Gotrek & Felix: Slayer

More Warhammer: The End Times stories from blacklibrary.com

THE RETURN OF NAGASH
Book One of the End Times

THE FALL OF ALTDORF
Book Two of the End Times

THE CURSE OF KHAINE
Book Three of the End Times

THE RISE OF THE HORNED RAT
Book Four of the End Times

THE LORD OF THE END TIMES
Book Five of the End Times

GOTREK & FELIX: KINSLAYER
Book One of the Doom of Gotrek Gurnisson

The world is dying, but it has been so since the coming of the Chaos Gods.

For years beyond reckoning, the Ruinous Powers have coveted the mortal realm. They have made many attempts to seize it, their anointed champions leading vast hordes into the lands of men, elves and dwarfs. Each time, they have been defeated.

Until now.

The Three-Eyed King has come. With the Empire in flames, Archaon Everchosen has marched south with all the armies of ruin at his heels to claim his birthright and usher in the Age of Chaos. The city of Middenheim, one of the few bastions remaining to men, dwarfs and elves, is his target, for buried deep in the mighty rock upon which it sits is an ancient weapon with which he will bring about his ultimate victory.

The last hope lies with a few heroes. With the great vortex sundered, the Winds of Magic have been freed, and each has found a mortal host. Only the power of these ‘Incarnates’ can prevent the cataclysm that Archaon seeks to unleash. But they are scattered, and even if they can be gathered, they may not be able to work together.

Far from the growing storm, Gotrek Gurnisson and Felix Jaeger lead a ragtag army through the ruins of the Empire in search of Felix’s family. Their deeds in these dark times are as heroic as any from their legendary journeys, but their friendship has been riven by words that cannot be unsaid and actions that cannot be undone.

And Gotrek’s Doom approaches.

These are the End Times.

‘If this journal is found, if the day was won, then remember this – here a Slayer lies.’

From
My Travels with Gotrek
, unpublished,
by Herr Felix Jaeger

ONE

He Who Changes

The gods themselves had ridden to the defence of Altdorf, so it was rumoured, but not even Taal had a finger to raise for this corner of Hochland’s Great Forest.

‘Doomed!’ howled Markus Weissman until his voice cracked, one more broken note amidst the clatter of cloven hooves and screaming men.

The men of his unit pressed in more from either side. He could smell their sweat, the soil in their green and red livery, could feel the shivers passing down their spears as they recovered their schiltron formation at the top of the hill and raised shields. There was a splintering crash as a shield split apart under a blow from a beastman’s club, then screams of terror before two men could rally to drive the creature back and seal the breach in their formation.

‘Blood of Hochland!’ roared Sergeant Sierck. His doublet sleeve had been torn off up to the shoulder. His reversible red and green cloak showed the red side to hide the blood that made a circus horror mask of his face, his beard and even his teeth as he bellowed for courage.

‘Doomed,’ Markus sobbed again, blindly driving his spear into a beastman’s neck. The goat-headed beast brayed and fell back with Markus’s spear point still lodged in its throat. He let the weapon go with a cry and struggled to free his katzbalger, the short, unfamiliar blade of last resort of the Emperor’s infantry.

He studied the cheap, impurity-riddled weapon for a moment, transfixed. How appropriate.

A spear stabbed over Markus’s shoulder and took a charging beastman through the eye. The monster stumbled witlessly on and somehow fell on Markus’s sword. Hot, stinking bile washed his hand and splashed over his boots. It reminded him of the birthing fluids that he used to see puddled on his neighbours’ fields at calving time. It was like that. Except in the one important way. The gutted beast emitted a deafening bray until another man’s spear skewered it through the mouth. Sickened, Markus snatched back his sword and bossed the dying animal with his shield. The beastman bumped and rolled down the slope and for a second Markus stood unopposed.

He gasped at the close, copper-sharp air. His ribs felt like a vice around his lungs. He couldn’t breathe! The need for air was overwhelming and he pulled his dented helmet from his head. He let it drop. The alpine wind moved blissfully through his beard. Unblinkered by the cheek-guard of his battered helm, he saw the herd in its terrible entirety.

They were doomed.

The rocky clearing in which General von Baersdorf had thought to make his stand against the beastmen that had been harrying them since Hergig was close to a league in length and about a quarter of that wide, rising steadily to this low hill at its northern end. In all that, there wasn’t a scrap of bare rock that didn’t harbour a dozen braying nightmares. The archers and outriders that von Baersdorf had hastily redeployed to defend the column’s gun carriages and supply wains had been wiped out and now beastmen boiled through the wreckage. Every so often a scrap of red fluttered over the broken wagons, a remnant of the general’s banner taken by his killers as a trophy.

