by Warhammer
‘No,’ spat Romilla, and ran for the stairs with all her might. The ground lurched again, and she fell forwards, dropping her hammer in order to grab for the stair rail.
There came an awful screech of tortured metal and the gantry tore away, dropping from beneath their feet. Romilla screamed with effort as she hung on to the hot metal of the stair rail with one hand and clutched Eleanora’s wrist with the other. The engineer wailed and clung hard to Romilla with both hands, her legs kicking in thin air.
The two of them hung suspended. Pain shot through every inch of Romilla’s body as she strained to hang on. Below, the huge spider hissed and clicked as though in triumph. Machinery clattered, clanged and banged. Steam hissed. Spiders skittered closer, gathering for the kill. Adrenaline made everything seem inescapably sharp and clear.
‘Sigmar… Give… Me… STRENGTH!’ Romilla roared, and the glow of her amulet became a dazzling star. She felt fresh vitality flow through her limbs and swung Eleanora as hard as she could. The engineer yelped in shock as she was propelled upwards, landing sprawled on the stairs with a clang. Romilla hung on grimly as the huge spider hunched itself, preparing to spring and snap her from the railing like a choice morsel.
Then Eleanora was gripping her by the scruff of her robes, sweating and swaying as she pulled Romilla higher. Romilla pendulumed her weight and managed to snatch the edge of the dangling stairs with her other hand. She hauled herself upwards, screaming. There came a rush of air and a terrible snap of chitin.
Romilla dragged herself up onto the stairs and looked down. Blood flowed, and she groaned in pain. Two toes from her right foot had been severed by the slashing blades of the giant spider’s mandibles, taken off along with the tip of her boot as cleanly as if it had used a straight razor.
‘That… is all you get…’ she panted, and spat defiantly down into the huge creature’s eyes.
Amulet glowing, Romilla pulled herself to her feet and hobbled up the creaking stairs to the platform above. At least the shock of near death seemed to have shaken Eleanora back to consciousness, she thought, though for how long she didn’t know.
The two of them stopped above the shuddering, hissing mass of machinery. The fires from below underlit the complex mass of controls set into the brass console at the platform’s heart. The moonlight from above turned its upper surfaces pallid green. Below them, Romilla could hear the masses of spiders closing in.
‘It’s up to you now, El,’ she said.
‘What about you?’ asked Eleanora, looking at her blearily.
‘I’ll pray, and I’ll protect you for as long as I can,’ said Romilla. ‘And I am sorry, my girl, that I couldn’t–’
Her breath caught in her throat, and she couldn’t finish the words.
‘It’s all right,’ said Eleanora. ‘They took away my father, but they gave me a mother. Thank you.’
Tears squeezed from Romilla’s eyes and her heart thumped painfully as Eleanora turned and staggered to the controls. She fell heavily against them, leaning all her weight on the console, and frowned down with fierce concentration.
Romilla coughed against the tightness in her throat and limped to stand beside Eleanora. Her amulet was still glowing fiercely, and in its light the young engineer didn’t look quite so ill.
‘Can you do it?’ asked Romilla.
Eleanora’s eyes darted across the switches and dials, the flashing green and crimson bulbs that illuminated small glass domes. Her focus sharpened as the challenge consumed her mind, though her eyes were no less bloodshot or red-ringed for it.
‘I… no…’ she said miserably. ‘I can’t. See, here and here,’ she pointed, but Romilla barely heard her. Her ears were ringing, so sharp was her sense of anger and disappointment. They had given all this, fought all this way, and there was nothing Eleanora could do. For the barest instant, the light of Romilla’s amulet flickered like a candle flame in a high wind.
No, she thought. She would not give in to despair again. Not while Eleanora lived. She tried to focus on what the engineer was telling her.
‘…and without that differential I can close off the locking valves and direct the force, but there simply isn’t enough pressure in the system.’
‘How could you get enough pressure?’ asked Romilla. The platform was swaying now, and awful clanging sounds rang from below. She didn’t have to look to know what was causing them as it crept closer and closer.
