by William King
Felix shook his head. Whatever the conversation was about, the Trollslayer was thoroughly engrossed. He had not even noticed the fight. That in itself was unusual, for the dwarf lived to fight as other folk lived to eat or sleep.
Felix continued his circuit of the tavern, taking in every table with a casual sidelong glance. The long, low hall was packed.
Every beer-stained table was crowded. On one, a semi-naked Estalian dancing girl whirled and pranced while a group of drunken halberdiers threw silver and encouraged her to remove the rest of her clothes. Street-girls led staggering soldiers to dark alcoves in the far wall. The commotion from the bar drowned out the gasps and moans and the clink of gold changing hands.
One whole long table was taken up by a group of Kislevite horse archers, guards for some incoming caravan from the north. They roared out drinking songs concerning nothing but horses and women, and sometimes an obscene combination of both, while downing huge quantities of Heinz’s home-distilled potato vodka.
There was something about them that made Felix uneasy. The Kislevites were men apart, bred under a colder sun in a harsher land, born only to ride and fight. When one of them rose from the table to go to the privy, his rolling, bow-legged walk told Felix that here was a horseman born. The warrior kept his hand near his long-bladed knife—for at no time was a man more vulnerable than when standing outside in the dim moonlight, relieving himself of half a pint of potato vodka.
Felix grimaced. Half of the thieves, bravos and muscle boys in Nuln congregated in the Blind Pig. They came to mingle with newly arrived caravan guards and mercenaries. He knew more than half of them by name; Heinz had pointed them out to him on his first night here.
At the corner table sat Murdo Mac Laghlan, the Burglar King who claimed to be an exiled prince of Albion. He wore the tartan britches and long moustaches of one of that distant, almost mythical island’s hill-warriors. His muscular arms were tattooed in wood elf patterns. He sat surrounded by a bevy of adoring women, regaling them with tales of his beautiful mountainous homeland. Felix knew that Murdo’s real name was Heinrik Schmidt and he had never left Nuln in all his life.
Two tall hook-nosed men of Araby, Tarik and Hakim, sat at their permanently reserved table. Gold rings glittered on their fingers. Gold earrings shone in their earlobes. Their black leather jerkins glistened in the torchlight. Long curved swords hung over the back of their chairs. Every now and again, strangers—sometimes street urchins, sometimes nobles—would come in and take a seat. Haggling would start, money would change hands and just as suddenly and mysteriously the visitors would up and leave. A day later someone would be found floating face down in the Reik. Rumour had it that the two were the best assassins in Nuln.
Over by the roaring fire at a table all by himself sat Franz Beckenhof, who some said was a necromancer and who others claimed was a charlatan. No one had ever found the courage to sit next to the skull-faced man and ask, despite the fact that there were always seats free at his table. He sat there every night with a leather bound book in front of him, husbanding his single glass of wine. Old Heinz never asked him to move along either, even though he took up space that other, more free-spending customers might use. It never pays to upset a magician, was Heinz’s motto.
Here and there, as out of place as peacocks in a rookery, sat gilded, slumming nobles, their laughter loud and uneasy. They were easy to spot by their beautiful clothing and their firm, soft flesh; upper-class fops out to see their city’s dark underbelly. Their bodyguards—generally large, quiet, watchful men with well-used weapons—were there to see that their masters came to no harm during their nocturnal adventures. As Heinz always said, no sense in antagonising the nobs. They could have his tavern shut and his staff inside the Iron Tower with a whisper in the right ear. Best to toady to them, look out for them and to put up with their obnoxious ways.
By the fire, near to the supposed necromancer, was the decadent Bretonnian poet, Armand le Fevre, son of the famous admiral and heir to the le Fevre fortune. He sat alone, drinking absinthe, his eyes fixed at some point in the mid-distance, a slight trickle of drool leaking from the corner of his mouth. Every night, at midnight, he would lurch to his feet and announce that the end of the world was coming, then two hooded and cloaked servants would enter and carry him to his waiting palanquin and then home to compose one of his blasphemous poems. Felix shuddered, for there was something about the young man which reminded him of Manfred von Diehl, another sinister writer of Felix’s acquaintance, and one which he would rather forget.
