Path of the Incubus

by Andy Chambers

  The target was aware of Cho’s presence now, as was designated target D crouching at his side. This was irrelevant as Cho had already scanned them both for weaponry and found none capable of breaching her spun-metal hide. Designated targets A and B were inactive flatlines, lying together in a crumpled heap beside the wreck of the Raider. At this close range Cho could determine that target B was in fact a contained essence, a life-without-body in a metal prison. No other threats or potential escape routes could be detected within Cho’s considerable sensor range, the target was completely trapped with barely enough control of its body to stand up, let alone flee.

  Cho slowly extended her spirit syphon. She took pleasure in considering whether to destroy the primary target first and then hunt designated target D afterwards for sport, or whether to simply drain them both with a single wide-setting, maximum-strength feedback loop. Caution came to the fore once again. Designated target D could not be allowed to become a distraction. She should attempt to rejoin the doubtless frustrated Vhi-engine as soon as possible and share knowledge of the kill. Their creator would be proud and recognise Cho’s accomplishment. The bothersome fact that Vhi’s attack had precipitated Cho’s opportunity meant he could still claim a victory of sorts. It mattered not at all. Vhi could maintain his rude pride and sense of superiority while Cho would know that whatever Vhi’s claims she was the one that had made the kill.

  The calculation had taken only a fraction of a second. Satisfied with her conclusions Cho struck. Baleful energies played over the targets, relentlessly sucking away their life essence. Their bodies began shrivelling as if the march of decades was passing within seconds. Vitality surged into Cho’s capacitor-valves in a flood of dark energy – a fine, fortified wine in comparison to the small beer of the ur-ghuls’ crude, short lives. Cho crooned with pleasure as she drank it in.

  The foot of the tower above Gorath was a charnel house. Eldar, possessed and Chaos warriors littered the flagged terrace two and three deep in many places. Even with the timely arrival of the Blades of Desire the toll of the fighting had been heavy and barely half of Yllithian’s White Flames kabalites were still on their feet. Overhead a swirl of hellions, reavers and Venoms snarled around the tower answering any shots from the defenders on the upper levels with a storm of fire. Aez’ashya – Archon Aez’ashya as Yllithian reminded himself – sauntered over to him with a hip-swinging gait that was filled with ribald mockery.

  ‘Nice work, Yllithian, you distracted them long enough for my blades to do all the work,’ she smiled.

  ‘This kind of butcher’s work you are very welcome to,’ Yllithian said coldly, ‘but sadly I expect our opponents haven’t been helpful enough to commit their entire force to be cut up out here in the open.’ He gazed up at the enormity of the tower and the ongoing skirmish significantly. Aez’ashya merely shrugged.

  ‘I’m happy to defer to your superior knowledge of our opponent’s dispositions,’ she said, ‘even if I find it a more than a little curious you’re so well-informed – these aren’t more friends of yours, are they Yllithian?’

  ‘Simple logic, no more,’ Yllithian snapped. He kicked at one the bulky corpses littering the terrace. It split open, leaking foul ichor and a sickening stench. ‘See? These are mortal servants of the Ruinous Powers – devotees of the entity we know as Nurgle. An incursion by the followers the plague lord is not just another random manifestation from beyond the veil. If they came here with a purpose I’ll wager that it had nothing to do with standing around waiting to get attacked by us. We need to organise our forces and start clearing the rest of the tower from top to bottom. We have to find out what they’re doing and put a stop to it.’

  ‘Oh we do, do we?’ Aez’ashya purred coolly, deliberately goading him. ‘I don’t believe that I’m under your command, Yllithian, my orders from the Supreme Overlord said nothing at all about that.’

  ‘Just what did your orders say, Aez’ashya?’ Yllithian replied acidly. ‘Something along the lines of “follow Yllithian and support him until”…oh I don’t know, let’s just say…” until further notice?” How close does that sound?’ He noticed Aez’ashya’s eyebrows twitch upward slightly in surprise and knew that his barb was close to the mark. The pertinent question was really whether Aez’ashya’s other orders were to wait for an opportune moment to kill him, but even Aez’ashya wasn’t going to be naïve enough to give away that little nugget of information.

