Blighted Empire

Chapter XII

Altdorf

Brauzeit, 1114

Under cover of night, Kreyssig’s Kaiserjaeger removed the Baroness von den Linden and her paraphernalia to the abandoned residence of Lady Mirella von Wittmar. Mistress of the traitor Prince Sigdan, the noblewoman had fled Altdorf in the aftermath of the disastrous coup against Emperor Boris. Her townhouse had stood vacant and desolate since then, not even the most desperate peasant willing to seek shelter beneath such an ill-regarded roof.

The witch was far from her usual composure. Her appearance betrayed no sign of her recent ordeal. To the eye she was as ravishing and seductive as when Kreyssig had first met her. He wasn’t sure if it was cosmetics or magic that covered her bruises, but whatever the cause, the baroness’s vanity was intact.

No, it was a more subtle air of tension and unease that clung to the woman as she stalked through the dusty chambers of her refuge. She snapped curt commands to the men carrying her effects, alternately urging them to greater care or greater haste.

When the last of her things had been brought in, she drew near Kreyssig, gripping his arm in a clutch that was almost as cold as ice. ‘Get rid of them,’ she whispered into his ear.

Kreyssig bristled at the assumed authority in her tone, but his defiance wilted as he met her intense gaze. Clapping his hands together, he dismissed his troops, ordering them out into the street. When the last of them marched away, he motioned for Fuerst to close the great oaken doors and seal off the entry hall.

The baroness stared at the portly servant, causing a flush to creep into his face. Fuerst couldn’t hold her gaze, turning his eyes to the floor and shuffling his feet anxiously.

‘Fuerst is dependable,’ Kreyssig reassured the witch. ‘You can trust to his discretion.’

‘It is not I who must fear his tongue,’ the baroness retorted.

Fuerst bowed in his master’s direction. ‘I can wait outside…’ he started to offer.

‘Stand where you are,’ Kreyssig snapped. It was a small, even petty thing, but he wasn’t inclined to submit to the baroness’s demand. He had to prove, even if only to himself, that he could defy the witch.

Her jaw clenched, the baroness spun around and stalked upstairs. Kreyssig smiled and followed her.

The witch led him into what had been the master bedchamber. Now it was littered with boxes of books — the hastily removed contents of her library. She glanced at the boxes for a moment, then descended upon one of them like a hawk swooping down on a dove. Without hesitation, she removed the topmost volumes and retrieved a heavy tome banded in black leather. Watching the proceeding, Kreyssig felt his hair stand on end, discomfited by the uncanny way the witch was drawn straight to the book she wanted.

A piebald cat came creeping out from some corner as the baroness settled onto the musty bed sheets. The brute sat beside her feet, becoming as still as a statue. ‘He will warn us,’ the witch said, ‘if there are rats in the walls.’ She extended her hand, beckoning Kreyssig to join her.

Careful to keep his distance from the feline sentinel, Kreyssig positioned himself at the head of the bed. He glanced at the cobwebbed walls, unsettled by the woman’s mention of rats. Better than anyone, he knew the efficiency of verminous spies.

He was soon to learn how little he really knew.

The baroness laid the book in her lap, folding her hands across its cover. ‘You have heard of the Underfolk?’

There was an absurd quality in such a ridiculous question being asked with such grim severity. Despite his feeling of unease, Kreyssig laughed at the witch. ‘What child hasn’t been threatened with fables about the Underfolk!’

The baroness did not share his humour. ‘A truth too awful to accept is quickly dismissed as a fable,’ she warned. ‘The Underfolk are real, Adolf. They are what the dwarfs have called “skaven” and fought many wars against in their long history. They are the fiends that lurk and slink in the darkness, watching and waiting to usurp the realms of men.’

Again, Kreyssig laughed, but this time it was forced laughter. ‘Conquer the realms of men? Those disgusting mutants?’ he scoffed.

‘It has happened before,’ the baroness cautioned. She opened the tome in her lap, displaying pages of illuminated text. The words were written in a cramped, spidery script, the drawings crude and horrible. A glance at the frontispiece was enough to make Kreyssig’s stomach churn. ‘This is an ancient Tilean text, written before the time of Sigmar. In Reikspiel, its title would be The Tower Falls. It describes an ancient city of men, the most powerful in the world, a kingdom that shone like the sun. For all its might, for all its magic, the city was brought to ruin by the skaven, razed so completely that even its name has been lost to legend.’

