[Gotrek & Felix 10] - Elfslayer

by Nathan Long - (ebook by Undead)

  “We’ll need a new disguise,” said Gotrek, thinking. He turned to Aethenir. “Trade that armour for Endless kit, elf. And hurry.”

  “What do we do with this fool?” asked Jochen, pointing to the young druchii still cowering under Felix’s sword.

  Gotrek dropped his axe and buried it in the young dark elf’s face, shattering his head and splashing blood everywhere.

  “That,” he said, and turned away.

  A few minutes later, once more locked to their chain, and with their weapons once more bundled in the sack, they shuffled down the long corridor between the unused barracks towards the menagerie stair gate, trailing behind the trembling figure of Aethenir, dressed as an officer of the Endless and wearing a silver skull mask.

  This time there was no bribery required. The guards at the gate seemed awed by the uniform of the Endless, and bowed Aethenir through without question. The high elf led them to a narrow stairwell that zigzagged down into the rock for twelve flights before ending in a broad, low-roofed corridor that reeked of animal dung and rotting meat.

  The roars of fierce beasts and the crack of whips echoed all around them as they started down it. The sounds and the smells came from a wide archway on the left-hand wall, sealed by elaborate wrought iron gates, and guarded by druchii in uniforms adorned with leopardskin capes and carrying long, wickedly barbed spears.

  Aethenir ignored them and continued on, as he had been instructed to by Farnir, and soon they came to a much smaller archway with no gate and no guard. The sounds and smells that wafted from this arch were of an entirely different sort of wildlife. Felix smelled wine and perfume, incense and the smoke of the black lotus, as well as sweat and sex and death. Raucous laughter and strange discordant singing reached his ears, mixed with far-off shrieks of pain.

  They filed through the arch and stopped dead at the scene that opened before them. The street, or tunnel—it was hard to make the distinction—was narrow and tall, with houses carved from the solid rock rising three storeys on either side. The high arched roof of the tunnel was cut back deeply, so that the houses had roofs and rooftop gardens and verandas. Witchlights blazed purple and red in iron lanterns hung from baroque facades, and the sights illuminated by this blood-coloured light were enough to turn Felix’s stomach. He had been in the red light districts of cities from Kislev to Araby, but never had he seen a place so dedicated to pleasure, pain and perversion. Usually, even in the loosest of cities, the joy houses kept a somewhat respectable front. Such a pretence was apparently unnecessary here.

  Friezes and statues depicting the most lewd and vile acts decorated the fronts of every establishment. Some places had iron cages hung above their doors, within which dull-eyed human slaves flagellated one another or performed listless acts of coitus. In front of every house stood armed guards dressed in fanciful armour that seemed to have more to do with titillation than protection.

  Strolling from house to house were the flower of druchii society—tall, cruelly handsome lords, sultry, sway-hipped ladies, swaggering officers, naked, silver-masked courtesans, exquisite persons whose gender it was impossible to tell, and pushing through the crush to the sound of cracking whips, covered palanquins carried by stooped, scarred human slaves, transporting those who wished to keep their identities secret.

  “Asuryan protect me,” murmured Aethenir. “This place is an abomination.”

  “For once we agree,” said Gotrek. “Even for elves this is disgusting.”

  Felix concurred, but the thing that concerned him more than the vileness of the place was its vastness. The street curved away into the smoke-shrouded distance before them and more streets branched from it on either side, and every house that they could see was a house of pleasure. They might search for the next three days and not find the house that hid the entrance to the secret temple.

  His fear was unfounded, however, for as he and the others stood staring around slack-jawed, Farnir called to a female slave who was displaying herself lewdly in a window cage.

  “Sister,” he said. “Did a troop of Endless and a party of sorceresses pass this way?”

  “Aye,” said the woman, not ceasing her gyrations.

  “What house did they enter?”

  The woman didn’t know, but she told them that the procession had turned the corner to the left, a few hours ago.

