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The Unlamented Archpustulent of Clan Morbidus – David Guymer

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods’

A Black Library Publication

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THE UNLAMENTED ARCHPUSTULENT OF CLAN MORBIDUS

David Guymer

‘Graunch Festerbule is with us.’

Rattagan Borkris listened with an idle ear as a pair of skavenslaves fussed over his cassock. His assistant, Underdeacon Makulitt Pus of the Presbyopic Wilt, was an unctuous rodent with teeth the colour of gold pried from Shyishan soil, black gums and a muzzle with one side drooping lower than the other, bestowing a permanent frown as though he were assessing the value of another skaven’s organs. He was, as Borkris’ keen sense of smell could confirm, much beloved of the Horned Rat. He stood with only a slight hunch, garbed in a long-sleeved black cassock with varicose piping. The rat servants busied themselves about their master.

Rattagan Borkris.

Malfeasant Superior of the Church of Gnawing Ruin.

Spiritual overseer to a million unworthy souls, twoscore lairs spread like a necrotic rash across the Realms of Metal and Death.

His robes were vestal white, as befit the lord of a great diocese of ruin, the emblems of the Great Corruptor and the one hundred and sixty-nine Verminlords that served that aspect of the skaven’s schizophrenic deity covering the garment with gold stitching. Even the gnawholes around the trailing hem had been re-stitched with thread of so close a colour match that only the keenest of eyes amidst his dim-sighted race could have spotted the difference. It was raiment to bankrupt a warlord clan and make the eyes of a lesser priest water. It announced him as the unholiest of unholies, a high priest and lector of Clan Morbidus, and a skaven who commanded the ear and whiskers of the Horned Rat himself.

He stared through the warpstained windows of his high tower as a slave threw a tatty white cloak over his shoulders. Rain scratched at the glass. Green lightning and machine fire lit the horned belfries and gnawing spires of Blight City.

‘Sequeous Rank is bought and bribed for,’ said Makulitt. ‘Milketan, Sithilis, Verukik – all have taken-snatched your offer. Ureik is under Festerbule’s claw and will scratch as he does. Perish and Wastrett are loyal to you.’

Borkris squeaked, unimpressed, as the ratservant moved in front of him to affix the collar buckle.

Loyalty, even amongst the pestilential ranks of the faithful, was not the same thing to the skaven that it was to other races. It meant that Rank, Perish, Wastrett and the rest had been bribed, threatened and cajoled for so long that they could no longer smell the distinction between their own self-interest and that of Borkris’ coin purse. Their churches espoused a variation of the Withered Word that was no more at odds with his own than that extolled by the more excitable zealots in the farthest flung parishes of the Gnawing Ruin. But if he had a warp-token for every skaven that had snatched with both paws, tail crossed behind their back, then he would be rich enough to buy the high throne of Azyr, never mind the archpustulency of Clan Morbidus.

A second slave forced a jewelled mitre over his ears. He wriggled his brow until it sat properly.

‘Go on.’ Borkris’ voice was a cultured squeak, blessed with a bubbling hoarseness that spoke of his high favour. He waited.

Makulitt remained painfully silent.

‘Is that all?’

‘Eight scratch-votes, your unholiness,’ said Makulitt. ‘Nine if you add-count your own.’

Borkris resisted the urge to turn and cuff him. To do so would have unsettled the teetering armature of arm rings and signets so painstakingly arrayed and forced the slaves to begin again. He was not one to fret over his property’s inconvenience, but tardiness he would not tolerate. ‘The Lyceum of Lectors numbers twenty-one. Fool-fool! A majority of twenty-one is eleven. With all my wealth you cannot bribe-buy two more scratch-votes?’

‘Two times the backing of Hascrible, or of Dengue Cruor, your unholiness. Persuade one of them and the archpustulency is yours.’

The slave working on Borkris’ collar nicked a dark red bubo on the underside of his muzzle with a claw. The slave gagged, swiping at the emitted flatus with his paw before going stiff and dropping dead at Borkris’ footpaws.

Borkris sighed and fastened his own collar. He chose to take it as a positive omen. The Horned Rat scurried in nefarious ways.

As archpustulent he would be a claw’s length from the primacy of Clan Morbidus. In time, perhaps, even a seat on the Council of Thirteen. A touch on the Black Pillar. A sup of the life-elixir. He preened as staccato lightning brought the warpstained glass to life, a chiaroscuro of light green and dark, scenes from the First Withering as retold through the Withered Word. And after that? He would see out the Final Withering with his own half-blind eyes.

The thought of Dengue Cruor or, better yet, that bell-waving fanatic, Hascrible, elevating him to so lofty a standing at the Corruptor’s right paw was a pleasing one.

‘Is it yet known how Archpustulent Heerak Gungespittle died?’

‘Not yet. Not yet,’ said Makulitt. ‘The sextons still try to determine which of the archpustulent’s wounds was fatal. I do wonder why so many would want-crave so lofty and… exposed a position.’

Borkris gnawed thoughtfully on his tail before answering. ‘Slave-thing.’

The second skavenslave scuttled around. His muzzle was inclined so far that, if not for the curvature of his spine and pronounced skaven hunch, he would almost have been looking backwards. He was naked apart from a grubby loincloth and a leather collar, his pelt lice-ridden and mangy, and pockmarked with scabs. Borkris closed his paw around the slave’s bare throat. The creature’s breath hiked, but he made no effort to resist. The abject’s fear-musk brought saliva trickling through Borkris’ fangs.

‘This is why,’ he said, and then he pushed.

The warpstained glass behind the slave shattered, the sound of raining shards immediately gobbled whole by the tumult and the hunger of Blight City’s insane machinery. The capital of skavendom in the realms was a teeming metropolis of a billion souls, the true Eternal City, gnawing on the roots of Order from a cosmic plane neither truly within the Realms of Chaos nor a part of the great hierarchy of the Mortal Realms. The ungodly engines that had dragged the city to that limbic nether-realm continued to rumble on, belching waste magic into the air, triggering city-wide quakes and only very rarely causing the first and last of the realms’ great cities to sink deeper into the dark strata of the universe. Over all that, Borkris still thought he could hear a faint squeal of terror falling further and further away before ending in a pathetic, hopelessly distant smack. Then again, it might just have been one of the Skrye clan assembly lines stalling.

‘As archpustulent I get to push-shove whoever I want through whatever I like.’

‘Who here can squeak-say of the Withered Word?’ Hascrible, the First Claw Broken of the Scratching Ruin, sprayed the table that was his pulpit with spittle. ‘There are those in this unwholesome covenant who do not know-smell the Word. I see the opulence and idolatry that abounds me!’

He was speaking rhetorically, of course, as the Corruptor spake unto Grey Seer Salasqueek.

Id est – he was lying.

Hascrible was blind.

He had not been born to the Clan Pestilens, littered instead to a warlord clan of no significance, but the fever that had burned through his body and taken his sight had cracked his brain open for the Word of the Corruptor. That plague had been the prelude to an attack by Clan Morbidus and he, half dead though he was, had been taken by the plague monks and enslaved. In the spore mines of Sour Pit he had preached. To himself. To the breath ghost he left hanging in the cold air. To the clang his pick made on the rock. And then – because what else was there for a slave to do but listen? – to his fellow chattels. Hascrible had killed the slavemaster that had sought to silence the Word and had eaten him. After that his following in the mines had grown large enough to be considered a Congregation of Filth within the internecine hierarchies of the great clan.

It was not, though, recognition that he sought. No. Nor the validation of his former slavemasters. No! The crackling in his chest and the fiery maledictions of his joints were all the acclaim he required, for they were the gift of the Corruptor. He had no ambition of his own, but if his god wished for him the archpustulency – which he surely did, for why else would he bid this avatar of his will to pursue it? – then it would surely be done.

‘You!’ He pointed into the congregation at random. ‘Squeak to me of the Withered Word!’ The rat so chosen hesitated, and Hascrible stabbed his claw elsewhere before he could find his voice. ‘What of you? You! You!’

He could not see them, but he could smell them. He could taste their zeal. Their hunger for the Final Withering. It was a tingle as of dark magic on his whiskers. He felt as they did, smelled as they did – a simple monk in a pestiferous habit and tattered cowl, crusted slavemarks and spreading cankers there on the sloughing flesh of his muzzle for all to see and judge his piety.

‘The Word is fever! The Word is madness! The Word is poison and lies, for the lesser pieces of the Horned Rat are jealous of the Corruptor, and so he plant-seeds lots-many falsehoods in the minds of his faithful. But not to me. Not Hascrible!’

He raised his staff, the horned bell housed at the top with a bronze emblem of the Splintered Temple clanging. The creaking protestations of his spine were, most assuredly, the manifested impatience of the Corruptor.

‘Your leaders have lost scent of the foetid path. Their noses are filled instead with gold and realmstone and earthly treasures. They have become numb to the blessed reek of his foulness.’

A sea of angry chittering surrounded Hascrible.

‘Anoint one of these false prophets in the unctures of the archpustulency and Clan Morbidus will be surpassed by Clans Septik and Feesik within the year!’ The outrage of the congregation grew more shrill. Hascrible’s screech rose to match it. The acid taste in the back of his mouth was, without doubt, the fetor of the Corruptor, eager to be sprayed across the Mortal Realms. ‘We will be ejected from the Council of Thirteen, become a shadow of those messiahs of ruin that brought the germ-spore of Clan Morbidus from the world-that-was, left to scavenge over the scraps of our lessers. Such will be the Corruptor’s punishment of your masters’ failure!’

