Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned

by David Guymer

  ‘Punishment for what, exactly?’

  ‘There was once a city on the moors, a holy place until it fell into sin. Sigmar smote it down with His hammer from the heavens. No one knows where it lies, nor its true name, nor how it came to fall.’

  ‘Typically forgetful humans,’ barked Gotrek from up ahead. ‘When’ll you learn to write things down? This is why your kind are doomed to suffer such things over and over.’

  Felix mumbled something as he scanned the darkness. He had just about had his fill of the dark myths of the moors. Just because one happened to be true, it did not mean he was about to start believing all of them.

  ‘Fascinating as that may be, what has any of it to do with our graveyard?’

  ‘According to the legends, it’s where the mutants that fled the city were buried once the witch-finders hunted them down.’

  ‘Unsanctified ground?’ asked Felix.

  Rudi nodded, eyes downcast. ‘They still bury folk there sometimes; stillborns and mutants, witches.’

  ‘Reassuring,’ Felix mumbled. ‘But promising, don’t you think Gotrek?’

  ‘A fair bet, manling, a fair bet.’

  Rudi’s fingers tapped at a spot over the collar of his leather chest piece, casting nervous glances towards their destination.

  ‘You needn’t accompany us,’ Felix offered. ‘Let Gotrek and I go ahead.’

  ‘No, I have to. If Thomas is…’ Rudi’s voice caught. ‘If Thomas is alive, then that’s where he’ll be.’

  ‘Why?’

  Rudi clamped his lips shut, shook his head and looked away. Felix decided to let him be.

  They had more important things to worry about.

  The eerie quiet of the hilltop burial site was enough to tell Felix that things were not all as they had been expected to be. Without any barriers to tame it, the wind blew hard and cold and seemingly from every direction at once. Felix’s hair whipped about his face. He restrained his cloak with a firm hand. His other hand he held tight about the grip of his sword. The view below was painful to witness. The village smouldered like a hot coal, snatches of light and grey half-shadows roiling amongst the deepening darkness in the crook of the valley.

  There was no sense of magic, no aura of evil contained or of evil set free, just a deep feeling of despoilment and senseless loss. A ring of jagged stones struck from the earth like teeth, encircling a pair of ancient-looking crypts and more than a dozen large, unmarked graves. The stones dripped with a mucky slop, clumps of soil and tenderised vegetation indiscriminately scattered. The graves had been exhumed. It did not look as though anything had been left behind. The door to the nearest crypt, a low-roofed wooden structure with hammer and comet finials partially rotted, had been smashed in and looted. The second crypt was oriented at an angle to the first, its entrance out of sight. Felix did not doubt that he would find it similarly emptied.

  Gotrek strode to the ring of stones and ran a thick finger through its pasting of filth. He brought it to his eye, mud oozing between thumb and forefinger. He grumbled in disappointment and rubbed his hands clean on his breeches. He glared over the ruined graveyard, then dropped his axe butt-down into the soil slick and shook his head grimly.

  He did not say anything. He did not have to.

  Felix stabbed his sword into the soil and squatted. His calves burned. The climb had been hard. Keeping pace with Gotrek had been harder. He gazed over the emptied graves, trying to imagine what would do such a thing and why.

  ‘Does it not seem odd, Gotrek? For a mass grave of the Chaos-touched to be left here like this?’

  ‘Everything your race does strikes me odd, manling. I gave up trying to make sense of your kind about a hundred years before you were born.’

  Felix clenched his jaw, but let it slide. This was not the time for that old argument.

  Within the ring of stones, Rudi crouched over the body of a boy. It was Thomas. He lay face up in the dirt. His skin was a bloodless white, anaemic eyes unnaturally wide. The woollen smock he wore sagged heavy with blood, a crimson tear gashing through to the bone and opening the boy up from throat to groin. Bite marks lined the bloody trench. It looked like the Beast had ripped the boy open and then drunk him dry. The strength required was abominable.

  Rudi rolled the body onto its front. It resembled the funerary rite of the earth mother, Rhya. Or perhaps Rudi simply could not bear to look on that horrific wound in his young brother’s chest. Rudi looked up, eyes rimmed with red. One hand remained on his brother’s back, as though unwilling to let go. He pointed toward an emptied hole that had once been a grave pit.

