Ilmaea: A Novel of the Dark Eldar

by Veriform

The Dark Eldar are a dying people, their lives empty of meaning, consumed with plotting, excess, and cruelty. Suth Anax is chattel, a half-born clone conceived in a tank for her Archon's use, but when disaster strikes during a meditative retreat, Suth finds herself with a unique opportunity.

Ilmaea

A Novel of the Dark Eldar

O sensate one

O foulest enemy

this ingrate worm

succumbed to you

and to your thirst

no more the lash

no more the needle

no more to raid

no more to ache

these prayers

cast into flame

to remember

we are not as we were

-traditional Dark Eldar funerary prayer

CHAPTER ONE: THE SCULPTOR

The haemonculus's windowless temple reeked of spilt bowels, actinic chemicals, and rotten flesh. In the gloomy antechamber of the twisted artist's atrium of horrors, Suth Anax, Sybarite of the Shrieking Maw Kabal, waited for her mistress to complete her meditations. Judging by the frequency and pitch of Linnis's screams, it wouldn't be much longer now. Suth sat sprawled on a form-fitting neuro-stim chair, relishing the miniscule jolts of refined chemical anguish it sent crawling up her spine. The synthetic fabric sweated microscopic doses of haemonculi-made compounds which penetrated armor, leather, and cloth to deliver their neurological payloads to Suth's pallid skin. She groaned with pleasure, running a gauntleted hand through her sweaty hair.

Leave it to the haemonculi to make even a chair a torture implement.

The deep, pounding bass beat of the ritual cant thundered through the temple's auditory system. The synthesized riot drowned out all other sounds but the raw-throated howls of Linnis Iskari. The Archon had spent the last month within the temple's fetid halls, refining her tastes for suffering under the practiced ministrations of the famed haemonculus flesh-artist, Rasque. For three years running Rasque had been the premier torturer in all of Commorragh, the foremost excruciator even among the psychotic ranks of the haemonculi covens. Suth uncrossed her legs, shuddering as the chair sent a stronger wave of pleasure/pain skittering up her spinal column from her ass to the base of her skull. She stood, a flush rising in her gaunt, pale cheeks, and stretched her unused muscles.

The ritual cant came to an abrupt end, leaving Suth's ears ringing as though she'd been caught in the middle of a firefight. She sniffed, folding her arms. Beneath her segmented black armor and leather fighting harness her nipples stood at painful attention. From the atrium came Linnis's harsh, panting breaths mingled with the stentorian rumble of machinery shifting. The dozens of blade-shaped segments making up the door to the haemonculus's inner sanctum slid suddenly open. Suth drew herself up to attention as her Archon, soaked in sweat and wearing only a sheer black robe, staggered out of Rasque's atrium. For an instant Suth glimpsed the nightmarish machinery of the haemonculus's torture altar, and then the blade-door shut with a snick of metal on metal.

Linnis was a tall, elegant Eldar in her sixth century. Kabal tattoos framed her deep-set eyes, slender jaw and wry mouth. She had ruled Shrieking Maw for over a hundred years, surviving uncounted blades in the night from uncounted enemies. Just now, though, she was barely staying on her feet. Her arms were dotted with bloody needle marks, her nostrils raw and bleeding. Twin trails of red ran from her nose to her chin where beads of blood pooled before falling to the damp metal floor. Suth moved to assist her mistress, catching the Archon's elbow as she stumbled.

"Take me to my cell," hissed Linnis, gripping Suth's arm with feverish strength. "I need to rest."

Suth ducked her head, black hair falling across her face. "I obey, mistress."

It was a short walk to the Archon's quarters in the temple, but Suth never let herself forget where she was. Any shadow might hold some gibbering abomination. Any door could conceal a cruelly inventive death for an unwary Sybarite.

Linnis's cell was an opulent grotto lit by recessed violet chemical lamps. Suth guided the Archon across the plush carpet, studded with hidden stimulant needles, to the great canopy bed. Linnis collapsed onto the silken sheets, sucking air through clenched teeth. There were dark circles beneath her wine-colored eyes. "Hypex," she snarled, waving a limp hand at the narcotics and potions cluttering her nightstand. "A three-tenths pure solution. At once."

