Hammer and Bolter 16

by Christian Dunn

  The elf heard a gasp, but it sounded as if it was several yards to the left of his position, eight to be precise, and, in his situation, it paid to be precise.

  For a split second, Gilead was torn between continuing on his quest to find the leader of the skaven, and any loyalty he might have to the boy. He had not asked the human to follow him, and yet he had been content to use the boy when it suited him. Was the life of one mortal human more important than the lives of thousands, perhaps millions of his species? The Empire was at risk, had been for decades, and in the past few years had been plunged into a combination of plague and famine that seemed impossible to escape. Gilead’s loyalty was to his quest; his obligation was to save the race, not the man.

  Almost unaware of what he was doing, Gilead strode the eight yards to his left where he had heard the boy inhale a frightened breath, drawing his sword and assessing the width of the tunnel from the curvature of the earth floor beneath his feet and the echo of his own light breath sounds, undetectable to whoever else might be in the tunnel.

  The sound of leather kicking at earth, behind and to the right of Gilead’s position, told him that the boy was being dragged away against his will, but that he was conscious and fighting.

  Gilead did not think to question why the boy was not dead. He knew why.

  The elf wondered where he had gone wrong, how he could have misjudged the skaven so badly, how he could have underestimated any creature that could successfully lead such a massive horde of unpredictable, infantile, erratic followers.

  Gilead had used the boy to halve his workload, and his enemy had used the same boy as bait.

  All the elf could do now was walk into the storm that was to come, alert and prepared to fight off a thousand ratmen with their glass-marble eyes and their foetid breath, with their squeals and claws and tearing blades.

  He was not afraid for himself, and he cared little enough for the boy.

  Gilead followed the sounds of scuffling as they echoed through the tunnels, leading yet further down into the depths of the earth. There was nothing to see, but the elf could smell the anticipation of a gathered army. There was nothing as profound as the aroma of eager expectation in the minutes before adrenaline began to pump and blood began to flow, and a hundred new scents pervaded the battleground.

  Suddenly able to stand fully upright, Gilead broke into a measured run, the sword held firmly in the on-guard position in his right hand, his left hand dragging lightly against the tunnel wall, balancing his footfalls and honing his sense of direction. This was no time to trip or fall.

  Then there was light.

  And there was sound.

  The sound was the rapid breathing of several thousand skaven bodies made restless by the passage of time that had brought their foe to them. Their patience, always limited, was being controlled by their sovereign, standing proud at the centre of his mound, a disheveled mess of a boy prostrate before him.

  The light was the greenish glow of a couple of dozen lanterns strung around and above the mound, lighting the Rat King of the skaven, not in a spot of light, but in a sickly haze.

  As Gilead stepped into the vaulted crypt, the crowds parted. One or two of the skaven were driven mad by the sight of a foe they were not allowed to touch, and they twitched and danced in front of him, frothing at the mouth, chittering and clutching at themselves. Some could do nothing more effective than rend their clothes and pull out clumps of their hair as their eyes spun in their heads and their blood organs burst within their chests.

  As they died, the elf stepped over them, walking deliberately towards the mound.

  As they died, the boy lifted first his scratched, torn and bloody head, then his shoulders and torso from the ground at the Rat King’s feet. He had no hope of living. He did not deluded himself; the elf was a wondrous being, but there was little enough chance of him escaping death, let alone of him saving the boy, too.

  Finding his way to one knee, and then hoisting himself painfully upright, the boy did himself proud, looking across the gap that divided them, out over a sea of mangy grey heads. He nodded to Gilead.

  ‘Quirin,’ said Gilead, fervently, but almost under his breath.

  The boy heard the elf speak his name, and his eyes were suddenly full of life, even though the skin on his face, where it was visible between tears and scratches, was so pale in the greenish light as to be almost grey. Gilead saw that the boy was sweating, too, and knew that he could not live for long.

