Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (6 page)

‘We were following the main road north out of Hergig to Wolfenburg and have been for about five days. As I said, Talabheim fell the autumn before last after a six-month siege. Hergig’s always been off the main road and it’s been a blessing of late, enough for the city to hold out until now.’

‘What changed?’ said Gustav.

‘A warlord named–’ Mann’s lips contorted around the foreign name ‘–
Khagash-Fél
. I’m told it means “Half-Ogre” because he has the strength and stature of five men.’

‘Is that all?’ Gotrek grunted.

‘It was he that broke the walls of Hergig,’ said Mann, somewhat defensively.

‘Walls of questionable standard from the outset, no doubt.’

‘Sounds like mighty doom to me,’ muttered Kolya, off-hand around a mouthful of half-chewed herbal sludge.

‘Do you deliberately taunt me with things I cannot have, rememberer? I can have no doom. Not until the manling is safe within the walls of Altdorf and at the little one’s side.’

Felix heard the incongruous sound of laughter and to his astonishment found it was his, bleak and despairing, slow as the death of his world. ‘Have you heard a word anyone’s been saying, Gotrek? Altdorf is gone. Kat is gone. The Empire is
gone
.’ His voice rose steadily, emphasising each additional loss with a thump of his hand.

‘To hold and to protect, manling,’ Gotrek intoned, voice sinking to a cavernous timbre. ‘To keep forever from the earth until Gazul sunders you.’

It took Felix a moment to realise that Gotrek was reciting the final lines of the oath that had made him and Kat husband and wife. They had been wed under the dim, ruby glimstones of Karak Kadrin’s shrine of Grimnir and it was not lightly that a Slayer invoked the name of Gazul, guardian of the honoured dead. Bitterness rose on bubbles of laughter as Felix spread his arms, as if to encompass the blackness that enveloped them. It was getting easier. The borders of the Empire were tightening like a noose around their necks. It was all too easy to believe that the end of everything was nigh, just out there under the pouring rain.

‘We’re
sundered
, Gotrek. The armies of Chaos march on our roads, garrison our cities, and now Altdorf.’ Felix clutched his hair, as if intending to claw out the grey. ‘By any measure, we’re done.’

‘Coward.’

‘Coward?’ said Felix, fury causing his voice to climb. ‘What kind of courage is it to deny what’s going on out there? It’s time to stop being so damned stubborn and admit it.’

‘Some of us keep the oaths we make, manling.’

Felix’s fist clenched, his voice dropped to a hiss. ‘I always kept my oath to you.’

‘Aye,’ Gotrek sneered. ‘To the letter.’

‘And just what’s that supposed to mean?’

Gotrek waved his hand with a growl and turned to Corporal Mann, who had been watching the exchange with a look of rising horror.

‘Just assuming you’re not conniving with dark powers, what were you hoping to find in Wolfenburg?’

‘N-nothing really, master dwarf. We intended to track the main road that far and then strike out for the Middle Mountains, skirting them westward until we make it to Middenheim. Ten men could defend the Fauschlag against a thousand. Archaon’s tried and failed before and with Altdorf gone, it’s the last great city still standing. It’s where everyone will be going now.’

Gotrek’s one eye glittered dangerously, like a dwarf with an oath to keep.

‘No,’ said Felix, ‘absolutely not. You’re talking about a journey of months, if not more, and with no guarantee we’ll find anything at Middenheim other than all the hordes of Archaon waiting outside.’
If we’re lucky,
he thought, but reminded himself of his position amongst these men and decided not to say it. ‘It’s madness. I for one don’t see too much wrong with Gustav’s plan. I’ve never been to Averheim. Perhaps that is where the Emperor will go. And perhaps with aid from the dwarfs too, it’s near their Worlds Edge Mountain strongholds after all.’

