by Warhammer
Not that it mattered now. Arek knew he was the dwarf’s master. No mortal was his match for speed or guile, and Arek’s armour and weapons were just as powerful as the Slayer’s. In a few more heartbeats he would be gazing down on the dwarf’s corpse.
He moved forward once more, smashing his sword down, aiming for the Slayer’s head. The dwarf moved aside slower this time, and Arek opened a cut on his temple. His axe smashed into the Slayer’s weapon again, forcing the dwarf back another step. Soon they would be at the entrance to a burning building, and there would be nowhere else for the dwarf to retreat.
Arek saw rage and something like fear burning in the mad dwarf’s one good eye. His opponent knew he was doomed. Now was the time when he would be most dangerous. Soon the dwarf would throw all his strength into one last desperate attack. Arek focused all his concentration on his foe, readying himself for the moment of supreme victory.
It came as a complete surprise to him when he felt something barrel into him just behind his knee. His leg started to give way. He heard a voice bellow, ‘This one is Bjorni Bjornisson’s!’
He looked around and down and saw a second, repulsively ugly Slayer glaring up at him. Reflexively he brought his sword smashing down. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of something metallic, covered in baleful runes, flashing towards his head.
It was the last thing he ever saw. As he died, the realisation that Lord Tzeentch had played a terrible trick on him flared through his mind.
To Felix it looked like everything happened at once. One moment, Arek stood triumphant, about to slay Gotrek with one blow. In the next, Snorri and Bjorni had barrelled into the warrior, upsetting everything.
Bjorni hit the warlord just behind the left knee, throwing him off-balance. His weapon bounced from the ornate Chaos armour but the force of the blow was still enough to upset Arek.
In the same instant, Snorri lashed out with both hammer and axe. The sheer power of his blows started the warlord toppling.
Even so, Arek was still deadly. As he fell, his savage slash smashed through poor Bjorni’s skull, splitting his head in two, and giving Felix the sort of view of the dwarf’s teeth, brains and skull that he could cheerfully have lived without. At the same time, he twisted to his right, attempting to catch Snorri with his axe. The Slayer managed to get both his weapons in the way, but the power of Arek’s blow sheared through the hammer head, and chopped through the haft of the axe, before carving a slice from Snorri’s chest.
At the sight of this, Gotrek howled a curse and lashed out with his axe. The mighty starmetal blade shrieked as it hit the neck guard of Arek’s armour. Sparks flared. The runes on the axe-blade blazed bright as miniature suns. Then the axe cut right through the armour like a knife through rotten cheese. Arek’s head parted from his shoulders, hit the ground, bounced once and rolled to land at Felix’s feet.
Caught up in the moment, not quite knowing why he did it, Felix picked the helm up and brandished it aloft.
‘Your warlord is dead!’ he shouted. Droplets of black blood dripped from Arek’s severed neck. Where they fell, the snow sizzled and melted. ‘Your warlord is dead!’
The beastmen looked upon him and fell back in dismay, as if unwilling to believe the evidence of their eyes. Felix looked over at Gotrek. The Slayer spat on the red-flecked snow in disgust.
‘Once again it seems I am robbed of a mighty doom, manling!’ he shouted, glaring at Snorri as if he held the other dwarf personally responsible. Snorri shrugged, looked at the remains of his weapons, and gently leaned down and picked up Bjorni’s axe.
‘Still plenty of killing to be done, Gotrek Gurnisson,’ he said quietly.
‘By Grimnir, you’re right there!’ Gotrek said. With that, he turned and lunged into the panicking beastmen like a swimmer diving into an ocean of blood.
Slowly at first, then more swiftly, word of Arek’s fall passed through the remains of the Chaos army. Fleeing beastmen spread panic and disorder among their comrades. Without quite knowing why, those comrades also joined the general rout. The embattled defenders, sensing a real change in their fortunes at last, fought back with renewed fury.
Seeing the tide of battle turn, Duke Enrik led the remainder of his forces from the inner citadel, helping to drive the mutants and monsters back towards the gaps in the walls.
