Gotrek and Felix - Road of Skulls

by Josh Reynolds

  Chaos marauders loped past. They wore heavy furs and armour, and their weapons were a motley assortment. Sieges were the one place where Garmr’s preference for mounted warfare had to be disregarded. It was rare that those unlucky enough to have a mount got to do more than clean up after the fact. These were chanting the Blood God’s name, or the name of their tribe or champion. The words were all one to Hrolf, and he shook his head irritably. He longed to join them. His throat had swollen with an insistent pressure and he gave a grunt as something shifted inside. It was growing harder and harder to control the beast that squatted within him. It was growing larger, and his skin strained to contain it. He touched his flesh, and felt eagerness well up within him. Soon, soon he could shed this worthless skin and rend and slay the way the Witch-Moon wished.

  ‘Hrolf,’ Canto said, riding up to join him.

  ‘What?’ Hrolf snarled, twisting in his saddle, jaws snapping. He felt his teeth slide in his gums, and blood filled his mouth, calming him. Canto raised a hand in a placatory fashion and Hrolf glared at him. The Unsworn was accompanied by the two other Exalted Champions who had been ordered to attend the siege, Kung of the Long Arm and Yan the Foul. Hrolf was in overall command, but it was a tenuous thing at least where the latter was concerned, and all four Exalted shared such duties as Hrolf did not care to attend to himself. Canto, as ever, seemed to have no interest in doing anything save hiding and complaining. He was no true warrior – he might as well have been a Slaaneshi for all the good he was in a fight. Canto knew nothing of the joys of battle and blood and slaughter. Hrolf blinked away red-meat images, trying to focus. His armour felt too tight, and he longed to strip it off, but he knew that was impossible.

  The armour had long ago set roots into him, merging with his flesh as effectively as the iron collar he wore about his thick neck. The collar too was a part of him. Like the armour, it stretched and spread when his form warped, protecting him even at his most battle-maddened. Khorne’s gift to a favoured son, he knew.

  He traced the eight-pointed star that graced the much-abused cuirass and felt the warmth of the strange metal. It felt as if it had been just plucked from the forge when he rode into battle, searing his skin and maddening the monster within.

  For a moment, he was lost in red memories of those first few days of the siege. He had led his men in taking the first section of wall, striking fast and hard, ignoring the death that rained down on them from above. The dwarfs defended every square of stone as if it were the last, giving ground grudgingly. Hrolf recalled how the boiling tar poured over the crenellations of the parapet and how his men had screamed as the concoction had splashed over them, pulling flesh from bone. He had ignored it then, scrambling up the ladder, blade in hand, head and heart thundering with the rhythm of war. Around his waist he’d worn a kilt of dwarf beards, scalped from the dead in the Peak Pass.

  He could still feel that first crunch of blade on bone and taste the first drop of dwarf blood. The wall had fallen quickly, though the dwarfs had not been unprepared. He had had more troops then, and had spent their lives freely, sacrificing dozens to pull down a third that number of dwarfs. The wall had shuddered beneath his feet, pounded by the war-engines of the dawi zharr, and he had laughed as part of it collapsed, nearly sweeping him away.

  ‘Hrolf,’ Canto said again, more insistently, his voice a hollow rumble. Hrolf looked at the featureless helm and the dead shark eyes staring at him through the ragged visor.

  ‘What is it, Unsworn?’ he rasped.

  ‘They’ve taken down another section of wall,’ Canto said.

  ‘We are ready to press forwards,’ Kung rasped, stroking the serpentine length of his horse-gut-cord bound beard. It hung down to his saddle, and the end was capped with a round ball crafted from bone. His hair was loose and whipped around his head like a black halo in the smoke-riddled wind; Kung’s status was marked by his unbound hair rather than ornamentation. Only chieftains and war-leaders could leave their hair untied among the diverse tribes of the territories of the eastern reaches of the Chaos Wastes. He wore heavy armour, its blood-stained plates engraved with thousands of gaping, fanged jaws that seemed to snap and bite the air in the light cast by the fires of the war-engines. An axe rested across his saddle; its haft was made from a carved femur and the blade was a beaten crudity which glared at the world with blazing eyes that were set to either side of the jagged edge. Hrolf did not know whether the weapon was alive in the conventional sense; some whispered that it contained the soul of Kung’s brother, whom he’d slain to take control of his tribe.

