Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned

by David Guymer

  ‘It will only get worse as dawn approaches,’ said Caul, pulling Felix’s attention from the still-simmering statue. What calamity could be so catastrophic as to deny its victims even the succour of the afterlife? And, more to the point, what would be the fate of Felix’s own soul should he too fall here?

  It was one thing to pledge his life in Gotrek’s service; it was quite another to forsake his very soul.

  ‘And just how could it be any worse?’ said Felix.

  ‘The dead march on Sigmarshafen by night. Those left behind are the weak, the less angry, but even so…’ He reached under his grey cloak, tugging a knife from his baldric as he studied the ruins with a glazed eye. ‘They say that every man sees the city differently. Whatever speaks to his deepermost fears.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I see,’ Gotrek rumbled, subjecting the fractured ruin to a harsh glare. ‘I see an empty ruin, and two manlings shrieking over naught but a puff of wind. If the brainless living and the restless dead are all this city can afford me, then so be it. My axe will greet them all the same.’

  ‘And what then, Slayer?’ Caul hissed. ‘Maybe your axe can harm them, but have you not been listening? They are damned. There is nowhere for them to go.’

  ‘Did I mention how sincerely I dislike this place?’ Felix muttered.

  ‘Then I suggest we make a start,’ said Caul. ‘Or come the dawn this city will be the grave of us all.’

  Felix picked up at that, giving Caul his undivided attention. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said get moving.’

  ‘No, no,’ Felix murmured, a smile spreading across his face like creeping dawn. ‘Graves, you said. Graves! That’s where the Beast will go.’

  ‘Solid thinking, manling,’ Gotrek chuckled. ‘Except for one thing. If a village of a dozen dirt-grubbers and a goat had two of them, then how much ground do you think it’ll take to house the dead of this damned place?’

  Felix frowned. Gotrek had a point. He had just witnessed with his own eyes how the passing centuries could accrue the dead. How many people had lived and died before he, Felix Jaeger, had been born? It was a tragedy worthy of Detlef Sierck that none now remembered their names, nor even of the city that marked their lives like a tombstone. The thought of the foul ends to which the limitless hordes of the Damned might be turned made him shudder. Uncertain why, he found himself looking again at the statue. What was it that it had said?

  ‘The Master will rise,’ he whispered.

  ‘What was that?’ said Caul.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Felix, discomfited by the sudden intensity in Caul’s regard. ‘Just thinking. There must be a Temple of Morr. That would be where most of the dead would lie, yes?’

  Caul was still studying him carefully, like a chirurgeon debating whether a limb could stay or go. ‘This city has a long and… gloried past. The House of Morr was desecrated centuries ago.

  ‘I know something better.’

  Felix turned at the approach of a familiar voice. Bare skin robed in dark fog, Nikolaus bore a chilling likeness to the black thing that had possessed Sigmar’s statue in his vision. Felix shivered and tried, without much success to banish the association. Rudi was with him, stuck close to his back. The young man’s hands were black from searching through the ruins.

  Nikolaus greeted every man present with a nod, saving the deepest and the longest for Gotrek, who acknowledged it with a grunt. ‘If the monster craves the dead then it will find them in the home of the heathen sisterhood.’

  ‘Heathen sisterhood?’ Felix asked, uncertain whether he really wanted to know.

  ‘Pacifists,’ said Nikolaus, ‘Worshippers of a pagan woman-god.’

  ‘Sounds no better than the mindless and the dead, to me,’ Gotrek grumbled.

  ‘Brüder Nikolaus speaks of the Shallyan sanatorium.’ Caul explained. ‘In life they raised no hand in their own defence.’ The man looked eastwards into the mist. The bridge hung squat and solid within the thick, drifting fog. An ominous cluster of high-walled buildings stood near it. That was what Caul was looking too. And he looked afraid.

  ‘But damnation changes you.’

  Chapter 9

  Sisters of Mercy

  Surrounded by rubble and the crumbling blocks of labourers’ housing, the charred brickwork of the Shallyan sanatorium resembled nothing much. Fire had transformed the entire district to something more akin to the inner walls of a kiln, the wind that was a near constant presence streaking the ash like claws with red. The sanatorium itself was of the same red brick construction as the street; a two-storey house abutting a walled cloister where four rounded towers had once stood at the corner walls. Three still did. The fourth, the north, had collapsed inward as though demolished by a giant’s club, burying the cloister under a mass of rubble six feet deep. The house itself was partially interred under the avalanche of brickwork set off by the collapse of the neighbouring buildings. The result of that destruction was that the road Felix and the others now walked was the only route to the house of healing still open.

