by Warhammer
But as he and Gotrek clambered over the rubble to finish off the ratmen who had escaped the collapse, Felix saw that, as he had predicted, it wasn’t going to matter. The thin line of Hammerers and Ironbreakers was dead, trampled underfoot by five times their number of orcs, and now the rest of the dwarfs and men were pressed front and back by slavering greenskins.
Stinkfoot, either frustrated by his foot’s poor showing as a weapon, or emboldened by the dwarfs’ desperate situation, finally limped through his black orc bodyguards and closed with Thorgrin, swinging an axe that looked like it had been crusted with the grot from between his toes.
As he and Gotrek killed the last of the skaven, Felix looked down to see the warboss’s vile weapon flash down like a grimy lightning bolt. Thorgrin flinched back, covering his nose with his free hand, and the axe only nicked his vambrace, but it didn’t stop there. The greasy blade swept on to chop through the shield the thane stood on, splitting it in two and sending Thorgrin crashing to the ground as Stinkfoot slashed at his shieldbearers.
‘Thorgrin’s down, Gotrek,’ said Felix. ‘We better–’
With a Khazalid war cry, the Slayer vaulted the balustrade and leapt down at Stinkfoot, his axe high over his head. The warboss looked up just in time to take the keen blade of the rune axe right between his beady yellow eyes. Gotrek split his head like a melon, all the way down to his underbite, then hit him high in the chest with his knees and rode his body down to the ground to roll to his feet right in the middle of his retinue of black orcs.
‘Come on, you snot heaps!’ roared Gotrek. ‘Avenge your leader!’
Felix’s heart thudded, expecting the end as all the towering orc champions turned towards the Slayer, but they were looking as much at Stinkfoot’s corpse as they were at Gotrek, and when one began to advance on the Slayer, raising its club, another shoved it and tried to get ahead of it. Within seconds, they were all fighting each other, fist and cleaver and headbutt, with Gotrek standing forgotten in their middle.
The Slayer roared, enraged, and hacked Stinkfoot’s stinking foot off at the knee, then dug his fingers into the oozing meat of the cut to wrap them around the severed shinbone and raised it up like a club. With this foul instrument in one hand and his rune axe in the other, he laid into the brawling black orcs like a whirlwind, swatting them in the teeth with the rotting appendage, then hacking them to bits as they fell back, choking and retching.
The dwarfs and humans were not slow to take advantage of this turn of events, and rallied all along their lines, driving the orcs back and reforming into squares.
‘Sigmar,’ Felix breathed. ‘Has he done it? Has he turned the battle–?’
Before he could complete the thought, the room shook from a great impact. The orcs and dwarfs were too engaged in their battle, and didn’t seem to notice, but Felix had felt it and looked around, trying to see the source. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, and was about to start down the stairs to join Gotrek when it came again. This time he was able to pinpoint the source of the sound. It was coming from the far left end of the room. He stared into the dim distance and saw grey dust hovering near the sealed-up entrance to the lift chamber.
Another heavy boom and Felix saw the dust shiver from the arch as it shook from an impact. A fracture line appeared between the blocks of the barricade. Something was trying to smash through!
‘Gotrek!’ Felix shouted, but the clamour of battle was too loud. The Slayer didn’t hear him.
‘Gotrek!’
With a final thunderous impact, the wall that sealed up the entrance exploded outward in a jumble of heavy blocks, and a shape like a glowing white hand smashed through to stagger into the room.
The White Widow had returned from its rubble grave, and both the warpstone bomb that was strapped to its back and the wrinkled skaven who rode it appeared mostly intact.
16
As the White Widow made its unsteady way towards the battle on its seven good legs and one broken one, the ancient skaven leapt from its back and scuttled away to hunch in the shattered archway, where it began waving its scrawny arms and shaking its orb-topped brass staff. A dim green light glowed to life within the orb, and Felix saw a similar light begin to glow within the matching globe on the rod that sprouted from the bomb on the spider’s back.
Felix’s insides fluttered with moths of dread as he realised that the skaven sorcerer meant to use a spell to detonate the bomb from afar!
