Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (11 page)

The spindly pair of goats that some oxygen-deprived mind had mistaken for beastmen lying in ambush loped between the rocks and bounded away. Despite two-dozen bullets being fired in their direction it didn’t look as though either one of them had been hit.

‘Pity,’ said Gotrek, and at first Felix thought it was the lack of a herd of beastmen that was troubling him, but then the Slayer turned on Gustav and grinned nastily. ‘Looks like we may starve to death yet.’

Felix pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath of air that felt more watered down than the ale in a Mootland tavern. Worries burned up what little air his brain was receiving. How much ammunition did they have left? Were they being tracked by the besiegers of Wolfenburg, and if so, had they heard those shots? He forced himself to breathe. He didn’t think he could take much more of this. His heart was going to give out long before Gustav’s deadline to cut their losses and turn back.

Looking on the bright side, the journey had at least given him the time he needed to recover from the battle in the forest. A tension headache pulsed through his skull and the tendons in his hands were as stiff as hawsers from hovering over the hilt of his sword, but he walked like a man with joints again, which was progress of sorts. His face no longer felt sore from Gotrek’s punch, though his ego was still a little bruised and, though he was a thousand leagues from a mirror, he doubted that a broken nose and a couple of cracked teeth would add anything to his looks. Not that there had been much interest in those lately. He sighed, suddenly miserable again.

So much for the bright side.

Gotrek issued a grunt and directed Felix’s attention through the spreading powder plumes to the head of the column. A handful of the scouts had returned. Kolya ran ahead of them, whistling through his fingers before waving his hand above his head and then shouting enthusiastically as he gestured towards something further on. It was far too far for Felix to hear what the man said, river or no river, too far even to pick out the expression on his face; but he had neglected Gotrek’s powers of hearing.

‘A dwarf township,’ said Gotrek, running his thumb around the rim of his blade and eyeing Gustav’s back with his tongue out. ‘Where we join our road.’

Lorin Lanarksson parked his wagon in what looked like a courtyard, the longbeard craning his neck around and whistling in awe as he pulled up on the reins. Petrified grass fell apart like talc as the iron-rimmed wheels rolled to a standstill on the ancient flagstones. The generally stoic mountain-bred mules snorted nervously in their traces. Lyndun jumped down and tried in vain to soothe them. There was something in the air. Men filed under the weather-smoothed stonework of what a few thousand years and some imagination could render back into a gatehouse. The strains of animal distress echoed back on them from the crumbling blocks of wall that surrounded them.

Felix closed one hand over the hilt of his sword and the other around the neck of its scabbard as he looked around.

The township was little more than a few hundred ancient structures huddled under the vastness of the mountain. The river ran through the edge of it, separating the courtyard and the remnants of a wall from the rest of the town, presumably as a defensive measure. Several bridges, only one of which was even close to being intact, made possible the crossing. The courtyard itself was slowly filling up with men, moving with superstitious care around fountains that had been weathered down to pitted grey stone to which only the occasional dwarfish form could be ascribed from the corner of the eye. It was unnerving, the likenesses vanishing into the stone when looked upon directly.

The mountain itself was dotted with old mine heads and fortifications, all now ruined, connected by a winding causeway that ran towards a broken citadel. The fortress was embedded into the rock at the summit where it caught the last of the light as the sun dipped under the western peaks. Something metallic glinted from its battlements, but it was too far away to make it out. Felix assumed it was some defunct feature of the ancient dwarfhold and returned his attention to the causeway. He assumed that this would be the path they would be following come the morning in order to get onto the dwarf roads to Middenheim.

For some reason he found it difficult to follow the path all the way from top to bottom. There was clearly a start and clearly an end, but his eye simply couldn’t seem to get from one to the other without getting lost. He wondered whether there was some manner of obfuscating runecraft at work, or merely clever design coupled with the effect of diminishing sunlight on tired eyes.

