by David Guymer
‘Shall we see just how strong you are, Herr Gurnisson?’
Gotrek shook with laughter. And rightly so. Caul was wiry and lean. Something in his demeanour hinted at a devilish strength, but Gotrek was… well… Gotrek.
Caul would be lucky to escape with a broken hand and a dislocated shoulder.
‘I’m familiar with your escapades, Herr Gurnisson, and it’s quite the tally.’ Caul lifted his still begloved right hand, fingers splayed. Felix noted how the glove’s middle finger there too stood flaccid and unfilled. ‘Let me see. There was a daemon, a dragon, a vampire…’ He lowered his fingers one by one as he reeled off a list of Gotrek’s unsuccessful attempts at atonement. Felix felt bewilderment grow. How had this man come to learn so much?
‘Have I missed any?’
‘Aye, a bothersome manling or two.’
Amusement gleamed from the man’s fiendishly arranged teeth. ‘And you think that this prepares you for the City of the Damned? Come Slayer, show me what you have, or do you fear that I’ll embarrass you in front of your dwarf-friend?’
Gotrek gave Caul a cursory once over, sitting back and crossing his arms behind his neck, tensing his biceps and pulling his enormous tattooed chest wide. The mountain of sheer physical power should have had a sane man quailing. Caul was obviously not that. His arm see-sawed like a cobra, eyes set unblinking onto Gotrek’s one as the Slayer slowly unfolded his arms. He held them over the table before him, each massive as a prize stallion’s stifle.
‘Which one do you want?’
Caul laughed, the mirth as hollow as everything about him. ‘You favour right. I favour left. Would left not seem fair, considering?’
Gotrek smoothed the smirk from his lips with his right hand, planting his left onto the table opposing Caul’s. A tremor passed through the tabletop, ripples lapping the edges of Felix’s stein. Man and dwarf clasped, Gotrek’s giant ham enveloping Caul’s hand entirely. Caul winced as Gotrek squeezed, a flash of pain too genuine to be smothered at once.
Felix dragged his chair back from the contest and smiled.
Was Caul Schlanger really about to try and best Gotrek in an arm-wrestle? A subdued ripple of excitement passed through the room with a scraping of stools being turned in Felix’s direction. The mercenaries sensed a humiliation in the offing and were even more intent on savouring it than Felix.
Gotrek grinned, tightened his grip a little further. ‘Just scream when you want to yield. You’ll not be the first reptile squashed in this hand.’
‘There’s a question that’s always bothered me,’ Caul hissed, suppressing the obvious pain like a true penitent. ‘With all the horrors you’ve faced, the monsters you’ve slain…’ A smile slithered from his lips and he leaned in close enough for each to share the other’s breath. ‘How did it feel losing your eye to a goblin?’
Felix tensed, fingers gripped to the tabletop in case Gotrek should snatch it from under him. The dwarf’s expression was set rigid but, as Felix watched, the tendons running his forearm pulled taut like cables. The clasped hands trembled ever so slightly under the pressure.
‘When I win, you’ll sod off and not bother me again.’
‘Agreed,’ Caul hissed, taking it like a martyr. ‘And if I win, you’ll listen to my offer.’
‘I’d demand something more grand, were I you. All the gold of the Everpeak, perhaps? Or the heart of a daemon prince?’
Caul snarled and threw his strength against Gotrek’s fist. It did not budge. Caul groaned, hunching underneath to put his weight into it.
‘Started yet?’
‘Don’t mock me, dwarf.’ Caul jerked on his seat, the table rattling as something struck it from beneath and between Gotrek’s legs.
Felix started back, hands up off the table. ‘You cheated!’
‘Sturdy,’ Caul observed with a wink. Gotrek had not flinched.
‘The one thing you should know about a dwarf’s stones,’ said Gotrek, forcing Caul’s hand to within a whisker of the tabletop, ‘is that they’re like stones.’
A spontaneous cheer swelled from the gathered mercenaries as, with a casual flick, Gotrek slammed Caul’s hand into the tabletop. Gotrek shoved the man off the table and sat back with a grunt of disappointment. ‘Leave your ale as you go. Fair recompense for such a pointless challenge.’
