The trickle of dust falling from Boneripper’s impromptu widening of the tunnel gave Kratch an idea. Most of the spells Skabritt had seen fit to teach his apprentice were minor incantations of no great consequence, but there was one his late teacher had foolishly taught him that held real power. Grinning, Kratch called upon that power now, weaving his paws before him in a complex pattern, syllables rasping off his tongue with rapid-fire quickness.
The roof of the tunnel groaned, dirt trickled down in a steady stream. Kratch locked eyes with Thanquol, then spun about and hurried down the tunnel, pursuing the warlock engineers and their burden. Behind him, the adept heard a terrible roar. He coughed as a cloud of dust washed over him, propelled by the fury of the collapse.
Kratch was almost disappointed. He had thought he would need to come up with something new to get rid of Thanquol. Instead, the same trick that had caught Skabritt had been good enough.
The apprentice grey seer scurried down the tunnel, chittering his wicked glee at the destruction of his hated master, his slippery mind already pawing over his next move. He would seize the Wormstone, take it to some secure place and then ransom the deadly weapon to one of the Lords of Decay. The hoary old rats would pay anything to keep such a fearsome artefact from their rivals on the Council, enough to give Kratch wealth and position beyond his wildest imaginings. Indeed, the thought occurred to Kratch, why should he limit himself to ransoming the Wormstone back to only one of the Lords? He could contact any number of them, then choose whichever one seemed most likely to afford him protection before closing the deal.
Kratch rubbed his paws together in the greedy human gesture of an Altdorf moneylender. With Thanquol gone, the only perceivable obstacle to his ambitions might be Viskitt Burnfang, but he had some ideas about how to deal with the warlock engineer. Strike him down, and the other Clan Skryre metal-mongers would quickly submit to Kratch’s authority.
Yes, Kratch thought as his scampering steps brought him into the moist muck of the sewer. Once Burnfang was out of the way, there would be no one to stop him.
The adept blinked in confusion when he found himself snout-to-snout with the warlock engineer. Burnfang’s eyes were wide with fear, his paws raised in a helpless gesture of surrender. All around him, the sneaks of Clan Skaul and the survivors of Clan Skryre likewise lifted their hands in defeat. Kratch was about to snarl at the ratmen when he became aware of shapes surrounding them in the reeking corridor of brick and filth.
“Adept Kratch, how kind-easy you to join-find us.” The voice was that of Skrattch Skarpaw, but the cunning assassin was too wise to emerge from the ranks of his followers and expose himself. Instead the black-clad killer simply laughed, a long murderous giggle.
“Take-snatch the stone!” Skarpaw snarled to his minions. “Kill-slay the meat!”
CHAPTER NINE
A Rat’s Revenge
Tons of earth and rock came smashing down into the cellar, bringing with it most of the kitchen up above. Fleeing ratmen were smashed into paste by the deluge of stone or skewered by great splinters of wood from the upper floor. Stairs, smugglers and shadow-wrapped wizard all vanished in a gritty cloud of darkness that rushed down Thanquol’s lungs with a smothering embrace.
The grey seer coughed and hacked, fighting for every breath of air, flinching at every fresh clatter of rock against stone. The smell of skaven blood filled his nose, the cries of maimed and mangled ratmen scratched at his ears. Thanquol ignored them all, instead turning his beady eyes to a more vexing question: why had he not been crushed by the collapse?
The answer towered over Thanquol, his huge back arched above the grey seer like a bridge of flesh and bone. By sheer brute strength alone, Boneripper defied the pressure of tons of earth, preventing it from smashing downwards and obliterating his master. The rat ogre’s head was crooked in an awkward position, his dull eyes staring plaintively at Thanquol, waiting for his master’s approval.
Let the beast wait, Thanquol decided. Of primary importance was making sure the damnable human sorcerer wasn’t in any condition to renew his attack on the grey seer. Crawling on all four paws, he squirmed his body around in the small space beneath Boneripper’s arched body. He ignored the moans of half-crushed ratmen, slithering away from their groping paws, his sharp eyes fixated only upon one purpose. A cunning smile spread across Thanquol’s face. The collapse had been total and complete. Wherever the wizard was, the vermin had been buried.