  Yllithian hesitated momentarily as he tried to decide what to do. He desperately wanted to be away from here as quickly as possible, but leaving before the Ilmaea was stabilised would be a virtual death sentence that Aez’ashya would no doubt be happy to execute. If the forces of Chaos could take over the stolen suns during the Dysjunction then all of Commorragh would be finished anyway, doomed to drown beneath a tide of daemonic filth from above. There was really no option except to go onward.

  Just as Yllithian reached his conclusion the tower trembled slightly, a momentary, vertiginous ripple across the entire structure that hinted at the massive forces being focused upon it from elsewhere in the universe. The terrace suddenly lurched beneath their feet and cracked, fissures opening in its surface as whole chunks of it fell away into the blazing inferno of Gorath below. There was a general rush for the towers with White Flames warriors and Blades of Desire wyches elbowing each other aside to get up the shallow steps at their base. As befitted the true state of Commorrite politics Yllithian and Aez’ashya led the charge, their differences and suspicions temporarily forgotten in the face of a common threat.

  A set of recessed archways in the flanks of the tower opened into a lofty chamber similarly pierced on all sides. The space was dominated by a wide, spiralling ramp that disappeared up into the ceiling and down through the floor. Muzzle flashes stabbed at the top of the ramp and a spray of explosives bolts bit chunks out of the floor at their feet.

  ‘Up!’ both archons cried in unison and led their combined forces storming up the ramp. Through the arches Yllithian glimpsed the last vestiges of the terrace outside collapsing, the air above it filled with a chaotic, spiralling swarm of reavers, Raiders and hellions as the stonework fell away. He was stranded in the tower, at least temporarily, until another platform could be found for disembarkation. He glanced up to see the top of the ramp crowded with hulking green-armoured shapes, muzzle flashes stabbed down at the running eldar like the opening of a set of fanged-filled jaws.

  A chain of explosions whipped across Yllithian’s shadow field. Dark ink-blots enveloped each impact as the entropic forces of the field dissipated the energy into shadows and dust. Other eldar around him were not so well protected and detonated in bright crimson novas as the mass-reactive rounds penetrated their bodies. The rush of eldar hesitated for an instant as those coming the head of the ramp flinched in the onslaught.

  Aez’ashya broke from the wavering ranks as a fast-moving blur that seemed to step under, over and around the hosing streams of explosive bolts as if they were stationary. She sprang up the ramp and vanished into the knot of bestial Chaos warriors at the top, their muzzle flares crisscrossing as they disastrously tried to follow her progress. A rush of fleet-footed wyches overtook Yllithian and plunged in after their mistress, their blades slashing in an intricate ballet of pain.

  By the time Yllithian and his warriors arrived at the top of the ramp only twitching corpses lay strewn around in the chamber above with no sign of Aez’ashya and the wyches. The ramp debouched into the centre of a windowless, triangular chamber with more spiralling ramps going upward in each of its corners. Yllithian redirected a few cliques of his followers to go back down and start sweeping the lower floors but his instincts told him the main fighting still lay above. Taking the bulk of his warriors with him he selected the ramp with the most bodies heaped on it and headed up. From above he could soon hear the sounds of combat.

  CHAPTER 23

  Into The Dragon’s Lair

  Morr wade
d through rushing melt water that had a rank, sulphurous smell to it as he followed the arched crack into the ice. The walls soon turned to black rock slick with moisture and gravel crunched beneath his armoured boots. As he moved forward the red glow ahead of him grew ever more intense and sullen. The slick, black walls opened out until he was descending a rough slope into a vast cavern where the far walls were shrouded in darkness and the floor seemed a shifting, bloody sea. A rumbling, subsonic hiss overlaid all other sounds in the cavern, the noise of an unthinkably gigantic serpent or a great host of people muttering and whispering. Morr knew it to be one in the same.

  As he descended further into the cavern huge pillars of twisted basalt rose up on all sides to lose their lofty crowns in the gloom overhead. The bases of the pillars were clearly visible. Serpentine coils of crimson energy twisted across the floor of the cavern and around the pillars to form a multi-dimensional cat’s cradle of living light. The crimson coils pulsed with vitality: roiling, knotting and shifting as they wound restlessly back and forth.

