“Sit on him,” he told Rodi. “And hold the leg.” He looked at Felix. “Manling, hold the good leg aside. Little one, bring the torch close.”
Felix nodded and squatted to grab Snorri’s left boot as Rodi sat on the old slayer’s stomach and pressed down on his upper leg, just above the knee, while Kat, looking slightly queasy, lowered the torch.
“Snorri is ready,” said Snorri, closing his eyes.
Gotrek stepped up and raised his axe, sighting down with his one eye to line up his swing.
Felix pulled Snorri’s left leg away from his right, then turned his head so he wouldn’t have to see. There was a swish and a thud, and Snorri grunted and jerked, then lay still.
Felix opened his eyes again and looked. The damage had been cut away, leaving a clean, straight cut through bone and muscle that looked disturbingly like an uncooked steak. Because of the tourniquet there wasn’t much blood, which somehow made it even worse. At least he lives, Felix thought. At least Snorri still has a chance to recover his memory before he meets his doom.
Rodi stood and turned, looking pleased with Gotrek’s work. “All right, Father Rustskull?”
Snorri opened his eyes and nodded, though he looked even paler than before. “Snorri is fine, but he would like a drink soon.”
“And Snorri shall have his drink,” said Rodi. “Just as soon as we find a surgeon with some hot pitch.”
Gotrek wiped his axe clean again, then found two discarded spears and crossed them. He and Rodi lifted Snorri onto the spears, then picked them up like stretcher ends and carried the old slayer out of the ring of beastman corpses and across the field in search of a surgeon, with Felix and Kat following behind.
Felix shook his head as they walked, amazed that they had all survived. The battle he had been certain would be the slayers’ doom had ended, and they were all still alive. Maybe they truly were fated for some great destiny. It seemed the only explanation for their continued existence.
A cold wind blew through the valley as they walked past the place where Gargorath and his headless axe lay on the ground. Felix shivered and pulled his old red cloak closer around him. The wind stank of death and moaned like a tormented soul. Then he paused, the hair rising on the back of his neck, and looked around.
Though the moaning and the chill and smell continued unabated, nothing moved in the wind. Felix’s hair didn’t flutter around his face. His cloak didn’t flap around his legs. The banners of the armies didn’t lift in the breeze.
He turned to the others. They had stopped too. All around the field, conversations stalled and the cries of the wounded died away.
Kat’s eyes were as wide as saucers. “Something… something is wrong,” she said.
Gotrek and Rodi set Snorri’s litter down and readied their weapons warily.
“The light,” said Gotrek, frowning. “It’s the light,” he looked up.
Felix and the others followed his gaze, and a collective gasp escaped their throats.
The moons were colliding, directly over their heads. Morrslieb was eclipsing Mannslieb, sliding across it like a dirty coin covering a freshly minted one. As they watched, the Chaos moon occluded its fairer sister entirely, and Mannslieb’s clean white light vanished, to be replaced by a sickly green luminescence that spread across the battlefield like a plague, making the wounded and the dying appear not only maimed, but diseased as well.
All over the valley, soldiers stared up into the sky, cursing and praying to their gods.
“It’s the end!” cried a man. “We have sinned and this is our punishment!”
“Sigmar save us!” wailed another.
A rustling from behind him made Felix turn. A wounded beastman was trying to rise, though it only had one hand. Gotrek kicked it in the head and it fell over. Felix blinked. The beastman had no intestines either. They had fallen out through the hole in its abdomen. Felix shivered. How was the thing alive?
Another beastman twitched and tried to stand. And another. Beside them, an archer with an axe through his chest and a missing arm opened unseeing eyes and sat up.
Felix stepped back and backed into Kat, who was looking at a drummer boy with no legs squirming on the ground and trying to turn over.
“What is happening?” she asked.
Felix only shook his head, unable to form an answer.
A heavy thudding and shifting to their left made them all turn. Kat gasped. Rodi cursed. Gotrek grunted. Felix stared, his heart pounding double time in his constricted chest. Gargorath was getting to his feet. Though Felix could see the monster’s shattered ribs through the gaping hole Gotrek had smashed in his breastplate, the war-leader was somehow still alive.
“It’s impossible,” Felix said.
All over the battlefield, broken figures were standing, both man and beastman, while soldiers cried out in dismay and fear.
Kat clutched Felix’s arm. “What is happening?” she asked again, an edge of panic creeping into her voice.
“It is midnight on Hexensnacht,” said a weird, shrill voice behind them.
They turned. A tall thin figure in plate armour was clanking stiffly towards them, its head cocked at an uncomfortable angle. “The year has turned,” it said. “The age of the Empire of man has passed.”
Felix stumbled back as he saw that the knight was Sir Teobalt, the blood still running sluggishly from the fatal wound the bestial templar Orenstihl had given him. His face, as he approached them, showed no animation. His eyes stared fixedly above them and to the left, and though his jaw moved, it was jerky and stiff, and not quite in time with his words. “The age of the Empire of the dead has begun.”
“Grungni!” said Rodi. “What’s happened to him?”
“What has happened to him,” said the thing that had been Sir Teobalt, “is what will happen to you all.”
Felix frowned. The voice wasn’t Teobalt’s, but he recognised it all the same. How did he know it? He couldn’t think.
“My necromancy could not work with the herdstone present,” said the same voice from beside them. They turned and saw that Gargorath’s jaws were moving too. “But I knew your axe could destroy it,” the beast said. “So I showed you the way to smash it.”
“And smash it you did,” said the same voice again from yet another direction.
Felix and the others spun around.
Lord von Volgen and Lord Plaschke-Miesner were lurching towards them, von Volgen no more than a paper-skinned mummy, and both dead from terrible wounds. “Then I whispered in the ears of these young lords,” the corpses said together. “Telling them to attack. Telling them of the glory to be found in death.”
As the dead youths continued speaking, the same high eerie voice began to echo from the mouth of every dead beastman and every risen soldier on the field. “Now,” it chorused. “Now I invite you to join them in that glory.”
The corpses of the men and beastmen laughed in shrill unison as they lumbered towards Gotrek, Felix, Rodi and Kat, raising their weapons in their stiff hands, and though Felix had failed to recognise the voice that rattled from their dead throats, he suddenly recognised their laughter. It was the mad giggle of Hans the hermit.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nathan Long was a struggling screenwriter for fifteen years, during which time he had three movies made and a handful of live-action and animated TV episodes produced. Now he is a novelist, and is enjoying it much more. For Black Library he has written three Warhammer novels featuring the Blackhearts, and has taken over the Gotrek and Felix series, starting with the eighth installment, Orcslayer. He lives in Hollywood.
Scanning by Anakwanar Sek,
proofing by Red Dwarf,
formatting and additional
proofing by Undead.
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[Gotrek & Felix 11] - Shamanslayer Page 33