BENEATH THE BLACK THUMB

David Guymer

I

‘You come to me offering death,’ said Copsys Bule, stabbing his long-handled trident into the soft red soil. Blood or something distantly akin to it oozed lazily up around the sinking tines. ‘A kingly gift, envoy, but death flourishes where I choose to sow it. I am a harvester of death.’

Kletch Scabclaw studied him with eyes that could have gleaned weakness from diamond. They were milk yellow, and glared over the mangy scrap of man-skin that he held pressed to his muzzle in the claws from which he had taken his name. The look on his furry, verminous face might have been one of disgust, though at what, or who, was something the plague priest kept for himself.

‘A new age begins, they squeak-say.’ Spreading his paws, the skaven irritably swatted aside a buzzing bloat fly. Through Bule’s blurred vision it appeared to have three eyes, until the rat-man snapped his claws and his vision once again became clear. ‘War comes. Even to you.’

Bule snapped his head up.

The skaven immediately backed up a pace, hunched for fight or flight. Light on his foot-paws, he stood atop the rotten mush that went up to Bule’s greaves. His right paw had gone for the weapon he concealed beneath his robes, and he hissed a warning through his scented rag.

Bule smiled, rotten flesh yielding to produce something too, too wide for a human mouth.

Slowly, Kletch held up his empty paws, then the gnawed-on nub of his tail. It switched over the rat-man’s head with irritation. ‘I did not come-scurry all way from clan-burrow to fight-quarrel. The Black Thumb and Clan Rikkit were friend-allies in the Age of Chaos. Is written. Is remembered. Now we must-need fight tooth to claw again.’

Bule turned his back with a mild shake of the head. Withdrawing his bloodied trident, he stabbed three new aeration holes into the soil, the tines spearing an inch deep before hitting something unyielding. Baring the black stubs of his teeth he gave a grunt of pleasure, planted his foot to the back of the fork-head, and rocked back and forth on the handle.

Levering the trident against his bloated girth, he turned over the unyielding patch in a waft of decomposing flesh.

The human corpse tore off its blanket of topsoil and flopped over. A face that was grey-black and runny and lovely as a crop of sweet tubers fresh out of the ground stared up at the slow circling stars with the clarity of the dead. Disturbed maggots and worms squirmed under the starlight, as if divulging some great secret under torture. Bule watched them re-bury themselves, lulled by the drone of a billion bloat flies and the rank cackle of crows.

Wriggle. Wriggle.

‘Rotbringer,’ the skaven prompted him.

Bule pinched his eyes wetly, mind asquirm with worms and portent. The rat-man continued.

‘The lightning men hit clan-burrows in Cripple Fang, Untamed Lands and Putris Bog. Even clan-cousins from far Ghyran come-flee, tunnelling the realm-places to bring word of war.’

Shouldering his trident, Bule turned around suddenly enough to elicit a low squeal of alarm from the plague priest of Clan Rikkit. The rat-man leapt to one side, reaching again for his concealed weapon, but Bule merely squelched through the spot he had been occupying as though he were a zombie suddenly impelled to be elsewhere.

‘Bule. Bule!’

Copsys Bule ignored him, his armour emitting a mould-muffled clank with every step. Several of the spiked plates were split apart at the joins, but the damage to his armour had been inflicted not from without but from within. Corpse gasses distended his belly, opening up the plates from the inside like a fat grub eating its way out of an egg sac. Everywhere there remained living skin, swellings, boils and tumours caused further buckling, mottling the once-green metal to black.

Not since before the Age of Chaos had Bule known an equal, and his gardens brought weeping harvest to lands from the Bloodbloom Fields in the south to the Avalundic Ice Kingdoms in the north, from the peat bogs of Murgid Fein to the unconquerable Rabid Heights and their gargant kings.

His demesne was too vast for one name.

It encompassed the Pox Sands, the great Bloat Lake, the Plantation of Flies, fleshwork patches stitched with irrigation ditches that steamed with blight and hummed with spawning daemonfly. As far into the bubonic haze as the eye could see, scrofulous, once-human things tilled the soil with rakes and hoes, or waded into pools with long prods to turn the bloated corpses that floated in them, gestating towards ripeness. Hundreds expired in the time it took Bule to walk past them, and were dragged away to the nurseries to replenish the soil in their turn.

But it was the nature of lesser beings to attach small names to great things.

They called it the Corpse Marshes.

Seemingly at random, feeling where the dead desired his knife, he squatted down into the mire. A sigh of simple pleasure escaped him. The crucified remains of men, women and children staked the ground in serried rows for a stretch greater than a man could ride in a day. Here could be found the bodies of almost every race, including several that no longer existed anywhere but as they did here now. For reasons fathomable to few but Bule himself, he called it his Living Orchard. A foetid breeze moaned through the dead, making them hum and sway, like lush-leaved trees in bloom. Drawing a curved knife from his arming belt, he sawed away a hand that liquefaction was beginning to pull away from the wrist. It was human. A nectarine blackness trickled from the cut. He licked it from his hand, eyes closed in ecstasy.

There was no plan in his mind of how his garden should be, but he knew what needed to be done towards its completion. And it would be soon. Very soon.

The thought thrilled him even as the part of him that had cherished these labours was saddened by their imminent passing.

‘There are a great many of your kind here,’ Bule said, aware that the rat-man had followed him and was now crouching on an old wall behind him. Keeping his distance. ‘Your fur. Your guts. You teem with life like no other.’ He cut away another sagging limb with a clinical slash. ‘Nothing rots as quickly as a skaven rots. Nothing embraces Grandfather Nurgle so completely.’

‘Is that what you want-wish me to take back to my masters?’

‘Ask me again come the high moon.’

‘Why-why? What changes then?’

Bule licked his knife with a wide smile. Birds cried in fevered tongues, a diseased animal sagacity that he might one day have the fortune to fathom but half of. ‘You come on an auspicious night. For the first time in two and a half thousand years the stars will align my realmgate with another.’

‘And then?’ Kletch hissed, suddenly wary.

‘Ask me again come the high moon.’

II

Fistula, First Blightlord of the Black Thumb, delighter in sickness and death, opened the orruk from hip to hip with a sawing reverse of his blade. A surprised snort issued from the greenskin’s tusked helmet, but the fighter remained upright, tough as necrotic flesh and just as dead to pain. Holding its squirming guts in a fist the size of a buckler, it swung its axe at the blightlord with a roar.

Hardwearing, vicious – orruks were infamous. But the fever spreading fire through its veins from the infected belly wound made it sluggish. Fistula sidestepped the clumsy slash with ease then broke its shin with a heel jab. It was sweating. Most men would never know that an orruk could suffer the way this one now did. But still it would not yield.

Fistula appreciated that.

Dashing aside its weakening backslash on the flat of his sword, he stepped in behind its flailing trunk of an arm, close enough to smell the daemon plaguelings rampaging through its veins, then plunged his parrying dagger through its throat.

The orruk’s mammoth jaws snapped spasmodically as Fistula tore his dagger loose and kicked the brute away. Blood from the torn artery sprayed in a rising arc and painted the open face of Fistula’s helm green. He gasped. Partly to drink the wetness from the air. Partly for the raw pleasure of doing so.

