Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (30 page)

Grimnir’s eyes flared, his upper body somehow swelling even further as the Ancestor closed both hands around the haft of his axe. A rumble passed through the pillars like vibrations through the skin of a drum, disturbing the rune-light. Felix swallowed, feeling abysmally small. The mountain itself seemed to tremble around him.

‘You would argue? With me?’

Gotrek glanced at Felix, then set his jaw. Blood trickled from unhealed cuts as he squared his shoulders to his Ancestor. ‘On this? Aye, I would.’

‘For once in your life, Gotrek, be sensible. It’s
Grimnir
for pity’s sake.’ Suddenly, the only thought in Felix’s head was the words that the mutant seeress had spoken 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
.

This was the place, and something frantic in the back of Felix’s brain told him that it was mere minutes from the time. Urgency filling his veins with fire, he got up to stand at his companion’s side. ‘It’s all right. I’ll wait here for you, or find another way out if I can.’

‘No one calls my rememberer unworthy. He as good as says it of me as well.’

With a chuckle that could have cracked an anvil, Grimnir stomped a few paces back and raised his axe. ‘Then come, Gotrek Gurnisson. Bloody your axe if you can.’

Gotrek readied his axe, tension singing from every sinew, his one eye sparkling with the ruddy gold of rune-light. If Felix didn’t know better, he’d think that a part of the Slayer was secretly pleased that it had come to this. What greater challenge of his prowess could there be? What greater doom?

But it may be enough to save the next.

That was what the seeress had said next, but what did that even mean?

‘Stop this,’ Felix shouted, no longer caring that he spoke out of turn before a god. ‘You’ll die here if you don’t.’

Gotrek ignored him completely and Grimnir merely laughed.

‘A true Slayer is more than just the manner of his doom or the measure of his disgrace. He is an aspect of me. His sacrifice is an echo of my purpose. And you are a true Slayer, Gotrek, perhaps the last great Slayer.’

As if that were a challenge that he could not allow to go unanswered, Gotrek launched himself at the Ancestor with a roar. Too quick for a dwarf of his physicality and power, Grimnir slid aside, his axe licking out with seeming nonchalance but with sufficient force to beat aside Gotrek’s blade and send the Slayer spinning off-balance. Gotrek adjusted quickly, swapped his axe out of his ringing hand, growled to mask his surprise, and came again.

What exactly happened next, Felix couldn’t say for certain.

Grimnir unleashed a blizzard of blows that Gotrek must have somehow managed to parry simply because he remained standing throughout. Felix could not imagine how the Slayer managed it. At times it was as if the Ancestor possessed eight arms, and watching them as they went about the business for which Grimnir was lauded was like trying to track the wings of a dragonfly in flight. The entire fight lasted perhaps ten seconds from first blow to last. Felix couldn’t be sure. His mind had slowed to a crawl, numbed by the speed and fury expended before his eyes.

But what happened after, Felix felt he had always known.

He was watching prophecy unfold.

The Vengeful Ancestor swept his starmetal blade across Gotrek’s body and then held it there, high, head bowed. Everything seemed to stop. Felix’s heart lurched between beats. He saw the blood glisten on the rim of Grimnir’s raised blade.

Then with a painful, physical sensation of acceleration, time resumed.

Gotrek was torn from his feet and spun half around. There was no resistance, no effort to regain his feet and fight again. The Slayer slapped to the ground like a side of red meat. His axe clanged down behind him with a funereal knell. The dwarf lay on his side. Blood speckled his tattoos and formed a spreading pool under his savaged chest. Felix stared at his friend’s face in horror. Perhaps it was this place, this palace of vengeance, or perhaps it was the company, but Felix could feel his pulse hammer behind his ears and he felt the terrible urge to empty his lungs, beat his chest and rage at the utter,
utter
stupidity of the universe.

This was one too many.

Gotrek Gurnisson was dead.

