Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (23 page)

Gotrek cast his gaze down, fingers tightening around the haft of his axe. A growl started deep within his chest. ‘You followed me all this way. And for what? This play fight?’

‘You?’ Be’lakor crossed his arms across the whispering silver sigil on his chest and chuckled deeply. ‘Whatever made you believe that I cared about
you
?’

The daemon prince gestured towards the forward bulkhead. The temperature plunged. Breath turned to mist inside Kolya’s throat. Frost stitched across the metal as, with a calamitous groan, the hatchway onto the corridor crunched slowly closed. Together with the broken ladders, Kolya realised that Be’lakor had effectively cut the hangar deck off from the rest of the airship. The daemon prince himself was already beginning to fade, extremities shining off into the aethyr, but not so much that he could not raise an incorporeal hand, summoning a discus of angry black energy that buzzed above his open palm like a steam-driven wood-saw.

‘But I would hate to leave without a parting gift, so please, accept this with my compliments.’

The daemon prince dropped his arm and threw the moment before he disappeared.

Kolya watched the discus come for him with a detached sense of sorrow. He had always believed that he would outlive the Slayer’s mad quest, maybe return to what was left of Dushyka and search for his brother, but he still could not move a finger. He grimaced. No matter. His ears filled with a furious roar that might have been Gotrek’s, and then Kolya heard and saw no more. There was a sudden heat, a crashing cold, a singular moment of incandescent pain that lasted an eternity before it was spent.

Then silence.

And Kolya’s war was over.

‘Dae ye almost huv it?’ bellowed Malakai Makaisson. His immense biceps strained at the wheel. All the colours of the aethyr flickered across the single lens of his goggles, now strapped determinedly over his face, flat reflections of the High magic that throbbed from Max Schreiber’s staff.

‘Just a little longer,’ Max replied tightly.

‘Ah know ye dain’t tell me how tae fly mah airship, but it’s lookin’ joost a wee bit hairy oot there.’

Max grunted, nodding his understanding of the situation, bending every last ounce of will that he possessed to the task of sealing the rift. He was a magister of the Light College; he had memorised by rote a hundred banishments and counter-spells long before he had been allowed to glimpse the second level of the great – now lost – pyramid of Light. The principal underlying each of them was the same; some manner of repetitive cant that freed and focused the mind on that which disturbed the natural order. Daemonic possession, restless shades, portals into strange dimensions both natural and fabricated, Max had faced them all, but this was different.

The power pouring out of the rift was breathtaking. The scale of it went beyond human comprehension. The tear filled the sky as if it meant to encircle the airship whole to swallow it in one calamitous bite. The colours that had streamed from its periphery were no longer visible. All that remained was blackness. It was not empty, though, far from it. Max could feel the malice seeping from that opening. There was something in there, a mind that Max could feel in the same way as he could feel fire on his skin as he burned or water in his lungs as he drowned, but whose reasoning was just as impossible for a mortal man to discern. It was the complexity of the universe, and its simplicity. It hated Max both as a representative of the mortal races but also as the man and individual that it recognised as Max Schreiber. That the Chaos Gods should reserve even a miniscule fraction of their enmity for him alone was at once chilling and strangely exhilarating.

Max shook his head. His thoughts were wandering, driven apart like sheep harried by wolves. There was too much random magic coming out of the rift. It was impossible to focus, and that made his mind easy prey. Had he a circle of acolytes to fortify his mind it might have been different, but he was the only wizard of any kind on board, and several successive attempts to make do alone had left his mind reeling and the taste of burnt copper in his mouth.

That left the brute force approach.

Reluctantly, he rallied his mind within the walls of his own head and concentrated upon his own power. Without needing to explore its limits, he knew that it was greater than it had ever been. The discoveries he had made in Praag, the…
things
he had done, had changed him and he could not say that it was all for the better. That alone was reason enough to doubt whether he should use these powers to their fullest, but it was not the only one. The End Times had upended many established truths, but there were many that still held. There were still dark things lurking beyond the veil of the aethyr, and it remained unwise to announce oneself to that realm with a reckless show of power.

Yet he could not escape the conclusion that he had the power that he needed, precisely where he needed it. He had had dreams of prophecy, and he knew that Felix and Gotrek had greater destinies than being swallowed by the Realm of Chaos.

