Gotrek & Felix: Kinslayer Read online

  Damir, the Ungol warrior who served her in exchange for the base pleasure of doing so and the dim prospect of one day joining her in immortality, waited for her by the coach. Her mortal family’s bear rampant flew from the four corners. The thrall pulled open the door. ‘To the Black Rose, my lady?’

  ‘No,’ said Ulrika, accepting Damir’s hand and allowing him to help a lady into her carriage. He closed the door on her, and then climbed to the box.

  Ulrika pulled thick black curtains over the raucous scenes without, then unhooked her widow’s veil and smiled a good shepherdess’s smile.

  A human would not know what was truly in their heart if she was to open it up and show it to them. She leaned forward to knock on the front quarter partition.

  ‘I think it is time that I met this Kat.’

  Four

  A Proposal

  Could Ulrika really make Kat whole again? Was that what she had been offering? The idea troubled him, perhaps more than such an apparent kindness should, and not just because Ulrika’s appearance in Kat’s life was going to lead to a lot of awkward questions. Felix wasn’t quite that selfish. He knew there were individuals in the world with the power to reverse what Heinrich Kemmler had done. Perhaps Ulrika was now one of them. Her display in Wilhelmplatz had certainly been impressive and maybe that had been the point, a demonstration. He would give almost anything to see Kat whole again, but few such powers gave without demanding a commensurate cost. His mind conjured images of secret covens, rituals conducted on darkest Geheimnisnacht, pacts with daemons, and vile blood magic. It was the varied and terrible possibilities excluded by that almost that had Felix abandoning Otto’s coach to the drunks that had claimed it and pushing through the screaming crowds towards the guard picket at the east entrance on Black Castle Alley.

  The soldiers, however, were too overwhelmed holding back the tide of people trying to catch a glimpse of their regent, the Reiksmarshal, to care about one more trying to get out. Felix hurried by them and into the boisterous crowds around the Kaisergarden. Seeing the grinding foot and horse-drawn traffic ahead of him, Felix drove through the press of urchins and vagrants to pass into Hubert Alley on the opposite side of the Kaisergarden, knocking a bowl from a beggar’s hand in his haste.

  The tall buildings of the altstadt meant the sun rarely landed here. It was dark and reeked of stale urine. Families huddled amidst refuse from which the eyes of rats glittered. Men, women, and children followed him with dead eyes that saw naught now but nightmares, mumbling in the languages of Tilea, Estalia and Araby. Felix understood only a little and tried to ignore even that much.

  ‘The rats, signore. The rats…’

  Felix squeezed past the Tilean and his children and into the sudden light of Sigmarplatz. Red leaves blustered across the perfectly square flagstones like the heralds of war. The square before the temple’s severe marble frontage was packed with worshippers come for the midday rituals. A unit of halberdiers in slashed doublets and faded red and blue livery warmed their hands over a brazier on the temple’s steps and watched the faithful and the hopeless file past. Felix quickened his pace until their prayers were behind him and he was on Befehlshaber Avenue.

  Stately, three-storey structures of dwarf-cut stone rose above the poorer surrounds of the altstadt, hoarding the high ground like a profiteer. Each residence sought to outdo the next in the beauty of their finials, the mullioned quality of their windows, or the quantity of their chimneys. As well as the homes of the merchant classes, there were banks, jewellers, dealers in exotic luxuries. In one lungful Felix had the bitterness of Arabyan coffee, the sickly tang of New World sugar, and the spices of Ind; a collective pomander to the noses of the affluent against the desperate reek of the dispossessed. It made Felix feel sick.

  He broke into a jog. His heart raced, his vision funnelled, but it was not due to the exertion as, despite age and Otto’s best efforts, Felix remained a fit man. It was the need to see Kat again, to purge his skin of Ulrika’s memory in his arms, that pushed him through the well-heeled gentry and their servants. He started to run. It did not feel nearly fast enough. It never was, no matter how fast he ran. He had been too late to save his father.

