by David Guymer
‘I do not need to.’
Ulrika spread her claws, scything them through a sequence of gestures as a rivulet of bloody syllables coursed from her lips. A dark wind from the forced gates of Morr’s garden fanned her hair. Felix shivered at its touch. It was one thing to know that she was capable of these arts, but quite another again to witness their use. The cloud of insects shrivelled and dropped dead from the air.
Helbrass spun back and lowered his sword. The impression of something loathsome left its colour trail upon his armour. ‘A sorceress? Count your stars that I am here to save you from yourself.’
Helbrass clenched both fists and roared as his entire body erupted into a pyre of incandescent flame. The howl of it filled Felix’s ears, but the sound was that of a gale rather than of a fire. It pulled back on his cloak. He raised an arm to shield his eyes. He could see things, flickering things, places between the tongues of multicoloured flame. Those places were real. With some visceral comprehension of the power of the Prince of Lies, he knew that.
Ulrika’s claws continued to carve the air into frayed and bloody sigils, but Felix could no longer hear the words she screamed.
‘You can thank me,’ shouted Helbrass, ‘when the Troll King does not take you.’
Runesmith Gorlin dumped his satchel under the ancient stone arch of the gateway up to the surface and dropped to his knees to start tugging out the straps. He flinched as Snorri’s hammer crushed a beastman against one of the squat stone struts, smashing it in so hard that the creature stuck there, still twitching after Snorri turned back to the horde.
The runesmith mouthed his thanks and returned to work.
‘Snorri doesn’t see why we don’t just kill all the beastmen. Then we can fix the door.’
‘Seconded,’ wheezed Krakki, tattooed paunch glistening by firelight.
‘Grobkaz,’ the runesmith swore, running his hands over the dolmen runes. ‘The gate is irreparable. It cannot be resealed.’
‘Does that mean we can try Snorri’s plan now?’ said Snorri, breaking a beastman’s spear on his forehead and then shattering its shin with a blow from his mace-leg.
‘It means that all of Chaos has a shortcut into the manlings’ Empire,’ Gorlin shot back.
‘And that’s…’ Snorri’s face screwed up in thought. ‘Bad?’
‘I came prepared,’ said Gorlin, almost proudly, returning his hands to his pack and shaking out a number of tubular containers with long tapers at one end. They smelled of saltpetre.
‘Snorri doesn’t mind getting blown up,’ said Snorri conversationally, pinning his own satchel to his side and ducking a swinging axe.
‘Don’t be a wattock,’ said Krakki. ‘You’d only light the wrong end.’
‘Would not,’ Snorri returned, and Krakki gutted a charging beastman on his fistspike with the biggest grin he could still muster.
‘Have you been carrying the torch all the way from Karak Kadrin?’
‘Enough, both of you.’ Skalf Hammertoes clutched his crossbow stock in fingers like talons and regarded them both. ‘These are the End Times and there is no need to bicker over every possible doom.’ He grunted, unearthing a decision and finding it poorer than he’d hoped. ‘Krakki, light the fuses. The rest of you…’ He grinned, swung up his crossbow, and started towards the wall of beastmen that blocked the Kislev-bound tunnel. ‘Run as fast as you can.’
Aekold Helbrass extended a green shoot of a hand, sapphire flames spiralling down the raised arm as though burning along a trail of spirits and then geysering from his open palm. Arresting her own incantation, Ulrika screamed a word of power and threw up a barrier that ran with the horrified faces of the battle’s dead. They cried out in one voice as Helbrass’s blue fire disintegrated against the glassine shell. Dazzling motes of change cascaded from the impact like willow blossom. Spirits shaken loose went whimpering back to their battlefield limbo. It was as if the most pessimistic of street agitators cried.
The old gods turned their faces even from the dead.
Fire coiled around Helbrass’s armour like a living thing. His stance was easy, utterly in control and yet free. It reminded Felix of the snake charmers that he and Gotrek had encountered in Ind. They had given their bodies to creatures that could, and perhaps should, have destroyed them, but emerged stronger for the union. It was not a reassuring comparison to draw.
