by Gav Thorpe
Still firing short bursts of shurikens into the daemon, Asurmen ducked under her sword arm, slicing her wing. He ducked as the Dark Lady pivoted, golden blade swinging for his neck. The top of Asurmen’s blade flashed as it met daemon flesh, leaving a trail of burning blood dripping from the creature’s thigh.
The other wing slashed unexpectedly at the Phoenix Lord, a clawed joint catching him on the shoulder. The blow sent him spinning to the ground. Snarling in triumph the daemon lunged, but Asurmen rolled aside a moment before the golden daemonblade hit, avoiding the weapon as it speared into the ground beside him. He aimed a burst of shurikens into the daemon’s face and sprang to his feet as she reared back, stung by the attack.
For a third time golden blade and diresword met, the furious detonation of their contact almost knocking Asurmen from his feet. The daemon princess was newborn and naive, but swollen on recently released warp power. She was expending that energy at a prodigious rate, siphoning more and more power from the warp to fuel her presence in the material realm.
A bolt of lightning spewed from the daemon’s eyes, striking Asurmen in the chest in a fountain of black motes. Hurled backwards, Asurmen twisted to turn the fall into a roll. He swerved to the left as he regained his feet, back towards the daemon, but another bolt of power caught him, slamming into his lower spine. Armour split as he was propelled face first into the ground.
Your arrogance has betrayed you, the daemon said as Asurmen rolled onto his back. She paced forward, crackling energy wreathed about her raised fist.
‘Do you really think this is the time to gloat?’ Asurmen fired both vambraces at once, a slew of shurikens slashing into the daemon’s chest. She staggered, giving him time to jump to his feet, and just enough time to raise his sword to parry the golden blade that swiftly descended towards his head. The shock of the impact knocked him down to one knee but the Phoenix Lord held firm, turning aside the next blow with the flat of his diresword.
Your weapons cannot hurt me, the daemon princess insisted, smashing her scimitar into the Phoenix Lord’s blade, forcing him back.
Asurmen countered as the daemon advanced, suddenly launching himself at the creature. He was inside her reach in a moment, driving his blade point-first into her chest. Psychic power surged from the spirit stone, pulsing fire into the wound.
Screaming, the daemon reeled back, flailing away from the Phoenix Lord as white flame burst out of the wound in her chest. Shrieking, the daemon tumbled down, wings furling about her.
Asurmen retreated a few steps, sword held level to guard his withdrawal. The kneeling daemon twitched, shoulders moving up and down with what looked like sobbing. Asurmen launched himself at the monster, leaping high, blade pointed down to drive between the shoulder blades.
The daemon princess whipped around as he left the ground. The daemon’s parody of a face grinned, revealing a row of needle fangs. The tip of her scimitar swept up towards the descending Phoenix Lord.
There was nothing he could do as the immense golden blade crashed against his chest, splitting armour from ribs to shoulder. The force of the blow threw him across the clearing, spinning and rolling, to crash into the ground almost at the treeline.
Now your soul will be mine! The daemon advanced again, steaming blood pouring from the puncture in her chest.
Asurmen struggled to his feet, sword held up in defiance.
Even your magic blade cannot kill me. The daemon pulled back her sword arm, ready for the final blow.
‘We shall see,’ said Asurmen. He looked up. ‘I have other weapons.’
Hull glowing red from the heat of re-entry, Stormlance blazed across the forest, setting the trees on fire with its passing. Pulsars stabbed out beams of raw power, striking the daemon princess square in the chest. The laser blasts seared straight through the daemon, leaving neat round holes. The daemon looked down in disbelief and then back up at the warship screaming overhead. She swayed slightly and returned her gaze to the Phoenix Lord. As she turned she opened her mouth, no doubt to utter some further taunt about the ineffectiveness of Asurmen’s weapons.
Taking advantage of the momentary distraction by Stormlance, the Phoenix Lord leapt, sword lancing out in front of him. The tip punched into the mouth of the daemon and out through the back of her head, fire licking along the blade. The Phoenix Lord’s knee smashed into the Dark Lady’s wounded chest and he rode the falling daemon’s body to the ground, while white flame engulfed her head.
