Ghost warrior, p.5
Ghost Warrior, page 5
She turned, eyes drawn to the acid burn across his neck and cheek. Her enquiry did not need to be spoken out loud.
‘While Iyanden bears its scars, so shall I,’ he told her. ‘The healers have deadened the pain but I will not let them erase the mark until my work is done.’
‘I do not think you will live to see that labour completed,’ she said, saddened by the thought. She knew well what it was like to work towards a goal she would likely not see achieved in her lifetime.
‘It does not matter, it is the labour that counts.’ He nodded towards the crystal structure gently gleaming beneath the skin of the craftworld floor. When complete, it would bring light and warmth to what had once been called the Avenue of the Guarded Love, linking three major domes back to the hub. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Begin your song,’ she replied.
The harmony came not as sound but thought, emanating from the depths of the bonesinger’s soul. Iyanna felt his swelling power like a nimbus about his body, bright and close in the void around them. His spirit flowed to his fingers, rippling along the formless mind-sounds of the verses to pour into the inert fabric of the circuit.
Fresh crystals started to grow beneath the light touch of his fingers, tiny traceries of diamond like the tracks of tears. She glanced at Lietriam and saw through the faceplate of his voidhelm that he was indeed crying, moisture wetting the contorted flesh of his face. From his grief came hope, his sorrow becoming a fuel for rebirth through the song of creation.
Life from the bonesinger. From Iyanna, the power of the dead.
The spiritseer let forth her thoughts, sending them into the nascent conduits of the fresh infinity circuit. Lietriam’s song was precise and beautiful, but it lacked power. That was her role. She sent her spirit back along the circuit, feeling her way through the deadened links towards the light and heat at the hub of Iyanden. Her being moved through the structure without effort, both part of it and apart from it.
Her soul pulsed like a beacon, sent ahead as a signal. It was both a call and a conduit, the means to attract the souls of the dead and the power to transport them into the reforged circuitry. It did not take long for the first sparks to appear. They travelled neuron-fast along the infinity circuit, drawn from the nearby systems to investigate the song Iyanna carried into their midst.
Their whispers grew in volume, a few at first, inquisitive and bold. Each was a particle washing up against her thoughts, nestling into her mind for comfort, yet cold to the touch. They were easy to coax into the freshly laid crystal, guided by gentle impulses from Iyanna. They joined the greater song, adding notes of their own to the growing symphony. From them echoed more of Lietriam’s power, linking the new with the old, the living and the dead. He drew on their energy, syphoning away their vitality to power the recreation of the damaged crystal. One by one, wearied by the exchange, the souls drifted back, grey and disorientated, floating without purpose back to the core where they were recharged by the presence of their fellow spirits.
The current of soul energy swelled as Iyanna and Lietriam’s song strengthened the bonds of the new circuit, until finally souls pulsed freely along its length. Iyanna withdrew herself, leaving the raw spirit stuff of Iyanden’s dead to populate the new veins. For a few heartbeats more Lietriam’s song continued, fading away to a murmur before it finally ended.
‘I am spent,’ confessed the bonesinger, his face pale and drawn within his helm. He lifted his hand away from the bright glittering trail. ‘I shall return at the beginning of the next cycle.’
She nodded, her acceptance mirrored in a gentle psychic pulse through the newly established conduit. Iyanna disconnected their tether and watched Lietriam float away into the darkness. She reached out a thought and snuffed the lantern globe, leaving herself only in the light of the infinity circuit. It twinkled like starlight, feeling like serrated ice in the airless passageway.
Was this how it had been for her family? When the torpedoes had struck, the structure and fields breached? Who had died in the conflagration and who had survived long enough to drift into the darkness?
Not even the comfort of their recovered spirit stones; even those of her ancestors had been lost in the cowardly attack.
The crude sentience of the voidsuit resisted as she idly considered opening the faceplate. The all-enclosing suit had been created to protect her, and would not willingly allow her to expose herself to the deadly vacuum. But if she exerted herself… She raised a hand, placing gloved fingers across the plate, feeling the smooth material as though on her skin. The suit bleated another warning, voiceless but insistent.
A tremor ran through the nerveways of Iyanden’s infinity circuit. To all but the most sensitive it would have been invisible; to those like Iyanna who had honed the gift of their psychic potential it was a message.
The sudden contact brought her morbid thoughts back to the present. The lantern globe flared into life and the suit exuded a faint sense of relief.
She let her thoughts touch the ripple on the fabric of the psychic network and an instant later was filled with an imperative to return. It was not just a message, it was a summons, sent with the full weight of the seer council, impossible to refuse.
Iyanna detached her tether cable and activated the grav-vanes that jutted from her back like insect spines, steering herself after her departed companion.
CHAPTER 5
FATES ENTWINE
The Ynnari were irrepressible, clearing Einerash from the place where the vortex had spun across the bridges and skyways, through avenue and plaza, all the way back to the Endless Stair. When the Tzeentchian horde was on the retreat, Meliniel descended in his wave serpent and alighted to meet his mistress, raising his spear in salute of her return.
