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Inferno! An Age of Sigmar Collection – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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THE FLESHSTINK PROCESSION

The monks did not go four or five tail-lengths before disappearing into oil-smear fog and teeming, ratty hordes. The air was fur and musk, smoke and fat, claw-scrabble and strident squeals. Weep Dripclaw kept his hood drawn and to himself, inasmuch as the numberless inhabitants of Fleshstink would allow, and listened, likewise, as the monks brought them the foulsome news of the Withered Word.

‘These are base-low and degenerate vermin,’ said Fekreek Bruhrk, Bilecardinal Superior of the Obstreperous Retch, his squeak conspiratorial. His head was tonsured, his lips cracked, the skin of his muzzle peeling and raw as ordination to the episcopal degree demanded. His expression was one of permanent addlement, and not improved by the charred-meat smell and warpstone edge to the fog. ‘Fertile fur for the Church’s message.’

‘Do not mis-smell the deviancy of the Moulder clans for the blessings of the Corruptor,’ said Weep. ‘They are as different as yellow dengue and scarlet palsy.’

Fekreek tilted his head, a gesture deliberately spoiled with a curl of his lip and a display of brown fangs. When he spoke, his ulcerated tongue rolled sloppily over his superior’s titleless name: ‘I would not dream-think of telling Weep Dripclaw his business.’

In the Churches of Contagion, orthodoxy changed daily. When the personalities of the Great Horned Rat became especially febrile and fragmented, it could morph hourly. Whatever it happened to be, Weep believed it. It was a test. To sift the morally adroit and theologically nimble from the masses. And so he believed, and strove with every moment to know the current truth of the Corruptor and to believe it harder than any anointed rat-priest of Clan Morbidus. Such was the state of competition within and between the Churches that an ‘irregularly’ consecrated theologian with a knack for interpreting, and for reinterpreting, the Word would always be in demand.

Weep and Fekreek both looked up as the sawing, hammering and gnawing that had been a part of their background abruptly ceased.

A scaffold of rotten timber beams and mouldy rope rose just high enough for the rickety platform at its top to be lost in fog. The resident vermin ignored it, as they ignored Weep and the lay menials who had spent the last Bell and a half erecting it. New structures went up in Fleshstink almost as frequently as old ones came down.

‘Why do you sit-wait, great cardinal of the Obstreperous Retch?’ Weep turned to Fekreek. The priest was still looking up at the tower, snot dribbling down his hairless snout. ‘Your congregation awaits. The Moulder clans yearn to listen-learn of their abhorrent ways.’ He gestured his snout to the platform. ‘Up-up.’

Poxmaster Gagrik could barely think for the clatter of machinery. Cable carts carrying muculent slop lurched, step by iron-grinding step, from slime plantations in the dank uplands to the feed mills and renderiser plants there in the delves. As befitted his lofty status as right paw to Archpustulent Makulitt Pus, Gagrik and his coterie of monks had set up their stall on the low ground close to the factories, the better to negate the false Word of his superior’s rivals. A poor decision, in hindsight. The fog was thickest there: equal parts vapour, warpstone dust and aerosolised animal fats, it drove him almost past madness with hunger, and turned the warp-powered ark lamps of the flesh-warren into spitting migraines on poles. Mill wheels the size of church fronts turned with cacophonous clanks, a deafening onslaught that was at the same time not quite deafening enough to blot out the sounds of pulping, tenderising, masticating and mincing emanating from the factories.

His stomach gurgled.

‘What do the craven apostates do now?’

Friar Rikkulous Snarp held the corroded brass of the farsquinter to his eyes and dialled the focus rings. He adjusted the filter sets to compensate for the all oppressive green, his fur crinkling in consternation. ‘They are very far-distant, most august one. Perhaps they do not think-plan to contest the Word of Clan Morbidus in the Fleshstink after all.’

Gagrik looked down at his subordinate and cuffed him across the ear. The jewelled rings and bangles concealed under worm-eaten robes gave a muffled jangle. ‘Other end. Fool-fool.’

Snarp turned the farsquinter over, the smaller holes towards his eyes and the larger away. ‘Infinite apologies, oh favoured of the bilious one.’

‘Careless paws betray faithless thoughts,’ Gagrik warned.

One of the Archpustulent’s favourite psalms.

Swallowing hard, Snarp brought the farsquinter to his eyes. He leant forward, tail rising from the ground to counterbalance.

‘They build, oh forgiving one.’

‘Building what?’

