Path of the Dark Eldar Read online

  More tales of the eldar from Black Library

  THE MASQUE OF VYLE

  A Warhammer 40,000 novella

  PATH OF THE ELDAR OMNIBUS

  Contains the novels Path of the Warrior, Path of the Seer and Path of the Outcast.

  VALEDOR

  A Warhammer 40,000 novel

  TANTALUS

  A Warhammer 40,000 Quick Read

  FACES

  A Warhammer 40,000 Quick Read

  THE VICTIM’S DANCE

  A Warhammer 40,000 Quick Read

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  THE TREASURES OF BIEL-TANIGH

  Atop the White Flames fortress in High Commorragh lay the pleasure gardens of Archon Yllithian. There, dense banks of dream poppy and lotus blooms breathed a heady musk into the cold air of Corespur. Glittering pathways of crushed sapphires led between ever-changing fractal sculptures starkly gleaming beneath the wan, poisonous light of the Ilmaea, the captive suns above. Ordinarily the pleasure gardens were a place of quiet introspection and less visceral pleasures, but now they were a scene of carnage, plagued by howling destroyers intent on further mayhem.

  Archon Yllithian himself stood on a terrace safely above the action, coolly watching as two packs of reavers swooped along the pathways and around the sculptures like brightly patterned, blade-limbed hornets. With both sides mounted on jetbikes, the action was fast and furious, blurs of colour briefly intermingling and bursting into fountains of crimson. The two packs were both pledged to him, but their rivalry had grown to the point of inconvenience of late. Yllithian’s judgement had been simple: they would resolve their differences in combat until he was satisfied that their bravado had been suitably quelled. There was no sign of this happening so far. The two packs broke apart and swept together again with mercurial swiftness.

  Two figures joined Yllithian on the terrace. A male and female, as alike as brother and sister, dressed in simple, form-fitting armour that was the colour of smoke beneath cloaks and hoods of an umbral weave that drank light and voided shadow. They bore the weapons of assassins – long nosed pistols, monofilament garrottes and knives of many kinds – yet Yllithian’s silent incubi bodyguards paid them no heed. These were Yllithian’s creatures, two beings grown from a single cell by the haemonculus Syiin, a pair-bond bred for obedience and loyalty.

  Yllithian winced theatrically as a head-on collision occurred in the gardens below, the belch of flames lighting his face momentarily with a diabolic cast. Turning his back on the ongoing melee in the pleasure garden he addressed the two newcomers.

  ‘Vyriadh and Xyril, my two light-fingered hands,’ he said. ‘You’ve brought me many gifts before now, lives and baubles plucked from the spires of Commorragh. Are you ready to go further?’

  ‘Always, my archon,’ Xyril said softly.

  ‘We live to serve,’ affirmed Vyriadh.

  Silence lay between them for a moment, broken only by the howl and scream of jetbikes in the gardens beyond.

  ‘There is a place, ‘ Yllithian said, ‘beyond the Thorn Gate, where the Livisia meets the Rhozokian Fields, where there is a hidden portal. It is known to only the most ancient inhabitants of Commorragh, and long forgotten by most. This portal leads to Biel-Tanigh, a sub-realm resting like a pearl between the folds of warp and the material universe.

  ‘Now, down the long ages Biel-Tanigh has served as a secret repository for all manner of artefacts from before the Fall. The guardians of that place are friends to no one, but they protect certain items that Asdrubael Vect has placed there to put them out of reach of his rivals. It is one of these items that you will retrieve for me.’

  ‘How does the item appear?’ asked Xyril.

  ‘An opal, no greater than the size of a clenched fist. It may show motes of light moving within it with apparent purpose. Pay these no heed.’

  ‘How is it guarded?’ asked Vyriadh.

  ‘The dwellers of Biel-Tanigh set traps and patrols to catch interlopers. They are a benighted offshoot of our species that abandoned the true ways of the eldar long ago. They pursue an esotericism it would be too tiresome to describe and their outlook is so extreme that they have alienated their fellows and separated their sub-realm from the greater whole. Kill any you find, but be warned that they are said to be surpassingly puissant.’

  Another sudden impact in the gardens hurled the flaming carcass of a jetbike high into the air. It described an elegant arc with its trail of smoke and flames as it curved upward and then down towards the terrace where Yllithian stood motionless.

  ‘My archon…’ Xyril said, watching the tumbling wreckage fall towards them.

  ‘Fear not, child, all eventualities have been accounted for,’ Yllithian said. A bolt of vivid energy leapt from a nearby tower to touch the tumbling wreck, and it vaporised instantly with a retina-burning flash of dark energy. Under cover of the sensor-blinding aftermath, Yllithian spoke several more terse instructions to his agents before he turned back to watch the ongoing combat. He waved the pair away with a final warning. ‘And don’t return until you’ve got what I want.’

  Vyriadh and Xyril passed along their ways to the place their archon had described to them. They were more alike than twins, more than brother and sister, bred and raised together, trained to work as a team for one purpose. The eldar of Commorragh, the true eldar as they would have it said, suppressed their own, naturally strong, psychic powers. They had to do so because they lived on the edge of precipice, with the eternal hunger of She Who Thirsts always at their back. It was death, and more than death, for them to flagrantly use mind powers like telepathy which otherwise would be as natural as breathing.

