Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned

by David Guymer

  But clearly they did not care.

  With a long breath that was as much relief at still tasting air – however foul – as it was about the numbing weariness in his chest, Felix sheathed his sword. Flexing his fingers, he edged down the slope of the roof to get a look at where he was. His body just wanted to lie down, but Felix had been through enough battles to know that if he did then he would never get back up. He reached the bottom and planted his feet into the slight upward curvature of the eaves. He held for a moment, caught his breath, and surveyed the City of the Damned by the light of the coming dawn.

  The rooftops were shrouded and indistinct in the fog, but he could discern the barbican to the north and, to the east, the high towers of the bridge and a slender structure that looked like a bell tower. The city extended in all directions, further than he could see, a dusty black sheet of steepled shapes. Beyond the river in the east, a finger of red light teased the edges of that cover, awaiting the fullness of its strength that it might rip it back and reveal what lay forgotten beneath the dark. Felix knew that the darkness hid more than mere bricks and mortar, something older and more wrathful than anything the city had yet shown him. He tried to remember what the seamen in his father’s employ had used to say about a red dawn.

  Knowing sailors it was probably nothing good.

  Carefully, Felix leaned forwards, looking into the fog for the least precipitous route down. The need to find Gotrek had become a compulsion almost as great as the dwarf’s own need for an honourable death. He just knew he had to find his companion before sunrise.

  ‘I have to find Gotrek,’ he said quietly, just loud enough for Nils and the others on the ridge to hear.

  ‘Good luck with that,’ Nils scoffed and then, when Felix did not laugh, ‘Mane of Ulric, you’re serious.’ He pointed east, his voice a frightened snarl. ‘Bernhardt knew better than to spend the day in this place. Everyone does.’

  ‘There must be some way. Caul wouldn’t have risked his own life otherwise.’

  ‘Schlanger was a nut and not one that’ll be missed. I’ll bet he gave no thought to how we’d make it out of here alive.’ The man gripped the shingles between his thighs in a nervous grip and rocked. ‘Best I can think of, find somewhere good and quiet to hunker down and sweat it out. And…’

  ‘And?’ Felix asked

  Nils shrugged, gazing eastwards. ‘Pray.’

  Felix looked into the stirring cityscape. ‘I don’t think Sigmar has looked this way for a long time. Or any god that I care to name for that matter,’ he added with a nod to the Middenlanders.

  ‘Today, I’d take any that’d have me.’

  ‘Mind what you say,’ Rudi snapped. The man was scratched head to toe and shivered. Whether through pain, cold or simple zeal was unclear. His fingers shivered to the hammer talisman at his breast. ‘Men of Sigmar, blood of Magnus…’

  The mercenaries sneered.

  ‘Stay with these men, Rudi,’ said Felix.

  ‘I swore an oath too,’ Rudi cried. ‘To slay the Beast or die trying. Either way, this is Sigmar’s land, and he’ll see it done.’

  ‘Sigmar doesn’t care about you!’ Felix shouted back.

  As soon as the words left his mouth he regretted them, but he did not try to soften them. Perhaps it was for the best that he had never had children of his own. Two days with Rudi and already he had turned into his father.

  Rudi’s face was red enough to ignite. He said nothing, but if looks had the power to ignite the souls of the impious then Felix would be naught but ash smouldering within his chainmail.

  Spotting a window ledge that looked like it would support his weight, Felix shuffled until he was directly above it. He turned onto his belly and looked back. Still Rudi would not speak, but nor did he try and follow, so perhaps a harsh parting was for the best.

  ‘If you don’t see me again, you can keep the cloak.’

  Hurrlk pounded down the ruined streets, brick and stone beaten to powder beneath his tread. All around, black shapes fluttered and flew, as though a swarm of moths had trailed him all the way from the river. From the dim confusion ahead there rose a sprawl, an ashen ruin rising from its sickbed for one last valedictory glimmer of life before its corpse was burned and buried again.

  And again.

  Hurrlk could feel the heat on his eyes, smell the ash on his tongue. Black cloaks fluttered over it, flags of surrender that burned, and burned, and burned…

  A piercing shriek jarred the fragments of his mind into alignment. From the conical roof of one of the towers, fighting the wind for its drapery of black cloth, his minion lifted its hooded snout to the fog again and called. He snuffled in confusion, hesitating at the sound of another cry behind him. It was not one of his own. It was deeper and in a language he did not know.

