[Thanquol & Boneripper 03] - Thanquol's Doom Read online

  A WARHAMMER NOVEL

  THANQUOL’S DOOM

  Thanquol & Boneripper - 03

  C.L. Werner

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  To Chris and Shaunna, for putting up with poor work habits.

  This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

  At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

  But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods.

  As the time of battle draws ever nearer, the Empire needs heroes like never before.

  Prologue

  Grey witch-light slowly manifested itself, coalescing from the darkness. The eerie luminance revealed a small chamber with walls cloaked in shadow, ceiling and floor concealed in an almost tangible miasma of blackness. There was a weird, unreal quality about the chamber, as though it were a place detached from the crude boundaries of physical matter. The air held the chill of magic, the frosty atmosphere of the aethyric planes.

  Far from this sinister refuge seemed the world of men. Yet if the chamber were not a part of that world, then at least it bordered upon it. Only a few feet from the shadow-wrapt walls the teeming streets of Altdorf stretched across the greatest city in the Old World. Only a few of the denizens of that metropolis suspected the existence of such a room, a shadowy sanctum torn from the mystic veil. Yet the name of the room’s inhabitant was known to many, a name whispered in tones of awe and fear by the city’s thieves and murderers, sorcerers and heretics.

  As the grey light flickered into being, a shadowy apparition detached itself from the darkness. Like a great black bat, the cloaked figure descended upon the solitary chair standing in the hidden chamber. Darkness crept away from thin, claw-like hands, drawn back as though black gloves had suddenly melted from the pale fingers.

  A hiss of laughter rasped through the chamber as the owner of those hands leaned across the table standing beside his chair.

  A motley assortment of curious objects rested upon the table. There was a golden bowl, shallow and broad-brimmed, filled with a translucent treacle. Beside the bowl yawned a hideous golden idol, incense pouring from its fanged and leering mouth. Next to the idol was a disc of glass set into a circle of silver. The glass was neither smooth nor clear, but rough and frosted, possessing a texture that somehow suggested a mass of cobwebs.

  It was to the glass that Jeremias Scrivner, shadowmancer and secret protector of Altdorf, directed his attention. The wizard’s intense gaze bore down upon the curious glass, focussing his very soul upon the frosted mirror. He could feel the magical energies rising up from the mirror in response to his focus. They were not unlike the emanations which had disturbed his other activities, drawing him from the dark streets into this hidden sanctum.

  The shadowmancer understood the mystic summons. There were some conjurations a wizard could not fail to recognise. That of the scrying mirror was one such magic. Through careful ritual and long meditation, Jeremias Scrivner had mastered an art few other wizards had ever dared attempt. Many had been driven mad by the very effort.

  As Scrivner stared down into the glass, his astral self began to pass through the frosted mirror, seeping down into that nether realm where thought becomes substance and dream becomes reality. It was that plane of existence which only the most colossal of wills could penetrate and only a powerful intelligence could retain its sanity. Entering the realm, the shadowmancer’s body became ever more wraith-like, passing into a more perfect semblance of shadow than even his own magic could evoke on the physical plane.

  The wizard felt his head swim as stars strode past his spectral form, as suns and moons wheeled through the amber nothingness all about him. Planets spun in their orbits, dancing to the phantom whistle of a cosmic flautist. Worlds shattered as discordant melodies warped their cores, comets flared into icy brilliance as they capered through crimson nebulae.

  Scrivener forced his straying thoughts back into focus. To lose sight of purpose was to court madness. The astral self would be fractured, blown across the cosmic reaches, scattered about the eternal void, torn asunder among the symphony of the spheres. The wizard who lost purpose would lose his soul and leave behind him a gibbering husk of madness.

  Through the effort of his steely will, the shadowmancer silenced the discord. The cosmic vastness collapsed in upon itself, taking the semblance of a monstrous form. A bloated, toad-like figure with golden eyes, the spots on its mottled skin shifting in ceaseless fluctuations of hue and pattern.

