by Death
The tree-branch ice-club came down. Felix was too stiff to move. He toppled rather than threw himself aside. Gotrek swung his rune axe to block the blow, the skin of ice that covered him splintering into a thousand glittering needles. The axe connected, shattering the ice-club and leaving the beast with nothing but a withered branch. Still it knocked Gotrek back a dozen feet and he crashed on his back in the snow.
The yhetee howled and bounded towards him again, tossing the branch aside and slashing with its huge claws. Gotrek rolled aside and swung behind him, nicking the yhetee’s forearm. It recoiled, barking with surprise, and Gotrek staggered to his feet.
‘What’s wrong!’ the Slayer growled at it. ‘Never had to fight for your dinner before?’
The yhetee lunged forward, bellowing another cloud of ice and swiping left and right. Gotrek ducked inside its reach as the frigid fog enveloped him, and chopped for its gut. It was too agile. It lurched aside and the axe took it in the leg instead, a long red gash that bled into its snowy fur.
Gotrek staggered stiffly away, his naked torso coated in an armour of ice. The enraged beast howled in pain and swept a backhand at him that exploded the Slayer’s frozen shell and sent him crashing into the remains of Harjit’s tent.
Felix forced his shivering limbs to move and pushed himself to his knees as the yhetee knuckled towards the tent. He had to distract it before it reached the Slayer.
But then, from the village came the sharp crack of a long-gun, and the yelling of men. The yhetee flinched as red blossomed on its shoulder, and looked towards the shouting.
Out of the driving snow came the caravan guards, Yashef and Usman waving scimitars in the lead, as little Noor knelt to one side, ramming another charge down the barrel of his gun.
All this was apparently too much for the yhetee. It backed away, growling, then snatched up Harjit, draped him over its shoulder, and bounded for the wall, clearing it in a single leap.
Felix breathed a sigh of relief as the caravaners ran up to him and helped him to his feet, but Gotrek was less pleased. He climbed out of the wreckage of the tent and glared around at them all with his single angry eye.
‘Fools,’ he rasped. ‘I would have killed it if you’d stayed away.’
‘Or it would have killed you,’ said Usman.
‘Grimnir willing,’ said Gotrek.
Yashef, seemingly over his earlier fright, knelt and pointed to dark patches in the snow. ‘You wounded it, but the snow is coming down too fast. Its trail will be covered in no time. We’ll end up walking in circles again like last night.’
‘No we won’t,’ said Gotrek, and started back up through the village. ‘I have an idea.’
Felix stared after him, uneasy. When the Slayer had an idea, things usually ended up with Felix fighting for his life.
As Gotrek and Felix and the others reached the top of the hill, the villagers and the merchants from the caravan were arguing over who would get to kill Father Gessler.
‘He trapped us here,’ Zayed was saying. ‘Deliberately, so that we would be eaten by this monster! I want to drag him behind my oxen all the way to Skabrand!’
‘No!’ cried Nyima, shaking a finger. ‘He has killed more of us than he has of you! He should be given to the wives of the slain warriors. They will make sacred fangs with his finger bones!’
Gessler knelt among them, head lowered, as the argument went back and forth above him, seemingly resigned to his fate, a broken man. Then Gotrek pushed through the crowd and grabbed him by the front of his robe.
‘Come on, priest,’ he growled, then dragged Gessler down the hill towards the gate.
Cries of dismay erupted at this, and the villagers and merchants jogged after the Slayer, shouting complaints.
‘What are you doing?’ called Zayed. ‘He is mine to kill! He owes me men and time!’
‘The vengeance should be ours!’ wailed Nyima. ‘Where are you taking him?’
Gotrek turned on them, glaring. ‘The priest meant to use us as bait. I will use him as bait. I will shackle him to the sacrifice rock and wait for the beast to come.’
Yashef laughed, delighted. ‘Yes! This is true justice. We kill the priest and the yhetee that slew our comrades! Good!’
The other guards cheered.
‘No!’ shrieked Nyima. ‘You must not kill the god! You will doom the village! You will destroy us all!’
‘Silence, crone!’ said Yashef. ‘We do you a favour. Come, dwarf. Let us go. Let the sport begin.’
