Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (24 page)

‘You cannot stop me, mortal,’ bellowed Be’lakor. ‘Even the gods cannot stop me.’

The daemon prince brought together what remained of his burning hands and Felix felt him summoning power.

He screamed a warning, just as the circular hatch leading down into the gasbag flung back to reveal Gotrek Gurnisson’s fiery orange crest. The Slayer took in the situation at a glance, slamming his axe down onto the walkway and adding his own booming voice to Felix’s.

‘I dreamt this,’ said Max, smiling feebly, sagging against his staff.

There was an implosion, a drawing in of light and sound to a dark point ravaged by white fire. The daemon prince burned away, his essence unravelling into the aethyr with a final thunderclap of spite that crumpled the walkway where he had been standing and sent a shockwave rolling out towards Max Schreiber.

‘No!’ roared Felix and Gotrek together.

Max didn’t even have the energy left to react. The wave struck him full in the chest and blasted him clear over the side of the gasbag.

Felix seized the handrail and had to consciously hold on to keep himself from diving after his friend.
Come back,
he urged, praying that Max could somehow hear his thoughts and find the strength. He stared into the clouds, willing for the disturbance that would let him know Max was alive. There was nothing.

Max had saved him. He had held nothing back for himself.

Felix’s eyes burned but nothing would come out. How long he waited, watching the clouds rush by beneath him, he could not say.

Come back
.

How many was too many? How many friends could he lose before he found himself no different to Gotrek?

The Slayer joined him at the edge. His huge fist swallowed the handrail. His one eye found Felix’s. It was set hard, a diamond in stone. His battered and war-weary features parted for a wordless snarl. Felix nodded, squeezing the handrail until his hand was numb from frost and his knuckles white. For once he and the Slayer were in agreement.

They were going to Kazad Drengazi.

Nergüi’s cold, dead face darkened with a scowl. The tribesmen waiting nearby to participate in the shaman’s final rites recoiled from the unexpected show of animation, a fearful murmur of leather scales and dark silk. His feather headdress hissed betrayal. The spirits whose charms he wore sewn into his gown lay silent. The gash across his throat sneered at the feeble trappings of an ignorant life.

‘
You are my hands and eyes in this mortal world,
’ the shadows around the shaman’s mouth hissed. ‘
But blind is what you are, crippled, weak. You could have warned me that the wizard wielded such power. He almost succeeded in destroying me.
’

‘I did what I could, Dark Master,’ said Morzanna, smothering the faintest, strangest impulse to smile. She could not say that a part of her was not glad that Felix and his companion were still alive, and not simply because fate had demanded that it be so.

‘
Do not say it, Morzanna. Men are slaves to their destiny, gods forge it. The Slayer will fall as you have foretold he will, and then
I
will deal with the human myself.
’

Morzanna nodded, but the daemon prince was wrong.

Even gods had their paths to follow.

‘
What are you waiting for?
’ The shadows knotted and coiled around the shaman’s body like tensing muscles, rippling suddenly outwards like a snap of wings. ‘
You have seen the path and you know what you must do now
.’

Morzanna nodded her understanding as the shadows dispersed and Nergüi became a dead man once again.

An awed murmur passed through the rank upon rank of sun-browned and leather-scaled warriors that filled the mountain causeway. They undulated over rocket-blown craters, horsehair plumes rippling like the yellow grasses of the steppe. Bowmen in armour of stiffened horsehide crouched in silence across the steep, rocky roadside. Even the horses seemed to catch the mood, scratching skittishly at the road.

Morzanna licked dry lips. All eyes were on her.

Command was not something to which she was accustomed, respect was not a thing she had ever sought after or craved. Hers was to guide and to follow, and in truth she had little care for the company of others. Indeed, she had never felt as at peace as she had during her self-imposed hermitage in the Shirokij with her spiders; hidden from the dreams of others, at least for a time, while destiny slumbered.

She ran her claws down the hard wood of her eagle-skull staff. Feathers flew. Chimes tinkled softly in the breeze. The cool wind was biting on the face and sharp on her nose and tongue. She had heard it said that the tribes could move an army faster than any other. There was a saying amongst them that Katchar’s all-seeing eye would tire and look away before their horses stopped running. The men liked to say that they could cross mountains, rivers, and even oceans and be ready to fight at the end.

