Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned Read online

  He could not find it.

  Felix’s blood ran cold.

  They were inside.

  Chapter 6

  Change

  Felix fell out of bed, still groping after his sword as the door crashed inward and man-like shapes piled through. Naked swords and mail vests rippled silver in Mannslieb’s diffracted glow.

  A sword swept down for where Felix lay prone and, without pause for thought, Felix grabbed the nearest thing to a weapon that he had to hand. His pillow met the blade’s arc with an eruption of gossamer-white down. He rolled clear as the blade bit deep into the boards where he had just been. His very human attacker released his sword to hack up a lungful of feathers. Felix reversed his roll, knocking his choking foe’s sword beneath his body. He kicked up into the feather snow, burying his boot in the man’s groin and crashing him into the wall where he folded with a whimper.

  Rolling from the captured blade, Felix claimed it with two welcoming hands and came up into a crouch. A large man, black beard stark against the drifting down, came bellowing through the door. There was not time to stand. He slashed upward just in time to batter aside the sword thrust for his neck. Vibrations rang through his sword and into his shoulder. Loosening his buzzing fingers, he stamped his heel into the man’s toes, forcing him back with a curse. A third man was already charging, sword held high. Trapped on hands and knees, Felix scrambled back, gasping in pain as the back of his head cracked off the underside of the dark wood table. He yelped, yanked his foot clear just as the swordsman skewered the floor with a good six inches of quivering steel.

  Confused screams sounded from the bunkroom below. How Felix suddenly wished he had been down there now.

  Felix kicked at the swordsman’s hand, but his foot rebounded off a steel guard. The man twisted away from the blow but held his grip on his stuck blade, violently levering it through the floorboards. Felix aimed another kick, only to spot two more men fanning out from the doorway to join the two he already had to contend with.

  ‘Gotrek!’ he yelled. ‘Wake up and help me!’

  The dwarf still slumbered, his drunken snores still louder than the shouts beginning to diffuse through the thin walls of the flophouse.

  The swordsman finally got the better of his weapon, wrenching the sword free in a spray of pale splinters. He drove in with a snarl. Felix saw the moonlight strike off the cold edge, felt it cut the air between his legs as he reached back beneath the underside of the table and hauled himself under. On burning fingertips, Felix pulled himself out the other side, up onto his feet, then planted a solid kick through the table’s side to send it crashing over. The four men stumbled back, empty plates, steins, and gnawed chicken bones clattering over the wooden floor.

  Gotrek shook his head blearily, still half-asleep. ‘Again, manling? The pisspot’s by the window.’

  The big black beard, the leader of the group, vaulted the upturned table with a wild slash. Felix dodged, footwork instinctual, parrying the man’s follow up with a durchlauffen that a tragically misspent youth had ingrained so deeply into his muscles that he was scarcely conscious of his own actions. He just did it, edged the oncoming sword aside on the flat of his own, and then felled the man. An elbow crunched through his attacker’s nose, an instant of violent impact that owed little to any fencing master of Altdorf.

  Two others advanced around the table’s near side, warily and together. The last edged towards Gotrek’s bunk.

  ‘Gotrek!’

  The dwarf snapped awake, looking about in confusion. His one eye opened wide as a long blade stabbed for his chest and, with a speed of reflex of which Felix could only dream, Gotrek threw an arm into its path. An instant too soon and Gotrek would have lost a hand, a fraction too late and he would have been impaled through the heart, but his timing was perfect. The sword struck the muscular inside of his forearm, batting it clear over his body. The blade struck the ceiling, the sharp angle driving its tip up and its unfortunate wielder down. The luckless thug slammed face first into Gotrek’s chest.

  Gotrek took the man’s head between both hands and gave a violent twist, vertebrae coming apart with an unforgiving snap. Gotrek threw the limp corpse to the floor, spilling a tirade of slurred oaths with a ham-fisted struggle at escaping the grip of his sunken pallet.