Fistula looked down on the beaten orruk. It was still snapping its jaws even as it drowned in its fluids and its eyes turned white. Fistula could have ended it quickly, should have, perhaps, but endemic as the orruks were in the shadow of the Rabid Heights there were never enough to last. He looked up.

The orruks were still fighting in scattered mobs spread out along the length of the narrow gulch into which the Black Thumb had pursued them, but they were broken. Not in the manner of a human or Rotbringer host. They did not run. Rather, they held on with the witless tenacity of sick beasts. Hardy as they were as a race, all bore the stigmata of infection: weeping sores and crusted cuts that would not heal. For every hundred that lay dead with an obvious wound, a hundred more twitched on the ground with blood foam in their mouths and flies on their rotting flesh.

Gors and bestigors plunged headlong into the fray, hacking and goring with frenzied abandon. Rotbringer knights on maggot-riddled steeds galloped up the steeply climbing wall of the gulch to strike at the orruk warleader. The huge beast was surrounded by his biggest and most brutal, but was already heavily beset by the Tzeentchian warhost driving in from the opposite side of the ravine.

The Changeling host was a cacophonous legion of colours and shapes. Gold glittered. Strange voices whispered. Flames of every cast, smell and texture danced along the crossbars of banner poles, and suits of almost-sentient armour whispered secrets to the deepest subconscious of all nearby with a mind to hear. Daemonflies buzzed over everything and everyone. Blight hounds ran along the flanks, pulling down the isolated and the maimed. Giant slugs burrowed up from under the hardpan to swallow Tzeentchian warriors whole while plague drones and sleek daemonic screamers swept at each other in pitched battle for the skies.

The orruks had become almost incidental.

Fistula read the kindred mood in his opposite number, the hunger, coming from somewhere out there in the gulch. They had both come to torment prey, but now, starved of a true challenge, they threw their warriors at the other with greater ferocity than they had ever before.

It was something that Copsys Bule had become too fat and old to realise. Even the most rapacious of plagues could be tamed, lingering only on the scraps left by those they had once devastated in their millions.

A stamp of hellsteel and an ebullient cry called Fistula back from the abstract of the battle. Through a congested melee of putrid blightkings and sickening orruk fighters half again their size, a Chaos warrior encased in full plate armour of azure and gold barged towards him. His helm was solid metal, with only the etching of half-lidded eyes through which some enchantment perhaps permitted him to see. From the sides, golden horns spiralled inwards towards infinity. The Tzeentchian knuckled aside an orruk and roared the final strides with his broadsword swept high overhead.

With a shout, Fistula pivoted on the spot and smacked his saw-toothed blade hard into the larger blade’s descent. It was not a parry. He struck the Tzeentchian’s broadsword as though meaning to do it harm. The impact arced up his arm. He felt it vibrate in his teeth. Reflex action shocked his fingers open and would have lost him his blade if not for the blood and pus that pooled endlessly into his grip from infected calluses and glued palm to hilt.

The Tzeentchian reeled as though it had been struck on the head by a blow that had left its helmet ringing. Its heavy sword trailed, elbows locked in spasm with the aftershock of keeping a hold of his blade.

Fistula struck off the warrior’s head with a single blow to the neck and laughed.

He was the opposite of Copsys Bule in most ways. Where the Lord of Plagues had become a bloated wreck of a man, Fistula’s body was wasted, the favour in which he was held written in lesions on pared bone and in the ropey musculature that seeped and seeped without end. He was a warrior. A fever raged in his mind that no level of war could ever purge and his armour, lighter by preference, was etched with tallies of the blights he had tasted and the civilizations he had brought low.

‘Secure the dead,’ bellowed a cadaverous, jaundiced blightking wearing a cruel harness of scythe-edged plates and hanging mail. He lay into the orruks with a pair of matching knifes, bloodily proficient in his preferred mode of killing. Fistula was one of the few to know him as Vitane. To most, he was Leech. The blightking turned and waved a come now gesture. ‘Bring up the wagons. If we are not back by high moon it will go poorly for you.’

Rattling in under a fug of disease came a dozen wagons. Each was drawn by a team of six wheezing horses, their loose wheels the size of a man, their high sides scratched with the knife marks of individual warriors and with a splintered parapet of aged wood. Leprous harvesters in hoods and swaddling leaned over the parapet with hooks to draw up the dead. The drovers called a halt. The horses snuffled in their traces, hacking, puking, biting at each other’s flea-ravaged coats.

Fighting his way to Fistula’s side, Vitane looked down on the orruk still dying at his lord’s feet. The leathery tissue was continuing to shrivel away, the liquidised remainder sinking around the bones.

‘He will be unhappy. This one is worthless.’

Fistula sneered. Vitane was old enough to have fought with Copsys Bule from the beginning, lacking enough in ambition or favour to prevent his star being eclipsed by the man he now followed into battle.

‘I am not here to scavenge and I am not here for Bule,’ Fistula said.

They could not all dine off glories past.

Fistula scanned the confusion for the Tzeentchian champion. Warriors of every stripe filled the gulch from wall to wall with a riot of colour and noise. Even the sky reflected the vivid clash, the bubonic haze that blanketed Bule’s demesnes turned a sickly turquoise by the rolling cumulus of Tzeentchian fire that followed the war horde from the north. Twisted trees covered in naked sores and weeping black foliage clung to the ridgeline. They swayed under the opposing winds.

Fistula shivered though he could not say why. His eyes narrowed.

There was something there, hidden under the drooping canopy. Fistula glimpsed a figure, or the suggestion of one. More a feeling than something he could later describe and claim with certainty had been real. He perceived a sense of robes, of a gaunt, skeletal height, but his overriding impression was one of watchfulness, of many, many sets of eyes trained upon every aspect of this moment in time. In a blink of the mind it was gone. The inkling of its prior being was a subliminal glamour that nevertheless refused to fully fade, as though he had gazed overlong upon a daemon and imprinted its corona of power onto his mind.

He shook his head, and with the blessed release of a peeled scab pulled off his helmet and wiped the orruk’s gore from his hairless scalp.

The sense of watchfulness remained on him, a nagging question at the back of his mind. He felt judgement, though for what, Fistula doubted he had the faculties to comprehend. Nor did he care. He bared his teeth in anticipation and raised his sword to signal the charge. His own glorification was all that mattered.

Let it watch. Let it judge.

III

Kletch Scabclaw spread his arms out to either side while a skavenslave hung the heavy ambassadorial cloak of Clan Rikkit over his shoulders. It was a bit much for the cloying humidity of the Corpse Marshes, and itched in hard-to-reach places that no garment so august should. Its fleas had been passed from priest to priest for two hundred years, and were now the hardy descendents of those that had survived the clan’s full arsenal of pesticidal sorcery.

His dresser ducked under his arm and shuffled around to the front.

The slave was naked but for its own scrappy fur and the brands of clan and owner, but Kletch was only partially reassured by that. To his mind there were any number of innovative places in which a determined assassin might secrete a weapon. His yellow eyes drilled into the side of the slave’s head. The wretch bared its throat with a whimper, stabbing its thumb several times in its panic to fasten the cloak’s rat bone collar. Kletch fidgeted as the slave fussed.

It was too hot. The garish green light of the warpstone braziers around the low-roofed tent was too bright. The spiced scent they gave off to hold back the reek was too sickly sweet.