The men murmured approvingly at that, partly – Felix suspected – because it had come from him, but also because the only dwarf most of them had ever encountered was Gotrek, and a few more of the Slayer at your back was as appealing a prospect as it would be infuriating. They weren’t to know that Gotrek was exceptional, even amongst his own tenacious kind.

The Slayer emitted a disparaging snort at the idea, to which Felix was tempted to add a round of sarcastic applause.

That’s how to keep up morale in the End Times.

‘Why go all the way around the Middle Mountains when you can go through them?’

Lorin’s whisper-thin voice drew everyone’s attention towards him. The longbeard inserted his cane shakily between the floor of the cart and the upright of the tailboard. The hardwood cane was ironclad and topped with a handhold shaped in the form of a hammer, and in any other pair of hands but his might have made for a serviceable weapon. The frail old dwarf remained as broad as two men, but he was gaunt as any dwarf Felix had seen outside of the besieged dwarfhold of Karag Dum. Heavy pink bags hung from his watery eyes. A zigzagging scar ran up one fleshy cheek to his temple, the inexpert stitching and the horrendous bite that it had closed still visible. His beard had been torn from that side of his face except for a few sad little tufts. What remained was as thin and wispy as a smoke ring blown into the rain, and as if to emphasise that he had a long-stemmed wooden pipe loosely clenched between his lips. It was unfilled and unlit but both Lorin and his son had previously assured Felix that they liked to remind themselves of the taste.

The longbeard’s lip ticked nervously at the attention, and he steadied himself with a firm grip on his cane. ‘There are ways. Gotrek, you know that; the ancient ways of our ancestors, beyond the guile of any man or beast to find.’

‘Are you talking about the Underway?’ said Felix, clenching his fists to calm himself and looking determinedly away from Gotrek lest his temper explode again.

‘There are no dwarfholds in those mountains, manling, so no,’ said Gotrek, exasperated as though reprising a tired argument. ‘And I’ve told you a dozen times over, Lanarksson, there’s naught in those paupers’ peaks but legends, tales good for nothing but drinking a dwarf’s gold.’

‘I speak not of minerals or gems, Gotrek, as you well know.’

‘Bah!’

Felix glanced at the map. He had never been to the Middle Mountains and, if he was honest, had never felt any great yearning to. No vengeful wight haunted them and there were no rumours of robber barons lording over decrepit castles in their heights. There was simply nothing there, unless one placed value on bare rock and year-round snow. Even the Grey Mountains harboured enough base minerals to keep a handful of dwarf clans in ale, but then Felix had heard Gotrek speak about Grey dwarfs in the same disparaging tones as he did humans.

‘Then just what exactly is supposed to be in those mountains?’ asked Gustav.

‘Fairy stories older than your Empire,’ said Gotrek, then scoffed. ‘Older than ours, if you’re fool enough to believe them.’

Felix felt a prickle of unease run through his skin. The fractured empire of the dwarfs was said to be almost ten millennia old. Intuitively, a myth did not survive for so long unless it concealed a grain of truth and ancient dwarfish legends were exactly the sort of thing that Felix wanted to avoid. They conjured images of high ranges and vast vaulted deeps, of stone-hearted gods, and rune-weapons with the power to raze mountains and sunder continents.

Not for the first time he wished Max were here, but to Felix’s mind Gotrek had no basis on which to be so diffident. Everywhere one cared to look, prophecies were being fulfilled and forgotten myths realised left, right and centre. Even while he had been in Kislev Felix had been hearing rumours Sigmar had arisen, battling the daemonic hordes in Ostermark.

But Felix had been through Ostermark. If that was the best that even Sigmar could do then Felix was at a loss who was supposed to save them now.

Gotrek stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘I say there are no dwarfholds in the mountains, but there was one once, thousands of years ago. And whatever else they may or may not harbour, there are roads through them.’

‘And these roads lead to Middenheim?’ said Gustav again, earning an impatient scowl from the Slayer.