  Did not yet know.

  Had long forgotten.

  And yet it was familiar. The memory of a memory trickled like salt water through his wounded brain.

  Yes.

  There could be no surcease. Not for one of the Damned. But someone had thought this creature could stop him. Or at least that it would try.

  Even half-remembered, it was too tempting to ignore.

  Ignoring the frantic screams and waving paws of his lessers, Hurrlk ground a circle into the rubble until he faced the sounds of battle. A brick wall stood before him. A breathy laugh huffed from his chest.

  And he charged.

  ‘Hold still, you squirmy beggar.’

  Grabbing for an insipid flash of tail, Gotrek blundered after the hooded creature. It darted deeper into the flame-gutted hovel. The creature reared its head from behind a half-buried table. Gotrek kicked it apart, making the creature squeal, and then, with a brusque feint, drove the creature into a corner.

  ‘Ha! Got you now!’

  With a wittering of breathless laughter it ducked Gotrek’s swing, wriggling under a beam as the starmetal blade clove through the sagging joist that had been behind it. The creature dived out through the window just as the ceiling began to groan. Glaring contemptuously up into the trickle of dust, Gotrek gripped his axe and the whole thing came crashing down.

  A mocking laugh drifted through the ash haze from the other side of the window. Gotrek snarled and shook himself free. The ceiling boards had been of the thinnest pine to begin with and after two centuries of rot and fire, there was little left to them but ash. Employing a combination of axe and shoulder, he hacked his way free and charged through the open door.

  The creature was gone.

  In its place was Nikolaus Straum and a lepers’ handful of his followers.

  ‘It fled that way, Brüder Dwarf,’ Nikolaus pointed down the road.

  The street was empty but for rubble and wisps of cloud. The blackened husks that flanked it shivered only slightly to the animal shrieks that riddled the wind. A bullet pinged off Gotrek’s axe blade from a second storey casement on the opposite face of the street. Gotrek bared his broken teeth at it. ‘Come face me you rotten-skinned, ork-breathed cowards! You’ll take me to the Beast if I have to run every last one of you to exhaustion to do it.’

  A loose smattering of fire answered him from both sides of the street. Nikolaus and his faithful retreated under the eaves of the hovel that the Slayer had just exited. Gotrek roared as a ricochet bloodied him across one massive shoulder. The bullet glanced off his thick skin, leaving an ugly red bruise. The brick wall did not get off nearly so lightly.

  Gotrek hefted his axe, gave an ululating war cry, and charged. With their own motley cast of oaths and cries, the flagellants staggered after him.

  Black-cloaked figures sprang from every mortis-jawed ruin they passed. They scrambled through cracks in their ruined frontages, crawling for vantages too slender for any man from which to unleash a salvo and then ran, sprinting from roof to roof in eager pursuit. The creatures that lingered on the road scattered before Gotrek’s charge. Some made expeditious work of the walls, shooting up as though zipped on hidden wires, while a handful
scampered down a side alley. Ignoring those that mocked him from the eaves, Gotrek roared into the alley.

  Heaving for breath, Nikolaus stumbled after. The dwarf’s stride was short but he ran like a steam engine. And Nikolaus would not be found wanting.

  The lane angled downhill to a fog-shrouded denouement where water lapped against stone. The fog smelled of rotting algae. The ground shifted underfoot. The mess of fallen masonry became tighter as they ran. Gotrek barged through it but, taller and frailer, Nikolaus was forced to duck hanging beams, jagged brick shards knifing his bruised frame. Something behind him gave with a soft moan of surrender and collapsed. There was a rush of red dust and a chorus of coughs.

  Gotrek cackled, his axe making swift work of a pile of broken lumber.

  The scrape of agile claws permeated the fog, closing from ahead and behind. They were trapped.

  ‘To our deaths, my brethren,’ Nikolaus cried. ‘Give praise that we are spared the horrors of the End Times.’

  Nikolaus placed his hand against the wall. At once, he pulled back.

  The wall trembled.

