Gloomspite - Andy Clark
Page 16
‘Up you come, you filthy old conjurer,’ said Borik, grabbing Bartiman by his uninjured shoulder and hauling him unceremoniously to his feet. ‘Let’s hope they don’t spread this thing with their bite, eh?’
Bartiman’s mind had been swimming with pain, but that thought sent icewater down his back and brought everything back into sharp focus.
‘Horrible… thought…’ he grunted, fumbling with his good hand for a leather pouch at his belt. Managing to open the drawstring as Borik shielded him from the crowd with his body, Bartiman extracted a generous pinch of black salts and, after a deep breath, ground them into his wound. He swore effusively as the grave-salts went to work, black ash puffing from his wound as it dried out and sealed shut. He would need proper healing, Romilla’s healing – and soon, if he wanted to keep using that arm properly – but at least he wouldn’t bleed to death.
Bartiman had lived a long time, far longer than any of his comrades, except perhaps Aelyn, he suspected, and he had learned an interesting thing over that great span of time.
The longer one lived, the more concerned with going on living one became, and Bartiman Kotrin was keen to avoid the underworlds of Shyish for a long while yet.
Romilla backed away until she hit the feasting table behind her. She shook her head in mute denial as Hendrick doubled over and retched violently. The club dropped from his twitching fingers and a wordless snarl bubbled between his foam-flecked lips.
‘Hendrick. No, please. This can’t be happening. Sigmar, please preserve us, this can’t be happening.’
Hendrick’s head snapped round at her words, and she felt a lead weight settle in her chest at the sight of the redblooms clouding his eyes, the purple veins worming their way through his flesh. Hendrick retched ropey strings of slime and let out a low growl.
He took a step towards her, another, his fingers flexing into claws, his limbs shaking.
‘Hendrick,’ she tried one last time, knowing it was hopeless but praying for a miracle. Romilla grasped her talisman and prayed with all her might for Sigmar to intercede, to save her friend, her comrade of many years. To lose Varlen then Hendrick like this in so short a time, it was just too cruel.
‘Sigmar, preserve your servant, I beg of you!’ she cried, but no golden light flared, no warm rush of divinity spread through her like the rays of dawn. There was only her friend, his face twisted into a monstrous mask, frothing poison spilling from his gaping jaws, his heavy muscles flexing as he lurched towards her.
She had seen what they became, the infected. She knew deep in her soul that, just like before, once the corruption took hold there was no saving them. It was just like before, and she thought her mind might snap, her heart might shatter right there and then at the thought of it.
‘God-King, why do you test me so?’ she whispered, then hefted her hammer and said, in a clear, unwavering voice, ‘Hendrick Saul, I offer you the mercy of Sigmar. I am so, so sorry old friend. Be with your brother now.’
Hendrick lunged with a howl. He was a huge man, heavily built, but Romilla had been fighting the spawn of Chaos in the Mortal Realms for nigh on twenty years. She had been through tests, endured horrors that would have seen most warriors curled foetal and ruined on the floor. This was no different. She told herself that as she stepped fluidly aside from his wrecking-ball punch, as she sprang back and swung her hammer down on the back of his skull. Bone cracked and Hendrick’s face slammed into the tabletop in a spray of blood.
Romilla cursed bitterly as he stumbled to his feet again, blood-fouled eyes rolling, and heaved a great stream of glowing purple vomit at her. She sprang back, frantic to avoid the fluid’s touch, and tripped over the half-eaten corpses behind her. Romilla hit the ground hard, managing to keep hold of her hammer, but he was on her in an instant. Bigger by far, heavier, stronger even with his skull broken and tongue lolling, Hendrick tried to pin Romilla down and vomit on her as she had seen so many other infected souls do already.
Squeezing her eyes shut and holding her breath, she did the only thing left to her, head-butting Hendrick in the face with all her might. Her forehead slammed into his already broken nose and drove shards of bone deep into his skull. Hendrick flailed backwards, blood squirting from his ruined face, and Romilla swung her hammer up from the floor and straight into the side of his head.