The screams of women and children carried weakly through the chaos. Markus looked over the column’s mutilated heart to the rearguard, ranged up under the eaves at the southern end of the clearing. A beleaguered ring of halberdiers held the beastmen at bay while terrified wagoners pulled their vehicles into a defensive circle around the soldiers’ families. Working under a pall of black smoke that obscured the wagons’ tops from view, the famed Hochland handgunners poured death and thunder over the halberdiers’ heads.

A long, bone-throbbing bass note boomed over the infernal din.

Standing like an icon to all that was unholy above the beasts that served him, came the Chaos warrior. Mounted northmen flanked him on stout, ill-tempered ponies. Their muscular bodies writhed with weird, unsettling tattoos and they bore an array of banners, gongs and other instruments, but even as a group they could not match their champion for size or sheer presence. His heavy armour was the deep blue of the northern sky and blazed with icy white runes that, though Markus could not read them, vouchsafed the ultimate understanding in death. From a sealed helm, twin discs of witchfire shone the cold contempt of the immortals onto their earthly demesne. His slow advance was the opening of a pit, a great maw, a chasm that resounded to the footsteps of doom.

He appeared to be searching for something. Or someone.

Markus moaned with dread. He was a farmer, not a fighter. When the Hergig soldiers had come through his land on their way to Wolfenburg he should have stayed behind. Better to die where his wife and baby daughter had died. Why should Ostland have fared any better than their neighbour? He looked up, tears in his eyes and an imprecation to the gods in his breast. Even the sky was damaged, the blunt banks of morning cloud scarred by comets that still fell months after Morrslieb’s destruction.

What sanctuary could there be in Wolfenburg, or even in Middenheim, when even the heavens were not safe? There was–

A strong but not unkind hand pulled Markus back from the front rank. Ernst Höller forced Markus’s useless helmet back over his ears, muffling the screams and narrowing the terrible view to that which lay immediately in front of him. Höller’s lined, red face looked at him worriedly. He had been a cobbler, the best that a farmhand’s coin could afford. Markus was still wearing one of his boots.

‘Look,’ yelled Höller, pointing towards the forest on the battlefield’s long eastern edge.

Broken in every meaningful way, Markus could do little but limply do as he was told. As he turned to watch, arrows scythed through the running beastmen from behind, carving out a thin crescent of killing ground into which a ragged mass of soldiers roared from the treeline. They wielded swords, maces, halberds and hammers. Some men had shields, though no two bore the same colour or motif, while others hacked into their foes with two axes and a berserker zeal. Their clothing, similarly, had passed under the great grinding wheels of war. Markus picked out the colours of Ostland, Talabheim and others that must have been from even further afield than that because he didn’t recognise them. And it was a jumble at that. Markus watched a wildly bearded axeman in black-and-white Ostlander trousers and a ripped burgundy doublet block a beastman’s axe with his own and then clobber it down with his shield. If there was a uniform then it was brown and red – blood, rust and the forest’s clinging mud.

One of the newcomers seemed to wear his sorry state more loosely than the others, and despite the fight that still raged around him Markus found his gaze drawn to that man.

He was tall, clad in mail that looked tough but well used and was covered by a shred of red cloak. A crown of blond hair illuminated his head, shining golden in the weak morning light that made it through the clouds. Brandishing an ornate longsword with the skill of a tournament knight, he glided through the beastmen as if their hooves were shod with lead, shouting encouragement to those around him. Amazingly, those men seemed to fight a little harder and a little better when he passed them.

‘Who says the north has no heroes?’ said Höller.

Markus looked back. His heart fluttered as he watched the swordsman in the red cloak throw himself between a beaten-looking soldier and the three beasts that assailed him. One beastman went down in short order. Then two. Watching that swordsman’s runic blade conduct its work, Markus was put immediately in mind of one of the mighty runefangs, but the Goblin-Bane of Hochland had been lost.
Hochland
had been lost. The third beastman fought as if its gods were watching while more of its horrifying brethren closed in. Markus couldn’t watch, but just as it looked as though the swordsman was certain to be overwhelmed, it was the beastmen that were screaming and animal parts went flying as if a bomb had just gone off underneath them. A gory crest of bright red hair emerged from the carnage and the biggest and bloodiest dwarf that Markus had ever clapped eyes on threw himself into the suddenly routed beastmen like a battle-mad minotaur with an axe.

‘Steady,’ barked Sierck, and Markus thought for a moment that it had been the glimpse of that barbaric dwarf that had led his comrades to waver.

