by Warhammer
Just as quickly, prudent skaven caution returned and resumed command. Perhaps it would be better to clamber up and see if there was any way he could take advantage of the situation. Certainly it was pointless going down into the cupola. There were just too many dwarfs down there even for a skaven of Lurk’s surpassing might. Even in his tormented state he could remember only too well how deadly Gotrek Gurnisson’s axe was.
Quickly he scurried to the ladder and began to pull himself up it.
‘Here they come,’ shouted Gotrek.
There’s no need to sound so pleased about it, thought Felix, but he kept the thought to himself. He knew he was soon going to need all his strength for fighting. A mass of tightly packed skaven warriors had erupted from the manor house, swords raised, mouths frothing. It was like something out of a particularly nasty nightmare. Any hopes that he might have had for Ulrika’s survival vanished immediately. At least he could avenge her, he thought. A fair number of skaven were going to die in the next few minutes.
The tower shivered. Fearing the worst, Felix looked up. His fears were confirmed. The airship’s engines roared to life as it slowly reversed away. Any thought of retreat to the Spirit of Grungni could be abandoned.
Thanks, lads, thought Felix. Just what I needed to make my day complete.
‘Come on up and die!’ Gotrek roared.
‘Snorri’s got a present for you,’ yelled Snorri, brandishing his axe with one hand and his hammer in the other.
Felix settled himself behind one of the support struts, hoping to get some cover from any missile weapons the skaven might care to deploy. The mass of ratmen warriors had reached the foot of the tower now. Some swarmed up the ladder, others clambered up the legs of the structure itself. There were far too many of them to count, and as he watched Felix saw the monstrous form of a rat-ogre emerge from the manor house. Given the number of close calls he had endured with these monsters in the past, the sight did not reassure him.
‘Not going to be much of a fight, this,’ Gotrek complained.
‘Easy,’ said Snorri.
Felix wished he shared the confidence of these two maniacs. His stomach churned with the fear he always felt before a fight. He wanted nothing more now than to get to grips with the foe, to end this waiting. Part of him even considered jumping down into the mass of skaven but he knew it would be suicide. The fall was too long and he would be surrounded from all sides and dragged down.
The first furry snout poked up the ladder. Gotrek split it with one stroke of his axe. Black blood splattered his bandages. The skaven dropped down, knocking away the others on the ladder. It started to dawn on Felix that actually, as long as they stayed here, they would have quite a good chance of surviving. Not too many of the skaven could get at them at once, and most of them would be in the uncomfortable position of having to raise themselves onto the platform, leaving themselves vulnerable for vital moments as they did so.
‘This is too easy,’ Gotrek said.
‘Snorri thinks we should climb down and start killing properly,’ said Snorri.
Don’t you dare, thought Felix, noticing that pink eyes were glaring at him as a skaven pulled itself up the metal strut. He lashed out at it, but in desperation it leapt forward, fangs bared, going right for his throat.
In a heartbeat he was too busy trying to stay alive to think about the precariousness of their situation.
Varek raced through the corridors of the Spirit of Grungni. Swiftly he entered the hangar deck. The gyrocopters were waiting. He clambered into a cockpit, and worked the crank of the ignition. The engine roared to life. Wind hit Varek’s face as the rotors began to spin. Dwarf engineers were already opening the doors at the back of the gondola. One by one the gyrocopters rumbled forward and dropped into the night. He was glad they had used the time flying over the Chaos Wastes to unpack and assemble the crated flying machines. It looked like they would all be needed now. Varek felt a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as his own copter dropped away from the airship, then the rotors above him churned the air and he began to gain altitude. He reached down into the satchel beside him and began to fumble for a bomb.
This was almost as exciting as the trip into Karag Dum, he thought.
Ulrika raced down the stairs. A skaven turned to look at her, snarling. She split its skull with one stroke of the stolen sword. Its surprised companion growled at her. A strange acrid stink filled the air. She noticed that the creature was venting some sort of musk from glands near its tail. She struck out at it. Sparks flashed as its blade parried her own. There was a screech of metal on metal as she slid her sword down its blade. The guards of the two weapons met. She twisted her sword, disarming her foe. It leapt back, screeching for mercy. She gave it none.
