Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned

by David Guymer

  The crunch of gravel from behind made him spin, dropping into a crouch as he sighted down the crossbow track and into the mist that spilled from the archway.

  ‘Put it down, hireling. Unless you mean to use it. I’m going for a walk.’

  With a scowl that served well to mask his relief, Nil lowered his weapon and stood.

  ‘Next time you sneak up on me, I’ll shoot you.’ For reasons he did not care to understand, the proposition gave the dwarf cause to grin. Teeth broken, tattoos shifting red in the harsh glare of his axe, it was the most ferocious display Nils had ever seen. ‘Just… shout next time,’ he finished, tamely. The dwarf stomped past. He noticed the pale gleam of human bone down the back of the dwarf’s breeches. Flummoxed, his voice temporarily caught. ‘Wait,’ he hissed, ‘Wait, where are you going?’

  ‘About,’ the dwarf snapped, without turning.

  With a slow resurgence of his earlier irritation, Nils realised that the dwarf’s path had taken him neatly between every one of his traps. He stepped back, studying the rubble to assure himself they were well hidden, then shrugged. The dwarf must have gotten lucky. He turned, squinting in the general direction of the south tower. A muted gleam of metal in a window was all the fog revealed of Bernhardt. He was about to turn away when the appearance of something on the roof made him look again.

  The fog cleared to reveal a weather vane. It creaked back and forth in the wind, charred arms dangling, like a burned corpse swinging from a gibbet. Breathing out slowly, he allowed himself a chuckle. Turning back to the street, he sought out his comrade.

  Marten’s wolf-pelt cloak whispered against the rubble, shivering white in the cold moonlight. The man was crouched with his back turned, half an eye on the departed dwarf. With the crank from his crossbow, he tightened a trip wire attached to a bell at one end. His efforts caused it to trill softly. The man crunched around.

  A nod, wolf pendant pawing his mailed coif. Job done.

  Nils threw a thumbs up to that cold glimmer. And hoped that Bernhardt saw.

  Bernhardt returned the thumbs up and pulled himself back from the ruined window. He thumped his mitts for warmth and sat down, shrugging himself under a fleece. The hole left in the brick by the broken window was uneven, serrated almost in parts. It bore an unnerving resemblance to a bloody mouth filled with gleaming teeth. Bernhardt stared down its throat, shivering in the bleak mist that froze its outward breath. Throwing a second fleece over his shoulders, he tried to calm his thoughts. Experience made it impossible.

  This was the City of the Damned. There could be no preparing for what the dawn would bring.

  Fog tickled the back of his throat and he coughed. Lungs crackling, he hawked it up, pulled down his face-scarf, and spat it out onto the street. Holding his breath, he repositioned the scarf, breathing deeply once it was back covering his nose and mouth. He had done everything that a diligent man could. He said the proper prayers three times each day. He had purchased all the right herbs to repel corrupting humours and then, with what little coin the priests and the herbalist left him, he had paid his visit to the chattel pens. The herbs tasted sour in his mouth. His skin still recoiled from the remembered touch of scales. The girl had been the most human he could afford, but then his mother had always told him that the vilest remedies were the most effective. Fingers to his throat he gave an experimental cough, feeling the flesh rise and recede.

  He grimaced. ‘A whole lot of misery for a scrap of coin.’

  He turned to the man watching the window to his left. Bernhardt dimly recalled Kurt as a large man, but the City of the Damned got under a man’s skin. It drained the meat from his bones and laid the soul bare. It was even rumoured amongst mercenary circles that, after six generations on this land, that same corruption had prevented Baron von Kuber from fathering an heir. Bernhardt wondered whether it was worth it. Now Kurt was lean as a coursing hound, with hair of the same thin grey. The man glanced up at Bernhardt’s words, fiddling with the bronze clasp of his cloak.

  ‘You say something?’

  ‘Just thinking aloud,’ said Bernhardt, feeling his throat and collar for lumps.

  Silently, Kurt carried on fiddling.

  Click, click, click.

  ‘Ulric’s shaggy knackers, will you give it a rest.’

