Tales of the Old World (74 page)

“Here,” the priest said, pulling the threadbare blanket from his cot and
throwing it to his guest. “Sit you down.”

“Thanks,” he muttered, his accent harsh and guttural. “And why not, hey? Why
not be comfortable for the last few hours?”

“Why not, indeed?” the priest agreed, studiously ignoring the emotion in his
guest’s voice. At least the man was talking.

Deciding to take the risk of turning his back on him, he went to rummage in
the cell’s single cupboard, listening to the squeak of his stool beneath the
stranger’s weight all the while.

“Ha! Here it is.” A smile eased the spare lines of the old man’s face as he
produced a fat bottle of glazed clay and two pots. He poured out two generous
measures, passed one across to his guest and took a seat.

“Drink,” he said.

Again the man grunted his thanks. He drained the cup in one deep draught,
lowered it and peered into the dregs that remained. Gradually, as if in response
to something he’d seen there, a glistening tear slid down a pale scar and
disappeared into the bristles of his moustache.

“Give me your pot,” the priest said. He poured another measure and waited
until his guest took it. “You did well to survive the trap.”

For a split second the stranger froze, his drink held halfway to his lips.
Then, in an explosion of movement that sent his stool spinning away and the cup
rolling across the table he was on his feet, a dagger sprouting downwards from
his left fist.

“What do you know about it?” he snarled, baring strong yellow teeth as he
edged forward.

The priest slowed his breathing, unclenched his fists. For a second he
watched the patterns the fire made in the razor sharp steel that quivered
beneath his chin. He forced himself to look away, to look instead into the
crazed eyes of his tormentor.

A lunatic, a beast at bay, he thought, not without a touch of pity.

“I know only what I see,” he said, marshalling his words as carefully as a
surgeon would his tools. “With those weapons and those scars you’d find it hard
to pass for a civilian. Your obviously a gentleman of fortune. You’re garb’s
worth more gold than I see in a year.”

“Perhaps. But…”

“And you’ve recently been set upon,” the priest hurriedly continued. “That
much is obvious. A man whose bearing and profession speaks of a proud nature
wandering the night dressed in those rags? No. I’ll wager that two days ago
those tatters were good enough to wear in any court.”

The soldier lowered his knife uncertainly as his host pressed home his
advantage.

“As for the trap, well, what bandit would run into the jaws of that weapon of
yours? It must have been a trap. Anyway, there have been no battles hereabouts
of late.”

“Haven’t there?” the man asked contemptuously.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the mad energy deserted him. The rage bled
away from his features, leaving in its place a terrible exhaustion. Sheathing
his dagger, the man recovered his stool and sat back down with a sigh.

“My apologies,” he muttered half-heartedly, and shrugged.

“Accepted,” the priest nodded. He recovered his guest’s pot and refilled it.
“Why don’t you tell me your name?”

“Otto van Delft,” he said, a trace of pride straightening his back. The
priest wasn’t surprised to find that he had one of Karl Franz’s subjects on his
hands. That would explain his manners.

“And what brings you to the shrine?” he asked warily. “You’re healthy,
strong. What do you want of Morr?”

“I’ll tell you,” Otto said.

He peered into the depths of the fire, the flames burnishing his grimy
features with a dozen shades of light and darkness. For a while he was silent,
listening to the crackle of wood settling in the fireplace and the muted
complaints of the rising wind that now lay siege outside.

Finally he took a deep drink and began. “What do you know of the ratvolk?”

“Ratvolk?”

“Yes, the ratvolk. The skaven.” Otto turned his attention from the fire to
the priest and saw him shiver, a reflex that had nothing to do with the draft
that slunk around the stone of the old walls.

“So you do know of them.” The soldier smiled grimly. “Of course you do.
Everyone does.”

The priest merely nodded and poured another measure from the jug. This time
it was for himself.

“Tell me everything,” he said, and took a drink.

“I have been hunting the vermin all my life. In sewers, swamps, forests. In
catacombs of brick and living stone, in lands of fire and ice and skin rotting
dampness. And why? Because…”

Otto paused, his brows meeting in sudden suspicion as he studied his host.
The priest’s slight nod seemed to reassure him.

