RATTENKRIEG

Robert Earl

 

 

The scratching had started again. Freda lay huddled in the darkness, cold sweat gluing her nightdress to her trembling body. In the light of the day it was a pretty thing, this nightdress. She’d chosen it because of the rabbit pattern sewn into the hem. Tonight, with the pattern hidden by darkness, it felt like a shroud.

Her knuckles were already bruised, but she carried on gnawing at them anyway, like a rat with a bone. Even when her sharp, little teeth tore through the skin and her mouth filled with the bitter, hot, copper taste of blood, she couldn’t stop.

Tonight there were more things to worry about than cuts and bruises. Horrible things.

Beneath the weight of her terror, Freda struggled to remember the words of a prayer, any prayer that might make the scratching stop. But she struggled in vain. All she could think of was the thing in the cupboard and how far away her father was.

Then the sound stopped. The pause lasted for a second, then a dozen, and then a dozen more. Freda held her breath, willing the silence to last. At length she felt the first tiny flicker of relief and took her fist out of her mouth. Slowly, with as much courage as a warrior entering a dragon’s lair, she raised her head from beneath the covers and peered towards the cupboard.

A loud impact banged against its doors.

With a shriek, Freda leapt from her bed, ran from the room and raced down the stairs. Her feet pounded on the floorboards, like a drummer sounding the retreat, the noise of her flight making her run all the faster.

“Daddy!” she screamed, as she fled down the short hall to his study, the rabbits on her nightdress snapping about her heels.

“Daddy!” She flung open the heavy wooden door and burst inside. Magretta, the house maid, sprang up from her place on Freda’s father’s knee, her cheeks burning. The old man himself also seemed a little flushed.

But Freda didn’t care if they both had the flu. She just wanted to be with her daddy. With a leap she flung herself into his arms.

“What is it?” he asked, his tone a kaleidoscope of embarrassment, anger and concern. “Nightmares?” He stroked her hair, feeling the sweat that had turned her beautiful mane of golden hair into dank rats’ tails.

“You’re trembling,” he said.

“It was the thing in the cupboard again,” she whined, clinging to him.

He exchanged a glance with Magretta and shrugged. “Oh,” her father said, and sighed. “Well, let’s go and have a look, then.”

“No!”

“Yes. It’s just your imagination.”

Taking the lantern from the table, he swung her onto his hip and carried her back upstairs. He grimaced a little at her weight. She seemed to be getting bigger by the day now, and he was no longer a young man. But Freda was oblivious to the effort the climb cost him. She stared into the shadows ahead, her expression as grim as a convict climbing the gallows.

“Look,” her father said, lifting the lantern to chase the shadows back behind the tumbled mess of her bed. “No monsters.”

“The cupboard,” she whispered, edging around behind him.

With a grunt, he lowered her to the floor and walked over to the twin mahogany doors. He opened them with a theatrical flourish. Inside a wall of hanging clothes hid the camphor wood rear of the cupboard, and for a moment he thought about pulling them aside and pretending to find something behind them. But, with the suspicion that such a joke might backfire and the knowledge that Magretta was waiting for him downstairs, he decided against it.

“There, you see?” he said. “Just clothes. Very pretty clothes for a very pretty girl. And perhaps some mice, but you’re too big to be scared of little mice, aren’t you?”

Freda nodded doubtfully.

“Good girl. Now, hop into bed. I’ll leave the lamp and send Magretta up to check on you later.”

“Why not now?”

“Because she’s, ah, busy.”

With a little sigh, Freda climbed back into her bed. At least he was leaving her the light. Daddy lent down and kissed her on the forehead, his whiskers tickling her skin, then he turned and left her, closing the door behind him as she pulled the blankets up to her chin.

The thing in the cupboard waited until he had returned to his study before it started scratching again. It was soft but insistent, like the throbbing of a rotten tooth, but this time she fought against the fear. The lamp helped. Even though Daddy had turned it down it still bathed the room in a warm light that somehow seemed to hold the noise at bay.

