Blighted Empire

Prologue

Skavenblight

Geheimnisnacht, 1112

The pungent smell of smouldering warpstone wafted through the blackened chamber, the corrupt fume slithering into every nook and cranny, oozing between the crumbling bricks, burning into beams of oak and ash, discolouring glass and tarnishing bronze. It was the stench of darkest sorcery, and this was its night.

Resplendent in silver robes woven from the scalps of man-thing she-breeders, Seerlord Skrittar perched atop the dais, his claw stroking the silky texture of his finery. The wealth displayed by such a garment! He could smell the envy in the scent of his subordinates whenever he donned it. It was a considerable expenditure to abduct the she-breeders, bear them back alive to Skavenblight and confine them in the blackest burrows beneath the city. They had to be kept in darkness, nurtured on a rich diet of glow-grubs and swamp maize for many seasons before their hair assumed the correct hue, scent and texture. It was a sad reality that only the smallest amounts of weirdroot could be used to keep the she-breeders tranquil or the drug would affect the desired properties in their hair. The breeders of the man-things were eccentric, excitable animals, entertaining pretensions of intelligence the Horned Rat had thankfully spared the brood-mothers of the skaven. They were given to crazed moods and had to be constantly watched lest they kill themselves in an unguarded moment.

Skrittar’s whiskers twitched in amusement as he pondered the perfection of the skaven mind. The Horned Rat had blessed his children with the divine spark, had created the ratmen in his own image and invested in them all the craft and guile of his own black spirit. The skaven were destined to dominate and rule over all others. It was a holy imperative. To do less was to betray their sacred duty. From the very first time the Shattered Tower’s bell had tolled the thirteenth note, the skaven had known it was their destiny to inherit the world.

The seerlord’s whiskers became still. His furred lips pulled back to expose his yellowed fangs, his naked tail lashed in annoyance against the cold stone floor. If not for the petty squabbling and bickering amongst the clans, the skaven should have dominated the world long ago. Short-sighted despots and craven-livered tyrants who could think only of their own pretensions of power and greatness. The Grey Lords had squandered the resources of the mighty Under-Empire on their internecine feuds and rivalries. If they could only put the welfare of skavendom ahead of their own ambitions, nothing could keep the ratmen from rising up and overwhelming the surface world. There was no force among gods or men that could stand against a united skavendom!

Skrittar shook his horned head, his nose crinkling in a sour expression as though a foul scent had filled his nostrils. There was a real prospect of skavendom uniting now. The past winter had seen Clan Pestilens unleash their hideous Black Plague against the man-things. The disease had run rampant, decimating the humans in numbers that were truly astounding. Virtually the entire Council of Thirteen had rallied behind Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch, even permitting a second plague priest to assume a position among the Lords of Decay, the diseased Poxmaster Puskab Foulfur, creator of the Black Plague! First Among Equals, Warmonger Vecteek the Murderous had showered the plague monks with gifts and honours, indulging them as the vicious warlord of Clan Rictus had never indulged any clan before.

If things persisted, all would march together under a single banner. But it wouldn’t be the divine light of the Horned One and his living prophets, the grey seers, who would guide the united hordes of the Under-Empire. It would be the pestilent minds and heretical creeds of the plague priests!

Skrittar stamped his paw against the floor, spinning around and scurrying to the gigantic mess of copper tubes and pipes that dominated one end of the vast, cavernous hall high within the holy confines of the Shattered Tower. The ancient stained-glass window that had been left behind by the original human builders of the city had been broken up and sold as scrap. It had been a necessary defilement to allow the great crystal lens of the hulking warpscope to focus upon the black tapestry of night.

A fabulous creation, that mountain of copper and bronze, glass and crystal. There were plates of polished warpstone deep inside the housing, sheets of the stone that had been ground so thin and fine as to be translucent. Exploiting a network of silver mirrors, the warpstone lenses would draw down the image of the night sky into the eye of the observer, permitting him such a view of the moons that it seemed he might reach out and grab them.

The seerlord chittered as the humour of such a thought occurred to him. Reach out and grab the moons? That was precisely what he had done. Not through the arcane technology of Clan Skryre; all their foolish contraption — itself shamelessly patterned after similar instruments developed by the dwarf-things — could do was offer a view of the moons. With his magic, Skrittar had done much more. Much, much more! He had stretched forth his tyrannical will and gouged his sorcerous claws across the face of Morrslieb, tearing great chunks from the dark moon’s surface. Chunks of raw, pure warpstone!

For a full cycle of seasons those boulders of warpstone had circled across the sky, becoming like little black stars, waiting for the moment when he, Skrittar, Voice of the Horned One, would draw them down to earth.

