CHAPTER 45

Now in the times that the eldar call the Rhana Dandra the god Khaine stood upon the field of battle, and lo, His heart was glad and His spirit fiery, for long had He been away from the field of battle. And bore with Him the great sword Suin Daellae, and its blade was a great flame that burned brighter than the stars of the world, and upon His shoulders was plate most ancient, forged in a forgotten age by the smith-god Vaul and tempered with care and skills and with knowledge that only He knew. Now thrusting His sword up above Him Khaine roared a mighty challenge, and far into the world did His voice travel, and all the beings of evil that heard it trembled and shook and were much afeared, for it was a sound most harsh, and bore with it poor tidings for all who stood against Khaine.

Now came the challenge to a dark place in the world away from the light of the stars where feasted she upon the souls of mortals and worlds, and raising her face she screamed in rage, for Malenesh was ever prideful and could brook no defiance, and because of the gage of Khaine was Malenesh caused to be roused. Then cried Malenesh, "Who is this impertinent fool who dares cast his gage against me, most favored handmaiden of Slaanesh and who has brought untold woes upon the world to sate the appetite of the Dark Prince?"

And casting His voice upon her did noble Khaine spake saying, "Khaine the Bloody Handed comes now against you. In the name of Isha, your mother, I cast My spite in your teeth, and in the name of My children also. Take up now My gage, or flee and be forever cast pusillanimous before mortal and god."

And now did Malenesh laugh. "Khaine?" said she most gleefully. "Is Khaine not the loudmouthed braggart who faced Slaanesh upon the fields of battle in times long past and was felled? Is Khaine not He who could oppose not my mistress and chose to flee in a manner most craven? Is Khaine not He who shattered His being to rescue naught but His soul from the clutches of Slaanesh?"

And Malenesh, her countenance furious, swaggered with prideful insolence up to Khaine and gazed indolently down at Him. And Khaine spoke not a word, but raised instead His sword and held it before Him in grave salute. And Malenesh sneered contemptuously back at Him and moved to stand before Khaine. And now came she all at once against the eldar god, and hurled she great knives of starlight against Khaine. But Khaine stood tall and the light struck His armor, and still it held. And now took up Malenesh ten and seven stars and hurled them at Khaine. But behold, Khaine was troubled not, and He gathered before Him the fires of the stars that was within Him and consumed them.

And now caused Malenesh to be a great gulf of nothingness beneath the feet of Khaine and called upon the storms of the Othersea that raged across the skies. And took now Malenesh within her hand the stars of far off places and hurled them across the world, and still Khaine stood, His head unbowed.

And now with a resounding cry did Khaine raise His blade of fire and struck at Malenesh, and hurled He from his bloody fingers raised like great claws the fire of all eldar that is, was, and will ever be that He held within His being, and distant worlds in places of the universe far from where god and daemon made their contest creatures that knew not of the war that was fought looked up from their mundane tasks in great amazement as a vast fire blazed across their skies. And even as they cast their eyes toward the heavens a great fear came over them, and they knew not why.

And now came Malenesh upon Khaine with great claws upon her fingers and with a slim blade of shimmering gold, and now was battle truly joined, Khaine with His sword all ablaze and Malenesh with claw and dust of gold that was one moment sword and the next a whip that shone with the light of a million suns, and such was the hatred that they bore one for the other that they cared not for the manner in which they fought, and beneath their steps were the fires of stars put out and worlds caused to crumble into nothingness, and though they fought not in the Othersea the waves of that place were so disturbed that they were caused to rise and grow turbulent as a ferocious beast of the wild caught in an unseemly trap. And then swirled the energies of the Othersea around even as the waves were churned all around it, and great funnels were formed and, because of the grievances that Khaine bore for Slaanesh, the funnels were made to travel into Her realm where much were laid to waste.

Now within that place where neither gods nor mortals knew the Laughing God saw this and threw upon His shoulders His cloak of shadows, and took He some of the other gods and went through a door that Hoec had caused to be. And as They went upon Their way rose Asuryan and said He most gravely in a manner that He had scarce adopted since times long past, "Now cometh the time, dear siblings of Mine, where Our work is upon Us. All that Our brother Cegorach hath lain down lieth before Us, and We shall trod upon this path, so that We may pay recompense to Our children for leaving them alone against the assailment of the foes of Our making."

