by David Guymer
‘Man-thing!’ the warlock hissed. ‘The king will not thank you for this.’
‘I am not listening,’ said Max. ‘You only hope to distract me because you know that tomorrow it will be you strung up for the harpies.’
The ratman fell silent, but even through the bitter cold Max’s weak human nose could smell the sour odour of the warlock’s fear. It spoke half-lies and nonsense as was the way of its kind. They both knew that it would be Max Schreiber who gave the Troll King his general.
It would be Max that got to return home.
‘Did I mention that I’m getting far too old for this?’ Felix muttered, peering out from behind the marble statue of an unnamed kossar at the outer ring of the Square of Heroes.
It was impossible to pick out a patch of snowy sky without a harpy shrieking through it. Hundreds of the creatures flocked over the battlements and the monstrously carved minarets of the citadel. At least twice as many were in flight, flapping, bawling and diving onto each other’s perches to send others startled and screaming back into the air in sprays of disturbed snow. Despite the lumpen streaks of brown and white droppings that lashed their gargantuan frames, the trolls that squatted amongst the inner ring of more illustrious statues could not have been more unmoved by the pandemonium that swarmed above their heads. Felix counted ten of the heavy, brooding creatures. Fifteen. Twenty.
He stopped counting. There came a point where additional information became distinctly unhelpful and as far as Felix was concerned that point had been passed a few hundred harpies back.
Within the inner ring, a gibbet had been fashioned out of the statue of a hideously mutated warrior that Felix had to remind himself had once been the legendary war leader Tzar Alexis. A huge bonfire burned in a pit before it. A chain of beastmen passed what looked like books, paintings and wooden furnishings from as far away as Nippon and Araby to throw onto the blaze. The light and warmth brought low rumbles of contentment from the trolls. Occasionally, one would shuffle through the snow to be nearer to the fire. More of the beastmen worked around the monolithic monsters, swinging nooses over Tzar Alexis’s many arms as more of their kin emerged through the snow shrouding the inner ring of statues leading a coffle of stripped and trussed human captives. The men were beaten and submissive. Their bare flesh was so blue that they no longer shivered. As they approached the fire, a group of beastmen with man-skin drums and bone horns tried to strike up a beat that could be heard over the harpy screech and failed.
‘How old are you, young Felix?’ said Snorri. Snow flecked the bristles of the old Slayer’s head, giving him a thinning crop of wispy white hair. He stood with his back to the kossar statue and a determined grin on his face.
‘Old enough that I think you should stop calling me young Felix.’
‘Don’t let that beard go to your head,’ said Gotrek, looking across from his own hiding place behind the next statue along, placing him quite deliberately with Felix between him and Snorri. ‘You’re not a day over fifty.’
‘And I don’t expect to make it there either,’ said Felix, offering a silent prayer to Sigmar to prove him wrong, then rolling against the stone at his back to take another peek into the square.
The captives were being led to the other side of the bonfire where Felix could no longer make them out. He squinted through the flames, watching as the beastmen fed wrists and ankles into nooses and hoisted bound men up into the air where they wriggled like caterpillars from Tzar Alexis’s arms. The beastmen’s spears discouraged the ever-circling mobs of harpies. From the picked bones that littered the square, Felix didn’t think the beastmen’s protection was going to be permanent.
Felix could still see more harpies flying in, beating hard against the snow, drawn by the excitement of what promised to be a feeding frenzy. Felix cursed his rotten luck. It looked like whatever slim hope they had had of making it to the citadel in one piece had just been whittled down to next to nothing.
‘The Goromadny Heights swarm with these creatures,’ said Kolya from what Felix still considered to be his customary position at Gotrek’s left side. Barring the occasional uninduced shudder, he appeared largely recovered from his dunking in the Lynsk. ‘They are scavengers and are never more wary than when there is food that another might steal. I think someone has set a trap for us.’
‘Bring it,’ Gotrek growled under his breath.
‘Who even knows we’re coming?’ said Felix.
