Path of the Incubus Read online

  Torturers and sadists, nightmare made real, the dark eldar are evil incarnate. Cold and beautiful, slender of bone, their lithe appearance belies their deadly talent for slaughter and cruelty.

  From the hidden city of Commorragh, the dark eldar launch their lightning raids into the depths of realspace, sowing terror and leaving devastation in their wake. They hunt for slaves, fodder for the hell-pits and the petty amusements of their lords who draw sustenance from the blood shed in ritual battle. For in this hellish realm, living flesh is currency and Overlord Asdrubael Vect rules above all with the greatest share.

  Beneath their supreme master, the archons of the darkling city murder and cheat to keep one step ahead of She Who Thirsts. For the dark eldar harbour a terrible curse, a wasting of their flesh that can only be slowed by the infliction of pain. Life eternal is the reward for this soul harvest, and the favour of the ancient haemonculi can extend an eldar’s mortal coil yet further... for a price. The alternative is damnation and endless suffering, a withering of body and mind until all that remains is dust.

  But such hunger cannot ever be sated. It is a bottomless pit of hate and depravity that lurks within the dark eldar, a vessel that can never truly be filled, even with oceans of blood. And when the last drop has bled away, the soul thieves will know true terror as the daemons come to claim them...

  PROLOGUE

  Welcome fellow traveller, welcome! Whether you are a simple observer or perhaps an unwitting participant in the unfolding drama before us please be most welcome. Unfortunately I must begin by breaking with some of the ordinary dramatic conventions at this juncture. You see this is the second of a series of three parts, a triptych if you will. Hence we must perforce begin with a recap, a résumé and a reappraisal of what has already occurred, as tiresome as that seems.

  Those of you who have followed this darkling tale thus far will already know most of these facts and so I hope you can forgive my indulgence of those only lately arrived. If you are confident in your recollections then I invite you to proceed without diversion. However, some perspective is useful both for those ignorant of prior machinations and for those many great minds that failed to grasp their immediate import at the time.

  First then, our stage: Commorragh, the eternal city. Dark, terrible, delicious Commorragh, where pain and subjugation are the meat and drink of ageless creatures of unfathomable wickedness. To fully understand Commorragh one must understand the wider universe that bore it. So, to begin with here is a secret that if properly understood might change your perception forever. All of reality, everything we see as static, safe and secure, is in fact in constant flux. The grains of sand on the beach demonstrate more solidity and longevity than the cherished absolutes of the worlds we believe in.

  You see our material universe is born of Chaos and our reality is nothing more than a passing fancy of the Dark Gods; an infinitely short moment when anarchy is frozen for long enough for us, myopic and stunted as we are, to perceive substance and believe that there is such a thing as ‘natural order’ in the universe.

  Such hilarious conceit! What amazing hubris!

  Mighty Commorragh is a facet of reality born out of hubris, and a very different one to the random dross thrown up by nature. It is a pearl consciously aggregated out of the spittle of creation by ancient, mortal minds that thought themselves the equal of the gods. And what a place they made for themselves.

  Beyond Commorragh and its enslaved sub-realms the material universe moves on: civilizations rise and fall, stars implode and the whole rough scrimmage over ownership of the galaxy continues apace. Within Commorragh a long, dark midnight reigns that has gone on unchallenged for millennia. Its inhabitants eternally cheat death and avoid their ultimate fate at the claws of She Who Thirsts, the daemon-goddess of their own creation. Sensuous, sadistic, pleasure seeking, these are the dark eldar, last remnants of an empire that spanned the galaxy in its time. Few have fallen as far as the inhabitants of Commorragh without being destroyed utterly.

  Still, pity the poor Commorrites, trapped upon a stage of their own making. They can take brief forays in the material realm to assuage their gnawing hunger, snatching what they can to carry it back to their eternal city, but they remain ever-hungry. Every day She Who Thirsts drinks a little more of their soul and that growing emptiness can only be filled with the suffering of others.