Hascrible’s sermons had never been for the mighty. Partly this was practical. The mighty seldom wanted for anything he could give them. But there was strength in numbers too, power and a certain thrill in exerting the true will of the Horned Rat through the furry masses of the laiety.

‘Whisper in the ears of your fellow monks. Squeak to the clanservants. And your slaves. Squeak the truth to your priests and your abbots. Let them know-smell in your gathering the mind of the Horned Rat, for you are many-many and they are few. Hascrible of the Scratching Ruin! Archpustulent Hascrible!’

Delirious squeals and the discordant choir of bells and chimes broke out across the eating hole, but Hascrible’s sensitive ears alerted him to the sounds of a fracas at the back of the crowd. While fighting was technically forbidden within the walls of the Morbidus clan stronghold during conclave, there were any number of loopholes relating to blasphemous squeaking and apostasy that the inventive skaven mind could contrive. Most therefore resorted to scratching and hissing, only accidentally misplacing a knife in someone’s chest when they thought they could get away with it.

He cocked his head towards the sound.

‘Ruin gnaws!’ one rat snarled.

‘Ruin scratches!’ another chittered.

Hascrible sniffed at a wafting scent, the inside of his nostrils shrinking from it like blasphemous parchment from a naked flame. He sniffed again. Wightrot. He knew it well, though it was only a smell. An incense so potent it was said to be capable of inflicting ague and shivers on the dead. Cut from the ethereal bark of dead forests, it was fabulously rare and fabulously expensive. The ignorant and the vain saw a censer of wightrot as a mark of prestige, and the Horned Rat knew that there was no dearth of ignorance or vanity in the upper echelons of Clan Morbidus.

‘Rattagan Borkris!’ he guessed. Or perhaps not, for it was not coincidence that had caused the rotgrubs in his brain to wriggle and bite until he had taken this particular eating hole between Borkris’ lairs and the Lyceum chambers for his church. ‘Come-stay. You and your priests. Listen-hear the true Word of the Corruptor and side with me!’

Borkris’ disdain squeaked from across the eating hole. ‘You will be exiled, Hascrible, not elevated. If you are not made archpustulent here then you and your church are soon to be purged. You know this. If you were not as mad-cracked as you are then you would know that you will never be made archpustulent.’

Biting and pushing, the malfeasant superior’s guard made a path for him through the congregation.

‘Never say never,’ Hascrible hissed. He held out crooked arms for a pair of burly monks to lift him from the table and onto their shoulders. He pointed after his departed rival. ‘To the Lyceum.’

The eating hall erupted with the sounds of squeals and furniture breaking the moment that Hascrible was out of sight.

‘Pustiss Ventik. Lord-Brewer of the Shrivelling Pox.’

The Lyceum burrows were a temple to the Great Corruptor, gouged from the sub-basement dinge of the Splintered Temple, the Blight City acropolis of the Morbidus clan. Bits of broken claws stuck out of the walls, and there were smears of diseased blood on the panels and triptychs where the slaves had continued digging with their fingers.

‘Gastrule Skabes. Provost-Warden of the Excremental Feast.’

The cornices and clerestory were celebrations of tarnish, mould, and verdegris, lesser decorations lurking amidst the gilt like rats, unaware of the awful majesty that loomed colossal overhead.

The ceiling fresco was the last masterpiece of the visionary, Glotto. Visions of the Final Withering, as it was known, had been the work of his disciples, painted after the skaven artist’s death using the fluids of his own diseased organs. Sigmar dissolved in lightning. Nagash succumbed to decay. Alarielle withered within a dead forest. Grungni drowned in the molten metals of his own forge. In a band of painted marble around the lower tier of the dome, the nine gods of Order succumbed in hideous and inventive ways to the divine malfeasance of the great four in the band above, while above them all, filling the dome’s apex, the Horned Rat gnawed at the stuff of the Mortal Realms in glee.

A dark-veined slab of marble, shaped by the devotion of skaven teeth and claws and installed with the strength of the faithful, sat beneath a mottled ciborium. A mildewed altar cerecloth lay across it, the grey material speckled black with dead insects and eggs. Behind it, an elaborate triptych of gold and mica, burnt sienna and skaven faeces showed the Great Corruptor ascendant over the lesser personalities of the Horned Rat.

To either side of the altarpiece, a plague furnace was tended by a hooded mutant. Standing somewhere in stature between a monk and a rat-ogre, the mutants were the results of the Morbidus priesthood’s spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to use disease and arcane alchemy to siphon some of the wealth generated by the Moulder clans’ breeding program. The hulking creatures tended their fires with a rare single-mindedness, and resilience to disease. When the Lyceum of Lectors came to its decision and the doors of the Splintered Temple were again unbarred, then the sexton-general would squeak for the furnaces to be fed with greenvile and with cankerwood, and with the new archpustulent’s own befouled robes, so that the pilgrims in the burrow-plazas beyond the stronghold’s walls might be flooded with toxic smog. Any skaven lacking in their tolerance to disease would, of course, die in horrific agony, but the faithful would know that a new archpustulent had risen to lord over them.

‘Graunch Festerbule. Most High Supreme Patriarch of the Carrion Blights.’

A heavily built skaven in a steel cuirass and a helmet with a crown read from an enormous ledger, spread across the hunched backs of two kneeling slaves. Sexton-General Crassus was a brute of a rodent, a lay-member of Clan Morbidus and so beneath the labyrinthine hierarchies of priests, but charged with the maintenance and defence of the Splintered Temple and thus of supreme eminence within its walls. At the sexton-general’s call a priest in a dust-grey cassock with venous piping and an elaborate bone-effect mitre and crosier raised his paw. Crassus gnawed on the tip of his quill and dutifully scratched Graunch’s name into the ledger.

The roll call went on.

Borkris watched, arms crossed over his wiry chest, paws burrowed into the voluminous sleeves of his cassock, as rivals, flunkeys and nobodies alike declared themselves. Underdeacon Makulitt had assured him of the votes of eight of them, and it would be his underling’s spleen if they failed to deliver.

‘Priestmonk Hascrible of the Scratching Ruin.’

Hascrible raised one crooked paw. Crassus squinted down his long snout as he scratched down the lector’s name. Borkris’ lips pulled back into a sneer. Hascrible looked as though he had snuck inside to scrub a fresh layer of filth onto flagstones before anyone important recognised his presence. As pathetic as the monk’s devout zeal was, it did seem to endear him to the masses. It was commonly remembered by beggars and slaves like Hascrible that the gullet of the Horned Rat awaited all, but the Word also spoke of the amusement he drew from those whose strength and cunning saw them climb over the backs of their litter-brothers. A frothing lunatic the monk most clearly was, but ignorant of the lies and hypocrisies of the Withered Word he could not be.

No one clambered over the bodies of so many rivals by being stupid.

For that reason Borkris had always assumed the bell waving and the frothing at the mouth to be elaborate theatre to enthuse his congregation, but his probity had, in recent days, proven frustratingly genuine.

‘Dengue Cruor. Bilious Sage of the Extirpated Way.’

Crassus looked up from his ledger.

The priests shuffled amongst themselves as if to shake the elderly plague priest like dandruff from their ranks.

The sexton-general drew back enough lip to expose a yellowed fang. ‘Dengue Cruor?’

‘He is not here,’ someone squeaked.

‘I have not seen-smelled him since first bell prayers.’ Another.

Wastrett Spleenrot, Pox-Abbot of the Ghurish Spreading, tittered, hacking up something corrosive and spitting it onto the flagstones. ‘The old-thing probably died in the night.’ He smeared the gobbet under his footpaw. ‘At long last.’

‘And where is Bilemaster Drassik?’ said Hascrible.

Everyone looked to the priest beside him.

Drassik, Bilemaster of the Church of the Scales of Pungeance, belonged to the small group of priests mad enough and poor enough to scratch their vote for a maniac that would be the doom of them all. And with Borkris’ only other genuine rival for the archpustulency, Dengue Cruor, similarly absent, the supporters of the Bilious Sage might not be so unwavering in their support.

Borkris preened. The Corruptor bared his throat to him this day. ‘They are late, and we all have other duties to attend to in our own realms,’ he said. ‘We should vote-scratch without them.’

Dengue Cruor, also known as the Verminable Cruor, or the Bilious Sage of the Extirpated Way, was in his burrow-hole in the meridional wing of the lower dinges. Drassik was there also, although, unlike the aged verminable, he was strapped to a table.

‘The Church of the Scales of Pungeance will make sourblight from your flesh and pudding meal from your bones, old-thing!’ The table legs rattled against the floor as the priest again decided to waste effort on breaking the leather belts holding him down. The priest’s diatribe had veered between fulminating threats and promises of hellish vengeance, but he reached for an inarticulate squeal as Cruor picked up an enormous pair of metal cutters. ‘Verminable! Maker of plagues! Whatever you want-wish is yours! Warptokens? Slave-meat? My scratch-vote? It is yours. All of it. Take it. Take-take!’

Cruor struggled to open the cutters. Despite the care he devoted to all of his tools, it had rusted. It was the price one paid for lairing in Blight City, for entropy was to the Realm of Ruin as heat was to Aqshy or darkness to Ulgu. It had not always caused him such difficulty, however. He was getting old. That was the real problem. Invigorating diseases and elixirs of his own concoction had strengthened and sustained him for many centuries, but age was finally starting to wear him down. Finally, he managed to wrench the cutters apart, wobbling the heavy tool towards Drassik’s snout.

