C. Werner: Dead Winter

Taking the tiniest nibble from his sliver of cheese, Krisnik darted a furtive look at the massive door. He was thankful the door was as thick as it was. Whatever the Council of Thirteen had been discussing for so long was nothing for his ears! The Lords of Decay took great pleasure displaying the bodies of spies when they were through mutilating them. Several score decorated the spires of the Shattered Tower at present, but the rulers of skavendom were always able to find room for more.

Krisnik shivered in his armour. Maybe joining the elite Verminguard hadn’t been such a good idea after all. Which one of his jealous rivals had arranged to put him into such a predicament, he wondered?

Eerie green light cast strange shadows across the enormous hall, rendering its immensity a patchwork of darkness and illumination. The light streamed from a pair of gigantic crystal spheres bound in cages of iron and supported upon great pillars of bronze. A confusion of wires and hoses drooped from the pillars, writhing along the stone floor until they vanished into a huge copper casket. A wiry skaven, his fur dyed a deep crimson where it was not scarred with burns, scrambled about the casket with frantic, jittery motions. His gloved paws flew across levers and hastily adjusted valves, causing the green light to flicker and small bursts of glowing gas to billow from vents in the bronze pillars.

The warlock-engineer bit down on a curse as the mechanism resisted his efforts. The warp-lantern was a new invention, the latest in the techno-sorcery of Clan Skryre. A lamp that created light not from rat dung or worm-oil, but from warpstone itself! A magnificent creation that would illuminate the whole of the Under-Empire and bring much profit to the warlock-engineers — if they could only get the thing to work right!

Glaring through his goggles, the technician growled at the scrawny skavenslaves locked inside the generator, forgetting for the moment that his snarls were wasted. The slaves were blind, deaf and mute, a precaution against their learning any of the council’s secrets. Angrily, the warlock turned back to the copper casket, stabbing his claw against one of the buttons. A spark of blue electricity crackled from a coil set at the top of the generator cage, shocking the slaves and jolting them into motion. The slaves began scrambling inside the cylindrical cage, their momentum causing it to revolve. The energy of their terrified efforts raced along the wires, feeding the warp-lanterns and causing the green light to stabilise.

Tugging nervously at his whiskers, the warlock-engineer glanced across the cavernous hall to the great table where the masters of all skavendom were gathered. His glands clenched as his eyes roved across the concentrated gathering of evil and villainy. In all the Under-Empire, there were no skaven more fierce or ruthless than these twelve. As Luminary of the Shattered Tower, it was his duty to provide light for these merciless monsters, that they might better see their surroundings and so be assured that none of their rivals had broken with custom and brought assassins into the sacred confines of the Grey Chapel.

The Luminary darted an anxious glance at the supreme overlord of Clan Skryre, the cruel Warpmaster Sythar Doom. The wizened Sythar was hunched in his steel-backed chair, his paws folded against each other, his fingers stroking the copper wires embedded in his scarred fur. Sythar’s face was a patchwork of skin grafts and iron plates, his eyes a pair of enchanted rubies three sizes too big for their sockets and held in place by a confusion of sutures and stitches. There was a compact power-plant hidden somewhere beneath the Warpmaster’s flowing black robes, connected to the thick black cable implanted into the underside of his jaw. When his withered lips pulled back to expose his metal fangs, blue sparks crackled about his teeth. It was a vivid reminder to all around Sythar that he had survived several attempts to murder him and a promise that the next attempt would be quite costly to his killers. The power-plant was wired to his heart and should that organ stop beating the result would be quite explosive.

Warpmaster Sythar Doom didn’t seem to notice the flickering warp-lights or the Luminary’s efforts to stabilise them. His attention was fixed upon the other skaven seated about the council table, his ruby eyes gleaming as each facet focused upon a different ratman. In the deadly maze of schemes and intrigues that formed council politics, it was dangerous to ignore any of them. The weaker Lords of Decay were forever scheming to rise higher in the hierarchy of the Under-Empire; the stronger were equally determined to ensure that they retained their positions. Sythar cast a covetous look at the Twelfth Throne, a trickle of drool causing his metal fangs to throw sparks.

There were twelve seats upon the council. Here, within the Grey Chapel, the seats were arrayed about an ancient oaken table, each throne radiating outwards from the great stone chair which was the Black Throne, the thirteenth seat set aside for the Great Horned Rat. The most powerful Lords of Decay occupied the thrones to the left and right of their god, the first and twelfth seats. That on the right was the Seerseat, always occupied by the Seerlord, master of the grey seers and grand prophet of the Horned Rat. It was the Seerlord’s function to implement the edicts of the council and to interpret the will of the absent Horned Rat. Supposedly above the bickering and politics of the skaven clans, the Seerlord was as ambitious and greedy as any ratman and used his position to further his own power, exploiting the vacant Black Throne to give himself a double vote whenever the need arose.

Seerlord Skrittar was going to need that double vote now. The fact pleased Warpmaster Sythar. The priest had dominated the council for far too long and it was time that he was put into his place. The bells fixed to Skrittar’s long horns tinkled as the grey skaven tried to suppress the tremors of rage rushing through his body. With his ruby-eyes, Sythar’s vision penetrated the oak table to see the Seerlord’s tail lashing angrily against the side of his throne.

How it must vex the prophet to have all his careful alliances and treaties crumbling before his eyes! And to have them swept aside by the Seerlord’s most hated enemy, the bloated Arch-Plaguelord of Clan Pestilens, Poxtifex Nurglitch IV, only made the spectacle even more delicious!

‘The man-things fight among themselves,’ the whisper-thin voice of Blight Tenscratch rasped through the shadows. A creature as twisted as his noxious clan, Blight was the despised ruler of the bug-breeding Clan Verms. Worm-oil was only a small part of his clan’s fortunes, their real wealth coming from exterminating infestations of fleas and ticks, infestations most ratmen believed Verms themselves had caused.

‘Now is the time to fight-slay,’ Blight hissed, slapping one of his scabrous paws against the table. ‘Kill all man-things and take their land!’

‘The man-things won’t fight each other if given a common enemy,’ the sharp tongue of Shadowmaster Kreep slashed across Blight’s words. Leader of Clan Eshin, Kreep commanded the most vicious cadre of killers and assassins in the Under-Empire, making his one of the most feared names in skavendom. Sythar thought it was a shame Kreep had allowed religious fervour and steady bribes to make him Skrittar’s lap-rat.

‘They will set aside their animosity to fight us,’ Kreep pronounced, raising one of his black talons. ‘We cannot fight all of the man-things.’

‘Then why did we send Deathmaster Silke to kill the Vilner-man? Just to help stupid beast-meat?’ The angry snarl came from Rattnak Vile, High Vivisectionist of Clan Moulder. The burly Rattnak was twice the size of Kreep, with immense paws tipped in steel talons within the Master Moulders had grafted to their clanlord’s bones. Rattnak’s eyes were glazed from the frequent overuse of warp-dust, and his posture was always that of a cornered beast ready to pounce. Kreep’s paws vanished into the folds of his cloak, closing about whatever weapons he had hidden there. Unless the assassin had coated his blades in very powerful poison, Sythar didn’t rate his chances against the monstrous Rattnak.