Suth selected a syringe of purplish liquid from among the clutter, examined its chamber with a critical eye for air pockets, then slid its point neatly into her mistress's radial artery. She depressed the syringe's plunger, sending the drug coursing into Linnis's veins. Almost at once the Archon relaxed, her eyes taking on a glassy, distant look. Few Dark Eldar in such a state of exhaustion would have trusted a servant with their dosages, but Suth had been raised from the tank as her mistress's personal attendant and bodyguard. Linnis, confident in her half-born's loyalty, allowed Suth an unusual degree of freedom. To Suth, that had always suggested a troubling weakness. It would be nothing to poison the woman, to stab her as she lay stoned on her bed. Suth replaced the syringe on the end-table.

"Watch the door," Linnis slurred. Her eyelids fluttered. Blood drooled sluggishly from the corners of her mouth and from her nostrils.

Suth straightened, pushing her hair back from her face. She felt tired, worn down by her time within the walls of the coven's temple. Commorragh was oppressive at the best of times, a thorn-tower thicket of pollution and excess, but the temples of the haemonculi were special hells within the webway metropolis's bosom. Wracks in the halls, limping abominations gasping under the weight of their own misshapen bodies. Chambers full of squealing, ruined slaves, Craftworld hypocrites reduced to skinless weepers. The stimulation was torrential, the omnipresent misery intoxicating. Sighing, Suth crossed the room and dropped into a rough-hewn chair. She began to remove her armor, fumbling with the sweat-swollen straps of her greaves.

Fucking kit, thought Suth, biting her cheek as she peeled off her segmented chem-sheathe armor and rubbed life back into her calves. Muses defile whoever designed this ghul-shit carapace.

Linnis began to cry in her sleep, curling in on herself like a child unbroken to the horrors of the webways and their great city. The exquisite arts of the covens, even applied in recreation, were not a forgiving pastime. A week of Rasque's constant attention had taken its toll on the fearsome Archon. Suth unstrapped her breastplate and let it drop to the floor with a loud, echoing clang. She sucked in a deep breath, plucking at the neckline of the sweat-darkened leather singlet she wore for padding. Gauntlets came next, then bladed pauldrons and her angular gorget. She rolled her shoulders, relishing the brief freedom from her armor.

There was bloodwine on the end-table. Suth poured herself a glass and drank, watching Linnis from the corner of her eye. The wine was tangy but sweet, hints of Man and Tau mingled in an alluring combination. It was just another treasure of the world denied Suth by her half-born status. She was the property of the Kabal, a vat-grown soldier spat on even by her subordinates. Since Linnis had ordered her raised to Sybarite on her twenty-sixth decanting day, Suth had been forced to kill three contenders for the title in formal duels. Six others had tried to take her rank from her by more traditional means. Poison, garroting, knives in the night. They had failed. Still, Suth's position was uneasy. She set down her wineglass and wiped her mouth.

From the hall came the muffled bass thumping of a new ritual cant, the synthesized electronic operettas the haemonculi listened to when they composed their works of flesh. There were, Suth knew, at least four other high-ranking Dark Eldar in the temple at present. It was rumored that even Archon Vect's Hierarch had his excruciations performed by Rasque and his acolytes.

Suth, using her dagger, cut herself two lines of adrenalight from the little yellow-white pile on the mirror at Linnis's bedside. She snorted them through the Archon's gilt nasal tube. Blinking, she straightened up as her surroundings took on a clean, sharp wildness. Her hands shook. The music beat against her eardrums like a hammer, driving the beat deep into her brain. The fine hairs on the nape of her neck stood on end. Another week in the temple and then they would return to the Kabal's center of power, Razorwing Loft. I never thought I'd be glad to go home. Suth staggered across the room and fell back into her chair, skin tingling as the adrenalight coursed through her veins. The walls shifted, crystalline expanses forming and dissolving at lightning speed. Suth's heart raced. She slid a hand down between her legs, caressing shaved white skin, flushed lips, moisture on her fingers.

Linnis retched noisily. Her limbs jerked, thrashing at the bedclothes. She vomited, gagging. Suth was across the room in an instant, staring down into her mistress's deep-set eyes. The pleading in the Archon's expression was clear. Her mouth was full of bile, her cheeks bright read. Linnis gripped the sheets with bloodless fingers, gurgling deep in her chest.

Suth knelt on the fiberplast mattress, hesitating. A choice.

Linnis gurgled, one hand fumbling nervelessly at Suth's wrist. It was as easy as that.

