Path of the Incubus

by Andy Chambers

  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 f
inally 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 rageing 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, the
se 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?’