‘They’re the secret ways of the dwarfs,’ Gotrek replied. ‘The manling, my rememberer and Lanarksson and Lyndun may come with me. Everyone else has been slowing us down too long already.’ His gaze swept the tent without a trace of human kindness. ‘You’re all on your own from here on.’

A stunned hush descended on the gathering. Kolya’s eyebrows arched as though he hadn’t been fully paying attention until now.

‘Well…’ began Lorin, cheek twitching furiously however hard he tried to hold on to his cane. Its hardwood base stuttered against the tailboard. ‘I’m sure that we could make an exception given the circumstances. Being the end of the world as it is, I’m positive that Grimnir would unders–’

‘I should’ve left that Chaos hound to gnaw on your skull a little longer, Lanarksson. You’ve forgotten what it means to be a dwarf.’

The longbeard’s lips ticked. Gotrek had always been hard, but Felix could not remember him ever being deliberately cruel. The dwarf who stood before him now was not the same one to whom Felix had once sworn an oath of friendship over a river of ale in an Altdorf tavern all those years ago. He was embittered and twisted, either by the horrors he had witnessed or those he had wrought himself, and had darkened as the world around him darkened. It was surprising to look back and realise that Gotrek had once had soft edges, but it was true: he had enjoyed good beer and good pipeweed, had on occasion been moved to make a joke and even smile at some of Felix’s; he had revelled in good food and had shared every dwarf’s passion for gold and old debts.

It was as if all of that had been chipped away and all that remained now was the iron core.

The Slayer.

‘You would condemn these men to their fates?’ said Felix, angry again before he even realised he was speaking. ‘And if they insisted, what then? Would you kill them? My own nephew? Perhaps I should expect no less from a Kinslayer.’

‘What did you call me?’ Gotrek rumbled dangerously, squaring up to Felix.

‘You heard,’ Felix shouted in the Slayer’s face. ‘I’ve been hearing about superior dwarf hearing for long enough to know that.’

Some trace residue of common sense urged Felix to stop there, but he felt as if a dam had just been breached. Gotrek had killed Snorri, the best of them by any measure of common goodness. They hadn’t spoken of it since Praag. Felix had tried not to think of it. Even Gustav and his men had taken the hint and pretended it had never happened – they had their own reasons to forget those events – and sometimes hours could go by in which Felix actually believed it, but then he would hear the splitting of bone in his mind and see the blood seeping through the snow between his boots and know that it had. Felix had failed to stand up to the Slayer then and every day the guilt of it gnawed at him, and he damn well wasn’t going to let things go the same with Gustav, Max, or anyone else for that matter.

‘You’re the coward, Gotrek. You’re stubborn, block-headed, and you can go and bury your head in the Middle Mountains if you want, but Gustav and I will be taking
our
men to Averheim.’

Gotrek regarded him stonily. ‘You done?’

Felix let out a hot breath and nodded. ‘
We’re
done, Gotrek. There’s nothing you can say to convince me to leave all these men behind.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Good. We can cut straight to it then.’

There was a
smack
of impact in the centre of Felix’s face and he staggered back. He heard what sounded like a pistol going off, but that might equally have been the sound of Gotrek’s knuckles cracking his jaw. Disbelief swam through his mind. Gotrek had hit him. The Slayer had never hit him before. His limbs turned to jelly as still, stumbling back, he tried to draw his sword. He saw two slightly blurred Slayers crack their knuckles before being suddenly whisked away.

Felix’s last thought before he hit the ground was to realise that he was falling.

He was unconscious before he had another.

FOUR

Half-Ogre

Fire spat into the rain, struggling like bound sacrifices from stakes eight feet high. Eight of them formed a ring to enclose a portion of the cobbled square. Behind that line of fire was held a dark, roaring sea of bestial heads and pointed helms, many-armed trophy poles and rippling banners. Out of the hundreds whose voices could be heard, only eight were visible from inside of the ring: two semicircles of proudly attired warriors with the courage and conviction to back one champion against another. Each held a weapon in either hand. The two combatants bore none.