  ‘Your exuberance is matched only by your idiocy, Kung,’ the other champion growled. Yan was a Khazag and his armour was covered in the stretched and stitched faces flayed from the skulls of his opponents. Where Kung was big and broad, Yan was lithe and deadly looking, like a needle wrapped in iron. The falchion on his hip had seen use in a thousand battles across a hundred years, and it bore the stamp of the daemonsmiths of Zharr Naggrund. ‘There is another wall, Dogsson. And another beyond that like as not… We will grow old and our bones will be dust before we are done with walls.’

  ‘Are you accusing me of building them, Yan?’ Hrolf growled. ‘Or are you simply yapping to hear the sound of your own voice?’

  ‘I am saying that this is a waste of time,’ Yan said. ‘We should rejoin Garmr. Let the stunted ones cower in their stone hole.’ Yan was a supporter of Ekaterina’s, Hrolf recalled, even as Kung was one of his. While every man in Garmr’s army was theoretically loyal to the Gorewolf, most were, in reality, loyal only to whatever chieftain or sub-chieftain they had followed before being absorbed into the horde. The Exalted who led the warbands that made up Garmr’s horde constantly fought for dominance. Eight warbands, made up of sixty-four smaller bands, and each of those made of still smaller bands with their own pecking orders, for a total of eight thousand men or more. It was only fear of Garmr that kept everything moving in the same direction.

  But Garmr wasn’t here. Even when he was, it was odds on that a battle would break out between one tribe or group and another. But without him, it was worse. The enemy were unreachable. That meant the warriors of the army now had no one to fight but each other.

  ‘Garmr has commanded that we take this fortress for the glory of Khorne,’ Hrolf said.

  ‘Garmr is not here!’ Yan said, spitting Hrolf’s own thoughts back at him. ‘Garmr is off taking skulls and reaping glory for himself, while we sit in the mud and waste ourselves on stone.’

  Hrolf felt his hackles rise. This had been a long time coming. Yan had been sniping at Garmr since before they’d crossed the Plain of Zharr, questioning his decisions, taking too many liberties. Yan wanted to be pack leader. But Garmr was pack leader; he would lead the pack to glory whether they wanted it or not, and Hrolf would help him. ‘You are impatient, Yan,’ Hrolf said. ‘We are all impatient, but you take it too far.’ Things moved in him, insistent. He forced them down, smashing all of his will down on the wolf, quashing its struggles. He flexed his aching hands, listening to the bones pop and the ligaments quiver. ‘Garmr is lord, and we serve him.’

  Yan sneered. ‘Maybe it is time to have a new lord.’

  Hrolf found it hard to think with the smell of blood in his nostrils, but he forced the waking dreams of slaughter out of his head and tried to focus. He needed to remain in control. His time would come, when the plan had been implemented and the damnable walls cracked wide. ‘Are you certain that you wish to do this here, Yan?’ he said. He spat blood. Some of it speckled Yan’s hand. The Khazag’s eyes narrowed and he made to draw his falchion. Hrolf urged his horse close and reached out, grabbing Yan’s hand, forcing his sword to remain sheathed.

  ‘Release me, dog!’ Yan hissed, snapping filed teeth. The others pulled their horses back, watching speculatively. Yan had seized this moment for his own, for good or ill. ‘The Blood God demands skulls and I shall give him yours,’ Yan continued, his free hand flashing to his hip, where a curved dagger hung. He drew
it and slashed out, across Hrolf’s face, opening him brow to cheek. Blood-matted hair hung lank from the depths of the wound, and a stink like a dog dead in a ditch for two weeks struck the gathered chieftains.

  Hrolf grabbed Yan’s throat. Yan’s eyes widened as Hrolf jerked him from his saddle and flung him to the ground. Then, muscles quivering, he prepared to leap on the other champion.

  ‘Hrolf, ’ware!’

  His eyes snapped around. Yan’s men, his lieutenants, moved forwards with deadly intent. The Khazags took their honour seriously. They wouldn’t take the humiliation of their war-chief quietly. Hrolf glanced back and saw Canto moving forwards with his armoured killers in tow. It had been his voice that had shouted the warning. Hrolf snarled. The coward wanted to seize his glory!

  He started his horse towards the Khazags, but Canto interposed his own mount. ‘No,’ he said. Kung followed suit, gesturing lazily with his axe.