‘More fables,’ Kreyssig declared.

The baroness shook her head. ‘Not fables — a warning. The book describes how the ancient kingdom was destroyed. The skaven didn’t assault the walls with armies. Instead they burrowed beneath those walls, ferreted out men whose ambition they could exploit. Meek and fawning, they offered their services to those who would betray humanity for power. Through their proxies, they set brother against brother, fragmented society until it festered with enmity and hate. Then, when the kingdom was sufficiently weakened from within, they rose up from their hidden burrows.’

Kreyssig scowled at the baroness. The fable she was relating drove too close to his own dealings with the mutants — the skaven as she named them. He couldn’t forget their demands for more and more food, food far beyond even the most gluttonous demands of the small handful of ratmen he had been led to believe dwelled beneath Altdorf. No, even without the evidence of his own eyes when the vermin had rescued them from the witch-taker, Kreyssig knew the creatures were duplicitous, pretending to be something they weren’t. It was all too easy to believe the baroness when she said their ultimate ambition was to visit ruin upon mankind.

‘If these creatures are what your book tells you they are,’ Kreyssig said, ‘then what does it say about stopping them?’

He could tell from the hollow look in the witch’s eyes that whatever knowledge was inside her book, how to overcome the ratmen wasn’t one of its secrets.

Kreyssig was silent for a moment, mulling over everything the ratmen had done for him. Had done for themselves. For the first time, he appreciated how the vermin had used him to their own ends. Exposing Prince Sigdan’s conspiracy, the treason of Reiksmarshal Boeckenfoerde, this information hadn’t been given to benefit himself or the Emperor. The skaven had done it to weaken the Empire. They had used him as their pawn.

Kreyssig had a peasant’s resentment at being used. He would pay his duplicitous allies back, and in their own coin. It would need bold, immediate action to salvage the situation.

‘Tell me all you can about these skaven,’ Kreyssig told the baroness. He glanced out the room’s window, watching the faint glow of dawn shining through the shutters. ‘Then I must arrange a meeting with the new Grand Theogonist. We will need the support of the Sigmarites in the coming battle.’ He favoured the witch with a cold smile. ‘It is never wise to underestimate the ability of faith to motivate men.’

‘In my time of need, my faith faltered.’ The thunder of Auernheimer’s voice was muted to a contrite rumble. The witch-taker’s head was lowered, his eyes staring at the lavishly embroidered rug under his feet. His arms were folded across his breast as he sketched a half-bow towards the man he addressed.

That man leaned back in an enormous chair carved from a single piece of Drakwald timber. His jewelled fingers drummed against the clawed arm rests. When he spoke, Duke Vidor’s voice was anything but low or humble.

‘You worthless peasant scum!’ Vidor roared. He leaned forwards, clenching his fist and shaking it at Auernheimer. ‘I arranged everything for you. I practically gave them to you as a Sigmarsfest present. All you had to do was kill them. You admit they were in your hands!’ Vidor snatched the dagger he wore on his belt and angrily dashed the weapon to the floor. ‘Draw a blade and slash their throats. Nothing elaborate. Just kill them and be done!’

‘Death would not purge the evil,’ Auernheimer said, his voice still subdued. ‘The corruption must be cleansed, burned away by fire. Only that will appease Great Solkan.’

‘Old Night rot Solkan and all heathen gods!’ Vidor raged, rising from his chair. He stalked across the hunting hall, glaring balefully at the witch-taker. He pointed at the stuffed heads of boars and wolves that adorned the walls. ‘Dead!’ he snapped. ‘Dead! Dead! Dead! That was all you had to do. Dead, this scum Kreyssig would no longer be able to defile the Empire. He wouldn’t be able to profane the halls of the Imperial Palace with his peasant’s feet!’ Vidor sneered at Auernheimer. ‘He wouldn’t be able to transgress upon the sacred traditions handed down to us by most holy Sigmar.’

Auernheimer kept his eyes on the floor. ‘I have failed and I shall atone for my mistake.’

