by Warhammer
‘Gotrek,’ said Felix through lips suddenly dry. ‘Your cave spider is here.’
12
Gotrek, Agnar and Felix dived away from the iron stairs as the White Widow pulled itself out of the hole and slashed its hooked forelegs at them. Its rider, an ancient black-robed skaven, shrieked orders at it and whacked the spider’s carapaced head with an orb-topped brass staff.
Looking at it full on and standing before them, the cave spider was terrifying – a mountain of hard chitin, crusted white with what looked like bat droppings, its bulging abdomen looming twice Felix’s height, and its graceful legs spreading as wide as a merchant ship’s deck. The skaven troops feared it as well, and backed under the rickety scaffolding as it ticked delicately across the floor. Gotrek, however, nodded approvingly.
‘This will be a fight,’ he said.
‘What is that on its back?’ asked Agnar.
Felix looked again at the strange sphere that glowed behind the skaven. It was a barrel-sized globe of brass plates, bound to the White Widow’s thorax with leather straps, and riveted together so poorly that sick green light seeped through the joins and glowing steam leaked from it in a fog. A short brass rod with a pulsing gem fixed to the end sprouted from it like a lightning rod, and a crude lever stuck up beside it.
‘A bomb,’ said Gotrek. ‘A warpstone bomb.’
‘But they’ll kill themselves too,’ said Felix.
‘So long as they win,’ said Agnar. ‘Rat-lords care not if rat-troops die.’
The black-robed skaven shrilled orders at the hundred-strong mob of ratmen cowering under cover of the scaffolds, and they hesitantly began to edge behind the giant spider and run up the iron stairs as it held Felix and the Slayers off.
Felix cursed. ‘They’ll reach Thorgrin before my warning does.’
‘At least you’ll witness my doom,’ said Gotrek.
‘And share it,’ muttered Felix.
The Slayer didn’t seem to hear him. He charged the White Widow, roaring a dwarf battle cry. Agnar was only a split second behind him. The cave spider stabbed down at them with its scythe-like forelegs, shattering the stone floor as they dodged past and swung for its body with their axes. It scuttled back on its six other legs and they missed, then had to duck and weave as the forelegs slashed for them again.
On the White Widow’s back, the skaven sorcerer chanted and raised his brass staff, causing flickers of green lightning to play about the orb that glowed at its end. Felix was ready to leave the fighting of the spider to Gotrek and Agnar. As they would say, it was ‘slayer’s work’, but he could certainly protect them from being brought low by magic when all they wanted was a good fight.
He scooped up a fist-sized rock from the rubble that was scattered across the floor and hurled it. It missed, but just barely, and the skaven flinched back, losing the rhythm of his chant. He chittered angrily and glared at Felix, then began again. Felix found another rock and flung it. This time it found its mark and mashed the skaven’s furless nose.
With a shriek of rage, the ratman swatted its spider mount between its two rows of eyes, goading it towards Felix, who backed under a low course of scaffolding and searched for another rock.
Dancing under the White Widow’s legs, Gotrek and Agnar struck home as it moved. Agnar’s long axe sent splinters of chitin flying, but didn’t crack its carapace. Gotrek, however, armed with his starmetal rune axe and considerably more muscle, broke through its left foreleg, biting into the meat inside. Black ichor sprayed him and the spider staggered sideways, trying to escape the pain of the wound.
With cries of triumph, the Slayers pressed their advantage, hewing like woodsmen at the shattered limb, trying to widen the break.
The White Widow’s right foreleg stabbed at them, and Agnar did not dodge in time. It knocked him flying, and he skidded to a stop a foot from the edge of the lift hole, half-conscious, blood welling from the back of his head.
Gotrek spun away as the bladed leg swept in again, and chopped into a back leg instead. It was a brutal strike, half-severing the joint, and leaving the limb flopping loosely and trailing fluids. Felix had never heard a spider shriek before. Indeed, he hadn’t known they could, but this one did – a high reedy sound, like violin bows rubbing together.
