Gotrek & Felix: Kinslayer

by David Guymer

  Snorri had stopped listening some time ago. His home was in a valley, picturesque like this one, on the borders of the Badlands halfway between Karaz-a-Karak and Barak Varr. He smiled weakly. He’d found it after all. Snorri Nosebiter had done something right.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’

  ‘What?’ said Snorri. There had been something about goblins, something about warning towns. His gaze slid back to the shortbeard, Craddi, and he smacked his lips. Had they been saying something about beer?

  ‘Blow to the head, I reckon,’ said Craddi. ‘I vote we leave him. We’re only a half day from the Badlands and who knows how close that warband is behind us. We can pick him up on the way back.’

  ‘Can Snorri have more beer?’

  ‘No,’ said Craddi and Fulgriff together.

  Snorri’s look of contentment went rigid. Why were they not letting him have beer? What had Snorri done to them? He made a grab for Craddi’s ale skin, but the ranger was young and trained to be nimble and skipped away. That just stoked Snorri’s temper even more. Half-falling, half-flailing, Snorri went for the shortbeard, catching the ranger’s ankle as he fell on his face and yanking the other dwarf from his feet. Craddi’s back hit bare stone, and he gave an unwitting blart on the grobi-whistle still in mouth.

  The rangers froze as the slightly wooden goblin war cry resounded over the valley. Time enough for Snorri to get onto his knees, pull off Craddi’s belt, and upend the ranger’s ale skin in one fell swoop. He sighed in pleasure, then Craddi kicked him in the jaw and he dropped the empty skin.

  ‘What’s the werit doing?’ The voice came from somewhere behind him, followed by, ‘He’s after the beer. Get him!’

  The flat butt of an axe struck him on the top of the head and Snorri dropped to all fours, his vision temporarily blackening. Another boot in the face snapped him out of it and he caught Craddi’s leg in both hands, hands that the Wastes had made strong, and wrenched the leg out of the knee socket.

  Craddi howled and grasped his knee as another blow struck down on the back of Snorri’s neck. The impact flung Snorri’s shoulders down as if he was about to be sick. The rangers closed in. There was one each side of him, raising their axes with the butts facing down to club him down like a tavern drunk. Snorri moved quicker than even he thought he could. The dwarf on the left went down with a wheeze of pain to a punch in the groin, while the one to the right got the full rolling-boulder force of Snorri’s shoulder across the knees. They buckled, it sounded like one snapped, and Snorri rose, slightly unsteadily, in time for his teeth to welcome a punch in the face.

  Snorri staggered back, accidentally spat a tooth in his attacker’s eyes and then grabbed him by the throat when he flapped. Snorri’s muscles bulged and the ranger’s eyes popped up like bubbles rising from the bottom of a stream. He had always been big. He had worked the mines since he first had stubble on his chin. You didn’t need a brain to pull a mine cart – as his mother had told the rather sceptical lodewarden – but his experiences had toughened him. He had fought daemons and survived the Chaos Wastes, and when he tensed his grip and lifted, the ranger’s feet parted easily from the ground. With a drunken roar, Snorri flung him into his companion and the two dwarfs went rolling downhill.

  That left Fulgriff.

  The veteran ranger threw down a half-loaded crossbow and drew a pair of hand hatchets. He wasn’t just showing the flat sides. Snorri didn’t think that was very sporting. He took his eye off him to bend down and scoop up another ale skin. The dwarf with the bruised dongliz pawed gamely at Snorri’s fumbling fingers before Snorri laid him out with a punch between the eyes, and then uncapped the skin. He chuckled happily as the smell wafted up, catching the gleam of steel as it sliced towards his head. He pulled aside, but too slow to save his ear. He roared in pain as Fulgriff’s hatchet sheared it from the side of his head. Blood spurted from the stump. Oddly, Snorri could sort of still hear a rhythmic whump-whump under his skull, but everything else had gone dim like his head was wrapped in cotton.

