The end times, p.47
The End Times, page 47
‘Tsk tsk, foolish Thaxx. Queek knows a bribe from Clan Skryre when it is fired at Queek,’ hissed Queek. ‘But tell-say, who else is involved? That venom on your sword-blade smells like Clan Eshin good stuff. Tell-squeal and Queek will end it quick-quick.’
Queek leaned in, so that Thaxx’s burbling, blood-choked words were audible to him alone. But Kranskritt, aided by Soothgnawer’s magic, heard them too, mangled though they were through the Redclaw’s wounded jaw.
‘The Horned Rat skin you forevermore, mad-thing.’
To Kranskritt’s surprise Queek laughed and nodded with satisfaction. He drove Dwarf Gouger down point first into Thaxx’s belly, and ripped upwards, disembowelling Thaxx.
Straightening up, the Grand Warlord of the Eight Peaks surveyed the skaven gathered around him in the Hall of Reckoning. ‘First clawpack,’ rang out Queek’s voice. ‘Thaxx betrayed Clan Mors. I will lead you now.’
‘Queek! Queek! Queek!’ the others shouted. Frizloq prostrated himself with admirable alacrity. His officers, then the lesser rats, did the same, all chanting the Headtaker’s name.
‘Loyal Ska!’ yelled Queek over the adulation.
‘Yes, O mighty Queek?’
‘This not over. Bring me Skrikk, bring me Kranskritt, bring me Gritch.’ He snickered evilly. ‘It is time all traitor-things dance with Queek!’
‘See now?’ said Soothgnawer to Kranskritt. ‘This is what you face.’
Kranskritt nodded.
‘Good. Back we go!’
The Hall of Reckoning faded from view, and Kranskritt found himself in his burrow once more.
The grey seer gathered what little courage he had and thrust out his horns. He closed his eyes – a skaven show of confidence. This time he spoke more boldly. ‘Yes-yes. How could perfect Soothgnawer be anything but correct?’
‘Indeed,’ said Soothgnawer.
‘I will find the goblin and make the offer. Goblin kill first clawpack, Kranskritt save the day with fifth clawpack. Grey seers look like heroes.’
And so, Kranskritt dearly hoped, Kranskritt could avoid his meeting with Queek.
When he opened his eyes once more, he was alone. Soothgnawer was gone, but the verminlord’s voice rang still in the secret spaces of his skull. ‘I know,’ it said.
Kranskritt threw together a variety of magical ingredients. He called in his servants. ‘Gather fifth clawpack! Into the mountains! Send-scurry message to mighty Queek.’ Kranskritt smiled as his scribe fetched quill and man-skin parchment. ‘Tell him unworthy Kranskritt follow mighty Queek’s orders to the letter, loyally and without question.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
SKARSNIK’S BIG DEAL
The halls under Karag Zilfin had once belonged to a powerful dwarf merchant family. In the glory days of the Eternal Realm, the place was plaqued with gold, its dark ways lit with glimlight glowstones and runic lamps whose oil never ran dry. Not that Skarsnik, the current occupant, knew that. Vala-Azrilungol had been stripped thousands of years before Skarsnik had sprouted. He had to contend with walls that ran black with mould, water that dripped from the ceiling all the time, and the constant blast of the mountain winds whistling in through glassless windows and empty door frames.
‘I hates this. It’s rubbish,’ he muttered as he walked to his chambers. He passed through his audience room, which was embarrassingly tiny compared to the Hall of a Thousand Pillars he’d once called his own. Tribute lay heaped chaotically everywhere. ‘Really rubbish. Nowhere near enough room for all me presents. I miss it in the proper underground, Gobbla. Nice and warm.’ He cut down a long corridor, perfectly carved in the stunty way with not a curve or kink to halt the wind blasting in from outside. Treasuries, store rooms and steps leading down opened up either side of him. At the end were his private quarters. He wasn’t too happy when he got there and came upon the moonhat guards and phalanx of little big ’uns trusted with his safety, all of whom were sprawled about the place snoring and not at all doing a good job of guarding. He was too annoyed to kick them awake. Instead, he let Gobbla eat one. His screams woke the others and they ran, mismatched armour rattling, to their posts.
‘Zogging idiots!’ he shouted. ‘There’s a bleeding war on!’
He muttered darkly and scowled at them. Gobbla burped. The goblin elite shook so hard their knees knocked.