Throwing himself clear, the Phoenix Lord rolled to his feet and turned in time to see the last of the creature’s form consumed by the cleansing fire. Not for the Dark Lady banishment to the warp. Her immortality had been fake, a lie, false hope to trap the greedy and vain. Daemons could certainly die, their essence dissipated forever by certain artefacts or conjurations. The Sword of Asur was one such treasure.
Did we win? asked Stormlance as the craft circled overhead, bleeding off speed.
‘Not yet.’ Asurmen gazed towards the heavens. ‘The battle was never going to be decided here.’
25
Neridiath followed Hylandris into the main control chamber of the Patient Lightning. She had expected something grandiose, far larger than the control pod of the Joyous Venture, but found herself in a chamber about twice as big as the one on the tradeship. The main difference was the number of stations at each function. Two eldar sat at the sensor banks and four manned the weapons arrays. There were three empty cradles at the pilots’ position and Neridiath turned a questioning look to the farseer.
‘It is good practice for a ship of this complexity to be steered by three pilots,’ he told her, ‘but it is not essential. Think of it as a redundancy. Quickly, the enemy attack cannot be stalled for long, we must reach sufficient altitude to avoid their resurgent ire.’
‘We cannot fly blindly into the void,’ said Neridiath, taking a walk around the control chamber, using the moment to familiarise herself, seeking to calm herself after the dash to the control pod. She needed her own equilibrium if she was going to guide the starship to safety. She introduced herself to the two crew manning the scanning stations.
‘I am Lymandris,’ replied the first, and waved a hand to her partner, who bowed his head in brief acknowledgement. ‘This is Kazaril.’
‘How much function do the scanners have?’
‘We have redirected the bulk of the scanning arrays to forward, leaving us blind to aft,’ said Kazaril.
‘I’ve got no plans to look back, anyway,’ said Lymandris as she approached the piloting suite.
‘Very well, as long as we can see it, I’ll try not to crash into it,’ said Neridiath. It was her plan to run and run fast, whatever Asurmen had said about the need for battle. The lustre of excitement had worn off this escapade the moment the daemons had taken her friends and all she wanted now was to be far away from danger and the temptation of battle.
She ignored the gunners, telling herself they would not be needed, and stopped behind the nearest piloting cradle. She hesitated for a moment, looking down at Manyia. The child was exhausted from her travails and slept restlessly. Placing a kiss on her forehead, Neridiath handed her daughter to Hylandris. ‘She trusts you, for some reason I don’t know. Please, make her dreams less fraught.’
‘I will,’ said the farseer, surprised. He took Manyia and folded over the voluminous sleeve of his robe like a blanket.
Emptying her thoughts of everything else, Neridiath slipped into the cradle, letting it engulf her with its psycho-reactive mesh; at once she felt the familiar sensation of being cocooned. Instinctively she set her thoughts free, finding a foundation in the ship’s matrix.
The first thing the pilot felt was the residual taint of the humans. There were a few still alive aboard the ship, most of them wounded, the others being hunted down. Outside the storm raged, lashing the hull with tendrils of warp power. Each bolt was like the unwelcome touch of
a stranger, making Neridiath’s skin crawl.
Something even worse drifted into her thoughts. Flashes of fire, of the air screaming past, of mayhem and pain. The starship was crashing, the flare of its atmospheric entry coursing through its systems.
There was a moment of blankness and Neridiath recoiled, her thoughts crumbling under the numbness of the comatose pilots that had last interacted with the navigational systems. It was a heart-wrenching sensation, as if the universe had opened up and swallowed their minds whole. Steeling her thoughts against the horror of their after-image, Neridiath pushed aside the memory remnants, clearing the pilot suite of all distraction, leaving just the purity of the psychic matrix.
