Hammer and Bolter 15

by Christian Dunn

  They were squatters and vagrants in their rock-hewn fastnesses, stolen away from the ancient race of dwarf masons who had quarried the stone, and built the halls and corridors and vaulted spaces. They were skirmishers and assassins. They had outnumbered the dwarf men, out-manoeuvred them, bested them and stolen from them. They were thieves and liars, wielders of knives and blades, and they were ruthless.

  He had learned about the air-walkers. He had learned so much about so many. He had learned that they were not all alike. The dwarfs were few; an old enemy, irrelevant. The humans were the worst, the ugliest the most stupid. The humans were to be despised and to be pitied. They would fall as the dwarfs had. They were as nothing compared to the Fell people. The Fell people, they were fast like he was, but long-lived, longer-lived than the humans... much longer.

  He placed his hand over the smoldering flesh of his belly, filthy black claws extending almost the full width of the spongy swelling below his narrow ribcage. He felt the incessant bump of his blood organ, ticking his existence away.

  The vibrations were growing, the waves pervading his senses, intersecting to create patterns in the micro-movements of the air in his waiting room, the antechamber that led directly out onto the mound of earth raised at the near end of the crypt, the mound from which he would speak to his followers.

  He smoothed his coat over his chest, pressing the amulet a little deeper into his fur and skin. He clenched his teeth together and rotated his jaw several times as if chewing, and he lifted and bobbed his snout and whiskers.

  Timing was everything.

  He took the staff in his left hand, and wrapped the ragged ribbons of cloth that clung to it around the flesh of his paw, protecting the soft parts while exposing the black claws. He cast his eyes over the runes that ran the length of the staff, and concentrated for the briefest of moments, almost as if in silent prayer.

  He left the antechamber by its only exit, and climbed the short spiral of stone steps that would lead him onto the mound. He tapped his staff down hard on each step, quieting the crowds that could hear his egress and feel the vibrations he was summoning from the staff and the old worn steps. There was menace in every footfall, and more in the deliberateness with which he placed his staff, not to aid his climb, but to instill fear and wonder in the waiting audience, his congregation.

  He stood on the dais in the pale ethereal light cast by a hundred lanterns, fed with low-grade vermin-fat, which had been hung, not for their light, for the congregants did not need it to see by, but for their effect. The chattering that had ebbed away as he climbed the steps came to a dead stop as he planted his feet firmly at the centre of the mound. He was surrounded by his bodyguard, the strongest, bravest and most ruthless of his followers, who stood lower on the sides of the mound, their backs turned towards him.

  A head, below and to his left, situated almost directly under a lantern that swung lazily back and forth casting its low tremulous light, twitched as if its owner might dare to look over his shoulder, might presume to defy an order.

  He took one step off the apex of the mound, one step down and to his left.

  The attack was swift and deadly, the blades of his staff whirring through the air, cutting the vibrations into bright new patterns. He destroyed the guard who had dared to twitch, his right-hand man, his captain, his champion, with a series of slices from the long stiletto bound to the end of his staff. Then, he sawed into his remains with the broad, serrated blade that protruded from the haft of his weapon at a twisted but pleasing angle.

  No human would have detected a sound as the congregation held its collective breath, but to these creatures, the air was filled with waves of tension and noise, and movement crashing through their numbers, driving them to respond with fear and wonder. Their leader returned to his position at the apex of the dais mound, blood gleaming on the blades of his weapon in the narrow beams of faint lantern-light.

  He watched the throng.

  Beyond his ring fence of bodyguards closest to the mound, stood his most trusted lieutenants, warriors and fangleaders, beyond them gathered their loyal followers, and beyond those great swathes of young clanrats eager for blood, swarmed in loose groups. It was there, at the edges of the congregation that the violence began.