The half dozen eldar that gathered upon Ulthwé included one of the craftworld's farseers, preeminent spiritseers and bonesingers, and the most powerful of the warlocks not occupied by one battle or another, as well as an autarch. They were gathered deep within the heart of the craftworld in a room with walls that shone with the soft light of the infinity circuit. The light was subdued now, far from the brilliance that it possessed before the harlequins had arrived. The voices of the infinity circuit, too, were few and far between, and where Elbera once saw whole hosts of the eldar of old within, now only a few brief flickers marked the passage of the few souls that remained. The craftworld seemed now very desolate. A quick look at the subdued presence of the other spiritseers told Elbera that they, too, felt keenly the departure of the souls.

The other eldar gathered there were no less somber, though their thoughts were not on the realm of the dead. The task that they were about to perform was at once very simple yet bore grave consequences. Committing the craftworlds to battle was a monumental decision, and though the autarchs had decided that it was a necessary venture, the other eldar still bore qualms about such a sacrifice. Elbera personally felt that they were being incredible silly. Communion with the dead granted interesting perspectives on life, and she saw within the reluctance of the eldar only their unwillingness to accept the possibility of danger posed to the ships that were their home.

There was a sudden shift in the air and a gap appeared before them looking into some dreary place. The gap grew wider, revealing half a dozen figures all dressed in the simple plain smocks that instantly identified them as eldar of the Exodite worlds. Without ceremony the Exodites stepped into the room and the gate vanished behind them.

"Where should this craftworld go?" their leader asked in a low voice, looking questioningly around at the Ulthwéan crowd before him. Quickly the autarch, clutching crystal slate, went up to him. They talked for a few moments, then the Exodite nodded. "All right," he said. "This should be simple enough. Let's get this done quickly. There are many more craftworlds that require the aid of the keepers, and the fewer of our number leave our worlds for this the better."

At a silent signal the farseer raised her face and dipped her mind into the infinity circuit, adjusting the solar sails, keeping the prow firmly forward, and making the hundreds of minute changes to keep the craftworld from deviating even the slightest from its current path. Slowly the craftworld broke the orbit around the star that it had for eons held, and ponderously it picked up speed, pulling away from the star. There was a surge of energy as the warlocks lent their power to the farseer, and the air was suddenly filled with a soft melodic chorus that floated phantomlike just out of Elbera's hearing as the bonesingers turned their mastery of the shaping of psychoplastics to aid the other psykers in making the acute adjustments to the immense ship's systems and tucking the atriums and the wraithbone bubbles surrounding the ship itself that the eldar of Ulthwé had added to the ship sometime in the past for one purpose or another beneath the ship's hull. The spirits of the infinity circuit scrambled to assist the various psykers, peeling back the craftworld's hull for the bonesingers and keeping the solar sails rigid for the farseer, and Elbera, her mind linked to both the living and the dead, guided the souls in their work.

The Exodite keepers patiently waited for the few minutes for their preparations to be completed, then, as one, they raised their right arms dramatically, palms open, facing toward the prow of the ship. Through the infinity circuit Elbera saw a rift, similar to the one that the keepers had stepped out of, open up in the complete darkness of the void before the craftworld, expanding quickly until it stood, a gaping hole in reality larger than many planets, a circular tunnel that stretched away into darkness hanging without support within the void. At an urging from the farseer the craftworld moved toward the rift that was the entrance to the rootway. It was a tight fit, and the expressions of the farseer and the warlocks grew intense with concentration. The song of the bonesingers changed as they directed their efforts toward aiding the psykers, and even the souls of the departed eldar moved, acting in concert to ensure that the craftworld remained unharmed. Elbera, for her part, was not really sure what would happen if the craftworld brushed against the sides of that rift in reality, but she was certain that she would not care to find out. The Exodites, it appeared, had the same idea, and they opened their fists, coaxing the rootway to yawn wider. Within the rift Elbera saw the walls of the tunnel shift and undulate and move aside, granting the craftworld more room to go past. Then they were within the rootway and the psykers pulled their minds out of the infinity circuit. Elbera let out a breath that she had not realized she had been been holding.