  The whole alley was shaking. Charred, horribly organic grit drizzled from above, beaten loose by some percussive force. Nikolaus dodged a falling tile. It smashed where it fell, the broken fragments twitching with each rhythmic pulse. With nervous squeals, their pursuers withdrew. Something was coming.

  Something big.

  Gotrek slowed, a gap-toothed grin splitting his hard face. He turned his axe toward the closing thunder. It seemed to be approaching from behind a row of houses. The loose bricks visibly rattled.

  ‘Here we go. This is what my axe has thirsted for. I’ll–’

  A titanic crash resounded through the wall and it spat mortar as though it had just been hit by a cannon. Gotrek gawped, red dust plastering his face as the whole edifice began to tilt. Gotrek’s head craned back to follow the tipping wall. A brick slipped loose and cracked across his forehead, snapping him out of his shock. He growled an oath against all human handicraft as another brick struck his knee. Gotrek ran for it. The wall shed bricks like buckshot from a gun barrel as it fell, colliding with the other side of the alley with an unflinching crunch. Gotrek looked up and flung himself to the ground.

  As if mortar had suddenly become water, the whole wall simply came apart.

  Burying Gotrek Gurnisson under a mountain of brick.

  Chapter 11

  Sunrise

  Nikolaus hacked bloody phlegm into the dust cloud. Just breathing was a torture, like swallowing gravel. He coughed again onto the back of his one hand, painting his faded tattoos with blood. Even that was flecked with brick shards

  ‘Gurnisson,’ he rasped.

  Those three syllables ravaged his throat, each a greater penance than the last.

  An impression of broad shoulders wavered within the gloom, a dark spectre where the dust did not linger. It was huge. Too massive to be the Slayer, too large even for fierce Brüder Arnulf. It could only be the Beast, scourge of Ostermark, the captor of der Kreuzfahrer. The dust settled, the veil of blood-red destruction cruelly withdrawn from the titanic bulk of the Beast. Ten feet tall and almost as broad at the shoulders, it slunk within the brick haze as though inhabited by the mind of a creature a third its size. Its snout was long and distended, raked as if by its own claws, and buried a pallid face between those mountainous shoulders. Red eyes gleamed with a ravenous insanity, an intelligence that could scarcely be considered animal.

  ‘Sigmar!’

  With an appeal for vengeance, Brüder Arnulf flew past, launching himself over the mounded brick, swinging his hammer mid-air for the head of the Beast

  He was dead before he hit the ground.

  Like a bear batting at a leaping salmon, the Beast flung a monstrously bandaged fist into the man’s path. His body snapped, torso caving around the brute’s fist, and then was slapped aside. The soulless meat that had once been Brüder Arnulf punched through the weakened alley wall in a scarlet spray, coming to a final stop against an interior wall with force enough to flense his organs between the bars of his own ribcage. Blood smeared the wall as he slid limply into the wreckage. Dead.

  But not wholly still. A shadowy nimbus flickered silver across his form.

  The Beast’s shoulders heaved with mirth, a rush of mephitic breath fleeing its jaws. It cast its mad eyes down, examining the ruins beneath its feet. It shuffled back, bricks bursting to crimson showers beneath its weight. It gave the shattered brickwork a cautious sniff and then, with the absent pattern of a child with one hand in the water, drew its claws through the broken pile.

  It sought the dwarf, Nikolaus reasoned. But why?

  Not caring to wait and see, Nikolaus ensured his final words would be ones of penitence, and charged. He had no true weapon – the End Times would not be averted by axe or spear – and the Beast did not even look up as his scourge whipped across its snout. Brüder Friedrich piled in a breath behind. His mace smacked uselessly off the thick bone that knotted under the Beast’s rags like armour. With a shrug of one shoulder, the Beast hurled them back. Nikolaus howled as his feet were parted from the ground. His head struck brick and his vision swirled with colour, as though the gulls of Chaos circled for a feast of sinning flesh. He saw Schwester Karolina stumble. Her stave caught in the rubble, pitching her from her single remaining leg before she was within six feet of the Beast.

  The Beast ignored them utterly. They were nothing and it knew it. Instead, the monster lowered its snout to sniff at the body it had unearthed.

  The Slayer was still, dusted red like a cinnamon loaf, orange crest flattened under a jumble of loose brick.

