The End Times | The Rise of the Horned Rat

by Guy Haley

  ‘I’m going to have to sort this out myself, aren’t I?’ said Skarsnik. ‘Come on, Gobbla.’ He pulled on his squig’s chain, and the pair of them shoved their way down to the front.

  Skarsnik’s prodder emerged first, punching through the gap between two goblins and spearing a stormvermin on its triple prongs. Skarsnik grunted as he pushed, shoving the dead rat back off its feet and tripping those in the ranks behind it. The rat was big, but Skarsnik was strong. Under his robes he was a mass of knotted muscle, his success such that he had grown huge for a night goblin – for a goblin of any kind, for that matter. Only Fat Grom had been bigger, but as Skarsnik liked to say, that was all fat and it didn’t count.

  ‘Come on, you ratties!’ shrilled Skarsnik. Recognising their master’s arch nemesis, the stormvermin scrambled over each other to get at him, eager to be the one to take his head. He stabbed and blasted with his prodder. Gobbla fought at his side, snapping the heads off halberds that might have speared his master, snapping the hands off that held the halberds, and snapping off the heads of the vermin that guided the hands. Skarsnik was old and thoughtful, but when roused he was mean as an orc warlord after a heavy night on the fungus brew. With Gobbla by his side, he was well nigh unstoppable. By his own efforts, he opened a wide circle in the front ranks of the stormvermin. ‘Go on! Get on at ya!’ he shouted, whirling the prodder round his head and whooping with delight. The goblins pushed forwards after him, chanting his name.

  Skarsnik brought his prodder in a wide arc, aiming to decapitate three stormvermin with one blow, only to find it intercepted by a black sword. A terrible strength was behind it. He pushed, and a fat, heavily muscled skaven pushed back. Skarsnik did not know his name, but it was Grotoose. A pack of rat ogres moved in and boxed in Gobbla, leaving the King under the Mountains to face Grotoose alone.

  The Clan Moulder war-leader leaned in close to Skarsnik, both of them grimacing with hatred and effort. With a flourish, Skarsnik disengaged, flinging Grotoose’s sword arm wide. Skarsnik reversed the prodder, sending the weighty ferrule on its base driving into Grotoose’s flabby stomach. Air exploded from the skaven’s mouth, and he doubled over. Skarsnik stepped in, but Grotoose was shamming. As Skarsnik approached, Grotoose slammed his sword hilt into Skarsnik’s head, and again. Driven back, Skarsnik stumbled, his feet fouled in the chain attaching Gobbla to him.

  Grotoose loomed over him, blotting out the pale sky.

  He raised his sword. ‘Now you die-die!’

  Grotoose never landed his blow. Gobbla came from the side, a bolt of crimson death, teeth snapping. He swallowed the claw leader of Clan Moulder whole.

  Skarsnik got to his feet and patted his pet. ‘That was close! That was too close,’ he muttered. ‘Good boy, Gobbla.’

  Gobbla burped.

  Skarsnik took a moment. The stormvermin and rat ogres had been driven back, the flow of battle moving away from him. Annoyingly, the stormvermin’s boss was still alive and kicking, but he was on the defensive. ‘They don’t need us no more, come on. We got some strategising to do,’ he said. His speech was peppered with bastardised Reikspiel and Khazalid words he used for concepts Orcish lacked the capacity to express. He led his pet back to his vantage point to begin said strategising.

  He extended his telescope again. The battle was much as it was before. Then he saw something he had never seen, a blurring shadow that leapt all over the battlefield. One instant it was in one place, in another elsewhere. A disk of metal whirred out from this darkness, curving through air and flesh alike without interrupting its course. It banked around and flew back to its starting point, being snatched out of the air by a huge clawed hand.

  ‘That’s weird,’ said Skarsnik. ‘That looks a bit like one of them…’

  Gobbla whined. Skarsnik looked down.

  ‘What’s wrong, boy?’

  Gobbla’s nose snuffled. He looked up into Skarsnik’s eyes with his one good one.

  ‘Gobbla?’

  A dribble of blood collected at the corner of the squig’s mouth. Skarsnik knelt down, concerned. A squelching sound came from Gobbla’s innards. Skarsnik put his ear to the squig’s side.

  Gobbla whined again.

  A knife burst through the top of the squig’s skull. Gobbla’s eye rolled back into his head, and the squig collapsed, deflating. His bulk wobbled and shook, and the knife cut downwards.

