C. Werner - Dead Winter

Rutger didn’t wait, but dashed from the room, taking the stairs in a mad scramble as he raced to confront a horror he knew he was already too late to thwart. Frederick lingered behind him for only a moment, puzzling over the import of his brother’s words. Then in a chill of understanding, the priest pulled up his robes and raced after Rutger.

The plague doktor had killed little Johan through his barbarous fakery — but it wasn’t Rutger who had sent for Bruno Havemann. It had been Aysha!

Frederick was only a few steps down the hall from the door to what had been Johan’s room when the house was shaken by a piteous wail. The heart-wrenching sound came from just inside the room. It took every speck of courage the priest possessed to cross into that chamber. Like his brother, he knew what he could expect to find. Only now there was no question it was too late to stop the tragedy from unfolding.

Rutger sat upon the floor in the centre of the room, bawling like a small child, the beautiful figure of his wife clenched in his arms, her golden hair spilling across his shoulders.

And just a few inches away, lying where it had fallen from Aysha’s lifeless hand, was a fat-bladed knife, its edge coated in blood.

Skavenblight

Ulriczeit, 1111

The burrows of Clan Verms were derisively known to skaven of other clans as the Hive. Few of them understood how fitting the name was. The earthen walls of the warren were obscured behind crawling masses of insects, the muddy floor was a morass of wriggling life, immense cobwebs dripped from the low ceiling. The air was hot and foetid, stinking of unclean life and the foulness that sustained it. Every inch of the stronghold seemed to have been given over to the cultivation of every manner of scuttling vermin.

Puskab Foulfur shuddered as he prowled the murky tunnels, thankful that the pestilential blessings of the Horned Rat killed most of the insects as soon as the creatures dared take an interest in him. The lower orders of life were always the first to succumb to corruption. Still, there were some things that proved hideously resistant to the plague priest’s sacred mantle of disease. The most persistent was a strain of transparent gnat with an aggravating high-pitched buzz and a perverse obsession with crawling into noses.

The gnats had much in common with their creators. The skaven of Clan Verms were all obsessed with their loathsome livelihood. It went far beyond the simple dictates of commerce and megalomania. They didn’t see their insects as a means toward an end, but rather a purpose in themselves. To breed ever stronger, ever hardier varieties of beetles and spiders, to create new colours of flea or bigger kinds of ticks, such matters formed the meat of the mania that gripped Clan Verms.

The deranged rabble were much too far gone to appreciate the divinity of disease the way Clan Pestilens did. They would never understand the holy truths of corruption. Their kind would never embrace the one true aspect of the Horned Rat.

But they would make useful instruments of the Horned One just the same. For the moment, it did not matter if Verms believed. It was enough that they obeyed.

Puskab stepped around a pool of stagnant water, its surface alive with mosquito nymphs, ducking his hooded head as a huge yellow spider swung down from the roof of the tunnel. A word of power, a gesture of the plague priest’s paw and the arachnid shrivelled into a husk.

Ahead of him, Puskab could smell the comforting reek of pestilence and decay. It was only the most humble echo of the Pestilent Monastery, but it was enough to relax his glands. A few days of effort and he had made the cave Blight had placed at his disposal into a little patch of diseased corruption fit for a plaguelord.

The cave was aglow with the light of dozens of worm-oil lanterns, but the fug exuded by the oil was masked by the pungent smoke rising from several bronze incense cauldrons. Even the crazed ratkin of Clan Verms understood the wisdom in keeping their lice and beetles away from Puskab’s laboratory.

Puskab chittered maliciously as he marched past the armoured skaven flanking the entrance to his lair. They were big black-furred bruisers, their bulks stuffed into mail that looked to have been fashioned from the chitinous plates of enormous bugs — perhaps from Blight’s vanquished deathwalker or its spawn. The guards lowered their heads and exposed their throats in a gesture of submission as the plague priest passed. Puskab wondered how much of their servility was genuine and how much was show. There was a delicate line between the roles of bodyguard and jailor.

The plague priest dismissed the question for the present. His eyes gleamed with joy as he gazed across his laboratory. Dozens of low tables had been erected, each provided with shallow trays built from the brainpans of skulls. In each tray, a sliver of rotten meat floated in a toxic cocktail of unguents and poisons combined in exact accord with the seven hundred and thirty-first psalm from the Liber Bubonicus . Only the most exalted of plague priests were granted such knowledge — any creature of lesser standing would contract Crimson Shivers from merely reading the formula.

Puskab was one of the exalted. He had brewed the solution within a thrice-cursed kettle and spoken the secret words as he stirred the mixture. Now each of the little trays with their tiny islands of festering meat would provide a breeding ground for the bacillus he had developed. The invisible vapours of the Black Plague would gather about the meat, forming mouldy patches upon its surface.

Staring out over the tables with their hundreds of trays, Puskab felt his heart flutter with delicious terror. Here, in this one room, were enough plague germs to kill every man-thing on the surface! If there were a way to distribute it evenly and quickly, the skaven could annihilate the humans in a single night.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. The Horned Rat demanded ingenuity and cleverness from his disciples, and so he had imposed a flaw upon this most divine of plagues. The Black Plague by itself couldn’t be spread. It needed a host, a creature to act as its vector.

Puskab turned away from the tables, strolling past a series of cages built into niches in the wall. Hordes of rats glared back at him with their beady eyes. The rats weren’t the plague’s vector, however. They were simply hosts for the creatures that would carry the plague. The fur of each rat was crawling with fleas of the hardiest and most fecund breed developed by Clan Verms.

In his first experiments, Puskab had been careful to use only human hosts. The fleas that infested man-things had no appetite for the blood of rodents, eliminating any chance the disease could be spread to the skaven.

What Wormlord Blight demanded, however, was something far different. He wanted to alter the Black Plague so that it could be used against other skaven. What the Lords of Decay were doing to the humans, Blight intended to do to rival clans. It was a thrilling display of the most murderous and uninhibited ambition!

Of course, Puskab was under no delusion that Blight could be trusted to honour their agreement. The army of assistants Blight had provided him were always trying to ferret out the secret of creating the plague. If Verms could gain that secret, their need for Clan Pestilens would evaporate. But the deception went farther than that. Puskab was aware that his supposed subordinates were continually sneaking insects into the laboratory, furtively testing them to see which strains could survive close proximity to the Poxmaster. It didn’t take much imagination to guess what the objective of such experiments was.

Puskab bared his fangs at the leather-robed ratmen scurrying around the tables. None of them returned his gesture. Even alone, a plague priest was too formidable a foe for such cringing coward-meat.