The Black Rift of Klaxus: The Gnawing Gate Read online

  Curious, he looked up.

  The city spread out beneath Kratus in waves of stone that rose and fell as Uryx spilled down the incline of the crater wall, and splashed the jungles below. Broken towers and shattered aqueducts rose like lonely grave markers amid the thick vegetation. As he swooped past, towards the Gnawing Gate, a tower collapsed in on itself in a gout of dust and fire, as vast roots curled tight about its husk. The city was being reclaimed, one street at a time, even as Moros had sworn. Soon there would be nothing left to fight over, save vine-choked ruins.

  The horizon was aflame, and massive streaks of lightning flashed down, illuminating the distant stretch of the southern crater-rim. The Tephra Crater was home to many small kingdoms, some no larger than a few fortified cities rising up from the Ashen Jungle. Klaxus was the largest of these, but even it was mostly jungle. And all of them nestled in the shadow of the crater walls. As he spun and wheeled, riding the winds, he heard the distant boom of thunder.

  Then, a great scream, as of some ravenous giant, shuddered through the air. He saw pulsing lengths of grey rise and plunge through buildings or erupt from the streets with malignant purpose. From above, the Gnawing Gate resembled nothing so much as a gangrenous wound in the body of Uryx. Like the mandrake towers, it was a tame horror, created by the cruel masters of Klaxus in times long past. But with the fall of Uryx, its servitude was at an end. Now it lashed out savagely at the city that had been its prison for so long. Whether this was the doing of Chaos, or merely another sign of the entropy consuming the city, Kratus didn’t know. But if the Stormcasts were to free the city from the Bloodbound, they would have to get past the monstrous edifice.

  A pillar of fire suddenly swept upwards, rising from a fallen building and jolting him from his reverie. It spun in place, a cyclone of flame, bending and writhing like a thing alive. More of them rose throughout the city, as if to challenge the storm clouds above, weaving serpents of flame that darted and struck at the roiling clouds. The air had become hot and dense, and the steady rain did little to alleviate it.

  Despite the fire, bands of Bloodbound moved through the streets like swarming ants. They moved in all directions, some heading for the jungles, others streaming towards the Mandrake Bastion. He spared a brief thought for Moros and the others. They would soon be hard-pressed, as they advanced towards the Gnawing Gate.

  Horns wailed and drums thudded as other Bloodbound celebrated their recent victory over the armies of Klaxus. The broken bodies of the slain were hoisted aloft on spears, and their weapons and armour doled out by magnanimous chieftains. All these sights and more Kratus saw as he led his warriors through the storm-tossed, fire-stung air.

  The enemy possessed no discipline; there was no sign that the brawling groups below were anything more than disparate tribes, gathered to plunder the vast crater-city – there seemed to be no organized plan of defence. They clashed in the streets and plazas, warring against one another over scraps of plunder, rather than turning their axes on the enemy. Such was ever the case, Kratus knew. Unlike the Stormcasts, the Bloodbound owed no loyalty save to their obscene god. They fought amongst themselves readily enough, when no other enemies were close to hand. That Anhur had managed to wield a coalition of this size for as long as he had was a testament to the danger the warlord posed.

  But the Bloodbound were not the only monsters who prowled Uryx. Kratus’ keen eyes spotted more than one herd of beastmen galloping through the streets in pursuit of unseen prey, or else clashing with their human allies over shelter and food.

  Worst of all, however, were the skaven. They alone moved with purpose, in great scuttling hordes that wound through the city and jungle. Kratus had faced the ratmen before. Wherever the forces of Chaos congregated, the skaven would soon follow, seeking slaves and plunder. These, it seemed, were after the one more than the other.

  Screams rose from below, as a horde of ratmen rounded up the former masters of Uryx and herded them into great wheeled iron cages. Men and women and children fled before the lash and spear as the chittering horde harried them out of their hiding places. The people of Klaxus were lithe and dark, and while they knew much of war, Anhur had broken them. They were beaten, the fight drained out of them. Kratus watched as a man stumbled and fell. The skaven fell upon him with savage zeal, clubbing and slashing at him until his bloody form was dragged bodily into one of the wheeled cages.

