The Black Rift of Klaxus: The Gnawing Gate Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  The Gnawing Gate

  About the Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  THE GNAWING GATE

  Josh Reynolds

  Pazak of the Faceted Eye watched the obsidian plates whirl and dance above the floor of the great chamber, faster, then more slowly. There was no pattern to it, no rhythm that he could determine. It was a thing of Chaos, forged in warpfire and shaped by impossible tools. The furnace kings were artisans beyond even Pazak’s comprehension.

  But though he could not discern the magics which had gone into the creation of the Black Rift, he knew how to manipulate them. How to set them into motion. Some doors were simpler to open than others. Pazak thrust out a hand, feeling the ebb and flow of the ancient sorceries which thrummed through the close air of the Sulphur Citadel.

  The priest-kings of Klaxus had not truly understood the wellspring of power that the citadel had been built on. They had known only that it made their petty magics more potent, and they had employed it with brute simplicity. With that strength, they had tamed the Ashen Jungle, and raised great structures from the soil of the crater. With that power, they had conquered the other crater-kingdoms, forcing them to kneel one by one.

  Pazak extended his hand, and something wet and sobbing briefly curled about his fingers and retreated, drawn back towards the shimmering cloud of spirits which circled the Black Rift like moths about a light. There were a thousand broken souls for every stone in the citadel; the last remnants of those unfortunates sacrificed by the priest-kings to the god they called Sigmar. From what little Pazak knew of the being in question, he doubted the Thunderer had appreciated such succulent offerings.

  In reality, the priest-kings had likely served one of the Four – perhaps the Changer of Ways. Pazak thought he could smell the faintest stink of Tzeentchian magics on the stones of the Citadel. Yes, the Deceiver could very well have had a hand in the continued survival of the crater-kingdoms. That one would have found the priest-kings to be pliable tools indeed.

  ‘Children,’ Pazak muttered. ‘Blind children, scrabbling in the dark.’ He looked up, at the face of Sigmar stretched across the curve of the dome. ‘And you, forced to watch it all. How did it feel, eh? How did it feel to watch your worshippers cavort and kill, all in your name?’

  A distant rumble of thunder was his only answer. Pazak snorted. ‘Growl all you like,’ he said, and turned his attentions to the latest batch of prisoners Warpfang’s followers had brought him. There were only fifty or so – the ones no good for menial labour, but too stringy to feed on. Warpfang would have culled his take from the rest. The skaven were being paid well for marching beneath the banners of the Scarlet Lord. When Warpfang returned to whatever pestilential burrow his clan called home, he would be rich in slaves and plunder.

  The prisoners were a forlorn lot, weeping and bloody. Some could barely stand, despite the lashes of the skaven. One or two looked dead on their feet. He could smell the sweet tang of infection and gangrene seeping from wounds, and see a few who were shivering despite the heat. The Klaxians had held out against the Bloodbound for centuries, thanks to the malign sorceries of their priest-kings. It was only when Anhur had breached the Steam-Ramparts and invaded the crater-kingdoms that their control began to fray at last. Now the once-proud folk of Klaxus were so much grist for Khorne’s mill.

  Once, he had been as they – a puling creature, barely more than an animal. He had been a mere shaman, a speaker to ghosts and a reader of bones. Unaware of the greater glory of Grandfather’s Garden, for all that he manipulated the magic of the realms. But when the plague had come creeping silently among his tribe, Pazak had embraced it willingly. And Grandfather had seen, and approved. Pazak had grown strong in Nurgle’s grace, and his mind and spirit had flourished.

  The plague-winds were his to control now. He could draw forth blight-flies and gurgling daemons, he could poison the air and rot a man’s flesh with but a look. Power such as he had never dreamt of, at his fingertips. And he’d almost lost it all at the Alkali Basin, but for the most unexpected of mercies. Anhur had turned aside the edge of his axe that day, and Pazak had kept his head, in return for an oath of service. An oath sworn in blood and bile.

  Anhur was a canny one, no doubt about it. He’d needed a sorcerer to open his door to Khorne’s realm, and Pazak had obliged, in return for his life. He rubbed his throat. He never wondered whether he should have let Anhur kill him. The carnage the Bloodbound left in their wake served Grandfather as well as Khorne. Rot followed death, and from corruption new life waxed profane. And this plan of Anhur’s would see much death and much rot.

