Gotrek and Felix: The Anthology (4 page)

Gotrek barked a laugh. ‘Does he want us to unclog his jakes?’

Sergeant Holdborn gave him a cold smile. ‘I only wish. It is a clearance hardly more pleasant, though. This way.’

5

Gotrek, Agnar, Felix
and Henrik followed Sergeant Holdborn through a side door into the keep, then down a narrow stair into an underground chamber surrounding a great shaft that slanted into the earth. A mechanism of pulleys and chains for hauling things up and down the incline hunched at the top of the shaft, and a crew of dwarfs was fixing a stout, wheeled cannon to a hook. As Sergeant Holdborn crossed to them, they began to let out the chain and lower it into the depths.

Holdborn nodded to the leader of the crew, a burly dwarf in a leather apron with a tightly braided beard and a handkerchief tied around his bald head, then turned to Felix, Henrik and the Slayers.

‘This is Engineer Migrunssun. He and his crew are tasked with bringing cannon to the old firing platform in the minehead of the eastern gem shafts. They will be part of our enfilade when the battle starts. Unfortunately, the minehead is overrun with ghouls. This is where you come in.’

Gotrek and Agnar nodded, pleased, while Felix swallowed. He noticed Henrik was looking pale as well.

‘Thick as maggots on a week-old corpse,’ said Migrunsson, grinning. ‘And we’ll need to clear them out completely. Can’t have ghouls trying to eat you while you’re aiming a field piece. Distracting.’

‘You expect the orcs to come up through the mine shafts, then?’ asked Henrik. ‘You’re training your guns on them?’

Holdborn shook his head. ‘That is the other duty of the engineers. They will be caving in the shafts, among other passages. Sealing them off, so the greenskins can’t come up behind us.’

‘The firing platform looks two ways,’ said Migrunsson. ‘It’s a fortified room above an archway between the minehead chamber and the Great Hall of the Guild of Jewellers, and it has gun ports into both rooms. Thorgrin plans to make the great hall his field of battle. We’ll poke our muzzles through the windows up top and be able to rake the orc flanks from an untouchable emplacement.’

‘Untouchable?’ asked Gotrek. ‘What’s to stop the greenskins coming through the archway from the great hall?’

‘Ah, well,’ said Migrunsson. ‘That arch is sealed off. Has been since the ghouls started congregating in the minehead. The orcs won’t get through it. Not without a battering ram.’

‘But with the arch sealed off,’ said Sergeant Holdborn, ‘neither will you. You’ll have to go the long way around.’

‘Naturally,’ said Felix under his breath.

Henrik grinned bleakly at him.

The dwarf cannon crews pushed a heavily laden wagon towards the slanting shaft. It was loaded with blackpowder barrels and crates of cannon shot. A smaller wagon rolled out behind it, piled with food, firewood and other supplies. Felix’s eyes widened. How far was it to the eastern minehead?

Catching his look, Migrunsson chuckled. ‘It’s only a few hours’ march, rememberer. But we might be waiting a long time for the greenskins to accept our invitation to dance.’

‘I hope you find your doom, Slayer,’ said Sergeant Holdborn, saluting Gotrek. ‘It’ll save me seeing your face again.’

Gotrek growled at his back as he turned and strode off. ‘It’ll save your hide, watchman.’

The chain stopped rattling off the winch and then went slack. Migrunsson started winding it back up and nodded to Felix, Henrik and the Slayers.

‘Head on down,’ he said. ‘Two more carts and we’re off.’

Gotrek and Agnar started down the slant shoulder to shoulder. Felix and Henrik hesitated, then went after them.

‘Once more, eh?’ asked Henrik.

‘At least,’ said Felix.

The walls of the shaft closed in around him and a chill wind blew up from below. He shivered, though from cold or premonition, he could not tell.

