Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (12 page)

‘Double watch tonight,’ said Kolya. ‘Eyes on bridge, and keep distance from river.’ He turned to Gustav and pursed his lips, a fatalistic shrug so subtle it didn’t even disturb the shells in his coat. ‘And for sake of your uncle pray that it is interested more in us than him.’

Felix covered his nose and mouth against the scent of rot. It filled the rubble-strewn portico that Gotrek had led him under, clinging to the weeds that grew up like a cocoon around the sickly green corpse that lay towards the back of the room. It was a goblin. Its foot was clamped between the jaws of a bear trap that had been hidden amongst the rubble. Judging from the state of the wretch’s fingernails and the bloody scratches between its ankle and knee, Felix reasoned that it had spent a good portion of its final hours trying to claw its way free. It was dark and beginning to bloat, and what looked like tiny bite marks were evident all over its body.

Felix took a step forward, rubble crunching underfoot and sending rats squealing through the undergrowth for the far corners of the structure. His heart thumped. Edging forwards, he crouched beside the corpse. A prickly thicket of dandelions held up the goblin’s body like a cushion, only its strangler’s hands and arrow-shaped head hanging over the edges. Its eyes and lips had been eaten. Felix covered his mouth again and turned back to the doorway where Gotrek had remained, wedged under the doorframe, axe held lightly in one hand and scanning the opposite side of the street with his one good eye.

‘I doubt this poor thing has been following anyone for at least a week.’

‘Pity for a goblin, manling? For shame.’

With a sigh, Felix sheathed his sword and instead drew a short knife from a leather pocket inside his right boot. He used it to clear away some of the weeds and rot around the bear trap and frowned. Even under the merest whisper of moonlight, the sharp steel gleamed. There were no markings anywhere on it to suggest that it had ever been worked by a tool. It was, quite simply, some of the finest craftsmanship Felix had ever seen.

‘Left by one of the expeditions that passed this way, no doubt,’ said Gotrek, then returned his gaze to the street.

The Slayer’s wariness was setting Felix on edge.

‘Is there something out there?’

Gotrek grunted, noncommittal, and without turning towards him jabbed the eye of his axe up to the ceiling. From the outside, it had looked like this building had another couple of storeys, though the thought of traipsing through rats and darkness and who knew what else to find a set of stairs that might not even hold his weight was strangely unappealing.

‘Why don’t you go take a look, manling?’ said Gotrek absently, settling in to watch. ‘I’ll just wait down here.’

Morzanna, prophetess of the Dark Master, had seen the moment that a dozen mutant knights in full battle regalia had piled into her chamber a hundred times, long before she finally heard the clatter of their footsteps up the stairs of the tower she had adopted as her own. The only furnishing was an unused mattress of bound straw that lay against a wall – more for the appearance of it, the acceptance of a kind gesture, than for its utility. The rest of the floor was occupied by fragments of stone that had crumbled from the ceiling. Weeds hung down, ropey creepers playing against her small, dark horns as she paced beneath them.

She walked to the window. It was wide and tall, installed for the view rather than for defence, and that was one of the reasons she had chosen it and no other had wanted it. She leaned out. The mountains were felt rather than seen, a cold breeze from a depthless void. The ruined township lay against it, a stitch in a black cloth. The stream was a thin gurgle in the distance. She frowned, then slid a few inches to the left. Here.

There came a knock at the door and she smiled brightly, Delphic fangs catching the moonlight. That had been unexpected, a nuance that prophecy could conceal.

She turned her hunched back to the window and smoothed down the glittering black silk of her dress, straightening the jet spider brooch that held it all in place. She had played the Ungol wise woman for many years, and it was a comforting guise to inhabit. It suited her. She had enjoyed the wandering, the isolation, the empty miles of oblast separating herself from the dreams of others. The fear in which even those who had ridden countless leagues to receive her wisdom had held her was something she had enjoyed less, but which she had always respected: she had earned their fear, and it had suited her too.

And even in the Empire where men would not know an Ungol from a Ropsmenn from a Gospodar, the instinct to fear a crone in black remained.

‘It is open,’ she answered, voice as clear as moonlight despite the age evident in her appearance.

A square-jawed warrior with a rectangular iron shield in each of his two left hands pushed through the door and stepped to one side to admit the immense armoured form of High Zarr Koenigsmann.