A tremble ran through her body and was copied by the ship as the gravity drive awakened at her insistence. Neridiath could feel the repairs made by Basir Runemaster, fresh wounds scabbed over, the matrix and the engines still raw in places. The Patient Lightning was hesitant, wary of these injuries, but Neridiath pushed on, exerting her will over the incorporeal spirits that powered and partly controlled the ship.
With a lurch the battleship lifted from the ground, a moment of disorientation while the inertia dampeners adjusted for operation within a gravity field. It was not only the systems that were careful, it had been a long time since Neridiath had manoeuvred from an actual planet – most of her voyages had begun and ended in the void of outer space.
The gravity drive was labouring slightly, stuttering and surging in the tempest, but she rode with it, easing out the jerks with small adjustments to trim and lift. The ship responded, the mesh between pilot and vessel deepening as both became more familiar with each other.
The storm suddenly abated, the crushing presence of the warp dissipating around the Patient Lightning. Neridiath felt a pulse of happiness running through the matrix, from both the living and the dead.
Gathering confidence and momentum, pilot and battleship lifted together, riding the buffeting of crosswinds that strengthened as the starship’s altitude increased. A brief foray into the sensor suite revealed the land dropping away with increasing rapidity, the humans soon reduced to specks and then a dark smudge pouring through the forest. A few heartbeats later and the forest was lost as the Patient Lightning reached the cloud layer, still accelerating.
The atmosphere thinned, the boundary between air and space a vague greyness. Neridiath fought the urge to hold her breath as the air pressure dropped and dropped until there was nothing left. She could sense the pull of the world’s gravity well decreasing too. The grav-engines were operating more smoothly, coasting the battleship away from the planet.
A sense of freedom swept through Neridiath, the spray of stars laid out before her, open void beckoning.
Her thoughts were interrupted by an urgent imposition from Kazaril at the sensor panel. Three jagged shapes were in motion, heading straight towards them, energy surging to their strange weapons.
The battleship’s instinct was to turn and fight. Neridiath fought the urge, instructing the Patient Lightning to direct more power to the engines. There was resistance, costing valuable time, but eventually the pilot enforced her will on the vessel, demanding all available power be directed to the engines.
Another skim through the sensor banks confirmed what she feared. The Chaos vessels were picking up speed far more swiftly than any normal human vessel. At full capacity the Patient Lightning would easily outrun them, but the battleship was far from operating at its maximum potential.
‘Madam pilot, we must reduce speed and manoeuvre for combat,’ one of the gunners interjected into her thoughts. ‘At current trajectories, we will be vulnerable to enemy fire before we have reached a safe distance. We will be unable to defend ourselves if we simply try to flee.
‘We must attack.’
The Patient Lightning sped away from Escatharinesh on a surge of gravitic energy leaving a silvery wake of energised particles glinting in the starlight. Neridiath commanded the battleship to unfurl its solar sails, trying to glean every last ounce of power she could. The fresh energy input increased their speed a little, but the reports from Kazaril were not encouraging. Two of the three enemy ships would most likely pass within range of the battleship.
‘We must slow to combat speed and divert power to the holofields as well as the weapons batteries,’ Kazaril insisted, the call echoed by others on the control deck.
‘How much more power do we need to get clear?’ Neridiath asked in reply. ‘How much more speed can we get?’
There was a pause while Kazaril consulted the matrix. He spoke without conviction.
‘Perhaps another five per cent? Assuming the gravity drive can cope with that much power.’
‘What if I reduce the environment systems? We can fly in the dark.’
‘Two per cent gain, at most,’ Kazaril told her. ‘And that would be reducing atmospheric processing to a minimum as well.’
‘What if we drop scanning and all weapons control?’
‘What if you just do as we say and reduce speed ready for battle?’ snapped one of the gunners. ‘We are wasting time. It does not matter how much more energy you squeeze out of the gravity engines, we are not going to get away. We must be prepared. We have no idea what sort of weapons those vessels possess. One hit may cripple us. We have to go on the offensive!’
