by David Guymer
Dizzily, he stood up and patted himself down. He was bruised, but alive, and aside from the damp smear of blood under his left armpit he seemed more-or-less in one piece. The Bloodthirster had flung him onto the bottom of the right-hand stair. The daemons had avoided this side of the chamber thus far, drawn up the left hand side after Felix and like grist to the bloody mill that was Gotrek and the greater daemon down in the centre.
Gotrek backed away from the thrashing Bloodthirster. The Slayer wiped blood from what looked like a broken nose across his bicep, threw Felix an almost accusatory glare and then threw himself into the torrent pouring up that left-hand stair with a berserker howl.
Noting every daemon warrior that was gutted, hacked in two, or kicked over the edge with a deepening snarl, Be’lakor drew his long black blade. Energy crackled along its length.
The Slayer was submerged in Chaos, but Felix was convinced he saw the dwarf smile.
Felix’s hand moved instinctively to his belt for his own sword.
It wasn’t there.
Swallowing the lump in his throat, he looked up.
The Bloodthirster was ablaze with fury. It was a red star, licked by a corona of bloody fire. It clenched its fists, infernal muscles bulging where its brass plate left arms and neck exposed, tendons hardening like steel cables as it drew back its head and roared. It was a cry that would make itself heard across an abyss and cause its darkest denizens to wail. Felix staggered from it. And he saw his sword. It shone white hot in the daemon’s neck, embers spurting around it, some amalgam of daemonic blood and binding magicks.
Sigmar, what now?
Felix’s hands scrambled through his clothing for a weapon. He had a small knife inside his left boot. He took it. And a liberated Hochlander’s pistol for which he had no shot. He took that too, gripping the barrel in his left hand to wield the walnut stock like a club. He retreated until his back was to the wall and gulped.
With a final bark of fury, the Bloodthirster stomped towards him, broad shoulders swaying with the intent to rend and sever and bleed.
Felix swore, spun away from it and ran up the stairs.
The Bloodthirster’s roar pounded after him, its footfalls shaking the staircase as it too broke into a run in pursuit. The monster had wings, but it wanted to run him down. Either that or it was simply too maddened by killing rage to do anything more considered than give chase and kill.
‘Gotrek!’ he yelled, taking the steps two at a time.
A warning? A cry for help?
Felix wasn’t sure, but at that moment it was all he could think of to say.
He practically threw himself onto the mezzanine, breathing hard of air that stung the back of the throat with the taste of ozone. The drone of the portal was intense and the radiance it put out almost blinding, doubly so when blisters of intensity shone across its surface. Gotrek and Be’lakor were painted chrome and battling over a carpet of skulls that had previously been the daemon prince’s throne. Dark lightning arced between Gotrek’s axes and Be’lakor’s outstretched claws, reducing every lesser daemon that drew close enough to ash. The Slayer grunted and pushed as if engaged in a straightforward contest of strength. Electricity flashed across Be’lakor’s silvered form. Warpstone ice crystallised across the walls and stitched over the Ancestor faces of the dolmen.
From some deep reserve, Felix found the strength to stagger forward. A skull crunched underfoot. There was no time for horror.
Enormous muscles straining, Gotrek drove through the lightning field to hack at the daemon prince. Be’lakor’s blade met his, shards of darkness breaking off, misting around the two fighters as their battle swirled through it. Be’lakor chuckled, fading into the darkness just as Gotrek’s axe swept through the emptiness he had that moment abandoned. Gotrek growled murderously, axes tearing up the mist even as it flowed away from him, reforming before the portal into the shape of Be’lakor, hand outstretched and an incantation of power on his lips. A withering volley of black arrows burst from the daemon prince’s claws and battered away at the protective barrier afforded by the Rune of Unbinding. It glowed golden-red, projecting a shield of the same hue around Gotrek. It looked thinner than that which Max had previously conjured for himself. It flickered alarmingly under the barrage and, much like a mail shirt deflecting and absorbing a blow but leaving a horrible bruise beneath, left Gotrek struggling to get up off his knees.