‘Felt that, did you?’ laughed the Slayer.
He pressed his advantage as the White Widow reeled sideways, its balance thrown. His axe slashed at the monster’s other legs, splintering them and leaving star-shaped cracks with every impact. The spider swiped and snapped back at him in a frenzy, its forelegs blurring as they tried to lance its prey. Gotrek was swifter, however, and fought within its reach, almost under its belly, making it back up in order to see where he was.
Shrieking with frustration, the skaven sorcerer beat the White Widow mercilessly with his staff, but the monster continued to retreat from the thing that was causing it pain – and into disaster. Its massive abdomen backed into the scaffolding along the west wall, snapping supports and causing the whole structure to groan and shift.
‘Sigmar save us,’ said Felix, as the platform above the spider buckled and sagged.
After that, the outcome was inevitable. Felix had earlier compared the scaffolding to a house of cards, and like a house of cards, when the bottom card was pulled out, the rest went with it. A chain of collapses followed the first, all the platforms and ladders and cross braces slowly folding in and crashing down upon the White Widow and the shrieking skaven.
Gotrek backed away as the first boards and posts began to topple, then turned and ran as the rest came rumbling after. He sprinted to Agnar, just now picking himself up at the edge of the hole, and dragged him aside as the wreckage struck the floor and spread in a tide of wood that spilled all the way to the precipice and sent planks and boards spinning away into the darkness below.
Through the rising cloud of dust, Felix could see that, under the debris, the giant spider still moved, and he thought it might rise up and shrug it off, but then, with a thunderous cracking and splintering, the granite cladding of the ceiling, which the scaffolding had been holding in place, peeled from the roof and crashed down on top of it, burying it completely.
‘Well,’ he said, coughing. ‘I think you got it.’
Agnar shook his head. ‘It might still live. We should dig down and make sure.’
‘There’s no glory in killing a trapped beast,’ said Gotrek. ‘And no time. Thorgrin must still be warned of the skaven and the Bretonnian’s treachery.’
Agnar scowled. ‘The skaven must be halfway there already. We’ll never catch them.’
Gotrek looked towards the lift. ‘We’ll beat them easily.’
‘But the cage is gone,’ said Felix. ‘Henrik took it.’
Gotrek ignored him and walked out onto the iron bridge, now partially bent from the rocks that had fallen on it, and eyed the cluster of cables that stretched down one side of the shaft. Felix followed him out, his heart palpitating.
‘Gotrek, I hope you’re not thinking–’
‘There’s no faster way.’
‘But how will we stop? If you cut the cable, the cage will drop and pull us up, I see that, but we’ll be going too fast. We’ll be pulled through the pulley at the top of the shaft. We’ll come out like sausages!’
‘The cage will stop here,’ said Gotrek. ‘And we will stop just short of the pulley.’
‘How? Are you going to hook your axe into the wall as we fly past? Even you aren’t that strong.’
Gotrek didn’t answer; he just stamped on the iron bridge with a heavy foot as if to test it, then strode to the scaffolding that still stood above the archway through which they had entered the room, all the while craning his neck and looking up at the ceiling.
‘What is he doing?’ asked Agnar.
‘I have no idea,’ said Felix.
Gotrek remained before the scaffolding, stroking his beard for a moment, then at last hefted his axe and started chopping at a particular support post.
‘Into the passage, manling,’ said Gotrek. ‘And you, Arvastsson.’
Felix and Agnar hurried past Gotrek into the passage, as, in three deft strokes, he cut the through post and it snapped under the weight. Again the scaffolding above began to fold in on top of itself. Gotrek stepped into the passage to stand with Felix and Agnar as it all crashed down to the floor and spread out across it in a roaring cascade.
Suddenly unsupported, the braces that held up the ceiling fell after it, and huge chunks of masonry began to plummet down and smash the floor below – at first only a few, but then more and more, an ever widening collapse that sent arches and keystones and decorative corbels thundering down to shake the ground. And as they hit, they bounced off the drift of wooden refuse and avalanched towards the iron bridge. The great stones bounded across it and slammed into the front of the lift shaft, denting and tearing it, and the stones that followed the first caved it in even more, until, as the rain of masonry finally subsided, there was a great, concave bulge in the shaft, filled with rocks.
