Gotrek and Felix: The Anthology

by Various

  The axe’s new wielder performs a single act of stunning bravery. A bloodthirster, the very avatar of the Blood God’s wrathful purpose, perishes, defenceless against the baneful runes hammered onto the weapon’s surface. Its demise is a shower of boiling blood. The wielder dies in scalding agony, never having the chance to savour his victory.

  Another scoops the weapon from the ground. An oath forms on his lips, to bring vengeance to the great enemy that threatens to swallow up the world.

  He leaves Karag Dum in glory, and dies in failure.

  A convoy.

  Wagons. Armoured in steel plates.

  An expedition, Lhoigor breathes. To find lost Karag Dum.

  Futile, of course.

  Over weeks, the procession trails through the Wastes, each wagon gradually falling to misfortune and destruction. One remains, set upon by braying monstrosities, and the passengers emerge to defend the stricken vehicle.

  Decades into the future, a warlord in a tent outside a burning city takes a sharp breath.

  It’s him, Kelmain observes. The humour in his tone is malicious, serrated like a blade.

  The Slayer, Lhoigor says. Gotrek Gurnisson.

  The dwarfs abandon their ruined wagon, the expedition a failure. The Wastes does its vile work. The three survivors are separated, and Gurnisson trudges on alone. To see him in this way, as this diminished warrior bereft of the trappings of a Slayer is astounding. He looks so unremarkable, so... tame.

  And then, he finds the axe.

  The cave is inhabited by a creature. It lairs here, dragging back its kills, smearing the walls with its filth. Gurnisson needs the shelter. He starts a fight he can’t win.

  The axe is hoarded at the back of the cave, amid a pile of bones and a handful of rusting trinkets the creature considers precious. In desperation, Gurnisson takes up the blade.

  The moment his fingers brush against the weapon’s handle, the warlord feels the brothers spasm. It’s a moment that’s so rare that it feels as if the stars are in some unheard of, auspicious alignment. Fate’s threads stretch taut. Some even snap.

  Gurnisson lived through that night. He even made it...

  …home.

  A valley. Picturesque. Serene.

  Gurnisson is already changed. Dwarfs are thick, compact creatures. His musculature is swollen beyond what passes for normality. And his nature, too, is not the same. The dwarf’s soul has become a darker thing.

  The axe changes the wielder, brother. He has grown.

  Home, however, is not as he left it. He walks among a village of blackened structures and ravaged bodies. He pauses over a female with an infant clutched in her bloodied hands.

  Gurnisson bows his head. In the ashes of his broken life, he weeps.

  Vengeance.

  Gurnisson snarls a violent promise in the hall of a dwarf lord.

  The enthroned noble watches with a highborn’s sneering dispassion. The words they exchange are heated, laced with a mutual dislike. There is some unresolved history here, a past slight that stokes anger’s flame.

  With a lazy gesture of one broad hand, the noble orders Gurnisson’s death, and thus secures his own.

  It’s a charnel scene. The lord’s chamber, richly appointed in rare gold and the elaborate tapestries of a ruling clan, becomes a gory mess of broken bodies and spattered blood.

  When Gurnisson shaves his head, he takes his time. With a blade taken from the slain lord’s belt, he cuts away his hair, leaving the stubbly crest that signifies a dwarf undertaking the Slayer Oath.

  He leaves that chamber in the throes of shame, and begins a ceaseless hunt for his own doom.

  Altdorf.

  Accursed Imperial capital. Birthplace of the pretender-god Sigmar Heldenhammer.

  The tavern is the usual squalid dive so common in all Imperial cities. Whoring and drinking, pissing and retching, the sweating mass of humanity squanders what few copper coins they have to forget about the harshness of their lives.

  Gurnisson is here. And another. A human.

  That... fool... slew Skjalandir. It was him.

  They are drunk, and locked in intense conversation. The bonds formed during heavy drinking often endure the longest, but the human utters perhaps the stupidest words he will ever speak.

  He slurs an oath. To a dwarf.

  An oath.

  The warlord dies.

