Strange, many-limbed shapes writhed to either side of Heshor, and it took Felix a moment to see that the shapes were Heshor’s five sorceresses, lying along the edge of the platform and coupling wildly with five of the Endless, naked but for their skull masks, and drenched with sweat. The lovers tore at each other constantly with sharpened fingernails, and all bled from long weals that criss-crossed their bodies, yet they moaned in a chorus of rising ecstasy. They looked as if they had been at it for hours. Felix shivered in disgust at the sight, and yet it was impossible to deny a horrible arousal as well.
The participants in the strange ceremony were guarded by seven armoured Endless, standing on the steps that descended to the centre, and watching the proceedings while at attention, their swords drawn and point-down on the floor before them.
“Magister Schreiber,” breathed Aethenir. “And Fraulein Pallenberger.”
Felix frowned, for he had no idea what the high elf meant, then he followed his gaze and saw that the lumps that lay upon the stone table within the larger circle were indeed Max and Claudia, cruelly strapped down with leather ropes and with their mouths bound and gagged.
He choked when he saw them. They were almost unrecognisable. They were naked and emaciated, and both had been shaved entirely bald, even unto the eyebrows. Paint had been applied to their faces and their bodies in purple and red swirls, and runes had been carved into their skin with knives. Max looked a hundred years old, Claudia’s ribs stood out through her lacerated skin, and their eyes were shut tight as if in pain.
Gotrek spat, disgusted at the sight.
“Sigmar,” murmured Felix. “Are they are alive?”
“They are alive,” said Aethenir dully. “They are sacrifices to the Great Defiler.”
“Sacrifices!” said Felix, horrified.
Aethenir shuddered. “It appears she intends to raise a daemon, though what purpose that would serve in using the harp I know not.”
Gotrek’s eye lit up. “A daemon!”
“Control your lust for glory, dwarf,” said Aethenir. “If Heshor succeeds in calling something out of the void, your friends will be killed.” He trembled. “Though it must surely mean our death, we must strike before the ceremony is finished.”
The moans of pleasure coming from the archway were growing higher and more urgent, as was Heshor’s chanting. “That might be very soon,” Felix said, swallowing.
“Leave the skull-faces to me,” said Gotrek. He turned to Felix and the others. “Kill the hags and save Max and the girl.”
Jochen and his men looked at him like he had suggested they run into a burning building, but they nodded. Felix nodded too, though he wondered if it would go quite as neatly as that.
Felix, Farnir and the pirates lined up on either side of the archway weapons at the ready. Aethenir stood further back, readying spells of healing and protection. Felix was finding it difficult to concentrate. The cries of ecstasy were getting louder and wilder, and try as he might, they were stirring dark thoughts and desires in his depths. He could see that the pirates were affected as well, twitching and grunting and shaking their heads like bulls beset by flies.
Gotrek stepped to the centre of the archway, running his thumb along the blade of his axe until it drew blood. The axe’s runes blazed like the glow of a furnace. Gotrek raised it over his head and opened his mouth to roar a challenge, but before he could speak, with simultaneous shrieks, the coupling druchii all climaxed together, while in the same instant, Heshor shrieked the final words of her summoning.
There was a crack like thunder and the room shook, nearly knocking them off their feet. Suddenly the air was filled with the cloying scents of roses and ambergris and sweet milk, and Felix felt the presence of a terrifying intelligence looming within his brain. His vague stirrings of desire were suddenly an all-encompassing lust. He wanted to race into the summoning room, not to kill, but to tear off his clothes and join the druchii in their orgy. Only past experience with alien thoughts invading his mind allowed him to resist the urges and understand that they were not his own. He shook like an aspen as he concentrated on hating the intruding emotions and casting them out.
The pirates, unfortunately, had not encountered such violent attacks on their consciousness before, and knew not how to resist. They shrieked and tore at themselves and their clothes. Some of them pawed at each other like lovers, while others stumbled through the arch towards the chamber, their breeches around their ankles.
“Come back!” called Jochen, though it was clear he was only inches from following them.
