The Carnac Campaign: Spirit War Read online

  The Carnac Campaign: Episode Three

  Spirit War

  Rob Sanders

  He was Kael Ra – Prince Ecliptic of the Alaitocii. Avenger. Autarch… Legend.

  His diresword knew only its desire to end enemies. His aspect armour was slick with the drizzle of barbarian blood. Gore dripped from the plume of his high-helm, while the fury of greenskin shells – crude but as unrelenting as a storm – turned to lead-splatter against the fluxing pulse of his energy shield. His craftworld kin were there: lithe, shadowy figures, whose blades and shuriken-fire was the bladed shaft of a spear thrust through the meat of the enemy ranks – a spear of which Kael Ra was the tip. The monstrous droves – living testaments to obstinate rage – split before the martial grace of the Prince Ecliptic’s advance. The orks bellowed their choler and contempt for the sleight craftworld host but could do nothing to stop the bloody, limb-strewn path the Alaitocii warriors were carving through their hordes. Kael Ra was a vision of serenity – cold, precise and deadly.

  His diresword sang with the balletic demise of invader greenskins, while his body arced and extended about its movements, guiding it to greater devastation. Brute-bore weaponry spat its point-blank-range fury into the sizzling shell of the autarch’s shielding, while Kael Ra whipped his shuriken pistol about him like the grip of a whip, allowing the trailing flourishes of monomolecular death to scythe through the soon-to-be-dead. All the while, Alaitocii guardians, warriors and the high priests of the god of war, fought at their autarch’s back in choreographed darkness and determination.

  For a moment, Kael Ra was lost to the battle. It was not rage or confusion. It was fugue not of the body or mind but of the soul. Thousands of foes had died before his blade on hundreds of worlds. Which was this? He had fought the greenskin plague on Ath-Ethon, on Lorachi and Talhennor, and many fringe worlds beyond. The pang of uncertainty shot through his heart, the kind of fear and uncertainty that the alien enemy had failed to put there. As his killing thrusts and elegant bladework took apart oncoming brutes, Kael Ra allowed himself a moment of consideration, a second or two away from the calculating contrivance of battle. Had he become lost on some darkened path? He had walked many but none seemed as potent and captivating as this. The figures about his pirouetting form – both foe and fellow eldar – appeared bleached in darkness. Their shapes were immediate and recognisable but their movements blotted into one another.

  His diresword skewered one beastbreed, before slipping it out of the carcass and flicking gore into the face of another. As the monster greenskin blinked the muck from its eyes, it found that its throat had been slashed open by the twirling sweep of the autarch’s shuriken pistol. A clawed arm flew off here, a tusk-twisted head there. Kael Ra ducked. He back flipped. He rolled, each movement taking him clear of a felling broadblade, crackling power claw or stream of lead. Crouching down in the blood-mulch and dismembered body parts, the Prince Ecliptic span on the toe-tip of his boot, his blade cutting through the gristle and bone of shins and ankles. Monsters fell about him, and like the harvester in the field Kael Ra reared to survey the fruits of his labour. It was then that he saw her.

  A single figure in the robes of a seer – her hair plaited into silver buns above her ears – walked through the enemy mobs with a tranquil abandon. It was as though the drooling beasts were not there; charging, wildly swinging and firing their weapons, roaring at the Alaitoc and each other. In turn, the greenskin monstrosities seemed unaware of her. She drifted through their throngs of violence and alien hatred, her steps light and her eyes on the Prince Ecliptic. Unlike the spiky silhouette of the enemy or the dark assurance of the warriors at his back, the wandering eldar ghosted her way through the scene. She positively glowed and Kael Ra felt drawn to her strangeness.

  Fearing she was one of his number – a straggler cut off from the spearhead by a barricade of furious green flesh – Kael Ra turned the lethal point of the battle formation aside. With his pistol empty and holstered, the autarch surged into the enemy ranks. With footwork fast and the grace of economical blade work, Kael Ra slipped through the beasts. Using his slender gauntlet like a grapnel, the Prince Ecliptic anchored himself on a greenskin giant, visiting centrifugal kicks and sword sweeps through the surrounding creatures. Greenskins fired on the ghost moving through their ranks but only served to maul further the toppling bodies Kael Ra left in his wake. The shadowy forces of the Alaitoc craftworld moved through the neat carnage, the point-blank shuriken fury of their number like a razored wedge being driven through the muscle and sinew of the ork hordes. Bestial clusters of greenskins fell upon the Prince Ecliptic – drawn down on the threat by animal instinct. Mob after blood-fevered mob dropped about the autarch, his lightning thrusts punching through their heart-skewered carcasses, and arcs gliding through throats and the tops of skulls.

