Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (22 page)

The sense of altitude and of velocity was incredible. The wind was a cold black hand pushing Felix back into the shaft. He fought against it, golden-grey hair thrashing about him as he planted his sword flat onto the walkway and drew himself out. The force of the wind on his cloak almost pulled him over the side, and Felix put his hand to the clasp at his collar, his first instinct to unfasten it and let it go to oblivion without him. He dropped his hand, instead wrapping the hem once about his waist and tucking the loose end into his trews. Sentiment would allow no less.

This tatty scrap of Sudenland wool had kept him warm on his very first adventure, years before he had had cause to rue the name Gotrek Gurnisson. And Sudenland didn’t even
exist
any more, a small fact that always made him marvel at and bemoan his age, depending on his mood. Right now, he did the latter, but there was fight in this sentimental old fool yet.

Keeping low, he ran to join the Hochland halberdiers fighting beside the handrail.

‘Praise the gods,’ yelled Corporal Mann. His voice was hoarse from shouting, grey eyes wide with a terror his mind couldn’t fully process. Behind him, the rift had widened to consume all but a blazing corona of sky. Felix tried not to look directly at it. There was horror enough for any man with the dark-bodied daemons continuing to stream from its black horizon. ‘We’re holding them off,’ Mann went on, ‘but there are more underneath out of sight of our bows.’

‘They’re attacking the gasbag, and the hawsers that hold it to the gondola,’ Felix shouted back.

‘What does that mean?’

For a moment, Felix was about to describe to the corporal in some detail exactly what that meant, but on this occasion his mind moved quicker than his tongue. What benefit would that knowledge bring either of them?

‘Try not to think about it.’

Weaving through the halberdiers and between a pair of archers in mid-draw, Felix gripped the handrail and looked over the side. A sickening vertigo rushed up to greet him and he swiftly removed his eyes from the bottomless whirlpool of cloud and focused on the gasbag. Thick nets hung down from the handrail. Felix had seen dwarf engineers clamber over them like goats over a mountain trail to conduct field repairs on battle damage – after the dragon incident for instance – and remembered being rather impressed by the dexterity and balance of so rugged a race. He also recalled being quite happy to remain up here with his hands just where they were on the handrail, thank you very much.

He swallowed the knot of fear, reaching over for a handful of the coarse black rope and giving it an experimental tug. It was strong. He’d been afraid of that.

‘We have to go down.’

Mann laughed nervously. Then stopped and looked down. The wheels turned. ‘No…’

‘We’re finished if we don’t,’ said Felix, knotting his arm up to the elbow in netting and bellying backwards over the handrail. The whole thing had a perilous amount of give, swaying alarmingly both as he slid his feet into the net and in reaction to the wind.

He took a deep breath, resolved still to at least resemble the hero that these frightened men needed him to be, and glanced up. Corporal Mann and his men were dropping their halberds to draw their katzbalger swords and follow him over the handrail. Felix felt the netting quiver against him. He found a wan smile, a warm feeling prickling into the edges of his nerves. As if being seen to be fearless and actually being it were not so dissimilar after all.

The gasbag was too large to defend in its entirety, but then they didn’t have to protect it all.

Malakai had once explained that even with half the liftgas cells destroyed the airship would still fly, and that were she to lose any more then she would simply sink gradually to the ground. Unless they were all to burst at once, of course, an event that the engineer had repeatedly assured him was impossible. All they needed to win was time, enough for Max to seal the rift.

And preferably before they sank deep enough, gradually or otherwise, to crash into the Middle Mountains.

Kolya had been four years old when he had first taken a life. The trap he had stolen from his father’s gear had broken the marmot’s back and sprayed its blood over the frost that clung to the young grass. In the years since, he had almost convinced himself of the lie that he had not known it was bad luck to hunt the animals in spring when mothers foraged for the hungry young in their burrows, but he had known. Of course he had known. Since he had been old enough to tell a polecat from a plover he had understood the rhythm of the seasons. His father had taught him and his half-brother that. But he had been hungry, for acclaim and for the experience.

He had wanted to know what it felt like to kill.

The Bloodthirster of Khorne brought all those feelings back to him as if he were shivering on the oblast again: the exhilaration, the thrill, the power, the enduring, simple pleasure of watching the frost turn red. Kolya recognised the greater daemon on an instinctual level. There had been a bond of sorts between them since that late spring day when he had first taken a life and found that he enjoyed it.