‘No! No! No-no!’

The priest thrashed like a cocooned slug.

Snick.

‘Arrrrrgh!’

A single whisker dropped from between the scissoring blades.

Cruor plucked the hair from Drassik’s chest with the claws of his forefinger and thumb. Drassik panted something nonsensical. He stared at the severed whisker with an idiotic blend of incredulity and relief. Ignoring the priest, Cruor twisted around on his stool, his tail slithering around its legs.

A brass alembic had been spread across a pair of tables, several stools and one precarious stack of books. The pot bubbled over a blue alchemical flame, filling the burrow-hole with fumes. Cruor removed the glass lid and dropped the whisker into the pot. It dissolved instantly into the liquid within. His assistant, a bronze-furred whelp called Gagrik, stirred the contents with a huge glass paddle. Despite his self-conferred title of poxmixer augustus, Gagrik was dressed not in the priestly cassock that was his due, but in an apron, mask and a pair of thick leather gloves. He hunched over the bubbling pot atop a platform of nailed-together stools and lengths of shelving.

‘One whisker of plague priest,’ Cruor muttered under his breath. ‘Taken…’ Cruor turned his attention back to the priest, foraging with one paw amongst the assorted implements strewn across his workbenches.

He found a paper knife.

‘That is it. Yes? You will let me go now. Yes? Most verminable sage. Most blessed of the Horned R–’

Cruor ran the knife across the priest’s throat. A bloody froth gurgled up from the neat wound, the priest jerking once more in his restraints. As if freedom would come as any kind of relief to him now. His jaw hovered open and shut before falling open for the final time. Blood continued to squirt from the priest’s neck, but it was slowing. His red eyes began to turn pink. Cruor frowned over him. He poked the priest with the knife. Drassik did not respond. Cruor pounded on the priest’s chest, bringing a splutter of blood and a damp gargle from the priest’s lips.

The verminable nodded to himself, satisfied.

‘Taken exactly thirteen breaths before death.’

He turned away from the corpse to study the bubbling alembic, adjusting the formulations in his head as he watched the evaporated fumes rising into the condenser.

Unlike his fellow lectors, Cruor had no church. He commanded no armies and had conquered no lands. Despite all of this he knew that he had personally delivered more apostates, both skaven and not, to the belly of the Corruptor than the other twenty members of the Lyceum combined. This he knew. He knew that they knew it too. And it was not because, at over five hundred years of age, he was older than the other twenty members of the Lyceum combined. His mastery of alchemy and pox-magic was unrivalled in Clan Morbidus, and over the centuries the increasingly deadly potions of his genius had been the death of millions.

He was one of very few skaven still alive who had experienced the Age of Blood, when the triumphant legions of Chaos had turned on their erstwhile skaven allies. He had seen plague lords and lectors who had sought to ingratiate themselves with champions of Tzeentch and Nurgle, only to be thrown onto the proverbial sword. But Cruor had survived. He had hidden, he had brewed his poisons and he had prospered.

Sigmar’s warstorm had been the best thing to have befallen the skaven race since the days of the First Withering. Suddenly the other gods – traitorous, savage Khorne in particular – were weak and the Horned Rat again had shadows in which to lurk and scheme. Such was the Corruptor’s way. To take advantage of other’s vicissitudes, to exploit unwitting catspaws like mighty Sigmar in securing the future dominion of the skaven race.

Such was also Dengue Cruor’s way.

He just needed to live long enough to see it.

‘Grated horn of a Great Unclean One,’ he muttered, sprinkling a claw-pinch of the exotic powder into the alembic.

The mixture in the crucible turned a sour yellow. Bubbles broke the surface with increasing vehemence, and the brass vessel began to rattle against the table. Cruor turned one side of his long face to the glass to study the reaction more closely.

‘Forgive this unworthy interruption, master.’ Gagrik swayed on his footpaws, dutifully stirring the mixture in spite of the bubbling pot banging against the frame of his platform. ‘But should you not quick-soon be joining the Lyceum?’

‘Do not speak-squeak. Fool-fool!’ Cruor glanced up, another claw-pinch of ground plague daemon horn at the ready. ‘The Lyceum does not meet for three bells yet.’ He sprinkled the second titrant into the mix. The brass plating around the alembic began to bloat, a sickly foam frothing through the imperfect rubber seals. He touched his soft nose to the froth and blinked at the giddy spike of acridity it drove up his snout and into the back of his brain. He shook his muzzle. ‘Pleasantly caustic.’ He reached again for the powder jar.

‘Forgive me, oh verminable one. But it is now.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes, master.’

Cruor pondered. Could he really have allowed so much time to scamper away, unnoticed? Age slowed even the nimblest of minds in the end, oh yes, it did. He would need to remember to wind the pocket bell-chime that he kept in one of these drawers. Perhaps he should take on a second assistant to tidy up and keep time for him…

‘I am too busy to spare myself now anyway. You know I hate-loathe the fuss of liturgical matters.’

‘Yes, master.’ The hint of a sigh in his underling’s voice. Cruor decided to be gracious and overlook it. Taking on one new assistant would be onerous enough.

‘These things are never done-settled at the first assembly. By the time they have argued the first vote and Hascrible has demanded a recount we will be done-finished. I will be robed-ready to rejoin them when they return from recess.’ He snickered. ‘Yes-yes, I will be ready.’

‘But what if–’

‘Even I cannot be in two places at once.’ As he spoke, he rummaged through the clutter of his workbenches, finally spotting what he was looking for and reaching over Drassik’s body to snatch it up. It was a glass potion bottle with a metal screw-cap lid. In it was a roundworm the size of Cruor’s middle claw. It was curled up, apparently sleeping. Cruor shook the jar and it uncoiled like a spring trap. Cruor tittered as a suckered mouth squealed down the side of the bottle where Cruor’s eye was, its segmented body bristling with spines. ‘Or can I not?’ He unscrewed the bottle, picked the roundworm up in his claws and dropped it into his mouth. The worm splattered under his blunted teeth, the texture meaty and the taste pleasantly vile.

As he chewed, he picked up a bronze-bottomed pan that he used for the cooking of poisons and spat into it.

He squeaked a word from the one hundred and sixty-nine phrases of power, then carved a rune into the brown splatter in the base of the pan. Then he spat out what was still in his mouth, along with an unhealthy gobbet of saliva, and smeared the lot over the bronze surface, obliterating the rune. What remained in its place was a mucoid smear-pattern that slowly ran into an image. Priests in jumbled gilt and jaded finery stand beneath the great clerestory of the Lyceum burrows. The gungy fluid continued to run. The image moved. A pair of rat-men in sexton robes move amongst them. One carries scratch-quills. The other parchment scraps. A third stands by the altar with a bucket. The priests stick together, like clanrats on a battlefield, as the sextons pass their consignments around. All except one.

Borkris.

The whelp.

The malfeasant superior of the Gnawing Ruin looked more than usually smug. Cruor snorted. As if all the wealth in the Realms of Chaos could make a golden bolus thick enough to save his soul from the belly acids of the Horned Rat come his time.

He would have liked to hear what the priests were saying or, better yet, to smell the tell-tale emanations of their musk-glands, but he saw through the eye of Gastrule Skabes. The identical twin of the worm he had just consumed had burrowed into the provost-warden’s eye and curled up there to feed off his optic juices and lay its eggs, a procedure so excruciatingly painful that the plague priest probably did not even recall it being inflicted upon him.

With half an eye on the silently moving image, Cruor watched the first drop of virulent yellow-green liquid swell from the dripper of the alembic. He snapped his claws for a vial and, when it was handed to him, bent to hold it patiently under the growing drop.

Oh yes. Soon, the life-elixir of the Council would be within his grasp. Soon, he would be ready.

What was the old verminable’s scheme?

Hascrible scratched at a particularly ripe gift from the Corruptor, nestled on the lobe of his right ear, as the Prater of the Foulsome Crucible made his claw-scratch. The priest glanced over both shoulders before scrunching up the parchment roll and tossing it into the bucket. And then, under the sextons’ unwavering gaze, he ate the scratch-quill. Hascrible heard the bones crunch as they went down.

Cruor was testing the loyalty of those who had pledged him their votes. Yes. That had to be it. His absence would tease out those who would remain loyal, even without the old rat’s breath on their necks, from those tempted to chase after their own ambitions. But how? How! How could he know? Each priest scratched the name he favoured on a strip of parchment, which would then by bundled into a ball and mixed with the others by the sextons. Even the quill would then be destroyed.

Hascrible was young for one so riddled with ailments and plague, but he had seen two elections in his time as a high priest of contagion.

He had seen a priest attempt to cheat by scratching a rune onto his own parchment that had changed every other scratch-mark on parchment that touched his own. Unfortunately for the unanimously elected priest, the one mark that had not been altered was the rune itself. The priest had, of course, protested his innocence, and the sexton-general had acknowledged that such a ploy would indeed be an ingenious way for another priest to rid himself of a rival. Crassus had therefore executed a third of the Lyceum at random and ordered a recount.

A rather surprised Heerak Gungespittle had been elected archpustulent from a thinned field of candidates immediately thereafter.

Hascrible gave his ear one last devotional scratching. He did not need to resort to such risky deceptions. His faith and energies went instead to the dark claws of the Horned Rat. He would guide the minds and the paws of his children, and he would ensure that Hascrible’s mark was made on their parchment, even if they were misguided enough to wish another there in its place. Yes, he would.

All praise the Great Corruptor!