"I'm not going to help you," said Suth, relishing the words, leaning in close. "I'm going to watch you die. What, did you think I loved you for contracting my birth? Did you think I wouldn't take my chance when it came? Muses, but you're weak. You wriggling parasite." She hawked, let milky spittle dribble from her parted lips. The gobbet landed in Linnis's left eye. The Archon blinked, choking on her own vomit.

It took Linnis just a few minutes to die. When her convulsions had ceased Suth rose from the bed, running her hands through her thick, dark hair. The room blurred around her, spinning herky-jerky as the music pulsed and the drugs drew icy fingers up and down her back. Nylik. She'd forgotten her mistress's hired Incubus. Nylik would be waiting in the temple's guardhouse, klaive balanced across his knees, meditating on the meaning of violence. If she left without Linnis, the Incubus would take her head and drag the corpse back to Razorwing Loft for the sport of the avians.

Another snort of adrenalight failed to resolve the issue. Jittery, plagued by black spots dancing around the edges of her vision, Suth strapped herself back into her kabalite warrior's armor. She cut her cheek buckling on one of the pauldron-blades, but the wound was shallow and didn't bleed much. She checked her splinter pistol in its thigh-holster, strapped on her venom blade, and tied her hair back with a thong of human-leather. The thin, vicious joy she'd felt watching Linnis choke on her own gall was fading, replaced by the overwhelming certainty that she'd dug her own grave. Without the Archon's patronage she'd be dead inside a week, cut down to make room for one of Hierarch Slosk's sycophantic lickspittles. Yes, it would be Slosk who took the reigns. Linnis had suspected her second-in-command of plotting a coup for decades, and now Suth had done the mad Eldar's work for him.

"Fuck," Suth hissed, pacing the chamber barefoot to invite the clarifying prick of the carpet-needles. She clasped her gauntleted hands, ignoring the burning cut on her cheek. With every circuit of the room she saw Linnis lying twisted on her back, skin a waxy whitish-grey, eyes staring blindly at the bed's silken canopy. The vicious harpy, Suth thought, scowling. She thought she owned me. Well, I've shown her. I've shown her what happens when you fuck with Suth Anax.

And now that I've taught her a sharp lesson, I'm going to die.

Suth considered another line of adrenalight, but the recessed lighting was already giving her a headache and her mouth felt dry and cottony. She checked her armaments again, considering a clandestine exit through the temple's waste tanks and into Commorragh's sewers. No, Khaine only knew what the haemonculi kept in their shitters. It wasn't worth the risk. What other options were there, though? Nowhere to hide the body, no way to destroy it, her chances of facing Nylik in a straight fight worse than negligible and her prospects on the streets even less promising should she somehow escape the Incubus. The half-born glyph tattooed on her forehead would see her dead soon enough. Suth glanced at the syringes still waiting on the bedside table. More than enough variety there to create a lethal cocktail, with bloodwine to wash it down. But no. No. She paused at the center of the room, surveying her surroundings. The ritual cant boomed in the hall outside.

Linnis would not be due back in Rasque's atrium until well after dawn. Suth had a night to think, just a little under ten hours to contrive a solution for her predicament. She sat down on the edge of the bed and put her face in her hands. Ten hours. If she couldn't think of anything by then she'd have to try her luck with Nylik. She glanced at Linnis through the cage of her hands. Laugh in hell all you want, you stupid bitch. I got you, even if it's the last thing I'll do.

The drugs kept her awake long into the night, but at last she fell into a sort of half-waking torpor, and finally to sleep where a naked Linnis crouched over a tiny Commorragh, her blue-nailed fingers cupped around the city's limits. The Archon's cold, dead eyes rose to Suth's and a smile split her face. "Half-born," she whispered. "I gave you everything."

Suth woke with the Thirst raging in her belly and a wrack's iron mask inches from her face. She screamed, throwing herself backward over Linnis's cold, stiff legs, and crashed to the floor. In a heartbeat the wrack was atop her, pinning her arms to the bare concrete. Its steel digits crushed her wrists and the deep, stentorian rasp of its breath through the grate in its mask filled her nostrils with the stench of necrosis and stale sweat. Suth closed her eyes, screwing up her face. This is it. All these years of scrabbling, clawing just to stay alive. She opened her eyes and stared into the thing's featureless black-iron face.

"You're suffering from the Thirst, if I'm not mistaken."

The voice was mild, urbane, and gut-wrenchingly wrong. Suth's brain, still addled by the afterglow of the last night's narcotics and by the rumble of the Thirst, shriveled up at once beneath the lash of that cool, monstrous pronouncement. She swallowed.