“It’s just mice,” she whispered to herself as the scratching was replaced by a series of sharp, crunching sounds.

“Shoo!” she said loudly. To her immense relief, the noises stopped.

“You’re just mice,” she told the cupboard triumphantly. She raised her head farther up out of the eiderdown, like an archer peeing over a castle wall. The sweet, glorious silence remained unbroken and a sense of triumph began to steal over her.

For a while she savoured her triumph and drifted off towards sleep. It was almost a shame that she had frightened the mice away. They were funny and sweet. And she always impressed daddy by being such a brave girl when they appeared. Not like silly Magretta who screamed and jumped onto chairs. Maybe tomorrow night she would leave out some cheese and see if…

The cupboard door swung silently open. Freda stopped breathing.

“Daddy must have left the latch off,” she told herself. “He must have.”

But before she could finish the thought, the monsters rushed out. There weren’t just one of them but two, four, a dozen. They swarmed over Freda in a single great mass, their filthy, black hair scratching her smooth skin, their jagged claws gripping her arms and legs like sprung steel rat traps. Freda, almost insane with terror, opened her mouth to scream, to vomit out this paralyzing horror, but a slimy paw thrust itself into her mouth. She gagged at the taste of the rotten skin and was choking as they bound her with thongs of rough leather.

And all the while, the lamp burned upon the table, it’s light still and even. The monsters had stirred no more breeze than they had noise. Their tails thrashed excitedly above their writhing bodies like scaly whips.

Within seconds their work was done and they left as noiselessly as they had arrived, slipping through the hole they had so painstakingly chewed through the back of Freda’s cupboard.

So it was, that when Magretta came to check on her a few hours later, all that remained of the little girl was a torn scrap of her nightdress: an embroidered rabbit torn in two.

 

The shrine was so old that it looked more like a thing grown than a thing built. Centuries of winter storms and harvest suns had rounded off the sharp edges of its masonry, leaving its granite bulk as smooth and featureless as a river washed boulder.

The centuries had blanketed the shrine with ivy, the greenery growing as thick as an old man’s beard. Within its rustling depths were many families of birds, the creatures living out their entire span amongst the foliage. In ages past, some of the shrine’s keepers had scoured the ivy from the walls because of them. Perhaps they had feared that those whom they were sworn to protect might be disturbed by the constant irreverence of the birdsong.

But the present incumbent had no such delusions. The dead, he knew, were dead. It would take more than a few chattering sparrows to disturb their sleep.

Besides, he liked to watch the birds flitting about the graveyard. Some of them had even grown enough trust to perch on his hunched shoulders as he worked. They’d watch with cocked heads as he chopped wood, drew water, scythed down the grass that poked up like green fingers from between the graves that huddled around the shrine.

And they did huddle, these graves, clustering around the ancient building like lambs around an ewe, nervous lambs that could smell the scent of a wolf. It was a fanciful notion, but the shrine’s keeper knew it to be an accurate one. The black depths of the forest that lay beyond his walls were alive with those who sought to enslave the dead. Kings and citadels had fallen beneath the onslaught of these abominations. Armies had been slaughtered. Great walls crumbled to dust.

Yet where they had fallen the shrine had stood, the neatly trimmed hedges that enclosed it remaining inviolate. Morr, after all, was a powerful god.

The shrine’s keeper smiled contentedly at the thought and decided that he’d worked enough for one day. He stood up, pressed his bony thumbs into the knots that had formed in his back and returned to his chamber. There he swapped his scythe for a jug of water, a crust of bread and a handful of small, wrinkled apples.

He sat on one of the gravestones as he ate and watched the sun setting over the forest. He enjoyed the sight as he munched his way through the fruit and scattered his bread to the birds that had flocked to his side. In the light of the setting sun their plumage shone and their shadows were dagger sharp. The priest found himself smiling again.

Despite the pain and the suffering, this world was a beautiful place. It was understandable that some men clung to it in defiance of their preordained span. Unforgivable, but understandable.

