Gotrek & Felix- the Fourth Omnibus - Nathan Long

by Warhammer

  The hermit giggled behind them. ‘Oh, my masters, have y’forgotten about me so soon? Don’t worry yourselves so. Old Hans knows a way. Of course he does.’

  NINETEEN

  The party turned to face the hermit, staring.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Gotrek.

  ‘A way to the hill!’ Hans cackled. ‘Without a beastman the wiser!’

  ‘How?’ asked Rodi, looking curious in spite of himself.

  The old man cackled again and looked sly. ‘Ye sons of earth may call me grave robber if you like, but if I weren’t, you’d be in a pickle, eh? I know the barrows around these parts like the back of my hand, and the tunnels that link ’em too.’

  ‘Tunnels,’ said Gotrek, interested at last.

  ‘Aye,’ said the hermit, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘The old kings, they built not just for the dead, but for the living.’ He turned and pointed down the hill, where old mounds snaked through the dead valleys like veins under the skin. ‘Each barrow was an escape, and a place to hide in times of trouble. All led through secret doors to the old keep, built around yon sacred circle.’ He turned back and nodded in the direction of the hill with the stone circle. ‘Tarnhalt’s Crown they called it then. Named for the last king that lived there.’ He giggled again. ‘His walls are fallen now, as do all works of men, the stones taken by folk for other things – all but the ring stones, which none dared touch – but the tunnels and cellars of the keep still sit under the hill. And there is a way out to the surface. A hidden way, not ten paces from the circle.’

  The Slayers had gathered around the old man now, drawn by his words, their eyes eager.

  ‘Show us the way, hermit,’ said Rodi.

  ‘Bring Snorri to the beastmen,’ said Snorri.

  ‘Aye, grave robber,’ said Gotrek. ‘Lead us to these tunnels.’

  The old man’s eyes narrowed with sudden suspicion. ‘You will remove the beasts, yes? You’ll smash their stone. You won’t rob old Hans of his treasures, will you?’

  Rodi sneered. ‘Do you think we’ve come all this way to steal from you?’

  ‘What do dwarfs care for human treasures?’ said Gotrek. ‘Your pathetic hoard is safe from us.’

  Hans hesitated a moment, stroking his stringy white beard, but at last nodded. ‘Very well, I will risk it. The beasts must go.’ He turned and started down the hill at a sprightly pace that belied his age, lifting the skirts of his robe as he went. ‘Follow me! Follow me!’

  Felix and Kat looked to Gotrek as the scouts muttered amongst themselves.

  The Slayer shrugged. ‘It’s worth a try.’

  Huntzinger and Felke looked less than happy, but finally shrugged, and the party turned and followed the old hermit as he led them down the slope and along the base of the hills until he came to an overgrown old barrow mound that stuck out from one like a blunt finger. Dry old bracken covered the front of the tomb, but it wasn’t growing from the earth. It had been placed there. The old hermit pulled it all aside and revealed a small black hole behind it, low to the ground, and so narrow Felix wasn’t sure the Slayers would be able to get their wide shoulders through it.

  ‘There, your worships,’ he said gleefully. ‘There is the hole that will lead you to the hill. Now, if you can give poor Hans a pen and paper, he will draw you a map of the way.’

  Gotrek snorted. ‘Dwarfs need no maps for tunnels, grave robber. We will find the way.’

  ‘No no no!’ said Hans, his eyes suddenly wide with alarm. ‘A map is best, my masters. You don’t want to go where you shouldn’t.’

  Everyone paused at that, and Gotrek gave him a dead-eyed stare.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

  ‘What are you hiding in there?’ asked Sergeant Felke.

  ‘Are there ghosts?’ asked Huntzinger, biting his lip.

  ‘Traps?’ asked Felix.

  The old man shrank back, eyes darting from one to the other. ‘No no! No traps, my masters. Not if you go where I say. I… I only fear that you… that you will try to take my things. I have protected them, and they–’

  ‘They’re trapped,’ said Felix.

  ‘Lead us, then,’ said Gotrek.

  ‘Aye,’ said Rodi. ‘That’s the best plan. That way we’ll stay out of mischief, and so will you.’

  ‘No!’ said the old man, suddenly frantic. ‘I cannot! I have tarried with you long enough. I must continue my work! I must go!’

