Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (25 page)

Felix pressed his face to the cool glass of the circular viewport by the airlock hatch. Cloud stretched for untold leagues in every direction, broken here and there by mountain peaks that rose from the surface like volcanic isles. The sun was a golden rune, shining from the purpure of the sky. The magical glow glittered from the mountaintops. One of them glittered back.

Felix gaped in wonder.

It was a citadel in the sky, its monolithic gates of iron-banded oak surrounded not by water or a ditch but by a moat of white cloud. Walls of a pale, luminous stone climbed towards the summit, rising with each successive ring as though the still-growing mountain had pushed up through the foundations of the ancient fortification. There the bright sunlight reflected dazzlingly from leaded windows and runic engravings, the stern face of Grimnir shining from the walls of buildings in hues of gold, silver and brass. The entire edifice looked as old as the stars, and yet there was an immaculate quality to it as though it had waited empty all these millennia for the tread of mortal feet.

Kazad Drengazi. The Fortress of the First Slayer. It had to be.

Had dwarfs once dwelt in this unlikely place, Felix wondered, or had the entire fortification been called to the mountaintop at the command of their god of war?

That there was something down there, Felix had no doubt. He could feel its power tingling under his skin. And what had the seeress said to him in his dream?

You are powerless against the opponent that awaits you in Kazad Drengazi, Felix, and Gotrek’s passing will be the doom of this world
.

He gave an involuntary shudder.

But it may be enough to save the next.

Gotrek watched from the neighbouring porthole, strangely subdued. The half-circle of admitted light cut his face in two, giving his bruised jaw a coppery complexion. Felix agonised over what to tell his companion about the seeress’s warning, if anything, but the certainty that it would be a pointless waste of breath bade him keep his dreams to himself. The Slayer was going to Kazad Drengazi now regardless of what awaited him there or anything that Felix might say.

And not alone.

Felix had pledged his companion no new oath. It was unnecessary. They both knew that he would follow the Slayer to the end.

The engines growled hungrily, rattling the bulkheads as Malakai Makaisson guided them in.

‘You asked me once why I do not sleep, manling,’ said Gotrek, nodding towards the fortress as it slid beneath them. ‘This is why. When I do I dream always of this place. I die here.’ He turned from the porthole. The metallic glow that the window shone onto his face imposed a stark, disturbing resemblance to the effigies of Grimnir in the citadel below. ‘And it is not a good death.’

FIFTEEN

Kazad Drengazi

Felix dropped the final couple of feet between the bottom rung of the rope ladder and the smooth white flagstones. His first act on setting foot within the ancient stronghold of the First Slayer was to execute a dramatic shiver. The air on the mountaintop was cold and thin. Either on their own would have been sufficient to account for the tingling in Felix’s fingertips and the blueness in his lips.

Breathe slowly,
he reminded himself, hugging his chest under his cloak,
slowly and deeply.

Gotrek was already down, swinging his axe in practice strokes as he paced out the wide plaza. It was encircled by marble statues that appeared to show various aspects of Grimnir. He was vengeance, war, honour, dishonour; in some instances he had one axe, in others two. Occasionally he was depicted dealing death with his huge hands and with daemonic gristle in his bared teeth.

On one side, a set of wide, shallow steps led up to an imposing structure fronted by square-sided stone columns. Simply by virtue of its position at the highest and most central point within the fortress, it was evidently a building of significance. Ornate entablature depicted scenes of battle, apparently the same battle, advancing through time as the eye followed from left to right before circling around the building to commence again. Unending. Felix immediately considered it to be a temple. On the opposite side a corresponding set of steps led down towards a rune-reinforced wooden gate. The plaza was set high enough that Felix could see over the inner wall, through the sparse forest of turrets and towers to the cloud sea beyond.

A breathtaking sense of loneliness pervaded the place, not that of an old man or a friendless warrior, to which Felix could relate, but that of a being that by its nature had no equal. The very stones that he stood upon now had once felt the tread of a god. It was an awesome, humbling feeling, and one that Felix would hesitate to call pleasant. He remembered when he and his father and brother had taken to the streets to witness the coronation of Karl Franz. He had caught a glimpse of Sigmar’s mighty hammer, Ghal Maraz, during its presentation to the new Emperor and the feeling he had now was similar to what he had experienced at that moment.

Insignificance, but married to a counterintuitive sense of collective importance, a physical connection to something ancient and powerful.

With an effort, he pulled his thoughts away from the divine and looked up.

The sleek mass of
Unstoppable
hung conspicuously against the violet sky, an uncanny combination of sun and starlight glittering from her gun-turrets. This wasn’t the first time that Felix had experienced such altitudes. There were peaks in the Worlds Edge Mountains which – as any dwarf would tell anyone – made all others resemble bumps in the ground, but he had never seen a sky like this. It was more than just altitude.

