Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  About The Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

  At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it isa land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

  But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever nearer, the Empire needs heroes like never before.

  ‘I have a recurring dream.

  ‘Always it awakens me with chills, my spirit returning from a place that the sun cannot touch, and on that count, at least, this night differs little. I leave Gotrek snoring soundly in the pallet opposite and, in the quiet light of moon and stars from the tavern’s little window, I write.

  ‘My hands shake, for never before has it come so clearly. For the first time I think I remember how it ends. I consider waking Gotrek. But I fear to. I fear that he will only confirm what I already now suspect. That this was no mere dream. That Gotrek and I did encounter a monster of a kind I have never before seen, and that we did then pursue it to its lair; a ruined city, deep in the darkest wolds of wild Ostermark.

  ‘I feel the residue of this nightmare lifting from me, some curative in the familiar act of scratching paper with sharpened quill. I must continue, commit these images to permanence and order ere they fail me again. As I arrange my thoughts, a lingering shard of dread makes my heart race. I had hoped the mundanity of words would rob the visions of their power, but they now seem only more plausible, not less.

  ‘For perhaps it was only a matter of time before Gotrek and I journeyed to the City of the Damned…’

  – From My Travels with Gotrek, Vol. VI,

  By Herr Felix Jaeger

  Prologue

  The priest’s sermon echoed within the hollow belly of the cathedral, an ugly wooden ceiling surmounting limestone walls and columns of pale Totenwald pine. In rough-spun woollen robes of white and red, Arch-Lector Hans-Jorgen Gramm snarled from his pulpit like a wolf in a cage. Hammered into the high wall above the altar, the majesty of Ghal-maraz, the hammer of the man-god Sigmar, overlooked the congregation. Its handle was varnished oak, its head tin and plated brass that the ignorant might mistake for gold. The priest turned to it often as he spoke, grasping for the acclaim of his god.

  Men and women in grubby woollen smocks packed the cathedral, spilling through the open doors into the square beyond. They listened in mute devotion. The priest’s High Classical meant little, but something in his vehemence touching their shared faith. Lay clergy walked the ranks of devotees in the Kirchplatz, relaying his words like living echoes. The fog that smothered the entire township seeped through the open threshold and into the cathedral where it took on a remarkable, shifting colouration before the great circular window of stained glass set above the lintel. The gathered penitents sniffled and shivered, submerged to the knees in a frigid rainbow of misdirected light.

  Such was all to the good.

  To live was to devote oneself to Sigmar.

  To devote oneself to Sigmar was to suffer.

  Pages in white linen smocks, their hair cropped short, walked the aisles bearing candles. The flames spat valiantly against the encroaching fog, releasing a hiss of brimstone, casting the memorial stones and plaques that adorned the walls into densely shadowed relief. Heroes, martyrs, their names outliving their frail bodies: Albrecht, who fought in the Great War alongside Magnus the Pious himself; Thesen, who gave his life defending this most holy site from the dread von Carsteins; Gottlieb who helped break the siege of Osterwald and rout the army of Azhag the Slaughterer; Golo, his son, who came closer than any before to purging the Ostermark Moors of its taint.

  There were others, their names and deeds no less worthy, two hundred years of the von Kuber line. Reliefs of their likenesses glowered by candlelight from the long walls. The artistry was provincial, edging rough, figures lacking in symmetry. But it had been done with faith.

  Baron Götz von Kuber sat in the front row, hunched before the altar as if in deep contemplation. He was a tall man, handsome, his likeness a reflection of those portrayed in stucco upon the walls. He was garbed for temple in his finest, a sombre grey doublet with padded sleeves, the linen overlayer embroidered with devotional symbols in threads of silver and black. But for him, the pew was deserted, a long stretch of bare wood reserved for the great and the good. Reserved for him.

  He was only half listening to the sermon.

  ‘Gramm will not approve.’

  A powerfully built man in the stark grey livery of the von Kuber barony leaned forward from the pew behind to hiss in his baron’s ear. He shared his lord’s dark hair, complemented by a thick, horseshoe moustache. Götz had found Konrad Seitz as a fierce young lad in a Sigmarite orphanage in Kielsel. His common stock was no barrier here, and he had served in Götz’s household guard since he had first mastered the horse and memorised the catechisms of devotion. There was none more loyal, none more intransigent in their faith.

  Götz did not turn, made no other gesture to indicate that he had heard. Head bowed and nodding with the priest’s words, his eyes flicked up. Gramm was lost in a froth of exhortation, veritably clawing at his wooden pulpit, and with no attention to spare his noble benefactor. ‘Magnus tasked my line with this duty,’ Götz whispered, ‘not his. Gramm will be returning to Osterwald tomorrow and will likely not return until spring. Don’t worry about him.’

  ‘It’s not him I worry for, lord.’

  ‘Then what? Of all men, I believed I could count on you, brother?’