  It was in this way that they proceeded—Aethenir marching along as if he knew where he was going, while Farnir whispered questions to the slaves they passed—and they were legion—to learn where they should go. At last, after several more lefts and rights, they were directed to a house known as the Crucible of Joy.

  Just before they reached it, Aethenir marched them into a dark alley between two houses and began unlocking their shackles. “What am I to say?” he whimpered. “What if we are turned away?”

  “Then we fight at last,” said Gotrek.

  “What if it isn’t the right place after all?”

  “We still fight,” said Gotrek.

  “Tell them…” said Felix, trying to think. “Tell them, ‘She awaits’. If it is the right place, they will lead us to the sorceress. If it isn’t, we haven’t compromised ourselves.”

  They left the unlocked shackles loose around their wrists and followed Aethenir out of the alley and up to the guards that stood before the door of the Crucible of Joy. From the outside at least, it looked little different than any of the other flesh houses. Its sign, if one could call it that, was a bubbling crucible hung over a fire in an alcove cut in the front wall, out of which spilled something that looked—and smelled—very much like blood. The guards were towering druchii women, dressed only in stained leather blacksmiths’ aprons, golden greaves and gauntlets, and helmets crested with pink and purple feathers that looked like flames. They came to attention as Aethenir stopped in front of them.

  Again, Felix could not understand what passed between them, but the guards seemed to treat him with the utmost deference. They bowed to him, and then one went to the door and spoke to someone within. After a moment, a human slave clad only in a purple loincloth came out, bowed almost to the floor, then motioned for them to follow.

  The interior was everything that Felix had feared, and worse. The fire motif continued through a hexagonal entry chamber where braziers blazed with purple flames. A druchii woman, topless, but wearing a black veil, bowed to Aethenir as the slave led them into a corridor painted with black and purple flames. From above and below and all around Felix could hear sounds of ecstasy and excruciation—moans and screams and whimpers of fear. A girl pleaded heartbreakingly for mercy in Bretonnian. A male voice laughed or screamed, Felix couldn’t decide which.

  Through open archways only partially curtained, Felix saw glimpses of fire and flesh and murder being done. He flinched from brandings and scarrings and knives that glowed a cherry-red. Memories of fighting in the cellars of the Cleansing Flame, and the fires that Lichtmann had attacked them with, came unbidden to his mind and made him shiver. In one room he saw a ring of druchii men and women passing around an enamelled pipe as they watched molten gold being dripped from a crucible onto the face of a bound woman, one drop at a time. They laughed dreamily at each scream and convulsion.

  Felix heard Gotrek growling beside him, and realised that he was echoing him with growls of his own.

  The house slave led them down a winding iron staircase that was hot to the touch. Three flights later he bowed them into a square black marble chamber with doors on each wall and a chandelier of purple-flamed torches hanging above. Veins in the marble glinted pink in the flickering light. The door directly opposite the stair was grander than the others, framed by fluted columns and topped by a decorative arch, into which was set a white stone face of cold, immaculate beauty. Three Endless stood before the door, rigidly at attention.

  Aethenir slowed when he saw them.

  “Go on, elf,” muttered Gotrek.

  “But surely they will know that I am not one of their fellows,” said the high e
lf.

  “They will if you cower back here,” said Felix. “Be bold.”

  The elf snorted angrily at this, but it seemed to have some effect. He straightened his shoulders and strode towards the guards. Felix held his breath and loosened the mouth of the sack that carried their weapons. The guards eyed Aethenir as he approached, motionless and impassive behind their silver masks. Then the centre one spoke.

  Aethenir replied, but apparently the answer was not to the Endless’ liking. He asked a second question. This time Aethenir faltered in his response.

  The hands of the guards dropped to the hilts of their swords and the centre one motioned for Aethenir to remove his mask.

  “Right,” said Gotrek, throwing off his chains and dropping the sack with a clang. “That’s it.”

  The Endless turned, drawing their swords as Gotrek and Felix pulled their weapons from the sack. Gotrek roared and charged them, shoving the paralysed Aethenir behind him. Felix followed the Slayer in, though he knew from past experience that it was hopeless. The slave in the loincloth ran shrieking back up the stairs as Farnir, Jochen and the pirates snatched up their weapons and joined the fray.

