Gotrek & Felix- the First Omnibus - William King

by Warhammer

  ‘They asked where we had come from,’ said Varek in answer to Felix’s unspoken question. ‘I told them we had come from across the Wastes, from the kingdom of the dwarfs.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said another greybeard, and turned and stalked away. It looked like there were tears in his eyes. As they waited, the crowd did not disperse. It surrounded them and stared until Hargrim returned, accompanied by a group of fully armoured warriors, each of whom carried a rune-engraved weapon. The eldritch symbols burned with a mystic light. Felix knew enough about dwarfs by now to tell that these were powerful magical weapons. These longbeards were the best equipped dwarfs Felix had seen since entering Karag Dum. They marched with a precision that would have shamed the Imperial Guard in Altdorf. Their armour gleamed, and they moved with pride and discipline.

  ‘The king will see you,’ Hargrim said. ‘Now you will be judged.’

  ‘So we are to meet the legendary Thangrim Firebeard after all,’ Varek said. ‘Who would have thought it?’

  Gotrek laughed nastily.

  ‘I have never seen so many rune weapons,’ Varek murmured to Felix. ‘Every one of those warriors carries one.’

  ‘We collected them from the dead,’ Hargrim said coldly. ‘There have been so many dead heroes here.’

  King Thangrim’s hall was vast. Huge statues of dwarf kings stood like sentries against each wall. More of the heavily armoured dwarf warriors stood immobile between the statues. The four newcomers were surrounded by an escort of the king’s guard. They were taking no chances of this being an assassination attempt. Their weapons were drawn, and they looked as if they knew how to use them.

  A raised dais dominated the far end of the chamber. On the dais was a throne bearing a powerful and majestic figure wearing long robes over heavy armour. Two priests flanked the king. One was a priestess of Valaya. Felix could tell that by the fact that she carried a sacred book. The other was armoured and carried an axe, and Felix wondered if he was a priest of Grimnir, the warrior god.

  As they came closer to the dais Felix got a better look at the dwarfish king. He was old, as old as Borek, but there was nothing feeble about him. He looked like an aged oak, gnarled but still strong. The flesh had fallen from his arms but still there were massive knots of muscle there, and his shoulders were broader even than Snorri’s. His hair was long and red, although striped through with white. His beard reached almost to the floor and it, too, was white in places. Piercing eyes glittered in deep-set sockets. Felix knew that this dwarf might be ancient but his mind was still keen.

  The weapon that sat upon the king’s knees drew Felix’s attention. It was a massive hammer, with a short handle. Runes had been cut into the head and something about them compelled the eye to look. He knew without being told that this was a weapon of awesome power, the legendary Hammer of Fate, which they had come all this way to find.

  The guard parted in front of them to leave a path leading only to the throne. The four comrades advanced. Varek went down on one knee, making florid and elaborate gestures with his right hand. Gotrek and Snorri lounged arrogantly beside him, making no sign of obeisance. Felix decided to err on the side of caution; he bowed low, then knelt beside Varek.

  ‘You are certainly impertinent enough to be Slayers,’ said the king. His voice was rich and deep and surprisingly youthful coming from that ancient throat. He laughed and his mirth boomed out through the chamber. ‘I can almost believe that the cock and bull story you told Hargrim is true.’

  ‘No one calls me a liar and lives,’ Gotrek said. The flat menace in his voice caused the guards to raise their weapons in readiness.

  The king raised a mocking eyebrow. ‘And few indeed threaten me in my own throne room and live. Still I ask your forgiveness, Slayer, if that is what you be. We are surrounded by the servants of the Dark Powers. Suspicion is only wisdom under such circumstances. And you must admit that we have cause to be suspicious.’

  ‘That you have,’ Gotrek admitted.

  ‘You have come to us claiming that you have voyaged here from the world beyond our walls. I would hear your tale from your own lips before I pass judgement. Tell it to me.’

  ‘I claim more than that,’ Varek said suddenly. ‘I claim kinship with the folk of Karag Dum. My father was Varig. My uncle was Borek, whom you sent out into the world to seek aid.’

