by Warhammer
One grot was being towed along by a hound-like thing that strained at its leash and snuffled and snarled. It was mostly snout, Romilla saw, with beady eyes that stared malevolently ahead, a mouth stuffed full of sharp fangs, and a pair of stubby little clawed legs. Her heart beat faster as she saw the beast catch their scent, snapping its snout around suddenly, nostrils flaring. She gripped her hammer tight and placed a hand on Eleanora’s shoulder as the creature took off across the street towards them, but as its lead snapped taut its greenskin handler dragged it back with a bad-tempered yank. The grot snarled at his beast, which snapped and growled at him until a hard kick sent it scampering out in front again. Romilla relaxed slightly, and one by one the procession of grots vanished into the murk.
‘Too close,’ whispered Thackeray. ‘We’re almost there. Hurry.’ The watchman rose and set off again along the street, pistol drawn. Romilla followed.
A few minutes more brought them to an intersection. The street they were on sloped steeply uphill from here, while the road that met it crossways dropped away on both sides between the clustered roofs of houses.
‘It is located a short way up the hill on our left,’ said Eleanora. They advanced, passing dark and crumbling buildings that reminded Romilla of the flensed skulls that had dangled from the grots’ banner. This city was truly dead, she thought. The greenskins and their Bad Moon had killed it.
Ahead, they heard a ululating shriek. There was a muffled gunshot, its flare of fire barely visible further uphill. Everyone tensed.
‘How much further?’ hissed Thackeray.
Eleanora froze momentarily, eyes darting and lips moving soundlessly.
‘El, he doesn’t need it exact,’ whispered Romilla.
‘Fifteen yards, give or take a handful,’ whispered Eleanora, looking none too happy at being forced to approximate.
‘Move, uphill, fast,’ ordered Thackeray. ‘Keep low and quiet, and let’s hope this entrance of yours is there.’
They loped uphill, bent double and desperately trying to mind their footing. Romilla felt something crunch wetly under her boot, heard an insectile squeal, kept moving. A taller structure loomed suddenly on their left, a stone tower with a series of large dials on its front that reminded Romilla of clock faces. Below them was a metal door with an iron ring set into its surface.
‘That door,’ said Eleanora, pointing.
‘Rechter, get it open, the rest of you, eyes open, guns up,’ whispered Thackeray.
A burly watchman hurried forwards. He grabbed the metal ring and tried to turn it, cursing softly as his gloved hands slid on the clammy metal. Romilla brandished her hammer and put out an arm to shield Eleanora, who had drawn a pair of especially large and formidable looking pistols clearly of her own design. The other watchmen clustered close, putting their bodies between Eleanora and whatever had uttered that terrible shriek.
Now came the sound of slapping footfalls and sharp, gurgling breaths. A weird giggle skirled through the mists, getting closer by the second.
‘Rechter…’ urged Thackeray, as loudly as he dared.
‘I know, I know, I’m–’
Watchman Rechter never finished his sentence. One of the spore-sickened fell from above, dropping through the murk to land on him like some huge and horrible spider. Rechter was smashed flat with a cry and the crack of breaking bone. Three more infected burst from the mists as he fell, sprinting flat out down the hill. One had once been a portly noblewoman, whose tattered finery trailed behind her like a comet-trail and whose rouge had mixed with bloody froth on her cheeks. Another was a militiaman whose left arm was nothing more than a bloody stump.
The third was Taverton Grange.
The sight of their former commanding officer charging at them out of the mists was just enough to cause the watchmen to hesitate for a lethal split second. Yellow-eyed and screaming like a gheist, Grange launched himself through the air and hit a watchman with crunching force. The two of them bounced and rolled down the hill and out of sight.
The noblewoman ducked under a panicked halberd-jab and hit another watchman in a tackle around their midriff. The watchman was slammed onto his back, his head cracking painfully from the cobbles. The infected reared up, her throat bulged obscenely, and she vomited a stream of frothing filth into his open mouth and eyes.
