“I found them,” she said.
“And?” asked Ilgner, when she didn’t go on.
“My lord, there are thousands of them. Thousands. I could not guess how many. I ran along the side of them for a quarter of an hour and still did not see the front of the herd. It wound away through the hills for… forever.”
“And did you see any champions among them? Fiends of the Wastes?” Ilgner asked.
Kat shook her head. “I didn’t, my lord, but I did not reach the head, so did not see the leaders.”
Ilgner nodded, thinking, then sighed. “There’s no help for it. I must see them. I must know what we face.” He looked to Kat again. “Can you bring us to the front of their line undetected?”
“I believe so, my lord,” said Kat after a moment. “They are making their way over the hills by the broadest valleys. It takes them out of their way a bit. I think I may find a straighter line through smaller passes and get ahead of them, but it will be dangerous. They will have scouts and outriders moving before them and beside them. In this weather we won’t know they are near us until they are on top of us.”
“Still we must risk it,” said Ilgner. “It is that or risk doom for all the towns south of Stangenschloss.” He waved a gauntleted hand. “Lead on, Kat. Lead on.”
And so they followed Kat’s footprints up into the hills through narrow valleys and tree-choked canyons, all white and soft with snow that was now up to Felix’s knees. It was hard slogging, and though the wind bit at his nose and cheeks, sweat was running down his back and ribs. The snow dragged at their legs and made it hard for them to judge their footing. More than once Felix slipped and fell and had to accept Gotrek’s hand to stand again.
By the time they had reached the top of the hills, the snow had eased off somewhat, though the wind did not. It blasted straight over the crest, driving the flakes into their faces so hard that they felt more like sand than snow.
Rodi looked up as ragged clouds streamed across the sky, shredding like carded wool and revealing the sickly green light of Morrslieb behind them.
“Be easier to see them now,” he said.
“And easier for them to see us,” said Felix unhappily. Thousands of beastmen, Kat had said. A herd that went on forever. It seemed just the sort of doom Gotrek would be unable to resist — leagues from nowhere, in knee-deep snow, so that even if Felix wasn’t killed by the beastmen who killed the Slayer, he would likely die from exposure before he made it back to civilisation. Wonderful.
They tucked their heads and started down the other side of the hill, and for another hour continued to go up and down smaller hills and in and out of wooded valleys until at last, just as it was becoming full dark, Gotrek lifted his head and inhaled.
“They’re close,” he said. “I can smell them.”
“No,” said Snorri, waving a hand behind him. “That was Snorri. Sorry.”
“Unless you ate a wet fur coat,” said Rodi, “it isn’t just you. I smell them too.”
Just then Kat came back, appearing out of the trees to their left like a white ghost. “They’re coming,” she said, panting a bit. “Down the length of the next valley,” she pointed back behind her. “There is a stand of trees on the other side of this ridge. You may spy on them from there without being seen, my lord.”
“Excellent,” said Ilgner. “Good work, Kat. Now we shall see what we shall see.”
They heard them before they saw them.
It was a quarter of an hour later. Felix was hunkered down at the edge of a pine wood that stretched down from the crest of the low hill behind them. He gazed with the others into a wide valley of jutting boulders and sparse, new-growth pine as the wind tore at his cloak and the steady snow slanted down ceaselessly from the charcoal sky and piled on his shoulders. It was full night now, but the white of the snow that blanketed the valley and the occasional light of Morrslieb piercing the torn and scudding clouds gave the scene the dim, colourless phosphorescence of a cave mushroom.
Despite his cloak, Felix was aching from the cold. His hands were stiff with it, and his face raw with it. Kat’s hat was pulled down so low, and her scarf so high, that only her eyes were visible, flicking up and down the valley anxiously while Ilgner and the knights shuffled and stamped their feet to keep warm. Ortwin shivered, his teeth chattering as he continued his ceaseless praying. Only the slayers didn’t seem to mind the cold. They squatted there shirtless, their eyebrows, beards and moustaches dusted with snow and crusted with ice, and didn’t even shiver.