As well as the exotic and the debauched, there were the usual raucous youths from the student fraternities, who had come here to the roughest part of town to prove their manhood to themselves and to their friends. They were always the worst troublemakers; spoiled, rich young men who had to show how tough they were for all to see. They hunted in packs and were as capable of drunken viciousness as the lowest dockside cut-throat. Maybe they were worse, for they considered themselves above the law and their victims less than vermin.
From where he stood, Felix could see a bunch of jaded young dandies tugging at the dress of a struggling serving-wench. They were demanding a kiss. The girl, a pretty newcomer called Elissa, fresh from the country and unused to this sort of behaviour, was resisting hard. Her struggles just seemed to encourage the rowdies. Two of them had got to their feet and began to drag the struggling girl towards the alcoves. One had clamped a hand over her mouth so that her shrieks would not be heard. Another brandished a huge blutwurst sausage obscenely.
Felix moved to interpose himself between the young men and the alcoves.
“No need for that,” he said quietly.
The older of the two youths grinned nastily. Before speaking he took a huge bite of the blutwurst and swallowed it. His face was flushed and sweat glistened on his brow and cheeks. “She’s a feisty wench—maybe she’d enjoy a taste of a prime Nuln sausage.”
The dandies laughed uproariously at this fine jest. Encouraged, he waved the sausage in the air like a general rallying his troops.
“I don’t think so,” Felix said, trying hard to keep his temper. He hated these spoiled young aristocrats with a passion, had done ever since his time at the University of Altdorf where he had been surrounded by their sort.
“Our friend here thinks he’s tough, Dieter,” said the younger of the two, a crop-headed giant larger than Felix. He sported the scarred face of a student duellist, one who fought to gain scars and so enhance his prestige.
Felix looked around for some help. The other bouncers were trying to calm down a brawl between the Kislevites and the halberdiers. Felix could see Gotrek’s crest of dyed hair rising above the scrum. No help from that quarter, then.
Felix shrugged. Better make the best of a bad situation, he thought. He looked straight into the duellist’s eye.
“Just let the girl be,” he said with exaggerated mildness—then some devil lurking at the back of his mind prompted him to add, “and I promise not to hurt you.”
“You promise not to hurt us?” The duellist seemed a little confused. Felix could see that he was trying to work out whether this lowly bouncer could possibly be mocking him. The student’s friends were starting to gather around, keen to start some trouble.
“I think we should teach this scumbag a lesson, Rupert,” Dieter said. “I think we should show him he’s not as tough as he thinks he is.”
Elissa chose this moment to bite Dieter’s hand. He shrieked with pain and cuffed the girl almost casually. Elissa dropped as if pole-axed. “Bitch took a chunk out of my hand!”
Suddenly Felix had just plain had enough. He had travelled hundreds of leagues, fought against beasts, monsters and men. He had seen the dead rise from their graves and slain evil cultists on Geheimnisnacht. He had killed the city of Nuln’s own chief of secret police for being in league with the wretched skaven. He didn’t have to take cheek from these spoiled whelps, and he certainly didn’t need to watch them beat up an innocent girl.
Felix grabbed Rupert by the lapels and swung his forehead forward, butting the duellist on the nose. There was a sickening crunch and the big youth toppled backward, clutching his face. Felix grabbed Dieter by the throat and slapped him a couple of times just for show, then slammed the student’s face into the heavy tabletop. There was another crunch. Steins toppled.
The spectators pushed their chairs backwards to avoid being soaked. Felix kicked Dieter’s legs out from under him and then, after he hit the ground, kicked him in the head a couple of times. There was nothing pretty or elegant about it, but Felix was not in the mood to put up with these people any more. Suddenly they sickened him and he was glad of the chance to vent his anger.
