02 - Temple of the Serpent Read online

  Shaking his head, Thanquol fought down the overwhelming influence of the warpstone. He focused on what was at hand. All he needed to do was kill the assassin, nothing more.

  Suddenly, Thanquol’s concentration was shattered by a deafening shriek of terror. The air was pungent with the stink of musk and the very ground shook with the violence of hundreds of ratmen stampeding. The grey seer turned and watched as the panicked crowd surged away from him, horrified by the crackling lightning dancing about the head of his staff, frightened by the malignant aura that had settled about him like a mantle as he invoked the awful magic of the Horned Rat. The mob surged away from him as quickly and as far as it could. But even the wide streets of Skavenblight could not accommodate the mass of struggling, frantic ratmen. They soon became packed and pressed together at either end of the street, unable to flee further. When that happened, the blind terror of the mob drove them back, turned them around to find escape in the other direction.

  From either end of the street, a wave of squealing, snarling skaven came stampeding. Between the two panicked hordes stood Grey Seer Thanquol, suddenly feeling very small and vulnerable for all the magic burning through his veins.

  The assassin chittered maliciously from his perch upon the wall. Thanquol scowled spitefully as the murderer climbed to the roof of the building and retreated from view. This had been the plan all along, he realised. The assassin wasn’t trying to kill Thanquol with the darts, he was trying to provoke him into using his magic to defend himself, thereby throwing the mob into a panic. When Thanquol was crushed beneath the paws of the crowd there would be no evidence that his death had been the work of Clan Eshin.

  Defiantly, Thanquol stood his ground. Mostly because there was nowhere to run. He raised his staff, sent a crackling blast of green lightning searing into the foremost ranks of the stampeding skaven. Several ratmen shrieked and fell, their bodies quickly crushed beneath the feet of the mob. In a blind panic, the skaven were oblivious even to the death-dealing sorcery of Thanquol. The grey seer turned and sent a second blast searing through the ranks of the mass of skaven rushing towards him from the other end of the street. Again, the mob refused to break.

  Thanquol spurted the musk of fear. He could blast a hundred of the craven vermin into cinders and still there would be enough of them left to crush his body beneath their feet!

  As he contemplated his doom, a huge shape charged at him from across the street. Thanquol spun, sending a blast of lightning crackling past Boneripper’s face. The panic of the skaven mob had infected Boneripper’s tiny brain! The slack-witted brute was turning on him!

  Thanquol did not have time to send another blast of magic at Boneripper before the beast was upon him. Huge claws closed around the grey seer’s body, pinning his arms to his sides and lifting him from the ground. Thanquol struggled and cursed, trying to wriggle free of his treacherous bodyguard’s grip.

  The panicked mob of skaven came crashing together, savagely attacking one another as the two sides met. The street became a sea of flashing fangs and raking claws as the frightened skaven tore at each other. The pungent stink of black skaven blood filled Thanquol’s senses.

  Boneripper lifted the grey seer still higher, keeping him well above the frenzied mob’s reach.

  Fear drained out of Thanquol and he bit back the last of he curses he had been heaping on his bodyguard’s head. Such a clever servant, he considered, to see his master’s distress and come rushing to his aid.

  He would need to find some suitable way to reward Boneripper for such selfless service.

  Perhaps he would let Boneripper eat Sneek’s heart after he tore it from the Nightlord’s mutilated chest.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Streets of Skavenblight

  Grey Seer Thanquol sat in the gloom of his rented burrow and carefully plotted his next move. Nightlord Sneek had failed in his first attempt to murder him, but he knew the master of Clan Eshin would try again. Once the assassins had a skaven’s scent, they never lost it.

  The warpstone-induced madness had passed. Thanquol wasn’t thinking in terms of killing Sneek. The very thought set his body trembling with fear. No, the only way to save his hide was to find out why Clan Eshin wanted him dead. Then he would need to find a way to make them change their mind. The only other alternative was to try and find an ally powerful enough to protect him from Sneek. That wouldn’t be an easy task. None of the warlord clans, even the mighty Mors, was strong enough to defy Eshin. The warlock-engineers of Clan Skryre were cosy as fleas with the assassins, developing all kinds of new murder devices for them. No help there.

