Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned

by David Guymer

  This place belonged to Hurrlk.

  Saved.

  Hurrlk moved through the trees, their slender bodies bowing for his passage. The trees began to thin, the forest dissolving away from the ribbon of solidity that struck from the ground to claim the land for its own. City walls. They were fractured and loose, bulging outward after some titanic blow from within. But they still stood. He growled and stabbed a claw at the walls.

  Climb.

  His minions clutched their bulging packs and hugged the tree line, wary of the light. But something beyond those walls called to them. A power. A darkness. Hurrlk issued another terse command, this time with a crack of his whip, driving the smaller creatures into a dash from the tree line.

  He loped on after them, doubts gnawing at consciousness.

  Were they saved? Or simply damned anew?

  Chapter 4

  The Saved

  The mists over the moors continued to condense. Felix could barely discern Caul’s gloves at the far end of his own reins. He clung nervously to his horse’s neck, its wet mane flapping to the rhythm of its stride. The air around them was so dense a white that he almost failed to notice as they passed under the canopy of the Totenwald at last. Slender pines knotted branches in the shadows, red winterberries hanging like droplets of blood. Felix noted the jarring absence of birdsong. Only the wind disturbed the high branches.

  The forest stayed with them for barely half an hour before the body of trees abruptly fell away. The ground ahead was studded with stumps as far into the fog as could be seen, ranked one after another like memorial stones in the garden of Morr. Unimpeded, the wind struck like a knife. Felix bent low to his horse’s neck, hair whipping out behind with his cloak. They did not slow, forging deeper into that wasteland, the earth beginning to blanch until it was as pale as the cloud through which they rode. He focused on the ground below the horse’s galloping hooves. It was not imagination. The land here was dead. Not merely impoverished as had been the moors with its uniquely mean and stunted flora, but dead. Utterly.

  It was barren white, like ash or old bone.

  Shapes emerged, the skeletons of wooden giants, like the bare rigs of storm-slain vessels blown through the mists of the Manannspoort Sea. They were watchtowers. Felix could not tell if they were manned. The riders made no call up and no spectral echo challenged down, but grey banners bearing the twin-tailed comet of Sigmar flapped wetly from their bleached pine ramparts. Felix saw spears and small ballistae, but it was possible they served merely as an illusion of strength.

  ‘Captain.’ The voice seemed to come from everywhere at once and nowhere close. After a moment, he recognised it as Torsten’s. ‘We’re close. Should we blindfold them?’

  ‘No,’ came Konrad’s brusque reply, tugging on Gotrek’s tether, making the red-faced dwarf scowl a breathless oath. ‘I don’t want to waste time. And besides, given these three already owe allegiance to the Beast, they’ve doubtless seen the City of the Damned with their own traitorous eyes.’

  The City of the Damned. Perhaps it was the way Konrad had said it, but it made Felix shudder.

  ‘This city; is that what von Kuber protects?’

  ‘The birthright of the von Kuber line,’ Konrad stated with pride, forgetful for the moment who it was that asked. ‘Bestowed upon his forefathers by the divine Magnus himself, to maintain vigil over its ruins lest evil again arise.’

  ‘The baron sounds a very pious man.’

  Konrad snarled, offended by Felix’s attempt at a compliment. ‘The City of the Damned would have been rubble once Götz was finished. There would not have been one brick left atop another for the Beast to hide under, and all that was left still able to burn would have made the bonfire for its execution.’

  ‘You’re certain then. This is where the Beast makes its lair.’

  Konrad regarded him hotly. ‘And why the Beast struck back.’

  With that, Konrad would say no more.

  The horsemen rode on. Felix could see nothing, could feel nothing that would suggest some dark power hidden somewhere in the mist. He wondered whether it was the city, wherever it was, that had killed off the land through which they rode. If so, it must be a force of truly terrifying measure. He wished he could confer with Gotrek, the dwarf was ever more attuned to such things, but his companion was too intent on running. He was about to ask Konrad to call a halt, perhaps give Felix another chance to persuade Gotrek to swallow his pride and get on a damned horse, when he heard something. It was a voice, a whisper only half imagined. He twisted in his saddle towards Caul.

  ‘Did you say something?’

