Relief came from the timely action of Skrim Gnawtail and his underlings. The Clan Skaul skaven flooded into the drug den, tipping bunks and addicts to the floor as they rushed the lone assassin. Willing to risk being outnumbered by the comparatively slow and ungainly human guards, Skarpaw was less inclined to take his chances with a score of vengeful ratmen. Another pawful of throwing stars downed the foremost of the snarling clanrats, then Skarpaw was dashing through the drug den, leaping over toppled bunks and slashing at intervening foes. The assassin seemed intent on gaining the hidden tunnel that would lead him back into the maze of passageways beneath Altdorf. He abandoned his purpose, however, when the entrance to the tunnel exploded in a shower of brick and earth.
Looming within the entrance, his body almost bent double to accommodate the low ceiling, Boneripper glared death at the would-be murderer of his master. The rat ogre’s armoured fist swung for Skarpaw, narrowly missing the assassin as he dodged away. The monster’s fist smashed into the wall with the force of a steam-hammer, cracking bricks into powder. Boneripper swung his head around, ropes of saliva dripping from his immense fangs as he growled at Skarpaw.
Boneripper before him, Skrim Gnawtail’s clanrats coming up behind him, and ever mindful of Thanquol’s magic, Skarpaw realised his escape rested upon a matter of instants. The assassin danced away as the rat ogre lurched after him, gutting a clanrat with his sword and pushing the maimed ratman into the monster’s path. Spinning away from the chittering ratkin squeaking for his blood, Skarpaw lunged for the locked doorway that led into the cellar of the tea shop. A glass orb drawn from a pouch on the assassin’s belt made explosively short work of the portal and the human guard beyond it. Before any of his enemies could recover from the roaring explosion, Skarpaw was darting through the debris, scrambling up the stairs to the streets above.
“No-no!” squealed Skrim Gnawtail as the clanrats started to pursue. “Man-things must not see-see skaven!” The decrepit old ratman was shoving one of Otto Ali’s men after the fleeing assassin. “Find-find!” he snarled. “Kill-kill!”
Reluctantly, fearfully, the men hurried to carry out the orders of their inhuman patrons. They knew what happened to those who defied the underfolk.
As silence slowly regained its hold over the drug den, Clan Skaul skaven began to seize those addicts who had been shaken from their stupor by the violence swirling around them. These wretches would be destined for the slave market of Under-Altdorf now that they had seen the skaven. The others, still lost in their dust-fuelled dreams, would be allowed to stay.
Grey Seer Thanquol let the limp body of the albino slump to the floor, its white fur now tinged with green from the poison of the assassin’s throwing stars. He strode through the wreckage, the butt of his staff tapping menacingly against the floor. Kratch hid his head as his mentor stalked past him, the adept trying to press himself into the frame of the bunk. Thanquol gave the apprentice a spiteful swat of his claw, licking Kratch’s blood from his fingers and snickering as he heard the flea yelp in pain. If he wanted to last long enough to have an accident, Kratch would need to grow a spine, and quickly.
Just now, however, Thanquol had a more important victim of his wrath. As Skrim snapped quick orders to his clanrats, Thanquol approached the sneaky ratman from behind. A blow of his staff sprawled Skrim Gnawtail on the floor. The old skaven snarled, reaching for his dagger, but quickly thought better of the suicidal action when Boneripper loomed behind the grey seer.
“Safe-secure?” Thanquol snarled through clenched fangs. “Brainless tick-feeder! Where did the assassin come from?” He punctuated his words by driving the butt of his staff against the ratman’s skull, drawing blood from his temple.
“Please, forgive-forget miserable Skrim,” the stricken ratman whined. “Not-not Skrim’s fault. Skrim would not-not betray great and terrible Thanquol! Clan Eshin, Skarpaw, they are traitor-meat worthy of Thanquol’s most holy vengeance!”
Thanquol struck the grovelling ratman again. He had a point, unfortunately. Skrim would hardly have put himself in the front lines if he was aware of the attempt to kill Thanquol. Of course, that didn’t mean someone higher in the ranks of Clan Skaul might not be in collusion with the assassin. Moreover, Skrim had not fabricated the human who smelled of Wormstone.
