Wolf of Sigmar Page 16

  ‘Ulric have mercy!’ Beck gasped. Mandred shared the knight’s horror as they watched the claw retreat upwards into the fog, its talons opening to shower debris and bodies across the New City. What beast was this that the ratmen now turned against them? What daemon conjured from the blackest pit?

  Mandred throttled the fear inside him, strangling it before it could overwhelm him. ‘Ulric listens only to the brave,’ he told his bodyguard as he started to climb from the pit. Whatever abomination the skaven had brought against them, they couldn’t allow it to drive them from the city. If victory was snatched from his army now, he knew there would be no coming back. Dietershafen, indeed this whole part of Nordland, would be lost, conceded to the skaven.

  ‘We cannot fight that!’ Beck declared, pointing his hand at the sky.

  Mandred looked away from the scarred knight, staring up at the rim of the pit where more of his warriors had gathered. There was no mistaking the terror in their faces. Only their fierce loyalty and belief in him had kept them from fleeing. Even that devotion was hanging by a thread. When the graf spoke, his words were meant for them as much as they were for Beck.

  ‘This is not our home,’ Mandred said. ‘We can turn away and leave it to the skaven. We can abandon our brothers to slavery and atrocity at the paws of these beasts. We can go crawling back to Middenland. And when the skaven again come, when they bring this great horror against our homes, who will there be to stand with us? Who will help us fight?’ He shook his head, his voice descending into a defiant growl. ‘No, it is here we make our stand. A man can die but once. Do we die on our feet or on our knees?’

  There were no cheers, no shouts of admiration, but Mandred could see that the conviction of his words had impressed itself upon the hearts of his men. He saw it in the clenching of their jaws, in the tightening of their fists. He saw it in the fatalistic gleam in their eyes. It wasn’t hope he had kindled in these men. It was duty, the ancient pride of every warrior that makes him understand that a man’s death can be more important than his life.

  Again, they heard the whirring grind of metal hissing from the sky. The mighty claw struck downwards once more, bringing with it havoc and carnage. With a ghoulish groan, it rose through the fog, discarding those it had destroyed like so much offal.

  ‘I go to find the monster, to sell my life choking on its blood,’ Mandred declared. ‘Who walks with me through the Gates of Morr?’

  It was a grim company who followed Mandred through the ravaged New City. Everywhere they saw the marks of the skaven monster, the horrendous craters gouged by its claws. Debris and mangled bodies were everywhere. The metal shriek of the gargantuan talon as it tore at Dietershafen was obscene in its steady rise and fall as it wrought still greater havoc.

  As Mandred’s followers advanced through the fog, they gathered to themselves small bands of survivors hiding amid the devastation. It was the same devotion to the graf that drew these men out from the grip of their fear. It was the same appeal to duty and honour that bound them to him as he pressed deeper into the New City, hunting the murdering titan.

  The hunt yielded only a few bands of terrified skaven, frantic vermin who were quickly cut down. For all its enormity, there was no sign of the giant monster itself. Mandred could hear the whirr it made as it moved through the fog, the ghastly din as its claw ravaged the city. Was the thing some flying beast, some vast kindred of dragon and griffon? If so, how had the tunnel-haunting ratkin found it and mastered it?

  As the whirring clamour again shrieked overhead, Mandred motioned his followers to silence. Carefully he studied the dreadful noise, listening intently to its cacophony. He almost laughed when he understood the truth. Turning to his men, he told them his suspicion. ‘That is no beast of flesh and blood the ratkin set upon us. It is one of their damnable machines. I know not what shape it takes. I do not pretend to know how it operates. All I know is that the creatures who command it are naught but more of the vermin. Find them, kill them, and their machine will kill no more.’ He paused, forcing himself to forget the devastation being wrought. Closing his eyes, Mandred tried to imagine what sort of ghastly machine the vermin could have built. The image of the hoists on the walls of Middenheim, employed to haul heavy loads of timber and stone up from the base of the Ulricsberg, their jibs reaching far out over the side of the mountain. The most splendid of these devices, built by the dwarfs of Karak Grazhyakh, was powered by a windlass and able to pivot upon its base so that the angle of ascent could be adjusted to accommodate larger loads. Once, however, the load of stone had been too great, snapping the hooks and sending the cargo plummeting back down the side of the mountain. The destruction inflicted upon the earth below reminded Mandred of the devastation now being wrought against Dietershafen.