A boast, but there was truth to be found there.

At least she hoped so. They had no airship to call upon and a lot of ground to catch up.

‘Ready your men and your beasts,’ she said to nobody in particular, neither knowing nor caring who amongst the remaining men now took charge of such things.

She extended a short dark claw towards the abandoned keep of the dwarfs. Her eyes narrowed. There was a road there, phasing in and out of her sight. She could not quite keep it in view, but that did not matter. She knew it was there.

The road to Kazad Drengazi.

And the fate of the world.

The idling engines produced a somnolent hum. Even the lighting on the bridge was subdued, reduced to a handful of glowing dials and the feeble sunlight. Clouds brushed the view screen like a mourning veil. Malakai Makaisson had shut down everything that could be shut down in order to save power. The battle had exhausted most of their fuel, and the destruction of the hangar deck had – by accident or intent – robbed them of what little the dwarfs had held in reserve.

Makaisson himself stood with both hands on the wheel, either unaware or not caring that the engines were powered down and the steering locks engaged. He wore his shattered one-lensed goggles and stared through the window into the cloud. Gotrek sat slumped in a swivel chair, to all outward appearances asleep, his brutalised physique swaying with the gentle movements of the ship. Gustav paced back and forth under the view screen, cursing under his breath and scratching at the scabs of his injured hand. Occasionally the young man would flinch, whenever a darker strip of cloud flicked across the view screen or a crosswind caused the deckplate to judder, then redouble his scratching and resume his pacing.

All of them kept to their own thoughts, plagued by their own daemons.

It was Malakai who broke the observance of silence, thumping the wheel and issuing a violent curse as the iron-bound oak splintered. ‘Ah cannae believe Max is deid. Ah thought he’d ootlive us all and tha’s sayin’ somethin’ of a human even if it’s comin’ frae a Slayer.’ The engineer drew his knuckles out of the wheel and grunted miserably. He looked around the depopulated deck. Most of the surviving engineers were busy in the engine room or still compiling damage reports. Or tending to the dead. ‘There’s nae many left o’ the auld crew, is there?’

Felix sighed, sat in a chair of his own. He didn’t feel up to speaking yet. He shook his head. No. No, there wasn’t. He turned to Gotrek.

Even with his one eye closed the Slayer looked utterly haggard. Felix had seen his companion more severely beaten than this. After the battle with the Bloodthirster in Karag Dum the Slayer had barely been able to walk unaided. But even then, having triumphed over the mightiest doom he would see in many years, Felix had not seen him so crushed in spirit. Were Felix feeling cynical, he might have been tempted to ascribe the Slayer’s mood to Malakai’s earlier admission that they no longer had fuel enough to clear the Middle Mountains to reach Middenheim. But that was unfair. This went deeper. If the wound were a physical one it would have gouged the bone.

To Felix’s surprise – and his shame for doubting it – Gotrek actually did care about his friends, these short-lived humans with their strange, flighty concerns who had become so important in his life.

Opening that door shone a light onto another that Felix had sought after for a long time. Gotrek had been cold towards Felix since their reunion in Praag and he had often wondered – bitterly at times – what he could have done to earn the antipathy of a dwarf with such honest blood on his hands. The Slayer resented Felix’s decision to leave him and return to the Empire with his new wife, he knew, but he had always believed that was because he had unwittingly reneged on some unspoken dwarf tradition of comradeship.

He had been half right. He saw that now.

Perhaps, once, it had been about the oath, about Slayer and rememberer, but that had been decades ago. How many opportunities had he been given to leave before and not taken them? Could he count them on one hand? Somewhere along the way they had become friends, possibly the only friend each of them had, and Gotrek had fully expected him to remain even without the formal obligation of the oath.

But Felix had left.

He felt sick.

‘Ah say we wheel her aboot and gae back tae ma auld keep.’ Makaisson thumped his palm meaningfully and growled. ‘Ah owe a world full o’ hurt tae tha’ daemon and whoever summoned the blasted thing ontae ma airship.’

Felix recalled the power that Be’lakor had unleashed against the airship, unleashed against
him
, and shook his head grimly. Never before had he had cause to doubt Malakai Makaisson’s ability to deliver on an oath of vengeance.

‘Kazad Drengazi,’ Gotrek grunted as though muttering the name in his sleep, but though his one eye remained closed there was clearly still no rest to be had for him here.

