[Gotrek & Felix 11] - Shamanslayer

by Nathan Long - (ebook by Undead)

  She looked up, and again there was that arcing spark of attraction between them. He looked away quickly, pretending to look for more beer. He bit his cheek hard to drive away the flicker of lustful images that flared up before his eyes, then laughed at himself. So full of noble sentiments. He only hoped they would stand when put to the test.

  Beside him Gotrek had turned away from Snorri and was staring at a soldier who sat across the table from Rodi and Argrin.

  “Empty?” Gotrek was saying. “Do you mean all dead?”

  Felix turned to listen as the soldier shook his head. “No, herr dwarf. The man said ‘empty’. Him and his fellows is trappers, and they was out in the deep green when the big herd passed by. They never saw ’em, but when they got back to Weinig they could see that them beasties had been to call and no mistake. The whole place was mashed flat — gate, houses and temple — just as you’d expect. But the weird part…” The soldier leaned in and lowered his voice for effect. “The eerie part, was that there was no people. Not a man, woman or child. They was all gone, and precious few corpses neither.”

  Rodi shrugged. “The beastmen took them,” he said. “For food or for slaves.”

  “No,” said Kat. “You don’t know them.”

  Rodi’s eyes widened to be challenged so bluntly by a woman, but Kat continued without looking at him.

  “They might have taken some for food,” she said. “But not many. They don’t carry their larders with them. They eat as they go. And they don’t take human slaves, because they can’t keep up.”

  “Then where did they go?” asked Argrin. “The men, I mean.”

  Kat shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Neither did the trapper,” said the soldier, eager to get the attention back on himself. “But he found the same thing in Bohrung and Grube further south. All vanished, like they was sucked up into the sky by a whirlwind.”

  “Mayhap yer trapper was mad, Pfaltz,” said another soldier, laughing. “A herd of beastmen that makes people disappear? Sounds like a tall tale to me.”

  “Or a good doom,” muttered Gotrek, his one eye shining with the fire from the torches of the hall as the others laughed and insulted the storyteller.

  Felix shivered. When Gotrek smelled a good doom, he knew trouble was sure to follow. He did not look forward to the morrow.

  For three days Lord Ilgner’s party pushed ever deeper into the trackless heart of the Drakwald, a terrifying green vastness that seemed to Felix, his imagination fuelled by the stories of the tale-spinning soldier, to be one giant malevolent organism that watched them through half-slumbering eyes like some listless cat — too comfortable for the moment to bother going after the mouse that has entered its territory, but secure in the knowledge that its prey was trapped, and that it could reach out its paw and crush it any time it chose — or make it vanish.

  There were no roads north of Stangenschloss, not even the meagre tracks that had served as such between Bauholz and the fort, and so the expedition travelled single file along faint game paths. Kat scouted the way far out in front, while Snorri, Rodi and Argrin — who had insisted on accompanying them despite their wounds — marched before Ilgner and ten picked knights leading their horses. Finally came Gotrek, Felix and Ortwin, bringing up the rear and keeping an eye out for anyone who might be following them.

  Felix was relieved that Kat was taking point. She seemed to have regained her composure again swiftly, and had greeted him with a cheery and non-committal hello on the morning they had set out, but he found that he was still having difficulty keeping his eyes off her when she was around, and so welcomed anything that took her out of his sight.

  Each day out of Stangenschloss the terrain grew hillier than the last, with much struggling up steep, brush-covered ridges, or pushing through thickly wooded ravines. Several times they came to places where they had to hack down the undergrowth to make a passage for the horses. Despite the bitter cold, the effort of the march made them sweat so much that they steamed.

  On the third day they woke up to ominous clouds and whistling winds. Gusts of driving sleet lashed their faces as they broke camp and shouldered their packs. Felix wondered if Ilgner might give the order to return to Stangenschloss due to the threat of a storm, but the general didn’t even discuss it, and they continued north as before.

  “One advantage to travelling in the thick of the forest,” he said cheerily. “Keeps the weather off!”

