by David Guymer
It was not fast enough.
A silver form crackled into being within the fleeing pack. With both hands, she took the ragged scruffs of two necks. There was a scream and a spark of fire, and a heartbeat later a pair of immolated cloaks were cast to the wind. The creatures wailed, nimbly swerved around her, but did not alter their course. They were headed for the river. Felix could see it through the smoke. The black water was eerily calm despite the shrill calls of the shadows that drove along it left to right and, muted by the fog, the unmistakable clangour of battle.
Felix moved towards it, but this time, the apparition did not depart.
The black-cloaked multitudes teemed along the quay at her back but she did not move. Her gaze was for Felix and Felix alone. She held out a hand, palm front to command him to stop. Numb with dread, he did so. The shade’s slender wrist was prickled with splinters, as if from a wooden stake, and bound in bloodied cord that fizzed like a lit taper.
‘Back, Sigmarite.’
Felix gaped, heart thumping, desperate to flee yet terrified to do so lest the apparition come for him in the time it took to blink. Her voice was cold, flat, brimming with hate. Scavengers streamed around her in blind terror. She ignored them. Before Felix even realised it he was running, hurdling a flickering pyre of rocks and sprinting for the colonnaded verandah of the large stone house on the near side of the square.
The building looked like it had been the office of a merchant. Felix could not have cared if it was the gartenhaus of the Imperial Arch-chancellor. Shoulder first, he charged up the stone steps of the verandah and straight through the front door. The oak had been sturdy enough to withstand the fire but this was an act of violence too far. The wood splintered down the middle and spilled Felix into the heaped debris scattered across the antechamber. Still moving forward, he scrambled upright and hastily snatched his bearings.
A staircase curved inside the left-hand wall toward the wreckage of a first floor gallery. Beyond it were ceiling beams and, through gaps in the roof, smoke. In the time he watched, a dozen black shadows flapped across the broken roof for the riverside beyond. The shrieks of their kin were muted, if only slightly, by the thin limestone walls. And Felix doubted that such a barrier would prove any impediment to the passage of the dead.
Several doors led off from the antechamber and Felix bolted for the one in the opposite wall. He was not thinking clearly, he knew, fleeing from the shades of the Damned towards the sounds of battle. But his racing thoughts brought him continuously to thoughts of Gotrek. He never thought his mind would equate the Slayer with safety, but right now he would have preferred his companion to all the gold in Marienburg and then some.
And where there was battle, he would surely find Gotrek, so he pulled open the door and dove through.
It led into a warehouse. The cavernous room was unbearably hot, thick black smoke belching onto the river front from the shattered door in the far wall. Through the opening came snatches of figures, dull moans, fraught screams, the slap of wood and iron against pliant flesh. Teary eyed and choking, Felix gauzed his mouth with his sleeve and forced a path through the heat.
The only light was from the fires that licked darkly at the river-facing windows. They were set into a thin strip above a creaking iron gantry, accessible by a set of wooden steps to Felix’s right. They were charred black. It was a miracle they had survived at all. Beneath the gantry, warped tracks of iron shelving ran the length of the walls. Heat had buckled them, ripping them from their corbels and splaying them across the ground. They had been melted into odd shapes, like claws. Felix took pains to avoid them. Thinking clearly enough to be wary, he angled his sword and pressed deeper.
Breathing was becoming painful. He coughed on acrid fumes, could almost feel the ash lining his lungs. The smoke churned, random eddies drawing imagined terrors into the murk. The ceiling gave an ominous creak and he glanced up. The instant he did so, he sensed movement in front of him.
She was here.
Felix stumbled back with a cry and, remembering his sword, swept the ensorcelled blade through the shade’s wrist. There was no resistance to his blow, the blade passing ineffectually through her arm and spinning him round, feet tangling and spilling him to the ground. His heart beat surrender, but a fighter’s instinct turned the fall into a roll, and he found his feet to hasten back. His back hit the ladder to the gantry. It gave an iron moan.
The shade had not followed. Smoke drifted through her as easily as had his sword, her hair gusting like sizzling motes towards the doorway. The same doorway that her presence barred.
