by Warhammer
He joined the Slayers in shouting abuse at the dragon, surprised at his own temerity. Normally, he would never in a million years have dared draw the attention of so powerful a beast to himself in such a way, but it seemed the influence of the sword was affecting him greatly. He could tell by the astonished looks Gotrek and Snorri were giving him that they were just as surprised as he was.
Wings beating the air furiously, the dragon rose to the attack. The gyrocopters rose in its wake, though the part of Felix that was still capable of sane thought wondered what they could do to so baleful a creature.
Through the porthole of the cabin, Ulrika watched the battle below with a growing sense of helplessness. There was nothing she could do to affect the outcome of this struggle. She did not have the skills to man any of the weapons or fly the ship. She doubted that she could nick the fearsome beast even if she could get within striking distance of it. And to make matters worse, they were thousands of strides above the surface of the earth. There was no way to hide or flee even if she wanted to.
No. She refused to sit here and be helpless. There must be something she could do. There was only one thing she could think of, so she did it. She snatched up the short powerful horn bow she used for horseback archery, strapped the quiver of arrows over her shoulder and set off to find a place she could shoot from.
Max Schreiber was glad to feel the terror pass. It seemed that the overwhelming power of the dragon to inspire fear in him had been dispelled by something. He was not sure quite what, but somewhere close by he felt a surge of magical energy, pulsing like a beacon. Whatever it was, it was very strong. Was it possible there was another sorcerer on the airship? It did not seem likely. Dwarfs were not known for their proficiency in the magical arts, and he knew that neither Felix nor Ulrika nor either of her two bodyguards were mages. It must be something else.
Whatever it was, he was grateful. His mind was clear, and he felt capable of drawing on the winds of magic once more. He reached deep down into the well of his soul and drew upon his power. In his mind he began to review his most potent spells. Perhaps there was something he could do to affect the outcome of the battle after all. Perhaps.
Looking out of the windows of the command deck at the awesome form of the dragon, he doubted it.
Felix watched the dragon come ever closer. He thought he could hear its mighty wing-beats even above the roar of the organ guns. He was impressed by the sheer size of the thing. He did not think he had ever been this close to so large a living creature. It made part of him feel insignificant, puny, despicable.
And another part of him thirsted for it to come within striking distance, to reach a place where he could engage it in combat. Felix considered this, and realised that whatever it was that wanted the battle, it wasn’t him, it was an external influence. It was something coming from his sword that was making him brandish his blade and shout challenges. While he was glad for the relief from fear, he also resented it. He was the master of his actions, not some ancient semi-sentient weapon. He forced himself to shut his mouth. By an effort of will he brought his sword down and held it in the guard position.
It was difficult but he managed it. The blade fought against him, writhing in his hand like a serpent. In a way he felt like he was drunk, not quite responsible for his actions. It took all his willpower just to keep quiet and hold still but he did so, and the more he did so, the more he felt the strange urges subside. Either he was his own master again or the sword was conserving its energies for the greater struggle.
‘Come taste axeblade,’ Gotrek bellowed.
‘And have a bit of Snorri’s hammer for afters,’ shouted Snorri. Felix watched silently. The creature was almost upon them. He was close enough to smell the Chaos poison on its breath.
The whole hull echoed as if struck by a giant hammer. The force of the impact almost forced Ulrika from the ladder. She felt the cupola surge and swing, and she knew that one of those giant claws must have impacted on the airship. Her heart leapt into her mouth. A vivid picture of the gondola becoming separated from the gasbag and plunging earthwards to its doom filled her mind. Quickly she pushed it away, and resumed her climb. If she was going to die, she wanted to die fighting.
Max rolled along the floor of the command deck, tossed about like a child’s plaything by the force of the impact. He felt the cupola sway as the dragon’s claws smashed into the side of the airship. The whole interior of the vessel vibrated like a drum as the huge reptile’s wings beat against it in a flurry of blows. In his mind’s eye, he saw the dragon clutching at the airship like a tiger on the neck of its prey. It was not a reassuring image.
