Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  The mandrake-king shook his head slowly. ‘There is no time, we will move soon with or without your creatures. In the final reckoning they would improve the odds greatly – why do you fear some pox? The haemonculi are supposed to be the masters of flesh – does Bellathonis now say they can be defeated by a microbe?’

  ‘This is no ordinary infestation,’ Bellathonis replied defensively. ‘These ur-ghuls are infected with something from beyond the veil. They carry the taint of daemon-seed. My assistant reports that he saw other ur-ghuls in Commorragh that were also infected. I fear we are witnessing the start of an epidemic the like of which Commorragh has never seen.’

  ‘Do you know where ur-ghuls originate, Bellathonis?’ the shadow-king mused without apparent concern. ‘It’s said that they were first bred by the lords of Shaa-Dom to protect their labyrinthine ziggurats. Only later did they spill out of that accursed realm to form the verminous hordes that haunt Low Commorragh.’

  ‘I’m aware of the story, yes,’ Bellathonis said with some puzzlement.

  ‘Shaa-Dom became a daemons’ playground after the fist of Vect shattered their wardings. Strange winds blew there for millennia. Who can say what alterations might have been made to the creatures caught in its grip?’

  ‘But ur-ghuls bear no such taint in the normal scheme of things,’ Bellathonis chided gently. ‘Believe me, I’ve vivisected enough of them in my time to know the difference. This is something new.’

  ‘Is it? Perhaps they return to their base state when mated to Aelindrach and the power of the Dysjunction. Strange winds blow once more and the ur-ghuls are caught up in the shadow-skein. Where once they served the masters of accursed Shaa-Dom now they serve only Xhakoruakh…’

  Bellathonis gazed up at the dark, featureless face of the mandrake-king trying to divine what madness lurked there. The discomfort he had felt when they first arrived at Xhakoruakh’s court returned with redoubled strength. The king claimed the diseased ur-ghuls as his own servants, and by extension he was using them to spread their plague to Commorragh in full knowledge of its daemonic origins. The haemonculus pursed his lips and thought carefully before responding with the most mundane complaint he could think of.

  ‘Well, the ur-ghuls are unsuitable for my purposes. I need untainted flesh and blood to shape with.’

  ‘It will be as you desire,’ Xhakoruakh granted carelessly, ‘now go and prepare your monsters. Time is growing short before we must move against my brother, and when our victory is won all of Aelindrach will be at my command!’

  Bellathonis bowed and backed away from the mandrake-king in silence. It seemed the plagued ur-ghuls were Xhakoruakh’s secret weapon, but not one he could employ against his sibling to bring him certain victory. That left the only other possible target as Commorragh itself. Xhakoruakh’s ambition ranged beyond claiming the expanding sub-realm of Aelindrach for his own. He had designs on the whole city.

  Chapter 10

  INFLUX

  Valossian Sythrac ghosted along a cracked passageway and descended a set of stairs that now leaned at a precarious, drunken angle. Dust and smoke stung his nostrils and in the distance roaring fires and screams echoed hollowly, but here everything was deceptively calm and quiet. Sythrac paused and crouched for a second, holding his huskblade carefully back behind his body as he leaned down to examine the steps more closely. The thousand captive spirits that inhabited his armour shifted and whispered in the back of his mind; pleading, threatening, advising, cursing.

  Elphor Helmanriss, the shade of a human primaris psyker that Sythrac had hunted down eight centuries before, could sense the recent footfalls of Sythrac’s current quarry still echoing in the aether. Inquisitor Ilem Kharporov, another human who had been more recently taken, could not help but notice there were three sets of tracks and that one was more heavily burdened than the others. Vy’ssandorsz Az, a Makelian strider who had once been a legend among his own people, could still taste faint traces of blood, sweat and metal in the air. Sythrac was on the right track.

  Sythrac moved on down the fractured stairs as they went through a slow, clockwise spiral. He was still angry, even a little dangerously frustrated. The Harlequin had delayed his departure from Vect for so long that he’d almost missed out on the most immediate and visceral stages of the battle. He hadn’t fought an engagement in the city on this sort of scale for a long, long time and he didn’t want to let the moment pass without something to remember it by. Now, as the fighting was beginning to gutter out around the Alzos’Querion Vha, he was rather desperately searching for a memento of suitable worth to really mark the occasion.