  Praag burns. Flame consumes the outer districts, and the raucous chanting of the conquering invaders is a deep chorus in the ruined streets and alleys.

  The sky is red. Literally, the very clouds are the deep crimson of arterial blood. Sorcery charges the air as the enchantments woven into the city’s broken walls bleed freely into the blighted skies. Everything smells of smoke and fire, blood and dying, looting and murder.

  Creatures that should not be wander the streets, feasting on the dead. They behold the world with beady scavenger eyes, avoiding anyone who comes close, and tearing out the throats of the mortally wounded.

  Praag burns, and yet the warlord dies.

  His life ends in a flurry of violence, surrounded by the heaving press of his own warriors. Gurnisson – the Slayer, the axe wielder – roars like a Lustrian carnosaur. The blade he fears, the weapon that is fated to end his life, is a blazing beacon of hatred for the warlord’s kind. It exults in the pain it is about to inflict. It howls its contempt for the Great Powers.

  His armour is breached, the enchantments of his slave-sorcerers burned out and useless. He feels his own blood snaking down the inside of the damaged plate in hot trickles.

  It flashes down in a blur of hot starmetal – gromril, the dwarfs name the rare and precious metal – and severs the warlord’s head from his shoulders.

  A hush falls over the–

  –stop this end this Kelmain Lhoigor I have seen en–

  –warlord’s forces. They pause in their destruction, uncertainty replacing the buzz of malicious celebration. Gurnisson’s human companion stoops to collect the warlord’s head, and holds it aloft so that they can all see.

  ‘Your warlord is dead!’ he shouts, his teeth bared in angry triumph. ‘Your warlord is dead!’

  He nearly lost his balance.

  Stunned, he held out a plated hand to steady his bulky form. His breathing came in ragged gasps, his warped throat turning the sound into a panted growl.

  ‘Your visions,’ he said, when his pulse had slowed, ‘have done nothing to reassure me.’

  The brothers watched with the warmth of a glacier. Their smiles were hungry. They scented the warlord’s weakness.

  He will tell us to kill the dwarf, brother. He will think that he can stop this.

  That he will, Lhoigor.

  How best to handle it?

  The way we always handle him. Humour him. Let him believe he is in control. He has scented his own demise. He will only grow more fearful as the hour draws closer.

  This war, this city... It was all for naught?

  No. Think of what will transpire. We have engineered the slaughter of thousands. This blow is not grievous enough to lay Kislev low entirely, but Praag will take years to rebuild. This army will scatter, but we will endure. And there are other, worthier warlords.

  True enough, brother. True enough.

  They gave Daemonclaw their assurances that such a fate could be avoided, and that death was just a mere possibility. They wove their lies with guiltless ease, and he calmed.

  ‘See to it the dwarf and his human henchman die. See that the axe is lost and not found again soon.’

  ‘We shall do our best,’ Kelmain lied with a smile.

  ‘If the vision truly came from Tchar, it would be blasphemy to try and interfere with the destiny he plans for you.’ Lhoigor couldn’t help himself.

  ‘Nonetheless, do it.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  They glanced at each other as he left, the black and white pieces of the chessboard sliding back into their starting positions.

  Delicious.

  IV


  The vision had not shown the actual truth. Not entirely.

  After all, Arek’s decapitation was not as clean as he had been shown. Not at all as clean.

  Dwarfs are often compared to their human allies and neighbours. Popular Imperial literature describes them as ‘short but stout’, always measuring them by human standards. The frowning, bearded little lords of the Worlds Edge Mountains; useful to have at your side in a fight, valuing a promise, and taking their quaint oaths very seriously.

  Humans could be very stupid, sometimes.

  To accuse a dwarf of having a dour nature is to misunderstand dawi psychology completely. It disregards an ancient culture’s pathological obsession with every slight, every injustice, every loss it has ever endured. Every month, another hold has to be scourged of verminkin. Every week, a new greenskin warleader trumpets his dominance by lining the mountain roads with fresh trophy pikes.

