Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (13 page)

Felix didn’t know what to say, and right then they had greater concerns. Gotrek’s battle cry filtered thickly through the pulsing vines. Metal sang. And what of Gustav and the camp, were they under attack as well? No, as harsh as it might have sounded, he would take this newly empowered Max Schreiber over the old one any day.

‘Can you get us out?’ he said instead, cutting to the only thing that mattered.

‘Of course,’ said Max, as though it were so obvious he hadn’t thought to raise the matter himself.

The wizard clasped his hands tightly around his staff, his robes sinking into the surrounding shadow. Felix noticed his own fingers appearing to unravel and become one with the darkness. He could no longer feel the floor beneath him and it melted into nothing even as he watched. The putrid, nectar stink of magically invigorated plant life disappeared. If he could have filled his lungs with shadow then he would have screamed.

‘Gird yourself,’ said Max. ‘Grey magic takes some adapting to.’

The first thing Felix became aware of again was sound. He could hear Gotrek’s shouts interspersed with others, cries of anger and of pain, the clangour of weapons and the crunch of mail and meat and bone.

Then images came, seldom in alignment with what he was seeing and all the more jarring for it.

To the metallic chatter of chain guns he saw Kolya, thigh deep in rushing white water, engaged in fierce hand-to-hand combat with a pair of stout axemen in long mail shirts, round shields, and winged helms, before the darkness swept through them and they were gone.

He saw Herschel Mann marshalling a firing line of Hochland longrifles, but the voice he heard yelling was someone else’s. Fire fizzed back and forth between the opposing banks of the river, a trickle versus a raging torrent.

Disembodied, Felix was helpless but to watch as a volleygun carved open Lanarksson’s wagon from front axle to tailboard. Big Lyndun tumbled down the steps from the buckboard, leaking blood like a colander. Lorin emerged from beneath the canvas roof, mouthing a cry that was lost somewhere in the aethyr shade and sporting a crossbow before a bullet tore out his throat. Two more punched through his chest, and then Felix heard a snatch of the dwarf’s voice before the shadows rolled in.

There was Gustav, leading a charge over the splintered remnants of a picket line and into the tight shieldwall of heavy infantry that was advancing against them over the bridge. Pistols blossomed from the front rank. He heard and saw men roar and then there was a clashing together. Gustav’s Gospodar sabre flashed and then the vision was gone.

‘No!’ Felix shouted, though with what and to whom he was uncertain. ‘Take me back to that last one. Gustav needs my help.’

Disconnected visual elements came and went. He saw a stab of orange crest, like the sail of a storm-tossed ship on a swell of armoured mutant warriors. There were ruined buildings webbed with shadow.

The darkness swirled through one and bore Felix’s flailing consciousness with it. An incredibly muscular figure was crouched by a window. He had a red scarf tied around his forehead and wore a pair of bug-eyed lenses marked with cross-hairs, through which he looked down onto the scene below him. Felix couldn’t say what the figure was watching. There seemed to be no spatial connection between the images he was passing through and he didn’t know the layout of the township well enough to stitch them together. The marksman raised what looked like a longrifle. It had a long cylindrical barrel attached to the top of the stock and some kind of scarlet glowstone within it that sent a beam of light in the direction he aimed.

And then the darkness pulled them apart again.

There was a
crack
like a thunderbolt and a mutant warrior in thick steel plate in parti-coloured black and white went down with a steaming crater where his visor had been.

Who was attacking who?

None of this made sense.

The confusion of images and sounds and gunpowder smells arranged themselves into ordered focus. The shadows slunk back to the aethyr where as far as Felix was concerned they were henceforth invited to remain.

