Valedor, p.2
Valedor, page 2
The spell broke. ‘We are well suited to one another, you and I,’ he said to the spear. He strode forwards, up the single step onto the dais, and into the cone of light. Without hesitation he thrust his hand into the stasis field. It slowed, and pain needled his skin as chronaxic dissonance set up and his arm was pulled into a different reference frame of time. He thrust the harder. His fingers moved so slowly, until his hand closed around the smooth shaft of the weapon and the field snapped off.
He lifted the spear, holding it up in front of him. The blade sang, the shaft vibrating. Raw power flooded through him, a remembrance of the untamed eldar psyche of the elder days. He had sought to recapture that vigour by abandoning the strictures of the path and living as a corsair. He saw he had only achieved a base caricature. More pain came with this epiphany, a snag at his soul, a cut that would never heal. A chill emanated from the spear along with the power and the hurt, one that in days to come would consume him utterly; of this he was as certain as he was that the heart beating in his chest was his own.
He cared not.
Another explosion rocked the craftworld. As if the shrine were no longer protected now the spear had been claimed, the lights went out. Yriel’s face was lit from below by the blue lambency of the spear’s blade.
‘You are mine, and I am yours,’ he said. He smiled, although his doom was upon him. He felt a sense of purpose he had never experienced before, and he knew without a doubt that this was right. He hefted the spear and then spun around, gauging its weight as he ran through a series of lightning-fast combat stances.
He stopped, arms outflung. The spear rang. He laughed; a raw, wild sound.
‘It is time for us both to be about our purpose.’
The Fortress of the Red Moon was falling. Already the upper spires that stretched into the void had been cast down upon the craftworld, or infested and sealed off by forcefields.
At the feet of the fortress below the energy domes, where mighty bastions soared over once-beautiful wilderness, battle raged most fiercely. Iyanna Arienal stood behind a dyke of alien corpses that stoppered a breach in the wall. The bodies of fallen eldar not yet reclaimed lay tumbled at its feet, blood mingling with alien ichor, cracked yellow armour abutting shattered chitin. Iyanna tried to ignore the glimmers of unclaimed spirit stones still bedded into the psychoplastics and mind-smithed metals of the dead’s wargear. There had not been time to collect them, and she feared there never would.
The tyranids were upon them again: a horde of aliens as far as the eye could see, crashing over the blasted parklands that fronted the slighted walls of the fortress, swarming around the rubble of fallen towers. Smoke rose in the middle distance, a funereal column marking the position of the broken Avatar of Khaine. When the returning fleets of outcasts had destroyed the voidspawn’s craft, Iyanna had felt a brief surge of joy, quickly doused. Their ships gone, the tyranids in the domes had fought with unbounded ferocity, and when the living idol of the murder-god had fallen before them, so had Iyanna’s hope.
The tyranids charged, a seething mass of multi-limbed monstrosities of bone and red. They switched direction with one purpose, like a flock of birds in flight, the mind that was generated by them and governed them all a baleful presence of inconceivable magnitude upon the skein. It squeezed at her, making her mind, already weary from communion with the dead, feel as if cast from lead.
‘Fire!’ she called. She focused her mind, conveying what her eyes saw to the silent ranks of wraithguard arrayed alongside her. Now more than ever they needed her guidance. Earlier in the battle, the spirit stones of those freshly slain had been plucked directly from their bodies and melded with new, unfeeling forms. Not for them one moment of the infinity circuit’s peace. The first ghost warriors roused had been fierce: those who had died while in the grip of the paths of Leader and Warrior, or outraged souls of sure purpose. These last were civilians all, innocents on the paths of gardeners and jewellers, poets, carvers, cooks and musicians, often slaughtered in terror. Their woe at their predicament was bitter in Iyanna’s mouth.
‘Fire!’ she called again. The air rippled with the discharge of distortion weaponry. The wash of the weapons’ energies, fatal to any living being that attempted to wield them, sickened her to her bones. She saw the wounds they made on reality vividly with her second sight, fleeting glimpses into the horror of the warp where She Who Thirsts glutted herself on Iyanden’s disaster. She could not draw back from it, the ghost warriors needed her guidance, and so she faced the death of flesh and soul equally and unflinchingly.
