Gotrek & Felix: Slayer

by David Guymer

‘Herr Jaeger. Great Sigmar, is that you?’

  Striding through the crowd came a tall knight in brilliant silver plate, covered by a tabard emblazoned with a fiery heart and a scabbarded broadsword clapping at his thigh. Felix turned to greet the man but before he could so much as open his mouth the knight threw his arms around Felix’s back. There was a loud clang as the man’s breastplate embraced Felix’s mail shirt and Felix staggered back, only to be checked by the strong arms knotted behind his back. Felix coughed politely, inhaling a sour hit of armour grease and sweat. The man pulled away, powerful gauntleted hands clasped to Felix’s shoulders, and grinned.

  ‘Aldred?’

  The Templar knight produced a short bow.

  Aldred Keppler – or the Fellblade – had been the prior owner of Felix’s sword, Karaghul, but the man had fallen to a Chaos troll in the dank ruins of Karak Eight Peaks. This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t… Could it? Felix wasn’t sure any more. The Templar looked, sounded, and – Shallya’s mercy – smelled real, and the way Felix’s heart responded to the reappearance of an old and valued comrade was entirely real enough.

  Felix clasped Aldred’s hand between both of his. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

  ‘You carried my weapon with you,’ Aldred shrugged. ‘It did my work in the world. That had been enough until now. Now everything changes.’

  There was something about the Templar’s words, or perhaps the wearied manner in which he said them, that jarred with Felix as wrong. He tried to shake the feeling off.

  ‘I need your help, old friend. I’m looking for a woman. Katerina Jaeger, my wife, perhaps you’ve seen her. She’s–’ Felix held an upturned hand approximately level with his chest, then smiled as an image of her leapt fully formed into his mind. ‘She’s about this tall, dark hair with a lock of silver on the left side. Probably the most beautiful of the refugees from Altdorf.’

  Aldred’s expression turned stern and Felix’s heart lurched over a precipice.

  ‘There are refugees from Altdorf, aren’t there?’

  ‘There are thousands of women in this city, and children. What do you think will happen when that which hungers beyond the gate breaks through?’

  Something struck the gates with a titanic crash. Wood crunched and split and iron bent, the gates splitting down the join to reveal a hideous daemon-headed ram. Liquid fire drooled from its brazen snout where it hissed against the flagstones. Cries for courage rang through the courtyard. Orders were bellowed, the names of Ulric and Sigmar thrown freely, men herded into ranks like sheep by dogs as the gate was breached again, the locking bar shattering with a crack and flames racing up the broken back of the gate itself.

  A command was given. It sounded over the din like ‘Fire!’

  Arrows whistled from the windows and balconies of the disused commission offices. Most thudded into the burning wood of the gates, a handful pattering indifferently from the daemon-infused brass of the battering ram.

  A woman’s voice called words of encouragement from a bow militia, spread along a rooftop opposite to Felix as a missile screen for a ballista embedded within a fascine of straw bales and brushwood. Whilst the weapon crew conducted frantic last-minute checks on their machine, the archers had readied and aimed and awaited the order to fire. It came courtesy of their female officer and a sheet of arrows hissed down a half-second ahead of the next fastest detachment.

  Felix kept his eyes on the woman as she dropped to one knee behind the rough, recently added battlement and reached back over her head to pull an arrow from her quiver. The shaft slid out and onto her bowstring and in one seamless motion she rose again. She was a head shorter than the smallest man in her command, and slender as an arrow. A padded gambeson jacket puffed out her chest. Her forearms and thighs were clad in light single-piece leather plates. Her short dark hair brushed her narrow shoulders, all except for the single white lock that hung errantly over her left eye. Disregarding it, she drew a bead on the breached gate. Firelight glinted from the weighty ring of dwarf gold worn on her left-hand thumb, tight against the bowstave.

  Kat.

