Valedor, p.20
Valedor, page 20
‘Good,’ said Taec. ‘We must hold back until we are sure they are on the surface. If we leave the labyrinth too early and engage the voidspawn piecemeal we will be overwhelmed.’
‘As the Autarch Sunspear nearly was,’ said Iyanna. She frowned. ‘Sunspear was brave.’
‘There are few who would disagree, but it was not his bravery that led him along that thread. He is proud, he wished for outright victory, and although fortunate for our plans, that was nearly his undoing. His arrogance approaches that of Prince Yriel’s, but even so, he was close to successful on his own terms.’ Taec sighed. ‘Victory eluded him. Still, a success for us, if a near disaster for them. For his failure he has had a hard time of it on Biel-Tan,’ added Taec. ‘We are not the only seers to treat our autarchs harshly, it appears.’
‘And the council of seers is behind the Biel-Tanian war council now?’
‘Fully,’ said Taec. ‘There is one seer among them, Altariec, who was against the invasion initially. However, your message swayed all but he and his followers. Now his hand is forced, he complains loudly that Sunspear’s actions precipitate a doom for Biel-Tan that could have been avoided, but he is beginning to admit that a greater peril awaits Biel-Tan should the first be avoided.’
‘That is good.’
‘It was not a point of view that was easy to foster,’ said Taec. ‘We were greeted at gunpoint.’
Iyanna raised her eyebrows.
‘Indeed,’ said Taec.
‘I am most relieved, farseer, that the Biel-Tanians march at our side. We feared the worst when we heard naught from you,’ she said.
Taec began a slow walk down the lounge, the high windows to his left. Iyanna followed. ‘Biel-Tan is closing on Dûriel, albeit to a safe enough distance to avoid attracting the voidspawn’s direct attention. The presence of the hive mind there is very strong. Biel-Tan have received no message from any quarter for several cycles, and if our experience is the norm, then none they have sent have reached their intended recipients either.’ He paused, and looked at her earnestly, leaning on his staff again. ‘You have not felt the like, not even when Far Ranging Hunger nearly destroyed us. The strength of the mind… It is…’ He trailed off. ‘It is impossible to describe. You must arm your mind against it. I will spread the word to the seers in the fleet that they must take special care of their runes of warding. Psychic communication, even projected by devices, is impossible in the face of it. Sunspear was forced to rely on electromagnetic means to direct his army.’
‘How primitive,’ said Iyanna.
‘There is more: the eye of She Who Thirsts is fixed upon the place. I grow ever more certain it was her caprice that cast the splinter out of the warp into the Dûriel system.’
‘Crystal father…’ began Iyanna.
‘How many times have I said that you need not refer to me as such, Iyanna? Your days as a warlock are long behind you, your might is equal to mine, though different.’
‘I speak respectfully because I must say a thing of some dreadfulness.’
‘Then say it.’
‘This war… It is a trap, designed by the Dark Prince solely to snare you. I feel this.’
‘And I know it,’ said Taec darkly. ‘I am thoroughly caught. My doom awaits me there on Dûriel’s dead surface, there is nothing to be done for it.’ His eyes were tired and sad, and he spoke frankly to her. ‘I will die and my soul will be forfeit, but what other choice do we have? She Who Thirsts will take me, but I go willingly. It is the only way.’
‘You could flee, you needn’t go. Let others work in your stead.’
‘What, child? Such as yourself? And then your soul will be lost, and not mine. Whichever way the die is cast, the numbers are not in our favour. I have scried again and again and there is only one future that leads to total victory, and that is one where I perish.’
He sighed again. There was a tremulousness to it that Iyanna could not miss. He was afraid. ‘There is nothing for it. Think of the sacrifices you have made, Iyanna Last-of-Your-House, that we all make. I will not be alone in falling into the Dark Prince’s clutches. Many will feel the true death and the torment that follows. But if not, what? We all die, we all suffer for now and evermore? If I die, Iyanna, at least you,’ he gestured at her elaborately with his hand, a mark of deepest respect, ‘will live. And you are the most important of us all. I was never convinced by the words of Ulthran, his relaying of the visions of Kysaduras, but I am now. It is you who have convinced me. I would die a thousand deaths to see you succeed, and I will. Do not think you have the easier path, for upon you the hope of all our salvations rests. You must triumph, Iyanna. Bring forth the goddess of death and restore equilibrium to the souls of our people. Dying is the easy part, and it is not for you to travel that road.’
