Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (14 page)

Felix turned to glance back before they turned onto another corridor.

‘What kind of weapon was that?’

‘King Byrrnoth Grundadrakk of Barak Varr tasked me tae gie him a crossbow faster and better tha’ them the dark elf scallies wur usin’ agin his shipping. New bolts get fed intae the track frae a hopper and forced oot wi’ a wee burst o’ steam for a mair powerful shot.’ Malakai shrugged as if he were describing the operation of hammer and nail. ‘But auld Grundadrakk in his wisdom didnae like whit they cost tae build sae ah kept the few ah made for maself. Ah wonder what’s left of the auld place noo?’

‘Barak Varr?’ said Felix and shrugged. He thought of Kolya’s map, the great empty swathe south of the Talabec and west of the Middle Mountains.

‘She is beset, but stands, the last stone on the path to the Everpeak,’ said Max quietly, eyes averted. ‘Vermin rule in her deep places, and like rotten grain from a breached drum they spill from their conquests in Hirn, Izor, Eight Peaks and Azul.’

For a minute everyone walked in silence.

Felix turned to Gotrek. He had learned from Snorri that the two dwarfs had used to live in a hill town – much like the ancient township they had just passed through – under the protection of Karaz-a-Karak, the Everpeak as men knew the capital of the ancient dwarf realm. In a sense Gotrek was learning of the plight of his home much as Felix had just days before. The Slayer stared grimly ahead as if it meant nothing. And perhaps it didn’t, Felix thought with a sigh. Then Malakai sucked in through his teeth and spat on the ground.

‘Well tha doesnae sound tae guid, diz it?’

‘No,’ Felix agreed, meaning to say something more but unable to find the words for it.

‘If you go in for that sort of talk,’ Gotrek muttered.

The corridor came to an end in what looked like a vast feasting hall. Great ceiling arches soared above them, carved into the likeness of longbeard dwarfs striking together tankards of ale over the centre of the hall where they met. Each was a work of art and that they had endured the millennia in such a recognisable state did credit to the dwarfs that had poured such loving labour into their artifice. Scores of low slung tables filled the tiniest portion of the room, leaving the rest to cracked tiles and more of that black cabling that seemed as pernicious in this castle as weeds. A handful of dwarfs in armour sat at just one of them, picking at the thin-looking vegetables that wallowed in gravy in their trenchers. Felix felt his mouth water and heard his stomach growl. He thought of the empty crates and sacks in his company’s wagons and looked about himself with fresh wonder and – almost – hope.

There must be hundreds of dwarfs here. Far from enough to win the war, but enough to make a difference if used wisely; enough to
hurt
the enemy, to let the Dark Gods know that there were still those that fought them. Whatever Gotrek’s misgivings about Malakai Makaisson’s intentions, Felix felt sure that the ancients who had once lived here would have approved. It had to be something truly remarkable to warrant such an expenditure of resources and the dedication of so many.

Malakai’s footsteps echoed from the grandiose beams as the Slayer-Engineer strode towards a large set of double doors at the far end of the hall and flung them wide.

Cold mountain air rushed through. It carried the scent of engine grease and oil and the barely discernible hum of some kind of idling engine. Felix stepped out into the night. The wind, reminded of its strength so high above the world, tore between the castle’s battlements and riffled through Felix’s hair and cloak. With one hand positioned for safety on the pitted basalt of the rampart beside him, he restrained his hair with the other. Gotrek peered over the side and spat down. He watched it fall for a long time, and then grunted with what sounded like approval.

The castle’s uppermost fortifications had been filled with a forest of metal girders, made into a towering scaffold by horizontal and diagonal beams and ringed with walkways and ladders and dangling ropes. Steel-wound hawsers the thickness of Felix’s arm fed through massive brass rings that had been unceremoniously bolted into the ramparts and swept up to some mysterious point in the sky. They bobbed up and down, as though attached to a ship that rolled with the waves. Beside Felix, Max however was looking up, his dark eyes alive with visions of destiny. Felix joined him, feeling his excitement rise as the blinking spots overhead that he had initially mistaken for stars turned out to be a string of guide lights employing the same arcane technology with which Makaisson had illuminated his castle. A shape emerged from the darkness as Felix’s eyes adapted to it – a huge, gleaming curve like the underbelly of a whale. Cold light glinted from the riveted metal hanging beneath it.