"Do speak up."

The wrack tightened its grip on Suth's arms. A pair of mucous-slicked steel blades slid from its wrists, pricking at Suth's armpits. The creature coughed, shifting its weight. Inanely, Suth wondered what its sex had been before it volunteered itself for a new life as one of Rasque's mute, lobotomized drudges. Dressed as it was in a shapeless grey tunic, body bulging with alien muscle configurations, it was impossible to tell. She licked her lips. "Yes," she answered the voice.

"Release her."

The wrack sank back onto its haunches, wheezing, hands clasped between its knees, blades retracting with a wet slurp of metal on synthetic flesh. It had to be at least seven feet tall. Suth sat up, trembling, and peered around the corner of the bed. The haemonculus, Rasque, stood just inside the room with the door at his back. He was a small, slender Eldar, bald and so pale that Suth could see the blue, wormlike veins at his temples and throat. His eyes were a diluted shade of violet, like the pressed flowers human children made; dull imitations of real colors. His tattooed lips moved, forming the idea of a smile. "Fetch Sybarite Sut'hnael a soul," he said. "Something fresh from my personal reserve."

The Wrack scampered out of the room, closing the door behind it. Somehow, the mild-mannered haemonculus frightened Suth far more than his grotesque minion. Hers eyes flicked to Linnis, lying still and grey amidst the tangled bedding, then back to Rasque. She was found out. No point in running now. "What do you want with me, surgeon?"

Rasque took the bedchamber's only chair. His elaborate leather harness was undoubtedly human leather, but his skirt and robe had the telltale milky purity of genuine Craftworld Eldar. He raised a six-fingered hand to his chin, displaying an additional thumb tipped with a delicate scalpel. "That's a complicated question, Sybarite Sut'hnael. What do I, the greatest flesh-sculptor in Commorragh, want with a lowly vat-born Kabalite with a dead Archon?"

"It was the hypex," said Suth. "She liked it too pure."

"I don't care if she keeled over with her mouth between your legs and a rifle's barrel in her ass," said Rasque, his smile gone. "She's dead, knowledge of the event is uniquely limited, and we have a rare opportunity for mutual gain. Surely you comprehend that."

He's going to make me a Wrack, thought Suth. A tinny voice buried deep in her reptilian hindbrain began, very loudly, to scream.

"Commorragh is a tripod," said Rasque, crossing his legs. His skinny calves were scarred with acid burns, the skin like melted wax. "The Kabals maintain our society through raiding, the covens keep them supplied with the latest alchemical advancements, and the Wych cults keep the populace comparatively docile with exhibitions of bloodsport. Since the Fall we have thus preserved our way of life, our glorious dominion over the Webways. And yet, as in all things, perfection stands so far away. Archon Vect, our de facto Overlord, has tipped the balance. He holds Commorragh by the throat, commands such taxes and obeisances that all others must be shamed before him or suffer his boot upon their neck. I ask you: is this proper? Do the Eldarith Ynneas, eldest children of creation, the enemies of Slaanesh, grovel like beasts before some gutter-born brat?"

Suth swallowed, the Thirst wrenching at the pit of her stomach. It had been her constant companion since the moment of her decanting, the bottomless hunger that was the legacy of Slaanesh's birth and the Fall of the Eldar. Only misery and death could fill the void. "Vect rules Commorragh," she said. "He's old, and he's strong. He has eyes everywhere."

Rasque pressed-flower eyes stared, unblinking, into Suth's. "I'm going to scalp him," he said, "and then I'm going to fuck his eyes out of his skull and paint a mural with his blood."

The Wrack returned, limping into the bedchamber with a crystal decanter clutched in its misshapen metal hands. Its masked countenance swung from Rasque to Suth. It paused, whatever remained of its mind struggling with the task at hand. Suth had eyes only for the decanter. It was a soul-trap, one of great sophistication, and within it was a flickering mote of light. Saliva flooded Suth's bone-dry mouth. She could almost feel the soul struggling to escape its prison, feel the tenuous flutter of its pointless attempts to pierce the membrane between physicality and the hellish Beyond. She got up, Linnis's corpse forgotten, Rasque at the periphery of her awareness.

The haemonculus gestured at Suth. "Give it to Sybarite Sut'hnael."

