Warhammer - [Brunner the Bounty Hunter 02] - Blood and Steel

by C L Werner (lit)

  No, the necromancer might have placed traps or spells to guard the lower floors, but it appeared he had fallen into the same trap that many a wealthy merchant had come to regret.

  The bounty hunter peered into the darkened room off the balcony. It was not quite as empty as the one opposite. Piles of rubbish and heaps of mouldering clothing littered the room. Brunner kicked at one of the rubbish piles, noting with indifference the rotting head which rolled free, disturbing the enormous rat that had been gnawing at the carrion. Brunner kicked a second rubbish pile, to reveal a number of human bones. Apparently the necromancer employed this room as a repository for the refuse from his studies.

  As he strode across the room, one of the piles of rubbish rose awkwardly to its feet. The shape that confronted Brunner was only partially human, made all the more hideous for its rapidly diminishing kinship to the race of man. Its skin was pallid. Ugly green boils were scattered across its flesh, and a loathsome, mouldylooking rash covered half its face and neck. The head was misshapen, like a melon crushed out of symmetry by a strongman's grip. Scraggly scraps of hair dangled from a diseased scalp. The face was devoid of humanity, a rotten stump of nose perched atop a wide fang-filled mouth. Scraps of clothing clung to the creature's lean frame, and it was caked in filth and gore.

  More horrible though was the activity Brunner had interrupted. As the monster's eyes glared at Brunner from the pits of its face, it dropped the decaying arm it had been chewing on and wiped the back of one of its clawed hands across its bloodstained mouth. The bounty hunter could hear the ghoul's wasted belly growl with hunger as it took a step towards him.

  The bounty hunter had heard of such beings before, putrid corpse-eaters that were sometimes kept by necromancers as labourers and protectors. They were not truly dead, these soulless wretches, rather they were insane, morbid men whose unspeakable choice of nourishment had destroyed their own humanity. They were little more than beasts, and no more intelligent than a clever dog. But with its poison-dripping claws, a ghoul had very little need of more than animal cunning.

  The ghoul took another step forward, a low moan escaping its bloodied mouth. Brunner could see the muscles tensing in the creature's emaciated frame as it prepared to pounce. The bounty hunter had no desire to test the quality of his armour on the ghoul's venomous claws, nor could he risk the commotion of a full-fledged fight. With lightning reflexes, Brunner pointed his crossbow pistol at the slavering corpse-eater and sent a bolt smashing through its left eye.

  The ghoul gave a single gasp as its eye exploded, then fell to the floor, twitching for several moments as life faded from its brain. The bounty hunter replaced his weapon. He hoped that the sound of the creatures fall was no greater than the creature might make on its own, and that it would go unnoticed by its master.

  Brunner stalked from the room, pausing in the open doorway. Like most of the buildings in this district, the doors had been salvaged long ago, leaving behind empty frames. He craned his helmed head around the corner, pistol at the ready. He sincerely hoped that the necromancer would not expect an intruder to set upon him from above. But with dabblers in the dark arts, Brunner had found that it paid to take nothing for granted.

  He cautiously emerged into the hallway and began a systematic search of the upper rooms. Many of them were empty, but he found two that bore signs of habitation. One of these had even had a bed and a wardrobe.

  Descending a rotting staircase, and testing every step before putting his weight on it, Brunner began to examine the rooms of the lower floor. He paused before a heavy wooden door to the left of the base of the stairs. He closed a gloved hand about the knob, trying to open the portal. With a scraping sound, the warped door moved, freeing itself from the equally distorted wood of the jamb.

  The bounty hunter tensed, listening for any sound that suggested he had disturbed something in the house. After a moment, he pushed the door open fully, pistol held at the ready. The room was dark, lit only by a dingy light filtering through dust-choked windows. Several inches of water pooled over the floor, and the broken remains of chairs and tables lay amid the brackish, stagnant water.

  A mottled orange and green salamander slid away from the dry area near the door and swam off into the dark waters.