With one hand, Felix felt over the side of his body to ensure it was all where he had left it. A wave of dizziness passed through him as his body delivered two contradictory senses of where he was supposed to be standing right now. Despite what a large, increasingly queasy, part of him insisted, he was no longer in the belfry. In fact he could see the belfry at the far end of the street, the ruin rising out of the tangle of weeds like a memorial stone on the site of a forgotten battlefield. The street between him and it was a grinding churn of armoured warriors, twenty or so Chaos knights and half again as many corpses, converging on Gotrek and his axe.

The Slayer issued a bloodthirsty peal of thunder and drove his axe through a warrior’s raised shield and deep into his groin. Blood spurted across the dwarf’s beard. Slivers of splintered steel peppered his snarling face with a metallic finish. A back-slung elbow cracked the side of a warrior’s helmet like an egg. A warhammer smacked against the Slayer’s shoulder blade and drove him to his knees. The hammer came down to crack his skull open. Gotrek caught the haft of the descending weapon and, in a bulging display of strength, yanked the hammer from the warrior’s grip and split it in half across his knee. A bare-knuckle punch as he rose sent a knight with four arms and a droning morning star in each hand crashing through two of his companions with a dented breastplate. A mutant with spines running down his ears and along the outside edges of his hands went down screaming with a shattered shin. Gotrek withdrew his boot and stamped on the knight’s thigh as he decapitated him with a single blow of his axe. More came in, smothering the Slayer with sheer weight of numbers.

Gotrek was formidable, but he was only one Slayer.

Felix cursed under his breath, looking back over his shoulder to where the river was lit up with gunfire like a firework display. Breathing hard, he turned back. For better or worse Max had brought him here. Gustav and the others would have to look after themselves.

‘Wait,’ said Max, seizing Felix’s shoulder at the most disconcerting moment possible, just before he had finalised the decision to charge and directed his muscles to see it done.

‘For what?

‘Do you remember poor Claudia?’ said Max conversationally, his special brand of madness impervious to the grunts and the cries and the wrench of torn metal. ‘I feel I understand her a little better now. The power of the Celestial is a blight that no man is equipped to bear.’

Felix shook his head as the wizard spoke, noticing as he did so that the multi-barrelled chain gun embedded in the ruins opposite the belfry was being pivoted about by its broad-shouldered crew and onto the street. They were going to gun down their own just to take out Gotrek.

‘Gotrek, look out!’ Felix yelled as the powerful weapon opened up, spraying the combatants with fire.

By virtue of numbers alone the mutants took the brunt, forced into an electric dance by the hail of bullets driven through them. Their thick armour offered scant protection and blood seeped through coin-sized holes front and back. Gotrek took a ding to his rune-axe that ricocheted off, leaving a black smudge on the starmetal. He roared furiously, then took a shot to the shoulder that punched him down.

Felix cried out, breaking free of Max’s grip to charge forward.

The cannon wound down, but before the dazed survivors could so much as pick themselves up a roar went up from both sides of the street and dozens of stocky warriors poured out from hiding amidst the ruins. Once on the open road they formed grimly into ranks and closed on the surviving mutants – and Felix! – like the walls of some mechanical dungeon trap.

These were not at all like the mutants Felix had just been fighting. Their tough, practical mail was unembellished but for the occasional spiked iron vambrace for added brutality at close quarters. Each bore a shield carrying a uniform runic device, tightly locked with their comrade on either side. Felix could see their faces within their open helms. Their cheeks were leathery, noses squashed and red, eyes hard behind their full unkempt beards.

Dwarfs, Felix realised, dismayed. Both he and the mutants had been ambushed by dwarfs. Had they taken one look at Felix’s tattered appearance and mistaken him for a mutant himself? Sigmar, he couldn’t blame them.

And as for Max…

A handful of the mutant warriors rallied themselves for a counter-charge, throwing themselves onto the advancing shieldwall which seemed to essentially grind over them. The remainder, clearly brighter than the rest, broke and ran, only to be picked off one by one with well-placed shots from marksmen positioned in the neighbouring buildings.

