Gotrek & Felix- the Third Omnibus - William King & Nathan Long

by Warhammer

  As they did so, the walls shook once more. ‘We must hurry now. To the Chamber of Secrets!’

  The walls around them shook once more and the lights in the ceiling died. A few of the men let out howls of fear. The dark chamber was suddenly filled with menace. Teclis strode ahead of them, filled with confidence. From the tip of his staff came light to illuminate their way and send things scuttling back away from its circle. Felix caught sight of vast bat-shapes rising into the darkness below the ceilings. Once more he was aware of the huge weight of stones pressing down all around them. He was within the depths of an artificial mountain and something about it oppressed his very soul.

  With every step into the ancient darkness he became more certain that the place was haunted. He was not sure what by – perhaps the ghosts of the Old Ones, perhaps the spirits of other long-dead things – but he felt certain that something was there. Very often it seemed to him that just as they entered a chamber, some vast shadow departed, hovering just beyond their sight, waiting and watching with malign intelligence for them to make some misstep or perhaps just to lose their way in the eternal gloom.

  Worse yet, the taint of warpstone on the air was getting stronger. There was a pressure in his ears, on the top of his head, within his cheeks, that intensified until it was almost painful. Even his teeth ached. He did not doubt that the elf was right. They were nearing the heart of the most powerful magic Felix had ever encountered. He sensed long-dormant forces coming awake all around them.

  Even Gotrek seemed to sense it. His movements were cautious and his head scanned from side to side watchfully. Felix noticed that the runes on the dwarf’s axe had begun to glow with their own internal light. That had never been a good sign, in Felix’s experience.

  Behind them they could hear the echoing shouts of the orcs. The sound seemed to rumble through the old chambers like thunder. The bestial roaring was amplified a dozen-fold until it became the voice of an angry god. In his mind’s eye, Felix could picture that vast army of greenskins filing out through the corridors, slowly, inexorably, an irresistible green tide filling up the whole structure.

  It seemed unlikely to Felix that they should have got this far without running into some sort of resistance. In his experience, the forces of Chaos never gave up anything they had taken without some sort of fight. Unless of course, it was all a trap. The sudden certainty of it shook him. Were they being lured further into the pyramid to their dooms? Would they be sacrificed in some unspeakable way as part of some dreadful ritual? Had they already been swallowed alive by the vast dark god that was the pyramid itself?

  He tried to push the thought from his mind and noticed something else. The amulet the elf had given him was warm enough that he could feel it on his chest. He touched it with his fingers and was surprised by how hot it was, and he saw that the runes on it, written in flowing graceful elvish script, were alight. Something had activated its protective power.

  Now in the distance, he heard other sounds, the bellowing of war-cries, the clash of weapon on weapon. Somewhere men or things close to men chanted the names of dark gods. Orcs responded with guttural shouts in their bestial language. So far, on the path they had taken they had encountered nothing. It felt even more like a trap, like walking down the throat of a mighty beast that at any moment might gulp them down into its huge stomach. He gripped tight on his sword as if by holding it tighter he could somehow hold onto his fears as well.

  Another thought insinuated itself into Felix’s mind. They were not in the body of some great beast, they were trapped in the toils of some great infernal machine, like the engines the dwarfs used to process ore and work metal, only this one processed souls and produced… what? He could not begin to guess. Suddenly he found himself longing for action. His nerves were stretched, his brow covered in cold sweat. Waiting for whatever dreadful doom that was about to ensnare them seemed intolerable. He had to fight down an urge to run towards that distant melee, to throw himself into the mindless carnage, to drown out his consciousness in waves of berserker bloodlust.

  The charm grew warmer on his breast. The runes on Gotrek’s axe glowed brightly. The auras blazing on Teclis’s amulets almost dazzled him. In the strange glow he could see the faces of the other humans. They all looked strange and bestial, their shadows were the shadows of slouching apes, their features chiselled into expressions of elemental hatred and violence. Culum glared at him malignly. Siobhain’s face seemed twisted with insane hatred. Bran looked furtively about as if he feared one of his kin would plunge a spear into his back and claim his crown for their own. They all seemed caught up in some mad dream.

  The elf glanced at him and concern passed across his hateful, alien features. ‘It’s this place,’ he said. ‘It twists your mind. Chaos and the magic of the Old Ones have intertwined to produce something that mortals were not meant to endure the like of. Be calm. Resist it. Soon we shall be where we need to be.’

  As if to mock his soothing words the sounds of violence intensified and the whole pyramid shook as if struck with a giant hammer. The lights flickered to life once more, and a strange keening whining noise filled the air. Felix did not want to consider what could cause such a vast stone structure to quake like a shivering beast. He sensed that forces were being unleashed that might crack the whole world like an egg. He wished he were anywhere but here.

  Ahead of them lay a massive square, open to the sky. That the place had once possessed a roof was evidenced by the fact that huge shattered stones lay everywhere. Mighty stone pillars jutted upwards to support a ceiling that was no longer there. They too showed signs of erosion. Moss had grown on their intricate carved stonework. Tufts of ochre outlined some of the lines and submerged others.

