“I saved your life,” said Aethenir.
“Did I ask for it?”
The elf shook his head, wonderingly. “You’re both mad.”
Just then, with an enraged “HOOG!” the sea dragon exploded from the waves again, twisting and snapping at something on its back. Felix and Aethenir could see that it was Gotrek, his short, powerful legs clamped around the serpent’s neck just behind its head, his axe raised high, roaring a wordless battle cry as water flew from his crest and beard.
lust as the sea dragon rose to its highest height, the Slayer slashed down and buried the axe’s blade deep into its brain-pan, spraying blood in all directions.
With a last soft “hoog” the fires died in the sea dragon’s eyes. For a brief moment, as Gotrek struggled to wrench his axe free, it hung motionless in the air, then toppled, Gotrek still clinging to it, as slow and inevitable as a tree falling in a forest, right for Felix and Aethenir.
“Flee! Swim!” cried the elf, and kicked wildly while clinging to the timber.
Felix kicked with him. The serpent slapped down beside them with a smack that hurt the ears and pushed them forwards on a surging swell. Its huge body slipped swiftly beneath the waves, leaving little eddies and whirlpools in its passing. It also seemed to have taken Gotrek with it, for he was nowhere to be seen.
Felix turned in a circle as the seconds ticked past. Had the Slayer not managed to free his axe? Was he still caught in the beast’s bridle straps? Had he found his doom at last?
But then, after it seemed that there could no longer be any hope, a familiar head broke the waves, gasping and choking and flipping its crest out of its eye.
“Gotrek! You live!” said Felix as he reached a hand out.
“Aye,” said Gotrek catching his hand. “Worse luck.”
Felix pulled him to the floating plank and the three of them clung to it and just breathed for a while. With the death of the sea dragon, Karaghul’s runes faded out, and so too did Felix’s all-consuming hatred for dragonkind, to be replaced by sick fear at all the suicidal risks he had just taken. Had he really shouted in the dragon’s face and waited for its attack?
He turned to Aethenir. “Thank you, high one, for pulling me aside. And I apologise for insulting you.”
Aethenir waved a dismissive hand. “You were ridden by the sword. I took no offence.”
Around them, the grey light of pre-dawn was beginning to push back the darkness. The mist continued to lift and the sea remained calm. The miserable night was over. Not that it mattered. Though they had survived the fight with the sea dragon, they were as dead as if it had eaten them, for without a boat, the cold of the sea would kill them long before their thirst or hunger ever did.
“Perhaps the skaven will save us,” said Aethenir. “Perhaps they’ve been watching all along.”
Gotrek spat into the water. “Saved by skaven. I’d die first.”
Then little more than a mile away, silhouetted against the pearl-grey horizon, Felix saw jutting black crags rising from the sea. “An island!” he cried, pointing. “Look! We’re saved!”
The others followed his gaze and peered into the half-light.
Beside him Aethenir moaned. “No, Herr Jaeger, that is no island, and we are not saved.” He shivered and lowered his forehead to the shattered plank. “We are doomed.”
THIRTEEN
Felix turned to Aethenir, confused. “What do you mean? Certainly it’s an island. Look at it.”
The high elf shook his head. “It is a black ark, a floating city, a piece of sunken Nagarythe held above the water by the profane magics of the druchii. It is a moving fortress from which the black ships of the corsairs spill to pillage and enslave. And it is coming our way.”
Felix blinked at Aethenir, aghast, then turned back to the island. Fear gripped his heart. It was closer now, much closer, and he had a sudden understanding of its scale. It rose hundreds of yards out of the sea, and must have been nearly a mile across. Towers and thick-walled fortifications jutted up all along the tall crags, and palaces and temples and citadels climbed steeply towards the centre, where a massive black keep glowered down on the rest of the island like a black dragon surveying its chosen domain.
Felix turned in the water, looking around for some escape. There was none. “This is madness,” he said. “We were after one tiny ship! The cursed skaven put us in the way of the wrong druchii!” He lowered himself again so that only his head showed above the water. “Perhaps they won’t see us. Perhaps they will think we are dead and pass us by.”