The one-time Grand Master of Wolfenburg’s Knights of the Bull wore his stigmata with grace, but the signs of the Dark Master’s favour were there. A large man, he was simply immense in the full plate and surcoat of his fallen order. But the proportions were not quite right: his huge chest and thick arms were oversized in comparison to his legs, his bovine nose was too flat and broad as though it had been squashed, and a thin down of black hair was just beginning to spread out from his beard and fringe. His fearsome bull-horned helm he held underarm.

‘Did you have trouble sleeping, prophetess?’ grunted the High Zarr, nodding towards the bed.

‘Always, my lord,’ Morzanna answered with a glassy smile.

‘It sounded as though you were having a bad dream.’

Morzanna sighed. In her mind’s eye she saw a dark templar, the rupture in his breastplate where it would be, the blood that would dye his white surcoat red. ‘It was not mine.’

Koenigsmann grunted again, as men did in the presence of one who saw their futures more clearly than they saw their own past, taking his helm in both hands and rolling it between his palms. As he did so, the knights that prophecy had promised Morzanna piled in.

Moonlight glittered across bared blades, lifted the white from the black on the once-proud tabards of Ostland’s boldest. Horned helms and fiendishly spiked knee and elbow guards tangled the slender spaces between them like branches in an ancient wood. And not all of them were components of the warriors’ armour. Slathering, muscular tongues glowed with faint bioluminescence in the dark. Pincer claws clacked open and shut like the vacillations of some predatory flower. Tentacles thicker than a strong man’s neck flexed and slithered across man-mountains of steel plate.

For as long as there had been men in Ostland, small bands of mutants had lived a nomadic life in the harsh isolation of the Middle Mountains. These men were not they. They had fled with their master from the doom of Wolfenburg and had forged for him an army worthy of their patron.

And where they rode, the seed and the shadow of Be’lakor had gone with them.

‘The outsiders are still coming,’ Koenigsmann hissed suddenly, striding past Morzanna to the window and looking out. The dark knight scowled, stiffly lowering his helm to the weathered window-ledge. The alpine wind ruffled his beard and drew goose bumps from his darkening, daemon-touched skin. ‘Is it him, this mortal warrior that can strike such terror in a god’s heart?’

Morzanna closed her eyes, summoning the image of a flame-crested dwarf and a handsome swordsman in a red cloak to her mind. An almost maternal warmth filled her. She did not know whether this particular vision was past, present or future, for this pair had touched her life at every stage. But for them, Morzanna would not be here at all, for she could still see the doomed world in which Morzanna the child had perished in the purging fires of Mordheim. If only the Dark Master’s nemesis could see what she saw, could
know
how, through her, he had changed the world and how he would change it yet. His destiny illuminated the heavens like a star, and gods and men alike ignored it at their peril.

‘He is wanderer,’ she whispered, opening her eyes and banishing the vision from her mind. ‘He is warrior and daemon-slayer. His fate will shape the world and others beyond it. He is to be the Dark Master’s downfall.’

‘And he wishes to escape this destiny?’

Morzanna parted her lips into a soft smile of devil-spined teeth. How was it that everyone bar her continually misunderstood the nature of fate? It was not an arrow that struck at random and could be avoided with luck. It was what would be. It was what had to be.

‘If anyone has the power to try, it is him. If anyone has the arrogance to believe they can succeed, it is him.’

‘Very well,’ said Koenigsmann heavily. ‘We’ll take their scouts while they’re separated and then hit their camp while they sleep. Spread the word.’ He jabbed his finger into the double-shielded knight’s breastplate. ‘Command the ambush personally. The Dark Master will arise.’

‘Aye, my lord,’ said the knight, marching from the chamber and taking half of the warriors with him.

‘Can you tell me any more of how we will triumph?’ asked Koenigsmann, turning to Morzanna.

‘Triumph, my lord?’ Morzanna asked coldly.

In her mind she saw the ruptured breastplate. The blood on white. There was another reason she had selected this tower for her quarters despite suffering neither cold nor fatigue.

‘My lord,’ one of the knights muttered, a heavy-set man in a scythe-edged harness of articulated plate with a stone bull pectoral clamped over his chest. His visored helm was open to reveal yellow eyes and a thin moustache. He scratched at the side of his head, mirroring something that had appeared on Koenigsmann’s.

It was a red dot, the tip of a lance of light that, from its angle, appeared to originate from a higher tower or possibly from the mountain itself.

That she did not know.

With an irritated expression, the High Zarr bent his head and swatted at the dot. His hand passed through it. The dot danced unperturbed over his temple.

