by David Guymer
Snorri’s mace-leg thunked into the flagstones as he remembered it was there. ‘Snorri is getting used to it.’
Krakki’s grin slowly faded as he took in the contents of Snorri’s mug. ‘What in Gazul’s damnation is this?’
Snorri sagged miserably into the table. Whoever said that thing about misery and company had definitely not been a Slayer. ‘Snorri made an oath.’
‘Then maybe I can piss in that mug for you, Nosebiter,’ Krakki laughed, belly rippling with coloured tattoos. ‘My water’s richer than anything drawn from the wells of Karak Kadrin.’
‘An oath is an oath,’ said Durin, softly spoken yet deathly serious as though arguing in his sleep. ‘It is not to be mocked.’
Krakki jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Daemonslayer. ‘Friend of yours?’
Snorri pulled a face. ‘Snorri would not go that far.’
With a shrug that suggested he had not really cared either way, Krakki helped himself to a chair and deposited his bulk into it. There, he leaned in, as though sharing a secret for Snorri and Durin alone. ‘You speak of Kislev,’ Krakki boomed and Snorri winced, wondering if the dwarf thought Snorri could not hear properly with one ear. With horror, Snorri wondered how Krakki would sound through two. ‘And you are not alone, but first you have to worry about getting there. The Underway north of here is overrun with beastmen. They even drove the goblins out, bless their evil green hearts.’
‘We will clear them,’ said Durin.
‘Good for you,’ said Krakki, then mimed a wazzock gesture with a finger looping over his temple and returned to Snorri. ‘The manlings kindly allowed the Chaos hosts to march right over them and now they’ve nothing better to do than find and break all the Underway gates they find. A runesmith led an expedition of Ironbreakers and Slayers under the humans’ fort at Rackspire to reseal the ways, but he was captured by beastmen and carted off to Praag. Or so the survivors of his throng say.’ He glanced at Drogun, fiercely polishing tankards behind the bar.
‘Wait,’ said Snorri. What Krakki was saying chimed with something that Durin had been trying to tell him before. What was it? He scratched the pinhole where his ear had once been, slowly coming to a conclusion so stupid it could only have come from Snorri’s own head. ‘Kislev can’t have fallen,’ he said slowly. ‘Kislev men fight almost as well as they drink. Snorri likes them.’
Krakki smacked the table and barked with laughter. ‘You have been buried in Khaza Drengi too long! Here, give me that trough-water they’re feeding you.’ The Slayer took Snorri’s mug, and then Durin’s too, spreading them apart on the table. With a frown, he bellowed to the bar. ‘Drogun! Bring me that old clay tankard, the ghoul-ugly one.’ Krakki waited, drumming his sausage-fingers on the table while the leathery old Slayer came grumbling over and stamped the requested vessel onto the table. It was indeed ugly. Gargoyles leered from every side of it and the handle had been shaped to look like bone. Why anyone had ever made such a thing, Snorri could not guess.
‘This is Praag,’ said Krakki, positioning the gargoyle mug in front of him ‘Obviously. It was sacked months ago by a warlord named Aekold Helbrass, only he got pushed out of Praag by some other warlord, leading a horde of trolls so they say, and continued south.’ Here, he placed his huge palm over Snorri’s mug. ‘This one, being piss-weak, can be Kislev city. Their queen tried to catch the Chaos horde as they forded the Lower Tobol.’ He shook his head grimly and took his hand back. ‘Helbrass crushed them. Their city fell soon after.’
‘Sounds bad,’ said Snorri. He liked Kislev. He had had some good fights there and liked their vodka. He did not want to think that it could have been destroyed without him even realising the fight had started. And also, he was almost certain that Kislev city had been where Gotrek had been headed. ‘Does anyone still fight?’
Krakki sat back, big eyes rolling to indicate the sullen potman behind the bar. The dwarf noticed the attention, but merely grunted and continued to stir his stew. ‘Brock Baldursson was on the Tobol Crossing that day with a throng of the Kislevite clans. It takes something to drive a dwarf from his home and Brock won’t say much, but it sounds like Helbrass unleashed a special kind of hell that day.’ Krakki’s eyes lowered, voice dropping to a rumble. ‘Of course, he wasn’t a Slayer then.’
