Gotrek & Felix- the Fourth Omnibus - Nathan Long

by Warhammer

  Yuleh il Toorissi

  A princess, and niece of a previous ruler of Ras Karim. She conspires with her lover, Halim, to overthrow the current, corrupt caliph, Falhedar.

  Z

  Zayed al Mahrak

  An Arabyan caravan master who plies the Ivory road between Barak Varr and Cathay. He employs Gotrek and Felix as caravan guards on one of his journeys.

  Zarkhul

  A prophet and the uniter of the orc tribes of Albion. He intends to lead them into the great Waaagh! to reclaim the Temple of the Old Ones.

  Zhufgrim Scarp

  A high, sheer-sided cliff in the mountains by Karak Hirn. At its foot lies the Cauldron Lake.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Nathan Long hails from Los Angeles, California, where he began his career as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He has written a wide selection of Warhammer novels, including the Blackhearts trilogy and the adventures of Ulrika the Vampire. To many fans, he is best known for his work on the hugely successful Gotrek & Felix series, including five full-length novels and the first Black Library fantasy audio drama, Slayer of the Storm God.

  Richard Salter is a British writer and editor living near Toronto, Canada with his wife and two sons. He has written and co-written several novels, most notably the ghost story The Patchwork House, and thriller Shining Ones with Steven Savile. He has published over twenty short stories including tales in Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction and This is How You Die. His Gotrek & Felix tale ‘The Funeral of Gotrek Gurnisson’ is his first short story for Black Library.

  An extract from Overlords of the Iron Dragon.

  The sorcerer’s face curled back in a leering rictus, exposing the blackened stumps of bone hidden behind his lips. There was something almost batrachian in his visage, bulbous eyes jutting from puffy folds of skin. Unlike the flesh around them, there was no softness in Khoram’s toadlike eyes, only a rapacious hunger as they stared both outwards and inwards.

  Possibilities and potentialities, the twistings of doom and fate, the shadows of futures yet unmade. Scenes of glorious victory and visions of annihilating disaster, each waxing and waning like the falling sands of time. The ebb and flow of prophecy was unrelenting and unforgiving. The weak of mind were consumed by the ordeal of divining insight from the tide of omen and portent, driven mad by their inability to confine such knowledge into purely mundane perceptions. The weak of spirit lost themselves in the cosmic expanse of the infinite, flesh and soul obliterated as they surrendered to the cyclopean enormity where past and future united into a single moment that defied the mortal conceit of time. Humanity had been the first and least of the sacrifices Khoram had rendered to his black arts.

  The sorcerer was a tall man, his body disfigured by the manifold blessings thrust upon him by his dread god. Grossly mutated, his robes and armour folded awkwardly about his frame. The side of his neck bulged with a hideous feathered growth, pushing his head down towards the opposite shoulder. One hand, the less malformed of his extremities, gripped a long staff. The other hand, ending in elongated, boneless digits, beckoned to the fist-sized sphere of glass that hovered around his head. At his summons, the sphere came to rest, floating just before his eyes.

  Wind rippled the sorcerer’s robes, disturbing the feathers of the growth on his neck. The beast upon which he stood shuddered, shifting slightly as it adjusted its flight through the darkling skies, high above the bleak hills of Shadowfar. The sorcerer’s boots were gripped by hairy tendrils that emerged from the creature’s back, melded into its very substance. The flattened, ray-like daemon could no more divorce itself of its rider than it could shed its own organs. Its corporeal form had become subsumed by Khoram, existing as an extension of his own. Through the skies of Chamon it would carry him until such time as it was dismissed and its physical mass dissolved into vapour. There would always be another daemon ready to enter the Mortal Realms to replace it when the sorcerer was in need.

  Khoram’s wormy fingers reached out and curled around the scintillating sphere, little ribbons of steam rising where his cobalt-hued skin rested against the glassy surface. Even flesh that had been transformed by the blessings of Mighty Tzeentch wasn’t immune to the corrosive touch of temporal abeyance.

  ‘Mighty is your power, oh Orb of Zobras,’ Khoram hissed to the gleaming sphere. ‘You are prophecy manifest. Prediction given physical form.’ He felt the heat in his fingers gradually lessen. The sorcerer thought of the great seer who had created the orb. ‘Zobras sacrificed much to achieve you,’ he told the relic. ‘At the height of his power he commanded daemons to forge you from the essence of time and dream. You are the pinnacle of his magic.’

