Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (29 page)

Felix listened with half an ear, eyes wide to the carnage all around him. A unit of Chaos warriors whose armour wept blood marched behind a screen of thrashing spawn into the roaring teeth of the Empire guns. A squadron of elf knights in fluted, scythe-edged armour and mounted on reptilian steeds fled from a fierce melee involving warriors of at least seven different races only to be overrun and pulled down by a pack of baying daemon hounds. Even the skies were not spared. Magic crackled through the clouds, pegasus knights and elven hawk-riders arrowing through the arcing spell effects to engage the enemy’s flyers. The din was overwhelming, a demoralising weapon in its own right. Everywhere there was something happening, something dying horribly and noisily. It was too much to take in as a whole.

‘What happened to Middenheim? Where’s Kat?’

‘You have a strange set of priorities given the circumstances. If you could only imagine what I have given for the cause, if there was a way to make you fathom the depths of my sacrifice, then perhaps you would understand.’

‘Is this about what happened to Ulthuan?’

The elf produced a disparaging sneer. ‘You still don’t understand.’

A resigned murmur passed through the crossbowmen, the clatter of gear, the near-audible clenching of teeth and hardening of hearts. A new sequence of flags had been lofted onto the vexillary’s signal pole: a plain white flag bearing the symbol of a crossbow, then two fluttering triangles beneath it, blue and white for Middenheim.

‘Orders are: advance!’ the unit sergeant yelled, then put a whistle to his mouth and sounded the march. The crossbowmen started forward and Felix, caught in the momentum of events he could neither comprehend nor control, moved with them.

He looked in the direction they were headed and clutched his sword in fear.

Without any formal warning of the emergence of so gross an anomaly, a vast silver portal now swirled over the centre of the Chaos legions. Distortions in the aethyr arced around its aureole, spreading out to become tears, claw-rents in reality as Felix in his limited way understood it. Through those tears a shadow bled through. Watching it was somehow more horrifying than anything he had yet seen on this battlefield.

It was sitting in the hold of a ship and watching salt water pour in. It was standing in line for the noose. It was the same shadow that had stalked him through the Great Forest and the Middle Mountains and had almost been his doom but for Max Schreiber. It was death.

It was inevitability.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘Time is much like war. Aeon-long stretches of nothing, or what I came to consider nothing, but always moving forward, always going
here
.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘He’s saying you have a choice to make, Felix.’ The cloaked seeress from his dream marched at his other hand, the pair of elf and mutant apparently perfectly innocuous within a marching file of Middenheimer crossbows. ‘To save a world or not?’

‘What kind of a choice is that?’

‘Not the one you think it is,’ the seeress replied sadly.

‘Who are you?’ Felix shouted over the pound of boots and the blister-roar of gun-fire. ‘Whose side are you on, anyway?’

Teclis laughed bitterly. ‘She is here with you, isn’t she?’

The elf pointed his moon-tipped staff towards the massed enemy formations. Felix looked as directed. For a moment he didn’t see, the enemy were simply too numerous to pick out one from the horde, but then he glimpsed the shaggy grey giant in battered plate that rose head and shoulders above the melee. Khagash-Fél hacked down orcs and men from horseback, his massive warhorse champing shoulder-to-shoulder with that of another mighty warlord. His blued armour was fantastically ornate and blazed with mystic runes that made him shimmer like a mirage. Arek Daemonclaw tore through all that opposed him with axe and lance. Felix quailed to see the two warriors side by side, and fighting in concert they appeared unstoppable.

They were also not alone.

Everywhere Felix looked he saw old enemies fighting to undo the world that he had hoped to leave for his children. The great red dragon Skjalandir soared over the battlefield as though it owned it, torrents of flame roasting through the eagle- and hawk-riders that buzzed around its bulk like insects. The necromancer, Heinrich Kemmler, skulked behind the lines, raising a regiment of zombie warriors here, dismantling a lesser spellcaster’s bone construct there. From atop a horned bell that was mounted on a kind of chariot, and pushed into battle by a tide of red-armoured skaven elites, Grey Seer Thanquol chittered commands. The ratman sorcerer squealed in delight as the iron-shod wheels of his chariot ground over orcs and goblins, intoxicated by the volume of warpstone he had consumed and gleefully vaporising those that tried to flee with bolts of warp-lightning from his claws.

