by Warhammer
‘Come back, you coward!’ bellowed Gotrek.
‘How can the dead be scared to die?’ shouted Rodi.
‘Snorri missed the fight,’ said Snorri.
‘There are still plenty to fight, Snorri,’ said Felix, helping Kat back onto the parapet.
But all at once, there weren’t.
As if an order had been given, the bats flapped clear of their combats and flew after the dead wyvern and its malefic rider. Within a matter of heartbeats, the battle was over but for the groaning of the wounded and the weeping of the peasants in the courtyard.
While officers called orders and soldiers called for the surgeon, Gotrek and Rodi turned from the battlements, their faces hard and angry. The wound in Gotrek’s thigh had drenched his trews red to the knee, but he paid it no mind. Instead he crossed to the severed forearm of the undead champion and picked it up. It began to disintegrate as soon as he touched it, the armour rusting away in brown flakes and the radius, ulna and finger bones within it crumbling to dust.
Gotrek crushed it in his meaty hand and looked out over the walls. ‘A worthy doom,’ he said.
‘Aye,’ said Rodi, glaring at him. ‘For me, Gurnisson.’
Gotrek turned on the young Slayer. ‘I did not rob you of your doom at Tarnhalt, Balkisson. You put down your hammer for the same reason I put down my axe.’
Rodi snarled and stepped closer to him. ‘You forced me to it.’
‘You were free to defy me,’ said Gotrek. ‘As you were free to walk into the wood today.’
Rodi’s hands balled into fists, and his face, already red, turned a deep vermillion. Gotrek put his axe on his back and waited, hands at his sides, meeting Rodi’s furious glare with his single contemptuous eye.
‘Snorri thinks he would have found his doom tonight,’ said Snorri, trying to climb back onto the parapet as Kat helped Felix up, ‘if some coward hadn’t pushed him.’
Gotrek and Rodi held their staredown for another second, then broke off to take the old Slayer’s hands.
‘Lucky for you, you didn’t,’ said Rodi.
He and Gotrek pulled Snorri onto the wall and Felix breathed a sigh of relief. Snorri couldn’t have done it on purpose, but he had intervened at just the right time. The last thing Castle Reikguard needed just now was a pair of Slayers brawling across the ramparts.
‘Dwarfs!’ gasped von Geldrecht, limping forwards on the arm of a knight, and followed by Father Ulfram and Danniken. ‘Dwarfs, I owe you my life, and I thank you. You, more than anyone, drove that hellish wight away and saved me from its axe. But – but did you not tell us the leader of the undead horde was a mad old man?’
‘That wasn’t Hans the Hermit, my lord,’ said Felix, shivering. ‘I don’t know who it was, or what. I have never seen it before.’
‘It was Krell,’ rasped Gotrek.
Von Geldrecht blinked. ‘Who? Who is Krell?’
‘Krell the Holdbreaker,’ said Gotrek. ‘The Lord of the Undead.’
‘The Butcher of Karak Ungor,’ said Rodi. ‘The Doom of Karak Varn.’
‘Whose name is written a hundred times in the Book of Grudges,’ said Gotrek.
‘Who so hated dwarf-kind that he returned from the dead to seek vengeance upon us,’ said Rodi.
‘My doom,’ said Gotrek.
‘My doom, said Rodi.
Gotrek glanced at the young Slayer and gave him a vicious smile. ‘He may well be, beardling,’ he said, then wiped blood from his wounded leg and looked at his hand. ‘But he has already killed me.’
SIX
Felix frowned, certain he couldn’t have heard the Slayer correctly. ‘Killed you?’ he said. ‘Gotrek, it’s just a scratch. You’ve taken worse. Far worse.’
‘No, manling,’ said the Slayer. ‘I have not.’ He held out his hand. The blood that dripped from his thick fingers was peppered with tiny black flecks. ‘The Axe of Krell leaves behind splinters of obsidian. They burrow to the heart and bring slow death.’ He smiled again, a grim flat line. ‘I have found my doom at last.’
Felix’s heart lurched. His head swam as he tried to take it in. Could he have already witnessed Gotrek’s doom without knowing it? It seemed impossible. The Slayer couldn’t die in such a sad, inglorious way.
‘Gotrek,’ he said, stepping forwards. ‘You have to clean the wound. You can’t let this happen.’