  Soaked to his undershirt in his own blood, Snorri ducked between the ranger’s two axes and elbowed him in the collar. The longbeard choked, but was made of sterner stuff than his unit. He tried to strike back with his second axe, but Snorri gripped him in a bear hug, pinning both axes to his sides and hoisting him off the ground. Then Snorri slammed a headbutt into the bridge of his nose and the dwarf went limp in his arms.

  Snorri let the body drop, then slumped down onto his backside beside it. Injured dwarfs groaning and whimpering all around, he took a sip from his ale skin. Absently, he rubbed at his severed ear, making it bleed some more. He looked up, gaze flitting from ridgeline to ridgeline down the stark relief of the Skull Valley.

  He could have sworn he’d heard a goblin war cry echoing between the peaks.

  He clapped his hand over the cartilage stump a few times, then shrugged. He took another sip of beer and smiled in big-hearted concentration.

  Now what had that ranger been trying to say about towns and goblins?

  Snorri hugged himself and shivered, but it could not shake the certainty that he had done something terrible. But what?

  A little shakily, he stood and turned back to the snowface, and then cried out in horror at what he saw. There were two figures in the distance. The blizzard made them formless, genderless, just shadows wreathed in snow. Their darkness made him think of burned-out houses and charred bodies and he covered his mouth with his hand to stifle a moan.

  The dwarf woman and her child had found him at last!

  He peered into the falling snow, his memory seeming to add details to the empty silhouettes. The child held her mother’s hand in a firm grip. She had bright, intense eyes, a quarrelsome frown on a face that, allied to a deep seriousness, struck Snorri as intensely familiar. The mother on the other hand wore her long silver-blonde hair in plaits over her broad shoulders. Her buxom girth was pragmatically attired in goatskin and leather and ornamented with gold, including – Snorri’s breath caught – including the chain that Snorri carried in his bag.

  Snorri blinked and the snow swept the visions down to the distant apparitions they were. Remembering what the old lady had said to him, he gave a determined growl and limped after them.

  Only when he was whole again would he find his doom.

  He had already remembered so much, suffered so much.

  What was the worst that he could have done?

  Felix sat with his back to the warmth of the firepit and gazed out into the gathering dusk that layered the oblast with deepening strokes of indigo, violet, and then black. Watching the snow fall was restful and strangely hypnotic, not at all dissimilar from watching the sky and making shapes from the clouds. A swirl of snow could be a city, a troll on an icy throne, a lover’s face. He sighed. Kislev was cold, her people brusque, their culture as strange to him at times as that of the dwarfs, but it was impossible to gaze into its emptiness and not feel a flicker of sentiment. On these lands he had fallen in love, fought a war, almost died at least twice, lost friends, and then fallen out of love again. Love and loss, the great events that had fascinated the poets since Sigmar’s day, and Felix had witnessed them firsthand right here.

  And now it was gone.

  The wind moaned with the birth tremors of daemons, eddies pulling the snow from Felix’s reminiscences and shaping them into something darker. Things with horns, tentacles, and bleeding skin. That was the problem with this game. A man could see whatever he imagined, and Felix had seen too much to imagine a happy ending. The borders of the Chaos Wastes were extending south. The old treatises told that such things had happened before, that each time the Dark Powers waxed the Wastes expanded a little further and retreated a little less. The borderlands of the gods had not yet swallowed Kislev, but it was coming. Like an old soldier who foretold the arrival of winter by the ache in his wrists, Felix could feel it, not in his bones but in his s
oul. A blackness hung over the steppe that had nothing to do with nightfall.

  From one of the neighbouring firepits, under a tatty awning emblazoned with the heraldry of some forgotten Border Princeling, Gustav and his free company were playing the same black game. Beer seemed to be involved and thus they were playing it louder. Everyone knew they rode to do battle with the so-called King of Trolls – the monster that stood apart from the champions of Chaos and alone defied them in their heartlands.

  Felix shook his head at a raucous cry from the tent. Perhaps he was getting old, but if a man was going to bare his soul to the elements then he should do it alone.

  ‘You fight in Praag before, yhah?’

