[Gotrek & Felix 10] - Elfslayer

by Nathan Long - (ebook by Undead)

  “Eh? Why?”

  “Because this will be worse than death.”

  Aethenir jerked awake with a cry of fear, then lifted his head and blinked around. “Mercy of Isha,” he moaned as he took in their surroundings. “What hell is this?”

  “It’s a skaven submersible,” said Gotrek.

  “A… a what?” asked Aethenir.

  “A ship that travels underwater.” Gotrek snorted contemptuously. “Damned vermin stole the idea from the dwarfs, and got it wrong, naturally—powered by warp-stone instead of black water. I’m surprised it hasn’t exploded.”

  “Skaven again?” said Aethenir. “But what do they want?”

  Before Gotrek or Felix could answer, splashing footsteps made them all look up. Through a circular opening on the far side of the metal chamber came a figure out of a nightmare. It was a skaven—the oldest Felix had ever seen—and decrepit beyond imagining. Felix had seen undead who looked healthier. It was skeletally gaunt, with gnarled hands and matchstick arms sticking from the sleeves of its dirty grey robes. Its paper-thin flesh was stretched skeletally across its angular, spade-shaped skull, and its snout seemed to have rotted away, the area around its nostrils nothing more than a gaping hole of black, corrupted meat. Horrible cysts and warts grew from shrivelled, scabrous skin gone mostly bald with mange. Only a few clumps of wispy white fur clung to its head and arms.

  It limped towards them with the aid of a tall metal staff topped with a glittering green stone. A retinue of other skaven followed it. Four big black brutes in polished brass armour, a crouching, scurrying ratman clad head to toe in black, a round, pop-eyed skaven that tottered unsteadily after the rest and seemed to have no tail, and behind them all, ducking to pass through the room’s low round opening, a huge albino monster of the kind that Felix and Gotrek had fought when the skaven had attacked them on the beach. It went and sat in a corner, scratching itself. Aethenir moaned when he saw the thing.

  The ancient skaven glanced at the high elf and paused. It muttered a question to the skaven in black. The assassin bowed obsequiously and replied in kind, motioning from Felix and Aethenir and back with nervous paws and pointing to their hair.

  The old skaven raised its head and hissed a laugh, then snapped its gaze back to Gotrek and Felix. Its laughter ceased as if it had never been. It limped forwards and looked them up and down with glittering black eyes that contained all the life the rest of its body seemed to have been drained of.

  “So long,” it crooned in a voice like a broken flute, as it smiled at them both with cracked yellow fangs turned brown with decay. “So long I have waited for this day.”

  TWELVE

  Gotrek lunged forwards, snarling savagely, the violence of his motion making the pipe creak at its joins.

  Felix strained forwards too, shouting as fury boiled within him. “What have you done to my father, you filth?”

  The ancient skaven leapt back from them, squeaking with alarm, and the rat ogre stood, rumbling dangerously and looking around. The seer turned to its minions and screeched in its own language, pointing a trembling claw at Gotrek.

  “Answer me!” shouted Felix. “What did you do to my father?”

  One of the armoured guards backhanded Felix across the cheek with a mailed gauntlet as the black-clad assassin hurried towards Gotrek, taking a coil of thin, grey rope from its belt. The blow snapped Felix’s head around and made his head ring with agony. He could feel blood trickling down past his ear. He decided he would wait to ask any more questions about his father until he had the ancient skaven at sword’s point.

  “Loose me, you skull-faced bag of sticks!” Gotrek grated.

  He snapped at the assassin with his teeth as it wound the rope tightly around his chest and shoulders and the pipe, and the old skaven squealed orders from a safe distance. Aethenir stared around at all this as if it might be some strange nightmare.

  The assassin hauled at Gotrek’s ropes until Felix saw the thin strands bite deep into the Slayer’s flesh, drawing blood in places, then it tied them off and backed away. Gotrek struggled but couldn’t move an inch. With a grunt he seemed to resign himself to his situation, conserving his strength.

  The old skaven breathed a phlegmy sigh of relief, and stepped forwards again, gazing at them triumphantly.

