by Warhammer
They tingled where they landed, and his flesh crawled anew at the thought of whatever horrors their touch might bring. At last his shortness of breath and the awful dizziness of Borik’s concussion conspired to plunge him back into a black well of unconsciousness. The duardin welcomed the feeling.
But oblivion didn’t last nearly long enough. He was dragged back to wakefulness by a drenching splash of cold water that made him gasp and choke. His eyes opened to a chamber now lit by glowing braziers full of coals. Borik took in the gaggle of grots, now joined by several more freakish creatures. Spider-like clusters of eyes stared at him pitilessly. Weird fungal bat-things fluttered back and forth over pointed black hoods. Something in a huge, grotesque mask cocked its head as it stared at him.
Borik’s peripheral vision was tinged with shimmering colours, warped shades of burned crimson and lurid green and sour blue that flickered in and out every time he moved his head. He coughed again, then froze in horror as he looked down at himself. Borik couldn’t see his chest, only his arms and legs strapped into the chair’s restraints. They were dotted with dozens of bulbous, flesh-coloured toadstools that glowed from within with a mottled light. He felt sick to his stomach as he realised some of the growths had sprouted tufts of body hair the same colour as his. They were fungi, but they were formed from his flesh. He could feel them now as part of him, pulsating, quivering. Borik couldn’t help himself, his gorge rose and he retched dryly. All it achieved was to spill another cloud of glowing spores across his body, and he felt misery and madness threaten. What grotesque thing was he becoming?
‘Don’t have to stay that way,’ said a familiar voice, full of mock pity. Borik turned his head to see Skragrott stalk around the chair. The grot reached out a claw and flicked one of the toadstools, which wobbled flabbily. Borik felt it as though Skragrott had poked him in the arm, and just managed to keep down another retching heave.
‘I don’t think he’s so funny now, is he?’ sneered Skragrott.
His grot attendants probably couldn’t understand his words, Borik thought, but they surely caught his meaning as they all sniggered and hissed.
‘I can stop it, and I can turn yooz back,’ said Skragrott, who had halted next to one of the burning braziers. ‘I got power over da ’shrooms, see? But first you got to tell me what I want to know. Who you workin’ for? Why woz you running off, and where to? What d’you know about my plan?’
Borik shook his head and groaned. ‘I don’t know anything. I came here…’ he stopped to spit out a mouthful of spores, trying desperately to avoid his flesh as he did so. ‘I came here alone and I’m leaving the same way.’
Skragrott shook his head and pinched the bridge of his long, hooked nose.
‘Dat’s not what Nukkit here says, though, is it?’ he asked, gesturing to the bloated grot with the alchemist’s set on his back. ‘Nukkit here is my number one Brewgit, and he says he seen you at dat big glitzy feast-thing wot the city’s boss-king threw. Da one where we ’shroomed him good!’ Skragrott cackled nastily. ‘Nukkit likes to watch his best work, see. Spent years perfectin’ that brew, had to delve into some dark ’n ’orrible places and make sum terrible dealz wiv terrible fings, so after him and his ladz switched dat barrel over in da kitchens, he snuck onto a balcony right up ’igh and watched da fun. And zog me, but what does Nukkit see? He sees yooz and your mates runnin’ about tryin’ to save everyone and spoil everyfing!’ Skragrott’s screech of rage was so sudden that it made Borik jump. The grot smashed his staff into the brazier with a resounding clang, and hot coals showered across the chamber’s floor. Sparks danced in the air, and Borik felt Skragrott’s red eyes boring into him through the rising heat haze.
‘’Urt him,’ snarled the Loonking, and his grot underlings closed in around Borik. Daggers flashed in the gloom. Talons dripped poison, and flasks dripped acids. A green-skinned fist brandished a jar full of scrabbling beetles with vicious mandibles and spiky limbs.
The minutes that followed were the longest and amongst the most miserable of Borik’s life, a cavalcade of horrors and agony that his mind fled from as best it could. When at last Skragrott recalled his underlings with a rap of his staff against the floor, Borik’s vision was swimming and every part of him screamed with raw agony.
