by Warhammer
Aelyn almost recoiled from the telescope.
The square itself was still littered with heaps of corpses and piles of rubble, and the gnawed and blackened ruins of tree trunks lay strewn like discarded sticks. Fungi and insects were everywhere, and dirty water washed across the square in waves. She noted that it was still flowing in the direction it always had, and she winced at the thought of the poison and filth it must surely be emptying into the canal, thence to be borne south towards the settled lands and Hammerhal Aqsha.
The waters now bubbled up not from an ornate fountain, but from beneath the twisted remains of the Bad Moon meteor that still jutted thirty feet into the air at the square’s heart. Grots were indeed swarming across it, chiselling and working frenziedly. Figures in shamanic robes capered and shrieked as they directed the work, brandishing their staffs or riding about on huge, lumbering mushrooms.
The grots had graven a leering visage into the meteor, whittling it into a moon-like shape. It was this monstrous grotesque that had caused Aelyn to recoil; its eyes were alive with deranged madness, and as she stared down upon the square she had felt those eyes stare back.
Taking a breath, she forced herself to look through the telescope again. Perhaps they were just carving idols? Greenskins did that, she knew, and if they worshipped the Bad Moon in whatever crude fashion then it made sense they would etch its likeness into things. Yet something made her stare harder, some instinct or inspiration that she could not quite place.
And then she saw it.
Aelyn straightened up from the telescope, her heart thumping sickeningly in her throat. She swallowed, turned to Thackeray and Kole who were watching her with alarm.
‘What in the realms did you see?’ asked Thackeray.
‘There is a tunnel beneath the idol,’ she said, forcing her voice to stay level. ‘They are bringing them up from below. Dozens and dozens of them, and stacking them beside the waterway.’
‘What? What are they bringing up?’ demanded Kole.
‘Barrels,’ said Aelyn. ‘Black and gold barrels. Barrels like the one your regent militant drank from before his horrific demise.’
‘They’ll empty them into the waters,’ breathed Thackeray, growing visibly pale as the implications sank in. ‘The villages to the south. Sigmar’s blood, Hammerhal…’
‘We have to stop this,’ said Aelyn. ‘We have to stop this right now.’
Chapter Fourteen
ESCAPE
Darkness.
A foul stench.
Throbbing pain that pulsed behind his eyes and ran in electric jolts down his neck.
Borik opened his eyes and quickly blinked them shut again. He had had a brief and bleary glimpse of something pressed close against his face, something fibrous and foul-smelling that he realised encased his entire head. He dragged in a breath, nostrils flaring as he fought back panic. He felt as though he was suffocating. There was something cold and wet jammed in his mouth that he couldn’t spit out. It tasted utterly foul, and he gagged deep in his throat as he fought not to vomit.
He wasn’t thinking straight, couldn’t orient himself. He thought perhaps his aching body was in a sitting position, but when he tried to move he found that his wrists and ankles were locked tightly in place. Borik’s breath came in short, fast gasps as he fought against the pain and the urge to frantically thrash his way to freedom.
Remember the code, he told himself. Remember the code. A Kharadron doesn’t shame himself with humanish displays of fear. A Kharadron stays firm and true as the winds that bear him to his aethergold prize. Amidst the storm, a Kharadron is the riveted iron, unbending and impervious.
Still, though he repeated the tenets of the code to himself again and again, Borik couldn’t entirely stop himself straining against his bonds. He was used to a mask upon his face, but this was different. Whatever it was felt awful, scratching and tickling his skin, bound close against his flesh as though whoever had captured him had given only the vaguest thought to whether he could breathe. That thought tightened his chest all the more, and Borik let out an involuntary groan around his disgusting gag.
He heard movement, and suddenly felt the need to stay very still. He couldn’t feel the weight of his armour, he realised, just his leather undersuit. Borik felt suddenly exposed.
How had he got here?
Where even was here?
Hazily, he remembered leaving the safe house with his equipment and a small band of survivors in tow. He hadn’t tried to talk them into it, hadn’t cared whether they followed him or not. He had assumed that they must have heard the raised voices through the office door. A watchman – Kasmir? Kasyr? Something like that – had stopped Borik right before he left and said that he and a few others thought the duardin was right. They wanted to join him in his escape. Borik had shrugged and set off with the watchman in tow, a small band of nervous city folk following close behind.