  “My nemeses,” it whispered. “At last I have you in my claws. At last you will pay for all the indignities you have heaped upon me.” It hissed, like steam from a kettle. “Horribly, you will die, yes-yes, but slowly, slowly. First, you will pay for all the long years I have suffered by your cruel schemes.” The mad ratman’s eyes shone with wild glee. “For every defeat, a snip-cut. For every setback, a blood-bruise. For every misery, a bone break.” It stepped closer, its tail and its frail limbs twitching with fevered excitement, until Felix could smell its acrid breath with each whispered word. “You will beg-beg for mercy, my nemeses—but to no avail.”

  “But…” said Felix, completely at a loss. “But, who are you?”

  The ancient skaven stopped. It blinked and stepped back. “You… you know me not?”

  Felix looked to Gotrek questioningly.

  The Slayer shrugged. “They all look alike to me.”

  Felix turned back to the skaven and shook his head.

  The ratman staggered back, eyes rolling, and collided with its tailless servant. The servant squeaked and the ancient whirled on it, swiping at it with its staff and spitting shrill abuse. The servant cringed back, then scurried unsteadily out of the chamber, leaving the old skaven screeching after it. The rat ogre lowed anxiously and thumped the deck with its huge paws.

  The skaven spun back towards its captives again, shaking with rage and tearing at the few tufts of fur on its skeletal head. “Madness! Madness! Can it be possible that you do not remember me? Can it be possible that you have masterminded my failure-fall by accident? Did you not destroy my works in the Nuln warren, oh those many years gone by? Kill-killing my plague priests, burn-smashing my gutter runners and my engineers, killing even my first gift of Moulder?” It clenched its paws in rage. “Close-close I came to killing you then, in the brood queen’s burrow. But for that cursed man-mage, my torment would have ended before it had begun!”

  Felix gaped, wide-eyed, remembering. This was that skaven? The ratkin sorcerer who had attacked them during Countess Emmanuelle’s costume ball twenty years ago? The one Doctor Drexler had saved them from? It was impossible! Surely skaven didn’t live that long. It had been ancient then. How old must it be now? And what sustained it?

  Felix glanced at Gotrek. The Slayer was glaring at the skaven with new loathing, and straining harder against the cruel ropes.

  The skaven paid neither of them any attention. It continued gibbering away, pacing back and forth before them, its limbs and tail atremble, lost in its memories. “Did you not then follow me north, foiling my every attempt to capture the earth diggers’ flying machine? Did you not twist-taint my servant-slave and turn him against me when you flew to the Wastes? Did you not rip-take the machine from me when my magic had it in its grip?” The creature clutched its forehead. “Impossible! Impossible that you do not know me! Impossible that all is by chance! My whole life! My whole life!”

  With a whimpering wail, the old skaven began to scrabble furiously at its robes, checking pockets and sleeves, and finally raised a small stone bottle in its shaking paws. It pried out the stopper, tapped a mound of glittering powder in the hollow between its thumb and foreclaw, then inhaled it through the ragged wet hole that served it as a nose.

  For a moment after it had ingested the stuff, the skaven shook even worse than it had before, and its escort of armoured troopers took a nervous step back, but then, with a final seismic shake, the tremors stopped and it stood straight, taking a deep, if thready, breath.

  It turned back to them, calm and composed, a stream of blood and mucus trickling unnoticed from its nose-hole as it glared at them with eyes that blazed with green fire. “If that is the case, then my sh
ame-rage is even greater, and therefore so will be your suffering. You will know agony-fear that no overdweller has ever endured, and yet by my magic you will heal to be tortured again-again, until you share all of my torture despair—”

  “Ah, your pardon, ratkin,” said Aethenir, his voice quavering. “But, does this mean that you have captured me by acci—”

  “You dare to interrupt?” squealed the skaven, snapping around. “I am speak-speaking, miserable prick-ear!”

  “Indeed,” said Aethenir. “But, er, as your feud appears to be with my companions and not myself, perhaps you could be so gracious as to let me return to the ship upon which—”

  “What do I care for your wishes?” screamed the seer. “You are mine-mine to do with as I please!” It limped to the elf, looking him up and down and stroking its cankered chin. “It was an accident that you were taken, yes-yes. Your misfortune to have yellow fur like the tall one. But never-never have I experimented on a prick-ear. Never have I put one through my mazes, or fed one with poisons. Never have I cut-snipped its flesh and examined its organs.” It leaned in, its ruined nose almost touching the elf’s high-bridged one. “You will be the first.”

