets of Flesh used command phrases to temporarily pacify their ravening golems. In the case of the Black Descent, the coven’s secrets came in the form of the mnemonic directions necessary to pass unscathed through their tortuous labyrinth to reach preset ‘interstices’ at particular locations. Progression (descent, to be most specific) through the coven’s ranks included further instruction on navigating the deeper and more inaccessible paths of the Black Descent’s demesne.

Bellathonis had gained a reputation as a renegade while he was in Lower Metzuh, a master haemonculus unaffiliated with either coven or kabal who was open to hire by all. In reality he was a member of one of the oldest and most powerful covens in Commorragh. At least he was in theory, anyway, although that was a matter of some dispute in Bellathonis’s own mind. Nevertheless, technically Bellathonis was still a member of the Black Descent and Malixian had managed to discover the fact. The mad archon’s demand was doomed to rejection in Bellathonis’s opinion, but he had scarcely been in a position to refuse to carry it to his supposed superiors in the coven.

Bellathonis had achieved the rank of master haemonculus in the Black Descent, and so he knew a handful of safe routes through the maze to a few specified interstices. These were mere meeting points where he could possibly find and consult with others of the coven. Only his superiors –those positioned ‘lower’ than himself within the Black Descent – knew the paths to the most important vaults and laboratories, the personal quarters of the coven leaders and the innermost sanctums. Thus, when Bellathonis entered the labyrinth on this occasion he began to perform the five hundred and twenty-seven steps required to reach the ninth interstices, the Chamber of Attenuation.

The master haemonculus concentrated carefully as he moved through a complex pattern: forward, back and side to side. He passed through innocent-seeming corridors of rough stone and areas which were pitch dark even to his altered eyesight. A single misstep in the labyrinth was liable to plunge him into the guts of a gravity trap or straight through an almost invisible monofilament web. The variety and lethality of the labyrinth’s traps was dizzying. Blood wasp nests and mutagenic acid sprays were behind the walls, agoniser wings lurked overhead and semi-sentient venom clouds lay in wait, spread a molecule thick over the walls.

Unaccustomed sweat beaded Bellathonis’s pallid face as he counted his way through convolutions as complicated as dance-steps. Deep down, he just knew that he had passed within a few paces of the ninth interstices a dozen times by now, but that his rank precluded him knowing the most direct routes. He finally emerged from the circuitous routes he had followed into an oblong chamber with an arched ceiling. Along each wall, pillars of glossy metal separated darkened archways identical to the one from which he had just entered. The chamber was bare except for a large silver gong and striker hanging in its center. Bellathonis stepped over to the gong and lifted the striker to ring it three times. Then he waited.

By being obedient and diligent, Bellathonis could eventually expect to descend to the rank of secret master, and then hidden master. Within a century or two more of faithful service, and making the correct friends, Bellathonis might eventually progress to the rank of intimate secretary and be placed in a position to directly serve someone with real power in the coven. In another millennia he might become worthy of consideration as a master elect of nine and wield just a little of that power for himself. In a lifetime, in fact probably over several lifetimes, it might be possible to descend as far as patriarch noctis, an office so far down in the Black Descent that it was ruled in turn by ranks that were completely unknown to a mere master like Bellathonis.

After several minutes a figure wearing viridian robes of an intimate secretary appeared through an archway on the far side of the chamber. The secretary grimaced at the sight of Bellathonis, contempt etching his sharp features.

‘You over-indulge yourself,’ the intimate secretary spat. ‘Three strikes are only made for matters of import.’

‘I have a matter of great import to discuss – in fact, one that exceeds your authority,’ Bellathonis replied evenly. ‘So run along and fetch the master elect like a good secretary.’

The intimate secretary shot Bellathonis a look that was pure poison before he turned and retreated through a different archway. As soon as the secretary had gone, Bellathonis discreetly slipped a small vial into his palm and loosened its stopper between his thumb and forefinger. The results made the master haemonculus blink rapidly in response as he hid away the vial again. He was struck by a sudden fear that the master elect would come upon him so evidently discomfited and did all he could to ignore his smarting eyes until the effect subsided a few minutes later. He needn’t have worried as the better part of an hour dragged by with no sign of the master elect. Bellathonis began to fear that the secretary would return with only a flat refusal if he troubled to return at all.

‘Matters of import,’ a new voice said without preamble. It was horrible voice, one with a tenor akin to the screech of bonesaws and shriek of drills as it dissected each word. Bellathonis knew it to be the voice of the master elect of nine. He looked about and noticed a deeper darkness that had appeared in another of the archways – a shadowy occlusion field that was hiding the master elect from even Bellathonis’s altered vision.

‘master elect,’ Bellathonis bowed smoothly to the formless shadow. ‘I have come to the coven bearing word from the august Archon Malixian on a matter of import.’ The master haemonculus stepped back a little as he bowed as though in deference to the master elect’s authority. In fact, he needed the master elect to enter the chamber fully.

The shadow remained where it was. ‘Malixian, mad archon of the Aviaries and now your patron also,’ the dreadful voice grated. ‘Unfortunate for you to be driven into his arms by disputes in the Lower Courts.’

‘“Unfortunate” is a term barely sufficient,’ Bellathonis snapped. ‘I was assiduous about supporting all of the petty archons equally and without favour. Some of the fools still took it upon themselves to burn my workshop and kill my servants.’

‘Yet you only return to the Black Descent after finding patronage in the satellite realms without reference to the coven’s desires. This could be seen as a disrespectful act.’

‘Or an independent one,’ Bellathonis replied petulantly. ‘I’ve told you before that I need no help from the coven to find patronage for my art.’

The shadow swept forward a pace. ‘And yet here you return for new purpose. So speak it.’

Bellathonis squirmed internally. The master elect was absolutely correct that he had only returned because he needed something from the coven. This was the point of decision, he had to persuade the master elect to do what was necessary or else return to Malixian empty-handed. At best that would mean Bellathonis being evicted from his new home. Other possibilities included ending his life in the gizzard of some exotic predatory avian.

‘It has come to Archon Malixian’s attention that the Patriarch Noctis Zykleiades has come into possession of an extremely rare and unusual flying creature. As Malixian’s passions are well known, it should come as no surprise that he wishes to add this creature to his collection.’ Bellathonis paused, his mouth dry. The roiling shadow that obscured the master elect remained silent.

‘And so Malixian has asked me to present his offer directly to the patriarch noctis so that a price may be arranged.’

‘Impossible,’ the master elect grated, ‘the patriarch will not see you. He will not haggle like a slave over his possessions. Least of all will he surrender a prize so difficult to find as the one to which you are alluding. Return to Malixian and inform him of this.’

Bellathonis sighed, his hopes dashed. ‘Then I fear my patronage from Malixian will be at an end. The archon was most insistent that I must at least gain Zykleiades’s ear and ensure the offer was presented to him. I will lose my new facilities in the Aviaries and be left wandering the streets of Metzuh.’

‘A presence in the Aviaries has some small value to the coven,’ the master elect ruminated after a long pause. ‘You may tell Malixian that his offer will be conveyed to the patriarch noctis. There is still no doubt that it will be rejected.’

‘My gratitude, master elect, for that small mercy. I will return and let Archon Malixian know what has transpired.’ Bellathonis started backing away towards the arch he had used to enter the chamber.

‘One matter remains,’ the master elect said, his words stopping Bellathonis in his tracks. ‘You will be assigned a secret master to join you in the Aviaries and oversee your work. You have been granted an excessive amount of latitude for too long.’

‘As you command, master elect.’ Bellathonis bowed, but the master elect was already gone.

Bellathonis waited for a dozen heartbeats before crossing the chamber to the archway the master elect had used. After pausing for a moment longer, the master haemonculus took a deep breath and plunged through it.

Bellathonis felt a thrilling mix of fear and excitement as he entered part of the labyrinth he had never been into before. Unsurprisingly, the walls, the flagstones and the feel of oppressive darkness were virtually identical. A simple, straight corridor led away into shadows, but Bellathonis had no doubt that it held devices every bit as deadly as those he had already passed. The master haemonculus examined the scene minutely while he allowed his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Before him, a faint luminescence began to resolve itself, a wispy trail hanging in the air that zigged and zagged its way down the corridor. The master haemonculus smiled triumphantly and began to follow the trail that had been unwittingly left behind by the master elect.

The trail was being created by some very special microbes Bellathonis had released into the Chamber of Attenuation. He had modified the tiny creatures to excrete light of a very specific wavelength whenever they were moved, specifically light of a wavelength that was invisible to the naked eye but visible to his own altered sight. Bellathonis’s initial dispersal of the microbes in the chamber had almost blinded him at first. Once the master elect had entered the chamber he became contaminated by tiny traitors that revealed his every move – but only if you knew how to look for it.

The threads of light drew Bellathonis deeper into the labyrinth. It was an insanely risky plan. The master elect might not go straight to the patriarch noctis; Bellathonis could lose the trail and become stranded in the trap-filled darkness; he might encounter another member of the Black Descent who was well aware that Bellathonis had no right to be so far into the labyrinth. Even if the master elect went directly to the patriarch noctis, there was no guarantee Bellathonis would find the creature Malixian wanted in the same location, nor that he could secure it if he did.

A reckless smile played around the master haemonculus’s thin lips as he continued following the trail. He had decided that the labyrinthine nature of the Black Descent’s territory was entirely symptomatic of the coven as a whole. The coven was so obsessed with secrecy and obfuscation that its members spent all their time traversing mazes of their own creation. Preservation of the status quo appeared to be the only real goal. All the secretive ranks and rituals were merely methods to turn the coven’s membership into pliant servants.

The Black Descent had proved too stratified, too oblique and too conservative for Bellathonis’s tastes. He had long craved to break away from the coven completely and Archon Malixian had unwittingly supplied exactly the impetus that Bellathonis had needed. A theft from a patriarch noctis’s collection deep inside the coven’s supposedly impenetrable labyrinth would be a fitting final gesture.

The light trail crossed five corridor junctions before it abruptly came to an end. Bellathonis froze as a sense of dread gripped him. The master elect could have discovered the contamination on his person or some invisible barrier might have registered the tiny creatures as invaders and destroyed them automatically. Whatever had occurred, the trail was broken from this point forward and it would be suicide to proceed. He would have to turn back.

As Bellathonis gazed dolefully at the area where the trail ceased he noticed something unusual. A few wan smears of luminescence clung to the wall at shoulder height. On instinct, Bellathonis reached out and placed his fingertips against the dimly glowing patches. The corridor wall split open beneath his touch.

The stone peeled back smoothly and silently to reveal a short corridor beyond. Bellathonis’s pulse quickened when he saw that this corridor was both broader and lower than the ones he was accustomed to seeing throughout the rest of the labyrinth. The hazy trail of light was visible again now moving arrow-straight along the corridor and through an archway at the end of it. From beyond the arch Bellathonis caught the grating tones of the master elect’s voice moving further away. He smirked to hear the deferential undertone in the master elect’s usual cacophony; the patriarch noctis must be with him.

The voice of the master elect dwindled away and vanished entirely. Bellathonis stalked forward noiselessly on the balls of his feet to the archway. He hid behind it and peeped cautiously through into the area beyond. The way led into a series of wide, low rooms interconnected with another via more archways and short flights of steps. Rich furnishings were apparent throughout the chambers: there were spindly-looking chairs and tables of metal and carved bone, hide-bound books and alchemical apparatus gleamed on shelves, mosaics of dark gems glittered from the walls, rich furs and exotic skins covered the floors.

The master elect’s trail led away to the left, but Bellathonis broke from following it to investigate the rooms further. He was sure that he had now entered the hidden chambers of the patriarch noctis, presumably his reception rooms or audience chambers. No guards or slaves were to be seen anywhere. No doubt the patriarch regarded them as unnecessary inside his inviolable sanctum and an undesirable security risk. Bellathonis chuckled at the thought. He mounted some steps and stopped dead at what he saw.

The room was octagonal with entryways on three other sides. The remaining four walls were decorated with displays of crude-looking weapons and armour that had the look of artefacts made by the slave races. Bellathonis’s attention was instantly drawn to what lay in the centre of the room. A hip-high plinth supported a cage that was roughly the size and shape of a torso. Inside the cage and completely restrained by its close-set bars was a bird-like creature of a type the master haemonculus had never seen before.

The creature had golden feathers that seemed to glow with an inner light. Wicked claws, as white as alabaster, gripped the perch beneath it. Most intriguingly of all, it had two raptor-like heads that were each blinded in one eye. The remaining black, beady eye in both heads regarded him with fierce intelligence. Even Bellathonis, psychically blunted as he was, could feel the faint fever-heat of psychic power radiating from it.

‘Well, you must be the one that Malixian spoke of,’ Bellathonis gloated. ‘An inquisitor’s gene-eagle, no less. He said that barely once in a lifetime does one get separated from its master and captured alive.’

The gene-eagle only hissed in response. When Bellathonis reached out to pick up the cage it snapped its beaks viciously at his fingers. The master haemonculus chuckled again as he plucked up the cage by the ring on its top.

‘Now don’t be like that,’ he admonished. ‘I promise you’ll like Malixian. He’s certainly most anxious to meet you’

As Bellathonis turned to leave, he heard a faint cry, barely more than a whisper, coming from an adjacent room. The master haemonculus became instantly wary and drew a slender, spiral-barrelled pistol from his sleeve. The cry sounded again and Bellathonis’s curiosity got the best of him. He moved to look through the arch to where the sound was emanating from.

The adjacent room was almost identical in layout. Instead of slave-made power hammers and force axes on the walls this room displayed sickles, hooks and saw-edged knives that appeared to be carved from metal-laced bone. The plinth in the centre of the room held an upright circle of light within which was splayed the crucified silhouette of a humanoid. It was from this that the faint cries came.

The humanoid’s flesh was ink-black and seemed to absorb rather than reflect the light. Its features shifted like oil beneath lank, dangling hair as pale as bone. Manacles at wrist and ankle held the prisoner against glowing tubes that made the circle of light. Where the limbs were closest to the light they were smoking slightly as though the light itself was burning them.

‘Free me… or kill me,’ it whispered.

Bellathonis considered for a moment. ‘Why should I do either when it’s quite delectable just to see you suffer?’ the master haemonculus said. ‘I know what you are, mandrake. You’re one of the shadow blood, a scion of Aelindrach. You’re just the kind of slippery semi-corporeal assassin I’m always warning the younglings about.’

The mandrake’s head came up to turn its shifting features toward the sound of Bellathonis’s voice, needle-sharp teeth glittering for a moment. ‘You are an enemy of Zykleiades,’ it whispered. ‘You come as a thief to steal from him. I would kill him for you.’

‘Tempting,’ Bellathonis agreed, ‘but messy. I find that vendettas generate a unique form of energy in the universe, one that is self-sustaining and consumes everything it touches.’

‘I am powerful among my bloodline, a king in the dance of shadows. Where I lead, others will follow. We would end your vendetta before it began.’

Bellathonis shook his head. ‘No, no. Zykleiades being dead would only create a new patriarch noctis. I’ve defeated this one already. I’d rather not see him replaced by an unknown and potentially more competent individual.’

‘Then kill me or I will reveal to your enemy all that I have seen and heard about you,’ the shifting, coal-dark face whispered before it sank down again.

‘I haven’t decided anything yet,’ Bellathonis said, ‘but I really should be moving along soon. Before I do, answer me one question. How did you come to be captured and put on display like this?’

‘I was betrayed by my own brother and lured into a trap of Zykleiades’s making. Now my brother sits upon my throne of skulls in Aelindrach and Zykleiades keeps me alive in order to control him with the threat of my release. Free me, and I will avenge myself on both of the fools!’

‘Here’s a different proposition for you to consider. I free you. You follow me out, ensure I escape the labyrinth successfully and get back to Malixian in one piece to deliver his new pet. After that you do whatever you want – chop off Zykleiades’s head if you want, or your brother’s – whatever makes you feel fulfilled. From time to time in the future I might call upon your help if, it proves agreeable to you to give it for a reasonable price. How does that sound?’

‘May Kheradruakh take my head if I ever fail you,’ the mandrake whispered, his voice thick with emotion. ‘Break the light and set me free!’

Bellathonis smiled thinly as he set down the gene-eagle’s cage and made an adjustment to the slender pistol in his other hand. A single high-velocity splinter from the weapon shattered the circle of light into a shower of tinkling crystal fragments. The moment the light was gone the mandrake seemed to vanish from sight and an icy chill fell across the room. The master haemonculus glanced around, shrugged his narrow shoulders and picked up the eagle cage.

‘I am still here, haemonculus,’ the mandrake’s voice whispered from the shadows, a cold breath against the nape of Bellathonis’s neck. ‘I walk in your footsteps. Leave this place and fear nothing, my blade-soul is hungry. What should I call you, enemy of Zykleiades?’

‘I told you he’s not my enemy, just someone unworthy to be my master, and you can call me Bellathonis. What should I call you, king of shadows?’

‘Xhakoruakh. You should be warned that any master you consider unworthy will become your enemy over time.’

‘All the better reason to be your own master whenever you can.’

Malixian’s eyrie stretched Bellathonis’s normal equanimity where heights were concerned. Tenuous clouds were floating by far below the narrow walkway he was on, the highest cages of the Aviaries thrusting up through them like mountain peaks. The master haemonculus concentrated on keeping his balance against the shifting weight of the eagle’s cage as he walked along the ledge. He had resolutely fought off attempts by minions and flunkies to take the cage from him. Malixian was going to receive the eagle from his own hands and no others.

The eagle had become agitated since entering the Aviaries, hissing and flexing its wings as much as it could within the close confines of the cage. There were times when it seemed to be purposefully trying to throw Bellathonis off the ledge. The haemonculus ignored the attempts and finally made his way to the open balcony where Archon Malixian was amusing himself with some newly hatched razorwings. At the sight of Bellathonis carrying the cage, Archon Malixian dropped the hatchlings and almost trampled over them in his haste to meet him.

‘Magnificent, magnificent,’ Malixian cooed appreciatively as the eagle tried its best to snap his fingers off.

‘No easy task, my archon,’ Bellathonis said with evident relief to be rid of the thing. ‘I fear I may have made some enemies in my old coven, but my appreciation of your patronage knows no bounds.’

Malixian glanced up from the cage with a look of pure joy on his face. ‘Your old coven can go hang themselves – you know they told me they wanted to send someone here to keep an eye on you? Unreliable they said – well they can stick this in their gizzard and swallow it.’

Bellathonis smiled wanly. Malixian definitely had his plusses as a patron; the usual Commorrite secrecy and backstabbing seemed totally uninteresting to him. His obsession made him ridiculously easy to manipulate. Staying at the Aviaries might prove truly profitable after all.

‘Where will you keep your gene-eagle, my archon?’ Bellathonis inquired politely. ‘It seems rather small for your capacious accommodations.’

‘Keep it?’ Malixian said as he lifted the cage up and fumbled with the latch. Bellathonis had a dreadful premonition as the mad archon pulled open the cage door. In a flash the eagle was out of the cage and plummeting away on golden wings that burned like the sun. The glowing speck dwindled rapidly as it dived from Malixian’s eyrie towards the Aviaries below. Bellathonis fought back the urge to pummel Malixian about the head.

Three white shapes flashed past the balcony in pursuit of the eagle, their wings folded back in perfect v-shapes. The eagle had been fast; these were faster. In a moment they were gone.

‘White ruhks,’ Malixian said with relish. ‘Incredibly hard to find things that are a challenge for them to hunt. That eagle could last them an hour or more. Magnificent.’

Speechless, Bellathonis could only look at the mad archon. Something told him that this was a defining moment in their relationship. The thought of that made Malixian’s patronage a considerably less reassuring prospect than it had been a moment ago. Sometimes familiar devils really are the best, Bellathonis reminded himself, and life’s lessons come at too high a price.

PROLOGUE

The flow of events is now sweeping rapidly to its conclusion: a flock of dark birds settles on the carcass it has made, a school of fish darts together at the approach of a predator. To begin a description of an ending one must surely begin at the beginning, but that is a tale unto itself, and in any case the beginning too often flows from a previous ending. I think you’ll agree it’s a pretty quandary and no mistake. So consider this:

We might say that this tale began with the Fall of the eldar race, a race of such brilliance and star-spanning genius that the entire great wheel of the galaxy was their playground. Their collapse, their Fall, only came about through their own hubris. Thinking themselves untouchable they unconsciously wrought an entity that could touch even them. Their doom was the manifestation of their own unspoken desires to indulge without limit, to inflict beyond sanity, to take and to ravish with a force so potent that their boundless passion became atavistic and unstoppable. Their passion gave birth to the entity the eldar call She Who Thirsts, and that entity went on to destroy them.

We could equally say that it began with Commorragh – a place that was old and wicked even before the Fall. Commorragh, the great port-city nestled deep within the void. Commorragh, the unique node lodged into the vast interdimensional labyrinth of the webway, itself the key to the eldar race’s galaxy-spanning empire. Commorragh, the city of portals, from whence its denizens can range across all that remains of the ragged, oft-torn webway to take what they will from a thousand tremulous realities.

Commorragh survived the birth of She Who Thirsts and the subsequent Fall. It seems such a little thing to say it thus, yet it was a dark miracle of such dimensions as to be almost incomprehensible at the time. When She Who Thirsts came into being the vast majority of the eldar race was snuffed out in an instant by the psychic shockwave of her birth. The very home worlds of the eldar race were dragged from the skein of reality and plunged into the roiling madness of warp space to feed the daemon-queen’s appetites. The eldar gods were overthrown and broken by the upstart usurper…

…And yet buried deep within the webway, warded and protected with arcane mysteries, Commorragh survived.

Perhaps the truth is that it began with the denizens of Commorragh. They were too proud, too vicious and too desperate to bow to the madness of the doom that overtook their race. The Commorrites slew all those vulnerable to She Who Thirsts, and then they massacred the fearful, and then they culled the weak. What survived in Commorragh was a race of pure-bred survivors with the blackest hearts imaginable. They became a people of flint and stone, ready to set their faces against any vicissitudes unleashed upon their race by the uncaring Fates. They would live on, no matter the cost, clawing their continued existence from the belly of creation without gods or allies or friends to help them.

Some say the Commorrites were like this even before the Fall, and that it was their own unbridled excesses that brought She Who Thirsts into being. Bitter wars have been fought over such contentions among the dwindling eldar kindreds that survived the Fall. In time wisdom prevailed and it became understood that such recriminations serve only She Who Thirsts. For she still desires the last drops of vitality from the race that gave birth to her. In the depths of the void and deep inside every eldar heart she lurks, waiting to consume the very last of them: a siren sickness, an addiction, a black hole draining away all life, all hope.

But this is still all just ancient history. We must look closer to the present to find the origins of our current tale.

Commorragh itself has been ruled over by a great tyrant named Asdrubael Vect for more than six millennia. This supreme overlord elevated himself from the ranks of the lowliest slaves by dint of his intellect, ruthlessness and daring. He swept away the ancient aristocracy and instituted a new order of absolute meritocracy in its place. For six thousand years only those cunning and bold enough to survive his blood-soaked reign have enjoyed the privileges of rank and survival. The tyrant has many enemies but few that could be called rivals. Past attempts to unseat him have been spectacularly bloody and ineffective, yet this has done little to dissuade those who would see the tyrant fall.

Which brings us to the current conflagration: a trio of Commorrite nobles with dreams of a return to the old order plotted against Asdrubael Vect. These three, Yllithian, Xelian and Kraillach, led the most powerful of the old noble houses and hungered for vengeance against Vect. In their ambition they unleashed forces beyond their capacity to control. As masters of the physical with troops, ships and fortresses at their command, these nobles fatally overlooked the metaphysical implications of their actions. Events spiralled out of control to such an extent that it was almost too late to prevent disaster before wiser heads could intercede.

You must understand that due to its unique nature Commorragh can be both stronger and more fragile than it seems. Its presence at the nexus of so many paths through the webway means that any sufficient perturbation in the void can set the whole, vast place thrumming. Native Commorrites call such an event a ‘Dysjunction’ and it is rightly feared. In a Dysjunction the bubble of reality separating Commorragh from the wild chaos of the void becomes stretched very thin indeed. Under successive shocks it becomes porous to the predatory entities that dwell in the depths, permitting their ingress to the city. Furthermore the galaxy-spanning portals which connect Commorragh to the outside universe can unpredictably reorient themselves and even spew unbounded etheric energies into the city. In short, as a result of a Dysjunction, the entire mighty edifice that is Commorragh teeters on the brink of ruin and madness.

This is what the nobles’ ambitions won for them and now all but one has been destroyed by it. The last noble, Yllithian, can only hope to survive if Asdrubael Vect remains ignorant of his role in the disaster… and it seems possible that the supreme overlord already knows the truth. Yet even in their failure the nobles have succeeded after a fashion. The Dysjunction has damaged much of the city. The resulting chaos has killed or scattered many of its citizens and the whole affair has placed the rulership of the supreme overlord in a highly precarious position. The race is on to see who will adapt and turn the changing situation to their advantage first: Vect, Yllithian, or other, even less savoury entities waiting in the wings.

Come now and we will enter the highest courts of a dark kingdom beset by ruin. See now through the eyes of one without passions, without ambitions – a perfect observer for the events coming to pass.

CHAPTER 1

THE GELDLING

I have no name, only a function. Though nameless I am bestowed many titles: supreme overlord, great tyrant, archon of archons, Allfather – and yet none of these are my own. I am a living cypher, an encoded shadow given a form that lives and breathes, that observes and learns and yet is nothing, a passing fancy to be used as desired and expended when necessary. If I should sound too dour shed no tears for me. I would not do so for you.

I am the image of my creator, and he is the wellspring of my existence. I worship him with a purity that you cannot imagine. He is quite literally everything to me, the quintessence of all that I am. It is a rare chance that allows us to be together at the same instant – some argue that it diminishes my function, but my creator knows better than they. Once I called him father. He punished me for it.

My purpose is simple. When we are together my creator’s enemies cannot tell us apart. Sometimes he speaks, sometimes I speak. I laugh inwardly to see their eyes flicker uncertainly between us as they try to determine which of us is the master and which of us is his shadow. It is our secret to keep and ours alone. A shared, precious thing.

His true name is Asdrubael Vect, and the titles of supreme overlord, great tyrant, archon of archons and many others belong to him. I have no name, but behind my back those who know what I am call me ‘the Geldling’. They may hold me in contempt, but at times like these it is I who stands unbowed by the aura of black menace that clings to Asdrubael Vect while others quail. I exist to be destroyed and if that becomes my master’s desire then it is my pleasure and my duty to obey.

Vect walks now, stalking from mirror-shard to mirror-shard in the highest tower of Corespur. Each fractal crystal shard shows a different view of his city plunging into ruin. Some of the shards are completely black, their invisible eyes blinded by an unknown agency, and these appear to disturb Vect most of all. He is angry, vengeful. Enemies have struck at the heart of his power and he does not know how or why.

But he suspects. He always suspects.

One living crystal facet shows a mighty spire in High Commorragh. Flames wreathe its base, white-hot and preternaturally hungry. The spire is kilometres high and yet somehow the flames have found a path all the way from its wide base to its narrow crown. Blade-sharp palaces at the tip are melting away, drooling onto terraces below as molten slag. As we watch, the base of the spire flakes away to reveal ant-like chambers and rooms glowing in the heat. These flash into a new inferno as oxygen rushes in. The spire lurches and seems to bulge along one side for a heartbeat before toppling with the slow majesty of a falling forest giant.

I notice a particular set to my master’s shoulders at the sight and I utter a bleak, cold-hearted laugh on his behalf. No doubt some of his enemies dwelled in that fallen spire. He has many enemies.

Another crystal shows a wide curve of Low Commorragh slums, an accretion of slave shops and vice dens wedged between the bases of the spires and their foundation slabs. This area would have once held the inhabitants of a small nation but now it has been inundated. A foul upwelling of toxic wastes from levels even lower than this has drowned the area. Now only a handful of shanty islands and tumbled ruins project from a strangling sea of foul, lapping ooze. Crusting the ooze is a thick layer of bloated corpses that bob obscenely in the swell.

Vect walks past this scene with barely a glance. The battle is already lost in the district shown. He deigns not to notice the black, wavering tendrils that have begun pushing their way up out of the ooze, their presence slowly blotting the crystal’s viewpoint.

He stops before a crystal pane that shows a confusing melee. A great, gleaming gateway of emerald and brass is vomiting an unending stream of multicoloured foulness. Wherever the substance touches the ground it warps and twists it like melting wax. Formless shapes rear up from flux to take on brief solidity: claws, fangs, limbs, eyes, tongues are shaped in an anarchic mockery of natural life. At the edges of the frame kabalite warriors are blasting and slashing their way to the gate. One after another they are pulled down by the gateway’s metamorphic excrescences. They give no heed to their casualties and push on regardless. A bare handful of survivors win through to the gate, but they do stop the flow.

Asdrubael Vect nods in satisfaction. I issue orders for the surviving kabalite warriors to be richly rewarded on their return. My orders will be obeyed as if the great tyrant himself had spoken the words, since few here know that I am not he. In the fullness of time the heroic survivors will be killed off, one by one, to ensure there is no chance of them spreading the ineffable corruption they were touched by as they fought against it.

The final crystalline pane that Vect examines is not like the others. This one shows a bloated, gibbous star against a storm-wracked sky. This is an Ilmaea, one of the captured suns that were enslaved to heat and light Commorragh long aeons in the past. The star appears to be caught within a gossamer net so fine that it is almost imperceptible against its constrained bulk. In reality the half-seen net is unthinkably vast and the star itself is shrunk to a fraction of its normal size, imprisoned in a pocket of dimensional space like a prisoner in an oubliette.

Angry flares roil from the Ilmaea’s circumference, yet it is clearly quietening now with each black arc of fire weaker and smaller than the last – a reverse of its situation just minutes ago. Vect gestures at the crystal and the view shifts closer to one section of the net surrounding the Ilmaea. It is revealed to be a network of vast structures connected by billions of kilometres of cables. Flights of dark, dagger-like kabalite craft are diving from a towering edifice, a rain of black knives plunging towards Commorragh.

The supreme overlord straightens and stares intently at the scene. Archon Yllithian and his White Flames kabal have survived. I know that Vect’s suspicions about Yllithian run deep. He had ordered archon Aez’ashya of the Blades of Desire to destroy the White Flames. Clearly the task was beyond her. I sense that the true Asdrubael Vect is about to speak and I move to his side as softly and silently as a shadow.

‘Get Sythrac and Malys in here,’ the true Vect says, ‘and send for my Medusae’. A terrified slave gladly flees from the chamber to fetch two of the high archons waiting outside. My heart rises even further at the news that I will have a rare opportunity to see my one and only true friend. This is truly a day of wonders.

In the atrium outside Vect’s scrying chamber an assembly of the most powerful archons of Commorragh awaited the supreme overlord’s command. The lofty onyx walls of the atrium rose to a sloping ceiling inset with unbreakable ruby panels, letting through the shifting light of the Ilmaea even as they transformed it to the colour of blood. A pain-choir had been summoned to supply entertainment and light refreshment for the archons while they waited. The thin, white-skinned choirmaster was a haemonculus named Uverashki who was famed for his discretion and artistic sensibility. The thin, high wails of the choir never interrupted conversation or become atonal for an instant beneath Uverashki’s assured touch.

Unfortunately not even Uverashki’s consummate skills in the arts of flesh-sculpting and excruciation could distract the archons from one another. The atmosphere crackled with an undercurrent of barely restrained tension. Bitter rivalries, murderous jealousies and long-running vendettas of such vehemence existed between the archons that they could snuff out suns and consign entire races to oblivion.

Among them there was Valossian Sythrac, the soul hunter who acted as archon of Vect’s own Black Heart kabal. He stalked impatiently back and forth as he awaited the call for action from his master. Nearby Archon Malixian of the Ninth Raptrex perched in his feathered cloak and beaked mask mournfully contemplating the destruction that the Dysjunction had wrought upon his beloved aviaries. Lady Aurelia Malys, archon of the Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue, whispered conspiratorially with Archon Khromys of the Kabal of the Obsidian Rose, a renowned artificer and creator with a mind as sharp as the monomolecular blades she forged. Lord Xerathis, archon of the Kabal of the Broken Sigil, stood to one side gazing out of the atrium’s many slit-like windows. Xerathis was looking across the riven cityscape of Commorragh with a voracious expression, perhaps wishing that the damage done there had been by his own hand.

Such games as these great leaders were wont to play with one another had brought untold misery to countless billions in the past, but usually only outside the confines of the great port-city of Commorragh. Assassinations, ambushes, infiltrations, blackmail and kidnapping were the tools of choice within the eternal city, lest the supreme overlord should take issue with stronger measures being used. Now the archons were constrained to sit and wait upon the tyrant’s command while their home burned around them. Even among such paragons of ancient wickedness as these the strain of inaction was beginning to tell.

With the possible exception of Valossian Sythrac it would have been a mistake to think of the assembled archons as being Asdrubael Vect’s staunchest supporters. That would be to give them entirely too much credit. Personal loyalty was a coin of little value in Corespur or anywhere else in Commorragh. Rather these archons were the ones most fatally bound to Asdrubael Vect in one form or another – whether through his patronage, his protection, the threat of his retribution or because of secrets known only to themselves and Vect.

Over the centuries the supreme overlord had spun a web of subtle interdependencies through Commorragh to the point where he could command these particular archons with every confidence of being obeyed. Their kabals and their strength were reliant on the existing order in the eternal city and thus any threat to that order also represented a threat to them as individuals too. Not one of them could or would trust any of the others for a moment, but in the current crisis they would act in perfect concert to maintain their collective grip on the reins of power. Even traitorous murderers can be persuaded to work together in the presence of a greater threat.

As the finely etched doors of the scrying chamber swung open, all of the archons glanced expectantly towards it, each perhaps anticipating that Vect would be calling for them alone. The pallid slave that appeared found himself pinioned by the merciless, black gaze of a dozen individuals steeped in untold centuries of murder and torture. To his credit the slave swallowed only once before announcing in a quavering voice.

‘The supreme overlord calls for the lord Sythrac and the lady Malys.’

His words were greeted with a frosty silence. The two so named exchanged a calculating look before striding confidently into the scrying chamber. Behind them the remaining archons were left to contemplate one another and reassess their potential standings in the supreme overlord’s eyes.

‘So the faithful hound has returned just in time to heed his master’s call,’ Malys observed slyly as the doors swung shut behind them.

‘It only remains to be seen why the master calls for his bitch at the same moment,’ Sythrac shot back. Lady Malys smiled thinly at his crude response. In truth Vect’s desire for her had waned all too quickly. Malys’s quick wit and cunning mind – attributes the supreme overlord had once found so highly attractive – seemed only to irritate him now. Finding herself paired with Vect’s puppet kabal-master was a novel and not entirely reassuring development.

‘It was fortuitous that you escaped the moment of Dysjunction, Valossian, it was quite the most terrible I’ve witnessed at its height. How is it that you always have the good fortune to be away at just the right moment?’

Sythrac paused and looked her full in the face before answering. Malys was renowned as an astonishing, indeed bewitching, beauty even by the extreme aesthetics of High Commorrite society. Unsurprisingly Valossian Sythrac seemed entirely unmoved by the sight of her. He knew that the beautiful face was merely a mask over a cold, intricate intellect of cogs and gears. Her comradely observation was just a probe, a reconnaissance-by-fire to reveal weakness or self-doubt on his part. It was easy to rebuff as he had none to be revealed.

‘The webway was riven and the portals failed as soon as the Dysjunction occurred,’ Sythrac said flatly. ‘Finding my way back was… challenging. Had I delayed leaving the Sable Marches by even an hour I would have been completely trapped there. So tell me, Aurelia, if I knew what was about to occur why would I go hunting in some backwater and risk not being able to come back at all? Now, assuming that your pointless curiosity has been satisfied, I, for one, do not wish to keep our supreme overlord waiting any longer.’

Malys smiled radiantly and nodded indulgently to him as if to imply that their brief dalliance had been at Sythrac’s own behest. He paid her no heed and stalked away with the dangerous poise of a hunting cat. The scrying chamber was circular in plan. Its faceted walls rose high overhead until they came together into a central point lost in shadows. The floor of the chamber was almost entirely occupied by concentric rings of tall, irregular crystals, each flattened and polished on their inward-pointing face. At the centre of it all they found Vect poised like a spider in the middle of its web. The supreme overlord was seated in an ugly metal throne with his doppelgänger at his side and his Medusae squatting a discreet distance away.

Both Vect and his double wore identical dark, floor-length robes embossed with eye-twisting sigils of glossy black metal. The whole was topped by a high crown of curling obsidian horns. Sythrac recognised Vect’s regalia as one that he had frequently adopted in the earliest days of his tyranny after his overthrow of the old noble houses. In more recent times Vect had worn it occasionally as a reminder of the past. It was a costume that the supreme overlord affected only when there was momentous, bloody work to be done.

‘Don’t waste time squabbling over my favours, children,’ the supreme overlord observed coldly as they came into view, ‘there’ll be time enough for that later – and I can assure you that not a few disappointments will be entailed in the final reckoning. Now kneel before me.’

Malys and Sythrac knelt as Vect commanded, ritually casting their gaze downwards and exposing their necks as a sign of submission. It was a humiliating ritual and intentionally so, a reminder that even among the apex predators of Commorragh one alone ruled supreme.

Naturally it also offered the supreme overlord an excellent moment of vulnerability to seize or kill those that had displeased him. Long seconds passed for Sythrac and Malys but no blade fell from the shadows. Finally Vect bade them rise and directed their attention outwards to the scrying crystals before speaking. A thousand scenes of destruction, conflict and despair confronted them.

‘The kabals have been busy, they fight with the strength of desperation and so we win our city back step by step. I have watched their progress through the crystals, but that isn’t enough to satisfy me. The time is ripe to reassert control.’ Vect paused, inviting comment.

‘How may the Kabal of the Black Heart serve your wishes, supreme overlord?’ Sythrac said immediately. Both Vect and his duplicate smiled at the archon’s simple statement of loyalty.

‘Very simply, I want you to push through Sorrow Fell to Ashkeri Talon and secure the docking ring. You have my authority to take over the White Flames fortress to use as a base of operations for the duration of the crisis. Tell Yllithian to come and complain to me if he has a problem with that. Kill anyone that attempts to resist your progress, lock down any gates you find that are still open. In a short time I will follow your forces and my Medusae will observe your progress. I hope you haven’t spent so much time hunting the slave races that you’ve lost your edge, Valossian, the city’s fate may rest in your hands. Now go.’

Valossian Sythrac straightened and bowed stiffly to the supreme overlord. He did not believe for a moment that the fate of the city rested in his hands. Sythrac knew Vect well enough to understand that the supreme overlord would never permit such a thing to happen. However, the mere fact that Vect had chosen to flatter him in such terms indicated that the tyrant was in an indulgent mood and at least a little reliant on Sythrac’s dutiful execution of the task in hand. Sythrac pursed his lips and then dared to ask a question.

‘Supreme overlord, may I ask something that is pertinent to my assignment?’

Vect looked at him sharply. The hard, black eyes of the tyrant were an almost palpable force as they swept across Sythrac’s face. The archon of the Black Heart could sense Malys looking at him too, cat-like and inscrutable as she tried to determine if Sythrac had lost his mind. After a moment Vect smiled thinly and said:

‘Very well, Valossian, I shall indulge you by listening to your question, but I will be the judge of the pertinence of your query and whether it deserves an answer. Speak.’

Sythrac bowed his head. ‘I’ve heard it said before that even whilst they are unpredictable no Dysjunction affects the city without cause. Whether it be wars between the Ruinous Powers, ill-starred experiments, sorcerous happenstance or plain perfidy, all Dysjunctions happen for a reason. What was the reason for this occurrence?’

‘An investigation into that matter is under way,’ Vect replied sharply, ‘and its results will be for me alone to know, although I will tell you one thing: the preliminary indications are that this Dysjunction was instigated by a person – or more likely several persons – within the city itself. This was a self-inflicted wound. Now go.’

Sythrac’s eyes burned with cold fire as he nodded his understanding and turned on his heel to leave. The archon of the Kabal of the Black Heart was a remorseless hunter. His sport was the pursuit of famous, and even legendary, souls from among the slave races: heroes, leaders, philanthropists, healers, warriors. Sythrac hunted them all and trapped their souls so that the slave races would always know that their greatest achievers were mere footnotes in a history dictated by the dark city of Commorragh.

The slightest scratch from Sythrac’s deadly huskblade was enough to turn a victim’s body to dust. With its mortal form destroyed the quarry’s soul was left naked to be devoured by the archon’s voracious spirit-traps. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of souls had been captured within Sythrac’s armour, where complex bio-harmonics diverted their stolen energies to invigorate his ancient body. Now Sythrac was determined to turn his skills to the relentless pursuit of those that had threatened his home.

Lady Malys remained silent until Sythrac was out of earshot. She eyed the two Vects speculatively as she tried to decide which of them was the fake. The one sitting in the throne had done all the talking yet that of itself meant nothing. The whole point of a geldling was that it could flawlessly impersonate the original. The two of them seemed to sense her indecision and smiled maliciously at her.

‘I see you have a question of your own,’ the standing one said.

‘It’s written all over that minx-face of yours,’ the one in the throne said.

Malys gave up trying to guess and simply addressed them both. ‘I was going to ask you why you invited both me and Valossian into the chamber together. Then I realised why when you were talking to Valossian – it was just to keep the other archons outside guessing, wasn’t it? You’ll have them all in here in pairs so they will be afraid to plot because you’re so obviously up to something yourself. You really can’t help yourself. It all just comes so naturally to you.’

The Asdrubael Vect that was standing beside the throne shrugged negligently, the one sitting smiled and said carelessly, ‘One does not rule Commorragh for six millennia without gathering many pearls of wisdom, dear heart. Here’s another that I that will dispense to you free of charge – for now anyway – simple precautions cost little and sometimes reap huge rewards. You should learn from this and understand that much like the crystals in this chamber the Asdrubael Vect you see before you is only a single face of a multi-faceted entity.’

Malys kept her serene smile in place while she dissected Vect’s words. He could be implying that both of the individuals she was seeing as Vect were geldlings, and that the real Vect was elsewhere scheming with other forces to win back the city. Equally Vect could be trying to keep her off balance by planting the seeds of doubt in her mind. Machinations came as naturally to the supreme overlord as eating or breathing were performed by others. In either case Vect was successfully dictating the direction of their encounter and that was something she felt constrained to counterattack. Perhaps she could even shake loose some useful information from the old monster.

‘Yet this multi-faceted entity doesn’t know who caused the Dysjunction?’ she retorted with breathtaking boldness, ‘I find it surprising that your omnipresent spies have failed you so badly.’

She knew was taking her life in her hands to speak to Vect so, but she was quite prepared to gamble that the supreme overlord would be willing to play at least for a little while. The fate of the city must surely be weighing heavily on his shoulders by now, what harm a little diversion verbally fencing with an old flame?

The Vect standing beside the throne had hissed at her challenge while the seated one smiled indulgently for a moment and then stood. The two exchanged places, with the one previously seated moving to stand behind the throne while the other seated himself. Malys felt as if she were watching a charlatan’s parlour trick being played out as a strange form of performance art.

‘You would be surprised by what I know,’ the now-sitting Vect said evenly. ‘Suffice it to say that there are complexities beyond those needed by the loyal, straightforward Valossian Sythrac to do his job. The individuals who were responsible for this Dysjunction had outside help. They also benefited from great good fortune and supreme opportunism in equal measure.’

‘Those all sound dangerously like excuses, Asdrubael, or are you just trying to be mysterious with me as well?’

‘I’m giving you what little information you need to perform your role at my dictation,’ the standing Vect said as though he were speaking to an obstreperous child.

‘Surely then you would include the identity of these suspected outsiders that have had a hand in so wounding our beloved city,’ Malys replied, ‘I’ll need to be on the lookout for them, won’t I?’

Both Vects smiled disconcertingly and Malys sensed a shared joke was being made at her expense. The ‘outsiders’ Vect was referring to must be pretty obvious in the flesh – or perhaps they weren’t, and that was the source of the joke. The list of suspects was pretty short anyway; it could only be other eldar or entities from beyond the veil. The slave races lacked both the knowledge and the means to attempt to manipulate the warp in ways that could bring about a Dysjunction.

‘I have a task for you in the lower levels,’ the standing Vect said. ‘Something that will require your skills of both violence and discretion.’

‘Oh goody,’ Malys smiled sweetly, ‘I am yours to command, as Valossian would say. Tell me more.’

‘Go to the Valzho Sinister and bring anyone you find there back to me – alive.’

Malys arched her perfect eyebrows before pouting. ‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘I feel as if you’re trying to get me out of the way for a while. Why would you want to do that, Asdrubael?’

‘You underestimate the importance of the task you’re being given,’ the seated Vect replied sharply. ‘Be on your way before you try my patience. A Dysjunction is a time of change. It means renewal as well as destruction for the city, a clearing of the dead wood to permit new growth. Be mindful which side of that equation you play to, Aurelia, or you may be consumed by the fires when the time comes.’

The audience was over and Malys decided not to try and push her luck any further. Valzho Sinister was deep inside Low Commorragh and despite her flippancy she knew that reaching it during the current crisis would be no small feat… one that would be matched and exceeded by bringing back its inhabitants alive. She smiled to the Vects and turned on her heel with her mind already processing what forces and weaponry to take with her, the feints and disinformation to spread to the other archons about her route and destination.

She caught sight of Vect’s Medusae squatting apparently forgotten a short distance from the throne. The creature’s current host was a grey-skinned, gangling specimen of the slave races. The Medusae itself clung to the host’s head and spine like obscene bunches of fruit, the individual brains of the Medusae collective pulsating gently as they drank in the sensations their host provided them with. Later, Vect had only to pluck one of those obscene fruit and taste of it to relive everything that happened here through the Medusae’s expanded perceptions.

What would the supreme overlord conclude when he reviewed all his meetings with the archons he was relying on for support? Some might well be consigned to the fire if Vect detected any wavering in their loyalty. As Malys left she passed through the circles of scrying crystals and saw the agonies of Commorragh being played out again in flickering silence. Behind her she heard the supreme overlord call out for Malixian and Xerathis to be sent in next. Malys cursed as she caught herself wondering if that meant Vect was going to speak with Archon Khromys alone – no doubt just as he’d intended she would.

CHAPTER 2

FALLING

Nyos Yllithian, archon of the White Flames kabal, watched as the pock-marked surface of Commorragh swelled with alarming rapidity before the prow of his personal barque. They were plummeting straight down towards it as fast as the craft’s grav-compensators would permit.

Yllithian gripped the arms of his throne on the barque to prevent them from visibly shaking. His new body – the one so recently taken to escape the grip of the glass plague that had finally killed El’Uriaq – was betraying him. The true Yllithian, the soul that inhabited this body, was well inured to shocks and frights – almost pathologically so – but the body he had taken possession of still seemed to retain some of the youthful instincts of its former occupant.

Adrenaline pulsed through his veins, his heart hammered in his chest. Yllithian had not felt this alive in a very long time and the pulse of life seemed to have sharpened his already well-honed fear of death. Yllithian briefly wondered what had become of the renegade haemonculus, Bellathonis, who had enabled his seemingly miraculous escape from the clutches of a true death. Having the haemonculus killed afterwards had seemed like the only logical option.

Bellathonis’s connections to Yllithian and the Dysjunction were all that Asdrubael Vect would need to crucify him. The damnable creature had disappeared before the deed could be done, although in retrospect that was probably just as well. Matters were moving so rapidly that Yllithian felt he might need the renegade haemonculus’s services again.

Around him his remaining kabalite warriors hurtled downwards. They were carried in the Raiders and Venoms that had survived the fighting above Gorath, the tortured Ilmaea now shrinking in their wake. The last remnants of Yllithian’s reavers and hellions were circling above and behind the formation watching for another attack by the Blades of Desire. The treachery of the Blades’ new archon, Aez’ashya, had not exactly been unexpected but it had come with childlike directness. Yllithian was forced to admit (although once again only to himself) that he had been taken a little off guard.

‘What course shall I set, my archon?’ Yllithian’s helmsman called out. His voice held an edge of trepidation in it.

What course? Yllithian’s keen mind was already darting through the options and being equally repelled by each in turn. There were only two realistic courses available to him. He could flee to his own stronghold or he could go back to Corespur and decry Aez’ashya’s treacherous attack to Asdrubael Vect – the very same individual who had, in all probability, ordered it.

The baroque vista of the eternal city was spread swiftly below them as they fell. Soon it blotted out all else, a jumble of jagged, irregular upthrust spires like a fist full of porcupine quills…

‘My archon?’ the helmsman prompted again nervously. Yllithian shot him a glance that held the promise of unending pain if he interrupted his archon’s thinking again. Beyond the barque’s ornate prow Commorragh was rushing ever closer. Yllithian’s mind was racing faster than the falling grav-craft.

There was a chance that Aez’ashya had acted alone, and there was also a chance that Vect would be sufficiently disgusted at her failure to disassociate himself from the attempt on Yllithian’s life. However, there was an even greater chance that Vect would welcome Yllithian back like a trusted ally before simply stabbing him in the back again.

Before Yllithian’s eyes the city was rising into the dark, angular mountain range that was Corespur – Vect’s unassailable fortress. Corespur seemed intact but around it in Sorrow Fell there were many fires burning unchecked. Yllithian’s sharp eyes could pick out the tell-tale flicker of weapon fire all across High Commorragh. The fighting was still going on. Yllithian allowed himself to relax by just a hair’s-breadth – the worst had not happened yet.

‘Set a course for the White Flames fortress. Take us home,’ Yllithian ordered crisply. The helmsman heaved on the craft’s tiller bar with a sigh of relief. Their angle of descent immediately shifted, the crushing g-forces Yllithian should have experienced almost entirely mitigated by the craft’s compensators. Behind them Yllithian could see the rest of his force altering their course to stay with him. He turned back again to gaze out over the burning cityscape in cautious wonderment.

Yllithian had already feared the worst when Vect had sent him off on the incredibly dangerous mission to retake control of the Ilmaea. The archon of the White Flames was to be killed off quietly while the rest of the city was brought back under the tyrant’s control. It had seemed likely that Aez’ashya’s attack had been timed to coincide with Vect’s victory elsewhere as a simple tidying of loose ends, but that evidently wasn’t the case. The city was still in uproar, the kabals were still fighting the invaders brought to the city by the Dysjunction – and no doubt each other. Yllithian smiled a small, tight smile to himself. That fact meant the supreme overlord was weaker than he seemed.

A warning call drew Yllithian’s attention upwards, back towards Gorath. The black, swollen disc of the Ilmaea had shrunk to a size no greater than his fist. Now he could make out high, faint arcs of glittering blue below the slave-star that were curving around into pursuit positions. There was no mistaking the drive-trails of the craft.

‘Razorwings!’ cried the helmsman in alarm.

‘Dive down into Sorrow Fell,’ Yllithian commanded evenly, ‘and don’t slow down whatever happens.’

The gleaming prow of Yllithian’s personal barque dipped again to plunge them towards the upper spires of High Commorragh. The archon of the White Flames prayed they were close enough to reach cover if they should need it. Vect had sent two forces to support Yllithian’s attack on the Ilmaea Gorath. Aez’ashya’s kabal – the Blades of Desire – and a flight of Razorwing jetfighters to clear a path for them through the daemon swarms that had been drawn to the imperfect interface of Commorragh’s wardings where they junctioned with the Ilmaea’s sub-realm. Aez’ashya had shown her true colours as soon as the fight over Gorath was won. Yllithian found himself rather naively hoping that the fighters didn’t have similar instructions to hers. He would know for certain soon enough.

The highest peaks of Commorragh were still distant but they were sliding rapidly closer as his grav-craft swept down towards them. Once within the tangled landscape of blade-sharp towers and barbed steeples the pursuing Razorwings could do little harm to Yllithian and his followers. It was only in the open air that the jetfighters’ vastly superior speed and acceleration gave them a lethal edge. Now that Yllithian had forced their hand he was not surprised by the Razorwings’ response.

‘Missile launch!’ cried the helmsman. Yllithian twisted around in time to see several small, bright stars accelerating towards his force. They would be monoscythe missiles, Yllithian concluded, diabolically clever devices that detonated into a toroidal ring of planar force. Objects caught in the explosion of a monoscythe would be sliced in two as neatly as if a giant scalpel had passed through them – which wasn’t far from what actually happened on a molecular level. He watched the missiles’ approach with his face showing only a cool, disinterested mask, while inside his intestines seemed to twist with barely controlled dread at the approaching salvo.

Despite their greater speed the missiles appeared deceptively slow at first. The seconds crawled past as they relentlessly overhauled Yllithian’s fleeing force. The reavers and hellions at the rear of Yllithian’s formation started twisting into complex evasive manoeuvres as the missiles bore down on them. Flickering fingers of splinter-fire and dark energy rose from Yllithian’s flotilla in a fruitless attempt to claw the oncoming missiles out of the air. But the missiles were fully as agile as the wildly dodging hellions and considerably harder to hit. It was a hopeless effort.

The missile salvo detonated among the hellions and reavers with startling suddenness. Tumbling wreckage plummeted downwards from the points of impact trailing smoke and fire in its wake. A wounded reaver caught at the edge of one blast careened wildly to its destruction as its now one-armed pilot struggled vainly to regain control. Yllithian’s barque dipped and lurched in the shockwave as debris fragments peppered off its protective energy fields.

Glancing around, Yllithian saw that the bulk of his force remained intact. The Raiders and Venoms carrying most of his warriors had escaped serious harm thanks to the lighter reavers and hellions absorbing the brunt of the missile salvo. The archon of the White Flames tensely watched the distant Razorwings waiting for another missile launch. Seconds passed and the spires of Sorrow Fell swept closer, yet no more missiles came. The Razorwings had already expended much of their ordnance in the fighting over Gorath, so now they must close to within cannon range or give up the chase. Yllithian had little faith that they would simply give up and ordered his surviving craft to close ranks for mutual support.

The highest peaks seemed almost close enough to touch when the Razorwings rolled onto their backs and dived in pursuit. As they accelerated into Commorragh’s artificial gravity well the jetfighters announced their approach with a rising roar and a series of thunderous sonic booms. Yllithian grinned mirthlessly – for all their bluster the pilots had hesitated a moment too long. Towers of metal, crystal and stone were now rising all around him, delicately leaping bridges and curving conduits flashing past both above and below. The dagger-winged jetfighters roaring in pursuit were built more for speed than agility and in this environment Yllithian’s own forces had the upper hand.

The Razorwings knew it too and they opened fire at extreme range. Darklight beams sliced past Yllithian’s force, each retina-burning slash promising a fiery end to its recipient. Not one of the shots had connected before the jetfighters had to pull up. A single enemy pilot refused to play it safe and charged downwards into the increasingly tangled upper tiers of High Commorragh. This particular foe flew with breathtaking agility as it hunted Yllithian’s bobbing, weaving collection of craft through the peaks and spires of Sorrow Fell.

The searing caress of the Razorwing’s twin dark lances stabbed into the fleeing formation with deadly accuracy. One of the White Flames’ Venoms immediately belched smoke and fell away into the depths. A storm of answering fire from a nearby Ravager lashed the jetfighter from nose to tail. None of the hits scored were immediately fatal, but they were enough of a distraction to cause the Razorwing’s pilot to misjudge the next manoeuvre. The speeding jetfighter clipped a gantry and ploughed full into the serrated edge of a spire where it instantly vanished in a dirty orange puff of flames.

The surrounding spires and bridges came to life as if they had been awoken by the violence of the jetfighter’s impact. Shots zeroed in on Yllithian’s force from all angles and set the air buzzing with splinter rounds and energy bolts. It was scattered, inaccurate, but plentiful enough to wound some of the White Flames craft. Yllithian’s well-protected personal barque sailed through the barrage untouched. The remaining Razorwings were quickly left behind as they circled in frustration above the tangled cityscape of High Commorragh. They were helpless to intervene as Yllithian’s force slipped away from them.

It was symptomatic, Yllithian thought, of his current situation to see every hand turned against him, predators circling overhead while assassins sniped at him from every window and archway. Under the stresses of the Dysjunction the thousands of kabals across Commorragh that Vect deliberately kept weak through his scheming had turned upon each other. They were fighting tooth and nail in an almost reflexive effort to grab a bigger slice of the pitifully small pie the tyrant habitually forced upon them. Ironically, at this moment, with enough leadership and visible show of force, the kabals could be welded together into an entity powerful enough to overthrow the supreme overlord.

Sadly, Yllithian reflected, he possessed neither leadership nor strength in sufficient quantities to impress the lesser kabals in the numbers that he needed. If his old allies Kraillach and Xelian had still been at his side with their own powerful kabals behind them it would have been a different story. Then it could have been done, the old noble houses could have staged the kind of resurgence they had dreamed of for centuries. Unfortunately for Yllithian his closest allies were no more.

Kraillach had been struck down by mysterious assassins inside his own keep, rumoured to have been led by Kraillach’s own chief executioner, an incubus named Morr. Kraillach’s remains had been deliberately obliterated to the point where no restoration of him could be possible even by the most skilled haemonculi. Xelian had suffered a less severe body-death, but her remains had vanished before they could be placed into a life-giving sarcophagus and restored. The latter occurrence was almost certainly a scheme of the daemonic El’Uriaq. Certainly the absent Xelian had been quickly replaced as archon of the Blades of Desire by El’Uriaq’s chosen puppet – Aez’ashya.

With El’Uriaq’s unlamented demise Aez’ashya had apparently re-oriented herself to follow Asdrubael Vect. Yllithian grimaced at her wayward foolishness. Perhaps she held some naive belief that loyalty to the supreme overlord would grant her protection in the long run. She would find herself a victim of Vect’s schemes at the earliest possible moment; of this Yllithian had no doubt. Nonetheless it was bitter to have to think that Aez’ashya could boast of having powerful allies, no matter how treacherous, when Yllithian had none. His scheme to raise thrice-accursed El’Uriaq as a weapon against Vect had backfired so spectacularly that it had shorn Yllithian of all support when he needed it the most.

Through a canyon-like gap between two spires Yllithian glimpsed the familiar alabaster peaks and rooftop gardens of his ancestral home – the White Flames fortress. For all the black cynicism that dwelled in Yllithian’s heart his spirits lifted to see that the place was still standing. It could be said that the house of Yllithian was as much the physical entity embodied by the White Flames fortress as it was a noble bloodline that ran through his veins. It was delightful to see that Vect had neglected to strike at it so far. Possibly he already had and failed here as he had failed above Gorath. As they got closer a notable circle of devastation could be seen radiating outwards from the fortress like the charred spokes of a wheel. It was ready evidence of hellish energies that had been unleashed by its defences.

Yllithian could see that a dark, skeletal spire nearby had been partially slagged and melted down to half of its original height. He decided he would definitely shed no tears if that indicated the annihilation of the ever-adversarial Venomyst kabal that had dwelled there. Other surrounding spires showed cleaner cuts made in them by monofilament and darklight weapons. There had been trouble here, but evidently nothing the fortress and its defenders couldn’t handle. For a moment a warm sense of security threatened to creep over Yllithian and he angrily crushed it. Something was not quite right; everything seemed a little too quiet. Even the random sniping at Yllithian’s force of grav-craft had tailed away to virtually nothing.

Some sixth sense drew Yllithian’s gaze upwards and there they were – Razorwing jetfighters circling high above the fortress like their feathered namesakes. When Yllithian’s force had dived into the tangled strata of High Commorragh it had merely frustrated their pursuit and not ended it. The Razorwings must simply have used their speed to surge ahead to where they could await Yllithian’s emergence at the most likely destination. The comparatively open area around the White Flames fortress was essential for its defence but now its primary purpose had been subverted by the lurking jetfighters – it was a killing field that Yllithian would have to cross before he could reach the safety of the fortress itself.

Yllithian’s force was only seconds away from being in the open and vulnerable to attack. He briefly considered landing so that he could disembark and make his way into the foundation layer to reach the fortress through the hidden ways. He immediately discarded the notion. That course of action carried its own set of unknown risks, he decided, and they were ones that considerably outweighed those posed by a single flight of jetfighters. A quieter, more cynical part of his mind told him that he was simply panicking. He was on the run and, like a hunted animal, he could think of nothing but fleeing for shelter as quickly as possible. Yllithian crushed that thought, too, before it robbed him entirely of his determination. The jetfighters were attempting to delay him until more of Vect’s force could arrive. If he hesitated now and was caught outside the fortress when they did he would be truly doomed.

‘Ready your weapons!’ he called out to his followers, ‘stay low and make full speed for the fortress!’

His personal barque shot away into the open space surrounded by its sleek, escorting shoal of grav-craft. Yllithian instantly saw the blue tail-fires of the Razorwings braiding as one after another the enemy pilots rolled their craft over to begin their power dives. The tall, gabled peaks of the White Flames fortress seemed to leap closer as the grav-craft raced flat-out towards them at top speed, but the Razorwings were hurtling down at them faster still. Yllithian did not need to issue an order to open fire. All around him his warriors could see that this was the final stretch and they fired at the diving Razorwings with everything they had.

It seemed impossible that the hook-winged jetfighters could come unscathed through the flickering storm of darklight beams, disintegrator bolts and hyper-velocity splinters that Yllithian’s warriors threw up, yet they did. They were too fast for even the lightning-quick reflexes of eldar warriors to track and hit with any certainty. The Razorwings’ return fire was far less spectacular but far, far more deadly. Paired darklight beams punched efficiently through the Raiders and Ravagers closest to Yllithian’s barque as if they were made of paper. The air was filled with the shriek of explosions and scything metal as the craft were spectacularly torn apart.

Yllithian saw little else as twin retina-burning scars of purple-black splashed across his vision. Yllithian’s barque shuddered in midair as the craft’s energy shields just barely shunted the lance strikes aside. The scent of hot metal and ozone assailed Yllithian’s nostrils as a high-pitched screaming sound began to emanate from somewhere beneath the barque’s ornate grillwork decking. He tried to keep the Razorwings in sight as they roared past but he could see nothing but a series of fast-moving blurs. Ahead the walls of the White Flames fortress were rearing up like a huge, white cliff as Yllithian’s force closed in on them at breakneck speed.

