Gotrek & Felix: Kinslayer

by David Guymer

  With a panicked tirade of wingbeats and piercing screams, the harpy jerked its legs in a bid to kick Felix off. Strong as its wings were, and well suited to its cowardly method of killing, it was not accustomed to bearing a grown man’s weight for so long without dropping it and they were losing altitude fast. The wind whistled up from the ground between them. His tattered cloak whipped around his eyes. He couldn’t even see the ground for the snow all around. Quickly, everything around him spinning, he tried to decide whether having the harpy pinned to his side was a help or a hindrance to his chances at this point.

  With a resigned snarl, he gave up trying to hit the creature with his blade and instead turned his fingers to prying the creature’s talons from his mail. Its claws were ivory white against its inky flesh, but cankerous and crusted with excrement. Felix slid his fingers between the harpy’s toes and tugged. It shrieked and thrashed against him harder, unable to comprehend that they each wanted the same thing. A viscous foulness seeped from the creased flesh above its knuckles. One claw came loose, tearing away another warped mail ring. Felix gave a cry of success as the remaining talons slid out. There was a moment of joyous weightlessness as the harpy’s wings ballooned out and it shot up with a parting wail.

  Felix almost laughed. Then his stomach shot up through his mouth and he fell.

  He still couldn’t see the ground, but he soon realised that that owed more to the thickness of the snow than to altitude when he struck a stone slab not long after opening his mouth to draw breath on a scream. There was a crunch of mail, an all-encompassing hit of pain as if he had just been punched by a fist the exact size and mass of his whole body, and then he felt the stone beneath him push back and he bounced.

  The image of an open gateway arced down through his vision. He realised he had landed on the top step of the procession that led up from the Square of Heroes to the citadel. The doors were dark, treated oak, carved with glowering faces and crossed with thick bands of steel. The doors were open wide and something reptilian and monstrous stood between them with an axe.

  That was as much as an instant could reveal, and the next thing Felix became aware of was his shoulder hitting the next step down. The step after that beat on the flapping mail of his hip. He was rolling, his understanding of what was occurring beyond the borders of his own skin reduced to a painful succession of body blows. His head spun. His mail shook like a sack of rice. Trying to stop himself he almost broke his elbow against one of the statues that spun past on both sides. Tucking his head under his forearms and pulling his legs in to his chest, he hoped simply to ride it out to the bottom in one piece.

  When the last step finally threw Felix’s shoulders back onto the Square of Heroes he lay there flat for a moment and groaned. Slowly his thoughts swam back into alignment with the physical location of his brain. It wasn’t a pleasant reunion.

  Sigmar, he hurt! Eyes scrunched tight, he levered himself off his back and onto his elbows. Snow swept across the dramatic frontage of Praag’s citadel. From up close it was uniquely horrible. Gargoyles and gothically realised daemons leered down from the battlements. Towers rose higher than he could see. Distant windows winked behind the snow like lighthouses in fog.

  Shaking snow from his face, Felix turned his attention to the castle’s most immediate and crushingly familiar feature with a sinking feeling. Statues stood sentinel between steps on either side, the likenesses of Imperial soldiers. Greatswords stared sternly across at dismounted pistoliers. Halberdiers with puffed doublets and dated wargear stood guard in cracked and weathered mail. All of them were mantled in heavy snow. They were the liberators of Praag, the soldiers of Magnus the Pious, granted this extraordinary tribute by the fiercely proud men of Kislev. Stiffly, Felix picked his sword from the ground where it had fallen and stood. The thought of climbing up that stair having just descended it in such abrupt fashion brought spasms to his aching joints and pain from their adjoining muscles. If he survived to see it, then he was going to be stiff as a board in the morning.

  He looked back. Could he really leave Gustav and the others to fight alone? Who would keep an eye on Snorri? Was Max or Ulrika worth all of their deaths? Felix tightened his grip on Karaghul. And if he was going to start being honest with himself now, what made him think he was capable of dealing with the Troll King’s remaining guards by himself anyway?