Felix turned to Gustav.

His nephew was still pacing, but he pulled up with a scowl as if feeling the weight of attention on him and thrust his hands into his pockets. ‘Kazad Drengazi, agreed. For Kolya, in case anyone’s forgotten him.’

‘A dwarf forgets nothing,’ Gotrek snapped.

‘Sometimes he just seems to.’

‘Sometimes I forget where I stick my axe.’

‘Don’t argue,’ said Felix weakly. He felt decidedly fragile, as though something precious inside him teetered and would surely shatter under one more harsh word. ‘Just don’t.’

Gotrek subsided back into his armchair. Gustav’s face tightened with anger and he returned to pacing the bridge.

‘Kazad Drengazi’s what the daemon wants,’ said Gotrek. ‘It said as much to me itself. There’s a power there, or so the legend says. If you’re strong enough to take it.’

‘If ye’re worthy o’ it,’ Makaisson corrected him.

‘What do you plan on doing with that power once you have it?’ Gustav muttered, still pacing.

Gotrek watched the young man back and forth, yellowed teeth bared. ‘I don’t care, so long as the daemon doesn’t get it.’

‘We’ll use it,’ said Felix, pulling his face up out of his hands and meeting the eyes of all his surviving friends in turn. Gotrek he saved until last. ‘Be’lakor said I’m destined to be his downfall. Those were his exact words to me before Max…’ He shook his head, shivered it off. ‘So we’ll do what Max asked me to do. We’ll beat the daemon to Kazad Drengazi, take whatever’s there for us to take, and return with it to Middenheim. On foot if we have to. And we’ll save the damned world if it kills us.’

‘Joost tha’?’ said Malakai, raising a limp smile from Gustav.

‘The little one’s lost, manling,’ said Gotrek. The Slayer averted his eye and clenched his thighs, broken fingernails digging through his trews and into the flesh. As if to distract himself from a greater pain. ‘I know that. I’ve known that since we heard the news of Altdorf. I just didn’t want to believe it.’

‘I think I’ve known it since Praag,’ Felix sighed.

Gotrek grunted, scratched his nose self-consciously and sniffed. ‘Middenheim it is then. It sounds like a plan.’

‘Ah daen’t mean to rain on anyin’s parade, but huv either o’ ye gied any thought at all tae how ye’re gaunny find a place that hasnae been found in ten thousand years o’ lookin’?’

Felix thought about this for a moment, then sank back into despondency. He’d forgotten about that. Max had been so certain about where they had to go that he’d assumed it would be obvious. He smiled self-pityingly. Give him a dragon in a cave or a vampire in his castle and he and Gotrek were in their element. They worked well together when things were straightforward and down the years neither one had exactly covered themselves in glory when it came to thinking things through. He recalled the view of the Middle Mountains that he had had from Makaisson’s keep: the outposts, the roads, each one a stitch in a vast tapestry sewn together over the millennia. If the dogged determination of all those generations of dwarfs had failed to locate the Fortress of the First Slayer then what hope did he have?

What did Felix have that they hadn’t?

A gentle bout of turbulence disturbed him from his thoughts.

What did
he
have?

He blinked, taking in the glowing dials arrayed around him as though seeing them for the first time. He looked up to stare open-mouthed at the clouds buffeting the view screen. Sigmar, he’d been so blind.

‘What?’ said Gustav.

‘Malakai, how high can this ship go?’

‘Until the air gets tae thin tae hold her. It’s nae like floating a boat. It’s complicated.’

Felix grinned, clapping the perplexed engineer on the shoulder and resisting the urge to hug him. The Middle Mountains’ ancient dwarfs had striven for centuries, but they’d not had the genius of Malakai Makaisson on their side.

They had not had an airship!

‘Take us up,’ Felix shouted, too filled with excitement, the certainty that he was
right
, to control his voice. He climbed stiffly out of his chair. ‘Up above the clouds. As high as she’ll go.’

Unstoppable
broke the surface of the cloud like a whale emerging from the ocean for air. Watery white cloud streamed down her gleaming hull, her mighty tail propellers frothing it up behind her as she climbed into open sky. It was not the blue that Felix had become accustomed to looking up to from the ground. It was a thin purple, a gauze through which Felix could see the black of space and the glitter of stars. It was hauntingly beautiful.