Ghost warrior, p.2
Ghost Warrior, page 2
‘Ignore it,’ said the Visarch, the words delivered between perfunctory but effective stabs of his blade. The grace of his earlier blows had been replaced with cold precision.
Yvraine swayed to avoid a rusted daemonblade before she replied.
‘You can feel it too?’ Her arm whipped out, the points of her warfan striking the eyes of the daemon to blind it, a heartbeat before the cronesword in her other hand parted its gut and spine. ‘It’s like beetles crawling through my soul.’
‘We’ll be well rid of it.’ For several moments they fought back to back, creating a mound of dissipating offal and festering daemon flesh around them. ‘Let Guilliman listen to its creaking whispers.’
A moment of respite and reflection.
The fury of the daemonic assault abated, outmatched by the ferocity and skill of the Ynnari. For each aeldari that fell, their spirit bolstered the others, their death-cry scattering across the Whisper to fuel the blows of Yvraine and the Visarch, steeling the courage of their followers. The unnatural energies of Nurgle’s garden retreated and regrouped, leaving Yvraine and her small host with an opportunity to make haste for the portal. The kabalites, incubi, wyches and Harlequins formed up about the emissary of Ynnead and the group set off into the now-dormant forest, swift but wary.
Lank leaves dragged over helms and shoulders, leaving mucus trails on their armour. Though the ground no longer bucked and tripped, underfoot was slick with moss-covered rocks, threatening to trip at a careless step. The darkness lifted for a time, the cloud-swarms of the bloatflies dispersed by a surge of Ynnead’s protective power, but only to reveal a dismal, watery pair of suns like rheumy eyes glaring down at the departing group.
Ahead of them, coils of Chaotic power flowed once more, no longer content to pursue them but coalescing between the fleeing aeldari and their goal. Trickles of filthy water oozed up between the scattered rocks and a vapour seeped from knotholes and crevasses, bringing with it the stench of rotting vegetation and the slither of grotesque millipedes and other carrion eaters.
From the branches Alorynis dropped down next to Yvraine, claws thick with pungent gore, azure-furred face and silver whiskers matted with daemonblood. Shimmers of contentment pulsed from the gyrinx, soothing Yvraine’s troubled thoughts. Unfortunately, the gyrinx’s empathic link was with her alone, leaving the Visarch prey to a swelling concern.
‘What if Meliniel has not held the other end of the vortex?’
‘The battle was all but won when we departed,’ Yvraine replied, her gown a diaphanous cloud behind her as she sped between the twisted boles on the tips of her toes. ‘There is none among us better at leading a host. I summoned the Yncarne to aid him and there are few foes either mortal or daemonic that can face Ynnead’s corporeal avatar. It is not like you to give credence to baseless fears.’
‘Perhaps it is this place,’ the warrior replied.
‘No, it is something more. Something else that is giving you doubts. You cannot mask it from me.’
‘Are we set on the right course?’
‘The portal lies directly ahead.’
‘Not that, in the wider sense.’ He ducked beneath a low branch, the crest of his helm tearing through long, yellowing leaves. ‘What is the point? Are we to run hither and thither at the beck and call of Eldrad and the humans? What of the mission to bring forth Ynnead?’
‘In time it will come,’ said Yvraine, but his words struck a chord. When the Whispering God had first laid his spirit upon her, she had been filled with such zeal and purpose it had been like a cold burning. Much time had passed and though she and the Reborn had swelled in number, and achieved much in the fight against the Dark Powers, she was no closer to uniting the croneswords than when the Great Rift had sundered the galaxy and all had been upon the precipice of ruin.
‘There must be some way to fight back,’ the Visarch continued, sensing her conflicted thoughts. ‘Not simply to respond and defend, but to strike at our enemies.’
‘Perhaps we have gathered the means to do just that,’ she said, meaning the Hand of Darkness at her belt.
‘But you are happy to turn it over to the humans, a good little hunting hound.’
Yvraine skidded to a stop, her blade in her hand in a flash, its edge against the side of the Visarch’s helm as he halted. His sword was also free, point aimed towards her midriff with unthinking, instant response.
