Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (9 page)

Kolya chuckled.

‘Through all these trees? A week at least. But Zabójka took us onto Wolfenburg road, and returned to forest only when he say his secret path is near. Oh yes,’ Kolya added with a tight little smile, ‘the army of marauders and beasts marching north behind us on same road maybe also have something to do with it.’

Felix stopped, stunned, a wet branch swinging back to slap him in the chest.

A herd of beastmen their company could just – and he meant
just
 – about handle, but a Chaos army on the march was a vastly different prospect. Felix had seen plenty of them on the roads of Ostermark when he had first crossed back into the Empire: whole regiments of Chaos warriors marching in step, the hellish banners, the bray of horns, the reek of char where daemons walked, the way the ground itself seemed to shake underfoot as broken and branded Ostermark men pushed the Chaos legions’ infernal engines of war west towards Talabecland. They were memories that would stay with Felix as long as he lived. And Gotrek had seen them too.

‘Did no one try to stop him?’

The Kislevite paused under the moon shadow of a wide beech tree. Were it not for his colourful patchwork coat then Felix doubted he would have been able to see the man. ‘Is up to you of course, but I suggest keeping down your voice.’ He nodded towards the surrounding forest. ‘Not all of Chaos army stayed on road.’

Felix was uncomfortably reminded of his nightmare of being hunted through a forest that had itself been somehow complicit with his doom. Looking around him now, he could see where some of that imagery had come from.
I see your death
. He shuddered. It wasn’t a pleasant comparison to draw.

‘Are they following us?’

‘Look at this,’ said Kolya, taking a frond of something leafy and green and producing an expansive shrug. ‘How is anyone to follow anything in this?’

‘Kat could,’ said Felix wistfully. His wife had been a true daughter of the Drakwald, and what had filled him with night terrors had been as unthreatening and common to her as a stroll down Befehlshaber Avenue, a gauntlet of hawkers, vendors and beggars that had in turn filled Kat with dread. Reminiscence hardened into a lump in his throat. He swallowed it with difficulty. ‘She could track a single beastman several days ahead. And I once saw her shoot down a running beastman at three hundred yards by nothing but moonlight.’ He shook his head, disbelieving still. ‘The best shot I ever saw.’

‘No offence taken,’ Kolya returned. ‘Is she as beautiful as she is deadly with a bow?’

‘You know you’ve asked me this question or one like it a hundred times since we left Praag.’

‘You are the poet, Lord Jaeger. Describe her to me and maybe I will not ask again.’

Felix sighed. ‘She was smaller than most women, and slender, but she could move through the forest like a deer. And she had the most beautiful dark hair, except for here.’ He pointed to a spot above his left eye. ‘Here she had a lock of silver that shone regardless of day and night.’ He ran his finger absently down the side of his face to the corner of his lip. ‘And a scar here. It didn’t bother her, and she knew it didn’t bother me.’ He smiled despite his heartache. ‘I’m no oil painting myself these days. And the gods save the merchant she caught staring at it. I think I once saw her humble Gotrek with that stare of hers, though I might have been mistaken.’

‘She sounds a veritable
atamanka
,’ said Kolya approvingly. ‘The terror of beastmen and of men’s hearts in all your forests.’

‘She was.’

Kolya took his employment of the past tense without comment.

Felix blinked away what might, given time and opportunity, have budded into a tear. At times like this he missed her so much that it was impossible to believe she could be gone. How could a ghost cause his heart such pain? But she was gone. A part of him wallowed in the pain, held the knife to the self-inflicted wound and demanded he suffer it. He should have been there. His presence in Altdorf would not have swayed that battle, he knew. He doubted whether even Gotrek and his axe could have made the difference, but he should have been there. The thought of Kat frightened and alone left him feeling hollow, nothing but a cold skein of unspoken grief. He wondered if it was the same guilt that drove Gotrek.

During the denouement to their disastrous last hours in Praag, Felix had learned that the Slayer had himself been on a quest in distant lands when his family had been killed by goblin raiders, and had shared his one-time comrade’s grief as he had heard the part that Snorri Nosebiter had played in their deaths. And now Snorri was dead too. Felix hoped the murder of his best friend brought the Slayer comfort.

‘Will you stay with Gotrek when you reach Middenheim?’ Felix asked, shaking off thoughts of splitting bone and bloody snow.