  Trapped in indecision, Felix was about to head back to the fight when he noticed that the flagstones beneath his feet were trembling, as if fearing the approach of something dreadful. Not wanting to, but unable to stop himself, Felix turned back to the stair and looked up.

  Descending the steps was a monster of epic scale, its terrible bulk nevertheless indistinct, wreathed in a lightning-charged penumbra of storm-black clouds. It was four-legged, its lower body covered in dark dragon-like scales while its torso and head were akin to a man’s, only proportioned like those of an ancient god of war. Its chest was carved with tattoos written in a dead language, and pierced with iron spikes and rings thicker than Karaghul. A mane of dark hair fell past the waist to those monstrous forelegs, thick and charged with the lightning that flickered around its head and shoulders. Huge tusks thrust from a plinth-like jaw. The air crackled and steamed with its approach, the brute power in its lower quarters causing its humanoid upper body to sway with every step. With both hands, it hefted an axe that made Gotrek’s look like something with which a halfling chopped firewood.

  Felix knew then that he must be getting close. Even the Troll King could not have commanded two such champions as this!

  He backed out onto the Square of Heroes but, to his surprise, he was not afraid. This was the monster that Karaghul had sensed from the river and he could feel the vague sentience within the Templar blade stirring in response to it, easing the aches from his body and filling his heart with strength. It had been forged to fight dragons, but despite centuries of warfare and scores of crusading masters it had never tested its enchantments against one of the legendary ancients: a dragon ogre of the prehistoric world. It was excited and, because it was, so too was Felix.

  That, however, frightened him a great deal.

  ‘You have come a long way and suffered so much just to die in my castle, Felix Jaeger.’

  The voice did not come from the dragon ogre – the monster emitting only a sonorous rumble – but from further up the steps. As hard as it was to look beyond the looming Old One, Felix forced himself to. There, crowned head towering over the larger than life-size statue of an artilleryman on the step above him, tattered red cloak sodden and streaming in the wind, stood the Troll King.

  ‘You know me?’ said Felix, but then of course, the Troll King had Ulrika, and had held Max for the better part of a year.

  As if reading Felix’s thoughts, the Troll King did not answer.

  ‘I am Throgg, the King of Trolls, and I had been hoping to watch the Trollslayer die here at my feet. But his henchman will suffice. For starters.’

  For a long moment, Max Schreiber stared at the window. Had he really just seen the face he had thought he had fly past his window? Impossible. Even if Felix had managed to pass the Auric Bastion, his chances of making it this far were infinitesimal. Throgg had picked apart Max’s dreams of escape and rescue surgically enough for him to know that.

  Reassured by this line of reasoning, Max ignored the phantasmagoria and turned back to his subject.

  Then he spread his raw and swollen fingers, and began.

  Sixteen

  The Troll King’s Champion

  The holes in Snorri Nosebiter’s head were tingling. He shook his head to clear it, stove a troll’s ankle in with his hammer, then dropped onto his stiff metal knee as a boulder-like fist droned overhead and he stuck his axe into a second troll’s thigh. Chips of stone flew out as Snorri yanked the blade loose with a joyous cry, tottering backwards and avoiding the clumsy kick from the first troll that instead hit the second’s wounded
leg and sent it crashing to the ground.

  Snorri wobbled giddily on his feet and slapped the back of his hand against his forehead. The tingling wouldn’t go away. It felt horribly like memories.

  Everything around him was burning. Men were screaming. Smoke burned his eyes and dried his mouth. The sweet smell of well roasted meat filled the air. It disturbed the ale sloshing in his otherwise empty belly and he threw up over the bloodstained flagstones. He dropped to his knees, crunching the charred ribcage of a goblin raider that had been hidden under the layer of soot. Snorri ducked his head under a swinging axe. A beastman’s axe, he reminded himself. Not goblins. His own axe gutted the beastman and he rose.

