Ghost warrior, p.9
Ghost Warrior, page 9
Yvraine suppressed a snort of derision and hid her sneer behind her fan.
‘But you assert that they are no longer mine?’ continued the spiritseer. ‘Is that your meaning?’
In reply, the farseer looked at Yvraine and then back to Iyanna.
‘It has become clear where your loyalties lie, Iyanna. Save yourself much anguish by admitting as such. Since the terrible misfortunes of the Red Moon fell upon your House there has been nothing to bind you to Iyanden save for habit and history.’
The spiritseer opened her mouth to rebut the assertion but found that the right words fled her. She satisfied honour and ego with a curt shake of the head before she turned sharply away, the butt of her spear rapping deafeningly on the floor as she strode towards the dome’s exit.
Yvraine stepped closer to the farseer as Alorynis wove in and out of Dhentiln’s legs. The Iyandeni seer directed an irritated glance at the creature, a psychic static causing the runes upon his bracelets and at his belt to fidget and buzz.
‘Confounded gyrinx,’ he muttered.
‘I live to confound the expectations of my seniors,’ Yvraine said quietly, resting a hand lightly on the sleeve of the seer. She fixed him with an icy stare. ‘Your people and mine shall walk side by side, but I will accept no distraction from my goal. I serve all aeldari through Ynnead, not one kabal or craftworld, masque or maiden world. Remember that all of our souls belong to the Whispering God, unless you would prefer to spend your eternal afterlife in the grasp of the Great Enemy.’
Dhentiln shuddered and recoiled, snatching his arm away. He tried to muster anger, but fear washed from him in cold waves. Though his runes guarded his spirit against the predators and perils of the warp, his soul was laid bare before the sight of the Opener of the Seventh Way. She continued before he could speak.
‘I have but one use for Zaisuthra, the gate that will take us to the Well of the Dead. All other concerns are yours alone, and Iyanden is welcome to them.’
Dhentiln considered this piece of information for a moment, brow furrowed.
‘You think you will find the Tomb of Eldanesh?’ His laugh was short and bitter, almost a yap. ‘You crave death more than I realised, if you think to venture into that cursed place.’
‘What do you know?’ demanded Yvraine. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The touch of Khaine lies upon that realm, Daughter of Ynnead. The god of the dead cannot protect you there, for it is steeped in the treachery of Kaela Mensha Khaine. Only strife and bloodshed waits for those that seek the Well of the Dead. Thus it is written in our legends.’ His expression softened, anger curbed by concern. ‘If you are right, and Zaisuthra is home to the Gate of Malice, do not pass through it. There is nothing on the other side but ruin. Khaine was the doom of our people once before, do not give him a second chance.’
Shaken by the farseer’s sincerity, Yvraine said nothing more. She quickly followed after Iyanna, Alorynis trotting at her heel.
CHAPTER 8
THE GHOST HALLS
The two sisters-of-the-dead approached the Gate of Souls, a metaphorical as well as physical departure point from the craftworld of the living to the abandoned lands of the dead. For Iyanna the Ghost Halls of Iyanden were a second home – or a first home in the case of the ancestral lands of the House of Arienal. To Yvraine they were a sacred realm, the resting place of Ynnead’s wards.
The physical Gate of Souls appeared as a broad, closed archway ten times the height of an aeldari, vast enough for even the great wraithknights to pass back and forth. Two pillars of silver and white stone held up the immense lintel, the runes of four dozen Houses inscribed upon its surface.
The lands of the dome that covered the approaches to the crossing point had once been verdant meadows and forests, through which had wound sparkling streams and golden stoned pathways. Memorial monoliths and statues had been erected in hundreds of secluded grottoes and groves, shrines to the fallen hidden in caverns and behind the cascade of rainbow-girded waterfalls.