The Wrack lurched across the room and relinquished the decanter. Suth took it, fumbled greedily with its glyph-warded seal, and drank. The soul passed her lips, emitting one last sub-aural wail of misery before Suth's own soul, strong and vital, tore it apart in a vicious frenzy. Manic glee washed through the Sybarite. Her knees buckled and she gripped the bedpost, the decanter slipping from her nerveless fingers as she fought to stay conscious and upright. Waves of mingled pleasure and agony pulsed through her, awakening a deep ache in her sex. She gasped for breath.

Muses, what's happening to me?

The Wrack withdrew to stand at its master's shoulder, hunched and subservient.

"I imagine you're used to the dregs of raid-plundered stock," said Rasque, his voice fuzzed and inexact when heard through the membrane of sensation enveloping Suth. "Bloodwine, cooked flesh, the souls of slaves. Hardly satisfying fare. What you taste now is the soul of one of our cousins, a piece of Craftworld trash my servants captured in a little raid of my own."

Suth sucked air through gritted teeth, fighting down the mad joy that threatened to boil up and out of her. Better than flesh-hooks, better than the chem-lash, better than adren and hypex and the highest highs she'd ever lived. Even the knowledge that a haemonculus had been raiding without kabalite involvement meant nothing to her. "What do you want?" she asked, clutching at her breast where her heart hammered like an avian's wings fighting gravity. The Thirst was gone, for now.

Rasque rose and moved to stand opposite Suth, the bed and Linnis between them. He laid a hand on the dead Archon's sallow, vomit-spattered brow. "I wish to offer you a gift, Suth," he said. He looked up at her, pale eyes cold with meaning. "Your Archon's face."

"If I refuse?"

Rasque shrugged. "I'll simply inform that brooding Incubus of his mistress's demise."

Suth's skin crawled in horrified delight, still beholden to the fading emotional storm of the soul's dissolution. "I'd become her," she said. With Rasque's talents, his skill for sculpting and reworking flesh, such a thing was possible. It would take time, but no one was better positioned than Suth to impersonate the deceased Archon.

"You would be mine, of course," said the haemonculus. "One word in the right ear and I could have you thrown out of Commorragh and into the Webways, alone and weaponless."

Suth paled. Exile within the Webways themselves, the great inter-spacial passages through which the Eldar had traveled since time immemorial, was a threat rarely invoked. There were horrors in the Endless Halls, but worse was the isolation, the utter lack of sensation. Nothing but the Thirst. She nodded, not trusting her voice.

Rasque pursed his lips, looking critically at Linnis's face. "I am not ungenerous," he said. "You'll find yourself well-rewarded. A lavish lifestyle, the protection of my coven, the chance to sit on the Council of Archons. All the privileges power brings. All I ask in return is that should I deliver to you a demand, a position to advocate in council, you will obey at once and without question."

"I'll have her face," said Suth.

"Yes," said Rasque. His eyes swept over her, peeling back armor, leather, flesh, muscle, fat, bone until there was nothing left but her naked, squirming soul. "It will be yours, and you will be mine. What do you say, Sybarite?"

Suth touched the shallow cut she'd given herself the night before, tracing its scabbed length along her cheekbone to the corner of her mouth.

Her lips parted, and she said: "Yes."

Four days passed in a hellish blur of knives, needles, and chemical baths. Rasque's wild laughter hung about the atrium as, like a virtuoso, he composed a new body from Suth's and the wreck of Linnis's. Suth lay strapped to an operating table at the center of the great room, bathed in harsh white light from the halogen lamps anchored to the ceiling. She swam in a drug-induced haze, her throat raw from screaming, her thoughts a haywire tangle of false memories and jagged cut-nerve pain. Rasque broke her legs, opened them up with his scalpel hands, with his sharp white teeth, to lengthen her calves with metal poles. He cut and tweaked, flayed and sliced, working sometimes shrouded in a robe of still-bloody hides and sometimes in the nude.

It was like a new decanting. Rasque cut her from her self, slashed dermis from muscle like a clothier following a pattern, drawing ligaments across new muscles. Chemical solvents washed through her system. Rasque drew off her blood into alembics and cut-glass flagons, kept her alive with drugs and suction as he excised her glands, stripped from her the scent of her skin, the color of her eyes, and the pads of her fingers. There is nothing of me left, she thought as in her demented half-waking state she wandered a plain of broken black glass, bare feet bloody and torn. A sun, dead star entombed in void, hung fat and rotten in the sky. Sky? Suth had seen so few of them. She wandered the forsaken landscape, bare shoulders flaking in the sickly, burning light.

