by David Guymer
‘The world’s ending, manling. Or hadn’t you noticed?’
Felix ceded the point, parrying a sword thrust then offering a counter that left a northman one hand the poorer. The next time someone suggested he spend a winter campaign in the north of Kislev he would know exactly what to tell them. Assuming of course there was going to be a next time for anything. He glanced up at a rumble from within the blizzard. Hoof beats.
‘Gospodarinyi!’
A single horseman swaddled in sheepskin and hemp galloped from the blizzard, guiding a shaggy Ungol pony by the stirrups as he drew back on a recurved bow. Coloured tassels shivered from the bow’s tips as the rider loosed. The feathered shaft zipped through the falling snow, and smacked through the Y-shaped opening of a marauder’s bull-horned barbute with a ferocious clang as the metal head exited the back of the man’s skull and struck the inside back of his warhelm. The marauder spasmed backwards as though his corpse was trying to work out how to run before he was dashed against the breast of the careening pony. A second Kislevite horse-archer chivvied his horse through the shank-high snowdrift, screaming ‘Yhah!’ at the top of his lungs and drawing back on his own bowstring.
The arrow flew over Gotrek’s shoulder and took his assailant through the heart. Gotrek howled pure frustration and beheaded the dying northman. Another centaur-like shadow breezed in false-silence through the blizzard and charged into the disordered northmen. What had seemed a certain massacre became a rout. The Kurgan were running and the Kislevites yipped and urged their steeds on to give chase.
Gotrek growled and sank to one knee. He caught himself on the haft of his axe and pushed himself back up. Felix offered no help. He could not have supported the Slayer’s weight even if he thought his aid would be welcomed. The Slayer met his look and nodded grimly, lowering his own axe at last.
‘Aye, manling. I thought I had it for a moment there.’
Felix smiled. He doubted there were many men who could understand why a dwarf might be less than thrilled at surviving such a battle, but Felix and Gotrek had shared much that was unusual. They were as near to friends as it was possible for members of two such different races to be. And strangely enough, he had come to share his companion’s disappointment. ‘There’ll be more out there.’
Gotrek’s grim look passed and he chuckled, running the pad of his thumb down the edge of his axe until it produced a bead of blood. It was one of the few parts of the Slayer’s body that was not already bleeding. ‘It is the end of the world, after all.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ said Felix.
Man and dwarf both turned towards the Lynsk as the tramp of hooves and the jingle of tack turned from the pursuit and galloped towards them. Just from the sound of it, Felix could tell that it was a larger beast than the rugged steppes ponies ridden by the horse-archers. The runes of Gotrek’s axe painted the falling snow a baleful red as he watched a snow-white Reikland destrier trot into view. It carried the nobility of its breeding with the force and assuredness of an emperor. It deserved a satin caparison, a harness of pure silver, and a knight in shining full plate, but somehow the warrior austerity of its leather saddle and tack was appropriate. And the woman who reined it in and turned towards them was as striking in her own way as any knight of the Reiksguard.
She was almost as tall as Felix and, though unhelmed, garbed in a gleaming haubergeon crafted from lamellar plates of white steel. Knee-high leather riding boots encased her legs. Despite the cold she wore neither hat nor gloves and her pale skin was laced with blue veins. He looked up, already knowing whose face he would see.
This was a dream.
The realisation was as sudden as it was obvious. It hurt like a blow to the ribs.
Of course it was a dream.
The woman looked down from the saddle, chin tilted proudly upwards. Her short hair was blonde as ash and railed against the wintry conditions of her homeland. She had not aged a day. The Slayer hefted his axe warningly.
‘What’s she doing here?’
Felix had no answer. Assuming that this was a dream, then her presence was obviously his doing. Unfortunately it was one thing to recognise that one was dreaming and quite another to act on that knowledge or make sense of it. He had loved her, would always love her, but she had been lost. The pain struck him like new. He had lost so many good friends while he and Gotrek ploughed on, but none still hurt him in the same way that she could.
The woman bared sharp, inhuman teeth. Her smile was colder than the oblast and more feral than any Kurgan. Dream or no dream, Felix felt sure that she, if no one else, still knew how to hurt him.
