Gotrek & Felix- the Second Omnibus - William King

by Warhammer

  All around he sensed the pulse of magic. Other wizards were at work, and most likely some of the priests as well, doing their best to contain the evil spirits that had been unleashed. Even as he thought this, he sensed something else, a flow of dark magical energy through the night. It was potent and evil, and it came from close by.

  ‘Gotrek! Felix! Turn right! Now! Beware! There is evil magic here!’

  To their credit, the adventurers did not hesitate, or even question his instructions. They raced down the side street in the direction he had indicated with Snorri in their wake. As they did so, Max’s magically attuned eyes picked up a strange, many-coloured gleam from up ahead. The currents of dark magic made his hackles rise. He muttered an incantation to strengthen his protective spells and prepared himself for battle.

  What new madness was this, wondered Felix, as they ran towards the massive structure? He recognised the building as one of the fortified grain depots in which the city’s foodstocks were stored. Normally the place was heavily guarded, but now the entrance was open and the way within clear. Where were the soldiers?

  As he approached the arched doorway, he got his answer. They lay in the snow, with their throats cut, puddles of redness clotting all around them. Felix’s mind reeled. This was not possible. Armed soldiers did not stand and let their throats be cut when they had the will and the means to resist. There was only one answer. Evil sorcery was at work here. The gargoyles above the entrance seemed poised to spring on him as he passed beneath them. He let out a sigh of relief as he stepped inside and nothing happened. For a moment he was glad to be out of the bitter cold, but when he saw what waited within he felt suddenly sick.

  More guardsmen had been slaughtered. Their throats had been cut, and their eyes were wide and staring. Their weapons lay near at hand, unstained by the blood of their foes, obviously unused. Again, Felix felt a sick certainty that evil magic was at work here. These men had put up no resistance, and they could not have been anything but wary. Not with those shrieking spectres howling on the wind earlier. Dozens of them had died here, and their enemies, whoever they were, had not taken a casualty.

  In a moment, Gotrek and the others were around him. ‘They are here to destroy the food supplies,’ said Max.

  ‘Or poison them,’ said Gotrek. Felix nodded remembering Sergei and Olaf and their tainted blades. Their employer certainly had knowledge of wicked alchemy.

  ‘Snorri thinks we’d better stop them,’ said Snorri.

  ‘How?’ Felix asked, fighting to keep fear from his voice. ‘Three score of city guards didn’t manage to.’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll think of something, manling,’ said Gotrek running his thumb along the edge of his axe till a bright bead of blood blossomed forth. ‘They are down in the silos. I can hear them.’

  ‘Be wary,’ said Max. ‘They have strong magic. I can feel it.’

  Gotrek looked at the corpses and snorted. ‘I didn’t need a wizard to tell me that.’

  They crept forward into the gloom. Felix caught the odd musty smell of grain in the air. Dust tickled his throat and made his mouth feel dry. They passed massive chutes designed to carry the grain down into the huge storage pits. It was gloomy here. The only illumination was the faint glow surrounding Max. He had muted it as much as possible to avoid warning any enemies of their approach, leaving only enough to let Felix see by. Felix suspected that the wizard had no more need of the light than the dwarfs, and he was grateful to Max for his concern.

  ‘Do you think there is a connection?’ Felix asked.

  ‘Between what?’ Max asked.

  ‘The ghosts being unleashed, and now this raid on the grain stores?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s more likely an accident that the ghosts were unleashed and this happened at the same time. I think the raids were timed to happen on the same night as whatever is happening outside the wall, but that does not mean they are connected either.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Chaos moon is full. Dark magic is at its most powerful on a night like this. This is a holy night to the followers of the Ruinous Powers. It might just be that a number of things are happening concurrently because of that.’

  ‘We can’t be certain.’

  ‘No. Maybe I am just hoping this is the case.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if it isn’t it means that the attackers outside our walls have some method of communicating with the worshippers of Chaos within them. And if they have, maybe they have a way of getting more than messages through.’

  ‘Not a reassuring thought.’