EIGHTEEN

Last Stand

The valley floor rose above the outer wall of Kazad Drengazi like the mighty crest of a wave. It even caught the sun like one, foaming as it did with the steel glint of marauder mail and weapons. Gustav Jaeger gaped as the impossible was redefined before his disbelieving eyes. Off to the left, across the cloud sea, a mountain crumbled in slow motion, sinking straight down under the surface. The very earth beneath them seemed to be shaking itself apart. His lamellar plate rattled violently as he gripped the crenellations of the citadel’s innermost defensive ring. Dwarfs in ringmail togas dashed past in both directions, yelling their own special gibberish despite the fact that no one could hear a thing over the birthing roar of a new mountain and what felt like the death rattle of the old.

The growing mountain rose higher, blotting out the sun over the citadel’s gatehouse and casting a long shadow over a swathe of the lower wards. More Slayer-Monks ran from the creeping shadow like ants from rising floodwaters, bearing nothing but their odd clothes and their weapons and fleeing for the next level of fortifications. Gustav could feel his bones vibrating against each other. He ground his teeth but they chattered anyway. The rising mountain leaned in and slowly, inevitably, like a hewn oak, it began to topple towards the gatehouse.

Gustav mewled something prayer-like, throwing himself down to hug the solid marble crenel as the fantastical tonnage of rock crashed over the gatehouse, flattening it as though it were made of sand and obliterating the curtain wall utterly. The ancient stonework of the inner ring sanded his cheek as it shook.

Compacted rock piled into the citadel, layering strata and substrata and a hot metamorphic core as the sheer weight and pressure caused parts of the avalanche to glow red and vent steam. The surface layer rushed forward, like a breaking wave racing up a beach, demolishing walls and buildings alike as it went.

Tiny by comparison were the men and horses that rode the wave. Gustav fancied they were screaming but of course it was impossible to hear. Hundreds were thrown off and crushed, but there were more than enough left behind to overwhelm the score or so dwarfs that haunted this deceivingly mighty citadel.

The rock wave ploughed down the second curtain wall, exhausting the last of its momentum to spill over into the grand, empty streets that lay beyond. For a moment there was calm, the universe taking a breath to realign itself to the new arrangement. Rubbled buildings settled. Loose rock tumbled back downhill.

Then there was a cry, exuberant and shrill, and a horde of terrified-looking marauders surged through the breaches and into the citadel’s second level. Horsemen spurred ahead, galloping uphill towards the next gate and loosing arrows at the barest hint of a dwarf.

Gustav lifted himself from the crenel, watching as a group of Slayer-Monks wielding a combination of axes and flails, hammers and maces, each with a weapon in either hand, charged from a ruined building and mowed through the flank of a marauder column. Their ferocity was tremendous and Gustav clenched his fist and gave a small cheer as he saw one amongst their number hammer down the ebony-armoured Chaos warrior that had been leading the marauders’ advance. Even as he allowed himself to imagine that the monks’ efforts might buy the defenders of the third wall a few minutes, a skirmishing line of horsemen thundered behind the infantry column, firing at the gallop and riddling the brave dwarfs with murderously accurate bow-fire.

The resistance crushed, the marauders roared and marched on.

A loud
bang
from immediately by his left ear startled Gustav from the nightmarish scene. He turned, a sulphurous pillow of smoke smothering him for a moment and then wafting by. Malakai Makaisson dropped his longrifle to the crenel and reloaded, shouting something incomprehensible to the Slayer-Abbot who stood beside him with his twin axes crossed over his chest as he did so.

‘
Orzhuk akaz uruk. Glihmhad hugorl al ikrim,
’ the abbot growled back.

‘It’s rude to talk in a language we can’t all understand,’ Gustav shouted, a little hysterical and not at all sure he shouldn’t be.

The engineer hefted his loaded longrifle and swung it around as if to take a pot-shot at
Unstoppable
, floating like a silver cloud above their heads. His red glimstone sight played across the airship’s prow until the aiming dot found the splintered view screen for the bridge. There, Makaisson waved his hand through the beam in a sequence of sharp cuts and brief pauses, dots and dashes.