‘There isn’t enough left in the system,’ said Eleanora, banging the console in frustration. ‘Unless Sigmar wants to send us the most perfectly timed eruption in the history of the Mortal Realms, we just can’t achieve the differential to release the build-up from this chamber and send it through the system. Unless…’ Eleanora gasped and slapped her palm against the metal. ‘It’s the… I’m having trouble… so stupid…’
Something huge and dark moved below them, blocking out the rising firelight and causing the gantry to creak and shift.
‘What, girl, what?’ urged Romilla.
‘If I disable the safety valves and purge everything in this chamber through the reserve pipes, it would draw a huge surge of energy up from the vents and blast it all through the machinery in this chamber. You wouldn’t need a pressure differential, the quantity of steam and fire generated would flood through the system and trigger an explosion even larger than we planned.’
A massive leg rose into view, clanging down on the edge of the gantry and effortlessly folding the iron guard rail down like crumpled paper.
‘What are you waiting for, El? Do it!’
Eleanora looked at her, and Romilla saw naked terror in her eyes.
‘It will set fire to everything in this chamber the moment the surge comes through. We’ll all burn. Like…’ she trailed off.
Like her father, Romilla thought. Oh Sigmar, why must you be so cruel? Romilla looked up at the glass roof above them. Escape, tantalisingly near yet wholly out of reach. There was a good twenty feet between them and it, and none of the ceiling’s arching gantries was close enough for them to reach. There would be no escape upwards, nor down through the tide of scuttling bodies that converged upon them. There would be no escape at all, she thought. The stark fact of it brought acceptance and sorrow in equal measure.
‘We’ll do it together,’ Romilla said soothingly, placing her hand over Eleanora’s. ‘I am with you. Sigmar is with you.’
Another huge arachnid limb clanged down on the platform’s edge. The gantry gave a terrible moan of buckling metal as it began to tilt under the spider’s weight.
‘All right,’ said Eleanora. ‘Better than… that.’ She threw a series of switches, working with feverish speed. Below, Romilla heard a grinding roar building. Steam howled and whistled. The chamber shook.
As though understanding what was coming, the vast spider redoubled its efforts and the platform tilted harder. Ironwork screamed and tore. In Romilla’s peripheral vision she saw skittering shapes spilling over the railing and stalking towards them. She and Eleanora had killed more than their share of spiders in the last few minutes; their broodmates were wary. She ignored them. She kept her eyes on Eleanora as the engineer flicked a last handful of switches and grabbed a metal dial.
‘Now?’ she asked, shaking.
‘Now,’ answered Romilla.
In the glow of her amulet, Eleanora turned the dial sharply to the right. There was a roar like dragon’s breath, an earthquake shudder, and the panicked squeal of dozens of huge spiders. Every indicator on the console flashed red. With a cacophony of screaming metal and rushing steam, the machinery in the chamber began to come apart. Pipes tore away from their housings and crashed together, belching boiling vapour. Glass valves smashed from the pressure behind them. Rivets shot through the air like bullets to ricochet from the stonework of the chamber. There came a sound like cannonfire as the huge panes of glass forming the ceiling cracked and shuddered. Romilla fe
lt Eleanora’s hand close on her arm like a vice and turned her head to look at the young engineer in surprise.
Eleanora was staring at her with feverish intensity, then back at the shuddering console.
‘What?’ asked Romilla, shouting to make herself heard. Her ears were ringing.
‘The pressure shift is too much for the radial support pipes!’ shouted Eleanora. ‘The overpressure is bowing the structure! I think there’s enough spare if I can just…’
Romilla shook her head in bewilderment, grabbing the console for support as the gantry groaned and tilted. Something vast and dark moved behind them, but she dared not look.
‘What are you saying?’ she yelled, but Eleanora was bent over the console, working the controls with feverish intensity. She gave a snarl of frustration and smacked one hand against the metal.
‘I hate not being able to think clearly!’ she exclaimed. ‘I forgot to account for the structural warping. If I can trap enough pressure in the nearest vent-pipes now that they’re blocked, I might be able to blow their internal seals and cause a localised explosion that will blast a support stanchion free without weakening our blast wave! If I get it right it will punch right through the wall and give us a bridge to exit by. But I can’t calculate the variables in this condition. Romilla, the pipe might not blow, the stanchion might fall wrong, we might get caught by spiders or consumed in the explosion if we’re too slow. I–’
Romilla looked at the amulet blazing white in her hand, then at Eleanora’s anguished expression. Even at a time like this, she thought, the girl found it so hard to act without certainty.
