[Gotrek & Felix 11] - Shamanslayer

by Nathan Long - (ebook by Undead)

  “But, my masters, please!” he cried. “I know the hills. I know their dangers. I can keep you safe!”

  Gotrek turned at this, though he did not slow. “What dangers are these, old man?”

  “Oh, herr dwarf,” chuckled the hermit, hobbling along beside him. The hills are a cursed place, withered by Morrslieb’s glance, and filled with all manner of barrows and circles and stones of ancient and evil power. Why, a single misstep, a wrong turn, and one might find oneself falling into an old tomb, trapped forever nothing but dusty old skelingtons for company.

  “But with me to guide you, naught will befall you. Oh yes, old Hans will see you right, so he will.”

  “And how do you know so much about it?” asked Rodi, sounding as if he didn’t believe a word of it.

  The hermit giggled. “Why, the hills is where I find all my things. The trinkets and bits that I sell to the city men. I know them barrows like I know my own fingers and toes.”

  “A grave robber,” spat Gotrek. “Robbing from your own ancestors.”

  Felix smiled at the Slayer’s disgust. There had been more than one occasion that the two of them could have been accused of the same thing, but maybe Gotrek put robbing someone else’s ancestors in a different category from robbing one’s own.

  “A recoverer of beauty,” said the old man proudly. “Gold, gems, wondrous swords. What need have the dead for these things? I rescue them from their selfish grasp and return them to those who can appreciate them.”

  “Aye, aye,” said Huntzinger dismissively. “A turnip is still a turnip, no matter what y’call it. On yer way.”

  “Just a minute,” said Felke, pausing and turning back. “What’s the harm in it? I don’t want t’be falling down no holes. If he knows the lay of the land down there, why not bring him along?”

  “Because the smell of him’ll spoil our food,” said Rodi. But Huntzinger was fondling his chin, thinking about it. He looked towards the hermit. “How much d’ye want, grandfather?”

  Old Hans smiled, showing the stumps of half a dozen teeth. “Only a few pennies, my masters. Ye’ll be doing me a service, so you will, if y’chase them beasties away from my hunting grounds. I’ll not be able to go about my business ’til they’re gone.”

  Gotrek crossed his arms over his broad chest and shook his head. “I don’t want him,” he said.

  “Snorri doesn’t want him either,” said Snorri. “He smells like cheese.”

  “We don’t need him,” said Rodi. “Dwarfs know all about holes and barrows.”

  “Aye,” said Huntzinger. “But we ain’t all dwarfs, are we?” He fished in his belt pouch and tossed the old hermit a few coins. “Come along, grandfather,” he said. “But stay at the back until we get to the hills, far to the back.”

  Hans caught the coins and bowed and giggled with excitement. “Oh, thank you, my masters. Thank you. Old Hans won’t steer you wrong, no he won’t.”

  Gotrek growled as the scouts started forwards again, clearly unhappy. Felix felt the same. The old hermit unnerved him somehow. He didn’t want him along either, but they weren’t the leaders of the party, so there was nothing they could say.

  He took a last slantwise look at the filthy old man, who was kissing each of the coins as he pocketed them, then turned and followed the rest as they started into the gaping gash that the beastmen had cut into the forest.

  The scouts were as amazed and unsettled by the scar as Felix and Kat had been, and cursed aloud when Snorri told them how it had been made. They were wary of it too, for though they could make good speed on it, it left them exposed, and they posted men far ahead and far behind, and wide to the east and west as well, to keep an eye all around.

  And it was well that they did, for halfway through the first day, one of von Volgen’s scouts, a bearded, buck, skinned woodsman with a Hochland long-rifle slung across his back, trotted up from the rear, a grim look on his face.

  “They ain’t all before us,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “I spotted fifty a’coming from the west, and Gillich saw twenty or so on a southbound tack t’other side of Bekker Ridge, just to the east. Seems the local herds are joining their friends from up north.”

  After that Kat volunteered to scout as well, and they posted her and the two rear scouts even further behind them so they would have plenty of warning to find cover before the beastmen arrived.