  The players: A group of Commorrite nobles intent on reclaiming lost glories in one of the endless power plays of the eternal city. These were unified by their ancient bloodlines and a contempt for the new order imposed after their forefathers had been overthrown. Incidental characters included: the master haemonculus Bellathonis employed to effect a proscribed resurrection, Lileath a young Exodite worldsinger kidnapped to be used as pain-bride for the operation, and Sindiel, a craftworld renegade who was eventually persuaded to save her. Perhaps most significant of all at this point in events was a bodyguard and executioner by the name Morr, a member of that curious warrior cult known as the incubi.

  To their scheme, then. The primary obstacle in the noble’s path to glory was, as ever, the Supreme Overlord of Commorragh, the great tyrant himself, Asdrubael Vect. Alas, the nobles could match Vect with neither brute power nor subtle intrigue. Confronted with these facts the leader of the conspiracy, one Archon Yllithian, persuaded his co-conspirators into a singularly dangerous course of action.

  As they were unable to overcome Vect themselves the nobles would attempt to raise one of the tyrant’s more successful prior opponents, a Lord called El’Uriaq, from the dead to guide them to victory. Predictably their scheme miscarried and they instead raised something beyond their power to control – the soul of this great noble corrupted by an entity native to the ever-changing realms of Chaos. This composite entity – quite possibly an emissary of She Who Thirsts – appeared wrapped in the seeming of the leader they sought.

  The consequences fell thus. Of the nobles but one survived the immediate aftermath. The bodyguard Morr, to his great distress slew his own noble master, Archon Kraillach, when he realised that Kraillach had become corrupted by the entity. The entity itself murdered the third noble, Archon Xelian, with a memetic curse when she proved intractable to its aims. Yllithian proved clever enough to be useful to the thing he had unleashed and so survived only to be near-fatally struck down during the monster’s destruction.

  These consequences alone are, of course, really quite inconsequential when compared to the harm that all of these dramatic events conspired to inflict on the metaphysical fabric of Commorragh itself.

  Here another brief moment of explanation is in order. It is best to imagine Commorragh as a bubble maintained by equal pressure across its entire membrane. If the membrane is breached the external pressure forces what is without to come within to the great detriment of anyone in the vicinity at the time.

  Over the centuries Commorragh has incorporated many other little pearls into its bubble, encrusting itself with a hundred stolen realities to be enslaved and exploited. Ripples in the surface of the membrane can also dislodge these satellites realms, setting them free to drift and realign chaotically.

  These phenomena are collectively known to the inhabitants of Commorragh as a ‘Dysjunction’, and most rightly feared. This tale revolves around the Dysjunction the noble’s schemes accidentally brought about, its effects and its resolution.

  So, now you know all that brought the tale to this point. Invaluable knowledge that will pay dividends later, I feel sure, although I promise there will be no quizzes. And who am I? Player or narrator or both, I don’t doubt that it will become readily apparent as the drama unfolds. For the present it would be boorish to take centre stage if only fo
r fear you might think this tale is about me. The correct questions for you to address to yourself at this time are these: What do I want? How will I get it? What stands in my way?

  CHAPTER 1

  Consequences

  The colony had existed forever. Cradled in darkness the feeders lurked awaiting the call to hunt, the breeders quietly gestated future generations after receiving the caustic seed of the patriarch. The younglings suckled and worried at the feeder’s veins in blind hunger while they impatiently grew and grew to become something other.

  The colony lived in eternal night, a soft umbral world made in equal parts from their environment and the woven excrescence of generation after generation of feeders and breeders living and dying. Beneath the colony flowed the river of life, a viscous and unchanging ribbon that gurgled along between the walls of the universe. Food came via the river, sometimes cold and soft as it drifted just beneath the surface, at other times warm and upright as it waded in the gentle current. The feeder’s sensitive spiracles scented every morsel, living or dead, and their ultrasonic shrieks summoned their broodmates to come join the feast before it left the colonies’ world.

