Gotrek & Felix: Slayer Page 4

  A faint cry from the treeline startled him from his reverie.

  His sword was half-drawn from its scabbard when he spotted the kossar in loose-fitting trousers and an open-fronted coat running into the clearing. He moved with an odd, high-kneed gait, bounding from body to body, stomping through puddles and laughing with his comrades in fierce pursuit. The man held what appeared to be a beastman’s beer skin high above his head as he ran. Only a Kislevite, Felix thought, relaxing his grip on his sword.

  The posse ran close to where Gotrek was overseeing the dismantlement of the Hochlanders’ vehicles, the Slayer rubbing his eye tiredly with his fist and bawling at each of them in turn as they passed him. With a growl of impatience, the dwarf turned his glare towards a band of Ostland woodsmen who had had the gall to look up from their work and smile as the kossars’ boisterous laughter passed by. Gotrek grumbled his way between two of the woodsmen and took over, his ancient rune-axe blitzing the wagon to matchwood in the time it took the Ostlanders to whip their black cloaks up over their faces.

  Felix frowned. His feelings towards his former companion were confused. They had often argued, and too much time with only their own disparate personalities for company had bred its share of conflict. And yet somehow they had always managed to avoid coming to blows or finding themselves in someone’s Book of Grudges. Despite that, there had never been a time when Felix was not a little bit afraid of the Slayer. Now, Felix could barely look at the dwarf without seeing the lives he had taken and feeling more than just a little fearful. Did Gotrek hold him in higher regard than he had Hamnir, or Snorri? Felix knew he would never dare ask, but he suspected not. He was only human – a manling – after all.

  He would sleep easier when the Slayer’s oath was fulfilled and they could again go their separate ways. Felix shook his head as he watched Gotrek stomp determinedly towards another wagon. If he had thought being oathsworn to Gotrek’s quest was bad enough, then it was because he’d never thought to consider the implications of actually being the object of one of the Slayer’s damned oaths.

  ‘Lord Jaeger!’

  A soldier in a piecemeal harness of rain-softened leather and steel covered by an earthy-coloured cloak made a beeline through the bodies towards Felix. From the off-white and black of his livery and the dully golden epaulet on his shoulder he’d been a sergeant in an Ostland regiment. The man removed his helmet to reveal short, weed-snaggled hair and threw a salute.

  ‘He’s not talking to me,’ Gustav whispered, somewhat sharply, in Felix’s ear.

  ‘Kolya sends word that he’s called off the chase on the warband,’ said the Ostlander. ‘He’s set sentries in the woods, but he didn’t want to venture too far from the main force.’

  ‘Very good, sergeant,’ said Felix, remembering to return his best imitation salute. It appeared to satisfy the Ostlander, who saluted again, even more briskly than before, and quick-marched through the puddles in the rocks to where a short column of horse- and hand-drawn wagons was just beginning to trickle into the clearing. Peasant families clung grimly to the sides or trudged alongside.

  Felix gave his nephew’s hand one last squeeze, then cupped the man’s pearl-wet gardbrace in his hand and eased him gently away. Whatever his feelings about it, these people – desperate as they clearly were – looked up to him. They needed their hero, and for as long as the body remained willing then Felix would play that role.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Gustav.

  ‘To see if I can see where we are,’ Felix replied, nodding towards the high hill that the poor, doomed Hochlanders had fought to the last man to hold. Unidentifiable bits of meat glistened in the rain. It looked like a butcher’s cart had been struck by a mortar.

  The hilltop was deserted, understandably so, but for a moment Felix thought he glimpsed a dark figure outlined in black against the grey clouds above the summit. A frisson of dread passed through him, utterly convinced for one irrational moment that the figure spied on him on behalf of the darkness he sensed from the forest. In the space of a shiver, the feeling was gone, as was the figure, and Felix wished he could say that the two had been unrelated.

  But the figure had been Max Schreiber.

