Ghost Warrior, page 23
He needed to give no command, his intent clear. Weapons readied, the Striking Scorpions vaulted over the wall of the veranda onto the bridge beneath, the buzz of chainswords springing into life swiftly followed by the cries of the dead and dying.
Iyanna walked among the dead.
They were all there, lining the avenue, standing before their mausoleums where before the statues had been.
Hariya, her mother. Her father, Arctai. Grandfather Naisayras. Grandmother Sasiahka. Illiyan, her paternal grandfather, and her aunt, his eldest daughter, Lotasitha. On and on, down the avenue the two lines stretched, pale figures, insubstantial, dissipating like tatters of fog caught in a strong breeze.
She would be free of them, free of their haunting, free of their weight upon her shoulders.
A cold hand slipped into Iyanna’s, its grip small but fierce.
She looked down.
‘Hello, Little Me,’ she said to Saisath. Her younger sister smiled. ‘Always smiling.’
Saisath’s features distorted, became hazy as though seen through tears, and in their shift Iyanna glimpsed for a moment another face.
Yvraine.
‘Don’t leave me,’ said Yvraine. ‘I need you, sister.’
‘Why do you want to forget me, Iyanna?’ Saisath asked, no longer smiling.
CHAPTER 26
A FAMILY LOST
It is true to say that the situation was dire for the Ynnari. Assailed from without and within, body and soul put to the test by the ambushes of the genestealer-tainted Zaisuthrans. But the Ynnari were no strangers to hardship, nor bloodshed. In battle and death they had been forged and in battle and death they were destined to end.
There was no thought of surrender, no doubt that they would fight to the death, for they knew the embrace of Ynnead awaited them. Though the gestalt of Zaisuthra smothered all distant thought and she could not feel Iyanna, Yvraine knew that many of her followers fought on across the craftworld – she would have sensed any great release of death even through the concealing psychic umbra. Yet she could not draw on it, and was left with the scattered soul-ashes of those close at hand, a fuel strong but in short supply.
Certainly not enough to conjure the Yncarne, which would have made a valuable reinforcement. Ynnead, like all gods, required sacrifice of sorts, and the Whispering God’s avatar remained, for the time being, out of reach until sufficiently numerous departed spirits could be gathered to raise the incorporeal manifestation.
Dispatching another genestealer with a caress from the Sword of Sorrows, Yvraine gathered the escaping lifeforce of her Ynnari, a swirl of diaphanous spirits that wreathed about her outstretched arm and fan. With a flick of her wrist she sent the psychic miasma flaring into the enemy, the curtain of descending soulstuff becoming a cleansing white fire that ran across the aliens’ chitin plates and burned through flesh like fire consuming paper.
The Whisper churned through the air, almost tangible, whipped into a storm by the presence of Yvraine and the smothering cloud of the groupmind. Howling and crying, the spirits of departing aeldari – Zaisuthran and Ynnari alike – seethed around the gates.
The soulbound fought bravely, the taunts of the wyches a contrast to the silent determination of the Silvered Blade Dire Avengers, in turn so different from the expressive but wordless war-calls from former incubi. Feeding upon the escaping soulstuff of their falling companions they drove forward, taking the fight to the Zaisuthrans, cutting them down with shuriken and klaive, wyches leaping over a mound of the dead to despatch others with hydraknives and razorsnares.
It was not enough, and even as the last of the genestealers within the hall gave its death rattle, the corridors around the hall darkened with the approach of many more. The Ynnari coalesced like a cloud about the Visarch and Yvraine, grim-faced, determined to sell their lives at the greatest cost to the enemy.
‘Death is not the end,’ the Visarch told them. ‘Through Ynnead, we shall be Reborn.’
Iyanna opened her eyes and let the cup fall from her hands. Thick alien blood splashed the yellow of her robe and spattered across the crystal tendrils that spread like roots from the Patriarch’s throne.
