Hammer and Bolter: Issue 20 Read online

  There was no point calling out, for Fithvael would not hear him, so Laban te Tuin darted the length of the corridor and touched his teacher’s arm. By the time that Fithvael had turned, there was no need for Laban to point; they could both see the Vampire Count stepping through a moving curtain of dust and grit.

  There was a booming thud, and the Count was enveloped in a great sooty cataract of dark, moist dust and particulates as the tunnel directly behind him collapsed under the pressure of the skaven vibrations. The Count stepped through the cloud, his armour dulled and marred by the shower, looking more sinister than ever.

  ‘Well, there’s no turning back, now,’ said Fithvael, drawing the shorter of his blades.

  ‘Onward!’ exclaimed the Vampire Count raising his sword in salute to his companions.

  ‘What is our aim?’ asked Laban.

  ‘The same as it ever was,’ said Fithvael, ‘to find Gilead and to ensure his safety.’

  ‘How do we do that?’ asked Laban.

  He need not have asked. The Vampire Count had skirted the two elves, standing side-by-side in the broad entrance to the great chamber, and had begun cutting down the ratmen that stood in his path. They fell one after another, one on top of another, as the Count carved a path through the throng.

  Many of the skaven were not aware of the Count cutting through them until it was too late. They were facing the mound where they expected their great King to emerge, to lead them on to greater battles against wondrous foes. They expected to attack, not to be attacked.

  Fithvael and Laban had no choice but to follow in the Count’s footsteps, bringing up his rear, and defending it so that he could not be attacked from behind and have his efforts wasted.

  The ratmen were almost too easy to kill. Their attacks, though frantic and unpredictable, were generally poorly aimed and haphazard; as many strikes missed as hit, and when they were on target they tended to be wide of the desired mark, so that Fithvael and Laban defended more attacks to their limbs than to their torsos or heads. The ratmen were also just as likely to attack each other as the elves, either by accident or by design, and fights soon broke out among the skaven closest to the Vampire Count. A wide ‘V’ of bodies was scattered on the floor behind him, like the wake of some great sea-going vessel.

  Of the skaven who saw their attacker, many fell dead before they were touched, their blood organs giving out under the pressure of fear and panic. An increasing number of the beasts rendered insane by the power of the rhythm stamped out by their kin, and by the ululating and shrieking of voices, sat among the corpses gorging themselves. The sight sickened Laban, who took considerable pleasure in smiting the cannibals, adding more carrion to the feast.

  Several long minutes passed as the Count made progress towards the great mound where the Rat King would appear to address his host. He cut and thrust, and swept through dozens of ratmen; blood ran from his sword and sprays of it clung to the filth on his sullied armour, yet he made little impact on the horde as a whole. The damage he could do, even with Fithvael and Laban at his back, was limited to an insignificant area, to one small section of the crowd.

  It would take one Vampire Count and two elves days or weeks to plough through the entire skaven horde. The task was impossible, but there was no sign that the Vampire Count would stop fighting until all of the ratmen were destroyed. There was no subtlety to his craft; he was a killing machine, an automaton, merciless and unmoved by the destruction that surrounded him. He had nothing but contempt for these pitiful creatures, and would gladly kill a thousand of them, or more, for the opportunity to stand opposite the great elf in combat.

  ‘Your people await,’ said Gilead.

  ‘Me?’ asked the Rat King, turning the plaited hair ribbon slowly around his narrow wrist. ‘Perhaps they can tell me.’

  Gilead handed the Rat King his staff, which had been propped up, forgotten, against the back of the throne. The King grasped it firmly in his hand, and hoisted himself up. His old body was not suited to the slow, ponderous movements of a beast deep in thought, and he seemed not to be aware of the patterns of vibration in the antechamber, which Gilead feared might crumble to dust under the waves of pressure that were bombarding it.

  The elf withdrew his sword from its place in the tangle of broken and discarded tools and weapons that comprised the skaven throne, and sheathed it. The Rat King arranged his robes around his body and slowly gathered his newfound wits. He did not see that Gilead was newly armed.

