[Blackhearts 02] - The Broken Lance

by Nathan Long - (ebook by Undead)

  Reiner stuck his finger in the hole. It was greasy as well. He pulled. The board came up easily, revealing utter blackness.

  Giano grinned. “Knock, knock, hey?”

  Reiner swallowed. “Aye. Er, after you.”

  Giano ducked eagerly through the gap. Reiner followed more cautiously, sticking his torch through first, then squeezing in afterwards. The board banged down behind him. Inside was a bit of an anticlimax. It looked exactly like the outside—a high, wide tunnel sloping away into darkness.

  “No sign of a cave-in,” said Reiner.

  “Maybe further down.”

  “Or maybe not at all.”

  They started down the tunnel, travelling in a small sphere of light through a universe of black. A hundred yards on, they almost tripped over two small crates piled against one wall. Reiner held the torch low. The crates looked familiar.

  “What is?” asked Giano.

  Reiner snorted. “‘Mining tools’.”

  As they continued on, Reiner’s heart thudded with excitement. Now they need not wait for the next shipment to Aulschweig. They could kill Gutzmann whenever they wanted and take the gold from here instead—a much easier proposition than stealing it en route. This was excellent news—at least it would be if Franka still lived.

  Shortly after that the tunnel stopped at a rough rock face, and for a moment Reiner’s heart sank. But then he saw a small opening in the face. It was a tunnel so narrow that he and Giano had to walk single file. Ten paces in, Giano stopped suddenly and raised his hand.

  “Light,” he said.

  Reiner put his torch on the ground behind him and they crept forward.

  Three yards further the tunnel opened up into a large space, lit with a wan purple light. Giano peeked out then gasped and flinched back. Reiner followed his gaze and jumped back as well, heart thudding. Looming over them was a monstrous insect the size of a house. Huge sabre-like mandibles jutted from its maw. It took a moment of deep breaths to realize that the insect wasn’t moving, wasn’t alive, wasn’t in fact an insect. It was a giant machine. And it wasn’t alone.

  Giano and Reiner stepped cautiously into the tunnel, looking up at the four massive metal monstrosities that sat on man-high wooden wheels to the left and right of the narrow hole. A thrill of fear ran through Reiner as he divined their purpose. They were digging machines. Mad, skeletal contraptions of iron, wood, leather and brass. The mandibles were giant steel picks meant to chew at the workface. They were attached by a series of axles, gears and belts to an enormous brass tank, green with corrosion, fitted with all manner of valves and levers. Broad leather belts led from beneath the mandibles to the backs of the contraptions, where strings of wooden mine carts were lined up, ready to take the chewed rock away.

  The scale of the enterprise made Reiner’s head spin. Not even the Empire built machines this large. What were they digging? Did the ratmen mine gold as well? Was there something else of value in the rock? Or…

  It came to him with sudden clarity and dread, and his blood turned to ice in his veins. The ratmen were building a road—a road high enough and wide enough to allow an army to march to the surface. And they were only twenty paces from connecting with the mine tunnel, which was just as high and wide. Their work was almost done.

  Giano swallowed. “This bad, hey?”

  “Aye,” said Reiner. “Bad is a word for it.”

  As he and Giano crept around the towering machines, weirdly lit by the pulsing purple light that came from glowing stones set high in the walls, Reiner saw movement in the shadows and jerked his dagger out of its scabbard. Rats—of the small, four-footed variety—swarmed over piles of bones and rubbish that cluttered the floor, ample evidence that this wasn’t some long abandoned endeavour. Some of the bones looked human. Reiner moaned in his throat. Were the ratmen kidnapping women for food?

  There was a small side passage in the left wall, and more dotted the tunnel on both sides as far as they could see. The openings made Reiner nervous. At any moment a ratman could pop out of one, and then where would they be?

  He and Giano started forward, looking warily around. A few moments later, distant structures began to emerge from the gloom. At first Reiner thought they were battlements of some kind—the walls and towers of some underground town—but as they got closer, he saw that they were siege towers, mounted on wheels and laid on their sides. They were surrounded by other giant engines of war, catapults, ballisti, and battering rams.

  “Blood of Sigmar,” he breathed. “They mean to take the fort.”

