A scratch post, little more than a wooden stake that had been hammered into the ground and covered in claw-scratch writing, pointed off in a bewildering array of directions. Every indecipherable notch corresponded to a branching tunnel. The acrid stench of skaven scent markings pooled there at the confluence. I retched, rattling my fetters as I tried to cover my mouth. I clenched my jaw, trying to breathe through my gritted teeth, but I could still taste it.
The place was a maze, a labyrinth, a hundred thousand skaven or more fighting across it day and night, and I’d not glimpsed so much as a hint of a way out.
If I was to have any hope of getting out of there, then the one advantage I could rely on would be the cowardice of the individual skaven and the sheer anarchy of their society. If I tried to fight my way out now then as many would try to run away as try and stop me, and a hundred times as many again would be reliably oblivious to the fact that I was ever there.
That still left me with a task, but I would gladly leap across that river when I was good and ready.
After about half an hour of scuffling and scraping, I had a respite of sorts when Milk Scar stopped scrabbling along with such easy haste and began probing out the path ahead with his tail. I assumed that we had to be venturing into newer delvings, or perhaps into an area that he did not know so implicitly. The passages all looked alike to me, I confess, though I did start to notice something different in myself. The sense I had of the Ghurlands began to recede, replaced by the sense of something gummy and vile, chewing on me from within. Even the light of far Sigendil became briefly occulted, as if some miasma had passed between us. Even on my brief incursion into Shadespire, I had not felt so distant from my maker.
Once again, I found myself in the implausible scenario of fervently praying for Xeros Stormcloud’s wellbeing.
‘Here-here.’
Milk Scar gestured to a door that had been set into the wall of the passage. It shouldn’t have been all that sensational, but it was, and I only understand why it was when I realised that I hadn’t seen a single one since we’d left my cell. The skaven exist cheek by jowl, after all, and clearly placed a low premium on individual space. The door was covered in brass wheels and rods, all of them lit a metallic green, but there was no handle or latch that I could see. I wondered for a second if I might have been mistaken about it being a door at all, but then Milk Scar scuttled up to it and knocked. There was no answer, but as the gaoler withdrew his paw the wheels covering the door began to spin, bars sliding through tracks, and of its own inanimate will the door lurched outwards.
The sight of it made my skin crawl, and I turned to Milk Scar.
‘What are you waiting for?’ I said.
‘I not go-scurry in there.’ His spear-rats gave me a jab for good measure.
Rattling my fetters as I made to lift my hands in surrender, I shuffled inside alone.
Though the pervasive illumination persisted, it was somehow darker inside, as though this burrow was the source of all that was black and it was thicker here as a consequence. Numerous low-slung tables cluttered the floor, spilling over with bits of metal, springs and gnawed wires. Tools that no five-fingered, two-handed, or right-minded man would have any use for lay everywhere, discarded, half-made. The walls were clad in shelving, none of it level, an eclectic collection of rusty machinery and ancient tomes. Spidery text crawled down the books’ spines, and averse as I am to lettering of any hand or kind, these works had me looking quickly away.
Across from the door was a chaise. It was Azyrite quality, the makers mark glittering dully on one wooden foot. One of the many fine things that the skaven had looted from the Seven Words in their last unsuccessful raid, I suspected. I certainly doubted that there could be too many cordwainers of the Magrittan school on this side of the Nevermarsh. The fine cordovan leather was shredded, the seat sagging. At first I thought it unoccupied, but then I saw the two sinister red eyes that floated in the darker shadow above its cushions, the jagged chasm of a grin.
I started towards it without thinking.
The chains looping through my leg irons pulled taut. I yanked instinctively on my handcuffs to break my fall, only managing to rattle the connecting bar, and struck my head on the corner of the closest table. I groaned, more with embarrassment than with pain, as screws and washers and ball bearings all clattered over the floor, and over me, though the wetness spreading from my temple was reminder enough that even the Stormcast Eternals are not so mighty that they needn’t fear their own stupidity.
The shadow-rat tittered, like a cold breeze brushing across my gravestone.
‘Leave him, Malikcek,’ said another voice, nearby. ‘Leave us.’
‘That’s right, leave us, before I–’ I wriggled in a rattle of rods and chains and looked up, but the chaise was already empty. I blinked. The depression that the shadowy creature had left in the cushions slowly crinkled out. ‘What? How did he…?’
‘The gods have been harsh-cruel to poor Malikcek.’
Shrugging off the gash to my forehead, I tensed the muscles of my abdomen to draw myself upright and turned towards the sound of the voice.
The creature hunched amongst the cluttered arcana was skaven in size and form, but encased entirely in metal. Coppery whiskers protruded from a muzzle lined with diamond-edged teeth. White hairs tufted through gaps in the ironwork where plates had been misaligned or fitted together poorly. Even the master warlocks of the Clans Skyre, it seemed, were not immune to the freneticism and failure of detail that marred the products of their demented, but undoubted, genius. Even when it came to their own forms.
‘And as you know-see for yourself, Malikcek is cruel-harsh to the gods in kind.’
The warlock pointed at me, then gestured to the chaise.
His hand was an articulated iron claw, bolted onto the shell of his arm, and studded with crystals, lenses, and odd designs. Out of curiosity more than genuine obedience I manoeuvred myself towards the chaise and dropped into it. The warlock made no effort to assist me. Nor did he sit himself. He didn’t stir at all, just watched me struggle to perform his bidding, his eyes like captured ice within the dark confines of a metal helm. It took no special gift on my part to sense the power behind that gaze. I’ve fought many mighty beings in my time. Mortarchs. Daemons. All of them paled in comparison to what I felt standing before me in that warren, and though I’ve stood against or alongside greater powers in the years since and not been cowed, only once before had I experienced its like.
When I’d clasped the hand of Sigmar and been thrown to Ghur for the very first time. Where the power of the God-King was uplifting, golden light from horizon to horizon and the glory of the stars themselves, what I felt in the warlock’s presence was something smothering and dark. It was a patchwork of rust and shadow, scraps of power sewn together with a ratman’s infinitely imaginative spite.
It occurred to me that I, and the Seven Words, were in far greater danger than I had realised.