‘How much-long to high moon?’ he asked of the plague monk seated against the wall of the pavilion behind his back.

‘Soon-soon.’

Scurf’s piebald fur was pox-scarred, so denuded of hair from his own incessant scratching that he resembled a game bird that had been abandoned before it could be fully plucked. The crusted word-bringer set his claw quill onto the stack of man-skin parchment on which he had been cataloguing the many new diseases they had encountered since their arrival in the Corpse Marshes and shrugged. ‘An hour, I think-guess.’

Kletch wriggled his shoulders in discomfort. ‘Something is about to happen-come. I feel-feel in my claws.’

‘I feel-smell also,’ said Scurf, always eager to concur.

The slave scurried over to the brass-ribbed chest sitting open by the hide wall of the tent, and returned with Kletch’s warpstone-tipped staff. Kletch snatched it off the slave with a snarled rebuke. Feeling a little better, he gave the air a fresh sniff, opened his mouth to taste. Between the reek of putrefaction and his own efforts to keep it at bay, there was little left to be smelled, but somehow he knew, knew, that there was more than just the three of them present in that tent.

‘You want-wish to go home?’ asked Scurf.

‘No,’ said Kletch, meaning yes. ‘Clanlords will not reward us for returning with paws empty. The lightning men hit them much-hard in lots-many places. Clanlords grow desperate. They… make bad decisions when they are desperate.’

The slave scurried back bearing a bottle filled with a greenish red liquor that it poured into a goblet. Steam hissed off the cup as the liquid hit the lacquer. The slave bobbed its head low and presented the potation. Kletch eyed the rodent severely. With a gulp, the slave brought the cup to its lips and took the daintiest sip.

Kletch took the goblet from his retching slave, stole his nerve, and then downed its contents. He grimaced, throat tightening, musk glands clenching, and stuck out his tongue to say: ‘Blegh!’

‘Best-best potions taste worst,’ said Scurf sagely.

Clan Rikkit had once been part of Pestilens, before a tunnel collapse in the ways between worlds had separated them from their brethren. They still retained many of the old immunities, but the cautious rat was the healthy rat.

‘This all a waste of time anyway,’ said Scurf, picking up his quill once more and dunking it in the shelled ink bug still twitching on his table. Scratching away at the parchment, he went on. ‘He has many warriors, but this not the Copsys Bule used to frighten my litter when I was small-young.’

Kletch was unconvinced. Bule could afford to let the world pass him by for a millennium or two if he chose to do so, of that he was certain. And if Bule was any less than the tyrant of clan legend then Kletch was glad that he had not been the envoy sent to treat with that Lord of Plagues.

‘One hour more we can wait. Let us see this over-done, but have all my warriors ready to go.’

‘Yes-yes,’ said Scurf, carefully folding his quill and packing it away.

Kletch twitched aside the tent flap and slipped out into the muggy night with wrinkled nose and downcast eyes. Two from the two-dozen plague monks quietly chittering their praises on the broken ground outside of the tent fell into step behind him.

A colossal fortress-temple had once stood here, built by a people who had worshiped the stars and raised towers of incredible scale that they might feel the distant objects of their faith more keenly. For all that their eyes had attended the heavens, they had clearly also been masters of stone. Many of the great structures still stood though they were ruinous now, verterbral columns of stone that had been yellowed by blight, weather and war. Copsys Bule called this place the Hanging Gardens, named so for the thousands upon thousands of dead and dying strung up from its moss-clad defensive walls. Those still alive writhed in fever so that the walls themselves appeared in motion. Their mouths moved but no evidence of their torment could be heard from them, not above the flies.

To count the flies was to court insanity. They were infinite, swarms within swarms, billowing over the corrupted fortress in such numbers that at times they were as the chitinous outer wings of a beetle closing over the world and shutting out the sky. At such times the drone was a gnawing on the boundary between earth and heavens, between real and unreal. At other times it was simply maddening. It set the teeth on edge.

The Clan Rikkit camp pavilion was set up on the rubble where the innermost gate had crumbled to create a rockery populated with razor weeds that were watered each day with the blood of year-dead men. It would foul a charge as surely as any gate ever would, assuming any enemy had the fortitude to survive as far as Bule’s innermost defensive line.

From that vantage Kletch had an unimpeded and deeply unpleasant view.

The Corpse Marshes were monstrous. It reminded him only somewhat of the honeycombed pox caves of Murgid Fein, where diseases were bred, mutated and harvested from slaves of every race. But here the scale was far more epic. The very fabric of the world for as far as his dim eyes could show him felt rotten, perished. The reports of all of his senses scurried about his mind to decry its wrongness and even he, master of the industrialisation of degradation, felt sickened by it.

A geyser of corpse gas rippled upwards and outwards from a sinkhole further down near the gatehouse. Grime spattered back over the rotten gates and the band of warriors marching home over its splinters. A column of plague beasts and meat wagons followed them. Kletch recognised Fistula’s pack: the most useful of Bule’s warriors, but a drop in the septic ocean of his horde.

Leaning against his staff, he settled in to wait.

‘Another day spent in genuflection to our lord’s placidity, envoy?’ said Fistula as he tramped up the slope, evidently bound for the same destination as Kletch. The champion was spattered with loose gore and beaming, contempt for all and sundry and for Kletch in particular vibrant in his bloodshot eyes.

The blightlord walked over, laden carts drawn by withered, pestilential beasts creaking on behind him. Kletch stiffened with immediate suspicion and sniffed at the flies buzzing lazily after the vehicles’ cargo. The experiments of Clan Burrzik in breeding eavesdropping mosquitoes had faltered as a consequence of the clan’s incompetence, but one never knew. One never knew.

‘Maybe,’ he said, then chirred something conciliatory and gestured with his tail to the top of the hill.

There, encircled by a ring of luminous white pillars that in their cleanliness exuded a sense of power and prominence, was a marble archway carved with astrological constellations and runic notations. It stood bare to the stars as if waiting only on their call, and even inert as it was, the sight of it sent a frisson of imagined dread running to the tip of his tail. He could understand why the ancients here had built such a monument to the heavens.

He licked his gums nervously. ‘What does Bule want-think will happen tonight?’

‘I can tell you what I think will happen.’

Kletch caught the blightlord’s look and read the need there. Battle. Survival. Aims not identical to his, but with cunning words and enough will perhaps complementary ones. He glanced upwards again to mark the approach of high moon, his neck, accustomed to tunnels and caves, already sore from continually doing so. That was when he noticed what had been worrying at him since he left his tent.

The stars were moving.

IV

For a count of years numbering seven times seven times seven times seven, Copsys Bule had tended his garden. He did not know how many millions he had pulled out of the ground since that first day. Unlike some, he kept no lists, no ledgers, except that which existed in his mind. He knew only that his god saw it as good.

Turning his knife so that it was point down, he pushed the blade into the mushy chest of the body spread like soft grey cheese over dry bread across the trencher table in front of him. There was no resistance. It was like cutting into marrow jelly.

Flesh separated in a great swelling of maggots as Bule carved from collar to coccyx. A comingling of organs and body juices dribbled from the gash. The smell was pure ambrosia. His belly gurgled. Decay was a master gourmet. It loosened the fat, softened fibres and pulled meat from the bone. It brought out a depth and range of flavours that the impatient flesh-eaters of Khorne or the squeamish that burned their meat with fire could never experience.