  Scrivner knew he looked upon the mighty mage-priest Lord Tlaco’amoxtli’ueman, among the most potent of the reptilian wizard-kings of Lustria, the eldritch slann. Alone among thinking races, the slann could cast themselves effortlessly into the nether realm, their cold brains immune to the numbing lure of the cosmic vastness. Here they would withdraw from the crudity of physicality, devoting themselves to a fuller appreciation of the Great Math.

  The slann’s unblinking golden eyes focused upon Scrivner’s astral form. The wizard bowed in humility before Lord Tlaco’s superhuman mentality. Thoughts rushed from the mage-priest, thoughts of such magnitude that they would have seared the brain of a lesser being. Scrivner reeled against the swirling confusion of algorithms and equations, sifting through the multitude of the reptile’s contemplations for that one stream of thought which it wanted to impart upon him.

  The effort was not made easily, but at last Scrivner was able to fix his mind upon the knowledge Lord Tlaco wished to impart to him, the wisdom which had caused the slann to summon him into the astral world.

  Like a robber with his prize, Scrivner fled from the slann’s presence. It was unwise to linger in proximity to such vast intellect lest the very magnitude of its thoughts crush the supplicant’s mind.

  Back through the dancing planets and flickering comets, Scrivner’s astral shape retreated. The wraith-like essence of the wizard seeped up from the frosty surface of the mirror, snapping back into his shadow-wrapt body.

  Scrivner leaned back in his chair, his flesh numbed after the brief excursion of his soul. The wizard focused his thoughts, drawing warmth back into his chilled bones, willing his body into a speedy recovery.

  Lord Tlaco had been perturbed by a potential miscalculation, a disharmony in the equation it had been considering. That miscalculation had a name, one with which Scrivner was not unfamiliar.

  Grey Seer Thanquol.

  Chapter I

  If there was a comfortable spot in the Under-Empire, the warren of Skabreach was as far from it as it was possible to get. A filthy network of half-empty tunnels burrowing beneath the blazing heat of the Estalian sun, Skabreach was the sort of two-mouse flea-hole that any right-minded skaven did his utmost t
o escape from. It was a no-place in the middle of nowhere, a pathetic slum of fungus-farmers and chow-rat breeders. The air stank of poverty and weakness, the miserable inhabitants scurrying about with their heads cringing low against their chests and their tails dragging in the dirt. One could almost watch the piebald fur of the ratkin falling out as anxiety and malnourishment wreaked havoc on their wasted bodies.

  Grey Seer Thanquol stalked among the tunnels of Skabreach with such contemptuous arrogance that he might have been the Horned One himself. The debased skaven of the colony prostrated themselves before him, cowering against the squalor of the tunnels until his imperious presence had passed. Sometimes Thanquol amused himself by trampling one of the abased ratmen, other times he vented his anger by lashing out with his staff against a skaven skull or knocking a few fangs down a farmer’s throat with a sharp kick.

  Lately even these violent distractions had failed to improve the grey seer’s mood. After three weeks his supply of warp-snuff was perilously low and even the lowest cut-throats of Skabreach’s pathetic black market had been unable to scrounge up any more. The abominable smell of the warren was growing noxious to him: a vile mixture of fear musk and starvation. He was growing sick of eating mushrooms and chow-rat, finding the taste equally tedious despite the thousands of ways his hosts found to prepare it. He found himself almost longing for the salty taste of rat-ogre. There had been a lot of meat on old Boneripper. Had he known what to expect when he returned to skavendom, he might have rationed the flesh of his late bodyguard a bit more judiciously.

  Thanquol’s eyes glistened with spite as he reflected upon his latest misfortunes and the events that had led him to such a pass. Coerced into an insane scheme by Nightlord Sneek to help Clan Eshin murder the reptilian Xiuhcoatl, Prophet of Sotek the Snake-devil. Of course, the small matter of having to go to Xiuhcoatl’s temple in Lustria hadn’t bothered Sneek—the skulking old backstabber wasn’t going!

