Hammer and Bolter 15

by Christian Dunn

At the very moment when he wondered whether he was dead or in some mortal trance-state, the glitter dust that the charm had produced whirled and cycled in the air before him, between his position and that of the skaven who had locked eyes with him. He could no longer see the young pup, for he was blinded by the perfectly realised hologram that the brilliant sparks had generated, the perfect vision of the Fell One.

  ‘He will come, so he will. He will come. When he comes, for come he will, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever.’

  He heard the words, both in his head and in the air around him. The voice sounded like his, but he could not remember forming the words, either in his mind or in his maw.

  ‘He will come, so he will. He will come. When he comes, for come he will, you’ll live forever. You won’t live for now, not just for now. You’ll live forever.’

  The words were real, the whisper coalescing around the astounding form of the Fell One that began to change colour and slowly revolve in the air before him.

  It was the pup, speaking.

  The Rat King’s eyes, open wide in a blinkless stare, could see the suggestion of movement in the pup’s jaw, and sense the tremor in the air caused by his whiskers as he shaped his maw to produce the words.

  Then another voice spoke up, and another.

  Eyes began to turn towards the figure of the Fell One with its white head-hair cascading from its high crown, with its intricately woven cloak of the strangest iridescent cloth, with its weapon so fine, so light, burnished so bright as to defy usefulness. Unblinking eyes shone pink, whiskers twitched and maws chewed and flexed and whispered.

  The susurrus of the thousands of voices moved the air such that the detail the Fell One was wrought in became increasingly profound. It was possible to divine individual hairs on his head and stitches in his garb, to see flecks of a million colours in the bright irises of his almond-shaped eyes and to stare into the eternity reflected back from their fathomless pupils.

  The news radiated outwards from the crypt.

  The skaven followed their burrows and tunnels back through the nether-lands to where they had come from, all the while monitoring the movements in the earth above them, searching for the sounds of the Fell One, reaching out to feel his alien vibrations in the micro-movements of the dirt around them.

  Competition was fierce, and the eager skaven fought one another tooth and claw for the best avenues, the shallowest fissures, the places under the earth that resonated most profoundly with the waves of movement on the surface. They defended the spaces where earth tremors intersected to pinpoint exact locations where the Fell One might pass. Some chose their positions and stayed there, fighting off all-comers, and touching, testing and sniffing the dirt endlessly, confusing their senses and rendering them helplessly insane, often in a matter of hours.

  They would begin by trying not to affect the area where they stood sentry, fighting the urge to twitch or move or even breathe. They could not risk hunting, did not dare to leave their posts in search of food or drink, so that when the supplies that they carried ran out, they didn’t think to replace them. Many died of starvation without eating the rations they carried lest they miss some tremor in the air because they disturbed it with chewing.

  Others of the skaven scurried back and forth, thither and yon in the dirt tunnels and warrens of the nether-lands, searching for the Fell One by covering too much ground too quickly. They collapsed, exhausted and confused, or fought for access to the narrowest least-used of the tunnels below ground. Their accelerated metabolisms meant they could cover a great deal of ground quickly, but they also meant they needed to eat and drink often. Many were so intent on finding the Fell One, so driven by their Rat King’s mission, so eager to please their lord and to benefit from the capture of so rare and wondrous a creature that they too forgot to feed their bodies.

  Violence had been the most common form of death among the skaven for centuries, violence from outside forces and external enemies, and violence from within their ranks. There was no understanding of familial relationships, no sense that they were brothers-in-arms, no loyalties, no ties, and no love lost between them. They fought each other, and killed and died, for any reason and for no reason at all. Now, they died from starvation and insanity, or they were ground down and eaten up by the amulet; that magical device that gathered up souls, devoured them, and distributed their life and longevity back to the wearer.

  The Rat King felt it all. Every road, every path, every warren, every space led back to his crypt, back to his anteroom, back to him.

  Any skaven that learnt anything, either by good luck or hard work, or by means of stealing from others of his kind, came scurrying back to its master, and the whispers began finding their way back up the chain of command to the Rat King.

  He felt their conversations in the air, knew when they were close and when they were on wild-goose chases. He could tell by their manner, their bearing, the way they whispered, as much as by what they whispered, whether they were onto something or not.

  Then he heard about the human. He knew from the side-by-side rhythms of the human boy and his master the Fell One, that he had found his quarry. The contrast between the vibrations they caused and the echoes these sent down through the fissures and burrows, down through the dirt and the earth back to the Rat King, was the most telling clue of all. Each vibration was identified by a comparison to its companion.

  The boy defined the Fell One.

  There was blood on his hands. There was skaven blood on his hands. The boy had killed a ratman. He had killed ratmen. He would kill them again.

  The Rat King did not care. The loss of one of his kind was as nothing. He could devour a thousand of them, a thousand thousand and still not consume a life force to equal that of the Fell One. Let the boy kill, let him kill them if it brought the Fell One closer.

  Closer he would come, closer and closer.

  ‘He will come, so he will. He will come. When he comes, for come he will, the Fell One will come too.’

