Chapter 3 – A Man in the Under-Empire
Apprentice Grey Seer Rikkund
"Welcome back," Nurse Veronica said, not looking from her computer, "You know where the room is, by now. Visiting ends at 8."
She was right. The faded champagne-colored walls flanked the familiar dimly lit corridor. Room 213 sat right down the hallway, just past the watercolor daffodil painting and dusty console table. A well-timed exhale and brisk pace stopped the ever-present stench of room 204 from ever being smelled. The smell was chastising, resurfacing the same guilt his first visit.
Breathmarks fogged the face shield given to him by nameless staff wandering the halls. Ray drove his thumb into his fingers, a nervous habit. The feeling of rubber gloves against his clammy fingers didn't help much. Neither did the plain floral curtains blocking family and friends from peeking at the hospital bed from the hallway. The door to the patient's room slid open without a sound, save for Ray's plastic gown rubbing against itself and the patient monitors beeping into the hallways.
Sunlight bled into the room, bouncing off the remarkably clean floors and white walls. The windowsill, accented with warm wood, was decorated with pots of yarrow and star grass. The monitors had been pushed into a far corner of the room, behind the worn set of chairs and a tray table with a half-eaten plate of eggs and pail nearly full of water. The curtain was drawn forward to cover the bed in an odd attempt at privacy. No one besides the nurses and doctors on the floor ever entered the room.
"Mom, I came to visit," said Ray. He pulled back on the curtain. He held his mother's frail hand as he sat down in a chair.
She spoke, each word seeming like a tremendous effort, "David? Is that you? I can't remember the last time I heard your voice?"
Tears rolled down her crow's feet and slid through hollow cheeks. A gentle sob broke the monotony of the heartbeat sensors, leaving Ray to decide if it was crueler to allow the delusion to continue or remind her of the truth. She always felt responsible for the loss of Ray's brother, so Ray sat there and waited. Time passed. The muffled sounds of nurses changing shifts broke the silence for a short time before leaving Ray and his mother alone once again.
Eventually, Ray's mother wiped her tears with a bony forearm. The bandage covering her IVs soaked most of the water, but some tears found their way to the stuffy soft blanket beneath. The IV pole creaked in protest as the small motion pulled the fluid-filled tubes closer. Ray wasn't sure if the weakness brought on by sickness or discomfort from the IV made it difficult for her mother. Nevertheless, she looked at Ray with a renewed sense of lucidity.
Ray broke the silence, "It's me, Ray,"
"Yeah. I should have known better," she said, looking at her bandages, "I've been going in and out. It's hard for me to keep the days straight in here."
Ray looked over to the unfinished food. "Are you still drinking and eating, mom? You need to eat if you want to stay healthy."
"I just don't get hungry anymore, Ray," She looked up at the IV bags, "This little world you bundle yourself up in. It's so confusing. I feel lost all the time. If they didn't give me a window, I think I would have left. Just with my gown and the medicine, probably a few weeks ago too, running in the streets like some crazy person..."
Ray turned to the window, noticing the sun had already set. Was he in there that long? Behind him, bedsheets shifted and the metal IV hooks rang against the plastic poles. Ray's mother dragged her feet over the bed, leaving her legs to dangle as she pushed herself upright against the edge of the bed. Ray rushed over to support her, but she shooed him away as she pulled her IVs closer.
"Don't touch me or you'll get sick. You'll get… uh… what did the doctors call it?"
"A VRSA infection, but I have a bunch of equipment to protect me." Ray protested, gesturing to his plastic garb, mask, and face shield.
Each step towards the window was a herculean effort, each with the wheezing and strain of a person running a marathon. Her only support, the IV stand, creaked and groaned as it took uneven rolls towards the edge of the room. Ray hovered out his hands around his mother if she fell, but she eventually staggered to one of the chairs resting near the window.
"Do you still remember the stars, Ray," Ray's mother gasped. She leaned her head back, looking upwards.