  Overhead dark clouds boiled in the sky, glittering redly as if tainted with warpstone dust. Huge thunderbolts lashed down. They must be striking fairly close now. The sight of the open sky increased Felix’s claustrophobia rather than the reverse. It reminded him that in another few moments they would plunge back into the stygian gloom. The air here was not fresh. It carried hints of some new corruption. Teclis uttered what might have been an oath in Elvish and moved towards the base of one pillar.

  It had been corroded utterly and a white hand stuck out from the rock. Felix moved closer and looking over the elf’s shoulder, saw that it was not a human hand. It had only three fingerbones and those were broader and thicker than the fingers of any man. The elf tapped the stonework with the tip of his staff, and rock crumbled to reveal a skeleton that was only remotely human.

  It tumbled forward and clattered onto the floor. The elf must have exerted some arcane energy for it did not shatter into a thousand pieces as Felix would have expected. Instead it flipped over as if animated. For a second Felix feared the thing was being returned to some sort of unlife, like the skeletons and zombies he had fought in the ruins of Drakenhof. Others shrank away as well. Only Gotrek and the elf held their ground.

  Seeing no immediate danger he moved cautiously forward. The skeleton belonged to a being almost as tall as a man and broader – something about the shape of the head and the disposition of the limbs suggested the batrachian. If a toad and an ape had been crossed, it might have a skeleton like that, Felix thought.

  ‘Slann,’ said Teclis. ‘One of the Eldest Race, the Old Ones’ chosen servants. It was immured here amid these pillars. You would find a similar skeleton at the base of each of these columns. They were entombed alive.’

  ‘But why?’ Felix asked.

  ‘As part of some ritual designed to consecrate this place. Their souls were intended as guardians. Maybe they were offerings to whatever it was the Old Ones worshipped. Or maybe the purpose was so alien we could not begin to understand it. Who can tell? Someday when we have more time, I would like to come back and examine this place. Who knows what secrets it contains?’

  ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ said Gotrek, raising his axe meaningfully. ‘Lead on, elf. Bring us to the heart of this thing.’

&nb
sp; Teclis shook himself from his reverie, but paused for a last wondering glance at the skeleton. Felix thought he understood. How long had it been since that creature had lived and breathed and walked in sunlight? Millennia at least. Before the birth of the Empire. Before the first human civilisations arose in ancient Nehekhara. What kind of world had it looked on? What strange marvels had it witnessed? For a brief moment, Felix understood part of the attraction of necromancy. To be able to make such a creature speak and give up its secrets. He shivered and pulled his gaze away, wondering where those dark thoughts had come from. This place really was affecting him, he thought.

  As one they passed out of the great courtyard, and back into the bowels of the temple.

  Felix studied the corridor around him as they marched. At this point it was as wide as a road and the only protective barriers were where support arches jutted out of the walls every fifty strides or so. If there were any chambers leading out of the corridors they had been sealed so cunningly as to be undetectable. Ever since the discovery of the skeleton in the base of the pillar, Felix had suspected that concealed chambers and corpses and secrets were everywhere around them. He found it only to easy to imagine sealed chambers in which legions of batrachian bodies had laid down their lives for their perverse gods, in which sinister engines pulsed with the energies of ancient sorceries.

  Overhead the greenish lights glowed eerily. They provided a dim and ghastly luminescence that hid almost as much as it illuminated. Shadows danced grotesquely as the light flickered then surged. They spoke of secret energies ebbing and flowing all around as much as the shaking earth. Once more the image of some huge, complex and ultimately incomprehensible machine struck Felix. But he was prepared to believe that powers that could slowly and inexorably shift continents were being marshalled here.

  As the thought struck him, he heard the sounds of battle echo once more through the huge structure.

  The noise of furious conflict came ever closer. Felix squinted into the distant gloom. Orcs and beastmen fought savagely at the next crossroads. Two mighty inexorable tides of monsters had met and neither was willing to give ground. Felix could not tell who was winning, nor did he care. He wanted merely to be out of this place, and away from the eternal gloom surrounding them.

  Teclis raised his hand and gestured for them to stop. All around, men and women readied their weapons, levelling their spears, limbering up their swords. Felix was not sure what use such mighty claymores might have even in these wide corridors. He doubted that there was room for more than two or three men armed in such a way to fight abreast. In a confined space they would prove almost as much a threat to their friends as their enemies.

  ‘No,’ said the elf. ‘We do not fight. Not yet. We must find another way.’

  They waited tensely to see if the battle flowed towards them, but it did not. Instead it receded away from them, flowing into the distance. The small army of humans began its advance once more.

  They came to another ramp, this one leading down into the depths. From it emerged a foul smell, of stagnant warpstone-polluted water, and old decay. Mould clung to the walls here, a peculiar black stuff that seemed somehow poisonous. It had eaten away at the ancient carvings and formed new and grotesque shapes that hinted at gargoyles and monsters without quite being them.