Caul reclaimed his hand stiffly. He massaged colour back into his fingers, then smiled coldly, as though pain were the preserve of others. ‘A powerful arm you have there, Herr Gurnisson. You’re as strong as I’d heard.’
Gotrek was already pulling over Caul’s stein and draining its contents into his own.
‘I’m in need of strong hands. The fewer the better, and I feel that you two are worth more than one man apiece. I want you two to come with me, to help rescue Baron von Kuber from the City of the Damned.
‘I couldn’t give a grobi turd for your lord,’ said Gotrek without looking up. ‘It’s the Beast my axe thirsts after.’
‘I know a thing or two about need, Slayer. I understand compulsion. That void in your belly that can’t ever be filled. The daggers in your mind that keep you awake at night and make food taste bitter.’
Gotrek glanced up. He raised the stein of discoloured ale. ‘Your food was already bitter.’
‘Let me tell you a tale…’ Caul’s four fingers grated his pale stubble. ‘Of a board-hewer’s son from the woodsman’s vorstadt of Talabheim. An old widow lived on the outskirts there; a hideous hag, blind, cruel to the ways of small boys, scraping a living selling idolatrous little effigies of Taal and Rhya that she made from feathers and dead twigs. One night, when this child was nine, he awakens to the dead of night. Outside it is dark, but in his heart there is a fire. He hears a voice.’ Caul directed a finger like a pistol to his temple. ‘In here. Sigmar had chosen him, chosen him for something great. He told him to rise from his bed, to take his father’s lantern, to douse the woman’s home in oil – and watch the old hag burn.’
Felix shook his head in disgust.
‘Does faith shock you?’ said Caul
‘No. Faith doesn’t.’
‘Götz lives. We all feel it. And Sigmar wants his champion returned.’
Gotrek snorted into his purloined stein. ‘Well Sigmar can’t have him.’
A collective gasp went up from the mercenaries. Caul glanced up, on some indiscernible level approving.
‘Forgive my companion,’ said Felix. ‘I believe what he is trying to say is that we would both feel safer without your blade at our backs.’
‘Aye, sod off.’
‘That’s as maybe,’ said Caul. ‘But Konrad is not about to just let you leave. He remains convinced of your collusion with the Beast.’
With a shrug, Gotrek stuck a thumb under his eye patch and proceeded to scratch around the hollow socket beneath. It was a habit that could, and knowing Gotrek likely was, have been contrived to disturb.
‘He’s welcome to try and stop me.’
‘Kinderkreuzfahrer, they call him,’ said Caul, a narrow smile of some cruel reminiscence. ‘He hates that, but it’s meant as the highest compliment. Konrad is the mirror of von Kuber in so many ways. There’s few can best either man with a sword, perhaps only Reiksmarshal Helborg himself.’
‘All the better then,’ Gotrek replied, reaffixing his eye patch with a chuckle.
‘Meritorious men with a powerful vision and a point to prove are ever the most dangerous. Konrad dreams of holy war, shedding the blood of the impious to nurture the soil of a commonwealth of faith.’
‘And what do you dream, Herr Schlanger?’ asked Felix.
Caul fell silent. He regarded Felix strangely. ‘My dreams are of black walls and ruin, of a white lady marshalling a host of the unquiet damned. I dream of a lord of shadow, a dark master behind the blasted gates.’
Felix felt a creeping unease, as though a wraith had passed through him. He had posed the question largely out of pique; he had not expected an honest answer. And certainly not that answer.
The moment was lost on Caul. His head cocked as he turned to Gotrek. ‘And what passes through the minds of dishonoured dwarfs when they close their eyes?’ Gotrek growled, but Caul ignored the threat. ‘They say you can’t die in dreams. Does that trouble you, Slayer? That there is to be no end to your disgrace, in waking or in sleep?’
Bestial fury raged from the Slayer’s throat. He rose, snatching up both his sturdy wooden chair and his axe in one moment of fearsome wrath that brought a frightened murmur to the mercenaries sat watching. ‘I’d advise you leave while you still have legs to run,’ Gotrek spat, cheeks reddening with fury.
Felix spilled from his chair, Karaghul ripping free of its sheath as he circled the table to put its bulk between him and Schlanger’s men.