Yllithian managed to spot the Razorwings again as they looped up and over to begin another strafing pass. His force had been almost halved by the first attack and the dispersed survivors were still trying to get back into a defensive formation. Thick, shaky lines of static were crawling across the ordinarily invisible sphere of energy that protected his personal craft. Yllithian reckoned it would not withstand another hit. Should two of the Razorwings decide to target his barque it would all be over. He settled back into his throne to await whatever fate had in store for him, staring defiantly at the fast-approaching jetfighters.

A blaze of energy from the fortress swept abruptly across the sky. Two of the attacking Razorwings blossomed into rapidly expanding balls of fire and debris. The remaining three veered sharply aside as dark spirals rose above the fortress – its garrison of scourges taking flight to confront the airborne intruders. Individually the winged warriors could pose little danger to the speeding jetfighters, but they had the true agility of flying creatures and outnumbered the Razorwings by more than twenty to one. Cheated of their prey for a second time the Razorwings turned tail and vanished as quickly as they had come.

Yllithian permitted himself a small, triumphant smile as his barque slid into a docking port low down on the flank of the fortress along with the remnants of his battered escort. Inside there were White Flames warriors clustered along the quaysides suspiciously covering the new arrivals with splinter rifles and disintegrators. Or rather they were suspicious only until they caught sight of Yllithian standing in his barque. To his astonishment the archon of the White Flames found himself greeted by salutes and cheers from his troops, in a tide of excitement and noise that seemed to rise until it echoed through the entire mighty fortress.

They were relieved, Yllithian realised, relieved that he was alive, so they could continue to follow him through the terrible crisis of the Dysjunction rather than think for themselves. Yllithian had always worked hard to be feared rather than loved by his followers and yet it seemed that sufficient terror from outsiders was enough to make them love him anyway. He smiled graciously and raised a hand to acknowledge the unexpected approbation.

Looking at the thronging warriors Yllithian also realised that he had been wrong. He had sufficient leadership and strength to unify the lesser kabals against Vect. He hadn’t considered the true depths of fear and desperation that the Dysjunction had brought to Commorragh. All he had to do was exploit it as thoroughly as he would exploit any other resource. He clenched his raised hand into a fist and the cheers of his followers roared louder still.

CHAPTER 3

INTO THE SHADOW-REALM

Commorragh is not a single city any more than it is a single place. Over the course of its existence many times many pockets of reality have been subsumed into the fabric of the eternal city. These sub-realms – Shaa-Dom, Iron Thorn, the Sable Marches, Malixian’s Aviaries and a thousand more – exist just around a multi-dimensional corner from the twisted heart of Commorragh. In metaphysical terms the sub-realms of Commorragh exist behind a door, through an arch, beyond a looking glass or – in the case of Aelindrach – within the darkest shadows.

At this moment, deep within the shadow-realm of Aelindrach a darkling creature squats and gazes at the unexpected culmination of its efforts. This being might once have been of the eldar race but if it were then time and strange tides have changed it greatly. Its skin is as black as pitch, its eyes are merely empty sockets of deeper shadow, its hair is as pallid as cobwebs, an additional pair of long, sinewy arms sprout from its shoulders and cradle a straight, sharp sword of dark metal. This is Kheradruakh, ‘he who hunts heads’, who is also called the Decapitator.

Even among the mandrakes the Decapitator is a dark legend and a patron saint of stealthy murder. Kheradruakh has collected heads for time immemorial, serving no master but his own strange agenda. He kills lowborn and highborn without prejudice. He even hunts among the slave races, searching for suitable additions to his collection. Not one in a thousand of his victims does Kheradruakh deem perfect enough to be emplaced in his inner sanctum. This vast, hemispherical chamber is lined with the flensed skulls of his victims, each one carefully placed so that their empty sockets are focused at a point in space before Kheradruakh’s dais.

The Decapitator has laboured remorselessly down long millennia to complete this macabre collection. Each chosen skull holds an echo of its former occupant, a soul fragment caught and pinned in place by Kheradruakh for his own ends in a grand design only the Decapitator understands. Of the bare handful that know of Kheradruakh’s strange, eldritch obsession, some believe that the skulls’ collective gaze is aligned on a single spot to slowly wear a hole in reality. They say that with each new addition the knots of creation loosen a little more at the point where their empty gazes rest.

Now Kheradruakh gazes with his own sightless eyes at the changes wrought in the fabric of reality with what, in his alien suite of emotions, might be termed as incredulity and shock. The eye is opening. It has come too soon, the collection is incomplete and yet the conduit has been formed…

Xagor tumbled helplessly through gossamer sheets of blackness with bright spots dancing before his eyes. The master still clung to Xagor’s back as they fell together, the master’s new, sinewy arms twisted so tightly around Xagor’s neck they were almost choking him. Xagor held on to the flapping, useless legs the master had recently inherited as tightly as he dared to, but they were inexorably slipping away from him. They were dropping quickly, more quickly than Xagor had thought they would fall and yet still less quickly than an outright plummet should have been. It was also getting colder.

‘Not long now, Xagor,’ the master’s new-old voice whispered hoarsely in his ear. ‘We’re approaching the umbral nadir.’

For all the master’s calming words Xagor was close to panic. He did cry out in fear when the arms around his neck abruptly loosened and the master’s legs slipped away from his grasp. More blackness clutched at his vision, denser now as though he fell through layers of rustling silk. Xagor wailed in terror when he felt his progress begin to slow as he crashed through the insubstantial barriers. His mind filled with the image of a gigantic, shadowy web with himself plunging ever deeper into its snares. At the centre, his terrified subconscious gibbered, was the dark and monstrous spider that had spun all this. Xagor would be cocooned in shadows to be drained until he was a frozen husk.

Xagor: a so-called wrack, a faithful servant to his master, the haemonculus Bellathonis, apprentice in the arts of sculpting flesh, an accomplished torturer and murderer in his own right. He still screamed like one of his own victims as he finally struck a soft, yielding surface and fell no more. The master’s laughter cut through Xagor’s unreasoning panic like an icy blade. It lacked something of the wicked, inhuman liquidity of the master’s old laughter, but it had a younger, wilder edge that chilled the soul just as effectively.

‘Open your eyes and look about you, Xagor!’ the master commanded. ‘We have arrived.’

Cautiously Xagor opened one eye and then the other, then shut and opened them again to make sure of what he was seeing. The darkness around them was so complete that it was impossible to tell if his eyes were open or shut. He could feel the moisture of his breath forming inside his mask in the frigid air, he could hear his wheezing lungs, but he could see absolutely nothing at all.

‘Aelindrach… is here?’ Xagor weakly asked of the blackness.

‘More precisely, we have passed into Aelindrach,’ Bellathonis said from somewhere ahead (or above? Xagor could not tell), ‘although you are also quite correct in saying that Aelindrach is here – it didn’t used to be, so in a sense it has come to us as much as we to it. A fascinating development, although not one without precedent.’

The master’s voice was strange-sounding, echoing and yet muted at the same time. Xagor could no longer tell how far away the master was, or in which direction. Panic stirred in him again.

‘Xagor cannot find the master,’ Xagor wailed a little petulantly.

‘Try focusing on the sound of my voice and relying less on your eyes,’ the master said dismissively. ‘Your senses are still trying to adjust to the shadow-realm. Physical laws are different here and it takes a certain… realignment of perception to get used to it.’

Although the disembodied voice remained muted Xagor found that the echoing effect was fading as the master spoke. This in turn made it easier for Xagor to locate the source of his master’s voice. Turning his head from side to side he caught a glimmer of greyness in the dark and tried to concentrate on it.

‘Here sight, sound and indeed all of the other senses become co-mingled,’ the master’s voice continued, ‘perhaps in the same way that light becomes one with its absence in this environment. Substance is a more tenuous proposition here, for bereft of our usual visual and tactile certainties it becomes difficult to decide what is and is not real in an environment where either is very much possible. Will is a more important attribute than perceptions of physical solidity under such circumstances: I live, I breathe, I am real, I exist here because it is my desire to do so. By my self-belief I am not absorbed into the shadow even as I become one with it in order to exist in this realm. Do you understand, Xagor? It may be the death of you if you don’t.’

The greyness had taken on a form to Xagor’s senses. It was little more than a rough sketching of blurred lines and indistinct, smudged highlights but his warped senses could tell that the master was speaking to him from a short distance away. Furthermore he perceived that the master had a form that was upright, somehow standing on legs that had been crippled in a Raider crash before they had entered the shadow-realm.

‘Xagor sees you now, master – no, Xagor senses you now. How does the master stand on shattered limbs?’

‘Because my substance is subject to my will and it is my will that I am able to provide my own locomotion in this place.’

Xagor looked down at himself and realised he was standing too, even though he had no recollection of getting up. What had seemed impenetrable blackness around him a moment ago had texture now, a thousand subtly different variations of shadow. There was the soft brush of sable and moleskin, the gritty density of basalt, the close-grained hardness of teak, the clinging liquidity of oil. With a start Xagor realised that they were in an open area, the vaguest hint of curved walls suggesting itself at the edge of his perception.

‘Master said that Aelindrach had come to us and we to it. This one would ask, in that case, where are we now?’

‘The shadow-realm has expanded its boundaries to encompass a greater part of Commorragh than is normal for it to interact with,’ Bellathonis replied. ‘I can only assume that the Dysjunction has… unshackled it somehow. This area was part of the travel tubes we were moving through previously, but this section has been consumed by Aelindrach.’

‘This one is confused,’ Xagor said sadly. ‘Thought Aelindrach was a place and not a monster gobbling up Commorragh.’

The grey wisp that was Bellathonis seemed to be shrinking and Xagor realised that it was moving further away from him. He hurried after it before it could fade entirely into the all-encompassing shadows. Bellathonis’s voice continued to drift back to him. ‘In essence Aelindrach is a sub-realm, just like any other,’ the master lectured distantly, ‘and like any other sub-realm it exhibits its own peculiar traits. In the case of Aelindrach, however, the differences are more grossly obvious. For one thing the boundary between Aelindrach and Commorragh is more… permeable than that of most other sub-realms, as we’ve already seen. I’ve heard it said that all the gateways to Aelindrach have collapsed and that is why its borders are so ill-defined. I confess that I’m not entirely convinced by that argument.’

Bellathonis had reached what Xagor could perceive as a curved, charcoal-black expanse of wall. At this distance (angle? It was all so confusing) he could tell there were even darker blots that showed openings in the wall. The blurred shape of the haemonculus merged smoothly into one of the openings, the grey emanation of its presence subtly altering the quality of it as Bellathonis moved inwards. Xagor drifted obediently behind him and noted the slightly denser grain of the shadowy medium they now traversed. For all the apparent solidity of the landscape around him Xagor felt as if he could simply push through it if he desired.

‘This one wonders…’ Xagor began before stopping as he realised the disquieting way that the sound of his voice brought their surroundings into sharper focus. He began again, whispering more quietly this time. ‘What Aelindrach turns to shadow – can it be returned?’

Bellathonis’s laughter was a tiny, tinkling storm that swiftly dissipated. ‘You mean can we return, don’t you, Xagor? The simple answer is yes. The insubstantiality of shadow intersects both our realm and this one under normal conditions – after all, it only takes the application of light to show that shadow is all around us. Also consider the mandrakes – they are creatures of Aelindrach that dwell here yet can travel to Commorragh or indeed elsewhere in the universe if they have a mind to go. We may yet become fully consumed by Aelindrach, but for now we are free to come and go as we please.’

In the rush of strangeness surrounding their arrival Xagor had forgotten about the mandrakes. The shadow-skinned slayers were rightly feared by Commorrites and the subject of endless blood-freezing tales about their stealthy murders and inscrutable ways. They were entities that were generally shunned, yet they could be bargained with by those brave or foolish enough to risk their soul in doing so. Xagor recalled his last encounter with mandrakes with a chilling sensation. He had been captured by them while on an important mission for the master. He had only survived the experience with his skin intact because–

‘The master is friends with mandrakes!’ Xagor blurted suddenly. The statement expanded like a bubble, coating the thick grain of the tunnel walls momentarily before fading away. Bellathonis stopped and turned to face him so that Xagor was able to perceive his master’s face clearly in the gloom.

‘Only some mandrakes,’ Bellathonis hissed, ‘or to be specific only one – and I’d very much hesitate to call our mutually beneficial arrangement a friendship. With the city in tumult and enemies hard on my heels I’ve come here with the slender hope that the arrangement we have can be extended to my protection.’

The haemonculus fell silent and turned his face away before beginning to move again. ‘You need to calm yourself, Xagor,’ the master murmured back over an insubstantial-looking shoulder, ‘or your continuing presence may become an impediment.’

Bellathonis’s implied threat seemed to hang in the air between them for a long time. Xagor gave himself over to resolute silence thereafter. They travelled for what felt like an eternity through the freezing darkness in complete silence. Xagor was distressed to find that moving through the shadow-realm still required effort, since it took an application of willpower to force himself through the darkness. He had also started to become aware of the effort that it took him simply to prevent himself falling. Xagor had a suspicion that the simple act of falling might have dire consequences in Aelindrach. From what the master had said it would quite possibly mean losing all sense of direction in the interwoven mesh of shadows – sinking into a sea of darkness with no hope of escape.

Bellathonis drifted tirelessly ahead while Xagor struggled to keep up. Fear of being left behind, lost and alone in the dark, kept the wrack moving. Despite his almost animalistic loyalty to his master, Xagor held no illusions about the renegade haemonculus. Bellathonis would abandon Xagor without a second thought if he lagged too far behind.

They emerged from narrow spaces into what seemed to be a more open region. Icy breezes that had previously seemed to toy with Xagor became savage creatures that were forever howling and tearing at his exposed flesh with frigid claws. Dark gulfs appeared to either side of their path, standing cyclones of shadow that plunged to impossible depths. Ebon strands of solidity formed criss-crossed patterns around them like ramshackle scaffolds or the winter-stripped branches of dead trees.

Xagor wondered if they were still within Commorragh at all or whether they had crossed the hazy boundaries into Aelindrach proper. The paths they were treading reminded him horribly of the riven sections of webway he had traversed to escape the maiden world of Lileathanir, and of the daemon-haunted ziggurats of accursed Shaa-Dom. The unfettered power of the warp was closer here than it was within carefully warded Commorragh, an energising tingle that excited and repelled at the same time. The fateful, siren call of She Who Thirsts was present too, a deadly undertow that could draw a soul into the all-consuming depths if it weakened and heeded it for even a moment.

There were the first signs of life – of a kind – that Xagor had seen since entering Aelindrach; furtive scurrying, half-perceived movement flickering between deeper tracts of shadow. Xagor’s nape-hairs rose when he realised that ghostly markings were appearing on what he thought of as the ground beneath his feet and the walls around him. As Xagor turned his head to look at the markings they seemed to vanish before reappearing as he turned away. He decided to risk pausing for a moment to study one set of the marks more closely. They were illegible, a collection of cryptic-looking scratches similar to runes of some kind. Perceived at precisely the right angle the scratches glowed with pallid witchfire that made them highly noticeable in the shadow-stuff of Aelindrach. Xagor looked up to tell Bellathonis but found that the haemonculus was already hovering close by, examining the sigils for himself.

‘They are markings left by the mandrakes for others of their kind,’ Bellathonis explained in a whisper, ‘challenges, taunts, boasts. Each is different and indicates a different mandrake grouping… clan or kin would be the closest translation but to call it a hunting pack would be more accurate. We must have come to regions that they commonly traverse.’

‘This one has seen – no! This one has sensed movement,’ Xagor whispered back.

‘Very good, Xagor. Just vermin so far, gloomwings and such, although I don’t doubt that we are being watched right now and we’ve been followed for a while. It’s time to show our teeth and make a stand.’

‘Master?’

‘One can only enter Aelindrach as predator or prey. Which one do you want to be, Xagor?’

‘Predator,’ Xagor responded promptly.

‘Well then we must act like predators and make a challenge of our own. If we don’t we’ll be hunted down as prey.’

Bellathonis had produced a curved, talon-like blade. In the darkness the edges of the knife seemed to glow faintly with their own inner light as the haemonculus busied himself scraping out a row of angular shapes. The individual sigils blazed with cold light for an instant before fading.

‘Come now,’ Bellathonis told Xagor as he finished, ‘we’ll let those trailing us see our sign and await the results. It should be easy enough to tell where we stand after that.’

‘This one would ask, what message was left?’ Xagor whispered as he hurried to follow his master.

‘The answer to that question is somewhat complicated but I can simplify it for you. There are rulers in Aelindrach, anarchic though it is. Kings and princes, and upstarts too. Two of the most feared rulers – which is to say the most powerful – are brothers at least in the sense that they sprang from the same source at the same time. One of the brothers is indebted to me, so naturally that makes the other brother a mortal enemy of mine.’

‘Message was statement of same?’ Xagor asked nervously.

‘Just so. Either we’ll be fortunate and the message will reach the ears of Xhakoruakh promptly, or we’ll be unfortunate and his brother will hear of it first.’

‘This potential outcome sounds bad.’

Bellathonis had begun to drift away again. His whisper came to Xagor as the faintest breath of sound. ‘Potentially very bad indeed,’ the haemonculus sighed.

CHAPTER 4

AFTERMATH OF AN ASSASSINATION

Kharbyr woke to the sensation of burning. He thought that he was back at the Raider crash and caught by a rupturing fuel cell. He thrashed wildly for a moment before realising that if that had been the case he would have been in no condition to thrash at all. Strangely, his legs were working again, but they felt odd. His whole body felt odd, altered in some way as if he’d been stretched out across too large a frame. He realised that the sensation of burning was the heat coming from a drool of molten rock that was creeping slowly towards his face.

He flinched back instinctively and found himself scrabbling to sit upright on a cracked, rubble-strewn floor. Kharbyr’s confusion deepened. The smashed-up Raider was completely gone. The whole wreck had vanished even though it had been pinning him a few moments before when Xagor had dragged him out of it. Kharbyr shook his head stupidly and then froze as he realised that the whole travel tube was gone. He was somewhere else entirely.

He was in a windowless space so he reckoned he was still underground. It was hard to see; his vision was blurred and doubling up worse than after a week-long binge. One wall was a slope of rocky debris with an opening melted through it that was still glowing from the blasting heat of its creation. It was from here that the rivulet of molten rock had come. There were tumbled stacks of cryptic-looking equipment and upturned tables scattered around the floor amid the rubble. Closer at hand there was a sled piled high with boxes and containers. There was blood, too, lots of it, splashed around in large quantities, and several huddled, still forms that didn’t look like piles of equipment.

A whisper of sound from the other side of the chamber made Kharbyr freeze again. Something was moving out there, something that made a soft swish of sound unlike anything made by a living creature. Kharbyr had heard a similar noise after Xagor rescued him from the Raider crash and glimpsed a prowling shape in the darkness. The wrack had told him they were being stalked by something but he hadn’t said what it was. As Kharbyr listened to the sound it came to him where he had heard it before. On the banks of the Grand Canal – a Talos-engine hunting for a fresh victim. The soft sigh of its gravitic impellers mirrored the sound he could hear in the chamber now.

+Don’t panic, I can help you to get out of this.+

The voice was a dry whisper in his mind. Kharbyr’s nape hairs rose in response. A thousand dread tales combined with all of the dire events he had recently witnessed in the Dysjunction made him fear for his very soul.

+…Don’t be such a witless fool. I’m no daemon from beyond the veil. I only want to help you, not swallow your soul.+

The Talos-engine was returning. Kharbyr caught sight of a curving, insect-like carapace gleaming dully with the red glow of reflected fires as it came into view. It was a smaller machine than the engine Kharbyr had seen at the Grand Canal but no less deadly in appearance. This one was narrower and sleeker-looking – an assassin rather than a warrior. A curved, scorpion-like tail held an imposing barbed stinger above the carapace while beneath it dangled a plethora of pincers, saws and flails. The Talos-engine was moving slowly and methodically as if searching for something.

+It’s here for Bellathonis – it almost had him too. He used an old Chiarasco trick to transmigrate his soul between bodies and escape. Very risky, but I think Bellathonis was desperate.+

Kharbyr was ignoring the voice in his head because he was busy being shocked by the sight of his hands. They weren’t his hands any more. One was longer-fingered and as pallid as a corpse, the other was sinewy and thick. Kharbyr blinked in surprise and felt eyes that he shouldn’t have respond in kind, eyes that seemed to be set into his shoulder blades. The words being whispered into his mind suddenly took on ghastly new import.

The haemonculus, Bellathonis… Kharbyr had been carrying a talisman for him. Xagor had implied the talisman was some sort of insurance when he delivered it into Kharbyr’s hands. Kharbyr groaned at the memory of the pain he’d felt, the wrenching sense of dislocation. The pain had radiated from the hidden pocket where the talisman lay. He fumbled with his unfamiliar hands to search through his equally unfamiliar clothing – strange, glossy leather robes that stank of acrid chemicals and old blood. The talisman was right there, or rather its twin was, tucked into his sleeve.

‘That bastard!’ Kharbyr snarled. ‘He’s stolen my body!’

There was a hissing noise as the Talos-engine suddenly spun on its axis and sped towards Kharbyr. The thing was fast. It crossed the length of the chamber before he even had time to flinch. The Talos stopped abruptly within arm’s length, its chain flails rattling and pincers snapping in agitation.

+Hold still and shut up if you don’t want to die,+ the voice in Kharbyr’s head commanded.

Jewel-like sensors set into the Talos’s metal carapace were regarding him balefully. Rods and spines flicked in and out of pits in the curved surface as the murder-machine tasted the air. Kharbyr froze in place as the probes extended almost close enough to touch him.

+If you’re very lucky it will be clever enough to be able to tell that you aren’t Bellathonis even though you’re inside his body. If you’re even more lucky it might be stupid enough that it won’t kill Bellathonis’s old body just to be on the safe side.+

The Talos-engine designated as ‘Vhi’ by its creator was locked in a state of confusion. Multiple contradictory inputs were triggering a series of cascading protocol conflicts in its mind-state. Vhi was caught re-examining the available data thousands of times per second while it assessed the unexplained event, even though it knew a significant amount of time was passing. Yet every action the Talos could take violated its specific mission parameters, its core protocols, or both at once, with an unacceptably high possibility of failure. In the terms of a living creature, which in credit to its creator Vhi did closely resemble, the Talos was caught in a quandary about what to do next.

Vhi’s assigned target had been present in the chamber prior to the moment of entry. The physical traces and the psychic spoor had correlated to a significant degree of certainty and this had been vindicated by a visual confirmation of the target after the wall of the chamber was breached. Eliminating the target’s guards had taken Vhi less than twenty seconds and yet the target had abruptly vanished from its sensors some eighteen seconds after initiating combat. The physical component was still present and still functional to judge by its movements and vocalisations, but the psychic component had been reduced to trace elements only. Vhi’s parameters stipulated very specifically that the target was to be completely annihilated in all respects. For a target-focused hunter like Vhi it was highly perturbing to find a key portion of its quarry being so wilfully elusive.

The mystery of the vanishing target could have been solved easily by Vhi’s sibling-machine, Cho. Their creator had constructed the pair of them as a matched, complementary set; Vhi for strength and speed, Cho for intellect and subtlety. When they had first encountered the confused psychic spoor of their quarry in the city they had elected to separate and function independently to enhance their chances of success. With its wider array of sensors and higher cognitive prowess Cho was the better hunter, while Vhi was the better killer. Each machine had felt itself equal to the task of eliminating the target and a certain degree of rivalry existed between them. Both had welcomed the hunt as a chance to test their capabilities to the fullest.

Yet Cho’s presence-signal was no longer being received by Vhi. It was possible that background interference was inhibiting Vhi’s reception. Some light damage sustained while eliminating the target’s bodyguards might also have degraded Vhi’s communications array. However, neither possibility appeared to correlate with Vhi’s own diagnostics and that left the disquieting possibility that Cho was now inoperative. Cho’s signal had ceased shortly after the target vanished from Vhi’s perception; Vhi estimated a strong probability that the two events were interrelated.

With only part of the quarry at hand and Cho unavailable for interrogation Vhi was undecided whether to destroy the fragment it had cornered. Extrapolation from the limited amount of known data for a scenario of this kind indicated a high probability that the physical component would reacquire the psychic portion – or at least provide useful information as to its whereabouts – at a future point. Destroying the physical component of the target was a key mission priority, but then Vhi had no meaningful plan for tracking down and extinguishing the psychic element of it.

The conflict could not be resolved without incurring mission failure of one form or another. Thus Vhi ruminated back and forth about the fate of its captive. Logic could give no guidance in such an illogical scenario and so instinct must provide an answer. Unfortunately Vhi was a construct, so raw instinct was a trait it was not overly blessed with. Theoretically time pressure was a constant; reacquiring the escaped psyche would become increasingly difficult the longer Vhi remained logic-locked.

There was really only one solution.

Kharbyr held perfectly still as the seconds dragged by with certain death hovering only a breath away. Perversely his consciousness spent the time filling in terrifying details about the murder-machine in front of him; the caked blood crusting its pincers, the mangled ribbons of flesh caught in its chain flails, the cyclopean red glow of its armed heat lance. Kharbyr was sufficiently arrogant enough to imagine that – properly armed and prepared – he could have fought this machine with an even chance of victory. Unarmed and disoriented as he was, even Kharbyr could not delude himself as to the likely outcome of trying to fight it under the current circumstances. Still, the thing hadn’t killed him yet and that must mean it could be bargained with. Kharbyr decided to ignore the witch-voice in his head and speak directly to the Talos.

‘I-I’m not him,’ Kharbyr said to the machine. ‘Bellathonis – he stole my body. Let me live and I’ll find him for you. I’ll find him for you and then you can make the bastard pay for what he’s done to me.’

The Talos showed no sign of hearing him, or of caring if it had. It remained poised, hovering in the air like a guillotine frozen mid-fall for another second – and then it was gone, flicking away and exiting the chamber like a shark vanishing into the depths. Kharbyr let out a long, slow breath and willed his heart to stop racing. He virtually jumped out of his skin when he heard the witch-voice inside his skull again. It was laughter; a dry, rustling chuckle like ashes sifting through dead leaves.

+You want revenge on Bellathonis?+ the voice sighed mockingly. +Then you’ll need to get in line with all of the others. It’s dangerous to ignore my advice, little Kharbyr, particularly when you know so little about what’s going on.+

‘Who are you?’ Kharbyr growled as he pushed himself to his feet. ‘And how do you know my name?’ He swayed unsteadily, feeling as if he stood on mismatched limbs. His whole body felt as if it had been pieced together or altered. He found that he had to stoop his neck forward to achieve an even vaguely comfortable posture. The voice continued to whisper in his mind, insidious and infuriating.

+My name is Angevere, and I know yours because all that you are is an open book to me. I see you’ve already met my old master, El’Uriaq, and my murderer, Nyos Yllithian. You even helped to bring El’Uriaq back from the dead so I suppose I should be grateful to you.+

‘El’Uriaq? You’re talking about when Yllithian sent us into Shaa-Dom!’ Kharbyr cried in dismay. The daemon-haunted sub-realm with all of its terrors and temptations had very nearly destroyed him.

+Yes, you were sent to find the bones of a tyrant so dreadful that he could threaten even Asdrubael Vect… And you brought the girl, the worldsinger, from Lileathanir to be his pain-bride too. You’ve been in the thick of this from the start.+

‘The thick of what?’ Kharbyr whined unconvincingly. ‘I was just doing as I was told!’

+The Dysjunction, of course – you’re one of the individuals that made it happen.+

A wash of icy terror swept through Kharbyr’s guts at the accusation. He was a Commorrite and as murderous as they come; he’d enjoyed many a thrill-murder and torture-hunt as he’d fought his way up from the dregs of the Old City. He’d participated in raids against the slave races and he’d seen their hovel-cities burning like stars in a night sky. Despite all that, the scale of the destruction the Dysjunction had wrought upon Commorragh had truly terrified him.

For Kharbyr a lifetime of wickedness and cynicism had been bolstered by the belief that there was a place for him in the universe and that Commorragh was it. The mean, tangled streets and glowering spires had been his nursery and his tutor; he fitted into that world like a knife into its sheath. What he’d seen in the last few hours looked very much like the end of the world, his world, and to find that he’d had a direct hand in making that happen was a horrifying prospect. The insidious voice continued to whisper into his doubt-filled mind, seeming to feed off his crumbling bravado as he confronted the ugly truth.

+Don’t feel bad, little Kharbyr, you were used just as the ones ordering you around were used. We’ve all been made the pawns of greater powers in this affair.+

Vengeance was a concept to which Kharbyr could still rally his flagging ego. He already wanted vengeance on Bellathonis and now he wanted vengeance on all the greater powers the witch-voice was harping on about, too. The voice chuckled appreciatively at his directionless fury.

+You certainly have spirit, I’ll grant you that much. It’s probably why you’ve been such a useful agent up until now. I can help you, Kharbyr, if you’ll help me. We can take our vengeance together.+

Kharbyr’s head came up and he looked around the rubble-choked chamber again. Now that the Talos was gone he was absolutely sure there was no one else present. The disembodied voice seemed disturbingly close to him. It felt as though someone were standing by his shoulder and whispering into his ear.

‘And just how would I help you?’ Kharbyr asked it warily. ‘If you’re so knowledgeable and so… so wise about everything I’d think you could help yourself.’

+Alas, my capabilities have been severely curtailed, as you’ll see. Step over to that sled piled with equipment. Look for a metallic cylinder on it that’s about as long as your arm.+

Kharbyr hesitantly followed the instructions. The low, bier-like gravity sled was piled with metal crates and boxes covered in an indecipherable script. There were bundles of gleaming tools: saws, scalpels, tongs and pincers of various kinds. Glass tubes, jars and alembics held in place by nets twinkled at the top of the pile like snow atop a miniature mountain. Kharbyr searched carefully, his mind full of the horrors he might find inside a haemonculus’s toolbox. He found the cylinder in plain sight. It was resting on end atop a box and unsecured, as if someone had simply put it there absentmindedly a moment before. He realised at once that the cylinder was simply a sort of casing. One half of it was open to reveal a crystal tube inside, full of fluid.

Another icy chill dripped down Kharbyr’s neck as he looked into the crystal tube. A medusa’s nest of black coils floated in the fluid, masses of lustrous dark hair that all but obscured a pallid, wax-like face. The eyes and mouth of the face were sewn shut and yet they still moved. Dry, croaking laughter erupted into his mind.

+Now you can see that I am in no condition to pursue anything on my own. Bellathonis kept me like this for his convenience while he tortured and exploited me. I want my revenge too, Kharbyr, I desire it with a passion that a stripling like you can only dream about.+

Actually seeing the thing called Angevere had restored some of Kharbyr’s boldness. She was as helpless as a babe in arms, all she could do was cajole or persuade with her mind-speech. He felt confident that he could simply ignore her wheedling if he wanted to.

+You’re wondering where we are. We’re in the foundation strata beneath the White Flames fortress. This is what’s left of a temporary bolthole Bellathonis established while he was working for Yllithian.+

‘So how can you help me to catch up with Bellathonis and make him give me my body back when you don’t even have a body of your own?’ Kharbyr demanded with studied insolence.

+Through wisdom, child, a characteristic that you are not overly burdened by. Think! You wear the face of Bellathonis now and that makes you a target for his enemies. It also means that you can find help by tricking Bellathonis’s allies into thinking that you are him.+

‘You mean like tricking Yllithian. Those two were always hand in glove together from what I saw, and Yllithian is extremely powerful.’

+Yes – though be warned that until recently Yllithian had thought to rid himself of Bellathonis. Fortunately I know that he’s now had a change of heart. Would you like to spy on Yllithian? There is a simple way that you can do so.+

Intrigued, Kharbyr followed Angevere’s instructions and dug through some pouches on his belt. From one of them he retrieved a multi-faceted red gem that was a little smaller than his thumb. While tapping it on the top of a crate three times he incanted the name ‘Nyos Yllithian’. After a moment a small, crimson-tinted picture formed in the air above the gem. It showed a first-person perspective view from the deck of a grav-craft that was racing through the spires of Commorragh. Kharbyr heard Yllithian’s voice barking commands to his lackeys and noticed the way they shifted deferentially as the viewpoint was directed towards them. The gem was showing events as seen through Yllithian’s eyes.

+Bellathonis did not trust Yllithian, so when he performed a transmigration to save the archon’s life he made certain modifications to the new body without telling him.+

‘Wait, Yllithian’s been transferred too?’

+Of course. Bellathonis had reasons to test the process before using it on himself. Yllithian’s old body was being devoured by the glass plague at the time so he was grateful for the chance to escape from it – although Bellathonis disguised the risks involved anyway.+

Kharbyr nodded to himself. Tales of strangeness like soul-transfers, body-swaps, transmigration and a thousand others were nothing new in Commorragh. It was common knowledge that for the right fee a haemonculus could reconstruct a body from ashes, or that death was a mere inconvenience for the wealthy elite. Some of those wilder stories had to have a grounding in reality.

‘I’m still tempted to just leave you here and go it alone, it’ll take more than a few tricks like that gem to prove you’re useful to me.’ It was a half-hearted threat and by now they both knew it.

+You would never be able to find your way out of the maze of tunnels around here, much less get to the White Flames fortress unmarked. Once there you could never pass as Bellathonis without my help. You need me, Kharbyr.+

‘All right, let’s say that I do, what happens next?’

+We watch Yllithian carefully and choose our moment. Then we approach him for help in finding the errant Kharbyr and reunite the two of you.+

‘Then what?’

+One thing at a time, child, a moment ago you were within a hair’s-breadth of your doom.+

‘You think the Talos will come back?’

+Only if we stop looking for Bellathonis. It wants him too.+

To Angevere’s expanded perception Kharbyr’s mind was quiescent and malleable. It was simple enough to prod him along into a plan to meet with Yllithian. Angevere chose not to share with her unwitting tool that her real objective was Yllithian, always Yllithian. A chance to repay Bellathonis for his tortures and humiliations would be welcome indeed, but the focus of Angevere’s hatred was reserved for Nyos Yllithian. The archon’s downfall should have been complete by now and yet he kept slipping out of the noose. Angevere planned to change that.

CHAPTER 5

AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR FOR VECT

Asdrubael Vect was in the midst of a light repast when they brought the calling card to him. He had moved to another of the great atria that girdled the highest peak of Corespur, a vast open space with one wall and most of the roof pierced with hundreds of tall, narrow windows looking out over Commorragh. Ordinarily the view outside was breathtaking – the jagged, precipitous slopes of Corespur falling away to the peaks and valleys formed by the spires of Sorrow Fell, beyond them the shining towers of High Commorragh in all their barbed profusion, and in the distance the radiating talons of the docking ring where armadas of sleek vessels twinkled like stars in the outer dark. Now the view was a hellish scene dominated by clouds of smoke under-lit by sullen fires. The wan, poisonous light from the quiescent Ilmaea that came spilling in through the windows threw dark bars of shadow across the exquisitely tiled floor such that despite its openness the atrium felt like an enormous cage.

A troupe of scantily clad Lhamaeans whirled and cavorted across the centre of the floor in perfect time with the ululating shrieks of their victims. A veritable host of the poor, damned souls were hanging from the ceiling, dangling in chains so that they were swinging helplessly in the midst of the sinuous dancers. The Lhamaeans stroked and caressed their playthings lasciviously as they gyrated between them. With every scratch of their poison-encrusted fingernails the Lhamaeans introduced more of the nerve-shredding neurotoxins that were slowly, exquisitely killing their victims. The screams embodied not only unimaginable pain, but agonised arousal and unfulfilled lust. Vect smiled as he enjoyed these simple pleasures and feasted on the outpouring of raw suffering that the adepts of Shaimesh were provoking.

A black-winged scourge came fluttering into the chamber through an open window. Before the scourge even alighted, Vect saw his trueborn warriors moving to bar its path. There was a low, hurried exchange of words and then there were nervous glances towards him as they tried to decide whether or not they should interrupt their supreme overlord with whatever news was being brought. Vect ignored them and continued to watch the Lhamaeans while the guards quietly squabbled over what to do. Finally the scourge seemed to tire of their indecision and broke away, stalking forwards on its own and forcing the guards to follow it with looks of fury on their faces. The scourge dropped to its knees a dozen paces from Vect and held up a small wafer of crystal for his inspection.

Vect frowned balefully at the interruption and held up one hand to the dancers. The Lhamaeans instantly froze into place mid-step like living statues. The shrieks of their victims faded away into low-pitched babbling and weeping. Vect lowered his hand and twitched his finger towards the scourge to signal it to approach. It did so at a half-crouch as though approaching an open furnace door and trying to avoid the resulting blast of heat. The crystal wafer it held so delicately in its talons was small enough that it would have fitted into the palm of Vect’s hand, rectangular, and unmarked save for a superimposed image of two stylised masks, one laughing and one weeping.

Vect arched one eyebrow and sighed volubly before turning to signal for the Lhamaeans to continue. Behind him he heard a short scuffle as his trueborn warriors seized the scourge and dragged it away with its talons scraping across the tiled floor. The shrieks of the Lhamaeans’ victims rose swiftly to obliterate the final fate of the unfortunate winged messenger.

Unusually as he completed his repast, Vect found himself relenting a little. He formed a growing belief that he could gain some value in bandying words with the one that had sent him the calling card and that the momentary diversion in itself might bear unexpected fruit. The individual in question would likely know more about how matters fared outside Commorragh and inside the webway than Vect cared to admit.

The Lhamaeans had almost completed their performance. The moans and whimpers of their victims were becoming softer and softer as they were finally devoured. The supreme overlord looked up and addressed his trueborn guards as though there had been no prior interruption.

‘Very well, I’ve seen his calling card. Bring in the Fool that sent it. Let’s hear what he has to say for himself.’

The onyx-armoured guards accompanying Vect’s visitor were unsure of his status when he arrived. They compromised by trailing a half-step behind the approaching figure with their splinter rifles held at the ready and looking as if they were preparing to leap into action at any moment. The visitor strode in front of them as confidently as if he were at the head of a guard of honour. He was little enough to look at: small, slight, dressed in faintly ridiculous archaic garb that was patterned with alternating diamonds of black and white so fine that they appeared grey from a distance. He wore a domino-style half-mask beneath which his full, mobile lips were visible, fixed in an overly wide smile.

For all the visitor’s non-threatening appearance there was, Vect noted, an underlying dynamism to his movements he tried to keep carefully hidden – more than the poise of a dancer or the power of an athlete, something more like the sprung wiriness of an assassin. Vect watched with an inscrutable expression as the stranger sketched a needlessly baroque bow before kneeling. The supreme overlord waved his guards away with an air of disdain.

‘What do you want?’ Vect asked without preamble. ‘Your time here with me will be short, so employ it wisely.’

‘Supreme overlord!’ the visitor sprang up and wrung its hands in apparent misery. ‘Those I represent wish to extend their deepest and most heartfelt commiserations on the dire events that have beset the great city of Commorragh–’

‘My city,’ Vect snapped.

‘…Your great city of Commorragh,’ the Fool continued without missing a beat, ‘and to take the opportunity to offer any and all assistance they can in restoring it to its former glory.’

‘How very neighbourly of you,’ Vect observed sarcastically. ‘If I find myself in need of troupes of jugglers to fill my arenas and bordellos I shall certainly look no further.’

The stranger’s smile hardened a little when he responded to the jibe. ‘Of course – you’ll be needing a great many souls to restock your city with, I imagine. I see this particular winnowing has been especially thorough.’

Vect gave a hard smile in return to acknowledge that the empty pleasantries had now been dispensed with. ‘A culling of the weak, nothing more,’ Vect said dismissively. ‘Commorragh has endured far worse during its history and always emerges the stronger for it.’

The slight stranger refused to rise to Vect’s bait and opted to nod sympathetically. ‘While I sense that the immediate shocks have passed there is something deeply… moribund about the city in the aftermath, don’t you think? It’s my fear that a canker is forming that might eventually poison this entire reality.’

Vect reappraised the creature for a moment, looking behind the mask being presented to him at that moment for the real motivations driving beneath the surface. The stranger was a Harlequin, certainly, one of the vagrant warrior-troubadours that claimed a mystical connection with the dead past of the eldar race as they wandered the webway. This one had the bright, fervent eyes of a fanatic, a true believer in their trickster deity, the so-called Laughing God. Although he was trying to disguise the signs, the Harlequin was tense, bursting with barely suppressed energy. Vect surmised that this Harlequin had other work that he was desperate to be doing, but that he had felt constrained to come before the supreme overlord first. It was an intriguing conundrum and Vect decided to strike at the heart of it.

‘You know something about the Dysjunction,’ Vect said incisively, ‘something that you felt you had to come straight here and warn me about. Something you’re now hesitant to reveal.’

The Harlequin spread his hands helplessly and hunched his shoulders as if to feign innocence. Vect smiled maliciously; this one was as weak as all the others.

‘I’ll make it easy for you,’ the tyrant added conversationally. ‘Stop wasting my time and tell me what you know or I’ll have my Castigators rip it from your bones.’

The Harlequin’s ever-present smile became a little wistful, as if he could think of nothing more welcome. Vect scowled and the Fool seemed suddenly to remember where he was with comic dismay. Defeated, the Harlequin blew out his cheeks and puckered his lips as if tasting something bitter.

‘Forgive me, great one. I truly desire nothing more than to unburden myself to you. I have borne witness to great and terrible events in the recent past which I’m hesitant to bore you with. Suffice to say that I’ve seen signs that the gods of Chaos have caught up Commorragh in their sport. This is what brought about your Dysjunction. The Grandfather of Pestilence and the Architect of Fate have pursued their mutual conflict into realms that are usually considered the sovereign hunting grounds of She Who Thirsts…’

Vect laughed outright at the Harlequin’s little speech. ‘Gods! Daemons! Always the same with your kind. You see things only through the lens of the Fall. You endlessly replay the old mythic cycles to teach us about the gods and our past yet you fail to see how utterly irrelevant you’ve become to the present. The past is gone, there is only the future for us. The powers of Chaos have schemed against Commorragh for its entire existence and they have never gained a permanent foothold here.’

Vect almost smiled to see the Harlequin virtually bouncing from one foot to the other with barely repressed eagerness to contradict his specious claim. ‘Perhaps that has been true until now, mighty lord, I would certainly never gainsay someone so knowledgeable as yourself about the details of their own domain,’ the too-wide smile flashed again. ‘My one fear is that this happy state of affairs may have now come to an end.’ The smile vanished into a concerned frown like the sun disappearing behind a cloud.

‘You’re using a great many words to say very little,’ Vect said pointedly. ‘Perhaps the Castigators will be the best solution after all. I often find that hearing reports of what people say is much more efficient and informative than actually speaking with them.’

The slight figure paled noticeably. It seemed that this meeting was not proceeding in the manner he had anticipated it should. The Harlequin glanced around for a moment as if just now fully absorbing the enormity of where he stood: the chains with the bones of the Lhamaeans’ victims swinging in the breeze, the coterie of the Lhamaeans themselves curled watching the visitor with the insatiable intensity of cats, the legion of black-armoured guards poised in the shadows, the stink of the burning city blowing in through the windows and most of all Vect himself, the pitiless tyrant with the power of life and death over it all. The little Fool looked very lost and lonely as he realised just how much he was at Vect’s non-existent mercy. Vect let the feeling of dread settle in for a few seconds before he considered the Harlequin was feeling sufficiently crushed for him to be able to shake loose some useful information.

‘Give me specifics,’ Vect snapped. ‘Give me places, people and details. Tell me how and why you’ve reached the conclusions you’ve reached and you might still walk out of here on your own two feet.’

The Harlequin, who was named Motley, felt as though he were dancing on hot coals. It had always been a gamble to approach Vect directly, but try as he might Motley could think of no better way to try and protect the city as a whole than co-opting its supreme overlord to the task. Motley hadn’t counted on the fact that Vect did not care about his opinions and saw him only as a resource to be exploited. The idea of torture did not elicit any real sense of dread within Motley, although he was cautious enough to allow Vect to continue thinking that it did. Imprisonment, however, could be deadly to his cause.

‘It began with a real space raid on a maiden world called Lileathanir,’ Motley began and Vect’s dark, disturbing gaze intensified immediately. The supreme overlord had heard that name before.

‘During the raid a small group kidnapped a worldsinger from her shrine. As a result of this the world spirit of Lileathanir became enraged and struck back – first at the raiding force to drive it away and later at the raid’s point of origin – Commorragh.’

For all his avowed contempt for talk of gods and daemons Vect fully comprehended the implications of Motley’s story. As supreme overlord of Commorragh, Vect understood that repositories of souls like a maiden world’s world spirit or a craftworld’s infinity circuit represented a source of real power in the metaphysical realm of warp space – raw, atavistic and potentially supremely dangerous power.

‘Continue.’ Vect spoke the word with distaste.

‘In the intervening time,’ Motley recounted, ‘the worldsinger was brought to Commorragh and used in an… undertaking to resurrect one of your old enemies, El’Uriaq, I believe. The attempt failed, or rather it seemed to succeed, but the result was corrupt and became the possessed vessel of a very potent daemon. The emergence of the daemon, the destruction of it and its offspring, the wrath of the world spirit – these factors combined, reflected and redoubled their effects to produce the Dysjunction that has wracked the, ah, your city.’

‘It should come as no surprise to you that I am aware of these facts,’ Vect said coldly, ‘and – although I find myself wondering at your knowledge of them – I find nothing in what you’ve said that implicates the gods of Chaos at work in some master scheme. Greed, opportunism and a lack of foresight breed disaster. So it ever was.’

Motley smiled despite himself. Like any good storyteller he had saved the best until last, an implicit twist for the tale that had – so far – kept Vect interested. Now they came to the point where he would find out if his best was good enough. Motley had fought daemons and confronted the darkness in mortal hearts more times than he could speak of and yet his mouth felt dry at this moment. He was wagering his life and his very soul that the tyrant didn’t know what he was about to be told. The little Harlequin moistened his lips and plunged onwards.

‘Ah yes, your gracious eminence, but in my incompetence I have failed to communicate the critical ending of one part of the story – the quieting of the world spirit on Lileathanir. It was an event of such magnitude that it brought the active phase of the Dysjunction to an end!’

Vect’s gaze was hooded. ‘You’re using too many words again,’ the tyrant said, raising a warning figure when Motley opened his mouth to reply, ‘and don’t test my patience by telling me that you’re supplying details. You’re not. Give me the facts without the dramatic embellishments. I need only to look out of the windows, little clown, to be fully appraised of the gravity of the situation.’

Motley nodded and chose his next words carefully. ‘One of the original kidnappers, an incubus named Morr, went back to Lileathanir to confront the world spirit in the hopes of appeasing it. He succeeded, partially, and was confronted by an agent of Tzeentch. A craftworlder warlock named Caraeis had been tainted – I don’t know how long ago – but when the time came he nearly, very nearly, acted as a conduit for a Scion of the Opener. If it had fully manifested as intended it would have consumed Lileathanir’s world spirit and pulled the entire planet into the Realm of Chaos. The Dysjunction would still be happening now if it were not for Morr’s sacrifice.’

‘All very tragic and very heroic. I’ll build a memorial to him,’ Vect said sarcastically. ‘And if we assume for a moment that everything you’ve said is true, I’ll grant you’ve tenuously connected a Chaotic influence to the occurrence of the Dysjunction, but not to Commorragh itself.’

Vect was toying with him now, Motley was certain of it, squeezing him for exactly what he knew. The Harlequin prattled on, nonsensically counting points off on his gloved fingers as though he were playing a game.

‘No agent of the Weaver can be revealed without it unravelling part of a larger scheme. The raid on Lileathanir and the kidnapping of the worldsinger were opening moves on the great game board, ones that would bring the Scion to Lileathanir when the time was ripe, but that wasn’t all. In Commorragh itself Tzeentch’s agents were whistling up a storm and then they planted a lightning rod in the city to receive it. Exactly why they did so or whether they even knew what the outcome would be we can only guess at, but I’m certain that they did it under the influence of the Architect of Fate.’

Vect gazed at the Harlequin for a moment before he turned and stalked away to the tall windows to gaze out over his city. Motley was momentarily taken aback by the turnabout and then skipped quickly to catch up to the tyrant, feeling like a chastened child. The guards in the shadows shifted warningly at the sudden movement before freezing again, statue-like. The tyrant was silent for so long that Motley jumped slightly when Vect suddenly spoke to him again.

‘I take it you have no proof for your supposition that the plague lord, Nurgle, is involved,’ the tyrant said flatly.

‘Only that the two, weaver and destroyer, are never far apart. Where one appears the other must follow.’

Vect grunted in a muted acceptance of the Harlequin’s statement. ‘There have been signs,’ the supreme overlord admitted finally, ‘unusual but not unique. I had thought them thoroughly crushed, but now I see I must look again and make sure. Tell me about these supposed agents in the city. Name them to me.’

Motley hesitated for an instant. Naming names to a monster like Vect was in effect handing out death sentences. However, the Harlequin found that he could bite back his moral compunctions readily enough. Redirecting Vect’s ire at deserving targets was an infinitely worthy cause, on top of which two of the three names he knew belonged to individuals that were already dead. The last was thoroughly deserving of death.

‘I learned from Morr that three archons were behind the scheme to raise El’Uriaq – Morr’s own master, Kraillach, Xelian and Yllithian. Of the three Yllithian was portrayed as the ringleader.’

Vect nodded slightly, leaving Motley with the impression that he had just passed some sort of test. The tyrant turned his gaze back to the roiling, fire-lit clouds below before speaking again.

‘So you’re here on some harebrained scheme to save Commorragh, root out the wicked people and protect all the precious innocents,’ Vect murmured. ‘I don’t think you represent anyone at all, little clown, just yourself, a big bag of suspicions and an overwhelming desire to meddle in other people’s business.’

Motley’s smile was sickly as he realised that Vect had seen through his little ruse. It was unfair to say that the Harlequin was entirely without resources – the other members of his troupe would come, or rather they might come, if he called on them. Motley had not done so because in the magnitude of something as awful as the Dysjunction striking Commorragh they were as effective as a thimbleful of water in a forest fire. Not to mention that few of the Harlequins in the troupe could be relied upon to be as enthusiastic in saving the dark kin from themselves as was Motley himself.

Motley saw the tyrant was grinning wickedly at him and was evidently well aware of his discomfort. The tyrant of Commorragh appeared to be reading his mind even though such a feat was patently impossible. The Harlequin spread his hands apologetically.

‘Not everyone hates Commorragh and wishes to see it fall,’ Motley said.

‘But most do,’ Vect shot back. ‘Do the craftworlds send their condolences and offer me their aid? They do not. Do the Exodites grieve for our loss? They do not – in fact they would rejoice if they knew of it. The sensibilities of our various backward cousins in the greater universe remain what they have always been – an irrelevance. Commorragh does not need them and I would reject any such overtures anyway, or better yet I would accept them and enslave all of the simpering fools that came here crying their false tears of conciliation. Commorragh stands alone as it has always done and I will destroy any fool that preaches otherwise.’

‘As the supreme overlord that is your right, in accordance with the diktats you made on your ascension to power,’ Motley agreed sadly. ‘The loyalty of your subjects must remain unquestioning.’

‘Just so,’ Vect pinioned the Harlequin with his merciless gaze. ‘You treat the words like an indictment, but you know that you speak the truth. While others may weep or cringe or wring their hands in the midst of disaster I live for these times of challenge. This is why I rule here, because I will always endure and this city will endure with me no matter the cost.’

The tyrant fell silent for a moment and then, unexpectedly, he smiled at the Harlequin disarmingly. Motley was more shocked by the sight than anything else he had seen so far. Vect had played at being the monstrous tyrant from the moment the Harlequin had arrived. Now he smiled as if that had all been a tiresome but necessary piece of play-acting between old friends.

‘You’ve performed a great service to myself and my city at no small risk to yourself,’ the tyrant said agreeably, ‘now tell me what you would take as your reward.’

The reversal was so complete that it made Motley feel a little giddy. The Harlequin sensed a more dangerous trap waiting for him now than at any point previously in the conversation. A cold, forbidding tyrant was one thing to deal with, a suddenly generous one was quite another. Motley had always rather prided himself on his measure of headlong foolhardiness but he instinctively shied away from claiming any rewards. Vect might take any request and twist it into some heinous crime or ironic punishment on a whim.

‘I ask only the permission to move freely through the city so that I can investigate further,’ Motley smiled before bowing again with a flourish. Vect appeared to weigh the request for a moment before replying.

‘Very well, though I will supply you with neither transportation nor protection beyond the boundaries of Corespur. You might join me in following the progress of Valossian – he’s pushing further into Sorrow Fell even as we speak – or stay here until things become a little safer.’ The supreme overlord’s eyes glittered with malicious humour at that and Motley understood that Vect believed staying in Corespur was the very last thing he should think about doing.

‘Supreme and overwhelming mightiness, it is my wish to set out forthwith so that I need trouble your monumentalness no further,’ Motley said and struck a heroic pose. ‘I go to seek our enemies wherever they may lurk.’

‘Enemies are everywhere,’ Vect said as he waved a hand to dismiss the Harlequin. ‘Wisdom comes from knowing which ones to eliminate first.’

CHAPTER 6

THE COURT OF THE SHADOW-KING

Sliding sidewise through the cracks and crevices in his reality Kheradruakh crept forth from his ossuary of skulls. He followed his altered senses outwards on the trail of the wrongness that was leaking into his lair. Confusion and anarchy greeted him, a billion fractured blades of other realities writhing in delectable torment. With his nostrils flaring and tongue flickering, the Decapitator tried to make sense of the tumult.

Aelindrach was altering, shifting its wavering boundaries outwards to encompass new territories. Many of the hunting grounds of old had already been absorbed into the ancient heartland of the shadow-realm, disrupting its still, icy perfection with their brash addition. Mandrakes and their kindred raced through the bloated realm slaughtering one another with an unholy fervour, mewling prey fluttered hither and yon with life-sparks so feeble that they were as valueless as ashes.

Among it all Kheradruakh caught an alien scent. It was the scent of something that was neither prey nor mandrake, life-sparks from the outer realm at large in Aelindrach. Kheradruakh was intrigued enough to seek them out. Cross-currents and undertows conspired to obscure the scent but Kheradruakh was indefatigable. He found the prey that believed itself not prey near the boundary of the outer realm. It stood at bay with mandrake hunters already circling – just a single pack closing in for the kill. The Decapitator lurked deep in the shadows and watched with unseeing eyes as events unfolded.

A blood-chilling howl cut through the darkness and was answered from afar. Xagor shivered involuntarily at the sound. It was a bestial sound, a sound that mingled hunger and rage as it tore itself free from the throats of their pursuers. They were getting closer now. The master had chosen the place for them to make their stand, a coffin-shaped declivity with a narrow entryway. There was no exit save by the way they had entered and that, Bellathonis had confidently assured Xagor, meant that their pursuers would have to come at them from the front. Xagor would have preferred somewhere with a way to retreat, but he was wise enough to hold his tongue.

Time crawled by in frigid silence as Bellathonis and Xagor waited. They clutched the weapons they had brought to Aelindrach like talismans. The haemonculus held the long knife and a skeletal-looking splinter pistol that had been the favoured weapons of Kharbyr, while Xagor had the heavy-barrelled hex-rifle that he had looted from the ruins of the Lower Metzuh at the beginning of the Dysjunction. It was a sparse enough selection of armaments with which to confront mandrakes, but Xagor at least had faith in his hex-rifle. He had seen its mutagenic bolts rip apart even the warp-infused flesh of daemons. He told himself that skulking mandrakes would soon come to fear its bite.

A thin rime of frost had begun to spread across every surface, the tiny crackling sounds of its progress as loud and sinister as footsteps in the enclosed space. A darker shadow suddenly flitted across the entrance and Xagor gripped his rifle tighter. The shape reappeared and Xagor thought he caught a glimpse of needle-sharp teeth being bared in the blackness outside. Xagor fired instinctively and the shape vanished so quickly that for a moment he thought he’d just imagined it. Then – a hissing shriek from outside that rose to an agonised pitch before being abruptly silenced.

‘Good shot, Xagor,’ Bellathonis murmured quietly, ‘that’s one down. Now get back into that angle like I showed you.’

Xagor obeyed and squeezed himself into one corner of their tiny redoubt so that he couldn’t see the entrance any more. The haemonculus’s wisdom was vindicated an instant later when the entrance was lashed by blasts of cold fire. The air was already freezing but now became life-sapping in its own right as the temperature plummeted. If any flesh had been directly exposed to the mandrakes’ balefire it would have shattered like glass.

Bellathonis sprang out of his hiding place and fired several shots from his pistol without taking the time to aim. The haemonculus was relying on the vicious whine of the impacting splinters to make their enemies outside duck back. Xagor mirrored the movement a split second later and stepped out with his hex-rifle levelled. He strained his senses to pierce the swirling shadows and find a target but his teeth were chattering so much that he could barely focus. A flicker of movement in the deeper blackness caught his eye and the wrack loosed a half-blind shot at the area before darting back into safety.

An uneasy peace settled for a moment. It seemed their pursuers faced an impasse where they either dared not or could not attempt to overwhelm Xagor and Bellathonis with a frontal attack. The haemonculus had gambled that this would be the case, but he had little data to use in predicting what would happen next. The mandrakes might wait them out, call for reinforcements or simply leave. The difficulty came in trying to determine what they had actually done rather than what they could do – to assume that they had left could be both embarrassing and fatal if the mandrakes subsequently reappeared and sank their icy claws into Bellathonis and Xagor’s backs. They could only watch and wait for the mandrakes’ next move.

They came without warning. Their attacking rush was utterly silent as the entrance suddenly filled with surging forms. Xagor heard Bellathonis’s pistol shooting and fired his own weapon by reflex. An instant later a saw-toothed sickle of bone was flashing down at his skull. He hauled his heavy rifle up just in time to block the descending blade and caught a glimpse of an inky, shifting face framed by pallid hair. Xagor swung the stock of the hex-rifle around in an effort to smash it into the face of his adversary, but the shadow-skinned mandrake oozed away from the clumsy blow before it could connect.

Xagor was distracted by the sight of his master clashing blades with another pair of the slinking shades. The wrack dared not fire again at such close quarters for fear of hitting Bellathonis, so he was reduced to fighting with what amounted to an ungainly club. Xagor’s own assailant came surging back before Xagor could even move forward to Bellathonis’s aid. The saw-toothed sickle swung down again, this time searching for his neck.

Xagor tried to block the attack with his rifle but the swing became a looping thrust that sank into his midriff. He gasped and dropped his rifle as a biting wave of cold from the wound threatened to freeze his heart. He wavered for a moment, grunted and grabbed at the wrist holding the sickle in an effort to stay upright. Xagor felt icy, corded muscle ripple beneath his grip and glimpsed the mandrake’s face again – this time with its jaws opening like a fresh wound to display rows of needle-sharp teeth glimmering in the gloom.

‘Xagor, your master is in peril! Help me!’ The sound of Bellathonis’s voice snapped across Xagor’s fading consciousness like a jolt of electricity. He smashed his masked face into the mandrake’s grinning visage with all the remaining strength he could muster. The ink- skinned fiend sagged beneath the blow and lost its grip on the sickle still protruding from Xagor’s guts. The wrack twisted the creature’s wrist savagely as it fell, evoking a bubbling hiss, and then stamped on its vertebrae in an effort to snap its neck.

To Xagor’s surprise the mandrake simply came apart in his hands, instantaneously transforming into runnels of ichor-like shadow that slipped between his fingers and vanished into the stuff of Aelindrach. The wrack turned and staggered again as he tried to leap to the defence of Bellathonis. He realised what the problem was, stopped and absentmindedly pulled the mandrake’s saw-toothed sickle out of himself. He ignored the crimson splatter of blood that came out with it as he tried to advance with a more measured tread.

The two remaining mandrakes were swirling about Bellathonis like wolves, snapping and worrying at the haemonculus’s defences as he fought to keep them at bay. Xagor swung awkwardly at the closest shifting blur and felt the sickle connect with something solid. His knees gave way and he fell, still clutching at the saw-toothed sickle and feeling it tearing through insubstantial flesh as he did so.

There was a hiss and Xagor dimly glimpsed Bellathonis thrusting his blade through his other attacker’s throat. As he slithered to the ground Xagor’s rapidly dimming mind decided that since he could no longer trust his legs he should crawl away and find his rifle so that he could at least shoot. He had dragged himself less than a metre before greyness closed in around him and provoked a final, panicked thought that he would be lost in the shadow-realm forever.

Xagor awoke to waves of excruciating pain alternating with the sensation of swaying. His wrists and ankles were bound to a pole being carried none too gently between two slaves. He sensed Bellathonis nearby and felt the reassuring presence of the haemonculus looming over him.

‘Be still now, Xagor, everything’s perfectly fine,’ Bellathonis murmured quietly to him. ‘Xhakoruakh’s followers found us in time. They’re taking us to him now. They seemed impressed by our little performance, hulp–’

The haemonculus was abruptly dragged away by a collar around his throat. A thin line of black cord connected to the collar was being held by a mandrake nearby. The shadow-skinned creature jerked it vigorously to bring Bellathonis to heel. Xagor saw that the haemonculus’s arms were also bound behind his back with more cords as he was yanked away. Xagor loyally snarled and thrashed at the sight of his master being treated like a slave, but that only served to send further waves of pain down his legs and arms.

The slaves continued to carry Xagor along listlessly, too cowed and frightened to even raise their heads. The wound in the gut where Xagor had been stabbed felt numb and he started trying to concentrate on that in preference to the hotter pain in his extremities. As a wrack Xagor was well versed in both dispensing and receiving pain. The master was very insistent that a balance was maintained – those who felt no pain, Bellathonis had said, could scarcely be expected to apply it with any degree of finesse. Xagor felt bolstered by the thought and stoically bore the sickening jolts of travel as they merged into one long torture.