Without realising it, Felix’s thumb had moved from his sword-grip to the ring on his finger, feeling over the indents made by the dwarf runes that banded it. There were so many things he had never said to her. He would have given his right arm just for the chance to say goodbye, would gladly have offered his life if it meant he could hold her once more. He was being a foolish and sentimental old man, he knew, and worse, the romantic he’d always feared he was. This wasn’t real. Kat wasn’t real.

The tramp of feet bore Felix on: the tick of a clock, the running of sand, of blood. The Middenheimers’ armour shimmered under the portal’s radiance, each man a ripple in a pool, reflecting the moonlight. Felix wondered what other worlds and strange horrors lay beyond it, then decided that he really didn’t want to know. He didn’t want anyone to have to learn.

Because it was real.

‘I have a choice to make? Then take me back to Gotrek so I can put an end to this. That’s what everyone wants. One last adventure. Isn’t that the way this is supposed to be?’

The sorcerer and the seeress shared a weighted look.

He closed his eyes and bent his mind towards his will.

‘Take me back.’

A hot wind blew cinders in Felix’s face. He opened his eyes.

He was back in Neumarkt, but this time overlooking it from the fortified rooftop on which he’d previously spotted Kat. The wooden wreckage of a ballista crunched underfoot as he moved to the edge. The merlons wore blackened, tormented silhouettes of men and women, immortalising the moment they were burned alive. Felix could taste bile in his mouth. It was as if this position had been hit with a fireball.

He placed his hands onto the heat-deformed crenellations and leaned out.

The gates were smashed, the stones around them continuing to smoulder. Islands of flame dotted the courtyard, like candles in a mausoleum, burning for the dead that littered the space. Fire reflected off broken windows, from ruptured breastplates and split helms, from fallen blades, from the tiniest morsel of bare steel on the arrowheads protruding from dead men’s backs. Felix felt his eyes weaken in the dancing light. His vision blurred.

Was this one last cruel test, to gauge his reaction to the reality of what the forces of Chaos would leave behind?

Felix pinched the tears from his eyes and sniffed. ‘I’m sorry, Kat. I never should have left you in the first place. I should have died by your side defending Altdorf.’

‘And who would that have helped, exactly?’

Felix’s fingers almost bored into the stonework. That voice. His heart sang, but part of him wouldn’t allow it to believe. He kept his eyes on the pyres. ‘I don’t see that it would have done too much harm either. In fact from where I’m standing, I don’t think it would have made any difference at all.’

‘You saved Max.’

‘He might still be alive if I hadn’t.’

‘I doubt he saw it like that.’

Felix sighed and hung his head. Then he turned around.

Kat stood in front of him. Her hair had been badly roughed up, the silver lock over her left eye stained red. Her leather armour and fabric pads were scorched and several pieces were missing. There was no sign of any other survivors.

‘Are you really Kat?’ he asked, looking her up and down and wondering why he had to do something as stupid as ask that question. ‘You’re not about to tell me I have a great and terrible destiny?’

‘You do have a destiny, Felix,’ said Kat, taking his hand in hers and looking up into his eyes. ‘And it doesn’t involve me. But I don’t regret being touched by it, even if it was only for a little while.’

Felix smiled through his tears, holding her hand tightly and pulling her to him as though the beating of his heart against her chest would make her real. Suddenly all of the things he had wanted to do or say boiled down to nothing.

This was enough. This moment.

Kat moved closer until they touched hip to hip, nothing but a fiercely clenched hand between them. She smiled shyly and turned her body against his, revealing a woollen sling nestled between her quiver and the padded back of her gambeson. From within, a pair of crystal-bright blue eyes peered curiously out from a pudgy face topped with a sprinkling of white-blonde hair. Felix had no experience in these things, but he guessed that the baby must have been just under a year old. The child babbled brightly and smiled as Felix smiled, reaching out with a small hand to grasp his cheek.

