Beneath the Black Thumb

by David Guymer

  The lizards scampered with near-impunity over walls and pox moats that, judging by the clear lack of defenders, the Rotbringers had considered impassable.

  The Rotbringers had been fools.

  Even by Kletch’s own standards, the lizards were light on their feet. Their bones seemed to be hollow, and with little else to them but light they skipped across floating corpses as cleanly as if they were solid ground. Only the moats themselves gave them pause – fecund nurseries of disease that hummed with deadly daemonfly – but they served only to funnel the rabid Rotbringers through their own defensive works where they were easy pickings for the lizard’s dartpipes.

  Skinks.

  Kletch shivered, some deep residual instinct to freeze and play dead almost killing him there amongst the running column of Chaos warriors, beastmen and mind-plagued fanatics.

  He kept running, not watching, his pre-conscious replaying him impressions of jungles he had never seen, of stepped pyramids he had never visited, the terror of being prey in a land he had never called his. He had not seen or heard of these lizard-men, these seraphon, before now, but deep down he knew them, and it was a knowledge that a thousand generations of new lands and new enemies could not wipe from his racial memory.

  He leapt from one patch of solid ground to another, then another, easily outpacing the beasts and once-men that ran around him. His heavy cloak slowed him only a little, flapping out as he made one long leap, landing on a leaning root of a column. Sinking around his staff onto all fours, he sniffed the air for the musk of his own.

  Useless. The whole castle was thick with decay. With a snarl, he resorted to using his eyes.

  Despite the lizards’ – the skinks’ – success in drawing the Rotbringers into more difficult terrain, the bulk of Bule’s horde were still charging for the good ground where the main outer curtain walls converged on the gatehouse citadel. He could hear the drums and horns, the shouts and the roar of beasts. Skaven eyesight grew dim over any kind of distance and for that, today, he was grateful.

  ‘Go around!’ he squeaked, gesticulating furiously from his pedestal to the band of Rotbringers that were wading into a stinking brown pond to get at the brightly scaled skinks on the other side. ‘Go get. Kill-kill. Go!’

  To no surprise of his, the Rotbringer’s champion plunged on into deeper water. The warrior was an idiot. He’d earned the dart in the throat that dropped him face down into the mire a moment later.

  The skinks were making a mockery of the heavily armoured blightkings, making them look sluggish. The daemons were another matter.

  Every sore on Kletch’s body wept, every ache seizing and filling his wiry body with pain as ten of Nurgle’s tallymen strode onto the pox moat, walking weightlessly upon the scum that floated on the surface and through the stinging daemonfly. The cold-blooded star-creatures barely reacted. Kletch watched as a skink shaman rustled his feathered cloak, flying over the plaguebearers’ heads to land in a swirl of red and gold on a stump of wall behind them. There, he shook his staff, exhorting a hail of darts from his kin that fell amongst the closing daemons.

  Kletch snickered. Everyone knew that daemons could not be killed that way. But the tallymen fell by the handful, if anything even more vulnerable to the seraphon’s envenomed darts than the mortals they marched beside.

  With a snarl, Kletch reached inside his cloak for his weapon, eyes locked on the shaman.

  ‘See-smell how tough you are. Kletch not afraid of scrawny scaly-meat.’

  The faintest trace of reptile musk warned him of the danger just before an ear-splitting shriek from above re-triggered every instinct he had to freeze, run, hide. Terradon. The giant reptile swooped overhead, banked gracefully under the effortless direction of its skink rider, then dropped a boulder from its hind-claws. It came down like a meteor. It was a meteor.

  With a terrified squeal, Kletch leapt from his column, arms and legs churning as the spot he had been standing on was annihilated, the air at his back electrified by a starlight explosion. His tail peeled. His cloak caught fire. He landed in a roll, steaming from fur and clothes and from the accidental release of fear musk down his leg.

  ‘Scratch and sniff,’ he swore.

  Patting himself down, he brushed a string of darts from the back of his cloak. He swallowed the bad taste in his mouth. Dropping to all fours to make himself less of a target to any skinks looking to pick off survivors, he scurried from the path, zig-zagged through a verge of bloodgrass that stuck up from a hummock of dead men and horses like pins, and then dived into a wild patch of bruise-coloured bushes that clung to a ledge growing out from the second curtain wall. A few tail-lengths in he poked his head up through the scratching branches.