The daemon thrashed its bestial face, appearing to strain against its own crimson musculature, then let loose a savage bellow and launched itself at the Slayer.

What followed was too quick for Kolya’s eye to keep track of. Gotrek and the daemon collided in a storm of blows that, for the brief fiery moment that it lasted, filled the empty hangar with the ring of steel. The combatants rebounded from one another. Gotrek staggered aside, bleeding from fresh claw marks all over his arms and chest as well as a deep gash across his forehead. He held his head at an angle to direct the trickle of blood towards his gaping eye socket. Kolya was astonished that the dwarf was even still standing after such a punishing experience. However, the Bloodthirster too carried a mean dent in its bronze breastplate. Several grazes in its ruddy flesh sputtered with hellfire, granting fleeting glimpses of something black and inviolate beneath.

‘You’re not the same daemon I fought,’ Gotrek rasped. ‘You smell as bad but that one at least gave me a decent fight.’

‘But it is, Slayer. Be’lakor calls and we, the banished and the abandoned, heed the Dark Master’s summons. After my destruction I might have been condemned for another thousand years, but now I am free. The power of your own Slayer Fortress is what freed me. Think on that. And when Be’lakor possesses it then I will be the mightiest general in his army.’

‘If I hear one more word about that place…’

‘You cannot escape your doom, Slayer.’

‘I certainly can’t escape hearing about it,’ Gotrek growled.

Silently, Kolya worked his way behind the greater daemon’s back, readying his hatchet and marking a target in an unarmoured slit between the base of the monster’s enormous bat-like wings. He didn’t doubt that its flesh would prove as tough or tougher than whatever metallic Chaos-substance it wore for armour, but he would take what advantage he could. Having witnessed its opening sally, he doubted he would get another opportunity.

He pounced, but at the last second before his axe struck the daemon beat its wings, buffeting him with a glancing blow that knocked the axe from his hand and sent him sprawling across the deck. He made to push himself up with his now free hand, only for his wrist to erupt in pain. Screaming, he flopped back to the deck. He rolled onto his back and sat, cosseting his broken arm to his chest with a grimace.

Ursun’s teeth, the daemon was as strong as it was fast. He had underestimated Gotrek’s toughness, though he suspected that the great bear himself walked lightly around that one.

Gotrek took advantage of the momentary distraction to sink his axe into the back of the daemon’s leg. The Bloodthirster bellowed in agony. Starmetal runes sizzled like branding irons, illuminating in deep crimson a look of grim satisfaction as the Slayer wrenched his axe back and swung again with a blow intended to sever the monster’s spine.

This time the Bloodthirster’s axe was there to meet it, the mighty weapons clashing together in a peal of blood and thunder.

Flame dribbling from the tear in its thigh, the daemon unleashed a barrage of frenzied blows that would have demolished a building, sending the dwarf reeling. The Bloodthirster mercilessly pressed its attack. The stamp of its brazen hooves sent tremors through the deckplates. Its wrathful roar shook the uppermost gantries as its axe and whip made a ruin of everything within reach. The damage those two weapons wrought was incredible and yet implausibly Gotrek remained on his feet, just about, knocking aside the daemon’s axe with his own and stumbling back under a crack of the Bloodthirster’s whip. The whip snapped around the siderail of one of the metal ladders to the next deck and with a savage howl of rage the daemon yanked back. The ladder gave a squeal of resistance before it tore away from its fastenings and crashed over the Slayer’s back.

The dwarf went under with a grunt that was as much sheer exhaustion as pain, and in a blink of motion the Bloodthirster was there beside him. It cupped the Slayer’s scalp in one mighty hand and bent the dwarf’s neck back to lift his face off the deck. Kolya did not think that anything would prevent the daemon from doing exactly as it had promised it would – cracking Gotrek’s skull like an egg and consuming his brain.

Then an odd shadow passed across the daemon’s face and it let the Slayer drop, gnashing its teeth like a dog denied a bone. It withdrew to wrap itself up in its wings and snarl in frustration.

‘No,’ it said, its voice growing measured to once again become that of Be’lakor the daemon prince. ‘Your doom is to be at the hands of one mightier even than I.’