  Rising from the demolished collection of greenskin bodies, Kael Ra watched the seer walk purposely towards him. She was a spectral vision advancing through their ranks, unseen by their alien eyes. The Prince Ecliptic’s gaze rose into the murk of the battlefield sky. There too, war was being waged. The heavens were overcast. Cloud banks flashed with the gunfire of dogfights and detonating aircraft. Kael Ra watched as the bulbous outline of a greenskin bomber dropped out of the clouds. Chugging its way in for a low pass, Kael Ra could see its belly, swollen with ordnance. It would have worried the autarch if it were not for the pair of Nightwing fighters searing up behind it, accelerating to attack speed. Within moments they had streamed through the greenskin obscenity with their lances and banked skyward in search of more challenging prey. With precision fire and ease the Alaitocii fighter pilots had burned through the bomber’s engines. As the oppression above swallowed the Nightwings, the ork bomber fell into a messy and inevitable descent.

  It was like a nightmare from which the autarch could not wake. Hacking and stabbing his way through the barbarian hordes, Kael Ra was powerless to stop the unfolding tragedy. The bomber turned as it tumbled, rolling onto its side and slamming into the enemy lines. Impossibly, the ork at the stick found its way to some kind of crash landing. Like the fin of an ocean predator, the aircraft’s remaining wing cut its way through the greenskin swarm. Alien brutes died in their droves, splattered against the flaming fuselage or smeared into the landscape under the beastcraft’s bulk. As it came to a stop, fires raging through its superstructure, Kael Ra went to call out. His lips moved but no sound proceeded from them. The Alaitoc force at his back never got the warning he intended for them. The flames had spread through the ordnance bay and like an erupting nova, the fat aircraft exploded – turning the battle gloom to brilliant white.

  Moments later, the Prince Ecliptic came to. He was on his back. Somewhere in the distance, the wreckage of the greenskin bomber was still throwing an infernal glow across the battlefield. The force of the explosion had thrown him some distance. He could hear the agonies of his warriors in the darkness beyond and the butchery of greenskin savages falling on the shattered remains of his spearhead force. The autarch’s field protection sizzled and spat to nothingness. Kael Ra went to get to his feet, but he could not. His legs were no longer there. Even for an autarch – such as he, the shock was overwhelming. He turned and retched into the dark dirt. The earth was already saturated with his blood. He looked down again at the horror of his ragged midriff and the absence beyond. Through a sickening numbness he could still feel his boots and armour.

  Wild gunfire hammered into the ground nearby, alerting the autarch to the barbed silhouettes of alien barbarians in the murk. They were running, their steps heavy and their howls jubilant. The sudden violence of detonation was like a drug to them. Their hunger for furth
er carnage became all that Kael Ra knew. Slapping about in the gore-soaked mulch for his weapon, the Prince Ecliptic found that his diresword had landed a little distance away. Rolling over onto his chest and allowing the agony of his grievous wounds to lance through the numbness of shock and stupefaction, Kael Ra crawled arm over arm towards the weapon.

  As the tapering tips of his gauntlet reached the hilt of the sword he felt the beasts all about him. Retracting his arm and rolling, Kael Ra managed to avoid the axe intending to split open his skull and sliced through the throat of its wielder with the tip of his sword. Arching, reaching, slipping and sliding in the mud, the Prince Ecliptic fought for what was left of his life, the life messily bleeding away into the ground about him. He cut out legs from under his attackers. He gored them through their guts. He turned aside heavy blades and the squat barrels of their barbaric weapons. Soon the bloody morass surrounding the prone autarch was carpeted with alien bodies. Just as the Prince Ecliptic thought he might actually escape the butchery of a battlefield death, the studded boot of a greenskin monstrosity slammed down on his wrist, squelching both his gauntlet and diresword into the mud.