  Clan Moulder was a possibility, if the ungrateful beastmasters didn’t blame him for the slave revolt that had nearly destroyed Hell Pit! Now was not the time to remind them that the attack on their city had been the work of the rebellious mutant Lurk Snitchtongue, not the steadfast and selfless Grey Seer Thanquol. Pestilens, the traditional adversaries of Eshin, was an even worse proposition. Thanquol had earned his fame at the expense of Pestilens by defeating the renegade Plaguelord Skratsquik. Now he’d undermined their efforts to steal the Wormstone and been an unwilling participant in the destruction of Nurglitch’s favourite disciple, Lord Skrolk. The only reason the plague monks would protect him from Sneek would be so they could kill him themselves.

  Thanquol picked a flea from his fur, staring in distaste at his grungy surroundings. It had been too dangerous to return to his own chambers: that would be the first place his would-be killers would look for him. The burrow his failing store of warp-tokens had allowed him to rent was little more than a hole clawed out from the muddy foundations of Skavenblight. The dirt walls dripped with moisture, ugly orange roots protruding from them at every turn. The ceiling was sagging, a few rotten beams and pillars cobbled from broken bricks the only thing keeping it from collapsing into the burrow. For accoutrements, Thanquol had a pile of insect-infested straw that smelled like it had last been changed when the Grey Lords were in power. A dilapidated desk pilfered from some Tilean villa leaned against a corner while an iron-banded trunk slowly rotted in another. This, the services of a diseased human slave, three meals a day and all the stagnant water he could suck from a bronze pipe in the tunnel outside his chamber had cost Thanquol seventeen precious warp-tokens.

  That was what angered him the most. His formidable reputation should have been enough to bully the burrow-master down to at least seven warp-tokens. It was almost as if the ratman hadn’t wanted Thanquol in his tunnels. Even after Boneripper broke a few of the insolent swine’s fingers, he’d stuck to his price. The filthy rat knew that Thanquol was in hiding and had used that knowledge to mercilessly extort money from him. Thanquol didn’t like to think that news of his problems with Clan Eshin had percolated down even into the squalor of the Sink, but it certainly looked that way. He had hoped to lose himself among the teeming masses of Skavenblight’s lesser clans while he plotted his next move. But if the wretches around him were more afraid of Clan Eshin than they were of Grey Seer Thanquol…

  He ground his fangs together in aggravation. If the filthy sewer rats of the flea-clans thought they could snitch to Sneek about his being down in the Sink he’d gut every last one of the vermin! He’d burn down their hovels and collapse their burrows! He’d string their living guts from one end of Skavenblight to the other! He’d feed their nethers…

  Thanquol snapped from his vengeful ruminations, his nose bristling as the stink of human blood struck his senses. He could see the dim outline of the man-thing slave at the entrance to his burrow. The dim-witted thing had probably been stumbling about in the dark again. Humans were as good as blind down in the tunnels anyway. Thanquol was sorely tempted to let Boneripper take a bite out of the idiot thing, but was less than optimistic about his chances of training the rat ogre to do domestic chores.

  “I did not call you,” Thanquol snapped irritably, lashing his tail against the floor.

  The slave staggered a few steps deeper into his burrow and Thanquol was a
ble to see the wretch better. He could see the scabby, sickly skin of the slave, clinging tight to his bones. He could see the thin, scraggly hair growing in patches on the human’s sore-strewn scalp. Most of all, however, he could see the wet, dripping wound that stretched across the man-thing’s neck.

  Someone had slit the slave’s throat from ear to ear.

  Alarm flared down Thanquol’s spine while fear-musk spurted from his glands. The grey seer leapt towards the pile of straw, tearing through it to retrieve his sword and staff, cursing himself for using his last piece of warpstone in the street.

  Clan Eshin had found him! Clan Eshin was here!

  Something blacker than black oozed into the burrow from the darkness of the tunnel. For a frantic moment, Thanquol imagined that the shadow wizard had followed him from Altdorf. Then the blackness moved towards him, moved with a speed beyond even a wizard-thing. He could see a black-furred hand gripping a dripping blade.

