by Warhammer
‘We’re not going to make it,’ said Claudia.
Felix hoped it wasn’t a prophecy.
He was on tiptoes as they came around the last landing and saw to his great relief the gate at the top, flung wide and abandoned by its guards. He felt with his toes for the submerged steps and pushed on. They reached the top neck and neck – quite literally – with the water, and slogged up out of it as it crested the top step and spilled through the open gate into the barracks corridor beyond.
Felix set Claudia on her feet and Gotrek helped Max to his.
‘Keep moving,’ said the Slayer. ‘This will fill slower than the stairs, but it’ll still fill.’
He strode through the gate and down the sharply tilted corridor towards the barracks like he was walking along the side of a peaked roof. Felix, Max and Claudia shambled after him, moaning with weariness. The rising water chased them as they went, running along the base of the left wall like it was a mill race.
The barracks area was deserted and destroyed, a chalky mist of rock dust still settling as they hurried through. Great portions of the roof had come down, and most of the barracks, cut into the solid rock, had caved in, their fronts fallen away to reveal collapsed floors and ceilings with bunks and chairs all fallen and smashed, the mangled bodies of slaves jumbled into the mess. But the truly terrifying damage was to the parade ground, which slanted away before them like they were walking down a hill. There was a jagged gaping crack running at a diagonal across it, the ground on the near side of the crack a foot higher than the ground on the far side. Out of the crack gurgled more water, racing away down the slanted ground. Felix looked up and saw that there was a corresponding crack running across the roof.
‘It’s going to split in half,’ he murmured, swallowing nervously.
‘Might sink first,’ said Gotrek.
The Slayer picked up his pace, splashing quickly through the knee-deep water to the front gate – the gate that had cost him two gold bracelets to pass through only hours before. It had collapsed. The massive wooden doors lay shattered and askew between the ruins of the guard towers and gate house, with the cave roof fallen in on top of the lot – a solid mountain of rock. All the water from the crack in the floor was pooling here, rapidly hiding the doors and the bottom-most rubble.
‘Trapped again,’ said Max dully.
‘Bah!’ said Gotrek and started towards the right-hand guard tower, which was still semi-whole. There was a wooden door in its base, half-submerged in the water. He tried the handle, but the door was stuck in its frame, twisted from the pressure pushing down on it from above.
‘Stay back,’ said Gotrek, then slammed his axe into the door. The curved blade bit deep, and he kept chopping, ripping long chunks out of the door near the frame. Felix kept an eye on the tower above, afraid that the door was the only thing holding it up. Finally, Gotrek hacked a hole through it, then reached in and pulled. The door wrenched open with a splintering shriek.
Felix closed his eyes, expecting the whole structure to crash down and bury the Slayer. He should have known better.
‘Come on,’ said the Slayer, and waded into the tower.
Felix, Max and Claudia followed. The water at the door was up to Felix’s waist, and got deeper within. Gotrek was up to his neck in it. Felix looked around. There was no other door in the small room. What was the Slayer doing?
‘Up,’ said the Slayer, and started up an iron-runged ladder set in the wall. Felix followed him warily up through a hole in the ceiling into another tiny room – this one studded with narrow arrow slots and completely crushed on the left side by the fallen cave roof. The walls that still stood did so only barely, the stones sitting precariously one atop the other with all the mortar turned to powder between them.
As Max and Claudia crawled up through the trap, Gotrek crossed to one of the arrow slots and kicked at the frame. Felix flinched back, expecting the ceiling to come down as the narrow window shifted and the wall around it crumbled, but once again the Slayer seemed to know what he was doing. A few more kicks and the stone frame fell out of the wall in one piece. An avalanche of mortared stone tumbled out after it, but to Felix’s great relief, the roof stayed where it was. Gotrek stepped to the V-shaped hole he created and looked out. After a slight hesitation, Felix joined him.
