The Last Hunt

by Robbie MacNiven

  Another ambush caught Shontai’s assault brothers three blocks short of the remains of the Mountain Gate. The hybrids attempting to set up a heavy autocannon on the top of a fast food outlet were simply bait. As the Assault Marines dropped down to slaughter the pathetic creatures, their masters – a brood of gene­stealers – burst from the access stairwell and flooded the rooftop. Two hunt-brothers, Chimbai and Dargan, were torn apart by the lightning-fast attackers before the rest of the squad could pull away, dropping a clutch of frag grenades in their wake.

  By the time the brotherhood had broken out to the gateway the city was completely overrun. They had seen no tribesmen during their withdrawal, only a sea of xenos. The communications channels now returned nothing at all but static. Heavenfall was a slaughterhouse. Joghaten knew he had failed, and the realisation made his stomach clench and every muscle burn with a violent, passionate shame.

  The Mountain Gate was no more, reduced to a breach of crushed rubble by the pounding entrance of hulking xenos monsters. Khan’s Lance rumbled through the remains, its great cannon primed, but there was no resistance. Beyond, the plains of Darkand stretched, bare but for the dark piles of xenos dead. Jaw set, Joghaten looked back over his shoulder. Behind, up the long Slope Road towards Heavenfall’s Pinnacle, there was nothing but a dark morass of alien xenoforms, all pouring after them. It was already far, far too late to turn back. After one more moment of hesitation he opened the link to the rest of the surviving White Scars and raised his right hand, fingers splayed.

  ‘Brothers, ride.’

  The Chamber of Seers,

  Iyanden Craftworld

  ‘They are coming.’

  Yenneth stood before the council of Iyanden, robes drawn tight around her, runelights playing over the wraithbone arches of the seeing chamber. Her kindred remained silent, critical, she was sure, of her every breath. Regardless of what the fates willed, what she was about to do risked the fabric of reality itself.

  ‘I have dispatched Arianna and her phalanx to the City of Pillars,’ she continued, her voice echoing around the dark chamber.

  ‘We know,’ Hildar replied. ‘We shall soon discover whether your trust in the mon-keigh is misplaced or not.’

  ‘I do not trust them,’ Yenneth said. ‘I trust the path I have set them upon. I have reactivated the gateway, to the best of my abilities. I will join Arianna while my spirit walks on Darkand.’

  ‘We shall see soon enough whether the path you have chosen does indeed run straight and true,’ Hildar said. ‘Go now, sister, and complete the act you have begun, for better or for worse. We shall be waiting.’

  The Gates of Eternity, Darkand

  The remains of the Fourth Brotherhood reached the stone pillars of the Gates of Eternity as dawn was turning the steppes blood-red. The pollution in the atmosphere had grown worse, the rising sun given the appearance of an angry, infected wound-scab as it climbed wearily into Darkand’s discoloured sky. The Furnace Season had lost its edge due to the infestation, the heat burning away countless billions of alien microbes in the atmosphere but barely reaching the plains beneath.

  The White Scars had ridden through the night. Three times they had engaged – purging xenos spore stacks, digestion pits and birthing pools, taking root like foul plants out around what had been the largest tyranid seeding areas. The Rhino transports remained at the heart of the column. Half of them were now like tribal mortuary carts, filled with the brotherhood’s precious bodies and what equipment they had salvaged from Heavenfall. Dorich’s narthecium was bloody and full.

  As the brotherhood arrived power was arcing between two of the pillars of stone that constituted the Gates of Eternity, bolts of energy leaping from one to the other with reports that boomed out over the plain. The eldar witch, Yenneth, was waiting for them, standing on one of the great, jagged yellow rocks at the edge of the erratic formation. There was a strange wind whipping around the stones, snatching at the eldar’s robes and making her charms and stones rattle eerily. Her form seemed to flicker when Joghaten focused on it, like a faulty pict-feed. Another illusion.

  ‘This is the heart of your portal on Darkand?’ Joghaten called up to the xenos as he brought Whitemane to a halt at the base of the rock. Behind him the battered column waited, engines growling, weapons primed. ‘This is where you have plagued our systems from all these millennia?’

