Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (2 page)

Altdorf.

The painful memories associated with home, and his decision to leave it in the first place, were forced out of his mind as a powerfully built beastman in a red leather jack and a visored helmet bulled through the herd from Felix’s blind side. It swept back an enormous war-axe. Felix reckoned that that had been about five minutes. He had always fancied himself an optimist. The axe-beast made it to within arm’s reach when it crunched to a sudden standstill and coughed blood over the side of Felix’s face.

‘The manling’s with me,’ came a voice like an iron boot on beastman gristle.

The beastman clawed feebly at the air as it was hoisted from the ground, Gotrek’s starmetal axe still buried in the base of its spine. As if raising a fully-grown and armoured bull gor over his head was a feat he could gladly repeat all day, the Slayer spread his cut and blistered lips into a spiteful grin. Blood spotted his scalp, increasing to a patter every time the beastman flailed a hoof for his huge crest of orange hair.

‘Must we stop for every mewling stray that falls into our laps?’ said Gotrek. The runes of his blade glowed redly through the suspended beastman’s flesh, casting a bruise-like pall of discolouration over his swollen, tattooed bulk. Purple shadows gathered within the knot of scar tissue that filled his hollow eye socket. ‘I vowed to return you to the little one, manling, not every man and dwarf between Praag and Talabheim.’

Felix ground his teeth, pulled his sword back up into a guard and turned his back on the murderous dwarf. Just looking at his one-time friend made him feel sick inside. Felix could see blood on the dwarf’s hands and no amount of beastmen deaths were going to wash it away. An oath tethered the Slayer to him, and this time it wasn’t even his. It was dwarf stubbornness and a grossly misplaced sense of obligation rather than his own drunken stupidity that plagued him now.

‘Did you see where that Chaos warrior went?’ Felix replied finally, voice wire-tight.

‘You are infuriating, manling. How am I to keep you safe when you charge headlong into a herd of beasts after a champion of the Dark Powers?’

‘Frustrating, isn’t it?’

From behind Felix’s back, there was the sound of something wet being wrenched from a blade followed by a thump. ‘What was that?’

‘Never mind.’

Taking advantage of the death that inevitably surrounded Gotrek Gurnisson in a battle, Felix again wiped blood from his eyes and studied the knot of Hochland spears on the hill. He was convinced that the Chaos warrior had been heading for them. He was about to share his thinking with Gotrek when he heard what sounded like a child’s scream from the opposite direction. He snapped around, thoughts of Kat and a diffuse paternal longing swirling through his mind before his eyes settled on a dim haze of pike shafts and powder smoke in the distance. His fingers tightened around the hilt of his sword, squeezing the golden ring he wore on his fourth finger.

He turned to Gotrek. It punched him in the gut to have to ask.

‘What?’

‘I think there are families back there.’

Gotrek snorted; amusement, derision, Felix could never tell and neither reflected terribly well on the dwarf.

‘If you don’t then I will.’

The dwarf’s expression hardened. ‘And let you chase after a Chaos warrior while my back is turned? On my oath, manling, I will not.’

‘You know what Chaos warriors are like. He’ll be onto you the moment he – Gotrek, am I boring you?’

Gotrek smothered his yawn with a hand the size of a cured ham. He shook his head blearily. If Felix didn’t know better, he’d say the dwarf looked tired. The golden chain running between his nose and his ear clinked. He ran his thumb around the rim of his axe blade until a bead of blood formed against the meteoric steel. ‘I know the drill, manling. Just point me at him.’

‘Push,’ roared Sergeant Sierck. ‘Push as your bloody mothers pushed.’

With one voice, the Hochlanders echoed the defiant roar of the newcomers from the woods and pushed. Beastmen bellowed and battered at the men’s shields. The animals pushed back, but slowly the discipline of the men of Hochland ground them down the hill.

Though Markus Weissman was so overwrought with terror that his arms shook, he pushed until he wept. He would have run if he could, but they were surrounded. Now there was hope, a champion, and all they had to do was fight a little harder to reach him. Even that slim hope was almost too much to bear.

