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Verminslayer – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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CHAPTER ONE

THE THIEF

The wall had come down, and by the look of things, it had come down in the last few hours. There wasn’t a lot that would grow in Greywater Fastness, but a rubble heap like this one would be smothered by weeds if it had been as much as half a day old. Underneath the poisonous air and the polluted soil, it was still Ghyran.

Elsworn Killebrook crouched down with a creak of leather straps and steel plates and picked up a fragment of brick. The air blowing across her face through the breach was foul. It turned the flame of her chemical lantern a demented, burning green in spite of the multitude of valves and switches intended to keep the air flow to the glass chamber constant and pure. The sweet, overripened stench reminded her of the Ghoul Mere, which lay beyond the city walls. It had the same unmistakeable reek of burnt hair and corruption.

‘It came through here all right.’

From the cramped gloom of the tunnel behind her there came the rusty scrape of shivs being drawn from belts and the thwack of cudgels striking their wielders’ palms. Sorrol Tun brandished a short sword. Orinkul Flathelm glowered into his upturned palm before deciding that, yes, the wooden club he had just whacked against it would be adequate to the job at hand. Brigid and Bryony bickered in some indecipherable accent over the same knife before drawing one apiece. Daegal solemnly polished his blunderbuss. Only the burly Hod contented himself to go on as he was, and then only because he had just one horribly mauled arm – an accident, Elsworn had been told, involving a moment of negligence and a steam-powered loom – and it was currently occupied with the underjack’s pack. The mercenaries’ rattletrap pony, a headless facsimile of the real thing made of grey iron and clanking brass and brought to life by thousands of grinding cogs, shuddered quietly to itself, hitched to a small tarp-covered wagon. It had no name.

Together, they were the Loose Cannon underjacks, as notorious for the extreme violence with which they policed Greywater Fastness’ labyrinth of subterranean ruins as they were for the extraordinary binges that would periodically carve a red path across the taverns of Five Dials.

‘What do you think it is?’ said Tun, crunching up the shallow incline of rubble and squatting down beside Elsworn at the breach. Then he said ‘eurgh’ and wrinkled his nose, though he did not immediately throw up, which lifted the Loose Cannons’ ageing sergeant just slightly in her estimation.

He was a slight, shabby-faced man with greying temples, bags under his eyes, and a two-day-old shadow wearying his chin. Aside from Elsworn herself, he was the only member of the company wearing armour: a battered steel breastplate and a kettle helmet that had itself seen better days. His quilted doublet and trousers were quartered yellow and black, Greycaps colours, but the uniform looked almost as old as he was. The tales of his drunkenness on duty, his belligerence towards senior officers, and the enormous gambling debts he had racked up with the hags of Elrith Ceyl were still scandalous half a decade later. How he had ended up in command of a tunnel-fighting militia instead of dead in an alley with a Khainite blade between his shoulder blades, Elsworn couldn’t say.

‘I don’t know yet,’ she admitted.

‘Big or small?’

‘By the size of the hole it put in the wall, I’d say big.’ She grinned at the thought. ‘Either that, or there were lots of them, and they had a lot of machinery to carry.’

All she’d had to go on thus far was the frightened blathering of some steelworkers who had suddenly needed to explain how the lower floors of Lady Ciriline Zukaus’ old factory had come to be entirely emptied of its machinery. To say that she’d taken their tales of a monster with a pinch of salt would have been an understatement – but that was before she’d entered the sewers beneath and found a hole knocked through a solid brick wall.

She worked the brick into a fine red crumb between her fingers and thumb. ‘This wasn’t brought down with pickaxes or hammers. It wasn’t dug out by some kind of beast either. This wall has been blown up.’ She brought a fingertip to the tip of her tongue, and immediately spat. It tasted acrid. It wasn’t common gunpowder. ‘Warpstone.’ She wiped her hands vigorously on her thighs. No steam lord in the city would be mad enough to use that Chaos rock in their processes, not even for the wealth of powerful transmutative properties it undoubtedly possessed. But one did not rise far through the ranks of the Freeguild in Greywater Fastness without coming into contact with it once or twice. The subterranean skaven race made extensive use of it, she knew, as fuel for their deranged industries, and the creatures even consumed it as food.

The skaven were a constant and ever-evolving menace in Greywater Fastness. They were not as visible an enemy as the Sylvaneth, who could be seen from any vantage on the city walls, but they were all the more dangerous for that, and no less persistent. It would certainly explain the steelworks thefts. The skaven had envious eyes and restless paws. Their civilisation thrived amidst the ruins of others, and they were always dreaming up new ways to fuse human or duardin ingenuity with their own warpstone-fuelled sciences.

Elsworn felt a thrill of excitement. She had heard terrible stories of the monsters that dwelled in the dark places beneath the city, but had never explored those places for herself.

‘Skaven,’ said Tun, speaking aloud what she had only been thinking.

‘Wim hadda gan,’ said Brigid, with a determined frown.

Elsworn stared at her blankly.

‘Girl’s right,’ said Orinkul, his voice as deep as something shy and fierce living at the bottom of a drain. ‘Guild rules are clear – any new passages have to be reported back to the guild office and the city surveyor immediately.’

‘Then go back,’ said Elsworn, standing up out of her crouch and clapping the last of the brick dust off her hands. ‘No one’s stopping you.’ It was the steelworkers who had called in the Loose Cannons, not her, no doubt hoping that they might recover their lost machinery without having to involve Lady Zukaus. The factory had been mothballed for years, for as long as Elsworn had been serving in the Freeguild, but the baroness still took a dim view of theft. Almost as dim as the one she took of failure, which was the only reason that Elsworn had not ordered the Loose Cannons back to their guildhall already. She would face anything the sewers could throw at her (was quietly looking forward to it, in fact), but having a unit of experienced guides at her back couldn’t hurt.

‘Don’t you dare go anywhere, Ori,’ said Tun. He turned to Elsworn. His grin flashed at her in the dark, like a smattering of copper coins clawed from the silty bottom of a wishing well. ‘Half a gill of Aqua Ghyranis says kill-of-the-week is as good as mine.’

