A Last Sniff of Glory Read online

  He held it in both paws as if weighing it up before deciding whether to open it.

  Reverently, he unwrapped it.

  There in his paws, bundled up like the meanest offspring of the union between rat and machine, was a wearable steel claw. It was three times the size of his own. The foreclaw in particular was long and terminated in a flared muzzle with a swollen knuckle of copper wires and rusted valves. Eldritch glyphs and technosorcerous symbols decorated the gauntlet, chief amongst them the emblem of Clan Skyre on the cuff and on the muzzle of the big talon.

  He had been given the gauntlet when the name ‘Red Claw’ had been big enough to earn the sponsorship of one of the Greater Clans.

  Not the Skavenblight Scramblers.

  Him.

  Above the gauntlet was a rickety scaffold of pulleys and rods custom-built for his arm. He slid the arm in with a soft squeak of pleasure, then wormed his claws into the control glove. He flexed his fingers, and made a fist. The old gauntlet emitted a plaintive squeal as mechanisms left to drown and choke on their own rust struggled to ape it. He chittered satisfaction nonetheless and looked to the bag of warpstone still held clutched to his breast, provoking a spasm of unnatural hunger.

  Just one nibble now wouldn’t hurt. There would still be more left for later.

  He wiggled his fingers and the mechanical steam-claw cried for mercy.

  He could almost hear the crowds scream ‘Red Claw’ again.

  ‘Let’s turn our attention to the match at hand.’

  Rurrk licked his lips and grunted assent.

  ‘The Eight Point Star is so beloved because it features only the eight most evil teams in Blood Bowl, as voted for by the fans. I confess to a little bias, but with the tournament finals right here in Drakenhof this year, the Drakenhof Templars are everyone’s favourite to lift the trophy. Are you nervous about the prospect of facing them, or are you hoping that the Evil Gitz will do you a favour in tonight’s other match?’

  Rurrk stared blankly.

  The interviewer shook his head, amused.

  ‘Moving on then. Again. The talk outside the ground right now is all about your first head-to-head with Prince Amaranth since that famous night in Erengrad. Your careers have taken very different trajectories since then. Can the fans really look forward to a re-match? Will you meet him head on as you did seven years ago?’

  Razzel leaned forwards, blinking rapidly as the candle’s flickering glow was turned towards him.

  ‘Our plan-scheme for Prince Amaranth is between the Great Horned Rat and me.’

  Clanking in his armour, Rurrk huffed up the tunnel from the away team dugout. The silence that cheered him from the solitary wooden stand as he emerged into the night was as thin as the moonlight that draped it in Mannslieb’s home colours. Astrogranite crunched under his footpaws as he neared the sideline and took a sniff of the open space. The lump in his head ached.

  With a week to go, Grey Seer Razzel had grudgingly paid out for a training session in what some local official had disingenuously described as a similar arena.

  Rurrk suspected that the stadium of the Waldenhof Pipers had never been anything but the runt of the Drakenhof litter, but even what there was had smelled better days. The seating in the wooden skeleton of a stand was long gone. The field was cracked and furry with flowering weeds. And Kato had gleefully reported something large living in the away arming chamber before venturing in with a grabber and a net.

  Puffing out his cheeks, Rurrk slugged the final few yards to the field.

  He’d never been the quickest. There was even a joke about it.

  ‘Who quicker, Red Claw Rurrk or treeman? Depends, is treeman still sleeping?’

  Now though, it was obscene. He was immense, put-on muscle squeezed into his old armour as though a warlock had stuck him with a needle and inflated him. Every step shot pain up his shins. It felt as if his legs would have given by now if not for the triple-winding of strapping holding in his knees.

  A couple of stormvermin were warming up on the sideline with some light relays and they laughed, jogging on the spot, as he clunked towards them.

  ‘Thirteen!’ squeaked one, a three-season veteran called Bisk, and tittered in mock amazement. ‘It move-moves!’

  ‘Quiet. Do not be rude-bad.’ His relay partner, Grist. ‘Do you not see-smell? Great Red Claw is back.’

  ‘You mean Rust Claw,’ said Bisk and exploded with chittering laughter. Rurrk made no reply as he clumped past, but did pause long enough to punch Bisk in the chest.

