Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  ‘Tread carefully, little clown. You know nothing about what you speak of.’

  ‘My profuse apologies. I am cursed with a propensity for asking impertinent questions at inopportune moments. Forgive me.’

  Morr grunted and walked away. Motley saw that the incubus was making for an exit from the cave, a ragged gash in the stone that showed a pale hint of daylight beyond. Motley wearily pushed himself to his feet and began to follow. The gash opened out into a narrow cleft in bare rock that soon became a treacherous ledge. One wall disappeared to reveal an almost sheer drop into a valley on that side, the other wall extending up in a cliff face softened in places by moisture-dripping clumps of grass and lichens. Above that was a golden haze of indeterminate source, sunlight with no sun. Below them the ledge descended towards a layer of coiling mist that covered the land like a blanket. There was a suggestion of the skeletal silhouettes of trees poking up through the mist, but they shifted and wavered uncertainly in a sea of whiteness.

  ‘Would it be impertinent to ask where we are and where we’re going?’ Motley said hopefully as he skipped nimbly down uneven steps after Morr.

  ‘We come to journey’s end,’ the incubus said eventually. ‘The shrine of Arhra lies in the valley below.’

  Motley began brushing fastidiously at the dried blood on his tunic, even though it was fast becoming invisible against the cloth anyway. ‘Well that was a good deal easier to reach than expected,’ Motley exclaimed a little unconvincingly. ‘Always a positive sign, I say, smooth sailing ahead!’

  ‘The swamp is not without challenges,’ Morr cautioned pedantically. His tone could not disguise that even his melancholy spirit seemed to have risen fractionally.

  Bezieth edged carefully forward, aware of the dull ache in her leg and the way everyone else was clustering behind her as if she were some sovereign shield of protection. There was music playing ahead of her, a wild, disquieting tune that skirled and whined in a way that set her teeth on edge. There had been doors at the end of the corridor, ornate sheets of precious metal pierced and worked into the form of twin phoenixes. These had been twisted and thrown aside with unthinkable force. Shadows from within flickered and danced across the opening, the music twisted and contorting around their shambolic rhythms. Bezieth of the Hundred Scars feared nothing living or dead, but even she hesitated to look inside.

  She could feel the pressure of a dozen eyes on her back willing her to step forward, while the amorphous, unknown horror ahead of her held her back. The pressures were equal for a moment, but pride drove her relentlessly forwards to look around the door jamb and reveal the scene. The floor was made up of runnelled porcelain tiles leading to hexagonal, silver-topped drains. These, the clustered stab-lights overhead, and the hanging chains showed the place had been a slaughter faire where passing denizens could enjoy exhibitions of the public torture and humiliation of slaves and eager masochists.

  Now the chains hung empty and the only light came from acrid bonfires that had been rudely piled around the hall out of debris. Figures cavorted madly around the flames in time to the piping music. Most of them appeared to be slaves, looking even more twisted and ugly than usual, but there was also a smattering of pure-blooded Commorrites leaping and capering with uncommon vigour.

  At the centre of it all lay the source of the madness – a great mound of pink and blue flesh with only vague approximations of limbs and a head. It writhed and wriggled obscenely like a questing maggot while rows of flaring, hollow spines opened up and down its length emitting the hideous, piping music. The revellers danced around it, dashed offerings of wine and food over it, suckled on it and screamed out their devotion. Periodically the skirling pipes became insistent, almost whining. At this the dancers would seize one of their own number and hurl them onto the fleshy mass. The piping became ecstatic as the mound closed over the sacrificial victim like a blunt-fingered hand. In the last moments the victims would suddenly snap out of their ecstatic revelry and scream piteously in the grip of the thing. The insane piping interwove mockingly with their dying howls.

  Bezieth had seen enough, the piping was starting to get to her too. She pulled her head back behind the ruined door jamb. Naxipael looked at her questioningly. She shrugged slightly and nodded back the way they had come. Naxipael shook his head in irritation and raised his blast pistols, his motion silently echoed by the other survivors. They were feeling frightened, angry and powerless – they all wanted to fight something. Bezieth rolled her eyes and gingerly hefted her djin-blade too. It emitted a chafing whine as if irritated by the hideous fluting sound ahead. Bezieth held it out before her and virtually let it lead the charge into the room.