  If Thanquol lived to be forty winters, he would never set one paw on a ship again! First the crossing of the Great Ocean on a stolen man-thing pirate ship. Then to be cast alone in a little dinghy with his injured rat-ogre, abandoned to the doubtful mercies of tide and tempest.

  And between those two terrifying ordeals at sea! Thanquol ground his teeth together as he remembered the green hell of Lustria, a stagnant morass of swamps so overgrown they were like jungles and jungles so damp they might as well have been swamps. How he hated those jungles! Alive with insects and reptiles and huge hunting cats! Everything in the thrice-cursed jungles had been devoted to one purpose: killing and eating ratmen! Even the plants were lethal, a riotous array of poisonous foliage even a skaven couldn’t choke down and a menagerie of ghoulish growths that supplemented their diets by dragging shrieking ratkin into their slobbering maws.

  Lizardmen, snakes, zombies, even the treacherous blades of his underlings from Clan Eshin had all been poised to thwart his mission! But Thanquol had prevailed! Like one of the triumphant Grey Lords of old, he had manipulated all of his enemies into destroying each other. The zombies had settled the murderous Chang Fang. His own masterful exploitation of the human Adalwolf had spelled Xiuhcoatl’s doom. Given the choice of killing the grey seer or saving his breeder-woman from the skink’s knife, Adalwolf had acted precisely as Thanquol knew he would. The human had been his instrument of death. It was a stratagem that would make even Nightlord Sneek bow to his cunning and subtlety.

  Thanquol tugged nervously at his whiskers, remembering his horrifying encounter with the bloated toad-priest of the lizardmen. He had once stood over the Black Ark, that most sacred of skaven artefacts, and he could safely say that the magical energies he had sensed emanating from the slann had been greater. For a sorcerer, it was a chilling prospect to consider that such power could exist within a living being. His glands clenched at the mere idea of facing a creature like that again. It would be a cold day in Kweethul’s larder before Thanquol set a paw in Lustria again!

  Shaking his horned head, the robed ratman smacked a prostrate farmer across the backside with his staff, evoking a squeak of frightened pain. The pathetic maggots of Skabreach lacked even the spleen to bare their fangs when they were struck. Not that Thanquol could entirely blame them. After all, it wasn’t every day one was abused by the mightiest hero in the Under-Empire.

  The narrow earthen tunnels pressed close against the grey seer as he made his way through the wretched warren. Sometimes he was forced to turn sideways to make any progress, the passage so tight that his whiskers brushed against both sides at once. The Estalian sun baked the ground into something approximating the toughness of concrete, making the excavation of even the smallest burrow a gruelling ordeal.

  A more prosperous community might have bought one of the warpstone-powered digging machines crafted by Clan Skryre or hired the use of one of the gigantic moles bred by the beast-masters of Clan Moulder. But Skabreach was far from such developments. Its only recourse towards expansion was to send gangs of skaven into the tunnels with shovels and picks. As a result, everything in the settlement was close and confined, even by the standards of the underfolk.

  Thanquol could not leave the warren behind him soon enough. When his boat had washed ashore on the Estalian coast, the grey seer had spent several frantic days searching for a hole that would lead him back into the tunnels of the Under-Empire. A hint of skaven-scent in the air had at last drawn him to one of the pit-vents leading down into Skabreach. There had been a moment of anxiety on his part when he discovered where he was. As an outpost of Clan Skab, Thanquol had every reason to suspect a violent reception. A warlord clan whose power he had played a part in diminishing through his hand in both the assassination of Warlord Vermek Skab and the near-eradication of Skab’s holdings beneath the human city of Nuln during the Battle of Nuln, the ratmen of Clan Skab weren’t likely to forget him anytime soon. Only a subtle mix of bribery and blackmail had enabled Griznekt Mancarver, Clanlord of Skab, to retain his seat on the Council of Thirteen. It made Thanquol’s tail twitch to think there was somebody among the Lords of Decay with more reason to want him dead than Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch.