  A score more of the skaven died of shock on hearing the elf uttering a word in his elegant, resonating tones, and hundreds ducked and shoved their ways further back into the crowd.

  Every single skaven, including the Rat King, would have stood in abject fear before the Fell One in any other arena, but in this place, at this time, the hive mind had taken over. They were not singular, they were not fighting for their own sakes; the hive mind was greater than any individual, and no one would die in vain. They knew not what they died for, but they were accustomed to the brevity of their lives, and killed and died by instinct, because that is what they’d done for thousands of years; killed and died and made more ratmen, that was all.

  Somehow, against the odds, the boy had held onto his hoe during his abduction. It lay on the mound before him, light playing off the blade-edge that Gilead had honed during the previous night.

  The boy stooped to pick up the hoe, but was slow and unsteady, and was quickly surrounded by several of the Rat King’s bodyguard.

  The Rat King laughed, and waved a hand over the boy as if to suggest that his guard should not defend him against the human.

  Gilead’s pace towards the mound increased, and with the movement of his body through the air, the skaven stepped yet further back, forming a wide aisle for him to jog down. The air was overflowing with the stench of the liquefaction of stomach contents as skaven lost control of their bowels and gag reflexes. Several reached filthy claws up to ears and nostrils that had begun to trickle with dirty black blood. Still, they did not seek to attack the elf.

  The boy lurched towards the Rat King with his hoe held out in front of him. The King ducked and wove and danced a jig around the boy, laughing and squealing in delight as his guard looked on. The boy staggered, one eye glazing over with the fever in his brow, the other filling with the blood that was oozing from several wounds in his face and head.

  As the Rat King ducked and danced, he turned his weapon over in his hands, slicing lightly, rapidly through the air, impossibly close to the boy’s staggering body.

  The boy tripped a little over his feet, and took the haft of his hoe in both hands, holding it vertically so that he could lean his weight down on it without falling to the floor.

  As the blood began to seep from dozens of shallow slices in the boy’s skin, as the cloth of his shirt began to fall away in long ribbons, exposing the grey skin of his torso and the hundreds of wounds inflicted there, Gilead made a last effort to reach the mound, the boy he could not save and the Rat King he intended to kill.

  The elf feinted towards the skaven lining his route, watching for an opportunity. Before they had a chance to retreat, Gilead found a skaven leg joint to step onto to elevate himself, a stooped shoulder for his next step and a head for his last, and he was up and over the bodyguard surrounding the Rat King. His eyes blazed as he confronted the ancient creature, but he held his sword away from his body to the right.

  The Rat King did not dance or weave or squeal. He stood before the elf as still and silent as any skaven might be, yet Gilead could feel the creature tremble, despite the bright flashes of light that reflected off the marble surfaces of his eyes.

  The Rat King dropped his weapon and fussed with something hanging around his neck, a length of ribbon or leather, perhaps. The Rat King pulled on the length of braided hair and the amulet tied to it. He clutched it in both paws and raised it above his head.

  The skaven were fast because they were short-lived creatures. They had no capacity for reasoning, so
every action was a staccato reaction, a primal response.

  Gilead was fast too.

  The attack came from behind Gilead to his left. It was a brutal, badly timed lunge, and Gilead deftly tripped the bodyguard and pierced his chest before he could rise from where he had fallen on the earth mound at the elf’s feet.

  A second guard attacked at the length of his staff weapon, a cross between a scythe and a halberd, an ugly hybrid clearly concocted from the blades of two older weapons and the handle of a third. Gilead disarmed him with a flick of his wrist, and the weapon spiralled away into the crowd that was gathering around the focus of the fight. It took out three more ratmen, two of them at the knees, and a third because he was pushed into the fray by the skaven behind him. The last tripped over his feet, falling onto the curved scythe blade that jutted from the weapon’s handle.

  Each skaven bodyguard that fell was replaced by another of his tribe, warrior’s all. Gilead found time to unsheathe his short blade, and, a weapon in each hand, cut and sliced his way through skin, bone, flaking leather armour and the putrid strips of rotten, greasy cloth that the skaven wound their hands and feet in.