Khagash-Fél paced the border of his side of the ring with his giant stride. Cracked and ancient armour hung loosely from his broad shoulders, a battered harness of black hellsteel plates, faded runes and dead-eyed daemon faces. Long shanks of sodden grey hair scrawled down both pauldrons, his grey beard reaching as far down as his faulds. He wore it in thick braids, in the manner of the dwarfish slavers that dominated the lands and culture of the eastern steppe. With his one good eye he studied his challenger. The other was lidless, milky and blind, ruined by the overlapping rings of the slave rune that branded the left side of his face. The
other
slept within its bed of flesh within his forehead, a slit of faint sapphire light bleeding onto his brow.

With the brazen arrogance of a warrior three times heavier than his opponent and all four of his supporters, Buhruk Doombull mirrored his steps. Huge, interlocking plates of spiked iron and bronze clanked as the minotaur moved and three rune-engraved skulls swung from the chain that tied them to his waist. A black iron helm with articulated cheek guards enclosed his massive head. Ruby-red eyes gleamed hungrily within. A pair of forward-curving horns barbed with steel blades thrust out from behind the cheek guards. Hot breath snorted from his snout, steaming the brass ring that pierced his nostrils, the angular Mark of Khorne reddening fleetingly as the surrounding metal cooled.

‘I am Buhruk, Doombull of Kislev,’ snorted the minotaur, his every word a bellow that made the braziers flicker and shake. ‘His hooves are its ashes. Its blood is his blood. His herd follows Khagash-Fél for more war.’ The minotaur stamped one brazen hoof, clenched every bulging muscle into a savage knot of fury and bellowed until it seemed the ground must crack. ‘More war! Where are his skulls? Where is his victory?’

Khagash-Fél gave Buhruk the hard face, the impassive mask of the steppe peoples. He raised his right arm high. Rain coursed down the scarified vambrace. His hand however, like his face, was unarmoured, and he presented it to the crowd like a relic. It was blotched yellow with age, covered by bruise-like markings of faded tribal tattoos.

‘I am Khagash-Fél, and you know me.’ His voice was cracked like his armour, deep like the hell that awaited this world; it pushed through the hammering rain like a blade-bossed shield for all to hear and bear witness. ‘With this hand did I strike down Bzharrak the Black and lead the uprising against the Gates of Zharr. It was I who broached the Mountains of Mourn and smote down Grullgor Thundergut and took his lands for our lands.’ He lowered his arm and swept it around the ring, marking the shadowed faces that lay hidden beyond the torchlight. ‘It was I who first brought you the power of the Greater Gods, I who won you freedom and then gave you glory. We are one people, and there will be glory untold for us in the days ahead.’

The reverential silence that followed his words was broken only by the smack of rain on stones, the hiss of tormented flames, and then by the sonorous, panting laughter of the Doombull.

‘Take your weapon, Buhruk, if you believe you can find the host of Archaon quicker than I. Or leave this ring now and do not challenge me again.’

Buhruk emitted a fiery snort, then rolled his neck, the blades that tipped his horns glinting golden in the firelight. ‘Half-man is small and furless. Doombull needs no weapon. But, as is tradition…’

Keeping both bead-like eyes on Khagash-Fél, the minotaur turned to his supporters.

Three were broad, heavily built beastmen wearing ill-fitting but ornate suits of lightly banded steel. Mail skirts hung to their fetlocks. Animal skin cloaks were buckled at their throats. In the dark, it would have been easy to mistake them for winged lancers of Kislev. The fourth was a Chaos warrior in brooding black plate ringed with spikes, brass etchings, and grisly trophy hooks hung with severed body parts and parchment scraps. Khagash-Fél commanded the loyalty of hundreds of such warriors and he did not know this man’s name, but he remembered that he was a man of Empire stock and had been an exalted champion in his own right until Khagash-Fél had crushed him and claimed his men. The man’s customs and thinking were strange to a man of the steppe. In the Empire, it seemed, a lord expected the fealty of his warriors, who gave it without question. Amongst the tribes, a lord would buy the loyalty of the strongest warriors with gifts and glory. And what was true for men was true also for the gods, only more so.