  His knights laughed at that. Felix didn’t find it particularly funny, or particularly true. Being under the trees did keep the wind and the sleet out of their faces, but the melting ice dripped from the needles and down the back of his neck, and turned the forest floor into a mouldy mulch of leaves and mud that made walking more like sliding and froze his feet through his boots.

  Just before noon they at last found evidence of the mysterious herd’s passage. It wasn’t hard to miss. The party wormed their way down a densely wooded pine slope and discovered Kat at the base of it, squatting and staring at a river of crushed underbrush, hoof prints, beast-dung, gnawed animal bones and branch-shorn trees so wide that the far side of it was beyond the distance they could see into the wood. Her expression was dark and thoughtful.

  “What troubles you, Kat?” asked Lord Ilgner. “Is it a very big herd?”

  She nodded, her mouth a flat line. “I don’t know if I’ve seen bigger, but that’s not all of it.”

  She beckoned them forwards, cutting across the beastmen’s trampled path. As they went on, the murky leaf-shrouded light brightened, until, after twenty paces, they stepped out into a strange gap in the forest where the trees had been chopped down in a long straight line that followed the beastmen’s line of march, and the sleet beat down at them from roiling grey sky above.

  Felix shielded his eyes and looked up and down the line of felled trees. It went as far as he could see in both directions — like a furrow cut into the forest by some unimaginably large plough. It was not wide — no more than five or six paces from edge to edge — but there were fallen trees and ragged stumps all along it, the axe cuts that had felled them so fresh that thick sap welled up out of them like pus from a septic wound.

  “This,” said Kat. “This is unnatural. The beastmen don’t travel like this.”

  “Is it perhaps marauders instead?” asked Ilgner.

  “Doesn’t smell like marauders,” said Argrin.

  Kat agreed. “There are only hoof prints. No boots. It was a herd that did this, but I have never seen a herd cut down trees on the march. They are creatures of the forest. They move through trees like we move in the open. I don’t understand it.”

  “Perhaps they have a cannon,” said Felix.

  Rodi laughed. “Beastmen don’t have cannon!” he said. “They don’t even have bows and arrows.”

  “Listen to the beardling,” said Gotrek under his breath. “He knows everything.”

  “Those that lead the beasts sometimes have cannon,” said Felix, remembering the hellish weapon that the Chaos champion Justine had brought with the herd that had attacked Flensburg.

  “It might be a cannon,” said Kat doubtfully. “But where are the tracks of the wheels?”

  “Unnatural or not,” said Ilgner, waving her on, “we have found our quarry’s spoor, and it does not appear to be hard to follow. Let the hunt begin.”

  EIGHT

  Whatever the beastmen’s reasons for clearing a path through the forest, Ilgner was right, it made them exceptionally easy to follow, and also allowed the party of knights and slayers to nearly double its speed. By mid-afternoon they had covered the same distance they had travelled the whole of the previous day, and Kat said that they were coming very near to catching up to the herd, for the dung and the half-eaten carcasses that littered the trail were still fresh. After that, they went with weapons drawn, and Ilgner and his knights stayed mounted, their helmets on and crossbows loaded and ready.

  Felix was so focused on looking and listening to the front, worried that a
t any minute they were going to run into the back of the herd, that when trouble came from behind them, he failed to hear it. Only when Gotrek stopped and looked back did he hear the distant thudding of heavy hooves below the moaning of the wind and the rattle of the freezing rain. He followed Gotrek’s gaze, wiping his eyes and peering through the slanting sleet, but the sound was coming from over the last ridge and there was nothing to see yet.

  “Beastmen?” asked Ortwin, his voice wavering between anxious and eager.

  “Aye,” rumbled Gotrek, his eyebrows dripping. “Though not nearly enough.”

  Even one beastman was more than Felix cared for, but he let it go. He ran up the line to Ilgner. “Beastmen behind us,” he said. “Gotrek thinks it’s a small party.”

  Ilgner looked back, cursing, then turned to his men. “Into the trees to the left. We’ll let them pass.” He looked down at Felix again. “Herr Jaeger, if you would be so kind as to go ahead and tell the slayers and Kat.”

