Six casks of Reikland hock, three dead and two men missing. Johann knew he should be thankful that any of them were still alive, but he still couldn’t help but grumble over their losses. They’d accounted for at least two of Volk’s gang, but unfortunately he wasn’t one of the casualties. Not bad considering they’d been outnumbered three to one. Still, if Volk’s men had known the sewers half as well as the smugglers, there was no chance they’d have given the thugs the slip.
Then again, giving them the slip had also put Johann in a situation he hadn’t encountered in quite some time: he had no idea where they were. It was more than Volk’s men removing marks from the walls—Johann would swear on the Hammer of Sigmar he’d never seen this stretch of tunnel before. He tried to keep his confusion to himself, not wanting to panic the men. He felt that his brother had some inkling as to what was wrong but trusted him to keep quiet.
When they came upon the breach in the sewer wall, however, even the dullest of the surviving smugglers knew something was wrong. The jagged tear in the brickwork, like the yawning mouth of some immense snake, was certainly something they would remember, Johann edged forwards, peering through the opening. He risked lighting a candle. Beyond the breach was a tunnel, raw earthen walls that looked to have been carved out with bare hands rather than tools. There was a foul smell as well, a thick animal stench that even the reek of the sewers couldn’t overwhelm.
Hans appeared at his side, staring into the earthen tunnel. He glanced back, watching the fear grow in his small band of thieves.
“We can hide from Volk’s gang in here,” Hans proclaimed boldly, gambling that their fear of the unknown wasn’t quite so robust as their fear of Gustav Volk.
The gamble played out and soon the entire band of smugglers was creeping through the narrow, winding tunnel. The unsettling sound of earth shifting overhead and the occasional stream of dust falling from the ceiling did nothing to improve their spirits. But it was when the huge Emil Kleiner, a former stevedore before he decided that even so marginally legitimate a profession wasn’t to his taste, found the body that things really took a turn for the worse. His ear-battering shriek was such that if any of Volk’s gang were still following the smugglers, they could not fail to find their quarry now.
A snarled reprimand died on Johann’s lips as he stared down at the ugly, mangled thing that had so terrified Kleiner. The noxious carcass was almost man-sized, dressed in a crude grey robe even the most pathetic of Altdorf’s beggars would have refused to be seen in. It was covered in bloodied fur and its appearance, for all its mutilation, was that of a giant rat: a rat that seemed to have thought it was a man!
Frightened whispers came from the circle of smugglers gazing down on the thing. Half-remembered childhood tales of the verminous underfolk and their kidnapping ways rose to the forefront of each man’s mind. Several made the signs of Ranald and Sigmar, praying to their gods for deliverance from such mythic nightmares. Even Johann felt the nervous urge to glance down the tunnel, to discover if the dead thing had any of its living fellows about.
Hans bullied his way through the frightened men, sneering with contempt at both their fear and the unnatural corpse that sprawled at their feet. “Gunndred’s noose!” he swore. “What is wrong with you slack-jawed curs? Never seen a dead mutant before?” Hans punctuated his outburst with a strong kick to the dead thing’s horned skull. The corpse rolled obscenely from the impact.
Their leader’s outburst rallied the men and nervous laughter echoed in the crumbling tunnel. Hans was right of course, the smugglers decided. The thing was no more than a mutant wretch. Looking like it did, there was small wonder the scum had chosen to hide itself down in the sewers. The only thing remarkable about it was that it had avoided the witch hunters long enough to even reach the sewers.
Underfolk? Bah! Everyone with half a brain knew there was no such thing as the skaven!
The smugglers began following the tunnel once more. The air was dank and foul, leading Johann to believe it didn’t lead anywhere, but Hans was more obstinate. They passed carefully around several places that showed signs of recent collapse. Once, a great pool of black blood rewarded their investigation, seeming to seep from beneath a recent cave-in. The men carefully avoided the ominous sign and pressed on.
Not far from the cave-in, the smugglers found a large chamber. If anything, the air was even fouler here. The floor of the cavern was littered with bones and fresh offal putrid blood splashed everywhere and gobbets of gnawed meat splattered against the walls. A quick inspection told Johann that whatever the place had been, the other tunnels that opened into it had collapsed a long time ago. He tried not to look too closely at the strange bones and furry meat littering the floor.
