Ghost warrior, p.24
Ghost Warrior, page 24
The sudden influx of power from across Zaisuthra, fuelled by dying Ynnari in the Highlands of Distant Repose, struck Yvraine like a thunderbolt. She lit like an oil-soaked brand, white fire engulfing her from head to foot.
The dead raged and screamed in her thoughts, their raw force twisting inside her skin, tearing at her heart, drowning her lungs with their agony. Quivering, teeth in a rictus, Yvraine held in the power. It crawled along her nerve endings and sent flickers of colour dancing across her vision but she would not let the unbound fury of the dead leave her.
Iyanna was there still, as though holding out a hand, all but her pale fingers lost in the darkness of the groupmind.
Yvraine realised what the spiritseer intended, saw that her mind was inside the monstrous brood-thoughts of the genestealers. Her words drifted through and Yvraine regained focus.
‘Ynnead rises,’ echoed the Opener of the Seventh Way.
Yvraine did not release the fires of the dead, but channelled it in, deep down through her own soul into the abyss where the Whispering God awaited. She became the fulcrum of a psychic lever between realms, her mind the axle upon which fate turned for a heartbeat.
Silently shrieking, the vengeful dead incarnate, the Yncarne rose up from its somnolence, conjured into being by the death cries of Ynnead’s faithful.
It clawed at the threads between immaterial and material, trying to weave for itself a form with which to smite the enemies of the Whispering God. Yvraine did not allow it, her thoughts a barrier to its incarnation, and in return she received a blistering wave of anger-heat washing through her.
She took the pain and shared it with Iyanna, the sister-of-the-dead drawing away the ire of the Yncarne with the chill of the tomb.
Yvraine flexed her thoughts, pulling the Yncarne into the material realm through her own body, a scream wrenched from her lips, every fibre singing with razor pain as the manifesting entity passed through her.
She let the rising power flow on, from her thoughts into those of Iyanna, passing the Yncarne’s emerging soul as one might pour water from one vessel to the next.
As the last vestiges of the god of the dead’s avatar slipped out from her senses, Yvraine saw through its presence into the heart of the groupmind. For an instant she witnessed the constellation of thousands of aeldari thoughts, bound together by the grotesque matrix of Zaisuthra’s half-living body, the nodes of the purestrain genestealers, their minds like black firelight.
The Opener of the Seventh Way felt a surge of joy as Iyanna released the Yncarne, not into the physical plane but into the essence of the groupmind itself.
Like electricity along a circuit, the chill touch of the Dead One flared and multiplied across the reeling psychic network. Dagger icicles of the Whispering God’s wrath arrowed through the minds of the Zaisuthrans and speared into the alien thoughts of the genestealers.
The craftworld shuddered, a great upheaval that sent Ynnari and Zaisuthran alike stumbling and seeking support. A hideous moan, born in the mind not the ear, rumbled through the domes and arterial ways, the ground shuddering and walls bowing as the vibration passed from the hub to the outer rim.
Triumphant, the Yncarne raged through the bio-crystalline vessels of Zaisuthra, feeding on the soul-matter that permeated the artificial organs and arteries. The Whispering God’s avatar smote down all resistance, crashing through the barriers of the genestealers’ brood-presence, its birth-thrashing sending ripples of destruction across the craftworld.
Artificial stars fell from domed skies, bringing fiery ruin to the hillside towns and mountain fastnesses below. Explosions blossomed, as bright as noon, until a few heartbeats later their energy was spent and a disquieting dusk befell Zaisuthra.
The Yncarne roared and howling winds raged across dunes and tundra, becoming the death scream of Zaisuthra. Forests toppled and seas bucked, tidal waves and hurricanes sweeping away thousands of aeldari in their torrents and storms.
Great crevasses tore open the towers of Sundervale, plunging halls and bridges and hundreds of members of the House of Arienal into the spasming crystal structure far below. Cruel laughter met their demise, the Yncarne supping upon soulstuff wrenched from the protective enclave of the groupmind.
No part of Zaisuthra was spared the cataclysm, the catastrophe every part as destructive and deadly as the birth-throes of the Yncarne that had fractured the craftworld of Biel-tan. To Ynnead went all, the souls of the loyal and the uncaring equally; to the Whispering God all spirits returned.