  ‘Our mother was there. I knew Thomas would run here.’ His head hung, heavy with bitter feeling. ‘The fool.’

  Felix glanced at the indicated hole. He could not imagine what Rudi was feeling. He did not ask what the woman had done to deserve an unmarked pit in the company of witches, mutants and daemon-touched. In a land like this one, it was easy enough to guess.

  ‘You were hunting the Beast already, yes?’ Rudi said, voice stiff with grief.

  Felix nodded. He willed the stiffened muscles in his legs to drive himself up from his crouch. He winced, then nodded once more.

  ‘Then you will keep on after it? Even now you have seen it?’

  ‘We’ll find it,’ said Gotrek. ‘Even the corrupted dead deserve better than this, being turfed out of their own graves.’ He nodded grimly, nose chain clinking as he spoke, almost to himself. ‘Aye, we’ll find it.’

  Rudi pressed Thomas deeper into the sucking earth, then stood. Felix noticed that he was shaking as he waded back through the muck towards the stone ring.

  ‘Then I’ll come with you.’

  Felix placed a restraining hand on the young man’s shoulder. Rudi flinched but did not throw him off.

  ‘I understand why you think you’d want that, but you don’t. Trust me, you don’t.’

  ‘What would you know of it?’ Rudi’s arm gestured towards the shallow valley where the village glowed dull red like the last ember of a fire. ‘My home is destroyed. My family and everyone I know dead with it. I’ve been a soldier. I know how to use a sword.’

  Felix sucked in his cheeks and tried to find the words. Felix hazarded that Rudi was eighteen, twenty at most. If he had been in Baron von Kuber’s militia long enough to experience more than being issued with sword and uniform before the Beast wiped out his detachment then Felix would be astonished.

  More than enough for any man, in Felix’s opinion.

  ‘I’ll take you to the place we’d tracked it,’ said Rudi. ‘And then I’ll help you kill it.’ It looked as though Rudi intended to say more, but then bit his lip. His hand moved to his chest, to some charm worn beneath his leather breastplate. He glanced back to his brother. His eyes darted from the body to the broken trail of the Beast and back again. ‘Do we have time to bury them?’

  Gotrek stood unmoving, still presiding over the desecrated graves with such a brooding intensity that he rightly quivered with the effort of containing it. ‘The creature’s faster than us, and has too great a head start.’ He turned his gaze on Felix. ‘Find yourself a shovel, manling. There’ll be no rest tonight.’

  The sun rose over the moors much as it had done ever since Felix had first been dragged into Ostermark.

  Bitterly.

  The rain continued to baffle, coming and going like a god’s favour. Felix squinted into the sleeting wind, trying to pick out the smear of grey on slate that heralded the dawn. In such an environment, Felix was actually rather glad to have Gotrek alongside. The Slayer walked stolidly, without comment or complaint. Indeed, without much of anything at all bar the occasional swipe of his axe whenever a particularly dense bramble thicket intruded onto their path. Had it not been for the dwarf’s bright orange crest and beard, Felix might have feared his eyes no longer capable of viewing any shade brighter than the iron clouds, or that he had, through his disturbed dreaming, been banished to some drab purgatory of endless hills and featureless skies.<
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  Felix rubbed at his temples and sought to banish the spectre of those dreams. He had not had long to sleep, but what moments he had grabbed had been haunted by anguished cries, white-clad ladies with bloody palms, visions of fire-blackened cities hidden behind a pall of fog. Had he not suffered similar nightmares almost every night for weeks he might have put such imagery down to the onerous duties of the previous night. He shivered from the memory.

  Felix’s career as Gotrek’s rememberer had been varied and seldom dull. He had been coerced into some dreadful jobs in his time, but he could recall nothing that compared to the pulling of roasted corpses from their still-smouldering homes for burial. Some were so badly burned that their bones had crumbled in his hands. His cloak still smelled of wood smoke and burned hair. Flecks of ash were lodged beneath his fingernails.

  He could not help but imagine where, and from whom, each black flake had come.

