‘Give me your pot,’ the priest said. He poured another measure and waited until his guest took it. ‘You did well to survive the trap.’
For a split second the stranger froze, his drink held halfway to his lips. Then, in an explosion of movement that sent his stool spinning away and the cup rolling across the table he was on his feet, a dagger sprouting downwards from his left fist.
‘What do you know about it?’ he snarled, baring strong yellow teeth as he edged forward.
The priest slowed his breathing, unclenched his fists. For a second he watched the patterns the fire made in the razor sharp steel that quivered beneath his chin. He forced himself to look away, to look instead into the crazed eyes of his tormentor.
A lunatic, a beast at bay, he thought, not without a touch of pity.
‘I know only what I see,’ he said, marshalling his words as carefully as a surgeon would his tools. ‘With those weapons and those scars you’d find it hard to pass for a civilian. Your obviously a gentleman of fortune. You’re garb’s worth more gold than I see in a year.’
‘Perhaps. But…’
‘And you’ve recently been set upon,’ the priest hurriedly continued. ‘That much is obvious. A man whose bearing and profession speaks of a proud nature wandering the night dressed in those rags? No. I’ll wager that two days ago those tatters were good enough to wear in any court.’
The soldier lowered his knife uncertainly as his host pressed home his advantage.
‘As for the trap, well, what bandit would run into the jaws of that weapon of yours? It must have been a trap. Anyway, there have been no battles hereabouts of late.’
‘Haven’t there?’ the man asked contemptuously.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the mad energy deserted him. The rage bled away from his features, leaving in its place a terrible exhaustion. Sheathing his dagger, the man recovered his stool and sat back down with a sigh.
‘My apologies,’ he muttered half-heartedly, and shrugged.
‘Accepted,’ the priest nodded. He recovered his guest’s pot and refilled it. ‘Why don’t you tell me your name?’
‘Otto van Delft,’ he said, a trace of pride straightening his back. The priest wasn’t surprised to find that he had one of Karl Franz’s subjects on his hands. That would explain his manners.
‘And what brings you to the shrine?’ he asked warily. ‘You’re healthy, strong. What do you want of Morr?’
‘I’ll tell you,’ Otto said.
He peered into the depths of the fire, the flames burnishing his grimy features with a dozen shades of light and darkness. For a while he was silent, listening to the crackle of wood settling in the fireplace and the muted complaints of the rising wind that now lay siege outside.
Finally he took a deep drink and began. ‘What do you know of the ratvolk?’
‘RATVOLK?’
‘Yes, the ratvolk. The skaven.’ Otto turned his attention from the fire to the priest and saw him shiver, a reflex that had nothing to do with the draft that slunk around the stone of the old walls.
‘So you do know of them.’ The soldier smiled grimly. ‘Of course you do. Everyone does.’
The priest merely nodded and poured another measure from the jug. This time it was for himself.
‘Tell me everything,’ he said, and took a drink.
‘I have been hunting the vermin all my life. In sewers, swamps, forests. In catacombs of brick and living stone, in lands of fire and ice and skin rotting dampness. And why? Because…’
Otto paused, his brows meeting in sudden suspicion as he studied his host. The priest’s slight nod seemed to reassure him.
‘Because,’ he continued heavily, ‘they’re part of me, part of all of us. They’re the evil that we try to hold at bay, with law and discipline. And I hate them.’
A log, settling in the fireplace, snapped open in a shower of sparks. The two men watched the sudden flare of light for a moment. Only when it had died down did Otto continue.
‘I have a reputation. I am a - what did you call it? - a gentleman of fortune. Yes. And like a thousand other gentlemen of fortune, I haggle like a whore for the best price, then throw the money away on ale and women. But unlike them,’ he said, leaning forward with a sudden intensity, ‘I do what I’m paid for. I keep the battle moving forward. Believe me, priest, that’s no easy thing.’
The older man nodded.