Daegal snorted. ‘I’ll take any wager of yours and double it.’ The other Loose Cannons were quick to follow suit with counter-wagers of their own. Tun, it seemed, had not learned any lessons from the gambling woes of his misspent youth.

‘The kill will be mine,’ said Elsworn firmly.

‘Is that right?’ said Tun, with a smirk that Elsworn longed to smack with the butt of her pistol.

‘It is.’

In part, it was a matter of honour: she had had word passed to the Cavalier-Marshal that if there was a monster down here in the sewers, then she would slay it and return with its head as proof of the deed. But even honour, she would freely admit, could have a selfish element. Her patron was well known for lavishing more attention on her Dreadwood estates than she ever gave to her faltering enterprises here in the city. She was infamous for it, in fact. What passed for gossip around the fine dinner tables of the Great Axle did not overly concern Elsworn, of course, so long as the next time the baroness led a hunting party into the Ghoul Mere it went with Elsworn a part of it. Her excitement of late had been restricted to breaking up fights amongst disaffected workers and horseback patrols of the baroness’ numerous half-empty warehouses.

Hardly the sort of fare to satisfy a hot-blooded Cavalier.

‘Orinkul,’ she said, turning back. ‘Pass me a shovel from the wagon. We’ll see if we can’t clear away enough of this rubble to squeeze through without covering ourselves in warpstone.’

At the merest mention of the wagon, the underjacks all cleared their throats, fell uncharacteristically quiet, and found objects of great fascination elsewhere.

Elsworn reminded herself that in addition to Orinkul, Daegal, Brigid, Bryony and Hod, there was indeed a sixth Loose Cannon under Tun’s command. His slow, cavernous snores were even then rumbling through the cart’s scrap-iron sideboards. The tarp sheet strung across the back rose and fell to the same grinding rhythm.

Tun gave an apologetic cough. ‘We try not to wake him before midday.’

‘Nad if weez may batter,’ said Brigid, giving the wagon a wary eye.

‘Unless there’re some grots or a pack of skaven to point him at,’ Daegal added, visibly anxious.

Elsworn turned her face in the vague direction of the Realm of Heaven, somewhere up beyond the dripping ceiling, and briefly closed her eyes. She signed the hammer of Sigmar across her chest, praying for patience. She didn’t have time for this nonsense. Pressing her lantern into Tun’s hands, she walked impatiently around the back of the cart. There, she took the tarp by the corner and, before anyone had the chance to object, ripped the sheet aside.

The Fyreslayer who had, until that moment, been lying underneath the tarp in an alcohol-induced stupor awoke with a violent splutter. ‘I’m up, you blasted shrew!’ he roared, grasping for the missing sheet with a tattooed paw the size of a ham joint. The large rune hammered into his chest, poorly hidden under a straggly mess of beard, sputtered like a piece of worked bronze freshly drawn from the fire. Elsworn almost choked on his breath. He smelled as though he had been smoked and pickled. His one, chronically bloodshot eye blinked around him in confusion. ‘I’m… Wait.’ With exaggeratedly drunken slowness, his eye focused on her. ‘You’re not her.’

‘Not who?’ asked Elsworn.

‘The god-bothering priest, of course! Who else would I be talking about?’

Elsworn looked around the nervously fidgeting ring of underjacks. ‘Priest?’

The duardin propped himself up. He swayed slightly on his elbows, the war-torn topography of his features crumbling with what appeared to be motion sickness as the wagon rocked from side to side. ‘What’s it to you anyway?’ he managed to growl, no doubt trying to sound threatening but failing miserably.

With a sigh, Elsworn reached over the drunken Fyreslayer for the shovel she’d come for.

The Loose Cannons really were the lowest of the low.

She wasn’t sure that she had properly appreciated that fact until just then.

Blastritt was feeling rather pleased with his cleverness.

This was not, in itself, an extraordinary state of affairs. He was a master warlock of Clan Skryre. The evidence of his fiendish cleverness abounded in every cunning, impressively complicated feature of his armour. The series of widgets running along the side of his gauntlet allowed him to unleash blasts of warp lightning from his fingertips, douse the enemies of progress in warpfire, or administer corrective shocks through the collars worn by his slaves, and only very rarely did he hit the wrong button by mistake. The big red button on the outside of the vambrace – designed to be visible in the dark to weak, colour-insensitive skaven eyes – was for emergencies only. One push, and his armour would release a cloud of lethal poison wind that would kill everyone within a three tail-length radius. Most impressive of all, however, in his own expert view, was the array of copper antennae that poked from his helmet. They allowed him to tap into the cosmic ley lines of whichever realm he happened to be in, transforming the native flavour of magic into the superior skaven kind that was more compatible with his equipment. On the rare occasions like this when he was forced to leave the comfort of his workshop warren, they also enabled him to exert remote control of his toys, with occasional actual success.

Fairer to say, then, that he was feeling especially pleased with his cleverness.

‘Quickly… now…’ he wheezed. The rubber mask zipped over his muzzle made breathing slightly more difficult than it might otherwise have been, but it was a small price to pay to avoid choking on the occasional accidental discharge of poison wind. That button was so very big, and so very invitingly red. Sometimes, he just felt the need to check that it was still working. He shook his head to rid it of the notion, and concentrated on what he was doing. ‘A short hop… a shorter scurry… and we can leave these sewers again. Our escape… will be… waiting for us there.’

An elite team of clanrats in leather cagoules clattered along behind him, battling to move a small fleet of trolleys laden with scrap. They created an impressive din. Their brass wheels jounced over the broken flagstones. Their pilots squeaked curses at one another, and at the truculent vehicles they were trying to push. Klatch One-Ear, the ambitious young warlock engineer who had personally vouched for his clanrats’ discretion and cunning, chivvied them anxiously from the rear. The regular snap of his warp-prod, followed by a pained yelp, a waft of scorched fur, and a rattling burst of acceleration, spoke of how effective verbal encouragement alone had proved.