Felix was lost for words.

They could do it. They could reach Middenheim. They could do anything.

‘Aye,’ said Malakai Makaisson, arriving in between Felix and Max and winding both men with a firm clap on the back. ‘Did ye miss her?’

The children of the tribes ran amongst the beaten Middle Mountains fighters, laughing and squealing as they pulled faces, danced around discarded blades, and kicked at men’s shins. It was an old game. Khagash-Fél, as old as the tribes themselves, remembered when he had run amongst captured warriors of the Yusak to prove to his father that their enemies did not frighten him. That had been more than a lifetime ago. Gods had been and passed since then.

Reining in his enormous black warhorse, Khagash-Fél dismounted. His boots hit the ground with a thump of meteoric iron. A frightened murmur passed amongst the mutant warriors as they saw him approach. They had dwelt here too long, hidden in these mountains and deaf to the Dark Master’s call. They were Empire men and thus born with water in their bones. They had forgotten how it felt to look upon a true champion of Chaos and know terror.

‘Who leads you?’ he intoned.

Silence.

One-by-one, Khagash-Fél cracked the knuckles of his hand. At least one man moaned. The tribe’s outriders had herded up just under forty of the mewling chattel. Those few in whom the Dark Master’s blessing was most evident were picketed here on the stone ground by the river at the town’s entrance, surrounded by a ring of tribesmen and beasts. The rest he could still hear screaming as they were fed into the great cauldron that had been set up in the valley beyond the walls, to be boiled alive in the traditional manner reserved for the blood enemies of the tribes.

Khagash-Fél was pleased to hear the old ways being upheld in the midst of such upheaval.

He approached the man who had made a sound. Self-evidently he was weak of heart and likely also of body and spirit. The man had been divested of his helm, revealing a wide mouth filled with poisonous-green teeth. His beard flexed unnaturally of its own volition and his pale, westerner’s skin was slippery with sweat. Khagash-Fél ground his teeth at the stench of urine rising from the man’s faulds. The man condemned himself still further with a whimper.

‘Who leads you?’

‘He is dead, O mighty one, slain in battle with the dwarfs and their allies.’

Khagash-Fél glanced to the castle that sat atop the mountain to his left. There was a road leading from it to the town but as hard as he focused on it, he could not force his eyes to track it all the way down. Mentally, he bade the Eye of Katchar to open and reveal the path’s true course to him, but it was a gift of the gods and not his to command, and it remained stubbornly shut.

‘Then who now leads you?’

The weakling warrior glanced for support to his comrades, who, showing equal sallowness of spirit, averted their faces. He opened his mouth and stuttered, then screamed as Khagash-Fél stooped down to grab him by the throat and drag him two feet off the ground.

And now the man fought: too little, too late. The mutant kicked out at full stretch to dink his toe on the warlord’s breastplate, working his large mouth for a bite on the tattooed skin around his neck. Khagash-Fél tightened his grip until the man’s eyes bugged out of his face and his lips drained of colour.

‘Had I and my people not come here, to whom would you have turned?’

The man opened his mouth and stared, perhaps seeing the great eagle come to snatch away the soul of the craven and bear it to its damnation. The creak of cartilage echoed up from his constricting throat.

‘Who?’

A frightened murmur passed through the watching captives, maybe seeing their own fate in the warrior’s slow death. All except one. His eyes narrowed. A slender old crone observed the scurrying children with an awkward look of affection. She was draped in black silks, ice-white hair pierced by dark horns. As if only then noticing his presence, she drew her attention from the children to regard him. Her skin was a chalky black. Her eyes shimmered like scrying pools.

