[Warhammer] - Dreadfleet Read online

  Roth sprinted around the raised decks that lined the back of the square. Grabbing hold of a noose that dangled from a squid-headed gargoyle, he pushed outwards from a balcony, swinging out and over the throng of the drowned. The rope twisted him round in mid-air as he sailed over the heads of the undead creatures and he came down hard onto the hangman’s platform, colliding with one of Aranessa’s crew and knocking him into the crowd below.

  “Oops,” grimaced Roth as the screaming crewman was pulled apart by grasping, clammy hands.

  He heard a feminine laugh from behind him, a musical sound that jarred with the unfortunate crewman’s shrieks of pain. Aranessa had fought her way to his side. She was so close that he could smell her scent.

  “Jaego! Longtime. Nice entrance, by the way.” She plucked a dagger from the scabbard of a fallen mariner and flung it point-first into the eye socket of one of the drowned that was climbing on to the platform. “This ain’t quite how we left it between us, eh?”

  Memories of supple female flesh sailed across the stormy waters of Roth’s mind.

  “Er… no,” said Roth, drawing his sabre and kicking hard at the bloated face of one of the undead clutching at his boot. “Look, I’d love to stop and chat, but I need to get to Rusting Harbour before it’s burnt to the ground.”

  “Hold still,” said Aranessa, grabbing Roth’s arm and leaning out to kick at the nearest foe with her saw-bladed leg. It fell back into the crowd, its head all but torn from its shoulders. “Ha! You’re still drunk then, I take it,” she said, thrusting her spear into the chest of one of the drowned that had gained the platform, hurling it back into the square below. “You’ll be hard pressed to get out of this little mess without a crew, let alone get across the city and back. And you’re not having mine, before you ask.”

  A strangled moan came from a hundred throats at once. Around the square, the hanged men that dangled from the gargoyle-nooses began to jerk like puppets, clawing rabidly at the air. The two dozen drowned that Aranessa’s crew had put down twitched and stood upright once more, cracked heads lolling and gashed-open throats spurting black fluids. They surged forwards, blood bubbling from their lips as they frenziedly grabbed and clawed at the legs of the nearest mariners.

  Roth redoubled his attack, grunting with effort as he stabbed at faces with his sabre and hacked through wrists with his sickle-hand. Around him, Aranessa’s crew slashed and stamped and shoved, doing everything they could to stop the drowned from clambering up onto the platform.

  Roth glimpsed a flash of colour at the back of the crowd. A blood red bicorn topped a pallid, drawn face, and dead black eyes stared unblinking back at him. Above the figure swirled tendrils of living smoke, each crested by a shrieking skull. The newcomer’s fanged mouth opened wide, like a snake, as it pointed a crooked finger at Roth. He felt an invisible grip on his mind and his limbs went weak. Every one of his long years was dragging him down, down into the darkness of an early grave.

  “Flog me rigid, that’s him,” hissed Aranessa. “That’s Noctilus.”

  She plucked a strange metal sea-urchin device from her belt and flung it hard at the pale figure. The device detonated with a sharp crack, filling the area with choking smoke. Roth gasped for air as the spell upon him was lifted, black spots dancing in front of his eyes.

  “We’re leaving, lads!” shouted Aranessa, gesturing to the far side of the square. “Back to the Swordfysh and cast off before even more of these dead bastards turn up.” For all the sea-captain’s bravado, Roth could see no way out without charging headlong into the morass of flailing drowned that surrounded them on all sides.

  Punching a gasping corpse from the platform with the hilt of his sabre, Roth grabbed a coil of thick, greasy rope from the gallows balustrade and widened its noose-end with a sharp tug. He flung it hard at the burning building opposite, breathing a quick prayer of thanks as the noose caught on the end of the lintel above the doorway. Behind him, a pistol shot bowled over one of the drowned just as it was about to sink its teeth into his leg.

  “Ogg! Ogg Halfheart!” shouted Roth, throwing the other end of the rope towards Aranessa’s first mate. “Pull this, and pull it hard!”

  The ogre caught the oiled rope in his meaty hand, looking at it dimly before absently backhanding three of the drowned from the platform into the square below.