Borik’s plan had been to make for the rivergate. He had thought to steal a boat of some description and then lay low under a tarp, a cloak – whatever he could find – until the craft had drifted through the city wall and away.
He couldn’t remember exactly how that had worked out, but some sardonic nugget of icy calm deep in his mind suggested that it couldn’t have gone especially well. He had a vague memory of something huge and hulking, of a retched stink of rotting fish and the awful sound of spewing bile that hissed and bubbled as it ate away at screaming city folk. Borik remembered nothing else, but from the pain in his skull and his current predicament, he assumed that whatever had come for them had knocked him out and dragged him… where?
He didn’t know.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
Harsh voices now, jabbering in grot tongue and sniggering evilly. Something poked him hard in the side of the head and made him groan in pain. More sniggering, then a harsh shout and the sound of scampering feet receding.
Through a haze of pain, Borik heard footsteps move closer. He smelt weird, acrid smells and heard low, muttering voices all around him. Suddenly a part of him wanted his hood to stay in place. It was irrational, it wouldn’t help anything, but he just wanted to be left alone. Part of him was working furiously on anything that would offer him even the remotest chance of escape. But the first part just moaned over and over again that he be left alone. That whatever was coming next would be even worse than this.
He thought for a moment of his comrades and wished that he could have made them see sense. If they’d been together, perhaps they could all have escaped. But he had left them behind, and now he was here. Borik felt anger at being abandoned, and shame at his own act of abandonment, and then suddenly sharp talons were raking the flesh of his face.
He tried to recoil, and his head banged against something cold and hard. He tried to cry out, and instead gave a spit-wet gurgle. The clawing fingers closed in a fist, ripping at the material that covered his face and clawing it away in a thick fistful. They left stinging lines of pain across his cheeks and forehead.
Borik forced his eyes open, cringing back in his seat for fear of what he would see. He took in a shadowy room, a cellar maybe? Or a cave? He was strapped into a metal seat and in the half-light he could see a group of grotesque figures leaning over him. Grots, certainly, but freakish and distorted creatures. One wore a huge fleshy toadstool on his head like a hat, whose roots, Borik saw, had squirmed through the grot’s scalp to emerge like wiggling worms from around his eyes. Another was scrawny and hunched, his pale red eyes saucer-huge in his wizened face. Borik saw his own bloodied visage reflected in those foul orbs, and his head began to spin. He looked away hurriedly and the creature chuckled to itself. Another of the grots was bloated and leathery, its skin covered in scar tissue from what looked like burns. It wore a bizarre arrangement of bottles, alembics and pipes on its back that jutted well up over its shoulders. Fluids gurgled through them, heated by glowi
ng coals in a metal dish that the grot wore strapped to its head. The sight would have struck Borik as humorous, were it not for the faint stink of burning flesh and the cruel delight in the greenskin’s piggy eyes. It was this one who had clawed the covering from Borik’s face, and the duardin felt ill as he realised the grot was holding a fistful of thick grey spider’s web.
‘Oozit?’ snarled the boggle-eyed grot in a shrill voice, poking at Borik’s chest with a long talon. ‘Wassit doon skarprin? Zoggin sneak, grokkit dunno. Kummon, zogger. Krakya jawz open.’
Borik shook his head, struggling to understand the mangled words. His eyes darted around the room and he struggled to make them focus in the hope of spotting some means to escape his tormentors. He saw his armour, his bag and his guns strewn in an untidy heap a few yards away. They looked to have been thoroughly rifled, but still, if he could just reach them. In his addled state, Borik actually strained against his restraints before reality asserted itself.
Somewhere behind him he heard a door creak, then the thud of heavy footfalls getting closer. The grots backed away, their expressions filling with fearful caution. Borik’s eyes rolled as he tried to look around, tried to see what was coming.
A shadow fell over him. The metal chair groaned as something huge and heavy settled upon its headrest. Borik felt hot breath upon his scalp and smelled a rank stench of sweat and fungi and something deeper, colder and immeasurably older. He craned his head back and found himself staring up at a truly enormous troggoth. The brute was wearing a crude helm, its yellowed eyes peering at him from the shadows of its eye-pieces with dull hunger.
