[Thanquol & Boneripper 01] - Grey Seer Read online

  Behind him, in the perpetual shadow of the cellar, a figure stirred, its footsteps echoing as it too deserted the room, vanishing into the deeper darkness beyond.

  Grey Seer Thanquol found that his progress through Clan Moulder’s stretch of the skrawl was much easier with Boneripper’s enormity looming beside him. The mutant rat ogre was a creature of some notoriety among the merchants and beastmasters of Clan Moulder. Few of them had failed to see the brute in the clan’s fighting pits, tearing through every beast, slave and captive he was pitted against. Beside such gruesome memories, even the fearsome reputation of Skavenblight’s elite stormvermin was insignificant.

  He’d given Kratch the unenviable job of holding onto Boneripper’s leash. It would take time for the rat ogre to accept his new master, though feeding him the best part of his previous owner had certainly helped improve the monster’s attitude. If Boneripper was still hungry, Thanquol felt better with Kratch being the closest thing to him. Being eaten by one’s own bodyguard was a terribly silly way for someone of his fame to end his brilliant career. With that in mind, Thanquol glanced at his apprentice. The wretch was once again treacherously lingering behind, stretching Boneripper’s chain to its full extent. Thanquol snarled a few threats and brought his apprentice sullenly back into place. Selfless, loyal underlings were so very hard to find.

  Up ahead, Thanquol saw his stormvermin suddenly grow tense. Squeals and frightened squeaks rose from the crowd filling the passageway, the musk of fear rising prominently among the fug of the streets. Skaven scurried and scrambled into shops and dived into slave pens in a maddened, frightened dash for safety. Low chittering howls told the reason for their flight. Thanquol snarled at his stormvermin as the two albinos shared an anxious glance, then retreated behind the bulk of Boneripper. As an afterthought, he grabbed Kratch by the shoulders. He wasn’t forgetting that the rat ogre might still be hungry.

  A heavy, stagnant smell assaulted Thanquol’s nose, a reek of beasts and blood, ratlike yet lacking the pleasantness of a purely rodent scent. Loping into view a few moments later was the source of the scent. A thrill of terror ran through Thanquol’s glands as he saw the crouched shape, thinking for a moment that the rat-beast had somehow returned to hunt him down. It took only an instant to realise that the creature he gazed upon was much smaller, only about twice the size of a skaven. It was more doglike than ratlike, with a broad build and powerful, square-set jaws. The handlike paws and long scaly tail were distinctly ratlike, however, and when it sniffed the air, it lifted its body in the fashion of a rat rather than sniffing the ground like a dog.

  It was a wolf-rat, one of Clan Moulder’s loathsome creations, a fearsome, barely tractable beast bred for those warlords and degenerates for whom the usual strains of giant rat and mole were not large enough. Thanquol grinned savagely, pushing Kratch away and cuffing the apprentice for observing his moment of fear. Formidable as a wolf-rat might be for a lone skaven, Thanquol was anything but alone.

  Then the wolf-rat caught his scent. It stared straight at him, singling the grey seer from among his guards. It was an unsettling moment, made worse when the animal uttered another of its chittering howls. Instantly other shapes loped into view, first one, then another. Before Thanquol could even twitch a whisker, a half dozen of the mutant beasts filled the tunnel ahead.

  “Stand-fight!” Thanquol snarled as his stormvermin started to back away. They looked at him, eyes wide with alarm. Thanquol raised his staff threateningly. “Stand-fight or burn-burn!”

  Then there was no more time for threats and commands. Howling, the wolf-rats bounded down the tunnel, foam dripping from their jaws, their eyes still locked on the robed figure of the grey seer. Thanquol forced his eyes shut, focusing his mind on the power of the Horned Rat. A green glow gathered about his staff. Opening his eyes again, he sent a bolt of shimmering energy crashing into the oncoming pack. One of the wolf-rats yelped, crumpling as the bolt struck it. Smoke rose from its singed fur, blood dripping from its mangled body as it dragged itself away across the floor of the tunnel.