  Below, clanking streams of Chaos warriors fed into a blurrily defined blob of screams and steel, a blood and lizard stink spilling out over half a league of the Hanging Garden’s heartlands. He didn’t need the eyes of a surface-dweller to see the blocks of bulky lizard warriors – saurus – grinding in under their golden icons. He could see well enough the giant reptiles that towered over all with swaying howdahs on their backs, even if he couldn’t quite count the horns on their bony head shields.

  The seraphon were being held back for now. Nothing stood up to attrition like a warrior of Nurgle, and Copsys Bule commanded monsters of his own. Kletch sniffed the air and shivered at the sharp, unmistakeably vile scent.

  The Lord of Plagues was down there. Good riddance.

  ‘Scabclaw-master!’

  Kletch hissed angrily to mask his surprise, but this time held onto his musk. Scurf was scurrying through the flesh-drinking grasses, surrounded by a clawpack of stormvermin mercenaries in muddy black plate mail and wielding vicious-looking halberds. Several hundred raggedy plague monks followed, individuals breaking every so often to sniff the air, lash their tails in fear, and then hurry on.

  ‘Lightning men!’ Scurf squealed.

  The word-bringer was in the same stained linen cassock he’d been wearing an hour ago, but had, apparently in great haste, donned a mail coif and was clutching a cracked tome that he held onto like a shield. He waved a rusty scimitar at the stars. Flies eddied and swarmed, a billion billion, but the stars behind no longer moved. An unnaturally intense constellation in the shape of a squatting toad glared down with eyes tinged red.

  ‘Fool-fool,’ Kletch snapped. ‘This is something other.’

  ‘Something new?’

  Kletch shook his muzzle. ‘Something old.’

  ‘The claw-packs are ready to leave-go,’ added Scurf. He glanced down to the battle and gulped. ‘Very-very much-ready.’

  Kletch bared his teeth, yellow eyes shining. This might all just work out after all. If Copsys Bule was defeated, as looked likely, then the clanlords could hardly blame him for failing to secure an alliance that the Lord of Plagues had never appeared to want at all. And if the weakened Lord of Plagues somehow managed to secure a pyrrhic victory?

  Will perhaps then the generous backing of Clan Rikkit would appeal to him more.

  ‘This way,’ Kletch hissed.

  Darting back into the bloodgrass, he wove through it, driving purposefully away from the main seraphon assault. Corpses at varying stages of rankness wobbled underpaw, tipping, sinking, at times disintegrating before he was able to leap clear and plunging him into foetid water. He spluttered a wordless prayer to the Pestilent Horned Rat that the tonic he had drunk would continue to prove effective. Keeping his head down and his nose clear, he scurried on. He was moving inside the circle of the inner walls to the far side of the fortress-temple. From there, with luck, he would be able to clamber down and escape without great difficulty. He upped his pace, becoming a blur of fur and movement.

  There was nothing in all the Realms quicker than a skaven with a battle to escape, but Kletch was not yet so anxious to flee as to allow himself to pull ahead of his brother monks.

 
; Not for the first time – and he fervently hoped not for the last – sound skaven thinking saved his hide.

  Crashing through a canopy of hanging dead, a lumbering reptile as massive as a barded warhorse snapped the lead clanrat up in its jaws, trampling three more before the saurus riding it could rein it back.

  Its predatory head was huge and low-slung, supported by a monstrous neck and counter-weighted by a thick tail that tacked menacingly in advance of its movements as it turned. The skaven in its jaws was shrieking. A savage yank of neck and jaw and the beast bit the pitiful creature through, sending legs and torso flying over opposite shoulders. A rake of its vestigial forepaws claimed another.

  Scurf issued a rallying squeal, backing into the stormvermin clawpack as the beast completed its turn and snorted in his nose. He whipped up his book of woes with a frightened squeak as the saurus’ mace came down.

  The book was mouldering parchment bound in cracked leather.

  The mace was meteoric stone.

