Gotrek & Felix- the Fourth Omnibus - Nathan Long

by Warhammer

  ‘It was my fault,’ said Ortwin, hanging his head where he knelt beside Sir Teobalt. ‘Had I not drawn my sword, things might not have come to such a pass.’

  Felix, off to one side tying up his bedroll, wished he could have told the boy it wasn’t true, but really, it was. If the squire hadn’t drawn steel, they might have got out of that tavern for a few shillings.

  ‘My dear boy,’ Vinck said, returning to the task at hand with renewed vigour. ‘Don’t apologise. I would rather Ludeker had faced the hangman’s noose after a lawful trial, but he was a cancer upon the heart of this town that has sorely needed excising, and I am not sad to hear of his passing.’

  ‘Milo is already trying to pick up the reins,’ said Kat sadly, then looked up, eyes hard, as a thought occurred to her. ‘And he might come looking for us afterwards. He might be worried we’ll do the same to him.’

  Sir Teobalt struggled up onto one elbow, wincing. ‘You must leave the village with the others, young Ortwin, and quickly. Go north to Stangenschloss in my name and pursue these rumours you have heard. Perhaps, when you send word to me, I will be well enough to join you.’

  ‘But we must take you with us!’ said Ortwin. ‘They may try to hurt you when they cannot find us.’

  ‘He cannot be moved,’ said Doktor Vinck. ‘He must have rest.’

  ‘I see no reason why they would try to hurt me,’ said Teobalt. ‘And even if they do, my life is not as important as the recovery of the order’s regalia. I have said I would recover it or die in the attempt. The danger means nothing to me.’

  Gotrek grunted approvingly.

  Felix stood and shouldered his pack. ‘We better go, then.’

  Kat stood too. Her pack and bow were slung across her back. ‘Aye,’ she said.

  ‘May Taal watch over you,’ said Doktor Vinck.

  ‘And Sigmar guide your path,’ said Sir Teobalt.

  Ortwin bowed low over Sir Teobalt’s hand. ‘I will not fail you, sir,’ he said, then he turned and joined Felix and the others as they ducked through the tent flap and out into the cold white day.

  It had begun to snow.

  Felix found himself in a black mood as he and the others tramped north along the banks of the Zufuhr and deeper into the Drakwald. As the lazy snowflakes settled on his eyelashes and melted into his red Sudenland wool cloak, his mind turned sourly to the infinite corruptibility of man.

  He had sensed no taint of Chaos in Bauholz, had seen nothing that reeked of cult activity, had found no vile altars or eldritch symbols daubed on the walls, and yet it was as foul a pit of villainy as any he had ever seen. Why was it that the corrupt were always strong and the good always weak? Why did the Ludekers and Noseless Milos of the world flourish while good men like Doktor Vinck were crushed and killed and shoved aside?

  Felix sighed. He knew the answer, and it depressed him. It was because the good and strong went forth to battle the forces of darkness and died to defend mankind while the cowardly stayed at home and preyed on the weak who were left behind. In that way the corruption of Bauholz was the fault of Chaos, for though the vile forces of the Dark Gods had not reached the village, those that would have protected it against corruption from within had gone north and not come back, leaving it defenceless against the depredations of purely human predators who saw opportunity where others saw tragedy.

  He wondered if perhaps greed was the unacknowledged fifth god of Chaos – some gold-skinned brother to lust, madness, disease and hate. Certainly greed seemed to do as much evil as the others, seducing men and women to steal from their brothers and sisters, to grind down those weaker than themselves, driving them into mad schemes and desperate gambles, birthing robbery, kidnapping, blackmail and murder.

  But perhaps not. The fault might lie within the nature of man himself, for though the greed of the dwarfs was proverbial, Felix had never seen one so degraded by it that he would stoop to murdering one of his own to satisfy his lust for gold. The dwarfs might indulge in sharp dealing, or take advantage of outsiders, but dwarf thieves and murderers were rare, and kidnappers and blackmailers were, as far as he knew, unheard of. It was man – weak-willed, frightened and desperate – that made blood sacrifices to greed, and swore terrible oaths at its glittering altar.