He looked up and saw Makaisson wrestling with the controls. The dwarf cursed loudly, ‘Bloody overgrown lizard! Tryin’ to eat us alive, so it is. Bloody stupid critter if ye ask me. It cannae eat solid steel. Can it? Well, can it?’
In his heart, Max was not so sure. He did know that the dragon did not need to be able to consume them to destroy them. A few more blows like that would pull the gondola loose and then they would all be dead.
Varek was really excited. He had thought that nothing could top his descent into the bowels of Karag Dum with the Slayers and Felix but this was close to proving him wrong. Aerial combat with a dragon, he thought. What a chapter this would be in his book. He lifted the portable organ gun Makaisson had given him. He decided it was time to get a few good shots at the dragon.
Felix felt the deck sway beneath his feet at the impact. The dragon’s claws had smashed into the side of the airship. The sound of shrieking metal filled his ears as the hull gave way under the force of the blow. The dragon’s long neck snaked up. It took a bite from the gasbag, lifting away a huge patch of the outer skin. Nacelles exploded in its mouth. Felix shuddered, wondering how much of this punishment the ship could take. A sweep of the enormous tail curled right round the gondola and came down on one of the organ guns, flattening it and the gunner. The wreckage of the turret went plummeting into space, tumbling to earth far far below.
Things were not looking good. The whole hull creaked when the dragon rested its weight on it. The dragon extended its long scaly neck and suddenly its head was looming over Felix.
Gotrek and Snorri rushed forward. Snorri’s axe lashed out and bounced from the dragon’s hide. His hammer had no discernible effect. Gotrek’s axe on the other hand bit home, cleaving the armoured skin and drawing blood. The dragon bellowed with rage. Its enormous head swung round to regard the Slayer balefully. Felix saw the malign intelligence in the creature’s eyes and knew that the dragon planned to revenge itself on the tiny creature that had hurt it.
It opened its mouth. The fires of hell burned within its jaws. Felix thought the creature looked almost as if it were smiling. Some strange impulse compelled him to throw himself between Gotrek and the dragon just as it breathed. He fought back the desire to scream as a wall of flame hurtled towards him.
Max chanted the words of the spell, drawing more and more magical energy to him. He knew he was only going to get one chance at this and he wanted to make the best use of it. Even if the dragon destroyed them, it gave him slight satisfaction to think that he would hurt it.
As the words tumbled from his mouth, he felt the winds of magic swirl about him. Responding to the arcane properties of the mantra, golden magic was drawn to him. His gestures shaped it, moulded it, the way a potter moulds clay. Beneath his hands and the force of his mind and words, a huge bolt of energy took shape. When the surge of energy was almost too great to hold, he made the final gesture and sent it spiralling towards the dragon.
A massive beam of gold light smashed outwards, passing harmlessly through the crystal of the window, before impacting on the dragon’s flesh and boring inwards towards its heart.
Ulrika pulled herself out of the hatchway on the top of the gasbag. She was just in time to see Felix jump between Gotrek and the dragon as it breathed. She knew in that moment that he was going to die.
‘No!’ she shouted. At t
he same time, responding without thought, her body was already bringing the bow up to the firing position, nocking the arrow, and bringing it to bear on the dragon’s eye.
Varek pulled back on the control stick with one hand, and blasted away with the portable organ gun with the other. It had very little effect. He could see scales being blasted out of the dragon’s hide but it was like using buckshot on a curtain wall. It might be uncomfortable for the dragon, but he was not going to do any real harm. Perhaps his book was going to end here, he thought. Perhaps this was where the story stopped.
Felix could not quite believe what happened next. As the flame flashed down at him, he brought the sword up to parry. It was a pointless futile gesture, made more from force of habit than from any hope of being able to save himself. And something happened. The runes on the blade blazed brighter. The blaze of heat and pain did not come. Some sorcerous force protected him.
