[Gotrek & Felix 11] - Shamanslayer

by Nathan Long - (ebook by Undead)

  She shook her head. “There are more here than all the herds I have spied upon combined.”

  “But what is their purpose?” asked Ilgner again. “Where do they go with the thing? What do they mean to do with it?”

  “Whatever it is,” said Kat, “they are heading south, into the lands of men. They must be stopped.”

  “Aye,” said Ilgner. “Aye.” And Felix could tell that he had left unspoken the simple question, “How?”

  For the slayers the question wasn’t how, but when? They could barely contain their eagerness to be at the monsters. They shifted restlessly and toyed with their weapons.

  Gotrek turned to Felix, Ilgner and the rest, a wild light in his single eye. “You’d best get away,” he said. “Return to the fort and prepare for what is to come. This is a true doom, a final doom at last. We four will die here.” He looked at Felix. “Manling—”

  But whatever he had been about to say was cut off as, behind him, Ortwin stood abruptly from his fevered praying and drew his sword, then stepped to the edge of the pines and held it aloft.

  “The Order of the Fiery Heart shall have its vengeance!” he cried, and plunged down the hill, wading through the knee-deep snow straight towards the herdstone, as ten-score beastmen turned their heads his way.

  For a stunned second, everyone just stared, and then they were all scrambling at once.

  “Stop him!” hissed Ilgner.

  “Kill him!” barked Rodi.

  “Run!” whispered Kat.

  Felix and some of the knights stood and started forwards, but hesitated at the edge of the woods. Kat half-drew an arrow, then stopped, uncertain. Only Gotrek acted. He scooped up some snow between his hands, packed it and hurled it. It caught the squire square on the back of the head and pitched him face first into the snow.

  “Mad infant,” grunted Argrin.

  “Forget him,” said Ilgner, staring at the beasts, more and more of which were turning and looking in their direction. “We must go. Now!”

  Felix was in hearty agreement, but he hesitated. Sir Teobalt had entrusted the boy to his care. He couldn’t just leave him behind. With a curse, he ran down the hill, lifting his knees like a Kislevite dancer so that the snow wouldn’t slow him.

  “Felix! No!” called Kat.

  Ortwin was just picking himself up when Felix reached him.

  “Come on, you little idiot,” he snapped, and grabbed the squire’s arm, pulling him back towards the top of the hill. The nearest gors and ungors were starting towards them, roaring and raising their weapons, and the ripple of turning heads had reached the herdstone.

  Ortwin struggled to get away. “No, I must avenge my masters!”

  Felix cuffed his ear. “What kind of vengeance is suicide? Come on!” He hauled on Ortwin’s arm and the squire reluctantly allowed himself to be dragged up the hill—

  Behind them, more of the beastmen were breaking from the column, their howls getting louder. At the crest, Kat was crouching and beckoning them on as Ilgner and his men backed away and the slayers readied their weapons. “Hurry!” she cried.

  Then a hair-raising shriek split the night and froze them all in their tracks. Felix turned as it echoed away down the valley, and saw that the beast-shaman was looking their way, his staff raised, and that the whole herd now stood staring at them, unmoving and utterly silent as the snow fell around them. The skin crawled on the back of Felix’s neck as he looked at them. He could see the hate boiling in their glittering animal eyes, their hands tensing on the hafts of their weapons, but they remained where they were. Even the ones who had been chasing them stopped and fell silent. “What are they doing?” asked Ortwin. “I have no idea,” said Felix. “Just keep moving,” he turned up the hill as the shaman’s voice rang out a second time, this time in a high chant, different from the one before, faster and more urgent. Then, like the murmur of thunder, the herd began to echo him, getting louder and more insistent with each repetition.

  Felix could feel the air tingle around him, and the falling snow began to dance in wild eddies that bore no relation to the direction of the wind.

  “Run!” he shouted, and shoved the boy ahead of him. There was a crack like a pistol shot and Felix glanced back, fearful. The shaman was slamming the head of his orb-clutching griffon-claw staff against the herdstone in time to the new chant, and with each strike, the veins of quartz that ran through it flashed blue and bright.

  “Faster!” Felix shouted.