  His momentary fear, in hindsight, had been absurd. Probably a result of eating the much too-salty flesh of his late and unlamented bodyguard for so many nights at sea. There wasn’t a rat in all Skabreach with the spleen to look at him, much less think of lifting a claw against him. Even the ruling warlord, a blight-eyed fawning rodent named Ibkikk Snatchclaw, had proven himself to be a grovelling lick-spittle. From almost the first moment, Thanquol had the warlord kissing his feet and falling over himself to keep the fearsome grey seer appeased.

  It would have been a pleasant experience, but for the annoyance that the best Skabreach had to offer was almost as bad as being back in the jungle. What the warren could produce on its own was barely enough for subsistence and the cringing ratmen were so terrified of the human knights who patrolled the surface that they wouldn’t so much as poke their noses above ground, much less scavenge for supplies. All in all, Thanquol was so disgusted he would recommend the place be demolished when he got back to Skavenblight. He was pretty certain he’d heard Ibkikk muttering seditious talk that was both heretical and blasphemous. Or at least certain he could make Seerlord Kritislik believe he had.

  Thanquol kicked another cowering ratman from his path and hastened his pace. There was a dank, musty stink on the air now, meaning he was getting close to his objective. Soon, the tunnel began to widen, the walls becoming jagged and smooth, unmarred by the tools of miners and the claws of slaves. His whiskers twitched in amusement. It was the smell of the river! The subterranean waterway that linked this forsaken outpost to the rest of the Under-Empire.

  As the tunnel widened, so did the press of skaven filling it. The grovelling wretches abased themselves as they caught the grey seer’s scent, but in doing so they only placed themselves more directly in his path. Ordinarily, he would have bludgeoned and kicked the cringing vermin until they got out of his way, b
ut the smell of the river made Thanquol anxious to escape the narrow tunnel. Callously, he scurried over the bent backs of the other skaven, indifferent to the squeaks of pain rising from the living carpet beneath his paws.

  Soon the tunnel broadened into a cavern. Ramshackle huts built from bone and tanned rathide littered almost every corner of the cramped cave, some of them suspended like the nests of bats from the ceiling. The steady rumble of the river pulsed below the clamour of hundreds of skaven chittering and squealing as they scurried about the settlement. Thanquol’s lip curled back in contempt as he noted the crude lanterns that illuminated the squalor. Skabreach was so poor it couldn’t even afford proper warp-lanterns. Instead of the comforting green glow of smouldering warpstone, the hovels were lit by the flickering orange light of ratskin lanterns, the pungent stink of burning dung clinging to the black smoke billowing away from each light.

  To be quit of this place, Thanquol was ready to brave anything. Even the thought that a slum like Skabreach might be too lowly to draw the attention of Nightlord Sneek and the assassins of Clan Eshin wasn’t comforting enough to make him embrace the flea-infested warren as a refuge.

  Thanquol hurried through the crowded runs between the rathide shacks, kicking and clawing his way through the press of scabby skaven bodies. His eyes were fixed upon his goal: the massive pier and warehouse maintained by Skabreach’s small clutch of water-rats from Clan Skurvy. Among the few skaven with an affinity for water and the lunatic capacity for braving the subterranean rivers of the Under-Empire, Clan Skurvy was a powerful force within the skaven economy; its clanlord, the self-appointed Fleetmaster Viskit Ironscratch, enjoyed a position upon the Council of Thirteen. Ironscratch held tremendous power through the indispensable services of his armada of barges and scows. Without clans like Skurvy and Sleekit, valuable cargoes of food and slaves would rot before they reached the markets of Skavenblight. The iron hook which served the Fleetmaster for a left paw was poised against the belly of every ratman in Skavenblight and the Council knew it. Grudgingly, they had allowed Clan Skurvy to increase its reach until even a forgotten slum like Skabreach was not beyond its influence.