Jain Zar: The Storm of Silence, page 25
She spun to a crouch and took a breath to scream again, but before she could release it Jain Zar appeared, the Blade of Destruction parting the greenskin from groin to shoulder in one cleaving strike.
‘An ork does not fall easily,’ Jain Zar admonished her. ‘Strike twice, thrice, to ensure it is dead.’
Nodding, Tallithea turned away. She saw a bone-armoured body on the ground among the dismembered carcasses of the aliens. It looked out of place, like a brushstroke that had gone awry or a chisel mark that had marred a perfectly sculpted feature.
She was no longer aware of the presence of Idomen. She felt a momentary disappointment that her sister had fallen to such crude foes, and knew dispassionately that when her war mask fell she would grieve for the fallen shrine-maiden. For now she regarded the loss without emotion as she crouched to pluck Idomen’s shining spirit stone from the breastplate of her armour.
‘More are coming but we do not have time to fight them all,’ Jain Zar said, gesturing towards the increasing din coming from up the mountain.
Her blood fired by the brief clash, Tallithea sped after the Phoenix Lord with light steps and a joyful heart.
The trees soon gave way to the trampled wake of the warlord’s beast, a broad swath of snapped and splintered trunks. Coming out into the meagre daylight, it was immediately apparent why the alien commander had chosen this location, as the vista stretched almost the entire length of the mountain valley below. The lead forces of both tribes clashed across a river, riders and bikers sparring and swerving through the spume of a ford while gun-trikes sped over a rickety bridge further down the mountain.
The larger hordes were closing with the inevitability of tectonic plates, the potential impact as earth-shattering. Warbeasts and battle engines pounded towards each other exchanging hails of rockets and shells, advancing amidst a sea of smaller walkers and creatures, a tide of green-skinned brutes baying and howling in their lust for battle.
Close to the forefront of the city-tribe’s attack rose a war machine larger than any other, a many-decked mechanical idol of a raging god, its turrets and ports ablaze with mounted weaponry and fusillades from the orks crowded within. Arcs of green energy leapt from the eyes of the god-titan, building in power.
Jain Zar knew she looked upon the throne-machine of the creature that would humble Ulthwé and save millions of her people. It felt strange to be indebted to an alien warlord, whose part in the fates to come was no more conscious than that of a natural disaster that sweeps all before it.
Ahead the king-ork of the mountain fortress was heading back to its huge mount, perhaps hoping to meet its rival head-on. He was followed by his entourage of slab-armoured thugs; if they were able to clamber aboard the mighty beast it would be all the harder to slay the commander.
Urging on the Last Heard with her thoughts, as though dragging them after her like the train of an elaborate gown, the Phoenix Lord sped across the broken wood and uneven ground. The Scream That Steals started to build inside, ready to be unleashed the moment she was within range of the orks. With it she felt the bloodthirst of the shrine-squad building, taking her power from her and feeding energy back at the same time, the Storm of Silence and her Howling Banshees becoming a solitary weapon aimed at the ork’s heart, guided by a single will and desire.
They had covered perhaps half the distance when the mist-shrouded and smoke-filled air above the clashing hordes bent and warped, blistered suddenly with dozens of golden portals. Falcons and Wave Serpents, Nightwing fighters and Vampire bombers sped from the webway.
Red flares of brightlances and the azure spark of starcannons coursed through the press of greenskins pouring up the mountain. Scatter lasers and shuriken cannons reaped hundreds of lives from the throng of aliens. The bright flash of pulsars lit the gloom, a dozen weapons converging on the engine-god of the city. Ammunition stores burst into flame at their touch, armour ran in molten rivulets under the intense barrage of lasers that sliced apart armoured turrets and punched through engine blocks. Smoke billowed from a score of rents in the machine’s armour.
