Dead Winter

Prologue

Skavenblight

Geheimnisnacht, 1111

The pungent smell of smouldering warpstone wafted through the blackened chamber, the corrupt fume slithering into every nook and cranny, oozing between the crumbling bricks, burning into beams of oak and ash, discolouring glass and tarnishing bronze. It was the stench of darkest sorcery and this was its night.

The noise of creeping rats inside the walls died out as the fumes incinerated their tiny lungs and liquefied their little brains. Beetles and roaches fell from the rafters, their bodies shrivelled into desiccated husks. Bats took wing, shrieking their fright as they desperately tried to flee the deathly miasma, smashing against walls and ceiling, raining down to the floor in battered, bloodied strips of quivering flesh.

Seerlord Skrittar’s whiskers twitched as the smell of blood flickered amidst the searing scent of warpstone. It was an unconscious, instinctive association. Skrittar’s mind was far too disciplined to be distracted in this, his hour of terror and triumph.

The Seerlord stood at the head of a ring of creatures dressed in grey robes. Like him, they were ghastly, inhuman things, abominable monstrosities that seemed to blend the most hideous qualities of man and rat. Great horns protruded from their elongated heads, terrible symbols were painted or branded into their furry foreheads; the eyes in their verminous faces blazed with malefic energies, glowing green in the omnipresent darkness. Their paws were folded before them, clawed fingers entwined, their fangs clashing together in a low chant of hisses and squeaks.

Seerlord Skrittar felt panic drumming inside his chest, as though any moment his heart might burst from sheer terror. The audacity of what he had thought to achieve! The arrogance! The impudence!

No! The Seerlord forced his nerves to quieten. There was danger, there was always danger when invoking the forces of darkness, when engaging in a conjuration beyond the blackest of the black arts. No other skaven would have dared what he had dared! Yes, the risk was great, but the reward was still greater!

His eyes narrowed as he gazed across the vast chamber. Eleven horned ratmen in grey robes, all of them the most potent of the Order of Grey Seers, with himself, the mighty Seerlord, and the Horned Rat himself symbolically assuming the sacred role of thirteenth intimate of the cabal. Each of the skaven sorcerers had imbibed in a potent mixture of wormroot and warpstone before the ritual, magnifying their own abilities yet further by devouring the still-living brains of their most gifted acolytes. The malign influence of Geheimnisnacht itself increased their powers still further, and whatever extra magic they needed they could draw from the warpstone fumes rising from six caskets arrayed about the edge of their circle.

Protection? Of course: a series of concentric circles composed of sigils and runes drawn in the blood of elf-things mixed with crushed warpstone and the powdered bones of dragons. The greatest protection, though, lay in numbers, playing the chance that if anything went wrong then the aethyric retaliation would claim a different ratman.

Skrittar gazed past his chanting minions, staring above them at the great window of stained glass. It was a relic left behind by the original builders of Skavenblight, the foolish man-things who had reared the Shattered Tower and engineered their vast city, only to have it taken from them by the Horned Rat and bestowed upon his favoured children — the skaven.

There was something of magic about that portal of stained glass set into a spider-web of iron. Only magic could have allowed it alone to survive the tolling of the thirteenth hour, when the Horned Rat’s divine malignance had struck down the humans like a mighty earthquake and left their great tower broken and crumbling. Only the most potent of sorcery could have allowed it to endure a million generations of ratkin, staring like a great unclean eye upon the teeming hordes of Skavenblight as they birthed, grew and perished.

Through the window, Skrittar could see the gibbous moon of sorcery, the ghoulish Morrslieb with its erratic orbit and eerie allure. This night, the Chaos Moon was ascendant, perched exactly at the centre of the thirteen constellations. Glancing away from the moon’s unsettling glow, Skrittar could see the fangs of the Big Rat and the long tail of the Little Rat, he could see the snarling muzzle of the Cornered Rat and the bloated carcass of the Drowned Rat, there were the feeble nubs of the Pink Rat and the murderous eyes of the Black Rat, and, whining off in the stellar shadows, was that cosmic buffoon, King Mouse, the meat that thought it was skaven.

Rare was such a conjunction. Maybe once in a thousand generations of skaven did moon and stars align in such a way. When such an alignment came to pass, there were certain spells and rituals, handed down from Seerlord to Seerlord, that could be performed. Magic of such awful potency that no other skaven was allowed to even suspect their existence. Yet there was only so much magic a single sorcerer could conjure, and Skrittar wanted far greater things.

The heathen vermin of Clan Pestilens were brewing some new contagion, a great plague they thought might finally bring the surface-dwelling man-things to their knees. Spies from every clan in Skavenblight had reported this to their warlords and now the whole Under-Empire was a seething hotbed of rumour and ambition. Outwardly, Skrittar dismissed the plans of the plague monks as diseased fantasies, delusions brought on by the maggots of madness burrowing through their brains. Inwardly, however, he feared that Arch-Plaguelord Nurglitch really did have such a weapon. If he did, the balance of power in Skavenblight would shift, the other Lords of Decay would scurry to curry favour with the plague priests and forget their true allegiance towards the grey seers and the Horned Rat.

