[Von Carstein 03] - Retribution

by Steven Savile - (ebook by Undead)

  Jerek stood his ground, offering no hint of diffidence. He couldn’t imagine an arrogant whoreson like Skellan bowing and scraping before the old woman. “He sent me to the city above to deal with a problem, and then bade me visit the mistress to find his whereabouts. It is done, so I have come as I was told.”

  Who does the vain Morr-loathed maggot think he is to use me as his messenger?” The woman leaned forwards in her throne, hatred blazing in the black pits that ought to have been eyes. “I am Kalada, I am the Eternal, beloved of Neferata. I am the true dark heart of this city. I am the black angel they pray to when the lights are out and the old superstitions grip them. I am the unseen threat lurking in the corner of the eye. I am not some worm he can order around as the whim strikes him.” Venom dripped from her words.

  Jerek stood his ground, affecting a Skellanish swagger. “Not my problem, lady,” he said, hoping he sounded as egotistical and cocksure as Skellan would have in his place. “I don’t want to bring his wrath down on my head. So do us both a favour, tell me where he is and I’ll get out of your hair, and you can carry on playing the dark mistress to your heart’s content.”

  She looked at him as though he were dirt beneath her fingernail, something to be rooted out and disposed of.

  “Like the maggot he is, he’s down below, crawling through the slime and putrescence of the old dwarf underways that the rat people have infested. He creeps and creeps, and squirms and creeps, inch by inch and out of sight, leading his damned army through into the heart of the Empire without ever being seen. One of my handmaidens will see you to the door, but from there you are on your own. If you try hard enough I am sure you will be able to smell his stench somewhere down there amid the filth.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Like a Wolf to the Slaughter

  The Old Skaven Underways

  Beneath the World

  The dead walked unseen.

  They moved with grim determination, unhindered by hunger and other earthly concerns. They came on, a relentless tide beneath the earth, hundreds of them, thousands as they were drawn down through the dirt to be born again into the agony of unlife. Mile by mile more and more white bone and diseased flesh clawed their way into the tunnels, joining the subterranean dance macabre.

  The underways were so vast and complex that it was impossible to map or indeed plot a path through them. Some were wide, others unbearably cramped and claustrophobic. In places methane-burning cressets lined the winding tunnels, hinting at some subterranean life, the glass spheres casting ghastly flickering light over everything. Other stretches of tunnel were a dark nightmare of squalor and filth as they rose nearer to the surface, moisture running down the walls and effluvia and human waste washing down from the city. The filth was knee-deep in places. The stench was overwhelming. The darkness was prowled endlessly by shadow-shapes that skittered and chittered before disappearing before the ceaseless advance of the dead.

  Mist crept along the floor in places, coiling around the shuffling feet of the dead and the damned. The mist was clammy as it writhed sluggishly around them.

  Mannfred von Carstein drove them on mercilessly, bending the shuffling corpses and shambling skeletons to his will. His hand closed around a talisman he had unearthed in the rubble of the old tombs at Khemri, in the baking deserts of the Lands of the Dead. It was a peculiar device of little worth; though he had found it deceptively powerful when it came to influencing the more mindless undead. It was an ugly trinket to the eye, a small oval shaped pendant carved from obsidian with a central eye surrounded by odd pictograms of what looked like animal-headed people. The jewel itself was gripped in a silver hand setting with pointed talons. He felt the Eye, hot against his skin, amplifying his will so that none raised by the necromantic arts or held together by the dark wind of Shyish, could resist him.

  Here and there the dead were assailed by gouting spouts of flame from fissures in the earth, always accompanied by a deep rumbling tremble from down below. Noxious fumes hung in the air of the webway of tertiary tunnels.

  Occasionally the rhythmic cadences of dull drums and hammering reached up from below.

  Cracks and chasms in the labyrinth vented greyish plumes of steam, and the stink of sulphur along with the stench of matted fur and excrement was carried by the subterranean winds.

  Patches of yellow oil corroded into raw iron ore set into the tunnel walls. It was slick to the touch and reeked like lamp oil. Occasional strings of long, thin, spiny, brown hair caught on jags of rock. The air smelled of festering wounds.