“No, manling,” said Gotrek. “They will not.”
Felix looked at him. The Slayer’s single eye blazed.
“This is what I have been waiting for,” Gotrek said, never looking away from the ark. “This is the black mountain the seeress promised. This is my doom.”
And mine too, thought Felix. For if Gotrek met his death on that floating rock there was no way Felix would ever make it off alive.
As they watched, a piece of darkness broke off from the craggy island and became a black ship with a lateen sail.
“Are they looking for us?” asked Felix, swallowing.
“They are looking for the rider,” said Aethenir. “They will have heard the beast’s battle cries, and are coming to investigate.”
And so it seemed, for the sleek ship rowed straight for them while Gotrek chuckled under his breath.
“Once we kill these,” he said, “we sail it back to the island. Then the real slaying begins.”
Felix looked at Gotrek agog. The Slayer was serious. “Putting aside that it may be difficult to kill a whole ship full of druchii, not to mention an island,” he said. “Three men aren’t enough to sail us there.”
“The galley slaves will row us back,” said Gotrek.
“And why would they do that?” asked Aethenir.
“To see their masters die.”
The ship was getting close now, slowing and arcing towards the wreckage. Gotrek watched it like a wolf eyeing an approaching sheep, seemingly unaware that he was the prey and the ship was the predator.
“Closer,” he murmured. “Closer.”
Aethenir, on the other hand, seemed to be praying. Felix joined him.
The ship heaved to a considerable distance from them and sat in the water, drifting slowly. It was a low, evil-looking craft, with a blood-red sail, rows of sweeps and giant, bow-like bolt-throwers lining both rails. Felix saw a flash of reflection from the deck. Someone was observing them with a spyglass.
A muffled command echoed across the water and one of the bolt-throwers turned their way.
“They’re going to fire!” cried Aethenir.
“Dive!” said Gotrek, and disappeared below the water.
Aethenir dived, but before Felix could follow there was a sharp clack, and something shot from the weapon. It wasn’t a bolt. Halfway through ducking down, he paused to watch the strange, amorphous shape come towards them, twisting and blossoming as it came. A net!
Panicked, he let go of the floating timber and dropped under the water, then panicked again as he remembered he was wearing chainmail, and was starting to sink. He kicked and flailed desperately with his arms, clawing his way back to the surface, and finally caught a hold of something, but it wasn’t the wreck. It was the net. He grabbed it gratefully anyway and pulled his face up to the air, sticking his head up through the weave of ropes.
Gotrek and Aethenir had risen too, and were also clinging to the net.
“To the edge,” said Gotrek. “Before they draw it in.”
But as they tried to pull themselves along the underside of the net, they realised that their hands were stuck fast to the ropes they had first touched. They pulled and yanked, but it was no good. It was worse than tar, and it wasn’t just their hands that were trapped. The strands that lay upon Felix’s shoulders were stuck to his chain-mail. A strand that had fallen across Gotrek’s head was stuck to his scalp and his crest. Aethenir’s long blond hair was caught in it, a
s were the sleeves of his robes.
Gotrek growled a curse as he tried to pull his hand away from the stickum. He could not. He brought a foot up and hooked it in the rope for leverage, then heaved mightily. After much straining and grunting, his hand tore free, leaving a patch of skin, but then his boot was stuck.
“Grimnir take all tricksy elves!” he cursed as he tried to free his foot. Without thinking, he grabbed the net for leverage and was back where he started. He roared with frustration.
The black hull of the corsair ship suddenly loomed up beside them, and ropes and grapnels snaked out from the deck and splashed in the water. The grapnels hooked the net and winches lifted it slowly clear of the water.
Felix, Gotrek and Aethenir came up with it, hanging at awkward angles and getting more entangled as more of the net touched their bodies and their clothes. Gotrek was the most tightly held, for he had struggled the most, and by the time the net had been swung over the deck, he was covered from head to toe in the sticky ropes.
As the winches lowered them to the deck, figures in ragged clothes spread out a canvas tarpaulin that shone greasily, and it was onto this that they were dropped—none too gently—on their faces.