  But Grey Seer Thanquol was not the only one who saw. Bellowing his fury, Boneripper lurched up from the floor, his back cracking against the sagging ceiling of the burrow. Thumping his claws against his chest, the crouching rat ogre lumbered towards the assassin.

  The killer spun away from Thanquol, springing at Boneripper in a fluid motion that carried him under the hulking monster’s claws. The rat ogre snarled in pain, his jaws snapping at the murderous shadow as it sprang away from him. Boneripper took a single step in pursuit, then crashed noisily to the floor. In that brief moment of contact, the assassin had expertly severed the tendons in each of the rat ogre’s legs.

  Boneripper snarled and snapped from the floor, dragging himself after the assassin. Thanquol hoped killing the brute would distract his attacker long enough for him to call upon his own powers to annihilate the scum. He could feel sorcerous energies gathering about him, seeping down into his veins. He felt a pang of longing for warpstone that churned his belly into a little knot of agony. His system felt empty drawing magic into it without warpstone to support the effort. Angrily, Thanquol gnashed his fangs and redoubled his exertions. If he did not strike quickly, there wouldn’t be any more warpstone, either now or later.

  Impossibly, even with a raging rat ogre roaring at him, the assassin noticed Thanquol’s efforts. Even as the grey seer’s eyes began to glow with power, a sharpened length of steel flew through the darkness.

  The knife slammed into Thanquol’s staff, splintering the wood and missing the grey seer by inches. He stared in horror at the evil-smelling blade and the green venom dripping from its edge. The poison wasn’t applied, it was oozing from the black metal itself. A weeping blade, a weapon carried by only the most expert of Eshin’s killers!

  Repulsed, horrified, Thanquol pulled the revolting thing free and threw it to the floor. His concentration broken, the grey seer’s eyes no longer glowed as he cringed against the wall of his burrow.

  The assassin, however, was again focused upon Boneripper. With a leap and a roll, the skaven swept beneath the rat ogre’s claws, bringing the blades he carried in his hands scything through the tendons of the powerful arms. The killer ended his attack just beneath Boneripper’s lashing jaws. A third blade, clutched in the coils of the assassin’s tail, stabbed upwards, scraping past Boneripper’s fangs to punch through the roof of his mouth and pierce the tiny brain inside his thick skull.

  Boneripper shivered, gasped, and then crashed against the floor. The assassin chittered coldly and stepped away from his kill, turning towards Thanquol once more.

  The death of his bodyguard had taken less than a few heartbeats, too little time for even Thanquol to find an opportunity to escape. Now, as he watched the black-cloaked murderer creep towards him, sheer desperation gripped Thanquol’s mind. Drawing quickly upon the dregs of magical energy still left in his body from his still-born spell, Thanquol sent a bolt of raw aethyric energy sizzling towards the assassin. The nimble ratman easily dived out of the spell’s path. It continued onwards, smashing into one of the supports. A great groaning noise sounded from overhead. Eyes wide with horror, Thanquol watched as the ceiling came crashing down.

  Thanquol expected to be crushed. For an instant, he thought he had been as his body was seized and all the air smashed from his lungs. Only when he was in the tunnel outside, coughing dust from his mouth, did he realise he was still alive.

  At least for the moment. Looking up from the floor of the tunnel, Thanquol found himself gazing at a sinister figure swathed in black. Black fur, black leather leggings, black silk trousers and blouse, black cloak and hood. Even the assassin’s scaly tail had been dyed black and the teeth in his muzzle had been stained to match the rest of him. Only the eyes were different, red and gleaming with amused malice. The eyes, and the green poison glowing on the edge of the knife he still held in his tail.

  “You owe your fur to the Nightlord,” the assassin said. His voice sent shivers down Thanquol’s spine. It was a thin whispering sound, the kind of noise a dagger makes as it sharpens against a stone.

  Thanquol’s head swam as he heard the words. Clearly it had been no effort on his part that had saved him from the collapse. But why would the assassin save him after coming so far into the depths of the Sink to kill him?