  Giano nodded, wide-eyed.

  They crept forward at a snail’s pace, hugging the wall and keeping low, and at last reached the jumble of machines, Giano sniffing like a bloodhound. As they came around a prone tower, they saw, further on, an encampment of sorts, though to one used to the regimented order of an Empire camp, it was an offence to the eye. Low structures that looked more like piles of blankets than tents hugged the walls of the tunnel and shadows wormed in and out of them like… well, like rats.

  Giano stopped, his hand on the hilt of his sword. He was trembling. “Ratmen!”

  “Easy, lad,” said Reiner, as Giano began to draw. “We ain’t here to fight ’em all.”

  Giano nodded, but it seemed a supreme act of will for him to return his blade to its scabbard.

  As they stepped back behind the tower, an overpowering stench overcame them. They clapped their hands over their noses and looked around. Against one wall was a pile of furred bodies—dead rat men, discarded like old apple cores. There was movement on the pile—the four-legged feeding on the two-legged—and it reeked like a slaughterhouse, an odour equal parts animal filth and diseased death. Some of the bodies were bloated with fat black boils.

  Reiner was turning away, nauseous, when he saw a white arm among the mangy limbs. His heart froze, and he stepped, trembling, to the pile, the rats scattering at his approach. Giano followed, covering his mouth with his handkerchief. Reiner reached out toward the arm, then stopped when he saw that it possessed a man’s hand, callused and thick. He looked for the rest of the body, and found, half hidden among rotting ratman corpses, and grinning, partially fleshed ratman skulls, the face of a pikeman, his right cheek and temple gnawed away.

  “Poor devil,” said Reiner.

  Giano made the sign of Shallya.

  They returned to their vantage point and surveyed the rat-men’s camp. It was not an encouraging sight. The whole place seethed with motion: ratmen darting in and out of the holes in the tunnel walls, ratmen swarming around the tents, rat men crawling over the line of carts in the centre of the tunnel, loading and unloading spears and halberds and strange brass instruments that Reiner feared were weapons as well, ratmen arguing and fighting.

  Giano shook his head. “How we finding boy in all these?”

  “I don’t know, lad,” said Reiner. His heart was sinking. He wasn’t by nature a coward, but neither was he a fool. He wasn’t the sort of stage-play hero who charged a horde of Kurgan armed only with a turnip. He was a follower of Ranald, whose commandments stated that one shouldn’t go into any situation without the odds clearly in one’s favour. Walking into this mess was a sure way to incur the trickster’s wrath.

  And yet, Franka was in there somewhere, if she wasn’t already some ratman’s dinner. And he couldn’t just turn around and leave without trying to find her.

  “Damn the girl,” he growled.

  “Hey?” said Giano, puzzled. “Girl?”

  “Never mind.” Reiner pulled himself up onto the prone siege tower. The view was no better. The ratmen were everywhere at once. No area of the camp was ever vacant long. There was no little-used corridor for Reiner and Giano to sneak down—no catwalk high above. They would be discovered at once, and that would be the end.

  Unless…

  Reiner looked at the tower he clung to. Its timber frame was stretched over with a patchwork of leather and furs. Reiner blanched when he saw that some of the skins had tattoos, bu
t he couldn’t be squeamish now.

  “Giano,” he said, drawing his dagger. “Help me cut down some of these skins. They walked robed among us. We shall walk robed among them.”

  Giano obediently started cutting but he looked doubtful. “The rat, he have damn good smelling, hey? He sniffing us even hiding.”

  Reiner groaned. “Curse it, yes. I’d forgotten. They’ll smell us for human in an instant.” He sighed deeply, then nearly choked on the stink of the pile of corpses as he inhaled again. An idea brought his head up and he looked at the pile, eyes shining. “There could be a way…”

  Giano followed his gaze, then moaned. “Oh, captain, please no. Please.”

  “I’m afraid so, lad.”