  Cartilage crunched beneath him as Felix pushed himself to the top of the hill. Blood oozed up from underfoot. Further from the epicentre of the carnage, men and beastmen more-or-less intact lay across each other, appearing to fight each other even in dismemberment and death. Felix covered his mouth, not so much against the smell as the taste. Flies droned around him, perhaps mistaking him for a corpse – and in spirit, surrounded by so much death, he felt like one. He swatted at the buzzing pests, more out of form than the belief that anything Felix Jaeger could do here would make the slightest difference to anything.

  ‘Are you up here, Max?’ he said, uncertain why he whispered or why his heart beat so hard.

  He crunched to the summit with a grimace and turned full circle. Meat glistened. The rain made dimples in puddles of blood. Trees extended out from the clearing in every direction, whispering and downcast under the rain. The Empire was rather like a dwarfhold, Felix thought. Those men fortunate enough to visit the dwarfs’ ancient fastnesses would see only the glittering audience halls beyond the mountain gates, but their deeps plumbed further into the darkness than that. The Empire was the same, its deeps hidden by tangled bowers rather than by stone. It was a sprawling country and perhaps, in days before these, even a great one, but take away its roads, its boats, and the Empire became a far darker and vaster land than even Felix could have believed.

  It made the deeds of Sigmar and his descendants even more inspiring. Those were heroes, living in a time of legends. Felix’s own deeds felt trifling by comparison.

  He peered through the falling grey sheets in the direction he thought was north. It looked like mountains on the horizon, but that couldn’t be right. They were shadowing the Bechafen to Talabheim road. There were no mountains in Talabecland.

  ‘Max?’

  Relief crept guiltily into his thoughts at the realisation that the wizard was not here. He turned to leave. In the clearing below, a few hundred men and half a dozen wagons assembled. He looked to the endless tracts of forest, and then to the mist-shrouded mountains in the north. He prayed that they weren’t lost.

  ‘The End Times near, Felix.’

  Felix flinched at the voice from behind him. The warmth leached from his veins and there was very little he wanted more in this world than to never have to turn around and face the man that spoke. He unclenched his fists, took a moment to steel his courage, and then turned.

  The rain flattened the old wizard’s hood against his face and brought a glisten to his ashen hands, exposed to the wrist where they held the simple yew staff upon which he leaned. Once of proud ivory and gold, his long magister’s robes were now bleached grey like his skin. More by memory than by their faded thread Felix picked out the elaborately embroidered geomantic symbols and coiling, self-cannibalising snakes.

  ‘I noticed,’ Felix replied, intending to sound light and failing miserably. The wizard’s captivity at the pleasure of the Troll King had damaged him, but his strange condition had only worsened since Praag. It troubled Felix to see the last of his old friends in such a sorry way, but Max was far beyond his – or anyone’s – ability to help.

  Max stared through Felix. The whites of his wide eyes were dark and their gaze clove to something distant, a realm of horror that he and he alone could see.

  ‘The Chaos Moon cracks asunder and falls from the heavens in a firestorm of corruption and death. The Isle of the Dead unravels and mighty Ulthuan sinks to the ocean’s bottom while her chill twin falters before the Handmaiden of Khorne. Old certainties fade as new gods arise and the greatest host of daemonkind since the last days of Aenarion musters in the corners of my mind. Your eyes are closed and you notice little, Felix. Oh, so little. If you saw but a fraction of what I mu
st…’

  ‘Neither of us are children, Max. I’ve walked the Great Bastion of Cathay. I’ve seen the old ziggurats in the Southlands jungle. I know that Chaos is everywhere. But that’s why we have to fight.’

  Max bowed his head. ‘You do not understand at all.’

  ‘You could have stopped this,’ Felix replied after a time, looking down as he slid his foot back and forth through the gory leftovers of men and beasts. ‘That sorcerer was no match for the Max I remember.’

  ‘I thought about it.’

  To Felix’s own surprise, he started laughing. It was a black laugh, the sort that only a man who had administered the ultimate mercy to friends in want of a healer as skilled as Max Schreiber could give. ‘I hope for all our sakes you found some answers?’

