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Contents

Cover

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

Verminslayer

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Epilogue

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Skaventide’

Backlist

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

The Mortal Realms have been despoiled. Ravaged by the followers of the Chaos Gods, they stand on the brink of utter destruction.

The fortress-cities of Sigmar are islands of light in a sea of darkness. Constantly besieged, their walls are assailed by maniacal hordes and monstrous beasts. The bones of good men are littered thick outside the gates. These bulwarks of Order are embattled within as well as without, for the lure of Chaos beguiles the citizens with promises of power.

Still the champions of Order fight on. At the break of dawn, the Crusader’s Bell rings and a new expedition departs. Storm-forged knights march shoulder to shoulder with resolute militia, stoic duardin and slender aelves. Bedecked in the splendour of war, the Dawnbringer Crusades venture out to found civilisations anew. These grim pioneers take with them the fires of hope. Yet they go forth into a hellish wasteland.

Out in the wilds, hardy colonists restore order to a crumbling world. Haunted eyes scan the horizon for tyrannical reavers as they build upon the bones of ancient empires, eking out a meagre existence from cursed soil and ice-cold seas. By their valour, the fate of the Mortal Realms will be decided.

The ravening terrors that prey upon these settlers take a thousand forms. Cannibal barbarians and deranged murderers crawl from hidden lairs. Martial hosts clad in black steel march from skull-strewn castles. The savage hordes of Destruction batter the frontier towns until no stone stands atop another. In the dead of night come howling throngs of the undead, hungry to feast upon the living.

Against such foes, courage is the truest defence and the most effective weapon. It is something that Sigmar’s chosen do not lack. But they are not always strong enough to prevail, and even in victory, each new battle saps their souls a little more.

This is the time of turmoil. This is the era of war.

This is the Age of Sigmar

CHAPTER ONE

THE THIEF

The wall had come down, and by the look of things, it had come down in the last few hours. There wasn’t a lot that would grow in Greywater Fastness, but a rubble heap like this one would be smothered by weeds if it had been as much as half a day old. Underneath the poisonous air and the polluted soil, it was still Ghyran.

Elsworn Killebrook crouched down with a creak of leather straps and steel plates and picked up a fragment of brick. The air blowing across her face through the breach was foul. It turned the flame of her chemical lantern a demented, burning green in spite of the multitude of valves and switches intended to keep the air flow to the glass chamber constant and pure. The sweet, overripened stench reminded her of the Ghoul Mere, which lay beyond the city walls. It had the same unmistakeable reek of burnt hair and corruption.

‘It came through here all right.’

From the cramped gloom of the tunnel behind her there came the rusty scrape of shivs being drawn from belts and the thwack of cudgels striking their wielders’ palms. Sorrol Tun brandished a short sword. Orinkul Flathelm glowered into his upturned palm before deciding that, yes, the wooden club he had just whacked against it would be adequate to the job at hand. Brigid and Bryony bickered in some indecipherable accent over the same knife before drawing one apiece. Daegal solemnly polished his blunderbuss. Only the burly Hod contented himself to go on as he was, and then only because he had just one horribly mauled arm – an accident, Elsworn had been told, involving a moment of negligence and a steam-powered loom – and it was currently occupied with the underjack’s pack. The mercenaries’ rattletrap pony, a headless facsimile of the real thing made of grey iron and clanking brass and brought to life by thousands of grinding cogs, shuddered quietly to itself, hitched to a small tarp-covered wagon. It had no name.

Together, they were the Loose Cannon underjacks, as notorious for the extreme violence with which they policed Greywater Fastness’ labyrinth of subterranean ruins as they were for the extraordinary binges that would periodically carve a red path across the taverns of Five Dials.

‘What do you think it is?’ said Tun, crunching up the shallow incline of rubble and squatting down beside Elsworn at the breach. Then he said ‘eurgh’ and wrinkled his nose, though he did not immediately throw up, which lifted the Loose Cannons’ ageing sergeant just slightly in her estimation.

He was a slight, shabby-faced man with greying temples, bags under his eyes, and a two-day-old shadow wearying his chin. Aside from Elsworn herself, he was the only member of the company wearing armour: a battered steel breastplate and a kettle helmet that had itself seen better days. His quilted doublet and trousers were quartered yellow and black, Greycaps colours, but the uniform looked almost as old as he was. The tales of his drunkenness on duty, his belligerence towards senior officers, and the enormous gambling debts he had racked up with the hags of Elrith Ceyl were still scandalous half a decade later. How he had ended up in command of a tunnel-fighting militia instead of dead in an alley with a Khainite blade between his shoulder blades, Elsworn couldn’t say.

‘I don’t know yet,’ she admitted.

‘Big or small?’

‘By the size of the hole it put in the wall, I’d say big.’ She grinned at the thought. ‘Either that, or there were lots of them, and they had a lot of machinery to carry.’

All she’d had to go on thus far was the frightened blathering of some steelworkers who had suddenly needed to explain how the lower floors of Lady Ciriline Zukaus’ old factory had come to be entirely emptied of its machinery. To say that she’d taken their tales of a monster with a pinch of salt would have been an understatement – but that was before she’d entered the sewers beneath and found a hole knocked through a solid brick wall.

She worked the brick into a fine red crumb between her fingers and thumb. ‘This wasn’t brought down with pickaxes or hammers. It wasn’t dug out by some kind of beast either. This wall has been blown up.’ She brought a fingertip to the tip of her tongue, and immediately spat. It tasted acrid. It wasn’t common gunpowder. ‘Warpstone.’ She wiped her hands vigorously on her thighs. No steam lord in the city would be mad enough to use that Chaos rock in their processes, not even for the wealth of powerful transmutative properties it undoubtedly possessed. But one did not rise far through the ranks of the Freeguild in Greywater Fastness without coming into contact with it once or twice. The subterranean skaven race made extensive use of it, she knew, as fuel for their deranged industries, and the creatures even consumed it as food.

The skaven were a constant and ever-evolving menace in Greywater Fastness. They were not as visible an enemy as the Sylvaneth, who could be seen from any vantage on the city walls, but they were all the more dangerous for that, and no less persistent. It would certainly explain the steelworks thefts. The skaven had envious eyes and restless paws. Their civilisation thrived amidst the ruins of others, and they were always dreaming up new ways to fuse human or duardin ingenuity with their own warpstone-fuelled sciences.

Elsworn felt a thrill of excitement. She had heard terrible stories of the monsters that dwelled in the dark places beneath the city, but had never explored those places for herself.

‘Skaven,’ said Tun, speaking aloud what she had only been thinking.

‘Wim hadda gan,’ said Brigid, with a determined frown.

Elsworn stared at her blankly.

‘Girl’s right,’ said Orinkul, his voice as deep as something shy and fierce living at the bottom of a drain. ‘Guild rules are clear – any new passages have to be reported back to the guild office and the city surveyor immediately.’

‘Then go back,’ said Elsworn, standing up out of her crouch and clapping the last of the brick dust off her hands. ‘No one’s stopping you.’ It was the steelworkers who had called in the Loose Cannons, not her, no doubt hoping that they might recover their lost machinery without having to involve Lady Zukaus. The factory had been mothballed for years, for as long as Elsworn had been serving in the Freeguild, but the baroness still took a dim view of theft. Almost as dim as the one she took of failure, which was the only reason that Elsworn had not ordered the Loose Cannons back to their guildhall already. She would face anything the sewers could throw at her (was quietly looking forward to it, in fact), but having a unit of experienced guides at her back couldn’t hurt.

‘Don’t you dare go anywhere, Ori,’ said Tun. He turned to Elsworn. His grin flashed at her in the dark, like a smattering of copper coins clawed from the silty bottom of a wishing well. ‘Half a gill of Aqua Ghyranis says kill-of-the-week is as good as mine.’

Daegal snorted. ‘I’ll take any wager of yours and double it.’ The other Loose Cannons were quick to follow suit with counter-wagers of their own. Tun, it seemed, had not learned any lessons from the gambling woes of his misspent youth.

‘The kill will be mine,’ said Elsworn firmly.

‘Is that right?’ said Tun, with a smirk that Elsworn longed to smack with the butt of her pistol.

‘It is.’

In part, it was a matter of honour: she had had word passed to the Cavalier-Marshal that if there was a monster down here in the sewers, then she would slay it and return with its head as proof of the deed. But even honour, she would freely admit, could have a selfish element. Her patron was well known for lavishing more attention on her Dreadwood estates than she ever gave to her faltering enterprises here in the city. She was infamous for it, in fact. What passed for gossip around the fine dinner tables of the Great Axle did not overly concern Elsworn, of course, so long as the next time the baroness led a hunting party into the Ghoul Mere it went with Elsworn a part of it. Her excitement of late had been restricted to breaking up fights amongst disaffected workers and horseback patrols of the baroness’ numerous half-empty warehouses.

Hardly the sort of fare to satisfy a hot-blooded Cavalier.

‘Orinkul,’ she said, turning back. ‘Pass me a shovel from the wagon. We’ll see if we can’t clear away enough of this rubble to squeeze through without covering ourselves in warpstone.’

At the merest mention of the wagon, the underjacks all cleared their throats, fell uncharacteristically quiet, and found objects of great fascination elsewhere.

Elsworn reminded herself that in addition to Orinkul, Daegal, Brigid, Bryony and Hod, there was indeed a sixth Loose Cannon under Tun’s command. His slow, cavernous snores were even then rumbling through the cart’s scrap-iron sideboards. The tarp sheet strung across the back rose and fell to the same grinding rhythm.

Tun gave an apologetic cough. ‘We try not to wake him before midday.’

‘Nad if weez may batter,’ said Brigid, giving the wagon a wary eye.

‘Unless there’re some grots or a pack of skaven to point him at,’ Daegal added, visibly anxious.

Elsworn turned her face in the vague direction of the Realm of Heaven, somewhere up beyond the dripping ceiling, and briefly closed her eyes. She signed the hammer of Sigmar across her chest, praying for patience. She didn’t have time for this nonsense. Pressing her lantern into Tun’s hands, she walked impatiently around the back of the cart. There, she took the tarp by the corner and, before anyone had the chance to object, ripped the sheet aside.

The Fyreslayer who had, until that moment, been lying underneath the tarp in an alcohol-induced stupor awoke with a violent splutter. ‘I’m up, you blasted shrew!’ he roared, grasping for the missing sheet with a tattooed paw the size of a ham joint. The large rune hammered into his chest, poorly hidden under a straggly mess of beard, sputtered like a piece of worked bronze freshly drawn from the fire. Elsworn almost choked on his breath. He smelled as though he had been smoked and pickled. His one, chronically bloodshot eye blinked around him in confusion. ‘I’m… Wait.’ With exaggeratedly drunken slowness, his eye focused on her. ‘You’re not her.’

‘Not who?’ asked Elsworn.

‘The god-bothering priest, of course! Who else would I be talking about?’

Elsworn looked around the nervously fidgeting ring of underjacks. ‘Priest?’

The duardin propped himself up. He swayed slightly on his elbows, the war-torn topography of his features crumbling with what appeared to be motion sickness as the wagon rocked from side to side. ‘What’s it to you anyway?’ he managed to growl, no doubt trying to sound threatening but failing miserably.

With a sigh, Elsworn reached over the drunken Fyreslayer for the shovel she’d come for.

The Loose Cannons really were the lowest of the low.

She wasn’t sure that she had properly appreciated that fact until just then.

Blastritt was feeling rather pleased with his cleverness.

This was not, in itself, an extraordinary state of affairs. He was a master warlock of Clan Skryre. The evidence of his fiendish cleverness abounded in every cunning, impressively complicated feature of his armour. The series of widgets running along the side of his gauntlet allowed him to unleash blasts of warp lightning from his fingertips, douse the enemies of progress in warpfire, or administer corrective shocks through the collars worn by his slaves, and only very rarely did he hit the wrong button by mistake. The big red button on the outside of the vambrace – designed to be visible in the dark to weak, colour-insensitive skaven eyes – was for emergencies only. One push, and his armour would release a cloud of lethal poison wind that would kill everyone within a three tail-length radius. Most impressive of all, however, in his own expert view, was the array of copper antennae that poked from his helmet. They allowed him to tap into the cosmic ley lines of whichever realm he happened to be in, transforming the native flavour of magic into the superior skaven kind that was more compatible with his equipment. On the rare occasions like this when he was forced to leave the comfort of his workshop warren, they also enabled him to exert remote control of his toys, with occasional actual success.

Fairer to say, then, that he was feeling especially pleased with his cleverness.

‘Quickly… now…’ he wheezed. The rubber mask zipped over his muzzle made breathing slightly more difficult than it might otherwise have been, but it was a small price to pay to avoid choking on the occasional accidental discharge of poison wind. That button was so very big, and so very invitingly red. Sometimes, he just felt the need to check that it was still working. He shook his head to rid it of the notion, and concentrated on what he was doing. ‘A short hop… a shorter scurry… and we can leave these sewers again. Our escape… will be… waiting for us there.’

An elite team of clanrats in leather cagoules clattered along behind him, battling to move a small fleet of trolleys laden with scrap. They created an impressive din. Their brass wheels jounced over the broken flagstones. Their pilots squeaked curses at one another, and at the truculent vehicles they were trying to push. Klatch One-Ear, the ambitious young warlock engineer who had personally vouched for his clanrats’ discretion and cunning, chivvied them anxiously from the rear. The regular snap of his warp-prod, followed by a pained yelp, a waft of scorched fur, and a rattling burst of acceleration, spoke of how effective verbal encouragement alone had proved.

Klatch cast frequent, anxious looks over his shoulder, but Blastritt was entirely unconcerned by the racket. As a far cleverer rat than his upstart underling, he knew, for instance, that humans had very poor eyesight in darkness. Had his own experiments on captured slaves not proven conclusively, too, that they barely even had a sense of smell at all? Truly was the race of men inferior to that of their skaven betters in every measurable or imaginable way. It was not just the gospel of ruin, as chittered to the masses by the Grey Seers, but science! The humans’ machinery would be much better off in skaven paws, that was for certain.

‘Hurry. Hurry.’

Blastritt threw an impatient glance behind him, looking back over the clattering train of brass trolleys moving the way he had just run. Was that the bob of a light he saw in the passage behind them? No. Quite impossible. There was nothing in these tunnels but rats, and the rats, like their ingenious cousin Blastritt, had no need for lights. It was either that or concede that Klatch One-Ear could be right and Blastritt wrong, and that was clearly absurd.

Reassured by this logic, he looked forward again and scurried by example. And if it appeared to Klatch or the others that he was scurrying just a bit faster than he had been before, then it was purely out of an understandable eagerness to get back to his work.

‘Did you hear that?’ Elsworn’s voice echoed through the vaulted hall until it left the ragged circle of her lantern-light altogether, feeling its own way into the dark beyond it.

To her left, a scummy trickle of water slithered through the thorns that had taken over the ancient canal bed. The towpath that she and the Loose Cannons walked along was paved but crooked, given over to various species of lichens and slimes. The walls were in the Azyrite style, probably put there in the early years after the Realmgate Wars, when any wonder had seemed possible. Mineral crystals in the smooth grey stone twinkled like the stars they had spent the aeons of prehistory forming under. The structures had clearly been old even before the canal was abandoned. Cruder brickwork and perfunctory slaps of cement filled the gaps in the semi-precious Azyrite stone. Fat, hairy root-tips poked in through the slowly crumbling repairs. The ceiling, though harbouring the odd bit of fresco here and there, was comprised largely of the buildings jumbled up on top.

‘Half an hour from the Zukaus steelworks, heading west…’ Tun frowned in thought. ‘My guess would be that we’re somewhere under Long Smoke, in the Inner Circle.’

The district of Long Smoke was where the phenomenal amount of rubbish generated by the citizens of Greywater Fastness was taken to be incinerated. It made a lot of noise, presumably enough to be heard even this deep underground.

‘It’s been three-quarters of an hour if it’s been a minute,’ Orinkul grunted sourly. ‘And we’re going south-west.’

Duardin were natural tunnellers: stout, sure-footed, innately tough, and able to see as well in total darkness as Elsworn could with a lantern, and Orinkul certainly sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about. In spite of their inborn advantages, duardin were actually quite rare in the various underjack guilds. They were skilled workers who knew their value, and had the bargaining power of the duardin clans to back them up if ever a steam lord was foolhardy enough to argue otherwise. It was highly unusual that one fell through the cracks. Elsworn supposed that if she had to be the exception to that rule, then she would sound sour about it too.

He and Tun fell to bickering over the apparent vicissitudes of flora, architectural styles and odour. With a sigh, Elsworn checked the time on the rugged fob watch that she wore attached to her breastplate by a slender iron chain. The faintly magical face glowed yellow in the dark. They had, in fact, been walking for exactly thirty-seven minutes, but she had no wish to enter the argument on one side or the other and so kept that knowledge to herself.

They followed the path of the old canal in single file. Elsworn had jogged ahead for the first few minutes, before reluctantly accepting that the monster was still some way ahead, and slowed to a brisk walk. Orinkul followed immediately behind her, then Tun. After him came the ever-affable Hod, his crude hatchet still swinging from his belt, his broad shoulders laden with gear from the cart they had been forced to leave behind. The rattletrap would never have made it over the rubble. Hod didn’t seem to mind. After him came Brigid and Bryony, their younger eyes twinkling and alert, followed by the rakish Daegal and his antique but much beloved Misthåvn blunderbuss.

Gotrek, as she had since learned the Fyreslayer was called, staggered along at the rear. He looked thoroughly miserable with his head in his hand, pausing every now and again to dry-retch over the canal. He was far enough behind Daegal now that he could legitimately pretend to have stumbled across the Loose Cannons by accident and just happened to be heading in the same direction. Further to that impression, he even brought his own light in the form of a flame-wreathed fyresteel greataxe that Elsworn doubted she could have lifted, never mind carried one-handed for almost an hour. He roundly cursed both it and the glare it threw into his eye on a regular basis.

Another quarter of an hour passed. Elsworn’s back began to ache from her constant state of alertness. She longed to pick up the pace, but she doubted Gotrek would manage it and some instinct warned her that it would be unwise to leave the Loose Cannons behind here.

The reek of warpstone corruption grew so thick that everyone, even Gotrek, who arguably smelled almost as bad and professed not to notice it, pulled face scarves over their noses and mouths. Elsworn’s lantern-flame wobbled, purple and green, like a grot trying to hide its bruises.

Even the plants they passed, hardy enough to persist in the darkness deep under Greywater Fastness, became ever more sickened and withered the further in they went.

More than once, Elsworn sensed something rustling in the dead briars at the bottom of the canal. She would turn her lantern towards them, only to find the patch lifeless once more. Some kind of rodent, or perhaps a small bird that had adapted itself to eking out an existence in the dark. Small enough not to worry about, anyway. Or so she told herself, surreptitiously glancing over her shoulder the next time she heard something rustle.

On one occasion, Bryony spotted a stunted, half-human skeleton tangled up in the bracken. At Tun’s insistence, they wasted another minute investigating, but the remains disintegrated the moment the girl jumped down from the towpath. It was ancient, probably sealed up when the brick wall they had broken through was first erected. They left it, and pressed on.

These old canals were vestiges of a time when Greywater Fastness had been a humble mining post on the Verdian frontier, with no aspiration to one day becoming the great, never-sleeping armoury of the Mortal Realms. But the town had industrialised and it had grown, and the canals had eventually given way to ever faster and more efficient forms of transportation. To give the city’s leaders some credit, they had at least tried to brick off or fill in those labyrinthine miles and miles of abandoned tunnels, albeit with varying degrees of permanence.

Elsworn raised her lantern, chasing off the more timid shadows to deeper hiding places amidst the ceiling’s mishmash of cantilevers and arches.

She paused and listened.

To a person born and raised under the constant din of Greywater Fastness’ industrial noise, the silence of the canals was stifling. She felt all the more certain that she had heard something.

‘Tracks,’ Orinkul announced suddenly, his voice echoing, and squatted to the ground. His fellow underjacks came to a stop behind him.

Elsworn peered over his shoulder. He grunted at the imposition of the lantern-light, but suffered it in silence, waving his hand over a pair of parallel tracks in the layer of slime coating the flagstones. Something had come this way on wheels.

‘Over here,’ said Tun. He was standing by a mooring bollard. It looked as though something very large had been using it as a gnawing post. The base was tufted with reddish-brown fur, and shiny with what looked like oil. ‘Giant rats.’

‘Wonderful,’ Orinkul muttered under his breath.

‘Loadsa chow on ’em rats,’ Brigid offered in return.

Orinkul made a sour face. ‘It gets better and better.’

Giant rats were something of an urban legend – relatively commonplace, it was true, but always present in greater numbers and more gargantuan sizes in the sewers beneath some other, poorer part of the city. They were endemic wherever the skaven made their lairs. The ratmen bred them for meat and labour in the same way that humans reared livestock, but they also mutated huge numbers of otherwise common rats as accidental by-products of their deranged industries. Either way, it meant that wherever the steelworks thieves were running to, it was close.

She drew her antique pepperbox pistol. It had a long, factory-engineered barrel assembly, and an ironwood grip worn smooth by the generations of Freeguild soldiers who had wielded it before her. Its five barrels needed to be rotated by hand. Reloading was a pain and it had effectively no range, but it was still a powerful weapon of first resort in a tight alleyway or a sewer. The percussion lock mechanism should shield the gunpowder from the damp too.

An identical, complementary piece hung from the opposite hip, beside the well-notched cavalry sword that she honestly preferred in most instances. A metal kite shield bearing the heraldic wolf-man of the Zukaus family, black against a scuffed orange field, hung from her back. She did not use it often, preferring to fight with pistol and blade, but she appreciated the extra protection it afforded her back.

She resisted the urge to hook her lantern to her belt and draw her sword too.

Gotrek gave a loud belch and swaggered carelessly in between Elsworn and Orinkul. He stank like a brewery. Just then, that close, he felt almost as big as one. He frowned as he bent forward to squint at the bollard.

‘This rat’s a big one, all right,’ he said.

‘The bigger the better,’ Elsworn said.

She had expected that boast to shut the Fyreslayer up for a moment or two, but to her surprise he just subjected her to another foul onslaught of breath and grinned at her.

‘Wait-stop!’ Blastritt squeaked, bringing the disorderly convoy of scrap-laden trolleys and muttering clanrats to a jarring stop.

They had passed through a junction in the old canal, a second rancid trickle emerging from the gloom to join with the one that he and his team had been following, but had not stopped. A short-sighted rat could achieve the surface by any number of stone steps there, but Blastritt’s knowledge of the lost underways was encyclopaedic. He had cleverly led his clanrats further on, to where a set of rusted iron rungs were bolted to the wall. They ran up towards a steel cover, and a more reliably quiet area of the human city. The neglect of the man-thing who owned these properties had allowed them to fall into disrepair, he knew, and other humans entered them only infrequently.

‘Klatch!’ he snapped, finally losing his patience with the younger warlock’s fidgeting. The incessant checking over the shoulder for signs of pursuit, he could live with – that was just natural skaven caution. It was the way Klatch chose to exorcise his fears by electrocuting the clanrats around him that was bothering Blastritt. The smell of burnt fur was irritating his whiskers, even through the protective layers of rubber that he wore, and the pained squeals and pleas for mercy were hardly conducive to concentration. ‘Check all trolleys before we go,’ he said. ‘Make certain-sure nothing has fallen out, or fool-meat is going back to get it.’ That should be enough to keep the warlock’s small mind off things, at least for a while.

While Klatch One-Ear busied himself with this undoubtedly crucial task, Blastritt raised the gauntlet of his right paw to be level with his snout. He adjusted some dials, flicked some switches, chittering a mnemonic – ‘The red rat runs back-back in the rain…’ – under his breath to remind himself of the sequence. The equipment that he had installed on his armour was complicated on its own, and made more so by design. How else to deter the unworthy paws of those who, through frustrated jealousy, might use his own inventions against him? If that meant it took him a few extra seconds to perform the most basic of functions, then that was just the cost that needed to be borne. He pressed a final button and a set of bronze doors hinged outwards from the vambrace. There was a hollow compartment inside. In it was a glass vessel. Copper wires and crocodile clips connected it to the rest of the suit. It looked dirty. In reality, it was just scorched on the inside by the god-like power that had been bound there against its will.

‘Scuttlegnawer,’ he chittered over the device.

The murk within the glass moved as the vast awareness trapped in the small space therein shifted its attention onto him. As always, the thought of having such a mighty being bound to his will made him shiver with glee.

‘I listen-hear.’ Its voice was the stuttering of electricity, the static that made a rat’s fur stand on end, and the smoky breath of a coke furnace down the nape of his neck. ‘Speak your command.’

Blastritt crowed inwardly over the hatred in its tone. Only the most absolute of tyrants, the most magnificent in their authority, could engender such powerful feelings of loathing from their minions. Only when he was finished preening did he whisper over the glass again.

‘We are here, Scuttlegnawer. Come-quick!’

Elsworn stared up at the light slanting in from the ceiling. The wan, jaundiced rays of a Greywater Fastness noon spilled in through a plethora of iron-grilled drains. They must have been standing directly under Spoke Road Number One. By her estimation, that made Orinkul and Tun both partially right about their heading. Pedestrians, animals, carriages, and assorted mechanical contraptions designed to make obsolete one or more of the above, rumbled by. They cast a wobbling shadow theatre against the walls and floor. Where the light crossed the lingering damp, it broke into rainbows of fragile-looking beauty, like the smiles of sick children. But it was still beauty of a sort, and most unexpected, coming after the warrens they had just traipsed through. The bustle of the street, too, was familiar and comforting.

While she took in the splendour, the underjacks took advantage of the natural daylight and ventilation to steal a moment’s rest.

Orinkul and Tun continued to argue over whose directional sense had been the most wrong, even as they shrugged off their packs, cheerfully egged on by the innocent-faced Hod. Daegal watched from a safer distance. He propped his blunderbuss against the wall, making sure that it was set and comfortable before attending to himself, flipping back the hem of his long black highwayman’s coat and parking himself on a patch of lichen. He had been, or so he claimed, a wealthy man in his native city, the owner of nine pirate vessels and the same number of husbands and wives. And he would be still, had his sentient and capricious cargo of Ulguanite shadowstone not led him off the One Road and into the claws of the Dreadwood. In truth, he was lucky to have escaped the Sylvaneth alive. Better diminished than dead.

Elsworn continued a short way on. The canal they had been following was joined by another here. Its rancid breath gusted in through its slime-encrusted mouth. Grimacing, Elsworn clicked the aperture dial on her lantern down, strangling off the flame to a narrow gasp of heat. It continued to burn a poisonous purple-green. She ignored it. The light from the surface was more than enough to see by.

She looked around, marking the various exits from the chamber. If a person intended to remain with the canal then there were now two potential routes to leave by. Added to that, she could see at least one flight of stone steps leading up towards the surface. The sorry state of the walls also left enough likely-looking hand-holds that an escape through the drains in the ceiling would be eminently possible. Elsworn dismissed that last possibility, however, as soon as it occurred to her. The idea of a band of skaven escaping by Spoke Road Number One in the middle of the day struck her as particularly unlikely.

She crouched down, examining the floor for more tracks of the kind that Orinkul had identified earlier. There were none. She pushed two fingers into the slime layer, then withdrew them. She watched the amoebal sludge slowly ooze back into its original shape, obscuring the deformation left by her fingers. She shook her head regretfully. If anything had come this way ahead of them, then whatever marks it had left would have been erased already.

Elsworn was a decent tracker, good enough to ride alone in the Ghoul Mere and not lose her way, but she was hardly the best she had ever seen. The abilities of the Wildercorps hunters to follow a trail were practically magical. What she would have done for a tenth of those skills now.

She looked up, weighing her options between the two paths ahead for they struck as the most likely. She longed to just pick one and push on. She could toss a coin if it came to it. The ability to pause and reflect was another skill she had somehow never quite mastered. She reminded herself that a horse could only be ridden so hard before it broke, and the same was undoubtedly true of the Loose Cannons. And of herself, if she was being completely honest. They had been going hard at it for over an hour, and being constantly aware of one’s footing, and alert for skaven ambushes, was more taxing than she cared to admit.

She bit her lip, drummed her fingers on her drawn pepperbox’s ironwood grip, let out a long breath, and tried to force herself to relax.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor nearby, Brigid broke a hunk of sawdust bread in half and shared it with her sister, the pair rabbiting to one another all the while. Elsworn couldn’t understand a word of it. It wasn’t even the strange pidgin Azyrite they used to communicate with the other Loose Cannons, but a unique language of their own devising with a speakership of exactly two.

Insofar as the rag-tag underjack militia units in Greywater Fastness had a uniform, the two young women, wearing a grimy, sporadically garish mishmash of fabrics and colours with squares of leather and metal hoops sewn in for added protection, were pretty much modelling it. They’d looked identical in the dark, but in the second-hand light of day Bryony’s rangier build and youth became obvious. Both of them, like so many in Greywater Fastness, had grown up without parents. They had been taken in by the petty crime gangs and begging syndicates that claimed the streets around the Loose Cannons’ fortified guildhall, before somehow managing to con their way inside. They had eventually graduated from cleaning firearms and mending armour to hunting skaven.

They had, as they often tried to remind everyone in spite of their barely comprehensible Low Azyrite, been with the Loose Cannons longer even than Orinkul or Tun.

Still, it was difficult for Elsworn to see them as anything other than children. Bryony was about the same age as her own sister. She tried to imagine herself taking Alicia down here with her to fight giant rats and was surprised by the unlooked-for smile that smuggled its way onto her face. Alicia would no doubt take swift and violent offence at the suggestion that she was any less capable than Brigid or Bryony. Her sister had never been one to back down from a challenge.

Elsworn tried to think about what she had been doing when she was younger. It felt like a lifetime ago. To most children born in the Outer Circle slums it was a lifetime. She had enlisted with her Freeguild at the minimum age of twenty-one. She had claimed a third-place finish in the Battery Green lists at eighteen, but she had started her training with sword, pistol, and musket long before then.

Greywater Fastness was a city founded on war. If peace, however unlikely the possibility, were ever to fall across the Mortal Realms, then Greywater Fastness would surely collapse overnight. This city that she revered like a heroic great-grandparent had raised her on mythic tales of the Realmgate Wars, of the hundreds of smaller but still unspeakably vast campaigns that those early triumphs had then spawned, of the founding of the Seeds of Hope of which Greywater Fastness was one. As an older child, she had sought out every war notice and pamphlet she could lay her hands on, devouring every detail of the free cities’ heroic crusades into lands still languishing under the corrupting hand of Chaos.

How she had longed to emulate the feats of her heroine, Tahlia Vedra, the Lioness of the Parch!

Dawnbringer Crusades were not entirely unheard of in Greywater Fastness, but they were rare. The God-King’s fragile truce with the goddess Alarielle, whose pre-eminence over Ghyran was undisputed, forbade such expeditions onto her soil, and Elsworn had witnessed the mustering of only a dozen in her lifetime.

The Greycaps Freeguild was the largest and most prestigious mortal force in the city, but even as a small girl Elsworn had known she had no interest in becoming a glorified nightwatchman.

Even then, her mind had been set on the Forgewrought Flintlocks Freeguild of Baroness Zukaus. Her soldiers were maligned by staid Greycaps officers as daredevils and rogues, which for Elsworn had only added to their appeal. The baroness had held on to a number of woodland lodges and fortified estates that the city had, or so it believed, surrendered to the Sylvaneth in accordance with Sigmar’s treaty. She was also rumoured to be a silent partner in at least a dozen illegal homesteads across the Ghoul Mere, all of which needed fearless men and women like Elsworn to garrison and supply them.

She sighed wistfully, and drew her thoughts back to the present.

Orinkul and Tun appeared to have resolved their differences, both able to agree that the other had been wrong, and were toasting their new accord with a flask from one of Hod’s packs. The smell of whatever it was they were drinking was so pungently alcoholic that Elsworn could feel it clearing her sinuses from twenty yards away. Bryony, meanwhile, finished off half her crust and offered the rest up to Gotrek. The Fyreslayer looked positively queasy at the prospect of taking aboard anything that hadn’t been fermented at least twice. He grunted, not altogether unkindly, Elsworn thought, and refused. He stared moodily into the distance, like a one-eyed drunk at the end of a long, melancholy spell.

Elsworn considered the Fyreslayer for a moment. He was certainly an enigma. With his broad, brutally muscular frame and the flame of orange-bright hair rising in a tall crest above his head, he bore a resemblance to the warriors of the Baeldrag lodge mission at Kaulgar’s Lookout. But where the Baeldrag Fyreslayers were infamously violent, prepared to go to war with anything and anyone if there was gold in it for them, Gotrek seemed to be mostly interested in drinking and complaining. And, suffice it to say, the old canals were better known for their monsters than they were for their buried treasures. The more she thought on it, the more she realised that she and Gotrek had barely spoken three words to each other since she had woken him up. She had assumed him to be a Fyreslayer based solely on the rune in his chest and his outward appearance, but it was starting to dawn on her that there was an interesting story there.

And if there was one thing that Elsworn appreciated almost as much as a good adventure, then it was experiencing someone else’s second-hand.

She went to join him. He gave her a wary look as she approached, as though he was expecting to have his dinner plate stolen.

‘What do you want?’ he growled.

Elsworn pursed her lips, briefly reconsidering just how interested she was in the Fyreslayer’s story. But she’d started now, and she liked to finish what she began.

‘I’m just curious,’ she said.

‘I bet you are.’

‘What brings a Fyreslayer to the Loose Cannon underjacks?’

Gotrek turned to face her. The anger simmering behind his one eye was so intense that it took Elsworn aback. ‘I’m no Fyreslayer, lass. Call me so again and you’ll feel the flat of my axe!’ As if to emphasise the point, he ran his thumb down the blade of his axe until blood welled up from beneath the parted skin. It evaporated instantly in the flames, though Gotrek didn’t seem to feel the heat at all.

Elsworn felt herself bristle. She was a Freeguild Cavalier, ennobled in battle by her peers. She hadn’t been called lass since she was five years old, and she wasn’t about to stand for it now from some lowly underjack.

The Fyreslayer turned away from her before she found her tongue again, the anger she had seen in him quenched by ale and misery once more. ‘As for the rest of the question, Why not? would be my answer, or perhaps, What business is it of yours? Where else can a duardin hope to escape the vulture-pecks of the gods for a few precious hours? Where but in this hateful city that even they would sooner pretend did not exist.’ He grunted appreciably, looking marginally less miserable and worn as he appraised the ruined greatness of the canal around him. ‘I like it down here. It reminds me of another place… long ago.’

‘Earlier, you said something about a priest.’

‘Did I?’

‘You did.’

‘Well…’ Gotrek scratched his beard, muttering something coarse under his breath. ‘It’s not as if you can open your front door around here without accidentally hitting a priest.’

‘Was she–’

‘Ssshhh!’ Gotrek interrupted her, raising a finger for silence before she could finish. He cocked his head to one side, the hung-over look he had been displaying up until then either exaggerated for sympathy or entirely affected. He appeared to be listening for something. Elsworn was about to point out to him that no one was making any more noise than his own infernal axe, when she realised that she could hear something too. A rustling from the canal bed.

She raised her pepperbox and swung towards it. There was a tiny squeak, and whatever it was fled deeper into the bracken. She let out a relieved laugh and let the gun, and her arm, drop to her side. It was just another one of the rodents she had noticed earlier. This stop had wound her more tightly than she had realised.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Just a rat.’

‘In my experience, lass, where there’re rats, you’ll find more rats. And worse things besides.’

‘And sometimes it’s just a rat.’

‘Quiet,’ said Gotrek, voice low. ‘Tell me you didn’t hear that.’

Elsworn held her breath, listening, unconsciously filtering out – as only a childhood in the heaving tenements of Burnt Arches could teach a person to do – the murmuring of the Loose Cannons and of the city above their heads. And then maybe, just maybe, she heard it too. A squeak, very much like that of a common rat, but deeper, as if arising from the throat of some larger creature: a creature, say, that was the approximate size and shape of a human being. She looked quickly around, trying to pinpoint the source of the squeaks, but they echoed confoundingly through the maze of tunnels and drains. Gotrek glared at her until she went back to being still. The distant chittering went on, uninterrupted.

As Elsworn listened, she began to discern a horrible pattern to the sounds. They weren’t the meaningless noises of an animal. Instead, Elsworn was certain that she could detect variations in pitch and sound, meanings strung together with a definite cadence that could only be described as a language.

Her heart beat faster at the realisation – skaven! And closer than she would have ever realised.

‘Everyone, be quiet,’ she hissed.

Ordinarily the underjacks would have taken her authority only as far as they could spend it, but the sharpness of her tone made them sit up and take note. She strained her ears until every plink of moisture falling from the ceiling sounded convincingly like the silk-wrapped footpaws of a skaven killer creeping through the tunnels.

The chittering of skaven speech, however, had stopped.

‘Sh-sh-sh-ssshhhh!’ said Blastritt, his claw pressed firmly to the brass zipper at the front of his muzzle, straining both ears for the distinctively plodding sounds of human speech that he had definitely just heard.

‘Infinite apologies, oh sensitive-eared one,’ said Klatch. With exaggerated delicacy and care, he slid the metal plate he had been examining back into its clanrat’s trolley.

‘I say quiet,’ said Blastritt, pitching his voice to a hiss that should have been well beyond the range of any eavesdropping human ears. ‘Do not deaden my brain with your obsequiousness!’ He flexed his gauntlet fingers, clacking the nozzles of the warpfire emitters menacingly, and Klatch wisely clamped his jaws shut. Blastritt ground his fangs as he turned his undivided attention back to the tunnel. He was starting to harbour the notion that they may just have been followed from the steelworks after all. Somehow, he knew, this was all Klatch’s fault. No human could have been alerted to their theft so soon, much less tracked stealthily moving skaven unerringly through miles of secret tunnels. Not without supreme incompetence on someone’s part, and it certainly wasn’t Blastritt’s.

He lashed his tail as he thought, the twin instincts of hiding and running away warring with typical skaven viciousness in his breast. He raised his snout and sniffed. It was difficult to smell much over the reek of the sewer and the treated rubber of his mask. Only that there was something there. Humans. Yes, definitely humans, but a hint of something else too. Duardin perhaps? Yes, duardin. They smelled of earth and stone and the strange beverages they liked to poison themselves with. He snarled to himself. More cursed luck. Though well known for their clumsiness, duardin were considerably less amusing up close and in the flesh. The second of the two skaven virtues took a sudden and decisive upper hand.

Silently, he jabbed the nearest clanrat. The skaven lifted its muzzle and cringed, turning its head out of eye contact and baring its throat in the gesture of submission.

‘Up-up. Climb.’ Blastritt gestured to the iron cover above them. ‘Open it. Now. And start moving the equipment. We cannot wait-here any longer.’

‘Yes-yes!’ The clanrat bobbed its head with a most agreeable urgency and immediately swarmed up the ladder.

Blastritt gnawed anxiously on the inside of his cheek. Whoever Klatch had alerted with his stupidity, it sounded as though they were close – too close by far for them all to scuttle away without risking discovery. It would take time to move all his equipment out of the canal and up onto the street, and more time still for Scuttlegnawer to send the vehicle to collect them. He would need to do something. A distraction! Yes, that was what a clever skaven like Blastritt would do. Raising his paw to the side of his head, he twiddled with the dial that stuck out from the side of his helmet. A pleasant tingle passed through his brain. He went momentarily cross-eyed and sparks spat from the ends of his helmet’s antennae. He scanned the nearby tunnels for any of his toys that might have been left lying around as a provision against just this sort of eventuality. Something in his brain went ping. Carefully, he turned the dial, focusing both his instruments and his mighty skaven intellect on the signal.

Ah yes, he thought, that would do. That would do very–

A loud bang from close by made him startle. He shot a glare over his shoulder. The witless clanrat who had just driven its trolley straight into the iron rungs of the ladder gave him a wincing look, as though expecting to have its fur blasted from its hide on the spot. Under more propitious circumstances that might very well have been the fate that awaited the dolt, but with an unknown number of clearly devious foes mere tail-lengths behind them, Blastritt had to be more creative in his punishments.

‘You!’ He indicated the shrinking clanrat, then stabbed the pointed claw back down the tunnel towards the junction they had just left. ‘Go. Keep watch. And stay-stay.’ Even the clumsiest rat could be quiet when it was hiding close enough to its enemies.

Elsworn could practically sense whatever it was out there holding its breath and waiting, listening out for her to make some move just as she was listening out for it. She cursed herself at the thought that, in calling out to the underjacks, she might have unwittingly alerted the skaven to her presence. Then, for no obvious reason, it started up again with some increasingly urgent-sounding chitters and expletive squeaks. As best as Elsworn could make out, it was coming from whichever passage she had her back to at any given time. She silently went over the merits of having the Loose Cannons split up to search the likeliest of the surrounding tunnels. The skaven could be anywhere.

‘That way,’ said Gotrek, pointing directly ahead.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m a dwarf, lass.’

Elsworn shrugged. She didn’t have any better ideas, and if it was an excuse to stop hanging around here like a pair of overripe plums, then it was good enough for her. The Fyreslayer gave a terrific roar and broke into a run, his greataxe trailing fire behind him. Elsworn would have been hot on his heels, had a living tide of shrieking vermin not come pouring out of the exact opposite passage at that very moment.

The Loose Cannons cried out in alarm, hastily swallowing down hard lumps of bread and snatching up weapons as they scrambled to their feet. Gotrek cursed as he skidded to a stop over the slime-covered cobbles, but his headlong charge in entirely the wrong direction had left him with no chance of racing back in time. Elsworn found herself standing entirely alone, smack in the verminous swarm’s path. Just rats, as she had told Gotrek so dismissively mere moments before, but thousands and thousands of rats – more rats than she’d seen flooding the streets of Estermere when the Varek and Son’s sawmill burnt down. If they reached her, then they would surely strip her bones clean in a matter of seconds.

She swung her pistol around and fired. A single rat burst into flying bits of pulp, the shot making about as much of an impression on the swarm as would spitting into a rainstorm. She eased off the trigger and massaged the barrel assembly around one place. There was a satisfying click as the percussion cap reset.

She fired again, and again, backing further away with each shot, the pepperbox kicking back at her like a panicked horse and filling the air with soot and thunder. Still, the swarm was gaining on her. If she was to turn on the spot and sprint for all she was worth, then the rats would still be faster. Even as she retreated, they spilled from the tunnel mouth and spread out to flood the full width of the floor in exactly the same way that a spill of poisoned water or flesh-eating acid would have done. The similarities would likely not end there.

Of all the ways she had imagined she might die, this could not have been further from the mark: eaten alive by rats in a sewer, mere yards from Spoke Road Number One and yet totally unnoticed by the thousands of people there.

It was infuriating.

The gun clicked empty, the last of its five shots fired. It would take her far too long to reload.

A deafening boom sounded from somewhere behind her as Daegal unloaded his blunderbuss into the swarm. It seemed inconceivable to Elsworn that the citizens going about their lives overhead failed to hear it, but sudden explosions and strange sounds in the sewers were not exactly unheard of in Greywater Fastness. Not one voice cried out in alarm as the teardrop-shaped blast of grapeshot tore across the swarm. It bought Elsworn precious seconds.

With a yell, she hurled her lantern. It hit the flagstones just ahead of the swarm’s leading edge and the glass chamber shattered, spilling alchemical fuel over the floor. In the split second before the pilot flame was doused, the flammable slick ignited, whooshing into a wall of roaring purple-green flame. The heat was phenomenal. An ogor in flame-retardant clothing would have thought twice before jumping across it, even if coaxed to do so with his bodyweight in meat, but the sheer mass of the swarm drove its hapless forerunners into the fire.

The first to scamper through it gave heart-wrenching squeals as their fur caught light, streaming out the other side like flares launched into the sky on Sigmarsday. The second, third, and fourth waves of rats smothered the chemical fire as effectively as a blanket thrown over a burning saucepan.

With her hand now free, Elsworn drew her sword, preparing to go down in an appropriate blaze of glory. She was not afraid to let an enemy get in close – the four parallel scars on her face, left there by a dryad’s claws, were the proof of that. Not that there was going to be much call for skill here. It would be like whacking at hay bales, assuming that every last bit of straw had teeth and claws and a frenzied energy.

She was, however, accustomed to having two conditions in her favour, and their absence disadvantaged her here. Firstly, she was used to fighting from horseback. And secondly, she was used to floors that were not coated in slime.

Just as her sword came free of its scabbard, her foot immediately proceeded to slide the opposite way. She flailed for balance, but it was too late to stop herself from slipping. She fell hard on her back, and would surely have broken something had a dozen or so rats not cushioned her fall. She felt the instinctive desire to cringe as their bodies broke under her, tragic squeals forced out of tiny bodies by her weight, but a moment later she found herself with no time to consider anyone’s plight but her own.

Rats swept over her like a river that had broken its banks. They bit. They scratched. They filled her skull with their chittering and squealing. She raised both arms to hide her face, brought her knees instinctively to her chest. She was drowning, dying by a thousand tiny bites, and delaying that inevitable outcome was the absolute best she could muster. And then, just as suddenly, it was all over.

The swarm streamed on past her, the last shrilly squeaking stragglers running over her armour and leaping clear.

She quickly patted herself down to make sure that all of her extremities were still in place. Ten fingers, two ears, one nose – all raw and stinging, but accounted for. Heart thumping in residual panic, she sat up and looked around.

The Loose Cannons were still fighting. Tun laid about himself with his short sword. Orinkul turned rats into bloody splats with his club. Hod stamped fiercely on anything that came near, holding on to his packs with his one arm. Brigid and Bryony fought back to back, snarling like half-feral things themselves. Daegal frantically reloaded his blunderbuss. Gotrek, meanwhile, was wreathed in his greataxe’s flames, roaring and fighting as the unstoppable tide swarmed heedlessly over him. Soon enough, the last of the rats were past Gotrek too.

They hared off down the tunnel in the direction that the Fyreslayer had initially been set on following, leaving him sputtering impotently in their wake. Gotrek looked for a moment as if he was planning to charge after them, before apparently thinking better of it. He sufficed himself with a choice slew of shouted curses.

Elsworn felt the urge to swear very, very loudly, her stinging wounds and the simple joy of being alive overwhelming her usual sense of decorum.

Tun limped over to her. He was carrying a nasty set of bites. The tough yellow fabric of his trouser leg was torn, stuck to his shin and dyed red with blood. He offered her his hand, which she gratefully took.

‘Interesting technique,’ he said, as he pulled her up.

Elsworn couldn’t help but grin back. The rush of blood returning to her head made her giddy. ‘They don’t teach it like that at the Academae Martial, it’s true.’

‘Give it a few years. One day, they’ll be calling that the Killebrook Position.’

‘They weren’t attacking us,’ said Orinkul, performing the same flustered self-examination as Elsworn just had, with particular emphasis around the beard. He looked, as usual, as though someone had just kicked his dog. ‘They were running away.’

‘Like all bloody rats everywhere!’ Gotrek roared, still spoiling for a fight with something.

‘Running away from what, though?’ Daegal asked, finally getting a wad of metal offcuts and black powder down the neck of his gun.

Just then, Elsworn heard another deep-throated squeak emanating from the tunnel behind them. She turned towards it. Whether it was the creature she had heard conversing earlier or something entirely different, she did not know. In that moment, she registered only the two red slit eyes, wide as disembowelling strokes, that appeared out of the darkness of the tunnel. Elsworn cursed herself for destroying her lantern.

Brigid scowled across at Daegal. ‘Ye’m hatter askit, dincha?’

With her sword in one hand, Elsworn holstered her spent pistol and drew the spare from the opposite holster. She grinned up at the mutated horror as it shuffled out of the tunnel and into the yellowish light from the Spoke Road, already picturing its malformed head on her mistress’ wall.

Now this, she thought to herself, is more like it.

CHAPTER TWO

ESCAPE

The giant rat was like none Elsworn had ever seen before.

It was gargantuan, for one, bigger than any urban legend, emerging unsteadily from the tunnel like an overladen freight train edging onto a siding. Its red-glowing eyes were close to level with Elsworn’s own, but its scruffily furred back hunched considerably higher still. The weak light from above glinted off the sharp yellow blades of fangs, the rabid foam that flecked a three-foot-long muzzle, and the riveted steel plates grafted apparently at random to its hulking body.

It had no eyes. Tufts of wire filled the hollow sockets in their place. One ear had been torn out and replaced with a profusion of thin metal antennae. Coloured wires ran under its skin like varicose veins.

A huge, multi-barrelled cannon on a tripod was bolted to its left shoulder, disabusing her of any notion that half-mechanical rats might have somehow evolved naturally in the sewers under Greywater Fastness. A separate clutch of whisker-like antennae sprouted from it. There was an evil-looking green stone set into the barrel jacket. It looked like an eye, and even as Elsworn stared back, she watched a shiver of oily green electricity pass into the stone through its antennae.

The gun twitched towards her, the plethora of barrels already spinning. It sounded at first like a complicated engine with a metal pipe jammed somewhere in its workings, then like a boiler that was about to explode.

Elsworn had spent enough time around guns and machinery to recognise that neither sound promised anything good.

She was already shaped for a charge at the rat monster, all her weight forwards, and it took only the slightest shove in the back for Gotrek to throw her onto her face.

‘The rat monster’s mine!’ he bellowed as the first green-glowing shells came shrieking out of those spinning barrels.

The shots fizzed over Elsworn’s prone form, butchering the stonework just behind where she had been standing a moment before. ‘Kill-kill-kill-kill!’ the cannon seemed to be screaming now, and if not for Gotrek’s single-minded desire to face the beast before she could, Elsworn was certain the weapon would have succeeded in fulfilling the voice’s wish. She slapped the ground in frustration and pushed herself back up. Another quiver of electrical energy passed through the antennae bundle and, like a cadaver jerked to life by strange sciences, the gun pivoted back to where Elsworn now lay. It continued to spit out shells, even as it tracked back, as if it had a giddy maniac on the trigger. ‘Die-die puny man-things!’ it shrieked.

The voice, Elsworn realised, was not coming from the gun itself, but from the warped gemstone set into the metal jacket sheathing the madly spinning barrels.

She saw Tun also on the ground nearby. On instinct, she scrambled towards the old man, throwing her body over his and bracing, expecting at any moment to feel the pain of warpstone-tainted bullets punching through her back.

She would almost certainly have done so too, had the monster itself not had other ideas.

With a rabid squeal, the huge creature lunged at Gotrek, swatting the outraged Fyreslayer aside with a swipe of one bronze-reinforced paw. The gemstone gave a tinny squeal of frustration as its own erratic platform dragged its fire away from Elsworn and Tun and murdered a great swathe of floor instead.

This came as scant consolation to the Loose Cannons, who suddenly found themselves squarely in the path of its rampage.

Hod flung himself from the towpath and into the rancid canal rather than meet it head-on. Brigid, Bryony, and Orinkul struck at it with cudgels and knives before being scattered like ninepins. Gotrek Gurnisson shook his head to clear it as he picked himself up, planting his feet so firmly to the flagstones that Elsworn doubted he would have got out of the way if it had been Dracothion coming out of that tunnel with Sigmar himself on his back. He swung with his axe. The gigantic blade smacked into one of the random metal plates armouring the monster’s snout and bounced off. Then the rat hit him like a runaway train.

The Fyreslayer left the ground with a belligerent shout, flying back and crunching hard into the stone wall.

Elsworn didn’t expect to see him getting up again soon.

Why had he not called upon the rune on his chest? she wondered. She had heard of Fyreslayers using the magic bound up in their runes to perform impossible feats in battle, from striking with many times their own strength to shrugging off seemingly mortal blows. Yet Gotrek’s remained dark. If he was saving its power for later, then he was clearly unfamiliar with the old Greywater adage that he who strikes first strikes last.

The rat monster chittered, its small mind momentarily confused by the Fyreslayer’s abrupt disappearance, before turning to go after Daegal, who had, until then, been doing his utmost to remain unnoticed. The ratling cannon on the creature’s shoulder continued to blast haphazard chunks out of the floor, giving Orinkul and the others strong second thoughts about attacking the beast from behind.

Tun tried to get up. Elsworn pushed him back down again, smothering his protests in the slime coating the flagstones. She propped herself up on his backplate and aimed her pistol at the monster’s back. Aiming was hopeless at this range, but the rat was so huge she could hardly miss.

Her first shot drew sparks from the monster’s ironclad rump. The second blew a meat crater out of its hind leg, but the monster was so massive, so thoroughly hybridised with metal, that it didn’t seem to feel it. She would need to inflict a truly catastrophic amount of damage just to make it stop and take note.

She stood up, feet sliding on the slimy ground as she stumbled into a charge.

She would make it take note.

Her first blow severed a bundle of wires running up its back leg. The rat issued a tinny squeal, forgetting about Daegal for the moment and swinging its snout around to batter Elsworn out of the way. She slipped in her haste, but just managed to back out of its reach, her heart thumping in her mouth as she brought up her pepperbox to fire two more shots in quick succession point-blank into the monster’s head. Meat and fur and acidic-tasting blood spattered Elsworn’s face, but the bullets failed to penetrate its mutated skull.

The rat’s shoulder cannon, meanwhile, clearly quite independent of the monster itself, continued to blaze away at its chosen target.

Daegal took a ricochet through the leg just as he was lining up a shot of his own. The shell went straight through the thickest part of his thigh with a sickening splatter of blood. The rogue toppled as though his leg had been snipped out from under him, almost forgetting to scream. He fired his blunderbuss reflexively into the air, forcing Elsworn and the others to shield their faces from the ensuing patter of metal offcuts and ball bearings that came raining back down.

Elsworn might not have been able to land a telling blow on the beast thus far with the pepperbox, but she decided then and there that she was going to do something about that cannon.

Ignoring Daegal’s increasingly gurgling yells, she lined up her last shot. She squinted along the straight line made by her outstretched arm, mentally adjusting for the range, the recoil, the jerking actions of the beast itself, let go of her held breath, and fired.

The green stone on top of the cannon exploded into a thousand glimmering shards and assorted bits of mangled wire. Elsworn gave a whoop of triumph as the voice it had been transmitting was cut short mid-expletive and the cannon itself went limp on its tripod. The barrels spun empty as they slowed down.

If the rat monster had noticed the shrill voice urging it on in the first place, then it paid no attention to its absence now.

It threw Elsworn aside with a swipe of its mangled snout, before scurrying on and bearing down upon the injured Daegal. The rogue attempted to pull himself out of the way, his mauled leg leaving a trail of blood on the flagstones. Elsworn had nothing left in her gun barrels. She could only yell after the rampaging monster, hoping to draw its attention back to her, but the scent of blood appeared to have driven it into a frenzy. Daegal gave up on trying to get away, raising his arms in a doomed attempt to shield himself, and screamed. The rat monster’s slavering jaws yawned wide.

And suddenly, there was Gotrek Gurnisson. The Fyreslayer bellowed as he slammed his shoulder into the monster’s flank, jack-knifing it half a yard wide of where Daegal lay helpless and giving its snapping jaw a taste of flame instead. It squealed in pain and outrage, the whiskers down one side of its snout burning, and swung its mutilated head around to snap at the Fyreslayer. Gotrek responded by bludgeoning its snout with the flat of his axe, achieving through sheer brawn what Elsworn had not been able to match with finesse and causing a trio of cables in the side of its neck to pop their staples. The severed ends hissed and writhed like the long necks of a headless kharibdyss, issuing jets of steam that scalded the fur from its own body and cooked the flesh there pink.

‘That’s enough, Gotrek!’ Elsworn yelled, scrambling to her feet and taking up her sword again. ‘The kill is–’

With a mighty roar, the Fyreslayer split the rat monster’s skull like a log. The creature thrashed in agony, but Gotrek’s embedded axe gave him the leverage to hold it still. A moment of frenzied struggling later, and the flames bound to the duardin’s axe-blade caught in the monster’s oil-slick fur and quickly spread. Elsworn gagged on the stink. Still it fought to free itself, its unnatural vigour keeping it alive long after the point at which death would have been a mercy. Its brains bubbled up through the break in its skull like a pressurised froth coming through a boiler jacket.

Elsworn stumbled to a halt, staring at the reeking, smouldering wreckage in horror.

‘–mine,’ she finished.

If one of the many passers-by on Spoke Road Number One had paused to slip a nail through one of the drains in the ceiling, Elsworn would have heard it drop.

The Loose Cannons were understandably subdued after their battle with the huge, mechanised rat. Brigid and Bryony were still fishing Hod out of the canal. Orinkul was tending to Daegal. With gruff efficiency and surprising care, he had already torn the leg off the man’s bloody trousers and fashioned a tourniquet. Daegal’s face was white. He was quiet now too, simply muttering ‘I’m fine’ over and over, as though he had been invited to an officer’s dinner and had wine spilled on his lap by another guest at the door. He had left pain behind him, and struck determinedly into the realms of shock. Tun stared at the charred lump that remained of the giant rat as though even he was shocked by the violence that Gotrek had wrought.

Elsworn glared at the Fyreslayer. Gotrek gave every indication of not noticing. She raised her sword to get his attention.

‘You killed it.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he said, without deigning to look at her. His attention seemed to be elsewhere.

The rat continued to smoulder at his feet. Its chest collapsed slowly into its ribs. Its skull was blackened and crisp. Metals squealed as the heat warped them. The overcooked, slightly bitter taste rose from it in thick, greasy wafts that shrouded Gotrek in smoke. His beard bristled in the rising heat. His own flesh, however, seemed proof against it. On the contrary, those blobs of spitting fat that hit his skin sizzled like meat thrown into a griddle.

Elsworn could almost see her modest dreams of earning a place at Lady Zukaus’ side going up in that same smoke.

‘The kill was mine.’ In the weak light of day, Elsworn would probably have recognised that she was being unreasonable. Accidents happened in battle. People got carried away. Mistakes got made. But she was tired and she ached and she stung all over where rats had bitten her, and she was in no mood to be reasonable. Particularly as Gotrek seemed totally ambivalent to the fact that he had done wrong at all. ‘You took the honour from me, Gotrek Gurnisson.’

‘Huh,’ he said, distracted for a moment by what sounded like a faint squeak from the tunnel ahead of them.

‘Gotrek!’

‘Easy now,’ said Tun, with his hands raised. ‘Why don’t we settle this on the flip of a–’

‘Turn around and face me, Gotrek. You owe me a head, and you– Gotrek!’

This last part she was made to shout at the Fyreslayer’s back as he turned away and, without so much as a word of acknowledgement that he was being spoken to, stomped off up the tunnel. She stared after him, speechless. She was starting to feel ever so slightly silly to be left standing there on her own with her sword en garde, which, of course, only made her feel her sense of grievance more keenly. ‘Gotrek!’ she screamed, but the Fyreslayer gave no indication that he had heard. With a scowl, she strode after him. ‘Gotrek!’

