by Warhammer
Hendrick realised in that moment that he truly didn’t want to die.
Not like this.
Not yet.
The sewer tunnel echoed with the furious roar of rushing water. The sound rebounded from the curving brickwork arch of the ceiling. It filled the air with a hammering tumult as thousands of gallons of acidic wastewater poured along the tunnel and away through other channels.
Aelyn kept one hand on the railing as she and her comrades picked their way along the gantry above the torrent. She had wondered if the stench down here would be unpleasant, but with so much water sluicing through the sewers the main concern wasn’t the stink so much as it was getting snatched by the acidic waters and borne away to a horrible death.
The gantries down here didn’t exactly fill Aelyn with confidence, either. Simple arrangements of wooden planking and ironwork bolted directly into the walls, they felt rickety and unstable. They creaked alarmingly under Borik’s armoured weight, so much so that she had considered ordering him back to the surface. The spark-lamp on his armour’s shoulder served as their main source of light, however, and besides, if they did run into anything dangerous down here then his cannon would prove very useful.
Of course, they had been down in the sewers for over an hour now and all they had run into was alarmed-looking rats attempting to stay above the rising floodwaters.
No, she thought, that wasn’t quite true. They had found something else.
‘The trail continues along the right-hand fork,’ she said. They had been tracking a trail of slimy smears and purple fungi that began at the emptying-out point for the grain silo and led deeper into Draconium’s tangled sewer network. Aelyn had a sense they were onto something concrete here, if they could just avoid getting swept away.
‘How much further are we going to press this?’ asked Romilla, rubbing at her arms. ‘Should we not gather the others?’
‘Probably,’ replied Borik.
‘Our trail is scuffs and smears, and a few small fungal blooms,’ said Aelyn. ‘How long before it is eradicated in these conditions? Even I cannot follow a trail that has been scoured away in a flood.’
‘So, we press on until, what, we encounter the source of all this corruption?’ asked Romilla. ‘There are three of us, Aelyn. Sigmar helps those who help themselves, you know.’
‘There are four of us,’ said Borik, hefting his cannon meaningfully.
‘I wish to find where our quarry entered the sewers,’ said Aelyn, raising her voice to be heard over the rushing water. ‘I don’t believe anything could dwell in these tunnels. To whit, they must have entered them from somewhere else to make their way to the grain stores and do… whatever they did to them.’
‘So, we find their entry point and that gives us something to work from,’ said Romilla. ‘But then we get out of here and find backup, agreed?’
‘Agreed,’ said Borik.
‘There are a lot of pipes affixed to the walls of this next tunnel,’ said Aelyn. ‘Be careful not to scald yourselves.’ The pipes that provided thermal heating to Draconium’s more well-heeled properties ran through the sewers, threading in and out of the brickwork and sometimes vanishing off down their own, smaller side-tunnels. They gave off a constant wall of heat, and frequently belched clouds of steam that Aelyn and her comrades had so far been careful to avoid.
‘I’ve served on Kharadron airships, crawling around tangles of endrinworks in spaces far narrower than this while two miles straight up in the sky,’ muttered Borik. ‘I think I can avoid–’
His sudden pause caused Aelyn to halt, holding onto the walkway railing with one hand.
‘Avoid what?’ asked Romilla. Borik held up a hand.
‘Pressure differentials,’ he muttered then, louder. ‘Out. Now.’
Aelyn drew breath to speak, then felt it too. A rising wave of air pressure, a sudden oppressive sense of something stirring. She felt the vibration that ran through the railing, and her eyes locked with Borik’s where they stared from behind his helm’s eye lenses.
‘What? What?’ Romilla’s voice sounded tight with alarm.
‘There was an entrance back that way,’ said Aelyn. ‘Swiftly.’
She spun and, as she did so, a violent jolt ran along the tunnel. Mortar dust puffed from fracturing brickwork. Water leapt and splashed high, causing Aelyn to hiss with pain where it hit her bare skin. The walkway groaned beneath them.
‘Go!’ urged Borik, and they broke into a run. Aelyn led the way, footfalls pounding the wooden boards as they creaked and shook. She heard her comrades behind her, Romilla’s quick, light footfalls, Borik’s slower, heavier gait.