  The hairs on the back of Felix’s neck shivered like grasses on the cold hills of the moors. The surrounding rooftops sagged, patient in the pace of their decay. Felix would never have believed his heart could beat so hard for so long. His chest ached with it, drawing breath starting to feel like squeezing into the armour of a dead man half his size. They had left the Retterplatz an hour ago.

  Why did he still feel he was being watched?

  Rudi tucked in close, sharp breaths haunting the air with clouds of mist. Like Felix, his eyes dodged from rooftop to rooftop. And just like Felix, finding nothing offered no assurance.

  ‘Have you ever been somewhere like this?’

  Felix did not answer, did not club the man silent and scream ‘No!’ as part of him so sorely wished. The young man seemed to regard him as some kind of unlikely hero, as though Felix had it in his power to spare him the world’s horrors. Felix wished that Nikolaus could have taken him ahead and spared him the questions.

  The flagellant and his brethren were still just about visible through the fog. Staves and peg legs announced their passage over the rubble, the undying echo making Felix wince and eye the shadows with redoubled fear. Beyond the flagellants, their gear making spider-like ghosts in the fog, walked Bernhardt and his men. Caul had ordered the mercenaries to scout ahead, but the ‘ahead’ part of that instruction had become lost somewhere in the darkened streets between here and the Retterplatz. The three groups had pulled closer and closer, the party bunching tighter like a herd of beasts scenting the approach of a predator. It was instinctual, pre-human, forest savages huddling around the fire until night passed. Ahead, the crimson shadow of the sanatorium brooded over the street. It swelled and shrank in the uncertain dark, illuminated by the mercenaries’ lantern only in flashes.

  ‘Before the end,’ Caul whispered, ‘a plague of madness swept the city. The Shallyans converted this building into a hospice for the afflicted, but the burghers condemned their efforts as witchcraft. They believed the madness to be Sigmar’s will, to weed out the weak-minded from the strong. The sisters did not defend themselves.’

  ‘Another glorious chapter for the Unfinished Book,’ Felix breathed.

  Caul shrugged. ‘Look around you. Sigmar passed his judgement on what went on here. The dead were just bones and three deep when Magnus came. It made a natural place for his armies to leave their own fallen.’

  Bernhardt’s voice called back from the fog. Its meaning was lost by the time it reached Felix’s ears, but it was followed by the hollow scrape of steel underneath brick. The sound echoed all around. Felix flinched.

  ‘Clear the way,’ came the cry again, this time clear enough to make out. ‘Shovels front. Put your shoulders in.’

  ‘Do you think we’ll find the Beast inside,’ asked Rudi. His face was pale, his fingers playing nervously at the belt where his swords should have been.

  Caul breathed a heavy sigh and flung his cloak over his left should
er to unveil a leather baldric worn over his darkly tinted mail. Knives stuck from the black leather like teeth. Selecting one with every appearance of great care, Caul pulled it free and presented it blade first to Rudi. Rudi examined it fearfully for a moment before reaching out. At the last moment, Caul yanked it away. ‘You know which end to use, yes?’

  Snarling, but saying nothing, Rudi kept his hand where it was.

  ‘The metal end,’ said Caul pressing the knife into the man’s palm and then, with a smile, ‘But there’s no wrong place to stick it.’

  The young man flipped it into his other hand, took an experimental swipe at the mist, and immediately looked a little happier. At the same time, Caul proceeded to tug three more knives from their strapping. He let them drop the moment they were free, counting under his breath as the four fingers of his free hand stroked up the baldric, playing the remaining blades like the strings of a lute. He caught Felix’s look.

  ‘Where order fails, Herr Jaeger, what then is left but Chaos?’

  Felix suppressed a shiver. The man was mad. He was trapped in a city with its long-forgotten dead and men too far gone even for Sigmarshafen.

  ‘Manling!’ came a cry from up ahead. Consciously or otherwise, even Gotrek’s usual growl had had its edges smoothed. The slip and snarl of busy shovels continued unabated from that direction. ‘There’s a way in.’

