Asurmen: Hand of Asuryan

by Gav Thorpe

  The dawnlight was almost full, the energy of the dream-tree pulsing strongly from tip of root to end of branch. Dead spirits were on the move, flashing past and through Illiathin, glorying in another spring after the long turn of winter.

  Illiathin had been told that a dream-tree wakening was one of the experiences of a lifetime, but he was underwhelmed. He had mind-shifted into many different guises and bodies, and the semi-mobile appendages of a tree seemed very constricting. It certainly did not compare to riding the mind of a golden falcon over the mountains of Tybraenesh, and it paled next to hunting as a dagger­fin in the lava flows of Lashartarekh.

  The touch of the dead was cold and clammy, spoiling what could have been a worthwhile experience. Instead of living with the moment of growth and resurgence that the dream-tree felt, he recoiled from the sensation, disconcerted by the morbid presence of the deceased.

  It is the juxtaposition that gives the experience meaning. Life and death entwined, inseparable.

  A surge of happiness buoyed up Illiathin as he recognised the thoughts of the other living eldar.

  Tethesis! Using the dream-tree as an intermediary, he opened up his mind, inviting his brother to share the sensation. To Illiathin’s disappointment, Tethesis withdrew, refusing the offer.

  I was told I would find you here, Illith. I have to talk to you. It is very important. I am on a contact pad near to you – come back to your body.

  Before Illiathin could refuse or agree, Tethesis’s spirit was gone, shrinking back to his physical shell. Illiathin drank in one last draught of the dream-tree’s life, feeling the immensity of its existence, pushing aside the dead chill in its heart to enjoy the light falling on a billion quivering leaves.

  Annoyed at his brother’s interruption – an encounter that could have been so much more pleasurable – Illiathin slid down the heartwood and back into his body. It took a moment for his consciousness to establish itself again. When he was fully integrated with his mortal form, the dream-tree relinquished its embrace and Illiathin opened his eyes. He looked first to the right, but saw nobody he recognised amongst the throng standing under the deep shadow of the dream-tree’s boughs.

  To the left were more strangers.

  Confused, Illiathin searched the dream-arborealists more closely, looking at their faces. One of them was coming towards him and he flinched at the sight – a doomsayer in stark white, the red-streak tears and blackened hair standing out amongst the bright colours of the other spring celebrants.

  Then he recognised his younger brother’s features beneath the scarlet, unrecognised at first because of the unfamiliar scowl and clenched jaw.

  ‘Oh, Tethesis,’ whispered Illiathin. ‘Who have you been listening to?’

  10

  The camp of the Flesh-thieves was easy to find, a swathe of broken trees that spread like a stain through the forest that covered the foothills. In the pre-dawn gloom the glow of crude oil-burning stoves and lanterns lit the encampment with a sickly yellow glare, casting shadows from the bulk of dormant armoured vehicles and high-sided tents.

  Their name was not just poetic. Flapping tatters of skin marked with perverse daubing and profane sigils served as standards for the various groups and warbands that made up the army. Braziers hissed and sputtered with fat scraped from the corpses of their victims. The vellum-like tents and pavilions were stitched together by braids of human and eldar hair, the swirls of dead mouths and ears and eyeholes sewn up with gizzard-string.

  The whole clearing would have reeked of the macabre ornamentation and Nymuyrisan was glad he could smell nothing within the confines of the wraithknight. Even so, the sight turned his stomach.

  The artillery guns that had been shelling the site of the Patient Lightning’s landing for the past six planetary rotations were lined up five deep in rows along the edge of the huge clearing. Their crews slept in bivouacs beside the great guns, alongside sandbagged magazines filled with shells.

  The Flesh-thieves themselves were oddly devoid of trophies. They wore an assortment of menial clothes, uniforms from different human organisations, worlds and regiments. They were little more than stray animals bound into a pack by the charisma and power of the Dark Lady.

