He only hoped they did so before Boneripper. Adalwolf was certain the beast would rip the ratman apart when he caught up to him. He wasn’t concerned about the ratman, of course, but they needed whatever escape route the slinking sorcerer had waiting to get him out of Lustria.
“We can’t count on that,” Adalwolf objected. “He’s a magician, remember? Once he’s far enough away from the pyramid, he’ll whistle up some kind of spell to set him right. Then where will we be?” He didn’t want to frighten the others with his suspicions that Thanquol was not alone, but neither did he want them to be caught off-guard. If Boneripper had rejoined his tyrannical master, they would need all their wits sharp, not lulled into a false confidence by the thought of trailing a lone wounded ratman.
The thought sobered Schachter. Straining under the weight of his coat, the seaman hurried down the narrow stairway, recklessly taking them three and four at a time.
“What are you standing around for!” Schachter shouted. “We’ve got a rat to catch!”
Throughout Thanquol’s long flight through the ruined streets of Quetza, he’d had the impression of being pursued. Sometimes he would hear the faint scuffle of feet against stone, or the clatter of rubble being disturbed, or the scrape of claws against the crumbling walls. He managed to keep one step ahead of his pursuers, however, constantly darting into the confusing maze of alleyways and collapsed buildings that formed much of the sprawling city.
All of his tricks, however, weren’t enough to fool his hunters. They kept following him, always just out of sight, always just at the edge of his hearing. Thanquol tried to pick up their scent, but when he sniffed the air he found his nose filled with a foulness that caused it to run. An abominable taint was in the atmosphere, a sickly vapour that seemed to rise from the very stones of Quetza. Thanquol thought of the long war between Clan Pestilens and the lizardmen and wondered what manner of contagions the plague priests had brewed to conquer the city.
Whatever vile diseases the plague monks had created, they had lingered long after the serpent-devil Sotek drove them into the sea. The foul vapours had seeped into the very stones, lurking and waiting like some venomous spider. Thanquol wondered why he hadn’t detected it before. The only answer was that somehow, in some feat of sorcery of such magnitude that it made the grey seer’s fur crawl, Xiuhcoatl had suppressed the lingering plague vapours so that Quetza would be safe for the lizardmen to build their temple.
If true, it was another example of the potency of the scaly creatures and their magic. More than ever, Thanquol was determined to get his tail out of Lustria and back to civilised lands. The deranged maniacs of Clan Pestilens could keep the damn jungles! In fact, Thanquol would suggest to the Council of Thirteen that they ship all of the Under-Empire’s malcontents and undesirables to Lustria as an efficient method of disposal.
The grey seer breathed a good deal easier once he was back under the shadowy overhang of the jungle. When he reached the edge of Quetza, he gave one last look back, trying to spot his pursuers. He was certain they hadn’t given up. The ease with which they navigated the city made him certain they were Xiuhcoatl’s followers. Strangely, the idea was more appealing than the alternative: scouts from the frog-mage’s army. Thanquol quickly glanced from side to side and sniffed at the air, but there was no sign that the closing pincers of the lizardmen were near. He chittered in amusement as he considered the huge army of reptiles surrounding the city. They would be too late in their encirclement of Quetza—because he would already be long gone!
Still chittering with nervous humour, Thanquol darted down the jungle trails Tsang Kweek’s gutter runners had chopped through the jungle. Already vines and creepers were starting to choke the path again, but it was clear enough for Thanquol to follow. There was even a strong smell of skaven clinging to the path, making it doubly easy for him to find his way. It was certainly a sign of the Horned One’s favour that Thanquol had survived where so many of Clan Eshin’s vaunted killers and murderers had died.
Thanquol smiled viciously as he remembered his fallen comrades. Shiwan Stalkscent, the arrogant little murder-master. Shen Tsinge, the treacherous little sorcerer. Tsang Kweek, the slinking little spy. Kong Krakback, the bullying little thug.
Blinking in bewilderment, Thanquol paused as he ran down the jungle trail. For a moment, he’d thought he’d heard Kong’s voice. But that was, of course, impossible. Kong was dead, along with all of his warriors. They had sacrificed their lives so that the rest of the expedition could get inside the Temple of the Serpent. If he’d heard anything, it had been Kong’s ghost, and since he didn’t like that idea, he decided he hadn’t heard anything at all.
