Gloomspite - Andy Clark

by Warhammer

  ‘Damnation, Eleanora, this looks awful!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘It’s just a spider bite,’ repeated the engineer, brushing her hair out of her eyes and sounding less certain.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ asked Romilla.

  ‘More since the moon rose.’

  Her blood ran chill at Eleanora’s quiet reply.

  An image flashed unbidden into Romilla’s mind, of Hendrick staggering to his feet, the spore sickness already ravaging his features. Behind it lay another memory, deeper buried, hidden behind a wall raised in self-flagellation and shored up with alcohol and self-hatred. It was one she hadn’t seen in a long time, a glimpse of Freeguild soldiery sprawled about her feet, flesh thick with stinking pustules, bodies slowly mutating, mewling groans filling the air. Her friends, dying around her; she herself untouched yet utterly powerless to stop their demise.

  Guilt nearly choked Romilla for an instant, but she forced it back, remembered all the tests of her faith she had passed to reach this point. She looked up at Eleanora, who was staring uncertainly down at her with the beginnings of real alarm in her eyes. Romilla forced her expression into something reassuring. She quietly promised herself that she would not let some horrible infection take Eleanora too. Sigmar’s blood, she thought, I will fail no more of my friends.

  ‘I have tinctures in my bag, and anti-inflammation unguents,’ said Romilla, patting Eleanora on the knee. ‘We’ll apply those now, and then–’

  The blast wave hit with catastrophic force. The window detonated, filling the room with a hail of razor-sharp glass that tore the curtains to tatters. The floor bucked as though a gargant had kicked it. Eleanora, who had her back to the window, was thrown from the bed to slam into Romilla with a scream. They both hit the back wall hard enough that Romilla had the breath driven from her body and felt a burst of agony as something cracked.

  Dust billowed.

  The air filled with a muffled whine.

  Woozy and half-stunned, Romilla stirred and tried to stand. She gritted her teeth as bone ground together, somewhere inside her chest. Pain was an old acquaintance, however, and the priest ignored the feeling as she disentangled herself from Eleanora. For an instant she feared the worst as she saw blood pouring down the engineer’s face, but a swift check revealed a scalp wound and some bruising, and nothing worse. Eleanora’s eyes were open and wild with panic, but they focused on Romilla well enough.

  ‘You’ve hit your head, but you’re going to be all right,’ Romilla said. All she heard was a distant suggestion of words, like someone speaking softly through a plaster wall. She realised Eleanora was trying to reply, but that her voice, too, was muffled and unintelligible. Falling back on the practical, Romilla quickly checked them both over for injuries. Aside from the internal break, which she could do nothing about, and a few stinging wounds where flying glass had cut her, she found herself to be more or less in one piece.

  Eleanora, too, could have been hurt far worse. Her scalp wound looked nasty, but it was superficial and quickly staunched. The engineer had other small wounds where broken glass had peppered her back and nicked a sliver from one of her ears as it whipped past. Yet her insistence on always wearing the heavy, tanned leather garb of the Ironweld had been her salvation, as the thick material had stopped the majority of the vicious glass projectiles that could otherwise have cut her to ribbons.

  Romilla surveyed the ruin of their room, working her jaw to try to encourage sound back into her ears as she did so. The window was a gaping hole, fringed with tatters of curtain. Their bags, the remaining equipment, and most of the chamber’s furniture had been picked up and hurled against the back wall, and now lay in dust-plastered heaps. Romilla’s eyes widened as she took in the heavy cross-beams that had fallen through the half-collapsed ceiling. They had crushed Eleanora’s bed entirely.

  ‘That could have been you,’ she mouthed, pointing, and Eleanora nodded back in shock. They had been phenomenally lucky, Romilla realised, that none of Eleanora’s bombs had been triggered by the blast. She offered up a prayer of thanks to Sigmar and dug through the rubble and dust for her bag of medical supplies. She didn’t know what had caused that blast and right now, she didn’t care. Romilla would attend to her duties first, and then face whatever trials Sigmar had in store for her next.

  She was still seeing to Eleanora’s cuts and doing what she could for the engineer’s foot when Bartiman pushed his way in through the buckled door.

