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Painboyz – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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PAINBOYZ

Mike Brooks

‘To properly unnerstand somefing,’ Dok Drozfang said, ‘ya gotta get into its gutz.’ He looked around with interest. ‘Mekboyz’ll tell yoo da same. Wiv dem, it’s engines an’ sprockets an’ all dat sorta fing. Wiv me, it’s all dose wobbly bitz wot’s inside a git – tubes an’ squishy lumps an’ so on.’

‘So why’re we ’ere, boss?’ one of his yoofs asked. He was a young painboy, still wet behind the ears – with someone else’s blood – and Drozfang whacked him on the back of the head.

‘Because we’re in da gutz!’ he said, gesturing around them. Their surroundings weren’t organic, not like those giant bugeye monsters that floated around in space and had all the other bugeyes travelling inside them, but they felt organic. The walls were damp and curved, and the passageway meandered back and forth with side passages branching off and occasionally opening out into larger, irregularly shaped chambers, such as the one in which they were now standing. It was as if the whole thing had been carved out by some enormous, burrowing worm rather than constructed. It was dim, too – not proper waving-yer-hands-around dark, but you somehow got the impression that the only light was filtering in through the teeth of something into whose intestines you had unintentionally strayed.

‘Honestly, yoo lot gotta learn to pay attention, or yoo’re never gonna amount to anyfing,’ Drozfang finished.

They were in a spikie nest, and Drozfang had led a mob of boyz, some apprentice painboyz, and his general hangers-on under what passed for the ground here. Spikiez were like scrawniez, in that they had pointy ears – tiny little things, not big, proud, flappy pointy ears like an ork – were about as wide as your arm, and flipped around a lot until you clobbered them, at which point they collapsed like yesterday’s breakfast. However, spikiez were unlike other scrawniez in that they had a lot more spikes, hooks, and general cutty-things on their armour, and also seemed to take positive delight in butchering stuff.

Drozfang could understand that to an extent: after all, what ork didn’t like smashing up some gits in a fight? And more specifically, as a painboy he had a deep and abiding interest in how living things were put together – and, indeed, how they came apart and sometimes went back together again. Combat was just a sort of succession of high-speed, experimental surgeries. Drozfang was dimly aware of some concept that surgery was only really surgery if the other git had agreed to it, but he never paid much attention to that sort of limp thinking anyway. So far as Dok Drozfang was concerned, anyone sleeping, or unconscious, or just looking the other way when he was around clearly wasn’t that bothered about whether or not he operated on them.

Still, spikiez were a bit more intense about the whole thing. They seemed to be more focused on the git under the knife being as unhappy about it as possible. Drozfang didn’t see the point of that. Of course, you couldn’t let a little thing like the patient screaming and thrashing get in the way of the work, but that was a by-product while you tried to attach your brilliant new Explodin’ Arm invention to their shoulder, not the purpose of the exercise. He had better things to do than just spend his time hurting gits for the sake of it. After all, Dok Drozfang’s Speshul Steam-Powered Lungs didn’t just invent themselves.

‘Dis place is weird,’ said the same yoof. His name was Fingerz, on account of having accidentally stitched one of his own inside another ork after he’d accidentally cut it off while trying to amputate the patient’s leg (the patient hadn’t needed the leg amputating, but as Drozfang pointed out afterwards, Fingerz clearly needed the practice). Drozfang kept him around because he definitely had the right sort of ideas, even if he currently lacked the skills to see them through properly.

‘Yeah, well. It’s a spikie place, innit?’ Drozfang said airily. ‘Bound to be a bit weird.’ Still, Fingerz wasn’t wrong.

‘Dis is, like, a spikie painboy’s place, right?’ said Wheezer, one of Drozfang’s grot Disorderlies, prodding a discarded tool of unclear purpose.

‘Reckon so,’ Drozfang said, taking a deep sniff, and nodded knowingly. ‘Smell dat? Dat’s blood, dat is.’

‘Yeah, but everyfing here kinda smells like blood,’ Fingerz pointed out. ‘Da one fing you can say about spikiez is, dey like blood.’

Drozfang clipped him around the ear again, although he took it easy on the yoof and didn’t use the hand with the power klaw. ‘Not like dis! Dat’s fresh blood, an’ lots of it! All different sorts!’

‘So, boss,’ Wheezer said hesitantly, with the air of a grot with the ability to see into the future, so long as the future consisted of getting kicked. ‘If some git an’ his mates broke into yoor place, yoo wouldn’t be happy, right?’

Drozfang aimed a kick at him on general principle, but Wheezer dodged backwards with a yelp.

‘Course not!’ Drozfang barked after him. ‘I’d have ’em sayin’ hello to dere own gizzards! Da bloody cheek of it!’

‘Do ya fink dis spikie’s gonna be any different?’ Wheezer yelped, from somewhere in the midst of a crowd of ork legs. ‘Just askin’, cos yoo’re always sayin’ we should explore our curiosities, an’ dat.’

‘Orks should explore dere curiosities!’ Drozfang snapped. ‘Painboyz ain’t gonna get good if dey just stick to wot dey already know. Grots don’t know nuffin’, an’ are only around to hand us da brainsaw, or wotever.’ He drew himself up. ‘Anyway, so wot if da git don’t like it? He’s welcome to come an’ complain!’

Drozfang laughed, and the other orks dutifully laughed along with him. Still, he thought, he’d better get them moving onwards. Drozfang had come down here out of curiosity, and the yoofs had come with him because they hung on his every word, and the Disorderlies were here because he’d have them scragged if they wandered off without his direct permission, but the regular boyz had tagged along simply in search of a fight. If they didn’t find one soon, then they were probably going to start causing trouble, which would impinge on Drozfang’s ability to have a good old root around and find out what was what in the world of spikie painboys.

‘Let’s try dis way next,’ he said, pointing in his best leaderly manner, which was to make a decision at random but pretend he knew something no one else did. ‘Dere’s bound to be–’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-979-9

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