  Damir was sitting beside him, also facing outwards from the fire. Shadows ebbed and rolled over his patched hemp cloak like the wax and wane of Chaos. The Ungol nomad offered up the liquor he was drinking. It smelled of turps and Felix waved it away.

  ‘Gorilka good for soul.’ Damir thumped his chest lightly and then waved it vaguely before him as though scattering seeds. ‘Made from same grain as feed horses. Only best.’ He grinned and offered it again. ‘Yhah?’

  With a sigh, Felix took the offering, swallowing just enough to be polite and immediately coughing it back into his hand.

  Chuckling, Damir clapped him on the back. ‘Yhah.’

  Felix too found himself smiling. ‘Yes, I fought in the last battle of Praag. I was there when Arek Daemonclaw died.’

  ‘Doskonale, Empire man!’

  The man looked pleased, so Felix assumed that this was good. Kislevarin was one of the most complicated human languages that Felix had ever come across, with a ludicrous and – to Felix’s view – arbitrary gender system. And the fact that Ulrika and her father had spoken Reikspiel perfectly well had also removed any incentive of his own to learn it. ‘Where did you fight?’

  Damir grinned. ‘Before I born, Felix Jaeger. But father and grandfather? They ride in pulk of Tzarina with Boyar Straghov.’

  ‘You make me feel old.’

  Raising his gorilka high, Damir saluted. ‘To growing old.’

  ‘To growing old,’ Felix agreed and joined the Ungol in a shot of the searing Troll Country spirit. This time he kept it down, and Damir’s grin deepened until his whole face seemed drawn by it. ‘Your fathers served Ivan Petrovich,’ Felix observed once the stinging sensation in his throat had sunk deeper into his chest. ‘Is that why you ride with Ulrika now, despite…’ He trailed off, then shrugged and stared instead into the snow.

  He had seen for himself how the common folk of Sylvania remained servile to their masters in undeath as they had done in life. Deference was bred into the backbone of the Empire and its people weren’t about to rise up just because their rightful lord had stopped breathing. There was something to be said for constancy, Felix supposed, but he had expected something better somehow from the famous independent spirit of Kislev.

  ‘Nyeh,’ said Damir, failing to disappoint. ‘In south maybe that matters, but not on steppe. On oblast, loyalty earned. Not fall after from mother like popłodu.’

  ‘And Ulrika earned it?’

  Damir gave a noncommittal shrug, then chuckled and elbowed Felix slyly in the ribs. ‘But she fine piece of horsemeat, yhah?’

  Felix prickled at the Ungol’s coarseness, but nevertheless produced a guilty smile and acceded to another hit of gorilka.

  She certainly was that.

  ‘Are my ears burning?’

  Snow crunched under knee-high leather riding boots as Ulrika strode from the other firepits towards them. With her cropped, ash-blonde hair, and garbed in virginal white plate that fell halfway past her thighs, she looked like a warrior goddess of the steppe. Felix’s heart seemed to beat just a little faster. Damir gazed on her as if she was made of gold.

  ‘Tend to your horses, Damir,’ said Ulrika. ‘We ride as soon as it is full dusk.’ The Ungol nodded and departed, and only when he was away amongst the horses did Ulrika cross her arms over her chest and smile. ‘Honestly, Felix, men never change. In a way, it is reassuring. Here you are, hours from the battle of your lives, and I find you talking about women.’

  ‘I was just thinking.’

  ‘Just?’ Ulrika tapped the lamellar plate that girded her heart. It was thicker than any other part of her armour, barring the bevor that protected her throat, and heavier than any mortal knight could have carried to battle. Clearly the suit’s maker had known the vulnerabilities of his work’s recipient well. ‘You forget what I can hear.’

  She sat down next to him, but facing the other way, into the fire, as if their meeting here was in some way illicit. It felt uncomfortably intimate.

  ‘You shouldn’t face into the fire,’ Felix murmured.

  ‘I think that I know that,’ said Ulrika. The firelight caused her eyes to sparkle.

  ‘It’ll spoil your night vision,’ Felix went on.