  The stairs opened onto a low-vaulted corridor. As Sythrac stepped cautiously into it he heard the grinding sound of a lock mechanism cycling from up ahead – that, and the low, hurried murmur of voices. He quickened his pace slightly, stalking forwards with his huskblade poised and ready. Light spilled in as unseen doors slid back into the corridor walls and Sythrac saw the wasp-like hull of a Venom sky-chariot revealed before him. Beside it three figures were busily readying the craft for departure. They were all covered with soft-looking plates of armour that were coloured a glistening, raw-meat red. The central figure, distinctive in a spired helm and cloak of pale hide, was in the midst of stowing an angular casket on the Venom’s rear passenger deck. Sythrac stepped out into full view of the three and spoke.

  ‘Archon Vhigis, your journey is at an end.’

  The archon of the Flayed Mask kabal hissed and sprang back from the Venom as if he’d been burned. His two trueborn siblings drew weapons and sprinted at Sythrac without hesitation. To them Sythrac was only one opponent and they were battle-hardened, trained from birth with all the lethal focus of Commorrite warcraft. Kill this one enemy and the three of them could escape from the killing field of the Alzos’Querion Vha and perhaps find a new life together somewhere in the lower tiers. So they believed as they ran at Sythrac with weapons at the ready, never realising what they truly stood against.

  Sythrac allowed a fraction of the power from the captive spirits in his armour to flow through him. The running trueborn seemed to slow down in his altered perception, drifting slowly towards him with blurring images of their past and future locations multiplying backwards and forwards along their course. The first trueborn was beginning a feint attack that was intended to leave Sythrac open to the agoniser whip wielded by the second. Archon Vhigis was behind them both levelling a blast pistol. He would fire it regardless of the risk of hitting his siblings, Sythrac sensed; Vhigis was gambling on a lucky strike from the compact darklight weapon to end the fight before it had even begun. The archon of the Flayed Mask was probably perceptive enough to realise that the gaunt, baroquely armoured warrior that had found them was no ordinary kabalite.

  Sythrac simply ignored the swinging blade of his first attacker. Instead he stepped around the rushing figure to cut at the one behind, the one with the whip. Sythrac’s huskblade sliced through the whip-wielder’s wrist just as he was raising the barbed length of cable and sent the vicious weapon writhing away like a wounded snake. Sadly such finesse was entirely lost on Sythrac’s opponent as the huskblade fulfilled its primary function and desiccated the trueborn’s body in the blink of an eye. The raw-meat red armour collapsed, empty, as the shrivelled husk disintegrated into dust.

  Sythrac dropped flat an instant before Vhigis’s blast pistol spat a retina-scarring ray of darklight through the spot where he had been standing just a split second before. The first trueborn, the one who had tried to feint, caught the blast squarely between his shoulder blades. There was a flash of heat and light as the trueborn’s chest was vaporised by the hit and then his body collapsed beside the empty armour of his sibling. Sythrac stood and looked at Archon Vhigis balefully. As befitted his title as archon of the Flayed Mask, Vhigis wore the skin of his predecessor stretched across the faceplate of his spired helm. The eyes visible behind the holes radiated fear and fury in equal meas
ure.

  ‘You shame yourself. Fight me properly and you might yet win your life,’ Sythrac said.

  ‘Says you, Valossian Sythrac!’ Vhigis spat back at him. ‘I know who you are – you’re Vect’s dog! Why have you come for me?’

  ‘Your kabal defied the supreme overlord and now they pay the price…’ Sythrac replied. He twitched the huskblade back and forth leaving smoky trails as it carved through the air, ‘…as shall you. Your soul is forfeit to me.’

  ‘To hell with you! Where was Vect when the daemons crawled up from the under city? Where was he when every hand turned against us? Damn him and damn you, too!’

  The witch-sight of the spirits showed Archon Vhigis levelling his pistol again before he had even finished speaking. Sythrac turned aside and the bolt creased past him by a hair’s-breadth. He allowed more of the captive energy of the armour to flow through him, the thousand ghosts stung into action screaming and roaring in his mind. Vhigis’s movements became slower still and Sythrac closed the distance between them in seven preternaturally long strides. He dodged two more blasts from Vhigis’s pistol with a twist or a pivot to left or right before arriving within arm’s reach and snatching the weapon from the archon’s hand. Sythrac threw the pistol away with contempt and slowed himself down for a moment.

