by Warhammer
Felix for a moment thought Claudia was dead too, her little body huddled in a ball at the base of the low stairs, but then he saw her twitch. He and one of Rion’s remaining warriors helped her up and supported her between them as the party moved towards the stairs. She whimpered and flinched at their touch, and her face was shredded where she had clawed at herself after the sorceress’s attack.
As they hurried across the antechamber, Aethenir turned to Rion, holding up the stolen book. ‘I know this is not enough,’ he said. ‘Not any more. I vow that I will not rest until I recover the harp and prevent the sorceresses’ plan.’
Rion nodded, but did not look around. ‘That is the path of honour, my lord,’ he said coldly.
Aethenir’s eyes were downcast as they entered the stairwell.
The two flights to the entry hall was one of the most terrifying distances Felix had ever travelled, for he expected at every moment for a roaring torrent of water to pour down them and bury them beneath the sea. It was also one of the most painful, for with every step the wound in his shoulder staggered him afresh. The blood from it was soaking his shirt and padded jerkin and turning the rings of his mail red. He nearly lost his grip on Claudia several times as the pain made him faint.
The others were in equally bad shape. Max’s face was pale and drawn, as if he had aged twenty years since the beginning of the battle. Aethenir was shaking as if with fever, sweat standing out on his pale skin. Rion and his last two elves moved with grim precision, staring fixedly ahead of them as their wounds bled into their surcoats. Only Gotrek seemed fit and ready for another battle. Though he bled from a score of wounds, his step was firm and his eye was clear and angry.
They reached the silt-filled entry hall and ran to the golden doors, then slipped through them onto the wide porch at the top of the marble steps, looking around anxiously for the sorceresses. Felix didn’t see them, and it looked as if it would be impossible to follow them, for the streets of the city were flooded with water, and it was rising swiftly, already halfway up the palace’s grand marble steps.
‘The water!’ wailed Aethenir. ‘She has loosed the walls!’
‘If she had loosed the walls, scholar,’ said Max, with barely concealed impatience, ‘we would be dead by now. They are whole, you see? She is losing concentration, that is all.’
‘And that is better?’ asked Aethenir.
Over their voices Felix thought he still heard the now familiar chime of the sorceress’s silver hoop, faint, but still audible. ‘Shhh!’ he said. ‘The ringing. Listen!’
Everyone listened, but it was hard to pinpoint where the sound was coming from, and it was getting fainter, lost in the deep distant roar of the whirlpool’s spinning sides.
‘Where is it?’ said Aethenir.
‘There,’ said Claudia, looking straight up at the sky with dull eyes.
Everyone followed her gaze. At first Felix could see nothing – only the glare of the sky shining down into the gloomy green well of the whirlpool. But then, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the light, he saw them – six black dots, levitating up towards the top of the well like they were being drawn up on ropes – the sorceresses. They rose in a circle, with one of their number in the centre.
‘Bring them down!’ cried Aethenir. ‘Stop them!’
‘But we’ll die,’ said Felix.
‘Still I think I must,’ said Max. ‘For the safety of the world.’ He took a deep breath and began an incantation, pulling power from the air around him with his hands.
He was too late.
Before he was halfway through his droning, the shrill ringing stopped, like a chiming glass pinched silent.
There was a short pause in which Felix could hear half a dozen frightened gasps – one of them his – then, with a sound like the world ending, the whirlpool collapsed, the green walls caving in and an avalanche of water thundering towards the centre to fill the unnatural hole in the sea.
TEN
Aethenir screamed.
Gotrek cursed.
Claudia stared.
Felix turned to her, shouting though she was right next to him. ‘Seeress! Lift us up! Levitate us!’
Claudia didn’t appear to hear.
The titanic waves were already crashing into the city, smashing buildings and toppling towers in their wake, and the shallow water in the street began rising much more rapidly.
‘Back to the vault,’ rasped Gotrek.
‘Back to the vault?’ cried Felix. ‘But that’s suicide!’ The Slayer was insane! They would be trapped underground, under water. They would die!