  Anger swelled up in him, but he forced it down. He had his orders, and he would see them through. There would be time enough for vengeance later. But, as he swooped past the aqueducts which carried Orius and his warriors to the Gnawing Gate, he caught sight of the skaven slithering up the support pillars. Almost thirty of the creatures, clad in dark, ragged smocks and blackened hauberks. More skaven were moving into position below, and all at once, Kratus knew they’d been seen. As he and his Prosecutors flew beneath the aqueduct, between the support pillars, sling stones rattled against his armour.

  The anger returned, and with it satisfaction. Orius had commanded that he not engage the enemy without reason. Well, this was reason enough, Kratus thought. He signalled to his Prosecutors. At his gesture, they swooped downwards. As they passed over the ratmen at the base of the aqueducts, they hurled their celestial hammers, pulverising skaven in their dozens. jezzail bullets and sling stones caromed off sigmarite war-plate in response.

  The skaven shrieked and scattered. Small knots of them raised their shields, hoping to protect themselves from the attack, to no avail. The crackling hammers whirled down, rupturing the street and hurling broken bodies into the air. The disciplined ranks began to waver and unravel, as the skaven’s natural cowardice asserted itself in the face of the oncoming storm.

  A second retinue of Prosecutors swooped low across the skaven lines, separating the panicking ratmen from their prisoners. The winged Stormcasts landed in the street and drove back those skaven brave enough to attack them.

  Kratus dropped through the smoky air like a rock, and the skaven unlucky enough to be standing beneath him crumpled, broken. The Knight-Azyros rose from the twitching remains of the ratman and drew his starblade without flourish. His wings remained spread, the rain evaporating as it struck them. Steam rose from his armour, a legacy of the speed of his dive. The skaven, stunned by his sudden arrival, scrambled back, clawing and biting at one another in their haste to escape. Kratus stalked after them.

  A skaven warlord, larger and better armoured than the rest of its foul kin, squealed and laid about itself with the flat of its blade. As it snarled, he caught a glimpse of a single glowing green fang amongst its crooked teeth. Slowly, spears were raised, and clanrats began to edge forward, hunkered behind shields. Kratus stopped. He cocked his head, waiting. The warlord snarled out an order, and the Knight-Azyros hurled his starblade as if it were a javelin. The warlord twisted aside with incredible agility, and the blade caught one of the creatures behind him between the jaws. The force of the throw tore the ratkin’s head from its hairy shoulders.

  As the body hit the ground, Kratus lifted his celestial beacon and flipped it open. The holy light flared, enveloping the front ranks of the cowering ratmen. The skaven screeched in communal agony as azure flames sprouted along twisted limbs and licked at wrinkled snouts. The warlord barked orders, to no avail. Some skaven fled, pelting into the darkness of the ruins like living torches, while others simply burst in the cleansing heat. Kratus continued forward, until he was treading upon slick ash. He pulled his sword free of the pillar it had become embedded in, allowing the smouldering skull to flop to the ground.

  He caught sight of the warlord, standing atop a low-hanging rooftop. The creature stared down at him, eyes glinting in the light of the cleansing flames. Then it whirled about and was gone. For a moment, he considered pursuing it, but before he could, a grey tendril, composed of rotting flesh, rock and root, speared towards him out of the darkness. Instinctively, Kratus chopped it in half. Ichor sprayed across his
armour.

  More tendrils, drawn by the scent and sound of combat, slithered into view. Dying skaven were caught up, crushed and consumed by the hundreds of gnashing mouths that sprouted along the twisting length of each tendril. The prisoners in the cages began to scream in fear as the tendrils stretched towards them eagerly.

  The Knight-Azyros turned to the cages and reached them with a single flap of his wings. As he landed, he swept his light over them, revealing the huddled shapes within – men, women and children, young and old: some wearing rags that had once been finery, others the tattered remnants of armour and uniforms. Most, however, had the starveling look of those who lived on the edge of sustenance, even in times of peace. Kratus stepped towards the cages, and the prisoners screamed and cowered back, as if they could not bear the light of his beacon. A tendril reared up over him with serpentine malice and he swung his celestial beacon about.

