by Warhammer
Felix blinked at it for several seconds, uncomprehending. He recognised it, but it was so out of place in its current surroundings that for a moment he couldn’t place it. Then he knew it, and his heart turned to a fist of ice.
It was his father’s ring.
EIGHT
‘We must go back to Altdorf!’ Felix cried, ripping the ring from the slimy cord around the skaven’s neck. ‘Immediately!’
The others turned towards him, curious.
Felix held up the ring. ‘This vile creature has my father’s ring! It must have… It must have…’ Felix found that he could not bring himself to voice what he feared the skaven must have done. ‘I don’t know what it has done. But I must return to Altdorf at once to find out!’
Gotrek’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the ring.
Max stepped forwards, concerned. ‘Felix, this is terrible. Are you certain it is your father’s ring?’
‘Of course I’m certain,’ snapped Felix, holding it out. ‘Look at it. It has the Jaeger J. The last I saw it, it was on his hand. The skaven have been in his house! I must go back as soon as possible!’
‘No!’ cried Claudia from behind them. ‘You will not!’
They turned. She was struggling to her feet, encumbered by her wet robes.
Felix glared at her. ‘Are you ordering me?’ he asked, hotly.
‘No,’ she said again, staring sightlessly past him towards the sea, her eyes rolled up in her head. ‘We will not leave.’ She thrust out a trembling finger, pointing past the drifting column of black smoke that was all that was left now of the Pride of Skintstaad. ‘We will go there! That is where the evil lies!’
Felix cursed under his breath. Damn the woman and her inconvenient visions. He was really beginning to think she did it on purpose.
The others looked out over the water in the direction she pointed. Felix reluctantly joined them, hoping against hope that there would be nothing there. Unfortunately, there was.
About a mile out, a distance they had not been able to see when the rain was at its heaviest, there was a break in the thick clouds that blanketed the sky from horizon to horizon, and the ragged edges of the hole were slowly circling like porridge being stirred by a spoon. A shaft of bleak sunshine streamed straight down through the hole. Felix shivered at the unnatural sight. It was hard to tell through all the mist and rain, but it looked like the water below the opening was swirling in exactly the same way that the clouds were.
‘No, curse it! I refuse!’ he said, the blood pounding strongly in his temples. ‘Ancient evils from the dawn of time can wait for once! My father might be… might be harmed, and I intend to return to his side at once!’
‘We haven’t got a ship, manling,’ said Gotrek.
‘I don’t care! I’ll walk!’
‘Certainly we will walk, Felix,’ said Max, in the sort of patient voice one would use to speak to a pouty child. ‘We have no choice now. But as we’re here, we should do what we came to do. One day out of twenty won’t make a difference.’
‘It could make all the difference in the world!’ shouted Felix, glaring around at them all. Didn’t they understand? His father could be dying. The skaven might have done anything to him.
Gotrek knelt and cleaned the blood from his axe with a handful of sand. ‘The rats have already done what they have done, manling,’ he said without looking up. ‘No matter how fast we return, we can’t turn back time.’
Felix bit back an angry reply, trying to find some fault in the Slayer‘s cold logic, but at last, with a final kick at the dead skaven, he let out a breath. ‘All right, fine. Let’s go have a look at where the evil lies, but then I’m going back to Altdorf, with you or without you.’
‘Thank you, Felix,’ said Max.
The others turned away and began preparing to row out to the cloudbreak. Felix stepped to the dead rat ogre and began wrenching his sword out from between its ribs.
‘Manling,’ said Gotrek.
Felix looked around to find the Slayer fixing him with his one hard eye.
‘Yes?’
‘Revenge is patient,’ Gotrek said, then sheathed his axe and turned away.
Half an hour later, after Max and Aethenir had seen to the survivors’ wounds as well as they could, and after the bodies of the slain had been buried in the sand and the grave marked so that they could be retrieved later, the remains of the landing party set out towards the swirling clouds in a single boat. Gotrek, Felix, Captain Rion, his three unwounded elves and the two remaining Reiksguard swordsmen manned the oars while Aethenir, Max, the wounded elf and Reikscaptain Oberhoff sat in the back and Claudia stood at the front, staring ahead into the wind and rain like a living figurehead. Felix once again fought the urge to push her in.
