Felix turned. Three of the ungors were running as fast as they could down the cleared path. Already they were hard to see through the sheets of slashing sleet. Two of the knights broke away and ran after them, but in their plate armour they were too slow. The dwarfs would be no better. Ortwin was still engaged. With a resigned grunt, Felix realised it would have to be him.
He charged down the path, slipping and slewing in the mud, but before he’d taken five steps, one of the ungors dropped with an arrow in its back. Felix looked around and saw Kat at the tree line, her feet braced wide as she nocked another arrow and drew back the string. He kept running just in case.
Another of the ungors fell, an arrow sticking from its arse like a tail, but the third one showed some intelligence and swerved for the woods. An arrow followed it and took it in the leg. It stumbled but ran on, vaulting over a felled tree and disappearing into the shadows.
Felix cursed. If they lost the thing they were doomed. The herd would know they were following them. The only sane option at that point would be to turn back — and Felix knew that was an option neither Ilgner nor the slayers would take. At least the man-beast was wounded. Felix had some chance of catching it.
He ran into the trees, glad that the herd’s passage had made the area to either side of the cleared path marginally easier to navigate. All the undergrowth had been mashed flat and pounded into the earth, but the trees were still so closely spaced that it was impossible to see more than a dozen paces ahead. The ungor was out of sight, but Felix could still hear it, thudding and thrashing ahead of him.
Then there were footsteps behind him too. He looked back. Kat was darting through the trees towards him.
“Run!” she said as she passed him.
“I am… running,” he gasped. But not like Kat, he thought. She ran like a deer, as if she had no weight at all He surged on, struggling to keep up with her.
A second later they dodged around an ancient tree and spied the ungor ahead of them, running with a hopping limp through the pines. It was a vile-looking thing, as lean as a starving wolf, with long greasy hair that flapped behind it as it ran. It had torn Kat’s arrow out, and blood ran down its bare leg and soaked into its filthy buskins.
Kat drew an arrow and tried to fit it to her bow while she ran. The ungor looked back and shrieked, its black horse-eyes wide with fear, then dived into the thick brush at the edge of the trampled area, thrashing and kicking to get through.
Kat cursed and ran to the place it had entered, plunging in without slowing. Felix was right behind her. They shouldered together through brambles and bushes as the forest got darker around them. Felix could hear movement from in front of him, and could see the shaking of branches, but he had lost sight of their quarry.
After a moment they pushed out into a slightly more open area and Kat stopped, looking and listening. Felix could hear nothing over his own breathing and the rattle of the sleet on the overhanging needles, but apparently Kat had keener ears.
“This way,” she said, and started to the left.
They ran on, leaping gnarled roots and ducking overhanging branches as they raced up a slick, wooded hill. Felix had no sense of where the ungor was now.
They broke onto a narrow game trail and Kat followed it further up the hill, putting on more speed. At the crest of the hill, the ungor flashed through a shaft of grey light then disappeared beyond the ridge. It was lurching with every step.
“Ha,” said Kat. “It’s slowing.”
“Good,” said Felix. He felt like his throat was made of hot sand. “So am I.”
They pounded after it, Felix slipping as they reached the top of the rise. Finally, as they came around a bend, it was before them, weaving wearily as it staggered down the path. Felix and Kat charged it. It screeched and dived into the thick brush again, like a rabbit into a hedgerow.
“After it,” shouted Kat.
They plunged in, fighting through the heavy growth as it struggled ahead of them. Then, with a surprised cry, it dropped out of sight, and they heard a heavy thud.
“Ha! It’s fallen!” said Felix, and pressed forwards eagerly.
“Felix, wait!” barked Kat.
Felix burst through a screen of bushes and stumbled forwards into the clear, then back-pedalled desperately. There was a ravine directly in front of him, dropping down a rocky cliff to a tree-hemmed stream below. His foot slipped at the muddy edge. He fought for balance. Pebbles pattered away under his boot.