‘I am no other’s slave,’ hissed the Opener of the Seventh Way. ‘You would do well to choose your words more carefully.’
‘I speak as I see,’ said the Visarch. ‘When last did Yvraine of the Ynnari do her own bidding?’
She said nothing and the two of them stood with legendary swords poised to end one another. The soulbound gathered about them, unsure what to do while the rest of the Ynnari cast wary glances at the stirring forest, weapons readied. Harlequins circled beneath the canopy, calling out in their lilting voices, warning that the trees were waking again.
‘We are not done,’ snapped Yvraine, lowering her blade, the move matched by the Visarch.
With a surge of corrupt power, the Garden burst into fruitful destruction once more. A fresh heave of plaguebearers broke free from the miasma of polluting energy, creating bodies out of the mud and leaves, dragging half-formed physical vessels from bubbling pits of tar, creaking misshapen heads, limbs and torsos from lichen-dotted tree trunks. The resurgent stench was terrible, the freshly descending flies again an ever-present buzzing distraction.
Yvraine focused, drawing a line between herself and the diminishing portal. All that mattered was following that line. Nothing else.
Gritting her teeth, she ran on.
CHAPTER 2
OF IYANNA ARIENAL
Iyanna liked to walk among the dead.
Perhaps ‘liked’ is not the correct term. She was drawn to the deceased. Her peers bowed their heads and murmured that her whole family had died, so it was understandable. Not just her family, the entire House of Arienal had been wiped from existence by a torpedo dispatched by a human renegade. Not just the living, but the dead also, their spirits lost among the conflagration that had consumed the homes of their descendants.
But even before, Iyanna had been a spiritseer for half a lifetime; a necromancer, the kin of Commorragh would less charitably phrase it. One that communicates with the dead. A noble calling, if a little morbid, and a path upon which many folk of the craftworlds had trodden before and since. After all, when one’s entire home is powered by the spirits of the dead, it is best to have someone close that is willing to speak with them.
Iyanna stayed a spiritseer for just a little too long, and spent a little too much time conversing with the shades of those-that-came-before. She became colder to those whose hearts still beat, inured to the passions of the living, so her critics claimed.
Fortunately for Iyanna, her aloof nature meant she did not care for her critics, and even less for their opinions.
As the remarkable Yvraine duelled for her life against the hosts of the Father of Rot, Iyanna was to be found in an entirely different place, to which her thoughts would often stray. She walked an avenue of white stone, lined by golden pinnacles that stretched up to a sky of pale yellow, lit by a distant orb – not a sun or a star, but a burning moon. In the dance of flames across its surface could be seen a scowling face, or at moments an expression of perverse delight. Its gleam was near-constant, only the slightest flicker of shadow moved on the pale street below.
Each illuminated building she passed was a tomb, a mausoleum of temple proportions, an edifice erected to rival those of the dead gods. Trees with silvery bark and white needles lined the pebbled gardens before each tombhouse. Their up-stretched boughs implored the skies, the weep of golden sap from knot and crack bright highlights of colour in the monochrome.
White. The colour of death. The absence and the everything. The bloodless flesh of a corpse and the white flare of a dying star.
Iyanna was also clad in white, a single sash of diaphanous material woven about her limbs and torso many times, gently undulating and flowing with each step. Her hair was braided tight, as white as her surrounds, and the skin beneath her attire marble-like. At her breast pulsed a single beacon of life and colour. The slow throb of her waystone, a heartbeat of orange and deeper red.
A statue of each internee stood on the rune-engraved flags outside the rows of pillared porticoes. They waited in poses of exclamation, lament or contemplation.
She passed Hariya, her mother. Short-haired, clad in a sleeveless dress, crouched with a protective arm over an infant. Her face was upturned, features set in grim defiance of whatever threat approached. A single tear rolled down her cheek. Hariya’s tomb-cathedral was adorned with roses and stars, a white flame burned from the needle that rose from among the many steeply pitched roofs.
