Malikcek floated over him.
I’d seen the assassin appear and disappear out of thin air, and turn aethereal at will, but seeing him simply move was somehow even more disturbing. He oozed through the air like a primordial slime, solidifying where he wanted to be with a hiss of amusement and a snicker of blades.
Even as I stand before you now, at my very best, telling this tale in my thrice-blessed, I’m not certain that I could actually best this creature. Then, I’d probably have stood a better chance of appealing to his better nature than I would fighting him.
‘What are you?’ I said.
He didn’t answer me, as I suspected he wouldn’t, but I had to ask.
‘Ikrit has been waiting. Ikrit hates waiting.’ I sensed something that was almost akin to envy in his voice as he went on. ‘This will all be over for you soon.’
Chapter nine
‘Move-move!’
Starting at the crack of their overseer’s whip, the thirteen-strong team of skavenslaves bent forwards and pushed. The unfortunates had been spread out between the spokes of a giant wheel that was laid flat on the floor of the burrow. Their forepaws were bolted to the spoke in front of them, their ankles locked to the circular rail that ran beneath their footpaws by a loop of chain.
The wheel itself was connected to some hellish contrivance that my captors had enthusiastically described to me as a ‘shaft’. The thing rose through innumerable tiers of false metallic flooring, like a menhir to the black gods of slavish automation and artifice. On each of these levels, more slaves toiled under the supervision of coated and goggled warlock-engineers. They fed stoves and pumped bellows, jumped up and down on see-saw-like assemblages of pulleys. They ran along treadmills, rubbing together giant wool-coated pads, making all of their fur stand on end and sending energy zapping through an array of bristling, copper-clad conductors. As the shaft neared the roof of the chamber it found itself slaved to a further array of belts and chains and a bewildering set-up of smaller wheels.
I didn’t get to see too much of it, fortunately, pinned as I was like the shiny bit on a Lord-Veritant’s staff at the very pinnacle of the skaven contraption.
My platform rose in a stepwise series of monumental clunks, each one apparently an even more goliath effort than the last. My arms and legs had been spread about as far apart as arms and legs could be made to go without breaking something, wrist bound to wrist and ankle to ankle by heavy chains beneath the platform. Even my gambeson, or what was left of it after my attempted escape, had been ripped off me, leaving my tattooed chest bare and goose bumping in the cold.
‘Stop-stop!’
Whips cracked again, echoing up through the tiers of scaffolding, and with a final weary clunk my platform sank back into its final stage and stopped.
I tugged on my arm restraints, but came closer to dislocating my shoulder than achieving my freedom. I let out the breath that I’d been holding onto throughout my ascent and tried to make my muscles relax. I looked up.
The chamber’s ceiling was an imperfect, slightly knobbled dome, still about a hundred feet above me and beyond even the most teeteringly high bits of the scaffold. The fact that skaven will flee in terror from any Freeguilder they don’t outnumber six to one, but will happily scamper along a length of mouldy wood a thousand feet off the ground never ceases to astonish me. For a race that is practically defined by its cowardice, they have a peculiar blind spot in matters of common sense and personal safety.
The roof itself was dark and metallic. I was no expert in these things, but I guessed it to be something along the lines of lead or tin or an alloy thereof, a few coloured spots of corrosion showing where the damp had trickled through. I was near to the surface. It would be full winter out there now.
The realisation that the days had continued to turn even without Hamilcar Bear-Eater out there to witness it actually came as something of a shock.
Turning my head from side to side revealed more of the same madcap skaven industry, if nothing of obvious, actual use. Fewer slaves toiled on these upper levels, with more of the work undertaken by engineers, which suggested that – whatever it was – it was presumably important. They wore rubbery suits that made them look like great auk in overly complicated helmets, and fussed over large, grumbling machines. The air was damp as well as cold, and the occasional spasm of dark green lightning would cut through the mist towards the arcing rods that the warlocks had positioned around their machines (the density of such instruments apparently denoted status), only very occasionally frying a slave.
I struggled uselessly as a gaggle of junior-looking engineers waddled towards me with armfuls of cables, most of my best insults sorely wasted on a race that didn’t even have a word for ‘mother’. Ignoring me completely, they fixed the cables to my platform. The shock of hammer blows ran through my bones and sparks sprayed over my body. The smell of metal solder filled my nostrils, and still I felt cold. Sniggering amongst themselves, presumably at my expense, the engineers withdrew to their machines.
‘Do not fight-struggle, Stormcast. It goes easier if you preserve your strength.’
Ikrit clomped towards me, slowly. Clad tail-tip to whiskers in iron and bronze, he looked awfully like a rat-shaped lightning rod to me, but as I might have expected he knew his machines better than I, and managed to avoid being incinerated by a stray bolt before reaching my side. Joints squealed as he reached out, rotating his wrist and brushing his gauntlet fingers over my shoulder and down my chest. My skin crawled from his touch. At my heart his gauntlet turned in order to hover, claws down.
He seemed to shudder in some kind of dreadful anticipation.
‘I feel like one of Xeros’ blood sacrifices,’ I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling.
‘Xeros?’
‘Lord-relictor of my Stormhost.’ And somewhere very close about now, I fervently prayed.
‘Sigmar accepts such bloody offerings?’
‘He doesn’t deny them, and the realms are vast.’
Despite lacking the breath with which to chuckle or a face with which to express much of anything, Ikrit nevertheless looked amused. ‘Yes-yes. They are. Ever expanding and ever changing as well, did you know? They make the gods themselves seem insignificant. Even they are inadequate to what they would rule. Many are the dark corners. Many are the hidden places. Even in those realms where the rule of one god is total – Shyish, Ulgu, yes-yes, Azyr even – their attention covers but fractions of what they claim is theirs. That is how Malikcek came to lose his soul to the Shadow Realm.’
I looked around for the assassin, but didn’t see him.
‘That does not mean he is not near,’ Ikrit whispered in my ear. ‘He foolishly accepted a charge to kill-stab a favourite of Malerion. He was good. A Deathmaster of Clan Snikch. He got in. Kill-stab the aelf. Yes-yes. Only then did Shadow God note his intrusion, and even then he could not block Malikcek’s escape. Not entirely. Part of Malikcek’s soul is forever his prisoner now. But where he was fool-fool in going in the first place, he was much-wise to come to me after. Long ago now. Before the Thirteen banished me from Blight City.’ His eyes glowered blue-white in what I rook for wrath. ‘What he had done, what had been done to him, it showed me what could be crafted from mortal souls. My magicks could not lift Malerion’s curse. I am not his equal. Not yet. But I keep it from claiming him totally, and in trade he serves me well. He find-brings trinkets from the gods’ tables.’ He tittered tinnily. ‘Like you-you.’
‘Like Barrach?’ I snarled.
‘Yes-yes. Malikcek killed him to spite me, I am sure. He hates me. He hates that I made him a slave. But he needs me more. More than I need him now he has made me strong. He knows this. He knows too there are more Gorkai in the Nevermarsh.’