‘A platform, eminence.’ The friar sniffed, in spite of the thousand tail-lengths between the end of his farsquinter and the vile, villainous nonconformists of the Scratching Ruin.

Gagrik rolled his eyes.

Corruptor spare me the plague of cretinism.

‘Six tail-lengths,’ Snarp announced. ‘Maybe seven tail-lengths high.’

Gagrik frowned into the distance. To the naked skaven eye, the construction was a teetering smudge of blackness in the green. He could have listed a thousand places that he would have rather been than there. His grip on the Coryzan noxwood sceptre under his robes was strong. His claws were blunted from hard work, permanently stained by many an exotic potion. Given the choice he would rather have been with the lay menials building his own pulpit than be the rat who had to climb it and proselytise a faith he barely understood himself.

‘I think it finished,’ said Snarp, still peering through the farsquinter.

‘Do you see him?’ said Gagrik. ‘The villainous uncanon? The arch pretender? The nefarious Antipustulent?’

‘No-no, eminence. Only one of his gullible fool-priests.’

Schisms such as that which had riven Clan Morbidus were not uncommon and occurred always in fours. Thus, when a wayward Church split to follow its own radical interpretation of the Word, three more would invariably follow, either of their own volition or for some contrived reason of the superstitious priests left behind. Gagrik did not know why. He knew better than to wonder. Nor would he risk his neck to suppose that the Archpustulent may have been in any way imprudent in wielding his powers of excommunication so profligately, appearing to neither understand nor care that unholy lore would force others from the bonds of orthodoxy.

‘The foul apostate climbs!’ Snarp jiggled footpaw to footpaw in his fervour, only the farsquinter against his face holding steady.

Gagrik looked up the ladder of their own ramshackle pulpit. Although sturdier than its rival effort, for the wealth of Makulitt Pus was inexhaustible, it leant like a monk on a palsied knee, creaking with every lurch-step fly-past of Fleshstink’s sopping cable carts.

‘Then we must shepherd these wretches from the false-faith of the Antipustulent.’

‘Yes-yes,’ said Snarp. He peered at Gagrik pointedly. ‘We must.’

‘Hear me, faithless!’ Fekreek shrieked from the tower-top, arms aloft, voice as ripe as a week-old corpse. ‘Hear the condemnation of the Great Horned One on your sinful and most-deviant works, and despair…’

Decrepit, unwholesome-looking specimens of Skavendom glanced up briefly as they scurried past. The skaven were a pious race. Few had a keener awareness of their slavering deity, nor so brief an allocation of years and, thus, so near an engagement with his jaws, as the skaven did. It was a rare rat, then, who would not spare a moment and half an ear to the slim possibility of salvation. Plague monks brandished clubs and snarled whenever a clanrat, sniffing a way to circumvent the crowd, pushed close enough to Weep to make the pulpit’s rickety scaffold creak.

Fekreek was too gripped by the passion of the Word to notice.

‘Remember how less ignoble vermin… errr… how less ignoble vermin reject such false prophets…’ A preternaturally high skaven voice boomed tinnily from a loudsqueaker somewhere on the other side of the warren. Weep lifted his snout towards the source. He could not see it. Sound lingered unnaturally in the fog, like a plague rat after a heavy meal. It moved strangely, or not at all. ‘They heed not their promises, for they know-smell the true scent of the Corruptor.’

Weep shook his head, sourly. Such wanton misinterpretation of the Word.

The passage was supposed to read how less ignoble vermin ingest such false prophets…

‘Louder, Bilecardinal Superior,’ he hissed.

‘And it is foetid!’ Fekreek cried, his voice climbing until it was as shrill as the joints on rusted armour. ‘It is Ruin, robing itself not in silver tarnish and verdigris…’

‘Nor cowering amongst you as a beggar, nor as a… er… a common leper or agent of infection. No-no! No! He is an emperor of ailment…’

‘A leveller of the potent…!’

‘A blight for the many…’

‘Give yourself to decay as they did…!’

‘Gird yourself in decay as they did…’

Weep hissed at a nearby plague monk as a clanrat with bug-eyes and sharp, needle-like fur barged into him from behind. The monk brandished his club at the miscreant, who, confident in the mass of furry bodies now separating them, squeaked insults in reply. Weep watched the clanrat push his way on until he was halfway lost in the fog, to the point where a monk in matted robes the colour of scarlet pus came up behind and coshed him on the back of the head with a rusty mace. The rat went down without a squeak. The monk lifted his snout to squeal something, but the fog was so thick it was as though they all scurried with fat-soaked rags in their mouths. Whatever it was, it changed the mood of the horde. A clanrat with mangy yellow fur and breath like a butcher’s midden was suddenly hissing in Weep’s snout. He hissed back, drawing a dagger from his robes. Before he had a chance to use it a plague monk clubbed the clanrat down. Froth sprayed from the unholy warrior’s muzzle.