“Snorri forgets why we’re here,” said Snorri after a while.
“Beastmen, Nosebiter,” said Gotrek. “We hunt beastmen.”
“Ah,” said Snorri. “Now Snorri remembers. Did Snorri ever tell you about the time he fought beastmen with his friends Gotrek and Felix?”
Gotrek grunted, but said nothing.
Then it came — a distant chanting brought on the wind, the sound of a thousand savage voices raised in unison.
Everyone looked up at once, then turned towards the north end of the valley. There was nothing to see yet, but the noise grew steadily louder, and was soon joined by a steady rumble that they could feel through the ground. The vibration was slow and rhythmic, like that of marching feet, but Felix knew the beasts didn’t march — they shambled along in a disorganised mob — so what was it? The chanting kept time with the thudding rhythm — a single phrase, repeated over and over in the beasts’ crude tongue, a vile gargle of harsh syllables and guttural grunts. And layered over it all were louder noises — whip cracks and roaring, wailing and smashing, and sounds of titanic tearing and snapping.
“What are they doing?” Felix wondered aloud.
No one had an answer for him.
Then, after minutes of staring, with the snow and the moonlight playing tricks on his eyes and making him see all sorts of things in the swirling flurries, Felix blinked and shook his head, for it seemed to him that the white distance was glowing yellow, like a candle set inside a porcelain bowl.
When he looked again the glow was brighter, and he knew it wasn’t a trick of the eye.
“They’re here,” whispered Kat.
Soon the silhouettes of young pines could be seen against the yellow light, and the snow flakes danced and glowed before it like fireflies, while the chanting and the thumping got louder, as did the syncopation of thuds and roars and cracks.
It seemed to take forever for the glow to get closer, and Felix wondered why. He knew from experience that beastmen could travel very quickly through the woods when they wanted to, but this herd seemed to be moving at a crawl. Even dwarfs marched faster.
Then, as Felix and the rest stared, one of the silhouetted trees shivered and thrashed like it was in a cyclone, then slowly toppled, accompanied by a horrendous splintering crash. Another tree fell the same way moment later, and then, after a pause, another. It was as if some gigantic foot was crushing them to the earth.
Felix looked around at the others, his heart racing.
Ilgner’s knights were wide-eyed and staring. Kat was shrinking back like a rabbit. The slayers were grinning with savage anticipation. Ortwin was still praying, his eyes closed.
“By all that’s holy,” said Ilgner. “What can flatten a tree like that?”
Felix looked back to the valley. The yellow light was brighter still, and had a shape now — long and sinuous, like some impossibly large glow-worm inching through the trees. The end of it faded into the snow-shrouded distance. It might have gone on forever.
More trees fell as the light crept ever closer. Felix began to see individual torches, and monstrous shadows moving around them, and now he could hear axes at work, which was almost a relief — for it was a much more mundane explanation for the toppling trees than the mad phantasms that had welled up unbidden in his mind.
“Ware the scouts,” said Kat.
Felix and the others looked where she pointed. Ahead of the crawling glow, dark shapes moved through the slender pines. Huge hunched
shadows with giant axes and clubs in their hands, wading ponderously through the snowdrifts and looking all around them. Felix crouched lower instinctively as he saw them, but they continued on.
Then, finally, as more trees snapped and fell, through swirling white veil of the snow came the column itself and all Felix could do was stare.
First came the ungors, all carrying aloft burning brands to light the way. Just behind them lumbered a vanguard of huge, horn-headed gors, all in armour and carrying terrible weapons, which they raised over their heads and shook in time to the incessant chanting. There were hundreds of them, striding forwards in one ragged rank that stretched from just below Ilgner’s position across to the far side of the valley for as far as Felix could see.
Behind them the trees fell. Felix squinted to make out the details in the bobbing lights of a moving mass of torches. The little shadows of hunched ungors scurried around the fallen trees, dragging them towards the sides of the valley, then running back for more as whip-wielding gors roared and lashed out at them.
Two more pines shivered and crashed to the ground with splintering screams, and four enormous horned shadows loomed through the gap they had made.
