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Death by a Thousand Gnaw-Bites - David Guymer

About the Author

An Extract from ‘A Dynasty of Monsters’

A Black Library Publication

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DEATH BY A THOUSAND GNAW-BITES

By David Guymer

I

Muskretch was the kind of minion that even a sage and erudite things-master like Krowl did not fully appreciate until they were gone.

Muskretch had known his skavenbrews: give him teeth and some claw shavings, and with nothing more than a pestle and mortar he could feed a vermintrain until the next Withering. He had learned the thirteen formulations of skalm, without ever needing to pester his betters. He had considered himself learned in the many ailments of the flesh market and the breeding pen and, indeed, had been so. His fascination with opiate salves had always been somewhat dubious, but had, in hindsight, saved Clan Grench a fortune in wasted flesh. He had, of course, continued to self-administer those salves long after their worth had been proven to all but the most sceptical of packmasters. 'Tweaking,' he would say, generally with slurred vowels and eyes half-lidded. He was bright then. But not too bright.

A surfeit of intellect was seldom a desirable quality in an underling.

He had occasionally been overheard to describe himself as an artist, the Writhing Broodsire his patron and the meat and bone of his subjects his clay. If nothing else this was further proof of the potency of his salve, for Krowl recalled him as being typically sullen and monosyllabic, and appropriately fearful in their dealings. The under-moulders had respected him. Or existed in sufficient terror of him to feign it convincingly. The slaves lived in dread of him. The clan's menagerie had almost eaten out of his paw.

More proof as to the power of his salves.

Muskretch was not yet entirely gone, of course.

It was a long way still to the Cadivaris Mons and the new start they promised.

Krowl was saving some of him for later.

II

The sun drew itself a claw's width above the horizon's teeth. A tattered cloak of glowing cloud muted its already meagre light, casting the endless deserts of the Necros underworld beneath a thin, bruise-coloured shroud.

Krowl gnawed vexedly on a scruff of tail as he took in the sunrise.

The skaven were temperamentally unsuited to any kind of collaborative effort. They were pathologically selfish, even when their own wretched lives depended on the survival of the clan. To watch them break camp, as he was regrettably forced to do now, was to watch the early throes of a civil war. Individuals wandered off in search of food or forage, abandoning the hard labour of dismantling the manskin shelters and beast pens to skavenslaves that had been eaten days ago. The slaves had been less valuable than the clan's surviving breedstock and were considerably more appetising. When a packmaster of sufficient wit and presence did manage to get a group moving in a set direction then it was in clumps rather than the neat marching files of the dead-things - ragged worm-tails of ratfolk and their pack beasts.

Krowl itched to be among them. He would make the indolent vermin move. But in his darkest heart he knew that it would be pointless. The clan's vermintrain had become such a chaotic sprawl, spanning several thousand tail-lengths of desert pan and disintegrating further each day that even he could not think to cajole them all. For all the mutant vitality of which he was rightly and properly proud, and for which the Fleshgifter had once shown him great affection, Krowl realised the need to pick his battles.

The Necros underworld was a cold and bloodless landscape, as dark as the skaven soul and as merciless. It was a place that hated life. Simply standing on its white sand and breathing its dead air was exhausting. What made it truly deadly, however, was the wind. It howled across the endless deserts from the broken spine of the Cadivaris to the south-east, blasting with the legion screams of the dead-things that swirled like a carrion aurora above its hunched peaks. It did not kill. It nibbled a rat, piecemeal. It sapped the will, even the most basic and vicious of wills - the skaven will to live - until not even the whip of the most brutal packmaster would make them walk. Krowl had done everything in his power to keep his hyper-metabolism burning, but even a skaven of his obscene vigour was not immune. When he moved his joints ached. When he ate his gums bled. His fur was no longer black but the squalid grey of ghoul-meat.

The Azghor of far-Gothizzar, secure in their brass citadels across the Straits of Odt, had a name for it: the nearest that the envoys of Clan Grench had come to a translation was 'Death by a Thousand Gnaw-Bites'.

Were a skaven to be forced, by necessity or peril, to venture into its teeth then he did so slathered in regenerative skalms, and encased in as many layers of protective gear as his supply of warptokens and his clan's alliances with the Clans Skryre could tender. Of course, those who could afford such due diligence did not venture abroad at all. They burrowed deep, prospered and propagated in the manner demanded of them by the Great Horned Rat, and forsook all but the most destitute and desperate to seek their fortunes in that hell.

Krowl raised his snout to the air, the wind pulling on whiskers that had become brittle and white.

'They move too slowly, Skraditch.' He turned from the sunrise to where the packmaster, who had thought he was moving stealthily, stood in a half-hunch between deference and surprise. Krowl gave a breathy titter, head cocked to indicate the quietly chittering sea of rats that trailed the things-master like his ever-hungry shadow. Their eyes glittered in the feeble light of the new day, the howls of the Thousand Gnaw-bites brushing furrows through their fur. 'They chitter when they are hungry.' He straightened, eyeing his chief packmaster with one lip curled over chipped fangs. 'They are quiet only when they sniff-scent meat.'

Skraditch took a step back.

Krowl's grin lingered a moment longer until the weight of it seemed too much to sustain.

'Make them hurry-scurry.'

'They would move better by night, things-master.'

'So do the dead.'

The packmaster lowered his snout in agreement, but made no move to go and do as he had been told. Skraditch was a close mouthed and brutish thing, which, as a packmaster of the Clans Moulder, marked him as entirely unexceptional. His scraggy, muscle-bound hide was riddled with scratches and bites, but then they had all resorted to chewing on their own tumours over the course of this march. He had never, even under the influence of potent soporifics, described himself as an artist, and no one of sane mind would ever say it of him. But there was a bite to his snarl that Krowl found amusing, the glint of a glare in a carefully averted gaze which said that while Skraditch was not killing anyone right now, he was thinking about killing something later.

Clan Grench did not need any artists now.

'You malinger, Skraditch.'

'Runscurriers and outsniffers return with the dawn.'

'And I hear of this now?'

'Clan is spread wide, O hulking one. It took them the full claw just to find me.'

'Some scent-sniff scouts they are.'

The packmaster opined nothing.

'Squeak then, Skraditch. What news do their noses bring?'

