Starseer's Ruin, page 14
The priest locked eyes with her. Perlo recoiled from its gaze. Green-eyed, luminous, mad, but then what was insanity to a human was just a day’s business to the Skaven. Wicked, cunning, amused.
She felt queasy that she could read the mood in the thing’s rat face far more easily than she could in Irixi’s reptile countenance.
Its hand – long-fingered, long-nailed, weirdly delicate for so monstrous a creature – reached out and tapped the bell hung from its carrying frame. Immediately one of the robed rat monks, crouched in utter obeisance nearby, leapt up and ran at the shield full tilt, waving a staff. She heard a war cry at the very edge of human hearing, and the thing hurled itself at the barrier of crackling energy. There was a flash and a shrill scream, and then a charred body rebounded back, robes spitting and crackling with violet flame.
Beside her, Irixi had flinched ever so slightly. Perlo hoped the rats had been too focused on the fire to notice. Using the shield was taking something out of the little Seraphon – or else drawing from a finite well of power in their surroundings. If the rats came en masse then eventually they’d get through. And their leader plainly didn’t care much for their lives.
The enthroned rat began some sort of twittering oration, high and ear-scraping. There were words there – all the languages of the realms had traded terms back and forth with the movement of armies and powers over the centuries – but the speech was so rapid and high that she couldn’t catch any.
It saw the blankness in her face, no doubt. Mammal to mammal, a kinship she absolutely didn’t want. Impatiently, it rang at the bell on its pulpit and chittered some orders, before settling back to a little self-indulgent dictation to its secretary.
Shortly after, they brought up the corpse.
Most of a corpse. It had belonged to a man named Groslyn, one of Lofus’ cronies. Not actually the most pleasant person Perlo knew from the army, but he’d deserved a better fate than this after death. Much below the ribs had already gone, the skin and innards ragged with the marks of rodent teeth. In place of that stolen flesh were a fistful of crudely stitched leather tubes rammed up into his chest cavity. Behind the propped-up corpse she saw bellows, with a team of rat monks already labouring over them.
Groslyn’s mouth dropped open, dead lips quivering. When the rat priest spoke again, a hollow, terrible voice issued from the man’s throat. Hollow because it was absolutely not that of a living man, terrible because it was still, somehow, Groslyn’s.
‘The great and terrible Ferskine, High Plague Priest of the Clans Pestilens, he who is most irresistible, most contagious, bids you welcome to his new den, may his wisdom and his issue fester and increase.’ Probably the valedictions were supposed to be triumphant, but in that ghastly voice they sounded like lamentation.
Groslyn stopped speaking – or being spoken through – and a thin, high whine like far-off screaming issued from his open mouth as his puppeted lungs deflated. The monks laboured at the bellows to give him more artificial breath.
‘To you, the human neophyte, know that Ferskine the worshipful, the magnanimous, the infinitely trustworthy, offers you your life in service to he, the majestic, the entropic, the master of decay and breeder of plagues. Know that to live in chains at the feet of such a lord is honour and freedom beyond all the rigid walls of your cities. To earn so prestigious a reward, know that you need only strangle that miserable scaled anathema crouching beside you and drive your thumbs into its accursed eyes.’
Perlo blinked. Possibly they’d drag half a dead Seraphon up and make a similar offer to Irixi, but she didn’t think so. There was an enmity between the lizards and the rats that cut far deeper even than her own people’s loathing of the enemies of Sigmar’s crusade.
She wondered if the whole thing was just mockery, but the mad fervour of the rat priest suggested otherwise. To the Skaven, this was a good and genuine offer. Slavery at the festering feet of this thing, as a reward.
Compared to the fate of most who fell into the hands of the rats, it probably was. Since the resurgence of the ratfolk, she’d seen plenty of evidence. The surgeries, the experiments, cells crammed with prisoners infested with parasites and plague, bodies stitched together or spliced with animals. Oh, she’d seen the victims of orruk torture, back when the creatures had been on the rampage, and that had been bad. What the Skaven left behind them was worse, though. Not because they were cruel, but because everything about their leavings spoke to an all-consuming and amoral curiosity.