  ‘Since the elder days has the enemy been withheld, never vanquished, but always denied.’ Aldred’s voice grew heavier as he spoke, his appearance shifting into a semblance of someone Felix felt he ought to know without actually appearing to change at all. And when Felix blinked, it was undeniably Aldred and surely had been all along. The Templar drew his sword and pointed back to the gates. Kurgan axes chewed through the cinders. Middenheimer spears and halberds fell back behind their volleyguns. Another sheet of arrows rained down. ‘With naught but constant courage and iron in our souls have we prevailed. Now the wolves howl at the gates of your world and men like you must stand up, prove yourselves worthy, and cast the daemons back.’

  Felix backed away, taken aback by the Templar’s sudden and uncharacteristic intensity. ‘Aldred?’

  The Templar nodded to something over Felix’s head, and Felix turned about just as a trio of burly Trollslayers waded through the crowded Neumarkt street in search of the coming battle. Wielding a pair of axes was the ugliest dwarf that Felix had seen in an achingly long time. His squashed nose was graced with a hairy wart at the tip and gold rings jangled from his big ears. Hurrying behind him was a slighter, younger dwarf garbed in furs, his recently shaven head speckled with orange stubble. And the third…

  Felix felt his tender heart break into jagged pieces.

  ‘Snorri thinks Felix has the right idea leaving,’ said Snorri Nosebiter happily, a stupid smile on his stupid, mashed-up face. ‘Why let them all come in here when we can fight them in the gate?’

  ‘Felix has decided not to do battle with us,’ said Aldred. ‘He is going instead to find a woman.’

  Bjorni Bjornisson’s ugly face split into a lewd grin and he jabbed Ulli several times in the ribs, making an approving growl, until the younger dwarf blushed furiously and backed out of reach.

  ‘Snorri… doesn’t understand. Do you not want to fight with Snorri again, young Felix? It’ll be a good one. Snorri saw the… the…’ his face scrunched up in concerted thought, ‘Ever-Chosen from the walls.’

  ‘He didn’t look so tough,’ Ulli declared loudly, still blushing and apparently startling himself with his own volume. He glared reproachfully at the other two Slayers.

  A lump formed in Felix’s throat. He had borne the guilt of his own inaction over Snorri’s death over months and leagues and part of him did yearn to stand by him now. Aldred glared at him expectantly. Nor had Felix forgotten the promise he had made to the Templar’s order – to wield their blade with honour, to combat evil wherever it surfaced.

  He turned to look across the street to the rooftop. His heart grounded him to the spot like an anchor, but he knew where he had to go.

  ‘Forgive me, Snorri,’ he managed to choke, dragging himself away from the forlorn-looking Slayer and his companions and plunging into the crowd.

  A fountain dimpled the surface of an ornamental pond, the centrepiece of a small cobbled garden surrounded on all sides by the high grey walls of Middenheim’s old town. Red roses and scented honeysuckle clambered over the stonework towards the square of sky. It was red like a sailor’s warning, filled with the crump of cannon fire and the screams of running battles. The cries weren’t entirely human, and ran from the sky like wet paint down a wall. The sky stuttered, the clouds curdling by in slow motion as Felix watched, before suddenly racing. His heart hammered, disorientated and afraid.

  What was happening to him? Where was he? And what had happened to Kat?

  He returned his attention to the garden with the idea of getting his bearings and trying to find his way back to Neumarkt, and noticed that there was a figure seated on the lip of the pond, garbed in thigh-length armour of pearl-white lamellar plates. Gustav. His nephew was seated side-on, with one slender leg crossed under him and his face turned away from Felix
to the fountain. His nephew ran his fingers – almost like claws – through the pond. A crowd of subdued, mournful-looking children surrounded him, their broken reflections looking up through crying eyes from the water of the pool. It was only then Felix noticed that the armoured figure cast no reflection. A sepulchral chill entered his bones.

  No. Not Gustav.

  The woman turned as though alerted to his presence by his beating heart and gave a predatory smile. Her short hair was as white as ash, her skin as pale as human bone. To the silvery scar across her left temple, she had added another that cut cleanly across her throat. One glance was all it took for his hands to relive the jolt they had felt as his blade had met her neck. In his mind he heard the thump of her severed head striking the stone of the Troll King’s dungeon.

