Chapter 19: Glimpse into the Abyss

A chill crawled up his spine. He felt his hair stand. Something scurried under his feet. He lowered his lantern and saw a flailing worm-tail disappear into the dark ahead. He froze. He spun around. Red beady eyes gleamed in the creeping dark. His pulse quickened. His chest tightened. His left arm ached. He raised and extended his lantern forward. The darkness retreated. The eyes dissipated. There was nothing there.

Giselbert sighed in relief. He relaxed his grip on his sword. He chuckled nervously as he resumed his prowl in this subterranean realm.

He had hoped to delay his inevitable third subterranean trek for until he had exhausted all his leads and options on the surface, but it seemed that the Powers-That-Be, he wasn't sure whether Righteous or Ruinous, intended of him otherwise. He wished that either Emmanuel or Johannes, or both, would accompany him into the dark but neither were in the mood to face the unknown perils with him.

Regardless, he was here, for good or ill, in this claustrophobic realm of pestilence, heresy and ratmen. His memories of his encounter with the underfolk, both living and dead, haunted his every step.

At least the snow above did not melt enough to wash away the tracks he was following. He prayed that this time his trail will not lead to nought.

He stopped by a hole in a wall, its entrance marked by a pile of crumbled bricks. The crude cross etched into the brickwork just beside told him this was one of Fleischer's many smuggler dens. He made a mental note to get ahold of that crooked bootlegger for interrogation after his return to the surface.

He pointed the lantern towards the floor. His pulse quickened, his arms trembled. The outgoing tracks were twice or thrice as long as the in-going tracks on which they were overlaid. Blood splatters trailed along with them.

He stumbled back. Flashes of red eyes. The snapping of plague-ridden incisors. The gleaming of bloodstained daggers. His left arm throbbed. His throat tightened. He clutched his chest. He lifted his visor and inhaled the foetid air deeply. Count to three, exhale. Count to three, inhale.

He inched towards the hole, back against the mossy wall. He listened closely. Sniffles, squeaks, scampers and scurries. He made the Sign of the Hammer and uttered a prayer. He hooked his lantern to his belt, clutched his sword with both hands and charged through.

Panicked squeaks and chitters. Scampering paws. Scaly tail and bristled fur scurried away from the light. Giselbert paused, sword in mid-guard. His heart pounded. His lungs shuddered. His arms shivered. His eyes glanced about. His left hand left his sword and unhooked his lantern. He shone his lantern about. Many corpses. Shattered barrels, crates and kegs. No malicious hungry crimson eyes, nor bristling black fur nor flashing daggers nor jabbering fangs. No skaven about. He sighed and lowered his sword. He stepped forward and felt a sharp crunch and a frantic chitter under his boots.

His heart leapt. His eyes swept down. A black-furred critter scampered away and burrowed into the wall to the left. Under his boot was a rat-gnawed hand. He lowered his lantern and traced the limb towards the half-eaten face of Ropot Fleischer.

The rats had been picking at his corpse. A gaping hole was excavated into his belly. Just above, there was an axe-wound, cleft into his chest from his left shoulder. There was a messy stump where his right forearm should be. Teeth-marks. The rats had gotten to it too. He followed the blood trail splattered on the floor towards the right side wall. There, at the foot of the wall, he found the missing arm, still clutching a bloodied axe.

He looked at the smuggler's corpse again. What's left of his face was frozen in fury and shock.

Close to Ropot laid a burly thick-armed stevedore, bare-chested, with a blue anchor tattooed on his bicep. He was clutching a bent cudgel. Five slain cultists laid close to them. One was cleft in the head. What little remained of his face appeared calm. The other was split at the bottom of his spine. Another was bludgeoned so hard his skull collapsed. Another still had his neck bent at unnatural angles. The rest bore lethal gashes and weeping wounds.

There were more bodies further into the den: about twenty or so cultists, four mercenaries, three Slammers and four Anchors. Other than their wounds, the mercenaries' bodies were relatively intact. There were cuts and test nibbles on their boots and gloves. Seemed that the rats saved these corpses for last.

Shredded gloves, broken links, bolt in eyes, detached heads.

He had surmised that most of the cultists were slain by the mercenaries until he found that the gangers themselves were covered in many wounds and clutching blood-caked knives, axes and cudgels.