Gotrek was already pushing through the narrow gap between the doors. ‘It’s the only thing that isn’t,’ he shouted.
‘Follow him!’ said Max, and hurried in with Aethenir and his escort.
Felix and the elf who was helping him support Claudia hustled her through the door as quick as they could, but she was still too slow. The water from the street was already spilling into the palace. She would never make it to the vault, and neither would they. With a curse, Felix scooped Claudia up, slung her over his unwounded shoulder and raced across the entry hall after the others. The pain was still almost more than he could bear.
‘Thank you, Felix,’ said Max, then turned back and held out his hands towards the palace doors.
Felix heard them grind shut as he plunged into the stairway. A useless gesture, he thought. Even if they held, the palace was full of broken windows. As Max caught up with him, the roar of the approaching water drowned out every other noise. The party splashed breakneck down the last flight, slipping and clutching at the walls as water pushed at the back of their legs and rained down from above.
Then, just as they reached the bottom, with a noise like the world ending, a cataclysmic impact shook the palace, knocking them all off their feet and sending huge blocks of masonry crashing down from the ceiling all around them. Felix landed on top of Claudia, his shoulder screaming and his ears nearly bursting as a horrible pressure slammed them.
The whirlpool had closed.
Gotrek picked himself up from the knee-high water as rocks and dust continued to splash down. ‘Run!’ he roared.
Felix found his feet and pulled Claudia up after him, slinging her over his shoulder again and slogging across the antechamber after the Slayer, dizzy from the pain and weaving drunkenly. A deafening thunder roared behind them. The palace doors? Felix didn’t dare look back.
After several endless seconds Felix trudged up the three steps to the vault with Claudia and stumbled through the half-open doors. Water was lapping over the raised threshold and spreading out in a puddle towards the treasures.
‘To the side!’ called Gotrek.
The elves and humans splashed to the right. Felix started to follow but tripped over the body of a dead elf and dropped Claudia again. The pain as he crashed down almost made him black out. He tried to rise, but his head was swimming too much. Then Gotrek’s powerful fingers grabbed his collar and pulled him across the floor. Rion was doing the same to Claudia. The whole room was shaking.
Felix looked back towards the vault doors as the Slayer dragged him aside. A frothing wall of water was blasting out of the stairwell towards the vault faster than stampeding horses. It’s over, he thought, cringing away from the sight. This is the end.
But then, just as he expected the full weight of the sea to burst in and batter them all to death against the walls of the vault, the doors slammed shut with a deafening boom, closed by the force of the water, and there was silence.
The elves and humans all looked at the doors in shock. They had held. Gotrek looked smug.
‘We… we’re alive,’ said Aethenir, as if he didn’t quite believe it.
‘Good thinking, Slayer,’ said Max.
‘Dwarf work,’ Gotrek grunted with a nod towards the doors. ‘The only doors I could trust not to break in this elf hovel.’
Aethenir sniffed. ‘That’s all very well, dwarf, but now you’ve trapped us under the
sea. How am I to honour my pledge to Rion and make recompense for my crimes if we all die of asphyxiation down here?’
‘Not asphyxiation, my lord,’ said Rion, looking towards the doors. ‘Drowning.’
Everyone turned. The doors had held perfectly, but there was a knife-thin arc of water spraying through the narrow gap between them. The puddle on the floor continued to spread.
‘Shallya’s mercy,’ moaned Claudia, staring with dull eyes. ‘You’ve made it worse. We might have been dead already. Now we must wait for it.’
Gotrek snorted. ‘You can all die down here if you like, but this will not be my doom. I’m getting out.’
‘How?’ asked Aethenir, in a voice tinged with hysteria.
‘I’m still working that out,’ said the Slayer, sitting down on a treasure chest and looking thoughtfully around the room.