  ‘To the end of days, lord. But I worry that if the clergy turn against you…’

  Götz silenced the man with a single shake of the head, still observing the service faithfully. ‘The faithful believe as we do. Chaos cannot be allowed this foothold in our lands. It is an affront to the Empire bequeathed us by holy Sigmar.’

  Konrad said nothing. Götz took his silence as blessing.

  ‘Promise me, Konrad, that should anything befall me you will continue this work. Promise me tha
t you will burn this sore from the face of Ostermark.’

  ‘What’s this talk?’ Konrad hissed. ‘Has the white lady approached your dreams as she has others?’

  ‘No, praise Sigmar, his faith in me doesn’t waver.’

  Konrad exuded relief. Oblivious to the conversation beneath his nose, the priest continued to rage. ‘I’m glad. Even Father Gramm has been struck by nightmares. The darkness of the city grows.’

  ‘Containing this evil so long has only granted it time to grow strong. Violence is all the forces of night understand.’ Götz was silent a moment as Gramm turned his way to exalt the champion who kept the tide of Chaos at bay. Götz took the praise coldly. ‘I’m the last of my line. It is just that the city we have watched all these generations should die with me. Promise me. Promise me that it will soak in a river of blood.’

  Before Konrad could answer, a minor commotion broke out from the cathedral doors. Götz took the excuse to look around. A soldier was squeezing through the packed congregation, attracting the unspoken ire of the lay clergy. They chastised him with sharp eyes and pointed looks. They were wasting their time. No one gave less of a damn for anyone else than Caul Schlanger. The newcomer nudged aside a chanting page and quick-marched the length of the aisle, then made a crabwise shuffle along the penultimate pew, past the knees of rapt soldiers in the baron’s grey, before finally squeezing in next to Konrad Seitz. Konrad afforded a spartan nod in greeting.

  The preacher admonished the interruption with a glare without breaking the stream of rhetoric. Götz clasped hands between his knees and returned his eyes to the arch-lector.

  Caul leaned over the back of Götz’s pew, hanging his head as though in prayer. ‘Another sighting of the Beast, lord,’ he hissed, breath warm on Götz’s neck. ‘Reliable this time. One of our own patrols.’

  Götz digested that ambiguous news. ‘How many dead?’

  ‘Thirty bodies found. We burned them to be on the safe side.’

  Götz nodded. Caul Schlanger was almost everything that Konrad Seitz was not. He was gristle on bones, eyes a reptilian green, thin lips stuck in a knowing sneer. Where he came from was just another piece of the enigma; some said Averheim, others Luddendorf, while still others insisted his extraction was Kislevite. Götz had even heard it rumoured that Caul was not the man’s real name, that he had shortened it out of frustration with superfluous letters. It would not be the oddest tale, and the man harboured idiosyncrasies aplenty to render it plausible. All Götz knew for a fact was that Caul was a murderous bastard, spared the hangman’s noose in Waldenhof by a baron’s good word and a meagre sum of coin. But on the one value of consequence, Konrad and Caul both stood equal.

  The shared conviction of faith.

  ‘We lost the creature on the moors,’ Caul hissed. ‘But we are certain it was headed for the city.’

  The city. It irked no end how they all skirted its name, avoiding mention even of the coded allusion that had long ago replaced it. The City of the Damned. Götz considered ‘The von Kuber curse’ to be a name more apt. For two hundred years it had blighted Götz’s antecedents, but no more. His father, Golo, had made inroads, but it would be him, Baron Götz von Kuber that finally brought this long war to a close.

  ‘This is why the City of the Damned must be purged,’ he murmured. He kept his voice flat and his face down, lest the arch-lector see his lips move. ‘Evil begets evil. It must be cast down, damnation take the naysayers and the hidebound who say otherwise. Rivers of blood, my brothers. It will be glorious.’

  Caul regarded him strangely.

  ‘Do you doubt our path?’ Götz pressed. ‘Do you believe the heathen and the heretic undeserving of our mercy?’

  ‘No lord. Death by righteous hands is a justice they scarce deserve.’

  ‘But…?’

  ‘But the city is damned. The Pious himself let it lie. Do you really think it can be saved?’

  Baron Götz von Kuber closed his eyes and allowed the elegy of Hans-Jorgen Gramm to sweep him away, through visions of blood and glory and destinies soon to fall.

  ‘Leave salvation to the Sisters of Shallya, brothers. We are warriors, and I will see this end. One way or another.’

  Chapter 1

  The Beast of the Ostermark Moors

  Felix Jaeger shivered in the autumnal chill that ghosted through the silent village. Wedged into the crease between two hills, the wind washed over in occasional gusts, coming and going with spits of rain from the grim, mid-afternoon sky. It was a tiny place, probably not large enough to earn its own point on a map, just a single cobbled lane of low, grey walled houses. Their doors were bolted and barred, their windows boarded, iron hammers nailed into the walls. Felix counted maybe nine or ten houses on each side, colourless uneven stone and grey mortar, each separated from the next by walled yards that sheltered tough-looking vegetables from the worst of the wind. On the village’s outskirts stood a sad little garden of Morr marked by a weather-pitted stone hammer. A goat picked its way around unmarked memorial slabs. It ignored Felix entirely as he walked by. A bronze bell around its neck tinkled as it bent to crop at a clutch of dandelion stalks.