Graunch Festerbule prodded him in the back with the butt-end of his crosier. Bone chaplets and pale torques jangled against the morbid obesity of the priest’s cassock.

‘You were squeaking to yourself,’ he said.

‘I was not.’

‘It sounded like you were chanting.’

‘I was not.’

‘He was chanting!’

Hascrible sensed the spreading of an anxious quiet as the sextons glanced his way. ‘I was praying, you gas-bloated oaf-thing. Because the Horned Rat does not listen-heed to your chitterings does not stop a true child from begging his ear.’

Festerbule bristled. ‘Infecund whelp. When you nurture your pet blights in the nighthaunt kingdoms of the glass veldts or the unfeeling lands, you come-scurry to me and squeak-tell of your favour. Until then, you may lick the pus from my claws.’ The priest’s arm swung back.

Someone grabbed his wrist before he could rake his claws across Hascrible’s snout.

Hascrible sniffed, but he could not make out who it was. The sexton-general, if he was lucky. If the Horned Rat favoured him, he corrected himself, preening in the warm glow of his piety.

‘The Most High Supreme Patriarch of the Carrion Blights apologises for his outburst,’ said Borkris. ‘These auspicious surrounds, the excitement of the occasion – it is all too much-much for one accustomed to the Realm of Death. Perhaps you and he can chitter-pray together when this session is concluded.’

Hascrible bobbed his head.

The sextons seemed to relax, withdrawing themselves to the clerestory walls. The fear-scent in the chamber thinned.

‘There is nothing to forgive,’ he said. ‘The Horned Rat is a permissive and uncaring god. So should we be.’

Crassus took the bucket of scratch strips from his underling. He started to pick out names, his muzzle moving up and down as he read the marks to himself, then again as he scratched them into his ledger. Hascrible could hear the scarred rat’s teeth clacking together. He shuffled from footpaw to footpaw, muttering homilies of corruption under his breath. What would he not have given for the chance to read the sexton-general’s lips? Why, oh why, had the Horned Rat needed to take his sight? Could he not have claimed his bitter taste instead, his sense of cold, the prickling in the nape of the neck when another skaven lurks in the dark? Not that he would ever question who or what the Horned Rat took to devour. No. Of course not. Never! He turned his nose to sniff the priests to either side of him. Their musk was as tense and as fearful as his own must have seemed to their noses. Not that he was at all anxious, of course. The Corruptor favoured only one rat, and his name was Priestmonk Hascrible, of the Scratching Ruin!

‘The first scratch-votes are counted,’ said Crassus, managing to make his voice snarl as though the consummation of that sacred duty had caused him to crack a tooth. ‘Rattagan Borkris has nine marks.’

A chittering of consternation and surprise broke out amongst the gathered priests. Borkris himself gnashed his fangs in frustration at falling short by a whisker’s margin. With Cruor and Drakksik absent that left nineteen voting lectors, and ten a winning count. Hascrible wriggled on the spot, closed his blind eyes, another prayer scuttling its way towards the pricked ears of the Horned Rat.

‘Dengue Cruor has four marks.’

‘What?’

Hascrible stamped his footpaw on the ground and lashed his tail. The crunching of bones and the arthritic flare in his ankle was, most definitely, the choler of the Corruptor himself. How could a high temple full of so-called priests be so deaf to the squealings of their god?

Crassus ignored him. He squinted down his snout at his ledger. ‘Hascrible has three marks.’

‘This is a travesty!’ Hascrible squeaked. ‘An outrage!’

‘Silence-close your muzzle, Hascrible.’

‘Who said that?’ Hascrible sniffed the air and turned his ears, but whoever it was, was staying wisely quiet now.

‘Salvik Rakititch has two marks,’ said Crassus.

The rust-furred priest from Aqshy seemed as startled as everyone else.

‘No one else has any marks. You have not elected an archpustulent.’ The sexton-general made it sound like an accusation as he closed his ledger.

Hascrible’s fury – incubated in his breast on behalf of the Great Horned Rat, naturally – bubbled over. ‘I demand a recount!’

The priests groaned – the only collective action the Lyceum would ever knowingly undertake.

‘Every time,’ said one.

‘Never sniff-smelled a sorer loser.’ Another.

‘Bad enough an archpustulent has to fail-die every few years to make us do this again.’

‘Agreed.’ Borkris. ‘We all have our diocese to attend. The Corruptor’s designs for the Mortal Realms suffers for want of our guidance.’

A dozen priests nodded in agreement.

‘This is as much a part of the Corruptor’s scheme as the wars for the realms,’ Hascrible protested. ‘I say count-tally the marks again. Crassus made a mistake. Either he cannot read or he cannot count!’

From being closely jostled by half a dozen priests, Hascrible suddenly found himself alone in an empty space in the middle of the burrow-hall. He gulped. The watery feeling in his bowels was, quite understandably, the ire of the Horned Rat at his doubting the indestructibility of the true of faith.

The sexton-general was silent a long time.

Then he reopened the ledger with a snarl.

‘Very well. One recount.’

Elaborately frocked plague priests spilled from the Lyceum’s burrow-doors like birds released into a mine. Some flew straight into the waiting cages of their guards, others fluttering off together to darkened burrows to plot and scheme and to decide how best to extract personal advantage from the coming rounds of voting. Borkris hoped that his demonstration of support would be enough to persuade a few more waverers. Assuming Cruor and Drassik remained absent, then all that stood between him and the archpustulency was one scratch-mark more.

He watched Salvik Rakititch disappear into a pocket of burly plaguevermin before departing through an upward sloping tunnel. The lay warriors were clad in rusted half-plates patched over with scraps of cloth. Their heads were tonsured and they carried heavy maces in baldrics, shields bearing the device of the Flame that Withers.

One more scratch-mark.

One.

Borkris summoned Makulitt with a curt snap of the tail. The underdeacon had been waiting outside the Lyceum with Borkris’ own gaggle of priests, guards and paid cronies, and scuttled in behind his master as he swept after Rakititch.

At first, Borkris assumed that the priest was returning to his own burrows. Each of the twenty-one lectors had their own grace and favour burrows within the Splintered Temple. Those who lacked the ambition to assume the mantle of archpustulent for themselves, and preferred to avoid the skulduggery that occurred between votes, would often bolt themselves inside until the decision was made. It would have surprised Borkris to discover that the Aqshyan was such a rodent. His reputation for violent conversion said otherwise, and anyone who would dare vote for themselves, never mind command the support of another, was surely not one to cringe and squirt the musk of fear when destiny reared its horns. That had seemed to be the priest’s destination, however, until his entourage had scurried him onto a branch to the left and started ascending again.

The tunnel opened up, after a few minutes, to what looked like a wine store. Huge metal vats stood off the ground on spindly wooden legs, like pregnant beetles armoured in brass. The air was rancid with the taste. Corrosion leaked from the ancient drums. Every so often, one of them issued a tortured groan. Another tunnel led off from the chamber but, unlike the way in, this one had a door across it. That door was locked, and guarded by a pair of sextons. They were heavily armed with helmets and metal shields, their mail covered by frayed surplices. One carried a halberd, the other a wicked-looking morningstar. The door must have led to one of the outer warrens, for the import of wine. The warrens of the Splintered Temple were as interconnected with those of Blight City below ground as they were above.

Rakititch turned as Borkris and his company entered behind him, a hulking plaguevermin to either side. Borkris frowned at that. He was certain that Rakititch’s entourage had numbered almost a dozen when he had walked into the storeroom.

With a threatening squeak, the other ten plaguevermin stepped out from behind the wine drums. The warriors stood with their shields raised, paws near to where their maces lay in their baldrics – although, a beady eye apiece on the phlegmatic sextons at the chamber’s far end, none of them had yet drawn. Makulitt squeaked in alarm. The underdeacon and his subordinates huddled into a tighter knot of bodies, glancing nervously between the well-armed plaguevermin and their master.

Borkris reluctantly tilted his muzzle, giving Rakititch a flash of throat.

‘Are you so afraid-scared of what I have to say that you run-scurry to the sextons?’

The Aqshyan priest shrugged. His fur was the colour of rust, or dark sand, swaddled in umber robes and yellow piping. An incense burner nestled against his chest on a neckchain. It made him resemble a miniature plague furnace, his head wreathed in smoke.

‘He who fights and runs away…’ began the priest.

‘Lives to flee another day.’ Every littered runt knew that old rhyme. It descended from those who first fled the world-that-was, or so the litter-mothers said. ‘I am not here to fight-kill.’

‘Good-good.’ Rakititch lifted his muzzle towards Borkris’ underlings. ‘Then they have nothing to squirt the musk over.’ Borkris waited for the Aqshyan to order his plaguevermin to back off, but he did not. He just stood there, waiting, back hunched, arms folded in his cassock sleeves, slowly disappearing in a thickening red cloud of incense smog. ‘If you have come to persuade me you are the Horned Rat’s favourite rat then do not waste your time-breath.’

‘You think the Corruptor favours another?’

‘I think he does not take favourites.’

Borkris tittered. ‘Of course he does. A slavemaster has favourites. Or a breeder of rat-meat will become fond of the rat cunning enough to avoid the block. But his mind is vast, his attention span short. He leaves us to pick our own favourites and expects to be pleased with our choices when his gaze again returns.’

‘Your reputation for usury and perfidiousness precedes you even into Aqshy, Borkris.’ Rakititch cocked his head. ‘I see-smell it is all true. If it were not then the gossips would have surely squeak-talked instead of your… agility with the Withered Word.’