‘What’s going on out there?’ she heard a mighty voice bellow. She almost cried with relief at its familiarity.
‘Father – is that you?’ She was already throwing the door open.
‘Ulrika,’ said her father, Ivan, reaching out to grasp her in a fierce hug. His bushy beard tickled her face. She saw a dozen more ragged and beaten looking men in the cellar. ‘What’s going on?’
‘The airship has come back. The skaven are trying to ambush it,’ she gasped out.
‘How many of the others are left alive?’
‘I don’t know. I think there are more prisoners down here in the cellars.’
Ivan reached down and picked up the sword of one of the skaven guards. He tossed it to his tall, thin, cadaverous-looking lieutenant, Oleg, and then picked up the sword belonging to the other skaven. His other favourite, Standa, short, burly and high-cheek boned, looked disappointed that there was no blade for him. ‘Filthy weapons but they’ll have to do.’
‘What shall we do?’ Ulrika asked.
‘Free as many prisoners as we can find. Kill as many skaven as we can. Use the weapons to arm our warriors, then fight or escape depending on the situation.’
‘That’s a pretty sketchy plan,’ she said, smiling.
‘Sorry, daughter, but it’s the best I can manage under the circumstances.’
‘It’ll have to do.’
Grey Seer Thanquol gnawed on his lower lip as he watched his warriors swarming up the tower. He could see that things were not going well. His brave skaven had the advantage in numbers but their foes’ position was a strong one. Gotrek Gurnisson held his ground above the ladder, and chopped anything that came at him. The other Slayer and Felix Jaeger roved around the platform killing any ratman who climbed up the outside of the tower. Thanquol was torn between aiding his troops and preventing the Spirit of Grungni from escaping.
He stood there undecided for a moment, and then decided to stick as close to the original plan as possible. After all, it was a mighty scheme of his own devising and it should still work despite the incompetence of his lackeys. He opened his mouth and began to chant the words of his spell.
The winds of magic howled in his ears as he drew their energies to him. Pure pleasure surged through him as the power of the warpstone filled him.
Felix ducked a blow from a skaven sword and slashed at the ratman attacking him. The skaven leapt back, claws scrabbling on the metal surface of the tower as it realised how close to the edge it was. Felix cursed. He had hoped that in its panic the creature would jump straight off. Well, he could always give it some assistance. He sprang forward, barrelling into it with all his weight. The skaven was much lighter than he and was sent tumbling back through the air, over the edge of the platform. And good riddance, thought Felix before he noticed that the thing had managed to grab a support strut with its tail and was dangling there upside down.
Smiling nastily Felix chopped at the creature’s long hairless tail. The tail parted and the skaven shrieked something in its incomprehensible tongue as it dropped to its doom. Felix had time for one brief snarl of satisfaction before the pitter-patter of paws on metal warned him that another skaven was behind him.
He whirled, sword raised to face his foe.
Lurk poked his snout up through the hatchway. He looked around. Dwarfs had taken up position behind the strange looking guns that filled the rotating turrets on top of the airship. He had seen enough of Clan Skryre’s engines to know that those guns would probably rip him apart if he tried to attack them. While he was a mighty and invincible skaven warrior there was no sense in courting needless death. There was nothing for him up here.
There was a roaring sound from below him, and suddenly some sort of flying machine rose into view over the airship. Lurk ducked as it whizzed directly above his head. Here was powerful sorcery, he thought, looking at the small vehicle. If only he had known what it was earlier, maybe he could have stolen it and escaped.
‘Oi! What’s that?’ he heard one of the dwarfs shout.
May the Horned Rat consume their souls, the dwarfs had spotted him! He ducked back out of sight, scuttling down the ladder, wondering what to do next. Perhaps he could go and hide among the nacelles of gas that filled the balloon. No. Pointless. Sooner or later they would seek him out in sufficient numbers to ensure his death. While this would almost certainly fulfil Grey Seer Thanquol’s dictum that he create a distraction on the airship, it would do him no good whatsoever. If he was going to help Thanquol to victory he wanted to be alive to claim his share of the credit for the triumph.