  Gilead watched a drizzle of grit fall from somewhere in the ceiling and land on the Rat King’s shoulders. Then he heard the whump of collapsing earth, and a light in the antechamber was extinguished as the first of the niches, high in the chamber wall, collapsed under the weight of vibrations that were thrumming through the underground structures.

  The Rat King left the chamber ahead of the elf, climbing the steps and walking out onto the mound. As the skaven host saw their King emerge, the ratmen nearest the mound redoubled their efforts to stamp and wail. The wave of sound rippled through the host, and soon the noise was beyond anything that Gilead had ever encountered. He looked out over the Rat King’s head, across the tightly packed crowd, and watched as gaps began to appear between the ratmens’ heads. Hundreds of the skaven died on their feet, crumbling to the ground to be trampled underfoot. The noise and wonder, the heat of so many bodies, and fear of anything and everything, killed them by the score.

  Gilead’s eye was drawn further and further into the crowd as the wave of death spread outwards from the epicentre that was the mound and the royal rat that stood on top of it.

  Then, slowly, a kind of hush began to fall.

  The Rat King did nothing. He did not twitch or sniff; he did not fidget or shuffle. He did not blink, and he did not speak. The blood organ in his chest was beating remarkably slowly, and he wondered that everyone around him could not hear it thump incessantly, instead of flickering like the buzzing wings of some carrion-eating insect. He did not know if he could stand the beat of his own heart. The quantity of blood reaching his brain was too much. He had too many thoughts, too many questions, and there was no one to answer them. He looked out at the snouts raised before him, but could not find a single pair of eyes that would stay open for long enough for him to focus on a single face, and talk to a single one of his followers.

  The skaven were filled with such unfocused expectation, that they were lost in a miasma of frenzy. They were born for destruction, and without a leader, any leader, they would destroy indiscriminately.

  They did not recognise their Rat King as he stood before him. He did not look like one of them at all. He should have been a blur of bristling fur and blinking eyes, of gyrating maw and hopping hind paws. He should have been spilling words out at them, over and over, feeding their bloodlust, rallying them to vicious acts of wanton death and destruction, even if it was only their own.

  The Rat King turned to look at Gilead, who slowly dropped his head in a deliberate nod, keeping his eyes fixed on the ratman. This seemed to fill the Rat King with more confusion and fear, and he tore his eyes away from the elf’s lean, perfect face and cast them up into the vaulted ceiling. The glossy crystalline surface far above their heads sparkled and scintillated, reflecting every speck of light back into the chamber. The Rat King lost himself in those sparkles for several long moments, composing himself. He wished for the hundredth time that his temples would stop throbbing and his heart would stop beating so heavily.

  When he dropped his eyes back to the crowd, the Rat King finally found something that he could focus on. At the distant reaches of the great space, he saw a pair of glowing, red lights at the head of a deep ‘V’ of fallen bodies, bathed in a bloody sheen.

  The phalanx of bodyguards standing in a broad circle on the slopes of the mound were facing outwards, into the crowd. They remained tense and fidgeting, their whiskers and tails twitching, their paws jerking and flexing the weapons that they carried, ready to attack. They hissed and snickered, and
blinked hard and often, as the skaven before them stopped stamping and wailing, and shuffled and sniffed and became agitated instead. Scores of the ratmen in the first dozen, tightly packed rows began to point and chatter, and elbow one another. Several tried to scale the mound, but were cut down by the strongest and meanest of the bodyguards.

  Gilead unsheathed his weapons. He knew what was to come, and he knew his part in it.

  The Rat King stood rigid in front of the elf, his snout pointing a little to the left in the direction of his fixed gaze. Gilead followed the Rat King’s line of sight, and then wondered why he had not seen it before. Someone was carving a path to the mound, someone was decimating the skaven horde, killing and maiming his way to… To whom? To the Rat King, in order to destroy him? Or to the elf?

  Then Gilead saw the edge of a long, narrow blade as the green lantern-light slid off its surface. He knew the blade, and he knew whom it belonged. He watched for another moment, tracing the arc of the weapon, and knowing that his old friend yet wielded it. Fithvael was in the great chamber, fighting his way towards Gilead.

