Valedor, p.10
Valedor, page 10
So confident was Aloec Sunspear that it would never occur to him that he might be wrong. After all, he so rarely was. Sunspear was not arrogant, nor was he afflicted with hubris. His expertise was a simple fact.
This steely self-belief was the core of an unbending personality. Aloec was a commander without compare, determined and ruthless on the battlefield, some would say humourless off it, as he found laughter in few things other than victory. Mocked by his more flippant colleagues, he would retort, ‘And what is there to laugh about, in these dark and dismal days?’ Although like most Biel-Tanians, he believed with utter conviction that the eldar’s time was coming again, he harboured no doubts as to the odds that they faced.
His mouth was therefore permanently downturned, his eyes flat and calculating. It was whispered that he should not be upon the Path of Command at all, but was marked by fate to be an exarch, and that Morai-Heg’s ghost would make him pay for his defiance of her intentions. Three aspect shrines he had passed through, the Patient Blade, Regrets Rendered Molten, and Flickering Extinction, and the exarchs of them all said differently. He had endured the ritual of Rhaan Lona in each without incident. No matter what his peers thought, Khaine had deemed him worthy.
Sunspear wore a tall scorpion helm. His armour was the white of Biel-Tan, and a rich green cloak patterned with thorns of gold hung from his shoulders. His stern demeanour was hidden by the helm, and his exceptional height – he was tall by the measure of his people – made greater by his towering crest. A grey sash hung with the runes of Dire Avenger, Striking Scorpion and Fire Dragon crossed his chest.
‘The eyes of the Dragon are put out.’ His words were conveyed to the whole of Biel-Tan’s army over radio. An inconvenient consequence of their foe’s nature. If he was affected by the crushing horror of the hive mind’s psychic roar, his followers could not perceive it.
The autarch turned from the swirling clouds of pollutants and spores that obscured his view of the valley. His command post occupied a flat shelf of rock several thousand paces below the summit of the Godpeak. The rest of the Inner Command were with him – the farseers Forlissiar, Kellian and Serriestalor, the quartet of warlocks that accompanied them, working hard to shield the farseers from the collective psyche of the swarm, and Autarch Hethaeliar the Fourth-Blooded, his second-in-command.
Sunspear’s personal transport floated several paces away, the Inner Command standing around it, all utilising gestures that suggested deep communion with the army’s various elements. Autarch Hethaeliar hailed him, her languid voice intimate in his ear-beads. ‘Lord Sunspear, the Vyper squadrons are reporting in.’
‘I open my ears to you, swift hunters,’ said Sunspear in the formal mode.
‘Autarch, creatures of both swarms are present in large numbers.’ Images flashed up on Sunspear’s viewing orb. The orb was projected by his helmet lenses directly onto his retinas in such a way as to make it appear as if it were in the air in front of him, a useful illusion. Flawless pictures of tyranids and broken cities paraded past his eyes. A smattering of the aliens were of red and bone; in the main they were purple and an unhealthy white. ‘The majority of Far Ranging Hunger are to our north, heading at speed towards your position.’
‘They have detected us?’
One of the farseers, Serriestalor, moved his head sideways, one hand up, the other palm down and descending. Not yet.
‘Starving Dragon roams the plains and the dead seas to the south, with greatest concentrations around the human cities and other population centres,’ continued the Vyper pilot. ‘Far Ranging Hunger moves towards them. It is incidental that you are in their path. As far as is discernible by us, you are undetected, my autarch.’
‘The humans, what was their fate? How fare the first despoilers of twice-despoiled Dûriel?’
‘You seek allies, autarch?’ interjected Forlissiar. Of all the three seers in Sunspear’s Inner Command, he had been most opposed to the plan. He was firmly of Altariec’s camp.
Forlissiar wished to goad him by suggesting that the lumpen humans could aid them. Sunspear ignored his mockery. The Vyper leader continued his report.
‘There are no signs of the humans anywhere remaining within five hundred thousand paces of the Godpeak. They have been destroyed and are being devoured. The majority of this world’s biomass was concentrated within the settlements of the humans. Our outrunner squadrons passed over three of their smaller cities. They are deserted of inhabitants.’
‘This area, it is free of their activity?’