  ‘Ulrika, I–’

  The vampire cut him off with a throat-cutting gesture that made Felix’s own throat tighten as surely as if she’d put her hand against it and squeezed. ‘You are looking for Katerina,’ she said, reading his mind as succinctly as she could his heart. ‘How disappointing. How very predictable.’

  Felix cast his gaze from the vampire to the clouds that boiled overhead, tinted red and backlit with silver. He shuddered. ‘Please. The east gate’s been breached. If you know where she–’

  Swift as a snuffed candle’s transition from light to dark, Ulrika’s smile turned bestial. She snatched one of the children who sobbed around her, hoisted the young girl, who gave a piteous squeal for help, and then plunged her into the pond. Felix cried out in dismay and without once thinking about how he intended to outmuscle her ran in to pull the girl from Ulrika’s clutches. The vampire shrugged him off as though he were no more than a child himself. Felix reeled back, his sword sliding from its scabbard as he recovered his footing.

  ‘Do you know what torment awaits the souls of vampires when they finally die, Felix?’ said Ulrika, water splashing her breastplate as the girl under her grip thrashed. Sobs rose from the other children, but none of them tried to escape. It was as if they were resigned to this, or they knew there was nothing better to escape to. ‘I do.’

  ‘Ulrika, stop!’

  ‘This is a test, a challenge. The wolves are at the gate and they are hungry, and if they are not stopped they will surely consume us all. Not all of them wear daemons’ faces, manling, and if you do not kill me then I will kill you.’

  Felix lowered his sword a fraction. ‘Manling?’

  With a snarl, Ulrika pushed the now still child to the bottom of the pond and sprang up, flinging out wet hands that ended in cruel bone claws. Startled by the lightning movement, Felix backed up. The vampire grinned, blurring left as Felix went right, then right as Felix brought his sword en garde and tried to back away, boxing him in until his back hit a trellis and red petals fluttered down to his shoulders. The vampire’s movements were dizzying, as jarringly unnatural as the racing sky or the screams that sounded from all around. She came on, wolfen teeth bared in a hungry snarl.

  Pulling at his cloak with a curse Felix tore the mistreated garment from the rose thorns in which it was snared and rolled along the wall, just as Ulrika’s fist smashed through wood, vines and stone where he had just been. Felix bounced himself from the wall and whipped around. Blood ran down his face from several small cuts. Rose thorns. There were more scratches on his hands and thorns still caught in his clothing.

  Ulrika drew her arm out of the wall. Her nostrils flared at the scent of fresh blood. ‘I do not recall you being this squeamish in Praag, lover. You have already killed me once. Why hold back now?’

  Hissing like a cat, she threw herself at Felix, already raking for his face with her claws. Felix’s sword flew up on instinct, thunking against the vampire’s bone claws and diverting their thrust down his mail sleeve, but not before the sheer force of the blow had driven him back. Metal ringlets cascaded from his arm and crunched underfoot as he gave ground and parried for all he was worth. For the few seconds that he could maintain such intensity his sword seemed to be everywhere, his eyes somehow managing to keep his sword arm apprised of Ulrika’s movements without the knowledge or intervention of his brain. His muscles burned. Sweat mingled with the blood that ran in runnels through the creases in his face. The vampire flowed around his blade as though the paleness of her skin betrayed her nature as a being of quicksilver, one second flowing around a breathlessly executed schrankhut guard and the next appearing inside his defence and launching a punch to his solar plexus that almost tore his body in two.

  The air rushed out of his lungs as he flew back, crashing over the low seat of the ornamental pond and rolling into the water.

  His vision turned murky, all diffracted jewels of light and bubbles of air. The roar of the fountain filled his ears. The instinct was to take a breath, but he resisted even as his empty lungs screamed at him, long enough to order his arms and legs beneath him and lift his head from the surface of the pond. He gasped great lungfuls of the floral-scented air. Water streamed down his cheeks and matted his hair. The fountain pummelled his back and effectively blinded him with spray. He folded over with a moan, his arms crossed around his bruised sternum.

  That had hurt.

  This was real!

  The watery screen parted to admit Ulrika, the vampire pouncing through the spray to land astride him and drive him back under the water. The last thing Felix heard before his ears were again filled with beaten water were the screams of children. Ulrika held him under for a moment, then dragged him out, choking and gasping with his hair stuck to the inside of his mouth.