‘Reputation,’ the mercenary sneered, injecting a whole world of contempt into the word. As if in further comment he coughed, hawking up a gob of phlegm that he spat with unerring accuracy into the fire. It hissed and sizzled as he continued.
‘Reputation is what you need in my business more than in any other. Wealth I have, but I needed more than one man’s gold for what I had in mind. There are rumours, you see, rumours of a city in the south, the heartland of the skaven, the womb of their race. I wanted backers. I wanted enough men to sweep down into those swamps and tear out the guts of the enemy.’
Otto, his pupils narrowing into twin pinpricks of fanaticism, spat the words out. ‘I needed one more war to make that happen. I came so close. Ever heard of Magdeburg?’
‘Yes,’ the priest said. ‘I knew a merchant from there. He made a contribution to the shrine.’
‘He wasn’t called Gottlieb, was he?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Gottlieb was the man who hired me. He was the mayor of Magdeburg. Poor bastard.’
Once more Otto drained his pot, once more his host refilled it. This spirit, White Fire the donor had called it, was proving to be very effective at loosening tongues.
‘Forty crowns a week,’ the mercenary said, ‘plus another fifty for a pelt. I let the lads keep the pelt money. That’s always the best way. Krinvaller skimmed a little off the top, of course, but not too much.’ The mercenary snorted. ‘Krinvaller! What an idiot. Still, I liked him. Everyone did. He’d made a great watch captain, lazy and kind hearted. Then Gottlieb launched the rattenkrieg and turned him from a good watch captain into a terrible colonel.’
‘The rattenkrieg,’ the priest ventured uncertainly, ‘is a war against the skaven?’
‘That’s it. Gottlieb’s daughter was taken, you see. She was a pretty girl, by all accounts, apart from a strawberry birthmark on her cheek. Not that that matters. A man’s child is his child and always beautiful to him. When she began to wail late one night about things hiding inside her closet, Gottlieb just thought she was having nightmares. Then, one morning… well, there was nothing left of her, just crumpled sheets and a torn scrap of nightdress. The skaven had gnawed their way from the sewers, up between the walls and through the back of her wardrobe. Their tracks were everywhere in the room.’
Van Delft paused, looked reflectively into the fire.
‘So Gottlieb went to war. He was winning it, too, even before I got there. I should have known something was wrong. A halfwit doesn’t lead a couple of dozen vagabonds down into the deeps and come back victorious. He doesn’t come back at all.’
‘Oh, gods, I should have known.’ Van Delft; face crumpled into a mask of pain and he smacked his palm against his forehead. ‘I should have known.’
The priest, his own features carefully composed, wondered if the mercenary was going to break down altogether. But after a few tense moments, he took a long, deep shuddering breath, pulled his hands reluctantly from his face and continued.
‘The information we were getting was very good. Before every mission Gottlieb would call us in and give us numbers, deployment, even these maps. Look.’ Van Delft reached inside the ruined doth of his tunic and pulled out a roll of parchments. Even in the uncertain firelight, the wealth of detail remained crystal clear. As well as the muld-coloured inks, which distinguished each tangled strand from its neighbours, each of the cobwebbed lines was beaded with its own peculiar series of dots and dashes. The priest held one up to the flame to admire the workmanship.
‘Why are they made of leather?’ he asked, rubbing the material bet
ween his fingers.
‘Because parchment tears.’ The mercenary, seized by a sudden fit of shivering, wrapped the blanket tighter across his shoulders. ‘I’d never worked with such information before. Usually underground all you have is instinct, smell, hearing. Fear. But with these,’ he waved a hand towards the maps, ‘we had depths, scale, everything. I should have known.’
‘Known what?’ the priest blurted out in spite of himself, and immediately regretted his lapse of patience.
His guest noticed the slip and smiled wearily. ‘This potcheen of yours seems to be loosening both of our tongues.’
‘We’d better take some more then. Give me your pot.’ As he poured, he watched his guest’s expression harden and guessed that his thoughts were falling back into the depths of the past.
‘Ever heard of warpstone?’ Otto asked.
The deepening gurgle of a filling cup faltered.