Khagash-Fél felt a thrill of recognition, of destinies coming together in the time and manner that they must.

His guide.

His prophet.

Watching proceedings from the bare back of his grey horse, Nergüi traced a ward against evil through the air. Strips of blue silk danced across the pony’s muzzle. The chimes sewn into his robes tinkled in warning. ‘She is a witch, warlord, and a potent one. Be wary when you question her, and kill her swiftly afterwards.’

The woman smiled, baring teeth like tiny knives. Nergüi’s browned face contorted in anger and he held out a hand to his acolytes for his staff. One of them had handed the eagle-feathered rod to him before Khagash-Fél could raise a hand for peace.

‘Do you not fear death?’ he asked. ‘Or do you think perhaps that I will not turn my blade on a woman?’

‘Everyone fears death, Half-Ogre, but I know that you cannot kill me.’

‘She is a prophetess,’ hissed someone from amongst the gathered tribesmen before Khagash-Fél could glare into them his will for silence.

Nergüi raised his staff until it was held vertical. He began to shake it rhythmically up and down, so that the glass-eyed beads threaded through its feathers shook. In time, he pounded on his chest with an open palm. Khagash-Fél recognised the chant as one of dispelling, but it felt suddenly childish when brought before the god-touched prophetess, so composed in her own power that she did not even look at the tribes’ shaman as he spoke.

‘Do you claim that you can see your own death?’ said Nergüi.

‘Can you not?’

The shaman laughed, grinning to his acolytes and the warriors around him who had ridden with him over countless leagues and many years and who now laughed with him. ‘Perhaps these Greater Gods have something finer in store for me.’

The woman glanced at Khagash-Fél. The corner of her lips curled. Prismatic fragments of something terribly profound glittered across her eyes. Khagash-Fél found himself absorbed. There was truth there, he could feel it, as only one great power could recognise in another. And she saw something similar in him, he knew. He regarded her in a wholly different light. He had lost four sons. It had been many centuries, but he would need more if he was to found a dynasty to rule the Dark Master’s empire.

‘Perhaps they do indeed,’ she answered, sharp as a crystal blade.

Unbeknownst to the men around him, Nergüi had stopped laughing. He rattled his staff fiercely. ‘Your foresight did not serve your former master, witch.’

For a moment, the seeress looked sad. ‘It is not prophecy that I give you but the future as it can only be. If all men were blessed equally by fate then none would be happier about it than I.’

‘And what do you see, prophetess?’ said Khagash-Fél eagerly.

‘Your people believe the dead see things that the living do not. You are right. Long ago I died, or should have but for the blind heroism of a man centuries unborn, and now I see as the living cannot. I see the end of things, and a future, a world on which the doom of great warriors will touch.’

‘Are all your visions so opaque?’ Nergüi sneered.

‘I see you in battle with the hero you seek,’ she said, ignoring the shaman and addressing Khagash-Fél, then turning to point a clawed finger to the old castle on the mountain. ‘There. A battle to the death.’

Khagash-Fél grinned.

‘Good luck,’ said Nergüi, lowering his staff. ‘The tribes know well the magic of the dwarfs and their black kin. These are hidden ways. There is no way to that castle.’

The prophetess turned back to Khagash-Fél. ‘The one you hunt is marked by destiny. The fates of worlds still unborn converge upon him. His doom draws near and his passage is as the setting of the moon to my eyes. I am Morzanna, prophetess of the Dark Master, and this one once saved my life.’ She extended her small, clawed hand and, despite Nergüi’s warning hiss, Khagash-Fél dropped the now-limp corpse in his grip and took it, swallowing it in his ogreish palm.

‘Come, Half-Ogre. Allow me to guide you to your destiny.’

TEN

Unstoppable

‘You’re a genius,’ Felix breathed, craning his neck as far back as it would go and gawping at the dark behemoth that strained on its hawsers like a harpooned whale.

It was an airship!

