by Nathan Long
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 ratmen’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, ratmen 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, but 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 far, 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 pitif
ul 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 ratman 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 asked, 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.
Reiner and Giano watched queasily as the two ratmen piled the man’s intestines on his chest and carried him out of the room by his arms and legs as the surgeon swept miscellaneous body parts off the table. Giano was muttering again. Reiner put a hand on his shoulder. The crossbowman lowered his voice but didn’t seem to be able to stop cursing.
The ratmen returned and crossed to the stacked cages. The first opened one at random, with a key from a ring on his belt, and pulled out a small figure.
Franka.
ELEVEN
Black Death Take You
REINER NEARLY SHOUTED out loud. The poor girl was so battered and dirty that, had he not known her so intimately, he wouldn’t have recognized her. The dress she had been taken in was gone, as was much of her uniform. Only her breeks and shirt covered her, and they were shredded and caked with filth. Her face was bruised and blank, and streaked with dirt and blood. She looked around dully, as if she had been sleeping, but when she saw where her captors were taking her, she began to scream and fight, kicking at them and trying to wrench her arms from their grasp.
‘Unhand me, you vermin!’ she cried. ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll cut you to ribbons. I’ll…’ Her threats dissolved into sobs of fury. The ratmen threw her at the table and she crashed against its metal edge, gasping.
The surgeon chittered angrily at his assistants, motioning for them to hold Franka still while he opened a vial he had taken from a table behind him. ‘Quiet, boy. Stop…’
Reiner could take no more, the voice of self-preservation that normally stopped him before he launched himself into deadly danger drowned out by Franka’s pitiful moans. He charged forward, screaming inarticulately as he drew his sword. Giano followed, roaring.
The ratmen looked up, startled. Perhaps the hoods Reiner and Giano wore confused them, but for one crucial second they stood frozen, staring. Reiner cut his down before it could pull its cleaver from its belt. Giano evaded the other’s wild slash and ran it through the ribs. Franka fell with her dying captors.
The grey-furred surgeon scrabbled backwards, squealing. Reiner leapt after him, but he squirmed behind a giant contraption like one of his four-legged kin. Giano dived to block the back door. The ratman was too swift. He dodged around him and disappeared into the dark hallway beyond. Reiner and Giano gave chase, but the hall quickly split into three curving corridors and they couldn’t tell which one he had taken.
Reiner skidded to a stop and turned back. ‘Forget him. Let’s fly.’ He re-entered the room and crossed to Franka, holding out his hand. ‘Franz…’
The girl crabbed backward, looking from him to Giano in terror. She snatched up a fallen scalpel and held it before her. ‘Back, monsters!’
‘Franz?’ Then Reiner remembered. He pulled off his mask. ‘It’s only us.’
Giano pulled his off too. ‘See? Nothing to be afraid!’
Franka blinked for a moment, then her face crumpled and
she began to sob. The scalpel clattered to the ground. ‘I thought… I didn’t think… I never…’
‘Easy now, easy now,’ said Reiner, helping her up and clapping her roughly on the shoulder. ‘Be a man, hey? Lad?’
Franka swallowed and sniffed. ‘Sorry, captain. Sorry. Forgot myself. You…’ she managed a weak grin. ‘You certainly took your time.’
‘Blame the damned vermin, lad,’ said Reiner. What he wanted to do was draw Franka into his arms and hold her, but for Giano’s benefit he played at manly heartiness. ‘Damned inconsiderate of them, living so far underground. Now…’
‘Save us,’ said a weak voice.
Reiner, Franka and Giano turned. The men and women in the cages were staring out at them. They were thin, haggard creatures. Some of them had obviously been there for weeks. The skin hung from their bones like wet muslin. Others were hideously deformed, strange growths sprouting from their faces and chests. Still others had extra arms and hands stitched onto them in bizarre places. Reiner groaned. There were at least a dozen of them—probably more. How could he possibly get them all out?
‘Please sir,’ said a peasant girl with hands like purple mittens. ‘We’ll die otherwise.’
‘You must, captain,’ said Franka. ‘You’ve no idea what they do.’
‘I saw enough,’ said Reiner, swallowing. ‘But… but it’s impossible. We’d never make it.’
‘Y’can’t leave us,’ said a gaunt miner, gripping the bars. ‘Y’can’t let ‘em have their way with us.’
Faint noises came from the far door: chittering rat-speech and the click of many rat feet.
