‘A calculated lie to determine your allegiance and intentions,’ Ekarynis pronounced with finality.
‘Or, admittedly with decreased probability, it was a statement of intent that later events have caused the noble archon to reconsider – a Dysjunction renders all events fluid and chaotic,’ Zykleiades added brusquely. ‘In either event I concur that Yllithian is the most likely suspect as Bellathonis’s patron. Furthermore if we are correct in that assumption it is likely that the archon in question is here, commanding his kabalites directly.’
‘Yllithian is the only possible suspect,’ Ekarynis insisted.
Zykleiades peevishly waved away the master elect’s pedantic narrow-mindedness. ‘I believe that I just said I concur with your findings. Even if we assume the supposition to be correct, though, the question then becomes, what is it that has brought Bellathonis and Yllithian together against the coven? They could not have known the difficulties we are having. They undertook a mortal risk by entering the labyrinth, so we can assume their need must be great. What is it that they want?’
Ekarynis tilted his head to one side in calculation. Zykleiades waited for the master elect to come to the same conclusion he’d made the moment Yllithian’s name had come up. Bellathonis’s motivations were easy to understand: revenge, avarice, showmanship, hubris or petty vindictiveness were all distinct possibilities and the truth probably hovered between them all. There was only one possible reason for Yllithian to have an interest in entering the labyrinth of the Black Descent.
‘They seek the release of Archon Xelian,’ the master elect concluded.
Zykleiades nodded thoughtfully in confirmation, his mind already moving ahead to calculate how to shift the pieces under his control and alter the game board in his favour. The problem with Ekarynis was that he had no imagination, no flair for speculation without hard data. The master elect might become patriarch noctis one day, but he still had a great deal to learn about how to manipulate people when they weren’t screaming in agony.
‘Gather up all your haemonculi, their wracks and their grotesques,’ Zykleiades said, ‘even the Talos if any are still functional. Concentrate them around the sixty-fourth interstice. We need to put on a show of force rather than sit passively by while Yllithian corners us in our lair.’
‘The kabalites are heavily armed,’ Ekarynis warned. The grinding discord of his voice made the statement into a sharp denouncement of Zykleiades’s competence.
‘I’d expect nothing less from Yllithian – the White Flames remain one of the wealthiest kabals despite enduring more than sixty centuries of Vect’s malice. As I said, only a show of force is required, Ekarynis, something that will confirm to them that they are on the right track and close to their goal.’
Ekarynis cocked his head to one side as he assimilated the new data. ‘And then?’ the master elect asked succinctly.
‘And then we give them what they’re looking for,’ Zykleiades said with a wide smile.
Chapter 15
DANCING AT THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS
Motley crept cautiously through the ruined workshops, slinking from pillar to bench to cabinet to doorway. The place was in semi-darkness lit only by guttering fires and sparking power feeds. He believed that he was in a cantonment far down in the city from High Commorragh and Sorrow Fell, somewhere close to the fringes of what was known as the Old City. The simple truth was that he was more than a little lost.
After being ejected from Vect’s ziggurat Motley had drifted aimlessly for a while. His flip-belt had saved him from an immediate and messy kinetically induced fate on some barbed spire. The anti-grav suspensor harness was concealed beneath his costume as it would be during any other performance, an adjunct that enabled the spectacular acrobatics sometimes called for during a Masque. In this case the simple device had saved his life.
He had watched the ziggurat and its accompanying armada from a shattered rooftop as they pushed onwards through the towering spires of High Commorragh kilometres overhead. The fringes of their advance were marked by the false-lightning of their weaponry and a persistent wail of psychic anguish as Vect’s boot heel was reapplied to the throats of his people.
When Motley spotted a smaller force splitting away from the main body his interest had been sufficiently piqued to begin following it. It was the first sign he’d seen of anything breaking formation with Vect’s aerial armada, so evidently some sort of scheme was afoot. The offshoot had spiralled lazily downwards, and using the flip-belt he’d bounded along from rooftop to steeple to buttress keeping pace with them.
