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  A wolfish grin spread beneath Baron Thornig’s beard. ‘I can speak for Graf Gunthar. He won’t pay this criminal tax!’

  ‘Don’t think Boris will let him get away with that,’ said Aldo Broadfellow. The halfling was sitting on a large cushion, massaging his hairy feet. He glowered at his toes. ‘Why that man insists on my wearing boots when I see him…’ he grumbled to himself.

  ‘The half-man speaks the right of it,’ cautioned Count van Sauckelhof. ‘Try to keep a schilling from Boris’s purse and he’ll lay siege to the Ulricsberg.’

  ‘With what?’ Baron Thornig growled. ‘He’s made it impossible to retain an army big enough to do the job!’

  ‘Don’t think he hasn’t thought of that,’ von Schomberg said as he returned to the table. ‘Boris has already granted a dispensation to Westerland and Drakwald in recognition of their ongoing travails.’

  Van Sauckelhof drained his goblet of wine in a swallow. ‘I half expected him to make us pay for each barbarian,’ he snapped.

  Kretzulescu caught the old knight’s meaning, his face growing even more pale. ‘You mean Drakwald?’

  ‘He’s a Hohenbach,’ von Schomberg said. ‘He could be expected to demand a certain loyalty from his homeland.’

  ‘He hasn’t shown any particular inclination to help the Drakwalders,’ Prince Sigdan said. ‘He even sent the Reiksmarshal home before the beastmen were entirely exterminated. That doesn’t sound like a man with any great devotion to his birthplace.’

  ‘Or it shows a man too shrewd to let emotion stand in his way,’ suggested von Schomberg. ‘While Drakwald is without a count, the province remains a protectorate of the Imperial Crown. All of its wealth belongs to the Imperial Treasury.’ The knight turned and nodded at Count van Sauckelhof. ‘If Snagr Half-nose had been a bit more successful, there might be two provinces in the same situation.’

  Van Sauckelhof slammed his fist against the table. ‘Of all the outrages! Renting rooms in the Imperial Palace to commoners, allowing the gentry to buy new titles for themselves, these were villainies enough, but if what you say is true, then our Emperor is nothing more than a blackhearted traitor!’

  ‘Have a care!’ Prince Sigdan exclaimed, anxious at the turn the conversation had taken.

  ‘Why else would he refuse to bestow the title upon Duke Konrad?’ Baron von Klauswitz asked. ‘Why else would he tell Boeckenfoerde to disband the army before its job was done? The Reiksmarshal had orders to make certain the beastkin weren’t annihilated!’

  ‘That’s not true!’ The objection came from a young man in the white tabard of a knight, a member of the Reiksknecht. Baron von Schomberg had brought Captain Erich von Kranzbeuhler with him to the Imperial Palace as his adjutant. Always impressed with the captain’s forthright manner and honourable character, he hadn’t thought twice about bringing him to Prince Sigdan’s castle.

  ‘The Reiksmarshal is a loyal man and a fearless soldier,’ Erich continued, unperturbed to have the attention of so many of the Empire’s leaders focused upon him. ‘If the Emperor was using him, then it was from deceit.’ The young knight bristled at the incredulity he still saw on the faces of those around him. ‘Can anyone here say they haven’t been forced to do the same?’

  Count van Sauckelhof smiled. ‘One of Boeckenfoerde’s officers has been carrying on with a shepster employed by my wife. It seems he was complaining about the Emperor giving them orders to finish the campaign before Mittherbst, then going and drawing off most of their cavalry to guard the Bretonnian frontier.’ The Westerlander shook his head. ‘I’d think such deceptions would be unnecessary if the Reiksmarshal was another of the Emperor’s sycophants like Ratimir and that peasant Kreyssig.’

  ‘What does it matter one way or another?’ Kretzulescu declared. ‘The problem right now isn’t the army. It’s this damn head tax or war tax or whatever the Emperor wants to call it! In Sylvania we’ve had three poor harvests in a row and enough ill omens to put a curse on Taal himself! I can name a dozen villages that have fallen prey to illness and half a dozen more that have been abandoned by both lords and serfs!’

  ‘Things stand much the same in the rest of Stirland,’ Baron von Klauswitz commented, a haunted look creeping into his eyes.

  ‘Plague?’ Prince Sigdan asked, giving voice to the dreaded word. It seemed to echo through the hall, sending shivers down the spine of every man at the table.

  ‘Shallya have mercy,’ von Schomberg whispered, invoking the goddess’s protection against the fearsome spectre of pestilence and disease.