It actually rather hurt, but Felix didn’t care. His heart had melted and turned to gold.

‘My daughter…’

‘Rosa Jaeger,’ said Kat softly, voice fading as the world around them returned belatedly to darkness. ‘Say hello to your father.’

SEVENTEEN

The First Slayer

Felix came to, his eyes welcoming back the red-gold pulse of rune-light with a smile so bittersweet that it ached all the way to the pit of his stomach. It had all been a fantasy, a trial devised by some uncaring rune-guardian, but in his heart it felt real. He had been there for his wife when it mattered. He had been with her at the death.

He had seen his child.

To hell with destiny. He closed his eyes again, to hold on to the ache for just one moment more.

‘Get up, manling. It gets worse.’

Felix buried his face in his palms and groaned as he sat up, then dragged his hands down his cheeks as if they might collapse into despair without bracing.

The Slayer stood with his axe head on the ground and his scratched hands overlaying one another over the haft. His fingers rhythmically flexed and clenched, a tic that in anyone else Felix would have described as nervous. His one eye swept over a patch of ground in front of his feet, his lips muttering quietly as though he were in deep, meditative prayer.

Felix glanced over Gotrek’s shoulder. His hands slid away from his face, no longer supported by his hanging jaw. Now he understood.

Behind Gotrek there loomed another Slayer, but one so truly massive that he made Gotrek look frail by comparison. He was a head taller, the extra height accentuated by a blade of bright red hair, and with muscle enough packed into his awesome frame to wrestle down a mountain. Looking at him Felix was aware of a sense of
density
, as if more had gone into his being than should have been possible given the size, impressive as it was, of his body. He wore heavy leather boots and a kilt of iron plates sewn together with bronze rings. Other than that and a few spiked piercings along one side of his neck and the adjoining shoulder, the dwarf went bare-skinned. Tattoos crisscrossed his body, but in contrast to the intricate designs inked onto Gotrek’s skin these were atavistic, branching blue lines that traced an endless spiral around his muscular frame.

The big Slayer set an enormous rune-axe against his shoulder and studied Felix with eyes of an eternal, ever-wrathful blue. Felix could have lost himself in that gaze.

The gaze of a god.

Felix glanced nervously at his companion. ‘Is that…?’

‘Aye, manling,’ said Gotrek gruffly. ‘This time it really is.’

Horsemen careened down the mountain slope, setting off a miniature avalanche of ice and scree. The earth was never deep this high in the mountains and the thin crust of topsoil concealed a hard layer of permafrost. The air was semi-frozen, thin enough to make filling one’s lungs in one breath a challenge. The tribesmen seemed to revel in it, throwing ice almost playfully from their ponies’ fetlocks, drawing down the fur-lined leather flaps of their helms and grinning, grizzled brown faces glowing with body warmth.

A posse of red-faced and hard-breathing riders reined in as they thundered towards Morzanna. Their animals snorted gamely, pawing at the frost. Morzanna shook scattered ice from her sleeves and smiled, using Nergüi’s eagle staff as a walking pole to climb the rest of the way to meet them. Khagash-Fél had been right to be proud of his people. Their fearlessness and tenacity was matched only by their enthusiasm. And it was infectious.

Despite the fate she had always known awaited her in the Slayer Fortress.

‘Temugan claims to have seen the skyship as it entered the clouds, prophetess. There.’ The rider who spoke, a sunken-cheeked warrior with a broad grin and fiery yellow eyes, creaked about in the saddle and pointed up to the sky. The wind riffled through the long sleeves of his black silk vest, worn as an underlayer to a sleeveless shirt of lamellar leather scales. ‘He marked the spot and has not removed his eyes from it in six hours.’

‘Have you found a way up?’

‘There is none to be found, prophetess,’ the rider declared, delivering what he must have known was crushing news and doing so without even the recognition that he should be fearful.