They were within the rootway for quite some time, and when they emerged, Elbera saw through the craftworld's sensors no stellar bodies close around them. Curiously, she took a shuttle and went out from the cavernous area at the heart of the craftworld up to its hull. The sense of Ulthwé's surroundings that she had gleaned from the craftworld's sensors or the souls that resided within it had not adequately demonstrated the utter darkness that they found themselves in. There was not a single nearby star, and the light of those that existed were so insignificant as to be nonexistent but for the craftworld's sensors indicating their presence. The streets of the craftworld had taken upon a soft iridescent light, illuminating all upon it in a pale shifting glow. Above them Elbera could sense a brief waver like air above a desert floor as the craftworld's holofields were activated, shielding even the soft glow of the streets from chance detection from the world beyond. Silently, with the weight of anticipation and trepidation pressing down around them and seeding the streets of Ulthwé with an oppressive hush, the eldar of the craftworld took to the streets, for a moment their martial training forgotten as they gazed upward at their new surroundings.

Then, like shoals of fish, the ships of the craftworlds sailed silently out of the craftworld's hangar bays to begin their watchful patrols, the usual glint of their solar sails muted, until they vanished completely into the void. The eldar of the craftworld turned without a sound to return to their training, leaving behind only the mournful sigh of the breeze blowing through the craftworld's streets.

The Solitaires stepped upon the battlefield of dust and twisted metal lying desolate under twin crimson suns in a flash of rainbow light. Behind him lay a ragged line of human defenders, dug in as always in bunkers and defense lines strained and cracked under repeated assaults. The Solitaire had fought upon a hundred battlegrounds since Cegorach had called upon them for this final task, and the situation with the humans was always the same. Before the Solitaire the scenery was also familiar. An endless horde of fanatics dressed in nothing but rags, stretching back into the horizon and on either side as far as he could see. Interspersed among them were warp beasts and howling daemons, and here and there were columns of tanks and lumbering machines of war, and from somewhere far off there came the deep bellow of some large daemon.

At the Solitaire's side there were a handful of harlequins, all Solitaires, with black coats that swirled around their ankles and horned masks upon their faces. They were not of the Solitaire's troupe, or even of his masque. Those he had abandoned when Cegorach's call had come – perhaps not completely, but he had certainly left the dark and the light and the twilight behind him. These Solitaires were who he fought with now, and it was their minds that filled his thoughts.

And so it was their thoughts that accompanied the Solitaire as he sprinted in a blur of splintering rainbow flecks across that sun and fire blasted sand. The dance was quite different. The Solitaires all fulfilled the same role in the dance of tale and war, and the rhythm that a band of horned-mask players took up was not the synchronized performance where every player had a role, but was rather one of savagery, a display of purest skill, speed, and agility that few in the galaxy could match, of prodigious coordination that only the Solitaires could achieve.

They crossed the intervening gap without a single word, silent as they always were. A thousand guns were turned upon him. He leapt, swerved, dodged, and simply kept moving, as did the harlequins by his side. They had, all of them, battled upon a hundred worlds since Cegorach's call, and where other Solitaires had been felled one by one around them, they alone had survived. There were few Solitaires now, numbering barely in the thousands, but they were the most paramount of the warriors of Cegorach save, perhaps, for the high harlequins. And now they reached the first of the Chaos cultists, and fell upon them like a veritable whirlwind, swords flashing, guns firing, and the signature weapons of the harlequins reducing foes to vapor and withered husks.

They ignored the howling lunatics before them, leaping over their heads and cutting a path through the filthy rag-clad fanatics, making for the larger daemons that rallied the forces of Chaos around them.

A screeching cultist, his eyes wild and flecks of foam at his lips, came at the Solitaire even as he leapt over the heads of the cultists around him. The Solitaire's response was swift, the weapon upon his arm spraying a cloud of lashing monofilament wire at the fanatic, promptly reducing him to a crimson mist. The Solitaire did not wait long enough to see the cultist's end. A great daemon a dozen feet tall had reared up before them, fang-filled maws stretched wide in a hoarse bellow, a large saw-toothed sword held aloft in defiance.

