Gotrek and Felix - Road of Skulls

by Josh Reynolds

  Canto’s blade rose and fell in the red storm that followed, monotonous and unceasing.

  It was a slaughter.

  And Khorne found it good.

  ‘As any who have met him can attest, my companion, Gotrek Gurnisson, was possessed of an erratic personality on the best of days. While I had grown used to it over the course of our journeys together, his sudden swings of temperament could still surprise me.

  In the weeks following our disastrous (at least from Gotrek’s perspective) encounter with the creature calling itself Mannfred von Carstein, Gotrek became surlier than ever, as if his near-plunge into the Stir had awakened some long pent-up streak of obnoxious fatalism.

  ‘As anyone who has read the previous volume knows, the Slayer is a seeker of death. And Gotrek’s death eluded him with the cunning of a fox fleeing before hounds. If I hadn’t been convinced that he was already mad, I would have thought that he was teetering on the precipice of it then. I know better now.

  ‘It wasn’t madness that drove Gotrek.

  ‘It was something infinitely more terrible and in its own way, sad.

  ‘So it was that I found myself journeying once more into the dangerous wilds of the Worlds Edge Mountains on the eve of what was to be one of the most peril-fraught experiences in my career as Gotrek’s shadow…’

  – From My Travels with Gotrek, Vol. II

  by Herr Felix Jaeger (Altdorf Press, 2505)

  1

  The Worlds Edge Mountains,

  near Karak Kadrin

  ‘Move, manling,’ Gotrek Gurnisson rumbled, grabbing a handful of Felix Jaeger’s red Sudenland travel cloak and yanking his companion backwards as the sword in the frothing Chaos marauder’s hands whipped out, scorpion-quick. The blade missed the tip of Felix’s nose only by the smallest of margins as he tumbled backwards onto the hard surface of the path.

  The Slayer stepped past Felix, his axe chopping into the marauder’s contorted features with a wet crunch. Gotrek pulled the weapon free of the ruin it had made of the dead man’s skull without apparent effort and looked darkly at the Chaos marauders who had ambushed them. ‘Well, who’s next?’ he said. He sounds almost cheerful, Felix reflected sourly as he scrambled to his feet. He drew his own blade. Karaghul seemed to purr as it slid from his sheath, and it was light in his hand as he gripped it and watched the Slayer toss his challenge into the faces of the men back-lit by the flames rising greedily towards the sky from the ruined structure behind them.

  Said structure was a dwarf outpost which clung to the side of the mountain crag like a limpet. It was a blocky thing, and it had been well camouflaged to look like part of the crag it was attached to. Now, however, the outpost belched fire through its entrance and the arrow-slits that lined the craggy, rough walls. The stink of roasting flesh clung to the rocks and Felix had seen the bodies of several dwarfs lying nearby, contorted in death. They had almost killed him then, while he’d been busy staring in stupefied horror.

  The path to the outpost was a narrow outcropping that looked out over the River Stir far below as it wound its way into the Worlds Edge Mountains. They’d followed the course of the Stir from the river-town of Wurtbad into the mountains for several days, hunting its origins in the valley near the dwarf-hold of Karak Kadrin. Felix had heard the latter once referred to as ‘the spine of the world’, and from this height he could see the resemblance. The mountain range extended from horizon to horizon, and spread as far as his eyes could see. The roof of the world, studded with stars, spread overhead, and if one had been prone to vertigo, simply looking up for too long would have been enough to provoke a fit.

  Gotrek had insisted on climbing to the outpost when he noticed the light of the fire. ‘Dwarfs know better than to light fires by night in these hills, this close to Karak Kadrin or not, unless there’s good reason,’ he’d growled. How he’d known the outpost was there to begin with, Felix hadn’t asked. Slayer or not, Gotrek was still a dwarf with a dwarf’s natural taciturnity in regards to the comings and goings of his people.

  Why Gotrek should be suspicious was another question he hadn’t asked. There was more than smoke on the night wind, and a rumble way down deep in the ground which Felix had felt before. There were forces on the move in the mountains. He’d expected greenskins… Sigmar knew there were thousands of the beasts infesting these hills.

