Tales of the Old World

by Marc Gascoigne

  A strange smile lifted the mercenary’s moustache. It looked almost nostalgic, as if he were telling the story of nothing more than a boar hunt or a particularly wild party.

  “That pelt I took myself. His clan marking—a burning paw—was new to me. I brought him down with nets, put a spear through the arteries in his neck and stood back. Time was I’d have gone in with a knife, but I’m not as young as I was.”

  “Taking it easy in your old age,” the priest replied, deadpan.

  “Patience wins,” van Delft shrugged, oblivious to the irony. “I just wished I’d paid heed to him. He must have spent at least five minutes biting at the wire of the mesh, splashing around in his own blood, and all the while shrieking about traitors to the race. I thought he was just trying to curse me, like they do, but…”

  Van Delft ran his fingers through his hair and then clutched at his temples. He sighed, the sound barely audible over the distant thrashing of the forest beneath the night winds.

  “That was the first of a dozen sweeps. The maps were always right, the numbers were always correct. And all we ever met were the dregs of three different clans. They were sickly things, not the least because they had all been cursed with some sort of fire. It seemed to have swept over them like a plague, leaving the survivors with withered limbs and scorched pelts. I had the idea that they’d pretty much wiped each other out before we’d arrived. I thought I had it all worked out. Then, three nights ago, I realised that I hadn’t.”

  The bitter snap of his laughter slapped against the stonework, briefly cutting through the distant hiss of the troubled forest. The priest, who had began to guess at the holocaust that had brought his guest here, shifted uneasily in his seat.

  “It was supposed to be one of the easiest patrols yet, just a slash and burn against some breeding chambers. I’d decided to let one of the corporals take over command for this one. Gunter, he was called. He was sharp, canny and not afraid to use his authority, but not reveling in it either. He’d have made a good leader.”

  Van Delft’s eyebrows furrowed into a deep ravine of sadness. The priest found himself wondering if the mercenary had ever had a family, children of his own. He supposed not.

  “Gunter was leading the column to a rendezvous point,” he continued. “We were dispersed into small groups. It’s tough to stop people bunching up for protection, especially underground. All that fear, all that darkness. But I could see that the lads were making an effort. They knew that Gunter was being tested and they wanted him to succeed. In fact, as soon as I saw that, I knew he had succeeded.”

  The soldier looked up and saw the question in his host’s eyes.

  “I needed to know if they’d work for him. That was the test. That was all we were really down there for. I knew there’d be no sort of fight that night. Thought I knew, anyway.” He shrugged miserably. “After all we’d swept through most of these catacombs already. The first I knew of what was to befall us was when Krinvaller fell into our midst. We were supposed to be linking up with his party, but he had no men with him now. Nor did he have any weapons and his clothes, all that silk and brocade and gilding that he was so fond of, had been shredded into rags.”

  Van Delfts picked absent-mindedly at the ruins of his clothes. “Hell, at first I didn’t even recognise him. I thought he must have been some madman who’d wandered down. It wasn’t until he cried out my name that I realised who it was, and even then I wasn’t sure. All that bonhomie, that soft arrogance that had flowered in the safety of the light above was gone, bled away by the reality of the deeps. I pitied him, then, a weak man in a terrible place. But before I could reach out to him and reassure him, the enemy struck. The enemy! This time they truly were skaven. Compared to these two, the weak and crippled vermin we’d hunted up until then were nothing.”

  “Only two?” the priest asked, uncertainly.

  “Yes, only two. And if anything they were even smaller than average, wiry little twists of things. You could see that even beneath the black strips of their camouflage. It didn’t matter. They had that energy, you see, that manic sort of power that can gnaw through stone or bend the bars from an asylum window.”

  “I’d seen their like a few times before. Usually just a glimpse, a shadow, a chill running down the back of your neck.”

  Van Delft lifted the pot to his lips and didn’t seem to notice that it was empty. The priest, eyes reflecting the candle light in twin circles of fascination, made no move to refill it.

