by Warhammer
Krell took another step back from the Slayers’ onslaught, and faltered on the edge. Rodi ducked in and smashed his axe into the wight king’s knee in a burst of shattered iron and splintered bone. Krell fell sideways, and Gotrek leapt forwards and hacked at his neck with his glowing rune axe. The blade smashed through Krell’s bevor, but before it could sever his neck, the champion toppled backwards into the moat and disappeared from Felix’s sight.
The two Slayers stepped to the edge, and Felix was certain they were about to leap in after him, but as they tensed, the four sparking fuses burned between their feet and vanished over the lip. Rodi laughed and stepped back, but Gotrek remained where he was, blowing like a bellows and still poised to jump.
‘That isn’t death in battle, Gurnisson,’ said Rodi, turning back to him. ‘That’s just death.’
Gotrek growled. ‘My doom does not require your approval, Balkisson.’
‘No,’ said Rodi. ‘Only Grimnir’s.’
And with that, the young Slayer turned and ran back towards the bank. Felix held his breath, not daring to blink and miss the Slayer’s last moment, though it might mean being caught in the blast himself, but after an interminable second, Gotrek cursed and raced after Rodi.
With a relieved breath, Felix sprinted for the corner of the castle, more than happy to use his long human legs to their fullest advantage, but even with his greater speed, he didn’t quite make it.
As he neared the wall, he looked back to see how the Slayers were coming, and the world behind him suddenly turned black and orange and yellow. One second, the bats were wheeling above the dike, and Krell’s wyvern was flapping down into the moat the next second, all of them were eclipsed by a billowing fireball that rose above the dike like a phoenix. The air was suddenly as hot as the Desert of Araby, and lifted Felix off his feet as a sound like the sundering of the world battered his ears.
He slammed down again ten feet further on, blind and concussed, and felt heavy thuds strike on either side of him. Then, through the ringing in his ears and the clouds in his head, came a new noise – a roaring, crashing tumult. He opened his eyes and rolled over. He was lying between the two Slayers, who were both looking back towards the moat and grinning like daemons. Felix followed their gaze and saw, frothing through the gap where the doors of the dyke had been, a rushing wall of water, twenty feet wide and twenty feet high, thundering down the moat like a stampede of white bulls.
Felix looked along the front of the castle, following the water’s progress. The first tower was halfway across the moat now, its crew of skinned beasts obliviously straining at their ropes, but the ghouls clinging to the top had seen the wave coming and were shrieking and gibbering and trying to climb down. They were too late. The wall of water shot up over the bridge of zombies and hit the tower on its leading edge, lifting it and knocking it sideways and back. Screaming in terror, the ghouls rode the thing to the ground as it smashed to pieces in the ravaged fields.
The zombie mound was swept away like leaves in a gutter and the water rushed on towards the second tower. This one had almost reached the castle side of the moat. The flood slammed into its back edge, the froth climbing halfway up its height, and toppled it sideways, crashing it down right on top of the covered battering-ram and smashing it to pieces.
After that, the tide was spent, and it only rocked the third tower slightly as it streamed around its base before reconnecting with the Reik on the far side of the castle. Nevertheless, a huge cheer went up from the walls as the defenders saw the undead horde’s attack reduced to a single tower, and the chances of the ram getting through the main gate reduced to zero.
Rodi laughed and pushed himself to his feet. ‘We did it!’ he said. ‘We slew Krell and broke the back of Kemmler’s army in one stroke.’ He grinned at Gotrek. ‘Not a bad night’s work, was it, Gurnisson?’
Gotrek walked past him towards the ropes without a word, his chest working and his face as hard and cold as an anvil.
The eager hands of Bosendorfer’s greatswords helped Gotrek, Felix, Rodi and Volk over the battlements and back onto the parapet, then slapped them jovially on their backs.
‘Well done!’ said Sergeant Leffler. ‘Saved our bacon, mein Herr!’
Von Geldrecht limped towards them through the surging ring of well-wishers, his eyes wide. ‘You did it, Slayers,’ he said, wonderingly, ‘Krell dead, the towers fallen, the moat restored, a thousand zombies crushed and swept away, the battle over before it’s begun–’
‘The battle’s not done,’ rasped Gotrek, his face still hard.