  The other wolf-rats kept coming. They struck the position of the stormvermin like a furry avalanche. Each of the white-furred warriors lashed out, their halberds flashing like scythes through the beasts, slashing their flesh and splitting their bones. Any lesser skaven would have been overwhelmed on the instant by such adversaries. The elite warriors from Skavenblight managed the impossible: they managed to hold their ground long enough for Thanquol to draw upon his powers once more.

  The temptation to nibble a piece of warpstone flashed through Thanquol’s mind, but the hazard, the way he had lost control, was too fresh in his memory for him to weaken to it. Instead he concentrated and evoked the might of the Horned Rat once more. Another bolt of energy, this time smashing into a pair of wolf-rats as they swarmed over one of his stormvermin. The blast incinerated all three, engulfing them in burning, roaring malignance that scorched the fur from their flesh and melted the marrow in their bones. Thanquol was certain the beleaguered warrior died happy knowing his sacrifice had destroyed two of the grey seer’s enemies.

  The other stormvermin was not so diligent about delaying the grey seer’s foes. Occupied with one wolf-rat, the warrior allowed the other two to get past him, the beasts heading straight for Thanquol. No time for concentration now. Thanquol grabbed one of the warpstone tokens, raising it to his muzzle. He was suddenly struck violently from behind, the nugget of warpstone flying from his paw. Thanquol dived after it, scrambling to recover it.

  Too late he realised the mistake of his instinctive dive for the errant warpstone. Thanquol lifted his horned head to see both of the wolf-rats driving down upon him. Their dripping jaws flashed, their clawed paws slashed at the earthen floor. As one, the beasts leapt, pouncing upon their prey. Thanquol covered his head and cursed anything and everything he could think of.

  Stabbing teeth and slashing paws never touched Thanquol’s fur. The grey seer uncovered his head and looked up in disbelief. Towering above him was Boneripper, and in two of the rat ogre’s immense paws he held a struggling wolf-rat. The brute seemed oblivious to the jaws that snapped at his fingers, at the paws that slashed at his chest. With a dull, disinterested look, he simply stared at the animals, almost as though trying to figure out what they were.

  Thanquol understood now. In his diatribe against all skavendom, he must have squealed Boneripper’s name. The rat ogre had reacted with admirable speed, rallying to his master’s defence. Even in so short a time, he had accepted both his new name and his new master. Surely another sign that the beast had been gifted to Thanquol by the Horned Rat himself.

  The grey seer looked up at his bodyguard and the struggling wolf-rats in his paws. He looked down the tunnel to where the last stormvermin was just finishing off his opponent with a stab of his halberd into its throat. Thanquol looked back at Boneripper, determined the rat ogre could do better. “Boneripper!” he called, pleased when the brute fixed his dull gaze on the grey seer. Thanquol made a snapping motion with his paw. “Rip-tear!” he snarled. “Rip-tear!”

  Boneripper nodded, a loathsome human gesture he must have been taught by Schafwitt’s decadent human mannerisms, but instead of ripping apart the wolf-rats, the rat ogre began to squeeze. Tighter and tighter his paws closed, ignoring the desperate spasms of terror from his captives. Thanquol could hear bones crack beneath the pressure, then a hideous squish as the heads of both animals popped from their necks. It wasn’t what he’d had in mind, but he was reasonably satisfied with the results. As a reward, Thanquol allowed Boneripper to settle down onto his haunches and start to feed off the carrion.

  “Master-master! You are safe-well! No-no pain-hurt?”

  Thanquol’s claws tapped the hilt of his sword, then he reminded himself that he might still need Kratch. For prudence, he’d have to dismiss that treacherous shove from behind as an innocent accident. “Be more careful fool-flesh!” Thanquol snapped, contenting himself with swatting Kratch’s snout with his s
taff.

  A quick investigation further up the tunnel found a dead Clan Moulder merchant inside a shop with an empty kennel. A scrap of the grey seer’s old robe, the one soiled during the fight in Clan Mawrl’s warren, was clutched in the dead traitor’s paw. Having failed with Clan Eshin’s gutter runners, Thanquol’s enemies in Under-Altdorf had turned to Clan Moulder’s beasts. He didn’t like to think what their next trick might be.

