Gloomspite - Andy Clark

by Warhammer

  Aelyn heard the careful control in Romilla’s voice. The priest had never fully recounted what happened to the army she accompanied out of Azyrheim all those years before, but Aelyn knew that it had been some curse of Nurgle that had spread through their ranks.

  Romilla alone had survived.

  The experience had plunged her into a crisis of faith, a spiralling descent into alcoholism and self-abuse in the slums of Hammerhal Aqsha that had almost been the death of her. Varlen, Hendrick and Aelyn had pulled her from her pit of self-recrimination and despair and helped her to find her faith and purpose again. Still, the priest’s horror at disease and decay remained, a spiritual canker that she could only keep locked away behind ironclad gates of faith.

  This spectacle of unbridled foulness could not be easy on her.

  ‘It may be,’ Aelyn allowed. ‘A clue, perhaps. If so, we should not expose ourselves to this foulness any longer than we must.’

  Toftin looked at her with fresh alarm. ‘Do you think it’s catching?’ he asked. ‘Bad air, curdled humours?’

  Aelyn shrugged. A muscle twitched in her cheek. Her mind had already leapt ahead.

  ‘Are there other routes in and out of here?’ she asked.

  ‘The… er… the big doors at the street end,’ said Toftin, gesturing. ‘There’s another entrance like this at the back, another set of steps down for labourers. Oh! And there’s the culvert, empties right into the sewers down there by the far corner.’

  ‘Rain drainage?’ asked Borik. Toftin shook his head.

  ‘Smouldergrain,’ he said, and when they offered him blank looks he elaborated. ‘It sweats when you bag it up. The runoff sours the grain if you leave it to stand, and in extreme cases build-up can even be explosive. So, we let it drain into the sewers. That way it doesn’t… um… spoil.’

  ‘Didn’t work,’ said Borik, earning an angry glare from Toftin.

  ‘There’s food ruined, livelihoods lost. Sigmar’s hammer, there’s lives lost. Is this a joke to you?’ asked the overseer.

  ‘Hardly,’ grunted Borik.

  ‘Overseer Toftin, thank you for your aid,’ said Aelyn, capturing his gaze with hers and holding it. Toftin seemed for the first time to become aware he was standing in the presence of an aelf, registered her alien features and the piercing amber eyes that shone beneath her cowl. Aelyn had found that many humans, especially the less-well-travelled, could be knocked off their stride by her ‘otherness’. Toftin nodded absently, taking an involuntary step away from her.

  ‘Of course, that is, er…’

  ‘We will circle around to inspect the rear entrance in case anyone has used that to gain entry and commit malfeasance,’ said Aelyn. ‘I would ask on behalf of the city watch that you don’t permit anyone in here in case there is a contaminant that may spread.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Toftin again. He looked relieved when they swept past him and out through the meagre office chambers of the warehouse into the rainy street beyond.

  ‘That’ll all need burning,’ said Borik.

  ‘The rear entrance, really?’ asked Romilla as she swathed herself in her leather cloak and raised a scald-shade over her head. Next to them, Borik’s armour emitted a constant chorus of metallic pings and plinks as the heavy rain rebounded from it.

  ‘No,’ said Aelyn. ‘Captain Morthan spoke of tunnels, did she not? Things move beneath the surface here.’

  ‘The sewer culvert, then,’ said Romilla with a sigh. ‘Sigmar’s grace, won’t that be pleasant.’

  ‘You want pleasant, go back to the inn,’ said Borik, stomping away past a gaggle of cloaked city folk who were hauling a cart down the cobbled street. Rainwater sluiced about its wheels, splashing up their legs, and Aelyn believed she could almost see the wood of the cart smouldering where the acidic rainwater worried at it.

  ‘Why did Varlen hire him again?’ asked Romilla as she and Aelyn set off after the duardin.

  ‘The big gun,’ replied Aelyn.

  ‘Of course,’ said Romilla, and Aelyn fancied she could hear the priest rolling her eyes.

