Wild Rider - Gav Thorpe

by Warhammer 40K

  Her words came more easily this time. Aradryan realised that it was his reception that was clearer, not her broadcast. Without effort his brain was already starting to filter out some of the unnecessary inputs.

  He dragged in a ragged breath and realised that in his confusion he had genuinely stopped breathing.

  ‘I don’t…’ he began, but he was not sure what he wanted to say.

  You can. Look at your hands.+

  He did so without question, focused on his painted fingernails dark against the near-whiteness of the console panel. He could see reflections of projector gems on the glossy surface.

  And stars.

  Looking up, the cradle adjusting beneath him, he saw the stars of the heavens splashed across the dome of the canopy. And ahead, the immense curve of Agarimethea.

  Physicality helped push aside the irrelevancies. He could still feel the impulses from the dawnsail but they were no longer as loud in his thoughts as his own. As with the tremble of nerve endings detecting the pressure of the piloting web around him, so that mass of information from the drop-craft was sifted and sorted for relevancy, and most of it discarded.

  He detected their forward motion, becoming more pronounced as they fell deeper into the planet’s gravity well.

  Aradryan took a moment to move his conscious thought back into the systems, to delight in the nourishing feeling generated by the stream of stellar energy drifting into the collector feathers along the wings.

  ‘Better now?’ It was strange to hear Tzibilakhu’s voice rather than to feel her thoughts. ‘Now you see why you could not fly alone.’

  ‘It is not all that different,’ he replied, recalling the thought processes of a pilot from deep memory. At his willing the projectors sprang into life, forming unfolding schematics of the airflow in the atmosphere ahead, positional representations of the other craft and telemetric links to the energy systems of the drop-craft.

  Tzibilakhu’s derision gnawed at him across the Whisper.

  ‘Really? And when we enter the upper air and a fresh bombardment of sensations rips through you, you’ll be prepared, yes?’

  Aradryan swallowed hard and nodded, but he could not mask his uncertainty leaking into the Whisper. His companion’s cruel laugh echoed within the Whisper but was suddenly cut short by a pained gasp.

  He felt it too, a sharp cessation of the extra sense that linked him to the other Ynnari. The canopy was pale yellow with light reflected from the highest wisps of Agaramithea’s atmosphere, but that was all he could sense. With the loss of the Whisper he had no reference for the dawnsail itself, other than the vague impressions of his other senses that they had started to spin as they fell, the brightening and darkening of sunlight through the canopy.

  His heart raced and his thoughts with it, but other than the biological response he felt no edge of panic. Aradryan’s reasoning mind sped through the possibilities and analysed thousands of variables, but the one constant was a lack of fear. The possibility of death was no longer an overwhelming terror. His ending would not be the horrific oblivion with which he had become so obsessed.

  With detached gratitude he considered how remarkable his transformation by the simple removal of that fear.

  The Whisper was gone but the echoes of Ynnead’s voice remained, reflected from the souls of the others aboard the dawnsail. He imagined rather than felt the spirits of others. Stretched across the galaxy like constellations, gathered in their craftworlds, aboard starships and through the webway.

  Ynnead guarded him now, and would be his succour after death. He had experienced the endlessness of his soul’s purpose, crafted for immortality in the far-distant past. His current life – his current physical incarnation – was a brief interlude in a far-longer existence. What would it matter if he died?

  ‘Aradryan!’ He turned lazily at his name, rotating the piloting cradle towards Tzibilakhu. She glared at him from above, teeth bared. ‘Do not abandon this life. I know the abyss to which you head, but Ynnead needs you to fight, not to lay down and surrender. And what of Yvraine? We are custodians of her fortune now. If her body perishes, what chance for Ynnead to rise again?’

  His contemplation was interrupted by a shrill whining from the dawnsail as a thickening atmosphere started to buffet the craft. As gravity increased Aradryan could feel them twisting and turning uncontrollably, plunging through the increasing density of air. Heat was building up along the wingtips and nose, more than the mat­erials and coolant systems would be able to cope with. The craft’s warning signals throbbing through his nerves felt like increasing pain.

  ‘Tzibilakhu.’