  There were prints too, in the dust, like the treads of large hunting dogs, only narrower, with elongated claws that left scratches in the clay ground.

  The deeper they went the more walls they passed that had been daubed with the mark of the Horned Rat.

  By then they had gone too deep, but there was no turning back.

  The ratmen came shrieking, chattering and squawking out of the darkness, ringing their plague bells and wielding swords and daggers of bone. If they were words, they were none the dread count could decipher. The sounds were a cacophony of rapid trills, short, clipped and they often sounded as though they were repeated several times. Beneath the chatter lay a low grating noise.

  Vermin swarmed over and around them, scores of bloated rats and ferocious bug-eyed rodents. Their thick worm-like tails quivered excitedly as they sank their teeth into the front ranks of the dead and tore at the rancid meat. There were no screams from the dead and no cessation in their relentless march. They dragged the rats forwards even as the rodents devoured the flesh from the calcified bones of their undead enemy.

  The ratmen held their ground, banging spears and swords against the clay floor and rock walls, raising a cacophony of sound that was deafening. It folded in and in, and in again on itself, intensifying and amplifying the din until it became a single wall of noise.

  In the flickering light of the glass spheres the many and hideous wounds of the ratmen were visible. Their feral snouts were torn and gnarled, gangrenous, teeth broken, lips torn back, eyes missing, ears ripped off. Others showed signs of mutation, their claws twisted and warped so that they became weapons grafted into their virulent flesh, their musculature bloated and twisted so that their reach doubled, their legs double-jointed around the knees, enhancing their natural pounce.

  The tunnels were cramped, claustrophobic, with the dead lurching and stumbling forwards into one another. Strips of flesh dung to bones, draping them like rags. There was no room for more than three or four of the small ratmen to come at the shuffling dead at a time. Even so there were hundreds of them spilling out of every crack and crevice, clothed in rags and scraps of armour marked with the triangle of the Horned Rat. Sheer force of numbers held the dead in a nexus of tunnels where fifteen passageways crossed one another. The dead air reeked of sulphur and brimstone. They came from all sides, dropping down from above and climbing out of fissures below, a swarm of vermin.

  Noxious fumes filled the tunnels, choking cloying fumes that sapped the air from around the dead. It was a pity for the rats that the dead had no need of anything as prosaic as air. The battle was joined with a clash of bone and fur on rusty blades. A sleek black-furred rat-man swung the ball joint of a human leg embedded with a razor of saw-toothed bone into shambling zombie. The bone stuck in rancid flesh. Shrieking, the skaven warrior tore his makeshift weapon free of his dead foe and slammed it again and again into the dead man’s rotten face. The bone razor made an ungodly mess, slicing through nose and cheek, opening an impossibly wide smile of flapping skin. Then the dead fell on the rat man and the shrieking turned to terrified screams as the zombie’s chipped and broken finger bones clawed into its eyes and pulled at its skull, until it had opened the ratman’s head and was feasting on the mulch of brain beneath.

  Green ribbons of crackling light arced through the fumes, tearing the flesh from the bones of the front line of undead. The corpses staggered and twisted in the hideous parody of a dance, flesh flensed from
bone. There were no cries. Agony was silent. Rats swarmed over the fallen meat, their teeth grinding and tearing at the rancid flesh as they chewed and swallowed, feasting ravenously.

  Gnats and flies swarmed in behind the smoke, biting and stinging, a multitude of insects buzzing around the faces of the dead, into ears and mouths as they flapped, up noses, in eyes with such cohesion to their pestilential assault that they formed a solid veil of insects.

  Mannfred moved effortlessly through the ranks of the dead, muttering an arcane curse beneath his breath. The flies swarmed around his face. The dead fell away from him as he walked slowly and deliberately to the front of their number. A foul stench of death arose, thickening into a cloud that gathered around his clenched fist. The flies fell, the sheer incessant buzz of their wings suddenly silenced. With a horde of ratmen clamouring to reach him, fighting over one another, Mannfred raised his fist to his lips and opened his fingers. He blew once, sharply, sending a thick plume of smoke out over the fat-bellied ratmen. The stench of death clung to the living, fed on their fur, as dissolution set in wherever the smoke touched, the smell growing ever more sickening as the fur, hide and flesh rotted from their bones. They fell at his feet.

