Tales of the Old World (75 page)

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
attacked.

“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.”