The End Times | The Rise of the Horned Rat Read online

  More Warhammer: The End Times stories from blacklibrary.com

  SIGMAR'S BLOOD

  A Prequel to the End Times

  THE RETURN OF NAGASH

  Book One of the End Times

  THE FALL OF ALTDORF

  Book Two of the End Times

  THE CURSE OF KHAINE

  Book Three of the End Times

  DEATHBLADE

  A Tale of Malus Darkblade

  GOTREK & FELIX: KINSLAYER

  Book One of the Doom of Gotrek Gurnisson

  The world is dying, but it has been so since the coming of the Chaos Gods.

  For years beyond reckoning, the Ruinous Powers have coveted the mortal realm. They have made many attempts to seize it, their anointed champions leading vast hordes into the lands of men, elves and dwarfs. Each time, they have been defeated.

  Until now.

  In the frozen north, Archaon, a former templar of the warrior-god Sigmar, has been crowned the Everchosen of Chaos. He stands poised to march south and bring ruin to the lands he once fought to protect. Behind him amass all the forces of the Dark Gods, mortal and daemonic. When they come, they will bring with them a storm such as has never been seen.

  And beneath the world, the ratlike skaven have united for the first time in many centuries. Their numbers are beyond counting and with the daemonic verminlords leading them to glory, their ascension is assured. In the western lands of Lustria, Clan Pestilens launch an all-out assault on their ancient foes, the lizardmen, an assault that the cold-blooded servants of the Old Ones cannot weather.

  The southern countries of Tilea and Estalia have been devastated, and Skavenblight expands to create a capital city for the skaven from which they can rule the surface world as well as their Under-Empire. Further north, they swarm into Sigmar’s Empire to finish what the hosts of the Glottkin began and drown the remaining cities of man beneath a tide of fur.

  And in the Worlds Edge Mountains, the most hated foes of the skaven, the stalwart dwarfs, fortify their holds, preparing for the onslaught that they know is coming. Their time is coming to an end and the time of the skaven is at hand.

  These are the End Times.

  PROLOGUE

  The Realm of Ruin

  In the darkest of places, in the most timeless of times, the twelve Shadow Lords of Decay convened in dire assembly.

  They came swiftly on foot, scurrying through the rotting refuse that choked their domain. Their high horned heads bobbed furtively, now visible, now hidden by mounded rubbish: the wealth and wisdom of myriad ages taken, gnawed, despoiled, tasted and inevitably discarded. One could find all manner of treasure buried in the stinking filth, but it meant nothing to the creatures who possessed it. It was only to be coveted for the sake of having, ruined for the sake of ruination, and quickly forgotten.

  Such was the way of this young race. Scavengers, usurpers, content to squat in the desolation of better peoples, their unnatural vitality and ingenuity nought but engines for entropy. The skaven were the true children of Chaos, and this place, this foetid reek under a glowering sky, was theirs alone – a nowhere realm nibbled out of the Realm of Chaos, given shape by the spirits of the ratmen that came to dwell there. A dismal place, the Realm of Ruin, a hell its inhabitants dearly desired to remake upon the mortal world.

  A verminlord is a huge creature, tall as a giant, but in the wrack of the Realm of Ruin there is no scale a mortal mind can make sense of. Thus, although the Shadow Lords walked on two feet, although their heads were capped with mighty horns – and although all possessed some obvious, uncanny power – when seen from afar they appeared small and timorous, resembling nothing so much as the lowly creatures from whom they had descended. They moved like rats and they were cautious like rats, stopping every hundred paces to lift their noses and sniff at the air with a rat’s sly mix of boldness and fear. Rats – rats cavorting in the rubbish of worlds.

  In ones and threes, but never twos – for two lends itself too readily to betrayal – they came to the place of gathering. Verminhall, the great hall of the Realm of Ruin. The immortal lords of skavenkind converged upon the building. Once close, they broke into a scurrying run, when they were sure no others could see them scamper. They entered the portals of the vast edifice with unseemly haste, keen to clear the open space around its walls and the terrible things that hunted there.