He licked the juices from his knife blade, mouth distending to accommodate his entire fist. The panoply of tastes and odours gave him shivers and he closed his eyes.

The added spice of plague magic, the power of new life, tingled on the tip of his tongue and then diffused through him like a warmth. He withdrew his hand, sucked clean, and then hung the knife from one of the curing hooks that protruded from his armour.

‘All. Ready,’ snuffled Gurhg, the bray shaman thumping the ground with a skull-topped stave as he walked around the stirring realmgate. Standing behind the sagging trenchers in an octed around the realmgate, blightlords and champions watched solemnly. The shaman raised his bull snout and snorted, bone fetishes and feathers tinkling from blistered horns. He closed his eyes and emitted a low sigh that made the hanging flesh of his throat quiver. ‘Feel. Him. Stirring.’

Bule spread his arms with a smile. Torchlight flickered from sconces set in the columns. Brass tocsins played by hooded slaves with wire brushes hummed a sonorous chorus.

‘Feast, my children.’

To a great squishing of meat and crumbling of rot-softened bone, the gathered worthies of the Rotbringers tucked in with a hunger. Bule watched them all, hands across his swollen girth. There was Fistula, ever prideful, ambitious, filling his mouth with the same abandon as the others. Beside him the old bloat hound, Vitane, sucked jelly from his fingers and laughed at a joke. Their greatly honoured guest from Clan Rikkit was hunched behind a corner trencher, nibbling diplomatically at a bit of bone and throwing uneasy glances up at the sky. Copsys Bule basked in the paternal glow.

It was nearly time. The magic was rising, and Bule could feel the realmgate responding. For a moment he could feel the connections that ran through the Eightpoints to some other place, some other realm, where one far mightier than he tended a garden of his own. He looked up. The moon was approaching its zenith. The stars were in alignment, brighter and clearer than Bule had ever seen them before. One of them momentarily grew brighter.

Bule examined the moving constellation with wide open eyes.

Yes. Yes.

The star grew brighter, brighter, shining out the others around it and projecting a beam of starlight directly onto the realmgate. Bule grunted at the sharp glare and shielded his eyes with his arm. As the light dissipated, he looked immediately back to the gate.

A slender-bodied lizard wielding what looked like a dartpipe and a spear was now standing on the pedestal before the Gate. It stood on its hind legs like a man, shorter even than Kletch Scabclaw and more wiry still. The black colouration of its scales mottled to white as Bule watched, matching itself almost seamlessly to the marble hues of the Gate behind it. His eyes continuing to recover from the flash, Bule noticed a hundred or so more of the little creatures, spread out in the shadows around the gathered Rotbringers.

A strained silence fell over them all. Even Gurhg noticed and stopped chanting.

The lizard-man lowered its head, spines engorging to raise a vivid frill. It emitted a warbling chirrup then lifted its dartpipe to its beak.

For one so vast, Bule could move like poison through a panicking man’s veins when quickened to do so. That he had not been so roused in over a hundred years was nothing. He was Copsys Bule, the Black Thumb, and his knife was in his hand and wrist deep in the lizard’s still-shattering ribcage before the creature had drawn its breath.

The lizard’s nictitating eyelids fluttered in shock. Already its scaly skin was beginning to blister with the lesions of Nurgle’s blessed rot, daemonflies pupating inside the wound in its chest, but to Bule’s surprise what emerged from that wound was not blood but pure, cleansing starlight.

Scalded where it touched his arm, Bule tore his hand back, ripping a chunk of the lizard’s chest out with it. It shuddered and fell, vanishing in a cascade of glimmering motes before it hit the ground.

Clenching and unclenching his fist around his knife handle, feeling the burned, cleansed, tissue pulling, Bule grunted at the barely comparable sensation of a metal-tipped blow dart puncturing his neck. He felt the venom enter his blood and would have laughed at its impish ineffectuality had he not been building towards such a fury.

This was his moment, his time. The signs had been guiding him for centuries towards this night.

With a snarl that came from deep in his monstrous belly, he turned and flung his knife. It spun end over end, so fast it appeared as a solid discus, and punched a chameleon lizard from its feet in an explosion of light and bone.

Blow darts and javelins droned around him like hornets, snuffing out the torches with the wind of their flight, and falling on the Rotbringers. They bristled from unfeeling flesh, rattled off heavy armour and even downed a handful of the mighty warriors before they had a chance to react. The beastman, Gurhg, dropped to his haunches and backed into a trencher table with his head down. He found Kletch already under it.

Air rippled inside the arch of the realmgate.

It was subtle but there, the power awakening in direct response to the plague magic that Bule had nurtured in his garden for two thousand four hundred and one years. That power was still rising. Nothing would stop it now.

Copsys Bule looked again at his hand, free of blight for the first time since he knew not when.

‘Kill them all!’ he shrieked. ‘Let none of them touch my garden!’

V

Fistula was more disoriented than angry. He was drunk on meat and cankerberry wine, and on a power that he could not put name to but which filled him with a fever swirl of thoughts. The discordant moan of tocsins droned through his mind, though they were playing a cadence of battle now rather than of ceremony. The taste of meat was in his mouth, but it was fresh, torn not from the embrace of Copsys Bule’s soil but from the struggling bodies of the living.

He spat out a mouthful of blistering starlight. Or tried to. His throat burned, however hard he wretched and gagged.

Goaded into lucidity on a knife-edge of pain he struck down a lizard-man that was hissing in cold-blooded consternation at the chunk bitten out of its wrist. It disappeared in a drizzle of glimmer dust. Two more took advantage of the light-shock to blindside him. They came with spears held short.

Fistula caught the haft of the first spear thrust, then with his sword hand punched it in half. The lizard stumbled. Turning his body across and through it, he pushed it on its way to the ground, spitting his sword out to arm’s length to impale the second. Light exploded from its back around the tip of his sword. This time he was ready for the glare. Eyes already narrowed, he spun quickly away, stamping on the first lizard and grinding the light that bled from its fractured skull under his boot.

Something small and metallic spanked his pauldron guard. Darts tipped with starmetal zipped by. He saw a burly Rotbringer with a cloak of festering hide go down under a volley of them. Another took a freak hit, a dart straight down the ear, dropping the warrior like his weight in dead meat.

From somewhere, screaming. Melting flesh and starlight.

Every one of these warriors was a master of war, the mightiest of mortal champions uplifted to near daemonhood by the Lord of Decay. But they had forgotten what it felt like to be challenged. After millennia of pointless warfare they had forgotten what it truly was to fight.

Fistula clutched at his gut with his off-hand.

He felt ill, stricken, a great swelling pressing up from inside his chest. Pressure climbed up his throat, as though he were a snake trying to regurgitate a man that had been too large for him to swallow. A bilious taste flooded his mouth and, on unconscious reflex, he doubled over and vomited forth a torrent of foulness and corruption.

The lizard-men caught in the flow died instantly and in agony. The Rotbringers similarly touched were healed as if by the beaming intercession of Grandfather Nurgle himself. Maggots squirmed over open wounds. New and glorious infections puckered flesh that had been rankly cleansed by the lizards’ light.