She cleared her throat, and the whole broken chamber went silent to hear her, save for the faint squeal of air leaving Groslyn’s chest.
‘O great Ferskine,’ she said carefully, and saw the little rat scribe briskly setting down her words for posterity, ‘your generosity is without limit.’
Irixi was looking at her suspiciously, and she wondered if the Seraphon simply didn’t lie much. She’d have to hope the lizard caught on and didn’t think she was actually betraying it.
‘I am obviously humbled and awed by such a gracious offer. I am, just as obviously, not worthy of it, and if I were to accept I would…’ How to buy time? ‘I would have to cleanse – no, uncleanse, befoul myself. I would have to… rid myself of this stink of Order that surrounds me. I… ah… There are rituals I must perform, before I am worthy to enter the service of so grand a magister of your clan.’
Honestly, she was larding it on so heavily by the end that even Irixi understood. But the Skaven lord was plainly very fond of itself, and so just maybe that level of obsequious buttering was what it was used to.
The creature made a languid gesture and sat back in its pulpit. The monks worked the bellows again and Groslyn’s half-corpse shuddered.
‘The triumphant and puissant Ferskine, whose very fleas are themselves potent with fecund power, notes the very proper and appreciated respect in your crude human mouthings,’ came the voice, using words that the living Groslyn probably hadn’t even known. ‘So be it that Ferskine, acute of senses and encrusted with knowledge, wishes you to know that the sufferings you shall endure for your duplicity shall be slightly leavened because of your respectful and pleasing utterances.’
The bell rang again and a good score of monks surged instantly up the stairs and into the barrier.
Beside her, Irixi stiffened. One clawed hand clutched at Perlo’s arm, and she felt the Seraphon desperately reaching for the strength of their surroundings. All around them, the network of connections and conduits that ran in broken lines through the ruin blazed in her sight. No, in her mind: when she screwed her eyes shut they were still there, wheeling constellations, piecemeal and incomplete, dancing in her brain. She could see how they linked – and where they no longer did – and how Irixi was drawing from them to keep the throne’s shield active.
She lent her little power to the fight – small, but she had grown up in Shyish, a child of Lethis. You learned some tricks. The realm had infiltrated this place in a thousand small ways, through root and spore and grave dirt. Weak, but pervasive, and a source of strength that Irixi had no connection to.
She felt a shudder all around them, dust sifting down from the ceiling, stone grinding against stone as the invasive roots crept forwards. There was a fulcrum point of the arcane here, where the alien, ancient mathematics of the Seraphon met the inexorable encroach of death to make some new thing, some grand potential. She heard Irixi draw in a shocked breath – shocked, but perhaps hopeful. Its grip tightened on her arm.
She opened her eyes. Charred rat bodies lay strewn back down the stairs. The violet radiance of the shield was now marbled with a deeper black-purple, deathly swirls of Shyish eddying across its surface. But it held.
Ferskine steepled its fingers, not furious but fascinated. She had the sickly feeling that the rat priest was actually enjoying itself. Curiosity: a virtue that, in Skaven, became the worst of vices.
‘If you have a plan,’ she said to Irixi out of the corner of her mouth, ‘you’d better hurry it up.’
‘A plan is unfolding,’ the Seraphon replied quietly. ‘Our allies, their venture, not without merit. The Good Purpose can be achieved now.’
‘You mean getting us out, right?’ And Irixi seemed calm – even optimistic, unless that was just her reading human feelings into a lizard face. And surely that meant a way out, a chance to live. What, after all, was more important?
Her eyes strayed to the great wall where this Orchid prophecy had once been recorded, that was now just shards and dust. Her own image there, truncated arms raised. She very much hoped the original image hadn’t been her begging for her life before some rat priest.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
From the Scriptorium of Ferskine of the Eleventh Bell
Nownow slavescribe record faithfully these words of your better yes-yes?
