Syiin had witnessed only a black-purple flash that disappeared in the blink of an eye – the gate opening for a fraction of a second – before the tetrahedron dropped to the ground inert and lifeless. In that brief instant every slave within a dozen paces of the spot was smashed into bloody pulp, crushed into walls and floor that were rent and scored as if they had been raked by monstrous claws. The slaves’ will to resist was broken immediately and the survivors took their place in the proper order of things by running and screaming until they were rounded up.
Rhakkar, in a rare moment of lucidity and expansiveness, had explained the dark gate’s operation to Syiin afterwards. Impossible entities thrived in the forbidden places, he had said, things that would use an open gate to reach out and lash at anything within grasp of their pseudopods. By setting the gate to open just a chink for a fraction of a second an unwelcome lengthier incursion was avoided and the gate became an effective weapon. Rhakkar had been jealous of his dark gate and never trusted it to his minions, in fact Syiin had never seen him use it again.
Syiin licked his lips and smiled a thin smile. There was poetic justice in destroying Bellathonis with a small taste of the kind of destruction he risked unleashing on the city. A simple device to trigger, with a wide area of effect and enough lethality to ensure the job was done. Perfect.
He reached out to take the little tetrahedron with trembling hands. It felt heavier than it should and was chill to the touch as he lifted it. He left the chamber and the door silently unfurled itself to seal away its contents for another hundred years. Syiin set himself to recalling the steps necessary to get back to the Chamber of Craft and from there out of the labyrinth of The Black Descent.
Only later, once he was safely ensconced in his own lair, would he give thought to how exactly to present Bellathonis with a very special gift.
The combined war fleet made a brave sight as it pulled away from Ashkeri Talon. Corsairs trailed after the sedately moving cruisers in darting shoals. Their shadowfields flickered through fantastical falsehoods as they flew, turning them into mythical beasts, clouds of fire and lightning, fey castles or alien vessels at their master’s whims.
The true enormity of Commorragh could only be appreciated from the void surrounding it. Only in the relatively narrow envelope between the city itself and the wardings that separated it from the roiling energies of the warp was it possible to look back and see the face of the dark city.
Perspective shrank the kilometres-long anchorages to thin fingers and then fine bristles and still the city expanded around them. The ships of the fleet flew out between the docking talons to where streams of ships moved constantly inbound and outbound, feeding the hungry city. An endless vista of lights gleamed in the darkness behind them, the city glowing like a faery fortress in the darkness. Toward its heart the spires, minarets and steeples of High Commorragh seemed to thrust upwards in mad profusion as they strained towards the crown of captured suns. The barbed spires seemed slender and fanciful from this distance, their mountainous girth rendered needle-like in the greater panorama.
Below the profusion of towers that marked High Commorragh lay the wide-flung disk of docking talons, their craggy knuckles thrusting out into the void. The tiers and districts of Low Commorragh grew in the gaps between them like plates of fungus sprouting between the gnarled roots of a tree. Below the level of the docking talons the troglodytic cousins of the upper spires hung like stalactites into the eternal cave of night. Slave mills, haemonculi pits, flesh farms and inverted tenements dangled in a dark fog of their own excrescences, lit only by the greenly glowing corpse-light of flaring gases. This was the port-city of Commorragh seen from the outside, an effect not unlike seeing an impossibly vast, spiny sea-creature feeding in the depths.
A circle of green flame appeared before the leading vessels of the fleet like an eye opening onto an infernal realm. One by one the ships of the war fleet slipped through the waiting portal and into the labyrinth dimension. In moments the entire fleet had been swallowed up and the circle vanished, leaving the eternal night around the city unchallenged once more.
Inside the webway the kabalite ships slipped rapidly along a curving tunnel of iridescent energy, its walls rippling with solid colours. Flashes of starlit sky appeared and disappeared through the shifting veil. The webway was an extradimensional marvel engineered by entities that pre-dated even the eldar. Its lattice was formed out of the very stuff of the warp and it burrowed between the material and immaterial worlds, part of both and yet separated from either. The eldar had discovered the webway early in their history, their quick minds soon learning its labyrinthine paths and mastering its ways. At its height eldar civilisation had built great port-cities, palaces and secret realms at interstices of the network, and in so doing it had unwittingly created the final strongholds it would occupy after the Fall.
At certain points the tunnel branched, splitting through immense hanging gateways of wraithbone and golden metal inscribed with eldritch runes of channelling and protection. They passed many smaller passageways leading off the major route, entrances only large enough for foot troops and light vehicles to reach some planet-based web portal. Much of the labyrinth dimension was only accessible thus; the greater ship-bearing arteries were rarer and infinitely more precious.
The webway of modern times had altered drastically since those golden days of empire. It had been torn open by war and disaster in a thousand places. Whole regions had been rendered inaccessible by the splintering of the pathways, while in other areas the wardings had collapsed, admitting strange beings from different realities. Travelling the labyrinth dimension was inherently dangerous in modern times. It took skill, intellect and experience learned through countless millennia to chart a safe course through the multi-dimensional maze of arteries and capillaries formed by the interdimensional network.