‘How?’ Vidor scoffed. ‘It was merest luck that my spies discovered that Kreyssig was meeting with the witch to begin with. Now he will have her hidden someplace we’ll never find her.’ He stared carefully at Auernheimer, a suspicion growing. ‘Don’t think you can attack the Protector without evidence,’ he warned. ‘If there is no evidence linking him to the black arts, you will be denounced as an assassin. The Emperor will have you drawn and quartered — when the Kaiserjaeger tire of torturing you.’

Auernheimer raised his head, turning a pair of cold eyes upon Vidor. ‘I am prepared to die for my god,’ he said. ‘I will not fail Solkan again.’ With a flourish, the witch-taker drew back his hood, exposing a bald head that was a patchwork of grey scars. Slashing across the scars, blood streamed from fresh cuts.

Vidor stared aghast at the fanatic’s display, finally tearing his gaze away. ‘Cover yourself,’ he hissed in a trembling tone before he remembered his noble bearing. Forcing himself to glare back at Auernheimer he added, ‘You are dripping all over my floor.’

The witch-taker replaced his hood. ‘The heretic must burn,’ he stated simply.

Duke Vidor grimaced at the remark. When he had conceived the idea of employing Auernheimer as his cat’s paw, he hadn’t realised the twisted mentality at work inside the man. He had assumed he was simply some charlatan, some opportunistic sadist playing on peasant fears to aggrandise himself. Auernheimer and his rabble had seemed the perfect instrument to destroy Kreyssig, able to act where Vidor dared not. If Kreyssig’s death were laid at Vidor’s door, there would be scandal at the very least. Disgrace and banishment should the Emperor decide to make an example of him.

Now, for the first time, Vidor was realising the mistake he had made. Auernheimer was no charlatan. He was that most dangerous of men — the true believer. His fanatical devotion to Solkan was no pretence, it was horrible, hideous reality. There was no outrage such a man would not commit if he believed it were the will of his god, and he would do so without a moment’s thought of his own life. That the witch-taker had failed once would only make him that much more determined to become a martyr and make amends before his god.

The witch-taker’s death wouldn’t bother Vidor, but if he should murder Kreyssig without the evidence to make even the Emperor incapable of punishing the Protector’s killers…

Vidor sat back in his chair, taking a firm grip on the rests as he spoke in soft tones to the bleeding fanatic. ‘Auernheimer,’ he said. ‘It does no good to kill Kreyssig. We must get the witch too. If we leave her alive, then she will simply bewitch someone else and use them to corrupt the Imperial court.’ He smiled as he watched the witch-taker’s expression fade from one of fatalistic determinacy to uncertainty. ‘We must leave Kreyssig alive for the moment, wait for him to draw her back out. Only when we can get them both can we act.’

Auernheimer looked undecided. ‘What of her daemons? The witch summoned a horde of daemons to rescue her. She may set such monsters loose upon the city if we don’t stop her.’

‘We have to find her first,’ Vidor said, his words slow, patient and patronising. Reasoning with the fanatic was like reasoning with a stubborn child. He didn’t believe a word of Auernheimer’s story about being thwarted by a horde of rat-faced daemons. More likely, Kreyssig’s Kaiserjaeger had burst in while the witch-taker was lingering over his superstitious rituals. Unable to admit that he had fled from mere men, Auernheimer had decided it was a host of daemons that had made him forsake his duty.

‘Leave things to me,’ Duke Vidor said. He reached again to his belt, but this time it was a sack of coins he tossed at Auernheimer’s feet. ‘Take that and find yourself a place to keep out of sight. When the time is right to act, I will send for you.’ He saw the doubt on the witch-taker’s face. ‘My spies found the witch once, they will do so again.’

As he watched Auernheimer walk from the hall, Vidor wondered about his own words. Kreyssig would be doubly careful now, and after his dismissal he had few friends in the Imperial Palace. The only one of any importance was Lord Ratimir, who had retained his position as Minister of Finance.

That a weakling like Ratimir could offer any help, however, was doubtful.

Lord Ratimir cringed against the wall behind his desk, his eyes clenched tight, every muscle in his body trembling in terror. He was like a frightened child, hiding his head under the blankets to blot out some nightmarish bogey in the innocent supposition that if something went unseen then it wasn’t really there.