Spitting at the snow, Helbrass’s serpents of energy darted forwards. Two of them this time, blue and gold, they smashed against Ulrika’s barrier in a welter of sparks and banished spirits. Ulrika shuddered and pushed back. Maws of multicoloured flame slid and slathered across her shield like sea-dragons over the bottom of a boat.
Felix didn’t fool himself that he knew much more about magic than any man not of the colleges, but he knew a fighter on the back foot when he saw one.
‘Fight back,’ he cried over the screams of the dead as they burned in the Changer’s fires. ‘Give him something to worry about.’
Ulrika groaned, arms spread-eagled as though she personally held up the weight of the sky. The pyrotechnic display washed her charred flesh. ‘I know how to fight, Felix. I can beat him. I just need…’
‘What?’
Swift as a knife in the back, Ulrika took a handful of Felix’s collar and bared her fangs.
‘Blood.’
Felix screamed as the vampiress dragged him towards her and then several things happened at once.
The barrier emitted a final death scream and Felix and Ulrika were momentarily encased within a shell of golden-blue flame. With her weight entirely beneath Felix, she gave a hungry snarl and hurled him wide, using the counterforce to duck back as the forked tongue of fire licked between them.
Felix flailed and then crashed into a wattle and daub wall on the other side of the street. His cry was driven out of him and he hit the ground under a patter of chalk dust and lime aggregates from the daub.
With a groan, he pushed himself up, watching as Ulrika sped away. She was moving so fast that her passing not only parted the smoke but dragged it on behind her. A stream of blue fire shot after her, but somehow she outpaced it and the jet flickered and faded back to Helbrass’s fingertips.
The champion followed at a walk, patient as an oak. Blue and yellow fire crackled over his left and right shoulder, blending over his helm into a perfect halo of infernal, life-giving green. Almost as an afterthought, he turned his head in passing and thrust an open palm towards Felix.
Felix hit the ground just as the pillar of blue fire whooshed over the spot and struck the building behind him. The impact punched through the wall and blew out the window shutters. Felix covered his head under his arms as bits of wattle and thatch hailed down. He tried not to look at them. Each was burned but also subtly changed, each one a mirror onto a scene of past triumph or future tragedy. Coughing, he pulled himself out of the debris and staggered onto his feet. Then he found Karaghul, wiped his fringe from his eyes, coughed again, and cast about for a sign of Helbrass.
The champion was striding after Ulrika. Where the vampiress had carved the smoke like a fish through water, around Helbrass it twinkled and fell again as fresh spring rain that nourished the virgin shoots at his feet.
Felix shot a quick glance the other way. He could pick out a few northmen through the smoke and fire fighting in the breached wall, but it seemed that Roch’s army and the Kurzycko garrison still held the line.
Covering his mouth and hunching underneath the thickest smoke, Felix chased after the Chaos champion. So long as it remained two-on-one then they had a chance.
He really should’ve known better.
The smoke cleared sufficiently around the incombustible stone solidity of the attaman’s manor for Felix to see more than a few feet without his eyes stinging. Its high walls had been buttressed with a pine stockade, the red stone balconies blocked up with ramparts of Ostermark l
ime from which the occasional matchlock flared to send bullets winging through the melee in the courtyard before its splintered gates.
A herd of about twenty beastmen filled the square with the clash of their weapons and their braying battle cries. The flagstones had been pulled up long before to construct the curtain wall and reinforce the structures deemed defensible, and the ground had been churned to a filthy slush under their hooves. As he watched, Ulrika fended off five one-handed, keeping the manor’s wall to her back as a sixth lowed ecstatically in her embrace. Blood spilled down her chin and over her breastplate. Black flesh softened and turned milky even as he watched. Only the scar above the left eye remained.
Felix tasted bile and had to cover his mouth for fear that he was going to be sick. With every beat of the foul creature’s heart that pumped blood onto her lips, her eyes grew fiercer. Her grip hardened. Even over the noise of the beastmen, Felix thought he heard ribs snap. He shook his head and swallowed his disgust. She did only what she had to in order to survive. They both had more important concerns right now than Felix’s civilised mores.
