Gloomspite - Andy Clark

by Warhammer

  They heard nothing. Romilla breathed slowly out and took another step up the stairs.

  ‘What are those?’ asked Eleanora. Romilla followed her gaze and gasped as she saw hundreds of silvery specks spilling from amidst the webbing and up Thackeray’s polearm.

  ‘Drop it!’ she barked, and Thackeray let the halberd fall with a yell of alarm.

  Too late.

  Dozens of infant arachnids, translucent and each no larger than a thumb nail, had swarmed onto Thackeray’s gloved hands. He staggered back, making sounds of revulsion as he tried to shake them off. He slapped the backs of his hands against the walls, crushing the swarming creatures. Still they bit him again and again.

  Romilla had a sudden vision of the three of them being trapped in the cellar by a tide of biting spiders. That couldn’t happen.

  ‘Hood up and stay close,’ she told Eleanora, grabbing her wrist, then drove into Thackeray from behind with all the force she could muster.

  The three of them tumbled through the mass of webbing and spilled onto a metal landing beyond. Romilla felt things scuttling across her body and she rolled and slapped frantically, crushing spiderlings with every swat.

  ‘Oh, Sigmar!’ spat Thackeray, writhing and beating at himself in revulsion. Eleanora echoed their movements.

  ‘Don’t stop! Not here!’ Romilla urged as she scrambled back to her feet. They were in the midst of what must surely be a spider nest, and the walls and ceiling churned with a silvery mass of constant motion. Dragging Eleanora and Thackeray behind her, Romilla pushed through the last strands of webbing and up another clanging flight of stairs. She ignored the squirming sensation on her skin, the sharp stabs of biting pain across her flesh, until she had hauled both her companions to the head of the next set of steps.

  Only there did she stop and wriggle out of her cloak, throwing it to the floor with a moan of disgust. They were all over her, she could feel their legs tickling and their fangs sinking in. Romilla slapped and beat at the swarming spiders, crushing them with every motion until at last they were all exterminated. Her skin still itched with the invasive sensation of arachnid legs, but Romilla made herself stop before panic took hold.

  ‘You’ve killed us all!’ gasped Thackeray, still swatting madly at himself.

  ‘They’re too young to be venomous,’ replied Romilla. ‘Calm yourself, man!’

  ‘How can you possibly know that?’ asked Thackeray, still scrubbing at his skin, his mouth twisted in disgust. Eleanora leaned against a nearby wall, whimpering slightly as she methodically checked each part of her body for spiders.

  ‘I don’t, but I assume we’d feel the effects by now if they had been,’ replied Romilla. She didn’t want to go into how just such an arachnid had bitten Eleanora many days ago, and that the effects of its bite had taken days to manifest. Somehow, she didn’t think any of them would find that comforting. ‘The alternative was to remain trapped in that basement while they crawled all over us and our comrades fought and died without our help. Would you have preferred that?’

  ‘You’re a cheffing lunatic,’ said Thackeray, drawing his pistol. His lantern lay discarded a floor below, still attached to the end of his halberd. Its light spilled up from below, dots seething across it where spiderlings covered its glass surface and making Romilla’s flesh tingle all over again.

  ‘Call me what you like, just help me get this done,’ said Romilla. Thackeray shook his head and set off up the next flight of stairs. The cobwebs were sparser here, forming diaphanous veils rather than knotted clumps. Romilla turned to aid Eleanora, taking one of the engineer’s arms and giving her a last look over for the telltale movement of spiderlings. She heard a wet crunch from above, and turned to look up the stairs.

  Thackeray was hauled off his feet, up the last few stairs and into the air above. Something awful enfolded him, a mass of spine-haired limbs and busy mandibles. The watchman’s eyes locked with Romilla’s for a moment, his expression a mass of horror and pain and terror. Then chitinous blades flashed and his head parted company from his neck, to be sucked into a glistening orifice that yawned beneath a cluster of staring eyes.

  Romilla froze. She couldn’t move. The enormous spider took several steps down the stairway, squeezing its nightmare bulk towards them. It gave off a carrion stench. The sounds of it crunching and sucking at Thackeray’s severed head made her gorge rise.