Now there was nothing left but grey sand, sharp grit and shattered monuments. Columned mausoleums stood broken on hilltops, bare to the sky and the uncaring universe, roofs toppled. The streams were dry beds, littered with the bones of fish and water mammals, their tiny skull eyes staring up from the hardened silt. Coins and trinkets and lovers’ tryst-gifts tossed into the pools for the blessings of the ancestors were held fast in the dirt, their gold and silver bright against the dark mud. The white-timbered bridges that had spanned the waterways were nothing but rotted piles, jag-topped fangs in the dark chasms and shadowed canyons that had once glittered with ten thousand lanterns, between cairn-littered mounds that had resounded to beautiful songs of lament beneath a constant starlit night generated by the craftworld. All of that midnight beauty had been replaced by a harsh, bland glare of artificial light, leaving little shadow and even less sense of awe.
Memories crowded Iyanna’s thoughts, images of the place as it had been. Her vision misted as she followed a path towards the gate beside Yvraine.
‘We came here when I was young. Many times, on the festivals of remembrance, for the banquets of joyous memorial. The happiness of lives spent well, and the sadness of their loss. Always the balance, the living and the dead in harmony.’
She made a pretence of clearing her throat, though it was no physical blockage that stifled her words. Yvraine said nothing, waiting for her to continue.
‘I can see them now, the banners of red and yellow, the streamers tied to the legs of flitting tomb swallows. I hear laughter, the lilt of my mother’s mirth as she remembered the jests of her mother. My father, smiling, silent but happy. Starlight of silver, lanterns of yellow and azure. And the smell of incense! Aromatic, uplifting vapours carried on the breeze from the wardens’ shrine braziers. I had nearly forgotten that.’
‘I remember celebrations on Biel-tan,’ said Yvraine. A pause, just a breath, but a heartbeat of reflection before she continued. ‘Mostly such events were to laud those that had given their lives while in service to Khaine. Heroes, we thought them. The exarchs, they would be reborn. But the aspect warriors? The pilots? The guardians and the jetbike riders, the gunners and the ships’ crews? Their lives had been given up to the glory of the Biel-tani, laid upon the altar of Khaine for the restoration of our people and our empire.’
‘The Rebirth of Ancient Days?’ said Iyanna, referring to the meaning of the craftworld’s name.
‘I believed it then, that we might be restored,’ confessed Yvraine with an embarrassed flush to her cheeks. ‘The folly! That we could ever drag ourselves back from the abyss into which we had plunged. To think that war and death would save us, that Khaine would be our salvation.’
‘Now you know that there is another way.’
‘The Seventh Way,’ said Yvraine, her smile wry.
They continued in silence as they walked the long paths towards the distant gate, contemplating the passing of even the dead. Not a buzz of insect or bird call or scurry of small animal broke the still, only the light tread of their boots on the gravelled paths.
They came before the Gate of Souls and stopped. Though all about was physically dead, even in that dismal place the ever-present aura of the infinity circuit laid upon everything. Attuned to the energy of the dead, both Yvraine and Iyanna accepted its presence as others accept the air in their lungs or the ground beneath their feet.
To the Opener of the Seventh Way it was the constant whisper of her god. On a craftworld she heard the souls of the dead speaking to her constantly, though their words were only half-formed, their intent clouded by their incorporeal nature.
For Iyanna, who had moved about every fibre of the infinity circuit at one time or another, the soul of Iyanden felt like a static upon her mind, rising to an invigorating crackle or snap when she neared one of the nodes through which its power might be accessed.
Beyond the gate lay nothing. At the boundary the infinity circuit had been deliberately curtailed, to preserve and power a functioning matrix for the living inhabitants of Iyanden. Crystal lattices and psychically inductive roots and branches existed past the gate, but they were fractured, disincorporated from the whole.
The sundering had happened after the incursion of the tyranids, when swathes of the network had been tainted by the hive mind, rendered corrupt by the phenomenon known as the Shadow in the Warp. Rather than some amorphous blanketing nightmare that quelled the realm of the other, it had formed tendrils of predatory darkness, infiltrating and devouring the conduits even as bio-constructs had assimilated the physical, living parts of the craftworld.
Upon this calamity had been poured further catastrophe, when both mortal followers of the Dark Gods and the daemonic minions of the Lord of Decay had followed in the wake of the Great Devourer. Already cut off from the hub, huge tracts of the Ghost Halls had been lost to the taint of Nurgle, purged after the invasion only by great effort of the seers and bonesingers.