Ray squatted down and pointed at the constellations in the sky, "Pisces, Orion, the big dipper…"
Ray continued, digging through his mind for everything he could remember. Constellations, special stars, planets. The many nights they spent returning to her ranch to gaze at them. Once fully exhausting the list, he turned to his mother. She eyed him expectantly, waiting for one more. Ray looked back up, trying to find the last one.
"It's Nova's shadow, Ray. Do you remember?" she said.
"I can't find it, mom,"
Soon, frail fingers found their way around Ray's wrist. Together, they explored the sky, dancing around galaxies and worlds they only could admire from their humble place on the earth. It was a journey the two had taken hundreds of times before.
Ray's mother began a familiar story, "When I was a little girl, I always loved to play with my brothers past the hills near our ranch. Our father hated us going so far, but…"
"But you always got bored of playing in the same old, dried-up river in the cow's patch…"
Ray's mother smiled, "One day, my brothers pulled a prank on me. They left me out at night, alone. And, oh my lord, it was so dark. The moon was gone and I could barely see my hands. I wandered the desert alone for hours. And that's when I saw it.
"A supernova…"
"Yes, a supernova. It lit up the night sky. I could see everything around me for a brief moment as if it was daytime. And in the distance, I saw my brothers and my parents looking for me. It was a miracle. We came home together, this time as a family,"
They found their fingers pointing at the same place in the night sky. A dark spot, lined with a weave of light decorating the heavens.
Ray's mother continued, "I spent every night after looking at that star. Night after night, I always was there. But, after a few months, it faded away. My brothers thought I was crazy, still looking for the nova. They were wrong. I can always find its shadow in the sky, to this day."
Ray closed his eyes, imagining a world with a light like that. Just for a moment, that's all he needed. But it was too good to be true. His mother had yet to finish the story.
"Ray, I found myself in that same place. I got lost, again, in the same valley. I looked up and I panicked. The star I had looked after, night after night, was hidden behind the clouds. I watched and wandered for hours but there were no more miracles. Nova couldn't save me this time."
"What happened next, mom? Mom? What do I do!?"
His mother didn't answer. Her fragile grip on his wrist weakened to nothing. The subtle scent of flowers left the air as the steady beep of the ECG faded. This wasn't their first conversation that ended like this. Ray should have been grateful. This was the longest conversation he had with his mother before reality returned.
Grey Seer Rikkund opened his eyes.
The stars were gone, replaced by green soot lining the dank, decrepit walls of a stone wall decorated with unfamiliar fungi. The pristine hospital floor transformed into an aged plaster ripened to a pale lemon yellow and pocketed with holes. Tiny whiskers of the Skaven's diminutive cousins poked out of them. They squeaked and fled to their hiding places when the apprentice Seer stirred from his bed. Rikkund's bed was a pile of straw that reeked of urine and feces. The previous owners of the burrow, like any Skaven, emptied their bowels wherever they stood without a second thought. Trinkets and amulets hung from the ceiling, shaking when ratmen walked nearby his domicile. Rikkund ducked and weaved to avoid the jewlery as he made his way to his desk.
Rikkund's claws tapped a lucky trinket on his wooden table. Bits of his old life had flashed forward with greater frequency as of late. The latest episode was probably brought on by the missing digit on the frail elderly hand resting on his table. His mother had lost part of a finger too. Proper Skaven tradition demanded that he would have to kill the ambitious Skaven clanrat that bribed him with the lucky hand. The walls have eyes and ears. Letting a hint of a rumor spread about his old life would get him killed by the end of the afternoon. Weakness may as well be a crime, punishable by death, in Under-Nuln.