‘Yes. When I was a younger man-‘ he broke off. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it.’
‘You know of its value then?’ Otto asked curiously.
‘I know of its value to some.’
‘So do I. And beneath Magdeburg I saw enough to buy a city. Although no sane man would risk trying to get it.’
‘At first,’ he continued, ‘I thought that the stuff must have been something else, some kind of mould or fungus. I was leading a gang down to a cut-off point when I first saw it, a great twisting seam threading itself through the walls like an artery through a corpse. And that light, that sickly green light! I swear it was pulsing, beating like the heart of some living thing. That light, it made our faces look like…’
He stopped, eyes blank and unseeing, his drink forgotten in his hand.
‘It made them look like daemons,’ he finished and drained his pot. ‘Such wealth was before us. For a moment, a second, I thought that here I’d found my key to the south. Madness of course, the idea of selling the enemy power in order to raise an army against him is insane. Then another thought hit me. Stuck down there, beneath countless tons of rock, with nothing between myself and the darkness except a single flame, I realised what sort of skaven pack must own this territory and just how powerful they must have been. If I’d have had time, I’d have retreated back up and thought things through.’
‘You didn’t have time?’ The priest nudged his guest out of a brief reverie.
‘No. That’s when the first attack came.’
Wordlessly he held his pot out and wordlessly the priest refilled it.
‘It’s always the same in the beginning, espetially underground. There’s always that terrible moment when you realise that you’re not imagining things anymore, that what you’re hearing is actually real. That’s when the air seems to rum to liquid, heavy and tough to breath, even before the stink hits you. The noise is always the same too; the hiss of fur against stone, the scrape of claws, the pattering of feet and the squeals of pain. Even in the seconds before battle those filthy things are snapping and biting at their own kin.’
Van Delft sneered into the depths of the fireplace, his bared teeth gleaming as sharp as a terrier’s beneath his moustache. ‘They even hate each other.’
This time, when he paused, the priest said nothing and merely sat transfixed.
‘The weakest always come first, the slaves and the vanquished. Pathetic creatures these, but crazed with a fear of what’s behind more than what is in front. I waited for them to come. I felt fear twisting into terror, felt terror twisting into madness. We waited some more. I thought of the lads behind me and tried to take strength from them. They didn’t have it to give, though. All I got was the sound of sobbing and the smell of piss. If their fear hadn’t frozen them I’ve no doubt they would have fled at the first alarm. As it was, they waited until we could see the lice crawling on the enemy. Then I fired Gudrun.’
He reached over to the weapon and ran his fingertips lovingly down from its muzzle to its breech.
‘She punched a hole straight through them, stopped the charge with a single smack of blood and shrapnel.’
Van Delft smiled gently and drew the firearm to his chest like a favourite dog. The priest half expected him to pat it.
He did.
‘Yes, she cut through them. That’s pretty much all I remember. In that battle Sigmar blessed me with the madness.’
The priest, who could well believe it, nodded and said nothing for a long while.
‘And was the pack as strong as you feared?’
‘No. No, they were nothing. Most of them were crippled with old injuries or disease. The rest were only half grown, or so old that they were toothless. There were even some females. The only one of them that was up to anything was the leader. Now he was something.’ The soldier nodded approvingly. ‘A great beast, at least as tall as a man, his pelt was almost pure black where it wasn’t riven through with scar-tissue. And from the tip of his snout to his left ear there was nothing but shiny, pink flesh, studded with a lump of warpstone in the place of his eye. How it flared when we’d cornered him!’
A strange smile lifted the mercenary’s moustache. It looked almost nostalgic, as if he were telling the story of nothing more than a boar hunt or a particularly wild party.
‘That pelt I took myself. His clan marking - a burning paw - was new to me. I brought him down with nets, put a spear through the arteries in his neck and stood back. Time was I’d have gone in with a knife, but I’m not as young as I was.’
‘Taking it easy in your old age,’ the priest replied, deadpan.