Ratimir didn’t need to see the thing to know it was still there. He could hear its paws slapping against the floor, the scrape of its tail against the cold stones. He could hear its short, wheezing breaths and the guttural coughs it uttered. He could smell the rank, mangy stink of its fur. He could feel its abhorrent presence tainting the air, turning it to foul slime that dripped against his skin.

‘Rati-man,’ a monstrous, scratchy voice squeaked in debased Reikspiel. The words ended on a note of chittering laughter.

‘Go away!’ Ratimir pleaded. He could hear the thing creeping closer. He tried to blot out the memory of its appearance, of that verminous shape slinking out from the passageway hidden behind the wall. Desperately he tried to wish away those fangs and claws, the wicked inhuman understanding shining from those beady red eyes.

Unseen, the thing crept closer. Ratimir could feel its foetid breath against his neck.

‘Not leave, Rati-man,’ the thing squeaked. ‘Want-need speak-squeak with Rati-man. Can-will help Rati-man,’ the monster promised. ‘Rati-man can-will help,’ the thing added with a threatening growl.

‘No… No…’ Ratimir sobbed. He raised his hands to cover his ears, to block the sound of that verminous voice. He wailed in disgust as furry paws seized his wrists and pulled his hands away.

‘Rati-man listen-learn,’ the skaven growled. ‘Make Rati-man rich-strong!’ A chitter of malevolent humour rippled from the monster’s throat. ‘Or make Rati-man Rati-meat!’

Sylvania

Sigmarzeit, 1113

Here I shall build my tabernacle.

The words still sent a shiver rushing down Lothar von Diehl’s spine. After only a few hours consulting De Arcanis Kadon, Vanhal had instilled a new purpose in the vast horde of undead. They had turned away from the northern reaches of Sylvania, marching back into the interior, circling down along the banks of the Eschenstir, past the battlements of Fort Tempelhof and into the verdant plain between the vastness of Grim Wood and the Grey Forest. For weeks the walking dead, now including the reanimated bodies of Lothar’s own army, prowled through abandoned fields and pastures, passing desolated villages whose sickly inhabitants cowered behind locked doors and prayed to unheeding gods.

Lothar had felt something akin to panic growing inside him as he observed the increasing desolation. The noxious star-stones that had rained down on Sylvania were more prevalent here, turning the land foul with magical emanations. He could almost see the vegetation withering, watch the magic seeping into its roots to twist and destroy. It was a blight that would never be erased, a corruption that would befoul these lands for all time. Even if the Black Plague passed, Sylvania would never recover from this poison from the sky.

Yet it was here, deep within this corruption, that the senior necromancer led his new pupil. Lothar knew better than to question Vanhal’s actions, even as he knew he must swallow his pride and accept the humiliation of a noble being apprentice to a peasant. The fallen priest’s power was too great, his sorcerous knowledge too vast to challenge. His only choice was obedience or death… And even death wouldn’t free him from Vanhal’s domination.

As he stared out across the plain, he could see the ancient ring of dolmens rising from the yellowed weeds and blackened grass. The weathered stones were a relic of elder ages, perhaps reared by prehuman hands. Even in such eldritch epochs, there must have been power here, a force that even inhuman minds had recognised and paid homage to. The Starfall had visited an inordinate amount of its fury upon this ancient site, fairly plastering the landscape with glowing black rocks, altering the very terrain with the magnitude of its celestial violence.

Now that terrain was being altered still further. Lothar watched as thousands of zombies and skeletons laboured around the dolmens, heaping great blocks of stone about them, transforming the standing circle into a solid ring. The blocks were quarried from hills deep within the Grim Wood, dragged by the tireless undead miles through the forest to the site of the construction. Before each block was laid into place, a patina of crushed star-stone was placed upon them, the noxious dust sizzling as it seeped into each block.

Lothar had enough magical aptitude to feel the power of this place, and to appreciate why Vanhal had been drawn here. The site of the dolmens was a sorcerous confluence, a wellspring of aethyric energies where the arcane and the mundane crossed and blended. It was what some erudite scholars had called a ‘window area’, a place where the veil between physical and metaphysical was worn thin. In such an environment, the power of evocations would be amplified, fed by the fountainhead itself. Here, it would be possible to effect conjurations that would make even his matricidal ritual seem insignificant!