Klatch cast frequent, anxious looks over his shoulder, but Blastritt was entirely unconcerned by the racket. As a far cleverer rat than his upstart underling, he knew, for instance, that humans had very poor eyesight in darkness. Had his own experiments on captured slaves not proven conclusively, too, that they barely even had a sense of smell at all? Truly was the race of men inferior to that of their skaven betters in every measurable or imaginable way. It was not just the gospel of ruin, as chittered to the masses by the Grey Seers, but science! The humans’ machinery would be much better off in skaven paws, that was for certain.

‘Hurry. Hurry.’

Blastritt threw an impatient glance behind him, looking back over the clattering train of brass trolleys moving the way he had just run. Was that the bob of a light he saw in the passage behind them? No. Quite impossible. There was nothing in these tunnels but rats, and the rats, like their ingenious cousin Blastritt, had no need for lights. It was either that or concede that Klatch One-Ear could be right and Blastritt wrong, and that was clearly absurd.

Reassured by this logic, he looked forward again and scurried by example. And if it appeared to Klatch or the others that he was scurrying just a bit faster than he had been before, then it was purely out of an understandable eagerness to get back to his work.

‘Did you hear that?’ Elsworn’s voice echoed through the vaulted hall until it left the ragged circle of her lantern-light altogether, feeling its own way into the dark beyond it.

To her left, a scummy trickle of water slithered through the thorns that had taken over the ancient canal bed. The towpath that she and the Loose Cannons walked along was paved but crooked, given over to various species of lichens and slimes. The walls were in the Azyrite style, probably put there in the early years after the Realmgate Wars, when any wonder had seemed possible. Mineral crystals in the smooth grey stone twinkled like the stars they had spent the aeons of prehistory forming under. The structures had clearly been old even before the canal was abandoned. Cruder brickwork and perfunctory slaps of cement filled the gaps in the semi-precious Azyrite stone. Fat, hairy root-tips poked in through the slowly crumbling repairs. The ceiling, though harbouring the odd bit of fresco here and there, was comprised largely of the buildings jumbled up on top.

‘Half an hour from the Zukaus steelworks, heading west…’ Tun frowned in thought. ‘My guess would be that we’re somewhere under Long Smoke, in the Inner Circle.’

The district of Long Smoke was where the phenomenal amount of rubbish generated by the citizens of Greywater Fastness was taken to be incinerated. It made a lot of noise, presumably enough to be heard even this deep underground.

‘It’s been three-quarters of an hour if it’s been a minute,’ Orinkul grunted sourly. ‘And we’re going south-west.’

Duardin were natural tunnellers: stout, sure-footed, innately tough, and able to see as well in total darkness as Elsworn could with a lantern, and Orinkul certainly sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about. In spite of their inborn advantages, duardin were actually quite rare in the various underjack guilds. They were skilled workers who knew their value, and had the bargaining power of the duardin clans to back them up if ever a steam lord was foolhardy enough to argue otherwise. It was highly unusual that one fell through the cracks. Elsworn supposed that if she had to be the exception to that rule, then she would sound sour about it too.

He and Tun fell to bickering over the apparent vicissitudes of flora, architectural styles and odour. With a sigh, Elsworn checked the time on the rugged fob watch that she wore attached to her breastplate by a slender iron chain. The faintly magical face glowed yellow in the dark. They had, in fact, been walking for exactly thirty-seven minutes, but she had no wish to enter the argument on one side or the other and so kept that knowledge to herself.

They followed the path of the old canal in single file. Elsworn had jogged ahead for the first few minutes, before reluctantly accepting that the monster was still some way ahead, and slowed to a brisk walk. Orinkul followed immediately behind her, then Tun. After him came the ever-affable Hod, his crude hatchet still swinging from his belt, his broad shoulders laden with gear from the cart they had been forced to leave behind. The rattletrap would never have made it over the rubble. Hod didn’t seem to mind. After him came Brigid and Bryony, their younger eyes twinkling and alert, followed by the rakish Daegal and his antique but much beloved Misthåvn blunderbuss.

Gotrek, as she had since learned the Fyreslayer was called, staggered along at the rear. He looked thoroughly miserable with his head in his hand, pausing every now and again to dry-retch over the canal. He was far enough behind Daegal now that he could legitimately pretend to have stumbled across the Loose Cannons by accident and just happened to be heading in the same direction. Further to that impression, he even brought his own light in the form of a flame-wreathed fyresteel greataxe that Elsworn doubted she could have lifted, never mind carried one-handed for almost an hour. He roundly cursed both it and the glare it threw into his eye on a regular basis.

Another quarter of an hour passed. Elsworn’s back began to ache from her constant state of alertness. She longed to pick up the pace, but she doubted Gotrek would manage it and some instinct warned her that it would be unwise to leave the Loose Cannons behind here.

The reek of warpstone corruption grew so thick that everyone, even Gotrek, who arguably smelled almost as bad and professed not to notice it, pulled face scarves over their noses and mouths. Elsworn’s lantern-flame wobbled, purple and green, like a grot trying to hide its bruises.

Even the plants they passed, hardy enough to persist in the darkness deep under Greywater Fastness, became ever more sickened and withered the further in they went.

More than once, Elsworn sensed something rustling in the dead briars at the bottom of the canal. She would turn her lantern towards them, only to find the patch lifeless once more. Some kind of rodent, or perhaps a small bird that had adapted itself to eking out an existence in the dark. Small enough not to worry about, anyway. Or so she told herself, surreptitiously glancing over her shoulder the next time she heard something rustle.

On one occasion, Bryony spotted a stunted, half-human skeleton tangled up in the bracken. At Tun’s insistence, they wasted another minute investigating, but the remains disintegrated the moment the girl jumped down from the towpath. It was ancient, probably sealed up when the brick wall they had broken through was first erected. They left it, and pressed on.

