Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned

by David Guymer

  You have nothing! If I am not freed then the End Times will never come. The world will linger. It will suffer and never die.’

  The stricken champion snarled, but the desperation in the daemon prince’s voice swayed him. With a stab of pain, he removed his hand from his mangled shoulder. The black armour of Be’lakor had sealed the wound in an agonising mulch of curdled blood and hell-steel. There was little blood, but it hurt like salt in an open wound. He swept his gaze across the black hordes. The last of the mutants had been changed or slain, the ratmen had fled for the portals. Even his own lieutenants were gone. He would have cursed Be’lakor for his foot soldiers’ indiscriminate bloodlust had he not known from the beginning what would happen to the mutants once they changed.

  As he looked past one of the many silvery portals, he caught a sweep of grey from behind a column.

  One of his.

  Golkhan gave a triumphal snarl. Men could always be trusted over beasts, rats, daemons, and witches. He lifted his arm, fist clenched in salute.

  ‘You!’ Get to the altar and deal with those thr–’

  The thrown knife slammed between his eyes, near ripping his head from his shoulders but for the ungodly strength of his gorget and vertebral plates. His armoured body struck the ground, dead before it did so.

  Be’lakor howled helpless fury, straining to tear the world apart with the power of his bare claws.

  Across the chamber, from behind a trembling column of obsidian black, Caul Schlanger gave a thin smile, setting three more identical knives in parallel lines upon the floor. Satisfied with the ordered arrangement, he looked up towards the Chaos star. Before it had sparked with a periodic brilliance. Now it blazed like a bound star. And Caul had been schooled in magic well enough to recognise a misspell that had passed well the point of no return.

  He threw a farewell salute to the screaming daemon prince and, whistling a dirge, turned back towards the portal for the city. Jaeger and his company had left him for dead in the house of Shallya.

  It was only fair that he returned the favour.

  ‘We rejoice in our sufferings,’ Nikolaus intoned. His voice was level even as his body burned. ‘Suffering brings endurance, endurance strength, strength triumph.’

  His soul was being weighed by fire, cleansed, sins as kindling for the flames of judgement. And he had many sins. More than enough to consume his unworthy flesh. It was right the white lady should be here with him. She was not real, he knew. At least they had likely never met outside his dreams. It did not matter. Nor had he ever met Sigmar. It was what they represented; old lives and new, sin and salvation.

  It was not just the white lady with him now. Here was Brüder Arnulf, all aggressive pride, and there strove Schwester Karolina. Her body was whole again, and she was beautiful. The realisation stirred nothing within him, his detumescence divine.

  He had been purified.

  His skin was blistering, peeling black, lead ink turning molten and dribbling over bare bone.

  Like a man of Sigmar, he embraced the pain.

  The war wagon of Baron Götz von Kuber rocked like a storm-tossed greatship between the black horrors that scaled its flanks. A sergeant of the moralpolizei struck down from the rearcastle with the butt of his Hochland long rifle. It cracked the daemon’s jaw, shaking its grip and throwing it down amongst the unholy creatures that swarmed the wagon’s ironclad wheels. Another mounted the battlements, sunken face snarling before receiving the full fusillade of a pair of repeater handguns. Both weapons clicked to empty and the headless corpse fell. The men gasped in relief. Another horror scaled the sides behind them. One man spun, unloaded his emptied chamber point blank into its belly, then shrieked as the daemon ripped the guts from his still shuddering belly.

  Konrad Seitz shouted for order, for the men of Sigmar to stand tall to the last. But there were too few left. The baronial banner had been trampled into the ash, the horn split, his musician slain. A handful of peasants could still be heard, fleeing for the river with a pack of horrors in loping pursuit. The rest lay dead in rings around the wagon, like the lines through a tree trunk marking an account of massacre and retreat. His own guard lay amongst them, men and boys, templar knights and warrior priests.

  All dead.

  A black horror sprung from the melee that consumed the wagon’s rear and onto the high battlements of the forecastle. With a snarl, Konrad span, rammed his dragoon pistol halfway down the daemon’s throat and pulled the trigger. The back of its skull blew back over the wagon in a sticky vapour.