  The scene around him resembled the stories of Grimnir’s March, the first Slayer’s doomed quest to do battle with the gods and their daemon legions. Smoke rose up from the ground to choke the driving snow, the wind blending them together into a choking grey pall that deadened sound and killed sight cold. The three-headed flying monster had gouged a trench of fire that had missed Snorri by inches and still flooded the square with heat. Tattered scraps of murk drifted across the beastmen’s big fire while all around bits of burning troll glowed like brands. The lowing of beastmen and the shrieks of harpies echoed oddly and from every direction. Monstrous shadows loomed teasingly out of the dark.

  Coughing, the air sticky with roasted blood, Snorri staggered after the standing troll, clashing his weapons above his head as much to block out the incessant tingling in his skull as to attract the troll’s attention. The troll grunted, distracted, rapping its own head with its knuckles as if mimicking Snorri’s behaviour, and slowly sank onto its haunches.

  ‘Stand up and kill Snorri!’ The troll’s mouth hung open and Snorri noticed that its nose was bleeding, a sticky brownish paste oozing over a protruding upper lip. It issued a groan. It eyes flickered up into their sockets. Snorri lowered his weapons. ‘Gotrek. Snorri’s troll is acting funny.’

  A tripled shriek echoed through the smog and Snorri squinted to glimpse Gotrek amidst the rubble of at least one large statue and surrounded on all sides by several more. His old friend was singed and savaged front and back with angry red slashes, and partially obscured under a haze of heat. A gout of flame belched over Gotrek’s head and blasted another statue to smithereens. The dwarf brought up his axe, red-faced and furious as he laboured down a lungful of fiery air before a swipe of the three-headed monster’s claws sent him piling through the statue of a Kislevite horse-archer in a shower of rubble.

  Snorri probably shouldn’t feel jealous. If his old friend were to meet his long-awaited doom then that would spare them all a lot of trouble, but he couldn’t help but think about his own promised destiny. And when you are whole again, when those you most love surround you again, then you shall have a death that brings you nothing but pain. Somehow he knew that that meant Gotrek was not going to die here.

  He had to be present for Snorri’s.

  The troll emitted a stuttering sigh, its head yawing back, and Snorri felt a sudden shock of connection in which he thought he saw himself through the monster’s rolling eyes. Snorri lifted his hammer, getting the greyed image of an old and tired-looking dwarf with no hair and one leg mirroring the same action, and then sought to blink it off and turn the hammer. He gave it a shake.

  That was strange.

  It reminded Snorri of his journey with old Borek back through the Chaos Wastes when the sky had been fat with magic. That had felt like this.

  The tingling in his skull continued to grow more intense, becoming a buzz that was starting to make his head hurt. Somewhere in the blizzard a harpy shrieked as it angled overhead towards the big statue where the humans fought, sounding in Snorri’s one ear like the mocking laugh of a harsh old witch. Giving his head a vigorous shake, Snorri swept up his hammer with the intention of cracking it on the troll’s out-thrust chin. The buzz became a whistle like a kettle in the pinhole scar of his other ear. Snorri grimaced. And then his eardrums bled.

  There was a sharp pain as if he’d been cleanly skewered ear to ear and a rivulet of blood ran the gnarled course of his jaw. The troll in that same instant seized, every muscle in its monstrous body tensing and then falling suddenly slack as the light was snuffed from its eyes. It hung upright for a moment, blood pooling under now lifeless eyeballs before it slowly toppled backwards, sprawling over the body of the troll that it had earlier knocked down. That one was dead as well, although the wound in its thigh continued to regenerate. Blood streamed from its nose and eyes and thick clots of it plugged its ears.

  Everywhere he could see, trolls were dropping like meat cut from a butcher’s ceiling hooks. Snorri stuck a finger in his cauliflower ear and scraped out a crust of blood. He arched a crooked eyebrow up towards the sky as it exploded with the black wings of startled harpies.

  Very strange.

  Felix’s sword felt like a lightning bolt in his hand. The blade glowed an intense blue-white, electrical bursts firing out from the tip with cracks that split the air and seared it with a burned, bitter taste. Though its fierce vibrations had numbed his arms to the elbow, Felix brought his sword into a guard and peered into the storm of arcing white light and deafening sound.