The smell of skaven was much stronger now and Thanquol was certain he’d reached the clearing where they had made their camp. He’d need some of the supplies they’d left behind to provision himself on the trek back to the beach. With enough food buried around the campsite to feed a few hundred skaven, he was certain there would be enough to keep himself in good state for some time.
Grey Seer Thanquol emerged into the clearing and immediately his face twisted into a scowl. The ground was torn up in every direction, churned by the claws of animals. Some filthy jungle beast had been digging up Thanquol’s supplies!
Then the grey seer’s eyes noticed the carefully stacked piles of roots and tubers and withered sheets of salted meat. Animals wouldn’t do that he realised, a chill sweeping down his spine. It could only mean that the lizardmen had already been here and found this place!
Spinning about to flee back into the jungle, Thanquol was thrown back into the clearing by a powerful blow. His mouth filled with blood as his fangs bit into his own tongue, his lungs gasping for air as the wind was knocked out of him by his violent fall. A savage tug ripped his staff from his hand while a clawed foot pressed down on his chest.
Thanquol sputtered and spat foul-tasting blood from his mouth. He tried to think what sort of appeal would ingratiate himself to the lizardmen.
Perhaps he could offer to show them where Clan Pestilens still had strongholds in the jungle? Surely the reptiles hadn’t wiped out all of the plague monks and they’d probably be most eager to finish the job to avoid another of their cities ending up like Quetza!
His mind racing with thoughts of how to save his skin by betraying his race, Thanquol was slow to notice that his attackers weren’t scaly. Big, black-furred skaven surrounded him, their armour caked in blood, their bodies striped with crusty wounds. He saw Kong Krakback’s ugly sneer as the hulking skaven warrior glared at him from the edge of the clearing.
“Kong!” Thanquol coughed, finding the vocalisation difficult with the foot of a skaven warrior planted on his chest. “I am happy-pleased to see-find you alive! We are victorious! Serpent-priest is dead-dead!”
The big skaven didn’t seem to hear him, instead running his paw along the length of the notched sword he held in his other hand. The toothy smile on Kong’s face was perfectly primal in its expression of murderous hate.
“They won’t listen-hear your lies, grey traitor!” a shrill, snickering voice raked across Thanquol’s ears. He had to twist his neck to an uncomfortable angle to stare at the speaker. What he saw was a black-cloaked assassin crouched upon the same fallen log Thanquol had used as his own perch after assuming control of the expedition. The assassin, like the skaven warriors, bore the marks of hard fighting on his body and his cloak was a mass of bloody rags. It wasn’t the killer’s new injuries that interested Thanquol, however, but the old one he saw through a rent in the ratman’s hood, the scabby splotch against the side of his head where an ear had been cut off.
“You!” was all the grey seer could think to say.
Chang Fang grinned back at him and lashed his tail in amusement. “So, Thanquol-meat, you remember me! You have betray-trick so many, I worry-fear you would not know me! I am Chang Fang,” the assassin declared, straightening himself into a proud pose. “Chang Squik was my triad-kin. When you betrayed him, you betrayed me
. For that, you die-suffer!”
Thanquol’s body shivered in a spasm of pure fear. Chang Squik? But that bumbling killer had been dead for years! What kind of lunatic held a grudge for such a long time! It was madness! Besides, he wasn’t the one who had caused Chang Squik’s death, it had been that damnable dwarf and his pet human!
“You die slow,” Chang Fang hissed, hopping down from his perch and drawing one of his wicked knives. “I make you suffer-scream much-much,” he added with an insane giggle.
“But we can go back!” Thanquol shouted. He could see it was useless trying to reason with the assassin, but surely Kong and his warriors weren’t so far gone as to ignore him. “Xiuhcoatl’s dead! I killed him! We can go back and claim the Nightlord’s reward!”
Thanquol’s words only brought chittering laughter from the other skaven. The ratman pinning him to the ground lashed his scaly tail across the grey seer’s face. The impact stung like that of a whip.
