Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (19 page)

He groaned. Slim chance of that.

A tattooed hand clung to a spear of metal. The flesh looked ancient, splotched with liver spots and faded ink, but a gnarled old oak had never held the earth between its roots more tightly. The warrior was still alive! Where did the Chaos Gods find these champions? The man’s feet kicked over an abyss. The strands of his long grey mane tapered and burned.

The bridge creaked alarmingly as Felix stepped onto it and drew his sword.

‘Your doom is foretold,’ the warrior snarled, swinging his free hand for a better hold that wasn’t there. His face was one of cold contempt, but his accent was familiar, similar to those of the barbarous horse tribes that plagued the steppe between the Worlds Edge and the Mountains of Mourn. Felix had been given cause to rue their horsemanship and suicidal bravery more than once during his near-fatal journey to the lands of the Far East. ‘The Dark Master will allow only one victor here.’

‘If I had a penny for every doom I’d been promised then I’d be High King of the dwarfs by now.’ Gotrek stomped carelessly onto the bridge stump. There was a juddering squeal and the Chaos warrior’s handhold pitched him ever further towards oblivion. Gotrek raised his axe two-handed over the warrior’s wrist.

‘I am a favourite of the gods, painted one. No weapon touched by fire in its making can harm me.’

‘Is that right?’ Gotrek brought his enormous axe to his one good eye as though considering testing the champion’s words, then stamped his heel onto the warrior’s fingers.

Bones crunched, but no pain showed on the warrior’s face, just a flicker of defiance in his human, seeing eye as Gotrek ground his foot forward and kicked out, pushing the Chaos warrior’s broken hand out into empty air. The man flailed in hard-faced silence, a fierce lament going up from the beastmen as they rushed like stampeding cattle for the ledge to watch their champion fall, but not once did the warrior scream. Felix held the man’s gaze, then watched him disappear.

Several seconds later, a final
bang
from the bottom of the gorge startled him from his vigil.

Gotrek put a heavy hand on his shoulder. Felix suspected it was less about offering comfort than it was borrowing a little support. The Slayer’s jaw was blue, his face was bleeding, and Felix didn’t like to think how close his former companion had just been to death. If he had been a minute slower in coming to Gotrek’s aid, if he had acted differently in just the slightest way, then it would probably be the both of them down there at the foot of the mountain now. The very idea offended him in a way he could not adequately explain even to himself.

It was a feeling.

The Slayer’s doom was coming, of that Felix had never been more certain, but whenever and however it came he was convinced that it would be an act that shaped the outcome of the End Times.

For good or ill.

Gotrek found strength to hawk up a gobbet of phlegm and send it arcing across the chasm towards the beastmen stranded on the far side. It fell well short, but it seemed to give the dwarf some pleasure.

‘If Makaisson should ask,’ he said, the burning wreckage that lay strewn all over the courtyard glittering in his one good eye, ‘we’ll tell him it was an accident.’

Khagash-Fél lay broken on the rocks. Beastmen, beaten into still, submissive shapes, were draped over the mountainside, their bloodied bodies glittering with bits of metal in the narrow shaft of light. The break in the chasm, coming far above after what looked like leagues of sheer, mountainous black, looked like a mouth and Khagash-Fél felt as though he had been swallowed by some mythical beast.

How could this have happened?

He was the Fire of Zharr, the Eagle of Mourn, the Plague of Yusak and the Delighter in Blood. He had slaughtered daemons and champions by the hundred over decades he had long lost count of. The Dark Master had chosen him for the destruction of his enemy; his prophetess had guided his sword. He bared his teeth, conquering the weakness that would have him scream at the broken bones that simple action upset, and tried to rise.

He would not fail!

‘Be still, Half-Ogre, your servitude is done.’

Morzanna crouched over him. Her claws pushed lightly upon his breastplate like a child seeking to hold down a bull. With a coarse groan, Khagash-Fél dropped back onto his bier of rocks. He tightened his eyes for a moment and snarled.

‘You saw this. You knew how this battle would end and you let me fight anyway. Why?’

The prophetess smiled sadly. Her eyes glittered softly under the distant light. ‘When you understand that, you will know what it means to tie your destiny to one as mighty as Be’lakor’s.’

Khagash-Fél tilted his head back to face the light. As a youth, he had once scaled a mountain this high and almost as steep to raid an eagle’s nest for an egg to present to his father. Even then his feats had been legend. It was an almost impossible climb up. Or down.

‘You are not here,’ he said simply.

‘Your mind dreams the ultimate dream, Terror of the East, but I am here with you.’ The woman spoke with a genuine sorrow. ‘Such is my gift.’