Malakai grunted as the light from Max’s staff redoubled in intensity.

‘Dae ye huv tae dae it sae brightly? Ahm tryin’ to see where ahm gawn.’

Max’s mind wrinkled from the sour note in the aethyr like parchment from a candle flame. It was the daemon prince that he had felt before, but his presence was much more powerful now that he had returned to his native plane. A vile name curdled the substance of the aethyr. It was one Max was horribly familiar with from his long studies into the nature of Chaos. The deeds attached to it were legendary, and in truth he had considered it no more than a story, a heroic epic told amongst the champions of the Dark Powers.

And yet here he was. The first. The Dark Master of Chaos.

Be’lakor
.

The daemon had not returned to the aethyr. He was passing through it, hunting for something. For
someone
. For…

Max’s grip tightened around his staff.

‘Oh no.’

A ripple of unease passed through Felix. It felt as though the clouds had parted to reveal a glimpse of his own tombstone. It had come from nowhere, and was not a helpful feeling to harbour when one was hanging by a rope miles above the ground. Felix slashed Karaghul behind him, opening a diving ray from mouth to tailfin. It veered off with a shriek, but the clouds boiled with more. Schools of the daemonic creatures strafed the soldiers spread out through the netting. Others fixed their horrible flat bodies to the gasbag, squirming like hellish leeches to work at the metal with their teeth. The airship alternately rumbled and groaned.

He and Corporal Mann had fought for every rung and hold to reach the midline of the gasbag, where the outward slope steepened into a short vertical drop that then swept back in towards the gasbag’s belly. The trick, Felix knew, was never to look down, but that bridge had been crossed and burned behind him some time ago and it was with a rather blithesome refusal to obey his own good sense that he looked down.

For a moment the clouds thinned sufficiently for Felix to see the great steel hawsers that swept down into the distance. They creaked like old bones clad in iron rust, audible even over the wind and the howling of daemons. Beneath them, like a wreck dredged from the ocean’s bottom, rode the gondola of
Unstoppable
. A damp powder fizzle of small-arms fire crackled from ladders and portholes into the swarm of flying daemons. The precariousness of their situation was terrifying to see. Felix knew that if those daemons were to succeed in separating the gondola from the gasbag then, without its engines and supplies, he would be just as doomed as Malakai and the rest of the airship’s crew.

As he watched, however, the rays broke off from their assault and turned as one in a new direction. His direction.

Felix gaped at the big black mass coming his way until the cloud blew back in and obscured them. The small company of men must have drawn them away. It was better than having them attack the gasbag, he supposed, but the sheer number of them made a mockery of his bold intentions of holding them off for even just a few minutes.

Felix’s thoughts ran circles around each other in his head. Should they stay a little longer, occupy the daemons for as long as they could, or return to the dorsal spine while they still had a remote chance of doing so? Yelling words of encouragement to the men around him, he quickly looked around to judge how much longer they could usefully fight. Everywhere, the men of Hochland were beset, hanging by arms hooked through the netting and flailing about them with their swords. The first of the incoming wave of rays broke the clouds below and Felix made up his mind.

‘Up! Everybody back up to the top.’

Felix clung to the shaking net until he was certain that nobody had remained behind to be the hero. He glanced between his feet and cursed in confusion.

The daemons hadn’t altered their course at all. They weren’t being drawn by the force of Hochlanders.

They were coming for him!

‘What are you waiting for, my lord?’ shouted Herschel Mann, fighting his way back down flanked by a pair of his soldiers and making short and unfussy work of holding the daemons at bay with the superior length of his officer’s longsword.

Felix took another look down. His heart seemed to slow to a crawl. They were good men, deserving of at least a chance to survive. In the circumstances, the errant ‘my lord’ didn’t grate quite the way it used to. ‘Go on ahead. I’ll be right behind you.’

‘The men would never forgive me if I left you behind.’

‘You’re not. I’m just giving you a head start.’

Felix lurched his sword around to swipe at the first bullet nose to scream up from the clouds under his feet. The daemon wrung its flat body around the tired stroke and lashed its tail across his back. His mail absorbed most of the force from the blow, but the mail ringlets biting through his undershirt to impose another line of bruises made him cry out in pain. On reflex he pulled himself tighter to the gasbag, swinging out again and missing again, but this time the daemon issued a panicked shriek that, but for the absence of a wound, almost convinced Felix he’d hit it. With a ripple of rubbery wings, the daemon peeled off, the masses coming in behind following it in unbroken formation.