But Vanhal intended even more than simply tapping that wellspring. The construction he had initiated would bind and harness the aethyric power, magnifying its potential a thousandfold. The castle he was building would act as a magical fulcrum, a nexus of arcane energies. With such power to draw upon, he would be able to perform feats of sorcery not seen since Nagash the Black strode the earth.

It was both a frightening and awesome prospect.

Lothar turned away from his observation of the undead labourers and studied the source of the tremendous will that drove them on. Vanhal was seated upon his morbid palanquin, legs folded beneath him, De Arcanis Kadon lying open in his lap. The necromancer’s eyes were closed, his breathing so shallow that no frost formed in the chilly air. To all appearances, he seemed more lifeless than the zombies building his castle.

Carefully, Lothar stole towards the palanquin, concerned that Vanhal’s magic had sent his spirit somewhere that made it impossible to return to his body. For all his injured pride, the possibility alarmed the baron. There was so much he still needed to learn. To be cheated now, when he had gained an inkling of how vast his mentor’s abilities and ambitions were, was too awful to contemplate.

He was just climbing onto the palanquin to check for evidence of life when Vanhal’s cold voice brought his pulse racing. Startled, Lothar dropped back to the blighted ground.

‘Separate a thousand workers from the construction,’ Vanhal said, the words coming more as a ghostly vibration than an actual voice. ‘Send them to scour the bogs and graveyards. I will need more hands to build my tabernacle. Have them bring me those hands.’

Lothar looked back at the construction, fear once again asserting itself. Vanhal already had more undead under his control than any magician Lothar had heard of outside of legends. Indeed, he was amazed that the necromancer could maintain command of so many. To try to raise and control still more was madness.

‘Do as I say,’ Vanhal’s phantom tones demanded, as though taking note of Lothar’s hesitation and reading his mind. ‘All must be prepared before Geheimnisnacht.’

Mention of the night of sorcery explained the urgency behind Vanhal’s command, but only served to increase Lothar’s uneasiness. He expected the castle to be built in only a few months! It would take an army several times greater than the one already under his control to achieve such a feat. Surely Vanhal didn’t intend to try and control so many undead?

One of the eyes behind the necromancer’s mask opened and directed a baleful look at Lothar. ‘All will be in readiness before Geheimnisnacht,’ he said, this time in a deep and menacing voice. Lothar’s objections withered before that stare and that voice.

‘It shall be as you desire, master,’ Lothar said, bowing before the sinister necromancer.

Vanhal closed his eye, refocused his mind to manipulating the undead labourers. Lothar shuddered, wondering if his master were mad. There was, of course, another possibility: that he could do everything he believed himself capable of doing. The idea of such power vested within one man’s mind and body rekindled Lothar’s faltering determination. Bowing again, he hurried from the presence of his master. He would detach some of the undead, send them to steal corpses from graves. He would see how far Vanhal’s abilities could stretch.

It would be a good lesson. An indication of how far his own ambitions might rise.

In normal circumstances, the smell of rotting meat mixed with warpstone would have been a delicious combination to the nose of any skaven. The promise of food and wealth all in the same sniff! Somewhere along the way, however, some insidious fiend had turned the normal state of existence on its tail. Seerlord Skrittar wasn’t certain what malefic force was behind this cataclysmic reversal, but he was certain this calamity was directed solely against himself.

His careful plans, his elaborate rituals to break pieces from the moon and seed them in the earth had been so perfectly flawless. The man-things were sick from the plague, the other Grey Lords were busy plundering the nests and warrens abandoned by the humans. Nothing should have interfered!

Then the stinky-things started showing up. Since that first encounter, when the cowards of Clan Fester had tucked their tails between their legs and scurried off in abject terror, the skaven had been unable to range more than a few food-stops before running into the wormy man-things! What was worse, the filth-things had started to gather warpstone. They were stealing Skrittar’s treasure out from under his very whiskers!

It was enough to make a less disciplined skaven grind his fangs to stumps. Skrittar, however, wasn’t about to concede defeat. Magnanimously setting aside his personal disagreements with their… unique… interpretation of the Horned Rat, he had invited Clan Pestilens to take a hand in gathering the warpstone. Vrask Bilebroth and his disciples weren’t quite outcasts, but with Vrask’s rival Puskab Foulfur on the Council of Thirteen, they weren’t the most popular plague monks. It had been embarrassingly easy to entice the plague priest from hiding by promising to lend him the protection of the grey seers against any retaliation his pestilential enemy might be planning.