Felix couldn’t believe his senses.
After everything they had been through, everything they had lost and every edge they had paid for in blood, Gotrek was losing.
He gritted his teeth and brought up his knife. Not while his rememberer still breathed.
Be’lakor noticed him standing there; battered, aged, hair curling from the electric heat and paltry weapons in hand. The daemon prince lowered his sword a fraction. His obsidian-black hand, part-way through the form of another spell, left it to smooth a cruel laugh from his lips.
‘Felix Jaeger. If it is not my downfa–’
The sneer disappeared from his face.
There was a crash from behind Felix, as of a brass foot-guard punching into marble and grinding deep. There was a sense of heat, of pressure, and terrible, terrible rage, and in what felt like devastatingly slow motion Felix turned his head to look around.
The frenzied Bloodthirster roared, storming up the steps, blinded to everything but what lay within arm’s reach of its wrath. Karaghul’s hilt blazed from its shoulder like the lance of a charging knight under the setting sun. It swept up its brass axe and threw itself forward.
Acting on instinct, Felix dropped to the ground. The daemon passed over him by inches, his skin reddening under its infernal body heat. It didn’t stop. It was too far gone for that.
It was charging straight for Gotrek and Be’lakor.
The daemon prince snarled, black eyes boring hatred into the charging Bloodthirster as his hands traced a rapid sigil through the air between them. It became treacly and dark and Be’lakor began to fade into it.
Gotrek’s crest rose through the murky soup. The nearness of the portal gave him a metallic lustre, an Ancestor idol worked from a jagged piece of tin. His axes glittered.
A measure of Be’lakor’s amusement returned as he continued to disperse.
‘What is it they say in those melodramas your companion is so inexplicably fond of – it’s behind you?’
‘You owe me the life of a rememberer, daemon, and a dwarf never forgets.’ The Slayer raised his own long-serving axe high, betraying not the slightest hint of concern at the flame-wreathed nightmare bearing down on him from behind, vengeance glittering diamond-hard in both of his eyes. ‘An eye for a bloody eye.’
He hacked down, burying his axe-blade in Be’lakor’s thigh. The daemon prince howled, a note of panic buried there in the outpouring of pain. The god-slaying Rune of Unbinding throbbed, like a swallowing throat, gorging hungrily on the shadow magic with which Be’lakor had wreathed himself. Until it was gone. Gotrek wrenched his axe free in a gout of something ethereal and grey.
Be’lakor extended a hand to the Bloodthirster; not to ravage the daemon with magic, for Gotrek’s axe had left him with none, but to appeal to the brute’s reason.
But Felix had left it with none.
Gotrek sneered, nodding to something in the portal that only he could see. ‘It’s behind you.’
Felix pushed himself up off his chest to watch in open-mouthed horror as the Bloodthirster trampled over Gotrek and ploughed through. The swipe of its axe severed Be’lakor’s outstretched arm at the elbow and bit into his hip, its brazen horns impaling the daemon prince’s chest and sending them both – and Gotrek with them – tumbling into the portal.
‘Gotrek!’ Felix screamed, all three of them disappearing in a flash of light that sent ripples racing each other across the surface.
The lesser daemons throughout the chamb
er and – inconceivably – still arriving in impossible numbers through the outer door gave voice to a keening lament.
Felix scrambled to his feet, clutching his pistol and his knife close to him, but none of the creatures seemed inclined to attack. There was no telling how long that would last. He studied the portal, breathing hard. He needed only a moment to think. He kissed the ring on his finger and muttered a prayer to Sigmar.
It was simply habit. He doubted the God-King could hear him here.
Then he took a running leap and dived after his friend.