  Bent onto all fours like some cadaverous hound, the Beast’s wet snout snuffled over the dwarf’s body. It lingered on the dwarf’s breeches, drawing deep. The Beast gave a snort of pleasure, a dull light gleaming within its mad eyes. With an urgency it had not previously betrayed it exhumed the body, then swiftly rolled it onto its front and pressed the dwarf’s face into the rubble with force enough to crush a man to marrow. The monster turned to the shadows and gave an angry hiss. A nervous chirrup arose in answer and a pair of black-cloaked figures scurried from hiding.

  They crouched beside the dwarf’s body and the Beast stepped back to let them work. They snatched the bones that had been stuffed into the dwarf’s breeches and stashed them in their own black wool sacks. One of the creatures then pounced onto the dwarf’s back. It bore a length of cord between two bandaged hands and set to work binding the dwarf’s wrists and ankles. Satisfied, the Beast uncoiled a whip from its right arm. With its twin tails it reminded Nikolaus of the herald of Sigmar, and he smiled.

  There was a crack and Nikolaus gasped in pain. Blood streamed from two bite marks in his chest. A poisonous fire raced through his veins, swiftly quenched by a cool numbness that promised oblivion. He flopped back. The sky was turning red. It was oddly warm.

  And he could smell burning.

  A figure approached bearing twine, but it was fading. It was Brüder Arnulf. At least it looked like him, but his face was wreathed in smoke. The apparition wavered, anger as raw as the rising sun.

  Nikolaus tried to reach out but found his hands tied.

  ‘Forgive me, brother,’ he mumbled, tongue fat, ‘we have sinned.’

  Felix dropped from the rooftop and into a crouch. The reddening sky was awash with harsh cries, but they, surprisingly, were actually the least of his concerns.

  Something was stirring within the City of the Damned.

  He looked back to the rooftop. Fog drifted across the shingles, cloaking Rudi and the others well. He shivered but, oddly, he did not feel at all cold. The new day promised to be a warm one, if a shred of sunlight could warm the mists of this benighted burgh so thoroughly. Cautiously, he crossed the alley until he came again to the main street.

  It was as he recognised it from his earlier approach, but now the way was littered with sackclothed corpses and the fog carried a coppery trace of fresh blood. Press
ing himself against the wall, he peered out, ducking back as four yapping shadows leapt between the roofs above his head and sprinted past. Each clutched a black sack as if it hid gromril or gold. Felix shifted from the alley to follow their progress. They were fleeing east. Towards the river.

  Felix took a last look back to the sanatorium while he waited for the shadow-creatures to pass out of sight. It was as quiet as a graveyard, barring the occasional shriek like a startled crow.

  A distant roar sounded, rebounding through the fog-shrouded ruin like a challenge.

  It was difficult to be certain through the fog, but it sounded like that had come from the east as well. And, much as he tried, Felix could conceive no surer way of finding Gotrek than by tracking the Beast.

  Fast as he dared, Felix left the alley behind and made after the departed scavengers. The ground was treacherous, a bed of rubble studded with corpses and weapons both ancient and new and, every so often, a fresh pack of shadows would come sprinting overhead to force him into a doorway or behind a pile of debris. Felix tried to be thankful for them, for they at least meant he would not get lost in the city’s maze of ruined streets, but he was beset by a creeping dizziness. Each breath was coming harder than the last.

  The air had ash in it; hands, boots, mail, and even his sword were similarly begrimed. It was as if the city had remade him as one of the Damned, an elemental of divine vengeance. The air was close against his skin. It carried a heat that he would have sworn had not been there just moments ago. Ashen fingers pulled out the mail collar of his shirt. He was sweating, and the metal was hot. He could almost hear the crackle of wood. The red glow on the horizon suddenly struck him as something quite different than sunrise.

  Fire.

  Silver-black, it flickered across the barren rooftops. By some witchery, the dead city burned.

  Fog banked the street ahead. Except it was no longer just fog. The dry ruin offered nothing for mortal flame to consume, yet wherever dawn’s rays fell it burned and vented a choking black smoke. Pushing his mouth into his sleeve, Felix ran into the smoke. He spluttered before the sudden surge of heat, coughed and looked around, eyes filled with tears.