Hammer and Bolter: Issue Twenty-Six Page 6

  Mondelblatt’s strange, strangled laugh came again, weaker and breathier than ever. Fithvael looked to Gilead, and Gilead shrugged. Neither one of them had wielded his weapon. It was difficult to know just how to fight this particular enemy.

  Mondelblatt stood in the doorway to his bedroom his hands eight or ten inches from his body on each side, his feet slightly apart. His head was tilted a little to the left, and he looked almost beatific. There was the illusion of a halo around his head as light shone in from a small window above and behind him.

  He might have looked like a god had he not looked so nearly like a monster. He was covered, from head to foot, in creeping, crawling insects. They climbed over one another and wove paths between their neighbours, covering every inch of his body. As he blinked, they dropped from his eyelids, onto his cheeks, which dislodged others moving there, which fell to his chest, sending yet more cascading down over his paunch onto his thighs and down to his shoes, from where they simply began their ascents once more.

  It was not malice, but expediency that had caused them to land on the old man. He moved little, if at all. He was an easy target. He was prey. The hive mind knew it. They took advantage of him.

  This was a plague like any other, a curse like any famine: the old, the young, the weak and the tender die first and most easily, and it was Professor Mondelblatt’s turn.

  There was no target for the elves to attack. If they thrust their blades at his body, they were as likely to do the old man damage as they were to kill the insects, and if the bugs died there would simply be more of them, and yet more.

  Gilead took a long, slow breath, and he stilled. Fithvael took a step back, and away. He looked at Surn Strallan, and, seeing that he continued to struggle, he quickly sheathed his weapon and began to flick and toss the last of the insects from the boy’s clothes.

  Gilead flicked the tip of his sword at Mondelblatt’s legs, first, and then at his arms. He began, in small, regular movements to weave a path over and over the professor’s limbs, inserting his blade beneath two or three overlapping bugs and, with a turn of his wrist, tossing them free. The bugs chittered and clicked. They opened their wing cases and seemed to spring on their legs or shrug or sidestep, but one by one, or in twos and threes, Gilead began to dislodge the creatures.

  Some of the insects suffered the loss of limbs or wings during the operation, one or two were dissected, some crumbled to dust under the auspices of Gilead’s blade, but Mondelblatt suffered too.

  He was still, because he was old, but no one is truly still, and the ancient least of all, even the shallow breaths of an old man will lead to the bobbing of his head or the shrugging of his shoulders, and old sinews, tired muscles and unresponsive nerves lead to spasms and jerks and palsies that cannot be helped.

  Gilead read the warning signs of the professor’s tics as well as he might, but not well enough, and, inevitably, the old man suffered a nick here and a slice there. A trickle of blood oozed from a wound in his wrist, and a sliced knuckle wept and dripped. Several long narrow traces were left in his right forearm and a piece of flesh the size of the last joint of a little finger came away from the hollow of his shoulder above his clavicle.

  Mondelblatt did not complain.

  He laughed once or twice, but the last time that strange sound emerged from his maw, a spider slipped between his broken teeth, and he did not like the sensation of it on his dry tongue. He could not spit it out, because without saliva, nor sufficient breath, he was unable to propel the thing away, so he resorted, finally, to biting into the bitter tasting, loathsome creature, which fell to ashen dust in his mouth.

  Two minutes passed, and Gilead, his sympathy much heightened for the plight of the old man, and his will to do him no further harm fully engaged, was, in the gathering of his next breath, shadow-fast. There would be no more breathing as he suddenly saw every locust, every scarab, every spider, every scorpion and beetle in stark detail. He saw and could predict every move that every one of them would make, and could tease them off Mondelblatt’s clothes and skin virtually effortlessly, skewering many of them as he flicked them into the air to land on the second blade that he had drawn ready. When he could collect no more, when the blade was full, he flicked them off with a swishing arc of the blade. For his next round, he simply used the first blade to throw the bugs aside, and the second to dissect them as they hung before him mid-air, as if he had all the time in the world to finish them off.

