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  ‘Rati-man,’ a monstrous, scratchy voice squeaked in debased Reikspiel. The words ended on a note of chittering laughter.

  ‘Go away!’ Ratimir pleaded. He could hear the thing creeping closer. He tried to blot out the memory of its appearance, of that verminous shape slinking out from the passageway hidden behind the wall. Desperately he tried to wish away those fangs and claws, the wicked inhuman understanding shining from those beady red eyes.

  Unseen, the thing crept closer. Ratimir could feel its foetid breath against his neck.

  ‘Not leave, Rati-man,’ the thing squeaked. ‘Want-need speak-squeak with Rati-man. Can-will help Rati-man,’ the monster promised. ‘Rati-man can-will help,’ the thing added with a threatening growl.

  ‘No… No…’ Ratimir sobbed. He raised his hands to cover his ears, to block the sound of that verminous voice. He wailed in disgust as furry paws seized his wrists and pulled his hands away.

  ‘Rati-man listen-learn,’ the skaven growled. ‘Make Rati-man rich-strong!’ A chitter of malevolent humour rippled from the monster’s throat. ‘Or make Rati-man Rati-meat!’

  Sylvania

  Sigmarzeit, 1113

  Here I shall build my tabernacle.

  The words still sent a shiver rushing down Lothar von Diehl’s spine. After only a few hours consulting De Arcanis Kadon, Vanhal had instilled a new purpose in the vast horde of undead. They had turned away from the northern reaches of Sylvania, marching back into the interior, circling down along the banks of the Eschenstir, past the battlements of Fort Tempelhof and into the verdant plain between the vastness of Grim Wood and the Grey Forest. For weeks the walking dead, now including the reanimated bodies of Lothar’s own army, prowled through abandoned fields and pastures, passing desolated villages whose sickly inhabitants cowered behind locked doors and prayed to unheeding gods.

  Lothar had felt something akin to panic growing inside him as he observed the increasing desolation. The noxious star-stones that had rained down on Sylvania were more prevalent here, turning the land foul with magical emanations. He could almost see the vegetation withering, watch the magic seeping into its roots to twist and destroy. It was a blight that would never be erased, a corruption that would befoul these lands for all time. Even if the Black Plague passed, Sylvania would never recover from this poison from the sky.

  Yet it was here, deep within this corruption, that the senior necromancer led his new pupil. Lothar knew better than to question Vanhal’s actions, even as he knew he must swallow his pride and accept the humiliation of a noble being apprentice to a peasant. The fallen priest’s power was too great, his sorcerous knowledge too vast to challenge. His only choice was obedience or death… And even death wouldn’t free him from Vanhal’s domination.

  As he stared out across the plain, he could see the ancient ring of dolmens rising from the yellowed weeds and blackened grass. The weathered stones were a relic of elder ages, perhaps reared by prehuman hands. Even in such eldritch epochs, there must have been power here, a force that even inhuman minds had recognised and paid homage to. The Starfall had visited an inordinate amount of its fury upon this ancient site, fairly plastering the landscape with glowing black rocks, altering the very terrain with the magnitude of its celestial violence.

  Now that terrain was being altered still further. Lothar watched as thousands of zombies and skeletons laboured around the dolmens, heaping great blocks of stone about them, transforming the standing circle into a solid ring. The blocks were quarried from hills deep within the Grim Wood, dragged by the tireless undead miles through the forest to the site of the construction. Before each block was laid into place, a patina of crushed star-stone was placed upon them, the noxious dust sizzling as it seeped into each block.

  Lothar had enough magical aptitude to feel the power of this place, and to appreciate why Vanhal had been drawn here. The site of the dolmens was a sorcerous confluence, a wellspring of aethyric energies where the arcane and the mundane crossed and blended. It was what some erudite scholars had called a ‘window area’, a place where the veil between physical and metaphysical was worn thin. In such an environment, the power of evocations would be amplified, fed by the fountainhead itself. Here, it would be possible to effect conjurations that would make even his matricidal ritual seem insignificant!