Felix hopped over the balustrade and jumped down on the pile of black orc corpses that Gotrek had left heaped there. It wasn’t a pleasant landing, and he ended up covered in black blood and orc smell, but it was softer than the floor and quicker than the stairs. He rolled off the putrid bodies and ran through the battle, setting his sights on the White Widow and the skaven.
Two orcs slashed at him as he ran past. He ducked their blows and tried to run on, but they blocked the way. He snarled with frustration. He had to stop the sorcerer!
A rotting, bandage-covered foot hit the left orc in the face as Felix ducked its axe, and it stumbled back, gagging. Felix chopped it in the ribs, then flinched aside, his eyes watering, as the foetid foot bounced his way. Gotrek appeared next to him and finished the orc off with an axe to the chest, then turned on the second. It snarled as it swung at the Slayer, and Felix thrust Karaghul through its neck.
‘Gotrek!’ he gasped as he ran on. ‘The White Widow! The bomb! The skaven–’
‘Get the rat, manling,’ said Gotrek, shoving the dying orc out of his way as he started forward again. ‘I’ll get the spider.’
Felix ran on, pounding across the endless marble floor as the green glow in the matching orbs grew brighter and brighter. If the warpstone bomb detonated here it would not only kill everyone in the Great Hall of the Jewellers’ Guild, it would make all of the upper levels unlivable for anyone except for the skaven, who thrived on the vile stuff. For decades – perhaps centuries – to come, anything that descended into Karak Azgal would die from its eldritch emanations.
His heart thudded at the implications. Was that what the skaven had intended all along? Had they helped Stinkfoot unite the orcs and lead them against the dwarfs just so both sides would be all together in one place – an easy target for their bomb? It sounded like just the sort of thing the ratmen would do. Felix almost laughed to think of Lanquin and Henrik helping the skaven in the belief that they would share the depths with them. What had Henrik called it? A mutually beneficial relationship? The cracked and leaking bomb strapped to the back of the White Widow was proof that the ratmen wanted Karak Azgal all to themselves. Lanquin and Henrik were betrayed along with everyone else.
The skaven sorcerer backed under the broken arch as Felix sprinted at him, pulling a long bronze knife that buzzed with strange black energy. Just the drawing of it made the hair stand up on Felix’s arms, and the hum it emitted drilled into his brain.
Felix slashed at the ratmage without slowing, trying to bear it down by sheer momentum, but it slipped left with jittery speed and he missed, while its buzzing blade flicked past less than an inch from his ear.
He flinched and spun to face the sorcerer, and the blade was again in his face. He parried desperately and felt a sick trembling as the blades touched and the knife’s power crackled down Karaghul’s length. In all this, the skaven had not stopped his chant, and his staff continued to glow brighter.
Over the ratmage’s shoulder, Felix saw Gotrek hacking madly at the White Widow. The eight-legged monster slashed back just as furiously, stabbing down with its sabre-sharp forelegs and striking sparks from the marble floor. The Slayer dodged past the blows and tried to close with it, aiming for the soft underbelly of its abdomen, but it skittered in a nimble circle and kept him before it.
Beyond that fight, Felix could see the battle raging on, with the dwarfs now firmly back in command, while the orc army disintegrated into a dozen squabbling warbands. The various bosses who had bowed to the power of Stinkfoot’s stinking foot, now realising that
there was no leader, had all decided that they could be the leader, and all over the field, the bosses were ignoring their common enemy and turning on each other. The dwarfs were now sure to win.
It would not matter, however. It wouldn’t even matter whether Gotrek killed the White Widow. If Felix didn’t kill the skaven mage, the bomb would still blow, and all would be for naught. They would die from the blast, or worse, become twisted, mutated parodies of themselves. He had to finish it.
In desperation, he barged forward, slashing wildly, and deliberately left himself open. The skaven could not resist the bait. It stabbed at his chest.
Felix caught its stringy wrist and stopped the blade a half-inch from his chest. Hissing angrily, the mage swiped its only available weapon at him – its staff. This was what Felix had wanted. He parried the swipe with Karaghul, putting all the strength he could muster into the block, and bit deep into the brass shaft. A bright flash blinded him and leaping arcs of energy sizzled down Karaghul to paralyze his arm with stabbing shocks, but the glowing orb dimmed and fizzled.