‘All we have now is faith,’ shouted Romilla. ‘If it fails, then we die. If we fail to act, we die. Just do it and pray to Sigmar for his aid!’
Eleanora bit her lip so hard that Romilla thought she would draw blood. Her hand hovered over a brass switch, fingers twitching as though she longed to count off on them even as fire leapt around them and the platform shrieked.
‘Eleanora, now!’ yelled Romilla.
The engineer vented a yell of frustration and snatched at the switch. There came a rumbling groan from the machineries below them, which rose to a tea-kettle shriek. Three glass gauges on the console burst in quick succession, showering Romilla and Eleanora with shards. Then came a deafening bang that echoed from amidst the background roar of fire and steam and buckling metal.
A level below the platform, a fifty-foot-high support stanchion screamed like the damned as it tore loose in a cloud of steam. It toppled sideways like a felled tree and crashed into the chamber wall. Tons upon tons of metal hit the stonework like a battering ram and sundered it. A ragged wound was torn into the side of the structure. Sickly moonlight spilled through the rent. Romilla’s eyes widened as the stanchion ground to a halt barely a foot below them, sunk into the stonework at a drunken angle.
A bridge.
Eleanora had done it.
‘Eleanora, you are a bloody marvel!’ Romilla shouted, grabbing at the console as she hauled herself and Eleanora towards the platform’s upper edge. An awful sense of vertigo gripped her, and the drop to the floor below yawned cavernous and filled with dancing flames.
Steam jetted madly around them. Overstressed machineries howled. Spiders hissed and chittered as they scuttled closer, scaling the steeply tilted platform. Eleanora cringed.
‘We have to jump,’ urged Romilla. ‘Over the railing, we scramble along the bridge, and we get clear. You’ve given us a chance!’
‘I can’t,’ gasped Eleanora, looking imploringly at Romilla. ‘My foot.’
‘You can, and you will,’ Romilla replied, her voice like iron. Her amulet was glowing like a fiery blue star, now, its light reflecting in Eleanora’s wide, frightened eyes.
The engineer gave a mute nod. They hauled themselves atop the railing, snatched one another’s hands and, even as a tide of arachnid horrors bore down upon them, they leapt and scrambled across the bridge. Behind them, the overloaded machines vented a monstrous blast of energy through the pipes of Draconium’s heating system, sending it racing away towards Fountains Square. An annihilating tide of fire billowed up from the rift and consumed everything in the chamber.
Bartiman felt the ground shudder beneath him. Aelyn’s body still lay atop his. She, combined with the vermin corpses of the grots she had slain, had all but buried the elderly wizard and hidden him from sight. They had also pinned him in place, so feeble had he become, and it had taken him long minutes to squirm and shove his way up through the carrion heap.
Part of Bartiman just wanted to hide beneath the bodies until death took him. Sigmar knew he had no desire to see that damned moon again before he passed. But the fear of suffocation had got him moving, that and the horror of his friend’s corpse laying sprawled atop him.
Damn me for a useless old fool, he thought. I can at least give Aelyn her rites before this nightmare ends.
But now, still trapped beneath several bodies and barely able to see the twilit sky, Bartiman felt everything begin to shake.
‘No, I don’t believe it,’ he whispered. Despite everything, Bartiman felt a fierce pride as the rumble grew to a howling roar that seeped up from beneath the cobbles. Bartiman choked out a dry laugh, heaving aside a last corpse and managing to haul himself into a sitting position amidst the bodies.
He was in time to see the eyes and mouth of the greenskin idol glow like furnace fires. Jets of steam blasted skywards around the idol, blowing shrieking grots high into the air. He saw a troggoth consumed by a sudden eruption of flame, just as it was about to swing its club through a reeling mass of watchmen. The regal grot with the moon-fungus staff spun, a look of horror on its face, and Bartiman felt a savage satisfaction at the thing’s look of sudden panic. That sense was only slightly spoiled when, a moment later, the grot vanished amidst a filthy puff of green smoke to leave its lackeys wailing in terror at its sudden disappearance.