If the dome of the Gate of Souls was a topographically barren waste, the Ghost Halls beyond were the psychic equivalent.
‘Ynnead has need,’ Yvraine reminded her companion. ‘While Dhentiln can reasonably lay claim that Iyanden requires all that remains of its infinity circuit, he could not say the same for the dispossessed dead.’
Iyanna nodded and raised the Spear of Teuthlas. A halo gleamed from its bladed tip, reflected from the dark, solid metal of the gate doors. The light flowed like quicksilver along slender channels, creating a glittering pattern upon the massive portal. On the left, entwined through the branches of a tree in full bloom, the rune of Isha, mother of the aeldari. On the other, set upon a pyramid that was in turn emblazoned upon a sun, the sigil of the Lord of Heavens, Asuryan.
‘The living seek the audience of the dead,’ Iyanna intoned, the words swallowed by the enormous weight of the portal in front of her.
A noise like the flutter of a breeze through dead leaves coalesced into a whispered reply.
Who speaks for the living?
‘Iyanna, of the House of Arienal, spiritseer. You know me well, ancestors of Iyanden.’
‘Yvraine, Emissary of Ynnead, daughter of shadows. My lord is your lord.’
Silence.
Iyanna’s heart thudded a score of times as she waited, and beside her Yvraine regarded the closed portal with icy eyes, her gyrinx companion on her shoulder stock still, fur and whiskers prickling.
Soundless, a dark line appeared between the doors and widened as the portal opened away from them. A wind blew out, chill and dry, and beyond the opening Gate of Souls lay nothing but pitch blackness.
Iyanna and Yvraine spared one look for each other, sisters in the family of Ynnead, and stepped into the embrace of the dead’s midnight.
The light from the dome outside the Gate of Souls faded as they walked on, the floor of the hall hard and cold underfoot. There was nothing of the infinity circuit here, not the slightest buzz or blur of psychic life. The Ghost Halls of Iyanden had changed little from when Yvraine had last visited, though also there had passed many cycles of subtle progression. In the past these domes had been disturbing analogues of the quarters of the living, where the dead had continued by rote that which they had done as mortals. Ancient courts of princes and seers had sat in death, a mockery of the intrigues and fashions that had once held sway upon the lost Houses. Clad in shells of wraithbone the spirits of the dead wandered their chambers and passages, and stood endless vigil at tombstones and parapets, gazing out to broken towers and fallen mansions.
The mindless parody continued still, but in far less grandeur. Severed from the infinity circuit the Ghost Halls had dwindled, becoming twilit places of shadows and formless wraiths. The carcasses of broken wraithguard and wraithblades lay where they had fallen in tiled hallways and on winding stone stairs, the ghostlight of their former occupants skittering to and fro in confusion and desperation, locked to their last mortal incarnation but unable to manifest anything but the most rudimentary awareness.
They proceeded along carpeted hallways between tapestries as old as the craftworld depicting cities and mountaintop fastnesses destroyed in the Fall five generations before. Ornate chandeliers and lamps glowed fitfully, enough only to throw dancing shadows about the intruders, casting patches of darkness across their path. The spear of Teuthlas gleamed in Iyanna’s hand, a pool of golden light around her, while Yvraine glowed with a moonlight of her own, reflecting the tomb-energy that seeped through every timber, beam, stone and thread of the forgotten palaces.
At the approach of the spiritseer the aeldari will o’ the wisps became agitated, gaining a semblance of their lost awareness, base sentience returning with the focus her presence brought. They flocked to her, streaming through archways and down stairs, until Iyanna was at the centre of a growing constellation of souls that bobbed about her like fireflies.
She raised her empty hand and allowed a soul to settle there, feeling for an instant the spark of his life, sharing fleeting memories of love and loss, poetry and destruction. With a flick of the wrist the spiritseer sent the soul back to the others.
‘Send word,’ she whispered, her breath a vapour lit by the swarming spirits. ‘Send word that a conclave is to be held. The House of Arienal calls.’