Swallowing several times to assure himself that he too was whole again, he looked about for more enemies. There were none. All around him were in advanced stages of rot or already returned to whatever heavenly body had spewed them forth.

He panted, heart racing. Was that all?

‘Kill them all!’ he heard Copsys Bule shout, a shrill note of fury screwing his voice tight. ‘Let none of them touch my garden!’

Fistula shot around to look down the slope. His heart thumped hard for joy.

Light knifed frenziedly from the heavens. Flashes blossomed within the fug of flies, then glowed and spawned warriors. Many of them were bigger than the lizard-men he had just slaughtered. Some of them were a lot bigger. That first wave must have been some kind of advance party. Scouts. Assassins, perhaps. This was an army, coming down in conventional formations.

Accompanied by tocsins and bells and calls to glory, warriors of the Rotbringers mustered over the old corpse-hung curtain walls to oppose them. Bule commanded the souls of a hundred thousand, and although more than half were scattered wide over the Corpse Marshes and beyond, what remained was a mighty host indeed.

He bared sharpened teeth, a feral grin. Now for notice. Now for glory. This was going to be a fight.

‘You want war?’ Bule roared at the stars, and the very ground beneath seemed to tremble at his words.

Someone had passed the Lord of Plagues his helmet, and his voice boomed from inside the steel. In both hands he gripped the haft of the trident with which he tended his garden, veins standing out from bulging biceps as he continued to howl without words. God-gifted power oozed from him, turning the air around him syrupy brown. Sickly, cyclopean figures beginning to take shape there. They were horned, drenched in mucous, stooped over serrated swords that reeked of soulrot. Nurgle’s tallymen. Plaguebearers. From the strain in Bule’s bearing it was though he passed them from his own body. In a sense he did.

Fistula howled, maddened by battle-lust and plague.

Bule crashed the brass ferrule of his trident into the ground and screamed.

‘I will give you war!’

VI

Kletch Scabclaw ran in the middle of the Rotbringers’ counter-attack, where he felt naturally safest, ducking, weaving, leaping between pockets of solid ground. Not that he felt all that safe. Beastmen thundered downhill like rabid animals while Chaos warriors, each with their own maddened cry on their black lips, battled each other to be the first to meet the enemy and in their blundering almost dragged Kletch under more than once. Of course, the plague monks of Clan Rikkit could be just as zealous in battle, but only with the inspiring words of their priest in their ears and the fumes of his blessed censer in their snouts. As well as being unruly, the horde was not as sufficiently numerous as he would have liked. That wasn’t exactly helped by those who were continually peeling off to strike out at the lizard-man skirmishers firing down on them from their flanks.

The lizards scampered with near-impunity over walls and pox moats that, judging by the clear lack of defenders, the Rotbringers had considered impassable.

The Rotbringers had been fools.

Even by Kletch’s own standards, the lizards were light on their feet. Their bones seemed to be hollow, and with little else to them but light they skipped across floating corpses as cleanly as if they were solid ground. Only the moats themselves gave them pause – fecund nurseries of disease that hummed with deadly daemonfly – but they served only to funnel the rabid Rotbringers through their own defensive works where they were easy pickings for the lizard’s dartpipes.

Skinks.

Kletch shivered, some deep residual instinct to freeze and play dead almost killing him there amongst the running column of Chaos warriors, beastmen and mind-plagued fanatics.

He kept running, not watching, his pre-conscious replaying him impressions of jungles he had never seen, of stepped pyramids he had never visited, the terror of being prey in a land he had never called his. He had not seen or heard of these lizard-men, these seraphon, before now, but deep down he knew them, and it was a knowledge that a thousand generations of new lands and new enemies could not wipe from his racial memory.

He leapt from one patch of solid ground to another, then another, easily outpacing the beasts and once-men that ran around him. His heavy cloak slowed him only a little, flapping out as he made one long leap, landing on a leaning root of a column. Sinking around his staff onto all fours, he sniffed the air for the musk of his own.

Useless. The whole castle was thick with decay. With a snarl, he resorted to using his eyes.

Despite the lizards’ – the skinks’ – success in drawing the Rotbringers into more difficult terrain, the bulk of Bule’s horde were still charging for the good ground where the main outer curtain walls converged on the gatehouse citadel. He could hear the drums and horns, the shouts and the roar of beasts. Skaven eyesight grew dim over any kind of distance and for that, today, he was grateful.

‘Go around!’ he squeaked, gesticulating furiously from his pedestal to the band of Rotbringers that were wading into a stinking brown pond to get at the brightly scaled skinks on the other side. ‘Go get. Kill-kill. Go!’

To no surprise of his, the Rotbringer’s champion plunged on into deeper water. The warrior was an idiot. He’d earned the dart in the throat that dropped him face down into the mire a moment later.

The skinks were making a mockery of the heavily armoured blightkings, making them look sluggish. The daemons were another matter.

Every sore on Kletch’s body wept, every ache seizing and filling his wiry body with pain as ten of Nurgle’s tallymen strode onto the pox moat, walking weightlessly upon the scum that floated on the surface and through the stinging daemonfly. The cold-blooded star-creatures barely reacted. Kletch watched as a skink shaman rustled his feathered cloak, flying over the plaguebearers’ heads to land in a swirl of red and gold on a stump of wall behind them. There, he shook his staff, exhorting a hail of darts from his kin that fell amongst the closing daemons.

Kletch snickered. Everyone knew that daemons could not be killed that way. But the tallymen fell by the handful, if anything even more vulnerable to the seraphon’s envenomed darts than the mortals they marched beside.

With a snarl, Kletch reached inside his cloak for his weapon, eyes locked on the shaman.

‘See-smell how tough you are. Kletch not afraid of scrawny scaly-meat.’

The faintest trace of reptile musk warned him of the danger just before an ear-splitting shriek from above re-triggered every instinct he had to freeze, run, hide. Terradon. The giant reptile swooped overhead, banked gracefully under the effortless direction of its skink rider, then dropped a boulder from its hind-claws. It came down like a meteor. It was a meteor.

With a terrified squeal, Kletch leapt from his column, arms and legs churning as the spot he had been standing on was annihilated, the air at his back electrified by a starlight explosion. His tail peeled. His cloak caught fire. He landed in a roll, steaming from fur and clothes and from the accidental release of fear musk down his leg.

‘Scratch and sniff,’ he swore.

Patting himself down, he brushed a string of darts from the back of his cloak. He swallowed the bad taste in his mouth. Dropping to all fours to make himself less of a target to any skinks looking to pick off survivors, he scurried from the path, zig-zagged through a verge of bloodgrass that stuck up from a hummock of dead men and horses like pins, and then dived into a wild patch of bruise-coloured bushes that clung to a ledge growing out from the second curtain wall. A few tail-lengths in he poked his head up through the scratching branches.

Below, clanking streams of Chaos warriors fed into a blurrily defined blob of screams and steel, a blood and lizard stink spilling out over half a league of the Hanging Garden’s heartlands. He didn’t need the eyes of a surface-dweller to see the blocks of bulky lizard warriors – saurus – grinding in under their golden icons. He could see well enough the giant reptiles that towered over all with swaying howdahs on their backs, even if he couldn’t quite count the horns on their bony head shields.