  ‘This invasion has obviously been long planned, Felix, by someone, or a group of people with diabolical intelligence. Who knows what other nasty surprises they have in store?’

  Felix stood on the edge of a loading ramp, looking down into the silo. About fifteen feet below, knee-deep in grain, he could see figures. There were a dozen robed and masked men. Some of them held lanterns whilst others moved in the storage bin, adding liquid from large vials and stirring it in to the grain. Felix knew Gotrek had been right. This was poison. What sort of men were these, he wondered, who could plot to kill their fellow citizens while outside an army of monsters waited? He already had the answer he realised. They were followers of the dark powers of Chaos. They probably did not even consider what they were doing as treachery. Unfortunately for them, he did.

  Seeing how few their numbers were reassured him somewhat. They had used sorcery and dark magic to overcome the guards but, hopefully, Max could counter that. Unless they were quite extraordinary fighting men, Gotrek and Snorri would prove more than a match for them. And Felix would cheerfully help in that slaughter. They were obviously overconfident and would be easy enough to take by surprise. They had not even posted sentries.

  ‘We were told not to kill the guards,’ grumbled one of the men below. ‘We were told but would you listen? No! When the higher-ups get word of this there will be trouble.’

  ‘Better safe than sorry, that’s what I say,’ said another voice in a self-justifying tone. It was a nasty voice, with a slimy insinuating quality to it, and Felix did not doubt for a moment that its owner had been the one to start the slaughter of the guards, and had enjoyed doing it. ‘Anyway, it’s a few less blades for our brethren outside the walls to worry about.’

  ‘Yes – but now everyone will know something happened here. This was supposed to be a surprise.’

  ‘Hurry it up,’ Felix heard a third voice say. This was the voice of a leader. ‘The blizzard won’t last forever, and the guard will be relieved in a couple of hours. We don’t have all night.’

  It was almost reassuring, hearing human voices after the spectral things they had encountered outside. Their foes were living, breathing people, and Felix knew that if he cut one, he would bleed. Suddenly he was glad.

  As so often happened to him, his earlier fear had passed to be replaced with a smouldering rage. He was angry at those men below for what they had done. It was bad enough that they had slaughtered the guards by stealth, but they were planning the murder of hundreds, maybe thousands more people. Felix knew that if their plan was allowed to succeed, he or Ulrika or any of these others could easily be among the victims. What they were doing was wicked and cowardly as well as treacherous, and it had to be stopped.

  ‘Looks like they’ve only managed to contaminate one bin so far,’ whispered Max.

  ‘Then let’s stop them before they do any more,’ Gotrek said. ‘Oi! What are you doing down there?’ he bellowed.

  The masked cultists looked up. Felix could see feverish eyes gleaming. Several of them held knives or swords. One of them raised his hands, and began to incant. Without giving himself a chance to think, Felix launched himself into space, swinging his sword as he went. He landed near the Chaos sorcerer and split his skull with one blow. The impact of landing was cushioned by the soft grain in which he now stood almost up to his ankles.

  The cultists yelled with dismay as Gotrek and
Snorri dropped to join him. Gotrek’s axe lashed out chopping the nearest cultist in two. The return swipe clipped the top off another’s skull and sent brainstuff spurting over the grain. Snorri howled with glee as he lashed out with his axe and his hammer.

  Felix’s assessment of the cultists had been correct. It took them a moment to recover, and in that time, Felix launched himself forward to stab another in the stomach. As he did so he discovered one of the disadvantages of their situation. The grain slithered around underfoot. It was like wading through a slippery type of quicksand. It at once sucked you down and made it very difficult to keep your balance if you moved.

  ‘Get them!’ one of the cultists shouted. ‘There’s only three of them.’

  The Chaos worshippers moved to engage them, slipping as they moved too. Only the dwarfs showed no signs of losing their balance. Of course, it was easy for them, thought Felix, with their short legs and broad feet. They strode forward to meet the enemy, barely impeded by their footing at all.