Thanquol didn’t know if his enemy could dig himself out or not, nor did the grey seer intend to wait around and find out. His inspection complete, he crawled back beneath Boneripper’s enormous chest. The rat ogre’s lungs were rumbling like a bellows, sucking in what little air had been trapped with them in the pocket. Already there was a stagnant smell to it. Thanquol licked his fangs. There were spells he knew that could whisk him out of his predicament as quickly as a filthy human could snap its wormy fingers, but Thanquol did not dare cast them without knowing how far the cave-in had filled the tunnel. It would do him no good to disappear in a puff of black smoke only to rematerialise in solid stone. Fortunately, there were other options available.
“Dig,” Thanquol told the hulking brute looming above him. “Dig-dig, fool-beast!” he repeated when Boneripper simply gazed at him with dull, vacant eyes.
Boneripper groaned as he shifted his body, trying to adjust his position to both support the ceiling and obey his master’s shrill commands. Streams of earth and rock trickled down as the burden rumbled in protest, sending Thanquol scurrying deeper into the shadow cast by the monster’s enormity. Boneripper took no notice of the grey seer’s fright, however. One arm and one shoulder twisted up above his head, Boneripper began clawing at the rock and dirt choking the mouth of the tunnel with his other arms.
Thanquol watched the excavation with a vengeful gaze, each armload of rock Boneripper clawed away bringing the grey seer’s fangs grinding together. He’d seen the look Kratch had given him just before the collapse. The treacherous apprentice was going to be sorry he hadn’t finished the job.
Red thoughts of violence and pain clouded Thanquol’s vision. His tail lashed angrily against the floor, his fur bristling. So Kratch had thought to get rid of him the way he had Grey Seer Skabritt, had he? Kratch thought to steal the power of the Wormstone for himself, to use it as a weapon against its rightful owners, the Lords of Decay? Thanquol would make him suffer for such callous treason against the Horned Rat and indeed, all of skavendom.
Even if he were not lost in bloody imaginings, Thanquol would have given no notice to the squeals and cries of the trapped ratmen who were crushed by the shifting weight of the collapsed earth, the piteous sounds growing fewer and fewer with each armful of rubble Boneripper clawed away. It was, after all, the duty of such lesser creatures to give their miserable lives that the genius of Thanquol should endure.
* * *
The force of the collapse knocked Johann from his feet. A thick cloud of dust enveloped him, coating him from head to toe in a gritty skin of dirt. He scrambled to find his knife, blinking debris from his tearing eyes. All around him he could hear the piteous wails of mangled skaven caught in the collapse, their rodent howls gnawing at his ears with their deafening discord. Johann was bleeding from dozens of small, vicious cuts, his cruel foes taking sadistic delight in playing with their prey. With every motion, Johann could feel his strength ebb.
Strength, a man’s only advantage against the abominable ratkin. The loathsome walking rodents were faster than any man, primal reflexes and instincts allowing them to twist and writhe away from the slow, comparatively clumsy strokes of a human blade. They were fiercer too, their savage minds gripped by a vile verminous malignity only the most desperate and degenerate breeds of men might ever sink to. They were monsters, in every sense of the word, but monsters built for murder and ambush, not a straight fight against a man’s superior strength. So long as that strength remained.
Johann’s foes had not been caught in the collapse. O
ne of the ratmen was clawing at its face, trying to wipe dirt and dust from its sensitive nose with the same sort of frantic frenzy as a courtesan might attack a dress upon which she had felt an insect’s crawling legs. The other ratman, however, was not so distracted by the brown coating that covered its fur and face. Its feral gaze was fixed entirely upon Johann, and its lips spread in a fang-filled grin when it saw the man’s knife lying on the floor.
With a savage squeal of murder and brutality, the ratman leapt towards Johann, a leap that should have seen the smuggler impaled upon the monster’s blade of rusty iron. The blow never fell, however. Sounding from the wall came a wailing echo of the ratkin’s cry, a mournful shriek of madness and unimaginable horror. A crazed blur exploded across the space between Johann and the ratman, smashing into the monster while it was in mid-leap.
