Gotrek & Felix: Slayer

by David Guymer

  Felix grinned despite himself. He did vaguely recall saying something like that about Middenheim prior to his encounter with Gotrek’s fist. His thoughts turned to Malakai Makaisson and the engineer’s own desire to return to Karaz-a-Karak to fight for his High King. Was this a test of some sort, to challenge a Slayer’s resolve to forsake hearth and home, everything that made a dwarf what they were, in service to some ascetic brand of honour? Had Makaisson been here in Gotrek’s place would that test have been failed? Felix hoped he wouldn’t have to find out what would happen should whatever force guarded this temple be dissatisfied with the Slayer’s answers.

  ‘Death is a gift, I am told. But who receives it, and what value does it hold to one who gives of it so freely? How much more precious then is life?’

  As the apparition of Gurni spoke, Felix again felt power being subtly diverted, the runes guttering and hazing as he looked around to see what was going to be sent to test them next. Seeing nothing, Felix returned his attention to Gotrek and Gurni.

  The only thing that had changed was Gurni himself.

  The apparition was blurring into the rune-light, not disappearing but changing, growing. His fading body stretched to become taller, tanned flesh folding back into dried meat and yellow bone that was then covered once again by manifesting plates of crimson steel.

  ‘BE DEATH TO YOUR ENEMIES, GOTREK SON OF GURNI. IT IS A WEAPON OF THE GODS THAT YOU WIELD. IT DOES OFFENCE TO ITS FIRST MASTER THAT A VICTIM SHOULD ESCAPE ITS WRATH.’

  The phantom solidified into its new form and Felix’s mouth hung open in horrified recognition.

  The warrior was enormous, half again as big as Felix, who was amongst the tallest of men, and as broad as the Troll King of Praag. His armour was embossed with writhing sigils of slaughter and death, and hung with living skulls that wailed their torment even as blood filled their mouths and seeped from their empty sockets. It smeared the warrior’s gauntlets and every rivet and seam of his armour. The dead champion didn’t speak, but red witchlight pulsed from the open face of his bone-horned helm. It was a foe Felix remembered too well, one he still sometimes saw before waking up to sheets doused in icy sweat and a full moon in the sky.

  Krell!

  Felix brought his sword up into a guard position and moved into position to protect Gotrek’s vulnerable left side, only for the Slayer to warn him off.

  ‘Back, manling. This one has to be mine.’

  The mountain thundered its approval. ‘A SLAYER IS ALWAYS ALONE. HE IS DEATH, AND IN THE FINAL COUNTING ALL DIE ALONE.’

  Felix tightened his grip on his sword but withdrew, bound by duty and friendship to stand back and watch. Krell spun his enormous axe menacingly, a blade as black as plague and just as lethal. Gotrek brought up his own deadly weapon, the two fighters circling, trading feints faster than the human eye could follow, testing each other’s guard with blows that left Felix’s hands ringing just for having seen them. Krell had been a champion of Khorne before his death and subsequent resurrection. The God-King Sigmar himself had once fought him.

  And he was one of the few to have crossed blades with Gotrek and walked away.

  ‘Gotrek. Left.’

  The Slayer bashed aside the wight-lord’s axe and unleashed a flurry of blows that drove the champion of death back. A mortal adversary would have been torn apart by such an onslaught, but Krell was tireless, skilful and uncannily swift for so large a being, and he was Gotrek’s equal in strength. Felix could see no weakness in the wight’s technique, and more than once his heart leapt into his mouth as a counter-stroke scythed towards Gotrek only for the dwarf to somehow pull himself out of the way at the last moment.

  Felix let out the breath that had been building pressure inside his chest.

  The merest graze of Krell’s obsidian blade could kill, and Felix could only assume that this simulacral version was similarly imbued. Felix had seen first-hand the slow, lingering demise that weapon had almost inflicted upon Gotrek once before.

  The Slayer had claimed that his death here would not be a good one.

  Had this been what he meant? Was Krell destined to finish the task he had so nearly completed at Castle Reikguard? Felix scowled, loyalty to the Slayer and all that that meant warring with what he thought he recognised as common human goodness.