  His thoughts flew back again to his father, who, though he’d had a successful business in legitimate trade, and who had more money than he could have spent in two lifetimes, had still felt compelled to consort with smugglers and pirates, and to deal in forbidden books, because he must have more! And Felix’s brother Otto looked set to follow his father’s example. When Felix had shown him the letter that proved Gustav’s crimes, Otto had been more concerned with losing the family business than restoring the family honour.

  All his brooding left him with the glum belief that mankind would finally be dragged down into the pit, not by the gods of Chaos, but by its own frail, fallible nature, and that no amount of heroic victories over the marauders and the orcs and the skaven would save it from its self-inflicted demise.

  Of course, that didn’t mean one stopped fighting them – particularly not those scheming lurkers in the shadows, the skaven. His hand gripped his sword hilt hard as he thought again of what they had done to his father. Revenge would be sweet when he finally–

  ‘Go carefully here, Felix,’ said Kat.

  Felix looked up, blinking. He had been following behind her blindly, lost in his thoughts, and hadn’t been looking where he was going. They had come to a high-banked stream which fed into the Zufuhr. Someone had laid a log across the stream as a crude bridge, but the bark was glassy with ice and covered with a dusting of powdery snow. A false step and he might have plunged into the stream – not wise in weather like this. Being wet in freezing weather was a more certain death than a fight with beastmen.

  ‘Thank you, Kat,’ he said, as he picked his way across the log.

  Gotrek followed onto the log behind him, stumping along without pause as if he were on solid ground. Ortwin came more hesitantly, but with a little tottering and arm-flapping he was across too, then Kat bounded effortlessly across like a, well, like a cat, and they were on their way again.

  Felix looked at her as she took the lead again. She moved down the nearly non-existent path with perfect confidence and grace, her stride light and her head turning to one side and the other as she listened to the forest, her posture relaxed yet ready – a complete contrast to how she had been in Bauholz. There she had been nervous and ill at ease, afraid of Ludeker and Milo, uncertain how to deal with the people she spoke to. All the strength and calm she had shown in the battle with the beastmen had disappeared when they had approached the village gates – now it was back again.

  Felix quickened his steps and caught up to her. ‘Er, Kat,’ he said.

  She looked up. ‘Yes, Felix?’

  ‘How did you come to this?’ he asked. ‘Your profession, I mean. My last memory of you is seeing you and the old forester – I forget his name – waving goodbye to us as we left Flensburg for Nuln.’

  ‘Papa,’ she said, nodding. ‘Herr Messner.’ Then she smirked at him. ‘I was mad at you when you went away. I wanted to go with you.’

  Felix smiled. ‘I remember.’

  ‘It just seemed natural to me,’ she said. ‘Leaving with you, I mean. You saved my life. I saved yours. We’d killed that… that woman together.’ She shivered. ‘I didn’t want to stay in another village. I’d felt safer travelling in the woods with you than when the beasts came to Kleindorf. There was somewhere to run in the woods. There was somewhere to hide.’

  Felix paused, uncomfortable at the mention of the woman – the strange, beautiful champion of Chaos who had led the beasts during their pillaging of the two towns – who looked so much like the girl he walked beside now. ‘That woman,’ he said. ‘I… Did anyone ever tell you about her? About who she was?’

  Kat’s eyes narrowed. ‘You mean that she was my mother?’

  Felix let out a relieved breath. He hadn’t b
een sure he could have told her even now. He was glad she already knew. ‘Messner told you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I figured it out.’ She tugged out the long lock of white hair that grew among her dirty black tresses. ‘My witch-lock.’ She snorted and pulled off her stocking cap, then smoothed the lock back down and put it back on. ‘I don’t care about her. Herr Messner and his family were my real family – Magda and Hob and Gus. I’m Katerina Messner now.’

  Felix chuckled. ‘Ah. So you liked living with them after all.’

  Kat nodded, her eyes faraway. ‘I loved them. Herr Messner – well, at first he and Magda tried to get me to learn the things that other little girls learned, cooking, sewing, mending, but… I didn’t like those things. I wanted to do what Hob and Gus did. I wanted to go out with Herr Messner and learn how to shoot rabbits, and follow trails, and kill beastmen.’