  Hurriedly withdrawing from the smashed word-bringer, the stormvermin lowered their halberds, throwing up a wall of hooked blades between them and the beast. The reptile – a cold one – snapped contemptuously, taking off one of the blades and eating it.

  The saurus hefted its bloodied mace and with cold calm scanned the skaven scattered across the grass before it. Every scale armouring its grossly powerful hide was chipped and scarred. Its eyes were old. Beautiful works of golden plate clad vulnerable spots such as its throat and wrists. It shone like the light at the end of all the skaven’s tunnels.

  Pumping its mace up into the air, it gave a roar that shook the air. With answering roars, a full cohort of glittering saurus warriors marched into the open.

  Kletch squealed for order, for ranks, shoving his way to the back of them as he did so. These saurus were on foot, armed with spears and shields, but it scarcely mattered. Each one was twice the size of an armoured stormvermin and looked the match for any six.

  With frenzied squeals, the plague monks charged. The saurus trampled them without appearing to notice and slammed into the line of stormvermin.

  ‘Hold. Fight! Kill-kill!’ shouted Kletch, growing ever shriller as the lizards’ massive line troops ground their way through his.

  A rustle from the tall weeds to the right made his heart sink. There were more.

  Hacking wildly at the bodies that came at him on nooses from all sides, Blightlord Fistula ran through, savaging a saurus from behind before the cold-blooded brute had even realised he was there. Coming under a swarm of flies, his putrid blightkings piled in behind him.

  This was a more even fight. The blightkings were Bule’s elite and, Kletch knew, Fistula’s were the best. He was not at all surprised that the first blightlord had been amongst the reckless few to be dragged out into the swamp chasing skinks.

  ‘In! In!’ Kletch squeaked, urging his warriors on.

  Scenting blood, the clawpacks and surviving plague monks pushed forward, wedging the saurus between two sets of enemies.

  Observing the reverse in fortunes with an impersonal, calculating detachment, the saurus pointed its cold one towards Fistula and roared its challenge. The first blightlord ran at it with a yell, both weapons out at his side, armour dripping with bile.

  The saurus struck first. The cadaver-thin blightlord parried the lizard’s mace with a blow that would have broken both of their arms had either been a lesser being, then rolled out of the lunge of the cold one’s jaws. His knife chewed down the side of the beast’s neck and spat out scales. He dodged back, turning a crunching side kick from the old saurus on his vambrace, then charged back in.

  The saurus was wheeling his furious mount when Fistula stepped onto a plague monk’s mushed body and, using it a springboard, vaulted over the reach of the cold one’s flailing snap. Sliding down the beast’s spiny neck, he slammed bodily into the saurus and punched a knife towards its neck. It moved just fast enough to take it in the shoulder. If it felt either surprise or pain it didn’t show it. A shattering head butt snapped back Fistula’s head and sent him crashing over the cold one’s flank and down to the sucking ground. The cold one stomped on his breastplate, pushing him deeper under.

  Then Kletch withered away the saurus’ head with a bolt of plague magic.

  The cold one issued a defiant roar that shook the eardrums long after it vanished into the same cloud of light that reclaimed its master.

  Shivering off the giddy tingle of the warpstone fumes from his pestilent censer, Kletch secreted the relic back into its pouch underneath his robes. He had taken the weapon from the clan vaults to deal with Copsys Bule, but it smelled like that was one precaution he didn’t need anymore.

  ‘He had me.’ Fistula’s laughter bubbled crazily, riding down from some wild adrenaline high.

  ‘We should be going-gone. Before more like it come.’

  ‘Going?’ Fistula sat up straight, face flushed red and cut in half by a razored smile. ‘I would fight more of your lightning men.’

  ‘They are not lightning men,’ Kletch snapped, suddenly lacking all patience for the stupidity of others. ‘The lightning men are... are much worse.’

  ‘Worse?’

  ‘Come with me,’ Kletch hissed, sidling closer, tail switching side to side. ‘Bule is old. Leave him to rot in his garden. Come kill-slay with Clan Rikkit.’

  Fistula looked to his warriors. Kletch bared his fangs in a grin. He wouldn’t be returning to the clanlords with empty paws after all.

  VII

  Copsys Bule was untouchable.