“Because,” he continued heavily, “they’re part of me, part of all of us.
They’re the evil that we try to hold at bay, with law and discipline. And I hate
them.”

A log, settling in the fireplace, snapped open in a shower of sparks. The two
men watched the sudden flare of light for a moment. Only when it had died down
did Otto continue.

“I have a reputation. I am a—what did you call it?—a gentleman of
fortune. Yes. And like a thousand other gentlemen of fortune, I haggle like a
whore for the best price, then throw the money away on ale and women. But unlike
them,” he said, leaning forward with a sudden intensity, “I do what I’m paid
for. I keep the battle moving forward. Believe me, priest, that’s no easy
thing.”

The older man nodded.

“Reputation,” the mercenary sneered, injecting a whole world of contempt into
the word. As if in further comment he coughed, hawking up a gob of phlegm that
he spat with unerring accuracy into the fire. It hissed and sizzled as he
continued.

“Reputation is what you need in my business more than in any other. Wealth I
have, but I needed more than one man’s gold for what I had in mind. There are
rumours, you see, rumours of a city in the south, the heartland of the skaven,
the womb of their race. I wanted backers. I wanted enough men to sweep down into
those swamps and tear out the guts of the enemy.”

Otto, his pupils narrowing into twin pinpricks of fanaticism, spat the words
out. “I needed one more war to make that happen. I came so close. Ever heard of
Magdeburg?”

“Yes,” the priest said. “I knew a merchant from there. He made a contribution
to the shrine.”

“He wasn’t called Gottlieb, was he?”

“No. Why?”

“Gottlieb was the man who hired me. He was the mayor of Magdeburg. Poor
bastard.”

Once more Otto drained his pot, once more his host refilled it. This spirit,
White Fire the donor had called it, was proving to be very effective at
loosening tongues.

“Forty crowns a week,” the mercenary said, “plus another fifty for a pelt. I
let the lads keep the pelt money. That’s always the best way. Krinvaller skimmed
a little off the top, of course, but not too much.” The mercenary snorted.
“Krinvaller! What an idiot. Still, I liked him. Everyone did. He’d made a great
watch captain, lazy and kind hearted. Then Gottlieb launched the rattenkrieg and
turned him from a good watch captain into a terrible colonel.”

“The rattenkrieg,” the priest ventured uncertainly, “is a war against the
skaven?”

“That’s it. Gottlieb’s daughter was taken, you see. She was a pretty girl, by
all accounts, apart from a strawberry birthmark on her cheek. Not that that
matters. A man’s child is his child and always beautiful to him. When she began
to wail late one night about things hiding inside her closet, Gottlieb just
thought she was having nightmares. Then, one morning… well, there was nothing
left of her, just crumpled sheets and a torn scrap of nightdress. The skaven had
gnawed their way from the sewers, up between the walls and through the back of
her wardrobe. Their tracks were everywhere in the room.”

Van Delft paused, looked reflectively into the fire.

“So Gottlieb went to war. He was winning it, too, even before I got there. I
should have known something was wrong. A halfwit doesn’t lead a couple of dozen
vagabonds down into the deeps and come back victorious. He doesn’t come back at
all.”

“Oh, gods, I should have known.” Van Delft; face crumpled into a mask of pain
and he smacked his palm against his forehead. “I should have known.”

The priest, his own features carefully composed, wondered if the mercenary
was going to break down altogether. But after a few tense moments, he took a
long, deep shuddering breath, pulled his hands reluctantly from his face and
continued.

“The information we were getting was very good. Before every mission Gottlieb
would call us in and give us numbers, deployment, even these maps. Look.” Van
Delft reached inside the ruined cloth of his tunic and pulled out a roll of
parchments. Even in the uncertain firelight, the wealth of detail remained
crystal clear. As well as the mud-coloured inks, which distinguished each
tangled strand from its neighbours, each of the cobwebbed lines was beaded with
its own peculiar series of dots and dashes. The priest held one up to the flame
to admire the workmanship.

“Why are they made of leather?” he asked, rubbing the material between his
fingers.