  The first day, however, passed without incident, and they made camp well off the cut, just in case any beastmen came down it during the night.

  Despite the constant patrolling of the scouts, Felix had felt the whole day that something was watching them — a squirmy tingle between his shoulder blades that made him constantly look behind him. This was a different feeling than he’d experienced when they had travelled north into the Drakwald. Then it had seemed as if the forest itself was watching them, like some half-slumbering nature spirit irritated by their intrusion into its domain. The feeling he had now was of some sinister entity that was following them through the forest but was not of the forest — but no matter how hard he had stared into the shadows or listened for footsteps, he had seen nothing and heard nothing.

  The sensation only increased as the twilight faded and the night closed in around their camp. With the fire banked low and the blackness of the forest as close as a smothering blanket, he felt as if the presence was hovering directly over him, near enough to breathe in his ear.

  Kat rolled over as he raised his head to look around once again.

  “Do you hear something, Felix?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Just… just a feeling, that’s all.”

  She nodded. “I feel it too.”

  He lay down again and forced a smile. “Maybe it’s just old Hans’ stench. I wish he’d sleep a little further away.”

  Kat giggled. “He’s already out beyond the pickets.”

  Felix edged his bedroll closer to hers until they were shoulder to shoulder. They grinned like guilty children. He felt better already.

  “Goodnight, Kat,” he said.

  “Goodnight Felix.”

  But despite her warm, soothing presence, when he finally slept, his dreams were full of formless terrors and half-heard whispers, and he awoke morose and out of sorts the next morning.

  More than once on the second day they had to move off the path in order to let small groups of beastmen pass them by. The slayers hated this, but bowed to the necessity of staying alive until they had the opportunity to try to kill the shaman — at least Gotrek and Rodi did. Snorri had some difficulty comprehending why they should wait.

  “But Snorri wants to kill these beastmen,” he muttered again as they listened to the grunting and tramping of a passing band.

  “These aren’t important, Father Rustskull,” said Rodi. “And besides, there’s only thirty of them.”

  “Snorri will share,” said Snorri. “When we get to the big herd there won’t be any need to share,” said Rodi. There will be hundreds for each of us.

  “But why can’t Snorri fight these, and then fight those?” Rodi rolled his eyes and gave up.

  The next night, as before, they made camp a good distance from the path, and banked their fire before it got dark. Felix was still plagued with the feeling of being observed, but he was weary enough from their long days of marching that when he bundled down next to Kat, sleep took him relatively quickly and returned him to his unquiet dreams.

  He was awakened some time later by urgent whispers. He blinked open his eyes as Kat, the slayers and the scouts all sat up and looked around.

  In the dim light of embers, Felix saw one of Plaschke-Miesner’s scouts kneeling next to Huntzinger, panting heavily. “More than two hundred,” he was saying. “And spread very wide.”

  “How far away?” asked Huntzinger.

  The scout swallowed uneasily. “No more than a half-mile.”

  The sergeant frowned. “How did they come so close?”

  The scout hung his head. “I… I mus
t have dozed.”

  Huntzinger cuffed his ear. “You damned fool!”

  Everyone stood and started talking at once.

  “Cover the fire!”

  “We’ll have to run for it.”

  “Damn you, Skall, you’ve killed us all!”

  At the far edge of the camp, Hans the hermit listened with wide eyes.

  Felke stepped past Huntzinger and grabbed the scout’s jerkin. “Can we get to one side of them?”

  Huntzinger pushed Felke away. “Lay off. He’s my man, I’ll question him.”

  “Then, do it, curse you!” shouted Felke. “We’ve got to move.”

  Huntzinger turned to the scout. “Well? Can we get around them?”

  The scout shook his head. “They’re spread too wide. Foragers on either side.”

  “Can we run?” asked one of von Volgen’s scouts.

  The scout sergeant looked down at the slayers’ short legs. “I don’t think so.”

  “We’ll hide in the trees,” said another.

  “Dwarfs don’t climb trees,” growled Gotrek.