'Foothills of Cadivaris mountain-place are in their smelling. Less than a day's hurry-scurry, they say.'

'A day?'

'They say.'

Krowl turned east. It looked farther, the mountains little more than an ethereal-cloaked haze, but then skaven eyesight was poor, better suited to the cramped dinge of buried tunnels than the limitless, empty plains of the Necros underworld. He sniffed again, but caught no trace of the mountains.

'Did anyone catch their scent?'

Skraditch shrugged.

'We must assume that they were noticed. Clan Fetter has lairs in the mountain places, and they have more keen ears and trembling whiskers than you have brain-meat.' Lips peeling, Krowl wheezed at his jest. Skraditch stood with the same idiot placidity - eyes glazed, one lip turned out - that he always bore. Amusement slackened into a snarl. 'Fetch-find your fastest message rat. I hope-hope you have not yet eaten all of Muskretch's things.'

Skraditch shook his head. 'With what message will it scurry?'

Krowl bit his lip. He turned towards the sunrise, swallowing the blood that slowly welled in his mouth. If he had only been able to salvage just two rat ogors…

'Tell them that Clan Grench comes to prostrate itself upon their mercy.'

III

Clans Grench and Fetter had been neighbours for hundreds of generations. More centuries than the skaven mind had the patience to count, and so to all intents and purposes forever. The re-emergence of Nagash after the Age of Blood and the vengeance he then wrought on the traitorous minions of the Great (so-called) Four had left ample room for Chaos' more furtive, opportunistic offspring to settle and multiply. Clan Grench had burrowed its dominion from the desert underworld. Clan Fetter had chosen to build high.

Their tunnels bored through the rag-and-bone crags of the Cadivaris, each a pocket clandom stitched together by rickety bridges and the strength of Over-Clawlord Gribberweal's numberless stormvermin hordes. Bone-frame gibbets in the form of the Horned Rat's unholy sigil, the one common emblem upon which the fractious masses of skaven could agree, dotted the range to mark out its borders. Every so often some ambitious clawlord would move those posts a few tail-lengths forward. Just as frequently, the same clawlord would resolve to dispatch black-cloaked agents to move the markers surreptitiously back. Cylindrical chimes cast from a foul alloy of warpstone and brass and looking, from afar, like the bodies of hanging ratmen, swung from the emblems' horizontal spurs. It was no natural wind that moved them, because these were the Cadivaris and there was no natural wind. Rather, it was the touch and movement of the dead, and so they sang always, for dead-things were lower even than the rats, and even rats would eventually learn to fear the whip and avoid it. But not the dead.

Grench and Fetter had been the closest of allies.

Grench and Fetter had been the bitterest of blood enemies.

Always they had schemed for eminence, and always had both sides seen this as good and right, for they were all Children of the Horned Rat and it could have been no other way.

Krowl knew the character of Clan Fetter well, as well as he knew that of his own. Better perhaps, because not even the cleverest of skaven could be trusted as a proper judge of his own.

Their wealth was in minerals and in metals, as well as slaves, the trade in which had continued to fill Clan Grench's labour mills and feeding vats even during their flurries of open warfare. Their clawleaders took titles like pickmaster, tunnelseer and underscrabbler, and knew the Great Horned Rat as 'He Who Burrows Between the Worlds'. Their anarchic traditions imbued the act of moving earth from place to place with a degree of seriousness that would have been amusing were they not themselves so menacingly severe. Where other skaven acted out of impulse, they were shrewd. Where others bit or snapped at a passing rat that aggrieved them, they clutched their resentments tight and to all appearances delighted in their possession. Most skaven, with the noted exception of the muskless Eshinclan, were simple to read, but the skaven of Clan Fetter were a stolid lot. They did not squeak unless squeaked to, showed excitement only when discussing the finer details of digging, and could be amused only by the suffering or ignominy of others.

At that moment, Under-Clawlord Thiskrule of Clan Fetter was grinning so broadly that Krowl thought his fangs might come loose from his gums.

'Hehehehe. I like this story, things-master. I knew that it was clever-smart to not kill-flay your farscurriers as soon as they set paw in my lair-place. Hehehehehe, now I know why.' His stormvermin, black-furred goons in steel plate, tittered loyally. 'Squeak-tell again how the Skryreclan drove you from your burrows. Hehehehehe.'

'Claw-dig the mud from your good ear,' Krowl hissed. 'You heard well enough the first time.'

The under-clawlord stamped his foot paw, and as though he had just dropped a stack of fine crockery all of his lackeys abruptly stopped laughing.

As one master looking on the work of another, Krowl could not help but be impressed by their obedience.

'I would hear it again. If you want-seek the mercy of my clan, the warm musk of your beloved brother skaven, then you will tell it as I squeak-say.' He waited then, expectant before exploding into gleeful titters. The stormvermin joined in, hesitantly at first, lest he stop as abruptly as he had the last time, elbowing their more slow-witted comrades into showing willing.

He shuffled towards Krowl until he was a tail-length away, the accepted distance for dealings between allies unless one meant to plunge a weapon into the chest of the other. Clearly, Thiskrule was as yet undecided whether or not that was what he meant to do. Claws chipped from burrowing wriggled like headless worms over the short handle of the war-pick that hung by a loop of leather from his greaves. Amusement at Krowl's plight had, at least, bought the things-master a fair hearing.

Krowl lowered his snout from the submissive, bared-throat posture of the supplicant and sniffed. The under-clawlord smelled of coal. Of dead-things waiting to be burned. They all did. The skaven of Clan Fetter were in the habit of rubbing their bodies with it, believing that the black colouration would cause the gaze of Nagash to miss them against the dourness of his realm. Even the naturally black-furred stormvermin were fastidious about rubbing down the pink flesh of paws, snouts and tails. It might very well help the God of Death to overlook them, but the reek of it stung the flesh from Krowl's nostrils.

'I tell you again, Thiskrule. If that is what it takes. I tell you once more.' He took a deep breath, glaring at the rats that slunk over the surrounding plinths of rock, fur bristling in the deathly breath of the Thousand Gnaw-bites. 'The vilest of treacheries it was. The blackest of outrages. An act of cowardice not seen since Maelish the Nine-Faced turned on our forebears in the Age of Blood.'