‘There is a crude geothermal power station to the north-west of our position, that is all.’
‘What is its status?’
‘Empty but for blood, autarch. The Godpeak may be extinct, but the area remains volcanically active. The plant’s systems, though primitive, appear to have gone into failsafe shutdown. A fleet of humans flees the system from the world they call Ector, they will pass near here in half a cycle’s time.’
Sunspear tensed. He would have dearly liked to scatter their remains to the stellar winds for their crimes in this system.
‘They will have to wait for their punishment. We have no time, nor the strength to destroy them,’ said Kellian softly.
‘Show me Starving Dragon,’ Sunspear said. The images projected by his helmet changed to show concentrations of the purple aliens.
‘As yet it is unaware of us,’ continued the Vyper leader. ‘Resistance has been quashed, the tertiary phase has begun.’ Fat creatures that were little more than bags surrounded by legs vomited torrents of bile into shallow pools excavated by strange, shovel-faced drones. Spines grew out of the ground, and from his studies of the Great Devourer, the autarch knew they would be sucking the mineral and organic wealth from the soil and rocks. The spines would grow throughout the next dozen cycles, to be milked and then devoured towards the end of the consumption phase. Others, those around the digestion pools, would grow into immense capillary towers, the means by which the biomass of the planet would be assimilated by the hive fleets. Swarms of small leaping creatures picked up every scrap of biological matter and devoured it, while larger workers stacked corpses in front of the smoking cities of mankind to be consumed by immense eater beasts.
‘They prepare to concentrate planetary resources,’ said Sunspear. ‘We must strike before the swarm begins to consume itself and returns its matter to the hive fleet. That is the point of danger for us. Far Ranging Hunger’s creatures will be swept up by the greater swarm of Starving Dragon and our own life codes added to bolster the arsenal of the Great Dragon.’ He pursed his lips, then lifted a hand, fingers fanning out. This gesture of confidence-in-knowledge would be visible in the squadron leader’s own visual feed. ‘Now tell me, what news of our own cities? I am curious.’
‘See for yourself, my autarch.’ The orb showed weathered stumps of wraithbone. ‘The usurpers demolished them, and those few ruins that stand still have been abraded by time’s passage.’ More pictures clicked by, dry seabeds, desert where there had once been rich grassland. Dûriel’s forests had survived, including those in the valley and hills below the Godpeak, but in a sorry state. Dead trees, felled by pollution, leaned drunkenly on one another; in places all were dead, nothing but rotting stumps and weed species remaining. Everywhere the vegetation was sickly, ravaged by off-world diseases and the salt blowing in from the dried-up sea beds. This was not the work of the Great Devourer, but of mankind. ‘The human squatters have managed our property carelessly. There is nothing but despoliation here. They were unforgivably thorough.’
Anger quickened Aloec’s heart. The seers, Altariec chief among them, had warned him his gambit was unfavourable, but he had nurtured a hope that once the voidspawn had been driven off, Dûriel could be saved for the future of his people. The seers accompanying him saw his disappointment and sorrowed for it, although they had known it could be no other way.
‘Their rapaciousness disgusts me. They take a paradise and make it a wasteland,’ said Aloec. ‘It is a mercy that they fell before the Great Dragon, for my revenge upon them would have been a hard one.’
Sunspear looked upwards to the pinnacle of the Godpeak, periodically obscured by the shifting red clouds of spores. Upon the very top were the broken remains of webway pylons, so ancient that the fragments of wraithbone looked indistinguishable from weathered stone. ‘They may topple our monuments,’ he said grimly, ‘but they have not the faintest understanding of our mastery. Final deployment may begin!’ he proclaimed. He unsheathed his chainsword and raised it high.
Above the shattered summit of the mountain, the clouds glowed bright as the chief webway gate to Dûriel opened. A slash of light swelled, then dilated into a sphere. Swarms of grav-craft shot through it, soaring off to hide themselves among the clouds. Dozens of smaller portals – temporary gates off the main conduit brought into being by wayseers – opened one after another where webway beacons had been secreted by eldar scouts, disgorging the armies of Biel-Tan unseen to positions all over the mountain.
‘You have lain dormant!’ said Sunspear to the gateway. ‘Too long you have waited for your true masters, for one hundred arcs! Today, your masters have returned!’ Sunspear looked again to the valley. ‘And we are too late.’