Kolya shrugged, a gesture that was strengthening Felix’s urge to punch the man every time he saw it, then pointed around the outer square of statues. The route was steeped in shadows cast by the bonfire and circumvented the interior of the square altogether. ‘I doubt we will make it.’ The Kislevite glanced at Snorri who, watching harpies swoop overhead and miscounting aloud, was witlessly oblivious to the slight. ‘But Lord Winter is on our side. If we go slowly and carefully then we might be able to make it around them.’
Felix peered as far into the blizzard as he could see, the point where the statues started to become ethereal and impossible to distinguish from whatever monster might lie in wait for them hidden out of sight. Fear churned in his gut. He kissed the hardness in his gloved finger where he wore his ring, a curious pre-battle jitter that he had never felt the need to indulge in before now, and then closed his fingers over Karaghul’s dragonhead hilt. A hot glow prickled up his arm and pushed the fear aside. Without quite realising he was doing it, he probed the shades of the distant statues for a monster he did not even know was there. His heart was beating hard with anticipation, filling his veins with warmth and strength. Clearly Karaghul knew something that he didn’t. Not for the first time, he wondered if the old Templar blade was more trouble than it was worth.
‘All right,’ said Felix, more eagerness in his voice than he liked the sound of, searching Gotrek’s face for approval and getting it in a curt nod. ‘We’ll go around.’
Keeping low and his hands on the statue’s back, Felix edged out into the open and tried to track the seething mass of harpies in order to watch for an opening. He was beginning to think that he would have as much luck just going for it and trusting to luck when a terrific lowing went up from the gathered beastmen. Felix flinched back into cover as the ominous cry resounded between the statues and the low ceiling of snow and the roosting harpies flapped noisily to flight.
Suddenly, the air was filled with screams and beating wings and Felix watched as the beastmen strung up the last of the captives. The man had been strung by his ankles so that his length of blond hair trailed through the thin snow underneath him. His naked skin was so white it was only the heavy bruising and interlocking mesh of blue veins that kept him from vanishing from sight into the swirl of falling snow. His hanging body pivoted around to reveal his face. The man’s straight jaw was broken and his face was puffy, his blue eyes had been sunk into his face by black pits of bruising, but it was still a face that Felix always expected to see when he found himself in front of a mirror.
It was Gustav Jaeger.
Felix gripped the statue in front of him, edging further out, only realising how long he’d been staring when a painful shriek from directly above forced him to look away. He turned his face up into the snow and met the horribly distended, feminine features of a slavering harpy looking back down. On instinct, Felix stabbed his sword at it but it flapped out of reach across the statue’s shoulders where it hopped and crowed like a warning bell with wings. Felix swore loudly, his stomach dropping at the onrushing rustle of hundreds of fleshy wings.
‘Very careless, young Felix,’ said Snorri happily.
Fifteen
Square of Heroes
Felix threw himself flat on the ground and rolled under the statue of the kossar. A harpy bombed through the air where he had just been standing and scratched the cobblestones with its claws. It turned to scream at him, hideous features twisted into a bestial mask of outrage, but didn’t stop, sw
eeping past and joining the growing flock that filled the sky above Felix’s position. Felix’s shoulder struck the statue’s heel and he drew himself under the protection of its legs. Struggling to bring up his sword in that half-hunched position, he looked back.
Gotrek and Snorri hadn’t moved from where they had been standing. Thrashing black shapes enveloped them both with a screen of wings and talons, but despite the harpies’ advantage of numbers, both Slayers were continuing to mow through anything that came close enough for them to hit. Gotrek’s axe killed so many so fast the blade was almost invisible but for the ruin it caused to rain out of the sky. Snorri fought like a dervish with his axe and hammer, reducing flying monsters to pulped corpses and even letting fly with his mace-leg more out of raw enthusiasm than in any expectation of hitting the fast moving creatures. Felix couldn’t spot Kolya, but as he searched an arrow shot out from one of the nearby statues to drop a harpy that had been about to attack Snorri from behind. A few of them, smelling the two humans hiding amongst the statuary, peeled off from the attack on the dwarfs in search of easier prey.
