He wept for Rutger and Aysha. He wept for little Johan, who might have been his son. He wept for Bylorhof and its people. He wept for himself, for the things he had done and the things he had wanted to do.
A noise from outside stirred Frederick from his sorrow. Distractedly, like a person in a dream, the priest rose and stepped to the window. Before him stretched the headstones and monoliths of Morr’s garden.
Frederick’s senses snapped from their somnolence. His attention was riveted upon a strange figure walking among the graves. The priest rubbed at his eyes, unable — unwilling — to believe what he was seeing.
The trespasser was caked from head to toe in dried mud, a long rope fastened around its neck. The thing moved with a ghastly, shuffling gait, its head crooked against one shoulder, its left arm dangling brokenly at its side. By the ghoulish light of Morrslieb, Frederick could see the discolouration of the thing’s wormy flesh, the ragged tears through which leathery muscle and bleached bone shone.
The thing moving among the graves wasn’t a living man! It was some nightmare horror, a walking dead man, one of the cursed undead!
The thing seemed to sense it was being watched. It turned and lifted its rotten face, staring at the window with eyes that were blackened by decay. It was impossible that the thing could see with such eyes, yet as it stared at the window, its lipless mouth pulled back in a gap-toothed grin.
For Frederick, this was the ultimate horror. The priest cried out, crossing his arms over his face to blot out the hideous vision. His body swayed as his brain recoiled.
A moment later, Frederick lay prostrate upon the floor, shocked into unconsciousness by the abomination he had seen.
An abomination that slowly, clumsily, made its way towards the temple.
Skavenblight
Ulriczeit, 1111
Even the perfume-balls, stuffed with honey and soaked in the most aromatic of insect ichor, couldn’t blot out the stench of the Pestilent Monastery. Many of the skaven from Clan Verms had resorted to binding urine-soaked rags about their noses in an effort to block the reek of the plague monks and their perfidious stronghold.
Puskab Foulfur observed the precautions of his allies with undisguised scorn. The Pestilent Monastery was a holy place, saturated with the diseased power of the Horned One. The air, the floors, the very walls exuded the malefic energies of another world. There was no defying the might of a god! Those who dared trespass would be tested in the flame of fever and the cauldron of contagion. The worthy would endure, becoming stronger than they had been. The unfit would sicken and die.
The plague priest reflected upon that truism, the great truth which set Clan Pestilens above all skavendom and marked them as the only true servants of the Horned One. Where the other clans were corrupt and decadent, their leaders nothing but avaricious megalomaniacs, the plague monks prostrated themselves before the sacred judgement of their god. No pup was born to privilege, no clanlord could worm his way to authority and greatness beyond his right, no grasping warlord could selfishly retain power when his time was past.
All those who carried the scent of Pestilens passed through the purifying fire of disease. The greatest were those that endured the most lethal sickness and plague. Any plague monk who felt his devotion and purity was strong enough could embrace one of the Seven Lethal Poxes, sacred diseases imprisoned within great golden cauldrons. The cauldrons were bound with spells of darkest sorcery, crafted by the obscene toad-things of Lustria. The sacred vessels had been carried by the plague monks throughout their long exodus out of the jungles, becoming the most holy of relics. Any skaven of the clan, no matter how lowly, might petition to have himself immersed in one of the contaminated cauldrons. If he survived the resultant infection, his status within Clan Pestilens would increase. Puskab had braved three of the cauldrons, more than most plague priests. Few of the plaguelords themselves had submitted to more than four of the cauldrons. No skaven had ever survived all seven.
Puskab raised his nose, sniffing at the air, trying to catch the smell of the Scabrous Sanctuary where the cauldrons were kept. He would draw comfort from the familiar odour of his clan’s sacred relics.
The distance was too great. Puskab had led his allies by an obfuscate and circuitous route into the inner sanctum of the monastery — a labyrinth of forgotten cloisters and disused passages. They had bypassed the moat of effluent which surrounded the stronghold. They had avoided the malarial maze where packs of half-living pus-bags roamed in fevered agony. They had crawled through the catacombs beneath the great dormitories where rabid poxbearers contemplated the forty-nine mystic symbols of the Final Pandemic. Through unused halls and forgotten corridors, Puskab led his allies, violating the secret knowledge entrusted to him as Poxmaster.
Wormlord Blight’s suspicions that Nurglitch was moving against Puskab had given the plague priest the leverage he needed to goad Clan Verms into action. The dead ratmen found floating in the worm pools might have been traitors bought by Nurglitch for the express purpose of striking against Blight. While Puskab had been working upon a strain of plague transmissible to skaven, Nurglitch could have had other plague priests working upon the same problem. With more resources at their command, the other plague priests might have solved the problem first, using that knowledge to infect two of their spies in Clan Verms.
Blight had seemed indifferent to the theory until Puskab pointed out that if the infection was deliberate, it would hardly have been his doing. No ratman set fire to his own nest and if the Black Plague were to escape into the Hive, then Puskab would be just as much at risk as his allies. And if Nurglitch had sent traitors to infect Clan Verms, then it was a certainty the Arch-Plaguelord would try again.
It was this, more than anything, which had finally decided Blight to move ahead with the assassination of Nurglitch. Puskab had suspected the proposal was simply a ruse to draw him deeper into the toils of Clan Verms, that Blight had no intention of going ahead with such a dangerous plot. Now the Wormlord’s paw had been forced. Killing Nurglitch had become a matter of survival, not bait to entice the loyalties of an ambitious plague priest.
Puskab grinned at the score of ratmen creeping down the narrow, earthen tunnel. White skaven carrying big metal caskets, their dyed fur proclaiming the dangerous cargo they bore. Brown skaven with the curious fire-prods that would drive the spiders to the attack. All of them moved with their backs hunched, their ears and tails low. They stank of fear and they were right to be afraid.
The catacombs they now travelled wound through the very walls of the Outer Temple. If they listened carefully, they could hear the abbots squeaking putrid psalms as they sawed off bits of their leprous bodies to place within reliquaries. These were the last guardians, the last ring of protectors before the Inner Temple and the sanctum of the Arch-Plaguelord himself.
There was no going back now. For any ratman outside the Pestilent Brotherhood to be discovered here was the ultimate in sacrilege. Such an outrage would bring frenzied packs of plague monks down upon them all. They would be slaughtered in an orgy of bloodshed.
So it was that when they reached the hidden doorway which connected the catacombs with the Inner Temple, none of his companions objected when Puskab used his magic to create a scout for them. Drawing upon his sorcery, the plague priest’s body convulsed in a fit of hacking and coughing. A black mixture of vomit and blood spilled from his mouth, forming a pool of foulness upon the floor. As Puskab wiped the filth from his whiskers, the pool began to undulate, forming itself into shapes. Great hairy flies emerged from the mess, their faces pinched and somehow ratlike. Their clawed legs scraped against their translucent wings, drying them of the priestly sickness.