The Masque of Vyle Read Online Free Page B

craftworld could not be found in its current condition. Cylia set its course to return it to the depths of the void and they departed from it with many a backward glance. Even stripped of its wraithbone and spirit stones the craftworld had a lingering presence. It was almost as if an indefinable sense of life and consciousness clung to it from the multitudes that had lived out their lives within its walls. More accurately it was possible to sense the slow, incremental passing of something that had once been vast and incredible. The great vessel was a titanic corpse that could only hint at how much greater the complete living entity had been.
    They turned their backs on the dark place as it sank into the multi-hued depths of the void and they took to the webway once more. A single thread of probability led them through time and space to a realm outside both the void and the material universe: a dewdrop of reality trembling on the inter-dimensional strands of the webway, a bubble of matter like and yet unlike many others created out of the eternally churning froth of warp space.

Chapter Two
    The Sable Marches
    As he emerged from the portal, Archon Kassais eyed the turbulent, storm-wracked skies of the Sable Marches with undisguised disdain. Far out to sea he could glimpse long-bodied grav-craft dumping something into the iron-grey waters, which was odd as he’d thought the whole point of this place was to take things out of the water rather than put them back in.
    Kassais shrugged mentally. He had been a visitor to a hundred different sub-realms in his time. None of them ever came close to the dark grandeur of Commorragh, the eternal city, with its glittering spires and endless, twisting streets. Some, it had to be granted, evinced a sort of primordial energy and primitive squalor that sharpened the appetite and roused the more base instincts to a pleasing pitch. He already knew that the Sable Marches was not destined to be one of these places.
    Kassais knew the Sable Marches had squalor in plentiful quantities but beyond that it was highly unlikely that they had anything else to offer by way of diversion. This was mostly because for unfathomable reasons its creators had chosen to fill up most of the realm with salt water when they shaped it. The Marches were still known as a wild realm, one so primordial and fierce that it had been virtually abandoned soon after its inception. This particular realm had only been formally recolonised much, much later, after many centuries of neglect. Kassais consoled himself that at least he would not be staying in the benighted sub-realm for too long. A quick visit and then away to more agreeable realms.
    Archon Kassais and his entourage had entered the realm through a moss-grown arch close to the water’s edge. Rutted tracks led off left and right along a crumbling rock wall before beginning to twist tortuously back and forth in order to climb overhanging sea-cliffs. Scrofulous-looking hovels clung precariously to the cliffs alongside the track, like accretions of droppings interconnected by flimsy-looking ladders and swaying rope bridges. The air was full of the scent of brine and rotting fish. The crash of waves and the cries of birds assailed Kassais’s ears in a highly objectionable fashion.
    They began to wend their way up the track with Kassais’s warriors swiftly pushing ahead to clear the way for his smoothly floating palanquin. The natives endured the warriors’ curses and blows with a studied sullenness that verged on impudence, a fact that irritated Kassais still further. They lined the narrow track on either side to watch the entourage’s progress through lidless, saucer-like eyes. Kassais considered making an example of some of them but reluctantly decided he really couldn’t afford the delay. Vyle was already waiting for him somewhere above and patience was not one of his fellow archon’s stronger suits.
    Apparently such islands as the Sable Marches could boast as