‘And Helbrass?’ murmured Durin. ‘What became of him?’
‘It’s not as if he’s anywhere to go but south, but there’s no one left to tell of it.’ Krakki pointed then to Durin’s mug. ‘Erengrad. She still stands, but has been essentially annexed by the Empire. And she’s on the other side of the Auric Bastion.’
‘The what?’ said Snorri.
‘That’d take some explaining,’ Krakki laughed. ‘What matters is it’s keeping the enemy good and hot. They’ve nowhere to go so there’ll be plenty waiting for us once we’ve cleared the Underway.’
‘What is… here,’ said Snorri, jabbing his finger into a knot in the table. It fell just to the left between ‘Kislev’ and ‘Praag’ and just looking at it made Snorri’s head feel funny.
‘There’s nothing there,’ said Krakki, gently. ‘That’s just the table. Try to pay attention, Snorri.’
Snorri stared at it anyway. You will have the mightiest doom. Spindly brown legs split out into the oak from a dark core. Spiders in the trees.
‘But Helbrass?’ Durin pressed again.
‘Better question,’ said Krakki, leaning back against his chair and grinning like a half moon. ‘What threw the conqueror of Kislev out of Praag?’
Praag, thought Snorri, letting the Slayers’ talk fade into the whistle through his torn ear. It always seemed to come back to Praag. It was a city full of memories, and despite the certainty of battle and death he found that he was not at all eager to return there.
‘Snorri,’ Krakki’s voice dragged him up by his working, cauliflower ear. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you looked scared.’
With a sad grin, Snorri went back to staring at the knot in the table. An old lady standing over him. She is sad. She is… angry. Snorri shook his head. Scared? He was outright terrified and the fact he was not certain why did not help at all. The image of that dwarf woman and child rose in his thoughts. He could smell burning, feel blood on his hands. He scrunched his eyes and tried to think of something else. There were too many memories and the priest had been right. Snorri did not want any of them.
The thought of those ghosts following him from Khaza Drengi and catching him alone on the wastes of Kislev petrified him far more than dying in shame.
Slowly, Snorri unclasped his fingers from around his mug and dragged them to the lip of the table. There, his fingernails crunched into the ancient wood and he pushed himself until he stood eyeball-to-eyeball with Krakki Ironhame. His new mace-leg thunked against the stone floor. Krakki met Snorri’s eyes, his ginger brows lifting questioningly. Snorri wanted a drink. His head ached for the need of it. Without breaking eye contact, Snorri reached for his mug, brought it to his lips and tossed it back. A shock of mountain water struck the back of his throat. Snorri’s eyes widened. His throat tightened in protest, but it was too late. Snorri gave a gargling sound as the dregs drained into his belly.
And just like that, Krakki began to laugh.
That’s it, thought Snorri. Snorri has had enough.
Muscles bunched through his neck and shoulders, then exploded forward, sending his forehead crashing through Krakki’s nose. Blood spattered from the fat Slayer’s face and he tipped back, spinning on nerveless toes before smashing full-on through the end of a table of feasting Slayers. The other end of the table swung up, swiping the bowls from under the dwarfs’ noses and catapulting gravy and ale across the hall. Leaving the shouting dwarfs and Krakki’s poleaxed body to their own devices, Snorri slumped back down into his chair. He wiped a piece of beef gristle from his head.
That had not been nearly as satis
fying as he had hoped it would be.
It seemed that there was nothing for it but to go to Praag and die as quickly and as gloriously as was still possible. It was what the old lady had promised, what everyone seemed to want. Everyone except Snorri, of course, but when had that ever mattered? He had always followed others, ever since that first trip into the Chaos Wastes. That had been before he and Gotrek had both become Slayers, before he–
His jaw clenched.
No. He would not remember that.
A proper fight was what he needed. The priest was right about that too. And at least Kislev was where Gotrek and Felix must be. They had a marvellous knack of being where the fighting was fiercest. They were both just lucky that way. He looked up over the wreckage of the table, heart sinking at the sight of Durin picking his way through it to fetch him another mug of water. He let out a long, resigned breath.