  “Down there, though, they’d thrown off their caution. Desperation had made them drop it, I suppose, the same as they’d dropped everything else that might have slowed them down. The only steel they carried sparkled in their paws. They’d dropped swords, bandoliers, nets, globes, everything. Sigmar alone knows how Krinvaller had made it this far.”

  “They hit him a second after he’d appeared. I was close enough to hear the thud of weapons burying themselves between his ribs. He fell to one knee, his face already twisted with pain from the poison, and reached out towards me. He looked so… surprised.”

  A log snapped in the stove and the priest’s heart leapt. He silently scolded himself and refilled the two pots.

  “I pulled back Gudrun’s hammer, but the assassins were already gone, quicker than screams from a nightmare. Then I looked down and realised that Krinvaller was still breathing.”

  The mercenary’s face hardened and he took a drink.

  “I almost finished him there and then. The poison the enemy use, it’s truly horrible. The first tears of blood were already flowing from his eyes and nose, and the tremors were flopping him around on the cold stone of the floor, like a fish on the quayside. I’d seen it before, I knew how bad it would get. So I bent down and found the sweet spot beneath his jaw with my knife. But before I could strike it home, he spoke.

  “It wasn’t easy for him. Even in the dimness of the lantern light, I could see the muscles in his neck cramping, and when he spoke you could see the soup of his lungs beginning to gurgle up over his teeth.”

  The priest grimaced. He asked a question, as much to take his mind off the image van Delft had conjured up as anything.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said to tell Gottlieb it had all been in vain. But for Sigmar’s sake, don’t let him look at the maps. He managed to thrust a roll of the damn things into my hands before the final seizure took him.”

  “At first I didn’t understand what he meant. Delirium, I thought, or the beginnings of insanity. But then I started to wonder again about the excellence of our information and the detail of our maps. Who’d made them? No human, that was for sure. And who was the ‘she’ Krinvaller had been, talking about? Who else could it have been but the girl whose disappearance had sparked this whole damn war?”

  Suddenly van Delft sprang to his feet, kicked back his stool and started to pace the room.

  “I should have known!” he cried. “After so many years of cunning and deceit, a lifetime of traps and stratagems. I thought myself so clever! Yet here I was working for the enemy. That’s when the true owners of that terrible domain fell upon us. We’d exterminated the last of their rivals, you see. They’d given us those cursed maps and used us as a weapon against the other clans. And now it was our turn. We were already deep into the catacombs by then. Every few yards the passageways split, tangling across each other like tubes in offal. There were so many conduits, that even at that depth, we could feel a faint, moldy breeze. It brought us the first rumours of our doom, this breeze, a secret, whispering sound started to emerge. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, as soft and insistent as a far off ocean.”

  “I remember Gunter looking at me, his eyes bright with terror in the darkness, and I knew that it was time to withdraw. Krinvaller was dead, his patrol annihilated and our plans were betrayed. There was nothing to be gained from throwing our own bodies into the jaws of the enemy too. So I sent Gunter down the line to lead the retreat. But before he’d gone a dozen paces the enemy attacke
d.

  “They spewed out in a great boiling swarm from every passageway, every narrow crevasse, every crack and rat hole that bit into our line. I gave the order to hold, to stand our ground. I think most of the groups heard. Some even obeyed. Most of them just broke and fled. I was beyond caring, by then. In the deeps there are no elegant manoeuvers or set piece formations. No bright uniforms or distant hill tops from which to signal your troops. There is only rage and terror and the will to win.”

  Van Delft’s teeth ground together beneath a right smile as he absent-mindedly tested the spring on his gun’s hammer. The priest could hardly believe the expression of savage joy that now seemed to mark his companions grimy features, but neither could he mistake it for anything else.

  Van Delft was obviously a man who loved his job.