  ‘Do you wish you had not killed me, my love? Do you resist what must be done because you know now how much it will hurt you?’

  Felix wanted to answer, but couldn’t. He hadn’t the breath.

  ‘In the Troll Country there was a saying: it is better to regret what you have done than what you have not. And there is so much I regret not doing to you.’ She opened her fanged mouth wide and leaned in.

  Felix opened his mouth for an airless scream and struggled, splashing water, but only managed to drive himself deeper under as the vampire leaned over him. The water closed over his eyes, distorting Ulrika’s face and the words she spoke to him as the pressure built inside his chest.

  ‘The fates of worlds lie in your hands, Felix. You have the power to save them, but not like this.’

  Felix came up gasping for air, scratching over his throat at hands that were no longer there. Nor was he sat in a pond but on uneven cobblestones, in the middle of a street that heaved with fighting men. He looked up, wondering where he was now, rubbing the still-bruised skin of his throat. Tattered banners flew between the leaning tenements: lions, eagles, and griffons rampant showing their colours, torn but defiant in the face of the enemy. Forests of spears and halberds shivered over the advance of thousands of steel-clad infantrymen. Arrows darkened the sky. Handguns and field artillery made a constant rumble akin to being behind a waterfall, through which men and other, more bestial things hollered and screamed.

  Around the spot where Felix sat, leather thigh and shin pieces creaked with strain. A company of crossbowmen stood in reserve, watching the battle, waiting for their colours to appear on the signal pole of the mounted vexillary who galloped up and down behind the front line displaying Emperor Karl Franz’s colours. The air was sour with sweat and spilled beer, soiled leathers and unwashed men, the true flavours of war for which the bitterness of spilt blood was merely a condiment.

  With a groan Felix got up and beat down his wet clothes. Then he looked around, eyes crossing at the strange realisation that while he was quite definitely on a narrow Middenheim street he was also quite definitely on a small hill overlooking a rolling battlefield filled with many tens of thousands of men. The scale of the deployment was staggering, and for a long time it was all Felix could do to join the crossbow auxiliaries he stood with and stare. There was no way that Middenheim could support
so many troops. He doubted whether even Unstoppable could move enough gear and supplies to the summit of the Fauschlag to keep them.

  Felix tried to focus on the street beneath the army. It looked like a merchant district – all houses with decorative windows, the offices of conveyancers and commissioners and the ostentatiously permanent stone frontages of banks. It had all been stretched out somehow, thinned just beyond the point of opacity to encompass the immense hosts arrayed against each other from opposite sides of the street.

  The massed regiments of the Empire held the centre of the line. Tens of thousands of infantrymen stood marshalled in proud battle order, awaiting the bugle to advance and relieve their kinsmen in the raging melee that dominated the battlefield between the two hosts. The proud colours of the ten provinces were emblazoned from surcoats and standards across a dozen leagues of unbroken files. Knights from more noble orders than Felix could name cantered their bulky armoured steeds between the blocks of state troops, pennons snapping from the raised tips of their lances as they rode into an evil wind. The rear ranks bristled with ordnance. Their flanks were ridden on the one side by the shining knights of Bretonnia with their intricately fashioned armour and brightly caparisoned destriers, and on the other by the hemp-clad horse nomads of Kislev. Some instinctive understanding told Felix that he was witnessing the last ride of two once-proud martial nations.

  Allies since the age of Sigmar, a smaller force of dwarfs anchored the Imperial position with guns and gromril. Resolute blocks of heavy infantry in flowing mail and winged, visored helms picked out with gemstones and gold presented a wall of shields around a core of artillery and missile troops. The distances involved were great, but Felix thought he recognised their leader. Draped in a cloak of dragon scales and wearing his orange-dyed hair in a fierce crest, there could be no mistaking Ungrim Ironfist, the Slayer-King of Karak Kadrin. The dwarf king led from the heart of his shield wall, hacking open wave after wave of beastmen and Chaos warriors, enveloped in a strange aura of flame.