Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned

by David Guymer

  But, even without the warrior’s voice-distorting helm, Felix could not mistake the cries of Golkhan the Anointed.

  The energies of Chaos roared through Morzanna’s veins like floodwaters through the cities of men. It purged, it renewed, it reminded the forgetful of its power. Retaining a grip on her sanity was challenge enough, her torment on a plane that surpassed anything Golkhan could suffer or conceive. Slaaneshi princes would have spent a year in solitude for a portion of what she felt now. Straining every sinew of her will to each ritual word, she fought to keep her head above the flood.

  She was aware of the others’ suffering as she was of the pulse in her thigh, the ache in her fingers. They hurt as she hurt, cried as she cried. Through the guileless veil of the firmament they were connected. To her left, Ubek panted with the effort of matching her. Nosta’s piteous wails passed through the minds of all as an understanding of true power finally bludgeoned its way into their skulls.

  The gates are opened, spoke Be’lakor, words manifesting simultaneously into each sorcerer’s mind. Now you are ready to begin.

  New instructions appeared in Morzanna’s mind. In that one moment she knew his intent and, through her, the others learned it too. She felt their horror as if it was her own. It went far beyond the creation of a champion. She struggled to keep up with the Dark Master’s bidding. The air was already thick with magicks and it resisted. A force of attraction drew on her temples as though to rip her soul through the roof of her skull.

  The world was changing, realities aligning. The ground rumbled beneath her feet and her body overflowed with the warping power of Chaos, spilling from her pores to lance through the eight points of the star.

  With one mouth and one mind, the sorcerers screamed.

  The black temple rumbled, the columns shaking. The Chaos star rippled and sparked, flaring across Golkhan’s armour as the champion widened his stance to keep from falling. The willow-thin mutants that flanked him swayed. The captivated mutants kept up their chant as if the acropolis was not being shaken apart around them. The walls shook again, harder this time and for longer, and Felix crouched behind a column, inexplicably terrified that the rattling of his mail would betray his presence to the keen-eared skaven. He was so intent on what he was seeing, that he failed to notice the arrival of Caul Schlanger at his side. The man’s face was impassive, his eyes cutting across the disordered rings of kneeling mutants to the warrior within that sorcerous star.

  The gaunt features of Golkhan the Anointed were stained silvery black by the energies that shot around him. And he seemed to have grown. A horned shadow loomed over his shoulder, and his armour was bulkier than Felix remembered. For where once the black plates had been run with hollow channels, now there were bones. They interlocked as smoothly as they would have done when bound in that giant’s flesh, as though one champion of Chaos had been subsumed into the living skeleton of another. Arms spread in rapture, Golkhan tilted back his head and knelt. Felix could see his face clearly. He was grey-eyed, with furrows in his forehead and silver in his dark hair. Balefire raced across his ossified armour.

  Slowly, Caul slipped a knife from his baldric. Then another.

  ‘Too late,’ he hissed.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Felix replied, unconsciously adopting the man’s whisper.

  Gotrek was standing nearby, searching over the mutants’ bowed heads for a sign of the daemon prince. Rudi and the flagellants mingled together by the portal. Rudi looked around in confusion, but clearly none of them had a clue where they were or where they had just been.

  ‘It looks like they aren’t finished yet.’

  As he spoke, the two mutants that shared Golkhan’s incandescent cage stepped behind his genuflecting bulk, arms describing an arch with, at its top, a horned and thick-browed skull. Balefire defiled its bleached surface to a densely shadowed silver. The warrior tensed, jaw clenched ready, palms balled into fists. The skull closed over his cheeks, fusing to the vertebral column embedded in his backplate and coif.

  The champion’s tormented howl sent a shudder through the enveloping magicks and out across the floor, the hellish lights a fitting shrine for this apotheosis of pain.

  Golkhan doubled over, then arched back, fingers grasping under the jawbone as if to rip it off. But it was fused more rigidly than his own bones. The chant of the mutants pitched higher. Even the formerly lethargic ratmen leaned from their galleries and chittered excitedly amongst themselves. Still screaming, the champion struggled to stand. He crashed to his side as the floor shook, torment flowing like a libation to the Dark Master. Sheet lightning crackled across the ceiling.