  Aethenir flinched away, gagging, as the skaven turned from him and chittered furiously at its escort.

  “Just like an elf,” snarled Gotrek out of the side of his mouth. “Only thinking of himself.”

  “I do not think of myself said Aethenir, as one of the armoured guards scampered out of the room on the old skaven’s orders. “But of my duty. Did I not promise Rion that I would let nothing stop me from righting the wrong I have caused?” He ground his teeth. “I must recover that terrible weapon or the destruction of Ulthuan will be upon my head. Surely a dwarf will not begrudge me doing all that I can to restore my honour?”

  “Elves have no honour to restore,” snarled Gotrek.

  Just then the old skaven turned back to Aethenir, its eyes gleaming. “What-what? Terrible weapon? What is this?”

  The elf’s eyes went wide as the ratman advanced on him. “I… I know not what you mean. I said nothing of any weapon. You misheard me.”

  “I did not mishear,” said the skaven. “No-no. I heard perfectly.”

  Just then the tailless skaven returned, a box under one arm which appeared to be made entirely of bone, etched all over with crude-looking glyphs. The little creature hurried to the ancient, making trembling obeisances, and held out the bone box with quivering paws.

  The old skaven turned the clasp of the box, which looked to have been fashioned from a human finger bone, and opened the lid. Inside it, Felix could see a terrifying collection of steel and brass tools, none of them very clean. The ancient ran a claw over them, then selected one and held it up. It looked like a scalpel, but with a serrated edge, and it was orange with rust. The skaven turned towards the high elf, showing its teeth in a travesty of a smile.

  “Now, prick-ear,” it hissed. “Now you will tell-tell what I misheard.”

  Felix had to admit that Aethenir held out much longer than he expected, but in the end he cracked, just as Felix had feared he would. He remained strong through the knives and the saws and flames and the collar that fit over a finger and increased pressure on it with a screw until it snapped. He had even kept silent when they had fixed a cage around his head and filled it with diseased rats, murmuring only some endlessly repeated elven cantrip that allowed him to remove himself into some interior chamber of the mind so that the excruciations of his flesh did not reach him.

  Felix looked away when torture began, though hearing the sounds was nearly as bad as watching. The clever skaven was serving a dual purpose with its treatment of the elf, extracting information while at the same time attempting to build terror in the hearts of those who would next face its ministrations. Felix couldn’t speak for Gotrek, but the ploy was working on him. With every moan and scream that came from the elf, cold dread dripped into Felix’s heart. He could feel every cut, anticipate every twist of the screw. He wanted to scream, “Tell him! Tell him!” to make it stop.

  Of course, it would be worse when the skaven started on him and Gotrek, for the seer wanted no information from them. There would be nothing they could tell it to make it stop. Their torture itself was the creature’s goal, and Felix could think of no way to escape it.

  It was when the wizened ratkin attacked Aethenir’s mind directly, dabbing a glowing paste of warpstone in his held-open eyes and then blasting him with spells that brought the poor elf screaming out of his mental stronghold, that he finally broke, whispering and weeping words in the elven tongue that Felix was glad he couldn’t understand.

  “Make them stop,” he whimpered finally to the skaven sorcerer. “Make them go away. They are eating my knowledge… eating it.”

  “I will banish them if you speak-speak,” said the skaven.

  And at last Aethenir spoke, weeping as he did. “It is called the Harp of Ruin,” he moaned, as Gotrek snarled curses at him. “A weapon that can cause earthquakes… tidal waves… raise valleys and lower mountains. The druchii mean to use it on fair Ulthuan.”

  The old skaven stared past the elf as it digested this information, scratching distractedly at a patch of scaly skin on its withered neck as it mused. “A great weapon indeed,” it said at last. “What the skaven might do with such a weapon. What I might do with such a weapon! The warrens of the overdwellers I would crash low, and raise-lift skaven cities in their place! I would show the council the greatness of my power! They would bow-scrape before me! At last I would rise-return to my true stature!”

