Ghoulslayer

Chapter Twenty-Two Shelter from the Storm

The streets of the Lingering Keep were already chaotic before Prince Volant sounded the alert. When he ordered everyone to take cover, there was a stampede. Screams rang out through the city. People clawed at doors and dived through windows. There was a desperate battle to find shelter as thunderheads rushed through the night. There were some in the city who had seen the results of the bone rain, and fear spread like a plague, leaving people as frantic and deranged as the monsters gathering beyond the walls.

Even those who had not seen it before could tell this was no natural storm. Mountainous clouds boiled into view, flickering with amethyst and enveloping the wynds, hurtling towards the gates that had only been slammed minutes earlier as the last few arrivals ­scrambled into the Lingering Keep.

Maleneth sprinted through the madness, dodging mobs of panicked refugees. She had almost crossed the square when she realised Gotrek was way behind her, walking casually from the walls, his axe slung nonchalantly over his shoulder.

‘Slayer!’ she yelled.

Trachos was at her side, and they both stopped to wait for him.

Volant and his captain were at the centre of a crossroads, yelling orders to the soldiers and trying to marshal the crowds into some kind of order. There was such a panic that the Gravesward had to form ranks and raise shields, driving people back to avoid a crush.

‘There are empty houses and temples in the eastern quarter!’ shouted Volant, climbing onto his steed and launching it over the crowd. Its wings dragged clouds of dust as Volant tried to redirect the people. He waved his scythe. ‘Head that way!’

The mob was too deranged to respond, so Volant spoke to the skele­ton drake and it opened its jaws in a roar so loud it cut over the noise of the approaching storm.

Finally some of the people paid attention, allowing the Gravesward to shepherd them away, relieving the bottleneck at the crossroads, but new crowds surged into the square from other directions and the situation was soon even worse.

‘The storm will hit in minutes,’ said Trachos. He and Maleneth had stepped out of the flow of bodies, climbing up a flight of colonnaded steps that led to a set of doors. The Stormcast Eternal was looking through his spyglass at the clouds. ‘These people are not going to make it.’

Gotrek shoved his way through the mob and stomped up the steps. He looked sullen. ‘Nagash is scared. That’s what this is all about. He’s doing everything he can to stop me reaching him. He’s swamping this city in skull-chewers so the Morn-Prince can’t send me to him.’ He glared at the carnage in the square. ‘And it’s not going to work.’

‘I can never decide whether to be impressed or amused by you,’ said Maleneth. She waved one of her knives at the scene below – thousands of desperate, fear-maddened people, clambering over each other as a cataclysmic storm gathered overhead. It looked like an apocalypse. ‘Does nothing here give you pause? Is there nothing about this situation that makes you think you might not be destined to reach Nagash?’

Gotrek laughed. ‘Bloody aelves. So quick to accept defeat. That was always your problem. Comes of being knock-kneed poetry readers.’

He looked up at Trachos. ‘We need to reach these Halls of Separation everyone keeps blathering on about. That’s where the prince sent the ghost eggs. We’ll go there and stand watch over the doors. I’ll take on every ghoul in the realms if I have to, until the priestess has finished her spell, but I’d rather guard a door than a city.’

Maleneth pointed at the tusk-shaped spire looming over the city. ‘The Halls of Separation are miles away, and Trachos just told you the storm will hit in minutes. You have the legs of a pot-bellied pig. How exactly do you intend to outrun those clouds?’

Gotrek shrugged. ‘The manling will work something out.’

Trachos stared at him. Then he nodded and stood a little taller.

Maleneth rolled her eyes. ‘How does this lump-headed brute have such an effect on people? How has he made you believe in yourself again, Trachos? How can your faith have been renewed by a god-hating savage?’

Trachos ignored her, peering around at the architecture. ‘This is an advanced civilisation, by the look of the buildings.’ He waved at an ornate arch reaching over their heads. ‘They have preserved things most realms lost in the Age of Chaos. These techniques must date back to the time before Chaos, when Sigmar still walked the realms. I see his hand in every–’

‘Sigmar?’ guffawed Gotrek. ‘You can’t lay everything at the feet of the hammer-dunce! These people have learned some half-decent engineering skills, and that can only have come from dwarfs. Or at least those pale shadows of dwarfs you call duardin.’