  “Aye, general,” said Felix, and trotted forwards as the knights began leading their horses into the woods.

  The slayers didn’t like it.

  “Hide from beastmen?” said Argrin. He looked genuinely shocked.

  “We didn’t join this squig chase to hide,” said Rodi, indignant. “You want to rob us of a doom.”

  “Ilgner came to scout the big herd,” said Felix, struggling for patience. “Not die before he found it. If you want a doom, stay behind and fight the whole herd after we’ve returned to Stangenschloss.”

  The two slayers grunted unhappily, but made for the trees. As Felix hurried forwards to find Kat, he heard Rodi mutter, “Humans,” in a disgusted voice.

  Kat looked grim when he told her.

  “Foragers,” she said. “A herd on the move has outriders that range for miles in all directions, hunting for food.”

  They ran back and joined the others, who had disappeared into the trees on the left side of the ragged path. Lord Ilgner had ordered the knights not just out of the open cut, but beyond the edge of the wider swathe of flattened undergrowth that the herd had trampled on either side of it. They buried themselves in the heavy brush, the knights with their cloaks and hoods drawn over their armour and helmets so that they would not betray themselves with any stray reflections. They waited with shields on their arms and cocked crossbows in their sword hands.

  Felix looked back at the path as he and Kat crouched down next to Gotrek and Ortwin in the bushes. It could be seen only in little slivers between the black silhouettes of the intervening trees. The sounds of the approaching beastmen were louder now — the clump, clump, clump of hooves on earth, the bawling and braying of their inhuman speech.

  “Will they see our tracks?” whispered Felix.

  “They might,” said Kat, laying an arrow on the string of her bow. “But our prints will blend in with all of theirs, so they likely won’t notice.”

  “Let us pray they don’t,” said Ilgner.

  Rodi and Argrin snorted at that. Ortwin however seemed to be taking the general at his word, and was mumbling over his clasped hands, his head bowed.

  As the sounds got louder, the horses began to shift nervously, but the knights held their bridles and murmured soothing words to them and they remained quiet.

  Soon Felix saw flashes of movement between the trees, like glimpses through the cracks in a plank fence. A big beastman — a gor, Felix remembered — with a head like an antlered bear lumbered down the treeless path with a club over one shoulder, its hairy torso covered in rags and scraps of rusty armour. Four more big gors followed behind it in twos, each pair carrying a pole between them from which was hogtied the corpse of a giant boar. Behind these came a score of the smaller, more man-like beasts — those Kat had named ungors — all armed with spears, and some leading dogs — or things that might once have been dogs — on ropes.

  Now it was the slayers’ turn to get restless. Felix could hear them muttering.

  “Dibs on the big one.”

  “I called him first.”

  “Abominations.”

  “Snorri could use a good fight just now.”

  “Quiet, sirs,” hissed Ilgner urgently. “Their hearing is as good as their sense of smell.”

  “We can only hope,” said Rodi, but the dwarfs’ murmuring stopped.

  Felix and the others watched in silence as the hunting party plodded along, snarling at each other and the weather and shaking the wet sleet from their fur. All Ilgner’s party had to do was wait. Another minute and the beasts would be out of sight. A minute after that they would be out of earshot.

  One of the dogs raised its tusked snout, sniffing, and Felix and the others held their breath. Had it scented them? It stopped and strained towards the trees. Its ungor master jerked its leash and cursed it. The dog barked and kept looking at the woods. The knights and the slayers white-knuckled their weapons. Kat raised her bow, though Felix doubted even she could hit a target through that thick screen of trees.

  The dog barked again. The ungor snarled and kicked it, dragging it on. It growled at the abuse, then at last gave up and padded on.

  Felix, Ortwin, Kat and the knights sighed with relief. The slayers cursed.