She met the eyes of Sydari, and saw clear the whorls of psychic power that poured from them, powered by the groupmind, inveigling their way into her thoughts, twisting perception and agency, turning her into a puppet. Bile rose in her throat, a wave of disgust and hatred. Her cold stare caused the Lord-Guardian to straighten in shock. He reeled back as the spiritseer extended her thoughts, snatching up the tendrils that linked him to her, ripping them from his mind with claws of ice. Through gritted teeth, she announced her decision.
‘My family are dead.’
Unable to match the pure speed and ferocity of the genestealers, the Visarch met them with guile and finesse. Always in motion, tempting throat-lacerating strikes and heart-shredding lunges, he used his own body as a lure, triggering the aliens to attack, meeting them with the edge or tip of Asu-var. He stepped into their attacks, a flourish of cloak to distract, a sidestep and thrust to part flesh with the least effort. Lethal claws slashed the humid air just a hair’s breadth from his armour. Foetid breath from lethal jaws flowed hot in the ventilator of his helm.
Through it a single thought burned in his mind: protect Yvraine.
The Opener of the Seventh Way stood her ground, whipping the Sword of Sorrows left and then right, catching limb and torso with the slightest touch to wrench forth such soulstuff as existed in the bio-engineered beasts that surrounded them. The Visarch could feel the slithering presence of the groupmind, a seething entity that tried to choke out all other thought, jealously holding onto the escaping psychic matter of its creatures.
Monsattra and the other emissaries had tried to flee when the purestrain genestealers had launched their attack, but Dreamspear intercepted them, somersaulting over their heads to cut off their escape. Turned to a dazzling blur by his dathedi suit, the Great Harlequin moved among them, a rainbow of violence that left slashed throats and pierced organs in its wake.
The soulbound formed up around their mistress. The incubi of the Visarch’s Coiled Blade cleaved as a single entity through the first wave of purebred genestealers, matching shrieking klaives against deadly speed. Her gladiatrices in the Bloodbrides bounded past, intent upon a fresh surge of attackers coming now from two of the other archways – part-aeldari hybrids with pallid skin and extra limbs, their Zaisuthran heritage perverted by the alien genes within.
Neither as graceful as their aeldari parents, nor as naturally swift as their alien sires, these half-born fell easily to the arena weapons of the Bloodbrides, their corrupted flesh left scattered across the tiles of the hall.
But the Zaisuthrans were resilient in mind and number, thrown forward by the unthinking desire of the groupmind, whose baleful energy fluxed and waxed strong through the arteries surrounding the Hall of Gates. Volleys of lasfire sprang from the archways, and the rasp of semi-organic blades on Commorraghan armour sounded loud among the fighting.
‘We must set free the passed ones from the starships,’ the Visarch called out, in the brief lull between parting the body of one foe and parrying the descending claws of the next.
‘The groupmind stills all thought,’ answered Yvraine.
He felt his mistress probe the amorphous darkness at the back of their minds, but it merged and flexed with her, formed of many points, no focus for her to attack.
‘Only if we mount up the dead of those that make it so strong can we penetrate its veil,’ she concluded.
Meliniel took a moment to survey the ongoing battle, piecing together what he could physically see with what he recalled from the last reports.
It seemed that, as he had thought, Azkahr was right. The few forays into the central building had been feints, while the majority of the Zaisuthran forces consolidated their positions in the outer towers, stables and halls.
He could see many of them now, the telltale glint of silver in windows and at doorways, their lasrifles trained on the upper storeys of the manse itself. The grav-tanks prowled above, keeping guard against counter-attack rather than supporting a thrust into the main building.
Doubtless they were also taking stock, marshalling their forces for a final incursion.
The Ynnari could reach some of the wave serpents and raiders, a few jetbikes. Several had been left in an underground space beneath the tower-wall, more in the courtyards and on the main road leading up through the moors. If they could find some way of distracting the Zaisuthrans, just for a short while, they could sally forth, retake some of the transports and break free.
Where to after that?
It didn’t matter, Meliniel realised.