A half-cycle passed. The webway yawned wide, becoming a glowing funnel half a million paces across. The ships flew down it, coming into a junction of staggering proportions. Many conduits came together here, giving it the appearance of a great, golden heart viewed from the inside.
If a heart, it was dead, the walls of it plaqued with broken wraithbone structures, the ash of the sun fragment that once lit it hanging dark in the centre. The ruins of a port city, cast down perhaps at the Fall, perhaps later – for in the uncertain light of the webway, one could see that the spires were blackened by flame, and walls scored with the tell-tale marks of lance fire. Whatever its name was had long been forgotten.
The ships – a fleet of twenty-three in all – went for the centre of the chamber, shoaling by the dead sun as lighter vehicles sped from apertures in their sides and swooped down to the distant city.
The scouts were gone a long time, for the nexus was broad as a world’s orbit around its sun, and the ruins were vast. Eventually they reported in, each vessel’s captain declaring his assigned quadrant clear of danger, and the ships of Iyanden sank in streams to an area of crumbling docks where seven major webway tunnels pierced the city floor.
Aspect Warriors deployed first, taking up position in cracked towers around the piers extending towards the centre of the nexus. Flights of Falcon tanks swept overhead, turrets tracking back and forth.
The word was given, and the sides of the Iyanden ships opened. Out strode the Phoenix Host, hundreds of tall wraithbone shapes disembarking onto the ancient quaysides. Iyanna was at their head, Althenian as ever by her side. She and all the other eldar wore their helmets, for the atmosphere of the dead city was not safe to breathe.
‘Fitting place,’ he said. ‘The dead walk in the dead lands. Homecoming.’
Iyanna, distracted by the sinister ruins all about them, replied, ‘This is as close as we can come with our ships to Dûriel. We go from here on foot.’
‘I will march,’ said Althenian. ‘I do not tire and will not, nor can I.’
Rank after rank of wraithkind tramped down the ramps into the dead city. A flight of Vypers sped overhead, looped and flew straight at the ground – an illusion, as they were scouting webway tunnels. The whole inner surface of the webway held gravity, making the chamber a giant world turned inside out, the broken towers of its bottom reaching out for their kind, lost to distance’s caprice, on the opposing side. The world-city was so large that on the ground the curve of the chamber was imperceptible, and webway portals opened directly into the plazas of the place, appearing as glowing, smooth-sided pits.
All was lit by the lambency of the webway, a shifting light that made every shadow a trickster. In this dimness, the yellow and blue of Iyanden were sinister brown ochre and midnight black.
‘In this place, the ghost warriors are as ghosts,’ said Taec, walking to join Iyanna and her companion. He glanced up at Althenian with idle curiosity, but the giant exarch’s attention was elsewhere.
‘They are not the only ones,’ said Iyanna. ‘I sense dark shades, the spirits of those who dwelled here. Not many, but dangerous. We should not tarry. There is a hunger on the skein that I do not like.’
‘We are done. The Phoenix Host is all ashore. All await,’ said Althenian. ‘Do not fear, with such might at your command, no danger.’
Iyanna shivered, as if touched by cold, and her face, a pale grey shape in the perpetual dusk, took on a seriousness mirrored by her gestures and the sense of her soul. ‘Ghosts will fight ghosts, a waste of time. We must be away.’
As if to deliberately accentuate her concerns, the sound of laser fire cut through the sepulchral silence of the city: the whining of powercells, the crack of stale air heated explosively, the thump of impact explosions.
‘From afar,’ said Althenian. ‘The sound of war in dead lands. Bad omen.’
The captain of the frigate Lileath spoke to the High Council through their helmet crystals. +We have movement in an area twenty thousand paces to the left,+ she said.
