Gloomspite - Andy Clark

by Warhammer

  ‘Not my task,’ Tobias told himself. ‘Not for many years now.’ Pilgrim retrieval was a duty given to the watchmen fourth class, and these days Tobias was second class. He touched a fingertip to the silver clasp, inscribed with Sigmar’s hammer, which held his cloak in place and denoted his rank. A habit, ever since Iyenna had left him to the affections of what she described as his twin mistresses – his job and his religion.

  As it always did, the thought of Iyenna soured Tobias’ mood. He squared his shoulders and set off down the street. His normal patrol route took him from here through the fringes of Docksflow before he doubled back west to reach the factories and workshops of Forges, before angling back uphill through the more affluent streets of High Drake and thence to the watch blockhouse atop Gallowhill. It would only be a short detour, however, to angle through the dive streets of the Slump. Tobias was sure he would find more impious souls to punish down there.

  The watchman had taken only a few steps before a subtle movement caught his eye. Shadows shifted in the alleyway beside the Wayward King. Between a broken crate and a heap of burlap sacks, something moved. There was a scratching sound. Tobias frowned, shifting his grip on his halberd and pacing closer to the alley. Vagrants and fengh addicts were a constant problem in Draconium. Life was hard in the realms beyond the heavens, Tobias could attest to that, but he would never understand how desperate someone must have to be to lean on the rotted crutch of drugs.

  His scowl became a smile as his eyes adjusted to the gloom and he made out glinting yellow eyes and a long, waving tail.

  ‘Hah, Saint Klaus, you old rogue. Where have you been? It’s been weeks, I thought the God-King might have taken you up for reforging!’

  Tobias sank to his haunches and held out a hand. The cat padded from the alleyway, its gaze switching hopefully between his gloved hand and his smiling face. It shoved its head against his fingers, an insistent nudge that elicited a chuckle from Tobias. He scratched the cat’s ears.

  ‘Still no owner, lad?’ asked Tobias. Klaus purred, danced back from his hand for a moment then wound under it again with his tail twitching. ‘Oh, very well.’ Tobias’ smile broadened, and he reached into a pouch at his belt for a strip of dried saltfish. Klaus snatched the food from his hand, and Tobias watched with pleasure as the cat chewed and swallowed, then looked expectantly at him again.

  ‘One of these days, I’m going to carry you back to the blockhouse and we’ll take you on as a mascot.’ Tobias reached for a second piece of fish but paused as a fresh volley of lightning broke high overhead. In its strobing glare, the alleyway behind Klaus was momentarily illuminated and Tobias saw something strange.

  The watchman’s frown returned, and he rose, trying again to light his lantern. It sparked and died, sparked and died, then at last sputtered fitfully into life. Klaus meowed a question, but Tobias ignored him, brow furrowed as he raised the lantern and played its beam along the alley. There. Halfway along, at the darkest point where buildings loomed high overhead, Tobias saw a deeper darkness surrounded by lumpy shapes.

  ‘Klaus, old boy, I think you may make a watchman yet,’ murmured Tobias. ‘My cloak if that’s not a tunnel of some sort, dug right in under the Wayward King.’

  Thoughts full of smugglers and thieves, Tobias opened the clasps on the haft of his watchman’s halberd and affixed his lantern beneath its blade. A twist of the mechanism and the clasps snapped shut, securing his lantern so that, when his halberd was lowered and pointed blade-first ahead of him, its light would shine out to light his way and blind potential miscreants. Tobias always thought of it as Sigmar’s light, an inescapable glare that transfixed wrong-doers and aided the God-King’s rightful servants.

  Stepping carefully past Klaus, Tobias advanced into the alleyway. Lightning cracked on high, whitewashing the walls and floor then plunging them back into shadow. To Tobias’ right rose the flank of the Wayward King, all crumbling stone and a couple of small, dirty windows high up. To his left hunched a tenement, one of many built to house dock workers, and Tobias noted that the only windows on this side of the building were long-ago broken and boarded. It was a good spot for secretive deeds; no eyes upon it at all.

  None but his and Sigmar’s.

