Hammer and Bolter 16

by Christian Dunn

  There was more scuffling and squealing in the hole and more evidence of flashing eyes and claws as the light began to ebb out of the air. Then something was bundled out of the hole onto the slope close to the boy’s feet. He peered at the bloody mess, not sure what to make of it, at first. It might just have been an old fur made into a bundle for storage, but it had new pink blood on it. Then he saw a black claw at the end of a deep gash, ripped out, no doubt, by the force of the blow that its owner had struck, and he knew that he was looking at the victim of vicious skaven infighting.

  He kicked, gently at the bundle of fur, and it rolled clumsily over. The boy wanted to gag.

  This was not a skaven soldier, an adult that could fight for itself in the scuffles for supremacy that occupied much of their time and thinking space. This was not a warrior being punished for some scheming insubordination. The skaven rat lying in a bloody heap at the boy’s feet was an infant. The skin on its belly had not yet grown hair and was still pink; where its hair had grown, it was soft and downy and a delicate colour. Its brand new claws, not yet the killing weapons that they might have become, were clean and white and almost transparent.

  The boy sat dumbfounded for a moment. He knew that they were vicious and evil, but, until that moment, he had not realised just how ruthless the skaven were.

  The first skaven to emerge, alive, from the hole in the ground was large and grey, and had only one eye in its misshaped head. The eye glinted blackly at the boy, caught off-guard by the horror of his realisation.

  Before he knew what was happening, the boy was pinned to the cold earth beneath him by the handle of his own weapon. He looked into the one good eye that the ratman still owned, and braced himself for the onslaught to his olfactory senses that was bound to occur if he followed through with the thought that was forming in his mind.

  He held his breath and kicked out in the direction of the ratman leaning on the handle of his hoe. It was his intention to dislodge the hoe and bring the ratman down on top of him so that he could fight it on his own terms. He had not factored in the possibility of the haft flexing and snapping off a couple of feet from his shoulder.

  When the rat landed on him, it did so by impaling itself on the jagged end of the broken hoe handle. Its body thudded down on top of him, expelling in a foetid gust the last of the stale air in the skaven’s lungs.

  Pinned to the slope, the boy thought, once again, that he would gag, or even faint at the stink that assailed his senses. Beyond that, he knew that he’d have to dislodge the surprising dead weight of the ratman in order to crawl out from under the corpse. He tried to bring a hand up to cover his face, pinch his nose, and cut off the stench, but both of his arms were pinned down. The corpse was leaching blood from the site of its fatal wound and the putrid, diseased smell of its insides added to the malodorous fog that was threatening to make the boy puke; a most unpleasant prospect when he had no way to turn his head.

  Suddenly, the smell had abated, and the cold air hit the boy hard in the chest, leaving the creeping sensation of someone else’s blood cooling and congealing in his shirt.

  He heard a yelp as he rose on his elbows to see who had rescued him. The last of the skaven, jaws wide in the midst of a death-scream, was run through on the point of Gilead’s sword, as the elf lunged effortlessly towards the ratman emerging from the hole in the ground. A deft shove, and the newly dead skaven fell back through the hole, folded almost in half, its clawed, hoof-like back feet the last of him to disappear below ground.

  The one-eyed skaven was not nearly as dead as the boy had imagined. It yelped as it rolled over, the haft of the hoe clearly visible protruding through its back. It crawled away, grabbing the dead infant under one arm and trying to scurry off down the hole. It was a pitiful sight. Its life-force was all but spent and its blood organ was pumping wildly, desperately trying to enable the skaven’s escape.

  Gilead only wiped the blood from his sword. The rat-thing was dead already; he wasn’t going to waste his efforts killing it again.