‘Of course he can’t!’ said von Geldrecht, limping forwards. ‘Sigmar’s beard, Herr Slayer, you must see our surgeon immediately. These splinters must come out!’
Gotrek turned a cold eye on the steward. ‘Is it my doom that worries you, lordling? Or your own?’
Rodi laughed at this, while Von Geldrecht’s red face got even redder.
‘Certainly, Slayer, you are a great boon to our defences,’ he said. ‘But you mistake me. I am merely concerned for your wellbeing–’
‘A Slayer’s “wellbeing” is his own business,’ growled Gotrek, and started for the stairs to the courtyard with Rodi and Snorri following. ‘And it doesn’t matter. The slivers are already at their work. There’s no getting them out now.’
Felix swallowed and stepped after him. ‘Surely it’s worth trying, Gotrek. Poison is no death for a Slayer.’
Gotrek waved him off and continued. ‘Leave me be, manling. I need a drink.’
Kat put a hand on the Slayer’s arm as he passed her. ‘Gotrek. Please. It might let you live long enough to face this Krell again.’
The Slayer stopped and looked at her for a long moment. ‘Aye. It might,’ he said at last. He nodded. ‘Very well.’
As they started for the stairs again, Felix shot Kat a relieved glance, and von Geldrecht let out a breath.
‘Thank you, fraulein,’ he said, limping after them. ‘You have done us a great service with this–’
She stopped and snarled back at him. ‘I didn’t do it for you!’
Felix turned away so von Geldrecht wouldn’t see him smirk at his stunned expression.
‘I’m sorry, Felix.’ said Kat. ‘He doesn’t give a damn about Gotrek’s “wellbeing”.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ said Felix. ‘I’d have done the same if I had any guts.’
Rodi growled as they started across the ruined courtyard towards the underkeep. ‘Two thousand years of grudges crossed off in the book when Krell died,’ he said.
Kat looked at him, amazed. ‘You have fought him for two thousand years?’
‘Aye,’ said Rodi. ‘Ever since he gave himself to the Blood God and came for our holds.’
‘Karak Ungor and Karak Varn both suffered beneath his axe before that pup Sigmar killed him,’ said Gotrek.
‘And now he lives again,’ spat Rodi. ‘And all those grudges must be written back into the book as unavenged.’
Gotrek nodded, his one eye distant. ‘Aye, but the Slayer who gives him a true and final death would be remembered in the histories forever.’
‘Aye,’ said Rodi, thumping his chest with his fist. ‘Rodi Balkisson, Slayer of Krell.’
Gotrek shot him a hard look. ‘We will see about that.’
‘Snorri thinks Snorri Nosebiter, Slayer of Krell, sounds better,’ said Snorri.
Rodi grunted at that, and Gotrek ground his teeth, and they stumped on in silence. Felix shook his head at the dwarfishness of it all. Cut by an axe that seemed certain to kill him, and Gotrek was still more concerned with wrongs done to his ancestors thousands of years before – and of course by how he would be remembered by the dwarfs who would come after him. It seemed sometimes that dwarfs lived more in the past than they did in the present.
As they continued across the courtyard, however, Felix’s grim amusement faded, to be replaced by a growing sense that something was terribly wrong in the castle. The dead and dying were of course everywhere, and the air was filled with the stench of burnt tents and roasted flesh, but there was something else, something worse behind it all, though he couldn’t put a finger on what.
Dead knights, farmers, spearmen, greatswords, ha
ndgunners and river men lay where they had died, their faces and necks shredded to red ruin, and their bones smashed by falling from the walls. There were corpses burning amidst the smouldering tents, and bumping against the hulls of the boats in the harbour, and the wounded looked hardly better, howling and sobbing with deep claw marks in their backs and their limbs crushed and bent.
Zeismann’s spearmen and von Volgen’s knights helped the farmers pick through the carnage, dragging the living to one side, and piling the dead on the other. The tenants wept pitifully when they found loved ones, and some could not continue. A mother hugged her child to her breast, the blood from his torn throat drenching her tunic. A young girl shrieked ceaselessly for her parents.
The men of the castle gathered their wounded as well, carrying them into the underkeep on stretchers as they moaned and wailed.
The wailing.
Perhaps that was it.