One of the big beastmen strained to offer up a huge spiked mace and Buhruk took it, wielding it lightly in one massive fist.

A smile teased at the corners of Khagash-Fél’s self-control. The hum of daemonic energy filled his gut, battle-rage coursing through his veins like the aqueducts of fire that fed the Desolation of Zharr. It was in moments such as these when one felt the interconnectedness of Chaos. A man could take pleasure from killing, from the staging of a slaughter and the revelry that followed. It was madness to hollow one’s existence by denying the gifts of all the gods but one.

On his forehead, the Eye of Katchar snapped open.

A murmur of dread and awe passed through the watching warriors, stretching out towards the deep yawn of time as the world around Khagash-Fél slowed to a crawl. He could see the individual gobbets of flame that spat out from the torches, watch each drop of rain as it smashed against Buhruk’s helmet into hundreds of tiny, infinitely reflective pieces. In contrast to the stalled immensity of the minotaur, the sepia-tinted shades that danced around him were a disjointed blur of action, reaction and possibility. Khagash-Fél felt his heart beat faster. Even this brief and incoherent glimpse of the future was intoxicating. The temptation was always to look a little deeper, see a little further, but with an effort of will he pulled back. To see all that the Eye would have him see was to duel with madness.

Such prophecy was the demesne of the gods alone.

Absorbing as much of the following minutes’ most likely course as he could, Khagash-Fél held out his hand for a weapon. His hand moved towards the leather-scaled tribesmen as if through deep water. Of the eight weapons presented he selected an axe, and for a moment the future lost a measure of its uncertainty and became clear. Then the Eye of Katchar closed. Khagash-Fél blinked away disorientation, the feeling of
limitation
that always followed the return to the present as the world resumed its normal pace and hue.

He brought up his axe. ‘I accept your challenge, Buhruk.’

The minotaur thrashed his head through the air as though fending off a daemonic possession, then issued a thunderous bellow as he dropped his horns and charged. Khagash-Fél looked up as the Doombull loomed over him, opening up his massive chest to deliver a blow from his mace intended to crush the champion’s skull in one hit.

Exactly as Khagash-Fél had foreseen.

He punched the head of his axe up into the Doombull’s unarmoured belly, forcing a wheeze of rotten, meaty breath from the minotaur as he dropped to one knee. Khagash-Fél side-stepped, reversed his grip on his axe and then lashed it back across the minotaur’s cheek guard. Blood and metal sparks sprayed from the open face of Buhruk’s helm and Khagash-Fél strode behind him, lifting his bloodied axe above his head to the rapture of the crowd.

Buhruk rose slowly and turned, wiping his bloody snout on his wrist. ‘You are fool to goad the Doombull. I will break your bones and drink their juices, half-man.’

Khagash-Fél made a
come
gesture with his axe.

Nothing was as beloved by the gods as drama.

With a howl of primal rage the minotaur roared forward, frenzied strokes carving through the air like a barrage of rockets. Khagash-Fél parried and dodged, always a second ahead of every blow. Each time Buhruk paused in his assault for breath, Khagash-Fél was already exploiting the opportunity to back away, his axe throwing fresh blood from another shallow cut onto the cobbles. The howls from beyond the fire-line grew more rabid with each libation.

The Eye of Katchar could not reveal every possible outcome, but he had become adept at sifting the improbable from the most likely; particularly with a battering ram such as Buhruk Doombull.

The minotaur’s torso bulged as if being squeezed from below, his mace coming down like a meteor. Khagash-Fél made to move aside, then snarled. It was time for the Doombull and his supporters to see what they challenged. His hand swung up to shield his head, the minotaur’s mace hammering into his open palm and driving him down to one knee. The cobblestones beneath him shattered, blasted rock ricocheting between the two warriors’ armour.