‘You were kind to me, High Zarr,’ said Morzanna. ‘You deserved a more caring master.’

The thunderous report of what sounded like a small cannon rumbled through the ruined township just as Felix threw his shoulder into the pine door for the third and final time and burst through onto a viewing platform. It looked like it had been a belfry. The walls were open on all sides except for narrow corner supports that held up a tiled roof. There was no sign of a bell, but Felix could see the stanchion where it had used to be. He imagined it being used to sound shift changes to the workers in the mines above. Or to alert them to an attack.

Felix ran to the nearest ledge and peered out.

It was like looking out to sea on a moonless night. It was just shapes, the whisper of an icy breeze, the fading echoes of a gunshot and… what was that? He held his breath and listened. Yes. He could definitely hear running feet, the clink of mail, the clap of swords in their scabbards.

He blinked hard and tried again to see. For a moment he wondered if his eyesight was finally going the way of his joints. Then he scowled and disregarded it. He doubted that a slow decline into decrepitude was something he was going to have to worry about.

Who had taken that shot?

There were a few handgunners amongst Mann’s troop, but none of them carried anything big enough to make a noise like that, and all of them were back in the camp anyway. Felix’s stomach dropped as the upshot of that hit him. He and Gotrek had managed to separate themselves from their own force and walk straight into a potential enemy.

He had to warn Gotrek!

He pulled back from the ledge, just as the Slayer’s bellicose roar from the street below heralded the clangour of steel on steel. Felix swore. Gotrek had sent him up here on purpose to get him out of the way. He clutched his sword and turned to run back the way he had just come.

Damn that Slayer.

And damn his oath.

EIGHT

Ambushed

Felix clattered down the stairs, bouncing off the square walls of the stairwell in his haste. The steps were too broad, the angle too low, designed for bigger feet and shorter legs than his, and his descent felt more like that of a stone dropped down a well than a run. He could hear the sounds of battle from outside. The stone walls muffled parts but seemed to amplify others, filling the weed-constricted space with wild shouts that came in answer to challenges that Felix had not heard and the ring of shields struck by phantom blows.

He half fell back into the portico where he had left Gotrek and almost landed on top of a grotesque pair of warriors. One was a heavily armoured hunchback with a battleaxe in both hands and a porcine snout protruding from a closed hood. The other was a willowy fighter with purplish skin and a pair of crab-like claws in place of her hands. From the looks of shock on their inhuman faces they were as surprised to see Felix as Felix was to see them, and in the short time available to think he realised that they must have entered through the back with the idea of ambushing the Slayer in the street. And then there was no more time for thinking.

Expelling his pre-battle nerves with a shout, Felix punched his pommel stone into the hunchback’s nose before the mutant could raise his axe, using the momentum of his descent to dog-pile the heavier warrior to the ground. Somewhere along the way, Felix had drawn a knife from his boot and he drove it through the mutant’s throat. The hunchback gargled, arterial blood squirting over Felix’s fingers. He looked up to mark the other fighter and cried out at the sight of an enormous chitinous pincer streaking for his neck.

Felix pulled back out of reach and then rolled off the dying hunchback, ripping Karaghul from its sheath as he rose. A spasm of muscle pain shot up his right side but he ignored it, raising his sword to parry as Willow Crab pounced over her stricken comrade and attacked. Shards of cherry-black chitin flew as the first claw almost punched Felix’s sword from his hand. Gritting his teeth against the pain coming from all quarters of his tired old body now, Felix backed off, clasping his ringing right hand with his left to wield the Templar sword two-handed and direct the second claw-stroke into the wall above his shoulder. The hideous mutation chewed through the rock as though it were stale bread. The mutant advanced under a barrage of clacking pincers, left, right, left, like some loathsome steam-powered threshing machine given lithe flesh. Felix couldn’t back away fast enough.

His heel hit something unpleasantly soft. The goblin, he realised with disgust, dodging and feinting and using every trick of footwork he knew or could devise on the spot to get out from under the mutant’s claws, slashing across her ribs as he spun away and into the space he had cleared with his retreat. The mutant hissed in pain and turned after him, tongues of purple flesh licking out from the edges of the wound to pull it closed. Felix brought his sword up in resignation.

Why did the Dark Powers bestow the most powerful gifts?

The glint of something sharp caught Felix’s eye amidst the weeds and rubble. Realisation hit and with an unworthy smile he positioned it between him and the advancing mutant and angled his sword into a guard.