But Gotrek shook his head. ‘This is my doom. I won’t let you mess it up. I go alone.’
Yashef and the other guards looked about to protest, but Zayed pushed through them. ‘Wait! Remember who pays you. I will not risk men on a fight not my own. We will be gone in the morning, with this mad village and its monster behind us. Forget the beast.’
Yashef and the others grumbled, but looked ready to obey. Gotrek, on the other hand, turned his cold hard eye on the caravan boss.
‘You think you can stop me?’ he rumbled.
Zayed shook his head. ‘I know better than to try and change a dwarf’s mind. You may go, and your pale friend too, and if you come back before we leave, you are welcome to continue with us. But we leave at dawn, with you or without you.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Gotrek, then turned and continued dragging Father Gessler down the hill. Felix sighed, then followed after him. The Slayer’s ‘pale friend’ would have much rather stayed behind and gone back to sleep, actually, but a vow was a vow.
The snowfall began to taper off as Felix and Gotrek led the silent Father Gessler up the winding trail that rose from the village to the sacrifice rock in the hills high above. It was still slow going trudging through the drifts, and Gessler fell several times. Felix hauled him to his feet each time, then shoved him ahead with more force than necessary. He wondered if all his years travelling with the Slayer had begun to make him hard-hearted. Gessler was a priest of Sigmar, and a fellow citizen of the Empire, and yet Felix found it difficult to muster any sympathy for him. He should have been pleading for Gotrek to show mercy, but he remained silent. He wondered why.
Gessler seemed a true believer in Sigmar, and Felix was certain that he didn’t have a spiteful bone in his body, yet despite that, he had sent all the young men of a village to their deaths, and had been prepared to sacrifice the lives of a score of strangers to repair the mistake. No, there was no spite in him, but he was a villain nonetheless – a blind zealot in the first case, who tried to make his converts follow the laws of his god without considering the realities they faced, and a duplicitous coward in the second case, who tried to trick innocent men into solving a deadly problem that he himself had caused.
The irony of it was that if Gessler had come to Gotrek openly, the Slayer would have accepted the challenge of the yhetee immediately, and the priest would have saved himself from committing his second crime – taking by guile what would have been freely given.
His true sin, Felix thought, was that he had caused the deaths of Humayan and his driver, and later Ghazal and Harjit, not to trick the other caravaners into fighting the beast, but to save himself from shame. He had been too embarrassed to ask for help, and so had instead stolen it, and killed four men in the process. That was why Felix remained silent.
Gessler too remained silent, plodding through the deep snow with his head down, his face a mask of dull misery, and not once looking around or making any move to escape. It was only when they had reached the rock and Gotrek was unfastening the bolts on the manacles that he finally spoke.
‘Slayer,’ he said. ‘Don’t let me die like this.’
Gotrek didn’t turn. ‘You don’t deserve mercy.’
‘And I don’t ask it,’ said Gessler. ‘I am ready to die for what I have done, but I wish to do it with my hammer in my hands, fighting the beast, as I should have before.’
‘You don’t deserve that either,’ said Gotrek.
‘I know it.’ Gessler hung his head. ‘I des
erve nothing. I have turned from Sigmar, and I will not be welcome in his halls. Still…’ He shrugged and sighed and fell silent.
Gotrek paused, holding the open manacles in his hands. Felix wondered what he would do. Personally, he would have granted the old priest’s request without a second thought. As angry as he was at Gessler for what he had done, he would not begrudge a man the chance to die with dignity. The Slayer, however, was a stickler when it came to honour, and was not known for his mercy. Felix was tempted to speak up for the priest, but he knew better. Gotrek would only dig his heels in, so he kept his mouth shut and waited.
The Slayer remained silent for another moment, then grunted angrily and returned to the manacles. Gessler moaned, and Felix sighed, disappointed. But then, as Gotrek began turning another bolt, something near the sacrifice stone caught his eye. Felix followed the Slayer’s gaze. It was a deep print in the snow, and it seemed rimmed with something dark.