The unexpected reprieve made Felix laugh.

‘Humorous is it not, Felix Jaeger, these quirks of fate?’

Felix gasped at the thin, chilly air. His gaze shot up. Above him like a monolith carved in obsidian to an ancient god was the daemon prince. His wings beat slowly, deliberately, shadowing Felix’s racing heart. Dark clouds brushed his muscular frame.

‘Laugh on, mortal,’ said the daemon prince, raising his monstrous sword over Felix like an executioner. ‘Only in a world where the gods make games of destiny and men bay like wolves beneath the Chaos Moon can one so feeble be prophesied as the downfall of one so mighty.’

Felix brought up Karaghul as the daemon prince cut down, but the black blade struck not at Felix himself but at the netting that he clung to. The ropes severed without resistance, snapping one by one until there was nothing to hold up that which remained. The netting dropped away. Felix clung on in blind terror as the gasbag’s riveted shell shot by. Something still attached caught. The loose end of the net whipped out from the hull, the change of direction drastic and, at such speed, snapping the rope through Felix’s despairing fingers and flinging him out into the clouds.

FOURTEEN

The Sacrifice

Felix’s arms and legs whirled as he plummeted. His cloak pulled free from his breeches and tore around him in a roar. The air rushed by too fast for him to draw breath. He was going to die. The thought raced around and around in his brain, growing ever shriller as his heart beat faster and faster. It hurt, as though it were being squeezed, and Felix wondered whether it would be the ground or his own terror that killed him first. He was going to die! Futile as the tiny spark of rational thought still extant inside his mind knew the struggle to be, he clawed through the clouds. It was like trying to catch the wind. His despairing scream was lost to the gale in his ears, the blistering comet tail of his cloak.

The clouds began to thicken as he fell deeper, darkening, and so frantic was Felix’s mind that it took him a moment to realise that his first impression was literal.

The clouds were actually getting
thicker
.

Gelatinous threads of shadow and something insubstantial that Felix could neither see nor fully touch streamed through his fingers, sticking to his skin for the briefest of moments before they snapped. He was falling into a web of shadow. And he was slowing! The shadow rose up to envelop him, sticking to his arms and legs, covering his eyes and filling his mouth with urgent threads of darkness. Panic filled him. He scratched the strands from his body even as he continued to fall, an instinctive aversion to the touch of Chaos overriding even his sense of self-preservation.

‘
Don’t struggle, Felix
.’

The voice came from the shadow itself and hence from all around, resonating with something deep within Felix’s mind that wished for nothing other than to obey. It was calming, darkly familiar, but something about it made Felix fight it all the harder. He’d seen with his own eyes that there were worse fates in life than death.

A ripple passed through the clouds, the tremor of a struggling insect in a god-spider’s web, and Felix felt something look up and take note. He sensed the spider. A surge of force, tinged with impatience, filled the air around him with strands. It had tried to be gentle, now it was taking him whether he liked it or not.

A crushing weight closed over his chest, but before he had time to register it the sensation had passed, the web of shadow seeming to pass through his skin and out the other side of his body as though he wasn’t fully there. He shivered but not, he realised, with cold because to his surprise it no longer was. Nor was he falling. In fact if anything the clouds were rising up
through
him, and stealing a part of him away with them.

His thoughts no longer seemed to be all in one place. His body, as discovered by that shadow, no longer seemed to exist at all.

Through a ghostly skein of grey he saw Gotrek. The Slayer’s mouth was open in a silent roar, his shoulder dropped like a battering ram as he charged a blocked hatchway. He saw Gustav, grainy and hollow, fleeing through deserted hallways. Lights glimmered, bedimmed, then changed, becoming instead the dials and gauges of
Unstoppable
’s bridge. Malakai Makaisson battled against the riptides from the Chaos rift, shades of eternity and damnation visible in black through the view screen.