A chorus of laughter rang out as they crashed down, and Felix turned his head to see that they were surrounded by tall dark elves in close-fitting grey surcoats, over which they wore heavy cloaks that looked as if they had been made from the hide of the sea dragon Felix and Gotrek had just fought. The corsairs looking down at them with sneering smiles on their long, gaunt faces.
“You’ll be laughing with your necks when I get free,” snarled Gotrek from where he lay.
A pair of red-heeled boots strode through the crowd of legs and stood before them. Felix looked up. A tall druchii with an amused smirk on his lips looked down at him. He wore a red sash belted around his surcoat and his long, braided hair was pulled back into a queue with silver wire.
“What strange fish my net has caught,” he said in heavily accented Reikspiel. “An Old World flounder, a cave-dwelling rock fish and an Ulthuan minnow—and none of them market fresh by the smell of them.”
“Free me and face me, you corpse-faced coward,” said Gotrek.
The dark elf’s eyes widened in mock amazement. “By the Dark Mother, a talking fish! And with such an ill-favoured tongue.” He stepped forwards delicately to the edge of the oiled tarpaulin and kicked Gotrek savagely in the cheek with his high heel.
Gotrek snarled and lunged, blood welling from a deep gouge, but trussed as he was, he could do nothing.
The druchii stepped back. “I am almost curious enough to ask how three such strange companions came to be floating out in the middle of the sea alone, but not quite. No matter where you come from, you all go to the same place.” He turned away and said something to his lieutenants, waving a dismissive hand.
One of the lieutenants bowed and, in turn, gave orders to the ragged human slaves who spread the tarp, but then another corsair pointed at Gotrek and said something that caused the druchii captain to turn back and look at him again.
The crouching humans were padding towards the captives, holding strange objects that looked something like oil lamps, but the captain waved them back again. They shrank away as he began to circle the net, staring at Gotrek intently. Felix couldn’t figure out what had caught his attention, but Aethenir understood the murmured exchanges between the druchii.
“He is interested in your axe, dwarf,” whispered the high elf. “And your sword, Herr Jaeger. He recognises them as powerful weapons and knows collectors who will pay well to own them.”
Gotrek snarled at that. “No one touches my axe. No one.”
But there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it at the moment. The axe was on his back, and his arms were so entangled in the sticky ropes that he couldn’t reach it.
After circling the net twice, the dark elf stepped back and waved the slaves forwards again. Felix thought he had never seen sadder-looking men in all his life—emaciated, dead-eyed creatures with patchy, close-cropped heads and permanently stooped shoulders. They came and crouched next to Felix, Gotrek and Aethenir, deftly avoiding the sticky ropes while they held up the strange lamps and began smearing black paste into a little metal reservoir above the flames.
“Brothers,” whispered Felix. “Help us. Free us and we will free you. We will slaughter these slavers and return you to the Old World.”
The men didn’t even turn their heads, just kept at their task as if he hadn’t spoken. Wisps of smoke began to rise from the black paste as the little pan that held it heated up.
Felix tried again in the few words of Tilean he knew, and then in halting Bretonnian. The men made no response.
“Damn you, are you deaf?” snapped Felix. “Do you not want to be free?”
“Leave them be, Herr Jaeger,” said Aethenir. “They have been so long under the druchii lash that they have forgotten what freedom is.”
The smoke was rising thickly now from the black paste, and a sweet, cloying scent reached Felix’s nose. His eyes watered. The slaves quickly covered the lamps with ceramic caps that looked like tobacco pipes with two stems. Felix had no idea what the strange devices were for until the slave who knelt next to him put one of the stems to his lips and pointed the other at Felix’s face.
A stream of sweet smoke shot from the stem, right at Felix’s nose. He pulled back and tried to turn his head, but the ropes held him too tightly. He couldn’t get away from it.
“The black lotus,” said Aethenir, choking. “They seek to drug us!”
