‘Good-good,’ the plague priest pronounced. He withdrew the brass rod he had thrust into the slave’s cage. Stalking over to one of the flaming braziers which flanked the entrance to the laboratory, Puskab thrust the end of the instrument into the fire. He held it there until the tip glowed and any trace of disease had been purged.
‘The Horned One favours me,’ Puskab declared. ‘New-better fleas. Carry-bring plague fast-quick!’
The skaven assisting Puskab in his diabolical labours glanced anxiously at one another. Somewhere beneath their protective leather cloaks, glands tightened and the reek of fear-musk oozed into the air. They had been warned by Wormlord Blight what their fate would be if Puskab’s experiments were to fail, but now they wondered if perhaps success wasn’t even more terrifying.
Puskab scowled at the frightened ratmen. Unbelievers! Hedonistic little heathens! To be infected by one of the Horned One’s holy plagues was a fate to be embraced joyously! Only in the fevered fires of disease could the soul of a skaven be judged! The inferior were destroyed, the superior emerged stronger than before, endowed with something of the Horned One’s divinity and ferocity.
The plague priest stalked past his trembling assistants, peering at them with his rheumy eyes. Soon there would be only two kinds of ratmen in the world. The true believers and their slaves. Clan Verms would help to bring about that change. Willing or unwilling, they were now instruments of the Horned One’s design.
The clatter of armour warned Puskab that he had guests. He turned away from the tables and faced the entrance to his laboratory. A pack of burly warriors marched through the doorway. Behind them the twisted shape of Blight Tenscratch lounged upon the platform of a velvet-draped palanquin. Breeder-scent wafted from the curtains and the smell of goat-cheese and blood-wine was strong. From the smells lingering about the Wormlord and the vicious expression in his posture, it seemed some pleasant interlude had been disturbed.
‘I am told your work has succeeded,’ Blight snarled, baring his fangs.
Puskab gestured towards the cage where the infected slave struggled to suck breath into his lungs. ‘Early-soon, but look-smell good-good,’ he explained.
Blight’s malformed body contorted at a grotesque angle, his claws wrapped about a lead goblet. Furiously, he flung the cup at the cage, spattering the slave inside with blood-wine. ‘Not-not this test-meat!’ the Wormlord snapped. ‘What about the others? The ones outside?’
Puskab’s heavy frame wilted under Blight’s enraged glare, assuming a posture that was both abased and alarmed. ‘None-none,’ he squeaked, pointing again at the cage. ‘This one first! Swear-tell by Horned One!’
‘Bring the traitor-meat!’ Blight growled. Before Puskab could act the armoured ratmen pounced upon him, seizing his flabby arms in their powerful claws. The plague priest’s assistants watched in excitement as their fearsome master was dragged away into the darkness of the Hive.
Puskab was carried to a vast cavern far beneath Skavenblight. The air was moist and musty, stinking of mildew and pond scum. His keen ears could hear water dripping from the roof overhead, each drop landing with a soft plink upon some loamy surface. The cavern was dark, its blackness so perfect that even the eyes of a skaven couldn’t penetrate it. A snarl from Blight caused a green glow to gradually form. Puskab could hear the crackle of electricity and the laboured breath of panting ratmen. The first thing he saw was the bronze pillar and crystal cage of a Clan Skryre warp-lamp, a nest of cables leading back to an enormous treadmill.
The irony of Clan Verms employing one of Clan Skryre’s warpstone-powered lamps wasn’t lost on Puskab. The clan stood to lose a fortune in the trade of worm-oil should use of warp-lamps become widespread. Verms spared no opportunity to criticise the upstart warlock-engineers and argue against the safety of their erratic inventions. To find them using one of the very devices they were so vehement in denigrating brought an uncontrolled bark of laughter rushing past his fangs.
‘Blind-worms not like smell-scent of worm-oil,’ Blight explained, his face sheepish, his tone embarrassed. His lips pulled back in a vicious grin as he remembered who he was talking to and why. Imperiously, the Wormlord pointed across the cavern.
The floor of the cavern was, as Puskab had imagined, covered in a loamy surface, a mass of moss floating upon a great pool of foetid water. He could see things slithering through the sludge, just beneath the surface. Scrawny skavenslaves were wading through the muck, chasing after the things swimming around them. Sometimes they would dive into the morass to emerge with a writhing mass of slimy white flesh clenched in their paws.
Puskab knew the snake-like things to be blind-worms, an observation validated when he saw the slaves drag their catch to a floating workstation where a brawny brown overseer wrestled the flailing worms into a suspended harness. Other slaves equipped with wicked metal probes crawled under the hanging worms to tease milk from the soft tissues between each segment of the worm’s body. The stinking ooze was collected in a motley assortment of buckets and bowls.
The plague priest had only a few moments to observe the procedure. His attention was forcibly diverted when Blight’s guards shoved him into the pool. Puskab sank to his waist in the muck, thrashing about wildly until he appreciated the fact he couldn’t sink any deeper.
‘Explain,’ Blight growled.
Ahead of him, floating some distance from the platform, was a pair of bodies. They were skaven, their lean frames still draped in the tatters of leather cloaks. Unmistakably, they had been Puskab’s assistants. The way they had died was also unmistakable. Ugly black buboes clustered about their throats.
Puskab took a long look at the corpses, then rounded upon Blight, pointing a quivering claw at him. ‘Your work-rats!’ he coughed, spitting a blob of phlegm into the pool. ‘Spy-meat! Traitor-meat! Listen-steal for enemies!’
Blight scratched at his whiskers, surprised by the violence and rage he saw on display. The plague priest was playing the part of injured party with impressive gusto. Enough so that the Wormlord waved aside his guards, intending to hear more before he had them hack Puskab to bloody giblets.
‘Who would dare sneak into the Hive?’ Blight asked.
‘Eshin,’ Puskab answered. The assassins were always the obvious choice when it came to infiltrators and spies. But perhaps they were just too obvious. The plague priest bared his fangs as he mentioned another possibility. ‘Skully-sneaks,’ he said.
Blight’s ears curled back against his skull, his tail lashing the snouts of the slaves bearing his palanquin. A low hiss of hate rasped across his fangs. The murderlings of Clan Skully weren’t so skilled as the killers of Clan Eshin, but they were close allies of Clan Moulder’s beastlords. Of all the other clans, there was particular enmity between Verms and Moulder. The two clans both prided themselves on their ability to breed new and exotic creatures to serve the Under-Empire, but where the power of Verms was beginning to wane, that of Moulder was in the ascension.
‘Spy-meat try to filch-steal plague-fleas,’ Puskab explained. ‘Not know-think that extra fleas crawl-hop into fur. Kill traitor-meat quick-quick!’ The plague priest’s corpulent body shuddered with a titter of laughter.
Blight’s head bobbed from side to side as he considered Puskab’s theory. It did fit all of the facts, but what decided him was that Puskab himself had remained in the Hive, well within the Wormlord’s reach. If the Poxmaster were up to something, surely he wouldn’t be so foolhardy as to linger around.