With the departure of the sorcerers, the spells binding the energies of dark magic unravelled and failed. The daemonic war engines lost power and became lifeless hulks. The last of the ravaging daemons thinned, faded and vanished into clouds of brimstone reek.
At the Gate of Gargoyles, the duke and his men linked up with the riders of the Ice Queen. Amid the destruction they saluted each other for a moment, then led their armies forth to complete the first victory in the Second Great War Against Chaos.
VAMPIRESLAYER
William King
BOOK ONE
PRAAG
‘At that time, in the depths of that dreadful winter, I thought myself well acquainted with horror and pain. During the siege of Praag I had endured the loss of many trusty companions to the fiends of Chaos. But all the travails I had previously undergone shrank to insignificance compared to what was to come. For, through some strange quirk of fate or jest of the Dark Gods, the Slayer and I were destined to encounter an ancient, terrible evil and to lose several more of those who had been closest to us in the most peculiar and terrible of ways. The darkest of our days were yet to come.’
— From My Travels With Gotrek, Vol IV, by Herr Felix Jaeger
(Altdorf Press, 2505)
ONE
Felix Jaeger strode through the ruins of Praag – burnt out buildings, ruins, and rubble, as far as the eye could see. The remains of a few collapsed tenements poked their scorched heads from the all-enveloping snow. Here and there men piled bodies on carts to be taken away and burned. It was a thankless and probably fruitless task. Many corpses would not now be found until the spring thaws, when the snow covering them melted. That’s if they were not excavated and eaten first, Felix thought. The effects of starvation were written on the faces of people all around him. Felix pulled his faded red Sudenland wool cloak more tightly around him and strode on towards the White Boar – or where it had been, before the battle. He had grown bored with the triumphal banquets in the Citadel and the company of the Kislevite nobles. A man could only stand to listen to so many speeches praising the valour of the city’s defenders and the courage of the relieving army before his ears felt as if they would fall off. His tolerance for listening to nobility congratulating themselves on their heroism was not as great as it once had been. It was time to see what the Slayers were up to. They had left the banquet early the previous evening and not been seen since. Felix had a shrewd idea that he knew where he could find them.
He walked through the remains of what had been the Street of the Silk Merchants, surveying the burned out remains of the great warehouses. Pale, lean and hungry people, wrapped in ragged coats, were everywhere, trudging heads down through the snow, taking shelter in the ruins of the old storehouses. Many eyed him as if wondering whether he carried enough money to make him worth the risk of robbing. Some looked at him as if he might be their next meal, quite literally. Felix kept his hand near the hilt of his sword, and wore the fiercest expression he could muster on his face.
In the distance, the temple bells rang out in celebration. Felix wondered if he was the only one who found anything ironic in their joyous clamour. Considering their dire straits it was surprising how many of the people looked cheerful. He supposed most of them had expected to be dead by now. Nigh unbelievably the great Chaos horde of Arek Daemonclaw had been thrown back, and the mighty Chaos warlord had been defeated. The Gospodar muster and a ferocious bombing attack mounted by the airship, the Spirit of Grungni, had delivered the city from that vast army. Against all odds the heroic city of Praag had been saved from the mightiest army to attack it in two centuries.
It had been a victory bought at high c
ost. More than half of the Novygrad, the New City, that vast, densely populated warren of narrow streets between the outer wall and the old inner wall surrounding the Citadel, was gone, burned to the ground when the rampaging Chaos warriors had broken through into the city. Nearly a quarter of the city’s population was dead according to the quick and informal survey conducted by the duke’s censors. The same number again were expected to die of hunger, disease and exposure to the bitter chill of the northern winter. And that was assuming no more marauding armies emerged from the Northern Wastes. The outer wall was still breached in three places, and would not withstand any more assaults.
