03 - Thanquol's Doom

by C. L. Werner - (ebook by Undead)

  “Great-mighty Thanquol!” Skraekual screamed. “Not-not great-mighty now-now!” He raised the Hand, the unseen power gripping Thanquol responding by smashing him against the ceiling. Sparks flashed in Thanquol’s eyes as the wind was squeezed out of his lungs. Coughing and spitting, he could only flail his legs in a feeble effort at escape.

  Laughing, Skraekual made a dismissive wave of his paw. Instantly, Thanquol was flung to the floor with bone-jarring force. Before he could even think about trying to rise, a tremendous force crushed him flat again, feeling as though a giant had stepped on him. He squirmed in agony beneath the steadily mounting pressure, frantically trying to concentrate on a spell, any spell, that would keep him from being squished like an insect by Skraekual’s magic.

  The gloating Skraekual paced across the cave, chuckling evilly, his entire body twitching in a spasm of vermicidal glee. “What-what does great-mighty Thanquol say-squeak now!”

  Thanquol looked past his tormentor and a vicious grin spread across his face. “Goodbye, Skraekual,” he snarled, provoking a confused look on Skraekual’s face. “Boneripper! Rip-tear-kill-crush!”

  Skraekual had been so fixated on his torment of Thanquol that he hadn’t noticed the skeletal rat-ogre stir from the rubble, or his own proximity to the hulking automaton. Before he could even turn around, Boneripper’s immense hand closed about Skraekual’s horned head. With one vicious tug, the rat-ogre pulled the grey seer’s head from his shoulders.

  The force pressing Thanquol against the floor instantly vanished. Painfully, he crept across the cave, kicking Skraekual’s head. “Traitor-meat!” he spat, giving it another kick. “Scat-rat! Tick-popper! Warp-witted snake-suckler!” Thanquol cried out in pain as he cut one of his toes on Skraekual’s horn. Glaring vindictively at the battered head, he focused his will and sent a blast of pure aethyric energy hammering down upon the object of his ire. Beneath the wave of raw magic, Skraekual’s head burst into bloody splinters of fur and bone.

  Panting from his fury and his exertions, Thanquol turned towards his enemy’s body. Exhaustion was forgotten as he spotted the Hand of Vecteek still clutched in Skraekual’s dead paws. Avarice again shone in Thanquol’s eyes. Having been on the receiving end of the talisman’s power, he was better able to appreciate its ability to augment the magic of its possessor.

  With a trembling paw, Thanquol reached out to claim the Hand for his own. At the last instant, however, his natural caution reasserted itself. Skraekual had acted even more insane than usual at the end, a condition that Thanquol could only believe had been brought about by using the Hand. Granted, the fool had been nowhere near the sorcerer that Thanquol was, but still there might be some sort of curse on the thing. A skaven proverb maintained that he who sticks his neck out ends up in the larder.

  Thanquol leaned back, staring suspiciously at the Hand. Again, greed and lust for power flared up in his black heart, driving back his instinctive fear. There was another skaven proverb that advised to take what you can when you can. It was sheer idiocy to leave anything so powerful just lying around. Besides, it would be safe enough to carry the Hand around. The danger would come from trying to use it. But a skaven of his stalwart resolve would hardly fall prey to that sort of temptation.

  His paw trembling with an almost overwhelming mix of fear and greed, Thanquol seized the gruesome artefact.

  Taking a sniff of warpstone-snuff to calm his nerves after his ordeal, Thanquol barked a sharp order at Boneripper. With the traitor Skraekual dealt with and the Hand of Vecteek now in the possession of a loyal servant of the Lords of Decay, it was time to be quit of these gloomy old burrows. He was eager to be back in Bonestash. He could explain his associate’s treason, make his apologies to Ikit Claw and Rikkit Snapfang and then be on his way back to Skavenblight. When he presented the Hand to Kritislik, the old villain would be forced to acknowledge the wisdom and cunning of his most faithful servant.

  Creeping back down the passageway, Boneripper limping after him, Thanquol thought that it really was too bad Bokha had been killed. That idiot would have been just stupid and tractable enough to use the Hand on Thanquol’s behalf, thereby solving the problem of any curse attached to it.