He examined the Anchor slumping against a copper cylindrical object. His belly was gnawed through. His intestine was gone. He had numerous cuts on his biceps and legs and a sucking wound in his chest. He pushed the Anchor to the side and he fell face-down on the dusty ground. Another wound on his back, directly opposite the one in front. He was ran through.

He examined the strange machine upon which the Anchor had laid. It was slightly displaced from the triangular stands which had held it aloft. There was a large dent where the dockworker was. There looked to be a funnel on one end and another opening the diameter of his head on the other. A crank, two gears and a length of chain were attached to this machine; a mechanism to turn the cylinder. Giselbert knew this to be a ball-mill.

An odour like rotten eggs emanated from one of the barrels near the funnel-like opening. He examined their uncovered openings. Sulphur, coal and a disproportionately large amount of saltpetre in these barrels. He walked to the other barrel and found, inside them, moistened gunpowder. He looked under the barrels and found drag marks buried under frantic footsteps. The cultists were ambushed after the Siege of Noble Row.

Giselbert sighted a piece of tattered paper pinned under a toppled crate. He picked it up and stretched it open. It was of the width of his shoulder. He knew this diagram of boxes and parallel lines. This was a map of the sewers. At the bottom, there was what looked to be a date and the seal of Salzenmund. This was taken from the Records Room.

The map had cross markings. He recognised one of the marked spots as an exit to the vicinity of the Docks Districts warehouse where he had met Tannenbaum. The other two too were manhole exits, probably leading to other warehouses. One of them, however, did not correspond to any manhole exits he knew of. It was quite close by.

Giselbert folded the map twice, rolled it up and tucked it behind his belt. He returned to the bodies and found corpses in disintegrating rags behind the cultists. He crept closer and found them oddly misshapen. He turned one of the corpses onto its back and gasped. He shot upright and made the Sign of the Hammer.

The corpse was disembowelled. Under his shredded rags were marks of scourging. His belly was picked clean, his tender flesh gnawed. Only his arms were spared by the ravenous vermin. They were scaly, had bony growths and ended in raking claws.

This one was a mutant.

The mutant was clutching an iron bolt, its tip stained red. He looked towards one of the slain cultists. Small stab wounds all over. Claw marks in the neck.

There were three other mutants and they all bore marks of torture and scourging. The cultists close to each of them bore wounds which corresponded to their mutant features or their improvised weapons. The slain cultists were stabbed, slashed or raked on their backs or sides. Seeing the mutants' muck-covered bare feet and remembering the stumbling, staggering and lurching footprints, he surmised that these mutants had been slaves, the very same that had heaved the powder kegs towards Noble Row. They must have rebelled around the same time as Fleischer's attack.

This was strange, he thought. He was told that mutants were evil men, wearing their degeneracy on their flesh like a cloak. The priests called them tainted, unclean, irredeemable. However, these mutants did not join their masters in their evil deeds. Instead, they rebelled.

As Giselbert contemplated the implication of what he saw, he glimpsed a parchment buried under a purple-cloaked corpse. He walked up to it and turned it around. Upon seeing what was under the slain cultist, he felt his throat clench.

It was indeed a parchment. It was of tanned human skin.

The very knowledge that he was holding it made his gut retch and his skin itch. Yet, he was loathed to discard the blasphemous object. His appreciation for the thing's value was being vindicated.

Scrawled on the parchment was a map of what he believed to be a vast network of skaven-dug tunnels. He had hypothesised that the unknown mark on the sewers map corresponds with the very same mark on this parchment. His belief was vindicated when he followed the trail and found this exact mark by a hole in a wall, an opening into a shovel-and-pick-dug tunnel.

Here, he found three more cloaked bodies, all ran through. Likely ambushed, if the footprints around the site were of any indication. The length of the stride-marks leading into the tunnel suggested pursuit.

Further, in the tunnel, he found that the outline and texture of the passageway had changed. The outline had transitioned from angular and rough to rounded and smoothed. This part of the tunnel had been here for a long time. Its extension into the sewers was recent.

Though he had come upon many twists and turns, his chances of becoming lost were near-inexistent. The marks at every junction, which corresponded with what's on the human-skin map, had guided his path. Where the marks were smudged or faded, the blood-soaked trail had guided the way.