  ‘We need to move,’ he barked. ‘Those things came down all over the city. I think one of them hit the square.’

  ‘What things?’ asked Romilla, her words marginally clearer to her own ears, now, as the whine there receded.

  ‘Projectiles, meteorites – great lumps of rock from that accursed moon!’ exclaimed Bartiman. ‘Have you not looked out the… what’s left of the window?’

  ‘I was busy,’ said Romilla shortly, but now she hastened to stare out of the ragged hole in the side of the chamber, being careful to avoid the sickly moonlight that spilled through.

  Her heart almost stopped as she beheld the ominous clouds of smoke, dust and dimly-glowing green spores that rose over the city. They were billowing upwards from multiple impact sites, she saw, swelling and spreading even as they slowly tattered apart. The clouds looked for all the realms like vast and horrible mushrooms fashioned from the stuff of ruin and nightmares, and where their pall drifted over the shattered cityscape the spores they carried fell like sickly embers. Romilla felt dread at the thought of what might happen, were they to settle upon human flesh.

  ‘Our friends were somewhere in all of that,’ she breathed.

  ‘Precisely,’ replied Bartiman as he came to stand next to her. Romilla turned to see Eleanora dragging her boot back on with a wince of pain and shouldering her sack full of explosives and weapons.

  ‘We have to go and help them,’ said the engineer, looking scared but determined. Romilla nodded and, pausing to scoop up what she had managed to salvage of Aelyn’s wargear, she made for the stairs.

  In the glass-scattered shadows of the inn’s common room, Romilla made for the front door but Bartiman grabbed her arm and pointed out the back. They passed Gathe and several of his serving staff, huddled behind the bar in terror. The man gestured at them, his intent clear. Go away. Leave us alone.

  She shook her head and hastened through the back door, throwing up the hood of her cloak and pulling her sleeves down as far as they would go before stepping back into the curdled light of the Bad Moon. She stopped in surprise as she saw the wagon that Borik had been eyeing a few days earlier, parked up under cover with a gnarlkyd in its traces.

  ‘That’s us,’ said Bartiman.

  Romilla raised an eyebrow at him.

  ‘Borik wasn’t wrong, it’s a solid wagon,’ said Bartiman. ‘We needed it more than Gathe, so I conducted a swift negotiation and paid the man a fair price. He seemed keen to be rid of us, did he not?’

  ‘I won’t ask how much,’ she said, her ears still ringing. ‘A fine idea, Bartiman. Let’s move.’

  They hurriedly loaded everything they had salvaged into the back of the wagon, tucking it under a heavy tarpaulin that had already sprouted several pale mushrooms. Then, bundled as thickly in cloaks and garments as possible to ward off the moonlight, they scrambled aboard the driver’s bench and Bartiman took the reins.

  As Romilla’s hearing returned fully, she took in the rising cacophony that floated from across the city. Screams of pain and terror mingled with the howls of the hopelessly insane. Creaks, groans and crashes told a tale of structural devastation. Yet the worst sounds were those of the invaders. Gibbering shrieks and malicious cackles, great booming roars, terrible hissing sounds and the constant clangour of crude gongs and bells echoed from every direction. Romilla felt fear for the friends they had left out amidst this madness before the moon rocks fell. She prayed hard that they remained alive and
unharmed, but she feared that amidst the fervent tide of prayers surely rising from Draconium in that moment, hers would be lost long before they reached the God-King’s ear.

  The moment Bartiman drove their draybeast out into the moonlight, the creature lowed in panic and discomfort. A row of blood-red mushrooms popped out of its spine as though emerging from the forest floor after a gentle shower, and Romilla squashed her revulsion at the little spurts of blood and pus that squirted out as each broke the surface of the creature’s flesh. The gnarlkyd tried to buck and fight, but Bartiman plied the reins with skill. He muttered words in a strange tongue that Romilla couldn’t place, causing the beast to stiffen as though with fear and then surge out through the inn’s back gates and into the benighted streets beyond.

  The journey that followed was a surreal and nightmarish experience. The Bad Moon leered down at them, its malice a palpable force beating upon their brows. Heaps of wreckage and the collapsed ruin of buildings forced them to detour, and then detour again, every delay driving them further away from Fountains Square and increasing Romilla’s fear and frustration.

