Chapter 2
FALLING
Nyos Yllithian, archon of the White Flames kabal, watched as the pock-marked surface of Commorragh swelled with alarming rapidity before the prow of his personal barque. They were plummeting straight down towards it as fast as the craft’s grav-compensators would permit.
Yllithian gripped the arms of his throne on the barque to prevent them from visibly shaking. His new body – the one so recently taken to escape the grip of the glass plague that had finally killed El’Uriaq – was betraying him. The true Yllithian, the soul that inhabited this body, was well inured to shocks and frights – almost pathologically so – but the body he had taken possession of still seemed to retain some of the youthful instincts of its former occupant.
Adrenaline pulsed through his veins, his heart hammered in his chest. Yllithian had not felt this alive in a very long time and the pulse of life seemed to have sharpened his already well-honed fear of death. Yllithian briefly wondered what had become of the renegade haemonculus, Bellathonis, who had enabled his seemingly miraculous escape from the clutches of a true death. Having the haemonculus killed afterwards had seemed like the only logical option.
Bellathonis’s connections to Yllithian and the Dysjunction were all that Asdrubael Vect would need to crucify him. The damnable creature had disappeared before the deed could be done, although in retrospect that was probably just as well. Matters were moving so rapidly that Yllithian felt he might need the renegade haemonculus’s services again.
Around him his remaining kabalite warriors hurtled downwards. They were carried in the Raiders and Venoms that had survived the fighting above Gorath, the tortured Ilmaea now shrinking in their wake. The last remnants of Yllithian’s reavers and hellions were circling above and behind the formation watching for another attack by the Blades of Desire. The treachery of the Blades’ new archon, Aez’ashya, had not exactly been unexpected but it had come with childlike directness. Yllithian was forced to admit (although once again only to himself) that he had been taken a little off guard.
‘What course shall I set, my archon?’ Yllithian’s helmsman called out. His voice held an edge of trepidation in it.
What course? Yllithian’s keen mind was already darting through the options and being equally repelled by each in turn. There were only two realistic courses available to him. He could flee to his own stronghold or he could go back to Corespur and decry Aez’ashya’s treacherous attack to Asdrubael Vect – the very same individual who had, in all probability, ordered it.
The baroque vista of the eternal city was spread swiftly below them as they fell. Soon it blotted out all else, a jumble of jagged, irregular upthrust spires like a fist full of porcupine quills…
‘My archon?’ the helmsman prompted again nervously. Yllithian shot him a glance that held the promise of unending pain if he interrupted his archon’s thinking again. Beyond the barque’s ornate prow Commorragh was rushing ever closer. Yllithian’s mind was racing faster than the falling grav-craft.
There was a chance that Aez’ashya had acted alone, and there was also a chance that Vect would be sufficiently disgusted at her failure to disassociate himself from the attempt on Yllithian’s life. However, there was an even greater chance that Vect would welcome Yllithian back like a trusted ally before simply stabbing him in the back again.
Before Yllithian’s eyes the city was rising into the dark, angular mountain range that was Corespur – Vect’s unassailable fortress. Corespur seemed intact but around it in Sorrow Fell there were many fires burning unchecked. Yllithian’s sharp eyes could pick out the tell-tale flicker of weapon fire all across High Commorragh. The fighting was still going on. Yllithian allowed himself to relax by just a hair’s-breadth – the worst had not happened yet.
‘Set a course for the White Flames fortress. Take us home,’ Yllithian ordered crisply. The helmsman heaved on the craft’s tiller bar with a sigh of relief. Their angle of descent immediately shifted, the crushing g-forces Yllithian should have experienced almost entirely mitigated by the craft’s compensators. Behind them Yllithian could see the rest of his force altering their course to stay with him. He turned back again to gaze out over the burning cityscape in cautious wonderment.
Yllithian had already feared the worst when Vect had sent him off on the incredibly dangerous mission to retake control of the Ilmaea. The archon of the White Flames was to be killed off quietly while the rest of the city was brought back under the tyrant’s control. It had seemed likely that Aez’ashya’s attack had been timed to coincide with Vect’s victory elsewhere as a simple tidying of loose ends, but that evidently wasn’t the case. The city was still in uproar, the kabals were still fighting the invaders brought to the city by the Dysjunction – and no doubt each other. Yllithian smiled a small, tight smile to himself. That fact meant the supreme overlord was weaker than he seemed.
