[Gotrek & Felix 11] - Shamanslayer

by Nathan Long - (ebook by Undead)

  “But Kat,” said Felix impatiently. “What of Kat?” Doktor Vinck sighed. “Milo took her with him.”

  “What?” cried Felix. “She went with that… filth?”

  “Not willingly, I assure you.” The surgeon looked away, shame colouring his face. “They took her while she was sleeping in my tent. Bound and gagged her and dragged her out. There… there was nothing I could do.”

  THIRTEEN

  Felix stared at the doctor, fear and rage rising in him like a boiling flood. “When did they leave? How long ago?”

  “Only a few hours ago,” said Doktor Vinck. “No more than three.”

  Felix turned and ran back towards the gate without another word. Halfway across the village’s only intersection he heard a shout from his left and looked around. Sir Teobalt was limping up from the docks, leading a troop of peasants with makeshift spears over their shoulders. He seemed to have made an almost complete recovery.

  “Herr Jaeger!” he called. “You have returned.”

  Felix stumbled, gulping with nervousness. Sir Teobalt was the last person he wanted to see at that moment.

  “What news have you?” the old knight asked, coming on. “Did you find my brothers? Did my squire acquit himself honourably?”

  “I…” said Felix, edging sideways. “I’ll tell you later, sir. I must go.”

  He sprinted away again, the templar’s confused cries following him as he ran.

  The slayers were just leading the cart through the village gate when he reached it.

  “Gotrek, turn about,” said Felix, beckoning to the Slayer. “We must go out again.”

  “What’s happened?” Gotrek asked.

  “Milo has fled town and kidnapped Kat. They’re three hours ahead of us.”

  Gotrek looked around at the frantic efforts of the townsfolk to strengthen their walls. “He’s the only one with any sense. These people will all die if they stay here.”

  “Then I will stay too,” said Rodi, his eyes lighting up. “You get the girl and continue south to warn the armies of men. I will stay here and do my best to convince these fools to leave, and if they do not…” He smiled grimly. “Then I will die defending them.”

  “Snorri will stay too!” said Snorri, his eyes dancing with anticipation.

  “No, Nosebiter,” said Gotrek, jumping down from the cart. “You will not. You will come with us.”

  “But Snorri wants to fight beastmen.”

  Gotrek’s jaws bulged under his beard. “Have you forgotten your pilgrimage?”

  Snorri frowned, then looked downcast. “Yes, Snorri forgot. He will come with you.”

  Gotrek turned and bowed to Rodi as Felix ground his teeth, impatient to go. “May you find your doom, Rodi Balkisson.”

  “And you as well, Gotrek Gurnisson,” said Rodi, bowing in return. He saluted Snorri too. “May Grimnir favour you, Father Rustskull.”

  “Goodbye, uh, what’s-your-name,” said Snorri. And with that eloquent farewell, Felix, Gotrek and Snorri turned and trotted south down the road.

  Knowing that Milo had a three-hour head start, Felix was afraid he and the slayers might never catch him, but to his surprise, only an hour later they heard curses and harsh voices coming to them across the silence of the snowbound forest.

  Felix stopped and drew his sword, listening. Gotrek and Snorri stepped to either side of him and drew their weapons as well.

  “Hold those horses still, curse you!” came a shout that Felix thought he recognised as Noseless Milo’s. “Anders, Uwe, lift together on my count. The rest of you lack-wits get behind and push.”

  Felix and the two slayers started forwards again, moving slowly and quietly towards a bend in the track.

  “It’s hopeless, Milo,” whined another voice. “We’ll have to leave some of the loot behind. We’ll never get it over this damned road.”

  “You’re a damned fool, Heiko!” barked Milo. “This is our fortune! If we sell all this in Ahlenhof we never have to work again. I’m not leaving a stick behind.”

  “Then it’s you who’s the fool, Milo,” said Heiko’s voice. “Because at this rate we’ll have beastmen crawling up our fundaments before we get ten miles.”

  There was a scrape of drawn steel, and Milo’s voice raised to a shout. “Are you challenging me, you mewling little turd?”