The tower looked out over a lake where the wide plaza that fronted the barracks area had once been. On the far side was a broad arch that opened into the huge central stairwell that led both up and down to the other levels. The plaza was tilted at the same angle as the parade ground, and it was flooded with rapidly rising water – shallow at Gotrek and Felix’s end, and deep near the stairwell, and filled with floating corpses. As Felix watched, the two witchlights that flanked the archway to the stairs were swallowed up, and glowed strangely from beneath the waves.
‘Throw the seeress down to me, then jump,’ said Gotrek. He stepped up into the gap and leapt down into the water with a big splash.
Felix turned to Claudia and motioned her forwards. Max led her to him, and Felix helped her up into the gap. She groped weakly at the edges, trembling and looking down. Felix shoved her. She squeaked and dropped out of sight, and there was a splash.
Felix looked guiltily at Max. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
Max shrugged. ‘It had to be done.’
The magister stepped up into the gap and jumped of his own accord. Felix jumped a second later. Gotrek was already dog-paddling for the stairs. Felix then put Claudia’s arms around his shoulders, and he and Max struck out after him.
Only a foot of the archway to the stairs was still above water as they began, and it was being swallowed up more quickly than they were swimming. Gotrek was a slow, awkward swimmer, Max was breathing like a bellows, and Felix, with chainmail on and Claudia clinging to his back, could barely keep his nose up. They had got no more than two-thirds of the way across, shouldering floating corpses out of the way all the while, when the arch vanished under the water.
‘We’ll have to swim down and back up,’ said Felix.
When they reached the wall, Gotrek inhaled and dived. Felix pulled Claudia’s arms tight and made her lock her hands around his neck.
‘Take a breath and hold on,’ he said over his shoulder.
He waited until he heard her suck in air, then plunged down beneath the waves. The glow of witchlights gave the scene a strange beauty. Even the bedraggled corpses that drifted half-submerged in the current looked graceful. Felix kicked down hard towards the submerged arch, and remembered just in time to kick down a little further so that he wouldn’t scrape Claudia off his back when he went under it. With a final kick he was through and paddling for the surface again. Instead he cracked his head on a ceiling. He nearly yelped in surprise and terror, and he heard Claudia do just that. She started thrashing and kicking in terror.
He turned his head up and saw what had happened. He had come up in the landing. The ceiling was flat above him. The stairs up were to his left. He clamped down on Claudia’s thrashing arms and kicked left as hard as he could, and at last they got out from under the roof and broke the surface, both retching and gasping for air. Gotrek was bobbing beside them.
Felix wiped the water from his eyes and looked around. ‘Where’s Max?’
Without a word Gotrek ducked back under the water and pushed back towards the submerged landing. He was no swimmer, but he had no fear of being under water either.
Felix paddled for the stairs where they rose up out of the water and helped Claudia out. She sat wearily on a step, her bald head bleeding from a dozen long scrapes.
‘I’m sorry, fraulein,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t intentional.’
She huddled over her knees, not looking up. ‘You’ve done more than you should,’ she said. ‘More than I deserve.’
A moment later, Gotrek reappeared, spitting water and hauling Max to the surface. The wizard came up choking and coughing, and could barely drag himself up the steps when Gotrek pulled him over.
Gotrek climbed out and w
hipped his crest out of his eyes. ‘Come on. Can’t stop.’
Felix rose wearily and helped Claudia to her feet. Already the place they had been sitting was two feet under water. Max pushed himself up, swaying like a drunk. Gotrek stepped beside him and put the magister’s around his shoulder again.
‘On,’ he said.
The central stair was broader than the barracks stair, and with higher ceilings, but the water seemed to rise just as fast. Again they were limping and cursing and stumbling with the water coming up behind them like some vast, silent snake, ready to swallow them, while the ark groaned and shuddered around them. At the harbour level they looked towards the docks, wondering if there might be an escape that way, but the corridor tilted down in that direction, and was filling rapidly with black water. Slaves and dark elves clambered up the slope towards them like they were running up a hill.
Gotrek snorted. ‘Only elves would build a harbour inside a floating rock.’
