03 - Thanquol's Doom

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

  Green flames crackled about the head of Thanquol’s staff, forming into a great sphere of destruction, a mass of flaming ruin that swept across the gallery, hurtling directly at the sentry gun. It was a spell of such awesome power that it could knock down a castle, sink a warship, collapse an entire warren. In a more lucid state, Thanquol would never have drawn so much power into himself without the aid of warpstone. But the grey seer’s snuff-fed fury had risen to a frenzy. He would see the sentry gun obliterated in a way that would make Skraekual’s nethers shrivel.

  The orb of fire crashed down upon the sentry gun. There was a flash of blinding light and a crash like that of a spitting volcano.

  Thanquol sagged against Boneripper’s shoulder, exhausted by his amok display of sorcery. At least he had shown Skraekual. He would never have dared call upon the Sphere of Annihilation! The scab-sniffing little nether-nibbler would turn himself inside out if he even tried! It took a true master of magic, a skaven who was truly at one with the Horned Rat to evoke such awesome power!

  Thanquol scrambled behind Boneripper’s chest as bullets continued to hammer at the lumbering rat-ogre. The terrified grey seer peeked under Boneripper’s arm to see the sentry gun, intact and unharmed, still blazing away. All around the weapon, the flagstones were scorched, but the gun itself was unmarked. Thanquol felt his glands clench as he spotted the protective runes inscribed upon the sides of the weapon glowing with the last wisps of his spell.

  The cursed dwarf-things and their filthy rune-magic! What kind of coward put talismanic runes on a stinking machine!

  Thanquol was too exhausted to even attempt another spell—he’d given his all to that damnable Sphere of Annihilation! What a useless spell! Whatever flea-brained moron-meat had come up with that one should be dragged out of his burrow and stomped like a rabid weasel! It was all that conniving Skraekual’s fault! Goading him into expending his powers on such a reckless spell!

  Thanquol was just starting to wonder how he would get back to the safety of the mine shaft when he sensed a powerful expenditure of magic close to him. He turned his head to see Skraekual standing at the mouth of the tunnel, his arms spread wide, his eyes glowing with arcane energies.

  The filthy coward was using Boneripper as a shield to protect him from the sentry gun! Thanquol gnashed his fangs in outrage at the idea of his rival using his own bodyguard to keep him safe. He’d strangle the rat for that!

  Quickly, it became obvious Thanquol had other problems to worry about. In response to Skraekual’s evocation, the entire gallery began to tremble, the chains of the pulleys swinging about as though caught in a tempest, mine carts tumbling onto their sides.

  Boneripper swayed and staggered. Thanquol leapt off the brute’s back an instant before the rat-ogre toppled over. Bullets skittered across the ground as the grey seer scrambled for the cover of an overturned mine cart, flinging himself behind it just as the sentry gun adjusted for his range.

  The gallery continued to rumble. From his refuge, Thanquol could see a jagged crack appear in the ground, gradually snaking its way across the gallery towards the sentry gun. As the crack spread, it widened, becoming a veritable fissure by the time it closed upon the sentry gun. The protective runes glowed brightly as Skraekual’s magic struck it, but the runes could only guard the gun, not the floor upon which it stood. With a shriek of escaping steam, the sentry gun toppled into the widening fissure.

  Grinding his teeth and lashing his tail, Thanquol climbed out from behind the mine cart. The look he directed at the exultant Grey Seer Skraekual was murderous.

  “Thank you for the distraction,” Skraekual chortled, scratching at his rotted nose. The grey seer chittered with amusement. “But that’s why you are here-here!”

  Still cackling, Skraekual ordered the surviving clanrats to pick themselves up and head for the far side of the gallery and one of the mine shafts located there. The two warlock-engineers hurried after the gloating grey seer, pausing only to stare down the black pit of the fissure. The tinker-rats didn’t linger overlong trying to find the sentry gun, making sure to keep close to Skraekual.

  Thanquol watched them all go, his belly boiling with disgust. Angrily, he kicked the fallen Boneripper.

  “Up-up, bone-butt,” he snapped. Boneripper obligingly lifted itself off the ground, gaining its feet with an awkward pivot of its socketed waist. Thanquol glared at the backs of the withdrawing scouts.