  “Gudrun here smashed through the first ragged mob that fell upon us,” he continued, oblivious to the priest’s stark appraisal. “And, with the flare of her muzzle flash still blooming in my eyes, I led a charge into the gap she’d opened for us. I hoped to punch through the trap, then turn and fall on their rear. But this time things weren’t so easy. This time, when we’d sliced through the front runners, we found stormvermin.”

  The mercenary eased the hammer back down and peered thoughtfully into the fireplace. A gust of wind rattled its way beneath the door and sent a brief plume of flames flaring upwards.

  “Black they were, and massive. They had teeth like carpenter’s chisels and carried heavy, iron bound spears. The blades were clotted with rust and blood, but the edges were sharp enough. They were too much for my lads. As soon as the first of the beasts leapt into the glow of our lamplight, I felt them break behind me, could almost hear their nerves shattering. I dropped a litter of caltrops and bolted after them, vaulting the dead, kicking away the hands of the dying. Thank Sigmar for those poor bastards. If the skaven hadn’t stopped to play with them, I wouldn’t be here now.”

  Van Delft lifted his pot and took a hefty swig. The priest recognised it as a toast, a tribute to those who’d paid so dearly for their captain’s freedom. There was no guilt in the gesture, only a sort of red-eyed celebration.

  Morr would have approved.

  “There’s a real joy to running away. I felt it for the first time as I overtook first one straggler then the next. We were winding blindly through the labyrinth now, recoiling from passageways held by the enemy, cutting through them when we had to. In the haste and the darkness, tripping over the still warm corpses of our comrades or hurtling blindly into sudden, vicious skirmishes, I knew that we were being driven, like sheep to the butcher’s. Deeper and deeper we fled, sinking beneath levels not shown on any map. The air became thick and suffocating, so much so that the flames within our lanterns started to choke out. By the time we reached the skaven’s slaughterhouse we had only the pulsing green glow of warpstone to guide us.”

  “Their slaughterhouse?” the priest asked, leaning forward and pouring them both another drink. He had a feeling they’d need it.

  “Yes,” the mercenary muttered, staring for a moment longer into the bright heart of the fire. “It was a chamber, as round the cathedral at Quierms. And huge, perhaps a quarter-of-a-mile across.

  “I recognised it for what it was as soon as we reached it. It was the bones that gave it away. They covered the floor as far as the eye could see, a great crunching carpet of them. There were bats there, too, fluttering around amongst the stalactites. I didn’t look at them too closely. The warpstone seemed to have done something to them. Something horrible. The last of the survivors stumbled in behind me, and we started off across the bone yard. But we had nowhere to go. There was only one entrance, and every minute more skaven poured through it, as thick as sewage from a pipe.”

  “I called the lads while we were still in range, reloaded Gudrun, and took aim. At that, the ratvolk started to scurry away, the great mass of them opening up before Gudrun’s gaze. I thought that it was because of their cowardice, but I was wrong. They weren’t fleeing from me. They were fleeing from the things that were approaching from behind them. At first, the monsters hardly seemed to be skaven at all. They seemed too bulky, for one thing. They were wearing masks, too. Great leather things with brass muzzles and round glass eyes.” He took another swig of drink.

  “Then, glinting in the warplight, I noticed the tangle of pipes and tubes that the first members of this bizarre procession carried and a new terror of something far worse than death gripped me. I’d seen these weapons before. I remembered the hunched bearers, spines bent beneath great tarred barrels that carried liquid death. I remembered the tubes and steel snouts that splayed outwards from the fuel tanks. And I remembered the burning horror.”

  The storyteller shuddered, and snatched for his pot. He drank deeply, then met his host’s eyes. Almost defiantly, he said: “I know that this sounds like madness, priest, but some of the skaven have learned how to torture fire into a horrible new form. Green, it is, and closer to liquid than the honest blaze in your grate. I’ve seen it leap and flow, surging forward from their infernal contraptions like water from a hose. I’ve seen it feasting upon skin, then flesh, and then bone. I’ve seen it melt armour and stone, or slip cunningly between them to seek out the soft flesh beyond. And I’ve seen men devoured inch by inch, driven insane by the agony.”