  Recently, for the first time in uncounted generations, change had come upon the colony. It was something unknown even to the patriarch with all his long-digested wisdom. The breeders trembled with fear and trepidation. The feeders fluttered angrily this way and that, seeking the source of disruption, but the source lay beyond their world and seemingly beyond the walls of the universe. Those seemingly impenetrable walls shook like a birthing breeder and strange, alien sensations swept through the densely clustered bodies of the colony. Food was becoming plentiful, particularly the cold and soft kind, but the colony was not thriving. Madness had gripped some of its members and sent them fleeing into the great unknown. The remainder clustered more tightly than ever, their fear bringing them closer together in the patriarch’s sinewy embrace.

  Now a new stimulus had entered the colony’s consciousness. Lights bobbed and slid along the river of life. Light, that hateful invader, meant only one thing – that it was time for the feeders to broach forth in a fluttering wave and quench it with their leathery bodies and their hooked claws. Sometimes light brought food: hot blood to be drunk and raw flesh to be torn and consumed. Other lights were hard and inedible, useless to the colony and only a source of distress until the river bore them away into the great unknown. In either case the feeders would clutch and worry at the source until it was gone and the comforting darkness closed in once more. Individuals mattered not at all – the continuation of the colony was everything.

  The powered edge of the blade was inactive but its inherent weight and molecule-sharp edge still sheared through flesh and bone as though it was little more than wet tissue paper. The victim gave a last, despairing high-pitched shriek as it tumbled to its death. This small drama did not serve to silence the speaker for moment.

  ‘Really? This is the only way out of Commorragh that you could think of on short notice? Even in the midst of an imminent Dysjunction there must be better paths to follow.’

  ‘Your presence is not required,’ the towering incubus named Morr grunted in response. The incubus viciously swatted at another gloomwing with his great double-handed blade, his klaive to use its correct title. Morr was very keen on being correct, Motley knew, and that was probably the only thing that was preventing the incubus from attacking him. The tunnel was wide but the ceiling was low – Morr could have laid a gauntleted hand flat against the filth-encrusted roof without stretching. Even so the incubus wielded his two-metre long blade in the constricted space with consummate skill and precision, keeping it in constant motion as he tracked his elusive attackers.

  His unwanted companion, a slight figure dressed in stylish, if archaic-appearing grey, skipped nimbly to one side as the flying gloomwing flopped into the viscous sludge flowing around Morr’s ankles in two neatly bisected pieces. It joined the pieces of at least a dozen other hook-winged predator-

  scavengers that had already whirled out of the darkness to attack and found Morr’s klaive waiting for them instead. The simple beasts seemed not to realise the dangerous nature of the prey they were trying to drag down with their numbers so they simply kept coming. What light there was showed an incessant flutter of dark wings circling determinedly just out of reach.

  ‘Oh come come,’ said the one in grey. ‘We’re on the verge of becoming such fast friends. It would be truly tragic to cut short our glittering association now, surely?’

  Morr reversed his klaive and whirled it with both hands, grunting as he slashed out at another darting shape. Traditionally all klaives feature an impaling spike or disembowelling hook projecting forward a hand’s span or so from their flat tip. Morr used his klaive’s hook to snag the gloomwing and drag it within range for a lightning-quick downward stroke. The unfortunate creature tumbled to join its bisected fellows in the muck.

  The incubus’s companion swayed negligently to one side to avoid another diving gloomwing but never stopped talking. ‘I confess I’m a little hurt by that, Morr, I mean after all we’ve been through together you might at least indulge me with a verbal response rather than grunting at me…’

  The incubus ignored the speaker and waded forwards, slashing left and right in a continuous figure of eight. The other skipped after him keeping up a continuous chatter. ‘I came all this way, after all. Found you in that dank hole you were hiding in and warned you we had to get out while we still could. The thanks I get is you stomping off into what can only be described as a sewer without a word… besides which, you still need my help. Who else can testify on your behalf when there were no other witnesses to Kraillach’s death?’