  “You heard him, Ogg-boy—pull!” shouted Aranessa, panic rising in her voice as the figure in the blood-red bicorn moved purposefully through the throng towards her.

  The ogre shrugged and leant backwards, his great muscles straining at the rope. Roth shouldered his way through the melee, stamping hard on the filthy hands that were grasping up at them through the trapdoors of the gallows platform. He grabbed hold of the rope too and added his strength to Ogg’s, several other crewmen getting the same idea and putting their weight into the task.

  With a great groaning crack, the supporting lintel came free. The mariners pulling the rope were suddenly bowled over backwards as the facade of the entire structure tumbled down into the square, crushing a great mass of the drowned under several tons of masonry. The air filled with mortar dust and billowing smoke, the ground was strewn with rubble and twitching corpses, but the way to the alleyways beyond lay open.

  Aranessa was off the platform and picking her way across the square before Roth could even get back to his feet.

  “Nessa, wait!” shouted Roth, but she didn’t turn back. Ogg and the rest of her crewmen were following her example, jumping from brickwork to spar as they fled the grasping, clambering undead that stumbled clumsily after them.

  Glancing anxiously around for the telltale flash of a red bicorn, Roth leapt down from the platform and ran for his life.

  Roth stumbled along Merwight Alley, smoke burning in his lungs. “Not far now,” he told himself. “Almost there, old man.” But he had a sick suspicion that he was already too late.

  An involuntary shiver ran through his body and some nameless instinct made him look up. Something was coalescing in the fog above him. Something big.

  To Roth’s mounting amazement, a glowing white galleon was emerging from the mists above him. It was easily twice as large as the Nightwatch. Its hull looked very much like a gigantic ribcage and its keel took the form of a great curved spine. Under its bowsprit loomed a skeletal figurehead holding a sword in either hand, its jaw agape in challenge. Great braziers of sickly green fire burned away the mist on its fore and aftcastle, and tattered sails flapped from its fore, mizzen and aft masts like flayed skin.

  Acres of rusted chain and a forest of tangled kelp dangled beneath the warship and Roth fancied he could make out groaning faces and skeletal hands writhing in the morass. It was the Shadewraith, no doubt about it: a ghost story made real and sent to plague the lands of men. One of the Dreadfleet.

  The spectral galleon came about, its keel carving the air as if on invisible waters. Port side on, it discharged a thunderous volley into the distant Castilla Diablos. A spike of return fire boomed from the fortress walls, but the cannonade did nothing more than tear a few thin wisps of ectoplasm from the Shadewraith’s hull. The sound of dead men’s laughter echoed from within its cavernous interior.

  The captain broke into a sprint.

  After a few minutes, he looked anxiously over his shoulder, and was relieved to see that he had left the Shadewraith behind. Panting and spitting, the captain ran pell-mell up the crazily-angled length of Hangman’s Lane and staggered up the vomit-stained sides of the Brinebridge. From here, he should be able to thread his way through the Fifth Ace—or the Hel’s Rest, whichever had been left the most intact—and get to the aftquarters of his family’s dwelling-ship.

  The battle was raging in earnest now, its flames consuming the entire city-port. From the cobbled path atop the Brinebridge, the captain saw a woman cut down by a man o’ bones, a young man fall from a rooftop, a tough old buzzard screaming in defiance as he was pulled apart by a pack of the drowned. The dead were everywhere.

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nbsp; In the distance, Roth saw that several large galleons had cast off from their moorings and were sailing out to the open sea to intercept the Reaver. By the looks of their headings, they were hoping to cut off the castle-ship’s escape route and rake its stern while they were about it.

  Behind the vanguard warships came the Man o’ War, Commodore Hamzik at the helm. The Man o’ War was a ninety-gun galleon that had more kills to its name than any other Sartosan vessel. Roth felt a surge of hope rise in his chest. The Swordfysh would be long gone by now, but while the pride of Sartosa still fought there was a chance they could repel the undead invaders.

  Roth frowned, adjusting the clockwork lenses embedded in his ruined right eye as he made his way across the bridge. Something was snaking up the stern of the Man o’ War, curling outwards as it rose up from the water. The captain wondered if it was some kind of sea serpent, but he had a sinking feeling that it was something far worse. He closed his good eye and squinted through his artificial replacement as the magnifying lenses clicked into place.