Although they had listened through this tale once now already, the stormvermin nevertheless nodded, for unprovoked attacks and stabbings in the back were regarded most favourably by the Great Horned Rat. As evidenced by the fact that the rat doing the stabbing tended to be the one who scurried away afterwards.

'From afar they shot dead my sentry rats, set warpfires to foul my warriors' noses, released poison wind into my tunnels, and then sent black-fur warriors in metal armour and breathing masks to kill-slay those who still lived.' His voice lowered, emerging now through gritted fangs. 'Seeing all was lost I threw open the cages. I filled the warrens of the Deathspittle with crazed rat ogors and mutant spawnflesh.' His lips twitched, the memory of that unholy carnage - the briefest of sniffs of the Fleshgifter's verminable apocalypse - giving him a moment of pleasure. 'But poison wind claimed them. And warpfire. And ratling guns. And warp lightning. While they died, we run-scurried.' He turned, not taking his eyes from Thiskrule and his henchrats for a second, and gestured at the motley bag of semi-upright, fur-wearing cadavers that had made it across the desert to the dubious sanctuary of Clan Fetter. 'All that is left of Clan Grench is here.'

'It pleases me that in your most desperate hour you think of me, things-master. Even in your plight you would bring all these slaves to me.' Thiskrule lifted his snout, raised one claw, and performed a theatrical tail-count of the ragtag claw-packs behind Krowl. 'But they do not smell healthy to me, friend-meat. The Thousand Gnaw-bites have been at them. How many nights in my mines will they last, do you think?'

'I am not here to sell my clan. I am here for your claw-help.'

'Why would I fight-scratch with your enemies?'

'Because I did not think you were stupid.'

Thiskrule preened, apparently under the impression he had been complimented, and waved a claw for Krowl to continue.

'Clan Grench and the Deathspittle is the beginning. You know this, Thiskrule. The over-clawlord knows this. The favour of the Clans Skryre rise as those of Moulder and Verminus fall. They scurry high on our backs, and they will scurry higher until together we reach up and pull them back down.'

'Clan Fetter is strong.'

'Clan Grench was strong.'

The under-clawlord snorted, but did not dispute it. His was the clan, after all, that had warred off and on against Clan Grench since before the great march of the dead. Clan Zappitch had conquered them in a single night of warpfire.

The balance of power in skavendom teetered on the back of a wheel. All knew this. It turned. Fortunes rose. Fortunes fell. Mere skaven existed to be crushed under its turning, meal for the trillions of hungry maws of He Who Is Without Number. But the wheel was ramshackle. It did not always turn fairly. Sometimes it got stuck. Sometimes it broke. Now, the Skryre and Pestilens clans vied with one another for outright supremacy of the Council of Thirteen. Their struggles had wiped out entire clans and forced countless more into submission. Some chittered that the two dominant clans now possessed more than two-thirds of the seats in the Masterburrow between them, enough to drive all skavendom into a second Great Civil War if the three weaker clans did not unite against them.

'They will come for you, Thiskrule. They take my workshops, my mills, my cages. Soon enough they will want too your metals and your precious stones. They will want your mines, and your warriors as slaves to work them. You know this.'

Thiskrule glanced over his shoulder at the now stolidly attentive stormvermin. Krowl guessed that the under-clawlord knew full well that this was a fight he was going to have to have sooner or later, but that it was also one he did not want to be seen having sooner unless it was on his own terms.

'Of course,' said Krowl, 'mighty Clan Grench does not come to you as beggars. We do not ask after the famous warmth of your giving and brotherly hearts. A trade, we propose. We take. You take. All take.'

Thiskrule brightened slightly.

'A trade?'

'The wealth of the Clans Moulder is not in land or things.' Krowl tapped on the side of his head with a claw. 'It is in here. But…' He gestured back to the scruffy pack of clanrats and packmasters strewn, exhausted over the mountainside. 'All my best and most big creatures are gone. I must restock, and then I can rebuild. Far from here or near, it does not matter. Tell me where to go and I will go there. I will not care. In exchange for your help I offer exclusive contract with Clan Fetter. No. With you. The first ten rat ogors go to you, and every tenth thereafter. The first hundred giant rats go to you, and twenty of every hundred after.'

Thiskrule frowned in thought. It was a generous offer. So generous in fact that Thiskrule was probably thinking the same thing that Krowl was thinking: that the things-master would very quickly come to rue it and be forced to find some excuse to wriggle out of it. But that was a problem for much further down the tunnel. It was far too generous an offer to reject out of paw.

'What do you want-need from me?' he said.

Krowl bobbed his head. 'Yes, Thiskrule. Yes. You are clever-smart. Giant rats, I can breed. Easy-meat. And mutant spawn too are easy.' Ask any experienced packmaster and they would likely shiver and say too easy. 'But rat ogors are what everyone craves. Even an Eshinclan deathmaster will pay his own rat-weight in warptokens for an impressive rat ogor to command. But rat ogors are difficult. They need…' He cocked his head and spread his paws, as if in apology. 'Rare ingredients. One in particular is especially dangerous to obtain.'

'What is this ingredient?'

'Ogors.'

Thiskrule blinked, looking around as though this might be a joke that Krowl had been put up to by his lumpishly nonplussed minions.

'Ogors?'

'Where do you think rat ogors come from?'

'From… rat ogors?'

'Yes-yes! Clever Thiskrule.'

The under-clawlord's lips twitched in an uncertain smile.

'But I have no rat ogors. I must make more. To create new broodlines from scratch is great task. It takes time. Lots-lots work, and lots-many subjects. Most will not survive the fusion with the rat, or the cocktails that make it possible.'

To most outsiders, a rat ogor was a rat ogor, a giant rat was a giant rat. But every Moulder clan defined itself by, and was fiercely protective of, its signature breeds. Those belonging to old and powerful clans like Clan Dregg were thousands of years old, while innumerable offshoot clans had borrowed and pilfered and bred in as many innovations and variations as there were body parts to the Writhing Broodsire. The clans cherished their champion breeders, afforded them every comfort, treated them like visiting Masterclan (or better, in fact, as the spiking of their feedstuffs only ever accidentally resulted in death), and held their precious stocks in lead cages, in locked burrows deep within the most secret bowels of their innermost holdings. This, more than any loss of pride or territory, was what wounded Krowl the deepest. At the same time however, there was a flutter of excitement in his belly that had not departed since he had left the Thousand Gnaw-bites behind him. A chance to start again from nothing, to craft something freakish and obscene, some wondrous abnormality of nature that would be as new to the taste buds of the Great Horned Rat as it was to the imaginings of Things-Master Krowl.

