Hammer and Bolter Issue Eighteen

by Christian Dunn

  As the last of the sparks and flames and the last wisps of light disappeared, Gilead saw the outline of a climbing plant imprinted on the wall. It was like a sky clematis, espaliered against the wall in an endless ladder formation, branches twisting, and tendrils sending out enough shoots to accommodate the abundance of leaves that had been shed into the room. The illusion was there in the last flames of light, and gone just as quickly. The niche held... what? A single leaf? No, Gilead saw that the niche contained a tall glass vial sealed at both ends, suspended in a soupy shaft of light that almost obscured the contents: a single tendril with a lone bud-node and a barely formed leaf.

  The fourth niche, the highest and largest of them, was more than simply a cavity, with its cleanly defined arched shape and its protruding shelf. Initially, Gilead could detect nothing there, except the shadow of something ancient, cold, long-dead. The shadow began to dissipate and the air to flex and, suddenly, Gilead was looking at a reflection of himself in a dense, smoky pane. The reflection stood to the foreground, and beyond it, the elf could see the antechamber with him lying on the floor looking up at the niches, each glowing brightly, displaying its wares. The arched niche through the glass was reflecting light and the faint image of another supine Gilead.

  Gilead did not dwell upon the images, but something primal made his mind stir, and, for an instant, he felt the urge to shiver. There was not room to accomplish the feat in the confines of the ties that bound him, so he contented himself with the sensation of someone walking stolidly over his grave.

  The fifth niche was a ragged black hole in the wall. Gilead stretched his mind into it, dilating his pupils and concentrating for several minutes in an unblinking state. He was shadowfast in his will, lying perfectly still, but performing a great many checks and manoeuvres in his mind to eliminate the possibility of anything at all emerging from the fifth anomaly in the wall, barely a niche, just a roughly scooped out hollow. In those several minutes, the niche disclosed nothing of its contents, past, present or future. It was as if it had never held anything, including the hands and tools that had dug it out of the wall, and that it never would house anything. Gilead had never witnessed anything so empty; it was as if the very air refused to fill the aperture.

  With some unease, Gilead relaxed his mind away from the niche, pushing his head gently into the earth beneath it in order to relax the muscles in his neck. They had become firm with his extended bout of concentration, not that he had been able to move his head more than a fraction of an inch, but the fine muscle control was part of an elf warrior’s training and it stood him in good stead. When the shackles came off, when the bindings were cut or unravelled, he would not rub at sore joints and creak at the knees and elbows, his head would not ache from the pressures on his neck and shoulders, and he would be able to stand both feet firmly on the ground without tendons and ligaments crying out for mercy.

  The rest he had taken had worn away to nothing as Gilead dissected the contents of the various cavities in the antechamber’s wall. He cast his ears out of the space once more, listening for echoing sounds of life in the great hall and the warrens, corridors and burrows beyond. Hearing nothing, he rested again, turning his eyes back into his head and succumbing to the self-induced sleep state that would refresh his mind and body.

  Gilead woke. For several seconds, he thought about nothing except what might have disturbed his sleep. When he did think, it was to assess his position again. He was well-rested, and, from his condition, he deduced that several more hours had passed. A quick check of his physical state confirmed that he had sustained no lasting injuries, but that some of the many minor wounds inflicted on him by the skaven were beginning to fester with the inevitable infections that their filth bred.

  He could only guess to the nearest hour or two what time it was. He did not know for sure whether it was daylight outside or for how long he had been tied up and left on the cold earth floor, but it must have been some time as the ground beneath his body had taken some of his heat and he no longer felt the dankness there. Sleep and hyper-consciousness, and the shifts in time they caused, elongating or diminishing it, like a concertina being played by some over-zealous drinking-hole musician, made time almost infinitely flexible.

  Gilead waited for whatever had woken him to stir again, but nothing happened. He felt none but the faintest of vibrations through his back and his hands trapped beneath him, between his spine and the floor of the antechamber.

