The Masque of Vyle

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

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

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

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

‘It is perhaps axiomatic of the eldar race that some of its deadliest warriors are not warriors at all. A nomadic cult or sect of entertainers called “Harlequins exists outside the ritualistic societal norms of the eldar. Some of their performances are stylised, others abstract, while yet others are highly formalised. The performers move constantly between surviving enclaves of eldar, ostensibly for the purpose of staging depictions of their common mythology – the gods, creation, ancient heroes – often with an underlying metaphor or moralistic cue. It seems possible that the Harlequins’ purpose may also encompass diplomatic functions between different enclaves with concomitant elements of espionage. Juliannoux of Vergaun believes the Harlequins’ activities even have some bearing upon judicial matters.

The players in a Harlequin troupe seem to take up fixed roles both on and off the stage, their personal interactions always suborned to the characters they portray. Of these singular roles, the High Avatar and Death Jester are most easily comprehended as those of a leader and a personification of death. The Master Mime is a more complex figure and seems to include the concepts of invisibility or shadow play. This role crosses with that of the Shadowseer – a notorious psychic puppeteer in its own right, but with functions that also embrace a nurturing aspect to offset the harshness of the kingly High Avatar. Most curious of all is the so-called Solitaire. An outcast generally shunned by the rest of the group, the Solitaire appears infrequently at performances. Only a Solitaire can perform the role of the entity that brought about the legendary downfall of the eldar race, the Chaos god Slaanesh, the being the eldar refer to as “She Who Thirsts
”.
’

– Excerpted from
De Libratii Xenostius Maxima
,
Volume XXII, Addendum 95.0349.378 – ‘Additional apocrypha’.

Chapter One

The Void-Borne Dead

They gathered in
response to a silent call. They came slipping through the skeins of reality towards the dark place, a snarl of negativity and putrescence in the multi-dimensional lattice of the webway. They slid along the filaments of the webway very much like spiders reacting to the thrumming discord they could feel running through their home. Their objective was a kilometres-
long vessel tumbling through the void like the dying carcass of a great leviathan.

Ashanthourus was the first to arrive, as befit his primacy as the troupe leader, High Avatar and Sun-King. His knowledge of the webway could be matched by few still living. Despite the parlous state it had fallen into since ancient times, Ashanthourus’s insight into the webway’s infinite number of routes, cross-
passages and cut-throughs meant he could proceed quickly and easily to his goal.

Ashanthourus transitioned through a portal into the dark place and was attacked immediately. Broken automata lurched out of the shadows all around him and sought to crush out his life. He understood immediately that these long-limbed creations were the once-noble dead of this world, and that their vessels were cracked and their spirits irrevocably corrupted by She Who Thirsts. Change had already marked their once-smooth carapaces with barbs and scales, as if the unliving wraithbone of their bodies sought a mutagenic rebirth as the spawn of Chaos. Madness had infected them all.

Ashanthourus danced a deadly pavane with the corrupted dead, darting and weaving through their slashing blades and crushing limbs. He raised no weapon against them, his grinning face mask unfaltering as he gradually turned their horrid strength against them. He stepped negligently from blade to blade with his hands clasped behind his back, swayed effortlessly between grasping claws and skipped around his lurching foes. One by one the corrupted vessels began smashing each other apart in their ungainly efforts to destroy him.

Lo’tos arrived moments later and beheld Ashanthourus in the midst of his exercises. As Master Mime and magician for the troupe, Lo’tos knew his place and seamlessly began to weave his own performance around that of Ashanthourus. He began by apishly imitating the Sun-King’s movements with his own, stepping directly in the troupe-master’s footprints. Moving like a clownish shadow, Lo’tos barely escaped the rushing blade-limbs that Ashanthourus had avoided so effortlessly. Lo’tos capered in mock terror from one of the machine-dead to another before darting back to follow the footsteps of Ashanthourus. Soon Lo’tos was fluttering around his leader and king as if in helpless supplication, before Ashanthourus led the last of the automata to impale itself on the wreckage of its fellows.

Lo’tos straightened and bowed elaborately to Ashanthourus, who returned the gesture, although he did not bow so deeply. The two of them held their pose for a moment to mark the end of the performance. Ashanthourus was resplendent in his gold-worked mask and magnificent crimson bodysuit. He contrasted strongly with Lo’tos’s constantly shifting face and scrawny, shadowy body.