  ‘I thought the beasts were keeping you from your work,’ said Felix, getting more suspicious by the second.

  ‘There are other barrows,’ said Hans. ‘I work all over these hills.’

  ‘It’ll wait,’ said Gotrek. ‘You’re staying.’

  The others encircled the old man. He shrunk away from them, trembling and shielding his head, and for the briefest second, Felix thought he saw a look of pure hatred flash in his eyes, but it was gone before he could be sure, and then Hans was smiling meekly again.

  ‘Very well, your worships,’ he bleated. ‘I will stay. I will stay.’

  With old Hans in tow, the party scouted the valleys around the beastmen’s gathering place until they found a suitable site to stage the armies of the three nobles when, and if, they arrived. Then von Volgen’s and Plaschke-Miesner’s messengers readied their horses for their run back to their masters at the Monastery of the Tower of Vigilance so that they could tell them that the Slayers had found a way to reach the shaman and kill him, and that it would be safe to engage the herd.

  ‘We will wait as long as possible,’ Gotrek said. ‘But if the armies are not here by sunset on Hexensnacht’s eve, we start without them.’

  Felke held up the hunter’s horn he had slung around his neck. ‘I will blow a blast when the shaman is killed,’ he said. ‘That will be their signal.’

  Felix stepped forwards. ‘And be sure to tell them not to attack before they hear it, or…’ He shivered, remembering Ortwin’s face changing before him. ‘Or it may not go well.’

  The messengers nodded, then mounted their horses and galloped away across the bare hills. At least, thought Felix, they will make good speed on such open ground, and with luck, the armies will make good speed back. The question was, would it be only von Volgen and Plaschke-Miesner, or would von Kotzebue and his four thousand men arrive with them?

  ‘Right,’ said Huntzinger, turning away. ‘Now to find a place to lay low until the time comes.’

  ‘The hermit’s barrow,’ said Gotrek without hesitation.

  Huntzinger stared at him. So did Felke. Their men murmured uneasily.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ they said in unison.

  Gotrek scowled. ‘I am. It’s warm. It’s out of the wind. It’s close to the beasts’ camp, and they’ll never find us there. It’s perfect.’

  ‘But… but it’s a tomb,’ said Huntzinger. ‘We can’t stay in a tomb.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The old kings,’ Huntzinger continued. ‘They don’t like being disturbed. They’ll wake up and kill us in our sleep.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Felke. ‘I’ll go in at the end, to get to the beasts, but I’ll not make camp there. I’ll not sleep there.’

  Their men murmured in agreement.

  Gotrek rolled his eyes. ‘Are you more afraid of a pile of dusty old bones than of ten thousand beastmen?’

  Huntzinger and Felke exchanged a glance, then looked back towards Gotrek.

  ‘Aye,’ said Huntzinger. ‘We won’t do it, and that’s that.’

  ‘There are some things a man won’t do,’ said Felke.

  Gotrek snorted with disgust, then shrugged his massive shoulders and turned away. ‘There are some things a coward won’t do,’ he said under his breath.

  Rodi and Snorri nodded in agreement.

  Felix glanced at Huntzinger and Felke, afraid they’d heard the Slayer. From the scowls on their faces, it appeared they had, but it also appeared that they didn’t look prepared to do anything about it.

  After an hour of searching, th
e scout captains found a deep gorge about a half-mile from the valley that held Tarnhalt’s Crown, and announced that this was where they would make camp. The dwarfs’ silence on the matter was eloquent, as was the fact that they laid out their bedrolls as far from the scouts’ tents as possible. They didn’t go so far, however, as to not take part in the protection of the camp, and stood their watches without complaint.

  Felix kept his mouth shut too. As much as he understood the dwarfs’ view that going underground would be the best way to keep out of the way of the beasts, he wouldn’t have relished spending a long period of time in the burial chambers of some ancient king either. He had done that once before. It hadn’t gone well.

  The scouts didn’t dare start a fire until after dark for fear that smoke rising above the hills would give away their position. This meant a long day of shivering and stamping their feet, trying to keep out of the steady, ceaseless wind, and glaring at the Slayers, who paced around the camp bare-chested, seemingly as comfortable as if they were in a warm tavern.