Then, just as he knew he was going to fall, Kat clutched his flailing hand and hauled him back, toppled against her then fell to his knees.
Without a word, Kat stepped past him to the edge of the slope, readying an arrow.
“Thank you, Kat,” said Felix as he got to his feet and joined her. “Is it dead?”
“I don’t know,” she said, peering down into the ravine intently. “I hope… No, Taal curse it, there it goes.”
Felix looked down where she pointed and saw the ungor just limping under the screen of trees, splashing down the centre of the ice-rimmed stream.
Felix eyed the sheer face of the sleet-slicked cliff uneasily. With some rope they might have descended, but with just hands and feet it would be treacherous. “I don’t know if we can—”
“But we must!” said Kat, angrily. “If I fail in this we are dead!” She cursed with frustration and began trotting along the edge of the cliff in the direction the man-beast had gone, looking at the thick covering of trees that hid the bottom of the chasm.
“You set yourself a high mark,” said Felix, following her. “You killed two of the three that ran, and wounded this one—”
“It won’t be enough!” she said. Then suddenly she skidded to a stop, staring out into the ravine. “Ha!”
Felix followed her gaze, trying to see what she saw through the gusts of sleet. At first he couldn’t make out anything that would draw her attention, but then he saw that there was a break in the trees through which he could see the glint of the swift-flowing stream.
Felix shook his head. The gap was a good fifty yards from where they were, and at this distance he could have hidden it by holding out his arm and covering it with his palm. The ungor would walk past it in three strides. Could Kat even loose an arrow before it passed?
It seemed impossible, even without the wind and the sleet.
Nevertheless, she raised her bow and drew the arrow-back to her ear, then stood as still as a statue while she waited.
Felix looked from her to the gap and back, not daring to speak for fear of ruining her concentration. How long could she hold the tension of the bow? How long could she keep her aim steady?
He scanned the trees before the gap, looking for some sign of the man-beast’s passage, but the cover was too thick. He could see nothing until the break. He watched it like a cat watches a hole, trying not to blink.
Suddenly Kat loosed the arrow, and Felix gasped, thinking she had fired at nothing, but then, as he watched, astonished, the beast sloshed into the gap — and into the path of the arrow. The shaft caught it in the neck, betwixt shoulder and ear, and it splashed face first into the stream and lay there unmoving, its head and torso half under the water.
Kat let out a yelp of triumph and leapt into the air. “Yes!” she said, then turned to the still-stunned Felix and hugged him, wrapping her arms around his neck.
Felix snapped out of his staring and burst out in astonished laughter as he hugged her back, lifting her off the ground. “Well shot, Kat! Sigmar’s hammer, what a shot! Never in my…”
His words trailed off as he realised that he was eye to eye with her, and that she was looking at him with the same strange intensity that she had when they had hugged before.
“Kat?” he said.
Suddenly she pushed her mouth to his and kissed him full on the lips, her tongue thrusting forwards to find his. For a moment he responded in kind, too shocked and too aroused to think what he was doing, and they grappled and crushed together like wrestlers.
But then his mind caught up with his body, and he pulled back from her, loosening his grip.
“Kat,” he said again. “Listen. I… I don’t think…”
She looked at him, blushing suddenly, and pushed out of his arms. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to hide her face. “I… I didn’t mean to do that. I just…”
She hurried to collect her bow, which she had dropped on the ground.
Felix stepped towards her. “There’s no need to apologise,” he said. “You just… er, that is, I hadn’t expected…”
“Forget it,” said Kat, not looking at him. “Just forget it. I’m a fool.”
“You’re not a fool,” said Felix, turning her around. “I won’t pretend I haven’t felt the same… urges, but…” He paused, wondering if he should tell her all the things that had been roiling in his head since that first brief spark of awareness. Could he even articulate it? Better perhaps to keep it simple. “I’ve known you since you were seven, Kat. It just feels… wrong.”