  Kael Ra fought to free himself but the beast put its other boot on his chest. It looked down the gaping barrel of its obscene weapon. The creature was huge, some kind of tribal boss of chieftain. Beyond, the Prince Ecliptic could hear the sound of guardians and Aspect Warriors trying to reach him but a small mountain range of green flesh – the chieftain’s entourage brute kindred and arch-maniacs – had erupted between them, leaving Kael Ra to their monstrous leader. The thing looked down at the struggling autarch. It was difficult to tell through the set of teeth and tusks sprouting from the horror’s maw but Kael Ra thought that it was smiling. Its beady eyes fixed on him with unbridled hatred and stringy drool slipped out through the gaps in its teeth and splattered against the autarch’s rising and falling chest. Kael Ra found himself snarling back at the creature. His moved his free hand unconsciously over his chest to the ornate spirit stone set in the psycho-plastic intricacies of his armour. He found himself holding his breath, willing the beast on. The greenskin hulk did not require any encouragement, however. Holding the bucking weapon steady in its claws, the monster blasted a long and thunderous stream of lead into the Prince Ecliptic.

  Suddenly the chieftain’s attentions were elsewhere. Driven on by concern for their autarch, the regrouping Alaitoc warriors had cut through the muscular ranks of the chieftain’s legion of bodyguards, necessitating intervention from the monstrous leader itself. As the battle raged on in the gloom beyond, the autarch’s chest fell for the final time. Kael Ra – Prince Ecliptic of the Alaitocii – Avenger. Autarch. Legend… was dead. With the light gone from his eyes, the blood-speckled lids drew slowly to a close.

  When Kael Ra opened them, the seer was with him. Kneeling in the blood and mud at the side of his corpse, she gave him a kindly smile. Once again, she seemed to glow and was oblivious to the carnage unfolding about her. From the obscurity and darkness, two further elder presented themselves. The first was a spectral vision, like his mistress; the second shared the bleakness of the surrounding shadow. The pair were dressed in the same bone-woven mesh, clutched matching shuriken catapults and wore the same cold judgement on their identical faces. They were twins, one the disdainful mirror image of the other. They flanked the seer like a watchful escort.

  ‘Are you sure?’ the first put to his mistress in syllables of broken glass.

  ‘We can do this…’ the second twin assured her, his voice no less mellifluous and cutting.

  ‘I am sure,’ the seer answered them. She held out a slender hand to the fallen autarch.

  ‘Kael Ra of Alaitoc,’ she said, her voice like a half-remembered battle hymn. ‘Prince Ecliptic. Take my hand, if once again, you wish to live.’

  Without knowing it, the dead autarch’s hand was in hers. She reared to her full and imposing height, pulling him to her. Together they stood. Kael Ra was unsteady. She held him to her lithe body.

  He looked down at the bloody patch of earth from which he had risen. He had risen… The Prince Ecliptic reached down for legs that moments before had not been there. Kael Ra stared about the field of battle and watched as the Alaitocii took the furious fight to the greenskin barbarians. Their rallying advance had the grief-stricken sting of disbelief. Their weapons shredded through the hated enemy. Kael Ra turned to the seer. The fires of battle glinted off the silver buns above her ears. For the first time in forever, the Prince Ecliptic found that words proceeded from the thoughts in his head. It was strange hearing himself again.

  ‘Who are you.’

  It was neither question nor demand and was delivered with all the addled humility a master in the arts of war could muster.

  ‘My name is Nestra, my lord. Nestra Orphiel,’ the seer told him. Her words proceeded from lips, soft and sharp, but echoed about his skull like distant thunder. She gestured to the members of her escort. ‘This is Castien and this is Ehrendril, the Brothers Rhespasian.’

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘The Darcassion Heights, on Talhennor,’ Orphiel told him, leading the unsteady prince up the incline of a ridge running parallel to the chaos and carnage.

  ‘Talhennor…’

  ‘This is the Battle of Talhennor,’ Orphiel said, ‘from which you emerged victorious.’

  ‘I don’t remember…’

  ‘You fell at Talhennor, my lord,’ Orphiel confessed, ‘but your death rallied the Alaitoc to a great victory against the greenskin and secured Talhennor for our exodite kin.’

  ‘Then I was not victorious,’ Kael Ra said.