The seraphon were being held back for now. Nothing stood up to attrition like a warrior of Nurgle, and Copsys Bule commanded monsters of his own. Kletch sniffed the air and shivered at the sharp, unmistakeably vile scent.

The Lord of Plagues was down there. Good riddance.

‘Scabclaw-master!’

Kletch hissed angrily to mask his surprise, but this time held onto his musk. Scurf was scurrying through the flesh-drinking grasses, surrounded by a clawpack of stormvermin mercenaries in muddy black plate mail and wielding vicious-looking halberds. Several hundred raggedy plague monks followed, individuals breaking every so often to sniff the air, lash their tails in fear, and then hurry on.

‘Lightning men!’ Scurf squealed.

The word-bringer was in the same stained linen cassock he’d been wearing an hour ago, but had, apparently in great haste, donned a mail coif and was clutching a cracked tome that he held onto like a shield. He waved a rusty scimitar at the stars. Flies eddied and swarmed, a billion billion, but the stars behind no longer moved. An unnaturally intense constellation in the shape of a squatting toad glared down with eyes tinged red.

‘Fool-fool,’ Kletch snapped. ‘This is something other.’

‘Something new?’

Kletch shook his muzzle. ‘Something old.’

‘The claw-packs are ready to leave-go,’ added Scurf. He glanced down to the battle and gulped. ‘Very-very much-ready.’

Kletch bared his teeth, yellow eyes shining. This might all just work out after all. If Copsys Bule was defeated, as looked likely, then the clanlords could hardly blame him for failing to secure an alliance that the Lord of Plagues had never appeared to want at all. And if the weakened Lord of Plagues somehow managed to secure a pyrrhic victory?

Will perhaps then the generous backing of Clan Rikkit would appeal to him more.

‘This way,’ Kletch hissed.

Darting back into the bloodgrass, he wove through it, driving purposefully away from the main seraphon assault. Corpses at varying stages of rankness wobbled underpaw, tipping, sinking, at times disintegrating before he was able to leap clear and plunging him into foetid water. He spluttered a wordless prayer to the Pestilent Horned Rat that the tonic he had drunk would continue to prove effective. Keeping his head down and his nose clear, he scurried on. He was moving inside the circle of the inner walls to the far side of the fortress-temple. From there, with luck, he would be able to clamber down and escape without great difficulty. He upped his pace, becoming a blur of fur and movement.

There was nothing in all the Realms quicker than a skaven with a battle to escape, but Kletch was not yet so anxious to flee as to allow himself to pull ahead of his brother monks.

Not for the first time – and he fervently hoped not for the last – sound skaven thinking saved his hide.

Crashing through a canopy of hanging dead, a lumbering reptile as massive as a barded warhorse snapped the lead clanrat up in its jaws, trampling three more before the saurus riding it could rein it back.

Its predatory head was huge and low-slung, supported by a monstrous neck and counter-weighted by a thick tail that tacked menacingly in advance of its movements as it turned. The skaven in its jaws was shrieking. A savage yank of neck and jaw and the beast bit the pitiful creature through, sending legs and torso flying over opposite shoulders. A rake of its vestigial forepaws claimed another.

Scurf issued a rallying squeal, backing into the stormvermin clawpack as the beast completed its turn and snorted in his nose. He whipped up his book of woes with a frightened squeak as the saurus’ mace came down.

The book was mouldering parchment bound in cracked leather.

The mace was meteoric stone.

Hurriedly withdrawing from the smashed word-bringer, the stormvermin lowered their halberds, throwing up a wall of hooked blades between them and the beast. The reptile – a cold one – snapped contemptuously, taking off one of the blades and eating it.

The saurus hefted its bloodied mace and with cold calm scanned the skaven scattered across the grass before it. Every scale armouring its grossly powerful hide was chipped and scarred. Its eyes were old. Beautiful works of golden plate clad vulnerable spots such as its throat and wrists. It shone like the light at the end of all the skaven’s tunnels.

Pumping its mace up into the air, it gave a roar that shook the air. With answering roars, a full cohort of glittering saurus warriors marched into the open.

Kletch squealed for order, for ranks, shoving his way to the back of them as he did so. These saurus were on foot, armed with spears and shields, but it scarcely mattered. Each one was twice the size of an armoured stormvermin and looked the match for any six.

With frenzied squeals, the plague monks charged. The saurus trampled them without appearing to notice and slammed into the line of stormvermin.

‘Hold. Fight! Kill-kill!’ shouted Kletch, growing ever shriller as the lizards’ massive line troops ground their way through his.

A rustle from the tall weeds to the right made his heart sink. There were more.

Hacking wildly at the bodies that came at him on nooses from all sides, Blightlord Fistula ran through, savaging a saurus from behind before the cold-blooded brute had even realised he was there. Coming under a swarm of flies, his putrid blightkings piled in behind him.

This was a more even fight. The blightkings were Bule’s elite and, Kletch knew, Fistula’s were the best. He was not at all surprised that the first blightlord had been amongst the reckless few to be dragged out into the swamp chasing skinks.

‘In! In!’ Kletch squeaked, urging his warriors on.

Scenting blood, the clawpacks and surviving plague monks pushed forward, wedging the saurus between two sets of enemies.

Observing the reverse in fortunes with an impersonal, calculating detachment, the saurus pointed its cold one towards Fistula and roared its challenge. The first blightlord ran at it with a yell, both weapons out at his side, armour dripping with bile.

The saurus struck first. The cadaver-thin blightlord parried the lizard’s mace with a blow that would have broken both of their arms had either been a lesser being, then rolled out of the lunge of the cold one’s jaws. His knife chewed down the side of the beast’s neck and spat out scales. He dodged back, turning a crunching side kick from the old saurus on his vambrace, then charged back in.

The saurus was wheeling his furious mount when Fistula stepped onto a plague monk’s mushed body and, using it a springboard, vaulted over the reach of the cold one’s flailing snap. Sliding down the beast’s spiny neck, he slammed bodily into the saurus and punched a knife towards its neck. It moved just fast enough to take it in the shoulder. If it felt either surprise or pain it didn’t show it. A shattering head butt snapped back Fistula’s head and sent him crashing over the cold one’s flank and down to the sucking ground. The cold one stomped on his breastplate, pushing him deeper under.

Then Kletch withered away the saurus’ head with a bolt of plague magic.

The cold one issued a defiant roar that shook the eardrums long after it vanished into the same cloud of light that reclaimed its master.

Shivering off the giddy tingle of the warpstone fumes from his pestilent censer, Kletch secreted the relic back into its pouch underneath his robes. He had taken the weapon from the clan vaults to deal with Copsys Bule, but it smelled like that was one precaution he didn’t need anymore.

‘He had me.’ Fistula’s laughter bubbled crazily, riding down from some wild adrenaline high.

‘We should be going-gone. Before more like it come.’

‘Going?’ Fistula sat up straight, face flushed red and cut in half by a razored smile. ‘I would fight more of your lightning men.’

‘They are not lightning men,’ Kletch snapped, suddenly lacking all patience for the stupidity of others. ‘The lightning men are... are much worse.’

‘Worse?’

‘Come with me,’ Kletch hissed, sidling closer, tail switching side to side. ‘Bule is old. Leave him to rot in his garden. Come kill-slay with Clan Rikkit.’