  To mock the importance they place in keeping oaths and fulfilling promises is to devalue a society that has endured since civilisation’s bloody dawn. To break a promise, to spit on an oath, is to throw brotherhood in their faces. It’s the fulcrum upon which their society spins. It is all they have.

  Every dwarf knows this. And they also know that the limits of their anger far exceed what humans have the capacity to comprehend.

  He put every remembered grudge into the blow. He summoned every shred of frothing, black rage into the strike that felled Daemonclaw and ended the razing of Praag. And yet, despite all these things, the axe forged in antiquity by an ancestor-god only partially severed his head.

  He grunted a Khazalid curse, blood and spit spraying from his lips. With a broad, flat boot, he forced the hissing gromril to bite deeper, as if he was breaking ground with a shovel. In the space between armoured pauldron and full-face war helm, black, polluted blood squirted from the wound in time with the dying warlord’s failing heartbeat.

  The head came free with the wrench of tearing sinew, and his armoured body crashed to the ground.

  What happened next, the vision had represented with chilling accuracy.

  ‘Your warlord is dead!’ cried Felix Jaeger. ‘Your warlord is dead!’

  The brothers did not even spare a moment’s attention as their puppet died.

  They, of course, had abandoned him. Outside the walls, they had listened politely to the demands of Daemonclaw’s heralds to stop the spread of fires within the city. The army had to winter here, after all. Smoking ruins offered little shelter.

  Lhoigor had declined in a sorrowful, regretful tone, and with a gesture, their armour became molten slag.

  ‘Now that Arek’s farce is concluded, have we a plan?’

  Kelmain’s rebuke had none of its usual venom. He was almost kindly, as if talking to a dim child.

  Of course we do, Lhoigor. We start again.

  ‘Oh?’

  Kelmain gave a shrill laugh. Around them, the brothers’ cabal of lowly acolytes and half-hearted disciples listened with their shaven heads bowed in deference. No one commented on the apparent one-sidedness of the conversation.

  As this gaping wound in Kislev scabs over, all we must do is guide another soul along the paths Arek took. Except this time, we shall be careful to study his worthiness more closely, no? We should choose a man who thinks slightly less of himself than this fool did.

  Lhoigor dipped his bald head in concession of his brother’s wisdom. ‘If this is the case, I thought perhaps we could alter our route to include the mountains? I would very much like to examine Skjalandir’s carcass.’

  Kelmain’s answer was spoken aloud so the acolytes could hear his words.

  ‘We travel by swifter means, my brother.’ He showed them his needle-teeth in what looked more like a threat-display than a grin. ‘Would you die for us? We are in a hurry.’

  In silent, wordless loyalty, they cut their own throats to power the brothers’ spell. With a thick bang of displaced air, they left the stink of a burning city behind them, and the fleeing hordes that had already begun to fight amongst themselves.

  V

  ‘We saw,’ Kelmain repeated, almost choking the words from his parched throat, ‘the Slayer.’

  Lhoigor shivered. The images were scars in his mind’s eye. He couldn’t banish what the vision had shown. His blinking was rapid.

  ‘Is he following us?’

  Lhoigor...

  ‘He must have followed us from Praag, Kelmain. You saw what he is capable of.’

  If one more fearful muttering passes your lips, I swear by the blood of the Changer I will kill you myself.

  Kelmain’s chest rose and fell in anger, as well as fear of his own. Something was wrong. The quality of the vision had been too... violent. Too vivid. Even more than the premonitions they usually endured. And the weakness was passing too slowly.

  Tchar’s holy breath, his skull ached.

  As he rose to his feet, the trembling of his knees shocked him. With a golden-clawed fist gripping his staff for support, he limped a few steps to encourage circulation. Lhoigor remained where he was, biting his silver claws in fretful thought.

  At last, Kelmain sighed. ‘You realise this is an opportunity.’ He used his ravaged flesh-voice. Lhoigor always responded better this way.

  ‘How so?’ His brother didn’t even look up.

  ‘Recall the vision.’

  ‘I... don’t want to, brother.’

  ‘Lhoigor. Recall the vision. Describe what we saw.’