  The Endless in the centre died on the first pass, parrying perfectly, but totally unprepared for the Slayer’s strength. The flashing axe drove his blade back into his helm, staggering him, and Gotrek hacked him in the side, cutting through both armour and ribs like they were brittle shale.

  Felix’s first exchange with the druchii he faced was almost exactly opposite. He slashed with his sword, only to find that the druchii had moved and was stabbing at his chest with an overhand thrust. Felix twisted, and the sword grazed his ribs. He fell back, slashing desperate figure-eights in the air. The druchii followed and he thought he was dead, but then Farnir, Jochen and the pirates came to his rescue, hacking and stabbing and howling.

  The druchii didn’t bat an eye. He blocked every wild attack and returned with a riposte that skewered a pirate’s neck. Felix lunged at him again, but his sword was turned neatly aside in passing as the druchii gashed another pirate’s wrist and turned to face Felix again.

  Felix fell back, then felt himself shoved aside, as Gotrek stepped in, swinging his axe up from the floor. The druchii saw him and spun to counter, but Gotrek was faster. The axe split the dark elf from crotch to chest and his guts slapped wetly on the polished floor. He crumpled on top of them.

  Felix and the pirates stepped back, looking for the last druchii. He was already dead—his head missing. Another pirate had fallen as well, pierced through the heart.

  “Well done, friends,” said Aethenir, stepping forwards.

  “You might have helped,” said Jochen, looking around at his dead and wounded comrades.

  “Better he didn’t,” said Gotrek with a sneer.

  The pirate searched the dead dark elves for the key to the door as Felix pulled his mail from the sack and put it on. There was no key. Whoever had entered had locked it behind them.

  Gotrek shrugged and stepped to the door. “Get ready,” he said.

  Felix, Aethenir and the remaining pirates lined up behind him. Farnir armed himself with one of the druchii blades and joined them. Felix took a deep breath and got a firmer grip on Karaghul.

  The door was of heavy, intricately carved wood. The lock was protected by a sturdy, black iron plate. Gotrek was through it in three swings of his axe, then kicked open the splintered panel and strode in, on his guard.

  Inside was a large and entirely empty bedchamber.

  Felix stared around him, confused. This was not the secret temple to some foul god that he had been expecting. This was—by druchii flesh house standards at any rate—a perfectly ordinary boudoir. A nightmarish mural of carnal atrocities was painted on the four walls above intricately worked ebony panelling. Fetters, whips and instruments of torture were displayed on racks to the right and left. Against the wall in front of them rose a massive sleeping platform, piled with furs and pillows, all in disarray, and so high that it was reached by a set of shallow black marble steps. At its four corners were hung columns of red velvet drapery, and torches were set into the wall on either side of it. All very grand and nasty, but a dead end.

  “This can’t be right,” said Jochen.

  “We have been led astray somehow,” said Aethenir.

  “Is it a trap?” asked Felix, looking back at the door.

  Gotrek snorted. “Men and elves are blind.”

  He stumped across the room to the torch on the left-hand side of the sleeping platform and pressed the wood panelling below it. There was a click, and everyone stepped back, wary.

  Felix watched the wall beside the torch, expecting to see a secret door open in it, but then movement caught his eye and he turned. The entire sleeping platform was slowly rising like the lid of a treasure chest, and folding back against the wall. The underside of the bed was revealed to be a large marble panel, carved into a bas-relief of a graceful figure that appeared to be both masculine and feminine, and who danced upon a mound of naked copulating bodies, all of them maimed in the most horrible ways. In the flickering torchlight of the room it almost seemed as if the figure and the bodies that it trod on writhed and squirmed lasciviously.

  There was a hole in the raised platform where the bed had rested, with marble stairs that led down into darkness.

  “Sigmar and Manann preserve us,” said Jochen.

  Felix had the sinking suspicion that they would shortly need the help of every god they could call upon.