Felix couldn’t tell if it was his imagination, but the screaming of the wounded seemed even more agonised than was usual after a battle. Even the cleansings and salvings of the Shallyan initiates and Surgeon Tauber’s assistants appeared to hurt them beyond bearing, as if they were being bathed with fire instead of water, and it got worse as Felix and Kat followed the Slayers into the underkeep.
Wounded men were laid out in the mess hall and along the corridor leading to the surgery, all in incredible pain. There was a smell about them too – a sick, sour reek of neglect that Felix associated with overcrowded poverty wards. He would have expected such a smell if the soldiers had lain here for weeks, but not so soon. Their wounds were fresh – minutes old. The place should smell of blood and burnt flesh, but not the charnel house. Not yet.
Captain Zeismann stood from lowering a spearman into a cot, and gave Felix, Kat and the Slayers a weary salute.
‘Well done, friends,’ he said. ‘Y’did heroes’ work up on them walls tonight. Saved old Goldie’s bacon for him and no mistake.’
‘Goldie?’ asked Felix.
‘Von Geldrecht,’ said Zeismann. ‘He ain’t much, but–’
A roar of anger from the surgery cut him off, followed swiftly by the crash of overturning furniture and bellowed accusations.
‘Murderer!’
‘Poisoner!’
‘You’re in league with the necromancer!’
‘Yer tryin’ to turn us all into zombies!’
‘Please!’ cried a higher voice. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me!’
Felix recognised the voice as Tauber’s, strained to breaking with fear.
‘Aw, what’s all this now?’ groaned Zeismann, and hurried for the surgery door, which was clogged with knights and foot troops, all shouting and trying to get in at once.
Felix, Kat and the Slayers followed as Zeismann shoved and elbowed at the back of the mob, raising his voice to a parade-ground bark to be heard.
‘Step back! Step back! What’s the trouble?’
The three Slayers bulled through the crowd as if it weren’t there, and Zeismann followed gratefully in their wake, with Felix and Kat taking up the rear.
Inside, Greatsword Captain Bosendorfer and a semi-circle of men had backed Tauber and his assistants into a corner. Tauber shrank from them, a scalpel in his shaking hand. His assistants wielded stools and buckets and mops. It smelled worse in there than in the corridor.
‘You may have killed us, you traitor,’ said Bosendorfer, ‘but we’ll take you with us.’
‘And take your head off too,’ said a spearman. ‘You’ll not be joining your zombie brothers.’
‘Hoy, now!’ said Zeismann. ‘What’s this about?’
‘I haven’t poisoned anyone,’ cried Tauber. ‘It must be something else! The claws of the bats!’
‘A liar as well as a traitor,’ sneered Bosendorfer. He pointed to one of his men, sweating on a cot like he was in an oven and clutching an arm wound that glistened with oozing green pus. ‘Pulcher was cut by falling slates. Those horrors never touched him!’
‘Then I don’t know what it is!’ said Tauber. ‘But I’ve got nothing to do with it.’
‘That’s just what you would say,’ said Bosendorfer, starting forwards. ‘Grab him! Bring him out to the yard where I can make a proper swing. And fetch out his minions too.’
‘Wait, now, Bosendorfer! Wait!’ shouted Zeismann, getting in the greatsword’s way. ‘I know you don’t like old Tauber, but these are serious charges. Let’s take it to General Nordling.’
Bosendorfer shoved the spearman into Felix. ‘Stay out of it, Zeismann! You don’t outrank me!’
The greatsword charged at Tauber with the mob barging in behind him, fists flying.
‘This is bad,’ said Kat. ‘Gotrek needs him.’
‘We all need him,’ said Felix, setting Zeismann on his feet. Tauber might be a pinched little man with the bedside manner of a mollusc, but he had patched up nearly a hundred wounded the day before and none had sickened – not even Kat, not even after Felix had threatened him. Whatever his crimes, Felix doubted this present evil was one of them.
He caught Bosendorfer’s arm as he started to drag Tauber out of the room. ‘Wait, captain! Are you really going to kill the only man who can patch you up?’
‘Aye,’ added Zeismann, stepping beside him. ‘Are y’daft?’
Bosendorfer glared down at them from his impressive height, and looked like he was going to shove them aside, but the Slayers moved in behind them and he only snarled.
‘He’s not patching us up,’ he said. ‘He’s murdering us, like he did up north!’