Where the weapons’ deadly beams terminated, pricks of light as bright as stars appeared along the line of voidspawn. They twisted in on themselves, expanding with flares of purple and green ghostlight, briefly-lived portals opening up onto the hell-dimensions of the Othersea. Where the distortion weapons hit directly, voidspawn exploded, torn apart by the forces at work within them. Others were pulled off their feet and dragged wholly through the veil that separated this world from the next. Hundreds were sent into the world of nightmares this way. The sense of horror built until Iyanna thought she would collapse, and then the portals slammed shut. Iyanna could still sense the enemy on the other side of the thin veil of reality. Torn from their hive mind’s great rope of being, the creatures briefly showed as feeble fibres on the skein, before winking out.
The distortion weapons whined as their power cells recharged. Iyanna brought new targets to the wraithguard’s attention.
The aliens came on undaunted, as unafraid of the warp as they were of physical death. Ranks of Guardians atop the broken parapets opened fire, alongside the last of Iyanden’s Aspect Warriors. Their fury raged unchecked. After cycles of ceaseless fighting, Khaine had taken most of them and they fought hard. But there were too few, so pitiful in numbers. The dead outnumbered the living many times over.
Iyanna dipped into the skein, seeking a future she could exploit. She was almost as skilled at this as the farseers, but could see no way to influence the battle. The consciousness of the hive fleet was a thread like no other, a huge, braided presence made up of billions of individual fates. Individually, the minds of the tyranids were nothing, animal spirits. But as a rope is twisted from many strands, and a cable twisted from many ropes, so the hive mind of the Dragon was made. Its presence dominated everything, smashing possible futures aside with its singular purpose, making psychic contact with the other seers all but impossible. The infinity circuit was tormented by it. Iyanden was under psychic as much as physical attack.
The tyranids reached the walls. Uncountable numbers of the lesser creatures clambered over their heaped dead, springing upwards on powerful legs. The greater species came close behind. In their midst was their leader, the vast hive tyrant that they could not bring low: the swarmlord. For the hundredth time, Iyanna looked into its fate. On the skein it showed up as a knotted ball, a confluence of lesser destinies. As much as any one of these monsters could be regarded as representatives of the hive fleet’s collective mind, this one was the Dragon incarnate. Slay it, and the bindings of the hive mind’s thread would unravel.
They had tried so many times to destroy it, and had failed at every attempt. Their last gambit had been to send Khaine himself in open challenge. But the hive mind had no concept of honour, no need to prove itself to its followers, in the same way that an eldar has no need to prove himself to his finger. The Dragon’s living tanks had barred the way, a hand sacrificed to fend off the blow, and down the Avatar had been dragged.
Iyanna brought the attention of the dead to rest upon this creature, and willed them to shoot it down, but the dark energies of their ghost weapons were blocked once more by the swarmlord’s towering guard of monsters. Where there had been a dozen of these titanic beasts, now only three remained, but this thinning of the swarmlord’s living shield had come too late. When the Fortress of the Red Moon was destroyed, there would be no more organised resistance, and Iyanden would be consumed.
Wearied beyond comprehension, the eldar fought on. Weapon-beasts waded through the tide of lesser creatures, again to assail the main gates to the fortress or spitting boluses of bile laced with toxins into the defenders. From riven bastions high above, bright lances shot killing stabs of light, but for every creature dead, two more took its place.
The gate was long rent asunder. A new barrier blocked the way through its arch. A double wall of the dead, alien corpses heaped without dignity; and behind this redoubt of flesh, the spirits of eldar fought on, rehoused in wraithbone. Against this barrier half a dozen giant beasts went. The wall of bodies collapsed, the corpses toppling in obscene flood. Wraithblades stepped forwards, crystal weapons flashing. They attacked as one and in silence, psychically charged blades cutting through the bony armour and cartilaginous cladding of the monsters.
Then Iyanna’s mind went elsewhere, calling upon her ghost warriors to open fire again.
There came a flash of terror as a spirit stone was breached and the eldar soul within sucked into the waiting maw of the Great Enemy. Iyanna would have wept, had her heart not been cased in icy fury. She would see as many of these creatures die as she could before her own soul perished. She directed her ghost warriors to rake the walls free of climbing aliens. The effect on the fabric of the fort was catastrophic, but there was little else she could think to do.