With a sigh, the old man glanced down at the liver spots on the back of his hands, the mottled skin there as creased as last month’s apples.

“It won’t be long before Morr greets me,” he told one of his fluttering friends. As if in silent confirmation, the sun dipped below the horizon and the breeze turned chilly.

As day turned to night, the priest dispersed the last of his bread and hobbled back to the shrine.

 

He’d been dreaming of wide, open grassland, an ocean of green, above which clouds as big as galleys sailed lazily past. In the distance, an old limestone wall stretched across the horizon. Sun-gilded lichen covered every inch of it, except for the single oak door. As he approached, the wood started to shake with the impact of a hard knocking. The sound was as loud as thunder and as relentiess as a funeral bell. It was also absolutely terrifying.

All the same, the keeper ground his teeth together and carried on marching towards the shaking door. A second later he was stood in front of it. His fingers closed around the handle and he pulled, swinging it effortlessly open to reveal…

With a suffocated scream the old man sat bolt upright on his cot, his skin washed with sweat and his bony chest heaving as he gasped for air.

Wide eyed in the darkness of his chamber, he ran his fingertips against the rough stone of the wall. He pulled the covers back and swung his feet onto the floor. The tiles were cold, cold enough to send a welcome chill of reality through his befuddled thoughts.

With a long, shuddering breath, he shook off the last scraps of the dream and ran a trembling hand across the damp skin of his scalp.

Although the dream had gone, the knocking continued. For a moment the priest sat and listened to it, as it rattled against his door with a desperate, knuckle scraping urgency. There was a mute terror in the sound, as though the visitor was living in a nightmare of his own and for a split second the shrine’s keeper considered ignoring the summons. But he extinguished that traitorous thought as soon as it appeared. Above all things, he was a priest of Morr. It was his duty to make sure that the dying didn’t slip away unshriven, and after sixty years of service his duty was as much a part of him as his bones.

Another volley of impacts rang out. Clenching his jaw, the keeper got painfully to his feet and stumbled blindly over towards the cell’s ancient fireplace.

“Have a second’s patience,” he called out to his unwelcome guest as he knelt down, knees popping, in front of the fire’s charred remains. “I’m making light.”

The knocking paused for a moment. Then it started again with a renewed urgency.

“Wait,” the priest snapped, then drew in a deep breath and blew. Ash flurried up into the darkness like grey snow, revealing glowing embers beneath. “I’m coming.”

The priest, ignoring a sudden fit of dizziness, took another breath and blew again. This time a tiny flame burst into life amongst the fire’s remains. After the darkness of the unlit cell, the light was painfully bright and the priest wiped a tear from his eye as he fed the fire with tinder.

Only when the fireplace was once more crackling did he turn to the door. Suppressing an edgy sense of déjà vu, he made himself walk over to it and lifted the bar.

He closed his fingers around the latch and pulled, swinging it effortlessly open to reveal…

Without a word of warning the door was slammed backwards in a rush of movement and cold night air. Even as the tortured hinges squeaked in protest, a huge figure, shapeless and shadowed in the flaring firelight, burst into the room. The guttering flame revealed it to be a hideous confusion of feathers, and furs and wild, staring eyes.

The shrine’s keeper moved with a speed that would have amazed his parishioners. Leaping back as easily as a man half his age, he seized the scythe from its place in the corner. Hefting its bulk upon his bony hip he turned, ready to throw his weight beneath the sweep of the blade. But before he could, the apparition swept the bedraggled mass of felt and feathers off of its head and bowed stiffly, chin to chest in the northern manner.

The priest recovered his wits quickly as he studied the man who stood before him. “Come in,” he said, his voice level with a soothing calm that he’d practiced on generations of grieving relatives. “Take a seat.”

His guest watched him return the scythe to its corner. Beneath the filth encrusted mop of his hair and the singed remains of his beard, his face was deathly pale and hard with suspicion. Only when satisfied that the priest wasn’t going to attack him did he look away, his eyes flitting about the bare walls of the cell, as though he expected them to spring open in some trap.

