Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

A gong sounded, a single strike that echoed long through the undercity. Almost as one the slave mass looked up, their chittering quieting to a hushed dread, the sighted and the sightless turning towards the source of the noise. The black-furred overseers stayed their barbed whips for the moment, sniffing the air, agitated, pink tails twitching.

Squeals of pain and panic swiftly silenced announced the arrival of the priests’ black-furred bodyguards. Even burlier than the slave-masters, clad in robes and coifs of corroded mail, mercenary spitevermin battered and chopped a path through the packed slaves. A ripple spread through the downtrodden horde as the spitevermin trampled the mangled corpses of those that had no room to evade the bloody advance. Terror spread like a bow wave before the armoured skaven. Slaves squealed and bit and clawed, tearing at each other to escape the unforgiving cudgels and blades.

As the press started to thicken more and more, the overseers were forced to wield their whips again, lashing out with snarled fury. Some fled before it was too late, others were buried under the weight of the slaves pushing away from the incoming procession. The musk of fear and scent of blood was overpowering, driving the slaves into an increasingly panicked orgy of ear-splitting shrieks and feral violence.

Behind the spitevermin came the first of the plague monks, clutching long staves from which hung warpcloud-spilling censers. The censers glowed with sorcerous power, the mutating effect of the warpstone plain to see in the cadaverous faces and blistered skin of the wielders. Their eyes glowed in the darkness, spittle flecking lips and fur and falling in drooling ribbons to the ground.

After the censer bearers came the procession proper, rank after rank of skaven robed in tattered green and black and red, their cowls and hoods half-hiding faces marked with pox scars and weeping sores. Their garments were stained, held together by fraying rope belts, and covered in a thin layer of shed fur and flakes of skin. They clutched foetid blades and woe-staves in fingers tipped with cracked nails.

With them came chanting. A sonorous, repetitive dirge filled the tunnels, stirring the warp-fog like the breath of an almighty beast. It was accompanied by the slow beat of heavy drums and the clatter of bone rattles. The gong boomed again at the moment the procession entered the vast chamber, its ominous note silencing the tumult for a moment.

The plague monks issued forth into their cathedral like pus filling a boil, dominating the space created by the spitevermin. They parted to create a path towards the object of the slaves’ labours, now revealed.

It was an arch. At least, it had been an arch at some time in the distant past. Of duardin construction, it stood five times the height of the spitevermin, broad enough to enter ten abreast. It leaned off-kilter, filled with blocks of rubble etched with duardin runes, brought down when the hall beyond had collapsed. The supporting columns were carved with angular, bearded faces that glowered down on the interlopers, the shadows caused by the flickering lamps making the eyes appear to stare around the room with distaste. The lintel stone, a single immense slab of carnelian-speckled granite, was covered in gilded script that glowed with a light not of the warp-lanterns.

A single figure swathed in voluminous black shrouds appeared at the tunnel mouth, his scabrous muzzle protruding from the patched hood. The plague monks turned and bowed their heads. Baring their fangs, the spitevermin glowered and snarled until the slaves threw themselves to their knees and bellies, grovelling and whining the name of their master.

‘Poxmaster Felk…’

With him came his plague priests, six robed attendants bedecked in amulets and fetishes of the Great Horned Rat. Battered copper and tin censers hung from their belts, dribbling more warpfume. Each bore a staff taller than them, tipped with a triangular device of bones surrounding a hunk of raw black warpstone. The air churned around these staves, their corrupting magic like a faint green fire. Felk’s rod was even larger and more impressive, a bifurcated branch with the skulls of five humans bound to it with rotted twine and rusted chain. Their eyes were nuggets of warpstone and their jawbones wired in such a way that they chattered madly with each stride that took him across the cavern. His priests followed a few steps behind, their gazes constantly shifting with nervous energy.

Felk stopped before the huge gate, under which a small gap had been dug. It was just large enough for him to step into had he desired, like a postern gate formed where two blocks of stone butted against each other at a sharp angle.

Instead of darkness, the hole glowed with an inner light, the same as that which lit the golden runes of the lintel. Felk’s lips curled back in pleasure, revealing shards of broken teeth and black gums.

‘Yes-yes!’ he crowed, turning to his companions. ‘See-see? Divinations were right-right. Duardin gate! Not just city, realm-burrowing tunnelway. No more begging, no more playing nice to Clan Nekrit for Poxmaster Felk and esteemed acolytes of Withering Canker.’

‘We spray musk on the tolls of Warlord Shrilk!’ exclaimed Priest Festik.

‘Our own gate-gate!’ laughed Priest Chittir.

‘Where does it lead-lead?’ Priest Kirrik asked as he took a step closer to the portal.

Felk gestured to one of the nearby spitevermin and then to the slave cowering at the warrior’s feet.

‘Send it through,’ the Poxmaster commanded.

The spitevermin heaved up the squalling slave in one hand and dragged it up the ramp of stone and bodies leading to the gate. The slave twisted and made one last lunge for freedom, but was too weak from its exertions. Its eyes fixed on Felk with a last panicked glare. The spitevermin heaved the protesting skaven into the flickering light of the gap.

Felk saw the slave for a moment, silhouetted against the golden glow. A heartbeat later the shadow dissolved, accompanied by a drawn out screeching that suddenly stopped.

‘Nowhere yet,’ said Felk, turning away. Somewhere in the Realm of Life, that much the Poxmaster knew. It mattered not. A realmgate would give him access, the power to move far more swiftly than the gnaw-ways allowed. ‘More dig-dig, whole gate must be open.’

He signalled to his troupe to turn around and follow him back to the upper chambers. As they left, the spitevermin withdrew, leaving the surviving overseers to lash the slaves back into action.

The route back to the main skaven city took them through a mixture of gnawed burrows and duardin-delved corridors and halls. There was filth everywhere, including half-eaten carcasses of animals and slaves, though anything of use had been stripped from the bodies. In the larger halls, where once duardin lords had held court over their followers, nests crowded around the walls, ramshackle conglomerations of stones, mud, sticks, furs, bones and other materials.

Felk knew his city well and could navigate its byways and tunnels by smell alone in the places there were no luminous fungi or warp-lamps to light the way. Fresher draughts of air from the Whiteworld Above signalled their arrival at the uppermost level, dug from the ruins of a human city. The ground had swallowed the buildings whole in times past, though most had collapsed, scattered into a litter of broken pieces of once brightly coloured temple domes and age-worn bricks.

The Great Shrine, centre of Felk’s domain, had been raised out of the combined duardin and human detritus. Built onto the remains of a palatial complex of buildings and towers, it resembled a gigantic termite mound more than anything. Packed earth, broken duardin mortar, human-crafted bricks, all had been thrown together for floor after floor. Haphazard bridges, walkways and stairs circled its girth, held together by frayed rope and rotting sinew. In many places it was shored up with ramshackle buttresses, cracks and slides in its surface caused by the frequent tremors. It looked as though it might collapse with the smallest shudder of the earth, but in reality was solidly built within and had withstood some of the fiercest quakes since Felk’s predecessors had erected it.