The coloured splashes of Aspect Warriors pouring from Wave Serpent transports dissected the advancing ork attack in many places, perfectly coordinated to isolate and destroy the most threatening alien warriors. Black Guardians followed in their wake and jetbikes circled the flanks, cutting down the greenskins in their path with ruthless volleys of shurikens and laser fire.
Jain Zar slowed to a halt, ill feeling rising as she watched a fresh salvo of fire flash down from the speeding craft in the skies above. Stabbed with brightlance and pulsar, the god-engine gave up all resistance, its boilers and furnaces breaking open to engulf the teetering structure foot to head in purple and orange flames. Secondary detonations wracked the machine, hurling flaming debris onto the warbikes and battlewagons clustered around the war engine.
The Last Heard gathered around their Phoenix Lord, snarling in spite, echoing her dismay.
Jain Zar looked at the collapsing ruin of the warlord’s battle tower and knew that she had failed.
19
A hundred runes danced across the skein. It was a thing of beauty, the combined efforts of Ulthwé’s seers conducting the strands of fate in concert with each other. Daensyrith led the psychic symphony, directing the great swell of the battle, arranging the foundations of the warhost’s movements. Around her, the council teased out individual destinies, manoeuvring squads and even individuals to make best use of the surprise of the orks. Exarch and Aspect Warrior, Falcon pilot and Avatar, the unfolding fates of all swayed and flickered in transit from the future to the past.
Eldrad was content to play his part, monitoring the attack up the left flank of the city-tribe of orks. He sent Striking Scorpions and war walkers on a course that would intercept alien reinforcements bundling out of their crude transports alongside the river that cut through the battlefield. A Wave Serpent disgorged its squad of Black Guardians so that their starcannon could cover the advance, its plasma bolts ready to ward off a burgeoning ork bike attack.
The farseer saw this playing out not on the mountainside but across the interlocking fragments of fate that made up the skein. In his mind’s eye the present and the future overlapped. The Striking Scorpions cut down the ork nobles with their whirring chainblades while the war walkers sent flurries of brightlance fire into more transports, turning them into half-tracked pyres. To his thoughts the starcannon had already turned the ork warbikers into slag and charred flesh.
The edifice of the skein quickly shifted like sands beneath their feet; once-futures disappeared, replaced by whole new mazes of potential. Fundamental changes spread out along the paths of possible outcomes, splintering fractals that broke the plan into a thousand strands.
Eldrad did his best to rein in the rapidly multiplying fates, his runes spinning and careening from one strand to the next as he sought out the best outcomes. He saw eldar dying, hacked down by thuggish aliens, blasted by their primitive weapons, crushed beneath vehicle rollers and tracks. The Striking Scorpions were surrounded, the war walkers left as burning wrecks on the riverside. The bodies of Black Guardians littered the mountain in pools of blood and mounds of severed limbs.
Around him flew the runes of the others as they tried to bring the rampaging fates back under control.
An urgent impulse spread through the threads, originating from Daensyrith. The head of the council demanded communion.
‘We must work as one,’ Daensyrith demanded. ‘We begin again, starting with the Rune of Khaine. All must spring from the Avatar’s fate.’
The seers closed their minds together, pulling with them dozens of strands, bending the skein with the pressure of their thoughts so that the splintering future started to coalesce around the burning rune of Khaine. Eldrad moved to join them, snatching up such fates as he saw best served the effort, seeking to trace the source of their creation so that he might add his thoughts to the new strategy.
Yet even as he sought out these beneficial futures, he demanded answers.
‘What has changed?’ he asked the others. ‘What did we miss?’
‘The orks are united against us,’ replied Astrothia. ‘We hoped to divide them, but we face two foes, not one.’
‘Impossible,’ replied Charythas. ‘We saw clearly that the orks continue to wage battle against each other even as we fall upon them. What could change so dramatically in a few moments?’
What indeed? Eldrad merged his threads of fate with those of the others, conjuring together a makeshift plan to keep the tides of battle in their favour. As he did so he searched the skein for an answer, seeking to know how they could not have foreseen the unity of the two ork tribes against a common foe.