Vrask had better be worth the effort Skrittar had expended on him! Watching the plague priest and his disciples sneak across an open field, the seerlord had to concede that the fanatics had a certain amount of bravado. Mad as bedbugs, but brave. It was a combination he might wish his other lackeys possessed, but Warlord Manglrr was such a craven mouse he wasn’t even present to watch Clan Pestilens at work — he’d left that duty to a sub-chief while staying behind in the comfort of the tunnels. It was an outrageous dereliction — especially after his loud demands that the Black Plague be brought to bear against the stink-things!

The stink-things were just beyond the fallow field Vrask and his disciples were crawling across. There was a man-thing bury-plot there. They had been busy for some time excavating the graves, piling the desiccated bodies on carts. It was a mad sort of exercise; there couldn’t be more than a few bites of meat on any of the bodies, and what was there would be tough and chewy. Certainly the stink-things weren’t very smart if this was their idea of foraging.

Skrittar lashed his tail in frustrated anticipation, waiting for the plague monks to confront the enemy. Vrask had promised a great deal with his new strain of plague, a refinement of the disease concocted by Puskab. The grey seer was anxious to see if Vrask’s boasts were justified.

After what seemed an eternity, the enemy appeared to finally notice the plague monks. First a few, then several dozen of the stink-things turned around to stare with glazed eyes at the fallow field. It took the creatures almost a minute to react to the approaching enemy, but when they finally did it was with chilling purposefulness. The stink-things advanced in a shambling mass towards the creeping skaven.

As the foe began to emerge from the graveyard, Vrask rose to his feet and snarled a command to his green-robed fanatics. The plague monks rose from the earth, the foremost of them bearing massive poles of brass and bronze, a metal ball suspended from the tip by a length of chain. Chittering their heretical psalms, the ratmen tore away the thick folds of cloth bundled about the cage-like orbs. With the covering removed, noxious fumes billowed from inside each censer as strips of plague-ridden meat slowly dissolved beneath a coating of acid.

Even from a distance, Skrittar could sense the deadly properties of those pestilential fumes. He could see the exposed arms of the plague monks shedding fur, could smell their naked skin blistering in the caustic clouds. Corrosion dripped down the metal poles and from the spiked frames of the censer balls. Nothing living could withstand such a lethal admixture!

Skrittar’s thrill of triumph faded as the plague monks charged into the slowly advancing zombies. Swinging their censers like enormous flails, the skaven fanned the fumes full into the faces of the stink-things. Flesh peeled and blistered, the foul sores and buboes of the Black Plague spread across enemy skin. It was a hideous, magnificent sight! But that magnificence soon transformed into horror. The ghastly damage the censers visited upon the stink-things, the corrosive disease that should have slaughtered an entire city of humans, did little more than slow the creatures down. The odd bit, an arm here, an ear there, dropped away when the flesh binding it to the body became too corroded to restrain it, but the loss scarcely phased the stink-things. With monotonous, steady tread, the undead closed upon Vrask’s disciples.

The Black Plague, that much touted super-weapon of Clan Pestilens’ had failed! For an instant, Skrittar wondered if the plague priest had tried to trick him, to fob off some fraudulent strain of pox as the infamous Death, but a single sniff of the abject horror in Vrask’s scent told him otherwise. Vrask was genuinely shocked at the plague’s ineffectiveness. He stood in the field, watching as the stink-things advanced towards his disciples and began to drag them down one after another, rending them with rotten hands and smashing them down with rusty spades. His shock was such that only when his disciples began to flee past him did Vrask’s instinctual self-preservation kick in.

Manglrr’s chieftain and the other representatives of Clan Fester were already scurrying back to the tunnels, the plague monks close behind. Skrittar, however, lingered. There were two reasons for such a display of courage. First, it would drive home to the vermin that the seerlord was far above them, so mighty he need not fear the things that brought them terror. Second, he’d already noticed that the stink-things weren’t pursuing the plague monks, but instead were shambling back to the graveyard.