Gotrek was surprisingly quick. His legs were half the length of Elsworn’s and he must have been five times as heavy at least. There was no logical way for him to get so far ahead of her so fast, but he moved like a rolling boulder, driven by his own terrible momentum and gravity and with scant heed for what got flattened in his path. Elsworn didn’t doubt that she could have outrun him if she absolutely had to, but half her attention was on ensuring that her footing was sound and she decided to keep it there. She and Tun had laughed about her slip with the rats, but it did not feel nearly so funny now. Ending up in the canal would be a perfectly ignominious end to the day, and one she intended to avoid if at all possible.

‘Slow down, Gotrek!’

Her voice rang loudly through the confines of the tunnel, but just then she did not care. If every starving ghoul, shadowy grot, and skulking ratman in Greywater Fastness’ hidden underways heard her and came running, then she would positively welcome them. At least then she would have something worthwhile to vent her frustrations on.

‘Gotrek!’

‘Shut your trap and keep up,’ Gotrek barked over his shoulder. ‘Or have you no interest at all in catching the thief you’re supposedly down here after?’

With some shame, Elsworn realised that she had in fact forgotten all about that. The excitement that had followed the appearance of the giant rat had pushed it right out of her mind. She recalled then how the cannon on the monster’s back had quite clearly been remotely operated by someone else, and of how the voice transmitted through the targeting stone had goaded the creature on to its destructive rampage. The steelworks thief, perhaps? It seemed more than likely, for who else would be so keen to attack a well-armed unit of underjacks and a Freeguild Cavalier in the sewers? The trouble was, she wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to think about her actual mission just then. Her blood still thrilled to the excitement of combat and she wanted to hold on to it for as long as she could. It felt good to have a target right in front of her.

‘Stop making excuses, Gotrek. If you’re afraid to face me then just say so.’

Gotrek snorted, but didn’t turn around. ‘You’re lucky I don’t care a jot what you think of me, lass. I’ve killed bigger and fairer than you for far less, believe me. Aha!’ he yelled, before Elsworn could reply. ‘Look.’

Elsworn looked up in spite of herself, but Gotrek’s fyresteel axe, though as superb a weapon as any she had seen up close, wasn’t half as good a light source as her lantern had been. She could not see much further along the tunnel than Gotrek himself.

‘I knew I saw the coward running off this way.’ The Fyreslayer stopped suddenly. Elsworn saw that he was standing in front of a ladder. The metal rungs had been drilled into the original stonework. They looked as though they were caked in rust, but when Gotrek wrapped his enormous hand around one and pulled, it resisted his strength without protest. ‘Ironweld steel,’ he grunted, apparently approvingly, and looked up the run of steps.

Elsworn followed his example. A metal drain cover sat slightly askew directly above them. The thinnest crescent of daylight slipped around the canted circumference. Elsworn told herself that there could be any number of reasons for that, most of which did not involve conveniently fleeing skaven thieves. A passing rattletrap could have kicked it on its way past, perhaps. Or the acid rains might have corroded the cover until it no longer sat comfortably in the road. Or, most likely to her mind, some hard-working local crook had been mining the back alleys for valuable metals. The merchants from Chamon were rarely able to meet the city’s rapacious demands for iron, copper, tin and other metals, and there was a lucrative secondary market in used goods.

‘A ladder to the surface, so what? And how exactly did the skaven, assuming it was skaven and that they came this way at all, get several tons of heavy machinery up there?’

Instead of answering, Gotrek started up the ladder. At the top, he threw the heavy drain cover aside and clambered out.

Elsworn’s shoulders sagged. The Fyreslayer really was going to make her follow him up there before admitting they were on a flight of fancy. She looked back the way she had come. Gotrek had taken the light with him when he went. The shaft of daylight coming in through the open drain cover was barely strong enough to illuminate the floor around her feet. Seeing the blackness so close around her gave her pause, and she suddenly regretted shouting so loudly after the Fyreslayer.

‘Tun?’ she whispered, but there was no answer.

She told herself that the underjacks probably had their hands full seeing to Daegal and Hod, and the other myriad minor injuries they had sustained in the battle, without concerning themselves with what Gotrek and Elsworn might be up to.

With a scowl, she pushed her sword roughly back into its sheath. It wasn’t like her to jump at shadows. Quickly, she followed Gotrek up the ladder and poked her head out into the warm, coke-scented air of the Inner Circle.

It looked as though that last dash through the tunnels had taken them away from Spoke Road Number One and into one of the irregular, rubbish-strewn alleyways that branched off it. A person could ferret all over the city using back alleys like these, if they were that determined to avoid the tolls and weren’t worried about ruining their shoes. Most stuck to the main roads or the workways. The bustle and noise of human traffic told Elsworn that they had not left the Spoke Road too far behind them, that it was possibly even just on the other side of that red brick wall beside her. It was just past midday. Elsworn knew it immediately without feeling the need to check her fob watch to confirm it. It was obvious from the fierce yellow colour of the smog, and by the industrial clangour that rose and fell with the changes in the city’s shift patterns, as regularly as the passage of Hysh across the sky.

Gotrek, she saw, had charged a short way ahead, but had since stopped. He was looking animatedly upwards at, so far as Elsworn could deduce after long consideration on the matter, absolutely nothing.

‘Did you see that, lass? Did you see it?’

‘See what?’

‘The train!’

Elsworn lifted her gaze. A rusting rail line ran overhead. It wended between the tall buildings like a river going around rocks, hoisted above street level on concrete stilts that had been heavily colonised with moss. The line bent sharply just ahead of where Gotrek was standing, disappearing behind an old, long-abandoned warehouse.

Elsworn turned on the spot, following the line back towards the Spoke Road with her eyes. She thought back on Tun’s and Orinkul’s arguments about their direction of travel through the canals, turning it all back to where they had first set out from and where she seemed to find herself now. She knew her city as well as the underjacks knew the old canals, if not better, for most of her streets were not sealed off or overrun with monsters. This was one of Lady Zukaus’ old lines, she was certain of it. It did not serve the old steelworks, but instead performed a loop of the baroness’ more prestigious Inner Circle properties before terminating near to her grand estates in the Great Axle. Elsworn had even ridden it once, gawking from the window at the cleanliness and splendour of the city’s hub. It had fallen out of regular usage since then with the development of the workways.

Other steam lords had converted their old railways to adopt the newer innovation, but the baroness’ waning interest in her family’s traditional industries ensured that this line had been left to rust.

She told Gotrek as much.

‘I’m telling you, lass, I chased a ratman up here. It was as close to me as you’re standing now, and then it jumped onto a train.’

‘How? Those tracks are… what… twenty, thirty feet up?’

‘It was running after it waving some kind of a crook, and then…’ He gave an angry shrug as though acknowledging how ridiculous he sounded. ‘And then it hooked on to the back of the train, just as it reached the bend there, and disappeared along with it.’

Elsworn considered the Fyreslayer’s account. As mad as it sounded, it did have the very faintest glaze of possibility. The music halls and taverns that lined the workways employed similar methods to quite literally hook their unsuspecting clientele off the lines and into their establishments. She decided against sharing this thought with Gotrek, however. It would only encourage him.

‘I didn’t see any skaven watching us at the canal junction,’ she said instead. ‘Or in the tunnel afterwards.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ said Gotrek. ‘Not with human eyes.’

Elsworn had to admit, again reluctantly, that Gotrek had a point there too. If he had indeed been chasing after a fleeing skaven, then she would never have been able to see it herself. Nor, she realised, would she have been able to hear it over the racket that she had been making chasing after him.

She walked to the nearest set of concrete stilts and laid her hand to it. She closed her eyes to concentrate solely on her sense of touch. The concrete was vibrating slightly. The spindly mosses scratched against the leather palm of her gloves. She told herself that there could be any number of reasons for that too, even the most outlandish of which sounded more likely than skaven running a train along a derelict line without anybody in the city noticing.

She turned back to look at the area where she had just been standing. The rubbish around the canal entrance looked as though it had been recently disturbed, but she could not exclude the likelihood that Gotrek was responsible for that too. She somehow doubted that the Fyreslayer had climbed out carefully. She knew for a fact that she hadn’t. Compelled by some instinct, she brushed some of the litter aside on the outside of her boot. She frowned at the trio of holes that appeared to have been drilled into the ground in a neat triangle around the opening, and crouched down to examine them more closely.

She had a sudden vision of something standing there on a tripod. A cable winch, for example: something big and strong enough to haul up several tons of heavy machinery and load it onto a train. Sigmar… Elsworn looked up at the rusting line. Was there even a slim chance that Gotrek could actually be right? Could the skaven have left the canal here and continued their getaway by train? Could even they be that brazen and expect to get away with it?

She shook her head, straightening back up and brushing herself down. No, it was impossible. This was just Gotrek filling her with enough just-about-possibilities to confuse her.

Remembering what had brought her running all the way up here after him, she drew her sword and brought it two-handed into a guard position.

‘I challenged you to fight with me, Gotrek Gurnisson.’

The Fyreslayer glanced back at her. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘You owe me,’ she hissed. ‘You took a kill that was rightfully mine.’

‘Have it. I don’t care.’

He spoke so dismissively that Elsworn wasn’t immediately sure that she understood him correctly. She had heard that the Fyreslayer lodges adhered to their own fierce code of conduct, one that they would sooner die than be seen in breach of, but if it were true then it was clearly of a kind utterly alien to her. Either that or Gotrek really was just another feckless wanderer, no better than the reprobates he ran with. Elsworn would no more claim credit for another warrior’s kill than she would steal his horse.

‘Fight me, Gotrek,’ she screamed, sudden fury making her sword-hand shake and her voice crack.

‘Don’t waste my time, lass.’

With that, he turned his back on her and stomped away.

‘I demand that you fight me.’

‘Good luck with that,’ he said, without turning around.

‘What will your comrades say when they learn that you backed down from a fair challenge?’

The Fyreslayer scoffed. ‘You’d call this fair?’

‘What will they say?’

‘Nothing to my face, if they know what’s good for them.’

‘Where are you even going?’

‘To see where that train went. Are you coming or not?’

Elsworn gawped at him for a moment. The anger she was feeling must have been addling her mind, because for a moment there it had sounded as if Gotrek was asking her to go with him. A snort of black laughter bubbled up from between her lips. She lowered her sword. The tip sank into the rubbish between her feet, which felt as though it was trying to be a metaphor for something.

It was true that she had a duty to track down Lady Zukaus’ property, if possible, and as unlikely as it was, the train line was as good a lead to follow as any. But her pride would not allow her to admit it. And deep down she knew – she knew – that if she were to give in and follow Gotrek on the next leg of his flight of fancy, then it would only be to delay the report she would need to make to the Cavalier-Marshal. The baroness needed to be told of the theft and Elsworn was privately glad that she would not have to be the one to tell her in person. She took a deep breath. The idiot Fyreslayer could waste his own time, but he couldn’t make her waste any more of hers.

With a grunt of annoyance, she resheathed her sword, and turned on her heel, wondering if the train was yet invented that could take her as far away from Gotrek Gurnisson as she suddenly wished to be.

Warlock Master Sprarrk tapped his bronze-plated footpaw impatiently on the concrete platform. Servos huffed. Hydraulics wheezed. The train was late. He resisted the urge to check the time on the giant clock face mounted on the station wall behind him. It was stopped and had been for years and years. He resisted the subsequent urge to take this opportunity to scurry back and fix it. Sprarrk liked fixing things. Almost as much as he liked blowing them up beforehand. On balance, however, he decided that it would probably not be the best idea to fix something that the humans who had abandoned this station believed to be broken. This was what the humans referred to as a good neighbourhood and patrols by inquisitive guards were not beyond the realms of possibility. He would just have to find some other way to while away the seconds until the train arrived.

An impromptu quizzing of his lackeys, perhaps! The Horned Rat knew how the clanrats of Clan Skryre loved nothing more than having their engineering nous tested by their superiors, and the more merciless the inquisition the better. It was, after all, the only way the cretins learned.

Sprarrk looked up, a particularly fiendish question on warp-conductivity and material resistances on the tip of his muzzle, only to deflate when he realised the substantial berth that his clanrats were giving him. That was not altogether surprising. Sprarrk was bored and entertaining accidents tended to happen around Sprarrk when he was bored. The kind of stupid rats that accidents happened to did not survive for very long in the ranks of Clan Skryre.

Snifh Blanchpaw was leaning out over the tracks at the far end of the platform, supposedly sniffing out for the train whilst conveniently being as far away from Sprarrk as it was possible to be whilst still being in earshot. Treet Gutternose was loitering at the top of the stairs, lying in ambush for any human beggar foolish enough to seek a place to rest in this not-so-abandoned station. Naark Coppertail and Zilch Redeye were rolling about in the rubbish covering the floor, squabbling over something edible that one or the other claimed to have found first. The pride of Clan Skryre indeed. Sprarrk sighed and raised his gauntlet into his eyeline, his keen skaven intellect enticed as always by the complicated arrangement of buttons and knobs that decorated the bronze vambrace.

Maybe he could torment the daemon for a little while instead. That was always reliably diverting, and unlike his underlings it couldn’t annoy him by dying just as he got to the fun parts.

‘It is coming!’ Snifh squeaked, waving his arms dementedly overhead as though he was announcing the thirteenth coming of the Great Horned Rat instead of a train that was already fifteen minutes late.

The clanrat scurried back from the platform edge, just as a colossal brass engine came huffing and clanking around the bend into the roofed station. Sprarrk recognised Klatch One-Ear in the driving cabin. The warlock engineer looked like a rodent who had been left alone in a shop full of sweetmeats. He stood before a dizzying plethora of enormous levers. The heat from the firebox blazed redly in his goggles. He wore a tatty flat cap pulled down over his ears, which he had assured everyone was essential train-driving apparel and which Sprarrk had decided to take on faith. He resisted tugging on the pull cord above him for about a second, then gleefully pulled it down hard.

The ensuing high-pitched whistle was, of course, totally beyond the range of human ears, but deeply, tail-shiveringly satisfying to all skaven within a thousand tail-lengths of the station. Klatch proceeded to pull it twice more.

Had their situations been reversed then Sprarrk would undoubtedly have done exactly the same thing, but since Klatch had got to drive the train while Sprarrk had been left behind to tap his footpaw on the platform, he instead disapproved enormously. He would have sharp words with the young engineer later.

The warlock could only count himself fortunate that aelves were even rarer in Greywater Fastness than they were everywhere else in the Mortal Realms, being widely disliked by the other furless races that called this city their home. Sprarrk did not know why that should be except that it could, perhaps, be on account of their almost skaven-like hearing.

The train wheezed to a halt, sending scrunched-up bundles of litter and giddy skaven swirling around the platform like snow. The engine drew a single carriage that was crammed with clanrats, their squashed faces and furry backsides pressed to the windows. Klatch yanked enthusiastically on the brake lever and the train came to a full stop. Something hissed most impressively. Steam gushed from the pistons and rolled across the platform. The faint aerosolised whiff of warpstone caused Sprarrk’s whiskers to twitch, for the superior skaven fuel-stuffs had enhanced the original, coal-fired human engine in many ways.

The carriage doors unlocked, and several dozen relieved-looking skaven tumbled out. They pushed rattling trolleys laden with scrap onto the platform. Snifh, Treet, Naark, and Zilch hastened to greet their clan-mates, and soon the station was bustling with skaven taking one another’s scent, marking choice items of scavenge with their musk, and squabbling in the inimitable skaven manner.

‘Blastritt!’ Sprarrk spread his arms wide in greeting as the other master warlock emerged last from the carriage, giving the air one final suspicious sniff before leaping onto the platform.

Looking at Blastritt was like appraising his own handsome reflection in a plate of mirrored brass. The pair of them were identical, down to the piebald markings on their black and white fur and the manic red gleam in their eyes. Even their armour, though the suits had been individually designed and built in jealous secrecy, bore the mark of identical geniuses. As similar as they were in their outward appearance, however, in temperament they could not have been more different. Where Blastritt was cautious, Sprarrk was bold. Where Blastritt was cunning, Sprarrk was more cunning. Where Blastritt enjoyed gassing his minions with poison wind, Sprarrk preferred to blow them up and set them on fire. How could two skaven so radically dissimilar have been pupped from the same breeder? This was the question that erudite vermin so often asked, but it was true. Blastritt and Sprarrk had survived the aggressive attentions of their litter together. They had backstabbed their way to the top of their clan together. They had taken charge of this great warren together.

They were, for all their striking differences in character, as close as two skaven could ever be.

‘I have been waiting, most punctual of partners,’ said Sprarrk, bobbing his head low, and making sure to get his greeting out first.

Blastritt lashed his tail in irritation at being beaten to it. ‘A delay that brings great-great pain to us both,’ he said, his voice muffled to the point of inaudibility by the ridiculous rubber mask and goggles he insisted on wearing over his muzzle. ‘I know-know how you pine when we are apart.’

‘I worry,’ said Sprarrk.

‘I worry more.’

Sprarrk narrowed his eyes. If he did not know better, he would think that Blastritt was trying to make this a competition. But that was foolish, of course, for all with noses to smell and whiskers to twitch could see clearly that Sprarrk was the more benign and devoted twin, making any such contest pointless. ‘Perhaps Klatch should tinker with the engine some more,’ he offered. ‘Clearly, it is still too slow.’

‘It runs as fast as old and windy human tracks will let it go,’ Blastritt snarled through his mask, and bared his throat, displaying both dominance and deference in one contradictory gesture. ‘We built it together, did we not?’

‘We did, of course. Of course we did.’

‘You could have perhaps sent it quicker when called,’ Blastritt suggested.

Sprarrk rested his claws on his chest and adopted a hurt look. ‘It takes time to heat the boiler. Although of course, you know this already.’

‘It was only a suggestion. I know you work as quickly as you can.’

Again, was that a thinly veiled insult? ‘Maybe if you had thought ahead and called sooner.’

‘I summoned Scuttlegnawer in perfectly good time!’

He spoke, naturally, of the daemon.

Sprarrk and Blastritt’s ascent through the ranks of Clan Skryre could be divided into two distinct phases: there had been the slow, painstaking climb that had taken place before tricking the Verminlord into its twinned prisons, and then there was the dizzying pace of their ascent afterwards.

Sprarrk could almost forget now the terror he had felt on the accomplishment of that black deed. Almost. He had been so certain that he was somehow carrying the scent of sacrilege around on his fur that he had refused to leave his burrow for a week. He would, however, refute the suggestion that the idea had been all Blastritt’s and that he had been against it from the start. It was simply the argument he had rehearsed at the time.

They had, as with all things, done it together.

He now held half of Scuttlegnawer’s soul while Blastritt possessed the other, allowing for instantaneous communication between them so long as the Verminlord remained amenable. Its unholy essence powered much of their more esoteric equipment. Its abominable intellect and mastery of all things arcane had only pushed Sprarrk’s and his brother’s genius to ever newer, ever more fevered levels of invention.

‘The daemon-thing must have taken its time passing your signal to me on this occasion,’ Sprarrk conceded.

Blastritt’s expression was thoroughly unreadable behind his mask. ‘Yes-yes,’ he said. ‘That must be it.’

‘It does so love to test the boundaries of its geas.’

‘Of course. It is the very essence of experimentation. We should torture it some more on our return to the workshop.’

Sprarrk brightened immediately. ‘My thoughts were the exact same!’

‘Great minds,’ said Blastritt.

‘Yes-yes. Yes.’

The two warlocks glared at one another across the platform. Their tails lashed in unison.

‘If I might interrupt, oh inseparably brilliant ones.’ They both looked up to see Klatch One-Ear leaning out of the train. His whiskers twitched and occasionally sparked with the high concentrations of warpstone in the steam. The metal studs in his leather armour gleamed with condensation. ‘Our theft this time was not unobserved. No. We were pursued, and only barely escaped with the equipment intact.’

‘Is this true?’

Sprarrk turned back to his brother, troubled by the guilty twinge of disappointment he felt at the thought of his cherished sibling’s near escape from death. After all, what would become of the work if Blastritt were to perish? Why, Sprarrk would be forced to assume the entirety of the glory himself and would doubtless be set back by many months. Inconceivable! He scurried a tentative half-step forward and stroked the exposed fur of his brother’s neck consolingly.

Blastritt issued a familial squeak and reciprocated, both warlocks chittering contentedly as they scratched one another’s coats. ‘It is true,’ he admitted. ‘But you forget my great cunning. I was able to delay them in the tunnels. They did not spot the train.’

One of Blastritt’s clanrats, currently squabbling with Treet Gutternose over the handle of his trolley as the pair of them swerved it towards the exit between them, looked sharply over at that, but said nothing. The trolley rattled on past on its way to the workshop under-warren below the station.

‘Good-good,’ said Sprarrk, greatly relieved.

If the humans of Greywater Fastness were to learn that the skaven had been moving about the city using their very own network of train lines, then he and Blastritt would have to go back to using the canals, and that would set their project back by many weeks. He said as much to his brother.

‘They saw nothing,’ Blastritt insisted.

‘I heard you. I simply thought it worthy of mention.’

‘And even if they had,’ Blastritt went on, ‘they would never be able to follow us to this part of the over-city. The speed with which we so boldly fled from them was too great. The cunning with which we dug our lair in this place is too far beyond their feeble powers of comprehension.’

Sprarrk preened at the memory. The site of their lair had been a brazen choice, to be sure, but also quite inspired, being as it was both hidden in plain sight and perfectly situated to their project’s eventual needs. Scuttlegnawer had murmured this to him (and presumably to Blastritt as well, he supposed) that this was to be so.

It was the daemon who, piecemeal and under the most extremes of duress, had revealed to them the schematics to what would be their most audacious invention yet. It was to be their crowning achievement, one that would surely make even the Lords of Decay in faraway Blight City squeak in admiration and alarm.

Scuttlegnawer had assured them that the work was mere weeks from completion, provided they could gather and repurpose the necessary materials at their current pace, and gather sufficient energy to turn the thing on when it was time. In that, Sprarrk allowed himself the slightest twinge of anxiety. In lifting an entire steelworks-worth of scrap metal, Blastritt had quite obviously outdone himself. It would keep the warlock engineers busy for days. Now it fell on Sprarrk to find the means to power their work whilst keeping the lights in their workshop running. He already had a plan, but now was the time to cast aside natural skaven caution and be audacious.

It was either that or allow Blastritt to persist in the obvious delusion that he was the cleverer and more important partner in this scheme.

And that, Sprarrk thought to himself, would be too cruel for a good brother to allow.

CHAPTER THREE

SCUTTLEBUTT

Elsworn ducked. The brick that had been sailing her way smashed harmlessly against the wall behind her. Her black horse, Comet, jingled the bit between his teeth and snorted angrily. Elsworn brushed the dust from the broken brick out of his mane and whispered soothingly in his ear. He was an Ulguanite breed, descended very distantly from the proud thoroughbreds that the aelves of Nakarth had once ridden. In many ways, his dark heritage had prepared him well for the smoke and gloom and maze-like alleys of his new home, but his first instinct was always to steer himself towards the deepest shadow and run, and just then that would have been disastrous.

‘Down with all the Zukauses!’ someone yelled, to bays of endorsement from the mob that had amassed in the street to greet them.

Some of them waved hand-made banners. Others held aloft crude effigies of the baroness made of wood and cloth. Given how unlikely it was that any of the rioters had ever actually seen Ciriline Zukaus first-hand, they presented a dizzying riot of shapes, sizes and colours. A few bore real weapons. Elsworn kept her eyes on those.

‘Let the Pale Oak have her!’

Another brick flew several yards ahead of Elsworn and smashed against the riveted steel flank of a horseless wagon. The Freeguild sharpshooter sitting in the castellated top turret flinched back, to howls of derision from the crowd.

The small convoy of armoured wagons was rolling up Artillery Way from the smelting works of the Rookeries. A deep block of Forgewrought Steelhelms presented a robust wedge of shields at the front. The Freeguild Cavaliers rode at a walk in single file on either side. Every so often, one of the big horses would sway to one side or the other. To the untrained observer, it would have looked like a natural quirk of the animals’ gait, but it was actually a very deliberate bit of horsemanship, intended to make even the angriest of mobs think twice before pressing the wagons too close.

‘Back off!’ Tonan scowled from the saddle ahead of Elsworn, dragging his reins rather more fiercely than he needed to and physically shoving the flank of his horse into the crowd. His mount was an aggressive charger with an innate sense for his master’s moods. He whipped his grey tail belligerently, and made to snap at a young woman’s head before being pulled back into line.

Tonan himself was unusually large for a cavalryman. An iron cuirass in the orange and black of the Forgewrought strained to enclose his chest. A leather bascinet-style helmet protected his head. His brawny hands were bare and covered in tattoos. They were so callused that he claimed to have no need for gloves.

Riding behind Elsworn came Garvil. He rode as casually as a steam lord on a jaunt, if not for absolutely everything about his roughshod appearance that said otherwise. He wore no helmet because his head was of a peculiar shape that no helmet seemed able to fit. Lank brown hair clung to it like mould to a slice of bread. Numerous brushes with childhood ailments had left his skin blotched and his breath rattly. A pair of chipped spectacles with tarnished pewter frames sat across his nose. The horse he rode was a rabid Greywater native, a breed renowned as much for their cast-iron stomachs as their volatile temperaments.

‘Sorry,’ he called over the heads of the crowd. ‘Terribly sorry. We’ll be sure to pass your complaints along to the baroness the next time she’s in the city.’

‘Easy,’ Elsworn shouted to them both, reckoning that either one of them – Tonan with his fiery temper, Garvil with his aggressive sarcasm – was liable to inflame the crowd in its current mood.

From her elevated horseback vantage, she looked across the sea of angry faces. Many had their faces masked and their heads covered. This had always been the fashion in a city so prone to poisonous vapours and acidic rains, but her recent experiences with the underjacks had left her suspicious of what could now be construed as an attempt at disguise. Was that a skaven provocateur lurking under that hood, or just a steelworker who had lost his job on account of the baroness’ adventures in the Ghoul Mere? How easy would it be, she wondered to herself, for the perfidious ratmen to walk at large through such a crowd? Too easy, she thought with deep unease.

Elsworn shook her head to try and clear it of the ghosts of the canals. Not every problem needed the nefarious paw of some invisible actor to make it explicable. A convoy of incredibly valuable (and highly toxic) cyclestone slurry through a district that mostly housed displaced Zukaus workers was always going to be a flashpoint for trouble.

She reminded herself that she had not actually seen any skaven at all, and had only a few circumstantial findings and Gotrek’s determined ravings to suggest that they had been involved. Why, in the cold light of day, even a cannon-toting mechanical rat seemed more plausibly explained away as an escaped Ironweld experiment or a lone survivor from some past skaven incursion. She could almost even believe that the deranged voice she had heard, urging the ironclad monster to shoot and kill, had been the product of her own overly fraught imagination. It all seemed so unlikely now.

Elsworn had delivered her full report to Cavalier-Marshal Ordo, who had grimly informed her that he would pass it along to the baroness when he saw her next. That had been the last that Elsworn had heard of it, and Ordo had a way of discouraging follow-up questions.

Elsworn almost wished that it was a horde of skaven coming at her now. Shooting civilians, even looters and machine-breakers, was generally frowned upon.

‘Out of my way!’ Tonan barked, smacking a man across the back with the flat of his sword and pulling Elsworn firmly back into the present. The man went sprawling, to the palpable fury of those around him. ‘Get a job,’ Tonan said, leaning out and spitting down at the man as his horse clattered past. Elsworn would have thought that his own experiences in the workhouse would have made him more sympathetic, not less. She supposed that his upbringing had left him with more than just physical calluses.

Elsworn fired her pistol in the air. The crowd recoiled, as though it was a living thing and she had just held a lit match to its skin.

‘Walk on,’ she snapped to the Cavaliers around her. ‘Marshal Ordo didn’t call either of you up to negotiate with the workers.’

‘I don’t see why they can’t just go live in the Mere,’ said Tonan. ‘Zukaus has plenty of work for them in the settlements.’

‘That’s because the people she has out there already keep on dying,’ Garvil pointed out.

‘Your point being?’

The convoy exited Artillery Way onto the main drag of Spoke Road Number Two. Elsworn noted with some relief that although the crowds were endeavouring to follow them out, they were finding it much harder to be as much of a nuisance now that there were five times as many people again pushing both ways.

There were pedestrians, people on horseback, people on mechanical steeds; there were chariots, carriages, coaches and wagons, both horse-drawn and fully mechanised, some shuddering along a few yards at a time before belching out black smoke whilst others left glittering trails of exhaust in their wake; there were merchants and beggars, soldiers and performers, people heading to and from their places of work, and children playing dangerous games in the street; there were people of every colour and species, dressed in every style of the Mortal Realms, although the practical greys and browns of Greywater were predominant.

Even as Elsworn watched, an automated trolley laden with terrified passengers careened past on rails that had been sunk into the road. Elsworn had never seen the like before, and she would not be at all surprised if she never saw the like again. Greywater Fastness could not physically expand its borders, but with the fevered spirit of Ghyran it was forever renewing and innovating in spite of that. There were fortunes to be made in devising a faster, more efficient, or even simply newer mode of transport, and there was no shortage of entrepreneurs willing to stake lives, livelihoods, and good reputations on such projects.

With Elsworn and the other Cavaliers watching for any sudden movements from the crowd, the convoy set about the task of crossing the road.

It was more like fording a particularly wide and dangerous river. The Steelhelms went out first to break the flow, followed in turn by the Cavaliers, who, working in pairs, then ferried the wagons over one at a time. Taking the final wagon with Garvil, Elsworn threw a last look over her shoulder.

She was certain that she had glimpsed something small and skulking dart out of Artillery Way after them, but when she looked there was nothing there. She put it down to the bedlam of the crowds.

That idiot Fyreslayer had got her so wound up she was seeing skaven everywhere.

About an hour later, by Elsworn’s watch, the convoy finally rolled off the Spoke Road and onto the quieter back roads of Long Smoke. She was, she realised, more than anything else, deeply bored. They continued on that way for another half an hour. The clop of the horses’ silver hooves and the growl of the wagons’ motors rose to compete with the industrial cacophony. The crowds thinned without ever quite dispersing altogether, and those people that they passed got quickly out of the way. The businesses here were still properties leased from the Zukaus family, but the district’s denizens still had jobs and were grateful for them.

Somewhere towards the front of the column, Cavalier-Marshal Ordo blew a whistle and the convoy trailed to a halt.

They were drawn up in front of a large brick building with a wall around it. A pair of enormous metal cisterns stood proud of the front wall. A byzantine arrangement of pipes fed into the big tanks from inside the building and then down, to places unknown under the ground. The steady leakage of some corrosive fluid had turned much of the metal brown. A group of large kilns chugged out a constant plume of noxiously coloured smoke from a yard at the side.

The luminous yellow sign to FLATHELM’S REAGENTS, assembled from glowing metals and gas-filled pipes, sputtered importantly out front.

Arilde Flathelm herself waved the wagons into the yard through an iron gate that a pair of apprentices were opening. She was a tough-looking duardin with a set of goggles pulled up over her forehead to leave a pair of white rings in the soot around her eyes. She was wearing a set of overalls so heavy that they practically constituted armour. Various mystery fluids sloshed about in glass canisters stuffed into her belt.

Elsworn, however, found her attention wandering. She wondered what new and unusual dangers Sergeant Tun and the Loose Cannons were facing at that very moment below her feet. Was every day in the underjacks as exciting as the one that she had shared with them, or had she benefited from a simple case of beginner’s luck?

She turned in her saddle so that she was facing in the general direction of the Loose Cannons’ guildhall. She could not see it, of course: any one from the smoke, the gloom, or the teetering jumble of intervening buildings would have been enough to obscure it from view, but she knew that it was there. She had felt the urge, more than once, to take her horse over there to ask if the canals they had uncovered had been explored, or even if Gotrek’s ridiculous pursuit of his train had come to anything. But she was still too angry. It had stopped her every time.

‘Do you ever wonder why we do this job?’ she asked aloud, and of no one in particular.

Tonan appeared to think long and hard about it. ‘Because it beats the alternative.’

‘Which is?’

He shrugged. ‘Not having a job to do.’

Elsworn was still feeling disturbed as she stabled Comet later that same night. What made it worse was that she could not definitively say why. It was just a faint unease that she had been carrying under her skin and could not shake, ever since she had left Gotrek and the other underjacks. As if her every move was being shadowed by someone so careful she could neither see nor hear them.

Comet gave a whicker of pleasure as she loosened the girth and lifted the saddle from his back, setting it down on the bench at the rear of the stall. He brought his nose around for a playful shove, which she brushed away with a smile. It was difficult to worry about things that she could not define even in her own mind while there was a horse trying to nip at her hair.

She picked up a brush from her kit and began to pull on the knots that had been worked into his coat by her saddle.

As handsome a beast as Comet undoubtedly was, his tack was of a far less impressive quality. Not knowing the first thing about horses when she had been ennobled and granted the title of Cavalier, she had blown her entire enfeoffment on the horse without realising that there were other expenses to consider. She regretted nothing. She had come to love him more than most of the men and women with whom she shared a uniform. His coat was black and sleek except for where a single grey streak ran along his forehead. It felt like silk under her fingers. He was swift and tireless, and accepted the city’s oppressive gloom and narrow streets far better than some nobler and more sensitive breeds.

Of course, no living creature was perfectly suited to life in a place like Greywater Fastness. Except for the skaven, she thought, and then shuddered, wondering what had caused that evil notion to creep up on her unawares. It was far from reassuring.

Finishing with the brush, she undid the last of Comet’s straps and removed the bit from his mouth. Then she showed him to his feedbag, which she had hung from a nail on the side of the stall. He took a mouthful and made a show of chewing, all the while expertly blowing oats and bits of sawdust between his teeth into the straw. Elsworn could only shake her head at his mischief.

‘Do you think I wouldn’t eat better food if I could get it?’ she asked him.

She wondered if Garvil had had the right idea after all. Greywater horses looked sickly and couldn’t put on weight to save their lives, but they were tough as old boot leather and unshy about hard work. Much like the Greywaterans themselves.

Elsworn patted Comet’s neck, as if to reassure him that she would never seriously consider any such trade. Taking a handful of leavened grains from the bag, she offered them to the horse by hand. Comet snorted the dust from her palm, making Elsworn laugh, and then did it again before finally accepting the feed at the third attempt. She stroked his mane while he ate, murmuring ‘well done’ in his ear.

The Greenway stables were as busy, in their own way, as the factories of the Inner Circle that surrounded them.

Given the lack of suitable alternatives elsewhere, most of the Freeguilds in the city stabled their animals here. Horses and grooms came and went at all hours, their movements dictated by the steam whistles and bells that signalled the changing of the shifts across the city. The hourly test-firings of the Hands, the twelve gargantuan artillery pieces mounted on the Outer Wall, ordered the city with far greater precision than the cycles of Hysh or the movements of the Cosmos Arcane.

The stables’ timber walls only partly muffled the din from without. Comet had become quite acclimated and barely noticed it at all. Elsworn found it comforting. She was tired enough that she might easily have slept in the same stall herself if not for the danger of soiling her uniform or being unwittingly trampled under Comet’s hooves in the night. It had been a long and deeply trying day and the wounds she had taken in the canals were barely healed. The susurrant whickering of several hundred horses was deeply soothing on her nerves. The scratching of Comet’s gums on her palm was strangely hypnotic, while the peaty scent of straw, dung, and horse almost–

She startled back awake with a vague awareness of having heard something thump against the wooden wall behind her. Given that she had been halfway towards sleep at the time, however, she obviously could not be entirely sure. She shushed Comet and listened, convinced now that she could hear something scratching and scuffling on the other side of the boards. No sooner had she satisfied herself that the sound was there, though, than it stopped. She shook her head and pressed her ear to the wall. Nothing. Her imagination filled the streets with scuttling vermin.

‘Stay here,’ she murmured to Comet, drawing her sword and warily exiting the stall.

The cheap alchemical lanterns that illuminated the Greenway stables burned low and in a variety of unsettling colours. The infernal glare of the foundries leached through the uneven gaps between the wooden boards. Horses by the hundred dozed inside their stalls, like battery hens in their cages. The sound had come from outside.

Dodging two cogwork sweepers and a groomsman exercising an Aqshian warhorse, Elsworn left by a side door and, once outside, broke into a run, intending to give whatever she had heard the surprise of its life.

She found the spot entirely empty, except perhaps for a few spots of oil on the ground and some scratches, suspiciously like claw marks, in the wall.

Neither were entirely inexplicable discoveries in Greywater Fastness. She told herself that it was nothing.

She just could not quite make herself believe it.

Elsworn rode the workway home. She held on to the guardrail, half dozing. The rubber slat she was standing on shuddered violently under her feet as the ingenious system of rollers and belts whisked her across the city.

When viewed from above, the city took on the appearance of a giant wheel, the five Spoke Roads radiating out from the glittering spires of the Great Axle to the immense curtain walls at its circumference. The smog layer that blanketed the rooftops glowed in various shades, depending on what alchemical substances were being burned and what materials produced underneath. A well-oriented Greywateran could tell exactly where they were, just from the colours in the smoke. The pollution was thinner above the rooftops, but it was ever-present. It was a burnt taste in the mouth and a slow accumulation of ash and grit in one’s eyes and face.

The brightest smudge of all belonged to the Great Axle, which came briefly into view as the workway track swerved to run parallel to its defensive wall.

The military and administrative hub of Greywater Fastness was a city within a city, ringed by the First Wall and home to the Grand Conclave, the Ironweld Assembly, and the steam lords – the wealthy factory owners and merchant aristocracy who met in the Crucible of State to dictate to the elected members of the Conclave what the business of the day would be. Rising above them like a golden column was the Scintillant Spire. Home to the battlemages of the city’s Collegiate Arcane, its arcane defences caused the smoke around it to coil in odd patterns that unsettled the eye and, if one was careless enough to stare for too long, tricked the mind. The lights of the lesser turrets in its vicinity bent as they passed it, making it appear as though the enormous edifice was wavering like a candleflame in a breeze.

Even those grand buildings paled into insignificance beside the lightning-wracked bastion of the Gravenstone. The Stormkeep of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer towered over the centre of the Great Axle, the hub around which the entire city turned.

Elsworn unconsciously signed the hammer across her chest as the workway swerved again, stealing the Great Axle from view and speeding her towards the Outer Circle. She stretched her eyes in an effort to keep herself awake, and looked down.

They were passing over the very edge of Greenway. After its stables, the district was perhaps most notable for the charitable foundation that had been established there about a hundred years before. The project of a displaced aelven noble, its ambition had been to encourage self-sufficiency through the propagation of rooftop gardens across the city. It had not got far beyond Greenway. Elsworn had often wondered if the district’s name had been coined by someone who did not like the aelf very much, for the patchwork sprawl of sickly, rotting rooftops was a distinctive sight as one rattled over it on the workway.

Elsworn tightened her grip on the rail as the track rose, carrying its passengers over the ramparts that divided the Inner and Outer Circles.

Almost immediately, the character of the city changed again. Gone was the churning and the pounding and the endless roar of the city’s industries. In its place was the cook smoke and human stink of sprawling slums and row after endless row of tenement housing.

The first station after Greenway was Burnt Arches. Elsworn alighted there.

The platform was as crowded as any of the streets of the Inner City had been. The great advantage of the workways over the trains that had come before them was that they ran constantly. Workers jumped on and off at all times, without the need for timetables or lengthy waits at platforms. They needed tremendous amounts of power to do so, of course, but if there was one thing that Greywater Fastness had in cheap abundance then it was raw aetheric power. Men and women in clean work clothes jumped aboard to be swept off towards the factories. Others, like Elsworn, leapt off in the other direction, dirty and tired, to stagger home for a few hours of rest before repeating the whole back-breaking routine anew the next day.

Elsworn wondered what it would be like to go to bed at the same time every day, knowing exactly when she would be getting up and what she would be doing tomorrow. She was not sure that she would like it very much.

Tumblers in brightly coloured costumes tottered about the platform on stilts, juggling fizzing bombs and dodging passers-by. Impromptu puppet shows delighted crowds of screaming children. Food stalls wafted their smells across the platform, creating a distinctly unappetising milieu with the oil and the smoke and the burnt rubber that were the signature odours of the workway. Fading posters plastered the station’s walls. Burnt Arches sends two hundred slaughter-fusils to the brave defenders of Excelsis – for the eternal glory of Sigmar! read one, over the woodcut image of a Steelhelms column marching under a pair of crossed rifles. Dawnbringer Crusade to resettle the ruins of Kranzinnport – Hammerhal orders arms for ten thousand proclaimed another. War declared in the Greenglades – the workers of Burnt Arches stand ready! Elsworn touched the fluttering poster as she walked past, and sighed.

She was as proud of her city’s role as armourer of the Mortal Realms as anyone, but what she would not give to have stood before a rampaging god on the walls of Excelsis, or to be setting forth from Hammerhal Ghyra with its pilgrim soldiers to reconsecrate Kranzinnport to the God-King.

Shrugging off the attentions of a woman in a beaked mask who was trying to sell her a bowl of stewed vegetables, she turned to take a last look over the platform.

For the first time since the morning, she had no sense of anything behind her. Whatever had been following her through the Inner City, it had clearly been no match for the incredible speed of the workways. Assuming, of course, that she had not simply imagined the whole thing.

Relieved and weary, she trotted down the wide concrete steps from the platform, and into the crowds of Burnt Arches.

A horde of children of various ages charged after an inflated pig’s bladder as it bounced along the dirty street. A smaller group ran in the opposite direction. They were chasing what Elsworn took at first to be an unusually large and filthy rat, but which she was relieved to discover was in fact a mangy dog with a bit of breadcrust in its mouth. Two girls fought one another back and forth across the road, the clack of their wooden swords ringing off the low eaves and mingling with the omnipresent rumble of the Inner Circle.

At a door that was identical to all the others, Elsworn stopped and knocked. There was some muffled yelling from the other side, followed by hurried footsteps. The door opened and a breathless young woman of about seventeen stood blocking the doorway. She had dark skin and curly black hair that she had cut roughly short. She wore a plain, sleeveless leather waistcoat over a homespun woollen tunic. Her trousers were patched over both knees and held up by a belt. It had been crudely altered to accommodate a pistol holster, which the woman’s right hand hovered over now.

‘Who are you again?’ she said.

‘Hello, Alicia,’ Elsworn sighed, looking up at the taller woman from the step. ‘I know. It’s been a while.’

With a shrug, her half-sister let go of the door and turned back inside. She left the door hanging open. Elsworn kicked the muck from her boots on the stoop and followed her inside. A rickety staircase went up on her right. A narrow corridor with whitewashed brick walls ran on to the living room, whose slouching door Alicia kicked back ajar on her way through. Elsworn followed her, rather more considerately.

‘Elsworn!’ declared a beaming, black-skinned woman with greying hair and wrinkles around her eyes. Ingret was halfway into a set of form-fitting, high-collared overalls of rigid leather. The protective clothing was so bulky that between her and the rough wooden table in the middle of the room, there was barely space left for Elsworn. ‘This is unexpected.’ She walked around the table, her stiff unfastened trousers making her waddle, and embraced Elsworn in the doorway. Then Ingret kissed her on the cheek, which Elsworn bore with the usual poor grace of adult children towards their doting parents.

‘It felt like time for a visit,’ said Elsworn, wiping the kiss off her cheek.

‘You’re always welcome.’

Her mother had always kept a room for her here, she knew, but she still preferred to sleep with the rest of her unit in the Forgewrought garrison or, occasionally, in the hayloft above the Greenway stables, where she could be nearer to Comet. This place felt too small for her now and, after her father died, less of a home than it once had been. Today though, she had felt the need to come back.

It probably had something to do with the uneasy sense of relief and dread she had been feeling after almost dying a few days earlier. Coupled, perhaps, with the strange certainty that something had been following her all morning. She forced herself to shake her head and return her mother’s kiss, planting a light peck in the woman’s hair.

Maybe it was just that it was tourney season. Elsworn always found herself growing maudlin when the hoardings started going up around the gunnery ranges at Battery Green and the lists were announced.

It was like seeing the ghost of her younger self riding back from their crusades to remind her of her childhood dreams.

‘Are you hungry?’ said Ingret.

Elsworn smiled. ‘Very.’

Her mother squeezed her arm before shuffling back to getting dressed. ‘You are in luck. Yanis has been standing over the stove since before I got out of bed.’ Elsworn could smell the stewing meats and hear the clattering through the thin walls of the adjoining kitchen. There had been no luck involved. It was, in fact, just excellent timing on Elsworn’s part to arrive before Ingret and Yanis began their shifts and Alicia walked to the temple for her lessons. As strange as it felt to Elsworn, who was dead on her feet and had been awake for hours, this was probably breakfast for them. The Freeguilds kept more irregular hours than most, which was one of the reasons why Elsworn always carried a watch. She was relieved to have timed her arrival just right. She would have hated to come all this way just to knock on the door of an empty house or, worse, find her mother and sister out and only her stepfather at home.

Alicia returned from whatever backyard shed she had disappeared off to, stomping back indoors with her drawn pistol in one hand and a fistful of bullets in the other.

Whatever Elsworn thought of her stepfather, and she generally tried not to think of him at all, a parent who could cook and whose food cart ensured a healthy supply of nearly fresh vegetables had done Alicia no harm at all. Her figure was fuller and healthier than Elsworn’s at her age, and she had a vigour that Elsworn could only watch with tired envy. She was taller already, at seventeen, than Elsworn was now at nearly thirty. She would probably be bigger than Tonan by the time she finally stopped growing.

‘Where do you think you’re off to, young lady?’ said Ingret, bending stiffly to pull up her trousers. She was reaching an age where, in some other place, she would not have been working at all, but arming Sigmar’s armies took every able body the city could throw at it.

‘I thought I’d take Elsworn outside to shoot.’

‘Breakfast first.’

‘Mother…’

‘You know the rules.’

‘We’ll only fire a few rounds.’

Ingret looked at Elsworn apologetically.

‘Just a few rounds.’ Elsworn smiled, drawing her right-hand pistol from its holster. Like a lot of families in the Outer Circle, they had a small firing range with a few battered targets in the long, narrow yard behind their house. It was not much, but it had been enough for Elsworn to learn to shoot on. Alicia leant in close to admire the exquisitely carved piece in her hand. ‘You can look,’ Elsworn said, drawing it teasingly into her chest. ‘But you can’t touch.’

‘I wish my father had something like that to leave to me,’ Alicia complained. ‘All he’s got is that stupid vegetable cart.’

‘It’s probably served him better,’ said Elsworn. ‘And you.’ There had been a time when Elsworn would come home to bask in her half-sister’s virtual worship, but the shine of that had worn off considerably as the years had gone on. It was another reason for her coming home less and less. A career in the Freeguild was dangerous. Elsworn knew that. It was entirely the reason for her choosing it. She was not sure she was ever wholly awake unless there was something trying to shoot at her or stab her. Alicia had that same need in her, she knew, and, in spite of Elsworn’s belated attempts at discouraging her, seemed more determined than ever to follow in her footsteps. ‘Maybe I’ll give them to you when I die.’

Alicia’s face brightened. ‘Promise?’

‘Yes. As mother is my witness.’

‘If I beat your third-place finish at the tourney next week, can I have them sooner?’

Elsworn laughed. ‘You can’t be serious. No one under eighteen has even qualified for the starting lists, let alone made a ranking finish. Ever.’

‘So, you’ll think about it?’

‘I’ll–’

A sudden thump from the direction of the front door made her look up. Alicia turned towards the sound, and from her frown it was clear that she, at least, was not expecting any further callers. There was another thump, followed by a horribly familiar scuffling sound. Elsworn had a vision of claws scratching on wood and of long, rag-bound muzzles snuffling under doorjambs.

She tightened her grip on her pistol. ‘Wait here,’ she began, but Alicia was already in the front passage ahead of her, striding determinedly back towards the front door with her own gun at the ready. Elsworn swore and hurried after her.

Alicia pulled open the door.

Elsworn raised her pepperbox, ready to put five quick shots into the body of whatever had come looking for her at her mother’s house, and was left to feel more than a little ridiculous on finding the step empty. She lowered her weapon. It was probably just some of the street children playing knock-and-run. She seemed to recall annoying her neighbours with similar games when she had been young.

‘Hello…’ said Alicia, squatting down to examine what looked, at first glance, like a pile of scrap metal that had been dumped on the top step of the stoop.

The ramshackle contraption was about the size of a dog. A rough shell of partly rusted metal covered its cogwork innards. It moved on caterpillar tracks. These had allowed it to get up off the street onto the step and butt its front panels against the door. It also explained the scuffling sound that Elsworn had heard, as one of the tracks was loose and it flapped every time it went round. She started to laugh. She hadn’t been imagining things after all. This was the thing that had been trailing her all the way across Long Smoke and Greenway. After she had got ahead of it on the workway, it must have followed her all the way to Burnt Arches and only now caught up.

People called them scuttlebutts. Elsworn was not sure why. It apparently derived from some naval slang, although Greywater Reach had no coastline to account for it. Similar machines (although it was believed to be a sign of good luck to see two that were exactly alike) trundled all over the city delivering messages.

Alicia looked up at her. ‘I have to wonder what you were expecting. It sounds a lot more exciting.’

Ignoring her sister, Elsworn bent down to collect the flimsy parchment roll from the slot in the contraption’s front. She carefully unrolled it.

‘What does it say?’ said Alicia.

Elsworn glared at her and returned to the note. She was a slower reader than her sister and had not yet made it past her own crudely spelled first name on the opening line. She read the rest of it slowly, her heart growing a little heavier with every word. It was signed at the bottom Gotrek Gurnisson, and the news the Fyreslayer had for her was grave indeed.

CHAPTER FOUR

BLACK LUNG

It was not just rubbish that people burned in Long Smoke. Paupers’ funerals had been held there since time immemorial and since the Necroquake, cremation had become compulsory for all citizens. Exemptions were granted in only the most exceptional of circumstances, and it was frankly uncanny how often those circumstances coincided with possession of a Great Axle estate and a family plot in an aetherically warded crypt.

Elsworn looked around her. The scene would not have looked out of place in a heretical pamphlet or a madman’s rendition of the Shyishan underworlds.

Huge, slump-sided rubbish heaps made mountains that blocked out even the chimney stacks of the adjoining wards. Trickling streams of poisonous run-off wound through the artificial valleys between them. Stink pipes rose high into the air, venting gases that intermittently flared off in reaction to some floating ember. The air was thick and hot. Fires burned everywhere. The smoke belching from the incinerators was so heavy that Elsworn could barely even see them at all except for the red blush of heat that blasted from their gaping maws.

It reminded Elsworn of the view from Mere Keep, the way small fires always dotted the swamps where the Sylvaneth conducted their sporadic raids on human settlements.

Men and women in heavy clothing and beaked masks traipsed up and down the heaps leading to the incinerators, like pilgrims with worldly offerings to leave at the mountaintop shrines of strange gods. Sweaty-faced ogors with leather aprons and shovels and appalling lung diseases toiled endlessly to shove rubbish down the furnaces’ throats, but as quickly as a heap could be cleared, a driverless wagon would chunter up from Spoke Road Number Two to dump a new one twice its size. The whole exercise assumed the appearance of a punishment dreamt up by those same sadistic gods.

Priests of every denomination flocked around the crematorium stacks like beggars at the Five Dials workway interchange, hawking their prayers and touting the benevolence of their god over all other gods.

Fiery acolytes of Sigmar shouted down the priestesses of Alarielle and branded all who heeded them as heretics. Representatives of lesser deities or the gods of faraway realms fought as savagely as gulls over every scrap of interest that God-King and Everqueen let drop between them. Priests of Kurnoth trailed eagerly after anyone foolish enough to meet their eye. The ghoulish followers of Nagash, the Lord of Undeath, pronounced eternal torment and servitude in death on all except those who journeyed to the underworlds with their prayers smoothing their passage. Hyshian missionaries wandered about with stunned looks on their faces, wearing tattered robes that had once been fine and, probably, white. The representatives of stranger, smaller gods abounded wherever one dared to look. There were gods worshipped here that Elsworn did not know the name of – gods that perhaps none at all knew the name of beyond the solitary lunatic now screaming it into the burning air.

They all fought to be heard above the roar of the furnaces, all of them promising a better afterlife for the departed. Or, failing that, a cheaper one.

It was enough to make Elsworn feel sick, although that could just have been the stench of rubbish, both burnt and unburnt, that lingered in the air. The air itself was ash. Elsworn could feel it accumulating on her lips and between her eyelashes.

Her thoughts drifted back to her first visit to Long Smoke.

She had been nine, maybe ten. She had walked here from Burnt Arches with her mother and a pitiful handful of fellow mourners to tip her father into one of those big open-fronted kilns. The smoke had stung her eyes, as though some lesser-known city ordinance demanded that tears be shed at funerals. A priest of Sigmar had spoken some words. Elsworn could not even remember now what they had been. All she seemed to remember was that he had smelled of cheap booze and had not been wearing shoes.

Strange, the things a person recalled, when details that were surely more important at the time grew faded.

All that she had left of that occasion now were unpleasant memories. To this day she could not stand amidst those furnaces, breathing in that smoke, without feeling the same helpless childhood tightening like a strap around her chest.

She grimaced, pulling on the leather cuff of her gauntlet in a vain attempt at making it comfortable. She had donned her dress uniform. It was very similar to her regular Forgewrought uniform except for the addition of some superfluous braid and a row of bronze medals sewn into the breast. The orange squares were a little brighter, the black less creased by frequent swinging, bending, and general wear. She also wore it a good deal less. The leather pieces were as stiff as the day that she had first bought them, and chafed horribly wherever they found a joint to rub against. She rolled her neck irritably, trying to dissuade her collar from wringing her neck quite so determinedly.

‘Can you not get a breastplate that fits on a Freeguild wage?’ Orinkul grunted, beside her.

Elsworn turned her head and looked down. She had to admit that the duardin cleaned up very well. In place of the scuffed leather jerkin and patched trousers in which she had seen him last, he was now wearing a rather expensive-looking tailored waistcoat in his clan’s colours. A sash embroidered with Dispossessed runes shimmered over the top. Elsworn wondered what they meant but, of course, could not read them, for the duardin clans rarely taught their secret language to outsiders. His boots had been polished. He had even combed and tidied his beard, which Elsworn understood that the Dispossessed of Greywater were generally loath to do.

The same could not be said of the rest of the Loose Cannons, who looked like furtive underground creatures suddenly brought out into a bright light.

Tun was still in the same old doublet and breastplate he had been wearing in the canals, and it did not look as though either of them had been washed since. He looked diminished by daylight, twice as old and twice as worn, the stubble on his chin thicker, the bags under his eyes heavier. Hod, so sure-footed and steadfast underground, looked ungainly here, as if a stiff wind would blow him down. Brigid and Bryony stood silently holding hands, like grieving orphans with their ragged clothing hanging loosely off their thin shoulders. And as for Gotrek, it was difficult to reconcile the force of nature she had met in the canals with the bitter, swaying drunk before her now. Even the headless rattletrap pony was there, one of the crew, its gears rattling softly as it concentrated all its energies on standing still and not falling over.

And then there was the priest.

He was short, thin, and very pale. The sharp tips of pointed ears struck through his long white hair, in spite of the dark hood he had pulled over his head. Elsworn assumed that he must be one of the frail, misbegotten male specimens that occasionally managed to break out of the Khainite temple of Elrith Ceyl and escape into the city. His robes were the colour of a night sky without street lamps or smoke, trimmed with purples and with a pewter snake-head brooch at the collar. A variety of mismatching rings studded his fingers. A coiling serpent earring glinted from inside his hood. He mouthed prayers to the Ulguanite goddess, Morathi-Khaine, in his weak but hauntingly sing-song voice. He made Tun exceedingly nervous.

The small group of mourners gathered in a half-circle around the long, shallow-bodied handcart that Gotrek had pushed up the rubbish hill towards the funerary quarter. Various divine symbols, covering a broad swathe of potential denominations, had been carved into its metal sides. Clouds of incense trailed from burners mounted on the front corners.

Elsworn looked sorrowfully down at Daegal.

Some effort had gone in to tidying him up, but the black shroud the underjacks had bound him in could do little to mask the corruption that had ultimately claimed him. His right leg had swollen to an unsightly lump and, in spite of the incense burners and the pervading reek of Long Smoke, he stank.

It had been such a small wound, Elsworn thought to herself, and a clean one too. It had gone right through the muscle of the thigh and clear out the other side. But the skaven were infamous for their warpstone weaponry, and the shell that had struck Daegal had clearly been of no wholesome composition. The wound had corrupted quickly, and his death would have been assured thereafter. Elsworn felt guilty that she had not been there for him before the end. She told herself that she could hardly be blamed for being unaware of his condition, but she knew that was untrue. She could have visited the Loose Cannons’ guildhall at any time over the past days, had meant to even, but she had not, and now Daegal was dead.

How fortunate had she been, she thought, to possess a few carefully hoarded vials of Aqua Ghyranis with which to cleanse her own wounds after that battle? It could so easily have been her lying in that cart now. It could have been any one of them.

The Khainite priest finished his prayers, licking his dry lips, and looked up. ‘Would anyone else like to say a few words?’

The Loose Cannons looked pointedly at one another. Elsworn wondered again what she was even doing here. She had barely known Daegal when he was alive and had no idea what to say about him now that he was dead. And she hated funerals.

‘He was all right,’ Gotrek grunted.

Elsworn looked sharply at the Fyreslayer. Even having known Daegal as little as she had, she could have come up with something better than that. The other underjacks, however, were nodding to themselves as if those two words, all right, summed the man up perfectly.

‘He drank too much,’ Hod mumbled, glancing up warily as though the sound of his voice might crack the leaden sky and make it fall.

‘He did,’ Gotrek agreed.

‘And he gambled,’ said Tun, with a smile.

‘A liar too,’ said Orinkul. ‘He was from Misthåvn like I’m from Mount Celestian.’

Tun sniffed. ‘He just made up the story and put on an accent to impress women.’

Bryony nodded to the Khainite priest. ‘Him gan a ril Ulguland now.’

The others put on an assortment of brave smiles and nodded.

Elsworn looked down at the black-shrouded body in the cart, her hands fidgeting with her gun belt. She wondered if she did not owe some genuine responsibility for Daegal’s death. It was true that she had not asked for the Loose Cannons to accompany her into the canals, but nor had she sent them away. Tun was the underjacks’ superior officer, but Daegal had fallen under her command. Perhaps that was why Gotrek had sent that letter telling her to be here. Maybe that was why she had agreed to come.

