Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (28 page)

No. Not Gustav.

The woman turned as though alerted to his presence by his beating heart and gave a predatory smile. Her short hair was as white as ash, her skin as pale as human bone. To the silvery scar across her left temple, she had added another that cut cleanly across her throat. One glance was all it took for his hands to relive the jolt they had felt as his blade had met her neck. In his mind he heard the thump of her severed head striking the stone of the Troll King’s dungeon.

‘Ulrika, I–’

The vampire cut him off with a throat-cutting gesture that made Felix’s own throat tighten as surely as if she’d put her hand against it and squeezed. ‘You are looking for Katerina,’ she said, reading his mind as succinctly as she could his heart. ‘How disappointing. How very predictable.’

Felix cast his gaze from the vampire to the clouds that boiled overhead, tinted red and backlit with silver. He shuddered. ‘Please. The east gate’s been breached. If you know where she–’

Swift as a snuffed candle’s transition from light to dark, Ulrika’s smile turned bestial. She snatched one of the children who sobbed around her, hoisted the young girl, who gave a piteous squeal for help, and then plunged her into the pond. Felix cried out in dismay and without once thinking about how he intended to outmuscle her ran in to pull the girl from Ulrika’s clutches. The vampire shrugged him off as though he were no more than a child himself. Felix reeled back, his sword sliding from its scabbard as he recovered his footing.

‘Do you know what torment awaits the souls of vampires when they finally die, Felix?’ said Ulrika, water splashing her breastplate as the girl under her grip thrashed. Sobs rose from the other children, but none of them tried to escape. It was as if they were resigned to this, or they knew there was nothing better to escape to. ‘I do.’

‘Ulrika, stop!’

‘This is a test, a challenge. The wolves are at the gate and they are hungry, and if they are not stopped they will surely consume us all. Not all of them wear daemons’ faces, manling, and if you do not kill me then I
will
kill you.’

Felix lowered his sword a fraction. ‘Manling?’

With a snarl, Ulrika pushed the now still child to the bottom of the pond and sprang up, flinging out wet hands that ended in cruel bone claws. Startled by the lightning movement, Felix backed up. The vampire grinned, blurring left as Felix went right, then right as Felix brought his sword
en garde
and tried to back away, boxing him in until his back hit a trellis and red petals fluttered down to his shoulders. The vampire’s movements were dizzying, as jarringly unnatural as the racing sky or the screams that sounded from all around. She came on, wolfen teeth bared in a hungry snarl.

Pulling at his cloak with a curse Felix tore the mistreated garment from the rose thorns in which it was snared and rolled along the wall, just as Ulrika’s fist smashed through wood, vines and stone where he had just been. Felix bounced himself from the wall and whipped around. Blood ran down his face from several small cuts. Rose thorns. There were more scratches on his hands and thorns still caught in his clothing.

Ulrika drew her arm out of the wall. Her nostrils flared at the scent of fresh blood. ‘I do not recall you being this squeamish in Praag, lover. You have already killed me once. Why hold back now?’

Hissing like a cat, she threw herself at Felix, already raking for his face with her claws. Felix’s sword flew up on instinct, thunking against the vampire’s bone claws and diverting their thrust down his mail sleeve, but not before the sheer force of the blow had driven him back. Metal ringlets cascaded from his arm and crunched underfoot as he gave ground and parried for all he was worth. For the few seconds that he could maintain such intensity his sword seemed to be everywhere, his eyes somehow managing to keep his sword arm apprised of Ulrika’s movements without the knowledge or intervention of his brain. His muscles burned. Sweat mingled with the blood that ran in runnels through the creases in his face. The vampire flowed around his blade as though the paleness of her skin betrayed her nature as a being of quicksilver, one second flowing around a breathlessly executed
schrankhut
guard and the next appearing
inside
his defence and launching a punch to his solar plexus that almost tore his body in two.

The air rushed out of his lungs as he flew back, crashing over the low seat of the ornamental pond and rolling into the water.