  Behind his pointed leather mask, and beneath his makeshift leather robes, sewn together with lengths of rawhide unwound from binding that held the siege machines together, Reiner’s heart beat as rapidly as a hummingbird’s. He and Giano were picking their way through the ratmen’s camp, tails cut from the ratmen’s corpses tied to their belts and dragging behind them, and with every step, retreat became more impossible and discovery more likely. Though they tried to hug the line of carts, where there were the fewest ratmen, still the beasts were all around them, and a mere skin was all that shielded them from their ravenous fury. If he or Giano revealed their hands or feet they were lost, for the ratmen’s appendages looked nothing like theirs. If they were challenged they were lost, for the ratmen’s speech was a chittering gabble of hisses, chirps and shrieks that Reiner’s throat couldn’t possibly have reproduced even if he had understood it. Fortunately, the ratmen hardly gave Reiner and Giano a second look—or to be more accurate, a second sniff—for they were covered in an almost visible reek of rat musk and death, and as such, blended in with the general atmosphere of the tunnel.

  Over Giano’s piteous protestations, Reiner had ordered the Tilean to follow his example and roll like a pig in mud within the pile of corpses. Reluctantly, they had rubbed themselves and their makeshift robes and masks against the oily fur and decaying flesh and diseased wounds of the bodies, and caked their boots and gloves with their excrement. It had been a foul, gut-churning experience, and was continuing to be. Being trapped inside the hooded mask with the stench was like drinking a sewer. If it hadn’t been for the distraction of the wonders and horrors he was seeing through his eye-holes, Reiner would undoubtedly have vomited.

  There were so many ratmen, so closely packed together—hundreds, perhaps thousands—within his range of vision, it made his head swim. And the camp continued around the curve of the tunnel with no apparent end. They were loathsome creatures, their long, narrow faces covered in filthy, lice-ridden fur, their mouths slackly open to reveal great, curving front teeth. But it was their eyes that truly repulsed Reiner—vacant black orbs that glittered like glass. They seemed utterly empty of intelligence. If it hadn’t been for the scraps of rusty armour that covered their scrawny limbs, and the earrings that dangled from their tattered ears, and of course the weapons that they carried, Reiner would not have believed them thinking beings.

  Their filth was indescribable. They seemed not to have separate places to dispose of their refuse and droppings; instead, they appeared to nest in them. Their tents were filled with bones, rags and filth shaped into crater-like depressions in which they slept. Some of the ratkin appeared to be deathly ill, yellow mucus weeping from their eyes and black lesions covering their scaly hands, but the other ratmen made no effort to avoid their diseased fellows. They shared their food and drink and rubbed past them in the narrow byways of the camp without a second thought. Did they wish to get sick? It came to Reiner with a shudder that perhaps they did. Perhaps disease was only another weapon to them.

  Some of the weapons Reiner saw them carrying he couldn’t even begin to understand: bizarre pistols and long guns that sprouted weird brass piping and glass reservoirs filled with phosphorescent green liquid. On the carts in the centre of the tunnel larger weapons were stored; great spears that hummed as they passed them, handheld cannon connected by leather hoses to large brass reservoirs.

  What Reiner did not see was any sign of Franka, or any humans at all. The camp seemed only tents and carts and rats as far as the eye could see. After walking a few hundred yards into it, Reiner’s steps began to slow. It was hopeless, pointless. If the myths of the ratmen were correct, their tunnels ran under the whole wide world. Franka might be halfway to Cathay by now. Or he might have passed her bones in one of the piles of garbage that were heaped everywhere. At last he stopped, overcome. He tapped Giano on the shoulder, and motioned him to turn around, but before the Tilean could respond, Reiner heard, very faintly in the distance, an agonized scream—a human scream!

  The men froze, listening with their whole beings. The scream came again. It was behind them, back the way they had come—a cry of terror and unbearable pain. Reiner and Giano turned and hurried back through the camp as quickly as they could, listening for further cries. What a bitter irony, Reiner thought. The screams were so pitiful it made him wish the man who uttered them a quick death, and yet, if he was to find their source the man must cry again and again.

  They had almost returned to the edge of the camp before the cry came again, and this time it was words. “Mercy. Mercy, I beg you!”

  Reiner turned. The voice came not from before or behind them, but to one side—from one of the branching passages.

  “In the name of Sigmar, have you no…” The voice broke off in a bone chilling shriek. Reiner winced, but at least he had pinpointed the passage. He touched Giano’s arm and they moved toward it.