Hendrick was thrown sideways by the force of the swing, crashing against a fallen bench. He slumped over it, fingers twitching, and was still.
Romilla levered herself painfully to her feet, ignoring the tears threatening to squeeze themselves from the corners of her eyes. There would be time for grief later, she thought. For now, she would try to save the man that Hendrick had given his life for.
Yet the moment she turned to look at the regent militant, she knew it was far too late. In fact, she thought bitterly, they could never have saved him at all.
Selvador’s chest was a distended dome, his throat a quivering sac within which things squirmed. Spore-thick froth drizzled down his cheeks and Romilla saw to her revulsion that questing tendrils of mycelium crawled out of his ears, his nostrils, even the corners of his eyes. The man’s gaze rolled madly towards her and she recoiled as she realised that somehow, he was still alive.
There came a grotesque ripping sound and a series of awful cracks as something forced the regent militant’s ribcage open. Blood fountained, mixed with glowing spores, and Romilla found herself backpedalling again to get clear of the lethal contagion. Unfolding itself from Selvador’s burst torso came a great mass of rubbery purple fungus, which grew and spread by the second. Thick tendrils thumped down and quested across the tabletop, pulsing and growing even as she watched. Blunt and bulbous growths swelled from within Selvador’s carcass like impossibly bloated organs that grew and grew, shedding more glowing spores as they went. In seconds, the fungal mass had obscured the regent militant’s body entirely and was spilling off the sides of the table, which groaned and then cracked under the ever-increasing weight.
Romilla looked longingly at Hendrick’s fallen form, already crawling with mycelium where the vile fungal mass was spreading over him. He was dead, she knew, and there was nothing of him left in that mortal flesh now. Nothing left to save.
With that knowledge came the thought that she must warn the others, that they must do something to stop the spread of this revolting daemonic growth. Who was to say when, or indeed if, it would stop growing?
Romilla spun on her heel and ran for the exits as behind her the pulsating fungal mass grew.
And grew.
And grew.
Aelyn cursed in frustration as she stumbled down the palace steps. Only her inhuman grace and poise prevented her from tripping and falling as panicked feastgoers barrelled into her. She had lost Eleanora when the press of the crowd drove her clean past the guard post and out of the arched main door.
People wailed in fear as they staggered out into the open space of the square before the palace. The mummers had long ended their performance, but now they sprang up from where they had been chatting and smoking jacu root, staring in frank shock at the panicked tide of people surging down the palace steps.
‘The regent’s dead!’ screamed a disconsolate voice. ‘Sigmar almighty, the regent’s dead!’
‘Plague!’ cried another.
‘Chaos, the taint of Chaos is upon us, the unbelievers defiled our city!’ came another shout. Palace guards were trying to force their way back up the steps, but against the fleeing masses it was a hopeless effort.
Aelyn caught sight of Eleanora, staggering from the leading edge of the crowd, hobbling badly. Aelyn slipped through the milling crowd, wondering if those who had just kept running had the right idea.
‘Eleanora, are you all right?’ she asked as she reached the engineer.
‘I couldn’t get to the weapons,’ said Eleanora, looking dazed. ‘There was a big woman and she–’
‘My foot really hurts.’
‘I promise that Romilla will look at it as soon as we get everyone back together,’ said Aelyn, attempting to sound soothing. She had never been especially adept at the finer points of humans and their limited emotional expressions. It was part of why she watched a lot and said only a little.
People were still spilling from the palace in their dozens, and as they came, several battered guards emerged with Olt close on their heels. ‘The infected are coming!’ shouted a guard, clearly retaining a bit more presence of mind than her comrades. ‘Weapons ready, for Sigmar’s sake! Civilians get out the damned way! Run, you idiots!’
That started a fresh stampede, and the guards from the square were forced to stand braced as exhausted, frantic people surged around them in a tide. More than one brave soul was knocked from their feet and vanished under the trampling of the herd.