  Gilead blinked and could see it all. He could see the faces of hundreds of skaven on the slopes of the mound below him and out on the floor of the crypt. He could see nothing in their eyes but a lust to destroy. They were jostling and breaking into skirmishes among themselves, since they could neither reach their enemy, nor, if they could have come face-to-face with the Fell One would they have been allowed to kill him. He saw a kind of uncontrolled primal frenzy that he had not known existed, despite the stories he had heard about the rat-creatures.

  He also saw the boy. He saw him look at the elf, his hero, and then he saw him close his eyes, involuntary. The bloodshot orbs rolled back into the boy’s head. Somehow, the boy held onto the handle of his hoe, and it kept him upright for what seemed like minutes. It was almost comical, the way the boy’s... Quirin’s… corpse was suspended, half-standing, half-kneeling, propped up by the weapon that Gilead had remade for him. Finally, the moment was over, and the boy was slumped on his face on the dirt mound.

  Gilead wanted revenge, not only because the skaven had killed the boy, but because he had allowed it to happen, and his guilt and anger could result in nothing short of devastation to the skaven.

  Gilead was shadowfast.

  While he ducked and dived and sliced and lunged, and thrust his blade into squealing ratmen one after another, he looked around for the leader of this debauched race. He saw that the sea of rat-faces looking up at the mound had become much denser, those twitching maws and marble eyes closer together. The crowd was surging towards the dais mound, dragging its dead and wounded with it, crushing the weakest among its mass. As it moved in an unstoppable wave towards him, the Rat King rode on an impossible wave of rat-arms away from him, shaking the double-paw in which it clutched its magical amulet .

  Gilead thrust with his short blade into the side of a rat that had changed its mind about doing battle with the elf, and was turning tail, attempting to run away. The blade ground on something as it punched through the leather armour, skin and bone of the creature’s torso, and, as the skaven turned, Gilead lost his grip on the weapon, his hands slick with the gore of dozens of the dead.

  Without a thought, he scooped up the boy’s hoe and began to turn it over in his hand, weighing its usefulness. Gilead’s second weapon was gone, rendering his primary blade much less useful against so many attackers.

  The elf sheathed his sword, grasped the hoe haft with both hands and began to wield it expertly. The handle end broke sternums and winded rats to death, or tripped them off their hind feet, tumbling them to the ground where they met their deaths by trampling. The sharpened head of the hoe cut through limbs and arteries, and even sliced a scraggy grey neck clean through, the rat’s head falling in one direction and its body in another.

  They came at him over and over again, barely lifting their weapons to the elf before dying at his hand. Gilead looked around again at the circle of assailants pushing and shoving each other, either to take their turn at fighting him or to get away from his thrusting attacks. They were poorly armed. Many appeared to have broken their weapons deliberately. There were stringy ribbons of greasy cloth where once a blade had been wrapped to a staff, many of the blades looked old and dull and well beyond use, and those skaven with decent weapons turned their blades away and attacked with hafts and handles.

  Gilead looked at the mass of bodies around him, which was vast, despite the fact that the ratmen were clearing bodies away from the focus of the battle as fast they could manage. Then he looked out again at the Rat King riding above his followers, relying on their loyalty to keep him aloft.

  They did not see him move, they did not feel his footfalls pass over their heads and shoulders as the Fell One found a path out over the crowd towards the skaven sovereign. He could not lose the battle by killing all day and all night, and for as long as it took to decimate the skaven horde. He could not lose the battle when none of the creatures were able or willing to even attempt to kill him. Despite it all, he knew that this was a battle he could not win.

  In the blink of an eye, the Rat King, with the help of experience gleaned through years of life that he should never have lived, homed in on the Fell One, and knew what he was doing. He cried out at his followers below him, and, letting the amulet fall to the length of the plaited hair string that it hung from, he began to spin the charm around his head.