The mutant lunged for him, her foot landing on the metallic disc that Felix had seen. There was a violent
snap
as the jaws of the second foothold trap bit shut over her ankle. She shrieked and swung a claw, dragging her mangled leg and the steel trap along behind her, either by accident or intent on positioning herself between Felix and the door to the street where Gotrek fought.

‘Perish the Dark Master’s downfall,’ she whispered.

‘Over my dead body,’ said Felix. He had no idea who the Dark Master was or what interest it had in Gotrek, but right then he didn’t care.

Willow Crab grinned like a death mask with far too many teeth as Felix went on the attack. Her movements were restricted by the trap that had bitten through her leg to the bone, but she was still quick. She was skilful too in a top-heavy sort of way, but Felix was better; he had been doing this longer than this woman had been alive and he knew his sword better than most men knew their wives. He scowled, Karaghul slicing through Willow Crab’s belly, then her arm, then her thigh.

He knew it better than he knew
his
wife.

Tentacles of semi-regenerated flesh rippled from numerous cuts and Felix drew back for a killing thrust up through the ribcage when the thump of running feet dragged his attention back towards the staircase.

More filthy-looking mutants in slimy cloaks and scratched leather armour piled in through the same back entrance that Willow Crab and Hunchback must have used. They came with a motley parade of hatchets, spears and nets and possessed no physical armament as impressive as those he had already dealt with, but that wasn’t going to matter given the sheer weight of numbers on their side. A claw snapped a hair’s breadth from his ear, and Felix retreated towards the nearest corner with his sword up.

He had always expected to die this way. Spoken aloud amongst comrades and friends it sounded terribly brave and honourable, but Felix didn’t feel either. In that moment, what he wanted with all his heart was to see his wife and child one more time. Just once.

Was that too much to ask this world for?

The first of the newcomers came for him, cloak billowing out beneath it with the undulations of what appeared to be squid-like tentacles in place of legs, and levelled its fisherman’s spear to impale Felix like a salmon.

Felix brought his sword around instinctively to parry. The spear shaved across the blade, wood peeling from the shaft as it went, and Felix kicked the mutant in the groin. Three more spilled around the first, brandishing axes and knives. Too many. More still were streaming in through the passage that fed past the stairs.

One of the cloaked figures in particular drew Felix’s attention despite the important proximity of several others. This one was tall, walking with hooded head held high with the aid of a staff gripped in two dark hands. Felix felt what little light there was in the room drawn towards that figure. The hairs in Felix’s skin pulled at their roots and even his eyes seemed to want to leap out of their sockets. He would have shut them had he dared.

‘Sigmar…’ Felix breathed.

The shadows that cloaked the figure opened out like the sepals of a pure white rose. Long ivory robes blazed with golden runes. The simple staff writhed in the man’s grip, a wraithlike serpent coiling out of the wood like a djinn from a lamp and hissing. The mutants screamed and covered their eyes, but Felix, strangely, didn’t feel the intense light at all. If anything it was restorative, leaching the aches from his bones. He felt better than he had in weeks.

The wizard muttered something in an arcane tongue and moved his fingers swiftly before his eyes. Shielding her face behind one giant pincer, Willow Crab leapt for him, only for the wizard to display an open palm of brilliantly radiating fingers, a wave of light purging the shrieking mutant of her stigmata limb by limb before a second wave blasted her into incandescent motes mid-air. Before the first sparkling fleck had hit his face, the wizard had slipped into a new incantation, voice rising and hands moving furiously as tiny spheres of diamond brilliance burst out of the aethyr around him and whizzed unerringly towards their terrified targets, mowing the mutants down like weeds.

The scent of metal solder and immolated flesh filled Felix’s nostrils. He ducked, several of those magical bullets shooting alarmingly close to him, but remarkably none of them struck. He watched from a crouch as the last mutant warrior scrambling over the bodies piled on the stairs took a white bolt in the back, spasmed, and then collapsed.

Felix looked over the burnt carpet of dead in shock and no little horror.

Max Schreiber faded slowly back into the afterglow of the carnage he had wrought. He pulled his hood back over his head, concealing the misting of his face and the inexorable eclipse of his eyes. Shadowy tendrils arced between his fingers and the darkening folds of his hood. He took his once again plain yew staff and leaned on it wearily.

‘I wanted to tell you about a dream I had,’ he said, blankly.

‘You… I’m sorry, what?’