‘He probably saved my life,’ she said, slowly, remembering then how Daegal had fired his blunderbuss into the oncoming vermin swarm, thinning the mass of rats in the moments before it overwhelmed her. It was probably only because of Daegal’s intervention, however unwitting a distraction, that the giant mechanical rat had not killed her, and probably Gotrek too, before finishing off the rest of the underjacks. ‘He probably saved all of our lives.’

Orinkul clapped her lightly on the back, then cleared his throat, embarrassed, and looked down at his boots. Elsworn felt oddly comforted.

‘Hear hear,’ said Tun.

‘Boy did all right,’ Gotrek agreed.

‘Wherever you are now, it’s probably a better place than this,’ said Tun.

‘Damned well better be,’ Orinkul muttered under his breath. ‘Given how much we had to chip in for that priest.’

‘Off to the stone with you, lad,’ said Gotrek. ‘And don’t even think about coming back.’ He hoisted the cart, his hugely muscled arms lifting the weight with ease and launching Daegal’s body into the open crematorium furnace. There was a brief flash as the fire found the fuel and incinerated it, and just like that Daegal was no more. Gotrek lowered the cart back to the ground. He clapped dirt from his hands, as though he had just emptied a bucket of nightsoil into an open sewer and was heading back indoors to finish his supper. ‘Right then. Let’s give the aelf his cart back and go and get properly drunk.’

The inside of the Black Lung tavern was, as the name suggested, somehow even hotter and dirtier than it had looked from the outside. The taproom was so smoky that Elsworn could not even see the walls. She doubted whether a clearer view would have improved their appearance by any noticeable margin. A fire burned behind a huge metal grate. The furniture was a mishmash of rescued pieces, saved from the incinerators by the Black Lung’s mysterious owner. Wherever this near-mythic founder was now, they were apparently not here. Drinks came out of colossal iron stills with mechanical pumps that would froth a person’s ale cup in exchange for a drop of Aqua Ghyranis. The atmosphere was so subdued there was not even a bouncer on the door. Its patrons drank as though they were just another downstream part of the machinery.

Most of the tables that Elsworn could see through the murk were occupied by groups of mourners from other funerals. The handful of Long Smoke workers were identifiable by their soot-stained overalls and their burnt faces, and by the seemingly bottomless manner in which they drank.

Elsworn and her companions, as unwelcome as that word felt in describing her relationship with the underjacks, sat around a badly scuffed metal table with a crumpled top. Brigid and Bryony were in a huddle at the far end of the table. Hod stared gloomily into his ale. He had not said a word since they sat down.

Orinkul, meanwhile, was volubly holding forth to a small crowd of Long Smoke workers on the oppression of labour by the capitalist steam lords. Two ales were apparently enough to turn the gruff duardin into quite the revolutionary firebrand. Elsworn was beginning to see how he had fallen so low in the favour of his clan as to wind up with the Loose Cannons. Gotrek was at the bar. He was wrestling a few dozen pints out of an automatic ale tap in a manner that its otherwise brilliant creator had probably never envisioned it having to deal with.

Elsworn wondered again what she was doing here. Daegal’s last farewell had surely given her ample chance to politely take her leave. It was not as if she had nothing else to be doing. She sighed into her own half-empty cup. It was a horrible thing to realise that she would rather spend her free time with the lowest of the low than in her own life.

What did that say about her life?

She turned to Sorrol Tun, who was sitting across from her, trying to spin a coin on the tabletop. The crumpled surface thwarted him every time. Having a ceiling above his head seemed to have relaxed him considerably. That, perhaps, and the departure of the Khainite priest.

‘Did you ever go back and explore the canal we found?’ she asked.

The old sergeant nodded to himself as he picked up his coin and tried again to make it spin. ‘We reported it to the masters of the underjacking guilds, and to the city surveyor. Given the creature we ran into down there with Daegal, we went back in with a full company. We even borrowed a few units from Greywater Lock.’ He gave a faint smile, flattened the coin between the palm of his hand and the table and sighed. ‘The Greycaps drove a steam tank down there. Would you believe it? A steam tank! Sigmar only knows what they thought they were going to run into.’

‘Did they find anything?’

‘Not a whisker.’

‘You should have come to me,’ said Elsworn, feeling unexpectedly hurt that they had gone to the Greycaps instead. ‘The Forgewrought Flintlocks could have spared a unit or two, and I would have gladly gone in again. It was Lady Zukaus’ property that was stolen, after all.’

‘It was the guildmaster’s decision, not mine. The Zukaus family has an… evil reputation.’

‘So do the underjacks.’

He made another smile at that. ‘We all need someone to sneer down at.’

‘I suppose that’s true.’

‘To those worse off than us,’ said Tun, raising his cup.

Elsworn matched his toast and took a sip. The beer smelled horribly chemical, which was how one could tell that it was safe for human consumption.

‘There was no sign of any skaven then?’

‘No.’ Tun checked over his shoulder to where Gotrek was still fighting with the ale taps. ‘And I wouldn’t let Gotrek get started on the subject either, if I were you. He’s convinced himself that there’s a plot to overthrow the city and that the Greycaps are full of idiots.’

‘Well,’ said Elsworn, smiling, nodding to the faded colours on his doublet, ‘we all knew that.’ Tun raised his cup in another silent toast and they both took another sip of their beers. In truth though, there was something in what Tun said that troubled her. As little as she wanted to speak with Gotrek again – on this or any other subject for that matter – it was difficult to be dismissive when she had been having the exact same fears herself. What could the skaven (and to her surprise, she found that she was no longer qualifying whether or not the culprits had been skaven) possibly want with a factory-full of old machine parts anyway? It was just scrap steel really, not even from the more efficient newer models that were filling out factories under great fanfare from the Ironweld Assembly.

Before she had the opportunity to properly organise these thoughts, Gotrek came stomping back from the stills with ten flagons of beer precariously balanced between his arms and his chest. He set them down on the table, spilling at least one full flagon’s worth in the process. Then he sat down behind them, like a field artillerist in his trench. Elsworn had been expecting him to share the beers around to Tun and the others, but this appeared not to be the case.

She stared at the ten beers in dismay. ‘Are you planning on drinking all of that?’

‘For starters.’

With a grimace, Elsworn flipped open her fob watch and looked down.

Sigmar, would you look at the time…

She pushed her chair back, intending to make her excuses now before the night really got messy. She had only just tensed to stand up when Gotrek pushed one of his ten cups across the table to her. Tun looked at him, and at it, as though the Fyreslayer had just willingly pulled out his own tooth.

‘Have a drink with us, lass,’ he said. ‘It’s what he would’ve wanted.’

She could not subsequently have explained, if commanded to account for her movements and whereabouts that evening, just how exactly she had managed to find herself tottering through the dingy all-hours scrap markets of Long Smoke with a thumping headache and a belligerent drunk under her arm.

She recalled several noisy toasts where the Fyreslayer had insisted they all drink to the memory of someone called aelfling. This had then been followed by a lengthy digression in which he bemoaned a woman called Amara, whose apparent affront had been to expect Gotrek to be nice to the Lumineth Realm-lord who guarded the realmgate to Hysh they had wished to use. The Fyreslayer had gone into great and anatomically unlikely detail about where the aelves could stuff their precious realmsphere. This story had lasted through about a dozen increasingly seedy taverns, during which time the other underjacks had gradually peeled off in search of greasy food or their own beds.

Elsworn did not think that she had consumed as much alcohol in her entire life as she had over the last few hours and she was not at all sure that she liked the feeling.

‘What are you looking at?’ Gotrek bellowed at an unfortunate crone, guilty of the capital offence of offering him a carrot. ‘That’s right, witch. You can take your… your… Oh…’ His neck muscles clenched suddenly and he turned deathly pale. He gripped Elsworn’s arm so tightly that she was forced to bend with him. He made a low, groaning sound, like something dangerous being performed far underground. The muscles of his huge, naked chest spasmed, and Elsworn braced herself for the deluge of vomit that was surely the inevitable consequence of the amount of alcohol that the Fyreslayer had imbibed. But instead, he took a shuddering breath and thumped the side of his head with the heel of his palm. Colour came gradually back into his cheeks. ‘Bloody vegetables,’ he muttered under his breath, looking up to shout after the hurriedly retreating old woman. ‘What do I look like, a horse?’

No, Elsworn thought, but unlike some people she could name was just about sober enough to not say aloud, I like horses.

‘There’s just something about vegetables that make me feel ill.’

‘And you’re sure it has nothing to do with the amount of beer you’ve drunk?’

‘There’s something to these Greywater brews, I’ll admit.’

Elsworn rolled her eyes, but said nothing, choosing instead to take the high road and focus all her limited willpower on getting the Fyreslayer to put one foot in front of the other.

‘I’ve crossed the burning plains of Aqshy and the deathless fjords of Shyish. I’ve chased my destiny across half of the Everspring Swathe, and this city of yours is the first I’ve found where a dwarf can get a proper beer.’

Elsworn studied the Fyreslayer for a moment. He had suddenly become a great deal more interesting than she cared to admit. ‘Really?’

‘Aye. You should taste the piss they serve in Druhiel.’

‘Not about the beer, you idiot. Aqshy? Shyish? Have you really travelled so far?’

‘Name the place, lass. Name any place you like and if I’ve not passed through it at least once then the next drinks are on me.’

‘Hammerhal?’ she suggested, naming the home city of her heroine, a city so unimaginably vast that it straddled several continents and stood in not one realm but two.

‘Pfft!’ Gotrek answered, though whether he intended it as a yes or a no Elsworn never quite found out, as he chose that moment to blunder into a merchant’s stall. A jumble of second-hand copper cookware clattered off the table and into the middle of the busy street. ‘Watch where you’re going!’ he yelled back over his shoulder, shouting down the infuriated merchant as Elsworn ushered him on. ‘No manners these… these… What was I saying?’

Elsworn closed her eyes and, with her free hand, held on to her forehead in an effort to keep her brains from thumping about inside. ‘Where did you say you lived again?’

Gotrek looked bemused. ‘What?’

‘I said where do you live? Where are we going?’

‘Don’t you remember?’

With horror, Elsworn slowly played through the events since the funeral in her mind. It was all looking quite a bit foggier than memories under six hours old had any right to be. ‘No?’ she suggested, hopefully.

‘You offered to help me look into the skaven in the canals.’

‘I did?’

The Fyreslayer nodded grimly, unpeeling the fingers of his hand to reveal the recent and bloody gash across the skin of his palm. Elsworn winced, struck by a sudden phantom pain and a horrible premonition. She pulled off her left glove and opened her hand. She had thought that her hand was aching a little bit.

Well, that explained that, even if she had no recollection at all of doing it.

‘Sworn in blood,’ said Gotrek approvingly.

Elsworn made a mental note to soak the cut in Aqua Ghyranis just as soon as they got to wherever she seemed to have agreed to go. Given the quality of the establishments they had been drinking in, she did not intend to risk going the same way as poor Daegal.

‘This is how it always starts, you know,’ said Gotrek, turning his head in towards her and pitching his voice low as if one could never know who might be listening. ‘An odd theft here. A granary burnt down in the night there. More vermin in the sewers than any longbeard can recall ever hearing of before. Maybe some folk gone missing too, but never the sort that anyone cares to go looking for. “It’s only that lecher, Bjorni from the Pipe and Whistle – he probably just fell in the river while eyeing up some woman.”’

‘All right then,’ said Elsworn.

She had, on due consideration, already decided to go along with the Fyreslayer’s plan for now, whatever it might turn out to be. It seemed easier than arguing at this point. And, quite on top of everything else, she wanted an excuse to go down into the canals again. She wanted to confront whatever conspiracy he believed himself privy to head-on, to face whatever dangers her city had to offer beyond mechanical rat beasts and pit her courage against it. The only reason she had not suggested it herself days ago was that her wounded pride would not let her do so. For some reason, consuming an unusual amount of alcohol made this seem like far less of an obstacle than it had been yesterday.

‘So where are we headed to now?’

‘To look into the skaven in the canals. Have you been listening to a word of what I just said?’

Elsworn looked at him as though he was mad, which she was starting to think might well be the case. ‘I meant where are we going exactly?’

‘You said you could get us a key to some particularly hard-to-reach bits of the old sewers.’

Elsworn stopped walking. She stared at the Fyreslayer, open-mouthed.

Surely she had not promised him that?

‘We’re going right now?’ she said.

‘Strike while the axe is still wet, that’s what I say.’

‘We’re both still drunk!’

‘Some of the best plans I’ve ever had came to me while I was drunk.’

‘I’m in my dress uniform.’

‘According to Orinkul you could do with wearing it in a bit. And besides, you’ve still got your weapons on you. What more do you need?’

Elsworn let out a deep breath. She had run out of excuses and Gotrek had made a lot of very interesting points. ‘Do you happen to remember what I get in return for helping you?’

‘Aye,’ said Gotrek, smiling grimly as he stumbled on, running his thumb clumsily around the blade of his axe until it bled. ‘Afterwards, you get to fight me.’

Garvil was the only man on duty when the pair of them stumbled into the Forgewrought garrison. The Cavalier was sitting in the middle of the cold, brick guardroom with his feet up on the big oak desk and a book propped up on his thighs. He lowered the book and raised an eyebrow as Elsworn staggered through the open door with Gotrek underarm.

‘It isn’t what it looks like,’ Elsworn assured him.

Garvil shrugged and went back to his book.

Elsworn wanted to go over there and demand to know how he could be so indifferent to her bringing a burly Fyreslayer back with her to the barracks, but Gotrek was already threatening to wander off. He had stopped to examine the banners and the gnarled wooden trophies that adorned the wall. Elsworn was able to drag him on before he could break something, ushering him out of the guardroom and onto a stairwell to the dormitories on the upper floor. It took them to a short corridor.

The walls were brick, interspersed with stout wooden doors and barred windows. Chemical torches burned in sconces.

‘My dormitory is just at the end of this corridor,’ she said, starting quickly off down it. ‘But more often than not I sleep above the stables with Comet. Or at home, sometimes. You’ll find half the garrison somewhere else most of the time.’

‘So, where’s this key?’

Elsworn looked over her shoulder, checking that Garvil was indeed the only other person here and that the surrounding dormitories were as empty as they appeared. Gotrek was loitering halfway back along the corridor. The low flame from his axe and the dull light from the rune in his chest illuminated the rugged brickwork to either side.

Elsworn stared at the rune for a moment, blinking off a sudden wave of dizziness. A part of her was glad that she was drunk. She did not think she would have agreed to any of this had she been sober, but she hoped her head cleared up a bit before they made it to the sewers.

‘Lass,’ Gotrek prompted.

‘That rune,’ Elsworn mumbled, pointing.

‘What of it?’

‘Why didn’t you use it in the fight with the giant rat?’

Gotrek gave a scowl before very deliberately shaking his head. ‘You know not what you’re speaking of.’

‘But I do, or at least… I’ve heard stories. Daegal–’

‘Is this it then?’ said Gotrek, gesturing to the door that Elsworn had stopped at.

Elsworn blinked once, remembering where she was, and turned to look.

Marshal Ordo’s study.

‘Ye-e-e-es,’ she said, suddenly feeling an awful lot less confident about Gotrek’s plan than she had when he had explained it to her the first time. The walk across Long Smoke had clearly taken the edge off her drunkenness.

‘Is your master home?’

Elsworn shook her head. ‘Probably not.’ Then with more certainty. ‘No.’

She had not seen Marshal Ordo in several days, but that was not in itself uncommon. He was most likely abroad with Lady Zukaus’ forces in the Ghoul Mere.

Gotrek drummed his fingers around the haft of his axe.

He studied the door thoughtfully.

‘Are you certain that stealing the marshal’s key is the right way to go about finding the skaven lair?’

‘Borrowing,’ Gotrek growled. ‘We’re borrowing the marshal’s key. Gotrek Gurnisson is no thief. And yes, there are parts of the old ways that are barred even to the underjacks.’

‘Garvil saw us coming in together.’

‘We could always kill him.’

Elsworn shot him a glare.

‘That was a joke,’ Gotrek said, straight-faced.

‘Ha-ha,’ said Elsworn drily.

‘The aelfling would’ve seen the funny side.’

‘I’m not her, whoever she is.’

‘More’s the bloody pity.’

‘This door is probably going to be locked anyway. We should probably just–’

There was a crash of splintering wood as Gotrek drove his axe through the wooden door frame. He grinned nastily at her, his teeth all yellow and crooked. ‘My hand slipped.’

Elsworn hovered over the threshold, uncertain whether to stay where she was or to further incriminate herself by following Gotrek inside. She debated herself only for a moment before choosing the latter option, if only to keep the Fyreslayer from doing more damage than he already had.

Unable to restrain her curiosity any further, she looked around the room as she crossed it. She had never been called to the Cavalier-Marshal’s study before. It was smaller than she had expected, and sparsely furnished.

Ordo was an abstemious man. He adhered to an extreme Sigmarite creed which preached that the salvation of the realms would come not through mortal prayers or the deeds of great heroes, but through hard work and puritanism. He was tall and sharp. Elsworn did not think she had even seen him eat. His one true extravagance was his horse, Nightwolf, a magnificent beast from Shyish that Elsworn had been able to envy only from afar. The beast’s devotion to Ordo was such that none but his master was allowed near.

There was a bookcase with no books on it, a desk with no chair. A map of the city with properties owned by the Zukaus family marked with pins covered one wall. The only decoration, if you could call it that, was a faded bloodstain on the floorboards.

Elsworn’s gaze lingered on the spot for a moment, and then looked up.

Gotrek was already at the desk, rooting through the drawers.

‘Gotrek,’ she hissed, wary of making even more of a commotion than they already had and alerting Garvil downstairs of what they were up to. Her hand strayed instinctively to the grip of her sword. ‘If you really have to go through the marshal’s papers, you could at least do it with a little respect.’

‘What papers?’ The Fyreslayer’s one good eye shone as he held up a ring of thick bronze keys. ‘There’s sod all in there but this.’

Elsworn relaxed her grip on her sword.

Maybe they could pull this off after all, find the skaven lair and see the keyring back into the marshal’s drawer, all before anyone even noticed they were gone.

She extended her hand, palm up, to take the keys from Gotrek. ‘If anyone’s holding on to those, though, it’s going to be me. It’s my head if they get lost.’

‘Fair enough.’

Gotrek handed them over.

Elsworn undid her belt, feeding it through the big brass ring before refastening it. She gave the belt a tug to make sure the keys were securely on. They jangled heavily. ‘Right…’ she said, after a moment’s thought. ‘Where’s the door that needs unlocking?’

The shop door opened of its own accord. A pressure plate under the paving stones, Elsworn assumed, connected to a winching mechanism on the other side of the door, but so cleverly done that it looked like magic. Gotrek complained about ‘gewgaws and show-offs’ as he stomped under the lintel, but Elsworn was afraid that he was flying against the wind on that one. Decorative automation was so fashionable and commonplace that a person could wander down the Spoke Roads and see beggars entertaining the crowds with the whirring gadgets on their shoulders. Thinking no more of it, Elsworn followed the Fyreslayer inside.

She looked around with interest. For all the times that she had escorted convoys of toxic slurry to the yard outside, she had never actually set foot inside Arilde Flathelm’s shop.

Given the size of the building, it was remarkably small and cramped inside. Elsworn reasoned that most of the interior space was given over to complicated alchemical apparatus and that the shopfront was solely to woo the passing trade. Coloured liquids bubbled in flasks, giving off pungently sweet aromas that brought tears to the eyes and exaggerated her already fiendish headache. Strange elements, the distilled essences of the eight Mortal Realms, flickered in bell jars. Elsworn blinked spots from her eyes and looked away.

The centre of the room was occupied by an antique arcanoscope of great size, its various arrays of spheres and lenses plated in polished brass. It looked quite out of place, sitting there in the middle of the space, and Elsworn assumed that its main purpose was to conceal the large crack in the floor underneath it. This, suffice to say, it did not do very well.

One side of the room was taken up by a large counter. Alchemical instruments for sale were displayed there in locked cases. The wall behind it was lined with books, their leather spines crisp and unbent, the titles of dry academic treatises lettered in gold. A neat gentleman with a thin moustache and a starched white apron stood behind the counter. Elsworn and Gotrek got to share a slightly condescending frown.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

‘Aye,’ said Gotrek, before Elsworn could reply. ‘You can help us by sodding off and fetching the owner of this place.’

‘Mistress Flathelm is in the middle of a most delicate process just now. I assure you that I can help you with whatever you are looking for.’

Elsworn sighed. Arilde’s assistant was quite clearly a pompous clown, but that was hardly a crime that warranted having to deal with a belligerent Fyreslayer as punishment. Plus, her head hurt, and she had a nasty suspicion that Gotrek was about to start shouting, after which he would probably move on to breaking things. She tapped the orange decals on her breastplate. ‘You know what these mean?’

‘Forgewrought Flintlocks,’ said the man, sounding markedly less sure of himself than he had a moment ago. ‘The Zukaus regiment.’

‘That’s right, so I can talk to Arilde or I can talk to you. Which would you prefer.’

‘I’ll… er… I’ll just go fetch her, shall I?’

‘I think that will be best. We’ll wait.’

The young man fled the room, leaving by a door behind the counter that, up until the moment he activated the mechanism, had been completely disguised amongst the bookshelves.

‘Couldn’t have done it better myself,’ said Gotrek. He looked disappointed. ‘I was hoping he was going to make me hit him.’

‘Are you going to tell me what we’re doing here?’ she asked, as the Fyreslayer wandered off to poke curiously through the displays. ‘And don’t tell me that we’re here to “look into the skaven”. I got that part. I’m not seeing any sewers.’

‘I’ve heard some particular rumours about this place,’ said Gotrek, taking a whiff of the vapours coming off a distillation flask and recoiling with an astonished cough. He blinked violently. ‘That’s the stuff.’

‘What rumours? And from who?’

‘From Arilde’s cousin, of course.’

‘Her cousin?’

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Know what? And if you don’t give me a straight answer this time, I swear I’ll– Gotrek, do you really think you should be drinking that?’

The Fyreslayer had stuck his finger in the condensing tube that came out from the side of the distillation flask and was now sucking on it, nodding appreciatively.

Elsworn stared at him in horror.

‘Tastes of aniseed,’ Gotrek said, before wandering further into the shop to poke at something else that should probably not be touched.

With no sign yet of Arilde, and quite unwilling to waste any more energy on keeping Gotrek from poisoning himself, Elsworn decided that this was as good a time as any to see to the cut on her hand.

She teased a small bundle from under her sleeve and unwound its cloth wrapping. Inside was a plain vial containing a few precious drops of Aqua Ghyranis.

The healing water could be sourced only from rare springs that were invariably hidden away in far-flung, difficult-to-reach corners of Ghyran, and which were usually fiercely protected by the Sylvaneth groves that they nourished. On account of its inherent value and scarcity, it had become a universal currency across the Mortal Realms. Gold and gems had little worth anywhere with a functioning trade route to the Realm of Metal.

Elsworn wet the cloth with a little of the water. There was no need to clean the cloth first as the Aqua Ghyranis would itself destroy any germs or toxins that it might have picked up on its travels through Greywater Fastness. Using the damp cloth, she dabbed the cut on her hand. It did not sting. A sense of warmth and comfort leached into her hand through the cut and spread slowly up her arm. She wriggled her fingers and made a fist. Already, the cut was beginning to close. She put the vial to her lips and tossed her head back to claim the last few drops. A renewed sense of vitality seeped into her. The hammering on her skull eased and she immediately felt more alert.

The best hangover remedy in the Mortal Realms, she thought, tucking the damp cloth and the now-empty vial back under her sleeve. Never mind that she had just swallowed half a week’s wage. Right then, she would have argued with the Everqueen herself that it was worth it.

At that moment, Arilde Flathelm marched in through the back door with her harried-looking assistant very distantly in tow. She looked as though she had indeed been in the middle of something delicate. She was wearing a set of leather goggles over her eyes, the glass lenses scorched totally black. Her grey hair had been pulled up into a tight bun and covered with a net. Her padded white coat smouldered where droplets of some corrosive substance had landed on it, contributing to the appearance of a duardin in a state of such fury that she might herself combust at any moment.

She looked at Gotrek for a moment, apparently dismissing the Fyreslayer as a curiosity before deciding that the woman in uniform was the one she needed to address.

‘What’s the meaning of this?’ she demanded, without preamble. ‘Barging into my shop and putting the fear of Grungni into my apprentice.’ She straightened, drawing herself no higher than Elsworn’s chest but only emphasising the width of her shoulders and her matriarchal girth. ‘I pay your mistress her proper dues, and unless you’ve a good reason for being here I can promise you she’ll hear of it.’

‘Calm yourself,’ said Gotrek. ‘Orinkul sent us. He told us about your problem.’

The alchemist blinked, taken aback. ‘He did?’

‘Problem?’ said Elsworn.

Arilde threw another look at Elsworn, more hopeful this time than angry. ‘Are you telling me that you brought a key?’

‘Aye,’ said Gotrek.

‘But what does Orinkul even…?’ Elsworn began, before her tired mind finally caught up enough to muddle two and two into one place. She turned back to Arilde. ‘Orinkul is your cousin?’

Arilde nodded.

‘Then he’s a–’

‘A Flathelm,’ said Gotrek. ‘Aye. Try to keep up, lass.’

‘But they’re one of the most powerful duardin clans in the city!’

The Flathelms had ancestral claims to cyclestone deposits under the Great Axle, some of them centuries old and still paying out handsomely. The Ghyranite realmstone was the one substance of value that Greywater Fastness was able to source for itself. It fuelled its forges, drove the unnatural growth of staple foodstuffs in industrial indoor gardens, and powered the mystical protections worked into its outer walls, to list but a few of its many applications. Once exhausted, the realmstone would even regenerate, in time, infused as it was with the very essence of Ghyran, but the city was full of quacks, and even a few genuinely respected alchemists like the Flathelms, who claimed to have cracked the secret of accelerating the process.

‘Poor Orinkul,’ Arilde sighed. ‘He got himself involved in one riot too many.’

‘Sorry, I’m still not entirely sure what we’re doing here,’ said Elsworn, rubbing her eyes tiredly. ‘You said something about a problem?’

Arilde glanced at her assistant, who shrugged, and then gave another sigh. Shaking her head, she bent down to collect something from behind the counter. Elsworn stumbled back against the arcanoscope, instinctively going for her pistol when she realised that the thing Arilde had picked up was an enormous, triple-barrelled cannon. Freeguild Fusiliers generally carried the unwieldy slaughter-fusils as small teams, or at the very least in pairs, with a specially designed pavise shield to keep the gun stable when firing. Arilde threw the weapon’s leather strap over her shoulder. Her broad shoulders seemed quite capable of bearing the full weight. A metal hoop welded to the top barrel allowed her to turn on the spot and aim if need be. The butt of the wooden stock rested firmly against the thick padding of her white smock. Her other hand was poised over the trigger.

Elsworn’s interest was piqued. Any difficulty that required a slaughter-fusil to solve was by its very nature her kind of problem. ‘What are you planning on doing with that?’

‘If we’re unlocking the door downstairs, I’m going to want it.’

‘Just how big of a problem are you hoping to solve?’

‘It’s probably best if I just show you.’

Arilde Flathelm took them in through the back door, leaving her bewildered assistant to mind the shop again in her absence. They passed through several rooms that each appeared to house a single grumbling cistern, a small host of engineers, and a great deal of steam. The steel vessels were of such gargantuan proportions that they put paid to any lingering mystery as to what Arilde was doing with the rest of the space in her building. Elsworn looked up in awe. Towering overhead, trembling dangerously, its summit wreathed in vapour, the cistern resembled nothing so much as a volcano that was about to erupt. Its attendants were too busy checking dials, adding in powdered reagents, and defogging their protective goggles to even notice their employer and her unusual companions walk by.

‘There aren’t many people who get to see this side of my workshop,’ said Arilde, forced to yell to be heard over the roaring and grinding and sloshing of the machines, which detracted somewhat from the intended gravity of her words. ‘My apprentices swear binding oaths never to reveal to another what they see here. If you are truly friends of Cousin Orinkul, then I’ll expect you to honour our clan’s secrets.’

Gotrek held miserably on to his head, as though these hordes of engineers were busy drilling into it, and growled something guttural in a language Elsworn did not understand. Non-committal. Elsworn looked around her. She doubted whether she could have described any of this to another person if she had wanted to. She nodded dumbly.

Arilde seemed satisfied, for she led on.

‘This is where we process the used cyclestone. As you probably know, even the used realmstone slurry from the factories retains a small amount of energy, a seed if you like, waiting for the right conditions to germinate. That is what’s being simulated in the fermentation vessels now.’

‘Isn’t cyclestone waste incredibly poisonous?’ Elsworn asked.

‘It is,’ Arilde replied with a nod, apparently impressed with her knowledge. ‘It’s partly that which created the Ghoul Mere around the Outer Circle. The region was once a part of the Dreadwood, before my forebears started pumping waste into it.’

‘Then I’d say it’s a good thing that you figured out how to turn it back into realmstone.’

Arilde snorted. ‘If anything, the waste product of the conversion process is even more dangerous, and of course once the secondstone itself is used up, that’s it.’ Leaving her slaughter-fusil to hang by its strap, she made a poof gesture with her hand. ‘It’s gone.’

‘Won’t it eventually regenerate?’

‘Not once it’s been processed into secondstone.’

‘But…’ Elsworn found herself considering Greywater Fastness’ vast, endlessly moving network of workways in an entirely new and not altogether flattering light. ‘Won’t we then eventually run out?’

‘Not in my lifetime. And certainly not in yours. Now, look at this.’ The duardin pointed through the steam to the morass of pipes that seemed to run everywhere like the threads of some gigantic fungus. ‘The waste of the process goes through these. There’s still some magic left in it and some alchemists think that’s what lends the substance its harmful properties. But we can’t get at it, at least not with our current formulae, so we let it flow down into the old canal that runs beneath this building.’

‘And what happens to it then?’

Arilde shrugged, as though she had never given the matter much thought. ‘My apprentices have always talked about hearing strange noises from the drains. They say that when you switch off the pumps to scrape out the pipes and top up the cisterns, you can hear voices coming from below.’

‘Voices?’

‘Ghost stories, you know? Probably just vibrations from somewhere else in the building. You’ve got to get right inside those cisterns to clean them out properly between batches, and believe me, it’s like sticking your head inside a bell – you can hear everything. But lately…’ She shook her head grimly. ‘Lately, I’ve started hearing the same thing myself. Voices, and something that sounds almost like drilling. And then yesterday…’ She paused, as though wondering how much more to say. ‘You saw the big crack on my shop floor?’

‘I saw the arcanoscope you’d put on top of it.’

‘There was an earthquake. Just a small one, but I had to shut the whole workshop down for the day. Frankly, with the volatile chemicals I keep here, it’s a wonder that a few split bricks was the worst of it. If it happens again then I can’t even hope to imagine we’d be so lucky a second time.’

Elsworn turned to Gotrek, who had been keeping himself remarkably quiet up till now. ‘Why didn’t you just ask the Loose Cannons to investigate this with you? This is exactly the sort of thing they’re supposed to do.’

The Fyreslayer scowled at nothing in particular, his one good eye bloodshot and full of migraine. ‘There are places in this city that an underjack just can’t go, doors that only an officer of her Freeguilds might open for me.’

Marshal Ordo’s keyring. Of course.

‘Tun told me that you already searched the tunnels.’

‘Days too late. The skaven are craven, but they are also cunning. It stands to reason they would have covered their tracks and fled long before we returned to hunt them in force.’

‘Why didn’t you take this straight to Greywater Lock instead of coming here drunk with me?’

‘Because the Greycaps are all imbeciles and you would have agreed to nothing sober.’

Elsworn had to admit that Gotrek had a point. It was at times like these that she realised she did not understand him at all. In an unguarded moment he had said something about a destiny, and yet he went about it as though some crackpot seer had told him to expect it at the bottom of an ale cup somewhere in Ghyran. There was surely the hint of the street-corner lunatic in his talk of plots and monsters and foul creatures in the sewers, but he did it with a fervour that put the lie to his callous attitude. It was, in its own strange way, infectious. In truth, she was only arguing for argument’s sake. She had already fully made up her mind to follow wherever the Fyreslayer led and suffer whatever consequences found her. Anything to avoid another tedious day of simply doing her duty.

At the end of the fermentation halls, Arilde unlocked a door that brought them to a set of stairs. They went down. An alchemical light flared like a struck match at their appearance, spraying the stairwell with sparks and filling it with a dull, reddish light. Arilde pulled her goggles up over her forehead so as to see better in the gloom. She took a firmer grip on her slaughter-fusil.

‘The effluent pipes go right down here,’ she said. ‘They run just behind the wall.’

‘Just how poisonous is this stuff?’ Elsworn asked, given a sudden reminder of Daegal and his warpstone-corrupted corpse in the moments before it was cast into the incinerator.

‘Very,’ Arilde confirmed cheerfully. ‘But don’t worry. It’s perfectly harmless so long as it’s inside the pipes.’ Elsworn was more concerned about what happened when the secondstone waste inevitably left the pipes, given that they were currently both heading in the same direction, but the alchemist said no more on the subject and Elsworn was too nervous about the answer to ask.

With Arilde leading the way, they went down. At every turn of the stairwell, just as the light from behind began to grow dim, another torch would sputter violently into life to light their way on. Elsworn became convinced that she could hear something dripping. She thought again about the rivers of poison that were flowing through the walls beside her. She ignored it for as long as she could before deciding that she needed to raise it with Arilde.

Before she could, however, the stairwell at last opened out into a small, dungeon-like room. It was completely devoid of furnishings or features, but for a steel door in the wall opposite the stairs. The lock was enormously heavy and engraved with runes. Elsworn knew the type. They could be found all over the city, usually on doors sealing off particularly dangerous areas of the sewers to which city authorities might still need access from time to time. Elsworn’s hand drifted to the keyring hanging off her belt. Arilde Flathelm was one of Lady Zukaus’ tenants. It stood to reason that the baroness would have a copy of the key.

‘Here it is,’ said Arilde. ‘Whatever near split my shop in half is down there, but I’ve not been able to go and see for myself what it is. Ironweld locks are nigh impossible to break without the proper key.’

‘Orinkul told me as much,’ said Gotrek, turning to Elsworn. ‘You see now why I had to bring you.’

Elsworn nodded.

Arilde hefted her fusil grimly. ‘Get on with it then.’

‘You’re coming down with us?’ said Elsworn, surprised.

‘Are you kidding? I’ve been wondering what’s behind this door since I first took the lease on this place.’

Elsworn took a deep breath. If she could have foreseen, when she had first donned her dress uniform that morning, that she would end up venturing into a toxic sewer with a famous alchemist and Gotrek Gurnisson, then she would probably not have believed it. But, in spite of every sensible misgiving she had, she was as excited as Arilde to see what was down there.

‘All right then, Fyreslayer.’

‘I’ve warned you about calling me Fyreslayer, lass,’ Gotrek growled, behind her.

‘And I’ll stop,’ said Elsworn, looking through Ordo’s keyring for the one that would fit Arilde’s lock, ‘just as soon as you stop calling me lass.’

CHAPTER FIVE

THE SLURRY PITS

Sprarrk allowed himself the pleasure of a brief, maniacal cackle.

His subordinates had, against all reasonable expectation, followed his specifications to the letter, and the extraction operation was proceeding exactly as Scuttlegnawer had chittered into his brain that it should. Chains clanked. Pulleys groaned. Wheels turned. Drills shrieked. Bricks and roots and bits of old stone fell through funnels and onto jiggling sieves, where they were then sorted by size into giant hoppers to be picked through by scores of skavenslaves, who sat hunched over the rattling conveyors in chains. Big machines of indeterminate function belched smoke. Spare skavenslaves squirted the fear musk in their pens. The very air that Sprarrk breathed fizzed with the purest essence of corruption.

Truly, he was witnessing skaven engineering at its very finest.

He lifted his snout and sniffed. His whiskers felt the way his teeth sometimes did when he gorged on too much sugar. They tingled with magical potential. His tail went stiff with anticipation and he gave another titter.

His brother, Blastritt, wanted power?

Well, Sprarrk would give him power!

Already, industrious clanrats were rolling barrels of the tar-like secondstone sludge over gangplanks and onto his ironclad steam-barge. They had been at it for several minutes. Under the studious red eye of the vessel’s snarling bosun, Crick Yellowhook, they had filled the hold and were currently making several teetering stacks of the stuff on the deck. With an impatient hiss, Sprarrk shooed a small gang of clanrats from one such barrel, and clanked over. He gave it a tentative sniff, then slid his claws into the gap at the top where the lid had been nailed down with more enthusiasm than care and, with the steam-powered strength of his suit, wrenched the lid away. Nails flew everywhere. One bounced off his armour and almost impaled a gulping clanrat. A waft of intoxicating foulness rose up off the barrel and blasted out his sinuses, delivering a heady rush that would have almost certainly put Sprarrk nose over tail if not for the stabilising bulk of his armour.

‘It is as commanded, exactly,’ said Snifh Blanchpaw, hastening to Sprarrk’s side and running his tail nervously through his paws. The other clanrats and crew kept a wary distance, glad that none of them were in charge. ‘It is. It is. Is it not?’

‘Pass me some warpstone, cretin.’

Sprarrk snapped his claws under his lackey’s snout and held out his paw. Snifh dutifully drew a string-tied pouch from his belt and shook out a miserly pinch of powdered warpstone over Sprarrk’s waiting paw. The waste products that trickled through the rocks here from the processing infrastructure on the surface held a tremendous amount of energy that the humans seemed bizarrely oblivious to. It was, of course, entirely inaccessible in its crude form, but spike it with a sprinkling of powdered warpstone and–

Where the glowing flecks of warpstone dust alighted on the surface, the sludge became suddenly agitated. It turned green, and then it turned black. It bubbled angrily, the rising fumes making Sprarrk’s fur stand fully on end and his gums ache as though every one of his teeth were swelling at the roots. Lightning arced between his whiskers. He sneezed. The confusing multitude of dials and gauges built into his vambraces nodded dangerously into red quarters. The suit began to shake. Safety valves fired off a small flurry of warp lightning bolts that had Crick and his crew instinctively diving behind anything that looked even remotely non-metallic.

Snifh Blanchpaw was not nearly so quick on his paws.

A wild bolt struck him in the chest – not sufficient to kill a ratman outright, but delivering a nasty enough shock to throw the unfortunate clanrat over the gunwale rail. He broke the hard crust of the old canal with the hisssss of burning hair being doused, followed by the hungry, slurping gloop of the highly toxic waters closing over the warlock engineer’s head.

Sprarrk frowned down over the side of the barge, watching the steady stream of bubbles slowly dry up, the occasional jolt of electricity causing his eyelid to twitch.

He waited.

It did not look as though Snifh was coming back.

Inconsiderate wretch, Sprarrk thought. No sooner had he found someone halfway competent than he was forced to find someone else to oversee the extraction process in his stead. There were times when he wondered if the Great Horned Rat did not send him these unfortunate reverses simply to test his ingenuity.

‘Yellowhook!’ He turned towards the rusty iron wheelhouse just as the vessel’s swarthy bosun poked his head out from inside it. He was a scarred and reassuringly grizzled clanrat with a string of piercings through his bottom lip and a pink tail that snuck out from under the tattered hem of a navy-blue greatcoat. One eye was covered by a black eyepatch. He had a wooden peg-leg and a tarnished metal hook for a paw. It was the latter that had earned the skaven his fearsome name. ‘Full steam!’ Sprarrk squeaked. ‘Straight to the workshop!’

Crick Yellowhook bared his teeth and ducked back into his wheel-house.

The outboard motors growled. The paddles slowly began to turn, breaking up the canal’s crusty surface like a balloon whisk through old batter. The hull shook deliciously, power flowing through its bones and causing the vessel to tug eagerly on its mooring lines. Sprarrk turned to the nervous gaggle of clanrats and engineers who were still cowering at the far end of the boat.

‘I want-need volunteers to stay behind and load the second barge.’

He was most gratified by the forest of paws that shot up.

Elsworn covered her nose and mouth with her hand. The door under Arilde Flathelm’s workshop had brought them out onto a narrow ledge overlooking a lock, where boats on the old canal would have stopped to be raised and lowered before continuing on. The work of some inhuman genius had metastasised its way through the ancient system of gears and winches, propagating into a bewildering profusion of machines that gnawed incessantly at the ceiling and walls. A glittering miasma of dust and poison hung over it all. The reek was akin to having her face dunked in strong vinegar, but even that, she felt, hardly did the odour justice. The stink seemed to have done Gotrek some good, however, for he was looking unusually sober and had not complained about the unholy din even once.

Arilde, meanwhile, had replaced her goggles over her eyes and fastened a mask over her face. ‘They’re mining the secondstone waste from the rocks,’ she muttered, her inflexible leather mask muffling her words and the look of horror that she was surely wearing.

What had begun as a puzzling theft from a long-abandoned Inner Circle steelworks and a minor slight against Elsworn’s pride had turned into something far more serious.

‘To what end?’ said Elsworn, keeping her voice low although it was hardly necessary given the thunderous noise being made by the skaven drilling machines. But skaven senses were notoriously acute and it was better to be safe than sorry. ‘You said yourself that the stuff is useless.’

‘To our alchemy,’ Arilde corrected her. ‘Perhaps they have made some breakthrough that eludes us yet. Or maybe they simply mean to use the slurry to poison us all. There’s no way to be sure without getting down there and taking a close look at those machines.’

Elsworn peered into the green fog, watching as bent and gangly figures, swaddled like Arilde against the poisonous vapours, scurried across creaking timber scaffolding. They looked like ants going about their inscrutable business in one infernal nest. Upright rats in goggled helmets and a variety of protective clothing pulled on levers, whipped toiling labourers dressed only in loincloths, and piloted the great drills that chewed hungrily and loudly into the rock.

It was, she thought to herself, Greywater Fastness in hideous microcosm.

Further along the lock and beyond the crumbling water gate, a swarm of ratmen were hurrying to load barrels onto an iron-hulled paddle steamer. Even as they stacked the barrels on the deck, a second boat wallowing low in the water, implying that it was fully laden, was chugging away downstream. It faded into the noxious green curtain that covered everything in that place to some degree, moving slowly towards the mouth of a tunnel.

For a long time, Elsworn could neither move nor speak. She could not even avert her gaze, though a part of her dearly wished to do so. She had been raised on tales of the nefarious ratmen. She had been drilled in the formations and tactics that were said to have been successful against them in ages past; she had studied their warped society in ageing textbooks, and listened to the haunted accounts of veterans who claimed to have lived through their sporadic invasions of the Mortal Realms. Secure in her ignorance, she had thought herself something of an expert on the menace below, but she saw how very wrong she had been.

The reality was somehow more thrilling and terrible than anything she could have imagined, if only because no sane mind could ever have imagined this.

She took a slow, clammy breath between the fingers clasped over her mouth and felt her horror begin to lift. If anything, she felt stronger for having had the experience. Her sanity had been tested in a way that few other humans would ever know and come through it unbroken.

She eased her sword an inch from its scabbard in readiness.

‘I knew it,’ said Gotrek, with an expression that was less horror than satisfaction. His lips moved soundlessly as though he was mentally totting up individual skaven for some secret but very important reason of his own. ‘I bet you’re glad you came along now.’

Elsworn could only nod dumbly as she turned her attention back to the infernal operation going on below her.

‘We need to raise the alarm,’ she mumbled to herself. If she and Arilde kept watch on the skaven from here, then perhaps Gotrek could round up – and sober up – the rest of the Loose Cannons. On second thoughts, it might be a better idea if she ran to the Forgewrought garrison while Arilde and Gotrek…

She turned to Gotrek, except that Gotrek was no longer there. She looked around wildly for a moment before turning her gaze down, cursing as she realised that the Fyreslayer had jumped from the ledge while she was thinking and was even then charging along the narrow towpath towards the nearest group of skaven, fire trailing from his axe.

The skaven were tending to a shuddering brass drum that they seemed wholly captivated by. In addition to a steady stream of pulverised rocks, it was making so much noise that the skaven did not hear the Fyreslayer coming until his was axe was halfway through the least fortunate of their number. The remaining skaven squealed in sudden terror and scattered, bedlam ensuing as they ran headlong into machines, other skaven and the canal. And, just in case that was not quite racket enough to alert the entire operation to their presence, Gotrek then proceeded to deliver a mighty cry that was half mad laugh and half bloodthirsty roar, beheading a fleeing ratman on the backswing.

‘Gotrek!’ Elsworn screamed at him, flinching as the skaven workers retaliated with a fusillade of panicky pistol fire. ‘You don’t get to die before we’ve had our duel!’ Mouthing a silent curse on all Fyreslayers, she drew her sword in her right hand and one of her pistols in her left, making to leap down and follow Gotrek into the fray.

Arilde’s strong hand stopped her at the ledge.

‘If you’re thinking of jumping down there, then you’d best have no intention of coming back up. Did I forget to mention that it’s secondstone waste they’ve been pulling out of the rocks? A lungful of that dust will kill you as surely as a skaven bullet in the back.’

Elsworn had another mental flash of Daegal and his warpstone-corrupted corpse. She was not afraid to die, but not all deaths were created equal and a slow descent into mutation and madness before the eventual mercy of death sounded more horrific than most. Throughout the time that she spent thinking about it, Gotrek was, of course, continuing to hack his way through the frantic crowds. Either he was hoping to die sooner rather than later or he was simply ignorant of the danger he was in.

Elsworn sighted down the barrel of her gun, aiming it at the furry swirl that surrounded the bright orange crest of Gotrek’s hair. She lowered it again with a grunt. The Fyreslayer might well have been set on dying down there, but she was not about to risk hastening his passing for the sake of a few dead rats out of a hundred.

She would have to find some other way.

As she quickly looked around, her attention settled on the craze of wooden scaffolding that criss-crossed over the lock, a truly terrible idea starting to form in her mind.

A sudden blast from a steam horn interrupted her thoughts.

The second of the two paddle boats she had noted earlier was getting under way, apparently prematurely judging by the skaven workers leaping clear of wobbling gangplanks and the barrels splashing into the water. They must have seen the mayhem spreading down the towpath and assumed they were under actual attack as opposed to the berserk charge of one clearly mad Fyreslayer.

Her plan took a firmer shape in her mind.

Whatever happened to her and Gotrek, the skaven could not be allowed to leave this place with Arilde’s secondstone. The fate of the entire city might well depend on it.

She holstered her pistol and slid her sword back into its sheath. Stepping backwards through Arilde’s steadying hand, she drew a handful of paces from the ledge, sizing up the gap between herself and the nearest bit of scaffolding. It swayed precariously, like an admonishing finger, some ten or eleven feet away. She grinned at the thought of how outrageously stupid and dangerous this surely was, and then took the gap at a run.

She threw herself from the ledge, feet still pedalling, arms windmilling, catching on to a frayed bit of supporting rope and sliding the rest of the way along it to the wooden platform. The scaffold gave a sudden lurch as she landed, and for a moment Elsworn feared that her weight would be too much for it. The warped, half-chewed boards had clearly been lashed together with the scruffy, skin-and-bone skaven frame in mind. After a few seconds of creaking and yawing, however, the scaffold held. She let out the breath she had not realised she had been holding, then drew her sword.

Her arrival into the fray had not gone unnoticed.

Like spiders drawn by the struggles of the insect snared in their web, skaven warriors came scrambling down rickety ladders with swords in their belts and knives held between their teeth. They moved with a speed and agility that no human could ever hope to match and they outnumbered Elsworn at least fifty to one. Her one useful advantage, if she could call it that, was that she was teetering at the far end of a narrow board that was wobbling a good twenty feet off the ground, forcing her assailants to come at her in single file.

Keeping a hold of the rope with her left hand, she widened her stance to eke all the balance she could out of her unstable footing, facing the onrushing horde like a duellist, side-on.

As soon as the first skaven warrior scurried into reach, she thrust with her sword. The skaven parried, its reflexes preternaturally swift. It tittered in amusement, sensing helpless prey with nowhere to run, but had failed to account for the chittering mass of vermin that was pushing up the plank in support. The warrior squeaked in alarm as the ratman directly behind it unwittingly shoved it over the side. The second warrior, now at the head of the pack, panicked as it took in the rapidly shrinking amount of plank and the twenty-foot drop in front of it. It dug its claws in to try and slow itself, but the advancing pack of skaven forced it inexorably forwards.

Elsworn’s position, right in front of that rabid horde, was looking less and less like an advantage with every moment.

A few feet to the side and a few more feet down there was another walkway. Letting go of the rope, Elsworn leapt for it, landing with her knees bent and her heart hammering in her mouth. The plank groaned, but this time she had too much else on her mind for her to worry about it, looking back to watch as desperate skaven warriors went tumbling over the edge of the scaffold and onto the melee below. She looked down.

The skaven were a hissing, squealing, gnashing swirl, hemmed in between the mass of their drills and Gotrek’s axe. Only Gotrek’s orange crest rose above them, like a saw going slowly but determinedly through a piece of wood. As Elsworn watched, she saw a small group of skaven equipped with gas masks and delicate-looking glass bombs skulking around behind the Fyreslayer. She yelled a warning, only to have it drowned out by the thunderous report of Arilde’s slaughter-fusil. The volley of shot from the high ledge mowed through the skaven globadiers, who dropped bombs that gassed at least as many of their number again in spite of the protective masks they wore, and sent the rest of them scurrying back into the shelter of their machines.

‘Go!’ the alchemist shouted to her, hoisting the enormous gun upright and setting its weight down on the ground to reload. She waved towards the departing steamer. ‘Stop them. I can cover the both of you from here.’

Elsworn nodded. Gotrek and Arilde were more than capable of looking after themselves by the looks of things, so long as the skaven continued to behave like a leaderless rabble. And she still had a boat to catch.

She walked quickly across the plank with her arms held out wide for balance, not quite daring herself to run. The walkway led onto a ramp, which she took. A hissing skaven warrior leapt out at her from the top. Elsworn reacted on instinct before she had a chance to think about it, stepping back and turning the rusty scimitar aside on the flat of her sword. She only realised that her heels were sticking out over the edge and that she was hanging on to the plank by her toes when burning lines of pain twanged along the bottom of her feet to inform her. The skaven hissed in triumph and lunged.

Elsworn performed a hasty sideways shuffle-then-pivot, the pain in the soles of her feet almost causing her to falter, but given that the alternative options were a lengthy fall or a skaven blade in the gut, she gritted her teeth and pushed through. The overcommitted skaven went right across her. Elsworn lifted her elbow, her sword-arm going up and over the hapless warrior’s head, then sent the skaven another half-step on its way with a slap to its rump. The ratman flailed at the edge before disappearing with a plaintive squeal, and Elsworn slid herself fully back onto the plank.

She let out a relieved breath and peered down. Another walkway cut diagonally across the lock gate, linking the scaffolding on her side of the canal with the markedly lighter set-up on the other side. The paddle steamer had finally shed its moorings, along with several members of its crew, and was pulling away, but Gotrek had somehow managed to fight his way onto it ahead of Elsworn. Fire whooshed from his axe as the brutal melee from the towpath migrated onto the boat’s deck. Skaven threw themselves overboard rather than face it. Arilde Flathelm unsympathetically mowed down those caught dithering about whether or not to flee.

Seeing Gotrek reaching the boat ahead of her only made Elsworn more determined to get to it before the fight was over.

She was wondering on how best to get down to that other walkway when a shrill squeak from much closer to her drew her attention. Three skaven, one of them black-furred and burly and clad from head to foot in steel armour, came scurrying across the plank towards her. Elsworn brought her sword to a guard and noticed, as her blade winked across it, the green dot hovering over her chest. She looked up, spotting a ratman crouched on an elevated platform. It was hunched over a rifle that was almost larger than it was, squinting through a green lens and sticking its tongue out in concentration.

Decision made, Elsworn leapt for that diagonal walkway beneath her, just as the crack of the skaven rifle-shot rang out above the general tumult. The walkway behind her exploded into fragments. Suddenly unsupported at one end, the plank drooped under the weight of the heavily armoured skaven champion and split, tipping it and its cargo of screaming warriors into the air.

Elsworn thudded onto the lower walkway, not even waiting to find her feet but somehow stumbling into a flat-out run. She crossed the stagnant body of the lock. The stench was beyond appalling. She covered her nose and mouth as best she could with her free hand, gagging, praying to Sigmar that she was far enough above the skaven machines to avoid breathing in the worst of the foulness.

The skaven steamer passed out from under the walkway ahead of her, the paddles on either side of its riveted iron body churning the canal water to a rancid froth as it gathered speed. A single fat chimney belched out poisonous green fumes.

It dawned on her that she was never going to make it across the lock and down from the scaffold before the boat, and Gotrek with it, disappeared into the tunnel.

She looked quickly around for an alternative, making a sudden beeline towards a horribly frayed guy line that had been knotted around one of the beams above her. It ran taut across the canal to where it was looped through a mooring ring, just ahead of where the skaven barge was passing now. Elsworn jumped without giving herself the time to change her mind, swinging her sword up and over the rope, catching the flat of the blade in the fingers of her off-hand and holding it horizontal across the rope as she started to slide. Her sword whined like an angry wasp. The scent of burning rope somehow managed to displace the stench of the canal from her nostrils. The melee on the back of the boat loomed larger, larger, as Elsworn sped towards it, screaming with the thrill of her semi-controlled descent and kicking her legs uselessly beneath her.

A skaven warrior with an anchor branded into the fur of its wiry bicep turned and looked up, just at the instant that the soles of Elsworn’s boots hit its chest and launched it overboard. The impact slowed her down enough that, when she let go of her sword to drop the last couple of feet, she only knocked half the breath from her lungs. She lay groaning on the barge’s wooden deck for a moment, feeling air rushing past her face and her head spinning around her even though she was now most definitely still. The walls appeared to reach up and close over her, and she realised that the boat had at last entered the tunnel. She had made it with barely a second to spare.

She just hoped that Arilde Flathelm had the good sense to retreat to her shop and barricade the door behind her.

The tunnel grew increasingly dark as the infernal glow of the drills fell away behind them. In its place were a few warpstone-fuelled lanterns swinging from the wheelhouse at the front of the boat. But the skaven would not be disadvantaged by the absence of light, she knew. If anything, the opposite would be true.

‘Lying down in the middle of a fight?’ came Gotrek’s belligerent roar. ‘Are you dead, lass?’

The Fyreslayer was fighting off a dozen skaven warriors with great, fiery swings of his axe. Sensing easier prey, a skaven who had been jabbing at Gotrek with a spear from behind several ranks of its fellows, turned its attention onto her instead. With her back flat on the deck, dazed and half-blinded and with her empty sword-hand shielding her eyes from the glare, Elsworn drew her pepperbox and shot the ratman between the eyes. It jerked back, poleaxed, and hit the deck with a crash.

Elsworn clutched her ringing skull in agony.

‘Perfect,’ she muttered through gritted teeth. ‘My hangover is coming back.’

‘Kill some more rats, it helps.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘I’ll not have you ruining a perfectly worthy doom with your complaining. Head to the engine room and leave the killing to me. We need more speed if we’re going to catch that second boat.’

With a scowl, Elsworn picked up her sword then turned to look towards the front end of the boat. As much as she hated to admit it, Gotrek was right: the fight on this boat was as good as over, thanks to the Fyreslayer, but there was still another one laden with dangerous secondstone waste somewhere on the canal ahead of them.

The wheelhouse resembled a tin shed that had been riveted to the deck. A corrugated roof sheltered a snug, raised deck, protected from the spray thrown up by the paddlewheels. A spoked steering wheel stood on a wooden pedestal. A sloping dashboard housed a complicated array of illuminated controls and dials. The acid-scorched front window looked out onto green-lit stone walls and the darkness ahead. A twitchy skaven pilot let go of the wheel and whirled towards her, pulling a warplock pistol that was wedged down its trousers, but Elsworn’s hand was quicker. The skaven’s brains splattered over those complicated-looking controls, and it slumped over the handles of the steering wheel like a noblewoman fainting into the arms of a relative.

Elsworn dragged its body off the wheel and quickly scanned over the controls.

To her surprise, a lot of it looked rather intuitive. The purpose of the steering wheel was obvious. The big lever to the left of the pedestal looked like a brake. The one to her side had a wide handle to accommodate the full grip of an entire hand and could be pushed forwards or backwards. Short, jagged symbols that looked like they could be skaven numbers marked the base in increments. Push the lever forwards towards the thirteenth sign and the barge would undoubtedly accelerate. Pull it back and it would likely begin to slow down.

It was really no different from the controls of a steam tank or a rattletrap carriage. She had never driven either, of course, but she had seen them at the engineering fayres and the displays that the Ironweld put on at the Battery Green tournament. It was almost disturbing. Could the skaven mind, for all its rapacious curiosity and capacity for invention, really be so alien if it could fashion something so familiar?

She shuddered, drawn from the repellent thought by the angry shouts and clashing of steel still rising from the back end of the boat. She flicked a glob of skaven brain matter from the window and peered through the dirty glass.

Was that glimmer of green the bob of another boat’s warpstone lantern, or just the glint of her own exhaust fumes falling out of the air ahead of her?

She decided that there was really only one way to find out.

‘Hold on!’ she screamed, gripping the gear lever in her right hand and pushing it all the way forwards.

‘Faster-faster!’ Sprarrk shrieked over the frantic growls of the paddles and the spray that was lashing down on the cabin’s lead roof. ‘More-more warpstone power to the engines!’

‘They can take no more-more, master!’ Bosun Yellowhook snarled back, both paws and his rope-like tail straining against the protesting wheel. Periodic flashes of warp lightning danced across his bared teeth. ‘We already exceed the dreaded thirteenth increment!’

The engine was howling like the damned, the paddlewheels churning so furiously fast that Sprarrk was unsure where the roar of foaming water ended and the beating of his heart began. The entire crew was soggy and terrified. The deck had become treacherously wet. Sodden crew-rats slid back and forth across it, squealing at one another in fright, desperately throwing ropes over teetering stacks of barrels before they could fall. The walls flew by as though afraid to linger, and yet still the vessel behind them appeared to be gaining.

Sprarrk felt his usual quick wits and cunning desert him entirely. How could this be happening? An attack by so large and well organised a host, so obviously knowledgeable in the most jealously guarded secrets of Clan Skryre machine-lore, should not have been able to strike with so little warning. Where were the scouts? Where were the lookouts and the sentries and the guards? Where were they? Sprarrk wondered, for he dearly wished to wring their scrawny necks and ask them how this disaster had been allowed to occur on their watch.

