Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘Get away from there!’ Emeli swatted at Jurgen with a hand the size of a Terminator, and he ducked in the nick of time, having the presence of mind to crack off a shot with the melta as he straightened up. This time the cauterised crater it gouged in her arm remained unhealed, seeping some noisome fluid into the wound.

‘It’s working!’ I shouted, flourishing the fallen inquisitor’s staff as though it were a chainsword. I lashed out at Emeli’s leg, and, to my relief, saw a fragment of it vanish back into the warp, if only for a moment.

‘Good,’ Amberley said, shuffling across to Vekkman and hoisting him onto her shoulder. Jurgen clambered up onto the dais, next to the pile of spirit stones. It reached almost to his waist, and for the first time I realised just how many of the things there were; no wonder the daemon had seemed so powerful, with such a vast hoard of energy to leech off.

‘What do you want me to do now, sir?’ Jurgen asked, quite reasonably under the circumstances.

‘Trying not to die would be good,’ I said, only half flippantly. If his gift from the Emperor was going to save us, and Emeli knew it, killing him would be her only chance of saving herself. Of course that would mean going through me, so chances were I wouldn’t be there to find out one way or the other. I backed up to the dais myself.

Emeli yelped, as the avatar arrested a leap in our direction by seizing her tail. Smoke and steam rose around its fist, the flesh charring and blistering beneath its grip. Emeli whirled round and smashed it hard in what should have been its face, and the construct staggered from the impact.

‘Something’s happening,’ Jurgen said, a note of puzzlement entering his voice. I risked a glance behind us, and felt a sudden surge of optimism. The stones were glowing brighter, the light gnawing away at the invading darkness within them, which began to dwindle in response. Slowly but surely even the most badly infected began to regain their lustre.

‘She’s weakening!’ Amberley cried, surprise and relief mingling in her voice. It was true. The avatar’s arcane weapon was glowing brightly now, carving its way through the daemon’s flesh and bone, while the warp spawn flailed and struck out with ever increasing desperation.

‘Stop! Stop!’ she wailed. Then the towering mass of flesh crashed to the ground. A miasma of nothingness, like its first manifestation, seemed to seep out of it, writhing like the scorching air over a desert as the thing’s essence sought to escape the destruction of her physical body.

But the avatar was faster, swinging its arcane weapon through the space the noncorporeal entity occupied, and a wordless wail of agony and despair echoed through the air around us. A nimbus of light erupted from the pole arm, in which a shadow seemed to move, struggling desperately as it was drawn into the very blade itself. Then the light faded, and the avatar froze into watchful immobility.

‘Is that it?’ Jurgen asked, and I exhaled gratefully, only aware as I did so that I’d been holding my breath, offering silent but nonetheless fervent thanks to the Emperor for our deliverance all the while.

‘Throne knows,’ I said, readying my weapons again. The eldar were still circling overhead, although they’d stopped firing now there was nothing left to shoot at, and their spears had returned to their hands.

‘Apart from the tidying up,’ Amberley said, as the leading jetbike grounded, and Sambhatain dismounted, with a faintly disdainful look in our direction. She raised a hand, and greeted the farseer in his own tongue.

‘Your language, please,’ he said. ‘It’s so much simpler, and you won’t have to explain it all again later.’

‘Do we have time for explanations?’ I asked, with a glance at the hole in the roof that I tried to make seem casual rather than panic-stricken. ‘I’ve tried breathing vacuum before, and it’s not an experience I care to repeat.’

Almost as the words left my mouth, however, the wind died down, the flickering nimbus of a force field sealing the breach above our heads.

Sambhatain smiled, in the kind of superior manner everyone associates with eldar, and generally detests. ‘We’ve time enough,’ he said. Then he turned to Amberley. ‘At least to settle the matters we need to discuss.’

Editorial Note:

Since the substance of those discussions, and their aftermath, appears to have been of insufficient interest to Cain for him to bother to recall, I’m forced to let another, less-reliable, source fill in the gaps.

From The Eldar: a History of Their Presence in the Ultima Segmentum, and Some Musings Upon Possible Means of Their Eradication, by Baltazar Thromp, 997 M41