Skrittar’s paw brushed across the focusing mechanism, manipulating the little flywheel as he pressed his eye to the observation port. Supposedly the Skryre tinker-rats had insulated the viewing plate against the harmful energies of the warpscope’s lenses, but just to be safe the seerlord hissed a quick prayer to invoke the Horned Rat’s protection. Ordinarily he would leave the hazards of using any of Skryre’s contraptions to an easily replaceable underling or an overly ambitious subordinate, but at the moment there was no one to indulge such caution.

Looking away from the observation port, Skrittar cast his gaze across the long chamber with its arched ceiling high overhead, and its stone walls black and hoary with age. The floor was marked with a bewildering array of protective talismans and circles, each figure drawn with exacting precision in the blood of elves and griffons and even more dangerous beasts. Bronze braziers cast a fume of smouldering warpstone into the air, saturating the chamber’s atmosphere with the stuff of raw magic.

Skrittar had bided his time for a full year, waiting for the cosmic conjunction of moons and stars that was Gnawdawn. It was only during such a conjunction that the black energies of dark magic were magnified to their full. Even then, even with his abilities bolstered and heightened by warpstone elixirs and vapours, his spiritual aura strengthened by obscene rites to the Horned Rat, Skrittar had known the sorcery he needed to perform was beyond his ability alone. As he had one year ago, Skrittar had summoned a cabal of his underlings, a coven of twelve of his ablest and most wicked grey seers.

They had been wary and suspicious when they had submitted to Skrittar’s summons, calling them to the grand observatory. The entire Order of Grey Seers had been shaken by the deaths of twelve of their number exactly one year previously. Outwardly, none of them had been so foolish as to doubt Skrittar’s claim that their comrades had expired in a failed magical experiment. He didn’t think anyone had managed to ferret out the true nature of their deaths — Clan Eshin had a most un-skavenlike propensity for discretion. Still, there had been an inordinate number of assassination attempts on Skrittar’s life since that Great Ritual one year ago.

Skrittar ground his fangs together in irritation. Even among the grey seers, prophets of the Horned One, there was a woeful lack of vision. Any of them should be happy to become a martyr, to give his worthless life in the name of his god. Their sacrifice would be the stuff that would blot out the heathen taint of Clan Pestilens forever! Their blood would be the first waters of a tide that would sweep through the Under-Empire and establish a theocracy that would dominate skavendom for all time! Their deaths would bring supreme power to their master, Seerlord Skrittar!

There were twelve more martyrs to the cause now. Twelve grey-cloaked bodies strewn about the floor. All the protective wards and talismans they had carried, the spells and arcane safeguards they had evoked, hadn’t been enough to save them. The grey seers had lent their magic to Skrittar’s ritual, each of the greedy fool-meat imagining the wealth that would soon belong to them, presuming themselves a share of what belonged to the Horned Rat and his supreme servant Skrittar alone! Greed formed a chink in their defences, made their caution falter for just a brief moment.

It was the only moment Skrittar needed. The twelve had died in an especially agonising fashion as they inhaled the poison. The seerlord had been too crafty to use Deathmaster Silke as he had the previous year, just in case someone had learned of their connection. Instead, he had engaged the Deathmaster’s disciple Killmaker Nartik to dispose of his unwanted, untrustworthy minions. Nartik had been crafty too, tossing the pungent packet of poison into one of the braziers the instant the ritual was over and the cabal had outlived their usefulness. Skrittar had been told the effects would resemble the Black Plague to such a degree that only the most adept assassins in Clan Eshin would be able to tell the difference. The rest of Skrittar’s Order would be convinced the massacre had been the work of the heathen plague monks this time!

Skrittar turned back to the warpscope. Through the viewing lens he could see the chunks of orbiting warpstone, each of them radiating a faint nimbus of green light now. Before his gaze, he could see them being drawn downwards. Soon, the magic Skrittar had conjured would have the warpstone plummeting into the earth, smashing down as a rain of meteorites. He had been very careful in his calculations. He knew where the warpstone would come smashing down, a section of land barren enough to be shunned by most skaven yet not so distant as to make a journey there noteworthy. He’d already picked one of the less powerful warlord clans to provide the labour he would require, a clan with sufficient dread of the grey seers and enough pious terror of the Horned Rat that the slightest twitch of Skrittar’s whisker would have them scurrying to carry out his commands.

The seerlord leaned away from the warpscope, rubbing his lucky cat’s foot over the eye he had pressed to the observation port just in case. He bruxed his teeth as he consulted the ratskin map laid out on a bench atop the dais. The trajectory of the warpstone would draw it down to the bleakest backwater in the region of the man-thing Empire. When the warpstone shower struck, Skrittar would not be far behind. His lackeys would harvest the biggest bonanza of warpstone the Under-Empire had ever seen, wealth that would make even Vecteek and Nurglitch bow to Skrittar and kiss the tip of his tail!

With the man-things sick and weak, with the dwarf-things hiding in their mountains and the green-things fighting among themselves, there was no one who would oppose Skrittar’s invasion of Sylvania.