  It was a cruel death, but the cloud dissipated before it could claim more than a third of the rodents. Their cries were wretched as they writhed on the ground. The vampire relished them. Beneath, behind and between the screams of the dying, Mannfred heard the drums.

  Only they weren’t drums.

  The ground trembled beneath his feet. It was a small movement at first, a rumble, but it quickly grew in intensity until the dirt and clay of the ground buckled beneath him. He reached out as a section of the ceiling came crashing down, crushing a handful of rats beneath the rockfall.

  All around the dead, the walls of the tunnel collapsed and the ceiling caved in. As the rock and dirt spilled into the passages the blighted skaven poured in after it, riding the wave of debris, talons bared, glittering with virulent poison. They fell upon the dead like a plague.

  A hunchbacked ratman scuttled forwards, a crystal sphere in its grubby paw. Chittering and shrieking it lobbed the glass ball up at the ceiling above Mannfred’s head, shattering it. A deleterious yellow-green choking gas billowed out. Mannfred breathed deeply of the poison wind, feeling its blistering bite at the back of his throat. Mannfred blew the vile gas from his lungs and levelled an accusing finger at the creature that had hurled the glass sphere. The gas ignited, an arc of flame billowing from his lips all the way to the ratman’s furred face. The skaven writhed around on the floor as the fire ate into him.

  Mannfred turned his back on the dying rodent.

  A beast came to the fore with a glittering blade that pulsed a sickly green in the ghastly light, throwing its taint across the ranks of the dead. The skaven was a giant, more a rat fiend than a ratman. It swatted aside a corpse, smashing its skull against a huge boulder. The sword danced in the creature’s hands, weaving a pattern of death in the air as it advanced on Mannfred. It was obviously a champion of its kind. It moved with the arrogant swagger of strength.

  Mannfred touched the talisman, focusing on the image of his damned legion parting to allow this monstrosity through to face him. Before him, the shuffling dead mirrored the image in his mind, a path opening up through the heart of them.

  Mannfred drew his blade and moved to meet it, ignoring the melee around him. Venom dripped from the ratman’s fangs. Mannfred bared his own fangs, his lips curling back into a feral smile, every bit as predatory as the skaven’s snarl.

  He blocked the creature’s first swing wordlessly. The blow sent shivers down his arm and a sunburst of pain up through his fingers as though the blade somehow contained lightning harnessed from the sky. His rage bellowed from his mouth as he threw his head back and screamed, launching a blistering series of cuts that the beast barely knocked aside as it stumbled backwards into the bodies of its fallen comrades.

  Mannfred lunged forwards, refusing to allow a moment’s respite.

  He cut low, bringing his blade up in a vicious arc, the tip of the sword piercing the underside of the warped ratman’s jaw, and up through its mouth and into its brain.

  The giant ratman didn’t fall.

  It staggered back, massive convulsions wracking its body, and reared back on its hind legs, tearing the blade free of its skull. Ichor dripped down the front of its battered battle armour. Whatever maddening battle drugs fuelled its system, the creature refused to fall.

  It lashed out with its loathsome blade, cutting deep into the Vampire Count’s shoulder.

  It was no ordinary sword.

  Agony sang in his tainted blood.

  Fire burned beneath his skin.

  The blade was laced with some kind of corrosive mixture. On a living thing its kiss would no doubt prove fatal. As it was, Mannfred felt the sickness of the warped blade’s bite, and the sting as its infection spread throughout his body. His back arched as his cadaver contorted, railing against the pain of the cut in his shoulder.

  Even as he straightened, he felt his flesh knitting, the answering fire spreading up his arm from his fingertips.

  His grin was ferocious.

  Mannfred moved in close enough to breathe in the stink of the skaven’s corrupt flesh. He hammered his fist into the ratman’s snout, following the blow with a balletic sword-arm cross, his blade cutting deep into the bone of his opponent’s neck.