Gotrek crossed to it, then bent and touched the dark stain. He raised his eye. More deep prints continued up into the mountains, following a steep trail out of sight around a bend. The Slayer paused again, glaring into the white distance, then cursed and turned to Father Gessler.
‘Get up, priest,’ he said. ‘You are lucky I am impatient to meet my doom, or we would be waiting until the beast came for its dinner again.’
Gessler sobbed with relief. ‘Bless you, Slayer. I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘Then don’t,’ said Gotrek, and turned for the snowy track.
They followed the trail of wide-spaced prints for another hour up into the mountains while the wind tore at their backs and heavy clouds laboured across the sky above them like ponderous snow mammoths. They needed no torch to see them, for though the moons were lost behind the clouds, the night was white with their hidden glow and the bright snow that covered the rocky slopes.
Towards the end of the hour, the snow picked up again, but not yet enough to hide the trail. A little while after that, they come to a place where the tracks entered a narrow, high-walled ravine with a little ice-fringed stream trickling out of it.
It was darker in the ravine, and the floor of it was a slithering scatter of shale that crunched and slid with every step. Felix tensed at every rattle, afraid they would be heard, and that the yhetee would drop down on them from above. Father Gessler murmured prayers and wheezed like a bellows. Gotrek just stumped on, seemingly unconcerned.
Soon they came to a place where the ravine closed to a bottleneck. The high, shadowed walls framed a wider, brighter area beyond, where snowdrifts mounded on either side of the black stream, and the falling snow whirled in a glowing curtain of white.
Here Gotrek paused, then crept forward more quietly. Felix and Gessler followed behind him, peering uncertainly ahead.
‘Do you see it?’ Felix asked.
‘Aye,’ said Gotrek.
‘Where?’
‘Right in front of you.’
Felix stared again, then almost gasped when something within the swirling whiteness shifted and he realised he was looking at a massive shoulder, covered in shaggy white fur. The yhetee was in the centre of the open space, hunched and facing away from them, and yet so camouflaged in the surrounding whiteness that even as he looked at it, Felix lost its outline and found it hard to see it again.
As they got closer, he could hear a horrible crunching and tearing sound coming from the yhetee, and then a claw flashed up and something red and thin spun over the beast’s shoulder and thudded on the ground. Felix winced. Gessler gagged. It was a human leg, now just red bones and tendon strings.
‘Harjit,’ Felix murmured.
‘Its last meal,’ said Gotrek. He hefted his axe, then looked to Gessler. ‘Are you ready, priest?’
Gessler was staring at Harjit’s leg, his face pale. ‘I… I must pray,’ he said, and fell to his knees.
Gotrek grunted, disgusted, and continued toward the bottleneck. Felix followed after him, but the Slayer shook his head.
‘No, manling,’ he said. ‘There is no one to save here. There is nothing but a fight. Stay back and let those who wish to die go forward.’
Felix paused, then nodded. ‘Very well, Gotrek.’
He stopped and watched Gotrek go ahead, oddly conflicted. So often extenuating circumstances had forced Felix to fight at the Slayer’s side, usually because he’d die too if he didn’t. Now that he could let Gotrek go into a fight alone without any risk to himself or any danger to anyone else, it felt strangely wrong. It might also be the last time he saw the Slayer alive. That felt odd too, but he had taken his vow in anticipation of this day. He knew it would come eventually. All he had to do now was hold up his end of the bargain and watch the fight so that he could write it down faithfully later. After so many years of following him, he would not fail the Slayer in that.
As Gotrek edged through the bottleneck, the yhetee lifted its head and sniffed the wind, then growled and reached for a heavy tree branch as it looked around. It raised the tree branch to its mouth and bellowed a blast of icy breath at it. Thick frost crystals formed on the branch, enveloping it and turning it into a huge ice club in seconds.
Gotrek stepped out into the open area. ‘Over here, beast.’
The yhetee spun to face him, then raised its huge, ape-like arms over its head and shook the club, roaring a challenge. Gotrek stumped forward, unimpressed, and lowered his head between his powerful shoulders, preparing to charge.
But then, just as the Slayer was about to sprint forward, something flashed past Felix and burst out of the ravine into the open area. It was Father Gessler, his hammer raised high and his robes flapping.