The one-armed attacker Romilla intercepted with a thunderous hammer-blow to the face. His legs shot out in front of him and he crashed down amidst the fungi, thrashing out his death throes.
‘Rechter! Rechter, get that door open! Oh, damnation,’ spat Thackeray as Rechter and his attacker rose from the floor. Both of them gibbered, twitched and spat foam. Thackeray raised his pistol and squeezed the trigger. The shot rang out through the murk and watchman Rechter was thrown back against the metal door with a clang. He slid to the floor, smearing gore down the door as he went. Eleanora’s pistols barked, their muzzle flares magnesium white in the gloom, and the other infected simply came apart in a welter of blood.
‘Sigmar’s hammer, El, those are fearsome!’
Lieutenant Grange burst from the murk again, this time sprinting uphill, and swiped his talons at Romilla’s face. She reared back with a cry, feeling lines of fire rake across her skin. Romilla teetered on the edge of her balance, and the memory flashed up of her tripping in the feasting hall, of her falling as Hendrick was infected and turned. The thought of the same thing happening to Eleanora hit her like a thunderbolt. Anger, absolute boiling fury surged through Romilla, and a halo of blue-white light sprang into being about her temples as the power of the God-King flowed through her. She drove her forehead into Grange’s aristocratic nose with all the force she could muster, caving it in with a crunch of bone and sending him reeling back. Her hammer followed, swinging up under Grange’s chin so hard that it ripped his jaw clean off and sent it spinning through the air. Tongue dangling, foam bubbling from the ruin of his throat, Lieutenant Grange staggered and then toppled lifeless to the floor.
More gunshots rang out as the noblewoman and her victim came at the watchmen with feral howls. Romilla saw that Thackeray had shoved Rechter’s corpse unceremoniously aside and was straining with all his might at the slippery metal of the door’s ring. Grabbing Eleanora, she dashed across the street and threw her strength behind Thackeray’s. The door ring gave a rusted squeal as it finally turned, and then spun.
Romilla looked back. Four watchmen had fallen. Another was staggering and clawing spore-thick foam out of her eyes. She would turn any moment, Romilla knew. Lieutenant Grange’s first victim burst from the murk downslope, jutting jaw thick with new-sprouted tusks, yellow eyes staring. A bullet took the creature in the shoulder, but it kept coming. One of the surviving watchmen screamed at the sight, turned to run and took a taloned fist to the face. He fell like a sack of grain.
‘Get through the door,’ snarled Thackeray. Romilla nodded, understanding.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said and ducked through the doorway, Eleanora close behind. Thackeray followed and, with a last anguished glance into the street he heaved the door shut at their backs. It closed heavily, cutting off a panicked scream from the street beyond. Something hit the door from the other side with a dull clang, which repeated several times then stopped. Thackeray spun the wheel closed from their side, his teeth gritted.
Eleanora stared in shock but said nothing. Romilla laid a hand on Thackeray’s shoulder, but he shrugged it off.
‘Can those things open this door?’ he asked.
Romilla hefted her hammer and swung it in a tight arc that dented the wheel and buckled it sideways into its housing.
‘Not any more,’ she said.
‘Come on then,’ said Thackeray. ‘And let’s hope that this tunnel of yours exists, Ms VanGhest, or we just entombed ourselves.’
They were standing in a stone passage, claustrophobically tight and with only the faintest grey glow in its cor
ners. Thackeray lit his spark-lantern, painting everything in harsh white illumination. Romilla nodded her thanks and let him lead the way, gesturing for Eleanora to walk between them where she was least likely to be attacked. Eleanora had assured them this was the entrance to one of the pipe network’s monitoring stations, a site through which the pipes ran all the way from their source and then on in a radiating spread to the more well-to-do businesses and homes of Marketsway.
Sure enough, the tight corridor quickly emptied out onto an iron gantry that ran around the inside of the tower. Above, metal stairways and more gantries vanished up into darkness. Below, they dropped two more floors into a circular pit that was dominated by a huge ironclad device that looked to Romilla like an overly elaborate boiler. Thick forests of pipes spewed from one wall to plunge into the device, which spat them out as a tangle of thinner conduits that vanished off in many other directions.