  Perhaps he would spend a few more of the council’s warpstone tokens after all. Thanquol snapped a curt order to Kratch and the last of his stormvermin. They would head for the armour shops of Clan Mors. Thanquol would feel a bit better with something heavier than his fur standing between himself and a stab in the dark. Then perhaps they would visit the temple again and collect some protective charms and amulets, just in case his enemies decided to use something less physical than a knife or a wolf-rat.

  Dr. Loew descended the stairs that connected his living quarters with his shop, taking extra care to step only upon the thickly carpeted centre of the stairway so that his footfalls might be muffled. One of the alchemist’s hands was wrapped about the handle of a heavy ceramic pestle, holding the tool after the fashion of a horseman’s mace, while the other hand clutched the glass neck of a more grisly weapon; a powerful acid derived from vitriol and troll vomit. He paused in his descent, cocking his head in a wary, watchful manner, his senses trained on the gloom of his darkened shop, waiting for any betraying sound to again reach his ears. It had been many years since any of the scum of the waterfront had been bold enough to try and rob him. Loew was determined to make an example of this clumsy burglar.

  The sound came again, a scratching rattle from the direction of his workroom. The alchemist’s expression grew vicious. It was trespass enough to try and steal his wares, but to disturb his experiments was a violation he would not forgive. As the sounds continued, Loew’s pace quickened, caution cast aside in his anger. He pushed through the darkness, rushing past the shadowy shelves of bottles and potions, towards the curtain that separated workroom from shop. Abruptly, the alchemist froze, every sense afire with alarm.

  Before him, the shadows seemed to reach out, to assume a solidity of shape and form. Something was standing between him and the curtain, something that seemed to mock his efforts to see it. Loew started to lift the bottle of acid, but a frightened chill that had nothing to do with the sudden coldness of the room arrested the motion. From the darkness, a voice hissed at him.

  “Return to your bed,” the whisper warned him. “There is nothing to find here except death.”

  There was a fearful menace in that voice, a nightmarish air of unreality that made even the alchemist pale as he heard it. Loew took a few stumbling steps back almost before he was aware of his own retreat. Remembering the sounds that had drawn him downstairs, remembering what it was he had left in his workroom, the alchemist drew upon his own miserly greed to put steel in his spine.

  “Who are you to order me around in my own home?” Loew snarled indignantly. “I’ll settle with you, be you ghost or phantom!” He started to raise the heavy pestle for a strike at the patch of thick darkness where he judged the whisper to have emanated. Suddenly, the darkness lessened, fading away and exposing what it had concealed. The pestle dropped from nerveless fingers.

  Tall, swathed in the heavy folds of a charcoal-grey cloak, his head hidden beneath the shadow of a deep hood, his face muffled beneath a thick grey scarf, all that Loew could see was a sharp hawklike nose and a pair of smoky grey eyes. The alchemist’s willpower was trapped by the intense stare of those eyes, swirling pools of darkness that drew him into their formless depths. There was power in that chill gaze, power beyond that of hypnotist and street-corner mystic, Loew could feel the icy touch of the arcane world in those eyes.

  The sinister apparition raised a hand swathed in black, motioning for silence from the stunned alchemist. “Preserve your life, forget what was brought to you,” the shade’s hissing voice told Loew.

  A sound from beyond the curtain, louder than anything Loew had heard before, broke the hypnotic spell that had started to numb his mind. The alchemist tore his eyes away from the smoky pits of the apparition’s hidden face, rushing past the menacing darkness and seizing the curtain in a trembling hand. With a snarl of defiance, Loew ripped the curtain away, ready to confront the burglar who had violated his workroom.

  For the second time, Dr. Loew was confronted by a sight that drained the strength from his spine. The alchemist’s retreat was more rapid than before, his terror impossibly even greater than when he had been confronted by the cloaked wraith in his shop.

  What was rummaging about his workroom was no burglar, at least no human burglar. It was a gigantic, feral thing, its general shape that of some enormous vermin. A great swathe of scorched, crusty hide stretched along its side from the edge of its snout to the tip of its tail, the ugly wound still dripping a filthy blue treacle that sizzled as it struck the floor. As Loew gasped in horror, the rat-beast swung its head around, fixing the alchemist with its beady red eyes.