  Eleanora gave a piercing scream. The stairwell filled with thunder and light as her guns fired again and again. The spider recoiled, dropping Thackeray’s body and giving a piercing shrill as shots punched deep into its face. Several of its eyes burst. One of its forelimbs sheared off halfway up, the wound gouting sticky black ichor. Clots of matter splattered from its body as Eleanora’s pistols hammered it relentlessly. The thing tried to retreat, tried to rear up and spread its legs wide, but it had trapped itself in its hunger to reach them. Another shot ruptured chitin and sprayed gore across the walls.

  Another.

  Another.

  The spider’s shriek climbed to a pitch Romilla could barely hear, and at last it managed to drag itself backwards out of the stairwell. The damage was already done. It thrashed and flopped, a flailing mass the size of several carriages that bled black sludge. It rolled onto its side and its remaining legs pulled inwards like a hand forming a claw. The spider gave a final, convulsive lurch that sent splatters of black slime oozing from its body, then lay still.

  Romilla’s ears rang. Her heart hammered. She turned to look at Eleanora, who was staring wild-eyed at the dead spider, her guns still outstretched. Smoke wafted from their barrels.

  Romilla drew breath to say something, though she didn’t truly know what. Then she heard the sounds she had been dreading. In the gunfire’s fading echoes, she caught noises of skittering and of heavy bodies dragging themselves over stonework.

  ‘There’s no time, we have to move,’ she said, and grabbed Eleanora by the wrist again.

  They ran up the last flight of stairs, leaping over Thackeray’s decapitated corpse and splashing heedlessly through the acrid filth that had squirted from the dying spider. Past cracked windows that looked out onto a corpse-strewn street, past an ironoak desk that might once have served as a station for the building’s receptionist, Romilla saw the corridor that Eleanora had spoken of. It stretched away from them in the half-light. She dashed along it, ignoring the drag of snapped spider’s webs and the itching pain from her dozens of bites.

  Perhaps the creatures had been poisonous after all, she thought. It hardly mattered now. Only doing Sigmar’s work mattered, before they were overrun.

  The two of them burst out of the end of the corridor, and several gnarlkyd-sized spiders came at them from the shadows. Romilla swung her hammer into the face of the largest, eliciting a crunch of chitin and sending the horrible thing skidding away. Eleanora dropped one of her guns, snatching a smaller pistol from her belt and pointing it at another spider that was dropping down from above on a line of silk. She squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened.

  Romilla swung again, dodging aside from the scrabbling limbs of the third spider and managing to smash her hammer into one of its legs. The thing limped backwards, hissing. Eleanora gasped, dropping her other gun and thumbing the arming mechanism of her pistol. She fired in the instant before the spider dropped, then its dead weight hit her from above and pinned her to the floor. Romilla screamed in denial and waded in, hammer swinging at the thrashing mass of limbs and chitin. She realised with a gasp of relief that the monster was already dead, flailing its death throes from the huge hole Eleanora’s pistol had bored through its abdomen. She heaved it aside all the same, revolted at its skittering touch, and felt twice the relief as she saw Eleanora pale but still alive, staring up at her in horror.

  ‘Behind you!’ urged Eleanora, and Romilla spun, instinct propelling her hammer in a wild swing. She caught the first spider in the mandibles e
ven as it reared up to strike, and sent it toppling backwards with ichor gouting from its ruined face. She hit the monster again, and then again, just to be sure.

  Romilla turned, breathing hard, sweat rolling down her forehead, to look for the last spider. She saw it squeezing itself through a crack in the stonework, just a tangle of legs and glittering eyes vanishing into the dark. Romilla reached down a hand and heaved Eleanora to her feet.

  ‘There are more of them coming,’ said Eleanora, gathering up her guns and hastily reloading them.

  ‘I can hear them,’ said Romilla, properly taking in the room for the first time. They stood in a bare stone chamber, one wall of which played host to a mass of piping and gauges. Two metal stairways led up and out of the chamber in opposite directions; one right, one left.

  ‘Which way, El?’ asked Romilla.