He’d kept them in sight until they sank completely into the tangled streets of Low Commorragh. There, unaccountably, Motley had lost them. By the time he arrived at the spot there were none of the Venoms or Raiders in sight. They had vanished into the riven cityscape as effectively as hunting cats slinking into a jungle.
The area Motley was now investigating had been little more than a bazaar formed by families of artisans working together under the titular lead of a petty archon. With the mutual protection afforded by one another the craftsmen were generally left free to pursue their work without constant fear of enslavement by trueborn from higher up the food chain. It had been just one of a patchwork of tiny territories that existed in Low Commorragh. Among the great sprawl of spires, tiers, districts and blocks that formed Commorragh, the town-sized area he was now traversing was referred to merely as a street. The Commorrites called it the Street of Knives.
Like so much of the Commorragh that Motley remembered this had once been a place of dark wonders. Millennia of accumulated wisdom and talent had been dedicated to the crafting of truly fantastic artefacts here. Admittedly they were nearly all weapons of one kind or another; sharp, light, wonderfully balanced and absolutely lethal – or not, if their makers desired it. Many of the weapons that had been so lovingly crafted in these workshops were made not merely to kill but to inflict the maximum amount of harm. Rifles that launched high-velocity splinters of complex crystallised toxins, neural agonisers, flesh-shredding flails, envenomed blades, on and on; a whole list of horrors created with all the wicked ingenuity of long ages spent plotting in the dark.
It was all very different from the equivalent spaces on the eldar craftworlds. There in light, open halls the psychic bonesingers drew their creations into existence from the very stuff of creation. Wraithbone and other psychoplastic materials would be shaped into the necessary forms over months or years, each a unique expression of those dedicated to its creation. There were no such methods available to the psychically blunt dark kin. They, or more accurately their slaves, physically shaped their weapons with tools and machines from the very quintessence of diamond or steel, forged them in plasmatic fires and instilled them with energies stolen from the stars themselves.
Motley stepped lightly, taking care to avoid the spilled coils of monofilament wire and scattered blades gleaming dully on the ground. This place had been abandoned quickly; perhaps it had already been closed when the Dysjunction struck the city. The rank stink of warp energies and daemon-spoor clung to the area, but that had become more and more commonplace the further Motley had descended into Commorragh’s labyrinthine lower tiers.
Motley disliked creeping, or even slinking. He would much rather have sauntered or even skipped, but sadly this was neither the time nor the place for such antics. The intrusions of Chaos across the city snarled at the edges of his consciousness like tiny nails of migraine being hammered into his skull. There seemed to be a gradual quelling of the sharply ominous feeling Motley had felt when he had first arrived in the city, but it was being replaced by something that he felt was entirely worse.
It was getting hotter. The further he penetrated into the Street of Knives the more the temperature climbed. At first Motley feared he would have to turn back and find a different route because of a fire ahead. It was not the first time he’d run into such a complication, but this time he
could smell no smoke at all. Ahead of him a wavering orange glow spilled across the crooked thoroughfare he had been following, but even that lacked the fiery animation of a true blaze.
Motley cautiously made his way forwards to get a better view of the source of the light and heat. At a twist in the crooked thoroughfare a side alley cut between the buildings before ending abruptly at a set of broad, rough-hewn steps heading downwards. The alley walls were bright with reflected light and a furnace heat met Motley as he came to the head of the stair. Further down he could see that the steps had been swept away as cleanly as if they’d been cut with a knife. He edged downwards as far as he could go and hung on to a protruding strut so that he could lean outwards and look around from the bottom of the steps.
A massive net of firefalls was drooling slowly down from the upper tiers. Long, glutinous strings of molten metal and rock spilled down the structures on both sides of Motley. The strands were braiding and twisting their way down as they ate into the fascia of the buildings and re-sculpted it into a smoking, vertiginous wasteland. The radiant heat was fierce against Motley’s exposed skin as he stared at the spectacle in wonder.
