Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  There were three petty archons from Low Commorragh: Naxipael of the Venom Brood, Khovoros of the Red Blades and Verixia of the Splintered Word. More importantly there were two archons of the mid-tiers: Malchierith from Hy’Kran and Xhubael from Yolosc. These were in attendance as representatives of more than three dozen other kabals in their districts, a complex assortment of long-standing alliances that were creaking badly under the conflicting pressures of the Dysjunction.

  A motley assortment of gang leaders stood towards the back of the small courtyard under the splinter rifles of wary White Flames guards: wyches, hellions, reavers, scourges, even an ink-skinned, slinking mandrake. These flotsam and jetsam had washed up at the White Flames fortress seeking sanctuary, each with their own handfuls of followers. Past associations or outright bribes had secured them a place at the foot of the walls under cover of the guns but as yet only these leaders had been permitted inside to plead their case.

  As Yllithian strolled into view a babble of demands, questions and entreaties rose from the throng. The archon of the White Flames smiled as he sensed his power over them.

  ‘The city lies in ruins and Vect does nothing!’

  ‘My people need sustenance!’

  ‘The lower city has been drowned!’

  ‘Aelindrach is coming for us!’

  Yllithian’s incubi bodyguards stepped forwards to keep the supplicants at bay with their klaives raised warningly. Yllithian himself waited and allowed the archons to feed off their own desperation for a few moments. He listened as their voices became more and more shrill until he finally raised a hand for silence.

  ‘Calm yourselves,’ Yllithian told them firmly, ‘I understand your great woes and I know of the tumult in the city as well as any of you. Why come to me and not go to Vect? As supreme overlord he holds all the power, while I am a mere archon like the rest of you.’

  Yllithian told the lie with a straight face but he was mocking them and they knew it. The noble line of Yllithian, along with Xelian and Kraillach, had ruled the city for centuries before Asdrubael Vect had brought about their downfall. Even so the house of Yllithian had survived through the intervening millennia to stand before them in the personage of Nyos Yllithian. As the ‘mere’ archon of the White Flames kabal Yllithian possessed the kind of resources and influence that the archons present could only dream of.

  ‘Vect has only secured Corespur and some parts of Sorrow Fell, all our messengers sent hence do not return,’ Archon Xhubael said with evident disgust, ‘and we have been alone and dying since the first shockwave.’ Xhubael was large and heavy-set for a Commorrite, her fingers glittering with rings. Yllithian found it hard to believe that she had ever suffered much in the way of privation.

  ‘And so you came to me as a cure for loneliness?’ Yllithian smiled. ‘I’ll be intrigued to hear you tell me what I can do about that.’

  ‘We know that Vect has tried to destroy you more than once,’ Archon Malchierith added slyly. ‘He sees you as a threat.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Yllithian nodded sagely. ‘He’ll willingly squander all of the forces he’s got hoarded away on Corespur in the hopes of ending me and any who associate with me.’

  Yllithian watched their reactions to his gloomy prophecy carefully. A few of those present had not fully thought through the ramifications of coming to the White Flames kabal for help. Only now did some of them realise that what they were doing could easily be seen as treason in the eyes of the supreme overlord. Xhubael and Malchierith were no such fools; they had already given up on Vect just as, from their perspective, he had given up on them.

  ‘Let us be clear, then,’ Yllithian said. ‘Tell me what you want of me.’

  ‘Allow us to carry your icon into Low Commorragh so we can show that we have the backing of High Commorragh,’ Malchierith pleaded. ‘The mere sight of the White Flames will pull the other archons into line.’

  ‘And what happens when Vect comes against you and claims that you’ve usurped his authority in bringing your tiers under control?’ Yllithian asked evenly. He wanted them to openly admit their opposition to Vect. When the histories looked back on this meeting it would be important for future generations to know that the noble, patriotic Nyos Yllithian was moved to help by his fellow citizens beseeching him in their hour of need.