Some other force was at work here to thin the barriers between worlds.

Malakai Makaisson was halfway down the swaying rope ladder, laden with enough of an arsenal to take the peak by force twice over if he had to. The longrifle that Felix had experienced the business end of during their accidental encounter in the Middle Mountains was slung over one shoulder. With the other elbow, Makaisson pinned an enormous multi-barrelled, crank-operated handcannon to his side. A satchel that the engineer had rather gleefully informed him was filled with bombs bounced against his back. A brace of heavily modified pistols was buckled at his hip and a small axe hung from his belt by a thong.

Felix didn’t want to meet the thing that would warrant the axe.

Following some distance above the engineer came Gustav Jaeger, climbing cautiously in full armour, the wind pulling plaintively at his ponytail and wolfskin cloak. Behind him came a string of frighteningly well-outfitted and intense-looking men. When the last of Gustav’s company had their boots on the ground, Makaisson tugged twice on the ladder, then threw a salute with the barrel of his longrifle towards
Unstoppable
’s prow.

The airship pulled slowly up and away. The stony emptiness of abandonment crawled up in its place.

‘Over here, manling.’

Felix turned towards his companion’s voice and gave a start. His hand dropped to his sword hilt as one by one the soldiers looked around and cried out in alarm. Makaisson swung up his longrifle, only to turn it down into the ground with an exclamation of what sounded like surprise.

Facing Gotrek was another dwarf, although quite possibly the strangest-looking one that Felix had ever seen. Blue, red and purple spiral tattoos covered his bald head and a row of metal rings pierced his jaw in place of a beard. He was wearing what looked like a toga, but which clinked as he slipped out from between the line of statues into the plaza. Closer inspection revealed it to be a weave of bronze ringlets rather than cloth. Gotrek held his axe up warningly. The strange dwarf halted and stared, apparently fixated upon Gotrek’s weapon. He pointed at it.

‘Ahz.’

Felix turned, bemused, to Gotrek who shook his head.

‘It’s not Khazalid, manling. Or no strain of it that I’m familiar with.’

‘I didn’t realise there were dialects of Dwarfish.’

Gotrek snorted, not taking his eye off the stranger. ‘You’ve never been to Kraka Drak, have you?’

‘He said
axe
,’ said Makaisson, haltingly. ‘Ah think.’

‘Ahz!’
the stranger repeated.

‘Aye, very clever,’ Gotrek grumbled, tightening his grip and drawing his weapon nearer to his chest as though anyone could be fool enough to try and take it from him.

‘You can understand him,’ Felix murmured to Makaisson from the corner of his mouth.

‘Ah wouldnae say tha’ exactly, but ma hame is a bit oot o’ the wye too and it sounds a wee bit similar.’

‘I thought that dwarfs didn’t change like that,’ said Gustav.

‘They don’t,’ said Gotrek flintily. ‘That should tell you how long they’ve been cut off up here.’

‘They–’

Felix looked up to note that, as they had been talking, more monkish dwarfs had shuffled into view. At least a dozen, but no more than twenty. Fewer than there were statues. Gotrek’s ears were, of course, sharper than his and the Slayer had likely marked their approach some time ago. Felix wished that he could be reassured by his companion’s diffident attitude to finding himself surrounded in a strange citadel by an even stranger force of dwarfs.

A place, lest he forget, that they had both been told would be the Slayer’s doom.

The newcomers closed in with a metallic shuffle, murmuring, pointing at Gotrek and also occasionally at Makaisson, often with some kind of whispered argument involved.

‘Everyone lower their weapons,’ said Felix, raising his hand slowly from his scabbard and trusting to Gustav and his nervous men to do the same. The last thing anyone needed right now was a sweaty finger on a pistol trigger.

Makaisson held his longrifle across his thighs. He turned slowly about, pausing to listen to snippets of conversation before moving on. His face was a grimace of concentration. ‘They’re all sayin’ somethin’ tae dae wi’ a prophecy. Somethin’ aboot their ancestors’ lang wait. And Grimnir.’ He cocked his head intently and turned halfway around. ‘And the End Times.’ His grimace tightened still further, then he shook his head. ‘Ack, ah cannae follow it all. Ah wish they’d all stoap whisperin’.’

Gustav nudged Felix in the ribs and nodded urgently towards the temple.

