by C. L. Werner
‘Words tell much,’ it chittered again. ‘Make Skilk master-Skrittar.’ The grey seer stroked the fur collar around his neck again. ‘Soon make Skilk master-seerlord! Make Skilk master-skaven! ’ Skilk’s body trembled as he announced his insane ambition, as the maniacal emotion flooded through him. The grey seer turned, squeaking commands to his stormvermin guards. The muscular ratkin scurried forward.
‘Feast much when Skilk made seerlord. Hunter-meat taste nice!’
Thulmann struggled as skaven paws closed around the ropes binding him, pulling him from the pew. Other skaven grabbed Krieger and Silja, dragging them towards the dark hole in the chapel floor.
Reinheckel sneered as the witch hunters were dragged away. The burgomeister emerged from the congregation, walking towards Grey Seer Skilk. The skaven’s lips curled back as the man’s scent filled his senses, displaying his sharp fangs.
‘Revered and holy one, your most unworthy servant prays you find this humble offering satisfactory…’ the burgomeister said.
Reinheckel got no further in his explanation. The grey seer had grown weary of his slave’s temerity, of his audacity in daring to speak to his master. Almost faster than Thulmann’s eyes could follow, Skilk lunged at Reinheckel, sinking his jaws into the man’s throat. Skilk shook his head furiously as he worried the wound, the burgomeister gagging and choking beneath the skaven’s fangs. The cult howled in horror, but made no move to aid their dying leader. After a moment, the crazed grey seer released his grip, letting Reinheckel crash to the floor, his body sputtering as life fled from it. Skilk raised his bloodied paws to his muzzle, licking the black fur with his pink tongue.
‘Take hunter-meat to larder,’ the grey seer hissed, savouring the taste of Reinheckel’s blood. ‘Soon feast much.’ The warpstone-laced insanity in Skilk’s eyes appeared to intensify. ‘Feast much after making ritual. After Skilk make seerlord!’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hot, clammy darkness enveloped them, the stink of decaying meat and the perpetual reek of skaven fur all but smothering them. In the past, Thulmann had invaded the lairs of daemons and the feeding grounds of ghouls. The skaven larder was worse than any of them. A dank burrow had been chewed from the earth deep below Wyrmvater, the cave littered with the mouldering provisions of the underfolk. Barrels and sacks of grain were strewn about in chaotic disarray, some of them sporting growths of white fungus. Carcasses in varying states of decay and dismemberment hung from iron hooks set into the ceiling. Beast, man and even their fellow ratkin, the skaven seemed indifferent to what source they claimed their meat from, at least, usually.
Thulmann looked up as the hulking stormvermin who had been set as guard over them prowled amongst the provisions, taking the opportunity to steal the odd handful of rotting corn or to nibble on one of the hanging carcasses. The ratman’s master, Grey Seer Skilk, appeared to have a special end in mind for the witch hunter and his companions, something he prayed to Sigmar would be quick at least, although he knew any mercy from them would be unlikely.
‘Do you think we have a chance?’ The voice was soft, barely a whisper. Thulmann could only just make out Silja’s outline in the darkness, but he could see that her body was trembling.
‘Have faith in Lord Sigmar,’ Thulmann replied. ‘Faith and courage are what separate us from these vermin. If it is our hour, then at least we can deny this scum the satisfaction of seeing our fear.’
The skaven guard was suddenly looming over Thulmann in the darkness. The monster’s paw slashed across the witch hunter’s face. ‘Hunter-meat be quiet!’
Long hours passed in the pit of horror, slowly wearing away at them all. Lajos Dozsa, never the bravest of individuals had started sobbing and moaning, much to the amusement of their captor. The incessant prayers of Haussner and his men were less entertaining for the guard, but even after repeated abuse, Haussner persisted. At last the vindictive ratman let the fanatics alone, trying his best to ignore them. Beside him, Silja contrived to squirm closer to Thulmann, at last managing to touch his side with her fingers. They both found even so slight a contact comforting.
When the heavy iron door to the larder was opened, the cave was suddenly engulfed in the green glow of the warpstone braziers that lit the tunnel outside. After the darkness, even the weird green light was blinding. Thulmann could hear footsteps entering the larder. It seemed their hour had come. He braced himself to hear the scratchy, gnawing voice of Skilk.