  There were no more accidents, and no more of the professor’s blood was drawn or spilt and no more flesh was excised, but when the battle was over, the old man fell to the floor, pale and ill.

  Fithvael dropped to his knees beside the old man, as Gilead breathed once more and sheathed his weapons. Strallan stared, and stared.

  ‘You should blink,’ said Gilead, ‘for I know I am no longer shadow-fast.’

  ‘What?’ asked Strallan, still staring.

  ‘He’s dying,’ said Fithvael.

  ‘He can’t be,’ said Strallan.

  Fithvael and Gilead both turned to the boy, who dropped his head to his chest, embarrassed. He didn’t want the old man to die, not because he pitied him, but because he feared him.

  ‘They’ve killed him,’ said Fithvael, pushing up the wide linen sleeve of the old man’s shirt to show a series of pinprick holes in his pale, papery skin. ‘The scorpions carry poison in their stings. Shadow-fast isn’t fast enough.’

  ‘His riddles were our only answers,’ said Gilead.

  ‘We have the map,’ said Strallan from the doorway where he’d taken up his position, as if ready and more than willing to leave.

  Gilead and Fithvael looked at him.

  ‘And?’ asked Fithvael after several moments, during which, once again, Strallan failed to blink.

  Strallan’s cheeks paled, and then flushed. He swallowed a dry, saliva-less swallow that almost made him choke, and then he said, ‘And the cart.’

  ‘Good,’ said Fithvael, looking at Gilead, and then down at Mondelblatt, before he turned his gaze back on Surn Strallan, ‘and?’

  Strallan stared back at Fithvael as if searching the old elf’s face for the answer. He shuffled his feet in the sand that had spread across the floor of the apartments. Then he stopped and pointed downwards.

  ‘There’s the sand,’ he said. ‘The cart made sand, too.’

  ‘And?’ asked Fithvael, lifting Mondelblatt into his arms.

  ‘Ulric’s teeth!’ said Strallan. ‘Must we?’

  ‘Must we what?’ asked Fithvael, placing the professor gently on his bed, folding the street map and tucking it into his jacket. Gilead continued silently to follow the exchange between the human boy and his old mentor, while filling his pockets with the many colours and types of sand that had erupted from the hourglasses.

  ‘Must we follow the wretched insects? Must we follow the creatures that killed the old man? Must we?’

  ‘Indeed we must,’ said Fithvael.

  ‘We,’ said Gilead. ‘Not you.’

  ‘Not me?’ asked Surn Strallan, ready to sigh with an unwelcome mixture of relief and disappointment.

  ‘You should remain here to look after the professor, make him as comfortable as you can in his final hours.’

  Relief and disappointment turned to horror in Surn Strallan’s eyes.

  ‘No,’ said Mondelblatt. ‘I’m not done, yet. I won’t be put away. I won’t be put to bed. I won’t be left for dead. Not now elf, not yet.’

  ‘It’s time for you to rest,’ said Gilead more kindly.

  ‘How can I rest?’ asked Mondelblatt, ‘when I’m the only fool that remembers the power of the amulet?’

  Laban’s descent was almost vertical, out of Mondelblatt’s apartments and down the stairs, past the exterior door through a low, adjacent arch and down narrow, curving, stone steps, illuminated by slender beams of golden light that cast an uneven grid pattern up the steps.

  Laban moved slowly, cautiously as he heard the odd sounds that emanate
d from below the building.

  He found himself in a simple storage cellar, but the yellow light appeared to be seeping between the stones of the end wall against which a series of trunks and boxes were piled in a haphazard fashion. The insects that he had followed were disappearing, one or two at a time, into those narrow shafts of yellow light. Laban moved the boxes quickly, and put his hand against the wall, which was vibrating. The mortar, turning to sand and disintegrating, trickled freely from the joins between the stones, letting more light and more sound escape, while allowing the insects to infiltrate in greater numbers. Soon they were all gone, and Laban was alone.