  Brunner left the room and pulled the door closed. Even a necromancer would not use rooms in such a state. He looked about him, studying the hallway. There was evidence of seepage now that he looked for it: the walls were warped and discoloured several inches above the floor. Just as he began to turn to retrace his steps and examine the third floor of the house, he noted something peculiar. The height of the water damage was noticeably less further west along the hall. Clearly the ground upon which the house had been situated had begun to shift, causing the once level ground to tilt. Not enough to be readily visible perhaps, but enough to cause the intrusive moisture to remain in the eastern section where the depression was greater.

  The bounty hunter made his way along the corridor, opening the few rotting doors to inspect the rooms beyond. He knew that the subjects of a necromancer's science were bodies - heavy, fragile corpses stolen from graves and gibbets. If the villain were able, he would have set up his laboratory in one of the lower rooms, rather than hauling heavy specimens up flights of treacherous stairs. And the laboratory would be where he would find the mummy of Nehb-ka-menthu.

  It was the third door Brunner opened that led to the laboratory. It was a large low-ceilinged chamber, the height of the room being further diminished by a secondary flooring of old doors, shutters and other pieces of scavenged wood a precaution against the wetness, no doubt, as the old floor had been rotted away by the creeping damp. A number of shelves lined the walls, their upper ranks laden with scrolls, books and what looked like pieces of alchemical apparatus, while the lower ones were bare. Hanging from the support beams were a number of gruesome paintings, their subjects various necrotic bodies in assorted degrees of dissection and decay, charts to lead the necromancer in his studies. Two partially decomposed bodies rested against the north wall of the room, like a pair of logs, so stiff and rigid were their dead shapes.

  Brunner looked over the room quickly, unmoved by the horror and loathsomeness of the things the necromancer had accumulated in his twisted studies. What interested the bounty hunter was the object lying upon a long wooden table in the centre of the room.

  The mummy stretched nearly the entire length of the seven-foot table. Encased in mouldering funeral wrappings that had become grey-green with age and decay, the corpse was like some withered ogre. Brunner could see that in life, Nehb-ka-menthu had been a powerful man, broad of shoulder and long of limb. The bounty hunter strode closer, curious despite himself to get a better look at the long-dead priest-king of Khareops. He could see that the wrappings still bore faint traces of pigment, like oily smudge marks, presumably the last remains of the once vivid and vibrant picture writing of the liche-priests of Nehekhara.

  The cloth was stretched tight about the shrivelled remains and Brunner could make out the face of the dead ruler through its mask of grey-green. The face was largely intact, displaying a dome-like brow, high cheeks and a firm jaw. There was a look of power and cruelty about the dead face that suggested an implacable will and a ruthlessness that might endure even the trial of the grave.

  Brunner drew away from the mummy, pulling Mahrun's holy stake from his belt. 'I wouldn't have liked to have run into you when you were alive,' he muttered to the motionless husk. 'Let's just make sure you don't cause me any problems now that you are dead.' He lifted the stake, holding it above the sunken chest of the mummy, and placed the point against its left breast.

  THE BOUNTY HUNTER found himself suddenly and violently thrown to the floor, the stake rattling across the wooden covering. He cursed his lack of caution. He should have heard someone approaching, but he had been so intent upon examining the mummy, that he had failed to hear his attacker's approach. As he began to lift himself from the floor, a powerful kick lashed int
o his midsection, throwing him back. The bounty hunter crashed against one of the shelves, knocking books and bones from the upper shelves and snapping one of the lower ones in half as his body smashed into it.

  On his back, Brunner could see his attacker now. He was a huge man, thick cords of muscle wove about his limbs, and his chest was a great mass of meat and sinew. He wore ragged clothing, much befouled by mud and less mentionable stains. The man's head was covered only by a few patchy spots of blond hair, his features broad, his mouth open in an idiot grin. Auburn eyes stared dimly at Brunner, fixed in a bleary dullard's gaze. In many ways, the bounty hunter was reminded of the thing he had killed in the room above. Perhaps this brute was also becoming a ghoul, sustaining himself on whatever his master did not employ in his foul experiments. The man made some inarticulate sounds with his thick, useless tongue, then shambled toward the intruder, setting down a leather sack he had been carrying.