The haemonculus gave her new organs. She saw her own afloat in jars of formaldehyde, just more offal excised from her wretched living corpse. What did she need with a heart? What had her lungs ever done for her? Linnis's would serve her better. She squinted up at that decaying sun, her eyes watering as cataracts bloomed beneath their gelid surfaces. How long until merciful blindness came? A thousand years. The end of time.

Bodies writhed on the plain of broken glass, heedless in their coupling. They appeared without warning, an orgiastic sea of tangled limbs and screwed-up faces, teeth bared, eyes squeezed tight shut. Waves surged through the ocean of flesh, great tidal storms of convulsive ecstasy and pain. I am entirely mad, thought Suth as the wave broke and bodies sluiced around her in a rolling surf. Blood hung in the air like mist. The sunlight shivered, shook, pulsed to the beat of a ritual cant far off in the dark of space beyond the shelter of the Immaterium. The Webways are our salvation.

Hands clutched at Suth's calves, at her thighs. She kicked free of the grasping masses, her skin slick with sweat from the heat of their horizon-spanning rut. She climbed collapsing hills of lovers interlocked in bizarre poses, ignoring the grunts of pain and pleasure that arose at her passage. She saw Linnis in among the lovers, her eyes pierced by metal spikes, her mouth stretched wide in a blank white grin. Suth climbed on, feet slipping on moist flesh, fingers scrabbling at arched backs and knotted limbs. At last an apex, short-lived meeting of two great tempests, already crumbling, but a thousand eyes, a million, a billion rose to her and every one of them burned with wavering yellow light.

"Slaanesh!" they screamed in the pure mind-bleaching fury of their collective consummation, faces raised to the unknowable Warp, spit flying from parted jaws. "Slaanesh! Slaanesh!"

Rapture.

There was an iron slab and she lay upon it. She blinked, and it brought pain. So did breathing. There was nothing left to her that didn't. She swam in a sea of light, one with the harsh chemical radiance that bathed the atrium. Her skin ached sweetly, deeply. The light faded by degrees, replaced by looming apparati of steel, bone, and alchemically-treated glass. A score of masked and silent wracks stood around the operating dais, framed by Rasque's machines. Some had masks worked to resemble cherubic faces. Others sported extra limbs or hands replaced by surgical equipment. Squinting, Suth picked out the wrack that had overpowered her in Linnis's cell. She swallowed, her throat dry. Murky shapes floated in tanks of preservative fluid serving as columns to the atrium.

How long did I sleep?

"Our timetable is limited, Sybarite," came Rasque's voice from the shadows near the door. "Or, Archon, I suppose. Tomorrow your late, lamented mistress is set to return to Razorwing Loft for a celebratory revel. I would prefer you had more time to heal, but alas: life is cruel."

He stepped out of the murk as Suth sat up, gritting her teeth at the ache in her head. Every muscle was sore, every bone weak and fractious. Her scalp burned where Rasque had readjusted her hairline to match Linnis's. The haemonculus approached the dais, stepping between his Wracks, and produced a square hand-mirror from within his man-hide robes. Suth felt a moment of panic as Rasque pressed the mirror into her cold, damp hands. My face is gone, she thought, not daring to look down into the new skin of her reflection. He took it from me.

She looked down. Linnis stared back at her, scarred and bruised, full lips, ironic brows, cheekbones like razorblades, and the long, perfect nose. Her hands, fingers shortened, veins more prominent. Breasts rounded out with Linnis's fat, hips wider and the sharp, grating pain from her pelvis, broken and rebroken before Rasque had pinned it into its new formation. She set the mirror down, felt herself with hands that no longer bore her fingerprints. Bruised hollows of her eyes, now pale rose where once they had been blue. Throat longer, slender, scarred with garrote-marks from Linnis's brush with the Black Heart's Incubi. My near-death, now. No familiar inch remained.

I am not myself.

"You will require chemical assistance," said Rasque, producing a phial of thick greenish fluid as though from thin air. He put the phial in Suth's trembling hand, but kept two fingers on its seal. His ancient pressed-flower eyes bored into Suth's new ones. "This is feroxin, a compound of my own invention. Take it twice daily, a six percent solution with an alco-amphetamine base. Expect your underlings to deduce your dependency and attempt to tamper with it. Accept fresh samples only from the hands of one of my wracks. I will be sending Lorash with you to Razorwing Loft as an attendant, to see to your surgical needs in the coming weeks."