  Skavenblight

  Nachgeheim, 1111

  A cold, clammy smell wafted through the darkened halls. Furtive shapes scuttled and scurried against the ancient stone passageways, squeaking and chittering as they crept through the shadows. The rats clawed their way through piles of rags, swam through scummy puddles of swamp slime, prowled across jumbles of old bones and tumbledown masonry. They leapt across the many holes pitting the crumbling floor or swarmed across the stout cables spanning the worst of the gaps.

  The entrancing scent of food drew the ravenous vermin deeper into the primordial gloom. They ignored the rank odours of the creatures which called the maze-like confusion of halls and galleries home. A starving scavenger learned to become bold around even the most rapacious predator.

  It was the boldest of the rats who scurried along the wall towards the alluring smell. The rat hesitated a moment when its beady eyes spotted two flickers of green flame rising from the darkness ahead. But hunger soon overrode caution and the big grey rat hurried on towards the source of the smell.

  The lump of blackened cheese was lying just within the glow cast by the nearest of the lights. Again the rat hesitated, but again its hunger drove it onwards. It hurried towards the beckoning cheese, leaping the last three feet to sink its fangs and claws in the enticing feast.

  As soon as the rat lighted upon the cheese, a great furry hand snapped out from the darkness, closing about the animal and its prize. The rat squealed in terror, writhing in its effort to sink its fangs into the flesh of its captor. Its captor, however, gave the rodent no chance to retaliate. With practised ease, a clawed thumb pressed down upon the rat’s head, snapping its neck.

  Krisnik Sharpfang stared down at the quivering carcass in his paw. Beady red eyes, hideously similar to the rat’s own, gleamed with hunger. Long fangs, monstrously enlarged versions of those in the dead rodent’s mouth, gnashed together in an expression of savage triumph. Whiskers twitched, ears shivered, a long naked tail lashed against the slimy wall. Uttering a famished whine, the skaven began to nibble at his catch.

  ‘Save-save some cheese,’ snapped a voice from the darkness.

  Krisnik froze in mid-chew, turning a hostile glare at the speaker. Illuminated by the green glow of the farther worm-oil lamp was a black-furred ratman, his brutish frame encased in a hodgepodge of steel plates and strips of iron mail. A thick-bladed broad-axe was clenched in one of the creature’s paws.

  ‘Catch-take more rat-meat with cheese,’ the second skaven hissed.

  Krisnik wolfed down the bite he had taken, then hurriedly closed his paw around the haft of his own broad-axe. ‘My-mine cheese,’ he snarled. ‘My-mine rat-meat!’

  The other skaven bared his fangs in a murderous leer, his claws clenching tighter about the grip of his weapon. His greedy antagonist glared back at him. The two ratmen, armed and armoured for battle, took each other’s measure. The second skaven reluctantly backed down, casting a worried glance at the massive steel-banded door behind him. Krisnik noticed the gesture, his former bravado evaporating in a shudder of fright. Almost sheepishly, he tossed the hindquarters of his catch to his comrade.

  It wasn’t that he was worried about fighting the other guard. He was bigger and stronger than his comrade, and better with the axe. Besides, if he wasn’t, there was that trick he’d learned about swatting an enemy’s groin with the flat of his tail. No, it wasn’t fear that made him relent; it was simply a matter of recognising t
he dignity and decorum which was proper for a ratman of his position. A warrior entrusted with the protection of the Shattered Tower didn’t lower himself to squabbling over morsels of cold, gamey rat-meat.

  Especially when the Lords of Decay would expect to find two guards exactly where they had been posted. It didn’t appeal to Krisnik to consider what they would do should they find one of their guards missing. Clan Rictus had enough ways of dealing with traitors and shirkers, all of them hideous and unspeakable. He didn’t need to think about how much nastier the imaginations of the council members might be.

  Taking the tiniest nibble from his sliver of cheese, Krisnik darted a furtive look at the massive door. He was thankful the door was as thick as it was. Whatever the Council of Thirteen had been discussing for so long was nothing for his ears! The Lords of Decay took great pleasure displaying the bodies of spies when they were through mutilating them. Several score decorated the spires of the Shattered Tower at present, but the rulers of skavendom were always able to find room for more.

  Krisnik shivered in his armour. Maybe joining the elite Verminguard hadn’t been such a good idea after all. Which one of his jealous rivals had arranged to put him into such a predicament, he wondered?