Kat gasped when she saw them, and Felix was afraid he had too. They were gigantic things, towering over the gors as the gors towered over the ungors, with shaggy, bull-shaped heads and heavy curling horns that stretched wider than a man might spread his arms. Each of them carried an axe taller than a beastman, with a double-bladed head that a dwarf could have hidden behind.
As the ungors hooked the branches of the fallen pines with chains and dragged them aside, the four great bulls strode to the next trees that stood in their way and hacked at their bases with slow, methodical strokes — one two, one two, one two. The trees were young and thin. It took no more than four bites of the massive axes for them to fall, then the bulls were onto the next group, with no more interest or emotion than a machine. It looked as if they had been doing this for-ever, and that they could go on doing it forever, never tiring, never slowing, never looking up from their work.
“Now they,” said Argrin, under his breath, “would be a good doom.”
“For you?” said Rodi. “Not if I reached ’em first.”
“Snorri thinks there is enough doom here for everybody,” said Snorri.
Felix wondered if the addled slayer had ever spoken a truer word.
Gotrek just grunted and watched.
“But I don’t understand why they’re doing it,” muttered Ilgner, seemingly to himself. “Have they been cutting this path since the Howling Hills? What for?”
Two columns of ungor torchbearers filed from the gap that the monstrous minotaurs had cut in the trees. Between them capered a throng of wild-looking beastmen, all masked and bedecked with feathers and bones and strange fetishes — but otherwise entirely naked — and all shaking long staves capped with human and beast skulls and bits of crystal and brass that glittered and bounced in the torchlight. The dancing beastmen roared a guttural chant and thrust up their totems to the ponderous thudding rhythm, which continued to grow louder with each passing second. Some of them tore their flesh in ecstasy. Some of them burned themselves with torches, or butted heads with their fellows, their horns clashing with deafening cracks. Some fell, and scurrying ungors dragged them to the side, while new revellers jumped in to take their place. And every few paces, following some rhythm Felix could not perceive, all of them would turn and bow behind them, wailing and shouting, then leap up again to dance on as before.
What comes now? Felix wondered anxiously. Are they bowing to some god? Has some champion of Chaos inspired this frenzy in them? If beasts as large as the minotaurs were toiling as lumberjacks, how terrible must the leader be?
Then Felix gasped again, as did all the other men, while the slayers swore in surprise.
For an instant, as it came out of the trees, Felix thought that his mad imagining had been true, and that it was a giant glow-worm that crawled among the herd, for the thing was long and round like a worm and had many legs, but then, as he focused through the blaze of torches that surrounded it, he saw that what he thought were the thing’s legs were actually beastmen, all walking in file and in step, with heavy wooden yokes across their shoulders that carried what Felix had thought was the body of the worm, but which was in reality the largest henge stone Felix had ever seen.
“Sigmar’s blood!” breathed Ilgner, as they watched it emerge from the trees. “What is it?”
“It… it is a herdstone,” said Kat. “The totem of the tribe. But… but it’s too big. And they never move them.”
“They do now,” said Gotrek.
The stone was laid on its side, and was as long as the mast of a Bretonnian galleon. Its rune-daubed dark grey granite had been crudely shaped, starting narrow at the top, but thickening as it went along until it was perhaps eight feet in diameter near the centre. Jagged veins of quartz twisted through it, pulsing from within with a weird blue light in time with its bearers’ chant.
Several of Ilgner’s knights made the sign of the hammer as they stared down at the thing, and Felix understood why. It radiated fell power like an evil sun. He didn’t just see the pulses of blue light he felt them on his skin like a warm wind, and within his mind, like a whisper heard in a nightmare. It made him want to run away, but also to run to it, to throw down his weapon and join in the revellers’ frenzied dance. It took; an effort of will to remain where he was and only watch.
“Slayer Gurnisson,” said Ilgner. “Your axe. Hide its glow.”
Felix turned to see Gotrek taking his axe off his back and burying the head in the snow at his feet. Its runes were blazing almost as brightly as a torch. Even through the snow Felix could see their glow.