+There are worse things than ghosts in these places,+ said Taec via the same psychic link to the force’s commanders. +Iyanna is right. We should not stay overlong here. We have the numbers and the might to overcome most threats, even that of fell spectres, but in doing so we will waste valuable time.+
Signals of assent came to them over the communications web. Columns were forming up alongside each of the five major transport ships, phalanxes of wraithguard at the front, their guiding spiritseers protected in their midst. Wraithlords went with them, three or four to each group of one hundred, those who were once seers aiding the spiritseers in directing the march of their lesser fellows. Wraithknights walked up and down the lines, weapons ready in delicate fists. Falcon grav-tanks rode by. A blast of air pushed at Iyanna’s and Taec’s robes as a Cobra floated onward to the front of their group.
Behind them came the Guardians of Iyanden, pitifully few of the living to fight alongside the dead. War walkers were gathering in number in the open spaces by the piers, waiting to go ahead as vanguard.
‘You should take a transport, Silvereye,’ said Iyanna kindly. ‘The crystal grows apace within you, and you are venerable. I must walk with the wraithkind, to ensure their minds remain clear.’
Taec bowed stiffly. He was glad Iyanna had given him the excuse to withdraw. As head of the seer council, he was senior to her in both the seer council and the High Council, but to have withdrawn to a vessel without prompting while the rest marched would have been unbecoming.
A Wave Serpent flew down to the broken square they waited in, and with a touch of his hand to his forehead, Taec took his leave of the spiritseer.
Only one warrior remained to join the column.
The army fell silent as the last door opened, a wash of fury coming with it. With steps like the ringing of a dolorous bell, the Avatar of Kaela Mensha Khaine strode down the gangway to the quayside. Aggression rose within every eldar present, living and dead. The thrill of it rose within Iyanna, starting deep in the pit of her belly and rising up her body to flush her breasts and face with heat. The power of it took her breath away. Her eyes slid closed, and when they opened again, she looked upon the world very differently. Fury; she felt it coming from all the others. Her sadness at war retreated, and became anticipation.
The Avatar halted, breathing fire, fire wreathing it from iron joints, fire streaming from its eye sockets, blood hissing from its perpetually dripping hand to the floor. Whatever spirits watched them shrank back into the dark. They feared the god-fragment greatly. It swung its head back and forth over the host, inspecting its followers. The roar of its furnace body was mirrored in the heartbeat of every eldar.
Abruptly, it walked ahead, eldar parting to let it through. Its heavy treads receded, taking with it some of its boundless anger, but not all.
The disembarkation was complete. Iyanna signalled the group of rangers who were to guide the force the remaining way to Dûriel.
+We are ready,+ she said. +You follow no path but your own, now show it to us.+
+This way,+ their leader said. Small groups of them joined the head of each column.
Iyanna held up her hands. With complex gestures denoting hope for victory, she signalled the army to move out, simultaneously emitting a psychic command pulse that galvanised all to motion.
The effect was, in its own way, shocking. The wraithguard of the first column suddenly lumbered into life from total stillness. The wraithkind did not move at all when not in motion, unlike living creatures, and their sudden transition from immobility made even Iyanna start. They marched in perfect unison, each one placing its feet exactly where the one before it had trodden; left then right then left again. The first column cleared the dockside, war walkers falling in to stride in front, and the second column joined it, then the third, until all five columns had merged into one to snake through the nameless port city towards the glowing way to Dûriel.
Iyanna and Althenian fell in behind the first group to draw off. The dead marched tirelessly, but slowly, and Iyanna thought she would have little difficulty in keeping pace with them.
+How far to Dûriel?+ she asked of the rangers’ leader.
+Four cycles’ march, my lady,+ he said. +An unusually long way to walk, but this part of the webway is seldom traversed, and has fallen into disrepair.+
She nodded. She knew this anyway, but asking again reassured her in some way she found hard to define. Perhaps it was simply the touch of a living mind upon her own when she was in constant communion with the dead.
