Path of the Incubus

by Andy Chambers

  ‘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, Naxiapel 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.