As Felix watched and worried about what the next day would bring, the men set up camp under Corporal Mann’s direction. Tents were erected within the square and fires lit. A picket of spears was established, both on the sole bridge and under the jagged, mouth-like opening through which they had passed the crumbling defensive wall. A pair of men hauled a sack of oats from Lorin’s wagon between them and bore it towards the river to make gruel for the camp’s supper.

The clap of struck steel resounded between the maudlin stones and Felix drew a sharp breath, spinning back around and drawing Karaghul a thumb’s width from its sheath.

‘
Doskonale
, friend Gustav, your skills improve.’

Felix let the breath hiss out between his teeth and slid his blade back into its scabbard. He didn’t know where these young men found their energy.

A ring of cheering and laughing soldiers surrounded the two men as they traded blows. Kolya danced behind a curved
ordynka
shortsword held in his weaker left hand, his right held behind his back, his colourful hemp coat jangling as he ducked and rolled. A slow altitude bleed trickled down Gustav’s nose, accentuating the grim focus on his face. His longer sabre slashed purposefully through the air, excepting the odd occasion when the Kislevite fancied a cheer and raised a ringing
clang
with a parry.

‘Keep your distance, Empire man. You have reach on me, use it…’

The duel continued without Felix to watch it. There was no need. Kolya was the better swordsman by a distance, perhaps better even than himself, although he liked to think that he could have taken the former lancer in a fair contest in his prime.

The softer tap of metal on stone drew his attention from the revels and towards Lorin Lanarksson who shuffled towards him, pausing occasionally to rap on a piece of masonry with the hammerhead grip of his cane.

‘My great-grandfather was part of an expedition to these mountains from Karak Kadrin. He would have been younger then even than you, Herr Jaeger.’ The longbeard gripped his cane and looked up to the ruins that dominated the northern skyline, his eyes wide with emotion. Torchlight stitched across the bite mark on his face. ‘To think that I stand upon the very stones that he once did.’

Although on a logical level Felix had realised that there must be many dwarfs younger than his own fifty years, he nevertheless still thought of them all as wise old longbeards or great slabs of permanence like Gotrek. Felix wasn’t sure whether the reminder diminished that impression or simply made him feel older and tireder than he already had just a moment before. What he could appreciate however were the timescales that the dwarf was alluding to. Four generations of that long-lived race could mean millennia. Felix had personally met dwarfs who had lived through the last Great War two centuries ago and had still been going strong.

He wondered what had happened to those dwarfs: old Borek and Prince Hargrim, or even Malakai Makaisson for that matter.

All dead, probably.

The thought depressed him, though not nearly as much as he felt it should.

Felix pressed his gloved hand to the wall as if it might let him feel the same mix of awe and wonder as it had the longbeard. He felt nothing, just a prickling down the nape of his neck as if an assassin stood behind him with a crossbow loaded and aimed. He shivered. It was nothing.

‘Don’t tell me. None of them came back alive.’

‘Oh no, they all returned: penniless and ashamed and pitied as well-meaning fools, but alive.’

‘What did they come here to find, if these peaks are as empty as everyone seems to think they are?’

The longbeard hesitated. His face ticked and he rubbed his beard with his hand to soothe it while he hurriedly located his pipe and bit on its long wooden stem. Felix heard the wood splinter and the longbeard pulled it morosely from his lips. ‘I don’t know how to describe it. There’s no human word for it.’

‘None at all?’

‘It’s never come up. I don’t think it’s ever been discussed with someone who’s not a dwarf.’ Lorin nibbled on the fractured pipe stem and shrugged. ‘To be completely honest, Herr Jaeger, we barely talk about it amongst ourselves since so few believe that it exists at all.’

Felix sighed. Sometimes he missed Gotrek’s economy of words.

‘It is… Kazad Drengazi. It is a temple, and legend says that it lies somewhere within these mountains.’

Felix could not entirely say why, but he felt that those two words of Khazalid conveyed a depth of meaning that Lorin’s well-intentioned explanation could not give. Before he could enquire further, Gotrek stomped over, his axe resting lightly against his shoulder. The Slayer jerked a thumb back, indicating the ruins behind him.

‘What are you standing around for, manling? Do you want to find the Middenheim road or don’t you?’