  Silhouetted within its own aura stood the dragon ogre. Black, lightning-struck clouds leached from its muscular torso like sweat from the body of a man. The air around it trembled with perpetual thunder that crashed and crescendoed like an infernal chorus. A bolt of lightning whiplashed through the storm and earthed in his sword and Felix staggered back as if physically struck. The runes etched into his blade glowed so brightly he could see them with his eyes closed. He groaned as fresh strength restored tired muscles with old aches, nevertheless gripping to Karaghul as though it were the one secure hold in the midst of a storm. He felt in his fingers the sword’s efforts to match the monster’s power and counter it, but even its potent enchantments were being overwhelmed by the torrent of raw, elemental fury. And as more of the sword’s protective magicks turned towards Felix’s survival, the first chink of genuine horror at what Felix was actually facing seeped in through the cracks.

  Here was a monster that had seen the first days of the world and survived the dawn of Chaos, or so some scholars had it. He was Felix Jaeger; a poet, a propagandist and a one-time sidekick to a Trollslayer. What claim could he have to best a monster like this?

  Punch drunk, Felix brought up his sword again.

  Hard laughter that bore a pain all its own reverberated through the thunder and lightning. Felix tried to pinpoint the Troll King, but he was lost in the squall of noise.

  ‘What do you hope to achieve, Felix? You are not a hero. You are a hero’s shadow.’

  Breaking its own storm front, the dragon ogre swung up its massive axe in two hands, driving a downward arc towards a blow that would have cleft an anvil in two. Bellowing like a cornered bear, Felix brought Karaghul up to parry as if any man had a hope in the End Times of blocking that blow.

  The impact hammered Felix down and sent arcs of lightning flaring over Felix’s head from where steel had struck volcanic glass. A compression wave pulverised the flagstones beneath Felix’s feet, throwing the dust up into the air before it was incinerated by the dragon ogre’s lightning halo a second later. The air burned and Felix felt as though his lungs were filling with molten copper. But Karaghul had somehow kept Felix alive. With too little time to marvel at the fact, Felix felt the overbearing pressure force him to his knees. With every ounce of his own strength and that which the sword could loan him he pushed back, but his sword arm quavered: it felt over-large and ached as if from days of exertion. The axe ground him under it, forcing his blade down until its white heat and static brilliance caused Felix’s beard and eyebrows to stand erect and sizzle.

  ‘When Shagga first came to me, he had just lost a war. Do you know how badly your kind had hurt him?’

  Felix groaned, the dragon ogre pushing its
advantage until he was almost bent backwards over the shattered ground. Desperately, he looked around for something to use, some tool, some trick, but there was not even a paving stone within reach that hadn’t been obliterated. He lay in dust fit for the grave. Even the snow was vaporised by the lightning mesh before it could make it as far as Felix’s exposed face. A tinnitus filled his ears, likely a consequence of thunderclaps going off every few minutes a foot from his head. He decided that if humouring the Troll King would buy him a few extra seconds to think of something then he would do it.

  ‘Did you help him recover?’

  ‘I did not have to. His kind is beyond your power to injure.’

  Great, Felix thought, gritting his teeth and straining against the dragon ogre’s strength while, seemingly unrelated in any way to the storms after all, the ringing in his ears had grown in pitch to a shrill whine. It was a pressure that seemed to be pushing outwards from inside his own head, like a particularly awful hangover although Felix had had worse, but most shocking was the effect that it had on the Troll King.

  The monster gave a long bellow of agony.

  Felix felt the ungodly strength bearing down on his sword arm relent as the dragon ogre turned away in concern for its master and Felix had to fight to keep his legs from jellying to the ground in relief. The tormented air became easier to breathe as the dragon ogre moved away, black clouds dissipating before the wind and unshrouding the figure of the Troll King. The troll was bent double, clutching at the statue of a halberdier on the first step up to the castle as if it were an anchor, the face crumbling round his claws.

  ‘What is happening?’ the Troll King growled, voice so sonorous that it shook Felix’s innards with its fragile sanity and its rage, then threw his gaze up towards the distant slits of light that glimmered through the snow above the castle’s battlements. ‘Max.’