  The moment was lost as Gilead lunged to his left, driving his sword through the torso of the skaven bodyguard pounding towards him. The ratman had turned to see what the hordes were fussing about, and he’d seen what they had seen. Gilead got between the Rat King and his bodyguard-turned enemy.

  The Rat King would have to suffer a little more, a little longer, before he was put out of his misery. In the meantime, there was a battle to be joined.

  There was much confusion on the mound, but, at its epicentre, the Rat King stood absolutely still, his eyes fixed on the Vampire Count. The only being in the room who didn’t need to blink.

  The skaven host had been of one mind. Their leader had made them strong, and they were granted their powers by him. As individuals, the ratmen had no minds of their own, but were drawn to their King, eager for a taste of his power, instinctively knowing that there was no other course for them. They lived only to do his bidding. All the time that the Rat King rallied his host, whipping it into a frenzy with one mind and one body, nothing could defeat his course.

  As the skaven looked up at their King, covered in the white hair of the weak and old and infirm, as they took in his immobility and his silence, some knew that his time was at an end. For every ratman with the instinct to attack the old and weak and feeble, their King became just another target.

  At the foot of the mound, jostling and bustling turned to nipping and clawing; then to all out fighting, resulting in mass skirmishes between the ratmen. The pounding and stamping and wailing continued throughout a large portion of the great chamber further from the mound, and the whole room shook with the impact of thousands of paws and the waves of sound that battered every surface.

  Gilead looked up to see that the lanterns lighting the space were jumping and jiggling as if even the great, dwarf-hewn ceiling above was heaving and flexing to the beat of the skaven paws.

  Then, in the far right-hand corner of the chamber, ratmen began to surge into the backs of their kin, and a wave of bodies tightened its formation, heaving a more solid mass of ratmen towards the mound.

  Between cutting and thrusting his blades through the bodies of all and any who would take him on, Gilead glanced across the chamber as the air in the room flexed with a great whump. Dust and debris was thrust into the chamber from the pressure of another tunnel collapsing. There were many entrances into and exits from the great chamber, but, one by one, they were collapsing. One by one the underground corridors, the burrows and warrens, the labyrinth of connected passageways, all were succumbing to the vibrations caused by the massed skaven. The pounding and stamping, and the shrieking and screeching, had hit the perfect frequency to resonate through the earth, shifting and vibrating stone and bricks and earth. Moving the dirt and rocks that supported the tunnels, rendering them weak and feeble, and drilling away at their capacity to keep the rooms and chambers and the corridors and passageways open.

  The great, vaulted chamber was a remarkable feat of engineering, dwarf-built, hewn from rock to withstand the massive tonnage of earth and buildings above. Yet the crystals in the ceiling shifted and sparkled, scintillating with the micro-movements that were being felt even in this underground fortress.

  Through dint of greater fighting prowess, luck and lunacy, any one of the ratmen might come to lead the skaven; instinctively many of them knew it.

  There was more than one battle to be fought. Any being who was not a skaven must be a foe, so that Gilead, Fithvael, Laban and the Vampire Count were all under attack as chaos spread throughout the chamber. The skaven no longer had one single purpose, to follow their King, but each had his own purpose, to survive against all-comers. Any ratman with the instinct for ambition or the lust for power must find a foe in every other ratman. Then there was the Rat King. The horde was divided. Many knew only one King and did not question his supremacy; they would fight and die for their leader. The rest thought nothing of renouncing their King for being old and still and alien to them. Skaven was set against skaven.

  The mood changed in the chamber.

  Gilead fought on the mound, taking on any and all. He sliced through arteries in necks and groins, cut weapon-wielding paws from limbs, plunged his blades into torsos and cut down the bodyguard one at a time, one after another, and the swarming masses that began to rush the mound in twos and threes. Every stroke met its target and no energy was wasted in dispatching the skaven beasts. As the bodies piled up, the elf wove a path across the mound, keeping the Rat King in the corner of his vision, conscious, even in the heaving throng of bodies that one body was singularly still.