  The stormvermin folded around his steam-claw with a pathetic mewling noise, then collapsed on the ground, whimpering with pain. Rurrk would have trodden on him too if he could have lifted his knee so high, but could not, and so settled for crushing the other skaven’s tail. You couldn’t have everything.

  Grist, meanwhile, wisely shut his muzzle and scampered for the safety of his teammates with his tail between his legs.

  ‘Starting places! Not have all night!’ Razzel waved his staff, tinkling like a wind chime. His white fur and puritan robes lit the Grey Seer like a brazier in the moonlight. He had been in a bad mood ever since Likkish and Skat had failed to turn up for the team’s sedan convoy from Skavenblight.

  Rurrk patted his gurgling belly.

  Add to Kato’s many talents, he was a splendid cook.

  Kato pointed excitedly to Bisk’s splayed figure from the decrepit little stand, a pocket of furry bodies comprising the team’s treasurers, cooks, engineers and assorted hangers-on. He mimed a ‘sleeping’ gesture, and then squeaked something encouraging that Rurrk couldn’t wholly make out.

  The players positioned themselves over the field to the squeaked instructions of the coaches. Both teams had been drawn from the Scramblers’ roster, with the team expected to line up against the Princedom of Pain in a week’s time facing off against the rest.

  Rurrk’s number was with ‘the rest’, which for today suited him perfectly.

  Wheezing like a bellows with a hole in it, Rurrk shoved a stormvermin with a sleek coat of black fur and shiny red-brown armour off his favoured spot right in the middle of the scrimmage line. He bared fangs then brandished his claw, and the whelp quickly found himself another place on the line. Ignoring the shrill appeals of his side’s coach, he turned round and passed his gaze along the opposing line-up.

  They were all familiar faces. Household names even. Big stormvermin in spiked guards. Line-rats grizzled by white eyes and torn ears and more scars apiece than years between them. Their hunches were loose, confident.

  At the end of the opposition flank was a brooding rat-ogre part-armoured in green plate bearing its owners’ emblems. Its rough hide was tattooed with further advertisements and covered with scorched cankers and sores. It glared stupidly at its handler as the skaven chittered at it, pointed at the terrified line-rats in front of it and occasionally emphasised a salient point with a slap across the snout.

  A braver rat than Rurrk.

  It wasn’t Headsplitter.

  That was one more reason for Razzel’s current searing temper. The legendary rat-ogre had, despite the near-magical disappearance of a fortune in bribes and agents’ fees, been otherwise employed on the other side of the world in Lustria for some months. All of which meant that the Grey Seer could now add a difficult-to-explain hole in the team treasuries to his end-of-season summons before the Council of Thirteen. The last-minute find of a halfway like-for-like replacement in Manwrecker (what its sponsors had in mind touring the provincial Sylvanian leagues Rurrk didn’t know and Razzel had been in no position to ask) had calmed the head coach down enough to squeal coherent instructions, but no more.

  An assistant coach in black and white checked rags standing in as referee scurried back from the scrimmage line and blew his whistle.

  Like a slave conditioned to his master’s call, Rurrk’s mind switch
ed on.

  The blinkers came down. The excited squeaks of the understaffers became a muted backdrop, the dull creak of a tunnel. The moon disappeared from view, a source of light, nothing else, as the world shrunk to a hundred and twenty tail-lengths by fifty-four and with him at its middle. He felt the kicker run up to the ball as he would an itch up his tail. The line-rat smacked his footpaw through it, the meat-slap clarion rang along Rurrk’s whiskers, bypassed his brain, and scurried down his spine to his arm.

  The stormvermin on the other side of the painted line was still watching for the kick-off when Rurrk’s rusted claw smashed through his snout. With a squeal, the big rat went down, and with a dozen more shrill cries just like it the two scrimmage lines crashed together.

  Skaven hissed and squealed. Claws scratched on metal. Tails clobbered heads and poked for eyes. Moonlight glinted on a previously concealed blade.

  Even in ‘friendlies’, skaven weren’t renowned for fair play.

  From somewhere, the ecstatic squeak of the thrower. ‘Long-long! Run-quick!’

  A stormvermin with something to prove went down under the challenge of a heavier model with better armour, and short-sightedness be damned, Rurrk got a good look as the black-furred behemoth followed through and came at him.