The dwarfs held every advantage. They had numbers, enviable discipline, and their superlative night vision had enabled them to ambush the mutants at their most vulnerable moment and take them out at range as they fled piecemeal.

The last mutant went down at a sprint with a crossbow bolt protruding from his throat. He collapsed just a few yards from where Felix stood.

Gotrek’s fate and what Max’s magic had shown him of their camp left him under no illusion that these dwarfs were rescuers. He was the last man standing simply by virtue of the fact that he was yet to be overtly aggressive or run away. Perhaps they thought him craven enough to be questioned? There was no more to it than that.

Could these dwarfs themselves be aligned with the gods of Chaos?

Stranger things had happened in these dark times, and they would not be the first Chaos warband to fall on that of a rival.

As he watched, the dwarf formations began to break up, axemen dropping down to deliver mercy kills to the fallen knights. Felix’s heart froze. Gotrek! Would these dwarfs recognise what they were doing before it was too late? Would they care?

‘Wait,’ he shouted, throwing down his sword and stepping over it with arms raised, halting only when a quarreller raised his crossbow to aim at Felix’s chest. His skin itched as though it could already feel the bolt whizzing towards it. ‘My name is Felix Jaeger,’ he proclaimed in his loudest and most confident oratorical tone, uncertain what that was supposed to mean to these dwarfs, but for some reason determined to let them know it anyway.

Daring the sharpshooters’ iron nerves, he brought his raised hands together over his head to tease off his left glove. Then he lifted that hand, all fingers tucked in bar the fourth to display the rune-inscribed dwarf gold that banded it.

‘I swore an oath before the Slayer shrine of Karak Kadrin. I am the hammer-bearer and a daemonslayer, and on the word of a dwarf-friend, stop!’

The dwarfs slowly lowered their axes, apparently impressed enough to not kill him. They muttered to each other in Khazalid. Felix saw more than a few shrugs amongst the throng.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ said Felix. ‘Someone get him a message to stop the attack on our camp.’

More urgent muttering. The quarreller finally shouldered his weapon and Felix slowly lowered his hands, noticing as he did so the red spot that had appeared on his chest. Felix froze. The dot played over his armour for a second and then vanished.

Felix released a relieved breath, catching movement from the corner of his eye as a muscular dwarf with a bright red crest of hair rose up from behind the rough parapet of the rooftop across the street and laid his large, powerful-looking longrifle down against the stonework. The dwarf was short and immensely broad. He wore a thick leather coat with a high, fur-edged collar, which, contrary to spring cold and common sense, he wore open at the front to reveal amazingly defined muscles. Twin bandoliers containing an unusual cylindrical type of ammunition were looped over his shoulders and crossed his chest. His white beard was, most unusually for a dwarf, shaved almost to the jaw.

Felix gaped, his open mouth struggling unwittingly into a smile.

The dwarf pulled his goggles from his face, leaving them to hang by a rubber strap from his neck, and then pinched his eyes.

‘Felix Jaeger. Ah wouldnae believe it if ah hidnae seen it with ma ain eyes. Whit in the world are ye daein here?’

NINE

Makaisson

Malakai Makaisson flung back the bleak iron doors of the mountaintop citadel and strode into the greeting hall of the ancient dwarfs. Felix imagined that it had been rather more welcoming in the past. Columnar stumps marked out what looked to have been a runic design, possibly with some kind of cultural or even magical significance to the ancient architects of this place, but now left Felix minding the remaining ceiling supports with an unease he was unaccustomed to in dwarf-built structures.

The walls had been constructed with defence foremost in mind and thus had been built without windows of any kind. Now, however, breaks in the stonework allowed in the night and the patch jobs courtesy of canvas and nails did a poor job of blocking out the breeze. Thick black cabling lay everywhere, running through heaps of rubble and scrambling up columns to what looked like iron gantries from which an intermittent light flickered and hummed. It was neither torchlight nor the precious glowstones that Malakai had innovatively employed in his handgun, but a cold, soulless kind of glow. The smell of oil lingered on the stones and Felix could see it on the faces of the dwarfs he saw working on the walls’ repair as they turned to him with expressions of wonder. They probably hadn’t been expecting company.