A warning call drew Yllithian’s attention upwards, back towards Gorath. The black, swollen disc of the Ilmaea had shrunk to a size no greater than his fist. Now he could make out high, faint arcs of glittering blue below the slave-star that were curving around into pursuit positions. There was no mistaking the drive-trails of the craft.
‘Razorwings!’ cried the helmsman in alarm.
‘Dive down into Sorrow Fell,’ Yllithian commanded evenly, ‘and don’t slow down whatever happens.’
The gleaming prow of Yllithian’s personal barque dipped again to plunge them towards the upper spires of High Commorragh. The archon of the White Flames prayed they were close enough to reach cover if they should need it. Vect had sent two forces to support Yllithian’s attack on the Ilmaea Gorath. Aez’ashya’s kabal – the Blades of Desire – and a flight of Razorwing jetfighters to clear a path for them through the daemon swarms that had been drawn to the imperfect interface of Commorragh’s wardings where they junctioned with the Ilmaea’s sub-realm. Aez’ashya had shown her true colours as soon as the fight over Gorath was won. Yllithian found himself rather naively hoping that the fighters didn’t have similar instructions to hers. He would know for certain soon enough.
The highest peaks of Commorragh were still distant but they were sliding rapidly closer as his grav-craft swept down towards them. Once within the tangled landscape of blade-sharp towers and barbed steeples the pursuing Razorwings could do little harm to Yllithian and his followers. It was only in the open air that the jetfighters’ vastly superior speed and acceleration gave them a lethal edge. Now that Yllithian had forced their hand he was not surprised by the Razorwings’ response.
‘Missile launch!’ cried the helmsman. Yllithian twisted around in time to see several small, bright stars accelerating towards his force. They would be monoscythe missiles, Yllithian concluded, diabolically clever devices that detonated into a toroidal ring of planar force. Objects caught in the explosion of a monoscythe would be sliced in two as neatly as if a giant scalpel had passed through them – which wasn’t far from what actually happened on a molecular level. He watched the missiles’ approach with his face showing only a cool, disinterested mask, while inside his intestines seemed to twist with barely controlled dread at the approaching salvo.
Despite their greater speed the missiles appeared deceptively slow at first. The seconds crawled past as they relentlessly overhauled Yllithian’s fleeing force. The reavers and hellions at the rear of Yllithian’s formation started twisting into complex evasive manoeuvres as the missiles bore down on them. Flickering fingers of splinter-fire and dark energy rose from Yllithian’s flotilla in a fruitless attempt to claw the oncoming missiles out of the air. But the missiles were fully as agile as the wildly dodging hellions and considerably harder to hit. It was a hopeless effort.
The missile salvo detonated among the hellions and reavers with startling suddenness. Tumbling wreckage plummeted downwards from the points of impact trailing smoke and fire in its wake. A wounded reaver caught at the edge of one blast careened wildl
y to its destruction as its now one-armed pilot struggled vainly to regain control. Yllithian’s barque dipped and lurched in the shockwave as debris fragments peppered off its protective energy fields.
Glancing around, Yllithian saw that the bulk of his force remained intact. The Raiders and Venoms carrying most of his warriors had escaped serious harm thanks to the lighter reavers and hellions absorbing the brunt of the missile salvo. The archon of the White Flames tensely watched the distant Razorwings waiting for another missile launch. Seconds passed and the spires of Sorrow Fell swept closer, yet no more missiles came. The Razorwings had already expended much of their ordnance in the fighting over Gorath, so now they must close to within cannon range or give up the chase. Yllithian had little faith that they would simply give up and ordered his surviving craft to close ranks for mutual support.
The highest peaks seemed almost close enough to touch when the Razorwings rolled onto their backs and dived in pursuit. As they accelerated into Commorragh’s artificial gravity well the jetfighters announced their approach with a rising roar and a series of thunderous sonic booms. Yllithian grinned mirthlessly – for all their bluster the pilots had hesitated a moment too long. Towers of metal, crystal and stone were now rising all around him, delicately leaping bridges and curving conduits flashing past both above and below. The dagger-winged jetfighters roaring in pursuit were built more for speed than agility and in this environment Yllithian’s own forces had the upper hand.