The darkness gave Felix only the vague impression of sleek contours, an outline defined by the glow of guide lights, but he could say without fear of contradiction that this new airship was every bit as immense as the first. It would be a squeeze, but Felix saw no reason why it couldn’t carry all of Malakai’s dwarfs and all of Felix’s men wherever they needed to go. Already the possibilities were racing through his mind. Flying to Middenheim was just the beginning. They could drop bombs on the Chaos hordes as they attempted to scale the Fauschlag. Utilising the airship’s phenomenal speed and range they could ferry in supplies from all over the world, or scour the land for survivors, unifying the Empire again in its common struggle. As history now remembered Magnus the Pious and Praag, perhaps children two centuries hence would learn the names of Malakai Makaisson and Middenheim. It was only one airship, but the implications were endless.

The guide lights glinted from the steel rims of glass portholes and from the barrels of organ guns and the blades of rotors. They turned dreamily, and it was these that were responsible for the quiet drone that Felix could hear against the wind. Looking closer, Felix could see that there were gaps in the bodywork of the fragile metal vehicle that dangled from the gasbag. The airship was unfinished, but it looked wondrous enough for Felix.

‘You rebuilt the
Spirit of Grungni
.’

‘Ah called her
Unstoppable
,’ said Malakai, stomping across the blustery rampart to the side of the great steel tower where a mechanism of wheels and cables had been bolted to the scaffold, adjoining what looked like a pair of parallel vertical rails that headed straight up. Malakai stood beside the contraption and put his hands on his hips. The wind bent his crest at the roots and ruffled his collar. ‘It’s whit ah always wanted tae call the last yin, and noo there’s naebody tae say otherwise.’ He patted the scaffold. ‘This yin’s all mine.’

‘There’re holes in it,’ said Gotrek.

‘She isnae ready yit is she, ye big wazzock.’

‘How did you get enough liftgas to fill the gasbag?’ Felix cut in before Gotrek could respond with anything even more insulting. ‘You told me before that it was difficult to find. You’d built a whole town to manufacture the stuff.’

‘Ye’re right, laddie, and tha’s a sensible question.’ Malakai glared pointedly at Gotrek who snorted and turned his back to go and pace the ramparts. ‘The auld mines all ower this place were filled wi the stuff. We joost pumped it oot.’

‘And what about fuel?’ said Gotrek. The dwarf paced with arms crossed, gripping his swollen biceps, but his one eye glittered with an excitement that Felix suspected he could not entertain until every possible flaw had been gone over and cast aside. ‘There’s nothing in these mountains and never has been. No gold, no iron, and no coal either.’

‘Everything we used cam wi us frae Sylvania, but ye’re right, there isnae much black water in the tank. Enough tae fly us tae Karaz-a-Karak in a guid wind.’

‘That’s where you’re going?’ said Felix, feeling much of his excitement ebb away. He’d been foolish to think that Malakai would want to fly his airship north when he could take it home to aid his own people. No doubt the dwarfs stood a better chance anyway. If anything had a right to describe itself as impregnable then the Everpeak was it.

For a moment Felix considered asking Malakai to take them all with him. It would undoubtedly be safer there than Middenheim ever could be, but more than that there was the prospect of skaven to fight if Max’s reports were to be believed. There was a debt of blood still owed there.

He sighed and let the bloodlust go. There was no point to it. If he found the rat that murdered his father, then what would change? No, he knew where he had to go and had been resigned to walking it before this.

As soon as he arrived at that decision breathing felt a little easier, as if a pressing weight had been removed from his shoulders.

He felt as though he had been tested somehow and had passed.

‘That’s where he
was
going,’ said Gotrek, turning to face the engineer. He tightened his grip on his biceps until the muscles of his chest and neck bulged. The bullet wound in his shoulder oozed. ‘Now he’s going to Middenheim.’

‘We can fight aboot it when she’s guid to go,’ said Malakai, meeting the other Slayer’s bleak stare without blinking. ‘It’s joost a waste o’ breath until she is.’