Weep raised a paw to calm the monk’s zeal, searching with his nose for the ratman who had struck the first blow. The Antipustulent had embraced so many of Clan Morbidus’ wayward Churches into his diocese that it was impossible to know them all by livery or scent.

The culprit had already disappeared into the fog.

‘Calm yourself, litter-brother,’ said Weep. ‘We come to convert. Not to fight-kill.’

With a rabid shriek, the monk pushed past regardless, club swinging into the belly of an apparently ignorant clanrat. Foetid breath whooshed from the clanrat’s lungs as he was lifted off his footpaws and slammed bodily into the foot of Fekreek’s tower. The stricken beam gave without any resistance whatsoever, and Weep turned to look up, his jaw falling open as the entire rotten frame exploded like a bird bone hit by a hammer. The tower pitched onto its broken toe. The handful of monks who had been doing their utmost to hold the wobbly structure upright scattered with shrieks of terror.

Fekreek screamed at them to come back.

Not one of them did.

Weep whirled with a scream, pushed his knife into the back of the plague monk – who was more interested in clubbing down Moulderclan than fleeing – and ran. He ran, until sound, weight and pain came down in awful amalgamation and fell across his shoulders.

Gagrik did not see his rival’s pulpit go down, nor was he able to hear it for the clank and shriek of industrial butchery taking place beneath his footpaws. But a displacement wave rolled through the fog as though the Great Horned Rat had reached down from his tortured heavens and flicked it with a blackened claw. And that Gagrik felt. He could hear as well Friar Snarp’s giggles as the priest peered through the warp-filters of his farsquinter, describing the catastrophe with great mirth. Gagrik set his own footpaws across the sturdy, even boards of his pulpit. His chest puffed a little fuller. The hunch of his spine became slightly lesser. Gagrik was not much of a preacher, but building, making – that he knew.

‘A new-sharp thing of befoulment arises within the Clans Pestilens,’ he squeaked, the loudsqueaker turning his natural skittish whine into a strident soprano, so loud that it made his fur stand trembling on end. ‘You are right-right to deny the false messiah-thing, Moulderclan. And wise. Yes-yes. Most-very wise. All of you. Yes. A new voice thinks to squeak for the faithful of Clan Morbidus. Favoured will be those who ignore him. Debased and degraded will be those who heed his pretenders. Woe!’ He shook his paws, taken by the energy of his sermon now. ‘A fate lots-much blacker awaits those who succour him openly. Not for them the gullet of the Great Horned Rat. No! Not even the fleas that infest the black fur of his infernal back will have them. No-no! For them will be the mites and grubs that plague those loathsome insects. Forever will be their torment! Death to the Antipustulent of Clan Morbidus! Death to–’

The platform lurched.

Gagrik swayed, spreading his footpaws, his arms and tail springing up for balance. He peered short-sightedly to the ground.

The Archpustulent had spent enough warptokens to ensure that there were as many lay members of the Morbidus clan in Fleshstink just then as there were clanrats of the Clans Moulder, but his congregation did seem to have swollen somewhat beyond even what he had paid to expect. Several monks in a mishmash of pestilential drab that might have belonged to one of Makulitt’s Churches led the rabble in noisome chants, a number pushing right up against the foot of the tower. The platform beneath him ticked like a Skryreclan time bomb as it tilted slowly, slowly, away from level.

He aimed the loudsqueaker straight down and yelled.

‘Stop! Stop now!’

Weep emerged, coughing up bits of lung and small pieces of wood, dragging his body like a blind and blood-soaked newborn from the wreckage of Fekreek’s platform. His arms shivered as he pushed himself up onto his elbows. A confusion of shrieks and squeals and dull metallic clangs filled the fog. He shook his muzzle, clearing the fuzz of tinnitus from his ears somewhat, and blinked the spots from his eyes.

Plague monks in every hue of contagion fought each other to the death. They grappled, arms locked, claws gouging, eyes crazed, weapons abandoned or simply forgotten about under the debris left by the fallen tower. Some were swaddled in the noisome robes of the travelling mendicant, pilgrims of plague and unholy rats of no Church. Others were sacerdotally anointed pox warriors – many of them, apparently, formerly in the guise of clanrats of Clan Dregg, raggy hoods since shrugged off in their determination to bite the face off their brother rat. There were a few genuine Moulderclan rats in amongst the fighting too, but their zeal for the fray was markedly lesser, and most of those that weren’t already corpses were in the business of running away.