  The elf could hardly hear the desiccated mortar falling over the sound of the clicking and squeaking and chittering of the insects. He recognised the swarming sounds that he had heard in Mondelblatt’s rooms when Fithvael had unwittingly released the locusts from the hourglass, but this was on a bigger scale. This was on a very much bigger scale. The insects that he had followed down to this place represented only a tiny fraction of the host swarm.

  Despite the scale of the swarm sounds, they too were overshadowed by other yet more disturbing noises, cries and bellows unlike anything the elf had ever witnessed. He thought the sounds must be organic; they were somehow bestial, sentient, almost musical, despite their discordance, for they had a strange, rhythmic quality not unlike speech or a melody. He knew, however, that they could not be human. They were tuned too low for the human voice, and the beginnings and ends of the sounds were too indistinct, and besides they represented no language that he had ever heard. It was the accompaniment that truly baffled the elf though, it was the squeaks and bellows, and odd, reedy outbursts that disconcerted him.

  Then the vibrations in the wall turned to rumbling and shaking, and Laban lifted his hand away, and took three or four hasty strides backwards in alarm.

  The entire building shook to its core, the golden light blazed, and the wall came tumbling down.

  The room beneath the university was ablaze with golden light, the walls had all fallen away and the swarm of insects wove a mesmerising pattern through the air. The dressed ranks of warriors clung to their weapons, ready to act upon their master’s every command, the Tomb Guards stood at his shoulders, expectant, and the Liche Priest prepared himself for his last, great rite.

  As he reached out over the mummy of the Tomb King, a great cloud of golden locusts rose and dispersed back into the swarm, having devoured the woven blanket of reeds that served as his shroud.

  Then the shadows fell, the long, lean, noble shadows, the shadows of three elf warriors armed and ready to enter the fray.

  Gilead arrived behind Laban as the young elf looked into the brightly lit room at the rite unfolding there. He was facing south, and had not been detected by the party of undead as the swarm surrounded them and they, too, faced south, the direction of their homelands. His shadow fell short of the dividing wall that now lay in pieces all around him.

  Fithvael carried Mondelblatt into the cellar, and Surn Strallan, pale and unsteady on his feet, followed them. The old elf placed the professor carefully on the floor against a remaining pillar, and indicated that Strallan should tend to him, but within seconds, several locusts were already picking at the papery flesh of Mondelblatt’s face and eating the linen of his shirt. Strallan tried to beat them away, but one or two simply switched allegiance, settling on the boy’s wafting hands.

  Gilead approached, his fist closed around something. He knelt low to the ground and began to move his hand as if he were writing. A trickle of multi-coloured sand emerged from the space he made between his long slender index finger and thumb, and Strallan realised that the elf was indeed writing something.

  The locusts on his hands hopped once, twice and then darted away, as if stung by some unseen swat.

  Strallan looked down at the trails and loops and swirls of sand. He could not read the elf words, but they wove the most beautiful pattern he had ever seen, and they seemed to scintillate somehow and glimmer with power. It was something like the way that Fithvael had used his voice. It was some sort of spell, some warding magic. Surn Strallan didn’t understand what it truly was, but he was very glad that it was there.

  Gilead very quickly surrounded the two huddled figures with more of the writing until they were warded on all sides, and then he sprinkled the little sand that remained in his hand over them, as if he were anointing them, speaking lyrical words in his own tongue that sounded magical to Stallan’s ears and made Mondelblatt sigh.

  Then Fithvael, Laban and Gilead stood together, and walked towards the undead host, knowing where they must attack, and wondering who would turn first. They stood for a moment, casting their long, elegant shadows into the room, over the Tomb King in his sarcophagus and over the host that stood to protect him.

  The swarm would not, could not, touch the elves. They gathered in a tornado around them, but could do no more, and, from the eye of the storm, the elves were content to forge onwards, cutting and slicing through the heaving mass of insects, killing few by comparison to the very great numbers that engulfed them, but closing the distance between themselves and their true adversaries.

  The swarm afforded the Liche Priest time.

  With two sharp thrusts of his staff in the air, he turned the dressed ranks of the undead warriors to left and right of the sarcophagus, confident that his troops would make short work of the foe.