  Gotrek chuckled darkly. “They’ll do our work for us.”

  “Snorri hopes not,” said Snorri.

  They were almost at the bend now. Felix craned his neck to the left, trying to see around the intervening trees.

  “I’m only asking you to see sense, Milo,” came Heiko. “I don’t want to—”

  He was cut off by a heavy thud and a shout of surprise. Someone cursed, and then came a babble of voices.

  “She’s loose, damn it!”

  “I’ve got her!”

  “Owl.”

  “Damn the bitch!”

  “She’s breaking for the woods!”

  Then Milo’s angry roar. “Get her! Get my wife!”

  Felix could wait no more. He charged around the bend with the two slayers thundering at his heels. The scene that met his eyes was a frenzy of struggle and motion. Four wagons, heavily loaded with blackpowder kegs, crates, beer barrels and all manner of plunder — including Sir Teobalt’s warhorse, Machtig, hitched to the last — sat in a crooked line along the trail, the first with its front right wheel down in a ditch and its back left raised like a dog cocking its leg to piss.

  A dozen filthy men were breaking from the wagons and swarming after a little figure who plunged barefoot through the knee-high snow, dressed in nothing but a night shirt, her eyes burning with the savage desire for freedom. Felix’s heart lurched. It was Kat, her wrists tied behind her back and a rope around her neck that dragged in her wake like a leash, and he knew at that moment that he loved her with all his heart and soul.

  Just then the lead man leapt forwards and caught the end of the rope, jerking it tight. Kat’s legs flew out in front of her and she went down flat on her back, yelping.

  “No!” roared Felix, and bounded towards the man, the thudding footsteps of Gotrek and Snorri as they followed him barely registering through his rage.

  The bandits turned at his yell.

  “Ranald’s luck,” spat Milo. “It’s the boyfriend. Stop him!”

  Felix swung Karaghul around in a wide circle and it chimed off a half-dozen blades as he tried to break through the gangsters to Kat. He didn’t get very far. Milo’s men were well armed with swords, spears and rapiers that they must have taken from better men, and Felix could tell that some of them had been soldiers once, for they handled themselves well.

  Felix parried two swords, but then had to jump back as a spearman stabbed at him from the second rank — proper military training.

  None of that mattered once Gotrek and Snorri reached the fight. Swords shattered and men screamed as the slayers waded in, weapons blurring. Felix shoved past a man who was clutching the stump of his wrist, and aimed a slash at the man who was dragging Kat away from the melee by the rope around her neck.

  A movement at the corner of his eye made him duck and something clipped him a glancing blow across the top of the head. Felix hit the ground and floundered in the snow, his head smarting and the world spinning around him. Noseless Milo was trudging towards him, a woodsman’s axe in one hand, and a length of chain in the other.

  “Come on, ye pretty little Altdorf milksop,” he snarled, raising the axe. “Let’s see how much she likes you when you’ve got a nose like mine!”

  Felix threw up his sword just as the axe came down, and staggered to his feet as it shrieked down the length of his blade. Milo’s chain cracked him on the side of the face, then whipped around the back of his head and snapped against his other ear.

  Felix howled with pain and stumbled away, his sword up blindly behind him as Milo came on. He needed a second to shake it off. He didn’t have it. Milo swung with the axe and chain again and Felix lurched aside
once more. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Kat on her feet kicking in the teeth of the man who held her rope.

  The stinging ebbed enough for Felix to recover himself. He heard the axe and chain whistling behind him and spun and ducked at the same time, Karaghul lashing out high. The rune sword sheared through the haft of the axe and the heavy head bounced hard off Felix’s shoulder. The chain wrapped around Karaghul and held it tight.

  Milo laughed and yanked hard, hoping to pull Felix off balance. But Felix was ready and went with it, lunging forwards to slam into Milo’s chest and knock him to the ground. The bandit swung his headless axe at Felix’s legs, but Felix kicked it out of his hand and wrenched Karaghul from the coils of the chain. He raised the blade high for the death stroke, but suddenly a little figure blurred in from his right and shoved him aside.

