Chris Wright - Age of Sigmar - Omnibus

‘You march to the great fortress which spans the worm,’ the skink said. ‘Great Kurkori has seen it.’ Before he could reply, it clicked its jaws and added, ‘You must march further and farther. You must go into its belly and to the worm’s head. This, Most Ancient Lord Kurkori has seen in his visions,’ the skink said. ‘The future and the past are all one for him. He has seen what will be, what is and what must be for the dream to be good.’

‘And you will march with us,’ Zephacleas said, somewhat shaken. The seraphon knew of their mission.

‘The Most Ancient and Somnolent Lord Kurkori has seen it,’ the skink said. Zephacleas peered at the slumbering shape of the slann. He wondered if the creature was even aware of what was going on. Then, perhaps it didn’t matter for such a being. An ally was an ally, and he was not one to turn away the offer of friendship. Especially if it meant the difference between success and failure.

He looked down at the skink. ‘Then let us ensure that it is indeed a good dream, my friend. I am Zephacleas, Lord-Celestant of the Beast-bane, servant of Sigmar,’ he said.

The skink stared up at him. It blinked, and said nothing. Then, ‘Takatakk. I am Takatakk. Starpriest to the Dreaming Constellation, servant of Kurkori.’ It looked up at him, expression inhuman and unreadable. ‘We have come to fight beside you, dream-of-Sigmar.’

Vretch strode down through the pleasingly noxious murk of the Gut-shaft. The incline was raw and infected. It sloshed pleasantly beneath his claws as he used his staff to test the route ahead. The shaft was a steep slope of shuddering meat, shot through with webs of veins and throbbing runnels full of what passed for the worm’s blood. Ichor dripped from the walls and ceiling of the shaft, and curtains of torn fat and muscle flapped wetly in the breeze which had followed the skaven down.

It was the most comfortable he’d felt since he’d first led his procession up through the gnawholes and onto the surface of the worm. The fleshy tunnel reminded him of the cramped and crooked corridors of Blight City, full of the comforting smells of rot and skaven — if somewhat more perilous, on the whole.

More than once since he’d begun his expedition, the scoured walls of the worm’s pores had expanded to envelop an unwary plague monk. Shu’gohl’s thrashing had grown worse since they’d started their descent. He wondered whether it had anything to do with the stink of pox-sludge which drifted from the dorsal area of the city.

Kruk was up to something. Nothing intelligent, obviously. No, Kruk was a fool and prone to foolish things. Vretch was tempted to bite his own tail in frustration at the other plague priest’s disagreeable antics. Even at a remove, occupied by battle with the storm-things and the star-devils, his rival was causing him difficulties. Then, it had always been that way.

Kruk was a natural disaster looking for a place to happen. If Squeelch didn’t act soon to put Kruk out of his misery, Kruk might kill the worm before Vretch had found what he was looking for, and that could prove disastrous. Who knew how Shu’gohl’s death might affect its internal regions? Things could shift or dissolve, carrying the object of his quest further out of reach. And that would be disastrous — Skuralanx might even blame Vretch for the delay, and punish him accordingly. He shuddered.

As he did so, he caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. A flickering shadow. He glanced back, but saw only the shadows of his followers, cast by the light of the warpstone torches they carried. Unconsciously, he hugged the Mappo Vurmio to his chest. A trick of the light, he thought.

Despite the worm’s convulsions, they reached the bottom of the shaft with little real difficulty, and most of his procession intact. It wasn’t that far, through the layers of flesh and muscle. The shaft flowered into a wide lump of fatty tissue, which jutted over what he believed to be Shu’gohl’s intestinal tract.

A foul wind rose up out of the dark and washed over him, carrying with it, the sound of… squirming. He smelled ichor and something else, something bilious and musky all at once. ‘Quick-hurl a torch, fast-fast,’ he said. One of his plague monks scuttled forward and threw a warpstone torch into the darkness, briefly illuminating the immensity below.

In that glimpse, Vretch saw that the Squirming Sea was well-named. It was a narrow sea of digestive juices running lengthwise along the worm’s body, broken at points by steaming reefs composed of uncountable squirming worms — whether these were parasites, or offspring, Vretch couldn’t say. In the distance, he could just make out the shapes of broken spires and crumbled towers, rising from the bubbling waters. It was said that whole man-thing fortresses had been swallowed by Shu’gohl on its eternal crawling. And more than just fortresses — encampments of orruks and even the warrens of skaven had been drawn into the worm’s belly.

It was one of the latter he had come to find: the lost warren of Geistmaw. It was an innocuous little den, inhabited by a clan of old. They had perished to a skaven, but had not been forgotten. He opened the Mappo Vurmio and flipped through its stiff pages. Those ancient cartographers had discovered the remains of the warren and its unfortunate inhabitants. And after they had mapped it, they had died one by one from a strange sickness — a sickness, according to their peculiar man-thing scratching, much like that which had drawn him here in the first place. Vretch licked his snout in anticipation.

He knew, with every fibre of his keen and matchless intellect, that the forgotten clan of Geistmaw had discovered the secret of one of the Great Plagues and brewed it, only to be subsumed by the worm before they could unleash it. How long must it have taken for the poisonous atmosphere of the lost warren to spread through Shu’gohl’s stomach-sea? A hundred years? A thousand? Only to be expelled at last in the worm’s wake, to poison the land where it squirmed. Such was the potency of the Great Plagues that they remained dangerous even centuries after their brewing.

He traced a page with his claw, following the route those long-dead mapmakers had taken. Most of what the worm ate passed through its digestive tract. But some things became lodged in the flows and eddies of Olgu’gohl, there to become a permanent fixture of this ill-lit realm. The Geistmaw warren was one such thing. Once, it had occupied the remains of a man-thing fortress of the same name; now both fortress and warren hung suspended from the worm’s stomach-lining over a natural eddy in the digestive fluid.

It would not be easy to reach, but reach it he would. He was too close to fail now. He peered over the lip of the precipice, down into the digestive waters below. He turned back to his followers and raised his staff. ‘Hurry,’ he snapped. ‘Lower the raft-platforms, quick-quick.’

His procession devolved into a flurry of activity as skaven dragged the rafts forward. The wide, scoop-shaped platforms had been made from ichor-hardened setae and scale prised from the worm’s back. They would resist the acidic waters of the Squirming Sea, as would the oars woven from similarly hardened setae-strands — or so his assistants swore. The oar-skaven were clad in thick, heavy robes designed to resist even the most virulent pox-brews, and wore goggles and cowls to protect their faces. Vretch had his own goggles and congratulated himself for thinking of them — the stinging steam rising from the gut-juices of Shu’gohl would have blinded even one as inured to pain as himself.

His followers dragged the rafts to the edge as others clambered down the fatty cliff below to create a living chain by which the rafts could be passed from one set of claws to the next. The rafts were lowered one after another without incident, and sat waiting in the bubbling stream below. Then, and only then, were Vretch’s books and the Conglomeration lowered to occupy the largest of the rafts. His pox-cauldrons and plague-urns were scattered about the rest — their contents would smoke and spew, keeping any potential predators at bay. The Horned Rat alone knew what sort of monstrosities lurked in Shu’gohl’s gullet.