‘To use a thing properly you need to understand the thing. Creatures like Hascrible do not see. Even the Eshin clan killer learns first how a body works.’

Rakititch snorted, conceding. ‘What do you want, Borkris?’

‘Your scratch-mark, of course. And I want to know-smell the other who voted for you. With you I have ten. With both I have eleven, and a majority of the Lyceum even if Cruor and Drassik return.’

‘I know not. It was a surprise, even to me.’

Borkris gnashed his teeth. Annoying, but not unexpected. ‘Then squeak your support of me before the next vote, and whoever it was may follow.’

‘Why would I?’

‘You know you cannot win for yourself. Not with two scratch-marks. Better to back the winner. Is it minerals or jewels from Chamon you want?’

The priest pulled a face.

‘Rare spores from the deserts of Shyish?’

‘You insult me, Borkris.’

‘A virulent crusade in the Realm of Fire, then! Yes-yes! With you, Salvik Rakititch at its head. As archpustulent I could command it. All the land it covers would be yours to despoil. All the glory would be yours to bargain with the Horned Rat for the fate of your soul come the Final Withering.’

Rakititch paused in thought.

He was still thinking when the head of one of his plaguevermin exploded.

Everyone turned as the armoured warrior sank to his knees, a fuming metal ball lodged in the ruin of his neck. A monk in vomit-brown robes dragged the flail back on a heavy chain. His nose was dripping, smearing his habit and his paws with copious quantities of virulent snot. Foam flecked the tattered edges of his hood, red madness gleaming from its depths. The nearby warriors were already starting to choke and die.

‘Plague censer!’ Borkris shrieked.

The censer bearer opened his toothless mouth and squealed, monks and warriors boiling up from the plague cloud that filled the tunnel behind him.

Hascrible screeched a challenge as he scrambled after his warriors. It was not cowardice that made him last into the storeroom, oh no, for he was a favourite of the Horned Rat and feared neither decrepitude nor death. His wizened muscles and arthritic joints were, quite obviously, the Horned One’s way of ensuring he entered the fray at exactly the time that he was supposed to. He felt a glow lurking in the mucous-filled caverns of his chest, a choke-response that, he was almost certain, had nothing to do with the nurglitch vapours currently circling through his respiratory system and devouring the plaques blocking off the inside of his lungs. It was destiny! The focused intensity of the Corruptor’s interest in him and him alone, nurturing and curating the many ailments of his life, much as the jovial grandfather was said to do with his own favoured creatures. Providence had brought him here. Yes, that was it. Providence!

He scuttled into the melee, crouched low, hidden by the incense pall, his normally keen senses of smell and sound confused by the anarchy of combat, questing the path ahead with his bell-staff.

He found a body.

His tail padded it down while he sniffed at the air. Robed. Hooded. A staff. A priest. One of Borkris’, judging by the finery. He was spread-eagled, face down, blood still oozing from the eyes and nose. That and the occasional rattle of breath told Hascrible that the priest was still alive. Hascrible’s tail coiled around the dagger in his cincture, then stabbed it into the priest’s brain through the soft meat of his throat. Hascrible felt only joy, for the priest’s final jerk was, as plain as the scent of blood, the last futile effort of his soul to evade the damnation of the Horned Rat’s jaws. This was, after all, the Corruptor’s work he did here. Rattagan Borkris had schemed to pervert the Horned One’s great will. It was a wrong that the faithful would see righted. Crassus would understand, he was sure, once Borkris was dead and unable to answer Hascrible’s charges of blasphemy.

An armoured warrior ran at him.

In the chaos of sounds and smells, vibrations and tastes, the first he knew of it was the scrabble of claws on stone. Then the hiss of breath as a weapon was drawn back. A lesser rat would have frozen, panicked by his blindness in such a sensory din, but not he. Not Hascrible. His blindness was the great paw of the Horned Rat upon his brow.

Hascrible raised a claw and pointed it towards the sound. He chittered a word that brought a cluster of rancid blisters to the tip of his tongue, and a beam of withering energy stabbed from his claw. The charging rat-warrior was vaporised. A mace-head and some rust flakes clattered to the ground, the sound of their falling muffled by the robes he had been wearing. Hascrible sniffed. He wished that he could have seen that. But such were the sacrifices demanded of the faithful.

With a sigh he lowered his still-tingling claw, squeaked another challenge and scurried off in search of Borkris.

A plague-shrivelled wretch from the stronghold’s slave stocks stabbed at Borkris with a spear. The thrust was weak, the paws that guided it malnourished and barely strong enough to keep a grip on the shaft, much less drive the point through skaven flesh. Borkris twitched aside, catching the spear as it slid across his shoulder, and then yanked it from the slave’s paw as he rammed a fist into the prominent lump of bone between stomach and chest. The slave doubled over, spraying Borkris’ cassock with spittle, and Borkris broke the spear over his head.

Raising his paws in line with his snout, Borkris snarled.

The altercation had knocked his armlets askew.

Sliding his right arm into his cassock’s left sleeve, he drew out a long, curve-bladed shamshir. This was why lectors so often lingered with their arms folded into their sleeves. For the comfort of a concealed blade. He was tempted to reach into his right sleeve as well, but decided that, in such an enclosed space, that would be unwise.

His hired thugs and Rakititch’s plaguevermin were fighting back hard against Hascrible’s followers, but the waves of foaming zealots had forced them back into the storeroom.

The priestmonk’s entourage, as with everyone else’s, had been restricted to a dozen. Twelve plus one amounted to the unholy numeral of the Horned Rat, but the true objective was to create a field even enough to discourage overt treachery. But Borkris had seen for himself how Hascrible had been spreading his message amongst the clanservants and slaves of the Splintered Temple, and there were even a pawful of monks in the habits of other lectors amongst his fighters. They outnumbered his and Rakititch’s guards several-fold, and they were the kind of odds that would lend spine to even the most enfeebled of slave warriors.

The plague censer bearer, however, was down, coughing up an orange froth in the midst of a ring of rapidly bloating skaven corpses.

Borkris would take the fanatic’s death over the alternative, but he suspected that Hascrible’s task for him had already been accomplished. Half of Rakititch’s warriors were in that pile, and most of the rest were coughing up their insides even as they fought off three, four, five times their number of foes.

And they were odds to make even the proudest of the Corruptor’s crusader-knights waver in his certainties.

Borkris spied a priest of the Gnawing Ruin scrambling up the wooden legs of one of the wine drums. The priest launched himself upward, grabbing hold of a rivet, claws digging into the metal, while a pair of spear-armed slaves stabbed at his whipping tail. A monk wearing Hascrible’s filthy brown threw away his sword to climb after him. Muttering a loathsome incantation, Borkris claw-scratched a rune of decay into the air and blew it towards the drum. The rivet the lackey had been clinging to burst, firing the screaming plague priest across the burrow-hall on a sour jet and slamming him against the vat on the opposite side of the chamber. Corrosion spread from the broken rivet and into the surrounding metal. It thinned, flaked.

It turned black.

Acrid wine gushed through the sickened metal, sweeping away the monk that had been clambering up the vat’s wooden legs, and crashing over Hascrible’s slaves. The flood flattened the followers of the Scratching Ruin, slicking the flagstones with communion foulness and imposing enough of a lull for his cronies, under Makulitt’s urgent squeakings, to pull back and regroup.

Watching Hascrible’s minions slip over the wet stones brought Borkris a brief gnawing of amusement before the sounds of an entirely separate battle drew his attention.

The sextons had entered the fray.

The temple warriors butchered whatever happened to fall in their path, entirely without consideration for allegiance. As Hascrible’s monks and slaves greatly outnumbered everyone else, for the time being that predominantly meant them. They swamped the two sextons in fur and froth, but the warriors fought as a genuine pair. Another skaven might – on the very horns of the Corruptor – swear to do such a thing, only to shrink from it or conveniently forget in the heat of battle. Not these two. They watched each other’s backs, without even the momentary hesitation of whether to stick a knife in there. They defended each other, killed together, while every other rat in the burrow-hall was busily fighting for its own hide. They were, in effect, unstoppable. And they were coming directly at Borkris. He doubted it was for his own protection.

He still remembered the election of Gungespittle.

He turned towards the entrance.

The emptying wine drum had pushed back the censer-bearers’ lingering fumes to reveal Priestmonk Hascrible’s dripping host in all its foulness. The zealot himself was towards the rear, hunched over and sodden through, his off-brown robes stained purple. He was shaking his muzzle, banging his ear as if to force wine through to the opposite side, pausing every so often to sniff at the air. The wine fumes seemed to have confused his nose.

Borkris bared his teeth.

He had not started this fight. Assuming he could evade the sextons, then he could prostrate himself before Crassus and claim self-defence. Kill Hascrible and victory was as good as his.

Rakititch breathed in his ear.

‘Who says I cannot win the archpustulency on my own?’ he hissed, and then punched a previously concealed sword of his own through Borkris’ back.

Hascrible pulled his claw out from his ear. He was certain he recognised that scream. A grin peeled his lips back as it came again. Borkris. His ears pivoted and he cackled at the brief snatch of conversation he managed to pick up over the melee. Borkris and Rakititch were fighting each other. The Horned Rat bless skaven perfidy! He was about to order his warriors to withdraw – those of them sane enough to heed a simple command at any rate – and let the two plague priests kill one another, when a crazed screech split the air. He sniffed, but all he got was wine vapour. He could hear squealing, dying, fighting getting closer. He snarled, scratching at a wart between his blind eyes.

‘What is happening?’

