In some ways Ysclyth had got off lightly. Neither Ysclyth, Nyos nor the tyrant himself were members of the crude and lumpen race called men. They were eldar, members of a race of beings incomparably superior to those insane barbarians currently most prevalent in the Great Wheel. As such the tyrant’s punishments were imaginative, protracted and ultimately fatal. The tortures the tyrant reserved for traitors had been honed to arts of screaming perfection down the thousands of years he had reigned. As eldar perfection was their birthright in all things, so Nyos could expect nothing less at the hands of the great tyrant, Asdrubael Vect. The shrieking agony that Ysclyth had endured at the end of his life had been mercifully brief by comparison.
As Nyos himself would be quick to inform those ignorant of such manifest facts, eldar are beautiful, lithe and quick, keen-eyed, sharply-sensed, long-lived and highly intelligent beings. In every conceivable realm the eldar stand as proud adults above the idiot children of the younger races, whether it be the arts, culture, aesthetics, wisdom, intellect, technology, subtlety, majesty, morality or, naturally, cruelty. The games that the trueborn eldar played with one another were deadly, the stakes total. A single missed step meant the long fall into oblivion had begun.
He moved deeper into the manse, wary of traps as his routes of advance narrowed inexorably the closer he got to his objective. He sought steps that would take him downwards, moving from one wrecked chamber to another, searching carefully. As he found none his anxiety grew. Nyos had a great many enemies that would relish the opportunity to catch him alone like this. He was confident in his abilities, a trained warrior from birth and a master of the blade, but he was cunning enough to understand his own mortality and that his own skills must be measured against a city filled with peerless killers. Secrecy had been paramount and so he had come alone, but the longer his fruitless search went on the more the fear grew in him… a false lead… enemies closing in. He’d dispatched some of his own enemies in the same way.
He spotted steps leading downwards in the kitchens and his paranoid fantasies evaporated like mist. He still went warily, but the debris partially blocking the stairway seemed undisturbed and masked assassins in singularly short supply. He found an archway opening into a low cellar, where a gleam of silver at the far end made his heart race.
He stopped himself from rushing forwards to investigate. This was the danger point: in sight of the objective, when the quarry was distracted and focusing on the wrong thing. He looked around the cellar, trying to pierce the gloom. Crumbling columns supported the sagging roof and broken, unidentifiable detritus lay scattered all over the floor. He stepped out, ready to spring back into cover in an instant. Nothing moved. He worked his way carefully around the angles of the pillars, ensuring he was completely alone before reaching what he’d come to find, a simple silver loop that hung from the cellar’s far wall.
A point that Nyos would be more loath to concede about the eldar was that despite all their glittering prowess there was one realm in which they fell short of their promise of greatness: that of power. Once upon a time the whole Great Wheel of the galaxy had been the plaything of the eldar and a portal like this could have led anywhere, connecting to others like it on a million different worlds. Those times were long past. Now the scattered survivors of the eldar race were in bitter, squabbling factions clinging to their sanctuaries while the universe passed them by. The once-great splendour of the eldar was forced to skulk miserably in the shadows and scheme for a return to past glories.
Nyos spoke the words to activate the portal. This portal only led to one place now, an accursed place forbidden to the citizens of Commorragh on pain of death. That was the tyrant’s law.
A fact Nyos also less habitually shared with others was that he had grown determined to lead his soon-to-be grateful and obedient kin into another golden age. That golden age could only begin with the removal of the great tyrant, and on that Yllithian had sworn his near-immortal life.
Although unassuming in his current appearance, Nyos Yllithian was possessed of considerable resources to bring about a resurgence of his kind. He was of a proud, pure bloodline that could be traced unbroken to before the Fall of the eldar race. He held the title of Archon of the White Flames, making him the feared and beloved head of one of the oldest and most noble kabals in all of the eternal city of Commorragh, the last bastion of true eldar culture in a benighted universe. The White Flames for their part controlled an entire tier of the mighty port-city with their own docks and shipyards, armouries and training grounds.