There was, at least, a door across the entrance to his rooms. He went in and shut it behind him with a sigh. A fire of bigshroom stalks burned in a long stone trough in the fireplace. He looked at the filthy furs heaped on his bed, and thought of sleeping.
He shook his head. ‘Nah, never no time for sleeping. Sleep when you’s dead, eh, Gobbla?’ He chuckled. ‘Got work to do. First mind, I reckon it’s time for a little drinky.’ On a table piled high with parchment covered in his spidery handwriting were numerous bottles. He shook them until he found one that was full. He held it up critically, grumbling that he had to tilt it this way and that to read the label. His eyes weren’t as good as they used to be.
‘Produzzi di Castello di Rugazzi,’ he said. He shrugged at it. Castello di Rugazzi had been burned down along with the rest of Tilea a couple of years before. He wouldn’t have cared had he known, but what Skarsnik held in his hands was quite probably the last bottle of wine from that vineyard, if not from Tilea. Skarsnik’s stash had once had brews from all across the Old World, purloined from caravans braving the trek over to the Far East. But once Gorfang was killed and the rats infested Black Crag, there was no one to police Death Pass. Then the wars had started. No one had come that way he could bully or rob for a long while, and Skarsnik’s cellars were running dry.
‘Gotta be better than Duffskul’s brew,’ he said sourly. He found his goblet on the floor, groaning as he stood up straight and his back cracked. He tipped a spider out and peered in. The goblet was filthy, so he spat in it and cleaned it with his ink-stained thumb until he was satisfied.
He bit the top off the bottle with his needle-teeth and poured. As it glugged into the goblet, Skarsnik smacked his lips in anticipation. He pulled a snotling out of a cage and made it drink some. He watched it for a moment. It smiled stupidly, and obligingly did not die, so he shoved it back into its prison.
‘Cheers, snotties,’ he toasted his tasters, and slurped down a mouthful of wine. Then he lit a candle of dwarf fat and sat down to his work. ‘Now then, now then,’ he said, rubbing his hands. He was determined to update his list of tribes currently squatting in the surface city and the Great Vale. ‘Got to be organised, eh, Gobbla? Where are you if you’s not organised?’
Gobbla growled. That was not the correct response. Skarsnik stiffened. His ears prickled.
A ball of black lightning burst into being behind Skarsnik, caused him to spin round so fast he lost his face in the back of his hood.
‘Not this again! Ratties, they never learn!’ he said, wrestling with his bosshat. ‘You’ve tried this fifteen times before, ya dumb gits! Garn! Get some new ideas!’ He stood up violently, sending his papers onto the floor. His goblet he caught deftly in one hand as the table toppled from underneath it. With the other hand he snatched up his prodder, and pointed it at the fizzing orb.
Black energy throbbed, sending arcs of greenish-black sparks earthing in his possessions. Much to his annoyance, his papers caught fire. ‘Oi! Oi! Oi!’ he yelled. ‘You want to come and talk to me, use the zogging front door like everyone else! You’s burning all me stuff up! Bleeding ratties! Got no manners!’
The whirling energies settled down. Through a dark portal, an arrogant horned rat-thing, fur white as snow, robes suspiciously clean, stepped into Skarsnik’s bedroom. The grey seer surveyed the room as if it owned it, and that really annoyed Skarsnik. Actually, that was kind of the entire problem with the Eight Peaks. When would they learn that the place was his!
The rat sniffed the air and pulled a face at what it found. ‘I great Grey Seer Kranskritt. I come-skitter with deal-tidings, green-thing.’ It spoke in accented orcish, higher than a gobbo, but perfectly intelligible. Skarsnik was used to that.
‘Well, well, well – a horny rat!’ said Skarsnik back in Queekish, the language of the skaven, and that took the grey seer by surprise, to Skarsnik’s delight. ‘Tinkle-tankle little bells too. Very nice, very pretty. Learn that off an elf? Cut above the average squeaker, ain’t ya? But it’s not like your lot to turn up yerselves. Usually get some poor rodent to do your dirty. You can’t be that important.’
‘I very-very much-important, green-thing!’ said Kranskritt, eyes boiling with outrage. ‘You show me respect!’