  She attacked silently, cutting down two of the dancers before they even registered her presence. Darklight beams suddenly slashed across two more of them, vaporising the leaping bodies in nebula-dark explosions of matter. Naxipael tried to hit the piping beast but revellers hurled themselves in his path to make a living shield of themselves. He laughed cynically as he blasted his way through them one by one.

  Bezieth carved her way forward too, outpacing Naxipael as she waded through the minions striking left and right almost disinterestedly as she concentrated her energies on limping towards the beast. Too slowly. The piping was changing, becoming a shrilling saw upon the ears as it called its children to war. The remaining dancers turned on Naxipael and Bezieth with hostility written over their mad faces. Pallid fires glowed in every eye, and phosphorescent drool fell from every lip. The marks of corruption could already be seen: flesh melting into tendrils or fur or feathers or scales, limbs that were strangely twisted and a distinct surfeit of orifices was in evidence.

  Hypervelocity splinters and disintegrator bolts ravened across the chamber as the rest of the Metzuh survivors opened fire, mercilessly cutting down the revellers where they stood. Some of those hit vanished like hydrogen-filled balloons sent alight, the skin peeling back as its contents ignited in a multi-coloured flash. Most of those struck accepted the wounds as stolidly as if they were made of clay rather than living flesh. The pink, fleshy craters that opened on their bodies dripped the same phosphorescent slime as drooled in ropy tendrils from their lips.

  The piping beast’s minions raced forward, their outstretched hands flashing with etheric flames. Fire leapt up around Bezieth and Naxipael, deceptively vaporous pink and blue gossamer blazes that seared armour and charred flesh at the slightest touch. Both archons were forced onto the defensive, concentrating only on trying to fend off the capering horrors that leapt around them. Shrill screams sounded from behind as some of the survivors trying to push into the hall were consumed by the scorching blasts. Bezieth saw one warrior burning like a torch, still firing his splinter rifle as he was overwhelmed. The fires leapt higher still, creating the illusion that the entire hall had become a pavilion of woven flames.

  Bezieth sheared through a leering face, ducked a gobbet of multi-coloured fire and cut off the arm that spit it at her. Axhyrian’s captured spirit energised her through the channel of the djin-blade, obedient and deadly in her hands for the present. Her enemies fought with no method, they leapt back and forth randomly, tumbling over each other in their haste to grasp and burn. She doggedly fought her way closer to Naxipael, who was reaping a great ruin of his foes but had been badly burned over his chest and back.

  The other survivors were formed in a tight knot just behind them and were likewise badly beset on all sides so she could expect no help from them. The numbers of their attackers did not seem to be lessening at all, if anything there seemed more of them now than when Bezieth had entered the hall. The shrill piping was becoming triumphant, a mad cackling sound that drove against the soul.

  A hoarse cry made her twist around to look back at the other survivors again and she gaped at what she saw. The wrack that had tended her, Xagor, was being hoisted onto their shoulders while the rest were fighting almost back-to-back to protect the execution of thi
s peculiar manoeuvre. The wrack was in the process of awkwardly trying to level a long, thick-barrelled rifle.

  Bezieth understood what they were trying to do. The survivors were lifting up the wrack up to get a clear shot over the heads of the capering minions at their daemonic master beyond. The wrack’s heavy rifle wobbled around alarmingly in the melee and the flame-handed dancers leapt madly everywhere, obscuring his target. The long-barrelled rifle finally spat once to no visible effect. To attempt such a thing only showed the survivors’ desperation. They had taken a fool’s chance, a futile last throw of the dice before the end came and it had failed.