Despite all this, Nyos Yllithian’s personal power, like the power of every other archon across the sprawling city, was but a grain of sand beside the mountain that was the great tyrant, Asdrubael Vect.
For generations Vect had kept his place by ensuring the intrigues of the archons were directed against each other, picking off rivals before they grew powerful enough to challenge him. From the outset the tyrant’s reign had been founded on bloodshed and betrayal of the basest kind. It was easy to see that as long as Commorragh remained in Vect’s grasp the eldar race would continue to slide ever deeper into obscurity as they expended their energies in internecine bickering.
Yllithian had spent many, many years quietly intriguing to align the forces he required. There had been the most delicate business of seeking allies, of which there were potentially many but only a few that could be trusted in their turn. Then had come endless sifting through the web of lies surrounding Asdrubael Vect to seek some clue as to how he could be defeated. Now Nyos’s determination to unseat the tyrant had led him to a forgotten slum in Talon Cyriix in the decaying underbelly of Commorragh. Here, it was whispered, a way to topple Vect might be found.
Nyos gazed at the mirror-like surface of the active portal before him as if it might betray what lay beyond. There had been rumours that Ysclyth had delved deep to find the forbidden sorceries that became his undoing. Even now there was a chance that Nyos had been tricked into walking blithely to his own doom. As Ysclyth and others had illustrated, Vect was particularly fond of dispatching opponents by using their own hubris against them. But Nyos Yllithian had been very careful, only using the most obtuse and roundabout sources to find the information he was now trusting his life to. In all the subtle checking and crosschecking there had been no inconsistencies or telltale signs of a trap.
This portal led to accursed Shaa-dom, that was certain, and he bore a psychically-charged opal the size of his fist that should serve to take him to the individual he needed to find there. Entry to Shaa-dom broke the tyrant’s laws; indeed even the mention of that place was a crime. Yet this formed the next step in the conspiracy he had planned so long for. Once he passed through the portal there would be no turning back.
All that remained was to see if he had the strength to survive the horrors that lay within the accursed halls of Shaa-dom. Yllithian had dressed for the occasion in a suit of angular black armour that was possessed of its own fierce little war spirit. It was clever enough to extrude monomolecular blades on command or playfully nip off a crippled limb to save its wearer’s life. He kept it unadorned for now, and vanity forbade wearing a helmet. He armed himself with a long, thin blade keen enough to cut stone, summoned up his courage and stepped through the portal.
Nyos’s first impression was of a breathless moment of cold and then a sultry heat. He was standing at the edge of a thoroughfare after emerging from an arch. The elegant flagstones were blackened and cracked, the decorative trees and statues lining it were twisted, skeletal remnants that seemed to claw at the roiling skies in agony. Away beyond the blasted facades Nyos could sense the epicentre of the destruction of Shaa-dom. There, he knew, there was a rift where unnatural fires still burned in the aftermath of the cataclysm that had occurred here. Warp-taint hung heavy in the air and reality itself had a sickly, greasy feel to it. The subtle thrill of She Who Thirsts sucking away at his life, always present but carefully controlled within Commorragh, gusted through him and he realised with a chill
that just to remain here for too long could be deadly. He had thought Talon Cyriix terrible but it was a child’s playground, a slave’s copy, when compared to Shaa-dom.
This was the horror the great tyrant had unleashed when he was challenged in the past. All his immeasurable power was used not to glorify the eldar but instead to destroy them, dragging them ever further down the path to oblivion. Generations ago the prosperous satellite realm of Shaa-dom had grown too proud for Asdrubael Vect to overawe and too powerful for him to humble. When El’Uriaq, the archon of all Shaa-dom, gathered his forces and declared himself emperor, Vect had publicly vowed that all of Shaa-dom would feel the edge of his blade and this was the result. Genocide unleashed on an already dying race.
Nyos regarded the smooth gem he was holding carefully. Bright motes wavered and darted within it as if battered by spectral winds. With agonising slowness they coalesced into a single brighter spark that floated at one edge of the gem in a determined fashion. Nyos set out in the direction indicated, finding himself drawn along the thoroughfare and crunching through occasional drifts of fragile bone, pitiful remnants of the widows and orphans that had suffered in the aftermath of Vect’s retribution.