By the time they approached the court of Xhakoruakh both Bellathonis and Xagor were being dragged by collars held by silent mandrakes. The number of slaves in the mandrakes’ coffle had shrunk dramatically as they were mercilessly consumed by their captors. To Xagor it seemed as if the creatures were gorging themselves by feasting on as many of their captives as they could before they reached the shadow-king’s demesne. Bellathonis’s strident protests had saved Xagor from being slain, but now the wrack had to stagger along unassisted and do his best to keep up with the fluid movements of the mandrakes as they travelled down ever-darker paths. Xagor was tough but he was close to the end of his endurance.

Xhakoruakh had made his holdfast in what amounted to a great cathedral of darkness deep within the heart of Aelindrach, a true palace of shadow. From a distance the place gave the appearance of a titanic, dusky spider’s web – an image that recalled to Xagor his entry into the shadow-realm so clearly that it made him shudder. As they moved closer crooked columns of onyx, ebony and basalt resolved themselves from the darkness and could be sensed climbing upwards in anarchic fashion to unseen heights. The columns branched, crossed and re-crossed to support a haphazard profusion of floors, steps and walls. There was no internal logic to the construction; stairs climbed to nowhere, walls stood in splendid isolation or clung to floors with no visible means of support.

Xagor and Bellathonis were dragged inside without ceremony and entered a multi-dimensional maze that assailed the senses with its flagrant impossibilities. What had seemed anarchic and haphazard from the outside revealed itself inside as an inversion, a shadow of itself built of corners and crooked ways, a labyrinth of impossible angles that led elsewhere. At times the deep network of shadows seemed to be alive with slinking shapes and baleful eyes, or the air would pulsate with sinister whisperings. In other moments the great edifice seemed utterly desolate and empty. The mandrakes led them ever deeper through shadow-choked crossways and dusty rooms. Discarded trophies and forgotten treasures lay scattered in odd corners: corroding weapons and rent armour, torn clothes and mouldering bones, trinkets, children’s toys, books of forbidden lore and bejewelled caskets all tossed aside like garbage.

They found Xhakoruakh in an empty, echoing space carpeted with fleshless skulls and hung with countless narrow banners that drifted slowly in a spectral breeze. Forbidden runes blazed coldly from the banners in complex traceries of emerald witch-fire that hurt the eye and the mind. The shadow-king was squatting at the centre of it all, his muscular arms outstretched and his midnight flesh rippling with glowing runes that outshone the ones gleaming on the banners around him. The dark, faceless figure rose at their approach and it became apparent that it was a giant among its kind. It stood head and shoulders above the mandrakes that were accompanying the prisoners and possessed an aura of dark and terrible majesty.

The mandrakes had already forced the prisoners to their knees. Now at the shadow-king’s approach they too crouched and averted their ever-shifting faces fearfully as the towering figure spoke. Its voice was rich and timeless as if welling up from sombre depths, the tolling of lost bells drowned in the deep.

‘Petty morsels these – why have you disturbed my meditations with such slender offerings?’

Xagor had readily slumped to the ground with the other slaves, dumbly accepting of his fate. Bellathonis, however, struggled up and shrugged off his guard’s first attempt to drag him back down. ‘It’s a great honour to meet you again, Xhakoruakh,’ the haemonculus said quickly. ‘You’ve… ah… certainly grown since we last met in person. It’s me, Bellathonis, although I wouldn’t blame you for not recognising me at present.’

‘Bellathonis… I remember that name, but you are not him,’ the shadow-king ruminated slowly. ‘I had an arrangement with Bellathonis once. Slaves for services rendered. One hand fed the other and it was satisfying for a time. Such petty trade has no place now.’

‘It was Bellathonis that freed you from Zykleiades’s trap in the labyrinth of the Black Descent and I’ll wager you’ve never told anyone about that,’ the haemonculus insisted. ‘I know because I’m Bellathonis in another form, I’ve changed just like you’ve changed.’

The giant raised its arms again so that the glowing runes set into its flesh writhed with unholy power. ‘The past is gone. The shadows spread and consume all. Old agreements are empty words in the new kingdom that I rule.’

‘Oh? So you’ve defeated your brother already? Then I presume the mandrake pack that attacked us before your loyal subjects came along must simply have been disobedient or insane.’

Xhakoruakh’s arms dropped and his shifting, featureless head was downcast. ‘Treacherous Azoruakh still defies me from the throne he stole,’ the shadow-king grumbled. ‘Just as my kingdom has grown, so has his.’

‘Well if our old agreement is null let us make a new one. I will help you to defeat your brother.’

The dusky giant immediately became wary and Bellathonis knew that the mandrake-king had accepted that the haemonculus was who he said he was. ‘What price would you exact for your services this time?’ Xhakoruakh said.

‘Only the tools and materials I require,’ the haemonculus said lightly, ‘basic protection and a place to work without any disturbance. Such a little cost to gain an individual with my talents and you’ll get so much in return. I’ll craft minions for you that will make your brother’s deluded followers flee in terror.’

The great ebon head of the shadow-king nodded slowly as it considered Bellathonis’s offer, but Xhakoruakh’s next words were troubled.

‘Strange for you to come to me now – I had not foreseen it in the shadow-skein nor was it shown by the carven ones. I know all, I see all and yet you are a mystery to me. How can this be?’

Bellathonis found the giant’s demeanour increasingly disturbing. The creature he had released from the patriarch noctis’s lair had been whip-thin and hungry, a quick-witted and infinitely dangerous entity. This being seemed to be almost literally drunk on power, bloated and engorged with it. Its mind seemed to be fevered or deranged in some way and Bellathonis found himself wondering what strange influences the Dysjunction might have had in the already half-unreal environment of Aelindrach.

‘The Dysjunction has made Commorragh too dangerous for me to stay in for the present,’ Bellathonis said, deciding to forego mentioning the assassin-machines that had been sent in pursuit of him, ‘so I naturally thought of you and the welcoming land of Aelindrach as a good place to wait out the aftermath.’

Xhakoruakh’s booming laughter rang horribly in the sepulchral silence of his palace. ‘The Dysjunction. Of course, such glorious terror, such rampant fear. No wonder I could not see you in it. I think no one before you has ever come to the shadow-realm seeking safety. Inversions, all is inversions.’

The shadow-king pointed at the mandrakes and spoke commandingly. ‘Release this one and take him to a place where he can do his work. Bring him whatever he needs. I care not from whence it comes – steal, scavenge, strip bare if you must. Bellathonis’s creations will join with my other weapons and then… oh Azoruakh, my murderous, treacherous, beloved sibling… Azoruakh, you will be utterly destroyed just as I have foreseen.’

Bellathonis tried to bow at the waist as best he could before he gave up and flexed his tightly bound arms helplessly. A razor-sharp blade whispered within a hair’s-breadth of his flesh and the cords fell away. The haemonculus indicated his distinctly sickly-looking wrack.

‘Thank you, my archon. I’ll need Xagor too, of course…’ Bellathonis began to say. But the arrival of the haemonculus had already been forgotten by the mandrake-king. Xhakoruakh turned away to gaze up at the forest of floating, rune-etched banners with sightless eyes.

A dreadful premonition sprang into Bellathonis’s ever-active mind. Power of the kind suffusing Xhakoruakh, Bellathonis knew, had to come from somewhere. It might be channelled, stored, amplified or redirected but it had an origin. Perhaps the expansion of the shadow-realm had fed its kings directly as Xhakoruakh claimed, or perhaps not. As he and Xagor left the shadow-king’s chamber Bellathonis could not stop wondering about the other ‘weapons’ that Xhakoruakh had alluded to, and what manner of beings were crafting them.

CHAPTER 7

THE TEARS OF SORROW FELL

We sweep together through Sorrow Fell, we are a tidal wave of terror, a firestorm of fear. Long lines of Raiders and Ravagers loaded with Black Heart kabalites stretch all the way back up to Corespur. We slide down from Vect’s unassailable fortress-mountain like a mass of iron filings following lines of magnetic force, the vast fleet of grav-craft weaving around jutting spires and barbed steeples as they seek out the living and the damned. This close to Corespur resistance to the Black Heart’s advance has been virtually non-existent. Most of the survivors that catch sight of the approaching armada either flee or give themselves over to singing loud and obvious praises to the coming of the supreme overlord. Where fighting does flare up the weaving lines of force converge momentarily to annihilate it in a flickering blaze of dire energies. Valossian Sythrac is chafing at the easy progress being made so far. He finds it insufferably dull.

I am well protected as I ride to war. We are aboard a floating ziggurat in the midst of the Black Heart kabalite armada. Thick walls of metal and invisible boundaries of force enfold us protectively, energy cannon and warriors guard the parapets of our moving fortress. The air thrums with a soft, insistent babble of voices reporting, ordering, observing, speculating. Our view of the city comes to us through remote feeds and photon-woven windows that are poor cousins to the scrying crystals of Corespur, but they suffice under the circumstances. From Vect’s throne I see all as we drift between the fuming spires. I see the tiny, far-off figures of once-proud archons standing covered in blood and ashes shaking their gory weapons aloft in salutation to Asdrubael Vect. I see Black Heart warriors crucifying prisoners as a warning to others of the price of resistance. I see scourges and hellions racing along the cliff-like flanks of spires looking for loot and plunder.

Valossian Sythrac paces like a caged animal. He is longing for something worthy of his attention. I secretly hope that his frustration will build to the point where he will leave, but Sythrac is too loyal and conscientious to give in to the desire just yet. If serious trouble begins he will be best placed to learn about it here in the central hub and he knows it. Still he chafes, stomping up and down in his baroque armour with its captive menagerie of souls. It’s said that his armour is inhabited by ten thousand ghosts, their strength enslaved by spirit-engines to serve their hunter. I would like to ask Sythrac to explain the process to me in more detail, yet I feel constrained not to by the presence of an outsider in our midst.

This outsider calls himself Motley and I do not like him at all. His gaze is too direct and too clever. He was brought to the ziggurat after we left Corespur and seemed surprised to see me at first. Now I catch him glancing at me with ineffable sadness as if he has realised what I truly am. The outsider constantly makes jokes and offers suggestions in a friendly way, but I think he has really come to watch and listen. Much like Sythrac, this Motley character would rather be somewhere else (and I wish he would go), but he feels that he must stay – for now at least – and continue to spy.

At least my friend is here with me. His silent presence beside the throne is oddly reassuring as he takes in all the sights with me. I have never witnessed so much change in the city before. For me it has always been a timeless place completely unaltered by the lives of the beings passing through it. Now I see that so much can change so quickly… and I find I am excited by the idea.

I turn to my friend, the Medusae. The jelly-like clusters of the exposed brains carried atop the host are engorged and trembling as the Medusae’s expanded consciousness flits to and fro gathering raw emotions and impressions from all the minds it can reach. Grape-like fruits are swelling up on the host’s neck and along its spine as the Medusae secretes the choicest collected memories of its experiences into the host’s adapted nervous system. I reach down and tenderly pluck one of the smaller fruit from the host’s back. I tell myself that it is a slight indulgence in order to perfectly maintain my disguise as the supreme overlord. The self-told lie is almost as exciting as the act itself.

The smooth-skinned bulb bursts in my mouth as I bite into it. The taste is bittersweet and releases a heady rush of sensations directly into my consciousness:

In my mind’s eye the jagged maws of shattered windows now flash past only centimetres away as I whip my skyboard into a tight turn. A hundred metres away I can see a body half hanging out of a window with its dead hands still clutching an ornate-looking heat lance that fires my mind with avarice. I dive as I hear the snap of the scourges’ wings closing in behind me and my heart sings with the thrill of the chase…

…The memory fades and now instead I experience the agonised wailing of a runaway slave as it is hoisted up by Vect’s soldiers to die twisting on barbs of merciless iron…

…The shrieking gives way to the triumphant howling of gore-slicked, exhausted warriors as they salute the endless black stream of dagger-like craft passing overhead…

The visions fade and I find myself back inside the ziggurat seated in Vect’s dark throne, smiling wistfully at the memory. I, too, would like to leave this place and wander the city, to see with my own eyes the things I have experienced vicariously, yet I know it cannot be. I must stay here playing my role like a puppet on a stage. The others can leave but I may not, until my puppet master whisks me to a new location to try and draw out the assassin’s blade. Sythrac abruptly stops pacing and lifts his head like a hound catching a scent – the background babble of voices has altered slightly. We give our attention to the displays and see our first real challenge set before us.

The grand processional called the Alzos’Querion Vha had become a carpet of bones. Above the charnel house the skies rained with livid, actinic fires and around it kilometres-high spires of glittering onyx, silver and crystal belched clouds of filthy black smoke like the chimneys of some infernal industrial complex. The processional had become the main battleground in a multi-cornered war between kabals in the adjacent spires. The most likely victors were set to be the Kabal of the Flayed Mask and the Kabal of the Twisted Sword. These two kabals held twin spires that stood like bastions at the far end of the Alzos’Querion Vha. In more peaceful times they had enjoyed exercising the privileges of their position with great frequency. They extracted tithes and enacted ambushes on all the traffic passing between their monumental flanks on its way up from the docking ring to the higher slopes of Sorrow Fell.

With the advent of the Dysjunction the most immediate neighbours of the Twisted Sword and the Flayed Mask had seized the opportunity to rid themselves of the avaricious pair forever. The fighting that ensued had turned into a bloodbath. Armies of slaves armed with improvised weapons had been hurled across the processional to be slaughtered in their tens of thousands. Above them armadas of aerial craft locked in combat so fierce that their progress could be marked by the constant rain of burning wreckage and plummeting bodies.

The turf war between the kabals had quickly spiralled into a self-sustaining conflagration that dragged more of the surrounding spires into the flames. Allies were summoned from elsewhere in the ruined city and mercenaries sprang up as if by magic to offer their services to all sides. Matters were further enlivened by the random arrival of daemons attracted by the scent of slaughter. Within hours the proud architecture and towering statuary of the Alzos’Querion Vha had been torn into rubble and the spires had taken on the appearance of shot-scarred fortresses battled over for months at a time.

Such was the scene when Valossian Sythrac’s heralds first arrived. The ebon-winged scourges from Corespur spiralled down slowly into the conflict bearing the icon of the Black Heart on swallow-tailed gonfalons of fluttering purple silk. The winged warriors called with their screeching, altered voices for the combatants to put up their arms and declare their fealty to the supreme overlord. In the roar and crash of battle their calls had no more impact than the cry of gulls over a storm-wracked ocean. Almost inevitably when the first of the heralds dipped low enough to be seen they were fired upon. The surviving scourges turned tail to flee back to their masters and the forces that were even now approaching the head of the processional.

It was doubtful that any of the kabals involved in the fighting set out with the intention of defying Asdrubael Vect. Their conflict was purely with one another, but the scourge-heralds reported back with tales of treachery and wilful anarchy. In the confusion of the fighting no kabalite authority could be found in time to try and avert the approaching disaster.

Sythrac needed no more encouragement than the first reports of serious resistance. He immediately issued a string of orders to the Black Heart forces. Within moments a wave of Voidraven bombers escorted by a mass of Razorwing jetfighters swept overhead to begin softening up the area. Closer at hand the lazily twisting lines of Raiders coming from Corespur reformed into serried ranks as they prepared for battle. Soon a veritable wall of barbed grav-craft stood poised at the head of the processional like a frozen tsunami. Reavers, hellions and scourges raced ahead of the mass and fanned out to seek the boundaries of the constantly shifting battlefield. The warring factions were going to be sealed off and then annihilated.

‘Surely you can’t mean to wipe out absolutely everybody down there?’ the Harlequin objected incredulously. ‘Why don’t you simply support the winning side and speed their victory?’

Sythrac, who had been about to turn on his heel to leave and join his warriors, paused to glance at Vect for direction. The supreme overlord smiled cruelly and gestured for Sythrac to wait for a moment. ‘Explain your mission to the outsider, Valossian,’ Vect said equably. ‘I think he misunderstands the nature of it.’

‘Of course, supreme overlord,’ Sythrac replied before tersely addressing the Harlequin with tones of contempt. ‘Support the winners and you gain allies of dubious worth, ones already flushed with their own success. Later their gratitude will turn into demands and then plots to gain what they claim should have been theirs by right of conquest. Better to destroy them now while they’re hard-pressed.’

‘Then why not buoy up the losers and force the winners to negotiate?’ the Harlequin persisted in the face of Sythrac’s warning glower. ‘Surely even that is preferable to going headlong down the route of mass slaughter?’

‘The losers have proven themselves weak and now deserve only death,’ Sythrac snarled. ‘All those fighting below us have defied the supreme overlord and broken his laws. They will pay for that transgression with their lives so that their deaths serve as a warning to others. Obey or die. There is no other path, no negotiation, no compromise to be had. That time has already passed, and now we’ve come to the moment of retribution.’

Even as Sythrac spoke shatterfield missiles were raining down on Alzos’Querion Vha. As each Voidraven bomber swooped down it birthed a quartet of the streaking projectiles. The shatterfields produced their own unique detonation signatures on impact – a double blast with the two explosions microseconds apart. The first detonation plunged the ambient temperature around the target to absolute zero so that it flash-froze everything in the area. The second detonation then propagated a vicious shockwave to shatter anything affected by the first. Seen through the displays the explosions flashed black then white as shattered, crystalline debris was thrown up into the air by the secondary blasts. The chain of detonations ravened up the processional and across the spires on both sides.

Sythrac watched avidly as the bombers did their work. In the aftermath the Razorwing escorts swooped down to annihilate any surviving grav-craft in a fury of missiles and darklight blasts. There was so little hunting to be done in the air that some of the Razorwings peeled off to begin strafing the processional itself. Return fire from the ground had dropped away to virtually nil, the warring kabalites too stunned to organise a coherent defence. Sythrac looked towards Vect with a pained expression.

‘I must go,’ Sythrac pleaded. Vect gave a small nod and the archon strode away.

Motley remained silent, too stunned by what he had seen to interject. He knew that the city had suffered terribly already; millions, perhaps even billions must be dead. Even so the level of violence Vect was willing to casually unleash against his own unruly subjects was coming as something of a shock. Motley was a great believer in negotiation and compromise (and, he had to admit, even a little targeted assassination when it was called for) as ways to ensure that everybody got what they wanted. In this case that would seem to be no one else dying.

Vect didn’t see it that way at all, nor did Sythrac. Even the tragic imitation of Vect currently sitting in his throne placed no sanctity on life for its own sake. Obedience was the only matter of importance to them, and even obedience was valueless without enough strength to be useful backing it up. Motley shook his head ruefully as he contemplated his own naivety. He was still seeing every surviving Commorrite as something precious, a soul to be saved that had, if anything, become even more valuable after living through the trauma of the Dysjunction. It seemed a cosmic injustice for them to live through a daemonic invasion and randomly warping reality only to be killed off by their own kind.

Motley had wondered at first how anyone aboard the ziggurat actually believed they were in the presence of Asdrubael Vect. To Motley, the aura of the creature was completely different; a thin and hollow presence compared to the towering black colossus projected by the tyrant himself. Then had come the realisation of how completely insensitive the Commorrites had made themselves in the psychic realm as a matter of survival. Centuries of excessive perfectionism had trained Commorrites to overcome the forfeit of something that, for Motley at least, was an essential part of his sensory landscape. Even so the Commorrites were blind in this regard and the real Asdrubael Vect had known how to turn that to his advantage.

The Vect-double was gazing at Motley intently as if it were aware of his thoughts. Vect’s curious ‘pet’, the Medusae collective, was ignoring him after initiating numerous unsuccessful psychic probes in an attempt to harvest some of his emotions. The thing was weak but exceptionally subtle in its approach – something that made Motley wonder how long Vect had been keeping it around for.

‘You shake your head and sigh, outsider,’ the doppelgänger said, its pitch and tenor absolutely perfect matches for the original. ‘Your overt demonstrations of disapproval offend me.’

‘Forgive me, eminent dominator,’ Motley said with little real enthusiasm for the play-acting, ‘my disapproval was directed inwards at myself for my foolishness. I thank you for taking some of Sythrac’s valuable time to instruct me to my betterment.’

‘Lies flow from your lips like water,’ the false-Vect observed coldly. ‘You should know that Valossian will hate you now for keeping him from his troops at a critical moment. You should try not to be left alone with him, or indeed be around him at all, when he returns.’

Motley smiled at the little performance. It was a trifle petty for the true tyrant, he thought, but the doppelgänger was probably a better judge of whether or not that was the case than he was. Motley’s welcome was certainly wearing thin, he thought; it could be time to move on soon. However, it was hard to tear himself away from the hypnotically shifting displays and their constant outpouring of information. He needed to understand more about what was going on in the city to watch for signs of corruption. Here he was at the heart of things, at least for now.

On the displays the barbed wall of grav-craft that had been hanging motionless at one end of the Alzos’Querion Vha was beginning to move. It rolled down the processional at what appeared to be a surprisingly leisurely pace. Raiders descended to disembark squads of blood-mad warriors onto the bridges between the spires and in a strict grid arrangement along the rubble-strewn processional itself. The last few enemy gunners on the ground that were feeling foolish enough to take their chances against the slow-moving mass were instantly countered by pinpoint salvoes of cannon fire from squadrons of Ravagers drifting overhead. The overall advance was smooth and machine-like in its precision.

The real trouble began at the far end of the processional, where two intact spires stood like bastions to either side of the open path to the lower tiers. One of the spires took the form of a double helix of lustrous jade. The other rose in bladed tiers of polished silver. As the Black Heart advanced on the latter, concealed weapon ports swung open and bulbous-looking cannon appeared. Motley’s heart clenched at the sight of the weapons; he knew their kind and could only watch with horrified fascination at what happened next.

The weapons belched forth not fire or lightning but gossamer sprays of dark strands so fine that they were almost imperceptible on the ziggurat’s displays except as a blurring in the air. Where the dark clouds drifted into the vanguard of the Black Heart’s force the Raiders and Ravagers seemed to simply unravel at their touch. Slivers of metal and flesh rained down from the stricken craft as the dark strands glided effortlessly through them.

The Black Hearts saw the danger and frantically twisted their craft around to escape the all-destroying strands. In the ensuing confusion craft collided or were caught in more clouds as the bulbous cannon filled the air with their lethal payload. In a few moments the rest of the Black Heart grav-craft had pulled clear of the danger zone. The warriors that were left behind on the ground were doomed. They tried to run, until the dark clouds drifted down to cover them like a shroud.

The defenders were using monofilament webs, nets of wires so fine that they slipped between molecules, severing sub-atomic bonds as they went. Motley used hand-held weapons of similar ilk and witnessed first-hand their truly awful effectiveness at flensing through armour, flesh and bone with the lightest touch. The very idea of using monofilament weaponry indiscriminately on such a scale as he’d just seen made him feel a little queasy.

‘Perhaps I should go, your incomparable mightiness,’ Motley said. ‘Many thanks for your hospitality, if you could just let me off somewhere…’

‘No,’ the false-Vect said flatly. ‘You will remain here until you’ve seen Valossian’s riposte.’

False-Vect or not, Motley could not simply disobey the creature, for fear of how the Black Heart kabalites might choose to defend their supreme overlord’s authority. The Harlequin settled himself to watch the displays again with an expression of rapt attention. Behind the fixed half-smile he wore Motley’s mind was racing. He wouldn’t find what he was looking for here on the frontlines of Vect’s reconquest of Commorragh. He had to go deeper, go to places where he could see and touch things with mind and hand.

The Black Heart craft had rallied out of range of the monofilament cannon. No more than one in ten of them had been lost in the initial encounter yet the remainder now circled like frustrated hornets, apparently unwilling to try their luck again. Minutes passed before Motley understood the reason for the delay as the Voidravens reappeared. The cannon belched forth their deadly webs to create once more an impenetrable wall of death at the end of the processional. The blade-winged bombers swept down into the maelstrom without hesitation even though they looked to be rushing headlong to their doom.

Bright fires kindled beneath the attacking aircraft’s wings as they executed a simultaneous missile launch. The missiles leapt ahead in a fan-shaped arc before plunging into the clouds of drifting monofilament and exploding. The Voidravens were using shatterfield missiles again and the clouds were effectively torn asunder by the double pulse of the detonations. The Voidravens flashed through the gap they had made to deliver their real attack against the spires themselves. Twin ruby-red beams sprang from each craft and gouged deep wounds into the flanks of the spires like fiery claws. The Voidravens pulled up and climbed vertically away at the last possible moment. As they did so each craft released the last part of their payload – a single device that was deadlier than their void lances and shatterfield missiles combined; void mines.

The void mines detonated in two stages much like the shatterfield missiles. However, in this case the first warhead was in itself harmless. It created a momentary ripple in the fabric of reality, an impenetrable sphere of force to contain the detonation of the second warhead – a single particle of pure darklight energy. The void mine’s destructive potential was so vast and unpredictable that it had to be limited to give the Voidravens a chance to escape the danger zone. Black, crackling spheres began to spring into being at the base of each spire. Some of the Voidravens demonstrated their pinpoint accuracy by dropping their mines directly into the open wounds they had torn in the spires with their void lances. In a few heartbeats the speeding aircraft had vanished into the thin upper air of High Commorragh leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.

Both spires were now deeply pockmarked around their bases as though a giant had been scooping out their innards with a spoon. Motley watched in horrid fascination as the double helix of lustrous jade lurched drunkenly to one side and began to slump against the tiered silver blades of its neighbour. Size and distance made the process appear slow but Motley knew that for those caught in the collapse it would be terrifying and inescapable. Dust and flames billowed up to draw a merciful veil across the scene. Further along the processional the Black Heart kabalites began to move forwards to root out any survivors.

‘All this death!’ Motley blurted, unable to contain himself any longer. ‘Don’t you see you’re putting the city at further risk? Commorragh is one of the greatest surviving bastions for our dying race and yet you level it as if such actions hold no consequences.’

‘Consequences?’ The false-Vect was smiling at his success in baiting the Harlequin into another outburst. ‘What you are seeing are the consequences of the poor decisions made by others. Do not blame the chirurgeon when he has to cut deep in order to save the subject, blame instead the infection that requires such drastic measures to cure. Rebellion, sedition, civil war – it is these things that threaten Commorragh with complete obliteration and I will see them excised!’

The Harlequin listened to the tirade with astonishment. Knowingly or not the false-Vect had struck at the very heart of the matter. The fighting was a symptom of a deeper disease. It was ever the way with the Chaos powers that their agents would spread disorder wittingly or unwittingly as they went about their work. As the host society broke down it became ever more vulnerable to their blandishments until the slow dissolution became an unstoppable avalanche.

Motley had heard similar tirades from members of another race – the human race, the latest and most contemptible of the mon-keigh to lay claim to the galaxy. Brutish and contemptible they might be, but the humans had yet to fall completely to Chaos as the eldar had done. The humans had wobbled on the edge of the abyss repeatedly but each time they had avoided their own destruction by doing precisely what Vect was doing now – excising the infection before it killed the host. It was frightening to think that there was something to be learned from a race that was so backward in so many other ways.

‘By your leave, gargantuan terror, I must go,’ Motley pleaded again with all the humbleness he could muster. ‘While I benefit greatly from the truths that spill so readily from your wise lips I feel I can serve better by going out into the city…’

‘You mean you want to go and spy elsewhere. Fine. Guards, throw this fool out.’

Two onyx-armoured warriors had evidently been waiting for just such a command. They grabbed Motley by the elbows and hustled him out of the control room. Once outside they thrust him off the bottom step of the ziggurat in what they doubtless felt was an inspired piece of literal-mindedness. If they were hoping that the Harlequin would scream as he plummeted to his doom they were sorely disappointed. Motley smiled, waved at them and fragmented into a kaleidoscopic cloud of colours that drifted away from the processional and its ongoing bloodshed. The scintillating diffraction created by Motley’s holofield quickly disappeared down towards the darkened tiers of Low Commorragh.

CHAPTER 8

CAGED FLAMES

Archon Nyos Yllithian was strolling casually through his pleasure gardens atop the White Flames fortress as if he had not a care in the world. Beyond the dazzling alabaster parapets the eternal city might shudder and gasp in its agonies, but here Yllithian was untouched by it all. Dressed in loose, comfortable robes and soft shoes he passed between rows of ever-changing fractal sculptures along pathways of crushed sapphires. He paused to breathe deeply of the heady scents of dream poppy and lotus blossoms nodding lazily in the chill air.

Time was pressing but Yllithian refused to be rushed, even if it was hard for him to maintain the illusion of introspective calm. Beneath the flowing robes he wore concealed body armour and a shadow field projector. Close on his heels there marched all of his surviving incubus bodyguards, their double-handed klaives in hand and their blank-faced helms scanning warily for threats. Behind the incubi were a hand-picked cadre of trueborn White Flames kabalites that Yllithian considered sufficiently trustworthy to protect rather than threaten him in a crisis. A discreet distance away and concealed behind a large pergola were two Venom sky-chariots lurking ready to bring additional reinforcements and serve as a means of escape if it became necessary.

Yllithian might once have found taking such precautions in the heart of his own stronghold a trifle excessive, but not any longer. The time had come to declare himself openly against Vect and that brought with it immeasurable perils. As archon of the White Flames, Yllithian had always been extraordinarily cautious about rooting out spies and traitors within his kabal. Deep in his heart Yllithian had known that inevitably this day would come and yet there could be no certainty that Vect had no agents left within the White Flames fortress. They would watch and wait and work to do the most damage they could whether it was with a backstabbing blade, a disobeyed order or simply a piece of bad advice. From this point forth he could literally trust no one. As he walked further through his sumptuous gardens Yllithian smiled to himself at his conclusion. He had spent his entire life trusting no one and nothing as a general rule of self-preservation; having a specific, definable cause for doing so would be… refreshing.

Turning a corner of the glittering path Yllithian emerged into a small paved courtyard centred on an intricate, multi-tiered fountain of silver and gold. The fountain had originated in the workshops of Alaitoc craftworld before its installation into an eclipse-class cruiser. That vessel was subsequently looted by the illustrious Zovas Yllithian. Of course that was in the days before Asdrubael Vect would lay claim to any such booty by his right as supreme overlord. Yllithian hoped the underlying message was not lost on the individuals waiting around the fountain for his arrival.

There were three petty archons from Low Commorragh: Naxipael of the Venom Brood, Khovoros of the Red Blades and Verixia of the Splintered Word. More importantly there were two archons of the mid-tiers: Malchierith from Hy’Kran and Xhubael from Yolosc. These were in attendance as representatives of more than three dozen other kabals in their districts, a complex assortment of long-standing alliances that were creaking badly under the conflicting pressures of the Dysjunction.

A motley assortment of gang leaders stood towards the back of the small courtyard under the splinter rifles of wary White Flames guards: wyches, hellions, reavers, scourges, even an ink-skinned, slinking mandrake. These flotsam and jetsam had washed up at the White Flames fortress seeking sanctuary, each with their own handfuls of followers. Past associations or outright bribes had secured them a place at the foot of the walls under cover of the guns but as yet only these leaders had been permitted inside to plead their case.

As Yllithian strolled into view a babble of demands, questions and entreaties rose from the throng. The archon of the White Flames smiled as he sensed his power over them.

‘The city lies in ruins and Vect does nothing!’

‘My people need sustenance!’

‘The lower city has been drowned!’

‘Aelindrach is coming for us!’

Yllithian’s incubi bodyguards stepped forwards to keep the supplicants at bay with their klaives raised warningly. Yllithian himself waited and allowed the archons to feed off their own desperation for a few moments. He listened as their voices became more and more shrill until he finally raised a hand for silence.

‘Calm yourselves,’ Yllithian told them firmly, ‘I understand your great woes and I know of the tumult in the city as well as any of you. Why come to me and not go to Vect? As supreme overlord he holds all the power, while I am a mere archon like the rest of you.’

Yllithian told the lie with a straight face but he was mocking them and they knew it. The noble line of Yllithian, along with Xelian and Kraillach, had ruled the city for centuries before Asdrubael Vect had brought about their downfall. Even so the house of Yllithian had survived through the intervening millennia to stand before them in the personage of Nyos Yllithian. As the ‘mere’ archon of the White Flames kabal Yllithian possessed the kind of resources and influence that the archons present could only dream of.

‘Vect has only secured Corespur and some parts of Sorrow Fell, all our messengers sent hence do not return,’ Archon Xhubael said with evident disgust, ‘and we have been alone and dying since the first shockwave.’ Xhubael was large and heavy-set for a Commorrite, her fingers glittering with rings. Yllithian found it hard to believe that she had ever suffered much in the way of privation.

‘And so you came to me as a cure for loneliness?’ Yllithian smiled. ‘I’ll be intrigued to hear you tell me what I can do about that.’

‘We know that Vect has tried to destroy you more than once,’ Archon Malchierith added slyly. ‘He sees you as a threat.’

‘Indeed,’ Yllithian nodded sagely. ‘He’ll willingly squander all of the forces he’s got hoarded away on Corespur in the hopes of ending me and any who associate with me.’

Yllithian watched their reactions to his gloomy prophecy carefully. A few of those present had not fully thought through the ramifications of coming to the White Flames kabal for help. Only now did some of them realise that what they were doing could easily be seen as treason in the eyes of the supreme overlord. Xhubael and Malchierith were no such fools; they had already given up on Vect just as, from their perspective, he had given up on them.

‘Let us be clear, then,’ Yllithian said. ‘Tell me what you want of me.’

‘Allow us to carry your icon into Low Commorragh so we can show that we have the backing of High Commorragh,’ Malchierith pleaded. ‘The mere sight of the White Flames will pull the other archons into line.’

‘And what happens when Vect comes against you and claims that you’ve usurped his authority in bringing your tiers under control?’ Yllithian asked evenly. He wanted them to openly admit their opposition to Vect. When the histories looked back on this meeting it would be important for future generations to know that the noble, patriotic Nyos Yllithian was moved to help by his fellow citizens beseeching him in their hour of need.

Malchierith and Xhubael exchanged glances warily, but they were merely hesitating at the final pinch of the noose. They knew that Vect would kill them in the most horrible ways imaginable if they were caught using Yllithian’s patronage to reclaim their districts of Commorragh. Yllithian concluded that the situation must be truly desperate in Hy’Kran and Yolosc – and getting worse by the hour.

‘We must act quickly,’ Malchierith admitted with a sigh. ‘If we hesitate now all that we’ve worked for will be lost. If Vect comes against us later for simply doing something to secure ourselves when he would do nothing, then we will fight him. What other choice will we have?’

‘Malchierith has the right of it,’ Xhubael grumbled. ‘We can’t just stand by and wait on Vect’s pleasure while everything collapses into anarchy. Damn him, I say, if he won’t help us we’ll have to help ourselves. He could be dead by now for all that we know.’

Yllithian found it highly unlikely that Vect had met with his well-deserved demise but he chose not to disagree with the sentiment. The petty archons and gang leaders were all nodding grimly. They apparently understood that any dissension from them right now would bring swift and certain death at the hands of the White Flames. They were trapped and committed by simply being present when such matters were being openly discussed by more powerful archons. Later they might try to slip away and go squealing to Vect, yet there would always be the dangling question, ‘Why didn’t you do something to stop them?’ Nonetheless Yllithian made a mental note to move their forces inside the fortress as soon as possible. It would be easier to keep them monitored and contained.

‘You shall have my support–’ Yllithian began, but his next words were interrupted by a shriek.

‘Traitor!’ the word came from a shock-haired hellion, one of the gang leaders at the back of the courtyard. The lithe youth darted towards Yllithian but two guards were already springing forwards to intercept him. The hellion switched direction and delivered a spinning kick to the closer guard and opened up a vein with his blade-like spurs. The courtyard exploded into pandemonium as the guard flopped to the ground jetting blood. More guards sprang forwards with rifles raised. Yllithian’s incubi closed in around him protectively. The rest of the gang leaders, Malchierith, Xhubael and the other archons backed away from the insane dissenter as one body, momentarily hemming in Yllithian and his bodyguards while they were distracted by the lone hellion.

That was the moment when the real assailant struck.

Yllithian was not by nature given to testing his luck. Cold logic was his weapon of choice, a carefully thought-through plan his preferred methodology. Leaving matters to chance was something he always tried to avoid, even when it seemed like fate increasingly pushed him towards ever chancier endeavours. He felt like a gambler that had staked everything already but had to keep doing so again and again just to stay in the game. He had known there was a chance another attempt would be made on his life when he met the archons. He had carefully stacked the odds in his favour, but always with the lurking understanding that there would come a moment when his life would hang in the balance and raw chance could intervene.

This was that moment. In a rare uncoordinated moment the incubi left a blind spot in their coverage of Yllithian. A blade instantly appeared in the gap between the incubi’s armoured shoulders and arrowed towards Yllithian’s chest in an unstoppable thrust. By sheer bad luck Yllithian saw the attack when it was only inches away and tried desperately to twist aside much too late.

The failures continued to compound themselves as Yllithian’s shadow field flared microseconds too late to rob all the power from the thrust, the blade surging onwards through a billowing cloud of entropic energy that was slowing it, but not stopping it, as it darted for Yllithian’s heart. The needle-sharp point punched through Yllithian’s concealed armour with surprising ease, tearing through the diamond-hard matrix as if it were no more than thick cloth. As the questing point dug deep into Yllithian’s flesh he began to scream, in the full expectation that he was using up his last breath. Then it happened…

…Somewhere in the roiling uncertainty of the void an ancient and unthinkably alien entity stirred minutely. Strands of Fate were split and re-woven by a movement that was no more conscious than the quiver of an eyelash. The entity settled again, satisfied…

…In Yllithian’s garden there was a blinding yellow flash. The stabbing blade shivered and sprang away as if it had struck a stone. Yllithian staggered back, trying to blink away the bright spots that were dancing before his eyes.

He was dimly aware of the incubi closing in around him again with their klaives slashing at his unknown assailant. His vision partially cleared and he saw Archon Verixia lying in a pool of her own blood at his feet. The incubi had severed her arm just below the shoulder. The blade that she stabbed him with was still gripped by the severed arm, the weapon itself twisted and fused as if it had been heated to unthinkable temperatures.

Yllithian looked down at Verixia, trying to understand why she had thrown away her life to so very nearly take his. Was it loyalty to Vect? Fear of retribution? Even with the cauterising effect of the powered edge of the incubi’s klaives she was only seconds away from bleeding out completely. She gazed up at him with undimmed defiance as she spat her dying words.

‘Vect will destroy you and everyone with you! You’re as dead as me – you just don’t know it yet!’

Yllithian had to fight to master himself and keep his adrenaline-soaked body from shaking uncontrollably in the aftermath of his close brush with death. He wanted to stamp on Verixia’s dead face, to shout at her, to scream at his guards for failing him, to kill everyone close enough to have seen his momentary terror as the blade gouged his flesh.

Instead he compressed his lips into a thin frown and breathed deeply for a few seconds. The archons and gang leaders stood as if paralysed as they were surrounded by angry White Flames kabalites. A few metres away lay the body of the hellion. He was half collapsed into the fountain, his corpse puckered with innumerable red craters where splinter rifles had torn apart his flesh, already blackened and bloating from the scores of different toxins racing through it.

Yllithian looked at the frozen, terrified faces before him. They expected to be massacred. That’s how Vect would have handled them in the same circumstances. Even a chance that any of the rest of them knew anything about the attempted assassination would have been enough to see them all tortured and killed. In accordance with his deadly, ophidian logic, Vect would consider none of the archons valuable enough to risk leaving alive after an incident like this. Yllithian closed his eyes and breathed in deeply again. He was not Vect. Not yet anyway. He opened his eyes and smiled graciously.

‘As I was saying…’ Yllithian said with glacial calm, ‘…before I was so rudely interrupted. I will support you in your efforts to retake your tiers of the city. I will lend my authority to any archon that needs it in order to bring our beleaguered home back under our control. Vect has proven himself unworthy to be our leader in the current crisis and it’s high time we took the matter into our own hands. Just as you have said – we must band together in order to help ourselves.’

The fools lapped it up, nodding as if in happy agreement with everything that Yllithian had to say. Behind the credulous smiles no doubt the wheels were turning as the archons weighed up how far to go with the White Flames and what they could get out of it. It didn’t matter, because they were his archons now, not Vect’s, and every moment they spent in service to him made it harder for them to back out of it. He would bind them closer, and they would drag in other archons in the hope of mitigating their own risk. It was hard to be a lone revolutionary, but in a crowd everyone could afford to be brave.

Yllithian was distracted for a moment by several reports whispered to him by invisible voices. Two of the reports were expected and one was most definitely not. The archon of the White Flames gave several terse instructions before turning back to his captive audience. He began issuing them orders with no further pretences.

‘So to business then. Naxipael and Khovoros – go and deal with Verixia’s Splintered Word kabalites, kill off the diehards and incorporate the rest into your own ranks. Malchierith and Xhubael – you need to leave for your own tiers now or it’s going to get considerably more difficult. You’ll be shown a way out through the foundation strata – flying is liable to become very bad for your health at any moment.’

An overlapping series of sonic booms thundered overhead as if to underline Yllithian’s words. Glancing up Yllithian saw the thin tail-fire streaks of Razorwings circling high above. They had returned in considerable strength and according to Yllithian’s whispered reports an immense force of Black Heart kabalites was not far behind them. For now the jetfighters bided their time outside the effective range of the defences of the White Flames Fortress and waited as patiently as vultures circling over a piece of carrion.

As the archons and gang leaders were being led away under heavy guard Yllithian had his unexpected guest brought up to the courtyard to speak with him in person. Through various artifices Yllithian ensured that his new allies were delayed for just long enough to see the arrival of the milk-skinned master haemonculus, Bellathonis. Let them wonder what plans he was hatching, let them speculate on how the singular skills of the haemonculi might factor into Yllithian’s schemes. They did not need to know that Bellathonis had just been caught skulking around in the lower levels of the fortress or that the haemonculus had only saved his own life by claiming he had urgent matters to discuss with Yllithian.

Kharbyr tried not to swallow anxiously as the Venom sky-chariot he was aboard banked hard over the gardens atop the White Flames fortress. He clutched the cylinder containing Angevere in one hand while hanging on grimly to a curving rail with the other as the grav-craft swung down to deposit him in a little courtyard with a fountain in it. As Kharbyr arrived two bodies were in the process of being dragged out and a knot of anxious-looking people were being ushered away by Yllithian’s guards.

He recognised Archon Naxipael in the group and thought for a panicked instant that the whole act would be blown by Naxipael recognising him right back. Then he remembered that he was wearing Bellathonis’s face and relaxed. There was no way that Naxipael could know that this ‘Bellathonis’ was actually the same skinny sell-sword that had run out on him back in Hy’Kran.

Yllithian stood over to one side of the courtyard surrounded by incubi and watching Kharbyr’s arrival expectantly. Kharbyr realised it was an entirely new experience for him to be looked at by the archon of the White Flames with anything but contempt. The few times they’d met Yllithian had always seen Kharbyr as worthless gutter-scum, a barely competent agent used at times by Bellathonis and hence utterly beneath his attention. The haemonculus himself however, Kharbyr now realised, was someone that Yllithian viewed with a touch of wary respect – not quite an equal, but almost certainly a force to be reckoned with.

Angevere’s voice whispered in his mind, nagging at him again. +Don’t start getting overconfident, it’s actually much easier to lie to someone that looks down on you than someone who’s paying attention, so don’t deviate from what I told you to say.+

Kharbyr had to suppress a shudder in response. He still couldn’t bring himself to feel comfortable with hearing the spectral voice speaking between his ears. It felt too much like he was being whispered to by the spirits of the dead.

‘Greetings, my archon,’ Kharbyr said as he drew closer. He tried to speak with what Angevere described as the jovial tone of contempt Bellathonis generally used. Yllithian’s eyes immediately narrowed suspiciously.

‘Bellathonis, I had not thought to see you again,’ Yllithian observed drily, ‘you look like you’ve been through a war. I see that you’ve brought back the crone as well. I suppose she might still prove useful.’

‘There was an attempt made on my life,’ Kharbyr began, recounting the well-rehearsed words with complacent ease. ‘It happened down in my private workspace – the place where I undertook that special project on your behalf.’

Yllithian’s expression froze at Kharbyr’s allusion to the resurrection of El’Uriaq. ‘Attacked by whom?’ the archon demanded.

‘My old coven, the Black Descent. They sent a Talos to track me down. They obviously believe I did something bad… No, unforgivable.’

Yllithian’s expression was unreadable. He seemed to calculate for a moment and then said, ‘This means nothing to me. They are your foes and not mine. As you can see,’ Yllithian gestured in the direction the bodies had been taken, ‘I have plentiful supplies of my own enemies right now. I’ve no wish to add to them by taking up some esoteric quarrel with an entire coven of haemonculi on your behalf.’

‘You’re ignoring the fact that they obviously know what we’ve done,’ Kharbyr insisted with what he considered some credible conviction. He was starting to enjoy his little piece of role-playing.

Yllithian shrugged disinterestedly. ‘I doubt that the Black Descent will share the knowledge with anyone else in case they get swept up in Vect’s pogrom. Wasn’t your old complaint about them always that they wouldn’t share knowledge even if the universe itself depended on it?’

The ghostly whisper in Kharbyr’s head was sharp and urgent. +Remember what I said. Don’t engage with him about what you might have talked about before. Yllithian’s suspicious of you and he’s trying to trip you up with the minutiae of past conversations.+

Kharbyr had never considered that Yllithian might be alert to imposters posing as individuals that he knew. Angevere’s weird insistence on Kharbyr rehearsing all of his lines suddenly stopped seeming so weird. He had to respond with something so he stuck with the script.

‘The Black Descent also have something that you want,’ Kharbyr said. ‘Someone that you’ve been looking for ever since she disappeared.’

Yllithian’s dark gaze bored into Kharbyr’s stolen face for a moment. The archon of the White Flames could not disguise his interest at the implication. Present him with a simple puzzle, Angevere had said, and Yllithian won’t be able to resist solving it. It seemed a roundabout route to go for getting vengeance on Bellathonis, but Angevere knew her way around a High Commorraghan courtly intrigue in ways that a thief and assassin like Kharbyr never could.

‘You’re inferring that the Black Descent have my dear old friend, Xelian,’ Yllithian said. ‘That’s an interesting theory. Sadly I can’t imagine that you have anything to back it up with.’

‘Xelian was one of your oldest and most powerful allies. With her back you could have the Blades of Desire on your side again and many of the biggest wych cults would follow. You can’t win against Vect without her.’

‘So you say,’ Yllithian grated dangerously. Kharbyr didn’t respond to the jab. Angevere had set things up so he could only make statements and not quibble over facts. Perhaps Yllithian could win against Vect on his own, but enough hints had dropped while they spied on him through the crystal that he was actively looking to recruit more allies. According to Angevere, Xelian was the biggest ally Yllithian had. Kharbyr plunged on with his script and tried to shake the feeling that he was digging himself into an ever-deeper hole.

‘If you just give me what I need I can lead your warriors into the heart of the Black Descent’s labyrinth,’ Kharbyr said. ‘You can retrieve Xelian and I can see my former coven-mates are repaid for inconveniencing me.’

Yllithian smirked at the suggestion. ‘You would drain away my forces on the very eve of battle,’ he said, ‘to go on a wild hunt led only by your word, and no doubt you see yourself commanding this… expedition.’ The archon of the White Flames shook his head and looked skywards before continuing. There was a dense weaving of fire-trails high above the fortress. Razorwings and Voidravens glittered in the wan light of the Ilmaea as they pirouetted impatiently awaiting the orders to attack.

‘Vect’s lackeys are already at my gates demanding entry. Very soon they will muster their strength to try and crush the White Flames fortress. We will test Vect’s hordes against my readiness to receive them. You have come too late, haemonculus.’

Kharbyr could feel his chances of success slipping away. The idea had been to get help from Yllithian for tracking down the real Bellathonis. Now it appeared that the archon of the White Flames didn’t care about being blackmailed by the Black Descent nor did he want to send any troops after Xelian. Kharbyr had run out of scripted inducements to offer. He decided to try something else.

‘Why not come yourself?’ Kharbyr said. ‘You could lead our expedition in person and be assured of its proper handling. Perhaps more importantly you could be absent from the fortress at the critical moment just in case your readiness proves to be less complete than that of Vect’s forces.’

+You fool! He’ll never agree to that!+ Angevere’s whisper was a hateful hiss, +Yllithian is too much of a coward to lead from the front.+

‘I could not leave my loyal followers at a time like this,’ Yllithian protested, yet Kharbyr found the claim unconvincing – the archon was considering the idea at least. Perhaps he really feared Vect’s hordes more than the labyrinth of the Black Descent.

‘You would be able to tell your warriors – in all honesty – that you were undertaking a dangerous mission to return your old ally, Xelian, to the fight,’ Kharbyr said. ‘If they are as loyal as you say they’ll welcome the news and cheer your progress. If you get stuck inside the fortress you’ll stop being able to influence the outcome of events outside it.’

Yllithian cocked his head to one side for a moment as if he were listening to an invisible presence. The archon seemed to come to a decision and his dark eyes blazed with sudden purpose. ‘We must move quickly,’ Yllithian declared, ‘Sythrac is approaching through Sorrow Fell and his outriders have already thrown a cordon around the fortress. If we go now it will be possible to slip through before the main force arrives. Any later will be too late.’

Kharbyr was a little stunned by the archon’s turnabout. He had only thought to introduce a little time pressure and now he was suddenly being swept up by it. The plan had been to ingratiate himself gradually and gain power by dangling tempting bait in front of Yllithian. A full-on rescue mission hunting for Xelian in the trap-filled depths of the Black Descent’s labyrinth had never been the point – but that was apparently precisely what Kharbyr was going to get.

+Child, what have you done?+ Angevere sighed bitterly inside his mind.

CHAPTER 9

GROTESQUERIES

The Decapitator was a patient hunter, indeed there were none more so. He had tracked individuals for decades across scores of different worlds, he had lain patiently in wait for weeks at a time awaiting the perfect moment to take his prize. He waited while the prey that thought it was not prey fought a mandrake pack to a standstill. He had witnessed another pack arrive and take their prize for themselves. Intrigued, he descended afterwards to examine the marks the packs had left behind.

Kheradruakh found the shaky bastardisations of the bloodline marks the two mandrake packs had left behind. He knew the signs of old, two brother-kings with a bitter, long-standing rivalry that was of no interest to the Decapitator. The outsiders, though, had left marks of their own declaring fealty to one of the brothers. This additional wrongness only served to irritate Kheradruakh further. Creatures from the outer realm were prey to be hunted, not rivals or brood-mates to be dallied with.

His instinct had drawn him onwards, as it always did, towards his most perfect prizes. He had trailed the mandrake pack and its shrinking coffle of slaves until they reached the stronghold of one of the brothers. Now he waited again and patiently listened to the whispers on the night breeze.

Xagor dragged another corpse across the uneven floor and dumped it into the flesh pit with a satisfied grunt. He lifted a long iron paddle and pushed the cadaver beneath the bubbling slurry. The stench was indescribable but to a wrack like Xagor it was simply the smell of industry in motion and of raw materials being prepared for work. In his own strange way he was the happiest he had been since coming to Aelindrach. The place the master had chosen for his newest temporary home was low and cave-like; the pits in the floor were irregular scoops where tailored microorganisms rendered down the corpse-flesh into a malleable tallow. With the proper stimuli, Xagor knew, this basic clay could then be reshaped into bone, muscle, tissue and even (if one were skilled enough in the arts of flesh-sculpting as his master was) the most complex of the internal organs.

To one side of the pits there was a mismatched array of crude, upright sarcophagi ranged along the wall of the cave. They were a far cry from the ornate, crystal-fronted regenerative chambers used by the Commorrite elite to restore themselves. These sarcophagi were formed from slabs of roughly shaped bone joined by glistening strips of gristle. They stood up to three metres tall, and a snaking mass of tubes and conduits connected the flesh pits to the occupants of each one. The occupants themselves were monstrous, hulking brutes almost as wide as they were tall. Their features were obscured by a clinging membrane across the front of the sarcophagi, but the shapes pressing on the membranous wall from the inside suggested a substantial amount of sinew, corded muscle and jagged bone featured in their physiognomy.

Bellathonis was there beside the sarcophagi, checking on each of them with the maternal concern of a broody hen. He was clad in robes of black hide, and had blanched his skin so that it more closely approached the haemonculi’s personal ideal of pure milk-white. It made Xagor particularly happy that his master seemed more and more like his old self. The loss of Kharbyr made Xagor a little bit sad but he consoled himself that the loss of the master would have made him much, much sadder.

The master looked troubled, however, as he constantly re-examined one sarcophagus with a lens-like apparatus he held up to one eye. At length he approached Xagor as the wrack was hauling another body across the floor towards the pits.

‘Kindly tell me, Xagor,’ the haemonculi asked with a fatherly smile, ‘how many of these ur-ghuls you’ve placed in the pits and where you put them.’

‘Seven, master,’ Xagor replied as he pointed out the pits he had used.

Bellathonis struck him in the face just as he finished pointing. The blow was precisely aimed to crunch Xagor’s iron mask against his nose with eye-watering effect. Something popped inside Xagor’s face and he felt hot blood start to cascade over his lips immediately. He fought with an urge to tear off his mask, or (in some deeply buried part of himself) to strike back. Instead he bowed his head miserably before his master’s inexplicable wrath.

‘Why must I be constantly surrounded by idiots?’ Bellathonis hissed as he raised his hand to strike again. ‘Diseased! All of them! We shall have to empty the infected pits and start them over. The grotesques linked to them are ruined – riddled with parasites and pathogens the like of which I’ve never seen! How could you not notice the materials were tainted?’

The haemonculus’s disappointment stung Xagor more than the blow had done. He had given little thought to examining the corpses, merely collected them from where they were dumped outside and dragged them to the pits. It was pure chance he had noticed how many of the whip-thin ur-ghuls had gone into the stew at all. Most of the bodies had been of slave races, with a few bloodied Commorrites, a handful of coal-black mandrakes and some weird, nameless things that Xagor had never seen before mixed in. Desperate to redeem himself Xagor blurted out the only other pertinent information he knew about ur-ghuls.

‘The ur-ghuls we saw in Commorragh were diseased too. This one thought nothing strange when their bodies arrived part-rotten, imagining that to be their natural state of being, like those of above.’

Bellathonis stopped, hand still raised to strike, and stared at Xagor intently. ‘What did you just say about the ur-ghuls in Commorragh? Repeat it to me exactly.’

‘T-The ur-ghuls we saw in Commorragh were diseased too?’ Xagor stammered uncertainly.

Bellathonis lowered his hand slowly. ‘That would seem to be more than a coincidence to me,’ the haemonculus murmured to himself as he turned back towards the flesh pits Xagor had indicated. The lens device was produced again and the bubbling slurry was subjected to Bellathonis’s scrutiny for a long time. Eventually the haemonculus drew a long, thin stylus from his sleeve and touched it to the surface of the foul-smelling mess with exaggerated caution. He withdrew it and examined the glistening drop clinging to the tip of the stylus through his lenses for several more minutes before dropping both it and the stylus back into the pit.

The haemonculus sucked in a long, rasping breath before speaking again. ‘Xagor, I believe we have some jars of denaturant on hand, run along and fetch them for me. Quickly now.’

Xagor hurried to haul out the jars Bellathonis had indicated from a niche at one side of the cave. The smooth stone the containers were made of was one of the few substances in the universe that could withstand sustained contact with their contents. Unfortunately it also made the jars exceeding heavy for a single wrack to move. Xagor was reduced to dragging them one by one over to where Bellathonis stood deep in thought. Although the jars were carefully sealed the air around them was tainted by a sharp, astringent scent that cut through Xagor’s bloodied nose and straight to his sinuses to make his eyes water again. By the time Xagor had dragged over the last jar he had also plucked up the courage to ask a question of the master.

‘Master… this one wishes to ask what is going on?’ Xagor ventured.

Bellathonis turned and lifted the last jar from Xagor’s hands with a surprising show of strength before answering. The haemonculus’s deft fingers busied themselves with breaking the seals as he responded. Xagor was disturbed to see that Bellathonis had now donned a face mask, a unique occurrence in the wrack’s experience of his master.

‘The sickness present in those corpses is not one of a… usual nature,’ Bellathonis said. ‘It is a creation every bit as specific as the glass plague and just as unnatural in origin.’

The haemonculus tipped the jar’s contents into the closest pit. The thick, amber fluid that poured out of it produced clouds of smoke as it mixed with the flesh-slurry. The noisome mass in the pit boiled and bubbled spectacularly for a few seconds before collapsing into a black, tar-like mass.

‘Unnatural?’ Xagor repeated uncomfortably. For a haemonculus to use such a word indicated that something was truly and spectacularly out of the ordinary.

‘It’s my belief that it is an instance of the sort of plague we most commonly associate with daemons and other entities from beyond the veil. It is an infection capable of corrupting not just the body of the host but also the soul as well.’

Xagor crouched fearfully watching the master moving back and forth destroying the contents of the tainted pits. The foul stench already present in the cave soon became positively toxic. A daemonic plague was something new to Xagor; he was far more used to the concept of a plague of daemons.

‘Must we flee from Aelindrach?’ Xagor asked finally. ‘Where will we go?’

Bellathonis shook his head. ‘We could not set one foot outside Xhakoruakh’s palace without his minions seizing us and dragging us back. That, plus where we would go, is a separate, insoluble and entirely valid question in its own right. If what I’m theorising is correct, nowhere will be safe…’

‘Because of the daemon-plague, master? Can it not be cured?’

‘The only real cure is the death of the host, but even then the corrupt soul – despite the supposed immortality souls are alleged to exhibit – will continue in a blighted existence enslaved to the plague’s maker. In short – no, there is no cure that I can imagine. Fire and lots of it would be my favoured prescription.’

‘Then what will we do?’ Xagor whined. The master’s evident disturbance was making the wrack increasingly fearful. Xagor’s entire world was built on the concept of Bellathonis’s nigh-omniscience in all matters pertaining to flesh. Seeing the master balking before such a well-known foe as disease made no sense to him. A virus, a bacterium, a plague, a pathogen or a parasite were all simply more factors to manipulate for a master haemonculus… weren’t they?

‘We will do the only thing that we can, Xagor,’ Bellathonis said. ‘We will present Xhakoruakh with our findings and see what he has to say.’

Bellathonis and Xagor made their way slowly through the shadowed paths of Xhakoruakh’s palace seeking the mandrake-king. It was easier said than done, for much like the realm of Aelindrach itself the palace was not fixed and permanent. Its internal dimensions shifted constantly; solid walls of blackness appeared to block old routes while rents and tears in previously impenetrable shadow opened new paths. The two of them had to find their way as best they could, blundering through the shadow-etched crypts and darkened passageways, feeling their way up stairs and down spiral ramps. They were still treated as outsiders and shunned by the lurking mandrakes that infested the seemingly infinite space in ever greater numbers. No shadow-skinned denizens barred their path but none offered guidance either.

At length they found their way into a space that gave the impression of a grandly vaulted gallery of such length that its far end passed beyond perception. Here they found Xhakoruakh at last holding court beneath cressets of burning green witch-fire that served only to deepen the shadows around him. A clutch of nightfiends were abasing themselves before the giant figure of the mandrake-king, more evidence of the forces he was gathering to go to war against Azoruakh.

‘Bellathonis, my master of monstrosities and fiends,’ the shadow-king boomed, ‘what brings you before Xhakoruakh? Is your work completed already?’

‘Alas no, my archon,’ Bellathonis replied. ‘The grotesques are still maturing at present, though, and they will soon be ready to join your followers. I’ve come before you because we’ve run into a problem that I felt you should be informed about immediately…’

Bellathonis paused awkwardly as he studied the nightfiends that had now moved to cluster around Xhakoruakh’s knees like a brood of soot-skinned waifs. Each of the nightfiends would be the leader of a mandrake pack, a fearsome hunter and stalker in their own right, yet they seemed oddly quiescent, almost animal-like, in the shadow-king’s presence. The forbidden runes etched into the fiends’ coal-black hides shared the same sickly emerald hue as those on Xhakoruakh himself.

‘Perhaps it would be best to discuss the issue in private?’ Bellathonis pleaded, ‘I would not wish to detain your eager followers from their duties with my dull domestic worries.’

‘There is no privacy in Aelindrach,’ Xhakoruakh rumbled. ‘Every whisper ever made can be found caught somewhere in the shadow-skein. Every secret can be ferreted out by the patient hunter – for where else would secrets come to hide but within the realm of shadow?’

‘Yes… quite,’ Bellathonis said. ‘Well, nonetheless, it’s one thing to have to ferret out a secret and quite another to lay it out in the open for all to see.’

Xhakoruakh shrugged and gestured. The nightfiends scattered into the deeper shadows of the gallery and vanished without a sound. The shadowy giant folded his long arms and waited expectantly.

‘Some of the raw materials supplied for my production of the grotesques were tainted,’ Bellathonis began, ‘specifically the bodies of ur-ghuls sent to the flesh pits bore highly contagious plagues. These have already spoiled several of my creations and I’m very close to thinking we should terminate the whole batch and start again.’

The mandrake-king shook his head slowly. ‘There is no time, we will move soon with or without your creatures. In the final reckoning they would improve the odds greatly – why do you fear some pox? The haemonculi are supposed to be the masters of flesh – does Bellathonis now say they can be defeated by a microbe?’

‘This is no ordinary infestation,’ Bellathonis replied defensively. ‘These ur-ghuls are infected with something from beyond the veil. They carry the taint of daemon-seed. My assistant reports that he saw other ur-ghuls in Commorragh that were also infected. I fear we are witnessing the start of an epidemic the like of which Commorragh has never seen.’

‘Do you know where ur-ghuls originate, Bellathonis?’ the shadow-king mused without apparent concern. ‘It’s said that they were first bred by the lords of Shaa-Dom to protect their labyrinthine ziggurats. Only later did they spill out of that accursed realm to form the verminous hordes that haunt Low Commorragh.’

‘I’m aware of the story, yes,’ Bellathonis said with some puzzlement.

‘Shaa-Dom became a daemons’ playground after the fist of Vect shattered their wardings. Strange winds blew there for millennia. Who can say what alterations might have been made to the creatures caught in its grip?’