With a psychic impulse she sent the formless ghosts in all directions, scattering them on the immaterial breezes. Her imperative was the last thing in their thoughts, such as they were, to carry her message out to the other Ghost Halls.
‘Will they come?’ asked Yvraine.
‘We shall see,’ said Iyanna.
CHAPTER 9
THE BEACON OF ARIEACH
It took a greater part of the remaining cycle to exit the grand house of the Gate of Souls and cross the Barrenlands that encircled it. Without energy from the network of Iyanden it was a desolate, lonely place, lit only by soul-light and the glimmer of stars through the azure skyscreens above. The skeletal remains of forests and the broken cliffs of long, dry shorelines guided them along the trackless route, though Iyanna knew the way by instinct. Not a soul stirred here save in the stones of the spiritseer and the coiling deathly energies of Ynnead that danced among the folds of Yvraine’s courtly garb.
A distant crash of waves sounded against a grey shore, and to this abandoned beach came the pair, to stand on the colourless dunes to look out upon a sluggish sea, its tides and swells created by extension from the still-living Dome of Skies that bounded the far side of the sea. On a crumbling cliff top to their right, overlooking the dismal bay, the Watchtower of Arieach stood proud, a yellow thrust of ghost-stone amid a complex of low buildings and walls.
They made their way along the beach, leaving shallow footprints in sands that had not seen mortal tread for more than three million cycles. A winding path through spurs of gorse and sea rushes led them up the cliffside, a strata of red, grey, black and white stone on one side, a precipitous drop to jagged rocks on the other with no rail. Yet aeldari are a dexterous people and the ascent carried no more risk for the pair than walking over open ground.
When they achieved the summit the path dissipated again, swallowed by dead grass and age-worn triangular flagstones that demarked the boundary of the watchtower’s realm, lined by a series of standing stones marked by moonlit glyphs in the most ancient aeldari language.
‘Are you sure you wish to do this?’ asked Yvraine when Iyanna moved to step across the boundary line. She laid a hand on the sleeve of the spiritseer’s robe.
‘Too long I have avoided this moment,’ Iyanna replied. ‘I am the last of the House of Arienal, and it is my right.’
There was a moment of resistance when they met the invisible border of the watchtower. Though the Ghost Halls were separated from the main infinity circuit, here and there pocket networks continued to work, as was the case at Arieach. A spirit engine hidden in the foundations of the tower, linked to the lodestones set about the circumference, recognised Iyanna’s approach and stuttered into a semblance of activity.
Silver illumination gleamed from high windows that had been dark a heartbeat earlier. Rune-carvings on the monoliths responded, shining red and green upon the parched grassland and abandoned buildings.
Yvraine moved to follow but Iyanna halted her with a raised hand.
‘I will return soon,’ the spiritseer assured her sister-of-the-dead.
Using the Spear of Teuthlas as a walking staff, Iyanna picked her way through tumbled boulders and uneven slabs, heading towards the central tower. She was still a dozen steps from the dark red wood when the doors opened. The great portal swung outwards to reveal a dimly lit interior. It was far from welcoming, the shadows seemed deepened rather than allayed by the gleam of her speartip.
Just a few strides inside she came to a halt, facing a semicircular alcove large enough for three to stand abreast, directly facing the door. The floor was tiled with black marble, a golden sigil of the House of Arienal set upon the curved wall.
Iyanna stepped within and looked up to see a tracery of crystal set into the white ceiling, much like an asymmetric spider’s web of diamond. Returning her gaze to the symbol, she reached out a hand, hesitating for just a moment before making contact.
Her ascent was both swift and without motion. A rush through her soul disconnected mind from body. She was remotely aware of her body disassembling even as her spirit was conducted intact along the psychic pathways, to be reunited with the reassembled molecules of her physical form in the time it took an electron to orbit its nucleus. One instant she had been standing at the foot of the tower, the next she stood upon the exposed summit, the wind dragging at her robe, the floor beneath her feet crackling with sparks of transporter energy.
The vertigo hit her when she took a step, threatening to topple her to the pale yellow slabs. Closing her eyes did not help, serving only to increase the dizzying spin that made it feel that her brain was rotating wildly within her head. She instead fixed her gaze on a point of silvery light far below – the ghost-haze of Yvraine.