Let it be known by the countless generations that shall come after and gnaw at the underside of the realms and sing shrill chorus of the virtues of Ferskine, the potent, the pestilent, the plague-begetter. This place of the snake-enemy, the hunters in the tunnels, the scaled ones, is in the grasp of none other than he, the triumphant, the terrible, Ferskine, none other, yes-yes!
Plainly there is none other fit within the ranks of our supreme Clans Pestilens, nor any of the lesser servants of the Horned Rat, may his fecund progeny ever increase until all the realms are consumed and corrupted, none other than he, great Ferskine, who could claim such a place for the furtherance of the gnawing tide. None other who could have sniffed out the luscious power still held within these stones. None other who can claim them from the Realm of Death and from their dull makers and repurpose them to corruption. Breed hosts of new kindred in their pools, cut our teeth on the bones of their beasts, sing our plagues into their flowing waters until all this place runs green and overbursting with rat and rot.
Be it known that, under the guidance and intellect and erudition of the most knowledgeable Ferskine, the true and proper feculence of the Horned Rat’s chosen shall creep into the moribund stone of this place and overcome the sleeping power of the scaled ones, and in that union a sickness shall be born of death and of lizard-rot and of Rat Triumphant that shall be spread to all the places of our enemies. For this ruin is theirs, and it is a part of their world, and all their places, their temples by land and water and sky, are touched by it. Be it known that Ferskine, only he, the most magnificent and unequalled, shall make this place a breeding ground for plagues against all the foes of the rat, that shall devour scale and skin and sicken the very stars. We shall blind their prophecies. We shall gnaw out their eyes. Only by Ferskine shall this be achieved, the unparalleled, the most noxious, may the favour of the Horned Rat be upon him forever and forever!
Part 3
WRITTEN IN DARKNESS
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
KENLO
The Skaven had harried them all the way back into the trees. Kenlo had been hoping the lizards would just stand and get hacked down to give his people a clean getaway, but instead the little ones ran ahead, a determined sprint for shelter, while the big ones lumbered along and trusted to their armoured backs to shrug off the stones the Skaven slung at them. All sense of cohesion had gone, and it had been the Steelhelms bringing up the rear, shields high in a bitter fighting withdrawal. Bitter because of the blood they’d lost in the venture. Bitter because Perlo was still down there.
They’d left four dead. Three in the tunnels, and one of Lofus’ people, because they’d had a pack of rats ambush the group holding the tunnel mouth while Kenlo had been below. For a group of chancers who’d come here expecting a quick looting trip, the venture had been slapped with a savage cost. The last thing Kenlo felt like doing was glad-handing and backslapping and telling them all how rich they were about to be. If he just let them fester they’d quit, though. Meaning he’d never get Perlo out. The magic would falter and then she’d be prey for whatever abomination the Skaven had planned for her.
He put on his best face to meet their glowering.
‘Look, this pack of rats isn’t just out on a jolly of its own,’ he tried. ‘You can bet the marshal’s facing their main force now. It’s not like you’re eating different to everyone back at the main camp.’
Regis the Fusilier gave him a level look. ‘All the same with you, I’d rather be on the line than whittled down out here. You never said lizards, quartermaster. You never said rats.’
‘I mean, I reckon we’re glad we’ve got a few lizards to put between us and them,’ Kenlo argued. ‘You mind ’em taking a spear for you now? You’re too good to have a big star-behemoth get gutted in your place?’ He weighed them up, trying to work out how it did sit with them, because Morrda knew the lizards were an uncanny bunch, and ‘better than rats’ was a low bar.
Stanner was watching him with those cold eyes of hers. He looked at her, made her a part of the conversation in case she was about to leap to his defence, but she just kept her thin lips shut. Probably enjoying seeing him on the back foot.
‘You’d rather be back taking the marshal’s orders right now?’ he challenged Regis. ‘When we could go back to the lines with some magic loot our mages could throw into the fight? Plus your bags stuffed with gems?’