  Nymuyrisan led the attack, the towering wraithknight stepping as easily between the trees as if the elegant giant body were his own. He could feel the spirit of Jarithuran flowing through him even as his own spirit flowed through the spirit stones powering the immense construct. It helped to have his brother close on occasions like this, although the pain of his twin’s death lingered still on the edge of his mind. Jarithuran responded to this line of thought, surfacing from his dormant state to offer wordless reassurance and encouragement.

  Skimming Falcon grav-tanks followed behind the wraithbone giant, moving swiftly and silently into position, spreading out around the perimeter of the camp. They remained out of sight of the sentries for the time being, masked from the humans’ simple scanners by the trees and countermeasures far more advanced than the sensors of their foes. In their wake came a handful of Wave Serpent transports, their elongated troop compartments filled with Aspect Warriors.

  The servants of Khaine stayed in reserve, to be deployed only if needed. This was to be a swift attack, wreaking destruction on the artillery that had beset the battleship, and then withdrawing. If the eldar had to commit infantry to the attack, their withdrawal would be far more prolonged and dangerous.

  ‘Surprise, speed and surety,’ Nymuyrisan announced across the etheric communication network, repeating the words Farseer Hylandris had impressed upon him before the departure. ‘Pick your targets with precision and watch for each other. We will teach the mon-keigh that they rouse our wrath with their impudent attacks. They will rue the coming of the dawn.’

  With a final check that his fellow eldar were in place, Nymuyrisan let the power of the wraithknight’s core flow into the long limbs, breaking into a run. He was one with the semi-living machine, its sensors filtering the external data into his thoughts, creating a shifting, ethereal view of his environment. Even before visual sensors could detect the enemy, heat and motion scanners were pinpointing possible targets. Red silhouettes highlighted their positions, while pale-blue blurs showed him where the eldar forces were approaching.

  Nymuyrisan trusted his brother to keep the wraithknight moving and assumed control of the twin starcannons mounted on the war machine’s shoulders. Hails of plasma spat from the weapons, flickering blue blasts that ignited one of the ammunition stores. The detonation lit up the camp with bright fire, rousing the Chaos followers more surely than any shout or alarm.

  The strobing red rays of pulse lasers from the Falcons followed Nymuyrisan into the clearing, picking out the self-propelled guns and dismounted cannons. The wraithknight pressed on, the first bursts of return fire glancing ineffectually from its curved exoskeletal plates. Lifting a hoof-like foot, Jarithuran stamped down on a small personnel transport, crushing its engine block and bending the axles. A spring in its step, the wraithknight powered on, star­cannons firing again at a communications pylon close to the centre of the encampment.

  A sense of alarm from Jarithuran warned Nymuyrisan of a human tank coming to life to their right. A heat plume from its engines shone scarlet amongst the cluster of sensor returns. Jarithuran turned as Nymuyrisan aimed the starcannons. The storm of plasma splashed across the thick frontal armour of the tank, scorching metal but not penetrating. The turret rotated laboriously towards them, its muzzle lit by the flicker of a tracking laser.

  Conjoined even after death, the twins reacted as one. Jarithuran pushed the wraithknight to the left, back past the swinging gun barrel, while Nymuyrisan lifted up the gleaming blade in the wraithknight’s right hand. The tank fired, its shot a blur past the wraithknight’s shoulder.

  Nymuyrisan could feel the men inside the tank labouring quickly to load another shell. He could sense their panic an
d felt a sharp spike in the fear as dread-hastened fingers dropped the shell before it could be placed into the breach. The driver slammed the tank into reverse and backed away with tracks spewing churned mud.

  The wraithknight was far faster, Jarithuran closing the distance in five long strides. A secondary weapon, some kind of rapid bullet-firer, growled into life, but Nymuyrisan had the left arm raised protectively in front of them, its scattershield generator glowing with multi­coloured light. The spray of bullets slammed into the projected field. Converted into energy, they exploded into a rainbow bright enough to momentarily blind anyone looking at it.

  The tank crew’s desperation was palpable as the wraithknight reached its target. One of them tried to scramble out of the turret hatch, only to be snatched up in the wraithknight’s left hand. Crushing the Chaos worshipper to a pulp, Nymuyrisan tossed the bloody remnants away and readied the ghostglaive. He remembered how wrong it had felt at first, using the spirit energy of his dead brother to power the glowing blade, but now he barely gave the matter a second thought.