Skarsnik leered a yellow grin and slurped upon his wine. ‘Yeah? Or what? I’ll tell you what, you goat-rat… fing, whatever you is. You’ll get angry and then I’ll blow you up with me prodder, that’s what’ll happen. It’s happened before. It’s getting late and I’ve got a lot on, so be my guest. Tempt me, and then I can gets on with me work.’
Kranskritt clashed his incisors together, eyeing the prodder nervously. Its power was well known by his kind, and feared.
‘I suppose you want to make a deal, then? Your lot don’t do well in deals with me, you realise that?’ said Skarsnik.
‘You very annoying-pain, green-thing,’ admitted Kranskritt.
‘You could have just sent me a messenger.’
‘We did. His skin-pelt now your new bedding,’ said Kranskritt, pointing disdainfully at Skarsnik’s bed.
Skarsnik looked sidelong at the fresh rat pelt serving as a coverlet. ‘Oh. Right. Yeah. He did try to tell us something, to be fair. If it makes you feel better, he was very tasty. Right then. I got things to be doing. Stuff to write. Plans to make. You know, you burneded all me papers up. Took me ages to do that. I’m not happy.’
‘Pah! Green-thing plans little plans. I know-know much more.’
‘So you said.’ Skarsnik had another drink. The wine wasn’t too bad. ‘Actually, you haven’t said much of anyfink apart from how important you is.’
The grey seer hissed and clenched its fists. This meeting was obviously paining it. ‘Tomorrow, Lord Queek of Clan Mors begins the next stage of the great war of extermination against the beard-things. He attacks in the Hall of Many Beard-Things.’
‘In the citadel?’
‘Big beard-thing fortress, yes-yes!’ snapped Kranskritt. His tail lashed.
‘Funny really, don’t know the citadel well. Even before the stunties came back, didn’t really go there. Full of traps. Nasty little stunties. I quite like being alive, y’see. No idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I show-show!’ snapped Kranskritt.
‘All right, all right, keep your horns on.’ Skarsnik giggled at the skaven as it bristled. ‘What’s the point?’
‘It would be good-proper if Lord Queek is not successful. Tunnel teams dig-melt their way upwards. I show. You take them, good quick-fast, yes? You come up into citadel. You kill many dwarf-things, many, er, stunties, you stop Queek’s easy victory.’
Skarsnik set his drink down. ‘Why? I ain’t no patsy for ratsies.’ He laughed again. He was on form today.
Kranskritt clawed his hands. ‘Foolish green-thing! Now your time is done, but still you making stupid joke-laughs! The children of Chaos rise! The Under-Empire will rule over all! You be destroyed, swept-aside like leaves in storm! You do it, and you live. Not enough for you, green-thing? You die now, if you prefer.’
‘Yeah, right. Blah, blah, blah. Squeak, squeak, squeak.’ With his teeth on his lips, Skarsnik mimed a little rat mouth jabbering. ‘I have heard it all before!’ he said, suddenly angry. ‘Year in, zogging year out! It’s always the same with your lot! Ooh, we is so clever. Ooh, we is the best. If that’s the bleeding case, how comes I’m the king of Karak Eight Peaks?’
Skarsnik stood tall. He was very large for a night goblin, bigger than the seer. The prodder thrummed with orcy power. ‘I ain’t no idiot. If you are so powerful, you don’t need me, does you?’
Kranskritt growled in irritation. He and his kind were used to skaven grovelling before them, squirting the musk of fear as soon as a seer showed its face. This goblin’s cool insolence was deeply disrespectful. ‘Very well! You help my faction, you help yourself. Hand-claw to hand-claw. Friends-alliance! No war! You take back upper deeps when beard-things dead.’
‘That’s more like it,’ said Skarsnik. ‘All the deeps to the third, and no poking yer little pink noses out of yer burrows for four winters.’
‘Skweee! Done-done,’ said Kranskritt.
‘All right then. Yeah. I’ll do it.’
‘Tomorrow! Third bell.’
Skarsnik shrugged. ‘Sorry?’
Kranskritt squealed. ‘New-day sunrise! Be in the west foundry, fifteen scurryings down-up-down-north of the Hall of a Thousand Pillars!’
‘Lots of ratties down there. In my house, I might add,’ said Skarsnik. ‘I’ll bet you know some of them. They’ll probably try to kill me. I’m not all that popular with your lot.’
‘I know you know-have ways in. Be there!’
Kranskritt disappeared with a squeak of annoyance and a burst of purplish light.