‘That’s it fer now,’ said Skragrott. ‘Not fun, lyin’ to the Loonking, is it? I could stop the transformation, ungrow them flesh-shrooms, but you fibbed to me, stunty, and I don’t like them wot fib to me. Makes me think they’re up to sumfink sneaky wot I won’t like. So, have fun sproutin’ and we’ll talk again later.’
Borik managed to grunt weakly, the best show of defiance he had in him, and Skragrott stalked from the chamber. As his consciousness wavered, Borik’s eyes again settled on his gear. There was no way he could reach it; that option was closed to him. But as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat, he felt a slight pressure against the base of his back. There was a cold lump there, and as he felt it, Borik realised that he had an escape plan after all.
He just had to work out how to enact it.
A workable scheme still hadn’t come to him by the time Skragrott and his retinue returned. This time, as well as his gaggle of hangers-on, the Loonking had something in tow, a wagon of some sort heaved along on rusty wheels by another massive troggoth. Skragrott stopped and looked over Borik with a critical eye before shaking his head ruefully.
‘Well you’re a zoggin’ state and no mistake,’ he said.
Borik knew it was true. The fungal curse was consuming his flesh, he could feel it spreading and pinching with every passing minute. The fleshy toadstools had doubled in size since Skragrott’s last visit, and to his revulsion a few of them were beginning to show signs of rudimentary features. A shallow pit here that flared like a snuffling nostril. A translucent blister there that could conceivably be an eye. One of the damned things was growing teeth, which jutted obscenely out of pink flesh that looked for all the realms like a gum. Borik could feel that his sanity was fraying along with his anatomy. He could feel skin and muscle softening and becoming rubbery and pliant, his physical form slouching and slowly breaking down. His body was one thirsty, hungry howl of agony, and each time he glanced at himself his revulsion at his own mutating flesh built. He wanted to claw at himself and scream. Instead, he could only sit and suffer as he felt himself teetering upon the brink of madness. He felt sick. He wanted to sob and giggle all at once. But he was Kharadron, and so he did neither.
‘Let’s try again, before you’re too far gone to speak proper,’ suggested Skragrott.
Borik grunted at him. Skragrott produced an amulet from within his stinking robes and brandished it in Borik’s face. It was crudely carved, as though it had fought against chisel and awl. It looked like an idiot’s approximation of a staring eye.
‘Who are yer mates?’ asked Skragrott. ‘Where are yer mates? And what are they up to? Tell me all dat, and I’ll fix ya. I swear it on the Bad Moon itself. But you lie to me, and dis here loonstone trinket is gonna light up like da Bad Moon isself.’
Insane as it seemed, Borik believed Skragrott truly would fix him. Even with his vision pulsating between psychedelia and the colours of putrefaction, even with his hearing echoing weirdly and vile itching sensations shuddering through his tortured body, Borik was sure he heard sincerity in the grot’s tone. Skragrott could fix this curse, and if he was willing to swear on his deity, he must genuinely be prepared to do so.
The temptation was immense. Borik could save himself from this ghastly torment. He could stop the revolting transformation that was wracking his body, maybe even be set free at last from this damned city he had never wished to come to in the first place. What loyalty did he owe his former comrades anyway? They had cut him loose! They had let him walk away! The code was clear, you stuck your neck out for your shipmates but everyone else was just a mark to be profited from. What profit was there in continuing to undergo torture for tho
se who were no longer a part of his crew?
A single thought cut through his exhausted delirium, a clear memory from maybe a thrice-turning before Varlen donned that damned crown. It hadn’t been a special evening, hadn’t mattered at all in the grand scheme of things, but it had mattered to Borik. They’d finished a job watching over some ore caravans travelling between Char-Vale and Hammerhal, and he remembered it now because he had almost been dragged into a Lashrat nest. He certainly would have been if his comrades hadn’t risked their own lives to come back for him. After making it to their destination in one piece, they had taken their pay to their favourite ale house, the Vandus’ Revenge. They had been well into their cups, just laughing about some stupid jest of Varlen’s. Hendrick, quietly amused, happy in his garrulous brother’s shadow. Romilla sat close to him as she always tried to be, and Eleanora close to her in turn, utterly absorbed in whatever gadget she was tinkering with. Bartiman had been holding court and Olt had laughed so hard he spilled his ale. Even Aelyn had raised a smile. Borik remembered that night – how he had felt, for just a moment, that if he never took to the skies again he might feel contentment with that, providing he had these good souls to guide his course.