  ‘Gobbla!’ screamed Skarsnik.

  Grotoose hauled himself from a long slit in the squig’s side. His skin was blistered from Gobbla’s potent stomach acids, fur falling out in clumps. Half his face had been melted off. Groaning in pain, he dragged himself away with fingers whose flesh came away from the bone as he scrabbled at the rock.

  Skarsnik looked on in speechless horror. Grotoose raised a head with eyes that had been burned to whiteness.

  ‘I first Clan Moulder beastmaster in Eight Peaks,’ he said thickly. ‘It take lot more than stupid red-ball, fungus-thing to kill me.’

  His face contorting with rage, Skarsnik raised the prodder high and drove it down through Grotoose’s back so hard it shattered the stone beneath. Grotoose shuddered, as if he’d still planned on getting up, before he finally realised he was dead.

  ‘Gobbla,’ said Skarsnik, in a small voice. The battle forgotten, he dropped his prodder and fell to the squig’s side. The squig sagged in on itself, its capacious body pooling like a half-empty wineskin. Skarsnik knelt and hesitated, eyes surveying this most cruel ruin as if he could bring it back to wholeness by wishing it otherwise.

  It didn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. Gobbla was dead, his small, faithful brain leaking out through the hole in the top of his head.

  Skarsnik laid both hands on the leathery hide of his closest companion.

  ‘Gobbla,’ said the Warlord of Karak Eight Peaks, with a catch in his throat. ‘Gobbla!’

  Queek dodged another thunderous blow from the wyvern, tripping on a half-buried lump of masonry as he did. He was panting heavily, bleeding down one arm from a lucky spear-thrust.

  ‘Getting tired, incha, little rattie?’ rumbled the orc. ‘You’re a tasty fighter, that’s what they all say. Down in the Badlands they say that. That far away. Yeah, that’s right. Ain’t you proud?’ The orc laughed. ‘Broken Toofs, my tribe. We heard that all right, we heard all about da Headtaker.’ He widened his eyes in mock fright. ‘But I reckoned it was all bluster, all talk. Load of nonsense. No rat going to outfight an orc every day of the week like what they say you can, though I see you got a couple of blackies up there on your spikes. Idiots, they are. No fun in them. I ain’t one of them snaggle-toothed stunty slaves. I’m a free orc – you’ll never beat me.’

  Queek kept his distance from the circling wyvern. He spat on the ground. Let the orc talk himself into an early grave. The ones with the big mouths always spoke too much, leaving themselves open to Queek’s mightiness.

  This fight had gone on too long. If he didn’t finish it soon, the green imp might win!

  How to end it? How to end it? Queek burned inside.

  ‘My name,’ said the orc, ‘is Krolg Krushelm! You hear that, now. I wants you to be thinking it when I guts ya! I’m a real greenskin, not like this sneaky little git here. No wonder you ain’t been beat yet. As soon as I’m done with you, I’m taking that cave runt down. It’s about time the Eight Peaks had a real boss.’ Krolg spurred his mount.

  The wyvern roared, spraying Queek with foul-smelling spittle. The tail swiped down, jaws coming at him from another angle, Krolg’s spear from a third.

  Queek had the measure of his opponents. A good fight, a fine challenge. A pity to finish it.

  He ducked the sting, batted the spear tip aside with his sword, rolled under the wyvern’s head, sprang to his feet and, with a powerful swing, buried Dwarf Gouger in the wyvern’s eye. The spike on the pick punched through the soft eyeball and the thin bone at the back of the socket
with ease.

  The wyvern bellowed in agony and spread its wings. It wrenched its head back from the source of its pain. Queek kept tight hold of Dwarf Gouger’s haft, letting go only when the time was right. As he arced through the air, Krolg’s mouth formed an ‘o’ of surprise below his twisting body.

  Krolg was still wearing the expression when his head toppled from his shoulders and rolled into the dirt.

  Queek landed on his feet in a crouch, a gleeful smile on his lips.

  He waited until the wyvern’s death throes had ceased before retrieving his favourite weapon.

  ‘Boss! Boss!’

  Skarsnik heard the words only dimly. His entire attention was fixed on the dead Gobbla, his hands still pressed into his gradually sinking flesh.

  A hand grabbed him. ‘Boss!’

  Skarsnik whirled round and snarled into the face of Kruggler.