The scampering of tiny paws made his hair stand and his pulse quicken. He shook off his anxiety and pressed on. Just ahead laid a downward-facing corpse in a tattered cloak, lying in a puddle of dried blood. Yet, the blood trail continued on. He approached the body. Two bolts were embedded into his back, one at the base of his neck and the other in the skull. He turned the body over. Half-eaten entrails spilt out. His heart froze. He held his breath.

A rat peeked out of the gap in the belly. It sniffled and gazed about. Their eyes met. The rat squeaked, leapt out and scampered into the dark. Giselbert blinked. He felt himself suffocating. He had forgotten to breathe.

Giselbert gulped at the air hungrily. He coughed. The dust stung his lungs. Hacking and spitting, he retrieved the human-skin map tucked behind his belt and unfurled it. His gut clenched intensely. He hissed in discomfort as he studied the map. It seemed that there were still longer corridors ahead. He looked at his lantern. The light was beginning to dim a little. He looked at his belt. The bottle of oil was three-quarters empty. He turned the corpse around and found a dagger, some throwing knives and his own shrivelled liver. No oil.

He wiped his hands against the cadaver's cloak, stood up and went on his way. If the map was accurate, he would soon find himself in a large clearing.

As he neared the clearing, he felt his hair stand and his skin itch. He felt an urge to avert his gaze. His gut retched, more intensely than before. Just ahead, at the end of the tunnel, an eerie Morrslieb-green light. Shielding his eyes, he made his way through and was greeted by an all-too-familiar and horrid sight.

He could already hear the manic chittering of fangs and the cruel hiss and malignant thunder of that sorcerous device.

The corridor had opened up into a chamber very much like the one he encountered under the Merchant's Guild. Great oblong metal carcases stacked atop or smashed into one another, some upright, others overturned. A great many pitted bones, rat-headed skulls numbered among them, buried the railway tracks he knew to be there. He looked up. The eerie glow had come from the diseased stones embedded in the roof and the rusted pipes laid along the walls. At the far ends of the chamber, massive crushing boulders were buried under immense tonnes of rubble.

Each crunch of skaven bones under his boots made his heart leap. Images of the battling skaven ghosts were still fresh in his mind. He could hear the chitters, the clangs, the scampers. He could smell that lightning. He breathed labouriously. He reminded himself that the ghosts weren't there as he pressed on.

It didn't take long before he encountered another corpse. This one, lying just around the corner, had belonged to an Anchor. There was a wicked dagger embedded into both his shoulders. He swung his right and found the murderer crushed against the overturned iron carriage, skull collapsed, ribs in splinters, a bloodied sledge buried into his chest. He glanced at the roof of the wreckage on his right before moving on. Just around the corner, almost out of sight, an iron ramp propped up against the wreck.

More bodies ahead. More iron ramps hidden behind corners and blind spots. Shadowed crevices hiding slain crossbowmen. Darkened doors blocked by slain combatants, most of whom were righteous. Their heads were pointed to or away from the abyss, their throats slit.

The treacherous graveyard of iron and bone had whittled the furious pursuers. As he closed the opposite side of the chamber, he found only three slain mercenaries. They were sprawled in a circle, clearly surrounded and clearly having sold their lives dearly, if the slain cultists around them were of any indication.

Giselbert lifted his visor and begun his examination of the corpses. It didn't take him long to discover a peculiarity. Many of these cultists were wearing shocked expression under their masks. The wounds they bore did not correspond to the falchions and broadswords wielded by the mercenaries.

Messy stab wounds in the armpits or under the chin. Slit throats and severed spines. Iron bolts lodged in their backs. Ragged stumps in place of limbs.

One of the cultists was apparently snatched into a blackened crevice. His throat was slit. Nibble-marks on his fingertips suggested that the rats had gnawed at him. However, the wound that should be dug into his belly was gouged onto his exposed chest. He shone his lantern into the gaping wound. The ribcage was gone, the remains bearing what looked like saw-marks. The heart had been cut out. He stuck his hand into the chest. He could feel a wet noise. He withdrew his hand. The glove dripped red. Thick, coagulated, sludge-like. It still emitted the iron stench.

He stood up with a start. He spun around, thrusting his lantern towards every roof and into every door. He stood still, eyes peering, ears alert. He waited.

No movement.

He swiftly hooked his lantern to his belt. He gripped his sword in both hands. He waited again.

All was still.

He made the Sign of the Hammer and cautiously wound his way through the labyrinth.

The stale air shifted. A shadow pounced. He swung to his left. His pommel struck flesh and bone.