Yes. He did like that.

'You want me to bring you ogors?' Thiskrule said again.

'Many firebelly tribes cross the Cadivaris through your mines. I know this. They are the only hot places in all this underworld. I want-need only two. A breeding pair. The rest I can make after for myself.'

Thiskrule fidgeted. He muttered into his whiskers.

'What was that? Squeak louder.'

'I said that my warriors are no longer allowed to enter my mine-holdings. Over-Clawlord Gribberweal, in his great wisdom, leases my mines and my slaveworkers to Clan Zappitch.'

'What?'

'You are right. I am not stupid-meat. I see how Clan Zappitch strips my wealth and weakens my clan. But nor is the over-clawlord.' This he declared loudly, in case any disloyal ears should be listening. 'He seeks only to appease the Skryreclan until we are strong enough to fight them.'

'Until they finish picking through the ashes of Deathspittle and bring all their warriors here.'

'My paws are tied. I cannot cast out Clan Zappitch without support of other under-clawlords, and there is no tunnel to the firebelly tribes that does not now go through the Skryreclan.'

Krowl frowned, thinking.

'There cannot be many here, not with the force sent against Clan Grench.'

'There is not,' said Thiskrule. 'A pawful of slavemasters and engineers. The workers are still those they barter from.'

'Then what if some manner of… mining accident were to befall them?'

'What kind of accident?'

Krowl grinned. 'The unfortunate kind.'

IV

Despite their reputation as great burrowers, Clan Fetter's mine workings were predominantly open-cast, great pits opened up with the liberal employment of high explosives, the claws of their slaveworkers relegated to the afterwork of sifting through what little was left. Secondary explosions were commonplace occurrences. Sometimes these were planned. Sometimes they weren't. To the thousands of ratmen who toiled night after night in those pits there was no obvious way to tell which was which. Thiskrule had assured Krowl repeatedly that there were to be no blastings in this section of pit today, but when unexploded charges littered the entire warren, about as common as scrap metal, then Krowl felt prudence to be more than justified, and was content to be well back just the same.

The spot he had chosen was well removed from the body pit, behind the upper lip where excavation spoil had been mounded up into heaps, providing both an unimpeded view and protection against any unfortunate explosions. A handful of larger rats roamed more brazenly than their upright cousins, digging amidst the scree, occasionally pulling up an old bone, a bit of discarded leather or ancient wood to gnaw on. Their chittering echoed around the great bowl of the pit. Krowl considered silencing them before deciding that he would not be able to even if he could be bothered to try. And besides, the rats were the blessings of the Fleshgifter: who was he to tell them where and how they were to breed and devour in his unwholesome name?

If all things went to plan then a little noise here would not matter either way.

'It is hot in here,' Skraditch complained, the first words he had committed since sunset.

It was full night now, a sickle moon gleaming behind a rack of clouds. Within the well-defended holdings of Clan Fetter they were safe from the dead, at least, the distant clangour of the chimes reminding them always of the starveling revenants at their borders. But warmth in Necros bore little relation to the presence or otherwise of Shyish's corpse-sun. Heat oozed from the rocks like a wound that wouldn't staunch. Fever hot. Raving its death-madness hot. The air had soaked in it. Every breath was a mouthful that had to be swallowed whole, a rank-tasting swill of atmosphere that had festered too long in the odours of brimstone and blood.

Skraditch was right then. It was hot. The firebellies roamed through a hundred pits just like this one, all of them hot going more-or-less unmolested as they migrated in relatively predictable patterns that followed the sources of food and heat. The old, the lame and the terrifically stupid might occasionally become prey for a sufficiently hungry pack of skaven slaveworkers, but otherwise they were considered a natural hazard best avoided, no different to the rockslides, cave-ins, zealous mineseers and accidental detonations that were endemic to their miserable existences. It would need to get a lot hotter if they were going to lure enough of the firebellies here to make Krowl's plan work.

The plan then was this.

Thiskrule had exploited what was left of his authority amongst the slaveworkers, blastmasters and mineseers of these mines to select a pit that was central enough to be worth the exercise, but out of the way enough for it to plausibly go unworked for an hour or two. Thiskrule had promised that this would be so, and in that at least the under-clawlord seemed to have been as good as his word. Krowl had yet to see anyone but his own warriors. Thiskrule's own engineers had then entered. Skulking through the rusted spiders of machinery as though feeling the watching Moulder clan's hungry eyes on their shoulders, they had buried an impressively large cache of explosives. They had supposedly hidden it afterwards. Krowl said supposedly because he was not prepared to call haphazardly stacking a few boards over the top hiding. But the things-master was too jittery to quibble, and the engineers' desire to leave was perhaps wholly understandable when viewed in the context of their comrades liberally dousing the entire area with rat grease.

Krowl had watched them do it.

So far, so trustworthy.

When those charges went off it would be with a blast that would be sure to lure in every firebelly in Clan Fetter's dominion, and woe betide the warlock engineer who got in their way. And while the firebellies ate themselves silly, Krowl and his more trustworthy packmasters would be there to take their pick of the stragglers.

Skraditch had the detonator. It was a bronze tube about the size of a sword's grip. A bunch of chewed-out copper wiring splayed from one end like the pulled roots of a weed. At the other end was a ball-handled lever. The mechanism of its operation was simple enough to figure out. Even a simpleton like Skraditch seemed to have got it. The packmaster gripped the device with altogether too demented a glee for Krowl's comfort. The things-master would have taken it off him by now, but he honestly feared what might happen if he tried to pry it out of Skraditch's claws.

That was a worry, but it was far from the only one. The faith that this plan required him to place in Thiskrule's loyalties was another. He would have preferred to keep the under-clawlord firmly between his whiskers, but it could not be helped. Thiskrule's clanrats were occupied encircling the warren, requiring his direct oversight lest lazy warriors become careless ones, ready to move should any of Clan Zappitch's warriors attempt to flee rather than be trampled by a stampede of ogor firebellies. No Clans Verminus host in the Mortal Realms was small enough to move unnoticed, Krowl would just have to do his best to like it.