  A silver spark leapt from Felix’s sword, earthing in his fingers with a sharp crack.

  ‘It’s over,’ Caul repeated, ‘because that...’ With his knife, he pointed to the Chaos warrior who was now climbing to his feet, fists clenched in acclamation of their own resurgent strength.

  ‘That is Baron Götz von Kuber.’

  Chapter 20

  Black Horror

  Their champion’s howls did not signal the end of the sorcerers’ work. If anything, it marked its beginning. Power flashed across the eight points of the Chaos star, earthing into the material in fiery tracers of dark energy and a terrific rumbling that shook the deep chamber to its core. Crouched behind a pillar, Felix set his palms to the floor as the whole edifice trembled. It was warm.

  ‘Tricked,’ Caul hissed, calm melting down to a terrible wrath. ‘Me! The Beast did not capture Götz; it just slaughtered his escort so he could escape.’ Caul’s voice was rising in pitch and fury. Felix grabbed his shoulder to shake the man quiet but he was having none of it. He shouldered Felix off and flipped a knife into a throwing grip. ‘The fire is too good for him. The flames would sooner gutter and die.’ With a scream, and before Felix could stop him, Caul flung the knife.

  The blade hissed through the charged air, streaking a perfect course for Golkhan’s open mouth. It struck the energy field. There was a brilliant flash and tempered steel tore itself asunder in a luminous hail. Caul snarled and drew back his second blade, but this time Felix was ready and grabbed his wrist, slapping down Caul’s second hand as the man grasped for the knife. Felix twisted the man’s wrist to dislodge his grip but the man held the knife as though double-jointed and wriggled loose, shoved Felix back and shaped to backhand the blade across his unguarded throat.

  ‘I told you to never touch me,’ he hissed. But he held his strike, looking over Felix’s shoulder.

  A sibilant hiss pulled Felix around. A ratman dropped from the nearest gallery. Another followed, scabrous feet meeting the floor with a delicacy incongruous with the hatred in its eyes. The mutants kneeling around the Chaos star continued their chant, too absolved of wit to recognise what was happening at their back, but from galleries all around the chamber ratmen noticed the intrusion. They shrieked outrage and – if Felix was not mistaken – terror.

  With a gravelly chuckle, Gotrek limbered his axe arm. He paid the ratmen no mind, his one eye for Golkhan alone. And he would butcher every mutant between them whether they deigned to notice or not. Felix tucked in behind the Slayer, pressed his own back to his and angled his sword against the closing skaven.

  He hated this part.

  While he might not choose to visit Ostermark of this era again, had he the option of returning to an Altdorf tavern to dissuade a young poet from making the acquaintance of a certain Trollslayer, then he might consider it.

  ‘Ready, manling?’

  Felix shook off his thoughts, giving the Slayer an incredulous look. ‘Are you?’

  Gotrek’s grin was infectious. ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

  The mutant did not utter a sound as Gotrek’s axe clove head from body. A gout of arterial blood drove the severed appendage eight inches from its neck and on an arcing trajectory like a hobgoblin rocket, leaving a haemic contrail until it smacked into the side of another’s face. It did not notice. The Slayer jovially severed its spine, then crack
ed the jaw of the mutant knelt beside it with the haft. The dwarf shoved both bodies aside, and barged through to the next. The chant continued unabated. The mutants acceded to the Slayer’s axe with the apathy of martyrs.

  Felix retreated over his companion’s leavings, stumbling on limbs as he fended off the hissing ratman that was trying desperately to get around him. It feinted, dodged, probed, then like the sudden crack of a whip followed through with its off-hand weapon. Felix swiftly reoriented to counter the mazy knife-work, parrying the blade before it plunged under his mail shirt. Already he was sweating, lungs heaving in the thick air.

  By Sigmar, these rats were fast.