  Still, Kritislik would reward him well. It wasn’t every day an artefact like the Hand of Vecteek was returned to the Shattered Tower.

  As Thanquol and Boneripper vanished around a bend in the tunnel, the dust kicked up by the fight in Thratsnik’s lair slowly settled. Thrown from its ancient seat, the mummy of the old grey seer lay crumpled in one corner of the lair. Its robes had crumbled away, exposing its bony frame and the withered stump where one of its paws should have been.

  There seemed an expression of vengeful amusement on the mummy’s shrivelled face.

  The war-room of Karak Angkul was a frenzy of activity. King Logan and his generals were gathered about the massive granite table which dominated the centre of the room. Arrayed before their steely stares was a three-dimensional model of the dwarfhold and its labyrinth of tunnels, galleries and deeps. Scattered throughout the model were tiny iron statues of warriors, their chests each engraved with a different rune. The statues denoted the positions of the hold’s warriors.

  “If there is trouble, it will come from the Sixth Deep,” Thane Arngar, one of the king’s generals, warned. He gestured with his hairy hand at a section of statues arranged in the twisting maze of mines beneath the Sixth Deep. “We should concede the mines and concentrate our troops in the Sixth Deep.”

  “Concede the mines!” roared the heavy-set Guildmaster Borgo Flintheart, head of the Miners’ Guild. “Leave the thieving thaggoraki down there with our gold? You must be bozdok!”

  “The ratkin don’t care about gold,” Thane Arngar told Borgo, “and the mines are too numerous to mount a proper defence down there. No, the plan must be to concede the mines and lure the ratkin into the Sixth Deep where we can bring the full weight of our warriors against them.”

  “We can move some of the reserves from the upper deeps as well,” opined another of the generals. “There’s no sense keeping them where they’re not needed. The Overguard in the First Deep has to stay, of course, just in case the ratkin have stirred up some of the grobi tribes to cause us trouble.”

  King Logan nodded as he considered the proposal. Weighing the benefits and dangers, he turned towards the one dwarf who had up until now been silent during the war council. “What do you think, Klarak?” he asked. “You’ve just come back from fighting these devils. Are they likely to strike out for the Sixth Deep if we pull out from the mines?”

  Klarak Bronzehammer picked up one of the iron statues standing in a section of the mine shafts. Grimly, he set the statue down. “I would advise keeping the patrols in place and keeping the reserves where they are. It never pays to try to guess what ratkin will do. They are base, honourless creatures and their minds are as crooked as a goblin’s heart. We have two choices. We can try to strike them first, which means taking the fight to their warrens. To do that, we’d have to take almost every able-bodied dwarf in the hold.”

  “And the other option?”

  “We try to eliminate their leader,” Klarak stated firmly. “The ratkin are all cowards. They’ll lose heart if we can kill their leader before the battle even begins.”

  “That’s why you want to keep the patrols down in the mines,” said Thane Arngar. “You are hoping they can spot this Grey Seer Thanquol before he can slither back to his own kind.”

  Klarak nodded. “Eliminating Thanquol is vital if we are going to save Karak Angkul from destruction.”

  Any further debate was interrupted by a disturbance at the door to the war-room. Two of King Logan’s hammerers appeared, marching into the enormous hall with the practised precision of a steam hammer. Between them, they escorted a ragged, unkempt dwarf who wore only a set of ill-fitting breeches and the heavy blanket draped over his shoulders.

  “Sire, this dwarf was discovered at the Great Gate petitioning for entrance,” one of th
e hammerers stated. “He claims he has urgent information he must report to your highness.” The hammerer’s face twisted into a crooked grin. “He wants to warn us that the ratkin are going to attack Karak Angkul.”

  The report brought a grim chuckle from some of the assembled dwarfs. Any warning about ratmen attacking the stronghold was very late in coming.

  The bedraggled dwarf straightened his body when he noted the mockery in his escort’s voice. Throwing off his blanket, he puffed out his scarred chest. “I am Mordin Grimstone of Karak Izor,” he said. “I was a prisoner of the skaven. For weeks I have been wandering the Ungdrin Ankor trying to make my way back to civilisation. While I was making my way here, I followed the ratkin warhost and overheard the plans of their leaders to attack Karak Angkul.”

