Gotrek and Felix: The Anthology (41 page)

Outraged fury caused Thanquol to send another blast of magic into the twitching bodies. His enemies in Greypaw Hollow were behind this, goading him into this foolish attack! He’d see that they paid for playing upon his selfless drive to exterminate the enemies of skavendom!

Before the grey seer could visit further destruction upon the corpses, a roar sounded from behind him. Thanquol spun about, staring in horror at a gigantic beast. The thing was bigger than either Boneripper or the troll, so large that there was something absurd about it as it crawled out from its cage, about the idea that something so enormous had been able to fit inside so small a space.

Where the troll had been a scaly brute, this creature was a shaggy monstrosity, its body covered in greasy, black fur. Four arms projected from its muscular torso, two of them terminating in great bony blades like the pincers of a tunnel-mantis. The beast’s head was like that of a goat, three spear-like horns thrusting outwards from its forehead. For all its monstrousness, there was a terrible gleam of intelligence in the beast’s eyes, the same expression of hate and determination he had seen in the troll’s eyes.

Once again, Thanquol could smell magic in the air, tendrils of energy that drifted between the beast and a human who was flailing against three others who were trying to bind him with chains. Again, the grey seer followed the coils of energy back to the aged breeder-witch. She stood, glaring back at him, her wrinkled face drawn back into an expression of loathing.

‘Keep Abela’s body safe!’ the witch shouted at the men trying to chain the lunatic thrashing about on the ground. ‘We must give him time to use the ghorgon to destroy the underfolk!’

The ghorgon, for such Thanquol decided the four-armed beast must be, lost no time trying to follow the witch’s orders. The creature came charging forwards, swatting aside those skaven unlucky enough to get in its way, slashing them with its bony blades or clawing them with its powerful hands. One stormvermin, driven mad with fear, tried to gut the monster with a pole-axe. For his efforts, the ratman was knocked to the ground and pulverised beneath the ghorgon’s hoofed feet.

The air was heavy with the musk of fear now, Pakstab’s craven warriors fleeing before the ghorgon’s assault. Thanquol could hear the warlord’s weasely voice calling off the attack, enjoining his weak-spleened vermin to retreat. The traitor-meat had no compunction about abandoning his confederate and spiritual advisor on the battlefield, even after all the generosity and beneficence Thanquol had showered upon Greypaw Hollow!

The ground trembled under his feet while Thanquol stared after his vanished allies. Spinning back around, the grey seer squeaked in fright. Barrelling down upon him, each of its four arms raised to visit murderous death upon him, was the ghorgon! Without any of Pakstab’s cringing ratkin to slaughter, the beast had made incredible time crossing the clearing.

Thanquol’s own terror saved him. Where a second of thought or deliberation would have doomed him, instinct rose to his rescue. Pointing his claw at the charging ghorgon, the grey seer unleashed the full force of the spell he had conjured.

A sheet of crackling green lightning crashed into the ghorgon. The beast howled in agony as its fur burst into flame, fingers of warp-lightning searing through its flesh and blackening its bones. The smouldering carcass of the monster crashed to earth, its momentum propelling it onwards. Staggered by the reckless release of such a mighty spell, Thanquol couldn’t even muster the energy to dash aside as the huge bulk came sliding towards him. Even dead, the ghorgon was massive enough to smash the grey seer into paste.

Thanquol sighed with relief when the sliding body came to rest almost at his very feet. That relief ended with a shrill screech that made him jump.

‘You’ve killed Abela!’ the breeder-witch wailed, pointing her withered hand at Thanquol. ‘You’ve killed my son!’

Thanquol could smell the currents of magic gathering about the old witch as she summoned the aethyric powers to her with vengeful abandon. Before he could raise his own defences, he felt the unleashed fury of the witch wrap itself about him in an invisible coil. He could smell the thread of energy writhing back to the witch. Worse, he could sense the thread working its way across the clearing, closing upon a little cage suspended near the troll-wagon. A small, wiry green creature moped about in the cage, its long arms dangling between the bars.