  “They will scent us anyway,” said Kat. “It is too late.”

  “Sigmar’s blood,” said another scout. “We’re doomed.”

  “Good,” said Rodi.

  Gotrek shot a grim look at Snorri at this pronouncement and grunted savagely. Then he shrugged and started throwing logs on the sleeping fire, so that it began to burn bright again.

  “What are you doing?” cried Huntzinger and Felke simultaneously.

  “There’s nothing to do but fight,” said Gotrek, turning to them. “Face the woods with the fire behind you and be ready.”

  The scouts babbled at this, terrified, but finally they followed the Slayer’s example and lined up facing the direction the beasts were coming from with the rekindling fire at their back so that it wouldn’t blind them, and waited.

  Felix found himself shocked by the suddenness and the stupidity of it — not that he could say he was surprised. He had known the Slayer’s doom was going to come sooner or later. He had just expected it to be grander and have more meaning. He had imagined that Gotrek would die fighting some eldritch monster from the dawn of time, not just perishing because of simple human error, which was all this was. Because of the scout’s lapse, they could not outrun the beastmen, or outflank them. Instead, they were going to face them, and not even Gotrek, Snorri and Rodi could defeat two hundred beastmen. They would die here in the middle of nowhere, for the most foolish of reasons, with nothing accomplished — the shaman undefeated, the stone undestroyed, the Empire unsaved. It felt wrong. It wasn’t fitting. Felix wouldn’t have written it that way in a million years.

  Off in the distance they could hear the beastmen coming — the heavy tread of their hooves, the crashing and lowing as they pushed through the brush.

  A scout whimpered. The slayers growled low in their throats and readied their weapons. Felix looked around and saw that the hermit had vanished — no doubt trying to run.

  Kat took Felix’s hand and squeezed it. “At least we won’t have to see our friends turned into beasts,” she said. “At least we won’t see the end.”

  Felix swallowed. It was small compensation.

  EIGHTEEN

  The sounds of the approaching beastmen got louder. Kat took her hand from Felix’s and fitted an arrow to her bow. Snorri chuckled happily. Rodi slapped himself in the face a few times and snorted like a bull. Gotrek ran his thumb along the edge of his axe, drawing blood. The scouts shifted nervously, eyes darting hither and thither.

  Felix readied Karaghul, then paused and looked at Kat. She stared into the wood, anxious but unafraid, her sharp chin firm. On a sudden impulse, he caught her shoulder and pulled her to him, then kissed her hard. She was stiff with surprise for a brief moment, but then relaxed into him and returned the kiss in full.

  For a moment, there was nothing in the world but the pleasure of holding her and tasting her and feeling her push against him, but then after a moment he heard Rodi’s dirty chuckle and they broke off. A few of the scouts were staring at them.

  Felix smiled at Kat, embarrassed. “I… I just didn’t want to leave that undone,” he said.

  She grinned and nodded, not quite able to look at him. “Aye. Good thinking.”

  They turned back to the woods. Moving yellow lights flickered in the depths — the torches of the beastmen. The scouts murmured and shifted, watching for the first of them to appear.

  “Steady,” said Sergeant Huntzinger. “Wait for your targets. We’ll take as many of them with us as we can.”

  Now Felix could see horned shadows rippling across the trunks of trees, grotesquely stretched. They were almost within sight. The time had come. Time to fight and die, after all these years. Strangely, there was no fear, only a sudden, almost overwhelming melancholy. He wanted to weep for all the things he would miss.

  A banshee wail split the night right above their heads, rising like a steam whistle, and an icy, unnatural wind swept through the camp, snuffing out the fire and throwing them into instant darkness. The scouts jumped and cried out, and Felix was afraid he had too. The eerie shriek made his hair stand on end. Kat mumbled a prayer to Rhya.

  “What is that?” cried Sergeant Felke from somewhere to Felix’s left.

  Felix could see nothing. The woods were pitch-black. The light from the beastmen’s torches had vanished as well, leaving not even the glow of embers behind, but Felix could hear them thrashing and howling in the distance. They seemed as scared as the men.