‘But you assert that they are no longer mine?’ continued the spiritseer. ‘Is that your meaning?’
In reply, the farseer looked at Yvraine and then back to Iyanna.
‘It has become clear where your loyalties lie, Iyanna. Save yourself much anguish by admitting as such. Since the terrible misfortunes of the Red Moon fell upon your House there has been nothing to bind you to Iyanden save for habit and history.’
The spiritseer opened her mouth to rebut the assertion but found that the right words fled her. She satisfied honour and ego with a curt shake of the head before she turned sharply away, the butt of her spear rapping deafeningly on the floor as she strode towards the dome’s exit.
Yvraine stepped closer to the farseer as Alorynis wove in and out of Dhentiln’s legs. The Iyandeni seer directed an irritated glance at the creature, a psychic static causing the runes upon his bracelets and at his belt to fidget and buzz.
‘Confounded gyrinx,’ he muttered.
‘I live to confound the expectations of my seniors,’ Yvraine said quietly, resting a hand lightly on the sleeve of the seer. She fixed him with an icy stare. ‘Your people and mine shall walk side by side, but I will accept no distraction from my goal. I serve all aeldari through Ynnead, not one kabal or craftworld, masque or maiden world. Remember that all of our souls belong to the Whispering God, unless you would prefer to spend your eternal afterlife in the grasp of the Great Enemy.’
Dhentiln shuddered and recoiled, snatching his arm away. He tried to muster anger, but fear washed from him in cold waves. Though his runes guarded his spirit against the predators and perils of the warp, his soul was laid bare before the sight of the Opener of the Seventh Way. She continued before he could speak.
‘I have but one use for Zaisuthra, the gate that will take us to the Well of the Dead. All other concerns are yours alone, and Iyanden is welcome to them.’
Dhentiln considered this piece of information for a moment, brow furrowed.
‘You think you will find the Tomb of Eldanesh?’ His laugh was short and bitter, almost a yap. ‘You crave death more than I realised, if you think to venture into that cursed place.’
‘What do you know?’ demanded Yvraine. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The touch of Khaine lies upon that realm, Daughter of Ynnead. The god of the dead cannot protect you there, for it is steeped in the treachery of Kaela Mensha Khaine. Only strife and bloodshed waits for those that seek the Well of the Dead. Thus it is written in our legends.’ His expression softened, anger curbed by concern. ‘If you are right, and Zaisuthra is home to the Gate of Malice, do not pass through it. There is nothing on the other side but ruin. Khaine was the doom of our people once before, do not give him a second chance.’
Shaken by the farseer’s sincerity, Yvraine said nothing more. She quickly followed after Iyanna, Alorynis trotting at her heel.
CHAPTER 8
THE GHOST HALLS
The two sisters-of-the-dead approached the Gate of Souls, a metaphorical as well as physical departure point from the craftworld of the living to the abandoned lands of the dead. For Iyanna the Ghost Halls of Iyanden were a second home – or a first home in the case of the ancestral lands of the House of Arienal. To Yvraine they were a sacred realm, the resting place of Ynnead’s wards.
The physical Gate of Souls appeared as a broad, closed archway ten times the height of an aeldari, vast enough for even the great wraithknights to pass back and forth. Two pillars of silver and white stone held up the immense lintel, the runes of four dozen Houses inscribed upon its surface.
The lands of the dome that covered the approaches to the crossing point had once been verdant meadows and forests, through which had wound sparkling streams and golden stoned pathways. Memorial monoliths and statues had been erected in hundreds of secluded grottoes and groves, shrines to the fallen hidden in caverns and behind the cascade of rainbow-girded waterfalls.