  The first cut sheared through the barrel of the tank’s cannon. The second plunged down through the top of the turret, slicing into the ammunition store near the base of the armoured vehicle.

  The explosion wrapped the wraithknight in a storm of flaming debris, scoring burned welts across the surface of its body and slender limbs. Nymuyrisan felt a pulse of admonition from his twin and offered up thoughts of apology in reply.

  Turning, they came across another tank, unmanned. At Jarithuran’s urging, the wraithknight crouched down and grabbed hold of a track mounting. Lifting up the tank, they tore the track and running wheels free before carving the engine in half with the ghostglaive. A second and then a third suffered a similar fate before Nymuyrisan felt the tingle of the communications matrix dragging him back out of the battle-trance.

  In that moment he sensed that two-thirds of the artillery had already been destroyed. The Flesh-thieves were swarming like ants from a disrupted nest, dragging out heavy weapons, dashing for their vehicles heedless of the storm of laser fire and shurikens that cut down their comrades. Nymuyrisan could see little in their armoury that could harm the wraithknight, but the Falcon crews were concerned about the swiftness and size of the humans’ retaliation.

  ‘Exit and I shall guard the withdrawal,’ Nymuyrisan told them, bringing up the scattershield.

  Walking backwards through the blazing ruins of the tanks, crushing underfoot any human foolish enough to come too close, the wraithknight backed away from the camp, unleashing bursts from its starcannons. Tank shells screamed from the scattershield in blazes of light, the flares of blinding luminescence further hampering the humans’ woeful targeting. Behind the wraith-construct, the eldar tanks and transports slipped away into the forest, their mission complete.

  With a last storm of plasma scything through the gathering platoons of soldiers, Nymuyrisan and Jarithuran guided the wraithknight back into the trees, enemy fire setting alight the foliage around them. Nymuyrisan raised the ghostglaive in a mocking salute, the flames of the burning camp reflected along the blade. They turned and broke into a run, soon hidden by tall trees, leaving behind a glow from the burning camp brighter than the radiance of the approaching dawn.

  III

  ‘It’s ugly.’

  Silhouetted against the glow of the dormant webgate pylons the starship was an elongated disc. The line of its upper surface was broken by short towers and hemispherical domes. The underside had an ungainly bulge towards the stern where the gravity engines were housed. Illiathin knew that there could be a form of imperfect beauty in asymmetry, the imbalance of form creating something powerful and dynamic. The ship of the Exodites possessed none of those aspects.

  ‘It is functional,’ replied Tethesis. He was dressed in his white robe, feet bare on the marbled red and grey of the orbital dock’s boarding bridge.

  ‘Style does not have to impede function. The habitat towers could be taller, for a start. That would offset the bulk of the gravity motors underneath. And the domes are so small. They look like warts almost.’

  ‘When we arrive at Thurassimenesh, the ship will be the foundation of our new city. We will not have gravitic impellers to reach cloud-touching towers, we will ascend by steps. The domes can be detached and used to form satellite settlements. We will be using physical labour to move them. Domesticated animals and the like. Any larger and they will be impossible to carry.’

  Illiathin looked around and saw clusters of other eldar moving up the three boarding bridges to the starship. Many were dressed in the white robes associated with the Exodites, as the doomsayers styled themselves, but there were several dozen at least in regular garb.

  ‘The newly inspired,’ explained Tethesis as he followed his brother’s gaze.

  ‘Inspired? Deluded more like.’ Illiathin looked back towards the shuttle-yacht that had brought him to the outer-system dock.

  ‘Do you not wish to leave?’

  ‘Leave?’ Illiathin laughed. ‘With you? I assume that is why you asked me to come here.’

  ‘I wished to have one last opportunity to impress upon you the folly of doing nothing. Please, Illith, come with us. With me. You do not have to accept the truth of the Exodus, but what harm could it do? I fear for you, Illith. For everyone.’

  ‘I have better things to do with my life than spend it cutting down trees and shovelling reptile dung.’