It could only be the by-product of some unimaginable blaze occurring higher up in one of the spires. Perhaps a ship had crashed and its fusion-fuelled heart was burning its way downwards, or a blaze the size of a city had generated a self-sustaining firestorm fed by its own rotating winds until it roared white-hot. He shook his head ruefully. The firefall could equally be the result of weaponry unleashed by the dark kin themselves. Whatever the cause the scene exemplified his worst fears for the city – that either neglect or overreaction would leave it a lifeless wasteland ruled over by inimical elemental forces.
Motley looked down. There were places to go further down where sections of steps, balconies and balustrades had survived the molten downpour of metal and rock. The protruding chunks were unevenly spaced and none too stable-looking. The flow of the firefall altered moment by moment so there was no way to judge if what started out as a safe path would soon become inundated with slowly drooling, fiery death. Towards the very bottom of the cliff-like expanse it disappeared from view into a dense, roiling darkness that seemed to be trying to climb upwards and was only being kept in check by the frequent firefalls.
The Harlequin was far from averse to risks – being foolhardy was very much a part of his reason for existence – but attempting to traverse the constantly shifting firefalls as he was contemplating doing, on nerves and flip-belt alone, would have been a truly suicidal act. He pouted and allowed common sense to have its boring way (again!) and turned back to head up the steps to the Street of Knives.
He stopped short. A group of dark kin were gathered at the top of the steps. They were clad in barbed armour and had an array of equally barbed weaponry that they were pointing straight at him. He began to raise one hand in a jaunty wave but he could see from their auras that they weren’t just being cautious. They were intent on his death.
He turned the movement of his arm into the beginning of a handspring instead, twisting and pivoting sideways in one fluid motion. He triggered his holo-suit as he moved so that his outline shattered into a cloud of glittering fragments. The high-walled alley had become a death trap and now it sang with the high-pitched staccato of splinter weapons firing on full auto.
Stone chips flew as hyper-velocity rounds whip-sawed across the steps after him. Motley spun desperately to stay ahead of the barrage of fire. He ran partway up a wall to find temporary escape before having to flip backwards to land on the steps again. More rounds chased him to the edge of the precipice and he teetered at the edge for a split second, arms windmilling comically. Motley gave up with a wild laugh and jumped, flinging himself into the super-heated air with the thought that boring old common sense didn’t always get its own way.
He flipped in midair and angled himself to land on an outthrust shelf of rock a dozen metres down from the alley mouth. A thick rope of liquid fire was running down the wall nearby and pooling at one end of the shelf before oozing over the edge to continue its downward fall. The heat was intolerable and Motley was forced to quickly leap again as his skin started to blister.
This time he tried to propel himself horizontally as far as he could. He landed on a skeletal framework of girders and grilles that had been heavily damaged but still clung to the cliff-face of the city like broken cobwebs. Lava-like flows from above had passed straight through the framework, warping and buckling it as they went. In places the metal still glowed a sullen cherry-red and the structure creaked alarmingly beneath even Motley’s feather-light weight as he landed. He held perfectly still as he glanced back towards the alley mouth for signs of pursuit.
He couldn’t even see the alley with its broken steps from where he was. The smoke and slow cataracts of flame obscured too much of the scene. The point he had jumped from might be any one of a hundred dark crevices in the riven cliff face above. He was safe for now – as much as could be claimed by an individual in his somewhat precarious position only metres away from fiery death. Where had the assailants come from? Motley was not easy to take by surprise; he should have been able to sense their presence and intentions long before actually seeing them.
The framework lurched abruptly beneath his feet and Motley spun to confront his true hunter.
‘You don’t even have a weapon ready, I’m disappointed,’ purred Lady Aurelia Malys as she stalked forwards across the twisted metal.
The archon of the Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue was a shimmering vision of exotic beauty in the light of the firefalls. Her armour was fitted to accentuate every alluring curve, her hair was a river of pure midnight touched by flame and her red, red lips held a secret promise of maddening desire.