  ‘Is there some high place, some vantage from which the skaven can command this part of the city?’ Mandred asked his warriors.

  One of the men who had followed Mandred through the fog, a Nordlander, stepped forward. ‘There is Manaan’s Lantern,’ he said. ‘It is a hill that overlooks the harbour. A tower sits atop it and a light was always kept burning there to guide ships through the fog.’

  Mandred doubted the ratkin had kept up the practice. No, he suspected the vermin had put the hill and the tower to a far different purpose. ‘Can you lead us to this place?’ he asked the Nordlander. The soldier looked around him, trying to get his bearings. The destruction was too vast, however. Ashamed, he finally shook his head.

  The grinding shriek of the claw growled overhead through the fog. Mandred scowled at the violent din as the talon wrecked further ruin upon the city. ‘Then we will let the snarl of this infernal machine guide us to its masters,’ he decided. Grimly, he led his men into the grey rubble of Dietershafen, pursuing the ghastly shriek of the war machine. By degrees, the men began to appreciate the cadence of the sounds, associating different pitches with the claw’s ascent and others with its hideous descent. Each man held his breath when he heard the claw ascend, dreading that when it came hurtling downwards once more it would strike the very ground he stood upon.

  Gradually, Mandred noted that what parts of the street had been spared the ruinous attentions of the claw were beginning to slant upwards. The ground was sloping towards some height. Perhaps Manaan’s Lantern itself. The sun was beginning to burn away the fog and as the misty veil was withdrawn, he could make out the vast shape of a rocky mound looming above them. As more of the fog cleared, the blocks of an ancient tower were revealed. Once it might have acted as a beacon for ships at sea, but the skaven had set the building to more fiendish purpose.

  The top of the tower had been levelled, expanded into a sprawling wooden platform, a deranged confusion of support beams slanting down from its bottom to grip the walls of the tower. Most of the platform was consumed by a great framework of metal, thrusting up and out like the skeletal arm of a steel giant. Huge tread-wheels operated the pulleys fixed to great chains, strange motors that belched black smoke were fitted to the turntable upon which the crane was based. With a grinding roar, the whole base would rotate, spinning the arm around, turning it so that it stretched out across a different section of the New City. On the end of the arm was the gigantic claw, each talon the size of a river barge. Chains coiled away from each of the immense digits, snaking their way back to a network of smaller tread-wheels attached to the sides of the arm. In each basket-like tread-wheel, tiny figures could be seen scampering, running forwards to open the talons, running backwards to close them.

  ‘There is our monster,’ Mandred hissed, glaring up at the tower. Beckoning to his men with the deadly length of Legbiter, the Graf of Middenheim led them around the base of the hill to the causeway leading up to the tower.

  Fortune favoured the attackers. Manaan’s Lantern had never been conceived as a defensive fortification by its builders, so neither wall nor gate protected the approach to it. The skaven had neglected to erect any defences of their
own when they transformed the lighthouse into a ghastly weapon. All that blocked their path as Mandred led his men charging up the sloping road was a pack of skaven spear-rats. The vermin fought savagely at first, but their bestial ferocity was no match for the fury of men who had been tormented by the mechanical claw, had watched comrades butchered by the insidious weapon. Upon the narrow confines of the hill, the greater numbers and speed of the ratmen counted for nothing, the discipline and strength of the humans for much. As the fight descended into a massacre, many of the skaven threw down their weapons and flung themselves over the rocky sides of the hill in a desperate bid to escape.

  The fight was still raging around the hill when Mandred and several of his knights broke through into the tower itself. Only a handful of ratmen tried to stop them as they rushed up the winding stairway. The black-furred monsters were bigger than their kin outside, but fared no better. Their mangled carcasses tumbled down the steps behind Mandred’s irresistible momentum.