The pile of books and writing compiled by his master, Grey Seer Vellux, gave him a headache. The ratskin documents, skinned from the backs of skavenslaves, formed several motley piles of literature on Rikkund's desk. Several other books, parchments, and scrolls were crammed into a nearby bookshelf, each of them highlighting one of the many facets of the Under-Empire. A significant portion of the library detailed the exaggerated exploits of the Grey Seers that wrote the books, but there was a surprising amount of details on the relationships and scandals of noble families within the human kingdom above, the Empire.
Rikkund had spent the first month of his life drilling the history of Man and Skaven alike into his mind. His master, Grey Seer Vellux, grossly exaggerated the strength of the Skaven under-empire and anything related to his own accomplishments. He wrote of millions of skaven ready to invade the surface at any time, blaming treachery and ineptitude of his comrades on the multitude of failures left in his wake. A particular violently written section outlined his rival killing a rising warlord with far too much detail to be uninvolved.
"And the Poxmaster Nisseri…" Rikkund said. He mouthed the chittering, hasty words in the Skaven language, Queekish, a second time before continuing, "...murder-killed the beloved warlord right before me-me as I bravely protected the two weak-meat pups."
He repeated the passage before furiously rubbing his temples. Sig would relentlessly make fun of him if he heard him speaking like this. The apprentice sighed. He wished that could worry about Sig's banter again as he flipped open another book. This time, Rikkund mouthed the words of a Grey Seer responsible for leading the previous assault on Nuln ten winters ago. The runes were nearly illegible, even by skaven standards. Crude scratchmarks detailed the Grey Seer intentionally sabotaging other generals in the army by leaking information to a "dwarf-thing" and his "man-thing" pet. The two single-handedly took down each general until the Grey Seer had no one left to blame and abandoned Nuln. Another example of skaven comradery. Any advances always imploded to the status quo.
Before Rikkund could continue the thought, a familiar craving returned. It crawled from Rikkund's stomach, reaching throughout his body from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail. His throat coiled. The acute awareness of his desperate hunger and thirst returned to the forefront of the young Seer's mind. The Black Hunger, an unavoidable affliction of Skavenkind, gripped Rikkund's mind and demanded to be satiated. The hunger was mad. It frayed the poise Rikkund had brought from the human world and ravished it with an insanity consolable by flesh alone.
Hyperventilating, Rikkund turned his thoughts to official Nuln documents. The awkward syllables fumbled their way out of Rikkund's mouth as he traced his finger along a shipping manifest. Reading and writing in Man's language 'Reikspiel' came far easier than speaking the language. Reikspiel is ill suited to the wiry squeaks of skavenkind. Every word made Rikkund hyper aware of his rat-face and rat-mouth, filling him with an unbridled sense of loathing. Thankfully, it was a far better feeling than hunger.
Rikkund skimmed the manifests, cross-referencing them against the notes compiled by his mentor. The previous invasion of Nuln could not be found anywhere in official Nuln documents. Documents referenced pages that didn't exist. The closest mention of skaven came in the form of 'rat-like beastmen'. In contrast, numerous Seers lambasted the failure of Clan Skab, the Skaven clan residing underneath Nuln, for failing to capture the city. Rikkund found other details outlining Skaven activity within Nuln. A horrific plague that killed a third of the peasant population, the mysterious disappearance of equipment at the College of Engineering, and a famine that nearly starved the city to death. Nuln officials actively suppressed the presence of Skaven underneath the city.
The stomach cramps returned, sending Rikkund falling from his chair to the floor. He could feel his innards contort as the Black Hunger returned. He muttered one of the prayers beaten into his head by Grey Seer Vellux before the scent of a rat underneath the desk caught Rikkund's attention. He clawed underneath the table, scratching the floor and toppling old books stored beneath it. The small rodent scurried to his tiny burrow. The Seer drove his arm into the depths of the hole, only stopping when he smashed the horns atop his wicked head against the frame of his desk.