His vision turned murky, all diffracted jewels of light and bubbles of air. The roar of the fountain filled his ears. The instinct was to take a breath, but he resisted even as his empty lungs screamed at him, long enough to order his arms and legs beneath him and lift his head from the surface of the pond. He gasped great lungfuls of the floral-scented air. Water streamed down his cheeks and matted his hair. The fountain pummelled his back and effectively blinded him with spray. He folded over with a moan, his arms crossed around his bruised sternum.

That had hurt.

This was real!

The watery screen parted to admit Ulrika, the vampire pouncing through the spray to land astride him and drive him back under the water. The last thing Felix heard before his ears were again filled with beaten water were the screams of children. Ulrika held him under for a moment, then dragged him out, choking and gasping with his hair stuck to the inside of his mouth.

‘Do you wish you had not killed me, my love? Do you resist what must be done because you know now how much it will hurt you?’

Felix wanted to answer, but couldn’t. He hadn’t the breath.

‘In the Troll Country there was a saying: it is better to regret what you have done than what you have not. And there is so much I regret not doing to you.’ She opened her fanged mouth wide and leaned in.

Felix opened his mouth for an airless scream and struggled, splashing water, but only managed to drive himself deeper under as the vampire leaned over him. The water closed over his eyes, distorting Ulrika’s face and the words she spoke to him as the pressure built inside his chest.

‘The fates of worlds lie in your hands, Felix. You have the power to save them, but not like this.’

Felix came up gasping for air, scratching over his throat at hands that were no longer there. Nor was he sat in a pond but on uneven cobblestones, in the middle of a street that heaved with fighting men. He looked up, wondering where he was now, rubbing the still-bruised skin of his throat. Tattered banners flew between the leaning tenements: lions, eagles, and griffons rampant showing their colours, torn but defiant in the face of the enemy. Forests of spears and halberds shivered over the advance of thousands of steel-clad infantrymen. Arrows darkened the sky. Handguns and field artillery made a constant rumble akin to being behind a waterfall, through which men and other, more bestial things hollered and screamed.

Around the spot where Felix sat, leather thigh and shin pieces creaked with strain. A company of crossbowmen stood in reserve, watching the battle, waiting for their colours to appear on the signal pole of the mounted vexillary who galloped up and down behind the front line displaying Emperor Karl Franz’s colours. The air was sour with sweat and spilled beer, soiled leathers and unwashed men, the true flavours of war for which the bitterness of spilt blood was merely a condiment.

With a groan Felix got up and beat down his wet clothes. Then he looked around, eyes crossing at the strange realisation that while he was quite definitely on a narrow Middenheim street he was also
quite definitely
on a small hill overlooking a rolling battlefield filled with many tens of thousands of men. The scale of the deployment was staggering, and for a long time it was all Felix could do to join the crossbow auxiliaries he stood with and stare. There was no way that Middenheim could support so many troops. He doubted whether even
Unstoppable
could move enough gear and supplies to the summit of the Fauschlag to keep them.

Felix tried to focus on the street beneath the army. It looked like a merchant district – all houses with decorative windows, the offices of conveyancers and commissioners and the ostentatiously permanent stone frontages of banks. It had all been stretched out somehow, thinned just beyond the point of opacity to encompass the immense hosts arrayed against each other from opposite sides of the street.

The massed regiments of the Empire held the centre of the line. Tens of thousands of infantrymen stood marshalled in proud battle order, awaiting the bugle to advance and relieve their kinsmen in the raging melee that dominated the battlefield between the two hosts. The proud colours of the ten provinces were emblazoned from surcoats and standards across a dozen leagues of unbroken files. Knights from more noble orders than Felix could name cantered their bulky armoured steeds between the blocks of state troops, pennons snapping from the raised tips of their lances as they rode into an evil wind. The rear ranks bristled with ordnance. Their flanks were ridden on the one side by the shining knights of Bretonnia with their intricately fashioned armour and brightly caparisoned destriers, and on the other by the hemp-clad horse nomads of Kislev. Some instinctive understanding told Felix that he was witnessing the last ride of two once-proud martial nations.