‘Ah was joost askin’ him if he minds havin’ a wee bit o’ his castle bloon up,’ Makaisson explained.

‘Blown up?’

‘Joost a wee bit.’

‘And?’

Makaisson grinned, returning his signalling hand to his gun barrel and shouldering the weapon.

‘Ah told ’em he disnae.’

The Slayer was dead.

Those four words struck at Felix’s mind like a chisel to a gravestone. The Slayer was dead. A tide of images ran through his brain. Faces. Places. The exotic lands they had seen together, the enemies they had battled side by side, the friends they had made. And those they had lost. He remembered a lot of drinking, a good deal of arguing, and an almost endless amount of travelling, often while cold, wet, hungry and on foot, but for some reason the memory of those forgotten hours in Gotrek’s company almost made him smile but for the burning grief that had his muscles seized.

The temple chamber rumbled, as if under some kind of bombardment, but Felix didn’t care.

The Slayer was dead.

Again the words of the seeress’s prophecy came to him, circling around his mind like taunts however much he tried to ignore them or forcibly throw them out. His mental flailing only left him vulnerable when something he had thought safely forgotten took the opportunity to strike. The mutant seeress had not been the first to prophesy the Slayer’s doom. It had been several years ago, during their escape from a black ark of the dark elves, when a greater daemon of the Prince of Pain had fled from Gotrek with the chilling message: ‘
One greater than I is to die killing you.
’

The Slayer was dead.

This was it then, the moment, the gimbal upon which the layers of prophecy and fate tilted in balance.

All Felix could think of was how stupid it was, how utterly vain and pointless a death. He wondered what he was supposed to do now. Was he doomed to waste away to eventual insanity in this antechamber? For all the daemons, mutants and mad priests who had jostled to give their pfennig’s worth on the Slayer’s doom, none of them had had much to say about Felix’s: only the seeress’s cryptic assertion that he had a choice to make.

He couldn’t take his eyes from his companion’s body. They stung. It was as though they were attached – melted, welded – and he couldn’t move them.

He knew what he had to do.

It was the only thing a friend and a rememberer could do for a Slayer. This was a hall of vengeance, and the daemon’s prophecy was only half fulfilled.

Felix turned on the spot and looked up, only becoming aware that his sword was in his hand and positioned into a guard when he heard Grimnir’s chuckle. It was a mirthless, mocking sound, that of a corpse being dragged across gravel.

‘You would fight me too, manling? And how much better than your companion do you think you would fare?’

Felix ground his teeth, but refused to lower his guard. ‘Does it matter? I’ve nothing left.’

With a snarl the Vengeful Ancestor surged forward, axe raised high. Felix tensed behind his blade, but held his ground. He knew that it was a hopeless, a futile gesture to avenge a futile death. Grimnir’s mighty axe would cleave through his own pitifully enchanted blade like a wafer. In a second from now he would be dead and he doubted that Gustav or Malakai would be around for long enough to miss him, much less mourn him. The mad thought then arose that he might as well use that second to attack. He was as good as dead anyway, so why not use that last hot beat of life to inflict upon this stone-hearted god at least one moment of the hurt Felix felt now, after he was gone.

Felix shifted position, lowering his hilt and angling the sword point up and out. Kolya had once described to him how men hunted wild boar. The beast was goaded into a charge, crashing through the woods towards the cordon of hunters that waited with spears. There was little skill, just courage, the will to stand before a charging beast, nothing between you and your ending but a point of metal.

The Ancestor loomed over him, less a boar than a savage bear, mighty chest opening up and rippling with muscle for a rending downstroke.

Felix roared and stabbed up with his sword.