Ignoring Felix and the mercenaries who muttered threateningly but made no move, Caul climbed slowly from his seat, leaning over the table to meet Gotrek eye to eye. ‘Come with me, Slayer. I’ll promise you a doom beyond imagining.’
Axe and chair both gripped above his orange crest, Gotrek looked thoughtful. Felix could tell that part of him was sorely tempted, only for stubbornness and a murderous dislike to hijack his tongue. He lowered his weapons. ‘It could be the mightiest of ends since Grimnir’s, but being led to it by a snake like you would render it worthless. A bet’s a bet, now be off, lest I break both legs and toss you out.’
For a moment Caul remained motionless, then eased back from the table. ‘Come and find me when you change your mind.’
‘Don’t hold your breath.’
Caul sketched an empty smile, then turned to his waiting men with a nod. The door that closed behind their departing backs was met with roars of triumph, the seated mercenaries surging from their tables to slap Gotrek’s shoulders and demand the honour of his next drink. Theis beamed from the corner, already summing the night’s takings. Gotrek accepted the adulation with a stony-faced stoicism, ignoring the buffeting as he set about downing Caul’s stein.
Felix rubbed his eyes wearily. All he wanted now was to sleep. It was probably time to raise the issue of lodgings with Theis. He could not help but stare after the closed door, nor fail to notice the knot of Middenlanders looking the same way, their severe expressions worn amidst the revelry like swords to a Shallyan festival. It disturbed him how much the man had known about Gotrek and himself. And it worried him what he had said about having people that would kill on his behalf. Suddenly, a bunk in the common dormitories no longer appealed.
‘The infamous Jaeger and Gurnisson. That was what he said. Have you ever heard the like?’
‘I’d think not, manling. That poem of yours’ll be titled Gurnisson and Jaeger.’ Gotrek set down his tankard and summoned more, glaring at Felix across the emptied cup. ‘If you know what’s best for you.’
Mannslieb gleamed like a silver coin in the night sky. Tendrils of darkness shredded past it as fog, a wash of whispering disquiet was drawn from the City of the Damned like a tide.
With a dreadful, patient menace it inched over the unliving wastes, inhuman will driving it implacably onto the hills and the walls of Sigmarshafen. The old timbers groaned under the pressure of insubstantial bodies, men crying out from the guard towers as fires were suddenly extinguished. The mist swelled higher, the palisade creaking like old bones on a winter’s night as the fog neared its summit.
And then, silently, its capitulation always inevitable, the barrier yielded. Fog spilled over and into the deserted streets.
Or near deserted.
Stripped to his woollen undershirt and breeches, Rudi shivered, cold, terrified, as mist, frozen and yet somehow still vaporous, streamed through the bars of the wooden pen. Moans rang empty through the fog that threatened to bury the township alive, a war cry for this hollow incursion. The voices came from nothing living; devoid of hate, of anger, of anything but pain and the tenebrous need to see that pain shared. Rudi held his breath for as long as he could, maddened by the thought of what spectral horror might be intaken on a lungful of that fog. Crawling backward over the bodies of his fellow prisoners, he pressed his back to the palisade. A scratching, as of many sets of fingernails, came from the other side. He tried to convince himself that it was just the timbers breathing, being rattled with pebbles from the wind.
But he was a man of Ostermark, and he knew better.
The fog was beginning to pool around his ankles, vapour colder than ice trickling over the waistline of his breeches and into his underclothes. He held himself tighter. Trapped in here, with what the gaolers dismissed as the brain-dead, or the mindless, it was easy to expect the worst.
His fellow condemned muttered and moaned, tugging absently at their hair, gazing into nothing as they cupped their hands into the mist to hear its somnolent whispers before it streamed through their fingers. Rudi’s skin crawled from the nearness of them.
The brain-dead.
The mindless.
There were horned heads, bloated bodies, flanged necks and forked tongues. Every foul deformity the human body could suffer and still loosely be called human was here, and yet somehow nothing to compare with the blank eyes that stared through the back of his skull with a vestigial, wholly forgotten, hate. Mercenaries often chanced upon these listless mutants, weapons dragged clattering over the cobbles to stumble into their captors’ arms. They were a prize more valuable than a mercenary’s wage, more valuable even than the occasional unearthed artefact or sliver of wyrdstone. The clergy of Sigmarshafen paid well for the execution of Sigmar’s will. And those who dispensed justice in their god’s name knew only one punishment
The fire.
