Path of the Dark Eldar

by Andy Chambers

  He came up against the piled bodies and wriggled through them in an effort to get away from the rampaging grotesque. Behind him he could hear shrieks and crunching sounds as the berserk monster poured out its pent-up rage. Ahead of him he could see the straight corridor was blotched with blood and lumps of tissue. There was a junction just ahead where a wider passageway crossed the corridor he was in. Masked figures were crouched in the openings on either side pointing heavy-barrelled rifles towards him.

  Kharbyr dived sideways and fired before he’d even consciously registered what kind of weapons were being aimed at him. His snap shot was considerably quicker than the rifle-wielders managed. Kharbyr’s strange pistol exploded one of his assailants so messily that it seemed to upset the others’ aim. Their rifles barked uncertainly and sent rounds smacking into the meat pile behind him, but Kharbyr was left miraculously unscathed.

  Kharbyr’s career of gang fights and murder for hire had taught him a few invaluable lessons about close combat. One was that when faced by enemies with rifles and all he had was a pistol he had to close the distance or run away. Running away wasn’t an option so he leapt forwards before they could shoot at him again. Several of his masked attackers readily abandoned their own cumbersome guns and came at him with their blades drawn. Kharbyr guessed that they recognised him as Bellathonis.

  Wracks. Kharbyr recognised them by the blood-stained leather they wore and the iron masks covering their faces. They were wracks just like Xagor. Their emaciated arms and torsos were crisscrossed with elaborate scars, chains hung from their wrists and ankles. Kharbyr could never stop himself thinking of wracks as being the haemonculi’s slaves, yet he knew that the creatures willingly surrendered themselves to the pain and torture inflicted on them.

  Two of the wracks slashed wildly at Kharbyr with broad-bladed knives that dripped a viscous-looking green ooze. He ducked beneath their strikes and then darted aside as a third wrack reached out for him with scissor-like claws. The wracks were dangerous opponents but they lacked Kharbyr’s steely reflexes and experience in close-fighting. They got in each other’s way in their eagerness to strike at him.

  He kicked the clawed wrack in the chest and shot one of the knife-wielders with his pistol. The shot wrack swelled and then exploded with an obscene slobbering noise. The knives the wrack had been holding went flying from its nerveless hands and Kharbyr snatched one out of the air with his free hand as it passed. He slashed out with the knife and threatened with his pistol to keep the wracks at bay as he tried to retreat. The roaring and tearing sounds behind him had curtailed, so there was some hope that help would be coming soon.

  The wracks that hadn’t come forwards to fight him had already backed off. Now they raised their rifles again in response to a shouted command. Someone had tired of their brethren’s paltry efforts and wanted quicker results. Kharbyr lunged forwards and thrust his captured knife into the guts of the scissor-handed wrack. The wrack clamped wiry arms around Kharbyr and raked steel claws across his back.

  ‘Die, traitor!’ the wrack hissed into Kharbyr’s face in a foul mixture of bad breath and spittle. Kharbyr responded by twisting the knife in the wrack’s guts and ripping it upwards into his heart.

  The rifles barked and Kharbyr felt the wrack before him shudder as rounds ploughed into his back. The other wrack had been about to plunge one of his knives into Kharbyr’s neck when the same volley also cut him down in his tracks. Kharbyr chuckled at the irony of the situation as he tried to keep the scissor-handed wrack upright to act as a living (actually mostly dead) shield.

  The body he held was stiffening rapidly, far too rapidly for it to be rigor mortis taking a hand. With a flash of inspiration Kharbyr suddenly realised that the cumbersome-looking weapons the wracks were using were hex-rifles. Xagor had once told him hex-rifles typically fired a crystal cylinder that had been impregnated with the glass plague. Kharbyr hastily pulled his knife out of the wrack before the fast-spreading crystalline transmutation brought about by the glass plague could seal it inside the wrack’s guts permanently.