  He had been too late to save Ulrika.

  With that thought burning a hole in his brain, Felix slammed into the heavy iron gate that was set into the brick wall surrounding Otto’s property and shook the bars. It was locked. In frustration, he beat against the bars and yelled the name of every servant he could recall. Of course, most of those names were already in the Reiksmarshal’s war ledger for the march north, but Felix shouted them anyway, to no avail. He rattled the gate until the dead leaves impaled on its crowning spikes shook loose, but there was no answer from the house. He could see the old building, across the coach yard and behind a screen of bronze-leafed maples. To the right of the yard was a herb garden, the stables and, obscured by a creeping tangle of vines, the servants’ quarters. There was no one there either. Curse this war! Felix took the gate in both hands as if he might tear it loose and shook it.

  ‘Someone open this gate! Kat!’

  He loved Kat.

  The reminder took him in a bear hug and crushed the air from his lungs. They had always planned to leave Altdorf once Kat was well again, hunt the beastmen she had once sworn to eradicate, live village to village. On the nights that Felix actually made it home and was sober enough to find their bed they still talked of the life they would have. As if it might one day happen. Felix blinked away the threat of a tear. He didn’t need Ulrika to tell him that Kat was getting no better. Felix wondered when he would ever grow up enough to talk about these things with the woman he loved rather than bottle them up and take them to the nearest tavern.

  Did he love her as intensely as he had Ulrika? Or Kirsten, for that matter? He didn’t know. Sickness and circumstance had tramped mud through feelings that had once been so clear. As Sigmar was his witness though, he loved her.

  Felix shoved himself back from the gate and looked up to its spiked summit. He realised he was attracting stares from the passing gentry, but he didn’t care. At least so long as none of them considered him so curious as to warrant summoning the watch. He took three steps back and then charged the damned gate, planting his boot into the iron frame just before he ran into it and kicking himself off and up, just high enough to grapnel his fingertips over the top of the gate. The bevelled iron bit into the pads of his fingers and he grunted in pain as blood welled under his grip. From the street behind him, people were pointing, shouting, but no one went so far as to try and stop him from pulling up his legs and dragging himself up and over.

  And why should they? It wasn’t their house.

  He landed on the other side, his heavy blue cloak almost throttling him for his troubles after its over-embroidered hem got snagged on the barbs and swung him by the neck like a noose. Choking and swearing, he tore off the clasp and shrugged it off, letting it fall over the gate behind him like some rich woollen modesty screen as he ran under the line of trees to the house.

  The door was unlocked and he burst through, sprinting for the staircase up to the first floor. The balusters bore ornate intaglio in the Tilean style. The walls were panelled in dense oak. Felix pounded up the carpeted steps and almost charged right through Fritz as Otto’s butler emerged from one of the guest suites bearing a stack of linen over the crook of one arm and a silver carafe of red wine in the other. Felix grabbed a hold of the handrail to keep from colliding with the man as Fritz turned his body to shield the carafe and breathed a sigh of relief at his livery’s near miss.

  ‘Kat,’ Felix demanded. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She is not here,’ said Fritz, straightening to deliver that missive in a tone of irritated dignity.

  ‘Damn it, Fritz,’ said Felix, taking the butler by the collar and making him squawk. ‘Where is she, then?’

  ‘Frauchen Annabella has visited the Bre
tonnian embassy every day since their war began. For word of her family,’ he added, then swallowed as Felix tightened his grip and hurried on. ‘Frauchen Katerina rides with her as far as the Shallyan temple.’

  Felix let the man drop. Every day? How could he not have known that? The question though was whether Ulrika knew. With a curse, Felix barged past the still-spluttering butler and raced up the second flight of steps. Could he even doubt it?

  On making the second floor, Felix spun, both hands clutching the handrail, and shot back down, ‘Fetch me a new cloak and my mail. Right now.’