Fistula looked to his warriors. Kletch bared his fangs in a grin. He wouldn’t be returning to the clanlords with empty paws after all.

VII

Copsys Bule was untouchable.

Of the lizard-men that came close, only the very mightiest amongst them could make it within reach of his weapon before Nurgle’s Rot left them crippled and blind. And yet on these star-lizards came, fearing neither death nor disease.

His trident struck like an adder, piercing the throat of a heavily scarred lizard and exploding through the back of its neck. With one huge scaly hand it grappled with the haft, swinging a glowing starmetal axe with the other. Bule yanked back on his trident, pulling the impaled scar-veteran into a forward stumble and sending its axe stroke flailing harmlessly past his shoulder. An open fist to the gut punched the scar-veteran off his weapon’s tines, two feet through the air and onto its back. Bule closed the distance, trident spinning once, twice, overhead, and then smashing through the lizard-man’s chest. With a heave, he drew the trident up, the weapon arcing back overhead to its full extension to polearm the spear warrior that had been charging his supposed blindside.

With the rest of his horde struggling to hold their line, Copsys Bule took another forward step.

A powerful lizard in golden armour blocked him. The blinding might of Azyr screamed between the joins of its scales, and the roar of its challenge was like that of a furnace. Saliva stellar white hissed from its jaws as it brought up a primitive-looking two-handed blade.

Bule turned the hacking stroke with a loop of his trident, then took the haft between both hands and drove the ferrule into the sun-lizard’s groin. The warrior emitted a grunt and staggered back, unhurt, throwing a punch that caught the haft of Bule’s weapon. The struck trident popped out of Bule’s fingers and landed in the mud behind him. It was the deft, impish move of a master of unarmed combat.

With a celestial roar, the sun-lizard swept its weapon overhead.

Spinning and dropping, Bule planted his knee on the ferrule and slid his hand under the trident’s haft. Halfway along, a flex of the fingers bounced it up, reversed against the slope of his shoulder, just as the sun-warrior charged in to deliver the deathblow.

There was a heavy crunch, a sigh, the burn of starlight raining across his back.

Bule turned as he rose, swinging his weapon out like a scythe, letting fly, and sending the dying sun-warrior cannoning into the head of the hulking lizard giant that had just strode into view. Both went down in a mighty crash. The sun-lizard vanished in a flash of sunbeams. The giant, merely unconscious, did not rise again.

‘Is this it?’ he cried, laying out a murderous sigil of overlapping figure-of-eights. ‘Is this all that you have?’ To kill again, and to kill swiftly, felt glorious. Colours were vivid, scents sharp, cries like bells. He was a man awakening from a coma and remembering that he was furious. ‘Do you even realise whom you face?’

He shovelled down another lizard-warrior on the flat of his tines, then span, alerted by the prickling sense of something approaching from behind.

A robed figure stood there on the writhing carpet of sickening lizards. It regarded him through the haze of flies, neither noticeably human nor obviously reptilian. Daemonic perhaps, yet not. Its head was angled like a hoe with a row of eyes along its ridge. Some of them examined Bule archly, others with compassion, mirth, and contempt. In spite of himself, of what and where he was, Bule felt a chill.

Blind to their visitor, a cohort of warrior lizards charged through the hazing flies. They died one by one. The inhuman apparition did not react, but, despite having no obvious mouth, Bule had the impression that it smiled at him, as though he were a bloat hound that had earned a treat.

A tremendous death bellow drew his attention away.

There, the mighty plague maggoth that had been rolling over the lizards’ advance with a wedge of Rotbringers in train collapsed in an avalanche of folds. A sunbeam split the monster from shoulder to navel and the armour-plated head of some apex reptile butted it aside. Fixed to the lizard creature’s back was the silver and star-metal housing of some inscrutable god-engine, which clicked and reset amidst a glow of energies. The Rotbringers retreated, their forward push stymied. Bule was aware of the enemy pouring forward on all fronts now as his own defences began to crumble. With a snarl, he took his trident overhand like a javelin and made to challenge that armoured reptile’s invulnerability.

‘He seeks a champion.’

The apparition’s robes whispered as it followed him. Its clothing was made not of hides or cloth but of eyes, and the susurrus it made was the sound of hundreds of blinking eyelids, rippling white, green, black, and every other colour that skin came. It moved without truly moving. It spoke without speaking.

‘Seek him, champion.’

Turning, gesturing without anything so prosaic as a pointed finger, the figure directed Bule’s gaze to the realmgate. The skin within it flexed. The stars above it wheeled. Even from afar Bule could see that the view within was no longer of the garden with which it had previously been twinned. Fury returned to him redoubled. Disbelief. It was not mere bad fortune that had brought the seraphon upon him with the aligning stars. They had come for his realmgate.

Somehow they had manipulated the Eightpoints to change its destination. How? The magic involved in enacting such a feat was godlike!

The apparition hissed in sudden distress. Its cloak shimmered with many colours, every eye tightening shut as though simultaneously blinded. And then in a searing moment of universal light, it was gone.

‘Grandfather!’ Bule cried, light like a fire in his eyes. ‘Aid me!’

Shading his eyes with one heavy arm, he peered into the oncoming host.

Floating on a cushion of force above the golden spears of its warriors came the source of the light. It was as if a star had been called down from the heavens and condensed into a brittle caul of bone-brown wrappings and dry flesh. Its presence alone was massive. From its palanquin, the mummified creature regarded the battle with the distant disinclination of an inhuman god. Instinctively, Bule understood that here came a being that had known power long before some daemons had even come to be. He felt himself drawn spiritually towards it, the golden funerary mask that picked out its amphibian features in jewels swelling to fill his mind as the universe subtly reordered around it.

It made no word or gesture, but somewhere in the cosmos something gave.

The heavens opened.

Bule howled impotent fury as the stars glimmered and fell, plucked from the sky, and smashed into his horde.

The first meteorite hit at an angle, obliterating a dozen Chaos warriors utterly and blowing a crater hundreds of feet wide. Then came the rest. The ground shook under the fury. The sky turned white, light and sound reaching an intensity where they sublimated into one, a single shrieking colour in Bule’s inner eye, and even the daemons burned in fire.

Bule struggled gasping onto hands and knees, tripping a warrior lizard running in behind him with a backward kick and riding it face-down into the filth until it stopped thrashing. He stood up, dazed senseless by thunder. Waves of power smashed out from the advancing palanquin. It was almost impossible to stand against it, but in a tremendous feat of will, he stood. He shook his head.

‘Aid me!’

Nothing. Nothing but the awesome presence of this starmaster.

Moving with difficulty, he turned and staggered back the way he had come. Never in his life had Copsys Bule run away, but Grandfather Nurgle did not know defeat.

With every waning, he would wax again.

VIII

First Blightlord Fistula stepped out of the realmgate and onto another world.

The air was syrupy, hot, sweetened by the sweat of fat citrus-scented leaves and by the bell-shaped blue flowers that he and his warriors crushed underfoot. He looked around in amazement, turning ponderously. He felt… weightier, as if the sky itself pushed him down under its palm. And the sun – forgetting for the moment that it should be night – was over large and buttercup yellow. Winged creatures rustled through the leaves above. And from somewhere, screams.