Felix reached after one to drag him back, and looked into the chamber. He regretted it instantly.
Standing in the large circle before Heshor and wreathed in rose-coloured fog was the most beautiful being Felix had ever seen. She—he?—it?—towered more than twice the height of a man and appeared to be neither male nor female but, unsettlingly, both—a voluptuous icon of lust that looked directly at him and beckoned him hither with violet eyes and luscious lips.
“What do you desire of me?” it asked in a voice like honeyed thunder.
High Sorceress Heshor replied in the druchii tongue, her arms spread wide. Felix cursed her. It was speaking to him, not her! Felix stepped forwards, trying to see the beauty more clearly. He caught glimpses of writhing tentacles, or perhaps swaying snakes, graceful limbs and clawed hands, that seemed to flicker in and out of existence. He couldn’t decide if the beauty had two arms or four, if it had breasts or a powerful chest, if its legs were those of a shapely woman or those of a goat.
“Back, manling,” said Gotrek.
Felix was jerked roughly back. He turned, snarling at this intrusion into his luscious dream, then blinked. Gotrek had pulled him behind him. He had been halfway into the summoning chamber though he had no memory of moving forwards. A dozen Endless were streaming up the curved steps towards them, half still naked, swords high, cutting down the enraptured pirates as they passed them.
Gotrek bellowed a challenge and slashed with his axe as three armoured Endless reached him. The first blocked the blow, but the force of it pushed him into another, staggering both of them. Felix ran one through before he recovered, but that was the last blood he drew. The rest of the Endless swarmed around him and Gotrek, Farnir, Jochen and the pirates, swords flickering faster than the eye could follow.
Aethenir huddled in the shadow of the arch, waving his hands, though whether he was casting spells or only flailing in fear Felix couldn’t tell.
“Out of my way!” Gotrek roared at the Endless. “I’ve a daemon to kill!”
The Slayer lashed about him in a blur of steel, his axe’s rune-glow trailing behind it like a comet tail, but he was the only one fast enough to return the dark elves’ attacks. Half the pirates were dead in seconds, and Jochen had a gash on his forehead that showed bone. Even firm of mind and in the best of health they would have been no match for the Endless. Starved on gruel and distracted by unnatural lusts, they fell like wheat before the scythe.
Another Endless went down before Gotrek, but the end was inevitable. There were too many of them. It was just Felix, Farnir, Jochen and the Slayer now. Then Jochen died with a foot of steel sticking from his back. Felix took a savage cut on his left forearm and suddenly his sword felt like lead. Two Endless were stabbing at him at the same time. He couldn’t block both. He fought to raise his sword, knowing that he was going to die.
The two druchii suddenly stumbled aside, their swords missing him. In fact, all around him the druchii were turning and falling and shouting in confusion. Felix blinked, surprised, but didn’t fail to take advantage. He ran one through the neck, then turned to see what had staggered them. He gaped. The chamber was suddenly chest deep in dwarfs, all attacking the Endless.
Gotrek turned as he cut down another masked druchii. “You,” he said.
“Da!” cried Farnir.
Birgi saluted them with a bloody shovel. Skalf raised a framing maul. Their heads were bald and bleeding from dozens
of little cuts. It looked like they had shaved them with butchers’ cleavers. Felix looked around. All the dwarfs in the room had shaved their heads and had armed themselves with what makeshift weapons they could find—picks, hammers, fireplace pokers, frying pans, pitchforks and roasting spits, and they battered the Endless with them with terrifying fury. Felix was amazed and relieved.
“We’ve heeded your words, Slayer,” Birgi said. “Go take your doom. This is ours.”
EIGHTEEN
“About time,” said Gotrek, but his voice was gruff. “Come on, manling!”
He turned from the newly made Slayers and started towards the summoning chamber. As Felix followed, he saw that the sorceresses had risen and were joining Heshor in a new chant, all calling out an endlessly repeated phrase while extending their arms towards the harp and sending energy pulsing towards it. The daemon too thrust its hands forwards, feeding the harp with its power, and the instrument glowed within a pink and purple aura. Two of the abomination’s other appendages were held out towards Max and Claudia, and curls of white and blue vapour rose from their bodies and trailed towards the daemon.