‘Wouldn’t Kolya or one of his scouts be better suited?’ asked Felix, not at all sure he was keen on the idea of spending the coming night alone with Gotrek picking through some desolate ruin.

Gotrek muttered something into his beard, turning slightly as if to ensure Felix couldn’t read his lips, and produced an exaggerated shrug. ‘Come or don’t, manling. It’s your choice.’

Felix looked up at the sky, thinking of all the reasons that he absolutely shouldn’t leave the camp and accompany the Slayer, then swore and strode after him.

Someone had to, he told himself. It might as well be him.

SEVEN

The Ruined Dwarfhold

Gotrek crouched before a granite block, hidden away within the corner of a ruined wall at the riverside end of a wide, empty street. Felix stood nervously at the Slayer’s back, fingers fidgeting around the grip of his sword.

The buildings were constructed in what he had come to think of as the dwarfish fashion, massive blocks laid atop one another with such expertise and precision that there was no sign of mortar and, by Mannslieb’s haunting light, it was next to impossible for his human eyes to discern the joins. There was an eerie stillness about this place, a graveyard serenity that the faraway murmur of the river could not detract from. It was impossible to stand here, surrounded by such age, and not wonder at the forgotten lives that had touched it. Who had they been? What had they done? Did anything of them survive in the world he knew? The romantic in him, perhaps, staring into the cosmos and praying for some sign of stability. The minds of men weren’t built to consider such sweeping timescales as this, the kind that diluted the thinker’s bloodline to water and eroded his most enduring legacy to dust on the wind. To stand here was to be forcibly reminded of one’s place and prominence in a world already steeped in history. Felix wondered if Karl Franz or Magnus the Pious or even Sigmar himself would have felt the same way in his shoes. The thought should probably have shamed him for its boldness, but for some reason it did not.

‘Do you ever feel that we’re on the wrong side of history?’

‘No.’

Felix smiled weakly, glancing over his shoulder to the pricks of light and occasional voices from the camp across the river. He could smell cooking oats. His stomach tightened with hunger. Some other disturbed sense made him shudder. ‘Doesn’t all of this make you wonder about the people who lived here? Will this be us one day? Is this what will be left of the Empire if we fail?’

‘Middenheim won’t look nearly so pretty in five thousand years.’

Felix examined the ruins with a new perspective. Could they really be so old? Now he was looking at them in this way, he recognised that this town had none of the features he had come to associate with dwarf settlements. There were no gyrocopter towers such as the dwarfs used for swift communications and provisioning of isolated outposts like this one. He had seen none of the great stone bastions used for housing cannons. Felix knew that the dwarfs had taught the secrets of gunpowder to men, and helped to found the engineering schools that, as much as the Colleges of Magic, had made the Empire the force it was. Felix clung sadly to that final thought.

Was.

Was it possible that there had been a time when even the dwarfs themselves had not possessed such knowledge? It seemed difficult to believe. Although it made sense intellectually, he had simply assumed that dwarfs were gifted with an inherent racial understanding of such secrets. The realisation that they had mastered them over centuries of methodical trial and error only deepened Felix’s respect for their achievements.

It made him more determined than ever that something of their civilisation be spared.

With one more glance over his shoulder, he joined Gotrek in his examination of the marker stone. The granite was green with age and framed by a thicket of brambles that had pushed through the softer stones amongst which it had been set. The runes carved into it were still legible however, once Gotrek had pulled down the obscuring weeds. At least Felix hoped they were. They were just cuts in the rock to him, and had he not been here with Gotrek he probably would have dismissed them as something scratched into it by a passing bird.

‘It’s
klinkerhun
, manling, runescript, but very old. It’s difficult to be sure but I think we’re on the right track.’ The dwarf looked up and peered down the street, his dark-adapted eyes piercing the gloom in a way that Felix could only envy. ‘Let’s head on and see if we can find another. There’s dozens of old roads heading into the mountains and I don’t want to be two days out before realising we’re on the wrong one.’