‘I dreamed of a hunter,’ Max went on, as if unaware of his surroundings or the lightstorm he had just unleashed on the mutants that still sizzled around him. ‘He was beset by beasts of land and air and sea. Hunter, Felix, don’t you see? Hunter. Jaeger. That is the meaning of your name.’

Felix stood up slowly and took a deep breath. He reaffirmed his grip on his sword. The belfry had been cleared but he could still hear the sounds of battle outside and even Gotrek, particularly in his exhausted state, couldn’t fight alone forever. He waved a hand in front of the wizard’s face.

‘Listen to me, Max. Do you know where you are?’

‘On the path of destiny,’ Max answered with a faint, chilling smile, looking through Felix’s hand and deep into his eyes. ‘I dreamt that I flew again, you and I seeking the ancient power of the dwarfs, but this time it was I that died. I think that maybe I have some role to play in your destiny after all.’

Felix withdrew his hand and repositioned it around his sword for a two-handed grip. When Max was like this it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to talk him. ‘Gotrek has a destiny, Max. I’m just me, the same old Felix. And the “hunter” thing is pretty tenuous. Kolya’s a hunter.’

Max shrugged. ‘Who?’

Shaking his head, Felix squelched through the charred gristle towards the doorway.

‘Wait,’ said Max, dreamily, and then with a shout: ‘Felix, get back!’

Felix saw the flash of a struck match from the opposite side of the street. Not enough warning on its own, but thanks to Max’s prescient shout he was already diving across the doorframe and into cover. He hit the ground flat as a torrent of shells from what must have been a larger-calibre variant of a repeater handgun blistered the ground where he had just been and chewed the stonework surrounding the doorway into an unrecognisable shape.

He breathlessly kissed his wedding ring in thanks for his life as he dragged his feet in from the doorway.

With a whine like an exhaling dragon, the storm of fire ceased. A thin drizzle of rock fell from what was left of the doorframe. Felix felt himself tense as he waited for the next barrage. He had encountered weapons like this before, but rarely, the sort of experimental ordnance that would normally be deployed only to the largest battlefields and even then under the careful stewardship of the most competent master-engineers. Felix had never faced followers of Chaos with this kind of weaponry before. It was something new.

Felix wasn’t at all sure he liked it.

‘Move away from the wall,’ said Max, crouching down and laying a hand onto a patch of weeds that stood up between a pair of burnt, misshapen corpses. A pulse of jade light passed down the wizard’s arm and into the ground.

Felix held his breath, but nothing happened. An accelerating whir from outside told him that the volleygun was about to fire again. He rolled his head back to examine the ruined stonework. It wouldn’t take another salvo.

‘I said move away,’ said Max.

Felix could feel the ground beneath his elbows shudder as though it were being slowly wrenched apart. The stonework groaned. From the corner of his eye he saw one of the mutants rising. Felix gasped, but it wasn’t the mutant: it was the weeds underneath it swelling. The same macabre scene was being enacted throughout the room, mutated corpses giving way to vigorous green growth.

Max mouthed an oaken creak of an incantation and the plants responded. The front wall turned green. Mosses and vines knotted together like green steel ringlets in a mail coat. Felix shuffled around and wriggled back, cringing from a questing root that squirmed across his thigh. Before Felix’s disbelieving eyes the wall turned thicker and greener until there was not a single stone visible at all.

Over the engorged groan of growing plant life, spinning gun barrels screamed.

Felix dropped himself back to the ground and covered his face under both arms, flinching with every sap-soft
thump
that struck the living wall. After a few seconds, he uncovered his face.

A wide-leafed creeper whipped before his eyes like a lion’s tail. Something thorny scratched his chin. Pale fluids dribbled down the vegetative barrier, but new growth was already healing the punctures and thickening the wall further still. He slapped at the wide leaf, staring open-mouthed around him. He had some knowledge of the nature of the aethyr, and he knew that it was divided, as the particular talents of the eight Colleges of Magic were similarly divided.

And Felix had never seen Max work magic like this.

Max rose silently, cracking the knuckles of the hand he had just used in his spell and sending what looked like bark chips sprinkling from his fingers. The grey flesh still carried a faint jade glow. ‘You see now why I was loath to aid you before. Everything about this is wrong. I am a mage of the Light. Teclis himself taught the first magisters of the Colleges that man cannot master all the winds of magic. To attempt to do so is to expose one’s soul to the evils of Chaos.’