A loose, metallic rattle sounded from one of the access tunnels and Krowl ducked behind the spoil heap. He sniffed the air. It sounded like one, no, two of Clan Fetter's mine carts being driven in on their rusty, ill-set iron rails. He stayed down.

'Someone comes.'

'Smells like slave-meat,' said Skraditch, chewing on something that Krowl took to be one of Thiskrule's slaves: a down payment on future arrangements.

'This pit is meant to be unworked. Thiskrule promised.'

'Maybe he lied. Maybe he incompetent.'

'Maybe both. Or maybe the mineseer had a dream from the Horned Rat that he would find gravesand if he digs in this pit today.'

Krowl listened, a gaggle of skavenslaves emerged from the tunnel pushing the ramshackle little carts with their iron heels. He risked a look, peeking over the rubble. He numbered them at about thirty or forty, but it was difficult to be certain over this distance, and almost impossible to perform an accurate tail-count by smell and sound alone. He saw the carts. They were full, bulging, presumably with mining equipment, but their contents were covered by a pair of manskin sheets.

'Do I throw the switch?' said Skraditch.

'We were to wait for dawn. Thiskrule's warriors will not yet be in place.'

'If I do not push now then some fool-meat mine-slave will discover the bombs.'

Krowl ground his fangs.

'Throw the switch.'

The packmaster looked giddy. Licking his lips, he gripped the bronze cylinder tightly and pulled the detonator lever.

He looked up, excitedly.

They all did.

Skraditch shook the detonator. He turned it upside down, then back again, then pulled the lever each way twice more. Nothing happened.

Krowl watched, meanwhile, with increasing concern as the slaves below drew the sheets from the mine carts and began setting up some kind of machinery. Something long and straight, a miniature pumpjack perhaps, but held across the shoulders of two skavenslaves. They were setting up a lot of them. He clambered a little higher up the spoil heap until his head was fully exposed in order to get a better look. He squinted down.

'I can't quite—'

The shell missed him by a whisker, exploding in the rock pile and peppering his undersnout and chest with shrapnel. He closed his eyes and averted his sensitive nose with a snarl.

'Warplock jezzails!' yelled Skraditch.

Krowl unlooped his herding whip and drew his off-paw weapon, a heavy warpstone-studded bone club designed for breaking rat ogors' skulls.

'We are betrayed,' Skraditch hissed, head down as shells hammered the other side of the spoil heap. 'We should run, while we still have a clan to run behind us.'

But Krowl wasn't listening. His mad charge had already carried him too far down the pit wall for him to hear.

V

His heels kicked up a cloud of gravel and scree from the slope, surfing down the pit wall on the back of a rockslide as whip-crack shots burst around him. The long-barrelled, two-rat jezzails were all heavily modified with telescopic sights and targeting scopes, complicated arrays of dials and lenses, everything that the feverish invention of the skaven mind could come up with to throw at the problem of their sharpshooters' congenital myopia. But the dust thrown up by his descent spoiled all of it. The sharpest eye in all of skavendom could not have drawn a bead on a rat ogor charging down that slope.

A buzzing green shell the size of a corn kernel whizzed over his shoulder and exploded behind him as he and half a ton of rock slid to the pit floor, a chalk-white pall rolling in behind him like an out-of-control doomwheel. He coughed, tracking his attacker by the emerald glare of his shooter's goggles, and then cracked his whip across the half-hidden ratman's face. The sniper went down. Krowl rounded on the gunner's partner. The ratman was crouched in front of where the gunner had been standing, wielding a huge wooden pavise. He squealed in terror as Krowl's cudgel smashed through the thick but lousy wood. The things-master's muscles bulged as he wrenched the weapon free. The rest of the shield crumbled away, the skaven behind left clinging on to leather straps and a fast-diminishing hope in the Great Horned Rat as his personal saviour. A powerful uppercut demolished the skaven's jaw and prematurely ended his prayers.

Panting with the insane rush of the charge, Krowl forced himself to stop and sniff around.

Clanrats and packmasters in the sour brown hues of Clan Grench surged downslope, braying like beastmen, falling on the Skryreclan warriors like animals consumed by the Black Hunger. He could see none of it. White dust and chemical fog obscured everything. It was all movement and noise. A muffled squeak. An abortive clang. A flicker of warp lightning. A shriek of terror abruptly curtailed by the crack of a whip.

Whatever the Skryreclan had been told regarding this ambush, it was obvious they had been expecting easier meat or they would have brought more warriors and bigger guns. Thiskrule's doing, he was sure. Underplaying Clan Grench's numbers in order to get the warlocks to bite, just as he had downplayed Clan Zappitch's strength to him.

A hissing canister dropped out of the pall and landed at Krowl's footpaws. It skittered around on the ground like a rat denied a lick of warpstone. He kicked it back into the murk whereupon it exploded half a second later, hurling a pair of packmasters high into the air. A pattering of hot debris rained out. A piece of it landed on Krowl's nose and ignited the fur. He patted it down and hissed. The pit was a veritable powder keg, so thoroughly doused in oil that all it would take to blow them all to the belly of the Great Horned Rat was one wayward spark. Undesirable, definitely, but did he not feel a quiver of excitement at the prospect just the same? To become meat for the chittering rapture of the vermintide: could any skaven wish for an ending more gloriously profane than that?

A pair of infernal, green-lensed eyes burned through the murk, the shadow outline of a metal helmet forming subsequently around it. Beneath, lit from above by its own glowing eyes, was a hunched skaven body, swaddled in heavy fire-retardant rags. With a snarl, the warlock bombardier allowed the mortar-like weapon he had been holding to drop into the leather carry-strap about his neck. With the now-free paw, he drew a black pole from a sleeve on his back. A cord dangled from the tip. The warlock twizzled the pole through a display no doubt intended to cow and impress, embellishing and ad-libbing as his excitement grew, switching from paw to paw, and giggling maniacally as he finally pulled on the cord. A claw-length blade of green-tinged flame burst from the tip of the pole, the colours melting across his dully reflective harness and for the first time illuminating the vulturine figure fully.