  Retina-burning slashes of darklight beams cut past Kharbyr and down the corpse-strewn corridor. He half saw lurking wrack snipers being immolated where they stood by split-second flashes of entropic energy. The wracks burned as if they were paper targets being subjected to an instant of furnace-heat. A brief, vicious firefight erupted in the tight confines of the corridor, in which Yllithian’s warriors seemed to be rapidly gaining the upper hand. Kharbyr crouched behind his glass-and-meat shield and tried to weather the storm.

  The banshee howl of energy weapons fire lulled for a moment of its own accord. There were no more targets in view.

  ‘Enough! Stop shooting!’ a desperate voice cried from the darkness. ‘We want to negotiate!’

  The sound of the voice was music to Yllithian’s ears. The idiots were finally learning some sense at last. He turned away from the smoking wreckage of a Talos that his incubi were in the process of cutting into pieces with their great klaives and shouted back.

  ‘Drop your weapons and come out into the open,’ Yllithian called with relish. ‘Any further resistance and you’ll die like all the rest.’

  He looked expectantly along the corridor towards where the main fighting had occurred. Over the heads and shoulders of his kabalite trueborn he could see the narrow thoroughfare was piled with corpses. Many of the bodies were still burning and the walls were pockmarked with glowing craters in mute testimony to the ferocity of the trueborn’s fire.

  The Talos had pounced on the rear of the White Flames force after they were engaged in front by wracks and grotesques. The pain-engine had enjoyed great success at first, cutting through the trueborn rearguard like a metallic shark. However, Yllithian, and more importantly his incubi bodyguards, had been on hand (Yllithian having sensibly chosen to remain close to the rear) to intervene and stop the rampaging machine.

  A hunched figure in viridian and black robes lurched into view from a side passage to display empty hands. After a moment’s hesitation a handful of wracks followed the wretched-looking figure into the open. Yllithian smiled with satisfaction. He had been waiting for this moment since Bellathonis led them into the hellish labyrinth. By his reckoning any attack on the Black Descent’s precious labyrinth would inevitably force the coven to negotiate if it was pursued with sufficient vigour. Bellathonis might or might not have brought them all the way to Xelian. It wouldn’t matter if they made a big enough mess along the way.

  Yllithian strode confidently forwards, pushing between his trueborn warriors with his incubi close at his heels. Static defence could only resist for so long, it always came down to a contest of wills between attacker and defender. Yllithian had great confidence in his own willpower over that of a coven of skulking haemonculi. He saw Bellathonis, whom he had mentally written off in the first clash at the head of the column, emerging from beneath a pile of corpses. Yllithian felt a vague sense of relief at not having lost a potential asset. The renegade’s direct usefulness, however, was about to come to an end.

  ‘Tell me your name and rank,’ Yllithian demanded of the haemonculus in viridian and black.

  ‘I hold the position of intimate secretary to the master elect of nine…’ the haemonculus began haughtily. Yllithian snorted and silenced him with a wave of his hand.

  ‘Forget it. I don’t care who you are as long as you have the authority to give me what I want,’ Yllithian said, ‘which as a mere “secretary” you don’t have. I suppose you may prove useful for conveying my demands to your masters.’ He turned his head and spoke to his incubi. ‘Kill the wracks.’

  The wracks quailed, looking to the intimate secretary for support and finding none. The incubi went about their work with the professionalism of butchers in a slaughter yard. Yllithian looked the intimate secretary straight in the eyes as the incubi’s bloody klaives rose and fell.

  ‘Listen to me carefully. I want Xelian
and, if necessary, I will destroy your entire coven and pull this labyrinth down around your ears to get her,’ Yllithian said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘I’m sure you’ve considered all kinds of clever schemes for killing me and wiping out my forces rather than giving in to my demands – plagues, poisons, traps, bombs and all that sort of thing. You might even be brave enough to give up your own life right now to make an attempt on mine, although frankly I doubt it. Anyway, I’m going to show you why that way you will lose even if you win.’

  Yllithian gestured and two of his trueborn emerged from the ranks behind him carrying a skeletal-looking device between them. It was a long, narrow aggregation of blocks and sheets of metal overlaid with glass-like circuitry. The intimate secretary gazed at it uncomprehendingly. He licked his green-tinted lips and asked, ‘I don’t understand, w-what is it?’