  At the top of the hill, Ilgner and his knights had recovered their surprise and were scrambling to mount their horses. Kat was backing away, open-mouthed, the flashes of blue reflecting in her white-rimmed eyes. The slayers were snarling and striding forwards, ready for battle.

  Felix looked back again. The flashes from the stone were getting brighter and brighter as the old shaman struck harder and the chant got louder. The blue light lanced out in knife-sharp shafts, like bars of sunlight cutting through a dark room.

  One shaft cut across the snow to Felix’s right, turning it a blinding white. He pressed on, blinking and wincing as he herded Ortwin before him, then gaped when he saw that the snow where the light had touched it was melting, steam rising from it in wispy curls.

  “Sigmar, he’s aiming for us!” he said. He waved a wild hand at the knights on their horses. “Down! Down! The light!”

  Another crack came from behind them, and Felix threw himself to the snow, trying to knock Ortwin down with him, but the boy only stumbled and turned, reaching out a hand.

  “Herr Jaeger, take my—”

  “Ortwin! Curse you, get—”

  A jagged bar of blue-white light flashed across Ortwin’s eyes and he fell back with a cry, throwing his hands over his face. Felix looked away, expecting to hear the sizzle of cooking meat, or the crackle of charring skin, but it didn’t come.

  “My eyes!” wailed Ortwin. “My eyes!”

  Another shaft of light shot up the hill past them and Felix heard Ilgner and his knights cry out. He grabbed Ortwin’s hand and dragged him on. Only a few more steps, a few more plodding, slogging steps.

  Ortwin stumbled along blindly behind him, wailing, “It burns! Oh, Sigmar protect me, it burns!” and dragging behind horribly. Did the boy want to die?

  Felix turned, angry. “Move, damn you! Pick up your—”

  He stopped, staring, utterly stricken. “By the gods,” he murmured-. “Your face.”

  “What’s wrong?” the boy asked. Then he shrieked in agony as he was wracked with convulsions.

  Felix stumbled back from him, horrified. The boy was changing before his eyes. Hair grew on his cheeks and spread like fire to his hairline. His nose was lengthening and his chin receding. His ears were growing points. Lumps were beginning to form on either side of his brow.

  Ortwin reached out trembling hands towards Felix as another spasm shook him. “Please, Herr Jaeger. Help me! What’s happening to me?”

  Claws tore out through the fingers of the boy’s gloves. Stubby horns burst from his forehead in sprays of blood, and his irises swelled to fill his whole eye.

  The boy was becoming a beast.

  TEN

  The squire’s yellow claws clutched at Felix’s legs. “Hllp me, Hrrr Jaegrr,” he pleaded. His voice was no longer human — more like the bleating of a goat. Felix could barely understand him. “Ortwin,” said Felix in a whisper. “I’m sorry.” He kicked the boy in the chest, sending him tumbling down towards the herd, then turned and ran up the slope, his mind jagged with grief for the boy and fear for himself. What would he tell Sir Teobalt?

  Fresh screams made him look up, and he moaned with despair. At the top of the hill, Ilgner’s knights were writhing and falling from their rearing horses as Gotrek and the other slayers backed away from them. One of the knights was clawing at his face. Another was tearing at his breastplate, shrieking, “Bees! Wasps! Get them off!” as fur grew from the joints of his armour. A third looked up from where he had fallen and Felix saw to his horror that
he had a snout where his mouth had been, and the black, shining eyes of a goat. A warhorse danced in a circle, hooves flying as tusks grew from its mouth and bony spines rose from its mane.

  “Slayers!” roared Gotrek. “To work!”

  Kat knelt over Lord Ilgner, who was curled and shaking in the snow. “My lord,” she cried. “My lord, are you all right?”

  Lord Ilgner howled with pain and the back of his cuirass split down the middle. A sable-furred ridge like that of a boar ripped out from it. He turned, snarling from a bestial mouth, and swiped a gauntleted paw at her, knocking her onto her back.

  Her eyes went wide with shock as the thing that had been Ilgner rose and advanced on her. “Oh no, my lord,” she wept. “Not you. Not you!”

