01 - Grey Seer

by C. L. Werner - (ebook by Undead)

  “When you sit before Morr, tell him others are coming,” the wizard hissed to the expiring mobsman. A gasped gargle rose from Volk’s throat, then the racketeer slumped onto the floor.

  The wizard turned from the last of the racketeers, turning his steely gaze across those who had been Volk’s prisoners. If the crowd had cowered before the racketeers, they trembled before the grey-cloaked magister. He lifted a hand, his long fingers no longer coated in a dark skin of arcane shadows. He pointed at Argula.

  “The smuggler, where was he taken?” the wizard demanded.

  Before the violence and brutality of Gustav Volk, Argula had been prepared to remain stalwart and defiant, sacrificing her own life if need be to keep her beau safe. Faced with the eldritch menace of the wizard’s hissed words, her courage wilted.

  “Upstairs,” she said, her voice quivering with fear and guilt. “Hans is inside the old priest hole.”

  “Show me,” the wizard commanded, gesturing to the stairs.

  Reluctantly, Argula stepped around the sprawled bodies of the dead racketeers, trying to keep her eyes from looking at their ugly, blackened wounds. She could sense rather than hear the cloaked magister following her, his very presence exuding an aura of wrongness, of offence against everything natural and pure.

  A sharp cry from the hall below caused Argula to turn about. The apothecary, Sergei, was crumpled on the floor, gripping a bleeding leg and moaning. Gustaf Schlecht stood over him, a grisly-looking surgical hook gripped in his grimy fist. He looked up at Argula with the same sadistic smile he had displayed when she was being threatened by Volk.

  “The toff’s fallen down and hurt hisself,” Schlecht croaked, his voice dripping with brutish humour.

  “Figured maybe I should look to him. I’m something of a doctor, after all.” He laughed at his own crude humour. Surgery, even the simple stitches Schlecht was called upon to minister to injured bouncers and bar patrons, wasn’t a matter of healing to the man, but rather an excuse for indulging his own sadism.

  Argula glanced back at the wizard, expecting that grim figure to intercede, to spare Sergei the cruel attentions of Schlecht. Instead she found the same grim countenance watching her from beneath the shadow of his grey hood. Remorseless, implacable, the wizard continued to follow Argula, utterly unmoved by the plight of Volk’s informant. By casting his lot in with racketeers, Sergei had earned his fate.

  The priest hole was a tiny alcove hidden behind the closet of one of the bedrooms. Argula pulled aside the rack of dresses that filled the space, exposing the little iron-banded door. A relic from the days of the Ulrican schism, when the cult of Ulric had sought to scour Altdorf of its Sigmarite faith, there were many priest holes to be found in the older structures of the city. They were places of refuge and concealment for the hunted priests, places from which the cult of Sigmar could continue to minister to the masses of Altdorf and maintain a presence and influence in the city.

  Now the tiny room hid a different sort of cleric. Leni Kleifoth, the demure priestess of Shallya, huddled against the doorway, her face flush with a resigned defiance. Utterly committed to non-violence, there was little a member of her order could do to oppose brutal men such as Volk’s mob, but at the same time, striking down a priestess was one of the few villainies that gave even the basest outlaw qualms of conscience.

  When she saw the grey figure standing behind Argula, Leni’s expression changed, becoming dour and uncertain. She looked sadly at Argula and allowed the woman to slip past her into the little room. Argula threw herself beside a little heap of blankets upon which Hans’ pallid body was strewn like a sickly scarecrow. Filthy brown liquid dribbled from his body, ugly green worms crawled visibly beneath his skin. The groans of pain rising from Hans were quickly drowned out by the weeping of his woman.

  “Report,” the cold voice of the wizard rasped, tearing Leni’s eyes from the piteous scene.

  “I have tended the man to the best of my skills,” Leni said. “I have made prayers to the goddess and burned incense in the victim’s name. I have…” her voice grew weak with guilt. “I have allowed him to drink the sacred tears, and have administered the other treatments dictated by my orders.”

  “Results.”

  Leni shook her head, stifling her own tears. “The victim remains unresponsive, the infection continues to grow and spread. There is nothing more to do except pray to the goddess.”