They might not have understood the artycles of the code, might not have seen the sense of what Borik had been trying to tell them, but they had been good and true comrades. He wouldn’t betray them now.
‘I have nothing… to say to you… grot…’ spat Borik. His voice sounded thick and weird in his ears, as though he might be melting from the inside out.
The crude stone pendant in Skragrott’s hand glimmered with a sickly light that hurt to look upon. It turned one side of the Loonking’s grotesque face corpse-pale, and reflected in his maddened eyes.
‘I was very much hoping that’d be your attitude,’ said Skragrott with a grin, stowing the amulet back inside his robes. ‘I’m goin’ to make you talk anyway, just so’s ya know. But before I do, let’s have a quick look at what you got in store for ya when I’m done!’
He gripped the tarpaulin that covered the wagon and ripped it dramatically aside to reveal a wheeled cage with thick metal bars. Borik moaned in horror at what he saw slumped inside. Bulging, rubbery flesh squirmed and twisted. Flesh-fungi pulsated, glowing from within as they blinked mutant eyes and slathered with sprouted tongues. Long, floppy tendrils beat weakly against the bars and coiled around them, trailing rubbery digits that bent and flexed revoltingly and left slime trails in their wake. Somewhere in amongst that bulbous mass of flesh and fungi, Borik saw two human eyes staring at him in deranged misery.
Kasmit. That had been the watchman’s name.
Kasmit.
Borik looked away, breathing hard, hanging tightly to the last shreds of his sanity. He felt nothing but pity for the poor thing that had once been a man, trapped in that cage for the grots’ amusement. Yet in that instant Borik also felt a sliver of hope. He could escape this yet. Silently, he thanked Kasmit and readied himself.
‘So now you know what bein’ unhelpful has earned you, it’s time to make it up to me,’ said Skragrott. He turned to his assembled minions and snarled out a series of words. Borik caught the name Nukkit, and cringed back as he saw the grot alchemist shambling over. Nukkit gave him a horrible leer as he cranked a spigot on the side of his alchemy set and let a reeking purple fluid drizzle into a test-tube that he held up to catch it.
‘Troof water,’ said Skragrott brightly. ‘Makes you tell us whatever we want, don’t it? Could’ve just given you this to start off, but… nah, not much fun, izzit? Already lost control of your body, stunty. Brain and gob go next!’
Borik coughed weakly, dribbling spores onto himself, and tried to gasp out some words. As he did so, he relaxed what remained of his left arm and pulled it slowly back towards him. He felt his rubbery flesh tug and give around the metal manacle that held his wrist down. Bright jolts of pain shot up his arm as fleshy toadstools were dragged under the manacle’s metal edge. He stopped. Any further and they’d snap, and for all he knew spray blood or spores of Grungni-knew-what all over the place. He couldn’t give himself away. Not yet.
‘Too late to start talkin’ now, stunty. Ain’t goin’ to earn you anything,’ spat Skragrott, but all the same he stepped forwards alongside Nukkit. The bloated grot leaned in and gripped Borik’s jaw, squishing the rubbery flesh and opening his mouth like a spout. The sensation was a new kind of revulsion, but Borik steeled himself.
Any second now, he would escape. He had them where he wanted them. He remembered again that feeling as he had sat in the torchlight and laughed with his friends, and he let it give him strength.
‘Know… a… secret… you… want… to… know…’ he gurgled, and Skragrott held up a taloned finger. Nukkit paused with the potion before Borik’s face.
‘If this is you bein’ funny again, you’ll regret it,’ said the Loonking. ‘Go on, what’s yer big secret? Never know, might even save ya yet.’