  ‘But, Herr Felix–’

  Felix couldn’t care less what the butler had to say. He had the key to his study door in his coat, but he was too agitated to be fiddling about with pockets and simply kicked the lock to splinters, then flung the door aside. His entrance sent half-written speeches and pamphlets flying, but he ignored them, striding through the clutter to the glass-fronted cabinet on the back wall.

  Karaghul glittered in the noonday sun that shone through the window. Sealed against the dust that hung across the air, it looked serene, a king lying in state, but Felix didn’t need to test its edge to know that the enchanted blade would be as sharp as the day he had found it in a troll’s hoard under the lost dwarfhold of Karak Eight Peaks. He took a deep breath and opened the glass door, then reached inside to lift the sword from its silver hooks. Unconsciously, he smiled. A thrill shot down his arm. The feel of that dragonhead hilt was as familiar to him as his own name.

  An image of Kat fled through his mind and the moment left him.

  He squeezed his swordbelt over his stomach and slid Karaghul into its sheath. He just hoped he wouldn’t have to use it.

  Not against Ulrika.

  The warm colours cast over the great hall of the Temple of Shallya by its stained glass windows could not detract from the cold. A chill wind blew through the open doors, but on straw mats throughout the cavernous space men threw off their blankets, doused in sweat as they raved of sorcerers, monsters and dead men walking. Judging from their livery and the accent of their rantings they were Altdorfers returned from the north. They looked weary, broken, and glassy-eyed. Their hacking coughs echoed from the vaulted ceiling. The air they breathed was sickly sweet with the odour of putrefaction. Priestesses in soiled white robes hurried amongst the men with mops and muslins and bowls of lukewarm vegetable broth. Lumps of dried vomit crusted the joins between the flagstones.

  Perched on a bench at the short end of the hall in the camphor-scented warmth of a candle shrine and the pastel glow of stained glass, Kat watched the sisters in their work. Theirs was a perilous and largely thankless calling, but Kat envied them. She missed having that kind of purpose.

  Stiffly, she pulled her knees up onto the bench and drew herself into the corner between back and armrest. Her eyelids felt warm and heavy, like baked honey. Even the short ride from the house had proven tiring. Annabella could be exhausting company, though Kat supposed that she would probably be anxious too if her country were ravaged by war and her family unaccounted for. With a feeling of heartache, her thoughts turned to Felix. She embraced the pain of him, let it fill her.

  He had given her all the family she had now.

  More and more since the lichemaster had… touched her, she found her thoughts centred on him, or more specifically that night in Flensburg when she had been a girl. It was all she dreamed of. She always recognised the dream when it came. There was the forest that she could walk in her sleep, the glare of the fire, the screams. But each time it was different, as terrifying as it had been when she had first witnessed it as a child, as though fate were showing her the infinite ways in which weakness or inaction might have yielded the death of the man she loved. She had been the one to slay the Chaos warrior, Justine. She had saved both Felix and Gotrek that night. But what if she hadn’t? Opening her eyes, she raised her left hand to reassure herself that the heavy gold ring she wore was still there. The thick angular band had been pushed over the thumb up to the knuckle. Her fingers were too thin: a reminder that she was not as strong even as that girl in Flensburg.

  Would she be able to save Felix now?

  She knew that she wouldn’t, but that didn’t mean she would stop fighting for him. She was his wife and she was a fighter. Today she might draw a bowstring twelve inches. Tomorrow it would be twelve and one eighth. It would not have the beasts of the Drakwald fleeing for their herdstones, it might not even draw Felix’s attention from his charts and his cups, but it was proof that she was getting stronger every day, even if nobody saw it but her.

  Time stretched on while she waited her turn with the sisters and her stomach began to growl. The priestesses were busy, she understood that and didn’t mind. It was preferable to being cooped up all day in the house, and sometimes a woman needed a sister’s care. It was her own fault anyway for scrimping on breakfast, but it was too easy when it was only herself and Annabella, and these mornings her stomach threatened outright upheaval at the merest scent of vollkornbrot or liverwurst. It clenched now, a pre-emptive warning.

