Skavendom in all its teeming millions was ran by the Grey Lords, the greatest, darkest and foulest of all Ratmen who ruled the scurrying hordes of the under empire as it gnawed at the foundations of the dwarves and tunneled beneath the fledgling cities of humanity. Masters of the technowizards of Clan Skyre, the Warriors of Clan Morrs, the insect breeders of Clan Verms and the upstart monster makers of Clan Moulder and countless other clans were the Grey Lords and the terrible magic power of the Grey Seers were their instruments. But they were not unopposed.
The oldest source was the largest, a terrible foe from the west long thought dead. Clan Pestilens had turned to heresy, to worshiping the Horned Rat as the spreader of disease and maker of plagues. Powerful was the returning army from Lustria and its virulent toxins found a ready home in the twisted bodies and weakened immunities of the crowded warrens. All of the holds of Araby fell to them, and the holds of the south lands beneath it and from here they made a war upon the loyalist clans of the north, swarming beneath Estalia in a rotting tide with plague, poison and fanaticism as its weapons. Millions of Skaven now followed their tattered banners and their threat was great.
But it was an old threat, one grown familiar, comfortable even. Devious and heretical Clan Pestilens was, but it could be understood, countered fought.
The other threat was Cluny and the worst thing about Cluny, no one understood Cluny.
Cluny was an abomination-thing from the breedingpits of Clan Moulder under the Ungol-Wastes, an experiment to build the perfect storm vermin that had gone horrifically right, a Skaven who felt no fear, who lead instinctively. Cluny had ripped his way full grown from the soft bulk of a breeder's belly and stood towering and bloody above his maker before devouring his heart. The warrens of Hell-Pit had been bright as day with the light of burning chemicals and loud with the screams of the Pack-Masters, an omen for the rest of Skavendom.
Cluny was a cold blooded daemon from the burning hells of Lustria. During the long wars against the usurper Clan Pestilens the saurus monster had grown addicted to the blood and flesh of Skaven, despairing when the Prophet of Sotek had driven the ratmen back across the sea. So great was Cluny's thirst, he had skinned half a dozen plague priests and stitched their pelts above his own and thus joined in their retreat. Unknowingly the Plague Priests had carried in their ranks an infection far worse than any of Nurgle's plagues, a fever that would burn all the warrens to ash.
Cluny was a Grey Seer, among the thirteen greatest of that despised order and leader of an army against the heretics of the plague god. Success was found and the diseased mad-rats had been driven out from a dozen captured dwarf holds and sub-human warrens, but victory bred fear in Cluny's superiors. They poisoned the slaves sent to feed Cluny's army and thus the Seer's army was defeated. Cluny was captured by the Plague Monks and his horns were cut away, taking with them his powers. He was thrown into a pit filled with jungle cats, yet he emerged alive to take his vengeance upon all who had betrayed him.
Cluny was the savior of Skavendom, Everchosen Avatar of the Horned Rat. His people had been driven beneath the earth, first by Sigmar and then by Myrmida, the dwarves were on the attack and the civil war between the Grey Lords and the Plague Monks had raged a thousand years with no success. Tiring of their petty squabbles, the Horned Rat had plucked one of his hundred horns and breathed life into it, turning it into Cluny. Cluny was his scourge, to batter Skavendom back into glory. Cluny would kill all the clans, unite all the clans, capture all the dwarf holds and put the races of men back in their rightful slavery.
Cluny was a Dwarf King, who's only son was slain by the ratmen. In vengeance he had taken the Slayer Oath and butchered Skaven for five hundred years, until the warrens had drowned in blood. But he had grown too old to raise his axe and in despair had prayed to whatever god would listen for an eternity of killing Skaven. The gods of chaos had heard his prayer and in jest changed him into a monstrous skaven, immune to any blow, immortal to the flow of time and obsessed with slaying his own kind. Only when the last warren had collapsed and the last skaven pup dashed against the wall would Cluny be freed of his oath.
Cluny was the last survivor of Clan Eshen, the army sent to pacify the distant east a thousand years ago. Promised help had failed to arrive and year by year, Clan Eshen was worn down by the endless armies of the Dragon Emperor until only Cluny was left. Abandoned, he had refused to die and returned to Skavendom to make the other clans suffer as Eshen had suffered. Hardened by an eternity of exotic war, Cluny moved without a sound and struck from the shadows, invisible to even the greatest sorcery. He would strike down the clans one by one, until only he remained.