  The grey seer bared his fangs in a threatening display and made a show of brushing mud from his robes. “Since it was you who put my life in fear-doubt, I am…”

  The assassin bared his own fangs, his tail arcing to his side, its menacing blade poised to strike. “You owe your fur to the Nightlord,” the skaven repeated, his whisper becoming a growl. “Because all-all he sent me to do was find-bring you.”

  Thanquol wasn’t sure exactly where in Skavenblight Clan Eshin had built Sneek’s pagoda. It was somewhere deep under the city, the pressure on his ears told him that, yet there was also the stagnant smell of the Blighted Marshes in his nose that told him he was near the surface. Eshin made a habit of using dwarf slaves to build their strongholds, and the dwarf-things had many ways of tricking skaven. Perhaps they used extremely dense rock in the ceiling to increase the sense of pressure, or maybe they had some way of piping the smell of the marshes deep underground. It was a puzzle Thanquol promised himself he would look into.

  Allowing, of course, that he ever left this place alive.

  He stood in a dark, spacious chamber. The floor beneath his claws was piled with elaborately woven rugs, their pattern tickling the pads of his paws. The ceiling was lost somewhere in the darkness above him, the walls obscured by silken veils that swayed and trembled in the warm breeze that crawled through the room. A thick, heady scent of incense pressed in around him, filling his nose with a not unpleasant stinging feeling, like a faint echo of the warpstone snuff he enjoyed upon occasion.

  Considering his favourite diversion, Thanquol dug a paw into the pocket of his robe. He stared in confusion at the slow, clumsy way his hand moved. There was a warning snarl from behind him, and a powerful claw dug painfully into his shoulder. Thanquol spun around at the contact, a spasm of fear running through him as he realised how slow his reactions were.

  The incense! Far more potent than even that employed by the Lords of Decay in the Shattered Tower, it was intoxicating his nerves with its soporific stink, rendering him slow and clumsy. His thoughts were no less sharp, however, and a grim gleam crept into Thanquol’s eye as he saw how slowly the Eshin guard moved to restrain him. Whatever the vapour was, the assassins were not immune to it either.

  The guard bared his blackened fangs, reading the change in Thanquol’s posture as a sign of the grey seer’s discovery. Like lightning, his paw drew a dripping knife from beneath his blouse. Thanquol pulled away, trying to ward away the assassin with his paws. This was the same killer who had murdered Boneripper. He was under no delusion about his ability to meet the assassin’s speed, even without the incense dulling his reflexes.

  “Peace, Grey Seer Thanquol,” a voice like the whisper of a drawn dagger scratched at the edge of Thanquol’s hearing. The Eshin guard-rat released
him and he turned back around to find himself facing a raised dais upon which stood an elaborately engraved throne, a seat of musky-scented wood carved from top to foot with writhing dragons and leering devils. Impossibly, the sputtering light of the warpstone braziers smouldering to either side of the chair illuminated the crown and sides, but left the seat itself in perfect shadow. From that shadow, a pair of sinister red eyes glistened in serene malevolence. A shiver crawled down Thanquol’s spine as he understood who it was sitting in the darkness.

  Nightlord Sneek’s black-furred paw emerged into the light to beckon him forwards. Thanquol could see the long, ghastly nails that tipped each of Sneek’s fingers, grotesque things that had not been gnawed or trimmed since he’d risen to the ranks of the Council. Now each was almost as long as the Nightlord’s hands. They had been painted with curious characters, the weird writing of the men of Cathay. It was a language unknown even to most of the Lords of Decay, a secret known only to the Nightlord and his closest disciples. Thanquol wondered what sinister message was written on those talons and who was meant to read them.

  The guard-rat sheathed his weeping blade, shuffling back to lean against one of the Cathayan columns that lined the centre of the chamber. His eyes, however, continued to regard Thanquol with unnerving intensity.

  “Come forward, Grey Seer Thanquol,” Sneek repeated. “There is much I would speak-say with the famous-honoured Thanquol.” The Nightlord’s paw vanished back into the shadow and there came the sound of hands clapping together. From behind the silken veils, a train of skavenslaves emerged, bearing platters of sweetmeats and pungent Tilean cheeses, jugs of bloodwine and pots of the pungent green liquid Clan Eshin had become addicted to during their long sojourn in Cathay.