  The elf sheathed his sword and looked at the boy. He did not speak, but it was enough that he had heard the commotion and come to investigate. The boy scrambled to his feet, wiped the worst of the blood off his face with his sleeve and pulled the blood-sodden shirt away from the sucking contact it was making with his skin. It disgusted him for a moment. Then he saw the remaining broken piece of his hoe, and the skaven’s putrid blood was all but forgotten. The hoe wasn’t a weapon, not really, and yet it’s balanced haft and sharpened blade had stood him in very good stead over the days and weeks that he had used it to combat the cursed skaven. Now it was broken and useless. He had not the tools to mend it, and, even if he could, the balance would be lost in the repair. Besides, he didn’t relish going after the one-eyed skaven to retrieve the missing section of handle from its corpse.

  Gilead picked up the end of the broken hoe with the head attached and weighed it in his hand. Then he signaled for the boy to follow him, and they walked towards the small camp they had made where the slope of the land met the tree line. The boy thought they must be returning for their supper, and could see the welcoming drifting smoke of the small fire that Gilead had lit some time before. He had become used to the tubers and corms that the elf cooked for them both, looked forward to them, even.

  As they reached the tree line, Gilead wove a path among the saplings that grew close to the edge of the wooded area. The woods had clearly been cultivated and used, but coppicing appeared to have stopped two or three years earlier. In these times of famine and plague, the boy was surprised to realise that Gilead had a wealth of young trees to choose from. The elf selected one that was growing straight and true at the centre of a clump that needed to be thinned out if any of the healthier saplings were to grow on unchecked. There were no woodsmen left to thin and coppice and manage the woodland, but there was at least hope that the woodland would survive and even thrive, eventually.

  Gilead cut the sapling low to the ground, and examined the wood where it had been sliced into. He discarded the sapling briskly, and the boy noticed that there was rot at its base. Perhaps it was an illusion; perhaps the woodland was not as healthy as it appeared to be. Gilead cut two more saplings from the central growth, but both were equally rotten. Then he selected a sapling from the outer circle of growth. He cut the young tree away above where it curved at the base to accommodate the growth of other branches. He weighed the length of raw wood in his hands and nicked off the one or two side shoots that were developing close to its tapering end. The cut end was clean and white, and the grain tightly packed.

  They walked the hundred yards or so back to the camp, and Gilead sat down by the fire. He retrieved what looked like a paring knife from his pack. When he began to strip the bark from the sapling, the boy wondered whether the tool he was using was appropriate to the work, but he had already seen the wonders that could be wrought with an elf-made blade and thought better of questioning Gilead. The boy coughed. Gilead looked up from his handiwork and nodded at the embers of the small fire, encouraging the boy to finish preparing their meal while he worked on.

  When the boy woke the next morning, Gilead handed him his hoe. The haft was smooth as silk, glossy almost, and had been finished with some sort of wax that smelt fresh and sweet. The hoe gleamed with a high shine and was almost too sharp to the touch; it had been fixed to the handle with perfect dome-headed pins of a type that the boy had never seen on a farm tool, although he had once seen something similar in the pommel of a greatsword.

  The boy didn’t know what to say. He simply looked at Gilead, who stood more than two heads taller than he was, and smiled up at the elf. He didn’t know whether Gilead had slept that night. He didn’t know how long it must have taken to produce something so perfect. To whittle and carve the haft should have taken a mere mortal a day or two, and to clean, straighten and hone a blade on the hoe at least another day. Gilead could not possibly have completed the work and slept, and yet the elf looked rested an
d alert.

  ‘We begin today,’ said the elf.

  The boy looked at him, an eyebrow raised, questioning.

  ‘They know we are here,’ said Gilead. ‘We have sabotaged as many of their entrances underground as we were able, and now we attack.’

  ‘We’re going underground?’ asked the boy, his mouth wide with fear and wonder.

  ‘If the skaven are to cease their persecution of the humans, we must penetrate to the source of their evil and destroy their leader.’

  ‘We’re going underground,’ said the boy.