‘That was inappropriate, Lo’tos,’ Ashanthourus admonished with his deep, mellifluous voice. ‘What has occurred here makes a case for tragedy rather than comedy.’

Lo’tos’s mask immediately swirled into a caricature of the weeping eldar face most often characterised as Isha the moon-goddess. The magician bowed low to Ashanthourus once again and became the very image of contrition.

‘The tragedy here is not of Lo’tos’s making,’ another voice said – this one as cool and liquid as starshine dancing on deep waters. ‘You should grant him forgiveness, my king of fools.’

Ashanthourus turned his grinning mask towards the newcomer and gave a nonchalant flick of his hand towards Lo’tos as he spoke. ‘Immediately given, my queen of mystery, in celebration of your timely arrival in this benighted place.’

Cylia, the Moon-Queen and Shadowseer for the troupe, stood forth from the portal still hooded and cloaked. Her mask was a reflective oval beneath her cowl and from her back spread the tubes of her
creidann
launcher like a set of branching antlers.

‘I sense great evil was done here, and done too quickly for these ghost warriors to intervene and protect their home,’ Cylia said sadly. ‘I fear their failure is what drove them to madness.’

As she swung forwards with infinite grace it became apparent that Cylia was followed by a threatening shadow, an armoured figure with its harness all worked with bones and symbols of death. This one had a mask crafted into the grinning visage of a skull and was known as Hradhiri Ra, the
margroach
or Death Jester of the troupe. In his hands he bore a slender, fluted cannon that was as long as he was tall. Hradhiri Ra cocked his head at the smashed wraithguard scattered about and looked back at Ashanthourus meaningfully.

‘It was severe enough to be called forth without explanation,’ Hradhiri Ra whispered in a voice that stroked icy fingers along the listener’s spine. ‘Grimmer still to arrive and find the work is already done.’

‘Our errant friend has called us with better cause than this perversion alone,’ Cylia said. ‘I sense these poor, broken vessels are only the beginning of the woes to be found in this place. Listen – what is it that you do not hear?’

All four stood with heads cocked in attitudes of listening for a moment before gazing back at one another.

‘The infinity circuit is entirely quiescent,’ said Ashanthourus.

‘The spirits of the dead are silent once more,’ concurred Hradhiri Ra in his sepulchral whisper.

Lo’tos hunched his shoulders and crossed his arms across his chest but kept his silence.

‘This craftworld has become a dead place, rotting without the protection of its ancestral spirits,’ said Cylia. ‘At the very least we should secure its gates before its poison can seep out into the webway.’

‘Then let us be about it,’ Ashanthourus said decisively and clapped his hands. By ones and twos other members of the troupe that had silently joined their master and mistress while they talked came stepping lightly out of the shadows. Most were slinking mimes or agile troupers, but a sprinkling of lesser Death Jesters and Shadowseers appeared also. In total no more than two dozen were present, but among eldar Harlequins that made for an unusually powerful Masque. Ashanthourus sent them hither and yon to secure the craftworld’s webway portals and search for survivors, although he held out little hope of finding any whole or sane.

The troupe members had seen places like and yet subtly different from this one a thousand times. The curving walls of the corridors and oval doorways, the smooth spiral ramps and the open forest domes were all familiar to anyone who had been aboard an eldar craftworld before. But in this craftworld the golden lights of the domes were extinguished, the curving walls were torn open and the doors were shattered. Some force had come aboard this craftworld and assailed it with unthinkable violence.

Measured across the millennia the finite number of craftworlds was always a tragically dwindling figure: internal strife, external enemies and outright disappearance all took their toll. The loss of any craftworld was always a matter to be mourned, investigated and, if circumstances warranted it, avenged.

The craftworlds had
wandered the great wheel of the galaxy ever since the Fall. Each one preserved a community of eldar that had the foresight to elude the unthinkable catastrophe that had overtaken the vast majority of their race during the Fall. The enormous ships were nation, fortress, domicile, parkland and life-preserving ark to those that lived out their lives aboard them. They were all unique, each one as much a living thing as a creation of industry and engineering. Much of the underlying structure of a craftworld was grown and sculpted using the amazing psychomorphic skills of its inhabitants.

The silent call that had brought the troupe hither drew them ever onwards into the depths of the craftworld. Light and heat gradually vanished as they probed deeper. Then gravity became increasingly tenuous as they moved inwards through the slowly tumbling hull of the craftworld. Now instead of walking, the troupe members perforce boosted themselves from spar to stanchion through drifting debris. They flipped themselves easily through spaces where up and down had lost all meaning; ceilings became floors, corridors became vertical shafts. It was in these chaotic spaces that the troupe encountered the first real traps left by the attackers.