His surroundings began to slip away. Gotrek’s scowl sank into blackness. The horse-archers and the ongoing battle grew distant and dim and even the cold was blunted before it reached his skin. He tried to cling onto it, even the cold, but it was as if there were cracks in his very soul, like some ancient Nehekharan urn that would leak empty as fast as it could be filled.
No, he thought, sensing wakefulness like a remembered dream. No, there is nothing for me there.
‘Ulrika!’
‘It is all right, Felix,’ the vampire smiled. ‘I will wait for you.’
Weak autumnal sunlight slanted through the casement window and across the oak desk where Felix’s face lay on its side and half buried in parchment. The early strains of arguments and of passing horses intruded from the street beneath his window. The study in his family’s Altdorf home was east-facing – the better for Felix to suffer early – and hateful little splinters of light shot off the uneven glass into his eyes. Felix buried his face under his arm with a groan, disturbing his delicate filing system and sending parchments sheeting to the floor. Eyes duly covered, he sank deeper over the desk. It smelled of iron gall ink, tannins from leather bindings and, from a more recent spillage, of sweet apple schnapps.
His dream was a world away, but it remained so vivid he could still feel the snow on his face and the weight of Karaghul in his hands. His thumping skull made him grimace. He certainly ached as if he had just spent the night painting the oblast of Kislev red. This, he concluded, though arguably several hours too late, was what became of men his age drinking themselves to unconsciousness upon their desks.
Grudgingly, he withdrew his arm from his face. The unkind sunlight glanced off the band of dwarf gold on his ring finger. He studied it like a man hypnotised. Angular dwarfish script ran around the outside. With his thumb, he turned the ring around his finger, watching the sun highlight one rune after the next. He never had asked Gotrek what it said.
This is my life now, Felix thought.
He wondered if there was any schnapps left in the bottle.
‘Felix?’ The voice was the hangover that followed the excesses of his dream. It was a woman’s voice, but not at all like Ulrika’s. The accent was that of a Drakwald peasant rather than of a boyar’s daughter and had not the noblewoman’s confidence or strength. ‘I know you’re awake, Felix. I can see your eye is open.’
Kat.
Felix grunted something that he had intended to be intelligible and levered himself up from the desk and into the back of his chair. The sudden rush of blood to the right side of his face made him wince.
Kat held by the study door. She had been young once, still was really, twenty years Felix’s junior, but their battle with Heinrich Kemmler had worn her. Her skin was drawn, her hair brittle like straw. The brown of her eyes seemed to be sinking into the white. The Bretonnian silk chemise she wore had been a sumptuous fit when it had belonged to his brother’s wife, Annabella, but on Kat it draped like a robe. That Felix had recovered from the lichemaster’s magic while she did not was a mystery that baffled every physician in Altdorf. Even Max Schreiber had been at a loss. She bit her lip, as if there was something she wanted to say, but she would not meet his eye. Instead, her gaze took in the clutter of manuscripts, books, dropped clothes and old plates. Anna
bella called it his ‘hermitage’.
‘Is something the matter?’ said Felix when she still did not look inclined to move or speak. Irritation took over. Had she woken him from a good dream just to stand there and judge?
‘You never talk about Ulrika,’ said Kat and as soon as Felix heard that name on her lips, he groaned under his breath and looked to bury his face in his hands. He must have mumbled it in his sleep.
‘Just a dream,’ Felix muttered into his fingers.
‘Do you dream of her often?’
Felix dragged his fingers from his face. Stubble scratched his palms. Sigmar, how long had it been since he had shaved?
It had been years since he had last seen Ulrika, and their involvement, even when he could still call her human, had not ended on the most cordial of terms. He took a deep breath, as if he could still smell the sweat and horse of her from his dream. His heart danced. Yet all it took was one dream.
‘I told you that she… died. I couldn’t save her. I don’t like to talk about it. I can’t help my dreams.’
