Gotrek & Felix: Slayer Page 5

  The woman’s voice echoed from the shadow.

  ‘Not only on you.’

  THREE

  Bad Tidings

  The punch hit the Hochland corporal like a swinging morningstar, and crunched knuckles into the man’s breastplate almost exactly like one. The man flew back, piling through the table that had been assembled from a plank and two barrels and scattering maps like feathers from a game bird brought down with a harquebus.

  ‘Liar!’ Gotrek roared, striding through the mess to drag the semi-lucid soldier back to his feet in a fist like an iron corbel. Despite being a foot shorter than anyone present, the Slayer filled the command tent with raw muscular presence and sheer bad attitude. His bulging arm glistened wetly, rainwater having rid him of enough blood and dirt that the spiralling tattoos looked vivid enough to be freshly drawn. He glared at the man, his one good eye bloodshot red. ‘You expect me to buy this tripe about gods and daemons and all the rest of it?’

  Another soldier, in a red and green surcoat with torn sleeves and a shirt of mail, broke one of the empty crates that had been deployed as seating across the Slayer’s back. Gotrek grunted, staggered, shrugged splinters off his shoulders and then cuffed the man unconscious. He shook the corporal in his grip.

  ‘I can’t hear you, manling.’

  ‘Put him down, Gotrek,’ Felix ordered, staggering in from the rain with cheeks red from running and sword drawn just as the Slayer drew back his fist for another punch. At the same time, a rattling series of clicks announced pistols and harquebuses being cocked and primed. A line of men in a mishmash of bastardised liveries and gear dropped to one knee, laying their firearms over the upturned seating and drawing a bead on the bristling Slayer.

  ‘Aim,’ said Gustav with incongruous levity, wearing a grim expression that was no less a smile for that. Like everyone else, he hadn’t yet had a chance to change following the recent battle. His ponytail was pasted to his face with rainwater and his white plate was dashed with wet smears of red. He looked like a highwayman, fresh from the stage of a Tarradasch play and an altercation with the evils of womanly virtue and corrupt Imperial justice. He reminded Felix rather too much of Ulrika.

  ‘You’d let him shoot me, manling?’ Gotrek growled flintily, still glaring at the Hochland corporal but clearly now addressing Felix.

  Don’t tempt me, Felix thought, but somehow managed to grind his teeth and not speak.

  Gotrek must have noticed the tightness in his jaw however, because he turned to fix Felix with a glare. Felix’s fingers didn’t stray from his sword. With a grunt, Gotrek let the man go. The Hochlander clattered bonelessly in amongst the scattered maps and for a moment Felix thought the Slayer intended to leave one last boot in the ribs, but then Gotrek turned and stomped to the corner of the tent without another word. There, he picked up a crate and planted himself on it, crossing his arms across his barrel chest.

  Felix allowed himself to relax. The line of harquebusiers and pistoliers visibly sagged with relief. Sheathing his sword, Felix waved in the gaggle of company sergeants that had decided a tactical withdrawal to the cover of the pouring rain was preferable to crossing Gotrek Gurnisson. He shook his head wearily as men returned to reset the seating, fix the table, and sort through the maps that had fallen on the floor. A too-young lad with haunted eyes and gore-drenched woollen coveralls – two months apprenticed to a chirurgeon before the armies of the Everchosen had ground his regiment underfoot – applied a grubby cloth to the fallen man’s brow.

  Felix took advantage of the lull to check on the arrangements. Such as they were.

  Rain drummed on the canvas sheet that had been spread between two banner poles and the rear compartment of a wagon loaded with crates, barrels and sacks, most of them empty. In its former incarnation ferrying ore of less than dwarfish quality on the Kadrin Road to the less discerning marketplaces of Osterwald, Bechafen, and Kislev City it had been the property of old Lorin Lanarksson and his son Lyndun. They sat in the unsheltered front of the cart, soaking in the misery as only two dwarfs together could. A single storm lantern swayed with the wind from a pole attached to the wagon’s rear.

  A gaunt-looking kossar and a bald-headed bruiser in the black and dirty off-white of Ostland each took one end of the ‘table’ and reset it across the two barrels. When they noticed Felix watching they threw a salute, which Felix returned with an inner sigh. The kossar sergeant made a show of assessing the table’s stability with a gentle rocking before declaring it fit for the maps to be relaid.