‘But ur-ghuls bear no such taint in the normal scheme of things,’ Bellathonis chided gently. ‘Believe me, I’ve vivisected enough of them in my time to know the difference. This is something new.’

‘Is it? Perhaps they return to their base state when mated to Aelindrach and the power of the Dysjunction. Strange winds blow once more and the ur-ghuls are caught up in the shadow-skein. Where once they served the masters of accursed Shaa-Dom now they serve only Xhakoruakh…’

Bellathonis gazed up at the dark, featureless face of the mandrake-king trying to divine what madness lurked there. The discomfort he had felt when they first arrived at Xhakoruakh’s court returned with redoubled strength. The king claimed the diseased ur-ghuls as his own servants, and by extension he was using them to spread their plague to Commorragh in full knowledge of its daemonic origins. The haemonculus pursed his lips and thought carefully before responding with the most mundane complaint he could think of.

‘Well, the ur-ghuls are unsuitable for my purposes. I need untainted flesh and blood to shape with.’

‘It will be as you desire,’ Xhakoruakh granted carelessly, ‘now go and prepare your monsters. Time is growing short before we must move against my brother, and when our victory is won all of Aelindrach will be at my command!’

Bellathonis bowed and backed away from the mandrake-king in silence. It seemed the plagued ur-ghuls were Xhakoruakh’s secret weapon, but not one he could employ against his sibling to bring him certain victory. That left the only other possible target as Commorragh itself. Xhakoruakh’s ambition ranged beyond claiming the expanding sub-realm of Aelindrach for his own. He had designs on the whole city.

CHAPTER 10

INFLUX

Valossian Sythrac ghosted along a cracked passageway and descended a set of stairs that now leaned at a precarious, drunken angle. Dust and smoke stung his nostrils and in the distance roaring fires and screams echoed hollowly, but here everything was deceptively calm and quiet. Sythrac paused and crouched for a second, holding his huskblade carefully back behind his body as he leaned down to examine the steps more closely. The thousand captive spirits that inhabited his armour shifted and whispered in the back of his mind; pleading, threatening, advising, cursing.

Elphor Helmanriss, the shade of a human primaris psyker that Sythrac had hunted down eight centuries before, could sense the recent footfalls of Sythrac’s current quarry still echoing in the aether. Inquisitor Ilem Kharporov, another human who had been more recently taken, could not help but notice there were three sets of tracks and that one was more heavily burdened than the others. Vy’ssandorsz Az, a Makelian strider who had once been a legend among his own people, could still taste faint traces of blood, sweat and metal in the air. Sythrac was on the right track.

Sythrac moved on down the fractured stairs as they went through a slow, clockwise spiral. He was still angry, even a little dangerously frustrated. The Harlequin had delayed his departure from Vect for so long that he’d almost missed out on the most immediate and visceral stages of the battle. He hadn’t fought an engagement in the city on this sort of scale for a long, long time and he didn’t want to let the moment pass without something to remember it by. Now, as the fighting was beginning to gutter out around the Alzos’Querion Vha, he was rather desperately searching for a memento of suitable worth to really mark the occasion.

The stairs opened onto a low-vaulted corridor. As Sythrac stepped cautiously into it he heard the grinding sound of a lock mechanism cycling from up ahead – that, and the low, hurried murmur of voices. He quickened his pace slightly, stalking forwards with his huskblade poised and ready. Light spilled in as unseen doors slid back into the corridor walls and Sythrac saw the wasp-like hull of a Venom sky-chariot revealed before him. Beside it three figures were busily readying the craft for departure. They were all covered with soft-looking plates of armour that were coloured a glistening, raw-meat red. The central figure, distinctive in a spired helm and cloak of pale hide, was in the midst of stowing an angular casket on the Venom’s rear passenger deck. Sythrac stepped out into full view of the three and spoke.

‘Archon Vhigis, your journey is at an end.’

The archon of the Flayed Mask kabal hissed and sprang back from the Venom as if he’d been burned. His two trueborn siblings drew weapons and sprinted at Sythrac without hesitation. To them Sythrac was only one opponent and they were battle-hardened, trained from birth with all the lethal focus of Commorrite warcraft. Kill this one enemy and the three of them could escape from the killing field of the Alzos’Querion Vha and perhaps find a new life together somewhere in the lower tiers. So they believed as they ran at Sythrac with weapons at the ready, never realising what they truly stood against.

Sythrac allowed a fraction of the power from the captive spirits in his armour to flow through him. The running trueborn seemed to slow down in his altered perception, drifting slowly towards him with blurring images of their past and future locations multiplying backwards and forwards along their course. The first trueborn was beginning a feint attack that was intended to leave Sythrac open to the agoniser whip wielded by the second. Archon Vhigis was behind them both levelling a blast pistol. He would fire it regardless of the risk of hitting his siblings, Sythrac sensed; Vhigis was gambling on a lucky strike from the compact darklight weapon to end the fight before it had even begun. The archon of the Flayed Mask was probably perceptive enough to realise that the gaunt, baroquely armoured warrior that had found them was no ordinary kabalite.

Sythrac simply ignored the swinging blade of his first attacker. Instead he stepped around the rushing figure to cut at the one behind, the one with the whip. Sythrac’s huskblade sliced through the whip-wielder’s wrist just as he was raising the barbed length of cable and sent the vicious weapon writhing away like a wounded snake. Sadly such finesse was entirely lost on Sythrac’s opponent as the huskblade fulfilled its primary function and desiccated the trueborn’s body in the blink of an eye. The raw-meat red armour collapsed, empty, as the shrivelled husk disintegrated into dust.

Sythrac dropped flat an instant before Vhigis’s blast pistol spat a retina-scarring ray of darklight through the spot where he had been standing just a split second before. The first trueborn, the one who had tried to feint, caught the blast squarely between his shoulder blades. There was a flash of heat and light as the trueborn’s chest was vaporised by the hit and then his body collapsed beside the empty armour of his sibling. Sythrac stood and looked at Archon Vhigis balefully. As befitted his title as archon of the Flayed Mask, Vhigis wore the skin of his predecessor stretched across the faceplate of his spired helm. The eyes visible behind the holes radiated fear and fury in equal measure.

‘You shame yourself. Fight me properly and you might yet win your life,’ Sythrac said.

‘Says you, Valossian Sythrac!’ Vhigis spat back at him. ‘I know who you are – you’re Vect’s dog! Why have you come for me?’

‘Your kabal defied the supreme overlord and now they pay the price…’ Sythrac replied. He twitched the huskblade back and forth leaving smoky trails as it carved through the air, ‘…as shall you. Your soul is forfeit to me.’

‘To hell with you! Where was Vect when the daemons crawled up from the under city? Where was he when every hand turned against us? Damn him and damn you, too!’

The witch-sight of the spirits showed Archon Vhigis levelling his pistol again before he had even finished speaking. Sythrac turned aside and the bolt creased past him by a hair’s-breadth. He allowed more of the captive energy of the armour to flow through him, the thousand ghosts stung into action screaming and roaring in his mind. Vhigis’s movements became slower still and Sythrac closed the distance between them in seven preternaturally long strides. He dodged two more blasts from Vhigis’s pistol with a twist or a pivot to left or right before arriving within arm’s reach and snatching the weapon from the archon’s hand. Sythrac threw the pistol away with contempt and slowed himself down for a moment.

‘Fight me or die where you stand,’ Sythrac snarled. ‘You are no archon of Commorragh to flee when your kabalites are falling. Fight and reclaim some shred of honour.’

Vhigis finally saw the inevitability of the doom laid out before him and drew his own sword with an anguished yell. Sythrac traded blows with the archon to test his mettle, allowing the howling spirits to ebb away so that he fought skill against skill alone. It soon became clear that Vhigis was an excellent swordsman by Commorrite standards, a deadly foe for a slave and a worthy adversary for any trueborn. To Valossian Sythrac, even unenhanced, he was nothing but a disappointing child. Sythrac soon tired of the uneven contest and allowed the power to flow through him again, landing a blow that shattered Vhigis’s darting sword into quivering fragments.

To his credit Vhigis did not give up. He flung the sundered hilt in Sythrac’s face and dived for his fallen blast pistol with the speed of a striking snake. It was still a hopeless manoeuvre against a skilled opponent like Sythrac and they both knew it. Sythrac allowed him to get one hand onto the knurled grip of the weapon before plunging his huskblade through Vhigis’s exposed back. The tip of Sythrac’s blade penetrated the archon’s torso with such force that it sunk into the flagstones of the floor beneath him. Vhigis was pinned in place like a grotesque insect as he writhed in the seconds before his body crumbled away into dust.

Sythrac opened the fingers of one gauntleted hand over the crumbling remains. The gesture revealed a soul-siphon embedded within the gauntlet’s palm, a cold, blue circle of light. The spirit-trap glowed spectrally as it extended an aetheral vortex across Vhigis’s desiccated corpse. The archon’s soul, even as it cried in horror at the ineffable claws of She Who Thirsts closing around it, was snatched up and drawn inside Sythrac’s ornate armour to be trapped, stored for Sythrac’s pleasure. Archon Vhigis of the Flayed Mask joined innumerable others in the ghostly menagerie contained in the network of softly glowing soul stones which festooned Sythrac’s armour. The archon was reduced to less than a helpless prisoner; a power supply, perhaps a source of secret knowledge, but most of all for Sythrac, Vhigis would be a memento of this day on the Alzos’Querion Vha when he had made the spires fall.

Sythrac shook himself and pulled his huskblade out of the floor and Vhigis’s dust-filled armour. Unsatisfying as it had been, the ghost of Vhigis and the memory would have to suffice. There would be others to be made in the vast, suffering cityscape of Commorragh as it struggled to survive the Dysjunction, of this Sythrac had no doubt.

He paused and looked over at the Venom that Vhigis had been preparing to flee on. The casket the archon of the Flayed Mask had been stowing there caught his eye – what treasure had Vhigis been so attached to that he had dragged the unwieldy thing all the way down here when he knew there would be a danger of pursuit? Sythrac could have squeezed the answer directly from Vhigis’s soul if he had a mind to, but he decided to look for himself.

The ugly, angular casket was old and worn-looking, with deep scratches and an encrustation of what could only be dried blood. Sythrac idly flipped open the lid and gazed upon dozens of flat, leathery faces lying inside. These were the faces of all the previous archons of the Flayed Mask, no doubt, each lovingly peeled and preserved by his or her successor in a kabalite tradition that must have been in place for centuries. Sythrac shrugged. Apparently Vhigis had had his own cargo of precious mementoes too.

Sythrac sighed and walked along the corridor to the end where a pair of concealed doors had been opened to the outside world. The screams and stink of burning became stronger as he emerged into the wan light of the Ilmaea shining high overhead. The base of this particular spire fell away before him towards Ashkeri Talon and the docking ring. Spread out before him was a series of deep valleys between lower spires that stepped down to the broad, flat knuckle on Ashkeri Talon that held the White Flames fortress.

That particular spire gleamed like a bone needle at this distance, and was notable for the way it seemed to stand alone amid a blackened wasteland of other structures. Sythrac paused and listened for a moment to the many voices begging for his attention – not voices from the spirits this time, but his worthless underlings craving orders, direction, praise, acknowledgement or whatever else they wanted.

The first squadrons of jetfighters were already prowling the upper air above the White Flames fortress, Sythrac could see as much from where he stood. The fact that they were staying so high indicated that they had met resistance from the fortress itself, a fact confirmed by the endless gibbering of invisible voices in Sythrac’s ear. He looked up and saw the first dark arrow shapes of Black Heart Raiders emerging from the Alzos’Querion Vha and passing directly overhead. Moments later the sharp angles of Vect’s mobile fortress blotted out the light of the Ilmaea as it passed in stately procession over Sythrac’s head.

He sighed again and began issuing orders: splitting the Raiders up to begin probing the deep valleys ahead for ambushes, threatening the scourge-heralds with blasphemous tortures if they didn’t approach the White Flames fortress right this very instant and demand a concrete pledge of fealty from Archon Yllithian. The momentary diversion of hunting Archon Vhigis was over. It was time to get back to the far more dreary business of crushing Commorragh spire by spire if necessary.

Several kilometres below Sythrac’s lofty perch a lowly Black Heart sybarite called Vaellienth just couldn’t stop grinning. Every day of his life he’d dreamed about a day like this, a day when he could go into the city and do whatever he wanted: kill whoever he felt like, steal whatever took his fancy, destroy at will. The rest of his clique felt the same way, he could see it in their wild eyes and fixed smiles – the Dysjunction was the best thing that had ever happened in Commorragh.

The wind whipped at Vaellienth’s face as their Raider plunged into a steep-walled canyon between spires, curving sharply to closely follow the riven flank of one as they searched for more survivors. Above and behind them dozens of other Raiders sliced through the air with their open decks packed with more black-armoured warriors hungrily searching for new victims. Vaellienth shouted to his helmsman and the Raider glided to one side to slip beneath a bridge of silvery spars that had been buckled by some unthinkable violence.

A spray of hypervelocity splinters rang from the prow armour of their Raider as soon as it came into view. Below them on a protruding terrace tiny figures raced to get into cover as the shadow of the Raider fell across them. Vaellienth swung the Raider’s forward cannon around to etch a searing line across two of the running figures before they could get out of sight. He could see they were escaped slaves, a mismatched selection of squat and gangling forms armed with an equally mismatched selection of captured weapons. Vaellienth’s clique of warriors used their splinter rifles to pick off some of the other runners with clinical precision. The return fire coming up from the terrace was so pathetically inaccurate that Vaellienth had the helmsman bring the Raider in lower so he could leap down to finish off the handful of remaining slaves at close quarters.

As his armoured sabatons crunched onto the terrace Vaellienth had a moment of heady exhilaration as he realised there were more slaves than he’d originally thought – a lot more. A dense knot of dirty, club-wielding wretches came bursting out from a rubble-choked entrance where they had been hiding and Vaellienth grinned again at the crude ambush the slaves had set up. Doubtless they’d hoped to lure him in and gain some more usable weapons, maybe even capture themselves a Raider. Instead they’d caught something far too big and dangerous for their puny trap.

The slaves had the strength of desperation but little else on their side. Vaellienth impaled the first one that ran up to him on his rifle’s combat blade. He left the weapon hanging from the wretch’s guts and drew a knife as he leapt forwards to take the next slave in the neck. Screams erupted all around him as the rest of his clique took down their own chosen victims in short order. The lumpen flailing of the slaves as they tried to defend themselves was almost comical. They were blatantly outmatched but they knew they could expect no mercy from the kabalites, so they fought to the death – or at least they tried to. Vaellienth kept two of the slaves half-alive to be hung from the Raider’s trophy chains, replacing two recently expired prizes from one of their previous encounters.

The word had come down from the supreme overlord himself – subdue the city – and subdue it they would. Vaellienth’s squad had swarmed through Sorrow Fell with a thousand others of the Black Heart kabal all racing with one another to be the first at the kill. They had swept through the upper spires like the fires of vengeance, killing anything that stood in their path. It was easy to tell who the rebels were; they were the ones that tried to fight or tried to run. Now the Black Heart forces were coming up to the maze-like boundaries of the Old City: the slums, the flesh farms, the factories and the workshops that formed the functional heart of Commorragh once you dipped beneath the tips of the glittering spires.

The long chains of Black Heart Raiders began to split up as they plunged down into the darkened streets, fanning out as they went. The destruction was more obvious here than it had been up in Sorrow Fell. Tumbled slabs choked the canyon-like gaps between the flanks of the spires. Streets and walkways had collapsed onto one another to produce a complex, multi-levelled maze. Jumbled spars, statues and metalwork shaken loose from the higher levels completed the tangle. Vaellienth and his followers eventually had to disembark from their Raider to make their way deeper into the mess on foot.

Thousands of metres above, most of the Black Heart kabal forces would be closing in around the White Flames fortress. Rumour had it that Archon Yllithian had turned traitor and would defy their approach. Vaellienth was not sad to be assigned to probing the depths instead. Any fighting at the White Flames fortress would be dominated by vast, unleashed energies and titanic machineries of destruction. The opportunities for personal skill and daring to make a difference in such an environment would be virtually non-existent, while the chances of sudden annihilation stood immeasurably high. Vaellienth felt better to be below on a battlefield where a quick blade and a steady aim could still win the day.

They found their way down into a more-or-less intact boulevard that had been unevenly roofed by fallen debris but not entirely blocked. Broken pipes burbled foul effluent into black, reflecting puddles in places where the tiled pavement had cracked. A few dim lights showed in places but the darkness beyond their reach was absolute. As Vaellienth and his warriors advanced along it he suddenly spotted a huge, bestial shape standing motionless in the shadows. He raised his rifle instinctively but in the same instant some sixth sense told him that what he was looking at was not alive.

Vaellienth advanced cautiously and realised that the shape was actually a statue of some sort that had been meticulously woven out of sections of pipe and lengths of wire. It was a depiction of a giant, antelope-like creature with spiral horns that had been partially crushed by fallen masonry so that it now looked as if it were supporting part of the sloping ceiling. A little further on there was another statue of a crouching predator about to spring. Nearby a tangle of limbs and part of a horned head protruded from beneath a pile of rubble marking where a prey-animal had stood. Now he knew what to look for Vaellienth realised they stood within a frozen zoo of off-world beasts. The whole boulevard must have been festooned with them before the Dysjunction.

He wondered briefly if the creations were the work of pureblood Commorrites or slaves. He decided the animal motif spoke of slaves trying to recreate something vaguely familiar from their home world in the harsh, alien environment of Commorragh. The existence of the works indicated that some petty archon in this area had indulged in letting his or her slaves be creative for a time. It had probably been a piece of studied cruelty in loosening their bondage just a little before reapplying it again with double force. Possibly the unknown archon had simply liked the things – there was a kind of crude exuberance about them that was appealing.

Vaellienth snapped alert as he heard the sound of running feet in the distance. He gestured sharply and his clique went into cover on both sides of the boulevard with their weapons at the ready. Vaellienth remained standing in plain sight as he listened to the running feet getting closer. He heard the footsteps splashing through a pool, stumbling on the other side and then the distinctive whip-crack sounds of splinter pistol-fire. Three wyches suddenly sprinted into view with blades and pistols in hand. They were glancing fearfully back over their shoulders in the direction they had come from. The leading wych suddenly saw Vaellienth and started to shout.

‘Don’t!’ was all she managed to yell before Vaellienth shot her in the mouth, the hypervelocity splinter round partly decapitating her as it opened a grotesque second mouth in the nape of her neck. The rest of his clique opened fire a split second later and cut the other two wyches down in their tracks. They had been sprinting so hard that their lifeless bodies slid along the tiled pavement for a few paces even after the splinter rounds knocked them off their feet.

‘Huh,’ Vaellienth opined vacantly as he allowed the muzzle of his rifle to drop. He had expected the wyches to come straight at him with their knives out for his blood. Instead they had seemed almost relieved to see someone else in the Stygian darkness of the boulevard. It was bizarre behaviour even for wyches. He swung his rifle up onto his shoulder for a moment as he looked over at the fallen bodies again. Something looked wrong with them but it was too dark to see exactly what.

He was walking closer for a better look when a new sound caught his attention. It was a sort of susurration, a long, drawn-in sound like an intake of breath, which emanated from further along the boulevard. The sound was soft but it seemed loud as if it came from many places at once. Vaellienth’s rifle was in his hands and aimed along the boulevard in a flash. Behind him he heard the muted rattle as his clique also pointed their weapons into the pitch-darkness. From ahead of them there came a waft of a stench so foul it made Vaellienth’s eyes water.

He realised with the slightest qualm of panic that despite his preternaturally excellent night vision it seemed to be getting darker even while he was standing there. Details he could make out before – chunks of rubble, wire statues, dark puddles – were becoming blurred and indistinct as though a mist were rising even though there was no mist. The shadows seemed to ripple as they deepened before his eyes. The sound came again, the shuddering hiss of air being drawn into hundreds of quivering scent-pits.

There was a rapid scrabbling rattle of claws on stone as the darkness came alive with the needle-fanged, whip-thin forms of hundreds of ur-ghuls rushing towards him. Vaellienth yelled and reflexively shot down the first in his sights, but there were a dozen more behind it. Sybarite Vaellienth and his clique of Black Heart kabalites were still shooting wildly into the dark tide of troglodytic monsters as it rolled over them in an unstoppable wave.

CHAPTER 11

THE BLACK DESCENT

Kharbyr was gradually getting used to the body that he had inherited from Bellathonis. He still didn’t like it much. The sense of it being a gangling mismatch of pieces cobbled together like a puppet master’s marionette never seemed to go away, but gradually he was getting used to it. Some of the strangeness was definitely useful in its own, twisted way. He never seemed to get tired or hungry, for example, and pain of any sort seemed to be only an interesting and not at all disagreeable sensation. Try as he might, however, Kharbyr couldn’t force himself to get used to having subsidiary eyes in his shoulder blades however useful they might turn out to be in the long run.

They were descending again. Kharbyr had been launched up to the top of the White Flames fortress for his brief talk with Yllithian like a cork popping out of a bottle. Now he was being hustled back to the base of the fortress to re-enter the foundation layer he’d emerged from in accordance with Angevere’s directions only an hour before. Four White Flames warriors arranged in a tight diamond around Kharbyr steered him almost, but not quite, by the elbows between successive anti-gravity drop tubes and flight after flight of seemingly endless, winding steps.

The steps gradually changed from being white marble, sweeping and magnificent near the top of the fortress, to being mean, narrow and steep towards the bottom. The warriors allowed Kharbyr no time for gawking along the way but he could see clearly that the fortress was being locked down even more thoroughly than it had been before. Squads of armoured warriors were rushing everywhere, and there was a general clangour of shutters being sealed and gateways being closed.

Yllithian’s people really were getting ready to fight Asdrubael Vect. Kharbyr had grown up in a part of the city where that sort of thinking was the punch line to innumerable jokes. Nobody went up against the tyrant and lived – those were the legends you heard in Low Commorragh. Up here closer to the top of the food chain in Sorrow Fell things were obviously seen a little differently.

There was a sense of… excitement in the air as if the warriors were engaging in the fulfilment of a day that they had long looked forward to. Say what you would about Yllithian, the support of his own kabal seemed to be as solid as a rock. It made Kharbyr wonder a little about Yllithian and his apparently remorseless ambition. Perhaps the archon of the White Flames was really a product of his environment; maybe that was what made him so mad and power-grasping that he would try to match wits with the supreme overlord.

+Nyos Yllithian climbed to the top of his house over the bodies of his murdered siblings. Nothing was forced on him – he was the one that undertook to do anything and everything in the pursuit of power.+ Angevere’s dry whisper was in his mind again, temperamental and pedantic-sounding. She still hadn’t forgiven him for breaking with her ridiculous script and inadvertently inviting Yllithian along with them to the labyrinth of the Black Descent. Now instead of being able to dictate events they were being swept along by them – as personified by the four White Flames warriors marching him so resolutely down into the bowels of the fortress.

+Do you even know anything about the Black Descent? Don’t worry, I can see from your empty memories that you don’t. Of course you scarcely know anything about haemonculi or their covens at all, do you child? I forget, sometimes, how young and impoverished you truly are.+

Kharbyr sighed internally. He’d already found to his cost that he couldn’t seem to block Angevere out or even reply to her directly through his thoughts. Speaking aloud worked but he couldn’t do that while Yllithian’s warriors were watching him. He was being incessantly nagged by an invisible ghost that took pleasure in picking fault with everything he did. The agony was that he daren’t simply ditch her and be done with it. Angevere represented the one slender hope he had of regaining his old body and avenging himself on Bellathonis, however tenuous that hope might be. The idea that he might find himself stuck inside Bellathonis’s mismatched, cast-off skin for the rest of his existence was simply unthinkable. Kharbyr was finding that his revenge fantasies were starting to widen to include Yllithian and Angevere, too. He tried his best to keep that particular thought hidden from the witch.

They had reached the bottom of the steps and debouched into an area of crooked corridors and dank, moisture-streaked walls. Angevere’s whispers continued while they marched through the corridors and she forced knowledge into his unwilling head.

+The haemonculi were in Commorragh even before the Fall. You might say that the city gave birth to them and that in their own way the haemonculi contributed to the destruction of the eldar race, too, but there are altogether too many culprits for that crime. Just prior to the Fall the eldar had become a divided people. They were divided because the realisation had come upon them that their power was effectively limitless. Their culture and technology had reached such a pitch that they were like unto gods. They could create or destroy simply through the application of their will. The realisation of that power brought about a great schism because some embraced it whilst others were repelled by it.+

The warriors were leading Kharbyr down a ladder into a cistern that had been recently drained. Green slime clung to the walls and floor of the otherwise unadorned and empty cubic space. At the bottom of the ladder the four of them stopped for a moment and just stood there, waiting, with Kharbyr effectively imprisoned in between them. Kharbyr had an unpleasantly queasy premonition that they had brought him all the way down there just to execute him somewhere quiet and out of the way.

There was a cracking sound and a circular section of the floor began to drop away in neatly divided segments to create a spiral stair. Wan yellow light shone up out of the hole along with the murmur of voices swiftly stilled. Kharbyr and his guards descended into a roughly cut chamber filled with dozens more warriors all wearing the sigil of the Black Heart. Kharbyr was chilled to the core by the sight – members of Vect’s own kabal were here in the very heart of the fortress! Then he smiled at his own foolishness. It was a trick all right, just not the kind of trick he’d thought of at first.

+Yes, they’re Yllithian’s followers. They’re wearing Vect’s sigil in the hope that they can bluff their way past the Black Heart’s roving patrols. Pay no attention to them and listen to me. What I have to tell you is important and it will affect your chances of survival when you meet the Black Descent.+

A circular, hatch-like door occupied most of one of the chamber’s walls, while narrow passageways entered via the other three. The stir caused by Kharbyr’s entry soon settled down and the spiral stair retracted silently upwards to lie flush with the ceiling. The warriors in the chamber were fully armed and armoured. Kharbyr noticed a preponderance of heavier portable weapons than normal among them; snub-nosed monofilament shredders and darklight blasters seemed a particular favourite.

+A large part of the schism from before the Fall was centred around the concept of Form. The conservatives saw their form as being something inviolable, the pinnacle achievement of evolutionary forces reaching back to the birth of the universe itself. The radicals believed that the form a soul took was not predetermined but a matter of cosmic accident. They saw no harm in changing their form as they willed once they had access to the technology for doing so. The most extreme transmigrated themselves into animals, ships, structures or even entire sub-realms.+

The warriors were awaiting the call to action and were evidently anxious to be about their business. However, first and foremost they were disciplined warriors and in Kharbyr’s experience that meant they were used to having to wait. He stood to one side while they busied themselves with endlessly checking and rechecking their wargear. Meanwhile Angevere’s scratchy voice wittered on inside Kharbyr’s skull without pause.

+Far more people took to physical modification of a more limited sort. Improved genes, faster reflexes, enhanced senses, regenerative cells, all that kind of thing – on and on ‘improving’ the evolutionary process. This is where what we now call haemonculi come in to play. They started as a sort of loose society of surgeons and scientists who arose to pioneer the most extreme kind of work. For a variety of reasons – most of them ethical and legal – many of them chose to make their homes in the port-city of Commorragh and other sub-realms in the webway.+

Just a few days in the past Kharbyr would not have cared less about some dusty old argument about the residence of souls. Such things had no relevance for him then, but now the subject had a deeply personal aspect. He perked up a little as Angevere seemed to be winding her way closer to some sort of point.

+Those who would become the first haemonculi performed some truly radical experiments of their own over time. They created artificial races and adapted existing ones to their purposes. The most stable proved to be the scourges, a transformation that could be undertaken by anyone with the urge to soar on their own wings. It’s entirely possible that some even less savoury creations were brought into being at the same time – like the mandrakes, for example, and a variety of deranged creatures that are now purely the preserve of the beastmasters.+

+Body-sculpting, alteration, eugenics – these proto-haemonculi raced to outdo one another in their pursuit of entirely amoral science even as the rest of the eldar race slid into anarchy. Ah, Yllithian is arriving, we must continue your education a little later.+

At that moment the hatch-like door began rolling to one side and the warriors turned to face it as one body. Through it Archon Yllithian entered the chamber surrounded by his incubi bodyguards. He was resplendent in his exquisitely finished armour and wargear, fully armed and accoutred for battle. The assembled warriors gave no overt sign of recognition, no martial salutes or cheers, but a perceptible change ran through them all like a jolt of electricity. Shoulders were squared and chins rose proudly in the presence of the archon. The atmosphere in the chamber had been tense while the warriors were waiting, now it veritably crackled with expectation. Yllithian looked around at them with pride shining from his face. One of the warriors knelt before him and delivered a brief, muttered report.

‘Good, good,’ Yllithian murmured in response. ‘And the second group were dealt with too… We’re all set then.’

The archon of the White Flames glanced sharply over at Kharbyr before speaking to his troops. ‘The stage has been set for us to proceed. Move out by squads and in Lhitiu’s name maintain your intervals correctly. I will be right behind you – with Bellathonis at my side – until we reach the sluices in the third strata. We’ll consolidate our forces again once we’re there. Now go.’

Yllithian strode over to where Kharbyr was standing as the first squad of warriors departed the chamber through one of the adjoining tunnels. ‘My dear Bellathonis, you look terrible,’ Yllithian smiled but his eyes were bright and hard, ‘as if you’re going to your own execution. You should exhibit a little more confidence if only for the sake of the troops.’

‘I have every confidence in your preparations, Archon Yllithian,’ Kharbyr said quickly. ‘They’re very… impressive.’

Yllithian looked a little disappointed. ‘“Thorough” is the word I would have preferred to hear. Still I suppose you are entirely ignorant of the minor miracle involved in both anticipating this requirement and acting upon it in the ludicrously short period of time available.’

‘Requirement?’ Kharbyr echoed.

‘For exiting the fortress undetected by any of Vect’s lackeys.’

‘Ah…’

+Ask Yllithian what he knows about the labyrinth of the Black Descent.+

‘How much do you know about the labyrinth of the Black Descent?’ Kharbyr asked the archon in what he hoped would sound like a conversational tone of voice.

Yllithian looked at him oddly and then smiled again. ‘The usual tales I’ve heard spun about the labyrinth involve its innumerable and fiendish death traps or the hideous fates of intruders. Both you and Syiin, my previous haemonculus, have been singularly close-mouthed about the topic and about the coven of the Black Descent in general.’

The archon spread his hands in a dismissive gesture as he continued, ‘It’s generally thought best to leave haemonculi covens to their own devices under ordinary circumstances, so obviously I’ve never been down there in person before – that’s where you’ll come in, of course, being the expert in this case.’

‘Of course,’ Kharbyr echoed again, his mouth dry.

They descended through a series of recently drained tunnels for a short time before striking off along a broader branch to drier ground. The dense, stone-like foundation layer beneath the spires (or rather the foundation strata as Yllithian knew it, for it was comprised of many layers) was a dense honeycomb of service tunnels, travel tubes, waste pipes and hidden ways. It had long been used as a way to transport personnel and property without risking the dangers of street and airborne movement. Indeed in some places entire underground rivers passed through the foundations of spires and afforded them either a useful point of ingress or a major security headache depending on perspective.

Each kabal kept its own secret maps of the foundation strata just as each kabal constantly blocked off or opened up different routes through it from time to time. Some parts of Low Commorragh merged seamlessly into the strata by becoming strings of caverns, quarries or mines. Deeper still the pits of the haemonculi were accessible at the points where they clung, hive-like, to Commorragh’s underside. All manner of dangerous wildlife, escaped slaves, insane Commorrites and other unnameable horrors lurked in the foundation strata, but none of them were more horrifying than the haemonculi themselves. Angevere persisted in ‘educating’ Kharbyr further as they travelled, her ghostly whisper forever at the back of his mind:

+After the Fall the surviving not-quite-yet-haemonculi realised that they stood on a metaphorical knife-edge. With their abilities they could cheat death, age, pain and disease for all intents and purposes. They could have ruled Commorragh and the other sub-realms purely through the promise of granting immortality to those loyal to them. However, the soon-to-be haemonculi were wise enough to understand that they had neither the desire nor the skills to lead the unwashed masses. They were only concerned with pursuing their craft further, but they also knew that if they tried to do so as individuals they would be enslaved and forced to labour for others.+

+So the haemonculi covens formed. Like-minded individuals banded together to organise the distribution of their effort. Pacts were formed between the covens and the ruling authorities – the noble houses originally and then later the kabals when Vect took power. The Black Descent has been one of the more powerful haemonculi covens in Commorragh for longer than anyone can remember. They are also and perhaps not coincidentally one of the more… orderly covens in regard to their practices.+

+The Black Descent has at least thirty-three strictly regulated ranks in its hierarchy, ‘the degrees of descent’ as they call them. Individual coven members are subject to the authority of those further up – or rather down in this case – the organisation. Coven members keep their true identities secret from those of lesser status and are referred to by their ranks alone.+

+You’re wondering how I could possibly know all this. Well it’s easy enough when you’ve had the misfortune to be around the real Bellathonis as much as I have. The problem is that the real Bellathonis didn’t progress very far through the Black Descent’s ranks before deciding to go it alone, and that’s a problem because of the labyrinth.+

+The labyrinth of the Black Descent is not only that – a physical maze to deal with intruders – but also a method of imposing discipline on the membership of the coven. Each member is only taught a limited number of pathways through the labyrinth according to their rank. The more exalted the member, the more routes they will know through the labyrinth.+

+The labyrinth itself is not fixed in place. The primary elements of the labyrinth take the form of interlocking cylinders nested inside one another. The cylinders slowly rotate so that the corridors and entries inside them line up with different points at different times. The routes that the members of the Black Descent learn as they progress are as carefully metered as dance steps so that they can move within the cylinders in time to make their appropriate connections. A mistake will lead the coven member into those fiendishly deadly traps that even Yllithian has heard about.+

+Bellathonis only knew of a fraction of the traps in the labyrinth, but it makes for a long list. Molecular acid jets, kinetic swarms, monofilament webs – both fixed spinnerets and free-floating ones, darklight fusillades, gravitic anomalies, splinter discharges, contact desiccants, nerve gases. The one piece of hope I can offer is that none of the traps will block progress entirely – there’s always a way past if you know the right steps. Bellathonis managed to steal into the chambers of a highly ranked member of the coven once by infecting his superior with a traceable bacterium that he used to follow him through the labyrinth. Unfortunately for you that was quite some time ago and the same trick won’t work again.+

Twice they passed bodies in the tunnels that had been freshly slain by the White Flames’ vanguard. The first were a sizeable group of half-naked kabalites bearing a sigil Kharbyr didn’t recognise – although Yllithian obviously did. The archon nodded with satisfaction and moved on without comment. The second group of bodies was larger. They all bore the sigil of the Black Heart and it took Kharbyr an instant to realise that in this case there had been casualties on both sides. Some of the fallen were Yllithian’s warriors that had been caught in a vicious close-quarters fight with Vect’s own people. Yllithian looked grim at the sight.

‘Curse it all,’ the archon murmured, ‘I had started to think we might get through cleanly. Still, word of the ruse will give the Black Heart kabalites plenty to think about – they’ll be so busy looking at each other twice that we’ll slip past them easily. We’re almost at the sluices already.’

Kharbyr nodded in a fashion that he hoped looked wise. He decided to try and put up a bit of flattery in the hopes it would keep Yllithian busy too.

‘You seem to know the strata very well, Archon Yllithian,’ Kharbyr ventured. ‘An impressive feat if I may say so.’

Yllithian was dismissive. ‘Any archon worthy of the title knows that nothing enters or leaves his domain without it being reported on by Vect’s spies. It became clear to me… well, let’s just say it was a long time ago now… that I would need ways to move unseen. I made it my business to learn as much about the foundation strata as I could.’

Kharbyr knew the true import behind Yllithian’s easy statement: teams of desperate agents clashing in the dark, secret maps being stolen, kidnappings and torture for information. A thousand tiny, independent vortices of pain and terror would have been brought into being by Yllithian’s thirst for knowledge. Each one would grind away producing tiny nuggets of information that once placed together made an increasingly clarified whole.

Just as Yllithian had promised, they reached the sluices shortly afterwards. Kharbyr could tell they were getting close by the trembling of the passageway beneath his feet and a distant rumbling sound that gradually rose to a deafening roar. They emerged on to a gallery that was open along the left to an empty, echoing space while the towering wall to their right was pierced by hundreds of arches. High-walled channels entered through the arches, crossing the gallery from one side to the other before dropping away at a precipitous angle when they reached its further edge. Decrepit-looking metal-strutted bridges formed a precarious walkway across the channels.

Most of the channels were full of swift-flowing liquids that thundered over the edge without pause. However, a handful were entirely dry or carried such sluggish flows that they barely trickled past. It was into one of these that Yllithian and Kharbyr were led, finding the bulk of Yllithian’s false-flagged warriors and a small gaggle of nondescript-looking agents. The archon went over to speak with them while Kharbyr risked a glance over the edge.

The sluice channel disappeared away at a forty-five-degree angle, its straight edges compressing rapidly towards a vanishing point that was lost in the darkness below. To his left and right the fuller sluices pushed their contents over the edge with an unceasing roar and producing billows of fine mist that Kharbyr wished he could believe was made up of water droplets.

A thin, black, ruler-straight line followed the sluice channel down at head height before vanishing out of sight. It was secured to one of the less dilapidated bridge struts further up the channel where Yllithian was issuing orders to the warriors. Kharbyr resisted the urge to touch the line. It would be braided monofilament – light and incredibly strong but also apt to shred anything it came into contact with that didn’t have the right kind of protection.

Yllithian returned and handed Kharbyr a loop of black metal. He recognised it immediately as a friction brake. They were all going to go sliding down that line into the middle of whatever lay at the bottom of the sluice. His look of trepidation must have been obvious because it made Yllithian smile.

‘No need to look so aghast, Bellathonis,’ the archon said. ‘You won’t be the first one going down. I’m reliably informed that there’s an entrance to the Black Descent’s labyrinth scarcely a hundred paces from where we’ll arrive.’

‘So you’ll be heading down before me, I suppose, it being so safe and all,’ Kharbyr blurted out tetchily. Yllithian simply smiled in response.

+There is one more thing I should tell you,+ Angevere whispered as Kharbyr took a firm grip on the gravity-line and pushed himself away. The initial acceleration was ferocious and he clung on to the friction brake grimly with the razor-sharp line hissing alongside his head as he slid down it. By now he was barely heeding the witch’s incessant, doom-laden prattle.

+The Black Descent will recognise the presence of Bellathonis, of you that is, the moment you set foot in their labyrinth. They’ll do their best to single you out and kill you as a matter of priority. I’m sure they would rather capture you instead, but I suspect they will probably be feeling more pragmatic than that, so do try to be careful.+

Kharbyr’s exasperated oath was swallowed up by the thunder of the sluices.

CHAPTER 12

ANOTHER REPAST

Asdrubael Vect had returned to his scrying chamber at the tip of Corespur. Much to his disgust more of the upright crystals had turned to inky black in his absence. It had now reached a point where his view of the lower city was almost totally occluded. Vect growled in vexation as he prowled back and forth between the darkened crystals.

‘Even a Fool knew something was going on,’ he announced to the chamber’s only other apparent occupant. ‘I had seen it too, of course, but it seemed to be of such minor import on the broader canvas. A loose end to be tidied up later, nothing more.’ He stopped and shook his head bitterly. ‘My mistake, but not a fatal one. Not yet.’ His self-assurance rang hollowly in his own ears.

The Fool had been right, something was indeed brewing in Low Commorragh that stank with the abyssal reek of daemonic interference. Vect spat a few sulphurous oaths in the general direction of the ineffable machinations of Chaos as he did his best to mentally set the conundrum to one side. The real frustration was that there was little that could be done about that particular state of affairs at the current time.

Vect resettled himself in his throne with something of an effort of will as he mentally dissected the complex orrery of interconnecting elements that were already in motion. No, the bulk of the Black Heart kabal was already fully engaged with protecting Corespur and subduing Sorrow Fell. All of his trusted archons were about their appointed tasks or they would be very shortly. The orbit of events had been influenced as much as possible for the present and now Vect had to see the outcome of some of those events before he could make his next move.

‘I hate the feeling of powerlessness that waiting can impose at times like these,’ he opined to his silent companion, ‘but over the centuries I’ve come to understand that waiting is an essential, indeed inescapable, part of the role of supreme overlord. All manoeuvres and stratagems come to fruition at their own pace – attempting to hurry them along is usually a precursor to disaster. Even with access to all the power of Commorragh I still can’t make time run faster or slower than it is normally wont to do.’

He stared down at the grey-skinned Medusae squatting in front of his throne before nudging it with his foot. ‘I think you’ll agree that I speak from experience in this regard.’ The Medusae was silent, its steel visor inscrutable. The clusters of brain-fruit covering its head and back pulsated gently, ripe and swollen with vicariously won experiences. Vect leered unpleasantly before reaching out and plucking a handful of the soft, fleshy nodules. He could at least pass the time usefully by witnessing events as they had unfolded.

One bite and he was reliving the moment that Valossian Sythrac left the ziggurat to take charge of his forces on the Alzos’Querion Vha. He saw the Harlequin, Motley, blanch at the techniques being employed and eventually get himself ejected by the geldling. On one level the experience made him laugh a little as a master is apt to do when its pet accurately apes his mannerisms. On another level it left a thick bile of frustration on his tongue. By the time Vect’s messenger had arrived carrying orders for them to send the Harlequin and the Medusae back to Corespur the little Fool had already flown.

Another bite and he experienced the dying moments of a rebel. The idiot gazed hopelessly up into dark, roiling skies as swarms of black, dagger-winged craft descended from them in an awe-inspiring display of raw power. The ground shook as explosions of white fire raced over the battlefield to engulf the rebel and his misguided friends, their agonised shrieks obliterated by the carpet of death that rolled over them.

Vect selected another fruit. This one carried him with Aurelia Malys as she separated the columns of Black Heart forces leaving Corespur. The iridescent green craft of her Poisoned Tongue kabal spiralled away in a leisurely fashion giving no indication as to what their final destination would be. Vect knew where she was going, of course, he’d given the orders to her himself. Even so it was informative to see how carefully she saw to her own safety before setting about pursuing them. The group that Malys had taken with her was relatively small – a compromise between speed, stealth and strength – but there was a persistent worm of doubt at the back of her mind as to whether she’d brought too many or not enough.

The next experience was ripe with anguish. One of Sythrac’s heralds was winging his way between palls of smoke towards the White Flames fortress. Its gates and docking ports stood invitingly open and no violence was offered as the herald flew closer to the vertiginous alabaster walls. Emboldened, more heralds descended bearing their swallow-tailed gonfalons and together they hailed the defenders in the name of Vect, supreme overlord. Their answer came sped on rays of all-destroying darklight. The heralds were slashed out of the skies by the retina-scarring beams in a heartbeat. Vect had a momentary impression of burning wings as the ground seemed to leap towards him…

Yllithian had shown his true colours openly at last. That news had reached Vect already, and the crystals had shown the White Flames fortress displaying its defiance to Sythrac’s first approach. The formalities of it all were irritating but necessary. Word of Yllithian’s stand would be spreading like wildfire, a focal point for any kind of organised resistance to the evil depredations of the great tyrant, Asdrubael Vect. Vect rubbed his hands with undisguised glee. The idiots would come running to make common cause with Yllithian and the White Flames without realising they were conveniently gathering themselves beneath a single banner for the deserved receipt of his unquenchable wrath.

The next fruit was strangely bitter. Vect followed the Sybarite Vaellienth as he dropped down into Low Commorragh on his Raider. As the sybarite and his clique entered the rubble-choked lower streets Vect felt the tension growing there in ways a mere warrior would have missed or dismissed. By the time the swarm of ur-ghuls erupted into view Vect was prepared for something of the sort occurring. He ignored the flailing emotions of Vaellienth as the sybarite was torn by hooked claws and bitten by needle fangs. Instead Vect concentrated on observing, dissecting and deducing everything he could from what he saw.

Vect stood and paced between the darkened crystals once more. Encounters with beasts and slaves released by the Dysjunction’s impact on the city had been universal. They figured into Vect’s calculations as mere tertiary considerations at best or distractions at worst. Now he recalled ur-ghuls figuring in a disproportionate number of reports. Large numbers had been seen in Low Commorragh even before this incident.

He returned to the Medusae and carefully selected several of its smaller, less-developed fruits. These would be the ones secreted from the very fringes of the Medusae collective’s roving senses. Each one was bitter and evoked another impression of darkness and corruption coming roiling up from the lower tiers. Swarms of ur-ghuls featured everywhere, apparently immune to pain and carrying a disease so foul that the slightest scratch could lay its victim low within minutes.

Not every such skirmish Vect witnessed was lost, the superior firepower and fighting skills of the kabalites sometimes enough to overcome the overwhelming numbers and preternatural vitality of the troglodytic horrors. Nonetheless the pitch-blackness and tight confines of the lower city worked against his warriors and everywhere they were being forced to give ground. Where the ur-ghuls emerged into the open they were easily dealt with, but the darkness seemed to be forever at their backs, advancing as they advanced.

The crystals of the scrying chamber remained just as opaque as ever but now it was clear in Vect’s mind where the daemon-seed admitted by the Dysjunction had taken root. This rising darkness could only be coming from Aelindrach. The mysterious shadow-realm had long been a part of Vect’s acquisitions, but too strange, too alien to properly assimilate with the rest of the city. The mandrakes made useful agents but their reticence about their place of origin was always universal and virtually unbreakable. They were lawless and clannish by nature, yet someone or something in Aelindrach was making a concerted effort to expand the shadow-realm and absorb all of Commorragh. That could not be countenanced.

Vect moved back to his throne and began bringing the lesser wardings into action. At one point the mastery of the wardings had been a jealously guarded secret fragmented among ancient, noble families. Vect had threatened and tortured his way to full understanding, eliminating each former possessor of it as he went. In time the last few bearing any scraps of knowledge came forward to teach him willingly in the hopes that he might spare them. They were proved wrong. Now the secret was Vect’s alone and he held it as part of his great armoury of weapons for use against those that might oppose him.

The greater wardings girdled the entire city, eldritch barriers of force that kept the restless tides of the warp in check and prevented them from swamping the reality that was Commorragh. The lesser wards were originally intended as an additional safety feature that subdivided the city itself. They were capable of placing additional, temporary barriers between the city’s innumerable tiers and districts in case of a breach. Their deployment placed a small but noticeable additional strain on the nigh-infinite energy reservoirs of Commorragh and Vect proceeded with care by only erecting a few carefully selected wardings. Sealing off the whole city would not serve his purposes; it could even have quite disastrous results.

The work was almost complete when he heard the doors of the scrying chamber opening. He glanced to one side to look at the crystal dedicated to the chamber itself. The individual that he saw to be approaching assuaged his mood somewhat and he settled himself on his throne to await their arrival.

‘Archon Khromys,’ he said just before the leader of the Obsidian Rose came into view. The Medusae retreated behind the throne as the renowned artificer strode forwards to kneel before him. She wore a kilt of blades that seemed to float cooperatively with her movements and baroque-looking gauntlets of green glass. The plates of her shoulder armour mimicked the curves of rose petals, black and razor-edged.

‘Supreme overlord, I have done as you bid me to do,’ Archon Khromys said.

‘Then rise and report. You found the vaults I directed you to, that much is clear. Tell me about their condition.’

‘Twelve were completely untouched, seven showed signs of exterior damage but no breaches. I was unable to reach the others as they had been buried by debris that will take time to clear. My kabal are working on those even as we speak.’

The archon of the Obsidian Rose was keeping something from him, he was sure. Vect’s gaze was penetrating as he interrogated her further, ‘You must have discovered the contents of the vaults – one with your skills would not be able to resist looking inside. Speak and tell me what you saw, and do not insult me by attempting to lie to me.’

Khromys went pale. ‘No! I could clearly see they were stasis-locked. Only a great fool would tamper with that, and only a greater fool would return to their owner and report on it. I input the codes you supplied, examined the vaults for damage and came straight back.’

Vect sat back and steepled his fingers ruminatively. Khromys was young for an archon, a relative newcomer to the ever-changing inner circle of Corespur. She played on that sometimes by acting the innocent – which was an almost laughable conceit to place before anyone who knew Khromys’s personal history in detail. As a newcomer she was also one of the less reliable archons in his court.

‘Very well,’ Vect said dismissively, ‘you may go. Report to me again when the remaining vaults have been uncovered.’ Khromys nodded, puzzled but relieved, bowed deeply to cover her relief and turn to leave. Vect let her get a half-dozen paces away before he called out to her again.

‘You have a celebrated intellect, Archon Khromys, tell me what you deduced was inside those vaults.’

Khromys froze. She knew that she could not leave the chamber without answering. ‘Weapons,’ she said after a moment. ‘Something too destructive to leave out in the open.’

‘You can do better than that,’ Vect purred.

Khromys looked back at him with a spark of defiance in her eyes, ‘I think it’s where you’ve been hiding your Castigators. I think you sent me to prepare them to be unleashed. Like I said before, weapons.’

Vect’s answering smile was merciless.

CHAPTER 13

OVERTHROW

Kheradruakh listened to the whispers on the ever-changing night breezes of Aelindrach. He heard the two rival brothers arming for their war to determine who should rule over a place which could never be ruled. He listened as Xhakoruakh’s outsider allies bred monsters for his shadow war. He listened as Azoruakh bartered souls for weaponry from beyond Aelindrach, the secret shipments entering through a gate known only to him. As the Decapitator’s alien senses caressed the shadow-skein he learned their deepest desires and the true sources of their mutual rivalry.

Xhakoruakh had lied when he told his outsider allies that secrets could not be kept hidden in the shadow-realm. In fact it took a rare gift to ferret out a secret within the deceptive tangle of shadows and angles that was Aelindrach. Few might boast the tenacity and skill required to make the effort, while the number of secrets to be found was very, very large. However, once the taste of conspiracy was on the Decapitator’s tongue he could hunt it down effectively through the skein. The ghosts of recently made pacts still echoed there, and within them was an interlocking puzzle box of motivations, actions and influences that opened at his touch.

Kheradruakh slid from shadow to shadow, always unseen. He whetted his blade and bided his time. The moment would come soon, whirring past on the raven wings of fate. He would be ready and waiting when it did.

While Xhakoruakh held court in a palace of shadows, his brother Azoruakh ruled from the top of a mountain.

As they approached the place it seemed to be a solid curtain of blackness rising up beyond the boundaries of perception. As they came closer it was possible to tell that Azoruakh’s fortress leapt upwards in a succession of tiers that mounted threateningly overhead like angular storm clouds rendered in obsidian. The ledges and angles of it were seething with the followers of Azoruakh. The silent, shadowy garrison awaited the approach of Xhakoruakh’s horde with weapons in hand; the dull patina of smooth bone on the saw-toothed hooks, sickles and knives that they bore seemed to gleam in the Stygian darkness of Aelindrach.

Xhakoruakh’s minions outnumbered those serving his brother many times over, but Azoruakh’s followers had the advantage of position. As the horde surged against the obsidian walls Azoruakh revealed another advantage he had held in secret against the day when his sibling returned to reclaim his throne. Strange and terrible weapons were unleashed to rain destruction down upon the shadow horde. Lucent beams played across the charging ranks disintegrating everything they touched as the killing began in earnest.

It had begun with the braying of horns echoing through Xhakoruakh’s palace, deep-throated bellows that hung on a single flat note which resonated in every nook and cranny. The signal was pre-arranged yet Bellathonis still experienced a curious tightening in his guts at the sound. The limited time he’d had for preparation was at an end and ready or not his offspring were going to be tested in the crucible of battle.

The grotesques he had bred were, to Bellathonis’s mind, not yet fully grown. Their musculature was underdeveloped due the paucity of the specimens he’d had to work with, the bony growths protruding from their spines, craniums and shoulders were as hard and sharp as flint, but equally brittle. They were quicker than ordinary grotesques and exhibited a sort of feral rapaciousness that was unusual for their kind. All in all Bellathonis was proud of them. The horns blared incessantly as if to hurry him along, their unwavering tone reverberating through the fabric of Aelindrach as they announced Xhakoruakh’s challenge.

Bellathonis and Xagor emerged from their womb-like cave under the palace with his battalion of grotesques to muster with Xhakoruakh’s other forces. The multitudes of dark angles in the cracked plain surrounding the palace were filled with them: mandrakes, ur-ghuls, crawlers, creepers and other nameless things summoned from the depths of the shadow-realm. Bellathonis’s iron-masked grotesques drooled and whined as they were driven into position within the multitude. In comparison to the other creatures present the grotesques were thunderous slabs of moving muscle and bone. They surged through the flitting entities like ships crossing a sea of shadows. The resonant horns stopped abruptly. In the oppressive silence that crowded in with their absence the only sound was the hiss of an icy breeze scouring the plain.

The giant figure of the shadow-king emerged from the heart of his palace into the expectant silence. He was surrounded by nightfiends bearing tall banners marked with twisting sigils of green witch-fire. A rippling intake of breath swept over the horde as they basked in the presence of their lord, Xhakoruakh. Bellathonis took in a sharp breath too. It seemed to him that he could feel the fever-heat of Xhakoruakh’s bloated form against his skin even from a distance. The shadow-king flourished a monstrous, rusted scythe above his head and cried out in a voice that rolled like deep thunder.

‘My restless children of Aelindrach! The time has come to take back what is rightfully mine. Trophies and riches will be yours for the taking when we unseat my treacherous brother! All those who take the road to victory with me shall reign as lords over the broken slaves of Azoruakh!’

The crude promises elicited an eerie, hungering moan from the assembled horde, but Bellathonis had eyes only for the weapon the shadow-king was holding. He could see that even Xhakoruakh’s brawny arms were knotted with the effort of keeping the heavy scythe aloft. It stood taller than the giant shadow-king, while its blade was close to a metre wide and two metres long. Its workmanship was crude, like that of a tool rather than a weapon, with some portions unfinished. The metal it was made from was so heavily corroded that it looked as if it had been lost underwater for centuries. Vivid green slime oozed from the scythe’s blade but the inscriptions carved into it were still sharp and well-defined enough that Bellathonis could recognise them. They were inscriptions in Chaos runes, the language of the damned.

Bellathonis knew the script from dusty tomes he had studied in the past as he delved into the nature of souls, books that had been filled with the esoteric warnings of long-dead scholars. Now that he stood with the shadow-king’s sighing horde in the icy wind on a cracked plain in Aelindrach the warnings seemed less obscure and more relevant. Any remaining doubts in the haemonculus’s mind that Xhakoruakh had been tainted by powers from beyond the veil evaporated completely in that moment.

There was a kind of blindness Commorrites suffered in relation to the Chaos gods, Bellathonis thought. She Who Thirsts had such a claim on their souls that it occupied all of their thoughts on the subject – when they gave it any thought at all, which was rarely if it could be helped. Every waking moment was dedicated to eluding the grasp of the daemon-queen and restoring the vitality she drained constantly from every living eldar in Commorragh. Small wonder that she should dominate their world-view.

The other Chaos gods were known to be older than She Who Thirsts. They were ancient, atavistic deities from the dawn of time and seen as being almost as irrelevant by Commorrites as the dead gods of the eldar. That was a conceit, but not too far from the truth under ordinary circumstances. Commorragh had been designed and built specifically to exclude the influences of entities like the decrepit gods of Chaos under normal circumstances. The wardings were supposed to keep Commorragh hermetically sealed from the surging tides of the warp – the preferred playground of the Chaos gods – so that its citizens could exist without succumbing to madness and mutation. That was how the wardings were supposed to work, but during a Dysjunction they could be compromised and what was without could find its way within.

Xhakoruakh raised a mighty shout over his shadow horde and they replied with a whispering sibilance that held words in tongues seldom heard among the living. The rise and fall of their eldritch chanting crashed like waves against a shingly shore as the horde stirred with common purpose. It dispersed into a hundred separate spills and runnels and began flowing away from the palace as the tide of shadow-skinned creatures flooded across the plain.

Bellathonis whipped the grotesques viciously to get them lumbering forwards in the same general direction. The slab-muscled beasts were showing entirely too much imbecilic fascination with Xhakoruakh and the monstrous scythe for Bellathonis’s liking. He glanced over at Xagor to see if the wrack had noticed anything amiss about Xhakoruakh. Recently Xagor’s duty to Bellathonis had taken him into Shaa-Dom and some of the less stable parts of the webway. The wrack had witnessed something of the power of the warp unchained and could probably read the signs of it here, too. Part of Bellathonis still wanted to be wrong, to write off his fears as a product of the strange sub-realm of Aelindrach tricking his senses. The frightened eyes that he could sense peering from behind Xagor’s mask told Bellathonis everything he needed to know.

The road to Azoruakh’s mountain-fortress had been no road at all. It was a trackless wasteland of rippling darkness that rose and fell in frozen waves as jagged and angular as the teeth on a saw-blade. It was not without opposition either. There were skirmishes and ambushes, murdered guards and mutilated scouts. All of them carried out with the vicious glee the denizens of Aelindrach reserved for striking from the shadows. Both sides fought in the same fashion, unseen and unheard until a blade kissed flesh or hooked claws wrapped around a throat.

Bellathonis did his best to keep himself, Xagor and the grotesques out of reach of such games by resolutely sticking with the largest groups of Xhakoruakh’s followers that he could find. Whenever Xagor and Bellathonis needed to rest, the haemonculus ordered the grotesques into a circle facing outwards, packed so that they were shoulder to shoulder and formed a living palisade of flesh, blood and bone. The precautions seemed to work well enough to keep Xagor and Bellathonis alive as they listened to the blood-chilling shrieks and howls from the skirmishes occurring around them.

Ultimately Xhakoruakh’s followers had the strength to push through his brother’s delaying tactics and the horde steadily approached the mountain-fortress. At first it was only a dark blur on the edge of consciousness but it grew ever greater as they approached. Just short of the mountain Xhakoruakh halted and sensibly brought his streams of followers together into a single body before advancing further. However, the shadow-king gave his minions no time to rest and instead drove them forwards with bellowed imprecations as soon as sufficient numbers were gathered. The horde of Xhakoruakh lurched forwards against his brother’s fortress and into a hell-storm.

Bellathonis had kept his charges back from the front lines while he assessed the situation. When the all-destroying lucent beams wielded by Azoruakh’s defenders stabbed down from the cliffs for the first time he was initially dazzled and then fascinated by them. The energies being employed clove smoking trails through the very fabric of Aelindrach; even the ground beneath the victim’s feet was blasted upwards in sooty columns at the beam’s touch. Such power was entirely in keeping with the effects of disintegrators and darklight weapons in more normal surroundings, but the shadow-realm was notoriously opaque to those kinds of high-energy discharges.

There was movement in the serried terraces that etched the cliffs. Shadows were descending from them like crawling bats. Some of Azoruakh’s followers were seemingly so confident of victory that they were keen to come to grips with the pitiful handful of Xhakoruakh’s minions that had reached the bottom of the cliffs so far. Further from the cliff the burning rays probed back and forth like restless fingers of light searching for those that had gone to ground to escape their lethal luminosity. Wherever one of them latched onto to a huddled knot of mandrakes or ur-ghuls more swung across to annihilate them in focused radiance.

Bellathonis looked around for Xhakoruakh but among the flashing beams and fractured darkness he could see no sign of the giant shadow-king. He did see a wall of mist that was rolling towards the cliffs with unnatural speed. The death-beams gouged hungrily through the mist, tearing it into tatters and revealing the shadow-king and his cadre of nightfiends charging towards the fortress.

For an instant Bellathonis believed his problems would be solved there and then. However, as the beams moved to sweep over the group they were held back by a shimmering emerald dome of force. Xhakoruakh’s charge was slowed to a crawl as he and his minions battled their way forwards. They suffered as they did so, their bodies smoking and thrashing beneath the attenuated yet still potent blaze of Azoruakh’s arcane weapons. Xhakoruakh pushed onwards with the strength of desperation, yet his nightfiends were falling one by one.

Bellathonis snapped his attention back to the grotesques drooling unconcernedly nearby and Xagor, who was shivering in anticipation of his imminent demise. ‘Quickly now, Xagor!’ Bellathonis called over the shriek of the destroying beams. ‘Help me ready the grotesques while there’s still a distraction going on.’ In a few words he quickly explained what he needed the wrack to do. Despite his terror Xagor was obedient enough to carry out the necessary tasks without question.

When all of the slab-muscled monsters were prepared Bellathonis jabbed a finger towards the black cliffs and shouted the command phrase to them, ‘Khourankir V’sylthi! Awake! Go up there! Kill the beamers! Kill! Kill!’

The lumbering grotesques were dazed and half-deafened by the battle raging around them. At first they were slow to understand the mnemonic phrase Bellathonis used and he had to repeat it. On the second incantation the iron-masked faces of the grotesques lifted slowly to focus on the cliffs while the bellow-pumps stitched to the monsters’ backs began to clench and unclench faster. Blocks of syringes lodged into their spines automatically depressed plungers to dump concentrated doses of hormones and stimulants into their already heavily boosted systems.

The grotesques shook themselves and roared with bloodlust as the hellish cocktail pulsed through their veins. The thick-limbed giants abruptly lunged forwards with their legs pounding and arms flailing as they ran headlong for the cliffs with quite astonishing swiftness. Bellathonis blinked in surprise then dashed after them, fearful of losing track of his creations entirely. Xagor, fearful of losing his master, ran after him.

A vagrant beam slashed across the grotesques as they charged forwards. The beam was turning to rain more hell upon Xhakoruakh’s failing defences, so it was only a glancing blow, although that alone would have atomised any mandrake or ur-ghul in its path. Bellathonis was delighted to see his creations storm through the shaft of previously all-destroying light and come out of it only mildly scorched. If anything the grotesques only seemed to get angrier and ran even faster to reach their tormentors.

They reached the deeper shadows directly beneath the cliffs. These were a battleground where the remnants of Xhakoruakh’s vanguard were in the process of being slaughtered by Azoruakh’s triumphant troops. The grotesques crashed into the snarling melee with all the finesse of a tsunami. Body parts flew as the monsters tore through friends and foes alike with hooks, claws and cleavers driven by bulging muscles and berserk, atavistic rage.