  The horrific fluting suddenly oscillated wildly, wailing up and down scales with agonising swiftness. The dancers whirled away clutching flame-wreathed hands to their heads, staggering even as Bezieth, Naxipael and the other survivors fought back a wave of sickness. The fires guttered out and the beast was revealed to be rearing and bucking, seemingly twisting in pain as its flesh rippled obscenely. With a final heave the fleshy mound split from end to end, unleashing a wave of bile, maggots, foulness and corroded bones across the floor. The mad piping ceased abruptly. The dancers wavered and collapsed into sacs of deflating skin. Naxipael and the impromptu pyramid of survivors fell too, depositing the wrack unceremoniously on the floor. Bezieth stood speechless for a moment, waiting to see if some new horror was about to burst forth. The hall remained silent and dark.

  Bezieth noticed the wrack was quick to scurry after his dropped rifle, cradling it to himself protectively as if it were a cherished pet. To her surprise one of the other survivors offered his hand to help pull the wrack to his feet. Now several more clapped the wrack on the back and congratulated him as if he were one of their own pulling off a tricky shot, rather than the surgically-altered meat puppet of a mad torturer-scientist. Bezieth shook her head. Part of the curse of the Dysjunction was to create strange bedfellows out of necessity, ripping apart the societal fabric of the city as well as its physical one.

  There were only seven survivors left now, not including herself and Naxipael. The odds against his ascension to High Commorragh had lengthened considerably and he was not happy about it. She looked toward Naxipael and called the wrack to attend him, her voice a whip-crack of discipline. The wrack jumped to obey, almost dropping his beloved rifle again in the process.

  ‘Possessed!’ Naxipael raved. ‘Traitors all, every damn one of them! Giving their own flesh away! Bah!’

  The wrack hurried up and carefully laid his weapon on the floor before seeing to Naxipael’s injuries.

  ‘We were too late,’ Bezieth shrugged. ‘Whatever got in there first was nasty enough to hold on when the warding closed. Every major daemon within a league probably squeezed itself into the first warm body it could find to avoid being drawn back. We can expect to see more possessed.’

  ‘I bow to your superior expertise in the field, Bezieth,’ Naxipael said through gritted teeth.

  ‘That’s right, I didn’t get a hundred scars in Necropolis street fights.’

  As with Bezieth the wrack’s methods were not kind but they were quickly effective. Raw wounds that were showing through Naxipael’s partially melted armour quickly scabbed over. Naxipael’s face took on a mask-like grimace of pain and he cursed volubly.

  ‘With respect,’ the wrack said deferentially, ‘this one would ask why no possessed were at the canal.’

  Bezieth regarded the wrack coolly for a moment before coming to a decision. ‘Because the big ones, which is to say the smarter ones, don’t stop for a feast as soon as they get inside the warding,’ she said, her eyes momentarily unfocused and distant with the memory. ‘They go deep and bury themselves somewhere where they can find sustenance, somewhere they can grow like a cancer.’ The wrack nodded while bowing and scraping so low that it was virtually banging its head on the tiles. Naxipael was muttering again as the scabs flaked off him to reveal patches of pink, new skin.

  ‘Xagor, isn’t it? Tell me about the weapon, Xagor,’ Bezieth said, looking at the rifle more closely. It was an ugly thing, owing more to the aesthetics of a butcher’s tool or a collection of tubes than the elegantly sculpted lines of a Commorrite weapon.

  ‘This device is called the hex-rifle, honoured one,’ the wrack said with some pride. ‘Acothyst’s weapon, Xagor found it in the processional among the entourage of Master Re’ryrinx. Most unfortunate.’

  ‘Never mind that. What does it fire?’

  ‘Cylinder impregnated with accelerated viral compound, normally glass plague. Xagor does not know what compound this device uses, perhaps mutagenic, perhaps not. Xagor has fired only one shot with it and suggests finding more test subjects for more accurate analysis.’

  ‘Well whatever it is it works, keep it by you in case we need it again,’ Bezieth said before pushing down her distaste and clapping the wrack on its leather-clad shoulder. ‘And nice shot, by the way.’

  Naxipael seemed more aware of his surroundings again, his cursing tailed off into a string of short expletives as he stood up somewhat shakily. He gave Bezieth a peculiar look and then shrugged painfully.

  ‘All right, Bezieth, I’ll listen to your suggestion of what to do next,’ Naxipael said with equanimity.

  ‘Then make for Sorrow Fell,’ Bezieth said, ‘and do it quickly.’