‘I will not beg for my life.’

‘You are brave. You deserved a more caring master.’

The woman glanced to the deep shadows where beastmen lay like basking birds on the rocks. A figure whispered out of the darkness. His feathered robes fluttered and chimed in a breeze that Khagash-Fél could not feel. His bone clogs struck the earth with a rhythm eerily reminiscent of the one played on funerary sticks for the passing of Khamgiin Lastborn.

‘You gave your life for the Dark Master,’ said Nergüi, headdress rustling as he crouched. His weathered face was wide with awe. ‘All the tribes speak of your sacrifice. They will serve to the last man. As will I. Forgive me, warlord, that I did not see until now.’

‘No,’ Khagash-Fél snarled, for the first time in his life seeing with the clarity of a dead man. He had been used until he was useless, and now it was the turn of his people. ‘Take my sword. Lead the people to Middenheim and the horde of Archaon as you asked of me. The tribes are not the Dark Master’s to destroy.’

Ignoring him, Nergüi rose and turned to face Morzanna. The shaman bowed his head and handed her his staff. Glass beads and bright blue feathers abased themselves around its eagle-skull tip as she wrapped her claws around it.

‘Obey me!’

‘You are speaking to a ghost, Half-Ogre. He cannot heed you.’

With that, Morzanna whipped her claws across the shaman’s throat. Air escaped in a hiss, bubbling through the rush of blood that, despite his words of consent, Nergüi sought instinctively to staunch. His dimming eyes found those of his warlord. Blood spurted between his fingers as he tried to work his tongue, but somehow Khagash-Fél heard every word.

‘
You did this
.’

The blood on Morzanna’s hands was turning black and rising off her like smoke. A similar substance was gushing out of Nergüi’s throat and mouth, enwrapping his body like a shroud and lifting it off the ground on huge, bat-like wings. The deep laughter of the blackest of gods rippled through the hardening cloud.

‘The airship of the dwarfs is swift,’ said Morzanna, voice strained with the effort of channelling the primeval horror she would unleash upon the world. ‘But the wrath of Be’lakor has no limit.’

TWELVE

Flight

The wide leather chair aboard the bridge of
Unstoppable
was more comfortable than any bed Felix had ever lain in. At least it certainly felt like it just then. The vibrations of the deckplate seemed to massage the aches from his body. The low hum of the engines was a lullaby. The way whips of cloud struck across the forward window felt like the airborne equivalent of drawing a blanket over one’s head. Even the bickering of the dwarfs felt soothing in its familiarity.

‘This isn’t the way to Middenheim,’ said Gotrek, standing directly in front of the window with his arms across his chest and glaring belligerently into the clouds.

‘That’s cause we’re gaun tae Karaz-a-Karak,’ Makaisson snapped back. He had his coat buckled and the fur-lined collar pulled up. His goggles had been pulled down over his eyes and he gripped the wheel with thick, fingerless leather gloves, standing on tip-toes in order to see over Gotrek’s shoulders.

What they both hoped to see through such thick grey cloud Felix couldn’t imagine.

‘You didn’t have enough fuel to reach the Worlds Edge Mountains and you certainly don’t now you’ve got a belly full of men to weigh you down.’

‘At least ah huv yin less gyrocopter tae worry aboot,’ said Makaisson with a sideways tilt of that fierce, goggled head towards Felix. ‘But if ye can git us tae Middenheim withoot a compass then ahm all ears.’

Gotrek snorted. ‘I am a compass.’

‘Ah know ye think sae, but ye really arnae.’

Sensing an argument with no quick resolution and that Felix could not seem to trouble himself with the outcome of, he moved his gaze over
Unstoppable
’s bridge. Dwarf engineers moved purposefully between stations, arguing quietly in Khazalid. One had a section of deckplate off and appeared to be applying solder to the steering shaft even as Malakai flew. Dwarfs were never the most extroverted with their emotions, but they all looked worried to Felix.

‘How are you feeling?’ said Max. The wizard stood over him, unhooded. Bone-grey flecks silvered his hair and beard. His colourless flesh creased with concern.

‘I should ask you that.’

‘I was a wizard of the Light,’ asked Max, smiling for the first time in an age. ‘That was not the first daemon I have been called upon to banish, although it was certainly the strongest. I am fine, Felix, as I see you are. I suggest you get some rest now while you are still able.’

Felix rubbed his eyes and yawned. ‘Gustav and the other men? Did they make it aboard?’

‘Yes. Malakai was ready to leave them behind, but by destroying the bridge you bought time to evacuate the fortress. You’re a hero.’