She looked up at him, then away again, nodding. “I… I understand. Only…” She paused, looking as if she was going to continue speaking, but then just turned back the way they had come. “We should get back to the others.”
She started into the bushes without a look back. Felix looked after her for a moment, wanting to say something to make her feel better, but still not knowing what that would be. He sighed and started after her.
After a while of walking together in silence he shook his head and laughed. “I still don’t understand how you made that shot. You loosed the arrow before the beast appeared.”
“It was walking in the stream,” she said, her voice dull. “I shot when I saw the ripples of its steps. I knew it would follow behind them.”
By the time Felix and Kat made their way back to the others, the wind had become stronger and the sleet had turned to snow — great fat flakes that whirled before the gale to stick to their clothes and melt into the mud.
They found Ilgner and his knights and the slayers tending to their wounds in the midst of the bodies of the fallen beastmen.
“Excellent news,” said the general when Felix told him the runners were dead. “Then we may proceed.” He had a bloody gash across his nose and cheeks that one of his knights was stitching up with needle and thread.
The sewing knight looked uneasily at the sky. “This doesn’t look like letting up, my lord,” he said. “We could be in for a bad storm.”
Ilgner shrugged, seemingly entirely unaffected by the terrible cut on his face. “We’re stuck in it no matter if we go forwards or back, so… onwards.”
As the party hurried to finish binding their wounds, Felix noticed Ortwin off to one side, kneeling in the mud beside one of the beastmen, his head bowed mournfully.
Felix crossed to him. “Everything all right, Ortwin?” he asked. “Did you not find this battle as glorious as the others?”
Ortwin raised his head. There were tears in his eyes. “It isn’t that, Herr Jaeger,” he said. “It is this.” He indicated the dead beastman he knelt beside.
Felix blinked in surprise as he realised that the rusty, dented breastplate that the monster wore strapped around its powerful furred torso was emblazoned with the insignia of the Order of the Fiery Heart.
NINE
“I fear we have reached the end of our quest, Herr Jaeger,” said Ortwin with a break in his voice. “I fear we have discovered the fate of Sir Teobalt’s brother templars.”
Felix sighed, his shoulders slumping. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t expected this all along — it had almost been inevitable that they would find that the templars had been killed by the beastmen. Still it was one thing to expect a tragedy, and another to learn that it had actually occurred. The tiny spark of foolish hope he had carried with him from Altdorf guttered and went out. He might win Karaghul now, for he had done what Teobalt had asked of him, but there would be no joy in it.
“I’m sorry, Ortwin. Truly. At least we know they died fighting bravely,” he said, noting the battered state of the stolen breastplate. To his mind that was poor compensation, but it seemed to comfort Ortwin.
The young squire nodded and said, “Aye. They would have wished for no better end than to die fighting the enemies of mankind. May Sigmar welcome them to his halls.”
Felix nodded and stood a moment in silence, then turned and left the boy to his prayers.
Three of Ilgner’s knights had to be left behind. One had been crushed to death by a beastman’s mace, his armour so crumpled that he could not be removed from it. Another had a cracked skull and could not see straight, while the third had a shattered pelvis and could not walk or sit on a horse, let alone fight. Ilgner left the two wounded men with the corpse and some food and a fire, and said they would come back for them once they had seen what there was to see.
It seemed a polite abandonment to Felix, and he didn’t doubt that the knights knew it. Even if Ilgner’s party met no mishap while scouting the herd, it might be days before they returned, and both men were in need of immediate attention. Indeed, had Ilgner turned around and returned to Stangenschloss right then, it would still have been unlikely that the wounded knights would have survived the journey. Felix was impressed by how calmly the men accepted their fates, and it seemed the slayers were too.
Argrin left them his keg of ale — which was admittedly nearly empty, but still had enough for a few drinks each — and Rodi said he would pray to Grimnir for them.
He shook his head as the rest of the party got under way. “I hope when it comes, my doom is clean,” he said. “Starving to death is no way to die.”
“Maybe some more beastmen will come,” said Snorri.