  The flattery spilled off Khoram’s tongue, tasting bitter in his mouth. By arduous rite and obscene ritual, the sphere had been soulbound to him, orbiting him like a captive star. To command the orb was never enough, however. It had to be appeased. Zobras had ignored the will of the relic he had created and in the end it had betrayed him when the armies of Chaos laid waste to his theocracy. The prophet’s ruin was a warning, a reminder to remain humble before the Dark Gods.

  ‘Reveal to me the path of things yet to become,’ Khoram enjoined the orb.

  He stared into the sphere, peering into its thousands of facets. Each one bore its own story, its own interpretation of how the future would unfold. Trying to concentrate upon all of them would be futile, an effort that had driven lesser sorcerers mad. Khoram, however, had received one blessing from his god that made all the difference.

  ‘There! There!’ The words sounded from the feathered growth on Khoram’s neck. A tiny face peered out from the midst of the feathers, clusters of black eyes fixated upon the orb’s planes. ‘There!’ the homunculus repeated.

  Khoram diverted his attention from the images his parasitic daemon had rejected. He depended upon the creature’s guidance to lead him to the most propitious of the visions. A connoisseur of lies, the tretchlet unerringly sniffed out the truth for its master.

  The sorcerer’s eyes gleamed as his familiar drew his attention to the image playing out within one of the facets. The moment he focused upon the image and his mind digested the scene, the other surfaces around it changed. Now they exhibited a new array of futures, possibilities derived from the initial prediction. Again, Khoram felt the tretchlet guiding him to the most truthful of the prophecies. Mustering his resolve, he tore his gaze away from the orb. It was unwise to peer too far ahead at one time. Therein lay the route of obsession and the madness of infinity.

  Looking away from the orb, Khoram gazed out across the cloud-swept skies. Ugly fogs of scintillating amber cascaded through the atmosphere, thrown aloft by the forests of spytepine that infested the hills far below. Buzzing swarms of tiny blot-midges flocked to the amber, greedily glutting themselves on the shimmering motes of hardened sap. Those that fed too lustily became weighted down by their feast, crashing onto the slopes below, their carcasses fertilising the very trees that provoked their downfall. The flux of Change in action, from benefactor to exploiter, from predator to prey. The role played one moment was but a mask that could swiftly be torn away, either by expedience or by the whims of fate.

  Khoram’s left hand closed tighter about the whorled runestaff he held. Glancing down at the daemon upon which he stood, the sorcerer drove the spiked butt of the implement into one of the scarred grooves that circled the creature’s forward edge. The disc-shaped thing snarled in irritation as the goad jabbed at it. Wormy tendrils tried to writhe up from underneath the daemon’s body, but their reach was incapable of threatening the mortal on its back. The creature let out another snarl, the shudder of its annoyance shivering through its substance up into Khoram’s feet. The circular daemon floated upwards, racing towards the height to which its master directed it.

  The roar of battle crashed upon the sorcerer’s ears. The skies below him were filled with conflict. Savage warriors draped in kilts of sapphire and malachite soared through the air on daemonic chargers similar
to the one Khoram rode. Fiery chariots harnessed to still larger daemons careened across the atmosphere, trailing plumes of smoke and flame in their wake. Bird-faced half-men glided about the fray, borne aloft upon shrieking daemon-steeds and loosing arrows of bone from bows cut from the tendons of gargants.

  The warhost of men and monsters spiralled around a clutch of fantastical craft. Great ships soared over Shadowfar, supported by metal cupolas suspended above their decks. From prow and stern, each ship directed an array of weaponry against their tormentors. Beams of golden light streaked out at masked warriors, punching through their flesh as they solidified into bullets just before reaching their targets. Harpoons rocketed away from cylindrical launchers fixed to the decks, the spears impaling howling beastmen, leaving them dangling against the keel until the chains fitted to the projectile were reeled back in.