  ‘There are enemies aplenty, Yan,’ Kung rumbled. ‘Do not make new ones before you finish the old.’

  ‘He struck me!’ Yan snarled.

  ‘I should have killed you,’ Hrolf nearly roared.

  ‘And then your plan would be ruined while we waited for Yan’s subordinates to sort themselves out and for a new champion to replace him,’ Canto snapped. ‘Or, we can follow through with your grand stratagem and end this whole futile affair in one fell swoop.’

  Hrolf growled. Canto was right. Canto was always right. Red images blossomed in his head; he longed to kill the man, to prove his superiority over the weakling, but Canto resisted every challenge. Even Ekaterina couldn’t draw him into battle, infuriating as she was.

  Canto was a coward. Hrolf hated cowards. They refused to walk the Eightfold Path, to set foot on Khorne’s stair, and they deserved to die. But Garmr wanted Canto alive. Garmr thought Canto was amusing. Canto was Garmr’s pet.

  They were all Garmr’s pets.

  Garmr had beaten him in a duel at the Battle of Ten Thousand Blades, forcing him and his pack into slavery. Khorne only respected strength, and there was glory to be won serving one as strong as Garmr. But even more glory to be won in killing him. Saliva and blood mingled in his mouth and he swallowed, trying to placate the beast. He longed to give in. The dwarfs in the Peak Pass hadn’t been enough. He needed more.

  He’d sent his Chaos hounds into the peaks to bring him word of any relief force or kill any dwarfs not cowering in their stone hole. The dwarfs had launched a number of counter-attacks in the first week, erupting from hidden gates and holes. The mountains were honeycombed and Hrolf had lost hundreds of men to the trickery of the stunted ones. His army was bleeding soldiers but that didn’t matter. There were plenty left.

  Besides, he had tricks of his own. His knuckles popped as he gripped his reins. He could taste the flesh of the dwarfs already. He grunted in pleasure. ‘Are you coming or will you stay here, safely away from the blood-letting?’

  ‘I’m coming,’ Canto said.

  ‘Good.’ Hrolf felt his grin threaten to split his face. ‘Now, now you will see how wolves hunt.’

  2

  The Worlds Edge Mountains,

  near Karak Kadrin

  Gotrek led the way deeper into the crags, eye narrowed. Felix followed, tired and cold. His nose was running and his legs ached. The climb from the outpost had been torturous, and more than once, he’d almost fallen from the narrow ledges and crumbling inclines that the Slayer had crossed with a mountain goat’s lack of concern. They’d piled stones over the bodies of the dwarfs before they’d left, and his arms and back were still sore from the effort. And he still had no idea where Gotrek was leading them. Not straight into the melee around the walls of Karak Kadrin, as he’d first feared. Regardless, Gotrek seemed determined to reach somewhere.

  Then, Gotrek was always determined. But this was different. It had been building for weeks, like a storm on the horizon. A nagging had grown into an obsession, and Felix had watched, afraid. As they had drawn ever closer to Karak Kadrin, Gotrek had spent his nights staring at his axe, as if it were speaking to him. Worse were the times his eye would slide into vagueness and more than once, Felix feared that the Slayer had finally snapped. Maybe he had.

  He studied their surroundings as they moved. The Worlds Edge Mountains never changed; or, if they did, it was with such slowness that it was imperceptible to the human eye. Dark, jagged rocks thrust fiercely towards the black, star-studded sky. There was a ragged quilt of green below them. The mountains were threaded with arboreal veins, brief bursts of forest surrounded by broken rocks, full of scraggly trees struggling in the shadows of the mountains. The mountains themselves rose and fell like glacial waves and in places it was easy to forget that there was a world beyond looming walls of lichen encrusted rock. Once or twice, he caught sight of the besieged Baragor’s Watch and Karak Kadrin beyond it and he thought perhaps Gotrek was leading him around the circumference of the valley, towards the mountain peak which the dwarf hold occupied. The high road was fine with Felix, as long as it meant avoiding the nightmare in the valley below. Better the crags than a Chaos army. But as the days passed, they’d drawn ever closer to the latter.

  They were on a path now, a proper one. It had been carved and shaped by dwarf hands, he suspected, given the comforting regularity of it. There were other paths running above and below them, as if this particular peak were ringed about by bands of stone. The dwarfs were meticulous about creating redundancies for the most menial of structures. Men, Felix knew, made do with the barest essentials – rickety bridges and crumbling walls, repaired only when necessary – but dwarfs rarely left such things to the first attempt, or even the second.