Again the view faded to grey and Felix was pulled away. He possessed thought but no will, a strip of cloud at the mercy of the winds. Panic seemed as alien now as his own physical body, and freed of it he recognised the same spell that Max had used to extract them from the besieged belfry in the old dwarf township. Max had saved him. Now he was able to think clearly he could feel his friend all around him, but he also realised that they were not alone in the shadows. There was another, a stronger wind, pulling them both away from the others and back above the airship’s dorsal spine once again. Clouds flashed by with ferocious speed, obscuring the form in their midst.

‘
You would seek to defy me with shadow, wizard? I am the lord of shadow. I am the black beyond the stars
.’

For a moment, Felix felt himself pulled in two different directions. It began with a tingling in extremities he could still not yet see. He felt cold again, and the wind roared through his ears. Then there was a jolt, a wave of compression that rolled across every surface of his body as the shadows were torn away and his consciousness, bound up once again in meat and pain, was slammed face-down onto a frozen metal walkway.

His fingers crawled over the metal, feeling every weld and rivet as though it were a mountain of ice. His mind spun, confused, translocated. His skin felt as though it belonged to another man half his size. The thin, frosty air curdled in his lungs. His throat clenched, his belly tightened, and he vomited onto the walkway. Shivering like a man pulled from freezing water, Felix twitched onto his side and gasped.

Herschel Mann lay facing him, flat on his side as was Felix, eyes wide. Still. Dead. Shadow coiled around the Hochlander’s face, bleeding from his glassy, horror-filled eyes like tears.

Felix cried out, rolling the other way and sitting up.

Bodies lay everywhere along the airship’s iron spine, cloud blowing between them so that they resembled barrows, dark humps that concealed dead men rising in eerie monument from the mist.

‘This is the mortal prophesied as my downfall?’ The daemon prince’s laughter rumbled over the dead like thunder as he descended, landing lightly in the running cloud on the walkway. He sneered at Felix. His wings folded in behind his back as he drew up his sword, opening his vast chest and the eight-pointed star of Chaos that glowed silver in the dark. ‘I will not permit it. Not in my world.’

‘This world is not yours,’ Max answered, tiredly but firmly. The wizard’s robes were frayed, as though he had been involved in a struggle that Felix had not been conscious of. They fluttered about him in the wind, exposing a grey-veined hand as the wizard moved to wipe a rivulet of gruelish blood from his nostril. ‘As long as I live it will not be.’

‘I was the champion of the Lord of Magic before your civilisation was born. I am Be’lakor. What are you to me,
wizard?
’

Max rubbed the unpleasantly dark liquid from his nose between thumb and forefinger, and with the other hand tightened his grip on his staff. Its head began to glow white. ‘An agent of destiny.’

‘Where I darken the sky, destiny withers. I have already dealt with the Slayer.’

Felix recalled the image of Gotrek that Max’s shadow magic had shown him, trapped somewhere within the gondola of
Unstoppable
but alive. Dealt with perhaps, but not defeated.

‘I believe you will find me an opponent of a different order,’ said Max levelly. ‘If you wish to harm Felix then you must do so through me. And I promise you, when I am finished you will be cast so deeply into the Realm of Chaos that the sun will be old and red by the time you set foot on this world again.’

The wizard’s conviction caused the mighty daemon prince to hesitate, but only for a moment before he relaxed and began to chuckle, a blade of mirthless malevolence with which he stirred the winds of magic. Max bent into the sudden wind, robes pulling against him in the vortex of dark magic that swirled around Be’lakor. His staff glowed like a lantern in a storm. He raised it high, then struck it down against the walkway, discharging a sphere of electric white force just as Be’lakor unleashed a rolling torrent of black flame towards him.

Felix shook off the residual disorientation left over from his rescue to roll clear and bury his face under his arms.

The explosion shook the entire superstructure of the gasbag.

Felix uncovered enough of one eye to witness a catherine wheel of coloured fire spinning out around the wizard and his barrier of light. Without pause, Max responded with a powerful conjuration of his own. A white sphere circumferenced with hissing serpents appeared before him and shot forwards, spitting bolts of lightning before Be’lakor split it asunder with a word. With a grasping gesture, the daemon prince brought the stuff of the aethyr rushing to him, and with a snarl of disdain sent it spraying from his extended hand to erupt against Max’s barrier in a pillar of hellfire.

Faster than the untutored eye could follow, Max Schreiber and Be’lakor bombarded each other with spells of ever increasing potency and pyroclastic fury.