  Men in the state colours of provinces from across the Empire’s north and east and with golden epaulets on the slashed shoulders of their doublets gathered around with pages of soggy parchment in hand. Each man commanded anything between five and twenty-five men, sergeants – so titled by Felix, whose patience for provincial variation in military hierarchy was thinner than the wool of his cloak – of the ad-hoc fighting companies that had tagged along on Felix and Gotrek’s long westward trek.

  On the table, individual charts were strategically positioned under stone paperweights so that the overlap of one fed vaguely into the next to fashion a map of the entire Empire. Areas where Chaos was known or rumoured to have conquered had been filled with pencil drawings of hideous monsters that left Felix with grave concerns as to the artist’s state of mind. Even without those personal worries it made for unsettling viewing. The only parts of the map that looked healthy were to the south and then only because they did not know any better. Daemons capered around the walled symbols of Bechafen and Osterwald, filling the forested spaces of Ostland and Ostermark and nibbling at the edges of Talabheim itself. A great tentacled monstrosity reared out of the Sea of Claws as if to drag Erengrad into the water, and stick-figure longboats peopled with gibbering horrors closed on the Marienburg delta.

  Felix decided that whoever was responsible should never be allowed near pencil or paper again.

  ‘You have timing of Ursun for his seasons,’ said Kolya, lounging against the wagon’s tailboard as he had been throughout, chewing on a pungent blend of locally foraged herbs and tabac. ‘Zabójka might have killed that man.’

  ‘Remind me later to thank you for the help,’ Felix replied.

  The Kislevite pursed his lips, cocked his head slightly as though listening intently to the rain, and shrugged. ‘No matter.’

  The Hochlander moaned, taking a swallow of water from the cloth that the young chirurgeon squeezed into his mouth. Felix dropped down beside him.

  The man had a long mane of dark hair, crushed from being all day inside a helmet. His beard was dashed with white, and cleft by a scar that cut across his left cheek from the corner of his lip. His breastplate was almost brown from mud, blood and rust, and so well beaten that in places it had more edges than a chewed coin. The vicious dent left below the collar by Gotrek’s fist was hardly the worst of it. A bronze-coloured epaulet shimmered dully from the red shoulder of his padded tunic. A singular leather vambrace that was scratched almost white hung loose on one strap. He looked up vaguely at Felix and, to his minor irritation, saluted.

  ‘Corporal Herschel Mann, my lord, Hergig city militia. At your service.’

  Felix raised an eyebrow and smiled at the slumped soldier. ‘At ease, corporal.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ the man murmured.

  ‘I apologise on behalf of my… friend,’ said Felix, glancing across to Gotrek who returned the stare with diamond tips. ‘I assure you he’s the same with everybody.’

  The man took another squeeze of water and swallowed nervously. ‘Forgive me, my lord. He asked if I had news of Altdorf and I told him aye, I did. Several of the men with me were attached to Reikland regiments, garrisoned in the outlying countryside during the… fall.’

  To Felix, the air suddenly felt too thick to breathe. His heart didn’t seem to want to beat.

  ‘The fall of what?’ asked Gustav.

  ‘Of Altdorf,
’ said Corporal Mann. ‘The fall of Altdorf, my lords.’

  Shouts of denial rose from the company sergeants who had not already been present to hear the news with Gotrek. Most of them had been enlisted men serving in regiments on the Empire’s hinterlands or, in the case of the Kislevite contingent, beyond it. Felix doubted whether half of them had ever been to Altdorf, but that didn’t matter. It was the seat of Imperial power, home to its most exalted institutions and most decorated regiments, a cultural home if not an actual one. It was unconquered and unconquerable.

  It was Altdorf.

  Felix stared at the shattered soldier for a long moment, not entirely comprehending. He felt the stool kicked out from under his heart, the noose tightening around his neck as it dropped. The disbelieving chorus of his men blended together into a whining note of white noise. Deep down he had suspected that even the great citadels of Reikland could not stand against the forces he had seen heading towards them. Mentally he had prepared himself for it, but to have it confirmed hit him emotionally like a kick in the gut.