  The holy light drove the tendril back. It retreated, smoke rising from its length. Swiftly, Kratus shuttered the beacon and chopped through the bindings holding the cages together. His Prosecutors followed his example and their hammers smashed apart the other cages. They stepped back. The prisoners stared at Kratus in something that might have been shock. He loomed over the tallest of them, and their frightened faces were reflected in the polished surface of his war-plate. Part of him longed to break his vow, to speak and perhaps comfort them. But he had not been forged for such things. He had been made to shatter chains and slay tyrants. The best he could do for the innocent was offer them his hand.

  He hung his beacon from his belt and extended his hand. Slowly, hesitantly, the first of the prisoners, a woman, took it and clambered out. The rest followed, more slowly. The mortals surrounded him, warming themselves in the heat of his presence. They began to speak, in the strange liquid tongue of Klaxus, asking questions, begging for answers. Hands reached for him, as if to touch his gleaming armour, only to pull back in fear.

  The moment was broken as more tendrils struck, diving for the newly freed mortals from on high. Kratus spun, his starblade slicing through the undulating lengths of predatory matter. The avenue shook as the Gnawing Gate bellowed in pain and frustration. He pointed towards the Mandrake Bastion.

  ‘Run, if you value your lives,’ one of his Prosecutors, a warrior named Syros, called out.

  The former prisoners fled, streaming past Kratus, the strong helping the weak. Syros and the other Prosecutors flung themselves skyward as more and more tendrils erupted from the walls and street.

  Kratus joined them as the last of the Klaxians vanished into the shadows of the city. As he flew out of reach of the tendrils, he saw that the skaven on the aqueducts had vanished. He hadn’t seen them retreat. More concerning, however, was the profusion of tendrils, each larger than the last, which now coiled about one of the support pillars and stretched towards the aqueducts. With a snap of his gleaming wings, he shot towards the aqueducts, hoping that he would be in time.

  Orius Adamantine beheaded a squealing skaven and twisted aside as the crooked blade of another scratched across his chest. Dozens of the ratkin had attacked out of the darkness, first with sling stones, then with blades, dropping onto the lead Stormcast with fierce glee. The attack had come so quickly that he and his warriors had barely had time to respond. Now, thanks to the cramped conditions of the aqueduct, the bulk of his warriors were trapped behind their fellows, unable to help.

  The rest of the creatures had rushed forward in a swarm, trying to take advantage of the narrow corridor to isolate Orius. He kicked a skaven in the chest, crushing its ribcage and sending it flopping down the aqueduct. Sling stones rattled off his helm as he turned.

  Not all of the skaven had dropped into the aqueduct; some still clung to the openings in the roof, and these were sending a constant barrage of stones into the packed ranks of the Stormcasts. He saw a pair of the creatures trying to manoeuvre a heavy-barrelled jezzail into position. He stomped towards them, scattering skaven with every step. His hammer and sword carved a path through those too stubborn to scramble aside.

  He was too slow. The skaven gunner chittered mockingly as it lit the fuse and aimed the weapon at him. But before it could fire, the aqueduct shook. Something massive and grey, like rotting flesh or wet stone, swiftly coiled about the unfortunate jezzail team, and crushed them. Gore rained down onto Orius. A booming roar echoed through the aqueduct, and a chill swept through him. The wall of the aqueduct bulged, the stones cracking as something pressed against the opening above. He backed away, weapons raised.

  With a scream of tortured stone, the opening split and shattered as something horrible forced its way through to flop into the water below. It resembled nothing so much as a titanic root, studded with scales of stone and bone. Orius took another step back as the tendril filled the aqueduct, squirming forward.

  Its surface burst and split, disgorging smaller pseudopods, which rapidly filled the aqueduct. These smaller tendrils thrashed and darted, crashing against hastily interposed shields and tangling about legs and weapons. Skaven and Stormcasts both came under attack. Orius watched as one of the tendrils split, revealing an oscillating maw of lamprey teeth, and engulfed a squealing skaven.

  ‘Back,’ he roared, ‘fall back!’

  Tendrils surged forward, hammering against his war-plate. For every two he chopped apart, four more arose from the swirling mass. The aqueduct shuddered about him, and the ancient stones beneath his feet began to buckle. A tendril snagged his wrist, yanking him off-balance. He hewed at it with his runeblade, even as more of the slithering strands of filth coiled about his helm and legs. A burst of blue lightning flashed and exploded upwards, momentarily driving back the mass of tendrils, as a fallen warrior returned to Azyr.

