Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (10 page)

But no further, Felix thought, as the Slayer nodded wearily and turned his back on the slaughter below.

‘Where are the man and the dwarf?’ demanded Khagash-Fél, his voice a barely human growl, focusing the bested champion’s mind with a tightening of his grip over the kneeling man’s bald head. The warrior’s skull creaked and he groaned in pleasure.

The champion was naked but for a pair of electrum bracers that clasped his forearms like entwined lovers and a belt to which a quartet of dazzling – now thoroughly dismembered – daemon women were chained. His superb muscular definition glistened with an oil that his pale skin seemed to exude, shining like buffed iron as mounted tribesmen thundered by with flaming arrows nocked to their bowstrings. Arrows and blades alike had glanced off the warrior’s smoothly lacquered flesh. Shafts lay unbroken on the ground where he knelt, teased from the air and prostrate before his beauty. Even Khagash-Fél’s own exalted daemon-blade, Ildezegtei, had caressed the champion’s musculature like a doe-eyed doxy swooning over a legendary hero on the eve of battle.

The gods adored a stalemate above all other outcomes in war. What better to please an uncaring immortal than strife without end? But these were the End Times, and Khagash-Fél found his patience for such trivialities waning.

He squeezed until the champion’s amaranthine eyes fluttered.

‘The gods grant you great power. What do you think that they gifted to me?’

‘Warlord!’

A tribesman jumped down from his horse and dropped smoothly to one knee. His bare chest was knotted with muscle, an artwork of scar lines and tribal tattoos. Concentric rings of scar tissue made a maze of one side of his face, with one lidless pearly white eye the prize at its centre, much like the slavers’ brand on Khagash-Fél’s own face. The warrior’s head was smooth but for a long topknot, the olive-dark skin slick with blood and sweat. ‘The Doombull’s scouts speak of a small group of men striking north on foot into the forest.’

‘And a dwarf?’ Blood trickled around Khagash-Fél’s cracked and yellow fingernails. Bone began to creak.

The tribesman sneered. ‘No man can make sense of those beasts. I sent our own scouts ahead to see for themselves.’

‘You did well…?’ The champion of depravity moaned once more and with a sickening
crunch
of bone went slack. Khagash-Fél shook pinkish matter from his fingers and turned to the tribesman with a question in his voice.

‘D-Darhyk, warlord. I have ridden with you for years.’

‘Of course,’ Khagash-Fél murmured, dismissing the already forgotten warrior from his gaze and turning to the city that its champion had called Wolfenburg.

Tribesmen galloped around the skull-studded curtain wall, waiting for the perfect moment when all four of their horse’s legs were off the ground and man and mount together seemed to glide before sending shafts wrapped with burning rags arcing over the city. Speed, power, courage; the horse-archers of the tribes were without peer, as devastating as a rampaging thundertusk or a charge of the metal-shelled knights of the west. It was without surprise that Khagash-Fél watched the Chaos warriors and their Kurgan brethren retreating to their stronghold, warmed by an ember of pride in the twists of smoke that rose over its grey slate rooftops.

There had been a time when such a faultless dismantlement of a rival champion’s war machine would have filled his heart with pleasure, but no longer. The Dark Master of Chaos had elevated him above such trifling affairs and he saw the conquest of this insignificant bastion of apostates and pariahs as the gods themselves must see it – a burning point on a map, one drawn on black canvas to depict an empire in shadow, a remount waiting for him on his road. He had pledged his soul to one god and there was no way back now. The dark smoke coiled like horns, reaching skyward against a backdrop of mountains.

‘It is as Khamgiin Lastborn revealed to me before his final ride,’ said Nergüi. The shaman sat astride his eggshell-grey mount, the frayed blue feather-strips of his robe fluttering down to its shanks. His narrow eyes peered into the smoke as though searching for a message left for them by the departed spirits of fire.

