Felix turned to Claudia and motioned her forwards. Max led her to him, and Felix helped her up into the gap. She groped weakly at the edges, trembling and looking down. Felix shoved her. She squeaked and dropped out of sight, and there was a splash.
Felix looked guiltily at Max. “Sorry,” he said.
Max shrugged. “It had to be done.”
The magister stepped up into the gap and jumped of his own accord. Felix jumped a second later. Gotrek was already dog-paddling for the stairs. Felix then put Claudia’s arms around his shoulders, and he and Max struck out after him.
Only a foot of the archway to the stairs was still above water as they began, and it was being swallowed up more quickly than they were swimming. Gotrek was a slow, awkward swimmer, Max was breathing like a bellows, and Felix, with chainmail on and Claudia clinging to his back, could barely keep his nose up. They had got no more than two-thirds of the way across, shouldering floating corpses out of the way all the while, when the arch vanished under the water.
“We’ll have to swim down and back up,” said Felix.
When they reached the wall, Gotrek inhaled and dived. Felix pulled Claudia’s arms tight and made her lock her hands around his neck.
“Take a breath and hold on,” he said over his shoulder.
He waited until he heard her suck in air, then plunged down beneath the waves. The glow of witchlights gave the scene a strange beauty. Even the bedraggled corpses that drifted half-submerged in the current looked graceful. Felix kicked down hard towards the submerged arch, and remembered just in time to kick down a little further so that he wouldn’t scrape Claudia off his back when he went under it. With a final kick he was through and paddling for the surface again. Instead he cracked his head on a ceiling. He nearly yelped in surprise and terror, and he heard Claudia do just that. She started thrashing and kicking in terror.
He turned his head up and saw what had happened. He had come up in the landing. The ceiling was flat above him. The stairs up were to his left. He clamped down on Claudia’s thrashing arms and kicked left as hard as he could, and at last they got out from under the roof and broke the surface, both retching and gasping for air. Gotrek was bobbing beside them.
Felix wiped the water from his eyes and looked around. “Where’s Max?”
Without a word Gotrek ducked back under the water and pushed back towards the submerged landing. He was no swimmer, but he had no fear of being under water either.
Felix paddled for the stairs where they rose up out of the water and helped Claudia out. She sat wearily on a step, her bald head bleeding from a dozen long scrapes.
“I’m sorry, fraulein,” he said. “It wasn’t intentional.”
She huddled over her knees, not looking up. “You’ve done more than you should,” she said. “More than I deserve.”
A moment later, Gotrek reappeared, spitting water and hauling Max to the surface. The wizard came up choking and coughing, and could barely drag himself up the steps when Gotrek pulled him over.
Gotrek climbed out and whipped his crest out of his eyes. “Come on. Can’t stop.”
Felix rose wearily and helped Claudia to her feet. Already the place they had been sitting was two feet under water. Max pushed himself up, swaying like a drunk. Gotrek stepped beside him and put the magister’s around his shoulder again.
“On,” he said.
The central stair was broader than the barracks stair, and with higher ceilings, but the water seemed to rise just as fast. Again they were limping and cursing and stumbling with the water coming up behind them like some vast, silent snake, ready to swallow them, while the ark groaned and shuddered around them. At the harbour level they looked towards the docks, wondering if there might be an escape that way, but the corridor tilted down in that direction, and was filling rapidly with black water. Slaves and dark elves clambered up the slope towards them like they were running up a hill.
Gotrek snorted. “Only elves would build a harbour inside a floating rock.”
They hurried on, joined in their flight by the slaves and the druchii alike—none, in their terror, paying them the slightest attention. More fleeing ark-dwellers poured out of the next level and the stairs were soon filled with a scrambling, surging mob.
Two flights later, as they rounded a landing in the middle of the panicked throng, Felix saw a sight he had never expected to see again—daylight. It shone through a great, columned archway—a warm, golden radiance that made even the cruel faces of the druchii and the gaunt faces of their slaves beautiful as they turned towards it. Felix thought he had never seen anything so wonderful in his life.
