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  It was too late for that, however. The plague had spread beyond any single clan, had established itself too broadly to be isolated and destroyed. In their desperation, some of the ratmen turned to the plague priests for salvation, abandoning themselves to the diseased heresy of Pestilens in the hope that doing so would save their lives. Many, the vast majority, took the opposite view. They saw Pestilens as the enemy. They saw Nurglitch as an ambitious tyrant and Puskab as a murderous betrayer. In such a stew of panic, confusion and outrage, the skaven fell back upon the beliefs and tradition of the past. They recanted their opportunistic rush towards the power promised by the plague monks and grovelled once again before the might of the Horned Rat.

  Such a flood of despair and turmoil was like a font of limitless power for the skaven ruthless enough to tap into it. Seerlord Queekual was such a skaven.

  While the other Grey Lords had retreated to their surface-world dominions, joining Vrrmik in his quest to destroy the Man-dread and quell the creature’s uprising, Queekual had steadfastly refused to quit Skavenblight. Let the others squander their strength chasing after an uncertain fortune. Queekual knew better. He knew the past held the key to domination. The ancient proverb that ‘all tunnels lead to Skavenblight’ was a simple truth and behind it was the wisdom that only from Skavenblight could a ratman control the teeming hordes of the Under-Empire.

  A canopy of weasel-skin was held above Queekual’s horned head by a retinue of docile acolytes. A cloud of antiseptic incense wafted about him, surrounding him in a luminous fog as the grey-cloaked adepts bore smouldering braziers before him. A small army of red-armoured stormvermin, their fur stained snowy white, their musk glands withered by special unguents to lend them a cold emotionless quality, formed the outer cordon of the Seerlord’s procession. Mixed among the stormvermin were lesser grey seers, paw-picked by Queekual for their oratorical ability. From their fangs flew a ceaseless stream of condemnation and excoriation, the accusing voice of a god most of skavendom had thought to neglect.

  Behind them all, carried upon the bed of an enormous carriage with thirteen sets of iron-banded wheels, nestled within a casement crafted from the bronzed skull of a giant, was the holiest relic in all skavendom: the Black Ark, the compact between the Horned Rat and the first Seerlord. Imprinted upon a block of purest warpstone, its quality unsurpassed by the richest ores ever found, were the thirteen tyrannies, the sacred dictates by which the skaven might placate their terrible god and achieve the promise He had made to them: that one day the ratkin would inherit the whole of the world.

  The scent of the Black Ark, the aethyric pulses of energy rippling from its warpstone heart, excited the senses of the ratmen, hurling the weakest into apoplectic fits and reducing even the strongest to worshipful fright. The Black Ark was the foundation of the Order of Grey Seers, the rock upon which they had built their power. It was the holy of holies to those who cowered before the malign divinity of the Horned Rat. Rarely did the grey seers bring it forth from the secret vault at the heart of the maze deep beneath the Shattered Tower, and when they did it was a portent of gravest moment.

  Seerlord Queekual drank in the intoxicating scent of the Black Ark, feeling its power flow through him like a dark shadow. For all their pretensions and heretical claims, the plague priests were nothing but charlatans playing at holiness. This was the true manifestation of the divine, not the febrile plagues and poxes brewed by the sickening Pestilens.

  Queekual cocked his ears back in bitter amusement. There was nothing miraculous about the accomplishments of Poxmaster Puskab! Had he himself not smelled with his own nose a miserable, pathetic man-thing slave-meat re-create the vaunted Black Plague? Had he not himself unleashed this concoction against the impious vermin of Clans Scruten and Gangrous?

  That thought gave Queekual pause, so much so that his step faltered. The acolytes carrying his canopy actually went ahead two paces, leaving their master’s horned head exposed to the hated sky. They glanced at one another, glands clenching as they expected the wrath of their vicious Seerlord, but for once he had a worry taxing at his brain more dire than even his pronounced agoraphobia.