  Nearer the portal, Caul Schlanger was similarly engaged. His grey cloak flowed between two opponents as though the three of them danced, ribbons of blood cast for the acclamation of the crowd. But his audience was in an unappreciative frame. More ratkin were descending from the nearest gallery and the three flagellants battered into them like sealers from the frozen north. The vermin were swifter and more agile, but the men failed to heed the wounds they took. Flesh split and bones cracked, only to then fall upon their would-be killers and rip them apart with bare hands and a vicious fervour. Rudi fought right alongside them.

  The ceiling gave a sudden groan and the temple shuddered.

  Felix swayed for balance as the ratman, already spinning into its next attack, stumbled. Its arms swam to keep itself up, but when the ground pitched a second time it was tossed onto its back. Felix ran it through. His sword struck stone and he pulled it back. There was a look of hatred in the creature’s eyes, right until the moment its head dissolved into green vapour.

  Felix left it and sought out Gotrek. The Slayer was not hard to find.

  He had gotten ahead, cutting a corridor of bloody ruin for Felix to follow. Blank, blood-spattered mutants flanked the path. Their empty, mindless chant made his skin crawl. Between every mutant, there wavered a dozen faceless spectres. They attended the ritual, but their mere presence was enough to make Felix’s skin flush as if it burned. If Gotrek saw them he did not share Felix’s dread. The dwarf’s axe glowed, streaming with vaporous tendrils as he barged through. The shades did not regard him, and simply reformed once he was past.

  One of the spectres twitched.

  Felix rounded on it with a yell, his blade passing through it as smoothly as Gotrek’s body.

  The apparition began to spasm. It fell to the ground, smoke churning through its body, thickening into what looked almost like claws that gouged into the flagstones. Felix backed away, warding it with the full length of his blade as it writhed upon the ground. Was it possible he had hurt it? Smoke knit together into muscle before his eyes, twitching with each spasmodic pulse of dark magic. Its arms turned black and gnarled, stretching to ape-like proportions. Its head, though vaguely human, sank into its shoulders. Its eyes gleamed a quiet blue, captive shards of the damned soul to which this body now belonged. It bared its teeth, dark lightning spitting across the salivary skein that sheathed its maw.

  Felix recalled the dark tendrils he had witnessed emanating from the Chaos star, how the shades had been drawn to them, turned savage, how those tentacles had reached past him for the City of the Damned.

  On dumb instinct, Felix readied his guard.

  And the first black horror of Be’lakor pounced.

  Morzanna screamed the words her patron bade her utter. She could no longer hear the voices of the others, just power, pounding through her skull like the pulse of a god, crackling before her eyes like grey lightning. It was a lot, but she could control it. Just. The world lurched, and Morzanna was one of the few that did not heave with it. She was an anchor, her will sharpened by the present as a hook for time itself. Realities that for two centuries she had not even considered separate were reuniting.

  And she understood what Be’lakor planned.

  A ritual of a power and scope that had not been attempted since the Great Ritual of Nagash. What was such a working to one who had measured his existence in aeons long before ancient Nehekhara felt the tread of the Great Necromancer? Be’lakor would heal the flailing tear in time the Pious had left behind. With minds like hers as glue, he would unite the broken shards and drag the City of the Damned, whole, five centuries into the era of the End Times.

  It was terrifying in its audacity.

  But Morzanna was one mind. Even she was not powerful enough to draw an entire city from its cell in time. There were others. Morzanna could feel them, connected by a shared experience of time, the Slayer and his human companion, the hermit and his devotees, Golkhan the Anointed. Their spirit auras sharpened to flickering points. Reality compressed around them.

  Her tortured awareness expanded, and gladly, distance no boundary to a seeress with body and soul flooded with the stuff of Chaos. Across the damned city of Mordheim, buildings phased in and out of existence, as though the city itself sifted through a billion iterations before settling on that which it would occupy for eternity. Buildings rose and fell, were burned and then remade, then changed.