Fekreek appeared to be dead.

Weep looked up as a great whumf rolled across the sky.

A sludgy missile arced lazily overhead from some kind of catapult hidden within the warrens, dripping like a wet comet as it flew.

This was getting rapidly out of paw. Who had brought a plagueclaw catapult? One of his or one of theirs? Unless, of course, it had been Moldrent’s doing. The Antipustulent was certainly mad enough to attempt to smuggle an artillery piece into one of the Greater Clan’s Blight City heartlands and expect nobody to notice. Weep silently girded himself to the mental task of aligning himself wholly to the military, theological and political genius that was Antipustulent Moldrent Sour.

The plagueclaw missile struck its target with a chloroformed crash.

Greenish flames and muffled squeals rose on a mushroom cloud of vile gases and debris. Metalwork shrieked as it tore. A zigzagging section of the Moulder clans’ weird assembly line collapsed in on itself. Gagrik moaned and looked away as bits of it fell on him, scratching dimly at the blood-scabbed paw that was trying for his wrist. Undaunted, the paw wrapped its fingers around his wrist and he mumbled in alarm as it hauled him up. Broken beams and splints of wood tumbled off his head and shoulders as he was levered upright. Slime from an upended cable cart dripped from his snout. He licked his lips and wrinkled his face in disgust.

Plague Abbot Krusk of the Gnawing Ruin slapped him.

Gagrik looked up, baring his fangs absently.

‘Move-move.’ The plague abbot was a proud foot soldier of the Corruptor with a seeping bandage wound across both eyes, a jaw filled with broken teeth and infected bronze piercings, and a rusty clawhammer in one paw. Gagrik knew him mostly by his smell, which was of the sour urine he sprayed daily on his leather armour and the blood that he coughed up onto his forearm fur. ‘If not then I will eat you, take your jewels, and squeak-say you were already dead.’

Gagrik peered dimly around, barely listening. The battle was a vague murmur, of something terrible happening very far away.

‘Who brought a plagueclaw? Was it the Archpustulent?’

Krusk jabbed the three cardinals of the Splintered Temple across his breast and gave a sticky sigh. ‘The Archpustulent is as treacherous as he is unholy.’

Killing everything and rationalising it later did sound suspiciously like the sort of thing the Archpustulent would do. As they often did when under extreme and unfair duress, Gagrik’s thoughts drifted back to his workshop in the basement sub-tiers of the Splintered Temple. He wondered if it was still there, safely boarded up and booby-trapped the way he had left it, or if someone had been desperate enough for the space to move in and claim it.

‘No one ever tried to kill-kill me when I was assistant to Verminable Cruor. For some reason, no one ever want-take that job.’

‘Up-up.’ Taking him by the collar, Krusk dragged Gagrik onto his footpaws. Nose to nose, Gagrik recoiled from the plague abbot’s breath. As potent as ammonia salts on an unconscious rat.

Gagrik shook his muzzle and snarled.

Krusk let him go.

Gagrik made to straighten his over-robes, then shrugged and shed them. The layers beneath were a yellowed cream. Cracked jewels and adornments twinkled in the greenish haze: golden spurs; horned crosses; the ordinaries of various orders of Pox and Ruin into which he had been duly invested as grandmaster, or simply invented himself to make his robes of state even more impressive. He pulled his sceptre from its sleeve and rolled his shoulders to loosen tense muscles. He bared his fangs.

‘Where is Friar Snarp?’

Krusk shrugged.

Fled, probably.

Everywhere else, skaven fought.

He had never been in an actual battle, but even from that position of ignorance he hesitated to call this one. There were no lines, no formations. No one was giving orders except for the most local and extremely rudimentary of kinds – plague abbots and pox templars squealing ‘Kill-kill!’ in the moments before they hurled themselves onto their fellow faithful. Or each other. It was hard to tell. It was a riot, with all the tools and appurtenances of the battlefield. Although everyone else appeared to be fighting, Gagrik was not sure if he was supposed to be too. He struggled to shake the feeling that every other rat in Fleshstink was privy to something that he ought to know, and in their apparently gleeful acts of fratricide were mocking him that he did not.

He turned to Krusk.