The engineer reached behind him and pulled on a lever that was part of the mechanism at his back. As he did, there was a hiss of vented steam from the top of the scaffold and then a metallic wail as a small iron cage came hurtling down the vertical tracks. Just before it looked as if it were going to shatter on the roof of the castle it slowed, issuing what sounded like a sigh, and then bumped home with a clumsy kiss of metal upon stone. Steam rushed out from the braking mechanism, flooding Makaisson to the knees as he pulled open the metal door, turned to Felix, and beamed.

‘Ah ken ye’d want tae see her. Fur auld time’s sake.’

Felix didn’t know what to say. Seeing the airship was like being reunited with an old friend, every bit as exhilarating as finding Malakai himself alive and well; more so, in fact, he was ashamed to admit. Taking his gawping silence as assent, Malakai turned to Max, who nodded once, and then to Gotrek who grunted and shook his head.

‘It looks the same as the last one. I think I’ll go and see what my so-called rememberer is up to.’ The Slayer touched his damaged shoulder and drew in a sharp breath. ‘Maybe I’ll see about this too,’ he added grudgingly.

‘Sorry aboot tha’,’ said Makaisson, sounding almost genuinely contrite.

Gotrek bared his yellowed teeth. ‘Next time, aim a little lower.’

‘You should get some rest,’ said Felix, promising himself that he’d curl up somewhere too just as soon as he’d had one glimpse inside of the airship. ‘I can’t remember the last time I saw you close your eye.’

‘Plenty of time for that, manling,’ Gotrek muttered wearily as he turned away. ‘Plenty of time.’

The elevator cage was, mercifully, much slower on the ascent than it had been on the way down. Felix wondered whether some technical marvel instructed it when passengers were aboard and to adjust its speed accordingly, but opted to save his questions in favour of clutching the bars of the cage as his stomach dropped through his feet and the ramparts of the castle disappeared below. The metal girders of the scaffold flitted by, the cage shuddering as it climbed higher. Felix tightened his grip until his knuckles were white.

‘Exhilarating,’ said Max, in a cold tone that didn’t know the meaning of the word.

‘Ye git bored o’ it,’ Malakai shouted over the wind that the climbing elevator sucked in and down.

Felix disagreed, and heartily so. He had travelled in similar devices to this one, both above ground and under it where such technology was commonplace in the mines of the dwarfs, and however he picked through the gamut of feelings rifling through his innards ‘boredom’ was conspicuous by its absence. Felix clung to the sides and watched the airship bloat as he was drawn nearer, the metal gondola that hung beneath the gasbag flashing faster and faster between various bars and stanchions until the elevator cage arrived at the top of the scaffold for an unimpeded view of Malakai Makaisson’s awesome invention.

There was a squeal of brakes and Felix’s view was filled with steam that gouted from a whirring array of wheels at the terminus of the tracks as well as from the elevator itself. Felix’s heart lurched as the elevator slowed. He shivered in the cloud of condensing steam as the cage arrived in its housing with a – he supposed – reassuring
bang
and Malakai drew back the door, this time on the opposite side of the cage to the one they had entered, opening onto the scaffold.

Felix was the last out, stepping onto a timber gangplank that wobbled dangerously underfoot and immediately regretting looking down. His stomach turned a somersault and he had to fight the urge to fold down to his knees, grip the gangplank, and never ever let go. He had been higher, he knew. He had sailed higher than mountains in the
Spirit of Grungni
, but there was something about seeing that distance quite clearly beneath your feet that made it seem a great deal higher. And besides, he thought queasily, trying to remember which side of the scaffold faced the roof of the castle and which a drop over the parapet – this whole castle was built onto a mountaintop.

Willing his stomach to settle and his arms and legs to stop shaking, Felix followed after Malakai and Max to the edge of the scaffold where another sickeningly slender length of wood ran to an open door in the gondola’s side. The plank was secured at each end with brass rings that rolled around the stanchion as the airship shifted in the wind. He supposed that looked vaguely sturdy. He watched as Malakai bounded across like a goat. The gangplank wobbled alarmingly under the dwarf’s bulk, but not enough to dissuade Max from gliding across after him. Felix took a deep breath and this time remembered not to look down, holding out his arms for balance as he practically ran across and jumped into Malakai’s arms.

