Utak's plan was discussed briefly by Nolan, Tyberos, and Kahurangi. It was accepted.
From the private villa's communication station, Utak reached a Kabalite worker of the lowest functional rank: below agent designation, the kind of individual that a Dracon would use for an errand precisely because their status made them invisible. He gave the message simply. A group of humans from the Imperium had arrived at Commorragh's outskirts requesting a personal meeting with the Archon. They wished to trade a pair of mortal specimens with a specific bloodline in exchange for the item the Archon recently acquired from the Pierced Rose's last operation.
The Kabalite worker left immediately.
Utak turned to face the room with a smile that had come back to full operational capacity.
"He will betray the message before he has gone three streets. That is not a possibility, it is a certainty. By Dark Eldar social architecture, passing information through the correct channels while simultaneously selling it to whoever will pay most is simply how information moves in this city." He spread his hands. "In other words: the Archon will know within the hour. The message has been delivered."
Nolan looked at the Dark Eldar for a moment with an expression that was mostly evaluation.
The behavior was alien to any standard he had worked with. It was also, in the context of what they needed, precisely useful.
Everyone turned to their weapons and equipment. The period between now and whatever came next would involve a significant amount of violence, and they all understood this with the particular pragmatism of experienced soldiers who have stopped finding it remarkable.
The outermost precincts of Commorragh were a chain of subordinate kingdoms: spires and palace complexes distributed around the city's main mass at varying distances, each one old enough to have its own history that predated most galactic civilizations. Above them hung the dark suns: dying stellar remnants that had been drawn into Commorragh's dimensional space over the ages, their light cold and malevolent, the kind of illumination that described a very long decline. The scale of what they implied about Eldar civilization in its full height was not comfortable to sit with.
The Valley of Pleasure opened below them as the fog parted: a wide depression of dark rock and metal spikes, littered with remains that had been there long enough to become part of the landscape. The strange mist that the valley generated apparently year-round drifted between the spikes and the bones in slow patterns that bore no relationship to any air current Nolan could detect.
"Welcome to the Valley of Pleasure." Utak had adopted the tone of a man conducting a guided tour of something he found professionally interesting. He was wearing considerably less than anyone else in the group: the shorts and refractor field that constituted the maximum concealment available to a Dark Eldar trying to pass as a local rather than a prisoner. "For our people, this valley serves as a traditional venue for resolving personal disputes. Or simply for the elimination of inconvenient individuals. The acoustics are helpful."
He was standing on a section of floor that had a Dark Eldar corpse under it, the dead face visible through the bone-filled surface of the ground where Utak's weight had shifted the debris. He had not noticed, or had noticed and found it unremarkable.
Chaplain Manu, standing between Utak and Ilaya, looked at the Dark Eldar with the expression of someone generating and discarding responses at considerable speed.
"Disgusting," he said. A single word, delivered with the flat certainty of a formal verdict.
"Oh, I understand the adult's perspective." Utak turned, apparently in good humor. "But consider: if your Imperium were overseen by a being with an appetite for souls as relentless as the one who pursues us, would your civilization's cultural habits be so different? After all, the entity you have seated on the golden throne also requires sustenance of a particular kind, and he is not entirely unlike..."
The Ten Ring came across the distance between them in a flat arc and connected with the side of Utak's jaw.
Utak went sideways, hit the ground, and remained there on his hands and knees, spitting blood and something that had been a tooth.
Silence.
He raised his head very carefully in Nolan's direction and began a series of prostrations against the ground that communicated the same message from multiple angles.
"Lord Primarch. I was completely in the wrong. That was a joke of the worst possible quality. I have no excuse."
"Put everything that is not directly relevant to this mission away," Nolan said. He kept his voice level and his eyes on the valley's fog. "We are done with that conversation."
"Completely done. It will not recur."
Nolan looked at Tyberos.
"The Archon's forces will not honor the agreed meeting point. They will come here to collect rather than negotiate. You take the Lamenters and hold this valley. Your objectives: occupy enough of their combat capacity to give us time, prevent any pursuit from following us into the interior, and do not take unnecessary losses. If the situation turns, you retreat." He held the Chapter Master's dark eyes. "The Void Stone is not worth the Chapter Master's life. We are clear on this."
He turned without waiting for an extended response.
"Pale Nomad, you are with me. Hunting team, same. Manu: Ilaya and Jonah are your only task. Nothing else."
"Understood, Lord Primarch."
The distant sound arrived from within the fog before he had finished: the high whine of Reaver jetbikes at speed, and beneath it the lower resonance of Razorwing gunships coming in wide.
Nolan picked up Utak from the ground without ceremony, settled him under one arm, put on the vibranium helmet, and nodded once to Tyberos through the eyepiece.
Tyberos shook his head from side to side once, the motion of a man loosening something in his neck. His lightning claws came up and ran their activation sequence: the blue-white field building along both sets of blades with a sound like the beginning of a storm.
A single raised claw, one measured sweep of it, and the five Lamenters in Terminator plate moved into position among the valley's rock formations without a word exchanged.
Nolan turned and ran.
Commorragh's interior opened as they went deeper: wider passages, older structures, the accumulated centuries of a city that had been growing since before the Imperium's founding. What filled the spaces between the architecture was harder to account for in clean terms.
In the dark corners of the corridors they moved through, violence was not incidental. It was ambient: present the way heat was present near a furnace, not a specific event but a condition of the environment. Species in cages designed for other species. Things done to bodies that were still occupied. The variety of alien life represented in those corridors as subjects rather than agents was extensive: humans, Orks, Tau, Exodites who had been taken from their maiden worlds, even Craftworld Eldar, their clean armor stripped and their expressions carrying something that did not improve on extended observation.
Nolan registered all of it and kept moving.
If circumstances had been different, this city would have received a response it would not have recovered from quickly. That was a fact he noted and set aside. Commorragh had been generating debts of this kind for longer than most civilizations had existed, and the ledger would be addressed eventually. Not today.
The Ten Rings worked quietly ahead of the group, finding the guards and sentries on each approach before any of them were close enough to raise an alarm. The Warscythe stayed on his back. The Heart of the Furnace stayed at rest. This kind of work required precision rather than scale.
They crossed through several districts before the architecture changed. The spire they were approaching was one of many in this section of Karmor, but it had specific qualities that distinguished it: the height of it, the age in its proportions, the quality of the materials that had gone into its construction. An Archon who had been accumulating status and possessions for generations would live in exactly this kind of structure.
Utak, who had been carried under Nolan's arm for the last section of the journey, was set down at the base of the approach.
He straightened, found his footing, and looked up at the spire. Something changed in his face: the familiar territory, the specific associations the building had for him.
"My Lord Primarch." He turned. The usual quality of his voice was gone, replaced by something that was neither charm nor calculation. "We are here. This is the place."
He looked at the entrance, and then back at Nolan.
"I will say this once, without jokes or flattery, because you have treated me with more straightforwardness than most in this city would find useful." He paused. "You can still leave. I can guarantee safe passage back to the Webway gate from this point. If you go inside instead, everything I know about Archon Ilu Limnu tells me that we will be in a situation that even your capabilities may not resolve cleanly." His eyes held steady. "Death, in this city, is a kindness compared to some of the alternatives available to him."
The fog moved through the street around them.
Nolan looked at the spire's entrance.
"How many guards on the outer level?"
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