‘You call that docile?’ Felix said as the bird’s hooked beak pierced the vampire’s skull and its thick, worm-like tongue probed the crack. He turned and shouted, ‘Gotrek, come on!’ Above, he saw that the attentions of the ghosts were beginning to drift away from the blackness in their midst, and instead fall upon the struggle below. There was a terrible hunger writ on those spectral faces, and Felix felt his stomach knot in fear. He suddenly wanted to leave as quickly as possible.
Gotrek decapitated a wight and looked at the avian abomination with disgust. ‘I’ll not get on that hunk of rotten meat,’ the Slayer said. Zombies staggered towards him, moaning. The Slayer bobbed around a flailing hand and split the offending corpse pate to groin. ‘I’ll walk out of here under my own power or not at all.’
‘Fine,’ Zabbai said, ‘Stay here and miss all of the actual fighting.’
Bile rose in Felix’s throat as he clawed his way up behind Zabbai. He could feel maggots and scarabs moving beneath the bird’s flesh. The bird shifted and gave a petulant squawk. He looked towards the ziggurat. The cloud of ghosts was dispersing, like the shell of a chrysalis peeling back, and the air had the odour he associated with a plague-pit. Felix’s skin crawled, and he blinked as the air seemed to squirm with half-seen shapes.
‘What?’ Gotrek snapped.
‘The army, remember?’ Felix said before Zabbai could, and was rewarded with the glint of comprehension in the Slayer’s good eye. Satisfied that Gotrek was coming, Felix looked for Antar. He saw the tomb-prince across the plaza, standing surrounded by heaps of the newly re-dead. Antar’s skills hadn’t been all bluster apparently, and Felix wondered whether he and Gotrek hadn’t got lucky the first time they’d fought the tomb-prince.
Antar had snatched up a bow and quiver from the shattered remnants of Zabbai’s warriors. A moment later, he sent an arrow smashing into a charging vampire’s chest. The creature shrieked as the force of the blow sent her flying backwards into one of the pits. The tomb-prince fired again and again, emptying the quiver with inhuman rapidity and felling wights and zombies with every shot.
He tossed the bow and quiver aside once he’d emptied the latter, and drew his khopesh and flail. Then, without hesitation, the tomb-prince of Mahrak charged the closest of his enemies, bellowing at the top of his nonexistent lungs. Two vampires closed in on him, and soon all three were engaged in a battle of lightning-quick lunges and thrusts. Beyond him, Felix saw a knot of slaves struggling to hurl a wight into one of the pits.
‘We can’t just leave them,’ Felix said. He felt sick. His previous urgency was undercut by a stab of guilt. He knew with all certainty that there was nothing to be done, unless he was tired of living. He looked at the bracelet on his arm. It was a convenient excuse for cowardice. The thought roiled in his gut like a slug of sour ale. He knew he was no hero, and that his courage could be called faltering at best. But there were certain things he had never done, and would never do.
The carrion began to rise into the air, scattering zombies and slaves alike. The latter were already beginning to retreat, taking advantage of the distraction provided by the carrion. Those who could had fled the plaza, scattering into the ruin. But there were too many left behind, and too many still in the pits. They needed time, to free those who remained and to break away from their captors. Time that Felix and the others could give them, but only at cost to themselves and their mission.
‘If you want to live to fulfil your oath to me, manling, we must,’ Gotrek said as he clambered up behind him. Felix looked at him, and then at the slaves still fighting. As he watched, a clump of zombies mobbed a man and brought him down, biting and tearing at him. The man’s screams tore at his heart, as did the pleading cries of those people still caged in their pits, and in that moment Felix knew that he had no choice. He had never had a choice, in fact, not since he had first joined the Mock-Beggars while at the University in Altdorf and penned his first political tract. Gotrek saw the look on his face and grabbed his arm. ‘There’s nothing to be done, manling. We have given them a chance. That is all Grimnir allows any of us – a chance, and an axe to use in making the most of it.’
Felix hesitated. It had been one thing when it was just his life in danger. But this was something else. He would not – could not – leave these people behind. Even if it cost him his own life, he couldn’t do it. All thoughts of flight, of Lybaras, of survival vanished, replaced by determination. ‘I don’t worship Grimnir. Here,’ he snapped, shoving the sword into Gotrek’s hands. Then, before he could stop himself, and before the Slayer could grab him again, he’d dropped from the carrion’s back. It rose above him, the shadow of its wings blotting out the sun, and, for a moment, blocking his view of the spirit host gathering over the ziggurat. He had his blade out of its sheath the moment his boots touched the ground, and a zombie’s head went flying. From above him, he heard Gotrek’s sulphurous cursing.
He kicked aside a corpse and hauled a wounded man to his feet. Felix flailed towards the jungle. ‘Go,’ he shouted. He doubted the man understood Reikspiel, but he hoped his intent was clear. He hurled himself into the melee, his blade rising and falling. ‘Retreat, fall back – run, you bastards! Go!’ he screamed. His sword slashed out, spilling a corpse’s rotting guts across the stones of the plaza.