  “Hurry-scurry before that whelp-gnawer goes and conquers the rest of the dwarf-things!” Thanquol cursed, urging his skeletal bodyguard onwards with a whack of his staff. The pair were soon scrambling after the other skaven.

  Like his minions, Thanquol didn’t pay any notice to the flattened hose that had been connected to the sentry gun or the faint wisps of steam still venting from its severed end.

  Chapter IX

  “I don’t like it.”

  The protest was voiced in the gruff tones that passed for a whisper with Thane Erkii Ranulfsson. The dour, white-bearded dwarf was Minemaster of Karak Angkul, charged not only with the expansion of the mines beneath the hold, but also with arbitrating disputes between the Miners’ Guild and the independent mining clans and wildcat prospectors who had claims scattered throughout King Logan’s domain. Of late, a new duty had fallen upon Thane Erkii’s shoulders: defending those mines that had not yet fallen to the skaven.

  Thane Erkii seldom had cause to don the heavy suit of steel chain and plate that had been in his family for over a thousand years, but he still managed to move quickly in the weighty mail. No dwarf was so unfamiliar with armour as to be burdened by it. What he did find burdensome was Klarak Bronzehammer’s insistence on accompanying his warriors into the lower deeps.

  No, Thane Erkii corrected himself, more than just accompanying them. Klarak insisted on leading the way.

  When the hose connecting to one of the engineer’s sentry guns had fallen slack, the alarm had been given. It had been quickly sounded, despite the possibility (or probability as Guildmaster Thori insisted) that it was only a malfunction of Klarak’s new and unproven invention. According to the inventor’s own assertion, and the evidence of those dwarfs who had witnessed the sentry guns in action, only a major skaven incursion would be able to get past the automated weapons.

  That made it even more unseemly that Klarak had insisted on coming down into the mines. It simply wasn’t done! A dwarf of his prominence shouldn’t be risking himself on some rat-hunt. His place was back in the upper deeps, to wait for word of exactly what Thane Erkii and his warriors found. If Klarak got himself killed, it would be a great blow to Karak Angkul’s defences. Moreover, Thane Erkii knew that if that happened, King Logan would blame him rather than the daring engineer.

  “I know you don’t like it,” Klarak said, his voice low yet still carrying that suggestion of brooding power which never failed to impress those who heard it. “But we have to be sure.”

  Thane Erkii had been hopeful when he’d seen the jagged crack in the gallery floor and the broken sentry gun lying at the bottom of a crevice. Certainly there was evidence the gun had dispatched a handful of ratkin, but there was no sign the vermin had been responsible for its destruction. No sign, that is, until Azram Steelfoot, Klarak’s personal lorekeeper, observed that several old histories made mention of skaven sorcerers casting spells that could create such havoc.

  It made Thane Erkii even more anxious about his prestigious companion to think that a ratkin wizard was creeping about the mines. More so because such a villain would hardly be doing so alone. Any moment he expected every passageway and tunnel to vomit forth a swarm of chittering ratkin.

  He was also irked that Klarak had shunned any sort of traditional armour, instead trusting to a curious steel vest of his own creation. Looking at the odd garment with its array of dials and gauges, pipes and rods, Thane Erkii could only scratch his beard. It didn’t look like it could stop a snotling’s language, much less a skaven knife. He could only wonder if the engineer was trying to get h
imself killed and earn Thane Erkii a place in the king’s Book of Grudges.

  “You must have a poor opinion of me and my warriors,” Thane Erkii grumbled. “Whatever you need to know, we can find out for you.”

  Klarak smiled at the Minemaster. “If you and your warriors were not the toughest fighters in Karak Angkul, I wouldn’t be down here. I know you find it eccentric for me to go hunting rats with you, but I have my reasons.”

  Thane Erkii would have asked for further details about what the engineer’s reasons were, but at that moment one of Klarak’s aides interrupted them. The fur-draped Thorlek came rushing up to his master, the weathered ranger holding a fresh rat pellet in his hand.

  “Skaven,” Thorlek explained. “They’ve headed into the old iron pits.”