  Malchierith and Xhubael exchanged glances warily, but they were merely hesitating at the final pinch of the noose. They knew that Vect would kill them in the most horrible ways imaginable if they were caught using Yllithian’s patronage to reclaim their districts of Commorragh. Yllithian concluded that the situation must be truly desperate in Hy’Kran and Yolosc – and getting worse by the hour.

  ‘We must act quickly,’ Malchierith admitted with a sigh. ‘If we hesitate now all that we’ve worked for will be lost. If Vect comes against us later for simply doing something to secure ourselves when he would do nothing, then we will fight him. What other choice will we have?’

  ‘Malchierith has the right of it,’ Xhubael grumbled. ‘We can’t just stand by and wait on Vect’s pleasure while everything collapses into anarchy. Damn him, I say, if he won’t help us we’ll have to help ourselves. He could be dead by now for all that we know.’

  Yllithian found it highly unlikely that Vect had met with his well-deserved demise but he chose not to disagree with the sentiment. The petty archons and gang leaders were all nodding grimly. They apparently understood that any dissension from them right now would bring swift and certain death at the hands of the White Flames. They were trapped and committed by simply being present when such matters were being openly discussed by more powerful archons. Later they might try to slip away and go squealing to Vect, yet there would always be the dangling question, ‘Why didn’t you do something to stop them?’ Nonetheless Yllithian made a mental note to move their forces inside the fortress as soon as possible. It would be easier to keep them monitored and contained.

  ‘You shall have my support–’ Yllithian began, but his next words were interrupted by a shriek.

  ‘Traitor!’ the word came from a shock-haired hellion, one of the gang leaders at the back of the courtyard. The lithe youth darted towards Yllithian but two guards were already springing forwards to intercept him. The hellion switched direction and delivered a spinning kick to the closer guard and opened up a vein with his blade-like spurs. The courtyard exploded into pandemonium as the guard flopped to the ground jetting blood. More guards sprang forwards with rifles raised. Yllithian’s incubi closed in around him protectively. The rest of the gang leaders, Malchierith, Xhubael and the other archons backed away from the insane dissenter as one body, momentarily hemming in Yllithian and his bodyguards while they were distracted by the lone hellion.

  That was the moment when the real assailant struck.

  Yllithian was not by nature given to testing his luck. Cold logic was his weapon of choice, a carefully thought-through plan his preferred methodology. Leaving matters to chance was something he always tried to avoid, even when it seemed like fate increasingly pushed him towards ever chancier endeavours. He felt like a gambler that had staked everything already but had to keep doing so again and again just to stay in the game. He had known there was a chance another attempt would be made on his life when he met the archons. He had carefully stacked the odds in his favour, but always with the lurking understanding that there would come a moment when his life would hang in the balance and raw chance could intervene.

  This was that moment. In a rare uncoordinated moment the incubi left a blind spot in their coverage of Yllithian. A blade instantly appeared in the gap between the incubi’s armoured shoulders and arrowed towards Yllithian’s chest in an unstoppable thrust. By sheer bad luck Yllithian saw the attack when it was only inches away and tried desperately to twist aside much too late.

  The failures continued to compound themselves as Yllithian’s shadow field flared microseconds too late to rob all the
power from the thrust, the blade surging onwards through a billowing cloud of entropic energy that was slowing it, but not stopping it, as it darted for Yllithian’s heart. The needle-sharp point punched through Yllithian’s concealed armour with surprising ease, tearing through the diamond-hard matrix as if it were no more than thick cloth. As the questing point dug deep into Yllithian’s flesh he began to scream, in the full expectation that he was using up his last breath. Then it happened…

  …Somewhere in the roiling uncertainty of the void an ancient and unthinkably alien entity stirred minutely. Strands of Fate were split and re-woven by a movement that was no more conscious than the quiver of an eyelash. The entity settled again, satisfied…

  …In Yllithian’s garden there was a blinding yellow flash. The stabbing blade shivered and sprang away as if it had struck a stone. Yllithian staggered back, trying to blink away the bright spots that were dancing before his eyes.