  ‘Do you think they heard that we were coming?’

  Gotrek scanned the row of houses with his one good eye. His enormous axe rested against one shoulder, its broad runic blade spattered with raindrops. He grunted, whether in amusement or acknowledgement, Felix never could say. ‘I didn’t start that fight, manling. All I wanted was ale and some answers. Is it my fault that folk hereabouts have no manners?’

  ‘These are the moors, Gotrek. I doubt whether anyone here has encountered a dwarf outside of a priest’s sermon. You can’t blame them for not knowing how to… er…’ He hesitated, not wanting to earn the Slayer’s ire for himself. ‘How to behave around one.’

  Gotrek grumbled and returned his eye to the road. ‘If I told that lot the elves had left, they’d probably have a parade.’

  Felix felt the tug of a smile at that. The people around here were certainly isolated. And superstitious too. This landscape bred strange ideas in people’s hearts. Every nook and valley had a capricious spirit that needed appeasing, every gurgling brook played host to the shade of some tragic and hopelessly romantic heroine. But of every myth spouted in the alehouses of Osterwald, surely the most egregious was that of – and here the drunken farm boys and goatherds would widen their eyes and speak in hushed growls as though in some awful student production of a Detlef Sierck melodrama – the Beast of the Moors.

  A missing person in one village, a broken seal on a family crypt in the next, strange sightings and animal howls on the moors. To Felix’s mind, it was all little more than glorified sheep rustling and banditry dressed up as some subhuman horror to frighten outsiders, children and the overly credulous. Not that that ruled out many of the folk of Ostermark. He sighed. Or Trollslayers in search of a glorious doom, for that matter.

  ‘This Beast of theirs has put the fright up them, that’s for sure,’ said Gotrek, uncaring for Felix’s thoughts. ‘I just hope this time we didn’t miss it.’

  Felix chose to say nothing, looking instead to the far end of the street just as a sudden breeze made his long hair and red Sudenland cloak snap out behind him. He turned his jaw side-on, a slap of drizzle to the face. He was bone weary. He tried to remember exactly when it was that he had started to have difficulty sleeping. It was after departing from Osterwald, he was reasonably certain, recalling his last night in the airless attic above the playhouse with an unexpected fondness. It was this blasted moor. His nights within it had been restless, his dreams visited by fog and anguished souls. Some nights he saw a lady in white. She never spoke, just watched, watched as her black-walled city burned. Just remembering it made him shiver.

  The Ostermark Moors was desolate country and the road had been as uneventful as it had been in dire need of care. These routes, if his history served, had been built to bear the armies of Emperor Magnus as they purged the northern provinces of Chaos in the
aftermath of the Great War and had likely not been touched since. Derelict shrine posts marked the roadside with a neglectful infrequency. Felix had counted perhaps two or three each day, but it varied. Hewn from single lumps of grey limestone into the rough form of a hammer, heads carved with classical script weathered to obscurity, devotion bowls gouged into the stony hafts. A week or so back, Felix had found a couple of verdigrised pfennigs behind a skein of cobwebs. He had left them. Even he and Gotrek were not yet hungry enough to steal from Sigmar. The best those recesses had offered their god since had been a nesting magpie that had squalled like a jilted harlot the moment they came near. Even Gotrek had gritted his teeth and left the bird in peace.

  Two weeks out of Osterwald with nothing but dry-stone walls, empty hills, and Gotrek’s complaints of sore feet, even Felix was starting to itch for some excitement. Gotrek may not have started that brawl in the last village but he had taken to it with an equal mix of enthusiasm and shame, as a man despairing of thirst might throw himself onto a muddy puddle. It had only lasted a minute; half a dozen goatherds that had thought to make light of Gotrek’s short stature and tattoos all beaten unconscious, the interior of the tavern turned upside down, Gotrek himself stood in the middle of it looking strangely downcast that there was no watch to drive him out of town. Like a child who’d ruined his bed and now had to sleep in it.

  There was no watch here, no militia, no sign whatsoever of Emperor Karl Franz’s rule, or whatever baron levied troops and tax in his name. That village had been three days ago, and in that time they had not passed another living soul.

  ‘The Beast, I’m telling you,’ said Gotrek, hefting his axe easily in one ham-like fist. It rattled on its chain like a leashed hound.

  Felix peered through the crudely nailed slats that blocked the window of what smelled like a smokehouse. Smoke pumped fitfully from its chimney. Felix stared at the smokehouse chimney, jerking damp locks from his forehead. The smoke moulded into twisted shapes, dragged up by the wind like a chain from a well.