After Blastritt’s courting of calamity beneath the steelworks, Sprarrk had made certain to be doubly cautious. Had he not commanded Snifh Blanchpaw in no uncertain terms to be as furtive as a mouse in his deployment of the extraction drills? Could it be that his erstwhile minion had wilfully misheard his instructions in a vain attempt to impress Sprarrk with his productivity? How typical of the wretched fool to have fallen overboard and drowned so that he could not properly account for his failures now!

Yes, the dead rat’s inadequacies were clearly the only plausible explanation. The only other alternative was treachery, and that he could not bring himself to consider. His underlings were too hamstrung by incompetence to even think about such a scheme, and Blastritt would no more betray his beloved twin than Sprarrk would devour his own foot. They were more than just physically identical. They were conjoined in mind and spirit. The success of one was the success of the other. If one of them were to perish then the other would surely wither and die also, assuming that the jealous hordes of their downtrodden minions did not turn on the weakened survivor and devour him first.

Thinking of his brother, hard at work in their secret lair, made Sprarrk brux his fangs in frustration.

‘Faster,’ he growled.

He had lost half of the secondstone slurry that he had promised already.

He refused to surrender the rest without a fight.

‘I see them!’ Elsworn cried.

The steering wheel shook in her grip as though she had to fight to keep it from jumping off the pedestal and rolling away along the deck. The thudding of the paddlewheels through the water was so great that she could barely hear herself think. But in spite of its foul origins, and the stiletto-like pain stabbing through her brain, there was a definite primal thrill to be had in pushing this machine to its limit. She was grinning from ear to ear as she made out the metallic outline of the second skaven boat from the darkness ahead of them.

With both hands on the wheel, she looked over her shoulder and yelled, ‘Gotrek!’

The Fyreslayer had finished off the last of the skaven crew and was now growling some kind of duardin work song as he tossed their bodies overboard. He had already pushed over a few of the heavy secondstone barrels that had been stacked closest to the rear. Elsworn could see them bobbing in the shiny green water, like stepping stones across a poisonous lake, leading the way to some dubious treasure that the spirits of this place could not give away fast enough.

Elsworn was by no means an expert, but even she could tell that the reduction in weight had brought them a noticeable boost in speed. Now that the other skaven boat was in sight, she was more certain than ever that the gap between them was closing. And fast.

She only hoped that Gotrek had a plan for when they eventually caught them, because hers did not currently go any further than ramming them with all the speed they had and praying to Sigmar.

Sprarrk braced his heavy, bronze-plated boot against the gunwale rail that ran around the stern of the boat. Spray blasted up at him where the rudder dragged through the polluted water. He glared back at the pursuing boat.

‘How is it that they gain on us so fast-quick?’ said Sprarrk. ‘Their engines are the same as ours.’

‘See how they throw their cargo overboard,’ squeaked a particularly excitable crew-rat who had tethered itself to the rail by its tail. It pointed into the water that was foaming and cresting in the steamer’s wake and turned keenly to Sprarrk. ‘We must do the same!’

Sprarrk cuffed it over the ear. ‘Fool-fool!’

The ratman rubbed its head anxiously, but did not make the suggestion again. Sprarrk did not expect the sort of weasel-brained cretin that one could find crewing a sewer barge to understand. It feared only for its own pathetic life and perhaps, by slight extension, for the continued sewer-worthiness of its craft. Sprarrk had larger concerns to worry him. The great machine demanded power! More power indeed than skaven technology could generate by conventional means. Without such power, all that he and Blastritt had built thus far was so much scrap metal, doomed to rust in their hidden workshop, doomed never to burst forth at the head of a chittering skaven tide and herald the veritable godhood of its creators. And worse! Sprarrk would be made to look bad next to his brother.

‘They are going to hit us!’ the excitable crew-rat squealed again.

Bracing himself firmly against the raised wooden board of the stern, Sprarrk raised his arm so that it was horizontal to the heaving deck, his claws aimed at the following boat. With a snarl, he pushed the prominent button on the inside of his vambrace. A gun-shaped section of plate detached from the rest, snapping out from his arm on struts and clicking into place. A barrel telescoped from the central jacket and locked. Sprarrk made a fist and the barrel whirred, pulling a belt stuffed with lethal, warpstone-tipped munitions from where it had been packed around his wrist under the plate.

His teeth flashed in the gloom.

‘We see-see about that.’

Elsworn swore aloud, ducking below the flimsy shelter of her wooden dashboard as green-glowing bullets sprayed across the front of the boat. The window exploded and the rounds came whizzing through. The wheel’s topmost handle exploded into a blizzard of flying splinters. The top of the brake lever disappeared, shot clean off by a warpstone bullet. The shriek of the armoured warlock’s laughter was almost as loud as the rattling of gunfire across the hull. It sounded awfully familiar to Elsworn – very alike to the disembodied voice that had directed the rat monster below Lady Zukaus’ steelworks. She attempted to rise and shoot back, only for the uninterrupted hail of bullets, and a fresh burst of deranged laughter, to force her back into cover.

The hull gave a low, tortured squeal. With a lurch of horror, Elsworn wondered if they might be sinking. The reality was less dramatic, but equally unwelcome. Without her hand on the wheel to steady it, the boat had drifted to the right and was now scraping against the side of the tunnel. They were losing precious speed. Keeping her head down, she heaved the wheel back around to the left. The massive steamer responded slowly, scraping along the side for several arduous seconds before finally coming away.

Elsworn let out a relieved breath, sitting herself back against the wheel, locking it firmly in place with her own body as bullets continued to zip above her head. So long as she could keep them moving forwards in a straight line, then her ramming and praying idea was still very much on. Without it, she was afraid that she was all out of alternative options.

A violent roar from somewhere amidst the mayhem reminded her that she had not laid eyes on Gotrek since the shooting started. She looked quickly around, keeping her head down and her back firmly pressed against the wheel, but could not see him anywhere on the deck.

Was it possible that the Fyreslayer had been killed, and the shout she had heard was his final cry before pitching overboard? The thought filled her with an unexpected sense of sorrow, if only for the duel they would never have, or the skaven plot that she would now have to find a way to defeat alone. She would not go so far as to say that she liked the irascible Fyreslayer, but fighting alongside a person engendered a certain grudging endearment.

‘Come here so my axe can taste you, you doddering tin can!’

Her sorrow turned into disbelief as it dawned on Elsworn that the reason she had been unable to spot Gotrek on the deck behind her was, quite simply, that he was no longer behind her. She risked a peek over her mutilated steering wheel and swore. There he was, standing on the bowsprit like the figurehead of Grimnir on a duardin warship, lashed with scummy spray and miraculously missed by the hail of glowing bullets. The axe that he brandished, wreathed in flames in spite of his utter soaking, must have made a singularly inviting target in the darkness.

‘Your rune, Gotrek!’ she yelled. ‘Use your rune!’

‘I didn’t come here looking for another back-seat Slayer.’

‘Are you trying to get yourself killed?’

To her great consternation, the Fyreslayer just laughed.

The stupid duardin Fyreslayer was standing on the prow of his hijacked steamer, bellowing for all he was worth as though livid at the water for being wet. He brandished a fiery axe that the spray from the canal, despite its copious efforts, appeared unable to extinguish. Sprarrk felt an indescribable sense of gladness that that axe was so very far away from him and that he, with the quick mind and natural preparedness that so typified superior skaven thinking, had brought a very large gun.

He unclenched his paw, temporarily starving the ratling gun of ammunition and causing the barrel to whine empty. Let the tattooed brute hear the mocking laughter of Warlock Master Sprarrk and know that his doom was imminent. Let him see that Sprarrk, in his brilliance, feared this oaf not!

‘You missed!’ the Fyreslayer shouted across to him.

Sprarrk crowed. This duardin was too simple for words! He pointed at the Fyreslayer, then lowered his claw to indicate something below the waterline.

‘Look again, fool-meat!’

The Fyreslayer responded with a belligerent frown, but lowered his one-eyed gaze all the same to the spot that Sprarrk was indicating and gave a splutter of outrage. Sprarrk’s precision shooting had holed his prow in a dozen places and now his boat was not only precipitously losing speed, but sinking too. Sprarrk could only laugh at the impotent mix of expressions on his mulish face. He wished very much to watch the Fyreslayer drown, seeing in his face the knowledge that his crude strength had been undone by the guile of his betters, but he knew that this would be unwise. Blastritt had stumbled across a band of underjacks and permitted them to escape, but Sprarrk was too clever by far to repeat his brother’s error. He would not allow a Fyreslayer the chance, however minuscule, to return to his lodges with Sprarrk’s activated secondstone and the potential to puzzle out his plans.

‘Bosun!’ he squeaked. ‘Destroy-sink that boat.’

‘Yes-yes!’

Crick Yellowhook hustled back from the prow, struggling under the weight of a wide, stubby cannon. A smaller crew-rat scurried behind him with a pair of sloshing barrels strapped to its back, each one connected to Crick’s gun by a pair of creaking hoses. The bosun slotted his gun into a pintle ring on the gunwale, pivoting it towards the wallowing steamer, expertly adjusting its elevation to account for the range as the other boat fell further behind them.

Sprarrk preened for a moment, enjoying the prickling sense of pride he felt in the obvious skill of his crew. It reflected well on his own genius.

Then he turned to Crick and snarled. ‘What are you waiting for? Kill-kill!’

Elsworn recognised the warpfire thrower from pictures she had seen in books. She had read the accompanying descriptions of its effects with horrified fascination and, for once, was not eager to experience them first-hand now. She expected the bullet-mauled wooden dashboard at the front of her cabin to withstand a stream of warpfire for about a second, but it was the best that she had to hand.

She threw herself to the deck underneath it, curling up into a ball and hiding her head in her arms. There was a click, followed by a fiery roar, and Elsworn flinched, expecting her next experience to be the searing agony of having the flesh melted from her bones. When this failed to materialise, she cracked open an eyelid.

She looked up, over the cratered moonscape of her dashboard, to the broiling green mushroom cloud that was rising from the canal ahead of her. At the ceiling, it flattened out, spreading across it in all directions and dislodging blocks of stone that dropped, steaming, into the water below.

Elsworn sat up, shaking in disbelief, staring open-mouthed at the burnt and gutted hull of the skaven steamer. It was still paddling on with one half of a burning wheel. A few skaven ran dementedly around what was left of the deck until the flames consumed them. The rest, those that Elsworn could see who were still alive, were splashing about with increasingly feeble strokes as they succumbed to the toxic waters.

Gotrek had not moved an inch from his spot on the bowsprit. He lowered his axe. ‘Well, that’s disappointing. But, knowing skaven weapons as I do, not altogether surprising.’

That, Elsworn decided, was something he would have to explain later. For now, they had other worries.

Squatting down beside the skaven pilot that she had shot, she tore the ragged sleeve off its jerkin to fashion a mask. Then, with trembling fingers, she set it over her face and tied it off at the back of her head. After everything that she and Gotrek had just survived, it would be a shame to ruin it all with a slow and humiliating demise on account of inhaling secondstone fumes now.

She stood back up and retook the wheel.

It stood to reason that the skaven had been heading towards a harbour somewhere downriver of Arilde’s workshop.

All she had to do was hope that they could get to it before they sank. And that they would not find it crawling with skaven when they did.

Elsworn pulled herself up through the open drain and collapsed onto the street. She blinked up at the light and the noise of the city as though she had been blind and the touch of a priest had healed her. As though ratmen and poison and the constant threat of death were basic realities now, and everything she saw here was but the innocent dream of a child. She found the strength to sit up as Gotrek climbed out of the hole behind her.

His muscular torso was covered in bites, scratches, bruises and burns. His hair was wet; whatever substance he used to stiffen it into a crest had been thoroughly rinsed out over the course of their brief plunge into the canal, and it now lay flat and miserable against his head. It added about a thousand years to Elsworn’s estimate of his age. He tugged off one boot and upended it. Two pints of disgusting brown liquid sploshed over the cobbles.

A pot-bellied duardin in a passing wagon tossed them a small vial of Aqua Ghyranis, evidently taking them for a pair of particularly tragic-looking beggars.

Elsworn surreptitiously picked it up off the ground and slipped it into her pocket.

‘There…’ said Gotrek, blowing like a horse who had been run all day without rest. ‘You’ve got your bearings. Now, let’s… let’s…’ He bent over, grasped hold of his knees, and wheezed. ‘Now let’s get back down there and get after them.’

Elsworn shook her head, too tired to make her mouth move in that bafflingly complicated way in which it made words. She marvelled at how she could have ever taken it so thoroughly for granted.

This had become so much bigger than the two of them. Whatever the skaven outpost under Arilde’s shop portended, Elsworn doubted it was anything good. She needed to speak with the alchemist again. She would have to take her discoveries to the Cavalier-Marshal, quite possibly to the baroness herself, and maybe even to Gryphon Hall in the Great Axle, all the way to the Grand Conclave itself.

Tomorrow.

She fished her watch out of her breastplate’s fob pocket. She thumbed open the rugged silver cover and looked blearily at the unmoving hands. She gave it a tap, and then held it to her ear.

What with an all-night drinking session with the Loose Cannons, a meandering stroll through Long Smoke, and then their escapades through the canals beneath it, she must have forgotten to wind it. For the first time in her adult life, Elsworn had no idea what hour it was or where she was supposed to be. She wondered why that felt so good. Then she wondered when she had made the decision to lie back down. The smoke-filled sky above her swam.

She would have to give both problems some proper thought.

Tomorrow.

Sprarrk hauled his waterlogged bulk onto the towpath and gasped. The water he had swallowed came up in an irresistible, burning torrent. He rolled onto his front and retched, splattering the mouldy flagstones with the contents of his stomach. He gave a shudder, spitting out the last few strings of acidic bile that were clinging to his fangs as the convulsions passed.

He was left with the distinct, deeply horrible recollection of having drowned. The aching muscles of his chest seemed to be clinging to the memory: the burning pain of holding on to an empty breath, and then the worse pain that came after it – of lungs turning to stone as they filled with rancid water. If not for the timely jolt of warp lightning that Scuttlegnawer had delivered to his heart, he would most assuredly be dead now, lying at the bottom of the canal with Crick Yellowhook and the rest of his worthless crew.

He mouthed a silent prayer to whichever schizophrenic aspect of the Great Horned Rat the daemon was supposed to represent.

‘I exist only to serve,’ the daemon chittered in his ear, its voice the out-of-tune squeal of a farsqueaker, before receding again into the background electrostatic of Sprarrk’s devices.

Sprarrk licked his vomit-speckled lips in anticipation of the fast-approaching day when the great work was complete, when Scuttlegnawer’s infernal will would at last be fully dominated by his own, the daemon’s near-limitless aetheric might Sprarrk’s to command. No more wearisome threats or cajoling, no more convoluted webs of bound spells and trigger words and crossing his claws behind his back. No longer would he and Blastritt be forced to exist as one soul in two bodies. They would be made one, whole, as they were meant to have been at birth, their wills combined in the one vessel mighty enough to hold such undiluted genius – the perfect, immortal form of a Verminlord of the Horned Rat!

Slowly, water leaking from his armour with every clanking step, he made his miserable way back to the burrow that he shared with his brother. It was a long way to go on foot. More than long enough, he thought to himself, to set plans of cosmic domination to one side and ponder the terrible vengeance he was going to inflict upon a certain Fyreslayer and his human accomplice.

CHAPTER SIX

AN AUDIENCE
WITH A BARONESS

Gotrek, true to form, had wanted to go back into the sewers the moment he had wiped the skaven blood off his face and got his breath back. It had taken all of Elsworn’s powers of persuasion to convince him otherwise.

‘It’s an awful lot of sewer to cover with just the seven of us,’ she had explained, referring to the five grumpy-looking underjacks who had risen from their beds, armed and hungover, in response to the crashing and yelling of Gotrek’s return. The Loose Cannons’ guildhall was a draughty, red-brick building, wedged in between a steel press on one side and a dyeworks on the other. It rang at all hours with the percussive metal thud of the former and reeked of the powerful chemicals employed in the latter. ‘It would probably involve a great deal of traipsing about.’

‘Many hands make lighter work,’ Tun had mumbled, before sheathing his short sword and going back to bed.

The Fyreslayer continued to complain, of course, but accepted the appeal to his sore feet as Elsworn had suspected that he would.

If they were serious about rooting the skaven out from under Greywater Fastness, then it was going to take a commitment of manpower and resources greater than all the underjacking guilds in the city were capable of fielding. The occasional lazy patrol by semi-professional militia units might have been enough to keep mutant rats off the streets, but they weren’t equipped to take on something like this. The Freeguilds would need to be involved, at the very least. That, in turn, would require steam lords to agree on the appointment of a marshal for the rubber stamp of the Grand Conclave. The battlemages of the Collegiate Arcane would probably want to be consulted. Requisitions would have to be made out to the Ironweld Arsenal. Petitioners might even be dispatched to the Gravenstone, although more out of an adherence to formality than any actual expectations of aid. The danger to the city would have to be grave indeed before the Anvils of the Heldenhammer emerged from their sanctum to the aid of mortals.

She just wasn’t sure yet how any of this was going to be accomplished. The back rooms and grand debating chambers of Gryphon Hall were not exactly her battlefields. It was not as though a Freeguild Cavalier could just breeze into the Great Axle, knock politely on the great steel doors of the Crucible of State, and declare (without, need she be reminded, a shred of actual proof) that there was a conspiracy afoot.

The steam lords would probably throw her into Battery Green Asylum and throw away the key.

If only she had thought to salvage something suitably incriminating from the skaven barge before it had sunk. Unfortunately, the skaven had not given her the opportunity, and nor would she have particularly wanted to haul a barrel of extraordinarily toxic secondstone waste through the Inner Circle.

She could only hope that Arilde Flathelm was less wanton in her destruction of the mines under her shop than Elsworn and Gotrek had ham-fistedly proven with the skaven boats. In the absence of any hard evidence from Elsworn, the testimony of so eminent a figure as the alchemist would undoubtedly prove critical.

‘We’re going to have to be smart about this,’ she said.

‘You’ve come to the right place then,’ Gotrek said, and yawned.

And with that, Elsworn decided that the best thing either of them could do for Greywater Fastness just then was follow the sergeant’s example and go to bed.

‘A week!’ Gotrek spluttered, spraying a mouthful of salted ham and fried eggs across the breakfast table. ‘You expect us all to sit here on our bloody hands for a week!’

Elsworn flicked a bit of egg white from her collar. She was sore all over and covered in chafe marks where her dress uniform had dug in. At least her brief dunking in the canal had softened it. If that was the worst that she suffered from her experiences of the day before, then she would take it.

Tun, Orinkul, Brigid, Bryony, and Hod watched her with the same kind of tense fascination with which people would gather around a drain that someone had dropped a bomb into. A number of other Loose Cannon units sat around their own low-slung wooden tables, chatting quietly, politely ignoring Elsworn and Tun’s squad. Others leant against the dining hall’s bare brick walls, shovelling in platefuls of fried food before venturing out on some patrol or other. From this quick portrait of life as a Loose Cannon, Sorrol Tun’s tight-knit little command appeared to be considerably above the average in terms of both size and general air of professionalism.

Most of the units on display comprised two or three individuals in padded haircloth vests and carrying clubs, with nothing obviously in common but a predilection towards killing things for money.

Even these dead-eyed men and women gave Gotrek a wide berth.

Elsworn suspected that it had something to do with the huge fyresteel greataxe that he had propped against the chair beside him as though it was another person. It did not exactly cry welcome in the Azyrite common tongue.

‘Think about it, Gotrek,’ she said, in her most patient tones. ‘The artillery tournament starts in seven days. Everyone we need to speak to will be at Battery Green to watch the show.’

She had even heard a rumour that Lady Zukaus herself intended to return from the Ghoul Mere for a rare personal appearance at the tournament this year. The theft from her steelworks, coupled with ghost trains and various other unexplained goings-on across her properties, had clearly prompted her to remind the great unwashed masses in her employ that she existed. If Elsworn could only talk to the baroness herself, instead of endlessly relaying messages through Marshal Ordo and his subordinates, then she was certain that she could convince her of the seriousness of the skaven threat. And if Elsworn could do that, then they would not only have a highly elite force with which to spearhead any future expedition into the sewers, but a persuasive voice amongst the other steam lords as well.

Gotrek took a swill of watered-down table beer and frowned unhappily into his cup. ‘I still don’t like it.’

‘I don’t like it either,’ said Tun. ‘I hate the tourney.’

Elsworn scoffed. ‘No one hates the tourney.’

‘I do.’

‘He always has to put a bet on the cannons,’ Hod explained cheerfully. ‘And he always loses.’

‘Well, if we discount wandering aimlessly through the sewers like madmen, then it’s honestly the best option I can think of. It would probably take months to track down and persuade all the officers we’d have to talk to just to start planning an expedition on this scale.’

‘You make wandering like madmen sound more appealing,’ Gotrek grumbled.

‘You’re both starting to sound like Brod Gurnak,’ said Tun.

‘Who?’ said Gotrek.

The old sergeant looked at him, surprised. ‘You haven’t heard of him? He was an underjack. A duardin. Only the most famous Loose Cannon there ever was. But he had a special hatred for the skaven, I don’t know why. He was obsessed with them. It got to the point where there was nothing he couldn’t link to some grand skaven conspiracy to bring down the city.’

‘It sounds like this Brod Gurnak is the one we should be talking to,’ said Gotrek. ‘Where is he now?’

Tun stuck a forkful of ham in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully.

‘He went mad,’ said Orinkul, with apparent relish. ‘He sold his house, spent all the proceeds on weapons, and went to live in the sewers.’

‘No underjack has seen or heard from him since,’ said Tun, still chewing. ‘This was decades ago, when I was still with the Greycaps. He’s probably long dead by now.’

The underjacks around the table fell into deep, contemplative silence.

‘Well…’ said Elsworn. ‘All in all, I think we’ll have better luck with the baroness, don’t you?’

‘What’s she like?’ said Tun, sitting back.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Lady Zukaus. What’s she like? Does she feed her horse on the blood of her workers and sacrifice a child every Sigmarsday like people say?’

‘Ahh…’ Elsworn smiled. ‘Somehow, I imagine not.’

‘You imagine?’

She nudged a bit of salted meat around the various eggy obstacles on her plate. ‘I’ve actually never met her.’

‘What do you mean you’ve never met her!’ Gotrek exploded again, treating the tabletop and all the neighbouring plates to another shower of half-chewed food. ‘You work for the woman, don’t you?’

‘You work for the High Arbiter. Have you met him?’

‘It’s not really the same thing,’ Tun interjected. ‘I’d say we work for Guildmaster Durst, and I see her passed out on the stairs most days.’

‘Well, I’d wager the baroness employs a few more people than the Loose Cannons. And she spends most of her time in her estates beyond the city walls.’

In spite of the ever-present danger from the Dreadwood Sylvaneth, Ciriline Zukaus only rarely travelled with an entourage greater than her own close circle of retainers. These individuals, at least, Elsworn had met, for they were invariably the face of the baroness amongst her workers and enterprises in the city. And even in the lounges of the Crucible of State, where they served as her voice. The Cavalier-Marshal, Ordo, Elsworn’s direct superior, was such a man. Suffice it to say, it was a cadre of warriors that Elsworn longed to join one day.

‘But trust me,’ she went on, ‘she’s no hobby general like a few steam lords I could name. Ordo heads her Freeguild, but I understand she’s a superb swordswoman in her own right, and an expert rider, and her soldiers are some of the most well trained in the city. No one has seen more action than the Forgewrought Flintlocks.’

‘I somehow doubt that,’ said Gotrek, looking up at her with a saw-toothed grin.

‘I heard that the Zukaus family is one of the oldest in the city,’ said Tun, and Elsworn found that she was grateful for the interruption.

‘One of,’ she said. ‘Maybe even the oldest. The first Baroness Zukaus was here before the city was founded, back when this part of Greywater Reach was just a few walled villages and a smattering of mines. And most of those villages were under her protection.’

‘And what was her name?’

‘Also Ciriline, I think. I understand that it’s a family tradition to name the firstborn daughter of each generation after that first baroness.’

‘And what do they do with all of the firstborn sons, I wonder?’ Orinkul grumbled into his table beer. ‘Drown them in the Ghoul Mere?’

The duardin undoubtedly intended his comment as a joke, but such was the reputation of the Zukaus family that nobody felt much like laughing.

For all of the following week, Gotrek was like a child who had been shown a cake and then told he could not eat it. He took to stomping around the corridors, axe in hand, and Tun had to assign him every onerous duty going just to keep him from picking fights with the other underjacks.

Elsworn, however, rarely ventured beyond the confines of the guildhall over the course of those days. On the handful of occasions when some necessary business forced her outside, she hurried back swiftly, certain she was being watched. A kind of agoraphobia seemed to grip her. She and Gotrek had struck a terrible blow against the skaven, of that she was certain, but they were far from beaten. And being as she was unable to say exactly where the skaven were, her mind was naturally inclined to seeing them everywhere.

She told herself that it was unsafe to leave the guildhall, that it was dangerous for anyone else to be around her. She sent word to Garvil that she was unwell, knowing that her fellow Cavalier suffered from every seasonal malady under the sun and would not report her absence or come looking for at least a week. She put her family as far from her mind as she could. If Alicia failed to qualify for the tournament because Elsworn did not go home to train with her as she had promised, then her sister would probably never forgive her, but that was preferable to unwittingly leading skaven assassins to her front door. She even had Comet stabled with her in the guildhall so he could be nearer to her. She had put him up in a shed with the guild’s rattletraps at first, until someone had taken pity on the horse and moved him into an annexe of the kitchens, much to the annoyance of the head cook.

For some reason, the unhappy ex-soldier had swallowed his objections and learned to put up with the big Ulguanite warhorse in his pantry. Elsworn had assumed at the time that it was because she was a knighted Cavalier, an officer of the infamous Baroness Zukaus. She learned only later that it was because of a rumour going around the hall that she was on friendly terms with Gotrek Gurnisson.

The guildhall was, in many ways, an unimpressive building, but it boasted a sizeable library of old maps. Elsworn spent so many hours poring over them, familiarising herself with the region of the canals where she and Gotrek had lost the skaven trail, that she started wandering them in her sleep. Like a ghost, returning to the scene of her demise. There were times when she awoke wondering if she had driven herself every bit as mad as the fabled Brod Gurnak.

Visitors came and went. She finally met with Guildmaster Camilla Durst, who turned out to be a more careworn and diligent woman than Tun had painted her. The only circumstances in which Elsworn could imagine ever finding her passed out on the stairs were through overwork and too much worry. Durst, for her part, did not seem to mind the fact that Elsworn had commandeered a room to serve as an office, or even that she had effectively dragooned Tun’s unit for her personal use. Such was presumably the lot of an underjack, however grand-sounding their title. She took Elsworn’s hair-raising reports of skaven insurgents in her city very much in her stride.

That, too, was probably very much the lot of an underjack. Elsworn could only hope that the steam lords would be more unnerved.

Late on the eve of the tournament, Arilde Flathelm walked into the guildhall with a pair of armed guards. She looked quite different from the last time Elsworn had seen her, dressed for a very different type of battlefield in a starched white waistcoat with ribbons woven through the padded shoulders and a golden pocket watch on a chain. Her grey hair was neatly dressed with golden wire. The enamelled grips of a pair of pistols poked out of her belt. She still, for all that, had faint rings around her eyes from the habitual wearing of goggles.

The duardin alchemist scooped up a pile of badly folded maps from a chair, setting them down on the table in front of it, and sat down.

‘I’m glad to see you’re all right,’ said Elsworn.

‘Not quite glad enough to come and check for yourself.’

‘I’m sorry. I’ve had a lot to occupy me here.’

‘Aye,’ said Arilde, looking over the bits of paper, some of which had been pinned to the walls and linked together with bits of coloured string, which lay scattered around the office. ‘I see that.’

‘So, what became of the skaven lair?’

Arilde grimaced as though the memory left a bad taste. ‘After you and Gotrek disappeared on that boat, I went back upstairs to round up some of my apprentices. We went back down in proper clothing to find most of the skaven gone, but their machines were still running. We took a hammer to them. I would’ve blown the whole lot up, but my shop is right above it, and there’s no telling how stable the foundations are since the skaven started drilling into them. But that’s a worry for another time.’

‘What did you make of what they were up to?’

‘They’ve learnt how to crack the residual magic trapped in the waste of the secondstoning process, no question.’

This time it was Elsworn’s turn to feel uncomfortable. Her city had already been careless enough with its industrial wastes to create the Ghoul Mere and make eternal enemies of the Dreadwood Sylvaneth. Now, it seemed that even its rushed attempts at recycling a small portion of that waste had been unwittingly providing an even more deadly enemy a near-bottomless supply of free power.

‘Fear not,’ said Arilde, already getting up to go. ‘Orinkul has told me of your plan to drum up support for a full-scale expedition into the sewers. I’ll gladly speak to Baroness Zukaus with you tomorrow. She’ll listen to me. As will others. They know better that you don’t dismiss the word of a Flathelm in this city.’

Even cloistered inside the guildhall for the week as Elsworn had been, it was impossible to fully seclude oneself from the excitement as young and old alike counted down the hours to the Battery Green tournament. It was an uncharacteristic spring in the underjacks’ steps, a glint in their eyes, a laugh in their voices. If Greywater Fastness was a city of clockwork then the annual tournament was the hour when bells rang and whistles blew. Only Orinkul, and to a lesser extent Tun, seemed to grow dourer as the night wore on. It’s the peacewater of the workers, the duardin had grumbled, and spoken considerably more on the subject, but Elsworn must have drifted out for she recalled none of it.

Elsworn could not help but feel infected by the rising enthusiasm. The darkness she had felt stalking her all week seemed to be just a little bit less daunting than she had at first imagined it. Tomorrow, she rode into battle, of a sort. She and Gotrek could act. Tomorrow, she would have the chance to turn the unrivalled firepower of Greywater Fastness onto the menace below, and she looked forward to seeing how threatening it would look then.

With a sigh, Elsworn flung off her bedclothes and blinked open her eyes.

She had never been able to sleep before a fight. It wasn’t nerves so much as excitement. Cavaliers were a restless bunch, by and large. Although she knew that it was not a battle that awaited her tomorrow, it felt as though there was almost as much at stake. The butterflies in her stomach had certainly failed to notice the difference.

It was gloomy in the room, without being fully dark. Nor would it ever become fully dark. The lamps had been put out and the curtains drawn over the single, tiny window, but an orangey chemical light stole in from the street through the gaps. Brigid and Bryony snored softly in the bed that they shared on the other side of the small room, the metal frame rattling with the steady pulse of the steel press on the other side of the wall.

Elsworn eased out of bed, slipped on her boots, and, taking care not to rouse the sleeping sisters, crept out of the dormitory.

She went downstairs, making for the dining hall. Most of the underjacks in the guildhall would be in bed, but even at this hour she knew that the building would not be completely deserted. The stoves in the kitchen kept it warm throughout the day and the lamps there were never dimmed. Patrols returned at all hours, and could always expect to find platters of cold cuts, old breads, a low-simmering pot of yesterday’s stew, and plenty of ale laid out for them on their return.

What she had not been expecting was to find the hall nearly full.

Underjacks huddled together around tables, picking at plates of leftovers and talking in low voices. A few men, fresh from the sewers with blood-spattered jerkins and muddy boots, showed off their trophies, frowning as they compared them to the familiar fire-blackened mutant head that was currently mounted on the high shelf labelled Kill of the Week. She frowned herself, reminded again of how Gotrek had stolen that honour from her, before shaking her head – she had bigger things to concern herself with now. A game of cannonade was being played on one of the corner tables. Elsworn saw Sorrol Tun seated there with a few of the other sergeants, a small crowd of spectators gathered around. It did not look as though the dice were being kind to him, which for some reason did not surprise Elsworn at all.

Gotrek was sitting alone at a long table. She was not terribly surprised by that either. The axe that he seemed never to be parted from was propped up against the chair beside him. A large bowl of stew and several mugs, all but one of which had already been relieved of their ale, lay about the table in front of him. He looked moderately drunk, which seemed to be the Fyreslayer’s natural resting state. His cracked lips were slightly parted. His one eye was wide and unfocused, staring into realms unseen.

Elsworn threw a hopeful look towards Tun, but the old sergeant was so intent on recouping his latest string of losses that he had not even noticed her come in. She turned back to Gotrek. The night before a battle was always long, but it passed easier in company. Any company. The Fyreslayer was hardly a fellow Cavalier, but he was better than lying awake in her dormitory listening to Brigid and Bryony snore. And she did not for one moment imagine that he lacked stories to tell.

She made a beeline across the hall to Gotrek’s table and pulled out an empty chair.

‘Can I sit with you?’ she asked.

Gotrek shrugged, but said nothing.

She sat down regardless. ‘You’re the last person I’d expect to have trouble sleeping.’

‘A dwarf will sleep only when there’s no fighting or drinking left to be done, or when there is an aelf talking.’

Elsworn had the distinct recollection of leading a semi-comatose Gotrek Gurnisson between various Long Smoke taverns, but thought better of reminding the Fyreslayer of this fact. She reached across the table for his stew. ‘Do you mind?’

Gotrek shoved the bowl towards her with a grunt. ‘Your need is greater. There is more meat in this miserable swill than there is on you.’

‘Careful, Gotrek. You’ve known me a week and you’re already turning into my mother.’

The Fyreslayer harumphed and folded his arms over his scruffy orange beard.

Elsworn grinned at him as she picked up a spoon and started eating. The stew was highly spiced and pleasantly oily but, as Gotrek had already noted, contained precious little meat. Classic Greywater fayre. She ate slowly and in silence, watching a pair of grunting underjacks who were engaged in an arm-wrestling contest on the next table over, while Gotrek alternated between drinking and brooding.

‘You know, it’s a tradition amongst Freeguild Cavaliers to tell stories on the eve of a battle,’ she said.

‘We’re not having a battle.’

‘I know that.’

‘We’re going to the bloody circus.’

‘Don’t be difficult, Gotrek. You know what I mean.’

The Fyreslayer arched a bushy eyebrow, but something had clearly piqued his curiosity for the ale in his fist had gone decidedly un-drunk between grumbles. ‘What kind of stories?’ he said.

Elsworn sat back in her chair. ‘Do you know how a Freeguild soldier becomes a Cavalier?’

‘I’ve never thought about it.’

‘We’re ennobled by our peers for our deeds in battle.’

She smiled faintly at the memory.

It had been the proudest moment of her life, surpassing in every way her third place in the artillery tourney just a few years prior. She had been a Fusilier in the Forgewrought, in recognition of her marksmanship, armed with a huge tri-barrelled slaughter-fusil similar to Arilde Flathelm’s and her father’s caplock pepperbox. Her patrol had been summoned to the defence of a rogue settlement, deep in the Ghoul Mere, that had been besieged by the Sylvaneth for several days. It had been a trap, however, and the Sylvaneth had attacked in overwhelming force almost immediately after the Forgewrought soldiers had arrived. Most of her comrades had broken when the gates fell, but Elsworn had drawn her sword and fought in defence of the regiment’s guns, holding her position long enough for the homesteaders to flee into the Mere and for a Cavalier to recover her wounded Fusil-Major.

Her superior’s first words on regaining consciousness the next day had been to call for parchment and quill to recommend her ennoblement to Marshal Ordo. But it was with as much regret as pride that she remembered it now.

The Cavalier who had borne away the injured Fusil-Major had been Garvil, now one of her few real friends, and he would claim forever after that he had been galloping ahead of the Pale Oak himself when he stopped for Elsworn and her commander.

To think that the Treelord Ancient, the dark master of the Dreadwood himself, had been so near and she had missed the opportunity even to measure her courage against the sight of him.

She sighed heavily. ‘It’s something we all share, but which is different for every one of us. Gather any two Freeguild Cavaliers around a campfire, and they’ll easily pass the night with their tales.’

Gotrek gave her a long, slow look, the glaze of cheap alcohol unable to fully mask the pain in his one good eye. ‘I care not for such tales. My life has been filled with the pursuit of glory, and more loss than I could honestly recount.’

‘It sounds to me as if you’re the one with the story to tell.’

He growled and shook his head.

‘Tell me.’

The Fyreslayer glowered across the table at her. He was stubborn and bitter, she knew, but too proud and, dare she say it, too vain to keep silent when it came to his own story. ‘Some tales are too long to be told,’ he said, at length. ‘We could tarry in this hall for another week and still not reach the part where I lost the axe of a god, or turned my back on the man I named dwarf-friend, leaving him to his doom so that I alone might find mine. All of which took place in another age to the one whose affairs concern you now.’

Elsworn realised that she was gawping. Of all the things she had been expecting the Fyreslayer to come out with, it had not been this.

‘The axe of a god?’

Gotrek scowled. ‘Why is it that everyone’s ears prick up at that bit? The aelfling was just the same.’

Elsworn glanced at the axe propped against the chair beside him.

‘This trinket?’ Gotrek scoffed, following her gaze. ‘No, lass. This was the work of duardin smiths, but mortals just the same. I found it in the warded vaults of the Unbak Fyreslayers, deep within the bowels of their volcanic lodge under the Great Spine of Aqshy. My axe of old was something finer still, forged by the Ancestor Gods when the cosmos was new and these worlds as yet undreamt of by gods or men. And if you weren’t half deaf from having guns going off every hour then you’d have heard when I said that I lost it.’

‘How?’ she asked, rapt.

Again, the Fyreslayer shook his head.

‘Does it have anything to do with your coming to Greywater Fastness? Are you here looking for it?’

Gotrek scowled and looked down into his ale. ‘I tried that for a time, but it came to naught, as most things I turn my hand to will, in the end. I just want to fight. And perhaps die. It’s long past my time, you know, and perhaps here, in this city that the gods themselves forgot, I might finally be allowed to do so. Maybe now that my destiny has eased its hold on me…’ His fingers tapped idly against the rune hidden under his beard. It made a dull, metallic clink. He shook his head to clear it of whatever distractions had been in there, and resumed. ‘If I can but find the monster great enough to kill me.’

Suddenly, Gotrek’s reckless behaviour in the battle under Arilde’s shop made perfect sense. Charging alone into a horde of skaven warriors. Standing unarmoured on the prow of an out-of-control barge while warpstone bullets sprayed around him.

‘Why do you want to die?’ she said, softly.

‘Enough of your questions. I should’ve said nothing at all.’

‘But you’re the one who came looking for me after Daegal died. Why do you even care, if all you want to do here is get drunk and die?’

Gotrek glared at her accusingly. ‘Who says I care?’

‘And if you’re so keen to die, then why don’t you just… you know?’

‘Kill myself, you mean?’

‘Well… yes.’

‘I would never live down the disgrace.’

Elsworn was silent a moment. There was not a lot about the Fyreslayer that made sense, but she knew what it meant to have a code. She knew how honour could tie a person’s hands as often as show them the right way forwards.

‘What brought you to Greywater Fastness in the first place?’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

‘I may not have been to Aqshy or Shyish, but I’ve heard my share of unbelievable tales.’

‘I hitched a ride with the first traveller who said he was heading to a brewery. I didn’t care where he was going and nor did I once look back.’

Elsworn let out a laugh.

‘I told you that you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘What happened to make you so desperately in need of a brewery?’

‘An aggressive falling out with the human woman I was travelling with at the time.’

‘The priestess you mentioned before?’

‘Aye.’

‘What happened?’

‘She found religion.’

‘She was a priestess. Surely she had it already?’

‘Are you telling the story, or am I?’

Elsworn waved for him to continue.

‘We’d washed up in a small village on the Rocanian Coast, fresh from putting the axe to a band of filthy maggotkin off of Kranzinnport. Its name escapes me now, and is unimportant in any case. Well, the priestess wakes me one morning after a serious night of restorative drinking to rave of how she’s seen the light, been visited by a sign or some such telling her we were to journey with all haste to Settler’s Gain, in Hysh. Now, I was of a mind back then to set these realms of yours to rights, and Grimnir knows there’s plenty in that particular one in need of righting, but it all went wrong long before we reached the Realm of Light.’

‘What happened?’

‘A bunch of those self-proclaimed Realm-lords, that’s what. There was a fight, words uttered that can never be unsaid, and the priestess and I agreed to go our separate ways. She with the Realm-lords, and I to wherever had a trough deep enough and ale to fill it. Hence my need for a ride to the only big city within ten thousand miles of that place, and perhaps the promise of an unremarkable death in the sewers beneath its streets.’

Elsworn stared at the Fyreslayer, open-mouthed. It was by far and away the most fantastical tale she had ever heard spoken on the eve of battle. To be honest, it beggared belief, but it was so outlandish, and spoken with such indifference to the wonders it recalled, that it never occurred to her to doubt it. What she felt, more than anything else, was envy of Gotrek’s former companion.

She could not wait for her own test of mettle with the Fyreslayer.

‘Tell me the rest,’ she murmured.

‘From the beginning? No, lass. Follow me and I can’t honestly think you’ll live long enough to hear it all.’

‘Then… tell me how you came to Hammerhal Aqsha.’

Gotrek stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘Aye. I suppose there’s a tale in that.’ He set his mug down on the table and peered into it. ‘But I’ll be needing another beer.’

‘I’ll get you one.’

‘Better make it ten.’ Gotrek leant forward, a mad gleam in his eye that had not been there before. ‘We’ve a whole night to kill, after all.’

Somewhere up there, over the smoke and the chimneys and the factory roofs, Hysh had arrived bearing the gift of a new day, entirely unremarked upon by the crowds who had been pouring into Battery Green since the whistles first signalled the end of the midnight shift.

Battery Green Firing Range, to give it its proper name, was the largest patch of open ground in Greywater Fastness, a rare bit of civic generosity in a city that was generally leery of any place where disgruntled workers might gather in large numbers. It ran in a curve along the inside of the Inner Wall for several miles. The turreted chimney stacks and high, spiked walls of Battery Green Munitions Yard and Penitentiary were an eyesore against one faraway end. The usual clump of factories stood tall over the other.

Its great length was divided into marked ranges. Here, hundreds of cannons, mortars, rockets, and artillery pieces so new that they did not yet have common names would blast away at targets mounted on the Inner Wall. Only very rarely did a shell sail over the wall to detonate amidst the slums of the Outer Circle, and most people of consequence thought this a small price to pay for ensuring that Greywater artillerymen were the best in the Mortal Realms – better than the master gunners of Excelsis, who, it was said, could glimpse the future before every shot; better than those of Tempest’s Eye, whose guns owed as much to Kharadron sciences as Aqshian gunpowder; better even, it was piously proclaimed, than the dread smiths of Azgorh, who marched with the Varanguard and commanded the siege weapons of Chaos.

When not taken over by the pageantry of the tournament or one of Sigmar’s holy days, the ranges would be littered with sandbags and dugouts, and even mocked-up towns and recreation woodland for the hobbying artillerist to blow up with cannons.

Today, however, the only evidence of the shooting clubs and their ranges were a handful of brightly coloured pavilions, waistcoated men with polished rifles hawking for members from amongst the city’s throngs.

In their place stood tents and chuck wagons and stalls. There were merchants, musicians, acrobats, apprentices from Scintillant Spire’s celestial colleges selling fortunes. There were men balancing on stilts and there were men balancing on ogors, an act that was altogether more difficult, for the ogors would often forget what they were supposed to be doing and wander off to find the food stalls. A small crowd booed a troupe of Elrith Ceyl Witch Aelves performing exhibition combat in warm-up for the real thing later in the event, because no one came to Battery Green to watch people fighting with knives. A bearded man in exotic robes charged excited children a drop of lifewater a time for a ride on his tamed ogor’s back. An itinerant battlesmith of the Baeldrag lodge Fyreslayers stood barefoot on a tray of coals whilst regaling his awed audience with the sagas of his people. Flagellants bedecked in the tokens of the Cult of the Wheel roamed the crowds, bemoaning the sloth and the waste – how many foul strongholds of Chaos, they demanded of any who would listen, could be brought to heel with the munitions expended in one day of levity here?

Soldiers patrolled the green in well-armed groups, alert for troublemakers and thieves. But even they were in a carnival spirit, walking with their helmets under their arms and their swords in sheaths. The heraldries of a dozen Freeguild regiments and a hundred minor lords emblazoned the shields on their backs, but Elsworn had seen no sign yet of her own Forgewrought Flintlocks.

Standing up in the stirrups, she surveyed the masses of people around her. Comet did not mind the smoke or the noise, but the crowds unsettled him, causing him to grind the bit between his teeth and pull on the reins to try and gallop. Still, Elsworn was grateful for his height. Finding the baroness and her entourage in all of this mayhem was going to be hard enough as it was. Without Comet, it would have been as good as impossible.

They walked on between a series of roped-off enclosures marked out with bunting. Loud bangs and puffs of smoke arose from the hordes of people firing pistols at distant targets. Elsworn looked keenly over the competitors and smiled to see a familiar face strutting up to one of the ranges. Alicia had come in a sequined waistcoat that she wore over a white tunic with a ruffed collar and baggy sleeves. She squared herself up to the target and quite casually blew a hole in the centre of the ring, turning to bow to the delighted spectators whilst simultaneously making some manner of rude gesture to her fellow competitors.

Elsworn was glad to see that Alicia had made it onto the first qualifying lists without any help from her this past week. In fact, watching her little sister perform, she was starting to become just a little bit concerned that Alicia might actually better her third-place finish after all and demand her father’s guns as the promised prize. She looked around for her mother and stepfather, who were bound to be watching nearby, but she could not see them for the crush.

‘It’s busier than Barak Varr docks on market day,’ Gotrek grumbled, walking a short way ahead.

The Fyreslayer was considerably shorter than Comet, but he was broader, some combination of his girth, belligerent glare, and the flaming axe he carried in one ham-like fist clearing the way ahead of them more effectively than a whole column of Freeguild Cavaliers could have done in his place. Orinkul and Hod followed behind them. Brigid and Bryony had slipped away some time earlier to enjoy the tournament. Tun, too, had disappeared, murmuring something about a bookmaker that he needed to see, and had not yet returned. Arilde and a couple of grey-bearded Flathelm clan bodyguards walked with them. They had met the Loose Cannons at the guildhall and walked the rest of the way together as arranging a meeting here at the tournament would have been quite impossible. Orinkul and Arilde had exchanged awkward hellos and gone the rest of the way in silence.

‘We could be in the sewers killing rats by now,’ said Gotrek.

‘If this doesn’t work, I promise we’ll go back to doing it your way.’

‘Does this master plan of yours include finding where in the blazes your mistress actually is?’

‘The more important steam lords have private enclosures behind the batteries.’ Elsworn pointed over the heads of the crowd, towards the glow in the smog that reliably oriented her towards the Great Axle.

‘True enough.’ Orinkul nodded, sourly. ‘They get a fine view while the rest of us get to duck cannonballs.’ Arilde looked to the heavens and rolled her eyes. Her long-bearded companions were more forthright in saying exactly what they thought, but the precise words they chose escaped Elsworn in the commotion.

She turned to glance over Comet’s other flank, where the ever-cheerful Hod walked with a bulging rucksack over his shoulders, just as someone’s cogwork helper scuttled out from behind a tent. It appeared to take one look at Elsworn, then made a high, mechanical peep and quickly reversed behind the canvas it had just emerged from. Elsworn stood a little higher in her stirrups and craned her neck to peer around the side of the tent, but the contraption did not re-emerge. Just another scuttlebutt, she told herself, sitting back down into the saddle and shaking her head.

But why a person would deliberately choose to make one that looked exactly like a giant rat, she would never know.

Blastritt scratched feverishly on the glass: two-scratch mark, take away four-scratch mark, brackets, to the power of thirteen, more brackets, multiply by seven-scratch mark… On and on he went, covering the windows in rambling equations until a shiver of ecstasy went through him and the brain-fever that had gripped him passed out of his system. He scuttled back, licking the powdered glass off his claws, and beheld the great murky window that he had borrowed for his workings. ‘Yes-yes,’ he chittered to himself. ‘Yes. By my calculations we have power enough to turn the machine on. But not enough to release both of our consciousnesses and complete the great circuit. No-no! We must find an alternative energy source to make up for that which you lost, most cunning of collaborators. Yes-yes, we must. And it must be very close to the point of emergence, for the machine will not have the power to scurry far, and we will have only moments before the storm-things are roused against us.’

Blastritt scowled up at the tarnished pane. To cap off the myriad theoretical problems he had to deal with, it looked as though his workshop was now going to need a new window.

He snapped for the attention of a team of engineers who were busily riveting and welding metal plates over the workshop’s tangled copper wiring. The engineers promptly dropped their present task to set about cutting the window out of its frame. Blastritt was certain that he had another pane of the approximate size lying about somewhere. One of the windows from Sprarrk’s train, perhaps? It was not as if they had been able to risk using it any more – not since those damnable underjacks had managed to chase it half the way to their lair’s hidden station.

‘Blastritt-brother,’ Sprarrk chittered excitedly from the workbench behind him. ‘You must come and see this. Quick-quick!’

Blastritt looked up, bristling at the realisation that his brother had not been listening to a single word that he had just said.

Ever since his brush with death at the hands of a malfunctioning warpfire thrower and an unusually lucky Fyreslayer, his brother had become obsessed with stalking the pair he deemed responsible, waiting only for the most opportune and risk-free moment to murder them both and devour their remains. To that end, Sprarrk had hastily built the fell device that sat on the workbench now, brooding like a profane temple over a graveyard of spare and discarded parts. He had even (and this was by far the most irritating part) gnawed into the workshop’s wiring to leach off their precious power supply. The device blinked and chirped. Electrical resistances in impure metals caused parts of it to glow, giving off the scent of burnt solder. A rigid antenna stuck out from the top. Through cunning sorceries and the most arcane of sciences, it allowed Sprarrk to command his scuttling network of clandestine, mechanical spies, and even to see through their artificial eyes.

Sprarrk was currently bent over his device with his eye glued to the rubber cup of the eyepiece, his back to Blastritt.

‘You spend too much time on that thing,’ Blastritt complained.

‘They burned me, drowned me, left me for dead-dead,’ Sprarrk hissed in reply, not looking up from his device. ‘And worse, they imperil the great work with their meddling. What if they do so again? No-no! They must be stopped, killed-dead, before they do more than simply delay us.’

Blastritt grimaced. He had felt for himself the moment when his twin’s heart had stopped beating: a pain in his chest as terrible as any he had ever known before, as though he was being sat on by a rat ogor and could not breathe. Had he not, in fact, suffered far worse than poor Sprarrk? Had he not been made to gasp on the floor of their burrow, with no knowledge at all of what was happening to him? All Blastritt knew for sure was that he would not be letting Sprarrk out of his sight again until the great experiment was completed. So what if they were identical in every way? Blastritt would not risk his own survival on Sprarrk’s competence. Indeed, this latest scare only made him more determined than ever to push ahead.

There was no better way to look over the other’s shoulder than to have the same shoulders. Only then, from within the immortal body of the Verminlord, could they both finally breathe easy.

But did anyone see Blastritt releasing hordes of mechanised rat-spies into the sewers and gluing his eyeball to the remote viewer? No, they did not!

‘The viewer will rot your whiskers and make you simple,’ said Blastritt.

‘That is a myth. I have not yet been able to irradiate enough brains for us to be certain.’

Sprarrk continued to peer hungrily into the eyepiece, his black upper lip peeling back to reveal a yellowish hint of fang. ‘The Horned Rat blesses our efforts with a stroke of good luck. Unexpected, yes, but most definitely good.’

‘You will squeak-say anything for an hour more on the viewer.’

‘Look-see for yourself!’

Sprarrk shuffled along the workbench to make room at the eyepiece.

With a long-suffering sigh, Blastritt manoeuvred his clanking frame to sit down beside his brother. He lowered his eye to the device, his still-frail heart entirely unprepared for the shock that was waiting for it.

The group that Sprarrk had been stalking this past seven-day was unmistakeably the very same band of miscreants that had harried Blastritt through the canals! Could it really be mere coincidence that the same ragamuffin troupe who had stumbled onto Blastritt’s trail had then gone on to blunder into Sprarrk’s operation mere days later? It sounded staggeringly unlikely. No rodent as paranoid as Blastritt and Sprarrk could be that unlucky. It defied belief. Treachery then, for it was absurd to even think that mere humans might have learnt of their plans without help. But whose? Sprarrk’s? Ridiculous. He dismissed it immediately. Scuttlegnawer? He frowned. It had the unpalatable odour of plausibility. The Verminlord was as devious as it was powerful, and it was not beyond the realms of possibility that it could have manipulated a few weak-minded cat’s paws into thwarting its captors’ schemes, selfishly prolonging its own daemonic existence in the process. It certainly knew all their plans in great detail, for Blastritt and Sprarrk had made it an unwilling accomplice in all of them.

Unfortunately, Blastritt could think of no way to neutralise the Verminlord at this late stage in the project except, perhaps, by eliminating its troublesome patsies once and for all. Such a scheme came with the added bonus of giving his brother something useful to devote his undoubted genius to for a little while.

He peered intently into the eyepiece, using the directional buttons on the front panel of the device to command the mechanical spy to scuttle about, panning his view left and right.

‘The humans fight a great battle!’ he squeaked.

‘Yes! Yes!’ Sprarrk replied eagerly. ‘I see.’

Those thrice-accursed underjacks seemed to have found themselves amidst a great horde of their fellow humans and duardin. Smoke wreathed the entire scene, crackling sporadically with what Blastritt immediately recognised as gunfire. Even as he watched, an enormously fat ogor strode through the smoky background, making off with a dozen squalling human infants, which it bore aloft on its cliff-like shoulders. Blastritt wondered if the surface races were as prone to the episodic bouts of internecine conflict and fratricide as the skaven clans. He had never before considered them to be that intelligent, and was certainly not the only thinker in skavendom to have held that belief, but the evidence of his own eyes seemed to be proof that he was wrong.

‘This is our chance to kill them all,’ Sprarrk went on.

‘You are right as always,’ said Blastritt, still watching the scene of terrible violence that their spy had been made a party to.

‘Fools die-die in battles all the time. The humans will never know by whose paw these ones fell.’

‘But there are so many of them…’

The appearance of the masterful skaven form never failed to inspire great fear and awe in the minds of lesser species. If even one of their warriors were to be spotted by the armies up there, then they would most assuredly set aside their current grievances to turn on the real threat in their midst.

Sprarrk licked his fangs eagerly. ‘Then we must slaughter them from afar. All of them.’

Blastritt looked up sharply from the viewer eyepiece. A frisson of terrible excitement tingled all the way down his spine to his tail. ‘You cannot mean…’ The rocket that they had stolen from the Freeguild fortress was to be used in only the direst of emergencies. They had made each other swear that this would be so, for the weapon was tantalisingly red and very, very large.

‘I do, brother,’ Sprarrk tittered, barely able to hide his excitement or his glee. ‘It is time to use-fire the rocket.’

‘There they are!’ Elsworn cried, pointing through the smoke of the green, and dropping back into the saddle with some relief.

The pavilions of the steam lords and various other city officials had been erected on a brick revetment overlooking the demonstration batteries. Well-dressed men and women peered through binoculars at the artillery displays, scented lanterns and powerful mechanical fans holding the gun smoke and other such worldly odours well at bay.

The orange-and-black pennons of the Forgewrought Flintlocks fluttered on the ashen breeze about half a mile further along the wall. Elsworn urged Comet into an eager trot, obliging Gotrek and the others to jog along after them if they intended to keep up.

A feeling of pride welled up in Elsworn’s breast as she spied the Wolfen Banner of Baroness Zukaus flying above the lesser flags of the Freeguild soldiers. It was said that a Cavalier herald in her permanent entourage bore it with her at all times in a magically protected box, and that it was permitted to fly only when a Zukaus personally joined her troops in the field. The heraldic emblem was a supernatural creature native to the folklore of the Greywater Reach and had no name in modern times; half man and half wolf, it stood upright with a musket in its hands and a human heart impaled upon its bayonet. The device was black against a rippling orange field.

Two score of proud Steelhelms and another of Fusiliers stood at parade-ground attention at the base of the revetment, their uniforms buffed and gleaming. A skirmish line of a dozen or so Cavaliers walked their anxious mounts back and forth. Elsworn picked out her friends, Garvil and Tonan, as she trotted through the cavalry screen towards the revetment. They waved to her and she waved back, swallowing the bitter lump of resentment in her throat as it occurred to her that, had Gotrek not pulled her into his orbit, she could have been honoured with a similar duty. She set aside her bruised pride. Gotrek was selfish and possibly even slightly insane, but that did not make the threat he had uncovered any less real.

Lady Zukaus’ inner circle of retainers sat sternly on horseback at the edge of the revetment, watching the show. Every horse there was a monarch amongst its kind – sleek black warhorses that made grateful beggars of the ragged steeds of the Cavaliers below them. Their tack was of a thicker and heavier make, a cold mass of grave iron with a jangle that was deeper and somehow even malignant in tone. Red eyes gleamed out from beneath the sculpted metal of their visors.

The men and women whom those noble horses had deemed worthy of riding them were similarly impressive. They were clad in the same Forgewrought colours as Elsworn, but in elaborately worked steel plates of exquisite craftsmanship. Heavy black wolf-skin cloaks fell across their shoulders. Caps of the same material covered their heads. This motley of the knightly and the barbaric was addled still further with the assortment of swords, axes, carbines, and spears that were strapped across backs or hanging from belts and saddles. They were also, to a man, very pale. There was an uncanny stillness about them too, as though no din or discomfort in this realm would ever ruffle them. Elsworn noticed that their horses were the only ones in the entire regiment that seemed wholly unperturbed by the noise around them.

Encircled by these dark knights, parked in their midst, was a large black coach. The dark wood was strengthened with iron. Its sides bore the heraldic wolf-man of the Zukaus lineage, but here the colours were reversed with the orange device portrayed over the black field of the coach’s sides. Finial pieces, made of brass that had been pierced and engraved, created the impression of rats running alongside the bottom of the coach, and of cruel-looking birds in various animated poses taking flight from the roof. Six albino horses were yoked at the front in two rows of three, orange-and-black pennons fluttering from their traces.

The Lady Ciriline Zukaus reclined in a couch on the coach’s roof. She was everything that Elsworn had expected she would be, and somehow more.

In spite of her tremendous wealth, she was dressed in what most Greywaterans would have dismissively thought of as settlers’ garb: tough, road-stained leathers with fur trims, and weapons in easy reach. Her great black cloak had a fur collar so thick it obscured her neck. Her long hair was the same fiery orange as her Freeguild’s colours, but her features were coldly aristocratic, like a bust carved from white marble. Even her lips appeared to have drained of all their natural colour. A scabbarded greatsword lay across her lap: a weapon that she knew well how to wield, as the Pale Oak and his Sylvaneth had learned to their cost on more than one occasion. She drummed her bone-white fingers on the ornate hilt as she watched the tournament, looking pensive and bored, as though already yearning for the sprawling expanses of the Dreadwood.