‘Sigmar grant me strength!’ he cried as he splashed through the shallow stream and charged the beast.
The yhetee snarled and swiped at him with its icy club. Gessler blocked with his hammer but it was no good. The club was twice his weight. It struck him in the head and chest with the force of a battering ram, and sent him flying back to land, shattered and twisted, in a midden of snow-covered skulls and ribcages.
Felix crept forward to the mouth of the ravine to see if Gessler still lived. The priest’s skull was caved in. If he was alive, he was beyond Felix’s ability to save.
Gotrek barked a harsh laugh, then charged the yhetee, leaping the stream the priest had waded through. Felix made a face at the Slayer’s laugh. Gotrek was hard, even unkind at times, but he rarely made fun of those who died bravely. It seemed uncharacteristic for him to mock the priest’s death – pathetic as it was.
Dwarf and beast slammed together among the snowdrifts. Gotrek’s axe chipped a chunk of ice off the yhetee’s club as they connected, but the force of the impact drove the Slayer back. The beast roared, gusting a column of crystallising air at him. Gotrek dove aside, avoiding the blast, and rolled up by the yhetee’s leg. He slashed at it, but the beast was too quick. It pivoted and swung again with its club. Gotrek blocked with his rune axe but, like Father Gessler, hadn’t the weight to stand his ground. He flew back, lifted entirely off the ground, and slammed down hard on a boulder near the ice-rimmed stream.
Felix winced as the Slayer’s skull smacked against the rock and his axe flew from his fingers to splash into the stream. The yhetee leapt at him and smashed down with its club. Gotrek groggily rolled aside, and the icy club shattered and split against the boulder.
Gotrek crawled behind the beast, shaking his bloody head and groping for his axe, the haft of which was sticking up out of the shallow stream. The yhetee turned and blasted down at him again with its frigid breath as it tossed the broken branch aside. A glassy glaze formed on the Slayer’s skin, but worse, the stream froze solid. When Gotrek grabbed the haft of his rune axe, it wouldn’t budge. It was trapped in the ice.
He got a firmer grip on it, but the beast was on him again, and he had to dive away. It bounded after him, roaring and swiping at his back. Gotrek stopped short and it overshot him, tripping.
Gotrek veered and sprinted for Father Gess
ler’s body. The yhetee recovered and charged after him. The Slayer reached the priest and snatched the warhammer from the priest’s limp hands, then turned and swung it with all his might behind him.
The beast took the full force of the blow on its snout and reared up in pain. Gotrek followed through with a smash to its knee. The beast howled, its leg buckling. Gotrek dodged around it and ran for the stream.
As the beast lurched to its feet, Gotrek skidded to a stop at the stream and smashed at the ice with Gessler’s hammer, trying to free his axe. The beast dove at the Slayer’s back, its claws outstretched. Felix was afraid that would be it, but at the last second, Gotrek spun again, swinging the hammer.
The results weren’t quite so fortunate this time. The Slayer managed to knock the yhetee’s slashing claws aside, but its full weight hit him in the chest, knocking him flat, and they both crashed through the ice into the water. The beast pressed up, dripping, and pushed Gotrek down under the water.
Felix’s heart lurched as he realised what came next. The beast would blast Gotrek with its arctic breath and freeze him into the river, encasing him like a fly in amber. After that it would be able to kill him at its leisure.
It was an end too horrible to contemplate, and Felix found himself stepping forward and drawing his sword, all the while knowing he would be too late.
The beast inhaled as Felix hurried forward but, just as it was about to roar, Gotrek’s massive, muscled arm shot out of the stream and jammed the head of Gessler’s warhammer down its throat.
The beast rose up, gargling angrily, and tried to grab the haft of the hammer with its clumsy clawed hands. Gotrek erupted from the water beneath it, blowing like a walrus, then ducked between its legs and dove for his rune axe.
This time it ripped free as the beast spun and tore the hammer from its maw. Gotrek charged forward, splashing through the ice-choked stream, then leapt up onto the boulder and vaulted through the air, straight at the yhetee.