Several times during the journey he got the distinct feeling that they were being watched, but when he looked back, he could see no one on the shore, and no skaven snouts bobbing in the water, so he decided it was his imagination, though it was still a mystery where the swimming ratmen had gone.
The closer they got to the opening in the swirling clouds, the more the rain let up until, about half a mile from it, they reached the eye of the bizarre storm and all became bright and clear, with the autumn sun slanting down through the ragged aperture and shining on the dark blue water – and something else.
Standing in the prow, Claudia was the first to see it. ‘There… there’s a hole. In the water.’
Felix stopped rowing and turned around with the others. ‘A hole?’
Max stood, shielding his eyes and looking ahead. ‘A whirlpool.’
‘It’s… it’s huge!’ said Captain Oberhoff.
Gotrek grunted, as if to say that this was just the sort of thing he would expect from water.
Felix stood and looked ahead. There was indeed a whirlpool, and it was indeed huge – almost half a mile across – an exact mirror of the hole in the clouds that roiled above it. The sea around it swirled and frothed like water going down a drain, and a noise like an endlessly crashing wave reached their ears now that they were out of the rain. Felix swallowed, terrified. It was a great maw in the sea, hungry to swallow them.
‘Well, there it is then,’ he said nervously. ‘Now we’ve seen it we can go back. We’ll tell the Marienburg High Council a whirlpool is coming their way and they can, ah, take measures.’
‘It is not the whirlpool that is the threat,’ said Claudia. ‘It is what’s within it. I can feel it, but we must get closer.’
Felix cursed. The woman’s visions kept leading them into trouble. Shouldn’t prophecy warn one away from danger, not drag one towards it? ‘You can’t be serious! We’ll be sucked in! We’ll die!’
‘I too can feel it,’ said Aethenir. ‘There is great evil here. Row on.’
Felix looked to Max for support. The wizard hesitated, but Felix could see the lust for knowledge in his eyes.
‘I can’t protect you from that, lord magister,’ said Oberhoff, piping up. ‘Best to turn back.’
‘Aye, lord,’ said Captain Rion to Aethenir. ‘Our swords are useless against such a threat.’
Finally some voices of reason, thought Felix.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Aethenir. We must get closer so that we may try to sense what is causing it. Row on.’
Max looked from Felix to Oberhoff to Aethenir. ‘Perhaps a little closer,’ he said at last. ‘Only be careful.’
Captain Oberhoff sighed. Rion’s jaw clenched. They exchanged a look of comradely suffering. Felix and the others reluctantly picked up their oars again and rowed slowly closer. There was a visible line between the choppy waves of the sea and the fast rippling current that raced around the great vortex. They edged towards the line, measuring every stroke. At last they began to feel the fatal tug of the current upon the keel of the boat.
‘It’s pulling now!’ said Felix, louder than he meant to.
‘Then retreat slightly and hold,’ said Aethenir calmly, and stepped towards the front of the boat.
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Felix cast a glance at his comrades as they worked together to reverse their strokes and bring the boat to a halt. The swordsmen looked nervous, Gotrek furious, and the elves as calm as milk. At last the boat came to a shaky stop, wavering restlessly in the water as the current drew it one way and their oar-work pulled it the other. It felt like they were balancing on a teetering rock. One slip and they would all go down. Felix wiped the sweat from his brow with his shoulder and kept back-stroking.
Claudia and Max joined Aethenir in the prow of the boat and closed their eyes, mumbling under their breath. A glow of light began to shimmer around Max’s grey-haired head. Ripples distorted the air around Aethenir. Claudia looked up at the patch of sky that showed through the clouds, whispering fiercely.
Felix, Gotrek and the others kept pushing slowly but steadily on the oars, keeping the boat in place as the wizards’ incantations grew louder and more droning. The three different spells weaved in and out of each other like some unearthly melody, and Felix felt weird pressures and unexpected emotions pushing at him from within and without. Claudia began to sway in place, and Felix feared – or perhaps hoped – she would fall out of the boat.