A weak croak. A stumbling foot. Giselbert seized his ambusher by the collar and, with his forearm, slammed the ambusher into the iron wall.

The pale-faced cultist made short lunges at him. His blood-caked teeth snapped rabidly at his throat, so close yet frustratingly out of reach. Giselbert's head flinched to the left. The maniac had raked at his helmet. He slammed the cultist into the wall again. The maniac gasped. Giselbert lifted his sword and struck him in the forehead.

The cultist crumpled unconscious. Giselbert could feel his heart hammering at his ribcage. He inhaled deeply. The stale air stung his lungs. He coughed phlegmatically before making the Sign of the Hammer and uttered his gratitude to Sigmar.

Even without the fresh mark on his forehead, the cultist was a sickly pathetic thing. Emaciated, with sunken cheeks and spotted rough skin. His bony fingers were scabrous, their skin torn and ragged, dirt and powdered bone under chipped nails. His lips and teeth were caked in blood. His weapon, a broken obsidian-black sword with a serrated edge, laid uselessly upon his finger-tips. Giselbert looked towards whence he came. Another one of those abyssal doors. He looked back at the cultist and approached him.

The cultist's eyes snapped open. He tightened his grip on his broken blade and lunged at the former watchman again. Giselbert recoiled in shock and reared back. He assumed a mid-guard, putting his blade between himself and his opponent.

The cultist did not come any closer. He was rooted to the spot. His legs were limp and unmoving, useless as strings of sausages. He flailed his scrawny claws futilely. He snapped his jaws at the former watchman. His mad eyes conveyed his frustration.

Giselbert breathed a sigh of relief. He relaxed his shoulders and lowered his sword. He leisurely strolled towards the cannibal. The maniac lunged again and fell short. Giselbert stood just out of reach. He looked at the jabbering cultist, then at his sword, before flipping his sword around and struck him on his skull.

The cannibal-cultist sprawled onto his side, his broken blade clattering away from his grip. Giselbert kicked the blade aside before kneeling to examine the unconscious malefactor. The top of his bare skull was bruised black. Blood seeped from his nose. The former watchman knelt before the limp body, removed his left glove and touched the discoloration on the top of his skull.

Tender, moist and lukewarm. A fracture under the skin.

Giselbert swiftly placed two fingers against the cultist's neck. A slow and sluggish pulse. He could feel a soft wheeze emitting from his throat. The cannibal still lived; he was just out cold. He exhaled in relief. He turned the cultist around and ripped his cloak off his back. He was immediately greeted with a rancid stench of iron and rot. There was a black wound carved into his back, at the waist. Fat maggots squirmed under the skin. His spine was severed. This explained his lack of mobility.

He ripped the tattered purple cloak into two parts, one larger and one smaller. The larger piece he wound tight around the cultist's arms. The smaller he used to gag the cannibal. Satisfied that the bindings were properly secured, Giselbert unhooked his lantern and cautiously stepped through the door. Nobody else was lying in wait, the cannibal was alone.

Further in the leaning carriage, Giselbert found blood on the floor, thick and black as sin. Piles of bleached bones, marred by human molars, lay in a corner. The cannibal had been here for a while.

He left the carriage and glanced at the cannibal-cultist. He wondered what the maniac had seen, what he had experienced that drove him to the brink. Perhaps he will interrogate him.

"Later," he thought, as he looked towards the other end of the chamber, beyond the walls of the iron labyrinth.

In place of a gate, he had found an iron vault. It was a rusted, pitted thing. Hastily-beaten and crudely-fashioned. It was wide enough for the first rank of three infantry units to pass through, shoulder-to-shoulder. The hole bore through it was one-third its width.

Giselbert shone his lantern to the side of this hole. Multiple cannonball-sized dentations. They took on the impression of massive fists. He looked to his left, towards the source of these blows.

A mountain of a skeleton. Big-boned. Its head, flat against the bone-blanketed ground, carried the all-too-familiar outline of a ratman's. It was too small to belong to the rest of the monstrous bulk. He approached the remains. Some strings of flesh and tendon still hung onto its massive bones. He remembered Lanric's, Morr preserve him, elucidation of his time in the sewers back in the Temple of Shallya. This must be one of the 'rat ogres' he spoke of.