He crawled backwards to the center of the room on all four paws. He swallowed the foam bubbling at the corners of his mouth, his hunger unsatiated by the pitiful amount of spit that tried to fill his stomach. Ill combinations of Reispeil and Queekish spilled from Rikkunds mouth. There was no story about the empire, no Skaven proverb, nothing in Rikkund's fragile state that could resist the tide of hunger that rushed into his head. He turned around and looked to the corner of the room he had tried to forget.
A human corpse lied in the corner. It had been delivered two weeks ago as a spoil from nightly Skaven raids on villages nearby the city. The name of the town the person was taken from; the valiant stand to save others around it; whether or not the corpse was a man, woman, or child. Its history was voided post-mortem. Fluid and waste had been dripping from both ends, staining the ground and filling the cavern with the sounds of flies and maggots crawling inside. The creatures underneath Rikkund's den had already picked apart bits and pieces of the skin, revealing the sagging muscle and fat underneath the rotting exterior.
Yet, the details were lost in the mind of a Skaven that stared upon a meal with two beady black eyes. Rikkund's maw clamped down on a hunk of flesh, tearing it from the corpse. There was no semblance of man in his movements as Rikkund devoured it. Just a starving animal.
The smell of rat feces blended with decaying flesh lined the interior of the corpse as Rikkund tore through muscles and organs. The scents burrowed into Rikkund's nose as the taste of blood and mush lined his tongue. The voracious meal was briefly interrupted by a bout of coughing after some blood dripped into Rikkund's lungs. The entire feast gave Rikkund a sickening satisfaction, the blackened portion of his soul chittering in glee as the leftovers of the corpse sat in front of the Seer.
Rikkund pushed himself back in a brief moment of lucidity. The black hunger roared for more food, but humanity slowly won out. Rikkund stared at his leftovers and suppressed the urge to vomit. Vomiting up a fresh meal would offend the Great Horned Rat. Every last Skaven was subject to the spiteful god and Vellux properly beat respect into Rikkund. He uttered a prayer to the Great Horned Rat for the meal before returning his attention to its remnants.
By the time, the Black Hunger took over again, rodents and insects would have completely devoured the rest of the corpse. Instead, Rikkund put the remains in a bucket filled with scat and dragged it to the exit. His other hand gripped a scavenged Butcher's knife as he opened the door.
The sounds of a few footsteps frantically skittering away faded as Rikkund stepped on the scaffolds in front of his den. Rikkund brought his snout near the wooden floor. The musk of fear, a putrid stench secreted by skaven when afraid, mixed with the scent of dried blood and urine. Rikkund let out a sigh of relief. Marking the exterior of his den with urine had stopped other skaven from attempting to brazenly ambush him as he walked out.
Now, Rikkund stood on a winding scaffold that snaked down the side of dusty bedrock towards unsteady wooden towers housing hundreds of skaven. Dozens of skaven loitered around other burrows in the bedrock, waiting for an opportunity to ambush. A pair of ratmen on a nearby tower were tearing into a skavenslave unwise enough to be stabbed from behind. Rikkund kept his eyes moving from shadow to shadow, letting the paranoia of potential assassins fill his imagination.
Rikkund's whiskers brushed against the smooth limestone walls. Many, many generations of Skaven ago, the Dwarves hollowed out the bedrock to form a backup reservoir underneath Nuln as a symbol of generosity to mankind. The water was diverted when it was no longer needed, but the grand cavern, like any other piece of Dawi design, remained long after it fell out of use.
After a dozen steps, Rikkund froze. Every strange moan and creak of wood forced him to pause in anticipation of a potential collapse of the shoddily built structure. His fingers dug into the few places to grip on the smooth limestone. Nothing was built to last in Skaven society. Untold numbers of Skaven die meaninglessly in preventable structure collapses and cave-ins. Fortunately, the structure held this time, so Rikkund followed paw after paw down the wooden structure.
