The Masque of Vyle Read Free Page A

infinity circuit normally permitted the souls of the craftworld’s dead to roam throughout their former home. Ghost warrior constructs even permitted a physical manifestation for those that desired to move beyond the circuit. However most souls wished only to remain in the infinity circuit and they commonly coalesced most strongly around the dome of crystal seers.
    Eldar that dedicated part of their long lives to the path of the seer came to the dome to finally give up the mantle of mortality by gradually entering the infinity circuit. Within the dome their atrophying bodies were slowly transformed into psychoactive crystal that grew little by little over countless millennia into fantastic tree-like structures linked directly to the infinity circuit.
    This place should have lain at the beating heart of the craftworld’s infinity circuit. It should have been a place where wisdom and ancestral knowledge veritably pulsed in the air, where generations of craftworld dwellers had been painstakingly gathered at the moment of death to be protected from She Who Thirsts behind bulwarks and sigils for all eternity. Instead, to the
psychic ally attuned Harlequins the dome felt dead and empty.
    The dome was part-filled with low dunes of scintillating sand; the air carried tendrils of brilliance where light scattered from drifting crystalline motes. The silent call had drawn the Harlequins to this place but by any metric they had arrived too late to save it.
    ‘Destroyed, utterly ravaged,’ said Ashanthourus in a voice that shook with cold fury. ‘Look, every spirit stone has been taken… or smashed.’
    They looked and saw that what the High Avatar had said was true. The curving walls of the dome showed thousands of hollow pockmarks where spirit stones had been interlaced into the infinity circuit. Every craftworlder carried such a talisman against the possibility of their death. The stone became a safe haven for their soul until it could be carried back to be implanted in the infinity circuit. Over the millennia a growing constellation of lambent spirit stones would have encrusted the interior of the dome.
    ‘Servants of the Great Enemy must have broken in here,’ Hradhiri Ra whispered uncertainly, ‘but I can’t see how the guardians permitted it. They could have called upon Khaela Mensha Khaine and thrown back the invaders, or sent for help from other craftworlds, or even abandoned this one and fled. I can see no sign that they attempted any of these things.’
    Lo’tos had crouched himself in a tight huddle with his arms wrapped around his knees. His tumbling, fractal-faced mask gazed over the shattered remnants of a people. The people of this craftworld had endured the Fall and all that came after it only to have their story end here. Even though he had seen greater evils than this one in his time the Master Mime still shivered involuntarily.
    ‘Cylia,’ Ashanthourus said abruptly. ‘You can discover what occurred within these walls. Your witchsight will show you past events. Look now, look and find out who was responsible for this abomination.’
    Cylia hesitated. ‘Such an action is not without risk, my Sun-King. If a greater daemon were here it could perceive me at the same instant I saw it. Even the protection of the Laughing God might not save me then, time and space would present no barrier to such an entity once it had tasted my psyche…’
    The Shadowseer’s voice trailed away apologetically beneath Ashanthourus’s gaze. She was unwilling to deny the High Avatar completely but knew the danger she sensed was very real. Violent events, heinous acts all left their mark on places in the material universe and brought them closer to true Chaos. The denizens of Chaos, potent entities that dwelled within its all-encompassing medium, required little more than a foothold to manifest outside their realm: a word, a symbol, even a thought could be all they needed.
    Lo’tos glanced to one side and his mask abruptly