  But Vanhal intended even more than simply tapping that wellspring. The construction he had initiated would bind and harness the aethyric power, magnifying its potential a thousandfold. The castle he was building would act as a magical fulcrum, a nexus of arcane energies. With such power to draw upon, he would be able to perform feats of sorcery not seen since Nagash the Black strode the earth.

  It was both a frightening and awesome prospect.

  Lothar turned away from his observation of the undead labourers and studied the source of the tremendous will that drove them on. Vanhal was seated upon his morbid palanquin, legs folded beneath him, De Arcanis Kadon lying open in his lap. The necromancer’s eyes were closed, his breathing so shallow that no frost formed in the chilly air. To all appearances, he seemed more lifeless than the zombies building his castle.

  Carefully, Lothar stole towards the palanquin, concerned that Vanhal’s magic had sent his spirit somewhere that made it impossible to return to his body. For all his injured pride, the possibility alarmed the baron. There was so much he still needed to learn. To be cheated now, when he had gained an inkling of how vast his mentor’s abilities and ambitions were, was too awful to contemplate.

  He was just climbing onto the palanquin to check for evidence of life when Vanhal’s cold voice brought his pulse racing. Startled, Lothar dropped back to the blighted ground.

  ‘Separate a thousand workers from the construction,’ Vanhal said, the words coming more as a ghostly vibration than an actual voice. ‘Send them to scour the bogs and graveyards. I will need more hands to build my tabernacle. Have them bring me those hands.’

  Lothar looked back at the construction, fear once again asserting itself. Vanhal already had more undead under his control than any magician Lothar had heard of outside of legends. Indeed, he was amazed that the necromancer could maintain command of so many. To try to raise and control still more was madness.

  ‘Do as I say,’ Vanhal’s phantom tones demanded, as though taking note of Lothar’s hesitation and reading his mind. ‘All must be prepared before Geheimnisnacht.’

  Mention of the night of sorcery explained the urgency behind Vanhal’s command, but only served to increase Lothar’s uneasiness. He expected the castle to be built in only a few months! It would take an army several times greater than the one already under his control to achieve such a feat. Surely Vanhal didn’t intend to try and control so many undead?

  One of the eyes behind the necromancer’s mask opened and directed a baleful look at Lothar. ‘All will be in readiness before Geheimnisnacht,’ he said, this time in a deep and menacing voice. Lothar’s objections withered before that stare and that voice.

  ‘It shall be as you desire, master,’ Lothar said, bowing before the sinister necromancer.

  Vanhal closed his eye, refocused his mind to manipulating the undead labourers. Lothar shuddered, wondering if his master were mad. There was, of course, another possibility: that he could do everything he believed himself capable of doing. The idea of such power vested within one man’s mind and body rekindled Lothar’s faltering determination. Bowing again, he hurried from the presence of his master. He would detach some of the undead, send them to steal corpses from graves. He would see how far Vanhal’s abilities could stretch.

  It would be a good lesson. An indication of how far his own ambitions might rise.

  In normal circumstances, the smell of rotting meat mixed with warpstone would have been a delicious combination to the nose of any skaven. The promise of food and wealth all in the same sniff! Somewhere along the way, however, some insidious fiend had turned the normal
state of existence on its tail. Seerlord Skrittar wasn’t certain what malefic force was behind this cataclysmic reversal, but he was certain this calamity was directed solely against himself.

  His careful plans, his elaborate rituals to break pieces from the moon and seed them in the earth had been so perfectly flawless. The man-things were sick from the plague, the other Grey Lords were busy plundering the nests and warrens abandoned by the humans. Nothing should have interfered!

  Then the stinky-things started showing up. Since that first encounter, when the cowards of Clan Fester had tucked their tails between their legs and scurried off in abject terror, the skaven had been unable to range more than a few food-stops before running into the wormy man-things! What was worse, the filth-things had started to gather warpstone. They were stealing Skrittar’s treasure out from under his very whiskers!

