C. L. Werner
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.