This was not destiny’s fulfilment, but its opening sally. Nergüi and his old ways had taken Khagash-Fél as far as he could. Ahead there waited a new guide, one who heard the commands of the Dark Master as Nergüi had once relayed the wishes of the old steppe spirits. He felt it in his blood, saw it reflected by the Eye of Katchar into his dreams.

‘Mountains,’ said Khagash-Fél, the single word that his son had related through the cast of Nergüi’s black feathers rumbling from his cavernous chest. That was where the Dark Master’s prophet awaited him, the one who would guide him to the red-cloaked man and the Slayer. Those mountains would be where they fell. It was fated.

The champions of Be’lakor came for them.

SIX

Into the Middle Mountains

A trickle of stones rattled down the steep sides of the gorge. Felix retraced their descent to a formation of bare and weathered rocks, a grim knuckle of sedimentary earth slowly grinding its way through the mountainside. The surface bore a dark sheen from the previous night’s rain. As Felix watched, a last desultory pebble bumped downhill. He strained his eyes. The relentless rush of the river beside them filled his head with white noise. For a second, he would have sworn there had been a human figure up there amongst the rocks.

Imagination could be a cruel thing.

With a nod of reassurance for the benefit of the soldiers around him, he forced himself to look away and trudge on with the long column of men and carts. The soldiers smiled, apparently content to take their safety at his word. Felix wished he could convince himself so easily. It felt as though he had been walking with a noose around his neck and a trapdoor beneath his feet ever since Gotrek had first led them into the pass. Not a minute went by when Felix didn’t squirm with the sensation of being watched, and every watch he awoke with eyes already sore in anticipation of another day’s straining on rugged-jawed ridgelines and distant shapes in the rock.

Unable to help himself, he glanced back up.

Past the rock formation the gorge rose to an ice-blistered peak, an unnamed titan of grey stone slumped under the leaden weight of the sky. The world had become a darker place since word of Altdorf’s fall had reached them. It wasn’t just in his mind.

The pass was tightening. The mountains crept a little nearer each day. The sense of sliding into some kind of funnel from which he could not escape was ever present. It made his muscles ache and his mind whirl and trying not to think about it only worried him more. With every ineluctable step forward the grey in the sky appeared to grow a little blacker. It was a mirror to the world for the world to see, and whenever Felix looked he saw doom closing.

And so he endeavoured not to look.

The company ate the day’s meal on the march.

Black bread and nuggets of hard cheese were passed down from Lanarksson’s wagon and then from hand to hand down the long, winding column of women and men. The sun was dipping behind the western peaks when Felix, walking with the middle of the column, saw his own mean ration. He chewed it slowly, making it last, as he surveyed the line of beaten men strung out ahead and ultimately winding out of sight deeper into the pass.

Quickly, as if to catch whoever might be watching in the act, he glanced again to the surrounding slopes.

There was no one there, but the sense of watchfulness remained, and Felix could not help but consider how vulnerable they were to any kind of an attack. There was little that could be done about it since the path was already barely wide enough for the wagons, but Felix couldn’t help but worry. It was as if his mind had forgotten how to do anything else. He wondered if all generals felt this way, or only the reluctant ones.

It was a wonder any battles were ever won at all.

Following the food came a cupful of ale, carefully doled out for each fighting man by the most sober-looking veterans that Felix had been able to identify. They wore dark leather armour with steel plates sewn in, and pushed a handcart laden with a single small barrel. Stern soldiers with loaded crossbows guarded its progress. Complaints fell on ears that were neither deaf nor heartless, but which had heard every tear-jerking tale there was at least twice already today and umpteen times the days before. The black-capped sergeant saluted Felix, his measuring cup in hand as though offering a grim toast, and then poured him a generous measure. Without thinking about it, Felix drank his due and no more, passing the remainder back.

The Slayer ignored the ale-men as he had the passage of bread and cheese. Felix wondered how long his former companion could go without food or water. At times Gotrek muttered to himself in what sounded like strains of Khazalid, the dwarfs’ well-guarded native tongue, but for most of their journey into the Middle Mountains he had been silent, glaring alternately between the valley sides and the soldiers ahead and behind. Determination alone seemed to sustain him now, but surely even the Slayer’s formidable constitution would have to fail eventually.