The raiding kabalite ships flew with an air of arrogant confidence through the labyrinth dimension. The eldar of Commorragh had become the masters of the webway, it was their hunting ground and their limitless domain. They slew any that they found within its fabric, although its infinite dimensions meant that it was rare to encounter such impudence. The eldar of the craftworlds still dared to use the labyrinth dimension on occasion, but they hurried quickly from one sanctuary to another only at times of need. The young races lacked the wit and sophistication to enter the webway; indeed many of its portals in the realspace carried deadly safeguards against their interference.
The greatest threat in the labyrinth dimension was from warp entities, daemons from beyond the veil that swarmed and hammered incessantly at the psychic wardings that held its arteries frustratingly just out of reach. In several places vast spirals of psychically active wraithbone surrounded the ethereal tunnels, repairing and reinforcing it against the insubstantial claws forever scrabbling at the outer walls.
Passage to the maiden world of Lileathanir could not be completed entirely within the webway. The ships would halt to disgorge their cargo of weapons and warriors into the lesser passages before moving onward to seek a transient portal into realspace believed to lie near enough to the planet to be used at this juncture. The arcane calculations required to determine that piece of information had been one of the more challenging aspects of planning so far. The difficulty of reaching Lileathanir was one of the reasons Yllithian had subtly prodded Malixian to select it as a target. His spy had found just one webway portal on the surface and had reported that to be long disused and virtually unguarded. No true eldar had set foot on this particular maiden world in centuries, so there was a very good chance that the short-lived Exodites had forgotten what kind of peril that portal represented.
The fleet reached the junction without incident, slowing to permit streams of grav craft to leave their bays and disappear into the narrower opening. Morr contacted the Intemperate Angel as it unloaded, his blank-masked helm suddenly filling every one of the curved viewing screens around the bridge.
‘Archon Yllithian
, with Archon Malixian’s consent I have decided to accompany the expedition to Lileathanir’s surface.’
Yllithian stifled a sigh and attempted to appeal to reason.
‘Are you sure your presence will be essential, Morr? It would seem that coordinating strategy from the ships should demand your full attention.’
‘My place is wherever I can serve my archon’s best interests. Under these circumstances that will be at the forefront of actions occurring on the surface.’
At least Morr was making an effort to not just blurt out his real reasons. Ultimately Yllithian could not prevent him going; even being informed of his decision was a simple matter of courtesy.
‘Well good hunting then, Morr, I’m sure your renowned good sense and discretion will serve you admirably.’
If Morr understood the sarcasm and the veiled warning behind Yllithian’s words he did not deign to respond to it.
‘Thank you, Archon Yllithian. Morr out.’
Yllithian turned back to consideration of his own hand-picked group. Originally he had intended to send six of his most skilled operatives to meet his agent at a pre-arranged spot on the surface of Lileathanir. With four others now joining the mission and his own agent unaccounted for Yllithian had reduced his own contribution accordingly. Two of his kabal members would accompany the others to seek out the missing agent, no more than that. The mission would succeed with six operatives or not at all.
The stiletto shapes of Raiders and Ravagers could still be seen streaming from the open bays of the ships and into the nearby sub-conduit. Their progress would be slow in comparison to the ships but the fleet had considerably further to go before it reached its own exit point from the webway.
According to Yllithian’s calculations the ships would be on hand at just the right moment, no more than a few hours after the raid began on the planet’s surface. It was slightly risky but Malixian had been unwilling to wait for the fleet to be in position before launching his attack on the surface. So the ships would arrive later, ready to fill their holds with whatever meagre selection of slaves Malixian might net from the raid while he wasn’t being distracted by oversized avians.
It mattered little as long as Malixian created a big enough diversion. From what the mad archon had excitedly told Yllithian about his plans there would be no issues on that front at all.
Despite the claims of Yllithian’s spy, the Exodite clans of Lileathanir had not entirely forgotten the tales of their Dark Kin. Their ancestors had sensibly buried the only functional webway portal on the planet beneath a titanic mound of earth and stones to prevent its easy use. A select brotherhood of wardens kept a strict vigil at the site year after year, century after century, in case the dark ones ever returned. Latterly the wardens’ role had devolved increasingly into forbidding curious younglings from investigating the great annulus and telling horrifying stories about fiends that came in the night.
Few truly took the warnings seriously any more and the wardens themselves had become something of a joke. Within the anarchistic, agrarian culture they lived in there was always more work to be done and always too few hands to do it. A caste of custodians that performed no visible function were viewed as an indulgence by some of their fellows. In what passed for Exodite society any form of indulgence was viewed with scepticism and more than a little disgust.
Nevertheless the wardens took note when the great earthwork mound covering the gate shivered during the night as if struck by a curiously localised tremor. Runners were dispatched immediately to the nearest settlements to give warnings – that were generally ignored – and the next day tripwires were strung and crumbling stone-faced pits uncovered for the first time in centuries. The wardens’ Exodite kin clicked their tongues and sighed to see such wasted effort. Lileathanir was still a young world and earth tremors were common, they said. The wardens’ actions reeked of a kind of desperation to prove their worth.