  “No!” cried Kat. “He’s mine!”

  She kicked Milo in the face, then dropped down with both knees on his chest. Her hands were still tied, but somehow she had them in front of her now, and they held a bloody dagger.

  “Kat…” said Felix.

  There was no stopping her. She stabbed down with the little blade, plunging it into Milo’s neck, and then his eye, and then his screaming mouth. “No man ties me!” she hissed. “No man holds me!”

  Felix blinked, stunned by her fury. Milo was long past hearing her, but still she stabbed.

  “Kat,” Felix said again, then, “Kat! He’s dead!”

  The girl looked up at him with the wild eyes of an animal, her teeth bared in a feral snarl. Felix stepped back, unnerved, but after a moment her face softened and she came back to herself. She lowered the dagger, and hung her head.

  “I’m sorry, Felix. He…” she paused, then shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” said Felix, still a little shaken. “I’m sure he deserved all of it.”

  He looked around. The battle was over. Gotrek and Snorri stood in the centre of a ring of dead bodies and red snow, while a handful of bandits legged it for the trees.

  Felix knelt by Kat and took the dagger from her hands, then used it to saw at the ropes on her wrists. She was trembling so hard he was having difficulty not cutting her.

  “He… he took my boots,” she said. “So I wouldn’t run. But I… I ran anyway.” A big sob erupted from her, then, and as he parted the last strand of rope she threw her arms around him and wept on his neck. Felix paused, bewildered by her sudden change from feral fury to frightened girl, but then he took off his cloak and wrapped it around her.

  “It’s all right,” he said, holding her and murmuring into her hair. “It’s all over now. We’re going south to Ahlenhof to spread the word of the herd’s coming. You’ll come with us. Everything will be all right.”

  She looked up at that, snuffling back her tears. “But, but no. I can’t go. I have to stay and protect Bauholz. I won’t let another village fall.”

  “But, Kat,” said Felix, as gently as he could. “It’s inevitable. The herd is ten thousand strong if it’s a hundred. Stangenschloss fell before it. How can you expect Bauholz to stand? Rodi has stayed behind to convince everyone to leave.”

  Kat shook her head. “The herd will miss the village,” she said. “The beastmen have gone due south from Stangenschloss. I’ve been watching them. If they stay on course, they will pass fifteen to twenty miles to the east of Bauholz. It is only the foragers we must worry about,” she stood and padded back to the wagons in her bare feet. “And they may not come.”

  Felix followed her. “Even so,” he said, as she pulled her boots and clothes out from under the buckboard and started pulling them on. “If the foragers come in force, you don’t stand a chance. A bunch of starved peasants, one old knight, one slayer—”

  “Three slayers,” said Gotrek, stepping up to him.

  Felix turned on him, sighing. “Come, Gotrek, you said that we must go south to warn the Empire.”

  “That was before,” said the Slayer. “When the town’s doom was certain. This is a fight we can win.”

  “You might survive it,” said Felix. “But what about the villagers? Even a small force of beastmen will kill too many of them.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Gotrek, stroking his beard and looking speculatively at the heavily loaded wagons with his single glittering eye.

  It took almost two hours for them to turn the wagons around and ride them back to Bauholz, and by then the day was guttering down to a dull grey twilight.

  “Sigmar be praised!” said one of the guards at the gate. “You’ve brought the weapons back,” and waved them through the gates.

  Rodi swaggered up to them as they led the wagons towards the centre of the village. “So, you’re not running away after all,” he grinned.

  “We heard you crying and came back,” said Gotrek.

  “Any more word of the herd?” asked Kat.

  Rodi nodded, his face growing serious. “A scout came an hour ago to say that they continue due south, but that a band of foragers was heading straight for us.”

  “How many?” asked Gotrek. “And how soon?”

  “The scout reckoned about a hundred, and a few hours at most.”

  “Snorri doesn’t know if he can wait that long for a hundred beastmen,” said Snorri.

  “Kat! You’re safe!” came Doktor Vinck’s voice.