  He was dimly aware of the incubi closing in around him again with their klaives slashing at his unknown assailant. His vision partially cleared and he saw Archon Verixia lying in a pool of her own blood at his feet. The incubi had severed her arm just below the shoulder. The blade that she stabbed him with was still gripped by the severed arm, the weapon itself twisted and fused as if it had been heated to unthinkable temperatures.

  Yllithian looked down at Verixia, trying to understand why she had thrown away her life to so very nearly take his. Was it loyalty to Vect? Fear of retribution? Even with the cauterising effect of the powered edge of the incubi’s klaives she was only seconds away from bleeding out completely. She gazed up at him with undimmed defiance as she spat her dying words.

  ‘Vect will destroy you and everyone with you! You’re as dead as me – you just don’t know it yet!’

  Yllithian had to fight to master himself and keep his adrenaline-soaked body from shaking uncontrollably in the aftermath of his close brush with death. He wanted to stamp on Verixia’s dead face, to shout at her, to scream at his guards for failing him, to kill everyone close enough to have seen his momentary terror as the blade gouged his flesh.

  Instead he compressed his lips into a thin frown and breathed deeply for a few seconds. The archons and gang leaders stood as if paralysed as they were surrounded by angry White Flames kabalites. A few metres away lay the body of the hellion. He was half collapsed into the fountain, his corpse puckered with innumerable red craters where splinter rifles had torn apart his flesh, already blackened and bloating from the scores of different toxins racing through it.

  Yllithian looked at the frozen, terrified faces before him. They expected to be massacred. That’s how Vect would have handled them in the same circumstances. Even a chance that any of the rest of them knew anything about the attempted assassination would have been enough to see them all tortured and killed. In accordance with his deadly, ophidian logic, Vect would consider none of the archons valuable enough to risk leaving alive after an incident like this. Yllithian closed his eyes and breathed in deeply again. He was not Vect. Not yet anyway. He opened his eyes and smiled graciously.

  ‘As I was saying…’ Yllithian said with glacial calm, ‘…before I was so rudely interrupted. I will support you in your efforts to retake your tiers of the city. I will lend my authority to any archon that needs it in order to bring our beleaguered home back under our control. Vect has proven himself unworthy to be our leader in the current crisis and it’s high time we took the matter into our own hands. Just as you have said – we must band together in order to help ourselves.’

  The fools lapped it up, nodding as if in happy agreement with everything that Yllithian had to say. Behind the credulous smiles no doubt the wheels were turning as the archons weighed up how far to go with the White Flames and what they could get out of it. It didn’t matter, because they were his archons now, not Vect’s, and every moment they spent in service to him made it harder for them to back out of it. He would bind them closer, and they would drag in other archons in the hope of mitigating their own risk. It was hard to be a lone revolutionary, but in a crowd everyone could afford to be brave.

  Yllithian was distracted for a moment by several reports whispered to him by invisible voices. Two of the reports were expected and one was most definitely not. The archon of the White Flames gave several terse instructions before turning back to his captive audience. He began issuing them orders with no further pretences.

  ‘So to business then. Naxipael and Khovoros – go and deal with Verixia’s Splintered Word kabalites, kill off the diehards and incorporate the rest into your own ranks. Malchierith and Xhubael – you need to leave for your own tiers now or it’s going to get considerably more difficult. You’ll be shown a way out through the foundation strata – flying is liable to become very bad for your health at any moment.’

  An overlapping series of sonic booms thundered overhead as if to underline Yllithian’s words. Glancing up Yllithian saw the thin tail-fire streaks of Razorwings circling high above. They had returned in considerable strength and according to Yllithian’s whispered reports an immense force of Black Heart kabalites was not far behind them. For now the jetfighters bided their time outside the effective range of the defences of the White Flames Fortress and waited as patiently as vultures circling over a piece of carrion.

  As the archons and gang leaders were being led away under heavy guard Yllithian had his unexpected guest brought up to the courtyard to speak with him in person. Through various artifices Yllithian ensured that his new allies were delayed for just long enough to see the arrival of the milk-skinned master haemonculus, Bellathonis. Let them wonder what plans he was hatching, let them speculate on how the singular skills of the haemonculi might factor into Yllithian’s schemes. They did not need to know that Bellathonis had just been caught skulking around in the lower levels of the fortress or that the haemonculus had only saved his own life by claiming he had urgent matters to discuss with Yllithian.