‘Like the rats are going to let us have a sniff of them!’ she snapped. ‘And who says there’s enough out there to pay for a round of drinks? This place was picked clean long before your bloody dad found it.’
Lofus cleared his throat, pulling rank. Regis scowled at him, and then her eyes widened. The sergeant was holding up a weird kind of mask. A lizard mask, for one of the small sort. Kenlo could see the slot where its crest would fit, and how the object would sit on top of its head, almost to the end of its snout. There were solid bulges moulded over the eyes, meaning the creature would be blind when wearing it, but then he was no judge of reptile fashion. A few strands and tatters showed there had been more to it, now fallen away, but what was left was very clearly gold, finely worked and inscribed with hundreds of little pictures, plates of topaz and bloodstone alternating in a neat border around its edge. It wasn’t necessarily the single most valuable artefact Kenlo had ever seen up close, but it was surely the most precious thing that anyone of his acquaintance had ever just picked up off the ground.
‘Did a bit of digging while we were waiting,’ Lofus said mildly, as if it was nothing. ‘Picked clean? Not hardly.’ He looked over at Kenlo, not challenging but not friendly either. ‘I reckon we start making patrols. Get in and out quick, couple of hours scavenging, lookouts for the rats.’ He clapped a hand on Kenlo’s shoulder. ‘We figure out some miracle plan to get her back, quartermaster, then you count me in. But as matters stand, I reckon we grab what we can and get back to the army. Flash them just enough relics or magic so they decide we were out here following orders, and then we’re rich and I’ll raise a mug to Perlo’s name next taproom we find ourselves in.’
Kenlo opened his mouth to object, and Lofus added pointedly, ‘And to the rest that died. And we’ll all consider ourselves lucky not to be amongst them.’
‘Sergeant…’ Kenlo looked around at the others and saw that Lofus had them. They weren’t just going to leave, but that was the most he was going to get out of them. If Perlo was to be saved, it was up to him.
Him and maybe Stanner. He eyed the scout, who was watching them all as though they were mildly interesting bugs on a twig. Before he could ask where she stood, though, there was some manner of hissing, croaking exclamation amongst the lizards, who’d been huddling at the fire.
The smaller ones had sprung apart into a circle. One of them, the one with the weird, shifting skin and the mobile eyes, had dumped something on the ground there. Kenlo peered over their heads and then grimaced as he saw it was a severed lizard tail.
‘Sigmar’s spit, what’s that about?’ he demanded.
Stanner was abruptly at his shoulder, making him jump. ‘It’s from their magus,’ she said. ‘The rats cut it off or something. The lizard scout nicked off with it when we were down there.’
‘With a tail?’ Kenlo asked incredulously. The lizard scout was making quite a song and dance about it, maybe retelling the whole grand adventure in mime. The tail itself didn’t even seem to be quite dead. It was writhing slowly, like a stubby serpent, colours blooming and rippling along it. It all seemed absurdly barbaric, and he wondered if they would ceremonially burn it or eat it or something. He looked to make some scathing remark to Stanner, but the scout was frowning.
‘It’s like…’ she murmured, ‘talking.’
‘What?’ Kenlo asked blankly.
‘You never see how they talk? It’s like it’s with their whole bodies, too. Like hand-sign. They’re watching the tail and it’s talking to them.’
‘What would a tail have to say?’ he demanded, and, at her shrug, pushed her forwards. ‘Go ask them.’
‘Why me?’
‘Who else is there? They’ve got some scheme, we need to know before it bites us. They’ve got a way to get… below…’ If they want to rescue their chief still, maybe I’ve got a chance. ‘Stanner, just ask them, if you know so much about it.’
She looked mutinous, but after a moment’s hard staring she turned to approach the ring of lizards. Nearby, Lofus chuckled.
‘Cold enough to be half lizard herself, that one,’ the sergeant observed, and Kenlo recalled vaguely that Stanner had slapped the man down that one time, when he’d drunkenly come on to her.