Men did things differently on the eastern steppe.

‘Leave me, I must think on this. And tell Temugan he may rest his eyes.’

‘You are kind and powerful, mighty prophetess,’ cried the horseman, already chivvying his mount around and galloping off with his arban. The men rode to join the host of fur-swaddled tribesmen that mustered in the high valley. Several dark lines laced the mountains to the south, more of Khagash-Fél’s vast host filing in through the dozens of unwarded roads and goat trails their scouts had been able to uncover.

‘I do try to be, when I can,’ Morzanna murmured after they had gone, speaking to the frigid air.

‘
Your enduring capacity for compassion provides me an eternal wellspring of succour, my child,
’ the air answered back. ‘
How it pleases me to experience your broken heart and dashed dreams over and over again.
’

‘I do not dream.’

Laughter’s echo rang in her ears. ‘
I trust that you are ready for the end?
’

Morzanna looked up the craggy, barren scarp that stoic Temugan had marked, her gaze following the incline until rock faded into cloud and ultimately disappeared altogether. There was a fortress up there. She could feel the power emanating from it, but even with that to aid her she doubted whether she had the ability to transport more than just herself over so great a distance by magical means. And any fortress of dwarf-make – particularly this one – would have potent runic wards woven into its design to prevent just that kind of solitary raid. It worked both ways, of course, and this particular citadel had been constructed as much with the aim of trapping things within as presenting a defence against those without.

She bared her fangs. It might as well have been on the moon.

‘There is always a way. There must be, for I have seen myself there, as I have seen you. I need time to consider it. There are limits to my skill, Dark Master.’

‘
For you, perhaps, but not for me
,
not here. Here the fabric of the mundane is pierced by the divine. Can you feel it, Morzanna? The End Times begin now, and neither earth nor sky shall ever be as they were again.
’

A ripple of power passed through the air, an in-breath that broke over the hollow silhouette of a bat-winged demi-god. The Dark Master was revealed for the briefest of moments before folding back under the surface layers of reality. As with the mountain topsoil, the boundaries between planes were thin here, worn fine enough by the waxing of Chaos that Be’lakor was almost capable of manifesting his own form.

The origins of Be’lakor’s curse of immateriality pre-dated the written word, at least in human culture – but she had seen pictographic slabs buried in prehistoric ruins under the frigid marshes of Albion that alluded to a Dark Master, and read texts unearthed from the elven ruin of Oreagar that purported to be the translation of a proto-Khemrian oral myth, of a champion of such malevolent ambition that he was stripped of his physical form by his god.

Tzeentch himself had done this and now, one layer at a time, Be’lakor was undoing it.

A greater demonstration of her master’s power she did not need, but from the rumble shaking the permafrost beneath her feet she feared she was about to receive one.

This one wasn’t for her. This was for the world.

The ground had begun to shake, stones running downslope until, as the force of the quake intensified, great boulders were torn from the mountainside and sent crashing down. The sound of several thousand men crying out in unison momentarily overwhelmed even the shaking earth. Morzanna turned towards the muster ground, looking on in mortification as one of the mountains, across which columns of men were still marching, shook itself apart. Millions of tons of rock collapsed in on itself as though its foundation had just been ripped away. Men were still screaming, but it was no longer possible to hear them over the crash of rock. Another mountain split up the middle and fell apart, town-sized slabs of earth tumbling away. Morzanna stood speechless.

To whom did one pray when gods walked amongst you?

The ground lurched, almost hurling Morzanna from her feet. Her slight build spared her. Hundred of tribesmen and horses were less fortunate, tossed aside as another peak at the far south end of the valley vented the phenomenal internal strain with a magmic eruption that blasted its summit apart. Morzanna dropped, sinking her claws down to the permafrost and feeling the ground’s tormented shudder. It bucked, throwing Morzanna up and then rising up to meet her. She slammed back down, still rooted by her claws, and then looked up.

The Kazad Drengazi mountain was falling away before her eyes, but it wasn’t collapsing.

The valley was rising.