“Here, take a seat by the fire,” the priest repeated, hastening to bar the door against the quickening wind. But when he turned around, the man was still in the centre of the room, sniffing the air suspiciously.

The priest sniffed too and immediately wished that he hadn’t. The filth that stained his guest’s rags also greased the air with a foul, sickly sweet stench. The odour had great intensity and reminded the old man of some of his riper charges.

None but a lunatic could live with such an odour, the priest decided unhappily. Then, as cautious as a man testing the heat of a stove he placed a hand on the madman’s shoulder and steered him towards a stool.

“We’ll take a drink,” he said soothingly. “Then you can tell me what brings you here.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the foul smelling stranger grunted his agreement and slung something from his back. At first the priest had taken it to be a beggar’s bedroll, but now he could see that it was a weapon.

At least he assumed that it was a weapon. What else could it be? The great polished lump of stained timber that served as a stock looked to belong to a crossbow, its smooth curves designed to rest easily against a man’s shoulder. On the top of this familiar shape, though, taking the place of the crossbows arms, there was nothing but a simple barrel of blue steel. As long and as thick as a man’s thigh it glinted dangerously in the firelight, its muzzle flared open in a toothless snarl.

It had a strange smell, too. An acrid, sulphur smell that was even sharp enough to cut through the rank stench of its owner.

“Here,” the priest said, pulling the threadbare blanket from his cot and throwing it to his guest. “Sit you down.”

“Thanks,” he muttered, his accent harsh and guttural. “And why not, hey? Why not be comfortable for the last few hours?”

“Why not, indeed?” the priest agreed, studiously ignoring the emotion in his guest’s voice. At least the man was talking.

Deciding to take the risk of turning his back on him, he went to rummage in the cell’s single cupboard, listening to the squeak of his stool beneath the stranger’s weight all the while.

“Ha! Here it is.” A smile eased the spare lines of the old man’s face as he produced a fat bottle of glazed clay and two pots. He poured out two generous measures, passed one across to his guest and took a seat.

“Drink,” he said.

Again the man grunted his thanks. He drained the cup in one deep draught, lowered it and peered into the dregs that remained. Gradually, as if in response to something he’d seen there, a glistening tear slid down a pale scar and disappeared into the bristles of his moustache.

“Give me your pot,” the priest said. He poured another measure and waited until his guest took it. “You did well to survive the trap.”

For a split second the stranger froze, his drink held halfway to his lips. Then, in an explosion of movement that sent his stool spinning away and the cup rolling across the table he was on his feet, a dagger sprouting downwards from his left fist.

“What do you know about it?” he snarled, baring strong yellow teeth as he edged forward.

The priest slowed his breathing, unclenched his fists. For a second he watched the patterns the fire made in the razor sharp steel that quivered beneath his chin. He forced himself to look away, to look instead into the crazed eyes of his tormentor.

A lunatic, a beast at bay, he thought, not without a touch of pity.

“I know only what I see,” he said, marshalling his words as carefully as a surgeon would his tools. “With those weapons and those scars you’d find it hard to pass for a civilian. Your obviously a gentleman of fortune. You’re garb’s worth more gold than I see in a year.”

“Perhaps. But…”

“And you’ve recently been set upon,” the priest hurriedly continued. “That much is obvious. A man whose bearing and profession speaks of a proud nature wandering the night dressed in those rags? No. I’ll wager that two days ago those tatters were good enough to wear in any court.”

The soldier lowered his knife uncertainly as his host pressed home his advantage.

“As for the trap, well, what bandit would run into the jaws of that weapon of yours? It must have been a trap. Anyway, there have been no battles hereabouts of late.”

“Haven’t there?” the man asked contemptuously.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the mad energy deserted him. The rage bled away from his features, leaving in its place a terrible exhaustion. Sheathing his dagger, the man recovered his stool and sat back down with a sigh.