  ‘Better things, or easier things?’ Tethesis bared his teeth in annoyance. ‘What meaning do our lives have? We do not strive any more. Spirit-drones and psychomatons explore and conquer in our name and we reap the rewards of an empire of ten thousand stars. To what do we aspire? What point is there in living this way?’

  ‘To honour those that could not enjoy such times,’ Illiathin snapped back. ‘Generations that lived and died on starships to seed the world we inhabit. Forefathers that travelled the cold gulf between stars to harness the webway gates that stretch from one end of civilisation to the other. Millions that died fighting wars against countless mon-keigh species, dying to create peace for those that came after. We should remember them, not emulate them.’

  ‘How can you understand anything of what they did if you have not even the slightest common experience? You have never set foot outside this star system, what do you know of forging an empire in the stars?’

  ‘I know that I have no care for it! Wear your heavy robes and walk barefoot upon the ground, but it does not mean you are any closer to the heirs of Eldanesh than I. You are as conceited as any other if you think you have found the key to happiness.’

  ‘Happiness? It is not happiness we seek, it is grief. The grief of life being lived, the cessation of which has been earned, not inherited. We go to build paradise, brother.’

  ‘Then go, and spare me your lectures.’

  Sadness fell across Tethesis’s features. He looked over his shoulder at the Exodite ship. Dozens of lights were springing up through circular windows along the rim of the disc. Returning his gaze to Illiathin, he sighed.

  ‘I cannot leave without you, Illith.’

  ‘You must have known that I would not come. Why drag me all the way to the edge of the system to hear it?’

  ‘Look, look at the stars, brother.’

  Illiathin turned away from the starship and the webway portal, his back to the system’s star so that he looked out from the asteroid-girdling dock into the depths of outer space. He knew he was looking towards the rim of the galaxy, where the stars were thinly spread, but still hundreds of them glittered like diamonds on black cloth. The thin enclosed atmosphere of the orbital station did little to distort the incoming light, leaving each star stark and sharp in the inky darkness.

  ‘Do they not call to you, brother?’ asked Tethesis. ‘A new world, a new beginning?’

  ‘An old argument,’ replied Illiathin, letting his annoy
ance show as he turned back to his brother. ‘Do not think that you can coerce me into joining you. I am not your guardian, I make no claim over what you do. If you wish to go, then go, follow your convictions, but do not use them as a lever to change my purpose.’

  ‘I will remain because I do consider myself your guardian. I have realised that I cannot leave you. It would be selfish beyond regard to abandon you.’

  ‘I do not need your protection, or your pity. Stay if you want to, that is your decision. I want nothing more to do with you. Leave me be.’

  Illiathin turned away and strode back up the docking bridge, back towards the yacht. He was not sure which vexed him most – that his brother had dared to invite him on this ridiculous expedition, or the fact that for a heartbeat, as he had stared out into the stars, he had almost said yes.

  11

  There was always a moment, a tiny fraction of an instant, between the real and the unreal, between life and death, each time Neridiath transitioned from the webway into the mortal realm or the reverse. Her spirit stone, the crystal soul-jewel that would capture her essence at the moment of death, became a tiny sun for that moment, bright and hot on her chest.

  It did not matter whether she was in the piloting cradle, experiencing the transition as part of the ship, or elsewhere just as a passenger. The sensation never changed, a coldness in the deepest part of her spirit, the leeching of the void. Everything seemed dim and lifeless for several moments after, as though vitality had been drained from the universe.

  Asurmen’s ship felt the change as much as any living eldar, bursting free from the webway like a seed expelled from a pod, its infrastructure alive with psychic energy. The warm embrace of the webway gave way to the vast emptiness of the real universe, a dizzying experience even for a seasoned pilot like Neridiath. And just as it took her a while to recover her wits and senses, so, too, did the starship need some time to reel back its psychic engines and activate the gravity drive. The solar sails unfurled, a golden reflective mesh of tiny hexagons that converted the particle energy of the stellar wind into power for the gravity impeller. Physical detectors took over from psychic senses.