The legends told that El’Uriaq had laughed at Vect’s posturing when he heard of it. His forces were well-armed and outnumbered Vect’s. Few of the other kabals would commit themselves to fight on behalf of the tyrant while many had sent secret emissaries to El’Uriaq. The emperor of Shaa-dom had returned to the completion of his plans to conquer Commorragh confident in the knowledge that any attack made by Vect would only play into his hands. A few days later the blade of Vect arrived in the form of a burning, crashing starship lurching suddenly into reality above Shaa-dom.
The glowing spark was leading him at a tangent to the impact site near the centre of Shaa-dom. He quickly came to what had been a covered avenue with a ribwork of high arches that once held panes of coloured crystal. Glittering shards scattered over the pavement added an incongruous splash of vibrancy to the hollow-eyed dwellings on either hand. Nyos advanced warily along the avenue, his superb senses taking in every facet of his environment. He reassured himself that here at the periphery of Shaa-dom the risks of encountering a denizen from beyond the veil should be slight, although an unwelcome part of his mind whispered that they would be certain to voraciously seek him out if they should sense his presence.
The vessel that struck Shaa-dom was one of those built by the upstart younger races – huge and crudely made, armoured in thick slabs of ignorance and wishful thinking. It tore through the supposedly unbreakable wardings between El’Uriaq’s realm and the Sea of Souls like a bull charging through cobwebs. El’Uriaq and the core of his warrior elite were immolated instantly when the ship crashed into his palace, but what came after proved to be the worse fate. The open breach left behind in the warding attracted a swarm of horrors from beyond. Shaa-dom was ravaged even more thoroughly than the unfortunate Talon Cyriix, the gusting energies of the breach sustaining a plague of daemons that harried the pitiful survivors without respite. The tyrant ordered the whole realm of Shaa-dom sealed off to protect the rest of the city. The wretches left inside who had somehow survived the catastrophe and the daemons that came afterwards were damned to a lingering demise as their trapped souls were relentlessly drained away by She Who Thirsts.
So had ended Shaa-dom.
The scuff of a footfall whipped Nyos’s attention to one side of the avenue. He caught a pale flicker of movement at a window and flourished his blade aggressively at the hidden watcher. This could be no daemon hiding and skulking with a tasty soul so close at hand. It could only be some twisted remnant of an eldar devoured by She Who Thirsts, a soulless and mindless wretch, ever hungry and driven only by instinct. One alone could pose no threat and it wisely stayed hidden from sight. Nyos pointedly turned away and moved on down the avenue, listening carefully for stealthy sounds of pursuit.
At the end of the avenue steps led upwards to a tall building that must once have impressively overlooked the covered avenue below. Now it appeared crumpled and sagged in upon itself as if its internal structure had been warped. The spark in the gem Nyos was holding strained strongly in that direction. As he set out again he could feel the fatigue in his limbs as She Who Thirsts sapped his life away. He set himself to hurry despite his fears, even though at every step it felt like an insidious marsh lay beneath his feet waiting to suck him under.
Nyos’s mighty ancient kin had long ago mastered the other realm – the Sea of Souls, the realm of Chaos, the immaterium, the warp or whatever else anyone cared to call it. The great city of Commorragh and its satellite realms were testimonies to a time when the eldar created their own enclaves in the warp and connected them with a fantastic skein of interdimensional pathways encompassing the whole galaxy. The predatory denizens of that other realm were kept safely sealed away, bound and constrained by eldar power and wisdom.
The Fall had brought an end to all that and thereafter the theme of daemons feasting upon souls had become a distressingly recurrent one in eldar histories. She Who Thirsts was the greatest daemon-goddess of them all, and She was ever-hungry for the souls of the race that some believed had created Her.
Whatever doors had closed off the building at the top of the steps had been torn away, and inside an atrium lay half-choked with rubble. Entering it Nyos stiffened as he heard a faint voice sound above him, an echoing whisper.
‘He comes!’