‘Underdeacon Makulitt!’

And suddenly Hascrible saw. He didn’t see, of course, Corruptor be praised, but he saw. Caught between Hascrible’s rotten host and the sextons, Borkris’ minions were fighting the way only trapped rats could.

Hascrible turned in the direction of the voice that had answered. He could neither see the monk, nor smell him over the pungent wine, but was confident enough when he reached out that he would find a pawful of habit with which to drag the underling into the path of the frenzied underdeacon’s charge.

The monk shrieked as Borkris’ frantic underlings ripped him to shreds.

The Horned Rat’s will had been done.

All praise to the Great Horned Rat!

Snorting wine from his nose and banging on his clogged ear, he turned tail and fled.

Borkris fell to the ground as Rakititch pulled his sword out of his back. The flagstones took a tooth. He snarled. If there had been a single nerve in his body not sick with plague or encrusted with scabs then both the impalement and subsequent blow to the muzzle would undoubtedly have been extraordinarily painful. But the Corruptor’s priesthood were a tough breed. Even those of Borkris’ ilk, who preferred to hold their paws above the day-to-day business of the death of all creation. He crawled along the ground from the Aqshyan priest, his breathing sucking in through one lung. He could hear it hissing out from the other, gurgling through the blood that was ineffectually plugging the hole in his back.

Rakititch pounced with a snigger and rammed the sword through his shoulder, hard enough to crack the metal but not before enough of it had penetrated the stone to pin Borkris to the floor. Borkris shrieked. That broke enough of him to hurt. He turned to look over his ruined shoulder, some morbid need inbred into the Clans Pestilens to sniff every blessing and pick at every scab.

It was not a sword at all, but a leather gauntlet with a quarter-tail-length fist spike. Rakititch wriggled his fingers out of the glove, causing the wound to stretch and tear. Borkris chittered in annoyance, but the diseases that had been calcified into the bone were already in his bloodstream, busily killing anything that might have caused him further agony. Smoke from the Aqshyan’s incense burner wreathed his muzzle, eddy patterns snaking about his snout and muzzle so that he no longer resembled a plague furnace so much as a bale taurus of the azghor duardin. Or perhaps that was just the necrotising infections that Borkris’ injuries had flushed into his brain, making him see the hated foe that he had crossed so often on the battlefields of Chamon and in the consular burrows of Blight City.

‘You squeak-say I cannot be archpustulent alone,’ Rakititch hissed. ‘But when word spreads that I killed you, your followers will quick-soon become mine.’

Borkris snarled. The pain was already dulling, and the degradation of his brain from within was proving a rhapsodic experience. ‘You think Hascrible is not already telling everyone that he killed us both?’

‘But I am not dead-dead.’

‘Not yet.’

With one eye, Borkris glanced towards the sextons. Just a pawful of panicking slaves left between them now. Rakititch turned rigid. His mouth opened to squeak a protest, even as his eyes roved the burrow-hall for a way out.

‘Deliver this morsel to the Corruptor,’ said Borkris. His neck swelled, his jaw broke, and a torrent of corrosive gases rushed from his distended mouth. Rakititch had been crouched over him. The bilious flood dissolved his sword arm and the rest of his body from the chest down.

Everything above that took a little longer to die.

‘May he be… sated… when I arrive.’ Borkris spat out a gobbet of acerbic phlegm, cackling, gasping for breath even as the butt of a sexton’s halberd cracked his temple and knocked the consciousness out of him.

The atmosphere in the Lyceum was quietly resentful, the echoes of the occasional muffled squeak gobbled up by the rotunda’s nightmarish frescoes. Wastrett Spleenrot was missing part of an ear, Verukik a paw-shaped patch of fur along his snout. Almost all had rips to their robes, cuts and plague blisters they had not possessed before. Borkris glared at them, one-eyed. The other was swollen shut. His head and body was a bundle of pointed sticks glued together with pain and a liberal slathering of skalm. His whole body rattled when he breathed. None of his former supporters risked standing too close. It might have been wariness of the heavy eucalyptus reek of the skalm, but he did not think so. None of them would even catch his eye. They gathered around Hascrible like flies late to the midden.

Having claimed responsibility for the killing of Rakititch, the maiming of Borkris and the disappearance of Drassik for good measure, the priestmonk looked outrageously pleased with himself.

Borkris did not care anymore.

A maniac like Hascrible would last five years at most. Borkris did not think he would survive even as long as that. He would generously give him three months before a senior cleric of good sense pushed him off a building. They would all be back here again in no time. He could wait.

He glanced to the old priest at his right.

Verminable Cruor was the only rat in the chamber, the sexton-general and his warriors excluded, who did not look the worse for wear. And perhaps that had been the full extent of the old rat’s ploy after all, for compared to his bedraggled and exhausted kith-rats he looked resplendent in a blood-red cassock, gold fascia, chaplets and a horned mitre. He carried as well an ornate stave, and small censers breathed out puffs of yellow-green fumes as he scurried. Where the other lectors were too mired in smugness or self-pity to do much beyond twitch and chitter, he seemed too anxious, or perhaps excited, to keep still, skittering hither and thither and wafting a trail of caustic vapours all around him.

He had every right to be agitated.

With Hascrible about to be elected archpustulent he was set to find himself in the same unpleasant hole as Borkris. Perhaps the old poxmaker would be nervous enough to consider an alliance. Borkris preened stiffly. Yes. Perhaps this need not be considered a defeat after all. A delay in his ambitions at best.

Before he could consider the matter further, Crassus cleared his throat.

The sexton-general stood before the altar, framed by the blotched pergola of the ciborium. A heavy sword hung at his hip. His claws drummed on the cracked device of the pommel. ‘You will now vote-scratch again.’ An over-the-shoulder snarl sent sextons scurrying towards the lectors, parchment, buckets and quills in paw. ‘Will anyone squeak-talk to the Lyceum before the scratch-count is made?’

A few eyes flicked towards Borkris. Guilty, some. Fearful, almost all.

He was weak now, they knew, but he would not always be so.

He shook his head.

Hascrible bared his teeth. ‘Nor I. Let us vote-scratch.’

‘I would squeak before we vote.’

There was a rustling of cassocks and a popping of joints as everyone turned from the altar towards Dengue Cruor.

Crassus thrashed his tail. ‘Speak-squeak.’

‘You all should vote for me,’ said Cruor.

Hascrible snickered. ‘You, old-thing? Why?’

Cruor sighed. ‘How I despise the intrigue of this burrow-place.’ At least one lector rolled his eyes. ‘So I will be simple-quick. You should vote-scratch for me because all in this chamber have been infected with splintergut. With a little help from Drassik, of course.’ He flicked one of his belt censers with a claw and tittered as the closest priest scuttled back from him in alarm. ‘A most virulent plague.’

Borkris felt a ringing in his ears.

Everybody else was quiet.

‘Onset is fast-quick and death quite painful,’ said Cruor. ‘So painful it will follow your soul to its afterlife.’ He withdrew what appeared to be a pocket bell-chime from beneath his fascia and studied it, counting under his breath. ‘I suggest you vote quick-quick.’

‘This is outrageous,’ Borkris hissed.

He looked to Crassus, but the sexton-general appeared to be at a loss for how to respond.

‘I submit gladly to the Corruptor’s plagues!’ Hascrible squeaked, straightening to his full, hunch-backed height. ‘I survived the blistering scalepox before even hearing of the Withered Word. Do your worst, verminable, I say.’ The priests started to shuffle away as though the priestmonk was personally contagious. ‘Vote-scratch for me. All who scurry in the Corruptor’s shadow will be spared!’

Borkris’ eyes narrowed.

Hascrible had to know something that the others in the Lyceum did not.

No one was really that zealous.

Yes. He saw it now. Hascrible and Cruor were in league. He could not believe he had not sniffed it before. Cruor’s absence from the first vote had allowed Hascrible to scare off Borkris’ supporters, allowing Cruor to re-enter, unsullied, and steal the archpustulency with this farcical deceit. He wondered what the priestmonk had been promised. The life-sustaining secrets of his alchemical concoctions? The recipe for plagues that had ravaged the first nations of the Mortal Realms before the awakening of the gods, known now only to a scholarly few? Yes. That had to be it. How else would he have bribed a fanatic that cared not for Borkris’ wealth? Borkris cursed his fixation on his own prize and that he had not deduced all of this for himself already. This was a trick. There was no plague. Splintergut indeed. Whiskers of a plague priest? Horn of a Great Unclean One? Extract of nighthaunt and an unshed raindrop from the high clouds of Azyr? Preposterous!

‘Only a rat cunning enough to smell through such a blatant deception is fit to lead Clan Morbidus.’

He drew the shamshir from his left sleeve, and with the same left-right arc, struck Cruor’s head from his shoulders. Blood sprayed towards the ceiling, as though its final act was to strain towards the Horned Rat at the apex of the dome, as the verminable’s body collapsed.

The lectors squealed in terror as Borkris lowered the blade.

He regarded them smugly.

‘What did you do?’ squeaked Festerbule.

‘You have killed us all!’ said Rank.

‘There is no plague,’ said Borkris, as though explaining the Withered Word to a fool. He pointed a claw at Hascrible, but the accusation he had been about to level disappeared in a tirade of increasingly painful coughs.

A muscle in his stomach that he did not know he had clenched. Something semi-liquid and foul-smelling trickled down the inside of his thigh as he doubled over with a squeal.

Onset is fast-quick and death quite painful.