In the middle of it all, Reikscaptain Oberhoff raised a shout. ‘A ship!’
Max broke off instantly – Claudia and Aethenir more reluctantly. Gotrek, Felix and the others turned, following the captain’s finger. On the far side of the storm’s eye, a dark shape was moving, just within the curtain of the rain.
‘Keep pulling, human,’ said Captain Rion.
Felix hastily returned to his oar, but his quick glance had shown him a black-hulled ship, small, but with a prow like a knife, with black sails and rows of long oars on both sides.
‘Asuryan preserve thy noble sons,’ said Aethenir, his pale skin turning even whiter. ‘It is as I feared. The corsairs of Naggaroth.’
‘The what?’ asked Oberhoff.
‘The dark elves,’ said Max.
‘We’d better get back to shore,’ said Felix.
Max nodded. ‘That would be wisest, yes.’
‘But the source of the prophecy!’ said Claudia.
No one listened to her. Even Aethenir, staring in frozen terror at the black ship, seemed no longer interested in the whirlpool. Gotrek, Felix, and the human and elf warriors bent to their oars and began backing them again, much more quickly now. Even so, they were only barely moving away from the vortex.
‘Lord Aethenir, Fraulein Pallenberger, sit down,’ said Max. ‘We must stay as low as possible and hope they don’t see us.’
Claudia and Aethenir crouched down; she petulantly, he like a tent collapsing. He looked back at the rowers.
‘Can we go no faster?’ he asked.
‘If you want to go faster,’ said Gotrek, ‘row.’
The high elf looked with horror at the last pair of oars in the bottom of the boat. ‘Impossible. I have never…’
‘Let me,’ said Oberhoff, stepping forwards and picking up one of the oars.
‘And I’ll take the other,’ said Max as he lifted the second.
The Reiksguard captain and the magister sat on the last bench, slotted the oars into the oarlocks and began to row with the others.
Gotrek snorted at Aethenir with disgust. ‘Letting an old man pull an oar. Weak-wristed little…’
His muttering drifted off as he put his back into it again. They rowed on, pulling as hard as they could while the dark elf ship continued its circular route around the eye of the storm, but even with the added help of Max and Rion they went very slowly indeed.
‘What is it doing?’ asked Claudia, watching the ship.
‘Staying a sensible distance from that hole,’ said Felix, gloomily.
‘We should have tried that,’ muttered Oberhoff under his breath.
The black ship sailed closer, moving like the sweep hand of a watch around the edge of the circle. Felix found himself hunching down over his oars, trying to stay as low as possible. The druchii craft was soon near enough that, even through the curtain of rain, he could pick out the individual ropes that rose to the black sails and the elves climbing them. He saw the burnished helmet of an officer glinting on the aft deck, and the cruel emblems emblazoned on the banners that fluttered at the tops of the masts.
The ship was nearly parallel with them now. Felix held his breath. Sail on, he thought, closing his eyes. Sail on. Pass us by and continue around the circle. Another revolution and we will be gone.
Alas, it worked as well as most other childish incantations. A harsh cry echoed over the water and Felix opened his eyes again. A druchii sailor was pointing at them from the weather top and calling to the deck below.
‘That’s torn it,’ said Captain Oberhoff with a curse.
With a swiftness that spoke of a decisive captain and a well-trained crew, the black ship arced off its course and aimed straight at them, its wet black sails gleaming like beetle shells as it broke into the sunshine of the storm’s eye. It cut an oblique angle towards them across the open circle of sea, like a man laying a knife across the top of his dinner plate, and moved at an alarming speed.
‘Row!’ cried Aethenir. ‘Row harder!’
‘Why don’t you use that hot air and blow?’ said Gotrek, pulling powerfully at his oar.
‘Don’t any of you have any spells that could help?’ asked Felix, before the elf could return the insult.
‘All my spells are of healing and divination,’ said Aethenir.
‘Rowing is more helpful than anything I could muster at the moment,’ said Max.
Felix turned his gaze towards the seeress. ‘Claudia?’