  Felix reached the crest of the hill and charged the general, sword high, but Gotrek was there first, his axe a blur. Ilgner’s wolf-like head dropped from his shoulders in a shower of blood and thudded to the snowy ground between Kat’s legs.

  Felix groaned with misery. If the knights had only stayed low like Kat and the slayers, the fatal blue light would have flashed over their heads. “The poor man,” he mumbled.

  “No time for pity, manling,” said Gotrek, as a beast-knight charged him. “Defend yourself.”

  Felix turned just in time to take the sword of one of the changed knights on Karaghul’s edge. Felix’s arm stung as the force of the blow staggered him back. The thing’s muscles had burst its armour and the sword looked like a plaything in its ham-hock hands. Behind it, he could see Snorri, Rodi and Argrin battling armoured monsters and slavering hell-horses in a mad scrum.

  Felix slashed back at his opponent, cutting through the furred hide of its leg. It howled and attacked again.

  Beside him, Kat chopped at it with her axes, weeping as she did. “I know them,” she sobbed. “I know them all.”

  Felix ran the changed knight through and stole a glance down the hill as it fell.

  Through the ever-swirling snow he could see that the beast-shaman and the war-leader had turned away from them as if they were of no more concern, and the giant herdstone was on the move again, as was the herd that followed behind it. Unfortunately, a dozen or so of the blue-painted honour guard had detached themselves from the rest, and were wading through the snow in their direction. Of Ortwin he could see no sign.

  He turned back just as a horse with a mouth like a crocodile lunged and snapped at him. He stumbled aside and the thing shouldered him to the ground.

  “Gotrek,” gasped Felix, trying to recover his breath. “More coming.”

  “I see them, manling,” said Gotrek.

  “We have to get away!” said Kat. “We have to warn the fort! We have to warn the villages!”

  “Aye,” said Felix. He lurched up and faced the horse as it turned and charged again. He dodged away as it kicked at him with its forelegs, then darted in again and gored it in the belly. Kat cut the hamstrings of its back legs with her axes. It collapsed to the ground, screaming, still sounding much too much like a horse. Felix shivered with revulsion.

  He and Kat looked around. The melee was over. The slayers stood shoulder-deep in a ring of dead horses and knights, but the blue-painted beastmen were halfway up the hill.

  “Snorri has never killed a horse before,” said Snorri, sounding sad.

  “Those weren’t horses,” said Argrin. “Now let’s get the real beasts,” said Rodi, striding eagerly towards the edge of the hill.

  “No,” said Gotrek grimly. “This doom must be deferred.”

  The two young slayers turned on him, staring. “Are you mad, Gurnisson?” asked Rodi. “This is a great doom,” said Argrin. Felix looked down the hill. The blue-daubed beastmen were closing fast.

  “It is a selfish doom,” said Gotrek. “If we take it, the fort will not be warned. Thousands will die.” Rodi snorted. “A doom is a doom.”

  “Aye,” said Gotrek. “But a great doom makes a difference.”

  “We’re all doomed if we don’t go now,” said Felix, exasperated. This was not the time to be arguing the finer points of slayer doctrine.

  “We’re doomed whether we go or stay,” said Rodi. “The beasts are too fast. We might as well fight now as later.”

  “We have to try,” said Kat. “Please! Let’s go!”

  “There is one great doom here,” said Argrin solemnly.

  “For the one who stays behind.”

  “I’ll stay!” said Rodi.

  “No,” said Snorri. “Snorri will stay.”

  “There’s no time for this!” said Felix.

  “Let the slayer who suggested it stay,” said Gotrek. He nodded to Argrin approvingly. “May Grimnir welcome you to his halls.”

  Snorri shrugged. “That seems fair to Snorri.”

  Rodi looked about to burst, but then cursed and spat. “Fine,” he said. “But I will have the rear guard.” He bowed to Argrin. “Die well, Argrin Crownforger.”

  Argrin bowed back. “We shall drink together at Grimnir’s table.”

  “Goodbye, Argrin,” said Snorri.

  “Hurry!” said Kat.

  Gotrek, Snorri and Rodi started into the pines without another look back as Argrin stepped to the edge of the hill and readied his steel-headed warhammer.

  “Come on, you cow-faced dung piles!” he roared. “I’ll cut you into chops and cook you on Grungni’s forge!”