These old canals were vestiges of a time when Greywater Fastness had been a humble mining post on the Verdian frontier, with no aspiration to one day becoming the great, never-sleeping armoury of the Mortal Realms. But the town had industrialised and it had grown, and the canals had eventually given way to ever faster and more efficient forms of transportation. To give the city’s leaders some credit, they had at least tried to brick off or fill in those labyrinthine miles and miles of abandoned tunnels, albeit with varying degrees of permanence.

Elsworn raised her lantern, chasing off the more timid shadows to deeper hiding places amidst the ceiling’s mishmash of cantilevers and arches.

She paused and listened.

To a person born and raised under the constant din of Greywater Fastness’ industrial noise, the silence of the canals was stifling. She felt all the more certain that she had heard something.

‘Tracks,’ Orinkul announced suddenly, his voice echoing, and squatted to the ground. His fellow underjacks came to a stop behind him.

Elsworn peered over his shoulder. He grunted at the imposition of the lantern-light, but suffered it in silence, waving his hand over a pair of parallel tracks in the layer of slime coating the flagstones. Something had come this way on wheels.

‘Over here,’ said Tun. He was standing by a mooring bollard. It looked as though something very large had been using it as a gnawing post. The base was tufted with reddish-brown fur, and shiny with what looked like oil. ‘Giant rats.’

‘Wonderful,’ Orinkul muttered under his breath.

‘Loadsa chow on ’em rats,’ Brigid offered in return.

Orinkul made a sour face. ‘It gets better and better.’

Giant rats were something of an urban legend – relatively commonplace, it was true, but always present in greater numbers and more gargantuan sizes in the sewers beneath some other, poorer part of the city. They were endemic wherever the skaven made their lairs. The ratmen bred them for meat and labour in the same way that humans reared livestock, but they also mutated huge numbers of otherwise common rats as accidental by-products of their deranged industries. Either way, it meant that wherever the steelworks thieves were running to, it was close.

She drew her antique pepperbox pistol. It had a long, factory-engineered barrel assembly, and an ironwood grip worn smooth by the generations of Freeguild soldiers who had wielded it before her. Its five barrels needed to be rotated by hand. Reloading was a pain and it had effectively no range, but it was still a powerful weapon of first resort in a tight alleyway or a sewer. The percussion lock mechanism should shield the gunpowder from the damp too.

An identical, complementary piece hung from the opposite hip, beside the well-notched cavalry sword that she honestly preferred in most instances. A metal kite shield bearing the heraldic wolf-man of the Zukaus family, black against a scuffed orange field, hung from her back. She did not use it often, preferring to fight with pistol and blade, but she appreciated the extra protection it afforded her back.

She resisted the urge to hook her lantern to her belt and draw her sword too.

Gotrek gave a loud belch and swaggered carelessly in between Elsworn and Orinkul. He stank like a brewery. Just then, that close, he felt almost as big as one. He frowned as he bent forward to squint at the bollard.

‘This rat’s a big one, all right,’ he said.

‘The bigger the better,’ Elsworn said.

She had expected that boast to shut the Fyreslayer up for a moment or two, but to her surprise he just subjected her to another foul onslaught of breath and grinned at her.

‘Wait-stop!’ Blastritt squeaked, bringing the disorderly convoy of scrap-laden trolleys and muttering clanrats to a jarring stop.

They had passed through a junction in the old canal, a second rancid trickle emerging from the gloom to join with the one that he and his team had been following, but had not stopped. A short-sighted rat could achieve the surface by any number of stone steps there, but Blastritt’s knowledge of the lost underways was encyclopaedic. He had cleverly led his clanrats further on, to where a set of rusted iron rungs were bolted to the wall. They ran up towards a steel cover, and a more reliably quiet area of the human city. The neglect of the man-thing who owned these properties had allowed them to fall into disrepair, he knew, and other humans entered them only infrequently.

‘Klatch!’ he snapped, finally losing his patience with the younger warlock’s fidgeting. The incessant checking over the shoulder for signs of pursuit, he could live with – that was just natural skaven caution. It was the way Klatch chose to exorcise his fears by electrocuting the clanrats around him that was bothering Blastritt. The smell of burnt fur was irritating his whiskers, even through the protective layers of rubber that he wore, and the pained squeals and pleas for mercy were hardly conducive to concentration. ‘Check all trolleys before we go,’ he said. ‘Make certain-sure nothing has fallen out, or fool-meat is going back to get it.’ That should be enough to keep the warlock’s small mind off things, at least for a while.

While Klatch One-Ear busied himself with this undoubtedly crucial task, Blastritt raised the gauntlet of his right paw to be level with his snout. He adjusted some dials, flicked some switches, chittering a mnemonic – ‘The red rat runs back-back in the rain…’ – under his breath to remind himself of the sequence. The equipment that he had installed on his armour was complicated on its own, and made more so by design. How else to deter the unworthy paws of those who, through frustrated jealousy, might use his own inventions against him? If that meant it took him a few extra seconds to perform the most basic of functions, then that was just the cost that needed to be borne. He pressed a final button and a set of bronze doors hinged outwards from the vambrace. There was a hollow compartment inside. In it was a glass vessel. Copper wires and crocodile clips connected it to the rest of the suit. It looked dirty. In reality, it was just scorched on the inside by the god-like power that had been bound there against its will.

‘Scuttlegnawer,’ he chittered over the device.

The murk within the glass moved as the vast awareness trapped in the small space therein shifted its attention onto him. As always, the thought of having such a mighty being bound to his will made him shiver with glee.

‘I listen-hear.’ Its voice was the stuttering of electricity, the static that made a rat’s fur stand on end, and the smoky breath of a coke furnace down the nape of his neck. ‘Speak your command.’

Blastritt crowed inwardly over the hatred in its tone. Only the most absolute of tyrants, the most magnificent in their authority, could engender such powerful feelings of loathing from their minions. Only when he was finished preening did he whisper over the glass again.