  “Did you get a good look at these leaders?” Klarak asked. It would go ill for the hold if Mordin had stumbled upon an entirely different army that was marching to join the one already threatening the hold.

  “There were two who seemed in charge,” Mordin said. “One was a horned ratkin they called Thanquol.” The escaped prisoner’s voice dripped with venom as he named the monster he had sworn to destroy. “The other was an iron-faced creature with a huge metal hand they called Ikit Claw.”

  Klarak’s face went pale when he heard the name of the second skaven leader. He turned towards King Logan.

  “Sire, I am afraid I’ve been wrong,” the engineer said. “If Ikit Claw is with our enemies then the peril is greater than I imagined.” Klarak cast his gold-flake eyes across the dwarf generals, fixing each of them with his steely stare.

  “It is not just Karak Angkul which is now in danger,” he told them. “But the whole of the Karak Ankor!”

  Chapter XI

  Klarak Bronzehammer leaned against the table, his intense stare boring into the faces of the gathered generals and leaders of Karak Angkul. For once, even Guildmaster Thori kept silent, reading from the frightened pallor of Klarak’s face that he was about to relate something of dire import. Even the engineer’s worst detractors acknowledged that he was no coward.

  “I first tangled with Ikit Claw when he raided Kraka Drak and tried to take many of the hold’s engineers away as slaves,” Klarak began. “Since then our paths have crossed several times. The last was in the dragon caves beneath Karak Azul. That time, he was trying to recreate an ancient ratkin weapon of vast destructive power, something he called the Doomsphere.”

  “Typically grandiose ratkin name,” said Guildmaster Thori. “Every piece of trash they knock together the vermin call the Big Sharp Stick of Exploding Death or the Backscratcher of Infinite Destruction.”

  “Except this time, the weapon could really do what the ratkin expected it to do,” Klarak said. “I saw the thing with my own eyes, a great orb of steel the size of a steamship and packed with raw wyrdstone.”

  The description brought a few gasps from Runelord Morag and the other runesmiths. More than any of the other dwarfs present, they understood the connection between warpstone and dark magic. They had some inkling of the destructive potential for a device such as the one Klarak described.

  “What did the ratkin expect to use this weapon for?” King Logan asked, fearing he already knew the answer.

  “Destroy every dwarfhold in the Worlds Edge,” Klarak told him. “Ikit Claw constructed his wyrdstone bomb over the fault running beneath Karak Azul. If he’d been able to unleash the power of his weapon, he could have precipitated an earthquake the likes of which no dwarf has seen since the Time of Woes.”

  Cries of alarm spread through the war-room, the magnitude of what Klarak described shaking many of the assembled dwarfs to the very core.

  “How did you stop him?” asked Thane Erkii.

  Klarak’s expression became even more dour, a haunted quality entering his eyes. “I’m not sure that I did,” he confessed. “Myself and my companions fought our way through Ikit’s minions, slaying scores of the ratkin. The Claw saw us coming and in his craven wickedness, he activated the Doomsphere moments before we could reach it. The huge machine shuddered into hideous life, the stink of skaven engines venting from its exhausts in a caustic cloud of green gas. If not for the protective gear I’d ordered my companions to bring along, all of us would have met our ancestors in that moment. I saw ratkin without protection doubled-over beside the weapon, coughing out pieces of their own lungs as the gas scorched their innards.

  “A rearguard of ratkin continued to protect the Doomsphere, each wearing a heavy respirator. While my comrades fought these vermin, I charged through their ranks and assaulted the hell-machine itself. Employing a steam hammer, I tried to smash my way through the steel shell to get at whatever mechanisms were inside.

  “I had only just begun my assault before I found myself attacked by Ikit Claw himself. The ratkin had strengthened his frail body with an exoskeleton of iron powered by infernal skaven sorceries. His left arm had been fitted with an enormous metal claw within which had been built one of the ratkin’s diabolic fire-throwers.”

  The engineer closed his eyes and sighed deeply. “I managed to elude the ratkin’s fire, but the iron frame he wore protected him from my pistol. The filthy beast then tried to crush me with his magic, but the ancestor badges I wore guarded me against his spells. I was able to close upon the monster, bringing him low with blows from my hammer until his metal claw was an unrecognisable mass of scrap. Before I could finish him, however, the Doomsphere began to shriek and shiver. One of the steel plates from the machine’s roof was ripped free, flung across the cavern as though shot from a cannon. A searing blast of greenish light burst from the resulting tear in the Doomsphere’s skin, scorching the roof of the cavern and raining rocks down upon those below.