Focus. She had to keep focused, form, mind and being. Her soul was a pale candle suspended between the skein and the now, on one side the ravening terror of She Who Thirsts, on the other the blank malice of the Great Devourer. Focus kept her safe from the depredations of both. It kept her from slipping away and joining the dead.
A shout went up from throats hoarse with screaming. To the rear of the parklands a disturbance rippled through the horde, close by the broad tunnelway that had led to the Oceans of Ceaseless Tranquillity; empty like so much of Iyanden, the seas all boiled away into the void.
‘Aid comes! Aid at last!’ The tyranid assault on the walls faltered as the impenetrable mind of the hive fleet turned to regard this new annoyance.
Iyanna stared towards the source of the cries, her sharp eyes scanning the tumult. Jetbikes powered out of the tunnel. Weapons fire flashed. Bright banners flickered amid the bone and red mass of the aliens.
Another voice rang out. ‘The Eldritch Raiders, it is the Eldritch Raiders! Prince Yriel is come, Prince Yriel is returned to the halls of his fathers!’
Iyanna cast out a desperate message from her mind in the obscure language of the seers. ‘The Great Dragon has many scales but a hollow heart. Pierce the breast and they shall fall away.’ She stumbled with the effort, the alien consciousness swatting aside her mind’s assay.
The eldar upon the wall, dead and alive, fought with the mettle of hope and despair combined.
Yriel saw Iyanna’s thought-sending as a single, burning rune hanging over the centre of the mass of aliens: the Dragon. The words of the spiritseer sang in his thoughts against the tuneless roar of the hive mind. ‘That way lies the leader, it is him we must slay! Slay him and they will falter! Make a path, make a path!’
Yriel hung by one hand from the rear portion of a light sky-runner, pointing the Spear of Twilight at the heart of the alien throng. The spear’s tip crackled with baleful energies, the weapon’s spirit enraged by the presence of the aliens on the craftworld. Yriel drank deep of its hatred, its power lending him enormous strength. The impetus of their charge had driven them deep into the horde attacking the carnelian walls of the Fortress of the Red Moon, but his raiders were few and their assault faltered. ‘Onward!’ he cried. ‘Onward for the House of Ulthanash! Onward for Iyanden!’
Yriel revelled in the fight. He had abandoned the path years past, allowing the extremes of life to soak his psyche. He did not turn from the horror of bloodshed, for he had long ago embraced his dark side. His soul was upon a knife edge, overbalanced further by the fell nature of the spear. Tottering over damnation’s abyss, he laughed, the grimness of his home’s predicament swept away by the glory of the moment, the romance of the final charge, the vision of the fortress saved. Both downfall and triumph were of equal value. His sharp eldar senses drank in the spectacle of carnage, and found it pleasing: the snap of his gonfalons in the wind, the poignancy of the eldar’s final stand, the light of artificial stars gleaming from glossy carapaces, the smell of burning and flesh putrefying, the dusty scent of ruptured wraithbone, and over it all the thick, acerbic stink of the Great Dragon’s beasts. Everything was cast in greater contrast through the medium of the spear, heightening already potent sensations. He was filled to the brim with the powers of his ancestor, intoxicated with new-found godhood.
‘Onward, my brave reavers! Onward!’ he cried. He held aloft the thrumming spear, and the sky-runner plunged on.
Open transports skimmed in the wake of his sky-runner. Corsairs, once of several bands but now wholly his, fired from the railed sides, their shuriken and las-bolts slaying many. Gargoyles attacked them and were driven back, the skimmers dodging their clumsy claws. Harpies and harridans flapped, too slow to catch them. The weight of living ammunition hurled skywards could not help but bring a few craft down, sending skimmers into the teeming infestation like great arrows, but not all.
Yriel’s pilot ducked and wove. Sprays of sharp-toothed grubs and ichor splattered against the hull, the plating hissing as acid ate into it. Through the cockpit shield Yriel heard the urgent chimes of alarms. ‘Onwards, Kalaea, take me to their heart! Do not fail me now!’