The skaven sorcerer shrieked with rage and clubbed Felix’s head with the staff, making suns explode behind his eyes and sending him reeling into the arch. With limp arms, he raised Karaghul to defend himself, but the ratmage was turning away from him, chanting and shaking the staff at the spider, which continued to battle Gotrek.
The globe on the staff flared bright for a moment, then died completely and fell off to bounce across the floor. Chittering with fury, the skaven hurled the rest of the staff away and scampered for the White Widow, its robes flapping like dirty wings. For a second, Felix thought the mage was racing to attack Gotrek, but instead it danced between the spider’s legs and clambered onto its back.
In his stunned state, this seemed to Felix a bizarre and foolhardy thing to do. Gotrek was backing the White Widow up with every slash of his axe. He had sheared off the first yard of its left foreleg and caved in three of its eight eyes, and its thicket of mandibles was a splintered, oozing mess. But then Felix saw the skaven reaching for the lever beside the fading orb, and he realised its intent. It was going to trigger the bomb manually. It was going to blow itself up, and the rest of them with it.
Heart thumping in his chest, Felix pushed himself up and ran for the fight. ‘Gotrek! The skaven! Kill the skaven!’
The Slayer was too focused to hear him, and it was too late anyway. The ratmage had grabbed the lever and was pulling on it. They were all going to die.
The lever didn’t move.
While Gotrek laid into the White Widow, meeting its every leg-slash with a hack from his axe, the skaven hauled repeatedly upon the bomb’s brass-handled switch, but nothing happened. Felix laughed with relief. The contraption must have been damaged when the roof fell in on it.
Squealing with frustration, the skaven bent closer to the mechanism, trying to find some way to unstick it and being jounced around like a flea on a hot skillet as Gotrek drove the White Widow into the lift room. Felix added his sword to the Slayer’s axe, hope rising in his chest. If they could kill the spider before the skaven freed the switch, they might just have a chance.
Gotrek was bruised and running with gore from head to foot, and the little finger of his left hand was bent backwards at an alarming angle. Nevertheless, he attacked the beast in a wild fury, his one eye ablaze with savage joy, and his teeth bared in a bloody grimace.
‘The bomb, Gotrek,’ said Felix. ‘We have to stop the skaven from setting it off.’
‘Just as soon as I’m done with this spider, manling.’
‘But–’
But what other course was there? It would be impossible to reach the skaven until the White Widow was dead. Unless….
Felix looked around for something to throw at the mage, as he had done before, but the blocks that had fallen from the arch when the spider had smashed through it were too large. There was nothing the right size.
Then, suddenly, there was.
As Gotrek and Felix slashed at the spider, it reared up to avoid a blow, and its flailing forelegs cracked against the broken arch above them. A fresh course of blocks tumbled down at the impact, and smashed those that had already fallen, sending Gotrek and Felix diving aside to avoid being crushed by rubble.
The White Widow pounced upon Gotrek as he struggled to rise, stabbing at him with its one remaining foreleg, but the Slayer rolled, and the sharp tip only tore his thigh instead of impaling it. Gotrek grunted and staggered up under the spider, his leg buckling, but right where he wanted to be, and he did not let pain stop him from striking true. He chopped upward with his rune axe and buried it deep in the monster’s abdomen.
The White Widow reared up like a spooked stallion and backed away, ichor gushing from the wound, and for a second time, Felix heard it scream. Gotrek limped after it, slashing at the spider’s legs where they connected to its body, and it cringed back to the edge of the lift hole, its back feet slipping off into thin air.
On the thing’s back, the ratmage was continuing to yank on the lever, still to no avail. Felix picked up a turnip-sized piece of rubble and hurled it, but missed. The White Widow was scrabbling at the edge now, clinging on desperately in the face of Gotrek’s brutal barrage, and the skaven was being jerked around like a puppet.
Gotrek’s axe burst one of the spider’s larger eyes, then crushed a mandible. ‘Come on, you oversized louse!’ he roared. ‘Fight back! Slay me!’
The spider tried, but with the loss of an eye, its aim was off, and its strikes landed wide. Gotrek hacked off a leg and it jerked back, its fat abdomen hanging out over open space. Felix thought that would be the end of it, but its back legs found purchase on the filigree of the lift shaft, and it braced itself over the drop.