The aeldari were always loath to be pinned to a place, preferring the flexibility and space of roving combat. From his time as the wielder of the Swordwind he knew perfectly well the value of space and distance. And among his number were reaver-bikers, hellion riders and others that not only excelled at such fast moving battles but craved it. Only his most adamant commands and their loyalty to Ynnead had convinced them to remain inside the manse when the first attacks had taken place – had they left then, he had no doubt they would have all been hunted down and slain piecemeal by now.
‘Where’s my dagger in the sleeve, Azkahr?’ he demanded over the messenger carrier. ‘Now would be a good time to see it slipped into the back of our enemy.’
No reply was forthcoming. Meliniel checked below, to assure himself that the Striking Scorpions had finished eliminating the attack across the bridge. He saw them standing in a group amid the scattered remnants of their enemies, their attention drawn to something at the far end of the slender span. Their leader’s warning came at the same time as Meliniel spied movement on the opposite side of the gap.
‘Infiltrators of the Great Devourer! Zaisuthra is beset by alien corruption, autarch.’
From the slender tower across the divide, dozens of powerful, loping creatures burst into view, claws flexing, black eyes fixed upon the eight green-armoured warriors on the pale stones of the skybridge. Meliniel’s chest tightened as he watched the tyranid-spawned monstrosities, even as his befuddled thoughts sought to comprehend how they came to be here.
‘Azkahr!’ Desperation tore clarity into his clouded mind. ‘Get everyone to the transports. Now! Children of the air, cast Ynnead’s net upon the skies!’
He was torn between jumping down to help the Striking Scorpions, and following his own command. The aspect warriors fired their shuriken pistols at the approaching knot of whip-fast aliens, cutting down several of their number, but a fraction of their strength.
It was pointless for them to turn and run – the genestealers were swifter even than aeldari, especially the heavily armoured Striking Scorpions. Meliniel fired down, a few volleys of shuriken that did little to blunt the coming spearpoint of horrific alien warriors.
Above the roofs around him the first jetbikes and skyweavers lifted against the pale clouds, their riders gunning their machines to full speed as they cleared the enclosing walls and hills. Hearing augmented by the systems of his autarch suit, he caught a distant but familiar purr of grav-motors, and cast his eye to the skyline in time to see the sleek shapes of two raiders slip over the crest, their open decks filled with the warriors of Azkahr’s ‘concealed blade’.
He gave silent thanks, their timing could not have been better.
Meliniel turned away and broke into a run. It would be up to Iyanna or Yvraine to call down the wrath of the dead waiting in the starships, for in a single pounding beat of his heart his mission had gone from winning to simply surviving.
CHAPTER 27
A GOD WHISPERS
The Patriarch hissed its displeasure, thrusting the tip of the Suin Dallae towards Iyanna. She was gone from the groupmind again, ejected as an outsider, and felt nothing of the psychic imperative that accompanied the gesture. The results were immediate though, as the members of the House of Arienal released their handholding and advanced with snarls and curses.
Iyanna leapt towards Sydari, who had drawn a dagger shaped like Khaine’s rune from his sleeve. She batted aside the clumsy blow, breaking his wrist so that the blade clattered to the floor. With her other hand she snatched him around the throat, talon-like nails of her ungloved hand pressing welts into the flesh above his artery. She had felt his presence in the groupmind, and although the Patriarch was the end and the beginning of the psychic web, Sydari was the focus, the aeldari lens through which the alien’s thoughts were broadcast. His loss would cripple the Zaisuthrans even as they warred with the Ynnari.
‘Your Lord-Guardian dies before I do,’ Iyanna snarled, turning around from the Patriarch to the coven and back again. ‘Stay where you are.’
The command to halt was as immediate as the one to attack, obeyed without hesitation. A few of the Arienali had weapons – laspistols brought forth from beneath cloaks, swords and daggers dragged from sheaths. Others had only their claws and fangs, the genetic legacy of the creature that had corrupted them, but such weapons were as equally lethal as those fashioned in Zaisuthra’s weaponshops.
‘They will not let you leave,’ croaked Sydari. With a grimace he prised himself from her grip and stepped back. ‘You were a fool to leave behind your weapon. So easily manipulated. Your grief makes you weak.’
