Now the valley was all but surrounded by a mighty skaven force, and whatever it was that the dwarfs sought to protect would soon be his. This very night he would give the command that would send his invincible furry legions surging forward to inevitable victory.

A flicker of movement attracted Thanquol's attention for a moment, a flutter of red in the breeze which reminded him vaguely of something ominous he had seen in the past. He ignored it and tracked the periscope along the side of the hill, inspecting the potent dwarf-built engines. Greed and a lust to possess them filled him; ignorance of their purpose did nothing to discourage him. He knew that they simply must be worth having. Anything which could make so much noise and create so much smoke was in and of itself a thing to make any skaven's heart beat faster.

Something about that fluttering scrap of red nagged at his mind but he dismissed it. He began to draw up a plan of attack, studying all the lines of approach along the valley edges. He wished he could summon a huge cloud of poison wind and send it blowing down the valley, killing the dwarfs and leaving their machine intact. The simple beauty of the idea struck him. Perhaps he should sell it to the warp engineers of Clan Skryre the next time he was negotiating with them. Certainly a device which could pump out gas the way those chimneys pumped out smoke would…

Wait a moment! The strange familiarity of that flapping scarlet cloak sunk into his forebrain. He suddenly remembered where he'd seen its like before. He remembered a hated human who wore something very similar. But surely… it couldn't be possible that he was here.

Hastily Thanquol twisted the periscope on its collapsible frame. He heard a grunt of pain from the skavenslave to whose back it was strapped, but what did he care? The pain of a slave meant less to him than the fur he shed each morning.

With a flick of his paws he brought the lenses into focus on the source of his unease. For a shocked instant he fought down an almost overwhelming urge to squirt the musk of fear. He stopped himself only by reminding himself that there was no way that the hairless ape could see him.

Thanquol flinched and ducked his horned head down, even though his mighty intelligence told him that he was already out of sight. He looked around to see if his two lackeys, Lurk and Grotz, had noticed his unease. Their blank faces looked up at him placidly and he was reassured that he had not lost face in front of his underlings. He took a pinch of warpstone snuff to calm his shaking nerves, then offered up something which could have been a prayer, or might conceivably have been construed as a curse to the Horned Rat.

He could not believe it. He simply could not believe it! As plain as the snout on his face, he had seen the human, Felix Jaeger, when he looked through the periscope. He leaned forward and snatched another glance just to be sure. No—there was no mistake. There he stood, as plain as day. Felix Jaeger, the hated human who had done so much to thwart Thanquol's mighty plans, and who mere months before had almost succeeded, beyond all reason, in disgracing him before the Council of Thirteen!

Justifiable hatred warred with the rational instinct of self-preservation which dominated Thanquol's soul. His first thought was that somehow Jaeger had sought him out and had come all this way to thwart his schemes of glory again. The cold light of logic told him that this could not be the case. Nothing so simple could possibly be true. There was no way that Jaeger could know where to find him. Not even Thanquol's masters on the Council of Thirteen knew his current location.