  Scruten and Gangrous! Scum who dwelt in the lowest depths of Skavenblight! How then had the plague advanced into the warrens of Clan Grikk and the wharfs of Clan Sleekit? How had it spread so quickly into the burrows of Skab and Gnaw? Certainly it was to be expected that the disease might bleed over into the squalor of vermin like Skrittlespike and Feesik, but how could it strike into the enclaves of Ferrik and even Rictus?

  Somehow the plague had slipped beyond Queekual’s ability to control. If he hadn’t taken such pains to destroy everything in the Moschner-man’s laboratory, if he could credit mere slave-meat with such cunning, he’d almost be prepared to think the plague had somehow been released directly into the tunnels! But that was impossible! He’d taken pains to execute the stormvermin who burned Moschner’s lab and collapsed the roof onto the remains. Their executioners too had been obliterated in the flames of a warpfire thrower and Queekual himself had attended to the warpfire operators, ensuring that there were no survivors at any level who could even hint at the nature of his grand scheme.

  Yet, however impossible, the plague had defeated his careful protocols. A few times Queekual had even entertained the loathsome thought that perhaps the spread of the disease had been the work of Pestilens themselves or their daemonic god.

  If so, the strategy devised by their diseased brains had spun around and nipped them in the nethers! The unleashed plague hadn’t cowed the skaven into meek subservience to the plaguelords! Far from it!

  The mewing, chittering pleas of the hordes lining the streets of Skavenblight were a cacophony of terrified devotion, prayers to Queekual begging him to intercede with the Horned Rat and save the doomed masses. At every step, his armoured bodyguards were compelled to stab and beat the desperate crowd back, and even so there were those who slipped past the white skaven, risking their lives in an effort to touch the Seerlord’s robe in the belief that his holy raiment might endow them with some manner of divine protection.

  Queekual wasn’t pleased by such signs of devotion, alarmed by the proximity of afflicted skaven to his person. It was true that he’d equipped himself with the most potent protective talismans before venturing forth into the streets, but there was no wisdom in forsaking caution. He’d made examples of many of the offenders, obliterating them with spells of such horrific violence that even his acolytes cringed and looked away. No matter how thoroughly he annihilated the trespassers, however, there were always more to take their place.

  Faith – it was a thing little removed from fear in the mind of a skaven. And like fear, it was something a clever manipulator could twist to his own purposes. Queekual gloated over the magnitude of that exploitation. With each death, with each fresh outbreak of the plague, the very fabric of skaven society threatened to come crashing down. The Council of Thirteen was impotent to either contain or harness the terror of their vast horde of subjects. Only the grey seers could do so, only they could entice the masses away from unrest. Only they could offer the one thing that would stifle the turmoil. Only they could offer hope.

  Queekual listened to the grisly crunch of bone being pulverised beneath the Black Ark’s carriage. The iron-shod wheels smashed the bodies of the ratmen thrown beneath them with merciless violence. It was a variant upon the delusion that touching the Seerlord’s robe would bring divine blessing. A sacrifice offered to the Black Ark was said to bring good fortune. There might be no truth in the myth, but the horde thronging the street was taking no chances. Again and again, ratmen were pushed out from that mass, thrown beneath the wheels by their fellows. A trail of black blood, like the slime of some titanic slug, stained the path behind the Black Ark.

  The devotion and despair of Skavenblight’s populace had been willingly surrendered into the paws of Queekual. From them, the Seerlord would forge a weapon even mightier than
the Black Plague, a weapon that would tear down the arrogance and heresy of Pestilens.

  Chapter XX

  Hochland, 1124

  The rocky slopes of Hochland’s Howling Hills were pitted and scarred, slashed by ravines and gorges. It seemed as if the gods had simply dumped all the leftovers from the Middle Mountains onto the plains, a deranged jumble of limestone and granite stretching across leagues in a grotesque sea of stone. Blighted, barren of tree or shrub or any green thing, the rugged stone run was a lifeless wasteland.

  Or at least it had been.

  From their tunnels deep below the earth, the skaven had crept and crawled up into the Howling Hills. Swarms of the vermin lurked in each ravine and defile, their bestial squeaks and snarls rumbling up from the depths like the snarl of some subterranean behemoth. The noxious fug of skaven fur and musk slithered across the rocks in a pervasive stink, emboldening the ratkin with the scent of their overwhelming numbers.