  He hadn’t come through all of this to watch Gotrek fall to a spectre from their past.

  The Slayer threw a stroke across Krell’s middle, but simply from the fact that Felix was able to see it from beginning to end he could tell that it was laboured. The wight angled his body under the blow, swinging his axe overhead and launching it one-handed towards Gotrek’s face, forcing the Slayer for the first time onto the back foot. He retreated, breathing hard, his axe moving so fast that it looked almost like a shield as Krell hammered down blow after blow. His bare torso glistened with sweat.

  Gotrek had gone into this contest wounded and it was beginning to tell.

  The dwarf drove all his flagging strength into a decapitating blow, dispatching it at Krell’s neck with a gravelly roar. The wight dropped silently to one knee, driving a blood-soaked couter into Gotrek’s stomach at the same moment that the Slayer’s axe cracked against a pillar. Gotrek’s axe sprang from his grip and he stumbled back, clutching his stomach muscles and wheezing.

  Krell advanced. The champion’s grin was fixed but Felix sensed triumph in the glow of his eyes. And more than triumph: vengeance, blood for his vile god. If it was not the real Krell then it was a terrifyingly close approximation. The wight swung up his axe for an executioner’s stroke as Felix raised his sword and tensed for a suicidal dive forward.

  ‘I don’t need your help, manling,’ Gotrek bellowed, dropping his shoulder and ploughing under Krell’s guard into the wight’s waist.

  A hiss of dead air escaped Krell’s teeth as the Slayer’s low-centred, bulldog-like power carried the wight back and smashed him up against a pillar.

  Stone crunched. Cracks spidered out through the luminous rock. Krell brought the haft of his axe down on Gotrek’s shoulder, but though it drew blood there was no force behind it. His poleyn slammed into Gotrek’s muscle-slabbed chest, but the Slayer shrugged off the blow with a grunt, denting the wight’s breastplate with a punch. Dust crumbled around him. Krell seized Gotrek’s fist in his, then the other, driving his knee into the Slayer’s chest like a piston as Gotrek emitted a furious roar and smacked his forehead into the wight’s face.

  The impact beat Krell’s skull against the pillar, a thin crack splitting through the bone from the back of his head over to his left orbit. Gotrek staggered back, an ugly skull-shaped red welt from the wight’s chin-guard on his brow, then shook it off to haul the undead champion out of the pillar.

  Dust fell over them both.

  Clenching his teeth the Slayer heaved the enormous warrior up over his head, then flipped him over from front to back and slammed him into the ground.

  Metal crunched, ancient bones ground together and snapped. The magic that animated the champion flickered, dazed, as Gotrek’s fist descended like a bomb from an airship, shattering the vertebrae of Krell’s neck and burying dwarf knuckles in the flagstones.

  With the toes of his boot, Gotrek slid Krell’s axe from the wight’s dead grip and kicked it away. It slid across the stone floor, clattering off between the pillars long after the axe itself had vanished. Krell’s body vanished soon after, disappearing between blinks.

  ‘The real one was tougher,’ said Gotrek, rattling down a deep breath and then spitting on the ground where the wight had lain.

  ‘WAS HE, OR HAVE YOU GROWN STRONGER? IN PREPARATION PERHAPS FOR A MEETING WITH ONE FAR GREATER?’

  ‘Bring it to me, then!’ Gotrek roared, scooping up his axe and clutching it in both hands, bulging like a clenched bicep as he glared one-eyed into the emptiness of rune-lit stone. ‘I thought you wanted to challenge me. Well, look at me, mo
untain. I stand unchallenged!’

  ‘PATIENCE, SLAYER.’

  Felix gasped as the Slayer vanished before his eyes.

  He opened his mouth to cry out to the dwarf, but in the time between thinking and breathing the entire temple too had followed Gotrek into oblivion. Darkness enveloped him, lightless, shapeless, devoid even of the sensation of stone beneath his feet and air on his face. Realisation hit like a cold wave and he did scream then, or at least he thought he did, but either he had been struck deaf or there was no air for him to hear it. He didn’t know which was worse.

  It wasn’t the Slayer who had been cast into oblivion.

  It was him.