  He looked up at the last of the niches, but could barely discern its outline against the dark, uneven wall. With half of his faculties directed at the possible return of the Rat King, looking into the niche was proving impossible.

  Gilead rocked slightly, releasing the increasing pressure on his hands, lifting his head off the floor in a series of complex callisthenic micro-movements. Despite being locked in bindings so tight as to make almost all movement impossible, the elf had rested his body well, and was not suffering stiffness, muscle cramp, loss of blood flow or any other minor ailments that might afflict humans, or even other, older, less-fit elves.

  Satisfied that his body was sound, and that there was no immediate threat from the other side of the antechamber door, Gilead allowed his mind to concentrate entirely on the final niche. The others told only parts of stories, and not the whole, and the elf believed that the artifacts collected by the Rat King would afford him a greater insight into the ratman leader’s intentions, and a better opportunity to defeat him and quash his obvious ambitions.

  Gilead breathed rhythmically, closed his eyes to focus on listening, and then opened them wide, concentrating on his sight at the expense of his other senses. His eyes penetrated the darkness and, within moments, it was as if he was standing with his chin at the lip of the niche, peering in, with an unhindered view of what was inside.

  Two small objects lay in the aperture, side-by-side. To begin with, Gilead could not see a connection between them. The first object was a small, perfect sphere hewed from some kind of stone. It was unexceptional, save that it was lapped to a mirror finish so bright as to surpass understanding of the craftsmanship that must have gone into making it. The second object looked like an entire eggshell with the egg removed. It was white and matt, and so transparent that Gilead could barely follow the curve of its form. There was a tiny pinprick hole in one end that allowed a fine shaft of light to penetrate it, and it sat on a larger hole in its flat end.

  Gilead breathed in and concentrated harder. In the next instant, he was trying to pick up the tiny sphere. Its surface was so smooth as to make it impossible to get a grip on the little object, but it was cold and preternaturally hard. At once, Gilead knew that the little ball was made of the rarest of all rocks, carved by a dwarf craftsman of the very first and finest order. Instinctively, he knew what the other object was. It was not an eggshell at all. The other object was the antithesis of the first. The little rock ball was the most perfect sphere with the most perfect surface made of the densest, hardest and heaviest of all organic rocks. The egg, though also made of stone, was hewn from the lightest, softest and most friable of the organic rocks, also carved by a fine craftsman, probably by the same man that had carved the sphere. These two objects represented the alpha and omega of the stonecutter’s craft. Gilead knew, without further investigation that he could never lift or hold the sphere; that its smooth surface would roll it out of his hands, even if he could hold its weight. Nor could he touch the egg without it crumbling to dust before it fell into his open palm.

  Gilead was reminded of the great hall where he had been captured by the skaven rat hordes. The high, vaulted ceiling was beautifully, perfectly carved whole out of the rock. The walls were as smooth as silk and the floor was flat and level. The great expanses of the room were almost impossibly large between the pillars that held the ceiling aloft, and this, too, reflected the dwarf stonecutters’ arts.

  As his mind moved around the great room, Gilead’s ears pricked. He could hear an odd rhythmic chant, a strange
ululating call, and the echo of it across the space. Then he heard footfalls, clicking with claws in a scurry that could only be made by skaven feet, punctuated by the rhythmic tap of the Rat King’s staff, like a third foot beating syncopated time.

  ‘He has come,’ he heard.

  ‘He has come, so he has. He has come. Now he has come, for come he has, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever.’

  Gilead opened his eyes and ears, and found himself back in the antechamber. The Rat King was returning, and the elf planned to be ready for the hunched, hairy, grotesque figure to walk through the door.

  Gilead expected the chant to end. Surely the Rat King couldn’t keep up his singsong prognostications indefinitely?

  Then he realised that the chant was in the air, embedded somehow, in the room around him. It was as if there was a zone around the skaven leader that followed wherever he went. The surest evidence of it was the chant, the mantra that alluded to Gilead. He wondered if there had been other chants for other missions, for it was clearly the Rat King’s fervent wish to trap the elf in some demeaning form of servitude or, perhaps, as some captive specimen.