  ‘It was a gift,’ Kurt answered, eyes hooded, trying to hold the thing shut. It sprang open as soon as he let go.

  Bernhardt swore, then coughed again. Finally, the thing snapped closed. The grey-haired mercenary puffed into his fastened cloak, then set his crossbow by the window and stiffly stood.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ he said, partly to Bernhardt, partly to himself.

  ‘Nothing for me,’ Bernhardt muttered well after the man had crept off into the dark to rummage through their gear for the strips of dried jerky stashed there. Bernhardt’s stomach turned, and not with hunger. He stared out of the window, mumbling to himself as he watched phantoms form and split through the murk. ‘There’s something rotten here. It’s in the meat, in us.’ He balled his fist into his belly, staring miserably into the creeping fog. ‘And I’ve always hated goat.’

  Disturbed by something in that shifting view he could not place, he leaned his head through the window and craned his neck to look up. It was dark, nothing but fog sweeping down off the eaves. Wary of glass shards, he pulled himself back and sat down. He massaged his throat, looking up to the ceiling beams.

  Strange how the absence of light made shadows seem denser.

  Then he heard something. A faint scratching noise stitched between the rafters. As if something were moving along the roofing tiles. It stopped. As if it knew that he listened.

  ‘Kurt,’ he whispered, breath fogging. ‘You hear that?’

  There was no answer.

  He picked up his crossbow, blowing warm mist to melt the frost that was beginning to crawl along the brass track. He clutched the weapon to his breast. To spare the lathe it had been left unloaded and he fumbled through his fleeces for the quiver. He withdrew an iron bolt and set it to the track and then, one foot in the cocking stirrup and his hand to the crank, he paused. He did not breathe. The scratching noise had come again.

  ‘Don’t sulk,’ he hissed into the unlit chamber behind him. ‘I think there’s something up there.’

  Still nothing.

  ‘Kurt?’

  He swore, feeling braver for it, and stood, turning his back to the window.

  A shadow passed before his eyes.

  A blade passed through his chest.

  His mouth stretched wide only for a gnarled, bird-like paw to smother his cry. He screamed into that ghoulish flesh, lungs working now like mighty pistons to draw air through the creature’s grip. Jerking against its sharp embrace, Bernhardt felt his struggles grow wearied, his breathing slow. Gently, the creature eased him down and then, as though he were already forgotten, climbed over him and out through the window. Lying flat on his side, unable to move, Bernhardt gasped as though he drowned. There was a fleeting glimpse of bony, lumpen feet and a blotched, egg-shell tail before the creature was gone.

  Blood ran slowly under his cheek. It felt warm, oddly welcoming.

  With failing, blood-filled eyes, he gazed into the closing dark. A gaunt, grey-haired body lay amidst the stowed gear. Above it, a faceless shade shimmered silver in the dark. It was looking at him. It was angry.

  And it was damned.

  Bernhardt’s failing heart froze. A last breath fled his stiffening lips.

  ‘Kurt…’

  The shadow crawled out into open air. The sensation of cold was instant, like a blow to the ribs. It hissed, shrinking deeper into its all-covering cloak and hood. Its claw-hold in the brickwork was good and it swung out, reaching up for another, sinking its claws deep into the aged mortar. Grey paste crumbled away like grave dust.

  It was easy to forget just how aged.

  It climbed a way and then, with a preternatural flurry, threw itself back from the wall to latch claws onto the overha
nging eaves. It swung a moment over nothingness. The fog coiled about its legs and tail. There was a disturbing sense of pressure, of hands that sought to close about its ankles and tear it down if only they could. But they could not.

  Not yet.

  The creature hauled itself up, scrabbling over the tiles until it could look down onto the street. Its eyes were dim, adapted for the night, but it had no difficulty detecting the others of its kind. On the rooftops, lurking within windows, dropping silently into the courtyard behind it. A harsh cry, like a vulture’s death song, sounded somewhere close.

  The creature tittered, twisted claws scratching the tiles in its excitement.

  Soon. Soon this would all be done.