  But instead of orcs, there had been a half-dozen tattooed Northmen clad in ratty furs that exposed bare, scarred chests. Scar-brands and vile-looking tattoos curled across their wind-roughened flesh and they spoke in a coarse tongue. Whether they were Norscans or members of one of the thousands of marauder tribes which infested the Wastes beyond Kislev, he couldn’t say. Nor, in truth, did he care. They were here and they wanted to kill him and that was enough.

  But while the mountain range held many dangers, including ravening orc tribes and brutish herds of subhuman beastmen, men from the Chaos Wastes were not known for being this far south. The thought sent a queasy shudder through him even as he joined Gotrek, as the Slayer launched himself at their enemies, his axe slicing the air with an audible hiss. Worry later, Jaeger… Fight now, he thought, as the Chaos marauders lunged to meet them.

  Gotrek moved quickly for a being of his size, and the marauders were taken aback. Two fell in a red rush, and then the rest remembered their weapons. Felix locked swords with a bearded warrior who snapped blackened teeth at him like a dog even as he forced his blade towards Felix’s face. Felix was bent nearly backwards by his opponent, but he recovered quickly, driving his heel into the warrior’s instep and slashing Karaghul up and across in a classic example of an Altdorf mittelhau, by way of Liechtenaur’s third law. He had ended a promising academic career with that blow once – two, in fact, if one counted the other student he’d killed in the duel.

  The Chaos marauder staggered, vomiting crimson. Felix, the words of his old fencing master beating his instincts into cruel intent, let loose a schielhau, parting the warrior’s hair permanently. As the man fell, skull cleft, Felix was already moving.

  Gotrek’s axe had already done most of the work, however. Another marauder was down, looking as if he’d been trampled and gored by a beast. Gotrek pressed the last two hard, uttering the occasional hard bark of grim mirth as a lucky blade touched his flesh or passed close enough to be felt. Felix considered going to his aid, but he’d been the dour Slayer’s companion long enough to know that Gotrek wouldn’t thank him for such presumption.

  Gotrek stamped forwards, never wavering or retreating. Felix thought that he might actually be incapable of even thinking of doing either. One of the Chaos marauders lunged desperately, but Gotrek simply shrugged out of the way, letting the edge of the blade graze his impossibly muscled forearm even as he grabbed the shaggy furs the warrior wore and jerked him forwards into a skull-shattering head-butt. The last warrior, rather than fleeing, flung himself at Gotrek. Gotrek’s blow was lazy, and he watched the two halves of the marauder fall with disinterest. He looked at Felix. ‘You walked right into that one, manling,’ he said. ‘If you get your head lopped off, who will record my doom?’

  ‘I hardly walked into it,’ Felix protested, cleaning his blade on one of the dead man’s furs. He glanced around the burning outpost. It was a small thing, as judged by a man. It wasn’t meant to be a home so much as a blind, keeping watch on western passes. There were dozens of similar outposts scattered across dozens of peaks. How they stayed in contact, Felix didn’t know. Gotrek had mentioned signal fires once, and mirrors. Felix didn’t look too closely at the dead dwarfs. He was too intimate with death as it was.

  ‘They were taken unawares,’ Gotrek said, before Felix could broach the question. He dropped to his haunches and yanked a corpse’s head up, examining the dead marauder’s face with his one eye. The Slayer looked positively simian in that position, all bloated muscle sheathed in weather-hardened flesh, his shorn scalp topped by a towering crest of red-dyed hair. Tattoos and scars clung to his frame. Felix had been present when Go
trek had acquired some of the latter, including the ugly mark that had torn the Slayer’s eye from his head. Gotrek hid that one behind a crude leather patch, for which Felix was grateful.

  Gotrek thrust a finger beneath the patch, scratching the socket idly. Felix winced and sheathed his sword. ‘Why are they even here?’ he said. ‘I thought they rarely came this far south. And how could they have taken them unawares?’

  ‘Magic, manling,’ the Slayer spat as he glared at a dead marauder. There was an area that had been carved to appear as if it were a natural outcropping before the outpost, and Felix strode to the edge of it and looked out over the rim of the world.

  The night wind moaned through the crags, and he pulled his cloak tighter about himself as he listened to the crackle of flames. Darkness spread out over the mountains, vast and all-consuming. Felix glanced up at the roof of the sky and saw that the moon was the colour of blood. Flickers caught his attention, drawing his gaze back down. He squinted. ‘Gotrek,’ he said and pointed.