Felix looked around with him. He had been too busy fighting or running until now to take in its details. Though the druchii had made a mess of it during their search for the harp, it was still a place filled with beauty. Below the witchlight chandeliers hanging above were neatly stacked treasure chests, ranks of statues carved from marble, alabaster and obsidian, jewelled suits of armour, beautiful swords, spears and axes, so delicate and exquisite that it seemed impossible that they could be used in battle, paintings, rugs, a throne of gold, complete with a deep blue canopy, and in one corner, a gilded war chariot – and all of it as bright and clean and unweathered as if the doors of the vault had closed yesterday and it had not spent the last four thousand years under the sea. Some elven magic, no doubt.
Aethenir threw up his hands. ‘He’s still working it out? You ordered us down here and you didn’t have a plan?’
‘Would you have rather stayed above?’ snarled Gotrek.
‘I would rather you had waited for us to form some strategy before charging impetuously into battle with the druchii, dwarf,’ snapped Aethenir.
‘High one, please,’ said Felix, trying to be a voice of reason so that he wouldn’t succumb to panic too. ‘We cannot change the past. Do you have any spells that might help us? Can you make us able to breathe water? Can you create a bubble of air?’
Aethenir blinked. ‘I… I can do none of those things. My few skills, as I said before, are in healing and divination.’
Felix turned to Max. ‘Max?’
The wizard shook his head. ‘Such spells exist, but they are not the purview of my college.’
Felix looked to Claudia. ‘Fraulein Pallenberger? You can make the wind blow. Can you not make air?’
She shook her head dully. ‘I require air to make a breeze. I cannot make it out of nothing.’
Felix sagged. No air. They were doomed. Even if they could get out of the sealed vault, their lungs would burst long before they reached the surface. Damn magic and damn all magicians too! All they seemed to be able to do was kill people and predict disaster. Never anything useful.
‘Ha!’ said Gotrek, standing.
Everyone, even the stoic Rion, turned to him with the eager light of hope in their eyes.
Gotrek strode past them towards the vault’s treasures. ‘Collect nine of the largest wooden chests, the biggest rug, as much rope as you can find and the chains from those chandeliers.’
The others stared after him, dumbfounded.
‘But, Slayer,’ said Max, struggling for calm. ‘What do you intend to do? How will this get us to the surface?’
‘Just do it!’ snapped Gotrek, upending a casket the size of a courtesan’s bathtub and spilling golden treasure in every direction. ‘We don’t have much time.’
By the time Felix, Rion and his elves had assembled the nine largest wooden treasure chests they could find, the water in the vault was up to their ankles. Gotrek collected the chandelier chains by the simple expedient of chopping through the winches mounted on the walls by which the chandeliers could be raised and lowered. They crashed to the ground in an explosion of delicate silver and crystal as the witchlights shattered. Aethenir wailed at this and the hundreds of priceless lost treasures uncaringly dumped on the floor, but the vandalism continued.
While Felix and Gotrek and the elves worked, Aethenir and Max called them over one at a time and used their healing arts on them. Felix bit a piece of leather against the pain while Max used a pair of tweezers to tug bits of cloth and broken links of chainmail from the wound Felix had received from the druchii swordsman, all the while murmuring spells of cleansing. Then Aethenir attended to him, and though by this time Felix was of the general opinion that the elf needed his neck wrung at the earliest opportunity, in this at least he was a useful addition to the party. Felix watched amazed as his long, slim fingers weaved over the wound and seemed to sew it up without touching it. The skin around the puncture glowed from within and the wound began to knit together at the ends, and then gradually close towards the centre, until finally there was nothing left but a pink scar and a deep ache.
‘It is still weak,’ said the high elf when he had finished. ‘You must rest it for a few days.’
Felix looked around at where they were. ‘I don’t know if I’ll have the opportunity, high one.’
Nonetheless he did his best not to tire it – leaving most of the heavy lifting to Gotrek and the elves, and instead pulling the gold tasselled ropes from the canopy of the throne and coiling them. The elves stripped the ropes and leather straps from the gilded war chariot. Claudia, recovering slowly from the druchii sorceresses’ mind blasts, sat cross-legged on a chest and untied the cords that held ancient war banners to their poles. Max searched the vault and determined that the largest rug was rolled up in the back right corner, but by the time they found it, it was half-soaked in the rising water and it took Gotrek, Felix and Rion’s elves to carry it out to the corner into the open. Felix’s head spun with every step, his shoulder aching like a hammer blow.