‘I took another… in case the first one… didn’t work…’ croaked Borik, then as Skragrott blinked at him in confusion he wrenched his arm backwards with all his strength. Skin split and stalks tore. Blood sprayed in stinking squirts, and with what remained of his strength Borik bent his rubbery arm around behind himself and pressed one thick thumb down upon the firing stud of Eleanora’s spare bomb.
‘I’ll greet my ancestors with your skull at my belt,’ spat Borik. The last thing he saw was Skragrott’s face twisting in an expression of horror, and something huge slamming into the Loonking from the side. There was a searing blast of light and heat, and Borik Jorgensson made good his escape.
The echoes of the blast subsided. Black smoke filled the chamber. Little remained of the duardin or the chair he had been strapped to, barring blackened ruin and drifting cinders. A bloated grot lay in a heap of smashed glass nearby, his flesh dissolving in the soup of lethal compounds that had spilled from his alembics to douse him.
Another corpse lay beside him, a huge one so badly blackened and burned that even its troggoth flesh could not regenerate the damage. Still the body stirred, the stump of one arm lifting slowly up and then flopping aside.
Skragrott the Loonking crawled out from under his slain troggoth bodyguard with a look of pure, murderous rage on his scorched features.
‘They’re all going to suffer fer that, stunty,’ he snarled, waving off the scorched and frantic grots that swarmed to help him up. ‘I’ll make zoggin’ sure they all suffer fer that…’
Chapter Fifteen
PLANS
‘We agree, then? We blow it up?’ asked Romilla. She leant over the desk in the safehouse office, her expression grim and her injured side tightly bandaged. The wound was painful, but she had found the sensation brought clarity and revelation. So often did one have to suffer for Sigmar’s gifts, she thought.
‘Seems the only safe way to dispose of so huge a quantity of such a perilous poison,’ replied Watchman Thackeray. ‘Sigmar knows we can’t risk physical contact with the stuff. Can’t exactly tip it away, either. It’d end up in the canal one way or another and we’d end up doing the grots’ work for them.’
‘If I knew more about its composition, I might be able to formulate something that could neutralise its potency?’ suggested Bartiman, who sat on a stool with a spare cloak bundled around his shoulders.
‘That would take time, and I do not believe we have much of that left,’ said Aelyn. Her eyes flicked to Eleanora, also seated, grey skinned and sweating profusely.
‘A few brave souls have reached us from other safehouses, but there’s a lot more have vanished without trace,’ said Watchman Shen, his tone dubious. ‘There’s still no sign of Lieutenant Grange. At this point we’re assuming he’s lost. Either way, from what sketchy intelligence we’ve been able to gather I can tell you that even with survivors of the watch and the militia combined, our numbers aren’t great.’
�
�If we throw everything into a strike at the grots’ poison, we may lose any chance of recapturing the city from them,’ said Watchman Marika.
Romilla felt a surge of sympathy for her, for all the people of this city who had not asked for nor invited the curse that had come upon them. But she had to make them see.
‘I wanted to believe this city could be saved, but we barely made it to the guild house and back alive,’ she said earnestly. ‘You’ve heard the reports just as we have. The Slump, vanished into a seething pit of a billion hungry insects. Greenskins raising fungal gibbets in the squares of Marketsway and ransacking every home and business for victims. Spiders big as town houses spinning webs between what’s left of the Rookswatch towers, while the smaller ones prowl the rooftops and string cocooned victims up from chimneypots and weather vanes. Then there’s the devastation from the meteors, the spore clouds still swirling through the skies, the infection spreading through what’s left of the populace… Borik may have been an unsympathetic oaf about it, but I’m sorry, he was right. Draconium is lost.’
Silence followed Romilla’s words. Somewhere in the middle distance came the faint sounds of screaming, swiftly cut off. Elsewhere, jabbering voices rose in a gleeful chorus of the damned. Floorboards creaked above them and everyone jumped.
‘Just our sentries,’ said Shen, though he kept a hand on his pistol all the same.
‘Captain Morthan entrusted you–’ began Marika hotly, but Thackeray shook his head.
‘They’re right, Marika. It’s a hard dose to swallow but we lost this fight before we even had a chance to draw our blades.’
