Champion of the Gods

Chapter six

I put on the manacles. I stepped forward on command and let the nervous-looking spear-rat insert a locking bar through each wrist while the other attached another set around my ankles. These, at least, were linked by a short length of rusty chain rather than being a solid lump of iron, allowing me to move a little, even if it did force me to shuffle about like a monk of the Listening Order. The thought of beating the two ratmen to death with their locking bars did occur, but I am not nearly the unthinking animal that I like to be portrayed as. That they feared me enough to be so cautious was flattering, but I knew that killing a couple of clanrat guards was not going to get me out of that cell. And I did want to get out of that cell. I was curious to know who was mad enough to think that they could cage the Bear-Eater, and why.

After that, I allowed (though I was definitely stretching the definition of ‘allowed’ by this point) them to feed a metal rod through steel eyes in both sets of fetters and lock them together. By the time Milk Scar was satisfied enough to unlock the door I was trussed like a Sigmarzeit hog for roasting.

I still fancied my chances in a fight if it came to it, but fleeing a skaven warren in that state was hardly going to be the most glorious escapade of my life.

I was content to wait for my moment. For now.

The spear-rats both shuffled behind me as I stepped out of the cell and into the passage. One of Milk Scar’s henchrats approached with a hood, a look in his eyes that suggested he was wondering how to overcome the clear foot of disparity between his uppermost reach and the top of my head with dignity.

‘No-no,’ said Milk Scar, to his henchrat’s poorly disguised relief. ‘Our… friends want-wish to see him.’ His struggles over the word ‘friend’ suggested to me that Queekish had no proper translation for it.

Then one of the spear-rats prodded me in the back and we were moving.

Exploring the interior of a skaven lair was one of those rare experiences that I’d often found time to imagine but had yet to indulge. Like hunting vulcharc through the Crystal Labyrinth of Tzeentch, scratching my name onto the black stones of the Shrine of Elixia in the famous Hanging Vale of Anvrok, or conquering the Tattered Peaks of Ulgu where, I’ve heard, you can see older stars than any in Azyr. Naturally, then, I went in with certain expectations, all of which were grossly surpassed by the reality.

As soon as the door was opened, I gagged on the stench of rat. If my gaoler had soaked a cloth in piss and ordure, allowed it to marinate with wet fur and fouled meat, and then stuffed the finished article in my mouth the pungence could not have been more overpowering. It was almost enough for me to turn around and beg for the hood. The effect of the odour was worsened by the fact that my sense of smell, along with an equally disturbed one of touch, was almost all I had to go on. The same awful green half-light that had permeated the dungeons coated every­thing here as well, enough to see by, but only just; no colour there but green and the many shades of it towards black. The clanrat right in front of me was less defined than a shadow.

Even the main tunnels were narrow.

The skaven scurried on all fours and it was tight even for them. No consideration was spared for the eight-foot-tall Stormcast Eternal with fetters binding ankles and wrists, and the skaven behind me took every moment of struggle as fair excuse to prod me in the back with their spears.

‘Try that again and I will break your arms,’ I snarled.

They simply tittered and prodded harder. As if the passages were not cramped enough with just the six of us, we had to contend with a constant flood of skaven coming in the opposite direction, as well as plenty more trying to overtake us from behind. A thoroughfare through skaven eyes, or to be more accurate, skaven whiskers, seemed to be a survival contest of biting and clawing and bullying of the fittest. I’d taken more than a few claw marks, and a few more sly spear jabs I might add, before we’d even lost sight of the dungeons.

Very occasionally the passage widened, but if I was expecting any respite from the deranged horrors of skavendom then I was to be disappointed.

The tunnel seemed to have been dug with just enough deliberation to wind around a succession of larger natural caverns, widening as it did so – in this instance, into a vertiginous shelf of flat-ish rock overlooking the chaotic sprawl of verminous industry below. Scaffolding clambered up the walls, wreathed in the impenetrable toxic smog of the hell-foundries and machinery in its depths. The rickety platforms that had been built onto the very top of the scaffolds put me in mind of dead fish floating on a poisoned lake, and I’d seen more than a few of those in my time battling the Rotbringers of Ghur.

There are many horrors that I’ve borne witness to in my life, but the sound and vibrations of those skaven machines, ravening and consuming with neither animus nor soul, made me shudder.