  From the decks, from armoured baskets fastened to the cupolas and the sides of the hulls themselves, the crew of the sky-vessels directed a determined defence. Pistols belched shot into the very faces of the attackers, larger snub-nosed weapons spewed blasts that shredded the wings of beastmen and scoured the hides of daemons. Axes and pikes were employed to deadly effect, hacking through the beaked faces of the monstrous raiders or plucking warriors from the backs of their steeds to send them plummeting to the earth far below.

  ‘How unfit for the storm are our foes,’ Khoram mused, the tretchlet gibbering in agreement. The crews of the sky-vessels were utterly unlike their vicious foes. They were shorter and stockier, broadly and stolidly built. Most wore bulky armour of heavy metal plates, their faces locked inside helms with glowering masks and golden beards. ‘They lack the grace and agility of those born to the skies. Brutes of rock and stone that seek to conquer the tempest with their puerile inventions.’

  The sorcerer shook his head. ‘The duardin are a meddlesome breed. Whatever the peculiarities of their creed they invariably demand great effort to dispose of. More effort than some are willing to expend.’

  As the thought came to him, Khoram gazed back into the orb. Responding to his mind, the facets shimmered and displayed a new array of images. Each facet displayed the same Chaos warrior standing upon the back of a daemonic disc. He presented a gruesome aspect, his baroque armour still dripping with the sacrificial blood used to anoint it before the fighting. Dismembered fingers dipped in wax were plastered about his gorget like hideous candles. Veiled by the smoke rising from the smouldering fingers his horned helm was an indistinct suggestion of shape and motion. Only the nine eyes that stared from the jumble of visors scattered across the helm’s face exhibited any clarity, shining through the smoke like angry embers.

  ‘Tamuzz is in a particularly wrathful humour,’ Khoram told his homunculus.

  As he watched, an armoured duardin defending the bow of one of the ships jabbed at the warlord’s daemon-steed with a pike, ripping into its mottled hide. Tamuzz brought the fiery blade of the glaive he bore crunching down into the duardin’s head. Even as the enchanted blade bit through iron helm and bony skull Tamuzz pressed the attack, not relenting until he had cleft the enemy from pate to palate.

  ‘Losing so many of his followers in the fighting has upset him,’ Khoram stated. ‘For all the blessings Mighty Tzeentch has seen fit to bestow on him, Tamuzz still reckons power in tired old conceits of mortal rule and domination.’

  Seen in the facets of the orb, Tamuzz ripped his glaive free and sent the body of the slaughtered duardin hurtling over the side of the ship. The warlord sought another foe, but even as he did Khoram sent a tendril of magic rippling through the orb to reach into Tamuzz’s mind. ‘Come to me,’ Khoram hissed, his homunculus echoing the words in a greasy titter. ‘Come to me.’ He was careful to invest the summons with more suggestion than command. Too overt a touch would rouse Tamuzz’s resistance and Khoram knew from past experience that the warlord’s will was strong enough to defy his magic if he was aware of its influence. ‘Set the thought in his head, let Tamuzz think it is of his own volition and there is little he will not do,’ Khoram boasted to his tretchlet. The daemonic parasite whined, reminding his master that his boast wasn’t entirely true.

  The dark spectre of the warlord came speeding away from the battle, a thin slick of ichor seeping from the injured daemon that supported him, leaving a greasy smear in his wake.

  ‘My slaves perish, curseling,’ Tamuzz hissed at Khoram as he soared towards the sorcerer.

  ‘Mighty Tzeentch demands payment,’ Khoram replied. ‘The Changer does not favour slaves…’

  Tamuzz shook the massive glaive he bore, the arcane energies bound within it causing a flicker of power to coruscate along the blade. ‘Spare me your philosophy. You promised me the sky-vessels. Bring them down.’

  Khoram cocked his head to one side, staring past Tamuzz to watch the battle over the warlord’s shoulder. He saw one of the warlord’s adepts pitch from the back of his daemon-steed when a duardin shot him in the face. ‘They will fall,’ Khoram said. ‘But they will fall when it is propitious to a greater purpose. The purpose to which we both strive.’

  The flash of arcane energy faded from the warlord’s glaive. The smouldering eyes lost their lustre, almost seeming to pull the veiling smoke tighter around them. ‘I have not forgotten,’ Tamuzz replied.