Not that Thanquol would allow anyone to share in that, a small sour part of his brain quibbled.
He kept dropping until he reached the bottom of the gasbag. He saw a dwarf face peering up at him from the hatch that led down into the airship proper. Whichever way he looked there were foes. Nothing for it, then, but to fight. It would not have been his first choice of action but it looked like he had run out of options.
He bared his fangs and reached out with his claws. The terrified dwarf ducked back into the gondola, pulling the hatch shut behind him. A surge of pain passed through Lurk. He realised his tail had been caught in the heavy hatch.
Someone, he decided, was going to pay for that.
Ulrika fumbled her way through the darkened cellars. The stink of skaven mingled with scents familiar from her childhood, all but overlaying the smell of too many people cramped into too small a space. She was glad though. It meant a lot of her folk were still alive, more than she had dared hope for. They were locked in with the vodka barrels and in the holding cellars from which the hungry skaven horde had emptied the provisions.
She wished she had a lantern. She wished she had more weapons. She pushed those thoughts aside. It was pointless wishing for things she could not have. She was going to have to work with what she did have. She listened. Even through the tightly packed earth she could hear the sounds of fighting. She could hear the roar of the rat-ogre, the squeals of wounded skaven and the sound of something else.
It sounded like explosions. What was going on up there? Had the skaven sorcerer unleashed some foul spell? She gave the door of the last cellar a push and confronted two cowering skaven. They obviously had been set here for a special purpose, and that purpose was immediately obvious. One of them held a knife at the throat of Max Schreiber. Max was unconscious, his beautiful golden robes ripped and filthy. The other skaven, a huge black-furred monster rose to meet her.
‘Prepare to die, foolish breeder,’ it chittered, in poorly accented Reikspeil.
Felix saw that things were beginning to turn against them. Despite their best efforts more and more skaven were gaining the platform. Slowed by their wounds, Snorri and Gotrek were not fighting as well as they normally would. With only three of them they could not cover all the possible means of getting on to the platform. There were four pylons, one at each corner of the tower, and the central ladder. While they managed to guard three, two were always clear for the skaven and as more and more of them forced their way onto the platform, they could not even hold those successfully.
He looked around. Wounded or not, the Slayers were wreaking awful havoc. The platform floor was sticky with blood and spilled entrails. It was increasingly hard to keep a firm footing in the mess. He dreaded the fact that at any moment he might lose his balance and go slithering over the edge. Here and there in the dimming light he could see bodies that had literally been broken apart by the Slayers’ axes. Bones and lungs and internal organs had all flopped into the light.
In one swift flash of terrible insight it struck Felix that they were differently arranged from human entrails, and that it was a dreadful thing that he had seen enough opened corpses to know this. A flicker of movement sent his peripheral vision to Gotrek. The Slayer stood on top of a pile of mangled bodies. He held one skaven in the air at arm’s length, throttling it, while his axe described a huge half-circle holding the skaven’s comrades at bay. Black skaven blood soiled Gotrek’s bandages. Froth blew from his lips. He howled like a madman, drowning out the frightened chittering war cries and the screams of his opponents. Nearby Snorri lashed out with his two weapons, chopping and smashing like a demented butcher in a hellish abattoir. He smiled as he fought, obviously enjoying the mayhem and uncaring as to the nearness of death.
The stink was abominable. There was the wet fur reek of skaven, the odd musky scent they emitted when frightened, the smell of excrement and torn bodies and blood. At any other time, it would have made Felix want to be sick but right now he found it oddly exhilarating. As always when death was close his senses were almost intolerably keen and he found himself savouring every moment.
