Josh Reynolds: Master of Death

From each of these, bipedal rats poured into the cavern, and it seethed with their numbers. Rat-things squirmed forward with a frenzied murderousness not usually found in vermin, unless they were cornered. Which, W’soran suspected, these very much counted as, given the situation. This was a bastion under siege, and its defenders fought with tooth, claw and spear to hold it against the silent ranks of the invaders. Wave after wave of screaming, chittering ratmen broke against skeletal phalanxes composed of dead men stripped of flesh and feeling alike. The walking dead fought without frenzy or fear, moving remorselessly forward at the behest of the minds of their masters, and their masters’ master.

Despite their advantages, the dead didn’t have it all their own way. The rat-things had weapons aplenty. One such, a grotesque giant rat-like behemoth that was all bulging flesh and exposed muscle, a tube of stitched meat that wailed from a dozen snapping mouths, raced towards the ranks of skeletal warriors, urged on by its verminous handlers, who clung precariously to the rickety howdah strapped to its undulating spine.

‘Kill it with fire!’ W’soran howled as he gestured towards the lumbering abomination which was waddling speedily towards his position. Its thunderous squeals buffeted his ears as it clambered across the cavern floor, its dozens of legs lending it ungainly speed. The rat-things had lashed and bolted the contraption on the monster’s very bone, and ballistae had been mounted atop it. One fired even as W’soran spoke, and the great, crude bolt crashed through the ranks, crushing dozens in its flight. Smaller shapes, neither wolf nor rat but some foul amalgamation of both, loped to either side of the titanic monstrosity, uttering high-pitched bays of hunger. There were hundreds of them, W’soran realised, even as he knew that this was only the first line of the enemy’s defence.

The rat-things who occupied this hole called themselves skaven. The mountain was riddled with them and their foul warrens, from the crags to the roots; it would take months, if not years, to cleanse it of their presence. If the mountain hadn’t overlooked one of the largest passes through the mountains, Vorag likely wouldn’t have bothered. As it was, it had been easy to convince the Bloodytooth — as his followers called him — to attack, especially after a number of black-clad skaven had attempted to assassinate the renegade Strigoi vampire.

The skaven had made the mistake of trying to warn Vorag off from dallying in their territory overlong, and had attempted to murder him in his tent. W’soran couldn’t blame them, though he did fault their methodology. The assassination attempt had been swift, savage and, sadly, futile. Vorag had survived, and, for all that he was a brute and savage, but he was nothing if not courageous. An attempt on his life was practically an invitation for retaliation. A crude, curved knife in his pillow and soon enough, Vorag’s rag-tag horde of Strigoi exiles — and W’soran and his small coterie with them — was besieging the fastness that the skaven called Crookback Mountain.

Granted, Vorag had set his eyes on the mountain from the start. It commanded the passes of the north-eastern edge of the Strigoi Empire, and trade, such as it was, flowed steadily through those passes to the east. After Vorag’s disastrous attempt at usurping the throne from Ushoran, and the resultant civil war between rival factions of Strigoi — supporters of Ushoran on one side and everyone else on the other — the Bloodytooth and his followers had fled Mourkain and the Strigoi Empire, to regroup and plan anew. The mountain, with its command of the region, would be an ideal citadel from which to strike at their enemies, and to rebuff any attempt by said enemies to collect the scalps and fangs Ushoran demanded in recompense for Vorag’s betrayal. In time, it might even rival Mourkain, and a new empire would grow about it, with Vorag on the throne, and W’soran behind him, whispering in his ear. But first, they had to deal with the skaven.

W’soran had fought them before, in the cramped dark beneath Nagashizzar centuries earlier, and his knowledge had only increased in the interim. They had caught captives early and often, the beasts being more inclined to flee or surrender than fight when their numbers were limited. Nagash had never bothered to learn more than the most rudimentary secrets of the skaven during the long war for the abn-i-khat mines, but W’soran recognised that there was some power in even the most inconsequential bit of trivia. After a few weeks with the flensing knives he knew their pestilential race inside and out, everything from the subtleties of their tittering language to the way certain glands squirted an acrid musk when they were frightened.

They had entered the mountain easily enough through the great clefts and labyrinthine tunnels worn into the rock millennia earlier by long-since vanished rivers. The skaven had crafted hidden gates and barbicans in those tunnels, but the defenders, used to the half-hearted assaults by the savage greenskin tribes of the region, had been unprepared for the speed and inexorable momentum of the initial undead attack. Vampires had rooted the ratkin out of their dead-drops and hidey-holes, flinging them squealing from the heights down onto the spears held aloft by bony hands. Even the multitude of deadly traps — deadfalls and unstable tunnels, among others — had done little to discourage the invaders. The dead were nothing if not durable, and failing that, easily replaceable.

It had been a simple enough matter to draw the slaughtered skaven to their feet and send the bodies forward to lead the invasion of their own lair. W’soran thought that there was poetry in it. The vile little things were as treacherous as they were disease-riddled, and coups came to the living skaven as naturally as breathing. Why should their dead be any different?

Battle had become a constant as they pushed deeper into the mountain. Vorag’s army had divided into dozens of smaller forces, each one led by one of his chosen warriors. Including this one, led by an idiotic Strigoi brawler called Rudek. W’soran seethed, but privately. Vorag did not trust him, despite the fact that it was W’soran’s magic that ensured that he had an army in the first place. But that would change, and sooner rather than later, if he had anything to say about it.

W’soran stood, surrounded by his acolytes, on an armoured palanquin, held aloft by the barbaric shapes of a dozen massive ghouls who were chained to it. He had bred the beasts himself in Mourkain, weaning them on vampiric blood and flesh. As a consequence, they had grown to elephantine proportions, each one a match for twenty lesser foes. They were armoured as well, bolted into heavy iron cuirasses, gorgets and greaves to protect them from stray missiles. Their malformed simian skulls were encased in leather and brass muzzles, to keep them from biting any of his acolytes who wandered too close to the edges of the palanquin. Fed on vampiric juices as they had been, the brutes now craved it with an addict’s frenzy. The ghouls bellowed and shifted in place, eager for the coming fray.

W’soran snarled and gestured. ‘I said burn it,’ he snapped. His acolytes flung out their hands as one and spoke with him as the sorcerous incantation left his withered lips. The air grew hot and began to smell of boiled meat as the spell rushed through the musty air of the great cavern and struck the monster. The abomination reared up with a shriek that shivered the stalactites from the upper reaches of the cavern as weird green flames crawled across its pustule-ridden frame. It screeched again and again, thrashing in agony. Its claws flailed, crushing wolf-rats and uprooting stalagmites as it hurled itself down and rolled over, trying to snuff the eldritch flames.