  It was enough to make a less disciplined skaven grind his fangs to stumps. Skrittar, however, wasn’t about to concede defeat. Magnanimously setting aside his personal disagreements with their… unique… interpretation of the Horned Rat, he had invited Clan Pestilens to take a hand in gathering the warpstone. Vrask Bilebroth and his disciples weren’t quite outcasts, but with Vrask’s rival Puskab Foulfur on the Council of Thirteen, they weren’t the most popular plague monks. It had been embarrassingly easy to entice the plague priest from hiding by promising to lend him the protection of the grey seers against any retaliation his pestilential enemy might be planning.

  Vrask had better be worth the effort Skrittar had expended on him! Watching the plague priest and his disciples sneak across an open field, the seerlord had to concede that the fanatics had a certain amount of bravado. Mad as bedbugs, but brave. It was a combination he might wish his other lackeys possessed, but Warlord Manglrr was such a craven mouse he wasn’t even present to watch Clan Pestilens at work – he’d left that duty to a sub-chief while staying behind in the comfort of the tunnels. It was an outrageous dereliction – especially after his loud demands that the Black Plague be brought to bear against the stink-things!

  The stink-things were just beyond the fallow field Vrask and his disciples were crawling across. There was a man-thing bury-plot there. They had been busy for some time excavating the graves, piling the desiccated bodies on carts. It was a mad sort of exercise; there couldn’t be more than a few bites of meat on any of the bodies, and what was there would be tough and chewy. Certainly the stink-things weren’t very smart if this was their idea of foraging.

  Skrittar lashed his tail in frustrated anticipation, waiting for the plague monks to confront the enemy. Vrask had promised a great deal with his new strain of plague, a refinement of the disease concocted by Puskab. The grey seer was anxious to see if Vrask’s boasts were justified.

  After what seemed an eternity, the enemy appeared to finally notice the plague monks. First a few, then several dozen of the stink-things turned around to stare with glazed eyes at the fallow field. It took the creatures almost a minute to react to the approaching enemy, but when they finally did it was with chilling purposefulness. The stink-things advanced in a shambling mass towards the creeping skaven.

  As the foe began to emerge from the graveyard, Vrask rose to his feet and snarled a command to his green-robed fanatics. The plague monks rose from the earth, the foremost of them bearing massive poles of brass and bronze, a metal ball suspended from the tip by a length of chain. Chittering their heretical psalms, the ratmen tore away the thick folds of cloth bundled about the cage-like orbs. With the covering removed, noxious fumes billowed from inside each censer as strips of plague-ridden meat slowly dissolved beneath a coating of acid.

  Even from a distance, Skrittar could sense the deadly properties of those pestilential fumes. He could see the exposed arms of the plague monks shedding fur, could smell their naked skin blistering in the caustic clouds. Corrosion dripped down the metal poles and from the spiked frames of the censer balls. Nothing living could withstand such a lethal admixture!

  Skrittar’s thrill of triumph faded as the plague monks charged into the slowly advancing zombies. Swinging their censers like enormous flails, the skaven fanned the fumes full into the faces of the stink-things. Flesh peeled and blistered, the foul sores and buboes of the Black Plague spread across enemy skin. It was a hideous, magnificent sight! But that magnificence soon transformed into horror. The ghastly damage the censers visited upon the stink-things, the corrosive disease that should have slaughtered an entire city of humans, did little more than slow the creatures down. The odd bit, an arm here, an ear there, dropped away when the flesh binding it to the body became too corroded to restrain it, but the loss scarcely phased the stink-things. With monotonous, steady tread, the undead closed upon Vrask’s disciples.

  The Black Plague, that much touted super-weapon of Clan Pestilens’ had failed! For an instant, Skrittar wondered if the plague priest had tried to trick him, to fob off some fraudulent strain of pox as the infamous Death, but a single sniff of the abject horror in Vrask’s scent told him otherwise. Vrask was genuinely shocked at the plague’s ineffectiveness. He stood in the field, watching as the stink-things advanced towards his disciples and began to drag them down one after another, rending them with rotten hands and smashing them down with rusty spades. His shock was such that only when his disciples began to flee past him did Vrask’s instinctual self-preservation kick in.