  Opposite them, across a narrow chasm, more paths rose upwards in a parallel trajectory. The regularity of the chasm was broken at certain points by ancient stone bridges, none wider than two dwarfs and all now mostly split in two, as if whatever great shift had opened the chasm had also cracked the bridges that spanned it in twain. It reminded him of certain cramped back streets in the Luitpolstrasse in Altdorf, where the roots of old bridges reached in vain across the fingers of the Reik that spread throughout the city. Not for the first time, he found himself wondering what the dwarf empire had been like at its height. What secrets did these mountains, once the cradle of that majestic civilization, still hold?

  ‘Where are we going?’ Felix said. He kept his voice pitched low. Sound carried surprisingly far in the mountains, as he’d learned to his cost more than once. And with a Chaos force in the immediate area, the slightest shout could draw the veritable wrath of the Dark Gods down on their heads. ‘I trust you have a plan of some sort.’

  ‘We’re going where we’ve always been going, manling. Karak Kadrin,’ Gotrek said.

  ‘Gotrek, it’s back that way,’ Felix said, ‘and under siege.’

  ‘So?’ Gotrek said. He glanced over his shoulder. ‘I will go to Karak Kadrin, siege or not.’

  ‘Can we at least wait it out?’ Felix said.

  ‘It cannot wait,’ Gotrek snarled.

  ‘Why?’

  Gotrek spun, the edge of his axe stopping just short of Felix’s throat. ‘I said, it cannot wait,’ he rasped. Felix risked a look down. The axe trembled faintly, but Gotrek’s hand was steady. Felix swallowed. ‘How are we getting in?’ he said softly. ‘You don’t intend to carve a path to the front gates, you said as much.’

  Gotrek blinked and shook himself. ‘No,’ he grunted, turning away. He didn’t apologize. Felix hadn’t expected him to do so. Whatever was eating away at Gotrek, the Slayer wasn’t likely to share it. Not with a human. Gotrek had his pride.

  ‘I told you, there are other ways in,’ Gotrek said.

  ‘And you know of these ways?’ Gotrek looked at him. Felix flushed. ‘Of course you do. I’m an idiot.’

  Gotrek hesitated, and then clapped him on the arm. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s not far.’

  ‘And what is it exactly?’

  ‘We’ll enter Baragor’s Watch through the
old Engineers’ Entrance,’ Gotrek said.

  ‘What’s the Engineers’ Entrance?’

  Gotrek grunted. ‘Old King Ironfist doesn’t hold with engineers. He ordered them to use a separate entrance, so the guild could move their supplies of black powder and inventions without endangering Baragor’s Watch. They recommissioned an ancient trading road, and sank shafts and haulers within the mountain. It’s a secret. No one but the engineering guild is supposed to know about it.’

  Felix didn’t ask the obvious question. He knew little about Gotrek’s past, but what he did know included the fact that the Slayer had once been a member of the Engineers’ Guild, though for how long and when, he had never said. He wondered if the Slayer had perhaps even had a hand in creating the entrance.

  Gotrek abruptly raised a ham-sized hand, waving Felix back. Felix tensed, freezing in place, his fingers brushing against his sword’s hilt. The path widened ahead of them, spreading into a dais or plateau of raised stone wide enough for dozens of men. A broken archway, decorated with ornate dwarfish carvings, loomed over them, and beyond it, a number of smaller archways and paths that spread upwards towards a higher, as yet invisible, point.

  As they stepped beneath the largest arch, Felix saw that the lichen growing on the ancient stone had been scraped away in places. Gotrek noticed his look and nodded. Felix swallowed. They hadn’t been the first to come this way.

  The plateau had been sanded flat long ago and the crumbling remains of a curved wall occupied the far edge, rising up as if it and the path as well had once been completely enclosed. On the walls were the remains of weathered carvings that might well have once depicted scenes from the golden age of the Under-Empire. There were more such carvings on the few ragged chunks of the roof that remained. Dwarfs weren’t fans of the open air at the best of times, wandering Slayers aside, and Felix wondered what cataclysm had occurred to crack such a structure open. Had that event been the same one that Gotrek had often hinted was responsible for crippling the dwarf civilization?