Hammer and Bolter: Issue 20 Read online

  Before they left the tomb, Anvindr removed the pieces of Hrondir’s armour from his sarcophagus. He did not know how, but he would find a way to return them to Banish, so that they might be worn once more by a brother of the Exorcists Chapter.

  ‘They resent us,’ said Pranix, watching the Wolves walk away. ‘They believe we could have acted sooner, and that our reticence let their brother die.’

  Montiyf raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You were right to counsel caution,’ he said. ‘An excellent strategy, Pranix, and your suggestion to destroy the anchor turned the course of battle. I fear you will be leaving my retinue soon.’

  ‘Leaving?’ asked Interrogator Pranix.

  ‘Of course,’ replied Montiyf. ‘I will be recommending your raising to the role of inquisitor, Pranix. You have demonstrated the correct qualities.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Pranix. He didn’t meet Montiyf’s eye.

  Inquisitor Montiyf felt a slight sense of disquiet at the coolness of his interrogator’s thanks, the slight suspicion that he expected no less than to be raised to the Inquisition. That this was Pranix’s decision, not Montiyf’s.

  Then he dismissed the thought. He could hear Tau heavy ordnance not far away. The daemon was dead and it was time for them to withdraw.

  Soon, they would depart the planet altogether, and leave Beltrasse to the Wolves.

  Gilead’s Curse

  Chapter 7

  Nik Vincent and Dan Abnett

  Don’t clamour so. I promised to finish my story and finish it I shall. Then I can end this sorry existence and join that great brigade of storytellers that shines so brightly in my memory. I am rested and eager to continue, if you could just remind me where I left the story off. It seems like years since Gilead’s name passed my withered lips, and yet I know it was mere hours ago.

  The skaven had congregated beneath the ground in the great hall with its crystallised vaults and buttresses and its great, arching black ceiling above. None remained but the youthful and exuberant. All the chaff had been separated; all the old and infirm, and the cowardly, were dead and gone, mostly into the stomachs of the survivors.

  All that a skaven had to do to survive was to kill and maim and incapacitate his brothers and cousins, his father and uncles and grandfathers, if he knew who they were. The ratmen were all of one cruel and vicious kind, and gave no thought to the complex biological relationships that might otherwise have tied them to allegiances they hadn’t the capacity to understand.

  The only skaven of any age among them was their king. He had been their master for as long as any of them had lived, and for longer than any of them could remember. There were no legends extant of any other ruler. He was all and everything to them. Their stories were short and brutal, their myths bloody, and all contained but one name, and his name was ‘King’.

  Gilead stood and flexed as the Rat King entered the room. He had sloughed off the ties that bound him, body and mind, and was refreshed and whole again. His senses were alert, and he was ready to do battle.

  The Rat King raised one whiskered brow; his jaw moved quickly back and forth, and around and around, but without making any words.

  ‘I have come,’ said Gilead.

  ‘So you have,’ said the Rat King.

  Gilead expected more. He expected the ratman to twitch and fidget, and to trip over its words, but it did not. Even its jaw had settled and was still, its whiskers unmoving.

  The Rat King took a long, deep breath, and then looked from side to side, as if suspicious of what was happening to him. His eyes swung from left to right, rather than darted, and then they fixed, unblinking, on the Fell One.

  ‘You are not what you expected to be,’ said Gilead.

  The Rat King felt his mind homing in on Gilead in a way that it had never managed before. He found that he was concentrating, taking in the tall, lean figure of the elf, scrutinising his prisoner’s features and stance, and trying to work out what was in his head.

  The Rat King shook his head slowly and blinked hard.

  ‘I have come,’ said Gilead again.

  ‘So you have,’ said the Rat King, looking startled at the sound of his own lowering voice, his words annunciated more roundly and not repeated.

  ‘And?’ asked Gilead.

  The Rat King sat in the strange throne of weapon blades and handles, staring at Gilead.

  ‘And I shall live forever,’ said the Rat King.

  He had stopped chewing out the words between jaws that twitched and gnawed at an alarming rate. He had stopped blinking so much and so often. Images came to him whole, not broken and strobed by the constant flickering of his eyelids.