Behind Olt came Borik, supporting Bartiman’s sagging form. Aelyn had barely taken three steps in their direction when the first infected ran shrieking out of the palace doors. Bows hissed and Borik and Bartiman threw themselves flat as arrows whipped over their heads to thud into the wave of spore-sickened bearing down on them. Olt was there in an instant, grabbing his comrades and hauling them roughly down the steps with his tattoos smouldering.
‘Where are Romilla and Hendrick?’ Eleanora asked.
And then Romilla was there, bursting from the palace doors at a flat run, her chest heaving and eyes wild.
‘The regent is dead,’ she bellowed. Aelyn saw her skid to a stop at the top of the steps by the panicked-looking guards and begin an animated conversation. Where was Hendrick? Aelyn thought with growing alarm. Was he still trapped inside? Why had Romilla gone to the guards rather than coming to join her comrades?
With Eleanora limping at her side, Aelyn hastened through the last fleeing dregs of the crowd and met the Swords at the foot of the steps. Even as she got there, a wave of familiar pressure rolled across the square. Yet this time, it was far more ferocious. Aelyn found herself lifted bodily from her feet then thrown hard against the ground. She hissed in pain as her injured arm was hammered into the cobbles. Eleanora cried out in pain beside her, and as Aelyn staggered to her feet she saw that everyone in the square had been toppled.
Some did not rise again.
‘Where’s Hendrick?’ she asked.
Olt shook his head, Bartiman and Borik stared blankly at her.
‘Isn’t he here already?’ croaked Bartiman. Then Aelyn saw Romilla walking leadenly down the steps, and in that instant, she knew. She felt a bleak sorrow well up inside her, threatening to overwhelm her composure, her sense, everything.
‘He’s gone, isn’t he?’ asked Aelyn.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Romilla.
Perhaps they would have said more. Perhaps there would have been tears, denial, even recrimination. But at that moment another shockwave struck, and with it came a terrible groaning sound that seemed to radiate from the very air itself. Aelyn staggered, feeling pressure crushing her down to her knees then vanishing as suddenly as it had come. Her ears popped, and a sharp headache blossomed behind one eye. She raised a finger to her nostrils and was unsurprised when it came away wet with blood.
‘What is happening?’ she asked.
‘Damnation,’ replied Romilla.
Then came the leprous light, spilling across the square like a false dawn as something emerged slowly from behind the flanks of the volcanoes that loomed over Draconium. Aelyn’s instincts screamed out a warning, and she felt suddenly as though she had woken from a deep sleep to find something monstrous standing over her bed, staring into her eyes. She felt an awful foetid touch spread over her skin as the pallid light found her, and as she turned slowly to stare skywards she already knew what she would see.
Vast, horrible eyes staring down, seeming to see straight into her soul. Tattered clouds scattering as though fleeing in horror from the lunar abomination that settled low and gibbous in the skies above. The jagged suggestion of fangs the size of mountains, set in a leering, pockmarked face whose sanity-blasting immensity dwarfed the city as an armoured warrior dwarfs an insect.
Aelyn beheld the monstrous celestial body as it rose. As its crushing malevolence bore down upon her she tried to scream, but her chest could not force the sound out.
Chapter Nine
EMERGENCE
Aelyn was driven to her knees by the monstrous spectacle above her. The lambent immensity dominated half the sky. It filled the gap between the two volcanic peaks, blotting out the stars of the heavens with its sickly light. Its glow glinted from cobbles and walls suddenly slick with cloying moisture. With a desperate effort, Aelyn dragged her eyes away from the grotesque spectacle to look at her comrades.
‘What in Sigmar’s name…’ Romilla managed to gasp. The priest’s eyes bulged with horror as she stared skywards, both hands wrapped around her hammer talisman so tightly that her knuckles were white.
‘The Moonshadow brings death,’ whispered Eleanora.