  Felix swore, parrying a fierce effort that left his knuckles ringing and spun from the inexpert follow-through that grazed the mail beneath his cloak. He came about on the second and final swordsman, the man’s attention straying as Gotrek finally staggered from his bed. Felix took full advantage, running him through from back to belly. The man coughed blood as Felix withdrew his sword from his guts, tottering for a moment until Gotrek finished the job. The Slayer smashed a chair over his head, driving him to the ground under a rough cairn of bloody kindling.

  Felix angled his sword into a guard, but the last man standing had lost his stomach for the fight. He backed away, then turned to flee, another man soon hobbling after, bruised manhood cupped in one hand and leaving a trail of blood-spattered feathers. Felix let them go. He was too tired to even contemplate giving chase just now.

  ‘Can a dwarf not even get an honest night’s kip in this town, manling?’

  Gotrek stomped around the table. The black beard lay amongst the detritus of the evening’s meal, draped between a pair of jutting pine legs. Blood splatted his broken nose and struck through his thick beard. He groaned at the sight of Gotrek bearing down and tried to squirm away. He pulled up with a gasp. The fall had broken something more than just his nose. Gotrek prodded the injured man in the ribs, swaying only slightly.

  ‘What’s the idea, eh? Looking to off a Slayer in his sleep?’

  When the man offered no answer, Gotrek poked him again, harder this time, then thumped him in the ribs when that too failed to illicit a response. The man choked on his scream. Gotrek raised his fist for another blow.

  ‘Wait,’ Felix blurted. He did not blame Gotrek his anger. To be killed without a fight was the gravest end for a Slayer else Gotrek would by his own hand have erased his shame long ago, but answers would probably be easier to extract if the one man that had them was not first beaten to a pulp.

  ‘Give me one good reason?’ Gotrek returned.

  ‘I’d like to know who sent him.’

  ‘It was that wretch of a captain, or I’m an elf,’ Gotrek growled, immediately slapping his hand to his forehead and covering his eye. He groaned.

  Shifting nervously, Felix kept his sword on the beaten soldier, splitting his attention between him and the hungover Slayer. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘What’s that barkeep brewing down there?’ There was an uncharacteristic quaver in his voice. He slid his eye patch across his pug nose to cover the bloodshot eye. He grinned as he slumped back onto the bed. ‘Much better. Bit of air, manling. That’s all this dwarf needs. Finish the man already and let’s be off.’

  Felix coughed. This probably was not how the baron’s witch-finders did it. ‘Er…’ He nudged the man with his boot. ‘Well then? Did Konrad send you?’

  The man bent his grimace into a smirk. ‘Sigmar guides me.’

  Gotrek snorted and almost fell off the bed. ‘You heard him, manling. It was Sigmar. Where should we start looking?’

  Felix ignored his companion’s sarcasm and crouched beside the wounded man. It was difficult to be certain in the grim light, but he looked familiar. ‘Torsten,’ he breathed as recollection struck. ‘Konrad’s man.’

  Torsten tried to pull himself up, but could not, collapsing further against the underside of the table. ‘We should have killed you both out on the moors. No one would have known any better.’

  Felix gave a rueful smile. ‘Nor cared, I would imagine.’

  The man snarled. He probably thought Felix mocked him deliberately. ‘Gramm would never have tried you for what you did. Ha! Much less punish you. Not his precious dwarf-friend. He forgets that Sigmar was a warrior.’

  ‘Shallya’s mercy, how many times must I
say we had nothing to do with what happened to von Kuber.’

  ‘Hide behind your feeble goddess, pagan. She’ll not raise a hammer to defend the lands of men.’

  Felix rose, pressing his fingers to his temple. ‘Spare me these lunatics.’

  ‘We’ll get nothing from him, manling,’ said Gotrek, somehow willowing upright and scraping his axe from its night berth beneath his bunk. He nodded in the direction of the door. It sounded as though the whole tavern had woken. Only the half-felt horrors that possessed the streets outside kept doors locked and windows barred. ‘I give this backstabber a half-hour to bleed out. Let’s leave these droppings to Gazul and be off. We can be at this damned city of theirs before sunrise.’

  ‘But Gotrek, you’ve heard what they say about that place. Should we not at least wait for morning? And what of Konrad? I want to give that man something to think about!’