It was something to make the Seerlord’s glands clench, the thought that the plague monks would gain ascendancy over skavendom. It was a possibility that had led him at last to build this cabal and initiate the greatest feat of magic ever executed by skaven sorcery.

Skrittar raised his paws, invoking the thirteen secret names of the Horned Rat, scratching his god’s mark upon the great ritual. At once, there came a shift in the chamber’s atmosphere. It was not necessary to feel the power rising from the circle, he could smell it, almost see it, draining out from the grey seers like a tremendous shadow. Through the stained glass window, he could see the face of Morrslieb begin to darken, its ghoulish glow muffled behind the magnitude of dark magic assaulting it.

A squeak of anguish echoed through the chamber. Skrittar could smell black skaven blood on the air. He heard a body crash to the floor. A few instants later, there was a second shriek, a second crash. Then there came a third.

Fear coursed through the Seerlord’s heart. Had he misjudged the potential? Was this too much power for even an entire cabal of grey seers to command? Around him he could feel the air becoming charged with an ever-increasing pulse of eldritch energy. He could see the moon growing dim as its very essence was overwhelmed by skaven sorcery.

A fourth shriek! Now there came anxious squeaks and whines from the other grey seers. One more death and the survivors would panic and break the circle, fleeing like fool-meat despite the havoc such an abrupt break in the ritual would cause. Skrittar ground his fangs together at the cowardice of his treasonous underlings. They deserved a bloody and unnatural death for their lack of fortitude. By their sacrifice, the Order of Grey Seers would ensure its place as masters of skavendom! It was their duty to stand and die for the glory of the Horned Rat and his true prophets!

Skrittar nervously nuzzled his chin against the elven talisman he wore, hoping its magic would be enough to protect him if his craven hench-rats broke the circle.

Before that could happen, the air lost the charge that had been building up inside it. The moon’s glow was restored. The smell of aethyric malignity drained away.

The Seerlord ground his fangs, glaring at his nervous underlings. If he found out one of them had ended the spell prematurely, if he learned one of them was responsible for causing the ritual to fail…

Then there was a tremendous flash of light. The sky beyond the window was aglow with a spectral radiance, a great aura that surrounded Morrslieb. Skrittar hissed in triumph. The ritual had worked! By means of his sorcery, he had reached out and ripped chunks from the moon itself! Great shards of celestial rock that would now circle above the earth, waiting for that moment when Skrittar would call them down and claim them for his own! Because there was a secret about Morrslieb, one that even elven wizards treated as impossibility and which other skaven thought of as a wonderful myth with no basis in reality.

The Chaos Moon, dark Morrslieb, was composed of pure warpstone! The chunks Skrittar had torn from its face would be enough to drive the Under-Empire into a new era of might and power. It would be enough to make the skaven the uncontested rulers of the world. It would be enough to make Skrittar the wealthiest ratman in skavendom, able to buy and sell the other Lords of Decay as though they were sacks of goblin-meat!

Seerlord Skrittar smoothed his whiskers, savouring the excited squeaks of the surviving grey seers. They knew what they had done. The ritual had exhausted them, left them drained and weary, but still their hearts burned with avarice as they imagined all the warpstone waiting to be called down from the sky.

Skrittar bared his fangs in a savage grin. The parasitic whelps would never share in that wealth. It belonged to the Order of Grey Seers and the Seerlord, not to a rabble of overly ambitious schemers and traitors! It was really too bad they knew too much. A little knowledge was a dangerous thing. A lot of knowledge was a death warrant.

Fingering his lucky cat’s foot, Skrittar’s gleaming eyes drifted to the darkness beyond the circle of power. He could just see the shape there, and only because he knew where to look for it and had saved enough magic to allow him to see it. A wiry figure, stealing unseen and unknown upon the exhausted grey seers, its body draped in a cloak of black, a mantle woven from the scalps of changelings and daemons. He could see the dripping daggers clenched in the killer’s black-furred paws, the enchanted metal of the blades themselves saturated with poison so that the knives exuded a constant sweat of venom.

Deathmaster Silke, the supreme assassin of Clan Eshin, the finest murderer in the Under-Empire. His hapless minions should feel honoured. Skrittar had spared no expense to ensure that they wouldn’t tell anyone else what they had done this night. He wondered if they would appreciate just how costly the services of the Deathmaster were. It was the finest compliment one skaven could pay another — spending a small fortune to murder them.

Skrittar watched as the first of his underlings went down, both of the grey seer’s lungs pierced from behind by Silke’s blades. Before the first victim had even hit the floor, the Deathmaster’s invisible form was springing across the circle to open the throat of a second witless sorcerer. It was exciting to watch the slaughter, thrilling to watch an accomplished killer at work.

Just the same, Skrittar kept a good grip on his cat’s foot and made sure he had an escape spell ready.

There was no knowing if the Nightlord of Clan Eshin hadn’t made a mistake and ‘accidentally’ added an extra name to Deathmaster Silke’s contract.