She had heard of cabals of the ancient Slann conducting such earth-shaping rituals, but never had she believed that any individual alive today could perform them. Be’lakor’s power waxed with the onset of the End Times, and with his proximity to the daemon gate locked away within the Slayer Fortress he was close to the godhood he had long craved. And he was getting closer.

‘
Your only task is the Slayer-Monks,
’ said Be’lakor, his voice the roar of upthrusting rock. ‘
Theirs is the power to summon the wrath of Grimnir, and that is an encounter I am not ready for.
’

The screams of ten thousand pierced the clouds as the valley floor drove them higher, the laughter of black gods welcoming their terrified souls to the heavens.

‘
Yet.
’

‘Grimnir,’ Felix breathed, gazing up into the lean, brutal face of the dwarf who looked down on him in return with something between godly indifference and outright hostility. ‘But he’s a… isn’t he a…?’

‘Those are the times you are living in, manling,’ Grimnir answered gravely, his voice a rumble redolent of war-wagons heading into hostile mountains, the rising clamour of a call to vengeance.

Felix simply stared.

He had been hearing tales of Sigmar’s second coming since before his departure from Altdorf and, in truth, had not given them great credence. Even after all he had seen it seemed unlikely. If the gods cared enough to intercede in their faithful’s affairs then why wait until things were as bad as this? But it was one thing to hear a story of a distant war in a foreign province from a bar-fly who had himself seen neither; it was quite another to find oneself within the undeniable aura of the divine. He gazed up, certain that his body was shrinking or that the ground was drawing him under.

‘You don’t sound much like I’d imagine a god talking,’ said Felix, gawking like a country maid before a civic parade of Reiksguard Knights in shining armour.

‘Nothing’s forever, lad. I wasn’t always thus, and perhaps I won’t always be.’

With that the Vengeful Ancestor dismissed him and turned to Gotrek.

‘You’re a true Slayer, Gotrek, a credit to my name. Ten millennia ago I left a mighty power here – and a burden – waiting for my heir in the End Times. You’ve proven yourself well worthy of it, and capable of bearing it.’

Gotrek bared a grin. Felix couldn’t blame the dwarf for being pleased. It wasn’t everyday one came in for personal praise from their god.

‘Grimnir…’ Felix absently repeated.

Ignoring him, the Ancestor raised an arm like a felled and muscularly carved oak and pointed through the lines of pillars to the door that the Slayer-Abbot had initially led them through. ‘The Realm of Chaos. It’s not a place you can describe to one who’s never seen it. What lies beyond that door I’ve fought the last ten thousand years to keep out. But these are the End Times and my strength wanes. And you’ve my leave to pass, son of Gurni.’

‘Isn’t that the way out?’ Felix hissed, leaning in towards Gotrek.

‘This is Grimnir’s path, manling,’ Gotrek muttered, looking almost embarrassed to be explaining this in the Ancestor’s presence. ‘There is no way out from here.’

‘Oh,’ said Felix, sitting with his arms around his knees while he processed that small but, on reflection, rather pertinent piece of information. ‘But… the abbot left. And they locked it, didn’t they?’

Gotrek shook his head, despairing of manling simple-mindedness.

Well, no matter, as Kolya would undoubtedly have said had he been here. It wasn’t as if there was much left for any man where they had come from. He thought of his wife and daughter. He had been prepared to offer his life for a glimpse of them and whether out of compassion or cruelty he had been granted it. If they did still live, and if there was anything he could sacrifice to buy them one more hour of freedom, of happiness, or even simply of life then Felix would give it in a heartbeat.

‘Pick yourself up,’ said Gotrek. ‘We’ve not found what we came for yet.’

‘Not him,’ Grimnir rumbled as Felix leaned into his haunches as a preliminary to the ever-worsening task of standing up. ‘You proved yourself worthy, Gotrek. He did not. He’s sentimental. He doesn’t understand the scale of this war, the sacrifices that must be made.’

‘He’s a dwarf-friend and a rememberer,’ said Gotrek. ‘That’s all you need to know.’