Now there was nothing left but grey sand, sharp grit and shattered monuments. Columned mausoleums stood broken on hilltops, bare to the sky and the uncaring universe, roofs toppled. The streams were dry beds, littered with the bones of fish and water mammals, their tiny skull eyes staring up from the hardened silt. Coins and trinkets and lovers’ tryst-gifts tossed into the pools for the blessings of the ancestors were held fast in the dirt, their gold and silver bright against the dark mud. The white-timbered bridges that had spanned the waterways were nothing but rotted piles, jag-topped fangs in the dark chasms and shadowed canyons that had once glittered with ten thousand lanterns, between cairn-littered mounds that had resounded to beautiful songs of lament beneath a constant starlit night generated by the craftworld. All of that midnight beauty had been replaced by a harsh, bland glare of artificial light, leaving little shadow and even less sense of awe.
Memories crowded Iyanna’s thoughts, images of the place as it had been. Her vision misted as she followed a path towards the gate beside Yvraine.
‘We came here when I was young. Many times, on the festivals of remembrance, for the banquets of joyous memorial. The happiness of lives spent well, and the sadness of their loss. Always the balance, the living and the dead in harmony.’
She made a pretence of clearing her throat, though it was no physical blockage that stifled her words. Yvraine said nothing, waiting for her to continue.
‘I can see them now, the banners of red and yellow, the streamers tied to the legs of flitting tomb swallows. I hear laughter, the lilt of my mother’s mirth as she remembered the jests of her mother. My father, smiling, silent but happy. Starlight of silver, lanterns of yellow and azure. And the smell of incense! Aromatic, uplifting vapours carried on the breeze from the wardens’ shrine braziers. I had nearly forgotten that.’
‘I remember celebrations on Biel-tan,’ said Yvraine. A pause, just a breath, but a heartbeat of reflection before she continued. ‘Mostly such events were to laud those that had given their lives while in service to Khaine. Heroes, we thought them. The exarchs, they would be reborn. But the aspect warriors? The pilots? The guardians and the jetbike riders, the gunners and the ships’ crews? Their lives had been given up to the glory of the Biel-tani, laid upon the altar of Khaine for the restoration of our people and our empire.’
‘The Rebirth of Ancient Days?’ said Iyanna, referring to the meaning of the craftworld’s name.
‘I believed it then, that we might be restored,’ confessed Yvraine with an embarrassed flush to her cheeks. ‘The folly! That we could ever drag ourselves back from the abyss into which we had plunged. To think that war and death would save us, that Khaine would be our salvation.’
‘Now you know that there is another way.’
‘The Seventh Way,’ said Yvraine, her smile wry.
They continued in silence as they walked the long paths towards the distant gate, contemplating the passing of even the dead. Not a buzz of insect or bird call or scurry of small animal broke the still, only the light tread of their boots on the gravelled paths.
They came before the Gate of Souls and stopped. Though all about was physically dead, even in that dismal place the ever-present aura of the infinity circuit laid upon everything. Attuned to the energy of the dead, both Yvraine and Iyanna accepted its presence as others accept the air in their lungs or the ground beneath their feet.
To the Opener of the Seventh Way it was the constant whisper of her god. On a craftworld she heard the souls of the dead speaking to her constantly, though their words were only half-formed, their intent clouded by their incorporeal nature.
For Iyanna, who had moved about every fibre of the infinity circuit at one time or another, the soul of Iyanden felt like a static upon her mind, rising to an invigorating crackle or snap when she neared one of the nodes through which its power might be accessed.
Beyond the gate lay nothing. At the boundary the infinity circuit had been deliberately curtailed, to preserve and power a functioning matrix for the living inhabitants of Iyanden. Crystal lattices and psychically inductive roots and branches existed past the gate, but they were fractured, disincorporated from the whole.
The sundering had happened after the incursion of the tyranids, when swathes of the network had been tainted by the hive mind, rendered corrupt by the phenomenon known as the Shadow in the Warp. Rather than some amorphous blanketing nightmare that quelled the realm of the other, it had formed tendrils of predatory darkness, infiltrating and devouring the conduits even as bio-constructs had assimilated the physical, living parts of the craftworld.
Upon this calamity had been poured further catastrophe, when both mortal followers of the Dark Gods and the daemonic minions of the Lord of Decay had followed in the wake of the Great Devourer. Already cut off from the hub, huge tracts of the Ghost Halls had been lost to the taint of Nurgle, purged after the invasion only by great effort of the seers and bonesingers.