Cluny was Sigmar, the Ur-Emperor, the Man-God, the Hammer Bearer who had driven the Skaven beneath the earth five centuries previously and freed their slaves. He had grown bored of slaying the endless Orcs and Kurgan on the other side of the worlds edge and returned to taunt his favored foe. With a trick he made his form that of the Horned Rat, that the Skaven would know despair as he slew them.
There were a thousand stories of what Cluny was, where Cluny had come from, what drove his endless war against all creation. None of them agreed, none of them matched and none of them made any sense. No one, not the hairless, whip scarred slave pulling bog iron from the haunted marshes or the surviving Grey Lords in Skavenblight's great bell tower knew which one was really true. Because no one knew who Cluny was, no one knew how to fight Cluny because no Skaven fought quite like Cluny.
Under-Nuln knew that very well now.
Bells announced Cluny's coming. Thumble sized tin bells looted from peddlers, bronze ship bells ripped from the decks of wrecked ships, cart sized iron bells looted from Tilean cathedrals. They clanged and boomed and rang through the Under-Way to announce Under-Nuln's death. Echoes were so loud that every Skaven in the city might as well have been deaf and the Empress at her banquet thought the sound the rumble of some courtier's stomach, while the city's priests thought it a portent of their Emperor's victory over Marburg.
Cluny came from the river and Cluny came down from the city and Cluny came up from the underways. Cluny was thirty thousand Skaven from a dozen clans united in fear of the Scourge, Cluny was a score of void stalker scorpions thirsting for ratmen blood, Cluny was four Hell Serpent centipedes writhing towards prey, Cluny was a forty foot taratula dragging a cathedral bell and most of all Cluny was a hundred black clad assassins waiting in the escape tunnels with poisoned knives. Into the confusion and terror of Under Nuln came Cluny and death came with him.
On the clan rat's shoulders were screens of hide and silk, stretching across the tunnels on frames of wood. Their smell drove the already confused Skaven into a panic, for the leather had been the skin of forest cats and the great spiders of the underway and the predators' stink was still thick upon it. Twenty feet from the milling crowds in the warren's markets, Cluny's horde started throwing bottles. The stolen glass was filled with the milk of breeders from the last warren and its hormonal stench drove the already fearful skaven of Under-Nuln mad.
The battle was not over quickly, but Cluny had won it before the first blade was drawn.
Snik-paw, traitor seer and most magnificent of all Cluny's followers, found his lord at the end of the fighting, in the oil reeking caverns of Clan Skyre's compound. Corpses burned or blasted to crisps littered the entrances, while the dark portals glittered with the shine of the technosorceror's exotic weapons. Cluny's army was massed around bends in the tunnels, waiting for their lord's command to move in. Armored Storm Vermin recognized the seer and beat a path for him through the mob, the clan rats refusing to part for the seer as would be his right in any other army.
'Lord-King, great scourge-savior of all ratmen!' the traitor seer yelled as he prostrated himself on the tunnel floor, fear glands expelling rapidly, 'I fail-fail, kill-slay not!'
'Shut up,' Cluny rasped, his single outer ear cocked upwards, listening to something no other Skaven could hear.
Before Skavendom's greatest warlord Snik-paw and even the elite vermin were dwarfed, Cluny towering chest and shoulders above them. Enormous muscles strained the black surface of his war plate, taken from the twist dwarfs of the far east, while the mummified and still armored gauntlet of a dwarf king was hung from his neck. A preyton's horns jutted from his helmet, framing the glow of his single red eye. His muzzle jutted out from between the black barbute's gap, its hair black where it wasn't covered in scars. Most disturbingly, Cluny's snout was still, not sniffing back and forth for danger or threat as a Skaven's should. Only the python thick length of his tail moved, the gigantic appendage lashing the dirt on its own volition before rising up above Cluny's head.
'Listen, all of you,' Cluny ordered in his odd accent, the chittering and whispering of the horde stopping in an instant, 'I've estimated how long it takes for them to reload. We send in the next wave of new captives and then we charge as soon as they fire. Not a moment before not a moment after. If we're slow, we die and we've together for too long and fought too hard to die here. Sweep the entrances, kill the guards, keep the warlock engineers alive. Take anything else, kill anything else, but keep the warlocks alive. Snik-Paw, stay by me.'
Snik-Paw cringed, knowing that his Lord fought only at the very front of the lines. He would thus be at the very fore of the fray, where his magic counted for less. Once more the desire to plant a knife in Cluny's back rose, quashed by fears that against the goliath skaven it would do nothing and that the cursed gauntlets bolted to Snik-Paw's hands would fulfill Cluny's promise of throttling him if the warlord died. All he could do was bite a chunk of warpstone for extra power and courage as a mob of captives from the rest of Under-Nuln were whipped past them.