  Gilead and the boy had sabotaged dozens of openings in the ground over the past weeks, cutting the skaven off from their prey above ground, and leaving them without escape routes. Gilead knew the lay of the land, knew every inch of hundreds of acres of pasture, scrub and woodland. He knew which entrances underground the skaven used most often and which had been abandoned or were used only in the direst of emergencies. Gilead and the boy had collapsed several of the portals, digging away at the earth around them. They had filled others with vegetation and rocks, and even rotten trees and branches torn from the woodland . Some, they had turned into traps, using tripwires and hidden obstacles that would bring the skaven crashing to the ground and cause lethal injuries.

  Gilead and the boy had skirmished at the edges of some of the burrow holes. They had injured some of the skaven, and killed several, but they had never before sent their victims back down their own holes, and, last night, the one-eyed ratman had crawled back into his warren with a hoe handle through his torso.

  When they climbed down into the hole in the slope where the boy had seen his first infant skaven, where the one-eyed ratman had retreated to die, they found nothing but a clump or two of grey fur and a broken, rotting leather thong that might have been part of some padded armour. They could smell death, putrescence and corruption, but the scent was hours old and mostly distant.

  The boy didn’t care to think what had happened to the corpse of the infant skaven, and there was no time for misplaced sentiment.

  It quickly became clear that there was no space underground with a ceiling high enough to accommodate the attenuated height of the elf, but Gilead seemed to lose none of his stealth or speed simply because he could not stand upright. The boy felt clumsy by comparison, even though he barely needed to drop his shoulders, let alone stoop, to walk unobstructed along the skaven-built tunnels and burrows.

  It also became only too obvious that the boy could not function in the pitch darkness that soon engulfed them below ground. The skaven were adapted to the lack of light, and Gilead seemed to manage well enough, but the boy soon found himself tripping over his own feet. Gilead handed him what looked like a rush lantern, but on a much smaller scale. It had a brass reservoir in the lower half, shaped like a bowl so that it wouldn’t stand on a flat surface, and a small crystal cover above with a wick between the two that was barely thicker than a strand of strong hair. The boy wondered whether it would show any light at all, and if it did, for how long. Nonetheless, he held the cover open, while Gilead lit the wick, and was soon surrounded by enough soft light to show the earth beneath his feet for a pace or two, the walls at his sides and the ceiling pressing down on his head. The light seemed not to bleed at its furthest reaches, but to stop abruptly at a radius of about a yard and a half.

  Gilead was the first to sniff out skaven scum, and he killed the ratmen they came across with consummate ease. The boy raised his hoe only once in the first few hours of their exploration. They had come to a junction, a place where one path forked into two, one tunnel rising steeply away, back to the surface, to an exit that Gilead knew he had booby-trapped with stakes thrust into the soft earth at dangerous angles, should the skaven happen to trip or fall into them. Gilead dealt swiftly with the two ratmen that emerged from the right-hand fork in the tunnel, which led deeper into the earth. He did not see the small, hunched figure of a third skaven as it peered around the edge of the tunnel that led back to the surface. The boy turned in that direction, something catching his eye in the darkness, and he was upon the skaven, thrusting the newly-sharpened blade of his hoe at an angle deep into the creature’s side. It did not cry out, it simply folded in half with the exhalation of a shallow, forced breath, and collapsed at the boy’s feet. The sound that followed could not possibly have been caused by his demise, could it? Was it a sound?

  The boy looked to Gilead for guidance, and the elf raised a hand to indicate the boy remain still and silent.

  The elf felt it through his feet, like a roll played on an impossibly deeply tuned drum. He felt the faint throb of dozens of scurrying feet thundering along pathways, tunnels and corridors, without knowing what it must mean.

  The boy’s eyes grew large.

  ‘They’re coming,’ he said.

  But the noise did not grow louder, and the vibrations did not increase. The skaven were not running towards the elf and the boy, but away from them.

  The elf and the boy continued deeper into the labyrinth of warrens and burrows, always taking the path downwards when given a choice.