  ‘Bah! To hell with him. If he wants to be king of this scrap of filth then good riddance, but there’s a monster I long to bleed and I’ll not have that bloody-minded wazzock keep me from a worthy doom.’

  Felix turned to the window. The glass was etched with frost despite the earliness of the season. As he watched, the window suddenly turned to black; a transient blur of shadow, then gone. Felix started back, heart yammering. His stare held but nothing returned. He blinked hard, afraid to keep his eyes closed a moment longer than he had to.

  Nothing.

  ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ Felix didn’t turn from the frosted pane.

  ‘Ha! Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a puff of wind? Come. Let’s find your pet wastrel and be on our way.’

  The street was empty, the whole township interred in mist.

  Felix tightened his grip on his sword and edged along the pine wall. The wooden tenement across the street seemed to have grown in the gloom, inflated by the shadows gathered under its eaves and its doubly barred doorways. There was not a flicker of candlelight to betray a living soul. He listened out for any hint of a nightwatchman, but there was nothing, nothing but the wind that whispered through his ears like the laments of the damned.

  ‘A fine night to off somebody on the quiet,’ grumbled Gotrek. ‘So much for honour.’

  Felix nodded silent agreement. Even with the racket that he and Gotrek had made and with two, maybe now three, dead bodies bleeding through to the bunkroom on the floor below, nobody had dared unlock their doors to investigate.

  ‘There must be somebody manning the guard towers,’ said Felix.

  ‘A firkin of Bugman’s says they’re safe abed, cowering under a fleece like lambs.’

  Felix eyed the tumultuous shapes ripped into the fog by the wind. By day it had been possible to dismiss his imaginings as no more than that. But by night? He saw faces contorted into screams, men consumed by flames, shapeless figures fleeing from who knew what, clashing together into clear bursts of black sky and stygian moans. He recalled Caul’s warnings; of how restless shades marched on Sigmarshafen each night.

  The knowledge only added a deeper shade to his fears. For nobody had yet been able to tell him what, exactly, dwelt within the City of the Damned.

  Gotrek ran down the lane, axe gripped tight between eager hands. Felix wondered what Gotrek intended to strike with it. Could the things that haunted the fog even be slain? The vivid crest, flattened where Gotrek had been lying on it and moonlight-bleached an eerie grey, disappeared into the fog-drenched street. Felix took a deep breath, planted a kiss and a prayer onto his own blade, and raced off in pursuit.

  The street led downhill, a short run to the Kirchplatz. The cathedral loomed like a giant, murkily haloed under a clouded moon. The market stalls were empty, carcasses of picked wooden bones and drab skin, a pile of wood massed between them in the middle of the square.

  Something within it moved.

  Felix cried out with a sudden terror. Faceless black shades hung from stakes of cindered wood. Flames consumed them, flickering at the edge of sight, burning silver and black. The wraiths’ mouths hung open but the screams, when they came, sounded from all around. Confined forever within the square, the fog shivered with undying agony. Felix bit his tongue, tasting blood.

  The cries came from the fog itself. What tortured souls were these?

  His heart struck once, hard enough to break ribs.

  The figures were gone. Nothing but mist coiled around blackened stakes.

  He wanted to ask if Gotrek had seen them too, but the dwarf had not paused and Felix hurried after him. They fled the Kirchplatz at a run, a deathless tremor echoing between Felix’s ears. The street stretched down into pitiless fog, the tenements to either side just dark suggestions in the murk.

  ‘Come, manling,’ Gotrek hissed, clutching his axe like grim death, staring anxiously into the whiteout. It disturbed Felix to see him so rattled. Maybe it was too much ale, but nothing sickened a dwarf like undeath. Gotrek shrugged his massive shoulders and lumbered through the tendrils of mist. ‘Not far to the gate.’

  The buildings slipped silently by on both sides. Faces appeared in windows that turned out to be boarded shut. Cries for mercy rang out over shingled rooftops. Gotrek barrelled under the awning of a potter’s workshop and into the jumbled plaza before the gate. Bits of pottery crunched underfoot. The fog was thicker here, denser in this pit of low ground between earth and palisade. Felix could not even see the wall, though it could be no more than fifty feet away. Even the guard towers were passive shades, barely one distinct from the other although it was all too easy to orient by the excremental reek that drifted from the chattel pens beneath them. That was where they would find Rudi.