  He stepped back, admiring the efficacy of the blow.

  The ratman remained on its feet for a moment, its head lolling on its neck, attached by a single tendon and a patch of fur. Then it fell.

  He cut the beast’s head from its shoulders and hurled it at the ravening horde of rats and mutant creatures from the deeps of the Old World.

  Then, standing over the corpse, he bade it rise, not the valiant enemy it had been, but a headless warrior of darkness and spite. Around him more and more of the fallen ratmen rose, joining the ranks of his abominable army, turning on the rats in the tunnels with stunning savagery. The headless rat was lethal, its vile blade cleaving flesh from bone, the touch of its weeping shaft corroding fatally through fur and scraps of battle armour to still the rabid vermin hearts of those rash enough to get in its way.

  Mannfred stood in their midst, silently watching.

  Every ratman that fell rose again, joining silently with the ranks of the undead.

  It was time, he knew, to lead his army to the surface.

  Like the grand puppet-master he was, Mannfred drew the newly dead rats and skaven to the fore of his army. These creatures would come up from the underground to strike fear into the hearts of the living.

  Winter would bring a war unlike any that humanity had ever witnessed.

  Jerek walked in darkness.

  He heard cries and other, stranger, sounds echoing up from the deeps. He ignored them. He wasn’t here for whatever daemons lived this far down in the underways. He was hunting other game. Skellan had disappeared down this hole and he would find him.

  The handmaiden, Narcisa, led Jerek deep into the tunnels beneath the subterranean temple. She didn’t talk. In the occasional flickers of light from the oil lamp she carried, Jerek saw utter distaste in her expression. He didn’t try to talk to her. He watched her as she walked. Everything about her bearing betrayed her profession. She was arrogant with her flesh, enjoying the attention of his eyes. She was barefoot, but not once did she so much as flinch as she walked over rock dust and chips of stone.

  Eventually, she stopped at the mouth of what appeared to be a vast cavern.

  “You aren’t like him, are you?” she asked suddenly. “You’re different. He talks and swaggers, and needs to be the big man, but you are different. You’re quiet. That, back there, with the Eternal, was an act, wasn’t it?” It was barely a question; she knew full well she was right.

  Jerek nodded without saying anything.

  “He is down here,” she said, walking ahead slightly and pointing. The way she said
he betrayed a surprising level of hatred. There is a shaft that plunges several hundreds of feet into the darkness, try not to fall down it.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Jerek said. You’ve met him haven’t you?”

  She turned to face him, nostrils flaring. She wasn’t pretty when angered. “Oh, I met him,” she said. She pulled at a red silk kerchief she wore tied around her throat, baring two hard pink scars of puncture wounds. “He gave me these.”

  “He fed on you?” Jerek asked, horrified by the thought of tasting undead blood. Surely it was poison…

  “He fed on me,” she admitted, as though confessing the violation burnt her tongue.

  “It’s not… it’s not right,” said Jerek, still struggling to come to terms with the idea of a vampire feeding on a kindred creature. Why would he?”

  “Potency, fool. Are all of von Carstein’s gets so simple? To drink the blood of a vampire is to absorb some of its essence, its strength.”

  “But it is an abomination,” Jerek said, aghast at the very notion of it. It was parasitic.

  “Oh you truly are simple, aren’t you?” the Lahmian handmaiden said, shaking her head in disbelief. “It is about the quest for domination. He seeks to imprint his power on me, cause me to cow to his will, to see him as my master.” She laughed bitterly at the prospect.

  Jerek struggled with the image. “Did you bow to him?”

  “Never,” Narcisa said vehemently.

  “Good. Skellan doesn’t deserve benediction. He is a monstrosity.”

  “And yet he is your kin?”

  Jerek shook his head. “He is no kin of mine, woman. I intend to end his miserable existence here and now.”

  “Yet you serve the same master, curiouser and curiouser. This is something else you did not mention to the Eternal. I wonder, does that mean you are lying to me, or did you lie to her?”