  ‘Spoken like a warrior,’ the seer observed. ‘Your spirit was carried back to the craftworld to great mourning. Alaitoc had lost the Prince Ecliptic but found the strength to eradicate a mighty enemy of the eldar.’

  ‘You flatter these greenskin savages.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Orphiel said, ‘but without your victory, these savages would have mauled many more fringe worlds and drenched the earth with the blood of our cousins. So said our venerable farseers.’

  ‘Is that your path?’ Kael Ra asked, ‘the gift of foresight?’

  ‘By the time you secured victory at Talhennor, I had not even been born,’ Orphiel said as she guided him along the gloomy ridge. The Prince Ecliptic pulled away from her.

  ‘Stop saying that,’ the autarch said imperiously. ‘There is no victory in death.’

  ‘You are wrong, my lord.’

  Kael Ra looked at the seer. He studied the grave lines of her kindly face, the glyphs and symbols of her dark robes.

  ‘And you are no farseer…’

  ‘I did not proclaim to be,’ Orphiel insisted.

  ‘You’re a necromancer…’ Kael Ra accused.

  ‘My lord,’ Orphiel continued, allowing the insult to pass on the wind, ‘you were brought back to Alaitoc and taken into the craftworld’s hallowed embrace. You reached the great matrix of souls that guide, protect and continue to serve our people. It is from there that I speak to you now.’

  ‘So this,’ Kael Ra gestured to the unfolding battle. ‘None of this is happening.’

  ‘It is happening for you,’ Orphiel told him. ‘But it is the distant past of your descendants.’

  The Prince Ecliptic stumbled and Nestra Orphiel reached for him. Once again, Kael Ra pulled away. He was overcome with emptiness. A sombre eternity stretched both before and beyond the ancient autarch. Orphiel allowed him a moment. The Alaitoc rally had begun. Grief had turned to anger. Anger to determination. Determination to cold pride. Guardians fought for their fallen autarch. Aspect Warriors fought for the honour of their craftworld war shrines. Illimitar Skystorm – winged death and exarch of the Swooping Hawks – had emerged from the Alaitoc lines to take his place in history. Orphiel nodded to herself. Illimitar would finish what Kael Ra had started and assume the mantle of high autarch
.

  ‘What perversity is this?’ Kael Ra said, witness to a future he had not known. ‘We send our fallen to the infinity circuit, that is no more than a living hell for its assimilates.’

  ‘The infinity circuit is many things,’ Orphiel told him cryptically, ‘but for the individual soul it is what their spirit makes of it. Your fear of failure has followed you here, my lord. It is how I knew where to find you. You choose to relive this moment from your past. To replay the game – hoping for a different outcome. It is this quality, Prince Ecliptic, which made you – and still makes you – one of the most powerful of Alaitoc’s warriors and leaders. A spirit of purpose. A soul without fear. You are a warrior that refuses to surrender – even in death.’

  The pair of ghostly Nightwings fell out of the cloudy sky, rolling wing over wing. Levelling out and skimming the sea of greenskin rage, the aircraft lanced the battlefield with a stream of las-fire, cutting a path up through the shadowy hordes that Illimitar and warriors used to funnel their invigorated assault. Kael Ra found himself nodding in appreciation.

  ‘I come to you from Eldorath Starbane,’ Orphiel told the Prince Ecliptic.

  ‘Never heard of him,’ Kael Ra said absently.

  ‘He leads the Alaitocii now,’ Orphiel said. ‘But against foes galactic, greater and more damning than the savages of the green plague. An enemy of old – an enemy risen from oblivion to take back what was lost in the War in Heaven.’

  ‘That cannot be–’

  ‘The yngiract,’ Orphiel insisted. ‘The silver servants of ancient destiny, intent on reclaiming the dynastic glory of a silent kingdom.’

  Kael Ra knew the yngiract…

  ‘This Starbane fights the metal menace?’ Kael Ra.

  ‘As best he can, my lord,’ Orphiel confirmed. ‘He leads the Alaitocii in defending the exodite world of Carnac against a yngiract overlord known as the Traveller. The Traveller claims Carnac as his own.’

  ‘It sounds like the Alaitoc face a desperate time,’ Kael Ra said, watching the shades of his eldar battleforce cut through the greenskin swarm.