‘He didn’t murder anyone up north, Bosendorfer,’ said Zeismann, exasperated. ‘That’s all been sorted out. He just couldn’t save everyone. You know that.’
‘I know nothing of the sort!’ snapped the greatsword. ‘I said then he was with the Kurgan, and now I say he’s with this necromancer, trying again!’
Felix blinked, confused. The warrior sounded mad. ‘If he’s with the necromancer,’ he said, as calmly as he could, ‘then why didn’t he poison everybody yesterday after the fight?’
Bosendorfer’s cheek twitched as he locked eyes with Felix. ‘Who are you, that we should listen to you? Are you with the necromancer too? Are you, Zeismann? Get out of our way! We’ve a traitor to kill!’
The men roared in agreement, and this time Bosendorfer did shove Felix and Zeismann, but as he started to drag Tauber between them, Gotrek, Snorri and Rodi stepped in his way.
‘If you insult the manling,’ said Gotrek, ‘you insult us.’
Bosendorfer paused at this, looking uneasily from Slayer to Slayer. ‘I– I didn’t insult him. I only told him to get out of the way.’
‘You said he was with the necromancer,’ said Rodi.
‘Snorri doesn’t know any necromancers,’ said Snorri. ‘And neither does young Felix.’
Felix could see that Bosendorfer would have liked to back down in the face of three so fearsome opponents, but the men behind him were shouting insults at the dwarfs and egging him on. He was trapped, and it made him angry. ‘I don’t care who you know or who you are!’ he shouted. ‘You have no authority here! I am Graf Reiklander’s captain of greatswords. I order you to get out of my way!’
The Slayers said nothing, only raised their fists. Felix and Kat did the same as the mob roared and Zeismann called for calm. But then, over all the noise, came a bellowing from the hall.
‘Surgeon Tauber! Clear your table!’
Felix recognised von Geldrecht’s voice, and so did the rest, for they all stopped shoving as the steward limped through with two household knights behind him. He was using a cane to walk.
‘Tauber!’ he gasped. ‘You must see to General Nordling at once. He has a pestilence in his–’ He stopped as he saw the scene before him. ‘Bosendorfer, what is this? Unhand our surgeon!’
‘My lord,’ said Bosendorfer, saluting. ‘It is Tauber who has caused the pestilence. Look!’ He flashed a hand around at the wounded, all moaning and putrefying in their cots. �
�Look at their wounds. He has poisoned them!’
‘You don’t know that, Bosendorfer!’ said Zeismann.
Von Geldrecht cringed as he looked from horror to horror, then turned back to Tauber, a frightened look in his eyes. ‘Is– is this true, surgeon?’
‘No, lord steward,’ said Tauber. ‘I don’t know what has caused it. I swear to you.’
‘He’s lying!’ shouted Bosendorfer. ‘He’s killed us all!’
‘My lord,’ said Felix, ‘I don’t think he has. If he was responsible, wouldn’t he have tried to slip away? He has been at his post, tending the wounded.’
‘He has been sickening them!’ cried Bosendorfer.
‘How d’ye know it was him that did it?’ said Zeismann. ‘It could be anyone!’
Everyone began shouting at once, with von Geldrecht bellowing over them all for silence, but then, into the room pushed four household knights with General Nordling on a stretcher between them, and the cacophony died away to a whisper of murmured prayers and indrawn breaths.
The general, so straight and proud when Felix had first seen him, now lay on the stretcher like a victim of famine. His limbs, under the bloody shirt that was his only cover, were bone-thin and swollen at the joints, and his face was gaunt and grey. His breath came shallow and fast, like a panting dog. Felix saw only one wound on him, but it was terrible. A spike of broken bone jutted out of his left leg above the knee, and the gash through which it stuck was black and bubbling with green pus, and stank of death.
Zeismann choked as the knights put Nordling on a table. ‘Sigmar, what happened to him?’
A frightened field surgeon who had trailed in behind the knights shook his head. ‘He was well enough after he fell from the chapel roof. Just the broken leg, and he made jokes about it as we carried him to the barracks, but only moments after we cleaned the wound he was like this. I don’t understand it.’
Von Geldrecht turned to Bosendorfer and motioned to Tauber, who was still pinned in the greatsword’s iron grip. ‘Release him. Let him work.’