  Eerie green light cast strange shadows across the enormous hall, rendering its immensity a patchwork of darkness and illumination. The light streamed from a pair of gigantic crystal spheres bound in cages of iron and supported upon great pillars of bronze. A confusion of wires and hoses drooped from the pillars, writhing along the stone floor until they vanished into a huge copper casket. A wiry skaven, his fur dyed a deep crimson where it was not scarred with burns, scrambled about the casket with frantic, jittery motions. His gloved paws flew across levers and hastily adjusted valves, causing the green light to flicker and small bursts of glowing gas to billow from vents in the bronze pillars.

  The warlock-engineer bit down on a curse as the mechanism resisted his efforts. The warp-lantern was a new invention, the latest in the techno-sorcery of Clan Skryre. A lamp that created light not from rat dung or worm-oil, but from warpstone itself! A magnificent creation that would illuminate the whole of the Under-Empire and bring much profit to the warlock-engineers – if they could only get the thing to work right!

  Glaring through his goggles, the technician growled at the scrawny skavenslaves locked inside the generator, forgetting for the moment that his snarls were wasted. The slaves were blind, deaf and mute, a precaution against their learning any of the council’s secrets. Angrily, the warlock turned back to the copper casket, stabbing his claw against one of the buttons. A spark of blue electricity crackled from a coil set at the top of the generator cage, shocking the slaves and jolting them into motion. The slaves began scrambling inside the cylindrical cage, their momentum causing it to revolve. The energy of their terrified efforts raced along the wires, feeding the warp-lanterns and causing the green light to stabilise.

  Tugging nervously at his whiskers, the warlock-engineer glanced across the cavernous hall to the great table where the masters of all skavendom were gathered. His glands clenched as his eyes roved across the concentrated gathering of evil and villainy. In all the Under-Empire, there were no skaven more fierce or ruthless than these twelve. As Luminary of the Shattered Tower, it was his duty to provide light for these merciless monsters, that they might better see their surroundings and so be assured that none of their rivals had broken with custom and brought assassins into the sacred confines of the Grey Chapel.

  The Luminary darted an anxious glance at the supreme overlord of Clan Skryre, the cruel Warpmaster Sythar Doom. The wizened Sythar was hunched in his steel-backed chair, his paws folded against each other, his fingers stroking the copper wires embedded in his scarred fur. Sythar’s face was a patchwork of skin grafts and iron plates, his eyes a pair of enchanted rubies three sizes too big for their sockets and held in place by a confusion of sutures and stitches. There was a compact power-plant hidden somewhere beneath the Warpmaster’s flowing black robes, connected to the thick black cable implanted into the underside of his jaw. When his withered lips pulled back to expose his metal fangs, blue sparks crackled about his teeth. It was a vivid reminder to all around Sythar that he had survived several attempts to murder him and a promise that the next attempt would be quite costly to his killers. The power-plant was wired to his heart and should that organ stop beating the result would be quite explosive.

  Warpmaster Sythar Doom didn’t seem to notice the flickering warp-lights or the Luminary’s efforts to stabilise them. His attention was fixed upon the other skaven seated about the council table, his ruby eyes gleaming as each facet focused upon a different ratman. In the deadly maze of schemes and intrigues that formed council politics, it was dangerous to ignore any of them. The weaker Lords of Decay were forever scheming to rise higher in the hierarchy of the Under-Empire; the stronger were equally determined to ensure that they retained their positions. Sythar cast a covetous look at the Twelfth Throne, a trickle of drool causing his metal fangs to throw sparks.

  There were twelve seats upon the council. Here, within the Grey Chapel, the seats were arrayed about an ancient oaken table, each throne radiating outwards from the great stone chair which was the Black Throne, the thirteenth seat set aside for the Great Horned Rat. The most powerful Lords of Decay occupied the thrones to the left and right of their god, the first and twelfth seats. That on the right was the Seerseat, always occupied by the Seerlord, master of the grey seers and grand prophet of the Horned Rat. It was the Seerlord’s function to implement the edicts of the council and to interpret the will of the absent Horned Rat. Supposedly above the bickering and politics of the skaven clans, the Seerlord was as ambitious and greedy as any ratman and used his position to further his own power, exploiting the vacant Black Throne to give himself a double vote whenever the need arose.

  Seerlord Skrittar was going to need that double vote now. The fact pleased Warpmaster Sythar. The priest had dominated the council for far too long and it was time that he was put into his place. The bells fixed to Skrittar’s long horns tinkled as the grey skaven tried to suppress the tremors of rage rushing through his body. With his ruby-eyes, Sythar’s vision penetrated the oak table to see the Seerlord’s tail lashing angrily against the side of his throne.