The city shook to the stamp of the ghost warriors’ feet. They were agile for such large machines, but still heavy, and the sheer number of them generated a certain noise. Their march was unlike the marching of other creatures: they planted their feet firmly but quietly, and the resultant tramping was loud but stealthy seeming, if not stealthy in actuality. The city was so silent that the slightest noise sounded like a crack of thunder. No living creatures had come this way for a long time, and why would they? A nexus point for the southern True Stars, all the inhabitants of those planets had been swept away by the calamity of the Fall, and there had been no eldar to come here for many generations.
Something stirred at the back of Iyanna’s mind, the sensation of being watched again. Shielded by the webway from the fall of the empire, other port cities and worldlets had survived. Some had even been built since. Many had become satellites of Commorragh, but not all. What had happened here? she wondered. Where was the sun that should light it? Where were the people? Shielded from the warp, those in the webway had famously avoided being consumed by Slaanesh.
She looked up, at elegant windows piercing the sides of soaring towers. Most still held their glazing. The damage here was superficial, many parts of Iyanden were in far worse state, but Iyanden yet lived, while the dead nature of the place was unmistakable. Sure she was being watched, she looked around her. Some of the spires were tens of thousands of paces tall, impossible architecture in an impossible realm.
She saw nothing, felt nothing more than the unease she had felt since debarking. The glass reflected only the shifting light of the webway, empty windows like the eyes of the dead, but the feeling persisted until the Avatar walked past the building, when it abruptly ceased.
Iyanna pressed her lips together, and refused to look up again. Even for one such as her, for whom necromancy was life, this place carried too great a burden of death.
Iyanna breathed more easily as the roadway opened out. The remains of a park girt the trumpet-mouth of a webway tunnel. Air- and grav-craft peeled away from the column on the ground, soaring vertically, then coming down at a steep dive and passing down the funnel into the webway. The Phoenix Host marched directly for the lip of the tunnel, through ancient trees that crumbled at their touch and grass, held together by nothing more than the memory of its shape, that puffed into dust.
They went on without pausing over the edge of the tunnel. As Iyanna came to it she experienced a brief surge of vertigo. The mouth of the tunnel was like a slope that turned into a sheer drop and the tunnel a pit that went on forever. But as she passed its edge, the wall of the tunnel became the floor so that she was perpendicular to the horizontal planes of the city. When she glanced behind, she saw the spires were now on their sides. Framed by the tunnel mouth, the ships were withdrawing to take up station at the centre of the chamber to await their return.
If they returned.
Grav-craft humming overhead, the Phoenix Host marched on in silence. Iyanna strained her mind to keep the huge number of wraithkind focused on their purpose. So much vengeance was hard to bear, but she summoned up her own pain, remembering the terrible psychic burst that had killed all her house but her, and drew her own determination from it.
She drew power too from Althenian. He marched alongside her, long limbs swinging easily. He had been there for her for so long, Althenian the Thrice-Dead, but not dead yet.
And soon he would be gone.
She drew strength from this sorrow too.
Chapter Eleven
War in the Webway
Gateways of light irised open over a low mountain once known as Kurnous’s Seat, ancient webway gates that had remained hidden, unseen beneath the skin of reality for ten millennia. Reaver jetbikes came through at supersonic speed, the wind screaming through the holes punched into their bodywork. They performed a wide sweep, then set themselves into a protective pattern. One of their number re-entered the webway. Within moments, it re-emerged, two dozen Venom transport craft streaking behind it. Behind the graceful fairings of the Venoms, each emblazoned with the emblems of the Cult of Strife, were fighting platforms crammed with wyches. Seven Raiders likewise full of warriors, and five more carrying collapsed hex cages, came behind. Scourges leapt from Raider fighting decks, wings spread, as keen-eyed wyches swept the muzzles of dark lances and splinter cannons across the angry sky. All were visible only to the other eldar, sophisticated field devices hiding the presence of the Commorrites from eye and mind alike.
A final flaring. Alone on a jet-black Venom came Lelith Hesperax, framed by pennants streaming from a dozen trophy poles arranged in a fan; the greatest of all Commorragh’s wyches, mistress of the Cult of Strife.