  Without stopping Teclis led them downward into the eternal gloom. Felix looked at the dwarf but he seemed absorbed with his own dark thoughts, his mind appeared to have turned inwards on itself as it often did before moments of extreme and explosive violence.

  Even the downward-leading ramp was huge. It descended steeply into a gloom that became ever deeper as the green ceiling lights became ever more intermittent. Felix strode along at the head of the column beside the elf and the dwarf. He found their presence reassuring even here. Then his eyes caught sight of something that left him stunned.

  The way ahead was barred by what looked like a huge broken wall of spikes. He strode closer and saw that they were not spikes but bones, part of another, much larger skeleton. A monstrous ribcage loomed above him. He walked along a shattered spine towards a fairly human-looking skull that had been smashed by some titanic blow.

  It was the skeleton of a giant. It blocked the entire corridor. Its size was entirely consistent with the creature he had imagined when he saw the huge print in the forest mud.

  ‘I don’t think he was entombed here as part of some ancient ritual,’ said Felix.

  He inspected it for the stigmata of mutation and could see none. The bones were huge, much thicker than those of an ordinary man in proportion to their size, and Felix guessed that the giant had been much broader in life in proportion to his size than a man. Still, there were no horns or claws. A few of the bones from legs and arms were missing but he saw their cracked and broken remains lay close by. It reminded him of the way orcs and beastmen broke bones to suck out the marrow. He suppressed a shudder.

  ‘What could have killed and eaten a giant?’ he asked, not really expecting an answer.

  ‘Another giant,’ said Gotrek grimly. He strode forward under the huge ribcage and paused to contemplate it for a second as if measuring himself against it. Felix wondered what was passing through his mind. Compared to this huge creature, even Gotrek’s mighty axe was less than a child’s toy. It was not a reassuring thought. The print they had seen outside was recent and the image of a cannibal giant strong enough to kill even its mighty kin sprang into his mind.

  He could tell by the expressions of all the men around him that the same thought had occurred to them. It was with visible reluctance that they continued their trek down into the depths of the pyramid.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Teclis studied the threads of power he sensed all around him. He was close now. Close to the black heart of the mystery he had crossed continents to solve. Close to the source of the dreadful eruptions of power that spelled doom for his homeland unless they were resolved. He felt the flow of vast energies around him, greater even than those pinned down by the watchstones of Ulthuan. Compared to them, this was like measuring a mountain stream against the flow of the mighty river Reik.

  There was something wrong here. The flows of energy were not steady. They stuttered. They erupted mightily one instant and faded away to nothing the next, as if someone had invoked their mighty energies but could not quite control them, was in fact battling to contain them. The thought sent fear shuddering through even his perfect self-control. That someone had awoken this sleeping daemon without knowing its true name, had aroused all this power without having the means to completely control it, was almost more frightening than the idea that evildoers had bound it to the service of Chaos.

  For if the power that underpinned continents and could shift worlds in their orbit was allowed to raven unchecked then the end of the whole world was perhaps nigh. Certainly the end of this temple and perhaps this island, and as an inevitable consequence, Ulthuan. Worse than that, even the partial control that was going on here was the mark of mighty sorcerers, perhaps more than his equals. He did not relish the prospect of facing them.

  His options were scant indeed. They needed to go on, to get to the very core of this, and soon. He led the way downwards into the heart of the pyramid. All around him power surged. All around him battle raged.

  The road ended at a mighty arch. Beyond it lay a huge chamber, with many entrances and exits. Felix looked at it. There seemed no rhyme or reason to the place. It was a huge maze laid out according to principles he could not understand. Above them were many galleries and walkways. Ahead of them was open space, and when he went to the edge and looked down, he could see more galleries dropping away beneath them. It was like looking into a huge well.

  He was reminded once more of the strange city he and Gotrek and Snorri had gotten lost in during their trek across the Chaos Wastes. Was there some connection between this place and that? Certainly there were similarities between the architecture, but this temple was built on an even more epic scale
. In his mind’s eye, he suddenly pictured dozens of such places scattered about the world, linked by a web of strange powers, laid out in a pattern just as incomprehensible to a mortal mind as their interiors.

  He was distracted from his reverie by the appearance of a horde of orcs on the gallery above and opposite them. Their leader was some sort of shaman, carrying a skull-tipped staff. He shrieked and pointed at them. So much for spells of concealment, Felix thought. Noticing the men below, the orcs raised their bows and sent a wave of arrows hurtling towards them. The distance was great but one could not count on all the force of the missiles being spent. Felix ducked down below the level of the stone banister. Arrows clattered down all around him. A second wave came in and Teclis incinerated them with a spell. Seeing this, the greenskins held their fire and shouted taunts and abuse in their vile tongue. Gotrek answered with a few of his own, and was joined by the human warriors. The elf seemed more concerned with getting them moving again.

  The orcs began to surge along the gallery seeking some way to get to their opponents. As Felix watched, beastmen and black armoured Chaos warriors emerged from another entrance and met the greenskins head on. A monstrous melee ensued.