  Then the Liche Priest also turned to face the elves, and, with a third broad, arcing swing of his staff he dismissed the swarm, sending it forth into the city, sending it out to do his bidding, to take the streets, to rid Nuln of all that was organic and wasteful, of all that would putrefy and taint.

  The dressed ranks of undead had turned, as one, with their narrow shields and spears and their curved swords, with their naked skeletal bodies, ragless and without armour, but with cuffs and headpieces, with anklets and simple badges of allegiance. The Tomb Guards turned to face each other across the widest part of the sarcophagus, ready to perish for their king, to end their millennia of immortality that he might begin another long reign, restored to this ancient city.

  Gilead took point, his shield strapped across his back, wielding both of his blades. He cut wide and fast and repeatedly, separating jaws, wrists, kneecaps and ribs, and marking and bruising shields. Nothing died.

  Nothing died because nothing lived.

  To left and right of him, Fithvael and Laban, each a yard behind and to the side ploughed into the undead host with equal vigour. Laban reasoned that he might sever heads, but managed, in most cases, only to dislodge them, or leave them rocking or wobbling on their spines. Still nothing died.

  The skeleton warriors opened their mouths and allowed their surging actions to create their battle cries, the air moving through their torsos as they lunged at the elves with their spears and defended themselves with their shields. There was a cacophony of bone on bone, and bone on sinew, and bone on elf steel, and still nothing died.

  Gilead severed a spine, a shoulder joint and an elbow of one of the creatures as ribs dislocated and hung from a wilting sternum, and still the creature thrust its spear at the elf’s throat, catching the lobe of his ear and a lock of his hair as it passed.

  ‘Duck!’ shouted Laban as a spear flew hard at Fithvael’s left shoulder, and, as he lowered his body and the spear passed harmlessly over him, the host regrouped, the first rank turning, as one, and the second stepping into the fray.

  Laban was attacked by a broader, squatter creature with a taller headdress and shorter weapon, a bright, curved sword that he used to thrust and hack at the young elf. Laban could do little more than parry and swing, and try to return strike for strike.

  There was no point thrusting.

  Thrusting is for flesh. Thrusting is to pierce skin and muscle, and to damage organs and to spill blood. To thrust into a skeleton is to risk missing. To destroy these creatures the elves must dismember and decapitate, they must separate bone from sinew and scatter the
component parts of the skeletal beasts.

  Gilead and Fithvael swung and hacked by instinct when they saw the figures that confronted them. Laban, appalled, parried and reacted, defended too much and attacked too little.

  The blow came to his thigh, and it came with the squealing of a sinew in his attacker’s shoulder and a hard, high whistle between ribs swinging through the air. The fluting of air through teeth was nothing compared to the impact sound, the wet thud of metal slicing hard, bloody muscle.

  Laban cried out, and Gilead turned.

  The skeleton warrior had aimed for the femoral artery, but he was not dealing with a human foe, and he had missed. The blood that came was from a minor vein, so, although the wound was painful, and, deep in the thigh muscle, was somewhat inconvenient, it was by no means fatal.

  Gilead’s fury was boundless, but it was nothing compared to Laban’s embarrassment. The young elf had wanted nothing more than to impress his illustrious cousin, and he felt that, so far, he had singularly failed to do so. He had fought decently against the skaven, but it had been a war of attrition rather than a great victory. Besides, he had made an utter fool of himself in front of the humans in the tavern the previous night. He would not, could not be defeated by these… these creatures.

  Before Gilead could come to Laban’s rescue the young elf had swung his sword twice more and discarded his shield in favour of drawing a second blade. He disarmed the skeleton with the curved sword, sliced through its spine in two places, above and below its ribcage, took out both of its knees and separated its jaw. Then he inserted the longer of his two blades between two of its ribs, forcibly removed the entire ribcage and, swinging his sword high, flung it over the heads of the host that was stamping and agitating to join the battle.

  The remainder of the creature’s bones were suddenly inanimate, tumbling to the floor to be kicked out of the way by the bony feet of the horde that filled the breach.