On the opposite side of the avenue, past the row of grey-leaved whispertrees that ran the length of the course, stood her father, Arctai. He was, at first glance, the very image of strength, dressed in an approximation of surcoat and scale armour. His marble incarnation stood with legs shoulder-width apart, fists on hips, chest and shoulders strong and straight. Yet there was weakness there. Unlike her mother, Iyanna’s sire had his face cast down, looking to one side, shame written in his features.
Iyanna paced onward into the shadow of the next grave-temple, skin prickling at the momentary chill.
She looked up to the plinth set before the modest tombhouse, into the carved eyes of her younger sister. Saisath, whom Iyanna had called ‘Little Me’, barely an adolescent. Her statue laughed, head tilted back, eyes closed, totally unaware of what was happening around her. Iyanna paused and laid a hand upon the bare foot of the figure.
‘Hello, Little Me. Always happy.’
The silence that swallowed the words tightened around Iyanna’s heart, a taloned grip that caused her to wince and retreat from the plinth. She looked down the long road – unending it seemed – and the quiet pressed in on her thoughts, quashing all else.
A figure appeared in the distance, quickly approaching. A gleam of red resolved into a ripple of flames that encased his person, orange and yellow flickers sketched a face below a mane of darker fire.
Iyanna. Why have you come here again? You must leave.
Iyanna blinked, and at the same moment broke her affinity with the circuit of Iyanden. The tomb towers and endless street dissolved into the broken stone walls and ruined gardens of the Dome of Accentuated Night. Blue-purple twilight darkened her vision, replacing the dusky glow of the burning moon. In the dim light – artificially generated by the craftworld itself – the ruined retreats and hermitages of the dome seemed like scattered stars across undulating blankets of hills, their slopes littered with acid-burned trunks and toppled monuments.
She was no longer dressed in her mourning garb, but in the deep yellow robe of a seer of Iyanden. Her craftworld’s rune was one among many embroidered into the heavy cloth and hung upon her torqs, belt and bracelets. The physical weight of her own body was disconcerting, heavy and ungainly after her spirit immersion in the psychic network. A couple of heartbeats passed before the feeling dissipated and her mind settled fully into its mortal conveyance.
Althenian Armourlost stepped closer, his immense shadow falling across the spiritseer. The wraithlord’s spirit was encased in a shell of wraithbone thrice as tall as she, a humanoid frame of deep yellow, detailed with the same yellow as her robe. His blank domed head and slender limbs were decorated with the runes of a destroyed warrior shrine – the Fire’s Heart – as was the long cloth that hung from his waist.
The wraithlord held out a hand, articulated psychoplastic digits large enough to engulf the spiritseer’s head. The movement was accompanied by a slight creak of flexing artificial tendons, like a branch bending in a gentle wind. The featureless, elongated head tilted slightly, its polished surface catching the faint gleam of the false dusk.
‘Why did you disturb me, Khaine-touched?’ Iyanna growled.
To the spiritsenses of Althenian there was not much difference between her projection into the ghost matrix of the craftworld and her physical incarnation. She was an ever-changing melange of grey and blue hues, a melancholy shade with flecks of even darker, colder bitterness.
At the heart, though, was still warmth. For all that her thoughts were wrapped in death, her manner aloof and dismissive, there was compassion still. The ice around it served as protection, nothing more.
Returned to her body, Iyanna’s form asserted itself a little more, approximating arms and legs in the wraithlord’s vision, and in her hand the bright white line of her spear. Its brightness was oddly vague, as though it originated from some place slightly beyond the physical object it represented.
He replied through sonic vocalisers, but to the mind of the spiritseer Althenian’s thoughts and intent also echoed into her consciousness, carrying with them strange after-images of eddying colour and creeping fire.
‘A harsh name. Even if I deserve it, it wounds me,’ said the wraithlord.
‘But it is true. You are a bloody-handed killer, worshipper of Khaine. You should not be. Your spirit should reside in a suit of exarch armour, with those that came before and after.’