‘Down there,’ said Eleanora, over the rumble and hiss of the machinery. ‘We need to follow the big pipes back to the pipehouse.’
They descended swiftly, their footfalls clanging hollow on the metal floors. Even here, the metal of the gantries and stairs was slick with slime and the walls furred with mould. Bioluminescent fungi sprouted around the boiler-machine’s base.
‘Is it still in operation?’ asked Romilla, surprised.
‘The function of the pipehouse is at least in part automated,’ replied Eleanora. ‘It has to be. If everyone got ill, or the building was evacuated or whatever else, if the system couldn’t regulate itself, it would soon explode and cause substantial damage.’
‘Which is precisely what we’re going to do to these filthy greenskins, isn’t it?’ asked Thackeray, scowling. His eyes had taken on a haunted, slightly manic look that Romilla both recognised and did not like the look of.
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘We just have to steel ourselves and do our duty in Sigmar’s name, no matter how painful that duty might be. You did the right thing, Thackeray.’
‘Don’t need your approval, knew what I was doing and why,’ said Thackeray stiffly. ‘Doesn’t mean they won’t all be waiting for me in the Land of Endings when my time comes though, does it?’
They stood in silence for a moment, their ears full of the hiss and bang of the boiler mechanisms. Eleanora swiftly checked over some dials and gauges, frowning and shaking her head.
‘Problem?’ asked Thackeray.
‘This doesn’t look right,’ she said, sounding distracted. ‘There’s… some damage… somewhere… We need to get moving, right away. The system’s pressure levels are slowly dropping, and if they deteriorate much further then the plan won’t succeed.’
‘Of course,’ sighed Thackeray. ‘Where?’
Eleanora pointed to where the dense nest of pipes flowed into the chamber. There was a crawlspace, just large enough for a human, which ran along the top of the pipes. Thick leather tarps had been laid over the pipes to allow people to crawl along them without getting scalded. Still, Romilla winced as she placed her hand on one. This would not be a comfortable experience.
‘Of course,’ said Thackeray again. ‘Soonest begun, soonest done. Eleanora, follow on my heels. Romilla, rear guard.’
Romilla raised an eyebrow and gestured for him to take the lead. Thackeray obliged, hauling himself up into the crawlspace with a grunt and a hiss of discomfort, and began crawling.
‘I hope our friends are having an easier time of things,’ said Eleanora before scrambling up onto the pipes.
‘I highly doubt it,’ sighed Romilla, quashing her worries as best she could and following the engineer into the hot, dark tunnel.
Aelyn ducked behind the wreckage of a cart. Stubby black arrows thunked into its opposite side, causing rot-wet wood to splinter. An arrowhead burst through the wood bare inches in front of her face, its barbed head dripping a viscous poison that sizzled where it dripped onto the cobbles.
‘They’ve got archers on the roof of the alchemists’ shop,’ she shouted. Then she rose, nocking her arrow, drawing and loosing all in one smooth motion before dropping back out of sight. A human archer wouldn’t even have had time to aim at a target. Aelyn’s sharp ears picked out the distinct thud of her shaft striking a grot in the chest, the bubbling wheeze of its breath and the clatter and thump as it rolled bonelessly down the slate roof and plunged to the cobbles below. She nocked another arrow, rose, loosed, dropped, then repeated the process again.
Several militia-militant slid in next to her, their shaved scalps, chainmail and robes distinctive. They rose from cover themselves and shot more arrows at the grot archers. Two of them ducked back down. The other toppled backwards with a greenskin’s arrow jutting from his cheek, its poison eating away at his flesh with a wet sizzle.
‘How much further until we reach Fountains Square?’ asked Aelyn. One militiaman just looked at her coldly. The other glanced back up the street as bands of watchmen and militia followed them in.