Felix nodded his agreement as the Slayer stood up and stomped down the road. He paused to examine the runescript. There was something mournful about it, in need of remembrance. Could it really be something as simple as a road sign they were following?
Empirestrasse – Middenheim 125 miles
. The outlandish thought made Felix smile as he turned away and after his former companion.

It felt good to have a destination again. It was something to cling to, and that was hope of a kind.

Their footsteps echoed through the ruins. Gotrek was actually being cautious, Felix realised, but even so his hobnailed boots scratched at the stillness like climbing pitons on bare stone. Felix glanced over his shoulder, convinced for a moment that he had heard the footfalls of another moving in parallel through the ruins. He dismissed it as the work of his imagination. Either that or his own too-loud footsteps being rebounded back at him. His mail shirt no longer seemed entirely adequate and he drew his cloak over his shoulders, as though the ragged Sudenland wool was a welcome layer of added protection for his back.

Felix held his sword a little more closely than he had before, matching the Slayer’s shorter stride so that their feet hit the road in unison. There was loneliness here of a kind he had not felt anywhere else; not in the misted swamps of Albion nor even on the lifeless sands of Nehekhara. These ruins were steeped in it, like stones in the desert that had absorbed it all day and now radiated it at night. He mentioned the feeling to Gotrek.

‘Even in my people’s Golden Age, when Karaz-a-Karak could put a throng of fifty thousand upon the field and not suffer one less hammer at her forges, there were naught but a few thousand here. They made a go of it, they were dwarfs, but they left in the end.’

Felix strained his eyes into the dark that filled the crumbling relics on either side, as if by willpower he could make them see as Gotrek’s could. His imagination populated the shadows with goblin raiders, charging through the streets on their wolf mounts while dwarfs screamed and their city was looted and burned. But Felix couldn’t see any obvious indications of battle damage. Skaven, perhaps? His heart beat a little faster at the thought of that vile, duplicitous race. He did not think himself a hateful man, or a coward, but he hated and feared the ratmen more than any other horror he had encountered. They were poisoners, saboteurs and assassins. They had murdered his father, nearly killed him more than once, and, but for a fortuitous twist of fate here and there, had very nearly brought down the Empire long before now. Even in failure they had burnt half of Nuln to the ground and destroyed the Gunnery School.

He thought back to that third set of footsteps that he had convinced himself was just his imagination.

Sigmar, he prayed tightening his grip on his sword, let it be skaven.

‘What happened?’ he managed to ask after a few minutes of picturing what he would do to the rat he found between him and Kat.

‘Nothing “happened”, manling. There was just nothing here worth staying for.’

The inherent sadness of that caused Felix’s shoulders to droop and he eased his grip on his sword.

‘And the temple that Lorin mentioned?’

Gotrek gave a disparaging snort. ‘The witless old fool. It is not a temple. It is a fortress.’

‘What does the name mean?’

Gotrek pursed his lips and considered. ‘There are some words that your language does not have meanings for. Suffice to say, manling, that it does not exist or it would have been found by now. The road we look for was not built by the dwarfs that once lived here, but is one of the dozens laid by the explorers who came hunting the legend of Kazad Drengazi.’

Gotrek pointed northwards and up. Felix could see nothing, except perhaps the glint of something metallic catching the light of the stars, but took it on faith that the Slayer was indicating the citadel on the mountain. ‘The last dwarfs to abandon the old dwarfhold travelled north on one such road and took it to your lands. Or what would eventually become your lands. It was they who helped the humans turn Middenheim into the fortress she is. They gave her walls, dug her mines, and even laid the designs for the funicular that serves the summit today.’

Felix’s eyes widened but he said nothing. He had given up trying to comprehend the age of this place. The Fauschlag had been an unassailable stronghold long before Sigmar turned the disparate human tribes into an Empire.

‘Those early miners found a labyrinth of caves and tunnels within the mountains,’ Gotrek went on. ‘One was extended to meet the road from here.’ Gotrek snorted thoughtfully, dropping to his knees to inspect another of the roadside rune markers that Felix had not even spotted was there. ‘Although I doubt Grimnir himself could tell you why.’