“Off the floor, flea-biter!” Thanquol spat. He pointed a claw to the alcove where the drug-addled Kempf had slept through the entire incident. “We must take away the man-thing and torture the hiding place of the Wormstone from it before Skarpaw returns.”
Skrim Gnawtail wiped at his bleeding head, bowing in deference to Thanquol’s imperious authority. “Wise and holy despot, would it not be smart-smart to leave the man-thing alone? It is selling bits of the stone to pay for its addiction. If we wait-watch, it will lead us to the Wormstone on its own.”
Thanquol pondered the suggestion. It wasn’t a bad idea and would save them the risk of breaking the human. Their minds were so fragile and if the human lost his senses under Thanquol’s persuasive techniques, they would lose the trail to the Wormstone almost as soon as they had discovered it.
The grey seer irritably struck Skrim’s snout. “Fool-fool!” he snapped. “What we will do is allow the human to leave. He will come back to buy more dust. Before he does, his metal-tokens will be stolen from him. To get more, he will have to return to where he has hidden the Wormstone.”
Thanquol’s tail twitched in satisfaction as he considered the brilliance of his plan. Skrim rubbed at his snout, trying to hide his confusion over how the grey seer’s idea was any different from his own.
Skarpaw burst through the front door of the tea shop, the slashed body of the thug who guarded it pitching headlong into the street. A thick fog swirled about the bleak streets of Altdorf, rendering even the nearest pedestrians into indistinct shadows. The sound of violence sent them scurrying for cover like a nest of frightened mice. The only one near enough to observe the assassin’s inhuman shape was an old toothless beggar crouched upon the stoop of the tea shop. Skarpaw slashed his dripping sword at the old man, shocked when the blow somehow failed to strike the withered human, scraping against the plaster wall instead of through his scrawny neck.
There was no time to correct the amateurish mistake, however. Already Skarpaw could hear Otto Ali’s men rushing through the shop he had just vacated. The assassin snarled defiantly at his pursuers, spinning around and launching himself in a full-bodied spring at the building on the opposite side of the street.
The assassin’s leap brought Skarpaw six feet off the ground and the skaven plunged his still-gory blade into the wall above his head. Even as the guards scrambled to attack him the ratman pulled himself from their reach, using his sword to hoist himself still further up the wall and from there to the roof of the building. He paused at the peak of his ascent to leer at the men who clamoured for his blood and spit in the face of the foremost of them. Chittering laughter erupted and the assassin disappeared beyond the edge of the roof.
“After him!” one of Otto Ali’s thugs shouted. Already, several of his companions had started running in the direction of a low overhang. Behind them, the dishevelled old beggar who had nearly been bowled over when the thugs burst from the tea shop rose to his feet, all suggestion of infirmity and age vanishing as he straightened his body.
The old beggar mirrored the renegade ratman’s actions, launching himself at the wall Skarpaw had impaled his sword upon. But where inhuman strength and agility had enabled Skarpaw to perform his incredible escape, it was a darker power that enabled the beggar to match the ratman’s feat. The man’s outstretched hands closed about the plaster of the wall, little tendrils of darkness clinging to his fingers and stabbing into the structure beneath. Like a jungle lizard, the man used claws of enslaved shadow to rapidly scramble up the roof in pursuit of the vanished skaven.
The wizard’s eyes studied the expanse of tiled, shingled and thatched roofs that filled the foggy sprawl of the waterfront. Leaping from rooftop to rooftop
, like some enormous and loathsome toad, Skarpaw’s fleeing figure could be seen. An unnatural sense of grace and balance served the magister well in this new facet of the chase. Where the skaven had paused to judge distances before jumping from one roof to another, the wizard automatically calculated the speed and velocity needed to carry him across the emptiness between one structure and another and to accomplish it as easily as taking a step. Where the assassin had scrabbled to regain his balance when his foot had encountered a broken tile or his weight had broken through a rotten shingle, the wizard’s arcane powers sensed such hazards and avoided them without slackening his pace.