They hurried on, joined in their flight by the slaves and the druchii alike – none, in their terror, paying them the slightest attention. More fleeing ark-dwellers poured out of the next level and the stairs were soon filled with a scrambling, surging mob.
Two flights later, as they rounded a landing in the middle of the panicked throng, Felix saw a sight he had never expected to see again – daylight. It shone through a great, columned archway – a warm, golden radiance that made even the cruel faces of the druchii and the gaunt faces of their slaves beautiful as they turned towards it. Felix thought he had never seen anything so wonderful in his life.
The crowd raced towards it like lost children running towards their mother, and Felix, Gotrek, Max and Claudia were borne along with it. At the top, they spilled into a square plaza, dominated by a black statue of a robed and hooded woman, and hemmed in by tall, sharp-roofed buildings. Beyond these Felix could see houses and temples and fortified walls climbing up a central hill towards the massive black keep that perched at the top of the ark – all of it tilted dizzyingly to the left. Streets radiated from the plaza at odd angles, but the druchii and the slaves were all running towards one that rose towards the upper reaches of the city, heading for high ground.
‘Follow them!’ said Gotrek.
He and Felix helped Max and Claudia to run with the crowd as the water bubbled out of the stairwell behind them and began to spread across the square.
But after only a few uphill turnings, Felix’s earlier fears were realised as they came to a locked gate. This appeared to be a barrier between the merchant quarters and the enclaves of the highborn. A huge mob of druchii and slaves pushed at the sturdy iron gates, roaring for entry, while on the far side, guards with repeating crossbows fired into them and shouted at them to fall back. Even nobles and officers were being shot down in the guards’ panic.
Felix and Gotrek paused and looked around as Max and Claudia leaned against them, gasping and catching their breath. There had to be another way. Perhaps they could climb to the roofs. As he turned, searching for an escape, he looked down over the lower quarters, spread out below them, and saw something that stopped him dead. Waves were slopping over the city’s outer wall, and water was running down the inside. Felix stared. He hadn’t thought the ark had sunk so far, but the ocean was spilling into it like water filling a ladle dipped into a bucket.
‘Gotrek!’ he said, and pointed.
Just as the Slayer looked around, the pressure from the water outside the wall became too much and it buckled exploding inward in a shower of stones and a towering avalanche of foam. The first breach quickly triggered others, and towers and curtain walls came down all along the west-facing side of the city.
The slaves and druchii in the square shrieked as the ground shook and tilted under their feet, then the shrieks became wails of despair as they turned and saw the ocean water surging through the city below them, levelling houses and toppling temples, and rising fast.
The crowd redoubled its efforts at the gates, and they bent inwards, but Gotrek turned away from them.
‘Too late for that,’ he said, starting down a side street. ‘Come on.’
Felix followed after him dumbly. What could the Slayer do now? The water would rise and swallow them no matter where they went. There was no escape. Any high ground they could find would be under water in a matter of minutes. Again the mad plans of High Sorceress Heshor had left them to be drowned in a sunken city.
But the Slayer trotted down the tilted street regardless, looking around, as the thunder of the approaching water got louder and louder and the ground slanted more and more under their feet.
‘Ha!’ Gotrek said suddenly.
Felix looked up and saw a sturdy wooden cart filled with large casks dragging two terrified dray horses backwards across the sloping street as they bucked and kicked. The cart slid sideways into a house and came to rest as Gotrek ran to it.
‘Here,’ he shouted.
Gotrek wrenched down the cart’s tailgate then climbed up. The casks were nearly as tall as he was. He glared when he saw dwarf runes branded into the wood.
‘Filthy thieving elves.’
He stove in the top of one of the casks then tipped it on its side. The heady brew spilled down the street in a golden tide.
‘In,’ he said, rolling the cask off the cart and setting it on its end. ‘Two of you.’
‘Are you sure this will work?’ asked Felix, hesitating.
‘Just get in!’ roared the Slayer.
Felix lifted Claudia into the cask, then climbed in awkwardly after her as Gotrek chopped through the top of a second cask and emptied it, then dropped it to the cobbles.