  With a low chittering growl, the monster began to stalk after the terrified man, its fangs gleaming like daggers in the gloom.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Black Dust, Black Death

  Iron fingers gripped Dr. Loew’s shoulder, pulling him back, throwing him to the floor. The alchemist could only gape in astonishment as the spectral figure of the intruder stepped between himself and the ghastly monster stealing slowly from the workroom. Even in the clutch of terror, Loew was horrified by the madness of such an act. Phantom or thief, it was suicide to stand before such a monstrous abomination.

  “Do not move,” the hissing whisper commanded, the force of the voice brooking no dissent. The grey-shrouded figure threw his arms wide, his splayed fingers pointing to the ceiling. Strange, rasping words crawled through the air and Loew felt the coldness of his shop become steadily more pronounced, little beads of ice beginning to form on the floor.

  More remarkable than the falling temperature, however, was the way the darkness seemed to swell and thicken. Shadows crawled from every corner and crack, swirling about the cloaked man, clinging to him like a second skin. In less time than it took for Loew’s mind to register the fact, the man was gone, veiled in a patch of solid blackness that all but filled the doorway to the workroom.

  Loew’s breath came in a ragged gasp. A dabbler in the arcane, the alchemist knew a master of the black arts working his craft when he saw—or failed to see—one. The intruder, the strange apparition who had warned him away from the workroom, was a magister, though whether one of the sanctioned wizards of the Colleges or some renegade warlock, he could not say.

  Loew quickly forgot his concerns over the wizard’s identity and purpose. More important to him, at the moment, was the effect his magic had upon the rat-beast. As soon as the wizard bound that wall of darkness about himself, the monster stopped its slow, steady creep into the shop. Its beady eyes blinked, its head swung about in confusion. It reared up, sniffing at the air, trying to pick up the scent of the prey it could no longer see. Even this sense was foiled by the wizard’s spell.

  Rendered invisible to both sight and scent, the rat-beast lost interest in Dr. Loew and his mysterious benefactor. Almost absently, it swung back around, pawing its way across the floor, its claws scraping deep furrows in the wood. Loew could just see its verminous bulk as it sniffed and snuffled about his workspace. Sometimes a decayed tongue would flick from its mouth to lick at his tools and instruments. There was more than randomness in what the creature chose to study and what it ignored. With horror, Loew realised what had drawn the monster to his shop!

  The alchemist could not restrain himself when he saw the rat-beast lurch up, setting its paws on a table so that it could sniff at a cupboard set into the wall. It was here that he had secreted the metal box in which he kept the wyrdstone Dietrich had left with him! When the rat-beast’s dagger-like fangs began to gnaw at the wood, any last trace of questio
n about its intentions were gone.

  The monster was after the wyrdstone!

  Avarice overcame terror. A shriek of protest burst from Loew’s lungs as he lunged past the blurred form of the wizard, plunging through the chill darkness and into the workroom beyond. With a roar that would not have shamed a Norscan berserker, the alchemist dashed the vial of acid full into the face of the rat-beast as it spun about to snarl at him. The hulking monster recoiled, its fur and flesh sizzling beneath the clinging, burning fluid. Its bulk lurched backward, crushing the cabinet into splinters. The metal box with the stone shard clattered to the floor, little tinny protests rising from it as it rolled away.

  Instinctively, Loew started to dive for the box, but once again he felt a clutch of iron close about his shoulder. The wizard’s touch snapped the alchemist back to his senses. Terror resumed its dominance of the man’s mind. Loew’s eyes bulged as he saw the stricken rat-beast rise from the floor, the flesh of its face still steaming, patches of bone gleaming through the corroded skin, its giant fangs made all the more enormous without lips to cover them. It chittered madly, then sprang like a raging mammoth.

  Loew was flung to the floor by the powerful thrust of the wizard’s steely arm. At the same instant, the magister was fading, his body twisting and shifting as though possessing all the formlessness of water. The lunging monster charged into the space between alchemist and wizard, the place where only a breath before, both men had been standing. The rat-beast’s pounce had it crashing against the wall, its head smashing through the partition that separated shop from workroom. Growling with the fury of a tempest, the monster tugged and tore, seeking to rip itself free of the obstruction.