  Klarak nodded. “How long ago?”

  Thorlek snapped the pellet in half, displaying a revolting mush of crushed seeds and mouse bones peppered with small black rocks. “Less time than it took us to get down here,” the ranger said. “A bit before midday.”

  “I should have known you’d be familiar with ratkin dung,” Horgar Horgarsson, the third of Klarak’s aides to accompany him into the mines, scoffed. “You probably eat the stuff.”

  “I’m not the one with the bad breath,” the ranger retorted. “In fact, this would be an improvement.” Malignantly, he threw the pellet at Horgar. Locked in his steel framework, the former hammerer couldn’t duck the loathsome projectile, the pellet glancing from his helm.

  Horgar fumed at the indignity, stomping forwards and reaching out to grab Thorlek. The ranger dodged the clumsy assault. Horgar tottered for a moment as he almost unbalanced himself, such was his agitation.

  “If I get my hands on you,” Horgar threatened, “they’ll need tweezers to pick up all the pieces.”

  Thorlek shook his head, an expression of mock gravity on his face. “Is that before or after you fall down?”

  Horgar’s face turned crimson and the dwarf sputtered wrathfully into his beard. The warriors around him watched anxiously, certain that the hammerer would soon fall upon his antagonist in a murderous frenzy. They didn’t know the long friendship between the two comrades, a friendship that most often expressed itself by one of them trying to drive the other into an apoplectic rage.

  Klarak, however, had seen it all before and many times at that. The engineer moved between the two combatants as though nothing had happened. “Thorlek,” he said, “I need you to pick up the ratkin trail.”

  Thorlek immediately forgot his feud with Horgar. “That will be easy enough. They don’t seem to be making any extra effort to hide their tracks.”

  That news met with a mixed reaction when the dwarfs heard it. If the skaven weren’t hiding their tracks then it was either because they were in too much of a hurry, too lazy, or too stupid. It was a fourth possibility that caused the dwarfs worry. The skaven might be behaving in such a bold manner because they didn’t feel the need to hide their presence. Each of them thought about the sentry gun and what Azram had said about ratkin wizardry.

  “We’ll follow the tracks,” Klarak said. “But be on the watch for any trickery. If there is a sorcerer with the ratkin, then we might have a bad fight on our hands. Don’t take any chances.”

  With Thorlek showing them the way, Klarak and the dwarf warriors marched into the old iron workings. In the gloom of the abandoned mine, the other dwarfs couldn’t see the troubled look that settled over the engineer’s rugged features. He was thinking of the warning he had been given. A warning about a skaven sorcerer named Thanquol.

  The skaven pressed on through the mine shafts, following the tunnels at the western approach of the main gallery. Although the shafts had been dug without any plan, simply pursuing veins of ore, there was nevertheless a regularity and order about them that put them far beyond the meandering confusion of a skaven warren. Even without Skraekual’s little map, Thanquol felt confident he could find his way out of the dwarf complex. If his rival was trying to get them lost, he was failing miserably.

  It was obvious from even a cursory sniff that the tunnels the skaven now wandered represented diggings that had been played out and abandoned long before the ratkin attack. The wooden beams that supported the tunnels were old and caked in dust, the walls unmarked by any fresh assault by either pick or hammer. The nests of brown rats poked out from niches that had once held lanterns, thick cobwebs stretched beneath the archways that supported each intersection. Beetles and other cave vermin skittered about the floor.

  Just like Skraekual to lead them as far away from another confrontation with the dwarfs as possible. He had a yellow streak as wide as a rat-ogre running down his spine. Thanquol could guess the warp-wit’s plan now. He would lead them on some wild chase through the abandoned mines for a few days, then head back to Bonestash and report that they’d made a full reconnaissance of Karak Angkul’s lower deeps. Skraekual would be heralded as a brave hero when he got back and he’d be thick as fleas with Rikkit Snapfang.

  Not a bad plan, Thanquol reflected. He should have thought of it first. Of course, there was no reason why he couldn’t still make it his own. All it would require would be for Skraekual to have a little accident.