  Morr halted, gripping his klaive in both hands as he readied himself and drew on his last reserves of energy for the battle ahead. He knew that he was confronted not by a physical opponent this time but a metaphysical one. The manifestation of the enraged, dead spirits of Lileathanir lay before him in the cavern, visible now as it coalesced in the broken vessel of the World Shrine. His own perceptions fluttered between interpreting it as the coils of a vast wyrm, a foaming cataract of blood and a blazing river of fire. He was less than a speck beside the all-encompassing power of the world spirit. He was no more capable of harming it than a mosquito is capable of harming an elephant.

  The one advantage he held was the composite nature of his foe. The world spirit combined the psychic energy of every living thing that had crossed over into the Lileathanir matrix at the point of its death: Exodites, birds, beasts. The resultant gestalt entity was primal and atavistic, driven by instincts that were by turns nurturing and destructive. Those instincts had pushed it into the dragon aspect of its nature, but there would always be countless spirits pulling it in a myriad of different directions. That was a weakness to be exploited.

  He reached up to his trophy rack and lifted from it the incubus helm he had taken at the shrine of Arhra. That fight seemed so long ago, so important at the time but so trivial now. He gazed into its blank-faced mask for a moment, remembering, before turning it around and slowly lowering the bloodied casque over his own skull. The fit was poor, the internal sensors did not mate properly with his fighting suit, the copper tang of clotted blood assailed his nostrils, but Morr cared not at all. A sense of wholeness and wellbeing flowed into him as he locked the helm in place. He grinned fiercely beneath the mask and raised his voice in challenge, mounting a rocky promontory to whirl his klaive so that it flashed brilliantly in the crimson light.

  ‘I have returned and I challenge you again! Come! Come and match your fury against mine! Never forgive! Never forget! Arhra remembers and now so will you!’

  The reaction was immediate, the gestalt consciousness of the dragon suddenly becoming aware of the miniscule speck in its midst that squeaked with outrageous defiance. A vast, triangular shape reared up from the crimson murk. There was the vaguest suggestion of a head with burning spheres like green lamps where eyes could be. Great exhalations of raw emotion gusted from the impossible maw of the being. Morr felt an expanding bubble of conscious recognition sweep over him, the sharp prickle of poisonous hate, the familiar hot wash of rage.

  ‘Yes! Me, here I am! I’m the one! I defied you then and I defy you now!’ Morr shouted into the earth-shaking hiss. ‘Now come! Fight me! Learn what Arhra knows!’

  Hellfire came raining down and Morr ran for his life, racing downward for the heart of the crimson coils. Beneath the psychic lash of the dragon’s fury the rocky slope around him exploded into an avalanche of molten debris. It was impossible to stay ahead of that tidal wave of destruction, the blast wave of it swept him up in giant hands and threatened to smash him down into oblivion. Morr was hurled headlong into the ghostly coils, his klaive carving a ruddy arc as he unleashed his own fury upon the souls of the restless dead.

  Caraeis had stepped from the portal into the frozen World Shrine of Lileathanir with Aiosa at his heels. The four Dire Avengers that made up the rest of the squad followed and immediately fanned out flawlessly into overwatch positions around the rough little cave. Their long-necked star throwers covered individual fire arcs that all intersected on the two figures that stood waiting for them at the entrance.

  ‘You!’ Caraeis snarled, little troubling to conceal his anger.

  ‘Yes, me again I’m afraid,’ Motley replied nonchalantly, ‘I thought you’d be here sooner than this, trouble with the runes again?’

  Caraeis did not respond to the taunt, though the lenses of the warlock’s helm that glared at the harlequin were lit with baleful amber fire. Aiosa cut in to ask bluntly:

  ‘What are you doing here and why did you assist the fugitive in his escape?’

  ‘Because this is the place that he was meant to come to,’ Motley replied airily, ‘and that is my answer to both of those questions.’

  ‘Then where is the incubus now?’ Caraeis snapped, rounding on Sardon. ‘And why do you, worldsinger, now stand beside this… this meddler!’

  Sardon blinked in surprise at the warlock’s venom. ‘The wanderer and his kind have come to Lileathanir since its first settlement,’ she said mildly. ‘The people of the craftworlds are thought of as our guardians, but children of the Laughing God are known as our friends. In our time of need he has come to us and offered help, a potential solution. What do you bring to the World Shrine? Anger? Recrimination? We have more than enough of that already, we need no more brought to us by outsiders.’

  ‘Solution? What solution?’ Caraeis spluttered, fixing his amber-eyed gaze on Motley again. ‘My runecastings indicated none of this.’