‘We have squeaked-done as Makulitt Pus has commanded. We have saved the vermin of Fleshstink from the false Word of the Antipustulent. We may run-scurry now.’

Krusk shook his muzzle.

He pointed into the fog.

Robes whiter even than Gagrik’s winked like a lighthouse in the melee.

‘Oh no,’ he breathed. ‘What is he doing here?’

One did not see a lot of white in Blight City. It was difficult to fashion, and ruinous to keep clean. Most clans only went to the effort and expense for their flags of surrender.

‘Pus!’

The false monks of Clan Morbidus chanted and banged their gongs.

‘Pus!’

The white shape bludgeoned its way closer, a wobble in the murk, just on the wrong side of definition.

‘Pus!’

A warrior of the Corruptor hurled himself at the white-robed divine with a shriek. The priest’s long-handled crozier connected with the monk’s jaw. Teeth and spittle flew. The monk skidded away over the ground.

‘Pus!’

A second monk attempted to run at the white priest, only to collapse into a fit of coughing while he was still three tail-lengths away, heaving in sticky lungfuls of the incense issuing from the skaven’s staff. He tottered forward on his knees, foaming at the mouth, the priest smashing him down the way a novitiate monk might line up a bottle or a brick to practise his swing.

Makulitt Pus.

The Archpustulent himself.

Weep had never smelled the high priest with his own snout before, and he found himself both awed and unnerved by his zeal. Another might have thought it a travesty that Moldrent and Makulitt must be at loggerheads. What heights of ambition, such a rat would rightly dream, might the Morbidus clan and its Churches reach with such fervid maniacs working in concert? But Weep knew, as a skaven and a scholar, that it was ever the Horned One’s whim to pit rat against rat, strong against strong, weak against weak, that only the most innovative and cunning would prevail, and the mediocre serve as meat for his eternal hunger.

‘Pus!’

With frenzied screeches and the furious pummelling of clubs and staves on unarmoured bodies, the monks of Clan Morbidus slammed together. A warrior swung a flail at Makulitt. The Archpustulent leapt the leaking censer, and hammered his crozier down between the monk’s ears. His brains exploded from his nostrils.

‘Pus!’

Weep almost wished Moldrent could be here now. The Antipustulent was a terror on the battlefield, which was exactly why Weep devoted so much of his time to ensuring he never found himself near one.

Muttering curses under his breath, Weep drew up his sleeves.

Sometimes a rat just had to do a thing himself.

He took a deep breath. The air was thick and syrupy. He held it. It burned in his lungs. It tickled the back of his throat with long, poison-steeped claws. Still, he held it. In his mind, he squeaked a prayer to the Corruptor. He felt his chest bloat, something inside boiling and scratching, rising up, pressing against his cheek walls, his lips, his mouth filling up. His eyes began to stream.

Still, he held it.

Makulitt turned his way and screamed a challenge.

Weep opened his mouth with a gasp and exhaled.

The pestilential brume drove a teardrop of corruption into the battling monks. The skaven caught directly under the torrent turned instantly to sludge. Those caught further out, with a limb or a tail in the stream, squealed as the appendages began sloughing from their bodies. Blind faith or blind luck preserved the Archpustulent. A wall of withered corpses, driven ahead of the pestilential breath, bowled the priest down and piled over him.

Weep cursed as the Archpustulent planted his crozier in the teardrop-shaped puddle and hauled himself back up. The high priest looked around, thuribles jangling, then seemed to notice Weep and remember where he was, and charged again.

The Archpustulent shrieked as his footpaw sank into the corrosive puddle.

Weep tittered.

Oh, how Moldrent would rock on his haunches and grunt in something approaching consciousness when Weep spoke of how he had personally slain his rival. How he would clench his fangs and drool before the next seizure administered to him by the Corruptor broke his sanity again. For did Weep not practically set the mitre atop his master’s head?

Cracking his fingers, limbering them for another casting should the threat arise, he scampered forwards. Unlike the fool of an Archpustulent, he took care to skirt the steaming broth his pestilential breath had made on the ground, leaping it at its narrowest and scuttling around. In his other paw, he brandished his knife. He would take the crozier, take the mitre, and perhaps then even Moldrent Sour would have to be sane long enough to be pleased.

With a toxic huff of air, another loose projectile from the plagueclaw catapult soared overhead. Weep glanced up, watched it go, saw it slap into the fog-shrouded hump of one of the Moulder clans’ giant slaughterhouses. The payload slid down the wall of the meat-plant.

He breathed out.