‘Until he falls in glorious battle against many foes.’

‘And then?’

‘What chance for cup of kvass in your city?’

The Kislevite slung an arm around a tree trunk that was perched on a mossy tussock of gnarled roots and earth and pulled himself up. The man turned and crouched, a grin deepening the shadows on his narrow face. Felix frowned in annoyance, though whether with Kolya or with himself he wasn’t sure. Sometimes he wasn’t sure what he really wanted at all. Even after everything Gotrek had done, as far as he had sunk in Felix’s esteem, Felix couldn’t shake the sense of
import
that he had carried through so many adventures. It wasn’t just professional pride, the hours he had spent in swamps and deserts and corrupted ruins, scribbling by starlight with mortal danger always just around the corner. It went deeper than that.

It was a saga that needed its ending.

Reaching under his mail, Felix withdrew his oilcloth-wrapped pocketbook and held it up to the moonlight. ‘I could give you my journal. The first entry is just after Gotrek and I departed Castle Reikguard with Kat and Snorri on the road to Karak Kadrin, but I can answer any questions you might–’

Kolya waved the offer away. Felix’s grip on the book hardened.

‘Gotrek deserves better.’

‘If you think so, why did you leave him?’

Felix sighed, but said nothing as the Kislevite dropped a hand to draw him up onto the tussock.

He didn’t have an answer for him.

Gotrek was standing in a small clearing between the wrecks of two coaches, hunched wearily over the awesome weight of his axe, glaring from one to the other. The vehicles were gaudily painted in bright, primary colours, rails and trims picked out in gold paint that shimmered in the torchlight of the men picking their way through the scattered debris. The body of the one nearest to Felix was peppered with arrows and a dark splash of blood coated the ladder to the driver’s platform. The second had been turned onto its side and gutted. A lantern had been slung from its undercarriage, casting a hesitant pall that advanced a way into the forest and then retreated, over and again, like a rat around a trap. Smashed boxes littered the ground, spilling what looked like face paints and glittering costumes over the forest floor.

Travelling players, Felix thought with a familiar wrench, probably hoping for sanctuary in the mountains.

‘Mutants, I think,’ said Gustav, moving out from behind the upturned wagon, flanked by a pair of heavily armoured soldiers with wary eyes and hands on their weapons’ pommels. He carried a second battered lantern that lit his face eerily from below.

Felix’s relief at finding his nephew alive and well threatened him with a smile, a twinge to his injured jaw bringing it out as a grimace.

‘Nice to see you too, uncle.’

‘What makes you think it was mutants? There’s a Chaos warband hunting us, apparently.’

‘Their tracks are… strange, and seem to be heading north into the mountains.’

‘You found tracks?’ said Kolya. ‘Show me.’

Gustav nodded, spared Felix a furtive smile, and led the Kislevite back around the wagons.

Mutants ahead, a Chaos warband behind, and who knew what awaiting them in the Middle Mountains. The forces of darkness enclosed them on every side. With a glance to the solemn rank of trees, Felix loosened the collar of his cloak. For a moment he had almost felt the shadow around his neck.

‘Over here, manling,’ grunted Gotrek, a little less of the usual flint in his voice, and gestured behind him with a jerk of the head.

Felix pulled his fingers from his collar and straightened his back before stamping over to join him. The Slayer lowered his axe and glanced aside as he approached. If Felix didn’t know better, he’d think the dwarf was actually
sorry
. His single eye was bloodshot, as if the pupil had been struck from behind with a spear. His enormous muscles trembled with the effort of keeping him upright. Sigmar, what would it take to make the dwarf sleep?

‘You just decided to punch me out, then,’ said Felix. ‘The old dwarf ways not as secret as you thought they were?’

‘There’s a lot of ground between us and the mountain road yet,’ Gotrek growled back, then shook his head with a clink of gold. ‘I didn’t wake you to argue. I have a new rememberer for that. I wanted you to see something before we head further from the Wolfenburg road.’

‘About that–’

‘This way, manling,’ said Gotrek, lumping his axe once more to his shoulder and trudging away between the two wagons. ‘Just a little further.’