  ‘Reason?’

  ‘Things have been stable for a little while but that won’t last, it’ll get worse. Sorrow Fell surrounds Corespur and it’s the only tier that will be organised enough to survive the worst, Vect will keep it that way.’

  ‘You’re assuming our glorious and beloved supreme overlord has survived,’ Naxipael sneered. ‘Some revenant might be eating his entrails at this very moment.’

  ‘More likely some High Commorragh pureblood is trying to stick a knife in his back, but I don’t find either possibility very likely. Vect still lives, you know he does. When the universe ends Vect will still be alive in the nothingness that comes after, floating in an unbreachable bubble of his own deviousness and sense of self-satisfaction.’

  Naxipael scowled but didn’t deny it. Asdrubael Vect had ruled Commorragh with an iron fist for six millennia. The supreme overlord had maintained his rule through disasters, rebellions, civil wars, alien invasions and Dysjunctions before. If anything Vect seemed to thrive on the experience, emerging stronger and with notably fewer opponents after each one. Naxipael had to grant that Bezieth’s plan had merit, contrawise to ordinary times it would actually be wise to seek protection from Vect’s presence rather than stay away from it.

  Between them Bezieth and Naxipael managed to get the survivors moving again, haranguing them for their laziness and threatening the tardy with lurid punishments. There were three warriors left, each from three different lesser kabals so they watched each other suspiciously at all times. There were a pair of Ethondrian Seekers in maroon cloaks and hoods, their half-seen faces constantly questing back and forth like weasels. They stayed close together and guarded one another’s backs religiously. Finally there was the wrack and a ragged-looking sell-sword that she vaguely recognised.

  They were sullen and unwilling to move, but all of them understood the peril they were in and obeyed after some grumbling. Not much of a force to take into Sorrow Fell, Bezieth thought, but any of them that could make it through the ruins of Low Commorragh should be able to find ready employment among the high archons at a time like this. Ready employment and relative safety until the Dysjunction was over.

  At least so she hoped.

  The images on the wall flickered, and the soft, amber light in the room fluctuated unpredictably. Distant, disturbing sounds flickered at the edge of hearing (or perhaps the edge of consciousness) but they seemed reassuringly far away for the present. It was still possible for the occupants of the chamber to set concerns of the Dysjunction aside for a moment and concentrate on their vital work.

  One of the images was briefly outlin
ed and expanded to fill the wall, the face of a somewhat slack jawed, flat-faced, raven-haired specimen of Commorrite nobility. One of the room’s occupants spoke up as twisting skeins of data unfurled around the image.

  ‘This is Kvaisor Yllithian, eleventh sibling on the Mol’zinyear branch, my archon.’

  ‘Too ugly,’ the room’s only other occupant snapped. ‘Next.’

  A different image promptly replaced the first, this one closely resembled Nyos Yllithian save for a certain dissipated look and what looked to be a permanently distracted expression.

  ‘Razicik Yllithian, seventy-third sibling on the Vatinyr branch, my archon.’

  ‘Seventy-third? Are you insane?’

  ‘There is a strong matrilineal quantum on the Vatinyr side of the family, my archon.’

  ‘You are insane. Next.’

  Face after face, name after name. All of them sharp featured, haughty, gazing at the viewer with naked contempt. There were certainly variations: pallid skins and dark ones, flamboyantly flowing manes or close cropped skull-caps, but every face bore a familial resemblance to Nyos Yllithian that was unmistakable. The master haemonculus Bellathonis stood nearby, scrolling through the ancient records of the noble house of Yllithian as they attempted to find a suitable candidate.

  Despite all of the haemonculus’s allegedly best efforts Yllithian was still dying. The glass plague was mutating aggressively, marching across his skin like a conquering army. His hands could no longer grip, his legs could not walk and he could only speak thanks to a succession of temporary skin grafts and devices. The plague had bound itself inside Yllithian’s own body in a way that made it impossible to completely eradicate. Perhaps as little as days remained to him but he’d thought it would be enough time to find the right individual to use as his successor. A message he had just received denied him even that, now he had only hours.

  ‘What about that one?’