Warhammer 40,000 - [Weekender 01]

by Black Library Weekender- Volume One (epub)

  Gotrek growled wordlessly and made to start forwards, but Felix grabbed his arm. The dwarf glared at him, but paused nonetheless. “What’s going on, Aldrich?” Felix said. “Did you bring us here to feed us to... whatever that thing was?”

  “If need be,” Aldrich said. “You weren’t my first choice, if that helps.”

  Felix recalled the look on the other man’s face when he’d found the boot. “Who were they? Not friends, I hope,” Felix said.

  Aldrich’s face twisted into a sneer. “More like employees. They were effective at murder, but not so much at monster-fighting.”

  “You killed your own kin,” Gotrek rumbled. As the Slayer spoke, it all fell into place in Felix’s head.

  “You murdered the rest of your family for the inheritance!” he burst out. Beneath his feet, the floorboards clattered as if something immense were moving beneath them.

  “Murder? It was a service,” Aldrich hissed. “If you knew what I know, you wouldn’t accuse me of murder... you’d thank me.” He stabbed Felix’s sword into the floor and held out his hand. “Give me the hair.”

  Gotrek gave a gap-toothed grin. “Come and take it, kinSlayer.”

  “Don’t force me to waste a bullet on you, Slayer, or your companion,” Aldrich said. He cocked his head, listening to the sounds of the ruin. “Can you hear it? They kept it here all this time. That’s why they left, the poxy bastards... not because of beasts, but to escape their own taint.” He smiled bitterly. “My taint too, I suppose. The money will ease the pain.” He began to back away. “You’ll want to keep that fire lit,” he said. “It hates the light. I’d hate it too, living in darkness for all those centuries.”

  The eaves and beams shifted and sighed. Felix heard the water-rumble again, only louder this time. It was like a wave approaching from all directions.

  “It recognises its own, that’s the only thing I can figure. That’s the only way they could have done it,” Aldrich continued, licking his lips. “The beastmen worshipped it and fed it, but when a Berthold came, it kept them safe. But not me... it knew. Somehow, it knew what I had done and it came for us. For me,” he hissed, his eyes rolling in their sockets. “But I escaped! Or maybe it let me go.” The panicked orbs swivelled, fixing on Gotrek. “I thought that was it, but then I saw you, master dwarf and I knew you might just be what I was looking for.”

  “Star Hall,” Gotrek said, his one eye blinking slowly.

  “What?” Aldrich said.

  Gotrek held up the lock of evilly glistening hair and sniffed it. “Ha!” he growled. “I thought I smelled warpstone.” He grinned at Aldrich. “This house must be sitting on a nest of the stuff. I thought only the ratkin were mad enough to build their lairs in such sour places...”

  Felix felt a chill course through him. His skin suddenly itched where the tendrils of hair had touched him and he was forced to fight off the urge to strip naked and check himself for signs of mutation. “What is it, Aldrich? Tell us that at least. What devil is lurking in the darkness?”

  “Haven’t you guessed?” Aldrich said, stretching out his hand. “Are you deaf? Give me that hair!”

  “First tell us what’s moving down there,” Felix said, his muscles tensing. If he could get to his sword, and Aldrich didn’t shoot him first, they might make it.

  “Bollin,” Aldrich said hoarsely. “Bollin Berthold. He didn’t die, but he was entombed nonetheless.”

  A groan erupted from the depths of the manor, sending shivers of nausea shooting up through Felix. Aldrich twitched. “The secret shame of the Berthold family, revealed only to those who profit from its wealth,” he muttered. “Something buried here changed him, and the family fled, only to return again and again. But after me, there’ll be no more. I’ll change my name. I’ll go west, to Marienburg, and leave this behind.” He looked around wildly. “I don’t want it, you hear?” he screamed. “I don’t want your damned name!”

  Silence fell as the echoes of his cry faded.