  King Thangrim smiled cynically. ‘If what you say is true it took a long time for Borek to send aid, and you do not represent much of an army. Still, tell your tale.’

  The king listened attentively while Varek spoke, stopping occasionally to ask confirmation from Gotrek. He told the tale simply and well, and Felix was astonished at the power of his memory. He also noticed that as the dwarfs spoke the priestess of Valaya’s eyes never left them, and he remembered that the priestesses were supposed to have the gift of knowing the truth. At the end of the tale, the king turned to the priestess.

  ‘Well,’ he said.

  ‘They speak true,’ she replied. There was an audible gasp from the warriors in the chamber. The king raised his hand and scratched his chin through his fine long beard. He considered them for a moment and then smiled grimly.

  ‘Now tell me, Slayer, how you came by the Axe of Valek,’ said the king.

  Gotrek’s answering smile was as grim as Thangrim’s. ‘Its owner had no use for it, being dead, so I took it. Do you have a claim upon it?’

  ‘The person who carried that blade from here was my son, Morekai. He sought to cross the Wastes and find out if anyone still lived there.’

  ‘Then he is dead, Thangrim Firebeard. His corpse lay in a cave on the edges of the Wastes. It lay surrounded by the bodies of twenty slain beastmen.’

  ‘There was no one with him? He left here with twenty sworn companions.’

  ‘There was only one dwarf. I buried him according to the ancient rites, and being in need of a weapon at the time, I took this one. If it is yours, I will return it to you.’

  The old king looked down and grief entered his eyes. When he spoke again he sounded as old as he looked. ‘So he died alone at the end.’

  ‘He died a hero’s death,’ Gotrek said. ‘He paved his road to the Iron Halls with the bones of his foes.’

  Thangrim looked up once more and his smile was almost grateful. ‘Keep the blade, Slayer. Such a weapon is not owned. It has its own doom, and it shapes the destiny of its wielder. If it is in your hands now, it is there for a reason.’

  ‘As you say,’ Gotrek said.

  ‘And you have given me much to think on,’ Thangrim said wearily. ‘And my apologies for doubting you. Go now. Rest. We will talk again later.’

  ‘Prepare apartments for our guests,’ he shouted. ‘And feed them of our finest.’

  Felix could not help but notice that there was a note of bitter irony in the king’s voice.

  Felix stared at the fish suspiciously. It was large and it looked well-cooked, yet there was something odd about it. After a few moment’s consideration he realised that it had no eyes. The meat smelled good and everyone else was eating it, yet he kept thinking of the things he had seen in the Wastes, of the mutants and beastmen, and of all the things he had been told about warpstone dust. He just could not bring himself to eat a mutant fish, and he knew there was good reason for this.

  By all accounts it was possible for mutation to be passed on through eating mutated food. It was said that the worst mutants were always cannibals who fed on other mutants. He had no desire to put this theory of mutation being contagious to the test.

  ‘It’s blindfish, manling,’ said Gotrek from across the table. Felix realised that the Slayer must have seen the look on his face and understood what was going through his mind. ‘It is naturally this way. Dwarfs have feasted on it since long before the coming of the Darkness. You can eat it.’

  ‘It’s a delicacy, actually,’ Varek added. ‘In the dwarfholds we breed them. They dwell in the deep cisterns. We feed them on mushrooms and insects.’

  Someh
ow this knowledge did not make the fish seem any more appetising. Unaware of the effect he was having, Varek continued to speak. ‘They live in darkness. Some loremasters think that is why they have no eyes. They don’t need them. Try some.’

  Felix speared some on his knife and lifted the flesh up for examination. It was white and tender looking and when he tried it, it was delicious. He said so.

  ‘It can be monotonous,’ said Hargrim, who was sat on the other side of him. ‘We live on mushrooms and bugs and blindfish. There are times when I wish I could have something different.’

  Felix dug into his pack and produced a strip of beef jerky. Hargrim looked at it just as suspiciously as Felix had inspected the fish. ‘Try some,’ Felix said.

  Hargrim took some and began to chew. Eventually he managed to swallow. ‘Interesting,’ he pronounced carefully.