  And more besides, he thought, as he studied the faces of the prisoners. He held up a hand, and one of the skaven stepped forward, muzzle twitching. ‘Where is Warpfang?’ Pazak said.

  ‘Gone out-out,’ the skaven chittered. ‘Hunting man-things.’

  ‘Where?’ Pazak said. The ritual to open the Black Rift required a constant flow of blood. The skaven chittered. It took a moment for Pazak to realise that it was laughing.

  ‘The Avenue of Five Hundred Hands,’ the ratman said.

  Pazak grunted. That was near the Gnawing Gate. And right in the path of the advancing Stormcasts. Brave little maniac, he thought, not without amusement. Unlike most of his kind, Warpfang was almost as fierce as any of Khorne’s chosen. If no one put a knife in his back, and he didn’t perish in battle, he might just rise far among his own kind.

  A useful creature, if he survives, he thought. Grandfather Nurgle had long cherished the friendship of the Horned Rat and his chittering children. Pazak scraped his finger along the face of one of the prisoners – a man, clad in the tattered raiment of a temple guard – and traced a sigil in the air with the blood. The sigil pulsed once, before the blood turned to ash and swirled away. Pazak nodded. ‘Good,’ he said, turning away. ‘Bulbus, my friend, see to the harvest, if you please.’

  The skaven overseers scampered aside as his faithful blightkings lurched into motion. The prisoners began to scream. Heavy blades rose and fell, silencing them. Chunks of bloody flesh and streamers of muscle were tossed about as blood seeped between the stones. More ghosts rose to join the legions which circled the Black Rift, dragged inexorably upwards towards the dimensional doorway that was slowly opening. Pazak twitched in time to their tinny shrieks. ‘Blood and souls, blood and souls,’ he murmured.

  Yes, some doors were simpler to open.

  The Gnawing Gate was hungry.

  The sound of its desire swelled, filling the streets and avenues, rising to the rooftops and above, shaking the leaves of the jungle-trees with its dolorous strength. It made the stones tremble, and animals flee. It was a cry of need, a moan of frustration, a warning of violence. A structure cracked and tore as something long, grey and glistening slithered through a window and ripped the walls from their foundations.

  More glistening things – tendrils formed from flesh, root and stone – stretched out from the grey bulk of the Gnawing Gate and tore in a futile frenzy at the nearby buildings. Other tendrils flailed in mute protest at the support pillars of the great aqueducts that rose over the gate, or stabbed viciously at the length of the vein-encrusted walls which stretched out to either side, separating the outer city from the inner.

  The Gnawing Gate squatted astride the Avenue of Five Hundred Hands, a rippling colossus of filthy creation. It was a thing of terrible sorcery and strange alchemy, wrought from stones culled from the depths of the sulphur lake, the blood and bone of slaves, and the very earth itself, raised up
during some long-ago siege to defend the main thoroughfare of Uryx from an encroaching enemy.

  It resembled a length of flayed meat, going sour, and stretched across the narrowest point of the city. Its walls were as thick as those of the Mandrake Bastion and the furthest edges of its length bled seamlessly into the high stone bastions to the west which kept watch over the Ashen Jungles on one side, and the yellowish shore of the sulphur lake on the other. The central gateway which was its skull, heart and brain occupied the Avenue of Five Hundred Hands.

  Beyond its crouched bulk, the avenues and plazas of the inner city spread out like the spokes of a crooked wheel, around the semi-central hub of the Sulphur Citadel. The western bastions were all but rubble now, allowing the Bloodbound to bypass it and travel from the inner city to the outer without fear of the gate’s hunger.

  More buildings collapsed, brought low by thrashing tendrils. The gate groaned again as thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. It jerked and quivered as the rain fell, and the fires set by the Bloodbound during their attack on the city drew close. Like an animal, it sought to flee the encroaching flames, and to feed itself, but could not manage either. So, it thrashed and groaned and shrieked.