Gotrek grunted, annoyed, then laid the axe flat and sat on it. The light disappeared.
Felix shared an amused smile with Kat, then turned back to the procession below.
Double columns of beastmen marched under the sturdy yokes on either side of the stone, all striding in unison to the rhythm, and shaking the ground with each ponderous step. There were at least two hundred of the monsters, a hundred per side, and more milled along beside them, chanting as well, their weapons out, the fur of their faces painted with blue stripes and symbols — an honour guard perhaps.
As the base of the stone appeared from between the trees, Felix and the others at last saw the leaders of the herd. The first was an enormous beastman, almost as large and muscular as the minotaurs, though leaner, who paced up and down on top of the stone, roaring at those who carried it. He had the blunt head and thick curling horns of a ram, but his teeth, when he snarled, were those of a predator, and his eyes glowed with the same blue light that pulsed from the stone.
The thick fur that covered his rippling muscles was coal-black, and criss-crossed with the white scars of a hundred battles. Over this natural armour he wore a suit of steel and bronze armour that fitted him perfectly, yet looked far beyond any beastman’s ability to make. The axe he carried also bore the mark of the same sophisticated hand. It was a weapon as tall as Felix, crowned with a huge, single-bladed head with a deep notch in the cutting edge shaped so that it looked like the open beak of some screaming predatory bird. Fist-sized blue gems gleamed on each side of the axe like angry avian eyes.
“There now,” said Rodi, chuckling. “I’ll have a go at him.”
“I thought you wanted the bulls,” said Argrin.
“They’ll be for afters,” said Rodi.
While the war-leader prowled up and down the stone, urging on his followers with hoarse bellows, the stone’s other passenger stood stock still upon it, a gnarled staff raised high as he lifted his goatish head to exhort the heavens in a keening, high-pitched wail. He was half the size of the other, and appeared to be some sort of bestial holy man, grey of fur and gaunt with age, and dressed in long dirty robes, stitched over with crude symbols. On his cadaverous head he wore a leather mask with a sinuous blue symbol painted on
the brow, and a crest of blue feathers that arced over his head and ran all the way down his back. One of his horns was bent at an odd angle, as if it had been damaged when he was young. The strangest part of his aspect, however, was the hundreds of severed bird claws that dangled from every part of his costume at the ends of strings and leather thongs. Eagle claws served him as earrings, crow feet as braid-locks in his straggly goat beard. Hawks’ talons clutched every finger of his scrawny hands and shrivelled chicken feet fringed the arms of his robes. Even the head of his leather-wrapped, fetish-woven staff followed the motif, for it appeared to be the powerful fore-claw of a griffon, which clutched a pulsing blue orb.
“A shaman,” hissed Kat. She made a curious sign by hooking her thumbs and spreading her fingers so that her hands looked like antlers, then thrust them angrily in the robed beast’s direction. “Taal wither you, fiend. Rhya poison your fodder.”
“Is it a crusade of some kind, then?” asked Ilgner, again to himself. “Do they do the bidding of their foul gods?”
The stone-bearers plodded slowly on, coming parallel with Ilgner’s party’s hiding place, with the main body of the herd appearing at last behind them. Felix stared as he watched them shamble out of the snow. For all the eldritch fear that the stone and its riders had inspired in Felix’s heart, this was perhaps the most terrifying sight he had yet beheld.
The beastmen came down the valley like a slow brown tide, thousands upon thousands of them, an endless winding river vanishing into the opaque distance, and filling the valley from edge to edge so that the nearest beasts lapped halfway up the hill that Ilgner’s party hid upon. Every single one of them croaked the shaman’s chant, so that the air throbbed with it. Felix edged further back into the pines for fear of being seen. Not since his journey with Gotrek and Malakai over the Chaos Wastes had he seen so many of the monsters in one place.
Ilgner too seemed impressed. “This beggars belief,” he whispered. “Kat, have you ever seen the like?”
[Gotrek & Felix 11] - Shamanslayer Page 14