‘Why do you haunt me?’ Felix screamed, throat hoarse from inhaling too much smoke.
The apparition merely extended its hand once again, reaching for Felix’s black eye. There was a tenderness there that bitterness could not fully expunge, but rampant heat boiled from her hand. It was not that of a warm body. It was more akin to a hot coal. Or a roasted corpse. Felix beat his hand through the shade’s arm, feeling nothing but hot smoke and then, with a strangled roar, spun and raced up the ladder to collapse onto the gantry. It shook hollowly as it took his weight, an ominous groan spreading along its length as each corbel in turn announced the imminence of its demise. He gasped and scrambled to his feet.
The iron gantry was white hot. A fiery welt pulsed across the back of his neck where he had lain on it. His mail was beginning to sizzle, his boot leather to melt, and the smell of his own singed hair pursued him as he stumbled to the windows.
Each one had been shattered inwards, as though some mighty spell had been detonated on the other side of the river. The central casement opened onto a triangular platform, ash-coated limestone projecting above the quay. The iron parts of a large derrick lay tangled, twisting under Felix’s boots as he staggered out into a scream of cold air.
An instinctual dread made him turn and stumble on the debris.
The faceless shade was at the window. Smoke wreathed her, gouting through the blasted windows. Coughing on the fumes, Felix backed off. Without making any kind of gesture, the spirit beckoned. She wanted him to join her. She wanted him to save her.
‘Back, Sigmarite.’
Was that all she could say? Continuing to back away, Felix’s foot slipped into emptiness. He kicked up into smoke, his mailed body drawing him the opposite way like a dead weight. The smoke-filled apparition suddenly surged forward, rearing large in his vision, only to then recede in what terror made slow.
He was falling.
His back hit something massive and hard.
He bit his tongue, then bounced, slamming side-on onto stone flags. He groaned. Something kicked him in the shoulder and he opened his eyes. Agile figures were vaulting over him to engage in a battle that sounded suddenly close. Taking a fevered grip on the sword still in his hand he prepared to push himself up, giving a startled yelp as a set of monstrous claws sliced beneath the underside of his collar and yanked him into the air. Felix gasped in pain. Hot blood trickled down his spine where those claws dug in. He dangled two feet from the ground at the end of a mummified trunk of an arm.
And before him snarled the Beast.
It was unhooded and for the first time Felix got a good look. Its snout was long and grey, with ebon fur peeling from eyes that glowed fierce and mad. Its black cloak was buckled with bone at its throat, swept back across its ogrish shoulders. A thick, wart-encrusted tongue licked its broken teeth as the Beast examined him with a strangely absent gaze. Its pallid tail flicked through the smog as though itself confused.
The Beast was the most debased and disfigured specimen of that already foul race that Felix had ever encountered, but he was in no doubt. The Beast was neither ghoul lord nor daemon.
The Beast was a ratman.
Chapter 12
The Claws of the Beast
With a disinterested growl, the Beast flung Felix from its claws. He sailed through smoke-filled air, then hit the ground with a metallic clank. He rolled over the broken flags like a felled log,
cloaked skaven hurdling his body as he rolled, finally fetching up against what felt like an array of legs. There was a rusted jangling of chain. For a moment he lay still, appreciating the full depth and favour of his pain.
Burned, bloodied, dizzy, he sat up.
Between the low limestone barrier of the river wall and the buttressed stone of the riverside warehouses, the dense fog seethed with cloaked rats. Felix watched as one of them smacked a steel bludgeon into the skull of a mindless, bone-plated abomination. The dark exoskeleton splintered under the blow, but the mutant expressed no pain, no shock. It came on, its bulk bearing itself and its attacker both to the flagstones. The skaven savaged the mutant’s throat, then shrieked as the thing fumbled over its face and, with a hideous absence of mind, gouged its eyes from their sockets.
Ignoring their kin-rat’s wails, more of the cloaked scavengers were tearing into the fray to lay into the dead-eyed shells of misshapen men with cudgels and nets.