He felt enormous pressure on him, as if he was pushing against the current of a river. For a moment, he felt as if he was going to be blown right off the top of the gasbag but he braced himself and held his ground. Slowly he forced himself forward, moving to strike the dragon. The blade pulsed brighter in anticipation of the blow.
Ulrika unleashed the arrow. It flew straight and true towards the dragon’s eye, but at the last second the creature moved and the arrow buried itself in one of the strange tendrils descending from the monster’s brow. The creature’s roar of hatred was deafening.
The dragon Skjalandir was frustrated. This was not going as he had planned. This strange vessel was putting up a fight. There was a sorcerer on board directing spells at him. That dwarf’s axe was as potent a weapon as any he had seen in his two thousand years of existence, and as for the sword that puny human was carrying, it almost worried him. It glittered with an ancient malice directed at all of his kind.
Rage and hatred filled him. He was easily angered now. He knew it. He had changed since those two identical albino sorcerers had woken him from his long sleep. He feared he knew why too. The one with the golden staff had driven warpstone charms into his flesh. The one with the ebony staff had wound him round with charms he had been too drowsy to resist. There was something of the memory of their arcane ritual that filled him with fear as well as anger. He remembered the name of a dark god, the Changer, ringing through his lair. He remembered the way the mages had spurned his great hoard. He knew he had been trapped in some sort of spell of their making, and he knew his mind was clouded and there was nothing he could do about it.
The axe bit home again, burying itself in the tendons of his neck. It was like an ant bite to Skjalandir. Painful, irritating, but hardly fatal. The same applied to the spell attacking his flanks, and the stings of those tiny guns. Really there was nothing these little creatures could do that would actually harm him. It was time to end this farce.
Skjalandir considered his options. He could breathe on the gasbag structure above the metal gondola. When he had slashed it, he had detected the thousands of smaller nacelles inside. His draconic mind was quite clever enough to grasp that these were what kept the ship aloft. If they could be made to catch fire...
Would the spell the sword had woven to protect its wielder against his breath protect the inanimate structure? Skjalandir doubted it. He would teach these dwarf interlopers to invade his realm, befoul his hunting grounds with their machines. He would kill them as he had killed all the other dwarfs who had come against him. He would destroy this vessel the way he had destroyed the towns surrounding his lair and there was nothing they could do to stop him.
Or perhaps he should continue to strike at the metal gondola. If he separated it from the gasbag all of those within would plummet to their doom. Then he could pick off the creatures on the gasbag at his leisure. Something within his warpstone-tormented mind preferred the latter option. It was more cruel.
He was aware of the other gyrocopters moving closer. Let them. Their steam breath could not harm him, and their pathetic explosive eggs would barely scratch his armour. That’s if they dared use their weapons so close to the airship. They were much more likely to harm their own vessel than to hurt Skjalandir.
Max felt the surge of magical energy above him. A protective spell, he guessed, and not cast by a mortal wizard. All wizards had their own magical signature, as distinctive as a voice. It could be recognised by a fellow worker of the mystic arts unless disguised. A skilled practitioner, like Max, could even tell the race and usually the sex of a caster from it most of the time, but for this one he had no clue. A device or a rune perhaps, and yet there was the hint of some sort of alien intelligence behind it.
Not that he was likely to find out now, Max thought. He had realised moments after he had unleashed his spell that he was fooling himself if he thought he was really going to harm the dragon. He could hurt it, cause it pain, but he could no more kill it than a bee sting could kill an elephant. The creature was too large and powerful and there was too much magic woven into its very nature for Max to be able to really harm it.
Another thing more powerful than I, he thought wryly. I seem to be meeting a lot of them lately.
His mind flickered through the routines of the escape spell, but he doubted it would do much good. It probably couldn’t carry him all the way to the ground and even if it could he still would be travelling with all his current velocity in the direction he was currently moving. If he got to earth he would be travelling at the same speed and in the same direction as the Spirit of Grungni, and would most likely smash into a rock or a tree or some other obstacle.