“Look at that.” The words left Hans’ mouth in an awed whisper. The smuggler was staring in open wonder at a huge chunk of greenish stone resting at the centre of the room, glowing faintly with its own inner light. Johann felt his skin crawl just looking at it. He could tell most of the other men felt the same way.
“Black magic,” hissed old Mueller, the eye that hadn’t been pulled from its socket by an over-eager river pirate squinting with a mixture of suspicion and loathing. At his words, other smugglers began making the signs of their gods for protection.
“Maybe,” agreed Kempf, “but have you ever heard of any kind of magic that wasn’t worth a fair number of crowns?” The little thief scrambled forwards and joined Hans beside the weird rock. He grinned as he studied the thing, reaching out a hand and scratching at the rock. Kempf sniffed at his finger and his smile broadened.
“Wyrdstone,” Kempf declared. The eyes of every man present grew wide not from fear, but from greed. Wyrdstone was a valuable commodity, so valuable that even the lowest cutpurse knew its worth. A type of rock soaked in magic that, it was said, could do everything from curing shingles to turning lead into gold. It was said to be able to remove wrinkles from the old and build strength in the young. Pigments mixed with wyrdstone dust could allow even the most talentless artist to create a priceless masterpiece, and a single whiff of a wyrdstone poultice was certain protection from the evils of mutation and madness. Those who lusted after wyrdstone insisted it was a different substance from the abhorred warpstone, the raw stuff of Chaos that brought madness and mutation with its touch. Such connections were the delusions of ignorant, superstitious fools in their minds. There was almost nothing alchemists and wizards wouldn’t do to possess even a small measure of wyrdstone. What they were looking at was anything but a small measure.
Still, the avarice of the men was tempered by the grim knowledge that few substances in the Empire were as forbidden as wyrdstone. If there was nothing wizards wouldn’t do to get some, there was nothing the witch hunters wouldn’t do to anyone caught with any. Even for men who daily risked hanging or an indeterminable stay in Mundsen Keep, the thought of what the witch hunters did to heretics was sobering.
Hans stared at the glowing rock for several minutes, then nodded his head slowly. “Kempf, do you think you could find us a buyer for that thing?”
“One? Why not a dozen?” Kempf replied enthusiastically.
The answer decided Hans. “Kleiner, Mueller, fetch that thing down. We’ll take it back to the hideout.”
The men hesitated, but a sharp look from their leader had the pair lumbering up to the pile of bones and pulling down the heavy rock. They drew frayed rags from their pockets, wrapping them tightly about their faces to fend off any sorcerous fume, wound ribbons of torn cloth about their hands to defend their skin from the touch of magic. Johann felt a shiver pass through him as he saw the green light stretch and grip the arms of the men, casting a diseased pallor across their skin. The men carrying the rock didn’t seem to notice and Hans was already conferring with Kempf in a soft whisper, trying to figure out how they would best bring their strange discovery to market.
As they worked their way back down the crumbling tunnel, Johann could not share the optimism of his brother. He could not shake the impressio
n that far from making their fortune, their troubles had instead only just begun.
CHAPTER TWO
The Maze of Merciless Penance
In the flickering dark of the burning city, with the night pierced by the screams of dying men and the air stagnant with the stench of scorched flesh, he could feel power surge through his body. Raw, primal and awesome in its terrible magnificence, it roared through his veins like a living thing, firing every nerve and synapse, awakening them to the eldritch power that soaked his flesh.
Power! The power to rip apart mountains! Power to smash the puny warrens of his enemies and entomb them forever with their treachery! Power to obliterate the stinking hovels of the humans and grind that pathetic, preening breed beneath the clawed feet of the skaven! Power! Power second only to that of the Horned Rat himself, mightiest of gods!
No, he corrected himself. With such power he was no longer a simple thing of flesh and spirit. He was a god himself, ascended like the infamous blasphemer Kweethul the Vile! His was the power to rend and slay and rip and tear! His was the power to rule, to hold the entire Under-Empire, and the broken rubble of the miserable human surface realm, in a claw of iron. He would squeeze that claw until the world screamed and everything knew that it lived only because he allowed it.