But then he saw the true reason, and he trembled as the brief hope that had begun to fill him ebbed away. Ernst Höller clutched his shield and moaned.

This was not a time for men: these were days of legend and destiny, of gods adopting mortal flesh to renew again the great struggles of the elder days.

They were the End Times.

And the Chaos warrior had reached the hill.

A madness of shapes and sounds blurred around Felix Jaeger as he fought. Screams and butchery hemmed him in and simply breathing left the taste of uncooked offal on his tongue. The clash of blades reverberated like the hammering of a blacksmith’s forge.

Too close and too dog-tired for the elegant swordplay he had swooned over as a youth, he kicked, bit and clubbed out with his blade using every instinct and dirty trick that he had accrued like scars over two decades chained to the Slayer’s shadow. A rusted sword slid through the flailing scraps of his Sudenland wool cloak and banged his shoulder blade. His armour absorbed the worst of it, but the recent bruise underneath left him in no doubt that he’d been hit. Gritting his teeth through the pain, he got his sword up to meet an in-swinging glaive with a numbing parry, then massaged the blow across his body and kneed the bull-headed gor in the kidney. An arrow whistled inches past Felix’s face as he ignored the snap of pain in his back to shoulder the beastman aside. The braying creature fell straight into the path of an axe meant for the struggling swordsman to Felix’s right.

Blood sprayed Felix’s overgrown beard and painted the right side of his face with a warm mask.

The soldier, all damaged ringmail vest and muddied burgundy and gold doublet, looked at Felix with awe as though Sigmar himself had just arrived to smite his foes. Felix would have gladly introduced the soldier’s skull to the heavily ornate dragonhead hilt of Karaghul had another beastman not immediately burst from the melee with a halberd. Felix turned it on the flat of his blade and struck open the beastman’s ribcage with his return. When Felix glanced over his shoulder the man was gone, the fight having already dragged them apart. Trapping his scrappy red cloak between his cheek and his shoulder Felix mopped sweat and blood from his face.

Felix was too old for this; too, too old. He had an old warhorse’s joints and they still ached from the last battle – with a Kurgan warband over the ruins of a forester’s winter station, after which they had decided that even the forest’s back roads were too dangerous to move an army on. He let his stiff muscles guide him, parrying faster than he could think. He thought it quite probable that he would be dead in the next ten minutes; fifteen, perhaps, if the men around him could remember what he had tried to drill into them.

Mentally applauding his keen view of any situation’s bright side, Felix quickly scanned the melee for a sign of the Chaos warrior. In Felix’s experience – and how he hated that he had become an authority on such matters – Chaos armies were second only to those of greenskins for their reliance on the strength and personality of their leaders.

If the Chaos warrior could be taken down…

Listing wagons rose from the ferment where Felix had last spotted the champion’s dark blue armour, like beached wrecks. There was no sign of him, or his coterie of icon-bearers and musicians, but Felix was certain that he was in amongst that wreckage somewhere. He looked past it to where a paltry group of spearmen or pikemen – it was too far away to tell – in Hochland colours defended the hill from what looked like a nearly endless surge of rabid beastmen. It was destined to be a last stand unless someone did something about it.

That that someone would again have to be Felix Jaeger, poet, propagandist and unlikely wanderer, struck him as sorely unfunny.

A resounding
clang
clawed Felix’s full attention back to the immediate fight. A grizzly Kislevite axeman had blocked the stroke of his beastman counterpart and now tested his biceps against the beast’s. Elsewhere, Felix saw another man gored by a charging beastman’s horns and trampled under its hooves. A ululating goat-like cry warbled from somewhere within the crush of bodies. It was less a battle than a bar brawl, a form of close-quarters, no-holds-barred violence in which the semi-feral beasts of Chaos were eminently equipped to excel.

‘Keep together,’ Felix shouted, charging to the aid of the Kislevite and hacking his unsuspecting opponent down from behind. ‘Don’t try to take them one-on-one. Don’t try to match them for strength. Stick to your friends and trust them to fight for you.’

‘Jaeger!’ someone nearby belted out with the patriotic fervour of a battle cry. The Kislevite took it up in his heavily accented tongue and suddenly Felix was surrounded by a coming together of men shouting his name.

A mix of anger and embarrassment gave Felix the strength to plunge Karaghul clean through a beastman’s neck. The Chaos blitzkrieg through Kislev and the Empire had ground cities to rubble and brought both nations to collapse, and the men left behind were hard and coarse, dark stones sieved from the more civilised flour. For some reason they looked to Felix to be a leader, but he was just like them: a man trying to get home to his family. He hadn’t saved a single one of them from Chaos. He had just brought them together and given them a direction.