  ‘Yes. Some. And I knew that this was too petty an engagement to account for you or for Gotrek. You have a destiny, Felix,’ said Max urgently as Felix began to turn away. ‘Since we first set out together to slay the dragon Skjalandir, I have believed it, and with all that remains of me I know it now. It was not chance that brought us together then and it is not hubris to turn to fate for an explanation of what brings us all together again now.’

  Felix tried to hold Max’s eyes but couldn’t. Their gazes slid across one another, the spaces they inhabited immiscible as oil and water. Felix shivered and wiped rain from the back of his neck, chilled to the marrow by the wizard’s talk and angered by how powerfully it had affected him. His destiny, such as it was, was his own and no other’s. The thought that some unknowable being might have done this to him infuriated him more than the fundamental loss of control over his own fate that such interference implied.

  ‘We’re not all together, though, are we? Some of us aren’t here.’

  ‘Only those that needed to be.’

  Felix’s lips flared in sudden rage and his hand moved of its own volition to the hilt of his sword.

  Snorri.

  Ulrika.

  How dare he!

  The rain pummelled Max’s hood as the wizard beheld the middle distance. With a sigh, Felix let go of his sword. It wasn’t the wizard’s fault. He was sick, a man with an infected wound. He had not chosen to be this way.

  ‘You should go,’ Max murmured, nodding downhill.

  On the nearest patch of flat ground between the hill and the treeline, a gang of unarmoured men, women, and even children were busily erecting an impromptu command tent over the back of an open-topped wagon. As Felix watched, Gotrek and a handful of others gravitated towards it.

  ‘The Hochlanders’ commander is the bearer of bad tidings. Your nephew has just heard, and convenes a council of war-captains.’

  A prickle of unease stitched down Felix’s spine. ‘How can you know that?’

  Max sighed. It looked as though he closed his eyes, but with grey eyes and grey skin, both concealed under a hood, it was difficult to be certain of anything. ‘Some powers I abjure by choice, others force their visions through my shuttered eyes and invade my dreams.’

  Felix spun around, his heart turning loops, and tried to pick out Gustav amidst the mismatched uniforms and mud paraded under the rain below. He could see a pocket of Hochlanders in their red and green, but there was no sign of his nephew.

  ‘I would advise you to hurry,’ said Max, serene as a passing breeze. ‘Gotrek Gurnisson is about to be the recipient of bad news.’

  Rain tapped on the leaves above the solemn bier as it traipsed southwards in unexpected defeat. Khamgiin Lastborn, the ever-changing spear of the Silver Road, tried to ignore it and lapse back into unconsciousness. The pain from the wound in his back was terrible, worse even than the ritual scarifications his father had inflicted upon him in his trials of manhood. Pain was just a feeling, a weakness like pity or affection. He told himself that, but the rain’s insistent rap on his armour demanded he pay notice and take heed.

  By the Dark Master of Chaos, it hurt.

  He opened his eyes and blinked away the dreams of torture and sadistic, androgynous daemon-fiends. Were they dreams or were they memories? It was difficult to know; he had lived long and suffered much, both before he had donned Tzeentch’s armour and after. Casting the past to the past, he took in his surroundings. Tall trees rose above him, carving up the grey light into meagre portions of light and shadow. The rain rustled lightly through their high leaves. Watching the weaving bowers shift slowly by, Khamgiin came to the realisation that he was laid out on some kind of litter, and that he was moving.

  On either side of him walked his men. They marched slowly, eyes low and shoulders hunched. The tribesmen were smeared with blood, their armour scored. Four of their strongest carried him on a shield across their shoulders. Despite his size and weight and their evident weariness, they bore their burden without sufferance. Men of the tribes were not like other men. Though it was many decades since Khamgiin had ridden the steppe, battled hobgoblin and ogre and worse every day simply to live for one more day of struggle, the pride he took in his people’s prowess was as strong as it had ever been.

  ‘Temay,’ he mouthed, addressing the tall warrior to his right. The man wore a coat of iron and leather scales, woven together with a backing layer of silk and worn over a sleeveless silk vest. His head was shaved but for a topknot. An elaborate tattoo of an eagle spread its wings over one cheek.