  Felix sighed. Madmen and a Trollslayer.

  Wondering what that must make him, he pinned his scabbard to his thigh with one hand and broke into a jog. The fog slapped at his face, ruined buildings drifting by through the dark. Heavy breaths and the crunch of loose brick from behind told him that Rudi had decided to follow. The flagellants said nothing as he passed them, too busy tossing salt and painting the walls with hammers.

  Standing before a steep mound of rubbled brick that was packed against the wall of the sanatorium, Bernhardt Armbruster greeted him with a nod. His crossbow covered the street. Behind him, a pair of mercenaries stood ankle deep in brick, bent double into their shovels to clear the way. They had stripped off their leather jerkins and sweated despite the unholy chill. The path into the cloister of the sanatorium was under a red brick archway. The brickwork was scarred, the work of an axe or a sword. The keystone was about two feet above his head and carved into the form of a dove, Shallya’s aspect as bringer of peace. The dove’s wings had been charred almost beyond recognition, its beak broken to a stub of pale stone in a blackened face.

  ‘There are no doors,’ Felix observed. At first glance, he had assumed them burned away or crushed under the rubble, but there were no hinges either.

  ‘Shallya always welcomes,’ said Bernhardt, momentarily removing his eyes from the street.

  ‘Credulous wench,’ muttered one of the shovellers, raising a laugh that did not last.

  Felix frowned and turned to follow Bernhardt’s look. Two blond-haired men, Nils and another whose name Felix had known he would not remember, moved purposefully between the milling flagellants. They trailed a length of steel wire between them, counting out measures as they went, pausing occasionally to peg distance markers into the rubble before continuing.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  For the first time, Felix thought he caught the hint of a smile beneath the mercenary’s face-scarf. ‘Caul wants the Beast captured alive. I would like to retire to Middenland one day. Somehow those two must marry.’

  Felix watched the two men set their traps for a moment, then nodded, suddenly glad for this small example of sanity.

  There was no sign of Gotrek and two of Bernhardt’s men were absent too. Sensing his thoughts, Bernhardt jerked his head back toward the arch. Felix saw that the way had been partially cleared, enough to clamber through if a man did not treasure the skin of his hands and knees. Gesturing for Rudi to follow, Felix twisted his scabbard from his legs and commenced to climb. At the summit, he ducked under the dove keystone, then slid down into the cloister.

  The first thing that struck him was the quiet.

  Shielded from the wind by walls of scorched brick, there was nothing to disturb the mist that trickled through rents in the walls to pool within the courtyard. It was eerie, like he had disturbed a sacred pool. Already, the scrape of shovels sounded distant. In the silence, Felix could almost feel the cold disk of Mannslieb hum from behind the clouds. Its silver light fell upon an undulating field of broken brick. Immersed in fog, the rubble sloped away from the archway, neglecting the grey-stoned columns that fronted Shallya’s house to Felix’s right, before climbing unevenly towards the north corner and its stump of tower.

  He felt a flash of horror.

  An image passed before his eyes as he faced the north tower. A lingering impression of terrified, white-robed women, the sound of screams, the touch of fire.

  Breathing hard, he held his gaze. But there was nothing there. The air was funereal, his rigid hackles tingling with the sense of desecration. From somewhere under the rubble, perhaps within the blackened crust that adhered to the walls, a trace odour of burned meat still persisted. How long had it been, Felix wondered? It was impossible to say. No one would tell him anything.

  Rudi shuffled past him, sliding down the rubble to the cloister wall. The fog seemed to constrict about his ankles as he walked. His hand traced the damaged wall. ‘It looks like a battle was fought here,’ he whispered, fingers sinking into a vertical gouge in the brick that looked to have been chipped out by an axe. The walls bore the scars of what could only have been a massacre.

  Feeling an itch on the nape of his neck, as if something shared this cloister with them, Felix bent to pick something from the ground. Muddy white against the immuring black. He blew ash from it. It was a piece of skull. With a curse he let it drop.

  ‘There are more.’ Rudi walked a short way towards the house, its columned front rising through the fog. Rubble slipped beneath his feet as he toed aside a brick to reveal a tangle of bones powdered with red dust.