  Caul acknowledged the question with a cold smile and rode on.

  ‘Please…’

  Felix started, staring into the fog. That was where the voice had come from. Not from any man he rode beside. The voice faded the harder he sought to focus on it, others arising from every direction.

  ‘…why…’

  ‘…spare my daughter…’

  ‘…damn you all…’

  ‘…what kind of god?’

  Felix would have closed his eyes if he was not afraid he would fall from his horse if he did. The stream of pained consciousness made him dizzy.

  ‘Who… Who is speaking?’

  ‘The Damned.’ Caul’s dry voice grated. The man leaned over so their eyes could meet through the thickening fog, so his words might be heard above the whispered din. ‘The baron’s soldiers seek to reclaim the streets, but not every enemy is a beast. Not every monster can be fought. The city judges men’s hearts and damns them. It doesn’t want to be saved.’

  ‘Quiet,’ whispered Konrad, something in the air making even him speak softly. ‘We’re almost past.’

  Konrad upped their pace. Gotrek made a wheezing sound that turned into a determined growl and upped his own to match. Painfully slowly, the fog began to recede, drawing away the whispers of the Damned with it. Felix could still hear them, a haunting note in the dark that he strove to ignore.

  A grey phantasm within the fog and the muted thunder of galloping hooves bespoke the return of Anselm. His steed glistened with damp and was blowing hard. Following a fraught exchange, he led Konrad and Caul through a change in course, veering rightward, further from the last vestiges of the whispering voices and ever so gradually uphill. The column slowed, the tenor of hoof beats deepening, as Felix found his horse upon a genuine road of compacted earth, bordered with what looked like rubble. Konrad looked both ways, left to right, thoughtful, and more than a little frightened, before leading them right.

  A signing post around the height of a mounted man resolved from the fog to one side of the road. It was cut from Totenwald pine, its weatherproofing layer of pitch peeling away under wraithlike fingers of fog. Konrad called a halt. From the post’s head, arrows pointed in two directions. Ahead, what Felix reckoned to be north-east, the arrow had been inscribed with a curling, antiquated script. The word ‘Sigmarshafen’ was only just legible beneath the decay. The arrow indicating the opposite route had been thoroughly defaced with some bladed implement, hammer runes daubed over the top in black paint. Felix leaned nearer in his saddle and strained, perhaps making out a stylised capital ‘M’.

  Felix felt a shiver pass through him as he turned his attention south-west.

  Like a spectre arisen from his own nightmares, the shadow of walls and towers reared from the fog. His heart thudded a dirgeful beat as he looked upon it. Every detail, from the walls themselves to this blasted wasteland upon which it lingered were precisely as he had pictured them in his dreams. What fell influence did this city exert that it could project its likeness into his dreams? And more than its likeness. He felt the same horror, the same translated torment that he had suffered through his nights. He prayed that it was nothing more than wind that conjured eddies in the mist, made it resemble men with halberds and pikes that patrolled those ruined battlements. He prayed for it, but he knew it was not so. He heard the whispers that the wind carried, closed his heart
to their anguish and turned away. He wished his ears could be shuttered as easily as his eyes.

  ‘Don’t want to go that way, meinen herr,’ Caul hissed. ‘Some say that at night, the Damned leave their city, cross the wasteland, and march on Sigmarshafen to entreat the living.’

  ‘What do they want?’ Felix asked.

  ‘I doubt even they know.’

  ‘Do we wait for Matthaus?’ shouted Torsten, as if brazenness might mask his fear. In his lap, Rudi looked determinedly to the ground. With bound hands, he groped for some charm or other that he wore under his leathers around his neck. Torsten gave him a rough shake to stop him fidgeting.

  ‘Maybe he has ridden ahead,’ said Anselm.

  ‘No,’ said Torsten. ‘He knows to meet here. He wouldn’t–’

  ‘He has ridden ahead,’ said Konrad, firm.

  ‘But, captain–’

  ‘Silence, Torsten,’ said Konrad. He turned in his saddle to peer onto those forsaken ramparts. Felix wondered what voices the militia captain heard. Konrad’s face set and he looked away, spurring his horse on towards Sigmarshafen. ‘We’ll pray for him when we arrive.’