In the distance Felix could smell the sickly sweet scent of burning flesh. Somewhere out there people were warming their hands around funeral pyres for the slain. It was the only way to get rid of so many corpses quickly. There were too many now to be buried, the earth too hard to be broken by spades. There were still worries about plague. The dreadful diseases unleashed by the worshippers of Nurgle, the Lord of Disease, during the siege had made a resurgence in the aftermath of the battle. Some claimed it was the Plague Daemon’s revenge for the slaughter of his followers. The wizard Max Schreiber thought it more likely that the cold, the hunger and the depressing effects of the Kislevite winter were making the population more prone to the spore daemons that carried disease. Felix smiled sourly; a man with a theory for everything was Max Schreiber, and depressingly correct most of them had proven too.
A wailing woman tried frantically to stop two of the carters bearing off the body of a dead man, her lover, her husband or her brother perhaps. Most of the people in the city had lost at least one kinsman. Entire families had been wiped out. Felix thought about the people he had known who had died in the battle. Two of the dwarf Slayers, young Ulli and the hideously ugly Bjorni, had been burned on those huge funeral bonfires.
Why had this happened, Felix wondered? What had driven the Chaos worshippers from their remote realms in the uttermost north, and compelled them to attack the city? Why had they chosen the weeks before the onset of winter for their assault? It was an act of insanity. Even if they had taken Praag, they would have suffered quite as much from the effects of the cold and snow as the people of the city now were. More so, for such was the grim determination of the Kislevites that they would have burned their entire city to the ground rather than see it fall into the hands of their bitterest enemies. Felix supposed that the daemon forces would have had fewer qualms about devouring corpses or even each other, but even so their attack had been madness.
He shook his head. What was the point of trying to understand them anyway? You would have to be mad to willingly follow the daemon gods of Chaos, and that was all he needed to know. It was pointless for any sane man to try and understand the motives of such lost souls. Of course, Felix had heard many theories. Max Schreiber claimed that a huge tide of dark magical energy was flowing south out of the Chaos Wastes, and that it was goading the daemon worshippers to new heights of insane fury.
‘Repent! Repent!’ shouted a lean man with burning eyes. He stood on the pedestal once occupied by a statue of Tsar Alexander and ranted at the crowd. Foam gathered at the corners of his mouth. His long hair was lank. He looked like he had lost touch with sanity a long time ago. ‘The gods are punishing you for your sins.’
It seemed the zealots who preached in the burned out squares of the city had their own theories. They claimed that the end of the world had arrived, and that the Chaos horde had merely been a harbinger of worse things to come. That theory only lost plausibility slightly when you considered that these were the same people who claimed that the end of the world had arrived with the Chaos horde. They had been forced to change their story a little when the horde had been defeated. Felix fought down the urge to shout at the man. People had enough troubles without being harangued by a furious lunatic. A quick glance told him it was pointless. Nobody was paying the zealot any heed despite the way he had bared his breast and pummelled his own chest in fury. Most folk walked swiftly by, trying to finish whatever business they had and get back to whatever meagre shelter they might possess. The man might as well have been shouting his anger at the wind.
A few stalls had been set up at the corners of the Square of the Simoners. Men in the winged lion tabard of the duke’s household doled out a ration of grain to a queue of hungry folk. The measure was now down to half a cup. Of course, the duke was now also feeding the assembled force of the Gospodar muster, nearly five thousand warriors and their mounts. They were camped out in the remains of the city and the burned out farms that surrounded it. Felix pushed his way quickly round the edge of the square, doing his best to avoid being caught up in the teeming mass of hacking, coughing, scratching flesh. He kept one hand on his sword hilt and one on his purse. Where crowds gathered you could never be too careful.
Felix had heard people say that the Ice Queen, the Tsarina of Kislev, had power over the winter weather. If that was so, he thought, why did she not loosen winter’s grip on the throat of her people? Perhaps such magic was beyond her power. It looked as if not even the Lords of Chaos had the power to do so, and surely they, most of all, had reason to do that, unless this whole invasion was just some sort of grim divine jest for their own amusement. From what he had seen when he had flown over the Chaos Wastes, Felix would not put it past them.