The Razorwings knew it too and they opened fire at extreme range. Darklight beams sliced past Yllithian’s force, each retina-burning slash promising a fiery end to its recipient. Not one of the shots had connected before the jetfighters had to pull up. A single enemy pilot refused to play it safe and charged downwards into the increasingly tangled upper tiers of High Commorragh. This particular foe flew with breathtaking agility as it hunted Yllithian’s bobbing, weaving collection of craft through the peaks and spires of Sorrow Fell.
The searing caress of the Razorwing’s twin dark lances stabbed into the fleeing formation with deadly accuracy. One of the White Flames’ Venoms immediately belched smoke and fell away into the depths. A storm of answering fire from a nearby Ravager lashed the jetfighter from nose to tail. None of the hits scored were immediately fatal, but they were enough of a distraction to cause the Razorwing’s pilot to misjudge the next manoeuvre. The speeding jetfighter clipped a gantry and ploughed full into the serrated edge of a spire where it instantly vanished in a dirty orange puff of flames.
The surrounding spires and bridges came to life as if they had been awoken by the violence of the jetfighter’s impact. Shots zeroed in on Yllithian’s force from all angles and set the air buzzing with splinter rounds and energy bolts. It was scattered, inaccurate, but plentiful enough to wound some of the White Flames craft. Yllithian’s well-protected personal barque sailed through the barrage untouched. The remaining Razorwings were quickly left behind as they circled in frustration above the tangled cityscape of High Commorragh. They were helpless to intervene as Yllithian’s force slipped away from them.
It was symptomatic, Yllithian thought, of his current situation to see every hand turned against him, predators circling overhead while assassins sniped at him from every window and archway. Under the stresses of the Dysjunction the thousands of kabals across Commorragh that Vect deliberately kept weak through his scheming had turned upon each other. They were fighting tooth and nail in an almost reflexive effort to grab a bigger slice of the pitifully small pie the tyrant habitually forced upon them. Ironically, at this moment, with enough leadership and visible show of force, the kabals could be welded together into an entity powerful enough to overthrow the supreme overlord.
Sadly, Yllithian reflected, he possessed neither leadership nor strength in sufficient quantities to impress the lesser kabals in the numbers that he needed. If his old allies Kraillach and Xelian had still been at his side with their own powerful kabals behind them it would have been a different story. Then it could have been done, the old noble houses could have staged the kind of resurgence they had dreamed of for centuries. Unfortunately for Yllithian his closest allies were no more.
Kraillach had been struck down by mysterious assassins inside his own keep, rumoured to have been led by Kraillach’s own chief executioner, an incubus named Morr. Kraillach’s remains had been deliberately obliterated to the point where no restoration of him could be possible even by the most skilled haemonculi. Xelian had suffered a less severe body-death, but her remains had vanished before they could be placed into a life-giving sarcophagus and restored. The latter occurrence was almost certainly a scheme of the daemonic El’Uriaq. Certainly the absent Xelian had been quickly replaced as archon of the Blades of Desire by El’Uriaq’s chosen puppet – Aez’ashya.
With El’Uriaq’s unlamented demise Aez’ashya had apparently re-oriented herself to follow Asdrubael Vect. Yllithian grimaced at her wayward foolishness. Perhaps she held some naive belief that loyalty to the supreme overlord would grant her protection in the long run. She would find herself a victim of Vect’s schemes at the earliest possible moment; of this Yllithian had no doubt. Nonetheless it was bitter to have to think that Aez’ashya could boast of having powerful allies, no matter how treacherous, when Yllithian had none. His scheme to raise thrice-accursed El’Uriaq as a weapon against Vect had backfired so spectacularly that it had shorn Yllithian of all support when he needed it the most.