‘Great Corruptor,’ he moaned, as groaning lectors began to crumple to the ground. ‘No-no…’

‘What is happening in there?’ Gagrik hissed.

‘I do not know.’ Makulitt pressed his ear to the door. ‘I cannot hear anything.’

‘They have been in there a long time.’

‘Maybe they are praying,’ Makulitt said hopefully.

‘I heard something hit the floor.’

‘I am sure they are fine.’

‘We should check.’

‘And interrupt the unholy ruminations of the Lyceum of Lectors?’

Gagrik hesitated. The poxmixer augustus was clad in robes that were almost laughably plain. Half his whiskers had been singed off and one eye drifted lazily, constantly weeping from too much time staring into his master’s concoctions. ‘A sniff then. Just to be certain.’

‘The door is bolted from the inside by the sextons.’

‘Just try it.’

‘You try it.’

Makulitt looked over his shoulder. The lackeys and lieutenants of Perish and Skabes and Festerbule and all of the other high priests milled behind them. It was quite clear that they were happy for Makulitt and Gagrik to settle this amongst themselves. Makulitt cursed his misfortune. If not for his injuries in the battle against Hascrible’s zealots then he would never have allowed himself to be manoeuvred into so exposed a position.

‘Fine then,’ he hissed. ‘We do it together. On three. One… Two…’

Gagrik and Makulitt pushed together. To their surprise, the door opened. Something on the other side resisted, but nothing so unyielding as a bar across it.

Makulitt pushed harder.

The door opened fully.

The body of the sexton that had been slumped against it slid onto the floor.

He was still holding the locking bar in both paws, but had apparently died before he had been able to open the door. And he was dead. The pale glaze over his eyes and the coolness of his fur was confirmation enough for Makulitt, his lack of breath another, but there was a very living pain in those eyes still. It was subtle, slow, but, moreover, Makulitt realised that the corpse was actually still writhing in pain. He raised his snout to take in the rest of the burrow-hall. Heavily robed bodies lay slumped over the ornature. The sexton-general was draped across the altar, covered by his mangy scrap of cloak. Even the mutants that had tended the plague furnaces were dead, the fires nibbling away at their skin, burning darkly on the voided contents of their vast, corrupted bowels.

The underdeacon squeaked in alarm, covering his snout with his cassock sleeve as the diarrheal stench reached him.

He was a priest of plague, an acolyte of the Corruptor and proselyte of the Final Withering, but the malady at work was something horrifying that he knew instinctively he wanted nowhere near him. Here was a plague straight from the codicils of the Libers Pestilent, certain martyrdom to any but the most malefic priest or champion of Nurgle.

‘So… who does that make archpustulent of Clan Morbidus?’

The gaggle of underlings in the corridor behind him quickly shuffled back.

‘I vote-squeak for Underdeacon Makulitt!’ Gagrik squealed.

About the Author

David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote the novel Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods, 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 drama Realmslayer. 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 Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods.

I arced over the gurgling water like a zephyrgryph with his claws unfurled. The air was ice, the sky a weird shade of green, amber leaking into the night with the dawn. My face was the painful side of numb as my arms and legs paddled the thin air. All I could hear from beneath me was the creak of ice, the rush of the river and the wind slipping through my fingers. I started to laugh, my mouth thus conveniently wide for a roar of triumph as my boots slammed into the frozen slush of the Nevermarsh. Cracks spread through the frost-veined mud, but it was already hard as rock and did not break.

Just as well – sinking to my greaves in mud or getting into a tug-of-war for my boot was hardly the look I had been going for.

‘Yes!’

The cry exploded from my chest and I spun around with my fists in the air.

‘Let it be known that Hamilcar Bear-Eater is first across every river, first into every charge, first unto every blade!’ I bellowed.

Broudiccan’s slow handclap wasn’t quite the enthusiastic reaction that I felt the feat deserved. My second-in-command cut an imposing figure on the other side of the water, a fortress of a man in the thrice-blessed maroon and gold of the Astral Templars. His Mask Impassive, the grim facial covering of the Stormcast Eternals, was anything but; a gouge from a beast’s claw had cloven the stoic purple mask in two, leaving a disdainful aspect which suited his taciturnity to the ground.

If he thought he could leap twenty feet across ice-cold rapids then I would have very much liked to see him try.

‘Bravo, Lord Hamilcar,’ Frankos shouted through cupped hands, separated from the burly Decimator by the haggard width of a tree. ‘Congratulations on being the first of Sigmar’s Stormhosts to set foot in the Nevermarsh.’

Distinctions of age and experience counted for little within a company of immortals, but the Knight-Heraldor had always been possessed of a youthful effervescence that made me feel old. I nodded my thanks, pausing to glare at my second.

‘May the Heraldor Temples always proclaim it so,’ I bellowed back.

‘They shall, my lord,’ he cried with gusto. ‘They shall.’

Frankos was also quite unique amongst my warrior chamber in taking everything I said in deadly earnest. He continues to do so, in fact, even after the later reversal in our fortunes.

The sigmarite mountain called Broudiccan rumbled as the giant sighed.

His masked gaze slipped towards the frothing water.

Feral-looking birds with wicked red eyes twittered back and forth between the two banks. Their beaks were perfectly made for the stripping of flesh, the cracking of bone, and I suspected they could even chew the cure right off a man’s armour. Generally, the birds were happy enough scavenging for fish and insects amongst the densely tangled buttress roots that clawed out of the riverbank and into the water, but the Freeguild army I was leading through the Gorwood might as well have been one giant victuallers’ caravan for all they were concerned. More than one poor soldier had already lost a finger or an eye. Broudiccan swatted at one, which knew better than to test its toothed beak on sigmarite and flapped out of reach to shrill from the leafless canopy.

‘I’ll wait for the bridge,’ he grumbled, after a while.

I barely heard him over the white roar of the water, but I am a Stormcast Eternal, and my ears are sharp enough.

‘I wonder about you sometimes,’ I laughed. ‘Are you a plodding Knight-Excelsior, summoned to my warrior chamber in error?’

Broudiccan shrugged. ‘Even Sigmar can make mistakes. The pain of reforging is proof enough of this.’

‘Ha! Indeed. I remember my last day as a mortal, when I feasted with Him and ten thousand warriors in the Heldenhall.’ The memories of my mortal life were dimmer back then than they are now, jumbled like a stained glass window that had been broken and thrown back together, most of the pieces still missing, but this I remembered. ‘He has a delicate stomach. For a god.’

Frankos frowned at nothing. ‘I do not remember my final night.’

‘Parts of mine are a little blurry also. It was that aelf nectar wine. I swear there was nothing like it where–’

A racket worthy of Gorkamorka drowned me out as the rest of the army made their way through the trees.

I looked past the two Astral Templars, my sentence unfinished.

About nineteen hundred soldiers, two of the five Freeguild regiments of the Seven Words, had followed me into the Gorwood. Their baggage train and camp followers amounted to about the same again although I generally deferred the small details to Frankos and the mortal generals themselves. The fifty warriors of my Chamber, the Bear-Eaters, were strung out over several leagues of woodland. The trees that grew here at the boundary of the Low Gorwood were twisted runts compared to the predatory bowers that canopied the high slopes of the Gorkomon, but no less deadly. For all my efforts, the Gorwood was – and would always be – a wild place, home to as many hungry creatures as it had been when the Beastlord Uxor Untamed had ruled these heights. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The men and women that emerged wore a collage of colours – torn, faded, chewed on – over armour of tough leather and the occasional skin. There were a few wooden or leather shields, but most carried two-handed spears, javelins or hunting bows. Despite the cold and the predations of the forest they were still laughing – Ghurites all of them, none tougher – whistling catcalls at those behind and pointing at me on the other side of the river.

Coming in behind the vanguard was a trio of ogors in tattered surcoats, hauling a bridge of coppery lumber behind them. Their faces were snarled with effort, muscles standing like boulders from a mountainside. A few of the soldiers dropped their gear to run in and help push, the ogors hissing something that probably wasn’t all that complimentary through their teeth.

I put my hands on my hips and watched them, my heart ready to burst with pride.

I loved them all.

Only slightly less than they loved me.

‘Who is first upon the Nevermarsh?’ I called out to them, thumping my breastplate. ‘He who waits upon no man, beast nor creature of Ruin.’ I thrust my gauntleted fists in the air, wringing the musty stink of bear from my cloak.

‘Hamilcar!’

Cheers rippled through the treeline. The ogors took the opportunity to draw up and wipe the sweat from their sledgehammer-like brows, before readjusting the draw-chains wrapped round their fists.

I made a grand show of pulling off my gauntlets, rubbing my hands together and blowing into them, despite the fact I have little feeling for the cold. I am a champion of Heaven, and to be of Heaven is to be as cold as starlight. And yet it means something to the common soldier to see his hardships shared. Most Stormcast Eternals, broken from humanity in order to be elevated to that space beyond, would never even have considered such a gesture. There are better warriors than I in Sigmar’s Stormhosts. I’ll not name them, and I’ll only deny saying it should it get back to them. Let’s just say I have all the fingers I need to count them. But if you think that any of them can get as much as I can from a mortal man, then I would say you have passed too many times over the Anvil of Apotheosis, my friend.

‘The winter is cold,’ I yelled. ‘The Ghurlands are dangerous. But you know cold, you know danger. Every man and woman here is a veteran of the Gorwood. You have fought beside me against beastman and skaven and orruk, yet here you all are with me still. Why?’ My breath shrouded my tattooed fist in fog. ‘Because Hamilcar Bear-Eater is your brother and your champion, ahead of you every step of the way!’