‘I do not carry a weapon to comfort me in my grief,’ Iyanna replied. Her heart quickened as she held out an empty hand. ‘I carry it to assuage my rage. And that is always with me.’
Blue flame burst from her open palm, a rod of fire that solidified in her grasp to become the gleaming Spear of Teuthlas, the horrified expression of Sydari reflected in its golden blade.
Before the Lord-Guardian could react, Iyanna thrust the polearm, lancing it through the chest of Sydari, tip shearing through ribs, heart and spine without pause. In his death-throes she saw her father still, and wondered if he had looked the same when the conflagration from the torpedoes had engulfed her family.
As though a spell were broken, the Arienal coven closed on her again in an instant, but Iyanna’s thoughts were not of them. She leapt over Sydari’s falling corpse, propelling herself towards the Patriarch.
It rose out of the throne, flames erupting from its darkened flesh, iron-and-bronze chitin-shaped armour reflecting the inferno gleam. The Suin Dallae screeched its own bloodlust as the Patriarch hauled its bulk from the iron chair, hampered by its unnatural hybrid form. Neither demigod nor alien broodfather, the Patriarch was not comfortable in its own body and slashed a clumsy blow, the burning head of its weapon passing well clear of the spear of Teuthlas raised to defend against it.
‘You are an abomination in every sense,’ snapped Iyanna, ducking beneath a claw tip. ‘Gods and fiends both disown you!’
The auric-edge of her weapon caught its chest, setting free a gout of sparks that turned to pattering droplets of alien ichor. Iyanna dodged another swiping claw-blow, narrowly avoiding the throne as she darted past the Patriarch. Its backswing was faster, catching a glancing blow against her shoulder, setting a blaze of psychic fire burning from her armour, a resonant flare of power setting fire to Iyanna’s thoughts.
It had another weapon though, more powerful than even the spear of a wargod.
For a heartbeat Iyanna felt the intake of power, the sudden vacuum as the Patriarch absorbed the psychic latency of the groupmind, syphoning away the vestigial thoughts of all the aeldari that comprised it. The Arienali stumbled and shuddered. Some cried out, others gasped in ecstasy as their wicked master took their psychic power into itself.
The blunt force of the psychic attack hurled Iyanna sideways through the air, to crash her against the remnants of the inner sanctum’s fleshy wall. The impact sent coruscations of white and green power scything across the embrace of her runic armour while talons of pure psychic energy tried to shred her thoughts and a silent wail of alien malignancy shuddered through her senses.
Iyanna knew better than to fight the force of the groupmind. She knew the power there, and could no more resist its battering waves than she could hold back a starship with her hand. But she had been within, had seen its structure and purpose, and knew that it was as much a part of Zaisuthra itself as it was the Zaisuthrans and the Patriarch.
And somewhere out there, through the crackle of alien minds and corrupted aeldari spirits, her companions, the Ynnari were dying.
She felt the wisps of their escaping spirits, like a vortex around Yvraine, the emissary herself a stalagmite-like pillar of ice among the swirl, the blood-hued dagger of the Visarch by her side.
Iyanna knew nothing of the unfolding battle, only that there was death on both sides. For each loss of the Zaisuthrans, the groupmind was diminished.
For every Ynnari death…
Iyanna let her thoughts fold into themselves, creating a short-lived psychic implosion. Within the storm of the groupmind, targeted by the Patriarch’s assault, Iyanna became a lode for the departing aeldari spirits. Through her, through the tissue-memory of the craftworld itself, the power raged, spreading frost and numbness where they passed.
It was not enough and Iyanna reached out, sending barbs of thought out into the groupmind, piercing and prodding, anchoring her thoughts with slender hooks in the soul of her sister-of-the-dead, a silver chain linking their minds.
‘Yvraine!’ Iyanna called out, the words giving impetus to the thoughts. ‘The Whispering God rises.’
The brushing contact from Iyanna set Yvraine’s soul afire. Like a bridge across a dark chasm, a piercing beacon in the depth of night, the spiritseer’s thoughts reached out through the murk of the groupmind. More than that, she opened up her thoughts to Yvraine, every fibre of her mortal being attuned to the forces of the dead.