‘One more intersection, then a short stretch of street and we’ll be there,’ she said. ‘They said this was your plan. That true?’
‘I had a hand in it,’ said Aelyn, rising to loose off an arrow then dropping again as a shrill scream greeted her efforts.
‘Cheffing stupid plan,’ said the militiaman, and spat. ‘Going to get us all killed.’
Aelyn replied with a level stare. The woman stared back, then flinched as another volley of arrows hit the side of the wagon. Fewer this time, noted Aelyn.
‘Move up! Move up!’ That was Watchman First Class Shen’s voice, raised from somewhere amidst the main advance. They had started as a small party, slinking through the carcass of their dead city, but as they had got closer to the square they had been joined by one band of watchmen or militia after another. Aelyn had recognised Watchman Kole amongst the newcomers, shooting her a nod and receiving a fierce grin in return.
The greenskins had responded swiftly to their advance, grots spilling from the shells of buildings, dropping from shattered windows and clambering up out of pits and shattered sewer gratings. Initially their attacks had been piecemeal and ill organised, easily repulsed with volleys of shots and a few well placed blows. As the defenders of Draconium advanced, however, the greenskin numbers thickened rapidly. As they passed beneath an arching stone bridge hung with dangling human corpses, bellowing troggoths had emerged from the shadows to plough into their ranks with clubs swinging.
Flapping monsters with bat-wings and gaping maws had swooped down to bite watchmen’s heads clean off. Spider-mounted greenskins had ambushed the advancing forces several times, galloping straight down sheer stone walls and scuttling along the undersides of road tunnels while emitting shrill war cries.
Still the Draconium forces had pushed on, and now they were within sight of their goal. No wonder Shen was urging the advance; at the rate they were going, Aelyn thought, they might actually succeed in driving the grots off!
Another hail of arrows fell from the rooftops to the right of the street. She popped up for a moment to see more grots scurrying along the slates to add their shots to the volleys. Black arrows fell amongst the advancing watchmen, and several crumpled.
‘We need to clear those roofs or this push will stall,’ said Aelyn. A robe-bundled figure dropped into cover beside her, and she saw Bartiman’s tired eyes glinting at her from under his cowl.
‘I think I may be able to do something about that,’ he said. ‘This will put the terrors up them.’
Bartiman produced a hideous little doll from under his robes, a fetish made from twists of cloth and splinters of bone. The thing’s dead glass eyes stared from a face made of black hair and jagged flint. It made Aelyn shudder. Bartiman gripped the fetish firmly in one fist, allowing its sharp shards to puncture his flesh until they drew blood. At the same time, he began a muttered chant that grew swiftly in volume and complexity until he was spitting twisted syllables while blood
drizzled from his fist onto the cobbles. The surviving militiamen exchanged a nervous glance and edged away as far as they dared.
Then Bartiman punched his fist skywards and shouted out.
‘Nar, Alhamar, Shyisha-Nar Kon Olynder-Nar!’
A green glow radiated from within Bartiman’s clenched fist, growing into an eldritch beacon of cold emerald light. One by one, flares of the same grave-light burst into being above his head, whirling faster and faster until a howling vortex of unnatural energies haloed the death wizard. With a scream of effort he flung his hands out, towards the rooftops on which the grot archers crouched. The vortex of energy billowed outwards, and as it did so, it split into dozens of wailing spectral figures whose yawning maws and crooked bones were hidden beneath clinging shrouds. Translucent and terrifying, the swarm of gheists boiled along the rooftops, passing through shocked greenskins as though they were no more solid than smoke. Where each gheist burst from the back of a grot, it did so in a spray of ectoplasm and blood. Their victims’ flesh crumpled inwards like old parchment, their eyes shrivelling and their teeth falling from their gums. Thumps and thuds echoed along the street as desiccated grot corpses rained from the rooftops.
The few surviving greenskins turned and fled, diving into attic windows or scampering away along ridges to escape. Bartiman stood tall and threw out his arms as the screaming gheists spiralled up and plunged back towards the humans in the street below.
