Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned

by David Guymer

  The black horror shrieked, silver claws ripping for Felix’s throat. Felix fended it off as best he could, but it was like trying to discourage a wolf with a stick. He jabbed for its face, seeking to exploit the superior reach of his weapon over the daemon’s claws. It scuttled back, bunched its hindquarters, then lunged, spinning like a javelin through a blur of silver and black. Felix cried out, tried to slide clear, but a simian fist on an upward rise punched the wind from his chest and lifted him from his feet. The blow turned him over and he slammed face first into the ground.

  For a split second he clung to the tremulous flagstones, then remembered himself and rolled to his right. A black fist crunched the stones where he had been. Propped up on his elbow, Felix’s sword lashed out backhanded, severing the daemon’s arm at the elbow. It howled, but did not bleed, flares of silver balefire streaming from the stump. Felix scrambled up. The black horror gnashed its fangs and flung itself forward. Felix braced and swung, a fencing school mittlehaus hewing its unguarded chest and cracking its ribcage like a conker. Felix dived aside before it landed. The body went skidding a dozen paces before flopping to a stop.

  He just wished he had the opportunity to savour his triumph.

  Everywhere he turned, faceless shades were being pressed into humanoid bundles and given form. Felix saw one ripped from the mind of a kneeling mutant only then to thrash and condense. The mutants’ chant faltered, serried eyes blinking confusion before the newborn daemon tore its spine from its back and began to feast. Daemons freshly forced into physical form hooted and raged, feasting on corpses or bringing down uncaring mutants to slake their hunger. A monotonous whir sounded over the gibbering and shrieks. There was a crack like a pistol shot and the black horror that had been about to dive onto Brüder Nikolaus’s back took a bullet in the side of the face and went down in a broken heap. The ratmen around him looked up to the slingers on the more distant galleries and hissed.

  Uncaring, the sling-rats proceeded to rain missiles into the melee.

  Caul grabbed one of his attackers by the throat and dragged its body over him. Bullets pulverised the dying creature and raked through those still standing. Hissing pain as his shield consumed itself in acid, Caul rolled clear, thick steam rising from his cloak to cover him as he scrambled behind a pillar. The others were not so quick-witted. Sling-fire mowed through man, ratman, and daemon alike. Nikolaus roared for the aid of Sigmar as all around him fell. The bloody-eared flagellant was struck in the collar, flipping him almost head over heels so his shoulders hit the ground before his feet. The one-legged sister crashed her stave across a skaven muzzle before she too was gunned down. Felix could do nothing but watch as Rudi caught a ricochet to the temple and went down under a mound of vermin. He staggered back, powerless to help.

  From their vantages, the slingers shrieked and continued to pour down fire, widening their arc to cut a swathe through the kneeling mutants in case any man hid amongst them. Anything to ensure the ritual proceeded unhindered.

  The ritual.

  With an effort, Felix dragged his attention towards the altar and the sorcerers that surrounded it. They were the ones bringing these daemons into being. It was them that would break the daemon prince from its cage. Felix shielded his eyes, squinting directly into the aethyric glare.

  The baleful light revealed a hulking silhouette. It grew large as Felix watched, like a body rising from the river’s bottom until, in a ripple of silver fire, it broke the surface. Jolts of energy burst around its armoured bulk, writhing in the darkness that leeched from its unholy exoskeleton. Golkhan the Anointed clenched his fists and roared, leaping from the altar and ripping his claymore from its scabbard.

  A second figure was already there waiting for him.

  Hefting his axe, Gotrek charged.

  Rudi gasped for air, overcome by the strongest sense that his spirit re-inhabited his body after a lengthy absence. Empty, foul-smelling cloth was draped over him and the only reasonable response his body could give to that first rush of breath was to vomit it back up. Spluttering on the bitter taste in his mouth, he rose, experienced a swirl of dizziness but managed to hold himself up.

  Coloured lights jagged across the ceiling. The floor trembled. The air was thick and odorous, like pickled meats, and filled with howls as though he had been deposited on the threshold of hell. His heart stilled. What if he had? Had he not always been told that such was the fate of those who failed Sigmar?