Iyanna walked among the dead.
They were all there, lining the avenue, standing before their mausoleums where before the statues had been.
Hariya, her mother. Her father, Arctai. Grandfather Naisayras. Grandmother Sasiahka. Illiyan, her paternal grandfather, and her aunt, his eldest daughter, Lotasitha. On and on, down the avenue the two lines stretched, pale figures, insubstantial, dissipating like tatters of fog caught in a strong breeze.
She would be free of them, free of their haunting, free of their weight upon her shoulders.
A cold hand slipped into Iyanna’s, its grip small but fierce.
She looked down.
‘Hello, Little Me,’ she said to Saisath. Her younger sister smiled. ‘Always smiling.’
Saisath’s features distorted, became hazy as though seen through tears, and in their shift Iyanna glimpsed for a moment another face.
Yvraine.
‘Don’t leave me,’ said Yvraine. ‘I need you, sister.’
‘Why do you want to forget me, Iyanna?’ Saisath asked, no longer smiling.
CHAPTER 26
A FAMILY LOST
It is true to say that the situation was dire for the Ynnari. Assailed from without and within, body and soul put to the test by the ambushes of the genestealer-tainted Zaisuthrans. But the Ynnari were no strangers to hardship, nor bloodshed. In battle and death they had been forged and in battle and death they were destined to end.
There was no thought of surrender, no doubt that they would fight to the death, for they knew the embrace of Ynnead awaited them. Though the gestalt of Zaisuthra smothered all distant thought and she could not feel Iyanna, Yvraine knew that many of her followers fought on across the craftworld – she would have sensed any great release of death even through the concealing psychic umbra. Yet she could not draw on it, and was left with the scattered soul-ashes of those close at hand, a fuel strong but in short supply.
Certainly not enough to conjure the Yncarne, which would have made a valuable reinforcement. Ynnead, like all gods, required sacrifice of sorts, and the Whispering God’s avatar remained, for the time being, out of reach until sufficiently numerous departed spirits could be gathered to raise the incorporeal manifestation.
Dispatching another genestealer with a caress from the Sword of Sorrows, Yvraine gathered the escaping lifeforce of her Ynnari, a swirl of diaphanous spirits that wreathed about her outstretched arm and fan. With a flick of her wrist she sent the psychic miasma flaring into the enemy, the curtain of descending soulstuff becoming a cleansing white fire that ran across the aliens’ chitin plates and burned through flesh like fire consuming paper.
The Whisper churned through the air, almost tangible, whipped into a storm by the presence of Yvraine and the smothering cloud of the groupmind. Howling and crying, the spirits of departing aeldari – Zaisuthran and Ynnari alike – seethed around the gates.
The soulbound fought bravely, the taunts of the wyches a contrast to the silent determination of the Silvered Blade Dire Avengers, in turn so different from the expressive but wordless war-calls from former incubi. Feeding upon the escaping soulstuff of their falling companions they drove forward, taking the fight to the Zaisuthrans, cutting them down with shuriken and klaive, wyches leaping over a mound of the dead to despatch others with hydraknives and razorsnares.
It was not enough, and even as the last of the genestealers within the hall gave its death rattle, the corridors around the hall darkened with the approach of many more. The Ynnari coalesced like a cloud about the Visarch and Yvraine, grim-faced, determined to sell their lives at the greatest cost to the enemy.
‘Death is not the end,’ the Visarch told them. ‘Through Ynnead, we shall be Reborn.’
Iyanna opened her eyes and let the cup fall from her hands. Thick alien blood splashed the yellow of her robe and spattered across the crystal tendrils that spread like roots from the Patriarch’s throne.
She met the eyes of Sydari, and saw clear the whorls of psychic power that poured from them, powered by the groupmind, inveigling their way into her thoughts, twisting perception and agency, turning her into a puppet. Bile rose in her throat, a wave of disgust and hatred. Her cold stare caused the Lord-Guardian to straighten in shock. He reeled back as the spiritseer extended her thoughts, snatching up the tendrils that linked him to her, ripping them from his mind with claws of ice. Through gritted teeth, she announced her decision.