And he was not sure he wanted to leave. Ulrika was on this ship and he did not want to abandon her. While she still lived, he wasn’t going anywhere.
Felix looked up at the dragon. He felt as if it were taunting him. It was flying just out of striking distance and ignoring the challenges roared by Gotrek and Snorri. He knew that it wanted them to know it could destroy them at will. It was toying with them. It appeared that everything he had ever read about the malice and cruelty of dragons was true.
He felt a brief surge of despair. After all this, was it going to end this way? It hardly seemed fair that after all the many adventures he had survived he was going to meet his doom during a chance encounter in the Worlds Edge Mountains. Then again, who knew when the day of their death would come? Everyone’s luck ran out eventually, and recently he had begun to suspect that he had had more than his fair share. He was only sorry that Ulrika was here – and that he was not with her at this final moment.
He glanced over at Gotrek to see how the Slayer was behaving now that his last moments were upon him. Fittingly enough, Felix decided. The dwarf was waving his axe and bellowing threats at the dragon. Snorri was egging him on.
From the corner of his eye, Felix saw something looping upwards to gain height above the dragon and then come crashing down like a swooping hawk.
Varek grasped the controls of his gyrocopter and gnawed his beard in frustration. He had done his best to slay the dragon but it ignored his organ gun and he could not hit it with his bombs. Now it was about to destroy the Spirit of Grungni.
Worse than that, aboard the airship was the lost treasure of Karag Dum and the Hammer of Firebeard, one of the legendary weapons of his people. If the Spirit of Grungni was destroyed the hammer might be lost once more, perhaps this time forever. Varek was proud of his part in this expedition, proud of being part of the airship’s crew, and prouder yet he had taken part in the expedition that had returned this ancient rune-weapon to his people. If they failed now, he knew that he would have to shave his head and become a Slayer to atone for his failure. He knew he could not live with the knowledge that they had come so far, suffered so much, and yet had failed at the last. He knew it would eat away at him for the rest of his life.
And a heartbeat after that the thought struck him, he knew the answer to his problem. If he became a Slayer he would need to seek his doom in combat against the mightiest of monsters. Before him was one of t
he mightiest. He would never find another so great, of that he was sure. He had a weapon that might kill it too, although at the cost of his life. Still, it was a mighty deed. A doom that would cause his name to live forever in the annals of his people and bring eternal glory to his clan and his ancestors. With a single action he could become a Dragon Slayer, and save the lives of all his fellows. Not wanting to give himself a chance to reconsider his decision, he acted immediately. He wrenched the control stick of his gyrocopter, jammed the throttle to full and aimed straight for the dragon before him.
The rotor blades hit first biting, great chunks out of the dragon’s flesh, then the nose rotors chopped in too. The sudden smashing impact ripped the engine apart, and a massive explosion smashed through Varek’s body.
His last regret before darkness took him was that he would never live to complete his book.
Felix watched the gyrocopter flash down on the dragon. At the last moment he got a glimpse of a familiar face. Varek, he thought, don’t do it! Even if his thought could have influenced Varek’s decision it was too late. The gyrocopter smashed into the dragon. Its rotor blades carved out great chunks of dragon flesh. The force of the impact smashed the dragon down and away from the airship. Moments later there was a massive explosion as the gyrocopter and its cargo of explosives ignited. A fireball enveloped the dragon as it fell. Felix could see no way anything could survive. He was wrong.
The dragon tumbled headlong towards the ground’s hungry embrace. Felix thought that any second it was going to smash into the ground but it did not. At the last moment, its wings snapped open, and its headlong fall stopped. As Felix watched it began to move upwards once more. At first he feared it was unharmed and coming for them again, but then to his relief he saw that its flight was wobbly and that it was heading off into the distance.
Grief tugged at his heart. He could not believe Varek was gone. The young dwarf had been a companion on one of his most dangerous adventures and suddenly he was just not there any more. Death’s claw had reached out and taken him. It was unjust, he decided, looking over at Gotrek and Snorri to see how the Slayers were taking it.