  Morr paused and turned to face the grey-clad figure, swinging his klaive without a glance to skewer another leather-winged assailant as it flew at his back. Morr’s blank-faced helm regarded his companion with unmistakable malevolence. When viewed at close quarters it became clear that the other’s clothing was not grey but a form of motley, tiny diamond panes of black and white that endlessly repeated. The too-mobile face below the domino mask was bright and smooth like that of a painted doll.

  In contrast the incubus was covered in dark armour from head to foot with scant decoration saving short horns and tusks curving from its sinister, narrow-slotted helm. There was something about the incubus’s resolutely taciturn nature that implied that, by extension, he found this loquacious individual irritating in the extreme. Morr’s klaive twitched involuntarily as if he were only barely manageing to suppress the urge to strike down his companion through a heroic exertion of willpower. For once the armoured warrior broke his customary silence in what amounted, for him, to a lengthy declamation.

  ‘I cannot prevent you accompanying me… Motley, and I do owe you… a debt,’ Morr admitted reluctantly, ‘but do not imagine I need you or want you to help me again. The hierarchs shall be the final judge of my actions and they will hear no testimony but my own.’

  Motley frowned sadly. ‘I’m afraid that despite your cogent disputations destiny has yet to have her wicked way with us both. Even were we parted I feel positive we would be cast back together again momentarily until the Dysjunction is resolved – you know it’s no coincidence that the masque sent me to you in your hour of need.

  ‘All is not lost, Morr, but only if we play out our roles in the drama together. There are forces that you do not, indeed cannot, know of in the greater universe that are moving speedily towards a resolution that will bode very ill indeed for Commorragh if it transpires as they would have it. If you’ll just accept my help again I can guide you to a better future.’

  The incubus gazed at Motley silently for a moment more before turning and stomping away through the ooze without further comment. The sudden movement scattered a handful of gathering gloomwings like leaves. The motley-clad one pursed full red lips beneath its domino-mask and then followed with a sigh. Further back along t
he tunnel, unnoticed by either the incubus or his unwanted companion, stealthy figures dogged their steps.

  Archon Aez’ashya stood upon a narrow path of silver above the kilometres-deep caldera of the volcano-like arena of the Blades of Desire. The thin, cold air of High Commorragh blew chill against her exposed flesh and the captive suns, the Ilmaea, circling above seemed to give little warmth. The uppermost edges of the arena were etched with gleaming white stone terraces where she could see a sparse-looking gathering of shivering spectators. Distance and the size of the arena made the numbers deceptive at first glance. In reality hundreds of kabal members had come to see the challenge in person, and many more were watching by indirect means. She could feel their presence hovering around her like a pack of silent, hungry ghosts.

  The silver path ran from one edge of the rim to the other, leaping arrow-straight over the centre of the hollow cone at the heart of the fortress. Anything falling from here would have an unbroken plunge until it hit monofilament nets strung above the forges, cell blocks and practice areas at the bottom of the pit. At its mid-point the path widened into a disc no wider than Aez’ashya’s outstretched arms from its centre to its periphery. Her challenger was already waiting there for her with readied weapons gleaming. Aez’ashya strode out confidently and brusquely acknowledged the cheers of her followers on the terraces. The cheers of her loyal kabalites seemed somewhat muted and in this case it wasn’t only the distance that was to blame.

  Aez’ashya had no illusions – she was archon of the Blades of Desire only because another had made it so. There were plenty who doubted her ability to hold onto the position, and some who hoped to gain it in her stead. To truly rule the kabal Aez’ashya knew she was going to have to prove herself over and over again. The very smallest beginning of that was disposing of her immediate challengers, three so far, four including her current opponent, Sybris.