He found one particular thread that stood out of place. It cut across everything else, a singular line through fate that briefly touched others but was not bent from its course nor knotted to any other.
The Rune of the Banshee sped along its length, spinning rapidly, flickering with life.
Jain Zar.
Before he had a chance to delve deeper along this strand, an impulse from Charythas brought him out of his contemplation, dragging his thoughts back to the here and now of the mortal world.
Eldrad stood beside the Wave Serpent that had carried him and Charythas to oversee the left flank of the eldar attack. From their vantage point they could see about half of the battle, the interplay of precise eldar attacks against the rushing brutality of the green-skinned savages. Though it lacked the clarity of the skein, the combined elements of clean eldar vehicles cutting lines through the rampant ork horde possessed its own raw beauty.
But there was nothing beautiful about the thousands of orks streaming down the mountain, roaring, trumpeting beasts of war at their heart. They were led by an enormous scale-skinned creature as tall at the shoulder as a wraithknight. Four immense tusks jutted from the riveted plates that clad its head, its body decked in howdahs and gun turrets. Cannons belched forth fire and smoke, their barrage ripping a swath through city-orks and eldar alike. Three other warbeasts flanked the monster, adding their own fusillades to the weight of shells falling upon the swift eldar formations. Crackling shields from generators mounted on smaller beasts around them fizzed and sparked with incoming laser and plasma, deflecting the fire of the eldar.
‘Jain Zar did not kill the mountain warlord…’
Eldrad watched with trepidation as the orks from the peak fortress attacked alongside their commander, steering towards the heart of the eldar rather than smashing into the city-tribe as the council had foreseen. Faced with annihilation, the orks of both settlements were willing to fight together beneath the banner of the still-living warlord.
A flare of fear and pain rippled across the skein, followed by a cold wind of loss. Below, Eldrad could see a thicket of Black Guardians trying to hold back the incoming beasts, several dozen of them, gathered about the smoking wreck of a downed Wave Serpent.
Even before he dived into the skein, Eldrad knew what had happened. The absence of Daensyrith was immediately apparent, a vortex at the heart of the seers’ threads.
‘We must leave.’ The thought came from Hathesis, one of Daensyrith’s closest allies. ‘The battle here will be too costly. If we withdraw now, we can minimise the damage.’
‘What of the fallen?’ replied Eldrad. ‘We have lost dozens of kin, their spirit stones lie unclaimed among the savages. Would you abandon the souls of our people to an uncertain future?’
Eldrad’s runes flew from his pouches at his command and circled in long orbits as he slid his thoughts back into the deep skein.
‘What choice do we have?’ said Astrothia. Her spirit flashed this way and that, highlighting the rampage of the ork warlord. The rune of Khaine guttered and died in the vision as the shell of the Avatar was crushed beneath the metal claws of the titan-beast. ‘Five times that number again will fall in saving them.’
Out in the far distance, nearly a lifetime away, Eldrad saw worlds burning, the rampage of the orks changed but unchecked. His own rune floated alone in the darkness, far from the sight of the others, beyond their understanding. He could not even reach back to show them that the doom had not been averted, that the dying was for nothing.
It was almost too much to contemplate, staring out into the infinite emptiness of the future, where paths of fate became so divided they ceased to exist. He felt the bitter cold to the depths of his soul and knew that he alone had been set upon this road. There was not an eldar alive that could walk it instead.
Waiting in the abyss was She Who Thirsts, a bottomless maelstrom consuming all that was left of his people. He looked down into the storm, watched the expansion and contraction of the god they had created, pulsing and writhing, waiting to feed on the last eldar soul.
And despair fled before the sight, for Eldrad knew beyond any doubt that he would not allow it. From death’s grip itself he would find a way to rob the Great Enemy of victory, to starve She Who Thirsts.