‘Hamilcar!’

The cry came back louder now, men still spilling out of the forest to hear my words.

I unhooked the halberd from its bracket across my back. The black wood of the haft scraped over my armour as I drew it. The head sang as it came free. The blade was sigmarite, forged by the first of the Six Smiths under the Auroral Tempest, imbuing the metal with the storm’s vicious power. Bands of amber and violet rippled through the blade as I turned it and held it aloft. A pair of predator birds that I had managed to trap and kill myself dangled from the head on chains. Runes of my own inscription decorated the haft. They imparted no power I know of, and I had no idea from which ice hole of my memory they emerged, only that in those days you could not leave me with a flat surface and a knife and not return to find the former filled with the strange pictograms.

I had always assumed them to be a facet of my lost life as a mortal, which would of course prove to be correct, though I never gave it much thought at the time.

‘The Nevermarsh is another challenge again. No army of Sigmar has ever crossed its border, and yet…’ I spread my arms to indicate the river running across me. The soldiers chuckled, a few of them still shouting my name. A cloaked and helmeted veteran in a glittery cuirass of leather and glass and a rash of insect bites on his browned face choked with laughter. Even I didn’t think my remark was that amusing, but I acknowledged the old-timer with the point of my halberd. I recognised him from some battle or other, and I always liked to give the impression of familiarity with every woman or man who bore the Twin-Tailed Comet in my name.

‘This is where our enemies seek to hide from us, so this is where we hound them. We will run them to the ground, my friends. We will kill them, we will butcher them, and we will feed their bloody carcasses to the carniferns of the Gorwood!’

The bank erupted with a mighty cheer.

‘For Sigmar!’

‘Sigmar!’

‘For the God-King!’

My voice was the coming of thunder. I held the final syllable until my throat was hoarse and my body shook with passion.

I rehoused my halberd, leaving my fist raised in salute.

The men would all be warm now. If my Vanguards were right about the position of the hole that our enemy had found to hide in, and they generally were, then I expected the fire I had put in the soldiers’ bellies to last them until it was needed.

‘A good speech, lord,’ Frankos shouted to me.

I could almost sense Broudiccan’s eyes rolling.

‘Go and aid with the bridge,’ I told the Heraldor. ‘You’re as strong as any ogor, brother.’ One hand on the pommel of his broadsword, Frankos bowed low, his white crest bobbing in the frozen muck. I called after him as he departed. ‘Be sure that it’s good and flat. I would hate for Broudiccan to fall off.’

I chuckled to myself, Broudiccan still wearing that disdainful look of his.

Now ordinarily, these sullen spells were precisely the reason I chose the Paladin for my second. The long silences gave me more room to talk, but a man can only bear so much.

‘Spit it out, brother,’ I barked.

‘It is nothing.’

‘With you, it’s never nothing.’

The big Paladin grumbled. ‘You are like a boy on his first hunt, lord.’

I smiled wistfully. ‘You remember your first hunt?’

‘No.’

‘Nor I mine.’ I cocked a grin as though he had just made my point for me. ‘Every time is the first now. The realms are so vast, the enemy so numerous. It is always new.’

‘You are a Lord-Castellant, not an Azyros or a Venator to go seeking out new dangers.’

I blew out through my lips. ‘The best defence…’ Broudiccan’s eyes narrowed reproachfully, and I motioned towards the Freeguild further uphill, dragging the bridge towards us with renewed vigour. ‘They will work faster knowing I’m here on the far side. I don’t forget my calling, brother.’

Frankos had joined the labourers as I spoke, jostling in between the ogors and taking up some of the chain to help pull.

‘He is a bad influence upon you,’ said Broudiccan.

I laughed at that. ‘I suspect most would say it was the other way around.’

‘I have known Frankos longer than you. He is perfectly incorruptible. You, on the other hand, will do anything for an audience.’

I frowned across the water, but Broudiccan had nothing more to add. Frankly, I should have been astonished to have got as many words out of him as I had, but I was justifiably distracted by what happened next.

Lightning struck earth a few feet from where I was standing.

Not an actual lightning bolt, of course. Deliverance from the Celestial Stair remained as possible as it ever had been during the Realmgate Wars, but it had become rarer in those days as Sigmar’s wars spread his attention thinner. Azyrite energies crackled and burst as the Prosecutor furled his wings then stood. His armour was the black of freshly dug soil, richer in gold even than my own, and embellished with images and inscriptions as one would a tombstone. It put me in mind of the mortis armour worn by Xeros Stormcloud, my Lord-Relictor, who had earned his war name for the black mood that followed him wheresoever he chose to darken with his tread. Or so I chose to believe, and tell all who ask.

Despite having just risen, the Prosecutor dropped again to one knee. ‘Lord-Castellant, I bear an urgent missive from my lord, Akturus.’ His delivery smacked of some ritual phrasing, the effect only slightly ruined by the breathlessness that came with a long flight from the Seven Words. He presented a tightly furled scroll, sealed with a flickering Azyrite rune.

The scroll fizzled under my nose.

Now, it has never been any secret that I find the written word disturbing. Trapping a man’s words and thoughts, his soul even, on parchment or tablet still seems to me like witchcraft and I avoid it where I can.

An awkward second passed between us in which neither moved or spoke.

‘Urgent was Akturus’ word, lord,’ said the Prosecutor, the formality of his address slipping. ‘Not mine.’

I sighed.

If in doubt, bluff it out.

‘Read it to me as we go.’ I turned my back, picked a direction from the frostbitten scabgrass and sand-coloured rushes of the Nevermarsh in what I was sure was an authoritative manner and started walking.

‘Yes, lord.’

The sounds of hammering and sawing and the strains of an ogor working song faded quickly as I strode into the marsh, swallowed by the chirp of predatory birds and biting insects. I idly swatted at a few. Largely out of habit. Most things in Ghur would try to eat you one way or another, but there wasn’t much out there that would willingly make a meal out of the storm-fused flesh and blessed sigmarite of a Stormcast Eternal.

The realm’s erratic sun was just pushing over the horizon, kissing every leaf and frond with amber lips. It was beautiful. From behind me, there came a faint crack as the Prosecutor broke the lightning seal and unrolled the scroll.

‘Brother Castellant,’ he read aloud. ‘Praise Sigmar, for he has noted your abrupt absence and seen fit to reinforce the Seven Words until your prompt return. Lord-Veritant Vikaeus Creed did arrive this morn at the head of the Drakwards, Exemplar Chamber of the Knights Merciless, to–’

I grumbled under my breath, missing whatever it was that the Prosecutor said next.

Vikaeus and I had what you could call a history.

She thought me foolhardy and arrogant. Actually, she still does, and nor is she exactly wrong. Foolishness and arrogance are two of my finest qualities, virtues to which too few amongst the Stormhosts can lay claim. I, for my part, have always been underwhelmed by the Lord-Veritant’s much vaunted gift for prophecy. While it is true that she accurately prophesied the coming of the White Pox to the Valdenmoor, and foretold of Skulla Gashamna’s ascension to daemonhood months before Lord-Ordinator Vorrus Starstrike read it in the stars, her warnings of my imminent self-inflicted demise had thus far all come to naught.

‘Still waiting for that vermintide she foresaw swallowing the Seven Words, I imagine,’ I said.

‘The Lord-Castellant did not impart that detail, lord.’

‘I bet he didn’t. Did he impart anything else?’

‘Yes, lord. He asked me to tell you that he prays for your swift return, and to remind you that the slight raised against his honour still stands.’

I said nothing to that.

Akturus Ironheel commanded a warrior chamber known as the Imperishables, a force numbering some four hundred souls. As a Lord-Castellant, we were equivalent in rank, but utterly dissimilar in character. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer, the Stormhost to which the Imperishables belonged, were a force of black repute, assembled from the heroes of empires long-dead and hammered into being while the Mallus turned under a darksome phase.

Or so their lords-relictor claim, and good luck to them, for no one knows better the power of a fearsome legend than I.

‘It was meant in jest,’ I said. ‘He enjoys it.’

‘He has already prepared the ring for ritual combat, lord. All of the Seven Words are eager for your return.’ It could just have been me, but I was certain I heard a smirk in the winged warrior’s voice.

Akturus might have preferred sitting in a castle to taking one, and despised the untamed Ghurlands as much as I hated being bottled up in the Seven Words, but he was the most vicious and underhanded fighter I have ever had the misfortune to cross in all my centuries of war. I swear, he knew the weaknesses of aegis armour and the pressure points of a Stormcast Eternal’s body the way a Lord-Castellant should know bricks and mortar.

And he was touchy about the honour of his war name, as I had recently learned.

‘Not nearly as eager as I am,’ I said, though I would have rather challenged the entire Drakwards Exemplar Chamber than entertain Akturus in the ring. If there’s one thing people admire more than a victor, it’s a bold loser, and being batted around the Seven Words by a Dracoth or two would at least be a moral triumph of sorts.

The Prosecutor chuckled, which I took as more comradely than mocking. It was easy to forget sometimes that the Imperishables were as human beneath their armour as I.

I sighed. I supposed that my reputation could afford to suffer a knock or two, taken in good spirits.

Suddenly, I stopped walking, holding up my hand as I stared into the endless marsh. It was called the Nevermarsh for a reason.

‘The thought occurs. I have no idea where I’m going.’

The Prosecutor gestured back the way we had come. ‘This way, lord. I am not the only bringer of news.’

Click here to buy Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Inferno! Volume 3 in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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