  Kruggler took a step backwards, both hands raised. ‘Boss! Now ain’t the time. Don’t let them see you like this, boss. The lads need bossing, boss! What are we going to do?’

  Skarsnik shivered. The skin around his eyes felt tight. A strange emotion he’d not felt before… Nah, nah, that wasn’t right. Once before, long ago, when Snotruk had killed Snottie, his loyal companion in his lonely days as a runt. Hollow like, all empty inside, like nothing really mattered any more.

  He shook it off, but it clung on, clamping around the quivery bit of meat inside his chest like it would crush it with cold, cold ice.

  ‘Ye’re right, ye’re right.’ He nodded at Gobbla. ‘Someone take that away!’ he said, trying to sound like he didn’t care. The goblins that came forward were wise enough to handle the dead squig very carefully indeed. Kruggler helped the goblin warlord up while one of Skarsnik’s little big ’uns smashed the chain with his long axe.

  The weight gone from his foot felt weird. He wiggled it around speculatively. Definitely weird.

  ‘Boss!’ said Kruggler in exasperation.

  ‘What? Yeah, sorry, the battle, the battle.’ Skarsnik raised his hand to his eyes. He couldn’t see very well because they kept filling up with water and he didn’t know why. He blinked it away and took stock of the battle.

  Towards Silver Mountain, a fresh horde of clanrats running down the remainder of the squig teams there.

  To the east, the now very distant form of Big Red trumpeting his way towards the evening. To the south, a mighty arachnarok spider being dismembered by the mysterious shadow.

  To the centre, the broken Idol of Gork – or was it Mork? He really couldn’t be sure – and an additional item: one slaughtered wyvern, topped with a headless orc. The Headtaker’s troops were forming up, gathering stragglers back into solid formations. The formation that Skarsnik’s little big ’uns had broken was being bullied back into shape by its leader.

  ‘I’ve seen enough,’ said Skarsnik.

  ‘What?’ said Kruggler.

  ‘It’s a bust. We’ve lost. A good scrap, but we couldn’t pull it off, because there really is a lot of them, ain’t there?’ said Skarsnik to himself. ‘Farsands, and farsands.’ He did a quick mental calculation, the kind that would make a normal goblin die of a brain infarction. ‘That’s actually a lot more of them than there is of us…’ He looked to the citadel. ‘Old Belegar’s next. We need to scarper.’

  ‘What?!’ repeated Kruggler.

  ‘Kruggs, mate, we have lost! Can I make it any simpler for you? If we don’t shift, Queek’ll have our heads on that poncy bedstead he wears on his back quicker than he’ll have Belegar’s. I don’t think I want to stick around for that. Sound the retreat!’ he shouted.

  ‘What about the rest of the boys?’

  ‘What? Out-of-towners, weird scrawny runts wot smell of old leaves and ride about on spiders, and deadbeats? Nah, they played their part. Leave ’em. Besides, if we all go at once, then the rats might attack us before we can get away, mightn’t they?’ Skarsnik tapped his grubby forehead with a bloody finger. ‘Always thinking me. That’s why I is king and you is not.’ He addressed his signallers again, before they commenced their flag-waving and horn-blowing. ‘And by retreat, I mean walking back inside carefully with your weapons ready, not running for the hills so we’s can all get out of breath, run down, chopped up and et by ratsies! Got that?’ he bawled.

  His horn-blowers and flag-wavers nodded. At least some of them understood. They relayed his orders as best they could. Some of the greenskins even obeyed them. All in all, thought Skarsnik, as he watched his tired tribe and its allies about face and march up to the gates of the Howlpeak, things could have been a whole lot worse.

  Once he’d regained the gates himself, he went up to the broken battlements atop it. Through his telescope he watched the skaven break into a desperate run as the last of the Crooked Moon tribe withdrew to the safety of the Howlpeak. For a long time, he kept his spyglass trained on Queek’s furious, furry face and watched it get madder and madder. He kept watching, in fact, until the gates clanged shut.

  Now that was funny.

  ‘Gobbla,’ he said, meaning to share the moment with his pet. ‘Gobbla, look at that, eh? Boy? Boy?’ Skarsnik looked down at his side.

  But, of course, there was nobody there.