Fear thundered in Thanquol’s heart. He understood the magic of the breeder-witch. She had placed the mind of her whelp into the ghorgon, and she had done the same with the troll and another human. Now she intended to force Thanquol’s mind into the loathsome body of a snotling!

Panic seized the grey seer. He struggled frantically against the hag’s curse, pawing at the air, trying belatedly to raise a magical barrier against her spell. Bit by bit, he could feel the magic taking hold of him, could sense his inner being ripped from his flesh, sent drifting towards the cage.

‘Boneripper!’ Thanquol yelled, crying out to his bodyguard to save him, forgetting for the moment the brute’s collapse after destroying the troll.

The rat-ogre seemed to have forgotten as well. Awkwardly, Boneripper rose up from the ground, its shattered arm still smoking. The automaton swung about, facing towards Thanquol, obediently waiting for further orders, oblivious to the stream of magic winding past its towering bulk.

Before Thanquol could call out to the rat-ogre to order it to kill the witch, he felt the last vestiges of his essence drawn out from his body. His spirit, his mind, was sent hurtling across the clearing. A flash of unspeakable cold, a confusion of whirring light and sound, and then there was only darkness.

It took a tremendous effort of willpower to vanquish that darkness, an effort that Thanquol found almost beyond him to make. Only the thought of all the enemies and traitors who would outlive him sustained him in his moment of despair. Feeling as though a thousand daggers pierced every corner of his being, as though a great fire had been sent raging through his chest, the grey seer fought his way back to consciousness.

The first thing that struck Thanquol was the almost complete absence of smell. What little he could discern were the aroma of old bone and the stink of metal, both underlaid with a tantalising hint of warpstone. The next thing which impressed him was his vision. It was much sharper than before, but everything had a strange, unworldly green hue to it. There was no sensation of touch: he couldn’t feel the bars of the cage or even the floor under his feet. He couldn’t even feel his heart beating in his chest!

Terror flooded through Thanquol’s mind as he considered the only possibility. The spell had been too much for the snotling’s fragile body to endure. His spirit had been hurled into a corpse! Any moment now his essence would be sent on its long journey to the burrows of the Horned One, there to answer for his failures and mistakes!

Thanquol shivered in horror at that fate. The Horned Rat knew he existed only to serve the vicious god of the skaven, that there was no more loyal or steadfast priest to enter the Order of Grey Seers! Yet, even in the afterworld there might be spies and traitors, filling the Horned One’s ears with lies about Thanquol’s devotion.

For a second chance! Thanquol would give himself utterly to the Horned One, devote himself purely to service to his god if only the Horned Rat would give his humble priest another opportunity to serve him!

In his terrified grief, Thanquol raised his hand to cover his eyes. It wasn’t the fact that the arm of what should have been a corpse moved when he willed it to move that shocked Thanquol. It was the shape of that arm. Not the leathery green limb of a snotling, but the massive, bony arm of a skeletal colossus!

Something had gone wrong with the breeder-witch’s spell!

Thanquol swung his body around, feeling the immense power of his new form. He glared down at the witch, savouring the terror gripping her features. The hag had not brought about his destruction, but her own. The transfer of Thanquol’s spirit into the body of the snotling had been intercepted, blocked when Boneripper lurched up from the ground. Instead of being cast into the fragile body of a greenskin runt, Thanquol had been invested into the mighty frame of a rat-ogre!

The grey seer opened his skeletal jaws and chittered malignantly, the sound crackling like lightning across the clearing.

The witch turned aside, glaring towards Thanquol’s real body. Her voice cracked as she shouted orders to the other caravan-humans.

Thanquol watched the humans go racing towards his old body. Let them have it, the weak, puny husk of rat-flesh! What need had he of a body of fragile flesh when his genius was enshrined in a hulk of bone and steel, merged with the pinnacle of Clan Skryre engineering!