Then the power flickered, cringing from him, retreating from his body like a wisp of ashy smoke from a smith’s furnace. His mind railed with horror as he felt his new-found magnificence deserting him. It was unfair, unjust that he should be cheated of his moment of ascendancy!
His eyes were pits of rage as he scoured the darkened streets of the burning city, looking for the traitor who had sabotaged his ultimate triumph. There would be blood and vengeance when he found them. He would bury his muzzle in their breast and gnaw out their beating heart with his fangs!
Then rage shattered in his mind, sent whimpering to some black corner of his being. The last of the divine power that had swept through his body abandoned him as he squirted the musk of fear from his glands.
There were figures moving in the dark street, striding purposefully through the swirling smoke and dancing embers. One was the tall straight figure of a man, his reek foully familiar as it struck the skaven’s senses. He felt only contempt for the man, but there was a reason he had vented his glands in terror.
If the man was here…
The second figure emerged from behind the veil of smoke. He was much shorter than the man, but stoutly and broadly built. Thick knots of muscle, like writhing jungle serpents, coiled around the apparition’s arms. Crude tattoos in the cut-scrawl of the dwarfs littered the figure’s bare chest and the sides of his shaven pate. A massive cock’s comb, dyed the same bright orange as the dwarf’s thick beard, sprouted from the centre of his otherwise shorn scalp. The dwarf’s battered face grinned evilly behind its old scars and bruises. A missing eye was covered by a weathered leather patch. The other eye burned into the skaven’s with a stare of murderous malevolence.
“This time, vermin, you taste my axe!”
Huge and cruelly sharp, like the hand of some savage daemon of war, the star-metal blade came hurtling towards the skaven, driven by all the monstrous power in the dwarf’s swollen arms…
Grey Seer Thanquol snapped awake, his entire body twitching in terror at the nightmare that had fallen upon his sleeping mind. Empty glands tried to squirt the fear-scent, but he could tell from the heavy fug that surrounded him that he had already emptied them in his sleep.
More troubling than his undignified display of scent, however, was the fact that he hadn’t heard himself cry out. Thanquol tried to open his jaws, finding them thickly tethered by a leather muzzle. Rolling his tongue around inside his mouth, he found that he had been further gagged with an iron bit. Instinctively he raised his hands to remove the vexing intrusion. He found his paws carefully bound by little mittens of iron, his clawed fingers safely locked away inside the cold metal shell.
Panic thundered inside Thanquol’s chest, his heart hammering like a crazed goblin against his ribs. Carefully, desperately, Thanquol forced himself to become calm. Turn fear into hate, he told himself. It was the maxim that had built the Under-Empire and given the skaven race dominance of the underworld. Fear wouldn’t do anything to help him now. Hate, however, just might. Revenge was a powerful incentive for staying alive.
Thanquol cursed the nightmare memory of that devil-spawned dwarf and the preening human he kept as a pet. All of his misery and misfortune had started the day that whoreson pair intruded into his affairs. He was so close, so tantalisingly close to achieving the grand plot he had proposed to Seerlord Kritislik. The traitorous human dupe he had spent so long training and grooming to become his pawn was finally reaching his potential, finally ready to be put to the purpose Thanquol required of him. Fritz von Halstadt, chief of Nuln’s secret police, would have murdered the brother of the human emperor once Thanquol provided him with “evidence” that the aristocrat was involved in a conspiracy against the countess of Nuln. Thanquol understood enough about the brood loyalty of humans, even if he found it incomprehensible. The Emperor would retaliate, the countess would resist, believing the evidence von Halstadt presented her. War would be the result, war between the Emperor and the wealthy warren-kingdom of Nuln. Favours and loyalties owed to both sides would cause the conflict to spread, and where these were not enough, agents of the skaven would sow further lies and deception. Before long, the humans would be slaughtering one another wholesale. When they were weak enough, the skaven would emerge from their burrows and take their rightful place as inheritors of the surface world.