Through a canyon-like gap between two spires Yllithian glimpsed the familiar alabaster peaks and rooftop gardens of his ancestral home – the White Flames fortress. For all the black cynicism that dwelled in Yllithian’s heart his spirits lifted to see that the place was still standing. It could be said that the house of Yllithian was as much the physical entity embodied by the White Flames fortress as it was a noble bloodline that ran through his veins. It was delightful to see that Vect had neglected to strike at it so far. Possibly he already had and failed here as he had failed above Gorath. As they got closer a notable circle of devastation could be seen radiating outwards from the fortress like the charred spokes of a wheel. It was ready evidence of hellish energies that had been unleashed by its defences.
Yllithian could see that a dark, skeletal spire nearby had been partially slagged and melted down to half of its original height. He decided he would definitely shed no tears if that indicated the annihilation of the ever-adversarial Venomyst kabal that had dwelled there. Other surrounding spires showed cleaner cuts made in them by monofilament and darklight weapons. There had been trouble here, but evidently nothing the fortress and its defenders couldn’t handle. For a moment a warm sense of security threatened to creep over Yllithian and he angrily crushed it. Something was not quite right; everything seemed a little too quiet. Even the random sniping at Yllithian’s force of grav-craft had tailed away to virtually nothing.
Some sixth sense drew Yllithian’s gaze upwards and there they were – Razorwing jetfighters circling high above the fortress like their feathered namesakes. When Yllithian’s force had dived into the tangled strata of High Commorragh it had merely frustrated their pursuit and not ended it. The Razorwings must simply have used their speed to surge ahead to where they could await Yllithian’s emergence at the most likely destination. The comparatively open area around the White Flames fortress was essential for its defence but now its primary purpose had been subverted by the lurking jetfighters – it was a killing field that Yllithian would have to cross before he could reach the safety of the fortress itself.
Yllithian’s force was only seconds away from being in the open and vulnerable to attack. He briefly considered landing so that he could disembark and make his way into the foundation layer to reach the fortress through the hidden ways. He immediately discarded the notion. That course of action carried its own set of unknown risks, he decided, and they were ones that considerably outweighed those posed by a single flight of jetfighters. A quieter, more cynical part of
his mind told him that he was simply panicking. He was on the run and, like a hunted animal, he could think of nothing but fleeing for shelter as quickly as possible. Yllithian crushed that thought, too, before it robbed him entirely of his determination. The jetfighters were attempting to delay him until more of Vect’s force could arrive. If he hesitated now and was caught outside the fortress when they did he would be truly doomed.
‘Ready your weapons!’ he called out to his followers, ‘stay low and make full speed for the fortress!’
His personal barque shot away into the open space surrounded by its sleek, escorting shoal of grav-craft. Yllithian instantly saw the blue tail-fires of the Razorwings braiding as one after another the enemy pilots rolled their craft over to begin their power dives. The tall, gabled peaks of the White Flames fortress seemed to leap closer as the grav-craft raced flat-out towards them at top speed, but the Razorwings were hurtling down at them faster still. Yllithian did not need to issue an order to open fire. All around him his warriors could see that this was the final stretch and they fired at the diving Razorwings with everything they had.
It seemed impossible that the hook-winged jetfighters could come unscathed through the flickering storm of darklight beams, disintegrator bolts and hyper-velocity splinters that Yllithian’s warriors threw up, yet they did. They were too fast for even the lightning-quick reflexes of eldar warriors to track and hit with any certainty. The Razorwings’ return fire was far less spectacular but far, far more deadly. Paired darklight beams punched efficiently through the Raiders and Ravagers closest to Yllithian’s barque as if they were made of paper. The air was filled with the shriek of explosions and scything metal as the craft were spectacularly torn apart.
Yllithian saw little else as twin retina-burning scars of purple-black splashed across his vision. Yllithian’s barque shuddered in midair as the craft’s energy shields just barely shunted the lance strikes aside. The scent of hot metal and ozone assailed Yllithian’s nostrils as a high-pitched screaming sound began to emanate from somewhere beneath the barque’s ornate grillwork decking. He tried to keep the Razorwings in sight as they roared past but he could see nothing but a series of fast-moving blurs. Ahead the walls of the White Flames fortress were rearing up like a huge, white cliff as Yllithian’s force closed in on them at breakneck speed.
Path of the Dark Eldar Page 70