Chapter 78

Marcus stared through his groggy eyes at his servant, watching the high priest work his magic, weaving threads of restorative energy through his gnarled fingertips. Energy that he sorely needed himself, by the looks of his pallid features.

“We are born…in rot,” he said with an almost serene air. “We…die…in rot.”

His statement was punctuated by a series of bloody coughs and sputters. Every movement of his lips, every word he formed, seemed like a lingering agony. Marcus watched him double over in pain. He was practically holding himself together with any strength he had left in his tiny body.

“Once again…” Marcus groaned. “You do too much for me, Deekius.”

He looked towards Skegga’s old throne.

“He’s dead?”

It seemed so odd a question that even Deekius couldn’t help but chuckle, his yellowed tongue flicking between his fangs as he did so.

“More dead…than one can be. We are…victorious…Shai-Alud…”

“Then why,” Marcus murmured. “Do you look so…so…”

He suddenly felt something lurch within his stomach – at the very spot where Deekius had laid his healing claws and directed the green light of the Gloomraav to his body. He tried to move, and yet he felt his every vein surge in the instant he tried to command his limbs. His eyes darted around, seeing the smile stretched across Deekius’ face, feeling something travel through his body. Something…foreign. Something new.

This something was traveling through his body with speed hitherto unknown – like a new chemical sending every synapse sparking off into explosive life, a drug that was changing the very anatomical structure of his being.

He tensed, veins popping on his forehead as he snarled and foamed at his mouth, before fixing his attention on Deekius again.

And with any dark Gods that did exist in this world as his witness, he saw the light in the ratman’s eyes fade away to nothing before him.

“Deekius…” he murmured. “What have you…”

“I am…telling you…” the rat-priest whispered, his voice little more than a hoarse choking. “I saw…where my path ends…long ago. I am doing…what must be…done…before the end.”

Somewhere nearby, a set of wet paw steps clattered on the bloody stones of the palace floor.

A blade glinted in the shadows.

“And yet still,” Deekius said. “This path is taking…strange turns.”

The shadow crept closer, a set of snarling teeth shining through the dark.

“I knew my life would…be ending here,” Deekius told the shadowed figure appearing through the dust of Grindlefecht. “But still…I never expected…you…would be…bearing the knife.”

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Marcus peered through the dust that still enveloped the ruins of Grindlefecht.

And slowly, a figure in the shape of a hulking rat phased through its gaseous curtain.

“You were not wishing to stab me…in the back, then?” Deekius asked the approaching shadow. “No…it was never…your way…”

As the gnarled paws of the warrior-rat came into focus, Marcus breathed an intake of acidic air that was still tainted by the fat toad’s final discharge of ordnance in death.

“You knew it would come to this, Gloomraava.”

Marcus’s addled brain flew to catch up with the reality unfolding before him, seeing the hobbled form of Skeever march into full view to stand before him and Deekius.

“Skeever…” Marcus snarled. “G-gather the troops. We have to find…Silas.”

The rat merely looked down at the shuddering form of his Shai-Alud and did nothing.

“Skeever?”

The ratman warrior met his confused stare with barely checked rage, his dark eyes flitting towards Deekius.

“If you wish to fight, Brother, you shall be losing.”

The rat-priest gave a throaty chuckle. “I have done…what was asked of me,” he replied. “My feet are treading the path…meant for me. As have yours, dear Brother.”

“You do not know the reason for your end?”

Deekius spat a globule of corrupted blood at the dull stones of the temple floor. “Your…reasons do not matter,” he replied. “None of them…do. All that is transpiring…is according to the Unclean…”

Marcus spat through the pain he could still feel gnawing at his ribs. He couldn’t make heads or tails of this nonsense.

But a sinking feeling was beginning to gnaw at him.

“Skeever,” he said. “Obey your Shai-Alud’s command. Return to…the foot of the temple. Gather the men that…remain.”

Once again, the Talon-Commander of Clan Red-Eye simply looked blankly at his General, his eyes looking right through Marcus as though the human was not even there.

Then his eyes flew again to Deekius’ shuddering form, and Marcus saw the glint of fury that overcame his features.

“Skeever…” he breathed. “No…”

“So be it,” Skeever Steelclaw whispered as he marched towards his Brother rat and raised his cleaver. “You always wished to stand beside He-Who-Festers, did you not?”

“Skeever,” Marcus growled, forcing his body to move through the strange pain that practically left him helpless. “Don’t –“

“Then let me send you to him.”

His machete flashed through the filth-ridden air with such speed that Marcus couldn’t have intercepted him even at his full strength. Through his foggy vision, he saw the ratman slice through Deekius’s quarterstaff and then twist his blade to deliver a mercy stroke to the rat priest’s jugular.

“No!”

He stumbled forward, body still shuddering as though the dark energies that had once swelled within him clung to life. But when his head hit the ground, his body tumbled down with it, and Marcus was left to stare into those tired old eyes as the priest that had summoned him finally left his grim world behind, still wearing a strangely serene smile.

“Bastard!” Marcus yelped, throwing himself at the snarling rat, knowing that a single stroke of Skeever’s blade could end him just as quickly as he’d just felled his brother.

The eyes of the betrayer met those of his General, and in the split second of unrelenting fury Marcus displayed, the rat made up his mind and struck him in the gut with the butt of his blade, winding him and sending him slumping to the ground, consciousness fading away once again.

He looked up at Skeever from the bloody, dust-laden temple floor, heart too heavy for anything but hate, head too addled to think of anything more to do than spit one word at his hateful face.

“Traitor…”

Skeever fixed him with his cold crimson eyes before Marcus once again tumbled away into the blackness of sleep.

“To you, Marcus,” the ratman said. “Never to my realm.”

***

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