  Unfortunately, the other grey seer was being exceptionally wary, keeping well back of the rest of the skaven where he could keep an eye on both the clanrats and Thanquol. The warlock-engineers were nowhere to be found, having lost interest in the scouting mission once it became obvious the dwarfs hadn’t been active in these tunnels for many years. If Thanquol didn’t know better, he would have thought the lousy tinker-rats actually wanted to run into some enemies. Whatever the reason, they’d started playing their old game of lingering well behind the rest of the party until after turning one bend of the tunnel, they simply disappeared. Thanquol hoped the cowardly lice fell in a hole and broke their scheming necks.

  “Right-right!” Skraekual suddenly called out, gesturing imperiously with his claw. The clanrats at the head of the pack dutifully turned about at the intersection, heading back southwards.

  Thanquol lashed his tail in annoyance. It was the warp-wit who was lost! The idiot had a map and he was still unable to tell where he was going! Any skaven with half a brain could tell that these shafts were ones they’d already been through. In fact, if Thanquol was right, another half-mile and they’d be back in the main gallery where the sentry gun had been posted.

  Thanquol stroked his whiskers. So he was right, Skraekual was just playing for time so he could scurry back to Rikkit and claim the job was done. The only problem was the idiot didn’t have the spleen to make a proper job of such deception. Even a mouse-brained moron like Rikkit wouldn’t believe they’d made a full reconnaissance of the dwarf positions in such a short time.

  It was looking like he’d have to arrange that accident for Skraekual sooner than he’d been planning.

  Suddenly, a new smell struck Thanquol’s nose, bringing him up short. The grey seer flattened against the wall of the tunnel, his heart pounding in his breast. He glanced at the clanrats and saw that they’d smelled it too. The cowards were cringing in the dark, muttering fearfully among themselves and casting eager looks at the dark tunnel behind them.

  Dwarf-stink, that unmistakable mix of sweat, beer and goat-cheese that exuded from the skin of every dwarf Thanquol had ever encountered. There was more, the tang of steel, the musky fug of oiled leather, the sharp sting of blackpowder. As he keened his ears to the effort, he could hear the tromp of boots marching through the tunnels.

  Thanquol glowered at the clanrats, cursing them for fifty kinds of flea-bitten fools. The dwarfs hadn’t been in these old mines in decades. There was only one reason why they’d be here now. They’d found spoor left by these third-rate sword-rats and picked up their trail! If he didn’t think they’d be more useful against the dwarfs, Thanquol would have blasted the whole lot of them with a bolt of warp-lightning for daring to endanger him by their stupidity.

  “Quiet-quick!” Thanquol snarled
at the cowering ratmen. From the sound of things, there were far more dwarfs moving through the mines than there were skaven in his patrol. However, Skraekual’s moronic map-reading abilities gave them a very good chance to avoid their enemies. The skaven had crossed and recrossed their own trail so many times it was bound to confuse the dwarfs. Dwarf-things were worthless when it came to picking up a scent. They’d use their eyes to follow the trail and the odds were good they’d pick the wrong one.

  All Thanquol and the clanrats had to do was keep quiet and stay in the shadows until the dwarfs passed them by. Then they could scarper while the fools were still looking for them in the mines.

  Thanquol fingered the little rat-skull snuff-box, longing for a pinch of warp-snuff to calm his nerves. Just a little bit, not enough to really make him go overboard. Just enough to keep himself steady. He had the box open before prudence and self-preservation made him stuff it back into his robe. The last thing he needed now was to start losing control—nerves or no nerves. He would need a clear head if anything went wrong.

  The marching dwarfs came nearer. Thanquol could see them now, tromping down the tunnel, every one of them armed and armoured for battle. Except maybe the one up front with the gold face-fur. He just had on some weird chain-vest thing festooned with a bunch of straps and gadgets. The dwarf reminded him somehow of the thrice-cursed tinker-rats, but there was something about his scent that the grey seer really didn’t like. He couldn’t place his paw on it, but he’d be just as happy to let some other skaven tangle with that dwarf if it came to a fight.

  Fortunately, it didn’t look like it would come to that. Thanquol’s eyes boggled happily when he saw the dwarfs studying the tracks on the ground. True to his prediction, they turned and started to march off down in the wrong direction.