‘I… I don’t know,’ she said helplessly.
Felix ground his teeth as he and Gotrek and the others pulled for all they were worth. Still the little boat only crawled, while the druchii ship loomed closer with every second. It was like one of those bad dreams where one ran in place seemingly never to escape a monstrous pursuer.
‘He means to ram us!’ cried Aethenir. ‘Does he not fear to go into the vortex himself?’
‘He has enough speed and sailpower to pull out,’ said Max. ‘We do not.’
The little boat was moving faster now, as it moved further from the whirlpool’s insidious grip, but still it was not fast enough. The black ship was only fifty yards away now. There was no way they could escape it.
‘It’s useless,’ wailed Aethenir. ‘We are doomed.’
‘Good,’ said Gotrek, throwing down his oar and drawing his axe off his back. He stepped to the prow and beckoned to the onrushing ship with one meaty hand. ‘Come on, you beardless skeletons, I’ll smash that floating toothpick to driftwood!’
Everyone else braced for impact. The druchii captain, however, did not attack them directly. Instead, at the last moment, he turned hard to port and shaved past them just out of reach.
But though the ship did not touch them, its bow wave did, nearly capsizing them and pushing them up and back on a mountain of white froth that threw Felix and the other rowers from their benches. Gotrek flew head over heels into the water and only prevented himself from disappearing beneath the waves by grabbing one of the rowlocks as he went over and holding on for dear life. Felix could hear haughty laughter coming from the black ship as its tall hull hissed by only yards away from them.
As the others recovered themselves, Felix scrambled to his knees and grabbed the Slayer‘s arm, helping him pull himself back in.
‘What were those villains laughing about?’ said Captain Oberhoff, climbing back to his oar. ‘They missed.’
‘No,’ said Aethenir, looking towards the whirlpool. ‘They did not.’
Felix and the others turned to see what he was looking at. Felix’s heart sank. The little boat was now deep within the band of rushing current that surrounded the hole. He could feel it pulling at them like an insistent lover.
‘Bugger,’ said Captain Oberhoff.
‘Row,’ cried Max. ‘Quickly, friends!’
Gotrek, Felix, and
the elves and men clambered back to their oars and tried to pull in unison. It was hopeless. The current dragged them sideways around the whirlpool faster than a man could run, and always a little closer to the centre. Their oars did nothing but jerk the boat this way and that. Felix’s blood ran cold in his veins. There was no way out. They would die here, not beaten by some great monster or devious enemy, but by simple gravity. The vortex would pull them down into its gullet and they would drown.
The glistening slope was getting closer, so smooth and glossy that it seemed almost motionless. Felix looked around at his companions. Gotrek, Captain Oberhoff and his Reiksguard, Rion and his warriors, all bent grimly to their oars, trying to the last. Max rowed too, but his eyes seemed far-away, as if searching for some solution. Claudia stared towards the whirlpool, eyes wide, crouching in the prow of the boat and mumbling under her breath. Aethenir seemed to be praying as well, his eyes closed and his delicate hands clamped together in supplication.
Reikscaptain Oberhoff murmured, ‘Sigmar, welcome me to your hall,’ over and over again, his eyes closed, and Felix found he was repeating the prayer with him.
Then they were tipping backwards down into the maw, sweeping down it at an angle like a marble spiralling down a funnel made of glittering green bottle glass. The angle of the slope steepened every second, and everyone shrank down into the boat, clinging to the sides. At last the slope became entirely vertical and they plummeted down in free fall.
Claudia screamed, and Felix was afraid he might have too. The others cursed and shouted, starting to fall faster than the boat as the drag of the hull against the watery walls slowed it. Felix clutched instinctively at one of the oar benches to hold himself in, then looked down into the green well, terrified, but determined to face his death head-on. The shock of what he saw there almost knocked the fear right out of him. Firstly, the walls of the whirlpool did not taper, as he expected, but went straight down, leaving a half-mile-wide circle of ocean floor exposed to the sky. Secondly, rising from that muddy floor were the shattered white towers and ruined buildings of an ancient city.