  Light guttered fitfully from a torch set into an iron bracket in the stone wall and slowly dispelling the darkness. Felix studied it for a moment, disorientated, his hands padding absently over his body as if to reassure themselves they were not alone. His heart fluttered like a butterfly trapped in a lantern. The flame wobbled on its stand, light and dark rippling out from it across the room. It looked real. The warmth of it and the crackle of wood was real. Hand on his aching, stubbornly trembling chest, Felix looked over the room that the light revealed.

  It was of a hard grey stone like granite, curved along one wall, with an arrow-slit window indicating that he was in some sort of fortified tower. A strange, gale-force roar sounded from outside. A full helm, the visor drawn back, and a breastplate hung from a dummy beside the window. A sheathed sword with a hilt studded with semi-precious stones was looped over a door peg. A pile of folded clothes – tabard, trews, a sash to be worn over the breastplate, all in the blue with yellow trimming of Middenland – lay on a chest.

  Next to the armour dummy was a writing desk similar to the one that Felix had once had in the study of his brother’s Altdorf townhouse. It was piled with sheaves of paper. Felix spread them out across the table. Real enough. They were requisition orders, watch rotations, troop dispositions, the sort of military bureaucracy that most soldiers would never dream existed but without which the Empire would surely collapse in a day.

  He set them down and looked out of the window.

  The roar of tens of thousands of abhumans rose to assail his ears. The pointed glimmer of as many sources of light again brought tears to his eyes. He could see that the tower he was in was one of several overlooking the unscalable walls of a mighty mountaintop citadel. It was not Kazad Drengazi. It was Imperial soldiery on the walls, and the ground, seething with monstrous forms all bearing torches and flaming arrows, was all too visible. Arrows fizzed between the walls and the winged beasts and daemons that harried the garrison, the heavier munitions of ballistae and small-calibre cannons pounding the air with thumps and blistering whines. As Felix watched, a plume of flame rolled from the forked tongue of a two-headed dragon and blasted a ballista tower to ruin. Rock and bodies blackened inside their armour tumbled onto the mountainside. Felix shifted his view down.

  A column of vile war machines rolled up the narrow causeway to the city’s gate. They did so under their own malodorous power, the fuming, twisting hunger of bound daemons driving battering rams and siege-ballistae over ground too treacherous for any beast of burden. Bloody steam hissed from the flared mouths of cannons, bony pitons stabbing into the rock to lock the weapons steady as great bronze barrels angled themselves upwards to fire.

  Middenheim. This was Middenheim.

  Was this a dream world constructed by the guardian of the mountain, or like Krell before it was it somehow more?

  ‘How is Gotrek being tested by this?’ Felix murmured to himself.

  ‘It is your turn, Herr Jaeger.’

  The voice had come from behind him and Felix spun around.

  At the back of the room was a small table upon which a chess board was set. There was a game under way that looked to be four or five moves in. Behind it were two albino men in sorcerers’ garb, one seated and one standing. An aura of incredible power shimmered around them both. The seated man was clad in black and leaned idly against a staff of ebony and silver as he examined the board. The tall, vulpine sorcerer standing beside him was robed instead in gold and held a glittering runestaff in gilt claws.

  Felix backed away.

  The mountain guardian was dredging his own mind for the enemies to destroy him!

  Goldenrod beckoned to the empty chair on Felix’s side of the board, but also, Felix felt, to the world beyond. As if answering the sorcerer’s call there was a digestive rumble from the causeway below, followed by a slimy boom and the crunch of wood. The gate. The tower shook under the impact, causing the chess set to rattle and toppling the remaining white castle. Blackstaff reached across the board to reposition it, his finger lingering on the piece like an execution stayed.

  ‘The turn is yours.’

  SIXTEEN

  Katerina

  ‘Sit down, Herr Jaeger,’ said Goldenrod in a high-pitched voice, gesturing to the empty chair. ‘Kelmain and I have been forced to concede that it is pointless to continue to play one another when neither of us is the clear superior.’

  ‘It was becoming an ever more tedious challenge to keep score,’ the black-robed wizard, Kelmain, agreed.

  ‘Where does it stand, brother?’

  ‘I fear I forget.’