  Felix caught himself scratching under his nails. All he had achieved was to compress the black rims deeper beyond his finger. The skin around his nails was growing red and increasingly tender, the pain his efforts caused a reminder of their futility. The flesh around his left eye was rising beautifully too. He dabbed at the five triangular punctures around his eye socket with a strip of rain-dampened cloth and prayed that the foul creature he had wrestled the night before had carried no infection on its claws.

  Felix sulked at the rear as the party of three trudged over the moors.

  It might have helped had there been something, anything, to take his mind off it all, but the Ostermark Moors were as empty as his purse and made just as grim viewing. The wind howled under iron clouds, carving depressions through the miserable brown grasses that spiked from the hills. Occasionally, something small and furtive made rustling waves in that dreary sea. Scrawny, black-feathered birds circled high above, as if waiting for them to die, shrill calls echoing through the emptiness without answer.

  After a time, even the obvious trail of human blood and broken plant life abruptly disappeared. Felix wondered if the Beast had left them a deliberate false trail. If it was capable of moving without leaving a mark would it not have done so from the outset?

  Gotrek considered the possibility but Rudi was adamant.

  ‘The Totenwald is this way.’ He pointed across the moor’s unending rolls of torturous grey and drab life. ‘That is where the Beast lairs.’

  ‘How much of this must we trek through?’ Felix asked. The moors sapped his voice of all strength, made it seem childish and small.

  ‘Do you not like my country?’ Rudi replied. He had likely meant it as a joke but his dead eyes betrayed him. He gave a dry snort and shook his head. ‘Not far now. The Totenwald and the ford across the Stir into Sylvania should be less than a day on foot.’ Rudi pointed ahead, south and west. A pale mist clung to the hilltops in that direction, cloaking whatever it was that Rudi alluded to. The knowledge that there was almost certainly nothing there to be seen did not measurably improve Felix’s mood. The white pall was some way distant, but Felix already felt a chill creep into his bones just looking at it.

  ‘Do you think the Beast has his lair in that province?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Rudi, trudging on as if through some harrowing dream, the nearby forest incumbent with primal fears and painful memories. This, after all, was the sight of Rudi’s first terrifying encounter with the Beast of the Ostermark Moors. ‘Hard to say. In the trees, in the dark.’

  ‘I’d wager that it does, manling,’ said Gotrek, hacking through a purplish clot of waist-high heather. ‘Where better to unearth the fiend that drinks the blood of men, then steals the corpses from their graves.’

  ‘You think it a vampire?’ Felix asked, hoping to Sigmar that it was not.

  A blood-drinker of conventional proportions had proven quite enough of a challenge, and that had been alongside the wizard, Max Schreiber, and Gotrek’s even more insane friend and fellow Slayer, Snorri Nosebiter. Not to mention a company of Kislevite lancers for good measure. He gave Rudi an appraising once-over. No offence to him, but there was no comparison to be drawn there. Felix did not share an ounce of Gotrek’s joy at the three of them hunting down an immortal horror the size of an ogre. He lifted his hand the full reach of his arm, uncertain whether even that could faithfully recount the monster’s scale.

  ‘It seemed, I don’t know, larger. Like some kind of mutant animal. Sylvania is cursed with more than just the walking dead.’

  ‘It’s a ghoul lord,’ Gotrek replied with a laugh like gravel. ‘I’d stake my eye on it. The biggest and ugliest of the bloodsucker breeds. I’ve never faced one, but I’ve heard the tales of those who have. Now there would be a mighty doom.’

  ‘Assuming you’re right,’ said Felix. ‘Assuming. What does it want with old bones?’

  Gotrek shrugged. ‘What does anyone want with other people’s bones?’

  Felix puffed out his cheeks and returned his eyes to the ‘road’. He had no idea, and he suspected that neither did Gotrek. Nothing good, that went without saying, and the Beast, whatever it was, had proven itself both willing and wholly capable of mass slaughter in the pursuit of its aims. He wanted to ask Rudi for more details of his encounter in the Totenwald, but the man had retreated deeper into himself as the morning had dragged on. Felix wondered if Rudi regretted the pledge, made in the heat of emotion, to join them on their quest and now, in the cold light of day, was too afraid to back out. Felix shook his head and sighed with feeling

  That was a fate with which he could not help but empathise.