  Eleanora VanGhest sat at her workbench, enjoying peace, an absence of other people and the familiar comfort of a workshop. Hendrick had instructed her to go and take advantage of the facilities in the Ironweld Guildhouse to which Captain Morthan had granted her access. It had been all Eleanora could do not to run there flat out, and she had returned every day since. Hendrick would call on her if they needed her skills. It had been turnings since the Swords of Sigmar had last worked out of a civilised location, and while the presence of her friends and her bag of tools gave Eleanora familiar touchstones with which to reassure herself, the uncertainty and anarchic conditions had made her ever more unsettled.

  Of course, there had been stares and mutters when she entered the guildhouse. There always were. Eleanora had endured the unfriendly scrutiny of artisans and engine-smiths ever since her father had first brought her in to test for the Ironweld Academy in Hammerhal Ghyra. She found their glares uncomfortable, and of course there had been more than one such supposed man of learning willing to impede her progress simply because of her gender.

  That sort of thing had typically just been an inconvenience for her; Eleanora couldn’t really connect with most people, couldn’t empathise with the unfriendly engineers around her, and so their discomfort at her presence didn’t increase or decrease her own in any meaningful way. And even the most obstreperous old-guard master couldn’t deny her ability with mechanisms and machinery. It was as though the pieces already fitted together in her mind’s eye.

  She had never been able to articulate any of this to her proud but frustrated father, or to the jealous peers who had eventually torched her workshop and caused her expulsion from the Academy. Eleanora’s father had died in that blaze, as had several other engineers, and after the entire thing had been pinned on her supposed carelessness, Eleanora had been exiled.

  Bewildered, alone, and shocked mute by the sudden ripping away of all she had known, Eleanora had been sent through the city’s great Realmgate and onto the streets of Hammerhal Aqsha. She supposed, in a detached fashion, that she would have died there, impoverished and starving, had not blind chance brought her and the Swords of Sigmar together. She had been with them ever since, she their ticket to all manner of ballistic and explosive devices, they her driftwood spar in the turbulent ocean of the realms. Romilla had nursed her back to health, had got her talking again, acting more like a mother than a virtual stranger.

  Her presence made Eleanora feel stronger. Safe.

  So yes, Eleanora endured the usual stares from the engineers around her when she entered the Draconium Ironweld Guildhouse, but after all that she had faced in the last few years of her life, those stares had even less purchase upon her than before. And soon enough she had been led, albeit grudgingly, to a workshop where she could at last lock the doors, spread out her tools and components in the proper and orderly fashion, and get on with some work.

  Eleanora’s foot still hurt. She shifted and winced, but she paid it no real mind. The others hadn’t seemed to be very interested when she tried to tell them about the spider, and it seemed to have been driven from Romilla’s mind by other events, so Eleanora assumed it must not be all that important. If she concentrated on her work, she could ignore the dull throb and the heat radiating up her ankle. Hendrick had requested bombs, explosives large and small, anything clever she could come up with ‘in case things got interesting’. Bombs, Eleanora could do. There was already a small stack of munitions by her workbench that attested to the fact.

  Clever, she could do also. And then there was that spider repeller that she had been thinking about ever since she was bitten. She was sure she had some time to work on that too, in amongst every­thing else.

  Distractedly she brushed her hair back from her eyes and tied it out of the way with the ribbon her father had given her on
her tenth birthday, the one that had been on top of her largest gift. He had fashioned her a set of tools at his workbench. He had presented them with a proud gleam in his eye.

  She still used the tools now.

  Eleanora wiped away a couple of tears at the memory, not even truly conscious she had shed them, and set to work.

  There was a lot to get done, after all.

  ‘Strange enough for you, Bartiman?’ asked Hendrick.

  ‘Well. I mean. Yes!’ The death wizard sounded oddly delighted, Hendrick thought, for a man staring at one of the most unpleasant and unnatural sights he’d ever seen.

  Their brief had explained that the previous tunnel dug into the Alchemists’ Guild had collapsed by the time the watchmen arrived. This time, that was not the case.

  Hendrick rather wished it had been.

  He, Olt and Bartiman stood in one of the dusty sub-basements of the guild, in a section that the alchemists themselves referred to as the bottle-shop. The chambers down here were lined with shelf upon shelf of alembics, potion bottles, cut-crystal beakers, lead crucibles and other, stranger receptacles fashioned from substances of every colour. Some of the chambers appeared to be in regular use, but further back along the corridors, the bottle-shop took on a dusty air of disuse. Too many bottles, not enough alchemists creating potions to fill them, one of the old men had explained as they led the Swords of Sigmar down into the basement.

