“Strike, coward-meat,” Scrivner jeered. “Or does Grey Seer Thanquol fear-shiver because my warriors will avenge their master!”
Thanquol snarled at Scrivner, but refused to rise to the wizard’s bait. The magister was trying to delay him, keep him lingering about this place long enough for his man-things to get him. Thanquol had lost enough already, there was nothing to be gained risking his pelt further.
The grey seer opened his scroll, his lips moving in a rapid stream of spits and squeaks. Abruptly there was a crack like lightning and a stench of brimstone. A black cloud of smoke lazily swirled about the place where Thanquol had stood.
Scrivner’s men stared in amazement at the deathly cloud, stunned by the grey seer’s sorcerous disappearance. The wizard himself simply shook his head sadly, wondering if perhaps the world might have been made safer trading a Jeremias Scrivner to remove a Grey Seer Thanquol.
“We failed you, master,” Theodor apologised, taking Scrivner’s arm and supporting the weakened magister as he started back along the causeway.
The wizard shook his head, pointing to the ruptured wall of the reservoir. Grimbold had worked on the Kaiserschwalbe. The dwarf had known the exact spot where a little explosive would do a lot of damage. The entire reservoir was draining away, taking with it the vile poison of the skaven. There would be much hardship and suffering in Altdorf in the weeks and months to come. It might take years before the Kaiserschwalbe could be repaired and in that time, the city would be forced to find other ways to satisfy its thirst. Water-barons would grow rich carting potable water into the capital, the poor would be reduced to boiling the polluted waters of the Reik. Unrest and disorder would follow hard upon such a crisis, politicians and nobles exploiting it towards their own ends, growing fat off the suffering of the masses. The authorities would be busy trying to maintain the peace, and with their attention diverted, many terrible things would be free to slink into Altdorf’s dark streets and forgotten corners.
Scrivner would have spared Altdorf its suffering, but Thanquol had left him no choice. To save the city from the horrible fate the grey seer had planned for it, the reservoir had to be broken.
“Failed?” Scrivner asked Theodor. He pointed at the one section of reservoir wall that had resisted Grimbold’s demolition. Like the outer surface, the inside of the wall had born a fresco. Despite the build-up of algae and the ravages of time, the subject of the fresco was still intact, almost whole despite the destruction all around it. Theodor’s mouth dropped as he recognised whose image it was depicted on the tiles.
“Magnus the Pious!” the watchman gasped.
Scrivner nodded his hooded head. “Saviour of the Empire,” he said. “But to save it, he first had to destroy the corruption within it. That is the way of saviours, if they would succeed, they must know when they must play the part of the destroyer.”
Black smoke and green lightning swirled about Grey Seer Thanquol as his body was thrust through the daemon world of Chaos. Every hair on the ratman’s pelt stood on end as he became a thing of substance and shape once more. Thanquol hated those terrifying retreats into the maddening realm beyond the spheres of order. Even though it passed almost quicker than a single heartbeat, he could not shake the horror of even so brief a glimpse at planes of existence alien and hostile to creatures of flesh and bone. It was a door that was opened only in moments of the most dire duress, and shut again as swiftly. Yet he could not help but feel the malevolent gaze of hungry eyes watching him as he blinked between worlds, daemon things that might, with the least effort, close the door before he had passed through it!
The thought was horrible enough to make the grey seer’s empty glands clench. He shivered at the idea of being trapped in that horrible void between the physical and the astral, his very soul nothing but a plaything for monsters of the aethyr, his only companions those ever watching eyes of malice and hate.
Thanquol fell into a wary crouch, his staff held before him to ward off lurking foes. Eyes glittered at him from the darkness, bright yellow eyes wide with the most rapt attention. For an instant, he thought that some of those daemon things had passed through the doorway with him when he used his spell to shatter the harmony of the spheres. His paws scrambled beneath the folds of his robe for even the smallest pebble of warpstone he might have forgotten, anything that might give him the power to fend off, or at least run away from, such ghastly foes.
A familiar smell made Thanquol’s terrified expression tighten into a sneer of annoyance and contempt. He knew that smell, the stink of the mangy felines man-things kept as pets. There must be dozens of the vile beasts all around him, filling the air with their reek.
Now that the grey seer’s eyes were completely adjusted to physical colours and a world where light and darkness existed as separate and disparate things, Thanquol could see that he was in some man-thing’s cellar, a dingy little brick-walled room filled to bursting with clutter. Old chairs, empty barrels, mouldy portraits of long-dead birth-kin, the accumulated rubbish of several generations of garbage collecting humans. Beneath, around, and on top of the clutter, a riotous array of cats were curled into little frightened balls of fur and eyes.
Thanquol hissed at the closest of the beasts, sending the flat-eared tabby scurrying backwards beneath a three-legged table, its frightened eyes never leaving the grey seer. It started yowling, a quivering sound quickly picked up by other cats scattered about the cellar. The grey seer scratched at his ears, deciding he’d never heard quite so abominable a sound.
A voice called down from the room above the cellar, the soft shrill sort of voice Thanquol knew commonly indicated an older breeder among the humans, what the man-things called a woman. “Karl! Franz! Beatrice! My little babies! What is going on down there?”
Thanquol’s eyes darted from side to side, scanning the rubbish for some new sign of foes. It took several breaths before he realised that the human was calling down to the menagerie of shabby cats. The grey seer ground his teeth together. After all he had suffered, all he had lost today, this was the final indignity—jumping at a bunch of snivelling cats!
“What is all that racket, babies?” the woman called down again. Thanquol could hear a door open, a little sliver of light shining down into the cellar. He could hear a step creak as someone started to descend. “What are you dong? Do you have a rat cornered down here?”
Thanquol’s lips pulled back, exposing his sharp fangs. He’d worked up quite the appetite, what with all the fighting and leading and run-tactical withdrawals. Eating the stringy meat of a cat was one of the few things a skaven found too revolting to contemplate, but an old human breeder…
“Don’t get too close to that old rat, babies,” the woman cooed, her steps now rapid as she descended the stairway. “He might bite you and make you sick, darlings!”
Grey Seer Thanquol rolled his eyes. He hoped she was fat, at least. It was going to be a long trip back to Skavenblight and he’d need something to nibble on along the way.
“I have a broom, sweeties!” the old woman called as she stepped down onto the floor. “I’ll swat that old rat…”
Her words faded into a horrified gargle, her eyes rolling into the back of her head as she fainted dead away at sight of the ghastly creature standing at the foot of the stairs.
Thanquol watched impassively as the old woman’s body crashed to the ground. He let a pleased hiss rasp through his fangs as he bent over her. She was one of the fattest, plumpest specimens he’s seen in quite some time.
In the long catalogue of things that had gone wrong today, Thanquol was happy to steal any crumb from the Horned Rat’s larder. At least he’d have a full belly when he made the trip to Skavenblight. Perhaps by the time he got there, he’d have concocted a lie to tell the Lords of Decay.
Perhaps he’d even think of one good enough to keep Seerlord Kritislik from blasting him into a greasy paste…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C.L. Werner was a diseased servant of the Horned Rat long
before his first story in Inferno! magazine. His Black Library credits include the Chaos Wastes books Palace of the Plague Lord and Blood for the Blood God, Mathias Thulmann: Witch Hunter, Runefang and the Brunner the Bounty Hunter trilogy. Currently living in the American south-west, he continues to write stories of mayhem and madness set in the Warhammer World. Visit the author’s website at: www.clwerner.wordpress.com
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