  It had been four days since the Gnawing Gate had last eaten, and it was growing more agitated with every hour. Kretch Warpfang knew the signs well enough, for he was no stranger to such monstrous flesh-engines. Indeed, Clan Rictus, one of the foremost Verminus Clans of Blight City, had its share of similar creations in its burrows and warrens. The warlord sat on the shoulders of a decapitated statue of a forgotten man-thing potentate and watched the gate’s paroxysms with some amusement. All around him, the Avenue of Five Hundred Hands was a-boil with activity, as his clanrats rooted out their prey and dragged them screaming into the wheel-cages. The Klaxians were a beaten folk, their armies cast down by the Scarlet Lord and their priest-kings butchered on brass altars. Now, as their city burned, all they wanted was to run and hide, to seek refuge in the deep places of the jungles.

  Lightning speared across the sky. Below, his bodyguards, arrayed around the base of the statue in a rough phalanx, shifted uncertainly. He could smell the musk of fear on some of them, and he showed his fangs in annoyance. The enemy – the storm-things – were in the city, if his scouts were to be believed. They were marching south, towards the Sulphur Citadel. Soon enough, they might even reach the Gnawing Gate, unless the beastherds managed to detain them in the outer city. Which they wouldn’t, filthy beast-things. It mattered little to Warpfang, in any event. It was not his job to fight the storm-things. He was to cull slaves, for whatever great work Pazak was undertaking. It fell to the rest of Anhur’s Gorechosen to defend the city.

  ‘Hurry-hurry,’ he snarled at his warriors, bashing the statue with his mace. ‘Get them in the cages, quick-quick! We must be gone by the time the storm-things arrive, yes!’ Lashes hissed and snapped as his packmasters hurried their prisoners into the wheel-cages. Warpfang settled back on his haunches, satisfied.

  His clawbands were scattered throughout this part of the city. It was inevitable that some of them might run afoul of the foe, but they all knew to fall back towards the secret tunnels he’d ordered to be dug... the ones that would take them deep into the inner city, out of sight of any advancing enemy. There, at a point of his choosing, they could regroup, and muster a concentrated defence – or would be in a position to take advantage of the situation. Warpfang glanced towards the gate as an immense tendril erupted through the roof of a distant structure and lashed blindly at the black clouds above. The Gnawing Gate roared, its hunger palpable. He snarled, and clamped down on his instinctive fear.

  The Scarlet Lord had decreed that the Gnawing Gate be left unfed and unmanned, after two tribes’ worth of bloodreavers had unsuccessfully sought to tame it to better defend the main thoroughfare into the city’s heart. The gate had devoured them with glee, its great fang-like portcullis rising and falling to puncture, pierce and pulverise. Now, its gatehouse towers, with their mortar of blinking eyes and thatch of scalps and teeth, twisted and swivelled in a desperate search for sustenance.

  Warpfang kept his warriors well away from the cannibal-structure, as a rule. He’d lost more than a few clanrats and prisoners to those creeping tendrils during his hunting expeditions, and now stationed scouts to keep a watch on it. It was growing, as the magics that bound it unravelled. Whole streets were now lost to thrashing tendrils and hungry stone jaws.

  He was almost impressed by the sheer artistry that the man-things of Uryx displayed in their architecture. They possessed an almost skaven-like ingenuity. He gazed down the length of the street. Severed hands, mounted on iron poles, lined the avenue. The hands had been preserved through some barbaric ritual, and the fingers of each were topped with flickering witch-lights that resisted the steady rain.

  ‘Magnificent,’ he chittered, as he scraped wet ash from his cuirass. A wail lashed his eardrums and he grunted in annoyance. He shifted on his perch.

  More prisoners were being dragged screaming from a tumbledown structure by his warriors. Most of the man-things had fled into the jungles or the caves along the crater-wall when Anhur’s warhorde had torn down the southern bastions and ravaged the cream of the Klaxian armies in a gruelling three-day slaughter. Others had chosen to hide in the slums and the outer boroughs of the city, hoping to ride out the sack beneath the noses of the victorious Bloodbound.

  ‘Stupid-stupid man-things,’ Warpfang muttered.