  ‘Fight me or die where you stand,’ Sythrac snarled. ‘You are no archon of Commorragh to flee when your kabalites are falling. Fight and reclaim some shred of honour.’

  Vhigis finally saw the inevitability of the doom laid out before him and drew his own sword with an anguished yell. Sythrac traded blows with the archon to test his mettle, allowing the howling spirits to ebb away so that he fought skill against skill alone. It soon became clear that Vhigis was an excellent swordsman by Commorrite standards, a deadly foe for a slave and a worthy adversary for any trueborn. To Valossian Sythrac, even unenhanced, he was nothing but a disappointing child. Sythrac soon tired of the uneven contest and allowed the power to flow through him again, landing a blow that shattered Vhigis’s darting sword into quivering fragments.

  To his credit Vhigis did not give up. He flung the sundered hilt in Sythrac’s face and dived for his fallen blast pistol with the speed of a striking snake. It was still a hopeless manoeuvre against a skilled opponent like Sythrac and they both knew it. Sythrac allowed him to get one hand onto the knurled grip of the weapon before plunging his huskblade through Vhigis’s exposed back. The tip of Sythrac’s blade penetrated the archon’s torso with such force that it sunk into the flagstones of the floor beneath him. Vhigis was pinned in place like a grotesque insect as he writhed in the seconds before his body crumbled away into dust.

  Sythrac opened the fingers of one gauntleted hand over the crumbling remains. The gesture revealed a soul-siphon embedded within the gauntlet’s palm, a cold, blue circle of light. The spirit-trap glowed spectrally as it extended an aetheral vortex across Vhigis’s desiccated corpse. The archon’s soul, even as it cried in horror at the ineffable claws of She Who Thirsts closing around it, was snatched up and drawn inside Sythrac’s ornate armour to be trapped, stored for Sythrac’s pleasure. Archon Vhigis of the Flayed Mask joined innumerable others in the ghostly menagerie contained in the network of softly glowing soul stones which festooned Sythrac’s armour. The archon was reduced to less than a helpless prisoner; a power supply, perhaps a source of secret knowledge, but most of all for Sythrac, Vhigis would be a memento of this day on the Alzos’Querion Vha when he had made the spires fall.

  Sythrac shook himself and pulled his huskblade out of the floor and Vhigis’s dust-filled armour. Unsatisfying as it had been, the ghost of Vhigis and the memory would have to suffice. There would be others to be made in the vast, suffering cityscape of Commorragh as it struggled to survive the Dysjunction, of this Sythrac had no doubt.

  He paused and looked over at the Venom that Vhigis had been preparing to flee on. The casket the archon of the Flayed Mask had been stowing there caught his eye – what treasure had Vhigis been so attached to that he had dragged the unwieldy thing all the way down here when he knew there would be a danger of pursuit? Sythrac could have squeezed the answer directly from Vhigis’s soul if he had a mind to, but he decided to look for himself.

  The ugly, angular casket was old and worn-looking, with deep scratches and an encrustation of what could only be dried blood. Sythrac idly flipped open the lid and gazed upon dozens of flat, leathery faces lying inside. These were the faces of all the previous archons of the Flayed Mask, no doubt, each lovingly peeled and preserved by his or her successor in a kabalite tradition that must have been in place for centuries. Sythrac shrugged. Apparently Vhigis had had his own cargo of precious mementoes too.

  Sythrac sighed and walked along the corridor to the end where a pair of concealed doors had been opened to the outside world. The screams and stink of burning became stronger as he emerged into the wan light of the Ilmaea shining high overhead. The base of this particular spire fell away before him towards Ashkeri Talon and the docking ring. Spread out before him was a series of deep valleys between lower spires that stepped down to the broad, flat knuckle on Ashkeri Talon that held the White Flames fortress.

  That particular spire gleamed like a bone needle at this distance, and was notable for the way it seemed to stand alone amid a blackened wasteland of other structures. Sythrac paused and listened for a moment to the many voices begging for his attention – not voices from the spirits this time, but his worthless underlings craving orders, direction, praise, acknowledgement or whatever else they wanted.