  Snorri laughed. ‘Now the blindfish doesn’t taste so bad after all, does it? Here try some of this to wash it down.’

  Snorri handed over a flask of Kislevite vodka. Hargrim swigged it down. For a moment, he looked like he might actually cough but then he recovered and smacked his lips and took some more. ‘That’s better,’ he said.

  Felix emptied his pack onto the table. There was waybread and cheese and more jerky. It added to the mushrooms cooked in blindfish oil, the blindfish itself and the jugs of water. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.

  Hargrim did so.

  With the speed the provisions disappeared Felix was glad that Hargrim was the only one of the local dwarfs who had joined them at their table.

  Felix looked around the room. It was richly furnished with thick but worn carpets and drapes, fine dwarfish statuary and a merchant’s ransom in silver and gold. It was one of the royal apartments. Each of the comrades had been given a similar one. Felix supposed that was one good thing about the casualties the dwarfs had suffered: there was plenty of room. He pushed the thought aside as unworthy and realised that he was getting drunk.

  ‘I still cannot believe that we have strangers here,’ Hargrim said. From the flush on his face, Felix could tell that the captain was inebriated as well. ‘It astonishes me. For so long we thought we were the last dwarfs in the world. We thought Chaos had overrun everywhere else. We sent out messengers and scouts into the wilderness but they never returned. It all seemed so hopeless and now you arrive and tell us that there is a whole world beyond the Wastes, that Chaos was thrown back, that the Empire and Bretonnia and all those other places of legend still exist. It hardly seems possible that others have survived these past twenty years without us knowing it!’

  ‘Twenty years?’ spluttered Felix and Varek almost simultaneously.

  ‘Aye! Why do you look at me that way?’

  ‘It has been two hundred years since the last incursion of Chaos!’ Felix said.

  Hargrim looked at him in astonishment. ‘That cannot be!’

  ‘Time flows strangely in the Chaos Wastes,’ Varek reminded them.

  ‘Strangely indeed,’ said Felix, remembering what Borek had told him of the odd powers of the place. Could the Dark Powers warp even the flow of time, he wondered, or was this some strange property that the Wastes themselves possessed?

  ‘Believe me,’ Varek said to Hargrim, ‘Here in Karag Dum only twenty years may have passed but beyond the Wastes it has been centuries, and there Chaos was thrown back.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Magnus the Pious rallied men and dwarfs to his cause, and broke the hordes of Chaos at the Siege of Praag, in Kislev. Eventually the followers of the Dark Ones were driven back to beyond Blackblood Pass.’

  ‘And yet no one ever came to relieve us,’ said Hargrim, and he sounded almost bitter.

  Felix did not know what to say. ‘Everyone thought Karag Dum had fallen. The last reports were of the city being overrun by the hordes of Chaos.’

  Gotrek surprised him by speaking. ‘No one knew what had happened. The Chaos Wastes had retreated but they had still advanced beyond where they once had been. They always do. Karag Dum was cut off. No one could find a way through. It was tried, believe me. Borek sought long and hard for a way to return.’

  ‘I do believe you, Gotrek, son of Gurni, for I have seen the Wastes, looked out from our highest towers, and I know they stretch as far as the eye can see. I have fought the warriors of Chaos and know they are as uncountable as flakes of snow in a blizzard. We have so few warriors that we soon stopped trying to get messengers out. Many were captured and hideously tortured.’

  ‘How have you survived?’ Varek asked – somewhat tactlessly, Felix thought. Still he was glad the young dwarf had asked the question. He wanted to know the answer himself. Hargrim shook his head.

  ‘With great difficulty,’ he said at last and smiled wearily, ‘But that is not a fair answer my friends. The answer is that our foes are divided and we hide and fight them as we may.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Gotrek asked.

  ‘Tell Snorri about the fighting,’ said Snorri.

  ‘After the last great siege, when the forces of the Enemy used terrible sorcery to break our walls, we retreated deeper and deeper into the mines, determined to sell our lives dearly and make them pay for every inch of dwarfish territory with blood. Our people divided up into their clans and hosts and made their way to the secret fastnesses we had prepared against such a day.’