  The stairs went straight down for so long that Felix was afraid they would come out at the bottom of the floating island and be dumped in the sea again. There were no torches mounted on the walls. They felt their way down in utter darkness but for a reddish glow far below them that bobbed and weaved with each step. The further down they went, the thicker the air became—a cloying soup of incense, lotus smoke, and something sharp and bitter.

  Then another, closer glow began to light their steps. Felix looked around and saw that the runes on Gotrek’s axe were pulsing as if fire was coursing through them.

  “Gotrek…” he said.

  “Aye, manling.”

  As they descended further, the red glow resolved itself into the reflection of crimson light shining upon a black marble floor at the base of the stairs. Gotrek and Felix stepped cautiously down to it and looked along a short corridor that ended at a pair of half-open, unguarded doors, through which came the red light, accompanied by the sound of voices raised in a high, wailing chant that set Felix’s teeth on edge.

  With the others edging forwards behind them, Gotrek and Felix crept to the doors, a pair of heavy gold panels crusted with rubies, amethysts and lapis lazuli in patterns that depicted thousands of naked bodies entwined in impossible, painful ways. Felix looked through the gap between them, then jerked his head back, startled, for a face was staring directly at them.

  “It’s only a statue, manling,” said Gotrek.

  Felix looked again. The air inside was so hazed with violet smoke that it was hard to make out details, but directly ahead of them, in the middle of a circular, brazier-lit chamber, was a statue of a six-headed snake that reared up twice as high as a man. Each of the snake heads was fronted with a beautiful white marble druchii face of indeterminate gender, one of them looking directly at the door with eyes that glittered like living onyx. Half-hidden behind the statue, on the far side of the room, was a pillared archway that opened into a further chamber, within which Felix could see shadows of sinuous movement that seemed to follow the rhythms of the chanting.

  Gotrek pushed through the obscene doors and entered. Felix tried to follow, but as he put his hand on the door, his mind whirled with unbidden emotions. All in an instant he wanted to weep and rage, laugh and kill, love and torture. A vision of writing the Slayer’s story in the Slayer’s blood on vellum made from the Slayer’s flesh crawled up into his brain, and he found he could not push it away.

  “This is an evil place,” said Aethenir, behi
nd him.

  The words brought Felix back to himself. He forced the horrid visions back down into his subconscious and followed the Slayer into the chamber. Aethenir, Farnir, Jochen and the pirates edged in even more reluctantly. The pirates huddled together like frightened cattle, and Farnir clutched a stolen sword like it was a lifeline. Under his druchii helm, Aethenir’s eyes showed white all around, and he murmured a constant stream of elven prayers.

  The chamber was perfectly circular. Walls of pink stone glittered like mica, and it throbbed with low moans of pain and ecstasy, counterpoint to the wailing chant that continued to grate on Felix’s ears. Purple flames leapt in golden braziers set at regular intervals around the walls, and the floor was a mosaic of golden tiles with a large offset ring of purple tiles within them, surrounded by strange runes. The six-headed snake sat at the centre of the room, with its pedestal touching the arc of the offset ring.

  As they crept across the golden floor towards the far archway, they passed close to the statue, and Felix saw around its base offerings of wine, blood, ink and other intimate liquids shimmered in little golden dishes amidst pink, red and purple candles. The pirates skirted warily around the thing, spitting and making warding signs.

  Beyond the archway was the second chamber. Thick purple smoke made it hard to tell just how large it was, but if there was a back wall Felix couldn’t see it. It appeared though to be another circle, with pillars ringing a sunken central area in which there was a broad circular platform. Braziers as big as shields were set between the pillars, within which smouldering mounds of incense raised columns of curling smoke that seemed to form into semi-human shapes if Felix looked at them too long.

  Behind drifting veils of smoke, High Sorceress Heshor stood facing away from them in the centre of a circle drawn on the marble surface of the raised platform, her arms raised in supplication. The Harp of Ruin sat upon a tall black iron table before her. A much larger circle bordered—but did not intersect—hers. There was a crude stone table within the larger circle, and something—or some things—lay upon it, obscured by the haze.