It was a divine deliverance, one that was perhaps more than the Zaisuthrans deserved for their perfidy. Having traded their souls to their alien invader, perhaps not willingly but knowingly, they had eluded She Who Thirsts for a time. In the bosom of Ynnead they would know the peace of eternal rest, a foretaste of the future of all aeldari should Yvraine’s plan come to fruition and Ynnead was fully awoken.
Even in the bowels of Zaisuthra the Yncarne’s devastation was felt. The floor rocked and the walls buckled, scattering the combatants of both sides.
Around the Opener and across the craftworld, the Zaisuthrans screamed, adding their cries to the voiceless dismay of their home. They flailed and staggered, hands held to their heads, retching and shrieking as the core of the groupmind was shredded by the ice-claws of Ynnead’s revenge.
Genestealers hissed and skittered about in mindless instinct, flailing claws at the floor and walls, twitching and rolling as raw aeldari power flooded their alien skulls.
The whine of anti-grav engines at full throttle drowned out the keening wind as Meliniel and his remaining warriors soared over the undulating moors. Their swift jetbikes, raiders and wave serpents had left behind the more sedate transports of the Zaisuthrans but ornithopter gunships swooped after them.
Beak-prows parted to reveal laser-spitting cannons, the Zaisuthran flyers opened fire. Flashes of red and blue sparked past the fleeing Ynnari, confounded by the criss-cross of skyweavers and voidweavers from the Masque of Midnight Sorrow, the aim of their pursuers thrown awry by the Harlequins’ holofields and mirage launchers.
Meliniel winced as a salvo caught one of the other raiders, screeching along its length in a series of detonations, tossing Howling Banshees to the ground blurring past below. The transport veered sharply and crashed into an outcrop of rock, bladed shards of armour and grav-engine scattered over the hillside.
‘This is all well for now,’ said Azkahr beside him on the deck of a raider. ‘But we cannot flee indefinitely. At some point we are going to run out of dome.’
‘Sometimes it is not important where you are running to,’ replied the autarch. ‘Only what we are running from. Adapt. That is the greatest lesson I have learned from the Ynnari. Death waits for us all, it is not wise to plan too far ahead.’
The Highlands of Distant Repose reverberated to a crack louder than any thunder Meliniel had ever heard. From the aftdeck of the raider, he looked up to see storm clouds roiling unnaturally across the twilit sky. He thought he saw a face carved by the billowing mass, half aeldari, half daemonic. The face of the Yncarne.
‘Was that…’ began Azkahr, but his words were cut short by another ear-splitting crash.
Lightning lashed down from the raging storm, blasts of black that earthed through the circling ornithopters, setting artificial flesh and feathers ablaze. A pulse of light drew the eye back to Withershield.
The ground beneath the manse and towers erupted as though upon a black-fired volcano. It was not boiling magma that exploded from the ground, but a coruscation of raging souls. Hundreds-strong, the deceased vortex shattered the buildings, casting the stones far out upon the hillsides, crushing hybrids and genestealers beneath a rain of blocks and bricks.
Swirling, the dead became a towering whirlwind, dragging in gunships and transports, hurling boulders and trees through the dazed squads of Zaisuthrans. In the centre of the tornado Meliniel saw again the grim figure of the Yncarne, drawn in the blur of detritus and spinning corpses.
On the moorlands about the broken ruins the Zaisuthrans were in disarray, many of them struck down by some invisible hand, others running to and fro in panic.
‘Now is our chance,’ said Meliniel. ‘We must strike while they are reeling.’
‘I thought we were running away?’ said Azkahr. He pointed to one of the nearby dome gates, half hidden by an upheavel of earth and splintered rock.
‘Adapt,’ replied Meliniel. A laugh of relief escaped before he regained some measure of self-control. ‘Adapt and survive. All wings, counter-attack!’
‘Kill them all!’ raged Yvraine, her command directed not only to the Yncarne wreaking havoc and despair, but through its presence into the minds of every Ynnari. Like a siren, her thoughts soared from the confines of the groupmind, reaching out to the crews still upon the ships, alighting in the spirit-slumber of the wraith-dead legion that waited there.