  How it must vex the prophet to have all his careful alliances and treaties crumbling before his eyes! And to have them swept aside by the Seerlord’s most hated enemy, the bloated Arch-Plaguelord of Clan Pestilens, Poxtifex Nurglitch IV, only made the spectacle even more delicious!

  ‘The man-things fight among themselves,’ the whisper-thin voice of Blight Tenscratch rasped through the shadows. A creature as twisted as his noxious clan, Blight was the despised ruler of the bug-breeding Clan Verms. Worm-oil was only a small part of his clan’s fortunes, their real wealth coming from exterminating infestations of fleas and ticks, infestations most ratmen believed Verms themselves had caused.

  ‘Now is the time to fight-slay,’ Blight hissed, slapping one of his scabrous paws against the table. ‘Kill all man-things and take their land!’

  ‘The man-things won’t fight each other if given a common enemy,’ the sharp tongue of Shadowmaster Kreep slashed across Blight’s words. Leader of Clan Eshin, Kreep commanded the most vicious cadre of killers and assassins in the Under-Empire, making his one of the most feared names in skavendom. Sythar thought it was a shame Kreep had allowed religious fervour and steady bribes to make him Skrittar’s lap-rat.

  ‘They will set aside their animosity to fight us,’ Kreep pronounced, raising one of his black talons. ‘We cannot fight all of the man-things.’

  ‘Then why did we send Deathmaster Silke to kill the Vilner-man? Just to help stupid beast-meat?’ The angry snarl came from Rattnak Vile, High Vivisectionist of Clan Moulder. The burly Rattnak was twice the size of Kreep, with immense paws tipped in steel talons within the Master Moulders had grafted to their clanlord’s bones. Rattnak’s eyes were glazed from the freque
nt overuse of warp-dust, and his posture was always that of a cornered beast ready to pounce. Kreep’s paws vanished into the folds of his cloak, closing about whatever weapons he had hidden there. Unless the assassin had coated his blades in very powerful poison, Sythar didn’t rate his chances against the monstrous Rattnak.

  ‘Man-things fight, man-things die,’ the sepulchral moan of Warlord Nekrot sent a shiver through the room. Though he occupied a lowly place upon the council, the ghoulish master of Clan Mordkin presented a terrifying aspect, his fur bleached to the colour of polished bone, his armour adorned with the skeleton of his predecessor. Clan Mordkin had reached prominence during the wars against Nagash the Accursed and they had been obsessed with death and decay ever since. Nekrot’s black eyes gleamed from the skull-mask he wore, his fangs bruxing as he contemplated the death and destruction of an empire. If it came to war, the other council members would think in terms of plunder and loot, but Nekrot would care only for how much killing his clan would get to do.

  ‘Boris-man now Emperor,’ stated Raksheed Deathclaw, glowering from within his red hood, his face obscured by a strip of scarlet cloth. Murderlord of Clan Skully, Raksheed was the bitter rival of Kreep, envious of Clan Eshin’s power and prestige. He could always be counted upon to vote against Kreep and by extension, Seerlord Skrittar. With many warrens underneath the sands of Araby, it was also in Skully’s best interests to maintain favourable relations with Pestilens and their extensive Southlands powerbase.

  ‘Yes-yes,’ agreed General Bonestab, the steel-encased warlord of Clan Grikk. ‘My spies tell me Boris-man hated much-much by man-things. With no leader, man-things not fight!’

  ‘Dwarf-things more problem than man-things!’ snapped Warlord Manglrr Baneburrow, commander of the teeming hordes of Clan Fester. ‘Dwarf-things kill Graug-dragon, now try to steal Fester-warren in Karak Azgal! We must crush-slay all dwarf-things!’

  ‘We will kill-slay all dwarf-meat.’ The words came in a venomous hiss. The eyes of the council turned towards the Twelfth Throne and the malignant creature seated there. Lord Vecteek the Murderous, Warmonger of Clan Rictus, preened his silky black fur as he leaned back in his stone chair, plundered from the dwarf-halls of Karak Ungor. Clad in a suit of steel plates that sported an array of spikes that would have shamed a rose bush, Vecteek let his piercing grey eyes linger upon each of his rivals. Even those who habitually sided with Clan Rictus squirmed under the Warmonger’s scrutiny.