  ‘It is one gateway, yes,’ the farseer allowed, her voice sounding strange and distant on the scything wind. ‘The largest, but there are others, as I’m sure you now know. Even in your fallen city.’

  ‘What lies beyond?’ Joghaten demanded. He’d already drawn a tulwar, and now gestured with the wicked weapon at the crackling nimbus of energy wreathing the stone pillars.

  ‘The webway,’ the farseer responded. ‘And your nemesis. She and her kindred occupy an abandoned, dead place we call the City of Pillars. Slay her there and scatter her band, and I will lead you back here. All will be remade.’

  Joghaten turned to Qui’sin, who now rode beside him at the head of his bondsmen. The Stormseer’s helmet was mag-locked to his belt, his features tight and grim. He merely shook his head.

  ‘All is as the Khagan wills it,’ Joghaten said, as much to himself as to his brothers. ‘Did he not face this very same choice, almost ten thousand years ago?’

  Behind them the remains of the brotherhood watched on, tense with expectation. They had been quiet since leaving Heavenfall, their oaths and boasts turned to ash by the defeat they had suffered. Joghaten knew their souls were torn, pride sundered by their failure to protect the hundreds of thousands who had looked to them as champions and saviours.

  ‘Make your decision,’ the farseer called.

  Joghaten twisted in the saddle and raised his blade. The dawn light caught it, running with the actinic blue of the portal to create a kaleidoscopic brilliance that glimmered before the eyes of the brotherhood.

  ‘We have reached the end, brethren,’ the khan called out, routing his words through every vox band and frequency. ‘Our end. Let there be no doubts. We have failed. Our charges lie dead, and many of our own brothers have been sacrificed for nothing.’

  None replied. Joghaten went on, words punctuated by the booming discharges of the webway portal.

  ‘You all know me. You know how I cleave to the memory of our great Khagan, how I have sought to emulate him and ­honour his memory since the first day I was taken from the steppes to the mighty Quan Zhou. We all know his story, and we know where he rides still, beyond the ken of man.’

  He lowered his tulwar, so that it pointed at the alien gateway.

  ‘There, beyond the veil of reality, our primarch hunts. There we will find vengeance for our brothers fallen on this same plain, all those years ago. I will personally take the head of the xenos filth who slew the great Arro’shan Khan. And, if we are found worthy, I will lay it at the feet of the Khagan. We shall find him, and in doing so we will atone for what has happened here.’

  This time there was a response, a low growl undercut by mutterings of affirmation and vengeance. Joghaten ignited his tulwar, energy streaking across the weapon’s razor edge.

  ‘We ride from reality into the unknowable beyond. We shall not return, not in this life. Our fleet will carry word of what happens here today back to Chogoris. All will know of the Tulwar Brother­hood. All will know of our last hunt.’

  It is never about trying to convince the mon-keigh to trust us, for they never will. It is about showing them that they have no choice in the matter.

  – Attributed to Farseer Eldarian, Yme-loc craftworld.

  Chapter Seventeen

  CITY OF PILLARS, CITY OF BLOOD

  TIME TO FURNACE SEASON PEAK

  [TERRAN STANDARD]: 0 HOURS.

  TIME TO PREDICTED PRIMARY XENOS PLANETFALL [TERRAN STANDARD]: 0 HOURS.

  The City of Pillars, the Webway

  The City
of Pillars had become a place of death, a slaughter-yard for a cousin’s feud. Skalorix, archon of the Kabal of the Pierced Eye, let out a shriek as her raider dipped into a stomach-turning dive, giggling like a young drukhari at her first slave-whipping. She clutched the edge of the barbed skimmer’s cupola with just one hand, revelling in the rush, in the knife-edge danger of the transport’s twists and turns. Its pilot, Vornex, was her favourite. More so than any in the Kabal of the Pierced Eye, he knew how to fly the drukhari way – unnecessarily risky, unbeatably exhilarating. Skalorix’s incubi, impassive behind their daemonic white masks, remained locked to the deck around her, like guardians watching over a child while its parents were absent.