  Felix looked at her. A hardness had come into her voice.

  ‘They thought it was because of what I had seen in Kleindorf, and in the raid on Flensburg, and they hoped that I would forget it in time.’ She gave a sad smile. ‘It was because of that, because I never wanted to let anything like that ever happen again.’ She shrugged. ‘But I didn’t forget it. It never left me. And when Herr Messner realised that I wouldn’t change, he didn’t try to turn me away from it any more. He took me out with Hob and Gus and taught me everything he knew.’

  ‘He seems to have taught you well,’ Felix said.

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘He was a good man.’

  Felix paused at the past tense. ‘He’s… he’s dead, then?’ asked Felix.

  ‘Aye,’ said Kat, her voice suddenly dull. ‘They all are.’

  Felix’s eyes widened. ‘All of them?’

  Kat sighed. ‘Flensburg was destroyed by beastmen, another great herd. There were just too many.’

  ‘How terrible,’ said Felix. ‘Was this during the invasion?’

  Kat shook her head. ‘No. Long ago. I was seventeen. I was already part of the duke’s rangers by then, and was out on a long patrol when it happened.’ She hung her head. ‘I should have been there.’

  Felix opened his mouth, about to say something trite like, ‘There was nothing you could have done,’ then closed it again. No one was ever really comforted by that. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said instead.

  She shrugged. ‘After that I quit the rangers and went out on my own.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Felix.

  ‘The rangers are good at what they do,’ said Kat. ‘But they have their duties. They must visit such-and-such a town once a month, and that town and then the next town. They must keep the roads clear and report bandits and catch outlaws. I only wanted to hunt beastmen.’ She bared her teeth. ‘So many times I would find a hoof print trail and want to follow it to the beasts’ camp, but the patrol had to move on and I couldn’t.’

  She looked up at Felix. ‘I wanted to be able to track them wherever they went, whether on the duke’s land or not, and for however long it took. I was sure that was the only way to really get rid of them. You couldn’t just kill a hunting party here and a warband there, you needed to find their secret places, where they lived, and bred, and destroy them utterly with fire and sword!’

  Felix blinked, unnerved at her sudden fury. ‘Er, yes,’ he said.

  ‘The first herd I tracked down was the one which had killed Papa and Mama and my brothers. I lived in the woods for months while I followed them. Never went near a town or a road until finally I found the camp and worked out a way that an army could surround it so that none of them could escape. Then I went to Magnusdorp, which was the nearest castle, and showed the lord my maps.’ She glowered at a memory. ‘He laughed at me. He didn’t believe me. He didn’t think a little girl could have found such a place.’

  ‘Well,’ said Felix carefully. ‘You can’t really blame him for that. You’re a bit of an exception to the rule.’

  Kat sniffed, dismissive. ‘So I snuck back to the camp and cut off the head of a gor, then brought it back to him.’

  ‘A gor?’ Felix asked, confused.

  ‘A beastman,’ she said. ‘The big ones, with the heads and legs of beasts, are called gors. The smaller, more human ones, are called ungors.’

  Felix nodded. ‘All these years fighting them and I didn’t know. Sorry. Go on. You brought the head of one of the beasts back to the lord of Magnusdorp?’

  ‘Aye.’ She grinned, showing a lot of teeth. ‘He listened to me then.’ Her eyes grew dreamy and faraway, as if she were talking about attending a dance. ‘His men wiped out the herd entirely. Their herdstone was crushed to dust.’

  Felix swallowed. Kat was as driven as a Slayer. It was a bit intimidating. ‘So, uh, you’ve been tracking beastmen ever since?’ he asked.

  Kat nodded. ‘Until Archaon’s invasion. Then I thought it would be better if I helped the soldiers.’ She straightened proudly. ‘I was a scout for Count von Raukov from Wolfenburg all the way to Middenheim, spying on the hordes, scouring the woods during the retreat, bringing the army information on enemy positions.’ She laughed. ‘There were times when I was so close to the Kurgan that I could have patted them on the head, but they never found me.’

  Felix shook his head. The girl didn’t seem to know any fear at all – at least while she was in the woods.