“It’s killing them,” said Felix.
“Worse,” said Aethenir, stepping up behind them. “Much worse.” He trembled as he fell in with them, but he did not falter. He held a druchii sword in his hand.
The sorceresses—still naked—were all facing away from them as Gotrek, Felix and Aethenir strode into the chamber, concentrating their attention and their energies on the harp. The daemon too was fixed on the harp, but Felix could feel its attention everywhere at once, a beacon that charred what it illuminated.
“Your warriors have failed you, daughters,” it said as Felix, Aethenir and the Slayer ran down the stairs into the circle. “Your enemies draw near.”
Heshor did not turn or slacken the flow of energy she was pouring into the harp, but by some silent command, two of her sorceresses did. One was Belryeth, Aethenir’s nemesis, and she laughed when she saw him.
“Dearest, you return to me!” she said as she wove her incantations. “Love, it seems, conquers all.”
“Honour conquers all,” hissed the high elf, and leapt up onto the platform straight at her, sword high.
She and her sister shot streamers of black mist at him and Gotrek and Felix. Aethenir screamed and dropped his sword as it enveloped him, but pitched himself headlong into Belryeth and they went down together on the platform. The Slayer shrugged off the mist and bulled on, but Felix staggered as it blew over him, every inch of his skin screaming as if he was being both frozen and cooked at the same time. His muscles tensed to the point of snapping and he crashed to the floor before the platform.
Gotrek leapt onto the platform and slashed his axe at the second sorceress in passing, his eye never leaving the daemon. She shrieked and fell as it bit into her side.
With her death, the black cloud dissipated, but the effects of the spell lingered, needles of fire and ice stabbing into Felix, and he could only watch as Gotrek plunged across the platform straight for the daemon.
Heshor and the other sorceresses broke off their chanting and shrieked at this interruption, but the daemon smiled down at Gotrek as he leapt across the warding line that bound it within its circle.
“Ah, little one,” it purred. “You save me from boredom. Excellent.”
It slashed down at Gotrek with a crab-clawed arm it had not possessed a second before. Gotrek blocked the blow with the flat of his axe and was bowled back like a hedgehog hit with a spade. He bounced twice before he spun off the platform and slammed to the floor of the chamber.
“Come, try again,” laughed the daemon. “I haven’t experienced a wound in millennia.”
Felix fought to his feet. On the platform, Aethenir and Belryeth were rolling back and forth in a parody of ecstasy as they fought for control of her dagger, while Heshor and her coven blasted the Slayer as he pushed himself up to his knees, shaking his head. The spells seemed only to anger Gotrek, and he roared as he rose to his feet.
Felix saw his chance. Though every sane portion of his brain told him to turn and run the other way, he jumped up onto the platform, weaved through the angry sorceresses and ran into the daemon’s circle—being careful, even in his mad rush, not to disturb the warding line, which appeared to have been drawn with some kind of purple powder—and aimed for the table upon which Max and Claudia were bound.
He didn’t make it. The daemon turned its full attention upon him as he crossed the purple line and he stopped as if he had run into the wall, held by the power of its regard.
“Have you come to steal my sacrifices, beloved?” it murmured, reaching hooked claws out towards him. “Or to join them?”
Felix’s mouth went slack, overwhelmed by the daemon’s majesty. He stumbled towards it, spreading his arms to receive its cruel embrace. He had never longed for anything more than he longed to be rent apart by those beautiful glistening claws.
Suddenly the daemon shrieked, and Felix collapsed as its pain broadcast through the chamber, sending waves of searing agony through his mind. He hit the ground screaming and writhing and saw that Aethenir and the sorceresses were too. Even Max and Claudia struggled and spasmed in their bonds. Only Heshor remained upright, shaking and tearing at her hair and gouging her face with her nails.
The daemon was falling back before the Slayer, who had somehow climbed back onto the platform. Purple blood spewed from a deep wound in the daemon’s leg, and the edges of it boiled and sizzled as if they had been splashed with acid.