Screams rose from across the square as city folk and palace guards alike cowered. The vast celestial horror leered down at Draconium, and as its pallid light bathed her Aelyn felt her head spin and her gorge rise. She could not tear her gaze from the moon’s pockmarked surface, the great craters that looked so much like shadowy eyes. She felt the malevolence and cruelty that radiated from those immense black pits, and knew as surely as she had ever known anything that these were the eyes she had seen in her dreams, only writ impossibly vast.
Aelyn could not have said how long she knelt, staring upwards, her mind and body both paralysed by unthinking horror. It was a sharp stab of pain in the back of her right hand that shook her from her stupor. She looked down and made a sound of disgust as she saw a white-tipped lump pushing up through the skin on the back of her hand. Even as she watched, revulsion tingling through her, the skin split and a white and purple mushroom the size of her fingernail pushed up from her flesh.
She snatched at the horrible growth, grabbing its rubbery flesh between the finger and thumb of her left hand and plucking it out of her skin. It came away with a slight tug, as though she had plucked out a hair, and a thin trickle of blood welled after it. Aelyn flung the mushroom away with a cry of disgust.
‘Rust and iron!’ cursed Borik, and as she glanced his way Aelyn saw that two small fungi had burst from the metal of his armour just as easily as one had poked through her skin. The others were exclaiming in horror now, too, and Aelyn suppressed a surge of panic as she realised that all of them had small, pallid mushrooms forcing their way out through flesh, metal and cloth.
The palace guards were similarly afflicted – as, it seemed, were the remaining feastgoers and mummers still scattered across the square. In fact, Aelyn realised as her aelven senses relentlessly drank in detail, there were patches of fungi bursting from every surface, forcing their way up between the cobbles, sprouting from the stained glass of the palace’s windows and popping up across people’s bodies like obscene pustules.
‘Is it the spore sickness?’ asked Romilla, aghast.
‘No, look, its everywhere. It’s in everything,’ said Aelyn, her voice a weak croak.
A palace guard staggered past her, clawing at his face and wailing. She gasped as she saw purple-capped mushrooms forcing their way out of both of his eyes, thrusting through his tear ducts in dribbles of blood.
Then came a terrible scream from the palace. Aelyn spun, the painful prickling on her skin driven from her mind by fresh horror. Three of the infected charged down the carpeted hallway and burst from the arched door. Two hurled themselves onto palace guards, smashing the soldiers down the steps in clattering tangles of armour and hammers and flailing limbs. The third launched
itself in a high arc and sailed towards the Swords. Instinct took over and Aelyn plucked a curved Wanderer’s dagger from her belt, flinging it to thump into the creature’s eye. She stepped aside, and the spore-stricken nobleman hit the cobbles with a wet crunch. Aelyn noted with distaste that pale fronds of mycelium had pushed through his skin like hairs. As his corpse lay twitching on the ground, the fronds sought purchase in the cobbles and began to dig in and spread.
‘We need to move,’ said Aelyn, shocked at how shaken she sounded. The attack of the infected had woken her companions, their mercenaries’ instincts taking over. They looked to her with fear and disgust in their eyes.
‘Where to?’ asked Romilla, then cursed as another mushroom split the web of skin between finger and thumb. ‘Where in the realms can we flee from such a malefic manifestation of the Plaguefather?’
‘Not Nurgle. Not Chaos at all,’ said Borik, sounding like he had been kicked in the chest. ‘We had it wrong.’
Aelyn heard more screams from within the palace, accompanied by the groan of buckling wood and metal, the crack of splintering stone. Something huge was stirring inside. To her left, the palace guards bludgeoned their infected into bloody pulp, before staggering away from the bodies looking aghast.
Everything was happening with nightmarish speed. Aelyn felt overwhelmed, her mind close to shutting down in self-defence. She couldn’t let that happen or they would all be lost. She wished for Hendrick. He would know what to do. She thrust the thought of him aside.
She could mourn later, but for now it was up to her to lead.
‘We need to get back inside,’ she began, forcing the words out, forcing herself not to stare up at the malevolent moon looming inescapably above her.