  At least the disused chambers were tidy. Not so this one. Shelves had been torn bodily from the walls. Glassware and crystal had shattered, leaving sprays of glittering debris strewn across the floor. The jagged wreckage mingled with brick dust and rubble; much of the back wall of the chamber had collapsed inwards as though forced from without. Bare earth had been left exposed, and in this yawned a noisome hole a good five feet high and just as wide.

  Olt touched his throat and muttered something in his tribe’s dialect. It sounded superstitious and fearful.

  ‘That is truly horrible, isn’t it?’ said Bartiman, still sounding too pleased by half.

  A hole would have been alarming enough, but this gaping rent gave off a reek like wet mould, spoiled soil, faeces and what Hendrick could only think of as the feet of an entire regiment after a week’s hard march. Thick tendrils of mycelium billowed from the hole’s edges to dig eager roots into the surrounding brickwork. Pale fronds drifted in a cool and stinking breeze that blew from somewhere within the black pit, and fungal blooms of a dozen rotten hues jutted from the tunnel’s walls, floor and ceiling. Several had fibrous spikes growing from them, while others resembled flyblown meat, chitinous carapace and in one case a screaming human skull. Thick-bodied white mites crawled all over the fungi and spilled out across the chamber floor.

  ‘You believe that the thieves came through this tunnel?’ Hendrick asked the gaggle of nervous looking alchemists packing the doorway behind them.

  Several nodded in reply.

  ‘And you believe that they used the same tunnel as their exit?’

  More nodding.

  ‘Has anyone explored the tunnel to see where it leads?’ Hendrick asked, expecting the shaken heads and nervous muttering that he got in response. ‘Right, then,’ he said to himself.

  ‘Chief, that’s the home of the bad spirits down there,’ said Olt. ‘We’re not going down there, are we?’

  ‘We’re no use just stood here,’ replied Hendrick. ‘The watch has spent plenty of time guarding holes from what Captain Morthan was saying, but they’ve not sent anyone down one.’

  ‘I would imagine that is because it looked so very inadvisable to do so,’ said Bartiman.

  ‘We’ve braved worse,’ said Hendrick.

  ‘Not out of choice,’ said Bartiman.

  ‘Morthan hired us because we can do things, brave dangers her watchmen can’t,’ said Hendrick firmly. ‘That begins with delving into evil-looking pits like this to find out who or what has made them. Find your courage, the pair of you, and let’s go. Olt, you’re the best at reading signs and spoor, you lead. Bartiman, give us some light. I’ll take rearguard so that nothing unpleasant can sneak up on you from behind while you’re concentrating on your cantrips.’

  Muttering under his breath, Olt shed his cloak and dumped it in the far corner of the chamber, along with his scald-shade. The alchem­ists looked perturbed at his feral appearance, but Olt just favoured them with a wolfish grin. Hendrick and Bartiman followed suit, shedding anything that would act as an encumbrance in the tight confines of the tunnel. Hendrick’s only concession was to leave Reckoner strapped to his back, reasoning that if they found a wider space further down he might have occasion to swing the hammer into the faces of whatever lived there.

  ‘Are we sure that we don’t want to gather the rest of the Swords first?’ asked Bartiman.

  ‘We’re just doing a recce, they’ve got their own matters to attend to,’ said Hendrick. ‘If we meet anything we can’t handle we back out fast. And keep your talismans close to hand, this has the reek of Chaos about it to me.’

  Olt touched his fingers to his charm tattoos. He unslung his hand axes and picked his way over the spongy mycelium into the tunnel entrance, making little noises of disgust as he did so. Bartiman followed, cupping his hands and muttering an incantation that conjured a ghostly light between them. Hendrick drew a pair of daggers as he followed his comrades into the tunnel. He curled his lip in disgust as the stench intensified, and the crawling mites began to blunder over his feet and up his ankles. The tunnel closed in around him, forcing him to stoop. He found he desperately wanted to avoid the touch of the pallid mycelium against his head and neck.