  Kharbyr tried not to swallow anxiously as the Venom sky-chariot he was aboard banked hard over the gardens atop the White Flames fortress. He clutched the cylinder containing Angevere in one hand while hanging on grimly to a curving rail with the other as the grav-craft swung down to deposit him in a little courtyard with a fountain in it. As Kharbyr arrived two bodies were in the process of being dragged out and a knot of anxious-looking people were being ushered away by Yllithian’s guards.

  He recognised Archon Naxipael in the group and thought for a panicked instant that the whole act would be blown by Naxipael recognising him right back. Then he remembered that he was wearing Bellathonis’s face and relaxed. There was no way that Naxipael could know that this ‘Bellathonis’ was actually the same skinny sell-sword that had run out on him back in Hy’Kran.

  Yllithian stood over to one side of the courtyard surrounded by incubi and watching Kharbyr’s arrival expectantly. Kharbyr realised it was an entirely new experience for him to be looked at by the archon of the White Flames with anything but contempt. The few times they’d met Yllithian had always seen Kharbyr as worthless gutter-scum, a barely competent agent used at times by Bellathonis and hence utterly beneath his attention. The haemonculus himself however, Kharbyr now realised, was someone that Yllithian viewed with a touch of wary respect – not quite an equal, but almost certainly a force to be reckoned with.

  Angevere’s voice whispered in his mind, nagging at him again. +Don’t start getting overconfident, it’s actually much easier to lie to someone that looks down on you than someone who’s paying attention, so don’t deviate from what I told you to say.+

  Kharbyr had to suppress a shudder in response. He still couldn’t bring himself to feel comfortable with hearing the spectral voice speaking between his ears. It felt too much like he was being whispered to by the spirits of the dead.

  ‘Greetings, my archon,’ Kharbyr said as he drew closer. He tried to speak with what Angevere described as the jovial tone of contempt
Bellathonis generally used. Yllithian’s eyes immediately narrowed suspiciously.

  ‘Bellathonis, I had not thought to see you again,’ Yllithian observed drily, ‘you look like you’ve been through a war. I see that you’ve brought back the crone as well. I suppose she might still prove useful.’

  ‘There was an attempt made on my life,’ Kharbyr began, recounting the well-rehearsed words with complacent ease. ‘It happened down in my private workspace – the place where I undertook that special project on your behalf.’

  Yllithian’s expression froze at Kharbyr’s allusion to the resurrection of El’Uriaq. ‘Attacked by whom?’ the archon demanded.

  ‘My old coven, the Black Descent. They sent a Talos to track me down. They obviously believe I did something bad… No, unforgivable.’

  Yllithian’s expression was unreadable. He seemed to calculate for a moment and then said, ‘This means nothing to me. They are your foes and not mine. As you can see,’ Yllithian gestured in the direction the bodies had been taken, ‘I have plentiful supplies of my own enemies right now. I’ve no wish to add to them by taking up some esoteric quarrel with an entire coven of haemonculi on your behalf.’

  ‘You’re ignoring the fact that they obviously know what we’ve done,’ Kharbyr insisted with what he considered some credible conviction. He was starting to enjoy his little piece of role-playing.

  Yllithian shrugged disinterestedly. ‘I doubt that the Black Descent will share the knowledge with anyone else in case they get swept up in Vect’s pogrom. Wasn’t your old complaint about them always that they wouldn’t share knowledge even if the universe itself depended on it?’

  The ghostly whisper in Kharbyr’s head was sharp and urgent. +Remember what I said. Don’t engage with him about what you might have talked about before. Yllithian’s suspicious of you and he’s trying to trip you up with the minutiae of past conversations.+

  Kharbyr had never considered that Yllithian might be alert to imposters posing as individuals that he knew. Angevere’s weird insistence on Kharbyr rehearsing all of his lines suddenly stopped seeming so weird. He had to respond with something so he stuck with the script.