  ‘I… uhm…’ Eleanora swayed, and Romilla looked at her in alarm. Eleanora never forgot anything once she had learned it. Not ever. Now was not a good time for her to start, yet as she took in the engineer’s greenish pallor and red-rimmed eyes, Romilla admitted to herself that she was amazed Eleanora was even still on her feet.

  ‘I don’t…’ Eleanora furrowed her brow, looking panicked and ill.

  ‘Sigmar, guide me,’ breathed Romilla then chose the right-hand stairway. ‘Always the righteous path over the sinister,’ she said and tugged Eleanora after her.

  The two of them clanged up the stairs and burst through a veil of webbing into another corridor. They ran along it, passing clumps of gauges and dials furred with cobwebbing. There were no windows here, though they must have been a floor or so above street level now. From ahead they heard a growing sound of clanging and hissing. Romilla felt the temperature increase by the moment, and as they rounded a corner she saw a fiery glow radiating from ahead of them.

  ‘This must be the way, Sigmar be praised!’ she gasped.

  They burst into a huge open space. Romilla had an impression of masses of pipework, flowing into the chamber from every direction and meshing with enormous machines at its heart. The din of rushing steam and groaning metal was loud here, and even she could see from the shuddering of pipes and the whistling jets of steam that all was not right. Thick webs and desiccated corpses of humans and duardin were scattered around the huge chamber, visible in the fiery light that spilled up from a stone-edged trench that ran along the chamber’s heart. It was into this man-made crevasse that the largest pipes plunged. The infernal glow blended with the sickly moonlight that fell through the arched glass roof high above, the two sources of illumination creating a curdled haze like blood mixed into spoiled milk.

  ‘Up there,’ said Eleanora, pointing one wavering finger at a gantry high up near the chamber’s ceiling. Romilla’s eyes traced the broken tangle of iron staircases, ladders and walkways they would have to traverse to reach the pipeworks’ controls, and her heart sank.

  ‘God-King, we ask your aid in this time of trial,’ she began, then stopped as something huge shifted at the lip of the fiery trench. Romilla’s eyes widened and her heart almost stopped as a spider the size of the city’s south gatehouse dragged its bloated form up into the chamber. It moved on legs thick as ironoaks, its mottled red and grey body so huge that it almost drove the sanity from her mind. A vast marking spread across the spider’s pale underbelly, a leering moon shape picked out in bioluminescent pigmentation. Its eyes transfixed Romilla, orbs as wide as wells and thrice as dark and deep.

  ‘Hendrick would have tried to fight them all, wouldn’t he?’ said Romilla, her hand closing reflexively around her hammer amulet as hundreds of smaller spiders spilled up from the trench around the monster’s legs. ‘He would have fought for a way we could all survive this and prevail. Damn him, he would have hoped for us, even if he couldn’t for himself.’ Romilla felt an answering tingle through her palm and looked down to see a faint blue light radiating between her fingers.

  Sigmar was with them. They did his work. And perhaps, she thought, he was trying to tell her something more. It was enough to get her moving, one more time, dragging the near catatonic Eleanora behind her as she made for the nearest stairway. They could still do this, she thought. Perhaps they could not escape the chamber – that much she could accept, though the thought of Eleanora’s death filled her with misery. But perhaps, like Hendrick before her, she had to hang on to her hope. If nothing else, they could do this, and if their deaths meant that thousands of innocent Sigmar-worshipping settlers were spared the vile fate that had befallen the people of Draconium, then Romilla could accept that price. She ran hard, adrenaline driving her exhausted body onwards, and as she ran she prayed.

  Another grot came at Aelyn and she spun her dagger, weaving aside from the creature’s spear thrust and ramming her blade into its throat. Blood jettisoned out. Aelyn whipped her blade back, and the grot collapsed. It wasn’t enough, though, she thought. Not nearly enough.

  The greenskins had borne down upon them and, trapped between their maddened comrades and the onrushing horde of foes, they had had no choice but to fight or die.

  Or, more likely, fight until they died, she corrected herself grimly.