‘Autarch?’
The eldar that had spoken was a ranger, swathed in the heavy coat of his kind despite the sultry heat of the dying world. He wore no insignia, save a small badge depicting Iyanden’s world-rune. No marking told of his path, for his clothes told all. Sunspear smiled unkindly under his helmet. He knew the values of the outcasts well, but it never failed to amuse him that for all their rejection of the restrictive eldar way of life, they all affected exactly the same dress.
‘You say we are too late.’ The ranger shrugged. His topknot quirked with the motion. His helmet was off, his mouth covered with a filter mask, his eyes hidden by dark glasses. ‘There are thousands more virgin worlds awaiting the eldar, autarch. I have seen many of them.’
‘The loss of even one shames us all,’ snarled Sunspear, and he turned from the outcast to watch the might of his craftworld arrive to reclaim the wreck of Dûriel.
From a dozen webway gates, sleek eldar grav-vehicles poured forth. Delicate yet deadly Falcon grav-tanks, Wave Serpents, super-heavy Cobras, Vypers by the dozen and jetbikes by the score. Their engines were so hushed, the sound of the spores hissing down onto the rock of the mountain drowned them out. At the Inner Command’s order, the tanks took up formation in the boiling clouds, hidden from eye and mind alike.
On the flanks of the mountain, Dark Reapers took up station. Teams of Guardians guided heavy weapons mounted on grav-platforms into place. Aspect Warriors of close-combat shrines moved down the slope, preparing to blunt Far Ranging Hunger’s inevitable counter-attack. War walkers, nimble as mountain grazers, sprang from rock to rock as they moved into advantageous positions from where they could reap the greatest tally of the dead.
Sunspear watched all this on visual projection, listening in on the minimal radio chatter of his army. It gladdened his heart to see so many fine warriors, even if they were several thousand years too late to save stricken Dûriel.
The streamers of spores and pollutants blew away for a moment, revealing the vista to Aloec’s eyes unaided. From his vantage point, he looked down upon a karst landscape, a range of dumpy, round hills like blisters on the land, deep caves, and sudden gashes in the ground. All was swathed in sick forest, broken up by expanses of bare rock and scrub. The hills spread either side of the Godpeak to frame a shallow valley that once, so he had read in the records of Biel-Tan, had been a most beauteous place: the Valley of the Gods. Its statues and gardens were not even memories, levelled by mankind in unthinking destruction. Only the plants of dozens of worlds growing in weedy profusion hinted that once upon a time things had been different here.
What maddened Sunspear was that men had not even deigned to settle in the valley. The glory of the gardens ruined, they had withdrawn, perhaps unnerved by the atmosphere of the place; the main cities of men had lain some distance away from where the eldar’s old haunts had been, and the nearest lay well away from the valley. Senseless, thought Sunspear. They destroy for the sake of destruction.
All around the Godpeak, plumes of dust rose upwards, thrown into the air by the sharp hooves of hundreds of thousands of voidspawn racing towards the south; deep red and bone, the children of the Kraken.
To the east, the valley opened out to a plain that sloped down to the site of Dûriel’s evaporated oceans. The stubby forms of ex-islands poked up from dry flats in the far distance. Where the sun penetrated the cloud to shine upon the flats, there blazed the dazzling white of extensive salt deposits. This wound on the world bore injuries of its own: long, parallel rectangles had been scraped out by human mining machines.
To the south, glinting slicks of liquid could be spied, tiny shapes around them. Organic towers grew like plants, though many thousands of times bigger. These were the digestion pools his Vypers had shown him.
‘See, Forlissiar,’ said Sunspear. He asked for his guidance deliberately. ‘The tyranids of Starving Dragon have begun upon their digestion of the world’s remaining bounty. There, the capillary towers have taken root and grow. We have little time. When will the swarms combine?’
Forlissiar’s voice was strained. All the eldar felt the crushing intellect of the hive fleets pressing down upon them, a formless horror wracked by unspeakable hungers. Terror was yet another of its weapons, projected into the minds of its prey. For the likes of Forlissiar, whose psychic abilities were fully developed, the effect was amplified a thousand-fold. Only the coterie of four warlocks, lending their own psychic might to that of the farseers, allowed them to see into the future at all, or indeed to remain sane. ‘As far as I can judge it, in the afternoon of tomorrow, autarch. The threads of fate are obscured in many places, but we have persevered. You must strike before then. Eradication will take some time, if it is possible at all. Kellian, Serriestalor?’