  Once or twice, the tunnels opened out into excavated caverns and caves, which might have been rooms if the skaven lived like any other civilised race. They found crude seats made from mounds of earth with planks placed on top, or from short planks simply wedged into the hard walls of the burrows at sitting height. They saw bundles and piles of leather scraps and cloth, and shallow bowls full of foul liquid grease used to oil leather armour or as fuel for the clay lamps that sat in niches higher in the walls. In the darkest and dampest corners they found foodstuffs stored and piled, fermenting into heaps of unidentifiable vegetation. Once or twice, they saw young skaven foraging at the edges of the mounds for the liquescent treats they clearly craved. Gilead ignored them.

  Sentries were posted only intermittently, mostly where the tunnels met or branched out. They seemed to have been chosen from the oldest and youngest of the active rat-warriors, from the sickest and least able. Gilead wasted little effort, simply running them through or cutting their arteries and letting them bleed out where they fell. They were no competition for him.

  ‘Why are they so few?’ asked the boy. ‘Where are the rest of them?’

  Gilead looked at the boy and tipped his head slightly on one side as if in thought. Some of the burrows and tunnels had clearly been deserted for some time, but many of them still held the appalling scents of the skaven, and some even harboured the warmth of their recently retreating bodies.

  The ratmen were short-lived and unsubtle, and could not possibly have any sort of plan. They had simply moved on, or were retreating for fear of their adversaries. Their kind had seen what Gilead and even the boy could do with a little brute force and effort and a decent weapon, so perhaps they preferred not to meet them in hand-to-hand combat. Perhaps they were cowards, after all.

  They were not cowards. They were brutal, ruthless killers, and, for the only time in any of their short lives, they had a leader who could formulate a plan; they had a leader who could formulate a plan and, having done so, a leader who could compel the skaven horde to carry out that plan.

  There were ratmen who could not, would not, concentrate for long enough to hear the plan. There were those who wanted nothing so much as to follow their senses, track the intruders into their tunnels and bring them crashing down at the mercy of their blades and claws and teeth, however unlikely that outcome might be. There were those who could not sit still, but broke away from their tribes and scoured the tunnels for prey. There were those too long in the tooth to leave the posts they had defended for all of their meagre lives. There were those too stupid to live. There were those whose thoughtless acts would lead the Fell One and the human boy ever closer to the heart of the underground compound that they called home. Dozens would die bringing the Fell One to the skaven Rat King, but their deaths would not be in vain, for they were, unwittingly perhaps, doing the better part of his bidding. There were any number that could be sacrif
iced, any number that would sacrifice themselves.

  The remainder of the skaven, the vast majority, had congregated once more in the great crypt. They had fought their ways there, jostling one another, beating a path when the call had come. The traffic through the burrows, tunnels and warrens had been fast and dense and had left bodies in its wake.

  Gilead had still been on the surface, mapping the entrances to the burrows, sabotaging them and planning his assault on the heart of the warren. Only the weak, the sick, the young and the disabled skaven remained close to the surface. He had killed the one-eyed old ratman with ease, had run through his companion, and the infant had died only moments after the boy had extricated his foot from the hole in the ground. The skaven Rat King had left traps like this one, close to the surface all over the plot of land that Gilead and the boy had quartered and examined. It mattered not which bait the Fell One took, it only mattered that his boy was a clumsy air-walker of the human kind, and would lead the elf into the snare that awaited. Every hole in the ground, every entrance to a burrow was rigged to bring down the clumsy boy; every hole had a small skirmish party ready to respond when the entrance was breeched. Wherever the boy fell, the Fell One would follow, and he would attack.

  Gilead and the boy worked their way deeper and further into the network of tunnels and spaces below the ground. Gilead felt his way through the soles of his boots and the palms of his hands, mapping in his mind all the tunnels he had passed through, which directions they had run in, where they had intersected and what they were made of. The boy kept pace only because of the lantern in his hand, by its faint pool of concentrated light. He remained behind the elf, where he had been told to stay, in touch, but out of danger.

  Gilead turned abruptly when the light behind him suddenly went out. He did not need it to see by, and he cast a hand along the passage behind him, marking out the yard, less than his arm’s length, between his position and where the boy should be. He was gone.