‘Clearly I am disarmed by your beauty, dear lady,’ Motley said with an ingenuous smile, ‘although the truth is that I’m more of a lover than a fighter, which is to say I’m more a clown than a grim warrior type. Perhaps you were hoping to challenge me to a duel or something? Not really my thing I’m afraid.’
Malys smiled slyly in return before coquettishly snapping open a fan of blades as if to hide her indiscreet pleasure. ‘There’s no need to be so shy. I don’t really want to kill you, little clown,’ she assured him, and Motley thought that never had a sweeter lie been told. ‘I just want to find out if it’s possible.’
She flicked her fan almost casually towards Motley. With the gesture monomolecular shards no bigger than a fingernail detached from the fan and streaked towards his exposed throat. The Harlequin twisted sharply at the waist to avoid the micro-blades but kept his eyes locked on hers.
‘I am every bit as mortal as you are. I can assure you of that, my lady…’ he said gallantly before swiftly ducking as a second flight of blades followed the first, ‘…and I won’t fight you without cause.’
‘You’d dare accuse me of mortality?’ Malys’s beautiful face twisted with contempt. ‘I’m no slave to time and chance. I’ll live forever unless my wits or my strength fail me. Which they will not.’
So saying she drew her sword with her free hand and flourished it at Motley. With a blade measuring over a metre it was unusually long for a single-handed Commorrite weapon. The first third of the weapon below the point was elegantly curved in the fashion so beloved of Commorrites and the metal was inscribed with flowing runes that glowed with inner fires. Motley smiled again, this time more apologetically.
‘Forgive me for my thoughtless offence, my lady, I did not mean to impugn your timelessness by including you in my confessions of my own fragility. Self-belief is truly the greatest asset bred by this magnificent city and you are especially well-favoured in that regard– ’
Malys took a leisurely cut at his head. Motley skipped back a pace to avoid the swinging blade and felt the metal grille they stood upon shift minutely under his feet. Over Malys’s shoulder he could see a reddish glow getting brighter through the murk, pe
rhaps another drool of liquid flame spreading closer to them.
‘–and once again I must insist on my passivity,’ Motley said with more urgency. ‘We’ve no reason to fight at a time like this.’
‘You’ve said that you’re a lover and not a fighter,’ Malys said as she sent the point of her blade darting at Motley’s eyes. ‘I find that fighting and seduction are very much alike, so by your own testimony you should be well practised.’
Motley twisted again to avoid the point and was almost caught as Malys turned the thrust into a short slash with a flick of her wrist. ‘I confess I fail to see the direct connection,’ he replied easily as he dodged. ‘A lot of sweating and grunting can be involved in both activities, I suppose, but the end objectives might be said to be diametrically opposed.’
Lady Malys lowered her blade a fraction and gave Motley a positively luminous smile before demurely hiding it from him behind her fan. So far she had just been toying with him. Her attacks were lazy and almost playful, but there was still a hint of the blinding speed and skill that she possessed to back them up. The Harlequin kept his weight carefully balanced as he tried to weigh the odds of escape.
‘Very good,’ Malys said and took another idle cut at Motley. ‘I meant that both incorporate three distinct phases. They begin with the pursuit, finding your partner and making them aware of your existence so that they know that they are desired. Next comes the first intimacy where your true passion is revealed.’
With those words Lady Malys exploded into action, spinning and slashing with her long blade and fan of knives as she unleashed a whirlwind of blows. Despite his caution Motley was caught off guard by the swiftness and strength of the resulting storm. He was reduced to ducking and diving to stay ahead of the flickering blade as she drove him back across the twisted gratings like a callow student.
She forced him back until only the yawning gulf was at his back and only his toes were still on creaking metal. A final, contemptuous thrust came arrowing in for his heart – a blow that dared him to leap for safety into the distinctly unsafe void or surrender his life.
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