Path of the Incubus

by Andy Chambers

  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 recumbe
nt 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 in
tractable 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.