Sturdy little mine
ponies were hitched in teams of two to the cannons and the wagons once they reached the bottom of the incline, and soon the artillery train was under way. Gotrek, Felix, Agnar and Henrik went first, followed by Migrunsson and the cannon crews – three dwarfs to a gun – then the guns themselves, the powder wagon and supply wagon, each with a dwarf driver, and the last with a dwarf field surgeon, and lastly, a rearguard of six Thunderers, who would be adding musket fire to the heavy shot of the cannons when they reached the emplacement.

‘The long way around’ was long indeed, and treacherous. Engineer Migrunsson assured them that things were much worse further down, but Felix thought that this first ‘civilized’ level was bad enough to be getting along with. They went by way of service passages and side tunnels, which, being dwarf work, were still wide enough for six dwarfs to walk abreast, and three times as tall as Felix – at least they would have been had they been in good repair. Unfortunately, they were not.

In the light of the torches that swung from the wagons, Felix saw everywhere signs of battle and cataclysm. Walls were slumped into rubble around blackened craters. Huge stones had fallen from the ceiling. In some places, the ceiling had come down entirely and the train had to skirt the blockage by way of smaller tunnels. In other places, the floor had buckled so steeply that all the dwarfs had to get behind the cannons and push, to help the ponies get them over the hump.

Though Felix saw no orcs or ghouls or other horrors, their spoor was everywhere – gnawed human bones, piles of scat, mounds of rotting rubbish, a long streak of dried blood where a body had been dragged – and he heard strange moans and screeches echoing out of dark cross tunnels. There were signs of human intrusion as well – holes broken through walls with pickaxe or explosives, abandoned lanterns and gloves and canteens scattered about, dead ‘gold-hunting canaries’ in tiny wicker cages, messages scrawled at intersections in many different languages.

‘Go not this way. Giant rats.’

‘Anya, I waited, but they’re coming. I love you.’

‘Merde. Je tourne en rond.’

There was a place where the ceiling had bulged down to within six feet of the floor, as if melted by some terrible heat, and the drivers had to lead the ponies through for it was too low to ride on the wagons. Felix’s hair rose on his scalp as he ducked under that bulge and he felt a sick prickling under his skin that made him want to scrub himself with lye.

Migrunsson led them through all of it as if they were going on a walk through a meadow, turning left and right without hesitation and humming a jaunty little marching song. Henrik sang too. Not the same song, but a tuneless little tune like a nursery rhyme, though so soft Felix couldn’t make out the words. It began to grate on his nerves after a while, but he didn’t want to start an argument, so he didn’t say anything. Agnar walked in silence, drinking from a canteen that Felix was almost certain didn’t contain water.

They walked until Felix got hungry, and quite a while after that, but finally Migrunsson put up a hand and slowed to a stop.

‘Eat something and have a drink,’ he said. ‘We are close to the ghoul nest now. You’ll need your strength.’

The cannon crews and drivers took biscuit and dried meat from their packs, and lined up for ale poured from a keg on the supply wagon.

‘Ghouls started biding in the minehead twenty years or so ago,’ Migrunssun told the Slayers as they knocked back a few mugs. ‘Some master of the dark arts set up house there, stealing bodies of dead adventurers and performing weird rites upon them, but he didn’t last long. A band of heroes led by a hammer priest went down there and caved his head in, then burned his body. Ever since then, though, ghouls seem to be drawn to the place. It’s like they can still smell the black magic in the stones.’

‘And you haven’t tried to cleanse the place?’ asked Henrik.

‘Oh aye,’ said Migrunsson. ‘Many a time. But they always come back. Worse than roaches.’

When the dwarfs had finished their meat and drink, they drew their hand axes and jammed their helms down on their heads and murmured vows to their ancestors. The Slayers didn’t pray, just rolled their necks and limbered up their arms in preparation for the fight to come.

Agnar’s weapon was a long axe as tall as he was, with a sharply curved head and a vicious spike at the heel. He and Henrik drank one last mug of ale each, and Henrik refilled Agnar’s canteen from the keg for him. When they were finished, Henrik drew a heavy broadsword and made the sign of Sigmar’s hammer on his chest.