Kat nodded slowly, looking as though she meant to press, before hugging herself around the chest and taking strength from it. Periodically they would have this argument or one like it. Felix had experienced so much, while she had been struck down in her prime. Sometimes Felix forgot that it must hurt her more than it hurt him. Guilty, he turned back to his desk as though nothing was currently more crucial than unscrunching these balls of parchment and ordering them into neat piles.
From behind his turned back, there came a shiver of silk as Kat shifted from the doorway. A sheet of parchment crunched underfoot. An empty bottle fell over and rolled across the carpet. Felix winced, steeling himself for a lecture.
‘We missed you at dinner,’ said Kat.
‘I was busy,’ said Felix, indicating the sprawl of papers without looking up. Much as it might have amazed him twenty years ago, Imperial propaganda did not write itself. At the touch of a hand upon his shoulder he softened slightly. He covered it with his own, then drew it to his lips to kiss her fingers. Kat’s wrists were so thin he could see where the flesh sank between the radius and ulna bones. Felix sighed. He had spent too much time speaking with Kat’s anatomists and physicians.
‘You didn’t come to bed again.’ Kat leaned forward, ran her fingers through his soiled cloak and sniffed his lank blond hair. Her nose wrinkled. Kat seemed peculiarly sensitive to bad odours lately. ‘At least put some clean clothes on. You reek like a sewer.’
Taking a deep breath, knowing there were things that Kat hated more than his drinking, Felix nodded towards the chart that had been tacked to the plaster wall behind his desk. To the uninitiated it was nothing but a tangle of blue lines and strange symbols. To the more erudite, however, it would have been apparent that there was an order amongst the scrawl that resembled the layout of Altdorf’s main streets. There was Karl Franz Avenue, and there Hans Josef Street, and when looked at through that lens, the gulf that split the diagram roughly into thirds could only be the confluence of the Reik and the Talabec that separated the islands of Altdorf into equivalent portions.
It was the most complete map of a city’s sewer system that existed anywhere in the Empire and probably anywhere else but the dwarfholds themselves. Felix had commissioned it himself and had mapped some of it personally. More than he let on in fact, but what Kat didn’t know…
‘I hope you found something this time?’
Felix sighed and slumped back into his chair. He dragged a sheet of parchment – scribbled with the worst kind of populist bile he had ever seen – from the desk, scrunched it up and idly tossed it at the map. ‘Nothing but rats. The sewerjacks Otto hired are either blind or every last skaven has abandoned Altdorf.’
‘Or they were never down there.’
‘Don’t you start,’ Felix snarled. ‘It’s bad enough that Otto still clings to that fantasy. Even after what they did to father.’
‘I’m not saying they don’t exist,’ Kat snapped back. ‘I’m just saying that in all my years tracking beastmen, I never saw one of these ratmen.’
‘And just how many years was that?’ Felix cut in.
‘Maybe,’ said Kat, Felix’s acid only making her harder, ‘the city you found under Nuln was for a special purpose. Maybe after you and Gotrek defeated them they retreated from the Empire, or–’
‘Kat!’ said Felix, raising a hand to ward off any more. Kat looked stunned and he realised he had shouted. ‘I swore an oath to punish the vermin that murdered my father. It’s the one thing I still have that I…’ Felix caught himself and very deliberately clammed his mouth there. Kat just stared at him, willing him to say what they both knew was on his mind. His frustration was no fault of hers. She was sick. It was the guilt that poisoned him. He felt like a murderer who had cheated another into his noose on some legal technicality. After he had seen Snorri safely to Karak Kadrin, Gotrek had honoured his own promise and released Felix from his oath. Felix had been perfectly entitled to his decision, but no one had forced him to return with Kat to his brother’s charity and leave his companion to seek his doom alone.
These were Felix’s troubles, not Kat’s. He had made an oath to her too, after all. Instead, he took a handful of parchment sheets and shuffled them loudly. ‘Sorry, Kat, but I do have real work to do as well. I wouldn’t want Otto to throw me out again.’
‘Fine,’ said Kat. ‘But Otto and Annabella have asked after you and I told them you would join us for breakfast. So you’d better.’
‘I will,’ Felix muttered.