As Dieter’s friends surged forward, Felix ripped his sword from its scabbard. The razor-sharp blade glittered in the torchlight. The angry students froze as if they had heard the hissing of a deadly serpent.
Suddenly it was all deathly quiet. Felix put the blade down against the side of Dieter’s head. “One more step and I’ll take his ear off. Then I’ll make the rest of you eat it.”
“He means it,” one of the students muttered. Suddenly they did not look so very threatening any more, just a scared and drunken bunch of young idiots who had bought into much more trouble than they had bargained for. Felix twisted the blade so that it bit into Dieter’s ear, drawing blood. The young man groaned and squirmed under Felix’s boot.
Rupert whimpered and clutched his nose with one meaty hand. A river of red streamed over his fingers. “You broke my node,” he said in a tone of piteous accusation. He sounded like he couldn’t believe anyone would do anything so horribly cruel.
“One more word out of you and I’ll break your fingers too,” Felix said. He hoped nobody tried to work out how he was going to do that. He wasn’t quite sure himself, but he needn’t have worried. Everybody took him absolutely seriously. “The rest of you pick your friends up and get out of here, before I really lose my temper.”
He stepped away from Dieter’s recumbent form, keeping his blade between himself and the students. They hurried forward, helped their injured friends to their feet, and hurried towards the door. A few kept terrified eyes on Felix as they went.
He walked over to Elissa and helped her to her feet.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Fine enough. Thanks,” she said. She looked up at him gratefully. Not for the first time, Felix noticed how pretty she was. She smiled up at him. Her tight black ringlets framed her round face. Her lips pouted. He reached down and tucked one of her jet-black curls behind her ear.
“Best go and have a word with Heinz. Tell him what happened.”
The girl hurried off.
“You’re learning, manling,” the Trollslayer’s voice said from behind him.
Felix looked around and was surprised to see Gotrek grinning malevolently up at him. “I suppose so,” he said, although right at this moment he felt a little shaky. It was time for a drink.
Grey Seer Thanquol perched on the three-legged bone stool in front of the farsqueaker and bit his tail. He was angry, as angry as he could ever remember being. He doubted he had been so angry even on the day he had made his first kill, and then he had been very, very angry indeed. He dug his canines into his tail until the sensation made his pink eyes water. Then he let go. He was sick of inflicting pain on himself. He felt like making someone else suffer.
“Hurry-fast! Scuttle-quick or I will the flesh flay from your most unworthy bones,” he shrieked, lashing out with the whip he carried for just such occasions as this.
The skaven slaves squeaked in dismay and scuttled faster on the lurching treadmill attached to the huge mechanisms of the farsqueaker. As they did so, the powerglobes began to glow slightly. Their flickering light illumined the long musty chamber. The shadows of the warp engineers of Clan Skryre danced across the walls as they made adjustments to the delicate machine by banging it lightly with sledgehammers. A faint tang of warpstone and ozone became perceptible in the air.
“Quick! Quick! Or I will feed you to the rat-ogres.”
A chance would be a fine thing, Thanquol thought. If only he had a rat-ogre to feed these slaves too. What a disappointment Boneripper had proved to be—that cursed dwarf had slain him as easily as Thanquol would slaughter a blind puppy. Just the thought of that hairless dwarf upstart made Thanquol want to squirt the musk of fear. At the same time, hatred bit at Thanquol’s bowels and stayed there, gnawing as fiercely as a newly born runt chomping on a bone.
By the Horned Rat’s foetid breath, he wanted revenge on the Trollslayer and his henchman! Not only had they slain Boneripper and cost Thanquol a lot of precious warptokens, they had also killed von Halstadt and thus disrupted the grey seer’s master plan for throwing Nuln and the Empire into chaos.
True, Thanquol had other agents on the surface, but none so highly placed or so malleable as the former head of Nuln’s secret police. Thanquol wasn’t looking forward to reporting the failure of this part of the scheme to his masters back in Skavenblight. In fact, he had put off making his report for as long as he decently could. Now he had no option but to talk to the Seerlord and report how things stood. Warily he looked up at the huge mirror on top of the farsqueaker, as he waited for a vision of his master to take form.