  The warrior did not answer. Weakly, Khamgiin rolled his head around to the left.

  ‘Khidu. What struck me? Was it him?’

  Still no answer. The men marched on like dead men to the underworld. Khamgiin tried to remember the end of the battle, but it was a blur of screams and fire. It had been as one-sided a rout as any he had come to expect from this soft land. Except for the dwarf. Yes, he remembered something now. The dwarf had been a foe worthy of Khamgiin’s gifts. Then there had been a loud bang and then… He winced as the memory brought with it an unpleasant throbbing pain in between his shoulder blades. He worked his mouth. It was as dry as the Great Steppe, but he managed to separate his lips and move his tongue.

  ‘Was the warrior slain? Did the Dark Master make a martyr of his enemy?’

  ‘No, Lastborn, he was not. You failed, as I foresaw that you must.’

  A woman walked behind the bier, dressed and hooded in black with face downcast like a widow. From the stoop of her back and the strands of white that strayed from her hood, Khamgiin judged her to be old, but immortality tempered such assessments and her voice rang as clear as the warning call of an eagle. Something about her presence put a sepulchral chill into Khamgiin. He turned to his men, but they walked on as if they were unaware of her or of him, ghosts in each other’s worlds. He clenched his eyes tight and felt for the spark of power within him. This was a dream, or perhaps a vision such as those in which Nergüi purported to see the future, brought on by blood loss and pain.

  ‘I bested Gorgoth the Gargantuan in mortal combat that lasted eight days and nights. I broke the numberless hordes of Hobgobla Khan and brought to heel the beasts of the Shirokij. I am the Lastborn of Khagash-Fél. I do not fail.’

  ‘The Dark Master cares not for your sacrifice. He is not appeased with oaths or with deeds. He does not desire your devotion.’

  The woman nodded imperceptibly to one side.

  A ghostly figure ran through the trees there. The dwarf! Khamgiin could see his bright orange crest through the moist bark. The tattoos that covered his monstrously muscular frame were a translucent blue, at times indistinguishable from the whorls and branches behind him. In silence the spectre of the dwarf ran, battling his way through enemies that Khamgiin could not see. The dwarf ran behind a tree, and for the brief duration of his passage it ceased to be a tree and was a pillar, square-sided and mighty, soaring towards a vaulted ceiling where fiery golden runes glimmered like bleeding stars. Something about them reminded Khamgiin of the histories his father had told, of when the tribes had lived under the yok
e of the Chaos dwarfs of Zharr. Before he could think on it further, the pillar was a tree again and the dwarf emerged from behind it with a man in tow. It was an Empire man in a red cloak, wielding what appeared to be a powerful magical sword. Khamgiin did not recognise him, but a tingling in his wounded spine told him that he should.

  ‘What am I seeing?’

  ‘What I see,’ the woman replied.

  A chill entering his bones, Khamgiin pushed himself up onto his elbows. ‘I have seen you in my dreams before. It was you who showed me the tribes riding westward to make war on the Empire. Who are you?’

  The woman bowed her head slightly, bringing up her hands in the same motion to draw back her hood. Despite his own godly favour, Khamgiin gasped. Her skin was a strange mix of light and dark, like rubbed chalk. Her lips however were jet black, as were the small horns that rose through her frost-white hair. The most unnerving thing about her, however, was her eyes. Their colouration constantly shifted and changed, like a candle behind stained glass, and Khamgiin felt certain that there were prophecies reflected there that could raise a man to the heights of the gods if he could interpret them without succumbing to madness.

  ‘A servant. I observe and follow. History will not record my name.’

  Khamgiin struggled to meet her shifting gaze. With a spurt of panic he noticed that everything around her was darkening. He was still moving, but his men were gone, as was the forest. He blinked into the nothingness that surrounded him. It wasn’t just a void left by the retreat of the mortal world, it was a thing with a cruel will and a terrible purpose of its own. He saw the silver outline of the witch before she vanished. She was haloed by something horned and dark, something vast and incalculably ancient with a capacity for hate that left the Chaos warrior quailing and small.

  ‘A darkness closes on me,’ he hissed.