  Rudi walked under his own dark cloud.

  Ever since childhood, Father Gramm had lectured him on the wickedness in his blood. It was impossible to believe that the monster was not somehow drawn to him. How else to explain surviving two encounters with the Beast, when a whole company of Baron von Kuber’s militia swords, and now his entire village, could not. He discarded Felix’s nonsense of grave robbers. The fault lay with him, with his own daemons.

  Memories of his burning village disturbed others he had hoped buried. His mother’s screams as she had confessed her sins on the fire, Gramm heeding every word and praising them as the pain of the daemon torn from her mortal soul. In his rasping voice, he had denounced Rudi as the get of Chaos. He could still feel the bite of the old priest’s lash, recall the taste of his own tears, as the corruption shared by blood was purged from his sinning flesh. ‘Trust to Sigmar,’ Gramm had incanted with each blow.

  But his god had abandoned him. Perhaps Gramm had been lax in his beatings. Perhaps the taint of Chaos still lingered.

  He pressed his palm to his breast, feeling out the bulge in his leathers from the hammer talisman beneath. With a start he realised he had begun to weep and pinched the tears away. Felix and the dwarf were already doubtful of him. It would not help if they saw him crying like a child.

  He focused on the solid presence of the dwarf in front of him. Gotrek hacked one-handed at the bracken. His axe was so massive Rudi doubted whether he and Felix would have been able to raise it between them.

  He did not doubt they would find the Beast, and that both Gotrek and Felix would die. He envied Felix’s courage. The man had no reason to remain, and yet he did. To Rudi’s surprise he did not feel afraid, guilty perhaps, but not afraid. Let others talk of vampires and heroism. He did not care. Twice now he had been spared. The third time he would be ready. Somehow, he would see the brute slain. He studied Gotrek’s broad shoulders, his fingers closing around the leather grip of his dagger.

  Then, he could consign his own black soul for Sigmar’s judgement.

  The hills slid by, unchanging, as the day wore down. Felix imagined he could discern the subtlest changes in hue amongst the whispering grasses; here an island of tan, there bistre, all of it rustling with uncanny communion. Every change in pitch of the ground beneath his feet was noted as though it was trumpeted from the heavens, every mottling pattern of white light on grey cloud was scrutinised for meaning. The air had grow
n colder, bleaker, the mist that had earlier seemed distant now rolling in from the hilltops to immure the three of them within its folds.

  The damp passed through armour, wool, flesh and bone with a chill indifference.

  Feeling his empty stomach growl, Felix forced his limbs to work harder. He could not risk lagging behind. If he lost sight of Gotrek and Rudi then, chances were, he would never see another soul again.

  ‘We have to take care now,’ said Rudi, voice lost partly to the fog. ‘The baron’s outriders patrol these hills. If they find us then the Beast’ll not be our worry.’

  ‘If they too hunt the Beast, then why should they stop us?’

  Rudi shook his head. ‘There are boundary stones across the moors. They mark forbidden territory where the outriders will shoot on sight.’ Rudi glanced nervously about. ‘We should have reached the markers by now. We might have missed them in the fog.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Felix, as Gotrek chuckled darkly.

  ‘I wonder then if it’s simple coincidence that draws the monster here,’ said Gotrek. ‘What does the country lordling protect here?’

  ‘Too big a coincidence, I think,’ Felix agreed, turning to Rudi. ‘Might it be connected to something that was hidden in your village?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rudi whispered. Just speaking on it seemed to be making him nervous. ‘The baron’s muster is to the north, in Kielsel, away from here on the Kadrin road. When we crossed the line after the Beast, the priests had us blindfolded before letting us on. Whatever’s there was long gone before they let us remove them.’

  Gotrek nodded slightly. ‘Something hidden from a lord’s own sworn swords must be very valuable – or very dangerous – indeed.’ He gave a jagged grin. ‘Here’s hoping for the second, eh manling?’

  Felix smiled ruefully. His brow creased with a sudden thought. ‘Wait, the priests had you blindfolded?’

  ‘Baron von Kuber allows no man to disobey a man of the temple. It’s a flogging for those who do.’