  Not so for bonded pairs like Xyril and Vyriadh. Their lifelong bond cultivated an empathic link between that enabled them to function with perfect synchronicity, each aware of the other’s thoughts and actions even as they formed them. Their souls were so enmeshed that such subtle dalliances between them passed below the attention of most daemonic entities.

  Pair-bonding was a rarity in Commorragh, and not without its perils. Each half of the whole knew the other could die at any moment and the fear of separation c
ould come to overshadow their lives. Suicide pacts between pair-bonds were common, and murder-suicides not unknown. Still, pair-bonds could be trained in psychometry, the art of tracing a psychically charged object by its unique ‘scent’, making them excellent hunters, assassins and thieves.

  Like twinned shadows, they descended from the spires to Corespur, and thence to the sprawling, anarchic districts of Low Commorragh. Bloodshed and murder were daily occurrences in Corespur but it still was a place of calm in comparison to Low Commorragh. Here, slaves and fleshborn rubbed shoulders in pursuit of illicit pleasures. Lime-lit signs and cages of light proclaimed paths to oblivion or sensory overload powerful enough to obliterate the miseries of wicked, eternal Commorragh… at least for a little while.

  The pair-bonded twins slunk past all such temptations without a backward glance. Their only pleasure lay in fulfilling the wishes of their master. They skirted around street brawls and skirmishes, weaving through back alleys and across rooftops as they slipped through the shadows towards their goal. They passed the great barbed edifice of the Thorn Gate unseen by its silent watchers and came at last to the stagnant flow known as the Livisia.

  The Livisia twisted through an acid-cut channel crusted with millennia of filth, a slow-moving ribbon of emerald ooze half-choked with crumbling bones and other less identifiable detritus. Xyril and Vyriadh clambered along its banks like dark-limbed spiders and so passed beneath slave tenements and flesh farms on their way to the Rhozokian fields.

  We’re so close!+ Vyriadh’s mind sang.

  Only to the portal, then we must be extra careful,+ Xyril’s mind cautioned.

  Extra careful then, careful now,+ Vyriadh’s mind echoed.

  They climbed up onto the Rhozokian Fields, a kilometre-wide pan of dirt mounds and reedy pools wedged between two out-thrust spurs of the city. The area was devoid of even slave shacks due to skulking ur-ghuls, the whip-thin horrors making it too dangerous for an unarmed group to enter.

  Up high, the portal,+ Vyriadh’s mind called.

  Xyril saw the inset slab of metal, seemingly no different from a hundred others lining the spur foundations hanging over them. Almost at the same instant she heard the hiss of indrawn breath through quivering scent-pits, the sound of an ur-ghul on the hunt. Vyriadh was already climbing, flowing up the ridged buttresses at an easy walking pace. Xyril sprang up after him and caught his outstretched hand even as she drew her pistol and fired down without looking. The poisoned sliver caught an onrushing ur-ghul, unseen by Xyril but clearly visible to Vyriadh above, on the top of its eyeless cranium just as it was grasping for her ankle. The ur-ghul collapsed on stiffening limbs as Vyriadh drew Xyril up beside him. A second and then a third of the troglodytic creatures burst into view, their scent-pits wide at the smell of blood. Xyril and Vyriadh shot them down with negligent efficiency and climbed up to the portal together.

  The webway tunnels beyond the portal were filmy and insubstantial, ghostly filaments undulating in the void. Rents and tears in the walls afforded stomach-roiling glimpses of oily hues swirling beyond, the colours of Chaos visible in all their inchoate glory. The chill breath of She Who Thirsts could be felt as Xyril and Vyriadh moved cautiously deeper inside – daemons had stalked these paths, the wardings that held them in check were tattered and broken. It seemed impossible that this section of the webway had survived at all, and only after long wandering along its dangerous passages did they discover the reason why.

  It appeared a savage shrine at first, a ziggurat built of horned skulls and twisted bones in honour of savage gods. Closer inspection revealed its meticulous construction and runes of dire portent burned into it. Not a shrine but a warning, a display of past transgressors to frighten off would-be explorers or invaders. Here was the portal to Biel-Tanigh itself, cloaked in the bones of the damned. Xyril and Vyriadh remained undaunted and set to uncovering the ancient portal hidden beneath.

  ‘Less than welcoming,’ said Xyril as she pried a skull loose.

  ‘To be expected,’ said Vyriadh as he caught it and laid it to one side.

  Xyril suddenly cursed and leapt aside, pulling down Vyriadh with her. An instant later the bone-shrine detonated in a blinding flash of light. Smoking shards scythed across the pair, whirring off their armour and slicing through their cloaks. The thunderclap detonation echoed along the tunnels like distant laughter. Looking up, Vyriadh saw the portal fully revealed and apparently intact, a leaf-shaped arch of copper-coloured metal covered in sinuous inscriptions.