‘Patience wins,’ van Delft shrugged, oblivious to the irony. ‘I just wished I’d paid heed to him. He must have spent at least five minutes biting at the wire of the mesh, splashing around in his own blood, and all the while shrieking about traitors to the race. I thought he was just trying to curse me, like they do, but…’
Van Delft ran his fingers through his hair and then clutched at his temples. He sighed, the sound barely audible over the distant thrashing of the forest beneath the night winds.
‘That was the first of a dozen sweeps. The maps were always right, the numbers were always correct. And all we ever met were the dregs of three different clans. They were sickly things, not the least because they had all been cursed with some sort of fire. It seemed to have swept over them like a plague, leaving the survivors with withered limbs and scorched pelts. I had the idea that they’d pretty much wiped each other out before we’d arrived. I thought I had it all worked out. Then, three nights ago, I realised that I hadn’t.’
The bitter snap of his laughter slapped against the stonework, briefly cutting through the distant hiss of the troubled forest. The priest, who had began to guess at the holocaust that had brought his guest here, shifted uneasily in his seat.
‘It was supposed to be one of the easiest patrols yet, just a slash and burn against some breeding chambers. I’d decided to let one of the corporals take over command for this one. Gunter, he was called. He was sharp, canny and not afraid to use his authority, but not reveling in it either. He’d have made a good leader.’
Van Delft’s eyebrows furrowed into a deep ravine of sadness. The priest found himself wondering if the mercenary had ever had a family, children of his own. He supposed not.
‘Gunter was leading the column to a rendezvous point,’ he continued. ‘We were dispersed into small groups. It’s tough to stop people bunching up for protection, especially underground. All that fear, all that darkness. But I could see that the lads were making an effort. They knew that Gunter was being tested and they wanted him to succeed. In fact, as soon as I saw that, I knew he had succeeded.’
The soldier looked up and saw the question in his host’s eyes.
‘I needed to know if they’d work for him. That was the test. That was all we were really down there for. I knew there’d be no sort of fight that night. Thought I knew, anyway.’ He shrugged miserably. ‘After all we’d swept through most of these catacombs already. The first I knew of what was to befall us was when Krinvaller fe
ll into our midst. We were supposed to be linking up with his party, but he had no men with him now. Nor did he have any weapons and his clothes, all that silk and brocade and gilding that he was so fond of, had been shredded into rags.’
Van Delfts picked absent-mindedly at the ruins of his clothes. ‘Hell, at first I didn’t even recognise him. I thought he must have been some madman who’d wandered down. It wasn’t until he cried out my name that I realised who it was, and even then I wasn’t sure. All that bonhomie, that soft arrogance that had flowered in the safety of the light above was gone, bled away by the reality of the deeps. I pitied him, then, a weak man in a terrible place. But before I could reach out to him and reassure him, the enemy struck. The enemy! This time they truly were skaven. Compared to these two, the weak and crippled vermin we’d hunted up until then were nothing.’
‘Only two?’ the priest asked, uncertainly.
‘Yes, only two. And if anything they were even smaller than average, wiry little twists of things. You could see that even beneath the black strips of their camouflage. It didn’t matter. They had that energy, you see, that manic sort of power that can gnaw through stone or bend the bars from an asylum window.’
‘I’d seen their like a few times before. Usually just a glimpse, a shadow, a chill running down the back of your neck.’
Van Delft lifted the pot to his lips and didn’t seem to notice that it was empty. The priest, eyes reflecting the candle light in twin circles of fascination, made no move to refill it.
‘Down there, though, they’d thrown off their caution. Desperation had made them drop it, I suppose, the same as they’d dropped everything else that might have slowed them down. The only steel they carried sparkled in their paws. They’d dropped swords, bandoliers, nets, globes, everything. Sigmar alone knows how Krinvaller had made it this far.’
‘They hit him a second after he’d appeared. I was close enough to hear the thud of weapons burying themselves between his ribs. He fell to one knee, his face already twisted with pain from the poison, and reached out towards me. He looked so… surprised.’
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