Vision spotting, Markus snatched glimpses over the top of his shield. He saw the dwarf with the axe and the red-cloaked swordsman part company, almost felt the impact as the dwarf hit the mass of beastmen like a catapult stone. He was going the wrong way! Why was the dwarf heading away from them? Then Markus saw that the swordsman was still coming towards him and that the dread warrior at the base of the hill had paused to turn towards the commotion on his flank. The armoured fiend looked from Markus and the others to the dwarf. It felt as though a lead weight had been removed from his chest.

The man and the dwarf would save them after all!

Then the Chaos warrior turned back, negligently raised one night-blue gauntlet and held it high as it erupted into incandescent black flame.

Felix felt a tingle run down the nape of his neck and he shivered, almost missing a parry that allowed a beastman in clanking mail skirts to graze his arm with its sword. Felix was familiar with the uncanny blessings that the Ruinous Powers could bestow upon their favourites but such gifts tended to run towards the prosaic – tentacles, horns, bigger muscles, deadlier blades. Disquiet running through him like icemelt, Felix sold the sword-beast a feint and then opened its gut with a deft downward flick of his blade. Felix recovered his stance as the beastman fell, cracking its flat boar-like snout on the upside-down barrel of a cannon.

This part of the battlefield was littered with the detritus of what looked like an artillery train. Bronze and steel barrels lay on the ground like caskets waiting to be buried. Felix felt a stab of regret that these mighty weapons had not even had a chance to be fired before they were destroyed. If they had then this battle might have gone very differently.

Felix still couldn’t see the Chaos warrior for the broken wagons that dotted the intervening space as though dropped from the sky to their destruction, but then he didn’t need to. He had enough experience of sorcerers to recognise the unease gurgling mockingly in his gut. It was just like his luck to run into a Chaos warrior blessed with perhaps the one gift against which Felix had no means of defence. Felix kissed Kat’s ring and prayed for a miracle.

Where was Max when Felix needed him?

Markus’s guts coiled in his belly like a serpent. The hairs on the back of his hands stood on end as if it was suddenly as cold as night, and a shiver ran him through from head to toe. The Chaos warrior had become a beacon, a pillar of black flame that touched the tormented sky and washed the beastman herds below with broken shadow. Markus had never been particularly observant with his prayers, but right then, despite his gods’ failure to defend his home, he didn’t see any other alternatives. Hopelessly, he cast about for the hero in the red cloak. He felt an arm slot through his.

‘Sigmar preserve us,’ said Ernst Höller.

‘Spare us,’ Markus stammered.

‘Stand!’ yelled Sierck, sweeping his sword high through the misted breath that wreathed his torso. The temperature continued to plummet. The professional soldier’s voice was taut with worry. That troubled Markus almost as much as the sorcerer himself. ‘Show them Empire st–’

He never finished.

His raised sword ignited with black fire as though it had been struck by lightning. In that sudden flash, Markus saw the man’s bones silhouetted against the writhing grey of muscle and flesh. The men to Sierck’s immediate left and right were screaming as searing ash fell on bare flesh and set light to their clothes. One of them was clubbed down by a triumphant beastman, but all Markus could do was stare in dumb horror. A disgusting wave rippled across Sierck’s charred remains. His chest began to bloat.

Markus broke from his fugue, some instinct pulling his friend, Höller, behind him as he turned his shield from the beastmen and onto his former sergeant instead. An anaemic tentacle lined with suckers and barbs punched through his wooden shield and his cured leather vest and burst from his back.

‘Doomed!’ Markus croaked, before an eruption of prehensile limbs tore his company apart.

An explosion tore out the top of the hill. Distance and the proximate sounds of combat rendered it hauntingly silent, and Felix watched in what felt like slow motion as the tentacled monster was sucked back into the Realm of Chaos and body parts began to fall. Felix cursed, raising an arm to shield himself from what looked like a man’s lung. It splattered against his forearm. Felix felt ill. The beastman nearest to him was neither as concerned nor as lucky and what looked like a horse’s head in a horned helm crashed through the roof of its skull like a mortar shell. With a pattering of splats and bangs, the downpour intensified.

Felix screamed for the men around him to take cover and then dived between the wheels of a hobbled gun-carriage. He flinched as something heavy and best left unidentified crunched onto the boards above his head, followed by a bony skirling reminiscent of beads cut from a necklace. An unfortunate image of vertebrae crossed his mind and the urge to vomit returned in force.

