by Warhammer
‘Never saw any skaven. Just heard a little scuttling some nights. Whatever it was, I think Snorri’s snoring scared it away. Anyway, if something attacked I have my bombs.’
‘Bombs?’
Varek fumbled inside his robe and produced a smooth black sphere. A strange metal device appeared to have been glued to the top. He handed it to Felix who inspected it closely. It looked like if you pulled the clip on top, it would come free.
‘Be careful with that,’ Varek said. ‘It’s a detonator. You pull that, it tugs the flint striker which lights the fuse which sets off the explosive. You’ve got about four heartbeats to throw it, then – boom!’
Felix looked at it warily, half-expecting the thing to explode in his hand.
‘Boom?’
‘It explodes. Shrapnel everywhere. That’s assuming the fuse fires. It sometimes doesn’t. About half the time, actually, but it’s very ingenious. And of course, very, very occasionally they go off for no reason at all. Almost never happens. Mind you, Blorri lost a hand that way. Had to have it replaced with a hook.’
Felix swiftly handed the bomb back to Varek who tucked it back inside the pocket of his robes. He was beginning to think this mild-mannered young dwarf was crazier than he looked. Perhaps all dwarfs were.
‘Makaisson made it, you know. He’s good at that sort of thing.’
‘Makaisson. Malakai Makaisson?’ Gotrek asked. ‘That maniac!’
Felix looked at the Slayer in open-mouthed astonishment. He wasn’t sure he wanted to meet this Makaisson. Anyone who Gotrek could describe as a maniac must be crazed indeed. Could probably win prizes for their madness, in fact. Gotrek caught Felix’s look.
‘Makaisson believes in heavier-than-air flight. Thinks he can make things fly.’
‘Gyrocopters fly,’ Snorri piped in. ‘Snorri been up in one. Fell out. Landed on head. No damage.’
‘Not gyrocopters. Big things! And he builds ships! Ships! That’s an unnatural interest for a dwarf. I hate ships almost as much as I hate elves!’
‘He built the biggest steamship ever,’ Varek said conversationally. ‘The Unsinkable. Was two hundred paces long. Weighed five hundred tons. It had steam-powered gatling turrets. It had a crew of over three hundred dwarfs and thirty engineers. It could sail at three leagues an hour. Such an impressive sight it was, with its paddles churning the sea to foam and its pennons flying in the breeze.’
It certainly sounded impressive, Felix thought, suddenly realising how far the dwarfs had taken this strange magic they called ‘engineering’. Like everybody else in the Empire, Felix knew about steam tanks, the armoured vehicles which were the spearhead of the realm’s mighty armies. This thing sounded like it made the steam tank look like a child’s toy. Still, if it was so impressive, he wondered, why had he never heard of it?
‘What happened to the Unsinkable? Where is it now?’
There was a brief embarrassed silence from the dwarfs.
‘Err… it sank,’ Varek said eventually.
‘Hit a rock on its first trip out,’ Snorri added.
‘Some people claim the boiler exploded,’ Varek said.
‘Lost with all hands,’ Snorri added with the almost happy expression with which dwarfs always seemed to confront the worst news.
‘Except Makaisson. He was picked up later by human ship. He was thrown clear by the explosion and clung to a wooden spar.’
‘Then he built a flying ship,’ Gotrek said, savage irony evident in his voice.
‘That’s right. Makaisson built a flying ship,’ Snorri said.
‘The Indestructible,’ Varek said.
Felix tried to imagine a ship flying. In the abstract he could manage it. In his mind’s eye, he saw something like the old river barges on the Reik, their sails filled, their sweeps tugging. It was powerful sorcery indeed that could do that.
‘Amazing thing it was,’ Varek said. ‘Big as a sailing ship. Wrought iron cupola. Fuselage almost hundred paces long. It could fly at ten leagues an hour – with the wind behind it, of course.’
‘What happened to it?’ Felix asked, a sinking feeling hinting that he already knew the answer.
‘It crashed,’ Snorri said.
‘Crosswinds and some liftgas leaks,’ Varek said. ‘Big explosion.’