  The Rat King grasped the arms of his throne with his clawed paws and breathed deeply once more, unused to the flow of air through his lungs and the rush of oxygen into his bloodstream.

  The Rat King swallowed. The pink rims of his eyes, the red of his gums and the puce flesh of his tail paled visibly before Gilead’s eyes.

  One side of the elf’s mouth curled in a wry smile.

  ‘Are you quite well, sir?’ Gilead asked the Rat King. ‘You look rather pale.’

  ‘I shall live forever,’ said the Rat King. His voice was deeper even than it had been moments before and he spoke more slowly, with greater purpose, as if, for the first time, he was formulating words and listening to what he was saying. He had stopped repeating himself over and over, ad infinitum.

  ‘Is this what it feels like?’ asked the Rat King, turning his paws over in front of his face, examining them as if he had never seen them before. ‘Is this what being immortal feels like?’

  ‘I am not immortal,’ said Gilead. ‘I will live only as long as any other of my kind, if I am allowed to expire of old age. You plan to kill me, and, if you succeed, I shall prove very mortal, very quickly.’

  ‘You have come,’ said the Rat King, looking hard at Gilead, who stood over him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gilead, ‘I have come.’

  Fithvael and Laban dropped into their knees and strode down corridors, tunnels and burrows, following the rumble of thousands of bickering jaws and the vibrations of as many twitching, fidgeting bodies. The Vampire Count was slower and clumsier, his armour making his body bulky and awkward. Fithvael was cautious of their new ally, happy that the Count struggled to keep pace.

  ‘How could we have mistaken such a beast for our fine cousin?’ Laban asked Fithvael as the two forged ahead.

  ‘Do not underestimate the Count,’ said Fithvael. ‘He is our ally for now, but, soon, he will be our enemy once more. He is a fine exponent of the blade arts, and it is incumbent upon you not to forget it, lad.’

  ‘I meant no disrespect,’ said Laban, colouring slightly as he turned to his teacher, and promptly tripped over an exposed root under his left foot.

  ‘We are all capable of being clumsy,’ said Fithvael, stifling his mirth.

  Fithvael and Laban stopped in their tracks, and the Count blundered towards the elves as a great wall of sound came up around them. They had never heard the like of it before, as it boomed and echoed down the tunnels of the underground warren, coming at them from any number of impossible angles. It was rhythmic and shrill with a hard bass note of thousands of stamping paws as they pounded into the hard, earth floor of the great chamber.

  ‘Come we close?’ asked the Vampire Count, breathing hard onto the back of Fithvael’s neck in the darkness of the tunnel.

  Fithvael placed a hand on the wall beside him, although he could feel the vibrations so strongly through his booted feet that there was no doubt in his mind what awaited them if they continued on into the great vaulted space at the centre of the warren.

  They had passed no live skaven on their journey into the depths of the earth. The weak and dying had been taken or devoured, and every last remaining ratman had gathered in one place; the one place to which the three unlikely companions were heading.

  ‘What do we do when we get there?’ asked Laban. ‘We should have a plan.�
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  ‘We have come to attempt to rescue our friend,’ said Fithvael. ‘I have no sense of him in the turmoil that the ratmen are creating.’

  ‘The Old One resides in these stricken realms,’ said the Vampire Count. ‘He resides at their centre. I know not how I know it, but know it I do.’

  ‘That still isn’t a plan,’ said Laban, who appeared to have shrunk as the noise around them grew louder. ‘We cannot simply walk into the gathered hosts of skaven. We will surely die.’

  ‘There is much cunning in their characters,’ said the Vampire Count, ‘and guile aplenty, yet they greatly lack real intelligence, and are frantic and graceless in battle.’

  Fithvael turned to the Count.

  ‘We can kill them?’ he asked.

  ‘We three can kill and maim their host in great numbers,’ said the Count, drawing his blades.

  ‘Great numbers, perhaps,’ said Laban, ‘but hordes?’