A third reason for lingering on the field of battle presented itself as Vrask Bilebroth went scurrying by, his decayed robes fluttering behind him like the tattered wings of a cave bat. Skrittar’s eyes narrowed, lips peeled back from his fangs. Extending his staff, he sent a bolt of power smashing into the fleeing plague priest. Vrask was sent tumbling snout over tail with such violence that one of the horns fitted to his cowl snapped off and went spinning into the night. Skrittar scowled at the presumptions of Clan Pestilens. The heretics were required by custom to deliver the horned skaven born to their breeders to the grey seers for indoctrination and training, but they were boldly lax about such obligations. Many of the plague priests and festering chantors within their clan sported horns and antlers in open challenge to the grey seers, some of them natural growths, others affectations of their costume. Vrask, it seemed, was one of the latter, a mundane skaven posing as a mage-rat.

Skrittar covered the ground between himself and the sprawled Vrask in a series of bounding hops, bringing his staff crashing down on the plague priest’s head before he could rise. He heard fangs splinter under the blow, smelt skaven blood oozing from Vrask’s mouth.

‘Mercy-pity!’ Vrask whined. ‘Not kill-slay loyal-true Vrask!’

Skrittar glared down at the cringing plague priest. ‘You lied to me, flea-nibbler!’ he spat, raising the staff for another strike. ‘Promise-say that the plague will kill all stink-things!’ He waved a paw at the graveyard where the creatures were already resuming their excavation. ‘Does that look like you killed them? I needed you to reassure those mice of Fester, now I’ll be lucky if the whole inbred clan doesn’t go scurrying back to Skavenblight!’

Vrask folded his paws over his head, trying to protect himself from the coming blow. ‘Yes-yes, I take-take blame-fault! That is why you need-want Vrask!’

The staff froze a hair from Vrask’s horned cowl. A cunning gleam crept into Skrittar’s eyes. It was true, the fault did lie with Vrask. He’d failed to destroy the stink-things and thereby he had proved that Manglrr’s faith in the efficacy of Clan Pestilens was misplaced. More than anything Skrittar could have said or done, Vrask had exposed the limitations of his heretical clan. The rats of Fester would be confused and dispirited by the plague’s failure, but if Skrittar struck quickly and boldly, he could turn that to his favour. He could redirect that disillusion into a more zealous adherence to the Horned One’s true dogma and His sacred voice on earth — Seerlord Skrittar!

‘On your feet, tick-licker!’ Skrittar snarled, kicking Vrask until he obeyed. ‘You are right, I can use you to show Manglrr where his faith should rest.’ The seerlord sucked at his fangs as he glanced back at the graveyard. Disgracing Clan Pestilens was all nice and wonderful, but that still left the problem of what to do about the stink-things.

A hideous thought occurred to Skrittar. Ignoring the whining Vrask, he raised his snout and sniffed again at the air. Yes, there was something wrong about that decayed smell, that tang of dark magic he could detect running beneath the stink of skaven fear musk. It was the smell from the fields, and it was a smell he didn’t like. It was a smell that made him think of abhorrent moments from countless generations past, when the Under-Empire made war against the Curse-thing of Cripple Peak.

Just the idea of that horrifying place made Skrittar’s glands clench. For generations entire clans had perished trying to seize the warpstone mines under Cripple Peak, vying for control with a terrifying mage-thing and the dead-things at its command. The tale of that conflict had passed into legend, a parable to warn future litters.

The foes they fought now, these decaying thieves who stole his warpstone, they were like the dead-things of Cripple Peak! They were the undead, creatures immune to the plagues of Pestilens because they weren’t really alive. Unleash a thousand poxes, and the monsters would keep coming.

As he considered the problem, Skrittar gnashed his fangs. There was a solution, of course, but it would mean letting other paws into the food stash. He didn’t like to invite further complications into what had already become an overly complicated scheme, but there was no getting away from the fact that if he didn’t then he’d never gather the warpstone before the entire Under-Empire was aware of it.

Clan Fester was afraid to fight the undead. Clan Pestilens was unable to fight them. But there was one clan who had built their very identity around their legacy as killers of the dead. They were the last clan to leave Cripple Peak, the survivors of the long war against the Accursed One.

Yes, Skrittar decided, it was time to form an alliance with Warlord Nekrot and the grave-rats of Clan Mordkin.