Felix stared as the dust subsided. ‘You’ve pinched it shut.’
Gotrek nodded. ‘Now the lift cage will hit the rocks and stop.’
‘And the cable will stop short of the pulley,’ said Agnar.
‘And fling us against the walls of the cage to be crushed into jelly,’ groaned Felix.
Gotrek shrugged. ‘It might, but we’ll beat the skaven.’
13
‘I should have seen it,’ growled Agnar, as he and Gotrek hacked through the iron latticework of the lift shaft with their axes. ‘I should have known him for a rogue from the beginning.’
‘Perhaps he wasn’t one at the beginning,’ said Felix, slotting a ladder taken from the wrecked scaffolding through the lattice. Wedged into a corner of the shaft, it made a makeshift platform they would be able to step on. ‘A man might think being a rememberer a grand thing for the first few years, but come to regret it later.’
Gotrek looked around at him, cold-eyed. Felix squirmed under his attention, but went on.
‘A man might get impatient, and want to get on with his life. He might want riches and comforts. He might want to settle down.’
Agnar chewed his lip through his beard as he swung again. ‘He always joked about hoping I’d find my doom quickly, so he might spend all my gold while he was young. Perhaps it wasn’t a joke.’
Felix frowned as he slotted a second ladder into the shaft about five feet below the first. ‘What gold is this?’
‘All I have collected over my years of slaying, I put in a dwarf bank in Talabheim. It is to go to my family, who I shamed before becoming a Slayer, but I granted Henrik a part of it.’
‘And he will take all of it,’ growled Gotrek.
With a final swipe of his axe, he finished the hole in the lattice, then squeezed through and crossed the ladder to the cables. Each was as thick as his leg and made of wound steel. He tapped them with the heel of his axe, listening to the tone, then nodded and scored one with the blade.
‘Bring the rope, manling.’
Felix stooped through the hole, then edged out onto the ladder and crossed to the cables, clinging to the walls of the shaft for support. He handed Gotrek a coil of rope recovered from the collapsed scaffolding, and the Slayer proceeded to tie him tightly to the cable at the waist and under the arms so that he was facing out. The ropes were so constricting that Felix could hardly breathe, and he began to panic again about slamming into the walls when the cable was loosed, but there was nothing for it now.
When Gotrek finished tying him, he beckoned Agnar ahead. The old Slayer squeezed into the shaft with his own coil of rope over one shoulder, and let Gotrek tie him to the cable too, back to back with Felix. When that was done, Gotrek lowered himself down to the second ladder and took his axe from his back, then started hacking at the woven steel.
Felix closed his eyes in helpless terror as he felt the shuddering of it through his spine. The rune axe bit into the softer metal with ease, and the smaller strands parted with deep, heartstopping twangs.
After a moment, the chopping stopped, and Felix pried open his eyes and looked down. Gotrek was tying himself to the cable at the waist, leaving his torso free. Just below him, a few thin strands of the cable remained uncut, twanging and singing with the stress of holding so much weight. Once he had bound himself to his satisfaction, Gotrek used the leftover rope to tie his axe to his wrist so that even if he lost his grip it would not fall.
Finally he was ready, and raised the axe over his head. Felix wanted to close his eyes, but couldn’t. If he was going to die, he wanted to see it coming.
Gotrek swung down between his legs, chopping into the remaining strands below his feet. One snapped and the rest groaned. He swung again.
Felix heard a bright twang and, with a jolting rush, his stomach dropped into his boots. The filigreed lattice blurred past at an alarming rate, inches from his eyes, and the upward force was so strong that he could not raise his arms against it or take a breath. At least the thing he had feared the most did not happen. Though the cable bowed out towards the side of the shaft and the struts flashed by less than an arm’s length from his chest, he was not crushed against it.