  Its eye refocused on Aethenir. “Where is this harp?” it snapped. “Quick-quick! I must have it!”

  The high elf looked like he was going to resist again, but the ancient had only to raise a hand that glowed with green fire and he spoke again, babbling in his fear. “A druchii ship takes it north. Six powerful sorceresses guard it. Their destination may be Naggaroth, or Ulthuan itself.”

  The skaven nodded and began to pace. “The ship I spied. Small-small—easily taken. But six sorceresses.” It looked hesitant. “The prick-ears are great in the ways of magic. Equals nearly of the skaven. The whirlpool. Could even I have created such a…?” It shook its head, as if banishing the thought. “How to accomplish this without risk-pain to myself. There must some trick weapon I could deploy that…” its eye fell suddenly on Gotrek and Felix. It paused, looking at them appraisingly, then turned away again, angry.

  “No,” it said. “Never-never! Not when I have them at last. I have waited for this too long. They are mine, mine, to do with as I wish.” It looked at Aethenir. “And yet… and yet will vengeance win me power? Is it better to use them as tools to reclaim my former position? Better, isn’t it, to set them against my enemies as my enemies once turned them against me? Yes-yes! That is the skaven way! They will smash-kill the tainted prick-ears, and I will pluck pick the harp from the wreckage.” It looked at its captives and a hissing giggle escaped it. “You will be the cheese in a trap for rats!”

  It turned to its guards and chittered something to them in its own tongue. They bowed and went to a metal locker in one corner of the room.

  When they turned back to the prisoners they held leather sacks, crusted on the edges with green muck.

  Felix opened his eyes, then blinked with shock. There were white clouds above him, drifting across a blue sky. He felt a cool breeze on his cheek, and a gentle rocking as if he were in a hammock. This was a decided improvement on the humid skaven torture chamber he had woken in last. Were they free? Had some incredible miracle happened? Had it all been a dream?

  All at once the pain returned, worse than ever, blinding him with its savagery, and he nearly blacked out again. When he had mastered it, he raised his head like a man might raise a brimming mug, afraid the slightest motion would cause some of the contents to slop out. Again his vision was distorted, as if he was seeing the world through an imperfect mirror, and nausea and vertigo threatened to overwhelm him with each turn o
f his head.

  He tried to sit up and realised that his hands and feet were still bound. With a lot of grunting and cursing he finally managed to get up on one elbow and look around. His heart sank.

  They were indeed free. The gentle rocking he felt was waves, lapping at the sides of a small wooden rowboat. There were no skaven in sight. In fact there was nothing in sight. All he could see, in every direction, was endless cold grey ocean. Aethenir lay in the bottom of the boat, his head down, trussed as Felix was, but with Gotrek the skaven had taken no chances. He was still cocooned to the pipe that he had awoken on. It had been freed from its moorings and now lay across the rowing bench. The Slayer hung from it like a meaty, but particularly ugly, chicken on a spit.

  “The knife,” the Slayer rasped.

  “Eh?” said Felix, looking around. “What knife?”

  A curved dagger, rusted and filthy, had been stabbed, point first, into the edge of the boat. It pinned a piece of vellum to the wood.

  Felix flopped over painfully and began wiggling it from the wood.

  “Don’t drop it,” said Gotrek.

  “I won’t” said Felix, then dropped it. Fortunately it clattered into the boat instead of out. The folded vellum fluttered down next to it. Felix picked up the vellum and unfolded it. He frowned.

  “What is it?” asked Gotrek.

  “A note.” Felix struggled to read the jagged script. “Druchii… coming. Fight… well.”

  Felix groaned, then scooped the dagger up and started towards Gotrek. Humping across a wobbling boat with one’s wrists and ankles tied and a knife in one’s hands was no easy task, and more than once he fell forwards and nearly impaled himself before he reached Gotrek and began sawing.

  “Cowards,” he said as the strands of rope began to part. “Wouldn’t free us even though we were unconscious.”

  “Aye,” said Gotrek. “They lead from the back.”

  “This time they lead from under the water.”