Screams broke out not far from where they were talking as the Gravesward began using their scythes on the crowd, cutting people down in an attempt to save others who were being crushed by the mob. As the crowd heaved in a new direction, bone carriages splintered and toppled and fleshless horses panicked, trampling through the mayhem, their black plumes bobbing as they tried to find a way out.

‘Minutes away, you said,’ reminded Maleneth, waving at the looming clouds. ‘Perhaps now isn’t the time to discuss engineering?’

Trachos was still facing Gotrek. ‘If the Erebid built their city on duardin principles, how would they have dealt with sanitation?’

Gotrek shrugged. ‘Latrines. Sewers.’

‘Have you lost your final shreds of sanity?’ muttered Maleneth.

But Gotrek was grinning. ‘Sewers – of course.’

Trachos studied the facade of the building they had climbed up to. ‘That ironwork looks like waste pipes.’ He leant out from the steps and looked down to the corner of the building. ‘We could follow that outlet and see where it leads.’

‘You want to crawl through the sewers?’ asked Maleneth. ‘For miles?’

‘Nowhere is safer than underground,’ replied Gotrek. ‘Besides, which would you prefer, muck or bone rain?’

Trachos led them back down the steps, muttering and glancing back at the walls of the building as he tried to follow the route of the pipes.

At the bottom of the stairs they hit the crowd. Maleneth grimaced as people crashed into her, but the bulk of a Slayer and a Stormcast Eternal was enough to smash through the crush. Trachos waved them on, heading round to the corner of the building.

As they left the main flow of people, clouds began sailing over the walls.

Some of the soldiers managed to force their way down from the battlements, but others took cover in towers and archways, looking as though they were preparing to battle the weather.

‘Here,’ said Trachos, hurrying down an alleyway at the side of the building. He reached a metal hatch and stamped on it with his boot, creating a loud, reverberating clang.

Gotrek grinned. ‘Good work, manling!’ He climbed up onto an overturned cart and looked over the heaving crowds.

‘Morn-Prince!’ he howled, but there was no sign of Volant.

The noise of the crowds and the growing storm drowned out even the Slayer’s booming tones.

‘Gotrek!’ cried Trachos as he levered the hatch open and revealed a flight of stone steps leading down into the darkness. ‘We have to go now.’

‘Where is that blessed prince?’ snarled Gotrek, his cheeks flushing with anger. ‘He needs to order these people into the sewers or they’ll all be massacred. Morn-Prince!’ he bellowed, his eye sparking, but there was no reply.

Maleneth ducked past Trachos and climbed down the steps, descending into the darkness. Glimmers of white shimmered over the walls. ‘It’s now or never,’ she said, looking back at Trachos.

‘Morn-Prince!’ cried Gotrek a third time. The gold sparks in his eye were mirrored by a flash from the rune in his chest, and his words tore through the city, charged with the power of the rune, ringing out with such fury that people staggered.

The sneer fell from Maleneth’s face. Gotrek’s cry sounded like the voice of a god.

The mayhem ceased. Everyone in the square turned to face him.

‘The sewers, you imbeciles!’ Gotrek’s face was purple. ‘Get underground!’

People stared at the Slayer, clearly shocked, then did as he ordered, sprinting for drain hatches and sewers.

A few seconds later a bright rattling sound filled the city as the downpour arrived, crashing over the walls like waves of broken teeth.

Gotrek leapt down from the cart and raced towards Maleneth and Trachos with hundreds of terrified people following him, all trying to escape the deluge.

‘Go!’ cried Gotrek, pounding down the steps and disappearing into the darkness. There was a loud splash as he disappeared from sight.

Maleneth grimaced at the thick stench that rushed up in his wake. ‘Smells as bad as him,’ she muttered, hurrying down the steps.