He pushed roughly through the men and continued down the wall, towards where Snorri and von Volgen and his knights were holding off the ghouls who spilled from the last remaining tower. Rodi followed him, but Felix stopped and looked for Kat.
She was at the wall, watching him as she shouldered her bow.
‘That was quite a shot,’ he said, crossing to her and giving her a squeeze. Where did you find flaming arrows?’
Kat held up her thick wool scarf, which now had rough holes torn in the end of it. ‘This and some naphtha from Volk’s cannon crews.’
Felix laughed. ‘Well done. The whole castle is in your debt. They owe you a new scarf, at least.’
Kat showed her teeth. ‘I’ll settle for a beast-hide coat.’
Felix looked after the Slayers. ‘If that’s what you want, I think I can oblige you. As Gotrek says, “the battle’s not done”.’
Kat snorted at his pathetic imitation of the Slayer’s sandstone rasp, and drew her hatchets. ‘Lead on.’
As they started squeezing through the back-slapping greatswords, Felix felt someone’s eyes on him, and glanced back to find Bosendorfer once again staring at him with undisguised loathing. Felix growled and hurried on. Was the greatsword angry that his men had offered Felix their congratulations? Ridiculous.
He hurried on with Kat, but by the time they had caught up with the Slayers, the fight was over. The cannon crews had set fire to the last siege tower, and Snorri and von Volgen’s knights had held off the ghouls until it had burned out from under them and crashed back into the moat in a hissing cloud of steam and smoke. As Felix, Kat, Rodi and Gotrek arrived, the knights were all cheering and wiping the sweat from their eyes, and Snorri was limping out from among them, his face covered in blood and his warhammer over his shoulder at a jaunty angle.
‘Gotrek Gurnisson! Rodi Balkisson!’ he boomed as he saw them. ‘There you are! Snorri thinks you missed a good fight!’
Gotrek balled his fists at this, and Rodi shot him a wary glance, but Gotrek only turned and stalked off again, pushing past Felix and Kat unseeing.
Rodi shook his head as he stared after him. ‘Poor cursed bastard,’ he said.
Felix frowned at him. ‘What do you mean?’
Rodi looked up, seemingly surprised to have been heard. ‘I shouldn’t have spoke,’ he said.
‘Aye,’ said Felix. ‘But you did. What did you mean by it?’
The young Slayer looked uncomfortable. He shrugged. ‘Don’t tell him I said it,’ said Rodi, ‘but I fear Gurnisson is cursed. He will never find his doom.’ He slanted a glance at Snorri. ‘He needs the intercession of Grimnir more than Nosebiter does.’
An hour later, Felix stared at the broken ceiling of his room as Kat slept soundly beside him, Rodi’s words turning over and over in his head.
He had always thought of Gotrek as unlucky – at least as Slayers thought of luck. He had survived encounters no one should have survived, and slain opponents he shouldn’t have had a hope of defeating. Felix had also come to believe that the Slayer was partly culpable in his continued survival. Not that he ever shied from a fight or turned from danger, but as Rodi had said once before, he was sometimes choosy about his doom. He wanted it to be epic. He wanted it to have meaning. Dying in some pointless bloodbath was not the doom Gotrek envisioned for himself. He wanted to die saving the world.
But did his inability to find his doom stem from more than ju
st bad luck and pride? Was the Slayer actually cursed? Had some god or daemon or mortal sorcerer somehow caused his quest to be endless? If so, why? What had the Slayer done to deserve such a fate? Was it tied in with the fate the daemon he had fought in the depths of the dark elves’ black ark had spoken of? The vaporous being had said that Gotrek was to die fighting one greater than itself. Did this mean that the Slayer was being saved for some great destiny? Did it mean that nothing could kill him until that destiny manifested itself?
Felix grunted and shifted uncomfortably in the cot. There seemed to be precious little difference between ‘destiny’ and ‘curse’.