‘You get used to it,’ Felix muttered drowsily.

‘Felix.’

‘Mmmm?’

‘It’s coming together, don’t you see? Do you remember the dream I told you about in which I was flying?’

It took Felix a moment to respond. His lids hung heavily over his eyes and his own body felt like a ponderous, distant thing. ‘Didn’t we all die in that dream?’

He was asleep before Max could answer.

Tall, slender pines rose out of the snow like the bars of a cage. A broken wind plucked the strings of the spiders’ webs that hung between the boles, trapped dew dazzling like jewels with reflected light. Felix’s presence here in this boreal wood disorientated him only for a moment, then he drew his cloak tightly about himself and blew on his gloved hands. A red squirrel bound in a silk cocoon hung from a branch, turning gently in the breeze. Felix’s breath misted in front of him, decorating the lattice of delicate webs strung up across the trail. His hand strayed to the hilt of his sword. The forest was dark and eerily quiet. The only sound to intrude upon it was the crunch of snow under his boots, and those of his companion.

‘Hurry along there, young Felix. Snorri thinks he saw something up ahead and he doesn’t want it to get away.’

‘What are we looking for?’

The hugely muscled dwarf turned around and shrugged. He was bigger even than Gotrek, a little shorter but broader at the shoulder with arms thick enough to grapple down a charging bull in each hand. Tattoos covered his bulk. His short beard was dyed red, but in place of a Slayer crest a line of nails with colourfully painted heads had been hammered into his skull. He pawed at his cauliflower ear, abashed.

‘Snorri was hoping you remembered. His head feels funny.’

Felix’s breath caught as he noticed the horrible red scar that split the middle of the Slayer’s forehead from the bridge of his nose to the base of his crest of nails. It looked like someone had hewn into his skull with an axe.

For a moment, Felix had the sickening memory of Snorri Nosebiter on his knees, staring up with a face flooded with tears to the starmetal axe coming for his shame.

This is the Shirokij,
came a lilting female voice in his mind.
Your path was laid here.

Felix shook off the feeling with a shiver as Snorri shrugged and carried on.

The Trollslayer hefted his axe and hammer and peered into the trees. Felix drew his sword as silently as he could. He glanced up, convinced he had heard a faint chittering from that direction. The branches swayed, flecking his bare cheeks with snowflakes. A bird, he thought, though he could not remember seeing one.

‘Did you hear something?’

Snorri turned his open face upwards and gave a whoop of joy. A second later a huge dusky-shelled monstrosity was dropping from the canopy, pinning the dwarf to the ground under its mass. Its eight fur-frilled legs were segmented and encased in dark red chitin. Enormous black eyes glared at Felix from an armoured polyp of clacking fangs that dripped with digestive venom.

‘Help Snorri, Felix, its feet tickle,’ came Snorri’s muffled yell, followed by a crunch as of a hammer bashing through the giant spider’s chitinous underbelly. The spider squealed and scurried sideways, a treacle-like spatter dappling the ground beneath it. Snorri ran after it with his axe raised only to be thrown into a tree by a swinging foreleg. Loose snow dolloped from the branches to bury him to the elbows.

Felix raised his sword as the spider scuttled around on the spot to face him. It hissed, mouthparts scissoring menacingly. He glanced sideways at Snorri, the old dwarf whistling the tune to a dwarf mining song as he dug himself free. Felix rolled his eyes in disbelief, wondering what it was about this situation and this idiot Slayer that made his heart ache the way it did.

Through breaks in the trees he saw more giant spiders scuttling towards them with a hideous clicking sound. Felix spun around. They were coming from every direction. Desperately, he looked around for a more defensible spot.

‘Snorri, what’s that?’

Felix pointed into the woods. Just visible in the gloom, its mossy outline swallowed up by the forest, was a cottage. Its wattled pine walls were dingy, its roughly thatched roof pierced in several places by the branches of the forest canopy and tangled with glittering silver webs.

‘This way, Snorri. We can hold them off in there!’

Before Felix realised what he was doing, he was barging past his spluttering companion and into the trees. A spiked-shelled horror lunged from the undergrowth and he veered to put a sturdy pine between them, lashing out on instinct at another as it came scrambling down the trunk and sending a chip of chitin flying from its mandibles as he ducked beneath it and ran on. From the unsubtle roars and the splintering of chitin, he gathered that Snorri was crashing after him.

With an inchoate cry of his own, Felix charged into the clearing.

And then stopped.

There had been dozens of spiders here. Where were they?

Heart hammering, he lowered his sword in confusion and looked over the dismal cottage that stood alone now in the silence of the wood. Warmth leached from his chest and he shivered as though a ghost had just passed through him.