The pursuit was swift and soon the wizard was near enough to his prey that he could hear the skaven’s heavy breathing as the beast launched himself across the yawning chasm of a street. Skarpaw crashed against the side of the far building, his clawed hands fastening themselves about the edge of the roof and labouring to pull the assassin’s mass onto the tiled surface. The magister employed the ratman’s distress to execute his own passage across the street. The wizard twisted his body in mid-air as he leapt between the buildings, lending him greater momentum and carrying him beyond the skaven to land in a crouch atop the tiled roof.
Skarpaw pulled himself onto the roof just as the wizard rose from his crouch. The magister fastened his dark eyes upon the skaven’s beady red orbs. The wizard made a sweeping gesture with his hand, banishing the aspect of age and poverty he had worn, revealing himself as a grey-cloaked figure with smoky eyes that matched the fog swirling about the roofs. The assassin cringed as he saw the display of sorcery, noting with something approaching horror the colour of the wizard’s raiment. The magister hissed a warning to the creature, stunning him by forming his threat in Queekish rather than any human tongue.
Skarpaw answered the wizard’s challenge with a bestial snarl. The skaven tore a tile from the roof and flung the ceramic at the human’s head. Moving only his right arm, flicking a sliver of shadow from his darkened fingers, the wizard cut the projectile in two. Skarpaw blinked in astonishment and horror at his opponent’s speed and spellcraft.
“Talk-speak or die-die,” the wizard’s hissing voice warned.
Skarpaw growled, flinging a tile at the wizard with either hand. Again the magister struck at the projectiles, shattering both of the missiles, but the skaven had already exploited the distraction. Lunging to the right, the ratman rolled down the steep incline of the roof, launching his body at the roof of the next building to the south. Like a giant spider, Skarpaw scrambled up the incline of the opposing roof.
The wizard was quick to match his enemy’s manoeuvre and jumped to the flat peak of the roof just as the ratman reached the level surface. The skaven grinned with ferocity as he saw that he and the wizard still shared the same relative positions.
The skaven reached down to the rooftop and again removed a tile, this time with both hands. Hidden from the magister’s eyes was the substance the skaven smeared about the back of the tile as he gripped it, the tar-like paste the assassin had removed from one of his many hidden pouches during his graceless ascent of the incline.
Again the wizard’s shadow magic licked out, a dark, formless blur. The darkness of the sorcery was as nothing compared to the blinding radiance as it struck the tile. The tile exploded when the shadowy bolt cleft its ceramic surface and struck the black paste smeared upon its underside. Shards of ceramic shrapnel ricocheted off the roof as the force of the explosion threw the wizard into the street below. Trying to grip the close-set walls of the buildings around him, the wizard crashed through a heavy fabric awning and into the wares of a potter’s shop.
Skarpaw snarled at the magister as he pulled himself from the pile of shattered pottery. The skaven would be off the roofs and into a sewer before the wizard could regain the rooftop. He would have liked to spare the time to settle with the meddling sorcerer, but he quailed at the prospect of facing him alone.
Even Clan Eshin knew of Jeremias Scrivner, and what they knew was enough to make even the boldest assassin afraid. Skarpaw would almost rather cross Thanquol’s immense bodyguard again than risk a second encounter with the shadowmancer.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hunters, Scavengers and Prey
“I am very sorry, Herr Kempf,” Otto Ali said. The Arabyan wore a broad smile that was as genuine as a Kislevite teetotaller. In the gloom of the drug den, however, Kempf couldn’t see the nervous tremor in the man’s face or the anxiety in his eyes. “As you can see, the Hooks raided my establishment while you were enjoying the dust-dreams.” Otto Ali spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness, indicating the smashed bunks and general disorder of the dust parlour’s main room. He didn’t explain that the damage had been caused by feuding ratmen, the same ratmen who supplied him with the black dust.
“But my purse is gone!” Kempf protested. “I had ten… er… twenty shimmies in there!”
“They must have stolen it while you were dreaming,” apologised Otto Ali. “I am afraid they robbed most of my customers when they burst through the door.” Kempf glanced in the direction of the door in question. The Arabyan hoped the smuggler didn’t look too closely at it and notice that it was broken out rather than in.