The wardens were denied whatever vindication they might have felt when the Commorrites really did come a few nights later. Molecular de-bonders planted in advance of the raid instantaneously vaporised the great shielding mound and a kilometre of surrounding jungle. The ancient order of wardens that had faithfully guarded the portal for centuries vanished in the blink of an eye. A vast torus of glowing plasma was still rising into the air above the spot as the first Raider craft emerged from the newly reopened portal and sped away into the night. More and more of the waspish vessels appeared through the glowing portal, forming a continuous wyrm-like stream of bladed darkness as they glided aloft into the night sky.
The wyrm swept westwards spreading ripples of terrified alarm through the natives of Lileathanir. Flames split the darkness as the first wave of attackers ripped into the closest settlements and brushed aside what scattered opposition the stunned Exodites could muster. Clusters of slender towers toppled and fell beneath the destructive double kiss of shatterfield missiles, the Voidraven bombers that launched them invisible as they swooped away into the night sky. Beastmasters descended from the Raiders and unleashed nightmarish khymerae packs upon the stunned survivors, the twisted warp beasts bounding across the forest floor howling with bloodlust.
The Exodites fought back bravely but their cause was hopeless from the outset. Wherever knots of warriors tried to make a stand deadly accurate splinter fire slashed through their ranks from above. The proud feral warriors were quickly reduced to heaps of twitching, helpless victims by the sharp bite of paralytic toxins. Wyches darted into the tumbled ruins shrieking like children as they raced with the khymerae to root out the pitiful survivors still in hiding. Within minutes all resistance had ceased.
The Commorrites started to spread out as they hunted the handful of Exodites that had fled into the jungle at the first sign of attack. Flights of Reavers and hellions sped on ahead to seek more prey while Raider craft slid beneath the forest canopy with capture nets at the ready. Red flames leapt up in the distance where another settlement had been found. A lone Raider, unremarkable save for its passengers, split away from the main body and took a heading northwards, quickly leaving the chaos behind.
Archon Malixian rode at the head of the kabalite horde aboard his glittering skeletal Raider. Throughout the night his forces harried the Exodites without mercy, smashing one settlement after another with their lightning-fast advance. Resistance was light and wherever it flared up it was quickly snuffed out by the Commorrites’ superior firepower. Nonetheless Malixian listened to the reports and slave tallies coming in and grew increasingly disconsolate as the night wore on with no indication of what he was waiting for. It was only as the first fingers of dawn began to thrust over the rim of the world that he caught sight of something that made his heart sing.
Mighty wings beat in the distance, catching flickers of sunlight on sail-wide pinions. He smiled happily at the thought of the mud dwellers rising to the occasion after all. A moment later keening whistles sounded and the Ninth Raptrex surged forwards to accept the challenge and begin their aerial hunt, all thoughts of the mundane, earthbound business of slave-taking temporarily forgotten.
Life. The very air of the maiden world was thick with it. Life sprang from the earth and flew through air. Life swam in tinkling streams and deep pools. Faint starlight picked out enormous trees rising from the forest floor, their wide trunks and high canopy rendering it into a vast, cathedral-like space crowded with living, growing things in every direction. Brightly flowered, fleshy-looking creepers entwined trees and writhed across the ground to form dense, springy mats underfoot. Crawling things writhed through the rich loam at their feet, munched the leaves on the trees and were in their turn consumed by small winged creatures that whirred through the canopy overhead and darted expertly between the densely twined limbs. Bright-eyed, long-tailed marsupials took fright and fled crashing through the undergrowth at the approach of interlopers. Life was everywhere.
‘It’s disgusting,’ said one of Bellathonis’s agents, the sell-steel named Kharbyr.
&nb
sp; ‘Yes, yes. Agreed. Extremely unhygienic,’ sniffed Bellathonis’s other agent, the wrack called Xagor.
‘Silence,’ said Morr. ‘Communicating your unworthy thoughts is of no value.’
Morr was not in charge of the operation, in theory none of them were, but Morr’s natural gravitas made him hard to ignore. Xagor cringed but Aez’ashya seemed to care little for the towering incubus’s warning.
‘Can’t you feel it? This place is so different, the city never felt like this.’
‘Life in our home is ordered, nurtured and properly utilised. This is nothing but anarchy,’ replied one of Yllithian’s people, a shaven-headed, hawk-featured warrior called Vyril. He wore a chameleonic body suit that made it appear as if he were made of glass.
Yllithian’s other agent, a noble-looking female called Xyriadh, was off ahead somewhere scouting out their route. To the disgust of Aez’ashya and Kharbyr the pair had insisted the group abandon their Raider shortly after they separated from the main body of the kabalite force.
Morr had quelled any argument by pointing out that despite their avowed primitivism Exodites were quite capable of detecting a lone Raider’s energy signature at a considerable distance. Their favoured guerrilla tactics meant that a vehicle travelling alone was almost certain to be ambushed. Since then the group had tramped on foot for hours through a seemingly endless jungle devoid of any trace of landmarks or civilisation. The soul-sapping effects of being in realspace could be felt by all of them and tempers were growing short.
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