‘No!’ Bellathonis shrieked at the top of his lungs. ‘Up! Up! Climb! Kill the beams!’

A few of the masked grotesques heard Bellathonis’s cry and their compulsion to obey their creator sent them lurching headlong against the cliffs. As the first few began to climb, ape-like, up the rough surface, the rest of the pack turned to follow them. Within a few seconds the entire group of lumpen meat-devils were hauling themselves on to the first terrace to renew their onslaught. Bellathonis ascended to join them through sheer force of will, briefly decoupling his false perceptions of Aelindrach’s solidity and gravity to float up as easily as if he’d been wearing a gravity harness. Xagor was left abandoned to his own devices and had to scramble up behind the haemonculus as best he could manage.

As he alighted on the terrace and permitted physical laws to take on a more recognisable aspect Bellathonis finally got to see one of Azoruakh’s strange weapons up close. It was mounted on a forked metal pedestal with two handles that allowed it to be swivelled and tilted to direct the beam. The weapon itself was bell-shaped with the open end acting as the emitter. A simple lever appeared to be the only way of activating the device. There was something familiar about the workmanship, Bellathonis thought. The weapon was certainly not something made in Aelindrach yet it had clearly been created with its effectiveness in the shadow-realm in mind.

Bellathonis turned the pedestal so that it pointed to a higher tier where several more of the weapons were busy concentrating their beams on Xhakoruakh and his shrinking entourage. He pulled the lever and watched with interest as a hazy column of luminescence sprang into being before it and seemed to almost tunnel its way through the air towards the target. The section of cliff he’d aimed at flared with milky incandescence as the beam struck it, a billowing plume of soot and shadow spurting away from the circle of light. Nothing else seemed to happen for a moment and Bellathonis felt a sense of disappointment.

Then the beams springing from the weapons mounted near the spot flailed wildly and then tumbled as the cliff underneath them gave way. An avalanche of dark shale and spinning shafts of light gathered pace with awful deliberation. It thundered into the ground with a bone-jarring impact that kicked up vast plumes of detritus in all directions.

From his perch the haemonculus contemplated the resultant destruction and then hastily shut off the beam. He picked up the skirts of his robe and ran headlong away from the weapon, trying to put as much distance between himself and it as he could. He was barely in time. Close at his heels shafts of light from higher tiers swung down to annihilate the traitorous device before it could inflict any more harm. The dense, rocky material of the terrace reverberated like a tuning fork under his feet. The back-scatter from the beams produced roiling clouds of darkness that engulfed Bellathonis and robbed him of any sense of direction.

He staggered and felt the surface beneath him begin to give way. A single beam was traversing slowly along the terrace towards him. Its awful brightness pierced the clouds of debris thrown up by its progress as it methodically annihilated everything in its path.

Bellathonis tried to summon the concentration required to fly again so that he could escape. To his disgust the sense of imminent danger ensured that his simple-minded subconscious kept him thoroughly bound by what it considered to be unbreakable physical laws. With disintegration rapidly approaching him Bellathonis felt only a mild sense of annoyance at his lack of self-control.

A fiercely strong grip latched onto Bellathonis’s arm and yanked him clear of the beam’s path. Once away from the blaze Bellathonis’s perception cleared a little and he realised that Xagor had pulled him into a niche in the cliff face.

‘The master takes too many risks!’ the agitated wrack shouted fiercely over the howling sound made by the beam as it passed.

Bellathonis smiled indulgently at his servant. ‘As ever your loyalty does you credit, Xagor, most gratifying,’ he said. ‘I confess my little experiment drew rather more attention than I’d anticipated. Tell me, did you see if any of the grotesques survived?’

Xagor nodded rapidly and pointed further up the cliff. The grotesques were climbing again in obedience to Bellathonis’s last command. They looked like ugly grey ticks on the flank of a black-haired animal as they hauled themselves upwards. Their obedience would soon disintegrate if they were left to their own pitifully limited recognizance for too long. They would enter a berserk state again and attack anything in reach. Given where the grotesques were now and where they were heading Bellathonis decided that under the circumstances he didn’t care too much if they did.

The attack by the grotesques and Bellathonis’s own improvised experiment had opened a chink in the defences. Xhakoruakh’s followers were beginning to rally and swarm upwards in the wake of the success. At first there was only a trickle, but the numbers swelled into a flood as realisation spread that there was a way to escape the killing rays. Mandrakes, ur-ghuls and nameless things climbed, wriggled and crawled up the cliffs. Fighting spread along the tiers like cold lightning. Bone-blades, teeth and claws flickered with deadly intensity.

The beams that held Xhakoruakh in check were overthrown as their operators were forced to look to their own survival. Finally the giant shadow-king was able to break free and hurl himself into the fray. He sprang up the cliffs roaring out his brother’s name as he plied his heavy scythe with lethal effect. Nothing could stand before him.

‘You know what, Xagor?’ Bellathonis said with a cold smile as the enraged shadow-king swept past their niche. ‘I believe that Xhakoruakh may win this thing yet.’

‘Hooray?’ Xagor wondered miserably.

When they broke down the doors of Azoruakh’s throne room Bellathonis expected some sort of last-ditch defence. Only three of the grotesques had survived, but Xhakoruakh had been so favourably impressed by the beasts’ performance that he insisted on their presence at the front of the assault squad. The shadow-king had been most taken with the grotesques’ ability to survive Azoruakh’s exotic weapons in a way none of his other minions could.

‘When I saw the beams being used against us I made a realisation about them,’ Bellathonis had explained. ‘They were based on a principle of resonance that is sometimes referred to as cataclysmic harmonics. In the context of Aelindrach such weapons perforce have to rely on the perceptions of their victims to convey more of their effect than would ordinarily be the case.’

‘So how did your creatures overcome it?’ Xhakoruakh had rumbled with some discontent at the haemonculus’s long-winded answer.

‘I partially blinded and deafened them. An eye and an ear drum were removed from each on the battlefield. That, plus their inherent resistance to pain and damage, rendered the light and noise of the beams survivable for them over a limited exposure. If I may ask something myself? How did you survive? Virtually their entire arsenal was directed at you alone for a while.’

‘Powers beyond Aelindrach favour me, just as others favoured my brother,’ Xhakoruakh replied cryptically. ‘Find your flesh-creatures and bring them to breach the throne room. Their strength will serve us well again.’

Bellathonis had dutifully rounded up the grotesques and placed them before the heavy obsidian doors of the throne room. Between them they held a section of broken column to use as a battering ram, the hallway behind them a seething mass of Xhakoruakh’s triumphant followers. At Bellathonis’s shouted order the grotesques swung the ram with vigour. A single, thunderous crash and the heavy obsidian doors flew back in ruins. Bellathonis shouted another order and the grotesques dropped their cumbersome ram and charged inside.

Bellathonis and Xagor hung back a little to permit the blood-hungry tide of shadow creatures to flood into the throne room with Xhakoruakh at their head. To the haemonculus’s surprise there was no immediate clash of arms or any dramatic declarations of sibling rivalry to be heard being exchanged between Xhakoruakh and his cornered brother. Instead there was only silence coming from the throne room. An ominous silence and the unmistakable stench of death.

After a moment’s hesitation Bellathonis sent Xagor into the throne room to investigate. There was a chance that Azoruakh’s final defence was something so devastatingly lethal that it could destroy Xhakoruakh and all his followers in utter silence. The Black Descent guarded their labyrinth with devices that were just as mortal or just as silent, though none could claim to possess both properties at once. His speculation was terminated by Xagor reappearing in the sundered doorway.

‘All safe, master,’ the wrack said somewhat shakily. ‘Also worthy of the master’s inspection. Outcome surprising.’

Intrigued, Bellathonis followed the wrack inside the room. It was a tall, almost conical space with walls that appeared to be formed out of the swirling collision of jet, onyx, obsidian and basalt. Azoruakh’s – now Xhakoruakh’s – throne stood at the top of a high dais of skulls piled against the back of the chamber. The centre of the floor was dominated by a circular pit. Heavy black chains hung down over the pit and swayed gently as if in response to some movement above.

Bellathonis could perceive no termination to the chains above him – they stretched up and away into a dark, rotating cloud that seemed caught at the pinnacle of the chamber. The pit swiftly became darker than anything Bellathonis had experienced in Aelindrach, a complete absence, an utter nullity that seemed to suck at the soul, consciousness and life itself. The grotesques were milling around near the piled dais of skulls confusedly looking for enemies. Xhakoruakh and his followers were ranged around the pit staring fixedly at the chains in silence, or more accurately at what was hanging from them.

A body, soot-skinned and gigantic, hung from the chains. It had some kinship with Xhakoruakh but would have stood taller and possessed a somewhat rangier form in life. The body had its skin tattooed in blue and yellow witch-fires that were now slowly dying.

A body without a head.

CHAPTER 14

LABYRINTH

The gravity line hissed past centimetres from Kharbyr’s face as he descended the sluice channel fast enough to make his eyes water. Yllithian’s warriors were ahead of him and behind him too, spaced along the line at regular intervals like beads strung on a wire. They were plunging through clouds of mist thrown up by the active sluice-ways to either side and Kharbyr quickly became slick with the aerosolised waste that was plunging downwards from High Commorragh around him.

+Some things never change, eh child?+ Angevere whispered sardonically in his mind.

Blinking through the tears Kharbyr saw flashes of light in the Stygian darkness at the bottom of the sluice, the droplets in the air hemming the bursts with rainbow outlines. A split second later he heard the crack-crack-crack of splinter weapons firing. An ambush! The Black Descent must have learned of Yllithian’s plans and laid a trap for him. All it would take was a few well-placed snipers and they could pick off the warriors coming down the gravity line one by one.

More flashes – disintegrators and blasters for sure – pulsed near the bottom of the sluice. By their light Kharbyr could see that he was getting close to where the channel levelled out and widened. A few more seconds and he would be caught in the fire-trap down there with the others, but there was nowhere for him to go. If he released the line early he would still be trapped within the sluice channel with no way out of it and no further control over his descent. He could crash into the others coming down and would certainly lose plenty of skin through abrasion before ending up in exactly the same place as if he’d held onto the line. There was nothing to do but hang on and hope the unseen snipers missed him.

The gravity-line did not follow the course of the sluice precisely. Instead of turning through a bone-smashingly sharp angle near the bottom in order to become horizontal the line curved and lifted Kharbyr out of the high-walled channel. For a second he could see that the sluice channels fed into wider canals that angled off in all different directions. In the distance he glimpsed the faint gleam of what looked like a lake. Then the line was plunging back into the channel again and it began to corkscrew gently to shave off his remaining momentum. Kharbyr could see charcoal-black figures outlined by the flash of weapons fire in the distance and Yllithian’s warriors ahead of him dropping from the line. This was it.

Kharbyr dropped from the line himself and rolled to one side of the channel with his ill-matched limbs flailing as he skidded to a halt. He bounded to his feet and ran along the edge of the channel on hearing the approach of more White Flames sliding down. The last thing he needed right now was to get tangled up with someone else and provide the enemy with a big, fat, two-for-one target to aim at.

The warriors ahead of him were dutifully hurrying forwards with their guns levelled as the strobing flashes of weapons fire continued. Kharbyr drew his own weapon, a curious-looking pistol with a spiral barrel that Angevere had advised him to use if he was cornered. He had laughed at the idea that he would have to wait to feel cornered before fighting back. With the pistol in hand Kharbyr began to look for targets, jogging forwards towards where the sluice opened out into a wide, dry canal.

Yllithian’s warriors were in a loose semicircle firing outwards into the canal. A few metres in front of them there were heaps of blasted, pulped and torn flesh that had doubtless once been bodies but were now mostly… parts. As more of the warriors arrived and joined the semicircle it expanded and moved forwards, its members still occasionally firing at unseen foes. Kharbyr realised there had been no return fire and that none of the White Flames had fallen. Not an ambush after all, then, but Yllithian’s forces had run up against an enemy of some kind. It was an enemy that made the warriors slightly nervous, if the gratuitous display of firepower being used was anything to go by.

The warriors that had arrived behind Kharbyr joined the semicircle just as the shooting died down. They advanced as a single body and things grew silent again save for the occasional kill-shot as they passed the heaps of fallen. Kharbyr moved up behind them and finally got a good look at their enemies.

The first thing that struck him was the stench. Kharbyr had killed enough creatures to know the foetid smell of split intestines and opened stomachs but this… this was so much worse. He covered his mouth and bent down to examine the bodies more closely.

+ Don’t touch them!+ Angevere hissed in his mind. +They’re diseased! The mark of Nurgle is on these corpses. Step back! The foulness of them offends my senses as much as it does yours.+

Kharbyr had absolutely no intention of touching the things anyway. He could see enough hooked claws and eyeless, domed skulls split by maws full of needle-like teeth to know that they were the remains of ur-ghuls. He suppressed a shudder as he looked at the visibly rotting corpses. He had encountered ur-ghuls in Low Commorragh when he was trying to escape from there with Xagor – right before Bellathonis had stolen his body. Packs of the creatures had been coming up from below and they had seen more of them in the travel tubes. Those had looked diseased too.

+You skimmed the edge of Aelindrach when you were with Xagor,+ Angevere announced suddenly, +and there were more of these ghuls on the loose? That’s interesting and very bad news. Someone’s been busy.+

Kharbyr heard footsteps and he turned to find Yllithian approaching in the company of his seemingly omnipresent incubi bodyguards. The archon looked down disdainfully at the heaped corpses.

‘Ur-ghuls. Nothing to worry about,’ Yllithian murmured dispassionately as though speaking to himself. ‘Packs of them tried to swarm the vanguard…’

Yllithian broke off and looked Kharbyr in the face before continuing, ‘…they proved highly resistant to injury, apparently, and had to be just about dismembered to stop them. Fortunately the exceptional weaponry possessed by my warriors ensured that they could prevail. So, what would your professional opinion be about these deathless beasts, Bellathonis?’

‘The ur-ghuls? There were packs, um, reported in the Old City right after things went crazy–’ Kharbyr fumbled for the words as Angevere hissed into his mind.

+Shut up! Tell him nothing!+

‘– maybe the Dysjunction had something to do with it?’ Kharbyr finished lamely. ‘Their toughness, I mean.’

Yllithian looked around with renewed interest at the charnel house his warriors had created. ‘Infused with energy by the Dysjunction… I suppose it’s possible,’ the archon said as he examined the corpses more closely. ‘Ah yes, but a very specific colour of energy – note the lesions on the skin and the triple-lobed pustules – I’ve seen those marks all too recently when we fought over Gorath. The gods of Chaos are attempting to inveigle us in their sport.’

Angevere emitted a mad peal of laughter inside Kharbyr’s skull at Yllithian’s words. He was momentarily too distracted to respond and the archon wandered away with his bodyguards in tow. For one mad moment he had the urge to run after him, confess everything and beg Yllithian’s forgiveness for tricking him. Anything that could get him away from the mad witch seemed preferable to continuing to serve her.

+He’d just kill you, child,+ Angevere chuckled inside his mind. +Or perhaps he would corrupt you and pledge your vagrant soul to his secret master if he understood who he truly serves. It matters not. Hurry along and attend to him, you don’t want to miss out on what comes next.+

Yllithian’s warriors had moved on and were now guarding an open hatch in the sheer wall of the dry canal. As he approached Kharbyr could see that there was a spiral design roughly carved into the lintel over the hatchway. Sprawled in the opening were the bodies of more ur-ghuls and two Commorrites clad in rough, nondescript clothing. They looked to be another pair of Yllithian’s agents to Kharbyr’s eyes and they had clearly been killed by ur-ghuls swarming out of the hatch when they opened it. The looks of horror frozen on their torn faces still faithfully communicated their shock and surprise.

+Do you see the design? That marks the beginning of the Black Descent’s territory,+ Angevere whispered. +You must tread carefully. The labyrinth proper begins further inside, but the traps start here.+

Yllithian caught his eye and gestured expansively at the hatchway. ‘From this point our guidance must flow from you, Bellathonis. I can console myself that any shortcomings on your part will be swiftly remedied by the plethora of death traps your friends in the Black Descent are alleged to be so keen on.’

The White Flames warriors stood around him, silent and enigmatic in their coal-black armour, but Kharbyr could see by the upward tilt of their chins that they were amused by Yllithian’s dark humour. The incubi gave no such indications. They watched him just as dispassionately as they watched everyone that might threaten the safety of the archon they had sworn to protect. Kharbyr hesitated.

+You have to go in, child. There’s no need to be afraid with me here to help you, as long as you obey my orders to the letter.+

Kharbyr swallowed his fears and wished that it were true that there was nothing to be afraid of. He stepped through the hatch into the gloom beyond it. The first thing he became aware of was the stench; a stomach-twisting, bile-rising, eye-watering putrescence that made him completely forget the mild unpleasantness of sliding down through the sluice-mists. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw a rough passageway with openings irregularly spaced along either wall.

+Go to the fourth opening on the right,+ Angevere whispered. Kharbyr did as he was bidden and noticed another spiral design chalked beside the opening. The hole itself looked as if it had been gnawed at by vermin. Beyond it was another passageway, narrower and arrow-straight with sharply defined walls. A faint breeze wafted out of the hole and the putrescent stench waxed even stronger. Kharbyr stopped in his tracks – not due to the smell this time, but at the sight of more bodies. A dozen or more dismembered ur-ghuls lay scattered along the passageway.

After a moment Angevere whispered in his mind. +It’s a simple monofilament spinner but it fills the whole corridor if you trigger it. Have Yllithian’s thugs shoot at the walls halfway down the passage at shoulder height and that will disable the sensor.+

Kharbyr hesitated again as he wondered whether the witch’s insight could really be so accurate. As he did so he became conscious of Yllithian’s warriors moving up behind him and felt a sense of mounting dread. The only way was forward and only Angevere could help him with that. Truly feeling like a puppet now, he directed the White Flames warriors where to shoot, as Angevere had ordered him. They used disintegrators to punch holes in the walls just to be sure, but they still made Kharbyr walk to the end of the passageway first.

The passage came to a dead end. Kharbyr stood in front of the blank wall in confusion for a moment before he noticed a slight breeze against his face. Closer inspection revealed that the wall in front of him was inching with infinitesimal slowness from left to right.

+Just wait here for now,+ Angevere whispered. +You’re still wondering how I can guide you through it. Trying to explain it to you would be like trying to describe colours to a blind person. Understand it this way. One who can see into the weft and weave of the warp can see into the future and the past, into destiny and desire, into action and reaction, because the void contains all of those possibilities.+

+So take heart, young Kharbyr. At this time and in this place it is a child’s game to see which footstep will bring about your doom or which path will lead you to your goal. For example, I can tell you that the real labyrinth begins at this point, and that this is one of its entrances.+

As Angevere fell silent a gap appeared at the left-hand edge of the wall and slowly widened like a maw opening. Through the opening another passageway was revealed that stretched off into the gloom. The passage was featureless apart from some fresh, ominous-looking stains and still at a slight angle to the one Kharbyr was in. As the wall inched towards making a perfect alignment he stepped impatiently through the entrance and into the labyrinth of the Black Descent. The only way forward was to get this over with.

Zykleiades was a patriarch noctis in the coven of the Black Descent. To his inferiors – the various masters, secretaries, elects, provosts, custodians and stewards over whom he held the power of life and death – his rank represented a degree of almost incomprehensible descent within the coven’s byzantine hierarchy. Most of these lesser coven members were only permitted to know the ranks of their immediate superiors and lived forever in the belief that they were getting closer to the hidden ruling powers within the coven with each advancement of their own. Some of them had never even heard of the rank of patriarch noctis. Nor would they ever do so throughout their entire miserable careers unless they fouled up so spectacularly that his presence was called for at their subsequent excruciation and execution.

Zykleiades had been promoted through the coven ranks a total of twenty-one times during his exceedingly long and eventful life. Each time new ranks and complexities had been revealed. Each time he had discovered himself to be now beholden to a whole raft of shadowy individuals that seemed if anything more numerous than they were before. By now he was convinced that he would never advance far enough to truly become one of those invisible rulers of the coven that might be speculated to exist at its lowest degree of descent. He was just as answerable to his superiors in the coven now as when he had joined its ranks as a lowly, wide-eyed wrack centuries ago.

He now stood in his chambers facing a dark mirror almost as tall as himself that had a rim of twisting leaves rendered in molecular carbon. Agitated clouds of inky blackness swirled on the mirror’s surface as a voice spoke from behind it. Vocal modulators had been applied to make the voice sound as sibilant and unrecognisable as an aural shadow. The individual communicating with him was ranked as a ‘Descendant Interlocutor’ and that was as much as a patriarch noctis like Zykleiades was permitted to know.

‘…retain control?’ the voice whispered. Zykleiades snapped his attention back to the last few seconds of conversation. His attention had drifted momentarily. It was becoming a common problem these days. Fortunately it was easy enough to cover his distraction.

‘The labyrinth is besieged!’ he cried with some feeling. ‘While I can appreciate the desire to retain control I can assure you that every means to do so is being fully deployed already.’

‘…Yet still our beautiful labyrinth is being overrun by vermin – precisely the kind of filth it is designed to exclude… This is… unacceptable.’

‘Then release more coven members to my control! Forgive me, Interlocutor, but I have already detailed how the forces at my disposal are insufficient for this allegedly minor task. The labyrinth was heavily damaged by the Dysjunction and the ur-ghuls… the ur-ghuls continue to appear in quite literally inexhaustible numbers despite their losses.’

‘…Others in the coven labour beneath the same difficulties as you and yet enjoy more success… Learn from their dedication.’

One of the compensations of Zykleiades’s rank was that withstanding the outright criticism of his superiors had become a less gruelling affair. He was not humiliated in front of his fellows to illustrate a point or given demeaning tasks to perform that would reinforce his menial relationship with the true exercise of power and authority. He had moved beyond such games. Instead he was simply being warned: improve your performance or face removal by your replacement.

‘As you wish,’ he said with resignation, ‘I shall redouble our efforts armed only with the materials on hand.’

‘…Ensure that you do…’ The clouded mirror cleared abruptly as the Interlocutor broke the connection.

Zykleiades stepped away from the mirror and wiped cold sweat from his face with shaking hands. The mirror now showed only a reflection of himself: a white, glistening face cut to display a wide, permanent smile amid hanging jowls that twisted into a beard-like mass of purple tendrils at his chin. Black, ribbed robes concealed the patriarch noctis’s surprisingly corpulent body while a pointed demi-hood rose from the nape of his neck to frame his pallid visage. He had made recent alterations to give himself the beard-like fringe of finely attuned sensory tendrils. Now they were giving him ample opportunity to experience the rank taste of his own fear.

Normally he would have said that another compensation of achieving the rank of patriarch noctis was that direct communications from his superiors became so rare as to be almost unknown. The fact that he had now received three of them in as many hours was highly disturbing. The Dysjunction and the renegade Bellathonis’s part in it all had already been a source of considerable alarm for Zykleiades even before hordes of ur-ghuls arrived, inexplicably obsessed with entering the labyrinth.

The patriarch noctis’s secret chambers were located in a series of wide, low rooms on differing levels nestled deep inside the labyrinth. How deep he did not know exactly. Like all coven members he was only taught the safe routes necessary for passage between a number of selected destinations, ‘interstices’ in the jargon of the coven. Wandering in the labyrinth without knowing the precise steps and timing needed to evade its innumerable death traps was tantamount to suicide – as the ur-ghuls were discovering to their cost. The troglodytic predators were dying by the thousands, clogging passageways, glutting traps, dulling blades with their numbers… and yet more continued to arrive. The labyrinth was designed to catch or kill individual intruders, certainly, but it was not designed to hold an army at bay. The only real blessing was that the ur-ghuls lacked weapons and direction.

All of Zykleiades’s rooms interconnected with one another via multiple archways and short flights of steps. Now the patriarch noctis shuffled restlessly through them as he tried to reason out a solution to his dilemma. His rooms were furnished with spindly-looking chairs and tables made of metal or carved bone. Skin-covered tomes and intricate alchemical apparatus gleamed on shelves in some rooms. Mosaics of dark gems and captured weaponry glittered from the walls while rich furs and exotic skins covered the floors. Being patriarch noctis did carry a few small compensations, he did have to admit.

While many of the pieces in his sanctum were of quite spectacular value, Zykleiades kept the majority of the collection for sentimental reasons. Each object represented a keepsake extorted out of some notable coup made by him: silvered alembics claimed from an old rival after his overthrow, pre-Fall furniture seized from an archon who had been unable to repay his debts, the rolled skins of an entire bloodline that had provoked the ire of the coven centuries before. Valueless junk in some cases, but every piece was precious to him.

A recent addition to Zykleiades’s chambers were the shrunken, hairless heads that hung beneath every archway. The patriarch noctis hated the sight of them. They served as a reminder that even before the Dysjunction struck, Bellathonis had been a poison within the coven. The renegade had somehow traversed the labyrinth and broken into Zykleiades’s own chambers. He still shook with rage and humiliation at the memory of the discovery. Zykleiades had had to increase his own security as a matter of course after that and the shrunken heads remained the most visible sign of the additions made.

A minimal level of consciousness still clung to the grisly artefacts, enough to register intruders and remember their passage or, as in this case, to warn of their approach. Their eyes rolled and lips moved as they struggled to form words with no breath behind them. Nonetheless words formed in the air seemingly from a hundred dry throats – it was synthesised, unfortunately, as there had been no time to create a more elegant solution.

‘Ekarynis, master elect of nine, has entered,’ the voices intoned.

Zykleiades looked up to see the hatchet-faced master elect approaching, his hands tucked within the sleeves of his slate-grey robe. The master elect moved with an overly precise, mechanical gait as though his limbs were constructed of wheels and steel rods. Long ago Ekarynis had his eyes replaced with flat plates of black crystal that now winked ominously in the uncertain light.

‘Master Elect Ekarynis,’ Zykleiades said formally, ‘I am displeased. This continued trespass–’

‘–Has encountered a new development,’ the master elect interrupted brazenly. The sound of Ekarynis’s voice was a special kind of torture: a grating, slicing, crushing mockery of language without a sense of warmth or comradeship with any living thing. For a wild moment Zykleiades feared that his superiors had already decided on his replacement and that the master elect was about to make an attempt on his life.

But that was not Ekarynis’s style at all. The master elect’s preferred methodology was one of relentless endurance. Where others faltered or failed Ekarynis drove ever onward like a machine – unemotional, tireless, soulless. He advanced through the coven via the simple expedient of stepping over the bodies of those who had fallen ahead of him. The master elect was punctilious, but he was loyal (in his own way). He would simply wait for the patriarch noctis’s downfall without acting to hasten it. Naturally he would also not act to prevent it.

‘What new development?’ Zykleiades snapped, his underlying fear manifesting itself as irritation. ‘Don’t waste my time with mysteries, Ekarynis, my patience has grown thin with them.’

‘A force of kabalite warriors have entered the labyrinth and are advancing through it in a highly determined fashion,’ Ekarynis grated.

‘Which kabal?’ Zykleiades blurted in astonishment.

‘The warriors bear the sigil of the Black Heart.’

The colour drained from Zykleiades’s tendrils at the news. It was just as he’d feared. Asdrubael Vect had uncovered the coven’s albeit tenuous connection with the Dysjunction and decided to punish them for it.

‘Who… who is leading them?’ he whispered.

‘The renegade Bellathonis is leading the warriors,’ the master elect noted with acidic distaste, ‘and due to his assistance they are proceeding rapidly and with very few casualties.’

‘Impossible,’ Zykleiades murmured. ‘No… no, Vect would never swallow Bellathonis’s lies so completely as to send him back here with a force of his own. Something else is going on if Bellathonis is involved… A ruse of some sort, a third party trying to make us antagonise Vect… But who? Who has that renegade found that has common cause to act against us?’

Ekarynis had been about to speak but he fell silent at Zykleiades’s rhetorical question and appeared to be considering it in a literal fashion. The flat black crystals in his eye sockets winked as the master elect tilted his head first one way and then another to consider the problem. After a moment Ekarynis’s head came up and his glittering gaze locked with that of the patriarch noctis.

‘Archon Nyos Yllithian of the White Flames,’ Ekarynis spat. ‘Recent reports indicate White Flames have acted in open rebellion against the supreme overlord’s authority. Yllithian also has prior association with Bellathonis and is believed to have sponsored the renegade’s actions in the build-up to the Dysjunction.’

Zykleiades narrowed his eyes shrewdly at Ekarynis’s summation. He had spoken with Nyos Yllithian at Corespur very recently. As the Dysjunction broke upon the city Vect had summoned the surviving leaders to Corespur to issue them with instructions and, doubtless more importantly in the tyrant’s eyes, to reassert his dominance. Zykleiades had attended as the representative of the coven of the Black Descent.

Unexpectedly the archon of the White Flames had accosted Zykleiades outside the audience chamber. With veiled words Yllithian had strongly implied that he knew about Bellathonis’s role in triggering the Dysjunction. He had further suggested that he would be amenable to joining forces to eliminate the troublesome haemonculus once and for all. The patriarch noctis briefly outlined the encounter with Yllithian to Ekarynis.

‘A calculated lie to determine your allegiance and intentions,’ Ekarynis pronounced with finality.

‘Or, admittedly with decreased probability, it was a statement of intent that later events have caused the noble archon to reconsider – a Dysjunction renders all events fluid and chaotic,’ Zykleiades added brusquely. ‘In either event I concur that Yllithian is the most likely suspect as Bellathonis’s patron. Furthermore if we are correct in that assumption it is likely that the archon in question is here, commanding his kabalites directly.’

‘Yllithian is the only possible suspect,’ Ekarynis insisted.

Zykleiades peevishly waved away the master elect’s pedantic narrow-mindedness. ‘I believe that I just said I concur with your findings. Even if we assume the supposition to be correct, though, the question then becomes, what is it that has brought Bellathonis and Yllithian together against the coven? They could not have known the difficulties we are having. They undertook a mortal risk by entering the labyrinth, so we can assume their need must be great. What is it that they want?’

Ekarynis tilted his head to one side in calculation. Zykleiades waited for the master elect to come to the same conclusion he’d made the moment Yllithian’s name had come up. Bellathonis’s motivations were easy to understand: revenge, avarice, showmanship, hubris or petty vindictiveness were all distinct possibilities and the truth probably hovered between them all. There was only one possible reason for Yllithian to have an interest in entering the labyrinth of the Black Descent.

‘They seek the release of Archon Xelian,’ the master elect concluded.

Zykleiades nodded thoughtfully in confirmation, his mind already moving ahead to calculate how to shift the pieces under his control and alter the game board in his favour. The problem with Ekarynis was that he had no imagination, no flair for speculation without hard data. The master elect might become patriarch noctis one day, but he still had a great deal to learn about how to manipulate people when they weren’t screaming in agony.

‘Gather up all your haemonculi, their wracks and their grotesques,’ Zykleiades said, ‘even the Talos if any are still functional. Concentrate them around the sixty-fourth interstice. We need to put on a show of force rather than sit passively by while Yllithian corners us in our lair.’

‘The kabalites are heavily armed,’ Ekarynis warned. The grinding discord of his voice made the statement into a sharp denouncement of Zykleiades’s competence.

‘I’d expect nothing less from Yllithian – the White Flames remain one of the wealthiest kabals despite enduring more than sixty centuries of Vect’s malice. As I said, only a show of force is required, Ekarynis, something that will confirm to them that they are on the right track and close to their goal.’

Ekarynis cocked his head to one side as he assimilated the new data. ‘And then?’ the master elect asked succinctly.

‘And then we give them what they’re looking for,’ Zykleiades said with a wide smile.

CHAPTER 15

DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS

Motley crept cautiously through the ruined workshops, slinking from pillar to bench to cabinet to doorway. The place was in semi-darkness lit only by guttering fires and sparking power feeds. He believed that he was in a cantonment far down in the city from High Commorragh and Sorrow Fell, somewhere close to the fringes of what was known as the Old City. The simple truth was that he was more than a little lost.

After being ejected from Vect’s ziggurat Motley had drifted aimlessly for a while. His flip-belt had saved him from an immediate and messy kinetically induced fate on some barbed spire. The anti-grav suspensor harness was concealed beneath his costume as it would be during any other performance, an adjunct that enabled the spectacular acrobatics sometimes called for during a Masque. In this case the simple device had saved his life.

He had watched the ziggurat and its accompanying armada from a shattered rooftop as they pushed onwards through the towering spires of High Commorragh kilometres overhead. The fringes of their advance were marked by the false-lightning of their weaponry and a persistent wail of psychic anguish as Vect’s boot heel was reapplied to the throats of his people.

When Motley spotted a smaller force splitting away from the main body his interest had been sufficiently piqued to begin following it. It was the first sign he’d seen of anything breaking formation with Vect’s aerial armada, so evidently some sort of scheme was afoot. The offshoot had spiralled lazily downwards, and using the flip-belt he’d bounded along from rooftop to steeple to buttress keeping pace with them.

He’d kept them in sight until they sank completely into the tangled streets of Low Commorragh. There, unaccountably, Motley had lost them. By the time he arrived at the spot there were none of the Venoms or Raiders in sight. They had vanished into the riven cityscape as effectively as hunting cats slinking into a jungle.

The area Motley was now investigating had been little more than a bazaar formed by families of artisans working together under the titular lead of a petty archon. With the mutual protection afforded by one another the craftsmen were generally left free to pursue their work without constant fear of enslavement by trueborn from higher up the food chain. It had been just one of a patchwork of tiny territories that existed in Low Commorragh. Among the great sprawl of spires, tiers, districts and blocks that formed Commorragh, the town-sized area he was now traversing was referred to merely as a street. The Commorrites called it the Street of Knives.

Like so much of the Commorragh that Motley remembered this had once been a place of dark wonders. Millennia of accumulated wisdom and talent had been dedicated to the crafting of truly fantastic artefacts here. Admittedly they were nearly all weapons of one kind or another; sharp, light, wonderfully balanced and absolutely lethal – or not, if their makers desired it. Many of the weapons that had been so lovingly crafted in these workshops were made not merely to kill but to inflict the maximum amount of harm. Rifles that launched high-velocity splinters of complex crystallised toxins, neural agonisers, flesh-shredding flails, envenomed blades, on and on; a whole list of horrors created with all the wicked ingenuity of long ages spent plotting in the dark.

It was all very different from the equivalent spaces on the eldar craftworlds. There in light, open halls the psychic bonesingers drew their creations into existence from the very stuff of creation. Wraithbone and other psychoplastic materials would be shaped into the necessary forms over months or years, each a unique expression of those dedicated to its creation. There were no such methods available to the psychically blunt dark kin. They, or more accurately their slaves, physically shaped their weapons with tools and machines from the very quintessence of diamond or steel, forged them in plasmatic fires and instilled them with energies stolen from the stars themselves.

Motley stepped lightly, taking care to avoid the spilled coils of monofilament wire and scattered blades gleaming dully on the ground. This place had been abandoned quickly; perhaps it had already been closed when the Dysjunction struck the city. The rank stink of warp energies and daemon-spoor clung to the area, but that had become more and more commonplace the further Motley had descended into Commorragh’s labyrinthine lower tiers.

Motley disliked creeping, or even slinking. He would much rather have sauntered or even skipped, but sadly this was neither the time nor the place for such antics. The intrusions of Chaos across the city snarled at the edges of his consciousness like tiny nails of migraine being hammered into his skull. There seemed to be a gradual quelling of the sharply ominous feeling Motley had felt when he had first arrived in the city, but it was being replaced by something that he felt was entirely worse.

It was getting hotter. The further he penetrated into the Street of Knives the more the temperature climbed. At first Motley feared he would have to turn back and find a different route because of a fire ahead. It was not the first time he’d run into such a complication, but this time he could smell no smoke at all. Ahead of him a wavering orange glow spilled across the crooked thoroughfare he had been following, but even that lacked the fiery animation of a true blaze.

Motley cautiously made his way forwards to get a better view of the source of the light and heat. At a twist in the crooked thoroughfare a side alley cut between the buildings before ending abruptly at a set of broad, rough-hewn steps heading downwards. The alley walls were bright with reflected light and a furnace heat met Motley as he came to the head of the stair. Further down he could see that the steps had been swept away as cleanly as if they’d been cut with a knife. He edged downwards as far as he could go and hung on to a protruding strut so that he could lean outwards and look around from the bottom of the steps.

A massive net of firefalls was drooling slowly down from the upper tiers. Long, glutinous strings of molten metal and rock spilled down the structures on both sides of Motley. The strands were braiding and twisting their way down as they ate into the fascia of the buildings and re-sculpted it into a smoking, vertiginous wasteland. The radiant heat was fierce against Motley’s exposed skin as he stared at the spectacle in wonder.

It could only be the by-product of some unimaginable blaze occurring higher up in one of the spires. Perhaps a ship had crashed and its fusion-fuelled heart was burning its way downwards, or a blaze the size of a city had generated a self-sustaining firestorm fed by its own rotating winds until it roared white-hot. He shook his head ruefully. The firefall could equally be the result of weaponry unleashed by the dark kin themselves. Whatever the cause the scene exemplified his worst fears for the city – that either neglect or overreaction would leave it a lifeless wasteland ruled over by inimical elemental forces.

Motley looked down. There were places to go further down where sections of steps, balconies and balustrades had survived the molten downpour of metal and rock. The protruding chunks were unevenly spaced and none too stable-looking. The flow of the firefall altered moment by moment so there was no way to judge if what started out as a safe path would soon become inundated with slowly drooling, fiery death. Towards the very bottom of the cliff-like expanse it disappeared from view into a dense, roiling darkness that seemed to be trying to climb upwards and was only being kept in check by the frequent firefalls.

The Harlequin was far from averse to risks – being foolhardy was very much a part of his reason for existence – but attempting to traverse the constantly shifting firefalls as he was contemplating doing, on nerves and flip-belt alone, would have been a truly suicidal act. He pouted and allowed common sense to have its boring way (again!) and turned back to head up the steps to the Street of Knives.

He stopped short. A group of dark kin were gathered at the top of the steps. They were clad in barbed armour and had an array of equally barbed weaponry that they were pointing straight at him. He began to raise one hand in a jaunty wave but he could see from their auras that they weren’t just being cautious. They were intent on his death.

He turned the movement of his arm into the beginning of a handspring instead, twisting and pivoting sideways in one fluid motion. He triggered his holo-suit as he moved so that his outline shattered into a cloud of glittering fragments. The high-walled alley had become a death trap and now it sang with the high-pitched staccato of splinter weapons firing on full auto.

Stone chips flew as hyper-velocity rounds whip-sawed across the steps after him. Motley spun desperately to stay ahead of the barrage of fire. He ran partway up a wall to find temporary escape before having to flip backwards to land on the steps again. More rounds chased him to the edge of the precipice and he teetered at the edge for a split second, arms windmilling comically. Motley gave up with a wild laugh and jumped, flinging himself into the super-heated air with the thought that boring old common sense didn’t always get its own way.

He flipped in midair and angled himself to land on an outthrust shelf of rock a dozen metres down from the alley mouth. A thick rope of liquid fire was running down the wall nearby and pooling at one end of the shelf before oozing over the edge to continue its downward fall. The heat was intolerable and Motley was forced to quickly leap again as his skin started to blister.

This time he tried to propel himself horizontally as far as he could. He landed on a skeletal framework of girders and grilles that had been heavily damaged but still clung to the cliff-face of the city like broken cobwebs. Lava-like flows from above had passed straight through the framework, warping and buckling it as they went. In places the metal still glowed a sullen cherry-red and the structure creaked alarmingly beneath even Motley’s feather-light weight as he landed. He held perfectly still as he glanced back towards the alley mouth for signs of pursuit.

He couldn’t even see the alley with its broken steps from where he was. The smoke and slow cataracts of flame obscured too much of the scene. The point he had jumped from might be any one of a hundred dark crevices in the riven cliff face above. He was safe for now – as much as could be claimed by an individual in his somewhat precarious position only metres away from fiery death. Where had the assailants come from? Motley was not easy to take by surprise; he should have been able to sense their presence and intentions long before actually seeing them.

The framework lurched abruptly beneath his feet and Motley spun to confront his true hunter.

‘You don’t even have a weapon ready, I’m disappointed,’ purred Lady Aurelia Malys as she stalked forwards across the twisted metal.

The archon of the Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue was a shimmering vision of exotic beauty in the light of the firefalls. Her armour was fitted to accentuate every alluring curve, her hair was a river of pure midnight touched by flame and her red, red lips held a secret promise of maddening desire.

‘Clearly I am disarmed by your beauty, dear lady,’ Motley said with an ingenuous smile, ‘although the truth is that I’m more of a lover than a fighter, which is to say I’m more a clown than a grim warrior type. Perhaps you were hoping to challenge me to a duel or something? Not really my thing I’m afraid.’

Malys smiled slyly in return before coquettishly snapping open a fan of blades as if to hide her indiscreet pleasure. ‘There’s no need to be so shy. I don’t really want to kill you, little clown,’ she assured him, and Motley thought that never had a sweeter lie been told. ‘I just want to find out if it’s possible.’

She flicked her fan almost casually towards Motley. With the gesture monomolecular shards no bigger than a fingernail detached from the fan and streaked towards his exposed throat. The Harlequin twisted sharply at the waist to avoid the micro-blades but kept his eyes locked on hers.

‘I am every bit as mortal as you are. I can assure you of that, my lady…’ he said gallantly before swiftly ducking as a second flight of blades followed the first, ‘…and I won’t fight you without cause.’

‘You’d dare accuse me of mortality?’ Malys’s beautiful face twisted with contempt. ‘I’m no slave to time and chance. I’ll live forever unless my wits or my strength fail me. Which they will not.’

So saying she drew her sword with her free hand and flourished it at Motley. With a blade measuring over a metre it was unusually long for a single-handed Commorrite weapon. The first third of the weapon below the point was elegantly curved in the fashion so beloved of Commorrites and the metal was inscribed with flowing runes that glowed with inner fires. Motley smiled again, this time more apologetically.

‘Forgive me for my thoughtless offence, my lady, I did not mean to impugn your timelessness by including you in my confessions of my own fragility. Self-belief is truly the greatest asset bred by this magnificent city and you are especially well-favoured in that regard– ’

Malys took a leisurely cut at his head. Motley skipped back a pace to avoid the swinging blade and felt the metal grille they stood upon shift minutely under his feet. Over Malys’s shoulder he could see a reddish glow getting brighter through the murk, perhaps another drool of liquid flame spreading closer to them.

‘–and once again I must insist on my passivity,’ Motley said with more urgency. ‘We’ve no reason to fight at a time like this.’

‘You’ve said that you’re a lover and not a fighter,’ Malys said as she sent the point of her blade darting at Motley’s eyes. ‘I find that fighting and seduction are very much alike, so by your own testimony you should be well practised.’

Motley twisted again to avoid the point and was almost caught as Malys turned the thrust into a short slash with a flick of her wrist. ‘I confess I fail to see the direct connection,’ he replied easily as he dodged. ‘A lot of sweating and grunting can be involved in both activities, I suppose, but the end objectives might be said to be diametrically opposed.’

Lady Malys lowered her blade a fraction and gave Motley a positively luminous smile before demurely hiding it from him behind her fan. So far she had just been toying with him. Her attacks were lazy and almost playful, but there was still a hint of the blinding speed and skill that she possessed to back them up. The Harlequin kept his weight carefully balanced as he tried to weigh the odds of escape.

‘Very good,’ Malys said and took another idle cut at Motley. ‘I meant that both incorporate three distinct phases. They begin with the pursuit, finding your partner and making them aware of your existence so that they know that they are desired. Next comes the first intimacy where your true passion is revealed.’

With those words Lady Malys exploded into action, spinning and slashing with her long blade and fan of knives as she unleashed a whirlwind of blows. Despite his caution Motley was caught off guard by the swiftness and strength of the resulting storm. He was reduced to ducking and diving to stay ahead of the flickering blade as she drove him back across the twisted gratings like a callow student.

She forced him back until only the yawning gulf was at his back and only his toes were still on creaking metal. A final, contemptuous thrust came arrowing in for his heart – a blow that dared him to leap for safety into the distinctly unsafe void or surrender his life.

Lady Malys’s blade shivered aside at the last instant as it was deflected by a short, curved blade that appeared in Motley’s hand as if by magic.

‘So you do come armed after all,’ Malys mocked as she flicked her steel fan at his wrist to sever the tendons. ‘So small though – you must feel inadequate around the incubi with their great klaives.’

The Harlequin knocked aside the razor-edged fan and ducked beneath Malys’s follow-through swing with her sword, rolling beneath the hissing blade to gain a pace back onto the shaky framework. ‘I find it adequate for my needs,’ he explained equably as he parried another of her attacks, ‘although I always consider my wits, limited as they are, to be a better weapon.’

The course of any battle between a long blade and a short one wielded by fighters of equivalent skill would inevitably be dictated by the individual with the greater reach. At least so Motley had been taught when he learned to handle a blade from beings that had spent whole lifetimes in the contemplation of such things. He tried to keep her talking to distract her while he kept his distance.

‘For example, it seems obvious to me now that you must have been the one I was following down from the upper city,’ Motley remarked brightly. ‘You’re off on a little job of your own, aren’t you? Patently with Vect’s blessing since you made no secret of your departure from his armada of doom.’

She rushed at him again and he gave ground. The blade-masters had taught him patience. Attempts by a combatant with lesser reach to push for a resolution would almost certainly have a fatal outcome for them rather than their opponent. Patience was key.

‘Your wits must be as limited as your blade if it’s taken you this long to reach that conclusion,’ Malys laughed as she cut and thrust at him mercilessly. ‘When my kabalites reported we were being followed I was delighted to hear by whom. I decided that I simply must meet you myself. Ha!’

Motley sprang back from an eviscerating cut that left Malys wide open to a counter blow. The only real recourse for the short-blade wielder was to defend until their adversary was generous enough to supply them with an opening by overreaching – like Malys had just done. Motley ignored the opportunity and danced away instead, sketching a courtly bow as Malys rushed after him.

‘I regret our lack of a formal introduction, dear lady,’ Motley said. ‘I’m called Motley and it’s a great pleasure to meet you, Lady Aurelia Malys of the Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue.’

‘I know who you are,’ Malys laughed as she cut at him again, ‘and I know that you went to visit dear Asdrubael. What did you tell him when you were there? Share it with me and I might let you live… perhaps only shorn of a limb or two.’

Malys’s sword missed Motley by millimetres. Again he was forced to deflect it at the last instant with his knife. To some extent a knifeman’s decisions became easier in a fight like this. A full defence would keep even a mediocre fighter alive for a limited time. It was the urge to attack, to take the offensive, that killed even the most skilful combatants in the end.

‘No secret there,’ Motley grinned at her. ‘I’ll happily share intimate details of my conversation with the supreme overlord – I warned him of dangers from the so-called gods of Chaos, that there had been schemes set in motion to allow their influence into the city. He told me that he believed what I had to say.’

‘Very good,’ Malys said without any apparent care for the message Motley had brought to Vect, ‘so why did he order you to follow me?’

‘He didn’t–’ Motley replied without thought as he ducked another swing.

Malys gave a radiant smile of triumph. ‘Then he can’t complain about me killing his agent, can he?’ she said and came after him again with redoubled fury. This time her strikes relied on strength rather than skill as she pressed her full advantage in reach and leverage. She was actively mocking him by taking his unwillingness to strike back and rubbing it in his face.

Motley ducked, dived and parried as the framework beneath them made ever more distressed imprecations protesting of imminent collapse. He concentrated his considerable skills on protecting himself and hoped that she would tire.

The lessons of the blade-masters about patient defence were further reinforced by the fact that Motley had no desire to kill his assailant on this occasion. However, he was fast reaching the point where he could foresee himself trying to hurt her simply to stay alive. If the ferocity of her attacks didn’t subside soon he felt as if he would be the first one to tire.

‘I’ve been… polite enough to grant… full disclosure,’ Motley panted after a seemingly endless period amid the deadly dance of blades. ‘Why not indulge a poor, doomed fool by doing the same? Where is it you were going to?’

Lady Malys’s lips quirked in a mischievous smile. ‘You think I overlook my objective? I may choose to dally with you but my kabalites aren’t sitting on their hands waiting for me to finish. In fact they should be almost there by now…’

She paused abruptly in her attack and smoothly took up a guard stance. She looked poised and magnificent against the firefalls as she stood and regarded him coolly. Motley, however, thought he could detect the slightest tremor in her blade as though her grip was becoming weakened by fatigue. It appeared she was not entirely indefatigable after all. He forced himself not to relax his own guard. With a Commorrite appearances could be deceptive and anything could be a trick.

‘Asdrubael would say that the better question to ask is not “where am I going?”’ Malys offered with a sly glance, ‘but rather “why am I being sent there?”. I’ll admit that I can provide you with no satisfactory answer to that question. Our supreme overlord treats information as his most precious treasure and he’s overly miserly with it. He commands. We obey.’

‘I’d not believed the archons of Commorragh to be such blindly obedient drones,’ Motley replied tartly, ‘I’m sure you have at least an idea of what you’re about – that would seem in keeping with your purported predilection for precocious cunning.’

She shook her head in response, glanced up and then began to circle him very slowly. ‘Flattery does become you, fool, but I won’t tell you my suspicions. I’m as miserly as Asdrubael when it comes to information. I will, however, offer you a few observations I’ve made just for the entertainment you’ve provided me with so far.

‘First – I won’t be the only one that Asdrubael’s sent out on a special task. He never has just one scheme in motion. He’ll have several plans going that are all capable of destroying his opponents because he trusts no single element to succeed. What I’m doing could be a ruse, a secondary objective or a vital cog in whatever infernal scheme he’s building up to next. Regardless, there will be others being readied, you can count on it.

‘Second – Asdrubael Vect is partial to weapons. He likes unexpected, devastating, irresistible weapons best of all. It’s not like he’s incapable of subtlety, quite the reverse. But unlike a lot of us here in Commorragh – and I’m including myself in that sweeping statement – he understands when the time for subtlety is over. When that happens he gets the biggest weapon he can find and ends the fight before anyone else has a chance to realise how far he’s about to escalate it.

‘Third and last is that I was wrong about you not being Vect’s agent. If he’s seen you and then let you get out of his sight alive while the city’s in this state you’re working for him whether you know it or not–’

At that moment Fate took an unexpected hand in affairs. A great gob of liquid fire dislodged from higher up dropped towards them like a slow meteor falling to earth. Motley leapt back and felt the grating he landed upon tilt at a crazy angle. Smoke and flames erupted across his view as the fireball crashed into the already mangled framework and carried what remained of it away into the depths with a terrifying scream of tortured metal.

Motley turned and ran up the tilted grating as he felt it beginning to drop away beneath his feet. The tiny boost he could get from sprinting on such treacherous ground made his leap feeble even after the assistance of the flip-belt. He fell short of the protruding metal stanchion he was aiming for and was sent skipping down the wall. An angular wedge of stone struck at his falling shins and almost sprawled him onto a narrow ledge that had been invisible from higher up.

He twisted himself in midair to grasp at the ledge with a grateful sigh of relief. Looking up, he saw dangling remnants of the framework where he had fought with Lady Malys. His sharp eyes picked out a figure holding on to a piece of the wreckage, her long sword still in hand. He waved and called out as she started her long climb to safety.

‘The third act in your drama of seduction and slash-or-murder?’ Motley yelled glibly up to her. ‘You never said what it was!’

Lady Malys laughed musically, the sweet sound of it drifting down to Motley across the hiss and crackle of the surrounding firefalls.

‘The final act,’ she called, ‘is the fulfilment of all that expectation and passion. Two entities are brought together, for better or worse, and become intimately entwined. Neither of them walks away entirely unchanged!’

CHAPTER 16

XHAKORUAKH’S ASCENT

The first brother was destined to fall into his grasp as easily as overripe fruit, the Decapitator could feel it in his bones. The battle beyond the walls formed the perfect distraction as Kheradruakh slipped between shadows and angles to gain entry. While the brother’s minions crashed and struggled against one another the Decapitator quietly slipped through their ranks and made his way to the vault of ascension. There he settled into the deeper darkness as patiently as a spider in its web. He would wait until the time was right.

Waiting for the precise moment to strike was not only a matter of form. The power-play of energies unleashed by the rival siblings had confirmed the Decapitator’s most dolorous assessments about the forces at work in Aelindrach. The brother he had chosen to stalk first had struck unholy pacts with forces outside Aelindrach for the strength to keep his throne. The challenger outside had sunk just as low for a chance to usurp it.

Kheradruakh’s lips curled back over his yellowed fangs at the thought of such shameful compromise. The tainted thinking of the outsiders pervaded everything the brothers did: power, possessions and rulership were their goals even if they had to bend their knee to eldritch gods to get them.

This was not the way of Aelindrach. The shadow-realm was a dark lover to be embraced, a cruel paramour to be coaxed and worshipped in its own right. It was a place where the purity of darkness and fear compacted like a diamond into something so hard-edged and beautiful that it scarred the mind to grasp it. The idea that Aelindrach could be tamed and exploited by naked ambition was a truly offensive concept to him. Kheradruakh found he gripped his long, sharp blade tightly as he waited in the shadows and wondered at the stirring of passions he had long thought to be extinguished.

The shadow-skein tightened inescapably towards a conclusion. With his forces facing disaster the defeated king sought to take the coward’s path and flee. No guards were in the vault to impede Kheradruakh’s progress as he unfolded from his hiding place and struck. He caught the deposed king just as he began to climb the chains to escape. His falling body became tangled in the dark metal links where it jerked like a grotesque puppet. The Decapitator ignored it as he scooped up his prize and stepped back into the shadows. He was just in time. The chamber doors burst asunder as the other brother stormed in to claim his worthless throne.

Kheradruakh did not wait to see the outcome. He was already speeding to his hidden place, his secret ossuary deep in the heart of Aelindrach. He would strip the flesh from his prize, taste of the skull and examine it with his own sightless eyes to judge its worth. Then it would join his collection and give proper praise to the dark for all eternity, or if it proved unworthy it would be discarded.

Then and only then would he return for the other brother.

The dark was rising in Low Commorragh. From the armoured flanks of the port of lost souls to the jagged eaves of Nightsound Ghulen the shadow-stuff of Aelindrach bled into Commorragh and claimed it for its own. The dark was like a palpable, living thing that oozed out of drains and through culverts to lurk in the shattered ruins left by the Dysjunction. In the narrow streets and crooked alleys the darkness spread and multiplied as it infested everything at the foot of the spires. The creeping shadows swallowed up whole groups of survivors that had endured the psychic shock of the Dysjunction and then the citywide quakes and daemonic incursions of its aftermath. Their very fear seemed to feed the encroaching dark and call forth its slinking denizens to quell their unthinkable hunger.

Bloated packs of diseased ur-ghuls swarmed through Low Commorragh like plague-rats slick with the foul ordure of their own corruption. Hooked claws scrabbled across broken stone and scent-pits hissed in the dark as thousands of the frenzied horrors hunted down anything too slow or too weak to escape from them. The eyeless predators were well suited to the narrow, shadowed streets and they quickly emptied them of prey. Still ravenous, the packs pressed onwards, always following the spreading stain leaking out of the shadow-realm of Aelindrach. Their unquenchable thirst drove the ur-ghuls ever upwards to places where other predators lurked.

The strongest and most astute Commorrites had long since fought their way into defensible locations. They had barricaded and secured them with everything available, then recruited or murdered any latecomers, or else been murdered by them in turn and so, by the feral laws of Commorragh, forfeited their right to security. In many cases the improvised strongholds had already made tentative alliances with their nearest neighbours against mutual foes. Many were giving heed to the rumours of the White Flames’ rebellion and weighing the gains to be made versus the risks to be run by taking on the mantle of loyalist or rebel.

As the dark rose around these tiny survivor-fortresses their inhabitants did not feel fear. Instead they congratulated themselves on their foresight in protecting themselves. They sealed off the entry points and set lamps to keep the shadows at bay. They patrolled their corridors and landings as they kept a close watch. When the hissing tide of ur-ghuls crashed against their doors they took up weapons and threw them back so that they stood as unconquered islands of light in a midnight sea.

Lady Malys’s Poisoned Tongue kabalites fought their way down to Valzho Sinister and only just made it to the brass-bound portals of that particular underworld ahead of packs of ravening ur-ghuls. Around the labyrinth of the Black Descent swarms of the foul troglodytes gave up their obsessive efforts to pierce the deadly maze and began to climb for the upper city in unprecedented numbers.

As the creatures began to broach High Commorragh and the fringes of Sorrow Fell their advance became frustrated. Shimmering boundaries of force were in place that blocked off streets, avenues and entire districts. The flood of ur-ghuls was split and redirected, channelled and dammed as they became caught up in a confusing maze that had been called into being by Vect from his throne in distant Corespur.

Such tricks were not designed to keep the tenebrous, plague-ridden hordes at bay forever. Some sent packs of ur-ghuls into box canyons and dead ends overlooked by enough firepower to wipe them out in an instant. Others took them out into open courts and plazas where they became prey for marauding gangs of reavers, hellions or scourges.

However, by far the majority of the invaders from Aelindrach were gradually directed into a single area of High Commorragh – the broad swath of wrecked wasteland surrounding the White Flames fortress. Patient observers from Valossian Sythrac’s besiegers took note of the fortress weaponry as it visited high-energy carnage upon the skulking ur-ghuls. The survivors were driven below into the tunnels of the foundation strata, where they posed an entirely new problem for the defenders of the White Flames fortress.

The dark was rising, yet it had reached its limits, so it seemed. The ur-ghuls, unable to make an impression on the upper towers of Commorragh, slunk back into the shadows. For the thousands of survivor-fortresses clinging on in Low Commorragh it seemed a victory, a moment of respite amidst the disaster-strewn times of the Dysjunction.

So it seemed until the coming of the mandrakes.

‘I remember the first time I saw this place,’ Xhakoruakh rumbled contemplatively. ‘He who spawned my brother and I showed it to us long ago. He promised it would be the wellspring of future greatness for Aelindrach. In truth it has changed little beneath Azoruakh’s rulership. I shall eclipse his reign.’

‘In this fond memory of yours your brother would not happen to be headless, I assume?’ Bellathonis snapped with a trace of irritation. Emotional self-indulgence annoyed him at the best of times.

They were standing in the throne room and watching as the lifeless corpse of Azoruakh was lowered from the hanging chains and borne away. Recent experiences had caused the haemonculus to conclude that he generally disliked mysteries, and mysteriously headless bodies doubly so. Xhakoruakh seemed to have become even more bloated than before and the ugly rusted scythe in his hands was emitting the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh. The shadow-king appeared to be introspective in his moment of victory.

Xhakoruakh continued as if Bellathonis had not spoken. ‘We were young then, barely suckled at Aelindrach’s teat, yet even then we knew we would be rivals one day – that this moment would come. I think our maker intended it to be that way.’

‘You don’t find it troubling to find your brother like this?’ Bellathonis insisted. ‘That someone entered the chamber, removed his head and then exited with it while we were standing right outside the door?’

Bellathonis was disturbed by the way that Xhakoruakh’s minions were reacting to the death of Azoruakh. He would expect to see shock and fear. Instead they whispered among themselves excitedly, nodding wisely as if the event had been entirely foreseeable or even pre-ordained.

‘The Decapitator came for him,’ Xhakoruakh shrugged as if that explained everything. Before Bellathonis could reply Xagor scurried over from where he had been examining the body in detail.

‘Single cut left to right. Large, straight-edged power weapon. Very clean, very precise,’ Xagor chattered nervously. ‘Cranium entirely absent. Assume taken by attacker.’

Bellathonis nodded distractedly as he considered Xhakoruakh’s statement further. In his studies about the shadow-realm he’d come across occasional references to a legendary figure named The Decapitator, Kheradruakh – literally ‘He Who Hunts Heads’. He’d thought of the Decapitator as a mythical figure, a paragon for the mandrakes rather like the Father of Scorpions was a paragon for the incubi – the first and greatest of them or some similar nonsense. It was unsettling to know that there really was an untraceable killer on the loose who was sufficiently expert to be both feared and respected by the mandrakes.

‘Master, this one made another observation,’ Xagor leaned in closer and hissed in a stage-whisper to Bellathonis. ‘Marks of Chaos on the body! Rapid mutation!’

Bellathonis’s eyes narrowed and he stole another glance at the body as it was hauled unceremoniously out of the chamber. The wrack was right: too many fingers on one hand, one foot curling itself into a bird-like claw. Azoruakh had become corrupted by the daemonic influences from beyond the veil just as Xhakoruakh had.

For a moment Bellathonis experienced a curious tightening sensation around his chest and forehead at the sight. It was an autonomic bodily response he recognized from his own test subjects as the onset of fear. It was interesting to note how the body he was inhabiting responded without any conscious input from its current occupant. It seemed that fear of the void, or at least fear of infection by its unpredictable energies, had been something deeply ingrained in young Kharbyr. There again the real Kharbyr had been to accursed Shaa-Dom in person. He might be said to have had more intimate experience of the untrammelled power of the void than Bellathonis could claim himself.

The seeds of corruption may or may not have been present within the shadow-realm before the Dysjunction, but its impact had certainly caused them to sprout there with frightening vigour. After Bellathonis had evaded the Black Descent’s assassination attempts Aelindrach had seemed like a safe haven to escape to. Now it was beginning to feel very much like a trap, or a prison with some particularly nasty inmates.

‘So what next for your kingdom now that your throne has been rightfully re-acquired?’ Bellathonis asked Xhakoruakh.

Decades spent interacting with Commorrite archons both high and low enabled the haemonculus to keep all his fears and suppositions carefully concealed behind a pallid mask of superciliousness. The sable giant finally tore his attention away from the hanging chains and turned it upon Bellathonis with the air of one indulging an overly demanding pet.

‘Aelindrach has been united under my rule. A few renegades may choose to hide and sulk, but after this…’ Xhakoruakh gestured reverently towards the hanging chains, ‘…this blessing from the Decapitator, no one can deny my power.’