  “This is poison, not true disease,” the wizard said, gesturing to the broken shape of the smuggler. “It attacks what is inside the man, not the man himself. Your failure to heal him proves the nature of this evil.”

  The priestess threw back her shoulders, glaring at the cloaked wizard. “Even if I fail, I must still try to help this man!”

  A dark chuckle hissed from the wizard’s concealed lips, amused by the boldness of the priestess and her fealty to her vows. “Admirable, but useless.” His stormy gaze returned to the stricken Hans. “The only help you can render him is the only help your vows forbid you to bestow.” His fingers spread, forming a splayed claw.

  In response to the wizard’s gesture, ribbons of shadow slithered from the gloomy room, enveloping Hans’ head. The smuggler gasped as the ribbons wrapped about him. His body thrashed against the blankets while Argula fought helplessly to pull the smothering darkness from his face. A minute, no more, and Hans was still. Argula held his hand, sobbing as she felt life pass from it. At the same time, the ribbons of shadow dissipated, exposing Hans’ lifeless features.

  “Release from agony,” the wizard told Leni. As he gazed upon the priestess, for the first time there was a hint of sympathy in the magister’s grey eyes. “The tranquil peace of death.” The sympathy drained away, once more the steely gaze was a thing of fire and judgement.

  “Check the woman for any sign of infection,” he ordered the priestess. “Baer will arrive to burn the carcass of the man. My familiar will collect your written record at the usual time.”

  “I obey,” Leni said, her tone subservient, laced with equal measures of respect and fear.

  There was nothing more. Like a patch of lingering night burned away by the dawn, the wizard’s body faded away, leaving only the empty doorway and the narrow walls of the closet.

  After the third attempt, Skrim Gnawtail was finally able to suggest a hideout that was not utterly beneath the dignity and position of Grey Seer Thanquol. The skaven priest-sorcerer’s new lair was an old townhouse on Altdorf’s prosperous Reikhoch Prachstrasse. The structure had sat alone and abandoned for years, shunned by the humans who dwelt around it. Ugly rumours had circulated about Contessa Eleanora Daria di Argentisso, the last tenant of the townhouse. Stories of vampirism and even more unspeakable acts of evil.

  Thanquol cared for the superstitious fright of humans only so far as it lent itself to his own purposes. If stories of vampires and ghosts kept the foolish animals from intruding upon his solitude, so much the better. He had enough flesh-and-fur enemies to occupy his thoughts without adding phantoms and spectres to his worries.

  The grey seer prowled through the dusty halls of the townhouse, dead leaves crunching under his feet. He wrinkled his nose as he nearly stepped into the wispy net of an immense cobweb stretching across the hallway. Angrily, he swatted the obstruction down with the head of his staff and smashed a fat-bellied spider beneath its iron-capped butt. The incident in the Maze of Merciless Penance had left Thanquol in no mood to abide the presence of insects, arachnids and all their crawling kind. If he had the underlings to spare, he would have the townhouse scoured from attic to cellar and all its creeping denizens exterminated.

  Unfortunately, Thanquol didn’t have the minions to spare. Barely two dozen of them had escaped the ambush laid by Skrattch Skarpaw and the treacherous clan lords of Under-Altdorf. Most of the survivors were Skrim’s slippery sneaks and Viskitt Burnfang’s warlock engineers. It was just as well—they were the most useful to him, far more valuable under the present circumstances than a battalion of stormvermi
n. Even their small numbers were preferable; too many and they might think to earn their way back into the graces of Under-Altdorf by betraying Thanquol to their old masters. Fortunately, he judged their numbers too insignificant to dare any mischief against a sorcerer of his maleficent might.

  Even if they were, there was Boneripper to consider. Since escaping from the sewers, Thanquol had been careful to keep his clever, cunning bodyguard as close to him as possible. It was a situation that had played havoc with the townhouse’s doorways and ceilings, but the humans had abandoned the dwelling anyway. More important than Skrim’s paranoia about leaving evidence of their brief occupancy was keeping Boneripper where the rat ogre could savage his master’s enemies before they could endanger Thanquol’s valuable hide.