Magic missiles fizzed and whined, glowing trails left in the air to be obliterated by the concussive blast fronts of explosions. Summoned beings rose briefly from the ferment only to be banished or simply torn apart by the crossfire. Shields both Light and Dark crackled in opposition. Commanding the heavens to his will Be’lakor reached skywards to call down a shower of warpstone meteors, each one detonating a hundred feet above the airship against an incandescent rainbow cast from Max’s fingertips.

Felix held grimly on, helpless to affect this duel, as the airship shuddered.

The air itself seemed to be beaten out of shape by the magical onslaught. Like a warped mirror in a house of horrors, the damaged air distorted both light and sound. Felix could hear what sounded like screams, interspersed with bursts of wild laughter that dribbled through the clouds like poison. Wiping the taste of sick from his lips, he steeled his courage and rose to his feet. The walkway shuddered and Felix widened his stance to compensate. He could feel an intense pressure on the back of his skull, a migraine thump that drew his gaze to the body of Herschel Mann.

The shadows coiling around the man’s body made his late comrade appear to twitch. And again, a flex of the fingers against the metal beneath his body. Felix’s heart hammered a warning. It was more than just his imagination. A sudden movement from behind spun him around.

One of the Hochlanders rose from the walkway as if repelled by some dark magnetism, his limp body angling to plant feet onto the metal. His mouth hung open, his eyes wide and staring and filmed with shadow. The man took a staggering step forwards and emitted an endlessly echoing groan. Another step, more assured, and an eye blinked open on his cheek. Felix moaned in horror. Daemons. He didn’t have enough knowledge of the subject to say whether it was the unleashed magic of two such mighty spellcasters that was drawing them or whether it was the proximity of the rift. He supposed it didn’t matter.

Felix backed away from the possessed man until his thigh pressed against the handrail. Wiping ice-cold sweat from his palms onto his trews, he reaffirmed his grip on his sword. He tried to focus on Be’lakor but the daemon prince had become almost transparent, as much a part of the distortion cloud that surrounded him as a discrete entity in his own right. Max however looked little better. He clung two-handed to his staff as though it were a rooted tree and he was caught in a hurricane. His eyes and mouth were rimmed with brackish blood and he slumped a little lower with every assault that pounded into his barrier.

With a crunch of broken bones, Herschel Mann lurched upright.

The dead man drew a shuddering breath. His chest swelled, pushing out his red-and-green livery until it tore. The skin beneath was black and hard. Darkening arms stretched, a succession of
cracks
as new joints were broken into lengthening bones or old ones twisted to unpleasant angles. His face flattened, his chest broadening to swallow it up.

Felix lowered his sword, too sickened to maintain his guard. Was this what the Chaos Gods had in store for the world? Was this to be the fate of Gustav, Kat, and everyone else that survived these final days if they failed? Defiance rekindled the fight in his heart and he raised his sword, turning again to Max. He wouldn’t let his friend fall while he stood idle. Not like Snorri.

Not again!

He hacked through Mann’s grasping arm at the second of his elbows, then smashed his pommel into the possessed’s maw as he charged past. He managed only a handful of strides before the force of magic sent him reeling back, his clothes steaming. It was not a physical barrier as such, but it was like trying to run into a fire. He gave a despairing yell, then clutched his sword for strength and summoned his willpower for another attempt. Max turned to face him.

‘Go to Kazad Drengazi, Felix. Fulfil your destiny and the Slayer’s. It is more important than my life.’

‘No. How many have to die before it becomes important? How many is too many?’

A light brighter than anything Felix had ever seen or could have imagined existing in a world that contained such darkness blazed through the wizard’s skin, and in the second before Felix was forced to look away he could not see a shred of shade on him. His eyes were summer-blue, his long hair and scholarly brow brushed with white. He was numinous and Felix ached to see the man beneath the shadow once more.

He was Max Schreiber, as Felix would always remember him.

‘Both eyes open, Felix.’

A wave of radiance washed out from the wizard, purifying the possessed where they stood and rolling out towards Be’lakor, stripping the daemon prince of his wards before breaking over his infernal form. Be’lakor roared in pain and fury, the black substance of his being going up in smoke. The sky pinwheeled in response and Felix flung his hand to the handrail to keep from pitching over the side. The rift stuttered in a state of flux, at times there and at others nothing but a grey sky.