  He coughed, hawking a partially digested lump of gristle from the back of his throat and tried to calm down. He was not dead. His heart was beating too fast for that, and the difficulty he was having drawing in the sickly sweet air attested to the fact he was still breathing. The last thing he remembered with genuine clarity was the river, crossing that strange haunted battlefield with Caul Schlanger. And even that was muggy.

  Rudi got feet beneath him and stood. He saw the corpses of two of Nikolaus’s followers. He did not know how they had gotten there, but then he was not certain how he had gotten here. It looked like they had fallen well, heaped beneath Sigmar’s enemies. From the fallen gear scattered around them it was not difficult to find a weapon, a short sword for his sword hand and a dagger for his left, as he had always favoured.

  There was one thing Rudi still did know for certain. He was a man of Sigmar, blood of Magnus, and he had come here for a purpose.

  He looked up, squinted. There was a star. A star in the centre of a fallen temple, as if the gods had torn away the sky and set it here that it might shine free.

  A figure strode from the glare. For a moment it looked like von Kuber, but he had only seen the baron once before, and then from afar. He was clearly mistaken. This man was as tall as der Kreuzfahrer, but clad in bone-plaited black armour that shone with malice. His eyes glowed dully silver within the sockets of a horned skull. The Chaos warrior roared a challenge, thundering from the glare to engage another figure that, now Rudi’s eyes had adapted, he saw was none other than Gotrek Gurnisson.

  Staggering to the dwarf’s aid like a dead man towards the light, Rudi paused.

  The flagstones trembled, but it was due to something other than that which shook this chamber to its roots. Something was approaching, something big. A deep, animal roar sounded from a distant quarter. Turning slowly to face it, Rudi lowered his weapons. He exhaled a single word.

  ‘No…’

  Golkhan’s blade met Gotrek’s axe, hell-forged onyx and starmetal blue colliding in a prismatic hail of sparks. Gotrek ripped his axe back and smashed the haft sideways into the warrior’s midriff. The champion retreated a pace, stealing the blow of strength, and thumped his pommel stone into the dwarf’s chin. His jaw cracked, the blow spinning him, blood spraying. He swung a reversed blow to counterbalance, axe shearing for Golkhan’s left knee joint. The Chaos warrior parried it.

  ‘You’re trying too hard,’ the champion laughed. ‘How like a dwarf.’

  ‘I heard you used to be someone I’d feel bad about killing.’ Gotrek scowled, rubbing his bearded chin and spitting a gobbet of blood. ‘How like a man.’

  Golkhan circled, ignoring the daemons that rampaged through his followers around him and the crackling energies at his back.

  ‘Are you not going to ask me why? Is that not what heroes do?’

  ‘I don’t need to ask,’ Gotrek growled. ‘You were given a duty without end and you grew weary of the honour.’ He pivoted on the spot to shadow the Chaos warrior’s steps, spinning his axe in one fist until it hummed with menace. ‘Your ancestors were of a nobler age. I send you to them with my apologies.’

  ‘Evil begets evil, Slayer. The world is rotten. Be’lakor promises a clean end.’

  ‘I make you no such pledge,’ Gotrek growled. ‘First I’ll kill you, then that lot,’ Gotrek pointed to the sorcerers concealed within their magical shield. ‘And then, if he ever dares show himself, your daemon lord.’

  Laughter, sonorous as a punch to the diaphragm, reverberated between column and stone. The sorcer
ous star rippled before its power like a soap bubble in a gale. Golkhan acclaimed his patron’s voice with a grin.

  ‘I am no one’s subject. The Master is but the herald of he who is greater, tasked with crowning the Everchosen to lead the armies of the End Times. So you see he must be allowed to rise. Without him there can be no end.’

  Gotrek drove a feint for Golkhan’s left shoulder, forcing the warrior into a parry.

  ‘Fight me already, you petty blowhard.’

  The Chaos warrior stepped back, baring his armoured chest with a flourish. ‘I was peerless before I was gloried. And look at me now! I will cut you into pieces, limb by limb. I will slave your soul to Be’lakor’s will, that you might bear my banner to the Wastes. You will be at my side as I claim the crown of the Everchosen and bring about the end of days!’