‘Welcome aboord,’ Malakai yelled as Felix stepped reverently onto the iron deck and looked around at the small boarding chamber.

A single white light shone from a fixed point in the ceiling, illuminating metal rivets and the edges of plates. It was all so well polished that Felix could see his blurred reflection in them. He scratched his greying beard ruefully, turning a full circle before coming to the circular door-hatch that led into the interior of the gondola. It was solid steel and, unlike an ordinary door, was opened by rotating a wheel mechanism in the centre and then waiting for the locks to release. Felix didn’t understand the logic behind the design but the dwarfs had similar systems aboard their submersibles as well, so he assumed it served some purpose for dwarfs were nothing if not pragmatic.

With a glance at Malakai for permission, Felix took the wheel in his hands. His heart was hammering. He ran his hands around the smooth curve of the metal. For a moment, he felt as if he could turn this wheel, stand back, and find Ulrika and Snorri and everyone else waiting for him on the other side. He smiled. And then he, Gotrek and Snorri would escape below for a good hard drinking session before the ship got under way. He sighed, a lump in his throat. He would never have thought, living through those terrible adventures, that those would be the best days of his life. What he would give now for one more argument with Ulrika, or a hung-over Snorri Nosebiter as the greatest of his problems. He was surprised to find himself even missing Gotrek. The Slayer was still around, of course, but what Felix found himself yearning for was his
friend
.

Malakai reached around him, and gave the wheel a gentle downwards tug to set it spinning. ‘A wee bit stiff for human hands,’ he said, with an understanding squeeze of Felix’s shoulder. Malakai was remarkably empathetic for a Slayer.

‘Yes. A little. No doubt I’ll get used to it.’

‘Sae, whit dae ye both want tae see first?’

The dwarfs’ infirmary was the busiest part of the castle, playing host to a steady stream of minor injuries from the battle as well as the cuts, scalds, and bruises that seemed an everyday part of life for the workers here. Behind a partially screened off corner, a craggy-faced elder with his long grey beard held in a net chewed on the stem of an unlit pipe and concentrated on sewing shut a nasty-looking cut on a warrior’s arm. A younger dwarf watched over his shoulder, on hand with a damp cloth and a half-empty jug of ale and prepared to deploy either one. Elsewhere, dwarfs in bloodstained leather aprons and gloves hurried about bearing trays of what looked like instruments of torture. One particularly grim-looking dwarf threw a bucket of sickly red water over a drain in the floor. Men moaned. Some lay unconscious on tables. Dwarfs sat stoically upright on benches or else stood, suffering their injuries as only dwarfs could.

Allowing the cruel alchemy by which crippled men were transformed back into soldiers to proceed around the table at which he sat, Gustav slowly unwound the foetid bandage from his hand. It felt like grinding one’s fist into a bruise. A sour milk smell emerged as it unravelled. He probably should have changed the bandage sooner, but what did he know, he wasn’t a healer, and it wasn’t as if clean cloth had been spilling from their empty grain sacks. He reassured himself that nothing dead ever smelled that bad.

‘The Dushyka wise woman said always to do it quickly,’ said Kolya, leaning onto the low table over a plate of something indescribable in gravy and a mug of something worse.

‘I bet that’s what all the ladies told you,’ Gustav replied, forcing a smirk.

Kolya grinned, massaging his ribs – bruised, but luckily not broken following a battering by a dwarf’s shield – then shuffled uncomfortably on his bench. It had been made to seat a body half his height and with a backside twice the girth of his. ‘I know seven languages, friend Gustav. There are many peoples beyond the northern face of the Goromadny, and I have almost as many wives there.’ He settled and shrugged. ‘Winters are long on the frozen sea, no?’