  Gotrek joined him. ‘More fires,’ he said.

  ‘Those signal fires you mentioned?’ Felix said hopefully.

  Gotrek didn’t reply. His single eye stared off into the distance. The dwarf’s sight was better than Felix’s, even with only one eye and in the dark. Then, tersely, he said, ‘No.’

  In the distance, something boomed. The rock beneath his feet trembled and he hastily stepped back from the edge. ‘What–’ he began, but a rumble like distant thunder cut him off. A distant light flared; a burp of luminescence that briefly revealed… what?

  The crag they stood on looked almost straight down into the valley, and the raging river that curled through it. There had been a forest there once, Felix knew, though the dwarfs had long ago chopped down every tree and uprooted every stump in order to create a killing ground quite unlike any other in the world. The valley was a bowl, and more than one army had funnelled into it, looking to lay siege to what he assumed at first glance must be the infamous Slayer Keep. It looked to Felix’s horrified eyes as if that was the case now. He was reminded of ants swarming a dog’s carcass. How many men must be down there, hurling themselves against the walls? He swallowed a sudden rush of bile. ‘Maybe we should head back west. See if we can–’

  Gotrek’s axe sank into a jagged fang of rock, shearing the tip off. Felix fell silent, and turned back to the valley below. With the light of the burning outpost behind him it was hard to make out what was going on down in the valley, but the brief bursts of firelight from below and the crimson light of the moon reflecting off the river helped with that. In any event, the citadel would have been hard to miss.

  The edifice spoke of brooding power. The fortress had been wrought from the rock of the mountain; the massive outer walls had been built from chunks of lichen-encrusted stone, as had the inner wall, which rose above the wall immediately preceding it to climb the slope of the mountain. To Felix’s untrained eye, it resembled nothing so much as half an onion, with a layer pulled free of the rest, though he did not voice this idle thought to Gotrek. Regardless, the fortress dominated the valley in which it crouched. Felix felt his heart skip a beat as he judged the scale of the walls, calculating their true size. ‘Those walls are larger than those of Altdorf,’ he said in awe.

  Gotrek grunted and spat. ‘One of Ungrim’s ideas. The true hold is deep in the mountain, as is proper. But Ungrim had a smaller false one constructed, for you humans. They call it Baragor’s Watch, after the first Slayer King.’ Gotrek’s expression twisted into a harsh smile. ‘Bait for a trap. Never met a Northman yet who can resist attacking a wall.’

  ‘If it’s only bait, why bother to construct them so solidly?’ Felix asked.

  Gotrek looked at him. Felix raised a hand and said, ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Baragor’s Watch is nothing, manling. It is a toy, constructed to house merchants and occupy enemies while proper dwarfs go about their business. There – that is Karak Kadrin!’ Gotrek growled, gesturing with his axe to the structure which rose behind the fortress and easily overshadowed it.

  Baragor’s Watch had been built on a rising slope, and from its upper levels extended a great stone bridge which was lit by the flames of a hundred braziers mounted on the stone stanchions that lined its length. The bridge spanned a massive chasm and connected the fortress on the slope with an even larger plateau gouged from the very heart of the mountain, where a second structure waited. That one, Felix knew, even if Gotrek hadn’t pointed it out, was the true Karak Kadrin. There, on the plateau, a pair of large doors were set into a titanic portcullis which was itself surmounted by the shape of two massive axes, carved into the surface of the mountain.

  ‘Karak Kadrin,’ Gotrek said again, his fingers tightening on the haft of his axe. Ancient wood and leather bindings creaked beneath the pressure of that grip. Felix didn’t reply. The Slayer had insisted that they travel to Karak Kadrin, though he hadn’t said why. Felix had tried to find an outgoing caravan, or even just a group of travellers heading in the same direction, but Gotrek’s surly impatience had put paid to that plan before it had even gotten off the ground. Thus, they had wandered into the mountains alone and on foot. Weeks of walking and climbing had worn Gotrek’s temper to a nub, easily plucked, and Felix felt little better, though his ailments were physical, rather than mental. Gotrek had shown little sign of wear, setting a punishing pace, as if something were driving him on. Now, staring at the distant fires, Felix wondered whether they were drawing close to that something.