In the instant he had, Felix considered his position. Would it be best to stay where he was with the statue’s legs guarding his flanks and eliminating the threat of an attack from above, or to meet them in the open where he at least had a chance of effectively wielding his sword? Unfortunately, the sheer speed of his assailants made his mind up for him. A black mass of them mobbed the kossar statue before Felix could even think about moving.
Felix couldn’t even hear himself cry out as everything he had previously been able to see and hear devolved into a maelstrom of teeth and claws and furiously beating wings that flooded the cramped space of Felix’s shelter with their unwashed animal stink. Felix shielded his face with his arm. Claws like fish knives raked through his mail. The armour absorbed the worst of what came his way, but there were enough of them that some, by pure chance, managed to rip at bare skin or tear weakened links from his mail. Felix stabbed back with his sword as he was tugged this way and that by whatever frenzied creature managed to get a grip on the sorry remnants of his cloak, but from his crouched position he could get neither the power nor the necessary speed to hurt his attackers. He cursed. The statue reverberated to the relentless storm of wingbeats. The harpies were practically fighting each other to flush him out.
Noticing that there were fewer of the creatures on the opposite side of the statue to the one he had entered from, Felix made the short crabwise shuffle that way. Leading with Karaghul like a lance, he impaled one harpy between the ribs and managed to send another squawking skywards after he pulled his sword free and returned its scream with a fraught one of his own into its misaligned face. Wincing at the bruises that reminded Felix all too graphically of the torn arteries and severed limbs that his armour had spared him from, Felix backed into the statue and brought his sword into a guard. He had a moment to catch his breath so he took it, too battle wise to let it pass. He kicked back with his heel at the marble behind him. This way at least, his back would be covered and he could give the harpies something in return.
He heard their screeches from the other side of the statue as they belatedly realised that he was gone and clawed at each other in a bid to climb. Through the snow, Felix saw the beastmen gathering. They had spears and halberds and their musicians were drumming them into a loose formation facing his way. Others were running around, apparently trying to goad the slumbering trolls into action. One of the monsters snarled, bit off the speartip thrust into its face with a splintering crunch, and started unsteadily to rise. A thickset beastman with a large set of stag-like antlers and russet robes that reached the snowy ground directed them from the foot of Tzar Alexis’s statue. It leaned on a black wooden staff, trussed men hanging around it, Felix’s nephew included, and pointed furiously towards Felix.
The rifling of freezing air through furious wings pulled Felix’s attention back to the point of his sword. Harpies spilled around the statue at his back and over it and Felix was fighting for his life all over again.
‘Gotrek,’ he shouted, somehow finding the breath as his sword slashed and parried faster than he could think. Harpies thrashed for him just outside his guard and there was no way he could fend them all off forever. ‘Do you see the beastmen, Gotrek?’
‘Aye, I see them,’ came Gotrek’s voice from somewhere within the onslaught. ‘They can wait their turn. This Chaos vermin can’t quench my axe’s thirst.’
‘They have Gustav and the others.’
In a storm of panicked figures, Gotrek strode out from behind the ring of statues. His back looked like it had been mauled by a bear and a full hand of claws had scratched his scalp from front to back along the line of his crest. One of the arrows in his chest had been gouged out, leaving a pit of red-soaked gristle behind. Judging by the manner in which the Slayer’s axe dismembered Felix’s attackers, the injury had done little to diminish his strength.
‘For the little one then,’ said Gotrek. ‘She always hated beastmen.’
‘For Kat,’ Felix agreed, feeling his ring dig into his finger as he tightened his grip on Karaghul.
Gotrek marched through the scattering harpies with a gleam in his one good eye. The loosely ranked beastmen in his path issued a mighty holler and thrust their spears into the air. ‘Straight down the middle. I’ll take the troll. Kill as many as we can.’
‘That doesn’t sound like something you spent a long time thinking about.’
With a dark scowl, Gotrek brandished his axe. ‘It’s got me this far.’