  Felix raised his left hand to his eyes. The lantern-light reflected from the angular edges of his ring, short-lived tears of ethereal gold.

  No.

  He forced himself to swallow, and then to look up. Sound crashed back in a tumult of angry, frightened voices.

  He turned a look of anguish to the corner where Gotrek sat, arms crossed and surrounded by empty chairs. There was a grimness on the dwarf’s face that Felix didn’t like. A blue vein bulged from his temple, and he appeared to swell as he clasped hands to his enormous biceps and stared through Felix into the rain. West – to Altdorf. Returning to Altdorf and reuniting Felix with Kat – and perhaps expunging some guilt of his own in so doing – had been Gotrek’s unwavering goal for over a year. In all of Felix’s own worries and doubts he’d never thought to consider how his former companion would respond to failure.

  ‘Lies,’ said Gotrek in a voice that could have ground gravel. ‘He didn’t tell you the rest. Said Sigmar’s own second bloody coming fought and lost. And there’s more too, if your head’s not already too full of foolishness to hear more.’ Gotrek snorted angrily. ‘Gods. Manling nonsense if ever I heard it.’

  ‘What of the Emperor?’ said Gustav, lifting his voice above the clamour.

  ‘Safe, I heard,’ said Mann, relieved to have something positive to share with his rescuers. ‘The old King of Bretonnia rode to his aid, and,’ he glanced anxiously towards Gotrek, ‘and the gods themselves.’

  A few men made signs to Sigmar and Ulric across their chests. Kolya chuckled drily. ‘We could use some of that, no?’

  ‘Gods or Bretonnians?’ Gustav murmured, a half-smile teasing his troubled mask.

  Kolya shrugged. ‘So long as they bring their horses.’

  The kossar sergeant by the table trumpeted with laughter. The Ostlander across from him gave both Kislevites a damning look. They had lost their country months ago. Most of the men in the room were feeling the loss of theirs only now. Felix merely bowed his head, part of him determined never to look up again.

  Altdorf had been more than just a distant symbol. It had been hope.

  It had been his hope.

  ‘We should head south,’ said Gustav, taking a steadying breath and striding forwards to plant a finger on one of the clearer portions of the map. ‘Averheim, say. It’s a long way, but it should be as far from the northern and eastern prongs of the Chaos incursion. The Emperor has to rally his forces somewhere and it’s as likely a place as any.’

  ‘How far?’ asked a slender, faintly well-born man in scuffed leather armour and a steel breastplate with a big dent over the right breast and a burgundy sash over the opposite shoulder.

  ‘Where are we now, anyway?’ added another man, this one in forester’s gear with an unstrung bow over his shoulder, leaning over the maps.

  ‘We’re shadowing the Talabec Road. A few days out from Talabheim.’ Gotrek tightened his arms about his chest and grumbled: ‘Assuming we ever move again.’

  ‘Talabheim?’ Mann started, before Gotrek guillotined whatever he had wanted to say with a glare.

  The Slayer sat stubbornly, but something forlorn in the Hochlander’s face made him grudgingly relent. ‘Spit it out before you get a nosebleed. Another one.’

  ‘Forgive me again, master dwarf, but you’re nowhere Talabheim. Fortunately, for it’s fallen too. You’re in Hochland.’

  ‘Bah!’ said Gotrek, rising suddenly and stamping a foot upon the ground, setting his nose-chain to clinking. ‘Talabecland, or I’m a treeman.’

  ‘I saw mountains from the hill, Gotrek,’ said Felix quietly. He didn’t want to put himself into another argument with the Slayer, but you couldn’t disagree with a mountain. And what did it matter now anyway?

  Altdorf had fallen.

  ‘There are no mountains in Talabecland, manling,’ said Gotrek as if that settled it.

  ‘My lord, if you’ll forgive me?’ Corporal Mann raised a hooked elbow that Felix took to pull the man up. The man stumbled against him, giving a sour hit of days-old sweat and armour grease, and then moved towards the map table. He pressed his finger into the map. The grimy digit fell on a bull-horned icon surrounded by double-ringed walls and set amidst a proliferation of barren-looking mountains.

  ‘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, hi
s 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?’