  In the dark little antechamber of the crypt, the Rat King sat on a throne cobbled together from the broken staves, hafts and blades of a dozen weapons or more; the rusted, useless, broken blades jutting out at angles in all directions. The joints were made with greasy twists of cloth, ribbons torn from rent and bloodied garments, wound tight, lacing back and forth around the sticks of wood. The hafts and staves were worn smooth, black and shiny by the filthy grasps of their many former owners, the runes crudely carved into them, many years before, honed by time and now silky to the touch.

  The Rat King’s refuge was at the centre of his world. It was, so far as he knew, the only space for hundreds of underground miles, the only place in the nether-lands that had only one entrance and one exit, and those two the same opening. He was the only ratman that lived in private, that could not be taken by surprise, whose space was sacrosanct and could not be penetrated by new digs or the re-opening of old tunnels. He lived at the end of the maze, at the vanishing point, and all roads led to his door. He lived at the epicentre of all vibrations, of all movement, and all sounds travelled to him.

  The stories of the boy came thick and fast, that he was with the Fell One and then at a distance, then close again. Every time the boy was mentioned the Fell One was felt, his rhythm denser and slower and more mediated, harder to detect, more economical. He was beyond the boy, and then ahead, and then behind him, to his left or right. They wove, together, a beautiful, intricate, crossing pattern with loops and whorls like the subtly winding paths of the pad prints from a skaven’s paw, and their vibrations made intersecting wave patterns of delightful complexity.

  Hundreds of sightings over days and weeks came together in the Rat King’s mind. His leaders, his champions, his warriors and his minions each had small pieces of the puzzle, and the further up the food chain the skaven were the more pieces of the puzzle they had, but none could put together a complete picture. None had all the information.

/>   No ratman would share information with another of the same standing in this skaven society. Lower ranking ratmen would share only with skaven of higher standing or status. The minions fed the warriors information, the warriors fed the champions, and the champions fed information to the leaders. Each of the dozen or so of the Rat King’s closest aides collected his own cache of information of sightings, of vibration paths, but none trusted his equals enough to share that information.

  Once the Rat King had got what he wanted, he pitted his underlings against each other, filling their heads with stories of treachery, backstabbing, spying and stealing. No one survived for very long with any amount of information.

  The strongest of the leaders, those who survived the deaths of their colleagues, came under special scrutiny from the Rat King. He promised them much.

  The first of his lieutenants entered his antechamber as he sat on his throne, facing the single portal that kept him the safest and best-protected of them all in his uterine cul-de-sac.

  He motioned for the large, red-eyed skaven with the thick covering of coarse dirty black hair to kneel before him.

  The skaven did not argue with him, despite being beyond grovelling to anyone, including the Rat King that he would happily conspire to dethrone. Something compelled him to take orders from the wizened old Rat King, whose wrist was adorned with the hard dull amulet that seemed to throb, lighting the kinks and curves of hair in the ribbon that held it in place.

  The Rat King held his hand in front of his kneeling lieutenant’s face, the charm suspended from it.

  The lieutenant remained still, but the air around him began to bend and throb, vibrating the Rat King’s whiskers and filling his mind’s eye with a hundred images. The lieutenant began to speak, although all of the information was already suspended in the air between them, making his speech redundant. His eyes glazed over and he recounted, in automatic tones, all of the information that had been fed to him through the channels of his command. He had thought to keep something back, not to tell the whole story, but to leave gaps in the tale that might confound the Rat King’s intention to track the Fell One for his own ends. However, as he knelt in the small antechamber, the lieutenant had no choice but to tell it all, and to share the conclusions that he had drawn from the wealth of information that had come his way. With a broad overview, he had seen connections that others with less knowledge had missed, and he added these to his recitation of events.

  The Rat King absorbed the account of the Fell One’s movements, along with the lieutenant’s thoughts on their significance, and all of the information that floated around in the air between them, with the amulet as his guide.

  When it was done, the lieutenant continued to kneel before the Rat King, unable to move unless instructed to, his gaze caught in the impenetrable depths of the charm stone.

  The amulet twisted and rotated on its hair-ribbon, as the Rat King brought his hands down onto his lieutenant’s face, one paw on each of the lieutenant’s cheeks.

  The Rat King began slowly to apply pressure with his opposable claws, above the ridges of his lieutenant’s cheekbones. Seconds later, with a pair of quick explosions, there and gone in no time, he caught two pink, wet reflecting flesh marbles in his palms. The Rat King tossed his lieutenant’s eyeballs casually to the earth floor and muttered for him to leave the antechamber.

  The lieutenant stood and turned, crushing one of his eyes under a paw as he did so, and stepping on the other as he moved tentatively across the room.

  The second of the Rat King’s lieutenants lost his hearing when his master penetrated his eardrums with the same claws that had blinded the first.

  The third lieutenant was relieved of his tongue, sliced deeply and cleanly away.

  The fourth lieutenant lost his most precious sense when the king excised his whiskers, plucking them one at a time from his maw and brow, and then had his paws burned to thickly scarred stumps incapable of feeling the subtlety of a vibration through any wall made of earth, brick or stone.