And fey was the mood of the Ynnari, merciless as they put gun and blade to use against the devastated and disorientated Zaisuthrans. With each that died the groupmind dwindled, every escaping soul now swelling the disembodied Yncarne. Like a parasite with tendrils set into every artery of its host, the avatar of the Whispering God absorbed the escaping soulstuff, wringing every drop of strength from each aeldari and alien death, syphoning away the immense lifeforce of Zaisuthra itself.
Yvraine gloried in the triumph. She was the Yncarne and her fingers and limbs were its incorporeal reach. She felt the craftworld buckling under the twisting grip of her hatred, energy fields flickering into nothing, exposing domes to the freezing, airless void. Thousands more died in moments, another huge upswell of power for Ynnead, and as it flooded her mind and body she rose up, gown aflame with white fire, eyes a pale blaze.
The Yncarne demanded more, demanded the spirit of Zaisuthra in return for the agony the craftworld had caused.
Yvraine fought back the Ynnead-born, straining against its wild death-lust. The Doom of Zaisuthra craved every particle of soulstuff, its hunger as deep as the chasm of She Who Thirsts.
The Opener of the Seventh Way almost lost herself in the bottomless gulf of the Whispering God.
She remembered the oblivion of Starshone’s test, the nothingness that had engulfed her. Had it been a foresight of this moment, or simply an abstraction of her hopes and dreams?
Thinking on that moment focused Yvraine’s thoughts, separating her mortal aeldari mind from the tempest of the Yncarne. With the separation came growing clarity, but it was hard to concentrate, to step back from the abyss that beckoned.
A red-masked helm swam in her vision.
The past, half remembered.
Fleeing for her life, pursued through the streets of Commorragh. A crimson warrior who fought in the same manner as her former exarch, his blade a flashing thing of beautiful lethality. Words, softly spoken, sincere but with an edge of humour.
‘I am simply called the Visarch, for I cast aside my name long ago, but it would be very familiar to you. Yvraine of the Biel-tani, our paths join once more.’
And older still, recollections from a life so distant now it could have belonged to another. That same dancing sword, upon a dozen battlefields, the death of hundreds. But more than just bloodshed. Cycles spent in peace, a brief tranquility snatched from the chaos that had been her life before and since. Quiet repose in the shrine of the Silvered Blade.
A different sort of peace swept through her, the silence of the tomb. It quenched the ire of the Yncarne that goaded her to lash out at the dying Zaisuthrans.
‘Mistress! Would you see us all dead?’ The Visarch’s voice cut through the euphoria. ‘Would you destroy that which we sought?’
She resisted, turning the Whisper against the Yncarne, corralling its power even as she regained her mortal senses and understood how close she had come to destroying everything.
Yvraine turned her eye to the Gate of Malice, its runes but a fitful gleam in the twilight of the hall. If Zaisuthra died entirely, so too their path to the Well of the Dead.
She became aware of her immediate surroundings, and floated gently back to the floor as the energy of the Whisper departed. The gates about her were dim, their essence sucked dry by the demigod unleashed within the psychic matrix that sustained them. In a last fleeting glimpse into the Yncarne’s otherworldly senses she saw starships spitting forth shuttles and gunships, the companies of the Ghost Halls descending towards the broken craftworld.
‘It is done,’ she said, almost collapsing as she let the presence of Ynnead fall from her as one might let slip a coat to the floor. She shed its power with a sigh, the Visarch there to support her with a hand beneath her arm.
For one heartbeat, then another she felt the Whisper a-quiver with receding power.
And then silence.
CHAPTER 28
SAVING IYANNA
The purging of Zaisuthra continued. In the void beyond the domes and defence fields Ynnead’s Dream and the other starships of the Ynnari levelled weapons batteries and torpedoes at the attendant fleet of the craftworld.
The Opener of the Seventh Way remained at the Hall of Gates. With the groupmind shattered she was able to feel her Ynnari again, a reassuring wash of souls dedicated to Ynnead. The Whisper linked her to them and they to her, though it was on conventional messenger-waves that she contacted Meliniel and the others.