‘It isnae any belter tae keek, but she’s oors.’

Felix assumed that meant it was good. Makaisson, he had once been told, hailed from an isolated far-northern community of dwarfs in the Dwimmerdim Vale, and his unusual manner of speech took some re-acclimating to. Gotrek regarded the ceiling sourly. Felix could still see lead where the bullet had punched into the bone of Gotrek’s shoulder but it had stopped bleeding and that, it seemed, was enough for him.

‘Not too bad. If you like the feel of rain on your face.’

Felix thought it was the nearest thing he had seen to paradise in a long time.

Malakai Makaisson, he thought with something approaching wonder. He still couldn’t believe it. What were the chances? Felix hadn’t seen the Slayer-Engineer since he and Gotrek had last passed through Nuln. Malakai had been teaching at the Gunnery School at the time, although Felix had heard through his various military contacts in Altdorf, and later from Snorri, that the dwarf had returned to Karak Kadrin to play his part in the debacle that was the Sylvanian campaign. Felix had assumed him dead. Snorri had thought so. At that moment Felix was almost inclined to give in to Max’s urgings and put it all down to destiny.

‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ said Gotrek, eyeing the lighting rigs suspiciously. ‘Never in all my years. If the Guild ever saw this your great-great-grandchildren would be swearing the Slayer Oath.’

‘Aye, mibbe ye’re right,’ said Malakai, an air of melancholy settling over him as he looked over the hall that he had rebuilt. ‘Ah suppose ah willnae tell ’em if ye dain’t.’

Gotrek grumbled darkly, glaring at the cables as if they were snakes.

‘How did you come to be in this out of the way place?’ asked Max, softly insistent, gliding under the strange artificial light that could find no purchase on his skin. The wizard had been attacking Malakai with questions almost from the moment the engineer had first presented himself in the township.

Felix found his persistence unnerving, but if Malakai felt the same way then he didn’t show it.

‘It’s a lang tale, young Schreiber, but if ye’re o’ a mind tae hear it…’

Felix held under the threshold as Gotrek, Max, and Malakai walked deeper into the greeting hall. He smiled. For a moment it was just like old times. Malakai Makaisson had that kind of effect, as if the end of everything was something one just had to look at in the right kind of way. But then his mind filled in for him the shades of those who were missing: one tall, blonde and achingly beautiful, the other stocky and broad with an idiot grin and a crest of multi-coloured nails.

With a sigh so deep that the thin air left him dizzy, he turned to look back the way they had come.

A scattering of torches marked the line of men, dwarfs and field guns on rickety wooden wagons as it crawled up the mountainside, throwing random pockets of illumination onto the barren rock and ruin of its surrounds. Both his men and Makaisson’s appeared too tired for bitterness, just another near-tragedy to mark the passing of another day. He tried to follow the snaking trail of men back down to the township, only to be thwarted by whatever cunning design or enchantment protected the dwarfs’ old paths through the Middle Mountains. The township was a black steepling in the mountains’ cleft far below, visible more by the faint twinkle of the stream under the stars than by the buildings themselves. He frowned.

Was that another glint of light down there in the ruins? And another over there, further back in the pass where the mountains surrounded the river as it fled for better lands. It was probably just a few mutants that Malakai’s force hadn’t accounted for, but part of him wished that it was something worse. That worried him. Would this hunger for vengeance pass with the war’s end or their arrival in Middenheim, or had he been irrevocably tainted by the encroachment of Chaos into the Old World? Or did the fact that his bloodlust bothered him prove that was not the case? He clung to that thought. It was comforting.