“Aye,” said Argrin. “That would be best.”
“Dying well no matter the circumstance — that is what is best,” said Gotrek. “No one gets to choose their doom, only how they will face it.”
The other slayers nodded gravely at this. Even Rodi had no comment to make.
The party wasn’t long on its march before the snow started sticking, turning the muddy track into dirty slush, and mantling the shoulders of the forest’s green pines with epaulets of white. It fell so thickly and fiercely now that Felix found it impossible to see more than a few steps ahead, and he huddled inside his old red cloak and wished it had a hood. Fortunately, the path of the herd remained as easy to follow as ever — a raw gash of severed stumps that wound up and down wooded hillsides and between towering boulders through which the wind howled and the snow danced.
An hour on and the snow was covering even the muddy trail. An hour after that, in an open valley of scattered pines between high crags, Kat found hoof prints in the snow — a very different thing than finding snow in hoof prints. It meant that the herd had passed by so recently that the swiftly falling flakes had not yet had time to cover them.
“They are close, my lord,” she said to the general. “Only minutes ahead.”
“Go find them and report back,” said Ilgner. “We will follow slowly.”
Kat saluted and hurried off into the snow, disappearing almost instantly behind the slashing curtain of white. Felix shivered to see her going off into such danger, and glared at Ilgner for sending her on so blithely. Then he snorted angrily at himself. It was her job after all, and he had seen her do it before without worrying for her. Foolish how an unexpected spark and an unintended kiss had made him suddenly protective of her.
His mind continued to churn with thoughts of her. Damn the girl, why had she kissed him like that? The wildness of it! The sweet hunger of it! The urgent strength of her arms as she grappled herself to him! It made him dizzy just thinking about it.
He tried to calm himself. The reasons why being with her would be a bad idea were still as valid as they had been before, but now he found himself hunting for arguments that would poke holes in them. She wasn’t that much younger than him, was she? And maybe it wasn’t necessary that he love her. Perhaps she didn’t love him. Perhaps all sh
e wanted was a few nights together while they continued on the trail of the beasts.
He looked around at Ilgner and his knights, and Ortwin and the slayers. No. That wouldn’t be such a good idea. He didn’t want a repeat of the embarrassment he and Claudia had endured on board the Pride of Skintstaad. Whatever he decided, he would have to wait until they got back to civilisation. Perhaps by then his fever for the girl would have cooled somewhat and he would be able to think rationally again.
He breathed a sigh of relief and returned his attention to their surroundings, pleased to have defused his trouble, at least for now.
The knights and the slayers were following the beastmen’s trail at a walk, not wanting to accidentally stumble into the tail of the herd. Here in this more open area, with only a few twisted pines dotting the valley floor, the true breadth of the herd’s trail could be seen at last. The swathe of snow blackened by their passage was more than a hundred paces wide, and had been churned up by thousands of hooves. It was an intimidating sight.
Felix looked over to Ortwin to see how he was doing. He was worried about him. The boy had been praying constantly since Felix had left him to it back at the site of the fight with the foragers. Not only that, before they had resumed their hunt, Ortwin had stripped the breastplate with the insignia of the Order of the Fiery Heart from the dead beastman, and now wore it instead of his own.
“All right, Ortwin?” Felix asked.
“Yes, Herr Jaeger,” said Ortwin, breaking off his verses. “Perfectly all right, thank you.”
“Not blaming yourself for the death of the templars or anything like that are you?”
“No, sir,” said Ortwin. “It was the beastmen who slew them. And the order shall have its vengeance upon them, sir.”
“Of course they will,” said Felix. “Of course they will.”
Less than an hour later, just as the grey day was darkening to a murky charcoal twilight, Kat’s little bundled figure trotted out of the snow and waved them down. Felix and Gotrek and the others gathered around as she stood at Ilgner’s stirrup to make her report. Her eyes were wide and fearful.
[Gotrek & Felix 11] - Shamanslayer Page 13