And in making this decision he saw that the void was not empty but filled with glittering strands, each as slender as a single fate, uncountable millions of billions, eldar and alien alike, all woven together to create the skein itself.
Upon this canvas were woven brighter threads. The lives of great leaders and thinkers, warmasters and emperors. In gold filament they stood out, but they were as much part of the mass as anything else, not entirely unique in the cosmos.
He found his own strand, saw the many knots and kinks and winding curves that still stretched far into the future, five lifetimes of the eldar and more. Alongside were the hundred others, those where his life ended short. As his mind flashed past he watched himself brutally cut down, turned to cinders, imploding beneath psychic assault and a hundred other deaths equally unpleasant. He saw himself turned to crystal in a dome of Ulthwé, his unfettered mind disappearing into the fractured infinity circuit of the craftworld. He saw his spirit stone consumed by a greater daemon of Chaos, his soul the plaything of immortal beings. He felt the crushing weight of his own demise a dozen times, falling into darkness with his quest unfulfilled.
But he saw also that one strand, the path that took him on into the future unbound, to the end itself when all things would be decided. It could be done, if he had the skill and the will.
More pressing concerns crowded these fleeting thoughts, for though such musing took only an instant of reality, matters were swiftly progressing in the mortal world.
Eldrad seized upon the closest threads of the future and examined them in detail, finding the strongest that did not contain the ork attack on Ulthwé. There were a few, but they differed only in detail. Each contained a single moment of decision, a knot in time where fates converged and then diverged.
He plunged his thoughts into that knot, unpicking the threads of the individuals involved, finding his at the heart, inextricably linked to the rune of the Beast, the signifier of the ork warlord.
He and the other farseers stood before the onrushing might of the titan-beasts, the cracked remains of the Avatar beside them, the smoking shells of tanks and Titans scattered over the battlefield. Summoning all of his power, Eldrad threw himself into the raw power of the webway, feeling the leach of She Who Thirsts tug at his soul as he dared the immaterial realm to bring himself face to face with the ork warlord on its fortress-mount.
Even as his Witchblade scythed down on the monstrous ork the mauls and axes of its nobles smashed apart his rune armour in sparks of psychic feedback, their blows raining down on his crippled body, dashing out his brains across the cold metal floor of the beast’s howdah.
And Ulthwé would be saved, the might of the ork army never quite reaching the critical mass it required to break out into the stars. Robbed of their leaders, the aliens would fall to fighting among themselves once more, no threat to any but their own.
Letting the visions fall away, he signalled for the others to join him, assuming his place at the head of the council without consultation. It mattered little if he was to die shortly, but there was some satisfaction in taking up the mantle of leader for the time being. With Charythas beside him, an escort of guardians behind, he mounted the Wave Serpent and sent a thought of command to the pilot, directing her to the thickest fighting ahead of the main ork counter-attack. There he would lay down his life for Ulthwé.
The sleek transport lifted up with a whine of anti-gravitic engines and turned its nose towards the battle, undulating shimmers of energy from its protective field enveloping its hull. Eldrad sat down opposite Charythas, who grasped with both hands the haft of his singing spear.
‘I saw… I saw what will happen. The price you will pay.’
‘What else did you see?’
‘What else? I saw Ulthwé saved. Is there anything else that matters?’
Eldrad thought of this, remembering that he alone had been able to reach his thoughts into the coldness of the distant fates. The other seers knew nothing of the grander spiral upon which they walked.
‘No, I suppose not.’
Eldrad considered the recent twists that had brought him here. But for small things, his fate would be different. It was hubris to think that they could control the anarchy that ruled time, make sense of the impossibly complex network of interlocking futures. Yet they tried their best and he was better than any other. It vexed him that he had been unable to solve this puzzle, that Jain Zar had backed him into this impossible position. Had she known what would happen if she left the warlord alive? Did she think he would shirk his sacrifice, to allow her horrifying intent to become realised?