  She frowned again. ‘I will go back to hunting beasts soon, but right now there are still too many people in the Drakwald who shouldn’t be here – all these refugees and soldiers trying to get home. I will guide them until they are gone, then I will return to my true purpose.’

  Felix swallowed, suddenly emotional, his depression at the sorry state of mankind lightening. Here was the counter to the greed and the corruption that had sickened him in Bauholz – the selflessness of a girl whose only thought was to help people return home and make the world a safer place. ‘You are doing great work, Kat,’ he said at last.

  She blushed and tucked her nose down into her scarf. ‘I am doing what I can.’

  After they had walked a little while in silence, Felix spoke again. ‘Is Bauholz your home now, then?’ he asked. ‘Do you live with Doktor Vinck?’

  She shook her head. ‘I haven’t lived in a town since… since Flensburg was destroyed,’ she said. ‘I go to Bauholz and to other towns for supplies, but I live here.’ She waved a hand around at the forest. ‘This is my home.’

  And welcome to it, thought Felix, staring around uneasily at the thick wall of trees on either side of the path.

  ‘Doktor Vinck sewed me up a few years ago when a beastman gored me with its horns,’ she continued. ‘I would have died without his help, so I always try to look after him, and Bauholz.’ She snorted bitterly, a great cloud of steam rising before her face. ‘I wish I had dealt with Ludeker as I deal with the beasts.’ She spat. ‘I should have, but Herr Doktor said there are laws, and that the law should deal with him.’ She looked back at the Slayer with a sly smile. ‘I’m glad Gotrek thought otherwise.’

  For five days Felix, Gotrek, Kat and Ortwin continued north and west through the deep forest, marching at a slow but steady pace. Their rate of travel was helped because the path they were on was the route by which supplies and reinforcements were brought to Fort Stangenschloss, and was therefore relatively clear and well maintained. Had they been travelling in any other direction, they might have measured their day’s travel in yards rather than miles, for the forest to either side of the path was an almost impenetrable undergrowth of brambles and intertwined tree roots.

  Ease of travel, however, was countered by the fact that such a well-marked path was a target, watched by those who would prey upon those who used it. This had been why Kat had wanted to join the supply train that was to have left Bauholz two days after their arrival. A well-manned, well-guarded convoy would be a less attractive target than four travellers on foot. Twice in those five days she had asked them to wait, then disappeared into the woods in order to investigate further along the trail. The first time it had been bandits, waiti
ng in the brush at a place where the path dipped down to go through a swift stream. The second time it had been mutants, hiding in overhanging trees for the unwary.

  Both times, Gotrek had wanted to go fight the ambushers, and Ortwin had concurred, and both times it had fallen to Kat and Felix to discourage them. Felix reminded them that Sir Teobalt had charged them with finding the lost templars, not to fight random villains on the road. Kat had reminded them that Doktor Vinck was days behind them and the fort days ahead of them, and that even if they were victorious they would undoubtedly incur wounds that they might die from before they reached help.

  Gotrek and Ortwin had reluctantly bowed to this combination of duty and cold logic, and had allowed Kat to lead them into the woods and around the ambushes, and they had escaped undetected.

  At night, they made camp just off the path, hidden from it by a screen of brush. Kat always stopped before the sun went down, so that by the time it got dark their fire would have died down and the pulsing embers could warm them without bright flames giving away their position. As Felix, Gotrek and Ortwin made up their bedrolls and gathered firewood, Kat would vanish into the trees and return a half-hour later with rabbits or pheasants or a fox, each shot neatly through the skull with a steel-tipped arrow. These she would skin and gut with practiced precision and cook over the fire. They never went hungry.

  On the night of the second day, the falling snow grew heavier, and they woke up the next morning with their bedrolls covered in two inches of dry powder, but with blue skies overhead. This distressed Kat, and not because it would slow them – the build-up was hardly enough to cover Felix’s boots.

  ‘We will leave tracks that will be easy to follow,’ she said. ‘It would be better if the snow continued, so it would cover them again.’

  Later that day, they came to a place where the forest had been burned and saw signs that some great battle had occurred in the midst of the charred trees. Under the thin cover of snow, the ground was burned black, and ash-covered bones and dented, soot-blackened armour littered it like broken teeth.