  ‘Men of Sigmar!’ he bellowed, though he stood alone.

  Hans-Jorgen’s eyes stared wide and accusing to the heavens. A great tear split his vestments and coloured his pale chest red. Konrad holstered his pistol and drew his sword.

  ‘Blood of Magnus!’ he roared, climbing over his battlements to drop into the wagon’s rear, hacking open a gibbering horror as he landed.

  The handful of men parted without a word to admit him to their ranks. The daemons closed, but Konrad stood amongst equals and as equals they would perish. His heart swelled with courage and filled his veins with pride. Konrad clenched his sword and screamed. His comrades beside him did likewise.

  And suddenly he did not feel nearly so alone.

  Felix groaned. Rudi and Nikolaus were faltering, but the barrier was ready to give. He knew it. He had pushed it so far that the aethyric skin was bent around him, stretched so thin that he could see the agony on the sorcerers’ faces. They had all to endure only a little longer. He ground his teeth and pushed hard. His muscles screamed from the effort. But where he pushed, the legions of the Damned pushed with him. They were innumerable, thousands upon thousands. There were farmers, fishwives, merchants and priests. And there were warriors. Felix saw the outline of armour and axes, Magnus’s army, the shades of those that had once battled Chaos and would now battle it once more at Felix’s side.

  Had he really been so scornful of human nature that he could believe such men would fall to bitterness and rage, have thrown in their lot with the harbinger of the End Times?

  He was a fool, but right now he was a glad and righteous fool.

  Then, within the electric glare of power and fire, Felix caught sight of something that stole his breath.

  He was tall, proud, armed and armoured like an emperor, silver smoke coiling within an open helm. Its wavering shield bore a griffon rampant, the heraldic mark of Magnus the Pious. Felix’s heart swelled until it might burst.

  All who ever lived. All who ever died.

  That was what Caul had said. They were the Damned. Of course the Pious himself would be here amongst them. Amongst his own.

  An electric shock bit his wrists, the vengeful strike of a dying serpent. He felt an end within his grasp. The flashes illuminated a faceless spectre at his side. It was a woman, wreathed in mistletoe and gowned in scorched taffeta. The faceless sister could not smile, but her warmth was comforting, and Felix felt her tenderness. She helped him, as she always had.

  And together with a thousand others, they pushed through the last vestige of resistance.

  Morzanna felt the commands of Be’lakor, shivering like a quake from the ocean’s depths. The voice commanded, it threatened, it cajoled and it pleaded. But it only made it worse. It was hopeless. It was the daemon prince’s own fault and it knew it. She smiled, as if the imminence of death gave her permission to be disobedient.

  She had always known the Slayer would be the destroyer of them all.

  ‘No, Morzanna. Fight. Do not believe that death can free yourself from me.’

  Death.

  The notion widened Morzanna’s smile. Shadows crept from her eyes like tears, tenebrous threads coiling about her throat and enwrapping her arms in darkness. They pulled her down. Her chest burned, straining not for air but for a release from the power that filled them. One by one the sorcerers fell, blood streaming from their noses and eyes. They were envious, hateful, and treacherous. She despised them all, as much as she d
id herself. Ubek was the last, his lips parted in a hateful sneer that froze into a rictus as his blind eye blinked shut for the first and only time.

  ‘Death,’ she whispered, her flesh igniting with silver-black fire even as she drowned. She closed her eyes, unable to bear the empty faces of the Damned as they bore down.

  ‘That would make a welcome…’ she paused, smile spreading to her eyes as she felt the fires burn. ‘…change.’

  Chapter 22

  Salvation

  The explosion was as brilliant as it was unexpected. No sooner had Felix felt the barrier give before him than he was lifted from his feet and flung across the chamber like a leaf on a gale. He saw Nikolaus fall to his knees, a prayer parting his lips as he was dashed to the ground and broken like a twig. The Damned were scattered, the shadowy beings dissolving before the wave of unleashed might.

  Felix crashed into the side of a column, spun around its girth and sent tumbling along the ground until he hit another. Silver ringlets scattered from his battered mail like a trail of schillings, twitching across the flags as the chamber trembled before the strongest quake so far. Felix spread both hands to the floor for fear that it would drop away from under him.