‘Killed everybody aboard.’
‘Except Makaisson,’ Varek said, as if this made a big difference. He seemed to think this was an important point. ‘He was thrown clear and landed in some treetops. They broke his fall along with both his legs. Had to use crutches for the next two years. Anyway, the Indestructible had a few teething problems. What do you expect? It was the first of its kind. But Makaisson has sorted them now.’
‘Teething problems?’ Gotrek said. ‘Twenty good dwarf engineers killed, including Under-Guildmaster Ulli and you call that “teething problems”? Makaisson should have shaved his head.’
‘He did,’ Varek said. ‘After he was drummed out of the guild. He couldn’t face the shame, you know. They did the Trouser Legs Ritual to him. Pity. My uncle says he’s the best engineer who ever lived. He says Makaisson is a genius.’
‘A genius at getting other dwarfs killed.’
Felix was thinking about what Gotrek had said about Makaisson shaving his head. ‘Do you mean Makaisson became a Trollslayer?’ he asked Varek.
‘Yes. Of course. He still does engineering work though. Says he’ll prove his theories work or die trying.’
‘I’ll bet he will,’ Gotrek muttered darkly.
Felix wasn’t listening. He was wrestling with another, far more troubling concept. Counting Gotrek and Snorri, that would make three Trollslayers in one place. What was Varek’s uncle up to? A mission which required three Slayers didn’t sound good. In fact, it sounded positively suicidal. Suddenly something that Varek had said earlier came sharply into focus in Felix’s mind, cutting through even the awful fog of his hangover.
‘You said earlier you heard scuttling,’ Felix said, thinking of the small shape he had seen in the undergrowth. He was starting to have an awful suspicion about that. ‘On your way to meet Gotrek and myself.’
Varek nodded. ‘Only at night, when we made camp.’
‘You’ve no idea what made the scuttling?’
‘No. A fox, maybe.’
‘Foxes don’t scuttle.’
‘A big rat.’
‘A big rat…’ Felix nodded his head. That was exactly what he hadn’t wanted to hear. He looked over at Gotrek to see if the Slayer was thinking what he was thinking, but the dwarf had his head thrown back and was staring blankly into space. He appeared to be lost in his own thoughts and was paying not the slightest bit of attention to the conversation.
Rats made Felix think of only one thing, and that thing scared him. They made him think of skaven. Could it be possible that the foul rat-men had tracked him even here? It was not a comforting thought.
Felix sat beside the fire and listened to the tremulous whickering of the mules. The darkness and the occasional distant howls of the wolves made them nervous. Felix rose and ran his hand over the nearest one’s flanks in an effort to calm it and then returned to the fire where the others were sleeping.
All day the track had risen into the Bone Hills, which had turned out to be as bleak and unprepossessing as their name suggested. There were no trees around them, only lichen covered rocks and sharp hills covered by short stunted grass. It was fortunate that Varek had thought to bring firewood with them or they would have spent an even more uncomfortable night camped out. It was cold in the hills, despite the summer heat of the day.
Supper had consisted of some bread bought at the inn back in Guntersbad and hunks of hard dwarf cheese. Afterwards, they had sat round the fire and all three dwarfs had lit their pipes. For entertainment they had the distant howling of the wolves. Felix found this marginally less depressing than dwarfish conversation which always seemed to rotate around ancient grudges, tales of misery long endured and epic drinking bouts. And horrifying a
s the howling was, it at least drowned out the sound of dwarfish snoring. Felix had drawn the short straw and won the dubious privilege of taking the first watch.
He tried not to stare into the fire and kept his eyes turned in the direction of the darkness so that he would not ruin his night vision. He was worried. He kept thinking about skaven and the thought of those ferocious Chaos-spawned rat-men appalled him. He remembered encountering them in the Battle of Nuln. It had been like a scene from a nightmare, battling in the dark with man-sized humanoid rats who walked upright and fought with weapons just as humans did. The memory of their hideous chittering language and the way their red eyes glittered in the darkness came back to him and made him shudder.