Rikkund reached the base of the cavern after stopping in anticipation of a collapse twice more. A massive shantytown, filled with walls and roofs haphazardly arranged directly on top and across from each other, took up the space. Several small groups of ratmen eyed Rikkund, hiding their treacherous paws within their rags but not going so far as to bare their teeth. These skaven, clan rats, were ranked above skavenslaves in the Under-Empire's hierarchy. But only slightly. Killing a Grey Seer was a gamble only the most desperate would even dare consider.
The sensation of a million tiny eyes gave Rikkund the strength to tighten his grip around his blade. His eyes darted from the depths of every dim alley to the top of every building in anticipation of a potential assailant. The flicker of a faulty warplantern made the nearby shadows cast the illusion of an assassin. Rikkund clutched the bucket and his knife as he hastened his pace.
The soft but steady sound of flowing water told him the collecting drain was close. He quickened his pace, still careful to avoid any suspicious shapes on his path. He walked over a makeshift metal bridge spanning a small stream of waste water. A trio of skaven sat beside the fault, drinking water from the small brown stream. They panicked when the apprentice Grey Seer walked so brisky through their territory. No Skaven would exude such confidence unless they were going to murder someone, threaten to murder someone, or bluff about murdering someone. They scattered, leaving the musk of fear in their wake.
Rikkund stopped, watching the skaven dip into the shadows of a nearby canal. Scavengers had long rendered the canal unusable. Nearby buildings that collapsed against the canal walls were reinforced with bits of wood and scrap metal, relying on the dwarven structure for the bulk of its support. Rikkund held the remains close to his chest as he looked closer at an outline hovering on top of it.
A skaven completely clad in black stood atop the canal. It stared directly back at him until the ratman realized Rikkund spotted him. Rikkund immediately ducked underneath a shack on high alert for anyone else.
"A Grey Seer? The Horned Rat does favor me-me," a scraggly old skaven said.
Rikkund yelped, squirting the musk of fear. A weak decrepit skaven lied nearly motionless next to him. His fur was mottled and grey, breaking into patches of infected skin throughout his torso. His left leg was torn off and crudely cauterized. The normally black beady skaven eyes looked like orbs of cloudy white, staring blankly in the distance. He began hacking up a yellow phlegm. The old skaven was barely able to lift his hand to grip his chest.
The old skaven spoke, "Would you help-assist me. Speak-tell a short prayer for the Great Horned Rat?"
Rikkund reached into his robe and held his knife to the old skaven's neck.
He whispered in the skaven's ear, "Speak-squeak quickly if you want to live. Tell-say where other skaven hide."
The old skaven pointed to a nearby building. Two pairs of rat ears ducked into cover when Rikkund tried to subtly look at it. Rikkund dropped the knife and pulled out his last warptoken, the currency of the Under-Empire. The old skaven caught it and brought it to his eye.
"Payment for info," Rikkund whispered before darting in the opposite direction as his ambushers.
As he turned the corner, the other skaven lept from the building and ripped the warptoken from the old skavens paws. It quickly devolved into a brawl that left the victor with a deep gash in his stomach and two dead losers. The victor celebrated by eating the old skaven first. Rikkund gripped his horns in frustration, lamenting his error. If he had left a wound on the old skaven, maybe they would have spared his life. Rikkund shook the thought away. Probably not.
After some time, Rikkund found the massive drain pipe sitting at the lowest basin of the cavern. Its concrete cover had been crushed by Skaven machinery long ago, leaving it in a pile of rubble beside the exit. Aside from the brutal cracks lining the point of impact, the dwarven design held true and the rocks had not been scratched since the day of its destruction. Rikkund walked through the pipe, listening to his soggy steps echo into the distance.
Shadows from the warplanterns near the entrance of the tunnel extended into near-darkness. Rikkund relied on scent and an unsteady paw on the walls of the pipe to continue. The rushing water drowned out Rikkunds presence as he walked to the entrance of the collecting duct.