  Torsten looked as though he would protest, but tightened his lip. Anselm fell to the back of the line as the other riders swept by. Felix saw him draw both pistols, directing his horse forward solely with his knees, riding with body twisted and tense as a screw as he stared back to the damned city.

  Onward, they rode, the laments of the Damned slowly diminishing from hearing if not from memory. In the far distance, the dark bulk of the Totenwald grew thick, the mists thinning somewhat as though drawn by some deep inhalation of the forest. Its rustling life haunted the mist, tempting, almost near enough to convince that the dead land they traversed must eventually end. But only almost. The dirt road beneath their hooves was hard as stone and dry as a burned match, split like salt flats into columnar breakages, not even weeds able to take root in the cracks.

  The road wound ahead into a steep rise, ascending a grey-earthed knoll, the highest ground in the area and studded with bare tree stumps. A bleak palisade ringed its summit like a dog bite. The road met the palisade at a gate flanked by guard towers from which grey pennants snapped in the stiff breeze. Solid figures in dark grey livery stood sentry on the elevated platforms, crossbows sweeping the mounted column that approached through the fog.

  Konrad raised a hand, waving until he received an answering signal from the leftward guard tower. There was a brief flurry of activity, signals whistled between the two towers and hidden men on the ground and, with a sound like trees being tortuously felled, the gates drew outward. Mist spilled from the opening portal, as water dammed. Felix felt its chill touch as it washed through him.

  ‘Sigmarshafen,’ Konrad declared, spurring his horse ahead, and drawing Gotrek with it. The Slayer looked ill, throat pulsing as though he might vomit. Konrad did not notice. ‘One time home of Magnus the Pious himself. The final bastion of the true faith. Sigmar’s haven in the darkness.’

  ‘Wood,’ Gotrek wheezed, eyeing the palisade blearily. ‘What fool would build a castle out of wood?’

  The cavalcade rumbled through the open gate and through the shadow of its flanking towers. Their frames had been erected so tightly that they doubled as chattel pens. Humanoid shapes clotted the tangled interiors, offending every sense that Felix possessed. Their bodies were misshapen, their stench vile, the moans that issued from their mouths as they butted dumbly against their cage a claw-hammer to the spirit. Face contorted with disgust, as much at himself for judging these objects so harshly as at the inmates themselves, Felix looked away.

  On clearing the gatehouse, fresh odours arose to impinge on his senses. The township carried a scent of pine, of bitter cold, accentuated by a curious spice that recalled the weekly visit to the temple he had been forced to endure as a boy. The streets were bare earth and filthy, visible only when a passing figure disturbed the ankle-deep skin of settled mist. Hastily assembled wooden huts with shingled roofs and no windows fought for each scrap of ground. They pressed in, as if they were caught in some glacially slow stampede for the gate and freedom from this frigid quagmire. Men and women gossiped under doorways in lowered tones, or pushed handcarts down alleys too narrow for mounted men on quiet errands of their own. Soldiery with swords and hammers in the grey cloaks of Götz von Kuber patrolled the streets. Peasants fell silent where they marched, signed the hammer, and offered prayers to the passing crusaders. Somewhere within the township, a blacksmith worked his forge. The peal of metal hammering on metal rang out like a call to prayer.

  On a street corner, a wild-eyed man sang of the end of days from an upturned box. The street preacher wore a sackcloth kilt, his bare and starving torso boasting more tattoos even than Gotrek. The ink was old and faded, hidden by burns, scars, and seeping wounds. His right arm was a messy stump of shoulder, but with his left he scourged his own back with a leathern thong, not even pausing between strokes in his portending of the End Times.

  ‘…the End Times will bring trial. Women will be wilful and without license. Their husbands and brothers will not humble them for they will be lovers of self, of gold, and of Chaos. They will be proud, arrogant, debauched, disobedient, ungrateful, unholy, brutal – enemies of right and of righteousness, treacherous, feckless, fat with conceit, slaves to pleasure, feigning of godliness. This sinning Empire is degenerate. Sorcerers flourish in houses of so-called learning. Churches fail. The End Times are come. We, Sigmar’s children, will fight the last war, will burn in its fire and be recast holy. The End Times come…’

  His catechistic ravings captivated an audience of several dozen. At the foot of his appropriated pedestal, children in rags fought with wooden hammers and with fluted innocence decried each other as heretics.