A powerfully built dwarf was descending the steps. He was massively broad. A bronze breastplate shaped into an impossibly well-defined musculature was strapped over his ringmail toga. A purple cloak hung from his shoulders. The elaborate tattoos on his bare head depicted an epic struggle between dwarf and daemon. The dwarf in particular was remarkably well rendered, and
his
tattoos showed a near-identical scene: the battle continuing, as in the temple entablature, seemingly without end. In one bear-paw of a hand the newcomer held up an axe that could have been an exact replica of Gotrek’s own. Strapped to his back and covered by his cloak but for the handle and the rim of the blade was another, equally large, that could have been its twin. Even Felix could see that these were both lesser blades. Masterfully forged though they undoubtedly were, they were weapons of common steel rather than the starmetal that had gone into the making of Gotrek’s mighty axe. The runes engraved into them seemed to be symbolic, ceremonial maybe, rather than brutally functional.

The whispers ceased as the dwarf – some kind of an abbot, perhaps – reached the bottom step. There he stopped, shoulders back and axe upheld as though it were the personal standard of an emperor, appraising the company of men and dwarfs with eyes like pommel stones.

‘
Khzurk a garak. Uruk ak a Grimnir.
’

Gotrek swore. Like Felix, he had been under the unfair expectation that the leader of these dwarfs would speak in a form they could all understand.

‘He welcomes Grimnir’s heir tae his fortress,’ Makaisson translated after a moment’s thought. ‘And he wants tae ken which o’ us it is.’

Felix glanced between Gotrek and Malakai. The two Slayers traded looks and Makaisson chuckled.

‘Ye dinnae actually think it’s me dae ye?’

With a shrug, hard face as emotive as fresh-hewn stone, Gotrek strode towards the abbot. There was an excited whisper of approval from the watching dwarfs that made the hairs on the nape of Felix’s neck prickle. He couldn’t help but feel that there was more going on here than a few poorly translated words of archaic Khazalid could convey. Without thinking about what he was doing, Felix drew his sword and fell into step behind his companion.

‘
Rhingul!
’ barked the abbot, throwing up his free hand to bar Felix’s approach with a dark-haired fist the size of a paving slab. ‘
Kilza al elgrhaza ak hukan za!
’

Despite the intensity of the dwarf’s words, Makaisson grinned broadly. He began to chuckle.

‘What did he say?’ Felix hissed.

‘He said the elf will huv tae wait here.’

‘
Elf?
’

Gotrek growled, unamused. ‘These dwarfs must have been up here since the passing of Grimnir. When their ancestors built this fortress, manling, Sigmar’s twenty-times great-grandfather was living in a cave on some elf princeling’s estate.’

Felix had thought his mind had acclimated to the scales of time he had had to deal with of late, but still relentless reminders of how ancient this place was made his head spin. These dwarfs had been standing vigil on this spot all this time. They pre-dated the Empire and like true dwarfs they had outlasted its fall.

All for this moment.

For Gotrek.

For a moment Felix feared he actually was going to pass out.
Breathe,
he reminded himself again. He wished with every aching fibre of his heart that Max could have been here to see this moment. The wizard had been right. By every god there had ever been, he had been right.

Gotrek made a series of pointed gestures with his axe and grunted something in his gravelly native vernacular that clearly put across the point that this ‘elf’ went where Gotrek said he went. The stern-faced abbot managed to look genuinely taken aback for a moment, then bowed and stepped aside. His brother monks hurried forward with a rustle of bronze to form a procession to line the route to the temple.

No question then where they were heading.

The most ominous-looking building in the entire fortress.

Felix turned back momentarily to clasp his nephew’s arm in his. It was a warrior’s shake, hand to elbow, unsentimental, but both men seemed to find it a little difficult to let go.

‘We’ll hold the fort until you get back,’ said Gustav, his lightness only exposing the cracks in his voice. He waved towards the cloud sea. ‘You know, just in case.’

‘We’ll be back before you realise we’re gone,’ Felix returned.

He couldn’t say why, but he knew that neither one of them believed him.

The inside of the temple was too large to be accounted for by its external dimensions. Hundreds of huge pillars as broad as oak trees ran in rows in every direction. The only light source was the angular, axe-stroke runes that glowered from the square sides of the columns and the hazy, uncertain walls. Trying to look at the walls made Felix’s eyes water and his mind want to fold inside out. The floor appeared to curve slightly upwards as it approached them, as if at some unimaginably distant point left would overlap with right, the ceiling becoming a floor, and so on for infinity. Felix put a hand over his eyes and followed the Slayer. Their footsteps echoed around him.

‘
Gharaz uk azaki,
’ said the abbot gravely, sweeping his arms around the surreal environment and clearly under the misimpression that he was imparting something of dire import. Felix wished they had brought Makaisson with them, but the monks had seemed quite reluctant to let even Felix pass the threshold. It had taken another round of elaborately articulated threats from Gotrek on his behalf to prevent the monks from taking his weapon at the door.