Skarsnik let out a long breath and shook his head. After a moment, he went to refill his goblet and gathered up the remains of his work. He frowned as he stared at the still-smouldering edges. ‘So then, Gobbla, rats is fighting rats again. Always the way. And when they is fighting, there’s some space for the likes of me to make something of it. Get me house back, get me halls back. Get some of them greenboys from up top down there to keep it, and for good this time! Be warm again!’
He flopped into a chair. The chamber rumbled with yet another tremor. They had never really stopped since the days the mountains had exploded. Gravel pattered onto his head. Gobbla waddled up and snuffled for a scratch. Skarsnik obliged, massaging Gobbla’s favourite spot between his eyes. ‘Of course, boy, it’s all a big trap. It always is.’ He slurped his wine. ‘But,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘why does I have this feeling this time things is a teeny bit different? And not in a good way…’
He sat there a long time rubbing Gobbla’s leathery skin, thinking thoughts no other goblin could, alone as always.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
PAYMENT FOR SERVICES RENDERED
Duffskul flapped his sleeves manically until his grubby green hand was free to press the stunty face. The fist-sized carving made a click, and the secret door it activated rumbled back into the wall. Duffskul puffed on his pipe and clucked his tongue with appreciation. It never ceased to amaze him how long the stunty-stuff kept on working.
Cold wind keened through the crack of the door, became a moan as the gap widened, and then a blast of winter that put out his pipe. Duffskul frowned and tapped the ashes from the bowl. He tucked the pipe into his belt, muttered some words to Mork and Gork, and waved his hands around desultorily. It was a poor effort, but lately the world had been so heavy with the essence of the Twin Gods, he barely had to try any more. The spell came on quickly, flattening him out, deepening the darkness of his robes. Soon all that was visible of him was a shadow like all the other shadows, excepting perhaps a greenish smear that might have been a face until you looked right at it.
The door finished its grinding recession, leaving the shaman’s way clear. Duffskul stuck his head out into the day. He was a night goblin and therefore not at all fond of daylight, but what little effort the sun put forth through the winter sky, choked as it was with ash and magic, was weak and unimposing.
He hopped out of the door. The odd flake of dirty snow splatted against his hood. Snow had been falling for weeks in the mountains, and Duffskul squinted at all the brightness of it, but wrapped up in his shadow cloak he felt safe enough from the Evil Sun. Besides, he couldn’t see it through all that cloud, so it couldn’t see him, could it? The thickest runt knew that. Even if the ground shone like silver. Humming tunelessly for courage, Duffskul tottered off, out onto the flanks of the Silverhorn.
Seventeen treacherous switchbacks later, a quick dart past a fresh skaven tunnel, and a hairy moment when a dozen rocks the size of cave squigs bounded inches past Duffskul’s nose, the aged shaman reached the bottom of the mountain. There the path joined a wider dwarf way, its cobbles much split by tree roots, which in turn descended through scrubby pine woods to join the main old road that ran through Death Pass.
Duffskul came out in a place not far from the Tight Spot, where the road went through high moorland. The dwarf road was heaving with greenskins of every kind, passing in long scrap trains out of the Dark Lands. They had started coming a few years ago, fleeing some upheaval out there and heading into the Badlands. Goblins first by the thousand, because they don’t like fighting. But lately there had been many orcs also. They had their fiercest faces on, but Duffskul was canny, almost as canny as Skarsnik, and he could see they were afraid. Duffskul wondered what was happening in the wider world. He had tried staring out through Gork and Mork’s eyes, but there was so much magic bleeding into everything that it made him dizzy just to try. Most troubling was that on the western side of the pass, where most of this lot were heading, the greenskins were coming back again. Life in the Badlands wasn’t too good either, Kruggler kept saying. All fine news for Skarsnik, thought Duffskul, as the majority of the greenskins, having nowhere else to go, were ending up in the Eight Peaks. But what did it mean? Through his persistent fug of intoxication, the old shaman couldn’t help but be concerned.
The ground rumbled. Rocks pitter-pattered down from the heights. It was not, reflected Duffskul, a question that needed answering. Earthquakes were frequent. They’d always had a bit of the old heave-ho coming from the ground, but nothing like this. Over the eastern peaks of the mountains the sky was black as night, and the sun never, ever shone there any more. The Dark Lands had become a whole lot darker.