  When they reached the roof of the tower, the enormity of the mechanical claw was impressed upon the men. The great steel arm towered over them, thrusting itself into the sky as though it might impale the sun. The turntable upon which it moved was on a cyclopean scale, hundreds of human slaves toiling to turn the great winch that operated it and made the whole crane rotate. Dozens of vicious skaven, whips clenched in their paws, prowled on a walkway above the slaves, snarling down at them in a debased mixture of Reikspiel and their own foul tongue.

  Mandred’s men launched themselves at the slavemasters, cutting many of them down before they were even aware of the attack. Mandred himself targeted the grotesque ratman who seemed to be master of this infernal machine, a corpulent monster attired in a heavy fur robe and with a strange confusion of wires and tubes running from its scarred snout to a box lashed across its chest. The creature’s paws were flying about a riotous confusion of levers and pulleys scattered across a broad console that seemed to have been crafted from the remains of a harpsichord. Pipes and tubes slithered away from the console, snaking upwards into the metal crane.

  Some betraying sound caused the fat skaven to spin around as Mandred rushed at it. The monster bared its fangs in a savage snarl, one paw digging into the bag it wore hanging from its shoulder. A glass sphere was soon in its claws and the beast chuckled evilly as it hurled the strange missile at Mandred. The chitter of vicious anticipation turned to a squeak of terror when the sphere crashed through the ramshackle flooring of the platform to plummet into the tower below. Whatever grisly death lurked within the globe went with it into the darkness.

  Mandred leapt over the gap in the floor, swinging his runefang in a cleaving stroke as he lunged at the ratman. Wires and tubes snapped as his sword slashed across the monster’s neck and sent its scarred head flying from its shoulders.

  As the brute’s twitching corpse collapsed to the floor, Mandred glared up at the ghastly machine. It would visit no more death upon his army.

  Even as he made that vow to himself, a flash of light drew Mandred’s eyes back to the city below. The fog was clearing rapidly. He could see the full extent of the havoc wrought by the claw upon the New City. Now, however, there was another menace, one that threatened the much larger Old City. Sorcerous green fire blazed among the houses. While he watched, a second fire erupted, then a third and a fourth. Orbs of glowing green light, eerily similar to the sphere the dead ratman had hurled at him but far greater in size, were raining down upon Dietershafen. It took but a moment, a single turn of his head, to find the source of the gruesome barrage. A dozen ships floated in the harbour, ugly warships whose lines displayed the same deranged principles of construction and vandalism as they had seen visited upon Manaan’s Lantern. Each ship in the skaven fleet had upon its decks an enormous catapult. It was from these that the wicked creatures loosed destruction upon the city.

  Victory, so near, was being stolen from Mandred’s army. The perfidious ratmen had decided to burn Dietershafen rather than lose it to the humans. Out in the harbour, the skaven ships were impervious to attack. There was nothing the humans could do to oppose them.

  Unless…

  Mandred looked back at that tower of steel and down at the turntable beneath his feet. He smiled as the thought came to him. The ratmen had built this gigantic claw to defend Dietershafen, to use it against attackers from the sea. Now, by the mercy of Ulric, he would put this obscene weapon to the purpose for which it had been intended.

  ‘Beck!’ Mandred shouted as he saw the knight rushing up to join him. His bodyguard had been caught in the fighting on the hill and had only now broken free to find his master. The reunion was destined to be a short one.

  Mandred waved his hand down at the rubble of the New City, to a square where the stolid shapes of Kurgaz and his dwarfs could be seen hacking their way through a mob of skaven. ‘I need you to bring Kurgaz here,’ he told Beck. ‘Have him bring his engineers, anyone who might have some idea of how to operate the claw.’

  ‘Your highness, I do not…’

  Mandred brushed aside Beck’s concern. Now wasn’t the time to worry about any one man, even a graf of Middenheim. Not when an entire city was at stake. ‘Bring the dwarfs,’ he ordered. ‘If we can’t turn this claw against those ships, all will have been for naught. We’ll be powerless to do anything but watch Dietershafen burn.’