Aelyn felt another surge of force, a sudden shift in air pressure violent enough to make her ears pop. The tunnel seemed to buckle around her, a jagged crack racing along its ceiling and vomiting mortar and dirt into the torrent below.
‘What in Sigmar’s name is happening?’ yelled Romilla over the rumble of the earthquake and the roar of the water. Aelyn kept running, almost pitching from the walkway as a board broke loose and fell away with a chunk of railing attached to it. The water snatched the wreckage hungrily and swept it away, smashing it to flinders against the tunnel walls.
‘Rust it all, just move!’ yelled Borik, his voice amplified by some duardin artifice in his helm. The light from his shoulder lamp jolted madly as they ran, strobing the tunnel to illuminate frothing water, shuddering brickwork and cracking wood.
Aelyn rounded a corner and saw a metal ladder ahead, its rungs reaching down from a circular shaft to meet the wood of the walkway.
Another surge hit, and Aelyn watched with incomprehension as the raging waters flowed impossibly up the tunnel walls. Wobbling globules of sewer-water broke away and drifted up to splatter against the cracked ceiling. At the same time, Aelyn felt her feet leave the gantry. She snatched at the railing and managed to get a hand to it. Desperately, she tried to work out what was happening, attempting to reconcile the violent dizziness and the weightless feeling of her body as it drifted up from the walkway. Behind her Romilla yelled in alarm. Then came the thudding footfalls of Borik, moving fast like a drunk trying not to topple over his own feet as he runs.
Aelyn felt an impact as Borik slammed into her and bore her down the tunnel, Romilla colliding unceremoniously with her. Aelyn looked down to see that Borik was running as though on tip toe, his feet just making contact with the floor. He had them both, his gun locked to his back by lodestones, his arms wrapped around his comrades’ waists as he made for the ladder.
His armour, she thought in bewilderment. His armour is heavy enough to weight him down, just.
Then came another pulse, a shockwave of pressure thundering up the tunnel behind them. Pipes buckled and burst from the wall. Brickwork exploded. The floodwaters fell with sudden fury and smashed down so hard that they sent hissing geysers spraying up towards the ceiling. Borik cursed as the gantry gave way with a crunch of buckling wood and a scream of twisted ironwork.
Aelyn twisted in the air. In a feat of agility, she kicked one foot against the buckling railing and, at full stretch, got a hand to the ladder. The aelf curled her long, strong fingers around an iron rung and grabbed hold. She snatched Borik’s ammo harness with her other hand.
‘Romilla!’ she yelled.
The priest managed to snatch the ladder as the wood of the walkway plunged away into the raging waters below. She swung, banging hard against Aelyn and nearly dislodging her grip.
Aelyn screamed with the effort of hanging on to Borik. The duardin’s armour-clad weight was enormous, and Aelyn felt tendon and muscle strain and begin to tear in her limbs as she clung on. Her shoulder was going to pop from its socket any moment. Her fingers were white hot agony. The ladder groaned ominously. Aelyn tasted blood in her mouth as she pushed her body past its limits.
‘Drop me, or we’ll all drown,’ yelled the duardin.
>
Aelyn dimly heard Romilla speaking low and fast. A prayer, she thought incoherently. Then she felt something give in her wrist, felt something else blossom hot and awful somewhere in her chest, felt her fingers begin to slip.
White light filled the tunnel, the sudden flare of a lightning bolt unleashed from the heavens. Through a haze of pain, Aelyn felt Borik’s weight taken off her as Romilla reached down, grasped the duardin by his other shoulder guard and hefted him upwards with no apparent effort.
Aelyn blinked as she saw the corona of holy light wreathing Romilla’s head, the lightning crackling around her limbs.
‘Climb,’ spat Romilla, her voice underpinned with a rumble of thunder. ‘Sigmar’s miracles are brief.’
Limbs shaking, her left arm screaming with pain and virtually useless, Aelyn dragged herself up the ladder towards the metal cover above. Below her she heard Borik’s gauntlets and boots clanging against the ladder’s rungs. The holy light flickered out as suddenly as it had come, and the shuddering in the brickwork around them redoubled.