Felix fell into stride with him as the dwarf broke into a run. He picked out a lanky, goat-bearded beastman just off the centre of the front rank for his target and drew his blade back. Gotrek and his axe hit the beastman formation like a rolling boulder, arms and heads and bodies in shattered armour thrown out around him. Following in the wake of that force of destruction, it would have been hard for Felix to put a foot wrong. His sword sliced down the lanky beastman’s chest. Felix felt flesh and muscle open and organs spill and then he was moving on, in amongst the madness of battle.
Blades and weapon butts lashed in from every side and Felix parried wildly. He could feel blood drying in his beard, and sweat poured down his face despite the snow. Every callus in his hands seemed to ring with the impact of his blade on others and if not for his gloves, doused with sweat though they were, Felix felt certain that he would have lost his sword some time ago.
Keeping his guard true and his eyes open, Felix tried to keep the statue of Tzar Alexis and Gustav in sight. It would be too easy otherwise to get lost in the melee and forget what he was aiming for. He saw that Gotrek, true to the dwarf’s word, was carving open the beastmen’s ranks to get at the troll. Felix shook his head in wonder. He had thought Ulrika to be Gotrek’s equal in strength, but somehow the Slayer made the slaughter of dozens look easy. Whatever stood in his way died until, at the bleating insistence of their shaman beneath the statue, they fell back from him and left him to the troll. Elsewhere, Felix spotted Snorri Nosebiter in amongst the fray. Where Gotrek was a single-minded and brutally efficient bringer of death, Snorri scattered it around like a careless painter with an overfull brush. The dwarf bludgeoned his way gleefully into the already wavering beastmen with all the crushing zeal that had been so wasted on the swift-dodging harpies.
Felix caught the downward stroke of a beastman’s halberd, pushed it past him using its own downward momentum, and then kneed the warrior in the gut. Its breath wheezed out from its lungs and Felix moved past. He was too hemmed in to think about finishing it. Another was on him before he made a step, but Felix could tell its animal heart wasn’t in it. Felix could see in its eyes that it hadn’t been expecting this when it had formed up with its brethren against two dwarfs and a man. A human regiment, suitably motivated and well led, might have held up even against the losses the Slayers had piled up, but beastmen were never soldiers. They were forest reav
ers and night terrors, opportunists, scavengers that followed in the wake of the Kurgan armies. They were little better than wolves and when Snorri cracked open the shaman’s skull with his hammer they broke as a herd, cloven hooves clattering over the flagstones as they fled back into the sweeping snows towards the citadel.
Felix stifled a disbelieving smile. Against his own sound expectation he was still alive. The trolls were largely still sat around the fire where he had first spied them, the harpies were craven vultures, and the beastmen were a rabble that broke at the first hint of a stand-up fight. The Troll King had built his kingdom on shingle. For the first time since he had jumped into the Lynsk, Felix actually began to believe that they might prevail. In the moment it took him to recover his breath and mop the cold sweat from his brow, Gotrek beheaded the one moving troll and then kicked the severed head into the fire. It went up in a shooting geyser of sparks and then shot out the other side where it left a charred trail in the snow until it lost impetus, a crisped skull swiftly cooling as the snow buried it.
Snorri meanwhile limped furiously after the fleeing beastmen, shaking his weapons above his head and shouting insults until it became obvious that the beastmen weren’t coming back.
‘They’ll be back once they’ve got their friends,’ said Gotrek, straining through clenched teeth as he squatted underneath the dead troll’s headless shoulders and heaved.
‘Good,’ said Snorri. ‘Most of them never even got to fight Snorri, and Snorri doesn’t think that’s fair.’
Gotrek merely grunted as, in an inconceivable feat of raw strength, he somehow performed the work of a team of dwarfs with a pit pony and rollers and dragged the troll’s torso up onto his shoulders. He panted for a second, swollen muscles quivering, then rolled the body into the bonfire. It burned with even more vigour than had its head, throwing out thick black smoke that stank of burned flesh.