A plain of black glass stretched out for a million miles. In another life, Felix had been a merchant’s son; he knew how to see the curve of the earth in the gradual appearance of a homecoming merchantman’s sail over the horizon. But not here. Here the plain went on until Felix’s eyes could follow it no further. The sky was tormented, riven by flashes of sheet lightning, thunder that mocked the benighted ground like the laughter of gods and daemons. The air tasted bitter on the tongue, like sucking on a coin, and it was dry. Felix doubted there was a river or a lake within… he shook his head and gave up. Whatever measure of distance he could recall or contrive would be inadequate. His long journey had brought him to the one place he had thought even Gotrek would never try to take him.
He was in the Realm of Chaos.
The hot core of the universe.
The home of the gods.
He turned around, partly to reacquaint himself with a mortal sense of scale – six and a half feet, give or take an inch, to the portal – but largely to reassure himself that he could still leave if he chose to. He could see the temple through it, flat and distorted just as this place had been from the other side. He could see the feral daemon-things crowding on the far side. For now they seemed content to stay there, which suited Felix fine though it did rather take a hammer to his cherished thoughts of returning back to his own world.
With a sigh, he drew his long hair away from his eyes and crunched back around. There was no sign of Be’lakor, nor any of the greater daemons that had temporarily united under him with the aim of slaying Grimnir and leading a daemon army out through Kazad Drengazi.
Unless one counted the crimson, severed head that Gotrek was in the process of messily wrenching from his axe.
The Bloodthirster’s eyes were glassy. Its red tongue lolled out from its open mouth. Felix was accustomed to daemons dissipating back into the aethyr upon their destruction and he had to remind himself that he was currently in the aethyr. It was not a pleasant thought. From what he had been able to gather of Be’lakor’s self-indulgent monologue, a daemon killed here could stay dead for a long, long time.
The head came off with a slurp and fell face down in the glass.
Felix found that very reassuring. He just wished he could see Be’lakor’s body somewhere out there too.
He beaked his eyes with his hand to shield them from the lightning flashes and searched the distance. The horizon – it comforted him to call it that – seethed like an angry sea. The daemon hordes that Be’lakor had sought to marshal had not gone away with his departure, but it looked as though the combined efforts of Gotrek and Grimnir had driven them back.
Possibly for the first time in ten thousand years.
Was that a cause to hope?
Felix brought his ring to his lips and prayed for it. By every god still standing, he hoped so.
‘Welcome to my home!’ Grimnir shouted, his dwarf blood still hot from an eternity of battle, cheeks flushed and eyes bright. He was closer to normal-sized now, a larger than average dwarf rather than the titan he had seemed through the portal. He wielded an axe in one massive hand. There was nothing overtly magical about this weapon. It was just an axe, but then he required nothing grander. His presence alone was empowering and merely standing in it helped Felix to stand a little straighter and look on the world with more steel in his heart.
‘Gotrek,’ said Felix, wanting to go to his companion’s side and draw him back, but loath to venture too far from the portal lest it somehow disappear or succumb to the warped dimensions of this place. ‘Let’s take the weapon, or the artefact, or whatever there is for us and get out of here. It might not be too late to use it to help Gustav and Malakai.’
Grimnir lowered his face. He smiled benignly as he shook his head. ‘You still don’t understand. I am the power, lad. Me. Long ago, I came here to fight the gods and end the threat of Chaos forever. I failed, though not completely. I stand yet.’ He turned to Gotrek with a shrug that on a figure less mountainous might have been construed as self-deprecating. ‘But now the End Times are here and there’s naught I can do to stop it. It’s my time to rejoin the world once again, to fight the final fight as I always intended to – to relinquish my burden to my heir.’
Felix stared at the two Slayers aghast, thunder’s laughter ringing in his ears.
‘You mean give Gotrek a portion of your power? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’
Grimnir jerked a thumb back around his head to the daemons gathered in the distance. ‘They’ll be back, and someone has to be here to fight them when they do. You’re my heir, Gotrek, if you’ll take it. This is where fate’s been taking you since you first took shelter in that cave and picked up my axe. You’re a Slayer after my own example. I promise you battle, for eternity and without respite, and I promise you doom.’ The Ancestor bared his teeth in a smile. ‘The mightiest doom ever achieved by a Slayer. My doom.’