  Every ratman Vrrmik could coerce, bully or threaten had been marched into the Howling Hills. The Supreme Warlord of Skavendom wasn’t satisfied with the horde, of course. It should have been ten times its size, a swarm of skaven that would have made the Horned One himself spurt the musk of fear to watch it sweep across the land.

  Naturally, such a concentration of ratkin had brought severe logistical problems. Entire thrall clans had been set upon as ‘tunnel pork’ during the march, their flesh sustaining Vrrmik’s more valuable warriors. Whole tribes of goblins had been attacked and devoured by the rapacious rodents. Hordes of scavengers had been loosed upon the farms, fields and forests of Hochland to strip the region bare of every last scrap of food. Tree bark, grass roots, beetles and fleas, no source of sustenance had been spared.

  Standing upon a stone column, a natural finger of rock protruding above the stone sea, Vrrmik could gaze down into the nearest of the ravines. It was like a pool of fur and gleaming skaven eyes, the clanrats packed so tightly that he suspected some of those closest to the walls of the fissure had been crushed by the press of their comrades. Such casualties wouldn’t linger long; they’d be soon devoured by those around them. Indeed, a few more food-cycles and Vrrmik would have to demote another thrall clan from ‘ally’ to ‘support’.

  The massive white skaven preened his whiskers, dismissing the possibility with a shake of his head. It wouldn’t come to that. Vrrmik’s spies, the best sneaks and stalkers warpstone bribes could entice away from Clan Eshin, were even now filtering back to him and reporting the nearness of Man-dread’s army. He could imagine their horror when they found the land stripped bare, offering nothing to sustain them or their horses. After their long march, the humans would be hoping to rest and fatten themselves before giving battle. The depredation of the land would give them no such chance. They would have to either fight or disband. Either way, Vrrmik would claim victory.

  Of course, the great warlord hadn’t left anything to chance. He’d been pleased by the way Man-dread had reacted to Puskab’s attack on his camp. To that end, he’d ordered the scavenger bands to forsake some of the fodder they’d encountered. In each village and hamlet the ratkin had attacked, they’d left little stacks of decapitated heads to greet Man-dread’s troops. Just the thing to make the deranged fool-meat too angry to think. The trail the scavengers left behind them was obvious enough for a troll to follow – straight from the scene of each atrocity and back to the Howling Hills.

  Vrrmik stroked the gore-crusted head of Skavenbite, feeling the hot sizzle of the warpstone spikes singe his fur. The Howling Hills would become an abattoir. It was ground created for slaughter such as Vrrmik envisaged. The rocky, crumbling slopes were impassable for horses, stripping the man-things of their mobility. The ravines and gorges offered shelter from their archers and the dwarf thunderers who had joined them. The only choice left to Man-dread was that of attacking the skaven directly, he couldn’t wait for the ratkin to come to him. Vrrmik could simply order the more useless of his troops butchered to feed his warriors; the man-things were too stupid to be so pragmatic. They’d waste away and starve instead.

  No, Man-dread would come to Vrrmik. He would march his men straight into the Howling Hills where the vast tide of the skaven would exterminate them all.

  The last hope of the man-things would die beneath Vrrmik’s hammer.

  After marching through the ravaged countryside of Hochland, through forests of denuded trees and villages of slaughtered men, the bleak desolation of the Howling Hills presented a culminating horror for the army that had marched so long and so far to save this land. Gazing up at the stone run from the plain below, the soldiers felt oppressed in spirit and mind by the hellish sight. The sounds and stink of the skaven told them that somewhere in that desolation their inhuman enemy lurked, waiting for the men to dare to trespass upon the craggy slopes of stone.