‘We were being followed by a force of northmen,’ said Gustav to the dwarf clansman wedged under his shoulder. His voice was breathy with altitude and his nose was bleeding again, a scarlet trickle running around his mouth, down his chin and steadily
drip-dripping
onto his armour. A ripening black eye already dominated one half of his face. His armour scales had been loosened out to ease the pressure on bruised ribs and he walked with a wince.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the dwarf. He glanced up at Gustav and then looked away in embarrassment and mumbled: ‘Those mutants have been trying to find their way up here for months, and the goblins before them for who knows how long. Aeons. The Wastes will freeze over before they get to the top of this mountain.’

‘Dain’t touch that!’

Felix turned to see Malakai Makaisson swat Gotrek’s hand away from one of the cables that coiled up the nearest column.

‘They’re carryin’ power frae the black water generators in the auld deeps. Mah ain design. Thaur waur mair important uses fur the insulation though, sae yer in fur a shock if ye tooch it.’

Gotrek scowled, but pulled his hand back just the same. It was probably only Malakai that could get away with talking to Gotrek like that.

Felix remained in the doorway just long enough to determine that Gustav, Kolya, Mann and the dwarfs’ leaders had everything in hand, before hurrying on after the others. With Malakai’s warning in mind he paid extra heed to where he stepped, taking care to avoid the over-floor cables where they ran through the rubble. He had had enough shocks for one day. It didn’t seem very sensible to leave something so dangerous just lying around on the floor, but Felix supposed that the dwarfs were accustomed to it.

‘What do you mean by more important uses?’

‘Ach, ye’ll see. But where wiz ah?’ The thrum of some industrial process taking place in a distant quarter of the citadel began to make itself felt through the stones. They approached a stairwell leading up, and Malakai moved towards it with Max in step. ‘Aye noo, and tha’ was hoo auld Ironfist and ah got separated efter tha wee beasties chased us oot of Sylvania. Ah saw hoo bad things were gonnae get efter tha, sae ah and those stuck wi’ me cam tae this wheesht place for a special project.’

‘You should’ve gone back to Karak Kadrin,’ said Gotrek.

‘Ah hear the Slayer Hold went doon no lang after tha’.’

‘Aye,’ Gotrek grumbled, deadly serious. ‘What of it?’

Felix walked through the crumbling innards of the castle and was overcome with awe. Steam filled the corridors and walkways that Malakai led them through, hissing between the bolted sections of great rusted pipes. Every few dozen steps they passed a room filled with unusual machinery. In some pistons rose and fell as if the mountain was sucking in steam. In others, internal walls had been knocked down to create space for rank upon rank of huge, gleaming engines that put Felix in mind of some infernal printing press. A juddering conveyor carried complicated metallic components from press to press, all attended by a single dwarf who made notes in a small book. Every stone shook as if the castle was being bombarded from above and everywhere dwarfs moved about with a purpose. Felix had to remind himself that it was the middle of the night outside.

Malakai Makaisson had constructed something astounding out here in the middle of nowhere, and Felix felt an urgent need to know why. Knowing the Slayer-Engineer as Felix did, he expected it to be both wondrous and destructive.

With a warrior’s eye, Felix looked about for signs of the weapons that the dwarfs were undoubtedly fashioning here to turn the tide against the hordes of Chaos, but could find nothing obvious. In what looked like finishing rooms, dwarfs in long-sleeved white overclothes blasted steel sheets with steam hoses while others buffed and polished. Machines that looked like iron-toothed mouths attached to conveyors spat nails into buckets that were then loaded onto carts for distribution.

Felix stepped to one side to allow a burly dwarf with a sweat-sodden grey beard to barrel down the narrow corridor behind a wheelbarrow filled with thick metal plates. Some quixotic type of armour perhaps? Felix could not for the life of him imagine what sort of monster Malakai intended to clad with it.

Gotrek watched the barrow rattle down the corridor, jaw clenched. Felix knew the Slayer was as curious about what Malakai was up to here as he was. He also knew that Gotrek was far too stubborn to ever ask.