  From the deck of Fleetmaster Skarpaw’s Vengeful Fang of Avenging Violence and Inevitable Domination over Clan Sleekit Warplord Sythar Doom watched as his minions rolled another cylinder of burning death into the basket of the warpcaster that was bolted to the roof of the ship’s wheelhouse. After the slight design flaw encountered during his attack on Altdorf, Sythar had set his most capable warlock-engineers to increasing the safety of the warpcaster. The machine itself, of course, was perfect. It was a design of Sythar’s own creation only slightly adapted from the catapults deployed by lesser races. Adjustments to the warpcaster itself weren’t negotiable; even the mere suggestion was treasonous and a quick way for a mouse-livered opportunist to get himself carved up into burrow-pork.

  A particularly crafty underling named Toksik Gnaw had provided the answer. Since the skaven conquest of Wolfenburg, Toksik had been collecting the man-things calling themselves alchemists. He had been using them to further his own researches, providing him with new insights into the very nature of warpstone. His studies had helped to ease the concerns about the warpcaster. Instead of redesigning the machine, he’d redesigned the ammunition. The warpstone explosive was now housed in a casing of lead, rendering it docile. After being loaded into the basket, however, an artillerist would smash a flask of acid over the projectile. The acid would eat through the lead and, as it dripped into the warpstone explosive, cause a violent reaction. Not only did Toksik’s solution make the ammunition safer to handle, but it also enhanced the destructive ability when the missiles crashed into their targets.

  Sythar almost regretted hiring Deathmaster Nartik to dispose of Toksik, but any minion that clever was simply too dangerous to keep around.

  ‘Burn-burn! Kill-kill!’ the slurred squeaks of Fleetmaster Skarpaw were more like listening to a cat being strangled than someone speaking. The grizzled pirate was prancing about the warpcaster, savouring every turn of its gears, every whine from its motors. Whenever he thought he could get away with it, he stroked the wooden framework with the few fingers still clinging to his right paw.

  Sythar felt a surge of disgust at his erstwhile ally. Skarpaw had been outraged at the prospect of destroying Dietershafen and its shipyards, irrationally demanding that Clan Skryre expend its resources to recapture the place. At some point in the argument, the foolish Fleetmaster remembered he was talking to a Grey Lord, one of the despotic Lords of Decay. There was a subtle change in the ship-rat’s scent as he took his dissension into the bottom of a bottle. The fermented mushroom juice had done wonders for his attitude if not his wits. From angry protest he’d descended
into drunken exuberance as Clan Skryre’s weapons levelled the city.

  The fog was clearing quickly now. Sythar had waited until it started to burn away before ordering Clan Skurvy’s ships to attack. He wanted to see with his own optics the extent of the destruction a concentrated barrage from half a dozen warpcasters could inflict. If he had to lose Dietershafen, at least he could exploit the opportunity to its fullest and conduct some field tests. There was also the practical side to consider: the more extensive the destruction the better his sales pitch would be to the next clan he offered the warpcaster to.

  Sythar gazed out across the ships in the harbour. There hadn’t been enough time – or warpstone in Clan Skurvy’s coffers – to outfit more than six of the ships with warpcasters. Most of the vessels were simply captured human ships. Only Fleetmaster Skarpaw’s flagship was one of the new ironclads Clan Skryre had designed. Immense plates of iron bolted to its sides, two gigantic paddlewheels fastened to its sides and powered by a warpstone furnace buried deep in the ship’s hold, the flagship represented a new height of design, surpassing anything that had ever put to sea. Sythar was more than a little angry that he’d sold it for as little as he had, but he consoled himself that the next one would be far more expensive. If Clan Skurvy didn’t buy, then of course there was no reason he couldn’t approach Clan Sleekit. Indeed, maybe the plague monks would be interested. They certainly had the warptokens to pay for such advanced engineering.

  Thoughts of advanced engineering caused Sythar to turn his head back towards Dietershafen. This time he didn’t look out over the Old City, where the incendiary warpstone missiles were setting the streets ablaze. Instead he looked at the New City, at the cratered moonscape that had devastated nearly the whole of the waterfront and much of the residential and market districts. The Far-Claw, a magnificent achievement, a murderous feat of engineering and fiendishness! It was a pity such a weapon, by its very size, was compelled to be a fixed installation.