  In the beam of his lantern the dim suggestion of shapes resolved into something clear and, to Tobias’ mind, incriminating. A hole had been dug here, right into the foundations of the Wayward King. It was surrounded by rough heaps of spoil, dirt and old broken cobbles piled a foot deep on the alley floor.

  Sloppy work. Professionals would have removed the debris to avoid attention being drawn to their efforts. And surely pointless, he reflected with puzzlement. The hatch that led to the tavern’s beer cellar was around the back of the building, in Drover’s Lane; he knew from experience that its lock had been broken and repaired so many times that a good kick was all it took to snap it off and gain access below. So why go to the trouble of digging a hole?

  He paced closer, lantern beam swaying with his footsteps. Tobias’ body radiated tension. He was ready at any moment for some malcontent to spring from the pit, cudgel swinging.

  Nothing moved but him.

  Lightning flashed again as he reached the lip of the hole and saw that, sure enough, it led straight down into the tavern’s cellar. Or rather, he realised as he stared at it, it had been dug up and out of the cellar. The way the soil had been pushed up and heaped around left him in no doubt of that fact. Tobias’ frown deepened. He sank down on his haunches, playing the beam of his lantern around the edges of the pit.

  ‘This was dug with… claws? Burrowed by something?’ He glanced back and saw that Klaus had followed him a short way down the alley, but that the cat had now stopped, wide eyed and watchful, some way back. Klaus’ tail twitched with agitation. His fur bristled.

  Something was awry here, and Tobias aimed to find out what. If some vermin or beast had been allowed to make its lair in the cellar of the Wayward King then his next visit wouldn’t be the usual social call, but an official inspection that would undoubtedly end in the negligent owner’s business being shut down. Tobias felt a momentary pang of regret that his visits would have to end. It was eclipsed by the greater surge of pious satisfaction at the thought of doing his duty to Sigmar.

  ‘Nothing for it, lad,’ he said, setting off for Drover’s Lane. ‘That lock’s getting broken again.’

  A few moments and one swift kick later, and Tobias was treading carefully down into the darkened cellar of the Wayward King. He pointed his halberd ahead of him, its lantern light flickering as he played it across stacked kegs and boxes of foodstuffs.

  ‘City watch,’ he said in a loud, clear voice as he advanced. ‘If anyone is here, step out into the light now or it will go worse for you.’

  He paused at the bottom of the steps, waiting, but nothing moved. Tobias had been half-ready for some belligerent duardin smuggler or worshipper of the Dark Gods to burst out and assail him. If he was honest with himself, he had rather hoped for it.

  It was cold here, the district being too poor to benefit from Draconium’s thermal heating-pipe network. Ironic, he thought; they toiled to build and maintain the system that drew volcanic heat up through the pipehouse and funnelled it to the richer regions of the city, but they had not earned the right to benefit from it themselves.

  From above, Tobias could hear a muffled din of rowdy conversation, singing and the clink of glass. Trickles of dust fell sporadically through the floorboards above his head, drifting in his lantern light.

  ‘How in Sigmar’s name can they have a hole in their cellar and not know about it?’ he wondered aloud, but a moment later Tobias’ question was answered as he realised that he couldn’t see the hole at all from where he stood. Pacing across the cellar to where he knew the hole must be, Tobias instead found a wooden wall barring his path, empty ale tuns piled up against it in a heap.

  The boards were rough-cut yar
renwood, festooned with splinters.

  ‘Cheap,’ muttered Tobias. ‘And comparatively new.’ It had clearly been put there to hide something.

  Quick and quiet, Tobias set aside his halberd, propping it so its light was pointed at the false wall. He moved the empty tuns one by one, stacking them to his right until he had cleared a good space, and then slid his gloved fingers into the gap between two boards. A quick, sharp wrench and the board he had grasped came away with a splintering crack of wood and nails.

  Tobias peered through the gap he had made. Sure enough, there was another few feet of space back here, and a ragged-edged tunnel connecting cellar and alleyway. He saw Klaus staring at him through the hole.

  Repeating his wrenching procedure several more times, Tobias made a large enough gap to squeeze through. He thought about grabbing his halberd, but the weapon would be unwieldy in the confined space and besides, its light would serve him well enough from where it was.

  Tobias pushed his way into the hidden chamber and immediately saw what it was for. Heaped at one end were several wood-and-iron strongboxes, hidden away behind the false wall.