Pitted, snapped and powdered. The creature's skeleton had crown-sized holes punched into them. Some parts of its spine looked to be shredded through. He closely examined what looked to be the remains of its forearm. Signs of filing around the hole. The smaller bones grounded down to dust. Someone had dug or ground the shots out.

He lifted up his lantern towards the walls. Ledged crevices, all occupied by warped iron cylinders, each made of six bound barrels. An acute discomfort stabbed his gut. "The underfolk had guns," he thought.

He looked at the bones at his feet again. On this shattered ratman remain was clad a crude plate-mail. It was punctured, nay, shredded. The thought of the power hidden behind these now-silent guns disturbed him greatly.

His lantern-light peeled away the shadows shrouding the iron vault. As he made to go through this hole, he felt a bump under his boot and look down. A frozen silver-brown puddle. He looked to the side of this hole and found what looked to be a frozen rusted floor at its edges. He looked and found reddish-grey fangs hanging over him. He realised that the vault was not breached by sappers or any known artillery. This hole was melted through.

He progressed through this vault and into the very centre of this network of skaven tunnels. Just a little further, slightly to his left, lay an iron wreckage. He approached this strange contraption and was able to make out its outline: a massive barrel of rusted iron attached to a blown-up sphere. It had fallen over to its left, its crude wagon-wheels hung rotten at its side. Its other wheels must have been buried under its bulk. He examined the mouth of the barrel and found that its edges had melted. This must be the weapon which had melted the vault.

He waved his lantern around, and found himself looking at still more crevices. Skaven bones hung on their ledges. There were no guns here. He looked behind him and immediately spotted the narrow stairways gouged into the walls at mid-point between the vaults. This must be the entry-points to these crevices.

There were three other vaults into this massive chamber, all of which were sealed. There were skaven bones everywhere. He stepped over one of the bones, noting the rusted helmet on its head, and the breastplate clad around its rotten corpse, draped under a tattered red cloak. It was clutching a crude-yet-formidable glaive in its fleshless paw.

He made his approach towards the gaping maw at the very centre. As he got closer, he felt cold, humid air rushing against him. He could hear the sound of crashing water echoing from down below. He reached this hole and looked into it. It looked bottomless.

He looked around. The hole was surrounded by four pillars. He approached one of them and found the start of a narrow spiral staircase. There were no railings. Feeling that these stairs were unsafe, he searched about for another means of access. He found, close to one of the rusted chains, an iron lever by the edge of this hole. He pulled the lever and the chains ground and whined. They flowed upwards.

A minute later, a platform emerged from the dark. It was of wood, rimmed by iron, just slightly smaller than the hole on which it sat. It looked large enough to carry an entire regiment. He looked at the wooden surface. Rotted. Worm-gnawed. He felt a sinking feeling as he stepped onto this platform and clutched the lever at the centre of it.

He reeled back. He kneeled over, clutching his skull. His heart rammed against his ribcage. His throat clenched hard. He could scarcely breathe. He could feel it. He could feel it rippling through his flesh, rattling his bones, echoing in his skull. Flashes. Jaws snapped, claws raked, beaten iron clanged, barrels flared. Flesh torn, blood spilt, guts strewn across the ground. Armour useless against the jade claws. Fire rained from above. Fur and flesh melting from the bones. Panicked scampers, chittering prayers. The shadow laughed. Anger, hate and contempt. Great curled horns. Eyes of wyrdstone. Twisted iron and flesh.

The skavens chittered, chittered with fear and reverence. They chanted furtively its name.

The Great One. The Great Horned Rat.

Giselbert's stomach clenched. He hurled. Iron and bile on his tongue. He hurled again. It hurted. His innards hurted. He fell onto his side, his sword and lantern clattering on his side.

He wheezed. His lungs burnt. His throat hurt. It was painful to breathe. How long had he lain there? His skin crawled. Morrslieb-green glow. They were everywhere, on the ceiling, on the pillars, even right in front of his eyes, on the platform. He grasped his sword and hoisted himself up.

The glows came from words, triangular and scrawl-like. He leant closer for a clearer view and felt his eyes burn. Runes. Foul sorcerous runes.

He picked up his lantern. He clutched his chest. His stomach still hurt. He could taste burnt iron on his lips. He shone the light down. Blood and vomit. He had vomited blood. He wiped the side of his mouth and limped towards the exit. He will return, once he made sense of what had happened, to this place and to himself.