  The silver-clawed sorcerer took a shuddering breath. Kelmain shook his head in wonderment. It was true that the two almost shared souls, that was how fundamental their bond was, but some things remained hidden from each other. Lhoigor never realised that he possessed a fractional superiority in raw talent, where Kelmain refined his own abilities with tight, masterful control.

  ‘He was walking through the Wastes. He seemed possessed by anger.’

  ‘No. That isn’t what we saw. Clear your head. This is vital. Recall the vision accurately, Lhoigor. Don’t be afraid.’

  As calm settled over the tension of the silver-clawed brother’s shoulders, he began to talk.

  Not walking.

  Staggering. The Slayer is staggering.

  His boots scuff the ashen earth of the Wastes, footsteps trailing behind him for countless leagues. Gurnisson can barely stand. He cackles a madman’s laugh, as if this wretched state of being holds some private hilarity.

  The bleakness of cold sunlight catches on his golden armbands. The priceless metal is worn and scratched from a journey that has surely taken months. Every hour of that trek shows. New scars stand out as livid blemishes on pale, tattooed skin.

  His presence is somehow diminished. This isn’t the warrior who bested Daemonclaw. It seems that even the axe’s influence can’t – or perhaps won’t – sustain him. He holds the blade out in front of him, swinging drunkenly at enemies who aren’t there.

  With the one eye that remains to him, blinking and clogged with dust, he stumbles after landmarks that won’t stay still, mumbling over the sanctity of mountains, cursing the false tranquillity of open valleys.

  No anger. No wrathful pursuit of two twin sorcerers.

  Just a Slayer fated to find his doom in the north.

  ‘Let’s kill him ourselves.’

  Kelmain hid a private smile. Like a child shown the foolishness of his fear, Lhoigor had certainly perked up.

  Now you are thinking like my brother again.

  They began to walk without paying attention to where they were going. It seemed an illogical thing to do, but it didn’t matter where you thought you were heading in the Chaos Wastes. It took you along its own paths, and guided you into its numerous pitfalls.

  I am sorry, brother, Lhoigor said for the second time that day. That vision was so strong. I was not myself when I came to.

  In truth, neither was I, Kelmain confessed, his reluctance to admit this obvious in the hesitance of his thoughts. Normally my wits convalesce swiftly. Not
today.

  Does it give you pause? The strangeness of it?

  Kelmain shrugged his spindly shoulders. We stand on the precipice of the gods’ realm. We should be surprised that vague abnormality was all we experienced, no?

  It is possible that the vision isn’t accurate. Lhoigor was voicing a concern neither really wanted to face up to. Perhaps something interfered, poisoning our perceptions with false visions.

  Kelmain took a long, impatient breath. If that is the case, then we will deal with it as it comes. The possibility of destroying this Gurnisson, perhaps bending his weapon to our purposes, is too great an opportunity to pass over. He added, You darken my thoughts.

  The journey continued in silence, not even with their voiceless communication. Each brother kept his own counsel, perhaps wondering which of fate’s threads would snap with the Slayer gone.

  Or perhaps they simply pondered how they would murder him.

  He was almost dead. It quite removed the fun from the situation.

  He was far gaunter than the vision showed. His bones were visible on account of the severe wasting of his muscles, the bumpy curvature of his ribcage hiking with each spluttered breath. He couldn’t even stand up.

  He cradled his axe on the ground underneath him, as if sheltering it from predators. And the bands decorating his arms seemed too dull to be true gold. Curious.

  The brothers stalked around him, as lean as vultures, bent over in their predatory intent.

  ‘You are ours, Slayer,’ Kelmain teased, the words close to a sneer. ‘Finally, this is the doom that has eluded you these past decades.’

  Despite the taunt, neither brother actually moved any closer. The dwarf was dying, but he was still dangerous. Obscured under his bulk, that axe waited.

  ‘Do I congratulate you, dwarf? In your dim, oafish mind, is this a victory for you?’ Lhoigor sniped. ‘What a life it must be, to have death as your foremost ambition.’

  The brothers tittered like hyenas, and the Slayer glanced up at them.

  With two eyes.