With a last surge of strength, Aelyn heaved the sewer cover aside and dragged herself out onto the rain-slick cobbles, uncaring of the downpour that engulfed her. She felt it scald her skin, but simply didn’t have the energy to shield herself. Behind her, Aelyn heard her comrades pull themselves, coughing and gasping, into the light. The street convulsed beneath her, then someone was lifting her up, wrapping a rain-cloak about her. She saw Romilla’s concerned face, skin pale, eyes red-ringed, then nothing.
Eleanora looked up from her work in surprise as a shudder ran through her workbench. Metal clattered as cogs toppled from their neat stack and spilled across the table. Her carefully arranged tools jumped and danced.
She sat back, frowning, swivelling the lens of her monocle away from her face.
‘What is happening?’ she asked the empty air.
As though in answer, the shaking increased. The tremors ran up through her chair, seeming to vibrate through her bones. From somewhere else in the guildhouse, Eleanora heard a muffled bang. Someone’s volatile experiment going wrong, she thought. Distantly, she heard running feet, and a voice yelling about fire. Yet her attention was drawn back to her workbench, where the cogs and wires, and even her tools, were engaged in some sort of strange dance.
Eleanora watched in rapt fascination as small metal components drifted free of the desk and floated gracefully into the air. They wobbled on obscure trajectories, spiralling around one another as a constellation of wire and metal and glass rose in slow motion from her workbench to fill the air before her.
Another jolt shot through the chamber and Eleanora let out a shriek of surprise as the violent motion toppled her chair, and her with it. The next instant the air was full of hurtling metal shards, and she screamed again as hot pain blossomed across her back.
Panicked, uncomprehending, Eleanora scrambled on all fours beneath her workbench. Only then did she grope at her back and find small, cold objects embedded there. She hissed and whipped her hand away. Her fingers were red with blood.
The floating metal. It had, what, exploded? But no, she realised. It hadn’t exploded. As she stared out from under her workbench with wide eyes, Eleanora realised that only her fall had saved her life. Across the chamber, cogs, wires, tools, bolts and glass had struck the far wall with enough force to embed themselves. Wrought in wreckage was a crude face ten feet wide, arcing outwards on one side, curving concave on the other so that it resembled some great leering moon. And its eyes… Eleanora stared fearfully across the chamber, into the same eyes that had cursed her dreams since the night before they came to Draconium.
‘The eyes that see into your soul,’ she whispered.
It was a good ten minutes before Eleanora gathered the nerve to emerge from under her workbench, and another twenty before she could finally bring herself to start prising shrapnel from her back, and then the wall.
Chapter Six
BLAME
The common room of the Drake’s Crown had become less crowded with each passing night. Where before folk had sought company and tried to reassure one another in bluff tones that all was well, the endless days of driving rain and ill omens had dampened all but the most ardent spirits. Hendrick suspected that most Draconium citizens who didn’t have to be out of doors were huddled in their homes, doing their best to keep the rainwater out and a semblance of heat in. He felt a certain sympathy for the poorer folks down in Rookswatch and Docksflow, not to mention the Slump.
‘The rain can’t eat away the homes of the poor, nor the poor themselves, not all at once,’ Captain Morthan had commented when she checked in with them two days earlier. ‘But if this storm keeps up, it’ll be their dwellings that start to come apart first, their cases of rain-scalding that will fill up the charitable apothecarions and the shrines on Pole Hill.’
Hendrick supposed that the tattooists would be doing a roaring trade in faith-marks to cover scald-burns once the storm finally subsided. If it subsided.
He looked wearily around the table, noting with mild distaste that creeping mould had taken hold in the gaps between its wooden boards. The Swords of Sigmar were by far the largest single group seated in the common room and, as far as Hendrick could tell, the only out of town guests staying in the inn’s rooms.
‘Not been a good day, has it?’ he asked.
Bartiman chuckled wearily. ‘A fair assessment, sergeant,’ he said. ‘Frankly, I’m surprised we’re all still here.’