  The three of them shuffled along the tight confines of the passage, taking shallow, disgusted breaths. The light from the Alchemists’ Guild rapidly faded until their only source of illumination was the pallid flickerlight conjured by Bartiman. Things scuttled through that light on swift little legs, their segmented bodies and feathery antennae brushing Hendrick’s legs and arms.

  ‘Remember what Captain Morthan said about insect attacks,’ he said quietly. ‘Keep an eye on these bugs.’

  ‘An eye? Hendrick, I’m kicking myself for not bringing some ­specimen jars,’ replied Bartiman.

  ‘Quiet, both of you,’ hissed Olt from up ahead, his voice sounding muffled. ‘Tunnel starts heading down pretty steeply up ahead. Getting narrower too.’

  Hendrick’s face was a frown of concentration as he continued to press forwards. Sure enough the ground began to slope away, and the tunnel shrank in until his shoulders knocked loose soil from its walls. Claustrophobia threatened. The touch of the fungi that clung to the walls was foul, and worse, the walls themselves had begun to ooze a kind of thick, clear slime that was cold and tingling to the touch. The trail of glass fragments continued down the tunnel, and translucent insects crunched underfoot.

  Hendrick kept his breathing steady and focused on the thought of finding a solution to the mystery of what threatened this city. Things had not progressed how he had hoped, thus far, and he desperately wanted a real enemy to fight. Racketeers didn’t count.

  If he was honest with himself, Hendrick had pictured their arriving in the nick of time to warn of some invading army. He had hoped to reap a tally of Chaos worshippers in return for his brother’s death. Perhaps some part of Hendrick had hoped to follow Varlen into death’s embrace, that he might be reunited with his sibling. Instead, they had mysteries and holes, ominous signs and a religious autocrat who believed Sigmar would save them from all of it.

  Hendrick was keeping his temper reined in by the thinnest of margins, and the events of the night of their arrival kept playing out in his mind’s eye. How he had stammered himself to a stop in front of the regent militant. How their warning had fallen on deaf ears. He felt as though he had let Varlen down, one last time, and the familiar sense of self-loathing had returned in force. That, in turn, frustrated Hendrick
as he knew it was horribly counterproductive, but the anger he felt at his own weakness only made him loathe himself more.

  Bartiman stopped so suddenly that Hendrick bumped into him, nearly knocking the old wizard from his feet.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Olt’s stopped,’ hissed Bartiman.

  ‘Something doesn’t feel right,’ said the scout, placing a palm against the slimy soil of the wall. A moment later, in a voice of tightly controlled panic, he hissed ‘No, no, go back, back, back now!’

  Hendrick had fought alongside Olt for a year now. He knew well enough not to argue. However, as he tried to turn and retreat up the passageway the horrible realisation struck him that he couldn’t.

  ‘I can’t turn around,’ he hissed. ‘There’s not space.’ Hendrick felt his body trying to freeze on him as intense claustrophobia clamped its hands around his throat. He sucked in a tight breath.

  ‘Back, go, now!’ shouted Olt, abandoning all pretence at stealth. Swearing, Hendrick forced his limbs to move. He began to scramble backwards along the tunnel as quickly as he could. His head banged the ceiling, dislodging clots of soil and fungus that showered down on him. Something wriggling dropped down the back of his neck, causing him to grunt with disgust. Bartiman, who had managed to turn around to face the right way, pressed close, his old features drawn with alarm in the wavering illumination of his light.

  Hendrick could feel it now too, a shuddering in the earth around them. He felt more than heard a subsonic rumble that shuddered through the bedrock and caused the tunnel to shake. Soil spilled down from above, finding its way into his eyes, his ears, his mouth.

  ‘Move, Hendrick, I’ve no desire to be buried alive!’ gasped Bartiman.

  ‘What in the realms is going on?’ he shouted, spitting mouthfuls of sour-tasting soil.

  The only answer was an increase in the violent shuddering. Barti­man’s concentration slipped and his light extinguished, plunging them into absolute darkness. Hendrick caught his heel on something that gave with a spongy crunch, and almost fell backwards. His heart hammered as he found his feet and kept going, praying to Sigmar almighty that the tunnel would soon widen enough for him to turn and run before it came down on top of them all.