  Across it all shades slipped through the cracks of time, thrashing as their bodies hardened and changed. From those displaced souls would the Dark Master forge an army, a host that Golkhan, invigorated by his patron’s might, would lead from their city, march upon the Wastes, and wrest the crown of the Everchosen for himself. Be’lakor would usurp the chosen of the Great Four.

  And he would announce his triumph with the ashes of the End Times.

  Shuddering in pain, Morzanna’s focus spun towards a troop of men, saw them storm across the bridge and, with a mighty horse-drawn wagon at their head, into the narrow streets of the city. Almost at once, the growing legion of black horrors descended upon them. There was screams, a peremptory crackle of musket-fire, the waving of banners and the vainglorious charge of the pious. She saw the wagon itself crash over the first wave and into the ruins of the city’s roads.

  Though ignorant of the Master’s true ambition, Morzanna had cultivated his cat’s paw to perfection.

  Her spirit-sight grasped upon Konrad Seitz.

  The man was exactly as he appeared in his own dreams. He stood tall at the forefront of his wagon as a deluge of black horrors loped from alleys, walls, and sewers. The men rallied to their captain. They would survive long enough to draw the city into their time. In valour, Konrad would assure the Master’s rise.

  As much as his traitorous liege, von Kuber, ever had in spite.

  The chatter of repeater handguns filled Konrad’s ears, spitting Grey Mountain lead into the smoke. The heavier thump of a Hochland long rifle sounded from the war wagon’s rear, pitching a black horror from its perch atop a ruined wall. Sulphurous black smoke washed across the wagon’s open top. The men coughed, but did not for a second dare relax their trigger fingers.

  The war wagon of the von Kubers was a scarred veteran of the Great War. Its hoary oak chassis was plated with iron, a curtain wall that surrounded the forecastle of the driver’s perch. Rain beat at the grey pennants that rippled from each corner of its ramparts, droplets sliding down slack reins to the disembowelled remnants of the four horse team.

  The driver was dead.

  Arch-Lector Hans-Jorgen Gramm hunched over him, hands drenched from his efforts to staunch the flow. Konrad climbed onto the driver’s bench, tried to make out the temple of Sigmar shown him in his dreams, but could not for the fog and drizzle.

  ‘Men of Sigmar, blood of Magnus!’

  A bounding horror galloped across the tenement tight to the wagon’s right and leapt. Like a diving eagle, it plummeted for the fortified wagon. Coolly bringing his pistol to bear, Konrad blasted a hole through its chest. Its twitching corpse landed near the eviscerated horses, amidst the constricting circle of priests and peasants that were being pressed back towards the wagon. One of them righteously beheaded the thing with a hoe.

  ‘Folk of Ostermark,’ Konrad roared, fishing in his pouch for fresh shot and drawing up his powder horn, without pause for breath. �
��If we die, then we die doing Sigmar’s work. For von Kuber, for the Empire, and for Sigmar!’

  The beleaguered men roared their love for the god of men and readied hooks and scythes for the daemonic harvest.

  ‘Passable last words, my lord,’ Gramm rasped. He tried to roll the driver’s body from the forecastle but had not the strength in his arms, and settled instead for drawing up the man’s mace for himself.

  ‘I am no one’s lord,’ Konrad retorted, thumping the hammer talisman worn upon the heart of his mail. It rested upon the heraldic comet of von Kuber. ‘I have two lords.’

  The two men swayed as the wagon beneath them shook. Konrad leaned over the high walls of the forecastle, tracked his aim along its flanks, convinced they had just been rammed. But it was not just them.

  The whole city was shaking.

  The sky bled with colour, the blazing arc of sunlight beginning to fragment, to constrict. The entire sky phased in and out as if seeking some kind of equilibrium. Konrad’s skin prickled and rose, every hair on his arms taut as though being drawn upward. As if Konrad himself was in some way responsible for reining the heavens into plane.

  With a snarl he discharged his pistol into a daemon’s back. He did not know what was happening and he did not care. With smooth precision, he reloaded. As Götz had always said, they were warriors, and they would see this end. One way or another.