  At times, they rattled along empty cobbled stretches where the only signs of life were the detritus dropped by fleeing crowds, and the occasional suggestions of pale and fearful faces peering through blinds and curtains.

  Yet for every abandoned space, there was a square, or street, or alley or bridge drenched in gore and thick with heaving bodies. Romilla saw black-clad greenskins pouring along the streets in such numbers that they looked more like swarming insects, overrunning those who fled them and burying them in heaving, stabbing bodies. She saw an obese grot riding atop a many-legged toadstool as large as a man, pointing his glowing staff at people and transforming them into fungal statues with cackles of glee. Beyond them, lunatic greenskins with froth spilling from their jaws whirled through militiamen wielding massive iron balls at the ends of long chains. These fanatics clearly had no control over their direction of travel, for she saw more than one smash into a wall or spark-lantern and meet a bloody end. Yet where they ploughed through human bodies the results were sickening.

  They crossed an arched bridge that spanned a dirty offshoot of the canal between looming houses, and as Romilla looked up she saw flesh-crawling shapes silhouetted against the skyline. Arachnid things the size of ponies picked their way across the rooftops, the exaggerated care of their many-legged gait belying the speed with which they moved. Sat astride each huge spider she saw the hunched silhouette of a grot, and as their wagon thumped down on the far side of the bridge a hissing hail of barbed arrows struck the cobbles behind its wheels.

  They sped across an intersection, scattering snarling greenskins as they went, and Romilla felt the cart lurch as bones broke and bodies split beneath its wheels. She heard shrieks and saw several of the spore-sickened dashing madly after the wagon, gaining by the second, their yellow eyes locked on her.

  ‘Behind us,’ she cried over the whipping wind. Romilla hefted her hammer and tried to turn in her seat as the first of the creatures leapt high with gangling agility and thumped down on their fungus-thick tarpaulin. There was a loud crack, and the spore-sick wretch’s face dissolved in a red blizzard. Its body was flung back from the wagon to thump bonelessly to the street in their wake.

  Romilla glanced sideways and saw that Eleanora had pulled a heavy firearm from her back, some fusion of coglock pistol and ferocious-looking blunderbuss that was churning with mechanical motion as it reloaded itself.

  ‘Hendrick told me to make plenty of guns and bombs,’ said Eleanora, as though apologising for something.

  Romilla managed a faint smile at her. ‘I’m glad that he did,’ she said, then snapped her head back around as thumping sounds heralded more of the spore-sickened landing on the tarp. The first, a mutated woman still clad in the ragged ruin of her former finery, reared up with a shriek, and her throat bulged with infected bile. Before she could spit it, Romilla lunged upwards and smashed the head of her hammer into the woman’s jaw. Tusks splintered, bone broke and Romilla’s victim was thrown backwards with frothing vomit geysering from her ruined face.

  The other, a grotesque that had once been a noble palace guard, crawled hand over hand towards them only for Eleanora’s gun to roar again and fling him backwards in a tangle of limbs.

  ‘Shadows of Shyish!’ exclaimed Bartiman in alarm, and Romilla spun back around in time to see something bewildering hurtling towards them with the speed of a runaway avalanche. She had an impression of huge fungal forms, two spheroid monsters each a good twenty feet across that were all fang-filled jaws, madly-staring eyes and lashing talons. Her mind struggled to process the scene as she realised the two abominations had been chained crudely together, and that cackling grots had lashed themselves to the creatures as though attempting to ride upon them.

  The monsters whirled around one another, pushing off with their stub-clawed legs, snapping their enormous fangs together with maddened fury, leaving cracked craters in building facades and street cobbles as they ricocheted closer.

  ‘They’re going to hit us!’ cried Eleanora.

  Romilla cringed as the shrieking grots rushed closer upon their enormous wrecking-ball steeds. With a sudden furious spasm, one of the chained monsters launched itself skywards, dragging its bellowing twin with it and eliciting a chorus of furious cries from the greenskins. Chains snapped tight and the entire deranged mass shot over Romilla’s head, low enough that tusks as long as her torso snapped together a hair’s breadth from her shaved scalp.