  The blitzing player cannoned off Rurrk’s shoulder and rolled muzzle-over-tail back across the scrimmage line. With both a gape and a giggle making their own shapes of his muzzle, he watched the stormvermin’s head disappear in a tuft of weeds. His iron claw whistled out greenish steam as his bulging bicep prematurely activated against the mechanism.

  He could have hugged Kato!

  The rat he had laid out during kick-off issued a groan and scratched meekly at Rurrk’s greaves. He stamped on the stormvermin’s helmet, crushing it like a stage prop. Blood and brain juices splattered through the flattened opening in the front, a spray pattern darkening the silvered ground.

  With a squeaked roar, Rurrk struggled to free his footpaw from the ruined helmet.

  His heart ran like a bull centaur on fire. His gut roared, hungry as a warpstone furnace, but strength pumped through his old muscles with the willing fizz of power.

  With a shrieking tear of metal, he got his footpaw out.

  He should have done this years ago.

  He could hear Kato’s squeaks of excitement from the stands, the roar of the crowd in his mind, the thump of their drums and the blare of their horns pushing blood through his ears.

  He swung his claw in a hiss of gadgetry and near-beheaded a line-rat that tried to jink past him. The rat’s footpaws skidded under him and he crashed onto his back and performed a boneless reverse somersault.

  Rurrk looked down on him, and so caught the flight of the ball late as it sailed over his head. He made a half-hearted flap at it with his unaugmented arm, but was too outrageously top-heavy to make a proper jump and the ball zipped past.

  He hardly needed to make his thick neck turn to see the ball sink soundlessly into the arms of the gutter-runner, Silkpaw. The black-shrouded runner smoothed the ball into the folds of his sleeve as though it were a bawling man-thing infant held for ransom, then spun on a warptoken and broke through the cage of squealing line-rats that had thought him marked.

  And then he decided to start running.

  Tinny cheers broke out from the minuscule crowd as Silkpaw took a lap of the end zone while his pursuers caught up. Then he tossed the ball nonchalantly over his shoulders and wove back to his own half as the line-rats folded over knackered legs and gasped like fish caught out of water and made to play Blood Bowl. His circuitous victory lap took him by Rurrk and he winked as he scampered by.

  Rurrk gave a wave of his bloody gauntlet.

  The fans loved Silkpaw. Everyone else wanted his legs broken. Another place where Rurrk’s opinions took tangents. He appreciated a good player, and they didn’t come better. That and their utterly contrasting playing styles left a jealousy-shaped absence in which a friendship of mutual ambivalence could prosper.

  ‘This not game-play!’ Razzel shrieked. His eyes were beginning to turn fully black and his palanquin bearers were beginning to squirt fear musk. Dark magic flowed through the Grey Seer’s voluminous robes and licked about his horns. ‘You get ball, you score fast-quick. And remember.’ Those throbbing disks fixed on Rurrk as if they might, on another day, have willed him to ignite. ‘This practice-play!’

  Warlock apothecaries lugged pots of skalm onto the field. One of them, red-cloaked against the night cold and with a green-lensed monocle, squatted by the flattened line-rat. He wafted a jar of warpstone snuff under his snout, then cocked an ear before pronouncing the rat dead. A pair of kitchen hirelings came along with shovels to scrape the first stormvermin off the astrogranite. It did not take an apothecary to tell anyone he was dead. Elsewhere, Manwrecker’s gore-slicked snout was coaxed out of the entrails of a line-rat whose eviscerated remains the clear-up crew were keeping way back from. The rat-ogre’s handler waved some kind of lure attached to a long stick and then, once he had the mutant beast’s attention, walked the goad back up the field to its position in the line-up.

  Rurrk watched, lips pursed, and came to a decision. He clanked slowly down the scrimmage line. Razzel watched his approach towards Manwrecker with an explosive expression.

  If rats could sweat...

  The referee took a quick tail-count to make sure no one had snuck on an extra player during the restart, then brought his whistle to his muzzle. He took a deep breath. His cheeks inflated.

  And Razzel cracked.

  ‘Fine! Fine! You play next week.’ The Grey Seer pointed a trembling finger at Rurrk. ‘But no more practice for you!’

  The interviewer nodded in feigned understanding, and Razzel fidgeted back down, chittering under his breath. He returned his attention to Rurrk and the candle flame shifted with it.