‘We are here, Scuttlegnawer. Come-quick!’

Elsworn stared up at the light slanting in from the ceiling. The wan, jaundiced rays of a Greywater Fastness noon spilled in through a plethora of iron-grilled drains. They must have been standing directly under Spoke Road Number One. By her estimation, that made Orinkul and Tun both partially right about their heading. Pedestrians, animals, carriages, and assorted mechanical contraptions designed to make obsolete one or more of the above, rumbled by. They cast a wobbling shadow theatre against the walls and floor. Where the light crossed the lingering damp, it broke into rainbows of fragile-looking beauty, like the smiles of sick children. But it was still beauty of a sort, and most unexpected, coming after the warrens they had just traipsed through. The bustle of the street, too, was familiar and comforting.

While she took in the splendour, the underjacks took advantage of the natural daylight and ventilation to steal a moment’s rest.

Orinkul and Tun continued to argue over whose directional sense had been the most wrong, even as they shrugged off their packs, cheerfully egged on by the innocent-faced Hod. Daegal watched from a safer distance. He propped his blunderbuss against the wall, making sure that it was set and comfortable before attending to himself, flipping back the hem of his long black highwayman’s coat and parking himself on a patch of lichen. He had been, or so he claimed, a wealthy man in his native city, the owner of nine pirate vessels and the same number of husbands and wives. And he would be still, had his sentient and capricious cargo of Ulguanite shadowstone not led him off the One Road and into the claws of the Dreadwood. In truth, he was lucky to have escaped the Sylvaneth alive. Better diminished than dead.

Elsworn continued a short way on. The canal they had been following was joined by another here. Its rancid breath gusted in through its slime-encrusted mouth. Grimacing, Elsworn clicked the aperture dial on her lantern down, strangling off the flame to a narrow gasp of heat. It continued to burn a poisonous purple-green. She ignored it. The light from the surface was more than enough to see by.

She looked around, marking the various exits from the chamber. If a person intended to remain with the canal then there were now two potential routes to leave by. Added to that, she could see at least one flight of stone steps leading up towards the surface. The sorry state of the walls also left enough likely-looking hand-holds that an escape through the drains in the ceiling would be eminently possible. Elsworn dismissed that last possibility, however, as soon as it occurred to her. The idea of a band of skaven escaping by Spoke Road Number One in the middle of the day struck her as particularly unlikely.

She crouched down, examining the floor for more tracks of the kind that Orinkul had identified earlier. There were none. She pushed two fingers into the slime layer, then withdrew them. She watched the amoebal sludge slowly ooze back into its original shape, obscuring the deformation left by her fingers. She shook her head regretfully. If anything had come this way ahead of them, then whatever marks it had left would have been erased already.

Elsworn was a decent tracker, good enough to ride alone in the Ghoul Mere and not lose her way, but she was hardly the best she had ever seen. The abilities of the Wildercorps hunters to follow a trail were practically magical. What she would have done for a tenth of those skills now.

She looked up, weighing her options between the two paths ahead for they struck as the most likely. She longed to just pick one and push on. She could toss a coin if it came to it. The ability to pause and reflect was another skill she had somehow never quite mastered. She reminded herself that a horse could only be ridden so hard before it broke, and the same was undoubtedly true of the Loose Cannons. And of herself, if she was being completely honest. They had been going hard at it for over an hour, and being constantly aware of one’s footing, and alert for skaven ambushes, was more taxing than she cared to admit.

She bit her lip, drummed her fingers on her drawn pepperbox’s ironwood grip, let out a long breath, and tried to force herself to relax.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor nearby, Brigid broke a hunk of sawdust bread in half and shared it with her sister, the pair rabbiting to one another all the while. Elsworn couldn’t understand a word of it. It wasn’t even the strange pidgin Azyrite they used to communicate with the other Loose Cannons, but a unique language of their own devising with a speakership of exactly two.

Insofar as the rag-tag underjack militia units in Greywater Fastness had a uniform, the two young women, wearing a grimy, sporadically garish mishmash of fabrics and colours with squares of leather and metal hoops sewn in for added protection, were pretty much modelling it. They’d looked identical in the dark, but in the second-hand light of day Bryony’s rangier build and youth became obvious. Both of them, like so many in Greywater Fastness, had grown up without parents. They had been taken in by the petty crime gangs and begging syndicates that claimed the streets around the Loose Cannons’ fortified guildhall, before somehow managing to con their way inside. They had eventually graduated from cleaning firearms and mending armour to hunting skaven.

They had, as they often tried to remind everyone in spite of their barely comprehensible Low Azyrite, been with the Loose Cannons longer even than Orinkul or Tun.

Still, it was difficult for Elsworn to see them as anything other than children. Bryony was about the same age as her own sister. She tried to imagine herself taking Alicia down here with her to fight giant rats and was surprised by the unlooked-for smile that smuggled its way onto her face. Alicia would no doubt take swift and violent offence at the suggestion that she was any less capable than Brigid or Bryony. Her sister had never been one to back down from a challenge.

Elsworn tried to think about what she had been doing when she was younger. It felt like a lifetime ago. To most children born in the Outer Circle slums it was a lifetime. She had enlisted with her Freeguild at the minimum age of twenty-one. She had claimed a third-place finish in the Battery Green lists at eighteen, but she had started her training with sword, pistol, and musket long before then.

Greywater Fastness was a city founded on war. If peace, however unlikely the possibility, were ever to fall across the Mortal Realms, then Greywater Fastness would surely collapse overnight. This city that she revered like a heroic great-grandparent had raised her on mythic tales of the Realmgate Wars, of the hundreds of smaller but still unspeakably vast campaigns that those early triumphs had then spawned, of the founding of the Seeds of Hope of which Greywater Fastness was one. As an older child, she had sought out every war notice and pamphlet she could lay her hands on, devouring every detail of the free cities’ heroic crusades into lands still languishing under the corrupting hand of Chaos.

How she had longed to emulate the feats of her heroine, Tahlia Vedra, the Lioness of the Parch!