The most awful thing about the skaven was that they were organised in a hideous parody of human civilisation. They had their own culture, their own fiendish technologies. They had armies and sophisticated weapons that were in some ways more advanced than anything humanity had ever produced. Felix had seen them when they had erupted from the sewers to invade Nuln. He could still picture that monstrous horde rushing through the burning buildings, spearing anything that got in their way. Vividly he remembered the green flames of their warpfire throwers illuminating the night and the sizzle of human flesh as it was eaten away by the blazing jets.
The skaven were the implacable enemies of humanity, of all the civilised races, but there were those who sided with them for pay. Felix himself had killed their agent, Fritz von Halstadt, who had risen to become the chief of the Elector Countess Emmanuelle’s secret police. He wondered how many other agents the rat-men had in high places. He did not want to think about it now in this lonely spot. He pushed thoughts of the skaven aside and tried to turn his mind to other things.
He let his thoughts drift back into the past. The howling reminded him of the terrible last nights of Fort von Diehl down in the Border Princes, where he watched his first great love Kirsten die, murdered by Manfred von Diehl, and seen most of the population slaughtered by goblin wolf riders let in by Manfred’s treachery. It was strange, but he could still remember Kirsten’s gaunt face and her soft voice. He wondered if there was anything he could have done to make things turn out differently. It was a thought that tormented him sometimes in the quiet watches of the night. It was an event that still caused him pain although of late he had felt it less often and knew that it was fading. He could even consider other women now. Back in Nuln, there had been the tavern girl, Elissa, but she had left in the end.
The picture of the smiling peasant girl in the field came back to him very vividly. He wondered what she was doing right now. He resigned himself to the fact that he would never even know her name, just as she would never know his. There were so many encounters in the world like that. Chances that never turned out right. Romances which died stillborn before ever they had a chance to live. He wondered whether he would ever meet another woman who touched him as much as Kirsten had.
So engrossed was he in these thoughts that it took some time for him to realise that he was hearing scuttling, the soft sounds of claws scrabbling on flinty rock. He kept himself low to the ground and then glanced around, carefully, suddenly fearing that at any moment he might feel the searing pain of a poisoned knife driven into his back. As he moved, however, the scuttling sounds stopped.
He kept still and held his breath for a long moment and it started again. There. The sound came from off to his right. As he watched, he could see the glitter of red eyes, and dark silhouettes creeping ever closer over the ridge top. He slid his sword from its scabbard. The magical blade which he had acquired from the dead Templar Aldred felt light in his hand. He was about to shout a warning to the others when an enormous howling battle-cry erupted. He recognised the voice as Gotrek’s.
A strange musky scent that Felix had smelled before filled the air. The rat-like shapes turned and fled immediately. The Slayer dashed past into the darkness, the runes on his huge axe glowing in the night, swiftly followed by Snorri Nosebiter. Felix would have raced after them himself, but his human eyes could not see in the gloom like a dwarf’s. He flinched as Varek moved up beside him, one of his sinister black bombs in his hands. The firelight reflected off the young dwarf’s spectacles and turned his eyes into circles of fire.
They stood side by side for long tense moments, waiting to hear the sounds of battle, expecting to see the sudden rush of a horde of rat-men. The only sound they heard was the stomping of boots as Gotrek and Snorri returned.
‘Skaven,’ Gotrek spat contemptuously.
‘They ran away,’ Snorri said in a disappointed tone. Treating the event as if nothing untoward had happened, they returned to their places by the fire and cast themselves down to sleep. Felix envied them. He knew that even once his watch had ended, there would be no sleep for him this night.
Skaven, he thought, and shuddered.
THREE
THE LONELY TOWER
Felix looked down into the mouth of the long valley and was overcome with awe. From where he stood, he could see machines, hundreds of them. Enormous steam engines rose along the valley sides like monsters in riveted iron armour. The pistons of huge pumps went up and down with the regularity of a giant’s heartbeat. Steam hissed from enormous rusting pipes which ran between massive red brick buildings. Huge chimneys belched vast clouds of sooty smoke into the air. The air echoed with the clanging of a hundred hammers. The infernal glow of forges illuminated the shadowy interior of workshops. Dozens of dwarfs moved backwards and forwards through the heat and noise and misty clouds.