Giselbert hissed in annoyance. His captive has struck him in the chest again. The scraping at the bottom of his sallet told him that the malefactor had attempted to gnaw at his neck. The heretic's thrashing had made his trek a struggle. His movement swayed, as though he was drunk. He had veered towards the brick walls numerous times along the journey already.

Having enough, the former watchman threw the cultist off his back and onto the moist muck. Despite his bindings and his gag, the madman attempted to lunge at him again. Giselbert unceremoniously kicked him hard in the head, knocking him out once again.

With a grunt, the former watchman threw the unconscious heretic over his back, carrying him like a blanket, and moved on. He appreciated the stillness, though he knew that it won't be long before the cultist roused back into consciousness and thrashed about madly again. Regardless, strangely enough, he was grateful for the company. He hadn't seen any beady eyes staring at him from the gap in the walls, and he hadn't paid any attention to the skittering and scampering of the denizens of these tunnels. The cultist wasn't someone he would gladly share any stew with, but his presence and his occasional thrashing about had kept the nightmarish visions away thus far.

Without preoccupation, his thoughts naturally returned to the elevator chamber down below. He shuddered just remembering the encounter. The cries, the snapping jaws, the tearing flesh, the contemptuous roar. He hadn't actually heard them, not through his ears at least. Those weren't sounds. Visions, more like. Projections, perhaps?

The snapping jaws, raking claws, clanging iron and flashing guns. Those were clearly of the underfolk. He could feel the fear and desperation behind these actions. And that sight! The wyrdstone eyes, the horned rat skull. That hateful and contemptuous laughter. It wasn't fellow ratmen they were battling against, it was something else.

The Great Horned Rat.

He recalled Lanric describing the rat ogre he had encountered. It too had great curled horns. Was this the Great Horned Rat? No, no, Lanric described that rat ogre as an idiot. This being gave him an impression of possessing a malevolent intellect. He recalled again the rat ogre outside the vault. Shredded, shot to death. The skaven in his vision had spoken its name in fear and reverence. A rat ogre wasn't an object of reverence. Fear, perhaps, for it's a monstrous beast, but certainly not reverence.

The Great Horned Rat was not a rat ogre. What was it then?

The runes. They glowed after he was struck by the visions. The creature must have done something, something that had inspired the visions. The skaven couldn't put it down. It was beyond their ability. The runes were seals, meant to keep it down below.

What could be so terrible that an army so vast as to litter every inch of the ground with their bones couldn't stop it? Something so mighty that the best they could do was to trap it down there by sorcerous means?

He thought of Tannenbaum. Maybe she knows. She possessed plentiful knowledge, much more than she let on. He could see it in her gestures and her emerald-green eyes. She knows many things, things beyond himself. Perhaps she also possessed occult knowledge. Yes, she probably knows. He should ask her.

He arrested the thought. He remembered that she hasn't revealed any true information about the occult thus far. She did not indulge him about the haunting under the Merchant's Guildhouse, though she clearly knew much more about it than she had let on. She's a witch hunter's henchwoman. Likely she was ordered to keep mum. Perhaps this was one of those information the witch hunter rather he or the public not know. There was no telling what she would do if he were to make this inquiry.

He remembered Vincent Kraft, the spy and informant. He looked like he knew a thing or two. He knew of the skaven, when nearly everyone else thought them tales and rumours. It didn't look like the haunting surprised him one bit. Maybe he asked and was enlightened. Or perhaps he knew all along.

There was simply no telling what might happen if he asked about The Great Horned Rat. Perhaps he will receive an answer. Or just as likely, the witch hunter decides he knew too much and had him executed. Too much uncertainty.

He peered to his back. The cultist was still prone, unconscious. He could be the key. If Ranald wills it, Tannenbaum and Kraft might decide to interrogate him personally. Should that come to pass, he must endeavour to eavesdrop. Perhaps he might learn something that way.

He put these thoughts aside for the time being. He had arrived at the manhole marked in the sewers map. He checked the unconscious cannibal on his back. He showed no sign of stirring. He shrugged as he grasped the rusted rungs and started his ascent.

He knocked the manhole cover hard enough to displace it from its seat. With a grunt, he pushed it aside. He threw the unconscious cultist off his shoulder and onto the cobbles above. He lifted himself out, out from the foetid depths and onto the frigid open air above. He grasped the bronze cover, intending to replace it.

He felt a poke in his back. He peered backwards and stared straight into a halberd-point.