  ‘Ill-gotten gains, I’ll wager,’ he said with a satisfied smile. ‘The watch coffers are about to receive a generous donation.’

  Then he registered another hole, this one yawning in the dirt floor at one end of the hidden chamber. This pit was wider, around five feet across and vanishing back and downwards into darkness. Again, it looked to have been excavated with large, heavy claws. A damp reek wafted from it, causing Tobias to wrinkle his nose in disgust. Small, glistening fungi sprouted around its entrance, half-visible in the spill of his lantern’s light.

  ‘What in the realms did this?’ Tobias wondered aloud. He edged tentatively closer to the hole, peering into its depths. Suddenly, he felt the lack of his halberd keenly. He was about to turn back for it when his lantern’s light suddenly winked out.

  Tobias cursed as he was plunged into inky darkness.

  ‘That damned lantern,’ he snarled, then stopped as he heard a scuff of movement from the direction of the main cellar. The sound came again, something or someone trying to move stealthily across the dirt floor. Someone coming closer.

  Tobias tensed, then jumped as Klaus gave a yowl from somewhere up above. Heart thumping, Tobias turned, trying to locate the gap in the boards that led back to the cellar. The hole up to the alleyway gave next to no light at all.

  He fumbled at his belt for his coglock pistol.

  ‘City watch,’ he barked, hoping to banish his panic with the weight of his authority. ‘Whoever is there, you are interfering with an official investigation. Spark that lantern at once and step back, or face Sigmar’s justice.’

  He heard a sound that might have been a mean chuckle or might simply have been an animal snarl. Tobias’ heart beat faster. Nothing human had made that noise. He strained to see, the darkness seeming to smother him. He fumbled his pistol free just as another scuffing scrape came from the cellar, the sound close enough that it made him recoil involuntarily.

  Tobias stepped smartly back and pointed his pistol blindly.

  ‘I’m warning you–’ he began, then something struck his legs from behind with tremendous force. Tobias felt hot agony sear its way up from his calves, felt himself flung forwards and a sudden crunching impact as the floor rushed up to meet his face. He tasted blood. His ears rang. His throat closed over the winded shriek of pain that tried to escape his lips.

  Something was ripping at the flesh of his legs, like a dozen knives driven into his calves and thighs all at once. Tobias tried to cry out, to yell for aid, but shock seemed to have sealed his voice inside him as sure as a stopper rammed into a bottle. He heard grunting, felt a wash of stinking breath, felt warm wetness, the slither of something muscular and slick across his flesh and a crushing weight.

  No.

  Not knives.

  Teeth.

  ‘Oh, Sigmar,’ croaked Tobias, swinging his pistol down to point at whatever had surged from the hole and sunk its fangs into him. There came a violent dragging motion, a wrench that hauled Tobias across the dirt floor and cracked his chin against the lip of the hole. His gun spilled from his nerveless fingers. Consciousness wavered.

  Tobias felt another ferocious tugging sensation, a crushing pressure and an explosion of unbearable agony from his legs, then a deeper darkness swallowed him whole.

  Chapter Two

  OMENS

  ‘What in the realms am I to make of all this?’ Captain Helena Morthan of the Draconium City Watch asked her lieutenant, Taverton Grange, gesturing at the three-dozen parchment missives glaring up from her ironoak desk.

  ‘Captain?’

  Outside the heavy leaded windows of Captain Morthan’s office, the sounds of the city bustled by. Cart wheels creaked. Voices rose in song or shouts or as the cries of hawkers. Animals brayed and instruments played.

  Inside her office, however, the air was stuffy and still, and resonated with the captain’s frustration.

  ‘There’s thrice the normal number of fresh reports here, Grange. Sigmar knows Draconium is a border city, and it’s always been a touch wild. Our city has spirit! But this?’ She gestured disgustedly at the reports, picked one up at random. ‘A break-in at the Alchemists’ Guild,’ she read aloud, eyes scanning quickly over the parchment to pick out the pertinent details. ‘Entry forced from below, through the bottle cellars. Supposedly some kind of tunnel that has since collapsed. No money taken but they were cleared out of alembics, test tubes, glass beakers…’

  ‘A peculiar theft, captain,’ said Taverton, his expression neutral. Helena nodded, raised her eyebrows, snatched up another report.