  Warpfang and his stormvermin had watched much of the battle for Uryx from the jungles, content to capture the man-things who wandered, thunderstruck, into their paws. His clanrats had been scampering through the caverns and lava-tubes of the crater wall, dragging screaming Klaxians out of hiding even as Anhur and his Gorechosen clashed with the sulphur-knights on the Bridge of Smoke. Few had escaped, and those who had, well, they had made for an enjoyable, if not challenging, diversion.

  Yes, it had been a wise decision to join the Scarlet Lord. Much loot and many slaves, all to increase his standing and that of Clan Rictus. The Horned Rat would smile upon them, and raise them up, perhaps even to the heights enjoyed by the Greater Clans. The sorcerer had promised Warpfang all that and more, in return for warriors and siege-engines to bolster Anhur’s conquest of the crater. Why the Scarlet Lord wanted this filthy jungle crater, Warpfang didn’t know, and didn’t particularly care.

  He hefted his halberd and watched the rain slide down the width of the blade, leaving greasy trails. When Pazak had spoken of the benefits of becoming one of Anhur’s champions, Warpfang had thought he’d gone mad, that his putrescent brains had finally leaked out of his mouldy skull. But he had never been able to resist a challenge. Thus, intrigued, he had made his play and won. Then, his skills were supreme. Better than any Chaos-thing, at least. Warpfang chittered in pleasure and swung his halberd absently.

  Who knew how far he might go, what treasures and pleasures might be his, now that he stood pre-eminent among the commanders of the warhorde. He had sent many treasures and screaming slaves through the gnawholes back to the warrens of his clan, there to increase his standing amongst his peers. Warpfang would rise, and Rictus would rise with him.

  He hissed in sudden annoyance as one of the prisoners broke away and scrambled into the ruins, heading straight for the gate. The skaven warlord dropped from his perch and sprinted after the runaway. His bodyguards surged in his wake, grumbling. Warpfang chittered in amusement. They didn’t need the wretch – one slave more or less made little difference. But his bodyguards were growing fat off easy meat and plunder and a run would do them good.

  ‘Faster,’ he snarled, as he sprang from the street to a pole and swung himself onto a wall. He ricocheted off, leaping from wall to wall as he pursued his quarry into the tangle of streets. His prey panted in fear and exhaustion, stumbling as he ran on hunger-weakened legs. The human wasn’t particularly fast, but Warpfang was enjoying the chase.
<
br />   That enjoyment came to an abrupt end as a greyish tendril erupted from the wall of a building in a plume of dust. It swiftly coiled about the human and jerked the wailing man back through the wall before the dust had even cleared. More tendrils bored through the street, arrowing towards Warpfang. He leapt backwards, twisting in the air. He hooked the shield carried by one of his bodyguards, and sprang onto the bewildered skaven’s shoulders. ‘Run-run, you fools! Quick-quick!’ he snarled, as he used the heads of the other skaven as stepping stones. His bodyguards trampled after him as he sprinted back the way they’d come. The slowest were snapped up by the questing tendrils, and dragged away, shrieking.

  Warpfang yowled out an order as he and his stormvermin burst out of the side-street and back into the witch-lights of the Avenue of Five Hundred Hands. The jezzail teams he’d stationed at the entrance to the avenue scurried forward. Heavy pavises chunked down at the mouth of the street, and soon high-velocity bullets of refined warpstone were screaming down its length. Grey flesh burst and ichor stained the street as the tendrils retreated. A screech rumbled down the avenue, rattling Warpfang’s teeth.

  As the echoes of the sound faded, dust and water spattered down from the aqueduct far above. Warpfang stared up at the serpentine length of shaped stone and licked his namesake idly. A jolt of energy filled him and he turned. He flicked his halberd out, indicating several of his scout-leaders. ‘You, you and you. Take your clawbands. Go. Quick-quick. Climb and see.’ He thrust his mace upwards, indicating the aqueduct. The skaven flooded past. Humans were tricky beasts. Almost as tricky as skaven. It would be just like them to attempt to flee the city via the aqueducts. Worse, the Gnawing Gate could have at last breached the structures. Whichever it was, his warriors would find out soon enough.

  The scouts began to scale the support pillars with commendable speed. More than two dozen of them – enough to stymie any escape attempt. As Warpfang watched them, a glint of something, far above, caught his eye.