‘Let nothing of this taint survive,’ Yvraine commanded her followers, referring to the genestealer infestation that had waylaid the aeldari. ‘Not one of these aliens or savages escapes.’
Across the craftworld itself, the Ynnari and hosts of the Ghost Halls swept through chamber and moorland, mountain valley and audience hall, breaking towers and bringing ruin to all that they encountered. They broke open the structure of Zaisuthra itself, exposing the malignant arteries of the groupmind, of withered vines of black and plates of bruised crystal left near lifeless by the ravages of the vengeful Yncarne – the Whispering God’s avatar now departed, its thirst for souls eventually sated.
Wraithlords set upon the survivors with gleaming blades and the burning energy of brightlances and firepikes. Wraithblade and wraithguard cohorts marched alongside coteries of wyches and squads of aspect warriors to clear all presence of the Zaisuthrans from subterranean palaces and floating sky-temples.
They toppled the statues and shrines also, feeling nothing but loathing for those that had erected the monuments and cathedrals to the memory of dead gods, their worship nothing more than a delusional mask for the alien dominance that had taken them generations past.
The Visarch led one of the companies, his Coiled Blade and a handful of aspect warriors at his back. Vindication fuelled him, the thought that he had waited idly for the Zaisuthrans to spring their attack like a thorn that worried at his thoughts.
Complacency had almost seen them doomed and the former exarch expunged his residual guilt with the blood of those who had wronged his people.
It mattered not that many were unwitting in the scheme that had ensnared the Ynnari. Few had gone willingly into the embrace of alien corruption, but all were touched by it. Zaisuthra itself, the streets and bridges, the rivers and rocks, was sick with the tyranid taint, and none were more aghast at this than Telathaus and Iyasta. Too strong were the memories of the destruction brought to their home, and too righteous their mood to bring equal devastation to the legacy of the genestealers. While the Ynnari slew the mortal remnants of the enslaving cartel, the two warlocks dragged into the purging light the last shadows of the groupmind.
Iyanna… did nothing.
Yvraine found her in the Temple of the Patriarch, standing among the Zaisuthran dead, her spear held to one side, gaze distant.
She was physically and spiritually spent by the battle and the drain of unleashing the Yncarne into the groupmind, but it was emotionally that the fatigue hung most heavily.
There was barely a flicker of recognition for the sister-of-the-dead, and though the Opener of the Seventh Way reached out with hand and mind, and spoke words of condolence and comfort, the spiritseer gave no response.
Concerned, Yvraine passed word for Althenian to attend them, in the knowledge that the former exarch knew her better than any other and shared an even greater bond than she.
When the wraithlord entered the hall, his first look was to the throne of Khaine and the blasted remains of the Patriarch slumped before it.
‘On thin thread, most slender of the crone’s weave, hung our fate,’ he told Yvraine. ‘A great debt, owed by all to Iyanna, for this chance. A great debt that not a life of account could repay.’
‘You are right, and I fear she pays the cost afresh,’ said Yvraine, guiding his attention to the inert spiritseer. ‘Not casually do we share our thoughts with the darkness of the alien soul. She touched something powerful and diseased and allowed it into her spirit so that we could strike back. I think we have lost her to the groupmind.’
‘She is safe,’ said the wraithlord, crouching beside the unmoving seer. A massive hand gently touched the breastplate of her armour, palm upon the glowing waystone set there. ‘I will bring her back to you, I promise.’
The air was thick with smoke, light grey plumes that rose from the burning ruin of the temples. Along the vast length of the street all had been engulfed by the conflagration. The porticoes and domes had fallen, the statues toppled by the blasts that had wracked the Street of the Dead.
Iyanna wandered the ruination, clothed in tattered rags, tears streaking the soot that coated her face. Life fluid, crimson and hot, dripped from her fingers in a grotesque mimicry of Bloody-Handed Khaine. Her bare feet stepped upon shards of shattered bone and slivers of sharp crystal but she felt nothing.
She felt nothing.
Such could be said for everything about her.
As Iyanna looked at the fallen mausoleums and stepped over the broken rubble of her ancestors’ memory she had eyes only for the horizon, where a burning spear thrust into the sky like a rising sun.