Dawnbringer Crusades were not entirely unheard of in Greywater Fastness, but they were rare. The God-King’s fragile truce with the goddess Alarielle, whose pre-eminence over Ghyran was undisputed, forbade such expeditions onto her soil, and Elsworn had witnessed the mustering of only a dozen in her lifetime.

The Greycaps Freeguild was the largest and most prestigious mortal force in the city, but even as a small girl Elsworn had known she had no interest in becoming a glorified nightwatchman.

Even then, her mind had been set on the Forgewrought Flintlocks Freeguild of Baroness Zukaus. Her soldiers were maligned by staid Greycaps officers as daredevils and rogues, which for Elsworn had only added to their appeal. The baroness had held on to a number of woodland lodges and fortified estates that the city had, or so it believed, surrendered to the Sylvaneth in accordance with Sigmar’s treaty. She was also rumoured to be a silent partner in at least a dozen illegal homesteads across the Ghoul Mere, all of which needed fearless men and women like Elsworn to garrison and supply them.

She sighed wistfully, and drew her thoughts back to the present.

Orinkul and Tun appeared to have resolved their differences, both able to agree that the other had been wrong, and were toasting their new accord with a flask from one of Hod’s packs. The smell of whatever it was they were drinking was so pungently alcoholic that Elsworn could feel it clearing her sinuses from twenty yards away. Bryony, meanwhile, finished off half her crust and offered the rest up to Gotrek. The Fyreslayer looked positively queasy at the prospect of taking aboard anything that hadn’t been fermented at least twice. He grunted, not altogether unkindly, Elsworn thought, and refused. He stared moodily into the distance, like a one-eyed drunk at the end of a long, melancholy spell.

Elsworn considered the Fyreslayer for a moment. He was certainly an enigma. With his broad, brutally muscular frame and the flame of orange-bright hair rising in a tall crest above his head, he bore a resemblance to the warriors of the Baeldrag lodge mission at Kaulgar’s Lookout. But where the Baeldrag Fyreslayers were infamously violent, prepared to go to war with anything and anyone if there was gold in it for them, Gotrek seemed to be mostly interested in drinking and complaining. And, suffice it to say, the old canals were better known for their monsters than they were for their buried treasures. The more she thought on it, the more she realised that she and Gotrek had barely spoken three words to each other since she had woken him up. She had assumed him to be a Fyreslayer based solely on the rune in his chest and his outward appearance, but it was starting to dawn on her that there was an interesting story there.

And if there was one thing that Elsworn appreciated almost as much as a good adventure, then it was experiencing someone else’s second-hand.

She went to join him. He gave her a wary look as she approached, as though he was expecting to have his dinner plate stolen.

‘What do you want?’ he growled.

Elsworn pursed her lips, briefly reconsidering just how interested she was in the Fyreslayer’s story. But she’d started now, and she liked to finish what she began.

‘I’m just curious,’ she said.

‘I bet you are.’

‘What brings a Fyreslayer to the Loose Cannon underjacks?’

Gotrek turned to face her. The anger simmering behind his one eye was so intense that it took Elsworn aback. ‘I’m no Fyreslayer, lass. Call me so again and you’ll feel the flat of my axe!’ As if to emphasise the point, he ran his thumb down the blade of his axe until blood welled up from beneath the parted skin. It evaporated instantly in the flames, though Gotrek didn’t seem to feel the heat at all.

Elsworn felt herself bristle. She was a Freeguild Cavalier, ennobled in battle by her peers. She hadn’t been called lass since she was five years old, and she wasn’t about to stand for it now from some lowly underjack.

The Fyreslayer turned away from her before she found her tongue again, the anger she had seen in him quenched by ale and misery once more. ‘As for the rest of the question, Why not? would be my answer, or perhaps, What business is it of yours? Where else can a duardin hope to escape the vulture-pecks of the gods for a few precious hours? Where but in this hateful city that even they would sooner pretend did not exist.’ He grunted appreciably, looking marginally less miserable and worn as he appraised the ruined greatness of the canal around him. ‘I like it down here. It reminds me of another place… long ago.’

‘Earlier, you said something about a priest.’

‘Did I?’

‘You did.’

‘Well…’ Gotrek scratched his beard, muttering something coarse under his breath. ‘It’s not as if you can open your front door around here without accidentally hitting a priest.’

‘Was she–’

‘Ssshhh!’ Gotrek interrupted her, raising a finger for silence before she could finish. He cocked his head to one side, the hung-over look he had been displaying up until then either exaggerated for sympathy or entirely affected. He appeared to be listening for something. Elsworn was about to point out to him that no one was making any more noise than his own infernal axe, when she realised that she could hear something too. A rustling from the canal bed.

She raised her pepperbox and swung towards it. There was a tiny squeak, and whatever it was fled deeper into the bracken. She let out a relieved laugh and let the gun, and her arm, drop to her side. It was just another one of the rodents she had noticed earlier. This stop had wound her more tightly than she had realised.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Just a rat.’

‘In my experience, lass, where there’re rats, you’ll find more rats. And worse things besides.’

‘And sometimes it’s just a rat.’

‘Quiet,’ said Gotrek, voice low. ‘Tell me you didn’t hear that.’

Elsworn held her breath, listening, unconsciously filtering out – as only a childhood in the heaving tenements of Burnt Arches could teach a person to do – the murmuring of the Loose Cannons and of the city above their heads. And then maybe, just maybe, she heard it too. A squeak, very much like that of a common rat, but deeper, as if arising from the throat of some larger creature: a creature, say, that was the approximate size and shape of a human being. She looked quickly around, trying to pinpoint the source of the squeaks, but they echoed confoundingly through the maze of tunnels and drains. Gotrek glared at her until she went back to being still. The distant chittering went on, uninterrupted.

As Elsworn listened, she began to discern a horrible pattern to the sounds. They weren’t the meaningless noises of an animal. Instead, Elsworn was certain that she could detect variations in pitch and sound, meanings strung together with a definite cadence that could only be described as a language.