  Of the lizard-men that came close, only the very mightiest amongst them could make it within reach of his weapon before Nurgle’s Rot left them crippled and blind. And yet on these star-lizards came, fearing neither death nor disease.

  His trident struck like an adder, piercing the throat of a heavily scarred lizard and exploding through the back of its neck. With one huge scaly hand it grappled with the haft, swinging a glowing starmetal axe with the other. Bule yanked back on his trident, pulling the impaled scar-veteran into a forward stumble and sending its axe stroke flailing harmlessly past his shoulder. An open fist to the gut punched the scar-veteran off his weapon’s tines, two feet through the air and onto its back. Bule closed the distance, trident spinning once, twice, overhead, and then smashing through the lizard-man’s chest. With a heave, he drew the trident up, the weapon arcing back overhead to its full extension to polearm the spear warrior that had been charging his supposed blindside.

  With the rest of his horde struggling to hold their line, Copsys Bule took another forward step.

  A powerful lizard in golden armour blocked him. The blinding might of Azyr screamed between the joins of its scales, and the roar of its challenge was like that of a furnace. Saliva stellar white hissed from its jaws as it brought up a primitive-looking two-handed blade.

  Bule turned the hacking stroke with a loop of his trident, then took the haft between both hands and drove the ferrule into the sun-lizard’s groin. The warrior emitted a grunt and staggered back, unhurt, throwing a punch that caught the haft of Bule’s weapon. The struck trident popped out of Bule’s fingers and landed in the mud behind him. It was the deft, impish move of a master of unarmed combat.

  With a celestial roar, the sun-lizard swept its weapon overhead.

  Spinning and dropping, Bule planted his knee on the ferrule and slid his hand under the trident’s haft. Halfway along, a flex of the fingers bounced it up, reversed against the slope of his shoulder, just as the sun-warrior charged in to deliver the deathblow.

  There was a heavy crunch, a sigh, the burn of starlight raining across his back.

  Bule turned as he rose, swinging his weapon out like a scythe, letting fly, and sending the dying sun-warrior cannoning into the head of the hulking lizard giant that had just strode into view. Both went down in a mighty crash. The sun-lizard van
ished in a flash of sunbeams. The giant, merely unconscious, did not rise again.

  ‘Is this it?’ he cried, laying out a murderous sigil of overlapping figure-of-eights. ‘Is this all that you have?’ To kill again, and to kill swiftly, felt glorious. Colours were vivid, scents sharp, cries like bells. He was a man awakening from a coma and remembering that he was furious. ‘Do you even realise whom you face?’

  He shovelled down another lizard-warrior on the flat of his tines, then span, alerted by the prickling sense of something approaching from behind.

  A robed figure stood there on the writhing carpet of sickening lizards. It regarded him through the haze of flies, neither noticeably human nor obviously reptilian. Daemonic perhaps, yet not. Its head was angled like a hoe with a row of eyes along its ridge. Some of them examined Bule archly, others with compassion, mirth, and contempt. In spite of himself, of what and where he was, Bule felt a chill.

  Blind to their visitor, a cohort of warrior lizards charged through the hazing flies. They died one by one. The inhuman apparition did not react, but, despite having no obvious mouth, Bule had the impression that it smiled at him, as though he were a bloat hound that had earned a treat.

  A tremendous death bellow drew his attention away.

  There, the mighty plague maggoth that had been rolling over the lizards’ advance with a wedge of Rotbringers in train collapsed in an avalanche of folds. A sunbeam split the monster from shoulder to navel and the armour-plated head of some apex reptile butted it aside. Fixed to the lizard creature’s back was the silver and star-metal housing of some inscrutable god-engine, which clicked and reset amidst a glow of energies. The Rotbringers retreated, their forward push stymied. Bule was aware of the enemy pouring forward on all fronts now as his own defences began to crumble. With a snarl, he took his trident overhand like a javelin and made to challenge that armoured reptile’s invulnerability.

  ‘He seeks a champion.’

  The apparition’s robes whispered as it followed him. Its clothing was made not of hides or cloth but of eyes, and the susurrus it made was the sound of hundreds of blinking eyelids, rippling white, green, black, and every other colour that skin came. It moved without truly moving. It spoke without speaking.