That could have been a lot w–

A sigh rippled out through the fog, the distances involved and the near solidity of the murk making it sound almost apologetic, entirely out of proportion to the slow-motion catastrophe playing out for the eyes. The wall collapsed. Weep stumbled to a stop, willing his shoulders narrower, as bricks pulled away from bricks, tumbling into an ever-expanding hole in the meat-plant wall. After the wall went the roof. One of the great steeple chimneys swayed as the building disintegrated under it. The gargantuan mill wheel that ground against one of the sturdier outer walls issued a series of increasingly loud and urgent pops as it, too, began to lean.

‘Fool-fools, all of them,’ Weep muttered.

With a steady tramp of armoured footpaws, great blocks of stormvermin in the drab of Clan Dregg emerged from the fog. The black-furred warrior caste were thick-necked, broad-shouldered and clad in bent plates of iron and bronze. Plague monks ran at them pell-mell, the stormvermin waiting phlegmatically for them to beat the frenzy from themselves on their shields before butchering them with swords. Weep sniffed about for where he had last spotted the Archpustulent. He bared his teeth. The priest was gone! He turned at the sound of screaming and cursing, watching as a muscular priest in cream-coloured cloak and cassock and a blind abbot dragged him from the field. The Archpustulent fought them every step, shrieking treachery and murder. Not dead yet, then.

Flexing his knuckles, Weep called on his prepared spell. To hell with the mitre. He would get Moldrent a new one. If there was one rat in all the Clans Pestilens who would not appreciate the genuine article then it was the Antipustulent, Moldrent Sour. Joints popped as his fingers drew the thirteenth eschatological sigil of the Withering. His claws thrust after the escaping priests. The final syllable of the incantation burnt a black mark on the backs of his teeth.

A rat ogor punched through the melee like a gargant’s fist through a wall. Plague monks and stormvermin alike flew from its leading shoulder like bits of pulverised brick. The monster threw back its hideously oversized head, and roared.

Weep swallowed his incantation whole.

The Moulder beast crouched onto its knuckles, tail lashing, then snatched up a terrified plague monk in a fist the size of the great Liber Abominus. It brought the squirming rodent to its jaws and bit the monk in half. A twist, a wrench, a crunch of sinew and bone, and it drew its locked jaws away, stringy bits of tissue stretching out between its bloodstained muzzle and the lower portion of the monk still wrapped in its fist. Weep gawped. The rat ogor stuffed the last of the monk into its jaws, veins polluted with warpstone standing rigid atop twitching, bulging muscles, and with a full mouth it roared once more.

As if that almighty bellow were the straw, the great factory wheel completed its stately collapse, dragging down what was left of the slaughterhouse wall and triggering a tsunami wave in the fog that saw the warren’s ark lamps exploding one by one.

But Weep was not watching any more.

He was running, already halfway to the Antipustulent’s palace in Brasstain.

Grey Seer Ratskitten limped from the stairwell and into the Hall of Twisted Bone with a mutter and a curse. A mutter, because there were two thousand and ninety-seven steps from the masterburrow to the top of the sub-tower of He Who Is Tenth. A sigh, because for all its sorely appreciated flatness, the great hall promised to be at least as lengthy a walk. His staff clacked on the parquetry as he struck determinedly out.

The mosaics his grey robes scuffed over were very fine. Much of it, he noticed, was markedly less fine than it had once been. Something had been dragged across it recently. Something large. It did not appear to have gone willingly.

He lifted his snout to follow the trail of gouged tiles and blood-smear with one lazy eye, an arc leading towards a portcullis and, behind it, a set of double doors. They were well made, snugly fitting and – that greatest of rarities in Skavendom – bespoke work. That was not where Ratskitten was bound, but he was, as his peers and underlings alike had always agreed, a curious rat. He wondered who the craftsrat had been to have won so lofty a commission. Mikalis, perhaps, the self-styled Architect of Ruin. Or it could have been Gethit Greystripe, the engineer who had succeeded in undermining the Stormkeep of Astralian and raised a tower of industry in its place. Of course, Gethit had come to fame only five years ago and been murdered by one of his apprentices less than a year later, but still, it was possible.

With a sigh, he limped on past the doors, the clack of his staff echoing through the vast emptiness of the hall.

Heavy was the burden of being Grey Seer Ratskitten.