‘Fine,’ Kat breathed, turning to leave just as Felix’s brother, Otto, burst though the study door.
‘Felix, I–’ Otto’s fleshy nose recoiled and he drew back as though personally affronted by the odour. ‘You really do live in here, don’t you? I had thought that Annabella was merely exaggerating for effect.’ He took a breath that set his jowls to shuddering, unaccustomed by the exertion of limping up the two flights of stairs from his study to Felix’s. Despite the hour, Otto was fully dressed in robes of velvet and brocade accoutred with folly bells and a glittering satin sash. A gold-topped walking cane wobbled in the grip of one pudgy hand while the other held a clutch of rain-splotched letters. Politely, he bowed to Kat, an excuse to eye the improperly-covered neckline of the younger woman’s chemise. Not for the first time Felix wondered whether it was only brotherly love that had behoved Otto to set aside grievances and take them in when they had turned up on his doorstep a year ago. Otto swallowed heavily and returned his attention to Felix. ‘Why are you still not dressed?’
‘Because I can write as well in yesterday’s clothes as in anything else.’
‘Yesterday’s?’ said Otto, as though this was a fallacy too far.
‘Is there something you wanted?’
Otto thrust one of the letters he held into Felix’s hand. Felix took it and examined the handwriting. It was addressed to him. He masked his surprise well, flipping the letter over and presenting its broken seal to Otto. ‘You opened it.’
Otto waved the statement away. ‘Do you know how much correspondence this war generates for me, Felix? Of course I opened it. I don’t even read the addressee any more. But that’s not important. It’s come all the way from a village called Alderfen.’
‘Is that meant to impress me?’
‘Spare me, Felix, I thought you were travelled. Alderfen is in the north of Ostermark, only days from the company offices in Badenhof.’
‘Ahh, I see,’ said Felix, returning his attention to the letter and reading through narrowed eyes as Kat slid a consoling arm around Otto’s elbow and hugged him to her. ‘It’s from Max,’ Felix smiled, temporarily forgetting the both of them. He and the wizard had been romantic rivals, allies, and before the other man’s summons to the von Carstein war in Sylvania and then on again to the north they had almost managed to become friends. Memories, it turned
out, were as good a foundation for it as any. He checked the date on the letter. Nachgeheim: almost four months ago. Felix hoped the situation had improved since then.
Max and the other magisters of his college had been called to the aid of the Supreme Patriarch himself in maintaining the Auric Bastion. It was an impregnable barrier, Gelt’s great miracle that would forever end the threat of Chaos to the Empire. Or that was what the Reiksmarshal would have Felix write for the information of the masses. But Felix was wise enough to recognise a thing that was too good to be true.
Felix skimmed over Max’s disquisition on Chamonic principles, leylines, and aethyrial harmonism. It was enough to make Felix want to bury his face in a bowl of water. Sigmar’s blood, it was as if the man was right here in the room.
…no one has ever succeeded in holding Chaos at bay, Felix. I do not believe that anyone has ever even thought to try, and for good reason. My colleagues and I will tread water for as long as we can. I do not know if there is safety in the south, even here I hear rumours, but were I in your position I would find somewhere safe and take Kat there. And I hope for your sakes that you both remember how to wield a weapon…
Felix glanced at the glass-doored cabinet on the wall that held Karaghul and folded the letter. ‘This is dated months ago,’ said Felix. ‘Before Gustav even left Altdorf.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Otto. ‘I can read, but it shows that a letter can get through.’
Kat patted his hand. ‘Your son will be fine.’
‘Of course he will,’ Otto mumbled stiffly, avoiding everybody’s eye. ‘He is safe and well in Badenhof and keeping a good eye on those thieves we call distributors. It’s just…’ He trailed off, then waved despairingly towards the letter in Felix’s hand. ‘I did more than just open it.’
Felix nodded slowly. It sounded bad.
Ask me. The words jumped unbidden into Felix’s head, fierce in sword and mail. Ask me. I will go north and find my nephew.
‘Anyway,’ said Otto, after a calming breath. ‘Get yourself dressed. We have to go.’