Aelyn was withdrawn; salves streaked her skin over several livid scalds, one arm and the other shoulder were encased in bandages and poultices provided by Romilla. The priest looked scarcely better, pale and exhausted as she always was after calling upon the God-King’s aid. Even Borik was quiet. He worked away with a scalthing-iron to smooth the dents out of his shoulder guard where Romilla had gripped it with her miraculously enhanced strength.
Eleanora sat as close to Romilla as she could get, her bandaged wounds hidden under a fresh tunic but clearly paining her. She seemed caught in a loop, going to pull her tools from her satchel then halting, staring at them uncertainly as though they might bite her, pulling a miserable face and counting off on her fingers, right then left, looking around to check Romilla was still there then absent-mindedly reaching for her tools again. She was favouring her left foot also, Hendrick noticed, and he had almost thought to ask her about it, but the moment had passed and now he didn’t feel like distressing the young engineer further.
Hendrick was aware that he, Bartiman and Olt looked little better. They had barely made it out of the tunnel before it fell in. Hendrick had an assortment of contusions where rocks and roots had jabbed at him. Bartiman kept coughing into a black handkerchief, and his breathing had developed a distinct wet wheeze. Olt had fared worst, being forced to dive from the tunnel mouth as it caved in. He had badly twisted one knee, and his palms and forearms were cut to shreds where shards of glass and crystal had ground into them as he sprawled onto the chamber floor.
There were a fair few empty tankards collected on the table between the Swords of Sigmar. After the day they’d had, even Aelyn was drinking, though she had curled her lip at the human-brewed ale. The inn’s barkeep, a stocky man named Gathe, slowly polished his glassware and watched them with an appraising eye. Hendrick supposed, glancing around at the near-empty common room with its guttering fire and smattering of lone drinkers huddled in dark corners, that their coin had been keeping the Drake’s Crown going these last few days.
‘We’ve had worse,’ said Hendrick, trying to sound solid and reassuring. To his own ears his slightly slurred assurances just sounded foolish.
‘When?’ asked Olt, who had given up hiding under his cloak, having declared that the city folk had worse things to worry about than some tattooed heathen. ‘Before I met you Heav’ners, yes? Because I don’t remember a turning this cursed in the last year.’
&nbs
p; ‘What is going on in this city?’ asked Romilla, staring around at them.
‘More’s the point, what are we still doing in the middle of it?’ asked Borik.
‘We took a contract with Captain Morthan,’ said Hendrick, frowning. ‘And more to the point, we seek to honour Varlen’s passing.’
‘Aye, and we took another contract before that with the Olmori tribe. Last I checked, their loot is still sitting in our bags and we’re overdue returning it, and meanwhile Varlen is just as dead as ever and far beyond caring what we do or don’t do to honour him,’ said Borik, setting his dented armour down with a thump. ‘Now, I’ll ask again, why aren’t we getting out of here tonight, now?’
‘Borik, the watch–’ began Bartiman.
‘Have their rust-taken hands full, and most of them are too busy hiding under the nearest roof to care anymore what’s happening in the streets!’ exclaimed Borik. ‘With the skills we’ve got, hrukni, we could be out of here in half a night at most and long gone by dawn.’
‘And when we hear that Draconium fell, and we weren’t here to help prevent whatever horror transpired?’ asked Romilla. ‘Could you live with that on your conscience, Borik?’
‘They’ve an entire city militia, the whole watch,’ he said, exasperation causing him to raise his voice loud enough that Hendrick winced. ‘What difference are a handful of injured, tired, pissed off mercenaries going to make, eh? This isn’t our problem.’
‘When Varlen died for this, it became our problem,’ said Hendrick.
‘I’m sorry for the loss of your brother,’ said Borik. ‘But he’s dead. He’s gone. In my fleet, we give our dead the burial of the winds, then we move on. A corpse is just ballast, Hendrick, and a memory doesn’t care how it’s kept.’
‘Borik, enough,’ said Aelyn quietly, her voice raw with pain. Borik glanced at her and Hendrick was surprised to see something like guilt flash across the duardin’s craggy features. Borik subsided without another word, though he still glowered at Hendrick from under beetling brows.