Krowl cracked his whip across the warlock's snout. The ratman's head snapped back, though his helmet protected him from all but the shock of it. With a flick of the wrist the things-master recalled the whip, snapping the trailing fall around the warlock's fire pole and yanking it from his paws. Krowl caught the stick as it flew towards him. He sniffed at it. Its fire tip was still lit. Insofar as he could smell there was no way to switch it off.

'Put down the fire-stick, things-master.'

Thiskrule stalked from the pall, pick in paw, helmeted and clad in steel plate, plastered from nose to tail in white dust. Two of his biggest stormvermin flanked him.

'You are a fool to cast in your lot with the Skryreclan,' said Krowl.

'I am not stupid-meat. I see which way the rat is running.'

'It runs to the doom of all.'

'You are surrounded, Moulder-thing. Your clan is dead-meat. Surrender now and I will find use for you somewhere other than the mines.'

Krowl snarled. He turned to look at the furious warlock. He looked down at the sputtering fire-stick in his paw. Then he turned, as if by the goads of the Writhing Broodsire, towards the spot in the not-so-distant murk where a haphazard stack of wooden planking concealed a shallow hole in the ground.

He had watched Thiskrule's engineers fill it.

'So far, so trustworthy.'

'What?' said Thiskrule.

'Your fur is white now.' Thiskrule looked down his snout at his dust-coated breastplate. 'The Death God sees you.' The under-clawlord looked up again, his expression baffled. 'He can fight the Broodsire for his meat.'

And he threw the fire-stick.

VI

He could hear a ringing. Krowl's first thought was that it was coming from inside his head, but then he recognised the dolorous cadence of Clan Fetter's boundary chimes, a fearsome migraine writ in corrupted brass as they repelled a sudden onslaught of the furious dead. But something near to him was breathing. Krowl could hear it. A slurping of air, as though it were being drawn through a straw of meat. It was followed by a crunch, bone and uncooked flesh being ground between flat, omnivorous teeth. Without otherwise shifting his crisped, flame-stricken body, Krowl painfully peeled open one eye.

The ogor that bent over him was twice his height and fully ten times his weight. The monster's gut sagged over its solitary article of clothing, a ragged loincloth which Krowl noticed had been stitched together from several skaven hides. As he watched, it stuffed what looked like the upper body of a warlock bombardier into its jowly face, simplistic flame-pattern tattoos swirling up and down as it chewed. The warlock's protective clothing was still merrily ablaze, and remained so even as the firebelly chewed the dead ratman down. Warpfire clung to the brute's fingers. It licked the fire off, the way Krowl would lick blood and grease from his paws, and then belched a gout of rancid-smelling flame. Patting its hugely muscled belly, the ogor then barked something triumphant in brutish pidgin.

This monster, Krowl gathered, had consumed the fieriest substance today: by such crude acts of devotion did the firebellies determine status.

Although his lips were so severely burned that he could not move them without bits of them flaking away, Krowl grinned with a triumph of his own. The Fleshgifter had seen his sacrifice and feasted well on it. This ogor was plainly strong amongst its kind. It would sire mighty offspring, imbued with the blind rage of Aqshy, ready to be moulded by the twisting hand of Ruin. What ferocious rat ogors he would make!

As brittle as a skeleton stirring itself from the ash of its own funerary pyre, he slowly crawled out from under the gaze of the gorging firebelly. Every movement was a special and delicate source of torture. His body's feverish, warpstone-fuelled metabolism worked to knit him back together, to lay down new muscle and to cover burnt skin, even as he painfully undid it all in his haste. The ogor emitted a string of bestial grunts and Krowl froze, one arm tensed beneath him, the other outstretched, both simmering in agony. His belly grumbled, and then so too did the ogor's, coming so briefly apart that Krowl could not believe they were not somehow aware of each other's presence. Urgent barks and the meat-thud reports of brawling echoed from deeper into the pit and with the awful sound of a physique both morbidly obese and hard with muscle, the firebelly turned that way. The brute yelled something obscene, and then stomped towards the distant sounds.

Krowl almost giggled in relief as the imminent danger moved away. Swivelling his ears to keep the ogor fixed in his hearing lest it return, he crawled at a redoubled pace. The shaft of some manner of pole weapon lay on the ground. He brushed away the grit that covered it. A thing-catcher. Perfect. Of his own weaponry, Krowl could only assume it had gone the way of his armour and clothing, blasted out of his paws by the proximity of the explosion, or else cooked into his skin, toughening his hide even now as regenerating flesh grew through iron and leather. He reached out for the pole and pulled. It refused to come. He pulled again, a bared-snarl tug that moved enough of the char-heap around the weapon to unearth the paw that still gripped it. Krowl yelped as it pulled back. He clamped his jaw shut and pulled harder, slowly drawing an arm, then a shoulder, then a packmaster's snarling muzzle from the heap.

'Skraditch?'

'Let go,' the packmaster hissed.

His eyes were seared white with blindness, his whiskers burnt from his snout, the flesh of which had set in a discomforting whorl. He gave no sign that he recognised the skaven he spoke to, or even that he knew where he was at all.

'You let go.'

'I hear the bells toll, things-master. Everyone is dead!'

'I still live-breathe.'

Krowl crawled forwards until he and the half-buried packmaster were belly to belly. They struggled over the thing-catcher.

'Mine!' Skraditch squealed.

'Shhhhh. You will draw the firebellies.'

'We could have endured if we had just fled. Run and hid. But you bled us. And bled us. Clan Zappitch did not kill us. You did! Now there is nothing but blood and rags.'

Slowly, inexorably, his muscles thickening and hardening even as the strength of Skraditch's burnt limbs failed him, Krowl gained the upper hand. Withdrawing one paw from the thing-catcher, Krowl pushed back Skraditch's muzzle, forcing the packmaster's head away and squeezing his jaws closed. He bit through Skraditch's forearm, just above the wrist, stifling the packmaster's howls, and then snapped his neck with a sharp twist of the wrist.

Exhausted, ravenous, breathing heavily from the exertions of the day, Krowl stood, hefting the heavy thing-catcher across both paws. He triggered the activation mechanism, testing that the spring-locks would deploy as they were supposed to.

They did.