Instead, he was surprised to hear a human voice speaking. The tones were too hatefully familiar to him, however, to draw any hope from it. He should have expected as much. Theirs had been a long game of cat-and-rat. Now that the game was at an end, why shouldn’t the winner come to gloat?
‘I see you have managed to hold onto them all,’ the snide voice of Doktor Freiherr Weichs stated as he paced through the larder. As his eyes grew used to the green light of the corridor, Thulmann could see that the physician had a scented pomander crushed to his nose.
‘Doktor-man bad,’ the skaven guard hissed. ‘Leave! Skaven meat! Not doktor-man meat!’
Weichs smiled indulgently at the guard, trying to hide the fear the ratkin made him feel. ‘That is not quite true,’ he said. ‘In recognition of my great contribution, Skilk… Grey Seer Skilk… has been kind enough to make a gift to me of one of the prisoners.’ Weichs turned away from the guard, letting his gaze sweep across the bound figures strewn across the floor. His eyes settled on Thulmann. ‘I need more subjects for my experiments, after all.’
The guard whined, but Weichs had evoked the dreaded name of Grey Seer Skilk and it was not about to risk provoking its master. Weichs walked towards Thulmann, the guard creeping along beside him, as if suspicious that Weichs might try to steal some of the provisions while he was in the larder.
‘Well, well, well,’ Weichs laughed as he stared down at Thulmann. ‘We come to the finale at last. Tell me, did you think it would end this way all those months ago when you started your senseless persecution of my work?’
Thulmann glared up at the smirking plague doktor. ‘Your work is an abomination, and you are worse.’
Weichs shrugged his shoulders. ‘Still, there are worse things than Doktor Weichs in this world,’ he said, shifting his gaze towards the guard beside him.
‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t share that sentiment,’ Thulmann spat. Weichs sighed and shook his head.
‘All I am doing is trying to better mankind, to make the body of man stronger, more resistant to the inimical forces that pollute our world. There are some who dream much nastier dreams, I assure you.’ There was something strange in the plague doktor’s tone, something that fought its way through Thulmann’s disgust and loathing. Almost against his will, he found himself considering what Weichs was saying, the meaning he was trying to convey. Weichs looked down at him, and there was something expectant, almost desperate in his eyes. It was not the look of a man basking in the glow of victory but one cringing in the shadow of fear.
Weichs shook his head again as Thulmann remained silent. ‘That was always the problem with witch hunters,’ he said. ‘They never know when to prioritise.’ Thulmann nodded his head ever so slightly. They were all dead anyway, what was there left to lose.
‘Doktor-man talked enough.’ the skaven guard snapped. It had struggled to follow the conversation, but its command of Reikspiel had not been up to the task. ‘Doktor-man fetch subject. Leave!’ Weichs turned and smiled at the monster.
‘Oh, I am quite finished here,’ he said. He dropped the pomander from his hand, the skaven’s attention shifting as its eyes were drawn to the sudden movement. In that instant, the plague doktor’s other hand was driving a dagger into the ratman’s side, stabbing deep into its heart. The skaven squeaked in pain and crumpled into a twitching pile on the floor. Weichs turned to Thulmann.
‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t applaud,’ Thulmann said, displaying his bound hands. ‘I was rooting for the skaven anyway.’
Weichs knelt beside the
witch hunter, holding his bloodied knife to the ropes. ‘I find your lack of trust disconcerting. Perhaps I should leave you to enjoy Skilk’s dinner table.’
‘Which you would have no problems doing,’ Thulmann said, ‘if you didn’t need us for something.’ He stared hard into Weichs’s elderly visage. ‘What is it you want of me, heretic?’
The strength seemed to drain out of the plague doktor. When he spoke, it was with a voice as timid as that of a child. ‘I want you to kill him for me, templar. I want you to kill Skilk.’
Thulmann’s mind raced. Weichs was turning on his patron, on this inhuman beast that had protected and supported him. ‘Why?’