  ‘The worst kind of solution as far as you’re concerned,’ Motley taunted with a wide smile. ‘One that doesn’t involve you: No rung up the ladder to the seer council. No expanded recruitment from the grateful survivors of Lileathanir. No fame. No glory. No praises sung in the Infinity circuit of Biel-Tan for all eternity. Nothing.’

  Motley felt he had judged the warlock’s true motivations nicely, probably better than Caraeis had ever admitted them to himself. Caraeis’s shoulders shook with suppressed emotion as he took a step towards Motley. Aiosa put up a hand to stop him and regarded the harlequin coolly from beneath her impassive mask.

  ‘You charge that Caraeis has been led by ambition? That… desire… has overcome his wisdom?’ the exarch asked deliberately.

  ‘It’s not my place to charge anyone with anything,’ Motley smiled. ‘I’m merely putting together everything I’ve seen and making an observation. I have to ask as a point of interest – what was the plan when and if you finally got around to bringing Morr back to Lileathanir? You were intending to solve the situation how exactly? Tossing him down a crevasse bound hand and foot perhaps? A living sacrifice to appease the dragon?’

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ Caraeis shouted. ‘You have no right to interfere! You’ve blackened your hands with the dark kin and now you seek to drag me down into the mire with you. We did not do this!’ Caraeis swept out his arms dramatically to encompass the shrine, and by extension the whole world.

  ‘No, but you sought to capitalise on it. The dark kin, as you like to call them, were ignorant of the consequences of their actions. If they knew the damage they could cause themselves in the long run they would never have acted in the way they did. Not that ignorance excuses it, of course… it’s just that you have no such excuse.’

  Sardon looked at the harlequin in shock. ‘What do you mean?’ she gasped.

  ‘That our friend Caraeis and all of his seer kind could have foreseen the violation of the shrine and the outcome. They could have
acted to prevent it and yet they did not.’

  ‘Every strand of fate cannot be followed,’ Caraeis replied with a quiver in his voice. ‘Only certain junctions, extraordinary nexii can be affected with the correct application of–’

  ‘Oh please! Stop!’ Motley laughed mockingly. ‘The strands of fate bend towards a great cataclysm that affects the webway itself and you claim that it was too obscure to foresee, too complex to affect? If that’s true you have little value in your current calling and should give serious consideration to finding another path – perhaps pottery, or food preparation.’

  ‘Enough!’ Caraeis snarled. ‘Where is the incubus? Speak now or–’

  Caraeis’s impending threat was cut short by a thunderous roar from the depths of the shrine. The rock walls shook and ice fell in splintering sheets as the roaring went on and on; an inchoate, hissing bellow of rage that crashed thought the shrine and made the stones quiver like a living thing. Motley grinned maniacally and shouted above the tumult.

  ‘There! That’ll be him, in the very heart of the shrine!’ the harlequin yelled wildly. ‘And I do believe he’s ready to receive you now!’

  Without a word Caraeis plunged into the World Shrine with his witchblade in hand. After a split second of hesitation the Aspect Warriors followed, Aiosa giving Motley a long, hard look as she ran past him. Sardon wrung her hands in dismay.

  ‘You’re letting them go? They’ll be killed!’

  ‘No. Stop. Don’t go in there. You’ll all be killed,’ Motley murmured sardonically as the last of the Aspect Warriors vanished into the quaking shrine. The harlequin’s lips were drawn into an unhappy frown, the very picture of sadness and dejection, but behind the mask his eyes glittered with dark, unfathomable amusement.

  Xagor and Bellathonis saw the murder engine approaching, its wasp-like form gleaming in the semi-darkness of the travel tube as it swept down on them from above. The engine was unhurried, confident that it had its prey cornered, and descended slowly enough to allow them plenty of time to realise the hopelessness of their situation. Being devotees of the arts of flesh Xagor and Bellathonis recognised its type immediately: a Cronos parasite engine, a time-thief. Bellathonis recognised more than that, a signature workmanship that he had also seen back at his hidden lab on the miniature Talos engine that attacked him there. He found himself having to grant that a twinned pair of such dwarfs had a certain artistic integrity that he had felt lacking in the singular entity. It still smacked a little of toy-making as far as Bellathonis was concerned.