The Solitaire leapt at it, his flip belt carrying him effortlessly across the intervening distance of two dozen feet in a single motion. His eyes locked upon the daemon's beady hate-filled ones, and in it he saw only the need to spill blood. The daemon's sword came in a great sweeping swing, killing many scores of cultists in the process with a speed that belied its enormous size. It was far from being fast enough. With a single unconscious thought the Solitaire reversed the systems of his flip belt, letting the suddenly crushing gravity pull him down toward the ground. The sword came around, the Solitaire flipped, leaping over the blade, his own sword flickering out, opening a gaping wound upon the daemon's leg. Another Solitaire came darting in, fusion pistol vaporizing great chunks of the daemon's torso; her other arm came up, slammed into the daemon's shoulder. A strand of monofilament wire hundreds of feet long lashed through the daemon's arm, its nearly invisible tip now and then breaking through the surface of its tough hide before disappearing back under its flesh. Then the wire sliced a long gash into the arm and from the gap flowed a thick dark slurry, all that was left of the daemon's arm. The Solitaire withdrew the wire back into her weapon as her leap took her onward, leaving the daemon to him.

The daemon did not appear to be greatly inconvenienced by the loss of its arm. It simply bent to pick up its sword. The Solitaire did not allow it to do so. He lashed out with his left fist, channeling his psychic force down through the glove about his fist. The daemon arched backward, its mouth open in a soundless scream as the glove took the very fibers of its being from its mortal form. The Solitaire directed another psychic pulse into his glove and it burned away the daemon's captured soul. Then he had already moved on, his sword claiming more lives as the Solitaires made their way toward another in that vast daemon force.

Eventually the Chaos force reached the human lines, and there they fell upon the beleaguered humans in a horrible contest of the press of bodies on one side and the training, weight of fire, and discipline on the other. The Solitaire had no eye for the battle going on far behind him, for the Solitaires were hunting for one, then another, and yet another of the greater daemons. Bodies pressed in on all sides, unwashed and with the blackness of corruption flowing from their very skin, but the Solitaires were no more than light in the air, and because those around them were uncaring for the lives of their fellows, their strikes claimed the lives of countless cultists and warp beasts and daemons. And all the while the Solitaires turned their joint minds toward larger prey.

But now there came a rumble from somewhere far beneath the ground, but it was not the bellow of a greater daemon, for that was a sign most familiar to the Solitaire. Then the ground beneath the feet of the Solitaires split and a great yawning chasm appeared there upon the ground, and fire came spilling out, consuming daemons and cultists both. And though the Solitaires leapt and strove to keep away, leaping off the heads and bodies of the daemons around them even as they fell snarling into the fissure, they could not avoid the ground itself eternally.

Now came a great daemon striding through the flames, and this the Solitaire moved toward, though fell Solitaires by his side. And leapt he off a daemon that turned to ash upon the fire under his feet, and struck that greater daemon with his glove. But the daemon was one that sought desperately the favor of its mistress, and it burst apart in a wave of sorcery that the Solitaire could not evade. And so he was finally felled, his ashen body falling into the pits of fire below.

There was the sense of floating, his very being tossed by the tides of the Othersea. Then came the one who had lain claim upon his soul – not Cegorach, but Slaanesh, for it was Slaanesh whose role he played. And yet the Solitaire waited, for Cegorach had lain upon him a promise to challenge Slaanesh for custody of his soul. But came the claws of Slaanesh closer, and yet Cegorach had not come. And all around him did Slaanesh lay claim to a dozen and yet a dozen more Solitaires, and still Cegorach had not shown Himself.

The Solitaire knew only calm. Perhaps Cegorach had others to defend, and this eventuality had always been a large possibility when the fates had called for him to join the ranks of the Solitaires. And so he cast his mind, for the first time since taking up the role of Slaanesh within the troupes, upon his past lives. Memories came starkly to him, and he saw the Commorrite warrior staring back at him, and the corsair pirate and, bearing a face unburdened with the lessons of age, the restless and forever inquisitive healer, and along with the face of the healer came the name that all who had first met him in those early days had called him.

The claws of Slaanesh touched him in a manner that was at once gentle and repulsive, digging into his very being, drawing his soul, like those of the Solitaires around him, toward Her waiting presence. Her throaty laugh resonated through his mind, a sound of triumph.

Calcis did not struggle, only fixed his eyes in futile defiance upon Slaanesh as She drew him inexorably on toward his final doom.