  The half-wit stooped to grab at Brunner's body, to lift him from the floor in a crushing embrace. The bounty hunter did not give him a chance. He rose to meet the muscle man, swinging around the object his questing fingers had closed on - a broken length of shelf. The splintered wood smashed into the idiot's face. Bright red blood and yellowed teeth sprayed across the wall behind him. The big man staggered back, one hand clutching at his injury, blood drooling from his ravaged mouth.

  Brunner did not give the idiot a chance to recover, but was on him in an instant, smashing the board once again into the man's head. The wretch staggered with the force of the blow, and retreated from the bounty hunter, making pathetic noises with his malformed tongue. His dim eyes stared stupidly at the man who was now attacking him. Brunner swung the board around a third time, this time cracking the wood across the big man's skull. The idiot dropped like a pole-axed ox, his big body splintering the scavenged wood on the floor as he fell. Brunner closed upon the prone body, kicking the man's head with his steel-toed boot. He had felt the strength in those arms and was not about to take the chance that the dreg might get back up.

  Panting with his exertions and trying to reclaim the breath the idiot's kick had forced from his lungs, Brunner knelt and retrieved the wooden stake from the floor. Pausing for a moment to collect himself, he strode back to the table and the withered corpse resting upon it.

  'Where were we?' he asked as he placed the point of the stake once more over the mummy's shrivelled heart. Once again, he was kept from finishing his task.

  'LEAVE THAT ALONE and get out of here!' shouted a voice from the doorway of the laboratory. Brunner spun around, dropping the stake to draw his pistol from its belt. Framed in the doorway was a thin, scraggly apparition. The man wore a loose cassock of dark blue trimmed with grey fur and tassels of hair. His brown hair was greasy and hung in ratty ropes about his unpleasant, slippery face. His skin had an unpleasant, sickly hue, as though he had bathed in pus and not dried the filth from his body.

  Like his servant, the necromancer also bore a leather sack, which he dropped to the floor in alarm. From it, the butchered remains of a freshly exhumed corpse spilled onto the floor. The bounty hunter had chosen a good time to make his entrance, the necromancer had been away, securing his sickening materials from one of Miragliano's morgues. But fortune had deserted Brunner just as readily. The necromancer was home now.

  The necromancer did not wait to see if the intruder would comply with his command. In one of his filthy hands, he gripped a severed hand, green with rot. Before Brunner could fire his pistol, the necromancer growled a word of loathsome power. The severed hand gave off a sickly light. The necromancer threw his free hand forward, casting a fistful of dust at the bounty hunter. Brunner dodged the particles of corruption that glowed with the same hue as the wasted extremity held by the necromancer. The dust impacted against the shelves behind Brunner, sizzling like acid as it withered the wood and corroded the leather bound tomes.

  Carandini uttered a sharp hiss as Brunner rolled away from the attack. The bounty hunter fired at the necromancer, the shot passing through the loose garment and burying itself in the rotten wood of the door. Brunner swore under his breath. Either some flaw in the symmetry of the ball had thrown off his shot or some dire sorcery warded his target. He rose from his crouch, holstering the pistol and unslinging the repeater crossbow from his back.

  The necromancer glared at Brunner, eerie witch-fire gathering in the hollow pits of his eyes. Carandini let the severed murderer's paw fall and clutched at the empty air with his wasted, claw-like fingers. Low, filthy sounds dribbled from the man's puffy pink lips. Brunner took aim hastily, determined to put a bolt between the necromancer's eyes before he could work his black sorcery. But before he could fire, a vice-like grip closed upon his boot, crushing his ankle with the fury of a wolf-trap.