“Exquisite,” rumbled the apparition’s beautiful voice, as it slashed at Gotrek with an enormous black sword that it plucked from thin air. The Slayer ducked the blow and chopped at its other leg. A new claw parried the blow, and a suddenly appearing mace smashed down at him from above.
Felix’s waves of pain subsided as the daemon’s attention was narrowed to fighting Gotrek, and he found he could move again. He crawled to the stone table and pulled himself up on it. Close to, Max and Claudia looked even worse than they had at a distance. Their cheeks were hollow and their skin slack and filthy. Scrapes and bruises and ritual cuts covered them from head to toe, and their fingernails were cracked and bloody, as if they had tried to dig their way through stone. Max had a black eye and Claudia a split lip. The seeress was unconscious, and Max only a little better. His eyes rolled madly when he saw Felix and he mumbled something behind his gag.
Felix reached trembling hands forwards and sawed through the silk cords that held the gag in place, then pulled it from his lips.
“My hands,” mouthed the wizard, his voice rattling like paper. “Then I can defend you.”
Felix almost laughed at this. Max didn’t look like he could defend himself against a strong wind, let alone daemons and sorceresses. Nonetheless, he went to work on the braided leather that held Max’s wrists. He didn’t get far, for the daemon wailed again and its pain drove all thought and ability out of Felix’s head. The screams of the sorceresses told him that they too were affected.
One of the daemon’s arms was effervescing away and it staggered back to the limits of its circle as it defended itself against the Slayer with three other limbs.
“That axe,” it moaned. “I know it now.” It shifted the weight of its attention to Heshor. “Release me back to the void, mortal. I crave sensation, not destruction.”
“No!” shrieked the high sorceress, some resonance with the daemon’s all-encompassing consciousness allowing Felix to understand her though she spoke in the druchii tongue. “You must fulfil your bargain! Finish the dwarf and resume!”
“You will hold me to your regret, hag,” it rumbled, as Gotrek attacked it again.
Felix recovered himself and finished cutting through Max’s wrist bonds and started on Claudia’s. He looked back. The sorceresses were standing again.
“Kill the human!” cried Heshor, pointing a black-nailed finger at him. “He must not disturb the sacrifices!”
She and the three s
till-standing sorceresses turned towards him, spouting vile incantations as Max mumbled a protection, moving his hands weakly through the ritual motions.
But then, before either spells or counter-spells could be completed, the daemon smashed Gotrek in the chest with an armoured fist the size of a boulder and sent him flying back again. This time the Slayer hit the platform shoulder-first and skidded backwards towards the edge—straight through the purple powder boundary of the binding circle, wiping it away. Blood welled from the Slayer’s nose and mouth as he came to a stop. He didn’t move.
Heshor and her sorceresses gasped and faltered in their incantations at this momentous accident. The daemon laughed.
“Did I not say?” it chuckled, then strode out of the circle, straight towards Heshor. “Come, daughter, I will make you a guest of my realm, as you have welcomed me to yours.”
The sorceress screamed and backed away, snatching up the harp as her remaining sisters stepped before her to guard her retreat, blasting the daemon with their black sorcery.
The daemon appeared to relish the attack, moaning with pleasure but slowing not one whit. It caressed the three sorceresses with probing tentacles and they collapsed in paroxysms of ecstasy so intense that they snapped their own spines.
Heshor turned and ran with the harp, but then a bloody figure rose up and tackled her, stabbing at her with a dagger. Felix was shocked to see that it was Aethenir.
“For Ulthuan and the asur!” he cried as they slammed to the ground, the harp between them. “For Rion and the path of honour!”
“No, scholar,” shrilled Belryeth as she stood and leapt to defend her mistress. “You will win no redemption.” She dragged Aethenir off Heshor as the daemon stepped closer.
The high sorceress scrambled to her feet as the high elf and the young sorceress fought once again, and fled for the door.
The daemon came after her, laughing melodiously. “Do you abandon me now, dear heart? Have you not pledged your undying love to me?”
[Gotrek & Felix 10] - Elfslayer Page 29