  ‘Crude,’ complained Xyril, sweeping a handful of smoking fragments from her lap.

  ‘Effective,’ admitted Vyriadh as he pulled a piece of bone from his scalp.

  ‘Not so, as we are still alive,’ corrected Xyril.

  No two sub-realms are identical. Each is its own world, a bubble of reality afloat in the seething tides of warp space. Most were constructed by the eldar in ancient times at the height of their power. Fortresses, ports, pleasure palaces, exotic gardens, secret lairs: all were hewn from the shifting tides of the warp, with the port-city of Commorragh being the greatest sub-realm of them all. Biel-Tanigh was a sub-realm of a different sort, one that was quite possibly never raised by eldar hands.

  The sky of Biel-Tanigh was a dull, unrelieved crimson, lit by a distant silver sun that scintillated in a manner disturbing to look upon. Tall, jagged towers of black metal rose on every side, their darkly gleaming flanks netted by immense briar-like growths. Shafts of silver sunlight moved across the scene like questing fingers, their motions so precise that it implied a guiding intelligence controlled them.

  The pair lowered themselves into the briar-choked avenues between the towers, dwarfed by the alien immensity surrounding them. The thick briars, all covered with span-wide thorns, shifted with lazy but undeniable purpose as they passed, coiling slowly to try and catch a hand or foot, or creeping closer whenever they halted in one spot for more than a moment.

  Xyril and Vyriadh pushed deeper, following their master’s cryptic directions through the labyrinthine streets and seeking the peculiar psychic spoor of the artefact he sought. They saw no living thing, all was still and empty save for the lazy, predatory briars and the silently sweeping sun beams. The jagged towers opened onto the streets at apparently random intervals, their dark maws set at ground level or high on their flanks and surrounded by coldly burning runes.

  ‘All of them portals, you think? Is this a city of portals?’ Vyriadh wondered.

  ‘Concentrate on finding what our archon wants.’ Xyril scolded. ‘Nothing else matters!’

  A movement ahead made both twins freeze instinctively. A long-limbed figure had emerged from a tower and was striding towards them. Metre-long blades curved from its four upper limbs; its body and head were abstract sculptures of curved armour with only the vaguest implication of humanoid shape.

  A thorned briar brushed against Xyril’s ankle and she sprang forward to escape it, racing seemingly heedlessly into the clutches of the scimitar-limbed myrmidon.

  Deadly blows rained down like thunderbolts, sending Xyril leaping, twisting and rolling through the clutching briars to evade them. Vyriadh landed on the thing’s back in accordance with their unspoken plan and plunged twin daggers into its neck joint. Its four scimitar limbs instantly reversed and swept backwards to encase Vyriadh in a bladed cage. He slithered free as Xyril punched a knife up to its hilt through the warrior’s curved breastplate, the corrosive poison on her weapon blackening metal with every hissing drop. She left the blade in place as she rolled away from a scything counter-attack and circled warily with Vyriadh as their opponent staggered and thrashed. The thing, the automaton as she now realised it to be, weakened and collapsed in lifelike fashion, its blades shuddering as the corrosive poisons ate out its heart.

  ‘Disappointing, scarcely puissant,’ sniffed Vyriadh.

  ‘Perhaps when seen in greater numbers–’ Xyril said before she looked up
at Vyriadh in sudden recognition that the air was brightening around them. A white haze engulfed one end of the street, growing in intensity until a beam of silver incandescence swept into view, making the dark avenue blaze with light.

  They instinctively ran together, making for the entry the automaton had emerged from as the one piece of cover nearby. The briars were writhing and knotting as if in pain at the coming of the light, forcing Vyriadh and Xyril to leap over and under the looping tendrils as they ran. They dived inside the entry, only steps ahead of the moving beam front, the baleful, silver light casting grotesque shadows as it swept past their hiding place and halted briefly over the fallen warrior.

  I fear the sun spies on us,+ Vyriadh’s mind whispered after a moment.

  I fear the sun is not a sun at all,+ Xyril whispered back.

  After a drawn out, horrible moment, the light dimmed as the questing beam moved on. The hissing, twisting briars quieted once more and the pair risked a glance outside. The wrecked warrior was gone, the whole area where it had fallen swept clean as if by a giant broom. At their backs, the featureless black metal walls of a corridor disappeared into the utter darkness.

  Out or in?+ Vyriadh wondered silently.

  Out, we still must find the archon’s desire,+ thought Xyril. +And safety will not be found inside.+

  The entry began to seal as if in response to the thought, leaves of metal sliding into place across it with unhurried fluidity. They darted through the narrowing gap before it could trap them inside, the entry sealing itself behind them with an audible snap. Outside, the dark, angular towers reared up all around them, enigmatic and indecipherable. They pushed onward through them, now watching the skies for questing beams, now dodging predatory briars. At last, they paused.

  There! I feel it!+ Vyriadh thought triumphantly.

  Perhaps,+ Xyril concurred after a moment. +I hear its call too. Numberless voices like surf on a beach, cheering.+

  Or screaming in a fire,+ Vyriadh laughed.