  The first squadrons of jetfighters were already prowling the upper air above the White Flames fortress, Sythrac could see as much from where he stood. The fact that they were staying so high indicated that they had met resistance from the fortress itself, a fact confirmed by the endless gibbering of invisible voices in Sythrac’s ear. He looked up and saw the first dark arrow shapes of Black Heart Raiders emerging from the Alzos’Querion Vha and passing directly overhead. Moments later the sharp angles of Vect’s mobile fortress blotted out the light of the Ilmaea as it passed in stately procession over Sythrac’s head.

  He sighed again and began issuing orders: splitting the Raiders up to begin probing the deep valleys ahead for ambushes, threatening the scourge-heralds with blasphemous tortures if they didn’t approach the White Flames fortress right this very instant and demand a concrete pledge of fealty from Archon Yllithian. The momentary diversion of hunting Archon Vhigis was over. It was time to get back to the far more dreary business of crushing Commorragh spire by spire if necessary.

  Several kilometres below Sythrac’s lofty perch a lowly Black Heart sybarite called Vaellienth just couldn’t stop grinning. Every day of his life he’d dreamed about a day like this, a day when he could go into the city and do whatever he wanted: kill whoever he felt like, steal whatever took his fancy, destroy at will. The rest of his clique felt the same way, he could see it in their wild eyes and fixed smiles – the Dysjunction was the best thing that had ever happened in Commorragh.

  The wind whipped at Vaellienth’s face as their Raider plunged into a steep-walled canyon between spires, curving sharply to closely follow the riven flank of one as they searched for more survivors. Above and behind them dozens of other Raiders sliced through the air with their open decks packed with more black-armoured warriors hungrily searching for new victims. Vaellienth shouted to his helmsman and the Raider glided to one side to slip beneath a bridge of silvery spars that had been buckled by some unthinkable violence.

  A spray of hypervelocity splinters rang from the prow armour of their Raider as soon as it came into view. Below them on a protruding terrace tiny figures raced to get into cover as the shadow of the Raider fell across them. Vaellienth swung the Raider’s forward cannon around to etch a searing line across two of the running figures before they could get out of sight. He could see they were escaped slaves, a mismatched selection of squat and gangling forms
armed with an equally mismatched selection of captured weapons. Vaellienth’s clique of warriors used their splinter rifles to pick off some of the other runners with clinical precision. The return fire coming up from the terrace was so pathetically inaccurate that Vaellienth had the helmsman bring the Raider in lower so he could leap down to finish off the handful of remaining slaves at close quarters.

  As his armoured sabatons crunched onto the terrace Vaellienth had a moment of heady exhilaration as he realised there were more slaves than he’d originally thought – a lot more. A dense knot of dirty, club-wielding wretches came bursting out from a rubble-choked entrance where they had been hiding and Vaellienth grinned again at the crude ambush the slaves had set up. Doubtless they’d hoped to lure him in and gain some more usable weapons, maybe even capture themselves a Raider. Instead they’d caught something far too big and dangerous for their puny trap.

  The slaves had the strength of desperation but little else on their side. Vaellienth impaled the first one that ran up to him on his rifle’s combat blade. He left the weapon hanging from the wretch’s guts and drew a knife as he leapt forwards to take the next slave in the neck. Screams erupted all around him as the rest of his clique took down their own chosen victims in short order. The lumpen flailing of the slaves as they tried to defend themselves was almost comical. They were blatantly outmatched but they knew they could expect no mercy from the kabalites, so they fought to the death – or at least they tried to. Vaellienth kept two of the slaves half-alive to be hung from the Raider’s trophy chains, replacing two recently expired prizes from one of their previous encounters.

  The word had come down from the supreme overlord himself – subdue the city – and subdue it they would. Vaellienth’s squad had swarmed through Sorrow Fell with a thousand others of the Black Heart kabal all racing with one another to be the first at the kill. They had swept through the upper spires like the fires of vengeance, killing anything that stood in their path. It was easy to tell who the rebels were; they were the ones that tried to fight or tried to run. Now the Black Heart forces were coming up to the maze-like boundaries of the Old City: the slums, the flesh farms, the factories and the workshops that formed the functional heart of Commorragh once you dipped beneath the tips of the glittering spires.