  Orius seized the moment. ‘Shields up, fall back,’ he bellowed. The last of the skaven was dragged squealing into the mindlessly champing maws of the tendrils, its hairy form pulled in multiple directions all at once. The Stormcasts fell back. Orius chopped through a questing tendril and sank to one knee. ‘Lock shields and stay back,’ he growled. ‘I will handle this.’

  Behind him, he heard the clang of shield rims striking, as Liberators filled the width of the aqueduct with shields, one atop the next until a burnished wall of sigmarite had been erected. No tendril would get past it. Satisfied that his warriors were safe, he rose to a crouch, weapons held low. He sprang forward even as the mass of writhing tendrils surged towards him anew. His runeblade slashed out, severing those that came close, while his hammer smashed aside the larger ones. With every strike, sizzling reverberations of lightning ran along the bulk of the thing, eliciting a monstrous roar from somewhere beyond the aqueduct walls. The Gnawing Gate, he thought, as he bisected a tendril. It had spread far beyond its remit. He had to force it to withdraw before it ripped the aqueduct apart.

  He fought his way to the central tendril and sank his sword to the hilt in its bulk. Muscles aching with the strain, he held it in place and struck it with his hammer. It writhed and thrashed with every blow, trying to pull itself free. The smaller tendrils sought to snare him, but he ignored them. A screech echoed up from the Gnawing Gate and the main tendril began to recede. He held tight to his sword and continued to strike it, not giving it a moment’s respite.

  Lightning tore across the sky as the tendril whipsawed back, out of the aqueduct, dragging him with it in an explosion of stones and dust. Orius held tight to the hilt of his blade, as the streets of Uryx twisted and stretched wildly beneath him. The foul expanse of the Gnawing Gate spread out directly below, and more tendrils, each as large as a building, slashed towards him. He tore his runeblade free and sprang into the air.

  Orius plummeted through the crawling sky, a prayer to Sigmar on his lips. Tendrils sought to snag and snare him, but he hacked through them as he fell towards the monstrous battlements below.

  Orius had once fallen from the Sky-Bridges of the Thunderpeaks, locked in battle wit
h an orruk chieftain. Next to that, this was the merest stumble. Or so he told himself, as the battlement rose up swiftly to meet him. He tightened his grip on his weapons.

  A moment later, he struck the flesh-stones of the Gnawing Gate hard and rolled across the heaving rampart, until he slammed against the base of a gatehouse tower. There was no time to catch his breath, however, as the tower undulated towards him with a sinuous motion. Innumerable eyes glared at him, as a thousand mouths champed and shrieked. Orius hooked the edge of his warcloak and whipped it about him, unleashing the spell woven into its lining. The runes which marked the edge of the cloak flared and a barrage of shimmering hammers, formed from sorcerous energies, exploded outward. The tower jerked back as the hammers tore burning craters in its stonework.

  He rose to his feet with a grunt of pain and looked around. His bones ached and something in him was cracked, if not broken, but he’d made it to the top of the Gnawing Gate. The rampart quivered beneath him, and the roar of splintering stone filled the air. It was as if the whole monstrous structure were beginning to tear itself loose from the street. Tendrils ripped themselves free from the wall and sought to entangle him. He drove them back, but only for a moment. The Gnawing Gate had had centuries to set down its horrid roots, and now they were all burrowing to the surface. There was only one way to put a stop to the monstrosity.

  Explosions rippled along the abominable wall, eliciting a shriek from the Gnawing Gate. He looked up and saw Kratus and his Prosecutors arrowing down through a storm of lashing tendrils, fighting their way towards him.

  ‘Kratus,’ he roared. ‘Make me a hole.’ He gestured with his runeblade, and the Knight-Azyros nodded in understanding. Prosecutors dove down, through the thrashing tendrils, and loosed their hammers. As the celestial weapons struck the ramparts and cracked the heaving stones asunder, Kratus and the rest of his retinue dropped from the sky. They spread their wings like shields over Orius as he bulled towards the newly made hole. Tendrils stabbed down and jerked back, seared by the blazing wings, or smashed by the hammers of the Prosecutors.