  The Rat King sank back into his throne and did not move for some time. Then, he pushed one paw down inside his clothes and pulled out a long ribbon of plaited hair with a jewel hanging from it. He held it up before his face and watched it, unblinking, for several seconds.

  ‘Nothing,’ said the Rat King.

  ‘What did you expect?’ asked Gilead.

  ‘Something,’ said the King, looking up at the elf. ‘I expected to know something. Now that I stop to think about it… There is nothing to think about.’

  ‘What did you expect?’ asked Gilead again.

  ‘Something,’ said the Rat King again.

  ‘You were going to live forever,’ said Gilead.

  ‘Not just for now,’ said the Rat King, looking from Gilead’s face to the gem as it turned slowly on its hair ribbon.

  ‘‘You are not what you expected to be,’ said Gilead.

  ‘It’s made of hair,’ said the Rat King, peering at the curving locks of the ribbon. He looked sharply up at Gilead again. ‘Whose hair?’

  ‘I know not,’ said Gilead. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Whose hair was woven into this ribbon?’ asked the Rat King. ‘Why? Is it just any hair? Or is it the hair of someone who matters… or who mattered once?’

  ‘I know not,’ said Gilead, watching the Rat King carefully.

  The Rat King brought the ribbon up to his nose and sniffed at it.

  ‘It is the hair of my brethren,’ said the Rat King. ‘Of my kind… But whose? Who gave this hair to make this ribbon? Is he dead? Did I belong to him? Was the hair given freely, or taken? Does it matter?’

  Gilead did not mean to answer the questions, thinking them rhetorical, but the Rat King looked up at him, sad longing in his eyes, and asked again, ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Does it matter to you?’ asked Gilead.

  Gilead had never feared for his life, and he did not fear for it now. He took his mortality entirely for granted. He knew that he would die, one day, soon perhaps, and it couldn’t matter less. That he was mortal was a blessing to Gilead, for only in death could he overcome the enduring sadness of too much life lived and too much loss lived through. He thought of Tor Anrok of his family, and of his twin, Galeth, dead these many years. He thought of Fithvael and the agonies they had endured in each others’ company. He remembered Benath and the funeral rites of his dear cousin and honoured friend. He thought of the oldest of his kind and of the youngest of his kin, and he remembered. He knew that with remembrance came knowledge and with knowledge remembrance.

  Gilead understood what had befallen the great Rat King, the beast who had dared to live forever, at any cost to himself, at any cost to his kind. He knew that the changes creeping into the Rat King’s consciousness were irreversible, that his skaven adversary would never be the same again. He could not know what effect that would have on the Rat King or on his own mortality.

  Gilead looked down into the Rat King’s unblinking eyes as great pools of water gathered in their lower lids. The water brimmed, and yet the Rat King still did not blink. When the tears fell, they fell fat and heavy, and ran off the greasy hair that clung to his thin cheeks, or caught in the great whiskers, riding their lengths and falling, pregnant, from their tapering ends.

  The Rat King was crying.

  Gilead had not known that was even possible.

  The Rat King unwound the hair ribbon from around his neck, and patiently unwove the strands of hair so that the loop became one long plait from which the Rat King removed the gem at its centre. Then he dropped the gem to the floor and began to wrap the plait carefully around his wrist, as if it were the most precious thing in all the world.

  ‘They are dead,’ said the Rat King. ‘The skaven that gave their hair for this ribbon are dead and gone, long gone, or not so long, they live such short and hectic lives.’

  The words seemed incongruous in the skaven’s maw, misplaced and formal, and his tone seemed alien, as if some human was hiding behind the Rat King’s throne, speaking for him in some grotesque joke.

  ‘You must help me,’ said the skaven, standing suddenly from the throne. He grabbed Gilead by the front of his shirt, looked up into the elf’s eyes, and shook him. ‘You must help me to help them.’

  Gilead covered the Rat King’s hands with his own and pried them away from their hold on his clothing. Then he placed the paws together in front of the ratman and let them go. The Rat King held his hands before him, where Gilead had left them, and did not move.

  ‘Help you?’ asked Gilead, his words dripping scorn upon the Rat King. ‘Nothing and no one can help you, now.’