  ‘I was fortunate enough to be at the Skavenblight Scramblers’ season opener and saw you knocked out by the previously unheralded Stovel Jamsalad. May he rest in peace. I can’t help but notice the improvement in your physique since then: a grey hair here and there, but you almost look like the Red Claw of old.’ He gestured to the rusted iron harness about his right arm and smiled, something practised and yet very far from perfect. ‘I’m sure every mortal of a certain age wants to hear your secret. Perhaps you can tell us something about your training?’ He leaned in, his smile conspiratorial.

  ‘Anything... special?’

  Kato rubbed down Rurrk’s fur. The wires of his brush were already thick with his fur, and the menial’s tongue lolled from the side of his mouth as he tried to clear them out. They had both given up on trying to get Rurrk out of his armour. Kato had undone the buckles at the back of his greave only for the muscles of his lower leg to hold the plate exactly in place. ‘Have to keep them on for the week,’ Kato had shrugged. It suited Rurrk.

  He never wanted to take them off again.

  ‘They squeak-say that Amaranth possessed by daemon, that why he so strong.’

  The voice had come from behind him, and Rurrk twisted round with a snarl. Silkpaw was there, sitting on the crumbling ruin of a wash basin. Its stone fascia was gone or had never been fitted, and there were cobwebs where there should have been water.

  ‘How you get in here?’ said Rurrk. He’d been facing the tunnel.

  The gutter-runner idly kicked the air with his footpaws. ‘I need no practice-play. Like you.’ He tilted his muzzle and looked at Rurrk piercingly. ‘I no old-meat, but I around long enough to know signs of warpstone poison. Fur loss. Hunger pain–’

  Rurrk bared his teeth.

  ‘–Temper.’

  ‘Sneak-rat should mind his own business. He still has glory ahead. Mine already far behind. Maybe… maybe just one more day.’ His eyes turned gauzy and he unclenched his fist. His gauntlet let off the steam it had built up with an acrid wheeze. ‘
You not there that day in Erengrad-place.’

  Silkpaw lowered his snout and bared his throat. Just for a moment, but all the same. He gestured with his nose to the arming chamber’s dirt ceiling. ‘I was there. In crowd. I saw you play that day.’ He sat back then, flicked out his tail. ‘Not care about warpstone. All stormvermin need-take. Most line-rats too. But this? This too much.’ He shrugged, sorrowful. ‘You going to die, Red Claw, before whistle blows if you not careful.’

  ‘I don’t know about the people watching, but I’m excited.’ He smiled coldly, teeth sharpened by candlelight. ‘CabalVision and our official tournament betting partner, Other Side, have now stopped taking wagers on your dying today after a flurry of betting in the run-up to the match. What do you have to say to those people who’ve already voted with their money pouches?’

  Rurrk sprung from the bench with a high-pitched growl.

  Aggression filling his muscles, he lashed out his tail and snapped the damned candlestick in half. It was still sputtering out on the floor when he pounced onto the stone-lidded sarcophagus it had been fixed upon and raised his claw to strike at the man sitting behind it.

  He squealed wordless fury as a pair of ghoulish heavies took him under each arm and lifted him back off the slab. He snapped for them, green-flecked and faintly luminescent froth spraying their dead faces, and thrashed his tail in a useless rage. He squealed an insanity of sounds which even in his head hadn’t begun as words.

  Throughout the episode, the interviewer did not bat an eye.

  He glanced over his shoulder to the cowled mummer who was magically transmitting the interview live, mimed a ‘cut’ across his throat and then turned back to Rurrk. He winked.

  ‘I like the temper. The fans will love it.’ For a moment, the measured facade slipped and the vampire bared fangs. ‘If you should die then try to do it neatly. Arrangements are already in place for your remains.’

  The crowd roared as the hunched figures of the Skavenblight Scramblers and the broken knights of the Princedom of Pain marched onto the Drakenhof’s famous field, and everything that had come before was forgotten. Rurrk’s too-short life became a broken tableau of loosely connected moments: the crash of a tackle; metal on leather; teeth flying; a ball in his hand; banners rippling, in the stands, held across scores of febrile paws and emblazoned in glittering claw-scratch with the name Red Claw. The only shared feature was him, growing progressively then noticeably and then unmistakably older as they passed.