“No lie-words!” the warrior snarled, leaning his weight onto Thanquol, driving the breath from his lungs.
“Thanquol kill-slay scaly-meat?” laughed Kong Krakback. The big black skaven was fingering his sword in such a way now that the grey seer thought if Chang Fang didn’t hurry the warrior was going to do the job first. “How Thanquol-meat kill-slay snake-priest? Trip over snake-priest while running away?”
The grey seer gnashed his fangs at Kong’s casual insult against his courage, then tried to think of a lie that would sound believable to the black skaven. They’d never believe he’d arranged for one of the humans to kill Xiuhcoatl, even if he couched the story in terms that made it sound like a happy accident rather than brilliant planning and careful strategy.
A cunning gleam came into his eye. “Boneripper!” the grey seer squealed. “I sent-told Boneripper to slay-kill!”
Chang Fang leaned over the prone Thanquol, a string of drool hanging from the assassin’s eager fangs. “Too bad you not keep-take rat ogre,” he giggled. “Now you suffer-scream much-much. Then die-rot!”
The assassin raised his knife, the blade gleaming in the hot sunlight.
Thanquol screwed his eyes shut, his entire body flailing as he tried to escape the warrior pinning him to the ground. “Xiuhcoatl dead-dead!” he yelled. “Boneripper slay-kill! Boneripper! Boneripper!”
Lord Tlaco shifted upon his dais, allowing his attendant skinks to pour cool spring water over his mottled skin. The dark spots upon the slann’s hide shifted position ever so slightly, setting the skink scribes surrounding it into a frenzy of activity as they recorded the new markings. The mage-priest paid them scant attention, allowing only the lower hemispheres of its brain to guide them in positioning the army around Quetza.
None of the servants of Sotek could be allowed to leave the city. Lord Tlaco had sent that message into the brains of the priests who had survived Xiuhcoatl. They understood the need for their own destruction. With Xiuhcoatl’s death, the Prophet’s magic had been broken. The powerful wards which restrained the sorcerous diseases infesting the very stones of Quetza had been broken. Every Lizardman in the city was now a carrier of the plagues that had caused it to be abandoned many sun-cycles past. They could not be allowed to bring the contagion to other cities.
The priests Lord Tlaco had telepathically contacted had met the news with the fatalistic acceptance that denoted those who understood the Great Math and their own value within it. The slann did not have to worry about them irrationally behaving like low-phase algorithms desperate to delay their own negation. However, there were many others who served the Temple of the Serpent, minions less aware of the Great Math. These might try to escape and bear the contagion away with them.
The mage-priest flicked one of his webbed hands. A phalanx of saurus warriors bobbed their heads in unison, acknowledging the command. The dark-scaled soldier-lizards jogged off at a quick march, moving to encircle the northern perimeter of Quetza. They would reinforce the skink skirmishers already lurking at the jungle’s edge, waiting with their bows to strike down any lizardmen trying to leave the city. They would maintain their positions for the next three lunar cycles. By then there would be nothing to fear from Quetza. Nothing would be left alive within the ruins to act as a courier for the plague.
Lord Tlaco’s eyes widened as one of his army’s scouts came scurrying towards the slann’s dais. Instinctively, the mage-priest’s armoured temple guard closed ranks around the levitating dais. A slight shifting of its skin spots had the skull-helmed lizardmen stepping aside for the scout.
In a rapid series of gestures and hisses, the chameleon skink explained that several low-phase algorithms—what the scout called “soft-skins”—had emerged from the city and were fleeing into the jungle to the south. The skirmishers had watched them go, but had obeyed Lord Tlaco’s command that the humans were not to be harmed.
It was a slight misinterpretation of its orders, but overall Lord Tlaco was pleased. The slann didn’t need all of the low-phase algorithms. It only needed the one that had been used to resolve the thought problem that had vexed Lord Tlaco. The slann had its solution, Xiuhcoatl had been killed. But did the Prophet’s death condemn his god or exonerate it? That was a problem that could only be resolved by studying the vector that had negated Xiuhcoatl’s value. Did the low-phase algorithm possess a rational value or was it a decaying fractal, a corrupted algorithm like the xa’cota?