  There had been a few others who had escaped the sewers with the Clan Skaul sneaks and the Clan Skryre warlock engineers. Thanquol saw little value in keeping a motley clawful of clanrat warriors and beastmasters around, especially when their added strength might just give Skrim or Burnfang ugly ambitions. There was another purpose they could be put to that would help him far more than their ability to catch rats or bear arms. All of his slave subjects were back in Under-Altdorf, a place he didn’t dare show his scent. It was more important than ever that his experiments with the Wormstone proceed on schedule. Lacking either numbers or leadership, the ragged survivors of the other clan delegations were perfect proxies for Thanquol’s absent supply of slave-subjects. Of course, the treacherous cowards didn’t see it that way, but Thanquol had ways to enforce his will.

  Viskitt Burnfang built a crude laboratory in the spacious old kitchens of the townhouse, even cobbling together a complex array of pipes to divert the smoke from his improvised furnace down into the town-house’s cellar. It wouldn’t do, after all, to have smoke rising from a supposedly vacant house. That was the sort of thing the man-things just might take it in mind to investigate.

  Burnfang attacked the experiments with his usual scheming and eye for sinister innovation. Using the town-house’s larder as a make-do slave pen, he had found a new way to administer the Wormstone by tainting the drinking water of the unlucky wretches. The liquid somehow diluted the poisonous infection, but if it lacked some of its former swiftness, it retained its grisly potency. Thanquol was pleased with the results, and the new means of introducing the infection to the enemies of skavendom. Indeed, it set the grey seer’s mind considering new potential for this weapon, potential that would set him among the greatest skaven to ever live—or at least even higher in those august ranks since no ratman could claim such a legacy of success, brilliance, and valour as himself.

  Thanquol paused beside one of the slave-subjects, a moaning warrior whose fur was already starting to fall out as ugly worm-like growths burst from beneath his skin. He watched every flicker of pain and suffering on the captive’s face, picturing the faces of Thratquee and Skarpaw and all the other scum who had betrayed him gripped by such pain! His enemies would not be allowed the leisure to regret baring their fangs to Grey Seer Thanquol!

  “Skrim!” Thanquol snarled. The little Clan Skaul spy came creeping into the kitchen, his feet slipping on the smooth marble tiles. His head bobbed up and down in frightened subservience to his tyrannical master. “Get your best sniffers! Somewhere in this filthy human-warren there will be a place of records. The man-things do nothing without writing it down. I want to know where they take their water from!”

  “Their water?” asked Skrim, not understanding.

  The question drew a look of disgust from Burnfang, but the warlock engineer simply shook his head and returned to his experiments. Thanquol bristled more at Burnfang’s manlike gesture than Skrim’s idiotic lack of vision.

  “Yes-yes, their water, fool-meat!” Thanquol snarled. If the spy had been close enough, he would have cracked his snout with his staff. As it was, he made do with a threatening display of fangs. “They will have maps, charts of their city. Bring the ones that show their canals and aqueducts!”

  Skrim muttered a string of obsequious assurances that he would follow Thanquol’s commands and scurried from the makeshift laboratory with indecent haste.

  Thanquol looked over at Burnfang, his lip curling in loathing. He would kill two fleas with one scratch. The degenerates of Under-Altdorf were so dependent upon the humans for their way of life, stealing not merely food and supplies, but even customs and mannerisms. He was certain they were also dependent upon the same source of water as the man-things. By poisoning the human city, he would at the same time be poisoning Under-Altdorf and all of his enemies there! It was a grand stroke only a skaven of his genius would have conceived! The capitol of the humans devastated and at the same time the rebellious degenerates of Under-Altdorf annihilated.

  Besides, Thanquol thought, if the Lords of Decay did complain, he could always shift the blame to Skrim Gnawtail for bringing him incomplete maps.

  Alone, wet, tired, the wound on his head still dripping blood and trying his best to follow the trail of one of Clan Eshin’s elite killers, Kratch was far from happy. Only the apprentice’s lust for revenge against Grey Seer Thanquol silenced the fear that hammered through his heart, driving him onward. He knew he was too weak to confront Thanquol alone. The trick would lie in convincing Skarpaw that the assassin needed him if he was to succeed in eliminating their mutual enemy.