Elsworn felt a thrill of excitement as she trotted closer. Perhaps when this business with the skaven was dealt with and the outstanding matter of her duel with Gotrek was resolved, she might yet win herself a place in Ciriline’s entourage. Looking at them all lined up along the revetment, however, Elsworn could not help the doubt that crept into her mind. The knights felt beyond her in some way that she could not quite put her finger on. She shrugged and shook off the ill-feeling. She had not run from the Sylvaneth, or the skaven, or from a fight with Gotrek Gurnisson, and she would not run from her own fears of inadequacy now. She would plead for the baroness’ aid in fighting the ratmen, and then she would do whatever it took to win a permanent place at her side.

Almost forgotten beside her, Gotrek muttered under his breath, ‘Well, that’s not suspicious at all.’

‘What was that?’ said Elsworn.

The Fyreslayer threw one last look up at the baroness on her coach, then shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

Elsworn had no idea what the Fyreslayer was unhappy about now. She was about to ask him to explain when a terrific sputtering whine drew her gaze upwards. A glowing rocket had launched from somewhere in Battery Green, fizzling into the sky before detonating with a bang so loud that the ground under Comet’s hooves seemed to recoil. All eyes turned to watch as the chrysanthemum cloudburst bled scarlet tendrils into the thick, suddenly ominous clouds. Even the baroness managed to overcome her ennui and look up.

‘Very pretty,’ said Gotrek, his voice sounding harsh in the sudden silence, his face painted a hellish red by the light falling out of the sky. He glanced sideways at Elsworn, entirely failing to observe the horror drawn into every line on her face. ‘You’d think you’d never seen a firework before.’

Master Gunner Casem scalded the back of his throat on the broth that his wife had made for him for his shift on the Outer Wall, hastily swallowing the mouthful and tipping the rest of the cup over the ramparts. He stumbled to his feet, patting down his uniform, and looked up. The chemical powders that went into the shell of a Skyfire flare were specially formulated, carefully weighed and measured by Ironweld gunsmiths and enchanted by wizards of the Gold College so as to burn with a flame that would pierce the thickest summer smog. A Skyfire burst could be seen on the Outer Wall from as far away as the Festermere Realmgate. The lingering red stain of this one lay over Greywater Fastness’ murky skyline like a blood clot in a poxwalker’s eye.

‘Yafe!’ he barked, shaking off the momentary disquiet.

‘Sir!’ the lad, Yafe, called out in reply, unbuckling the satchel he wore over his hip and pulling out the field glass. He trotted down the steps from the main rampart to the inner wall walk, bringing the glass to his eye and training it on the angry red mark above the city. He adjusted the slide rule along one side, carefully rotating the ranging dial on the other.

‘Take your time,’ Casem growled.

‘Forty-seven degrees, anticlockwise!’ the boy announced at last. ‘Distance… er…’ He made another adjustment. ‘Twenty-three thousand yards!’

Casem turned to his crew and roared, ‘Forty-seven degrees, anti-clockwise!’

‘Forty-seven degrees, anticlockwise!’

The fifty-strong crew of gunners, lifters, loaders, ventsmen, spongers, engineers, and firers set about hauling their great gun around.

The Hand, named for the clockwork procession with which it traversed the Outer Wall’s circumference rails and test-fired over the Ghoul Mere, was the largest and most powerful gun ever built in Greywater Fastness. It was so huge that the only way to fire it at all without destroying it utterly with its own recoil was to mount it on the Outer Wall. Only the immense geomantic dynamo of Greywater Fastness itself, driven and channelled by the Gravenstone at its centre, had the explosive power necessary to launch its thousand-pound payload over its fifty-mile maximum range. It had to be loaded by crane. Its destructive potential and reach were unequalled in the Mortal Realms. When it spoke, every rooftop in the city shook as though the God-King himself spoke through them. A direct hit was a death sentence. There was a reason that even the Pale Oak had never once shown his face before the Outer Wall.

Only twelve had ever been built. Their mobility and power allowed a relatively small number of guns to shield the entire city. And, as every good citizen of Greywater Fastness knew in the back of their mind, the Hands could be easily pivoted to face inwards.

With a clanking of great cogged wheels and a rattling of chains, the turntable on which the Hand was mounted rotated slowly around. The turntable clunked into its final position. ‘Forty-seven degrees – check!’ An engineer pulled on a lever and the gargantuan main barrel raised its elevation like the boom of a crane. ‘Twenty-three thousand yards – check!’

Casem tried not to think about it. The sale of Skyfire flares was strictly controlled. Only the Ironweld themselves and a handful of approved Freeguilds were allowed to hold them. It was their job to judge whether a situation was severe enough to warrant the intervention of the Hands. Miles away, high up on the Outer Wall, Casem and his crew were in no position to make that decision for themselves. Casem had one job to perform, and in Greywater Fastness a man’s job mattered more to him than his gods.

He nodded to his second gunner, who nodded to both of his assistant gunners, who each nodded in turn to their team of engineers.

Casem could see that they were all trying not to think about it too.

He turned back to the flare over the city.

His hand swept down.

‘Fire guns!’

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE BATTLE OF
BATTERY GREEN

Elsworn stared aghast at the sky. She felt the incoming shell long before she heard or saw it. A few loose bricks in the revetment wall started rattling, like the roof of her parents’ house when the Weald Line passed over Burnt Arches. Comet whickered nervously. The vibrations were jangling the steel bit between his teeth. Then came the thunder. Gotrek’s axe-flame writhed around the runic blade as though it was being exorcised from the metal but would not go. The Fyreslayer frowned up at it. He, alone, seemed entirely unperturbed by the twenty-thousand pounds of death flying towards them. Ignorance was underrated. Without realising that she was doing it, Elsworn drew out her fob watch on its chain and actually tutted when she saw that it was only twelve minutes to the hour. My watch is slow, she thought, as if this was both the likeliest explanation and the worst thing in the world.

A half-mile stretch of the Inner Wall evaporated in a blinding flash. Elsworn dropped her watch and drew her hand reflexively to cover her eyes, but too slow and too late, the sudden brilliance forcing its way between fingers and through eyelids. A primordial sun had laid its egg in the Inner Wall and now the hungry hatchling blasted its way free. She lowered her hand, blinking, just in time to gawp anew, this time at the house-sized blocks of rubble falling in apparent slow-motion over the green.

She did not immediately register the screams at all. They simply should not belong on the same scale as the destruction she was witnessing.

Another almighty boom rolled across the city as another of the Outer Wall’s guns found its range and fired. Elsworn had the horrible feeling that she should be doing something, but she could not for the life of her think what that thing might be. Her body screamed at her for action, but her mind was ignoring all requests. ‘Defend the baroness!’ she could hear someone yelling, and such was Elsworn’s state of shock that she may actually have laughed. She could not even defend herself. Survival in a situation like this was a matter of dumb luck rather than skill. If one of those terrible shells was to land anywhere nearby, then she would be dead and there would be absolutely nothing that she could do about it.

She tightened her death-like grip on Comet’s reins until the leather creaked and pinched hard enough for her trembling hands to register. Slowly, she felt her training begin to kick in, because as shocking as it was to consider, she had been trained for this. Her world was one of callous deities, sentient forests, and plague-stricken immortals hell-bent on the corruption of life as she knew it, and here she was with a sword, a horse, and a gun.

Miracles, quite frankly, were expected of the mortal men and women of the Freeguilds as a matter of course.

She wheeled Comet around, making herself and her horse into a physical barrier between the Steelhelms and the incoming fire, just as the second shell landed.

The centre of the green erupted in a mushrooming fireball, and then Elsworn saw no more. The flash burnt her eyes white. There was a rush of oven-like heat across her. Gotrek bellowed something she did not catch before that too was snatched away, men around her screaming, and then the shockwave hit.

It hit Comet side-on. The horse screamed, a sound more heart-wrenching than all the cries of men combined into a single shriek, and toppled sideways. Elsworn’s heart gave a lurch. The sensible thing to do would have been to jump clear, but she was still blind and half in a panic and what instinct made her do instead was hold on to the reins for dear life until she hit the ground. Comet landed on top of her. She screamed as agony shot through her trapped leg before losing it to a fit of hacking coughs. The air was hazed with dust, like breathing in a sandpit. All around her, Steelhelms staggered about in a daze, or else lay in unmoving heaps. She couldn’t see the baroness’ coach. There was no sign of Gotrek or the others. She had no idea how far the blast had thrown them.

She heaved against Comet’s back, rewarded with another hot flash of pain as the horse rolled off her leg and stood himself back up.

Her foot was still caught in the stirrup.

‘Whoa there, Comet,’ she yelled, but the horse’s ears were flat to the side of his head, a wild look in his eyes, and he did not hear a word of it. Elsworn scrabbled around on the floor for something to hold on to. ‘Got–’ she started to say before feeling a sharp tug on her ankle. And then the horse was off, dragging her over the flagstones of Battery Green at the gallop.

The crowds flashed by in a blur. Small scenes of panic and death clamoured for her attention as she slid helplessly through. An old woman cradling a bloodstained bundle. A pair of Freeguild Steelhelms, their uniforms white with dust, as they supported each other through the pall. Two men dragging a struggling child between them to safety. A grey-haired dog digging frantically at a pile of rubble. A massively obese ogor mercenary, lying back with his eyes peacefully closed as though resting, propped up by the tent pole that had impaled his chest. The true scale of the disaster was surely beyond her ability to conceive and so her mind latched on to these. Tens of thousands of off-shift workers would have descended on Battery Green for the tournament. The potential death toll was horrendous.

She thought of her family, somewhere out there on the pistol ranges when the first shells had fallen, and felt as though she had been shot through the heart herself.

She had to do something.

With a cry of anguish, Elsworn curled herself up by the stomach muscles, grabbing hold of the flapping material of her trouser leg and clinging on while the ground thundered away beneath her. She pulled furiously at the hobble strap that was trapping her boot in the stirrup.

At the line of mocked-up fortifications that spanned the middle of the green, Comet swerved without slowing, tearing the strap from Elsworn’s grip, swinging her out like a whipcord and throwing her bodily through a plywood barricade. She gave another scream, covering her head with her arms as Comet opened his gait back up and tore along the line of earthworks.

‘Stop, Comet!’ she yelled, slaloming helplessly over the flagstones in his wake, leaving a trail of dust and splinters. ‘Comet! Slow down!’

She wished now that she had listened to Garvil’s advice and spent her ennoblement monies on one of Greywater Reach’s stubborn native breeds. They might look like half a horse’s skin stretched across an entire horse’s bones, but they were unflappable. You could shoot at them, face a horde of bellowing Ironjawz, smear them in blood and gore, and never even put them off their dinner.

Comet’s terrific turn of speed and youthful vigour seemed much less of a selling point than it had done at the time.

Another earth-shuddering fountain of debris showered her with grit.

Comet slammed his hooves to the ground and skidded to an abrupt and untidy halt. He whinnied in fright, trying to back away from this latest round of shelling, but in doing so finally afforded Elsworn enough time to pull herself up and dump her backside into the saddle. She swayed there for a moment, dizzy.

Her hand dropped to her left thigh, and she winced. The leg did not feel broken, but the ankle was undoubtedly badly sprained. If she was only obliged to spend the next fortnight on crutches then she would consider herself to have got off very lightly indeed. Resisting the urge to give Comet a serious scolding, she instead took a firm grip on the reins, letting him know that she was back in charge and giving him a reassuring squeeze with her thighs.

While he settled, Elsworn looked quickly around, the realisation that she had absolutely no idea where she was and still less on how to get back settling over her like a millstone around her neck. The brightly coloured stalls of the tournament had been cast down and trampled. The people had scattered before the shelling or were already dead, buried under that same wreckage. There were no landmarks left to guide her back, or to inform her of where her family might be, if they were even still alive at all. The dust thrown up by the bombardment was thick enough that not even the lights of the city could penetrate it. In their absence, Elsworn felt as though even up and down had been erased from her mental list of available directions. Everywhere suddenly looked the same. Only the lingering phosphorescence of the Skyfire flare overhead made it through the smoke to the ground and there was little comfort to be had in that.

She spent a moment just staring up at the sky.

Standard doctrine in these situations was for the Hands to keep firing until a green flare was launched to signal that the target had been completely annihilated. Bombardments would usually last a handful of minutes. Often, a single shell was enough. But Elsworn had the terrible gut-feeling that no such signal was going to be forthcoming here. The Hands were going to carry on pulverising Battery Green until they ran out of ammunition or it dawned on the master gunners that someone had made a catastrophic mistake.

Almost unnoticed from the smoke behind her, there came the rusty shiver of a blunt sword being drawn, the unmistakeable click of a warplock pistol being cocked, and something profoundly inhuman covering its mouth to mask its sniggers. Skaven! Elsworn thought with a shudder, hoping very much that this was the last horrified discovery that she would have to make this day.

Klatch One-Ear tittered quietly to himself as he peered through the periscope. The device was a typical masterpiece of skaven invention. Who else but the master race would have considered a long tube and a pair of old mirrors as the solution to the age-old problem of how to spy on one’s enemies without getting one’s head shot off in turn?

He cranked the handle to squeak the periscope tube around on its pedestal. His field of view wobbled to the right.

One of the humans’ giant artillery shells landed in a plume of dust. A building fell down. The ceiling shook, and powdered brick trickled over the heads of the skaven below. It occurred to Klatch that this sewer may not be entirely safe. He should probably have set up his command post even further back, but he was proud to have been entrusted with such an impressive gathering of skaven might, and it had resulted in a most un-skaven-like rush of blood to the head.

Looking through the periscope, he could see that quite a few of his warriors had mistaken the initial flare for the signal to attack and had struck prematurely from their burrows. Klatch could see a great many of them amongst the dead and the fleeing. No matter. It was never a bad idea to clear one’s ranks of the stupid before an undertaking such as this.

He watched as clanrat warriors scuttled through the smoke and ruin. He saw warpfire-thrower and ratling-gunner teams taking up positions to mow down human survivors as they fled, herding them onto the halberds of the waiting stormvermin that Klatch had deployed to the main surface routes out of the square. Sharp-eyed jezzails, meanwhile, outfitted with the last word in smog-piercing optical technologies, would even then be hurrying towards concealed vantages in the factories overlooking the square. And if Klatch were to squint very hard indeed, then he could almost convince himself that he saw trains loaded with crack skaven troops shunting specially widened Doomwheels into position. Teams of field engineers had been dispatched ahead to construct exit ramps which the Doomwheels would roll down to unleash their awesome destructive potential on the hapless humans below.

Klatch wished that he could have been up there instead of here, strapping himself into the pilot’s seat of one of those magnificent war machines. When he imagined himself crushing fleeing humans under his wheels, all the while obliterating droves of elite Stormcast Eternals with warp lightning, it was all he could do to restrict himself to a dignified quiver of longing.

He supposed that he would just have to get used to it. Once he had masterminded the capture and death of the troublesome Fyreslayer and his human lackey, then the masters would be sure to shower him with ever grander titles and responsibilities when this was done.

He preened at the thought.

Warlock Master Klatch!

It had a suitably impressive ring to it.

He lifted his eyes from the periscope just as another massive artillery strike impacted the square above them. Powdered debris blew across his snout, making his nose wrinkle and his whiskers twitch. Such was his excitement that he barely even flinched. What even was death, he thought to himself, to a skaven as mighty as he?

The other warlocks and clawleaders huddled around the periscope fidgeted rather more anxiously. The cowards! They wore cunningly wrought armour, an array of power cells, coloured lenses, spitting weapons, and leaking fuel tanks glowing in the dark. Behind them, no doubt contributing somewhat to their general unease, loomed the Stormfiends.

The brutes stood head and shoulders above even the tallest of stormvermin clawleaders, as befitted a creature that existed at the very apex of the skaven sciences, straddling the mutational breeding programmes of the Clans Moulder and the restless tinkering of Clan Skryre. If the question had been how to turn the huge, hulking strength of a mutant rat ogor into something even more unstoppable, then the answer, as it had arrived in the form of the Stormfiend, was surely to hammer in anything that even remotely resembled a weapon.

Every rat ogor was a rabid, half-mad force of destruction even before the warlocks of Clan Skryre got hold of them, more than capable of tearing through an entire cohort of Stormcast Eternals with brute strength and insatiable hunger alone. The creatures that Klatch had gleefully released from their secure pens were more machine now than either rat or ogor. Armour plates had been welded to their leathery hides. Ratling cannons and warpfire throwers had been mounted on their shoulders or bolted to the end of surgically truncated limbs. A dizzying variety of doomflayers, shock gauntlets, and grinderfists added even further to their startling lethality in close combat.

Klatch would not want to be in the Fyreslayer’s shoes once the Stormfiends caught their scent, that was for sure. He would not, if he was being completely honest with himself, want to be the warlocks standing between them and their prey right now either. Fortunately, they had been well trained to fear the electro-whips of their skaven betters, and for now at least their simple minds were held captive by the percussive drumming of heavy artillery guns on the ceiling.

He wondered if it was time to order the attack. He had very much been expecting the guns to stop firing by now, but such was life. You could not skin a cat without breaking some skin. He turned around, once again feeling a stab of envy for these petty warlocks and cowardly clawleaders who would get to lead the attack while he was forced to remain safe and snug and more than a little bored here in the sewer.

None of them seemed to appreciate the exciting opportunity that Klatch One-Ear was about to give them.

The skaven emerged from the smoke like wraiths from a Ghoul Mere fog. They were clad in rags, like dead men who had stumbled upon a party of smaller, feebler dead men and taken their clothes. Their weapons were notched. Their armour was scavenged. Their ears, fingers, and tails were adorned with rusty jewellery and shiny metals. They approached her with the jackal-like courage that only a numerical advantage of twenty to one could bestow. They did not need to rush, and for the longest time Elsworn simply stared at them in shock.

The skaven had been nightmarish enough when she and Gotrek had first encountered them in their own subterranean world. Seeing them abroad in hers felt like an invasion of the darkest kind.

With a cry of outrage, she wheeled Comet about. The plywood and plasterboard ruin of the Battery Green fortifications lay off to her left. That felt right to her. This was the way she had come. She loathed the idea of letting these wretched scavengers see her run, but she liked the idea of letting them get any closer even less.

A mounted warrior was at an advantage over infantry only so long as she was moving.

She dug her heels into his ribs. ‘Yah!’ she yelled. ‘Now you can run!’ And like a black wind from the shadows of Nakarth did he run. Every cross thought she had borne against him over the last minute and a bit, she recanted in that ecstasy of spine-jarring, face-melting acceleration. He was through the skaven line before they realised what had hit them. A few carried pistols and spun around with a barrage of fizzes and cracks to fire after him. Elsworn ducked over the saddle horn, making herself as small a target as possible as the evilly glowing rounds buzzed by her.

Comet galloped on as though he would gladly outrace a skaven bullet, and soon enough, the outraged chittering of the skaven warriors fell away behind them.

She straightened a little and looked around. She needed to find Gotrek, then she needed to find the rest of her Freeguild and the baroness. Altogether, they would be a force that not even the skaven would overcome easily.

Most of Battery Green was still shrouded in smoke, but everywhere that she could make out she saw running battles being fought between skaven warriors and beleaguered Freeguild troops. Masses of armoured rats hurried through the shattered tents, while heavy weapons teams gleefully raked the tournament field with howling fusillades of death. If there was one thing that Greywater Fastness had in abundance, however, it was guns, and Elsworn was heartened to see that the skaven were not having things all their own way. Every crater and mound of debris was the setting for a firefight between pistol-wielding civilians and the deadly skaven weapon teams, a thousand and one small acts of heroism, any of which could be snuffed out at any moment by the pounding guns of the Outer Wall.

Was this disaster entirely of the skaven’s making? Had they launched the Skyfire flare that had called down the bombardment of Battery Green? It sounded all too plausible given the evidence. But why? They had been nothing if not clandestine in their incursions above ground so far. Could it be that what she was witnessing now was simply the natural fruition of those furtive plans? Was it not, in fact, also possible that the reason for this overt attack now was the very same one that had persuaded Elsworn and Gotrek to delay taking action against them – the chance to get all of Greywater Fastness’ military and civilian hierarchy in one place? She had to applaud the skaven’s intelligence network. Her respect for their deviousness rose in line with her horror.

A cluster of elegant tents and a stage marked out with flags grew out of the smoke ahead. The Elrith Ceyl camp! Elsworn reined in and swung towards them. The Elrith Ceyl had been set up close to the pistol ranges where she had last seen her sister. If any of the Khainites were still alive then maybe one of them could tell her where the competitors had fled or if they had seen a certain Fyreslayer berzerker. A slim hope, she knew, but the best she had to grasp at under the circumstances. It was a better one than charging aimlessly across Battery Green and hoping for something better.

As she galloped closer, she saw that the Khainites were indeed very much alive. A troupe of lightly armoured Witch Aelves, their bodies painted purple and white, were on the stage exactly where Elsworn had last seen them, their lethal ballet ongoing as though a barrage from the Outer Wall had been included as a dramatic interlude. Skaven warriors piled onto the stage in what should have been overwhelming numbers, only to find themselves disarmed, disoriented, dismembered, and finally struck through the heart with breath-taking speed and artistry.

Elsworn drew her sword, determined to aid them, not that they appeared to need it, but no sooner had she decided on that course than some important skaven was making a decision of his own.

A scalding jet of warpflame hosed the entire stage, aelf and skaven alike writhing about as they dissolved into the stream, flesh and armour falling off their bones like the meat from a pot-roasted joint. Elsworn soon saw the grisly method in this madness as eager skaven warriors from the rear ranks stormed onto the still-smouldering stage to put the last hideously burnt Witch Aelves to the sword. A second ago, they had been untouchable, and now every last one of them was dead.

Elsworn should have turned aside there and galloped on, but she was committed now. Mentally as well as physically. The sheer effortlessness with which the skaven had murdered the Elrith Ceyl offended her. She wanted to avenge that dishonourable killing in blood. And why not? A thoughtless shelling from the Outer Wall could kill her at any moment, and it was surely better to go out with a sword in her hand. She could think of no more honourable way of greeting death than that.

Still hard at the gallop, she swung her pistol towards the burly ratman carrying the warpfire thrower. She had a moment to think, shifted her aim to the right and fired. The bullet thunked into the leaky barrel that was being lugged across the shoulders of the skaven directly behind. Neither one seemed to notice, until the volatile fuel inside the barrel detonated, letting rip with a fiery green blast that vaporised skaven bodies over an impressively wide radius.

She offered up a quick prayer of gratitude to the erstwhile skaven gunner on the canal boat that she and Gotrek had accidentally destroyed, wherever the spirits of such creatures went after death – she would never have had the idea without him.

She yelled a war cry as Comet thundered through, firmly expecting the remaining skaven to break for she had seen first-hand how they crumbled under pressure. But to her surprise, perhaps realising that there was only one of her, they rushed in to meet her. Comet slammed through a dozen before weight of numbers and a thicket of skaven spears forced him to a standstill, trampling the unfortunate vermin under his silver-shod hooves. The skaven squealed and stabbed back, their rusty spear-tips striking off his steel barding and tangling in the old blankets he wore over his shoulders. Trusting Comet to remember his own training, Elsworn laid about her with her sword, the heavy, curving blade ideally suited to chopping downwards through cap-wearing skaven heads. There were simply too many to be chopped.

She wheeled Comet around to make space. He flailed his hooves, snapping a worm-eaten spear in two, then kicked wildly back, caving in the skull of a skulking ratman who learned the hard way not to sneak up on an Ulguanite warhorse.

Taking the opportunity for a look around, Elsworn saw what looked like a leader perched on the late Witch Aelves’ stage. It was a lean figure in scuffed bronze with verminous emblems fluttering from a tattered cloth on a pole above its back. It was gesticulating urgently towards Elsworn and squealing at its warriors in the unintelligible dialect of the skaven. It seemed likely that the presence of the leader explained the unusual reticence of the skaven warriors to break. Elsworn swung her pepperbox around, determined to remedy that fault immediately, only to have to duck her head out of the way when a skaven warrior attempted to noose it with a man-catcher. When she looked up again, the leader was gone. She swore, taking her frustrations out on the pole-armed skaven warrior by chopping its paw off with a reverse stroke and sending it reeling away with a mouthful of stirrup.

The skaven leader reappeared a moment later. Elsworn flinched as it sailed across her eyeline with its back banner snapped in half and struck bloodily through its chest, its head twisted all the way around and hanging off its ruined neck. Suddenly recalling the juggling ogor that might very well have been loose on Battery Green, she risked another look towards the stage, astonished to see that it was not an ogor, but Lady Ciriline Zukaus, crunching across the boards in mail-lined leather jackboots.

She was bloody from head to foot, much of it strangely concentrated around her thinly parted lips. Her black wolf-skin cloak dragged through a trail of skaven gore. A severed tail lay draped over one shoulder. She carried a dripping skaven head in the opposite hand. From the state of the neck, it had been ripped away from its former body rather than cleanly cut. Her greatsword rested lightly on her shoulder, as though she was a noblewoman at a shoot and the skaven no more troublesome to her than the grouse. In contrast to her earlier pallor, she looked flushed and vital, as if the carnage agreed with her. The smile she turned on Elsworn was breezy, effortlessly predatory, a flash of white against the redness dripping down her face.

‘It is Elsworn Killebrook. Is that right?’

It was all Elsworn could do to stare without her mouth falling open.

‘I have been hearing good things about you, Elsworn. Only good things.’ Faster than Elsworn’s eyes could follow, Ciriline’s greatsword mowed through a dozen more skaven warriors, who, for all their own dervish energy, seemed to line up patiently to be slain. Her bloody sword returned to its resting place against her shoulder. She licked freshly spilled skaven blood from her top lip with every indication of relish, and turned her smile back to Elsworn. There was a gleam in her eyes, something old and strange and deeply fascinating that made Elsworn want to put down her sword right there and study it forever. ‘Keep it up,’ Ciriline said, and then, even as Elsworn’s eyes remained locked on hers, promptly vanished from sight.

She must have jumped down from the stage and disappeared from the smoke while Elsworn had been distracted. But just for a moment, Elsworn knew with appalling certainty that she had witnessed something that she should not have; that the eyes she had been looking into had, in the end, not been human eyes at all, but the glassy, intelligent eyes of a beast; that the smoke had rippled not of its own natural volition, but to make way for some winged form of wolf, and that the creature that had once been Ciriline Zukaus had from there taken leave of the stage.

No sooner had she fully disappeared, however, than another, much broader figure came coughing and spluttering out of the smoke she had left behind. Elsworn did not think that she had ever been gladder to see anyone.

After the shocks of the day, Gotrek Gurnisson’s humdrum ugliness was profoundly reassuring.

Whatever roundabout route he had taken across Battery Green, it had not left him unscathed. He was bleeding from several small cuts across both of his arms. There was a powder burn in his beard and several large pieces of shrapnel stuck in his crest. The look in his one good eye was even more manic than usual, and he snarled as he sent burning skaven tumbling off the stage with great, blustering sweeps of his axe.

‘Where did she go?’ he roared, by way of greeting.

‘Who?’

‘The bloody vampire, of course.’

Elsworn blinked, but already the memory of what she thought she had seen was fading. ‘The what?’

‘I know, I know. You probably call them something ridiculous.’

‘What in Sigmar’s name are you talking about?’

‘Never mind. My axe craves the taste of something new, but it will settle for more rat well enough.’

With a combination of Gotrek and the baroness having cleared the space ahead of her, Elsworn steered Comet alongside the stage, gave him a short kick, and jumped him up onto the boards. While his silver hooves clattered around in a circle on the blackened planks, Elsworn looked quickly around. She still had the powerful feeling that her duty was to go after Ciriline Zukaus, even if the very thought of doing so made her spirit quail. The dilemma was soon rendered moot. She could no longer even see the baroness through the smoke, and skaven swamped the stage on all four sides. Neither the brutal death of their leader, nor the massacre wrought by Ciriline, nor Gotrek’s flaming axe seemed to have dissuaded them.

Elsworn had never heard of skaven behaving in this way before. They were scavengers and opportunists. They preyed on the weak and avoided the strong like the plague. They were not supposed to be so single-minded.

If it did not sound so obviously absurd then Elsworn might have imagined that they were here for her personally.

Even as she considered this, a black-furred skaven warrior in uncharacteristically good-quality bronze plate stabbed up at the stage with a halberd. The Fyreslayer struck the blade in half with a brutal swipe of his own. But there were more. And, as far as Elsworn could make out, they were getting larger and better armoured all the time. Something very suspicious was definitely going on here.

‘What do we do now, Gotrek?’

‘I thought you fancied yourself as the one in charge.’

‘If you’ve any ideas, I’d love to hear them.’

Quickly deciding that Comet was going to be of no further advantage to her, she dismounted, gasping as her twisted ankle took her weight for the first time. She hobbled around on the spot until she and Gotrek were virtually back to back, bringing her sword up into a guard. She tightened her grip on her pistol, but decided to save the remaining shots lest any more skaven weapon teams show up. She did not intend to meet the same end as the Elrith Ceyl. With the advantage of higher ground, they could at least make a reasonable fight of it.

‘Work, damn you,’ Gotrek growled, behind her, thumping the rune on his chest like an old man who had swallowed his soup too fast.

This was, as far as Elsworn was concerned, the worst possible time for the Fyreslayer to start losing his mind.

She checked back over her shoulder to make sure that he was not dying, watching as Gotrek drew aside the straggly orange curtain of his beard to reveal the golden ancestor rune hammered into his chest. It was extraordinary work and clearly heavy with power. It also did not seem to be doing very much, however hard Gotrek struck it and the choice words he tried as curses.

‘Are you all right?’ she said.

‘You’re a nosy, stubborn, bothersome slip of a human, did anyone ever tell you that?’

Elsworn grinned despite herself. ‘Why isn’t it doing anything?’

‘I haven’t got the blasted thing to work since Amara left. She cursed me somehow, I’m certain of it.’

‘Then we’ll just have to do without it.’

The Fyreslayer dropped his hand from his rune and returned it to his axe, taking it two-handed. He nodded grimly. ‘You should’ve got back on your horse and run.’

‘And let you out of our duel?’

The Fyreslayer glared out across the numberless skaven horde, as if they had been drawn from every blackened corner of the Mortal Realms for the sole purpose of annoying him. ‘It’ll take more than a few rats to make this Slayer go back on his word.’

Klatch knew that he should have stayed in the sewer. The proper place for any skaven general was as far from actual battle as possible, which, now that it occurred to him, may have been why Blastritt and Sprarrk had sent Klatch to lead from the front while they remained behind in their workshop. But the thought raced through his mind with the hot-blooded enthusiasm of a half-blind whelp with his first firearm and a bullying black-fur to shoot. The guns! The explosions! The smells! The sounds of Doomwheels as they ran over terrified humans! He simply could not abide to sit on his tail a moment longer.

Most importantly of all, the Fyreslayer and his underling had been spotted at last, cornered together like mice in a trap. Klatch had fed the messengers who had delivered this news to the Stormfiends, who had duly sniffed them, fought over them, and then messily devoured them before thumping their enormous armoured chests and bellowing that they had the scent.

Klatch did not strictly have to watch the Stormfiends tear the hapless duo limb from limb, but he wanted to. He knew how badly the masters wanted them dead and suspected that they would appreciate a grisly first-hand dispatch. They had always appreciated, and rewarded, that kind of attention to detail.

His coterie of fellow warlocks trotted obediently behind him. Every so often, one of them would peel off to attend to an injured human that needed shooting or their pockets rifled through. Klatch let them go in his haste so that, writ large, his entourage probably looked like a train being driven too soon and too quickly out of its station, rattling off increasingly larger and more important parts of itself as it went.

An explosive roar from the biggest, and thus dominant, Stormfiend announced that their prey was close. Klatch could almost hear the clangour of steel and the giddy fzzap! sound of warp lightning weaponry. He could not see a thing through the dust and smoke, and knew that this would be debilitating and terrifying to most humans, but skaven had keener senses than sight alone.

He sniffed the air as he ran, whiskers twitching, clutching the long brass pole of his doomrocket possessively to his chest.

After so many months spent skulking about in the masters’ shadow, picking over the city’s leavings to construct their enigmatic machine in secret, he just wanted to blow something up with his own paws.

Was that really so much to ask?

One of the armoured ratmen leapt up onto the stage with a snarl. Elsworn had been doing everything she could to preserve the slender advantage of her high ground, dashing around the stage stabbing and slashing at skaven as quickly as they could climb up. But there were too many of them, her ankle was already protesting, and, given that Gotrek seemed perfectly happy for the skaven to come at him in whatever numbers they pleased, the stage was too large for her to cover alone. The skaven warrior bared its teeth at her, a mix of amusement and malice that no human mouth could recreate, and came at her with dervish speed.

Elsworn got her sword up just in time, striking another notch into the skaven blade as it scraped down the angle of hers. For all the skaven’s apparent scrawniness there was a feverish intensity behind its movements and it was unexpectedly bulky in its bronze breastplate and helmet. It drove her back with a swift flurry of blows. Elsworn parried with instinctive skill, but gasped every time a short retreat put weight on her bruised ankle.

The skaven tittered, its scavenger’s instincts immediately sniffing out the weakness, and focused all of its attacks on pushing that back foot even harder.

With Elsworn’s back practically to the edge of the stage, it went for the kill.

Her parry was as neat as it was automatic, for the skaven was far too fast for her to counter its moves deliberately. She turned the sword-thrust aside and then, with a twist of the waist, sent the squealing ratman into a nosedive off the edge of the stage.

Elsworn flashed a breathless grin even as twenty more, having made the stage already while she had been distracted, rushed to take its place.

She fought as she had never fought before, every stroke of her sword a kill without consideration for honour or fair play, every parry the springboard for a counter-attack that threw her back onto the offensive. She was going to die here, she knew it, and yet the more certain she became of that, the faster her sword seemed to move. She revelled in the clarity of being one misstep away from death. There was no duty here, no honour, no concern for the wellbeing of anyone but herself and her own sword.

At least she did not need to worry about any skaven getting around behind her. Gotrek slaughtered all-comers with frightening ease in spite of his startling inefficiency, like a prototype engine designed for killing, all huffing and blowing and belching smoke before splitting skaven bodies like kindling. Even Comet was doing his bit, stamping around the stage like a trapped animal, administering panicked kicks whenever a skaven head popped over the side of the stage.

Elsworn parried a sword-stroke, made herself narrow as a rusty halberd chopped across her, grazing her ear and passing less than an inch wide of her chest. She broke a skaven’s nose with a shoulder charge, knee-capped another with a flick of her sword. From the corner of her eye, she saw a skaven heft up a crank-operated, multi-barrelled cannon, similar in appearance to a Freeguild slaughter-fusil only far more ramshackle, and swing it towards the stage. Fending off skaven attacks one-handed, she smoothly drew her pistol and shot the ratman between the eyes. The skaven gunner jerked backwards and sank beneath the furry tide without a trace.

Elsworn threw a quick glance over her shoulder as she did not entirely trust Gotrek to warn her should any more skaven weapon teams attempt to sneak up on them from that direction. She performed a horrified double take as she took in the monstrous phalanx that was currently wading through the rear ranks of the skaven horde. Elsworn was familiar with the mutant sub-species of skaven known as rat ogors, and these, she was certain, had to be examples of that monstrous breed.

Each brutish specimen stood three times the height of the skaven they sent flying with every swipe of their spade-like paws, even accounting for the fact that they were hunched almost double by their upper bodies’ sheer brawn. Their heads were too small for the size of their torsos. Their beady red eyes were blank with stupidity. If even one of those monsters made it to the stage, then Elsworn doubted it would have to think too hard before tearing her and Gotrek limb from limb. Surely even the Fyreslayer’s great strength could not stand against such raw, animalistic savagery for long. The slight elevation of the Witch Aelves’ stage suddenly felt like a laughable advantage. The rat ogors would go over it as easily as she would the sill of a doorway. To make matters even worse, the rat ogors had been haphazardly armoured, metal plates welded directly to their tattily furred hides. Between them, they brandished an arsenal of arcane and, knowing the skaven as she had come to do, appallingly dangerous weaponry.

‘This is more like it!’ Gotrek bellowed, leaping down from the stage and, before Elsworn’s astonished gaze, proceeding to carve himself a fiery path towards the armoured rat ogors.

‘Gotrek!’ Elsworn cried, struggling to fend off twice as many skaven as she’d had to contend with before the Fyreslayer had left her with the stage to herself. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ She peered down over the edge and cursed.

She was going to have to go after him. If she stayed where she was and tried to fight the entire skaven horde herself, then they would overwhelm her in minutes. Not that her chances against half a dozen rat ogors were looking any better, but at least with Gotrek beside her they might both last a little longer.

Looking up, she caught the glint of metal as a skaven engineer, easily missed until then amongst the lumbering rat ogors, hoisted a long brass tube onto its shoulder. A scuffed, red-painted rocket had been rammed down its neck. Elsworn snapped her pistol up and squeezed off three shots in quick succession, everything left in the barrel assembly, but the range was too great and the metal balls pranged harmlessly off the armour-plated chest of the warlock’s rat ogor bodyguards.

With a grin full of sharp yellow fangs, the skaven aimed its rocket launcher up at the stage.

Elsworn swallowed. Charging headlong into a rabid pack of rat ogors suddenly looked like a plan with no obvious downsides.

‘Wait for me!’ she yelled, and hurled herself from the stage.

Klatch One-Ear pulled down on the trigger with an ecstatic squeal. The launcher kicked back against his shoulder like a clanrat having his foot amputated but did not immediately explode, which was an always slim but never unexciting risk with Clan Skryre weapons. Grubby black fire and a torrent of smoke blasted out the back, flash-cooking the upper half of the clanrat who had been unwisely attempting to hide there, and the doomrocket shot out the other end. The recoil sent the rocket screaming skyward, but skaven weapons were cunningly designed to counter such mishaps and the missile soon looped back down again as its wobbling vanes caught the air, leaving a corkscrewing trail of smoke behind it.

‘Wait for me!’ he heard the black-furred human female squeal before flinging herself from the platform.

But the doomrocket had veered well off target now and was no longer heading towards the stage at all. Doing a full loop-the-loop, it shrieked back towards the Fyreslayer as though he had – of course! – been Klatch’s intended target all along. Klatch just had time to drop the launcher tube and dive behind the reassuringly solid bulwark of the nearest Stormfiend before it hit.

He closed his eyes and covered his ears, still giggling insanely to himself as the awesome warpfire explosion rocked the Stormfiend on its weighted heels, fire and fury blasting around its broad shoulders and singeing the tip of Klatch’s tail.

After a second or two, it abated.

Uncovering his ears, Klatch took a tentative sniff and looked up.

The Stormfiend he had been sheltering behind had been reduced to a fleshless hulk, held upright only by the tough metal plates of its armour. Two more looked to be in an even more deleterious state, their armour melted into most unskaven-like shapes. Several hundred clanrats and erstwhile stormvermin elites lay in a confusing tangle of body parts, armour pieces and scraps of fur, all of them rimming a crater about twenty tail-lengths wide. It was black with smoke. Rooting through his assortment of gear, Klatch pulled on a set of warpstone-lensed goggles, the occluding smoke becoming invisible as the scene took on a uniformly greenish tinge. He looked towards the middle of the crater and gave an involuntary squeak of fright.

Impossible!

The Fyreslayer was still there. His long beard and fearsome-looking crest of hair were smoking. His face was black with soot, but he was very much still alive, his fiercely white eye turning unerringly towards Klatch despite his notable lack of warpstone-lensed goggles.

He took a doddering step towards Klatch.

‘Is that the best that you…? Is that the best…? Is that…?’

Then the Fyreslayer’s one eye rolled back into his head and, like a mighty fortification undermined with explosives, he fell over backwards with a crash.

Klatch’s musk glands squirted in relief and he grinned in spite of the acrid odour that he had just covered himself with. He performed a giddy dance, skittering around the fused hulk of the Stormfiend. He had killed the Fyreslayer! The warrior had harried Blastritt, come within a whisker of slaying the great Warlock Master Sprarrk, ended countless of his beloved kin-rats, but clearly he was no match for Klatch One-Ear! Yes, he had lost half of his Stormfiends and almost all of his clanrats, but the masters would undoubtedly have expended even those few bodies remaining and Klatch too if it would have brought the end of that nuisancesome pair.

Klatch drew his warplock sidearm from the man-skin holster on his belt and, feeling very brave and important, waved it over his head for the attention of anyone clever enough to have survived the blast. He had only to claim the Fyreslayer’s head, and dig out some recognisable remains of his female lackey to serve as proof of her demise.

A few dozen shell-shocked clanrats and a couple of badly singed Stormfiends would just have to be an overwhelming enough force for him to do it.

Elsworn rolled the crisp skaven corpse off her and sat upright, retching on the foul smoke taste that was in the air. It contained more meat than most good broths. The stage had been demolished. The area around it had become a charnel field, flagstones cracked in the heat, jumbled up with bits of bone and armour, scraps of fur, inexplicably surviving oddments like an earring or a button. Her ears rang. Occasionally they whistled or buzzed. The steady crump of shelling shivered through the thick murk to report that the Hands were still firing. Elsworn looked up.

The flare was still up there, but it was starting to disperse in the higher winds above the rooftops, thinning and spreading out and clearly confusing the wall gunners’ aim. The intensity of the bombardment was unchanged, it was just being spread across a much wider area.

The thought should have appalled her, and given time she was certain that it would, but just then all she felt was relief for her broken little oasis of peace.

‘Gotrek!’ she cried, her voice sounding like sand, gravel, and muddy water put together in a mixer. ‘Comet!’ But there was no sign of them. There was no sign of anyone. As if that last blast had ended the world and she was all that was left, floating on a few square yards of burnt flagstones, those muffled reports she could still hear just the echoes of the end. ‘Gotrek!’

Standing up felt like a feat, but even through the listlessness of her shock she realised that staying where she was for the skaven to find her was a terrible idea. Picking a direction that felt no better or worse than any other, she crawled towards it on all fours, croaking ‘Gotrek’ or ‘Comet’ as she went. The Fyreslayer could not have been far. Something orange leapt out at her from amidst the greys and browns and scorched blacks. She scrambled towards it and gasped with relief. It was Gotrek! The Fyreslayer was miraculously in one piece, for Elsworn was certain she had seen the skaven rocket score a direct hit. It had been his body, in large part, as well as the mass of skaven around her, that had shielded Elsworn from the full force of the explosion. Aside from a few nasty-looking burns, he almost looked as if he had passed out drunk and singed himself on the tavern’s hearth.

Elsworn reached out to shake him awake, only to recoil with a cry of pain and the hissing of scalded flesh. She shook her fingers to cool them, her fingertips already swelling with blisters. The Fyreslayer was red hot. Golden light leaked through the strands of his beard, like a lantern hidden under a bushel. His Fyreslayer rune. It might not have been obeying Gotrek’s commands, but it was certainly doing something.

Taking care not to burn herself again, she leant over him, turning her head to check that he was breathing and hearing what sounded like a faint muttering coming from the rune. It came in time to the pulsing of her scalded fingers, but the words were in no language she knew, and in a voice so deep it sounded more like the molten grumblings of the earth than the speech of mortals.

Elsworn wondered if it was the power of the rune that had saved him, and by extension her, from the skaven rocket. He had been so secretive about what it was supposed to do that it was difficult to be certain. She had seen him trying to activate it at the start of the battle, and though she had witnessed his uncanny resistance to fire before now, this was clearly something else.

A direct hit from the skaven rocket would have surely stricken the Everqueen herself. Unfortunately, she had no time to dwell on it any further.

A skittering of furtive claws made her look up. A snuffling. A sniffing. Rat shadows slinking through the smoke around her. Elsworn drew her spare pistol and fired. The bang sounded contemptuously through the smothering pall. One of the encroaching shapes threw up its arms as it dropped. Another stole closer while her back was to it. She smoothly turned and fired again. The second figure squealed and fell. More came running and Elsworn kept shooting, every shot accounting for a ratman that was half a yard closer than the one before. Three. Four. Five. The barrel assembly clicked empty and spun out, the manual chambering mechanism glowing too hot to be touched.

A deep, sonorous growl trembled through the murk. Elsworn turned, looking up, open-mouthed, as one of the monstrous rat ogors shuffled into view.

The eyes appeared first, disembodied from the rest of it by the smoke, replaced by lumps of warpstone and glowing in the dark. Next came the power stones and vents and lightning-wreathed prongs of the fiendish cannon welded to the stump of its arm, followed by the red-painted armour that had been nailed to its hide. Finally, there came the brute itself, all twelve or thirteen feet of it, patchily covered with dark fur and fire-blackened skin and bulging like a brick pile with muscle.

The sight of the beast set Elsworn’s heart hammering, but her grip on her sword was surprisingly firm as she rose, putting herself between the unconscious Gotrek Gurnisson and the approaching rat ogor. A futile gesture, surely, for the rat ogor would slay her as effortlessly as she might stamp on a rat, but she refused to leave Gotrek at its mercy. The Fyreslayer would do the same for her, she knew, even if his reasons for doing so were his own.

The rat ogor roared, spittle flying from its splintered fang, and swung its arm cannon towards her. A series of powerful explosions thumped the air and Elsworn flinched, yet the bloody craters that appeared were not across her own chest, as she had been expecting, but across the rat ogor’s. Its lidless stone eyes peered blankly over her head, its brow furrowed in confusion, too stupid to be troubled by the pain but sufficiently perplexed by it that it appeared to have forgotten its intention to kill Elsworn.

There was another rattle of gunfire that Elsworn recognised this time as coming from Ironweld pistols and slaughter-fusils. She heard the bugling of the heralds and the clatter of hooves, saw the leaping orange-and-black swallowtails attached to banner poles and lances, and the Cavaliers of the Forgewrought Flintlocks galloped in, swinging their warhammers and swords in the air. They were followed by a swarm of infantry and Elsworn did not think that she had ever beheld a more welcome sight.

She saw Arilde Flathelm huffing ahead of a unit of red-faced Fusiliers, pausing to blaze away with her slaughter-fusil and blast another trio of meaty chunks out of the puzzled rat ogor, which gave a discontented growl before finally succumbing to the damage. It toppled over with a crash. Orinkul crushed a ratman’s skull with his club as it rose up out of the smoke to flee. And there was Tun even, short sword drawn but apparently unused, the old sergeant totally preoccupied with chasing after a fortune-teller with the flowing blue robes and lightning-haloed staff of a Celestial wizard. The wizard made a hand gesture, energies forming a corona around his wrist, and then sent an excoriating bolt of lightning streaking through the pall. A second rat ogor that Elsworn had not even seen until then gave a pathetically high-pitched squeal, its skeleton briefly flashing up against its blackened frame as the bolt went through it. The soldiers roared, Forgewrought and Loose Cannon and about a dozen other regiments that must have got swept along in the advance, and charged.

Squeaks of panic rang through the smoke as skaven that Elsworn had not even realised were that close to her turned tail and fled. She saw a ratman in dusky red robes and bronze plate armour scampering away with a purpose. It had thrown away its weapon, but with an immediate flash of recognition, Elsworn realised that this was the very skaven who had fired the rocket at her and Gotrek. Was this the skaven responsible for all of this destruction and death? It did not look exactly like the warlock they had chased through the canals from Arilde’s shop, but in the quality of its equipment it certainly had the look of a leader about it.

Fumbling in her pouch for a single one-ounce ball, she manually pushed it into her hot revolver’s firing chamber, swinging the weapon up and tracking the fleeing ratman with her aim. With her finger poised over the trigger, she hesitated. The figure vanished into the smoke and her chance at ending it disappeared with it.

She would not shoot a foe in the back as they fled. Not even an irredeemable creature of pure Chaos like the skaven.

A wave of weariness crashed over Elsworn. Suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to lie down alongside Gotrek and sleep until they cleared Battery Green again for next year’s tournament. With a grunt, she allowed her revolver to drop like a ton weight to her side. The skaven were routed.

It was over now.

They had won.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE TRAIL OF
THE SKAVEN

Greywater Fastness, in the days following the Battery Green massacre, was a shell of the city that Elsworn knew. It took a native like her to notice. The Hands continued to sound out the hours and, even a week or so on, people who had grown up with them in the background flinched at the sound. The chimneys of Long Smoke’s crematoria blackened the skies on the glut of corpses from the green. The factories were still open. Orders from across the Mortal Realms for swords, armour and guns continued to be honoured and filled. The trains ran on time. The workways never stopped, rumbling along through the heavy gloom like snaking columns of Deathrattle on some endless march.

But where the workers crowded onto the workway platforms would have been boisterous and animated, fired up by the forge-priests for a day of hard but worthy toil, now there was a sullenness that came with weariness, even fear. Those same preachers gave frothing sermons in denunciation of the skaven – surely the basest of all the Chaotic races for their rank mockery of human form and human industry. Workers travelled in towards the factories only in well-armed groups, and on their return they bypassed the taverns and theatres they would usually frequent in favour of spending their few free hours fortified inside their homes.

The wealthy had abandoned the Inner Circle altogether, taking their patronage and their money and their exuberant dashes of colour and withdrawing to walled estates and subterranean bunkers in the Great Axle.

Freeguild and Ironweld troopers patrolled the streets in unusual strength. Watches over the hub strongholds had been doubled. Cogforts on great caterpillar tracks ground up and down the five wide Spoke Roads like clockwork, bristling with cannons, driving the usual street traders ahead of them onto less-frequented streets. And most unusually in a powder keg like Greywater Fastness, no one complained.

There were even rumours that the Anvils of the Heldenhammer had been seen abroad of the Gravenstone, but to anyone who knew the city well, this was less a cause for hope than a portent of imminent doom.

As drastic as these changes felt, the city was nevertheless reassuringly Greywateran in its response to tragedy.

Almost overnight, stalls had popped up in the various flea markets offering repellents and lures, poisons, traps and charms, all of them guaranteed by one authority or another in their efficacy against the skaven menace. Entrepreneurial inventors touted their new rat-catcher rattletraps and bloody exhibitions were held in front of paying crowds. The hundred districts of the Outer Circle formed citizen watches, barricading their streets and leading torchlit searches of every loft, cellar and derelict shed. The steam lords strove to outdo one another in their displays of conspicuous patriotism, donating arms, money, and willing workers to the plethora of newly minted underjacking guilds with dashing names like the First Sewer Lancers, Rookery Lane Ratters, and Lord Meinhard’s Genteel Jacks. The printing presses had never been busier. Leaflets and flyers fluttered from every horizontal surface, promising rich rewards for proof of every skaven slain. Those theatres and taverns that the mood of fear had emptied wooed their patrons back with skaven-hunting parties, the better establishments even going so far as to outfit their amateur militias in branded heraldries and to provision regular stops for drinks.

It was hard to find a soul who would admit to crossing themselves with the hammer at the mention of Pale Oak, or averting their eyes from the statue of Alarielle in the House of the Great Alliance. The Menace Below were the true threat to Greywater Fastness and everyone had always said so.

Such was the explosion of paranoia, enterprise and religious fervour that every square inch of sewers must have been searched twice over by the time the week was out. It was testament to the labyrinthine nature of the old canal network that not a trace of the skaven was found.

It was as if their army had struck out of thin air, and then vanished afterwards without a trace.

Elsworn performed a last pat over her gear as she trotted down the stoop of her mother’s Burnt Arches tenement.

Her pistols were in their holsters, one on either hip. They had been dismantled, oiled, and painstakingly cleaned. Her pouches clinked with spare bullets and packets of black powder. She had a canteen filled with clean water and a week’s supply of distillation tablets so that she could refill it on route, several vials of Aqua Ghyranis, an old lantern that she had liberated from her stepfather’s vegetable cart, and a jam jar filled with powdered lighting reagent. Her sword was in its sheath. She curled her fingers around the grip, partly for the reassurance of feeling that it was there, but partly also because it was an awkward length when dismounted, and she did not want to trip herself on the steps.

Her armour still looked a state. Most of the colour had been scraped off the back when Comet had dragged her across Battery Green, while bloodstains and powder burns largely obscured the front. Elsworn found that she did not mind. In some strange way, she even approved. The pristine gear had been the pretty armour of a bored soldier. Now, it felt as though it belonged to a properly blooded warrior.

At the bottom of the steps, she thanked the grubby-faced boy who had watched her horse for her, handing over the small sack that she had promised in payment. Some trades were too small to transact in Aqua Ghyranis, and most Outer Circle residents lacked the expensive paraphernalia to properly measure and carry the lifewater anyway.

The barter economy was alive and well in Burnt Arches.

The boy opened up the sack and looked inside, giving a ‘whoop!’ before tearing off along the row of tenements to show the fresh vegetables to his mother.

Elsworn smiled, watching him go as she unlooped Comet’s reins from around the lamp-post. She gave the horse a hug, breathing in his strong, earthy smell. She did not know what had happened to him after the rocket attack that had so nearly accounted for herself and Gotrek, and was resigned to the fact that she never would. She was just grateful that he had survived with only superficial burns and had found his way back, hungry and cross, to his old stables at Greenway.

‘Elsworn, wait!’

She turned back to the house as Alicia flew down the stoop with her usual disregard for harm or dignity and flung her arms around Elsworn’s neck. The bigger girl knocked her onto her back leg, her sprained foot giving just the faintest of twinges to remind her that it was there. Though it ran against her usual sense of decorum, she gingerly returned the embrace, her arms tightening their squeeze as she recalled how it had felt to be so certain that her sister was dead.

It was Alicia who broke away first. She looked at her older sister gravely. ‘Good luck,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’

‘Do you think you’ll find them?’

‘I don’t plan on coming back until I do.’

Alicia had taken to wearing the badge of the local underjacking guild, the Burnt Arches Brigade, sewn onto her jacket sleeve. It had always been too much for Elsworn to hope that her ambitious, overeager sister would not seize on the same zeal for skaven-hunting as the rest of the city.

Just one more reason for Elsworn to find the skaven lair first.

‘And then?’ Alicia asked.

What had started for her as a bit of welcome adventure and, she freely acknowledged now, a mild sting to her pride had turned into something that she could not walk away from if she’d wanted to. The skaven had attacked her city. They had ruined her patron, they had endangered her family, and they had murdered countless thousands of others. She would not stop now until the cancer was rooted out and destroyed. She was not naive enough to believe that Greywater Fastness’ woes would be ended for good there – the Mortal Realms were too vast, and the city too great a prize for the forces of Chaos to leave unspoiled – but she would gladly lay down her own life if it meant ridding her home of this particular evil.

‘Then, I’m going to find the one responsible for Battery Green and see how well they fare against my sword.’

‘You and your honour,’ Alicia said, and tutted.

Elsworn smiled, giving her sister’s arm one final squeeze before letting go.

Her ideas of honour were childish, she knew, born out of ash and grief and the fires of industry. But they had given her something to lift her eyes from the grime and strive towards. Something that was worth fighting for when all around her was bleakness and toil, leavened only by strong drink, cheap theatre, and rowdy comradeship. Elsworn preferred to have her honour. It had seen her this far.

Unbuckling one of her treasured pistols, she held it by the barrel and presented the carved ironwood grip to her sister. Alicia looked at it as though it was a splinter of the Oak of Ages Past and would age her a thousand years in an instant if she allowed it to prick her skin.

‘You never did get to finish the tournament,’ said Elsworn, by way of an explanation. ‘But I saw you shoot. I dare say you would have ranked well.’ She offered the pistol again. ‘A bet is a bet.’

Alicia looked up, disbelief taking years off her face. ‘You’re giving it to me?’

‘It only seems fair, since my father left me with two.’

‘Does this mean I can come with you?’

‘Don’t push it.’

She looked up. Her mother was looking worried on the stoop in her work clothes. Her stepfather stood beside her with one arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders. He was a portly, umber-skinned man with thinning hair. He was wearing dirty brown overalls that always smelled of potatoes and a crumpled apron. He nodded at her. Elsworn nodded back.

She was doing this for them now, as much as she was doing it for herself.

Alicia, meanwhile, had slid the pepperbox under the waistband of her trousers and gave her another fierce hug. With nothing left to say, Elsworn returned it, wondering as she did so why it felt like it was for the final time.

She picked up Garvil and Tonan outside the Forgewrought garrison, a bleak fortification with a crumbling wall and a single tower held together by moss. It was sparsely populated at the best of times. Most of the Freeguild’s troops would be on deployment in the Ghoul Mere, garrisoning lonely outposts on the One Road through to Festermere. Those that remained generally preferred, as Elsworn always had, to billet themselves elsewhere in the city, rather than spend the night in its purportedly haunted rooms. Even the workers in the nearby businesses gave it a wide berth. The two horsemen were the only people about.

Tonan steered his impatient charger around to meet Elsworn halfway as she trotted up Hangman’s Lane towards the small keep’s open gate. Garvil remained where he was, hunched over the back of his old nag like a sack of potatoes, his nose in a book. He read on unhurriedly for a few seconds more before carefully dog-earing the page and sliding the book into the leather holster that hung from the offside of his saddle. He slid his glasses back up his nose.

‘Thank you both for coming,’ said Elsworn, with more feeling than she had expected.

The three of them had been through a lot together. They did not always get along, but in that, and in most other ways that mattered, they were more like family than their actual families. They were good men who, while she would never go so far as to label them honest, she would always trust with a blade at her back. Sergeant Tun had grumbled about having two more ‘hobby-horses’ in his sewers, but Elsworn had the nagging suspicion that they were going to need every sword-arm they could get.

‘Thank you for asking,’ Tonan said gruffly.

‘It’s not like we have jobs to go to,’ said Garvil.

Of all the Freeguild troops visible on the streets, the Forgewrought Flintlocks were conspicuous by their absence. Ciriline Zukaus had not been seen since the attack. The same went for her officers. Elsworn might have feared her patron dead, but a woman as prominent as Baroness Zukaus could not lie missing for a week without something turning up. Also, she had the strangest recollection of seeing her exit the battlefield, although the memory was annoyingly resistant to being pinned down. She put it down to the anarchy of the day. No doubt it would all come to her in time.

The baroness’ disappearance had, if nothing else, been serendipitously timed.

Chemists from the Ironweld Assembly had studied the debris left over from the Skyfire flare in the aftermath of the battle and determined it to be one sold to Ciriline’s mother eighty years previously. It was, as far as anyone knew, still rusting in the armoury of the Forgewrought’s decrepit, seemingly deserted bastion now.