  Gilead breathed in as long and deeply as he was able, and then breathed out again. He emptied his body of every last atom of air, and relaxed his muscles until they were almost unbearably slack. Then he repeated the exercise. He did this three, four, five times more, and then listened again.

  It was taking some time for the Rat King to cross the great hall, but Gilead was in no doubt that he was heading for his antechamber, and for the elf.

  One by one, Gilead tensed all of his muscles individually, beginning with his hands and feet, and working his way towards his body mass and his centre of gravity. When he had tensed all the muscles individually, he tensed them all in unison, breathing in as deeply as he could while doing so.

  The bounds around the elf’s body felt extraordinarily tight, and, where they were of the narrowest gauge, they began to cut into his skin and the almost imperceptible layer of subcutaneous fat that covered his muscles.

  The elf was not concerned that the Rat King could hear him, only what he could hear of the Rat King. He was still minutes away, and the chant continued unabated.

  Then Gilead felt a breeze on his face, and looked up at the door to see if he could locate the source of it. The door was firmly shut, but Gilead could see the shadows of leaves, falling on a breeze. They were the same leaves that had cascaded down on him from one of the wall-niches. The same, but different. The leaves were not red and yellow and sappy green, they were brown and black, like gossamer lace, ragged and punctured with ugly holes.

  The leaves fell around him, disappearing in the air, leaving a putrid smell behind of rotting vegetation, and, oddly, of stale urine. He looked around, trying to work out what was going on, and saw a massive root system growing down through the ceiling from the earth above, and into the room. The roots appeared to be growing strong and true in the same ladder-like formation as the plant above ground, except that dozens of rats were playing around the roots. They were pulling on the finer roots, as if they were playing some strange game of tug-of-war; they were scratching away at them, trying to gnaw through them, and pissing on them. Several young skaven were laughing and playing, and seeing who could piss the highest up the root system. Where their urine fell, it burned like acid, making the roots shrink and fume with the reek of ammonia and sulphur. Where there were tooth marks in the roots, and chunks bitten away, the white fleshy part of the plant was turning brown and shriveling before Gilead’s eyes. The magical tree did not stand a chance under the skaven onslaught, and they seemed to be treating the destruction of the beautiful, rare and ancient organism as a game.

  The odours in the room thickened as the tree, first the leaves, and then the branches, and, in what seemed like no time at all, the entire plant, roots and all, turned to dust and ashes.

  Gilead turned his attention back to his predicament. He was bound with ropes made of hemp, leather and rags . The rags were heavily greased, and much of the leather had moldered in the dank conditions underground. Some of the hemp ropes were little more than oakum ready for the picking. The rot and filth of the skaven existence below ground, and never far from the water table, meant that conditions were forever dank and moist, and that all organic materials rotted easily and quickly.

  The ropes that were whole, complete, were new to a life below ground, unwilling to fall apart and shred, nevertheless they had a deep and penetrating dampness about them that made them soft and pliable. As Gilead breathed in and flexed his muscles, over and over again, he began to hear the creak of the ropes as they flexed and stretched.

  The whisper of dying leaves and crumbling roots subsided, and beyond the sounds, Gilead heard a faint, pitiful cry. He smelt a salt-sweet tear cutting across the malodorous plant smells of organic death and ammonia, and he saw a tendril of silvery hair bobbing. The cry gave way to wracking, wretched sobs, and Gilead saw a string of snot finding its way between lips that should have been pink and pert, but were, instead, pale and pursed in a grey, frightened face. Only the eyes, the huge, pale blue eyes of the child princess were as he had seen them before.