The End Times could not come soon enough.
Two
Jaeger and Sons
The Kurgan marauder stumbled through the shin-high snow and slush that banked the partially frozen river. A white skeleton of frost filled the lines between his armour’s leather plates, the pieces haloed in turn by snow-sodden furs. His eyes were bloodshot. His greased face bore the scars of a torturous journey, over the Frozen Sea and across the Worlds Edge Mountains, all for this one chance at the soft lands of the south. The man fell to his knees. His voice raised a bitter scream as Felix Jaeger planted his boot into the Kurgan’s chest and wrenched the glittering runesword from his belly.
Felix backed off, sword raised into a guard as the northman tumbled away to the river. The sound of ice water slushing against the rocks drove under the howl of the wind. A collection of burned-out cottages poked out of the snow where the land abutted the water. The snow fell thick and heavy and he blinked around in confusion. He could not seem to recall how he had got here. His confusion faded with the intrusion of battle. It was coming from all around. Felix tightened his two-handed grip around the dragonhead hilt of Karaghul. The Templar blade had never fit so perfectly into his hands.
There was meaning here, even if it did not extend beyond the reach of his blade or the next second of his life.
His eyes were starting to throb, so hard had he been staring into the blizzard, but he dared not blink. Who knew how many northmen were out there? Felix watched the thick flakes fall. He could not keep his eyes trained any longer. He blinked.
‘Manling! To your left.’
Felix jerked, shot his gaze left, and swept Karaghul across his body to parry the heavy berdish axe that hacked for him through the snow. The two weapons clashed apart, but Felix had been on the receiving end and his knuckles took the worst of the impact. He spun aside as the axeman came on in a storm of white fur and seal-blubber breath. Felix parried, danced back, set his feet and angled his blade for a flawless nebenhut guard to catch the overarm slash that the Kurgan’s posture screamed was coming next.
But the steppe barbarian was no student of fencing and in truth Felix’s own body was no longer as quick as he remembered it being. The northman gave a berserker howl and, rather than slash his axe back, turned his great strength to control the weapon, swing it up and stab the spear-like point on the eye of the blade at Felix’s breastbone. Felix cried out in surprise and flung his sword across the path of the blow. It hit flat into the haft of the axe, deflecting it instead onto Felix’s face. He ducked and turned aside, then watched the heathen weapon stroke an inch past his eye and impale the flapping red Sudenland wool of his cloak.
Felix dug his heel into the bigger man’s foot, then punched him in the throat as he doubled over. The Kurgan staggered back, but held onto his axe and dragged Felix by the cloak along with him. With a guttural curse, the warrior yanked on the haft, throwing Felix sideways before beating at him with the flat of the blade. A tavern brawler’s instinct hunched Felix into a foetal position and the blade passed overhead. He gave a muffled cry as the move swept his own cloak over his head and the world turned red.
For an instant, all Felix could feel was panic. His heat pounded, his muscles falling slack as if to ease the passage of the Kurgan’s axe, but it could not have lasted more than a second. He could feel the presence of the northman’s body tangled up with his, the warrior refusing to let go of his weapon even though it was still caught in Felix’s cloak. His side was pressed into Felix’s chest. Felix needed no second invitation.
He knifed his knee into the proximate area of the northman’s kidneys. The muffled grunt of pain that elicited was sweeter than a harp’s strings. The grip on the axe loosened, enough for Felix to bring up his sword and thrust it straight through the taut red wool and into the northman’s chest. There was a wet cry and the opposing weight fell away.
Felix shook his cloak back over his shoulders. A fresh blast of freezing air welcomed him back with an icy slap in the face as Felix kicked aside the berdish axe and silenced the northman’s gurgling with a swift stab through the throat.
Clearly the Kurgan had never worked Nuln’s seedier taverns.
A dozen fur-clad marauders were advancing through the ruins by the river. Felix could hear more battling out of sight, but he tried not to worry too much about those. Chances were he was not going to live to have to deal with them. To his surprise, the thought left him oddly elated, as if there could be nothing finer than dying on this nameless snowfield today.