  The passage was short and opened up at its far end into a room that glowed brightly with the purple light. It was hard to determine the room’s dimensions, for it was so cluttered that Reiner couldn’t see the walls. Machines from a poppy eater’s nightmare loomed on the left: a thing like a casket surrounded by metal spider’s legs, each tipped with a scalpel or pipette, a chair with straps to pinion the arms over which dangled a helmet ringed with sharp screws, a rack that seemed to have been constructed to stretch a creature with more than four limbs, a charcoal brazier that glowed with red heat, a contraption of glass bulbs and tubes through which coloured liquids bubbled and dripped.

  On the right, piled up like so many children’s blocks, was a jumble of small iron cages, none more than four feet high, but all containing at least one, and sometimes three or four, filthy, dung- and blood-smeared humans. Reiner’s heart leapt at this sight—foul as it was—for Franka might be among them. He wanted to run forward and check them all, but he daren’t. The room wasn’t empty.

  In the centre was a tableau Reiner had been avoiding looking at directly, for it was from there that the screams came. Now at last he faced it. There was a table, and a man on the table, shackled to it, though so weak now the fetters were no longer necessary. It was extraordinary to Reiner that the man still lived, for his torso had been laid open like a gutted fish, the skin of his belly pinned back with clips so that his organs were exposed. They shone wetly in the purple light. The fellow had the rough hands and hard-lined face of a miner, but he was begging for mercy in the high whimper of a little girl.

  Hovering over him like a cook making a pie was a plump, grey-furred ratman, scalpel and forceps held high in gloved hands. He wore a blood-drenched leather apron with a belt full of steel implements slung at his waist, and a leather band circled his brow, attached to which were articulated arms, all fitted with glass lenses of various thicknesses and colours that could be pulled down in front of the creature’s beady black eyes. It already wore thick spectacles, which it balanced on its broad furred snout. It was such a caricature of the short-sighted scholar Reiner might have thought it comic, had it not been for the horrible vivisection it was engaged in.

  What made the situation even more horrible was that the rat-man was speaking to his victim, and not in the chittering gibberish of his kind, but in high-pitched and broken Reiklander. “Does read Heidel?” it a
sked, then tsked sadly when the man didn’t respond. “Wasted. Wasted. You Reik-man. Finest books. Finest lib… lib…” It snarled in frustration. “Book places! And you no read, no think. Just to drink, to mate, to sleep. Shameful.”

  The sound of Giano muttering furiously in Tilean beside him snapped Reiner out of his horrified trance. The crossbowman’s hand was reaching for his sword. Reiner touched Giano’s arm and pulled him out of the doorway behind the bulk of a great black-iron cauldron. Giano patted his shoulder gratefully, recovering himself.

  “Here me,” the rat-surgeon continued, sighing. “Down below. Book come garbage and sewer. But know I more of out world than it.” He severed some membrane in the man’s belly. The miner groaned. The ratman ignored him. “Does know Volman’s Seven Virtue? History of beer-making in Hochland? Poem of Brother Octavio Durst? I know this. And so more. Many more.”

  He set his implements aside, pulled a lens in front of one eye, and began to paw through the man’s organs with delicate claws.

  “This me confuse. Why man? Why man so big? Why win so many battles? Why so brave?” He shook his head. “First think, maybe man stupid. Too stupid to be scare. But skaven stupid too, and always scare. Run away, all time run. So not that.” He scooped out his victim’s intestines with both hands and set them on the table beside him. “So now think something new. Fix the moulder way! Pinder say brave in spleen. So I try if man with no spleen will scare. Then, I try if skaven with man-spleen will brave. Ah, here is.” He tugged at an organ with one hand, then cut it from its mooring with his scalpel.

  The man convulsed and gasped. Blood welled from the cavity of his belly and his hands began to clutch and grasp. The grey ratman tsked again, then tried to stem the flow with a clamp. He was too slow. Before he had successfully applied it, the table was awash with blood and the man lay still and silent.

  The rat-surgeon sighed. “Another. Too bad. Well, we try again.” He raised his voice and chittered over his shoulder. Two brown rats in leather aprons came out of a further room. The surgeon directed them to remove the body and bring another from the cages.