Slush became good soil and sprouted wildflowers as Helbrass walked onto the courtyard. Blue and yellow flames became indigo and capered from his fingertips.
Felix opened his mouth to shout a warning just as a beastman blundered out from one of the burning cottages and barrelled towards him. Felix swore and brought up his sword to parry aside its axe. He pedalled back for space and adopted a guard. Either Helbrass had numbed his hands more than he’d realised or the beastman’s strike had been unusually weak.
The muscular, goat-headed gor stamped its hooves and brayed a challenge. It was a foot taller than Felix and half again as thick around its chest. Felix could hear its lungs scraping for breath. It drew a huge breath of thick smoke, swung a blow that fell a foot to Felix’s left, and then collapsed to its knees with spittle on its wispy goat-beard. Felix didn’t even bother finishing it off. His own lungs were burning too, though he was smart enough to cover his mouth and measure his breathing. He staggered away from the beastman’s drowned-fish gasps, watching helplessly as Helbrass flung his indigo fire through the herd towards Ulrika.
Whether it was sense or the survival instinct of a beast, Ulrika withdrew her dripping mouth from her meal’s neck and flung the beastman underarm into the fire.
Indigo flame bloomed around the beastman and it brayed in pain, seizing as if the mutagenising beam was triggering every nerve in its body to fire. Flesh rippled beneath its fur. Its muzzle opened but, rather than a bleat of agony, produced a slimy proboscis that stretched out from the gor’s terror-stricken throat. The beastman jerked in the grip of the beam, choking as the worm-like creature filled its mouth, swelling until it pushed out its cheeks and dislocated its jaw with a horrific snap. Felix stared in horror as the newborn thing hissed at him and then lashed back to sink fangs into the beastman’s eye. Blood and clear fluids spattered down its muzzle. The beastman convulsed, but Felix wasn’t sure the creature felt it any more. More of those tendrilous horrors burst from its snout and armpits and from under its nails and slithered through their own birthing gore to join the feast. What remained of the beastman simply came apart. The stained rags it had been wearing split to spew a dozen blood-soaked worms that screeched as they tore into each other for the last scraps of meat on the creature’s bones.
Felix watched it collapse, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as if the experience had hollowed him inside and out. Death was one thing, but that? For some selfish reason, the yearning wish that he and Kat had found the time to have a child filled his mind. Even Gotrek had understood the power of immortality.
But that was wrong. It wasn’t immortality. It was continuance.
Ulrika snarled, poleaxed a beastman with a hypnotic stare, grabbed it with both hands and positioned it between her and Helbrass like a shield.
‘Do you know what happens to those like us in Praag?’ said Helbrass. ‘Would you not rather die than live forever in a cage?’ Laughing, he extended an emerald claw. ‘Or do I seek understanding from the cursed?’
‘You were a prisoner?’ said Felix, unable to believe it. What kind of a monster could hold this captive?
‘I and others. More than I could kill before I escaped.’
‘What of Max?’ Ulrika spat suddenly. Her voice was slurred as if she was drunk and her fangs had become engorged to interfere with her tongue. ‘A Light wizard of the Empire called Max Schrieber. He was taken after the battle at Alderfen.’
Helbrass spread his hands in what might have been a shrug. Flame flicked along the edges of his armour. ‘All life is connected. All life is one. Even the Troll King understands this in his heart.’
‘Understands what?’ said Felix.
‘Death or life,’ Helbrass roared, those flickering embers igniting into a pyre of incandescent madness. Felix covered his eyes. The surviving beastmen lowered their weapons and bleated in confusion. The Ostermarkers stopped firing. Everyone had stopped to watch the Chaos champion burn. And his eyes were solely on Ulrika. ‘Stasis or change. Stagnation or expansion. Since before the age of the Old Ones that has been the only choice that matters.’
The multicoloured flames turned grey, roaring higher until the champion’s entire body was consumed by them. And then the inferno flickered back down. Felix stared. Helbrass was gone.