He raised his skeletal paw, intending to send a spell searing down into the witch’s body. Thanquol cringed when nothing happened. He couldn’t feel any magic coursing through his new body. Worse, he couldn’t sense the aethyric emanations around him! He tried sniffing at the witch, but couldn’t discern even the faintest whiff of magic!

Suspicion flared through Thanquol’s mind. If he couldn’t smell magic, he could see confidence, and the witch was much too confident now. Somehow, in some way, Thanquol sensed he was still bound to his old body. He remembered the care the humans had taken with the bodies of their kinsmen when the witch cast their minds into the monsters.

Howling in panic, Thanquol charged across the clearing, the skeletal claws of the rat-ogre swatting aside the converging humans as though they were flies. He didn’t waste the time to savour the havoc, but sprang for the horned ratman standing alone and vulnerable. Invested with Boneripper’s mind, Thanquol’s old body stood unmoving, gripped by the idiocy that required commands from its master to give it motivation.

Thanquol tried snarling at his old body, to get Boneripper to flee, but without the warp-tooth, he had no way of commanding the stupid brute. Instead, he resorted to scooping up his body and tucking it under the rat-ogre’s arm. Without further hesitation, Thanquol dashed into the forest, leaving the clearing and the caravan behind.

He needed time to understand what had happened to him, time to study the effects of the witch’s curse. Then, once he was master of this condition, he would come back and settle with the witch and his hated enemies Gotrek and Felix!

Thanquol spent almost
an hour lurching through the gloom of the forest before he found the other skaven. He cursed the dim-senses of his new body. With a proper nose, he would have been able to find the fools quickly. Instead, he had been forced to grope about in the brush looking for tracks.

After deserting him, his duplicitous allies had retreated to a shadowy patch of scrubland a league or so from where the caravan had made camp. Thanquol could hear them arguing amongst themselves, trying to concoct some lie that would make their abandonment of skavendom’s greatest hero believable when Skavenblight sent its representatives to Greypaw Hollow.

Thanquol listened to the vainglorious squeaking of Warlord Pakstab for a full minute. It was just as well Boneripper’s body didn’t have a stomach, because it surely would have turned hearing the weak-spleened maggot-nibbler touting his brave effort to reach the embattled grey seer. Only the arrival of three gigantic beast-things had driven him away. He knew that the noble Thanquol wouldn’t have wanted Greypaw Hollow’s valiant warlord to throw away his life needlessly.

Snorting with contempt, Thanquol lumbered out from the trees. The sudden appearance of the skeletal rat-ogre brought squeals of fright from the skaven. Thanquol lashed his bony tail in amusement. Unable to smell, he’d been forced to judge the wind by sight alone, but he’d managed to prevent Boneripper’s scent from betraying his presence to the treacherous ratmen. Surprise was his, and he intended to use it to the fullest.

‘Pakstab-meat,’ Thanquol snarled. The skaven were doubly horrified to hear the grey seer’s voice thundering at them from Boneripper’s jaws. ‘Stop-speak, before I ring your neck!’

The warlord fell to his knees in shock. ‘Terrible Thanquol… is-is that you?’

The rat-ogre loomed over Pakstab, swatting him across the muzzle with a bony claw. The blow sent the ratman tumbling through the scrub. ‘Next stupid question?’ Thanquol growled, turning his skull-like visage so he could stare down at each of the skaven in turn.

‘What-what happened?’ Krakul asked, the warlock-engineer’s eyes boggling excitedly behind his goggles.

Thanquol took a shaking step towards the tinker-rat. ‘You should have stayed quiet,’ he warned. He lifted Boneripper’s massive claw, intending to swat the treasonous little scrap-licker. As he did so, however, he felt a cold pain in his side. His entire body shivered to a stop.

Krakul clapped his paws together, chittering maliciously. The reason was obvious to Thanquol: the faithless weasel had repaired the safety valve, making it impossible for Boneripper to hurt a skaven of Clan Skryre.