  “Ikit Claw broke away from me, but the ratkin had lost the appetite for battle. He turned his gaze to the hole in the top of his machine, and in his eyes was an expression of such wrath as I’ve never seen. I moved to close upon the ratkin once more, but even as I did, a panel in the side of the Doomsphere was blown loose, a stream of burning light erupting from the rent and blocking my path to the warlock.

  “By this time, the entire cavern was coming apart. Rocks fell like rain from the savaged roof and the vibrations of the Doomsphere were making the ground quiver and quake. The ratkin were fleeing in their multitudes, slinking back into the dark, trying to escape the disintegrating machine. More steel plates burst as the power within the sphere continued to mount. As an engineer, it was obvious to me that the machine was going to self-destruct, that no power could restrain its raging energies now.

  “I quickly gathered my companions and together we fled from the cavern. My last look back found Ikit Claw still struggling at the controls of his Doomsphere, trying to induce it to power-down. A few minutes later, and I was bowled over by the shock wave of a tremendous explosion. The cavern, and everything within it, was buried by tons of rock.”

  “But it appears that Ikit Claw escaped the destruction of his machine,” King Logan observed.

  “That is what concerns me,” Klarak said. “From Mordin’s description, there can be no doubt he saw Ikit Claw.”

  “You think this creature would be crazed enough to repeat such a fiendish experiment?” Guildmaster Thori asked.

  “For what the records tell us,” Lorekeeper Azram answered, “we know that the ratkin are given to obsessions. Once it has entered their mind to do a thing, they will try to do it, regardless of their own losses or the obstacles in their way.”

  Klarak paced along the table, staring at the three-dimensional map. “More to the point, we can’t afford to assume Ikit Claw doesn’t intend to construct another Doomsphere. The situation of Karak Angkul is much like that of Karak Azul. The same underground fault links us. Detonating his weapon here might serve the same purpose as detonating it beneath Karak Azul.”

  “You can’t be sure of that,” Guildmaster Thori said. “There is no basis upon which to base your theory.” The old dwarf snorted with disapproval.
“But I’ve grown used to your unproven theories.”

  King Logan ran his hand along the length of his beard, thinking hard about what Klarak had said. The dwarfs were always a cautious people, but they also weren’t prone to abandoning themselves to imaginary terrors. “How can we know if this ratkin warlock is up to something?”

  “You might look for anything unusual,” Klarak said. “Anything that is abnormal. Something that doesn’t fit the model of ratkin raids.”

  “You mean like the mines?” Thane Erkii asked. All eyes turned to the Minemaster, fixing the undivided attention of the war council upon him. The thane shifted uncomfortably in his seat, unaccustomed to having the king and his advisors hanging on his every word.

  “The last two patrols in the mines have reported some strange things,” Thane Erkii explained. “They’ve found some of the support beams missing.”

  “Ratkin are always vandalising our diggings,” observed Guildmaster Borgo.

  Thane Erkii shook his head. “Not in this fashion. The beams were removed, but the ratkin had built new supports to replace them and prevent the tunnel from collapsing. Naturally, their crude constructions were spotted right-off but…”

  “Where did this happen?” Klarak demanded, an urgency in his voice.

  Thane Erkii thought for a moment, then drew the connection Klarak feared. “All the beams they stole were the ones from your workshop. The ones you sent…”

  “Have your dwarfs remove every beam that is still down there before the ratkin can steal them!” Klarak ordered, forgetting his place in the magnitude of the fear growing inside him. He shot an apologetic look at King Logan. The king waved aside his remorse and repeated the engineer’s orders to Thane Erkii.

  “Why the need for haste?” wondered Guildmaster Thori.

  “Because I was right to doubt my sabotage was enough to destroy the Doomsphere,” Klarak told him. “It was a design flaw that caused the machine to destroy itself. The steel plating wasn’t tough enough to contain the energies of the Doomsphere as it started to power-up.”