  Wielding his massive claymore one-handed, the Chaos warrior attacked with a scream. Gotrek blocked the first stroke, just barely, suffering a deep cut to his left bicep and supplying a vicious dent to the warrior’s breastplate in kind. The champion retaliated with a torrent of blows that Gotrek matched, scowl fixed. The dwarf ducked a reaping swing, losing a scrap from his crest, then roared forwards, ramming the shoulder of his axe into the champion’s armpit. The warrior grunted and stumbled. Gotrek’s axe flashed across his pectoral plate, splitting a fragment of rib. Golkhan howled in agony as if it had been his own bones severed, clutching the break in one hand and sending a wild riposte that Gotrek blocked with ease. The champion came again, a maddened belly thrust that Gotrek batted down, his counter shearing a strip of bone from the warrior’s vambrace and sending the great champion of Chaos into convulsions on the floor.

  Gotrek circled around him and kicked him in the belly.

  ‘Limb by limb, was it?’

  ‘That axe,’ Golkhan moaned, shoving himself back along the flagstones. Unsteadily he rose, using the horns of a kneeling mutant to haul himself up. He touched the shaven bone of his forearm and grimaced. ‘The white witch warned me about that axe.’

  Gotrek presented the blade like an oar to a drowning man. ‘It’s not done with you yet.’

  Golkhan gripped his claymore in both hands and flew into the attack. His first blow hammered into Gotrek’s guard like a tree striking a mountain. The claymore rebounded. The Chaos warrior hissed but came on, leading with his spiked spaulder to split Gotrek’s cheek and spill him to the ground between the champion’s legs. Golkan laughed, legs bestriding the recumbent dwarf, claymore upended for a killing drive. Gotrek’s feet scissored through both of Golkan’s feet, sending the warrior crashing to his back with an outraged roar. Both fighters grabbed for their weapons, rose as one, and struck blades with another furious spark.

  Panting, Golkhan drew back. Gotrek began to chuckle, wiping a speck of blood from his eyebrow and rubbing it into his beard.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ the champion wheezed.

  ‘I’ve suffered worse picking my nose.’

  Golkhan snarled, but backed further, hand clutched to the broken rib.

  I gift you an apportionment of my own might and still you fail me, Golkhan.

  The disembodied voice rumbled over the anarchic bloodletting that filled its temple, impossible to ignore as a volcanic eruption in a thunder storm.

  If becoming Everchosen of Chaos was nothing more than wearing a crown, then I could have chosen any mortal of a hundred thousand.

  ‘Your champion is weak, like elven bladders,’ Gotrek roared, lifting his face to seek the voice’s source amidst the dark distortions and daemonic howls. ‘Face me yourself. Unless your courage is better hidden even than your foul hide.’

  Gotrek son of Gurni, you would challenge a god. Your audacity amuses.

  ‘Stay away!’ Golkhan shouted. ‘I need no aid.’

  A deep bellow sounded close by; the daemon’s laughter boomed through it.

  You forget yourself, vessel. There is but one Dark Master.

  Across the tumult of shrieking ratmen, chanting mutants, rampaging daemons, the whip-crack of sling-fire and the shaking walls, one of the myriad portals rippled with energy.

  A gigantic form emerged. Its muscular body was hunched, bound in dark rags. It turned in Gotrek’s direction, lowered its hooded snout, flexed its fists and issued a titanic bellow every bit as mighty as the voice of Be’lakor.

  ‘Grimnir’s bloody crest,’ Gotrek swore. ‘I saw that monster downed by my own axe.’

  The Beast was shoved aside to make way for an identical twin. The newcomer ignored the angry jaws of the first, cracking the twin tails of its rat-bone whip into the daemonic host.

  They had wondered how it could be in two places at once.

  What is death, Slayer, when time has no meaning? Be’lakor’s laughter turned mocking. Consider that, as you welcome death in my dominion.

  Chapter 21

  The End Times

  For centuries, the bitterness of the Damned had festered, been allowed to become fury. Now, by the power of the Dark Master, they had been granted form, powerful limbs and killing claws with which to vent that long-frustrated rage upon the living. All of the living. Alone or in rampant packs, they ripped into the surviving mutants, charging down the fusillades of the withdrawing skaven.