  ‘Hit them again,’ the archon hissed into the communicator. The splinter cannons spat once more, and her sharp features twisted with delight as her raider made a low pass over another spirit-phalanx, riddling the wraithbone automatons with razor barbs. Though none fell, they shuddered and buckled beneath the barrage. Reality screamed and shuddered around the speeding raider as it took return fire, wraithcannons tearing hairline cracks in space and time. None could hit the skimmer, however, as it darted up over the edge of the broken amphitheatre the aeldari were making their stand in.

  The attacks had started mere minutes earlier, and in truth Skalorix was more than happy to see her cousins converging on her kabal’s positions once more. Holding the City of Pillars had never truly been about defending the webway gate. She needed slaves and, even more importantly, spirit stones if the fortunes of the Pierced Eye were to be truly revived.

  She’d known Yenneth and her ghost-constructs would return, seeking to dislodge her either by force or misplaced lies about the Devourer. This time, however, Skalorix would make sure she did not let any of her foolish cousins leave the City of Pillars.

  It was like waking from a dream. For the briefest moment, Joghaten didn’t know where he was. He found himself and his bondsmen racing through a wide, deserted street, flanked by the husks of tall, pale stone buildings. The eyes of alien gods looked down upon him from either side, the graven images scarred by time and neglect. Overhead impossible constellations swirled through a deep blue sky, etheric brilliance shining down on a forgotten city locked in a bubble of unreality. Whitemane’s roar was his only comfort, rebounding from the walls around him.

  Then figures flitted across his vision, barbed shadows at the far end of the street. He remembered.

  He’d been the first through, the first to pass beyond the crackling gateway and into the unknowable realm of the aeldari. The strange city he found himself in now had been built by the eldar, that much was clear, for in the tall, slender buildings, crystalline trees, broad boulevards and statues carved from strange, bone-like substances, their handiwork was certain.

  The vox was down and Whitemane’s auspex display was a ­scrambled mess, but Joghaten needed neither to tell him that he wasn’t alone after all. Behind him he heard the roar of assault bikes, and the keening battle-yell of the steppes. Grinning wildly, the Master of Blades depressed his firing studs.

  Two figures ahead convulsed and fell, spindly forms eviscerated by the hail of bolts. Joghaten recognised the wicked, sickeningly slender forms of dark eldar raiders, scurrying to respond to the sudden attack from the reactivated webway portal.

  If there was any force in the galaxy – or beyond it – that was not going to give them time to recover, it was the White Scars.

  The remains of the Fourth Brotherhood speared from the active webway gate, actinic energies trailing after them. The forgotten streets and alleys of the City of Pillars were suddenly alive and throbbing with the fury of dozens of overcharged engines as the Space Marines ploughed straight into the first contacts that registered on their auto-senses.

  It was the brotherhood’s pilots who reaped the swiftest tally. The Stormhawks and Stormtalons came through the eldar gateway with unerring speed and accuracy, climbing immediately into attack runs on the first airborne xenos craft they spotted.

  There were plenty, but none had expected to find their rear echelons under attack. Heavy bolter and assault cannon rounds punched through the light xenos, sending two raiders slamming with fatal speed into roofs and walls.

  Drayang caught another flyer as it rose from what looked like some sort of ancient amphitheatre. The area around the tiered stone seats bore the heaviest enemy presence, and Drayang’s Stormhawk took fire from a darting xenos fighter that almost took out his left afterburner. It was while twisting away that the Stormhawk found the raider rising directly up into its sights.

  The alien skimmer jinked and turned away with more speed and skill than any airborne object had any right to, but it was too late. A spray of assault cannon rounds hammered its fuselage, causing it to tip suddenly and violently. It clipped the amphitheatre’s flank and dropped back into it, vanishing from Drayang’s target lock. The whole exchange lasted perhaps three seconds before the Stormhawk had passed overhead and then dropped down to street level to shake its new pursuer. The dark eldar fighter followed with a skill not even the Adeptus Astartes could match. Two streets beyond the amphitheatre, its dark lance speared straight through the Stormhawk, blasting it apart in mid-air.