The crowd raced towards it like lost children running towards their mother, and Felix, Gotrek, Max and Claudia were borne along with it. At the top, they spilled into a square plaza, dominated by a black statue of a robed and hooded woman, and hemmed in by tall, sharp-roofed buildings. Beyond these Felix could see houses and temples and fortified walls climbing up a central hill towards the massive black keep that perched at the top of the ark—all of it tilted dizzyingly to the left. Streets radiated from the plaza at odd angles, but the druchii and the slaves were all running towards one that rose towards the upper reaches of the city, heading for high ground.
“Follow them!” said Gotrek.
He and Felix helped Max and Claudia to run with the crowd as the water bubbled out of the stairwell behind them and began to spread across the square.
But after only a few uphill turnings, Felix’s earlier fears were realised as they came to a locked gate. This appeared to be a barrier between the merchant quarters and the enclaves of the highborn. A huge mob of druchii and slaves pushed at the sturdy iron gates, roaring for entry, while on the far side, guards with repeating crossbows fired into them and shouted at them to fall back. Even nobles and officers were being shot down in the guards’ panic.
Felix and Gotrek paused and looked around as Max and Claudia leaned against them, gasping and catching their breath. There had to be another way. Perhaps they could climb to the roofs. As he turned, searching for an escape, he looked down over the lower quarters, spread out below them, and saw something that stopped him dead. Waves were slopping over the city’s outer wall, and water was running down the inside. Felix stared. He hadn’t thought the ark had sunk so far, but the ocean was spilling into it like water filling a ladle dipped into a bucket.
“Gotrek!” he said, and pointed.
Just as the Slayer looked around, the pressure from the water outside the wall became too much and it buckled exploding inward in a shower of stones and a towering avalanche of foam. The first breach quickly triggered others, and towers and curtain walls came down all along the west-facing side of the city.
The slaves and druchii in the square shrieked as the ground shook and tilted under their feet, then the shrieks became wails of despair as they turned and saw the ocean water surging through the city below them, levelling houses and toppling temples, and rising fast.
The crowd redoubled its efforts at the gates, and they bent inwards, but Gotrek turned away from them.
“Too late for that,” he said, starting down a side street. “Come on.”
Felix followed after him dumbly. What could the Slayer do now? The water would rise and swallow them no matter where they went. There was no escape. Any high ground they could find would be under water in a matter of minutes. Again the mad plans of High Sorceress Heshor had left them to be drowned in a sunken city.
But the Slayer trotted down the tilted street regardless, looking around, as the thunder of the approaching water got louder and louder and the ground slanted more and more under their feet.
“Ha!” Gotrek said suddenly.
Felix looked up and saw a sturdy wooden cart filled with large casks dragging two terrified dray horses backwards across the sloping street as they bucked and kicked. The cart slid sideways into a house and came to rest as Gotrek ran to it.
“Here,” he shouted.
Gotrek wrenched d
own the cart’s tailgate then climbed up. The casks were nearly as tall as he was. He glared when he saw dwarf runes branded into the wood.
“Filthy thieving elves.”
He stove in the top of one of the casks then tipped it on its side. The heady brew spilled down the street in a golden tide.
“In,” he said, rolling the cask off the cart and setting it on its end. “Two of you.”
“Are you sure this will work?” asked Felix, hesitating.
“Just get in!” roared the Slayer.
Felix lifted Claudia into the cask, then climbed in awkwardly after her as Gotrek chopped through the top of a second cask and emptied it, then dropped it to the cobbles.
He jumped down into it. “In, magister!” The sound of the approaching water was so loud now he had to bellow. Felix looked down the street. He could see it coming up the hill faster than a man could run, swallowing houses and carrying dark elves and slaves and tumbling debris with it as it rose.
Max started climbing feebly into the giant barrel.
Gotrek grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him in head-first. “Get down!”
“It won’t work,” cried Felix. “We’ll be smashed to pieces.”
The black tide reached them.