Nyos stepped into the shadows by the shattered doorway with a speed that belied the fluid elegance of the motion. He waited tensely for the first crash of weapons-fire or a rush of enemies. The seconds dragged out longer but nothing came. He caught the same voice again, scratchy whispers that groped their way into the atrium, definitely coming from above.
‘Only the first, the visionary.’
The bright spark in the gem he held strained towards the sound of the voice. Nyos made an instant decision and regally stalked out into full view in the atrium before looking upwards. A handful of tiered balconies rose toward another shattered crystal roof, brutally opened now to show the roiling clouds above. Withered vegetation overhung the balconies and trailed artistically down pillars; on the lowest balcony, a darker shape lurked among the shadows.
Seeing no other way upwards Nyos sheathed his sword and secured the gem before climbing nimbly up the cracked stonework. He studiously avoided the treacherous streamers of dead vegetation and their spurious promise of a secure handhold. Swinging himself suddenly over the cracked balustrade he confronted the whisperer.
At first glance it looked like a pile of black rags, but a lustrous river of long, black hair spilled from beneath a cowl where the head would be. Skeletal spider-like hands emerged from the rags to wander between a scattering of small bone-white objects on the floor. It lifted one and showed it to him with a titter: a tiny rendition of the rune of vision.
Nyos’s guts churned with instinctive disgust. The manifold gifts of the eldar extended to very considerable psychic prowess and their ancient civilisation had been built as much with thoughts as with hands. But after the Fall the use of psychic powers became a sure way to attract daemons, effectively signing the sorcerer’s death warrant along with any other unfortunates in the vicinity.
It was a hard vice to resist, akin to losing a limb, but the eldar kindred of Commorragh and its satellites soon learned to shun their psychic gifts, and to destroy those that pursued them despite the consequences. Now every scrap of their mental training focused on internalising their powers and hiding their presence from She Who Thirsts. The few that still pursued such knowledge, like Archon Ysclyth, usually came to a sticky end however clever they thought they were. Some still dabbled in the meaner warp-arts, using cards and grimoires and other fetishes to protect themselves. Rune-casting to see the future was another crime replete with its own set of horrid punishments for anyone involved in it.
+He’s afraid now that he’s found what he’s looking for,+ the warp-d
abbler said and tittered again.
‘Be careful, Angevere, your soul is still precious to you or you would have been devoured long ago,’ Nyos replied coolly. ‘If you wish to retain it you’ll obey me or I’ll send you to your richly deserved appointment with She Who Thirsts without further delay.’ He was gratified that the witch drew back a little at that. She still knew fear.
‘That is your name, isn’t it? Angevere, who was once handmaid to Dyreddya, concubine of El’Uriaq?’ Nyos spoke with mocking politeness, mercilessly pressing his advantage. ‘You’re looking surprisingly sprightly, all things considered.’
+I apologise, my lord, I meant no disrespect,+ the wretched thing whispered in his mind.
‘Better. Now prove yourself by telling me the reason I chose to visit this charming locale.’
The spider-like hands crawled obediently among the scattered runes, gathering them up before casting them again. The bone-white sigils clicked and clattered unnaturally together as they fell, twitching slightly as they struck the ground as if imbued with a life of their own. Once the runes had stilled the wretched crone reached out and touched the closest to her.
+Salvation inverted, for one who passes from light into darkness,+ she whispered before touching another and then another. +In the skein of desire: freedom, meaning transcendence and victory. In the place of the enemy stands the rune of mastery. You seek to overthrow your master.+
Nyos bridled at the description of the great tyrant as his master, but could not deny it.
‘Simple guesswork any street entertainer could mimic. If you wish to continue your miserable existence you must do better, crone,’ he said, and drew his fine, keen sword. The crone appeared to ignore him as she continued fondling the scattered runes.
+Here in the line of kinship are pleasure inverted to denote suffering or pain, and generosity inverted to indicate the miser. Both are touching the rune of brotherhood. You have two allies that share your goals sufficiently to trust, at least until the objective is achieved.+
Path of the Renegade Page 2