‘My family are dead.’
Unable to match the pure speed and ferocity of the genestealers, the Visarch met them with guile and finesse. Always in motion, tempting throat-lacerating strikes and heart-shredding lunges, he used his own body as a lure, triggering the aliens to attack, meeting them with the edge or tip of Asu-var. He stepped into their attacks, a flourish of cloak to distract, a sidestep and thrust to part flesh with the least effort. Lethal claws slashed the humid air just a hair’s breadth from his armour. Foetid breath from lethal jaws flowed hot in the ventilator of his helm.
Through it a single thought burned in his mind: protect Yvraine.
The Opener of the Seventh Way stood her ground, whipping the Sword of Sorrows left and then right, catching limb and torso with the slightest touch to wrench forth such soulstuff as existed in the bio-engineered beasts that surrounded them. The Visarch could feel the slithering presence of the groupmind, a seething entity that tried to choke out all other thought, jealously holding onto the escaping psychic matter of its creatures.
Monsattra and the other emissaries had tried to flee when the purestrain genestealers had launched their attack, but Dreamspear intercepted them, somersaulting over their heads to cut off their escape. Turned to a dazzling blur by his dathedi suit, the Great Harlequin moved among them, a rainbow of violence that left slashed throats and pierced organs in its wake.
The soulbound formed up around their mistress. The incubi of the Visarch’s Coiled Blade cleaved as a single entity through the first wave of purebred genestealers, matching shrieking klaives against deadly speed. Her gladiatrices in the Bloodbrides bounded past, intent upon a fresh surge of attackers coming now from two of the other archways – part-aeldari hybrids with pallid skin and extra limbs, their Zaisuthran heritage perverted by the alien genes within.
Neither as graceful as their aeldari parents, nor as naturally swift as their alien sires, these half-born fell easily to the arena weapons of the Bloodbrides, their corrupted flesh left scattered across the tiles of the hall.
But the Zaisuthrans were resilient in mind and number, thrown forward by the unthinking desire of the groupmind, whose baleful energy fluxed and waxed strong through the arteries surrounding the Hall of Gates. Volleys of lasfire sprang from the archways, and the rasp of semi-organic blades on Commorraghan armour sounded loud among the fighting.
‘We must set free the passed ones from the starships,’ the Visarch called out, in the brief lull between parting the body of one foe and parrying the descending claws of the next.
‘The groupmind stills all thought,’ answered Yvraine.
He felt his mistress probe the amorphous darkness at the back of their minds, but it merged and flexed with her, formed of many points, no focus for her to attack.
‘Only if we mount up the dead of those that make it so strong can we penetrate its veil,’ she concluded.
Meliniel took a moment to survey the ongoing battle, piecing together what he could physically see with what he recalled from the last reports.
It seemed that, as he had thought, Azkahr was right. The few forays into the central building had been feints, while the majority of the Zaisuthran forces consolidated their positions in the outer towers, stables and halls.
He could see many of them now, the telltale glint of silver in windows and at doorways, their lasrifles trained on the upper storeys of the manse itself. The grav-tanks prowled above, keeping guard against counter-attack rather than supporting a thrust into the main building.
Doubtless they were also taking stock, marshalling their forces for a final incursion.
The Ynnari could reach some of the wave serpents and raiders, a few jetbikes. Several had been left in an underground space beneath the tower-wall, more in the courtyards and on the main road leading up through the moors. If they could find some way of distracting the Zaisuthrans, just for a short while, they could sally forth, retake some of the transports and break free.
Where to after that?
It didn’t matter, Meliniel realised.
The aeldari were always loath to be pinned to a place, preferring the flexibility and space of roving combat. From his time as the wielder of the Swordwind he knew perfectly well the value of space and distance. And among his number were reaver-bikers, hellion riders and others that not only excelled at such fast moving battles but craved it. Only his most adamant commands and their loyalty to Ynnead had convinced them to remain inside the manse when the first attacks had taken place – had they left then, he had no doubt they would have all been hunted down and slain piecemeal by now.