‘Praise to the Whispering God,’ announced the autarch. He pointed with his weapon towards the few remaining pockets of resistance out in the pale city. ‘With your leave, I shall finish the task at hand.’
‘I wish it,’ Yvraine said, waving her fan imperiously, though the ghost of a smile betrayed her good humour. ‘Return Einerash to the whispers of the dead.’
She turned as Meliniel strode away snapping orders, to greet the approach of a handful of White Seers. The curators of the Black Library, or counted among such, halted a distance away, but for one of their number who raised a hand to the Opener of the Seventh Way.
‘I see you found the courage to set foot outside your demesne, Ruisafoneth.’
‘It is not cowardice to avoid certain death,’ retorted the White Seer, without rancour. ‘You have our gratitude though your intervention was unasked for. I do not think Ahriman will ever relent in his attempts to breach the Black Library, I also think he will turn much thought now to you and your people. Twice now you have thwarted him, but also in you perhaps he might find the means to serve right his age-old error.’
‘I am willing to grant the release of death to any of his followers that come. If Ahzek Ahriman wishes to know more of the tomb-lore of our people, I shall teach it to him.’ She raised the life-stealing Sword of Sorrows, its edge glinting with cold fire. ‘But he will like not the lesson, when he too finally knows what it is like to be rendered to dust.’
‘We must now close the Endless Stair. Every attack weakens us a little, Yvraine, every setback strengthens the Great Powers.’
‘The only victory is not to fight on their terms,’ said Yvraine. ‘When Ynnead rises, everything will change.’
The White Seer did not reply but his posture suggested disagreement. With a gentle cough he changed the subject.
‘You have the tainted artefact?’ asked Ruisafoneth.
Yvraine nodded and laid a hand upon the shielded container the White Seer had given to her to hold the corrupting energy that surrounded the Hand of Darkness.
The seer held out a hand. ‘The White Seers are well-versed in dealing with such corruption given physical form. It will trouble the world of mortals no longer.’
‘I was not tasked by you to retrieve it, but another,’ Yvraine reminded him, stepping back, hiding the box with a swirl of her cloak. ‘There is a purpose grander than destruction in your rune-furnaces for this device.’
‘An error,’ Ruisafoneth said sadly, his hand dropping to his side. ‘One which many have made before you. Eldrad should be wise enough to know that the enemy’s weapons cannot be turned to any good purpose. Even he cannot bend darkness into light. And to trust the humans… It was the ignorance of a human that fashioned this vile thing in the first place.’
‘Perhaps or perhaps not, but it is a judgement I will not make. I promised to deliver the Hand of Darkness to Eldrad, and he can do with it as he deems right, to share it with the primarch if he desires.’
Yvraine felt the presence of the Visarch close at hand, radiating disapproval without saying a word. She darted a look over her shoulder at the strange warrior.
‘It is unlike you to stand idle when there is killing to be done.’
The Visarch stalked away without reply.
Ruisafoneth inclined his head, inviting Yvraine to step closer. She bent her ear to him, fan raised to hide their faces.
‘Your movement has grown strong, Yvraine, but know that you are not immortal. Choose wisely those that are close to you. Khaine does not freely pull his claws from the heart of his sworn sons and daughters.’
‘He is loyal to my cause,’ said Yvraine as she straightened. ‘Sometimes too sure of himself, but loyal.’
The White Seer’s silence was profound and lasted for some time, until he eventually gave a tip of the head and turned back to the others. The group of mindweavers returned to the spot where the vortex of the Endless Stair coiled about itself, their arms raised as they began their chants of unmaking. Their engines drifted past, dormant again, and slipped into the stream of the diminishing portal, fading like mirages. Surrounding the kaleidoscopic whorl, the White Seers turned outwards, eyes blazing with golden power, streams of sparks falling from raised hands to create interlacing and concentric circles of intricate runes on the ancient stones.
The ring of seers contracted, pacing backwards slowly, their passage leaving a blaze of silver light until they stepped within the bounds of the Endless Stair. For a heartbeat and then another, the webway conduit continued, flashes of red and amber coruscating up the column of light.
With a sigh the portal shut, sucking in the last of the silver symbols, draining their fire like dust into a tornado until nothing but empty air remained.
Yvraine felt a moment of loss, knowing that once again the power of her people had been diminished. The tide was endless, the erosion of the aeldari and the corruption of the mortal universe as unstoppable as the turning of the stars.
Sadness turned to anger, born of frustration. The words of the Visarch haunted her, their subtle accusation all the more poignant for their accuracy. The quest for the final cronesword was her goal, but it was not the only means to fight the forces ranged against the Reborn. If they were to inherit a life worth living, there were other victories to be won along the way – victories not just in stopping the expansion of the Dark Powers but in turning them back, taking the war into the night.
Quite unaware of the life-threatening drama that engulfed her allies among the Ynnari, Iyanna returned to her home to answer the summons of the seer council. Lietriam and other bonesingers had raised a solitary tower for her, a distance from the seers’ edifices that clustered about the entrance to the Dome of Crystal Seers, but still within sight of the glowing structure of the hub. Far to the rim, among the Ghost Halls of the Lost Dynasties, the estates and manses of the House of Arienal still remained, and Iyanna spent more time among the echoes of her ancestral lands than at her seer tower.