  For their part, Gotrek and Rodi were restless and irritable. They knew their doom was only a few valleys away, and it appeared to be testing their patience to wait for it. Only Snorri seemed at ease, following the other two Slayers around and telling them stories about his days with Gotrek as if Gotrek wasn’t the one the events had happened to. Felix saw the Slayer’s shoulders hunch at each new tale, but he never snapped at Snorri, only nodded and grunted non-committally, his brow furrowed and his mouth set in a grim line.

  Felix did his best to ignore all the tension, and sat in the shelter of a big boulder, updating his journal with shivering hands, and wondering if he would be able to decipher the shaky lines he had written when he reread them later. He wished he could have waited out the day bundled in a tent with Kat – a much warmer and more pleasant way to pass the time – but she was doing her duty with the rest of the scouts, patrolling on a wide perimeter and keeping a constant eye on the herd, so he hardly saw her.

  After a meagre dinner cooked over the low fire, Felix did his turn at watching on the lip of the gorge, looking and listening for approaching beasts, and watching as Morrslieb chased Mannslieb up the sky and then passed it by, so close that the edges of the two moons seemed to almost touch, before racing on and leaving its bigger, more distant brother in the dust of stars.

  At midnight, with Mannslieb directly above and Morrslieb already setting over the eastern hills, his time was done, and he picked his way back down into the gorge to the camp and shook Gotrek by the shoulder.

  ‘Your turn, Gotrek,’ he said.

  The Slayer sat up, awake instantly, and looked around. Then he stood and grabbed his axe.

  ‘Where is the hermit?’ he asked.

  Felix looked to where they had leashed the old man to a stunted tree to make sure he didn’t slip away. The rope that had gone around his wrists lay on the ground, but of Hans himself there was no sign.

  Felix cursed. How had the hermit escaped? He looked around. Sergeant Huntzinger was on watch, the same man who had cuffed his scout for letting the beasts creep up on them. He crossed to him as Gotrek stepped to the empty leash.

  ‘You let the old hermit go,’ said Felix. ‘Were you asleep?’

  ‘What’s this?’ said the sergeant, standing and turning. He cursed as well. ‘How can it be? I looked at him just before you came down the slope. He was lying there, asleep.’

  Their voices were waking the rest of the camp, and sleepy questions followed them as they crossed to Gotrek, who was looking down at the leash. The sergeant made the sign of the hammer, for the knots that had tied the rope around Hans’s wrists were intact.

  ‘Sorcery,’ said Huntzinger.

  A scrap of parchment was rolled up in the loops. Gotrek picked it up and unrolled it. It was a crudely drawn map, showing rooms and corridors, and done apparently in blood.

  ‘Or the ropes weren’t tight enough,’ said Sergeant Felke, sneering as he joined them. ‘Looks like you’re just as lax as your men, Huntzinger.’

  ‘I tied those ropes myself,’ protested Sergeant Huntzinger. ‘He could not have escaped them.’

  ‘But he did,’ said Gotrek.

  Felix looked over the Slayer’s shoulder at the map. ‘It looks like he still wants us to go after the beasts.’

  ‘Or walk into a trap,’ said Rodi, joining them and looking too.

  Felix swallowed. Was that it after all? Was Hans’s whole reason for joining him as their guide just a ruse to trick them into entering some underground trap? Perhaps he wasn’t a grave robber after all. Perhaps he preyed on grave robbers. Perhaps the gold and trinkets he sold were stolen from the bodies of his victims rather than the tombs of the old kings.

  Gotrek handed the map to Felix and turned away. ‘Spread out and look for him,’ he said. ‘But watch for beasts.’

  Huntzinger and Felke looked affronted at this casual assumption of command, but only turned to their men and chose who would go and who would stay.

  Felix, Kat, Gotrek, Rodi and the four chosen scouts spread out on different headings, leaving Snorri – who couldn’t be trusted to remember what he was searching for – and the rest to guard the camp. It was a fruitless search. Felix staggered back after two hours, half-asleep and two-thirds frozen, with nothing to report. The others came in soon after him with the same report. Hans had vanished. He was not to be found.

  ‘Probably gone to ground in another barrow,’ said Kat.

