by Warhammer
Alanaer crouched by Junas.
‘He’s alive,’ the warrior-priest declared. He pulled the big man up to sitting, and smiled ruefully as the brawler spat out another tooth. ‘But I doubt he’ll be breaking any more young ladies’ hearts with this face.’
Halik managed a nervous chuckle. ‘Skaven,’ she muttered, as it left her.
‘More of Thanquol’s craven minions, I expect.’ Gotrek moved like a statue taking life, slowly, vitrified gore and dust trickling from his shoulders. He drew in a shuddering breath, then coughed it up. He wiped blood from his bottom lip on his thumb, then lifted it to his eye. He grunted and stuck it in his mouth. ‘Leftovers from the war on the other side of the Stormrift Gate. With skaven you never can kill them all.’
‘No.’ Alanaer shook his head. ‘The servants of the Great Corruptor have long coveted my Queen’s realm. I expect that their presence here predates the Grey Lord’s invasions of Hammerhal Aqsha by some time.’
‘What have you found here, darkling?’ Halik looked up at the archway that Maleneth had discovered. Her footsteps slowed noticeably as she looked on it. She shivered as she reached out to run her hand along the inside of the stone arch, hesitating, finally bringing the hand back to her side unused. ‘Tambrin passed this way,’ she breathed. ‘The ground here is marked, and not by skaven paws. And.’ The ranger paused, ear cocked. ‘Can you hear that?’
Maleneth listened, then nodded, impressed. The ranger was good.
For a human.
‘Footsteps,’ she said.
‘And still only one set,’ said Halik.
‘He has somehow bypassed a locked door, a watch patrol and now a skaven ambush as well,’ said Maleneth. ‘He belongs in a temple of Khaine, this child.’ She turned to join the old ranger in her study of the arch. ‘It reeks of soulblight and carrion. Whatever dwells beyond this portal, I fear it is beyond even Khaine’s reach now. Such things are best left buried.’
Gotrek heaved himself to his feet with a clink of gold chain and a dying splutter of half-seen flame. Maleneth had to marvel at his determination. And all this for the myth of an ancient ghost, for surely Gotrek Gurnisson cared less for this Tambrin boy than even she did, and she cared nothing at all. It was with a mixture of amazement and frustration she was lately becoming painfully familiar with that she watched the Slayer limp towards her.
‘What are you all standing about for?’ he said. ‘There’s black work ahead of us yet.’
After what he had inflicted on the plague monks, nobody felt inclined to argue.
A chill blue light shone from the passage beyond the archway. The languid movements of the mist that filled the corridor diffused and scattered it. It was like being submerged in water. Maleneth felt her breath starting to come quick and shallow. She studied the walls. Frost prickled the weeds and mosses that encrusted their ancient stonework. But aside from the chill the plants looked healthy. The air in this part of the dungeon smelled clean. For some reason, that pristine quality troubled her more than the rank despoliation in the chamber that had preceded it. It was the sterility of abandonment. Nothing had moved in to claim these halls. That alone was enough to give Maleneth’s heart jitters.
There was a tired creak as Halik raised her bow.
The ranger’s aim wavered.
‘Sigmar preserve us.’
Maleneth drew her hand from the frost-stippled wall and looked up. Her eyes were sharper than those of the human ranger. At that precise moment she wished they were not.
Between her looking away and turning back the mists ahead had parted. Or rather, something had drawn them apart. They clung to the walls of the passage in a way that was wholly unnatural, trembling like cold skin, and bathed in blueish light. A taller-than-human figure stood revealed in the ankle-deep mist. Its body was formed of crackling energy. A long cloak and a suit of ribbed, holly-like armour filtered its fell glow. It turned its head to look back over its shoulder and Maleneth felt that her heart would stop. A black helmet masked its face with coiling shadows. In one fizzing blue hand it led a small boy. Were one to mentally unbox the ears and reset the nose then the resemblance to Junas would have been striking. For all that he was standing upright, the boy seemed to be sound asleep.