  And then, the sound of wood snapping as the floor began to buck and heave. Aldrich’s scream was drowned out by a thunderous roar as something vast and hairy burst upwards through the floor, its flabby lips slamming shut on the last Berthold. It was all writhing hair, save for a huge face, all the more horrible for the distinctly human cast to the features, which resembled Aldrich’s, albeit twisted into a brutish and inhuman leer. It was as if someone had stretched and pulled a human face across a jumble of barrels, and the lashing tendrils of its great beard and moustaches stretched out with quivering eagerness. Massive, square teeth ground the pulpy thing that had been Aldrich into a red stain as it heaved itself around, its mad, empty eyes fastening on them.

  “Stoke the fire, manling,” Gotrek said, raising his axe. “It’s time someone put paid to this pest-hole.” With an inarticulate roar, the Slayer charged towards the monstrous spawn of Chaos, his axe licking out to sever the tendrils that sought to snare him. Felix began throwing wood on the fire, fear lending him speed and strength.

  Gotrek was like a man caught in a bramble thicket, hewing and chopping, unable to press forwards more than a few steps at a time. His roars mingled with those of the thing, and a deluge of raw sound hammered at Felix’s ears. His hands bled from splinters as he tossed more and more broken wood onto the fire. Light drove back the shadows, more fully illuminating the battle.

  Gotrek’s flesh was bruised and battered by the pounding, yanking tendrils, but he staggered on. Blindly, he groped out, snagging a handful, and with a snarl he struck out with his axe, letting the haft slide through his palm. The blade of the axe bit deep into the bulbous, pasty flesh of the thing’s cheek, and a fountain of foul-smelling fluid spurted. The Berthold-thing wailed and rolled, nearly pulling Gotrek off his feet.

  “Out of the way, manling,” Gotrek bellowed. Felix needed no further encouragement. Even as he dove aside, the Slayer set his tree-stump-like legs and every muscle in his arms and chest swelled. Then the Chaos-thing was sliding unwillingly across the broken floor and up off whatever passed for its feet as Gotrek gave a mighty heave and sent it rolling into the fire pit.

  There was an ear-splitting wail and a rush of noisome odour and then the greasy crackle of the hungry flames drowned out everything else. The agonised thrashing of the beast sent chunks of burning wood spilling across the floor and walls and very quickly the mouldy structure became engulfed. Bollin Berthold, if that was who the beast had truly once been, burned even as the house he’d built did the same.

  “Up, manling,” Gotrek said, hauling Felix to his feet. “Time to go.”

  Felix scrambled to his feet, snatching up Karaghul as he went. Together, he and Gotrek fled the ruin, even as the light of the cleansing flame illuminated the night. The creature’s screams pursued them into the clean night air, fading only after a painful length of time.

  Once they were outside, Gotrek watched Star Hall burn, a sour look on his face. “No doom and no gold,” he grunted, his good eye reflecting the firelight.

  “Well, the one can’t be helped, true enough,” Felix said. He reached down and plucked a thin curl of singed hair from Gotrek’s axe. “But as to the other, who’s to say?” He held up the hair so that Gotrek could see it. “When do you think the offices of Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel open up?”

  Gotrek laughed and they turned towards Wolfenburg, leaving Star Hall and its secrets to burn.

  Jurgen had never liked people very much, and their returned indifference was fine by him. That was the main reason he’d joined the Imperial Guard: they told you what to do and you got on and did it, without any of the social niceties of civilian life he found both tedious and baffling. Since becoming a commissar’s personal aide, however, he’d been forced to interact with others in ways which went far beyond the simple exchange of orders and acknowledgement, although he remained obstinately wedded to the most straightforward approach in dealing with them.

  “What do you want?” the sergeant in the blue and yellow uniform of the local militi
a asked, looking warily at him from behind the flakboard counter walling off most of the warehouse-sized room. “The Guard have their own stores.”

  Jurgen nodded, unable to argue with that, having already worked his way through the inventories of every Imperial Guard supply depot close to the commissar’s quarters. He didn’t suppose there would be much here worth his attention, but you never knew, and it was a point of personal pride to know where he could lay his hands on anything Commissar Cain might feel the lack of at a moment’s notice.