‘Spit… on your… plans…’ rasped Bartiman. ‘And… spit on… your ugly… damned… Bad Moon.’
The explosion was titanic. It was apocalyptic. It washed out Bartiman’s senses and threw him backwards into the heaped bodies with bone-breaking force. It obliterated the poison stocks, evaporated the ground water, and incinerated the warring armies of grots and humans still entangled together at the heart of the square.
Bartiman felt rather than saw the entire heart of Fountains Square bulge upwards like a huge bubble, then burst in a spray of flame and cobbles and flailing bodies.
Debris rained down, trailing smoke, pulverising the corpses around him, and Bartiman took a deep breath as he prepared for his end at last. It was long overdue, he supposed, and at least they had avenged their friends.
Then the heart of the square caved in, thundering down into a huge pit. Bartiman began to slide, felt panic overwhelm his fatalism, clawed frantically at the sliding corpses around him. Something blunt and heavy smacked him in the head, and he knew no more.
Epilogue
DUSK
Orlen Drell cowered in the mouth of a storm drain, shying away from the touch of the glowing fungi that half-filled it. Even driven mad and hollowed out by hunger, he had not dared to remain out in the moonlight. He had grasped soon enough that its rays brought pain. Yet neither had he been fool enough to crawl far into the dark spaces beneath the city. He was a beaten and bloody fugitive, hiding in terror from the monsters that moved in the darkness, and in his more lucid moments he wondered how he had possibly survived this waking nightmare for as long as he had.
Drell had scraped off the fungal growths that had sprouted from his flesh. The process had left him shivering and bloodied, but he was too frightened to seek out any kind of medical supplies, nor even food or water. He certainly wouldn’t countenance trying to eat the mushrooms growing around him in the dark; that way led to a certain and horrible death. Instead he simply crouched, balled up and stiff in th
e dark, while he waited for the next horror to manifest itself.
Perhaps it was how far he had strained his senses in his quest to stay alive, but Drell felt the change coming before he saw it. Tremors shook the air. Drell tensed.
A dull rumble reached his ears, a sound that reverberated through air and stone alike and grew slowly but inexorably. The tunnel shuddered, and Orlen fumbled to steady himself in his awkward position. Then came a reverberant boom, and another, and another. The drain shuddered and cracks spiderwebbed its walls. Orlen was torn between paralysis and flight. He didn’t know where he should go – back out into the light that stung and sickened him, or back into the darkness where some terrible thing would surely take his life.
Orlen gave a whimper of alarm as the air pulsed. A thrumming pressure beat against his eardrums and made his heart flutter in his chest. The feeling increased, and Orlen’s whimper became a wail as a vortex of air funnelled along the storm drain and sucked him helplessly towards its entrance. He fought against it, digging his nails in until they splintered, but the pull of the air was inexorable. His wail became a frantic screech as he was dragged through a slimy mass of toadstools that themselves shuddered and tore in the howling gale. Orlen was a few yards from the mouth of the drain, almost back into the sickly pale light of the moon and fighting frantically, when there came another boom, this time so deafeningly loud as to leave his ears ringing. It was accompanied by a vicious pressure wave that replaced the howling vortex and shoved Orlen back along the drain like a ramrodded cannonball.
Orlen’s head spun. He was all but insensible, his senses overwhelmed by unnatural stimuli. For a time, he simply lay still as death, breathing and feeling his heart pump.
Then Orlen realised that something had changed.
He scrambled around into as best a crouch as he could manage in the tight space. He squinted against the glow that filled the mouth of the drain.
Not moonlight. Not the poisonous pale green rays that had sickened the city for so long now. Orlen saw the gold and rose shades of sunset spilling along the storm drain, and even that simple sight was enough to slow his hammering heart a little. Then, new sounds filled the tunnel, faint and strange and somehow painful. There came a sizzling squeal, a bubbling, popping sound that Orlen realised was emanating from the fungi growing out of the tunnel walls. The ragged bargeman watched in incomprehension as, one by one, the toadstools shivered as though caught in a brisk breeze. Their flesh squirmed and ran like wax, bubbles rising and bursting to release a reek of putrefaction.