Her heart beat faster at the realisation – skaven! And closer than she would have ever realised.

‘Everyone, be quiet,’ she hissed.

Ordinarily the underjacks would have taken her authority only as far as they could spend it, but the sharpness of her tone made them sit up and take note. She strained her ears until every plink of moisture falling from the ceiling sounded convincingly like the silk-wrapped footpaws of a skaven killer creeping through the tunnels.

The chittering of skaven speech, however, had stopped.

‘Sh-sh-sh-ssshhhh!’ said Blastritt, his claw pressed firmly to the brass zipper at the front of his muzzle, straining both ears for the distinctively plodding sounds of human speech that he had definitely just heard.

‘Infinite apologies, oh sensitive-eared one,’ said Klatch. With exaggerated delicacy and care, he slid the metal plate he had been examining back into its clanrat’s trolley.

‘I say quiet,’ said Blastritt, pitching his voice to a hiss that should have been well beyond the range of any eavesdropping human ears. ‘Do not deaden my brain with your obsequiousness!’ He flexed his gauntlet fingers, clacking the nozzles of the warpfire emitters menacingly, and Klatch wisely clamped his jaws shut. Blastritt ground his fangs as he turned his undivided attention back to the tunnel. He was starting to harbour the notion that they may just have been followed from the steelworks after all. Somehow, he knew, this was all Klatch’s fault. No human could have been alerted to their theft so soon, much less tracked stealthily moving skaven unerringly through miles of secret tunnels. Not without supreme incompetence on someone’s part, and it certainly wasn’t Blastritt’s.

He lashed his tail as he thought, the twin instincts of hiding and running away warring with typical skaven viciousness in his breast. He raised his snout and sniffed. It was difficult to smell much over the reek of the sewer and the treated rubber of his mask. Only that there was something there. Humans. Yes, definitely humans, but a hint of something else too. Duardin perhaps? Yes, duardin. They smelled of earth and stone and the strange beverages they liked to poison themselves with. He snarled to himself. More cursed luck. Though well known for their clumsiness, duardin were considerably less amusing up close and in the flesh. The second of the two skaven virtues took a sudden and decisive upper hand.

Silently, he jabbed the nearest clanrat. The skaven lifted its muzzle and cringed, turning its head out of eye contact and baring its throat in the gesture of submission.

‘Up-up. Climb.’ Blastritt gestured to the iron cover above them. ‘Open it. Now. And start moving the equipment. We cannot wait-here any longer.’

‘Yes-yes!’ The clanrat bobbed its head with a most agreeable urgency and immediately swarmed up the ladder.

Blastritt gnawed anxiously on the inside of his cheek. Whoever Klatch had alerted with his stupidity, it sounded as though they were close – too close by far for them all to scuttle away without risking discovery. It would take time to move all his equipment out of the canal and up onto the street, and more time still for Scuttlegnawer to send the vehicle to collect them. He would need to do something. A distraction! Yes, that was what a clever skaven like Blastritt would do. Raising his paw to the side of his head, he twiddled with the dial that stuck out from the side of his helmet. A pleasant tingle passed through his brain. He went momentarily cross-eyed and sparks spat from the ends of his helmet’s antennae. He scanned the nearby tunnels for any of his toys that might have been left lying around as a provision against just this sort of eventuality. Something in his brain went ping. Carefully, he turned the dial, focusing both his instruments and his mighty skaven intellect on the signal.

Ah yes, he thought, that would do. That would do very–

A loud bang from close by made him startle. He shot a glare over his shoulder. The witless clanrat who had just driven its trolley straight into the iron rungs of the ladder gave him a wincing look, as though expecting to have its fur blasted from its hide on the spot. Under more propitious circumstances that might very well have been the fate that awaited the dolt, but with an unknown number of clearly devious foes mere tail-lengths behind them, Blastritt had to be more creative in his punishments.

‘You!’ He indicated the shrinking clanrat, then stabbed the pointed claw back down the tunnel towards the junction they had just left. ‘Go. Keep watch. And stay-stay.’ Even the clumsiest rat could be quiet when it was hiding close enough to its enemies.

Elsworn could practically sense whatever it was out there holding its breath and waiting, listening out for her to make some move just as she was listening out for it. She cursed herself at the thought that, in calling out to the underjacks, she might have unwittingly alerted the skaven to her presence. Then, for no obvious reason, it started up again with some increasingly urgent-sounding chitters and expletive squeaks. As best as Elsworn could make out, it was coming from whichever passage she had her back to at any given time. She silently went over the merits of having the Loose Cannons split up to search the likeliest of the surrounding tunnels. The skaven could be anywhere.

‘That way,’ said Gotrek, pointing directly ahead.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m a dwarf, lass.’

Elsworn shrugged. She didn’t have any better ideas, and if it was an excuse to stop hanging around here like a pair of overripe plums, then it was good enough for her. The Fyreslayer gave a terrific roar and broke into a run, his greataxe trailing fire behind him. Elsworn would have been hot on his heels, had a living tide of shrieking vermin not come pouring out of the exact opposite passage at that very moment.

The Loose Cannons cried out in alarm, hastily swallowing down hard lumps of bread and snatching up weapons as they scrambled to their feet. Gotrek cursed as he skidded to a stop over the slime-covered cobbles, but his headlong charge in entirely the wrong direction had left him with no chance of racing back in time. Elsworn found herself standing entirely alone, smack in the verminous swarm’s path. Just rats, as she had told Gotrek so dismissively mere moments before, but thousands and thousands of rats – more rats than she’d seen flooding the streets of Estermere when the Varek and Son’s sawmill burnt down. If they reached her, then they would surely strip her bones clean in a matter of seconds.

She swung her pistol around and fired. A single rat burst into flying bits of pulp, the shot making about as much of an impression on the swarm as would spitting into a rainstorm. She eased off the trigger and massaged the barrel assembly around one place. There was a satisfying click as the percussion cap reset.