‘Where’s my dagger in the sleeve, Azkahr?’ he demanded over the messenger carrier. ‘Now would be a good time to see it slipped into the back of our enemy.’
No reply was forthcoming. Meliniel checked below, to assure himself that the Striking Scorpions had finished eliminating the attack across the bridge. He saw them standing in a group amid the scattered remnants of their enemies, their attention drawn to something at the far end of the slender span. Their leader’s warning came at the same time as Meliniel spied movement on the opposite side of the gap.
‘Infiltrators of the Great Devourer! Zaisuthra is beset by alien corruption, autarch.’
From the slender tower across the divide, dozens of powerful, loping creatures burst into view, claws flexing, black eyes fixed upon the eight green-armoured warriors on the pale stones of the skybridge. Meliniel’s chest tightened as he watched the tyranid-spawned monstrosities, even as his befuddled thoughts sought to comprehend how they came to be here.
‘Azkahr!’ Desperation tore clarity into his clouded mind. ‘Get everyone to the transports. Now! Children of the air, cast Ynnead’s net upon the skies!’
He was torn between jumping down to help the Striking Scorpions, and following his own command. The aspect warriors fired their shuriken pistols at the approaching knot of whip-fast aliens, cutting down several of their number, but a fraction of their strength.
It was pointless for them to turn and run – the genestealers were swifter even than aeldari, especially the heavily armoured Striking Scorpions. Meliniel fired down, a few volleys of shuriken that did little to blunt the coming spearpoint of horrific alien warriors.
Above the roofs around him the first jetbikes and skyweavers lifted against the pale clouds, their riders gunning their machines to full speed as they cleared the enclosing walls and hills. Hearing augmented by the systems of his autarch suit, he caught a distant but familiar purr of grav-motors, and cast his eye to the skyline in time to see the sleek shapes of two raiders slip over the crest, their open decks filled with the warriors of Azkahr’s ‘concealed blade’.
He gave silent thanks, their timing could not have been better.
Meliniel turned away and broke into a run. It would be up to Iyanna or Yvraine to call down the wrath of the dead waiting in the starships, for in a single pounding beat of his heart his mission had gone from winning to simply surviving.
CHAPTER 27
A GOD WHISPERS
The Patriarch hissed its displeasure, thrusting the tip of the Suin Dallae towards Iyanna. She was gone from the groupmind again, ejected as an outsider, and felt nothing of the psychic imperative that accompanied the gesture. The results were immediate though, as the members of the House of Arienal released their handholding and advanced with snarls and curses.
Iyanna leapt towards Sydari, who had drawn a dagger shaped like Khaine’s rune from his sleeve. She batted aside the clumsy blow, breaking his wrist so that the blade clattered to the floor. With her other hand she snatched him around the throat, talon-like nails of her ungloved hand pressing welts into the flesh above his artery. She had felt his presence in the groupmind, and although the Patriarch was the end and the beginning of the psychic web, Sydari was the focus, the aeldari lens through which the alien’s thoughts were broadcast. His loss would cripple the Zaisuthrans even as they warred with the Ynnari.
‘Your Lord-Guardian dies before I do,’ Iyanna snarled, turning around from the Patriarch to the coven and back again. ‘Stay where you are.’
The command to halt was as immediate as the one to attack, obeyed without hesitation. A few of the Arienali had weapons – laspistols brought forth from beneath cloaks, swords and daggers dragged from sheaths. Others had only their claws and fangs, the genetic legacy of the creature that had corrupted them, but such weapons were as equally lethal as those fashioned in Zaisuthra’s weaponshops.
‘They will not let you leave,’ croaked Sydari. With a grimace he prised himself from her grip and stepped back. ‘You were a fool to leave behind your weapon. So easily manipulated. Your grief makes you weak.’
‘I do not carry a weapon to comfort me in my grief,’ Iyanna replied. Her heart quickened as she held out an empty hand. ‘I carry it to assuage my rage. And that is always with me.’