‘His intercession certainly cleared the way for you in an unexpected fashion,’ Bellathonis observed somewhat sceptically. ‘No climactic duel to the death between the two rivals. No battle royal where you both got to truly test your strengths – and the favour of your respective patrons in full…’

Xhakoruakh shook his great head slowly and boomed, ‘No. No final battle. My brother was fleeing when the Decapitator took him. Azoruakh sought escape from Aelindrach at the end – he was a coward and a traitor to the last.’

‘Fleeing? How so?’ Bellathonis said. ‘There is no other way out of this room save the one we entered by – although admittedly that was no barrier to the escape of this Decapitator character of yours.’

The shadow-king chuckled. It was an ugly, thudding sound like cudgels smacking into flesh. The bloated giant was still chuckling as he turned and waddled over to settle himself rather awkwardly into the throne with the iron scythe resting across his knees.

‘You know so much and yet understand so little,’ Xhakoruakh boomed. ‘You perceive only a room with a chair and call it a throne room.

‘This place is important not just for its symbolism. There is a portal here. No one can say how old it is but it’s as ancient as any in Aelindrach. Some believe that it was the very first portal to open in this realm, that it is the navel of our world.’

Bellathonis glanced uncertainly towards the pit in the centre of the room. Portals in Aelindrach commonly appeared as dark rifts or crevices without any of the ornate arches and over-engineered fail-safes to be found around warp gates in Commorragh itself. Now, with the shadow-realm expanding its boundaries almost organically as it bled into Commorragh, such strictly defined delineation points were becoming blurred. Xhakoruakh laughed again.

‘No. Not down there, haemonculus, even your heart is not dark enough to descend that path,’ the giant pointed upwards to where the hanging chains were lost to perception at the top of the chamber. ‘Up there. We call this place the vault of ascension for that reason, the way out is above and leads directly into Commorragh.’

‘A useful thing to control in ordinary times, I understand,’ Bellathonis shrugged, ‘but surely now it has become meaningless. One needs only to walk to the fringes of Aelindrach and it is possible to step into Commorragh right now – or at least so I’ve been led to believe.’

Xhakoruakh smiled disturbingly, his shadowy face seeming to split open to reveal far too many fangs packed into a shark-like grin. ‘Ah yes,’ the shadow-king chortled, ‘but this path leads us into the very heart of our foes, Bellathonis. I had my ur-ghuls try to pierce their defences from Commorragh so they might invade Azoruakh’s stronghold from within but the simple creatures were unequal to the task. Now we will reverse the strategy and emerge inside the labyrinth.’

‘The labyrinth? You can’t mean…?’ Bellathonis exclaimed. Xhakoruakh positively shook with merriment at the haemonculus’s surprise.

‘Yesss,’ the shadow-king hissed, ‘the labyrinth of the Black Descent – did you never wonder how it came by that title? I’ll wager that few outside the shadow-realm can remember the source of that particular jest.’

Bellathonis nodded in understanding, ‘The coven hierarchy always took great pains to keep its secrets well hidden. Even though I once stood among their ranks I never even heard a whisper of a rumour about this one.’

‘The Black Descent trapped me at Azoruakh’s behest – by so doing they placed my brother in their debt and also held me in readiness, poised to replace him if they so desired.’

‘Would you have still served them after your incarceration and torture? You were in a sorry state when I found you in Zykleiades’s chambers.’

‘I would have done anything to regain my throne. I would have gnawed off my own limbs. I would even have obeyed my oppressors… for a time. They were too wise to put my loyalties to the test, but the threat was always there and gnawing at Azoruakh’s mind.’

Bellathonis stood in silence gazing up towards the portal hidden by clouds at the apex of the chamber. He had wished to escape from Aelindrach and here he was presented with the solution with all the customary mockery that the Dark Gods reserved for the delivery of their decidedly mixed blessings.

‘So now that you have control of this portal what do you intend to use it for?’ Bellathonis asked at last. He felt he already knew what the answer would be but he wanted to hear it from Xhakoruakh’s own lips.

‘The city will be ours. Even now my creatures bring the blessings of Aelindrach to the arrogant denizens of Commorragh. They treated the shadow-realm as being beneath their attention for too long. They can ignore us no longer.’

‘The city is too vast for you to conquer with ur-ghuls and mandrakes alone,’ Bellathonis said, but there was a worm of doubt in his mind about that. Xhakoruakh did not need his minions to conquer the city in order to rule it. They only needed to spread the daemon-plague among enough of the surviving population and the dynamics of a pandemic would take care of the rest.

‘There will be vengeance too, of course,’ Xhakoruakh boomed. ‘I will take my revenge on the curs that kept me away from my throne for so long. They will all drown in lakes of blood. You should take joy in the fall of the coven that branded you a renegade and sought to end your life.’

‘In fairness I can’t say that I didn’t provoke them,’ Bellathonis said, leaving unspoken the thought that he really had made a serious error of judgement by letting himself become involved in Yllithian’s schemes in the first place. ‘Besides, I told you when we first met that I don’t personally give myself over to vengeance. I find it’s far too time-consuming and self-destructive to be a worthwhile pursuit. I also feel I should warn you that if you act against one coven all of the other covens will move to oppose you, and without the haemonculi on your side… well, Commorragh just isn’t Commorragh any more, is it?’

Xhakoruakh’s smile vanished and Bellathonis understood immediately that he had made a mistake. The shadow-king’s plans had no need for the arts of the haemonculi or immortality in general. In fact quite the reverse was true and every haemonculus represented a threat – an individual that could resist the plague and even discover a cure for it. Bellathonis moved swiftly to correct himself.

‘Listen, I know the Black Descent and I know the haemonculi. They are all cowards and they will be terrified by the power rising out of Aelindrach – turn them into your slaves! Make them work for you in gaining final victory instead of letting them become a distraction from it. That is a plan I can wholeheartedly support, for the selfish reason that I will gain access to all of the equipment, supplies and wracks I’ll need to keep making more of my grotesques for your armies. You seemed to like the grotesques and I’m sure you’d appreciate having more of them available.’

The shadow-king nodded slowly. Xhakoruakh seemed too mired in his own plots for the future to believe that Bellathonis would do anything but play along with him. The urge to punish the coven of the Black Descent for holding him prisoner had probably been slowly eroded away by the more grandiose plans of his patron Chaos god.

‘Yes, there is wisdom in that. We must make them fear the night and then take delight in the bonds of their terror becoming bonds of slavery. They will serve Xhakoruakh and make more flesh-beasts as you instruct. Your creatures will be in the vanguard of all my new conquests – the ones you have already made… and a million more like them.’

CHAPTER 17

XELIAN

Angevere was not infallible.

The sound of the blood wasps was a nightmare – a high, angry buzzing that sawed at the ears so hard that it felt as if they must burst. The sound of the warriors screaming was worse as the vicious insectile weapons burrowed into their flesh, swarmed into their eyes and choked their mouths with tiny, stabbing bodies. The geno-engineered creatures were, in contrast to so many of their kind, permanently fertile and laid their eggs in anything they penetrated with their freakishly oversized ovipositors. The larval offspring hatched in seconds and burrowed deeper so that they could metamorphose just as quickly into their bloodthirsty adult forms.

Yllithian, stepping back adroitly from the mess, allowed himself a moment to enjoy the efficiency of his warriors as they went about cleaning it up. He had hand-picked those accompanying him into the labyrinth from among the finest of his trueborn. All of them had been with him on Gorath and he knew that all of them were dependable.

Plasma grenades and shredders obliterated the razor-limbed swarm while blasters were used to incinerate those overcome by it. There was no hesitation at killing their compatriots, only a swift, deadly efficiency. In a few seconds the corridor was clear again, swept clean by white-hot fires and scoured by monofilaments. He sent for the haemonculus for an explanation.

‘Tell me what happened,’ he said to Bellathonis when the haemonculus arrived. ‘You missed something and it cost me three of my warriors.’

Once again Bellathonis exhibited the curious delay before answering. It was just a fraction of a second and Bellathonis was trying to hide it but to Yllithian it spoke volumes. After a fashion such nuances were his speciality. He’d had to learn a lot about them in order to hide and become able to lie more convincingly. In this case the nuance meant that the individual in question was getting information fed to them from the outside.

‘The trap must have reset after I passed this point,’ Bellathonis said. ‘Blood wasp hives sometimes need a bit of time to regenerate after they’ve been very active. Or it might have been on a delayed trigger…’

‘All of which are speculations that I could supply for myself,’ Yllithian remarked coolly. ‘You need to do better than this, Bellathonis. I can’t imagine that we are even close to our goal yet and we still have to get out of here afterwards.’

‘An undertaking like this doesn’t work with certainties,’ the haemonculus replied wearily. ‘I’m doing the best that I can.’

‘Then try harder and find me Xelian soon,’ Yllithian warned, ‘or the next time we find a trap I will feed you into it.’

‘You could never find your way out without me,’ Bellathonis said with a surprising spark of defiance. ‘I’m sure you’ve been marking the path we’ve taken like anyone with sense would, but that doesn’t work in the labyrinth. If you try to follow your trail back you’ll find it’s gone.’

‘Very true, which is why I took the precaution of bringing something along that I can rely on to get me out of here if it becomes necessary. You really are dispensable, Bellathonis, in every sense of the word. I’ll admit I would like to find Xelian after coming all this way for her. However, my patience is not without limits. The only reason I keep you alive is because you are useful to me. If that ends then so do you.’

Suitably chastened the haemonculus slunk away back to the head of the column. Yllithian enjoyed the sense of control he was having. In the past Bellathonis had always been too damnably slippery to pin down and threaten in a satisfying fashion. The incident made Yllithian wonder how he’d ever thought of the haemonculus as anything more than he really was – a lowly carver of meat.

Angevere was not infallible but Kharbyr had quickly learned to obey her commands quickly and without question.

+ Down!+

Kharbyr dropped flat the instant Angevere’s voice hissed in his mind. The quickest way to get out of harm’s way in a pinch was to let gravity do the work for you – loosen the knees and drop without the fractional delay of tensing muscles to spring. The disadvantage was that it left you exposed afterwards, but in a situation where easier targets were left standing around in the open the trick could be a lifesaver.

Kharbyr dropped and a volley of shots hissed straight over him. The warriors that were standing directly behind him weren’t so lucky. He heard the cracking sounds of their armour being pierced and their shrieks as the poison took hold. Kharbyr ignored them and rolled to one side of the corridor where he tried to cram himself into the angle between floor and wall as tightly as he could. A firefight was about to break out over his head and he had left himself with nowhere else to go.

+Amateurs,+ Angevere sneered. +They should have easily taken you with their first volley.+

Vivid bolts of darklight pulsed down the corridor and splashed the darkness with flares of entropic energy as Yllithian’s warriors retaliated. Misshapen, shambolic figures were outlined in the glow and more shots homed in on them like a swarm of angry blood wasps. The charging figures were misshapen giants, monstrously over-muscled, with metal blades and bone spikes jutting out from them at all angles. Kharbyr had seen their kind before – grotesques. He knew the haemonculi used them as guards or gladiators. He’d never seen a grotesque in its berserker state before.

In the narrow confines of the corridor the hulking grotesques could barely fit two abreast, while seven or eight of Yllithian’s warriors could shoot at a time. Simple mathematics said the grotesques should have been cut down almost immediately. Instead they stormed forwards despite missing limbs, cratered torsos and, in one memorable case, a missing head.

Kharbyr came up into a crouch and raised his own pistol to shoot. The compact, spiral-barrelled weapon seemed faintly ludicrous in comparison to the ravening energies around him but he fired it anyway. The grotesque that he hit swelled obscenely in the course of a few seconds until its straining flesh burst open in a welter of blood. The grotesque lumbered a few steps closer sporting a ragged, bloody crater where its chest had been, before it was cut down by another flash of energy.

The dead grotesque slumped over to become part of an impromptu barricade of mangled flesh that was being formed by the fallen just a few metres in front of Kharbyr and Yllithian’s warriors. The remaining grotesques were forced to scramble over this twitching mountain of meat into the teeth of the White Flames’ firepower. It was sheer foolhardiness for them to continue but the grotesques were burning with the fires of neo-adrenaline and meta-steroids. Their berserker rage drove them onwards into certain death.

All pretence of battle was lost as it turned into a slaughter. The air became thick with smoke and the stench of burning. Strobing light from blasters and disintegrators converged on the roaring grotesques as they struggled to clear the obstacle, each new casualty piling it higher. Kharbyr stood up so that he could get a better angle to keep shooting – the dead were getting closer to the roof of the passage. Pretty soon the grotesques wouldn’t be able to squeeze through at all.

Someone had failed to let the grotesques know that they were being slaughtered. Just as Kharbyr stood up the bulwark of dead and dying flew apart as if an explosive device had been triggered. Through the bloody breach roared the biggest and ugliest monstrosity Kharbyr had yet seen. Glaring red eyes burned behind its iron-grilled mask as it barrelled into the front of Yllithian’s warriors. Kharbyr reflexively ducked beneath a swinging, blade-studded fist and rolled to get behind the creature as it tore into the warriors’ ranks.

He came up against the piled bodies and wriggled through them in an effort to get away from the rampaging grotesque. Behind him he could hear shrieks and crunching sounds as the berserk monster poured out its pent-up rage. Ahead of him he could see the straight corridor was blotched with blood and lumps of tissue. There was a junction just ahead where a wider passageway crossed the corridor he was in. Masked figures were crouched in the openings on either side pointing heavy-barrelled rifles towards him.

Kharbyr dived sideways and fired before he’d even consciously registered what kind of weapons were being aimed at him. His snap shot was considerably quicker than the rifle-wielders managed. Kharbyr’s strange pistol exploded one of his assailants so messily that it seemed to upset the others’ aim. Their rifles barked uncertainly and sent rounds smacking into the meat pile behind him, but Kharbyr was left miraculously unscathed.

Kharbyr’s career of gang fights and murder for hire had taught him a few invaluable lessons about close combat. One was that when faced by enemies with rifles and all he had was a pistol he had to close the distance or run away. Running away wasn’t an option so he leapt forwards before they could shoot at him again. Several of his masked attackers readily abandoned their own cumbersome guns and came at him with their blades drawn. Kharbyr guessed that they recognised him as Bellathonis.

Wracks. Kharbyr recognised them by the blood-stained leather they wore and the iron masks covering their faces. They were wracks just like Xagor. Their emaciated arms and torsos were crisscrossed with elaborate scars, chains hung from their wrists and ankles. Kharbyr could never stop himself thinking of wracks as being the haemonculi’s slaves, yet he knew that the creatures willingly surrendered themselves to the pain and torture inflicted on them.

Two of the wracks slashed wildly at Kharbyr with broad-bladed knives that dripped a viscous-looking green ooze. He ducked beneath their strikes and then darted aside as a third wrack reached out for him with scissor-like claws. The wracks were dangerous opponents but they lacked Kharbyr’s steely reflexes and experience in close-fighting. They got in each other’s way in their eagerness to strike at him.

He kicked the clawed wrack in the chest and shot one of the knife-wielders with his pistol. The shot wrack swelled and then exploded with an obscene slobbering noise. The knives the wrack had been holding went flying from its nerveless hands and Kharbyr snatched one out of the air with his free hand as it passed. He slashed out with the knife and threatened with his pistol to keep the wracks at bay as he tried to retreat. The roaring and tearing sounds behind him had curtailed, so there was some hope that help would be coming soon.

The wracks that hadn’t come forwards to fight him had already backed off. Now they raised their rifles again in response to a shouted command. Someone had tired of their brethren’s paltry efforts and wanted quicker results. Kharbyr lunged forwards and thrust his captured knife into the guts of the scissor-handed wrack. The wrack clamped wiry arms around Kharbyr and raked steel claws across his back.

‘Die, traitor!’ the wrack hissed into Kharbyr’s face in a foul mixture of bad breath and spittle. Kharbyr responded by twisting the knife in the wrack’s guts and ripping it upwards into his heart.

The rifles barked and Kharbyr felt the wrack before him shudder as rounds ploughed into his back. The other wrack had been about to plunge one of his knives into Kharbyr’s neck when the same volley also cut him down in his tracks. Kharbyr chuckled at the irony of the situation as he tried to keep the scissor-handed wrack upright to act as a living (actually mostly dead) shield.

The body he held was stiffening rapidly, far too rapidly for it to be rigor mortis taking a hand. With a flash of inspiration Kharbyr suddenly realised that the cumbersome-looking weapons the wracks were using were hex-rifles. Xagor had once told him hex-rifles typically fired a crystal cylinder that had been impregnated with the glass plague. Kharbyr hastily pulled his knife out of the wrack before the fast-spreading crystalline transmutation brought about by the glass plague could seal it inside the wrack’s guts permanently.

Retina-burning slashes of darklight beams cut past Kharbyr and down the corpse-strewn corridor. He half saw lurking wrack snipers being immolated where they stood by split-second flashes of entropic energy. The wracks burned as if they were paper targets being subjected to an instant of furnace-heat. A brief, vicious firefight erupted in the tight confines of the corridor, in which Yllithian’s warriors seemed to be rapidly gaining the upper hand. Kharbyr crouched behind his glass-and-meat shield and tried to weather the storm.

The banshee howl of energy weapons fire lulled for a moment of its own accord. There were no more targets in view.

‘Enough! Stop shooting!’ a desperate voice cried from the darkness. ‘We want to negotiate!’

The sound of the voice was music to Yllithian’s ears. The idiots were finally learning some sense at last. He turned away from the smoking wreckage of a Talos that his incubi were in the process of cutting into pieces with their great klaives and shouted back.

‘Drop your weapons and come out into the open,’ Yllithian called with relish. ‘Any further resistance and you’ll die like all the rest.’

He looked expectantly along the corridor towards where the main fighting had occurred. Over the heads and shoulders of his kabalite trueborn he could see the narrow thoroughfare was piled with corpses. Many of the bodies were still burning and the walls were pockmarked with glowing craters in mute testimony to the ferocity of the trueborn’s fire.

The Talos had pounced on the rear of the White Flames force after they were engaged in front by wracks and grotesques. The pain-engine had enjoyed great success at first, cutting through the trueborn rearguard like a metallic shark. However, Yllithian, and more importantly his incubi bodyguards, had been on hand (Yllithian having sensibly chosen to remain close to the rear) to intervene and stop the rampaging machine.

A hunched figure in viridian and black robes lurched into view from a side passage to display empty hands. After a moment’s hesitation a handful of wracks followed the wretched-looking figure into the open. Yllithian smiled with satisfaction. He had been waiting for this moment since Bellathonis led them into the hellish labyrinth. By his reckoning any attack on the Black Descent’s precious labyrinth would inevitably force the coven to negotiate if it was pursued with sufficient vigour. Bellathonis might or might not have brought them all the way to Xelian. It wouldn’t matter if they made a big enough mess along the way.

Yllithian strode confidently forwards, pushing between his trueborn warriors with his incubi close at his heels. Static defence could only resist for so long, it always came down to a contest of wills between attacker and defender. Yllithian had great confidence in his own willpower over that of a coven of skulking haemonculi. He saw Bellathonis, whom he had mentally written off in the first clash at the head of the column, emerging from beneath a pile of corpses. Yllithian felt a vague sense of relief at not having lost a potential asset. The renegade’s direct usefulness, however, was about to come to an end.

‘Tell me your name and rank,’ Yllithian demanded of the haemonculus in viridian and black.

‘I hold the position of intimate secretary to the master elect of nine…’ the haemonculus began haughtily. Yllithian snorted and silenced him with a wave of his hand.

‘Forget it. I don’t care who you are as long as you have the authority to give me what I want,’ Yllithian said, ‘which as a mere “secretary” you don’t have. I suppose you may prove useful for conveying my demands to your masters.’ He turned his head and spoke to his incubi. ‘Kill the wracks.’

The wracks quailed, looking to the intimate secretary for support and finding none. The incubi went about their work with the professionalism of butchers in a slaughter yard. Yllithian looked the intimate secretary straight in the eyes as the incubi’s bloody klaives rose and fell.

‘Listen to me carefully. I want Xelian and, if necessary, I will destroy your entire coven and pull this labyrinth down around your ears to get her,’ Yllithian said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘I’m sure you’ve considered all kinds of clever schemes for killing me and wiping out my forces rather than giving in to my demands – plagues, poisons, traps, bombs and all that sort of thing. You might even be brave enough to give up your own life right now to make an attempt on mine, although frankly I doubt it. Anyway, I’m going to show you why that way you will lose even if you win.’

Yllithian gestured and two of his trueborn emerged from the ranks behind him carrying a skeletal-looking device between them. It was a long, narrow aggregation of blocks and sheets of metal overlaid with glass-like circuitry. The intimate secretary gazed at it uncomprehendingly. He licked his green-tinted lips and asked, ‘I don’t understand, w-what is it?’

‘The warhead,’ Yllithian replied coolly, ‘from a void mine. Normally there are two sections to a void mine. The first projects a sphere of force intended to contain the detonation of the second within safe parameters. In this example that part has been removed to leave the primary detonator unhindered – that’s a speck of pure darklight that I’m told would annihilate this entire labyrinth and a good chunk of the surrounding city if it were triggered.’

The intimate secretary looked suitably horrified. His milk-white face also convulsed through outrage and disbelief but both emotions withered before Yllithian’s unshakeable self-belief. If the archon of the White Flames were killed the entire coven and their beloved labyrinth would join him on his funeral pyre, of that he had no doubt.

‘Good. I see we understand one another,’ Yllithian said and waved the trueborn carrying the warhead back to their place in the ranks. ‘Just to be perfectly clear, that isn’t the only one. I’ve planted a number of these unfettered void mines in your labyrinth as we’ve moved through it. Should I give the signal or my life signs terminate they will all detonate and obliterate it completely. So you see, I win or no one wins. Now get me Xelian.’

The intimate secretary swallowed loudly and said, ‘I will certainly convey your message to the master elect. It appears you have a… ah… winning argument for the present. If your demands had been presented to the coven at an earlier juncture I’m sure a great deal of long-term damage could have been prevented…’

Yllithian smiled icily as he responded, ‘Yes, I don’t doubt that you would have given it due consideration and done absolutely nothing. By “long-term damage” you’re implying that my relationship with the haemonculi will be irrevocably harmed by my actions. You are incorrect. Very soon the covens will be precisely divided into two camps – those who live by understanding that they are merely servants to the new ruler of Commorragh and those who die for thinking themselves free. Vect has permitted your kind entirely too much freedom to politic and interfere on your own account. Such laxity will shortly be at an end.’

The intimate secretary took a step back and almost bumped into the incubi behind him. He looked frantically around the blank-faced helms and then back to Yllithian. ‘I will tell the master elect immediately,’ the intimate secretary babbled, ‘and impress the urgency of the matter on him.’

‘There is no need,’ grated a hideous, clashing voice from the darkness. ‘I am already aware.’

CHAPTER 18

THE CASTIGATORS

By the time Motley found his way back up the firefalls and onto the Street of Knives Lady Malys had vanished without a trace. He cast around listlessly for a time searching for some clue as to which way she had gone. It seemed likely to be a fruitless exercise. Through some means the archon of the Poisoned Tongue appeared able to mask her comings and goings even to someone as psychically adept as himself. The psychic threads of causality he could read from the street and its buildings were too confused and traumatised to yield any useful hints.

It was at this moment that he realised that the darkness was deepening around him. He looked up to where, between the canyon-like walls of the spires, he could see the wan stars of the Ilmaea riding high overhead. The stolen suns were not obscured and no dimmer than before. No shadow was being cast by clouds above and yet the light around Motley seemed to be leaching away before his eyes. A strange taint was in the air as if a chilly breeze were blowing onto Commorragh from distant, polluted shores. Motley breathed deep of the stench, sneezed and stuck out his tongue before grimacing.

‘Oh, that isn’t good,’ he said to the empty street. ‘That isn’t good at all.’

The Harlequin stood motionless and strained every sense into the encroaching shadows as he tried to divine their import. There was a subtle shift occurring in the fundamental structure of Commorragh’s underlying reality, but it wasn’t the raw vibrancy of the warp he could feel. This was something old and fusty that felt as if it had lain undisturbed for countless millennia before it was disturbed, the rarefied air of a mausoleum.

Motley wondered if it were perhaps the influence of a sub-realm as he started strolling along the street and whistling a jaunty tune to see what it might draw out. Around him the shadows deepened swiftly as the temperature dropped inexorably. There were a multitude of separate realities that Vect had annexed over the centuries to expand his eternal city. Most of the sub-realms had their own distinct characters. Some of them were very much at odds with what was generally agreed on as the normal consensual skein of existence for eldar–

Aelindrach. It could only be Aelindrach.

Motley stopped whistling. To his hyper-attuned senses the surrounding darkness was no longer empty. He could hear a faint rustling as stealthy feet slipped between the shadowed angles surrounding him, he could smell the scents of dried blood and old bone on their weapons, he could feel the handful of corrupted life-sparks closing in with their minds full of hunger and death. The children of the shadow-realm, the mandrakes, had come to Commorragh in force.

They rushed in on him from all sides, their serrated blades singing through the air as they sought his life. Motley sprang high into the air to avoid their rush while pirouetting to break a neck with a snap-kick. He flipped and landed between two of the sable-skinned hunters. He slashed with his short blade to open the throat of one mandrake while he simultaneously punched out at the other. His knuckles had barely brushed the mandrake’s coal-black skin before an inconspicuous device strapped to his wrist responded to the move by thrusting a mass of monofilament wires into the target’s chest.

The weapon was called a ‘Harlequin’s kiss’, a term that always amused Motley with its grim irony – some nameless death jester back at the dawn of time no doubt liked the imagery of victims being rendered weak at the knees by the horrifically simple but deadly weapon. The mandrake he had struck immediately collapsed like a boneless sack of meat, which was effectively what the looping coils of the Harlequin’s kiss had turned it into.

Motley spun aside from a jagged machete hacking at him from behind. The mandrake recovered from his missed blow with cat-like quickness and whirled his weapon upwards to make a disembowelling cut at the fleet Harlequin. Instead, the mandrake’s wrist was severed by Motley’s descending blade. Black ichor flew in pinwheeling droplets from the separated appendage as the mandrake clutched the stump and hissed in agony. Quicker than thought Motley reversed his knife and slammed its point up beneath the wounded mandrake’s chin.

More mandrakes darted out of the shadows at Motley with their bone-white hooks and cleavers thirsty for his blood. The Harlequin gave a brief thought to continuing the fight and then realised that even more mandrakes were coming. The shadows were alive with crawling shapes and needle-fanged snarls. Motley leapt upwards again, this time catching a hanging chain with one hand so that he could swing himself onto the eaves of an iron-scaled roof.

The mandrakes swarmed after him, climbing up the vertical walls towards his perch with impressive swiftness. The Harlequin took a run-up and leapt again, this time crossing the street and beginning a series of jumps, wall-runs and climbs across the patchwork roofs of Low Commorragh that the mandrakes couldn’t keep up with. They used their otherworldly powers to flit from angle to angle in the deeper shadows as they attempted to catch him. Motley flinched aside from their traps and ambushes time and again as he fled ever upwards, always towards the light.

Eventually he paused for breath on a small, copper-clad dome bathed in the wan light of the Ilmaea and gazed back down into the abyss. The sheer drop between the spires was enough to make an ordinary observer’s head swim, but not Motley’s. He clung to the upright spike at the apex of the dome with one hand and shaded his eyes with the other as he leaned precariously and probed the depths carefully for signs of pursuit. The shadow-stain was far below him for now but he could see that it was climbing inexorably. Whorls and spirals of inky blackness were spreading up the flanks of the spires like winter frost.

‘There it is, you old Fool,’ Motley remarked to himself. ‘’Tis still a civil war at heart, but I’m thinking it’s definitely one with some uncivil patronage involved.’

Mandrakes had a highly peculiar aura about them at the best of times; they were only semi-corporeal with one metaphorical foot kept forever planted in the shadow-realm. The ones Motley had fought in the Old City had something more: they bore the distinctive sickly-sweet stench of the Chaos god Nurgle, Grandfather of Pestilence, Lord of Flies, Master of Plagues, etcetera, etcetera. Motley had been gambling when he’d told Asdrubael Vect that Nurgle’s involvement was a virtual certainty. It was not particularly reassuring to find his gloomy prediction being realised.

Motley looked about from his rooftop perch. He had come up a long way, so far that he was now perhaps halfway up the side of one of the taller spires at a point where a canyon-like gulf separated the spire from its neighbour with several hundred metres of open air. The titanic structures were striated with tiers and terraces bearing wild-looking parks and ornate formal gardens. Off to one side he could make out the reflective expanse of a lake curving away around the flank of the neighbouring spire.

In between every one of these open areas was an eclectic array of buildings warring for space like weeds fighting for sunlight. Towers, turrets, cupolas, mezzanines, balconies, domes, lesser spires, statues, steeples, arches, bridges and stairways were piled one on top of the other without apparent rhyme or reason. Great swaths of the buildings had been damaged by the Dysjunction and a few had completely collapsed, tearing ragged holes in the cityscape. For all the destruction the scene was oddly peaceful. No fighting could be seen on the terraces and the narrow skies seemed clear save for the occasional speeding grav-craft or winged scourge.

Motley’s attention was drawn to one particular crevasse in the spire opposite. A cold, blue light shone from within its depths that seemed at odds with everything else around it. The slight Harlequin shrugged off the sensation at first, telling himself that when confronted with such enormous vistas it was perhaps natural for the mind to seek a point of easy distinction to use as a reference point. He looked up again to see if he could sight Vect’s great armada but found his attention kept being drawn back to that blue light. Something about it made his nape-hairs crawl and put an itch in between his shoulder blades.

‘All right, all right,’ the Harlequin muttered to himself in exasperation, ‘the pretty blue bauble demands attention, I see that now, but how to go about consummating such fervent desires, hmm? Too far to leap across the gap, so how’s a poor performer supposed to satisfy his idle curiosity?’

The Harlequin looked around for a way to get across to the adjacent spire. The flip-belt could carry him sailing across the gulf in a single leap, of course, but at a cost of losing a great deal of height. He’d be back down among the coiling shadows of Aelindrach and lose sight of his objective. Several bridges appeared to have spanned the gap until they had collapsed or been smashed by falling debris in the Dysjunction. Now all that remained of them were projecting stubs in the spire wall, roadways to nowhere.

There was a broken spider’s web of chains and cables still stretched across the chasm in a few places. The more tenuous links had survived thanks to their inherent flexibility and they still formed a potential bridge that Motley could use. He leapt upwards to catch a wire that was still under tension and swung himself atop it. He ran forwards along the swaying, finger-thick line on quick, sure feet over the kilometre-deep gulf yawning hungrily below him.

As he drew closer to the curious blue-lit crevasse Motley perceived the life-sparks of patient sentinels hiding amid the ruined buildings at its lip. He went forwards cautiously, easing between shadows and slipping along roundabout routes to work himself closer to what they guarded. The watchers were kabalites with calm, disciplined minds who seemed well settled in their positions, as if they had been in place for some time. The kabalites’ vigilance was unwavering but they were definitely bored.

Motley’s natural inquisitiveness had been excited before; discovering something that apparently warranted guarding made his nosiness become positively uncontrollable.

Quiet as a ghost Motley pulled himself up to a shattered window ledge so that he could peep through it at the closest kabalite. He was careful to wait until their attention was elsewhere before taking a long, hard snoop. He saw a warrior in jade-green armour wearing the sigil of a black rose made up of petals that were individually reminiscent of knife blades. Motley dropped back out of sight to ponder for a moment. A cheery hello would probably be greeted by gunfire. On the other hand trying to sneak past shouldn’t be too hard. The problem with that was he would have no idea what he was sneaking into, while angry people with weapons would then be positioned between himself and the exit.

There was another approach and it appealed to Motley from the moment it popped into his mind.

Ozarhylh shifted slightly and adjusted his grip on his splinter rifle. It had been hours without word and he was starting to wonder if Khromys had made it back from Corespur at all. What they’d found might well be sufficiently sensitive to get the whole kabal killed to keep its presence hidden.

The rumours kept rolling in from both above and below: stories of battles up in High Commorragh between the Black Heart and rebel kabals led by Nyos Yllithian, panicky reports of the lower city being overrun by mandrakes and worse, news that the internal wardings had been raised, cutting off whole districts, word that escaped slaves had taken over one of the ports, speculation that the supreme overlord had gone mad, or been consumed by daemons, or had fled the city entirely.

The craziest rumour that Ozarhylh had heard personally was that El’Uriaq himself had risen from his grave in Shaa-Dom to rain vengeance down on the city that killed him… although in truth nothing seemed completely impossible right now. With all this happening around them they were all stuck guarding the broken vault like a bunch of fools waiting to get picked off. Their archon was nowhere to be found and there was plenty of grumbling that they should pick up and move to somewhere more defensible until things quietened down.

‘Not a bad idea,’ a cheery voice announced from behind him. ‘It’s certainly exciting times in the dark city right now.’

Ozarhylh whipped around with the speed of a striking snake, his rifle raised. He gained a brief glimpse of a slight, grey-clad figure crouching on a block of rubble behind him. Then the rifle was torn from Ozarhylh’s hands and slammed back into his forehead with stunning force. The ground seemed to lurch under his feet and he fell over backwards. As he did so a dutiful yet interminably slow part of his brain tried to get his hands to function and claw out his pistol. The grey figure casually kicked the pistol out of Ozarhylh’s grasp as soon as it cleared the holster and then planted an elegantly pointed shoe on his chest when he tried to rise.

‘Please don’t get up on my account,’ the newcomer smiled, his tone jovial. ‘I’d much rather we just talked – is that all right with you?’

‘Rhzevia! Komarch!’ Ozarhylh yelled. ‘We’re under attack!’

The grey-clad figure watched him curiously. Ozarhylh could see now that it wore archaic-looking clothes and a domino half-mask above a wide, friendly smile. He tried to surge up suddenly and knock his attacker off his feet. He might have had more success trying to rise with a neutron star sitting on his chest.

‘I’m afraid your friends can’t hear you,’ the slight figure said contritely. ‘They’re taking a nap for the present. I’ve, ah, interfered with your communications too, so it’s really just the two of us. Feel free to keep yelling if it makes you more comfortable, but I confess that you might attract something even less desirable than my company.’

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ Ozarhylh grated furiously.

‘That’s the spirit! Asking the right questions! Now calm down and you can guess the answers for yourself – I’ll help you with clues and we’ll play a little game together – won’t that be fun? Let’s start with “Who am I?” I’ll give you a hint – do you think I’m from Commorragh?’

‘No…’ Ozarhylh admitted. A Commorrite would have killed him by now, or at the very least started torturing him for the answers this intruder obviously wanted. He looked at the stranger’s attire again and realised that what he’d seen as grey was a dense pattern of black and white diamonds. The half-mask and smiling lips dredged up a memory of outsiders, of elaborate dances, of acrobatic entertainers shrouded with mystery and dogged by disquieting legends despite their apparently harmless profession.

‘You’re a Harlequin,’ Ozarhylh concluded with disdain.

‘That’s right! I am a Harlequin, but you can call me Motley,’ the Harlequin chattered effusively. ‘This is wonderful! See how well you’re doing? Now for question number two things get a lot more difficult. “What do I want?” Well that could include all manner of things – peace, prosperity, love, laughter and the leisure in which to enjoy them. All sorts of things! No, I think to be fair we’ll have to restrain ourselves to “What do I want right now?”, don’t you think?’

Ozarhylh glared back in silence. He wouldn’t play this clown’s game any further. This Motley character could only be there for the vault – precisely the kind of intruder that Khromys had placed them there to guard against. His life was already forfeit, either the Harlequin or his archon wouldn’t hesitate to take it once their curiosity had been satisfied.

The Harlequin frowned and said in answer to Ozarhylh’s unspoken thoughts, ‘Not at all – you need to think more clearly. We’re both on the same side or I would, in your world-view, simply torture you and kill you to get what I want. Here, I’ll give you another hint – do you think an outsider like me would be permitted to just walk around freely in the city during a Dysjunction? Who would make such a call?’

Ozarhylh’s skin felt suddenly cold and clammy as the Harlequin’s implication sank in. Only one power in the city could claim authority over something like that – Asdrubael Vect himself. ‘You’re an agent for the supreme overlord?’ he whispered fearfully.

‘You said it, not me,’ Motley said with a malicious grin, ‘but anyway that’s cheating – I’m supposed to be the one asking questions in our little game, so let’s try again.’ The slight figure leaned closer and whispered in Ozarhylh’s ear, ‘What do I want?’

‘You’ve come to check on the contents of the vault,’ Ozarhylh said shakily. ‘You want to know if anybody else has been here or knows what’s happening. They don’t, no one’s alive nearby – we used nerve gas to make sure. We can’t do anything about the flyers, but none of them seem to have noticed anything yet.’

He was babbling and he knew it, the mere invocation of Vect’s name having robbed him of all his courage. Khromys had boasted about speaking with the supreme overlord one to one in Corespur when she got her orders, but Ozarhylh hadn’t really believed her at the time. Now he did believe her, because suddenly it looked like they were involved in one of Vect’s schemes up to their armpits. This could mean that a great elevation for the Kabal of the Obsidian Rose was in the works or it could equally well prove to be a disaster.

Motley watched him with his head cocked to one side as though listening. The Harlequin seemed to come to a decision and removed his foot from Ozarhylh’s chest before handing him back his rifle.

‘Show me,’ Motley said.

Ozarhylh stood quickly and made to point the rifle at Motley before thinking better of it and letting the weapon hang at his side. ‘There’s an easy way to get down over there,’ Ozarhylh said, pointing, ‘but I’m not going back inside the vault for any price. Too many ghosts.’

Motley frowned unhappily and shot Ozarhylh a mournful, pleading look. For all the cheap theatrics Ozarhylh understood that the Harlequin was telling him to come along now or suffer retribution later.

‘All right! All right!’ Ozarhylh cried in exasperation and started to lead him down the path they’d made through the debris when they’d found the place earlier.

Motley followed the kabalite warrior down a narrow trail leading deeper into the rubble. It brought them to the top of a jumbled slope made up of fallen masonry and twisted metal. Towards the bottom of the slope an intense blue light was shining that cast long, hard-edged shadows towards them. In the glare Motley could see an immense, metallic hand half buried in the debris. The hand was broken off at the wrist and seemed to be gripping the hilt of an enormous sword.

‘We reckon it came from that statue of Archon Hiyurlarx up on the red raven’s spire,’ the kabalite offered by way of explanation. ‘Not sure if the whole thing went over or just this part of it. Either way Belian Hiyurlarx would be laughing right now if he could see the damage he’s done.’

The kabalite began to pick his way down the slope with a long-suffering sigh. The titanic piece of falling statuary had gouged a ragged wound in the cityscape that was over a hundred metres deep and almost twice as long. On the far slope Motley could see torn rooms and sliced corridors that had been left open to the air by the subsequent collapse.

Motley started to follow but hesitated for a moment as he sensed unquiet spirits in the chasm below. The low psychic moan of anguish was completely unexpected after the virtual silence of Commorragh and its close-minded inhabitants. This was no daemonic howling or the buzz of void-born predators – it was the suffering of eldar souls in torment. Motley shook his head and summoned up his courage. He had experienced things infinitely more disquieting than this in his time. If anything he was now absolutely determined to find out what the kabalites had been guarding.

As they reached the bottom of the crevasse Motley could see precisely where the light was coming from. A pair of immensely thick, heavy doors dominated one end of the chasm. The doors were sealed by a circular magnetic locking mechanism that stood a good deal taller than the slight Harlequin could have reached on his tiptoes. The giant falling sword of Archon Hiyurlarx had struck just a hand’s-breadth from the left-hand edge of the heavy doors. The impact had opened a split in the wall of the vault and it was from this that the light shone.

‘Just sheer bad luck really,’ the kabalite said uneasily. ‘If the sword hadn’t come down point first it wouldn’t even have nicked the walls. They’re made of some seriously tough stuff – fortress grade – but you’d know more about that than me.’

Motley smiled knowingly and moved up to a position where he could peep inside. The blue light was all-pervasive, as if the very air was infused with it. A low mist obscured the floor and was spilling out of the crack in faint streamers. Inside the Harlequin could see the silhouettes of giant figures, smooth-limbed and metallically gleaming.

‘Gods, no,’ Motley whispered in horror. ‘It can’t be.’

The figures had the distinctive curving forms of wraithguard and wraithlords – the animated guardian-constructs built by craftworld eldar to carry the souls of their dead. Motley squeezed through the cracked wall in a daze. As the trapped souls within sensed his presence the swell of grieving mind-voices grew more frantic. Motley resolutely tried to block them out.

With closer examination he recognised that the machines were not craftworlder wraithguard and wraithlords. They embodied many of the same aesthetics but had undoubtedly been constructed by Commorrite hands. The ordinarily fine, clean lines of the craftworlder’s designs had been weighted down with masses of additional armour and weaponry. Many had had some of their long limbs amputated in order to keep them quick and agile despite their extra burdens of blades and energy projectors, sacrificing their traditionally compact eldar-like forms for greater performance. Everything about the Commorrite copies seemed to add a vicious tension to the original designs.

The machines were constructed out of wraithbone and other psychoplastic materials Motley would have expected to see on a craftworld. The dark kin had no ability to create wraithbone for themselves and only limited ability to shape it. However, the unique properties of craftworlder materials meant they were highly prized by Commorrites. Every piece of wraithbone used for the constructs had to have been stolen from the craftworlds or the webway itself. The contents of the vault represented an unimaginable horde of plunder in Commorragh, but that was not what Motley found most horrifying about it.

There were clusters of spirit stones embedded into the constructs’ carapaces. Each of the war engines had a dozen or more of the glowing gems sunk into their gleaming metal bodies around their foreheads and shoulders. Motley knew that every one of the stones contained a soul caught at the moment of death to keep it safe from the clutches of She Who Thirsts. The spirit stones represented a most despicable theft from their resting place, an act that went beyond grave-robbing to the literal enslavement of the dead.

It was not without precedent, certainly, for spirit stones were a rare and precious commodity in Commorragh, just like wraithbone. They were stolen, hoarded and fought over, twisted into psychically attuned artefacts that the Commorrites could create by no other means.

‘How… how many are there?’ the Harlequin asked in bewilderment. Ranks of the gleaming constructs stretched away into the depths of the vault. The war machines closest to the damaged wall where he was standing had been knocked over by the impact and now lay in a tangled sprawl of curved limbs and jutting weapons. Beyond them the blue light and mist made it hard to see exactly how many more still stood further inside. There might be hundreds of them in there, thousands even.

Motley’s query was met with silence. He realised that the kabalite had not entered with him and was nowhere to be seen outside. Motley shook his head, trying to keep the insistent, tortured voices of the dead at bay so that he could think clearly. The crushing truth was that he could not do anything to help the captured spirits. Filling every pocket he had wouldn’t have emptied a thousandth of the spirit stones from their settings, and the kabalites certainly weren’t going to let him saunter out carrying even such a small fraction of the fortune on display.

Motley was suddenly struck by what Lady Malys had told him during their duel below the firefalls – ‘Asdrubael Vect is partial to weapons. He likes unexpected, devastating, irresistible weapons best of all.’

Weapons. The war-constructs arrayed before him (Motley refused to think of the twisted perversions as wraithguard) would certainly be unexpected and devastating. Many of the Commorrites’ weapons would be ineffectual against enemies that neither bled nor felt pain or fear.

Motley backed out of the blue-lit vault feeling very much alone and very much a coward for doing so. There was a dreadful wrong here but he could not – dare not – do anything to try and rectify it. To his surprise he found the kabalite was still waiting for him outside. Motley could see from the look in the warrior’s eyes that his courage had failed him and he hadn’t been able to follow the Harlequin inside.

‘How many are there?’ Motley asked again numbly. It was all he could think to ask, his mind was still too overwhelmed with sorrow at what he’d seen. The kabalite seemed to misunderstand the question.

‘At least twenty,’ the kabalite said. ‘There’s more being dug out on the lower tiers. Most of the ones up top were intact so we got through those more quickly.’

‘Twenty?’ Motley repeated in confusion. There were many more than twenty constructs in the vault.

‘Twenty vaults – including this one, I mean.’

Motley blinked and then cleared his throat a few times as he absorbed the news. ‘Do you know what’s in them?’ he asked finally.

‘Of course, they’re Vect’s Castigators,’ the kabalite said with certainty. ‘Nobody had seen one in a hundred years. Who’d have guessed they were right here in the city all that time? And so damn many of them, too…’

The kabalite smiled and Motley had an urge to kill him for it. A smug, stupid child so pleased with his cruelty deserved to be wiped from existence. The Harlequin took a quick step forwards before he could quash the desire. The kabalite flinched then glared back defiantly.

‘We’ve done what the supreme overlord commanded, we’ve done our part!’ the kabalite snarled. ‘If you don’t like it then go talk to Vect!’

‘I may just do that,’ Motley replied icily. ‘Now, tell me precisely where they all came from?’

The kabalite looked confused and glanced towards the vault. ‘How should I know? Craftworlds? Someone must have plundered a fair few to get all that together.’

Motley tasted bile at the thought. He remembered dead craftworlds adrift in the void, stripped of the souls that had once thronged their infinity circuits. He remembered the terrible acts of vengeance that had been undertaken against the perpetrators of such loathsome acts, but to punish was not to prevent and not every act could be punished. Over the millennia the dark eldar had still preyed upon their craftworld kin just as they preyed on every other living thing in the galaxy. Asdrubael Vect had gathered the fruits of their labours and turned them into weapons to keep his own people under control.

Vect.

Always Vect.

Motley had felt that he’d begun to understand the great tyrant, just a little – perhaps even had a sneaking respect for the absolute righteousness of Vect’s certainty in himself. Vect did not need the city but the city certainly needed him to keep it going. Without Vect Commorragh would have fallen to Chaos and catastrophe millennia ago. Undeniably it was Vect’s power that kept Commorragh alive, but Motley couldn’t feel anything other than hatred for him at that moment.

‘I must go,’ Motley said. ‘I…’

The Harlequin’s next words were cut off by a deafening noise from the vault behind him. A string of loud reports made him flinch and spin round with the expectation of witnessing gunfire. Instead he saw that the huge locking mechanism set into the vault doors was turning, dust spraying from its concentric metal rings as they aligned themselves with a series of resounding metallic clangs. Motley turned back to the kabalite and shouted one word to him over the tumult: ‘Run!’

CHAPTER 19

SHADOW AND FLAME

Lady Malys returned to Corespur with a sadly reduced coterie of her kabalites. Their Raiders and Venoms slunk into the gaping ports on the fortress’s flanks without fanfare or welcome. All eyes were currently focused elsewhere on the siege of the White Flames fortress and the rise of Aelindrach. Those few who noticed Malys’s Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue nosing into docking cradles gave them little heed. They gave the handful of prisoners she’d brought back with her even less.

Despite the apparent indifference of Vect’s lackeys to her arrival Malys found she was summoned into the tyrant’s presence within minutes of setting foot in Corespur. She felt chagrined that her hopes for her own rather minor task to be overlooked in the greater sweep of events had been optimistic, just as she had known they would be. Her mission to Valzho Sinister had been a disappointment as far as she was concerned. She shared none of the apparent eagerness of the supreme overlord to discuss its outcome. Heavily armed squads of Black Heart kabalites arrived to take away the prisoners and escort Malys to the supreme overlord without delay.

She was led onto a spiralling ramp of quicksilver that transported her down into the bowels of the great fortress in a blur of speed. Malys was intrigued by the change in venue. Corespur – as befitted usual fortress anatomy – had its lower areas given over to armouries, dungeons, torture chambers and pits. Every time she had met with Vect it had been somewhere in the upper reaches. She’d begun to suspect that Vect enjoyed the god-like disassociation to be found in ruling from the literal top of the world. Something had happened to propel the supreme overlord out of his usual haunts.

The uncomfortable, obvious conclusion was that she was being brought below for punishment or, at the very least, censure of some kind. Malys disciplined herself mentally for the ordeal to come. There was no escaping it, she’d allowed herself to get distracted by the Harlequin for too long and Vect was undoubtedly well aware of the fact. Why he’d set her up to fail was impossible to determine – a test of some kind probably. If that were the case then she had at least partially passed it by coming back to Corespur at all.

She found Vect in a low-vaulted chamber that was entirely dominated by a three-dimensional representation of Commorragh traced with floating skeins of light. Vect stood in the midst of it all like some unthinkably vast monster wading through the thousands of cubic kilometres of volume it represented.

‘You’ve returned,’ Vect stated without looking up, ‘and with precious little to show for your efforts from what I’m told.’

Malys sighed volubly. ‘Yes, I’m back with little to show for it. For what it’s worth I brought back all of the survivors from Valzho Sinister alive and unspoiled just as you ordered.’

Vect appeared to ignore her, his attention focused on a tiny point inside his city of light. Malys took in some of the details being displayed as a matter of course, but found a number of annotations were strange to her. The whole city was shown in all of its spiny, eclectic glory; a moderately flattened sea-urchin with the twisted horn of Corespur at the top and the blunt claws formed by the docking spurs spaced around its circumference.

Coloured areas indicated districts according to their allegiance. Corespur and most of Sorrow Fell were tinted purple. One tiny section of High Commorragh glowed a persistent, angry-looking red where the White Flames fortress continued to defy Sythrac. The dissonance was repeated by a number of bright embers in the otherwise grey mid-tiers – the known rebel kabals opportunistic enough to declare themselves openly. The lower two-thirds of the city were shown in darkness, a skeletal wireframe of the known topography of Low Commorragh that was virtually bereft of the usual indicators. Malys noted that Valzho Sinister, a hanging spindle located on the underside of the city and invisible at this scale, was located somewhere deep within the darkened territories.

‘I’m sure that you have a number of excuses that you want to share with me,’ Vect murmured disinterestedly as he focused his attention on another speck. ‘Get on with it.’

Malys knew that ‘excuses’ were what Asdrubael called facts that he didn’t like. Invoking the word wasn’t necessarily fatal in itself – there were good excuses and bad excuses in the world according to Vect. The supreme overlord was, however, letting her know that she was already standing on shaky ground.

‘The inmates breached their cells during the Dysjunction. A… riot had ensued that was further enlivened by a few entities from beyond the veil getting involved. When I got there only a few inmates were still alive, the rest were already dead or too insane to be useful.’

Vect shot her a cold glance, locking eyes with her for the first time. ‘I am disappointed that you felt the need to take that decision on my behalf,’ he said. Malys thought he looked tired, old even, but his eyes still blazed with dark ferocity. After a moment the supreme overlord looked back to his miniature city and muttered, ‘Continue.’

‘Asdrubael, the crazed ones were literally chewing off their own limbs or setting themselves on fire,’ Malys said with some exasperation. ‘They were void-touched, believe me, you wouldn’t have wanted them in Corespur. Anyway, we got the rest out despite the bowels of Aelindrach opening to vomit up every mandrake in creation into our laps.’

Vect reached out to touch a series of gem-like points of brightness that hung within the topographical map of Commorragh with his long-nailed hands. Tiny strings of glyphs unrolled beneath his fingertips. ‘You exaggerate, of course,’ the supreme overlord said, ‘although I’ll grant you that Aelindrach has grown prominent as a threat recently. In point of fact every mandrake in creation was certainly not in your lap, I’d say the vast bulk of them are in mine. Continue.’

‘That’s all there is to it,’ Malys replied cautiously. ‘I’ve done as you ordered and returned, also as ordered… You really believe the mandrakes are capable of anything?’

‘Normally, no. But my beliefs don’t come into it – they are a threat because they have come to believe in something else. The Fool was right about that.’

‘The Harlequin? You sent him after me – was he trying to warn me? If so, then thank you, Asdrubael, I didn’t think you still cared.’

Vect shot her a withering glance, his fingers still busy in the map. ‘No, I didn’t send him to warn you. Nor did I send him to cross blades with you, you undertook to do that on your own account.’

Malys realised that Vect was trying to keep her on the defensive, distracting her from… what? ‘The Fool was following me,’ she responded with a touch of outrage. ‘I couldn’t have that now, could I? I was protecting the security of my mission and by extension the security of your plans, supreme overlord.’

Vect shrugged disinterestedly and turned back to the points of light. Malys could see that perhaps twenty of them seemed to be the focus of the tyrant’s interest. One by one the tiny lights were changing from being amber-coloured to pulsing blue. The lights flashed in unison so as more of them changed over it became increasingly obvious just how many of them there were, a cascade of nodal points in the three-dimensional space. Malys realised there were more than twenty lights; there were dozens, hundreds maybe, all the way from Corespur into the city depths beneath Low Commorragh.

‘What are you doing, Asdrubael?’ Malys asked with a trace of alarm creeping into her voice. ‘You’re not planning to destroy the city are you? The fight isn’t over yet, so there’s no need to be quite so drastic.’

Her protest actually drew a chuckle out of Vect. ‘No there isn’t,’ he admitted, ‘not yet. This is something marginally more targeted than demolishing all of Commorragh.’

The great tyrant stepped back out of the floating image of the city and swept an arm through it in a grandiose gesture. The flashing pills of light steadied into a uniform constellation of icy-blue sparks. As they did so Malys felt the floor begin to tremble beneath her feet.

‘Marginally more targeted,’ Vect reiterated with some relish, ‘and considerably more efficacious.’

With Vect’s gesture in Corespur hundreds of stasis-sealed vaults across the city responded to the final input of their fail-safe codes. Monolithic mag-locks that had not moved in centuries rotated in their housings before slamming open with a sound like the tolling of sombre bells. Metre-thick doors began to grind slowly open with a low, rolling thunder that reverberated from the heights of Corespur down into the depths of Low Commorragh. Within the vaults thousands of smooth-skinned war machines shook themselves into wakefulness. The tortured, insane ghosts inhabiting their shells awoke to the light of another dawn that was to be marked only by perfidy and horror.

Ancient heroes, ordinary citizens, traumatised veterans, innocents, criminals, the insane; all became one inside the nightmarish mannequins they had been sealed into. As they were roused into wakefulness their composite personalities were goaded on by falsehoods and lies. The unending wars they fought were each their own version of reality. Some saw themselves emerging from their vaults into a shining city bathed in golden sunlight beset by nightmarish monstrosities. Others saw only a smoke-wreathed battlefield refilled with mortal enemies from the past. Some of the captive spirits believed that they fought to protect their long-dead loved ones, others that their opportunity for vengeance had come at last, for others unreasoning fear or rampant murder-lust were motivation enough to lash out at the living.

The gleaming constructs marched from their vaults and out into the city, their long limbs moving with the fluid assurance of living creatures. Resistance came immediately; diseased ur-ghuls, pitch-black mandrakes, rebel kabalites and escaped slaves instinctively turned their attacks against the new enemy rising amongst them. At first Vect’s enemies fought and died without understanding what came against them.

On the docking ring the port of lost souls had been overrun by escaped slaves. Several barges full of them had been in the process of unloading as the Dysjunction struck, including thousands of trained fighters that had been captured expressly for use in the arena. These proved to be a formidable force when united by desperation, opportunity and their mutual hatred for the Commorrites. Opportunistic kabals looking to recapture the port for themselves made several probing attacks. Each was firmly rebuffed by masses of wild-eyed, half-naked primitives armed with rifles and blades torn from the dead hands of their captors.

Vect’s Castigators seemed drawn to the port as if the unconscious pull of killing non-eldar foes governed their actions. The slaves’ captured weapons could do little to harm the metal-skinned war machines, while the Castigators’ own distortion whips and mono-claws tore easily through their ranks. Discipline, such as it was, broke and the slaves fled in all directions, some barricaded themselves inside the port, others split into bands to try and escape from it. A few attempted to surrender to the long-limbed, blood-slicked constructs. The Castigators hunted down and executed every one of them.

On Yolosc tier Archon Xhubael had declared her intention to follow Yllithian’s leadership to her coterie of petty archons. Not all had welcomed it and some had to be silenced because of that. A brief, vicious skirmish ensued through the chambers and corridors of Xhubael’s demesne that left her warriors scattered and disorganised. Xhubael had never known that the foundations of her stronghold on Yolosc abutted a long-buried Castigator vault. Her walls shook and crumbled as the war machines blasted their way to the surface. Xhubael’s last sight as she lay pinned beneath the fallen rubble was of steel warriors with arms and legs like knife blades climbing out of the pit to end her life.

In the shadowed depths claimed by Aelindrach, mandrakes and ur-ghuls pounced on the deadly automata from ambush again and again. Each outcome was the same – swarming shadow creatures cut down in droves, a desperate struggle in hand-to-hand combat with implacable, untiring enemies. Numbers alone brought some successes with individual Castigators dragged down and torn apart, but the price paid for each small victory was too horrible for even the ur-ghuls to bear. In the upper city the lesser wardings erected by Vect kept the children of Aelindrach penned inside an invisible maze. The Castigators’ remorseless assault drove them into the killing fields of the White Flames fortress and the blood-soaked foundation strata beneath it.

Everywhere the defeated fighters cursed the terrible weapons wielded by the new army, and their seemingly unstoppable resolve. Word soon began to spread that Vect had called upon the unquiet dead to become his foot soldiers against the living.

Bellathonis became instantly wary when the first vibrations from the vaults’ opening reached him. He and Xagor were driving his grotesques towards the White Flames fortress, picking their way through the vastly complex interweaving of pipes, conduits, tunnels, tubes, channels, and cracks that made up the foundation strata. He had hopes of reaching not the fortress itself, but his temporary laboratory beneath it.

He’d told Xhakoruakh that he needed better equipment, and that until the shadow-king secured the facilities of the Black Descent there was little else he could usefully do. Unfortunately when Xhakoruakh agreed he also set one of his nightfiends and clutch of mandrakes to ‘protect’ the haemonculus while he was in Commorragh. Most of Bellathonis’s thoughts had subsequently been occupied with just how he could rid himself of his troublesome and unwanted bodyguards.

The tunnel they were in shook for half a minute before falling ominously still again. Bellathonis glanced at Xagor for confirmation and saw the wrack nod. He’d felt it too. Time spent in Aelindrach had taught Bellathonis to rely on his non-visual perception overly much and now he was having trouble adjusting back to normality. By the disturbed flitting of the mandrakes they were also aware that something was amiss. The grotesques simply stood and drooled. Within the foundation strata, sound was a strange and inconstant mechanism; the weaving tunnels could carry noises from kilometres away or muffle ones from nearby so it became impossible to tell how close they were.

The unmistakable sound of metal striking stone filtered through the darkness, a beat repeated many times over. It was regular, unhurried and seemed to come from all directions. Bellathonis called back his grotesques and addressed the nameless nightfiend leading his guards.

‘We need to get out of here right now,’ Bellathonis said hurriedly, his voice a raw whisper. ‘Xhakoruakh needs to hear about what’s just happened.’

The nightfiend shrugged noncommittally at the notion, so Bellathonis tried pushing harder. ‘Whatever we’re hearing doesn’t belong to Xhakoruakh, therefore we can assume that it’s hostile to us!’ the haemonculus hissed. ‘Go back to the king and report. I will proceed to the laboratory with Xagor and the grotesques.’

The nightfiend shook his head and gestured down the tunnel with his saw-edged falchion for Bellathonis to keep moving. The haemonculus was drawing breath to argue further when he caught a gleam of light from ahead. The nightfiend noticed it, too, and sprang into the shadows. The regular ringing of metal on stone stopped abruptly and was replaced by a thin, high noise rapidly rising in pitch. The mandrakes began flickering forwards from shadow to shadow, their weapons drawn.

‘Xagor!’ Bellathonis yelled as he ducked for cover. ‘Get down!’

A soundless impact rippled through the tunnel as several of the advancing mandrakes were instantaneously wiped from existence. Where they had been a perfectly spherical bite had appeared in the wall and floor, the material displaced out of the reality of Commorragh and sent… elsewhere. Bellathonis recognised it as the distinctive strike of a distortion weapon – a rare type in Commorragh but one with a dire reputation. Heedless, the surviving mandrakes surged forwards to come to grips with their assailants and quickly found themselves outmatched.

Bellathonis watched in fascination as a pair of Castigators advanced to meet the mandrakes’ rush. He could see at once that they were not purely machines like the Talos pain-engines, but rather housings for a living consciousness. The Castigators’ monomolecular claws pierced the pitch-black mandrakes like lightning bolts while the mandrakes’ own saws and sickles glanced from impervious metal. One of the war machines fired its distortion whip at point-blank range, a brief twist in reality pinching out its enemies so thoroughly that it was as if they had never existed at all. The other Castigator appeared to favour its claw-like blades more and sliced the last mandrake apart with the fluid grace of a knife-limbed dancer.

Xagor was already disappearing from sight back along the tunnel. Bellathonis realised the nightfiend was still lurking nearby, apparently too worldly-wise to charge forwards and share his minions’ fate. The grotesques were milling around in confusion making big, attractive targets. Bellathonis agonised for a second and then ordered the lumbering flesh-puppets to attack. If they were going to be destroyed they might as well do some good by buying him some time.

‘Now we go back and tell Xhakoruakh!’ Bellathonis hissed angrily to the nightfiend.

The nightfiend nodded rapidly in response.

CHAPTER 20

THE SIXTY-FOURTH INTERSTICE

Kharbyr watched with trepidation as Yllithian talked to the two haemonculi from the Black Descent. He hadn’t thought that the flesh-sculptors would be willing to give in to Yllithian so easily, but here they were hemmed in by Yllithian’s incubi and ready to sue for peace.

It meant that his own usefulness to the archon of the White Flames was quite likely at an end. Angevere had been silent since the beginning of the ambush and for once he wished that she’d advise him on what to do. He stole a surreptitious glance at the canister he had slung over his shoulder, half expecting to see it had been pierced by some stray round intended for him. That would be how it would have played out in a story, after all, with the wicked witch unintentionally saving the hero.