  Lifting its hood to the sinking moon, it called.

  ‘Tell me again of how you slew a dragon.’ said Rudi, eyes bright in the cold like tiny stars. Felix sighed, cursing whatever malicious muse had allowed him to think that sharing some of the other horrors that he and Gotrek had lived through might ease the young man’s fears. It had, but a little too well for Felix’s tastes.

  ‘I think that story was my favourite.’

  The pair of them were scrunched uncomfortably close, fetched up against a brick-pile that marked the truncated end of the corridor, just off the main hall. The crack of bone echoed from the hall as Caul Schlanger sought out whatever secret thing he seemed to think rested here. Felix was trying desperately hard to be disinterested. The man was not sharing and Felix was not about to go begging for answers. If Caul wanted to spend the day rooting through bones, then that was fine by Felix.

  Irritated despite his best efforts to convince himself otherwise, Felix shifted against the brick wall. Bits of brick lumped into his back. Tiny red splinters pricked the bare skin between his gloves and the end of his sleeves every time he tried to move. And his black eye still hurt.

  With another sigh, he gave up the attempt at comfort and turned his attention to the crumpled pages of his journal that lay open across his knees. He dipped his quill into its vial of iron gall ink and held it a moment to dry, hoping that Rudi would find something else to distract him. No such luck.

  ‘I’m not some Tarradaschian hero,’ Felix muttered, inked quill hovering over the page as he tried to back calculate to today’s date. Lips moving silently, he shrugged, simply scratching ‘Brauzeit’ below his last entry. All the way back in Osterwald. ‘I’ve seen people die. Honest, good, innocent people. I almost died myself that day. It’s not actually something I care to recall.’

  Rudi leaned nearer to peer over Felix’s arm at the page slowly filling with tidy black lettering. ‘Then why do you?’

  ‘It’s my journal,’ he answered without looking up, his tone one that he hoped betrayed annoyance. ‘I promised to compose an epic poem of Gotrek’s doom. It’s been a long time now and I’d hate to forget the details.’

  ‘So you’re a warrior and a scholar too? Your father must be very proud.’

  With a wry chuckle, Felix rolled his eyes before returning to his page. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’

  Rudi sniffed distractedly at the oft-patched Sudenland wool of his borrowed cloak. ‘Do you think my father would be proud of what I’m doing now?’

  The tension Felix had been carrying dissipated into the freezing mist. He stoppered his ink vial and closed his journal for another time. ‘Only you can answer that. But I believe he would be.’

  ‘Last time I saw him, we fought.’

  Felix smiled gently. ‘In a way I envy you. All my life I’ve longed to tell my father what I really think.’

  Looking miserable, Rudi shaped an answer, just as a thin cry carried down the mist-cloaked corridor from the hall. A hollow bone clacked as it dropped. Caul had heard it too. Felix sat a little higher, freeing the dragonhead hilt of his sword. It had sounded like a bird.

  Felix and Rudi shared a look. As one they stood.

  They had heard that cry before. They knew what it foreshadowed.

  There came another bellow, this time distant; a deeply pitched rumble that Felix remembered all too well.

  The Beast was coming.

  Chapter 10

  Ambush

  The wall of fog that lay across the bridge broke for the passage of something vast. White threads coiled around its rags, snapping one by one like the strands of some ethereal cobweb as the monster pulled its bulk clear. At once, its posture shifted. It slumped into a hunchbacked shuffle, sniffing the air in confusion. Mad red eyes gleamed from the hooded depths of its cowl. Images ghosted across his troubled eyes. Scents were there then gone.

  Where am I? Am I still?

  One moment the air was ripe with the dry stench of roasted bone, the next it was naught but ash on a cold wind. The quay was packed with intangible, smoky figures. Bunting shimmered between the balconies. Boats tangled pennons as they jostled for the shallows. It was all of it a lie. They awaited the second coming of a god, but not the one they expected. And his gifts were madness and death. Their debauchery revelled through the wind like a lure, like a dancer. He could smell the colour. Synaesthesia rendered their inevitable deaths to a cold coppery confection, dead blood clinging to the walls of his throat.