Felix had no idea what he was going to do about it when it did.

It was a rare cloudless night, the stars shining fitfully against a sky as clear as polished glass.

A cluster of tents had been pitched against the frothing waters of the river, hugging to the scant protection afforded their flanks by a sharp curve in its course. Unfortunately, the ground further from the water was naught but solid rock and after the first unsecured tents had threatened to slide into the river the men had instead thrown down bedrolls with what amounted to a collective shrug and a thumbed nose to the harsh vagaries of fate. Felix had heard and read that generals moulded the armies they led in their own image, and he was somewhat gratified to see something of his own attitude in their response.

A handful of soldiers hauled off their boots and braved the rapids to cleanse their aching feet. Others took advantage of the respite to refill canteens or rinse their clothes, but most simply slept where they fell. There were no fires. As the night chill set in men shivered in their dreams, while those detailed to watch paced the picket of spears around the camp’s perimeter rather than freeze.

Felix took his own shift on the picket in the final frigid hours before dawn, huffing mist onto his gloved hands and peering up the starlit slopes. It still felt strange to look on a night sky that did not contain Morrslieb, the fell twin of the greater moon that tonight bathed the gorge in silver. He could not say that he missed the presence of the Chaos Moon, but even as the harbinger of evil that it was, it was difficult to see its destruction as a portent for good.

He considered raising the matter with Gotrek, for the Slayer never slept these days; he sat enshrouded within his axe’s ruddy aura, not so much watching as impatiently awaiting the dawn and the chance to move again. The hole in the Slayer’s un-patched eye reminded Felix of howling wolves, of goblin arrows, and ultimately of Kirsten, Felix’s first great love, who had died in the same attack that had claimed Gotrek’s eye.

With a heart’s sigh, Felix clapped his hands and stared into the night. Had he not loved and lost enough since then? He could understand as well as anyone why Gustav wore Ulrika’s armour and why Kolya inked the same horse onto his bicep each morning. It was more comforting sometimes to hold on to the pain rather than let it go. He wondered if Gotrek felt the same way as, for all his race’s inscrutable character, Felix had come roundabout to the conclusion that dwarfs and men were really not so dissimilar as each liked to think. They were all children of the Old Ones, if that high elf antiquarian with whom they had argued in a Marienburg tavern was to be believed. Their disagreement had later been taken outside, the scholar himself subsequently dumped unconscious into the canal, but in a way Gotrek had proven the elf correct – they did all bleed the same colour.

Felix chose not to disturb him. He felt that they had edged towards a
detente
of sorts, but it was still too difficult to talk to him. He didn’t even know how he would start.

He was looking up at the sky, idly entertaining the notion of drawing his journal out from his under his shirt, when the sound of whispered voices from further along the palisade put to bed such civilised musings.

‘It is said that Emperor Karl Franz, imbued with the might of Sigmar, fought three daemon princes in the battle for the Imperial Palace,’ whispered one man, breath fogging around a dark silhouette sat on an upturned box behind a rank of spears. Felix recognised the rural Hochlander accent of Corporal Herschel Mann.

‘Felix once struck a wounding blow upon a Bloodthirster of Khorne,’ said a second, invisible man, not whispering in the conventional sense but possessed of a voice that seemed to dwell in darkness.

Felix scowled and tried not to listen. He shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Max was responsible for the stories about him circulating through the company.

His nephew would be so thrilled to learn that there wasn’t a well-thumbed copy of his book hiding in someone’s pack.

‘Truly?’ said Herschel.

‘Wielding a rune-hammer that none but the heroes of the dwarfs had wielded before or since, and screaming Sigmar’s name.’

Felix snorted into his collar. At least he’d remembered to include the screaming.

‘I had no idea,’ Herschel murmured quietly. Felix felt the man’s eyes turn his way in the dark.

‘There are many more tales,’ said Max. ‘It was Felix’s own hand for instance that delivered the death blow to the corrupted dragon, Skjalandir.’