Only by the shape’s clothes could Johann tell the strange vision was Kempf, his erstwhile comrade and fellow criminal. Pushed to madness by the advent of the skaven into the cellar, driven to the limits of despair by his need for black dust, Kempf’s face was as pallid as the belly of a fish, his eyes gaping orbs of mindless terror. Seeing the skaven in the flesh, Kempf’s mind recalled dreams and visions from the drug den of Otto Ali, mixing them together into one obscene collage of depravity and evil. Now, driven into his own world of shadows, the ratman’s cry had invaded the madman’s last refuge. Like any cornered beast, Kempf lashed out.
Johann saw madman and ratkin roll across the floor, their bodies tangled together. When they stopped, both forms were still. Kempf’s hands were locked around the ratkin’s scrawny neck, pressed together, the furry neck snapped like the stem of a weed. The madman was equally dead, the ratman’s rusty blade thrust through his belly with such force that its point erupted from the man’s back, the monster’s bestial jaws mired in the gory wreckage that had been the dust-fiend’s throat.
A low growl of fury finally snapped Johann from his morbid fascination with Kempf’s death. He lunged for his knife as the last ratman sprang for him. His shoulder exploded with pain as he sprawled beneath the monster’s attack, catching the edge of the skaven’s blade. His fingers closed about the grip of his fat-bladed knife, rolling onto his back to meet the creature’s next charge.
The attack never came. The ratman stood transfixed, staring vacantly at the wall above Johann’s head. Slowly the creature’s limbs began to droop, the sword clattering from its claws. It was like watching a pig bladder deflate, as though all the air inside the ratkin was slowly draining away. At last its head slumped against its breast. For the first time, Johann was aware of a little sliver of blackness piercing the ratman. While he watched, the shard of night sank back into the furry chest and the verminous corpse toppled to the floor. Beyond it was a dark shape of shadow and menace.
The wizard’s veil of gathered shadow billowed about him as he stepped forwards, sheathing his sword. The magister’s stormy eyes regarded Johann coldly and the smuggler felt himself wither beneath the terrible judgement in their grey, misty depths.
“Above,” the wizard’s hissing voice intoned, pointing a finger shrouded in black at the stairway. Johann did not question the man’s authority, did not even think to protest his right to command. Like a little boy scolded by his father, he hastened to obey, taking the stairs two at a time. Dimly he was aware of a presence following after him, though his ears could detect no sound upon the creaky wooden steps.
The taproom of the Orc and Axe was strangely deserted for this hour. Johann could see only a handful of what he took to be grim-faced patrons scattered about the room. They were a disparate group, such that Johann would have sensed no thread of common unity were it not for the identical expressions they wore, each face being a mask of worry and concern. He thought perhaps that the reasons for their concern were the dead men stacked like cordwood in one corner of the hall, but a single glance at the bodies gave him doubts. No one would hang for killing men belonging to Gustav Volk. The mystery of why the thugs had not investigated the violence in the cellar was answered.
“You and your filthy mob brought this on me!” roared Ulgrin Shatterhand when the old dwarf’s eyes spotted Johann entering the room. He tried to shake off the restraining hand of a younger, yellow-bearded dwarf standing beside the bar. “Couldn’t leave well enough alone! Had to use my tavern for your idiot manling intrigues!” Ulgrin’s bluster died a sudden death when he saw the apparition stalking behind the smuggler. The dwarf muttered some half-audible oath into his beard and decided to busy himself with tending a rack of cracked clay steins.
The other dwarf came forwards, bowing deeply as Johann stepped further into the room. The head of every other man in the room made a similar nod of respect and fealty. Johann realised the gesture was not for him, but for the strange being who had rescued him from the underfolk.
“Report,” the wizard’s hissing voice commanded, his smoky gaze resting on the figure of the bowing dwarf.
“All of Volk’s men have been dealt with,” the dwarf replied, patting the heft of the broad-bladed axe lashed across his back. “No prisoners.”
The wizard turned, pointing a finger at one of the men. Johann was shocked to find himself staring at the scarred face of Theodor Baer, the watch sergeant. The watchman was treating an ugly gash in his leg with a bottle of pungent-smelling Reikland hock, gritting his teeth against the pain.