  TWENTY

  Lurklox’s Deal

  Skarsnik went into his private rooms as quickly as he was able. That was not very quickly. He had to patrol the borders of his much-reduced kingdom to make sure the lads were watching out properly, and that there were units ready to see off an attack, and that the outsiders who had come into the Howlpeak didn’t cause any bother. That went double for any who were orcs. He had a few challenges now Gobbla was gone, but that was not such a bad thing. He needed to put a couple of orcs down to keep the rest in line. Without Gobbla, they found him still extremely dangerous, and the fact that he could still break an orc with his bare hands without his giant pet had quietened them down real quick. But Gobbla’s loss was telling on him in other ways. Without the squig, he’d lost his skaven assassin early warning system. He might as well leave the door unlocked, dismiss all his guard and go to sleep with a knife conveniently laid out next to his bed.

  Once inside, he locked the door and commenced pacing, the butt of his prodder clashing on the floor. He banged it harder and harder as he got more and more worried. Skarsnik was no stranger to dilemmas, but this one was a real pickle and no mistake.

  ‘Got to get organised, got to get organised!’ he muttered to himself. ‘Where is I if I don’t gets organised?’ He glanced to his papers, but this time they didn’t hold the answer. ‘Gotta fink!’ he said, and worried at his fingers with sharp goblin teeth. ‘Item one,’ he said to himself. ‘Old Queek’s going for conquest. Item two, there’s loads more of them than there is of us. Item three, them stunties aren’t going to be there much longer, and when they is not, old squeaky Queeky’s gonna come knockin’ on me door with all his monsters and such. So what to do? Need Duffskul, yeah.’ He made to call the shaman, but remembered he was dead too. Who else could he call on? No one had seen Mad Zargakk in years, Kruggler was the brightest of the gobboes to hand but still very thick, and there was no point at all in asking an orc…

  He caught something from the corner of his eye, a flicker in the room where one shouldn’t be.

  ‘Oh, come on. Not again!’ he groaned. He levelled his prodder at the globe of black lightning crackling into being. ‘I’m not in the mood today, ratboy! Buzz off or get a face full of Morky magic!’

  But as the visitor manifested, Skarsnik’s expression of defiance turned to a gape. His intention to zap the rat dissipated. This wasn’t your usual rat with horns, magicking himself in to have a pop – although it did, he supposed, have horns. And it did look like a rat, only not that much. Bigger, it was. Everywhere.

  ‘Rats,’ he said, ‘aren’t usually that big.’

  Skarsnik took a step back as an immense shape
stepped out of the shadows. Although, that wasn’t right, because the shadows came with it. They writhed over the thing, whatever it was, stopping Skarsnik from getting a good look at it. He got an impression, nothing more – long, hairy arms lined with thick tendons, black claws, and a head crowned with an impressive rack of horns above a masked face where terrible eyes burned.

  For the first time in a long time, Skarsnik gulped fearfully. The thing! The weird thing from the battle that had taken out Grobspit’s spider monsters, right there in his bedroom! The creature was huge, bigger than a troll, all wiry muscle and patches of fur. It had claws bigger than Gobbla’s teeth. Then Skarsnik recognised it for what it was, and recovered his wits. Better the daemon you know, and he knew this kind well enough.

  ‘Oh. Right. It’s one of those.’ The stink of rodent and glowy green rock was unmistakeable. ‘Ratfing daemon, one wiv lots of extra shadow, but a ratfing daemon you is. Well, ain’t I honoured,’ he said archly. ‘Oi, back off,’ he shouted, holding his ground. His prodder crackled with power. ‘I ain’t no snotty to be pushed about.’

  ‘I am a lord of the Thirteen in Shadow!’ scoffed the rat-daemon. ‘I am master-assassin! That cannot hurt me. You cannot hurt me!’

  ‘Yeah, right. Shall we give it a little try? I reckon a blast of Mork magic’d put a very big hole in you, you… you… ratfing. Don’t you?’

  ‘This is no stand-off, green-thing. I mighty-powerful. I show you mercy. If I wanted you dead, tiny and most vexing imp, dead you would be.’

  ‘Who’s showing who mercy? You want to test?’ He jiggled the prodder. ‘Fzapp!’ it went, very quietly but menacingly. Skarsnik sniffed at the sharp smell of discharged magic. ‘What is it you want, anyhow? Not seen one of your like for a while.’

  ‘I am verminlord! Master of skaven. You have glimpsed-seen my kind?’ said Lurklox, catching his surprise just a moment too late.