‘These are days of gods and heroes,’ Herschel agreed.

‘And men of destiny.’

Felix rolled his eyes and tilted his head back to the stars. The stars didn’t care who he’d been or what other men thought he was. They were the same here as they were over Altdorf or Middenheim, and for some reason that thought heartened him through to the dawn.

The morning began with a shower, raindrops pattering over sheets and bedrolls and rousing stiff men from their slumber. Aching in their bones, the company broke camp and resumed their march.

The Middle Mountains dragged by, vast and empty and seemingly unchanged by the days spent travelling through them, except perhaps by their creeping nearness. The clouds deepened in pitch through the day until the sky was as black as burnt wood. The air grew cold and difficult to breathe, and several soldiers complained bitterly of headaches and of nosebleeds that would not stop. Felix had walked the Worlds Edge Mountains with Gotrek and travelled the Silk Road across the Mountains of Mourn, and he was accustomed to these conditions and did his best to help the men to adapt to them – to breathe deeply, to stop by the river often and drink – but even he was starting to feel the effects of what the dwarfs disparagingly called ‘altitude sickness’.

‘How much further to Middenheim, do you think?’ asked Felix, setting his foot heavily on the ground and turning to watch as a gang of strong but tired men got behind Lanarksson’s wagon to lift its back wheel from a furrow in the track. Lorin mouthed hoarse instructions from the driver’s seat.

‘Assuming this goes to Middenheim at all,’ muttered Gustav.

Felix thumbed his wedding ring slowly around his finger. He did not want to consider that possibility, but Gotrek’s sense of direction had not proven itself to be especially reliable lately. He wondered if it could be connected in any way to what was happening to the world at large. Could the dwarf’s loss of bearings be another symptom of the same malaise that afflicted Max? He couldn’t answer that; these were questions beyond him and he knew it.

An apathetic cheer sounded over the roar of the water as Lorin’s back wheel crashed onto solid ground and the wagon again got moving. Felix looked over it to the jagged line of peaks. He shivered.

‘I can’t shake the feeling we’re being watched.’

‘It’s not just you,’ said Gustav. His eyes were bloodshot and his left nostril scabbed from a recent bleed. He scratched his bandaged right hand incessantly at the puncture scars on his neck, eyes constantly on the move from peak to peak. ‘I’ve not seen so much as a bird, but you can feel it, can’t you?’

‘We probably are being watched,’ Gotrek’s voice rumbled from up ahead. The dwarf neither turned around nor slowed his pace, but the handful of soldiers between him and Felix clutched their weapons a little more tightly and pinned their gazes to the mountainside. Felix silently cursed his callousness.

‘I thought that none but a dwarf could find these roads.’

Gotrek chuckled mirthlessly. ‘We are following the river, manling. A blindfolded troll could make it this far. I would have thought it obvious that we are not yet on the old dwarf roads.’

‘How long until we are?’

‘I don’t know.’ Gotrek shrugged, glaring at the shadows over the too-near horizon. ‘I’ve never been this way before.’

‘We should make a plan for if we can’t find this supposed road,’ Gustav murmured, eyes ahead, fingers scratching. ‘I don’t want to be walking through these mountains until we arrive out the other side in Nordland or starve to death. I say give him two more days to find his way, then we turn back, make for the south.’

‘We’ll find it,’ said Felix, mustering a confidence that he did not the least bit feel and fortifying it with a smile.

Gustav scoffed but hadn’t the energy to add anything further.

Felix walked on, thinking about what Gotrek had said, the nape of his neck prickling with imagined arrows.

‘Beastmen!’

The cry rang out from the head of the marching column. Men and women scattered screaming in all directions, covered by the staccato
crack
of handgun fire. Puffs of powder smoke rose over the column, dispersing into the thin air as the volley echoed through the gorge.

Felix huffed a dozen strides up the side of the valley, and then spun around, waving his arms in a cutting motion across his chest. ‘Stop. Cease fire.’