by Warhammer
He divided the stack in two and slid two gold coins towards Gotrek, and two towards Felix. ‘Monsieurs Agnar and Henrik have signed on. What say you join them? With warriors of your calibre in our ranks, we are sure to win.’
Felix looked to Gotrek. This was his to answer.
The Slayer stared at the gold with a dwarf’s usual reverence, but at last he shook his head. ‘A Slayer who finds his doom needs neither gold nor ale afterwards. Your reward is meaningless.’
Agnar blinked at this statement, as if he hadn’t considered it that way before, and Lanquin looked as if he were going to make another argument, but finally he shrugged and took back his gold.
‘As you will, friend dwarf,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will change your mind. Until then, drink your fill. It is on the house.’
Felix groaned. Giving free beer to a Slayer was sure to lead to fighting and property damage, and the prospect of paying more gold to Lanquin than he had offered in order to repair tables, chairs and broken windows loomed large before him, but to his surprise, Gotrek was practically abstemious for the rest of the night. He only drank ten mugs of Bugman’s, and did little more than exchange war stories with Agnar. Felix did the same with Henrik, enjoying himself despite the mocking tone the man put into every tale he told. Henrik might be a blowhard, but he knew Felix’s every concern and complaint. He laughed at jokes and stories that only another rememberer would understand. He had known the loneliness and the homesickness and the cold nights in the middle of nowhere. He had suffered through the rages and black moods of his companion. He had made the hair’s breadth escapes and survived the wounds and fevers that were an inescapable part of following a Slayer. Henrik might not be Felix’s friend, but he was his brother. That could not be denied.
3
After sleeping the night at the Grail, Gotrek and Felix woke to a light but steady rain that soaked them to the skin as they trudged up the muddy zigzag path to Skalf’s Hold, the dwarfs’ above-ground settlement built upon the ruins of Karak Azgal.
Walking with Gotrek through the dragon-mouthed gate in the thick stone walls at the top of the broad plateau, Felix was struck with wonder. There could not have been a greater contrast between the town on the hill and the town in the valley. Within the hold’s walls was a tidy grid of neatly paved, rain-washed streets, all lined with squat stone houses and commercial buildings of dwarfish design, and all immaculately cared for. There was no trash in the gutters, and the only smell was that of someone baking bread. Felix had seen dwarf riches before – vast, gilded chambers deep underground – but this modest holdfast in the middle of the moonscape of the Worlds Edge Mountains struck him as more ostentatious than the most lavish guild hall. It was as if some nobleman had allowed his beautiful daughter to walk naked and unescorted through the worst slums of Altdorf. She might not show any outward display of wealth, but the noble’s confidence in her safety spoke of great reserves of hidden power.
Gotrek grumbled under his breath as they walked towards the keep that rose in the centre of the town. ‘Not proper. A dressed-up defeat.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Felix.
Gotrek snorted. ‘The kin of Skalf Dragonslayer lost Karak Azgal, and couldn’t win it back. Instead they built a town on top of it and charged others to do their fighting for them.’ He flashed a thick-fingered hand at the prosperous houses. ‘All this was built not on mining or smithing. It was built on fees and taxes taken from the fools who come to seek their fortune below.’
Felix looked around again, seeing it in a new light. ‘So it’s no different than Deadgate.’
‘Aye,’ said Gotrek. ‘A marble-walled cesspit instead of a clapboard one.’
The streets around the town’s central keep were filled with heavily armed dwarfs with the dragon of Karak Azgal on their shields, as well as a more motley collection of mercenaries, adventurers and fighting men, all hunching stoically in the rain. The square to the north of the keep had been turned into a makeshift military camp, with tents of all shapes and descriptions lined up in ragged rows. Recruiters were out in force, offering Thane Thorgrin’s coin to fight the greenskins, and ale and food sellers were carting their wares around in barrows and doing brisk business with the troops and applicants.