The morale of the castle, so high after the restoring of the moat and the destruction of Kemmler’s siege engines the night before, crashed down again with the coming of the dawn and the revelation that their great victory had been all for naught, and every gain the defenders had made had been cancelled out under cover of darkness.
Felix and Kat were pulled from sleep by cries of horror and dismay, and after struggling into their armour, made their way up to the walls under a lowering grey sky to find half the defenders huddled against a cold wind and staring silently down over the battlements.
The zombies were swarming near the ruins of the blasted dike, and like ants carrying bits of dirt to make an ant hill, they were carrying heavy rocks to it and throwing them into the water. Unlike ants, however, they were throwing themselves in as well – for the rocks were tied around their necks, and they were sinking to the bottom. Already the mound of weighted bodies had drastically constricted the flow of water through the channel, and the moat was half the depth it had been when it had swept away the siege towers.
‘Is there nothing you can do, Captain Volk?’ asked von Geldrecht from where he, von Volgen and his officers stood with the artillery captain further along the wall.
‘Shooting at ’em might slow ’em a while,’ said Volk, shrugging. ‘But we’re almost out of shot. And dropping pipe charges into the moat might shift a few, but they’ll just pile more on.’ He shivered. ‘Look at ’em all. They’re endless.’
Felix did just that, sweeping his eyes across the misty fields beyond the walls. Despite the thousands of undead that the bursting of the dike had swept away the night before, there seemed just as many zombies surrounding the castle now as there had been before, perhaps more. And at the tree line, three more towers were rising, and another battering-ram was taking shape.
‘They don’t need to eat,’ said Kat. ‘They don’t need to sleep. They never run out of supplies. They don’t care how many times we knock down their towers. They just keep making more.’
Von Geldrecht turned to Gotrek, who stood with Rodi and Snorri next to him at the wall, and held out his hands, pleading. ‘Herr Slayer, you saved us last night. Is there nothing you can think of to fix this? Have you no clever trap to destroy them again?’
Gotrek grunted, his single eye never looking away from the zombies filling the moat. ‘Sorry, lordling,’ he said. ‘There is nothing to do but fight.’
‘That sounds good to Snorri,’ said Snorri.
Von Geldrecht groaned, sagging as if something had broken within him, and turned back to the wall as his officers stared at him in dismay. Von Volgen grimaced and leaned in to speak to him again, then glanced up as he felt Felix looking at him.
Felix turned away. The mixture of fury and regret in the lord’s eyes was too painful to see.
Though the hopelessness and the four days with little water and less food, had made the men of the castle listless, sick and weak, far worse for morale was the fact that there was no longer anything to do but wait for the end. The hoardings were all built and repaired, the river gate was patched, the saboteur had been caught and killed, the cannons supplied with all the remaining shot, and every weapon sharpened and polished until it shone.
Von Volgen kept his knights busy with exercise and wall patrols, but after his too-public display of despair, von Geldrecht disappeared into the keep without passing along any orders or words of encouragement, and his officers seemed to have decided to follow his example. They gave no orders, nor demanded any drill, just stood their watch when it was their time, and retired to their quarters when they were done. Consequently, their men did nothing as well, and sat huddled in little groups, griping and moaning and inventing rumours of more traitors. Even the weather added to the lassitude. Heavy clouds lowered over the castle, growing darker and more oppressive as the day went on and filling the air with a thick, undersea tension.
The mood was summed up perfectly by a spearman who Felix passed as he paced the walls. ‘What’s the point of doing anything,’ he asked another spearman, ‘when there’s nothing to be done?’
There was a brief flurry of excitement in the middle of the afternoon, when von Geldrecht came out of the keep briefly to talk with Sister Willentrude, and von Volgen accosted him afterwards as he hurried back to the stairs.
‘Lord steward,’ he called, ‘when may we expect to see you among us? Your presence is needed.’
Von Geldrecht waved him away and continued up the stairs. ‘Not now, not now,’ he said. ‘I have pressing business.’
Von Volgen stopped at the bottom of the stairs, glaring. ‘What business could be more pressing at this time than the morale of your men? You must order them, my lord.’
Von Geldrecht turned, his eyes feverish and his beard unkempt. ‘The graf summons me!’ he snarled. ‘And it is his orders I obey, my lord, not yours!’