‘Skilk is preparing for his great ritual, the spell I translated for him from that abominable book he took with him from Wurtbad. Tonight he will try to work the magic, try to summon the spirit of his dead mentor. Through that communion Skilk hopes to learn the secrets of beyond and use them to gain mastery over the entire skaven race. If the spell fails, I will pay the price for that failure. Somehow, I am even more frightened that it will succeed.’
‘We’ll need weapons,’ said Ehrhardt who, like everyone else, had been listening to the conversation with undivided attention.
‘Just outside, in the corridor,’ Weichs said. ‘I told the skaven I wanted to examine them. They were all too occupied with preparing Skilk’s ritual to question me too closely.’
‘All right,’ Thulmann agreed. ‘We’ll kill your rat for you.’ Weichs made no move to cut the ropes.
‘One other thing,’ the scientist said. ‘I am not fool enough to save myself from Skilk only to die on a witch hunter’s pyre. I want your oath, your solemn oath, that I will go free. Neither you nor any of your witch hunter friends will seek to restrain me, bring me to trial or cause me harm. You kill Skilk and then we all go our own ways.’
Thulmann glared at the plague doktor. The words tasted like wormwood, but he knew he must say them. It was their only chance. ‘On my honour, Weichs, when this is settled I will not try to stop you.’ The words brought a roar of protest from Haussner, a protest that was quickly silenced by Krieger’s harsh reprimand.
‘Swear it, by Sigmar,’ Weichs insisted. Thulmann ground his teeth. He really hadn’t wanted to draw his god’s attention to his humiliation. Spitting the words from his mouth, he told Weichs what he wanted to hear. Grinning, Weichs cut away the ropes from Thulmann’s hands and then rose and crept back towards the door.
‘What about my feet?’ the witch hunter demanded as he massaged feeling back into his limbs.
‘I leave you to attend to those,’ Weichs said. ‘It is not that I do not trust you, but I’ll feel better knowing you are busy freeing your friends rather than haunting my trail. I’ve left a map with your gear. Follow it precisely and it will lead you to the cavern where Skilk is conducting his ritual. Don’t be late.’
With that, the plague doktor slipped away into the green light of the corridor. Thulmann began pulling at the ropes binding his legs, cursing under his breath.
‘A devil’s bargain, but it had to be done,’ Krieger said. ‘I will not speak ill of this to Zerndorff.’
‘I have graver considerations to occupy me, Brother Kristoph,’ Thulmann said, managing to free one of his feet. ‘You put whatever you like in your report to Zerndorff… if any of us are still alive to take it to him.’
Monolithic walls of stone encompassed the cavern that sprawled before them, surfaces pitted and scarred where they had been gnawed by pick and hammer over countless centuries. Iron cages were set into the walls, smouldering chunks of warpstone casting their sickly green glow across the underworld. Smaller lights gleamed from the faces of the walls, warpstone deposits the skaven had yet to plunder exuding their corrupt radiance.
‘What was that Weichs said about being late?’ Krieger pointed into the cavern with the barrel of his pistol. Thulmann followed his fellow templar’s lead. They had seen no sign of life since entering the cavern. Even the bloated rats that normally infested any lair of the skaven were not to be found. Picks and hammers were strewn haphazardly around the diggings, forges and smelters standing silent and cold. There was a crawling, malignant force about the place, something different even from the stifling stink of the skaven warren, something that seemed to repulse him on the most primitive, primal level, urging him to keep away just as it had the rats.
Ahead, illuminated by the glowing fumes billowing from a dozen iron braziers, Thulmann could make out a large gathering of figures. Most were skaven, their naked tails lashing nervously behind their slouched bodies. Strewn around them, transfixed on pikes of steel, were human figures. Perhaps Wyrmvater had earned such a massacre for their diseased worship of the Horned Rat, but their butchered ruins were dreadful to behold. They had learned the true nature of their inhuman ‘benefactors’, too late.