+Don’t be so stupid. Anything that hit me would have killed you, too. The psychic shock alone would do it, although a hit from the weapons Yllithian’s troops have been using would likely annihilate us both… I’ve been silent because I’m trying to think of a way out of this. The possibilities have become a lot more complicated. There are new players entering the game.+

The idea that things had changed was already foremost in Kharbyr’s mind, he didn’t need someone with void-sight to tell him that. Some agreement seemed to be met between Yllithian and the haemonculi. The two of them took up position to lead the vanguard of the White Flames much as Kharbyr had been doing. Yllithian was making his way back through the trueborn warriors, but he stopped beside Kharbyr and looked at him speculatively.

‘They might still try to betray you,’ Kharbyr said, ‘and you’ll still need me to get out of the labyrinth afterwards. You can’t trust them and your idea for getting out sounded a bit… drastic.’

Yllithian favoured him with a wintry smile before replying, ‘Of course it did, Bellathonis, threats don’t work if they seem mild and easily borne. You needn’t worry. I’m not about to put my trust in the Black Descent and start narrowing my options. Stay at my side for a while, there’s no need for you to keep leading us through the traps – although I believe that was really Angevere doing the work all along.’

+Say nothing!+ Angevere hissed in Kharbyr’s mind. It was almost reassuring to find her back on form.

The column of trueborn started to move along the corridor in the direction it had been heading. It stop-started every few paces as the warriors wove through the corpses and cratered stonework created by the battle. They went only a short distance before the haemonculi turned to lead them down a side passage where they all kept resolutely to the left-hand wall. Here they reached an archway and the haemonculi halted.

‘All right, come along, Bellathonis,’ Yllithian said as he made his way forwards again, ‘I want you close at hand for this.’

+Go with him,+ Angevere ordered. +Don’t be shocked by what you see beyond that arch.+

Kharbyr furrowed his brow. If Angevere’s warning was intended to set him at ease it was a colossal failure; instead he now felt more thoroughly unsettled than he was already. The two haemonculi standing by the arch watched him approaching beside Yllithian with ill-concealed contempt on their faces. The one in green-and-black robes looked ready to tear Kharbyr’s throat out with his teeth if he got a chance. The hatchet-faced one with flat, black crystals for eyes looked less vitriolic but far more dangerous.

+ The one in viridian and black is an intimate secretary, the other in the slate-grey robes is a master elect of nine. Bellathonis knew the master elect personally, or at least had dealings with him. His name is Ekarynis. They are both mid-level functionaries, servants of the patriarch noctis. It seems the Black Descent’s leadership choose not to expose themselves to risk.+

‘The sixty-fourth interstice lies beyond this arch,’ the hatchet-faced master elect announced in a voice that seemed to scrape rusty knives across Kharbyr’s eardrums. ‘The chamber is not large enough to hold your entire force, or even a substantial fraction of it – we must proceed with only a handful.’

‘Go ahead, Bellathonis,’ Yllithian murmured, ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

+ Do as he says.+

Kharbyr felt an uncharacteristic weakness at the knees. He was no coward, he’d seen plenty, he’d seen Shaa-Dom and the broken World Shrine at Lileathanir… yet whatever lay beyond the arch evoked a wave of unreasoning dread in him. He had to force his legs to move, and even then it felt as if lead weights had been attached to his feet. The two Black Descent haemonculi glanced at each other and then passed through the archway. Taking a deep breath Kharbyr plunged after them.

The place they’d called the sixty-fourth interstice was a pentagonal room with an arch entering it through each wall. As Kharbyr stepped inside he could feel the rage inside the chamber like a red miasma clinging to the walls and hanging in the air. A sense of unrelenting fury pounded on his subconscious like an inaudible scream. Kharbyr gasped and almost stumbled.

+By the gods, she’s angry,+ Angevere hissed into his mind. The sibilant mind-voice of the witch was almost lost behind the roiling emotion saturating Kharbyr’s consciousness.

A glass-fronted sarcophagus stood upright in the exact centre of the chamber. A blood-red mist swirled behind the glass rendering its contents invisible. Five thick chains of dark metal were wrapped around the sarcophagus and connected to rings set into the floor, forming a pentacle around it. The precautions seemed extreme in view of the sturdy construction of the sarcophagus itself; a heavy, ugly lump of ochre-coloured stone crudely shaped like a person.

An incubus appeared at Kharbyr’s elbow having silently followed him through the arch. The incubus’s blank-faced helm scanned around the chamber before it turned and left. A moment later, much to Kharbyr’s relief, it returned in the company of its brethren and Yllithian. The archon took in the scene before him and cocked his head at the wash of raw hatred in the room. He looked over to Kharbyr and spoke, his voice sounding loud and unwelcome in the emotion-soaked chamber.

‘They tell me that Xelian is within that sarcophagus. They also tell me that they have been keeping her on the knife’s edge between life and death, all the while attempting to prevent her full resurrection.’

‘Why?’ Kharbyr asked incredulously.

Yllithian shrugged, ‘They won’t say. My thought is that El’Uriaq engaged the Black Descent to keep Xelian available but inactive while he used Aez’ashya to take control of the Blades of Desire. Doubtless if things didn’t work out he planned to substitute Xelian as his cat’s-paw if necessary.’

+ Entirely likely. El’Uriaq was never one to waste raw materials he could later re-forge to fulfil his needs.+

‘That sounds like something El’Uriaq would do,’ Kharbyr repeated distractedly, ‘but… it feels almost like daemons have been loose in here, all that rage…’

‘Since I can safely assume you’re telling me what Angevere thinks that means I’m right in my assumption, which is most gratifying,’ Yllithian said with insufferable smugness.

One of the haemonculi, the hatchet-faced master elect with the nerve-shredding voice, interrupted by speaking directly to Kharbyr for the first time. ‘The psychic taint present in the chamber developed prior to the impact of the Dysjunction that you initiated. It is understood that the subject’s close association with the event enabled it to draw upon its incipient energy as it approached.’

‘None of that matters now,’ Yllithian snapped impatiently. ‘Release Xelian immediately. Your custody of her is at an end.’

The master elect stepped back and gestured to the sarcophagus. ‘The subject is yours for the taking. Simply loosen the chains and Xelian will be free to rejoin you.’ Yllithian looked over at Kharbyr expectantly.

+If you value your life do not touch those chains.+

‘Loosen them yourself,’ Kharbyr told the haemonculus. ‘The archon told you to release her, not me.’

Yllithian’s dark, calculating eyes snapped back onto the hatchet-faced master elect. ‘Do as Bellathonis says,’ Yllithian ordered, ‘or our agreement becomes null and void.’

The incubi took a step forwards to underline Yllithian’s threat. The master elect looked at his compatriot significantly and spoke one word.

‘Obey.’

The other haemonculus in green and black looked ready to argue. His green-tinted lips writhed as he tried to keep his outrage in check. The flat, crystalline gaze of the master elect bored into his face and the outrage melted away into fear and resignation. The intimate secretary’s shoulders slumped and he moved to the ring bolt securing the closest chain, where he hesitated again.

‘Do it,’ the hatchet-faced haemonculus ordered in a voice that cut like a bone-saw.

The intimate secretary flinched and leaned down to release the first chain. He glanced across nervously at the crudely shaped sarcophagus, but there was no visible response. Kharbyr released a breath he had been unconsciously holding. Moving quickly now the intimate secretary rushed to a second ring, bent and loosened that chain also. He hurried over to the third ring…

Before he could reach it the glass front of the sarcophagus shattered. A hate-filled shriek assailed the minds of all present in the chamber. Through half-blinded eyes Kharbyr saw a hideous, blood-slick apparition leap out of the sarcophagus. It landed on the haemonculus’s back and tore at his throat. The doomed haemonculus screamed and flailed helplessly as he was pushed down and mercilessly savaged. Yllithian’s incubi moved forwards with their klaives at the ready.

‘Stand back!’ Yllithian commanded.

The creature had the appearance of something that had been flayed. Thick ropes of meat-red muscle and glistening yellow cartilage were visible on its crooked limbs. It tore at its prey with hooked claws and monstrous strength. It began pulling forth dripping organs to display in front of the haemonculus’s horrified gaze before greedily devouring them one by one. It took his eyes last of all.

The haemonculus’s thrashing subsided and his heels slowly stopped drumming on the stone floor. As the crouching monster feasted noisily on the remains it seemed to be changing before their eyes. Smooth skin now clothed the flayed musculature like a taut silk sheet, its crooked limbs straightened to become full and shapely, long, lustrous dark hair hung down over its face as it continued to slake its terrible thirst.

‘Xelian,’ Yllithian said distinctly. The creature paused and turned blazing eyes towards him. It flicked back its hair and wiped the back of one long-fingered hand across its mouth.

‘Yllithian,’ it replied in a low, feral growl, ‘so much the gallant prince that he comes to save me. You must have been truly smitten by my beauty.’

Xelian stood up and despite the gore slicking her limbs she was indeed beautiful, youthful and bewitching in her nakedness. Feeding on the haemonculus’s pain as his life was ripped from him had allowed her to renew herself fully – at least for the present. She tossed back her mane of raven hair again and laughed lustily.

‘I’ve been waiting in breathless anticipation for release, my sweet prince, what took you so long?’

‘You weren’t easy to find,’ Yllithian smiled back. ‘The Black Descent kept your sarcophagus hidden from me.’

Xelian locked her still-hungry gaze with Kharbyr and then the hatchet-faced master elect in turn.

‘Bellathonis I remember, this other one I saw beyond the glass when they held me prisoner,’ Xelian said. She took a step towards the hatchet-faced haemonculus, her fingers hooking into claws once more.

‘I made an agreement, Xelian,’ Yllithian warned. ‘I agreed that bygones would be bygones on their part as well as ours. Come, we can find you better things to feast on than this withered old piece of flotsam.’

Xelian stared at Yllithian for a long moment then shrugged and relaxed her hands. ‘You’re still the great schemer,’ Xelian said. ‘I should have expected as much. What’s been happening? Where’s that piece of filth El’Uriaq?’

‘Destroyed, sent back to the pit he crawled out of,’ Yllithian said coldly. ‘El’Uriaq proved… unsuitable as a rallying point against Vect and became a threat in his own right.’

‘Really,’ Xelian arched her perfect brows in disbelief. ‘So you dealt with him, then? After he took both myself and Kraillach down so adroitly. How did you defeat him?’

‘That’s for me to know and you to guess at, my dear Xelian,’ Yllithian gently admonished.

+Tell Xelian that we destroyed El’Uriaq. Don’t let Yllithian claim the credit.+

Kharbyr swallowed and tried to think of a way to say such a thing without offending Yllithian or calling him a liar. Xelian’s eyes flicked across to him and he knew in that moment that she understood precisely what had happened – that Bellathonis was the one who had really dealt with El’Uriaq.

‘Well then keep your secrets,’ Xelian said dismissively to Yllithian. ‘It’s not like I really care. I need armour and weapons to be of any use. Tell me you brought something along with you.’

‘There’s plenty available on the dead trueborn outside,’ Yllithian retorted. ‘I’m afraid I had no time to swing by your boudoir at the Blades’ fortress on the way to literally saving your skin. Other matters have been pressing for my attention.’

‘It is time,’ the master elect announced abruptly. ‘The noble archons will depart the labyrinth now as agreed.’

Xelian bared her teeth at the interruption but Yllithian waved away her ire. ‘Yes, we need to move on. Affairs will have been moving rapidly in the city while we’ve been stuck in here. Lead on, master elect, and you’ll have your dungeon back to call your own momentarily.’

The master elect moved quickly, seemingly anxious to be rid of Yllithian and his force of invaders. They moved swiftly along the smooth, identical corridors of the labyrinth, yet as they did so Yllithian perceived a change in their surroundings. It was getting darker.

His trueborn were well-equipped with both lights and their own excellent night vision but the darkness still seemed to ooze in closer with every step they took. In fact the shadows they cast became blacker and more hard-edged from moment to moment, with a hint of otherness about the shapes cast on the walls that seemed to suggest they were not their own shadows at all.

Yllithian brought the column to a halt and ordered that the master elect be brought before him. Now he was no longer walking he realised it was getting colder too, his breath steaming gently in the chill air. When the master elect arrived Yllithian rounded on him furiously.

‘You seem to have forgotten that I hold the keys to the destruction of your entire coven!’ Yllithian snarled. ‘Should I be killed then the void mines I planted will tear this place apart, and yet I believe that you’re leading us into another trap. Convince me otherwise or you will forfeit your life.’

The hatchet-faced haemonculus showed no signs of fear. The flat crystals replacing his eyes returned Yllithian’s angry stare balefully. ‘You must stay your hand. Affairs in the city have moved forward as you surmised they would,’ the master elect confirmed. ‘You are not the only invaders at large in the labyrinth. The children of Aelindrach have also turned against our coven…’

The words had barely escaped the master elect’s lips when a sickle of yellowed bone sliced through his neck in a spray of arterial gore. The corridor erupted into pandemonium as countless mandrakes surged out of the shadows on the walls, ceiling and floor to attack the White Flames trueborn.

Yllithian felt icy claws clutching at his legs and whipped out his sword to split the skull of a mandrake unfolding from the shadows beneath his feet. Xelian was instantly at his side, chopping at others with her scavenged blade. She drove the pitch-skinned wretches back into the darkness with savage blows. The two archons stood back to back against the deluge of mandrakes flooding into the corridor.

A quick glance showed Yllithian what he’d most feared was occurring. For all their superior firepower his trueborn were being overwhelmed at close quarters. Their fearsome shredders and blasters were useless against foes that could simply manifest within claw’s-reach and attack. The trueborn were still seasoned warriors and they fought back bitterly against the nightmarish horde with blade and pistol. One by one, however, they were being dragged down.

Yllithian made a lightning-fast calculation in his mind and baulked at the distasteful results. There was only one possible solution to the situation – to surrender before they were wiped out. The battle was being fought in an awful, eerie silence marred only by the clash of weapons and the curses of the trueborn. Yllithian lowered his blade and shouted out at the top of his voice.

‘Wait! We are all enemies of Vect and the Black Descent. We should join our forces! Let me speak with your leader!’

It was a long shot. Other Commorrites might be relied on to at least consider such a proposition. This was how kabals were made stronger, more often than not, with an acknowledgement of superiority on the battlefield. But mandrakes were feral creatures and there was no guessing how they might react.

Yllithian’s trueborn responded by breaking off from combat as best they could, backing warily together in clumps within the tight confines of the passageway. The mandrakes swirled among the shadows uncertainly, the walls seeming to ripple with stealthy shapes as they also paused in their attacks. A mandrake swirled into being directly in front of Yllithian with its featureless face only centimetres from his own. Invisible lips peeled apart to display blood-red fangs as it hissed at him.

‘Take me to your leader,’ Yllithian repeated calmly, ‘and remember that if you kill me all of you and this entire labyrinth will be destroyed. I’m sure you overheard that much before you killed the master elect. It is no empty boast.’

‘Are you mad, Yllithian?’ Xelian snapped. ‘I’ll not sully my hands with the scum of the shadow-realm. You can’t trust them for a moment.’

‘Anyone can see that they’ve got bigger plans afoot, Xelian,’ Yllithian replied smoothly. ‘I can see, and I would speak with the one behind them. As I said before – our enemies are the same, it’s foolhardy for us to waste our energies fighting each other.’

The mandrake struck suddenly at Yllithian’s lowered sword. He allowed the weapon to slip out of his grasp and raised his hands to show that they were empty.

‘No reason for us to fight at all,’ Yllithian said soothingly. ‘Powerful kabals obey me in the city. Now take me to your master so that we can plan how to rule it… together.’

The mandrake raised its sickle and bared its fangs again in response, but Yllithian could tell it was an empty gesture, sheer bluster. He stood calmly and dared it to strike him. After a second the shadow creature lowered its crude weapon almost thoughtfully and then turned, beckoning for Yllithian to follow it.

CHAPTER 21

THE CHILDREN OF AELINDRACH

In the spaces between worlds Kheradruakh lurked and waited for his chance to come. For the first time in as long as he could remember the Decapitator felt impatience. The desire to kill was building in him as it had seldom done before. The dark symmetry had to be completed and the pattern made whole; he fancied he could hear the heart of Aelindrach calling out to him for justice and vengeance. He had to fight back his eagerness to obey. There were always too many present, almost as if the shadow-king knew that he was marked for death.

The surviving brother had broken with the ancient pacts. He had used the font of ascension to vomit a great clot of deepest night into the roots of the Old City where he now held court. The Decapitator had felt relief at Xhakoruakh’s passage out of Aelindrach, but he also felt rage at his treatment of the shadow-skein. The corrupted king used the children and the realm as nothing more than tools for his ambition. For Kheradruakh the quintessence of Aelindrach was the lone hunter pitting itself against a hostile universe. Xhakoruakh acted like a bloated farmer tending a crop.

Kheradruakh gripped his long, straight blade and waited. An opportunity would come as it always did – vigilance would slip, watching eyes would tire. A day, a month, a year, the Decapitator would be ready and waiting when it did. Even now he could sense the approach of newcomers, more outsiders crashing into the pattern without subtlety or understanding. They formed a conflicting snarl of desires and motivations that held promise of distraction.

The Decapitator hovered close and watched their progress with sightless eyes.

Xhakoruakh’s new court was being held in what had once been the grand library of the coven of the Black Descent. It contained knowledge gathered from every corner of the known universe. Close-packed shelves stepped vertiginously upwards on walls that formed a teardrop-shaped space dominated by an ornate central cupola set with enormous lamps at its upper tip. Among all the dark places within the Black Descent’s labyrinth the grand library was a unique point of brilliance. Clear, white light had bathed it continuously for centuries – not for the convenience of its users, but in the hopes it would hold back the children of Aelindrach.

Thousands of different forms of data storage were ranged on the steep shelves in the body of the library, everything from clay tablets, scrolls of flayed skin and engraved bone steles to optiotronic pearls and crystalline wafers that could store more than the sum total of a hundred physical libraries. The subjects painstakingly collected by the coven ranged widely across arcane science and eldritch sorcery: hybridisation, eugenics, surgery, anatomy, bodily modification, dissection, vivisection, torture, the healing arts, biomechanics, toxins, pathogens…

The library represented a vast treasure trove of dusty learning that, for the most part, was left unread and forgotten about by the Black Descent. A pit at the base of the teardrop-shaped chamber acted as a direct gate to Aelindrach, a curiosity created by a haemonculus named Mhenthak millennia ago during a prior Dysjunction. Mhenthak was cast into the pit he’d made as punishment for his presumption, yet in later centuries the coven made frequent use of the access it granted to the denizens of Aelindrach. Agreements were made, slaves were traded and for untold thousands the brightly lit library became the last place in Commorragh they ever saw.

Xhakoruakh’s arrival had cracked the grand library like an egg. The great lamps mounted in the overhead cupola were all shattered, the splintered pieces of their lenses forming knee-deep drifts of broken crystal. The eyeless guardian creatures of the Black Descent were torn and scattered across the library stacks. Dense, black ganglia had erupted from the central pit like a monstrous fungus. Jagged strips of undulating shadow radiated from it in all directions to pierce the walls like bolts of dark lightning, thrusting deep into the guts of the city.

On every side beings of the shadow-realm lurked and cackled. They pawed through the forbidden knowledge without understanding, tore priceless volumes to shreds and flung illuminated leaves into the air like confetti. Tumbling books and scattered pages hung motionless overhead, caught in the radiant of dark channels like insects frozen in amber.

Bellathonis found the shadow-king enthroned on a mountainous pile of mouldering manuscripts, the charnel smell of his body mingling with the dusty scent of mildew. The rune-etched banners had been brought forth from his palace and planted around him like a forest of fast-growing weeds. The long silk banners rustled with otherworldly breezes and faint whispers as the haemonculus made his way through them with Xagor and the nightfiend at his side.

At times Bellathonis fancied he could hear not whispers, but faint, sibilant laughter from the fluttering silk. He could not shake the sensation of scrutiny, a feeling of being watched that had begun on the approach to his lab in the foundation strata and persisted ever since they had turned back. The haemonculus attempted to put it from his mind. He had returned to present bad news to the shadow-king so a sensation of paranoia was inevitable. Xhakoruakh appeared deep in thought with his chin resting moodily on one fist, but as Bellathonis drew closer the shadow-king’s featureless face turned towards him.

‘Bellathonis,’ Xhakoruakh rumbled. ‘Back so soon? Where are the others I sent with you?’

‘Destroyed, along with my grotesques. We could not reach my laboratory,’ Bellathonis began before Xhakoruakh cut him off.

‘A failure then. Another failure,’ Xhakoruakh said grimly before resting his chin back on his hulking fist once more.

‘What’s important is what destroyed them,’ Bellathonis insisted. ‘There were Castigators in the tunnels, Vect’s creations – ghost warriors!’

‘This is known to me,’ the shadow-king grumbled morosely. ‘Reports flutter in with unwelcome candour to form a growing chorus. My followers are chased back into the deepest shadows, they are pursued like prey through the upper fastness…’

‘The Castigators’ perceptions can’t be easily blinded like a mortal’s,’ Bellathonis agreed hesitantly. ‘Their reputation of old depicts them as indefatigable hunters with sight so keen that they can see through lies and falsehoods.’

‘Then how can they be defeated,’ Xhakoruakh rumbled speculatively, ‘when their gaze pierces every shadow?’ Bellathonis decided to take the plunge and assume it wasn’t intended as a rhetorical question.

‘They are physical entities – heavily armed and armoured, certainly, but they can be defeated with conventional weaponry of the right sort – blasters, dark lances, disintegrators… I begin to see your problem, these are weapons you simply do not have. Perhaps we have to face up to the fact that your ambition exceeds your grasp at this time, Xhakoruakh, and concentrate on consolidating your gains. Let the kabalites worry about Vect’s Castigators–’

They were interrupted by the arrival of a mandrake. It slipped to the shadow-king’s side without so much as a sideways glance at Bellathonis, which came as an irritating but pertinent reminder of his status among Xhakoruakh’s followers. As the shadow-king listened to his minion’s whispers his lips peeled back to display a broad grin.

‘Good, bring them now,’ Xhakoruakh ordered andthe mandrake retreated from his presence. The shadow-king rose from his rotting throne and flexed his corded arms so that the emerald runes inscribed on them seemed to crawl across his flesh.

‘You see?’ Xhakoruakh rumbled and pointed. ‘The all-father of the carved ones sends an answer to me in my time of need as he always does. Stay with me, haemonculus, and witness a dark miracle unfolding.’

Bellathonis and Xagor looked up expectantly and saw a small group of kabalites descending the ladders to the floor of the library. Bellathonis was shocked to recognise several of the individuals in the group, not least of all himself.

+Hello again, Bellathonis,+ Angevere whispered in his mind. +I am looking forward to hearing you try to worm your way out of this.+

Kharbyr had a bad feeling the moment they got to the library. The corridor they were following turned a corner and suddenly they were on the edge of a vast, dark chasm. The mandrakes wouldn’t allow White Flames warriors or the incubi to go any further so it was just the two archons and him feeling their way forwards. He could hear stealthy movement all about him but he could barely see his hand in front of his face. There seemed to be racks or shelves to either side and a sloping ramp beneath their feet, but what lay beyond only the Dark Muses knew. He shuffled along, trying to keep the vague smudge that he knew was Yllithian in sight. What made it especially difficult was that he was also trying to stay as far away from Xelian as possible.

The unmistakable taint of daemons hung about Xelian – a coppery taste of blood and gore, the electric sense of a caged beast ready to burst forth and wreak red ruin on everything around it. He wanted to warn Yllithian but he was too frightened to reveal what he knew. She would tear him apart just like the haemonculus she’d consumed at the sixty-fourth interstice.

+Don’t think about that – keep your wits about you,+ Angevere whispered. +All our efforts are about to bear fruit, and for some it will be a bitter harvest.+

They climbed down ladders of twisted ironwork until they came to a floor that sloped very gently downwards. As they set foot on it the sense of dread that had been growing in Kharbyr’s breast blossomed into cold certainty. They were in the presence of something otherworldly, a vast, monstrous entity that was alien and invisible but as real as the foetid breezes rippling against his cheek.

+Forward, child, your destiny awaits,+ Angevere whispered.

There was a sickly greenish glow nearby, a nest of pallid corpse-light that the mandrakes were leading them towards. As Kharbyr got closer he could see the luminescence came from long, tattered banners that seemed to have sprouted from the ground. Eye-twisting runes were emblazoned on them in strokes of emerald fire. A wash of fever-heat brushed Kharbyr’s skin at the sight of them so that he quickly looked away again.

In the middle of the field of fluttering banners stood the biggest mandrake Kharbyr had ever seen. Mandrakes were normally waif-thin creatures with narrow shoulders and stooped backs, but this one was a hulking monstrosity on a par with the haemonculi’s grotesques. It held a giant, rusty scythe and its skin writhed with the same twisted runes as were on the banners. The stink of daemons was everywhere; they were damned to die in that pit, Kharbyr was sure of it.

‘I should have known,’ Yllithian murmured to himself.

‘Known what?’ the shadowy giant boomed in a voice that seemed to roll up from unfathomable depths. ‘That you would come beneath my heel? Kneel before Xhakoruakh, the true and only king of Aelindrach!’

‘I think not,’ Yllithian replied with breathtaking arrogance. ‘You only give us audience because you need my help. Let’s not waste our time playing games when we have a powerful mutual enemy – Asdrubael Vect – to contend with.’

‘Bold words for a leader with so few followers,’ Xhakoruakh grumbled.

‘I am Archon Yllithian of the White Flames, and those few outside represent only a fraction of the numbers that pledge allegiance to me. Soon, with Archon Xelian’s help, another one of the most powerful kabals in the city will be joining our fight against Vect. The days of Vect’s tyranny are coming to an end, and all those who help to bring about his downfall will make their mark on this city as none have done in six thousand years!’

Even Kharbyr had to admit it was an impressive speech. Xhakoruakh, however, still seemed sceptical. ‘I have heard of the White Flames, but Commorrites are notorious for their lies and boasts,’ the shadow-king grumbled. ‘I’m fortunate to be blessed with minions who can tell me if you lie now. Bellathonis, do you know this individual to be Archon Yllithian?’

Kharbyr blinked in surprise at the giant mandrake addressing him. Then he realised that he wasn’t the object of the shadow-king’s query, the giant was addressing a shadowy figure standing half hidden behind the banners. Kharbyr recognised the silhouette immediately – it was his own.

‘Bellathonis!’ Kharbyr screamed, his legs already driving him forwards without conscious thought. ‘Bellathonis, you bastard! Give me my body back!’

Angevere’s insane laughter was echoing in his mind. The shadow-king turned and raised his scythe threateningly as Kharbyr dashed forwards. Xelian did nothing and Yllithian, after looking nonplussed for a second, simply watched him with hard, black eyes. Their faces and their actions were only a blur, a backdrop to the flapping banner and what was standing behind it. Kharbyr thrust the rotting silk aside and saw his own face – a visage that was pallid and strange yet still the same face he had seen every time he looked into a mirror.

Kharbyr reached out to grab his doppelgänger so that he could somehow pull himself back inside it where he belonged. He understood on some level that his mind was fracturing; the sight of his mirror-self was shattering him into a million shards of memory that tore at his soul. He screamed incoherently at the real Bellathonis, but the creature wearing his face slipped easily out of his grasp and pushed him away.

Suddenly there was a tearing sound in the air that evoked a frightful shard of memory in Kharbyr’s tortured mind. From the corner of one eye he saw a blurred shape rushing towards him out of the dark, a smooth metallic form with a curving, scorpion-like tail. Flames jetted in front of Kharbyr’s face, he spun and screamed again as he finally recognised the doom that was swooping down upon him.

The assassin-machine named ‘Vhi’ set its impellers to maximum for the final run in towards its target. The psychic traces had converged, they were strong and clear – almost boosted given the way that they resounded so firmly in Vhi’s detection arrays. As it slid forwards Vhi experienced a rush of conflicting data that a mortal creature would have described as ‘excitement’.

The prey had certainly been evasive, more tricky than anything contained in Vhi’s memory engrams. The specialised Talos unit had used all of its patience and cunning to bring a positive conclusion to its primary directive. It had allowed a false-positive decoy to go free after the initial disappointment of first contact. It had waited at the target’s primary habitat to reacquire it. Now that decision had been vindicated as it tracked a new trace through to a region of twisted extradimensional spaces where the paired psychic signals, false and true, were occupying virtually the same volume.

The hunt had been long and hard. Vhi’s capacitor banks were virtually drained. Its compact internal power source was struggling to maintain all systems at full functionality, but there was no doubt that the target was now within range for termination. Vhi lavished the energy necessary into firing a bolt from its heat lance to clear a wall in its way, bursting through it in a storm of molten shrapnel that had a high probability of inflicting collateral injury and inducing panic.

Vhi’s sensors created a detailed snapshot of the space it had breached in less than a millisecond. It registered the teardrop-shaped space of the library, the stepped shelves and their contents, the cupola above and the forest of banners below in precise detail. The return for life forms present was less certain. Large numbers registered but the vast bulk of them were indistinct shadows caught in the act of recoiling from Vhi’s entry.

Five life signs stood out distinctly near the bottom of the teardrop amidst the banners. Two of the life signs fulfilled the parameters for Vhi’s primary target. Vhi had moved less than two metres into the library chamber in the time taken to detect them. It twisted sharply, lavishing more energy on its gravitic impellers as it dived. The air shrieked around its hull as Vhi dropped on its prey like a hawk.

The second it took to drop to the floor gave Vhi enough time to unleash another pulse from its heat lance. Thermal energy scoured a line across the location of the target traces and caused a momentary white-out in Vhi’s sensor feed. By the time the glitch cleared Vhi was overrunning the target and close enough to lash out with its chainflails. The murder machine slewed sideways to skid over its victim, the high-speed flails ripping away chunks of flesh and extremities in an orgiastic welter of blood.

Vhi skidded to a halt with fires burning all around it, the forest of banners sprouting orange and yellow flowers as they were consumed. The Talos attempted to reacquire the psychic trace and for a frozen second found nothing but residuals. There were only two remaining detectable life signs and both were engaged in hostile activities. Vhi turned on them and made to lunge forwards but its dwindling reserves made the movement fatally sluggish. One of the life forms shot Vhi with a high-yield energy weapon at closer range, hitting the mid-dorsal carapace where its primary logic centres lay.

Cascade failure was almost instantaneous. Part of Vhi’s consciousness was able to witness the rapid reduction in its faculties as the power spike burned its engrams into ash. Redundant fail-safes rerouted commands around the affected areas but it was fighting a losing battle. Self-destruct protocols went into effect, preparing Vhi’s internal power source to detonate like a miniature sun.

The protocols were terminated abruptly by a large edged implement impacting directly on the damaged mid-dorsal carapace area. It struck with enough force to shear through Vhi entirely, instantly reducing its machine consciousness to a disparate shower of components. Vhi’s last impressions were of a hulking yet still ill-defined life sign towering over it with a primitive agricultural implement in its hand. A virtually undetectable second entity, a shadow of a shadow, stood poised behind Vhi’s slayer as if ready to strike. Vhi’s final logic collapse came in a weltering of conflicting data that a mortal being might have felt as ‘pride’ and ‘regret’.

The outsiders had brought distraction and they had also brought death. The machine’s sudden attack provided Kheradruakh with all the opening that he needed. He swarmed down from the dark spaces and dropped behind Xhakoruakh just as the shadow-king swung his scythe to cleave the machine in two. The Decapitator swung his own long, straight blade at the shadow-king’s exposed neck with preternatural expertise…

CHAPTER 22

NECESSARY ALLIES

Yllithian was startled for a second by Bellathonis’s sudden fit of madness. Then, as he caught sight of Bellathonis’s two agents lurking off to one side of the mandrake-king – Xagor and Kharbyr he recalled their names to be – all the pieces abruptly slid into place.

He had been played.

Bellathonis’s whole scheme had been put in motion to bring him before this creature called Xhakoruakh. It all made sense now – Bellathonis had swapped bodies with one of his agents. The individual that had led Yllithian through the labyrinth was not the haemonculus at all but one of its hapless subordinates. Yllithian knew quite well that Bellathonis was capable of such miracles; he’d performed one for him, too, by transmigrating his soul so that he could escape the glass plague consuming his old body.

The plan seemed to have gone awry now that the false-Bellathonis was attacking his supposed minions. Xhakoruakh appeared to be just as bemused as he was by the turn of events and for a moment Yllithian felt a perverse twist of empathy for the hulking monstrosity. They were both leaders being beset by the machinations of their inferiors.

Yllithian laid a hand on the grip of his pistol instinctively. The mandrakes had taken his sword but left him with his far deadlier blast pistol still holstered in plain view. Yllithian was torn between a desire to eliminate Bellathonis and his minions for their presumption in manipulating him or enjoying a certain admiration for the nuances of the scheme. In either case the question remained – why had he done it?

The answer came with an explosion and the shriek of superheated air. Yllithian sprang to one side with his pistol drawn as a hurtling shape wreathed in flames erupted from a wall overhead and plummeted towards him. He fired a shot at it purely by instinct; it fired back at him in the same moment.

They both missed, a vivid line of fire flashing over Yllithian’s head just as his blaster bolt careened past the thing’s shining carapace. He tracked it trying to get another shot as it hurtled overhead, following the course of the flame etched by its fire lance before landing a few metres away. It skidded sideways into the individual that Yllithian had been thinking of as Bellathonis and ripped him to pieces in the blink of an eye.

It was a Talos, much smaller than the one they’d encountered earlier but no less deadly. Its scorpion tail whipped around as Yllithian steadied his pistol in both hands and fired, hitting it squarely on its curved prow. The blaster bolt punched a fist-sized crater straight through the armour and into the machine’s delicate innards. It seemed to stagger in the air and then dipped forwards to accelerate, gathering itself to lunge at Yllithian like a wounded animal.

The shadow giant, Xhakoruakh, appeared suddenly at the machine’s flank. He seemed to simply ooze out of the air like a smoky cloud gathering out of nothing. The heavy, rusted scythe was still in the mandrake-king’s hands and he swept it straight through the Talos, cutting it in two. The sundered components crashed to the ground with a despairing shriek of tortured metal.

Yllithian immediately pointed his pistol towards the roof to show he intended no harm to the king. As he did so Xelian sprinted past him with her blade drawn – running straight at Xhakoruakh. Yllithian opened his mouth to shout at her to stop, but in that moment he saw what she had already seen. A second shadowy shape was materialising behind Xhakoruakh. Xelian leapt forwards just as the apparition swung a long, straight blade at the mandrake-king’s neck.

Xelian’s outstretched blade could not possibly block the blow in time, but she did deflect it. Xhakoruakh, already twisting away from Xelian’s apparent attack, was struck in the shoulder instead. The shadowy giant roared in pain and outrage as the sharp sword carved a deep furrow across its broad back, but he was alive to roar about it. Xelian rolled and came up on her feet ready to confront their new assailant – only to find that it had already vanished.

Silence fell across the scene save for the crackle of flames and the cursing of the mandrake-king. Beyond the circle lit by the fires Yllithian could sense the mandrakes were gathering, angry and confused by what had occurred. He was about to order Bellathonis to tend to the injured king when he realised the haemonculus’s two minions – Xagor and Kharbyr – had both vanished.

‘Yllithian, what the hell’s going on here?’ Xelian demanded, eyeing the circling mandrakes warily.

‘Bellathonis manoeuvred us into a place to kill us, along with good king Xhakoruakh here,’ Yllithian replied firmly. ‘I trust you will have the good grace to live, Xhakoruakh, you seem like a sturdy sort.’

The giant mandrake shook himself like a dog and the drooling blackness that was spilling from his wounds lessened. ‘Only a scratch,’ Xhakoruakh rumbled in evident pain. ‘Why would the haemonculus betray me? He has served faithfully.’

‘That is his way,’ Yllithian sighed bitterly. ‘He will faithfully serve one master until he betrays them for another. Vect is behind this, I guarantee it – Bellathonis’s most recent interaction with you will give a clue as to why.’

‘He had just returned from the upper city with news that Vect has released his Castigators,’ Xhakoruakh said uncertainly. ‘He told me that we needed weapons, weapons we do not have, if we were to prevail.’

‘You see – he had already taken the decision to betray you, he was citing your weakness,’ Yllithian continued confidently. ‘When the haemonculus learned you were meeting with myself and Xelian – the ones who could supply the weapons you so badly need – he had to make his move, and is so often the case he fell victim to his own murderous schemes.’

Xelian had a look on her face that veered between incredulity and pride at Yllithian’s tale-spinning. Xhakoruakh was unreadable, his formless face a perfect mask, yet Yllithian felt that the king’s body language indicated he was being swayed. Further embroidering of the truth was interrupted by shouts and the clash of weapons from the tunnel mouth they had used to enter the library.

‘My followers are merely concerned for our safety,’ Yllithian explained. ‘I will go to them and explain what’s occurred. When I return we can talk in more detail about just how we can help one another, king Xhakoruakh.’

Xhakoruakh felt gingerly at his neck and slowly nodded.

Hours later Xelian was clinging to the underside of a bridge in High Commorragh. She relaxed one limb at a time to keep her long muscles limber as she waited. A swarm of mandrakes hung silently near her, clustering like bats on the ornately fashioned bridge supports.

She reflected on how fortunes could be changed so quickly. Her time in the labyrinth of the Black Descent was already fading from her mind. She had become a mindless thing living purely on rage and hate while she was trapped in there. The experience had been a crimson blur underscored by a growing sense of anticipation that she would one day be free. Now that she was free and whole again the memory of it was sloughing away like a discarded snakeskin.

Yllithian was always so hard at work trying to manipulate everything, while Xelian was more inclined to deal with one thing at a time. On this occasion, however, she had to admit that Yllithian’s constant scheming had borne some useful fruit over and above setting her free. A deal had been struck with the mandrakes; Yllithian would support them and they would join their forces with his to fight against Vect. Everyone present knew that the alliance would last for precisely as long as it took to defeat the supreme overlord and not a minute longer. Given the present alternatives that tacit act of betrayal seemed a positively desirable outcome to look forward to.

The bridge she clung to crossed between two closely set spires that were themselves merely finials on a greater, multi-tiered colossus. They were positioned not far from Xelian’s own fortress, or rather the fortress currently occupied by the usurper of her kabal, Aez’ashya. The two peaks formed a narrow canyon several hundred metres in length that passed beneath several other connecting bridges. Below them Xelian could see the curved terraces that were cut into the flanks of the spires stepping down into the gloom. Several of them had once been filled with water and walled with crystal. These had now all been shattered and their contents dumped out onto lower terraces where a few pools still gleamed in the wan light of the Ilmaea.

Movement on one of the lower terraces drew Xelian’s attention. Two Castigators were striding across it, their long metallic limbs catching the light as they searched for enemies. She found herself holding her breath until they stalked out of sight. The idea of them noticing her at such a distance was ridiculous, but her subconscious self seemed to believe otherwise. The Castigators had barely left her field of vision when she caught another flicker of movement at the other end of the canyon. This was the one she’d been waiting for.

A single Venom grav slewed around the corner and dipped its nose to start a high-speed run along the canyon. The Venom was one of Yllithian’s. He’d told her a handful of his craft had managed to escape the White Flames fortress before it was besieged. Now they were scattered in hiding around the city until they were needed in special tasks. Seconds behind the Venom a shoal of reaver jetbikes came screaming around the corner in hot pursuit. Splinter rifles flashed beneath the reavers’ curving prows as they looped wildly to make attacks on the fleeing Venom. Xelian could recognise the insignia on the jetbikes and even some of their riders – they were hers, reavers from the Blades of Desire.

The Venom had got a head start accelerating down the straight, so its larger engines were already pouring out maximum thrust before the reavers came around the corner. Even so, once the reavers hit their turbo-boosters the larger craft was being rapidly overhauled. Xelian counted six reavers in total all spread out in a loose line. They’d abandoned using their guns in favour of milking every ounce of speed possible out of their bikes. Xelian knew what they were thinking – now it was a race between themselves to see who could overtake the Venom first and bring it down with a well-placed sideswipe using their wickedly hooked bladevanes. With the Venom boxed in by the vertical spire walls on either side it had no chance of escape.

The Venom flashed past just metres beneath Xelian. She caught a glimpse of the pilot’s face twisting up to look at her with wide eyes full of fear and elation. Then the wedge-shape of the Venom was gone only for the space to be instantly filled by the wasp-like hull of one of the reavers in pursuit.

Xelian leapt.

She was aware of the mandrakes jumping too, a curious sort of folding then reappearing like wings opening and closing. It reminded her of bats again. The wych on the reaver below saw her coming and tried to twist aside. He was too slow. Xelian crashed into his shoulder feet-first, her armoured sabatons breaking the wych’s arm and collarbone with a sickening crunch. The wych’s scream was lost in the howl of the jetbike’s engines.

The momentum of the jetbike spun Xelian aside as it carried on careering forwards. She turned the motion into a back flip as she lashed out at the rider with a razorflail. The jointed blade of the flail wrapped around the wych’s neck, half decapitating him. It also anchored itself deeply enough to drag Xelian in the jetbike’s wake as it nosed over into a death-dive.

The white-hot jets of the reaver’s drive unit blazed only centimetres from her face as she struggled to pull herself aboard. She grabbed for a bladevane and felt it cut through her gauntlets as she used it to lever herself forwards against the mounting g-forces. The curving terraces of the spire’s flank were sweeping past almost within touching distance by the time she kicked the wych’s body out of the seat and grabbed the controls. She cut the power and fought to drag the machine out of its dive, hauling it up just short of disaster.

It was so much fun being alive again. She owed Yllithian for that if nothing else.

The mandrakes had killed all of the other reavers by the time she got back up to them. At least that’s what she guessed from the five fresh, smoking holes in the canyon walls. Of the mandrakes themselves and Yllithian’s Venom there was no sign. Xelian shrugged to herself. The plan assumed she would be on her own from this moment forward. The truth was she preferred it that way. She twisted the throttle on the jetbike and it shot away, taking her home.

Aez’ashya, archon of the Blades of Desire, strode rapidly down a ramp in her fortress towards another disturbance in the reaver bays. She tried to think of it as her fortress, her domain, even though it didn’t really feel like it belonged to her at all. There were always furtive eyes watching her from corners, or whispering groups of kabalites falling silent at her approach. No one had plucked up the courage to challenge her for the place of archon yet, but it was coming.

In the mid-tier kabals of Commorragh a change of archon was commonplace, the kabals themselves morphing and combining with dizzying regularity. In High Commorragh things were more static. The changeover in leadership for a kabal as large as the Blades of Desire should have been momentous, a major power shift. Instead it felt as if none of the kabalites really believed they had a new archon and still thought of Aez’ashya only as a glorified caretaker.

She’d done what she could; she’d defeated all of her challengers and led the kabal to war. She’d even been to Corespur and met with Vect when he assembled his High Archons after the Dysjunction. It hadn’t been enough. Yllithian had survived her betrayal in the battle over Gorath, which put Aez’ashya out of favour with Vect. The kabal had taken heavy losses between fighting minions of Chaos and White Flames on top of those already incurred in the Dysjunction itself. None of her efforts had been enough, all because of Xelian.

Xelian remained undefeated. Her body had been spirited away after what looked like a botched assassination attempt. Aez’ashya had found herself propelled into the vacant position of archon as if by an invisible hand. She had seized the opportunity and fought successfully to keep that position. Even after her secret patron had abruptly stopped helping her she kept fighting, but it felt like it was a losing battle. With the final fate of Xelian still uncertain it was impossible to entirely escape from beneath her shadow.

She could hear a gabble of raised voices from further down the ramp. One of the reaver gangs had probably come back with more hair-raising stories: ghost warriors on the streets, the White Flames’ rebellion and mandrakes invading from Aelindrach. The agitation to get back out and participate in the fighting would already be starting. That meant Aez’ashya would be spilling more blood just to keep the kabalites in line.

As she approached there was a sudden change in the timbre of the noise. Instead of many voices talking over each other they were all speaking as one. Aez’ashya broke into a run, sprinting down the ramp with a small part of her wondering if she was heading the wrong way.

They were chanting Xelian’s name.

Aez’ashya clattered into the reaver bay to find dozens of wyches, hellions, scourges and beastmasters already there. Others were arriving by the minute through other entrances so for the moment Aez’ashya’s arrival went unnoticed. In the middle of the bay there was a damaged jetbike trailing a thin plume of smoke, scrape marks showed where it had careened into the open bay before skidding to a halt.

Xelian was standing on top of the long, curved prow of the jetbike with one arm raised in acknowledgement of her crowd of cheering celebrants. She was tall and regal-looking despite being dressed in patchwork armour that looked like it had been looted from the dead. Xelian seemed to sense Aez’ashya’s eyes on her and turned towards her, smiling.

Aez’ashya didn’t wait for Xelian to make her whole I-have-returned speech. Instead she whipped out her pistol and started shooting, reasoning that giving Xelian any time to prepare for some formal duel would give away an advantage. As quick as Aez’ashya was Xelian saw the move coming and dived into the crowd to avoid it before anyone else realised what was happening. Aez’ashya’s splinter rounds ploughed into a hellion and a wych standing behind the jetbike instead of her intended target. Both targets folded up with surprised grunts that alerted the crowd.

Before the bodies even hit the floor the shooting triggered unforeseen consequences. The different gangs in the bay each assumed the others were trying to kill Xelian. Weapons were drawn and fighting erupted immediately as each faction turned on another group of supposed traitors. Aez’ashya laughed to see the kabal start tearing itself apart so readily. Some of the Blades of Desire were apparently so dedicated to the idea of their dead archon that they would turn on each other like rabid dogs in her presence.

‘Enough!’ Xelian’s voice rang out over the conflict and suddenly every hand was stilled. Aez’ashya couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The normally raucous, unruly wyches and hellions ceased fighting as promptly as cadets receiving an order. Xelian broke cover, sprinting towards Aez’ashya with a razorflail whirling in one hand. The surviving Blades of Desire scattered into the far corners of the bay to watch avidly as the duel unfolded.

Aez’ashya abandoned her pistol immediately – if she missed her one shot as Xelian closed in she would never get a second one. Instead she sprang back and drew her own twin knives in readiness for close combat.

The razorflail was a Commorrite weapon that ably demonstrated its origins both in its multifaceted fighting style and its inherent dangerousness to its wielder. In essence it was a segmented sword with a flexible core. That allowed it to be wielded like a whip or, as the name suggested, a razor-edged flail. However, the segments could be brought together and locked with a mere flick of the wrist, instantly transforming the flexible razor-edged flail into a rigid, saw-toothed sword or vice versa.

Aez’ashya ducked under Xelian’s opening swing with the razorflail. She came up fast with her knives ready for when Xelian locked the segments of the flail and made a blindingly quick reverse cut with the sword she now held. Aez’ashya knew the fighting style, a complex weaving of feints and counters using the weapon’s chimeric capabilities to best effect. She pressed in closer where her knives would have the advantage, forcing Xelian to keep the razorflail rigid to parry a storm of successive stabs and cuts.

Xelian gave ground coolly, swaying aside from thrusts and blocking slashes with infuriating self-confidence. Aez’ashya started to deliberately drive her towards the open side of the bay where there was a drop of hundreds of metres down onto the flank of the fortress. Xelian moved readily in front of her attacks, so much so that Aez’ashya had to hurry to keep up.

She clung grimly to her opponent, matching moves step for step as the edge of the bay got closer. If Xelian opened the distance she could take the offensive again, shake out her flail and weave a web of razor-edged doom in an instant. Instead Xelian stepped aside and made an almost languid counterattack. As Aez’ashya parried it Xelian loosened the segments of the flail, allowing it to swing flexibly around the blocking blade and bury itself in Aez’ashya’s upper arm.

Aez’ashya hissed and thrust out wildly with her other blade. Xelian simply stepped back, whipping the flail back to lacerate Aez’ashya’s bicep in the process. Aez’ashya dropped immediately into a defensive stance in anticipation of Xelian continuing her attack, but her opponent simply stood her ground and smiled.

‘First blood,’ Xelian purred. ‘You’re mine now.’

Xelian sprang, her limbs blurring as she charged. Her attack broke on Aez’ashya like a furious whirlwind, the flail whipping in from every angle so fast it seemed to be in two places at once. For Aez’ashya, already weakening from the blood leaking from her lacerated arm, it was all she could do to stay alive. The sharp hooks on the flail scratched at her arms and legs, lashed at her face.

It was Aez’ashya’s turn to be driven back. Xelian circled her back towards the damaged jetbike in the centre of the bay. There seemed to be an almost solid ring of kabalites forming around them as more and more Blades of Desire arrived to see the battle. It was turning into an arena in miniature with the vicarious anticipation of the crowd building higher with each caress of steel on flesh. Aez’ashya gasped as she realised that Xelian was toying with her, arousing her followers’ bloodlust with a martial display before slaking it as she went in for the kill.

Aez’ashya refused to die like an arena slave being slowly slaughtered for entertainment. She hurled herself bodily at Xelian, her knives arrowing straight for the bitch’s heart. Xelian darted aside from her rush, looping the razorflail around her ankle as she stumbled. Xelian pulled and sent Aez’ashya crashing to the floor of the bay with her foot all but severed.

The knives went flying from her hands as she fell, so she crawled after them, ignoring the furnace blast of pain from her legs. Xelian’s next strikes took her hands at the wrists and then more blows sent bolts of agony through her dimming consciousness. Before long everything was a red haze overlaid by the chanting of a name. A name that Aez’ashya had never been able to escape.

Xelian.

CHAPTER 23

THE ICONOCLAST

The Decapitator seethed with black rage in the angles between Commorragh and Aelindrach. He had been denied his prey. Long ages of the universe had passed since the last time that had occurred. He blamed himself for his impatience, his recklessness. The window of opportunity had been too narrow to strike, just as he’d known it was, but his eagerness to slay Xhakoruakh had driven him into the fray anyway.

The outsiders had been his undoing. Seeing Xhakoruakh’s original allies flee before the killing machine gave the illusion of opportunity. He had ignored the presence of the newcomers and focused on a speedy execution. Foolish pride. Shameful failure. The swirl of negative outcomes threatened to drown him in unwanted possibilities.

In the midst of it all Kheradruakh found a place of inner calm. It was as if the abyssal sea of Aelindrach reached out to gather him to its dark, cold bosom. He floated there at peace for a time, far from the storm-wracked surface world with its outsiders and apostates. He soothed himself with the thought of caressing Xhakoruakh’s neck with his blade once more.

The moment would come again.

Just as it always did.

‘Why?’

‘The Talos would have killed me first otherwise.’

‘…’

‘Xagor, I think you’re just getting confused. Kharbyr was the one killed back there buying us time to escape, not me. I’m right here just as I have been all along.’

‘No more mandrakes?’

‘No. Xhakoruakh’s cause is lost. Even with Yllithian’s help he can’t beat the Castigators and the Black Heart kabal combined. Anyway, if he won it would mean plague and a slow death for the city and we don’t want that, do we? This is the only sensible course of action.’

‘This one understands,’ Xagor said morosely as they hurried on their way. The wrack had a curiously shifty look about him that had been absent prior to their close call in the library. Xagor’s loyalty had been tested on numerous previous occasions, but this time the results were unacceptably opaque.

+Why won’t you have the good grace to just roll over and die?+ Angevere sneered in the back of his mind. Sneering at him was the most harm she could do at the moment, so she was doing it constantly. Bellathonis, on the other hand, was growing accustomed to ignoring her.

They were still somewhere in Low Commorragh – of that much Bellathonis was certain. The shadowy conduit they’d fled down out of the library had dumped them a good distance away from the labyrinth of the Black Descent. Possibly they were somewhere on the top of Nightsound Ghulen if the reedy fens were anything to go by.

‘Come on, Xagor, here – you can carry Angevere for a while to keep you company.’ Bellathonis tried to sound cheery, but he had a suspicion that it just sounded patronising when he did so. Xagor sullenly took the cylinder containing Angevere’s head from him and they continued to travel, wordlessly for a time, across the boggy ground towards an immense, baroquely inscribed slope in the distance. The gloom of Aelindrach afflicted the place such that they moved in perpetual twilight, although the slope ahead gleamed golden as if it were being lit from above.

They were travelling swiftly using the same kind of shadow-walking they’d learned in Aelindrach, slipping in and out of the angles between the dimensions. Packs of ur-ghuls lurked in the distance, but none of them interfered with their rapid progress. Banks of black muck and narrow streams drifted past them like insubstantial clouds blowing in the wind. Even so it was going to be a long climb up to Corespur.

+You’re insane. If you go to Corespur Vect will do things to you that even you will find distressing. I’m sure he’s had cause to punish haemonculi before. There will be ways.+

Bellathonis stifled an inner sigh. There had been a time when just moving out of arm’s reach was enough to escape Angevere’s mind-speech. Unfortunately the crone was becoming stronger or more skilled with practice. He answered her directly to keep her engaged while he locked away his own thoughts deep inside his mind.

‘Boredom, primarily, is the best way to inflict suffering on a haemonculus,’ Bellathonis opined airily. ‘Oh, some have addictions to tinctures and potions they make for themselves, or for the suffering of amazingly obscure and irrelevant races of particular profiles. You can make them squeal just by taking their favourite toys away. For most haemonculi, however, a simple absence of stimulus has them screaming and crying in no time.’

+How dull. Well at least I now know what Vect will do with you – he’ll wall you up somewhere and leave you to die of starvation. I’ve heard that’s a horrible, excruciating death so there’ll be some ‘stimulus’ for you in that, I suppose.+

‘Oh Angevere, if only I’d known how deeply you cared for my well-being I wouldn’t have allowed us to be parted for so long,’ Bellathonis replied sweetly. ‘I swear I’ll never let you out of my sight again.’

That prospect seemed to quieten the crone down for a while. For all her bluster and hate she still feared Bellathonis. The haemonculus made a mental note to reacquaint her with the exact reasons why at the first opportunity.

The slope swelled up before them, becoming ever more complex and granular the closer they got to it. Finally they were climbing a dust dune that had accumulated at the foot of the incline. Large pieces of statuary projected from the dust at random intervals. Some were identifiable – a foot, an eye, a hand – others were seemingly random textures on ragged chunks of stone. The diversity of styles and materials present would have seemed remarkable if it were not completely overwhelmed by the constituents of the slope itself.

The slope stretching above them was entirely composed of similar pieces both larger and smaller than the mere fragments that had fallen into the dust dune below. Bits and pieces of crowned heads, sceptres, angelic wings, rune-carved tablets, rods, chains, clocks, icons, swords, torches, plants and animals were jumbled together. There were untold thousands of broken sculptures, pictures and objects in the mound, of all shapes and sizes, from hand-sized statuettes to oversized idols with hints of a few truly titanic-sized pieces deeper inside. Nearly all of it was either made of gold or covered in it, the acres of peeling gold leaf seeming to shimmer with an inner light all of their own.

There were empty sockets showing where gems had been inlaid in some pieces, evidence that scavengers had been hard at work. Even priceless stones from the outer worlds were mere baubles in Commorragh, where only psychically imbued spirit stones held the value of true treasures. The lowliest beggars – the lame and the parched – must have picked over this pile of discarded plunder but they had been too frightened to touch the gold.

‘What place is this? Xagor does not know it,’ Xagor asked.

‘I recognise it. It’s called the Iconoclast’s mound,’ Bellathonis replied. ‘Raiding parties coming in through Port Carmine used to dump religious artefacts they’d taken – objects of faith, relics, icons – off the high roadway when they re-entered the city. It started as a joke, so I hear, but over time it became something of a tradition.’

High above, at the fringe of perception there was a dark line where the slope terminated against one of the armoured eaves of Port Carmine. Higher still the protruding spires of High Commorragh could be seen and somewhere above them, invisible from so far down in the city, Sorrow Fell and Corespur.

The shadow-skein of Aelindrach terminated at the foot of the slope and climbed no higher, seemingly repelled by its presence. Bellathonis consoled himself that it was probably best to stay out of the dark angles for the remainder of their journey anyway – Xhakoruakh’s minions would be looking for him.

‘That isn’t really why it’s called the Iconoclast’s mound, you know,’ a cheery voice called from above them. Bellathonis snapped his gaze to the source and saw a slight figure in grey emerging from between two broken halves of an immense face.

‘Motley!’ Xagor bleated in shock. The figure bowed extravagantly before springing lightly down the jumbled slope towards them.

+Beware! This one serves She Who Thirsts!+ Angevere hissed. Bellathonis blinked in surprise. The smiling Harlequin, for it was certainly one of those strange nomads approaching them, certainly didn’t look possessed – but you never could tell.

‘Oh! Fie on you, head-in-a-tube!’ Motley cried in mock outrage while wagging a finger in admonishment. ‘My first and only master is the Laughing God, arrangements with the doom of our kind notwithstanding, as you must well know. I think you’re trying to turn Bellathonis against me when we’ve only just met!’

‘You have… the advantage of me, Motley,’ Bellathonis said cautiously. ‘You appear to know of me and I don’t know you, other than via Xagor’s rather sketchy description of his encounter with you in the webway. Based on that I’m to understand that I owe you my thanks for his safe return.’

‘Oh, no need to thank me, you old monster!’ Motley grinned and clapped him on the shoulder with surprising strength. ‘I didn’t really have much choice. Things were already in motion at that point and leaving your little group to die in the webway would have made it all so, so much worse. It was all damage control by that stage.’

‘You mean on Lileathanir?’

‘I mean the Dysjunction in general.’

‘Ah,’ Bellathonis replied with a sudden qualm. This smiling, friendly little fellow had the look of a killer about him. He spread his hands in a gesture that encompassed the whole city as he replied with spiteful honesty, ‘I regret that your efforts have not been more successful.’

Motley smiled again, more grimly this time. ‘Just think how much worse it could have been – but I’m not here for recriminations, not this time. I’d actually just come here for quiet to have a bit of a think, and then you – the answer to my problem – just walk straight up to me! How fantastic is that?’

‘Enough to give one a belief in divine intervention,’ Bellathonis responded warily, ‘which is ironic given our surroundings.’

Motley’s laughter was clear and genuine, ringing blasphemously across the broken icons. ‘Oh! My! Yes, yes it is, my dear haemonculus, and in ways you cannot imagine. You see the origins of the Iconoclast’s mound go way, way back – all the way back to before the Fall. When the people found they had become gods themselves they had no further use for graven images and imaginary friends. They threw them in the rubbish: Asuryan, Lileath, Isha, Kurnous, Khaine and all the rest…

‘Later, when they stole similar artefacts from other races, they did the same thing. They threw such plunder down among their own broken gods to show that there was no higher power, no saviour, no immortal plan. Everything was damned for all eternity. So they wanted to believe because it made their own damnation easier to bear – and do you want to know the even greater irony? The bits and pieces of the eldar gods are still down there, broken and forgotten at the bottom of the pile, buried under a spoil heap being made ever higher by hatred and hubris. Now how’s that for a metaphor?’

Motley laughed again with more than a touch of madness. Bellathonis looked at Xagor and the wrack shrugged helplessly back at him. ‘Was like this before,’ Xagor said, ‘but laughed less at own jokes.’

Bellathonis nodded and casually laid a hand on his pistol. ‘I think I’m going to have to insist on you telling me what your intentions are,’ Bellathonis said reasonably over Motley’s maniacal peals of merriment. ‘We have a long way to go and we can afford no additional impediments, however entertaining they may purport to be.’

Motley wiped tears from his eyes and calmed himself. ‘Ah, excuse me for that, things had been getting so grim lately that I’d almost forgotten why I came… and it’s almost here – the big show! No time for you to reach your seats now without a little help. Luckily for you helping is my business.’

+He will swallow your soul, Bellathonis. You’re damned by even talking to him. Accept no help from this creature and move on.+

Reverse psychology? It seemed so crude on Angevere’s part that it gave Bellathonis pause for thought. ‘Tell me your intentions more plainly,’ he told the chuckling Harlequin. ‘What do you mean by “the big show”? Why are you saying we’re too late?’

Motley pointed up into the skies high above the Iconoclast’s mound, up past Port Carmine to the spiretops of High Commorragh where the Ilmaea shone clearly. There was turmoil in the upper air, vast numbers of objects swirling and crackling with distant lightning.

‘The overture is beginning,’ Motley said, suddenly serious. ‘I’ll help you to reach Corespur in the blink of an eye – it’s dangerous, but what isn’t right now? I’ll even make sure you can meet with Vect and explain yourself to him, cut a deal, fall on his non-existent mercy – whatever it is you hope to do.’

‘Why?’ Bellathonis’s question was flat and suspicious-sounding. Motley’s lips quirked into a smile before he answered.

‘Because I’m Vect’s agent!’ Motley cried pompously. ‘Or so some would have me believe, but mostly because if the supreme overlord has you to focus on then maybe, just maybe, he might relent and stop the slaughter.’

‘Hmm, so what you are really saying is that you intend to take me before Vect whether I like it or not,’ Bellathonis said and gripped his pistol more tightly.

It was a futile gesture, he knew; everything he’d ever read about Harlequins emphasised how dangerous they were beneath their exterior projection of fun and frivolity. Coming from scholars with a fine interest in dangerous psychopaths such conclusions could not be dismissed lightly.

‘Am I?’ Motley pondered the notion for a moment and then looked back at Bellathonis without any trace of humour in his eyes.

‘I am,’ the Harlequin announced firmly.

CHAPTER 24

WHITE FLAMES, BLACK HEART

Valossian Sythrac gazed hatefully across the smoking plain at the shimmering walls and high-peaked roofs of the White Flames fortress. All efforts to take the place had been suspended on the supreme overlord’s orders, the latest in a stream of nonsensical and seemingly contradictory instructions coming down from Vect’s ziggurat. Frustrated, Sythrac was reduced to drifting slowly around the perimeter of the siege in a Raider in the hopes that Yllithian and his lackeys would seize the opportunity to sally out and attack him. His menagerie of captured souls babbled and shifted restlessly on the edge of his consciousness, seeming to feed on his discontent.

Sythrac still had faith in Vect – no doubt the supreme overlord was preparing something he simply did not need to know about in order to perform his function. He told himself he accepted that blindness being imposed on him as necessary to enact Vect’s will, but a small part of him questioned that necessity.