The other two seers of the Inner Command joined them. ‘Starving Dragon will yet be unaware,’ said Kellian in the sing-song voice of a half-trance. ‘In this its dominance of the skein will be a blessing, for its ignorance will be plain to see.’
‘The dragon will feed, bent to the table, it will see its brother not,’ said Serriestalor.
‘Good,’ said Sunspear. ‘Good.’
‘Be wary, autarch,’ said Forlissiar. ‘Your opportunity is slim. Destruction of the Swordwind is the outcome of many threads, as Altariec warned you. You must be careful. Strike quickly, and withdraw.’
‘We have time,’ said Sunspear. ‘Altariec is too timid. We will wipe out all the creatures of Far Ranging Hunger and depart. I decree it will be so.’
A stream of information came to Sunspear and the Inner Command, squads moving to rendezvous points or emerging from the webway, wings of Crimson Hunters calling ready, status updates on the deployment. The farseers consulted the runes and each other, Forlissiar voicing concerns all the while, the three of them passing direction on to Sunspear who relayed it to his warriors. He trusted the seers would find the most fortuitous positions for his forces.
The sun sank below the horizon, and still the eldar army came through the webway. Hidden in the cloudbanks, they spread over the continent, taking up position over Far Ranging Hunger’s beasts. Vypers criss-crossed the planet at speed, marking out the locations of Starving Dragon’s main digestion pools. Most of these were outside the human cities. Grisly images of thousands of corpses dumped into steaming acid became commonplace on Sunspear’s display. Starving Dragon’s creatures on the world were vastly in the majority, even if they were only a part of the greater swarm in orbit. Sunspear was not complacent. If even a handful of Far Ranging Hunger’s higher creatures were absorbed by Starving Dragon, then the terrible future foreseen by Taec Silvereye of Iyanden would come to pass.
The night wore on. Lightning cracked in the distance and a mighty storm sprang up. Wind blew strongly over the peak, dry at first. Later in the night veils of coloured rain washed the landscape. Sunspear wondered idly if, now men were gone, the planet’s balance would reassert itself; if over time the rain would fall to fill the seas again.
Sunspear waved away his aides when they suggested he rest. ‘I will oversee the deployment of the last Guardian,’ he said. And he did.
The sun rose over clearer skies, the rain having cleared the lower atmosphere of spores, although the higher altitudes where the eldar waited were still thick with them. The last few messages came over the communications network. A Gemini squad of Revenant Titans, the last of the force’s heavy elements, emerged from the main webway portal bent double.
The army assembled, Sunspear took stock. His army was the fastest elements of the Swordwind, all that could be gathered and moved quickly through the webway, and was ready for battle. He made a silent prayer to Khaine and Asuryan that it would be enough. ‘We come in answer to Iyanden’s call,’ he said, ‘as is right. Now, let us announce our presence to the voidspawn, and redirect the flow of fate.’
During the night, the creatures of Far Ranging Hunger had made good headway. Coming down from their planetfall in the north, they filled the Valley of the Gods, their red and bone bodies lapping around the feet of the Godpeak in parody of the dead seas of Dûriel. Several hundred thousand paces east and west they stretched out, a tidemark on the landscape. Unsuspecting of the eldar craft hidden in the clouds, they pressed on, instinct driving them towards Starving Dragon.
How fitting, thought Sunspear, that their own spores mask the instruments of their destruction.
‘Attack,’ said Sunspear calmly. ‘Scour them from the skein.’
Immediately, several hundred craft plunged from the turgid skies over the swarm, spitting shuriken, las-bolts and the plasma packets of suncannon at the teeming mass of tyranids. Upon the mesas and hills around the valley, Aspect Warriors and war walkers opened fire, targeting the swarm’s leader-beasts. The Revenants ran towards the edge of the rock shelf where Sunspear’s command post was situated, and leapt into the air. Jump jets flared blue-white and they hurtled down the mountainside.