‘All right,’ said Felix, ‘we give up. What are you doing here?’

‘We’ve all got oor ain weapons tae brin’ tae these times, young Felix, and these are mine.’

‘Forgive me, but they don’t look much like weapons.’

‘Nae the noo, laddie,’ Malakai grinned, stubbing his nose with a finger as thick and browned with grease as a sausage.

Gotrek snorted, though over what, Felix wasn’t minded to ask.

‘It’s destiny,’ said Max. The steam billowed through his robes as though he had just been summoned from some black dimension. He leaned into his staff and gazed about himself with bleak-eyed wonder. ‘It has to be. What else could reunite us all at such a pivotal moment in time?’

Malakai rested the muzzle of his gun on his shoulder and shrugged. ‘Mibbe it is and mibbe it isnae. It disnae seem tae make a difference either way ye keek it though diz it?’

Felix shook his head ruefully. Why hadn’t he thought of telling Max that?

‘And anyway,’ Malakai went on. ‘Ah can see a few who arenae here. Did poor Snorri Nosebiter get his memory back?’ He turned to Felix with a half-cocked grin. ‘And how aboot yer wee lass, Ulrika?’

Felix’s heart skipped a beat when he heard the question. He turned to Gotrek. Gotrek glared back. Felix’s tongue felt as though it was stuck to the roof of his mouth.

‘They both fell in Kislev,’ said Gotrek, his one eye fixed on Felix.

‘Well ahm sure it wiz a guid death. We’ll drink tae Snorri’s honour when this is all ower.’ Malakai reached out and took Felix’s shoulder in a consoling grip. It felt like being crushed under a rock, but Felix barely felt it. ‘And ahm sorry aboot Ulrika, she were a braw lass wi’ a guid heart.’

Felix felt Gotrek’s eye on him, and looked away just as a dwarf with a screaming circular saw sheared through the neck of a silvery-white sheet of metal. ‘Yes,’ he answered hoarsely. ‘Yes, she was.’

They passed through dozens more corridors and several further sets of stairs, always rising, until Felix was well and truly lost and desperate for a window if only to assure himself of where he was in relation to the outside. They passed taprooms in which dwarfs drank and smoked with the same dour determination with which they worked. A steam whistle wailed through the halls, making Felix jump when it first went off behind his ear.

The sound hung in the air for several seconds after the initial blast. Felix counted them, cringing a little with every added number at the thought of what dark thing might lurk in the valley and be drawn to such a din. To the dwarfs, however, it appeared to represent nothing more terrible than a shift change, workers in leather overalls covered in soot and oil and with protective gloves hanging from their wrists staggering into bunkrooms to rouse bleary-eyed comrades and slump into their still-warm beds. Watching them made Felix’s eyelids feel heavy and he tried and failed to suppress a yawn.

In rooms lined with armour dummies and weapon racks dwarfs shed work gear and strapped on mail and shields, no doubt for a shift patrolling the township below or manning the citadel’s walls. The dwarfs were a dying race, Felix knew, and had been for millennia. As such they had few professional soldiers, their armies comprised largely of dwarfs like these who set aside their trades in favour of axes in times of war. Even knowing that, Felix was impressed by their fortitude.

On the door of one such barracks room a large circular target had been mounted and as Felix walked by a dwarf in half-tied mail aimed a bulky crossbow towards him. Felix’s heart leapt into his mouth. The dwarf was clearly blurry-eyed from over-work, or else maddened by Chaos! The dwarf pulled on the trigger and a second later the yellow ring in the centre of the target bristled with iron bolts. Steam hissed from the strange mechanism riveted to the basic crossbow chassis in place of the conventional drawstring and crank as the dwarf lowered his weapon and moved to tug his bolts out of the door. He grunted a greeting to Makaisson as they marched past.