She fired again, and again, backing further away with each shot, the pepperbox kicking back at her like a panicked horse and filling the air with soot and thunder. Still, the swarm was gaining on her. If she was to turn on the spot and sprint for all she was worth, then the rats would still be faster. Even as she retreated, they spilled from the tunnel mouth and spread out to flood the full width of the floor in exactly the same way that a spill of poisoned water or flesh-eating acid would have done. The similarities would likely not end there.

Of all the ways she had imagined she might die, this could not have been further from the mark: eaten alive by rats in a sewer, mere yards from Spoke Road Number One and yet totally unnoticed by the thousands of people there.

It was infuriating.

The gun clicked empty, the last of its five shots fired. It would take her far too long to reload.

A deafening boom sounded from somewhere behind her as Daegal unloaded his blunderbuss into the swarm. It seemed inconceivable to Elsworn that the citizens going about their lives overhead failed to hear it, but sudden explosions and strange sounds in the sewers were not exactly unheard of in Greywater Fastness. Not one voice cried out in alarm as the teardrop-shaped blast of grapeshot tore across the swarm. It bought Elsworn precious seconds.

With a yell, she hurled her lantern. It hit the flagstones just ahead of the swarm’s leading edge and the glass chamber shattered, spilling alchemical fuel over the floor. In the split second before the pilot flame was doused, the flammable slick ignited, whooshing into a wall of roaring purple-green flame. The heat was phenomenal. An ogor in flame-retardant clothing would have thought twice before jumping across it, even if coaxed to do so with his bodyweight in meat, but the sheer mass of the swarm drove its hapless forerunners into the fire.

The first to scamper through it gave heart-wrenching squeals as their fur caught light, streaming out the other side like flares launched into the sky on Sigmarsday. The second, third, and fourth waves of rats smothered the chemical fire as effectively as a blanket thrown over a burning saucepan.

With her hand now free, Elsworn drew her sword, preparing to go down in an appropriate blaze of glory. She was not afraid to let an enemy get in close – the four parallel scars on her face, left there by a dryad’s claws, were the proof of that. Not that there was going to be much call for skill here. It would be like whacking at hay bales, assuming that every last bit of straw had teeth and claws and a frenzied energy.

She was, however, accustomed to having two conditions in her favour, and their absence disadvantaged her here. Firstly, she was used to fighting from horseback. And secondly, she was used to floors that were not coated in slime.

Just as her sword came free of its scabbard, her foot immediately proceeded to slide the opposite way. She flailed for balance, but it was too late to stop herself from slipping. She fell hard on her back, and would surely have broken something had a dozen or so rats not cushioned her fall. She felt the instinctive desire to cringe as their bodies broke under her, tragic squeals forced out of tiny bodies by her weight, but a moment later she found herself with no time to consider anyone’s plight but her own.

Rats swept over her like a river that had broken its banks. They bit. They scratched. They filled her skull with their chittering and squealing. She raised both arms to hide her face, brought her knees instinctively to her chest. She was drowning, dying by a thousand tiny bites, and delaying that inevitable outcome was the absolute best she could muster. And then, just as suddenly, it was all over.

The swarm streamed on past her, the last shrilly squeaking stragglers running over her armour and leaping clear.

She quickly patted herself down to make sure that all of her extremities were still in place. Ten fingers, two ears, one nose – all raw and stinging, but accounted for. Heart thumping in residual panic, she sat up and looked around.

The Loose Cannons were still fighting. Tun laid about himself with his short sword. Orinkul turned rats into bloody splats with his club. Hod stamped fiercely on anything that came near, holding on to his packs with his one arm. Brigid and Bryony fought back to back, snarling like half-feral things themselves. Daegal frantically reloaded his blunderbuss. Gotrek, meanwhile, was wreathed in his greataxe’s flames, roaring and fighting as the unstoppable tide swarmed heedlessly over him. Soon enough, the last of the rats were past Gotrek too.

They hared off down the tunnel in the direction that the Fyreslayer had initially been set on following, leaving him sputtering impotently in their wake. Gotrek looked for a moment as if he was planning to charge after them, before apparently thinking better of it. He sufficed himself with a choice slew of shouted curses.

Elsworn felt the urge to swear very, very loudly, her stinging wounds and the simple joy of being alive overwhelming her usual sense of decorum.

Tun limped over to her. He was carrying a nasty set of bites. The tough yellow fabric of his trouser leg was torn, stuck to his shin and dyed red with blood. He offered her his hand, which she gratefully took.

‘Interesting technique,’ he said, as he pulled her up.

Elsworn couldn’t help but grin back. The rush of blood returning to her head made her giddy. ‘They don’t teach it like that at the Academae Martial, it’s true.’

‘Give it a few years. One day, they’ll be calling that the Killebrook Position.’

‘They weren’t attacking us,’ said Orinkul, performing the same flustered self-examination as Elsworn just had, with particular emphasis around the beard. He looked, as usual, as though someone had just kicked his dog. ‘They were running away.’

‘Like all bloody rats everywhere!’ Gotrek roared, still spoiling for a fight with something.

‘Running away from what, though?’ Daegal asked, finally getting a wad of metal offcuts and black powder down the neck of his gun.

Just then, Elsworn heard another deep-throated squeak emanating from the tunnel behind them. She turned towards it. Whether it was the creature she had heard conversing earlier or something entirely different, she did not know. In that moment, she registered only the two red slit eyes, wide as disembowelling strokes, that appeared out of the darkness of the tunnel. Elsworn cursed herself for destroying her lantern.

Brigid scowled across at Daegal. ‘Ye’m hatter askit, dincha?’

With her sword in one hand, Elsworn holstered her spent pistol and drew the spare from the opposite holster. She grinned up at the mutated horror as it shuffled out of the tunnel and into the yellowish light from the Spoke Road, already picturing its malformed head on her mistress’ wall.

Now this, she thought to herself, is more like it.

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First published in Great Britain in 2025.
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