Such a grand scheme, surely inspired by the Horned Rat himself! Even the seerlords had been impressed, though Kritislik had insisted on tampering with it slightly so that he could claim part of the glory when the humans were brought to ruin. Perhaps that was where things had started to go wrong, when Seerlord Kritislik had started tinkering with Thanquol’s brilliant vision. It was a thought that had occurred to Thanquol before, but one he knew it would not take a gag to prevent him from ever speaking aloud.
He doubted if even Seerlord Kritislik could contrive a scheme complicated enough to employ that hell-sent dwarf as a pawn, either willing or unwittingly. Yet who else could have managed such a feat if not Kritislik? Thanquol refused to believe it had been dumb blind randomness that had drawn the dwarf and his pet across his path. Everything would have succeeded but for them! Thanquol would have become the most renowned grey seer since Gnawdoom rescued the Black Ark from the wizard who dared steal it from its sanctuary deep beneath Skavenblight.
It was too much to think that it was circumstance that caused the cursed pair to kill von Halstadt before Thanquol could make use of him. Too much to think that any dwarf, however crazed, could fell a mighty rat ogre like his unfortunate Boneripper with a single blow! Nor was that the end of their meddling. The pair had lingered in the human warren-kingdom of Nuln, interfering in Thanquol’s attempts to recover the situation. They had spoiled his efforts to abduct the countess, ruined his attempt to cement an alliance with the warlock engineers of Clan Skryre by stealing a human-built steam-tank, and thwarted his all-out attack against Nuln itself, an attack that by rights should have left the city a smouldering crater.
Oh, to be certain the Lords of Decay had been most lavish in their praise of Thanquol’s efforts. They had tactfully ignored the intention of his grand scheme and instead focused upon the damage inflicted on the man-city and the severe losses suffered by the warriors of Clan Skab during the fighting. Clan Skab, they said, had been growing seditious. As a result of the fighting in Nuln, they were now too weak to act on any rebellious thoughts. Seerlord Kritislik himself had rewarded Thanquol, presenting him with a new rat ogre to replace the one he had lost. He was even given freedom and resources to pursue his vendetta against the cursed dwarf and his underling.
Thanquol should have suspected then, but he allowed his own ambition and his deep need for revenge to cloud his judgement. He gathered
a new band of minions and pursued the dwarf far into the north. The battle that followed should have been a resounding victory; Thanquol had planned it out to the smallest detail. Instead his wretched minions had allowed themselves to be destroyed and routed by the filthy dwarfs. His second Boneripper performed even more wretchedly than its predecessor, killed by the dwarf’s pet before it could even lay a paw on him! Thanquol was right to have been suspicious. Few skaven would have had such sharp instincts. If he’d trusted the miserable wretch to protect him… hadn’t it been Kritislik who had suggested he employ the rat ogre as a bodyguard?
Pursuing the dwarf and his allies had led Thanquol even further north, most of his carefully hoarded wealth being spent to gather more warriors and to purchase a proper bodyguard, a hulking beast worthy of the name Boneripper. To remind Seerlord Kritislik of the importance of Thanquol’s brilliant and cunning mind, he sent a runner back to Skavenblight telling the Lords of Decay about the airship the dwarfs had built and in which his despised enemy had so cravenly quit the battlefield. Now he was not simply going to accomplish the elimination of a hated foe of the Under-Empire, but also secure a technology that made the loss of the steam-tank in Nuln insignificant.
But things continued to go wrong. His agent, the snivelling and faithless Lurk Snitchtongue, who in his foresight Thanquol had sent to hide in the airship before its escape, returned from his experience mutated and savage, exposed to the raw forces of the blighted Chaos Wastes. His paw-picked warriors, after occupying the airship’s staging area in Kislev and imprisoning its human defenders, were too glutted on their recent successes to obey his exacting commands when the airship returned. Had they followed his strict orders, the damnable contraption would have been his and all its miserable occupants at the grey seer’s mercy. Instead they had foolishly, treacherously rushed in and gotten themselves slaughtered. Even the wretched dolt of a rat ogre managed to get itself killed. Boneripper! Fah! Thanquol always knew the gruesome things were nothing but bad luck!
[Thanquol & Boneripper 01] - Grey Seer Page 3