  The blood thirst was upon them as their whiskers, snouts and ears responded to the waves that their leader had sent through them. The stench of blood, the movement in the air as thousands of them exhaled almost in unison, the vibration under their feet as their leader pounded the end of his staff into the earth of the mound, conspired to generate a wave of fear and loathing that roused them to acts of unfathomable violence. When their leader cut down the lieutenant who had been plotting against his reign, reasserting his strength and wisdom, and rightness, the youngest of the congregants, the most eager, the neurotic and most easily influenced turned one upon another, needing no further excuse to wreak a debt of violence on their weaker companions.

  The bodies would not lie in their stinking filth and blood for long. The wounded and dead would be consumed with gusto as soon as the niceties had played out.

  In the minute or two that their leader allowed to elapse, dozens, perhaps hundreds of the most pathetic, had been hacked to pieces or maimed; ears, eyes and limbs torn to shreds, guts and skulls opened.

  In the last moments before their ruler brought the meeting to order, two tribal leaders did bloody battle, surrounded by a heaving crowd of baying followers. They thrust and scythed their weapons at each other, blades clashing and arcing, leaving shadows in the air as they sped to their targets. The smaller, but bulkier of the two, hunched at the shoulders and wide of stance, took the bloodiest wound low in his gut or perhaps high up in his thigh. The resulting spurt of blood probably emanated from the femoral or iliac artery. His opponent stepped to one side and raised his arms in triumph, only to be cut brutally across his narrow belly with the serrated blade wielded by one of his henchmen. The victor took two steps up the side of the mound, and the last place in the circle of bodyguards was won and filled, the ring of warriors completed. Their leader had asserted his strength and power, the scheming right-hand man had been dealt with and replaced, and all had been accomplished in an appropriate bloodthirsty frenzy on the grandest of stages.

  His position thoroughly reasserted, the leader threw back his head and squealed with laughter. The sound was high and shrill and filled with breath, like a shriek or a screech. The cacophony erupted in the space and fractured the atmosphere, which was too filled with the sounds of clamouring, skirmishing young ones. The air splintered and trembled as it was cleansed of the sounds of close and brutal combat.

  The congregants loosened their grips on their weapons, shrugged themselves back into postures and stances that roughly signified attention to the dais, and, most of all, they fell silent.

  He told them. He told them all, his warriors and his workers, his spies and his whisperers. He told them this, as he had told them before, long and often.

  ‘They love us and loathe us; love and loathe.’

  He snickered, and his whiskers wove intricate patterns in the air as he proclaimed this lesson to his gathered masses.

  ‘They worship and defile us. Worship us. Worship me. They give into the earth all the things they despise on the earth, and all the things they treasure beyond everything. Their treasures are our treasures. They dig our dirt and deposit their treasures in the earth to worship us. My treasures. The gold is mine, and the gems; the gold is mine and ours, and all to my good. The gold and the gems. And the secrets. The dirt holds their secrets.’

  The skaven masses hissed their approval as the Rat King laid claim to all that was below the surface in every crevice, nook, hole and grave dug by man or beast.

  ‘It is the Fell One,’ he said. ‘The Fell One must be mine. The Fell One must be my newest treasure. Behold his powers. Behold how fleet he is, how fleet. The Fell One must be mine. Seek him. Seek him out, and I shall lead him here. The Fell One shall fall at my fe
et and call me master. The Fell One shall fall, and I shall be his merciless captor. Behold how fleet he is, how fleet. The long-lived one, the Fell One, shall fall. When he falls, for fall he will, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever.’

  There was movement among the skaven crowds gathered in the crypt before their Rat King. They shuffled and elbowed one another at this strange turn of events. They bared their teeth, and hissed, and kicked. One went down at the edges of the gathering, and then another. They were restless, and their ruler seemed not to know what he was saying. The atmosphere filled first with motes of dust, disturbed into flight by the action of rat-feet on dry, subterranean dirt. Then the air began to move with the breath of the ratkin and the palpable tension among them; their snouts could not help but shrug and twitch, their whiskers tremble and their ears rotate. Their blood organs could not help but flutter and fibrillate. Their energy made the motes dance and weave in intricate, delicate patterns, writing the courses of their fates in the air around them. No mortal man could read the prophesies written there, but the dancing collections of motes began to mesmerise the weakest of the skaven. Only the initiated, the ancient, the leaders and kings of other worlds and other times could truly read the hieroglyphs created in the air, the omens and oracles that spoke of the true and honest states and fates of their kind.