A look below showed him why. The frayed end of the cable, less than a yard below Gotrek, was pressed against the side of the shaft, scraping off a cascading shower of sparks and making a deafening shriek as it rose, holding its passengers away from death with its rigidity. Gotrek, closer to the end than Felix, was even closer to the wall, and was sucking in his gut and holding down his beard to keep it from being ripped off at the roots. Over the screaming of metal on metal and the rattle of the shaking shaft, Felix heard a wild whooping. It took him a moment to realise it was the Slayers, howling with savage glee.
Chambers and rooms flicked by as they whipped past, separated by short intervals of black, and a few seconds later the plummeting cage shot by inches behind them, dropping so fast that Felix hadn’t time to fear it crushing them before it was gone.
An eyeblink after that, Felix saw a flash of movement outside the cage, and caught a frozen picture of a gaping ratty face staring at him amongst a swarm of others. They had shot past the skaven troops, still labouring up the stairs that wound around the shaft one step at a time. Gotrek had been right. They were going to beat them to the first level – if they lived.
Only seconds later, the ride came to an end, and what Felix had earlier feared finally happened. As the boom of a huge impact echoed up from below, the cable jerked to a stop, snapping Felix’s teeth shut, then slapped back and forth like a pendulum in a wind storm. Felix was crushed against the side of the shaft, and only great good fortune let his heavily bound chest take the blow and not his head. Even so, all the air was knocked out of him and his ribs felt like they had been hit with a sledgehammer. His knees too cracked against the steel, and he hissed in agony.
‘All… alive?’ he asked as the swaying stopped.
Behind him and below, the Slayers grunted in the affirmative, and he saw that they had taken some damage too. Agnar had blood streaming from his scalp where the front few inches of his Slayer’s crest had been ripped away by some passing snag, and it looked like his nose had been broken. Gotrek had deep scrapes and bruises on his shoulders and forearms, and a great welt over one eye.
As he looked around, however, Felix feared that they had a greater problem than their wounds. They were dangling over a bottomless pit in the centre of the shaft, tied securely to the cable, and the door they had hoped to reach was more than thirty feet above their heads.
‘Are you certain you thought this through, Gotrek?’ Felix asked.
‘Swing, manling,’ said Gotrek. ‘With me. You too, Arvastsson.’
Gotrek began to swing his arms, legs and rune axe back and forth in a slow, strong rhythm. Felix and Agnar did the same, moving as he moved. At first the effect of their motion on the heavy cable was negligible, and Feli
x feared it was all for naught, but after a while their feeble wiggle became a slight sway, and then, as the movement of the cable added itself to their momentum, their swings got longer and longer, until, finally, Gotrek was able to reach out and grab the lattice of the shaft.
The first time, it ripped from his hand, but the second time he was able to catch a crossbar with the hook of his axe and they stopped in mid-swing. Gotrek pulled himself hand over hand up the haft of the axe, then grabbed onto the lattice and clung there as he untied the rope that bound his waist to the cable. One end of this he retied to the lattice, then unwound the other.
‘Gotrek!’ Felix cried. ‘You’ll–’
The last few coils whipped off Gotrek like a chain going through a pulley and the cable sprang free again.
‘All part of the plan, manling,’ said Gotrek, as Felix and Agnar swung again to a stop in the middle of the shaft.
‘I’m relieved to hear there is a plan,’ said Felix.
Gotrek coiled up the loose rope and made to throw it at him. ‘Catch it and pass it around you, then throw it back.’
Felix caught it with a wild grab, then passed it behind him to Agnar, who handed it back to him on the other side.
‘Now lift it so it is above your heads,’ said Gotrek as Felix heaved the remaining length back to him.
Agnar and Felix took the rope, which was at their waists, and edged it up over their shoulders and heads until it was wrapped around nothing but the cable.
Gotrek nodded approvingly, then threaded the loose end of the rope through the lattice and started hauling at it, winching them closer and closer to the side with every pull.