First the steelworks. Then the old train line. Now this? Elsworn was obliged to consider the possibility that the baroness was involved in this plot somehow, either through complicity or carelessness or from being deliberately targeted by the skaven for reasons she did not understand. If only Elsworn, at least, had spent the occasional night in the Forgewrought garrison. Could she have prevented the deaths at Battery Green, or would she simply have died a few days or weeks before them, her throat slit in the night by a stealthy skaven dagger?

She did not blame herself, but neither could she absolve herself of all guilt for what had happened. If nothing else, they had been careless. But there was no point in torturing herself with what she might have done differently. All she could do from here was ensure that those who were truly to blame faced justice.

Tonan brandished a pair of rolled-up posters that he held clenched in one tattooed fist. ‘You say you’ve a lead on where the skaven might be, and that’s good enough for us. No way I’m going back to the workhouse.’ With the wary pride of a man in possession of a treasure map, the brawny Cavalier unrolled each poster in turn and showed them to Elsworn. She read them both slowly, and then gave a snort of laughter so sudden it startled Comet.

With typical Greywateran enterprise, Tonan had found one bill offering a quarter gill of Aqua Ghyranis for every skaven tail and another pledging half a gill for a skaven head.

‘We mean to fill our bags with the steam lords’ money and then take our chances on the One Road,’ said Tonan.

‘Before the Ironweld decides they’ve seen enough and pass their enquiry into the Forgewrought on to the Order of Azyr,’ Garvil added.

Over the years that Elsworn had known him, she had seen her fellow Cavalier face Sylvaneth and skaven alike with the same phlegmatic sigh, but the prospect of the witch hunters had him genuinely rattled.

Elsworn wondered if she should not be more worried. Ciriline Zukaus had never been popular, at least in part because she had put so little time or expense into trying to be, and even Elsworn, as lowly as she was in the grand schemes of Greywater politics, could see the scavengers circling. From rival dynasties with an eye on the Zukaus empire to egalitarian idealists on the Grand Conclave, sizing up a rare opportunity to bring down a member of their city’s unofficial, hitherto untouchable upper chamber, they were all suddenly out for their piece of flesh. The Forgewrought Flintlocks had not yet been officially disbanded, but it was only a matter of time. There were few enough of them inside the city as it was. Most had quietly put away their armour and slipped away, perhaps signing on with one of the new underjacking guilds newly flush with wealth, purpose and respectability.

It was sobering to think that, after everything that had happened, a skaven-infested sewer might actually be one of the safest places for her to be.

The three Cavaliers trotted side by side through the eerily busy-but-quiet thoroughfares of the Inner Circle. Most of the shops were boarded up and shuttered. Hand-painted signs over their windows declared the premises to be cleared out of all their stock, green X marks painted over doorways to show that they had been thoroughly searched with no trace of skaven found within. The street vendors had been pushed onto lesser roads, in part by the rumbling procession of the city’s cogforts, but also by the heavy military presence on the Spoke Roads, because very little that was traded out of handcarts and pop-up stalls was technically legal merchandise. The few brick-and-mortar shops that remained open were selling potholing supplies at enormously marked-up prices, ropes and shovels and light-making chemicals going for more than Elsworn had paid out for Comet.

Elsworn shook her head sadly. Self-interest could be a fine spur to action in some, but in others it was greed plain and simple. The city had laws against profiteering, but it looked as though the Freeguild had their hands full searching for the skaven and could not devote the manpower to enforcing them. She was just grateful that she had squirrelled away enough supplies of her own that she did not need to pay these prices now.

As they rode by one such shop, a small horde of beggar children came streaming out from the alley onto its backyard, running around marching soldiers and chasing eagerly after the three horses. Elsworn turned to look back, smiling as she watched them give chase. A flesh-and-blood animal larger than a small dog or a rat was an uncommon sight in Greywater Fastness, and with the matching orange heraldry that the three Cavaliers wore, they must have looked very wealthy indeed.

Wealthy, perhaps, but not generous.

Tonan brandished his sword in the air and snarled, causing the children to scatter like startled crows. A few of the soldiers looked up, but most did not appear to notice at all. Some sentries they are, Elsworn thought. But then, armed groups were not exactly noteworthy in Greywater Fastness at the moment.

Elsworn turned back around to look disapprovingly at Tonan.

The big man had the decency to look abashed. Freeguild Cavaliers were individualistic and brave and highly skilled, but not all of them were natural-born leaders, or exemplars of the Sigmarite virtues.

A few minutes later, Elsworn brought them off the Spoke Road and onto a smaller branch street that felt immediately familiar despite the more recent proliferation of displaced street traders. This was where she and Gotrek had emerged from the canal, after their aborted pursuit of the skaven paddle steamer.

Gotrek was there waiting for them, standing over an open drain cover and glaring murderously at anyone who came near enough to so much as threaten him with a bowl of soup or a good deal on some darning.

Rather like Elsworn herself, the Fyreslayer looked considerably the worse for wear for his ordeals at Battery Green. He was black and blue all over. His trousers were ripped. Parts of his beard were still black. A nasty cut to his lip had clearly become infected and swollen to the size of a gadberry. Elsworn liked to think that this would teach the Fyreslayer to bathe such obviously corrupted wounds in Aqua Ghyranis instead of beer, but she held out little hope that it actually would. In addition to his long roll of other unattractive qualities, Gotrek was also miserly with his money. Except, of course, where the aforementioned beer was concerned. Where the Cavaliers rode with bulging saddlebags and clinking pockets, Gotrek bore only his axe. It flickered dully in the smoke and the dust, its flames never still.

Gotrek himself looked similarly impatient.

‘Lass,’ he grunted, looking up at her.

She nodded back. ‘Fyreslayer.’

By some unspoken accord that had been thrashed out between the two of them after the battle, they had not spoken again about her saving his life at Battery Green. Despite his oft-stated desire for death, he did not seem too unhappy to have been denied it on this occasion. She got the impression that, when it came to the matter of his death, he was pickier about the specifics of it than he liked to let on.

‘You took your bloody time,’ he said.

Gotrek took a deep breath, thumping appreciatively on his barrel chest. ‘Get a lungful of that,’ he announced, his unnecessarily loud voice carrying off down the four tunnels. ‘Fresh air.’

Elsworn did not want to admit it, but the air did taste less poisonous down here in the canal than it had in the street they had just left. The ceiling sheltered it from the pollutants that were constantly sedimenting out of the sky. It was far enough away from the chemically poisoned bedrock under Arilde Flathelm’s shop, and not yet deep enough to cross those areas frequented by ghoul packs, mutants and skaven. It was strange how she had never noticed it before.

The ladder down from the street had brought them to a moderately large chamber, about the size of the entire ground floor of Elsworn’s house, with a high ceiling supported by arches. Dripping passageways led off in the four cardinal directions. The ground was slick with surface moisture. Sickly-looking slime moulds glistened where they caught the flickers of Gotrek’s axe.

The rest of the Loose Cannons were already assembled and, like Gotrek, appeared to have been waiting for some time.

Orinkul and Tun were in the midst of a heated debate over the providence of the ceiling stonework. Tun was adamant that the utilitarian architecture betrayed a pre-Maliti construction, while Orinkul countered that the old man was blind, senile, and a human who wouldn’t know a common sedimentary from a star-forged Azyrite metamorphic if one of them was to drop out of the heavens on top of him. They looked as though they could happily continue all day. Brigid and Bryony sat together against a wall, tossing stones at a puddle. Hod watched them amiably, listening to their nonsense chatter, so laden with shovels and picks and everyone’s spare gear that, even standing idle, he sounded like a prospecting supplies shop setting out its wares.

Elsworn felt a tremendous warmth on seeing them again. She had not realised just how much she had missed them during the battle at Battery Green, or how often she would stop and worry about them in the days afterwards. Somehow, in spite of her initial low opinion of their qualities, they had become as dear to her as her own family, their idiosyncrasies as familiar as those of comrades she had known for years.

Tonan looked around disgustedly as he and Garvil led the horses in. The Loose Cannons had not been idle, and Gotrek and Tun had already done some light scouting of the surrounding tunnels. They had found another entrance under one of the nearby shops (in spite of the green X that some other militia had painted on the door) that was large enough to bring in the animals. For the most part, the tunnels comfortably accommodated a mounted warrior. None of them had any idea how long they would have to spend down here searching, or how many miles of tunnels they could expect to travel. The Loose Cannons’ broken-down rattletrap pony was already there, hitched to a small field cannon in a limber. The underjacks all seemed very proud of it. Elsworn did not want to know where they had got it from.

‘It’s a sewer,’ said Tonan.

‘You missed your calling as a great thinker, didn’t you?’ said Garvil, mildly.

Tonan nodded in agreement, missing the sarcasm. ‘It’s too quiet.’

‘You get used to it,’ said Elsworn, only realising it was true as she said it. After her adventures with Arilde and the Loose Cannons, she really had grown accustomed to the underground quiet. It was not an entirely reassuring thought.

Quickly, she rattled off everyone’s names, introducing the underjacks to the Freeguild Cavaliers and vice versa. They regarded each other like estranged relatives who had been put in a room together and told to get along.

‘No Arilde?’ said Elsworn, once everyone had been introduced.

Orinkul snorted. ‘She sends her regrets, but she’s far too high and mighty to slum it with the likes of us.’

‘And she’s too rich to be tempted by a tenth share of the reward money,’ said Tun.

‘Good,’ Tonan growled under his breath. ‘More for us.’

‘That too,’ Orinkul agreed. ‘I hear she’s been advising the Grand Conclave, and assisting the Greycaps with their own search for the skaven lair.’

‘Well, that sounds like worthy work too,’ said Elsworn.

The duardin looked unconvinced. ‘She’ll be measuring the curtains in Gryphon Hall and insisting we call her Lady Flathelm of Long Smoke next.’

‘Wi shud av tall’d avon bout dis way,’ said Brigid.

‘What did she say?’ said Tonan, looking perplexed.

‘She said we ought to have reported this passage to the Greycaps ourselves,’ said Orinkul.

‘No,’ said Gotrek and Elsworn at the same time. They glanced at each other. Elsworn smiled. She did not think that she would ever truly know the Fyreslayer’s mind, but in that moment at least she felt an understanding pass between them. ‘No,’ Gotrek said again, this time more firmly. ‘We found the skaven first. They’re ours. The Freeguild might have got a head start, but we were hunting the skaven long before they decided to muck in. No one knows about this tunnel, but the lass and me.’ He looked at Elsworn, who nodded. With all the preparations she had been making for the Battery Green tournament, she had not even had the chance to mention it to Guildmaster Durst. And afterwards, it had quite slipped her mind until Gotrek had reminded her of it.

She pointed towards the westbound tunnel. ‘That passage there will take us right back to where Gotrek and I left the canal. The skaven were using it to transport secondstone waste stolen from Flathelm’s Reagents. According to Arilde, they were mining it for fuel, so it stands to reason they were taking it back to a lair of some kind. If we retrace our steps to the point where we lost them, then follow the canal on to the end, it’s bound to lead us to the skaven eventually.’

‘Eventually…’ said Tonan, sceptical.

‘I thought the whole point of us going to Battery Green was to rustle up a few extra sword-arms?’ said Orinkul.

‘Because we couldn’t search all of Greywater Fastness alone,’ said Elsworn. ‘But now half the city is looking.’ The greatest strength of the skaven, she had come to realise over these past days, was not their vast numbers or their fiendish technologies. It was their ability to lurk out of sight, conducting their evil business unseen and unsuspected by those in the Mortal Realms who might otherwise have had the means to oppose them. With their presence revealed, their power to terrify her had simultaneously withered. And the skaven were not alone in drawing strength from common cause. Her plan had worked, albeit not quite in the fashion that Elsworn might have hoped. ‘That doesn’t mean that we can’t still be the ones to find the lair ourselves.’

Gotrek nodded in agreement.

‘I still think–’ Orinkul began, before the Fyreslayer cut him off with a growl.

‘The furry buggers fired a cannon at me.’ Gotrek glared around him, his one eye conveying such menace that even hardened warriors like Garvil and Tonan, men who had faced the Pale Oak and been honoured for their bravery, looked down at their feet and fell silent. ‘That’s no death for a Slayer, and I mean to see they answer for it to my axe. If anyone here has a problem with that then they have a problem with me.’ The Fyreslayer looked around. ‘Well?’

No one spoke.

‘Good,’ Gotrek grunted. ‘That’s that settled then.’

The canal was not deep, but there was no towpath to follow alongside it. The Cavaliers rode through in single file, an underjack cautiously wading ahead of each horse with a rope fastened around their middle. The water was brackish and green. Dead plants poked their spindly fingers above the surface. It stank of old rot. The occasional splash and furtive ripple signalled that there was something alive down there, but whatever it was seemed content to leave the Loose Cannons be, and Elsworn had seen no sign yet of skaven. Or anything else for that matter.

They had rejoined the canal far enough downstream of Arilde’s workshop that the water was not immediately lethal, but even so Elsworn was secretly relieved to be safely on horseback. Lank strands of dirty wet hair dangled from Comet’s underbelly like dead men from a row of gibbets, but for the most part the water rarely lapped higher than his knees. Elsworn had a vial of Aqua Ghyranis with the horse’s name on it when they next had the opportunity to stop.

Gotrek walked ahead of her, the waterway halfway up his chest, soaking his beard, which lay straggled out over the stagnant surface like the roots of a weed. He held his axe above his head, swinging it first one way and then the other with whooshes of flame and vertigo-inducing migrations of shadow from wall to wall. Garvil rode behind her, led by Orinkul and Tun, and then Tonan, his sword drawn and ready, with Brigid and Bryony. Hod took up the rear, followed by the shuddering rattletrap, its limber sloshing like a waterwheel through the turgid stew.

Elsworn wondered how long it had been. She resisted the impulse to check her watch, if only because doing so would require her to loosen her grip on either Comet’s reins or her pistol. Just follow the canal to the end, she had said. It’s bound to lead us to the skaven lair eventually, she had said. But she had once again failed to appreciate just how big a maze this place was. She doubted even Tun, who had been with the Loose Cannons for almost a decade, had explored even a hundredth of its ancient passageways.

The canal had run as straight as an arrow for about a thousand yards before splitting into two. Elsworn had bit her lip, uncertain, but Gotrek seemed in no doubt of the way to go. ‘I can smell them,’ he had answered cryptically, when asked, before leading them left. The passage had branched and divided several times since then, Gotrek picking one path or the other each time without once stopping to consider. His certainty was reassuring, even if Elsworn had no idea what it was based on. He took to whistling tunelessly, which would have been annoying had they been strolling idly down Spoke Road Number One, never mind waist-deep in her distant forebears’ sewage hoping to surprise a skaven horde.

‘Do you have to do that?’ she said, having displayed the patience of a Lord-Ordinator in putting up with it for as long as she had.

Gotrek responded by whistling louder, and throwing in occasional half-growled lyrics. It was only then that Elsworn noticed how the off-key notes appeared to bounce off the high stone walls, echoing further into the gloom than the firelight could reach and returning subtly different sounds depending on the architecture of the tunnel ahead. It occurred to her that the Fyreslayer was not merely being flippant: he was sounding out the options ahead of him somehow, mapping the way before them using only the echoes of his voice and his own mind. Elsworn was struck by his ingenuity. Truly, Gotrek was a duardin of many hidden talents.

‘A simple enough trick,’ Gotrek admitted, when she brought it up, in that off-hand way that he reserved for comments on his more peculiar skills or questions about his past. ‘But like all things worth knowing, it takes time and hard work to master. Who in this fickle age of yours would be willing to put in the graft when all they need do is bind the right spell or bribe a willing god to do it for them?’

‘Would you teach me how to do it?’

Gotrek looked surprised. Just as quickly, his expression darkened.

‘If you live long enough,’ he said.

‘You told me after Daegal’s funeral that you’d seen this sort of thing before.’

Elsworn was not sure why she was still whispering, when Gotrek was freely shouting his replies back at her. It was as though she had become nervous of her own echoes, wary of what they might say, and to whom they might run. Even the steady clop of Comet’s hooves in the shallow water sounded incautiously loud. Silence was immeasurably worse, though. All manner of evil things lived in silence.

She needed to talk.

‘There’s little in this world I’ve not seen,’ said Gotrek.

‘A skaven invasion, I mean.’

‘Aye,’ Gotrek rumbled, not quiet as such, but deep, rippling the surface of the water like the tremor from some distant quake. ‘Once. Long ago.’

‘What happened?’

Gotrek shook his head. ‘That’s a tale I’ll not tell in this life.’

‘Does it have something to do with your wish to die?’

For the longest time, Gotrek was silent, to the point that Elsworn accepted he was outright ignoring the question, but then he held up one brawny fist and said, ‘Hold up. There’s something ahead.’

Elsworn squinted through the flickering glare cast by Gotrek’s axe into the shadows that still lay beyond it. At first she saw nothing, and despaired of ever doing so, but then she saw the thing that Gotrek’s keen duardin eye already had. Metal. A mooring ring, jutting up from the stone alongside the canal and glinting in the firelight.

‘Why have we stopped?’ Garvil murmured, behind her.

Elsworn turned in the saddle. ‘We’ve found something. Pass it along to Tonan and the others.’

While the Loose Cannons armed themselves in readiness, the two Cavaliers lit lanterns and hung them off their mounts’ bridles. Elsworn held hers aloft as she spurred Comet on, narrowing the aperture to leave only the tiniest of flames alight so that Gotrek could not complain too vociferously about the light in his eye. The illumination picked out a crumbling stone quay. The path was strewn with the wispy remnants of long-decayed ropes, bits of chain scattered about like the bones left behind after the flesh had gone. There were even a few crates still stacked up on the wharves waiting for boats that had never arrived, presenting an awkward mix of brittleness and calcified timelessness.

‘Where are we?’ said Elsworn, sweeping her lantern up and down the wharf.

‘I don’t know,’ said Tun. ‘We’ve gone right off the edge of any map I’ve ever seen.’

‘We’ve been heading in towards the Great Axle,’ said Orinkul, frowning up at the vaulted ceiling. ‘I’d hazard that we’re somewhere under Potbank, right by the First Wall. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was where boats left the original Greywater settlement bound for the realmgate at Festermere.’

‘I told you it was pre-Maliti,’ Tun whispered.

‘That was at least five miles back,’ the duardin snapped back.

‘There’s no way the skaven have been unloading cargo here,’ said Tonan gruffly.

‘What makes you say that?’ asked Elsworn.

‘Just look at it.’ Tonan gestured to the wharf with his sword. ‘The dust is six inches deep. Nobody’s disturbed this in centuries.’

As much as it pained her to consider doubling back and retracing their steps, she had to acknowledge that her fellow Cavalier made a good point. ‘We must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.’

‘Looks like it, but where?’

‘Maybe we should split up.’

‘Sounds like a sure way to a skaven knife in the back,’ said Garvil with, yet again, another very fine point. Elsworn was starting to wonder if Brigid and Orinkul had also been right about seeking help from the Greycaps. She had assumed that it would be a simple enough task to follow the canal to the skaven lair, and Gotrek’s confidence since had done little to dent that belief until now.

Gotrek, however, clearly having nothing to say since his mind was already made up, had reached over the side of the wharf with the eye of his axe and proceeded to poke the wire that had apparently been concealed there amidst the rubbish. Something in the darkness went twang. Elsworn flinched and, more by luck than judgement, felt the crossbow bolt whisk across her. It clattered dully off the wall behind her and then splashed into the water.

Elsworn stared after it, her hand pressed to her beating heart. The urge to shoot Gotrek in the back of the head became very strong.

‘Told you,’ he said, apparently well satisfied. ‘I can smell them.’

Elsworn stepped gingerly over the body of a skaven warrior. It was sprawled across the corridor, separated by about a yard from its head, which was still looking up with an expression of shock at the axe that had come down on it through a false panel in the right-hand wall. The blade hung across the corridor on a retractable wooden hinge. The blood on the blade had turned crusty, several days old at least. Elsworn ducked under it carefully, glancing back the way she had come as Tonan, Garvil, Tun, and the others picked their way through the litter of inventively murdered skaven dead. The Cavaliers had left the horses tied up on the wharf with the rattletrap, a plan that was looking more and more well judged by the minute.

She wished that she knew what had happened here. Why would the skaven booby-trap their own lair? Had there been a falling out over the defeat at Battery Green? The skaven had undoubtedly given Greywater Fastness some deep scars, but most of its leaders had survived and its citizens had clearly fought back harder than they had been expecting. Elsworn would not have been surprised to learn that they had taken almost as many casualties from the adventure as the people of Greywater. She simply did not know enough yet to say for certain.

She turned back, straightening up on the other side of the axe.

Gotrek was on all fours, his flame-wreathed axe smouldering on the floor beside him as he rooted around the skirting stonework like a boar hunting for truffles. Elsworn raised an eyebrow, but decided that the Fyreslayer had earned the benefit of a little doubt and, while he busied himself with whatever he was doing, performed a careful study of the wall in front of her. There was no sign of a doorway or a hidden nook. It was very much a dead-end.

‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ she mused aloud. ‘Why would the skaven fight so hard for a tunnel that goes nowhere?’

‘Because,’ said Gotrek, without looking up from whatever it was he was so intent on. ‘They’re not so in thrall to their dim eyesight as you humans are. Aha.’ He pushed a bit of decorative moulding with his finger and, to Elsworn’s astonishment, it sank into the stone. There was a muffled click and a door swung outwards from the wall on well-oiled hinges.

Elsworn stared in amazement. There had not been a single crack or a seam in the rock to suggest its presence. She would never have believed the door was there if she had not just seen it for herself, and even having done so she was still not entirely convinced.

Gotrek got up, not bothering to brush off the rubbish that his wet beard had picked up off the floor. He had never looked more like a rough-sleeping drunk with a stolen axe, and yet there was a manic gleam in his eye that made Elsworn feel wary. There was an excitement in him she had not seen before, now that the doom he claimed to seek was near.

‘The nose never lies, lass.’

Elsworn raised her lantern to peer over Gotrek’s head, but the passage was narrow and she saw little of note beyond more stone. She moved forwards for a closer look, but Gotrek held up a hand.

‘Wait.’

Hawking up a great gob of saliva, he turned to the newly revealed doorway and spat across the threshold. A rattle of gunfire set off down the corridor as a string of concealed, pre-cocked handguns discharged one after the other. Gotrek’s spit landed, gloriously unscathed, on the flagstones about six feet on, settling under a pall of powder smoke.

‘How in the world did you–’

Elsworn flinched as a fiery jet roiled down from the ceiling to incinerate the flagstone that Gotrek had just spat on. Two further jets, each one successively shorter than the one before, licked down until the flamethrower in the overhead cradle exhausted its fuel and Gotrek’s spit was most definitely no more.

Her mouth felt suddenly dry.

‘Sigmar…’ she breathed.

‘Now you can go,’ said Gotrek.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Aye, I’m sure.’

‘How?’

‘These traps are well done, but amateurish even so. Good enough to trick a human, to be sure, or a careless skaven, but not so clever as to fool me.’

It did not surprise Elsworn in the least to discover that the skaven were masterful trap-makers. It felt like an obvious fit for their cowardly nature and paranoia. ‘I would have expected something… I don’t know, different from the skaven. Something more inventive and insane than tripwires and crossbows.’

‘That’s because the skaven didn’t lay these.’

‘Then who did?’

‘That’s the question, isn’t it.’

Elsworn shook her head. This was making less and less sense the more she thought about it. They had come here following skaven. They had found skaven. The conclusion seemed obvious.

‘Who else could it be?’ she asked patiently.

‘I don’t know, but if I didn’t know better I’d say it was the work of a duardin.’

With Gotrek leading the way, they went on. Elsworn took pains to step only where he did, fully expecting to be met by some ingenious mode of dismemberment if she deviated by so much as a bootlace. The corridor was only twelve or thirteen feet long, but by the time Gotrek pushed open the creaky wooden door at the far end, Elsworn ached as though she had just scaled a cliff.

Gotrek stepped inside, his axe lighting up a long-buried chamber. Elsworn looked around with interest, venturing further in so that the others could enter behind her. It was a large room, made up of what once would have been several smaller rooms before the walls had crumbled in under the pressure of the city that had been built on top of it. She could almost imagine the place as a harbourmaster’s office or a labour exchange, administering to the movement of cyclestone and other goods along the canal, centuries before the full settlement of Ghyran. She felt a shiver at the closeness of such ancient history.

She went to a very old-looking desk that occupied the largest of the suite of rooms. It was strewn with papers. She ran her fingers through them. The original lettering was faded and they felt ancient. Curiously enough, however, every page appeared to have been written over a second time, covered front and back in densely handwritten gibberish. She shook her head and moved on. Bits and pieces of chair lay around the desk like dumped kindling. She frowned at the sight of an empty food tin lying amidst the detritus. This was not ancient. She recognised the name of the canning company embossed on the bottom of one of the tins. Looking up from it, she then saw, tucked into a back room and hurriedly buried under a heap of balled-up paper, what appeared to be a bedroll. She walked to it, shifting some of the paper around with her sword. Definitely a bedroll. She crouched down and sniffed it. Her nose wrinkled in disgust. A used bedroll at that. There was also a pocket crossbow propped up against the wall right beside it and a lantern with a little bit of fuel still in the reservoir. She touched the glass, not entirely surprised to find that it was cold.

Someone had been living here, and until quite recently too.

Oddest of all, however, were the walls.

When the room’s occupant had run out of old papers to pour their thoughts onto, they had turned to the walls. In a way, it reminded her of the major train stations and the workway junctions – how their walls were always plastered and replastered with flyers. But, instead of the usual patriotic notices, here there were maps and strange diagrams and long, long lists of nonsense interspersed with feverish crossings out and looping arrows to imply belatedly realised connections. Here and there, cryptic notes-to-self such as AT THE BRICKHALL CROSSING AGAIN – THE TRAINS!!! or simply WHY, underlined and circled and trailing a string of question marks.

Elsworn felt the ghost of a very disturbed soul.

While she studied the wall, Gotrek had walked over to the bedroll. He prodded it with his toe and, when it failed to fill the room with poison gas or explode, crouched down to investigate the other belongings that its former owner had left behind. Whoever it was, it looked to Elsworn as if they had abandoned the place in some hurry. Perhaps the moment the skaven discovered their carefully hidden front door.

‘This must be one of Brod Gurnak’s hideouts,’ said Tun, speaking in an awed tone as though he had just entered hallowed ground, turning around on the spot and looking up to take everything in.

‘The legendary underjack?’ said Tonan. ‘I thought he was a myth, like crocosuchians in the sewers under Mere Keep.’

Brigid whispered something to her younger sister, Bryony, who smirked, but offered no opinion on the mythical nature, or otherwise, of giant reptiles under Grey Gate.

‘Look at this place,’ said Tun. ‘It’s Brod all right.’

‘The work he’s covered the walls in certainly looks mad enough to have been Brod’s,’ Orinkul acknowledged, before adding with a sour grunt, ‘I suppose.’

‘Looks like we just missed him,’ said Gotrek. ‘Pity.’ The Fyreslayer got up from the bedroll he had been examining and turned towards them. ‘This Brod. He’s the Loose Cannon you mentioned before. The duardin.’

‘The mad one,’ said Orinkul.

‘The legend,’ Tun corrected.

‘Disappeared one night and went to go live like a rat?’ said Gotrek.

‘That’s right.’

‘It would certainly explain a few things if this was his,’ said Elsworn.

Like the skaven bodies piled up outside, for instance, and the decidedly excessive attention to booby-trapping the place. It also explained how Gotrek ended up leading them all here by mistake, for the scent of skaven was almost ripe enough for her to have followed it, and was surely fresher than any trail that the skaven plundering Arilde Flathelm’s waste chemicals had left behind. But it did not change the fact that Tonan had been right – they had quite clearly taken a wrong turn somewhere.

‘Look at this,’ said Tun, joining Orinkul by the long wall opposite the entrance, staring up at the scrawl that filled it. His finger traced a series of lines that might have represented passageways, careful not to disturb the chalk. ‘He’s been mapping the tunnels. I recognise some of this, but… there are whole sections here that even the guilds don’t know about.’

Elsworn did her best to see what he was seeing. She could just about reach the starting premise of a map, bits of it even looked vaguely familiar, but she could not make heads nor tails of it. Fortunately, she had with her two Loose Cannon underjacks who had turned their obscure knowledge of Greywater Fastness’ subterranean byways into a fiercely competitive hobby.

‘This must be us here,’ said Tun, indicating a symbol on the right-hand side of the wall that meant nothing at all to Elsworn.

Orinkul grunted, agreeing without admitting to agreeing, and lightly rapped on another nearby section with his club. ‘And this X he’s marked here, that will be my cousin’s workshop. I recognise the layout of the tunnels around it.’

‘Look,’ said Tun, his finger moving again as he turned to face Elsworn. It settled on another chalk X. His sallow, whiskered cheeks creased with a grin. ‘It’s the old steelworks where we first ran into you.’

Elsworn did not immediately answer. It felt like a lifetime ago.

She frowned up at the map. Tun’s comment had jogged loose a related thought. Arilde’s shop and the steelworks were both Zukaus properties. The wall was covered in similar X marks, scores of them, and suddenly Elsworn saw why the map had felt so familiar. She had seen it before, hanging on the wall in Marshal Ordo’s study in the Forgewrought garrison.

It was a map of all the Zukaus family holdings in Greywater Fastness.

Given the unlikelihood that a skaven-obsessed ex-underjack would make special note of those locations for any other reason, Elsworn made the leap that they indicated skaven activity. The realisation hit her like a punch in the stomach. She had already started to entertain the notion that the skaven had been deliberately targeting Ciriline Zukaus’ abandoned properties, but she would never have imagined that they had been working on this scale. They must have been working methodically for months, if not years, pillaging tools and materials, long before Elsworn had stumbled across their activities just a few short weeks ago.

Elsworn saw now that she had barely scratched the surface of what the skaven must have been building in secret.

She frowned suddenly. Looking at the wall in this new light, she could not help but see the one prominent location that wasn’t on Brod Gurnak’s map, one very old Zukaus property that even a mad underjack with nothing on his hands but time would struggle to stumble across by chance, a place so well guarded and secret that she doubted even the Anvils of the Heldenhammer would have thought to look for the skaven there. But it was the missing piece that completed the whole puzzle.

She knew exactly where the skaven were hiding.

‘Tun,’ she said, in a voice so strange that the grey-bearded sergeant checked his debate with Orinkul and looked across at her. ‘With this map, do you think you could find your way to Greywater Lock from here?’

Gotrek stomped over to join them. ‘Isn’t that the big Freeguild fortress? Why would we want to go there?’

Elsworn turned back to the map.

Today, Greywater Lock was the great fortress of the Greycaps Freeguild, barring ingress across the First Wall as well as serving as a heavily guarded road, rail, and workway hub for the entire eastern rim of the Inner Circle. In ages past, however, Elsworn knew that it had once been a hub of a different kind. The name, Greywater Lock, had not come about by accident. It had been a customs house on the old canals, with the modern fortress standing over some of the largest, best preserved, and most direct waterways in and out of the old city. Unlike Greywater Lock, the old part of the city now went by a different name.

They called it the Great Axle.

‘Because I know where the skaven are,’ said Elsworn, planting her finger slap in the middle of Brod Gurnak’s map.

All this time, the skaven had been hiding right under their noses.

The lair was abuzz with activity. Skaven charged up and down the corridor carrying equipment and, for once, Blastritt obliged them by stepping aside to let them pass. That meddlesome Fyreslayer and his human lackey! Not content with slaughtering half of his troops and coming within a mouse’s whisker of killing his brother, they had also forced a dangerous shortening of a painstakingly prepared timetable. And there was still so much work to do. The reactors were running at full tilt. He could taste the fumes on his whiskers, even through the mask he wore over his muzzle, and could feel the vibrations that made his claws go tit-a-tat on the floor. The wall-lights flickered in their sconces, like electrical flies trapped in glass jars, growing dim even as the reactors turned vast quantities of the second-secondstone into power. The demands of turning on the great machine drained the warren’s grid as quickly as it could be filled.

Anxiously at first, and with some trepidation, Blastritt unzipped the leather mask and pulled it away from his snout. He raised his nose and took a last sniff of the place he had called home for several years. Practically a lifetime, by skaven standards.

The skaven mind, he knew, was hardwired to seek out safe and comfortable spaces and this place, for all that it was many leagues from the rest of his clan and in the heart of his enemies’ greatest stronghold, had been that place for the longest time. He gave the rusty iron wall an affectionate pat. It had been stone when he and Sprarrk had first stumbled across the hidden entrance beneath the abandoned train station. Exiled from the great warren of Skryre’s Lock by Arch-Warlock Skitterclank, denounced for their sacrilegious experiments and dangerous genius, condemned to wander the perilous underways of Greywater alone.

They should have perished, but they had had each other, and they had had Scuttlegnawer, and they had found their way to this place. To its skeleton of stone corridors, they had laid down a circulatory system of cables, and welded to it a skin of steel, iron and brass. It had become the foundation of their great work.

Reluctantly, he withdrew his paw, refastening his mask around his snout. He would miss the place. He would miss these mortal senses that had allowed him to appreciate it.

Such was the price of progress.

Funny how the closer he came to his and his brother’s final apotheosis, the less keen about the idea he felt. He was not even sure now whose idea it had been in the first place. He told himself that a few last-minute jitters were totally understandable, given the circumstances. It was not every day that a skaven realised the fulfilment of his life’s work. Nor, he squeamishly conceded, did he expect the shedding of his mortal form and the merger of his soul with his twin’s to be a completely pain-free experience.

He came to a doorway just as a team of engineers welded it shut, flying sparks making their goggled faces look like those of daemons. Blastritt swallowed nervously and scurried on. Not that he had been thinking of slinking out through that door and going anywhere, of course. Certainly not. No. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was just checking that all of the exits were properly sealed, that was all, and it certainly appeared that that was the case. He silently congratulated his engineers on their attention to detail.

Nothing could be allowed to interfere with the machine once it had been switched on.

Despite the flurry of last-minute activity, the lair was unusually empty, and Blastritt decided to put his gnawing sense of disquiet down to the absence of his fellow skaven. Once the machine was fully up and running then Blastritt and Sprarrk, with Scuttlegnawer’s unwilling aid, would be able to operate it entirely by themselves. The warren itself would require only a skeleton detail during that time, mostly to patch up any faults that the stresses of the process itself would cause, and having too many idle paws around the place would only cause trouble. They might even, once the transference reaction was fully under way, start to entertain rash thoughts of escape or even sabotage.

They were going to conjure a greater daemon of the Horned Rat and seize its body. Some said that it was impossible. A part of Blastritt secretly hoped so.

Whatever happened, he expected it to be terrifying.

He gulped and scurried quickly on.

Where was Klatch One-Ear when he needed him? To his irritation, he found that he actually mourned his lackey’s absence, for some of Klatch’s bushy-tailed keenness would have been most welcome just then. After he had returned from his attack on the surface with a pawful of singed clanrats and a breathless tale of how he had so very nearly almost killed the Fyreslayer, Sprarrk had tossed the young warlock out on his tail and ordered the doors barred behind him. Blastritt had wanted to disagree, but he and Sprarrk never disagreed. He had the horrible suspicion that if they ever did, they would not stop again until one of them was dead. And until Blastritt could be absolutely certain that that one was not going to be him, he would bite his tongue and keep his disagreements to himself.

He scurried into his workshop in a clank of heavy armour and a nervous hiss of leaking gases that quickly cleared the floor around him. The familiar burrow was otherwise crammed with bodies, skaven workers fixing and cutting and welding, hiding unsightly bundles of cables behind metal panels, adjusting the big black leather seats installed in place of Blastritt’s old workbench, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. His brother, Sprarrk, was already there, encased in armour that could have been copied from Blastritt’s own, lashing his tail anxiously as he looked up into the newly fitted window. It faced out onto solid rock.

For now.

Looking at his brother, Blastritt wondered what he was thinking. Then he scolded himself for his foolishness. He would be thinking the exact same thing that Blastritt himself was thinking.

‘Does your snout not twitch with excitement?’ he chittered, hoping, perhaps, to be reassured.

Sprarrk flinched, as though Blastritt had just trodden on his tail, and threw a cornered glare over his shoulder. ‘Yes? Who says it does not?’

‘What? No one.’

‘Was it Scuttlegnawer? Because he lies! My snout twitches. It twitches harder than any rat’s. Does yours?’

‘Yes?’

‘Good-good,’ said Sprarrk, looking less than mollified. ‘We are both excited.’

‘Yes-yes,’ said Blastritt.

‘Good.’

Sprarrk looked as though he wanted to say more, only to have the excitable squeal of an alarm distract his attention. The busy engineers had installed a control panel under the window, filling it with a skaven’s fever dream of levers, knobs and buttons, and an array of dazzlingly complicated-looking dials. A bulb was flashing red over a gauge with a lightning-bolt symbol to indicate that it reported on the reactor subsystems. Its wobbling needle was prodding dangerously into the red quartile.

‘We are at power!’ Blastritt squealed, running over to look at the dial, all his unease over the coming transformation forgotten in the sudden thrill of seeing his invention coming online. Soon now. Very soon. Another leakage of poison gas, this one brought on by excitement rather than nerves, alerted the skaven working nearby to flee as Blastritt practically threw himself back into the chair they had been preparing for him.

Unlike the workshop’s other furnishings, and indeed most of the great machine if he was being brutally honest, the two cockpit chairs had not been patched together from cast-offs. They had been lovingly hand-engineered to Blastritt and Sprarrk’s unique specifications, crafted to accommodate the superior skaven form, with a curved back, short limbs, and a hole in the bottom for a tail to slither through.

He wriggled himself comfortable, looking across the bulky partition between them as his brother did exactly the same thing, two sets of identical paws at two sets of identical controls. A large, red-handled lever at Blastritt’s left paw was mirrored by the one to Sprarrk’s right. Blastritt longed to pull it. His natural skaven curiosity was eager to find out what would happen if he did, irrespective of the danger.

Sprarrk looked as if he was thinking the very same thoughts.

But the reactors were well and truly working now. Blastritt could feel their awesome power as it shivered through the cushion of his seat from the reactor chamber directly below.

‘It is time!’ he squealed.

In unison, they raised their gauntlets, Blastritt’s right and Sprarrk’s left, pushing the vambrace buttons to unlock the slot that held their piece of Scuttlegnawer’s daemonic soul. Blastritt threw his brother a worried look, and Sprarrk, of course, threw one of his own right back. The Verminlord, bound and caged and divided into two even halves, had been the energising force behind their creations for so long. For a few seconds at least, they would both be quite helpless. Keeping his eye on Sprarrk to ensure that he was not waiting for Blastritt to go first, feeling more than a little wounded to notice Sprarrk making the same check of him, he inserted his claw into the release catch.

The scorched glass marble rolled out of its slot and into Blastritt’s waiting paw. It felt far too heavy for its tiny size, pushing his arm down towards the floor. Blastritt reassured himself that this was nothing more than a trick of the mind. With the Verminlord’s empowering presence removed, his armour was running on conventional warpstone fuels and his strength had been much diminished. That was all it was.

‘It is time,’ the marble seemed to chitter.

He sensed Scuttlegnawer scratching at the inside of the glass, desperate to break out, but at the same time eager, as though all its reticence thus far had been a ruse to achieve some goal of its own. Blastritt shook his head. It was impossible for the Verminlord to exert a magical influence over the world beyond its prison, and yet – and yet – he could not help but wonder if some of its eagerness had not penetrated his paw, for before he even knew what he was doing he was pushing that small marble into the slot in the control panel that the skaven engineers had prepared for it. The machine accepted it with a clunk. Buttons across both halves of the panel lit up in a giddying display. The entirety of the burrow seemed to groan around them, as if iron muscles flexed against bones of stone, and strange and unholy life flowed into nerves of bundled copper and veins carrying liquified gases. Blastritt felt his stomach tie itself in knots.

Scuttlegnawer had been safely transferred into its new prison. The penultimate stage was complete. It was in the machine. There was no turning back now.

Not that he wanted to, of course.

‘Ready, brother?’ he squeaked, trying to sound unafraid.

‘You sound nervous-scared.’

‘Me? No-no! I am only excited to begin.’

‘Good-good,’ said Sprarrk, belatedly adding, ‘Me too.’

CHAPTER NINE

GREYWATER LOCK

Greywater Lock was an imposing fortress, thrusting up from a corner bastion of the First Wall like a lantern of battlemented grey stone. Lights shone from a thousand narrow windows, for though there were parts of the city that daylight sometimes touched, here amidst the fumes of its beating heart it was always night. And in the smoky halo of its keep, a crown of iron: railway tracks and workways and pedestrian bridges, all converging there before looping out across the surrounding rooftops. This was the Greywater Lock that Elsworn knew well. Fortress. Transport hub. Home of the Academae Martial, where she had trained. She had certainly never approached it from below, as she did now.

Dozens of wide, rubble-strewn canals criss-crossed the subterranean hall like ditches across an old battlefield. Here and there, Elsworn could make out the work of mortal hands, the curve of an arch, a weathered bas-relief, but otherwise it more closely resembled a cavern buried by an act of god. The canals branched and crossed one another, serviced by vast turntables and locks. Huge, rusting cranes that, in ages past, would have been used to hoist entire barges from one canal to the next listed like dead trees after a fire. Crossing it would be like traversing a maze.

There were at least nine major tunnels that Elsworn could see, and probably any number of lesser exits that she could not. Most of the obvious ways in or out had been gated, or else deliberately caved in, for the Greycaps were not entirely oblivious to the danger that an unmapped network of underground passages surely posed. Only those in the best repair had been kept open and saw occasional use, keeping the fortress supplied by barge when the roads were busy or a certain level of secrecy was deemed necessary. Rough brickwork and patches of white plaster indicated the sites of ongoing maintenance. They were lit by low-burning torches that sent tentative fingers of reddish light poking across the ruined lock. Nor had these ways been left undefended. The green, sluggish water of the canals sluiced through sturdy iron water gates, the towpaths rendered impassable by stockades of well-packed rubble topped with sharpened wooden stakes.

The centrepiece of these subterranean fortifications was the Undergate, the fortified underground doorway into Greywater Lock and a small castle in its own right.

The old stronghold, as Elsworn recalled from her own time as an officer candidate, was out of bounds to all but a few senior commanders and most Greycaps never ventured down below. The care of the ruins, as Tun had explained on the way, had been farmed out to a dedicated troop, still officially Greycaps but independent in all but name. They called themselves the Black Watch. Elsworn had heard only rumours, and was surprised to discover that Gotrek and the other Loose Cannons knew a lot more about them than she did. While the underjacking guilds and the Black Watch had their own areas of responsibility, it appeared that they stepped on one another’s toes on a semi-regular basis.

It was, by tradition, a predominantly duardin troop, doughty heavy infantry in long coats of unbreakable gromril mail supplemented by Irondrakes, armoured specialists wielding grenade launchers or flamethrowers, weapons capable of clearing whole tunnels of vermin or felling a troggoth before it could come near. The duardin Ironbreakers were solid, but slow.

When the defence of the Undergate called for a swift offensive, the Black Watch maintained a few small units of aelven corsairs for that purpose.

An aelf of any kind was a rare sight in Greywater Fastness, and few more so than the Scourge privateers. The Greywater Reach was landlocked by the great continent of Verdia. It had no need of a navy and never had. The city did not even have a river. How a dozen or so families of cold-hearted aelven smugglers had come to reside in the city’s canals was thus a mystery that no one had ever solved. By all accounts, however, they had been there for centuries, and continued to ply the old waterways on a flotilla of small boats, moving untaxed goods in and out through little-known outlets in the Ghoul Mere.

Despite their questionable devotion to law and order, the Scourge were as naturally adept at tunnel-fighting as any duardin. Reaper crossbows and naval cutlasses made deadly weapons at close quarters, while cloaks of sea-dragon scales provided protection that was at least as good as any mail coat. Their senses were supernaturally acute, sharper even than those of a duardin, and they were a notoriously paranoid breed.

Elsworn had spent most of the long hike through the canals debating with Gotrek how best to sneak past such eagle-eyed sentries, but surveying the scene before her now, she quickly realised that this was not going to be her biggest problem.

The far end of the lock was teeming with skaven.

The stretch of fortifications that ran across the coreward exit, towards the Great Axle, was now a heap of rubble. Bits of it still burned, stubborn patches of skaven warpfire scalding the paws of rag-wearing clanrat warriors as they surged through the breach like a verminous flood. Warriors, weapon teams, and ramshackle war machines swarmed along the ancient wharf, where they were met by hails of reaper fire and dour, immovable blocks of duardin Ironbreakers.

Powder smoke and plumes of mustard-coloured poison gas wreathed the battlefield. Elsworn was just able to make out a corsair captain, a hard-faced aelf woman in darkened silver mail and with a crown over her short, spiky black hair, as she charged up the steps of the Undergate. Elsworn watched as the aelf vigorously cranked a handwheel, causing a high, whining alarm to reverberate through a set of vast metal pipes and ring out across the ceiling of the lock.

The skaven must have attacked suddenly, for there was no sign yet of any relief in the form of disciplined Greycaps soldiers from the garrison above. Unless, of course… A truly horrendous thought occurred to her. She still did not know what the skaven were hoping to accomplish with all of the raw material and realmstone they had been gathering, or what kind of strength they had amassed here. What if they laid siege to Greywater Lock from above, even as they flooded its defences from below? For all she knew, the skaven could have been running amok through the Inner Circle for the entire time that she and the Loose Cannons had been wandering lost through the sewers.

She pushed the thought to one side. There was no way to know for sure, and even if all of her worst fears were to come true, there was nothing she could do about it from here. The only decisive action she could take was to do exactly as she had already planned to do – locate the skaven lair, execute their leaders, and put paid to whatever evil plans they had at whatever stage of completion she found them.

She tried to think. The skaven had evidently struck from the direction of the Great Axle, which fitted with her theory of where the lair must be, while she and the Loose Cannons had arrived in the opposite direction, from a rimward passage to the south-east of the Undergate. The fiercest fighting was happening some distance away, and so she had a little time in which to consider her next move. Already, however, she could see large groups of skaven skirmishers, growing frustrated with the implacable gromril shield wall of the Ironbreakers, scurrying in her direction in a bid to outflank them. Really, it was only the thick smoke and the mayhem that had kept even one of them from spotting the small band of horsemen and underjacks already.

‘There’s no way we’re reaching the Great Axle this way.’

‘Follow me, lass,’ Gotrek growled, brandishing his axe. ‘I’ll show you the way.’

‘Gotrek, even you can’t think that you can fight your way through an entire skaven army.’

‘Watch me.’

‘Shouldn’t we fetch help?’ Tun muttered under his breath, peering at the battle from behind a hunk of fallen ceiling and wincing at every flicker of warp lightning and shrill-voiced skaven cry.

Brigid and Bryony had fallen uncharacteristically silent. They looked small, clutching small daggers in small hands, huddled together with the rattletrap and their limbered demi-cannon. Orinkul fiddled nervously with his club. As a weapon, it was perfectly adequate to the task of coshing lone ghouls over the back of the head in the dark. It was decidedly less well suited to pitched battle with a well-equipped skaven horde. From the bleak look on the duardin’s face, he was realising this only now.

‘I hate to be the one to say it, but we are the help,’ said Tonan.

Elsworn shook her head in frustration.

In truth, she wanted nothing more than to lead her fellow Cavaliers into the back of that horde in a glorious charge, to break three thousand with three or die trying. But she carried a greater burden of responsibility now. A massed skaven assault on the largest, most well-fortified position outside the Great Axle could only mean that something big was in the process of happening. She thought of Alicia and her family, their friends in Burnt Arches, of everyone in Greywater Fastness who, knowingly or not, was counting on Elsworn to put a stop to the skaven here. As far as she knew, she and her companions were the only ones who had put together the various clues to deduce the location of the ratmen’s lair. They simply could not afford to tarry here, however noble the idea of recklessly riding to the relief of the Black Watch might play inside her own head.

‘You’re going to frown yourself to an early grave,’ said Gotrek, looking up at her.

‘I need to think.’

The Fyreslayer shook his head. ‘Believe me, I’ve spent nigh on an eternity looking towards the next fight but one. But I was chasing a thing that won’t ever be caught. You asked me once how I ended up in Greywater Fastness, and that’s your reason. Because, when it comes down to it, you can only fight one battle at a time, and any one might be your doom. And what if it is? Will the realmsphere stop turning? Will Azyr fall out of the sky? Hah! A dwarf can hope. So let’s fight the battle in front of us and worry about the next one after, if there must be an after for you or I.’

Elsworn blew the air out from her cheeks. She realised that everyone except Gotrek, Freeguild and underjack alike, was looking at her for direction. Without ever demanding or expecting it, she seemed to have become their leader. One battle at a time… She turned the concept over in her mind.

Ever since her first encounter with Gotrek, she had been thinking of him as an obstacle between herself and the advancement she had sought within her Freeguild. Now that she stopped long enough to consider it, she realised how right Gotrek was.

Just look at where she was now.

She was standing at the periphery of a great battle, having covered herself in about as much glory as a sane woman could ever ask for, and all while she had been too busy following Gotrek to think about it.

A smile crept across her face.

‘All right, Gotrek,’ she said. ‘We’ll try it your way.’

Their straight shot across the lock went unnoticed for about as long as it took for Gotrek to wave his axe in the air and yell that he was coming.

Elsworn cursed as a rattle of musketry sounded from a nearby rubble heap. She flinched, hearing the tainted bullets buzzing like wasps as they zipped by her head. One spanked off the scuffed brass plate of the rattletrap’s chest, causing the unsteady machine to stagger. The underjacks went to ground around it, the big and ungainly Hod sufficing himself with turning his back on the incoming fire and hunching his shoulders, the plethora of pots and pans he was carrying surely equating to an arch-knight’s plate armour and then some.

The initial flurry of fire turned into sputtering volleys as individual skaven marksmen reloaded as quickly as they could. Their aim was as poor as their fire discipline, but the optimistic torrent was enough to make the underjacks keep their heads down.

Only Gotrek was steaming ahead for the lock over the first canal. The narrow, V-shaped span was the first of several crossings they would have to make before reaching the Undergate.

Elsworn took a deep breath. One battle at a time. She had been right about one thing, at least. They were not going to be breaking through to the Great Axle using the canals; there were simply too many skaven between here and there. But Gotrek was unwittingly onto something. This was Greywater Lock. If they could just fight their way through to the Undergate and climb the stair, then they could have their pick of road, workway, or rail once they made it to the top. And with any luck, the Greycaps would be far too busy dealing with a skaven invasion to trouble themselves too much with a few scruffy-looking mercenaries in their castle.

‘Stay with Gotrek,’ she barked across at Tun, the old man looking even more haggard than usual as he hurried, almost bent, on the other side of the rattletrap.

Brigid gave a cry and fell against the limber, a new hole in her patched-up leather jerkin. She whimpered as she pressed her hand to the shoulder, blood slowly leaking up between her fingers. Bryony screamed something unintelligible and stopped moving altogether to tend to her.

The skaven kept on shooting.

‘Let’s just leave the blasted gun here and leg it!’ Orinkul bawled, brawny hands clasped over the limber’s tailboard and pushing, flinching every so often as a skaven bullet pranged the bodywork or struck a spark off the cannon.

‘Not yet,’ Tun shouted back, even as a tear-stricken Bryony dragged her wounded sister around the back and, between herself and Hod, threw her in alongside the cannon.

Elsworn drew Comet around, sizing up the potential for a charge on the skaven position. The ground was broken, strewn with rubble and hidden pitfalls, the absolute bane of the mounted warrior, but Elsworn had never heard of a skaven cavalryman before and was hoping that this lot wouldn’t know that. ‘Yah!’ She slammed her heels into Comet’s ribs, his hooves grinding the smaller pieces of rubble into a fine powder as he flew across the intervening ground. A few skaven loosed terrified pot-shots before running away, but the rest simply turned tail and scattered, some even throwing their guns to the ground in an attempt to speed themselves on their way. The dangerous footing forced Elsworn to rein in well short of the skaven position, but she fired a couple of shots after them just to focus their minds on fleeing.

Tonan and Garvil arrived a moment later.

‘Ride on that way until you hit the canal,’ Elsworn called to them both, waving furiously after the broken skaven with her still-steaming pistol. ‘Keep them off the underjacks’ flank while they cross, then double back to join us.’

‘Sigmarsday soldiers,’ Tonan muttered, using the slur that described how most Freeguild viewed Greywater Fastness’ vast army of citizen irregulars, spurring his horse into a canter before Elsworn had the chance to defend her companions’ honour. Garvil gave her a wry smile as he passed Elsworn and Comet at a more measured trot. A Greywater horse might take its time, but it always got there in the end.

Elsworn wheeled Comet around and looked back.

Gotrek was already over the lock and had been mobbed by clanrats. Thirty or forty of them had rushed him all at once, trying to drive him back with their spears. They would have had better luck trying to stop a runaway train. Tun, meanwhile, having guided the rattletrap as far as the bend in the lock, drew his short sword and rushed to Gotrek’s aid. Left to its own limited set of preprogrammed ideas, the rattletrap blithely ploughed into the skaven left in Gotrek’s wake, pulling the limber and its passengers along behind it like an unconvincing second-hand steam tank. Bryony stabbed frenziedly over the sideboards in defence of her sister. Hod stamped down on furry fingers as terrified skaven clung on to the tailboard, dragged along in the unlikely war machine’s wake. It was all Orinkul could do to charge after it.

Comet clattered over the narrow lock, threading that needle and making it look easy. Elsworn leant over as he trotted on, dispatching a skaven warrior who had been playing dead with a blow from her sabre.

A second canal barred the way ahead, but, fortunately for the underjacks, the skaven had already made an attempt at fording it, laying down a set of planks to fashion a crude bridge. Gotrek was busily slaughtering himself a path towards it.

Elsworn could just make out the embattled Ironbreakers on the other side. Clad from head to foot in rings of gleaming mail, round shields embossed with runes of invulnerability. A mass of ferocious, furry bodies swirled around them, but Elsworn had never seen a group of fighters so perfectly suited to a single task. With their flanks anchored by the waterways and the terrain breaking up the skaven horde into more manageable numbers, those fifteen duardin were ably holding up fifteen hundred with, as far as Elsworn could see, no losses of their own.

An iron-masked duardin in the rear ranks with a dribbling flamethrower waved for the underjacks to hurry across the plank bridge. Too grateful for the assistance in decimating the skaven flank, it seemed, to worry overly much about the strange and unlikely form that assistance had arrived in.

Gotrek was onto the plank bridge and pounding across before a person could say Grungni.

Overtaking Orinkul, who was still huffing along behind, Elsworn drew in alongside the moving limber. She looked in, surprised but relieved to see Brigid sitting upright against the cannon. She looked drawn, however, very pale, and as her eyes came up to meet Elsworn’s, it did not feel as though the girl was entirely there.

‘Mi’ll liv,’ she mumbled.

‘You will,’ said Elsworn, firmly, drawing a small vial of Aqua Ghyranis from her sleeve and throwing it to Bryony, who caught it. The smaller girl stared at more wealth than she had ever seen, gobsmacked.

‘Hark at how the other half live,’ Orinkul grumbled, catching up just in time to see Bryony take the vial.

‘Apply a few drops to the wound after you take out the bullet,’ Elsworn said to Bryony. ‘Make sure they go into the wound. Then have her drink the rest.’ With that said, she drew Comet aside and left the limber to roll on without her.

She was, on some level, still coming to terms with the fact that she had just handed over a week’s wages for a job that she was not entirely sure she still had. On another, she was not at all sure that she cared. She had allowed her pursuit of personal glory to condemn Daegal to a slow and agonising end. That was something she would have to live with, but she could ensure that the same fate did not befall Brigid too.

With a clatter of silvered hooves on stone, Tonan and Garvil rode to rejoin her. With a little discipline and some actual leadership, the skaven should have had the right weapons and sufficient numbers to re-form and deny a couple of light horsemen, particularly as the Cavaliers could manage no more than a canter over the rough ground. Instead, Elsworn was graced with the sight of the skaven’s entire flank effectively falling apart before them.

‘We might just make this after all,’ Elsworn said, as they reined in beside her.

‘I’m as surprised as you are,’ said Garvil.

‘Not me,’ said Tonan. ‘That Fyreslayer clearly knows what he’s doing.’

Elsworn shook her head, but she was grinning. There was something about a real fight and the taste of gunpowder smoke that made it hard for her to think ill of anyone. Even Tonan. ‘Go and help the others across the next canal. Brigid has been shot and Bryony will be no good to anyone until the bullet’s out. But once you’re over, you’ll have the Black Watch Ironbreakers between you and the skaven. It’ll be an easy ride to the Undergate from there.’

Elsworn regretted the words even as she spoke them, for the gods rarely allowed such falsely confident assertions to pass unpunished.

As if waiting on her prompt, a low, threatening rumble made itself heard over the squeals and the cries of the battle. Mechanical rather than thunderous. Like a grindstone smashing up rocks. A flicker of static parted the thicker smoke on the other side of the canal, the faintest impression of a wheel, and the skaven there were suddenly throwing themselves onto the Ironbreakers’ shields as though there were worse things than a clean death on a duardin’s axe. The hairs on the back of Elsworn’s hands stood up and gave off tiny sparks, and then she saw it. The skaven war machine. It rumbled out of the obscuring smoke like a chariot, but one that featured only a single colossal wheel. Its goggled, static-frizzed skaven pilot was perched up high in a crow’s nest fringed with levers and buttons. A huge electrified prong stuck out, forklike, from the front, one more on either side. There were no beasts drawing it, no engine pushing it. Instead, its unstoppable forward roll seemed to be driven by the swarming multitudes of vermin furiously running inside that unholy wheel.

The war machine rolled over the solid mass of terrified clanrats, skewering their squealing bodies on metal spikes and grinding them to a grisly pulp under its enormous mass. The Irondrakes charged to the front rank to hose it with fire as it crushed its way through the skaven horde. Giant rats squealed as they burnt to death inside the wheel, but only ran all the faster until they did so. The war machine’s pilot chittered dementedly as it went faster. Then it hit the Ironbreakers, breaking open the hitherto inviolate shield wall like a cannonball hitting a rank of tin cans. The pilot squealed with glee, keeping a firm grip on the steering wheel as its war machine bumped and jolted over the rough carpet of indestructible duardin armour.

Only Gotrek remained standing in its path, and the maniac stubbornly refused to get out of the way. Elsworn could not watch, but nor could she make herself look away. It seemed that Gotrek Gurnisson was about to meet his doom at last, and that her own destiny somehow hinged upon the moment. The skaven pilot, too, seemed unduly perturbed by the Fyreslayer who was being stupid enough to wave an axe at its mighty war machine. Almost as if it had seen Gotrek before and feared him.