What had happened to the world, he thought? After so many years of wandering, Felix had thought himself inured to horror, but this was too much. He was sick and he was tired and he just wanted it all to stop. Not for the first time he wondered if he had done the right thing by coming to these strangers’ aid when they could so easily have continued on unmolested. But that wasn’t the Empire he remembered and it wasn’t the one he still hoped to return to. That absence had given him a romanticised view of his homeland, Felix would not argue, but he had only done what any decent human being would have done, whether they were men of Ind or the Empire.

Slowly, the drumming on the chassis above his head eased to a desultory sputter and Felix took a deep breath and crawled out from under the far side.

The apocalyptic scene that awaited would not have looked out of place on the warped plains of the Chaos Wastes.

The wreckage of wagons and Imperial war machines lay everywhere, strewn with bodies and pulverised by falling gore. Everything, even the air itself, carried a pink glaze, thickening to crimson over the hilltop itself where a faint mushroom-shaped cloud was rising. A hollow clangour of fighting still rang out sporadically between the wrecks, but it was disarmingly calm, stunned into near silence.

Flat on his belly, Felix wriggled across the blood-slicked rocks and then pushed himself to his knees. He was surrounded by bodies, most of them men, garbed in workmanlike leather and dark tabards that marked them as engineers from one of the provincial gunnery schools. Felix wasn’t familiar enough with the Empire’s various institutions of engineering to tell exactly which. He supposed it didn’t matter. It was one dead place or another dead place.

The body immediately in front of him already looked to have been half-eaten. Entrails spilled around the man’s sides from a messy wound in his gut. There was a long-barrelled pistol tucked under his belt. The man had clearly been killed before he had had a chance to draw it. Felix supposed that that was a mercy of sorts. Without thinking, he took the firearm. A year surviving in the Chaos-occupied wildernesses of Kislev and the Empire had taught him to waste not. Taken by a sudden melancholy he closed his grip around the walnut stock, felt over the rough etching on the barrel with his thumb, A maker’s mark, perhaps. Felix wondered where it was. Did their city still stand? Was this gunsmith still alive? Pushing the sudden wash of hopelessness aside, he pushed the barrel under his trousers against the opposite hip to his scabbard. There was no shot or powder that Felix could see and he had neither the time nor the inclination to go rooting through the engineer’s blood-drenched pockets. He rose.

His determination to kill the Chaos warrior had become all-consuming. It heated his blood like a fever. Had he had the time to consider it then that might have troubled him more than it did, but right now he needed to punish the man – the
fiend
 – that could unleash devastation like this. Quelling his protesting stomach, Felix turned again to the wagon, stuck his hand over the tailboard’s sticky coating, and climbed aboard.

The squat, wasted power of a mortar barrel sat over the axle, lashed down with ropes and partially covered with a canvas. Felix moved towards it, ignoring the sticky squelching noise from underfoot as he took advantage of the high ground to get his first decent look at the battlefield.

The area around the hill had been bloodily pacified. Beastmen lay around the summit in rings like trees felled by a meteor. In Felix’s immediate vicinity, men that looked as bloody as corpses themselves were only just beginning to pull themselves up and blink in horror at the scene around them. Felix planted his boot on the gun barrel and swept his cloak over his shoulder. He probably cut quite the inspiring figure, but there was little else for it if he wanted to be seen.

‘Find your captains and regroup by the forest,’ Felix shouted, pitching his voice low to make it carry as he had learned – in another life, it sometimes felt – as a student of the dramatic arts. ‘And don’t forget to keep together.’

As the shell-shocked soldiers withdrew from the weapon train, Felix turned his gaze south to where the battle continued to rage.

It looked like the Hochlanders’ rearguard had pulled their wagons into a defensive ring. The vehicles’ high wooden sides were hung with shields and bristled with spears. Arrows and bolts hummed through the air and, intermittently, the
crack
of handgun fire rolled over the carnage like thunder. The tip of Gotrek’s crest shook violently within the churn. Felix saw a unit of kossars in long open-fronted coats running in to support him with hand-axes and javelins. Felix suspected that it was an act less of courage than of self-preservation. Felix had only followed Gotrek into half of the improbable situations that he had because the alternative – the slight chance of having to face them without the Slayer beside him – was somehow even worse.