  Drayang died without knowing he had brought down the drukhari archon’s raider.

  In the shadows of the City of Pillar’s ruinous temple of Khaine, Iyanden’s assembled warrior council waited on their farseer’s command. Yenneth stood with her head bowed and both hands grasping her staff, feeling Arianna’s mind caress her own. The mon-keigh had arrived, she realised. Even better, their sudden assault from the webway portal had left Skalorix and her personal retinue stranded.

  ‘We must strike,’ she said to the council, who were standing, robed and armoured, in the jagged shade of the temple’s broken columns. The sound of splinter rifle fire and the rip-scream of wraithcannons echoed around the neighbouring streets.

  ‘It will take them only minutes to recover the initiative. Skalorix must die.’

  ‘What of the mon-keigh?’ one of the warlocks, Yetoc, asked. ‘What if they attack us as well?’

  ‘Focus on the drukhari,’ Yenneth urged. ‘But, if need be, slay the mon-keigh too. There is no time now for hesitation.’

  As the council set off Yenneth reached out with her mind, seeking the mon-keigh’s leader one last time. This was what she had brought them here for. For better or for worse, the path she had chosen for them all was nearly at an end.

  The witch was in his mind again. Joghaten had come to a halt on the corner of some sort of shattered temple, eldar blood dripping from his blades and bike. His White Scars had rallied to him, those who had managed to stay at his side thus far – his bondsmen, Qui’sin, Feng’s riders and the Fourth Tactical Squad. Vox communication was seemingly impossible. At this stage there was nothing to do but kill. Until the farseer spoke to him again.

  She is close, huntsman,+ said the voice. +Travel east. Your vengeance is at hand.+

  Joghaten turned to Qui’sin, whose bike was idling next to Whitemane. The Stormseer merely nodded. Joghaten raised his right hand, palm open, fingers splayed.

  ‘Ride.’

  Skalorix and her retinue were stranded at the bottom of the City of Pillar’s crumbling amphitheatre, their raider brought down by a crude mon-keigh flyer. Aeons before, the open-air space had played host to the troupes of the Harlequinade and their breathtaking recreations of the heights and depths of the aeldari’s existence. Now it was a scene of slaughter, brutal and uncomplicated.

  Skalorix’s mirth had turned to rage. She should have known. Of course a craftworld like Iyanden, which tortured its own dead and forced them to serve its whims, would trick the brute mon-keigh into aiding them. That Yenneth would actively bring them into the webway showed how desperate she was.

  ‘Kill them!’ Skalorix shrieked. ‘Kill their weak shells again!’

  Her incubi were cutting into the
wraithguard lining the amphitheatre’s tiers, glaives cleaving through wraithbone with bursts of cutting energy. The burning wreck of her raider lay at the centre of the open space, its beautiful, hook-like form twisted and broken. Her pilot, Vornex, lay among the remains, impaled on his own barbed control panel, and a lone piece of shrapnel from the battered fuselage had sliced over Skalorix’s right cheek, leaving a single ruby line defiling her porcelain whiteness. For that alone she would hire the Altered Coven’s most talented haemonculi to recraft Yenneth’s flesh.

  A fresh hail of splinters began to rain down from the amphitheatre’s sides. Vayne’s kabalite warriors had managed to scale its sides and were now catching the battered wraithguard in a vicious crossfire. The whole kabal was converging on the clash, drawn by their archon’s demands for support. In a few more moments the aeldari would once more be overwhelmed, and she would turn her vicious passions on the idiot mon-keigh who dared defile this place with their presence. Battling with the constructs across the gladiatorial space, it felt for the world as if she was back in the pits of Commorragh. The thought made her pulse race.

  One of her incubi fell mere feet away, neck snapping in the relentless grip of one of the wraithguards. Even with a warlock guiding them the constructs were sluggish and ill-suited to melee, especially against warriors such as Skalorix’s bodyguards, but they were still far from harmless. The incubi’s killer turned its wraithcannon on the archon.