Borik grunted, and tried again to tug against his restraints. Again, he could barely move at all. He stared upwards, breathing fast and waiting for the thing to rip him from the metal seat and bite his head off in a single mouthful. Instead, the troggoth stepped ponderously aside to make way for a smaller figure who circled around to stand before Borik.
Only now did he realise that the grots hadn’t been backing away from the troggoth. They had been retreating in fear of this ghastly figure instead. It was grot, but like none Borik had ever seen. Tall and rangy, the greenskin stood wrapped in ragged black robes with crude Bad Moon glyphs worked into their material. It wore a crown of pale fungi that burrowed their roots into its skull, and held a staff atop which a huge moon-fungus glowed with nauseating light. In its other talon the grot held a shorter staff topped by a human skull, while the train of its robes was borne aloft by a pair of weird moon-faced squigs, who clutched the cloth in their fanged mouths.
Borik could stare only at the greenskin’s eyes, though. He saw cunning there – fierce, cruel intellect that studied him like a spiteful child studies a helpless insect. There was madness there too, Borik thought, sharp as a razor and every bit as deadly. This was surely the greenskins’ leader, nightmare royalty stepped from the pages of a children’s fae-tale to torment him.
The grot rapped its moon-staff against the ground, and its followers dropped to their knees. They bowed to their king and jabbered ‘Gloomspite! Da Gloomspite!’ over and over.
‘Enough, shut yer mouths,’ spat the grot king, its words thick and snarling but comprehensible. Borik felt sweat trickle down the back of his neck as the figure stalked closer and peered regally down at him. A cruel smile played at the corners of the grot’s wide mouth.
‘Oo are you then?’ asked the grot. ‘Talk, stunty, wot’s yer name?’
Borik tried to speak around whatever was gagging him. He could produce only a groan. The grot king scowled, pantomiming noticing Borik’s gag for the first time.
‘Oh speak up, zog’s sakes! And don’t talk wiv yer mouth full! Don’t yooz know yer addressin’ Skragrott da Loonking? You ain’t worthy, ya little scrutter. Someone get dis leg bone out of his gob, it’s makin’ me hungry!’
The grots cackled at their master’s jest, and the one with the alembics on his back hastened forwards. Borik heard more spider silk tear, and then blessedly the awful tasting object was ripped from his mouth. He spat bile as he saw the rotting bone now clutched in the grot’s hand.
‘Come on then, oo are ya?’ asked Skragrott, leaning closer. ‘And why woz you trying to sneak out of my city?’
‘Borik… Borik Jorgensson,’ he croaked. ‘I was leaving because… the place has… gone downhill of late.’
Skragrott blinked, then his face split in a broad leer.
‘Oh, Bad Moon’s blessings ladz, we’ve got one wot finks he’s funny.’ The grin turned hard and mean, and Skragrott brandished his skull-topped staff under Borik’s nose. The duardin stiffened as the skull’s jaw twitched, and a murmur of jumbled voices spilled from it.
‘Listen to me, stunty. You don’t want to be funny. You don’t want to be clever. All yooz want to be is helpful, and maybe you get out of this alive. Now you don’t look like dem uvver gits that fink they can stop us from taking wot’s rightfully ours. You ain’t a black-robe or a spear-boy. I should know the difference, we’ve snatched enough of ’em these last days. Nah, you’re something else and I want to know what. And I’m Skragrott da Loonking, so I always get what I want.’
‘I don’t care… if you’re the king of that rust-taken moon up there…’ panted Borik, his mouth bone dry and still full of that foul taste. ‘You’re a filthy grot and I’ll not tell you anything. Not that I’ve got anything to tell.’
Skragrott’s smile widened, showing an alarming array of fangs.
‘You best hope dat’s not true, stunty,’ he said. ‘I can drive ya mad. I can turn you into whatever ’orrible thing I please. Know why? Coz I ain’t da king of da Bad Moon. No, I’m its emissary!’ He shouted the last word, brandishing his staffs and eliciting a worshipful cry from the assembled grots.