In a megawarren like Blight City, solitude was its own luxury, and the Hall of Twisted Bone was deliberately uncluttered by oddments or slaves. Massive windows stood where the portraits of great lords might have hung in a man-thing keep. They were unglazed. The humid stink of a billion billion skaven living out short, fast, frantic little lives brushed across his fur as he passed by them, and excited his whiskers. The Tower of Kavzar was the greatest structural feat achieved by any race, anywhere. It pierced the sky of the Realm beneath the Realms like a spike into the roof of a mouth, the endless warp storms that forked and split across the roof of the world its unintended consequence. The view from near its summit was tremendous. Normal perspective was turned upside down. The sky was near enough to smell the corruption that flaked off the skin of the Great Horned Rat as he burrowed through it, an evil shadow filled with threatening shapes and fork-tailed lightning. It was the ground instead that was distant, swaddled by the clouds of skaven artifice, and which glittered with a firmament of greenish stars.

Movement, close enough to register with dim skaven eyes, caught his attention. He turned away from the view.

The doors at the end of the hall opened.

A pair of albino stormvermin stepped out.

They were white-furred instead of black, pink-eyed and clad in shape-fitting plates of black warpstone-steel with a patterned, golden trim. Custom-made to their muscular builds, not scavenged. In uncanny unison the two warriors planted their halberds onto the parquetry, a doubled clack that rang out far louder than the report of Ratskitten’s staff. Making a point. They said nothing as he shuffled with hunched shoulders between them.

But then, of course, they could not.

He stepped inside.

This was not Ratskitten’s first time in the whisper holes and private burrow-halls of the worthy. Far from it. But the Tower of Kavzar was the centre of power of all Skavendom, the diverse cultures of a diaspora, its unbridled innovation, its unlimited wealth. Every wing and sub-tower was a new surprise, every great lord his own unique beast.

The lair of He Who Is Tenth was no different.

Everything was slightly too large and solidly made, as though for a skaven of uncommon clumsiness or strength. Creatures that even the Realms of Chaos would not tolerate to exist outside the arts of taxidermy lurked sullenly behind big chairs and pillars. An adult ripperdactyl with human hands and the head of He Who Was No Longer Tenth perched on a beam: the predatory gleam in its eyes, achieved with glass and warpstone, gave Ratskitten a particular start as he scurried inside.

More unnerving by far were the sculptures. Made of clay, they dotted the room on small tables and pedestals, or balanced precariously atop small towers of well-chewed books. They looked vaguely humanoid, albeit twisted into odd shapes, as if in anger at some failing that the sculptor had identified before proceeding to fire and display them anyway. It was difficult to be certain what they were supposed to be.

And Ratskitten had a nose for such things.

A number of too-large chairs were scattered, apparently at random, around the space. The armrests and backs were all heavily gnawed. The skins of more races than one could easily find in Blight City’s epicurean quarters draped the seats. Stuffed skaven lords occupied a few of them. Ratskitten suppressed a yelp when he first noticed. They were draped in mouldering finery of silks and sequins, their faces pulled into expressions of idiocy or wonder as they admired the even-rarer skins that adorned the back wall.

The silken, lilac-coloured skin of the greater daemon Syll’eik’queilein fluttered languidly in pride of place above the hearth. Palace rumour had it that the skin faded each day and that each day a new one was taken to replace it, that Syll’eik’queilein still lived somewhere within the Tower of Kavzar and each day thanked the immortal Lord of Decay for his exquisite skill with a skinning knife when it was done.

Despite his own august station in the teetering pyramid of the Masterclan and his own not-inconsiderable personal power, Ratskitten felt himself shrink with every step that took him closer to that beguiling hanging.

And the vile lord enthroned beneath it.

Zhurn Aelf-Eater, Master Moulder of Clan Dregg, holder of the Tenth seat on the Council of Thirteen, sat uncomfortably in a great wooden seat. His two tails constricted about each other like serpents that loathed one another absolutely, tumbling over the armrest and onto the floor. He gnawed furiously on a finger the length of most clanrats’ entire paw, even as his eyes lifted and narrowed. Ratskitten gulped and raised his snout to bare his throat. One eye was red as the heart of Khorne and twice as mad. The other was a shapeless lump of raw warpstone beaten into an empty socket, but Ratskitten was in no doubt that it probed him in its own foul way. The Lord of Decay shifted slightly, a giant predator marking the approach of a rodent creature too small to warrant its interest as prey, letting it know that it had been noticed, that its continued existence was on sufferance.

The doors closed with a thud of great finality. The paired albino stormvermin resumed their posts to either side. Ratskitten was almost entirely successful in not flinching.