  A grandiose, overstated mirror to the Temple of the Horned Rat that stood in the living world, Verminhall was dominated by a tower that soared impossibly high. Sprouting from the uncertain centre of the building, thick and ugly, it disappeared into the churning purple clouds. Its top was lost to the sky, and its filth-encrusted walls flashed to the violence of emerald lightning. As with all things the children of Chaos possessed, it had doubtlessly been stolen from forgotten creatures – some race that had regarded itself as finer and worthier, only to fall in surprise to the vermintide. After all, this chain of events was set to repeat itself forever. In a sense, it already had. Time has no meaning in the Realm of Chaos.

  The greater powers sneered at the Horned Rat, seeing him as one of the infinite array of petty godlings whose insignificant domains marred the purity of Chaos. They were wrong to do so. The Horned Rat was no longer some minor creature, for he had grown mighty. His children were legion. Long-fermented plans were at last coming to fruition.

  If this terrible place taught any lesson at all – to those few able to survive here long enough to receive it – it would be this: one should not dismiss the offspring of the lowly.

  The hour of the Horned Rat was at hand.

  The daemonkind verminlords, first among the servants of the Horned Rat, were as numerous as their mortal counterparts, countless in their multitudes and ubiquitous in the culverts and gulleys of creation. But of them, only twelve were deemed truly great. The greatest of these twelve was Lord Skreech Verminking. He who had once been many, and was now one.

  Causality had no meaning in the Realm of Ruin, not in any sense that a mortal would understand. But Verminking’s intention was to arrive after his peers, in order to underscore his own importance, and he always performed as to his intent.

  The interior of Verminhall was a cave, a monument, a howling void, a place of life and of death, a temple, a palace – all, none and many more of these things besides. The laws of nature were openly mocked. Braziers burned backwards, green light glinting from Verminking’s multiple horns as warpstone condensed from the very air. Fumes pulled themselves into dented brass firebowls, adding second by second to the mass of the solid magic growing within them. The lump of warpstone embedded in the daemon’s empty left eye socket flared with sympathy at its brothers’ birth pangs as the verminlord passed.

  There was no sense to the geometry of the great hall. Stairs went on infinitely to nowhere. Black rivers flowed along walls. Within round cages of iron, cats roasted eternally in green fire without being consumed. Windows opened in midair, looking upon places neither near nor far, but most definitely not within the bounds of the Realm of Ruin. The squeaking of a billion times a billion anguished skaven souls made a painful chittering that obliterated all other sound. Verminking moved through it as one long accustomed to visiting, taking unexpected turns and secret ways precipitately and without warning, the ultimate rat in the ultimate maze.

  The other eleven great verminlords awaited their lord in the Chamber of the Shadow Council, a room that was at once endless in size and claustrophobically small. A hollow, thirteen-sided table, as wide as forever, dominated the floor. A pool of noisome liquid was at its centre, in whose oceans strange images sti
rred.

  As they awaited their chief, the Shadow Lords of Decay bickered and schemed with one another, or sat grooming their remaining patches of fur with long tongues, content to listen to their peers, hate them, and secretly plot their undoing. All the others were present, and thus only two places were empty: Verminking’s own, the first position; and that next to his, the thirteenth. The head of the table, in a sense, this was the seat of the Horned Rat himself – a massive throne carved of warpstone, big enough for a god. The likeness of its owner glared in baleful majesty from its canopy’s apex.

  It was said that the Great One could watch them from the unblinking, glowing eyes of his facsimile. Verminking suspected he watched them all the time; he was a god after all, the verminlord reasoned. Such was the burden of being the most favoured of the Horned Rat’s many children.

  Lord Verminking was not alone in his nervousness, although he hid it better than most. As was usual at such gatherings, each member of the assembled Shadow Council broke regularly from his bluster, blagging and threats to glance at the place of the Horned Rat. The god was known to attend the meetings himself – infrequently perhaps, but thus always unexpectedly. When he did attend, the musk of fear hung heavy on the air, and often as not a new opening became available upon the Council. In their own fear of the verminlords, no mortal skaven would have ever suspected that the rat-daemons felt terror for any reason, but they did. Their hearts were as craven as those of lesser ratkin.