If the dome of the Gate of Souls was a topographically barren waste, the Ghost Halls beyond were the psychic equivalent.
‘Ynnead has need,’ Yvraine reminded her companion. ‘While Dhentiln can reasonably lay claim that Iyanden requires all that remains of its infinity circuit, he could not say the same for the dispossessed dead.’
Iyanna nodded and raised the Spear of Teuthlas. A halo gleamed from its bladed tip, reflected from the dark, solid metal of the gate doors. The light flowed like quicksilver along slender channels, creating a glittering pattern upon the massive portal. On the left, entwined through the branches of a tree in full bloom, the rune of Isha, mother of the aeldari. On the other, set upon a pyramid that was in turn emblazoned upon a sun, the sigil of the Lord of Heavens, Asuryan.
‘The living seek the audience of the dead,’ Iyanna intoned, the words swallowed by the enormous weight of the portal in front of her.
A noise like the flutter of a breeze through dead leaves coalesced into a whispered reply.
Who speaks for the living?
‘Iyanna, of the House of Arienal, spiritseer. You know me well, ancestors of Iyanden.’
‘Yvraine, Emissary of Ynnead, daughter of shadows. My lord is your lord.’
Silence.
Iyanna’s heart thudded a score of times as she waited, and beside her Yvraine regarded the closed portal with icy eyes, her gyrinx companion on her shoulder stock still, fur and whiskers prickling.
Soundless, a dark line appeared between the doors and widened as the portal opened away from them. A wind blew out, chill and dry, and beyond the opening Gate of Souls lay nothing but pitch blackness.
Iyanna and Yvraine spared one look for each other, sisters in the family of Ynnead, and stepped into the embrace of the dead’s midnight.
The light from the dome outside the Gate of Souls faded as they walked on, the floor of the hall hard and cold underfoot. There was nothing of the infinity circuit here, not the slightest buzz or blur of psychic life. The Ghost Halls of Iyanden had changed little from when Yvraine had last visited, though also there had passed many cycles of subtle progression. In the past these domes had been disturbing analogues of the quarters of the living, where the dead had continued by rote that which they had done as mortals. Ancient courts of princes and seers had sat in death, a mockery of the intrigues and fashions that had once held sway upon the lost Houses. Clad in shells of wraithbone the spirits of the dead wandered their chambers and passages, and stood endless vigil at tombstones and parapets, gazing out to broken towers and fallen mansions.
The mindless parody continued still, but in far less grandeur. Severed from the infinity circuit the Ghost Halls had dwindled, becoming twilit places of shadows and formless wraiths. The carcasses of broken wraithguard and wraithblades lay where they had fallen in tiled hallways and on winding stone stairs, the ghostlight of their former occupants skittering to and fro in confusion and desperation, locked to their last mortal incarnation but unable to manifest anything but the most rudimentary awareness.
They proceeded along carpeted hallways between tapestries as old as the craftworld depicting cities and mountaintop fastnesses destroyed in the Fall five generations before. Ornate chandeliers and lamps glowed fitfully, enough only to throw dancing shadows about the intruders, casting patches of darkness across their path. The spear of Teuthlas gleamed in Iyanna’s hand, a pool of golden light around her, while Yvraine glowed with a moonlight of her own, reflecting the tomb-energy that seeped through every timber, beam, stone and thread of the forgotten palaces.
At the approach of the spiritseer the aeldari will o’ the wisps became agitated, gaining a semblance of their lost awareness, base sentience returning with the focus her presence brought. They flocked to her, streaming through archways and down stairs, until Iyanna was at the centre of a growing constellation of souls that bobbed about her like fireflies.
She raised her empty hand and allowed a soul to settle there, feeling for an instant the spark of his life, sharing fleeting memories of love and loss, poetry and destruction. With a flick of the wrist the spiritseer sent the soul back to the others.
‘Send word,’ she whispered, her breath a vapour lit by the swarming spirits. ‘Send word that a conclave is to be held. The House of Arienal calls.’
With a psychic impulse she sent the formless ghosts in all directions, scattering them on the immaterial breezes. Her imperative was the last thing in their thoughts, such as they were, to carry her message out to the other Ghost Halls.