That was an answer that could only be determined by studying the human who had made the decision to shoot Xiuhcoatl instead of the xa’cota. Lord Tlaco wasn’t certain simple dissection would allow him to understand why the low-phase algorithm made its choice. It was preferable to study its value before negation rather than after. Trying to impress that factor into every mind in his army as well as the thought-pictures that would ensure the lizardmen could differentiate Lord Tlaco’s subject from the others demanded an uncomfortable amount of concentration on the slann’s part. He would have to tap into those hemispheres of its brain that were already working upon other disharmonies in the Great Math to do so.
It had been easier just to order the army to allow anything that wasn’t a lizardman to leave the city. Warm-bloods could not carry the plague the xa’cota had used to kill Quetza, so there was no danger in allowing them to pass.
Now that their escape had been reported, however, Lord Tlaco decided it was time to collect its subject. The slann’s spots shifted into a determined pattern and the skink scribes set down their styluses and bowed their heads. Those elements of the army the slann had kept in reserve for just this purpose turned their heads so that, from the mightiest saurus war-chief to the small-brained terradons and razordons, every eye was fixed upon Lord Tlaco. The mage-priest sent the necessary impressions and factors into the minds of this fragment of its army.
Like a single gigantic creature, the lizardmen hurried into the depths of the jungle, one purpose driving them all: to collect Lord Tlaco’s specimen and return with it to the mage-priest.
Chang Fang’s knife hurtled downwards. The assassin held his weapon not in the stabbing thrust of an expert killer, but in the slashing stroke of a crazed butcher. He had decided he would start his revenge by cutting Thanquol’s horns from his skull. Then he would move to lower and more tender bits of the grey seer’s anatomy.
Before the assassin’s knife could even nick the grey seer’s horn, he found himself flying through the air. Chang Fang was so intent upon his vengeance that he didn’t see the bloody mangled mass until it slammed into him, carrying him away with it across the clearing. The assassin twisted his body in mid-air so that it was the torn mass of the corpse that smacked into the bole of a mangrove instead of his own back. The assassin toppled back to earth along with what he now knew was the wreckage of one of Kong’s clanrats. He tried to brace himself for the fall, but his best effort had gone into twisting the corpse about so it would absorb the collision with the tree. He struck the ground hard and it took several precious seconds to blink away the spots that danced before hi
s eyes.
Across the clearing, Kong and his warriors were showing no less surprise than Chang Fang. They stared in gaping horror at the hulking shape that loomed out of the jungle towards them. There was no question who had killed the clanrat and then thrown the still twitching corpse across the clearing to knock down the assassin.
After killing the kroxigor, Boneripper had followed Thanquol’s scent through the pyramid, mutilating any lizardmen that got in his way. When the grey seer made his retreat from Quetza, it was Boneripper who followed him through the ruins and later into the jungle. Perhaps some dim sense of betrayal and abandonment was working on the rat ogre’s mind, confusing his feelings towards Thanquol. Perhaps he was simply too weary from his battles with the lizardmen to catch up to his fleeing master before. Whatever his reasons, Boneripper had been content to linger after Thanquol, making no effort to catch him.
At least until he heard Thanquol frantically crying his name. Any resentful thoughts vanished as the obedience that had been beaten into the rat ogre’s brain took over. Moving with the speed and stealth of a jaguar, the huge monster rushed through the forest, a living engine of havoc.
Boneripper beat his huge claws upon his chest and roared at Thanquol’s enemies. The ferocious display might have frightened Kong and his warriors more if the sudden movement hadn’t opened some of the wounds Boneripper had suffered in his fight with the kroxigor. The sight and smell of blood excited the skaven at the most primitive level of their minds. The hulking rat ogre had gone from terrifying foe to wounded prey.
Two of Kong’s warriors rushed at Boneripper from either side, while the leader himself and a third skaven charged at him from the fore. The rat ogre roared a second time, then brought both of his clawed hands slashing in an arc before his body. The clanrat charging at him from the right was eviscerated by the unexpected speed of the monster’s attack. He collapsed in a squeaking mess, frenziedly pawing at the dirt in his death agonies.
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