So engrossed was he in these thoughts that it took some time for him to realise that he was hearing scuttling, the soft sounds of claws scrabbling on flinty rock. He kept himself low to the ground and then glanced around, carefully, suddenly fearing that at any moment he might feel the searing pain of a poisoned knife driven into his back. As he moved, however, the scuttling sounds stopped.

He kept still and held his breath for a long moment and it started again. There. The sound came from off to his right. As he watched, he could see the glitter of red eyes, and dark silhouettes creeping ever closer over the ridge top. He slid his sword from its scabbard. The magical blade which he had acquired from the dead Templar Aldred felt light in his hand. He was about to shout a warning to the others when an enormous howling battle-cry erupted. He recognised the voice as Gotrek's.

A strange musky scent that Felix had smelled before filled the air. The rat-like shapes turned and fled immediately. The Slayer dashed past into the darkness, the runes on his huge axe glowing in the night, swiftly followed by Snorri Nosebiter. Felix would have raced after them himself, but his human eyes could not see in the gloom like a dwarfs. He flinched as Varek moved up beside him, one of his sinister black bombs in his hands. The firelight reflected off the young dwarfs spectacles and turned his eyes into circles of fire.

They stood side by side for long tense moments, waiting to hear the sounds of battle, expecting to see the sudden rush of a horde of rat-men. The only sound they heard was the stomping of boots as Gotrek and Snorri returned.

"Skaven," Gotrek spat contemptuously.

"They ran away," Snorri said in a disappointed tone. Treating the event as if nothing untoward had happened, they returned to their places by the fire and cast themselves down to sleep. Felix envied them. He knew that even once his watch had ended, there would be no sleep for him this night.

Skaven, he thought, and shuddered.

THE LONELY TOWER

Felix looked down into the mouth of the long valley and was overcome with awe. From where he stood, he could see machines, hundreds of them. Enormous steam engines rose along the valley sides like monsters in riveted iron armour. The pistons of huge pumps went up and down with the regularity of a giant's heartbeat. Steam hissed from enormous rusting pipes which ran between massive red brick buildings. Huge chimneys belched vast clouds of sooty smoke into the air. The air echoed with the clanging of a hundred hammers. The infernal glow of forges illuminated the shadowy interior of workshops. Dozens of dwarfs moved backwards and forwards through the heat and noise and misty clouds.

For a second the fog cleared as the cold hill wind cut through the valley. Felix could see that one vast structure dominated the length of the dale. It was built from rusting, riveted metal with a corrugated iron roof. It was perhaps three hundred strides long and twenty high. At one end was a massive cast-iron tower, the like of which Felix had never seen before. It was constructed from metal girders, with an observation point and what looked like a monstrous lantern at its very tip.

High over the far end of the valley loomed a monstrous squat fortress. Moss clung to its eroded stonework. Felix could make out the gleaming muzzles of cannons high among the battlements. From the middle of the structure loomed a single stone tower. On the face nearest the roof was a massive clock, whose hands showed that it was almost the seventh hour after noon. On the roof, an equally gigantic telescope pointed towards the sky. Even as Felix watched, the hand reached seven o'clock and a bell tolled deafeningly, its echoes filling the valley with sound.

The eerie wail of what could only have been a steam whistle—Felix had heard something like it once at the College of Engineering in Nuln—filled the air. There was a chugging of pistons and the clatter of iron wheels on rails as a small steam-wagon emerged from the mine-head. It moved along iron tracks, carrying heaps and heaps of coal into some great central smelting works.

The noise was deafening. The smell was overwhelming. The sight was at once monstrous and fascinating, like looking at the innards of some vast and intricate clockwork toy. Felix felt like he was looking down upon a scene of strange sorcery of a kind which, if truly unleashed, might change the world. He had not realised what the dwarfs were capable of, what power their arcane knowledge gave them. He was filled with a wonder so strong that, for a moment it overcame the fear which had been nagging at the back of his mind all day.

Then the thought came back to him, and he remembered the tracks he had seen this morning mingled with the hob-nailed boot prints of the Slayers. There could be no doubt that they belonged to skaven, quite a strong force at that. Felix knew that fearsome as the Slayers were, the rat-men had not fled out of terror. They had retreated because they had other things to do, and getting into a fight with his companions might have slowed them down in the performance of that mission. It was the only possible explanation for why so strong a party of skaven had fled from so few.

Looking at this place now, he understood what the probable objective of the skaven force was. Here was a thing which the followers of the Horned Rat would want to capture—or destroy. Felix had no idea what was taking place down in that valley but he was certain that it was important because so much industry, energy and intelligence were being expended, and Felix knew that dwarfs did nothing without a purpose.

Once more, though, he felt his heart start to race. Here was industry on a scale that he had not imagined possible. It had a sordid magnificence and implied a terrifying understanding of things beyond the knowledge of human civilisation. In that moment Felix understood just how much his people had yet to learn from the dwarfs. From beside him he heard a sharp intake of breath.

"If the Engineers Guild ever finds out about this," Gotrek rumbled, "heads will roll!"

"We'd better get down there and tell them about the skaven." Felix replied.

Gotrek looked at him with something like pride showing in his one mad eye. "What could those people down there have to fear from a bunch of scabby ratlings?"

Tempted as he was to agree, Felix kept quiet. He was sure that he could think of something, given long enough. After all, the skaven had given him plenty of reasons for terror in the past.

Somewhere off to their right something glinted, like a mirror catching a beam of sunlight. Felix wondered briefly what it was and then dismissed it from his mind as being some part of the wondrous technology he saw being deployed all around him.

"Let's go tell them anyway," he said, wondering why the dwarfs had put something that glittered so brightly amongst a clump of bushes.

Grey Seer Thanquol peered down at the scene through the periscope. The device was yet another magnificent skaven invention, combining the best features of a telescope and a series of mirrors, thus allowing him to watch those unsuspecting fools below unobserved from within the cover of this clump of bushes. Only the lens at the mechanism's tip was visible and he doubted that the dwarfs would notice even that. They were so slow-witted and stupid.

Still, even the grey seer had to admit that there was something magnificent about what the dwarfs had built down there. He wasn't sure what it was but even he, in his secret ratty heart, was impressed. It was fascinating to look at, like one of the mazes he kept for humans back home in Skavenblight. There was so much going on that the eye did not quite know where to look. There was so much activity that he just knew that something important was happening down there—something that might well redound to his credit with the Council of Thirteen once he had seized it.