Felix saw the opening just as Gotrek did, and together they sprang forward to hack at the White Widow’s three middle legs, spread wide on the lip of the hole. Gotrek sheared through one, Felix cracked another, then kicked it off the edge as it drew back.
The spider listed sharply as its props fell away, and stabbed down with its remaining foreleg to catch its weight, but Gotrek chopped through that one too and it collapsed, its hammer-hard head crashing against the edge, then slipping off. The hooks of its back feet tried to hold onto the lift shaft, but its weight was too great, and they lost their grip. The White Widow fell.
Felix stepped to the edge with Gotrek and looked down as it plummeted away, bouncing and jolting off the walls. The last thing he saw before the spider vanished into the darkness was the skaven sorcerer, still pulling feverishly on the lever of the bomb.
Gotrek spat after it. ‘Interfering rats. Without the weight of that scrap yard contraption on its back, the spider might have beaten me.’
Felix nodded. ‘It would have made a grand doom.’
‘Aye,’ said Gotrek, then turned and started back into the Great Hall of the Jewellers’ Guild.
As Felix followed him, a huge shock jolted the room, bringing rocks and dust down from the high ceiling and stopping dead every combat on the field of battle as the dwarfs and orcs looked up and dodged falling rubble. Felix picked himself up from where the impact had knocked him off his feet, then scrabbled away as a giant block broke from the arch and bounced across the floor. He looked around, heart pounding. A hellish green glow was pulsing from the depths of the lift shaft.
‘Wh-what was that?’
Gotrek shrugged and kept walking. ‘The ratmage finally got that lever to work.’
17
Gotrek and Felix strode back towards the battle, but it was nearly over. Riven with infighting, the orcs had had enough, and were scattering for the promenade with the dwarfs and humans in hot pursuit. Those orcs left on the field were dead or dying under the dwarfs’ thorough throat cutting.
Gotrek ignored it all and continued towards the balcony where Agnar had met his doom. To one side, Felix saw Thorgrin on his back, his helmet off, surrounded by a circle of concerned dwarfs. A dwarf surgeon was tending to his wounds. Gotrek
ignored him too, and stumped up the balcony stairs. Agnar lay dead from a score of stab wounds amongst drifts of slaughtered skaven. His legs were buried under the massive corpse of the rat-ogre he had slain, and the rubble of the collapsed doorway, but his butchered torso was uncovered and his face, in death, had a look of peace that Felix had never seen upon it in life.
Gotrek pried Agnar’s axe from his still-clenched hands, then cleared the rubble and the rat-ogre’s corpse from his legs and lifted him up as if he weighed no more than a child.
‘Bring his axe, manling.’
Felix grunted as he picked up the long-hafted weapon. It was twice as heavy as he had expected. He followed Gotrek down the stairs, then to the corridor that led to the stairs to the surface, where the dwarfs and humans were laying their dead. As Gotrek knelt and laid Agnar with the others, Thorgrin, now bandaged and splinted, limped forward with the assistance of his remaining shieldbearer.
‘Well met, Slayer,’ he said. ‘I mourn that you did not find your doom as your comrade did, but I thank you for slaying the orc and the White Widow. I – we – are in your debt.’
Gotrek bowed his head over Agnar as if Thorgrin wasn’t there. ‘You have restored your honour, Arvastsson, and died as a Slayer should,’ he said. ‘May Grimnir welcome you to his halls.’
Felix stepped forward to lay Agnar’s axe on his chest, but Gotrek took it. ‘No, manling,’ he said, standing and turning towards the door. ‘That axe has a vow to keep.’
Thorgrin bowed and tried again to thank him. ‘Is there any reward we could offer you? Two months’ entry into the hold with the licence waived, perhaps? Lodgings at the Golden Mug?’
Gotrek stepped past him and through the door without slowing. ‘Your war isn’t over, brigand. There are still more rats to kill.’
The Grail appeared to be closed when Gotrek and Felix reached it. The front door was locked and barred, and the gate to the stable yard was chained shut. Sounds of frantic activity drifting over the high fence, however, suggested that it was not entirely empty.