  “Dunno yet,” he said, choosing just to answer the question, and ignore the statement of the obvious which had followed it. “What have you got? And I’m not here for the Guard.” He readjusted the shoulder strap of his lasgun, so he could rummage in a pocket without the weapon slipping to the floor. After a moment he extricated a grubby sheet of vellum, embellished with a seal, and leaned across the counter to bring it within the sergeant’s field of vision. The man stepped back hastily, as people so often did when faced with clear evidence of Jurgen’s borrowed authority from close at hand.

  “The bearer of this note, Gunner Feric Jurgen, is my personal aide, and is to be accorded all such assistance as he may require in the furtherance of his duties.

  Commissar Ciaphas Cain.”

  “You’re with the Commissariat?” the sergeant asked, a nervous edge entering his voice, and Jurgen nodded. It was a bit more complicated than that, he was technically still on secondment from a Valhallan artillery regiment he never expected to see again, but he’d never bothered to find out precisely where he now fitted into the inconceivably complex structure of the Imperial military. No one else seemed to know either, and he found the ambiguity worked to his advantage more often than not.

  “I work for Commissar Cain,” he said, keeping it simple, folding his well-worn credentials and returning them to the depths of his pockets as he spoke.

  “So I see.” Sergeant Merser forced an ingratiating smile towards his face. Though he outranked this evil-smelling interloper, he’d long since learned that his status in the planetary militia didn’t mean a thing to most Guardsmen; they regarded all locally raised units as little more than a civilian militia barely worth acknowledging, let alone according any sign of respect. Besides, this particular Guardsman appeared to be running an errand for a commissar, one of those mysterious and terrifying figures seldom encountered by lowly militia troopers, and a good thing too if even half the stories he’d heard about them were true. Not just any commissar either, but Cain, the Hero of Perlia, who even now was giving the rebel forces infesting the city the fight of their lives. However unwelcome his visitor may have been, it was probably best to appear co-operative, at least until it became clear what he wanted.

  Jurgen leaned on the counter, and raised his gaze to the racks of neatly shelved foodstuffs in the cavernous space beyond. “Can’t see a lot from out here,” he said.

  “No, of course not. Come on through.” Reluctantly, the sergeant lifted a hinged flap in the boardsheet countertop, enabling him to tug open a sagging gate of the same material beneath it. Jurgen ambled through the gap, making a mental note of the man’s name at the top of the duty roster tacked to the wall as he passed. Even the most trivial detail could turn out to be important, the commissar always said, and Jurgen had taken the precept to heart, squirreling away whatever nuggets of information he could find as assiduously as pieces of unattended food or kit. You never knew when something you stumbled across might come in handy.

  “Got an inventory?” he asked, and Sergeant Merser nodded reluctantly.

  “It’s around here somewhere,” he said, making a show of rummaging through the shelves under the counter. After a moment or two of Jurgen’s patient scrutiny it became obvious there was no point in attempting to stall any further, and he hauled out a venerable-looking book, leather-bound and battered, trying to hide his annoyance. “I think you’ll find everything’s in order.”

  Jurgen said nothing as he took it, but his scepticism was palpable, hanging around him like the peculiar odour which had accompanied him into the stores. Merser found himself edging away from his unwelcome visitor, unsure of which he found the more unsettling.

  “I’ll get on, then,” Jurgen said, dismissing the sergeant from his mind as thoroughly as if the militiaman had evaporated.

  Merser watched, as the Guardsman worked his way methodically along the storage racks, periodically pausing while he leafed through the pages of the venerable tome. Now and again he glanced in Merser’s direction, with an expression of patient inquiry.

  “Some local thing?” he asked, as a sliver of dried meat disappeared through the hole in his beard, accompanied by the squelching sounds of mastication.

  Merser nodded. “Sand eel. From the Parch. Only things that can live out in the open down there, so the locals raise them for food.” Aware that he was beginning to babble, he clamped his mouth firmly shut. The less he said, the less could find its way back to the commissar’s ears.

  “Had worse,” Jurgen conceded, slipping a couple of packs of the leathery shreds into one of the pouches hanging from his torso armour. There had been none of that in the Guard stores, and Commissar Cain generally appreciated the chance to try new flavours. Come to that, they were both seasoned enough campaigners to find the idea of emergency rations which tasted of anything identifiable at all a pleasant novelty.

