Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh! by Nate Crowley

Author:Nate Crowley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2022-01-28T10:24:16+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

GHAZGHKULL GETS SOMETHING BACK

I was a grot, and I was running for my life.

Couldn’t tell you what planet I was on, who Ghazghkull Thraka was, or anything like that. I’d come out of a hole, in a tunnel, not long ago, and had lived in that tunnel ever since, scraping fungus from the walls to put in a big metal bucket. I’d bullied the grots who was smaller than me, I’d been bullied by the grots who was bigger than me, and I’d grovelled to the orks who’d occasionally come to collect the buckets. It had been a dark, squalid, terrifying life, just as the gods had intended for my sort. It had been perfect.

This time, though, when the orks had come down to the tunnels, they’d come with shootas, and they hadn’t given a squig’s cough about the fungus. There hadn’t been any explanations, just bullets. And before I’d even figured out what was going on, half the grots in the tunnel had been shot to ragged pieces. As luck would have it, I’d been carrying the big metal bucket when it happened, and that’s what saved me. A bullet had pinged off it, right back into the shin of the ork who’d fired it, and I’d legged it while the ork was busy shouting at the bucket.

The orks had set after me right away, with a whole pack of sniffer squigs, and although I’d got a good head start, it wouldn’t last forever. I needed to lose ’em, somehow. But how, when I was lost myself? I’d never left my tunnel before, and all the tunnels beyond it looked exactly the same.

Then I smelled it. I didn’t know what it was, and it was so faint that it must’ve been coming from miles away. But somehow I knew it meant safety, and as mad as that was, it wasn’t like I had options. So I ran towards it. It led me upwards, gradually, and after a while the tunnels started looking a bit different. The walls weren’t fully grown over with fungus yet, and I saw they were made out of machines. Not proper, orky machines either, but fussy ones with too many right angles. These had been someone else’s tunnels, not long ago.

The further up I went, the more bare the walls got, and the less places there were to hide. Which was bad news, ’cos I badly needed a breather. In the end, I had to settle for collapsing behind a hump of shot-up machinery in a wide chamber where it looked like there had been a big fight. I could already hear the squigs snarling in the tunnels behind me, but all the fear-juice in the universe couldn’t have squeezed another step out of me without a few gasps of air first.

I was so puffed out, actually, that it took a moment for me to clock the other thing hiding behind the machine. It was like a grot, but… infinitely worse? Its face was all flat and boring, like its ears and nose had been chopped off, and it wasn’t even green.

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