  Then the creatures were gone, past them and careening away down the street to smash through an alchemists’ tower at the far end.

  ‘What in the name of the Mortal Realms…?’ asked Bartiman, gripping the reins with one hand and plucking a toadstool from his robes with the other.

  ‘Don’t know, don’t want to know,’ said Romilla. ‘Just get us to the square.’

  ‘Almost there,’ replied Bartiman. ‘If I’m not mistaken, it’s just up this rise.’

  As they climbed a steep street thick with a miasma of dust and spores, Romilla pulled cloth over her nose and mouth and tried to take shallow breaths, motioning for Eleanora and Bartiman to do the same. The cart’s wheels hissed through a shallow flood of groundwater that was spilling from the lip of the square above them. Romilla feared the worst as she saw red streaks polluting it.

  Then their wagon was up over the rise with a lurch, and ploughing into thicker black clouds of smoke and dust.

  ‘Stop, stop,’ urged Romilla as their wheels hammered over rubble and bodies. Bartiman hauled on the reins, but their gnarlkyd was mad with fear and tried to keep going. Something burst wetly beneath their wheels, then there came a tremendous crunch and a violent sideways lurch. The wagon swayed madly, threatening to overturn and hurl them into the ground with violent force. Romilla cried out as another deafening crack sounded right beside her ear. The gnarlkyd convulsed and fell forwards, ploughing into the cobbles face first. Their wagon thumped into it from behind and they skidded to a bloody halt.

  Romilla stared at Eleanora, whose gun was still smoking as it reloaded.

  ‘We had to stop,’ said the engineer. ‘What if we ran over our friends?’

  They disembarked from the wagon, which Romilla doubted was ever travelling anywhere again. Its panels were thick with fungus that was prying the boards apart, wet rot was spreading through one axle and the front right wheel was a shredded mess where they had struck some lump of rubble or wreckage.

  ‘Quickly, gather the equipment and let us search,’ she said. Yet Romilla felt far less hope than she did dread. Amidst the swirling smoke, the ashes and dust and glimmering spores, visibility was a matter of yards. The ground was split and crumpled as though someone had grasped one end of the square like a huge tablecloth and given it a violent tug, and dirty water swilled across it. Chunks of glowing moon rock and smashed fragments of statuary lay everywhere
, and between them were heaped corpses. Grots and humans sprawled, their limbs snapped like twigs where the blast wave had flung them, their skulls crushed, or their bodies burst like gourds by the force of the meteor’s fall. Some seethed busily with insects, which worried at flesh and scuttled in and out of nostrils and eye sockets. Others were thick with fungal growth, entire heaps of corpses disappearing rapidly under multicoloured groves of swaying spore-blooms.

  ‘This is a nightmare,’ intoned Bartiman. ‘I can see scant chance that they are still alive amidst all this.’

  ‘They’re alive,’ replied Romilla with a conviction she didn’t feel. ‘Until we see them laid out dead on the ground, Bartiman, they’re alive.’

  ‘The longer we spend here looking for them, the greater the chance we’ll join them in the underworlds,’ said Bartiman. Still, he hefted the satchel that he had recovered from his room and stalked into the gloom with his staff pointed out before him.

  Romilla followed the death wizard, motioning for Eleanora to stay close. The engineer nodded, handing her a leather bandolier into which were tucked several metal orbs with cogwork innards. Romilla quickly buckled it around her waist.

  ‘If the greenskins come for us, press down the brass stud on the top of the orb and throw it at them,’ said Eleanora. ‘It should take three seconds for the mechanism to fire.’

  They picked their way through the roiling fumes. Romilla knew from prior experience that Bartiman’s powers afforded him sensory perception that went beyond the canny, especially when it came to seeking out souls either alive or dead. She didn’t waste breath asking him where they were going, she simply trusted him to lead the search.

  Romilla felt nausea sweep through her at the touch of the airborne spores. She could only imagine what horrible effects they might have, and wherever she saw one settle on her skin she brushed it away before its tingling touch grew too intense. The fumes hid the face of the Bad Moon, yet she felt no relief from its malevolent regard. Her head swam, and ghoulish shapes reared up through the smoke, the screaming faces of diseased friends long dead that broke apart like phantasms whenever she looked their way.