Puskab chittered maliciously as he marched past the armoured skaven flanking the entrance to his lair. They were big black-furred bruisers, their bulks stuffed into mail that looked to have been fashioned from the chitinous plates of enormous bugs — perhaps from Blight’s vanquished deathwalker or its spawn. The guards lowered their heads and exposed their throats in a gesture of submission as the plague priest passed. Puskab wondered how much of their servility was genuine and how much was show. There was a delicate line between the roles of bodyguard and jailor.
The plague priest dismissed the question for the present. His eyes gleamed with joy as he gazed across his laboratory. Dozens of low tables had been erected, each provided with shallow trays built from the brainpans of skulls. In each tray, a sliver of rotten meat floated in a toxic cocktail of unguents and poisons combined in exact accord with the seven hundred and thirty-first psalm from the Liber Bubonicus. Only the most exalted of plague priests were granted such knowledge — any creature of lesser standing would contract Crimson Shivers from merely reading the formula.
Puskab was one of the exalted. He had brewed the solution within a thrice-cursed kettle and spoken the secret words as he stirred the mixture. Now each of the little trays with their tiny islands of festering meat would provide a breeding ground for the bacillus he had developed. The invisible vapours of the Black Plague would gather about the meat, forming mouldy patches upon its surface.
Staring out over the tables with their hundreds of trays, Puskab felt his heart flutter with delicious terror. Here, in this one room, were enough plague germs to kill every man-thing on the surface! If there were a way to distribute it evenly and quickly, the skaven could annihilate the humans in a single night.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. The Horned Rat demanded ingenuity and cleverness from his disciples, and so he had imposed a flaw upon this most divine of plagues. The Black Plague by itself couldn’t be spread. It needed a host, a creature to act as its vector.
Puskab turned away from the tables, strolling past a series of cages built into niches in the wall. Hordes of rats glared back at him with their beady eyes. The rats weren’t the plague’s vector, however. They were simply hosts for the creatures that would carry the plague. The fur of each rat was crawling with fleas of the hardiest and most fecund breed developed by Clan Verms.
In his first experiments, Puskab had been careful to use only human hosts. The fleas that infested man-things had no appetite for the blood of rodents, eliminating any chance the disease could be spread to the skaven.
What Wormlord Blight demanded, however, was something far different. He wanted to alter the Black Plague so that it could be used against other skaven. What the Lords of Decay were doing to the humans, Blight intended to do to rival clans. It was a thrilling display of the most murderous and uninhibited ambition!
Of course, Puskab was under no delusion that Blight could be trusted to honour their agreement. The army of assistants Blight had provided him were always trying to ferret out the secret of creating the plague. If Verms could gain that secret, their need for Clan Pestilens would evaporate. But the deception went farther than that. Puskab was aware that his supposed subordinates were continually sneaking insects into the laboratory, furtively testing them to see which strains could survive close proximity to the Poxmaster. It didn’t take much imagination to guess what the objective of such experiments was.
Puskab bared his fangs at the leather-robed ratmen scurrying around the tables. None of them returned his gesture. Even alone, a plague priest was too formidable a foe for such cringing coward-meat.
Puskab regretted that he had been unable to bring a small pack of plague monks with him into the Hive, but as Blight told him, a secret was best kept by one tongue. It would have made the plague priest’s position precarious to have his fellows around. It might give Blight ugly ideas about his new ally.
The plague priest’s nose twitched as the aroma of the Wormlord struck his senses. He looked towards the doorway, watching as the twisted Blight Tenscratch and his retinue of sword-rats and lickspittles came trooping into the laboratory. Blight had draped his crooked body in a billowy robe of soft cloth he claimed was woven by worms. He held a little gold sphere in his paw, its sides split by narrow vents. As he approached, the Wormlord shook the ball, disturbing the beetle trapped inside and causing it to exude a sulphurous musk.
‘The work proceeds?’ Blight inquired, whiskers quivering with anticipation.
Puskab gestured across the laboratory to the cages. ‘Much-much work still,’ he answered. ‘Horned One make-give plague to use-kill man-things.’
A low growl rattled about at the back of Blight’s throat. ‘But you can change-fix. You promise-say plague can kill-slay skaven!’
‘Need-take time,’ Puskab confessed. He turned to a little wooden box, holding it so that Blight might see the pile of curled-up fleas lying inside. ‘Need-find flea that can live-carry Black Plague.’
‘We will find the flea,’ Blight hissed. ‘If we have to stop the worm farms and turn them into flea ranches, Clan Verms will find what you need.’ A crafty look crept into the warlord’s eyes and his fangs clashed together. ‘You must change-fix,’ he told Puskab, ‘or Clan Verms will not help you against Nurglitch-traitor.’
Puskab’s black teeth showed in a menacing leer. ‘Nurglitch powerful-strong! Too strong-mighty for Clan Verms!’
Blight reacted with a squeaky laugh. Waving his paw, he motioned for part of his retinue to come forwards. First was an armoured sword-rat shoving a trembling skavenslave ahead of him. Then came a sinister white ratman holding a big iron box. Finally, a pair of lean, wiry skaven brandishing strange worm-oil torches with long handles and a curious metal cup to cover the paws that gripped them.
‘Watch-learn,’ Blight commanded. As he spoke, the sword-rat ran the edge of his blade across the back of the slave’s legs, hamstringing the wretched creature. As the stricken ratman collapsed, the white skaven set his box on the floor. Setting a heavy paving stone in front of the box, the white ratkin pulled a metal door upwards.
At first the motion made no sense to Puskab. The white-fur had opened the box but the stone still obscured whatever was inside. Then the plague priest’s nose registered a sharp, acidic smell. While he watched, smoke began to rise from the stone and a low sound, like the sizzle of grease dripping onto an open flame, reached his ears. Before his eyes, the centre of the stone began to melt away. Soon a dark hole yawned at the middle of the stone and a cluster of hairy black legs emerged into the light.
The thing was a spider, a huge tarantula as big as Puskab’s fist. The abomination scuttled out from the hole its venom had bored through the stone, rearing upwards on its back legs, its forelegs and pedipalps quivering in the air. The collapsed slave shrieked in terror, but his crippled legs buckled beneath him when he tried to rise. Before the ratman could crawl away, the spider lunged at him. What the spider’s acidic venom could do to flesh was enough to sicken even a plague priest.
While the tarantula was still slurping up the melted flesh of the thrashing slave, the ratmen with the torches sprang into action. Displaying an agility honed by long practice and deadly necessity, the acrobatic skaven scurried around the spider, jabbing at it with their torches. At first the mindless arachnid simply reared back, waving its forelegs at its tormentors, but soon it gave ground, recoiling from the hot breath of the torches. Using the oil-lamps like goads, the two skaven drove the spider away from its meal and back into the metal box. As soon the tarantula was inside, the white ratman slammed the door shut.