Even from the overgrown outcropping that jutted from the forest to overlook the Wolfen Vale, Felix could smell the blood. A sprawling city that could only have been Wolfenburg, the capital of Ostland, blistered the earth like burnt and puckered flesh. Banners of tattered skin flew from its battlements, lit from beneath by candles of human tallow. Like a pumpkin carved into a nightmarish mask and then set around a candle, the shattered walls gleamed with thousands of individual points of light. The breaches in the city’s walls had been packed with polished skulls, and her lights now shone through the eye sockets and fracture wounds of her people. The alpine wind blowing through those walls returned the dead their voice, a haunting moan that filled the sparsely forested bowl of the river valley.

The great stone bastion of the Elector’s Palace stood within an inner ring of fortifications, all now half-demolished, a moat of rubble around a gutted citadel from which the fell symbols of Chaos glared out over the city. Nearby, the granite keep of the Knights of the Bull stood in a similar state of ruin. Rising between them like a judge from its promontory atop a rugged scarp was the remnants of the chapter house of the Order of the Silver Hammer. The ancestral home of the Knights of Wolfgart – the Witch Hunters, as most men knew to fear them – had been subjected to a more comprehensive pogrom of desecration. Even from afar, the deep warpstone glare emanating from the crater made Felix’s stomach turn.

He had seen Kislevite
stanitsas
ransacked and burned. He had seen the gruesome tribune poles that had dotted the oblast and that even the crows dared not overfly. Every man in his company brought talk of destruction, of smashed armies and broken cities, and Felix had believed every word. But this was the first time he had seen first-hand for himself one of the great cities of the Empire in ruins.

And it wasn’t over yet.

On the road before its walls, two vast armies collided. Ten thousand banners danced like daemons on hot coals. Hundreds of mounted northmen with coloured pennants streaming from their short lances ploughed through endless blocks of heavily armoured and hideously mutated infantry. Beastmen battled each other in churning whirlpools of froth and fur. Bursts of dark magic charred the air. Ogres in blasted plate mail bellowed, islands of brute power in a sea of foes. Huge, muzzled beasts sent gouts of flame rolling through the melee, immolating fighting men by the score. It was a cauldron of noise.

There wasn’t an Imperial banner in sight. This was a battle between the gods of Chaos, rival champions feuding over scraps and favour. Felix turned away, sick.

‘I wanted you to see this,’ said Gotrek. Scrawled with tattoos of doom and dishonour and worn haggard by many months of bloodshed, the Slayer looked as much at one with his time as Felix had ever seen him. ‘This is what your Empire has become now, manling. Wherever you go this is what you will find. As sure as the stones of Everpeak, Middenheim is the last city of man. That is where the little one will be waiting for you. There is nowhere else to go.’

Felix simply stared over the opposing hordes in numb horror. There was no end to the Chaos Gods’ appetite for carnage. When the Empire and her allies were broken and the world was theirs, would they then fall on each other like this until only one champion remained standing? And then what? What kind of world would one ruled by Chaos be? Felix couldn’t imagine. He didn’t want to.

‘I think that Chaos warrior you let go has followed us here,’ Gotrek muttered softly, as if sorry to intrude on Felix’s thoughts.

‘I didn’t
let him go,
’ Felix spat, still staring at the unbelievable act of violence being staged in the valley below. ‘I put a bullet between his shoulders.’

‘Same thing,’ said Gotrek with a shrug, then nodded down. ‘I recognise some of the markings on those beasts down there. If I had one I’d wager a Bugman’s that they’re from the same herd we fought back in the forest.’

Felix didn’t bother to look for himself. Although dwarf eyes were generally not as sharp as a human’s – an adaptation to low-light vision, or so Max had once explained – they had a remarkable capacity for picking out intricate detail. Felix supposed that when one got down to the mechanics of it, the inner workings of a fine dwarf-made clock or the tribal war paint on a beastman’s hide were all very much the same.

‘And what if they follow us onto the mountain road? They could use it to attack Middenheim.’

‘Dwarfs don’t build a thing for others to use, manling. Archaon himself could walk those mountains for ten thousand years and never get near those roads.’

‘Fine,’ Felix sighed, sickened as much by the tug of inevitability as by the rivers of blood being spilled. Watching it brought Max’s words ringing between his ears:
your final adventure
. ‘Fine. I’ll not fight you. We’ll take the dwarfs’ mountain road and we’ll go to Middenheim together.’