  ‘Vampires do not have night vision, Felix. My eyes do not work as yours do. I do not see colour as such. For me it is always night.’ Her smile, when she found it, was a little sad. ‘It is all just vision to me.’

  Felix nodded as if the minutiae of the vampiric condition fascinated him profoundly. The snow swirled, adopting libidinous new shapes.

  ‘What were you thinking about?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘It is an Ungol tradition to share a secret before battle, so it will not die with you.’

  Felix shrugged with his eyebrows and gazed into the snow. It sounded sufficiently morbid to be true. He wished he could say he had been thinking of the Troll King of Praag and the thousand images – none of them good – that that title conjured. He had tried. Mulling on the coming battle was preferable to trying to unpick the emotional tangle of his feelings for Kat and Ulrika. He looked past Ulrika into the snow.

  Perhaps it was this place. The memories of a lost time tugged on his heart.

  ‘Back in Kurzycko,’ he said, turning to regard Ulrika fully. There was no longer any evidence of Helbrass’s burns. The scar by her left eye remained, but clearly she had fed and fed well. The idea repulsed him. And it left him more than a little jealous. ‘When you needed blood, why did you drink from the beastmen? I was nearer. Why didn’t you take mine?’

  Ulrika shifted a little closer until their legs touched. The fire divided her face into light and dark. ‘Do you wish I had?’

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  Ulrika reached out, slowly, and brushed his neck with ungloved fingers. Despite being girded to the cold, he shivered. ‘I could drink from you and it would be ecstasy as you have never experienced, but you would not be you any more.’ She nodded to where Damir readied his horse and his men. ‘I could command you to do anything, but I have thralls enough. I want you to want to be here with me.’

  ‘You said that before,’ said Felix. It troubled him to hear her speak of men as though they were less than servants, animals, but seemingly of its own volition, Felix’s hand caught Ulrika’s fingers and squeezed them to his shoulder. ‘Why?’

  ‘Chaos waxes, and for better or for worse I am a creature born of Chaos. You, though…’ She drew nearer until their bodies touched. She turned her hand so her fingers entwined with his. Her voice became husky. ‘When I’m with you I remember what it felt like to feel.’

  ‘I–’

  Whatever he had been meaning to say was fervently forgotten as Ulrika leaned forwards and kissed him.

  A shock pulsed through his lips, down his neck, and made his entire body tingle. Her lips were cold, her body incomparably strong, but in every way that mattered she was the same Ulrika he had known twenty years ago. His free hand explored her neck, her ear, her hair. Exactly the same. He inhaled the familiar scent of horsehair, wood fire and vodka that he, an Altdorfer in a foreign land, had found so irresistible and exotic. That tingle became a glow, a warmth of desire that smoothed
away any lingering stain of guilt, and he relaxed into her.

  Too soon, she pushed him back. Arousal had brought her fangs from beneath her lips. He could see the blood throbbing to them. Her eyes were wide and burned with promises. All he had to do was give himself willingly. Felix’s smile shuddered into being, heart warring with his head, and when he opened his mouth he had no idea what he wanted to say. No, that wasn’t entirely true.

  He knew what he wanted to say.

  His grin hung indecisively for a moment, long enough for him to become cogent to the squat, ox-like figure that had just tramped out of nowhere from the snow and into the circle of firelight behind Ulrika’s back. Felix blinked.

  It took another moment to put together what he was seeing. Partly because the figure’s appearance had changed so much over the past year, but mainly because his presence was so utterly, astronomically, impossible. Ulrika twisted around and made a short, breathless gasp of surprise.

  The thickset and slightly singed dwarf limped over on a metal leg and prodded Ulrika none-too-gently in the shoulder. She resisted the push with a scowl and the dwarf turned to Felix.

  ‘Is she a vampire yet? Snorri’s starting to get confused.’

  Felix didn’t know whether to laugh, smile, or just cry out. His lips still thrilled with Ulrika’s taste. His chest felt sore with guilt, but also relieved in a strange way, as if Snorri had just pulled him back from a precipice. His tongue seemed to knot itself up between the options as he scrambled to his feet and beat snow from his breeches.