  It was normal, the sisters had assured her, and would soon pass.

  The breeze blowing through the open door sent a shiver through her bones and she burrowed deeper into the hardwood corner of her bench. It was too cold for autumn. In fact she’d not been touched in such a way since that Nachhexen night in Castle Reikguard when Heinrich Kemmler’s necromancy had sucked the warmth from her veins. She shuddered at the memory.

  ‘You appear unwell, sister.’

  The unexpected voice from behind gave her a start. It was a woman’s voice, but deep as midwinter snow and layered over an accent that harked at lands far beyond Kat’s travels.

  Wearily, her head ever so heavy on her withered neck, Kat tilted her face back across the clamshell arrangement of benches that surrounded the candle shrine and towards the door. The woman who had spoken was seated on the bench behind her but one, leaning forwards with her arms crossed over the back of the one in front. Even seated and slouching, it was clear that the woman was tall, and shapely in a way that Kat had never been. Her slender body was neatly clad in tough leathers that Kat could appreciate. A black widow’s veil masked her face. A passing glance would have shown a war-widow in mourning, but Kat never trusted first impressions. There was something about the woman that suggested grief was as alien a feeling to her as love. Just looking at her gave her unseasonal chills.

  And Kat knew the feel of death when it sat eight feet behind her.

  ‘Finding an ill woman in Shallya’s house is no great feat,’ said Kat. Felix wasn’t the only one to find solace in sarcasm.

  The woman smiled as if reading her thoughts, her own impossible to make out for the black veil that covered her eyes. She appeared to consider her words for a moment before speaking again, leaning forwards over her crossed hands. ‘What if you were shown a way to become strong again? You and Felix could travel as you were meant to. You could again be the terror of the beasts you so despise. More than you ever were before.’

  Kat’s grip on the back of her bench tensed. Unbidden, her other hand moved to cover her belly like a shield. ‘Do you know me?’

  With a wooden growl that echoed through the hall, the woman pushed back her bench and stood. She was even taller than Kat had initially thought, as tall as Felix. Almost certainly a noble. No one else could be fed so well. The woman moved out from the formation of benches and stalked towards her. Stalked was the right word. Her footsteps were soft and silent, like a hunter. A sword swung at her hip. Looking at it made Kat’s fingers curl around the phantom yew of her bow.

  The woman held her position just beyond the blue-green wash thrown by the large stained glass window. Almost as if the light, its sanctity, or both repelled her. Kat shuffled further along the bench and deeper into the light.

  ‘I once feared as you fear, Katerina.’ The woman’s use of her name caught K
at like a fish on a barb. The woman prowled the edge of the light. Kat tried to make out her features, but her weak eyes felt like they were being cooked with a turquoise glow. ‘Even after this gift was given to me I would have rejected it.’ With a laugh as hollow as the ring of moon chimes, the woman stepped into the light, painting her riding leathers in greens and eerie corpse-browns as she knelt and cupped a hand under Kat’s jaw with a supple creak of leather. She brushed aside the single white lock that lay over Kat’s left eye. ‘Now I realise that it does not matter where this strength came from or who gave it. It is mine now and he is gone. And I am more powerful than he ever was.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  The woman seemed almost to purr as her big blue eyes filled Kat’s world. Her mouth opened to reveal the long fangs of a fiend.

  ‘To do a good deed for an old friend.’

  Felix staggered into the great hall of the Shallyan temple with the bandy-legged gait of a sailor, having sprinted across half of the altstadt from Otto’s house to get there. He took in the bare stone walls and columns, the coloured windows, the stink of sickness in one breathless second as he collared a young, white-robed priestess.

  ‘Kat Jaeger. Where is she?’

  The woman pointed through a series of arches to where a half-circle of benches had been arranged before a large stained glass window depicting doves in a clear blue sky and what appeared to be a candlelit shrine. He saw two figures there, one seated while the other knelt, and his heart lurched. The seated figure was clearly Kat, but the other…