He pulled off his helmet, wiped his running nose, and drew deep.

‘New lands.’

Soon all that was green would be a verdant collage of yellows and browns and leaf-rust reds. It would be the cradle of a new land’s blight, the metastasis from which a new canker would swell. And all of it was his.

‘Over here,’ growled Vitane, crunching through the undergrowth in the vague direction of those screams.

Fistula acceded to the old blightking’s instincts for pain and followed. After a few minutes of unexpectedly heavy going through the dense foliage of this foreign land, the warriors were, to a man, blowing hard, their armour hanging loose on straps. The screams got nearer. More abject. Chesting aside a branch, too weary to bother his arm with the task, Fistula pushed ahead into a sun-drenched clearing.

Varicoloured lichens and mushrooms covered the split bark of the fallen log that dominated the clearing. The cries were coming from the other side of the log.

Shading his eyes from the visceral brightness of the sun, Fistula saw the bray shaman, Gurhg, who was easy enough to pick out with his totemic staff and cloak woven with bones, even within a knot of his followers. There were perhaps two-dozen, stomping about and smashing horns – re-establishing dominance hierarchies and staking claim to new territories. Gurhg stood hunched and swaying in the middle of it, nodding his goat head approvingly as six men and a woman bound to a line of hastily woven racks screamed. The wails of the seventh man were of a different order. A beastman with the face of a horse and a line of horrendously infected iron piercings through its top lip diligently flensed the human with a blunt knife.

Fistula smiled. There were people here. Good. It had been too long.

‘Blightlord.’ Arms spread, snout turned to bare the throat in that odd gesture of his, Kletch Scabclaw padded towards him through the forest. The skaven envoy fussed at the clasp of his cloak, but despite his obvious discomfort he did not seem inclined to take it off. At the treeline, he bobbed low and withdrew with a hiss, averting his eyes from the sun.

‘Where are your warriors?’ asked Fistula.

‘In woods. Less brave rats than I must cower where sky is less bright-strong.’

‘Good.’

Fistula looked across the clearing at the brawling beastmen, and the blightkings now spreading out through the lichens to crash down and rest. It was not much, but it would be a start, and more would flock to him soon enough.

‘I will have them seek-burrow for the way home at once,’ said Kletch, stamping his foot-paw anxiously.

‘Good…’

Fistula put his hands on his hips and turned his face full on to the sun. It was his. It was all his.

Something heavy and wet tramped up through the woods behind him. The wheezing breath on the back of his neck was thick with the stench of stagnant meat.

‘I began my quest with less. I can begin again.’

Fistula spun around.

Bule.

‘I see now,’ said Copsys Bule, unhelmed, smiling blackly. ‘I see what I have been missing.’

‘This is mine,’ Fistula snarled, baring his blades. Some withered instinct for self-preservation kept him from using them, some dim recognition that the gods too had their favourites. He backed into the clearing. Bule moved towards him, Fistula continuing to retreat until the fallen tree prevented him from going any further. He dropped into a fighting crouch. ‘I will not let you turn my conquest into another garden. You have forgotten how to do anything else!’

The Lord of Plagues spread his arms in forgiveness as he passed from the tree line and into the sunlight. His eyes squeezed shut against the sudden glare, but still Fistula did not think to attack. Mosses mottled and died where Bule trod. Insects dropped dead out of the air as he breathed it. Throughout the clearing beastmen, skaven and blightkings alike stopped what they were doing and abased themselves.

He came within sword’s reach, knife’s reach, arm’s reach. Fistula lowered his weapons. He felt lethargic. His skin was hot.

Dropping to one knee in front of him, Copsys Bule leaned in and embraced him.

Fistula made an attempt at fighting it, but he felt so weak. His breath drained up and down like fluid. He shivered with chills even as fever sweat poured down his skin. Jerking in his determination to fight, he struggled as the Lord of Plagues cradled him, lowering him to the ground. Fistula tried to stare hatred at him, but failed even in that. Delirium fogged his eyes and opened his mind to wisdom’s flood.

Sorcerers robed with eyes. An army of champions. Chaos united. A three-eyed king. Round and around.

‘I’ll. Fight you. Forever,’ he swore.

‘Grandfather Nurgle does not want us to submit,’ Bule smiled. ‘He wishes us to rage.’

The last thing Fistula saw before Nurgle’s Rot fully entered his mind was Bule turning towards Kletch Scabclaw, arms open in blessing and friendship.

IX

Copsys Bule broke up the earth with his trident. A tangle of roots knotted up the soil, making it tough, and before long he was breathing hard, a burn spreading through his shoulders. It felt good. The simple labour eased his mind and his muscles. The repetitive activity gave him the chance to think, and to order his thoughts.

He had much to think upon.

‘There,’ he said, giving the ground a vigorous final crumbing, then stabbing his trident to one side. He ran his arm across his lank-haired brow, then turned and nodded.

Vitane slid his toe under Kletch Scabclaw’s body and rolled the corpse into the rill that Bule had prepared for him. Flies crawled over the ratman’s lips. His eyes were the black of rot-pickled eggs and the smell had that same astringent piquancy.

‘So much life.’ However many skaven he buried, the truth of that still filled him with wonder. ‘My garden will thrive here. It is as I said to you, envoy, no other race gives so thoroughly of themselves to Grandfather Nurgle.’

The skaven did not answer and nor did Bule expect him to. He would live again, of course. That was Nurgle’s promise to all. The ratman’s flesh would nurture many millions of short and wondrous lives, his decomposition would bring bounty to the ground in which he lay, but never again would he talk, think, or interfere in the ambitions of a Lord of Plagues.

Pulling up his trident, Bule proceeded to bed the skaven in.

The humans would go here, and here, either side, where their decay would be accelerated by the skaven’s proximity. One of the other rat-men he’d dig a plot for over by the south-facing tree line where its remains could feed the poplars there. They were fast growers, and the rot would spread quickly. Already their leaves were beginning to wilt and brown at the edges. Birds hawked up a thin and sickly chorus of phlegm on the bowers.

He could see it now. He did not know how this was to end, he never had, but he knew how to begin.

‘Archaon.’

Fistula was fetched up against the log, shivering like a man just fished in full armour from an ice pail. He muttered non-sequiturs under his breath, tired, for the moment at least, of raging them at the forest. His eyes rolled, like bones cast by a feverish shaman, and his brush with Nurgle’s Rot had bequeathed him a circlet of rugose blisters that rimmed his bald head like a crown. Bule examined the stigmata. There was a sign there, he knew it, but of what?

‘He grows more lucid,’ observed Vitane.

‘Nurgle favours him greatly.’

‘A lord of flies,’ Fistula murmured, shaking. ‘A king with three eyes.’

A sign. Definitely.

Taking up his trident, Copsys Bule pushed it into the ground and began again.

He had much to think upon.

About the Author

David Guymer is the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned, along with the novella Thorgrim and a plethora of short stories set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Legend Awards for his novel Headtaker.

The storm breaks as the Stormcast Eternals go into battle for the first time. Read the first book set in the Age of Sigmar.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

The Realmgate Wars: Call of Archaon – 1. Beneath the Black Thumb © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. The Realmgate Wars: Call of Archaon – 1. Beneath the Black Thumb, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Stormcast Eternals, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78251-693-4

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