Milk Scar moved unerringly through it all in spite of his blindness. He would scurry along, inches from a thousand-foot drop, whiskers atwitch at some change in pressure or humidity that I couldn’t detect. Then he would count out his steps before halting at a bustling intersection, sniffing both ways, then dashing headlong into a seething torrent of vermin – as if it were somehow preferable to the seething torrent of vermin that had been there two seconds beforehand. When he counted, I counted, doing my best to recall our route, memorising the rhythm of the landmarks, such as they were. A side-passage from which the unappetising stench of roasted flesh emerged. Another that went up, skaven scrambling over each other for claw-holds, the chittering and screaming of skaven barter echoing down. We went through a sprawling warren of hide yurts that I took to be the skaven equivalent of an embassy quarter. Beastmen brayed and jeered as I was led through, shaking their horns in a riotous display. I bared my teeth gamely and tried to clench my fists and flex my muscles. My fetters wouldn’t let me raise my hands above my waist, but I was pleased to see that the effort offended them enormously.

A scratch post, little more than a wooden stake that had been hammered into the ground and covered in claw-scratch writing, pointed off in a bewildering array of directions. Every indecipherable notch corresponded to a branching tunnel. The acrid stench of skaven scent markings pooled there at the confluence. I retched, rattling my fetters as I tried to cover my mouth. I clenched my jaw, trying to breathe through my gritted teeth, but I could still taste it.

The place was a maze, a labyrinth, a hundred thousand skaven or more fighting across it day and night, and I’d not glimpsed so much as a hint of a way out.

If I was to have any hope of getting out of there, then the one advantage I could rely on would be the cowardice of the individual skaven and the sheer anarchy of their society. If I tried to fight my way out now then as many would try to run away as try and stop me, and a hundred times as many again would be reliably oblivious to the fact that I was ever there.

That still left me with a task, but I would gladly leap across that river when I was good and ready.

After about half an hour of scuffling and scraping, I had a respite of sorts when Milk Scar stopped scrabbling along with such easy haste and began probing out the path ahead with his tail. I assumed that we had to be venturing into newer delvings, or perhaps into an area that he did not know so implicitly. The passages all looked alike to me, I confess, though I did start to notice something different in myself. The sense I had of the Ghurlands began to recede, replaced by the sense of something gummy and vile, chewing on me from within. Even the light of far Sigendil became briefly occulted, as if some miasma had passed between us. Even on my brief incursion into Shadespire, I had not felt so distant from my maker.

Once again, I found myself in the implausible scenario of fervently praying for Xeros Stormcloud’s wellbeing.

‘Here-here.’

Milk Scar gestured to a door that had been set into the wall of the passage. It shouldn’t have been all that sensational, but it was, and I only understand why it was when I realised that I hadn’t seen a single one since we’d left my cell. The skaven exist cheek by jowl, after all, and clearly placed a low premium on individual space. The door was covered in brass wheels and rods, all of them lit a metallic green, but there was no handle or latch that I could see. I wondered for a second if I might have been mistaken about it being a door at all, but then Milk Scar scuttled up to it and knocked. There was no answer, but as the gaoler withdrew his paw the wheels covering the door began to spin, bars sliding through tracks, and of its own inanimate will the door lurched outwards.

The sight of it made my skin crawl, and I turned to Milk Scar.

‘What are you waiting for?’ I said.

‘I not go-scurry in there.’ His spear-rats gave me a jab for good measure.

Rattling my fetters as I made to lift my hands in surrender, I ­shuffled inside alone.

Though the pervasive illumination persisted, it was somehow darker inside, as though this burrow was the source of all that was black and it was thicker here as a consequence. Numerous low-slung tables cluttered the floor, spilling over with bits of metal, springs and gnawed wires. Tools that no five-fingered, two-handed, or right-minded man would have any use for lay everywhere, discarded, half-made. The walls were clad in shelving, none of it level, an eclectic collection of rusty machinery and ancient tomes. Spidery text crawled down the books’ spines, and averse as I am to lettering of any hand or kind, these works had me looking quickly away.

Across from the door was a chaise. It was Azyrite quality, the makers mark glittering dully on one wooden foot. One of the many fine things that the skaven had looted from the Seven Words in their last unsuccessful raid, I suspected. I certainly doubted that there could be too many cordwainers of the Magrittan school on this side of the Nevermarsh. The fine cordovan leather was shredded, the seat sagging. At first I thought it unoccupied, but then I saw the two sinister red eyes that floated in the darker shadow above its cushions, the jagged chasm of a grin.

I started towards it without thinking.

The chains looping through my leg irons pulled taut. I yanked instinctively on my handcuffs to break my fall, only managing to rattle the connecting bar, and struck my head on the corner of the closest table. I groaned, more with embarrassment than with pain, as screws and washers and ball bearings all clattered over the floor, and over me, though the wetness spreading from my temple was reminder enough that even the Stormcast Eternals are not so mighty that they needn’t fear their own stupidity.

The shadow-rat tittered, like a cold breeze brushing across my gravestone.

‘Leave him, Malikcek,’ said another voice, nearby. ‘Leave us.’