  Aradryan announced the word with growing recognition, surfacing from his morbid thoughts. His companion floundered at her own controls but her gaze snapped down to him as he shouted her name. Sudden recollection of their predicament shunted aside all philosophy and higher thought, a rush of physical stimulation that dragged Aradryan’s mind to the here and now.

  ‘Use your spirit to power the systems,’ he told her, extending his soul into the control panel. ‘Between us we can still give the dawnsail life.’

  ‘I can’t,’ groaned Tzibilakhu. ‘Without the Whisper the soulthirst returns. I am emptying!’

  ‘Reach out your thoughts to me, as though you heard the Whisper,’ said Aradryan, even as he wrestled with the angles of the attitude planes, desperate to bring some semblance of control to the falling craft. Wisps of clouds streamed past. ‘Use me as your anchor. Feel the others!’

  Aradryan returned his focus to the interface panel, extending the wings fully for atmospheric descent in an attempt to increase their lift. Attitude vanes extruded from the tail and wings, stabilising their flight a little.

  ‘I can feel it…’ It seemed that Tzibilakhu whispered directly in his ear but it was in fact the internal messenger-waves of the dawnsail carrying her voice to him. ‘I feel you. And others. But where is Yvraine?’

  He had noticed that also in a distant fashion, accepting the absence of the Opener of the Seventh Way as normal. She was the conduit, after all, through which the Whisper resounded into the physical universe.

  ‘It does not matter for now,’ he told Tzibilakhu, sensing her unease returning. ‘I cannot control all of the dawnsail’s systems. Join with me in the crystal matrix and regulate the drives. I will guide us.’

  He sensed a moment of resistance from the other pilot, perhaps bridling at his superior tone, but any umbrage was swiftly overtaken by the instinct for survival. Aradryan felt the Commorraghan beside him, within him, a sharp-edged presence that leveraged itself painfully through his soul. Gritting his teeth, he persisted, driving his thoughts into aerofoils and rudder. He coaxed rather than forced, sublimating his thoughts with Tzibilakhu’s so that they acted in concert, powering forward at the time when they were level.

  A few harrowing heartbeats later they managed to bring the dawnsail into a steep but stable dive. Aradryan settled his thoughts into the navigational systems to identify where they were in comparison to the rest of the descending host.

  Fresh warning pulses tore through his consciousness as the sensory suite powered up, detecting alien aircraft approaching on a swift intercept route. In the back of his thoughts he noted a distant shriek, growing louder.

  Chapter 16

  A HUSHED WHISPER

  An aeldari fleet going into battle might be compared to a flock of birds or fish shoal, united by a common understanding and instinct. Though the Ynnari and Saim-Hann ships existed in different spheres – one guided by the souls of their shared infinity circuit, the other the common experience of the Whisper – in purpose they were as one. Drukhari battleships and Asuryani cruisers broke from the webway surrounded by a swarm of smaller vessels, both of the Ynnari and the craftworld. As shoaling fish move together, each individual reacting instantly to the presence and movements of its neighbours, so the assembled warflee
t of Yvraine reformed squadrons and flotillas, bending their courses about each other as they angled from the handful of webway breaches to the gleaming atmosphere of Agarimethea.

  Yvraine sat in a side compartment of a dawnsail, nestled within the main bay of the Ynnead’s Dream. Via the battleship’s psychic network she was able to monitor the dispersing fleet as envisaged by the massive vessel’s sensors, relayed into her thoughts as though she witnessed them personally. She saw the dazzle of sunlight on unfurling solar sails and the gleam of etheric engines lighting as the ships detached from the energetic impulse of the webway itself. A momentary sense of dislocation dizzied her thoughts as the Ynnead’s Dream moved from a semicorporeal state into full reality, as though suddenly burdened with weight and dimensions it did not previously possess. The pull of Agarimethea’s gravity was a nagging sensation, but the light of its star was warmth upon her back.

  The world itself seemed a glassy orb of beautiful blue and green swirled with pale cloud, the poles stark white against the blackness of space.

  Perfection.