Suth's eyes flicked to the faceless wrack standing dull and complacent in the shadows. The idea of the creature trailing her every move did not sit well. It's not as though I have a choice, she thought bitterly, looking back at Rasque. The haemonculus owned her, body and soul.

"The Thirst will be more acute for the next month as your new body adjusts itself to the changes I have made," said Rasque. He began to pace, hands clasped at the small of his back, shoulders forward, in a circle around the slab where Suth sat naked and defenseless. He looked like a gargoyle, a nasty little statue granted life by the Laughing God as a poor jape. Short, bald, twisted. Other haemonculi made their bodies works of mad art, extra limbs and gibbering mouths, superfluous eyes, organs worn externally like trophies. Not Rasque. No, he was a plain, ugly little male, unremarkable even in his distasteful appearance. Why?

Suth swallowed with some difficulty. Her throat was dry. "I leave tomorrow," she husked, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

"Yes," said Rasque, still pacing. "We'll have to see if my handiwork fools Nylik. The Incubi are most perceptive, as a rule." He showed his teeth again. "I'm confident, nevertheless."

Even the thought of the mercenary guard's coal-black stare put a sliver of cold doubt in Suth's heart. The Incubi were not like the rest of the Dark Eldar. The place they held in Commorragh's society was a strange one, defined as much by austerity and discipline as the Kabals were by excess and self-indulgence. Oh, they drank souls and feasted as their kin did on suffering, on ruin, but only through the mastery and application of martial violence. No Incubus would glory in the depraved bloodletting of the arena, or submit themselves to the lash for pleasure. No. They were...different. Nylik was a perfect example of their steely resolve.

Dead-eyed brotherfucking ascetic.

A wrack brought clothing. Two others helped Suth to dress. Rasque watched, expressionless, a voyeur with no interest in the bare, bruised flesh before him. Suth found herself shrinking from his gaze as the wracks buckled the straps of her leather under-harness, cinching it tight around her bust and waist. Next came molded leather greaves and gauntlets carved with glyphs describing the Shrieking Maw Kabal's sordid, bloody history in High Eldar poetic verse. They were the soul of impracticality, leaving bare her upper arms and the tops of her thighs. Showmanship, like everything at the pinnacle of Commorragh's society. Suth rolled her shoulders, avoiding Rasque's eyes as clammy hands fastened a steel torc inlaid with khymera teeth around her throat.

"There will be council sessions to attend," said Rasque. "You know your Archon's positions, I daresay, but there are certain movements within the Kabals that I will require you to support. There is an Imperial world near to one of our Webway nodes, Jericho III. You've heard of it?"

A smile tugged painfully at the corners of Suth's mouth. She still remembered the screams in the streets, the burning towers, the corpses heaped in the shadows of gutted buildings as hellions and reavers screamed through the sky and hallucinogenic gas spread madness among the survivors, the Terran kine running wild for the sport of the raiders. "I have," she said. "Why?"

"Lord Vect will raise the issue of another raid," said Rasque. He paused, staring off into the shadows with his back to Suth. The knobs of his spine were raised slightly, pushing against his worm-pale skin. "An invasion, really. Commorragh always needs more slaves. For the pits, for the feasts, for the labor crews and the Houses of Excess. I want you to support him."

"Why?"

"You know enough," said Rasque. "Be cautious, be ruthless, suspect everyone. Sleep. We'll speak again once the Kabals are in concord with each other."

The haemonculus vanished. One moment he stood a pace from where Suth sat, legs dangling over the edge of the stained and spattered operating table, and the next he was gone. Suth ran a leather-armored finger along her bottom lip. It came away slick with blood. My skin is gone, she thought. This face is not mine. She slid down from the slab, ignoring the dull stares of the wracks as their masks swung to follow her progress across the room. Her knees shook at the first few steps. The soles of her feet were tender. She passed between two wracks, the blade-door hissing open at her approach, and went out into the hall. Laughing hurt, but when it came bubbling up from deep within her there was nothing she could do to stop it. She slumped against the ribbed and glistening wall, giggling to herself at the thought of Linnis dead beneath her bed's dark canopy.

I might be leashed, she thought, blood trickling from her nostrils as she laughed, I might have sold myself to the fleshmongers, but you're dead, Linnis, and I've got your face.

I've won.