Felix dropped down into the bottom of the barrel next to Claudia as he felt the water lift them and shove them down the street. The cart horses screamed as they and the cart were carried away. Felix’s teeth snapped shut as the barrel smashed into something and rushed on. Another impact, and another. The barrel splintered. Water slopped into it. Claudia’s knee cracked him in the jaw. He caught her and held her tight, as much to protect himself as to shelter her as they bounced around like dice in a cup. From all sides he heard shrieks and wails and juddering collisions, and always the water was lifting and throwing them around.
Felix looked up through the opening of the barrel and saw one of the massive walls of the highborn quarter rising above them and coming closer. They were being carried towards it by the water. Then a hand gripped the lip of the barrel. A dark elf face appeared, eyes round with fright. He tried to climb in. He was going to capsize them!
Felix let go of Claudia and punched the druchii in the face. He snarled and caught Felix’s wrist. Felix rose up and punched with his other hand. The dark elf wouldn’t let go.
Then suddenly the black wall filled his vision and they slammed into it. Felix fell back as the dark elf was mashed flat, his ribs snapping like sticks. He fell away screaming as the great wave receded and the barrel was swept back from the wall again.
Felix peeked over the lip as currents began to pull them this way and that, and saw the rooftops and chimneys of the merchant quarter disappearing below the crashing, spuming waves. Eddies and whirlpools whipped the refuse of the city around in a chaos of clutter. The barrel swirled around nauseatingly. Felix thought he saw the cask with Max and Gotrek in it, but then he was spun around and lost it again.
There was a crack like thunder above him and Felix turned and looked up. A massive castle-sized section of the retaining wall sheered off from the rest and slid down into the water, houses and people and furniture tumbling after it. A huge rolling swell rose up as the black cliff vanished in a towering splash, and Felix and Claudia’s barrel was pushed even further away from the city.
Felix couldn’t take his eyes off the demise of the ark. It sank more slowly than he expected, as if the dark elf magic that had kept it afloat for four thousand years was still fighting to support it, but it sank all the same, coming to pieces as it did. Knife-sharp towers crumbled and toppled, walls collapsed. Cracks ran up through the once-solid ground, ripping the mansions and palaces built upon it asunder with a sound like an endless cannon barrage. Dark elves and slaves were crushed by falling masonry or were swallowed by chasms that opened beneath their feet or fell screaming into the water. Felix felt the barrel being pulled back towards the ark by a powerful undertow as more of it was sucked under the waves and his heart raced. They were going to be pulled into the cataclysm and swallowed, and there was nothing he could do.
The temple level disappeared as they swirled closer, explosions of black fire erupting all over it, and great crackling arcs of purple energy leaping from building to building, shivering stone to dust wherever they touched. Felix swore he saw a river of blood pouring from the imploded ruins of a brass-walled temple and staining the water as it sank. An unearthly howling that sounded like neither man nor beast rose up to a hair-raising shriek, and then was cut off as if a door had shut.
The barrel was hit from behind as it rushed towards the sinking ark, then again from the left and the right. All the floating debris from the sinking city was converging towards the sucking centre, crowding the sea with bobbing, bumping junk and knocking Felix and Claudia this way and that.
They were close enough to see the eyes of the black stone dragons that were carved into the eaves of the roof, when waves finally reached the massive black keep, its proud, jutting towers still miraculously whole, but smoke rising in billowing columns from every window. Then, with a crack that Felix felt more than heard, the castle cleaved in half, jagged orange fissures appearing in its basalt flanks as the fire that raged within it was revealed.
The half closer to Felix sank more quickly, its towers toppling as it slid down into the sea to show blazing rooms and corridors and frantic silhouetted figures burning like paper dolls as they leapt into the water. The other half followed immediately, and suddenly Felix and Claudia’s barrel was tilting down a surging hill of water as the tallest tower of the keep slipped down into the sea and disappeared into the centre of a swirling whirlpool. Felix saw a glossy black carriage heave up beside them and topple towards them as the vortex sucked them down, and he dropped back down into the barrel and clung to Claudia for dear life.