  By the time Jurgen had finished working his way round the shelves, the pouch was considerably fuller than it had been, stuffed with other local viands which the offworld-supplied Guard stores had been without. There was little enough else to like about Helengon, a world which, in his opinion, was aptly named. He’d seen worse, of course, and at least the heretics they were fighting here were human enough instead of gleaming metal killers or scuttling tyranid horrors, but like most of the places he’d been since enlisting, the air was too warm and dry, and the ground too firm underfoot.

  “Anything else I can help you with?” Sergeant Merser asked, and, reminded of his presence, Jurgen shook his head.

  “Got what I came for,” he said, passing the book back.

  “I see.” If the sergeant’s voice trembled just a little, or his face seemed a trifle more ashen than it had been, Jurgen didn’t notice: but then he seldom noticed things like that anyway.

  One kind of subtle cue Jurgen was pretty much guaranteed to pick up on, though, was intimations of danger. By this point in his life he’d been on the receiving end of enough ambushes, berserker charges, and incoming fire to have taken it pretty much for granted that if something wasn’t trying to kill him now it was only a matter of time before it did. Accordingly, it didn’t take him long to realise he was being followed.

  He glanced around, tugging gently on the sling of his lasgun, to bring it within easy reach of his hand without appearing to ready himself for combat. Sure enough, a faint scuffle echoed in the shadows behind him, as someone took a half-step too many before realising their quarry had become stationary, and froze into immobility in their turn.

  Jurgen felt his mouth twitch into an involuntary sneer. Typical militia sloppiness, he thought. Not a bad place for a bushwhacking though, he had to give them that. He’d cut down an alleyway between two of the big storage units, which, from the signage stencilled on the ends, he’d deduced contained small-arms and ammunition, neither of which made them worth a visit. Those he could obtain directly from the Guard if he wanted them. Besides, most of the las weapons around here were of local manufacture, adequate, but no match for the products of an Imperial forge world; he had no desire to find a power pack shorting out on him just when he needed it the most.

  Which could be any time now. Seeing no point in letting his followers know he was on to them, and needing a plausible reason for his sudden stop, Jurgen unsealed his trousers, and relieved himself against the nearest wall in a leisurely fashion. While he did so, he let his gaze travel around his immediate surroundings, as though simply passing the time until nature had run its cours
e.

  There were two men trailing him, trying to make themselves invisible behind a stack of corroding metal drums. They’d almost succeeded, but not well enough to escape the notice of a combat veteran of Jurgen’s calibre. A faint clank of metal against metal meant that at least one of them was probably armed.

  In the other direction, a jumble of crates narrowed the gap between buildings; a soldier in blue and yellow was lounging casually against one, puffing on a lho stick, and apparently keeping an eye out for his immediate superior; a performance which would have been a little more convincing if his head had spent more time turned in the direction of the alley mouth than towards Jurgen.

  Completing his task with a sigh of satisfaction, Jurgen rearranged his clothing and his dignity, and resumed his unhurried progress towards the smoking trooper. As he’d expected, the soft padding of stealthy footsteps followed him. Only one pair, though, by the sound of it. That meant the other man would be lining up a weapon of some kind. His opinion of the Helengon militia plummeted even further, if that were possible; the gunman would be as much of a danger to his confederates as to Jurgen. More of one, even: Jurgen had a helmet and flak vest for protection, while the troopers stalking him were dressed simply in fatigues.

  It never occurred to Jurgen to wonder why these men appeared to be after him; they just were. Reasons were irrelevant.

  As he passed the smoker, the man attacked, lunging with the combat knife he hadn’t quite managed to conceal behind his body while leaning against the crates. Either he knew what he was doing, aiming a single, precise blow at one of the vulnerable points in Jurgen’s body armour, or he was an idiot, striking out blindly in the vague hope of finding an opening. Whichever it was, he was out of luck; Jurgen pulled the lasgun off his shoulder, ramming the barrel into the side of the man’s arm, and deflecting his aim with a snap of shattering bone. The blade skittered off the tight carbifibre weave of his flak vest, and Jurgen pulled the trigger, putting a couple of rounds through the smoker’s chest before he even had time to finish inhaling in preparation for an agonised scream. One down.