A mighty roaring filled his ears. He was suddenly aware of flashes from the base of the tower and the movement of large ominous shadows above him. He risked a glance up and saw a gyrocopter had been catapulted from the airship and was soaring above them. He had a brief glimpse of the mad face of Malakai Makaisson at its controls, as the insane engineer rained bombs down at the foot of the tower. He heard the anguished, fearful screaming of the skaven massed there. The tower itself shook as if kicked by a giant, and Felix had to fight to keep his footing amid the gore.
He offered up a prayer to Sigmar that the bombs didn’t send the whole towering structure crashing to the earth, burying them all in a chaos of smashed wooden beams.
Did Makaisson have any idea what he was doing, Felix wondered? Did he care? Looking down Felix could see that he was causing terrible casualties among the skaven. Broken ratman bodies were hurled skywards. Some were torn completely to bits by the force of the explosions. Others lay on the ground, limbless, bleeding and shrieking. It was a wonder that the skaven could hold their ground in the teeth of so ferocious an assault. Felix realised that more bombs were cascading down, this time from the airship. One hit the tower near him, fuse spluttering. For a horrible moment, he felt that his time had come, that he was about to be blown into a thousand tiny fragments of flesh. He froze on the spot for an instant but then courage and mobility returned and he kicked the bomb off the platform.
He saw it disappear, sparks trailing from its flickering fuse, into the crowd below. A heartbeat later a terrible explosion blasted through the skaven.
That was too close, thought Felix. He shook his fist in the air and shouted, ‘Watch what you’re doing, you stupid bastard!’
It was all too much for the skaven down below. They scattered in all directions, unable to face the death crashing down on them from above any more. A glow from the door of the mansion attracted Felix’s attention. He saw a familiar form illuminated by it. Astonishment almost paralysed him. He recognised the skaven sorcerer. It was Grey Seer Thanquol, who had led the attack on Nuln, and whom Felix had last seen fleeing from the ballroom of the Elector Countess’s palace.
How had he got here, Felix wondered? Had the creature come all this way simply to get revenge? Was it possible that the grey seer had been behind the attack on the Lonely Tower?
From the swirling energy around the figure he could tell that the grey seer was about to cast a spell.
What new madness was this?
Lurk stood on the edge of the cupola. The whole hellish scene was visible below, illu
minated by flashes of light from the bombs. He saw his luckless kin torn apart by the violent blasts and felt thoroughly and profoundly glad that he was not down there with them. The relief evaporated when he realised the precariousness of his own position. If he did not get off the airship soon he would be caught by the dwarfs and overwhelmed by their sheer numbers. He needed to get away now but he could see no way to do it.
Except one. The airship was moving close to the tower again. It was just possible that he could leap from the top of the cupola and land on the tower. It was dangerous, and if he mis-timed his leap or missed his footing he would be sent plunging to his doom. On the other hand, if he stayed here his death was certain, and any chance was better than no chance at all.
Lurk screwed his courage to the sticking point. He felt his muscles tense, his heart rate accelerate, his musk glands tighten.
Any second now he was going to do it.
Ulrika ducked below the black-furred skaven’s swipe and slashed back. The creature bounded away from her counter-blow and bumped into the skaven with its blade at Schreiber’s neck, sending it flying. Ulrika realised that the ratman probably had orders to kill the wizard at the first sign of any trouble. It would make sense. On his own, a conscious Schreiber could wreak as much havoc as a troop of cavalry. Wizards had that kind of power.
She realised that she would have to do her best to save his life, and quickly. She sprang forward while the skaven were still entangled, and split the skull of the huge black beast with one powerful stroke. Its corpse flopped to the earth, trapping its smaller fellow. Taking advantage of the fact, she buried her sword in the still living skaven’s throat and then kicked it a couple of times for good measure.
After ensuring both were dead, she turned to Schreiber. He was bruised and his hair and eyebrows looked singed but a quick check told her his heart was still beating, a fact for which she was profoundly thankful. Gently she shook him, knowing it was risky to treat an injured man in such a way, and yet needing him to be awake and helping her. He groaned and mumbled and his eyes flickered open. Slowly she saw consciousness return. He smiled through bruised lips.