Buhruk’s bellow of victory turned into a disbelieving snort as the dust settled to reveal Khagash-Fél alive and unscratched with the minotaur’s mace firmly in his hand. Khagash-Fél twisted the mace-head aside and shoved Buhruk back with a kick in the gut as he rose. Khagash-Fél’s heart thumped powerfully within his chest. He could almost hear the erratic
boom-boom
echoing from the underside of his breastplate. With a discipline forged over centuries into a mask of hellsteel, he maintained the hard face as he flexed his ringing fingers. Inside, he grimaced; that one he had felt.

‘Your own god favours me more than he does you, Doombull. No weapon of fire or fire-born can harm me.’

The torches danced on the tumultuous roar of acclaim.

‘Another!’ Buhruk howled, throwing out his arm to his supporters for a weapon, any weapon.

Quicker-thinking than the beasts beside him, the black-armoured Chaos warrior snapped the steel head off his lance and threw the weapon into the ring. Buhruk caught it out of the air in his massive fist as though it were a short spear, raising it overhead for a stabbing thrust and bringing up his mace to wield both like some monstrous daemon-possessed war machine. The beastmen in the shadows bayed like starving wolves, shouting down the hiss of the tribesmen at this breach to the ancestral tradition of the challenge.

Wary now, Khagash-Fél stepped back. The Eye of Katchar had not shown him this. Tossing his axe out of the ring, he turned and yelled back to his own supporters for his more favoured weapon: ‘Sönögch, a sword.’

A tall warrior in armour of metal scales and a conical leather helm with a horsehair plume moved to obey. As the sword flew from the man’s hand Khagash-Fél saw that a fifth figure now stood amongst his supporters.

Everything seemed to slow down, as if the Eye of Katchar showed him his future once again.

The sword hung in midair as though trapped in crystal.

The shaman, Nergüi, was a flourish of colour beside Sönögch in his long, feather-like blue robes. Eagle feathers, animal teeth and gemstones glittered in the firelight. Dozens of bead necklaces made a frill around his throat and across his narrow shoulders. An elaborate feather headdress screened his weather-scoured features from the rain and torches. Only his piercing amber eyes shone amidst the umbral shade. For a brief moment they met Khagash-Fél’s one. With a movement so subtle it failed to disturb the chimes sewn into the streaming silk ‘feathers’ of his robes, Nergüi shook his head.

The sword sailed with celestial slowness into the ring.

Khamgiin
.

A hammering filled Khagash-Fél’s head. The groan from his left gardbrace announced the swelling of his bicep as his fists clenched; fists that were turning a deep magma-red. Steam hissed from the joins in his armour where the rain struck his bare skin.

His last born was dead.

Khagash-Fél opened his mouth wide as if to cry out, but no sound issued forth but a strange, hollow buzz, that of a swarm of maddened wasps sealed within a jar. There was a rising pressure in his gut, like the urge to vomit only much more intense and with an irresistible will of its own behind it. Steam poured off him as, with a resounding
crack
, his jaw dislocated and stretched still wider.

His sword came towards him.

Khagash-Fél batted the blade aside to send it skittering away across the stones.

Everything snapped back into focus.

Buhruk bellowed a new challenge and raised his spear as Khagash-Fél finally released a cry of his own, a droning roar that rose from his gut, flying from his distended jaw on a torrent of bloated, pestilential flies. The Doombull swung his mace into the swarm, as effectual as a brush in holding back a wildfire, and an instant later he was engulfed in it. The minotaur screamed as if he was on fire, swinging wildly from within a chittering second skin, as he tottered forwards and then toppled. On hitting the ground his mighty frame burst apart, thick bones and armour plates piling into the cobbles and scattering putrid chitinous bodies across the ring.