  Felix found himself trading blows with a big man, larger than himself, armed with a heavy broadsword. The man was slower than he was, and not nearly as skilled, and under normal circumstances, Felix would have dispatched him in an instant. As it was the difficulty of moving without falling over, and the way the grain sucked at his legs and slowed his movements, meant that he was having some difficulty. It increased when the man was joined by two of his fellows. Wonderful, thought Felix. Why can’t they go and fight with Gotrek instead of picking on me?

  He parried one blow, barely turned another, and felt his arm being nicked by the edge of a sword. He prayed that the blade wasn’t poisoned, and tried to keep the thought from freezing him on the spot as he blocked another blow. The force of the impact threatened to send his blade flying from his numbed fingers. He almost overbalanced in the slippery grain.

  From above came a searing flash of golden light. One of the men’s cowls caught fire, and the beam continued onwards, setting his hair alight and causing the flesh of his scalp to melt and run. As Felix watched his skull seemed to cave inwards, and his head sagged downwards as if made of melting clay. The man gave a horrible gurgling moan and collapsed. Another of Felix’s assailants glanced upwards to locate the source of this new threat. Felix took the opportunity to slide his sword blade under the man’s ribs, and send him headlong into Morr’s realm.

  The last man shrieked and leapt at Felix but as he did so, Gotrek’s axe caught him on the back of his head, passed right through his torso and cleft him in twain. Felix glanced up and saw Max Schreiber standing there, a golden aura surrounding his right hand. Felix nodded his thanks and then glanced around the silo. It was like a scene from some hell of the Blood God’s. Parts of dismembered bodies lay everywhere. Blood seeped into the grain. The alembics of poison lay there, their contents gurgling outwards.

  ‘Snorri doesn’t fancy eating any bread made from this stuff,’ said Snorri.

  For once in your life, Snorri, you just said something sensible, thought Felix.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Felix asked worriedly. ‘Wait here until the guards come?’

  He had enough experience of these things to know that the guards might just take one look at the carnage they had caused and haul them off to the duke’s cells. That’s if any guards were coming. They might well not be, in the aftermath of the ghosts of Praag being unleashed.

  ‘The question is whether this was the only granary being attacked,’ Max said. ‘The only reason these swine failed here is because we stopped them. If something similar is happening at every granary in the city…’

  ‘We should warn someone,’ Felix said.

  ‘Who? If there is a traitor in the palace.’

  ‘We should tell the duke in person. I doubt he’s the traitor, and, if he is, we have an even bigger problem.’

  ‘The duke would see me, I think,’ Max said. ‘He requested I attend his court earlier today. Of course, he would probably listen to Ulrika too, but she’s not up and about.’

  ‘He would listen to anyone who came here on the Spirit of Grungni,’ Felix said, thinking quickly.

  ‘Then let’s not waste any more time debating about it,’ said Gotrek. ‘Let’s go!’

  The snow had stopped falling for the moment. The streets were eerily quiet beneath their blanket of white. The night air was cold and still. From somewhere off in the distance came a long high-pitched wail, and what sounded like a sob of grief. It seemed that the night’s evil was unending, thought Felix. Max stood frozen for a moment, in the attitude of a man listening to some barely perceptible noise. After a moment, he said, ‘The forces of dark magic are strong this night.’

  ‘Easy to see who’s the wizard here,’ Gotrek said sarcastically. ‘I don’t think we need you to tell us that.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Max said testily. ‘Why don’t you leave the divination to me, and I’ll leave the axe work to you?’

  ‘Sounds fair,’ said Snorri.

  ‘What did you mean exactly?’ Gotrek said.

  ‘There’s something big going on out there,’ said Max. There was no need to ask where out there was. They all knew he meant beyond the walls. ‘Some mighty arcane ritual. They are gathering all the winds of dark magic from the north, channelling them into a mighty storm of magic.’

  ‘To what end?’ Felix asked. ‘To overcome the city’s spell walls?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Max said. ‘Or perhaps for some other reason.’

  ‘What might that be?’

  ‘Let me think about it.’

  ‘Then think while we move,’ said Gotrek. ‘Come on!’