‘Thambrin,’ said Junas, the most recent break to his nose making his voice come out as a frightened honk. ‘Praith Thigmar.’ He shook off Alanaer’s supporting arm and tottered forwards, hand outstretched to his son. ‘I’m here, Thambrin.’
The shade drew the boy in close.
‘Begone, spirit.’ Gotrek hefted his axe. Its forgefires chased the shadows from his face, filling its creases with new ones. ‘Release the child and walk amongst the living no longer.’
The shade turned to regard them fully, pushing the boy behind its back. It flickered rather than moved, its outline stuttering in and out of focus with a horrible vibration as though it were only weakly tethered to the living realm.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Junas snarled. ‘Thoot it.’
Maleneth was not sure if Halik did as Junas demanded or if terror had simply loosened her hold on her bowstring.
A foot away from the ragged armour of its chest her arrow disintegrated. Aged a thousand years in the blink of an eye, the shaft fell to dust like a stick fed into a Kharadron steam-shredder. A brittle wedge of rusted and barely recognisable steel dinked on the spirit’s breastplate and dropped to the floor. The apparition crunched it under one icy boot. It looked up. Maleneth gasped in horror as its helmet melted back. A skull face glared out from a hood of shadow, eyes blazing with malefic lightning. The breath that Maleneth had taken caught. It refused to come out. She felt it freeze in her lungs where it hid, icicles creeping outwards into her heart. Her mouth stretched into a silent scream, her black hair turning slowly white.
Then the ghost screamed.
It hit Maleneth like a lightning bolt. Something inside her braced, clinging on to meat and bone like a drowning woman to a wrecked ship in a storm. From the corner of her eye she saw Halik as her soul was blasted from her body. Pale and ephemeral, its hands grasped for the ranger’s body, but passed through, unable to prevent the corpse from toppling. With a plaintive wail the disembodied soul dissolved into the aether. Maleneth grit her teeth. Junas had folded to the ground, his hands over his ears. Alanaer was screaming. Over and over. As if to block out the banshee cry with the terrified sound of his own voice.
‘It is the ghost of Hanberra!’ the warrior-priest wailed, holding his hammer before him as if its crossed shadow would ward the visitation from his sight. ‘By the light of my Queen, it is true. The hero who broke free from Sigmar’s lightning to go back for his family!’
Even without the benefit of a dark legend, Maleneth would have known that this was no ordinary shade. The empty halls. The skaven’s terror. Its bearing and raiment – all made it clear that this had been the spirit of a great hero in life. But death had eroded him until only the deepest core of the warrior’s former personality remained.
A solitary purpose.
‘I said unhand him,’ said Gotrek.
Unlike the others, the Slayer simply looked weary, as though having been burned once by the purple sun of Uthan Barrowalker, the winds of Shyish could no longer touch him. Maleneth looked for the warning flicker of runefire, but in vain. The master rune was cool in the Slayer’s chest. It was, perhaps, a sign of the tremendous power it contained that once unleashed it took time to recharge. Not that that came as any great solace to Maleneth at that moment.
‘Give me my thon,’ snarled Junas. ‘He’th mine, not yours.’
‘He’s mine. Not yours.’
The words echoed back at them as if from a deep well.
Maleneth shuddered.
The ghost of Hanberra did not move. One moment it was upright. Then it was turned away, hunched over the sleepwalking boy. And then it was facing its mortal pur
suers again, the boy held in its arms, drifting away from them as though drawn on the freezing in-breath of the deep earth itself.
‘Thambrin!’
Junas lurched into a charge.
Gotrek caught his scuffed and damaged wrist with one hand. Despite barely coming up to the big man’s chest, the duardin stopped him without effort.
‘Don’t be an idiot, manling,’ he said in a voice like stone. ‘You’ve failed the boy once today already. Don’t fail him again by dying now.’ The Slayer pulled back on Junas’ arm, dragging him easily to the floor at his feet. He looked down the passageway towards the towering wraith. ‘Your boy is dead, spirit, as are you. Unhand this one and face a dwarf nearer your own age. My axe will grant you the release you seek.’