‘Will they come?’ asked Yvraine.
‘We shall see,’ said Iyanna.
CHAPTER 9
THE BEACON OF ARIEACH
It took a greater part of the remaining cycle to exit the grand house of the Gate of Souls and cross the Barrenlands that encircled it. Without energy from the network of Iyanden it was a desolate, lonely place, lit only by soul-light and the glimmer of stars through the azure skyscreens above. The skeletal remains of forests and the broken cliffs of long, dry shorelines guided them along the trackless route, though Iyanna knew the way by instinct. Not a soul stirred here save in the stones of the spiritseer and the coiling deathly energies of Ynnead that danced among the folds of Yvraine’s courtly garb.
A distant crash of waves sounded against a grey shore, and to this abandoned beach came the pair, to stand on the colourless dunes to look out upon a sluggish sea, its tides and swells created by extension from the still-living Dome of Skies that bounded the far side of the sea. On a crumbling cliff top to their right, overlooking the dismal bay, the Watchtower of Arieach stood proud, a yellow thrust of ghost-stone amid a complex of low buildings and walls.
They made their way along the beach, leaving shallow footprints in sands that had not seen mortal tread for more than three million cycles. A winding path through spurs of gorse and sea rushes led them up the cliffside, a strata of red, grey, black and white stone on one side, a precipitous drop to jagged rocks on the other with no rail. Yet aeldari are a dexterous people and the ascent carried no more risk for the pair than walking over open ground.
When they achieved the summit the path dissipated again, swallowed by dead grass and age-worn triangular flagstones that demarked the boundary of the watchtower’s realm, lined by a series of standing stones marked by moonlit glyphs in the most ancient aeldari language.
‘Are you sure you wish to do this?’ asked Yvraine when Iyanna moved to step across the boundary line. She laid a hand on the sleeve of the spiritseer’s robe.
‘Too long I have avoided this moment,’ Iyanna replied. ‘I am the last of the House of Arienal, and it is my right.’
There was a moment of resistance when they met the invisible border of the watchtower. Though the Ghost Halls were separated from the main infinity circuit, here and there pocket networks continued to work, as was the case at Arieach. A spirit engine hidden in the foundations of the tower, linked to the lodestones set about the circumference, recognised Iyanna’s approach and stuttered into a semblance of activity.
Silver illumination gleamed from high windows that had been dark a heartbeat earlier. Rune-carvings on the monoliths responded, shining red and green upon the parched grassland and abandoned buildings.
Yvraine moved to follow but Iyanna halted her with a raised hand.
‘I will return soon,’ the spiritseer assured her sister-of-the-dead.
Using the Spear of Teuthlas as a walking staff, Iyanna picked her way through tumbled boulders and uneven slabs, heading towards the central tower. She was still a dozen steps from the dark red wood when the doors opened. The great portal swung outwards to reveal a dimly lit interior. It was far from welcoming, the shadows seemed deepened rather than allayed by the gleam of her speartip.
Just a few strides inside she came to a halt, facing a semicircular alcove large enough for three to stand abreast, directly facing the door. The floor was tiled with black marble, a golden sigil of the House of Arienal set upon the curved wall.
Iyanna stepped within and looked up to see a tracery of crystal set into the white ceiling, much like an asymmetric spider’s web of diamond. Returning her gaze to the symbol, she reached out a hand, hesitating for just a moment before making contact.
Her ascent was both swift and without motion. A rush through her soul disconnected mind from body. She was remotely aware of her body disassembling even as her spirit was conducted intact along the psychic pathways, to be reunited with the reassembled molecules of her physical form in the time it took an electron to orbit its nucleus. One instant she had been standing at the foot of the tower, the next she stood upon the exposed summit, the wind dragging at her robe, the floor beneath her feet crackling with sparks of transporter energy.
The vertigo hit her when she took a step, threatening to topple her to the pale yellow slabs. Closing her eyes did not help, serving only to increase the dizzying spin that made it feel that her brain was rotating wildly within her head. She instead fixed her gaze on a point of silvery light far below – the ghost-haze of Yvraine.
