by Warhammer
And these were only a few of the dead. Aethenir, Rion and his house guards, Max’s Reiksguard escort, Farnir, his father Birgi, and thousands more. A whole city had died – and not just wicked druchii, but human, dwarf and elf slaves and prisoners, not all of whom had given their lives willingly for the cause. Felix tried not to feel guilty for this horde of ghosts. It certainly hadn’t been him who had enslaved them, or who had woken the deadly instrument that had shaken the floating island to pieces, but once again, had he and Gotrek not been present, they would not have died. On the other hand, had he and Gotrek not been present Marienburg would have died, and Altdorf drowned – hundreds of thousands dead instead of a few.
And there might be one more dead.
The moment he thought it, his heart thudded in his chest and he wanted instantly to be home. His father. He had to learn what the vile skaven had done to his father. He had to discover if the old man were alive or dead.
The thought brought him out of his reverie and he looked around. The galley drifted quietly, its mast broken, its sails slack and torn. Much of the rigging was hanging in tangled ruins. He stepped to the rail. He could see no land in any direction. They had survived, yes, but how were they to get home? How could two men, a dwarf and a not particularly handy young woman sail a dark elf galley back to the Old World? Even if any of them knew how to sail it would be impossible. There were too many things to do at once. They would need a whole crew.
The thought brought him up short. Perhaps they had one. He turned and climbed painfully to the sterncastle. There he found the druchii with the whip and the cutlass, or what was left of him. He pulled the ring of iron keys from his belt – the corroded leather tore like tissue – then hurried as fast as his battered body would take him back down the stairs and into the bowels of the ship.
He found them in the dank, sweat-grimed hell of the rowers’ deck, and for a wonder, most of them were still alive – the only dead being those closest to the oar holes where the poison cloud must have blown in. Those that still lived looked up from their oars as he unlocked the latticed iron door that imprisoned them, and stared when they saw that he was human. They were a gaunt, haggard lot – men and dwarfs with dirt-blackened, whip-scarred skin and dreadlocked hair and beards, all chained at the ankle to the hard wooden benches that rose in tiers along the length of the galley.
‘Greetings, friends,’ said Felix as he stepped to the first iron padlock and opened it with the key, ‘Do any of you know how to sail a ship?’
Grey Seer Thanquol sat chest deep in water in the bottom of a leaky ale cask in the middle of the Sea of Chaos, contemplating the follies of ambition as his servant, Issfet Loptail, bailed water using a druchii helmet for a bucket.
For almost twenty years Thanquol had longed for only one thing, vengeance on the tall yellow-furred human and the mad red-furred dwarf. For almost twenty years he had nursed his hatred for the pair and dreamed of new and more creative ways of dismantling them body and soul. And after twenty years he had had them at last. They had been at his mercy. He might have done anything he pleased with them.
But then the words of that vainglorious prick-ear, the tale of the Harp of Ruin and what it could do, had set his mind to thoughts of position and power and the rightful return to his former rank and privilege. And like a human in a maze who drops one piece of meat for a bigger piece of meat and in the process loses both, he had let go of his nemeses, used them to confound the druchii and steal from them the harp, and just when everything seemed to have gone according to plan, he had lost it all.
The human and the dwarf had escaped him, the harp had been destroyed, the submersible, surely the most glorious invention in the long history of skaven innovation, and which he had hired at great expense and with many promises of political favours from Riskin of Clan Skryre, had been blown to dust, and… and…
He looked at his tied-off right wrist, the ragged stump already healing due to his sorcerous ministrations. The dwarf would pay for this painful, humiliating maiming. He would never stop paying. Though Thanquol had nothing now, having squandered all his coin and influence hiring the submersible and Shadowfang’s night runners, he would rise again. He would amass wealth and power and influence, and when he had it, he would reach out his remaining claw and crush the vicious, black-hearted dwarf to a pulp, but not before tearing off his disgusting pink limbs one by one, as if he were a fly.
‘What now, oh most bereft of masters?’ asked Issfet as he dumped the last of the water out of the cask and leaned, panting, against its rim.
