Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue

The Kabal of the Poisoned Tongue is a Drukhari kabal of Commorragh, closely allied with the Kabal of the Black Heart. A kabal is a raiding fleet and political faction of the Drukhari, the xenos raiders who make their home in Commorragh, the webway city known as the dark city. Rather than relying on open strength, the Poisoned Tongue has built its standing in Commorragh’s murderous politics on misinformation, sabotage, infiltration and assassination, turning its kabalites’ skill in deceit against rivals while letting supposed allies bear the cost of battle. Its warriors are recorded wearing blue livery, with some accounts adding green trim to the scheme.

The kabal claims no world beyond Commorragh itself, and even there its power is deliberately dispersed rather than concentrated: it is said to hold the void-docks of Scarlet Harbour and the slums of Netherdell outright, and to dominate a number of lesser kabals through hidden influence, so that no single reversal can break it. It is also said to maintain holdings hidden within the webway, including facilities linked to toxin distillation and, by some accounts, a working relationship with a masque of Harlequins. The kabal is noted for the unusually high proportion of Trueborn — Drukhari born rather than raised from the general kabalite ranks — within its ranks. Its most noted formation, the Fangs of Malys, specialises in infiltration and impersonation, riding to war in raiders fitted with mimic engines that let them pass as the very enemy they are fighting.

Before battle is joined, the Poisoned Tongue habitually seeds its chosen targets with false warnings and fragmentary signs of an impending raid, so that when the true strike falls it comes where the victims least expect it. Actions recorded to the kabal’s name include the Panacea Wars, the raid on Greyshroud, the Narteum Atrocity, a raid on Askovar II, an uprising against the Kabal of the Black Heart during the era known as the Age of Plenty, a clash with Adeptus Arbites forces aboard the space hulk Gallowdark, and the Slow Death of Graegus, a campaign against Ork freebooter pirates recorded to the thirty-seventh millennium.

The kabal’s archon, Aurelia Malys, is recorded as a former consort of Asdrubael Vect, the supreme overlord of Commorragh, until he cast her out; later tradition holds that she then led the bulk of her kabal into the webway, where she encountered the Laughing God Cegorach and came away carrying his heart in place of her own, a tale offered to explain the uncanny accuracy of her foresight. Other archons associated with the kabal include Xurul ka’Teren, and the Dracon Naezir is also named among its officers.

Following Vect’s apparent death amid the opening of the Great Rift and the disjunction that struck Commorragh, Malys withdrew most of her kabal into the webway rather than remain for reprisals she expected from the Black Heart; her foresight was vindicated when the archons gathered for Vect’s wake were slaughtered and Vect himself returned alive. The Poisoned Tongue now watches the dark city from a distance, continuing to plot within Commorragh’s wider web of intrigue.