Path of the Incubus

by Andy Chambers

  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.

  Balef
ul 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 rageing 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 wi
th 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.’