The thought of what waited for him tomorrow was a cold weight in his belly. He wanted to be sick, but his stomach was empty, and his chest ached from retching. Part of him wanted to believe that this could not happen, that Felix would not let it, but the world did not work that way. He had been forced to watch as his mother burned, had smelled it, had heard her screams. Out of nothing, his body was wracked with sobs. He brought them under control with a shuddering of his sore ribs.
Rudi tried not to dwell on it, but he could not resist the groundswell of bitterness that briefly threatened to pollute his terror. Whatever corruption was at work on the mindless had set its claws too upon the men of Sigmarshafen. His pen had remained locked for barely an hour at a time, Rudi watching on in disgust as girls of various levels of deviancy were dragged, mumbling and insensible, from the enclosure and into the straw bales of the nearby stable.
Mutation, it seemed, was never far from the surface.
Somehow the rumour had spread that bedding a mutant could lessen its symptoms. The gaolers – attending a steady stream of mercenaries and soldiers confessing to rashes, sores, suspicious lumps and agues that they dared not bring before a priest – had fast become wealthier and more reviled even than the black bands of the moralpolizei.
The mutants’ madness still seemed like bliss to Rudi.
Trembling, he peered between the bars of his cage. He could just make out the street, the wooden houses across the road were huddled close, sagging roofs making them hunched. The streets were empty. Even the grasping gaolers had abandoned the night-time streets to the Damned.
The thought of escape never occurred.
Even if he could shatter the tough pine of his cage with his bare hands, it would only put him out there, with whatever undying horrors it was that haunted the streets of Sigmarshafen. And that was a fate more terrifying than all but the most sadistic of witch-finders could devise.
On the pyre at least, his suffering would end.
Felix lay awake, eyes wide, staring at the ceiling of the attic room that Gotrek had won for them in an ill-advised drinking bout with, it had seemed, half the mercenaries of Sigmarshafen. Rhythmic snores arose from the next bunk, the entire pallet bent like a hammock under Gotrek’s squat mass. Felix fought the urge to get up, stumble again around the dark little table to the square of
pallid light, and confirm again that nothing was there. It was fortunate that the dwarf had stumbled into the bed nearest to the window. Had he been lying closer, he doubted he could have resisted the compulsion.
It was bad enough that the creeping unease that crawled like spiders under his skin meant that he now sought sleep in a pinching night vest of ringed steel. The bed groaned as he shifted, the weight of his mail causing the mattress to close around him. The slant of the ceiling brought it to the wall above Felix’s pallet close enough for him to taste the pine. The whorls in the wood made faces in the silver light that penetrated the fog, disturbing grotesques of nightmare and pain. It was disconcertingly like being interred within his own coffin.
The window rattled.
Moans of anguish ghosted past the sill, dark spirits circling the inn, seeking him out, drawn close by his warm and beating heart.
Directly under the beam of sombre light from the window, the white linen tablecloth rippled gently. The breeze kissed Felix’s cheek with cold dead lips. He drew his sheets close, wrapped himself in his cloak, and shivered. It was nothing, he commanded himself. Just an over-tired imagination filled to bursting with black tales of the haunted moors. A draught seeped through the join around the window pane. If the wind could get though then perhaps the ghosts on the fog could too! Cold air whined through the cracked fitting. It brought voices, pleas whispered in his ears. They wanted him to help them, to save them.
They wanted him to join them.
‘Don’t be a fool, Felix,’ he murmured, desperately in need of hearing his own voice spoken aloud, but the entreaties would not stop.
Maybe he was asleep after all.
The voices, the mist; it was all so like the nightmares he had suffered since venturing onto the Ostermark Moors that he could well believe it. Only the bone-ache weighing him into his mattress offered the clue that this was real.
A floorboard creaked from the landing. His head rolled over his pillow to face the door, shadows shifting over the sole plate, a groaning pressure against the door frame. Lying still, he fumbled under his bunk for Karaghul.