The spirit issued a sepulchral moan.
‘Release.’
Its cloak flapped about it like the wings of a bat and a warhammer of truly monstrous proportion appeared in one gauntleted fist. With the other hand, it cosseted the still-sleeping infant to its chest.
Then with a hiss it swung.
Gotrek ducked his head at the last moment.
The hammer punched a hole through the roof of his crest and pulverised a block from the wall. Masonry dust rained through the embittered shade. It painted the Slayer grey. Gotrek shook it off his head, shortened his grip on his axe, and punched it straight up into the spirit’s body. The red runes on its fyresteel blades glowed like coals plucked from a fire. The shade flickered and the fyrestorm greataxe cleaved through scraps of aether. The wraith rematerialised a dozen feet away. Swifter than Maleneth could follow it moved again, its hammer no longer there, embedded in stone beside the Slayer’s face, but here, poised above its own crackling skull at the apex of a downswing.
Gotrek threw himself to one side as the hammer stove in the flagstone he had been standing on. He landed on his back with a crunch of armour and a gravelly curse. The duardin was insanely tough, but nimble he was not.
Alanaer began to chant.
The ice that caked the stonework around Hanberra’s feet cracked and hissed. Vines groped from the thaw to tug on the harder edges of the spectre’s armour. A tendril wound its way up his leg to reach for the sleeping child.
The shade pulled Tambrin in close and hissed. ‘He’s mine. Not yours.’ It drew in a breath of amethyst-flecked magic, turned towards the warrior-priest, and screamed.
Alanaer was lifted from his feet and thrown back down the passageway. He landed on his back and rolled. Unconscious or dead, Maleneth did not know. Either way he did not get up again.
Taking full advantage of the distraction, Gotrek hacked at the shade’s ankle from prone. The fyresteel blade passed through the spirit’s leg, leaving a flickering line of blue energy and golden fire where it had crossed. The shade stuttered in and out of form, screeching in outrage. Maleneth covered her sensitive ears as the ghost of Hanberra kicked Gotrek in the ribs. There was a blast of sound and pressure as if from a thunderbolt and the Slayer was hurled across the passageway, plunging into the mist like a brick into water before crunching into the stonework behind it.
Shaking masonry from his crest, Gotrek pulled himself back up.
This is it, Maleneth thought. The Slayer’s doom.
Finally he could die. She could recover the rune from his remains and, if she was quick about it, return to Azyr late in some kind of triumph.
Hanberra drifted back. Its hammer blinked to a defensive position as Gotrek shrugged off the last of the wall and barrelled towards it with a roar. Maleneth frowned. She could see that Hanberra was not fighting to its utmost. The ghost actually seemed more intent on shielding the child in its arms than it was on actually defeating Gotrek.
And that, Maleneth thought, is just not going to be good enough.
She rifled through what was left in her various pouches and pockets. Her long mission had kept her away from the blood markets of Azyrheim, and her fruitless efforts to concoct a poison that would actually kill Gotrek Gurnisson had depleted her supplies still further. But she still had a few herbs. Poisons that she had not yet thought to try. Her fingers closed around the hard nut of a wightclove and she withdrew it from her pocket. It was tough, ridged and white as bone. She kissed it for Khaine’s blessing and then crushed it to a powder against the back of her hand.
Leaping into the midst of the contest with a yell, Maleneth struck the powder from the back of her hand and across Hanberra’s arm. The arm that held the boy.
The spirit shrieked as its arm and shoulder wavered.
A concentrated and properly delivered dose of freshly harvested wightclove would banish a spirit and, though Maleneth would not like to test it, cause severe discomfort to a Mortarch. With a single dried clove the best she could hope for was a temporary loss of corporeality, but that was all she wanted. The shade tried desperately to keep a hold of the child, but its efforts were as fruitless as those of Halik’s spirit had been on her own body. Its arm had taken on the consistency of mist. The child fell through it. Maleneth dived as the spirit cried out in anguish, intercepting the boy before he could hit the ground, and then rolled, curling to protect his body with her own.