  “Down there, in the killing pen in which we’d been cornered, I knew that I couldn’t face that horror again. I raised Gudrun’s cold muzzle to the hollow beneath my chin and tightened my finger on the trigger. The ratvolk saw it and rushed to ignite their weapons. One of them produced a flaring sulphur match from its filthy rags and held it warily in front of the nozzle. I pressed harder on the trigger, but still the hammer remained locked. The first faint mist started to roll from the burnt black muzzle of the fire thrower, and I pulled harder. Still, no matter how I pulled on the trigger, Gudrun wouldn’t fire.”

  “I glanced down to check the mechanism but then, with a hiss of frying air, the skaven’s weapon blossomed into hideous life. A great ball of writhing flame belched out of the machine and rolled towards me, towards us all. But it never arrived. Instead there was a metallic shriek and the fire was sucked back into the very contraption that had given birth to it. By the gods, you should have heard the ratvolk squeal when they saw what was happening. Some of them turned to run but got jammed in the passageway, others tried to swat out the flame with their paws and when they caught light… well, lets just say it was a glorious moment.”

  Van Delft smiled at the priest. He seemed not to notice that the old man wasn’t smiling back.

  “It only lasted for a moment, though,” he continued. “As the enemy’s fire turned upon itself, the cavern erupted into a flash of light and darkness. I can still see it now, when I close my eyes. The thousands of fangs bared in terror, the thousands of widening eyes gleaming as bright as stars, men melting like wax. Then the very earth shifted uneasily, as if disturbed by the foul beasts that crawled within its depths and I heard the first rumble of falling stone. And then… and then nothing.”

  Van Delft ground to a halt. The priest studied his haggard features, the pallor of his skin. The two high red blotches on the sharp angles of his cheekbones had little to do with the jug of potcheen they’d drunk. The mercenary looked exhausted, stretched to his limits. But for all that, the madness that had gleamed in his eyes when he’d arrived seemed to have passed. Perhaps the telling of his tale had been the cure he’d needed.

  The priest had seen it happen before. Sometimes words could drain the poison from a man’s soul, just as leeches could sometimes drain infection from a wound.

  The old man poured the last of the potcheen into his guest’s pot and sat back. He noticed that the first grey fingers of dawn were creeping between the timbers of his door.

  “That was two days ago, maybe more, maybe less,” van Delft shrugged. “As far as I know, I alone survived the holocaust. And now I am finished. My reputation is in tatters. My dreams died with the cor
pses I left behind me. There’s not a man in this land who’ll give me a command after Magdeburg.”

  “What will you do?” the priest asked softly.

  “I will finish my contract. I still have gold for black powder, snares and nets. I’ll go to Magdeburg, eat and sleep for a final few days. Then return to the deeps. Amongst such rivers of warpstone the enemy will never be far from reach.”

  “Ah. Now I understand your errand, I think. But you can’t be shriven now. I can only offer Morr’s blessing to those who near his realm, and you aren’t, not really. I can’t.”

  “No. Not me. Them,” van Delft said, gesturing to the bed where the priest had thrown the maps. “Them.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said, duty warring with caution, as he considered what a grisly treasure hunt that would be. “Anyway, I thought that you said the bodies were buried beneath.”

  The squeak of the opening door distracted the priest from his dilemma and he looked up to see that van Delft had let himself out. Gathering his robe about him, the old man followed him out into the chill grey light of the dawn.

  “Where are you going? Stay here and rest, eat.”

  Van Delft, who’d already reached the liche gate, stopped and turned back. He looked suddenly younger. Perhaps it was no more than a trick of the morning light.

  “No. I have work to do. As do you. But Priest?”

  “Aye?”

  “Thank you.”

  And with that he was gone.

  The older man watched him disappear into the mist. Then, with a shiver, he returned to the warmth of his cell.