‘What now?’ snapped Thanquol querulously. ‘What else, fool? Start paddling, quick-quick!’
SLAYER OF THE STORM GOD
Nathan Long
‘Knock again, manling,’ said Gotrek Gurnisson.
Felix Jaeger raised his fist and rapped on the door of Hans Euler’s Marienburg town house, louder this time.
A window opened in the house next door and a maid in a winged cap leaned out.
‘Herr Euler is away, mein Herren,’ she said. ‘You won’t find him home.’
Felix would have been very surprised if he had, for he had stabbed Euler through the heart on the dark elves’ black ark more than a week ago, and the treacherous pirate was hopefully rotting at the bottom of the sea at the moment.
He was about to tell the girl some lie about leaving a card, or delivering a letter, but then Gotrek turned towards her and her eyes went wide. She disappeared into the house with a squeak of fright.
Felix didn’t blame her. Gotrek was a fearsome sight. He was a dwarf Trollslayer, and ugly even for that ugly breed. Short, broad, and muscled like a jungle ape, his scarred, sun-browned flesh was covered in swirling blue tattoos, and a crest of flame-orange hair rose from his shaved head. Add to this an eye-patch, a face like a weathered boulder, and a rune-inscribed battle-axe in a fist the size of a baked ham, and one had a vision to make a hardened veteran blanch, let alone a Marienburg housemaid.
Felix knocked again. Again there was no answer, but this time he thought he heard faint shufflings and thumpings inside.
‘Someone’s after your safe,’ said Gotrek. ‘Stand aside.’
Felix stepped back and the Slayer gripped the doorknob, twisting it with slow, inexorable strength. His biceps bulged. The lock mechanism squealed for a moment in pain, then, with a sharp snap, the knob spun loose and the door creaked open.
There were more thumpings and rustlings from within. Felix drew his sword as Gotrek pushed the door wide and stepped into the dim interior. All was as he remembered it – or nearly all. The wood-paneled entry hall was still dark and stuffy, with a spiral staircase to the left and a door that opened into a richly furnished parlour at the back. The parlour’s bay window still had a big hole – now partially boarded up – where Gotrek and Felix had been shoved out of it during their last visit, and the small safe that Gotrek had thrown down the stairs was still half-sunk into the wooden floor where it had smashed through the polished planks.
The dead butler sprawled on the floor was new, however, as were the chisels and hammers and files that were scattered in a puddle of water surrounding the safe. Felix turned away from the butler, whose brains were spilling out of the hole in his head. The thieves must have been hard men indeed to murder the man and then leave him where he fell as they went about their work.
Gotrek snorted as he looked at the safe-cracking tools. ‘Cheap human chisels. No match for dwarf workmanship.’
Felix rolled his eyes at this typical dwarfen bias, but had to admit that the safe showed hardly a mark. Beyond it, a trail of wet footprints led from the broken parlour window to the puddle and back again.
‘They’ve gone out the back,’ he said.
He and Gotrek strode to the back window and looked out. Euler’s back wall dropped straight down to the canal they had plunged into when his bodyguards had thrown them out. If the housebreakers had gone out the window, they’d have had to have gone into the water, but Felix saw no swimmers, only c
ircular ripples spreading out across the calm water.
‘Strange,’ said Felix.
Gotrek shrugged. ‘At least they didn’t get into the safe,’ he said, and turned away, pulling a ring of keys from his belt pouch.
Felix followed the Slayer to the safe. They had stolen the keys from Euler on their previous visit, but their abrupt exit had prevented them from using them.
The whole business had been distasteful. Not the sort of thing Felix normally cared to do. Euler had been in possession of some incriminating letter with which he’d attempted to blackmail Felix’s father, and the old man had asked Felix to get it back. If he hadn’t been on his death bed when he’d made the request, Felix would never have done it, but as it was he’d felt obliged, and had come reluctantly to Euler’s house to try to intimidate him into giving it up.
Needless to say, it hadn’t gone well, and then the business with the dark elves had intervened, with Euler chasing them across the Sea of Chaos, thinking that they were on the trail of great treasure, and Felix had been forced to kill the pirate when he had turned on them in the bowels of the black ark.