  ‘The warhead,’ Yllithian replied coolly, ‘from a void mine. Normally there are two sections to a void mine. The first projects a sphere of force intended to contain the detonation of the second within safe parameters. In this example that part has been removed to leave the primary detonator unhindered – that’s a speck of pure darklight that I’m told would annihilate this entire labyrinth and a good chunk of the surrounding city if it were triggered.’

  The intimate secretary looked suitably horrified. His milk-white face also convulsed through outrage and disbelief but both emotions withered before Yllithian’s unshakeable self-belief. If the archon of the White Flames were killed the entire coven and their beloved labyrinth would join him on his funeral pyre, of that he had no doubt.

  ‘Good. I see we understand one another,’ Yllithian said and waved the trueborn carrying the warhead back to their place in the ranks. ‘Just to be perfectly clear, that isn’t the only one. I’ve planted a number of these unfettered void mines in your labyrinth as we’ve moved through it. Should I give the signal or my life signs terminate they will all detonate and obliterate it completely. So you see, I win or no one wins. Now get me Xelian.’

  The intimate secretary swallowed loudly and said, ‘I will certainly convey your message to the master elect. It appears you have a… ah… winning argument for the present. If your demands had been presented to the coven at an earlier juncture I’m sure a great deal of long-term damage could have been prevented…’

  Yllithian smiled icily as he responded, ‘Yes, I don’t doubt that you would have given it due consideration and done absolutely nothing. By “long-term damage” you’re implying that my relationship with the haemonculi will be irrevocably harmed by my actions. You are incorrect. Very soon the covens will be precisely divided into two camps – those who live by understanding that they are merely servants to the new ruler of Commorragh and those who die for thinking themselves free. Vect has permitted your kind entirely too much freedom to politic and interfere on your own account. Such laxity will shortly be at an end.’

  The intimate secretary took a step back and almost bumped into the incubi behind him. He looked frantically around the blank-faced helms and then back to Yllithian. ‘I will tell the master elect immediately,’ the intimate secretary babbled, ‘and impress the urgency of the matter on him.’

  ‘There is no need,’ grated a hideous, clashing voice from the darkness. ‘I am already aware.’

  Chapter 18

  THE CASTIGATORS

  By the time Motley found his way back up the firefalls and onto the Street of Knives Lady Malys had vanished without a trace. He cast around listlessly for a time searching for some clue as to which way she had gone. It seemed likely to be a fruitless exercise. Through some means the archon of the Poisoned Tongue appeared able to mask her comings and goings even to someone as psychically adept as himself. The psychic threads of causality he could read from the street and its buildings were too confused and traumatised to yield any useful hints.

  It was at this moment that he realised that the darkness was deepening around him. He looked up to where, between the canyon-like walls of the spires, he could see the wan stars of the Ilmaea riding high overhead. The stolen suns were not obscured and no dimmer than before. No shadow was being cast by clouds above and yet the light around Motley seemed to be leaching away before his eyes. A strange taint was in the air as if a chilly breeze were blowing onto Commorragh from distant, polluted shores. Motley breathed deep of the stench, sneezed and stuck out his tongue before grimacing.

  ‘Oh, that isn’t good,’ he said to the empty street. ‘That isn’t good at all.’

  The Harlequin stood motionless and strained every sense into the encroaching shadows as he tried to divine their import. There was a subtle shift occurring in the fundamental structure of Commorragh’s underlying reality, but it wasn’t the raw vibrancy of the warp he could feel. This was something old and fusty that felt as if it had lain undisturbed for countless millennia before it was disturbed, the rarefied air of a mausoleum.

  Motley wondered if it were perhaps the influence of a sub-realm as he started strolling along the street and whistling a jaunty tune to see what it might draw out. Around him the shadows deepened swiftly as the temperature dropped inexorably. There were a multitude of separate realities that Vect had annexed over the centuries to expand his eternal city. Most of the sub-realms had their own distinct characters. Some of them were very much at odds with what was generally agreed on as the normal consensual skein of existence for eldar–

  Aelindrach. It could only be Aelindrach.