He turned around, dizzied by a wave of relief as he spotted Snorri. The bodies of dozens of giant spiders lay amongst the boles of the trees and scattered like tree stumps over the clearing, upturned with their legs curled over their bellies. The Trollslayer swayed on his feet and chuckled. His body was riddled with bites and pinkish froth was coming out of his mouth. He spotted Felix and made a gurgling sound, shaping to throw his hammer at him only to accidentally toss it behind his back and fall into a giggling heap on the ground.

Felix tried to go to him but the air around him was suddenly too dense to move through, like something from a nightmare, blurring the trees and the cottage until all he could see was Snorri and the woman who settled over him in a rustle of black skirts.

She put her hand around Snorri’s throat, dribble running through the dwarf’s beard and over her fingers before she removed her hand and took his giant palm instead, scratching her nails along the palm lines and uttering a singsong chant. Felix felt the hairs on his arms stand on end and a shiver run through him. He recognised the voice as the one which had spoken to him just moments earlier. The woman was working magic.

‘You should have died today, Snorri Nosebiter, but I will not allow it. You slaughtered my guardians, you intruded on my seclusion. And you imperil my very soul should my master find what I do to you now.’ She hissed, a strange kind of smile on her lips as a nail dug a new branching line into his palm and drew a trickle of blood. An arc of something magical flared from the droplet and crackled over her knuckles. ‘The doom you seek shall elude you until the day that I decree. It will not come for many years, long enough for you to suffer. And when you are whole again, when those you most love surround you again, then you shall have a death that brings you nothing but pain. This is your curse,’ she smiled sadly. ‘A gift worthy of a Slayer. You will have the mightiest doom.’

Felix watched transfixed as the woman redrew the palm lines in blood. She looked up from the moaning dwarf, treating Felix to a conspiratorial smile as the power to rewrite destiny flashed in her lavender-pale eyes.

Her appearance was painfully familiar to him and yet wrong in every measurable way. Her back was bent, her hands unsteady as if from a wasting frailty at odds with the force crackling from too-long, almost claw-like nails. Her grey hair was tied back with a pin. Her face was kindly but sad. She was clothed in layered skirts of black silk decorated with coloured shards of chitin and glass beads. It was his mother, Renata, but it wasn’t. The voice and the eyes were both wrong, as were the strange clothes. His mother had always hated black; the only time Felix had seen her wear it had been for her journey to the Garden of Morr.

‘This is the second time you’ve tried to appear to me as my mother. Why?’

‘I never had a mother,’ the old woman replied, skin darkening and hair growing paler as she spoke. ‘But I had a father who loved me more than the world. I remember being surrounded by people who cared for me.’ She looked at Felix strangely, colours lapping at the purple of her eyes until Felix could no longer be certain what colour they were. Small horns began to push through hair that was now completely white and shone like the face of the moon. ‘I have felt the kindness of strangers and have tried, in my own way, to show the same to others.’

A final burst of power blasted Snorri’s hand from the woman’s clutches. It lay steaming in the snow, the dwarf mercifully unconscious with a look of vacant dread scrawled across his features.

Revulsion filled Felix like bile from a ruptured gut. Was it even possible for a mortal being to possess such world-changing power? This woman had altered Snorri’s fate. Whatever doom he might have had she had taken from him to instead see his life end underneath Gotrek’s axe. His mind reeled with the implications. If Gotrek was merely responding to the tugged strings of this old hag’s web, then was he still culpable for his friend’s death? Felix shook his head sharply. Gotrek had still been the one with a choice to make. No hand but his had struck the final blow.

‘I would hate to be the beneficiary of your
un
kindness.’

‘Your friend, Max, always believed that you were being guided by a greater power.’ She spread her hands demurely. Each finger ended with a sharp black claw. ‘He is powerful and wise, and your meetings with him over the years have been more than fortuitous.’

Felix’s brow knotted as he fought to order his thoughts. ‘You were the sorceress that Max spoke of back at the dwarfhold. Why would you “help” with one hand and then loose a daemon on us with the other?’

‘Have you not at times sympathised with some of those your companion is compelled to slay? But it is not sympathy. I do what I must for whom I must, for even my master cannot see as clearly as I do. I have watched over you for a long time, Felix, guided you through the choices you must make and the allies you would need come the final hour. It was my magic that staved off old age long enough for you to reach it, and my summons in your dreams that called you back from the Far East in time to shape it. Your friend’s death was necessary, as was the manner of it. It tethered Gotrek to you in a bond of grief, and only together can you achieve what I alone know that you must.’