  It was no living thing, but a black mechanical tentacle, barbed and glinting dully in the gloom. Each segment was the size of an outhouse. Another tentacle slithered up the side, then another and another, swaying and curling as they rose high into the air. Seawater and rank black oil drizzled from between the segmented sections of each tentacle as they rose with the sound of clanking metal. Distant cries came from the deck of the Man o’ War as it opened fire on the tentacle-limbs curving around it with blunt culverins and stab-cannons.

  One tentacle was hit square on and recoiled instantly, thrashing like a stuck snake. The other mechanical arms came down heavily upon the Man o’ War with a crash of splintering wood and tearing metal, followed by a juddering roar as barbed segments sawed through its painted finery. To Roth, it looked as if two taloned hands had reached out of the water and throttled the life from the warship. He made out a glowing greenish-yellow light beneath the water, no doubt the malevolent eye of whatever blasphemous creation was wrapping its tendrils around Captain Hamzik’s ship.

  Roth shook his head in disbelief. Only the dwarfs had the ability to build submersible craft, and the mountain-folk were the allies of mankind. For one of the honour-bound sons of Grungni to join forces with the undead was unheard of, even amongst the dwarf outcasts that operated out of Sartosa.

  Terse orders drifted up from the riverside below. Roth broke into a run, crossing the bridge and loping along the banks. Ahead, he could see a team of stevedores hurrying to pivot a converted harbour crane toward the tentacled beast, intending to use it as an improvised catapult. As the captain pounded towards them, the stevedores searched around for a projectile to hurl at the mechanical monster, settling upon a broken cornerstone that seemed a pitifully inadequate weapon to Roth’s eyes. Clicking his tongue in frustration, the captain upended an algae-slicked barrel from the alleyway next to the Death’s Head and gave it a good hard shove so that it rumbled across the cobbles toward the stevedores.

  “Fling that instead, but tap and taper it first!” shouted Roth, his face flushed. “Whatever that squid thing is, it’s slick with oil, so if this barrel contains anything like Swillard’s usual rotgut, it’ll burn like fury.”

  The stevedores shouted their thanks, hefting the barrel into position before stuffing a sheaf of burning thatch into the barrel’s tap. The contraption’s counterweight clunked loudly and sent the flaming barrel soaring high into the air. It turned end over end before breaking apart against one of the tentacles with a loud bang. Great gouts of flaming alcohol shot out in all directions, setting aflame the oily gunk that leaked from the tentacle’s composite sections and causing the writhing limb to withdraw under the water. The stevedores gave a great cheer, but their efforts were not enough.

  With a series of shuddering, splintering cracks, the mechanical monster tightened its tentacled grip. It broke its beleaguered prey apart with the ease of an iron gauntlet crushing a tinderbox. Roth almost bit through his lip as the remnants of the Man o’ War began to sink, a confusion of broken timbers spreading across the water. The oil-black tentacles of the mechanical beast withdrew almost immediately, slick and sickening as they slid back into the water.

  The wreckage of the once-proud Man o’ War blocked the river completely, stalling the advance of the Sartosan warships intending to cut off the Reaver’s escape. With one shocking blow, the Dreadfleet had turned the odds in its favour.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Scores of dead bodies were strewn throughout the streets of Rusting Harbour. Some were smouldering and fire-blackened. Others had been cut down by nameless assailants or blasted to pieces by the Reaver’s incendiary broadsides. Scattered bones and bloated corpses lay mingled wherever the Sartosans had mounted a decent defence, but there was not a soul to be seen.

  As he rounded the corner of Rottmettle Walk, Roth hurdled a pair of crouching scavengers dispassionately prising the jewels from the eye sockets of the men o’ bones strewn along the street. Twenty years ago, he’d have done the same, but wealth was no good to anyone unless you were alive to spend it.

  Up on the hilltop, the gunners of Castilla Diablos poured yet more cannon fire into the Shadewraith as the cursed ship drifted slowly towards them. It had no more effect than if they were firing blindly at the mist. The spectral vessel floated up towards the fortress, setting a course that led straight into the Castilla’s thick stone perimeter. Roth caught a glimpse of the Shadewraith just as it sailed clean through the curtain walls like a ghost, leaving the stonework clad in crackling ice in its wake. The sound of distant explosions intensified and the sky glowed red over the ramparts of the Castilla. Roth thanked the sea god Manann that he was not amongst the defenders of the hill fortress.