Within a moment there was a great crack and the reek of ozone and burned hair, the slaves burning without time to scream. Cluny's tail smote the air with an even louder pop and the enormous ratman bounded out on all fores, his plates quiet as a night wind. Snik-Paw was swept after him in the charge of clan rats and storm vermin, all of them chanting Cluny's name from their scabrous lips. Through the winding tunnels and into the cavernous warren the horde charged, their Lord's immense back their only sight.
Cluny dashed into the Clan Skyre warren, clawed gauntlets and barbed tail lashing without pause to disembowel the crew-rats of some great bellows' device. A single bound had him over the contraption and reeking bloody havoc amongst the clan's storm vermin. His axe was out, a great stolen thing of dwarf metal that bit through their rusty mail to spill their modified blood. As he was swept into the fray, Snik-Paw could not help but think with warp stone fueled courage how he should incinerate the heretical Rat-Lord who dared make him cower in fear.
Clan Skyre beat him to it, another gout of green flame washing over Cluny and his opponents. The horde winced as one, screaming in rage that their savior had been slain, while from the warren emerged a cadaverously thin warlock seer, his frail body reinforced with copper pipes and hissing pneumatics that almost covered his laughter. More Storm Vermin and the Warlock's apprentices appeared behind him, the junior warlocks cocking arbalests to shoot down Cluny's horde, which was trapped behind the fires.
'Snik-Paw, end them,' Cluny bellowed, voice rising from the flames like a daemon prince from hell.
Reflexively the Seer obeyed, firing the power he'd ben planning to use on his chief forwards to detonate in the rear ranks of the Warlock's army. Ratmen were knocked forwards and the tunnel rumbled, while the remaining Skyre skaven screamed to be trapped between two flames. They screamed louder when Cluny emerged from the fire before them.
A green glow, sickly as plague, enveloped the Warlord, protecting him from the fire even as it symbolized the Horned Rat's favor. He walked calmly from the flames and his tail cracked out to wrest some device from the warlock's hand. A single punched floored the skyre chieftain and Cluny placed a taloned foot on his neck, tail lashing behind him.
'Drop your weapons and follow me,' the scourge promised, 'I will lead you better than this pile of filth ever could.'
Timidly the Clan Skyre forces obeyed, while Cluny's own army hurridly brought up sand and earth to smother the fire. Cluny's great tail lashed impatiently until a path was cut and then wrenched the warlock over his shoulder, walking through the still roiling ashes to toss his body before Snik-Paw's feet.
'You will ensure our new acquisition's loyalty in a moment,' Cluny ordered the Seer, 'his skills at explosives and steam will be most useful to the Horned Rat's vision. For now, you must explain to me why you failed. Not enough troops? Too stiff opposition? Cowardice?'
The last word bit hard as a slayer's axe and the Seer visibly flinched.
'Empire-men! Empire-Men in the tunnels!' Snik-Paw squealed, 'Same plan as you, to take the Ark while the norscan-men and Empire-men fought outside!'
'Sigismund is wise,' the warlord mused, 'Who won?'
'No-not! Fled-ran when the worm and scorpions dead-slain!' the Seer rushed to explain, 'Could not take the Ark without them!'
Snik-Paw didn't see the tail whipping into his left eye and never saw anything from it again either.
'I can forgive failure, for it I lash you not,' Cluny explained, 'Sigismund's empire is large, his champions many and powerful. Their God gives them courage, while ours had an impure race to build upon and I have not yet beat the cringing cowardice from our race. So know I take your eye not for failure, but for cowardice. We need to know who has the Ark. If the Norscan's hold it and use it we have a problem, if the Empire has it we have a disaster. Either way, we do not hold it and our plan must change. Do you understand?'
'Yes-Yes!' screamed the Seer, rolling on the ground in pain, 'Understand-Know!'
'You do not, you speak out of fear and pain, hoping that I do not kill you,' Cluny sighed, 'like all of our race you fail to see the larger picture, instead pursuing hopes of a single moment's advantage. I could kill you Snik-Paw easier than I draw breathe and suffer not for it, other seers I have now to wield magic for me. But that is not my way, so your punishment, all of Skavendom's punishment must be more severe. Only when it has been scourged, only when the heathen Pestilens and the useless Grey Lords are dead, only when our race is fit to overthrow the humans, only then do you need to fear dying by my hand. Understand?'
'Yes-Yes!' moaned the Seer, pawing at the bloody hole in his face, 'Next time I will stay, next time I will watch!'
'Good,' said Cluny, standing up to his full, immense height, 'Hurry with the Warlock. We will need to know what we will take from the Clans at Fester-Spike.'
)