  Felix and Kat turned away and hurried after the slayers as they heard the beastmen bellow in response. Felix was afraid it was all for naught. Argrin wouldn’t hold the beastmen for long, and even in the dark and through the whirling flakes, they would have little trouble following the party’s footprints in the snow. They were only postponing the end.

  “We’re not going to be fast enough,” he said when he and Kat caught up to the slayers. “They’ll follow our footsteps and catch us.”

  “Then another will stay behind to stop them,” said Gotrek. “Until we have all met our doom.”

  “If we can reach the deepest woods it might be possible to lose them,” said Kat. “There are places where the snow never reaches the—”

  She was cut off by the roaring of beasts and the clash of steel on steel, rising out of the wail of the wind in the trees.

  Rodi paused and turned, but Gotrek shoved him on. “Keep moving,” he growled.

  They hurried up the hill through the darkness, silent and grim, following the footsteps they had made on the way here, and listening to the snatches of the fight that the wind brought them — screams and curses, clashes and thuds — and then, much too quickly, the triumphant howl of the beastmen.

  The sound brought a lump to Felix’s throat. He had barely known Argrin, but the young slayer had made a great sacrifice for them, and the fact that it had been very likely worthless just made it all the sadder.

  “Lucky bastard,” snarled Rodi, with a rasp of emotion in his voice.

  “Snorri is jealous,” said Snorri.

  As they reached the top of the ridge and started down the other side, Felix strained his ears behind him. He could hear nothing. The wailing wind covered everything. Had the beastmen given up? Had they decided it was too much bother to give chase, and gone back to the herd? It was impossible to know.

  The pines were thicker on this side of the hill, and the darkness beneath them was almost complete. Only the white of the snow gave some light, but not nearly enough. Felix followed Gotrek more by sound than sight. The crackle of branches and the slap of a twig against his cheek told him they were entering another tangle of brush before his eyes did. Felix would have loved to light a torch, but light would be their doom. Six steps into the thicket, Kat hissed. “Stop! Turn left!” Gotrek obligingly turned left, and Felix followed, Kat, Rodi and Snorri crunching in behind him. The bracken grew even thicker here, and the faint light faded entirely. They might have been in a cave. “Some trouble?” Gotrek asked.

  “No,” Kat said. “But deeper in the bracken, they might not see we’ve turned off our old path.”


  “Ah,” said Gotrek. “Smart.”

  For a few minutes it seemed that the ruse had worked. As they broke out of the brush and continued along the steep shoulder of the hill they heard nothing behind them but the wind. It felt as if they might be entirely alone in the wood.

  But then, as Felix followed Gotrek’s steps through densely packed trees, feeling his way like a blind man, there was a distant crashing behind them, as of something big wading through bracken, just audible above the moan of the trees.

  “Found us again,” called Rodi from the back.

  Gotrek cursed and quickened his pace. Felix tried to do the same, flinching at the darkness that loomed up at him with every step. He could hear Kat picking up the pace behind him.

  “Find an open space, Gurnisson,” Rodi called again. “I’ll need some room to swing my axe.”

  They sped on, Felix stubbing his fingers and barking his knuckles on the trunks of trees he couldn’t see, then pushing past. He shivered at the thought of fighting beastmen in the pitch dark. It would be short at least. And he wouldn’t see it coming.

  A guttural howl echoed from behind them, the baying of a beast that has caught the scent. Felix looked back — a stupid thing to do, since he could no more see behind him than in front. He turned back, and ran smack into a tree, cracking his head on some knot of wood. The world spun around him and he staggered, hissing in pain, then caught himself and felt his way around the tree one-handed as he massaged his temple with the other. There was blood, and a lump was rising. Touching it made his legs go wobbly and he had to steady himself again, fighting nausea.

  He started on again, but after a few steps he realised he wasn’t hearing Gotrek ahead of him anymore. He paused. The noise of the others was off to his left, only a few feet. He edged in that direction, but ran into dense undergrowth. There was no way through. For an instant he thought about working his way back to where he had left the trail, but he didn’t dare. The beastmen were in that direction. He’d have to keep going and angle back after the brush thinned.