  More light splashed across distant stonework, as ancient as the mountains. ‘Fire-throwers,’ Gotrek muttered. He spat over the side of the outcropping. Felix saw that Baragor’s Watch wasn’t as sturdy as he’d first thought. The outer wall was already down, or at least no longer in one piece. Breaches had been made and men surged through as another roar of faint sound echoed upwards.

  ‘It sounds almost like cannons,’ Felix said. ‘But that’s impossible, isn’t it?’ He looked at Gotrek. ‘The Chaos worshippers don’t use such things, do they?’

  Gotrek’s face settled into an expression of grim resolution. He didn’t answer Felix’s question but instead said, ‘We need to get in there, manling.’

  ‘And how do you propose that we do that?’ Felix said, unable to look away from the battle raging far below. ‘I don’t fancy our chances trying to wade through that.’

  Gotrek clutched his axe and for a moment, Felix thought that the Slayer was contemplating doing just that. Then the dwarf shook his head. ‘There’s more than one way into Karak Kadrin, manling. These mountains are honeycombed with hidden doors and secret gates. If I recollect rightly, there’s one close by. We’ll find it and then, by Grimnir, we’ll find out what’s going on down there,’ Gotrek snarled, gesturing towards the Chaos forces with his axe.

  The Worlds Edge Mountains,

  the Valley of Karak Kadrin

  Hrolf’s skin had taken on a waxy sheen, like something not quite solid. He could feel his hair rasping against the inside of his skin. His horse hissed in unease and he dropped a fist between its leathery ears. The Witch-Moon was high, and his beast stirred uneasily in him.

  He and his mount sat a few miles from the keep, in a rough camp that Canto had insisted they set up. Hrolf saw little need for a camp; if men suffered in the weather, then they would take the walls all the quicker. The camp was by the river, ‘close to a water source’ as Canto said. Why they needed water when blood was readily available, Hrolf didn’t know.

  Still, it served the plan. He licked his teeth. He looked around him at the men who were moving into the hills, carrying the devices he would use to win victory. He denied himself the joy of battle to oversee them, because of the plan. It was a good plan. Better, it was his plan, not Canto’s or Ekaterina’s or one of the others’. Something exploded and he jerked in his saddle. The stink of the war-engines of the dawi zharr irritated his senses more and more as the siege progressed. The stunted ones had spent millennia perfecting the arts of siegecraft
, and their black-iron engines were some of the only things capable of knocking down the fortifications of their southern kin.

  They had already done so, in fact. The great outer wall of Karak Kadrin had been cracked open like an eggshell by the cannon that the crooked little daemonsmiths had provided, only to reveal another. Walls, walls, walls… Hrolf spat, growing angry as he thought about the walls and those who crouched behind them. Then he grinned. The inner wall wouldn’t be a problem for long. A great spurt of fire lit up the night as one of the war-engines – a magma cannon, he thought they called it – vomited out a stream of flame that brushed across the stones.

  The fire wasn’t hot enough to melt stone, but it drove the defenders back, and his warriors had no fear of climbing into or walking through fire. Hrolf smelled burning pork and saliva washed the inside of his mouth, mingling with the omnipresent tang of blood. His body ached abominably, his bones creaking in their sheaths of muscle like the supports of a dilapidated house caught in a strong wind. Hrolf frowned as crude frameworks of bone and animal gut thumped against the walls, carrying the warriors of Garmr into battle.

  They would be driven back soon enough. Hrolf strangled a snarl. They were always driven back and had been for weeks now. Garmr had grown bored after three days and taken the rest of the army back towards the Peak Pass, leaving Hrolf and Canto to take Slayer Keep. There were more enemies than dwarfs to fight in these mountains, and Garmr was intent on killing every last one of them it seemed.

  A snarl caught his attention and he shifted his gaze, taking in the war-shrines that stood behind him, overlooking the battle. The beasts that had pulled them had been pressed into service, carrying battering rams and siege equipment into the valley. Now, only their bipedal attendants remained: grunting, slobbering madmen and women, chained to the icons by their thick collars, screeching hoarse praises to Khorne as they tore at each other in a berserk frenzy, driven wild by the scent of a battle they would never be able to participate in. Hrolf grimaced, disturbed by the fanatics. They were being punished, or perhaps rewarded. It was hard to tell sometimes.