He jumped down into it. ‘In, magister!’ The sound of the approaching water was so loud now he had to bellow. Felix looked down the street. He could see it coming up the hill faster than a man could run, swallowing houses and carrying dark elves and slaves and tumbling debris with it as it rose.
Max started climbing feebly into the giant barrel.
Gotrek grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him in head-first. ‘Get down!’
‘It won’t work,’ cried Felix. ‘We’ll be smashed to pieces.’
The black tide reached them.
Felix dropped down into the bottom of the barrel next to Claudia as he felt the water lift them and shove them down the street. The cart horses screamed as they and the cart were carried away. Felix’s teeth snapped shut as the barrel smashed into something and rushed on. Another impact, and another. The barrel splintered. Water slopped into it. Claudia’s knee cracked him in the jaw. He caught her and held her tight, as much to protect himself as to shelter her as they bounced around like dice in a cup. From all sides he heard shrieks and wails and juddering collisions, and always the water was lifting and throwing them around.
Felix looked up through the opening of the barrel and saw one of the massive walls of the highborn quarter rising above them and coming closer. They were being carried towards it by the water. Then a hand gripped the lip of the barrel. A dark elf face appeared, eyes round with fright. He tried to climb in. He was going to capsize them!
Felix let go of Claudia and punched the druchii in the face. He snarled and caught Felix’s wrist. Felix rose up and punched with his other hand. The dark elf wouldn’t let go.
Then suddenly the black wall filled his vision and they slammed into it. Felix fell back as the dark elf was mashed flat, his ribs snapping like sticks. He fell away screaming as the great wave receded and the barrel was swept back from the wall again.
Felix peeked over the lip as currents began to pull them this way and that, and saw the rooftops and chimneys of the merchant quarter disappearing below the crashing, spuming waves. Eddies and whirlpools whipped the refuse of the city around in a chaos of clutter. The barrel swirled around nauseatingly. Felix thought he saw the cask with Max and Gotrek in it, but then he was spun around and lost it again.
There was a crack like thunder above him and Felix turned and looked up. A massive c
astle-sized section of the retaining wall sheered off from the rest and slid down into the water, houses and people and furniture tumbling after it. A huge rolling swell rose up as the black cliff vanished in a towering splash, and Felix and Claudia’s barrel was pushed even further away from the city.
Felix couldn’t take his eyes off the demise of the ark. It sank more slowly than he expected, as if the dark elf magic that had kept it afloat for four thousand years was still fighting to support it, but it sank all the same, coming to pieces as it did. Knife-sharp towers crumbled and toppled, walls collapsed. Cracks ran up through the once-solid ground, ripping the mansions and palaces built upon it asunder with a sound like an endless cannon barrage. Dark elves and slaves were crushed by falling masonry or were swallowed by chasms that opened beneath their feet or fell screaming into the water. Felix felt the barrel being pulled back towards the ark by a powerful undertow as more of it was sucked under the waves and his heart raced. They were going to be pulled into the cataclysm and swallowed, and there was nothing he could do.
The temple level disappeared as they swirled closer, explosions of black fire erupting all over it, and great crackling arcs of purple energy leaping from building to building, shivering stone to dust wherever they touched. Felix swore he saw a river of blood pouring from the imploded ruins of a brass-walled temple and staining the water as it sank. An unearthly howling that sounded like neither man nor beast rose up to a hair-raising shriek, and then was cut off as if a door had shut.
The barrel was hit from behind as it rushed towards the sinking ark, then again from the left and the right. All the floating debris from the sinking city was converging towards the sucking centre, crowding the sea with bobbing, bumping junk and knocking Felix and Claudia this way and that.
They were close enough to see the eyes of the black stone dragons that were carved into the eaves of the roof, when waves finally reached the massive black keep, its proud, jutting towers still miraculously whole, but smoke rising in billowing columns from every window. Then, with a crack that Felix felt more than heard, the castle cleaved in half, jagged orange fissures appearing in its basalt flanks as the fire that raged within it was revealed.
