Age of Sigmar: Omnibus

He would need to take some, but could not take them all. Not all, no, but many. He would need them when they reached Olgu’gohl. There were secret places and strange things, in the deeps. Vretch had the uncomfortable suspicion that a skaven could spend years scurrying through the stomach of Shu’gohl, and never find what he was looking for. Still hugging the Mappo Vurmio to his chest, Vretch began to separate the rest of his hoard.

The piles slid and toppled, filling the air with loose sheets of parchment, as Shu’gohl shuddered suddenly. Vretch’s cauldrons wobbled on their tripods, and bilious liquids slopped to the floor, scalding several of his assistants. The gibbets above clattered and twisted in their chains, and the insensate things within them moaned sorrowfully. Vretch cursed and snatched up an armful of books, trying to salvage them from the pox-froth spilling across the floor. The liquid was a dilution of the original pestilence which had brought him to the Crawling City. It had taken him days — and hundreds of man-things — to refine it into something close to the potency of the original pox. ‘Skirk, Putrix! Save the books, fools,’ he squealed.

Two of the plague monks flung themselves between the steaming pestilence-broth and the books. They rolled about in it, soaking it up with their fur and grimy robes. Skirk sat up with a shriek, his flesh melting from his crooked bones. Putrix clawed at the floor, squealing in agony as great boils the size of a skull rose on his flesh and burst, disgorging thousands of squirming worms. The worms melted away as quickly as they’d come, and the two plague monks slumped, rotting quietly, their bodies forming a natural bulwark between broth and books. Vretch peered over them and gestured airily. ‘Clean it up, quick-quick,’ he said to his other attendants. ‘We might be able to get some use out of it yet.’

‘Faster-faster, quick-quick,’ Kruk shrilled, exhorting his followers to greater speed as the Congregation of Fumes flowed squealing and chittering out of the anterior gates of the Dorsal Barbican. He bounded ahead of them, stopping only when they lagged too far behind. The laity of the congregation were made up of plague monks culled from a dozen lesser clans. They sought his patronage and the protection of his mighty procession. Many were willing to die for Kruk and the rest were, at the very least, willing to kill for him.

At their head, and just behind him, came the Reeking Choir, his plague censer bearers, those skaven most devoted to the Effluvial Gospels and to him personally. They swept their great, spike-tipped censers in wide arcs, filling the air with a toxic miasma that inflamed the senses and filled the mouth with froth. They were led by a boil-covered, skull-faced creature named Skug, whose twisted frame was bloated with watery blisters and lesions that wept an ochre pus. Skug’s muzzle had rotted to the bone, but he felt no pain, thanks to the blessed smoke of the many censers which hung from the chains draping his body.

Kruk inhaled a lungful of Skug’s smoke as he burst into a scurry, letting its putrid aroma fill him. His mind swam with images of disease, corruption and death — all of the beauty of the world-to-come. That was the true way of it, the best and most glorious way to worship at the cloven hooves of the most gaseous Great Corruptor. The Horned Rat was the source of and the spewer forth of the Grand Effluvium, those great gastric gases which would sweep over the Mortal Realms and strangle the breath from the unworthy.

And Kruk would be the Archfumigant, the Spreader of Gaseous Blessings, who would squat at the right talon of the Horned Rat for all eternity. The plague priest sucked in another mouthful of smoke, and felt the growing ache in his claws fade. From behind him came the clangour of plague-bells as his followers rang out the call to war.

Soon, every choir, congregation and clawband on the anterior side of the barbicans would follow the ringing of those bells and join him. They would come at his call, or suffer for their absence later. Those who had dared invade his territory would drown in blessed smoke and blood. So demanded Skuralanx and so Kruk would ensure.

It had been truly a sign of the Horned Rat’s favour the day he’d made the acquaintance of the verminlord. The daemon had spoken to him through Skug’s varied collection of boils and lesions, and warned him to flee the warrens beneath Putris Bog before the Stormcast Eternals arrived to lay waste to his allies in Clan Rikkit. He’d led what he could of the congregation, including many from Rikkit who’d abandoned their old loyalties for new, through the sorcerous gnawholes Skuralanx had cut in the skin of the world.