  Manglrr’s chieftain and the other representatives of Clan Fester were already scurrying back to the tunnels, the plague monks close behind. Skrittar, however, lingered. There were two reasons for such a display of courage. First, it would drive home to the vermin that the seerlord was far above them, so mighty he need not fear the things that brought them terror. Second, he’d already noticed that the stink-things weren’t pursuing the plague monks, but instead were shambling back to the graveyard.

  A third reason for lingering on the field of battle presented itself as Vrask Bilebroth went scurrying by, his decayed robes fluttering behind him like the tattered wings of a cave bat. Skrittar’s eyes narrowed, lips peeled back from his fangs. Extending his staff, he sent a bolt of power smashing into the fleeing plague priest. Vrask was sent tumbling snout over tail with such violence that one of the horns fitted to his cowl snapped off and went spinning into the night. Skrittar scowled at the presumptions of Clan Pestilens. The heretics were required by custom to deliver the horned skaven born to their breeders to the grey seers for indoctrination and training, but they were boldly lax about such obligations. Many of the plague priests and festering chantors within their clan sported horns and antlers in open challenge to the grey seers, some of them natural growths, others affectations of their costume. Vrask, it seemed, was one of the latter, a mundane skaven posing as a mage-rat.

  Skrittar covered the ground between himself and the sprawled Vrask in a series of bounding hops, bringing his staff crashing down on the plague priest’s head before he could rise. He heard fangs splinter under the blow, smelt skaven blood oozing from Vrask’s mouth.

  ‘Mercy-pity!’ Vrask whined. ‘Not kill-slay loyal-true Vrask!’

  Skrittar glared down at the cringing plague priest. ‘You lied to me, flea-nibbler!’ he spat, raising the staff for another strike. ‘Promise-say that the plague will kill all stink-things!’ He waved a paw at the graveyard where the creatures were already resuming their excavation. ‘Does that look like you killed them? I needed you to reassure those mice of Fester, now I’ll be lucky if the whole inbred clan doesn’t go scurrying back to Skavenblight!’

  Vrask folded his paws over his head, trying to protect himself from the coming blow. ‘Yes-yes, I take-take blame-fault! That is why you need-want Vrask!’

  The staff froze a hair from Vrask’s horned cowl. A cunning gleam crept into Skrittar’s eyes. It was true, the fault did lie with Vrask. He’d failed to destroy the stink-things and thereby he had proved that Manglrr’s faith in the efficacy of Clan Pestilens was misplaced. More tha
n anything Skrittar could have said or done, Vrask had exposed the limitations of his heretical clan. The rats of Fester would be confused and dispirited by the plague’s failure, but if Skrittar struck quickly and boldly, he could turn that to his favour. He could redirect that disillusion into a more zealous adherence to the Horned One’s true dogma and His sacred voice on earth – Seerlord Skrittar!

  ‘On your feet, tick-licker!’ Skrittar snarled, kicking Vrask until he obeyed. ‘You are right, I can use you to show Manglrr where his faith should rest.’ The seerlord sucked at his fangs as he glanced back at the graveyard. Disgracing Clan Pestilens was all nice and wonderful, but that still left the problem of what to do about the stink-things.

  A hideous thought occurred to Skrittar. Ignoring the whining Vrask, he raised his snout and sniffed again at the air. Yes, there was something wrong about that decayed smell, that tang of dark magic he could detect running beneath the stink of skaven fear musk. It was the smell from the fields, and it was a smell he didn’t like. It was a smell that made him think of abhorrent moments from countless generations past, when the Under-Empire made war against the Curse-thing of Cripple Peak.

  Just the idea of that horrifying place made Skrittar’s glands clench. For generations entire clans had perished trying to seize the warpstone mines under Cripple Peak, vying for control with a terrifying mage-thing and the dead-things at its command. The tale of that conflict had passed into legend, a parable to warn future litters.

  The foes they fought now, these decaying thieves who stole his warpstone, they were like the dead-things of Cripple Peak! They were the undead, creatures immune to the plagues of Pestilens because they weren’t really alive. Unleash a thousand poxes, and the monsters would keep coming.