With a stiff grin, Krowl wobbled towards the raucous commotion of the feasting firebellies.

He bad everything he had ever needed right here in his paws.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Guymer’s work for Warhammer Age of Sigmar includes the novels Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods and The Court of the Blind King, the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio dramas Realmslayer and Realmslayer: Blood of the Old World. For The Horus Heresy he has written the novella Dreadwing, and the Primarchs novels Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa and Lion El’Jonson: Lord of the First. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

An extract from Thunderstrike & Other Stories.

If there was one thing Captain Holger Beck hated about the swamps – even more than the bloodthirsty mosquitoes, the overbearing heat and the stink of filthy, brackish water – it was the light. Filtered through the feathered branches of the paperbark trees, it fell from the sky like a foul miasma, gloomy and sick. It gave everything a queasy, submerged look, and constantly peering through it was beginning to give him a headache.

Holger looked out from the raft over the choked wetlands and felt his heart sink. They were poling along a narrow channel that cut between the glades, the surface of the water carpeted in a thick green scum. On either side of the channel the swollen boles of the swamp mahogany trailed beards of moss into the water. They looked like faces staring at him, he thought, like creatures uneasily mashed together from all the muck and filth of this awful place. He turned away. Every now and then he could hear the rippling flop of a leopard eel slipping below the surface, the slow and menacing drip of the recent rain pattering through the leaves.

Something screeched in the distance, hidden in the mists. Holger sighed. A mosquito landed on his neck with a flicker and he slapped it into a bloody paste.

‘It’s a man’s life in the Freeguild,’ Sergeant Huber said. She raised an eyebrow, an ironic smile on her face. ‘Isn’t this the kind of adventure you signed up for, sir?’

Huber’s collar was unbuttoned and her sleeves rolled up, her breastplate stacked with all the others at the centre of the raft. The rest of the platoon was sprawled out exhausted in the heat, mopping their brows with sodden kerchiefs or staring dejectedly into the shadows across the water. On either side, two guardsmen dipped poles into the stagnant water and propelled them slowly onwards. The water slopped over the lip of the raft, oily and dark. Holger looked back at the rafts that were following behind, another dozen or so carrying his whole company deeper into the Mirkmere Swamps. He could see the glint of metal, the faded green of uniforms, but he couldn’t even see the rearguard, the light was so dim.

‘I didn’t take a commission in the Iron Bulls so I could have adventures,’ he said. He uncorked his flask and took a careful sip, feeling it burning in his chest. Only enough firewater left for another day or two, damn it. ‘I took it for a nice uniform, a quiet bit of guard duty, and plenty of opportunities for playing cards and drinking in the officers’ mess.’

‘And then the siege happened,’ Huber prompted him.

‘And then the siege happened…’

He shut his eyes, tipped the flask to his mouth again. No matter how long ago it was, the memories still lashed him with their original force. Lieutenant Holger Beck of the Iron Bulls had spent the best part of the Siege of Excelsis hiding in a tavern cellar off the Pilgrim’s Way, head buried in his hands as he tried not to cry. The smart new uniform, the polished steel breastplate, the officer’s sword at his hip – none of it was worth a cuss when the enemy were at the gates. He had slipped away as the first arrows fell, as the Ironweld cannons had started firing with a sound like holy thunder. He didn’t think of himself as a coward, Holger Beck. He was more of a realist, and the idea of matching himself against the awful things that had fought their way into Excelsis had been just too fantastical a concept for him to entertain.

Armoured orruks slavering for war, ogors and daemons… He shivered. Thank Sigmar he hadn’t had to witness the worst of it.

‘Still, it all worked out in the end,’ Huber said cheerfully. ‘The lone survivor of your platoon, all those medals, the promotion. Your own company.’

‘Yes,’ he sighed again. ‘It all worked out beautifully.’

‘I must confess,’ a voice said at his side, ‘that it pains me to hear you talk in such cynical tones, Captain Beck.’

Holger turned to see the priest standing there with a strained look on his face. Caspar Hallan was young, ascetically thin, his hair shorn down to the scalp. He had the sort of flinty, uncompromising look in his eye that had always made Holger nervous. He bobbed slightly as the raft buckled over the water. As far as he could tell, Caspar was as close to being a fanatic as you could get without actually grabbing a copy of Intimations of the Comet and ranting your way into the wilderness to convert the heathens. Holger had always been highly suspicious of men who were that certain in their beliefs – they tended to be the ones who got you killed.

‘Mere soldiers’ banter,’ Holger said. ‘The life of a guardsman is a hard one, I’m sure you’ll agree, and our humour occasionally tends towards the dark.’

‘We must not make light of our mission, however,’ Caspar said. Unlike the sprawling troops, he hadn’t even loosened a single button against the heat. ‘The brave settlers missing from Palmer’s Creek, from Dezraedsville and Junivatown, deserve better. They deserve our zeal, our courage, our faith!’

‘They’ll get all three,’ Holger said. ‘We’ll find out what happened to them, I promise.’ He glanced at Sergeant Huber and shrugged. ‘As much as I can promise anything in this benighted place.’

Caspar drew himself up and stared with unyielding fervour into the dripping murk.

‘There is nowhere in the Mortal Realms that can be considered benighted while the light of Sigmar is there to illuminate it.’

‘And what brings you with us?’ Huber interrupted. ‘This is a military expedition, not anything to do with Sigmar’s Temple.’

‘The ministry of Sigmar’s priesthood is wherever his justice needs to be meted out,’ Caspar intoned. Holger couldn’t tell if he was quoting scripture or not; everything the young man said felt like it came from a parchment or a scroll. ‘Nearly a thousand of the faithful have vanished from these settlements, brave crusaders spreading the light of Excelsis deeper into the Mirkmere, and I would be on hand to offer spiritual succour wherever it is needed. Succour,’ he added, patting the hammer at his belt, ‘and righteousness.’