That nightmare was over, thankfully, and now he and Gotrek were back in Marienburg until the following morning, when they and their old friend Max Schreiber, a magister of the College of Light, and Claudia Pallenberger, a seeress from the Celestial College, would board a riverboat to Altdorf for the last leg of their journey home.
Max and Claudia were staying the night at the house of an acquaintance of Max’s, and Gotrek would have been content to bide his time drinking at their inn, the Pelican’s Perch, but Felix still felt an obligation to recover the letter, even though Euler was dead and there was a distinct possibility that his father was as well. So he had asked the Slayer to accompany him back to the smuggler’s house for one last try.
The key turned in its lock with a satisfying click, and Felix knelt as Gotrek hauled on the handle and opened the safe’s heavy steel door. The walls of it were inches thick, and the space inside hardly big enough to hold a loaf of bread, but what lay within glittered in a way that made Felix’s heart race and Gotrek’s ugly face split in a terrifying smile.
‘You can have the letter, manling,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the rest.’
He pulled out a sheaf of papers and handed them to Felix, then began scooping out the treasure and dumping it on the floor – a small spill of jewellery, loose gems, and gold coins of strange foreign design.
Felix sorted through the papers. There were contracts, promissory notes, articles of incorporation, and, at last, an envelope scrawled upon in his father’s scratchy hand. His heart thumping with relief, Felix opened it and made sure there was a letter within, then stuffed it in his belt pouch.
‘I have it,’ he said.
Gotrek just grunted and kept sorting the treasure, entirely engrossed. He held a thick gold circlet up to his single appraising eye. ‘Dwarf gold, human work,’ he said. ‘Not bad for all that.’
Felix looked at the coil as the Slayer slipped it on his wrist. He thought it might have once been a necklace, but it barely fit around Gotrek’s meaty arm. It was made of heavy gold wire – eight braided strands branching from a central bezel set with a sea-green gem the size of a walnut. Though it was undeniably beautiful, Felix found he didn’t like the look of the thing. Perhaps he was just sick of anything that reminded him of the sea.
‘Are you sure it’s not elven?’ he asked, hoping to make Gotrek take it off.
Gotrek snorted. ‘Not flimsy enough.’ He tossed a delicate gold necklace into the puddle. ‘That’s elven,’ he said with a sneer, then began picking through the rest and putting the choicer bits in his belt pouch.
Felix thought the elven necklace was beautiful, but he wasn’t going to argue the point with a dwarf. He’d just take it. But as he picked it up, voices reached them from the street.
‘Aye, sergeant,’ came the housemaid’s voice. ‘I saw ‘em. They broke down Herr Euler’s door.’
A man’s voice answered her. ‘Back inside, miss. We’ll take care of this. Swords out, boys.’
‘The watch,’ whispered Felix.
Gotrek grunted angrily, and for a moment Felix was afraid he meant to stay and fight, but instead he just swept up the treasure in his big hands, stuffed it down his breeches, then stumped towards the spiral staircase, jingling with each step.
‘To the roof, manling,’ he said. ‘While they follow the footprints to the canal.’
Felix followed, surprised and relieved. Apparently Gotrek’s lust for gold had momentarily won out over his lust for battle.
As they started up the stairs, Felix paused and looked back at the wet footprints, suddenly wondering why they seemed so wide and splayed. Had the housebreakers used some sort of special shoes to swim the canal?
There was a crash as the front door burst in. Felix hurried after the Slayer.
Gotrek shook another ruby out of his trouser leg and put it on the table with the rest. ‘I think that’s the last of them.’
Felix looked up from reading his father’s letter and glanced askance at the little pile of now-pungent treasure the Slayer had amassed. Showing so much wealth in a tavern like the Pelican’s Perch would bring nothing but trouble, but perhaps that was what the Slayer wanted, or perhaps he just didn’t care.