‘I will accept no doom,’ Gotrek grunted, levering the huge ladder aside and pushing himself back up to his feet. He hefted his axe, almost unbalancing himself with the weight of it, and stuck out his jaw. ‘Not until I feel the stones of Middenheim beneath my feet.’

Be’lakor chuckled blackly. Bands of darkness swirled out from his folded wings to enshroud his body, reducing the daemon prince to a shadow and a breeze. A cyclopean golden eye pulsed from the cloud. The laughter turned hateful and dispersed, but the voice purred from all around.

‘It will be exquisite.’

Gotrek slashed his axe through the cloying gloam. ‘You’re not the first to make such an empty promise.’

‘Empty?’

Gotrek spun around and raised his axe with a snarl.

From the shadows behind him emerged a new figure, taller than either Be’lakor or the Bloodthirster but supple as a willow sapling. A slender loincloth hung between its long, cream thighs. It wound a lock of dazzlingly multi-coloured hair around one finger as it gazed in hunger and adoration at the Slayer. In two more hands it held a long, undulating blade that put Kolya in mind of a woman’s tongue. The fourth ended in an elegant pincer claw that clicked with an aching melody. Its beauty resisted definition of male or female, man or beast. It was at once everything Kolya could imagine or yearn for in his darkest fantasies. From the divine to the infernal, it whispered of ripeness, readiness, of promises awaiting fulfilment.

‘Nothing in this world of delights is
empty
, precious Slayer. It was not my fate to fight you when last we met and it is still not. That is to be the pleasure of another, he who stands above us all.’

‘Swill-spitting hell-spawn,’ Gotrek roared, swinging back his axe and barrelling towards the daemonic beauty.

The daemon yawned as though bored, covering its mouth with one delicately-fingered hand before waving it dismissively towards the Slayer. A thunderclap went off under the dwarf’s chest, blasting him from his feet and sending him careening into the last of the ladders. The iron frame buckled around him and then rolled him out onto the deckplate like kneaded bread onto a board.

He showed no immediate inclination to rise.

Ignored for now, Kolya hurried to the dwarf’s side. He crouched amidst the metallic debris and offered his uninjured hand. Gotrek stared at it as if mentally fixing its position relative to his nose, but then the haze cleared from his eye and he glanced up at Kolya.

‘This is the day you’ve been waiting for, rememberer. Why would you help me now?’

Kolya met the dwarf’s gaze. It was all he dreamed about, that gaze, coming for him through a crowd of Kurgan, even as Kolya feathered the dwarf’s breast with arrow after arrow, loosing faster than any man could outside of a dream but never fast enough. He would see the blood of Boris Makosky, of his beloved Kasztanka, and some nights would bring him further slaughter as his doomed effort to flee that gaze moved him to the tirsa of Talicznia where Marzena, the wise woman, and his half-brother Stefan burned.

Zabójka
he had named him, and he had vowed to watch the murderer die.

He sucked in his gaunt cheeks, feeling on them the gaps in his mouth where the dwarf had kicked out half of the teeth on the right-hand side of his face, and shrugged. Call it a feeling. Humanity, maybe.

‘Some things more important than promises made in blood, more important even than horses.’

‘Aye,’ said Gotrek, his one eye appearing to turn inward. ‘Aye, some things maybe.’

‘Beautiful sentiments,’ said Be’lakor, himself once again, darkness falling from his muscular forearm like the folds of a cloak as he raised a claw to point at the man and the dwarf. ‘Ten millennia hence, I will bid the daemon-spawn that rule this world in my stead to recite them in your memory.’

A sizzling bolt of dark magic leapt from the daemon prince’s claw-tip and struck Kolya in the chest. His limbs spasmed as he was plucked from the ground and flung back. Steam rose from his hemp coat, the smell of burnt fur and feathers. Arcs of charge washed across him. He moaned in pain, tried to get up, but found he was incapable of doing anything more than twitch.

Gotrek rose and turned, thumping his chest with a vengeful roar. ‘Fight me, lurker. I promise you’ll not get a better chance to finish me, in Kazad Drengazi or anywhere else.’

‘I have seen Morzanna’s prophecy, Slayer, and I know that you have witnessed it as well. She does not sleep, but through her do the doomed dream of prophecy and death. That has always been her special gift.’