She broke from her roll just before she hit the wall, braking with an out-turned foot. The boy lay beneath her, pudgy arms and legs spread out. Unbelievably, he was still asleep.
Behind her, the spirit raged.
Aether rose off the ragged figure like smoke. It clenched its fist, finding it once again solid, and took its massive warhammer in a two-handed grip. It stuttered back and forth around its streaming outline, screaming in rage.
‘Thambrin!’ Junas cried, but made no move to intervene.
Maleneth bared perfect teeth in a grin.
This is more like it, she thought. A little more of this and you might rid me of this burdensome Slayer yet.
Exhausted beyond even his own awesome strength, but defiant to the last, Gotrek looked up to meet his doom. His one eye met Hanberra’s and for some reason that was not immediately apparent to Maleneth, the shade hesitated. An unlikely understanding seemed to pass between ancient duardin and lost soul. A pain they had both shared. A pain that had broken one and made the other.
‘He’s mine. Not yours.’
‘No,’ said Gotrek. ‘This one is still of the living. Begone, spirit. Seek your boy in the Lands of the Dead.’
‘Dead…’
Hanberra’s hand flickered to its eye sockets. The shade’s corposant skull stared at them as if seeing them as they were for the first time in a thousand years. Its warhammer burst into a cloud of rising ash above its head. Its armour began to peel away, lightning seething about the trapped human shape underneath.
‘Dead…’
‘Aye,’ said Gotrek. ‘Aye, he’s gone and it was your fault. And no. It doesn’t get any better. So begone, spirit. Begone and be at peace.’
‘Hangharth was his name,’ the spirit said, as though remembering a precious revelation it had thought long forgotten. ‘Sigmar forgive me.’ Its dissolution accelerated. There was a muffled crump, as if of lightning striking somewhere far below ground, and the ghost of Hanberra vanished in a puff of smoke, its last words a breath on a dead wind. ‘I should never have left.’
Maleneth stared at the thinning cloud in horror.
From somewhere behind her, she could hear Alanaer coughing as the warrior-priest stirred.
‘That was brave, aelfling,’ said Gotrek. The duardin picked himself up and walked stiffly towards her. She offered no protest as he bent to take the child from her. Tambrin was a stocky boy, and was clearly going to grow into a large man, but tucked into the crook of the Slayer’s huge arm he looked gangly and long-limbed. His lips smacked together as he started to stir. Gotrek shushed him with a few gravelly consonants of what might, to ears attuned to the sounds of picks on stone and hammers on anvils, have been a lullaby. A grin, unset
tling in its strange lack of hostility, spread across his scarred face. ‘Maybe there’s hope for you yet, eh?’
‘Gotrek…’ said Maleneth.
The duardin’s expression hardened. ‘Come on, aelfling. Let’s go on back.’
‘Do you mean, do you honestly mean, that the ill-tempered old Slayer I knew genuinely came down here to save a human child?’
Gotrek glanced fleetingly at the child in his arms. ‘Of course not.’ Grumbling under his breath, he deposited the boy into Junas’ crushing embrace. ‘But you said I left a beer untended up there.’
About the Author
David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio drama Realmslayer. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.
An extract from Gotrek & Felix: The First Omnibus.
Damn all manling coach drivers and all manling women,’ Gotrek Gurnisson muttered, adding a curse in dwarfish.
‘You did have to insult the lady Isolde, didn’t you?’ Felix Jaeger said peevishly. ‘As things are, we’re lucky they didn’t just shoot us. If you can call it “lucky” to be dumped in the Reikwald on Geheimnisnacht Eve.’
‘We paid for our passage. We were just as entitled to sit inside as her. The drivers were unmanly cowards,’ Gotrek grumbled. ‘They refused to meet me hand to hand. I would not have minded being spitted on steel, but being blasted with buckshot is no death for a Trollslayer.’
Felix shook his head. He could see that one of his companion’s black moods was coming on. There would be no arguing with him and Felix had plenty of other things to worry about. The sun was setting, giving the mist-covered forest a ruddy hue.