  From the galleries, the skaven unleashed salvo after salvo onto any that approached too close. A pack of horrors overwhelmed one such position. The ratmen defended it with a fury and then, as scenting a signal, gave a collective squeal and broke, making the absurd leap from that gallery to the next. The black horrors bounded after them only for a hail of fire to beat their punished bodies back to the ground. Despite their efforts, their ferocity and their weapons, the skaven were pushed back, rallying at the last around the great bulwark of the Beast. Its bellows shook from column to column, its whip striking down black horrors with every stroke.

  Felix had not the time, or the vaguest inkling of where to begin, to consider how that fallen monster had gotten here, nor how its mirror twin was even now crashing through the black horrors like a mounted Reiksguard through goblin bowmen.

  It was charging towards Gotrek.

  His companion saw the monster closing, thumped Golkhan off the shoulder of his axe, then swerved to avoid the swipe of its claws. The Beast hollered like a branded giant and struck again. Gotrek ducked under its arm, coming up to parry a tirade of blows from Golkhan’s blade, then sent the champion reeling with a backhand blow in time to evade a punch from the Beast that would have taken the head off a troll.

  Clearly, the Beast was not dead.

  Felix had journeyed to the Chaos Wastes, been transported through daemon-infested pathways to mystical islands, but this was the first time that Gotrek’s quest had taken them to a realm where time itself had no consequence. He took his sword in a hardened grip. Fluids he had no name for greased his face and gloves, threatening his sight and making his grip slippery. He closed with his companion.

  By Sigmar, it would be the last.

  A black horror skidded across his path. Felix hacked it down. A hand grabbed the back of his knee. Felix cried out, kicked back. The hand let go and a body fell. He spun round, lifting his sword two-handed to sever whatever came for him now.

  A man lay before him. Two faces contested one head, both its mouths frozen in their repetitious cant. Its four eyes looked into Felix’s two, and it shivered. The shiver became a twitch, then a spasm, and the mutant doubled over in agony. Fingers clawed at the black flagstones, shoulder blades rippling beneath flesh that was becoming harder and darker by the moment. Felix stepped around its grunting, half-made form and struck its head from its shoulders.

  What insanity was this? Was this the reward these creatures had been expecting for their service to the daemon prince?

  Somehow he doubted it.

  Felix looked across the shaking chamber to see the same change being enacted over and over, flesh and shadow equivalent in their damnation. Even one of the fleeing ratmen shrieked and began to convulse before its comrades hacked
it apart and tossed the pieces to the closing horrors. Felix felt an itch beneath his skin. Surely his imagination. There was no sign of hardening flesh or warping bone. But then he was not one of the Damned. He thought of the women and children of Die Körnung and his heart broke.

  This was why Morschurle had been commanded to remain.

  These people had been innocent, before corruption had warped their bodies and anger their minds. This madness had to be stopped. And it had to be done now.

  The Beast bellowed, thumped its chest and threw a left hook. Gotrek’s parry drew blood from its knuckles. The monster barked, then swung its right and missed, pulping a black horror that had been readying to pounce on the dwarf’s back. Gotrek saw the daemon crash to earth, grinned, and grabbed the flapping end of a bandage from the Beast’s snout. The Beast snorted as Gotrek yanked down its snout, cracking a clutch of teeth with a head butt that sent it sprawling. Gotrek cackled, but a second later was on the ground himself, the guard of Golkhan’s claymore smashing into the base of his skull.

  Felix accelerated into a run.

  Golkhan pinned the dwarf beneath his boot, the tip of his sword parting the crusted beard like a beggar seeking bare flesh at a brothel. His gauntlets capped the pommel stone for a beheading drive.

  Felix closed the remaining distance and then, with a yell, lunged into a flying tackle that ripped Golkhan from his feet and sent them both rolling across the floor.

  By the twin virtues of luck and his foe’s surprise, Felix came up on top and smashed the flat of blade into Golkhan’s face. And again. Golkhan snarled, the shadow of a grin playing within his bone helm, and he punched up with an open fist. It caught Felix a glancing blow under the nose, but it jerked him back as though struck by a hammer. Black spots were summoned to his eyes, there to detonate with a force felt at the back of his skull.

  Or was that his head striking the flagstones?

  Had he really just seen Gotrek hit square in the head and get back up? Not for the first time, he marvelled at the thickness of his companion’s skull.