  The Rat King looked out over the heads of his followers, out into the depths of the crowd, as whispers approached him. He heard disappointment, disenchantment, impatience and dread. He heard the disaffected whisperings of the very young and the moans of fear from the old.

  ‘Gold and gems,’ he heard. ‘Gold and gems.’

  ‘Gold and gems,’ he said, lifting his weapon in his left hand, allowing the runes carved into the surface of its haft to glint in the low, yellow light of the smoking lanterns.

  The skaven hordes quietened a little, and he felt rather than heard the whisper come again. He seemed not to be able to speak his own mind.

  ‘Gold and gems,’ he said again.

  And then again, ‘Gold and gems.’

  He felt the ache in his belly, and smelt the musky, acrid scent of his body hair singeing and his skin scorching beneath the amulet.

  ‘Gold and gems,’ he said once more as he thrust his hand under his coat to extract the amulet.

  As he lifted the hair-ribbon over his head, the amulet felt dull and cold in his paw, no more interesting than a lump of coal or chalk. He could not feel its facets, nor imagine the reflective qualities that it had possessed only minutes before. It felt dull and soft and crumbly. Fear struck deep in his blood organ as he clenched his clawed paw around the amulet. He felt the power drain out of his hands, and thought he might stagger or fall. His left hand gripped the staff of his weapon more firmly, and he allowed it to take his weight as his right hand rose before him, without him exerting any of his will upon it.

  His head was suddenly full of words that he did not understand and could never have annunciated. He wanted to copy the words, say them aloud from his V-shaped maw, but none would come.

  He heard a hum, a tune, almost a melody. It was a lullaby, and then it was gone, transformed into a frantic crashing wave of discord that emptied his head of all right-thinking.

  Then the motes in the air began to dance to a different tune, to no tune at all, only to the noises in his head.

  The Rat King wanted to hold his paws over his ears and over his eyes. He wanted to still the insistent twitch of his whiskers and the rotating of his ears, and yet he had no power over his movements.

  Finally, he felt the amulet grow so cold in his paw, so insubstantial that he thought it would fall to dust. He wanted to clench it more tightly, to hold onto it, never to let it go. It sustained him. He knew not how, but it was because of this object that he had grown and thrived and lived so long among his brethren.

  He clutched the staff in his left hand, driving its end so firmly into the compacted earth floor of the mound that it made a small, perfectly hemispherical crater that was beginning to radiate odd cracks in the surface of the dais. His weapon took his entire weight for he felt as slow and heavy as death. His blood organ boomed, low, within his body, ponderous as a human’s.

  His head turned to watch the movement of his right arm as it stretched out to his side, parallel to the floor. He looked at his paw, glowing and translucent, the veins showing like threads of pink light through the padding of his paw palms. The veins pulsed, long and slow. The involuntary twitching in his snout and whiskers slowed so dramatically that he thought he had been stilled, that this was all some terrible dream-state, or some unasked-for condition that afflicted any hapless being who came into ownership of his amulet; the magical talisman that had shown him his path to great age and even greater power among his kind.

  He could do nothing but watch and trust.

  At the furthest reaches of the congregation, skaven began to keel over where they stood, falling to their deaths as their blood organs slowed to nothing, or trilled to a frequency beyond the capacities of their bodies to tolerate. There were no signs. There was no way to know which of them would succumb or why they were dying, but die they must, in their dozens and hundreds. They expired staring into space, without a mark or a spot of blood appearing on their bodies.