“Because parchment tears.” The mercenary, seized by a sudden fit of
shivering, wrapped the blanket tighter across his shoulders. “I’d never worked
with such information before. Usually underground all you have is instinct,
smell, hearing. Fear. But with these,” he waved a hand towards the maps, “we had
depths, scale, everything. I should have known.”

“Known what?” the priest blurted out in spite of himself, and immediately
regretted his lapse of patience.

His guest noticed the slip and smiled wearily. “This potcheen of yours seems
to be loosening both of our tongues.”

“We’d better take some more then. Give me your pot.” As he poured, he watched
his guest’s expression harden and guessed that his thoughts were falling back
into the depths of the past.

“Ever heard of warpstone?” Otto asked.

The deepening gurgle of a filling cup faltered.

“Yes. When I was a younger man—” he broke off. “Yes, I’ve heard of it.”

“You know of its value then?” Otto asked curiously.

“I know of its value to some.”

“So do I. And beneath Magdeburg I saw enough to buy a city. Although no sane
man would risk trying to get it.”

“At first,” he continued, “I thought that the stuff must have been something
else, some kind of mould or fungus. I was leading a gang down to a cut-off point
when I first saw it, a great twisting seam threading itself through the walls
like an artery through a corpse. And that light, that sickly green light! I
swear it was pulsing, beating like the heart of some living thing. That light,
it made our faces look like…”

He stopped, eyes blank and unseeing, his drink forgotten in his hand.

“It made them look like daemons,” he finished and drained his pot. “Such
wealth was before us. For a moment, a second, I thought that here I’d found my
key to the south. Madness of course, the idea of selling the enemy power in
order to raise an army against him is insane. Then another thought hit me. Stuck
down there, beneath countless tons of rock, with nothing between myself and the
darkness except a single flame, I realised what sort of skaven pack must own
this territory and just how powerful they must have been. If I’d have had time,
I’d have retreated back up and thought things through.”

“You didn’t have time?” The priest nudged his guest out of a brief reverie.

“No. That’s when the first attack came.”

Wordlessly he held his pot out and wordlessly the priest refilled it.

“It’s always the same in the beginning, especially underground. There’s
always that terrible moment when you realise that you’re not imagining things
anymore, that what you’re hearing is actually real. That’s when the air seems to
rum to liquid, heavy and tough to breath, even before the stink hits you. The
noise is always the same too; the hiss of fur against stone, the scrape of
claws, the pattering of feet and the squeals of pain. Even in the seconds before
battle those filthy things are snapping and biting at their own kin.”

Van Delft sneered into the depths of the fireplace, his bared teeth gleaming
as sharp as a terrier’s beneath his moustache. “They even hate each other.”

This time, when he paused, the priest said nothing and merely sat transfixed.

“The weakest always come first, the slaves and the vanquished. Pathetic
creatures these, but crazed with a fear of what’s behind more than what is in
front. I waited for them to come. I felt fear twisting into terror, felt terror
twisting into madness. We waited some more. I thought of the lads behind me and
tried to take strength from them. They didn’t have it to give, though. All I got
was the sound of sobbing and the smell of piss. If their fear hadn’t frozen them
I’ve no doubt they would have fled at the first alarm. As it was, they waited
until we could see the lice crawling on the enemy. Then I fired Gudrun.”

He reached over to the weapon and ran his fingertips lovingly down from its
muzzle to its breech.

“She punched a hole straight through them, stopped the charge with a single
smack of blood and shrapnel.”

Van Delft smiled gently and drew the firearm to his chest like a favourite
dog. The priest half expected him to pat it.

He did.

“Yes, she cut through them. That’s pretty much all I remember. In that battle
Sigmar blessed me with the madness.”

The priest, who could well believe it, nodded and said nothing for a long
while.

“And was the pack as strong as you feared?”

“No. No, they were nothing. Most of them were crippled with old injuries or
disease. The rest were only half grown, or so old that they were toothless.
There were even some females. The only one of them that was up to anything was
the leader. Now he was something.” The soldier nodded approvingly. “A great
beast, at least as tall as a man, his pelt was almost pure black where it wasn’t
riven through with scar-tissue. And from the tip of his snout to his left ear
there was nothing but shiny, pink flesh, studded with a lump of warpstone in the
place of his eye. How it flared when we’d cornered him!”