“My apologies,” he muttered half-heartedly, and shrugged.

“Accepted,” the priest nodded. He recovered his guest’s pot and refilled it. “Why don’t you tell me your name?”

“Otto van Delft,” he said, a trace of pride straightening his back. The priest wasn’t surprised to find that he had one of Karl Franz’s subjects on his hands. That would explain his manners.

“And what brings you to the shrine?” he asked warily. “You’re healthy, strong. What do you want of Morr?”

“I’ll tell you,” Otto said.

He peered into the depths of the fire, the flames burnishing his grimy features with a dozen shades of light and darkness. For a while he was silent, listening to the crackle of wood settling in the fireplace and the muted complaints of the rising wind that now lay siege outside.

Finally he took a deep drink and began. “What do you know of the ratvolk?”

“Ratvolk?”

“Yes, the ratvolk. The skaven.” Otto turned his attention from the fire to the priest and saw him shiver, a reflex that had nothing to do with the draft that slunk around the stone of the old walls.

“So you do know of them.” The soldier smiled grimly. “Of course you do. Everyone does.”

The priest merely nodded and poured another measure from the jug. This time it was for himself.

“Tell me everything,” he said, and took a drink.

“I have been hunting the vermin all my life. In sewers, swamps, forests. In catacombs of brick and living stone, in lands of fire and ice and skin rotting dampness. And why? Because…”

Otto paused, his brows meeting in sudden suspicion as he studied his host. The priest’s slight nod seemed to reassure him.

“Because,” he continued heavily, “they’re part of me, part of all of us. They’re the evil that we try to hold at bay, with law and discipline. And I hate them.”

A log, settling in the fireplace, snapped open in a shower of sparks. The two men watched the sudden flare of light for a moment. Only when it had died down did Otto continue.

“I have a reputation. I am a—what did you call it?—a gentleman of fortune. Yes. And like a thousand other gentlemen of fortune, I haggle like a whore for the best price, then throw the money away on ale and women. But unlike them,” he said, leaning forward with a sudden intensity, “I do what I’m paid for. I keep the battle moving forward. Believe me, priest, that’s no easy thing.”

The older man nodded.

“Reputation,” the mercenary sneered, injecting a whole world of contempt into the word. As if in further comment he coughed, hawking up a gob of phlegm that he spat with unerring accuracy into the fire. It hissed and sizzled as he continued.

“Reputation is what you need in my business more than in any other. Wealth I have, but I needed more than one man’s gold for what I had in mind. There are rumours, you see, rumours of a city in the south, the heartland of the skaven, the womb of their race. I wanted backers. I wanted enough men to sweep down into those swamps and tear out the guts of the enemy.”

Otto, his pupils narrowing into twin pinpricks of fanaticism, spat the words out. “I needed one more war to make that happen. I came so close. Ever heard of Magdeburg?”

“Yes,” the priest said. “I knew a merchant from there. He made a contribution to the shrine.”

“He wasn’t called Gottlieb, was he?”

“No. Why?”

“Gottlieb was the man who hired me. He was the mayor of Magdeburg. Poor bastard.”

Once more Otto drained his pot, once more his host refilled it. This spirit, White Fire the donor had called it, was proving to be very effective at loosening tongues.

“Forty crowns a week,” the mercenary said, “plus another fifty for a pelt. I let the lads keep the pelt money. That’s always the best way. Krinvaller skimmed a little off the top, of course, but not too much.” The mercenary snorted. “Krinvaller! What an idiot. Still, I liked him. Everyone did. He’d made a great watch captain, lazy and kind hearted. Then Gottlieb launched the rattenkrieg and turned him from a good watch captain into a terrible colonel.”

“The rattenkrieg,” the priest ventured uncertainly, “is a war against the skaven?”