Lo’tos had fallen to his natural role of pushing ahead and investigating potential performance locations. As he rounded a bend in the corridor a tiny, silent flash up ahead caught his attention. An innocent-looking gust of debris was blowing towards the magician, unfolding like a flower as it rushed up the corridor at him. Lo’tos recognised peril at once. He acted quicker than thought to swing himself to the side and into a narrow pipe barely wider than his shoulders. The debris flashed past his hiding place in a deadly blur, the invisible mass of monofilament wires hidden within it slicing through everything they touched at a molecular level.

A dozen paces behind him Ashanthourus, Hradhiri Ra and Cylia saw the magician dart aside seconds before the roiling hurricane of debris struck. As it reached them it had doubled in size, the shredding action of the monofilament adding constantly to its mass as it tore chunks from the walls, ceiling and floor. Cylia reacted instinctively, flinging up her arms and summoning a protective sphere of psychic force about the three of them. The energy parted the tumbling mass as cleanly as the bow of a ship parting a wave. The monofilament webs were abruptly pushed aside to scour the corridor walls into nests of razors as they expended the last of their momentum.

The magician’s tragic mask peered out cautiously once he was sure the danger had passed. He saw Hradhiri Ra’s skull visage looking back at him. Ashanthourus was busy communicating their discovery to the other members of the troupe, telling them to be even more cautious.

‘We had thought you lost to us,’ the Death Jester whispered. ‘Come out of that hole before our critics think to become yet more scathing.’

‘How was it done, Hradhiri?’ Cylia asked, and a slight inflection of her voice made the Death Jester pause and turn to look at the reflective oval of her mask in surprise. He could have sworn that the Shadowseer sounded nervous.

‘A simple motion sensor and explosive charge would suffice,’ the Death Jester whispered. ‘Any
mon-keigh
could come up with the same idea, but monofilament webs are an eldar weapon.’

Cylia nodded, her cowl dipping to obscure the smooth curve of her face. Ashanthourus looked across sharply at them both, his grinning, gold-chased mask seeming both sinister and scheming in the darkness.

‘Monofilament in itself proves nothing: we carry enough of it ourselves to weave a starship,’ the troupe-master said brusquely.

‘Precisely so,’ Hradhiri Ra whispered. ‘But who else does? Warp Spiders? Renegades? Kabalites? The list is short and it gives us our first clue as to who is responsible for this tragedy.’

Lo’tos for his part only shrugged and blurred his mask to display the swirling mass of debris he had witnessed rushing towards him. So armed with the image of his antagonist for a face the magician crept forwards more cautiously, on hands and toes like a four-legged spider.

The next trap was different, a hive of microscopic machines programmed to strip the flesh and flense the bones of any living thing they sensed nearby. Lo’tos sensed the machine-nest’s almost inaudible buzzing from afar and hunted it down, hidden under a pall of psychic shadow. Once it had been located, Hradhiri’s shrieker cannon put paid to the globular nest and its occupants before they could do any harm.

Ashanthourus received more reports from the other troupes moving through the craftworld. Other traps had been found and disarmed. Their distribution seemed random and their details varied but all were of a particularly vicious brand of cunning that the troupe-master found all too familiar. This craftworld was a small one, little bigger than a city when the greatest world-ships were the size of continents. Even so it represented a potentially vast area to search with only a handful of individuals. When the danger of casualties was added to the mix it became an impossible task. With regret he ordered the troupes to cease their fruitless search for survivors and concentrate on closing the craftworld’s webway portals.

‘It is truly lost then?’ Cylia said.

‘I cannot risk losing more of us searching for survivors that may not exist,’ Ashanthourus said heavily.

‘They exist, I feel them,’ replied Cylia distantly. ‘But I fear they are beyond our capacity to save.’

Coming upon the
innermost halls of the craftworld, they encountered its surviving inhabitants. Bereft of the protection given by the psychic seals built into their craftworld home, they had been warped into supple, serpentine entities by the baleful influence of She Who Thirsts. They were barely identifiable as eldar : mewling, mismatched things that had rapidly regressed into atavistic mutants. The monstrosities diverted themselves from preying on one another to rush gleefully at their newly arrived playmates with extended claws and lolling tongues.