  The lieutenants relayed their information and, maimed and helpless, were returned to their men. None would last out the day, and, with their deaths, all the information they had gathered was lost back to its sources, sources who could not be induced to share anew.

  The Rat King was all-knowing. He was the repository of all information pertaining to the Fell One and his unlikely companion.

  The watched ones, the Fell One and the boy, had nothing in common. They did not sleep nor eat at the same time, nor with the same frequency; they moved at different paces, often in different directions; their bodies had no rhythms alike, nor had they similar needs.

  And yet.

  ‘He will come, so he will. He will come. When he comes, for come he will, the Fell One will come too.’

  The words echoed around his antechamber as he awaited more news, more sightings, more information to add to the labyrinthine light map that he cast his black eyes over.

  He did not read it consciously. The skaven were a simple, brutal race. They kept smells in their heads and vibrations, they recognised things intuitively. They knew fear when they saw it and the blood thirst. They registered anger and resentment, hunger and mirth. They instinctively knew where they were, underground, at any time, however far they had travelled through the nether-lands, however injured or frightened they were; a skaven could never be lost in his natural habitat. Maps of the nether-lands were redundant, and it was a simple fact that no one had ever seen fit to draw them. Maps of the top-world were known to exist, but the skaven turned their noses up at the thought of them, preferring to rely on the solid evidence of ancient and immovable landmarks.

  A three-dimensional map made of dust and specks of light would be as alien to the skaven as flying. And yet, there it was, suspended in the foetid air of the Rat King’s underground lair, a living, breathing, cycling representation of all the routes and paths the Fell One and the boy had taken in their travels.

  The Rat King disturbed the air gently with the claw of his left hand, amending the details on the map with hieroglyphic notations, while his right hand swung the amulet from its hair-ribbon in a fast, short pendulum motion that seemed to rearrange the dust in subtle, but important ways. He did not fully understand what he was doing, only that he was responding to the whispers in his head, the urgings and admonitions that he must listen to through all his waking hours, and all of his hours were wakeful.

  All the time that the Fell One had been in his sights, all the time that he had been accompanied by the human boy, was time that appeared to have been spent in some kind of search, some quest that led the old being in a tacking course from one point on the surface to another. He was an air-walker, a crust-liver and yet he wove a path from one point of egress to the next across the skaven nether-lands.

  Every point of egress from above ground to below, every portal, every burrow entrance from which a skaven might exit onto the dirt or enter under it, was marked by a sighting of the Fell One and the boy.

  Other sightings put the boy at the site of an ancient tree or a known well, and still more put the Fell One at the entrance to a basement or the site of an ancient burial; places known to the skaven, landmarks for them in the confusing light and air of the top-world. But whenever the Fell One’s path entwined with the boy’s, wherever they joined forces, they did so where the skaven world met the surface.

  The Rat King saw it all. Suddenly, all he could ever want was right there in front of him.

  Everything fell neatly into place, and the Rat King clapped his paws together in glee, the claws clacking against each other in a staccato sound that tore tiny holes in the fabric of the air, disturbing the map that shone and glittered before him.

  They were hunting. They were searching for skaven to kill. The tiny dull lights, flitting aimlessly in angry little batches, congregating in the dark places on the Rat King’s map were their prey. The skaven were dying, their blood was on the Fell One’s hands and on the boy’s.

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nbsp; The dull lights began to wink out one at a time, and then by twos and threes. Some continued to throb faintly for several seconds before blinking out, and some hurried away, returning to the nether-lands and to safety.

  But they were not safe. The skaven were not safe. They were not safe from their Rat King, and they were not safe from the Fell One; they were not even safe from the boy.

  The boy was the key, the boy and his companions.

  He could have him. He could have the Fell One.

  ‘He will come, so he will. He will come. When he comes, for come he will, the Fell One will come too.’

  He spoke without realising that he was doing so, and as he spoke again, his black eyes clouded a little and his gaze seemed to fall short of the map that was slowly disintegrating back into its component parts.

  The amulet, twisting and pulsing on its hair-ribbon, seemed to be slowing down, no longer rocking back and forth like a relentless pendulum marking time, but coming to a gentle rest.

  ‘I will bring him, so I will. I will bring him. When he comes, for come he will, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever.’

  The Rat King unwrapped the hair-ribbon from around his wrist, hung it around his neck and dropped the amulet down under his coat. He could feel the flesh of his belly warm with the contact of the charm, and could smell the searing of his hair. His snout twitched slightly, and if his V-shaped maw with its rows of sharp teeth could smile, a smile was what appeared on his face now.

  He placed his fleshy palms flat on the walls of his antechamber and felt the vibrations building. They built so fast and with such intensity that his palms curled, involuntary, and his claws dug deep gouges in the mossy stone walls.

  He shrugged his coat more comfortably around his shoulders, and took the haft of his weapon in his left paw, using his right to wrap the strips of ragged cloth around the soft parts of his palm while exposing the blackened claws, now sharpened by their recent contact with stone.

  The ground beneath his feet throbbed, and he could hear the treads of thousands of pairs of feet as his minions drew closer.