  Gotrek sneered. “Dogs on both ends of that leash—”

  He was cut off by a crashing and a thudding at their backs. Everybody turned, peering into the depths of the forest with eyes blinded from staring towards the relative brightness of the path. Out of the shadows came two of the ungors, filthy, half-naked savages with tiny horns and pointed teeth. One had a brace of rabbits over its shoulder, the other carried a dead fox by the hind leg. They were running right for the hidden party.

  “Kill them,” snapped Ilgner. “Swiftly!”

  The two ungors pulled up short as they saw the knights and the slayers standing before them in the darkness. Their eyes bulged and they opened their mouths to scream.

  The one with the fox never got a chance. An arrow appeared in its throat and it toppled backwards without a sound. The other, however, lived a second longer, and spent it screaming and trying to run.

  Two of Ilgner’s men fired their crossbows. The two bolts vanished into the ungor’s back and it went down thrashing and shrieking. Another shot from Kat silenced it, and everybody turned back to the path. Had the hunters heard over the wind?

  There was a sound of bestial voices raised in the distance, and then the tread of heavy hooves coming nearer.

  “They heard,” said Kat.

  “Damn and blast,” said Ilgner.

  “Grimnir be praised!” said Rodi and Argrin.

  Ilgner started forwards, motioning for the rest to follow. “Back to the open path. Hurry. They’ll murder us in here. No, curse you! Leave the horses!”

  The knights and the slayers shouldered through the maze of trees towards the cleared strip, but before they had made it halfway, a handful of the ungors came back down the path, dogs straining at their leashes as they peered into the woods and called out questions. Then one of them shouted and pointed directly at Felix — or so it seemed to him — and it and its comrades charged baying into the tree line, their massive dogs bounding before them.

  “At them!” roared Ilgner. “Push them out! Don’t let them trap us in here!”

  The knights shouted a battle cry and ran forwards, shields up and swords back. The slayers were just behind, axes and hammers high, roaring with joyous rage. Felix, Kat and Ortwin ran with them, screaming along with the rest.

  The two sides crashed together just inside the tree line, swords and axes singing and blood flying. Felix grinned with grim pleasure as he saw that this would be no repeat of the fight around the ale wagon. The ungors were outnumbered and outfought. They weren’t attacking hired bravos and old men this time, but well-trained, well-armoured men, and berserk, battle-hardened dwarfs, and they were getting the worst of it.

  Felix cut down a dog with scales for skin, then gutted an ungor with bat ears and two rows of pointed teeth. Ortwin and Kat kill
ed another dog. All around them axes fell and swords flashed and the ungors shrieked and died. Then they were stumbling out onto the cleared path with all the rest — and straight into the thundering charge of the five big beastmen and the rest of their ungor followers. Three of the knights went down instantly under the crushing blows of spiked clubs and crude axes.

  “Dress ranks!” shouted Ilgner. “Dress ranks!”

  But it was too late. The gors were already in their midst, swinging in all directions as their smaller followers circled and struck from without. Another knight fell. Ilgner’s visor was ripped away by a spiked club, and blood sprayed from his helmet like sweat as he fought the beastmen’s bear-headed leader.

  Then the slayers shoved to the fore, howling for blood. Gotrek’s axe bit into a beastman’s club and he wrenched the weapon out of its hands. Felix and Ortwin hacked the monster down then turned to fight the ungors that tried to flank them as Gotrek challenged another gor. Snorri elbowed Ilgner aside and crashed his hammer down on the bear-headed beastman’s kneecap, shattering it. The big gor fell on its side and Ilgner and two of his knights stabbed it to death. Rodi and Argrin struck a beastman at exactly the same time and it crashed down onto its back.

  “Mine!” cried Argrin, as he finished it off.

  “No, mine!” roared Rodi, doing the same.

  All around the melee, the ungors fell squealing as arrows whispered out of the woods and feathered their backs and sides. Good old Kat. Felix looked up as he stabbed a fallen ungor through the heart. The tide had turned. Now it was the beastmen who were surrounded and the slayers and the knights who were on the offensive. They were winning. It would be over in seconds.

  But then, from the centre of the melee, Ilgner bellowed and pointed. “Stop them! They’ll warn the herd!”