‘It was you who called me forth from my shrine. Only you could. You dared much, to travel so deep and far, into blood. Desperate, you walked with Khaine’s acolytes, his exarchs. Your own blood, offered in free sacrifice, bound me thus. Bloody-handed, now residing in this form, forever.’ Across Althenian’s shoulder his brightlance lowered on its mounting, though he was careful to point the powerful laser weapon at nothing in particular. ‘I asked not. You cursed us both in folly, our fate shared.’
‘A mistake I will not repeat.’
‘Perhaps then, a better title for me. Unique One?’
‘You seem in oddly good humour. I do not appreciate it.’
‘As you may, it is not my mood awry, it is yours. You departed, left me for your deceased kin, distracted,’ said the wraithlord. ‘You brought me to locate a spirit stone, still unfound.’
The memory seeped back into Iyanna’s thoughts, forgotten during her foray into the Avenue of the Dead. It was a plaintive sigh on the edge of hearing, an almost silent shudder of loneliness and longing. She shivered at the thought of the time that had passed. Though the spirit within would be only dimly aware of such temporal concerns, and to a living aeldari the intervening period between the invasion of the tyranids and this discovery was barely one twentieth of a lifetime, it was still an eternity to be trapped without body in the unfeeling shell of a spirit stone. The half-heard psychic moan continued still.
So distant, so quiet, so… alone. It was no wonder the others had missed it.
But not Iyanna. The psychic sob of the lost spirit had permeated her dreams, nagged her waking thoughts until she had recognised it for what it was. The sensation was sharper, now that she had located the dome where the overlooked stone would be found.
She held up her spear, the heirloom of Teuthlas, though she brandished it as a divining rod and not a weapon. The spiritseer let a portion of her psychic potential flow into the crystal structure at its core. She focused on the whispering dread of the forlorn spirit. The triangular head of the spear glowed with a blue aura and emitted a low hum as it resonated with the unworldly connection between seer and spirit.
Iyanna took a step and moved the Spear of Teuthlas gently back and forth, panning it across the landscape of gentle hills and desolation. The tip dimmed and brightened as she did so, guiding her towards the lost psychic gem.
‘This way,’ Iyanna announced, levelling the spear to point towards the tumbled ruins close to the heart of the dome.
She set off across dying grass, the wraithlord following with long strides. Since the destruction wrought by the Great Devourer, the resources of Iyanden had been directed towards those parts still habitable. Places like the Dome of Accentuated Night – in its prime only ever home to a few hundred aesthetes and antisocial philosophers – had only recently been scoured of spore-pollution and the psychic residue of the tyranid hive mind.
They walked along a meandering river, little more than a trickle across smoothed stones between banks thirty strides apart. The trail they followed was marked in places by standing stones as tall as Althenian. They were raised in different stones and psychoplastics, varying from slender monoliths and needles to trilithons and elegantly curved totems.
Each was marked with runes, the name of an Asuryani that had once resided there. Though the inhabitants had eschewed contact, broken almost entirely from the network of the infinity circuit, their stones had acted as conduits through which messages could be left and their desires made known to the wider world without direct interaction. A kind of psychic go-between for the antisocial.
The hermits and philosophers were all dead now, but their waymarkers remained. Iyanna could feel the quiet echoes of their terrified, dying thoughts as the Great Devourer’s bio-constructs had spilt through the dome, slaughtering and digesting those whose isolation had meant they had not felt or perhaps had ignored all of the warnings of invasion. The stones were morbid reminders of those that had been lost, a coldness that pressed on Iyanna’s thoughts each time she passed one.
It took them some time to traverse the carefully formed but partially devastated wilderness. As they mounted a hill to come upon the toppled building they sought, the lost spirit sensed their approach. The strengthening contact brightened the tip of Iyanna’s spear while a warmth of familiarity seeped into her. She could not help but feel the relief of the forlorn aeldari soul, its pitiful surge of anticipation filling the void left by her grief. She momentarily skirted the infinity circuit with her thoughts, anchoring herself in its rune-protected channels while she allowed her mind to project further ahead, honing the connection to a point.