Gotrek ignored it all and strode through the open doors of the keep itself. A table had been set up under a tent in the middle of the courtyard, and would-be warriors were lined up to make their mark in the recruitment book. Gotrek ignored this too and stumped towards a door that led into the keep itself. The dwarf guards who stood on either side of it stepped in his way, and a dwarf veteran crossed to him, his hand on his axe.
‘What’s your business here, Slayer?’
‘I want a licence to enter the hold,’ said Gotrek. ‘I seek the cave spider.’
‘Licences are not being issued,’ said the dwarf. ‘Not until Stinkfoot’s been dealt with. You want to go down, join up. You’ll have plenty of fighting.’
‘I don’t care about your fight. I go to my doom.’
The grizzled dwarf’s eyes went cold. ‘You don’t want to help your race? You don’t want to help your brothers save their hold?’
Gotrek spat at his feet. ‘You don’t want to save the hold. You want to save your little sky-bare surface town so you can go on selling licences and candle stubs.’
‘What did you say?’ The veteran’s eyes had gone from ice to fire in a blink.
Felix swallowed and dropped his hand to his hilt. If this came to blows it would be bad. Gotrek might find his doom at the hands of fellow dwarfs, or worse, he might slaughter half the settlement.
‘If you saved the hold,’ continued Gotrek. ‘You’d lose all your business. You’d have to work for a living.’
‘Get out,’ said the dwarf through clenched teeth. ‘Before I throw you out. We don’t want help from the likes of you.’
‘On the contrary,’ said a voice from behind him. ‘A Slayer is just what I need.’
The veteran looked around as a white-bearded dwarf in gromril plate stepped through the door into the rain, followed by a retinue of dwarf Hammerers. The guards all saluted him but he looked only at Gotrek. He had a bulging gut beneath a breastplate that had been custom-made to accommodate it, and a round, pink face under his white beard. He looked like a shop keep, but the fine armour and the deference of the guards said otherwise.
‘Thane Thorgrin,’ said the sergeant. ‘I was just removing this–’
‘Stand down, Holdborn,’ said the thane, then nodded to Gotrek. ‘Your assessment of the situation is harsh but accurate, Slayer. We have profited from the loss of the hold, but better that than abandon it altogether. The sale of all those candle stubs will one day allow us to raise an army strong enough to purge the depths once and for all.’
‘And meanwhile you let greenskins nest in the halls of your ancestors and grant licences to fools to be eaten by them.’
The rotund thane smiled. ‘I have often thought that it was much easier for a dwarf to be uncompromising when he intended to die at his earliest opportunity.’
Gotrek snorted and turned back towards the gates. ‘I’ll go back to the Bretonnian. At least he’s an honest thief.’
‘Go if you wish,’ said Thorgrin as Felix started after the Slayer. ‘But I can give you one thing the innkeeper can’t.’
Gotrek kept walking.
‘The lair of the White Widow,’ called the thane. ‘My scouts have found its location.’
Gotrek stopped, then turned back.
‘Help us defeat the greenskins,’ said Thorgrin. ‘And I will tell you where it lives.’
‘Where do I sign?’ said Gotrek.
By the time Gotrek and Felix had penned their names in Thorgrin’s book and received his coin, and been told to report back to the keep the next morning before sunrise for the thane’s big push into the hold, the earlier light rain had become a downpour. It came straight down in sheets so thick it was impossible to see more than five paces in any direction, a
nd the gutters of Skalf’s Hold’s cobbled streets were swift-running streams a foot deep.
Deadgate had no cobbled streets or gutters, and was consequently a swamp. By the time Gotrek and Felix had made their way down the zigzag path and passed through the settlement’s eastern gate, they were slogging through knee-high mud, and the streets had emptied completely, the doors and shutters of the ramshackle inns and houses closed tight against the torrent. The place might have been a ghost town.
Even so, Felix was surprised when he started seeing ghosts. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a hooded figure hunched in the mouth of an alley to their right, but when he looked properly, it was gone. There was nothing but rain and a pile of barrels. Another figure appeared at the corner of a building, but it too vanished when he turned towards it.