Beyond the mob of ratkin, the black expanse of the crevasse snaked its way through the centre of the cavern. Great digging machines stood on one side of the crack, neglected and forlorn. On the near side of the crevasse stood a great stone altar, pitted and scarred by the passage of time. Around this was an array of tall iron stakes, a jumble of painted bones hanging from them by ropes of sinew and chains of steel. Thulmann could see more bones stacked on the altar, a hideously malformed skull with great ram horns grinning from atop the pile. Surrounding the altar were a dozen robed skaven, each of them sporting the grotesque horns that marked them as disciples of the Horned Rat, a collar of fur surrounding their necks marking them as members of the Skrittar. These chanted and hissed, banging the ground with their staffs.
Skilk stood behind the altar. Even across the distance that separated them, Thulmann could feel the grey seer’s aura of triumph and exultation. The skaven’s eyes were afire with expectation, ambition drooling from his muzzle. Skilk held Das Buch die Unholden in his paws, gripping it as if it was some sacred talisman. Weichs stood to one side of the grey seer, his face even paler than it had been during his visit to the larder. The plague doktor’s mouth was moving as he read from a bundle of papers he held, but what he read was smothered by the sound of the chanting Skrittar priests.
‘Looks like they persuaded the good doktor to participate after all,’ Silja observed, venom in her voice. Thulmann looked over at her and nodded.
‘Just be thankful he didn’t tell them about us,’ the witch hunter said. ‘Skilk must have almost every skaven in the warren down here.’
‘And you honestly expect to kill them all?’ asked Captain-Justicar Ehrhardt. The Black Guardsman was again fully armoured, the steel of his helm making his voice sound cold and inhuman.
‘Not all of them,’ Thulmann confessed, ‘just Skilk. We kill him, we can at least hold our heads high when we get to the gardens of Morr.’ There had been some discussion about trying to escape the skaven warren after Weichs had released them, to get to the surface and come back with an entire garrison of Reiksguard. Krieger had been a rather vocal proponent of such a tactic, finding heartfelt support from Lajos. He wished he could have shared such optimism, for Silja’s sake, but he could not allow the illusion to linger. Thulmann and Ehrhardt were under no illusion as to how slim any chance at gaining the surface was. The memory of Wurtbad and the warren beneath its streets was too fresh in their memories to forget the confusing labyrinth even a small skaven stronghold made.
Thulmann turned from the other witch hunters, placing a hand on Silja’s shoulder. Driest’s Hochland rifle was among the weapons recovered by Weichs. Thulmann had appropriated the weapon for Silja’s use. With Streng gone, the woman was the best marksman among them. They had both heard the extravagant claims Driest made about the range his weapon could cover, but now was not the time to put such claims to the test. ‘We will distract them. If you get a decent shot at him, take it. You may not get a second chance. I am counting on you.’ Silja started to reply but Thulmann put his fingers to her lips. Leaving her side on what would soon be a battlefield was hard enough. ‘I know you will try your bes
t.’
Thulmann unlimbered his pistols, handing them to Lajos. He looked down at the strigany merchant. ‘I am putting her in your care again, Lajos. Keep the vermin off her as long as you can.’ The witch hunter glared at Lajos. The man seemed to be only half listening to him. Thulmann cuffed the man’s ear. ‘Did you hear me?’
Lajos rubbed at his bruise, staring meekly up at the witch hunter. ‘I… I’m sorry but I could have sworn I heard someone shouting over there. Shouting in strigany!’
Thulmann grabbed the merchant’s arm. ‘What were they saying?’ he demanded.
‘Something about making an offering. Offering the “blood of corruption”, whatever that might be.’
Screams rose from the centre of the cavern, sharp, shrill and human. Two of the grey seers had stopped chanting, scurrying forward to seize a human cultist who had not yet been slain. Even across the distance, Thulmann could tell it was the mutant daughter of Kipps.
Breath came to Streng in hot, stinging gasps. The mercenary’s leg throbbed with stabbing pain, protesting in no uncertain terms his fear-fuelled flight from his refuge among the rocks. Streng ground his teeth together, trying to keep his agony silent, trying to keep it from betraying his position.
Crouching among the brambles of a half-dead stand of bushes, Streng tried to collect his thoughts, tried to fight past the fear flooding his mind. If he could not control his panic, he would die. He had to think, had to figure out how he was going to escape, how he was going to elude the inhuman thing stalking him through the shadowy woods.