  Goldenrod nodded portentously, turning a cunning look onto Felix. ‘I am keen to see the outcome of this game. Your opening gambit demonstrates a keen and, if you’ll pardon the observation, unconventional mind.’

  Felix stared in confusion at the chequerboard. He backed away, shaking his head slowly, until he hit the door.

  ‘This isn’t real. I don’t even know how to play this game.’

  ‘What is real?’ said Kelmain with a shrug.

  ‘Is a dream real?’ added Goldenrod. ‘What about a vision, a prophecy?’

  ‘What makes them real?’ Kelmain cut in, seamlessly carrying his brother’s line. ‘Is it us? The way we interpret and act upon that which we see? Would we have acted differently had we not seen at all?’

  ‘Are you saying this is really Middenheim?’ said Felix, reaching back with his left hand to the wood of the door and running the palm of his right along the rough-set stones. He shot a glance towards the window, a narrow aperture through to a void of sulphur smoke and screams.

  Not narrow enough.

  ‘He’s not really so bright after all, is he, Lhoigor?’ said Kelmain, disappointed.

  ‘His mind is so… binary.’

  Felix’s gaze was still on the window. The smell of burning filled his lungs now. He could feel it permeate through his chest. The screams were distant, almost ethereal, but impossible to distance himself from, like a haunting in a lost love’s home.

  ‘Is Kat here?’ Felix asked sharply. ‘Did she survive the fall of Altdorf and make it here before the siege?’

  ‘If this is not real then we are essentially conjurations of your own mind and powerless to aid you beyond what you are able to offer yourself,’ said Kelmain.

  ‘And if it is real,’ Lhoigor hissed, baring yellow-bright fangs as he leaned forward into his golden staff, ‘then what makes you think that we would?’

  ‘You killed our pawn Arek Daemonclaw. And Skjalandir.’ Kelmain produced a self-deprecating smile. ‘And us.’

  ‘So you see,’ said Lhoigor, fangs disappearing behind a smile as he once again indicated the chair and bade Felix sit. ‘It does not matter whether this is real or not. The end consequence is the same.’

  ‘But if you will play a game or two, then maybe we can give you a hint.’

  ‘No,’ said Felix, heart pounding with a desperate logic of its own. If Kat was here he’d find her. Real or not he’d find her. And his child…

  He choked.

  He would see his child.

  Kelmain emitted a rasping sigh, scratching his cheek as though politely informing Felix he had something in
his eye, and looked askance to his brother. ‘I wonder if Archaon plays.’

  Either one of these men could incinerate him with a word, but Felix no longer cared. His own life hadn’t bothered him terribly for some time now, and now his family might actually be within his grasp it concerned him even less.

  He turned to face the door, his hand closing over the brass handle and pushing it down.

  ‘We have played with destiny and been burned,’ called Lhoigor, his voice suddenly swollen with melancholy, bitter with wasted might. ‘Seldom is there but one right path, and the obvious choice is rarely the best. No door is opened without consequence.’

  But Felix wasn’t listening.

  He opened the door.

  Frightened-looking men in the colours of city and state mustered in the courtyard before the east gatehouse; blue and gold, white and blue, rivers churning before the dam broke and spat them all out to the sea. Smoke poured over the walls. Concussive blasts rolled through the air, not a heard sound so much as a wave that rippled banners and spooked horses. Teams of artillerymen in crimped black livery yelled obscure, technical-sounding instructions to one another as they heaved a pair of helblaster volleyguns into positions of enfilade either side of the gate. Unhelmed and grey-maned knights drew into a line, a bulwark of steel and horseflesh that spanned the main road onto Neumarkt, their broad armoured shoulders level with the guttering of the boarded-up commission offices. Their muscular mounts snorted at those hurrying by, wolf-faced champrons snarling, unsettled by the struck match smell that pervaded the air. Every few seconds a resounding blow crashed against the gates. Drums, horns, whistles and pipes added to the thunder of beasts and guns. Rattling and barking, a battered old steam tank chugged into the courtyard and whistled to a stop.

  Felix waded into the commotion as though he’d just taken a blow to the head.

  He had no memory of crossing the threshold of that door, nor of heading down any stairs. And yet here he was.