With an insane squeak, the pilot pulled on a lever. A squirming mass of purple-green lightning erupted from the war machine’s three projecting forks. It was clear to Elsworn that Gotrek was the intended victim, but the lightning seemed drawn to the most heavily armoured targets and, as Gotrek wore none at all, the three bolts leapt over his head as though he wasn’t there.

The first bolt struck the iron rattletrap and blew it to smithereens. The second arced away from that same target at the last millisecond and struck the cannon. The ensuing explosion knocked Tun and Orinkul flat. Brigid, Bryony, and Hod did not even get the chance to scream before being annihilated along with the limber. The third leapt towards the Cavaliers.

Elsworn tensed, but by the time she had done so the bolt had already flashed across her, leaving her blinking in shock, unable to comprehend the sudden absence of her two friends or the greasy smear of man and horse spread in a long line across the ground where they had been standing. It passed her and Comet by inches.

She numbly wondered if the lightning had actually struck her after all and that she had simply failed to notice it. This hollowness in her chest was surely what death felt like.

Seeing Gotrek standing miraculously unscathed in the middle of the carnage, the skaven pilot gave a squeak of dismay and yanked its steering wheel to the left. The war machine careered past the bewildered Fyreslayer, smashed the corner off the base of a crane, and went sailing off the edge of the canal. The pilot squealed in fright, pulling on another lever that released a powerful spring under its seat, launching it and the skaven sitting in it high into the air as the doomed machine smashed into the opposite bank.

There was one final explosion, larger and more punishing than any that had preceded it, as warp lightning ripped the machine apart from the inside.

Elsworn barely registered it, even as the blast turned her vision green and bits of wood started raining out of the air around her. They had been as good as free, and now, in the space of a few terrible seconds, half of the people that she knew in this world were gone. It was someone else who wheeled Comet around, someone else who Tun and Orinkul called out to in confusion and grief as the horse ran past them. Gotrek shouted something and turned to run after her, but Elsworn did not hear the words. The only thought left in her head was to go forwards, to finish what they had come this far to do.

She was going to find the skaven lair, and she no longer intended to restrict herself to punishing the skaven leaders for their crimes.

This time, she meant to kill them all.

Klatch One-Ear pedalled ineffectually on the smoky air, endeavouring to build enough momentum to swing himself to freedom. The ejection seat (a far-sighted modification on his part) had spared him from a certain and electrifying death with the destruction of his Doomwheel, but the opening parachute had snagged on the boom of a rusty old crane. He had been glad enough of it at the time, for the Fyreslayer and his bothersome human companion had been directly beneath him and he would not have welcomed the prospect of a third encounter without any friendly warriors or devastating war machines to back him up. Now, however, he was stuck and the pair were gone, fled towards the dubious safety of the humans’ castle.

Fools, he thought, kicking with both legs and straining with one outstretched claw to reach the crane tower. Do they not realise that they flee in entirely the wrong direction! He gnashed his teeth in frustration as his chair swung limply back and forth.

Of all the hapless foes he could have expected to encounter here…

He knew that Master Sprarrk had only tasked him with this attack as a ruse to be rid of him, but in his secret ratty heart, Klatch had been only too willing to take his leave. As brilliant as the masters undoubtedly were, the inventions of Clan Skryre rarely worked as anticipated first time around. Was trial and error (preferably someone else’s) not a fundamental pillar of the scientific method? The very best place, in his expert view, to experience the Parasite Engine’s first scuttling steps was from a thousand leagues away with his eyes tightly closed and his paws clamped over his ears. And that was only if it failed. If by some miracle the machine actually worked, then Klatch expected things to get about a hundred times worse.

The last thing he had expected to run into instead was that misbegotten pair.

What rotten luck! What woeful fate! Surely, he was the most luckless of all rats. If he was not so small and humble, so far beneath the notice of rapacious gods, he might have wondered if he had offended the Great Horned Rat in some way.

Giving up on swinging himself free, he let his limbs go slack, and instead began feverishly gnawing at the leather strap fastened across his chest. He wondered if it was possible that the skaven of Skryre Lock, in the Ghoul Mere, had forgotten who he was yet, and decided that it was time to take the risk.

Klatch had come to the conclusion that there was no safe place left anywhere in this benighted city.

CHAPTER TEN

GREAT AXLE

Elsworn clattered up the stairs to the Undergate. An aelven corsair made a grab for her bridle straps, but she refused to slow down, dragging the stubborn pirate half a dozen steps before persuading him to let go. Another, the captain with the spiky black hair and the scarred face, waved her arms for Elsworn to stop, but was ultimately obliged to leap out of the way as Comet thundered through. At the top of the stairs there was a gap of about ten feet, but the drawbridge was already extended, the portcullis up and the gates open, a double file of Steelhelms in quartered yellow-and-black livery trooping across. Comet barged through them all, shields, breastplates and helmets dashing off his lathered haunches as he rattled across the drawbridge and passed through the Undergate.

Finding herself at the foot of a winding staircase, Elsworn reined in lightly and looked up. The staircase was narrow, for ease of defence should the Undergate ever be taken, and with a tight right-handed spiral that favoured a right-handed defender. There were more soldiers coming down. A bearded man already at the bottom tried to get hold of Elsworn’s stirrup, but she urged Comet on out of his reach and onto the staircase. Men and women cursed loudly as they came down the staircase to find a snarling Cavalier pushing determinedly up the other way. Comet stamped and whinnied, disliking the tight confines and the soldiers crammed in all around him, but Elsworn kept on urging, drawing the reins firmly out to the right to keep turning around the stairs.

The staircase emerged onto a small room filled with creaking windlasses and taut chains. A pair of burly Greycaps fell out of their chairs as Elsworn burst in with Comet. She did not tarry long enough for them to recover before goading the now-frantic Comet through the door opposite and galloping off down the corridor.

Castle servants and soldiers alike dropped what they were doing and pressed themselves flat to the walls as she galloped past. Elsworn’s eyes flew every way as she went. She must have visited Greywater Lock a hundred times when she had been a student officer, but this part of the fortress was frustratingly unfamiliar. Up, she thought. If the Undergate guarded the lowest passages into Greywater Lock then what she needed to find was another stairway. She needed to go up.

After a short, recklessly fast ride, the corridor brought her to a long, high-ceilinged hall that looked as though it could have been used for the hosting of feasts. A high, cloth-covered table for the seating of lords and officers looked down on about twenty long, plain wooden versions arranged in rows. Chemical lanterns with an array of tints hung from hooks on the walls. Tapestries depicting the long and storied history of the Greycaps Freeguild hung from the ceiling, unmoving in the still air. Elsworn looked around quickly. There were no windows, which had to mean that she was still underground. I have to go up.

Fifty-odd half-dressed soldiers, scattered over a few of the nearer tables, looked up from a hastily abandoned breakfast. ‘What in Sigmar’s name…’ one of them managed to splutter before Elsworn, seeing no more convenient route across the hall, jumped Comet up onto the table, splattering the astonished officer with the wreckage of his porridge bowl.

The horse stamped his way along the table, scattering men and crockery alike, before jumping gladly down at the far end. At the sound of a fresh ruckus from behind her, Elsworn turned in the saddle and looked back.

Gotrek had staggered in and was angrily shoving off the Greycaps who had got up to help him. He bent over and wheezed, hands on his thighs, as though he was about to be sick. ‘Hold on… lass.’

‘We need to go up, Gotrek,’ she called back. ‘All the way to the top.’

Without waiting for the Fyreslayer’s answer, she barged Comet through a set of half-closed double doors and onto a narrow strip of landing. Stairs went up and down. She turned Comet on the spot, his hooves raising a clatter from the wooden floorboards, to face him towards the upward flight.

A shudder passed through the stairwell, violent enough that Comet needed to readjust his footing to keep from falling. Elsworn held him on a short rein, keeping her own balance in the saddle with a squeeze of her thighs. As abruptly as it had come, it passed. Elsworn soothed Comet’s frayed nerves while her mind raced through possible explanations.

It had felt like an earth tremor, which was not exactly unheard of in Greywater Reach. The city may not always feel the changing of Ghyran’s seasons directly, but the Verdian continent was not so torpid that it would not stir itself when the Realm of Life grew particularly vigorous. Cyclestone mining, subterranean blasts, even powerful conjunctions of the realmspheres, had all been known to induce minor quakes too, and most of the Great Axle and Inner Circle had been constructed accordingly.

Given everything that had been going on under Greywater Fastness of late, Elsworn did not think that she could dismiss this particular tremor out of hand.

Its timing was more than a little coincidental.

She had to get to the Great Axle, and she had to get there now.

Comet responded with a weary snort and started up the stairs at an uneven trot. He was exhausted. He loved nothing more than the freedom to run, but he was a creature of plains and shadows and the climbing suited him poorly. The next landing arrived all too quickly. Elsworn pulled the horse around the hairpin, meeting an unfortunate student coming the other way with a stack of papers. There was an explosion of fluttering white leaves and a cry of outrage, both of which Elsworn mulishly ignored as she rode through, turning sharply at the next landing and leaving the stunned boy behind. She did not allow Comet to ease off the pace until they were at the top, fifteen flights later. The horse’s legs trembled as though they were made of rubber as he staggered out onto that final landing. Elsworn had never pushed him as hard as this before. She felt a stab of guilt at seeing him in such a terrible condition. In her anger over the deaths of Tonan, Garvil, Brigid, Bryony and Hod, and her fear of what the skaven might be planning to do next, she had allowed herself to drive him too far.

Once again, it was someone other than herself who suffered for her impetuosity.

‘It’s all right, Comet,’ she soothed, swinging her feet out of the stirrups and jumping down. She gave his lathered neck a comforting pat down. ‘You’re done now. You’re done.’

Leaving the poor creature to regain his breath, Elsworn went to the door and tried the handle.

It was locked.

That was frustrating.

She took out her pistol and shot through the lock, then kicked in the door and strode through, only to stumble to an abrupt halt on the other side.

There were few sights in Greywater Fastness as guaranteed to make the bottom fall out of a person’s stomach as a first glimpse of Greywater Lock Interchange.

Elsworn had come out onto a crowded platform where hundreds of humans, duardin, rattletraps, and aelves were waiting impatiently for their train. The crack of the gunshot, and Elsworn’s accompanying dramatic entrance, had drawn a few startled looks, but even they were soon swept away in the general commotion and noise.

She let her gun fall limply to her side and stared numbly up. Trainlines and workway belts climbed the cliff-like grey wall of the castle’s upper reaches like ivy. Up into the polluted sky they rose, as if a person need only step onto the right one to ride it all the way to the Realm of Heavens. Scores of platforms protruded from the battlements, yellow-and-black flags fluttering limply in the hot, sullen breeze produced by the endless procession of clattering trains. Each platform was connected to at least one other by a network of staircases and cogwork-driven funicular trams. Everything was noise. Everything was motion. The air felt like an angry snarl from a pipe-smoker’s mouth.

Pulling her gaze from the dizzying view, she looked instead over the crowds around her. It seemed impossible to her that there could be a skaven invasion afoot while here, just a few hundred yards above it, Greywater Fastness went about its collective business as if nothing at all was amiss. She was unsure whether to feel pride or despair at her home city’s ability to shrug its shoulders and soldier on through any calamity. A part of her wanted to grab the first passer-by she came to and scream at them that they were mad, but then the platform guards would have to rightly assume that she was the mad one and drag her off to the castle’s dungeons.

It was as she considered the guards that Elsworn realised she had not yet seen any amidst the crowds. In their crisp yellow-and-black uniforms, they tended to stand out amongst the drably outfitted workers. Elsworn looked again, more deliberately this time, and confirmed to herself that the platform was indeed devoid of its usual complement of Freeguild. With the exception of a few soldiers still riding in and out on trains and a couple standing guard at the funicular terminal to the next platform, it appeared as though the interchange had been emptied. The rest must have been called downstairs to reinforce the Undergate, leaving only a token presence behind to avoid causing a panic.

Because Sigmar help them if something as trifling as an invasion should cause productivity to dip and oblige the rest of the Mortal Realms to cope without new cannons for a day.

Had this been the skaven’s intention all along? she wondered. A diversion?

But a diversion from what?

‘I said…’ Gotrek stumbled out of the service stairwell and onto the platform behind her. He dropped to his knees and wheezed. ‘Wait… for me…’

Leaving the Fyreslayer to recover his breath, Elsworn pushed her way into the crowds, staring up at the big chalkboard display that hung from the ceiling with the day’s timetables.

‘What are we looking for?’ Gotrek called after her.

‘A train to the Great Axle.’

‘Where in the Great Axle?’

‘Anywhere in the Great Axle!’

‘Why not just jump on one of the workways?’

‘The trains are faster, trust me.’

‘What about that one over there?’

Elsworn looked around, but couldn’t see through the thick crowd.

‘Over there,’ Gotrek repeated, this time pointing to it with his axe, which, if nothing else, proved most effective at clearing the platform around him.

With the crowds around her thinning, if only briefly, Elsworn finally caught a glimpse of what Gotrek had seen. Idling there in a siding was an armoured carriage coupled to a long, powerful-looking engine. The yellow-and-black heraldic shield of the Greycaps emblazoned the side. Its windows had been narrowed to slits just wide enough to slot a handgun through. Additional firepower had been mounted on the roof in the form of an Ironweld great cannon in a rotatable cupola. It could be accessed by a short flight of steps from inside the carriage.

It was one of the Greycaps’ supply trains. Elsworn had seen them from time to time, ferrying troops and provisions between Greywater Lock and their various subsidiary garrisons across the city. The Forgewrought had used to run one just like it, before the line had been allowed to fall into disuse. Elsworn was unsure what had become of the train, but, knowing now what the fate of so much of Lady Zukaus’ unwanted equipment had been, she had the horrible suspicion that she could guess. Unbelievably, the Greycaps had left theirs totally unattended. It would have been almost perfect, if not for the utter madness of attempting to commandeer a train through the clockwork mayhem of Greywater Lock’s busy lines. And, of course, one other problem so trivial by comparison it hardly warranted mentioning at all.

‘Can you even drive a train?’

‘How hard can it be? It’s not as if you even need to steer it.’

‘I could do it.’

Elsworn looked back as Orinkul and Tun stumbled onto the platform, the former practically tripping over Gotrek while hauling the latter like a rolled-up curtain to the menders. Tun looked almost dead from the climb.

It was the duardin who had spoken.

‘You?’ said Elsworn, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice.

The duardin bristled. ‘Why not me?’

‘You know how to drive a train?’

‘So I’ve picked up a thing or two about trains. What of it?’

‘You heard the lad,’ said Gotrek, pushing himself back up off his knees and starting forwards. ‘Let’s have the thing before someone less scrupulous than you or I decides to make off with it.’

‘All right, but we’re only borrowing it,’ Elsworn hastened to add, as first Gotrek and then Orinkul and Tun trooped past her. Saving the city from the skaven was all well and good, but she did not want to be caught stealing from the Greycaps in the process. She had the distinct feeling, however, that no one was listening to her.

Holstering her pepperbox, she hurried after them, arriving at the train just in time to catch Orinkul doing something arcane with the points further up the track and Gotrek manhandling Tun into a seat in the carriage. Orinkul returned from doing whatever it was he had been doing, clapping his oily hands as if after a job well done. He started up the ladder into the driver’s cab. Gotrek went to follow him.

‘And just where do you think you’re going?’ said Orinkul.

‘You’re addressing an elder, beardling, and an engineer. I can help.’

Orinkul waggled his finger under Gotrek’s nose and then pointed at Elsworn. ‘She can help.’

‘Her?’ Gotrek spluttered.

‘Me?’ said Elsworn.

‘If anyone else gets to go in the front then it should be me!’

‘She’s smaller than you, and it’s going to be cramped enough in here as it is,’ said Orinkul. ‘I’m going to be doing all the driving anyway. All she has to do is follow instructions, and I’d sooner trust her with that than you. No offence intended, of course,’ he mumbled quickly under Gotrek’s volcanic glare.

‘There is one thing you could do to help,’ said Elsworn.

‘What?’ said Gotrek, turning to her.

‘You could fetch Comet for me.’

‘Sod off.’

‘Please, Gotrek. If I leave an Ulguanite warhorse unattended in Greywater Lock Interchange, he’ll be halfway to a butcher’s shop before we’re clear of the station.’

The Fyreslayer worked his jaw, a thousand fiery rebukes seeming to well up inside his throat.

‘I’ll fetch your horse,’ said Tun before Gotrek could answer, holding on to the door as he re-emerged from the carriage. ‘I can do it. Gotrek would probably be better looking at the great cannon on the roof anyway.’

‘Aye, manling,’ said Gotrek, slightly mollified. ‘Aye, you might be right.’ Still shaking his head and grumbling, the Fyreslayer stomped into the carriage, making for the stairs at the back.

Elsworn quickly followed Orinkul up the ladder to the engine.

The driver’s cab was every bit as cramped as Orinkul had warned her it would be. It was quite obvious that it would never have accommodated both duardin at the same time, although Gotrek would have undoubtedly felt obligated to try and prove otherwise. The front end of the cabin was a confusion of pipes and cisterns and what looked like an enormous hot-water boiler above a grate. It was still warm. She looked at the profusion of levers and knobs warily, taking care not to touch anything until Orinkul told her otherwise. The duardin, meanwhile, had opened up the grate under the boiler and was inspecting the inside of the firebox.

‘Filthy,’ he tutted.

‘Never mind the mess, Orinkul. Can you get it going?’

‘All right, all right. But clearly it’s too much for the Greycaps’ engineers to follow their own handbook regarding maintenance.’ Elsworn heard the muffled scuff of a paraffin lighter from inside the firebox. Orinkul shut the grate again and straightened up. His face and beard were black with soot, and Elsworn had to cover her mouth with her hand to stifle a laugh at his comical appearance. ‘What?’ he said. Elsworn shook her head, keeping her hand firmly in place over her mouth, not trusting herself to say anything.

A bright yellow flame had appeared on the other side of the grate, leaping out of the heap of coals and licking eagerly at the bars of the grate.

In addition to being cramped, the cab was quickly becoming stiflingly hot.

The boiler creaked as heated water expanded and began to steam.

‘Now, if you’re quite done sniggering,’ said Orinkul.

Elsworn took a hold of herself. After the battle, and then the race through Greywater Lock, she had just needed to get that out of her system. She felt better for it. ‘Yes.’

‘Throw the reversing bar for me while I adjust the cocks.’

‘Which one’s the reversing bar?’ she said, looking over the plethora of levers that might qualify.

‘The big one, right there on your right. You can’t miss it.’

Elsworn saw it: a big square-sided lever made of brass. It was currently horizontal, sticking straight towards her. ‘This one?’

‘Like I said. Now, ease it forwards. Slowly,’ he added quickly, as Elsworn took it in both hands. ‘Just until I say, and no further.’

Elsworn nodded and tried to lift, grunting in frustration when the thing failed to budge so much as an inch. It was heavier than it looked, and stiff. The Greycaps’ engineers must have been built like ghroxen. She crouched down and shuffled under it, setting her shoulder to the bar and putting all her strength into it. She let out a ragged cry of triumph as the bar finally began to move.

At the same time, Orinkul opened the taps on some of the pipes coming off the boiler, appearing to do so at random. Hot water frothed up through the loosened seals and dribbled angrily down the pipes. Elsworn could see the crusted limescale where engineers before him must have performed the exact same procedure, but had no more time to dwell on it then.

Something inside the engine went clunk, and she felt the train very slowly starting to roll forwards.

‘Now the brake,’ said Orinkul.

‘You’re telling me there’s a brake?’

The duardin nodded calmly to the cluster of brass handles sticking down from the ceiling at a variety of unhelpful angles. Elsworn wondered if it was too late to go and fetch Gotrek.

She took one of the levers and looked hopefully at Orinkul.

‘There you go, we’ll make a train driver of you yet. Now, slide it clockwise.’

The engine gave a sudden lurch and Elsworn fell backwards, banging her head on a pipe and cursing loudly. Orinkul, she noticed, as she rubbed the bump on her head and got back up, remained at the controls as though his boots had been nailed to the floor. Unlike herself, the duardin’s short stature and powerful build made him exceptionally difficult to shift. He took another lever and drew it slowly towards him. The train began to accelerate, crankshafts and coupling rods pumping furiously, rhythmically, metal wheels clacketing over the track.

‘Tease the reversing bar back a bit,’ he said.

‘I only just pushed it forward.’

‘It controls the amount of steam out of the boiler. You don’t want too little, and trust me when I say you want too much even less.’

Without further hesitation, Elsworn threw her arms over the lever and pulled it back until Orinkul nodded in satisfaction.

‘Aye, that’ll do it.’

Elsworn wiped the sweat off her brow. ‘You really do know a bit about trains.’

Orinkul stared darkly out of his side window, as though minding the track ahead. ‘My father used to work on the trains,’ he said, eventually, voice so low Elsworn barely heard it over the thunder of moving parts. ‘Until the workways came along and killed off most of the old lines. That’s when I decided to turn my back on the Flathelm clan. They could’ve fought it, with their wealth and influence, but they chose not to.’

Elsworn did not know what to say. Judging by the pain in the duardin’s face, she doubted he would be much comforted by the usual platitudes about the inherent moral virtue of progress. By way of a distraction, she leant out of her own side window and looked back. They were accelerating out of the siding and onto the main track. A woman in Greycaps livery was running after them, waving her hands in the air, but much, much slower than her lost train was going, and as the engine continued to build up speed, the soldier quickly grew small behind them.

She lifted her gaze, seeing Gotrek and Tun both standing in the cupola above the carriage. Gotrek appeared to be fussing over the great cannon, explaining the fine detail of its operation and handling to the dazed-looking sergeant. Puffing black clouds from the engine’s smokestack shrouded them both. Seeing Elsworn staring up at him, Gotrek bared his yellow teeth and threw her a belligerent thumbs up.

Elsworn could only shake her head at his high spirits. It was hard to believe the change in him. When they had first met, the Fyreslayer passed out in the back of an underjack’s wagon, he had barely had the motivation to pull on his own boots, and now look at him. By her own rough estimate, he had come close to dying at least four times since then, but every successive brush with mortality seemed to lift his mood a little bit more than the one before. Elsworn knew as well as anyone how hard it was to keep perspective in the mayhem of a battle, but really, did he have no appreciation at all for the seriousness of the danger that Greywater Fastness was in, or of the friends they had lost opposing it this far? She reluctantly had to conclude that he did not, and would probably not care if she was to point it out to him.

Indeed, he would probably argue that Garvil and the others were the lucky ones, for without so much as trying they had found the death that eluded him.

She looked down then, performing an unconscious swallow of the lump that had formed in her throat. Growing up in Greywater Fastness, one quickly outgrew a fear of heights. Or else took themselves and their phobias onto the One Road to find a less vertiginous home elsewhere in the Mortal Realms. But the bottomless drop, through blurring track and cauldrons of smoke, made her stomach want to shrivel to the size of a nut.

As they left the cliff-like grey face of Greywater Lock behind them, they rattled along tracks that had been raised hundreds of feet above the ground on rusting metal piers.

And they still had further to climb before reaching the Great Axle.

She squinted into the smoke spewing from her own borrowed engine and tried to make out their destination. The First Wall was visible without being visible, a big, increasingly dark expanse of pregnant nothing directly ahead of them. Anywhere else in the city, the skyline would have been traced with the faint silhouettes of rooftops and chimney stacks, the muggy glare of lights, but here, nothing. Slowly, it came properly into view, casemates and battlements looming up out of the murk.

The First Wall was the oldest and grandest defensive structure in Greywater Fastness. As the old saying went, the Outer Wall only protected the city from its enemies, the First Wall protected it from itself. Elsworn had only been across it once, in a Freeguild train much like this one, waved through by the guards stationed in its fortress towers.

There was a roar, as of sewage being sucked into a vortex on its way through a drain, and Elsworn pulled her head into the cab, just as the train rumbled into a tunnel. Everything suddenly went black. The clattering of the wheels on the track took on an echoing quality. Only the cherry glare of the firebox and Orinkul’s unflustered manner reassured her that they had not come off the rails and plunged right over Realm’s Edge to fall forever into the Cosmic Gulf.

Her discomfort lasted no more than a few seconds, and then the train swept out of the tunnel on the far side of the First Wall.

Elsworn returned to her window to stare in awe over the Great Axle.

Greywater Fastness was a city of marvels, but almost all of them, or so it seemed to her just then, were crammed into the few square miles inside the First Wall. There was the Crucible of State, Gryphon Hall, the Stone College, the Anvils of Industry, and, she gasped… yes, there it was, the Gravenstone itself. Each building was a grand outline, half hidden in smog, a constellation of lights that decorated the neatly paved avenues like bunting. Elsworn stood at her window and stared, reminding herself that every one of those lights represented the bedchamber of a great lord or the study of a mage. There were gardens here too, she saw, that rarest and most extravagant of luxuries. She saw flowerbeds, fountains, benches where the high and the wise might take their ease between deciding the destinies of millions, real trees with lights in their bowers.

Elsworn felt her gaze linger. In spite of her upbringing, and in ways she could not fully account for in words, Elsworn was still a child of Ghyran; she longed to one day be wealthy enough to wall off a patch of green space and call it her own.

‘You still haven’t told me where in the Great Axle we’re going,’ said Orinkul, pulling her out of her reverie and looking dead ahead, steadfastly unimpressed by the grandeur below them.

Elsworn frowned, drumming her fingers on the solid brass of the reversing bar while she thought. She felt as though she had been running for hours, and now that she had finally been able to stop, her body found itself with more energy than it knew how to get rid of.

Finally, she turned from the window. ‘Have you heard of the Forge-haven?’

Orinkul raised an eyebrow. ‘Of it? Aye, but only rumours. There are duardin in the mining clans who claim that the steam lords have been buying up old claims on the cheap, paying good wages to turn the underground workings into boltholes for themselves and their kin. But of course, they’re only stories.’

‘Well, I can’t speak for all the steam lords, but Ciriline Zukaus certainly has one. I’ve seen it.’

Orinkul scowled out of his window.

‘I knew it.’

Elsworn smiled to see him so grimly satisfied in his outrage. ‘Marshal Ordo took me there once, after my ennoblement. In the event of a catastrophe so grave that the First Wall itself might fall, the baroness’ most trusted warriors were to make their way to it with all haste.’

‘And leave the rest of the city to its fate, I suppose?’ Orinkul looked up at her disapprovingly. ‘I shan’t pretend to be surprised.’

Ignoring the duardin’s sour look, Elsworn thought back to the map she had seen in Brod Gurnak’s wharf-side hideout. All those empty properties, targeted and ransacked by restless skaven paws. The baroness’ retreat in the Forgehaven district was the only unmarked spot where the skaven could possibly be – the only place where no one, except perhaps Ciriline Zukaus herself, would have thought to look for them, and no one had seen or heard from the baroness since Battery Green. No sooner had Elsworn’s thoughts turned to her patron than the mental likeness she had of her morphed into something bestial and unsettling.

She shuddered, trying to shake the image off, but for some reason she could not. She wondered where it had come from.

‘So how do we get to this secret underground hideout of yours?’ said Orinkul.

‘There’s a disused station, just–’

The engine went over a sudden bump in the track. Elsworn’s grip on the reversing bar tightened reflexively, but was not enough to prevent herself from banging her head a second time, this time on the ceiling.

‘Ow,’ she said.

It was then she noticed that the train seemed to be leaning further and further onto its side. She held on to the bar and tensed her ankles, but it was all she could do to keep from sliding towards the door.

‘What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know!’ said Orinkul. ‘There must be something up with the track.’

Elsworn stuck her head back out of the window, narrowing her eyes against the lashes of smoke, and saw to her dismay that Orinkul was entirely correct.

The track immediately ahead of them had been canted almost onto its side, its supporting piers thrown higgledy-piggledy by whatever it was that was causing the ground beneath it to bulge. The skaven lair, Elsworn thought. It had to be. Even as she watched on, helpless to do anything else but stare, a six-storey manor house in the high Azyrite style collapsed into the sinkhole that had yawned open under the track. As its elegant façade fell into the abyss, something vast and dirty and indescribably ugly pulled itself out of the earth in its place, shrugging off cobblestones and bits of building the way a surfacing mole would clear its way of topsoil. It was impossible for Elsworn to describe. Too big to take in at once. It was as though someone had taken an old ruin, with all its random additions and burnt-down wings, remodelled it in scrap metals, and mounted it on weirdly jointed legs. Its multifarious windows glinted in the smoke like stained glass in a desecrated church. Elsworn recognised the familiar gleam of warpstone.

As the train hurtled towards it, and its inevitable doom, Elsworn came to the conclusion that she had tragically misjudged the nightmare scope of the skaven’s vision. They were not using her patron’s underground stronghold as a hiding place from which to conduct their experiments, as she had supposed.

The machine tearing its way out of the Great Axle was her patron’s stronghold.

Sprarrk gripped the armrests of his chair until his claws pierced the leather upholstery. His fur tingled as though it had been subjected to a non-lethal jolt, his tail flicked across the floor like an electrified wire. His initial ambivalence over this phase of the great plan had singularly failed to outlast the exhilarating, terrifying, heart-stoppingly vertigo-inducing moment of the Parasite Engine’s birth.

‘Ye-e-e-e-es!’ he, or Blastritt, or possibly both of them at the same time shrieked. ‘Yes-yes-yes-yes-yes!’

With a fierce grin slashing his muzzle in two, he stared up into the green-tinted main window. The smoke-filled sky yawed from side to side, the great dwelling-places of this city’s rulers rolling like storm-tossed ships on the Globos Gulf.

The entire cockpit rattled around him, as though things were about to start shuddering loose, which, on his underlings’ prior form, was not beyond the realms of probability. Those same warlock engineers clung grimly on to the workstations they were supposedly crewing, tails wrapped around table legs as if their lives depended on it. The air inside the sealed cockpit had become rancid with their fear musk. Sprarrk was starting to wish he wore a mask like his brother.

‘Geomantic well detected,’ Sprarrk chittered, tapping his claw on one of the glass-fronted dials inset in his control board. He looked up excitedly. ‘Only four miles north of here.’

‘Good-good,’ said Blastritt, his paws flying over the controls. ‘The Parasite Engine has secondstone enough for a few minutes only. If we cannot find an alternate source of energy before that time, then it will devour Scuttlegnawer’s unholy essence and this experiment will end in failure.’

‘I know that!’ Sprarrk snapped.

‘Then go. Go!’

Sprarrk scowled, prising his left paw from the armrest of his seat and transferring it to the control stick that would allow him to command the Parasite Engine’s five limbs. It was a good thing he loved his brother like, well, a brother, because one of these days Sprarrk was going to get fed up of being treated like a brainless whelp.

The nightmare assemblage of spare parts and corrupted glass continued to pull its legs out of the rubble, shaking off bits of building with the exact mannerism of a rat climbing out of a dirty puddle. With all its limbs now free and rubble tumbling down its metal body, it began to move, ungainly as a newborn foal but unstoppable as a maw-krusha. It rammed into the side of another building, which promptly collapsed before it. The skaven war machine did not even slow down. Elsworn wondered where it was going with such haste, but did not have time to think on it before the train hit the canted section of track.

She screamed as the engine began tipping onto its side. Her stomach dropped through the floor and plummeted the rest of the hundred or so feet to the ground beneath the ruined track. The sweat on her hands cost her their grip on the reversing bar, and she fell backwards with another cry, slamming hard into the side door, which was almost halfway towards becoming the floor. Pain spiked through her arm, but she had a horrible feeling that a bruised shoulder was about to become the least of her worries. At any moment, she expected to feel the moment of weightlessness as their train flew off the tracks, followed quickly afterwards by the long inescapable fall to the ground.

But it never came.

The engine lurched itself right again. Elsworn choked on a half-prepared scream as her fingers slid loose from the door sill and she rolled like an unfinished log across the floor. Halfway across, with the train apparently level again, she came to a stop with her back to the floor. Her head spun for a few seconds more. Elsworn lay there while it did so, wet palms pressed to the deck plates, enjoying the privilege of sucking hot air into aching lungs. The train thundered along the track, showing no immediate sign of hurling them all to their doom.

‘Zharr bokar,’ Orinkul swore through gritted teeth. He was standing at the controls as though he had been frozen in place by a sorcerer’s stare. His eyes were horrified white discs in his soot-blackened face. ‘Let’s never do that again.’

With shaking hands, Elsworn pulled herself up. Resisting the urge to kiss the grimy duardin, she returned to her side window and leant out. She looked back to see Tun holding on to the sides of the great cannon cupola, looking ill. Gotrek was brandishing his axe in both hands and shouting down at the war machine with words Elsworn could not hear. Relieved that they were both still well and that the coupling between the engine and the carriage was intact, she turned to look at the track ahead, seeing almost immediately what must have happened.

As she had noted to herself back in Greywater Lock, the city’s larger buildings were built to withstand the occasional quake. The transport infrastructure, so vital to trade and industry, was similarly robust. The weight of the Greycaps’ armoured train must have been enough to carry it over the most badly affected section of rail while the rest of the track settled back into something closer to its original position. Elsworn was not expecting a smooth ride, but it did not look as though she was immediately about to die.

Not from crashing a derailed train into the Great Axle, anyway.

She lifted her gaze from the track, slanted rooftops and grey towers flashing past her at speed, as the skaven war machine tottered ever further away towards the heart of the Great Axle. She had to do something. But what? There was nothing she could do to stop it from here. She could not shoot it. Not even the great cannon in the carriage would be powerful enough to make a noticeable dent in a colossus like that.

She wondered what her heroine, Tahlia Vedra, would do in a situation like this.

Her gaze wandered further, desperately seeking ideas.

The track ahead of her, she noticed, was far from straight. It meandered like a genuflecting drunk around the ballrooms and palaces of the Great Axle, and while the train was steaming away from the skaven war machine at the moment, she saw that the track would soon be looping back to cross its path again.

If they could only time it just right…

‘Can you make this thing go any faster?’ she said, shouting over her shoulder to Orinkul.

One day, they’ll be calling it the Killebrook Position…

Those words, spoken to her in jest, might have been meant for this very moment.

‘Faster, Orinkul!’ she yelled, taking a hold of the door handle and making ready to do something very stupid indeed. ‘As fast as you can go!’

Steam whistled from a ruptured pipe in the ceiling, filling the cockpit with screaming ghosts. Warlock engineers abjured them with flapping arms and flicking tails. One bashed dementedly with a hammer at a relief valve that refused to open. Another beat a stubborn electrical fire with a blanket. Alarms pealed from every system important enough to have an alarm. Coloured lights strobed through the clouds of vapour. A particularly serious-looking crack had broken the front window almost in half where a mortar shell had struck it.

The Parasite Engine’s doddering rampage had not gone unchallenged for long, but Blastritt had not been so naive as to believe that it would.

Humans were a slow-witted species, on the whole, but they had a certain mulish courage when it came to defending their home warrens. Where the discovery of an enemy in the midst of their lair would be the signal for any right-thinking skaven to turn tail and flee, a human in that situation would invariably dig in and fight all the harder. It was why human cities appeared so wrong-headedly designed with all their higher walls and bigger guns on the inside. Even then, Blastritt could see cannons being wheeled out onto rooftops. Small-arms crackled from every window.

Thus far, their fire had been the stinging of insects to the towering machine’s metal skin. But, as Blastritt well knew, those stings were only going to become more painful the nearer they drew to the geomantic power source at the city’s heart.

‘Look-look!’ Sprarrk squealed in warning, pointing a claw towards something he had spotted through the cracked window.

Blastritt drew a sharp intake of breath.

A phalanx of black-armoured giants was taking up positions in the street before them, locking shields and readying hammers while a handful remained behind to set up some kind of large and powerful-looking ballista.

The storm-things of the man-god.

How insignificant they looked from the towering vantage of Blastritt’s war machine!

‘I see them.’ Blastritt reached for the squeaker horn, suspended on a wire from the ceiling above his seat. ‘Fire all ratling guns!’ he squealed, speaking into the horn so that the entire Parasite Engine resonated with the commanding tones of his piercing skaven voice. ‘Kill-kill the storm-things!’

‘Divert battery reserves to the warpstorm mega-blasters!’ Sprarrk added, clearly getting carried away.

‘No-no,’ said Blastritt. ‘We have insufficient secondstone. The drain on the reactors will be too great.’

‘Of course.’ Sprarrk struck his forehead with the heel of his palm. ‘Stupid, stupid Sprarrk.’

Blastritt shook his head.

There were times that he wondered if they were really related at all.

‘Blast through them!’ he shrieked into the horn. ‘Kill-kill all the storm-things and stop for nothing!’

‘What in the blazes…?’ Orinkul spluttered as Elsworn opened the cab door and stepped out. ‘Are you sure that’s safe?’

Elsworn planted her boot deliberately on the top rung of the ladder, holding on to the open door with both hands. The track galloped by beneath her, disappearing so fast that the wooden sleepers were a continuous blur. The roar of the pistons thumping in and out of their steel jackets was a physical assault on the senses. The huge drop seemed to rise up and pull on her legs. She closed her eyes, took a deep, steadying breath, and tightened her grip on the door until she was certain she would not fall.

As if it was not her intention to do exactly that.

‘Just keep this speed up, Orinkul.’

She had to time their approach perfectly. Enter the coming bend too soon and she would miss her jump. Hit it too late, on the other hand, and she would almost certainly discover that their earlier reprieve had been a temporary one as the skaven war machine crashed through the track just seconds ahead of their speeding train.

Even with her life hanging in the balance, Elsworn was finding it difficult to concentrate, and for once it had nothing to do with her immediate peril.

She looked down, rapt, as the Anvils of the Heldenhammer brought battle to the unholy skaven machine.

Every Stormcast Eternal was a champion, encased in god-forged black starmetal, wielding weapons that were not only too massive for any mortal hand to wield, but too strange for any mortal mind to fathom. Huge crossbows without strings or levers fired lightning bolts into the skaven machine as it lurched down the street towards them. Hammers wielded two-handed struck its limbs with the force of successive thunderclaps. Giants with numinous wings flocked around the construct’s storm-cratered hull, energy crackling and arcing between its back and their hands as they threw javelin after javelin. Stuttering streams of defensive gunfire pursued the winged warriors, dozens of deceptively small-looking turrets rotating around in armoured blisters and hazing the air with warpstone traces and smoke.

When Elsworn had first seen humanity’s heroes in the street below, she had wept for joy. A common soldier like her could live their whole lives without ever participating in a battle great enough to warrant the deployment of a single Stormcast Eternal. Now, she got to see them die and wept tears of a different sort.

Here and there, a star-bright flash from amidst the craze of skaven fire announced the death of an immortal. The Stormcast Eternals did not die in the way that mortals did. Elsworn knew that much. Instead, their bodies and armour returned to the heavens from which they had been made, dissolving into blessed lightning and blasting back to the sacred anvils of Azyrheim to be Reforged anew.

She was watching rebirth, rather than death, but still she wept.

Not even the Stormcast Eternals could hold the skaven machine at bay.

By what right did she, a mortal woman, hope to do better?

Watching the Stormhosts falter, Elsworn almost drew her foot back into the safety of the cab and abandoned her hairbrained plan. But even as her spirit quailed, her body did not flinch from what needed to be done. She reaffirmed her grip on the open door, shuffling her feet so that she was perched on the top rung with her toes sticking out over the abyss. Sigmar saw all, she knew this, but not even the God-King was mighty enough to defend the Mortal Realms from all its foes. Why else would he feel compelled to uplift humanity’s mightiest champions to forge the Stormhosts? Nor could his champions be everywhere. The Mortal Realms were incalculably vast, and common men and women performed miracles in their heroes’ stead every day, if only because there was no one else who could do it for them.

Sometimes, all it took was a single act of reckless heroism. Elsworn thought of her family, counting on her to save the day even if they did not know it, and of her comrades who had failed to make it this far. She was nothing special, she knew, not like Gotrek or the Stormcast Eternals battling in the streets below her now. She had not been blessed with divine strength, unending life, or the power to walk unharmed through the hottest fire, but she had never let any of that stop her before.

Had she not, in fact, been waiting for any excuse to do something like this?

Baring her teeth in a grin, she looked down, resisting the urge to squeeze her eyes shut as she flung herself off the ladder with a cry.

The fall was not nearly as great as it would have been had her timing been off by half a second either way. She banged into the roof of the skaven machine with a yelp of pain, metal on metal, bounced once, rolled a short way, and then began to slide. The impact and ensuing roll had left her winded and dazed, but she had kept enough of her wits to manoeuvre herself onto her back and take control of her slide using her feet.

One of the skaven weapon blisters stuck out of the hull ten yards below her. Elsworn steered herself towards it, using her hands and feet to brake before smacking into the spherical iron cowl that rimmed the skaven gun.

Her leftover momentum pitched her forwards, and she milled both arms furiously to row herself back again. She gasped in relief as her back hit the rusted metal plate of the hull and stayed there.

Letting go of a long, shuddering breath out, she looked down.

Two ratling cannons, each half as long as she was tall and crudely lashed together to create a multi-barrelled chimera that could be aimed and fired as one, projected from the blister. They appeared to be mounted in some kind of rubberised bubble, which moved around within the metal blister in a manner vaguely reminiscent of the way a soft eyeball twitched within a bony socket. Sitting at a rowing bench inside, tinted green by the dagger-shaped windows and eerily blurred, Elsworn could see a skaven gunner. It was wholly oblivious to Elsworn’s presence, its full attention on the train now rushing overhead with the last of her friends still aboard.

Gotrek. Orinkul. Tun.

Comet.

With her feet planted on the iron cowl, Elsworn drew her pistol and fired it point-blank into the window at the roof of the blister. The strange glass splintered around the bullet, but did not shatter. She saw the skaven cringing in alarm as she fired again: two, three, four shots sending a craze of off-white cracks through the pane. Recovering from its shock, the skaven gesticulated at her to get off, chittering something that Elsworn could not make out through the glass.

Cursing aloud, she chambered her last bullet and shot it into the glass.

The blister exploded.

Elsworn had enough warning to turn her face away and shield her eyes with her hand before the force of the blast threw her back into the hull and kicked the wind out of her lungs for a second time. Heat licked her face like an overly affectionate hound, shedding bits of metal into her clothes and hair. She coughed, wincing as her attempt at brushing debris from her face caused deeply embedded fragments to pull at her flesh, and lowered her hand.

Gotrek Gurnisson was standing in a smouldering crater where the weapon blister had been. He was on one knee, his axe buried almost up to the haft in the wreck of the hull. Its bound flames licked hungrily up out of the gash, and Gotrek appeared to be very slowly sinking as the metal around him turned molten. The heat did not seem to trouble him in the least. The rune that he kept hidden behind his beard throbbed like a star of ill-omen from behind a cloud, stirring it seemed, but still dark, the veins cording his huge muscles taking on the appearance of golden threads.

‘Gotrek?’ she said, keeping her back pressed to the sides of the lurching machine, too appalled by his sudden, violent appearance to think of anything less obvious to say. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘What am I doing here?’ he growled, holding on to the ruined metal with one hand while struggling to pull his axe free of the ruined blister with the other. ‘What are you doing here? Jumping off a moving train to an almost certain doom was my idea.’ He glared through the cinders drifting up off his own beard as though Elsworn had robbed him of something irreplaceable.

She shook her head before she could think of something to say to placate him. She did not have time to be dealing with one of Gotrek’s moods right now. Their perch on the side of the skaven war machine was precarious at best. They had to find a way to get inside and disable it before it could make it to its destination. Wherever that might be, Elsworn doubted its creators planned to simply take in the sights of the Great Axle once they arrived. Her gun had proven incapable of blasting a way in, and she did not want to waste time hunting for a convenient hatch that may or may not even exist; so long as Gotrek Gurnisson was along for the ride, she might as well put that infamous temper to good work.

‘We need to get inside, but its armour’s just too thick,’ she said. ‘Do you think that axe of yours is up to it?’

The Fyreslayer scowled at her through the flames licking up from his buried axe.

‘Stand back. And cover your delicate human eyes.’

Sprarrk cackled mercilessly as the Parasite Engine crunched over the storm-things’ battle line, its feet slipping, as if on sublimating ice, as wounded immortals crumbled into lightning under its tread.

‘Geomantic node in range!’ Blastritt squeaked, excited enough to overlook the fact that the Parasite Engine was dying. Alarms pealed. Circuitry bled. Electricity squirmed over the wall panels like serpents, lunging from the metal every so often to bite a warlock engineer who came too close or stood too tall.

The machine had never been designed to survive this long. It was simply the engine that Sprarrk and Blastritt had devised to convert realmstone energy into the soul-fuel they would need. It had more than surpassed Sprarrk’s expectations in bulldozing its way this far.

It did not need to suffer for much longer.

Sprarrk peered through the window. It was so thoroughly bullet-riddled now as to have been rendered almost opaque, but he could still just about make out the monolithic black spear of the storm-things’ fortress ahead of them. He tittered to himself. Human fools! They thought themselves so clever with their books and their schools and their learning, but Sprarrk knew as much about the geomantic principle as they ever would. More! For he had prised all he knew from the cold, dead grip of his un-mourned former mentor’s paw, and had not contented himself with mere rote learning. No! He had theorised and he had experimented and then, with the intuitive understanding of Scuttlegnawer enslaved to his will, guiding his steps through the many failures he had encountered along the way, he had learned more.

And Blastritt had helped a bit too. He supposed.

Sprarrk knew well the planning that went into Sigmar’s cities. First came the discovery of a site of power. These were places where the realm’s ley lines intersected, places where fey creatures like the Sylvaneth were instinctively drawn and where magic gathered in such concentrations that it crystalised out of the cosmic aether to form realmstone. Then came the tapping of that natural magic. The first structures of a new city were specifically designed to draw its power forth, like clean water from a well, harnessing it in such a fashion as to hold back supernatural dangers that walls alone could not repel.

The Gravenstone was such a structure. Its sheer black sides were wreathed in lazy drifts of smoke, untouched by the anxious lights of the buildings in its shadow. Its walls bore no ornament. Its battlements flew no banners. It was the fortress of a dead-thing. Only a fool could look up at those walls and doubt who, or what, dwelt within, and what the fate of those who approached its starmetal gates with wickedness in their hearts must be. Lightning bolts came crashing down from its ramparts as if the heavens had been emptied of all its unquiet spirits, thrashing the Parasite Engine with power enough to shatter armies. The Parasite Engine returned fire, only to be rebuffed by a dome of cold-blooded Azyrite force.

But Sprarrk was not fooled. No, he saw through it.

The energy that powered the Gravenstone did not come from the stars. It was drawn up from the ground below. The lair of the storm-things was the motor that drove the Great Axle, the cosmic dynamo that made the entire hateful city turn.

And now that power would be his.

Seeing the vast geomantic engine operating at such quarters, Sprarrk could not help but feel a faint tingle of fear. But there was excitement, too, in being the one to stick a proverbial spanner in its works.

The Fyreslayer and his human pet had done their best to defeat him, and they had failed. They had uncovered his secret lairs, robbed him of the materials needed to fully complete the Parasite Engine, forced them to accelerate unready plans and risk a most daring assault on the Gravenstone. For a few minutes, they had even killed him. And still, they had failed. Soon, he and his brother would be remade as a god, a step on the cosmic ladder beyond even the immortal storm-things, and the power he had known as co-pilot of a Parasite Engine would pale to nothing in comparison.

Everything he had spent half his life telling himself he wanted was his for the taking. He and his brother would be one, and they would live forever. Never again would either have to fear the death of the other.

‘I have it,’ he snarled.

‘Then by all means, proceed.’ The stiff leather of Blastritt’s mask creaked as it struggled to conceal his bared teeth. ‘It is called a Parasite Engine for a reason.’

Gotrek attacked the damaged hull in a frenzy. He raged, he spat, he bellowed curses, hacking at the crumpled metal until the air around them both had become fire and there were gobbets of solidifying metal clamped like silvery leeches to his skin.

The amount of damage he had caused in a short amount of time was extraordinary. Elsworn was awed by his strength – not only that he had managed to inflict such harm on something so solid, but by the fact that he was still doing it, too. He was attacking solid metal with an axe; if any ordinary person were to attempt such a feat, then the blade would have been falling from numb and ringing fingers after only the second or third blow.

She thought of the duel he had promised her, unsure whether to feel alarmed or elated by the prospect. A little of both, perhaps, tempered by the certainty that it was never going to happen either way if Gotrek could not speed things up even more.

‘Can you work any faster?’

‘I’d like… to see you… do better.’

Elsworn looked up and let out a moan.

Something was happening to the Gravenstone. The bleakness of its façade, a testament to the power of the God-King over death itself, had suddenly taken on the appearance of brittleness. It was a corpse whose life had left it, hollowed out and emptied. Incoming fire from its Celestar ballistae had become intermittent and ineffectual, flaring off against an ugly green field of energy that now surrounded the skaven machine, releasing deafening crescendos that had Elsworn covering her ears and grimacing. Umbilical threads of foul, efflorescing colours wormed between the fortress and the machine, the Gravenstone’s own pearly-white barrier stuttering and waning in parallel to its counterpart’s rise. If Elsworn did not know any better, she might have believed that the power of one was being drawn into the other through a set of invisible, cosmic straws.

She turned away, unable to bear the sight any longer.

‘This thing’s siphoning magic from the Stormkeep somehow. I don’t want to be stuck out here when it’s done.’

‘Be my bloody guest.’

‘Maybe I will!’

Gotrek grunted and stepped to one side, sweating like a blacksmith, muscles bulging from him like mailbags strapped to the side of a wagon. Steeling herself against the heat, Elsworn peered into the hole he had made. The Fyreslayer had certainly made an appreciable dent, and even a couple of gaps through which she could see the metal flooring inside the skaven machine. Now that she was standing closer, however, she saw that the runic heat of Gotrek’s weapon was actually hindering his efforts as much as it was helping. Even as she watched, semi-fluid metal oozed in to plug those holes, undoing a good deal of the Fyreslayer’s work.

‘You’re right,’ said Gotrek. ‘This is much faster.’

‘Just wait a second.’

‘For what?’

‘I’m thinking.’

If they could just wait for the metal to cool a little, they could easily break through while it was brittle. But they did not have that kind of time and she knew it. She put her hands on her hips while she considered the problem, accidentally sloshing her water canteen against her pistol holster.

She looked down at it for a moment.

Struck by inspiration, she took the canteen from her belt, pulled the stopper, and emptied the contents of the bottle over Gotrek’s hole. There was a strident hissss of escaping steam and Elsworn coughed, feeling the skin of her face peel in the heat. She ignored it, proceeding to upend every bottle she had. Leaning out over the hot, billowing froth, she stamped down on the floor of the hole, her efforts immediately rewarded with a splintering crack, similar to that of a thin piece of slate snapping between one’s hands.

Encouraged, she hit it again with the heel of her boot, continuing to hit it until the bottom finally came away. It fell into the gunner’s compartment under the blister, smashing into a thousand brittle pieces on the metal floor.

She looked at Gotrek and raised an eyebrow.

‘I softened it for you,’ he said.

Elsworn wished she had the time to rub it in just a little, but the longer they spent there on the skaven machine’s back, the more horribly exposed she felt. It would just have to wait until later, assuming they lived long enough to see it.

‘Come on then,’ Gotrek barked, hoisting his axe before Elsworn had the chance to speak. ‘Last one in’s a rotten aelf.’

‘The machine is at full-full power!’

A shiver of excitement ran down Blastritt’s spine and quivered out through his tail. They had said it could not be done. They had said it was impossible! A greater daemon of the Horned Rat could not be bound in such a fashion, they had said, for a daemon’s body and soul were inextricably intertwined, as indivisible as an atom; to attempt the separation of one from the other was a fool’s errand, akin to full mastery of transmutation or locating all six lost volumes of the Libers Pestilent, requiring such vast expenditures of power as to make it practically, if not theoretically, impossible.

Well, Blastritt wished that Arch-Warlock Skitterclank and his old enginecoven in Skryre Lock could be here to see this!

Power dials on his control boards wobbled and pipped as they probed dangerous regions of red. Pipes whistled as the pressure within them grew. Tendrils of warp lightning, too much for the Parasite Engine’s capacitors to contain any longer, flared off in great rambling arcs that crawled over the windows and walls. An orchestra of tormented metals and alarms squealed ever louder, ever higher, in tribute to his imminent ascension to demi-godhood. Blastritt could almost feel Scuttlegnawer stretching its insubstantiated muscles through the circuitry of the machine, as though it was the daemon’s straining, rather than the looming reactor overload, that was causing the wall plating to buckle inwards.

Yes-yes, he thought. Get good and strong and fat, Scuttlegnawer.

He would not want a weak and hungry body for his apotheosis.

His left paw alighted on the lever in the central block, between his and his brother’s halves of the control panel. He turned to look over his shoulder. Sprarrk’s paw was similarly poised over his own lever. All that remained now was to shed these mortal bodies so that their souls could merge into one, as they had surely been meant to have been joined since birth. Each lever was connected to a small but extraordinarily powerful single-use warp lightning generator under the user’s own seat. Death alone was insufficient for the ritual. The shock needed to be powerful enough to obliterate all bonds between body and soul and force his essence into the Verminlord before it could be devoured by the Great Horned Rat. So all of their calculations had demonstrated to them time and again.

And yet, for some inexplicable reason, he hesitated.

His claws tapped on the ball-handled grip of the lever. He wondered if it was going to hurt. Scuttlegnawer had been silent on that part, but then Blastritt had been too afraid to ask and daemons, particularly those enslaved against their wills, were infamously loath to volunteer information.

He licked his dry lips.

‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

Sprarrk looked up from his own absent reverie. It took him a moment for the wires in his brain to uncross. ‘I am ready. Are you ready?’

‘Of course. This is why I asked you.’

‘Then why have you not pulled your lever already?’

Blastritt looked at the lever in his paw. He did not want to admit as much to his brother, but he had been wondering the exact same thing. ‘Why have you not pulled your lever already?’

‘I was waiting for you,’ said Sprarrk.

‘You should go first.’

‘No-no.’ Sprarrk gave his head a violent shake. ‘I insist that this honour be yours.’

‘But this was your idea,’ Blastritt protested. ‘If anyone is to get first sniff of our combined souls’ new home then it must be you.’

‘My idea?’ Sprarrk looked genuinely puzzled.

‘Do you deny it?’

‘I do. This was your idea.’

‘It was not! I distinctly recall how you weaselled me into agreeing to it.’

‘You are mistaken,’ Sprarrk snarled. ‘The very idea that I would dare summon a Verminlord is preposterous. All know me to be the weaker twin.’

Blastritt gawped. ‘Lies! I am the weaker brother.’

‘You say this only to spare my hurt feelings.’

Blastritt ground his fangs until his skull vibrated.

He tried to do one nice thing for his brother before they united to become one soul, and see how Sprarrk repaid his generosity! Blastritt was seriously starting to wonder if Sprarrk even deserved to join him in godhood at all. Maybe he would go without him. Yes, that was what he would do. He would take the Verminlord all for himself and let Sprarrk whine and complain about it then.

He fidgeted his paw into a loose grip around the head of the lever.

‘We go-go at the same time?’ he suggested.

‘All right,’ said Sprarrk with apparent reluctance, tightening his own grip on his lever.

‘On three?’

‘This would be traditional.’

‘Yes-yes.’ Blastritt took a deep breath. He turned to face forward. He did not want his last sight before assuming divinity to be his brother’s idiot muzzle. ‘One…’ he began. ‘Two…’

‘Wait-wait!’

Blastritt cringed as though Sprarrk might accidentally set off his under-seat warp lightning generator with his shout. ‘What!’ he snapped.

‘Do we pull on three? Or after three?’

‘On three, we said.’

Blastritt turned away, chittering under his breath, and resumed counting.

At three, he ground his eyelids shut and tensed.

Nothing happened.

He peeled open the eye nearest to Sprarrk and peeked across at his brother.

‘You did not pull!’ he said, straightening out of his defensive hunch and opening both eyes.

‘Neither did you,’ Sprarrk countered.

‘Only because I knew that–’

Before Blastritt had the chance to protest his innocence fully, Sprarrk lunged across the central block for his lever. Blastritt slapped the paw away on reflex, and only afterwards did it sink in what his brother had just tried to do.

Blastritt stared at him in shock.

‘You tried to kill me!’

‘It is for your own good.’

Sprarrk made another grab for the lever, the two of them tussling over it even as the overload under the control panel grew.

‘I have changed my mind,’ Blastritt hissed.

‘I was first-first out of our mother’s belly,’ said Sprarrk, the tips of his claws straining for the knob at the top of Blastritt’s lever. ‘Now it is your turn.’

Between the pair of them, they must have been carrying enough firepower to rival the Parasite Engine itself, but Scuttlegnawer’s eviction had sapped their armour of strength, reducing them both to an enervated scuffling reminiscent of the fights they had used to engage in when they were whelps. Blastritt could sense Scuttlegnawer’s amusement from deep inside the machine. It reminded him of how the bigger rats had used to goad the two sibling runts to fight so that they could mock their weakling efforts, too contemptuous even to finish off and devour the loser as custom demanded. The recollection filled Blastritt with a blinding rage, and he stopped trying to simply block Sprarrk and started groping for his brother’s lever himself.

‘What are you doing?’ Sprarrk hissed.

‘What I should have done the moment after you were whelped behind me.’

‘I was first-first!’

Blastritt squealed in alarm as Sprarrk’s paw inched closer and closer towards his lever. He strained, but its progress remained one way and inexorable. They were identical in almost every way, but Sprarrk’s boast of being several seconds older had perhaps a flicker of truth to it and his strength was infinitesimally greater.

‘Always, it falls on me to be the strong one!’ Sprarrk shrieked.

‘No-no!’

‘I will be right behind you, I promise.’

‘Graaaaaarrgh!’

Surrendering to his brother’s superior strength, Blastritt gave up on trying to reach Sprarrk’s lever and, without stopping to think about what he was doing, mashed his paw down on the big red button on the outside of his vambrace. His armour emitted a violent wheeze as several gallons of compressed yellow-green gas sprayed out of it to flood the tiny cockpit. The handful of surviving warlock engineers who had, up until that point, been watching their fighting leaders with typically rabid fascination, clawed at their throats as they collapsed over their workstations. One managed to totter all the way to the door before passing out with his paw still draped over the handle.