Gotrek looked thoughtful. He glanced to the portal, then ground his jaw and turned towards the daemons that filled the vastness of the horizon. Then he nodded.
Just once.
‘No,’ Felix yelled, striding forwards now and to hell with the portal assuming they were not already lost there with it. ‘We need Gotrek. The world needs him. I–’ His voice caught. His fist bunched over his mouth, then he yanked it away and beat his chest with it. ‘I need him. He swore to come with me to Middenheim. He swore!’
Felix backed up again, eyes blurring with the tears he’d forgotten he had. He wiped his eyes and sniffed.
‘The world is dying.’
‘Aye,’ said Grimnir. ‘Maybe it will die, and maybe I’ll die trying to save it. But there are worlds beyond this one, lad. Worlds that will have need of their gods.’
Gotrek’s passing will be the doom of this world, the seeress in Felix’s dream had told him, but it may be enough to save the next.
Tears were streaming unchecked down Felix’s cheeks as Gotrek turned to him, blurring his vision and scattering the glare from the lightning flashes so that it appeared the Slayer was surrounded by a silvery corona of light. The Slayer looked him up and down as though committing him to memory, as if the timescales he envisioned expanding before him would tax even the legendary memory of a dwarf.
‘No,’ Felix sobbed. ‘No. He’s not offering some glorious afterlife filled with maidens and wine, Gotrek. There’s not a foul thing we’ve faced together that I’d wish this fate on.’ He extended a hand to Gotrek, but for some reason his feet continued to back him away towards the portal. ‘I’ve lost too much to lose you now too. It’s too much. Come back with me. I’ll fight beside you to the end, I’ll–’
‘Felix,’ said Gotrek, cutting him off gently.
Felix gaped, stunned silent, as Gotrek produced a saw-toothed smile that said all that needed saying. It was carefree, reminiscent of one that had once belonged to a dwarf yet to bear the burden of a never-ending quest. Light was streaming off him and Felix roughly rubbed his eyes dry, expecting the effect to clear with the tears but to his surprise it remained. Too late, Felix recognised the cool touch of the portal on his back. He had backed into it, and the world was turning silver. He resisted the urgent pull of the current, the demand of his native plane, to throw his luminous companion – his friend – one last imploring look.
Haloed in silver, Gotrek raised his axe in farewe
ll, in salute.
‘Remember me.’
CODA
It was dark; the dark of the deep earth, of grief, of the lonely space inside the walls of Felix’s mind. The portal was gone, buried under the same cave-in that had accounted for the daemons and snuffed out the ceiling glowstones under a mountain of rock. Only Felix, it seemed, had been spared, sheltered under the sturdy stone arch of Grimnir’s dolmen. The sole, faint source of light emanated from the ornate runeblade partially buried under a heap of marble. It was Karaghul. It still glowed from its altercation with the Bloodthirster, albeit dimly, and its gradual decline was Felix’s only external confirmation of the passage of time.
How many minutes – or was it hours? – he had spent watching it fade he could not guess.
From somewhere within the collapsed structure, Felix could hear the trickle of water. Whatever pseudo-dimension this place had once inhabited, it was now firmly a part of the mortal realm with the departure of Grimnir’s power. There was another sound too, a scratching, like something tiny digging far, far away. He listened. And were those voices he could hear? It almost sounded as though they called his name. He shook his head.
No. He was alone now.
Out there, the End Times continued, but they would do so without him, and without the Slayer. In short, it no longer felt like his concern.
Aching all over, aching inside, he bent slowly forward to play out the ties that held his mail shirt tight. With his other hand, he reached inside the loosened shirt to withdraw the oilcloth-bound parcel that rested against his heart. He set it upon his lap, carefully unwrapping the protective covering to reveal his leather-bound journal, a quill pen, and a small vial of iron gall ink. He let them be undisturbed a moment more, took a deep breath.
The air tasted stale, used. He had lived half of his life amongst dwarfs, and he had spent enough time underground to know what that meant.