Gotrek stopped in the middle of the flooded street and glared around, peering out from under his sodden crest, which had flopped down over his one eye. ‘We are being hunted.’
‘Haunted?’
‘Hunted.’ He lifted his rune axe from his back and readied it.
‘Only two streets to the Grail,’ said Felix, drawing his sword. ‘Should we make a break for it?’
‘We’ll have to get through them first,’ said Gotrek.
Felix followed the Slayer’s gaze. Five hooded figures were appearing out of the obscuring torrent like spectres materialising from the ether. Unlike spectres, however, they were armed with very real looking swords. He heard a splash behind him and the scrape of steel. Four more were blocking their retreat, and more stepped from the alleys on either side.
Felix went on guard and raised his voice to be heard over the rain. ‘What do you want?’
‘To get paid,’ said one.
And with that, they attacked.
4
Felix faced out behind Gotrek and braced for the ambushers’ attack. The Slayer, however, didn’t wait. He roared towards the charging men, churning the mud and whirling his axe around his head like the blade of a dwarf gyrocopter. Busy with his own assailants, Felix didn’t see what happened next, but he heard the clang of steel meeting steel and the sick chop of steel meeting flesh, followed by the shrieks and gasps of butchered men, and knew Gotrek was faring well.
He, on the other hand, was in some difficulty. The men he faced were not great swordsmen by any stretch, but there were a lot of them, and they all had one target, while he had many. He flashed around with Karaghul and knocked aside two blades, but three more were sweeping towards him. He jerked back and left to avoid them, and nearly pitched face-first into the mud as it sucked at his boots.
A bright bite of pain flared above his elbow as one of the blades nicked him, and two more swords stabbed for his face as he stumbled. With a desperate swat, he batted them aside, then crashed into the men who had wielded them, more by accident than design.
The first went down under the impact, but Felix clung to the second and spun him around, just in time for him to take the blades of two of his comrades in the stomach. Felix shoved the gutted man forward, then slashed over his shoulder with Karaghul and caught one of the assassins in the neck and the other on the back of the hand. As they staggered back, the man who had fallen tried to push himself up under Felix’s feet. Felix chopped down and he sank into the mud, red staining the brown.
The others came in again, more wary now, six of them, and Felix backed away, sword out, tearing off his cloak with his free hand. The heavy wool was saturated with water and made him feel as if he were being dragged down by the shoulders. He wrapped a few folds of it around his wrist for a buckler and held it out to the side.
‘Come on, then,’ he said.
But the men were staring past him, faces uncertain, and when he dared a glance over his shoulder, he knew why. One of Gotrek’s attackers was toppling, headless, into the mud, and the bodies of five others floated face down in spreading pools of crimson. The Slayer was backing up two more, one of which was holding a bent sword in front of him and weeping, while the other was missing his left forearm and clutching the stump. Two more were fleeing into the rain.
Felix grinned savagely at the men who hesitated before him. ‘Aye. And if you kill me, he’ll really be mad.’
He had to give them credit. Three of them actually came at him again. Felix slapped the leftmost one with his drenched cloak, knocking him into the centre one, then parried the blade of the right-hand one and backhanded him across the arm.
The man stumbled away, hissing and dropping his sword, and Felix turned on the other two, whirling his cloak in their faces and stabbing under it. They leapt back, then kept retreating, staring over his shoulder.
Felix looked back and saw Gotrek slogging through the mud towards him, spattered in blood, with brains dripping from the blade of his axe.
Felix cursed and splashed after them. ‘Stop!’ he called. ‘Stand where you are! Who sent you? Who is paying you?’
They turned and ran without answering and he splashed after them, but floundered in the mud and went to his knees as they vanished into the downpour. With a sigh he struggled to his feet and slogged back to Gotrek, who was turning the bodies of the fallen face-up in the mud and pulling back their hoods.
‘Any left alive?’
The Slayer shook his head. ‘Those we didn’t kill drowned.’
Felix looked at the uncovered faces of their attackers. He recognised none of them. They were all of the type common to Deadgate – lean, scarred men who looked hungry enough to kill their own mothers for meat. Well, they were sated now.