  ‘Lord, I have come!’ announced Verminking. As he made for his chair, he kicked aside dozens of the blind white rats carpeting the floor. From the mouths of these pathetic vermin came the mewling excuses of fallen skaven lords, their souls condemned to recount their failures forever.

  Verminking’s musk glands clenched as he squeezed past the Horned Rat’s throne to gain his own seat. When he reached his place, a lesser verminlord – one of the elite guard of the Shadow Council – appeared from the gloom and pulled Verminking’s chair out for him. The daemon gave it a cursory examination before sitting. One could never be too careful in the domain of the Great Horned One. The verminlord guards in service to the Council had their tongues ripped out so that they could not relay what they heard, but that was no barrier to ambition – nor, in that place of sorcery, to speech.

  ‘You are late, Lord Skreech,’ hissed Lurklox, the shadow-shrouded Master of All Deceptions. He was Verminking’s opposite number and, therefore, his second greatest rival. At least that was the case bar every third meeting, when Lurklox was replaced by Lord Verstirix of the fourth position in ceremonial opposition to Verminking. All this was enshrined on the Great Black Pillar growing in the tower. The rules governing the mortal Lords of Decay were maddeningly complex, but as nothing to those that dictated the politics of their hidden demigods. The Black Pillar in Skavenblight had been inscribed by the Horned Rat himself. The Great Black Pillar – the real sum of the Horned One’s knowledge, the verminlords liked to think – was eternally updated. It grew constantly from the root like gnawing-teeth as more edicts were added to its hellishly contradictory catalogue. Rarely a day went by without some new ruling. The pillar was already over one hundred miles high, and the text upon it was very small. Only Verminking confidently claimed to know the full scope of the Horned Rat’s teachings. He was lying.

  ‘We are entitled to be late, yes-yes, Lurklox. It is our right!’ insisted the lord of all verminlords. ‘Many places we must go, many things we must see, so that you might see them too.’

  ‘You dishonour us,’ said Lurklox. One could never quite catch sight of the assassin, he was so swathed in shadow.

  Vermalanx the Poxlord waved a diseased hand at Verminking. ‘Yes-yes,’ he said thickly. ‘Mighty-exalted the great Skreech is, he of the many minds and many horns.’

  Vermalanx dipped his head in a bow that could have been mocking, but so much of the Poxlord’s face had rotted down to brown bone that it was impossible to tell. The more sycophantic members of the Council clapped politely. From lumps of warp rock, empty eye sockets and multiple eyes randomly arranged around malformed heads, they gave sidelong looks to their fellows, determined not to be out-fawned.

  The shard of warpstone embedded in Verminking’s face flared dangerously. ‘Do not mock-mock, do not tease!’ He slammed his hand-claw down on the table. ‘We are the greatest of all of you. The Great Horned One himself whispers into our ear.’ Among Verminking’s many untruths, this statement had the distinction of being mostly true, even if it was disconcerting for him when the Horned Rat did actually whisper in his ear.

  ‘Oh, most assuredly you are the greatest, O greatest great one, most pusillanimous sage, O most malfeasant malefactor,’ said Verminlord Skweevritch. The metal prosthetics covering the upper part of his body hissed green steam as he twitched submissively.

  ‘Lickspittle,’ chittered the Verminlord Basqueak.

  ‘I say vote Skweevritch off-away! We have no time for such sycophancy,’ said Lord Skrolvex, the fattest and most repugnant, to Verminking’s eyes, of their number.

  ‘Silence!’ he shouted, his multiple voices covering all frequencies audible to skaven ears, to deeply unpleasant effect. ‘Silence,’ he said again for good measure. Long tails lashed. Ears quivered in discomfort. ‘There is business afoot, yes. Business we must watch, oh so carefully, my lords. In the mortal lands, great Lords of Decay meet, great Lords of Decay plot-scheme. They meet, so we the Shadow Council, great Verminlords of Decay, the true Council, must meet too-also.’