‘That’s right, leave us, before I–’ I wriggled in a rattle of rods and chains and looked up, but the chaise was already empty. I blinked. The depression that the shadowy creature had left in the cushions slowly crinkled out. ‘What? How did he…?’

‘The gods have been harsh-cruel to poor Malikcek.’

Shrugging off the gash to my forehead, I tensed the muscles of my abdomen to draw myself upright and turned towards the sound of the voice.

The creature hunched amongst the cluttered arcana was skaven in size and form, but encased entirely in metal. Coppery whiskers protruded from a muzzle lined with diamond-edged teeth. White hairs tufted through gaps in the ironwork where plates had been misaligned or fitted together poorly. Even the master warlocks of the Clans Skyre, it seemed, were not immune to the freneticism and failure of detail that marred the products of their demented, but undoubted, genius. Even when it came to their own forms.

‘And as you know-see for yourself, Malikcek is cruel-harsh to the gods in kind.’

The warlock pointed at me, then gestured to the chaise.

His hand was an articulated iron claw, bolted onto the shell of his arm, and studded with crystals, lenses, and odd designs. Out of curiosity more than genuine obedience I manoeuvred myself towards the chaise and dropped into it. The warlock made no effort to assist me. Nor did he sit himself. He didn’t stir at all, just watched me struggle to perform his bidding, his eyes like captured ice within the dark confines of a metal helm. It took no special gift on my part to sense the power behind that gaze. I’ve fought many mighty beings in my time. Mortarchs. Daemons. All of them paled in comparison to what I felt standing before me in that warren, and though I’ve stood against or alongside greater powers in the years since and not been cowed, only once before had I experienced its like.

When I’d clasped the hand of Sigmar and been thrown to Ghur for the very first time. Where the power of the God-King was uplifting, golden light from horizon to horizon and the glory of the stars themselves, what I felt in the warlock’s presence was something smothering and dark. It was a patchwork of rust and shadow, scraps of power sewn together with a ratman’s infinitely imaginative spite.

It occurred to me that I, and the Seven Words, were in far greater danger than I had realised.

‘Why am I here?’ I asked.

‘Because I wished it. Because you are valuable to me.’ He tittered. It was a dry, retching sound, like a blade in need of oiling that wouldn’t come free of its sheath. ‘Because take-luring you was easy.’

I shook my head, trying to understand. ‘Kurzog said that it was about me. To capture me? Why?’

The warlock said nothing. His eye-glow was unblinking and his mask expressionless.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded.

He cocked his head. It was a skaven mannerism I was familiar with, but performed with a stiffness of movement more reminiscent of the newly animated flesh of a zombie or the bark of a slumbering treekin than a ratman. ‘In Blight City they call-squeak the Rat That Was, the Ur-Rat. To the Shadow Lords of Decay in the Realm of Ruin I am Outcast. In Phoenicium I am Life-Taker and Gnawing Winter. In the Fractal Fortress of the Legion of Fate I–’

I interrupted him with a chuckle.

‘They have a few good names for me there too.’

I had been expecting him to bristle. It is what most verminous maniacs would have done in his place, but he did not. He just studied me, as though I were a moving part in some mechanism of his and had just started running backwards.

‘What does your mother call you?’ I said.

‘Mother…?’ The warlock pondered the question, then performed another creaking laugh. ‘Ikrit is my name. Was. As good as any. Quicker to say than most.’

‘Why am I here?’ I said again.

Ikrit didn’t answer.

He clanked towards me, unclawing his huge mechanical hand one stiff-jointed digit at a time until his palm was open to me. I tried to draw myself out of reach – and you would too, under the circumstances – but my movements were hampered by my restraints, and by the back of the chaise. He laid his claw upon my chest. A frisson of power surged from the cold metal and into my skin. It was the wild vigour of Ghur. The steady life-pulse of Ghyran. The iron grip of Chamon. The enduring stasis of Shyish. More. Powers from realms I had never trodden and peoples I had never encountered, all somehow welded together and fused by skaven sorcery into that cold mechanical shell.

I understood then what I had felt from him before, and for the first time in my many lives, I think I felt afraid.

‘The lightning-god and his duardin slaves take-steal from all of Pantheon, and mix-meld to make something unique in the realms. And powerful.’ He tittered, excited, as he looked at me, his eye glow flickering. ‘First step is hardest, I know. Innovation not easy. But after that? What has been made once can be copied. What has been copied once can be made again. The lightning-god has a secret. I want-want.’

‘Why me?’

The warlock shushed me with a metal finger upon my lips. I growled and tried to shake my head, but for a skaven-sized creature Ikrit was obscenely strong. He pinned me down with one finger and bent in as if to sniff me in the manner of his race, but his ironclad snout emitted no mortal breath that I could hear, or feel against my face.

‘I ask-squeak the questions now.’