  Gilead knew not why he was keeping the skaven leader alive, other than to have the pleasure of dispatching the evil ratman when the time came. In the meantime, every ratman that tried to get close to his King, to assassinate his erstwhile leader, was met with the controlled white-heat of Gilead’s intent.

  Halfway across the chamber, and making faster progress as the skaven turned on each other, the Vampire Count continued to plunge onward. He was no longer simply cutting down bodies, for some of the ratmen, no longer in thrall to their King, were turning to fight back. The Count was in no danger.

  He stood tall and proud in his filthy armour. The damp earth and grit that had marked his armour, covering it in a layer of dust, was caught in every joint and seam of the burnished metal; grinding and marking the armour with a myriad of tiny scratches that would take a week of careful rubbing, and a tub of good lapping powder, to polish out.

  Every time the Vampire Count raised his blade to the foe, it came back bloodied. Every time skaven blood gouted from the hundreds of wounds he inflicted, it arced through the air, coming to rest in splashes and droplets all over the armour, smearing the dirt that was already there. He was a gruesome sight to behold. He strode on, hacking and driving through the crowd, one after another of the skaven horde falling to his sword, many before they had a chance to defend themselves.

  One at a time, or even in skirmishing groups, there was no hope of the skaven doing the Vampire Count any lasting damage. He took a jolt to a greave from the studded end of a spear haft, and a dink to a rerebrace from a poorly judged swing of a mace, but none of the ratmen came close enough to do any real or lasting damage. If he’d had living flesh beneath the armour, he would have hardly suffered a bruise, and certainly no broken bones.

  Other hearts and blood organs beat at their own rates: for the skaven, fast enough to kill the creatures that owned them, for the elves, in the calm, measured manner that allowed them to fight on through the long minutes, balancing the rhythms of their bodies with the swing, thrust and slice of their bladed weapons. The Vampire Count had no heart to rely on, and yet, he too fought to some internal beat, some rhythm of his own.

  ‘How long must we do battle?’ asked Laban, swinging wildly, and taking down two more skaven.

  ‘For as long as it takes,’ said Fithvael, inhaling as he withdrew his swo
rd from the side of the skaven that was convulsing on its short fall to the floor of the chamber.

  ‘There are so many of them,’ said Laban, ‘and they are so easy to kill.’

  ‘Pathos,’ said Fithvael, ‘can occur on a battlefield. Feel it when we are done with this. Do not succumb to it here, nor now.’

  ‘They are so wretched,’ said Laban as the figure he was lunging at fell hard on its back, clutching its chest; it avoided being skewered, only in the act of dying. Dying on the edge of an elf blade would have been an honourable end, if the skaven had cared anything for honour.

  ‘And he frightens me,’ said the young elf, breathing as he spoke, not entirely effortlessly, for he had a blade in each hand, and, though his lower body was moving only a small pace at a time towards the mound, his shoulders, back and arms had built up a fast-paced rhythm. The skaven were coming to him, but there attacks were so ineffectual that they might as well have been throwing themselves on the elfs’ blades.

  ‘Gilead?’ asked Fithvael, driving his short blade into the skaven scrabbling at his boots, trying to pull himself upright without thought to how he would survive standing before a well-armed elf without a weapon in his paw.

  ‘The Count,’ said Laban, thrusting his sword across the old elf, and turning his wrist, disarming the skaven on the old elf’s blind side.

  ‘You should be afraid of him,’ said Fithvael, stepping back to give the young elf room to complete his manoeuvre.

  ‘What will happen?’ asked Laban, side-stepping away from Fithvael and making a quarter turn to stop three more skaven in their attack, disabling the first before killing the second with a slash to the jugular and the third by disembowelling, the blade flashing across the rounded, grey-furred belly of the old ratman.

  ‘We finish this, and then we’ll see,’ said Fithvael, quickly taking two steps backwards as the space between him and the Count opened up. ‘The Count is cutting a swathe; keep up, lad.’

  Laban noted the glimmer of a mocking smile cross Fithvael’s lips, and realised that the old man was enjoying himself.