  Felix didn’t blame them. The ear-splitting wail continued rising — a sound like a soul being ripped asunder by daemons — and a dread presence filled the wood. Felix felt flensed by it — as if the bones had been sucked from his body, leaving him as limp as a dead jellyfish. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think, could only hunch there next to Kat, quivering and twitching and staring about as the noise went on and on.

  After a moment a dim red light gave Felix back his sight — the glow of the runes on Gotrek’s axe. The Slayer glared, uncowed, up into the trees, with Snorri and Rodi at his side, as the men trembled all around them. There was nothing to see but shadows and mist drifting through the branches.

  Out in the darkness the herd was running. Felix could hear their screams and their hooves thundering past to the right and left of them, and he saw a few shadows flicker past, but strangely none of the beastmen came through the camp. Whatever the evil thing was that had snuffed their torches, they were terrified of it and would not come near it. It felt to Felix like he stood on a stone in the middle of a river and watched the waters split to his left and right.

  Then a single beastman did run into the camp, bellowing and stumbling wildly as it crashed through the bracken. It ran directly at the leftmost scouts, but didn’t seem to see them, for when they dived out of the way it didn’t turn on them, only staggered off into the trees again, clutching its head and screaming as if it were being chased by the contents of its nightmares.

  For a few more minutes the sounds of the beasts passing them by continued, while the shrieking echoed from the branches above them and the enervating terror pinned Felix and the scouts to the ground. But then, as the last heavy hoof beats diminished into the distance, the hideous wail trailed off and the feeling of dread dissipated into a sense of trembling relief.

  The runes of Gotrek’s axe dimmed as the others recovered themselves and muttered prayers to Sigmar.

  “Get that fire lit,” said the sergeant.

  Felix let out a shaky breath as one of the scouts fumbled with his flint and steel to rekindle the flames. “What was that?” he asked.

  Gotrek glared up into the branches of the trees above them, his one eye searching. “Something vile.”

  “But it protected us,” said Kat. “It chased the beastmen away.”

  “Protected us?” snorted Rodi. “It robbed us of our doom.” He spat on the ground.

  “Aye,” said Gotrek. “Why?”

  �
��Maybe it wanted the beastmen for itself,” said Snorri. “Snorri thinks that’s greedy.”

  Felix doubted that was the reason, but he couldn’t think of a better one.

  Just then, a rustling at the edge of the camp made everyone turn and go on guard again. Old Hans the Hermit poked his head out from behind a tree, his eyes as big as eggs. “Is it over, my masters?” he quavered.

  Everyone grunted with disgust and relief and settled back down to their bedrolls as the scouts who were on duty headed back out into the woods to continue their patrols. Felix doubted, however, that anyone except the slayers got any sleep. Felix certainly didn’t. The memory of the shrieking and the cold, evil presence was too fresh. He knew if he closed his eyes they would return.

  The next day, the ground began to rise and break up into rolling hills and winding valleys, all covered in oak and elm, and there was less undergrowth. The herd’s axe-hewn trail twisted through the lumpy terrain like the path of a snake, avoiding the largest trees, which must have been too much bother to cut down, and sticking to riverbeds and areas of new growth.

  After noon, the trees too began to grow more sparse, and those that remained had turned twisted and strange. The elms, which in the morning had been straight and tall, were now stunted and sickly, while the great spreading oaks had become black, tangle-rooted monsters with deformed branches and trunks that bulged with growths like bark-covered goitres. The beastmen’s path grew straighter then, as they had fewer trees to fell, and veered to the south-east, cutting across the grain of the rise and fall of the hills.

  A few hours later the trees gave out entirely, and they came at last to the northern edge of the Barren Hills. Felix thought they could not have been more aptly named. The land stretched out in an endless sea of low, mist-swathed ridges, mangy with dead winter grass and leafless thorn bushes, and bare of trees but for an occasional wind-bent pine hunched upon a rocky crest, like an old witch in a tattered cloak surveying her domain.