Kempf scratched at his neck, feeling sick and disgusted by what he was hearing. His face wrinkled in disgust, as his arm rose. “What did they do? Piss on me while they were at it?”
“Some men have strange ideas of amusement,” Otto Ali said. He saw anger flare up in Kempf’s eyes. “When someone has a knife pressing against my belly, I don’t tell him what he can and can’t do,” the dust dealer explained.
Robbed, humiliated, his stomach turning with sickness and his skin feeling like ants were crawling beneath it, Kempf wanted to scream, to let all the pent-up outrage loose in one furious howl. Instead, the fire in his eyes faded into glassy hunger and when he spoke, it was with a shallow whisper.
“But I needed that silver,” Kempf muttered, more to himself than the Arabyan. He lifted his now pitiful face to stare at Otto Ali. “You will make good my loss? I don’t mean in money, but rather… in kind?”
Otto Ali’s smile became a great deal colder, but far more genuine. “I have misfortune enough already, Herr Kempf. I cannot compound my own losses by assuming those of my patrons.”
“But I need… I mean… I was robbed here!”
“Here or in the street, I cannot afford to make it my concern,” said the dust dealer. “If you seek charity, I suggest the Shallyan hospice.” A shrewd gleam came into Otto Ali’s eye. “The Hooks left little enough dust for those who can pay.”
Kempf clutched at the Arabyan’s arm, his face turning a sickly shade of green. “You mustn’t!” the smuggler pleaded.
“First come, first served,” Otto Ali said. “Those with coin to pay, that is.”
“I can get the money!” Kempf swore, his voice cracking with emotion. “Please, just give me a few hours!”
“Don’t be too long,” warned Otto Ali, but the smuggler had already released him and was dashing through the hastily-repaired door of the drug den. The Arabyan watched the little man run off, his contempt for the man’s pathetic addiction twisting his face into a sneer.
“Does it dare-dare bare its teeth-fangs!” a shrill voice snarled from nearby.
Otto Ali quickly threw himself to the floor, abasing himself as Grey Seer Thanquol and his apprentice Kratch emerged from one of the curtained alcoves. Despite his many years as a pawn of the skaven, he still sometimes forgot that the ratmen regarded a smile as a threatening display. With the sneaks and spies of Clan Skaul, such an oversight was dangerous. Around a creature as vicious and megalomaniacal as Thanquol, it could quickly prove lethal.
“He goes to get more of the stone,” Otto Ali said, his face still turned to the floor.
Thanquol pressed his clawed foot on the man’s neck. “Skrim, remind your pet that it does not speak-squeak to me. The ears of a grey seer are not for the chitter-chatter of man-things.”
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nbsp; The crook-backed Clan Skaul spy and several of his underlings cowered around the grey seer, looking almost as miserable as the Arabyan dust-dealer. Their scent was heavy with the odour of submission, their snouts held much lower than that of Thanquol. No danger of any of the ratmen forgetting about keeping their teeth hidden behind their lips.
“Great and malicious potentate,” Skrim whined, “my… your brilliant plan-plot proceeds…”
“Enough whining,” Thanquol snapped. “Set your trackers after the thief-meat!”
Skrim hastened to chastise and bully his cadre of skaven sneaks. The wiry ratmen pulled coarse brown cloaks and hoods tight about themselves and rushed after the departed Kempf.
“They will find-seek him soon-soon, master-teacher,” Kratch’s weaselly rasp sounded in Thanquol’s ear.
Of course they would, Thanquol thought. Even the mongrel, degenerate skaven of Under-Altdorf couldn’t fail to follow such an easy trail. It had been a stroke of genius to spray the sleeping thief-man with his own musk. The lowest skavenslave could not fail to follow a fleeing human smelling of a grey seer’s scent!
“Kratch,” Thanquol said, turning his head ever so slightly to regard his apprentice. “Gather Burnfang’s warriors and my other minions. Have them ready for when Skrim’s sniffers run this thief-meat to ground.”
Kratch’s face grew pinched, his whiskers twitching. “You anticipate trouble-danger, wise-brave overlord?”
Thanquol brought his staff smacking down against Kratch’s snout. “Don’t ask-ask! Just do what I tell-say!”
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