  Overcome by a sudden urge to be elsewhere, Felix pulled up his knees, winced as no man should ever have to, and got haltingly to his feet. His leg was numb from hitting the pillar, a bruise to his thigh the size and colour of a roggenbrot loaf.

  The centre of the chamber had been scoured bare. The altar was gone. There was no sign of the sorcerers, the warpstone sigil, or anything else for that matter besides a hole in the ground. Power crackled across the chamber, incandescent flares licking the walls and causing stone to dribble like fat. Black horrors gambolled without purpose, slapping into columns and each other as the walls shook. And in the midst of their disarray, a dark angel wavered like smoke.

  It was Be’lakor.

  The daemon prince was almost as large as the Beast, larger still if one counted its leathery wingspan or the jagged height of its black crown. But where that degraded monster had been a rounded mass of malformed muscle and bone plates, Be’lakor was lithe, his powerful body sculpted in volcanic glass. That statuesque might was now hunched, as though wounded, bat wings cocooning its body. How it had come to be hurt, Felix could only hazard. Gotrek’s axe passed through the daemon’s leg trailing a wisp of black smog.

  The daemon laughed coldly, the creak of glacial ice. ‘You have taken my army, you have beaten my champion. My ritual has been spoiled but not ruined.’ The daemon’s voice was sonorous and smooth, but just a voice now that it did not cross planes. The chamber trembled, sending dust through the daemon’s body. It chuckled darkly, as though tickled. ‘I will be free. I may find myself five years past or five hundred. It is but a turning of the world to an immortal.’

  ‘We’re both here now, you sack of steam.’ Gotrek made another swing. The runes of his axe flared with a frustrated brilliance as they clove through the smoke that was the daemon prince, Be’lakor. ‘Fight me now and have done.’

  Be’lakor continued to fade. Only an outline remained, shadow upon shadow, a hint of a crown. ‘Your doom is coming. Trust that when it nears, it will be my hand that guides it.’

  ‘When?’ Gotrek roared, stamping through the fading shape. He looked up, swung his axe and roared. ‘Tell me who and I’ll seek him out.’

  Laughter echoed.

  ‘You seek prophecy from a daemon king, son of Gurni. By thwarting me you assure only the crowning of another. The Everchosen of the four powers will march south and all will become darkness. If I must anoint their champion then I will see to it he has might enough to end you, Slayer.’

  The voice faded to nothing. Gotrek growled and lowered his axe.

  ‘I look forward to it.’

  Cracks were spreading along the ceiling, the serried columns now looking decidedly unstable. Over shaking ground, Gotrek came running, snatched at Felix’s arm and pulled him around before running past in that peculiarly dwarfen gait that looked as purposeful as an ox but without the grace.

  ‘I told you this place wasn’t sturdy,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I give it five minutes before it comes down on our ears.’

  Grunting through his pins and needles, Felix set off after him. His companion sounded remarkably buoyant considering he had once again been denied a doom. Felix could not keep the scowl from his face.

  Probably because they were both about to get buried.

  The black horrors of Be’lakor thrashed insubstantial fangs as they passed, following their master into oblivion as the power that sustained them waned. Some remained solid enough to fling themselves onto Gotrek’s axe, and the Slayer was more than happy to oblige. Around the crumbling chamber, Felix saw a handful of ratmen and grey-cloaked soldiers still fleeing for the myriad silver-shimmering portals that led back to the city. He pointed to one.

  ‘There. I’m certain that’s the one we came through.’

  ‘You sure? They all look alike to me and I don’t want to bump into myself coming the other way.’ The dwarf suddenly chuckled, his errant good mood confirmed, and nuzzled his axe blade to his bearded chin as he ran. ‘Now there would be a doom and a half!’

  ‘Just take it,’ Felix growled.

  The portal shimmered as though it suffered. Its surface quavered before Gotrek’s glowing axe, but the reaction was half-spirited. The dwarf was striding towards it, pinching his nose as if about to dive into deep water, when Felix saw the bloody pile of flayed corpses to his left shift. The body on top of the heap sat up and groaned. The young man’s eyes narrowed as they sought focus.