He hurried up the stairs and vanished once again into the keep, and after a few minutes of murmured speculation about the incident, the men returned to their lethargy, and the day continued as before.
The Slayers, being pragmatists, slept while they waited for the battle to come, but Felix and Kat were too restless, and wandered the castle ceaselessly, helping out where they could, but mostly just walking or staring out at Kemmler’s siege towers as they grew like toadstools sprouting after rain. The swarm of activity around the looming constructs was as hypnotising as the gaze of a cobra before it strikes.
Another restless soul was Bosendorfer, who sat with his greatswords on the steps of the temple of Sigmar as they pounded out the dents in their armour and replaced damaged straps and buckles. Though he never moved from the spot, Felix felt Bosendorfer’s eyes following him wherever he and Kat went, and all day long his talk was full of loud comments about honour and cowardice and disruptive outsiders – at which his men laughed uncomfortably.
Felix did his best to ignore it all, but then, towards the end of the afternoon, the tension, like the heavy clouds that were gathering over the castle, could no longer hold its burden, and burst into open conflict.
It started when one of Sister Willentrude’s assistants came out of the underkeep and said something to Bosendorfer. The captain and his men rose and followed her inside, and taking advantage of their absence, Felix and Kat came down off the walls and warmed their hands at the ever-burning pyre.
A short while later, Bosendorfer and the greatswords came back out of the underkeep in double file, carrying a corpse between them on a stretcher. Bosendorfer was at the back of the procession, carrying a two-handed sword outstretched in his hands and chanting a prayer, while Sergeant Leffler was at the front, the doublet, breeks and morion helm of a greatsword’s uniform held neatly folded in his arms.
Felix and Kat stepped back as the procession shuffled to the pyre and the greatswords laid down the dead man and made the sign of the hammer over him.
‘Best to make yourself scarce, mein Herr,’ said Leffler out of the corner of his mouth, then nodded at the corpse. ‘That’s Hinkner, who was wounded when we was fighting them ghouls with you. Captain blames you for his dying. Says he’d still be alive if we hadn’t come back to the wall at yer call.’
Felix sighed. ‘Very well, I’ll retire. Thank you for the warning–’
‘I told you not to speak to my men!’
Felix turned. Bosendorfer was striding towards
them angrily, the sword he had held in reverence now gripped at the hilt and ready to strike.
Kat whipped out her skinning knife, but Felix held her back. ‘He was just telling me to get out of the way, captain,’ he said.
Bosendorfer laughed, harsh. ‘Get out of the way? You could not go far enough unless you left the castle!’ His hands shook as he pointed the sword at Felix’s throat. ‘That you are alive to witness the funeral of a man you killed is a travesty! It should be you on this pyre, not Hinkner.’
Felix knew he should back away. He knew he should say nothing and leave the captain and his men to their funeral, but that last jab had been too much, and his anger boiled over at last.
‘I am indeed sad to witness the funeral of a brave man wounded in battle,’ he said, as cold as he could manage. ‘But if you want to throw someone on the fire for his death, captain, then it should be you who walks into the flames.’
‘What!’ cried Bosendorfer. ‘What do you say?’
Felix stepped closer to him as men all over the courtyard turned to listen. ‘The other night when we were raising toasts, you asked us all to pledge death to the man who had murdered the wounded who’d died in their cots. Do you remember?’
‘Of course I remember!’ said Bosendorfer. ‘What has that to do with this?’
‘Nothing, but the fact that you are the murderer,’ said Felix. ‘You are the one who killed those men. You are the one who killed Hinkner.’
Bosendorfer raised the two-handed sword over his head, snarling, but there was a cast of unease in his eyes, as if he feared he faced a madman. ‘What are you saying? I’ve killed no one!’
‘Haven’t you?’ asked Felix. ‘Who forced von Geldrecht to hide Surgeon Tauber away for fear of his life? And how many men would still live had he been free to care for them? Hinkner didn’t die in battle. He died from his wounds because Tauber couldn’t see to them. You killed him, captain. You killed all of them. And if you wish to fight me over it, I am ready.’