A brute howl pulled his gaze back from the ruins. There in the snow, a sanguinary blur of starmetal silver and ink-strapped muscle hacked through a score of barbarian northmen. Gotrek Gurnisson fought in a ring of bodies and human debris. Despite wearing nothing above his tattered trews but piercings and spiralling blue tattoos the dwarf gave no care to the cold as, with a roar like a collapsing cliff, he swung an axe that a man would struggle even to lift and severed a northman’s leg below the knee. The marauder, meeting the bone-hammer of Gotrek’s knuckles, was dead with a snapped neck before his knees were fully bent. Gotrek roared for more and more came. At their head strode a warrior in a ringmail hauberk with a white bear cloak and an antlered helm. The northman’s bare arms were heavy with trophy rings. He spun his twinned axes in anticipation as he chanted some guttural gibberish about his deeds and his gods. One blade left a crimson trail of power through the air it cut.
A champion.
Felix had seen Gotrek dismantle such arrogance a hundred times, but as the two warriors joined it became clear that Gotrek was struggling. The dwarf looked as though he had been fighting without relent for days. Somewhere along the road he had lost his eye patch and gore bled from the gaping socket. Cuts and bruises coloured his skin as if they and his tattoos fought a contest to see which could take the greater portion of the Slayer’s flesh. A pair of arrows stuck out of his chest. The shafts were thick, garishly fletched in the Kurgan style, and had been fired from their powerful recurved composite bows. Had Felix taken a shot to the heart like that he would have been dead before he knew what hit him, but Gotrek’s slab-like chest was tough as tempered steel and sterner protection than Felix’s mail vest any day. But still, they slowed him.
Slipping the Slayer’s guard, the champion dragged his blade across Gotrek’s chest, adding a deep score to the tally and bringing a spurt of blood. The Slayer howled, throwing the Kurgan champion off and driving him back with a storm of blows. His starmetal blade slammed deep into the northman’s gut. The not-so-favoured of the Chaos Gods regurgitated blood, choking on that last mouthful as Gotrek flung him from his axe and into those that came roaring in behind.
With a yell, Felix cut down the last Kurgan between him and the Slayer, hurdled the northman’s corpse and, turning mid-leap, slammed into Gotrek’s back to beat down a northman axe that had been destined for his unguarded shoulders. There was a strange thrill, the feeling like that of wielding one’s first practice blade and finding it achingly familiar but not quite as remembered. He parried another attack, feeling
Gotrek’s massive shoulders grind over his as the dwarf carried on doing what no one did better. Felix ducked a swinging adze, parried a sabre. The northmen were coming thick and fast from the river, drawn to the ring of steel and the Slayer’s howls.
Kislev, Felix realised, with the sudden clarity of ice-cold Kurgan steel, and that river was the Lynsk. He had seen it often enough from Praag’s Gate of Gargoyles and could not count the times that his dreams had returned him to this spot since. It was as though his subconscious would not believe he had survived that battle, as if he was living on borrowed time. Felix laughed.
He did not know why exactly, but this whole situation was surreal. If he was in Kislev then he must also be behind the Auric Bastion, the magical barrier that had been erected to hold back the Chaos hordes.
And trapped in Kislev with those very same hordes!
No wonder Gotrek looked so awful. The Slayer regarded Felix, laughing as he parried and fought, as if he had gone mad. Talk about pots calling kettles black. His laughter turned melancholy as he sliced through a Kurgan’s hide jack, then reversed his grip and sliced his blade back across the northman’s throat in a red slash of arterial blood. Well, thought Felix, spitting Kurgan blood from his gums, you have to laugh don’t you.
‘I can’t believe I actually missed this madness.’
‘Less… talk,’ Gotrek wheezed, parrying the stab of a knife, then punching the eye of his axe into its wielder’s gut. The man doubled over, his head parting company with his shoulders a moment later. ‘Don’t fall for want of a breath and miss my…’ A hand-axe decorated with evil glyphs clanged off the flat of his blade. Gotrek elbowed the Kurgan in the face, kneecapped another, and sliced his axe through the belly of a third. ‘…my doom.’
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ Felix said. And by Sigmar he really meant it.