  ‘Did we win?’ Rudi croaked. His skin was charred, his fringe and eyebrows completely burned away, and his woollen smock smouldering where it still clung to his flesh at all.

  Felix wondered how he looked. He doubted his cloak could take that amount of darning.

  ‘Aye, lad,’ said Gotrek. ‘You slew the Beast like a hero.’ He stomped over to where the stricken boy lay, bent onto one knee and hoisted him up over one broad shoulder. As though bearing nothing but the weight of his own brawny bulk he rose again and turned back towards Felix, shifting the lad so he lay draped around his thick neck. Rudi said nothing. He was out cold. Gotrek gave him a congratulatory slap on the rump. ‘When you come too we’ll talk about thieving a dwarf’s honest doom.’

  The chamber shook as if to a blow. Felix started for the portal and waved to Gotrek to follow.

  ‘What of Nikolaus?’ he barked. ‘And the lizard?’

  Felix dropped his eyes. ‘Nikolaus took the brunt of the blast. I didn’t see Caul. He’s probably gone too.’

  ‘They will be remembered,’ Gotrek said simply, then lumbered into a run that drove him through the mirror of the portal.

  It rippled in torture. Felix took a deep breath, aware that it might well be his last, and jumped in after.

  The transit was different this time.

  It was briefer, for one, but empty. The voices were gone, replaced by a malignant presence that probed warily at the emptiness the Dark Master had left behind. Even other daemons, it seemed, shunned Be’lakor.

  Felix was certain it was only that wariness that kept him alive long enough to burst out the other side. Sight, sound and smell returned in a bundle and, for a moment, it was difficult to extricate one from another. He heard Gotrek’s roar, followed by a whoosh of starmetal and a bony crack, smelled a bitter musk, then his vision cleared enough to see the dwarf tug his axe from the skull of the Beast. The monster’s eyes flickered red within its torn hood as it collapsed amidst a pile of vitrified rubble.

  ‘Stay down this time,’ Gotrek growled, smearing blood across his face with his bicep.

  The pack of skaven that had followed their master back into the catacombs squawked and scattered, bounding over the blast debris and half-mechanical monstrosities for the exit.

  The cavern trembled and Felix threw a hand to the nearest wall. He wished he had not. It groane
d beneath his fingers, cracks splaying out from the surface and deep into the rock. The dwarf turned his blood-smeared eye to the ceiling, blinking away a trickle of grit that streamed from above. A tremor made his assorted chains and piercings chime, trembling pink in the strobing balefire.

  ‘The rats have outdone themselves this time,’ he said, lumbering into a run that took him after the fleeing ratmen.

  Felix followed, running past the empty stares of the daemon machines. The abhorrent creations did not stir as the walls at their backs crumbled. Felix wondered if they were unaware, like golems awaiting their maker’s command. But he knew that was not so. They knew what was coming and welcomed it.

  They ran into the main chamber, Gotrek in the lead and pounding for the hall to the stairwell. Sheets of rock were cascading from ancillary shafts, spilling into the excavated chamber like avalanches and flooding the cavern with dust. A gang of daemon machines disappeared under a torrent of rock. Felix coughed and covered his mouth with his cloak. His feet were numb from the shaking and he could barely see ten feet through the dust. Incandescent flares lay within the shroud where torches had been torn from their corbels to blaze upon the ground.

  The ground ahead crumbled into a crevasse. It was widening by the second.

  Felix saw black cloaks leap over it and keep on running. He gave a cry of despair but Gotrek did not slow down. Rudi’s face pounded into the small of the dwarf’s back as he took the gap flat out, thumping into the far side without breaking stride. With a yell, Felix jumped after, the rock crumbling from his boot just as he cast off. His heart lurched as he smelled the dry reek of emptiness below, arms milling in a wild panic before he landed in a rough stumble that hysteria forced back into a run.

  The acropolis trembled in its death throes. The ground behind him sheered back into the abyss.

  Felix willed his legs to pump harder, but his bruised side was still numb. His unbalanced stride bounced him off the wall and scratched his arm, but at least he was heading forward. Gotrek was disappearing into the dust cloud, but there was only one way to go now. No chance of getting lost.