  ‘We must know one another, of course,’ said the Rat King, looking beseechingly up at Gilead. ‘We must know ourselves and our brothers and cousins. We must know one another.’

  Then the ratman sat suddenly down on his throne. He would have fallen, had not the throne been directly behind him. It was as if he’d had a sudden shock and needed a moment to recover.

  The moment came and went as Gilead looked from the Rat King to the gem that lay between its hind paws. The Rat King looked at its wrist and then covered the plaited ribbon tied their, with its other paw, and groaned. The rims of its eyes and the pads of its paws grew whiter than ever, and then it closed its eyes and sat very still.

  Gilead watched as the hairs on the Rat King, every last one of them, stood on end. Its whiskers did not arch from its snout, but stood straight out like needles. It bristled all over as if gooseflesh was keeping the follicles taut, causing the hairs to stand proud, making the ratman an inch bigger in every direction. The effect was freakish, and Gilead wanted to look away, but found that he could not. Then, every single hair in the Rat King’s body blanched white from the root to the tip, before Gilead’s very eyes.

  The elf could not tell what had caused the change. Whether it was just another side effect of the amulet that seemed to be ruling the Rat King’s thinking, or whether this was happening as a direct result of the ratman’s constitution.

  The Rat King opened his eyes and looked once more at Gilead, with wonder and longing, rather than with the empty expressionless eyes that the elf had become used to. This new animation was disconcerting.

  ‘Are you quite well, sir?’ asked Gilead, the smile returning to his lips; the irony of the situation wasn’t lost on the elf.

  He bent at the waist, ostensibly to be on a level with the seated Rat King, but also so that he could retrieve the gem from the floor at his feet.

  ‘I must know,’ said the Rat King, a vision of pure, ethereal white. ‘I must know it all. I must know who I am and whence I came. I must know all that has gone before me, and all that I can expect from the future.’

  ‘I have come,’ said Gilead.

  ‘But can you tell me everything?’ asked the Rat King.

  ‘There is nothing to tell,’ said Gilead.

  ‘If we can hear nothing but their shouting and stamping, they can’t hear us at all,’ said Fithvael, striding off down the corridor that gleamed with a faint, greenish light from the far end.

&nb
sp; ‘But how will we defend ourselves against so many?’ asked Laban.

  ‘We won’t need to,’ said Fithvael. ‘You’ll see, lad.’

  ‘If we are to find my cousin, Gilead, what makes you think he’s down among them?’ asked Laban.

  ‘I don’t think it,’ said Fithvael, turning and staring hard at the boy. ‘I know it, and so does he.’ Fithvael gestured beyond Laban to the Vampire Count who stood several yards distant.

  ‘Your cousin is among them,’ said the Count. ‘Had he died at their hands, there would be a riot of celebration.’

  Fithvael gestured, waving his hand before them.

  ‘That is not celebration,’ he said. ‘That is blood lust.’

  ‘And yet you urge me to walk into it,’ said Laban, standing his ground.

  ‘It’s not your blood they’re baying for,’ said Fithvael.

  ‘You’re not nearly as important as your fine cousin,’ said the Count, coming up behind Laban, and patting him heavily on the shoulder.

  Laban turned to look at where the gauntleted hand had touched him, and tried to hide the shudder of revulsion that passed through him. By the time he turned back, Fithvael was a dozen yards farther down the corridor, his back resolutely turned on his companions.

  Laban felt something trickle down the back of his shirt, and raised his hand above his head. At first, he thought that water, or condensation, had gathered and was falling on him. Many of the underground tunnels were wet and muddy, and once or twice, he’d heard a drop of water fall into a puddle below, the sound echoing through the tunnels. Even standing directly below the drip, Laban could hear nothing but the roar and shriek of the skaven horde.

  There was no drip. Laban pushed his fingers below his collar at the nape of his neck and felt slightly moist grains of sandy earth. Then, before him, against the greenish gleam at the end of the tunnel, he saw a fall of gritty particles. The young elf touched the arching ceiling of the tunnel and felt a fissure opening in it as the whole structure vibrated with the pulsing throb of the restless crowd.