  As they rushed through the chilly winding streets, Max once more appreciated how cunningly Praag had been rebuilt. The city was a maze, designed to confuse any who did not know its layout already. Not that it would help much if invaders had cultist guides from within the walls. The guards at the gate of the inner wall let them pass easily enough, and they ran on up the massive stone outcrop on top of which the citadel rested.

  Max was worried, more than he had been in his entire life. The full enormity of their situation was settling like a lead weight on his shoulders. He and Ulrika and the others were trapped here. Not only was the weight of foes without the walls near overwhelming, but also there were traitors within. Worse, the enemy army contained sorcerers more powerful than any Max had ever encountered, and they were, even now, engaged in some evil magical ritual the purpose of which he could not yet fathom.

  Think, he told himself. What are they really doing? Gathering all the dark magical energy of an entire continent to them. Why? What can they achieve? They can power spells of enormous force. Or? Or, for a short time, they can raise the level of dark magical power in this area to that of the Chaos Wastes, or even higher. Suddenly, a sinking feeling settled in the pit of Max’s stomach. All of his studies pointed to one thing they could do with that energy.

  ‘I think they are going to raise an army of daemons,’ said Max.

  Felix let out a low moan. Snorri gave what might have been a yip of glee. Gotrek smiled with grim mirth. ‘What makes you say that?’ Felix asked.

  How could he explain this to them, he wondered? They were not sorcerers. They did not have the training or the knowledge that would let them appreciate the full enormity of the situation. He did. This was an area he had studied extensively. Daemons required the presence of enormous amounts of magical energy if they were to hold their forms in the mortal world for any length of time. Magic was to daemons what air was to humans or water to fishes. It was an element they needed to survive. Fortunately for humanity, in most areas of the world magic was relatively scarce and daemons could not be summoned for more than very short periods of time. Usually minutes, hours at most. Only in areas like the Chaos Wastes was there enough of the raw stuff of magic to enable them to permanently hold their forms. If the mages of the army out there could draw enough energy to Praag they could recreate those conditions. And once that was done, with all that
energy loose, who knew what daemons were capable of? Not even the most powerful of the ancient wizards had any idea.

  Max felt a chill worse than that of the night air pass into his very bones.

  Ahead of them the citadel loomed out of the snow. It was huge, as large as any royal palace in the Empire, but, to Felix’s mind, there was something odd about it. It looked subtly wrong. The doors were too massive, the wings subtly out of proportion, as if the architect had been eating weirdroot when he had drawn the schematics, and then labourers had actually gone out and built what he imagined.

  For all that it had a disturbing beauty. Monstrous gargoyles clutched the roof eaves. Huge ornately carved stone balconies jutted out from beneath the window arches. Massive monsters had been carved in such a way as to suggest that they were emerging from the living stone to do battle with the sculpted heroes who confronted them. A huge statue of Magnus the Pious loomed beside the main door raising his hammer so that it met the blade of Tzar Alexander that rose from the other side. These two heroes of the Great War against Chaos stood eternal guard on the entrance. Felix wondered if there was any truth to the legend that they would spring to life again to defend the city if the need arose. Somehow, he doubted it. If ever the hour of that dire necessity was at hand it was now, and the two stone warriors showed not the slightest inclination to spring to life and join battle with the hordes of Darkness. Felix did not blame them. They had probably got enough of that during their own lifetimes.

  The statues should have been heartening, a reminder of the fact that men had triumphed over Chaos before, but they were not. Felix suddenly realised why the architecture of the place seemed so mad, and the decorations were so disturbing. The palace had been built by those who had seen such monsters and who had fought against them. It was as much a memorial to that struggle as the great statue of the unknown warriors facing it across the palace square. Perhaps his suspicions concerning the sanity of the builders were unfounded. Anyone who maintained enough grasp on reality to build anything after the Great War with Chaos was to be admired. Felix fervently hoped that some of the people here in Praag would be able to build something that their descendants could marvel at in two centuries. He fervently hoped that there would be descendants, and a world for them to live in.