“Hold on, fraulein!” he shouted.
Then everything became a terrifying jumble of sound, motion and jarring impacts. Water swallowed the cask, whirling and slamming it around like a cork beneath a waterfall. Felix was upside down, then right-side up, crashing into Claudia, then mashed by her, all in the space of a second, unable to see anything but swirling bubbles, crashing water and flashes of waves, refuse and sky, as the cask was sucked under the pummelling waves. Bodies flew past in the water—men, women, druchii, horses, rats. Things slammed into the barrel, knocking it up, down and sideways. A human child caught the edge of it, looking pleadingly into his eyes, then was gone again before he could react.
The barrel filled with water as it went down and down. His lungs screamed for air and the world began to turn black and blurry at the edges. He wondered if they would be pulled all the way to the bottom of the sea, or smashed out of the barrel and crushed to death by whirling debris. He felt himself floating and pressed against the sides to keep himself in.
Then, long after it seemed possible that it could continue, the water began to calm, and he felt the cask slowly rising through the silt-clouded water. They broke the surface miraculously face-up, the top of the barrel almost level with the water. Felix pushed up and sucked air greedily, then realised that Claudia was still in the barrel, under the water. He reached down and hauled her up and she clung to him, choking and puking water down his chest and shivering.
He looked around at the mad scene around them, hoping to see the Slayer and Max. The sea in all directions was cluttered with ships and floating junk—barrels, boxes, planks, carts, wooden spoons, bits of clothing, papers, trash, what appeared to be a wig, and corpses of all races floated everywhere. To his left, three small druchii sloops were entangled, thrown together by the mad whirlpool of the ark’s sinking. Further away, more black ships pulled swimming druchii out of the water, or fired crossbows into floating masses of pleading slaves while sea serpents, both mounted and unmounted, breasted through the rubbish and fed indiscriminately upon all.
Felix heard a splash and a familiar cough. He turned. Another barrel floated not far away, upside down! Was it the one?
>
“Gotrek!” called Felix. “Max!”
Gotrek’s head bobbed up next to the barrel, and he hauled Max up beside him and helped him cling to the cask. The magister was barely conscious, but he was alive. Felix shook his head in wonder. They had made it. They had survived. As impossible as it had seemed, they had escaped the black ark.
Then Felix heard a noise behind the moans, screams and shouts of the survivors and the “hoog” of the serpents that sent a chill up his spine—the clamouring wail of the Harp of Ruin.
TWENTY
Felix and Gotrek looked around, searching for the hellish instrument amid the chaos of ships and trash and fighting. Then Felix found it. He blinked, confused, for it seemed to be floating about a yard above the water, as if it were somehow levitating. He looked closer and saw that the harp was hooked to a halberd, and that the halberd was strapped to the back of a dog-paddling skaven, who was heading right for them at the head of a cluster of swimming skaven. The water around them frothed with the thing’s vibrations.
Gotrek pulled his axe from his back and shook it over his head. “Come on, you vermin!” He roared.
But it seemed he might not be the first to reach the rat-men. Bearing down on them from behind was a phalanx of sea dragon knights, with High Sorceress Heshor mounted behind Commander Tarlkhir on the first. Heshor looked entirely healed from the wound the daemon had inflicted upon her. Tarlkhir spurred his mount and the serpent scooped a skaven out of the water and choked it down with a single gulp.
“Hoog!”
“Foul serpents!” cried Felix, drawing his sword.
Karaghul’s runes were glowing brightly in the presence of so many sea dragons, and Felix could feel the urge to swim towards them welling up in him. His muscles twitched and tingled with barely controlled violence. He fought down his fury with difficulty. He had already fought a sea dragon while bobbing helplessly in the middle of the sea and hadn’t cared for it much. Doing so floating precariously in a flooded beer keg with a half-conscious girl beside him was unlikely to be an improvement. Maybe the damned serpent would choke to death on the barrel, he thought.
[Gotrek & Felix 10] - Elfslayer Page 32