The reports had been coming in for weeks now, of homesteads and settlements utterly deserted, their inhabitants vanished, as if swallowed up by the swamps. Contact had been lost with Fort Harrow, and concerns had even reached the office of the High Arbiter in Excelsis. Holger shook his head and traipsed to the back of the raft, stepping over his soldiers’ feet. He had no doubt that all those settlers were dead. Leopard eels were the half of it; there were flense-fish in these waters, he was sure, razorspines too. Even bloaters. Any number of disgusting diseases, any quantity of poisonous fruit. Bogs, quagmires, quicksand. No matter what Caspar thought, it wasn’t just the faithful who joined these crusades out into the wilderness; it was those too poor or too stupid to see any other way of surviving. You take folk who’ve spent their lives grubbing about the slums of Excelsis and drop them in the middle of the Mirkmere Swamps, what do you expect to happen? You could barely see five feet in front of you in here. They’d only built the rafts because the trails were so choked and overgrown it would have taken them weeks to cut their way through.

Holger sighed for what felt like the hundredth time that day. Sigmar knew what had happened to those people, but where was the sense in sending a full company of Freeguild into the swamps to look for them? And a full company that was led by none other than the Iron Bulls’ least enthusiastic officer, for all that?

‘Just my luck,’ he muttered bitterly.

He squinted through the rising mist at the rafts coming up behind, raising his hand to signal them.

‘We’ll have to stop soon,’ he said to Huber. ‘Evening’s nearly on us, and this damned mist is getting worse. It stinks like corpses. We’ll press on to Fort Harrow in the morning.’

‘Take us in to the bankside,’ Huber told Corporal Fischer.

The corporal angled his pole to push the raft to the left, and soon they came under the lowering canopy of the woe trees. The shadows were deeper here, danker, the mud oozing into the water. A whooping, almost mournful cry came from deeper in the swamps. It rose and then broke apart, fading into a careful silence.

Holger could see the other rafts following up behind and bumping into the bank. He stepped out into the mud and slogged his way up towards the treeline, where lank ropes of ivy dropped from the canopy overhead. The undergrowth was thick with bindweed and scrub. The swamps were full of these patches of raised ground, hummocks of mud that were like islands in the shallow waters. He could see Lieutenant Weigand further down the bank chivvying his platoon from their raft, and the other platoons beyond them – all of them struggling with their weapons and equipment, the helmets and breastplates, firearms, swords and shields, ration packs.

What a waste of time… he thought.

He turned to call on Corporal Fischer to start setting up camp. Fischer was standing there under the low sweep of a woe tree, one hand resting on its trunk, the other trying to pluck something from his mouth. For a minute it looked like he had something caught in his moustache, and then his knees buckled and he sank into the mud.

‘Fischer, what do you think you’re doing?’ Holger said. ‘Get on your feet.’

He stepped forward. A snick in the air, the whip of something passing his face. He turned and saw Lieutenant Weigand with an arrow sprouting from his eye, his mouth open and a look on his face of vexed amazement. He toppled from the bank, and with a splash disappeared into the slimy water. Holger looked back at Fischer, slumped against the tree. His eyes were like glass. An arrow had passed through the back of his neck and was jutting from his jaw.

Holger turned to Sergeant Huber, who stood there with her mouth open, her hand on the hilt of her sword. Half the other guardsmen from the company were still on their rafts, the other half milling about uncertainly on the bank. There was absolute silence, broken only by that same strange whooping call far out across the wetlands and the glades, which rose once and then melted off into the mist.

Holger swallowed. ‘Huber?’ he whispered.

‘Yes, captain?’

‘…What do we do?’

There was a sharp hiss, like falling rain. A dozen guardsmen hit the mud, riddled with arrows.

Someone screamed. There was the scrape of drawn swords, the damp thud of arrows striking shields. Hoarse shouts of command, steel clashing against steel. A guardsman stumbled past and collapsed in the undergrowth with a knife buried in his neck.

Holger threw himself into a hollow between the bloated roots of a tree. Groaning, screams, the splash of water. He risked a glance over the edge of the root and saw a dark shape slip past, lank and wiry, a long blade in its hand. He saw one of the guardsmen from Third Platoon stagger past with his guts hanging out, blood pouring from his mouth. He choked, dropped, fell face forward into a brackish puddle. The mists swam like a rolling tide, the gloom broken only by a few columns of watery light falling down from the canopy.

‘God-King save me, save me, please!’ Holger hissed.

He scrambled over the roots and slipped into the slime, rolling, hauling himself up, running. An arrow smacked into a trunk beside his head.

‘Huber! Where are you?’

He ducked, tripped again, smacked his head against a stone. He scrambled into a spume of razor-tipped fern, the stink of rot and blood in his nose. He was heading deeper into the swamps, but there were screams still ringing from the bank, and if Holger Beck knew one thing it was to run away from where the fighting was fiercest.

‘Oh Sigmar, please,’ he whispered. ‘I swear, see me through this and you’ll have the most faithful servant at your command!’

He ran on, scurrying from cover to cover. When he glanced back, the channel of water had been swallowed in the mists and the screams and cries were dying away. He’d lost his sword somewhere, but no force in the Mortal Realms would have made him go back for it.

Slowly, for the next agonising hour, Holger crawled forward inch by inch through the putrid water, weaving his way through the swamp weed and the fern, trying miserably not to make a sound. Insects clicked and whirred in the air around him; creatures slithered away through the muck. Water dripped down his collar. The darkness drew in and he started to shiver.

He started and stifled a scream when he saw a pale face peering at him from the undergrowth, but it was only the priest, Caspar Hallan, huddled in the mud.

‘Damn it, you scared the life out of me!’ Holger spat.

Caspar’s thin face was drawn with fear. There was a long, shallow cut down one cheek, blood dripping onto the torn collar of his robes.

‘Captain Beck…’ he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘What… those things, they… Did you see them, Beck? Did you see what they were?’

Holger swallowed and shook his head. He risked a glance over his shoulder. Was that laughter he could hear? A liquid cackle, burbling off into the fens.

‘We have to go back,’ Caspar hissed, staring into the darkness. ‘For Sigmar’s sake, we have to go back…’

‘I don’t think Sigmar’s listening out here, priest.’

‘Then what do we do?’

‘We make for Excelsis – it’s our only hope now. Get back to the city, warn them if we can…’

Or, he thought, just hide away in the lowliest backstreet tavern we can find and never breathe a word of what happened here…

A shadow dripped across Caspar’s face. The priest’s eyes went wide with horror, and his mouth opened to scream. A dank smell enveloped him.

Holger spun around, but then all he saw were stars.

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