  The mesmerised ratmen watched as the great vaulted ceiling of the crypt, black and sparkling, filled with thousands of pinpricks of bright light. Some died on the spot; many opened their own veins, driven by wonder and awe to end their lives at this zenith of their sovereign’s power. The Rat King was returned safely to the dais on a wave of rat-paws, where he stood at the centre of the bloody mound. All of his bodyguards were gone, not even their bodies remaining on the mound, although much of their blood had been spilt there . Every tribal leader, every champion, every lieutenant had been killed by the Fell One. Every one of them would add to the Rat King’s longevity, but they were as nothing compared with this great catch. The Fell One was in their midst, and the Rat King had the ultimate power over him.

  The Rat King cried out high and loud and long. The rats responded vigorously, sloughing off their mesmeric states to do their leader’s bidding.

  As shadowfast as he was, Gilead did not expect the ratmen to know that he was using their heads and shoulders as stepping-stones, but the Rat King was preternaturally fast, too, and he could feel and read every vibration and every movement in the air. He had monitored The Fell One’s every move, and now it was time for him to best him, to capture him and to harness his life-force.

  Without warning, the sea of bodies under Gilead’s feet disappeared, the rat’s answering the clarion call to disperse with all haste.

  Gilead fell, suddenly, but not far. His drop was almost vertical, and, under other circumstances, he would simply have risen in his knees, his weapon in his hand, and fought on.

  As Gilead hit the ground, the ratmen piled on top of him in a mass of sheer numbers that weighed him down, crushing him to the earth floor of the crypt, disabling him. His ability to be shadowfast was knocked out of him as his concentration broke in the fall, and it was as much as he could do to fill his lungs so that he would not be killed by the black mass of stinking bodies that lay on top of him.

  Gilead could not move, and the mass of bodies above him did not move.

  Dozens of rats died in the scrum that brought the Fell One down to earth and kept him there, hundreds had died in combat with him, and thousands had died in setting the trap and luring Gilead into their midst.

  The Rat King looked down on the Fell One as he lay lifeless on the floor of his antechamber, tied every which way with leather thongs from old armour, with the greasy rags that the skaven used in the construction of their weapons and in their sovereign’s throne, and with lengths of strong
sinew cut from skaven corpses.

  The Rat King did not count his dead. He could not count, but he knew in his thrumming blood organ that if he could, he would take great pleasure in counting the scores, perhaps hundreds of years of life that this great bounty, this Fell One, would secure for him long into the future.

  THE SHADOW IN THE GLASS

  Steve Lyons

  It was a quiet Moon-Day morning when the Inquisition came to Icthis.

  Yriel Malechan was woken by the sounds of running footsteps, shouted warnings, slamming doors. She heard the distant snarls of engine-spirits and leapt from her cot.

  The floorboards of the old cabin felt cold to her bare feet.

  Yriel pressed an eye to a worm hole in the window shutters. It overlooked the little village’s main road – the climbing road – a good distance below.

  A convoy of eight tanks was grinding its way along that road. Marching alongside them were red- and black-armoured troops, two hundred of them at least.

  The procession was led by the witch hunters themselves: old, grim-faced men with tall hats and dark cloaks who wielded their devotional symbols like blunt weapons.

  Yriel caught the eye of one and recoiled with a frightened gasp. She had felt, impossibly, as if the witch hunter was staring back at her, even at this distance, through her tiny spy hole. She had felt like he could see into her.

  With a start, she remembered the mirror.

  She had slept with it under her pillow. She retrieved it now, her hands shaking. The mirror looked as beautiful to Yriel in the shafts of dawn that pierced her roof as it had in the dusty gloom of the curio shop yesterday.

  It was a perfect glass disc, mounted in an ornate frame. The frame was pressed with gold – whether real or not she had no way of telling, but it glistened all the same – and inset at its crown with a small, greenish-black gem.

  But it wasn’t just the frame that made the mirror so alluring. It was what the mirror showed her.