  Kratch followed the assassin for what seemed hours, sloshing through the reeking sewers of the humans and old, seldom used rat-runs whose ceilings creaked and whose walls displayed generations of neglect as they crumbled beneath Kratch’s whiskers. Skarpaw, like all of the assassins of Clan Eshin, did not have an individual scent, his glands having been removed in one of the clan’s mysterious eastern rituals. However, if Kratch could not pick out Skarpaw from any other skaven by his scent, the assassin could not hide the fact that he still had the distinctive smell of all ratmen. So long as no other skaven crossed Skarpaw’s trail, Kratch’s nose would be able to track him without confusion.

  The trail led Kratch into a particularly ramshackle section of sewer. A long-ago collapse had filled the tunnel with rubble from the street above. The wreckage had simply been bricked over by the humans, who had diverted their waste around the compromised section of tunnel. The shoddy excavation that Skarpaw crawled into to reach the forgotten channel was so poor, Kratch doubted it was the work of either man or skaven, more likely the labour of mutants or scrawny, slinking sewer goblins.

  Crawling after Skarpaw through the cramped, debris-strewn passage, Kratch was struck by the putrid stink of the place. It was a smell of death and decay, of rot and ruin, of sickness and corruption. No skaven who had once encountered such a smell could ever forget it; the smell of the plague monks, the diseased fanatics of Clan Pestilens.

  Kratch’s hackles rose and he fought the urge to squirt the musk of fear. He could pick out the individual scents of other skaven from the air, not simply one or two, but dozens. Some were alive with loathsomeness, others were the foul smells of the dead. Kratch recoiled from the horror of realising how little difference there was between the two.

  Kratch pressed his body flat in the narrow tunnel, trying to work up the nerve to continue. The faint sound of voices gave him something to concentrate upon besides his own fear. One voice was the whispered snarl of Skarpaw, the other was a gurgling croak thick with evil. The adept strained to make out words, but the distance was too great. Gingerly, with as much care as he had ever shown in his entire life of scheming and spying, Kratch crept closer, clenching his teeth as the sickening smell of the plague monks grew more intense.

  Now Kratch could put words to voices. Skarpaw was explaining his recent failure to the plague monk leader. The assassin’s tone was strangely servile, lacking the authority and threat of an Under-Altdorf clan leader. There was actually a trace of fear running through Skarpaw’s words, a desperate, almost pleading anxiety Kratch had never thought to hear come from the mouth of an assassin. Hearing Skarpaw’s fear fanned the flames o
f his own, and Kratch began to slowly crawl back through the narrow opening. A sudden shift in the conversation arrested his retreat, however, and the adept crooked his ears as he heard the filthy croak of the plague monk mention Thanquol and the Wormstone. He started to creep forwards again, ignoring the stink of death and corruption all around him.

  “…certain you have been followed?” the croaking plague monk asked.

  “Yes-yes, rotten one!” Skarpaw’s anxious voice replied. “Long-long has his scent been in my nose!”

  A tremor of terror sizzled through Kratch’s brain. Fool-fool to think he could follow one of Clan Eshin’s killers without the assassin knowing it!

  Panicked, Kratch started to crawl away. As he did so, the smell of dead ratman swelled around him. He felt scrawny paws close tight about his ankles, holding him firm as he lashed about to free himself. Threshing his body about, Kratch was able to see the dead-smelling things that held him. They were skaven, once, but now they had more kinship to corpses than living ratmen. Their fur hung from their bodies in wet strips, peeling away from skin that looked as lifeless as boiled meat. Tatters that might once have been robes clung to their near-skeletal frames, while blemished eyes gleamed rabidly from the sunken sockets of withered skulls. The things glistened with a sheen of pus that seemed to exude from every pore.

  Kratch shrieked and flailed all the harder in the grip of the diseased ratmen, his lips stumbling over the syllables of a spell. Firm paws gripped him about head and shoulder, strong claws clamping his mouth closed before he could work his magic. Beset from before and behind, Kratch flailed helplessly in the grip of his captors.

  The oozing ratmen carried their quarry out of the tunnel and into a large vault. Scummy water sloshed beneath the feet of the skaven as they stalked through the chamber. Ahead, on an island of broken bricks and mud, a cluster of ratmen watched the procession with malicious amusement. Robes, pelts and bodies were in better condition than the wretched specimens that had captured Kratch, but not one of them was without the stamp of disease. Even Skarpaw’s black-cloaked figure seemed pallid and infirm, his limbs trembling as with an ague.