‘Any idea who they were, or what they wanted?’
Gotrek grabbed one by the ankle. ‘No. But I know who might.’
He started down the swampy street towards the Grail, dragging one of the corpses through the mud behind him.
Louis Lanquin wrinkled his nose as he looked at the dead man lying in a spreading puddle of filth and blood in the middle of his tavern.
‘He is no acquaintance of mine,’ he said. ‘And I wish you had asked me to come out to see him, rather than bringing him in and dirtying my floor.’
The place was crowded with patrons seeking shelter from the rain, and they were all staring at Felix, Gotrek and the corpse. Felix noticed that Agnar and Henrik were not among them. Maybe they were still sleeping it off. Agnar had outdrunk Gotrek three to one the night before.
‘You didn’t pay him to kill us?’ growled Gotrek.
The Bretonnian laughed. ‘My friends, if I had wanted to kill you, I could have poisoned your Bugman’s last night, or murdered you as you were sleeping it off.’ He signalled two bouncers and gestured to the body, then looked back to the Slayer. ‘There are many factions here in Deadgate, and more in Skalf’s Hold, and some of them do not want the dwarfs to win. If they thought your deaths would further their cause, they would not hesitate.’
With practiced speed, the bouncers brought a sheet of canvas, laid it beside the dead man and rolled him onto it. As they dragged him towards the door, a servant came in with a mop and bucket and began cleaning up the mud. Within a minute, all trace of the corpse’s visit was gone.
‘I bear you no ill will for suspecting me,’ said Lanquin. ‘They who have just fought for their lives are bound to look on the world with some mistrust.’ He waved to the bar. ‘Please. You are welcome to drink as before, on the house. Think of it as an apology for how shabbily my adopted town has treated you thus far.’
Felix looked at Gotrek. The Slayer shook his head.
‘We would not presume upon your hospitality further, monsieur,’ Felix said. ‘You have already been too generous. Thank you all the same.’
Lanquin shrugged. ‘As you will, and I wish you a more restful time wherever you go.’
He bowed as Gotrek and Felix strode to the door and splashed out into the rain again.
‘He’s lying,’ said Gotrek. ‘Those killers were his.’
‘You can’t know that,’ said Felix.
‘I don’t have to know it, manling.
I know it.’
‘But why would he want us dead? Because we took Thorgrin’s coin instead of his? That doesn’t make sense. Don’t they both want the same thing? Why would Lanquin kill anyone who aimed to fight the orcs?’
‘Maybe he wants the orcs to win,’ said Gotrek.
Felix looked at him askance. ‘That makes even less sense. You heard him last night. It is a simple question of economics. He needs Deadgate to survive just as much as Thorgrin does.’
Gotrek shrugged. ‘Sense or no sense, I sleep with one hand on my axe tonight.’
‘Aye,’ said Felix. ‘Aye.’
After spending a night at an inn called the Palace, Gotrek and Felix woke, mildly surprised they hadn’t been attacked in their sleep, and returned before sunrise to Thane Thorgrin’s keep. They were not alone. The courtyard of the keep was packed with dwarfs of Karak Azgal’s throng, neat blocks of axe-wielding warriors, thunderers with their handguns over their shoulders, and veteran Ironbreakers clad head-to-toe in heavy plate armour. Behind the dwarfs were a less orderly mass of human mercenaries – a mix of hardened adventurers, greedy treasure seekers and nervous shopkeeps, come to protect their properties and investments in Deadgate. They were divided into squads behind more seasoned captains, and were haphazardly armed and armoured. Nevertheless, there were a fair amount of them. Felix reckoned that, all told, there were roughly three hundred dwarfs, and two hundred mercenaries lined up and awaiting orders, and to his surprise, Agnar and Henrik were among them.
The grizzled Slayer kept his eyes on the floor and seemed to weave on his feet as Felix and Gotrek crossed to them, while Henrik gave them a chagrined look.
‘Agnar took what you said about gold and free ale to heart,’ he said. ‘So we followed your example.’
