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The Unlamented Archpustulent of Clan Morbidus – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Unlamented Archpustulent of Clan Morbidus

David Guymer

‘Graunch Festerbule is with us.’

Rattagan Borkris listened with an idle ear as a pair of skavenslaves fussed over his cassock. His assistant, Underdeacon Makulitt Pus of the Presbyopic Wilt, was an unctuous rodent with teeth the colour of gold pried from Shyishan soil, black gums and a muzzle with one side drooping lower than the other, bestowing a permanent frown as though he were assessing the value of another skaven’s organs. He was, as Borkris’ keen sense of smell could confirm, much beloved of the Horned Rat. He stood with only a slight hunch, garbed in a long-sleeved black cassock with varicose piping. The rat servants busied themselves about their master.

Rattagan Borkris.

Malfeasant Superior of the Church of Gnawing Ruin.

Spiritual overseer to a million unworthy souls, twoscore lairs spread like a necrotic rash across the Realms of Metal and Death.

His robes were vestal white, as befit the lord of a great diocese of ruin, the emblems of the Great Corruptor and the one hundred and sixty-nine Verminlords that served that aspect of the skaven’s schizophrenic deity covering the garment with gold stitching. Even the gnawholes around the trailing hem had been re-stitched with thread of so close a colour match that only the keenest of eyes amidst his dim-sighted race could have spotted the difference. It was raiment to bankrupt a warlord clan and make the eyes of a lesser priest water. It announced him as the unholiest of unholies, a high priest and lector of Clan Morbidus, and a skaven who commanded the ear and whiskers of the Horned Rat himself.

He stared through the warpstained windows of his high tower as a slave threw a tatty white cloak over his shoulders. Rain scratched at the glass. Green lightning and machine fire lit the horned belfries and gnawing spires of Blight City.

‘Sequeous Rank is bought and bribed for,’ said Makulitt. ‘Milketan, Sithilis, Verukik – all have taken-snatched your offer. Ureik is under Festerbule’s claw and will scratch as he does. Perish and Wastrett are loyal to you.’

Borkris squeaked, unimpressed, as the ratservant moved in front of him to affix the collar buckle.

Loyalty, even amongst the pestilential ranks of the faithful, was not the same thing to the skaven that it was to other races. It meant that Rank, Perish, Wastrett and the rest had been bribed, threatened and cajoled for so long that they could no longer smell the distinction between their own self-interest and that of Borkris’ coin purse. Their churches espoused a variation of the Withered Word that was no more at odds with his own than that extolled by the more excitable zealots in the farthest flung parishes of the Gnawing Ruin. But if he had a warp-token for every skaven that had snatched with both paws, tail crossed behind their back, then he would be rich enough to buy the high throne of Azyr, never mind the archpustulency of Clan Morbidus.

A second slave forced a jewelled mitre over his ears. He wriggled his brow until it sat properly.

‘Go on.’ Borkris’ voice was a cultured squeak, blessed with a bubbling hoarseness that spoke of his high favour. He waited.

Makulitt remained painfully silent.

‘Is that all?’

‘Eight scratch-votes, your unholiness,’ said Makulitt. ‘Nine if you add-count your own.’

Borkris resisted the urge to turn and cuff him. To do so would have unsettled the teetering armature of arm rings and signets so painstakingly arrayed and forced the slaves to begin again. He was not one to fret over his property’s inconvenience, but tardiness he would not tolerate. ‘The Lyceum of Lectors numbers twenty-one. Fool-fool! A majority of twenty-one is eleven. With all my wealth you cannot bribe-buy two more scratch-votes?’

‘Two times the backing of Hascrible, or of Dengue Cruor, your unholiness. Persuade one of them and the archpustulency is yours.’

The slave working on Borkris’ collar nicked a dark red bubo on the underside of his muzzle with a claw. The slave gagged, swiping at the emitted flatus with his paw before going stiff and dropping dead at Borkris’ footpaws.

Borkris sighed and fastened his own collar. He chose to take it as a positive omen. The Horned Rat scurried in nefarious ways.

As archpustulent he would be a claw’s length from the primacy of Clan Morbidus. In time, perhaps, even a seat on the Council of Thirteen. A touch on the Black Pillar. A sup of the life-elixir. He preened as staccato lightning brought the warpstained glass to life, a chiaroscuro of light green and dark, scenes from the First Withering as retold through the Withered Word. And after that? He would see out the Final Withering with his own half-blind eyes.

The thought of Dengue Cruor or, better yet, that bell-waving fanatic, Hascrible, elevating him to so lofty a standing at the Corruptor’s right paw was a pleasing one.

‘Is it yet known how Archpustulent Heerak Gungespittle died?’

‘Not yet. Not yet,’ said Makulitt. ‘The sextons still try to determine which of the archpustulent’s wounds was fatal. I do wonder why so many would want-crave so lofty and… exposed a position.’

Borkris gnawed thoughtfully on his tail before answering. ‘Slave-thing.’

The second skavenslave scuttled around. His muzzle was inclined so far that, if not for the curvature of his spine and pronounced skaven hunch, he would almost have been looking backwards. He was naked apart from a grubby loincloth and a leather collar, his pelt lice-ridden and mangy, and pockmarked with scabs. Borkris closed his paw around the slave’s bare throat. The creature’s breath hiked, but he made no effort to resist. The abject’s fear-musk brought saliva trickling through Borkris’ fangs.

‘This is why,’ he said, and then he pushed.

The warpstained glass behind the slave shattered, the sound of raining shards immediately gobbled whole by the tumult and the hunger of Blight City’s insane machinery. The capital of skavendom in the realms was a teeming metropolis of a billion souls, the true Eternal City, gnawing on the roots of Order from a cosmic plane neither truly within the Realms of Chaos nor a part of the great hierarchy of the Mortal Realms. The ungodly engines that had dragged the city to that limbic nether-realm continued to rumble on, belching waste magic into the air, triggering city-wide quakes and only very rarely causing the first and last of the realms’ great cities to sink deeper into the dark strata of the universe. Over all that, Borkris still thought he could hear a faint squeal of terror falling further and further away before ending in a pathetic, hopelessly distant smack. Then again, it might just have been one of the Skrye clan assembly lines stalling.

‘As archpustulent I get to push-shove whoever I want through whatever I like.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Inferno! Volume 3 in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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