A single ascensor lifted her to the summit of her spire, its transit up the transparent elevator revealing more of the wildlands, out to the edges of the dome where slowly returning civilisation clustered about the innermost arteries and avenues of Iyanden. At the pinnacle, her chambers were sparse – a single dormitory and adjacent washroom, with the bare minimum of furnishings to rest the body. It was rare that she would spend more than a cycle there at a time, and was often away for a dozen cycles or more. There were not heirlooms or pictures of her family. She needed no physical reminders of what had been, what she had lost. What would be the point when the Houses of the Dead were but a mind’s step away at any time?
The pulse of the farseers’ summons still resonated faintly along the spirit circuits, gentle but insistent, guiding her thoughts back to the present, away from the lure of morbid recollection. She shooed away the troubling signals as though swatting flies. Iyanna was of no mind to be hurried by the council, her robing routine arranged as much to order her mind as it was her garb. The meticulous, oft-repeated process laid calm her thoughts and focused her energy.
Iyanna began by divesting herself of her void suit and donned the golden ceremonial robes of her position. She laid on the plates of the Armour of Vaul, feeling its embrace like the comfort of an old lover. In these times – for most of her lifetime – its protective caress was the only assurance she felt that she was still alive. Iyanna felt its heat on her, the warmth through the thick fabric of her robes, soothing away the creases in her thoughts. She responded in kind, projecting her psyche into the crystalline matrix hidden in the depths of the wraithbone until the runestones and sigils that covered the ornate breastplate glimmered with a fiery light.
Carefully, she opened the crystal-fronted cabinet upon the wall of her abode, the Spear of Teuthlas hanging upon two rune-etched hooks within. It leapt the gap to her open palm, eager to be in her grasp. She slowly closed her fingers about the haft, feeling the weightlessness of it, still amazed after so long by the mastery of craft and psychic engineering that had been its creation. It was part of her again, a limb restored, a companion returned.
If an impertinent stranger was to ask how long the spear’s warlike spirit had held sway over her, she would not reply. To herself, Iyanna justified her familiarity with the deathdealer in simple terms: the galaxy was torn by war. Against this truth all philosophies and arguments failed. There was no apathy, only resistance or surrender. It was this thought, more than any other, that had guided her to support Yvraine and the Ynnari. Iyanden – and Iyanna in person – knew better than any others the power of the necromancer, of the dead raised to fight the wars of the living.
There was pleasing balance to the thought that the Great Enemy would be suffocated beneath the weight of the spirits he had tried to devour.
Her mood lightened by this thought, for there was little that Iyanna enjoyed save for the prospect that her people might yet die in peace, the spiritseer alighted upon a skyskiff and let its spirit-guided sentience take her to the Halls of the Seers within the towering crystal needles of the hub. It flitted across bridges that spanned chasms down to the bare substrate of the craftworld, and along bright tunnels painstakingly dug to avoid quarantined domes and plains still awash with alien organisms.
Two warlocks geared for battle, witchblades at their hips, awaited Iyanna at the berthing platform – a ruby-glass balcony set halfway up the hub. Before her eyes fell upon them, she knew them by the aura of their minds. Telathaus and Iyasta, twins that had experienced the peculiar life of treading exactly the same Paths together. When they spoke, they wove in and out of each other’s sentences, so it was sometimes impossible to distinguish them or their individual thoughts.
‘The council is waiting–’ one snapped.
‘–upon you, spiritseer,’ finished the other.
‘And I am arrived,’ Iyanna replied, ignoring their hostility. The cult of Ynnead was a subject of tension through the craftworld, and the twins were of the faction that believed the return of the Whispering God boded ill and efforts to bring about his ascension distracted from the labours to rebuild Iyanden.
The two parted as she alighted from the skiff, and fell in beside to escort her through the crystal-walled corridors, though she knew the way to the council chambers.
‘No,’ said Iyasta, directing her to the right at a junction.
‘We head for the Oracular,’ said Telathaus, motioning her to turn at the same time. ‘You must see–’
‘–for yourself what the seers foretell.’
They continued through the gleaming passages, passing archways beyond which the naked infinity circuit flashed and flickered. She saw other spiritseers, comforting the buzzing souls within the matrix. Even unattached to the infinity circuit, the spiritseer could feel distress permeating the atmosphere. Iyanna detached a little of her mind to discover what was amiss among the dead of Iyanden, but the warlocks intervened, interposing their thoughts between her and the infinity circuit.
‘It is better that you–’
‘–do not cloud your perceptions before you come to–’
‘–the Oracular.’
‘This is highly suspect behaviour,’ Iyanna warned them. She had an urge to stop and demand an explanation, but the merest hesitancy on her part spurred a fluttering of agitation from her escorts.
‘The farseers require your expertise, Iyanna,’ said Iyasta.
‘It is a matter both important and delicate,’ insisted Telathaus.
Their psychic nudging, the mental equivalent of a hand gently laid upon the back, encouraged her to continue, though she made her irritation known in thought and posture.