  ‘A wild animal attack inside the common grazing paddocks on Westslope,’ she read. ‘The herdguards swear nothing crossed their fences, yet three runtin were, and I quote here, Grange, “ripped to pieces and scattered about the place as though a gargant had got hold of them”.’

  ‘So… not rustlers then, captain,’ said Grange. Helena snorted, but her expression soured as she continued to read aloud from the reports.

  ‘Eighteen separate fights last night alone, four involving naked blades, two in the streets of High Drake no less. Six accounts of what has been euphemistically termed family disturbances and Sigmar knows how many more that went unreported. Old Posver has been spewing predictions of doom and damnation again in Fountains Square, so much so that the men have had to move him on three times in the past day alone. Krysthenna the bloody Lantern Bearer has been preaching her Shrine of the Last Days’ Warning nonsense again. She claims that “the signs are all there”, or some such nigh-heretical twaddle. Drunken and disorderly conduct, including from two of our own.’

  ‘Surely not, captain,’ said Grange, frowning.

  ‘Oh, it gets substantially more unpalatable,’ she said. ‘An elderly grandfather, snatched, presumably dragged through an open window, down in Rookswatch. The man’s daughter is understandably inconsolable and demanding something be done.’

  ‘One can hardly blame her,’ said Grange, his aristocratic features twisted into an expression of muted dismay.

  ‘No indeed,’ said Helena. ‘But for now, our highest priority must be these three reports,’ she brandished a fistful of parchment. ‘Three of our own, Grange. Two found dead, one not found at all. Watchman Second Class Ulswell, or what was left of her, found in an alleyway in Forges in what’s described as “a near skeletal state”. Watchman Third Class Phenswick, face-down in a dung heap behind a row of homes in Docksflow. He was found with eighteen separate stab-wounds in his back, neck and limbs, one ear missing, and what are described as “growths of a fungal nature” splitting his skin.’

  Grange gave a disgusted grunt. ‘Clearly these are not normal attacks,’ he said, folding his arms in a defensive gesture that Helena thought betrayed his age. ‘Skeletal, fungal, these aren’t words you’
d expect to read in such reports. Is there some kind of dark magic at work here, captain?’

  ‘No idea, Grange,’ said Helena. Grange was young, and he had been foisted upon her as a political appointment in exchange for the favour of the Grange family, one of Draconium’s largest self-made mercantile dynasties. It was a mercy, thought Helena, that he just happened to be an efficient and no-nonsense officer most of the time. Still, there were occasions when he looked at her as though expecting the answers to just fall out of her open mouth, and in those moments her lieutenant irritated Helena Morthan considerably.

  ‘You mentioned a third watchman, a disappearance?’ he asked.

  ‘Watchman Second Class Kench, vanished shortly after resolving a violent altercation in the Wayward King on Catchman’s Street,’ Helena read. ‘No one reports seeing Kench after he stepped out of the tavern’s door. It’s like he just,’ she snapped her fingers, ‘vanished.’

  She watched her lieutenant think hard before opening his mouth to speak. This, at least, was a trait Captain Morthan approved of.

  ‘There’s no common method here, and no apparent concentration of incidents,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ allowed Helena.

  ‘So, are we treating these issues as simply a particularly bad night of unrelated disturbances, or…?’ he left the sentence hanging.

  ‘If it were just this last night, I would be inclined to do so,’ said Helena. ‘It isn’t, though, is it? Let’s say aloud what we’re both thinking. There’s been a notable uptick in civil disturbance, inexplicable violence and… what else to call them, odd incidents for several weeks now, hasn’t there?’

  ‘You have to step back and look at it as a whole, captain, but yes, I would concur with that assessment. There were the Pole Hill killings a fortnight back, that even the threat of the Etched didn’t prevent. Those rain-scalded Sigmarite priests put the fear of divine retribution into even the city’s most hardened ne’er-do-wells, and yet… Then there was that business down at the docks, all that grain spoiled and workers choking on whatever it was that billowed out of the holds. And there’s been more violence and disquiet in the last turning than I’ve seen in my entire service to date.’