Even with the sun still up, the taproom was crowded with rowdy revellers. In fact all Marienburg was crowded with rowdy revellers, piling into town for the Storm Festival, a local holiday that culminated with the priests of the sea god Manann leading their congregations in a prayer to spare their fishing and trading fleets from harsh winter storms. Despite the freezing winter winds that whipped spray off the canals and blew it in their faces, the merry celebrants were singing songs in the streets and carousing from inn to inn, red-cheeked and rubber-legged and praising Manann with every bend of their elbows.
A squad of Black Caps pushed into the tavern. Felix hid his face behind his father’s letter, but the watchmen only spoke with the barman, scanned the place cursorily, and headed back out to the street. The watchmen looked on edge – understandable, what with the town full of drunks, and also rumours that some of those drunks were going missing – pulled into the canals by strange assailants, never to be seen again. The Storm Festival Curse, the locals called it, for apparently it happened every year. Felix thought it much more likely that the missing revellers had fallen into the canals after one too many toasts to Manann.
As Gotrek muttered over his glittering hoard, Felix returned to the old letter. So far he hadn’t found anything particularly blackmail-worthy. It was a note from his father, acknowledging that he had received some goods from Euler’s father – a smuggler just like his son. There were lists of Tilean glass, Bretonnian brandy, Cathayan silk, and other fancy goods that Felix supposed might have been smuggled or stolen. It didn’t seem enough somehow. His father had been terrified that this letter would rob him of Jaeger and Sons. Nothing here seemed to merit that terror.
Felix turned the letter over. His heart stopped. He had found it. At the top of the page was a list of six books, with a note scrawled to one side in his father’s hand. Felix didn’t recognise all the titles, but even the ones he did were enough to tie his stomach in sailors’ knots – The Maelificarium by Salini, Urbanus’s The Seven Gates, Sudenberg’s Treatise on the Hidden World. All were forbidden texts in the eyes of the Temple of Sigmar, and tomes of darkest sorcery. The possession of any one of them would be enough to have a man burned at the stake.
Felix read the note his father had written beside them.
Returning the Urbanus and the Bastory. Estlemann says they are damaged and unsellable. Will want full refund.
GJ
Felix’s head swam. His father had dealt, was perhaps still dealing, in forbidden books! This was indeed something that would destroy Jaeger and Sons if exposed. He was filled once again with loathing for the old man’s greed. This proved beyond a doubt that Gustav would do anything to increase his fortu
ne. Of course, Felix thought with a twinge of guilt, his father might be dead now, and he shouldn’t think ill of him, but the old villain certainly made it difficult to be charitable.
A shadow passed over the letter and a voice jarred Felix from his musings. ‘How much for the bracelet?’
Felix looked up. A piratical old sailor in a long coat stood at the table, jostled on all sides by the crowd that filled the tap room. He was a barrel-chested man, with a bald head, gold earrings, and a clay pipe that stuck out from an enormous white moustache and beard. He pointed a thick finger at Gotrek’s wrist, indicating the bracelet with the sea-green gem.
‘Not for sale,’ said Gotrek. He pushed a small pile of jewellery towards the man. ‘If you want any of that, we can deal. It’s elven.’
The old sailor shook his head. ‘Just the bracelet.’
‘Then you’re out of luck,’ said Gotrek.
The sailor frowned. ‘Double its weight in Altdorf Crowns,’ he said.
Gotrek snorted. ‘Crowns are cut with copper. This is pure. Ten times its weight wouldn’t be enough.’
‘So, you’re willing to haggle?’
‘No,’ said the Slayer, and returned his attention to his sorting.
The sailor shrugged. ‘Can’t say I didn’t try.’ He stepped back. ‘Get ‘em, messmates.’
All at once, all the men who had been jostling and laughing and drinking behind the old man turned towards Gotrek and Felix, grinning as they readied cudgels, brass knuckles and saps. Felix had never in his life seen so few teeth among so many men.
Gotrek jumped up, laughing, and snatched up two three-legged stools. ‘Come and get it, you wharf rats!’
The wharf rats obliged him, roaring and leaping over the table at him as bracelets and necklaces scattered everywhere. Felix was shouldered to the floor in the rush. Boots stomped his spine as he rolled under the table, covering his head, and the smack of fists on flesh was loud in his ears.