So that was how Gotrek planned to pass under the Chaos hordes that undoubtedly besieged the City of the White Wolf and get inside.

A gust of wind from the north carried an eerie moan through the ruins.

Dare he even hope?

‘Was that wise, building a back door into your fortress, I mean? Who else might stumble onto these same roads?’

Gotrek scraped moss from the marker with his thumbnail and grunted: ‘Impossible.’

Felix wished he could be so sure. Before he could open his mouth to seek further reassurance, Gotrek raised his hand for quiet and sniffed the air. Gotrek licked his finger and held it up to find the wind, turning in its direction – north, down the street – and glared into the dark. Felix bit his lip, sword raised.

‘What is it?’

‘Shhh. I thought I smelled something.’

The dwarf turned to Felix, who shook his head. He still had that cooked-oats smell in his nose, and he suspected that even had he not it would have been difficult to detect much beyond the gentle reek of his own unwashed clothing.

‘I told you, you wanted Kolya,’ he murmured. ‘He’s good at this sort of thing.’

The Kislevite had formerly made his living hunting monstrous game across Troll Country and the Goromadny Mountains, trading the prized carcasses with the Kurgan-speaking tribes that dwelt there. He didn’t have an old man’s tired eyes or aching joints, nor did he have the same need for a bedroll and a fire and a cupful of gruel that Felix did. More importantly, he was Gotrek’s rememberer now, and his place was surely here. Was it the man’s laxity or Gotrek’s conscious choice that had Felix here in his stead?

The Slayer muttered gruffly and then fell silent, standing up and crossing over the road as if Felix hadn’t opened his mouth at all.

‘Over here, manling,’ Gotrek’s lowered voice called back from under the shadows. ‘I don’t think we’re alone.’

Gustav Jaeger and two free company men in soiled burgundy and gold overlaid with plate armour and cloaks crouched around the footprint left in the soft mud. It was a little larger than a man’s. Gustav sank his finger into the print, eyeing the rushing ribbon of pearly white froth that roared by them. He had the strange notion to taste the muck on his finger, but resisted and shook his hand dry with a scowl. He was being watched, judged, and it was making him jumpy.

‘What are you thinking, friend Gustav?’

‘I’m thinking I’ll not be sleeping tonight.’

Kolya grinned and squatted down on the opposite side of the print, tracing it with his finger as though mentally mapping its shape. The shells and pebbles tied into his coat by coloured ribbons bounced softly off one another as he moved. The square patches of hemp that made up his clothes were grey in the dark, but no less bright by contrast to their surroundings. A freshly drawn henna in the style of a horse glittered with a faintly metallic tint from his forearm. He stood, planting his own foot into the mud beside the print and backing away to examine it.

‘Larger than a man, and heavier: see how deep it is compared to mine.’

Gustav studied the print intently. He was no tracker. He had peppered Kolya and those men he was expected to lead with questions on the subject, but there was no escaping the fact that he had not travelled anywhere without the aid of a road and a hired guide until the Battle of Badenhof had forced him. His skills would never match those of other men, he knew. Men like his uncle.

Nevertheless, the print looked to him to be no more than a few hours old.

‘Some sort of monster?’ growled one of his men, a scarred greybeard named Sturm with a sword across his bent legs and a half-cocked pistol in hand.

‘I don’t know,’ Kolya admitted. ‘But I have seen prints like this before. On the oblast.’

The Kislevite scanned the opposite shore, drawing his bow halfway taut to sight along the shaft. The tassels attached to its recurved ends fluttered lightly in the breeze. The Middle Mountains were a long way from the northern oblast, but Gustav could see the huntsman’s instinct at work.

To Gustav, the darkened ruins looked insectile, giant spiders on segmented legs of black limestone. They hugged the mountainside as though waiting to scurry down and overwhelm them.

‘Do you see something?’ he hissed.

Kolya lowered his bow, brow knotted in consternation. Gustav swallowed nervously. Something that Kolya couldn’t spot was infinitely more worrying than anything he could.