Zhurn drew his claw from between his teeth and watched it regenerate with obvious disgust. His gaze lifted to focus again on Ratskitten, his expression very much unchanged.

‘My summons takes-pulls you from nothing of importance.’ He licked his lips. ‘I hope.’

Ratskitten bobbed his snout. ‘I merely sniff-study a most fascinating set of tablets. Taken by Eshinclan agents in Sigmaro–’

‘Good,’ said Zhurn. He sat back. Ratskitten winced in pain as the lord’s spines screeched down the wood back of the chair. ‘You know why you come here?’

‘Actually, I–’

‘Yes,’ said Zhurn, and Ratskitten clammed his mouth shut. ‘What do you know of the civil war in Clan Morbidus?’

Ratskitten opened his mouth, eyeing the Master Moulder carefully to ensure he was not about to interrupt again before answering.

‘Little,’ he said quickly. ‘No more than any rat can hear or smell for himself. Eight months ago Makulitt Pus was scratch-voted to succeed Heerak Gungespittle to the Archpustulency. I understand he has been most… hasty in purging his clan of rival Churches. But that which weakens the great Pestilens clans can only be to the better good of–’

‘Their scuffles destroyed half of Fleshstink,’ Zhurn growled. ‘They may squeal their homilies in my demesnes and kill one another as they please, but when they irritate a Lord of Decay then a claw mark in the sand is crossed. Order is the responsibility of the Masterclan.’ He leant forwards. His fur seemed to growl as it brushed wood. ‘Deal with it.’

‘But–’

‘You know why they seek converts in Fleshstink?’

Ratskitten offered an ingratiating bob. ‘A most interesting question, lord. The warrens are of spiritual significance to both sects of the Morbidus split. As the cauldron of the fleshslough blight, which is, of course, absurd as contemporaneous accounts in the libraries of Clan Retchid clearly show–’

‘I will tell you why,’ Zhurn snarled, and Ratskitten obediently shut up. The Lord of Decay fidgeted again, and for one horrifying moment in which his heart refused outright to beat, Ratskitten feared he might actually rise. ‘You know where the Antipustulent has laired since his exile from the Splintered Temple?’

‘No, I–’

‘Brasstain of Clan Ezzik. The competition between the Clans Pestilens and Skryre is legendary. High Arch Warlock Lord Skrach backs their Pustulency only to weaken a rival.’

Ratskitten’s brow wrinkled. ‘So–’

‘They were there to annoy me,’ Zhurn growled. ‘To make me as sick of this scuffle-war as Skrach has become. To make me deal with it so that He Who Is Second, and so nearer to the left paw of the Fleshgifter than I am to his right, will not have to.’ The Master Moulder resumed his gnawing, this time on another claw. As if awaiting that signal, the albino guard moved. The doors opened up like a trapdoor. ‘As I now pass this problem on to you, grey seer, infinitesimal in the broodsire’s smelling as you are next to me. End the fighting before the day of the Bloodfeast.’ The Master Moulder snarled around his slobbered paw. His miscoloured eyes glittered madly. Behind him, the skin of Syll’eik’queilein fluttered against the wall, as if equal party to its master’s pleasure. ‘Or I will find another use for you.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

‘Red Knight’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021
‘Mourning in Rainhollow’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021
‘Blood Drought’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021
‘The Nefarious Antipustulent of Clan Morbidus’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021
‘Roadwarden’ first published in Inferno! Volume 6 in 2021
‘Trail of Ash’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020
‘No Matter the Cost’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020
‘Mournclaw’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020
‘River of Death’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020
‘Watchers of Battle’ first published in Inferno! Volume 5 in 2020
‘The Manse of Mirrors’ first published in Inferno! Volume 4 in 2019
‘The Fourfold Wound’ first published in Inferno! Volume 4 in 2019
‘The Serpent’s Bargain’ first published in Inferno! Volume 4 in 2019
‘The Unlamented Archpustulent of Clan Morbidus’ first published in Inferno! Volume 3 in 2019
‘In The Mists of Chaos’ first published in Inferno! Volume 3 in 2019
‘The Book of Transformations’ first published in Inferno! Volume 3 in 2019
‘From the Deep’ first published in Inferno! Volume 2 in 2019
‘Faith in Thunder’ first published in Inferno! Volume 2 in 2019
‘Ties of Blood’ first published in Inferno! Volume 2 in 2019
‘No Honour Among Vermin’ first published in Inferno! Volume 2 in 2019
‘The Path to Glory’ first published in Inferno! Volume 1 in 2018
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