‘You’re… a hrukni-faced little monster in a crown made of mushrooms,’ snarled Borik. ‘I spit on you and your ugly damned moon.’
The crack of his cheekbone breaking echoed through the chamber. Borik’s head jolted sideways with the blow, the ringing in his head redoubling. Skragrott hefted his skull staff, now spattered with Borik’s blood. He looked as though he were contemplating another blow. Instead, he allowed his leer to resurface.
‘I got business here, stunty,’ he said. ‘I’m doin’ the Bad Moon’s bidding, and I can’t be leavin’ nuffin’ to chance. You might just be some nobody, but you got a lot of guns and gear if dat’s true. Me, I reckon yooz a messenger or something, tryin’ to run off and get help. Tryin’ to spoil fings before the real fun begins. Well, lucky you, I got some time to spare. Da Loonshrine ain’t proper carved yet, and ’til it is we can’t do our ritual. So dat means my ladz get to run rampant for a while and ’ave some fun. And meanwhile, I get to ’ave some fun of my own, wiv you.’
‘Keen on the sound of your own voice, aren’t you?’ said Borik with a grimace. He tongued a loose tooth and winced. Blood trickled down his chin. ‘Why are you doing all this anyway?’
The grot king threw back his head and shrieked with laughter. The lunatic mirth cut off as suddenly as it began, and Borik noted with alarm that the other grots had backed away further. Clearly, this was a recognised sign of Skragrott’s patience wearing thin.
‘You think I’m some stupid little grot chief, gonna try to impress you by gabbin’ all my plans out just so yooz can run off wiv wot’s in my brainbox and tell your mates?’ asked Skragrott. He leaned in again, and this time Borik felt the crackle of barely suppressed power. The Loonking locked eyes with him, and it felt to Borik as though he teetered on the brink of some terrible precipice, powerless to pull himself back from the edge.
‘I’m the Bad Moon’s will made manifest,’ hissed Skragrott, his eyes glowing fiercely. ‘I’m malice, and I’m spite, and I’m cruelty and cunnin’. I’m da one that’s worthy, and soon enough I’m going to be the one everyone calls Master. But not before I find out what’s… in… your… skull…’ He punctuated each word with a smar
t rap of the bloodied skull between Borik’s eyes. The blows were sharp and painful, sending sharp jolts through Borik’s brain.
‘Not yet though,’ said Skragrott, straightening up. ‘For now, let’s see how you enjoy a bit of the Bad Moon’s generosity.’ So saying, the grot swung his other staff around so the glowing fungus at its tip was pointed straight at Borik. The duardin squirmed, unable to stop himself, desperate for that horrible object not to touch him. He was powerless to stop it, though. Skragrott tapped it once against Borik’s chest: just a gentle nudge, accompanied by a string of glottal sounds deep in the grot’s throat.
Then he stepped away with a wicked grin and swept from the chamber. The other grots hurried after their king, while the troggoth stomped across the chamber and settled heavily in one corner. It locked its dull gaze on Borik and then became still as stone.
Borik barely gave the monster a thought. His heart was racing painfully and there was a tight pain in his chest that he knew was nothing to do with panic. He felt awful pinching sensations deep inside his torso, and groaned at the sensation of something squirming deep inside him.
What in Grungni’s name should he do? Borik tried to restrain his panic. Was he about to burst open from within like the regent militant? He prayed to all the gods of Order that it wasn’t so. He might not always have been his best self, but he didn’t deserve so horrible a fate as that. The minutes dragged out, Borik waiting with horrified fear as the pinching, twitching feelings inside his chest continued. He felt his breathing getting ragged, and coughed hard, his chest convulsing as though something inside was tearing. His eyes widened as he saw glowing motes dancing on the air in front of his face. Had he coughed those up? What was going on inside his body? Borik’s skin crawled and his thoughts spun. Revulsion made his skin tingle. The grot had put something inside him. He couldn’t flee, couldn’t try to tear it out, couldn’t even move. He could only feel that awful squirming going on and on, only endure the tightness and convulsions of his chest, only give occasional wet coughs when he couldn’t control his hitching chest any longer, then moan in horror at the sight of the glowing spores that drifted lazily from his mouth to settle upon his body.