  On the surface, but not within. Like a fruit with rot at its core, there was a canker beneath the glorious appearance of the maiden world. A fitting name, taken for the goddess Lileath. Unsullied but full of future power. Lileath had been the moon goddess, creator of dreams and guide to good fortune. She had been the daughter of Isha, the mother of the aeldari, in turn granddaughter of the crone goddess Morai-Heg. It was the hag-seer that gave up her hand to Khaine so that she might drink her own blood and know her fate, and from whose finger bones the croneswords had been forged by Vaul the Smith.

  Myth held that Lileath had been gifted with a vision of Kaela Mensha Khaine being slain by the mortal descendants of Isha, and thus Khaine had murdered Eldanesh and the War in Heaven started. Dreams and death, always intertwined. The Whisper was like a waking dream when at its most powerful, guiding her actions and thoughts as if from outside.

  With a sudden sense of profound realisation, Yvraine saw the pattern within, the cycle of the aeldari that she sought to turn full circle.

  Ynnead was not simply the spirits of the aeldari, the sum of the Reborn given life. She was the full incarnation of the maiden, mother and crone. Ynnead was Lileath, granter of visions; Isha, birth-giver to the aeldari; Morai-Heg, holder of fate.

  She stood, reeling while the power of the revelation coursed through her.

  ‘Yvraine!’ The Visarch’s sharp call was filled with concern but she waved him away as he moved to her, reluctant to speak lest she lose her grip on the thread of thought that caused a tremble of excitement.

  Had she been approaching her task wrong all of this time? She had thought it obvious that her quest was to unite the croneswords and in that moment Ynnead would rise from her slumber to destroy the Great Enemy. But what if the croneswords were simply the means, not the end?

  She had been known as the Daughter of Shadows. Was she Ynnead’s aspect of the moon, the mortal incarnation of Lileath? If so, then perhaps the keys of Morai-Heg were simply a means to discover the Mother and the Crone.

  Yvraine thought of Eldrad. When he was younger he had been known as the Eye of Fates Unseen. Such was his power on the skein that the only veil he could not see beyond was death itself. And even that he had tried to pierce, to bring about Ynnead on the sands of Coheria.

  Could he be the Crone? Farseers were the cultural descendants of the old priesthood of Morai-Heg, the fate-gatherers that had once acted as oracles in the aeldari dominion. Eldrad himself had been a pivotal force in reshaping that ancient worship into the runelore that had spread with the Asuryani Path. And though he aged, and the crystal curse of all seers grew in his veins, his longevity was remarkable. What the seer dismissed as simply being too stubborn to die perhaps had a more divine root.

  Did he know?

  Yvraine looked at her companions, seeing them afresh with the gaze of this knowledge.

  Meliniel drew her eye, sat on one of the benches with hands clasped in his lap, fully armoured, spear beside him. It was not the autarch that fixated her but the gemstone within his breast. The jewel of Khaine, a symbol that Meliniel was now host to the Warshard. Kaela Mensha Khaine’s greatest avatar, bearer of the actual blade Anaris that had slain Eldanesh.

  And others not present. Idraesci Dreamspear, the Harlequin, the embodiment of the Laughing God. What of her ally on Iyanden, Iyanna Arienal? The symbol of her craftworld was the flame of Asuryan, the father of the gods himself, lord of the reborn phoenix…

  What of others? Hoec and Kurnus? Gei and Isha? Perhaps the fifth cronesword would not be revealed to her until the pantheon had been assembled.

  It made glorious and yet terrifying sense. Do the gods not also have souls? When the Great Enemy attempted to devour its aeldari creators not all were consumed. Cegorach escaped. Khaine was shattered into the avatars of the Bloody-Handed. Other fragments might have survived. A piece or pieces of every god scattered throughout the aeldari, born again and again into mortal form just as the souls of the aeldari themselves.

  She almost fainted with the weight of understanding.

  The Visarch was at her side, Meliniel rising also, and she realised she had fallen to her knees. Alorynis scampered back and forth, hissing at the others as they tried to approach.

  Doubt crept into her thoughts, replacing elation with a cold sickness.