Sprarrk, meanwhile, hit by a particularly concentrated dose, gurgled and choked. He scratched at Blastritt’s mask with his claws, aggressively at first as though determined to tear out the metal zip and shred the tough leather, and then with increasing feebleness as first his windpipe and then his lungs turned to a toxic sludge that came bubbling back up through his nose and mouth. His fur turned yellow as the poison wind chemically burnt it. His eyeballs dissolved, leaking down the sides of his face like poisonous tears. Sprarrk’s face was a shrunken thing like a mummy’s, eyeless and furless and flecked with pink foam, by the time he finally stopped trying to scream and slumped over the central block, dead.

Blastritt giggled, even as the dead weight of his brother’s armour pinned his arm to the armrest and pushed him back into his seat.

His brother was dead.

Now who is the strong one!

For the first time in his life, he was free.

His elation lasted for the lesser half of an instant. He cringed in sudden horror, remembering how he had so nearly perished when the Fyreslayer and his lackey had drowned Sprarrk in the canal. Had he not felt the terrible ache of breathlessness in his own chest? Had Klatch not found him there, writhing in agony on the floor of the burrow they shared?

He braced himself and waited for the agony to come, his breaths pulling on the leather of his protective mask, but nothing seemed to be happening. Surely he should be dead by now?

Blastritt cracked open one eye.

Well, this was strange.

Blastritt frowned, thinking again of how he and Sprarrk had used to squabble as runts. They had not always been as inseparable as they had gone on to become. He wondered who it was who had first put the idea of conjoined souls into their heads anyway.

Now that he thought about it…

Scuttlegnawer.

The cockpit’s alert lights were still flashing their warnings, but murkily now, hidden behind the cloying fog of Blastritt’s poison wind. The panelling continued to groan and buckle as the geomantic energies coursing through them exceeded the material integrity of the metals. The rattling and squealing of rusted bolts were starting to sound decidedly like the mocking chitters of a daemon’s laughter.

With or without him, and preferably without, Scuttlegnawer was coming out.

Blastritt quickly decided that it was time to get out of there.

He made to get up, but found that he could not. Sprarrk’s body lay across him and, without the Verminlord’s power coursing through his armour, Blastritt alone lacked the strength to lift it. He struggled against the weight, but it was no use. He was pinned in his seat. He could not get up.

If he perished here, then it would be all Sprarrk’s fault!

He had time for one last squeal of outrage as the Parasite Engine exploded.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SCUTTLEGNAWER

Elsworn coughed, struggling to reload her gun one-handed in the dark. Her other arm was folded over her nose and mouth. The air in the corridor was smoke, and not the good, honest, warmly blanketing kind that came from Sigmar’s industries. It tasted of unclean fuels and burnt metals, so thick it felt as though a tar-smeared animal had got into her mouth and was trying to dig its way into her throat with its claws. She could not see the wall in front of her. Coughing into the crook of her elbow, she holstered her newly loaded pistol and felt over her breastplate for her fob watch. She flipped it open, holding it aloft like a tiny lantern. The dull yellow glow made a smudge in the dark, but not nearly enough to illuminate the rest of the corridor. Still, it was reassuring enough just to know there was something out there that was not smoke.

Something brushed against her hair. Elsworn turned, gun and magically glowing watch raised, eyes filled with stinging tears, but could not make out anything for the smoke. A breeze, she told herself, although she could feel nothing of the sort. Something electrical sputtered fitfully from hiding.

It sounded almost like laughter.

‘Gotrek,’ she croaked, before losing herself to another fit of coughing.

‘Here, lass.’

Elsworn whirled around. The voice had come from right beside her, but she could not see a thing. She waved her hand blindly in front of her.

‘You can cut that out,’ said the voice, in a familiar-sounding grumble. ‘I’m not a ghost.’

‘Gotrek,’ Elsworn gasped, relief leading her to take in an unwise lungful of smoke that she had to fight to keep from coughing back up. ‘What happened?’

‘I’m no expert in skaven engineering, but if I were to hazard a guess I’d say it blew up.’

Elsworn set aside her preferred response to that remark in favour of smothering another bout of coughing with her arm.

She wondered if they had caused this somehow. Their intention had been to disable the skaven war machine before it could finish siphoning the energy of the Gravenstone and that was what appeared to have happened, insofar as Elsworn could tell from here. She looked around, trying to pick up the bits and pieces of her memories from before the explosion. She and Gotrek had broken into the machine. A pair of skaven warriors in heavy bronze armour and boarding swords had come running to attack them. Gotrek had made short enough work of them and come to a sealed hatch. He had raised his axe to smash his way in, and then…

And then…

Could they have broken through that door and done something that Elsworn had forgotten about in the aftermath? She supposed it was possible. She had seen knocks to the head do stranger things to people. Either way, she could not very well stand around here while she thought about it. Her chest was aching as though she had climbed to the top of Mount Celestian and she was starting to feel light-headed. And Sigmar only knew what the skaven poison she was inhaling was doing to her insides.

‘We can’t stay here, Gotrek.’

‘The corridor ahead of us is blocked, I checked. There’s no way through.’

‘What about the way we came?’

‘Back?’ The Fyreslayer sounded offended by the very idea.

‘Unless you’ve got a better idea…’

‘Maybe. We’re not alone in here, lass. I can smell it.’

Elsworn thought of the brief touch she had felt on the back of her head and shuddered, trying again to pierce the smoke with her eyes and failing. Again, she thought she heard the faint echo of laughter. ‘Well, I hope it suffocates before we do, because that’s what’s going to happen if we stay here for much longer.’

Gotrek grumbled for a moment before muttering, ‘Aye, you’re right. That would be no fit way for a Slayer to die.’ Elsworn felt him heft his axe up against his shoulder. Its light bobbed half a yard ahead of her at about eye level, murky and yellow and barely discernible at all, like a Dreadwood spite that did not want to be followed, but Elsworn had keen eyes well accustomed to darkness. ‘All right, follow me.’

After a short walk, they came to the familiar wreckage of the weapon blister through which they had forced their entry. It did not look as though their incursion into the skaven lair had got very far. Whatever had accounted for the machine, it had obviously happened quite soon after their arrival.

Gotrek shouldered his axe and started to climb, using the mangled metal struts and the frames of the broken windows for a ladder. Grimacing as she drew her arm from her face in order to climb, Elsworn followed after him.

It was a short climb, barely ten feet straight up, but Elsworn was wheezing by the time she reached the outer hull of the skaven war machine. Her head was spinning and she felt dizzy and nauseous at the same time. The smoke and the lack of air made even the lightest of tasks feel like an ordeal from the gods.

The air on the outside of the machine was every bit as foul-tasting and poisonous as that on the inside had been, but it was not nearly so thick. For the first time, Elsworn could see further than the fingers of her own outstretched hand and, more importantly, she could breathe again.

Taking full advantage of both welcome boons, she sat up and looked around, trying to take in what had happened.

The skaven war machine was a mountain of scrapped metals, pitched onto its side in the middle of a rubble-strewn avenue lined with burnt trees. Black smoke and traces of glittering green dust issued from numerous fissures in the wreck’s hull like the first fitful dreams of a cooling volcano, but whatever had caused the explosion had obviously destroyed the machine completely. That was something to be grateful for, but the Great Axle did not appear to have come through it in much better shape. Its grand palaces had been reduced to smouldering shells, corner walls and bits of door frame sticking out of the rubble like weapons abandoned on a battlefield.

The destruction extended as far as the eye could see, which was admittedly not very far, and Elsworn prayed that it went no further.

Elsworn was not terribly familiar with the Great Axle. She was not sure she would have been able to orient herself at the best of times, and seeing it as it was now she realised that she had no idea at all where she was. She looked around for the reassuring bulk of the Gravenstone. If anything could have ridden out this destruction then it was surely the Stormkeep of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer, but she could not find that either.

It dawned on Elsworn that the explosion must have originated from a particular part of the war machine and been directed predominantly outwards from there. The machine’s own armour must have protected her and Gotrek from the worst of the blast.

If they had been just a little slower in forcing their way inside… If they had been but a few seconds faster in breaching the interior hatch and been in the corridor when it had been crushed…

She swallowed.

It did not bear thinking about.

She thought of Comet, Orinkul and Tun, and felt sick.

Worse than the scene of destruction around her, however, was the silence. It was so anathema to everything that made Greywater Fastness tick. She felt that she would rather hear the screams of the dying than bear another second of this stillness. Standing on the side of a crippled war machine with only the smoking of Gotrek’s axe and her own rasping breaths for company, Elsworn could not shake off the terrible gut-wrenching certainty that she and the Fyreslayer were the only two people left alive in the entire city.

She told herself she was being ridiculous. If even a god had the power to wipe out Greywater Fastness at a stroke, then the Everqueen would have surely done so centuries ago.

There was a patter of disturbed debris.

A muffled squeak.

Elsworn swung towards it, so grateful for the existence of another survivor besides Gotrek and herself that, in that moment, she did not care whether its back was furred or its fingers tipped by claws. She peered into the lazily coiling smoke where the sound had come from, but there was nothing there, just a few small bits of metallic junk running down the side of the hull as though knocked loose on a breeze.

‘Not there, here.’

The voice came to her like a secret whispered between rooms. Elsworn whirled, pulling her pepperbox from its holster and rising to her knees, but there was nothing behind her either, just barren, windswept metal and clouds of glittering warpstone dust that, just for a moment, had taken on a horned, rat-like shape.

Elsworn felt the hairs on the nape of her neck prickle.

Something had survived the destruction of the skaven war machine all right.

She only wished she could say for certain what it was.

They made their way slowly down the side of the machine, Elsworn’s sense of desolation only growing more acute as they left the wreck behind them. Gotrek had started them on their way with a snatch of a hummed tune, but even he quickly lost interest in feigning nonchalance. He squeezed his axe ever more tightly between both fists, his one good eye eagerly scouring the smoke for hidden dangers.

If Gotrek was feeling excited about it, then whatever he thought was out there must be very bad indeed. Elsworn wished she could say that the Fyreslayer was imagining things, but she could not. The smoke was filling her with the exact same feelings of dread.

‘Gotrek, look.’

She pointed to a small heap of black metal lying in a pile by the side of the road. Elsworn might have walked straight on past and thought no more of it, if not for the impassive mask staring up at the sky from amidst the wreckage. Oil smeared the shining sigmarite like tears. Her heart felt as though it might stop. It was more than just a body. It was a fallen idol. Elsworn was no expert in such matters, but judging by the fact that the Anvil of the Heldenhammer was still here and had not yet ridden the Storm Eternal back to Sigmaron, she had to believe that he was still alive.

Given the number of pieces he was in, that spoke of an appalling level of care on someone’s part.

What in all the Mortal Realms could do this to a Stormcast Eternal?

Making the sign of the hammer across her chest, Elsworn started towards the stricken Paladin, only to feel Gotrek’s rough hand on her shoulder.

‘Wait, lass.’

‘It’s a Stormcast Eternal,’ Elsworn cried, trying to shrug Gotrek off, but his grip on her shoulder was so firm it might have been cast in bronze.

‘Which means he’ll come back. You won’t.’

‘What are you talking about? There’s nothing–’

‘Stay behind me,’ Gotrek growled suddenly, drawing her back, and Elsworn noticed then that he was no longer looking at her as he spoke but at something in the smoke immediately above the dismembered Stormcast. ‘And get ready to run.’

Elsworn gawped down at the Fyreslayer, certain she had misheard.

‘Did I just hear Gotrek Gurnisson telling me to run?’

‘This one’s mine, and this time I’ll hear no argument.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ she said.

‘We’re not playing heroes any more.’

Elsworn could not decide if he was deliberately trying to insult her so that she would leave and let him have this final battle to himself. ‘Who’s been playing?’

‘I have, until now, letting you think you ever had a chance of besting me in a fight.’

Elsworn drew a sharp breath, her wounded pride allowing her to forget for a moment the fear creeping through her like smoke. The Fyreslayer had always been rude, but how dare he treat her contribution as if it was nothing, as if the friends she had lost had been nothing? She turned around, about to tell him exactly who had been carrying who these past weeks, when she remembered the wounded Anvil of the Heldenhammer still lying in the street and decided that this was not the time for that fight.

‘Oh please. Do not stop-stop because of me.’

Elsworn’s gun shot up as the voice hissed out of the smoke, like steam from a leaking boiler.

The smoke above the downed Anvil of the Heldenhammer began to roil and thicken, drawing in and sweeping up, picking up bits of metal and flecks of warpstone dust as it went like a spectre picking up its clothes, moulding itself out of rust and shadow into the shape of something almost human. A pair of green slit eyes opened either side of a long, bestial head. They glinted with malice as the mouth split into a grin filled with nails and coins and broken knife-points arranged like teeth. Black horns erupted from its forehead. They formed a knotted spiral with no obvious beginning and no apparent end, and only madness in between. Copper wires wound around its scrawny neck and wrists like primitive jewellery. Its body, though, was anything but primitive, an insane assemblage of moving parts, cobbled together from the downed skaven war machine and collected off the street, together fashioning thousands of rusty cogwheels that clattered and whirred and oozed blood where they crunched together in facsimile of un-fleshed muscles and internal organs. Its lashing tail was a thick braid of cables. A nimbus of strange electricity shrouded its thin, towering form like an aura. In one scarred paw it wielded a glaive four times as long as Elsworn was tall. Its blade was a jagged half-moon of solid warpstone, seething with enough corrupting magic to drive a coven of Chaos sorcerers mad with avarice. It had been appended with coils of wire and strange devices, as though the need could possibly exist to make such a weapon deadlier still.

A daemon, Elsworn thought, feeling her knees begin to tremble.

A skaven daemon.

She would not have thought it possible that either of those two words could be made to sound more loathsome than they did on their own, but once again she had followed Gotrek Gurnisson into a situation that demonstrated just how naive she was.

Her sanity buckled under the strain.

She might have run away screaming then, and been none the wiser about it until she was lost in the Great Axle, with no hope of ever finding her way back. It was with some surprise, then, and no little pride that she returned to her senses with her feet firmly planted on the cobbles beside Gotrek. She had been brought face to face with one of the most malign creatures in all of the Mortal Realms and not broken.

That realisation alone gave her the strength to raise her pistol higher, aiming it straight at the daemon’s grinding, half-exposed metal heart.

‘We’ll fight it together,’ she said.

Gotrek sighed loudly. ‘First you get in the way of my rat ogor. Then you jump off my train. You’re as bad as Amara, but without the excuse of being a hammer-waving fanatic.’

Elsworn shook her head. She had no idea what he was talking about most of the time.

‘Fine, have it your own way,’ Gotrek went on. ‘Just don’t go moping around Shyish afterwards telling people I didn’t warn you.’

‘Killing you myself will be less amusing than watching you kill-kill each other,’ the towering cogwork wraith chittered over them. ‘But it will probably be less amusing for you as well, so I suppose that this is only fair.’

Gritting her teeth against the nausea welling up inside her, Elsworn steeled her courage against it and pulled on the pistol’s trigger. She pulled it again, three more times, with the same complete lack of result. The trigger mechanism did not even muster a click, which was what should at least have happened if she had forgotten to reload the barrels. She tore her gaze away from the daemon to glance down at the gun in her hand and cried out in despair.

The weapon was feverishly disassembling itself, every tiny pin and coil of spring coming apart from its neighbouring pieces as though being carried away by a swarm of industrious ants. The only bits still in her grasp were the ironwood grip and the trigger, and even as she watched they too disintegrated into their constituent parts and streamed away through her fingers.

‘Interesting…’ the daemon mused, drawing the metallic cloud into a swirling, three-dimensional diagram with a switch of its claws. ‘Percussion cap firing mechanism. Good. Cylindrical repeating chamber. Good-good.’ The daemon tittered to itself as it studied the dismantled weapon. ‘Clever. Yes-yes. Very clever. Your inventiveness might one day rival that of Clan Skryre, and yet…’ The daemon held out its free paw and the swarm of metal pieces flew towards it, reassembling themselves as they went until, before Elsworn’s horrified gaze, there was a complete pepperbox pistol in its grip, pointing back towards her. Somehow, the weapon now fitted its gigantic paw perfectly. ‘And yet I am Scuttlegnawer, the Master of Technology. The machinery of the cosmos is mine to tinker with. I have been eager to explore this warren of yours, man-thing, ever since the smoke from its polluted fires reached me through the gnawholes. For centuries have I waited for a big enough fool to summon me, and then two scurry along at once. I almost feared you might stop them. Almost. But in the end, all you did was hurry them into summoning me sooner.

‘Now I am ready to play.’

Elsworn was still flexing the disbelieving fingers of her now-empty grip.

She did not know what she was supposed to do now.

‘Sigmar…’

The daemon showed its rusted peg teeth. ‘Your god has no place here any more, man-thing. And as for yours–’

It turned its fiendish gaze to Gotrek, its thin green eyes widening in something akin to surprise as it found the Fyreslayer barrelling towards it with a furious yell instead of waiting patiently for its mockery. His axe burnt the air in two like a steel press, hammering into the blunt face of the daemon’s glaive, which moved with impossible speed to interpose itself.

Elsworn did not even see a blur.

‘How very-very rude,’ Scuttlegnawer hissed.

Gotrek answered with a bloodcurdling shout, looping his flaming axe overhead and throwing himself at the daemon with no thought to defence. He struck with such wild abandon it was like watching the ground breaking up under the tread of a godbeast and spewing fire; but landing a blow on Scuttlegnawer seemed to be as troublesome as trying to wound a shadow. It scuttled aside from mortal blows, parried when doing so amused it, showering both combatants with burning embers and motes of warpstone, before countering with swift jabs of its tail and giggling throughout in the manner of a warrior beset by an earnest but very small child.

Without stopping to think, Elsworn drew her sword, let out a battle cry of her own, and charged.

The daemon fended off both attackers at the same time in a deranged whirl of grinning teeth and leaking warpstone. As superb as she was on a pistol range, Elsworn was at least as good a swordswoman as any she knew, and yet even she could not break through its defences. It was like trying to kill a snake with a pitchfork. Gotrek wreathed all three of them in fire as he worked himself up into a spitting fury, the heat of it pulling sweat through Elsworn’s armour and causing her to stumble, even as she struggled to so much as nick the daemon’s rusty hide.

‘Use the rune, Gotrek,’ she yelled, seeing yet another blow effortlessly turned on the daemon’s glaive.

The Fyreslayer merely scowled, attacking with redoubled fury.

‘He has broken it. Yes-yes. Careless, Fyreslayer. I see the broken wires of fate and the sad, pouting faces of its makers. He blames the priest-thing, but no. Too facile, yes, the fault goes deeper than he sees.’

‘Shut up and fight me!’ Gotrek roared.

‘Shall I tell you what you did, Fyreslayer? For it is you who broke it. Yes. Or would you sooner see me carve this sliver of the Shattered One from your flesh and consume it? Yes-yes. I believe that you would.’

A sudden lash of the tail sent Elsworn flying. She hit the ground and rolled, keeping a hold of her sword, which clattered angrily where it struck the broken cobbles like a loose chain on a flywheel. She stuck a knee out to break her roll, coming to a dishevelled halt in the lee of a half-collapsed townhouse. Winded, she looked quickly back just as the leering daemon swung its reassembled pepperbox around and opened fire.

Lead bullets, tainted with warpstone, screamed from the muzzle. Elsworn was back on her feet and throwing herself over the remaining stub of wall behind her even as the hail of shot chewed into the brickwork. She kept her head down and grimaced as more bullets than it was physically possible to shoot out of her pistol’s five chambers mauled her hiding place.

‘A clever device, man-thing. But Scuttlegnawer is clevererer.’

The daemon chittered some words over its weapon as though soothing an injured bird, and then threw up its paw. The pepperbox took flight, leaving a trail of greasy black sparks in the air as it sputtered towards her. Elsworn remembered to duck again only as another torrent of bullets pummelled the wall. Elsworn wondered just how much more abuse the brickwork would take. It did not look as though the possessed gun was going to be running out of bullets any time soon.

Staying low to keep out of the drifting weapon’s line of sight, she scrambled along the line of the wall. She peered around the far end. Scuttlegnawer had Gotrek firmly on the defensive, going from attack to attack to attack with so little recovery time between blows that Elsworn had to forcibly remind herself there was only one of the creature. Gotrek was only barely keeping up, and even that was astounding. She saw now how even the Anvils of the Heldenhammer had not stood a chance. She measured the distance between herself and the daemon, but even as she weighed her chances, the possessed weapon registered the fact that she had moved. It pivoted towards her, blizzarding the end of the wall with shot and forcing her back behind cover.

Elsworn grimaced. If only she had kept her second gun instead of giving it to Alicia. With aim as terrible as Scuttlegnawer’s, one shot would be all she needed to take the hovering pistol and free her to help Gotrek.

She looked desperately around for anything that could double as a weapon, about to settle for throwing a brick when a grimy figure came charging out of nowhere to tumble alongside her into cover behind the wall. Elsworn’s first thought was that a skaven warrior had managed to make it out of the downed war machine and sought to attack her. On instinct, she raised the brick in her hand, ready to bash the creature’s brains out if it came to it, only to hesitate at the last second when she realised that, under all the brick dust, the face was a familiar one.

‘Orinkul?’

Elsworn stared in disbelief, the brick still in her hand. It had never even occurred to her that any of her friends might have survived the explosion.

The duardin rubbed the filth from his eyes and blinked. He seemed almost as surprised to see her as she was to see him.

‘Elsworn?’

‘You made it.’

He nodded. ‘Looks like.’

‘And you came back?’

‘We underjacks stick together, rat daemon or no.’

Elsworn gave his shoulder a grateful squeeze, then turned away, blinking, for it felt as though she too had something in her eye.

A colossal boom of thunder rolled across the broken street. Elsworn was already down, but she burrowed her head further into the rubble on instinct.

She glanced up as the echoes faded to see Scuttlegnawer chittering in annoyance and the ruin behind it collapsing into rubble. She looked the other way, unsure whether to laugh at herself or despair over her failure to spot the armoured train lying half-buried in the same townhouse she was using as cover. In fairness to her, there had been other things on her mind, and the train had done an excellent job of camouflaging itself in the rubble. Mangled bits of track looked like so much firewood and scrap iron. Reddish-grey dust masked the carriage’s painted sides, but it had miraculously come through its fall in one piece and the right way up, even if the engine had come to rest as a wreck on its side.

Elsworn could hardly believe her eyes. Here she was holding a brick while there was an Ironweld great cannon just sitting there. Sergeant Tun was up there with it, wreathed in smoke and bent like a ghoul over a disturbed grave, trying to lift another cannonball into the bore.

‘Fool-fools! It seems this realm is filled with them.’

Scuttlegnawer swept its claws through a brisk sequence, and Tun cried out in alarm as the cannon came loose from the cupola and floated free. It swung slowly in the air like a gargant’s club, sending Tun fleeing back inside the train.

Elsworn swore under her breath.

If this was but a foretaste of Scuttlegnawer’s powers, one ensorcelled revolver and a scuttled cannon were going to be the least of their worries. If the daemon was allowed to weave its magic over the Anvils of Industry or the Crucible of State, then it would be as good as invincible. The Freeguild would have a job on their hands to stop it and would probably end up levelling half of Greywater Fastness in the process, assuming it could be done at all.

They had to stop the daemon here, now – but how?

She turned to Orinkul. ‘I need you to keep my gun’s attention on you for a few minutes. Can you do it?’

‘Why? What are you planning to–’

Without waiting for a reply, Elsworn turned and lobbed her brick over the wall. The possessed pepperbox blasted it to bits, but all she had wanted from it was the moment’s distraction that she got, half running and half slipping through the rubble until she came to the wreck of their train. There, she slid up against the weathered iron cladding and peered in through one of the narrowed windows. Tun had collapsed into one of the pew-like seats towards the rear of the carriage, but she was not looking for him.

She pulled on the sliding door handle, rattling it hard, but it refused to budge. Something was jamming it shut. ‘I’m coming in,’ she murmured aloud, sticking her sword through the door’s vertical seam and levering for all she was worth. After a few seconds of that, something that was not her sword finally went snap and the door popped back onto its rails. Elsworn dragged it wide.

Comet reared up in the open doorway, all flailing hooves, flared nostrils, and wide-eyed terror. He had been in the train when it had fallen through the townhouse’s roof and was penned inside for several minutes afterwards, and the ugly flashes of warp lightning and violent shouts coming from Gotrek’s battle with Scuttlegnawer were not exactly assuaging the poor creature’s nerves now. He looked ready to bolt, whether Elsworn got out of the way or not. She held her ground, regardless, holding her open hand out to him and making soothing noises.

The horse stamped his hooves, threw his mane, but allowed Elsworn to take his reins, blowing an ill-tempered raspberry as she laid her forehead against his. His whole body was shaking, but she could feel him calming.

‘Good boy,’ said Elsworn, stroking his mane. ‘Good boy.’ Sliding one foot into the stirrup, she boosted herself up into the saddle. Comet sidestepped tiredly under the burden, Elsworn leaning over the saddle horn to murmur promises of oat cakes and clean water and all the golden straw in Hysh to sleep on if he would carry her just a little further.

She threw a glance back inside the train to where Tun had apparently passed out over the pew he’d fallen into, head on his arm, arm draped over the back of the seat. There was no time to check if he was otherwise unhurt.

If, by some miracle, this all worked out, he could rouse himself at his leisure later, and if it did not… Well, if it did not, then she would be doing him no favours by waking him beforehand.

She clicked her tongue and flicked the reins, nudging Comet into a walk through the rubble. One good charge. That was all she needed. It was surely all she was going to get.

She looked back across the street. The cannon fire and the collapse of another building had thickened the air still further, to the extent that Elsworn could no longer see fully across it. Scuttlegnawer was visible as an electric green halo, Gotrek as a feeble, fiery gold. It did not look as though he could hold the daemon at bay for much longer. Orinkul was where she had left him, throwing bricks over the wall for the daemon pistol to gun down, but neither it nor Scuttlegnawer seemed to have noticed Elsworn and Comet circling around the battle’s edge.

Her heart began to race as she left the ruin of the townhouse behind and remounted the road. The sound of Comet’s hooves clattering on the paving stones sounded to her own ear as if she came with an entire factory workers’ marching band at her back, but still, neither Scuttlegnawer, nor its gun, nor even Gotrek himself looked up from the fight to spot her. Ordinarily, she would have considered an ambush as the last recourse of the cowardly, but necessity seemed to have arrived at some kind of understanding with her pride. For Gotrek, and for Greywater Fastness, she would make an exception in this case.

From somewhere deeper in the murk, Elsworn saw what looked like tiny flickers of lightning, and took heart. There were Stormcast Eternals still out there fighting. Perhaps the fate of the entire city did not rest solely on her shoulders after all. The realisation should probably have diminished her resolve, but its effect on her was the opposite. She could fight now, without having to fear for what might happen if she failed.

She would not leave Gotrek to face this doom alone.

They were underjacks. They stuck together.

Reining Comet in, she wheeled him around until he was turned back towards the fighting. Nothing but open road in his way. ‘Yah!’ she yelled, driving him into a canter, and then on to a gallop. His chest rattled with exhaustion, his gait was ragged, but there was no terror in the Mortal Realms, no weariness so great, that would hold Comet back when given his head to run. Like a shadow racing ahead of the day, he flew, driving Elsworn back against the cantle of her saddle, flattening the skin against her face, pushing her lips up from her teeth as she grinned in pure exhilaration. No more cowering behind walls. No more running. It was just her, a horse, and three-and-a-half feet of sharp Greywater steel in her hand.

What did the nightmare before her matter?

She was a Cavalier. She would ride it into the ground or die trying.

Comet tore aside the veil of smoke with his speed, revealing the appalling tableau in all its dreadful detail. There was Gotrek, face down in the wall that had broken his fall. And there was Scuttlegnawer, its bent and rusted spine turned to Elsworn as it raised its glaive to administer the killing blow. Gotrek turned his head to look back, too beaten even to defend himself, the defiance still alight in his one good eye mingled with something Elsworn could only describe as glee. Seeing the look, Elsworn almost pulled her stroke and rode Comet past. Had Gotrek not come to this place, this city beyond the reach of gods and destiny, to find a death as glorious as this? She did not pretend to understand what madness drove him, but she had come to respect it, and she did not want to be the one to ride roughshod over his need as he had once done to hers.

But even then, it occurred to her that destiny was perhaps a more tenacious weed than Gotrek had given it credit for, and that Greywater’s soil was not so inimical to its growth after all. Because here she was, a soldier in Sigmar’s Freeguild, ready to chalk up one more miracle in his name.

Scuttlegnawer finally registered the thundering of hoofbeats on the road behind it and looked up from its prey. Its dark green eyes struck her with the full bottomless weight of its malevolence, its warped sanity, its terrible intellect, and had it not been for Comet then Elsworn was certain she would have been stopped rigid by the sheer might of its stare. But the horse swept her on. She was there. No time for second thoughts even if she could force her brain to entertain one.

With a wild yell, she struck, investing her swing with all the strength in her arm, all the courage in her heart, all the conviction in her spirit, and, crucially, all the speed of her stampeding mount, smiting her sword clear through the daemon’s neck. Its great horned head went sailing through the air ahead of her, spinning end over end spewing poisonous vapours before hitting the wall across from her, where it disintegrated into a yellow-green cloud. Its body lasted a few moments longer, tottering on cloven feet, spasming with warp lightning, until its entire bulk collapsed in a noxious plume, bits of harvested metals tinkling to the cobbles like a midnight shower in Chamon.

She reined back hard, covering her mouth with her arm and coughing as all manner of lethal gases scratched at the back of her throat, bringing blisters to her cheeks and tears to her eyes. There was not Aqua Ghyranis enough in the entire Everspring Swathe for this. Climbing hastily down from Comet, who at least had the protection of his helmet and blankets, Elsworn lay down beside him where the gas was thinner. She refused to kill a greater daemon only to choke on it immediately afterwards.

Something metallic caught her eye from amidst the ground litter around her. Ferreting towards it with one hand, she brushed some of the dust off the ironwood handle and cried out in surprise. It was her gun.

Hesitantly at first, half expecting the thing to throw off one last spiteful bolt of lightning or explode, she drew it across the ground towards her and lifted it up.

The barrel glittered with stuck-on motes of warpstone dust. A little mustard-coloured gas dribbled from the barrel, but other than that it seemed that no trace of the daemon’s vile enchantment lingered. It had even reverted to its original size. She drew the weapon to her chest and closed her eyes in relief as she lay her head against the barrel. It felt strangely warm, perhaps a little heavier than it had been before, but she put both of these apparent oddities down to simple weariness on her part.

She had just slain a greater daemon of the skaven’s corrupt deity. The Mortal Realms could cut her some slack, given the circumstances.

With the gas around her beginning to thin out, Elsworn at last sat up.

The flicker of Azyrite lightning from within the pall seemed to be working its way ever closer, as though drawn by the daemon’s demise. Elsworn was struck with the definite inclination to be elsewhere by the time the Anvils of the Heldenhammer arrived on this scene. She fully recalled Garvil and Tonan’s warning about the Order of Azyr taking an interest in Lady Zukaus’ affairs, and being caught with a stolen Freeguild train in the warpstone-infused crater of the skaven apocalypse engine was not going to lend tremendous credence to her protestations of innocence. The Anvils of the Heldenhammer were prone to strike first and ask questions later.

Elsworn shook her head sadly. All the years she had spent dreaming of seeing the realms beyond her city, she had never thought she would be forced to leave it like this, fleeing to the One Road like a common crook without even stopping long enough to say goodbye.

She turned her pistol over in her hand. Perhaps somewhere, somehow, her sister would be holding its counterpart and thinking of her.

Gotrek came crunching towards her. His face was a mass of bruises. His nose was bleeding and there was rubble in his hair. He looked thoroughly despondent. Elsworn looked around for Orinkul, but he was nowhere to be seen – probably gone to pull Tun out of the train and flee before the Anvils of the Heldenhammer got here.

‘Is that it, do you think?’ Elsworn murmured. ‘Is it over?’

Gotrek pursed his broken lip, and said nothing. It seemed that, once again, they were going to try and forget whatever had just happened between them. As foundations for friendship went, Elsworn had known better, but it was something they could work on.

Gotrek turned to walk away.

Dusting off her trousers and holstering her pepperbox, Elsworn started after him.

‘Where do we go now?’

‘I’m thirsty.’

‘And then, our duel?’

The Fyreslayer halted. He turned to scowl at her over his shoulder, but Elsworn was confident she saw the glimmer of approval in his one, bloodshot eye. ‘Aye, when I say you’re ready for it. A promise is a promise.’ Then he cast a sidelong look at Comet, traipsing tiredly alongside Elsworn and trying to nibble on her sleeve. The humour left him.

‘So long as he stays out of it.’

EPILOGUE

The small sewer barge cut sullenly through the crusted bog, the huddle of clanrats watching anxiously as the forest slid slowly by. Klatch One-Ear hated the Ghoul Mere. In its dankness, its closeness, its low, brooding canopy, it was almost akin to being underground, but the constant restless movement was unsettling. The furtive rustling of a leaf here, the flutter of something winged there. Trying to keep track of it all strained Klatch’s keen skaven senses. His paws ached from clutching his brace of warplock pistols for so long.

He turned his head sharply, one pistol jerking upwards as an overhanging branch bobbed lazily into the water. A scruffy-looking heron with tar-slicked feathers sat halfway up the branch, observing the passing boat with head cocked and too much intelligence in its milky yellow eyes.

Klatch shivered. His whiskers twitched.

He hated the Ghoul Mere.

‘Row, fast-quick,’ he chittered, turning to wave his pistol over the two cringing oars-rats. They stood hunched, one at each side, with paddles in their paws. ‘Row, lazy-meat worms. Before the humans follow-chase. Before woody-meat tree-things come for our scent, to peel the fur from your worthless hides and string you from their thorny branches.’

The two clanrats hastened to redouble their efforts, causing the boat to wobble as they singularly failed to settle on a steady rhythm. Klatch was about to scold the pair again when the glint of something reflective drew his attention back to the bank. A wildcat, more scab than fur, hissed at him, the rancid green light of Ghyran’s moons shining in its eyes, before disappearing into the undergrowth.

‘How much farther to Skryre Lock?’ grunted Thrash Krakmaw.

The hugely muscled stormvermin was clad in a motley of brass and steel. He had installed himself in the small vessel’s prow, passing the hours running a whetstone up and down his rusty scimitar and growling unimaginative threats at the oars-rats. For some unknowable reason, Klatch’s standing as Sprarrk’s favoured right paw did not seem to mean as much now that Sprarrk, and most of the skaven he had less-than-brilliantly led, was now dead. It was for this reason that while one of Klatch’s pistols tracked the strange noises of the Ghoul Mere, the other remained subtly pointed at Thrash.

‘Not far now,’ Klatch assured him. ‘No. Not far.’ In truth, he was far from certain just how far they had still to go, or even if they were going in the right direction at all. The Ghoul Mere was a maze, endlessly changing as the vigour of the Dreadwood reclaimed poisoned waterways only to die back elsewhere and open new ones.

Klatch had not plied these routes in many moons, and had fled Skryre Lock in something of a hurry after a string of unfortunate accidents involving mislabelled warpstone explosives and a number of Klatch’s erstwhile peers. He saw no reason for Thrash and the others to learn this, however. He was glad simply to have escaped the disaster of Greywater Fastness with his fur attached. He would worry about the rest later, and had absolutely no qualms about shooting Thrash in the face and tipping his body over the side for the crocosuchians if the big stormvermin objected.

Klatch preened quietly to himself at the thought.

Yes, he was in charge now.

The boat rocked gently.

There was a muffled squeak, a splash, and then silence.

Klatch bared his fangs at the oars-rats, for their clumsiness had pulled him from a most agreeable daydream. Neither clanrat reacted with the expected deference, instead gripping their paddles in suddenly trembling paws and staring slack-muzzled at something behind Klatch’s back. Thrash Krakmaw scrambled to his footpaws, causing the boat to yaw dangerously with his shifting weight. Feeling his musk glands tightening, Klatch turned to where Zilch Redeye was supposed to be standing on the stern platform, steering them with a long wooden pole. The pole was still there. Zilch was not. Klatch scurried up onto the platform and peered down. Ripples gently lapped against the swamp’s banks.

‘Where is Zilch?’ Thrash squeaked.

‘I do not know.’

‘Is it tree-things?’

‘I do not know!’

There was an explosion of leaves from the canopy directly above them. All four skaven looked up as a screeching flock of mangy-looking ospreys descended on the boat. Klatch buried his head in his arms, squealing in pain and fright as the hunting birds pecked and tore at his fur. Thrash roared, swinging his scimitar wildly and smacking it into the starboard oars-rat’s chest. The clanrat puked blood over the larger skaven’s breastplate before pitching himself overboard. The second oars-rat shrieked in panic, two dozen or more birds acting in uncanny unison as they sank their talons into his scalp, his shoulders, along the length of his scrawny arms, hoisting his bony frame aloft and bearing it up into the canopy. There were more screams. The leaves thrashed. Blood splattered down over the boat.

Klatch brought up both pistols and fired blindly into the cawing mob. The birds twisted and writhed in unnatural ways to avoid being shot, almost as if they were being shaped, moulded by some other force, wings flapping madly as individual bodies were drawn into a single upright frame. It was a tall, terrifying human female. Her skin was white, her jawline hard. Her hair was the colour of a dying flame. The feathers of the last struggling birds became the fur trims and collar of a great black cloak, spattered with swamp water and mud. She smelled of dead animals. Her eyes were a hellish purple.

Thrash roared, muscles bulging against the restraints of his armour, as he swung his scimitar at the newcomer. The woman wore a greatsword in a scabbard across her back, but she did not bother drawing it, instead blocking Thrash’s swing on the outside of her hand. The stormvermin yelped as though he had just struck a wall, not resisting as the woman plucked the sword from his grip, snapped it in half across her knee, and then casually dropped both halves over the side of the boat. Thrash shook his head, spraying the deck with spittle as he lunged for her. There was a flicker of movement and suddenly the woman was no longer there, Thrash stumbling along the rocking boat with nothing but her corpse scent in his paws. She was behind him. Klatch squealed a warning, but too late, as she clapped her hands either side of Thrash’s head. A twist. A crack. A wrench. Thrash’s headless body slumped to the floor of the boat. Blood from his severed neck continued to sputter out, like water from a gassy tap, spattering all over the woman’s heavy leather boots.

She smiled at Klatch, bloody, feral, long canines slinking from the sheath of her upper lip. Klatch impulsively tossed both his pistols overboard. When superior skaven tactics and weaponry failed, it fell to abject obeisance to carry the day.

He dropped to his knees.

‘I am your humblest of servants, most–’

Thrash’s head hit the deck.

At the exact same moment that it did, the woman who had dropped it appeared over Klatch. He flinched, a surprised squeak choked off mid-sound as the woman took him by the throat and effortlessly lifted him up into the air. He scratched, kicked, lashed his tail, but he may as well have been in the clutches of a Stormfiend for all the good his efforts did him. The grip around his throat tightened. Klatch’s head began to throb. His vision narrowed, even as his senses seemed to sharpen. The forest around him clicked and twittered. Eyes glittered, watching him, as though every bird, squirrel, fox, and cat in the Ghoul Mere had come at their mistress’ summons, come to watch their sovereign administer judgement.

Klatch wondered if he really was about to die and whimpered at the unfairness of it. To survive the demise of his masters, only to perish now. He clawed feebly at the woman’s leather-clad arms.

He had had such plans.

‘I am hunting someone,’ she said, her words going through the throbbing of his skull like cold nails. ‘I believe that you will know them.’

Klatch nodded feebly. Anything, he managed to mouth, though he was not sure any sounds came out.

The woman understood him well enough, however, for she bared her teeth in that horrible smile once again, loosening her grip on his neck just enough for him to breathe. ‘I seek a Fyreslayer doomseeker and his companion, a human woman named Elsworn Killebrook.’

Klatch moaned softly.

He wanted to tell the woman that she should take his neck and wring it until he choked, for he would rather that than tangle with those two again. For some reason, the words refused to come out. There was something about the woman’s eyes, the way the amethyst glow in them roiled and swirled, making patterns that drew his full attention and made him forget what it was he had wanted to say. The creatures of the Ghoul Mere chirruped all around, but it no longer sounded menacing. Join us, they seemed to be urging. Listen. Obey. Serve.

And before Klatch knew it, he was telling the woman everything he knew about the Fyreslayer and his human lackey.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Guymer’s work for Black Library includes the Warhammer Age of Sigmar novels Kragnos: Avatar of Destruction, Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods and The Court of the Blind King, the novella Bonereapers, and several audio dramas including Realmslayer and Realmslayer: Blood of the Old World. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned. For The Horus Heresy he has written the novella Dreadwing, and the Primarchs novels Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa and Lion El’Jonson: Lord of the First. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Angron: The Red Angel, The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

An extract from Skaventide.

Sometime past midnight, the Heart of the Halt pulsed once, and the heat of it woke Brevin Fortis from dreams of shadows and smoke.

He sat up and stared across his workshop. He’d moved his pallet in here years ago, when he’d first come to this place on the edge of everything, to be closer to his work. The night was quiet and cool, but his skin was slick with sweat and he could feel a heat gathering in his chest where the Halt had marked him ten years before. He stood, thin sheets sliding off, pressed one hand against the raw basalt of the room’s wall, and murmured.

‘Where?’

Beneath his hand the cold stone warmed and then began to glow red like approaching dawn, like blood flowing. The glow bloomed around his hand in a perfect circle, then moved upwards, like a brush stroked through ink, away from the Heart, towards the top of the Halt. As he watched, it dimmed to nothing but a lingering heat.

Brevin frowned and took his hand away. Then, he stepped to the rack next to his bed where his armour hung, the silver sigmarite gleaming in the gloom, and began to dress.

It was three hundred steps to the top of the Halt from Brevin’s workshop, but he took them three at a time, well acquainted with the shallowness of each stone tread. This fortress had been built long ago by mortals, and its rooms were scaled for them, despite the enormity of the place.

The Halt was a wall, four hundred feet tall and almost three times as long, a bastion of basalt that stretched between the sheer cliffs of Warrun Vale. The vale itself cut through the Adamantine Chain, the gigantic mountain range that separated the dry, hot plains of Aqshy’s Great Parch from its lonelier lands bordering the Ocean of Tears. In some distant age, a forgotten empire had built a line of fortresses into these mountains, an attempt to block every route in and out, denying passage to an enemy now unknown. Warrun Vale, located almost in the centre of the Chain, was the widest of those routes, and so the Halt was the greatest of the ancient fortresses.

And deep within that giant pile of basalt, those mortals had set the Heart, the relic that had been Brevin’s blessing and curse for ten long years.

Brevin reached the top of the steps, breathing easy despite the climb and the altitude. The Warrun Vale might lie far below the snow-capped peaks of the Adamantine Chain, but it was still high above the Great Parch. The air here was cold and thin, but Brevin’s body had been crafted by the gods. The guard at the top of the stairs was mortal though, and when the woman stepped out to challenge him, Brevin could hear the chatter of her teeth, the panting draw of her breath.

‘Who–’ she started, but her voice fell to a stammer as she saw him in the lantern light. ‘Lord-Ordinator!’

‘Golden Lion,’ he answered, keeping his voice low. It was deep in the night, and most of the Halt’s defenders were asleep. Or should have been. He’d heard mutters as he mounted the steps, the sounds of restless sleep broken by dreams. Or nightmares. ‘How goes it?’

‘Quiet, Lord-Ordinator.’ The woman finally remembered herself and moved back, giving him space to pass. Beneath her cloak she was wrapped in a breastplate, its steel enamelled crimson and emblazoned with the golden head of a lion snarling over two crossed swords. Brevin didn’t recognise her, but Brevin didn’t recognise most of the mortals guarding the Halt. The 27th Regiment of the Golden Lions had marched here four years ago, the latest regiment sent by the distant free city of Hammerhal Aqsha to guard this lonely bastion. Eight hundred men and women with polished armour and determined faces, the first line of defence for the vast open lands that surrounded Hammerhal Aqsha and the other free cities of Sigmar.

Another set of children wrapped in costume armour, waving toy swords.

That was unfair, Brevin thought. The Adamantine Chain was far from any place that could be called safe. In the years they’d been here, these mortals had faced feral orruks, screaming grots riding malformed troggoths, bands of blood-mad Khorne worshippers from gods-cursed Hel Crown, and even a pair of towering gargants. They were soldiers, brave and true, even if they were half his size.

Besides, he’d been mortal once himself. How he would have bristled then to be thought of as a child when he’d fought for his people. But it was hard to remember that the Astral Grandhammer he carried now was over twice as tall as he once was. Before Sigmar had taken his soul and poured it into a body remade for war.

‘My lord Stormcast Eternal,’ the guard said as he passed. ‘Are you looking for General Kant?’

‘I was not,’ he answered honestly. ‘But I am now, if she is here.’

‘Yes.’ The soldier pointed towards the centre of the wall. A figure stood there, a shadow against the dim glow rising from the face of the wall below. ‘She said she couldn’t sleep.’

‘I know the problem,’ he said. Nodding his thanks, he walked towards the Golden Lions’ leader.

General Delia Kant was in her mid fifties, a lean woman with grey hair and weathered brown skin marked with scars. Despite the hour, she wore the Golden Lions dress uniform with its crimson cap and jerkin. The only time Brevin had seen her out of that uniform was when she wore her armour. Armour which was just as well kept as her uniform, but ruthlessly utilitarian. Kant was a practical woman, organised and meticulous, patient but demanding with her soldiers. Brevin had got along with her well since she arrived, though they seldom spoke. The general was private, disciplined. Contained. But when he stepped up to the low rampart that ran atop the Halt’s face, she looked grateful for his company.

‘Brevin Fortis, honoured Lord-Ordinator of the Hallowed Knights. Good evening. Or should I say good morning?’

‘Morning would be more accurate,’ he said. It didn’t feel accurate though. The sky was black, the stars bright. Dawn did not touch any part of the horizon, and the only light came from the stars, the three moons that spun over the realm of Aqshy, and the steady glow of the face of the Halt. The wall was made of basalt, dense volcanic rock without seam or joint. But the face of it was covered with a sheet of quartz a foot thick, gleaming crystal covering the dark stone. Threads of crimson ran beneath the quartz, a web of glowing red veins. Emberstone. Aqshy was the Realm of Fire, and emberstone was its magic in crystalline form, fire made solid. Volatile and valuable, small pieces of emberstone could fuel vast conflagrations of magic. The amount of it contained in the face of the Halt was anything but small, and Brevin had only heard of one place that used more emberstone in its construction. That was the Whitefire Court, the home of the Collegiate Arcane in the city of Hallowheart, and the mages that lived there were constantly fighting to keep that power contained.

In the Halt, the emberstone’s power was chained to its Heart, and Brevin could feel the heat of that ancient artefact in his chest as he stared at the glowing veins of power in the wall below.

‘The Heart woke me from dark dreams,’ he said. ‘It told me to come here.’

‘Dark dreams,’ Kant said, frowning out at the darkness.

Warrun Vale was kept clear for the distance of a bowshot, but beyond that the pass was overrun with pines, massive old trees filling it from cliff to cliff except for the thin track that disappeared into the forest. The Golden Lions ran patrols out into the wilds on the other side of the Adamantine Chain, and occasionally traders would try their luck in those distant lands, though they seldom found anything there but death. The Warrun Vale was a lonely place, and beyond the mountains, foothills gave way to flat plains that ran down to the Ocean of Tears. During the day, you could see what felt like forever from here, across a haze of green to the distant sea, but there was nothing civilised out there. And now there was nothing but night.

‘I dreamt of darkness too,’ Kant said. ‘Darkness that flowed and choked. Dreams are strange lately. My sergeants tell me my soldiers don’t sleep, and when my dreams woke me tonight their cries kept me awake.’ She looked up at him. ‘Did the Heart speak to you of dreams when it woke you?’

‘The Heart spoke to me of nothing,’ Brevin said. ‘It just wanted me awake.’

Over a decade ago, Brevin Fortis had come to the Halt to study it. Lord-Ordinators were the engineers of the Stormcast Eternals, those mortals to whom the great god Sigmar in his wisdom had granted immortality so that they could battle anyone or anything that fought to despoil the Mortal Realms. Brevin had been a builder in his first life, before he was reborn a Hallowed Knight, and his ability to shape stone was valued just as much by his god as his ability to hew flesh. After his soul was Reforged, he was taught to raise edifices that would protect and inspire Sigmar’s faithful. But there was always more to learn, and when Brevin heard of a massive wall in the mountains which stood uncorrupted and unchanging through countless years and attacks, he set out to understand it. With ten other Hallowed Knights he’d come to the Halt, and found the Heart buried deep within it. He had touched that artefact, and was touched by it, and now this was his home.

He was part of the Halt now. Tied to it with chains of fire that wrapped around his heart. But did he understand it, after all those years of study? Not really.

Kant shook her head. ‘I’ve campaigned over thirty years. Came here to put in my last years before I retired somewhere to count my scars in peace. I liked it here, because it was predictable. Running patrols and breaking up fights between bored soldiers, with the occasional chance to throw rocks down on orruk heads from safe atop this wall. It seemed like a good plan. But these last few nights…’

The general frowned at the sky, as if looking for portents. ‘Something’s coming. I don’t know what, but I can feel it. So can my soldiers. They have trouble sleeping when they should, then fall asleep when they shouldn’t, and they talk of dreams they cannot remember.’ She breathed deep. ‘It’s affecting me too. Like tonight. Like every night for the last week. Dreams of choking dark, dreams of… I don’t know. Something’s wrong, something’s coming, but I don’t know what it is.’

‘Nothing is happening, but nothing feels right,’ Brevin said, and she nodded.

‘Maybe this doesn’t happen to you any more, Stormcast,’ she said, ‘but maybe you remember it. That feeling when you’re struck and you know it’s going to hurt. But the pain hasn’t hit yet, and you’re just waiting for the hurt to come. That’s what it feels like.’

‘I remember,’ Brevin said. ‘You have caught the feeling well.’

‘Lord-Ordinators…’ Kant hesitated for a moment, then pushed on. ‘I’ve heard that you’re trained to read the stars. To see the paths of the future in their dance. Could that be why you were brought up here?’

‘By the Heart?’ Brevin laughed, a rueful chuckle. ‘My ability to read the heavens was always limited. But when I touched the Heart, what little skill I had was wiped away. My perceptions are tied to the Halt now, and this wall is more concerned about stone than sky. But it woke me tonight for some reason, and I can feel something here.’ He tapped the armour over his heart, gauntlets ringing faintly against the polished metal. ‘Something is wrong, something is coming, as you said. But I cannot say what, or when. I wish I could read it in the heavens. Or anywhere.’

He raised his eyes, and then, across the vast gulf of darkness he did see something.

A flicker of red like flame. A shifting flow of sparks, like crimson lightning flowing across the distant horizon. Was it a storm? No. These flashing lights were red as blood, red as the veins of emberstone running beneath the quartz face of the Halt. This was not lightning, this was something else, and in his chest Brevin felt heat and a low pulse of pain. This was something wrong.

Up and down the Halt, the soldiers on guard duty were calling out, pointing to the distant light.

‘What is that?’ Kant asked, straining her mortal eyes. ‘Wildfire? An eruption?’

‘No,’ Brevin said. The pain and heat in his chest were increasing, and with the pain came knowledge. ‘It’s emberstone.’

‘Emberstone?’ Kant said. ‘What? How?’

‘I don’t know,’ Brevin said, watching as the crimson light stretched across the sky, like some false dawn. ‘That much. That much!’ The words hissed between his teeth as the pain in his chest grew. It was as if a thorn of fire had been driven through him. The power out there, being released… That much light, that far away, must mean whole veins of emberstone were being torn from the roots of the realm. Aqshy itself was being ripped apart, out in the distance, falling into fire and death and destruction, but as he watched, it became worse.

Amid the burning redness came flashes of green, a poisonous emerald just as bright as the crimson. That colour dug into his eyes, and in his chest the burning pain twisted and he felt suddenly sick, like the nausea he dimly remembered from being mortal. The green intensified, ripping into the red, and up and down the wall, guards were turning away, some vomiting, others falling to their knees.

And then the horrible light was gone.

Red and green, the bright fires were swallowed up by a darkness that swept across the sky and blotted out the stars.

‘What is it?’ Kant asked, staring at the rising dark.

‘Smoke,’ Brevin answered. A tidal wave of smoke, rising from whatever apocalypse was occurring on the horizon, rushing towards the mountains. Towards them. ‘It’s coming. Sound your warnings, here and all through the Chain.’

General Kant began to shout orders to her soldiers on watch, telling them to take messages to the candelarium and to sound the bells. The soldiers scrambled away, and soon the bells were ringing, rousing the whole of the 27th.

‘Lord-Ordinator!’

The deep voice cut across the sound of the bells, and Brevin saw Therus striding across the wall towards him. The Hallowed Knight was fully armoured in his silver sigmarite, the heavy pauldrons on his shoulders enamelled in shining blue and gold. Behind him were the other Stormcasts in Brevin’s command, their size serving to clear space around them as mortal soldiers poured out onto the top of the wall.

‘What orders?’

Brevin opened his mouth to speak, but stopped when a sound rippled through the air. It sounded like rocks breaking, and beneath his feet the whole Halt shifted, as if the ground itself had rippled like a wave. The pain in his chest sharpened, then loosened, and the Lord-Ordinator stared out one more time at the horizon. It was a wall of black threaded with jagged lines of crimson and emerald, and it was rushing towards them like a charging beast.

‘Stand ready,’ he told Therus. ‘Line up along the Halt, and show the mortals that whatever happens, Sigmar is with them.’

Therus nodded, and the Hallowed Knights began to fan out, moving carefully through the crowd. Brevin looked back to the smoke. The terrible curtain was rushing forward, eating up everything beyond the Vale. It moved like a tidal wave, and it broke when it hit the edge of the mountains. It smashed into that great line of stone and recoiled, but then rushed forward again, pouring up Warrun Vale. A river of darkness seamed with terrible light, it crashed into the high sides of the valley and poured forward.

The Golden Lions were shouting and cursing as they gaped at the onrushing darkness. Some started to turn, trying to escape the top of the wall, trying to hide behind it before that terrible gloom reached them. But they were barred by the press of soldiers still ascending the stairs. Beside him, Kant turned, half-stunned, but she saw what was happening and her trained mind snapped into action.

‘Golden Lions, stand! Stand, damn you! Stand!’

Her shout rang out, and near her the crowd began to still, but the Halt was too huge; the soldiers farthest away couldn’t hear their general and Brevin was sure that panic would take them soon.

Raising his massive hammer into the air over his head, Brevin bellowed, ‘Lions! Golden Lions! Hear your general and halt!’

Sudden silence fell over the soldiers, and Brevin caught Kant up with his free hand, helping her atop the Halt’s parapet, holding her steady as she stood over the crowd.

‘My Lions!’ she shouted, and this time their eyes turned to her. ‘Form ranks and stand firm!’

The order rippled down the wall, General Kant’s words taken up by the sergeants who’d found their way up, and soon the 27th was standing in rigid lines, formed up for parade even though many of them were still pulling on armour. Every eye stared down the Vale, and General Kant nodded her thanks to Brevin as they both turned to stare out too.

The smoke still rolled towards them, though its rushing advance had slowed as it moved up Warrun Vale. But it rolled through the trees and crossed the clearing before the Halt. Brevin glanced at the mortals standing in their formation. They were still, but their eyes were wide and watching. What would happen if that smoke crept up the Halt and touched them, ran across their skin and up to their faces? Would it fill their lungs like fire? Would it choke them, kill them? Brevin didn’t know, couldn’t tell what this dark cloud would do to them any more than he could say what it would do to himself or the other Hallowed Knights who stood like silver statues along the wall. Whatever happened to them now, they were in the hands of Sigmar, and they would face this doom unblinking.

So he stood with General Kant, his heart burning, and watched the smoke come until it finally reached the Halt.

Flickering with flashes of red and green, the dark cloud ran into the glowing face of the wall and a ripple of light went through the quartz, like water struck by a stone. In his chest, Brevin felt the pain increase again, a deep, aching throb. The smoke poured forward and it rose up the wall to the height of a Stormcast, higher, a flood of stinking dark. Its stench was acrid and greasy, like gangrenous bodies burning. The pain and the stench made even Brevin want to stagger, but he held himself still, ignoring the sweat that slicked his face and hands. He kept his pose as the smoke finally, slowly, ceased its rise. It had made it maybe twenty feet up the wall. Now it drifted there like mist, contained but constantly moving. Shifting in response to the vibrations that ran through the ground, smaller now but still present, as if the realm itself was twitching in pain.

Raising his eyes, Brevin could see the tops of the trees at the clearing’s edge, could see the cliffs rising out of the dark, but most of Warrun Vale and the land beyond was gone, swallowed by smoke. Looking down from the Halt was like looking into a void, and the pain in his chest was like being eaten alive. But he kept his voice steady as he spoke to Kant.

‘Tell them.’

‘Tell them what?’ Her hard voice had an edge to it, of emotions barely held in check.

‘Tell them they have to fight.’ Brevin was struggling not to raise his hand to his chest. The pain was worse than dying. Worse than being reborn. But he made himself speak. ‘Tell them.’

General Kant turned her back on the apocalypse and faced her Golden Lions, drawing her sword and raising it high. ‘Something comes!’ she shouted, and her voice echoed in the silence that filled the Vale. ‘I can’t tell you what it is. But I can tell you why.’ She pointed with her sword away from the smoke, down the other side of the Vale towards Hammerhal Aqsha and all the rest of the Great Parch. ‘It comes because out there lies civilisation. Order. Justice. Joy. But more than that, out there lie our homes. Our families. Everyone and everything we love and want to live.’ She slashed her sword down, pointing it back at the smoke. ‘I don’t know what that is. What made it, and for what purpose. I don’t have to! All I have to know is that it and its creators will not pass this point. This is the Halt, and the Halt holds!’

Up and down the wall, a shout rang out.

‘The Halt Holds!’

‘Good work, general,’ Brevin said, helping the woman down. The pain in him had lessened a little, but she seemed to sense something in his movements and looked at him.

‘Lord-Ordinator–’

‘Have no concern for me,’ he said. ‘Worry about your troops, because our waiting is done. The pain, though – I think the pain has barely even begun.’

She nodded, face grim, and went to speak to her sergeants. Brevin watched her go, leaning on his grandhammer. In his chest, the pain was slowly ebbing but still terribly strong. And in his mind he saw the veil of smoke pulling itself across the sky again, but in his memory there was something else. Something he’d seen before the stars were consumed by that dark. Something Kant and the other mortals had missed.

Something that might have been eyes. Baleful, green, inhuman eyes, blazing across the sky.

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First published in Great Britain in 2025.
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