The sky-runner sped true. A serpentine monster reared up in front of its sharp prow, but the craft swerved, and resumed its course. It banked into a great curve, slowing just enough to allow Yriel to leap in safely. As he jumped, the stubby wings of his corsair’s flightpack flicked out, decelerating him rapidly. He landed lightly upon the gory corpse of a fallen giant. Before him the swarmlord loomed, taller than a wraithknight and greatly more massive. Its eyes glittered at him with malign intelligence.
‘Great Dragon!’ Yriel called, holding aloft the Spear of Twilight. ‘I come to slay you, as my forefather Ulthanash slew the wyrm Draoch-var with this very blade!’
Three huge creatures lumbered at Yriel, directed by the psychic command of the leader-beast, but he leapt aside from their swipes, the spear granting him unparalleled reflexes. One and then another fell, pierced by the pin point lance beams of the prince’s followers as he bounded closer to his prey.
Roaring, the swarmlord attacked, driving down a claw twelve paces long at Yriel. He back-flipped, the wind of its passing stirring his hair. The tip of the claw slammed down into a carcass, slowing the hive tyrant for the merest heartbeat as it tugged it free, but it was enough. The prince landed on his feet. Smoothly he drew back his arm and cast the spear of Ulthanash at the creature. The spear screamed a polyphonic wrath-song as it hurtled through the air, passing in an eyeblink to pierce the jaw of the swarmlord, drive up through the soft mouth into the swollen brain case, and emerge, gleaming, from the top of the armoured skull.
The swarmlord toppled, lifeless. Yriel yelled in exultation, feeling more alive than he had in many cycles. He had become jaded by his life as a corsair. But this! This was the theatre of life full in the round!
The niggling pain he had experienced when he had picked up the spear became more intense. The spear, lodged in the skull of the leader-beast, glowed brighter and brighter. Its hunger burning, the spear sucked greedily upon the limitless psychic banquet of the hive mind.
The spear-tip blazed, bright as a solar flare, the chill of its link to his soul turning to incandescent agony. A pressure built in his head, pain so acute he thought it would crack open. The world became a radiant tableau of hard whites and black shadow under the light of the spear’s feeding.
Prince Yriel gripped his temples. Something gave in his left eye and a wash of liquid heat filled the orb of it.
Falling to his knees, he screamed.
The light ceased. The hive mind retreated, its oppressive presence becoming again a distant threat. With no other of the higher creatures remaining, and the hive fleet destroyed in Yriel’s drive back to the craftworld, there was nothing to link the voidspawn to their gestalt soul, and the conjoined intellect of those upon Iyanden dissipated altogether.
The swarm faltered. The assault collapsed as the creatures lost their unity. Some milled about, some fell catatonic, many died at the sudden severance. Some, reverting to savage, simplistic instinct, attacked their fellows.
With one blow, the tide had turned. The hunters became the hunted. Iyanden was saved.
The Spear of Twilight stood proud of the swarmlord’s blackened skull. For one hundred paces around was a wide circle of smoking bones and black earth. All soft matter had been atomised. At the centre of this circle, unharmed, Prince Yriel lay curled in the ash.
Yriel was upon a beach. A hot and merciless sun burned at his skin, a calm sea was in front of him. He wished to dive in, to cool himself even if he could not quench his thirst, but as he approached he saw the sea was not of water but of blood. He turned away only to find that he could not move: his feet were trapped in the sand. Bending to free his feet, he saw each grain was a miniature, screaming skull.
He stood again, perplexed. A long while he remained there, until a mighty wind whipped up a swell, bringing with it the rich scent of ripe meat. The sea drew back from the shore as a red wave rose over him, the thick, glistening face of it blood, the cap frothed with skulls.
The wave crashed upon him, and Yriel surfaced from his sleep, tipped from nightmare by a rush of fury. He sat up in his bed with a cry, silken sheets stuck to his muscled torso with his sweat. He kicked at them to free his feet, tangled while he dreamed.
His nightmares were becoming more frequent and more vivid. He growled in frustration when his feet would not come loose and he trapped himself further. The urge to rip at the sheets built, the wave about to break. He saw the wave still in his mind’s eye, his dreams intruding into his wakefulness. He slapped his hands to his face; fingers clasping at his temples, he tried to grind away the image from his eyes with the heels of his hands. After a moment, it passed, and Yriel sighed raggedly.