“That’s it. Gottlieb’s daughter was taken, you see. She was a pretty girl, by all accounts, apart from a strawberry birthmark on her cheek. Not that that matters. A man’s child is his child and always beautiful to him. When she began to wail late one night about things hiding inside her closet, Gottlieb just thought she was having nightmares. Then, one morning… well, there was nothing left of her, just crumpled sheets and a torn scrap of nightdress. The skaven had gnawed their way from the sewers, up between the walls and through the back of her wardrobe. Their tracks were everywhere in the room.”

Van Delft paused, looked reflectively into the fire.

“So Gottlieb went to war. He was winning it, too, even before I got there. I should have known something was wrong. A halfwit doesn’t lead a couple of dozen vagabonds down into the deeps and come back victorious. He doesn’t come back at all.”

“Oh, gods, I should have known.” Van Delft; face crumpled into a mask of pain and he smacked his palm against his forehead. “I should have known.”

The priest, his own features carefully composed, wondered if the mercenary was going to break down altogether. But after a few tense moments, he took a long, deep shuddering breath, pulled his hands reluctantly from his face and continued.

“The information we were getting was very good. Before every mission Gottlieb would call us in and give us numbers, deployment, even these maps. Look.” Van Delft reached inside the ruined cloth of his tunic and pulled out a roll of parchments. Even in the uncertain firelight, the wealth of detail remained crystal clear. As well as the mud-coloured inks, which distinguished each tangled strand from its neighbours, each of the cobwebbed lines was beaded with its own peculiar series of dots and dashes. The priest held one up to the flame to admire the workmanship.

“Why are they made of leather?” he asked, rubbing the material between his fingers.

“Because parchment tears.” The mercenary, seized by a sudden fit of shivering, wrapped the blanket tighter across his shoulders. “I’d never worked with such information before. Usually underground all you have is instinct, smell, hearing. Fear. But with these,” he waved a hand towards the maps, “we had depths, scale, everything. I should have known.”

“Known what?” the priest blurted out in spite of himself, and immediately regretted his lapse of patience.

His guest noticed the slip and smiled wearily. “This potcheen of yours seems to be loosening both of our tongues.”

“We’d better take some more then. Give me your pot.” As he poured, he watched his guest’s expression harden and guessed that his thoughts were falling back into the depths of the past.

“Ever heard of warpstone?” Otto asked.

The deepening gurgle of a filling cup faltered.

“Yes. When I was a younger man—” he broke off. “Yes, I’ve heard of it.”

“You know of its value then?” Otto asked curiously.

“I know of its value to some.”

“So do I. And beneath Magdeburg I saw enough to buy a city. Although no sane man would risk trying to get it.”

“At first,” he continued, “I thought that the stuff must have been something else, some kind of mould or fungus. I was leading a gang down to a cut-off point when I first saw it, a great twisting seam threading itself through the walls like an artery through a corpse. And that light, that sickly green light! I swear it was pulsing, beating like the heart of some living thing. That light, it made our faces look like…”

He stopped, eyes blank and unseeing, his drink forgotten in his hand.

“It made them look like daemons,” he finished and drained his pot. “Such wealth was before us. For a moment, a second, I thought that here I’d found my key to the south. Madness of course, the idea of selling the enemy power in order to raise an army against him is insane. Then another thought hit me. Stuck down there, beneath countless tons of rock, with nothing between myself and the darkness except a single flame, I realised what sort of skaven pack must own this territory and just how powerful they must have been. If I’d have had time, I’d have retreated back up and thought things through.”

“You didn’t have time?” The priest nudged his guest out of a brief reverie.

“No. That’s when the first attack came.”

Wordlessly he held his pot out and wordlessly the priest refilled it.

“It’s always the same in the beginning, especially underground. There’s always that terrible moment when you realise that you’re not imagining things anymore, that what you’re hearing is actually real. That’s when the air seems to rum to liquid, heavy and tough to breath, even before the stink hits you. The noise is always the same too; the hiss of fur against stone, the scrape of claws, the pattering of feet and the squeals of pain. Even in the seconds before battle those filthy things are snapping and biting at their own kin.”