‘Ulrika–’
Before he could finish, Helbrass reappeared inside the manor gate in a thunderclap of shadow-grey flame that sent cracks splintering up through the lintel stone and threw Ulrika and her beastman hostage flat on their faces. Felix ran to protect her. Despite what he had witnessed, she was still the Ulrika he had known. He readied his blade as if it could be of any use whatsoever as the very air beneath the arch was distorted, excited to the point of ignition by the energy of change.
‘Stasis or change?’ Helbrass yelled. ‘Those are the choices.’
‘Men don’t change,’ Felix returned.
Helbrass emitted a shrill laugh. ‘Allow me to open your eyes to how wrong you are.’
The champion stabbed his sword into the ground and then clenched his fists over the pommel as though straining to draw it back. Flames spat from his armour, like tightening muscles, shifting from grey to orange. Looking at them was like staring into a prism, but rather than colours it was reality that they split, spraying out all its component possibilities.
‘Witness your destiny! Experience the manifold possibilities of destruction before one claims you.’
Felix couldn’t close his eyes fast enough to keep from looking.
He saw Kislev.
Cries of despair rose from every quarter of the city as the besieging army poured in through the warped and still-living gate. He charged down the Goromadny Prospekt. If there was to be a last stand, if there was anyone else left, then it would be at the Ice Palace. He looked over his shoulder, hearing the cries of the Kurgan gaining ground, and saw the chariot racing up the prospekt. Its painted blue hull was wrapped with chains and pulled by three black horses, a pair of marauders in the car. One pointed him out with his spear. With a curse, Felix ducked against a wall and swung his sword around to face them. It was hopeless anyway, now that Gotrek had fallen…
Alderfen.
Covering his nose and mouth to keep from vomiting, Felix matched blades with the hideous plaguebearer of Nurgle. Pus drooled from its hanging jaw, its cyclopean eye staring blankly as if with fever, but despite its famine-wasted form it was hideously strong. With a blast of purifying light, Max Schreiber reduced a score of them to a foul smell on the aethyr. Not enough. The battle was already lost. There was time only for regret – that neither man would leave the other behind…
Altdorf.
Too weak to lift his own head, Kat raised him under her arm and spooned something he could no longer taste into his mouth. It was pointless. Kat should have fled Altdorf with their child like e
veryone else, but now they would both die like Otto and Annabella. Because of him. Through the window, he could see what men had once called Karl Franz Park, and the putrescent daemon lord that had made it its home…
The Everpeak.
The last and greatest army of the dwarfs stood arrayed in gromril and gold before the skaven horde. They were doomed, and fought only to spare themselves the sight of Karaz-a-Karak in flames. In the front rank of a legion of Slayers, he and Gotrek stood shoulder to shoulder. Gotrek pointed to a figure amongst the hordes, but it was unnecessary. Felix had marked that card long ago. Thanquol! From his throne atop a great horned bell the Grey Seer commanded his minions forward, and in a chittering mass a million strong they obeyed…
Kurzycko.
He saw…
‘Sigmar’s blood!’
He had seen enough. Without waiting for the vision to finish, he grabbed Ulrika by the hand and dragged her back from the attaman’s manor.
Snorri didn’t think he’d ever felt so many beastmen crammed so close. The tunnel stank of blood, guts, and panic – and the sulphurous spark of a lit taper.
With axe, hammer, and mace, Snorri bludgeoned a path through the beastmen. Durin Drakkvarr followed with an ice-cold ferocity, eyes set like ball bearings in a daemon mask. Drogun, Skalf and the other surviving Slayers followed in behind. Snorri bared his teeth, barely even looking at what he was killing any more.
This was it. The end. He could almost taste it.
Snorri Nosebiter would sup ale in the Ancestors’ Hall tonight!
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
Durin’s voice was typically cold. Between blows, he picked Snorri’s satchel off the ground and tossed it over. Snorri dropped his hammer and caught it. The strap had been sliced through. Pity, thought Snorri, the blade must have missed him by a hair’s breadth.
‘You have borne it thus far. It would be a shame now to meet your doom without it.’