‘Incoming signal for you,’ said Kazaril before Neridiath could reply. He pushed across a sliver of the sensory banks into Neridiath’s consciousness.
A speck of power was bursting out of the upper atmosphere of Escatharinesh, an arrowhead of white light and fire. Neridiath recognised it immediately, her shock blurted out in a mental impulse.
Stormlance!
XII
After getting Jain Zar to retrace her steps, it did not take long to find the small ship that had brought the cultists back from the webway. Asurmen recognised it as an old class of pleasure yacht, once used for corona-skimming in stars and satellite cruises. The blood-drinkers had added two crude weapon pods to the sides, sporting long-barrelled cannons.
‘Can you fly one of these?’ asked Jain Zar.
‘Simple enough,’ he replied. ‘It should have a mental command circuit.’
The door hissed open at their approach, descending to form a boarding ramp. The ship itself was not very big, intended for no more than twenty passengers. The interior was a mess, the floor stained with drag marks of blood, most of the cabins equally soiled. Asurmen found a chamber near the stern that was not too badly despoiled and deposited his bag on the bed with a clink of crystals.
‘What are those?’ asked Jain Zar, pointing at the coloured gems as they slipped onto the fraying sheet.
‘I call them affinity stones,’ said Asurmen. ‘They form a psychic bond with you. When you die, they capture your spirit. You should have one.’
He picked up a stone and tossed it to Jain Zar. It flickered into life as she caught it, glittering with white light.
‘Why would I want one?’ she replied, looking uncertainly at the gem, caressing it with a fingertip. ‘Why do I want my spirit trapped in one of these things for eternity?’
‘Because I think the alternative is much, much worse. Trust me.’
She accepted this with a nod and followed him back to the control deck. The bridge was relatively clean and clear of grisly decoration, and the panels lit up as they entered. Asurmen located the pilot’s couch and sat down, gesturing for Jain Zar to sit next to him.
‘I should be able to tell the ship where we want to go and it will do the rest,’ he said. This impulse of desire was enough to start the ship. It silently ascended, closing the hatchway as it lifted over the city.
From this viewpoint the scale of the catastrophe was stark. Daemonic spires sprawled where habitation towers had once stood, like hives of malign beasts with impossibly angled walkways and doors, whose presence contorted the dimensions of space
around them. Fires of bright purple and green burned from pyres of eldar corpses, the spirit flames shaped into weeping, wailing faces. Clawed monstrosities capered and danced around the fires, laughing and singing.
As they continued to rise, the details faded, leaving only a scene of total destruction. Towers had toppled, bridges and aerial rails fallen, canals and rivers turned to black sludge that had burst the banks. Asurmen saw the arena park, now a wild forest of fanged and thorny vegetation that thrashed with manic sentience.
The arena itself was choked with people, the dead left in place by the whim of their newly birthed god, in the seats where they had bayed and cried for blood with such determination that they ignored the fall of the world around them. Asurmen imagined the gamblers outside had continued to make their wagers until the very moment that their essence was stolen.
Higher still and all that remained was a glistening whiteness. The glow of affinity stones covered the city, each one marking a dead eldar. In the city centre the streets were ablaze, and in dense patches further out where the desperate eldar had come together in their panic and grief. Elsewhere the stones were sparser, until their glow was lost with distance.
‘They look like tears,’ said Jain Zar, turning her affinity stone over in her hands. ‘The tears of a goddess, perhaps, weeping for all the dead.’
‘A last gift to us from Isha, maybe?’ suggested Asurmen.
‘From who? Isha?’
‘Isha was a goddess. The first, mother of all the eldar…’ Asurmen began.
26
Asurmen raced after the battleship, his own ship’s golden sails gleaming. Stormlance extended its matrix, locking with the psychic circuitry of the Patient Lightning. Amongst the hundreds of spirits on board, the ship located Neridiath and made contact with the pilot.
Isn’t this spectacular? There was a vicious rasp to the warship’s thoughts, its enthusiasm for the coming battle lapping at Neridiath’s mind like waves slowly eroding a cliff.