  Felix froze at the sound of voices.

  They were coming from the towers. Real voices.

  Felix waved Gotrek to silence. He strained to listen, but it was just one more voice amongst a sussarant swell. He held still a moment longer, but it did not seem as though anybody was about to venture down from their posts. He let out a deep breath, feeling oddly reassured by the presence of soldiers nearby. It did not matter that they would probably kill him if they found him. They were something that he understood, something that his mind could deal with.

  ‘Right,’ said Felix, looking first to one tower, then to the next. ‘Which do you think Rudi is in?’

  ‘Let’s not hurt ourselves thinking, manling. You take the right, I’ll check the left.’

  Felix nodded, but Gotrek was already disappearing into the fog. ‘Right,’ he murmured to himself, clutching his sword two-handed as though it might engineer its own escape. Silently he cursed Gotrek and his great hurry to die. It would hardly have added much time to their search to check the pens one after the other. He was tempted to follow after Gotrek anyway, claim he had gotten turned around in the fog, but he did not think he could take the look on the dwarf’s face

  Instead, he turned his back and edged toward the rightward tower. Passing feet creaked over the platform above his head, the dull murmur of frightened men believing themselves quiet. He set his hands against the pine bars and pushed. They did not give. The pen’s solidity did little to calm his nerves. He tried to look inside. The slats were set too tightly to tell whether Rudi was inside or not. He moved along, palms running the smooth wooden frame until he came to a right angle and followed the turn to a gate. It was of the same pale pine as the towers and walls, but with the addition of a sturdy iron lock.

  There were shapes moving about inside but it was still too dark and crowded to discern Rudi from the confusion of bodies within. Some pervasive terror kept him from calling out. Nervously, he glanced behind his back. The sense of being watched, called to even, by the wronged dead was almost too much to bear. The memory of the spirits, eternally burning each night before the cathedral, returned to him in a flash of dread. It did not matter who was inside. He would not wish that fate on any man.

  He sized up the door. Karaghul would probably manage, but it was not exactly the task for which the noble blade had been intended. It would take time.
Assuming his fingers did not go numb first. He cast about for something heavy with which to break the gate down.

  Behind the towers, a stub of alley sank under the murmurings of the unquiet fog. Right under the shadow of the palisade, it ran from the township gate toward a stable, the pine structure ringed with a picket of sharpened stakes. The whole assembly shifted within its grey cloud, its aspect ethereal. Felix took another quick look around and, finding nothing better, ran for it, vaulting the picket and skidding to a standstill in a tiny paddock.

  The stalls were dark. The horses within, chained and blinkered to keep them from bolting, whinnied in fright at what their simple minds knew to fear as well as any man. Trying to ignore the animals’ terror, Felix quickly scoured the yard. There were a few lengths of chain lying loose, horseshoes, nails, and an iron drum filled with dried oats. So far so unhelpful. A passing wind made him shiver and pine for the daemon-haunted north. He was ready to give up and set to work with his sword after all when he found what he was looking for.

  Propped up against the side wall of one of the stalls was a long-handled cavalry mace. Its flanged head was crusted with rust from too many misty nights and too little care, but he suspected that it could still do a job. He slammed his sword back into its sheath and hefted the mace, whistling softly in surprise at its weight, then tossed it over the picket. It impacted into the dirt alley with a flat thunk and he leapt after it, swept it up on the run and raced back into the fog.

  At the tower, there was still no sign of Gotrek.

  Felix studied the gate, judged the distance in his mind and aimed a phantom swing at the iron box of the lock. He drew back, glanced up to the guard platform, and prayed that no one would be committed enough to come down.

  He swung.

  Intended for bludgeoning armoured knights, the flanged head clove through the lock as if it were painted vellum. The gate snapped inward, chewed out strings of wood pulp spraying from where the lock had been. Felix threw down the mace, kicking in the door as it snapped at its hinges and swung back at him. He followed it through, blocking its return swing with his own body.