The mutants advanced through the smog from the direction of the bridge, relentless in their indifference. And more were coming. Dripping wet, cloaked in rust-coloured algae, hair and clothing struck with splinters, they flopped over the lip of the river wall and fell ashore. They acted like zombies but for the breaths that made their chests rise and fall, and the way that they so freely bled and died. Dozens lay dead but twice as many more lay trussed and bound.
Wading into the fray, the Beast unspooled a whip, testing its bite with a doubled whip-crack. It was doubly barbed with bone, what looked like the incisors of some monstrous rat, and glistened with a black lacquer that made Felix think immediately of poison. The great whip snapped over the shrieking ranks of his minions, drawing strips of flesh from the misshapen multitudes that pressed them. Where the whip drew blood, mutants spasmed, went slack and fell.
Something stuck a toe in his kidney.
‘Wake up, manling. Get up and give me a hand.’
Felix coughed, thinking smoke must have gotten into his ears, and looked over his shoulder. Hurriedly, he stood. The Beast had thrown him deliberately to where two abject files of almost-humans had been lashed together, bundled against the river wall, and abandoned. They moaned to themselves, pulling limply in all directions. And in the middle of the foremost file, as belligerent amongst them as the strains of a Nordland drinking ballad in an Estalian cantata, orange crest quivering with fury, was Gotrek. The Slayer glared at the mutants that flanked him, their conflicting efforts dragging him from side to side. He spat onto the back of the gelid-fleshed abomination to his left.
‘Don’t just stand there and gawp. I refuse to meet my doom lashed to some daemon-spawned wretch and without an axe in my hand.’
Gotrek looked as though he had taken every bit as much punishment as Felix had and then some. His axe, still bolted to his bracer, dangled from its chain between his bound wrists. His face and beard were dusted red. It looked as though the dwarf had fallen under a wall.
‘Seems you were right,’ Gotrek grunted, grudgingly presenting his bound wrists to Felix’s blade. His one good eye was bloodshot. It glared beyond Felix’s shoulder to where the Beast battled. ‘The brute was after the bones. Caught me by surprise and took what I had.’
Felix carefully inserted his blade between Gotrek’s wrists and began to saw. ‘It drove us from the sanatorium too. They’re all gone. Caul, Bernhardt…’ He paused, freezing mid-stroke. ‘Damn, maybe even Rudi.’
‘You left him?’ Gotrek’s brick-dusted eyebrow arched. ‘After all you insisted the little oathbreaker come along.’
‘I thought it was for the best,’ Felix hissed. ‘I didn’t realise the city was about to sink into some fiery abyss!’
Gotrek grunted and pushed his wrists towards Felix’s sword. ‘Less with the talk, manling, and more with the blade. Or must I talk you through it?’
Felix scowled, sawing through enough of the rope’s slippery outer coating for Gotrek to rip off the rest with a triumphant roar. Felix flinched and looked around, but the skaven were far too busy to notice what was happening behind them.
‘What happened? Felix asked as Gotrek wiped oily residue onto his torn breeches, then gripped his axe in a pugnacious, two-fisted embrace. ‘Why didn’t it just kill you?’
Gotrek gave a crooked leer, running his thumb around the rim of his axe blade until it bled. He jerked his bloodied thumb over his shoulder to the Beast. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’m going to march over there, rip off its troll-ugly head, and bring it back here. You can ask it questions until you both turn blue. How does that strike you?’
Felix smiled wearily. ‘Like a Mootland summer.’
‘Ha!’ Gotrek roared, no doubt in the hope that something would take note. He started into the fray, then paused and looked back. ‘One thing, manling…’
‘Yes?’
A look of embarrassment coloured Gotrek’s brutal face as he hid his oil-smeared left wrist behind his back. ‘When you pen that final verse you have my permission to haze over certain details.’
‘If I survive to see the inside of a book again, I’ll write whatever you like.’
‘There’s the spirit,’ Gotrek replied, giving a brothers-in-arms slap that near dislocated Felix’s shoulder. It was times like these when Felix doubted whether the Slayer actually heeded a word he said. ‘Stand back, manling. My axe thirsts from chasing shadows, and only the blood of every last one of these vermin will sate it.’