  He licked his lips and snarled, confused.

  Why am I? Why is this?

  Buildings clustered to the riverside like sheep to a water trough, blurring together in the fog. The phantom bleat of river bells sank into the wind. It blew cold and callous across the water. His nose twitched in the supernatural chill. Periodically, a memory emerged from the blackness, but his thoughts were clumsy and slow, and grasping for it only pushed it deeper under.

  He lumbered forward, nearing the ungainly skeletons of the bridge towers. The piled bodies of the Damned turned their shapeless features to him, then recoiled. He was one of them, but not.

  Dead, but not.

  Damned, but not.

  A frustrated snarl rose from his ruined throat. With claws like butchers’ knives he ripped at the rags about his face, shredding the soiled cloth to ribbons that fluttered free like ash rain. Blisters burst, smearing his claws with blood. He stared at them in horror.

  He remembered the ash rain.

  Who is this? When was I?

  He squinted skyward, into beclouded black, then moved to the edge of the bridge, claws encircling the damp stone as he peered down. The water was dark, roiling with the lost souls of the burning and the drowned. It cast no reflection. Blackened and bloody claws dug into the stonework. Lips peeled over monstrous yellow fangs.

  ‘Huurrrrlk…’

  A call like a vulture’s rang amongst the shifting ruins and, at once, he pulled up. He sniffed the air. The call sounded again and he turned towards it. His memories were elusive. A revelation came and then went, passing in a moment of understanding. They had not happened yet. He broke into a run as the call came again.

  He would make them happen again.

  For the last time.

  Sword in hand, Felix burst into the cloister just in time to witness the surrounding walls and rooftops erupt into deadly life, harsh calls firing across the street like the hunting shrieks of birds of prey. Felix saw their dark shapes flocking the rooftops, clustering over the ridges to loose death into the street before dispersing in shrill bursts of shadow.

  The three Middenlanders that had still been working in the cloister scrambled into cover around the archway as missiles whistled over the wall.

  Felix spotted a scrap of sackcloth in the fog-clouded street beyond the archway, but no sooner had he wondered what the flagellants were doing outside than, as if Felix had laid a doom upon the man’s shoulders, he was struck in the side of the head by a slingshot. He did not scream. His death was too sudden for that. The man beside him did howl, and righteously so, anointed with his brother’s blood and then losing his leg to the swollen knee joint in the jaws of an iron trap. Their fellows flowed around them, belting their pious cries into the mist. The trapped man bellowed the name of Sigmar before a bullet punche
d through the back of his skull and his body fell beside his silent brother. Perhaps it was just the ripples that the charging flagellants had left in the fog, but Felix could see silvery silhouettes rising from their corpses.

  A cry shrieked from somewhere near at hand. A dark body scuttled over the roof of the nearest tower.

  Felix was thinking just quickly enough to shove Rudi back inside the house and hit the ground himself before a bullet tore a chunk of brick from the column where his head had been. He bounced swiftly back to his feet, holding Rudi down and threw a sharp look back to the tower. Mist moved across the conical roof, but nothing else. Felix swore, trying to find where the creature had gotten too and finding nothing.

  Rudi’s face was pale with fright. Felix waved a ‘come’ gesture, trying with just the two eyes to mind the myriad angles of attack that the cloister afforded, and made a crabwise run for the south wall. He flung himself against it with a relieved gasp. Rudi was a second behind.

  Two mercenaries were pressed under the flanking curves of the archway, loaded crossbows tight to their chests. One poked his weapon under the arch only to snap back from a storm of fire. The second man whistled under his breath and did not move as bullets ripped up the rubble between them. The third Middenlander, recognisable in his heavy white wolf cloak, stood back from the wall, crunching slowly back over the sloping rubble towards the north tower. His eyes were dark as though infused with smoke, lips moving without sound as he stroked the shrivelled wolf paw at his collar. He was pale even by northern standards.

  ‘Is he all right?’ Felix shouted, and then to the man himself when no one answered, ‘What’s your name?’