Van Delft sneered into the depths of the fireplace, his bared teeth gleaming as sharp as a terrier’s beneath his moustache. “They even hate each other.”

This time, when he paused, the priest said nothing and merely sat transfixed.

“The weakest always come first, the slaves and the vanquished. Pathetic creatures these, but crazed with a fear of what’s behind more than what is in front. I waited for them to come. I felt fear twisting into terror, felt terror twisting into madness. We waited some more. I thought of the lads behind me and tried to take strength from them. They didn’t have it to give, though. All I got was the sound of sobbing and the smell of piss. If their fear hadn’t frozen them I’ve no doubt they would have fled at the first alarm. As it was, they waited until we could see the lice crawling on the enemy. Then I fired Gudrun.”

He reached over to the weapon and ran his fingertips lovingly down from its muzzle to its breech.

“She punched a hole straight through them, stopped the charge with a single smack of blood and shrapnel.”

Van Delft smiled gently and drew the firearm to his chest like a favourite dog. The priest half expected him to pat it.

He did.

“Yes, she cut through them. That’s pretty much all I remember. In that battle Sigmar blessed me with the madness.”

The priest, who could well believe it, nodded and said nothing for a long while.

“And was the pack as strong as you feared?”

“No. No, they were nothing. Most of them were crippled with old injuries or disease. The rest were only half grown, or so old that they were toothless. There were even some females. The only one of them that was up to anything was the leader. Now he was something.” The soldier nodded approvingly. “A great beast, at least as tall as a man, his pelt was almost pure black where it wasn’t riven through with scar-tissue. And from the tip of his snout to his left ear there was nothing but shiny, pink flesh, studded with a lump of warpstone in the place of his eye. How it flared when we’d cornered him!”

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.”

“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 corpses 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.

He threw another log into the stove, straightened the chair and rolled his blankets up. Then he picked up the maps van Delft had left him. The columns and lines that tattooed the soft leather remained clear and untouched by the hell their owner had been through, the leather still supple and well oiled. The priest picked up one at random, smoothing it out on the flat of his thigh. Although the square of its shape was slightly misshapen the texture was smooth, finer than any leather he’d worn before. The priest held it up to the light that spilled in through the doorway, tilting it this way and that against the shadows that still haunted the room.

The detail really was incredible. But now that he looked, there was one flaw. It was a single, strawberry shaped smudge on the corner of one of them. The priest picked up the next one and found another imperfection. This one consisted of an arc of little curled hairs, golden blonde in the gathering sunlight.

The next one was marred by a little indentation in the centre. An inverted button of leather, perhaps as big as his fingertips, the skin within had been compacted into swirls.

The priest ran his thumb over it, wondering what it reminded him off.

A rose, perhaps.

No. No, that wasn’t it. It was something less fragile. Ah yes, of course. It was just like a belly button. Just like a…

The potcheen soured in his stomach. His hands began to shake. Reluctantly the old man looked back at the unusual leather of these maps.

Looked at the belly button that marked one. The birthmark that blemished another. The eyebrows that furred one edge of a third.

And he realised that van Delft had brought him the remains of a body to be shriven, after all.

 

Outside, the mist gave way to drizzle, which in turn gave way to the warmth of the sun. It warmed the fields and the cemetery and the stones of the shrine. It shone golden on the wet ivy and sent flights of sparrows wheeling up into the sky, born aloft by the joy of their lives.

The priest, the rites of death completed, watched them. They scattered across the blue vault of the sky, tiny little sparks of happiness born up the warm, southerly wind that whispered gently through the greens of the forest below. He took a deep breath of clean air, only slightly scented now with the smoke of the funeral pyre and smiled as the first of the sparrows descended, drawn by the sight of the bread in his hand.

“Yes, little friend,” he told it as it hopped forwards. “This world is a beautiful place.”

He pursed his lips as it flew away. Then softly, as if he didn’t want the bird to hear him, the priest added the single word: “Sometimes.”