The ravaged plain around the White Flames fortress had become a killing field for both sides. The surrounding spires had all fallen, the foundation strata was full of rents and gouges so deep that in five spots they went all the way through to the lower city. Despite all the violence the White Flames fortress still stood proud and defiant behind fields of seemingly impenetrable force. Anything moving in the open plain was annihilated by the emplaced weapons of the fortress or by the surrounding Black Heart forces hovering just beyond the fortress’s range. They were deadlocked.

As a result the fighting had become desultory, limited to squads picking their way through the tunnels in the foundation strata or attempting to dig new ones. Desperate, frenzied battles between groups of mandrakes, Castigators, kabalites and ur-ghuls were taking place just a few metres beneath the surface in spaces barely big enough to swing a weapon. The mandrakes and ur-ghuls were still massing, their numbers increasing by the hour. The arrival of the Castigators had acted to stabilise the situation but had done nothing to alleviate it.

Sieges, stalemate, tunnelling, stagnation – none of it was the Commorrite way. Sythrac’s early successes had given his force momentum and instilled a sense of purpose. The longer they sat still besieging the White Flames the more that energy drained away and left them vulnerable. Every kabal in the city was watching the siege and in their eyes the mere fact that Vect was not winning it meant that he was losing it.

The ghosts swirled again, unable to conceal their awareness of a new development. A flicker of movement near the base of the fortress caught Sythrac’s attention. A moment later his warriors on the Raider saw it too, pointing and crying the alarm. Lines of tiny figures were debouching from gates in the fortress that were level with the blasted plain. As Sythrac watched docks in the upper towers opened up too. The lean bodies of Raiders and Ravagers began to slide out of them with their aethersails spread for combat.

The White Flames forces began forming up in the plain. They were careful to remain safely under the protection of the fortress guns and out of range, but otherwise they were clear in their intent to offer battle. Sythrac wondered what sort of madness had gripped Yllithian. As impressive as the White Flames numbers looked the Black Heart kabal easily outnumbered them by five to one. A feint then, an attempt to draw Sythrac in just as he had hoped to draw Yllithian out.

The ghost of Daryvitch Helstrab, who had once been the grand marshal of a sixty-year campaign across the Platea Rift, whispered of an alternative scenario to Sythrac. A relief force was coming. Sythrac dragged his attention away from the White Flames’ distracting little parade out on the plain and squinted towards Ashkeri Talon and the docking ring. Sure enough a swarm of distant specks was coming into view and becoming denser by the second. The disembodied voices of his spies whispered in his ear describing the approach of multiple grav-craft with no positive identification displayed as yet.

Sythrac cursed and sent word of his intentions to Vect’s floating citadel. He also requested the help of the Castigators, but he did not wait for a response. He divided his forces, one part moving to intercept the relieving force while the greater part remained to guard the fortress and prepare to meet any sally by its defenders. The odds were shifting in Yllithian’s favour. The situation was still far from being critical but the trend was a disturbing one. Sythrac felt eager to rectify that fact.

Xelian felt the wind whipping through her hair and laughed as they plunged towards the White Flames fortress. Her personal Venom transport clove through the air eagerly, bucking beneath her feet as the pilot sent it hurtling through the thin air of High Commorragh towards her date with destiny. Around her packs of reavers and hellions raced to overtake one another (although they never, ever passed her, she would have killed them if they tried). Behind her the sky was dark with more Venoms plus Raiders full of wyches and beastmasters with their savage pets. Razorwings and Voidravens circled overhead giving them top cover.

It was an impressive showing, better than she’d hoped for. Every member of the Blades of Desire that could walk or hold a weapon was crammed onboard the transports or piloting one of the craft within the swarm. Xelian had left her fortress empty and virtually unguarded to bring everything to the fight. Leaving forces behind to keep an open line of retreat would only signal weakness to her followers. This was the point of decision, all or nothing.

They had swung out high and wide around the docking ring to avoid attention until they turned in towards their objective. Xelian led the swarm in a sweeping turn to place the city squarely in front of them. The stacked tiers of foundation strata and spires expanded before them, revealing a circular gap in the spire tops with the ivory spike of the White Flames fortress at its centre. Smoke and flames wreathed the fortress but it still stood unbroken. Around it a slowly rotating storm cell of grav-craft and scourges wheeled endlessly at a safe distance, too cowardly to take on Yllithian’s guns – just as he’d said they would be.

They swooped in towards the battleground, the Razorwings and Voidravens surging ahead to begin their complex dance with their opposite numbers in Vect’s forces. Missiles rippled from the flyers’ wings as the two sides closed in. A chain of brief flashes marked the deaths of pilots and machines just before the survivors converged into an inextricable, constantly twisting knot of hunters and hunted.

Xelian’s remaining forces slipped beneath the airborne melee without slowing. Her own pilots could only keep Vect’s busy for so long before numbers began to tell and she intended to capitalise fully on that time. Part of the outer ring of Vect’s besiegers was peeling off to meet her. They were ragged and slow but evidently determined to make Xelian fight before she could gain the support of her allies inside the fortress. Again, just as Yllithian had predicted.

There was barely time to identify the enemies rising to meet them. Distant Raiders and Ravagers swelled rapidly. In the course of a few seconds they grew from miniscule dark scratches outlined against the battle plain into baroquely bladed swords aiming straight for the heart of Xelian’s swarm. A lethal web of darklight beams, disintegrator pulses and hyper-velocity splinters criss-crossed between the two forces in the instant before impact. Reavers exploded, Raiders gouted flames and fell away before Xelian’s force smashed into their challengers with a physical shock that resounded throughout the spires of High Commorragh.

Reaver bladevanes tore through metal and flesh as they careened through the enemy ranks close enough to touch. Wyches dived from their hurtling Venoms onto the pitching decks of enemy craft as they swept past. Hellions slashed at warriors and were blasted from their skyboards in return. The aerial battle rapidly devolved into a swirling mass of attacking craft, falling bodies and flaming debris.

At her command Xelian’s Venom dived into the fray and grazed past the prow of a Ravager that was firing furiously in all directions. She leapt off into the midst of the Ravager’s startled crew with two short, straight swords in her hands. This was butcher’s work, close and deadly with no time for finesse, so she had armed herself accordingly. Within seconds the Ravager was awash with blood and piled corpses, wallowing helplessly with its guns silent. Xelian snatched a second to look around for her next victims.

Her own Raiders, being slightly slower than the vanguard of Venoms and reavers, were just now entering the battle. The lean grav-craft grappled with those of the enemy to drag themselves together into temporary, shifting battlegrounds where warriors and wyches slaughtered one another with glorious abandon. Khymerae and clawed fiends were urged into battle by the beastmasters, sweeping across the interlocked islands of craft like a tide of nightmares.

Their victories proved short-lived as the foe turned their guns against the captured craft to send them and their captors plummeting in flames. Far below on the ravaged plain around Yllithian’s fortress Xelian could see that the White Flames forces were on the move. A wedge was forming to thrust against the encircling ring where it would break through to link up with her own forces. The Black Heart kabalites were responding as they must – by tightening the ring to threaten the fortress and the sallying force with their whole weight. Even Vect’s darkly gleaming ziggurat was closing in on the fortress at the head of a mass of Ravagers.

Xelian’s Venom returned and she leapt easily across to its rear deck as it passed. She directed her pilot to a substantial tangle of interlocked Raiders nearby, where combatants were still struggling hand to hand. There was time to wet her blades perhaps once or twice more before it was time to withdraw. Xelian and her Blades of Desire had done their part, now it was down to Yllithian and his shadowy allies to do the rest.

Vect watched the battle develop, ignoring the pleas and entreaties of the archons to take action. The battlefield appeared as a roiling cauldron of violence: frothing and bubbling, with black and red jets flaring between a thousand chained lightnings. Hundreds of predatory machines dived to their doom carrying their fragile cargoes of flesh with them. Energies were unleashed that atomised metal and burned the air itself. Brave warriors and cowards alike were blasted, stabbed and shredded out of existence in their thousands by the impartial whims of fate. Vect smiled to see it all, a fitting final act.

Sythrac had moved to intercept the rebels that were attempting to break the siege and now the traitor Yllithian moved his troops to intercede in that fight. Move and counter-move. The fools had matched themselves against a master and already they had shown their hand. Every rebellious kabalite that Yllithian could call into play was here, drawn in by the inescapable gravity of the siege. They had all come to fight on the game board Yllithian and Vect had created between them. Move and countermove. But Yllithian and his rebels had made a fatal error by moving too soon – they were not strong enough to prevail.

Vect gave an order. The Kabal of the Black Heart and its allies – Malys’s Poisoned Tongue, Malixian’s Ninth Raptrex, Khromys’s Obsidian Rose, Xerathis’s Broken Sigil, entire regiments of Castigators – swept into the fortress’s killing field to come to grips with Yllithian’s White Flames.

They were greeted by a storm of fire that dwarfed anything seen in the battle so far. The White Flames fortress blazed like a false sun, momentarily outshining the Ilmaea with its fatal corona. Spears of all-destroying plasma and massed darklight beams slashed through the air to tear smouldering gaps in Vect’s forces. Again and again the gaps were closed in the ranks as Vect’s kabals plunged onwards in an unstoppable wave.

Vect laughed at the destruction. It mattered not to him how many lived or died on the field of battle, only that the bloodied survivors pledged fealty to him alone.

The wave crashed upon the fortress and the troops isolated outside it in a shuddering foam of violence. Raiders and Venoms disgorged squads of kabalites and Castigators onto the ravaged foundation strata to take on Yllithian’s warriors. Others surged onwards to assault the shot-starred walls of the White Flames fortress itself. A blistering firefight encompassed the scene, the energy flashes and explosions merging into a continuous howl as if a legion of mad gods had been set loose upon the city.

Eager to witness the carnage, Vect ordered his mobile fortress closer. The multi-tiered ziggurat of darkly gleaming metal drifted slowly towards the fighting under the watchful protection of a squadron of a hundred Ravagers. As they began to move reports reached Vect of kabals approaching from the mid and lower tiers of the city. Tiny, desperate knots of Commorrites had heard about the battle and were coming to make their own marks on the city’s future. Their true allegiance was anyone’s guess, some motivated by opportunism or greed, some by idealism. Most would be driven by an inflated idea of their own importance. Vect ordered some of his Castigators and Ravagers to keep them back. This struggle would be decided without their last-minute interference.

Yllithian’s forces were failing, the White Flames warriors outside the fortress cut off and surrounded by a fast flowing whirlpool of Vect’s kabalites. Those of his minions assaulting the walls, however, were failing in their attempts. Every slit and cupola in the high white walls flared with violent energies that were exacting a dreadful toll from the attackers. Vect ordered his ziggurat closer still with the intention of employing its formidable firepower to force a breach. Yllithian’s fortress was mighty, but the fury of Vect was mightier still.

The fortress gunners recognised the threat, shifting their aim to engulf the ziggurat in a storm of fire as it came within range. Rippling shields of pure energy shrugged off the shower of blasts and bolts as if it were only a light summer rain. Vect’s escorting squadron of open-decked Ravagers fared worse in the firestorm but doggedly maintained station with their supreme overlord. As the ziggurat began to cross the ravaged plain its shadow fell across the deep pits in the foundation strata. A change occurred, a roiling in the darkness itself as though it had suddenly gained substance. Crooked, pitch-black figures with bone-white blades in hand began pouring out onto the plain like ants boiling from a nest.

The Ravager escort was rapidly overwhelmed, the long-bodied gunships sinking beneath the weight of struggling mandrakes and crew. Vect’s ziggurat seemed to stagger in the air as scores of shadow-stepping mandrakes swarmed aboard it. They were led by a giant figure armed with a rusted scythe that it wielded with unstoppable strength. Blood flowed freely in the ziggurat’s narrow, armoured corridors as the Black Heart kabalites fought desperately to keep the mandrakes from their prize.

They failed.

Yllithian watched the battle develop from afar, drifting inconspicuously aboard a commandeered Raider and surrounded by a small escort. The sight of the White Flames fortress still glittering and defiant provoked an almost sentimental mood in him. Of all the things he had gambled in his pursuit of power his ancestral fortress was the most precious. To see it still unbroken after he had emerged from the labyrinth was a source of indescribable relief.

Bereft of any superior means of observation on this occasion Yllithian had to rely on boosted optics in the shape of a small hand-held telescope to observe what he could of the fighting. He watched Xelian’s Blades of Desire appear over the rim of High Commorragh and race into battle, drawing off a sizeable contingent of besiegers. He saw his own warriors struggling to link up with her and becoming cut off outside the fortress.

In that moment Yllithian wished he could have been closer to the forefront of the action, waiting with Xhakoruakh in the pits beneath the plain or standing on the walls surrounded by his troops so that he could watch the trap unfold. Vect’s Castigators had driven the mandrake-king’s forces back into the shadows and culled their numbers significantly, but, as the stinking giant had revealed, they still did not understand how numerous their enemies remained.

Yllithian’s plan was simply to lure Vect’s forces into an open battle where the sudden appearance of mandrakes could inflict the greatest possible toll. Despite what he’d told Xhakoruakh he had little hope of the children of Aelindrach winning the day. Most likely the horde of mandrakes and ur-ghuls would be massacred once out in the open, but in the course of their destruction they would drag Vect’s forces down with them. Yllithian and Xelian did not need to break the siege in order to score a victory against Vect. All they had to do was give battle, withdraw and leave Vect’s kabals to count the cost. Defections would soon follow.

Yllithian’s heart leapt as he saw Vect’s ziggurat begin to move. He had never dared to hope that Vect would allow himself to become directly embroiled in the fighting. Entering any combat bore a risk no matter how infinitesimally small the combatant attempted to make it. Chance could always take its toll, Fate might rear its ugly head and bring down the highest as easily as the lowest in the anarchy of war. Yllithian gripped his scope and watched, unable to take his eyes off the ziggurat’s stately progress. If Xhakoruakh saw and understood well enough to wait he could have a chance to strike at Vect himself.

The battle swirled and flamed as if a million daemons beat upon the anvils of war, yet Yllithian had eyes only for Vect’s progress. It seemed so painfully slow that he began to wonder if Vect were taunting him somehow, aware of Yllithian’s watching eyes and his all-too-obvious plan. No, the shadow of the ziggurat still crept forwards, inching across the war-torn foundation strata. It began to cross one of the ubiquitous yawning pits, the shadows merging…

The trap was sprung.

Yllithian’s pulse hammered so hard he found it difficult to keep the scope steady. He glimpsed crowds of pitch-black shapes swarming over the stepped ziggurat, saw it lurch in the air and slide sideways to impact on the surface with deceptive gentleness. Armoured plates bowed and ruptured, flames spurted from splits in the tortured metal as the angular shape crumpled. It was the most orgasmic sight Yllithian had ever witnessed.

He lowered the scope and issued orders to his helmsman to get him to the fortress as quickly as possible. A thousand possibilities raced through his mind. It could all still be a trick, a counterfeint of Vect’s to draw him in to his doom. He raised the scope again as his Raider began to move. The dark ring formed by Vect’s forces was dissipating like smoke, the kabals breaking away from the equally shocked White Flames to race away into High Commorragh in shameful defeat. He had won.

Trapped in a place of fire and burning metal, Xhakoruakh strove to free himself from the pillar pinning his lower body. The shadows were close, all he needed to do was stretch far enough and he could slip into the angles between worlds and escape. The shadows were close… but jealous flames kept them at bay. Fire, the old enemy, might yet become his doom.

The shadow-king cursed his weak minions for fleeing when the tyrant’s palace fell. The eviscerated body of Vect lay among a dozen slain warriors nearby, but none of Xhakoruakh’s own people had been there to witness him deliver the killing blow.

The shadows, so tantalisingly close, rippled. Someone had returned for him. Xhakoruakh began to call out, but then recognised the shape poised in the darkness with its long, straight blade.

‘It’s you,’ Xhakoruakh rumbled. ‘I knew that you would come back for me.’

Kheradruakh’s slash took the shadow-king’s head from his shoulders in a single, clean cut.

CHAPTER 25

CORESPUR

They were treated as prisoners, stripped, searched and brought to the scrying chamber atop Corespur, all without comment. The onyx-armoured guards escorting them had a swagger about them as if they were big game hunters bringing in a particularly valuable kill. Motley found the behaviour a little unwarranted considering that he had literally delivered himself and Bellathonis to the front door.

In the chamber, surrounded by rings of polished crystal, they found Vect himself seated on an ugly metal throne. The great tyrant appeared to be in rare humour, positively overflowing with malicious glee as he watched the scenes displayed in the crystal panes. The inner ring had been entirely dedicated to a single, vast battle involving multiple kabals clashing around a white-walled spire. Vect spared them a glance and a mischievous grin before raising his hand for silence as he stared intently at a single crystal. The viewpoint it showed was a distance from the towering spire, looking up from a low angle as the battle swept around it.

It was hard not to be distracted by the kaleidoscopic images of closer violence in the other panes. In each one fantastic machines and warriors fought to the death in lightning-fast combats, the barbed, weaponed masses of the opposed kabals grappling like amorphous monsters with ever-shifting limbs of fire and steel. Vect glanced at Motley again and grinned as if reading his thoughts.

‘All of the battles are of vital importance to their participants,’ Asdrubael Vect mocked, ‘but only one is relevant now. The others have played out their parts in my design. I see you were thoughtful enough to bring me a gift from your sojourn in my city, Fool. Tell me what it is you think you have brought me.’

Motley was, rarely for him, nervous as he replied. Vect remained an enigma, there was no telling how he might react. The Harlequin chose his words carefully. ‘This is Bellathonis, a haemonculus who assisted a certain Archon Yllithian in a certain endeavour that eventually led to… well, the Dysjunction happening. You wanted vengeance on the ones responsible – here is one who witnessed everything and can point you to all of the others.’

Vect laughed, maniacal peals of evil merriment that rebounded from the upright crystal panes and winged their way into the shadowed eaves above. ‘Priceless!’ Vect chuckled. ‘You still believe that some judicial process will be applied, that the guilty will be separated from your precious innocents and justice will be done.’

‘Not at all,’ Motley responded. ‘It is simply my earnest hope that with those responsible in hand you can cease punishing the entire city for the actions of a few individuals.’

Vect smirked and looked at the crystal once more. ‘Again, you make the mistake of believing I do not wish to harm my citizens,’ the supreme overlord said carelessly, ‘that all I do is a matter of sad necessity instead of the exercise of my will. As I recall you also believed servants of the Chaos gods to be loose within my city – tell me what you have found.’

‘Many things,’ Motley sighed uncomfortably. ‘From what Bellathonis has told me and what I’ve seen for myself the main threat comes from a sub-realm called Aelindrach. The Architect of Fate and the Plague Lord had found living champions in that place, and after their clash Nurgle’s champion became ascendant. That is the source of the shadows and invasion of Commorragh in the aftermath of the Dysjunction.’

‘Fascinating,’ Vect murmured condescendingly before issuing a whispered command. The viewpoint that was absorbing all of the tyrant’s attention began to move, sliding slowly forwards across the ruined plain towards the fortress.

‘Supreme overlord, may I interject?’ Bellathonis asked with unctuous humbleness.

‘It speaks!’ Vect mocked with his attention still on the crystal. ‘Very well. Just do not tell me you have come to throw yourself on my mercy. I have none.’

‘Of course, supreme overlord, that is well documented and attested to. Contrary to the Harlequin’s beliefs I have not given myself over to your authority in order to bring your attention to the threat from Aelindrach. Firstly, as a citizen of Commorragh I have always been under your authority and from gestation to dissolution I always will be…’

Vect smirked, but kept watching the crystal, circling one finger indicating Bellathonis needed to speed up. The haemonculus hurried.

‘…but like many others I accept only you as my true master. Yllithian made great promises and I chose to follow him – in doing so I accepted his objectives as my own, and also his failures. In exchange for my continued existence I can offer his life for mine, and in a fashion I think you will find pleasing.’

Vect’s brows arched and he broke from watching the crystal for long enough to give Bellathonis a penetrating look. ‘You have no conception of what pleases me, haemonculus, although I accept your tribute in the spirit it is offered,’ Vect said before nodding towards where Xagor was quailing as he held out Angevere’s head like an offering. ‘I see you’ve brought me the crone – that was wise too. Now be silent, the final act is beginning – you’re just in time to see it.’

An eruption of darkness was obscuring the view in the crystal, drowning it beneath what proved to be the shadow-skinned bodies of countless mandrakes. The nightmarish killers vanished from sight just as the whole viewpoint tilted sideways and slid towards the ground. The pane went dark. The scenes in the other crystals changed in a ripple effect, the combatants in one fight after another separating and one side immediately fleeing the battlefield.

‘What just happened?’ Motley asked impertinently. Vect shot him a scathing look. Bellathonis cleared his throat, taking his life in his hands.

‘Supreme overlord, if I might hazard a guess?’ the haemonculus wheedled. Vect nodded.

‘Our supreme overlord has manufactured an event whereby he appears to have fallen on the field of battle, and upon seeing this disaster his loyal kabals are fleeing… or at least the ones that are truly loyal are fleeing… The rebels will now take heart and consolidate at the scene of their victory along with whatever turncoats flock to join their cause.’

Vect nodded again and smiled approvingly at Bellathonis. ‘Close enough, but you are missing the vital ingredient of what happens next.’

‘What happens next?’ Motley asked in mystification. Heartening your enemies and adding to their numbers sounded like a remarkably poor plan to him.

‘You almost fatally unhinged affairs without ever knowing it, Fool,’ Vect remarked venomously. ‘It gave me great cause to regret keeping an eye on you. Fortunately you’ve brought me something to make up for it, so I may be able to forgive your transgression.’

‘You’re referring to the lady I danced with by the firefalls,’ Motley said contritely, ‘or perhaps the fellow at the Castigator vault? My regrets for the inconvenience in either case.’

‘Lady Malys, whom you so inconvenienced that she simply had to run off and duel with you, was supposed to bring back the occupants of Valzho Sinister. In the event she brought back only a handful of survivors, but fortunately for you both they are sufficient for my needs. They have just reached their positions – you are about to witness a miracle.’

Motley glanced over at Bellathonis to see if the name meant anything to him. The haemonculus’s milk-white face betrayed nothing if it did. Animate shadows were running amok in the circle of crystal faces now, while the tall white spire stood unbroken with long processions of grav-craft passing into and out of it. Lots of new friends arriving, it seemed.

‘Valzho Sinister,’ Vect continued, unperturbed and evidently enjoying Motley’s ignorance, ‘contained the last beaten remnants of a cult from far, far back in Commorragh’s history. It was a time so long ago that I had not yet achieved the dominance that I so richly deserve. The cult attempted to seize power over the city, thinking that their eldritch knowledge would be sufficient to keep the noble houses cowed. They were wrong, of course, the nobles cared nothing for the suffering the cultists could inflict on the city, only that they were challenged.

‘The most terrible weapon in the cult’s arsenal was prepared, a thing so terrible that it was encoded with safety measures that ensured it could only be activated by members of the cult’s leadership. Yet in the final test they feared to use it. The nobles overthrew the cult but kept the leaders alive and in torment in case they ever required the use of that weapon. They, too, feared to use it when the time came. I gained control of Valzho Sinister when I overthrew the nobles. I am Asdrubael Vect and I fear to use nothing to assert my will.’

‘What did the cultists worship?’ Motley whispered, terrified by what Vect’s answer might be. He had thought the supreme overlord too self-assured to resort to calling upon the fickle gods of Chaos. He had been wrong and now Commorragh was surely doomed; there would be an eternity of bondage in the grip of the new tide of unimaginable horrors that Chaos would unleash. Motley had seen it many times over, desperate souls calling for help at any cost without understanding there were costs that no one should ever have to bear.

The scenes in the crystals were taking on a new aspect; the shadows were becoming hard-edged and blacker by the second, the lone white spire blazing with reflected light. The Ilmaea, usually wan and sickly-looking, had swelled in the sky over High Commorragh until they almost filled it. The light brightened impossibly until the crystal panes looked like sheets of white-hot metal.

‘They were the Solar Cultists,’ Vect smiled. ‘They worshipped, and tended to, the Ilmaea.’

In later times it would become known as ‘The Gaze of Vect’. All Commorrites would shudder to remember the day when Asdrubael Vect called down the Ilmaea to scour the darkness from High Commorragh. All the horrors of the Dysjunction came to be forgotten in the face of the retribution it incurred.

Around the White Flames fortress the air shimmered with heat haze under the focused glare of the Ilmaea as the temperatures skyrocketed. Within seconds mandrakes and ur-ghuls were physically shrivelled in the hideous blaze, their withered forms immolating like scraps of paper beneath a blowtorch. The great, seething mass of the shadow horde caught on the plain was utterly annihilated, torn apart and burned to ash by the unrelenting suns. The handful of survivors fled shrieking into the deepest darkness of Aelindrach to nurse burning scars that would never heal.

Yllithian’s followers fled for shelter inside the fortress as the plain smouldered and fires leapt up spontaneously on all sides. They were caught inside a ring of flames and as the heat mounted higher the plain itself ran molten. Still they thought themselves safe inside; the White Flames fortress was buttressed by more than metal and stone, impenetrable shields of force protected it on all sides, air and sustenance could be supplied indefinitely. They had only to wait, under siege once more even if it was by Vect’s stolen suns.

It was not to be. The ring of flames tightened inexorably around the lone white spire and the heat soared still higher. The super-heated air itself burned as the ring closed, a titanic vortex of fire grew, spinning faster and faster as it reached up into the heavens. The fortress shuddered and smouldered under the assault, but still stood defiant as the fiery pillar roiled higher still. Its head split to become hydra-like as it reached out to touch the face of the Ilmaea themselves…

Raw plasma siphoned into the spinning funnel directly from the bloated bodies of the caged suns. Their coronas were momentarily joined as they poured their fusing mass onto the fortress below. The White Flames fortress was engulfed in the living blood of the suns, pounded by unthinkable energies in the whirling atomic firestorm. No clever construct or adroit technology could keep such energy at bay for long.

Emitters failed and relays melted, the impenetrable shields of force protecting the fortress collapsed suddenly and catastrophically leaving the structure itself exposed. The inrush of elemental forces ate through stone and drank metal. Organics, the fragile inhabitants of the fortress, flashed into expanding gas in a split second. The whole great edifice with its high white walls and sloping gables, its rooftop gardens and bladed oubliettes, vanished with an ear-splitting roar.

With their work of destruction complete the Ilmaea split their cyclopean gaze once more, the firestorm dissipating over a bubbling lake of molten metal and stone that slowly drizzled through gaps in the foundation strata to fall into Low Commorragh as a killing rain. The work was not over. The fiery presence of the Ilmaea rushed outwards again, expanding to burn back the encroaching shadows of Aelindrach from Commorragh.

The darkness that had spilled from the shadow-realm’s boundaries recoiled like a living thing, fleeing before the unmasked faces of the captured stars. Flames and destruction followed in their wake as the guttering fires begun by the Dysjunction roared into fresh life. The city would suffer beneath the burning lash for many hours, but never again did the Ilmaea focus fully on a single stronghold as they had on the White Flames fortress.

Through the billowing smoke and livid flames came marching Vect’s Castigators. Their metal hides were invulnerable to the heat, just as their insensate minds were immune to the pain. They set about completing Vect’s reconquest of Commorragh with indefatigable determination and unshakeable purpose. They terrorised the populace and imposed Vect’s rule of law with unimaginable cruelty – all while dreaming they stood as heroes on the battlefield once more.

Yllithian’s small force was arrowing towards the fortress and within sight of it when the Ilmaea began to swell in the sky. Ever cautious, he had his helmsman circle for a moment while he determined what new devilry Vect might be brewing. Commorragh was usually a city of perpetual twilight; it was only among the heights of High Commorragh that the Ilmaea shone visible at all times and most often they seemed weak and distant. Recently, over Gorath and in the tortured skies around it, Yllithian had witnessed the potential power of the Ilmaea first-hand so he chose to wait. The suns became more bloated, the fractured light from a million barbs and steeples across the spiretops became blinding. Then it happened.

Flames rose. Flames higher than the spires themselves. Roaring, inchoate pillars of fire reaching into the heavens before smashing back down again like an enormous fist. The White Flames fortress (oh, the bitter irony of that name now!) seemed to leap upwards for an instant, the whole, vast bulk of it skipping impossibly into the air at the touch of the coruscating rivers of plasma from above.

Yllithian could not shake the image from his mind. Just for an instant the fortress seemed to hang there, frozen among the towering fires, and then it disintegrated into a billion flaming fragments. The solid-looking lines of alabaster walls and towers flew apart like sand before a hurricane. Yllithian’s imagination was set reeling by the power displayed, for an entire spire-fortress – reinforced, armoured and shielded with the very best that Commorragh’s artisans could fashion – to be wiped out in a single moment… and Yllithian’s heart was broken in that same instant.

The archon of the White Flames sagged, black depression gibbering in his tortured mind. With the loss of the fortress he was bereft; thousands of years of accumulated wealth and history gone, his followers, his slaves… In an instant his strength had been reduced to that of a petty archon from the mid-tiers, just the few warriors that were with him, his incubi bodyguards and a small legion of agents scattered around Commorragh who, by their nature, would turn traitor at the first opportunity.

A shouted warning brought Yllithian to his senses. His crew had spotted a swarm of grav-craft moving swiftly through the jagged spire-scape. Their course was parallel with Yllithian’s, their objective unknown. He raised the scope once more in his trembling hand and looked for colours or insignia. A wave of relief washed over him as he identified them as Xelian’s Blades of Desire – he even caught a glimpse of Xelian herself on the rear deck of a Venom.

He ordered his helmsman to set a converging course with the fast-moving Blades. He needn’t have bothered, they were spotted immediately and the whole swarm altered course to intercept him. Within moments they were engulfed by a restless cloud of snarling reavers and hellions that circled menacingly just beyond pistol-shot. The Blades’ battered collection of surviving Raiders and Venoms swept in close behind and joined the throng. A single Venom sped out of the mass and slewed to a halt beside Yllithian’s craft. Xelian sprang lightly across from the Venom to his Raider.

She was, Yllithian noted, still covered in blood from fighting in the aerial battle over the fortress. Two short, wide-bladed swords hung negligently from Xelian’s hands, also caked in gore. Yllithian moved to place himself out of easy striking distance while his three incubi quietly placed themselves in position to guard him. This was a delicate moment, as Xelian’s force critically outnumbered Yllithian’s handful of White Flames. She might decide that betrayal was the logical choice, that their attempts to unseat Vect were finished.

‘We still have a choice,’ Yllithian told her, confidently taking the initiative to head off any traitorous notions. ‘We can flee the city in our remaining ships or take to Low Commorragh where we can evade Vect’s kabalites successfully. In either case we’ll need to regroup and rally our supporters.’

Xelian stared back at him with a calculating, hungry gaze like a hunting cat sizing up its next meal. ‘You’ve failed, Yllithian,’ she growled throatily. ‘Your keenest supporters all just got immolated along with your entire kabal. You’ve got nothing left that’s worth a damn.’

‘But we’re so close!’ Yllithian cried passionately. ‘Look around you. Vect has pulled every trick he could and left the city in ruins! He’s crumbling, Xelian! His support is slipping away! One more push and we can take him down.’

‘I don’t think so. At the start of this you talked about Vect always using the best weapons he could get hold of. I think he’s just proved that he can find bigger weapons than you. That isn’t going to change.’

Yllithian opened his mouth to retort but Xelian was already moving, her limbs a blur. The two short swords thrust through the gorgets of the closest incubi, wedging the wide points firmly into their spinal columns. Xelian swung herself forwards, feet first, using the sword hilts for leverage as she delivered a double kick to the chest of the third incubus. The impact sent the heavily armoured guard sprawling over the railing of the Raider and plummeting to his death below.

Xelian’s attack took only a split second, but Yllithian had his sword and pistol out before the last of his incubi fell. Around him he could hear crashes and screams as the Blades of Desire took apart the rest of his warriors. Despair burned hot in his mind, but there was defiance with it and a determination to make Xelian pay for her treachery.

She looked at him and smiled rapaciously. ‘Just the way I’ve always wanted to see you, broken but still with a hint of defiance. This will be a pleasure.’

Yllithian was a highly trained swordsman, a fine fighter by even Commorragh’s unforgiving standards. Xelian beat him as easily as she would have defeated a child.

CHAPTER 26

THE DEATH OF HOPE

When the Dysjunction first struck Commorragh, Asdrubael Vect had called together the High Archons, including Yllithian, to the supreme overlord’s grand auditorium in Corespur. There Vect had flayed several dozen archons and hung them from the roof in chains to emphasise the gravity of the situation to the rest. They took Yllithian back there for his final humiliation.

Xelian had kept him alive and delivered him unharmed directly to Vect. He had been stripped and imprisoned but his wait had been a short one – just long enough for the crushing gravity of the situation to set in. Yllithian could almost have forgiven Xelian for doing it – if the roles were reversed he would have done the same thing – almost, but not quite. He hoped that Vect would wreak his vengeance upon her too. Something every bit as dire as the fate the tyrant no doubt had planned for him.

Suicide whispered seductively at the edges of his consciousness, just as it had during his hopeless fight with Xelian. He still recoiled from it in horror, knowing it for the siren call of She Who Thirsts, ever hungry for his soul. No, he refused to give up his life when his one remaining dignity might be having it forcibly taken from him, with him biting and clawing to the last.

They dragged him to be displayed before Vect, stripped and in chains, and placed him between the horns of a half-moon of archons arranged before the steps to Vect’s throne. The dais itself was raised, a thick-bodied pillar of metal extending up to the ceiling.

Sitting directly in front of the dais, only a few metres from Yllithian, was a waist-high irregular-looking lump of something hidden beneath a black silk sheet. The sight of it gave Yllithian an ugly premonition it would be involved in whatever torment lay ahead, but its nature he could not even guess at. Moments passed with only the howl of distant winds for accompaniment as the archons waited in silence.

A hundred archons had been present at Vect’s first audience; Yllithian noted that barely a score stood at the foot of the dais now. All of Vect’s favoured were there, though: Sythrac, Malys, Khromys, Malixian and Xerathis. Treacherous Xelian was present too, although Yllithian did enjoy the fact that no other archon would apparently stand close to her.

The light leaking into the auditorium through its high windows was wan and poisonous-looking, the stolen suns once more sealed back into their sub-realm vessels and leaking the barest possible illumination across the eternal city. For a moment Yllithian wished he could cruise the upper air just once more with the city spread out beneath him, dreaming of days when he would dominate it.

The wait was ended abruptly by the tramp of Black Heart kabalite warriors filing into the auditorium and taking position around the dais or along the walls. A number of Vect’s courtiers and playthings swept in to arrange themselves on the dais steps. Among them Yllithian saw Bellathonis’s two minions, Kharbyr and Xagor, in the company of a capering, masked fellow dressed in grey. He wondered briefly which one of them was really Bellathonis before deciding he was too tired to really care.

A troupe of slaves was lined up to sing a passage of the Maldhys Uzkch Vect – the triumph of Vect – under the exacting ministrations of two haemonculi. As the slaves’ voices reached a crescendo of pain the dais slid downwards as smoothly as a piston until it became level with the steps. A hemispherical shield of entropic energy atop the dais swirled and dissipated to reveal a dark, ugly throne occupied by Asdrubael Vect. The supreme overlord of Commorragh favoured the archons with a broad, malevolent smile.

‘Yllithian, I’m so glad you could join us,’ Vect said with levity. ‘I feel that today’s lesson is going to be made invaluable by your presence.’

‘The lesson is that you’re vulnerable, Asdrubael Vect,’ Yllithian replied, twisting to address the archons too. ‘You can kill me, but another will take my place. One day you’ll fall and I’ve brought that day closer!’

Vect raised his brows quizzically and rose from his throne. ‘Your defiance sounds weak and desperate, Yllithian,’ the tyrant said as he descended to the cloth-covered lump before the dais. ‘It would be more effective for you to beg me for your life – I’m inclined to grant it.’

Yllithian blinked with surprise. Even though he knew that Vect was toying with him he couldn’t prevent a spark of hope kindling in his breast. The supreme overlord saw it and smirked.

‘Your optimism is quite admirable, but I imagine that’s what brought you to this point in the first place. Optimism and hubris – oh, and lots of luck, we shouldn’t forget about that…’

Vect whipped away the silk sheet with a flourish. Under it was revealed a life-like statue of a crouching figure rendered in black glass. Yllithian recognised it instantly – it was his old body, discarded and forgotten since he had escaped from it and the vitrifying glass plague that was destroying it. The blood drained from his face and sweat sprang from every pore.

‘You never asked me why I should want to spare your life,’ Vect said. ‘Ask me now.’

‘Why…?’ was all that Yllithian could manage to croak, his throat dry with fear.

‘Because you’ve been touched by the gods, Yllithian,’ Vect said with cruel mockery. ‘There are powers with such investment in you that separating your soul from your body will have consequences best avoided… for now.’

‘Powers?’ Yllithian repeated in confusion.

Vect looked at Yllithian with his black, penetrating eyes, the twin orbs blazing with malicious intent. ‘That you do not even guess is the ultimate irony, I suppose,’ Vect observed coldly. ‘The Fool said it was so, yet I found it hard to credit. You have been made into a pawn, Yllithian, a servant of hidden masters. Your overweening ambition called forth the Architect of Fate and that fickle entity guided your quests for forbidden knowledge and ultimate power. Your strength, such as it is, has never been your own. It was granted to you from an arcane source, and for now that deity has abandoned you.’

Outrage surged through every fibre of Yllithian’s being. He was no pawn of eldritch powers! His motivations were his own! Vect grinned openly as he drank in the anguish. Beneath the fierce twist of emotions Yllithian felt the first worms of doubt begin writhing. How often had a miraculous piece of luck furthered his plans? How often had his enemies looked the wrong way? The very possibility was soul-crushing.

Seeing that Yllithian had reached his nadir Vect appeared to tire of his plaything. The supreme overlord went back to his throne, turned to his courtiers and twitched a single, long finger to summon one of them forwards. It was the individual that Yllithian had known as Kharbyr, bony-looking and white-faced now – evidently this was the real Bellathonis, in the throes of transforming himself to show his old face. The haemonculus was carrying a silvery crown with tall points like horns at the brow. Yllithian recognised that, too. He shrieked and tried to flinch before he was restrained. Helpless, he could only watch and curse as Bellathonis jammed the crown firmly onto his head.

Crippling agony stabbed at Yllithian’s temples, a searing hot pain that burned out all thought, all volition except for the need to scream. There was a wrenching sensation, deep rooted as though something at the very core of his being was twisted free. There was a sickening sense of transition and Yllithian found himself paralysed, blinded and nearly deaf save for the very faintest echoes of his own screams fading away in his vitrified ears.

Motley watched the gruesome theatre as the rebel archon was publically tortured by Vect. As the tyrant had said, it was an object lesson, a demonstration to the other archons of what lay in wait for them if they followed a similar course. The screams abruptly faded away as Yllithian’s soul was migrated into the barely living receptacle of glass that had been his previous body. Motley shivered involuntarily at what was to come. The threat was not over yet.

Bellathonis stepped back as the process was completed and the two Yllithians, glass and flesh, were dragged away. One might become the new archon of a re-forged White Flames kabal if any survived Vect’s murderous pogrom. Equally he might be consigned to a horrible death at the tyrant’s whim. The other, the true Yllithian, Motley hoped was destined for a long and fruitless existence extended for as long as possible by the haemonculi. He’d witnessed what could happen to a soul marked by the Chaos gods at the moment of death in the World Shrine of Lileathanir and it was not a pretty sight. The memory of it made what he had to do next all the harder.

‘Motley. Xelian. Kneel before me,’ Vect intoned from his dark throne. ‘Come and beg my forgiveness. Your respective gifts were pleasing to me, but I still want to hear reasons to grant your continued existence.’

Xelian strode out brazenly and knelt before Vect with her head bowed. Motley wandered forwards more hesitantly, keenly aware of the predatory gaze of the Commorrites fastened on him from every side. He got to his knees beside Xelian, acutely conscious of her almost animalistic presence so close, and a faint musk like the scent of blood…

Motley suddenly thrust his arm sideways with the speed of a striking snake, seeming barely to touch Xelian’s throat with the heel of his palm. Xelian collapsed, her body instantly consumed from within by the writhing monofilaments of the Harlequin’s kiss that had been concealed at Motley’s wrist.

Vect’s courtiers cried out in dismay and scattered. archons and guards surged forwards with weapons in hand. Vect merely held up a hand for silence and continued to watch the Harlequin from his throne with dark intensity. Motley ignored them all as he crouched over Xelian’s rapidly liquefying remains with a small, dimly glowing gem in his hand. The gem swiftly brightened and gained a vivid, crimson hue. Motley stood and held up the ruddy jewel between his thumb and forefinger for Vect’s appraisal.

‘Forgive me, dreadful lord,’ Motley began. ‘Where one god comes the others will surely follow. That’s what makes the power of Chaos so dangerous. We used to think we understood them, before the Fall. We used to laugh at how bombastic and primitive they were, but they know how to persist better than any mortal and how to take advantage of the smallest opening. Xelian was becoming a vessel for the blood god, her soul was tainted – the stone doesn’t lie.’

Vect waved away Motley’s explanation disinterestedly. ‘If you’re correct in your supposition that means there have been Chosen of three out of the four Chaos gods at work in my city. By your own admission where one comes the others will follow and yet we’ve seen no agent of She Who Thirsts. Interesting that you prosecute the others so readily but not those of our nemesis, the bane of our kind.’

The Harlequin pursed his lips, but did not answer until the spirit stone between his fingers had vanished with some adroit sleight of hand. ‘One might argue,’ Motley said cautiously, ‘that we are all her agents – all the eldar who survived the Fall, I mean, and all the generations afterwards – we granted Her existence and now we are pledged to Her before we even take our first breath. On that basis my hands would be permanently crimson if I pursued them all.’

Vect laughed cynically. ‘You’re evading, Fool. Your recriminatory self-examinations are of no interest to me. There is a great deal of work still to be done and you’re a dangerous distraction from that. Take your prize and get out of my sight. If you come before me again I will not be so gentle.’

Motley bowed low before the supreme overlord and hurried away from his dark, dire court before Vect could change his mind. It was a victory, of sorts, and Motley decided to be simply glad he’d had a part to play in it without paying the ultimate price.

Deep within the shadow-realm of Aelindrach the Decapitator squats in his sanctum turning over the bulbous skull of Xhakoruakh in his hands. He minutely examines it with his twisted senses, tasting the shadow-skein clinging to its calciferous ridges and bony orbits. At last he is satisfied and climbs the rows of skulls forming the inner wall of his dome-like sanctum. Kheradruakh feels his way to the correct niche and carefully pushes the shadow-king’s skull into position. It comes as no surprise that the appointed spot for Xhakoruakh’s skull is directly opposite that of his twin brother, Azoruakh, their opposing hatreds balanced perfectly.

Kheradruakh returns to his dais and squats again, his sightless eyes gazing at the hole being worn in reality by the dead gaze of his amassed victims. The eye has closed again, the false-conduit is no more and yet the Decapitator believes he senses a stirring at the place between worlds. He waits and dreams of dark days yet to come.

EPILOGUE

So, dear companion, we come to the end of my tale, the termination of a journey through three stories of the eternal city woven around the advent of the Dysjunction and its aftermath. As narrator I stand revealed as the Harlequin, with small parts to play in the first, a starring role for the second and stumbling through increasingly reckless improvisations for the third.

In the passage of this adventure, the Path of the Archon, I learned something from Commorragh. It was a pearl of wisdom I had often witnessed but never truly grasped until I fell under the tutelage of Asdrubael Vect. Simply put it is this: to become the leader of many is to become something other, a being both greater and lesser than the ordinary mortals they rule over. Like the gods of Chaos our leaders are constrained to fulfil the roles we imagine for them. Our leaders, our tyrants, our overlords, our despots, call them what you will – they impose their will with the force that we grant them in the mortal realm just as daemons do in the immortal realm of the warp.

Constrained? I hear you cry, what constrains the gods of Chaos except one another? The answer, enquiring reader, is in their natures. They are what they are, they are defined by their natures and could not change them even if they wanted to – which they don’t, of course, as those elemental natures are what grants them existence. So it is with mortal leaders, they become what we want them to be, what we desire them to be and what we allow them to be. Those failing in our expectations are dispensed with and replaced with something more congruent with the popular zeitgeist.

In the case of Commorragh this demands a being of pure terror. A creature so dark and vengeful that it can hold a gigantic city in thrall through the mere threat of its intercession. An entity so malevolent that it will hold the all-destroying power of Chaos at bay without regard to the cost. The Commorrites, the unrepentant survivors of the Fall, strive endlessly towards anarchy, but deep down in their black hearts they acknowledge their need for the most autocratically mandated order possible to survive as a species.

Perforce all archons, the leaders and exemplars of Commorragh, have become lesser reflections of Asdrubael Vect: violent, brilliant, manipulative and ambitious. Beneath Vect’s rule they can be nothing less than absolutes that have burned away all other considerations other than their lust for power. They are dark flames beside the black conflagration of Vect’s wickedness. One day any of them might kindle sufficiently to outshine his brilliance as Yllithian so very nearly did, but that day has not yet dawned. No one has proved to be as ultimately grasping and selfish as Vect, not yet.

Such is the Path of the Archon.

Now I would ask you to take a moment and recall the three tales I’ve told. In the Path of the Renegade we followed several very different renegades rebelling against very different things. There was the young pathfinder Sindiel trying to escape his stifling existence aboard the craftworlds, there was the haemonculus Bellathonis rebelling against the strictures of his coven and there was Archon Yllithian seeking to overthrow the tyranny of Vect.

All three reacted violently against the self-rule called for by their respective societies and all three came to know dire consequences of that action as events spiralled beyond their control. To their credit Sindiel and Bellathonis both acted to try to rectify the situation as best they could. Yllithian escaped only by the intervention of Fate, and found himself serving an uncertain master. The desire for freedom brings with it great peril from those who would exploit it. Let us call these the Exodites.

In the Path of the Incubus we saw those who tread the straight and narrow by obeying the word of their masters, the scions of discipline, convention, honour, duty and order. The titular incubus Morr stood first and foremost in the tale, but also there was Caraeis, the doomed warlock of the craftworlds at the head of a squad of Dire Avengers.

This seer and the aspect warriors were trained to be so narrow-minded that they regarded Morr as being ill-disciplined and dishonourable even when he offered his own soul to save the souls of billions. All of them suffered for their unquestioning loyalty and struggled to find new purpose under the bitter lash of failure. The acceptance of duty calls for self-sacrifice in pursuit of an ever-distant goal. For some the goal is forgotten and self-sacrifice becomes an end in its own right. Call these, then, the craftworlds.

With the Path of the Archon we have witnessed the machinations of the high lords of Commorragh bearing bitter fruit. We have seen their ambitions turn their home into a battleground teetering on the brink of annihilation. We have borne witness to how, after planting the seeds of their own ruin, they made others pay the price for as long as they could. We may think, then, of these being the dark eldar.

Three tales interweaving, each representing a facet of our fractured racial psyche. Each bears a warning but also a kernel of hope. Long have the eldar dwelled in isolation from themselves and one another, denying parts of their existence in the name of survival. Yet the boundaries are far from impenetrable when they exist only within our own minds.

Hence the role of humble players such as myself. It falls to us to tweak the nose of Fate by crossing boundaries, defying convention and mocking the absurdities of existence. Among our divided folk it’s the only way we have to show that in this grim, dark universe there is always something to be learned from that which you most despise.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author of the Path of the Dark Eldar series, along with the novel Survival Instinct and a host of short stories, Andy Chambers has more than twenty years’ experience creating worlds dominated by war machines, spaceships and dangerous aliens, and currently works in the PC gaming market. He lives and works in Nottingham.

An extract from Path of the Eldar – contains the novels Path of the Warrior, Path of the Seer and Path of the Outcast.

A star was dying.

To the eldar she was Mirianathir, Mother of the Desert Winds. She hung in the dark firmament, a deep orange, her surface tortured by frenetic bursts of fusion and rampaging electromagnetic winds. Particles streamed from her body and fronds of energy lapped at the closest planets, scourging Mirianathir’s children with their deadly touch. They hung barren around her. For a million years she had been dying and for a million more she would continue to die.

Yet in her death there was life for others.

For the eldar.

Bathed in the radioactive glow of Mirianathir’s death throes, a craftworld floated upon the stellar winds; an artificial, disc-like continent of glowing domes and silvery energy sails, arcing bridges and glittering towers. Wings unfurled, the craftworld soaked in life-giving energy, an inorganic plant with mirrored leaves a hundred kilometres long. Surrounded by the ruddy light of the dying star, Craftworld Alaitoc absorbed all that Mirianathir had to offer, capturing every particle and stellar breeze, feeding it through the spirits of its infinity circuit to sustain the craftworld for a thousand more years.

The space around Alaitoc was as full of movement and energy as the star upon which it fed. Ships whirled and swerved, tacking across the stellar winds, refuelling their own energy stores. The webway gate behind the craftworld swirled and ebbed, a shimmering portal into the space between the material and immaterial. Trade ships with long fluted hulls slipped into and out of the gate; sleek destroyers with night-blue hulls prowled through the traffic, weapons batteries armed, torpedoes loaded; slender yachts darted amongst the shoal of vessels; majestic battleships eased along stately paths through the ordered commotion.

With a fluctuation of golden light, the webway portal dilated for a moment and where there had been vacuum now drifted Lacontiran, a bird-like trading schooner just returned from her long voyage to the stars of the Endless Valley. Trimming her solar sails, she turned easily along the starside rim of the craftworld and followed a course that led her to the Tower of Eternal Welcomes.

The dock tower stretched five kilometres out from the plane of the craftworld, encased in a bluish aura that kept at bay the ravening emptiness of space. Like a narwhal’s horn, the tower spiralled into the darkness, hundreds of figures along its length, lining the elegant gantries and curving walkways. Eldar of all Paths had come to greet their long-travelled ship: poets, engineers, autarchs, gardeners, farseers, Aspect Warriors, stylists and chartmakers. Any and all walks of life were there, dressed in the fineries of heavy robes, or glittering skin-tight suits, or flowing tunics in a riot of colours. Scarves spilled like yellow and red waves and high-crested helms rose above a sea of delicately coiffured heads. Jewels of every colour shone in the glow of the craftworld alongside sparkling bands and rings and necklaces of silver and gold and platinum.

Without conscious thought, the eldar made their way around each other: embracing old friends; exchanging pleasantries with new acquaintances; steering a private course, never encroaching upon the private space of another. Their voices rose together, in a symphony of sound as like to the babbling of a crowd as a full orchestra is to the murmurings of a child. They talked to and around and over each other, their voices lyric, every intonation a note perfected, every gesture measured and precise. Some did not talk at all, their posture conveying their thoughts; the slightest raising of a brow, the quiver of a lip or trembling of a finger displaying agitation or excitement, happiness or anxiety.

In the midst of this kaleidoscope of craftworld life stood Korlandril. His slender frame was draped in an open-fronted robe of shining silk-like gold, his neck and wrists adorned with hundreds of molecule-thin chains in every colour of the spectrum so that it seemed his hands and face were wound with miniature rainbows. His long black hair was bound into a complicated braid that hung across his left shoulder, kept in place with holo-bands that constantly changed from sapphires to diamonds to emeralds and every other beautiful stone known to the eldar. He had taken much time to style himself upon the aesthetics of Arestheina, and had considered long the results in a mirrorfield, knowing that his companion was partial to the ancient artist’s works.

She, Thirianna, was dressed in more simple attire: a white ankle-length dress pleated below the knee, delicately embroidered with thread just the slightest shade greyer than the cloth, like the shadows of a cloud; sleeveless to reveal pale arms painted with waving patterns of henna. She wore a diaphanous scarf about her shoulders, its red and white gossamer coils lapping across her arms and chest. Her white hair, dyed to match her dress, was coloured with two azure streaks that framed her narrow face, accentuating the dark blue of her eyes. Her waystone was also a deep blue, ensconced in a surround of white meresilver, hung upon a fine chain of the same metal.

Korlandril looked at Thirianna, while all other eyes were turned towards the starship now gracefully sliding into place beside the uncoiling walkway of the quay. It had been fifteen cycles since he had last seen her. Fifteen cycles too many – too long to be away from her beauty and her passion, her smile that stirred the soul. He nurtured the hope that she would notice the attention he had laboured upon his appearance, but as yet she had made no remark upon it.

He saw the intensity in her eyes as she looked upon the approaching starship, the faintest glisten of moisture there, and detected an excited tremble throughout her body. He did not know whether it was simply the occasion that generated such anticipation – the gala atmosphere was very infectious – or whether there was some more personal, deeper joy that stirred Thirianna’s heart. Perhaps her feelings for Aradryan’s return were more than Korlandril would like. The notion stirred something within Korlandril’s breast, a serpent uncoiling. He knew his jealousy was unjustified, and that he had made no claim to keep Thirianna for himself, but still the precision of his thoughts failed to quell the emotions that loitered within.

Set within a golden surround, the opal oval of Korlandril’s waystone grew warm upon his chest, its heat passing through the material of his robe. Like a warning light upon a craft’s display the waystone’s agitation caused Korlandril to pause for a moment. His jealousy was not only misplaced, it was dangerous. He allowed the sensation to drift into the recesses of his mind, closed within a mental vault to be removed later when it was safe to do so.

Thoughts of Aradryan reminded Korlandril why he was at the tower: to welcome back an old friend. If Thirianna had wanted to be with Aradryan she would have travelled with him. Korlandril dismissed his fears concerning Thirianna’s affections, finding himself equally eager to greet their returning companion. The serpent within lowered its head and slept again, biding its time.

A dozen gateways along the hull of Lacontiran opened, releasing a wave of iridescent light and a honey-scented breeze along the curving length of the dock. From the high archways passengers and crew disembarked in winding lines. Thirianna stretched to her full height, poised effortlessly on the tips of her boots, to look over the heads of the eldar in front, one hand slightly to one side to maintain her balance.

It was Korlandril’s sharp eyes that caught sight of Aradryan first, which gave him a small thrill of pleasure; a victory won though no competition had been agreed between them.

‘There he is, our wanderer returned to us like Anthemion with the Golden Harp,’ said Korlandril, pointing to a walkway to their left, letting his fingers rest upon Thirianna’s bare arm for the slightest of moments to attract her attention.

Though Korlandril had recognised him immediately, Aradryan looked very different from when he had left. Only by his sharp cheeks and thin lips had Korlandril known him. His hair was cut barbarically short on the left side, almost to the scalp, and hung in unkempt waves to the right, neither bound nor styled. He had dark make-up upon his eyelids, giving him a skull-like, sunken glare, and he was dressed in deep blues and black, wrapped in long ribbons of twilight. His bright yellow waystone was worn as a brooch, mostly hidden by the folds of his robe. Aradryan’s forbidding eyes fell upon Korlandril and then Thirianna, their sinister edge disappearing with a glint of happiness. Aradryan waved a hand in greeting and wove his way effortlessly through the throng to stand in front of the pair.

‘A felicitous return!’ declared Korlandril, opening his arms in welcome, palms angled towards Aradryan’s face. ‘And a happy reunion.’

Thirianna dispensed with words altogether, brushing the back of her hand across Aradryan’s cheek for a moment, before laying her slender fingers upon his shoulder. Aradryan returned the gesture, sparking a flare of jealous annoyance in Korlandril, which he fought hard not to show. The serpent in his gut opened one interested eye, but Korlandril forced it back into subservience. The moment passed and Aradryan stepped away from Thirianna, laying his hands onto those of Korlandril, a wry smile on his lips.

‘Well met, and many thanks for the welcome,’ said Aradryan. Korlandril searched his friend’s face, seeking the impish delight that had once lurked behind the eyes, the ready, contagious smirk that had nestled in every movement of his lips. They were no longer there. Aradryan radiated solemnity and sincerity, warmth even, but Korlandril detected a barrier; Aradryan’s face was turned ever so slightly towards Thirianna, his back arched just the merest fraction away from Korlandril.

Even amongst the eldar such subtle differences might have been missed, but Korlandril was dedicated to the Path of the Artist and had honed his observation and attention to detail to a level bordering on the microscopic. He noticed everything, remembered every nuance and facet, and he knew from his deep studies that everything had a meaning, whether intended or not. There was no such thing as an innocent smile, or a meaningless blink. Every motion betrayed a motive, and it was Aradryan’s subtle reticence that now nagged at Korlandril’s thoughts.

Korlandril held Aradryan’s hands for a moment longer than was necessary, hoping that the extended physicality of the greeting might remind his friend of their bond. If it did, Aradryan gave no sign. With the same slight smile, he withdrew his grasp and clasped his hands behind his back, raising his eyebrows inquisitively.

‘Tell me, dearest and most happily-met of my friends, what have I missed?’

The trio walked along the Avenue of Dreams, a silver passageway that passed beneath a thousand crystal archways into the heart of Alaitoc. The dim light of Mirianathir was caught in the vaulted roof, captured and radiated by the intricately faceted crystal to shine down upon the pedestrians below, glowing with delicate oranges and pinks.

Korlandril had offered to drive Aradryan to his quarters, but his friend had declined, preferring to savour the sensation of his return and the casual crowds of eldar; Korlandril guessed from the little Aradryan said that his had been a mostly solitary journey aboard the Lacontiran. Korlandril glanced with a little envy as slender anti-grav craft slipped by effortlessly, carrying their passengers quickly to their destinations. A younger Korlandril would have been horrified by the indolence that held sway over Korlandril the Sculptor, his abstract thoughts distracted by mundane labour of physical activity. Such introspection was impossible though; he had put aside self-consciousness in his desire to embrace every outside influence, every experience not of his own body and mind. Such were the thoughts of the artist, elevated beyond the practical, dancing upon the starlight of pure observation and imagination.

It was this drive for sensation that led Korlandril to conduct most of the talking. He spoke at length of his works, and of the comings-
and-goings of the craftworld since Aradryan had left. For his part, Aradryan kept his comments and answers direct and without flourish, starving Korlandril of inspiration, frustrating his artistic thirst.

When Thirianna spoke, Korlandril noted, Aradryan became more eloquent, and seemed keener to speak about her than himself.

‘I sense that you no longer walk in the shadow of Khaine,’ said Aradryan, nodding in approval as he looked at Thirianna.

‘It is true that the Path of the Warrior has ended for me,’ she replied, thoughtful, her eyes never straying from Aradryan. ‘The aspect of the Dire Avenger has sated my anger, enough for a hundred lifetimes. I write poetry, influenced by the Uriathillin school of verse. I find it has complexities that stimulate both the intellectual and the emotional in equal measure.’

‘I would like to know Thirianna the Poet, and perhaps your verse will introduce me,’ said Aradryan. ‘I would very much like to see a performance, as you see fit.’

‘As would I,’ said Korlandril. ‘Thirianna refuses to share her work with me, though many times I have suggested that we collaborate on a piece that combines her words with my sculpture.’

‘My verse is for myself, and no other,’ Thirianna said quietly. ‘It is not for performance, nor for eyes that are not mine.’

She cast a glance of annoyance towards Korlandril.

‘While some create their art to express themselves to the world, my poems are inner secrets, for me to understand their meaning, to divine my own fears and wishes.’

Admonished, Korlandril fell silent for a moment, but he was quickly uncomfortable with the quiet and gave voice to a question that had scratched at his subconscious since he had heard that Aradryan was returning.

‘Have you come back to Alaitoc to stay?’ he asked. ‘Is your time as a steersman complete, or will you be returning to Lacontiran?’

‘I have only just arrived, are you so eager that I should leave once more?’ replied Aradryan.

Korlandril opened his mouth to protest but the words drifted away as he caught, just for a moment, a hint of the old wit of Aradryan. Korlandril smiled in appreciation of the joke and bowed his head in acknowledgement of his own part as the foil for Aradryan’s humour.

‘I do not yet know,’ Aradryan continued with a thoughtful expression. ‘I have learned all that I can learn as a steersman and I feel complete. Gone is the turbulence that once plagued my thoughts. There is nothing like guiding a ship along the buffeting waves of a nebula or along the swirling channels of the webway to foster control and focus. I have seen many great, many wondrous things out in the stars, but I feel that there is so much more out there to find, to touch and hear and experience. I may return to the starships, I may not. And, of course, I would like to spend a little time with my friends and family, to know again the life of Alaitoc, to see whether I wish to wander again or can be content here.’

Thirianna nodded in agreement at this wise course of action, and even Korlandril, who occasionally succumbed to rash impulse, could see the merits of weighing such a decision well.

‘Your return is most timely, Aradryan,’ he said, again feeling the need to fill the vacuum of conversation. ‘My latest piece is nearing completion. In a few cycles’ time I am hosting an unveiling. It would be a pleasure and an honour if both of you could attend.’

‘I would have come even if you had not invited me!’ laughed Thirianna, her enthusiasm sending a thrill of excitement through Korlandril. ‘I hear your name mentioned quite often, and with much praise attached, and there are high expectations for this new work. It would not be seemly at all to miss such an event if one is to be considered as a person possessing any degree of taste.’

Aradryan did not reply for a moment, and Korlandril could discern nothing of his friend’s thoughts from his expression. It was as if a blank mask had been placed upon his face.

‘Yes, I too would be delighted to attend,’ Aradryan said eventually, animation returning. ‘I am afraid that my tastes may have been left behind compared to yours, but I look forward to seeing what Korlandril the Sculptor has created in my absence.’

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

‘The Treasures of Biel-Tanigh’ first appeared in the Games Day Anthology © 2011, Games Workshop Ltd.
‘Midnight on the Street of Knives’ first appeared as an eBook © 2011, Games Workshop Ltd.
Path of the Renegade copyright © 2012, Games Workshop Ltd.
Path of the Incubus copyright © 2013, Games Workshop Ltd.
‘Bellathonis and the Shadow King’ first appeared in the BL Live Chapbook © 2012, Games Workshop Ltd.
Path of the Archon copyright © 2014, Games Workshop Ltd.
Path of the Dark Eldar copyright © 2015, Games Workshop Ltd.
This eBook edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
All rights reserved.

Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.

© Games Workshop Limited 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-78251-770-2

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