  Then, the air sucked away the swirling motes from around the corpses. The particles grouped and banded together and moved around the crypt in waves until all eyes were fixed on the dancing display of light and dust specks over the skavens’ heads. The spectacle drifted up towards the vaulted masonry high above them, casting shadows and spots of light onto the surfaces of the stones, making them glisten and glitter.

  A galaxy of motes and particles, forming an array of symbols in three dimensions settled in a broad halo around the mound with the Rat King at its centre. Then he was bathed in light as the specks reflected and refracted all the illumination they could summon from the lanterns that flickered their smoky flames into the cavernous ceiling space.

  The throng was agog, the skaven staring at their leader and at the story that was playing out over his head.

  The Rat King watched as his right paw throbbed with the pink light that seemed to be coursing through his veins, and he sucked in a shocked breath as he watched his claws spread and his palm open.

  He waited, his blood organ stopping entirely, true silence falling all around him as the motes stopped their merry dance, each coming to a dead halt in the air, all shining their reflected light down on him.

  If there had been any capacity for rational thought in the Rat King’s mind, in that moment, he would have believed that he would never take another life-sustaining breath. Indeed, many of his kind would be dead by the time the drama had played out, and he did not doubt, in that moment, that he would be one of them. If he survived, he knew that he would live a longer, more satisfying life than all of his predecessors, perhaps than all of his predecessors combined.

  He dreaded dropping the amulet to the earth floor at his feet. He dreaded that it would wither to dust, that it would cease to protect him, cease to strengthen his reign.

  He wanted to close his eyes against the sight. He wanted his blood organ to begin pumping again. He wanted to be one of them, one of the horde, a simple skaven without the wit for ambition, without the secret of longevity.

  He could neither blink nor twitch a whisker, nor clear his parched throat. The terror and anticipation filled him with wonder and horror and glee. The amulet had woven its magic before in ways that he had never understood, but he had kept it, cherished it, allowed it to burn his hair and brand his flesh, tolerated it filling his mind with unfathomable sounds and words and songs. He had fallen under its spell, and he had benefited and suffered for it in almost equal measures.

  The Rat King’s claws peeled away from the charm, and his pink palm throbbed.

  He was no longer holding the amulet in his paw, and yet, it did not fall.

  The charm hung for a moment in t
he air, and then brilliant light exploded from it in a million prismatic sparkles, brighter and more ethereal than the dust motes held magically still in the air above his head. He thought that the charm had splintered and broken, its otherworldly elements rending it asunder in a miasma of blinding shards of luminescence.

  When all the light had dispersed into the vaulted ceiling of the crypt, and his hand closed again, involuntarily, around the air, he felt something cool and solid and slick where he had expected to feel nothing at all. The amulet felt hard like stone, but greasy like the pelt of a well-fed and well-serviced brood-mother. He could not determine whether it was the faceted mineral that it had appeared to be in its most recent incarnation, and he could not open his paw again to look upon it.

  He stared out over the congregation of rats, at their faces upturned to look at the light display whirling above their heads. Then, deep in the gloom at the furthest reaches of the crypt, he saw a pair of pink eyes shining out at him. Their gaze held as the Rat King called upon this, his minion, to do his bidding, to find the Fell One.

  Suddenly, there was a picture in his head, a glowing image of the tallest, most slender and upright being that the Rat King had ever seen. The biped stood as high as two, if not three, skaven, and it was straight, without the angles for shoulders and elbows and knees and heels that typified the ratman’s physique. It was more like the hairless, human air-walkers, while being taller than the tallest man-thing, longer of neck, more elegant, half the width and so uncannily upright. The Rat King knew that this was his target, this was the Fell One, this was the creature that would help him to live forever. He knew not why, nor how this could be achieved; he only knew that it was his destiny. He only knew that he had clutched the amulet, and that he had sensed and seen his very being projected into a wondrous future, to a time when he would be worshipped by everything below the ground in the nether-lands, by everything above it and by all that lay between.