For a second the fog cleared as the cold hill wind cut through the valley. Felix could see that one vast structure dominated the length of the dale. It was built from rusting, riveted metal with a corrugated iron roof. It was perhaps three hundred strides long and twenty high. At one end was a massive cast-iron tower, the like of which Felix had never seen before. It was constructed from metal girders, with an observation point and what looked like a monstrous lantern at its very tip.
High over the far end of the valley loomed a monstrous squat fortress. Moss clung to its eroded stonework. Felix could make out the gleaming muzzles of cannons high among the battlements. From the middle of the structure loomed a single stone tower. On the face nearest the roof was a massive clock, whose hands showed that it was almost the seventh hour after noon. On the roof, an equally gigantic telescope pointed towards the sky. Even as Felix watched, the hand reached seven o’clock and a bell tolled deafeningly, its echoes filling the valley with sound.
The eerie wail of what could only have been a steam whistle – Felix had heard something like it once at the College of Engineering in Nuln – filled the air. There was a chugging of pistons and the clatter of iron wheels on rails as a small steam-wagon emerged from the mine-head. It moved along iron tracks, carrying heaps and heaps of coal into some great central smelting works.
The noise was deafening. The smell was overwhelming. The sight was at once monstrous and fascinating, like looking at the innards of some vast and intricate clockwork toy. Felix felt like he was looking down upon a scene of strange sorcery of a kind which, if truly unleashed, might change the world. He had not realised what the dwarfs were capable of, what power their arcane knowledge gave them. He was filled with a wonder so strong that, for a moment, it overcame the fear which had been nagging at the back of his mind all day.
Then the thought came back to him, and he remembered the tracks he had seen this morning mingled with the hob-nailed boot prints of the Slayers. There could be no doubt that they belonged to skaven, quite a strong force at that. Felix knew that fearsome as the Slayers were, the rat-men had not fled out of terror. They had retreated because they had other things to do, and getting into a fight with his companions might have slowed them down in the performance of that mission. It was the only possible explanation for why so strong a party of skaven had fled from so few.
Looking at this place now, he understood what the probable objective of the skaven force was. Here w
as a thing which the followers of the Horned Rat would want to capture – or destroy. Felix had no idea what was taking place down in that valley but he was certain that it was important, because so much industry, energy and intelligence were being expended, and Felix knew that dwarfs did nothing without a purpose.
Once more, though, he felt his heart start to race. Here was industry on a scale that he had not imagined possible. It had a sordid magnificence and implied a terrifying understanding of things beyond the knowledge of human civilisation. In that moment Felix understood just how much his people had yet to learn from the dwarfs. From beside him he heard a sharp intake of breath.
‘If the Engineers Guild ever finds out about this,’ Gotrek rumbled, ‘heads will roll!’
‘We’d better get down there and tell them about the skaven.’ Felix replied.
Gotrek looked at him with something like pride showing in his one mad eye. ‘What could those people down there have to fear from a bunch of scabby ratlings?’
Tempted as he was to agree, Felix kept quiet. He was sure that he could think of something, given long enough. After all, the skaven had given him plenty of reasons for terror in the past.
Somewhere off to their right something glinted, like a mirror catching a beam of sunlight. Felix wondered briefly what it was and then dismissed it from his mind as being some part of the wondrous technology he saw being deployed all around him.
‘Let’s go tell them anyway,’ he said, wondering why the dwarfs had put something that glittered so brightly amongst a clump of bushes.
Grey Seer Thanquol peered down at the scene through the periscope. The device was yet another magnificent skaven invention, combining the best features of a telescope and a series of mirrors, thus allowing him to watch those unsuspecting fools below unobserved from within the cover of this clump of bushes. Only the lens at the mechanism’s tip was visible and he doubted that the dwarfs would notice even that. They were so slow-witted and stupid.