“Report,” the grey-cloaked spectre hissed.
Like a well-trained dog, Theodor set down the bottle, seemingly oblivious to his still bleeding wound, and answered the command of his master. “No casualties. We took Volk’s gang by complete surprise. Only a few minor injuries.”
“Select three unimpaired operatives,” the wizard’s voice spoke in a steel whisper. “They will descend to the cellar. Dispatch any wounded ratkin.”
Theodor nodded. Forcing himself back to his feet, grinding his teeth against the pain from his leg, he began shouting orders at the other men in the tavern. A motley group composed of a villainous-looking Tilean, a pock-marked stevedore wearing the colours of a Fish, and a hulking Kislevite with a thick red moustache, drew daggers and hurried to their butcher’s work.
A wiry little man came across the barroom, bowing before the wizard. For the second time, Johann was surprised to see a face he recognised amongst the wizard’s crew. Ludwig Rothfels, the street-corner agitator, was another of this mysterious master’s thralls.
“Master,” the agitator reported, “Gustav Volk and five of his men left the Orc and Axe shortly before your operatives were in position.”
“Volk is inconsequential,” the wizard replied. “His mob will wait. The matter of the underfolk cannot.”
Ludwig nodded in servile agreement, but did not excuse himself from the magister’s imposing presence. “Master, an unscrupulous apothecary was with Volk when he left, one Sergei Kawolski.” Ludwig darted an accusing look at Johann. Before the agitator could elaborate further, Johann seized upon the importance of what he had said.
“Sergei with Volk!” The smuggler’s eyes were wide with alarm. He felt sick at the ghastly purpose that alone could unite those two names. Ludwig was right to accuse him. He should have waited for the priestess. Now, the quack he had brought to treat his brother was selling out Hans to his enemies!
Johann fell to his knees, clutching at the wizard’s hand. It felt cold and unreal beneath his fingers, as though what he touched had no more substance than a fistful of river fog. He stared up at the wizard’s face, hidden within the shadow of his hood and the thick folds of his scarf. “He is taking Volk to my brother! Please, they will murder Hans! You must stop them!”
The wizard’s eyes were an icy storm of steely grey as his voice spoke in a soft, hissing whisper. “This will be a second debt you will owe to me,” he stated, each word laden with menace rather than hope. “I do not forgive my debtors easily.”
Before Johann could reply, could even explain where his brother was, the hand he held became even less real, less solid bene
ath his fingers. While he watched, awestruck, the wizard’s body vanished, fading into nothingness like fog burned away by the sun. Almost before he could register what was happening, the wizard was gone, only a lingering chill in the air remaining behind.
Somehow, Johann knew he did not need to tell the sinister being about the Crown and Two Chairmen. He felt that the wizard already knew where his brother was. There was no secret, Johann felt, that could endure those eyes of mist and fog. Nothing could be hidden from that penetrating gaze, the gaze of the being Johann knew he too must call “master”.
Thanquol ground his fangs together as he followed the treacherous scent of Kratch, his duplicitous apprentice. The grey seer had decided to strangle the adept with his own entrails while allowing pain-pain snails to dissolve Kratch’s nethers with their acidic slime. Or perhaps he would have a Clan Moulder flesh-shaper open up the traitor’s belly and sew a live bonechewer inside. Watching Kratch squirm and writhe as the terrified mole clawed its way free would be deliciously entertaining.
Changes in the scent brought Thanquol to a halt. The fug of the sewer was oozing into the tunnel now, but mixed with it were the smells of battle: blood, fear-musk, the stench of burned fur and the noxious reek of warpfire. Thanquol cast a nervous glance at Boneripper, the immense monster lumbering beside him, forced into an awkward half-crouch by the low ceiling of the tunnel. It was on the tip of his tongue to order the brute back into the cellar, to dig out the other side of the cave-in and take their chances against the man-thing sorcerer. Whatever had befallen his cowardly underlings and their despicable new leader, the grey seer wanted no part of it.
01 - Grey Seer Page 24