  Was it all delusion? Not so long ago she had been resolved to her own destruction for the cause, and now she wove a fantasy about the rebirth of the gods. Belief and disbelief warred, her mind wracked back and forth between the two until all became blurred, her vision misting in physical sympathy.

  She staggered to her feet and at the same moment felt through the Whisper a sense of detachment as the dawnsail launched from the Ynnead’s Dream along with the rest of its berthed flotilla. Her mind’s eye focused again on the warship’s view of Agarimethea, which had started her train of thought. Battle was imminent, she could afford no distractions.

  Yvraine resolved that the revelation was true, but that she could not yet reveal that purpose to the others. They seemed ignorant of their own divine heritage and perhaps for good reason. The myths of the gods were full of deceit, infighting and treachery. Better that none of them harboured a higher ambition than the service of Ynnead. And if she was to voice her new dream, would they believe her?

  ‘I am well,’ she assured them, straightening her gown. Alorynis confirmed this with a contented meow, and proceeded to wash his face with a paw. Yvraine offered no further explanation. She had learned quickly in Commorragh that it was often better to say nothing rather than a falsehood that could be disproved.

  She could see nothing of the Visarch’s nor Meliniel’s faces but their doubts washed through the Whisper. Yvraine was about to offer further reassurance when the dawnsail reached the upper atmosphere of Agarimethea.

  To Yvraine it felt like being slipped into a pool of acid, burning into her from her skin and down to the bone. Particle by particle she was stripped away, every cell emptied of its vitality. The Whisper died with her, the ever-present buzz of her Ynnari fading to nothing as she sank between the waves of electric agony.

  She screamed but made no sound, writhing in silent torment.

  Choking on invisible fluid, she rose from drowning, throat burning, eyes afire with pain. Her corpse-self animated once more with the thrum of life, bringing movement to leaden limbs, turning her inert heart into a burning organ once more. With the return of life came the return of sensation. Light. Sound. The chill of the floor beneath her.

  And a horrific silence within her mind.

  The Whisper had gone.

  There were scores of warriors aboard the dawnsail with her but she might well have been entirely alone for all that she could feel their soul power.

  Once again her companions stood over her. Alorynis lay twitching not far away, rolling on his back,
legs jerking with phantom pains. She felt like cracked glass, so fragile that the slightest movement might cause her to shatter.

  ‘Do not touch me,’ she sighed, cheek pressed against the floor as a reassurance that she was still upon the dawnsail. But it was an empty vessel, literally. She felt nothing of the others on the ship.

  Slowly, as though every limb might snap and her lungs might turn to dust, she turned to all fours. Steadying herself, she knelt up, straightening a back that might split apart with the effort. Moving only a tiny amount at a time, she managed to get her feet under her, the bones in her legs feeling as brittle as a confectioner’s delicately spun wares. Warning glares kept the others at bay each time they made a move towards her.

  ‘The Whisper has gone,’ said Meliniel. He sounded betrayed. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘That we are within the necrontyr’s reach,’ croaked Yvraine. ‘The same power that fends off any delving of the webway has robbed us of Ynnead’s voice.’

  The Visarch presented a flask of rejuvenating liquid, its honeyed flavour sweet on Yvraine’s tongue even though the rest of her felt like flakes of ash compacted into an approximation of her body.

  ‘It seems to have affected you hardest,’ said her bodyguard. ‘We can return to orbit, if you wish.’

  ‘No.’ Yvraine shook her head, disturbingly aware of her skull’s own weight and the bones within her body, like a carcass remembering to move. Even so, the shock of transition into the necrontyr dampening field was wearing off. The effect on her empathic link remained, her mind robbed of all sense of her followers, but the physical symptoms were softening. ‘I regain my strength. I will fight.’

  ‘Not yet, you will not,’ insisted Meliniel. She knew that he had already adjusted his strategy accordingly and made no argument. In truth she desired nothing but more time to recuperate. ‘The Wild Riders will draw the strike of the necrontyr and then we shall respond and cut off the sting.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the Opener of the Seventh Way. She managed to reach a seat and almost fell into it. Groggily, Alorynis followed, ears flicking, tentative as he picked his way between the legs of the Visarch and curled up on a fold of her robe.