Blue flame burst from her open palm, a rod of fire that solidified in her grasp to become the gleaming Spear of Teuthlas, the horrified expression of Sydari reflected in its golden blade.
Before the Lord-Guardian could react, Iyanna thrust the polearm, lancing it through the chest of Sydari, tip shearing through ribs, heart and spine without pause. In his death-throes she saw her father still, and wondered if he had looked the same when the conflagration from the torpedoes had engulfed her family.
As though a spell were broken, the Arienal coven closed on her again in an instant, but Iyanna’s thoughts were not of them. She leapt over Sydari’s falling corpse, propelling herself towards the Patriarch.
It rose out of the throne, flames erupting from its darkened flesh, iron-and-bronze chitin-shaped armour reflecting the inferno gleam. The Suin Dallae screeched its own bloodlust as the Patriarch hauled its bulk from the iron chair, hampered by its unnatural hybrid form. Neither demigod nor alien broodfather, the Patriarch was not comfortable in its own body and slashed a clumsy blow, the burning head of its weapon passing well clear of the spear of Teuthlas raised to defend against it.
‘You are an abomination in every sense,’ snapped Iyanna, ducking beneath a claw tip. ‘Gods and fiends both disown you!’
The auric-edge of her weapon caught its chest, setting free a gout of sparks that turned to pattering droplets of alien ichor. Iyanna dodged another swiping claw-blow, narrowly avoiding the throne as she darted past the Patriarch. Its backswing was faster, catching a glancing blow against her shoulder, setting a blaze of psychic fire burning from her armour, a resonant flare of power setting fire to Iyanna’s thoughts.
It had another weapon though, more powerful than even the spear of a wargod.
For a heartbeat Iyanna felt the intake of power, the sudden vacuum as the Patriarch absorbed the psychic latency of the groupmind, syphoning away the vestigial thoughts of all the aeldari that comprised it. The Arienali stumbled and shuddered. Some cried out, others gasped in ecstasy as their wicked master took their psychic power into itself.
The blunt force of the psychic attack hurled Iyanna sideways through the air, to crash her against the remnants of the inner sanctum’s fleshy wall. The impact sent coruscations of white and green power scything across the embrace of her runic armour while talons of pure psychic energy tried to shred her thoughts and a silent wail of alien malignancy shuddered through her senses.
Iyanna knew better than to fight the force of the groupmind. She knew the power there, and could no more resist its battering waves than she could hold back a starship with her hand. But she had been within, had seen its structure and purpose, and knew that it was as much a part of Zaisuthra itself as it was the Zaisuthrans and the Patriarch.
And somewhere out there, through the crackle of alien minds and corrupted aeldari spirits, her companions, the Ynnari were dying.
She felt the wisps of their escaping spirits, like a vortex around Yvraine, the emissary herself a stalagmite-like pillar of ice among the swirl, the blood-hued dagger of the Visarch by her side.
Iyanna knew nothing of the unfolding battle, only that there was death on both sides. For each loss of the Zaisuthrans, the groupmind was diminished.
For every Ynnari death…
Iyanna let her thoughts fold into themselves, creating a short-lived psychic implosion. Within the storm of the groupmind, targeted by the Patriarch’s assault, Iyanna became a lode for the departing aeldari spirits. Through her, through the tissue-memory of the craftworld itself, the power raged, spreading frost and numbness where they passed.
It was not enough and Iyanna reached out, sending barbs of thought out into the groupmind, piercing and prodding, anchoring her thoughts with slender hooks in the soul of her sister-of-the-dead, a silver chain linking their minds.
‘Yvraine!’ Iyanna called out, the words giving impetus to the thoughts. ‘The Whispering God rises.’
The brushing contact from Iyanna set Yvraine’s soul afire. Like a bridge across a dark chasm, a piercing beacon in the depth of night, the spiritseer’s thoughts reached out through the murk of the groupmind. More than that, she opened up her thoughts to Yvraine, every fibre of her mortal being attuned to the forces of the dead.