  Chattering and insults were traded. Verminking silenced them with a hand-claw, and pointed his other at the pool. ‘Listen! See-smell! Look-learn!’ he said. Greasy bubbles popped on the surface as the pool became agitated. In slow circuit the liquid turned, swirling around and around, faster and faster, to form a whirlpool, whose funnel plunged deeper and deeper until it surely must have surpassed the limits of the water. A black circle appeared at its bottom, and the whirlpool went down forever. The other verminlords looked at it in askance, lest it drag them in, but Verminking had no such fear. He stared eagerly into the depths of eternity. Fumes rose from the liquid, sparking with warp-lightning, before settling down as a glowing mist. Within the mist, the following image formed.

  A room not unlike the Shadow Council’s, though not so grand. A table like the Shadow Council’s, though not so ornate. Thrones around the table, like the Shadow Council’s, though not so large. In the twelve thrones sat twelve skaven lords of great power, though not so powerful as the twelve who watched them unseen.

  Verminking’s skin twitched. The Verminlords of Decay watched the mortal Lords of Decay. Who watched them? Where did it stop? Were there conclaves of rats, squeaking in the sewers observed by gimlet-eyed beastmasters? Were there layer upon layer of ever greater rat-things plotting and interfering with those below? He chased the thought away, but it lingered at the back of his fractured mind, insistent as a flea in his ear.

  The mortal skaven were in full debate. Things were not going well. Shouting and squeaking raised a clamour that shook the room. Many were standing to wave accusing forepaws at one another. Some squeaked privately to one another, or shot knowing looks across the table as deals were silently struck and as quickly broken.

  Just as Verminking had silenced the Shadow Council, so Kritislik the Seerlord silenced the Council of Thirteen, although nowhere near as majestically. He was white-furred and horned, and that should have ensured him supremacy. He was chief of the grey seers, the wizard lords of the skaven, blessed by the Horned Rat himself, and nominal chief of the Council in his absence. But the others were in rebellious mood. Kritislik was agitated, squeaking rapidly and without authority. He had yet to squirt musk, but the look of fear was on him, in his twitching nose, widened eyes and bristling fur.

  ‘Quiet-quiet! You blame, shout-squeak! All fault here. Great victories we have were in manlands of Estalia and Tilea.’

  ‘Many slaves, much plunder-spo
ils,’ said Kratch Doomclaw, warlord of Clan Rictus. ‘All is going to plan. Soon the man-things will fall. Listen to the white-fur.’

  ‘No!’ said one, huge and deep voiced. He was black as night and unconquerable as the mountains. Lord Gnawdwell of Clan Mors. ‘You take-steal too much, far beyond your scavenge rights. You test my patience, thief-thief, sneaker. I will not listen to your prattling one heartbeat longer.’

  ‘My clanrats, my victory,’ said Kratch, making an effort to keep his voice low and slow. ‘Where is Lord Gnawdwell’s trophy-prize? I shall squeak you where – still in the hands of the dwarf-things, who you have not yet defeated.’

  Squeaking laughter came from several of the others, including, most irksomely for Gnawdwell, Lord Paskrit, the obese warlord-general of all Skavendom.

  The lords of the four greater clans scowled at this display of indiscipline among the warlord clans. Lord Morskittar of Clan Skryre, emperor of warlocks and tinkerer in chief, was not impressed.

  ‘Many devices, many weapons, many warptokens’ worth of new machines you of the warlord clans were given-granted in aid of the Great Uprising. What have we to show-see for it? Yes-yes, very good. Tilea-place and Estalia-place gone-destroyed.’

  General noises of approval interrupted him. Morskittar held his paws up, palms flat, and bared his teeth in disapproval. ‘Fools to cheer like stupid slave-meat! The weakest human-lands destroyed only. Frog-things still in their stone temple-homes. Dwarf-things still in the mountains. And Empire-place not yet destroyed!’ He shook his head, his tail lashing back and forth behind him. ‘Disappointing.’

  ‘What you squeak-say? Where are your armies?’ said Lord Griznekt Mancarver of Clan Skab. ‘Guns no good without paw-fingers to pull triggers.’

  More uproar and shouted accusations. All around the room, the elite Albino Guard of the Council stiffened, ready to intervene on the winning side should open conflict erupt.