Allies since the age of Sigmar, a smaller force of dwarfs anchored the Imperial position with guns and gromril. Resolute blocks of heavy infantry in flowing mail and winged, visored helms picked out with gemstones and gold presented a wall of shields around a core of artillery and missile troops. The distances involved were great, but Felix thought he recognised their leader. Draped in a cloak of dragon scales and wearing his orange-dyed hair in a fierce crest, there could be no mistaking Ungrim Ironfist, the Slayer-King of Karak Kadrin. The dwarf king led from the heart of his shield wall, hacking open wave after wave of beastmen and Chaos warriors, enveloped in a strange aura of flame.

Looking beyond the dwarf position things became… strange.

Random visions? Prophecy?

It was too outlandish to be a dream.

Crowding the ghostly cobblestones beside their – ostensibly – mortal enemies was a raucous host ten times more numerous than that of the Empire and the dwarfs combined. The greenskins filled the air with noise. Hulking leather-skinned brutes beat on man-skin drums. Prancing goblins wearing nothing but piercings and glitter played manic tunes on bone pipes and led their followers in shrill, exuberant chants. Every second that Felix watched, thousands of crooked arrows whooshed from goblin bows. Rickety trebuchets flung boulders high into the air while impatient lines of goblins with spiked helms and hand-sewn wings waited for their turn to be catapulted across the battlefield. Felix picked out the greenskins’ commander where the fighting was fiercest and the monstrous champions of Chaos pushed hardest: an immense, one-eyed black orc, all welded iron plate and dark green muscle, wading into the Chaos ranks with saliva drooling from his tusks and every appearance of a brutally straightforward joy. The warboss’s host was clearly far beyond his ability to fully control, bits of it charging forward and withdrawing again almost at random; a tattered sleeve at the edge of a fine mail coat, flapping nevertheless in the face of a common enemy.

Dumbstruck by this improbable alliance, Felix turned back to the Empire force and beyond it to the opposite flank where – if that were possible – something even stranger lined up in order of battle.

A gleaming spearline of tall elven warriors held a tide of marauders at bay, handling their long weapons with a graceful, almost elegant ruthlessness. Their presence alone was not so strange. There was precedent for the armies of men and elves coming together in times of great strife, but what
was
strange was the sheer diversity of elven forces that had been deployed to the same field together. Lean, knife-chinned warriors in leather kheitans and surcoats of nightshade purple shared ranks with princely spearmen in silver-blue scales, and with others that shunned armour altogether, lightly tanned and garbed in jerkins of autumnal leaves. Longbows and reaper crossbows spoke the common language of death in a single chorus. Felix didn’t know what could have reunited such a bitterly divided race, but as he watched an enormous black dragon swooped over the elven lines, bearing with it an iron-clad elf lord and a streaming wake of shadow.

Felix felt out the dragonhead hilt of his sword, but the weapon didn’t stir. It was possible that the beast was too far away to arouse the blade’s killing instinct, or perhaps all of this was less real to Karaghul than it was to him.

Just at that moment, he wished he could share some of its steel ambivalence.

Because there, at the far end of the battle-line, under the stretched mirage of a vintner’s awning, there hovered an entity more puissant and terrifying than anything the massed legions of Chaos could conjure. Through a pall of unnatural darkness strode a skull-faced titan, suspended above earth that atrophied under his step by a buffer of dark magic, an unconscious manifestation of a power too absolute for even that dread figure to fully contain. That being’s battlefield was a lifeless wasteland that none other shared, for whenever even the mightiest champions of Chaos rode against him, men fell and rose again to swell his unliving legions. A name, an imprecation familiar to every passing student of the forbidden, trembled blindly into Felix’s hindbrain and screamed.

Nagash
.

‘What’s happening here?’

‘The inevitable,’ said a dry, subtly condescending voice from the spot beside him in the ranks. In defiance of logical reason and everything he remembered seeing around him a moment before, an elf mage now stood there amongst the crossbowmen. This one Felix knew personally. He was tall as all elves were but extraordinarily thin and pale, with skin that was almost translucent on the bone. His face was narrow and haughty, his almond-shaped eyes crystal pale and almost cruel. Teclis, High Loremaster of the White Tower of Ulthuan. The mage shrugged. ‘The singularity. The end of everything that has come before.’