Stormvault by Andy Clark

Author:Andy Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-12-07T14:47:40+00:00

Chapter Ten

THE PRIZE

Mordavia, the third evening of the campaign

Grey Seer Splichritt was used to tunnels. The Blight City, his warren-lair in Skitterspike, the gnawholes by which he flitted between the Mortal Realms, and indeed virtually every fortress warren he’d ever set footclaws in were all cramped, low-ceilinged tangles of tunnels, ramshackle architecture, perilous machines and teeming masses of skaven. Yet for all this, the tunnels that wound their way up through the deeps of the old-things’ city made him nervous.

He felt strangely hemmed in. His overdeveloped magical senses shrieked a constant warning at him, leaving his grey fur bristling and his tail switching like a whip. The harsh green glow of his underlings’ warpstone-powered weapons caused the shadows to rear and dance as they always did, yet today Splichritt saw menacing shapes in each one. The sounds of his underlings scrabbling and jostling and hissing at one another rolled together within the confines of the tunnels, and normally that was a sound that Splichritt associated with safety in overwhelming numbers. Today, he had to keep restraining himself from cringing like a slave-cur as the noises grated on his highly-strung nerves.

It didn’t help that the shadows concealed real dangers as well as imagined; in one corridor, stone hammers as large as pillars had swung down to crush a clawpack of clanrats like scuttergrubs; in a low-ceilinged chamber whose walls bore barely discernible man-thing murals, a crumbling statue had jerked to life with emerald energy burning from its eye sockets. It had waded into the swarm with its stone blade swinging, only to be blasted apart by the rockets of the warlock bombardiers; in a high-arched vault, a half-seen shadow figure had hissed incomprehensible words at the skaven in a voice like flowing sand until Splichritt had ordered it annihilated by the Skryre weapons teams. Whether the resultant cave-in had been the doing of the haunting presence or merely thanks to overly exuberant crew-rats unleashing unstable ordnance in a confined space, the result had been hundreds more dead. To an army with less bountiful numbers, the fiasco might have been considered costly.

Splichritt hated the smell down here, too. Something ancient and paper-dry dusted his sinuses, a barely perceptible undertone to the overwhelming reek of the grey slime that dripped from walls and ceilings.

‘Plague-things have been here, yes-yes,’ he muttered to himself, and absently massaged his singed tail tip as his litter bearers lumbered up another winding, slime-slick stairway. The flying beard-things had killed hundreds of his underlings with their bombing run, but their inferior armaments had been no match for Splichritt’s sorceries. Frankly, he was annoyed with himself for allowing even a slight scorching of his blessed personage. If he encountered the beard-things again, they would pay for the insult!

As for underlings, he had plenty more of those. When Blackclaw and his gutter runners had brought him their information, Splichritt’s natural genius had allowed him to spot the opportunity for power straight away. Admittedly he didn’t know precisely what that power was

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