  The old surgeon was hobbling out of the temple of Sigmar, now properly fitted with its gilded hammer. Sir Teobalt walked beside him, tall and proud despite his limp. Felix avoided his eye.

  “And you’ve brought back the wagons too,” said Vinck as he stepped up to them. “My prayers to Sigmar have been answered.”

  Kat hopped down from the first wagon and embraced the doctor as the others pulled to a halt.

  Doktor Vinck returned the hug, but then pulled back and looked sadly at her. “Though you should have kept going south and forgotten about us. It will end badly here, I think, despite your return.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Gotrek. “I have an idea.”

  Doktor Vinck turned to him. “If it is that we should leave the village, like your fellow slayer suggested, we will not do it. We have bowed before violence and savagery for too long. We will do so no longer.”

  Gotrek shook his head. “Not that. I have another way.” He turned and looked at the barrels stacked on the cart. “We will put this looted blackpowder to its proper use at last.”

  Sir Teobalt and Doktor Vinck frowned at him, confused.

  “But we have no cannons,” said Sir Teobalt.

  “And few guns,” said Doktor Vinck.

  “We don’t need them,” said Gotrek. “All we need is all the drink in the village.”

  FOURTEEN

  As Gotrek began to outline his plan, Sir Teobalt finally caught Felix’s eye and gestured for him to step into the temple of Sigmar with him. Felix’s heart shrivelled in his chest as he did so. The moment had come to tell the old templar what had happened to Ortwin and the other brothers of the Order of the Fiery Heart, and he dreaded it.

  Teobalt limped to the newly refurbished altar and turned, stiff. Felix noticed that, beneath his armour, his arm and shoulder were still wrapped with bandages. “As you have returned,” he said, “I wonder if you have time now to speak with me of the fate of my squire, Ortwin, who I see is not with you.”

  “Yes, Sir Teobalt,” said Felix. “I apologise for not telling you sooner, but…” He motioned back towards the door.

  “It was a matter of great urgency, aye,” said Teobalt, his eyes never leaving Felix’s. “But now it is finished. So…”

  He left it hanging. Felix nodded, but still hesitated. Should he lie? Should he tell the knight that Ortwin and the other templars had died nobly in battle fighting the beastmen? It was an attractive idea. It would be so simple, and so kind. It would ease the old man’s heart and make him proud. But what if he should learn the truth? Ortwin and the templars couldn’t tell, but Gotrek and Snorri had been there. They knew, and slayers never
lied. Besides, Teobalt had asked for the truth. No matter how much of a kindness, to lie to him would not be honourable. It would not be a fitting way to win Karaghul. Felix would cringe at the taint of it for the rest of his life.

  “Very well, Sir Teobalt,” he said at last. “I will tell you. You… you heard from Kat how the herdstone that the beastmen carry changed Lord Ilgner and his men into beastmen?”

  “I heard this from Doktor Vinck,” said Teobalt. “Who heard it from her. A foulness. Did Ortwin die fighting these abominations, then?”

  “No, sir,” said Felix lowering his head so he wouldn’t have to meet Teobalt’s eyes. “He… he changed too. He became a beastman.”

  There was silence from Sir Teobalt.

  Felix swallowed and continued. “And I fear that this is what happened to the Knights of the Fiery Heart as well. We killed a beastman wearing armour with the order’s insignia upon it. At first we thought that the beast had stolen the armour, but having seen Ortwin change—”

  Sir Teobalt’s palm cracked Felix hard across the cheek, staggering him sideways. Felix caught himself and looked up, clutching his face.

  Sir Teobalt advanced on him, his eyes blazing like blue suns. “Lies!” he cried. “Damned lies!”

  “Sir Teobalt,” said Felix. “I swear to you—”

  “Will you perjure yourself in the house of Sigmar?” said the old templar. “Cease, sir, lest his hammer strike you down!” He grabbed Felix by the front of his mail. “The knights of the Order of the Fiery Heart were true followers of Sigmar. Devout, strong in their faith, and perfect in the observance of their duties. It is impossible that such as these could be corrupted by the foul touch of Chaos. I will not believe that they fell prey to such weakness of the flesh!”