  Mandred felt the mood of his army falter at the edge of despair. All this way, across half the Empire, these men had followed him, taking heart from the hope he offered them. The vision of a land freed from the ratkin, the dream of a world liberated from the tyranny of monsters – these were the promises that had spurred these men on, made them persevere in the face of cruellest hardship and adversity. Now the faith that had sustained them for so long was fragmenting, crumbling away before his very eyes. The hope of victory was gone, vanished like a mocking illusion. To fight the skaven in open battle would have been hard enough, but to fight them in such terrain as this, to engage them in the desolate stone flow with its concealing ravines and gorges, seemed a hopeless prospect.

  There was no going back. Mandred knew that. To turn away now would see his army scatter to the wind. The only choice he had was to fight. They had to fight here on the ground the skaven had chosen, ground that robbed the humans of two of their advantages over the ratkin: the mobility of cavalry and the reach of archery. The ratmen, with their greater speed and numbers, sheltered among the rocks, able to manoeuvre by scent around the confusion of boulders and ravines, held every advantage now. It was only through such superiority that the beasts would countenance any battle. If their leader, Vrrmik believed there was any possibility the humans could win, his force would never take the field.

  Only one advantage still remained to Mandred, an edge that Vrrmik could never take from him. The soldiers who marched behind his banner were men and it was the hearts of men that beat within their breasts, hearts that could be moved to selflessness, could be stirred to valour and fired with courage. However numerous Vrrmik’s horde, they were skaven, they were cringing beasts driven by fear and greed, incapable of believing in anything more vital than their own skins. Terror and avarice were the forces that drove them on, but such things could only stretch so far, overcome only so much. Mandred’s troops could endure more than Vrrmik’s monsters. That was the one strength the skaven could never equal.

  Mandred marched before his troops, eyes roving over the face of each man, matching each gaze, peering into each soul. ‘The road has been long to reach this place,’ he told his men. ‘Never have men endured so much, come so far for such noble purpose. You have not marched here for plunder, you have not taken up sword and spear in the name of conquest, you have not left behind your homes and families simply to fill the coffers of kings and lords. No, it is nothing so base that has led you here but rather a nobility of spirit that drives you to seek a dream greater than yourselves. In your veins burns the fire of a glory mightier than gold, a splendour greater than that of kings and courts! In you I see the majesty of mankind, the foundation upon which the future will stand! You are the pillars of a thousand tomorrows; on your deeds will your children and your children’s children upon their many generations look back in awe and wonder. They will whisper of your valour, of the strength in your arm and the boldness in your heart, and they will marvel that such might could be contained within mortal clay!

  ‘Our enemy is vile, obscene in their foulness! You have seen their savagery! You have
seen their cruelty! You have marched through the lands they have despoiled, heard the people they have enslaved! Hochland has been razed by these monsters, transformed into a lifeless desert by their hunger! Such will be the fate of your homelands if the vermin prevail!’

  Mandred clenched his fist, shaking it at the heavens. ‘The skaven will not prevail!’ he told his troops. ‘Here they will be broken, shattered upon our steel! They fight for domination, to sate their greed. We fight for our homes, for our families, for those we would keep safe from the horrors of Old Night. It is our cause that is just; it is our fight that is righteous!’

  He watched as he saw the old determination settle once more on the faces of his men as they rallied to his words. Mandred felt his pride swell as he saw the unyielding set of one Nordlander’s jaw, the defiant scowl on the face of an Averlander, the cold fury in the eyes of a mercenary Roppsman. He pointed his hand at the soldiers, waving his finger at them. ‘Do not let the enemy frighten you with their numbers. However overwhelming they may seem, remember that they are but vermin. However many they are, each of them fights alone. You fight with comrades! You fight knowing the man beside you guards your back! You fight knowing that your deeds will be remembered, that if you fall your sacrifice is not in vain! You fight for the Empire and the gods themselves will praise your valour!’

  Mandred raised the bulk of Ghal Maraz high, letting the glow of the warhammer shine out across his soldiers. He brought the weapon swinging down, pointing it at the Howling Hills, at the great spire of broken stone where the tattered banners of Vrrmik and Clan Mors fluttered in the breeze. ‘I march to bring death to the ratkin,’ he snarled. ‘I march to strike terror in their craven hearts. I march to show them that they are not masters of men, but simply vermin to be crushed underfoot. Who marches with me?’