In times of heavy rain, the river ran high and poured its excess water into the sewage system below. Everything could be diverted through this collecting duct, need be. Rikkund's master Vellux often complained about the flood that ruined many of his belongings two springs ago. The strength and presence of pollen in the water let Rikkund deduce springtime was nearing again. Eventually, the pipe finally reached its destination.
Rikkund stood in front of a massive cylindrical chamber. Water roared from an unknowable height above to depths far deeper than the Undercity. Water spewed from the multitude of similarly sized pipes at various distances above and below Rikkund. It reminded him of a giant nephron spewing Nuln's waste into a singular channel.
Rikkund lifted the bucket at his side. The remains of the corpse had mixed with the refuse, leaving a disgusting mulch. He held the bucket in front of him. It dangled above the seemingly bottomless channel. Water from pipes above and below poured into the black abyss beneath him. An old Nuln schematic stated the water ultimately drained to one of the several nearby rivers. Wherever it led, it was far from the influence of the Skaven underneath Nuln.
"No one told me-me your…" Rikkund said. The Skaven tongue seemed to take any sincerity from his voice.
Rikkund continued in English, "No one told me your name. I always found out as much as I could whenever I had to eat…"
He went back to the bucket, noticing part of a pelvic bone sticking above the rotten mush. Most of it was shattered and stained with fat. Rikkund's eyes traced the remnants of the heart shaped pelvis into the rest of the remains.
"So you were probably a man," lamented Rikkund, "I wonder if you were like the farmer too. Gaslit into believing the Skaven were myths then forced to watch them slaughter your family. That village was razed and burned to the ground because there was an inkling of a rumor that warpstone was there. It wasn't but they all died. Died for nothing…"
"I'm sorry," Rikkund said.
Rikkund tilted the bucket forward. The bucket turned over, its contents flooding out. The remains dropped into the channel, drowning in a rush of water. Rikkund waited, listening to the rush around him. His muzzle dampened from the mist formed by water bouncing from the cobblestone walls of the chamber.
"You deserved better than this."
It took no more than a moment for Rikkund to notice something was amiss. Even with an aptitude for low light, Rikkund could see no further than a few feet down the tunnel. He relied on his Skaven sense of smell and took a long deep sniff of the air. First and foremost, the smell of old water flooded his nostrils. Then, the rotting meat and feces from the bucket he carried. He took another sniff and felt fear spread through his body. Another Skaven approached. Was it the skaven from the canal?
Chants to summon the powers of the Great Horned Rat fumbled out of Rikkund's mouth. His practice over the past few months had paid off as the Winds of Magic began to swirl around Rikkund's body. His eyes glowed green with the power of his rat god and energy began to spark in his fingertips. He could feel the gruesome power throughout his body from the tips of his fingers to the end of his tail. The strain was immense.
Too intense, in fact. The power simply vanished, fading away from Rikkund. The novice Seer collapsed from exertion in a vain attempt to catch his breath. Panting, he looked upwards and shifted his hand to the knife at his side. He could bluff his way through this. Don't show any weakness.
Rikkund shouted, "You are the biggest fool-rat in the Under-empire to walk unannounced to a Grey Seer. Leave now-now or I will murder-kill you with magic gifted by the Horned Rat."
The figure stopped. "Then, do-do it. Cast-chant your silly magic."
Rikkund curses were drowned out by the rushing water behind him. Attempting to cast another spell would render him vulnerable if he failed. More likely, when he failed. The apprentice Seer adjusted the knife in his hand and prepared to pounce forward.
"So you can't cast-chant Grey Seer magic?" said an icy voice.
Winds of magic stirred in the air again. It rushed beneath Rikkund's legs towards the skaven in front of him. Ugly green energy glowed in a single eye before lighting up the pipe.
The icy voice spoke, this time, laughing, "You were always weak-weak, brother-trash."
A/N: Thanks for reading. I appreciate any feedback/suggestions for future chapters!