Suddenly the boat gave an alarming lurch to the side. For an instant, Thanquol thought one of the sharks had risen up to chew its way through the boat to get him. As the little vessel continued to tilt lower into the sea, water streaming over the gunwales, the grey seer’s terror mounted. It only lessened slightly when he saw a huge black arm reach over the side and pull a gigantic furry body into the boat. Even when the creature settled down, sagging wearily into the stern, the rowboat sat alarmingly low in the water.
Thanquol’s nose wrinkled at the unpleasant smell of burned fur rising from Boneripper’s scorched body. Wooden splinters jutted from the rat ogre’s hide where shrapnel from the exploding ship had driven them home. The brute was cut in dozens of places, his thick black blood oozing slowly from the wounds to mix with the water sloshing about Thanquol’s ankles.
There couldn’t be much strength left in the rat ogre. One sniff told Thanquol as much. Just like the witless slob to get himself crippled right when the grey seer needed him the most! Who was going to row the little boat someplace safe? Certainly it was unfair of Boneripper to expect his master to do such a thing! The stupid lummox should have stayed in the water and fed the sharks…
Thanquol pulled at his whiskers and a sinister gleam crept into his eyes. What did Boneripper weigh? Maybe eight hundred pounds? Certainly not less than five hundred.
The grey seer’s belly growled as he quietly thanked the Horned Rat for his bounty.
Upon the shore, Lord Tlaco watched as Grey Seer Thanquol began to row away from the burning wreck of the pirate ship. The slann considered this cruel little creature, plucking his thoughts from the matrix of the Great Math. How unlike the unknown quotient, that curious warm-blood that had taken his own life when rescue was offered to him. This corrupted algorithm was utterly selfish, fully aware of his own decay and decline towards negation and reaching out with every essence of his being to stave off that inevitable eventuality.
It was a contrast to be certain. The xa’cota might have made an interesting specimen to compare with the human had the warm-blood allowed himself to be captured. Now, however, Lord Tlaco doubted if there was any especial value in acquiring the ratman. The xa’cota carried diseases that could harm the skinks and other minion breeds and through their sickness even a slann might fall ill and die. That would not aid its study of the Great Math if the mage-priest were to perish in a plague.
No, there was something more to the corrupted algorithm than even the threat of disease. Lord Tlaco could sense a connection between the ratman and one of those dread persistent fractals that had cast their shadow upon the harmonious equations of the Old Ones. To invite such a being into his laboratories would be to endanger all of the slann’s other researches. The mere presence of an algorithm connected to the persistent fractals invited corruption.
The slann’s spots shifted. A dozen of its temple guard started to wade into the waves, their axes clenched tightly in their jaws. They would overturn the boat and butcher the noxious creature and end its menace to the Great Math.
Abruptly, Lord Tlaco’s eyes dilated and a low croak rumbled from his wide mouth, arresting the advance of the lizardmen. The little skink minion perched upon the slann’s dais chirped and hissed, calling the warriors back.
Casting his thoughts through the potentialities of the Great Math, Lord Tlaco tried to see the possibilities of this corrupted algorithm that had drawn his attention. The mage-priest was pleased by the way the xa’cota’s value ingratiated itself into other equations. If the slann had been capable, he would have found the degeneration of those problems highly amusing.
The xa’cota was a greater menace to his own kind than he was to the Great Math. Through him, much could be done to undermine the rest of his kind. The corrupted algorithm’s selfishness, greed and ambition would lead him into conflict with others of his kind, conflict that could greatly weaken the xa’cota as a species.
Yes, the potentialities of probability made it desirable that the xa’cota should return to his own kind. Focusing its consciousness upon the matrix of reality, Lord Tlaco excited the currents of the sea, creating a new undersea stream that would speed the corrupted algorithm back across the World Pond. The slann would uncreate the environmental change his magic had caused once it had served its purpose. A shift of his skin-spots told the skink attendant to remind the mage-priest to do so before the next lunar cycle.
Lord Tlaco remained with his retinue on the beach, watching the tiny dot of Thanquol’s boat dwindling on the horizon. Only when the grey seer was completely lost to sight did the slann give the command to return into the jungle. He expended some of his magic to weave a corridor through the trees, a pathway that would bring them quickly back to the pyramids of Xlanhuapec, the City of Mists.
Now that the experiment was at an end, the mage-priest was keen to study what results he had acquired.
Their influence on the Great Math would be a thing worth contemplating over the next century.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C.L. Werner was a diseased servant of the Horned Rat long before his first story in Inferno! magazine.
His Black Library credits include the Chaos Wastes books Palace of the Plague Lord and Blood for the Blood God, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang and the Brunner the Bounty Hunter trilogy.
Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the Warhammer World.
Visit the author’s website at: www.clwerner.wordpress.com
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