  Then he saw a pink, fleshy, padded paw with black claws and scrappy grey/brown fur, and he felt wet onyx eyes staring malevolently into the porcelain blue ones. One claw traced a trail down the girl’s cheek, leaving first a livid white line and then a thread of crimson blood. The girl closed her eyes, squeezing her nose up so high that it looked for all the world as if she were baring her small, pretty teeth, but her gums were almost blue as she hyperventilated herself into a state of raw panic. The claw that had sliced the flesh of her cheek, however shallowly, now went to work on her hair and on the pale, silky sheen of the fabric of her simple dress, trimmed with lace too old and too perfectly and intricately made to be of recent manufacture, and the colour of good paper to prove its age. Curls of hair and ribbons of silk began to float through the air as the child screamed. More padded paws with more filthy claws began to grab at her hair and clothes. She screamed, shrill and sudden, and a gold wire circlet of pink pearls and glittering diamonds dropped to the floor with a sound like tiny bells, scattering gems everywhere.

  As the Rat King wove his path across the great hall, the images in Gilead’s visions became bigger and more garishly coloured, and the sounds resonated less hollowly, seeming more real. Gilead could almost see the waves of scents on the air, the sweet, honeyed aroma of the girl’s peachy skin and recently laundered garments, the clean salt of her tears, and the sour smell of her abject horror. If the skaven hadn’t chosen to kill her, the experience very well might have. Gilead confronted the events, knowing that they had happened deep in the past, and that there was no way to change what had gone before.

  The Rat King’s past actions, the means by which he had retrieved the various strange, magical objects that occupied the niches in the wall above Gilead, hung heavily in the air.

  Gilead breathed again, deeply and quickly, swelling his torso and making hard bunches of the muscles in his arms and legs, putting pressure on the bindings until wrinkles and then cracks began to appear across the leather thongs that bound his legs. As much as it was possible to be still and yet shadowfast, the elf had achieved that state. He used his speed to flex and relax his muscles, spasming them at an alarming rate in order to manipulate the ties and thongs that bound his arms to his torso. Finally, one by one, the leather straps began to twist, and stress fractures began to appear in several places in the ties around his wrists and elbows.

  Then the knocking began, the sound of axes against rock, of wedges and pegs being driven into fissures with hardwood mallets, and of water dripping from rotary drills driven into rock by short, heavyset creatures with stone in their hearts. Gilead saw the sheen of sweat on low brows topped with abundant hair, and droplets forming on full beards and moustaches. Then he looked down at his hands, and they were the hands of a dwarf holding a diam
ond file in his right, the left stained with the lapping powder that had been scattered onto whatever he was holding in it. Gilead blinked hard, and looked around. The faces of a dozen dwarfs around him, each mason wielding a tool of his trade, began to fade and flicker out, until Gilead was alone. He looked down and saw that he was sitting at a bench on which sat the eggshell that he had seen in the niche. The elf was disconcerted for a moment to see through the eyes of a foreigner, but he persisted in opening his left hand and looking down at what was held there.

  He caught the merest glimpse of a small, hard spherical object, and then became aware of its extraordinary weight. Gilead loitered for a moment in the nameless dwarf’s mind, and there he saw the great sadness of a man who had lost his companions. This dwarf was the last of them, the others all lost in battle to the hugely abundant ratkin. It was a war of convenience; the skaven were multiplying beyond all that was reasonable, and sought to annex whatever underground spaces they could colonise. The dwarfs had been the greatest architects of the Empire for millennia, but they were a dying breed, and the skaven were willing and eager to capitalise on that.

  With no one to defend him from the hordes, the dwarf fought bravely and well. He would not have had the opportunity to fight at all if Gilead had not been in his head when the skaven ambushed him, but the elf could not fight for him. Gilead blinked hard and stepped out of the dwarf’s mind.

  The skaven quickly disarmed the dwarf of his file, but not before he had brained several of the marauding ratmen. When all that remained to him was the little ball of heavy stone in his left hand, the dwarf closed his fist around it and punched his way through the heads of a dozen more of the rat-scum before he was overwhelmed and taken down. After the dwarf had fallen, the Rat King pried his fingers aside to expose the magical sphere of rock. It took several of his coterie to roll the little ball onto an improvised litter so that it could be transported back to the Rat King’s lair. Gilead could not bear to watch what became of the dwarf’s body, but when next he opened his eyes, there was no dwarf corpse to be seen among the dozens of dead ratmen.