Path of the Incubus

by Andy Chambers

‘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 Warri
ors’ 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.