  ‘Like this one,’ Felix said.

  ‘Precisely. We retreated under the earth, to places shielded by runes of power, and we emerged into the debated halls to raid and fight and we discovered a strange thing…’

  ‘What was that?’ Gotrek asked.

  ‘We found that the forces of Chaos had fallen out with each other. We did not know then but we found out from captured prisoners that their supreme leader, Skathlok Ironclaw, had been drawn away to a battle in the south, and that his lieutenants, each of whom followed a different power, had fallen into dispute over the spoils.’

  ‘When was this?’ asked Varek.

  Hargrim gave a date in dwarfish which meant nothing to Felix.

  ‘It was the Imperial Year 2302,’ Varek translated. ‘At about the time of the Siege of Praag.’

  ‘If this was the case, why did you not drive them from the city?’ asked Gotrek. Hargrim laughed and there was no mirth to his laughter.

  ‘Because there were still so few of us left, son of Gurni. After the Great Siege we numbered less than five thousand warriors, and those were split between five hidden citadels. Even with the majority of their warriors gone, our foes numbered ten times that and divided though they were, we knew they would unite to fight against us if we emerged in strength. So, over the years, we learned to sally forth in small groups and pick away at our enemies. It was not a good strategy, as we later learned.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Felix.

  ‘Because for every one of their warriors who fell, another one would appear. For every war-band we destroyed, two more would come in from the Wastes. But when we lost a warrior we could never replace him. We may have killed twenty for every stout-hearted dwarf we lost, but in the end we had no way of replacing our losses, and they did.’

  ‘I can understand this,’ said Felix. ‘There are many warriors out in the Wastes, and this is a worthy citadel and would provide them with shelter.’

  Hargrim shook his head sadly. ‘You do not understand the followers of Chaos at all well, if that is what you think, Felix Jaeger. They came here because there was treasure here – gold and dwarf-made weapons, and most of all the black steel they covet for the making of their armour and the forging of their foul weapons. They came here because they knew they would find others to fight of their own kind, and thus win glory in the eyes of their insane gods. This place has become a kind of testing ground for the warriors of Chaos, where they can find others to slaughter in order to advance themselves.’

  Hargrim’s words made sense to Felix. He had occasionally wondered where the Chaos warriors got their weapons. He had seen no sign of foundries or fa
ctories or any kind of manufacturing since they entered the Wastes, yet the followers of the Dark Powers must get their gear from somewhere. He had simply assumed that it was the product of sorcery or bartered from renegade human smiths but now he saw another answer. Here at Karag Dum was ore and all the equipment produced by dwarfish industry. If some of the things he had heard were true, this one hold could produce more steel than the whole Empire. He voiced his suspicions at once.

  ‘You are correct, Felix Jaeger. We tried to destroy all the forges and furnaces and anvils we could not dismantle and carry into the hidden places, but we did not have enough time to get rid of them all. Some were seized by the followers of the Ruinous Powers. Some were repaired using black and incomprehensible magics. Now the mines are worked by hordes of beastmen and mutant slaves, and mage-priests oversee the manufacture of weapons and armour.’

  ‘If this place could be retaken, it would be a terrible blow to the powers of Chaos. For where else would they get their weapons?’ Felix said in drunken excitement.

  ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not,’ Hargrim said. ‘The Chaos worshippers must have other mines and other foundries now and empty as Karag Dum now seems it is still well held.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It is not now as it was in the early days. Many warriors of Chaos have come here and hold their own small fiefdoms. There are entire towns in the Underhalls now which are dedicated to the worship of one of the four Powers of Darkness. They each have their own liege lords and armies. They trade ore, weapons and armour to those outside. They exchange swords for slaves, spearpoints and arrowheads for their disgusting food, armour for magical devices.’

  ‘You said there were other dwarf fastnesses in Karag Dum,’ Varek said.

  ‘Gone now,’ Hargrim said. ‘Over the years, they have been wiped out. Those of their people that survived made their way here. Most did not. Many have been hunted down by the Hounds of Khorne as they fled. Others would not come here lest they led the followers of the Terror to our last haven.’