  ‘Will he try anything?’ asked Huntzinger.

  Rodi shrugged. ‘What could an old man do?’

  ‘He could lead the beasts down on us,’ the sergeant replied.

  Felix frowned. ‘I don’t know about that. He seemed genuinely angry with them. And he left the map. I think he truly wants us to drive them away, though I can’t guess what else he might want.’

  ‘Do we still use the map, then?’ asked Felke.

  ‘What choice do we have?’ said Rodi. ‘There is no other way to get to the shaman.’

  ‘We use it,’ said Gotrek. ‘But not blindly.’ He nodded to Rodi and Snorri. ‘We will scout the tunnels tomorrow so that we find no surprises on the night.’

  The next morning, Felix, Kat and the three Slayers made their way back through the hills to the barrow that old Hans had shown them. As they approached it, Felix had the sudden irrational fear that they would find the hole into the crypt gone as if it never was, like some mysterious door in a hill in a fairy tale, but when they pulled away the bracken it was still there, an irregular black shadow in the face of the mound. Felix wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ said Rodi.

  ‘No, Snorri will,’ said Snorri.

  ‘I will,’ said Gotrek, and stepped in front of them before they could stop him.

  Felix didn’t know how the Slayer was going to fit – his shoulders looked wider than the hole by a foot – but Gotrek didn’t even hesitate. He knelt down, stuck his head and his axe arm in, then twisted and propelled himself through with his feet. A rattle and hiss of pebbles and dirt rained down after his passage and for a second Felix thought the opening was going to collapse, but then the rain eased up and Gotrek’s voice echoed hollowly from within.

  ‘It’s safe.’

  Snorri went next, widening the hole even more as he shoved through it, then Kat, who didn’t even touch the sides.

  ‘After you, Herr Jaeger,’ said Rodi.

  Felix took a breath, then knelt and crawled forwards. There was an awkward moment when his hands couldn’t feel any floor and his legs were hemmed in by the sides of the hole, but then strong hands were pulling him out and setting him on his feet in utter darkness.

  Felix stood and cracked his head on something above him. He hissed and hunched down, rubbing his crown.

  There was a sharp scraping from nearby and then a torch kindled and glowed in Kat’s hands, just in time to show Rodi crawling out of the hole like an ugly, crested mole.

  ‘Ah,’ said the
young Slayer as he picked himself up and dusted himself off. ‘Nice to be underground again.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Gotrek.

  Felix looked around. They were in a long, low chamber – so low in fact that he could not stand straight in it. It seemed to have been built by people of Kat’s stature. The stone walls were carved with crude wolf’s heads and skulls, as well as angular intertwining runes and symbols. Against the long walls were four stone biers, old bones in rotting, dusty clothes scattered upon them, but not a single piece of armour or weaponry or jewellery. If old Hans wasn’t a grave robber, someone else certainly had been.

  Felix turned to the back of the barrow, where Hans had said the entrance to the tunnels would be. His heart sank. There was nothing but a stone wall with a crumbling relief of a running wolf. He was about to curse Hans for misleading them when Rodi laughed.

  ‘The old man calls that a secret door?’ he said. ‘A blind elf could find that.’

  ‘Snorri thinks a dead elf could find it,’ said Snorri.

  Felix closed his mouth again, chagrined, and followed the others to the back wall, thanking Sigmar he hadn’t spoken.

  Gotrek reached out and pulled a stone from the wall that looked no different to Felix than any other stone, and reached into the hole that resulted. He pulled at something inside the hole, and there was a grating of iron on stone. Then he pushed at the wall with the running wolf on it with his other hand and a narrow door swung open, revealing blackness behind.

  ‘Come on then,’ said Rodi, shoving in first.

  Gotrek and Snorri gave him dirty looks, then followed after, and the three of them set off into the darkness without hesitation. Felix and Kat hurried after them, looking around warily in the light of Kat’s torch. The tunnel beyond the door was as low as the barrow, and nothing more than a raw hole in the rock and dirt, kept from collapse by heavy wooden beams and posts. It smelled of mould and damp earth and decay. Spider webs hung like shrouds from the ceiling and fluttered in a constant moaning breeze. Felix hunched his head and kept one hand out to tear them down before he walked into them.