  It was then that Felix caught sight of Gotrek.

  The shadows slunk from the baleful glare of his axe, streaming, sepulchral forms, that screamed in silence and were gone. The dwarf paid them no heed. He crunched around the columns of the main house, fingers probing every cracked piece of wall. Finding nothing, he moved toward the main building with an impatient oath. The dwarf’s moods were never the easiest to discern, but if Felix did not know better he would have guessed that his companion was rattled.

  Felix chose to take that as a very bad sign.

  ‘Brüder Gurnisson, this way. Let me show you to the vault.’

  Nikolaus’s voice set a hollow charge through the burned out atrium. Felix cringed from every grim repeat of the word ‘vault’ that echoed between broken columns and out from the main hall. Already crooked where its supports had crumbled away, a second floor gallery creaked. Felix held his breath, half expecting the whole structure to come crashing down on his head.

  Sweeping his axe through the fog, Gotrek moved across the hall to where the flagellant waited by the entrance to a stairwell. With exaggerated caution, Felix followed suit. Shards of bone and coloured glass crunched underfoot. Large oval windows, no doubt a blessing to those convalescing under the sisters’ care, now admitted nothing but a ghastly mist that pooled around Felix’s ankles. Human skeletons of varying degrees of completeness were heaped against the walls. More were doubtless buried under the fog and rubble that veiled the wide floor space.

  ‘I don’t like this, manling. I don’t like this at all.’

  Felix was not inclined to disagree. He shot a glance back the way he had come, just as Caul, Rudi and one of the Drakwalder mercenaries passed over the threshold, weapons drawn. Caul bade the sell-sword to guard the door, and then, abandoning Rudi to his own devices, picked his way through the field of bones. The way his eyes flicked from one to another, it was clear he was looking for something.

  ‘Do you expect to find something here, Herr Schlanger?’

  The man’s smile tightened. H
e did not look up. ‘I attended a Shallyan seminary once. Briefly.’

  ‘Was that before or after you burned an innocent woman alive?’

  Caul met his eyes across the drifting fog, then tightened his cloak against the chill. ‘Let’s not quibble over definitions of innocence. But if forgiveness were solely for the just, then the sisters of mercy would have few supplicants at their doors.’

  ‘Then why did you leave?’

  Caul’s grin spread slowly; hideously arranged teeth, ordered four by four. ‘It… wasn’t for me.’

  From the stairwell, Nikolaus spoke again. ‘The vaults, Brüder Gurnisson. Would you care to see?’

  Gotrek exhaled, long and slow, giving the desolate hall one last look over. ‘More of the same, is it? Bones and the like?’

  ‘Yes, only a great many more.’

  ‘Then don’t bother. I’ve seen as much as I care to.’

  ‘So now we wait?’ Felix asked softly.

  ‘For the Beast to come,’ Caul concluded. ‘Somewhere out of sight. And don’t forget.’ He singled out Gotrek. ‘We’re here to capture it and find its lair, not kill it.

  ‘For how long?’ said Gotrek, eyeing the groaning walls with a poorly hidden unease.

  ‘As long as it takes.’

  Gotrek shuffled his heavy boots through the thin carpet of bones and debris. ‘I’ll not sit on my hands in this mausoleum for Grimnir knows how long.’ And then to Felix, ‘Hold the fort, manling. I’m taking a look around.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Felix, suddenly terrified that Gotrek would leave, struck positively numb by the fear that he would expect Felix to go with him. ‘The Beast’s coming for the bones. It’ll be coming here.’

  ‘It wants bones, does it?’ Gotrek growled, his axe’s glow bequeathing his eye a malicious tint. He bent down, shovelling a mass of the bony shards into a ham-like fist, then clenching it before Felix’s nose.

  ‘Then it can pry them from my cold dead grip.’

  Hands struggling in the cold, Nils pulled down the jaws of a foothold trap until they locked with a faint click. He rose, stamped his feet for warmth, then dragged a boot through the ash to conceal his handiwork. With nothing left exposed but a few steel teeth that would easily be dismissed as just more debris, Nils unslung his crossbow for one last sweep of the surrounding rooftops. Breath misted into a cloud before his face. His eyes narrowed. The fog treated sounds and objects strangely. For a moment, he would have sworn he had seen something move.