Gotrek issued an ululating cry and, axe held high, charged for the skaven’s backs.
It was oddly reassuring to note that even such twisted specimens as these were still paranoid back-stabbers at their cores. The ears of the nearest twitched the second that cry left the Slayer’s lips. It turned its head just as Gotrek’s axe swept it from its shoulders. More of the skaven hissed and broke off from the mindless to face him. Gotrek laughed at their approach, ripping his axe through a brutal figure-of-eight that sent limbs, heads, as well as the suckered feelers from the manifold limbs of a mindless, spinning asunder in a grisly shower.
‘…he is my courage. I will trust and be not afraid. The Lord Sigmar is my strength and my song…’
Felix looked down, away from the Slayer as the familiar, broken voice rasped at his back. The flagellant’s eyes were glassine and half lidded, as dead as those of the mindless. His lips were flecked with spittle and moved slowly, unconscious vessels for their master’s message. He was sandwiched between two of his acolytes, the last two, and bent against the river wall within the second file of the chain gang.
Felix collected his sword and began to saw.
‘Hold on, Brüder Nikolaus,’ he murmured, painfully aware of Gotrek’s joyous howls. ‘I’ll get you out of there.’
Hurrlk thumped down a gasping, waxen-fleshed fusion of man and monster, then grasped it by the tentacles burgeoning from its clavicle and tossed it back for his minions to bind. The mindless swarmed the quay. They were clumsy, they were slow, but they were relentless. And they were numerous, like mayflies on a marsh. He had never seen so many.
Did not.
Would never.
He snarled and lashed his whip, another pair spitting froth and jerking as though ravaged by warp-lightning. It was then he noticed the waxen one was rising. It rubbed its head and moaned. Anger flared within his breast like a star thought dead. Why had it not been bound?
‘Oi, ugly!’
With a low growl, Hurrlk turned. His minions were dead or in flight. The cretinous fools; as if death held terror for one of the Damned. Surrounded by singed rags and bits of meat, the flame-fur gestured with his axe. The peeling grey flesh of Hurrlk’s lips pulled back over his pale, translucent teeth, his throat rattling like the bars of a daemon’s cage. He drew back his whip.
‘Aye, come on then. Come give this dwarf a mighty doom.’
Gotrek ducked the stroke of the monster’s whip, gritting his teeth as it parted a layer of his skin and a clutch of hair from his scalp. It did not draw blood. He rose again, glancing ov
er his shoulder as a skaven fumbled at the tear in its chest, coughed liquid foam into its cowl and fell limp. A soft-shelled mutant stumbled over its body and groped mindlessly for Gotrek’s throat. He cackled grimly and shattered its face with an elbow.
‘The lash might cow these vermin, but they’ve not a dwarfish constitution.’
The Beast swung its head furiously from side to side, as if muddled by a train of events too swift for it to follow. Unchecked, a pack of mindless pressed into its back. With a scything sweep of its tail it threw them down, a pair sent flailing over the river wall with a distant splash. Snorting and snarling, it focused its mad eyes on the dwarf.
‘That’s right, Beast, I’m going nowhere. Come to me or I come to you.’ Gotrek’s lips twisted into an expectant leer. ‘My axe thirsts.’
The Beast threw back its head and barked, a shrill burst of sound that tore the smoky gauze to scattered shreds. It stamped, dropped its shoulders, spread its monstrous arms wide enough to encompass the entire quay with their span, and then charged.
Gotrek twitched in readiness as it thundered over the broken flags. The skaven shrilled and skipped from its path, but the mindless were not nearly so cogent of their peril. A ram-horned mutant went down under a massive foot, silvery blood splattering the monster’s bandaged calf. The Beast sprung off the mutant’s ruin, a paw like a knife-studded shovel shearing towards Gotrek’s face. The dwarf stepped clear, deflecting the blow off the flat of his axe, then spun to deliver a counter that clove deep into the monster’s belly.
The Beast hollered, but did not stop, its charge bearing it right through the swing and slamming Gotrek to the ground. Gotrek wheezed as the Beast fell on top of him.
There was no skill at play; neither the instinct nor even the desire for its own survival.