  ‘Then let us do what is needed of us,’ Khoram said. He waved his snaky fingers away towards the horizon. ‘We must harry them still further away from Shadowfar. The next valley. That is where their doom will come.’ The sorcerer nodded at the orb circling him. ‘Such is the prophecy that guides us.’

  ‘I will lose more warriors,’ Tamuzz objected, some of the edge creeping back into his tone.

  ‘You will gain more, glorious Tamuzz,’ Khoram insisted. ‘Through me, you will be at the right hand of Power.’

  Grokmund Wodinssin watched from midship as carnage waxed and waned all around him. The gold fillings in his teeth felt as though lightning were racing through them, an impression that had always presaged some disaster. The last time he’d felt that unpleasant tingling in his teeth was when Lodrik Kodraksimm had challenged him to a drinking contest and he lost his stake in a most profitable voyage.

  What he felt now was far worse. Grokmund thought if he champed his teeth sparks might fly out, so fierce was the sensation. Was it because of greater danger or because he had more to lose this time? He glanced at the deck beneath his feet, picturing the box locked away in his cabin below. The aether-khemist’s tests had given every indication that this find would make all their fortunes, would expand the wealth of Barak-Urbaz a hundredfold. If Grokmund was right, this venture would mean more than riches – it would mean fame and glory. The mightiest duardin in the sky-hold would regard them with honour.

  Grokmund ducked down as a daemon-riding cultist flew above the Stormbreaker’s deck. As the brawny human passed, he brought a heavy mace swinging at the aether-khemist. The bludgeon struck sparks from the duardin’s helm but failed to deal any greater damage. As the enemy soared away he was struck from behind by the rifle-fire of a Grundstok thunderer. The cultist sagged across the disc-like daemon, borne away as the creature flew onwards.

  Grokmund rose slowly, shaken by the nearness of his escape. Mutant beastkin darted around the ships of Admiral Thorki’s fleet like megalofin pups in a school of sungills. The Kharadron defenders sent volley upon volley into the raiders, felling some but leaving far too many to press the attack. Swooping from below the hulls of the frigates and gunhaulers, diving down from on high to slash at the great endrins that kept the vessels aloft, the ambushers were taking a slow but steady toll upon the Kharadron. Lifeless skyriggers drifted away from the fleet, the small aether-endrins fitted to their backs keeping them airborne until at last their fuel would run out and bring them sinking earthwards. Some of the skywardens who’d attached cables to the frigates now dangled from the sides of the ships, their aether-endrins damaged, their bodies clanging incessantly against the iron-plated hulls.

  ‘You’ll
lose your head that way,’ Admiral Thorki reproved Grokmund as he helped him back to his feet. Encased in a heavy suit of aether-powered armour, Thorki was easily able to lift Grokmund with one hand while his other aimed a volley pistol at the raiders. He sent a bullet smashing into the beaked face of a beastman as it came whipping towards the ironclad’s endrin. The maimed creature dropped its bow and pawed at the gory wreck of its face before vanishing into the distance.

  ‘I have to do my part,’ Grokmund told Thorki. ‘Protecting the find is all that matters now.’

  Thorki shook his head. ‘We need you to make certain of our claim and secure full rights to the find.’ Despite their magnetised boots, both duardin felt the deck beneath them tremble as aethershot carbines mounted in the hull plastered the attackers with a withering volley. Around them, Grundstok thunderers blasted away at the raiders with their rifles and mortars, trying to keep the attackers from swarming the ironclad’s decks. ‘Get below,’ Thorki told the aether-khemist.

  Grokmund remained where he was. ‘If the ship falls it won’t matter anyway,’ he said. ‘I’d prefer to die fighting than hiding down in the hold.’

  Thorki conceded the point grudgingly. ‘If you get yourself killed, our backers will shave my beard,’ he snapped. The admiral swung around, shouting commands to the gunners up on the forecastle. He gestured with his pistol towards a pack of bird-faced beastkin that were flying at the ship from starboard. ‘Udri! Bring them down!’

  At Thorki’s command, the gunners swung around the great volley cannon bolted to the roof of the forecastle. The whole ship shook as they fired the weapon. Caught in the explosive discharge the centre of the oncoming pack was shredded, daemons and beastmen alike plummeting from the sky. Arkanauts rushed to the gunwales, picking off mangled survivors with their pistols.