  The captain ran on, heart pounding. There she was: the Enlightenment, a masterpiece of shipbuilding. It had been decades since Roth had last seen her. In his father’s day, she was the most beautiful vessel on the high seas, but the constant grind of Sartosa had taken its toll. Now she leant heavily upon scaffolds and rusted iron spars. Her once-green hull was caked in soot and guano, and a spider’s web of ropes stretched out over the ramshackle outhouses clamped upon her hull like giant barnacles.

  The raging fires started by the Bloody Reaver had crawled up the lesser boathouses leaning drunkenly against the Enlightenment’s hull and now fully half of the captain’s old homestead was ablaze. Roth leapt up onto the shanty-dwellings at the galleon-house’s stern, reflecting grimly that it had been a lot easier to do this when he was twenty years of age, back before he had walked out on his family and exchanged the love of a good wife for the life of a pirate.

  His heart heavy, Roth jumped from roof to roof, taking care to put his muscled weight on lintels and ridges where he could. Instead of trying to steady himself, he used his momentum to plunge bodily through the stained-glass windows at the Enlightenment’s stern, losing his scabbard and sabre in the process. No time to go back for them now.

  Thick smoke billowed toward the smashed window like a physical presence, forcing its way into his lungs. Roth’s father, the Mapwright of Tilea, had clothed the interior of his galleon with countless treasures over the course of his illustrious career, and virtually all of them were highly flammable.

  The drawing room Roth had smashed his way into was crammed full of exotic volumes that would have been worth a fortune to the Colleges of Magic in Altdorf, but right now they were less than worthless. The corridors and stairwells leading from the drawing room were hung with priceless tapestries and the friezes painted on the ceilings were exceptional examples of the cartographer’s art.

  Just fuel for the flames, thought Roth. They mattered little.

  “Lisabet?” Roth shouted. “Armando?”

  A muffled roar of flame answered.

  A hot surge of panic rose in his throat. Spluttering and coughing, Roth ripped off a piece of his shirt and wound it around his face before grabbing one of his wife’s precious flower vases from a side table and upe
nding it over his shoulders. Water was the best armour for a man trapped in a burning ship.

  The Enlightenment was a labyrinth of corridors and rooms, and had Roth not known it inside and out, he soon would have been lost. A childhood of exploration meant that he could navigate it blindfold. Just as well, for the clouds of choking smoke pouring through the corridors made it virtually impossible to see anything. Even his clockwork eye-lenses were useless.

  As he stumbled towards the living quarters, the few glimpses Roth did manage to snatch made his skin prickle with loathing. He had hated this part of the galleon-house as a young man. The painstakingly accurate star-charts and navigational parchments that hung from the walls had been defaced by strange depictions of bladed citadels, skull-faced cliffs and daemon-mouthed volcanoes afloat in a sea of bone. Roth frowned as he barrelled through the flickering corridors. His father’s condition had worsened, like as not, but unless the fire had claimed him he was probably still alive. There was no way Lisabet would leave that disturbing filth everywhere if he wasn’t.

  A rusted blade jabbed out from the smoke-filled room to Roth’s right. Caught off guard, the captain jerked backwards, tripping over a key-chest and flailing into a burning tapestry in his haste to avoid the blade. Several braids of his white hair caught light, filling his flaring nostrils with an acrid stench.

  The blade stabbed out again, gripped by a fleshless hand. A man o’ bones emerged from the burning remnants of Roth’s old sleeping quarters, diamonds burning brightly in its eye sockets. Its clawed feet left strange scratches in the polished wood of the deck. Sticking sideways through its ribcage was a Cathayan blade that Roth recognised as his father’s favourite sword.

  Roth swore in horror as he remembered that he had lost his own blade. The thing came forward in syncopated bursts, its mildewed skull following Roth’s clumsy attempts to put something between them. Roth clutched at a broken cabinet, pulling a plank from its underside and throwing it awkwardly at the man o’ bones. It bounced from the creature’s bony scalp, but did not slow it.