When everything was brought together, Gotrek laid three of the gold tasselled ropes parallel on the ground near the door, each about a long pace apart – actually they floated in the water, but there was no dry space left to lay them now, so it had to do. Then he hacked the lids of the chests off with his axe and set the chests upside down on top of the ropes in three rows of three, wedged as close to each other and the door as possible. They bobbled and bumped a bit in the water, floating. Gotrek nailed the ends of the ropes to the sides of the chests with gold-headed nails pried from the golden throne.
‘Now unroll the rug over the chests,’ said Gotrek.
Felix, Rion and the elf warriors did as he asked, pushing and lifting the heavy rug until it covered the nine chests completely. Felix was still unsure what Gotrek was up to, but at least staying busy kept his mind off their impending drowning.
‘Now the chains.’ Gotrek picked up the end of one of the chains and started pulling it around the covered chests. Felix grabbed the other end and pulled the other way. They met on the far side of the chests with several feet of chain to spare. The elves did the same with the second chain.
‘Tuck the carpet as close to the chests as you can while I pull,’ said Gotrek, taking the two ends of one of the chains.
The rest of the party stepped to the chests, folding and pushing down on the carpet all around the edges of the chests as if trying to tuck in the sheets of a bed. All the while, Gotrek hauled on the ends of the chains, taking in the slack.
‘I think I begin to see what you intend, Slayer,’ said Max as they were at it. ‘The wooden chests will float, and also hold air, and binding them together keeps us together, and makes it harder for any of the chests to flip over and spill its air.’
‘Aye,’ grunted Gotrek, heaving again. ‘And the ropes underneath are to hold on to.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ said Aethenir. ‘Even if this bizarre contraption works, we will never get out of the vault. There are hundreds of thousands of pounds of water holding the doors shut!’
Gotrek snorted. ‘And you call yourself a scholar. When the vault fills with water
it will equalise the pressure.’
‘When the vault fills with water we will drown!’ cried Aethenir.
Gotrek didn’t dignify this with a reply, though Felix wished he had, because he wanted to know the answer too.
When the carpet and the first chain were as tight to the sides of the chests as they could make them, Gotrek attached a jewelled, dwarf-made crossbow to one end of the chain and hooked the cleat into the other end, then used the ratchet to winch the chain even tighter. When it was so tight Felix feared that a link would break, Gotrek lashed the crossbow in place with a length of the leather chariot reins and did the whole thing again with the second chain and another crossbow. By the time he was finished, he was cranking the crossbow’s handle under a foot of water, and the nine chests were floating like a raft.
Max looked at the raft uneasily. ‘Slayer, I foresee a problem. When the water rises so will this. And the roof is far above the top of the vault doors. It will press against the ceiling. How will we get it out?’
Gotrek didn’t answer, only stepped to the nearest full treasure chest, picked it up as if it weighed nothing, then carried it to a corner of the raft and set it down. The raft dipped down into the water at that end.
‘Ah!’ said Max. ‘Excellent.’
‘Space them evenly,’ said Gotrek. ‘The raft must be just heavier than the air and wood.’
‘How do you think of these things, dwarf?’ asked Aethenir, shaking his head as Rion and his elves lifted a single chest between them and staggered with it to the raft.
‘Dwarfs are practical,’ said Gotrek. ‘They look at the ground. Not the sky.’
‘Which is why they so rarely soar,’ sneered the high elf.
‘They don’t drown much either,’ said Gotrek dryly.
Felix scratched his head, still not quite understanding. ‘I assume we’ll float up on other chests as the water rises in here, but then how will we swim down to the raft? I’m not sure I can dive so deep, and I doubt Fraulein Pallenberger can.’
‘I have never swum at all,’ she said in a small voice.