  Motley stopped whistling. To his hyper-attuned senses the surrounding darkness was no longer empty. He could hear a faint rustling as stealthy feet slipped between the shadowed angles surrounding him, he could smell the scents of dried blood and old bone on their weapons, he could feel the handful of corrupted life-sparks closing in with their minds full of hunger and death. The children of the shadow-realm, the mandrakes, had come to Commorragh in force.

  They rushed in on him from all sides, their serrated blades singing through the air as they sought his life. Motley sprang high into the air to avoid their rush while pirouetting to break a neck with a snap-kick. He flipped and landed between two of the sable-skinned hunters. He slashed with his short blade to open the throat of one mandrake while he simultaneously punched out at the other. His knuckles had barely brushed the mandrake’s coal-black skin before an inconspicuous device strapped to his wrist responded to the move by thrusting a mass of monofilament wires into the target’s chest.

  The weapon was called a ‘Harlequin’s kiss’, a term that always amused Motley with its grim irony – some nameless death jester back at the dawn of time no doubt liked the imagery of victims being rendered weak at the knees by the horrifically simple but deadly weapon. The mandrake he had struck immediately collapsed like a boneless sack of meat, which was effectively what the looping coils of the Harlequin’s kiss had turned it into.

  Motley spun aside from a jagged machete hacking at him from behind. The mandrake recovered from his missed blow with cat-like quickness and whirled his weapon upwards to make a disembowelling cut at the fleet Harlequin. Instead, the mandrake’s wrist was severed by Motley’s descending blade. Black ichor flew in pinwheeling droplets from the separated appendage as the mandrake clutched the stump and hissed in agony. Quicker than thought Motley reversed his knife and slammed its point up beneath the wounded mandrake’s chin.

  More mandrakes darted out of the shadows at Motley with their bone-white hooks and cleavers thirsty for his blood. The Harlequin gave a brief thought to continuing the fight and then realised that even more mandrakes were coming. The shadows were alive with crawling shapes and needle-fanged snarls. Motley leapt upwards again, this time catching a hanging chain with one hand so that he could swing himself onto the eaves of an iron-scaled roof.

  The mandrakes swarmed after him, climbing up the vertical walls towards his perch with impressive swiftness. The Harlequin took a run-up and leapt again, this time crossing the street and beginning a s
eries of jumps, wall-runs and climbs across the patchwork roofs of Low Commorragh that the mandrakes couldn’t keep up with. They used their otherworldly powers to flit from angle to angle in the deeper shadows as they attempted to catch him. Motley flinched aside from their traps and ambushes time and again as he fled ever upwards, always towards the light.

  Eventually he paused for breath on a small, copper-clad dome bathed in the wan light of the Ilmaea and gazed back down into the abyss. The sheer drop between the spires was enough to make an ordinary observer’s head swim, but not Motley’s. He clung to the upright spike at the apex of the dome with one hand and shaded his eyes with the other as he leaned precariously and probed the depths carefully for signs of pursuit. The shadow-stain was far below him for now but he could see that it was climbing inexorably. Whorls and spirals of inky blackness were spreading up the flanks of the spires like winter frost.

  ‘There it is, you old Fool,’ Motley remarked to himself. ‘’Tis still a civil war at heart, but I’m thinking it’s definitely one with some uncivil patronage involved.’

  Mandrakes had a highly peculiar aura about them at the best of times; they were only semi-corporeal with one metaphorical foot kept forever planted in the shadow-realm. The ones Motley had fought in the Old City had something more: they bore the distinctive sickly-sweet stench of the Chaos god Nurgle, Grandfather of Pestilence, Lord of Flies, Master of Plagues, etcetera, etcetera. Motley had been gambling when he’d told Asdrubael Vect that Nurgle’s involvement was a virtual certainty. It was not particularly reassuring to find his gloomy prediction being realised.