As he exited the square huge, thick flakes of snow began to fall, brushing coldly against his cheek. It frosted the hair of the folk about him. Felix was sick of the sight of it. He thought he was used to snow. Winters in the Empire were long and harsh but they were a summer picnic compared to what winter brought here. He had never seen so much snow fall, so quickly, and never known it to be quite this cold. He had heard rumours of huge, white dire wolves stalking the city’s outskirts and making off with children and the weak. He had heard tales of other worse things too. It seemed the Kislevites had horror stories for everything concerned with winter. Hardly surprising, he supposed, and he had seen enough of the world to know that there was most likely a grain of truth behind all of them.
Felix told himself not to be so dour. After all, he was alive when he had fully expected to meet his death during the Chaos horde’s attack. He could even leave the city on the mighty airship, the Spirit of Grungni, when Malakai Makaisson departed. True, that would mean returning to Karak Kadrin, the squat savage home of the Slayer cult, but surely even that would be preferable to spending the winter in Praag. Only a fool or a madman would want to do that.
Felix knew that really he had no choice in the matter. He was sworn to follow Gotrek and record his doom. Wherever the Slayer chose to go, he was bound to follow. Surely not even Gotrek would choose to remain in Kislev? Felix shook his head. The Slayer would most likely do it out of sheer pig-headedness. He seemed happiest when things were most uncomfortable, and Felix could imagine few places more guaranteed to provide a healthy measure of discomfort than this snowbound, burned out shell of a city.
Now that he and Ulrika Magdova had finally separated, there was no real reason for him to stay. Briefly he wondered where the Kislevite noblewoman was. Most likely she was still with Max Schreiber, back at the banquet; the two of them were thick as thieves these days.
Ulrika claimed it was because of the honour debt she owed the wizard for saving her life during the plague. Felix was not quite so sure. It was hard for him not to feel jealous of the mage, even though, theoretically, he and Ulrika were not a couple any more.
Yes, he told himself, moving on was for the best.
The snow crunched under his boots. He walked towards a charcoal brazier where a vendor was selling skewered rats. He did so more because he wanted heat than any of the four-legged chicken the man was selling.
The vendor seemed to read his thoughts and gave him a glare. Felix met the man’s look evenly until he glanced down and away. Despite his scholarly appearance he felt there were few men in the city who would give him trouble at times like this. Over the long period of his associat
ion with the Slayer, he had learned how to intimidate all but the most confident when he wanted to.
From over by the entrance to the Alleyway of Loose Women, above which a red lantern still burned even in this gloomy daylight, he heard the sound of weeping. The more cautious part of his mind told him to move on, to avoid any trouble. The curious part egged him on to investigate. The battle was over in heartbeats, and he marched over to the mouth of the alley. He saw an old woman weeping. She was bent over something and then leaned back and let out a terrible wail of anguish. No one else seemed to be paying much heed. Misery was abundant in Praag this season, and no one had much reason to go looking to share someone else’s.
‘What is it, mother?’ Felix asked.
‘Who you calling “mother”, priest boy?’ the old woman responded. There was anger in her voice now, as well as grief. She was looking for someone to focus it on, to distract herself. Felix guessed he had just made himself the target.
‘Did I offend you?’ he asked, still polite, studying the woman more closely. He could see that she was not really all that old. She just looked that way. Her face was covered in rouge to hide the pockmarks. Her tears had smudged her makeup horribly. Black rivulets ran down her powdered cheeks. A streetgirl, he decided, one of those who sold herself for a penny a tumble. Then he looked at her feet and a faint thrill of shock passed through him as he saw why she was crying. ‘Was she a friend of yours?’
It was the pale corpse of another girl. At first he thought she had died of the cold, then he noticed how utterly unnatural her pallor was. He bent down and saw that her throat was bruised. Some instinct told him to run his fingers over it. The flesh was torn, as if a beast had gnawed at it.
‘You a watchman?’ the woman asked aggressively. She reached out and grabbed his cloak, thrusting her face close to his. ‘You secret police?’