The skaven slaves scuttled faster now. The light in the warpglobes became brighter. Thanquol felt his fur lift and a shiver run down his spine to the tip of his tail as sparks leapt from the globes at either end of the treadmill, flickering upwards towards the huge mirror at the top of the apparatus. One of the warp engineers rushed over to the control panel and wrenched down two massive copper switches. Forked lightning flickered between the warpglobes. The viewing mirror began to glow with a greenish light. Little flywheels began to buzz. Huge pistons rose and fell impressively.
Briefly Thanquol felt a surge of pride at this awesome triumph of skaven engineering, a device which made communication over all the long leagues between Nuln and Skavenblight not only possible but instantaneous.
Truly, no other race could match the inventive genius of the skaven. This machine was just one more proof, if any was needed, of skaven superiority to all other so-called sentient races. The skaven deserved to rule the world—which was doubtless why the Horned Rat had given it into their keeping.
A picture took shape in the mirror. A towering figure glared down at him. Thanquol shivered again, this time with uncontrollable fear. He knew he was looking on the features of one of the Council of Thirteen in distant Skavenblight. In truth, he could not tell which, since the picture was a little fuzzy. Maybe it was not even Seerlord Tisqueek. Swirls and patterns of interference danced across the mirror’s shimmering surface. Perhaps, Thanquol should suggest that the engineers of Clan Skryre make a few adjustments to their device. Now, however, hardly seemed the time.
“What have… to… report… Seer Thanq…” The majestic voice of the council member emerged from the machine’s squeaking trumpet as a high-pitched buzzing. Thanquol had to strain to make out the words. With his outstretched paw he snatched up the mouthpiece, carved from human thighbone and connected to the machine by a cable of purest copper. He struggled hard to avoid gabbling his words.
“Great triumphs, lordly one, and some minor setbacks,” Thanquol squeaked. His musk glands felt tight. He fought to keep from baring his teeth nervously.
“Spea… up… Grey… I… hardly hear you… and…”
Thanquol decided there were definitely a few problems with the farsqueaking machine. Many of the Seerlord’s words were being lost, and doubtless his superior was only catching a few of Thanquol’s own words in return. Perhaps, thought the grey seer, this could be made to work to his advantage. He must consider his options.
“Many triumphs, lordly one, and a few minor setbacks!” Thanquol bellowed as loud as he could. His roaring startled the slaves and they stopped running. As the treadmill slowed, the picture started to flicker and fade. The long tongues of lightnin
g dimmed. “Faster, you fools! Don’t stop!”
Thanquol encouraged the slaves with a flick of his lash. Slowly the picture returned until the dim outline of the gigantic skaven lord was visible once more. A cloud of foul-smelling smoke was starting to emerge from the farsqueaker. It smelled like something within the machine was burning. Two warp engineers stood by with buckets of foul water drawn directly from the nearby sewers.
“…setbacks, Grey …eer Thanquol?”
If ever there was time for the machine’s slight irregularities to prove useful, now was that time, thought Thanquol. “Yes, master. Many triumphs! Even as we speak our warriors scout beneath the man-city. Soon we will have all information we need for our inevitable triumph!”
“I said… setbacks… Seer Thanquol.”
“It would not wise be to send them back, great one. We need every able-bodied skaven warrior to map the city.”
The councillor leaned forward and fiddled with a knob. The picture flickered and became slightly clearer. Thanquol could now see that the speaker’s head was obscured by a great cowl which hid his features. The members of the Council of Thirteen often did that. It made them seem more mysterious and threatening. Thanquol could see that he was turning and saying something to someone just out of sight. The grey seer assumed his superior was berating one of the engineers of Clan Skryre.
“…and how is… agent von Halstadt…”
“Indisposed,” Thanquol replied, a little too hastily for his own liking. Somehow it sounded better than saying he was dead. He decided to change the subject quickly. He knew that he had better do something to save the situation and fast.