  Konrad took a heady lungful. ‘What you see is the vision of holy men. This is a place of sanctuary and of pilgrimage. The people you see here are warriors, crusaders in Magnus’s own example.’

  Felix shook his head and allowed Caul Schlanger to lead him on.

  A main thoroughfare bore away from the gate and through the scrum of housing. The narrowness of the street coupled to the volume of human traffic compressed the column into single file. Peasants hurried from their path, tugging on caps and signing the hammer across their chests. The clop of iron shoes echoed eerily loud over the hush. The wooden tenements pressed them close, upper storeys leaning inwards, defying the zealots in their shadow to command them back.

  Sigmarshafen was quite unlike any town Felix had ever occasioned.

  There were no hawking merchantmen, no gaudily painted shop fronts to attract custom. Hushed peasants in plainly coloured smocks and woollen hats and gloves conducted their business and did not tarry. As Felix watched, a broad man, head gleaming like a polished skull, emerged from the doorway of some kind of shrine. His white tabard was stained with dirt about the hem – and with blood most everywhere else – and worn over several layers of mail. The twin-tailed comet, herald of Sigmar, was emblazoned over a steel pectoral. The warrior priest glared fixedly as they passed. A gaggle of initiates hung in the doorway behind him, boys from Rudi’s age to as young as six or seven.

  They each watched Gotrek in fearful temperance. They all wore scars.

  Despite his ignominious appearance, red as raw knuckles and leashed to a horse, Gotrek was drawing looks of awe from more than just the priests. More than once, Felix saw women point and men choke back tears. By their acts of valour alongside the man-god, Sigmar Heldenhammer, dwarfs were themselves practically deified by followers of his creed. Felix looked around. And those here were clearly fanatics, probably unwelcome even in the most extremist of temples in the Empire’s cities. The Slayer merely grunted, fixing his one eye to the lathered grey hindquarters of the horse in front of him.

  ‘Captain!’ A blond-haired youth in von Kuber’s grey pushed through the crowded street towards them. Felix recognised Luthor, whom Konrad had dispatched to send advance word of their comi
ng. The man was out of breath and reeked of sweat, clearly arriving not long before they had. ‘Gramm is waiting. He commands these three be presented at once.’

  ‘Does he now?’ Konrad chuckled. Luthor spun on his heel to depart. ‘And Luthor?’

  ‘Yes, captain?’

  ‘We lost Matthaus in the mist. Report to the gate. See that outriders are dispatched to look for him.’

  ‘To what end? He wouldn’t be the first…’

  ‘Do as you are told!’ Konrad spat with venom. ‘Matthaus has served der Kreuzfahrer since he was young. He would not heed the dreams of the Damned.’

  Luthor looked dubious, but was not about to argue. He saluted, held it until Konrad and the other horsemen were well past.

  Ahead, the dirt road forced the encroaching buildings back far enough to form a square, flanked on three sides by drab market stalls and on the fourth, the north-west, by a half-stone cathedral. The locals had made an effort. It had tall windows of stained glass and a wooden belfry that craned skyward from its limestone body, but it was a lacklustre affair by comparison with its like in Altdorf or Nuln. Even the penniless clergy of Osterwald would have turned their noses at a secondment to a temple like this. Only the most disfavoured, or the most fanatical, would devote their life to Sigmarshafen by choice.

  Skeletons, charred black by fire, swayed from a gibbet erected before the cathedral’s pale wooden doorway, such that each congregant might see and be thankful. Fog wreathed the corpses with a sallow touch, setting ropes to creaking, the wind echoing from their hollow skulls like the moans of the unquiet dead. Not all were in possession of the usual apportionment of arms or heads. A crowd had gathered to gawp, peasants and pilgrims come to hawk phlegm onto charcoaled feet, hooves, claws, and jeer. Rising above the hush, from a crenellated pulpit that hung suspended from the belfry, a preacher sang of the End Times, his tune a stark complement to the hush below; the creaking nooses of the saved.