‘I’ve never quite got over it,’ the rememberer murmured to Felix as they went to stand behind the Slayers in the line of march. ‘The nerves before a battle.’

‘Nor I,’ said Felix.

Engineer Migrunsson whistled the column forward and the Slayers strode ahead into the darkness beyond the wagon lanterns. Agnar was listing a little as he walked.

The smell came
first – a faint sourness that wrinkled the nose and clung to the back of the throat. A minute later it was an eye-watering reek, equal parts rotting corpse and unwashed beggar, and as the flags of the tunnel became littered with bones, excrement and torn clothes, it swelled to a choking miasma of death that made Felix wish he had not eaten anything at their stop. Henrik turned and vomited against the wall, and the dwarfs soaked their kerchiefs in ale and tied them over their noses and mouths before continuing.

The glow of a fire flickered on the walls of the tunnel ahead, and a hunched form was briefly silhouetted. It raised a misshapen head towards the oncoming company, then darted into an open archway, gibbering warnings.

‘Through there is the minehead chamber,’ said Migrunsson, priming a flintlock. ‘Their home sweet home.’

Ahead, the passage echoed with howls of rage and the slap of bare feet on stone. Felix’s stomach slid into his guts as he watched churning shadows looming larger against the tunnel wall. Then they appeared. A seething tide of fish-white horrors poured out of the archway and bounded at the dwarfs: long-armed, crook-backed subhumans – males and females – their slavering mouths filled with sharp teeth and their eyes filled with nothing but hunger.

The nearest went down to Migrunsson’s musket, its head exploding in a crimson shower, but the rest vaulted its toppling body and surged ahead, clawing and shrieking and snapping their jaws. Gotrek and Agnar charged forward to meet them, and dismantled half a dozen into bloody chunks with their first swings, but the tunnel was too wide for the two Slayers to stop them all, and dozens more swarmed past to launch themselves at Felix, Henrik and Migrunsson’s cannon crews.

Hook-clawed hands slashed at Felix’s face and grabbed at his arms. Saw-toothed mouths shrieked at him, nearly overwhelming him with breath that smelled like putrid meat. He lashed out with Karaghul, gagging, and carved great wounds into the horrors, cleaving flesh and shattering bones and knocking them to the floor. Beside him, Henrik fought with a wide-eyed determination that showed both skill and terror. Felix guessed he looked about the same.

Around them, the dwarfs met the ghouls’ crazed flailing with practised formation, spreading across the width of the tunnel and hewing with their hand axes like threshers advancing down a field. Felix and Henrik kept pace with them, content to take the protection of their flanks and let the Slayers do their butcher’s work out in front of the line.

Watching them, Felix was once again stunned by the speed and savage fury of their kind. They spun like drunken tops, axes blurring and red crests whipping about, and the ghouls seemed to just fall apart around them. White limbs flew in arcs of blood. Scarred heads toppled from bony shoulders. Guts spilled from torn torsos. Agnar was not quite as fast or strong as Gotrek, but his long axe had a greater reach, and he whirled it around him like a fan blade, lopping heads and crushing skulls. Gotrek got in closer, shearing legs and splitting ribcages, and was soon crimson from head to toe.

With this red whirlwind at its head, the dwarf column chopped its way to the archway and through it into the minehead, a high, firelit staging room with a huge black opening on the west wall and a smaller on the north. On the east wall, a wide flight of steps rose to a door above a sealed arch – the firing platform. They had reached their destination.

Scores of ghouls were rising from where they crouched around feeble fires and loped across the filth-slicked floor for the dwarfs. Beyond them, the flames showed shoulder-high heaps of bones and clothing and broken implements piled in the corners, and crusted rag-mounds that Felix feared were beds. Bodies lay half-eaten near the fires – some human, some dwarf, some ghoul. The death reek wafting from them was so thick Felix could almost see it.

‘Hold the cannons in the passage!’ called Migrunsson.