  Bartiman was still propped against the rubble, muttering incantations as best he could. He had reduced a handful of grots to mummified corpses, and blasted another band to ashes, but Aelyn knew he couldn’t possibly keep his efforts up much longer. His voice had become little more than a rasp, and his last attempt at a spell had fizzled to nothing. Now she stood over him against a seething tide of foes and fought harder than she ever remembered fighting.

  Aelyn’s shoulder was a mass of agony. Her ribs ached, and her thoughts reeled under the malign gaze of the Bad Moon. Still she spun her daggers in her hands, wove and twisted and stabbed with furious determination. A spear tore a deep graze across her shoulder, and she stabbed its wielder in the eye. A rusty shiv found its way past her guard and sunk into her ribs, but only an inch or so before she had lopped off its wielder’s hand and kicked him back into the press of his fellows. A squig launched itself at her, jaws agape, and Aelyn ducked under its hurtling mass before sweeping both daggers up to slice the tip from one grot’s hooked nose and bury the other under another’s jaw.

  Another speartip came from somewhere to sink deep into her calf, and Aelyn hissed with pain as her leg gave out beneath her. She fell half on top of Bartiman, and heard him grunt in pain as her weight landed on his frail body.

  Aelyn pushed herself back up and stabbed out, driving one blade into a grot’s chest and another into an assailant’s weapon arm. A greenskin sunk wicked fangs into her forearm with a crunch and Aelyn screamed in pain as its dirty teeth scraped bone. The dagger dropped from her nerveless hand and the grot gave a muffled giggle around a bubbling mouthful of Aelyn’s flesh and blood. Horrified, she punched her other dagger into the side of its head then ripped it out and stabbed again.

  Filthy hands grabbed at her. A fist caught Aelyn in the jaw. A knife sank into her back, and agony shot through her again. Numbness came after it, ice spreading through her body, slowing her heartbeat, stifling her breath.

  Aelyn slumped back, trying to shield Bartiman with her body. She lashed out one last time, and something squealed with pain as her blade hit home. Another knife pierced her chest, and another.

  Aelyn coughed hot blood across her face. As her last breath rattled out, she saw the leering face of the Bad Moon stare down at her from above the mobbing press of grots. A moment of regret sparked in her mind, and then darkness fell.

  ‘Get back, you damned monster,’ spat Romilla, smashing her ­hammer into a spider’s face and sending it squealing into the dark. The arachnid fell from the gantry, dropping a good thirty feet to hit the stone floor with a wet splat.

  The control panel was only one level above them now. Romilla could see it, tantalisingly close, bathed in corrupted moonlight. The face of the Bad Moon leered down through the thick glass
of the roof, and she had to fight off the sensation that it was staring directly at her, willing her to give up.

  ‘One more walkway,’ she said, as much to herself as Eleanora. ‘One more set of stairs and then we’re there!’

  Romilla’s amulet was glowing brightly now, its light seeming to redouble with every crushing hammer blow she struck in Sigmar’s name. But the platform they stood on was shaking as though in a high wind. She looked down to see the enormous spider scaling its way up the chamber’s machineries, huge limbs moving with greater speed and grace than anything so vast had any right to.

  Dozens more spiders were swarming up around it, and more kept bursting from the innards of the web-strewn tangles of pipes, or dropping heavily from the ceiling to thump down on the gantries she and Eleanora ran along.

  Romilla glanced at Eleanora. The engineer’s eyes were glazed, her breathing laboured. A dark stain was spreading across her injured leg and an awful sickly-sweet smell accompanied it. The poor girl was on her last legs, thought Romilla, and the thought threatened to break her heart and her resolve both at once.

  No, she thought. Not now. Not when they were so close.

  Romilla raced along the gantry, dragging Eleanora along like a deadweight behind her. The Ironweld engineer had dropped her guns, but at least she was still hanging onto the shoulder of Romilla’s filthy robes with one hand. The priest took hope from that simple gesture.

  Their footfalls clanged against the metal as they pelted along. Romilla gasped as a vicious convulsion shook the metal and almost hurled her over the guard rail. She looked down to see the vast spider drawing its leg back to strike again at the gantry’s support stanchions.