Grimnir pulled out of his attack at the last minute, batting away Felix’s sword with a negligent wave of his enormous axe. Then, to Felix’s astonishment – and no little annoyance – the Ancestor started to laugh. He lowered his axe and put his hands on his hips, waves of mirth shaking his stone barrel chest. Felix glared, eyes stinging, as he worked life into the numbed fingers around the grip of his sword. That single parry had deadened them.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Felix, the hoarseness in his throat lending his voice a bravado he didn’t feel. He had been expecting to be dead by now, and the terror of what he had just tried to do was only now beginning to circulate through his system. ‘Are you worried I’ll stain your axe?’

The Ancestor’s laughter settled into a low chuckle, a giant hand separating from his hip to wipe what looked like a golden tear from his eye. ‘Clearly I’ve been stuck too long in the Realm of Chaos, for never would I have expected to find such courage in one of the younger races. Tell me, manling, are all your kind as you are?’

‘I don’t think I’m anything particularly special.’

Grimnir again threatened to break into a laugh, but managed to restrain himself. Felix glared angrily. The Slayer was dead, and now his killer laughed.

‘What would any man do to avenge a friend?’ Felix returned with a snarl.

‘Your body is frail, manling, but your heart’s in the place it ought to be, I’ll grant you that.’ The Ancestor sighed, huge chest heaving as he lowered his axe to the ground with a clang. The runes that adorned its killing edge faded, as though attuned somehow to the ebb and rise of its master’s wrath. ‘Maybe you aren’t worthy, but it’s not as though I have another ten thousand years to wait for one who is. Dwarfs are ever practical, and perhaps you are worthy
enough
.’

Grimnir knelt in the pool of blood beside Gotrek’s body and laid one massive hand over the Slayer’s face. So large was it that it obscured Gotrek’s entire head and part of his crest. Felix started forward with a warning growl and raised his sword again.

‘Leave him alone. Haven’t you done enough?’

The Ancestor warned him back with a look. It was not a threatening one, but nevertheless it commanded obedience and Felix found his sword lowering. Grimnir hadn’t moved.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Hush, manling, and be patient.’

A golden-red light shone through the join between Gotrek’s cheek and the palm of his Ancestor, expanding to envelop the Slayer’s head and then his entire body in an auric cocoon of energy. Felix grunted in pain and raised a hand to shield his eyes, but even as he did so the brilliance began to recede and he warily repositioned the hand around his sword.

Grimnir rose, a bloody imprint on his knees, and nodded towards Gotrek. Felix turned away his blade and looked.

There was a rasping intake of breath that filled the Slayer’s chest, and then a fit of coughing, as a man dying of thirst might drink too much and splutter. Gotrek sat upright, hacking and heaving. His own blood glistened on the stones around him but the wounds on his body were healed. With one harsh valedictory cough, Gotrek took a breath and swallowed it. He looked around, confused.

Felix gasped, hand to his mouth. ‘Gotrek, your eye.’

The Slayer clapped his hand to his good eye, and then like a blind man muddling in the dark worked his fingers towards the other, which had for twenty years been an empty socket.

Until now.

‘What in Gr–’ Gotrek glanced up at his benefactor and grumbled something under his breath. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Arise, Slayer,’ said Grimnir, extending a helping hand. ‘In this place there is always more killing to be done.’

Gotrek clasped the Ancestor’s arm and allowed himself to be hauled up. He clenched his fists, swung a practice roundhouse and grunted satisfaction at his healed muscles, then turned with his ‘good’ eye scrunched tight and stared at Felix to test the acuity of the other which the power of Grimnir had restored to him.

That and more.

The Slayer was alive!

Felix couldn’t speak for the exuberance bubbling up beneath his breast.

‘You’re skilful and uncommonly strong, Slayer,’ said Grimnir, nodding appreciatively to Gotrek’s axe as the dwarf bent to collect it from the ground. ‘Bearing my axe for so many years has toughened you, but you’re aware that its most powerful enchantments lie dormant.’

‘You speak of the Rune of Unbinding. Aye, King Thangrim of Karag Dum spoke of it, but with the passing of his Runelord so too went the craft to awaken it.’