  Brunner stared down at his feet. Dull, idiot eyes stared back at him from a cracked and splintered face. There was no question that Carandini's feeble-minded assistant was dead: pulpy coils of brain hung from the ruptures in his skull. What animated the hulking brute's movements, what enabled him to reach out and grab his killer, was only a twisted perversion of life, a horrible violation of the laws of death brought into being by the necromancer.

  The pressure on Brunner's foot increased until he thought the clutching fingers would crack his very bones. Clearly the strength of the already powerful dreg had been increased by this unnatural state of pseudo-life. Brunner brought the crossbow swinging low, firing into the monster at his feet. The first bolt exploded the zombie's skull, spilling brains and dark blood across the floor. A second bolt burrowed into the monster's back. The zombie grew tense as its unnatural life ebbed away, and its twice slain muscles tensed into the wooden rigidity of death. Brunner howled as the grip on his boot increased with the zombie's destruction.

  Brunner had no time to extract himself from the crushing grip. The sound of shuffling feet demanded his attention. The two bodies he had noted leaning against the wall had been stirred into motion by Carandini's incantation. The zombies moved forward with stiff, awkward steps, rotting garments and flesh hanging from their wretched forms in ragged strips. Lifeless eyes were trained upon the trapped bounty hunter as they ponderously advanced upon him. The necromancer gloated from behind the long table. He was peering above the embalmed hulk of the priest-king, using the ancient body for cover. Brunner considered loosing one of his remaining crossbow bolts at the fiend, but decided that the shot would be too uncertain.

  Instead, he fired his last two bolts into the oncoming zombies. The first walking corpse staggered and fell as the steel bolt punched through its rotten skull and embedded itself in the wall behind the undead automaton. As it hit the floor, a greasy putrid fluid bubbled from its wound, yellow with corruption, black with the dried remnants of the corpse's blood. Brunner fired his last bolt at the other zombie. The missile impacted in the corpse's face, sticking from its cheek like a macabre growth of bone. The zombie staggered from the force of the impact, but uttered no sound of anguish or injury. It merely swung its body around and began to shuffle relentlessly towards the bounty hunter once more.

  Brunner threw the spent skaven crossbow at the approaching zombie and drew Drakesmalice from its sheath. Gripping the sword tightly, Brunner swung it downward, severing the wrist that had closed upon his ankle. He stepped away, favouring his uninjured foot. The other zombie took another shambling step forward, its wasted limbs groping toward him. Brunner leaned his body away from the necrotic thing and swung Drakesmalice at its neck. The sword clove easily through the rotted flesh and the desiccated head flew from its shoulders, bounced from the near wall and rolled across the floor. The headless body stood for a moment, devoid of motion, before toppling sidewise to the floor, rigid in its second death.

  Carandini gave a yelp of fright as he watched the last zombie expire. He bounded away from the long table, scrambling toward the doorway. Brunner hobbled towards the man, murderous eyes blazing from beneath his visor. Carandini had chosen his cover only too well, f
or by positioning himself behind the table, he had also placed the bounty hunter between himself and the door. The necromancer hissed like a serpent, spun around and dashed toward one of the shelves. The bounty hunter paused, pulling a throwing knife from the bandoleer across his chest.

  'Wait!' pleaded Carandini. The necromancer held a small glass vial he had removed from the shelf in an upraised hand. Brunner pulled back his own hand to hurl the knife into the wizard's body. 'This contains bog fire!' Carandini declared, his slippery voice at once threatening and pleading. 'If I drop this, this entire room will go up!'

  Brunner hesitated. If the vial did indeed contain bog fire, the eldritch vapour might react with the air just as the necromancer threatened. The room, and everything in it would be incinerated by the volatile explosive gas. The entire house with its rotting timbers would quickly go up in flames. He might escape the room if Carandini were to drop the glass, but with his injured foot, Brunner was not sure he would escape the fire that would follow. Slowly, and reluctantly, the bounty hunter replaced his knife.

  'That's right,' sneered the necromancer. 'Now put away your sword.'

  'I can't do that,' commented Brunner, taking a few hopping steps forward.