Felix held his breath, but a second slave, a little boy of no more than nine or ten, reached forwards and pinched Felix’s nostrils shut while the first punched him in the stomach. Felix gasped and sucked in an involuntary gulp of smoke. He choked and sputtered as the resinous poison filled his lungs, but then had to inhale again just to breathe, and took in more smoke. He could hear Aethenir and Gotrek coughing and cursing as well.
The third lungful was easier, and the fourth was actually pleasant, the smoke slipping silkily down his throat and spreading sweet languor through his veins. The cold and the discomfort of the ropes felt far away, cushioned by a delicious warmth that felt like the heat of a summer sun radiating from his lungs. By the fifth lungful he was straining forwards to catch as much of the smoke as he could.
Aethenir’s choking protests quietened as well. Only Gotrek continued coughing and cursing. Felix wished he would stop. The Slayer’s struggles were disturbing his lovely lethargy.
A moment later, Felix’s pipe slave got up and went to blow smoke in Gotrek’s face instead, as did Aethenir’s. Felix was sad that the smoke was gone, and he was angry with Gotrek for being so greedy, but sadness and anger took too much energy to maintain, and he quickly let go of them, content to relax into the sluggish current of contentment that flowed through his veins.
After a while even Gotrek’s struggles subsided, and then more slaves came, this time with buckets of some foul-smelling grease that they rubbed into the ropes to loosen their hold. Felix watched with idle interest as his sword was carried away, followed by Gotrek’s axe. There was some sort of seismic convulsion behind him at this, and another when further slaves carried away the Slayer’s golden bracelets, but both times the eruptions subsided again in a rumble of slurring curses.
Then the grease was rubbed on the rest of the ropes and Felix, Gotrek and Aethenir were pulled from the net. More slaves helped Felix to his feet and took off his armour, jerkin and shirt, then put shackles on his wrists and his ankles that were connected by a chain so short he couldn’t stand upright. He thought the shackles were silly. He didn’t want to go anywhere. He just wanted to lie down again. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let him. They locked his chains to a ring on the central mast and left him there with Gotrek and Aethenir. It wasn’t comfortable, but he was too happy to care. He just stared ahead as the high crags of the black island loomed closer. It quickly filled his vision from edge to edge. I
t must be the size of Nuln, he thought dreamily. He wondered if they had a college of engineering too. That would be nice.
After a time he could differentiate between the island’s jagged grey granite cliffs and the towering black basalt walls that topped them. Tall, crenellated watchtowers rose up at every turn of the wall, each crowned with a halo of wind-whipped fire. For a moment Felix thought that they were going to crash right into the granite cliffs, and he giggled at the druchii’s foolishness. They would smash their pretty boat. But then he saw that what he had taken for a dark shadow next to a craggy outcropping was actually the mouth of a black cave. Felix’s head tipped back and back as the roof of the cave came closer and closer, then swallowed them entirely. For a while all was dark, and he found that restful, but then an orange glow appeared in the darkness before the ship, a flickering light that reflected on rough stone walls and a baroque filigree of stalactites that thrust down from the ceiling high above them.
Then the dark channel opened out into a vast underground bay, at the far end of which great fires blazed in giant braziers mounted on towers that rose above a long line of docks and wharfs. It reminded Felix of Barak Varr—not nearly as big, or as brightly lit, but just as full of ships. There must have been more than thirty low-slung galleys docked in the harbour, as well as many smaller ships and boats, including some that looked like Old World merchantmen. Felix thought the light of the flames dancing on the black water as their ship rowed towards the braziers was the most fascinating thing he had ever seen.
The Clan Skryre skaven at the periscope turned and bowed to Thanquol, who stood in the centre of the bridge of the mighty skaven submersible, trembling with excitement.
“They have been taken into the ark, grey seer,” said the sailor.
Issfet smiled up at Thanquol fawningly. “It has happened just as you hoped, oh most geriatric of masters,” he shrilled.
“Yes-yes,” said Thanquol, rubbing his paws together. “Now we must only be patient, for surely, where my nemeses go, ruin and confusion must follow.”
[Gotrek & Felix 10] - Elfslayer Page 20