He fought his way through the press towards the closest of the pits, where a gang of slaves was trying to pull up a final cage. Felix intercepted a wight who was moving to stop them. He bowled the dead man over and set his heel on the latter’s head to hold him pinned. Overhead, more spirits were beginning to drift down, away from the great roiling mass of ghosts that clustered about the black kernel. The air throbbed like a sore tooth, and Felix felt an itch on his skin that could only be explained by the presence of necromancy. The wight clawed at his leg, and Felix sank Karaghul through the dead man’s skull. A ghost swept down and enveloped a number of freed slaves in its tattered arms, its shape billowing and expanding to engulf them. Their already withered forms shrunk even further as they collapsed and died, their lives snuffed out by the spectre. More ghosts joined the first, like crows flocking to a carrion feast.
Felix became more frantic in his attempts to get the slaves to retreat. There was no way that they could defend themselves against the spirits. He shouted, cajoled and pleaded. Some listened, but not many. They fought on, grimly determined to pay back their enslavers or to free those of their fellows who were still imprisoned. Felix cursed their bravery, even as admiration for their efforts filled him. Admiration curdled into fear as a flood of howling spirits crashed down from above, something black and terrible leading them.
Felix’s eyes widened as he recognised the necromancer, or what was left of her. Her vaporous form was swathed in flimsy shrouds of shadow, and lit by a corona of flickering ghost-lights that danced and spun about her. Her tattooed visage had become shrunken and even more skull-like, and her crimson hair framed her head like a nest of writhing serpents. She held her scimitar in one pale, luminous-fleshed hand. Eyes as black as the deepest caverns met his and Felix froze, unable to move. He knew what she had become, even if he couldn’t say how, or why.
He’d faced such creatures before, when he and Gotrek had travelled across the Grey Mountains to Bretonnia, and the Slayer had insisted on hunting for the monster known as the Red Duke. They’d found the Red Duke readily enough, but the vampire had escaped the bite of Gotrek’s axe, and Felix and the Slayer had been trapped in a grail shrine for a week by a legion of the undead, including the screaming spectres that the Bretonnians called wailing hags, but Felix knew as tomb banshees. Octavia’s mouth sagged open, and a scream burst forth.
All around Felix, slaves toppled over, eyes bulging with fright, and blood trickling from their ears and noses. Zombies, immune to the mind-wrenching shriek of the newborn tomb banshee, tore at those who survived. Felix staggered as the scream washed over him. The sound was one of mingled sadness and fury, a lifeti
me’s thwarted ambition and obsession that smashed into him like a hammer blow. His heart stuttered in his chest, but he remained standing. Memories, tattered rags of past failures, fluttered around his mind’s eye as a pall of melancholy settled over him.
As the banshee swept towards him, followed by her ghostly retainers, Felix raised Karaghul. Her scimitar snapped out, and he parried the blow. The banshee hurtled past him, and the spirit host enveloped him, tearing at him with impossibly cold hands. Felix lashed out wildly, driving them away. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the battle was turning against the freed slaves. The ghosts rolled over them like a malevolent fog bank, and those not struck dead by the banshee’s wail died in the chill clutches of the spirits. The cries from the pits were silenced, and the remaining vampires began to pad towards Felix.
Felix looked around. He was the sole living man left in the plaza. Despite his best efforts, he had failed. The thought was like a knife in his heart, and he wanted to scream curses at the dead things that circled him like predators in the twilight. The banshee screamed again, and barbs of futility hooked themselves into his courage, and began to strip hope from him, one agonising inch at a time. In that moment, he was back in Blutdorf, with the bodies of twisted and tortured children at his feet, and the laughter of the self-styled Mutant-Master ringing in his ears; he was in Praag, watching as the servants of Chaos rampaged through the city; he was in Sylvania, watching as Ulrika, red-eyed and fanged, left with her new mistress. Every dragon slain, every warlord dead, by his hand or Gotrek’s could not outweigh the losses that came with every victory.
He had once thought that some force guided him and Gotrek, some great intelligence, acting in opposition to Chaos. He knew now, after so many years, so many losses, that such imaginings had been nothing more than a young man’s fancy. They were alone in the dark with the beasts beyond the firelight. And the beasts were hungry. The banshee wailed and the zombies moaned, and the ghosts howled and the vampires hissed, and the dead closed in on the last living man, offering up the final gift. He recalled Octavia’s words, her offer of death – kinder than the sword, she’d said. ‘You call this kind?’ he snarled up at the hovering banshee. ‘This isn’t a gift, it’s theft!’ he shouted, chopping through a ghost that drew too close.
The banshee screamed again, and in that scream were not the failures of the past, but those of the future. He saw Gotrek dead, his body trampled beneath the feet of a victorious enemy. He saw a looming snarl, studded with fangs, and felt the blow that would prevent him from recording the Slayer’s final fate. He saw mountains fall and cities burn, and knew that there was no epic battle waiting for them at the climax of their tale, for he and Gotrek were not heroes out of an epic from the days of Sigmar. They would die amidst death, lost in a tide of fate, and all that they had accomplished, all that they had done, would be forgotten. There was no victory, no glorious doom. Just a doom, a cessation, a death – one amongst many – and his words, his scribbling, would be so much ash. He staggered, head swimming. ‘No,’ he groaned.
The banshee drifted around him. She wailed again. ‘No,’ Felix said. He blinked bloody tears out of his eyes. He knew he’d made mistakes, he knew that all he’d written would be forgotten – all stories were – but he’d come too far, done too much to give up. He’d fight until his last breath left him, until he saw the Slayer fall, and if he followed him to whatever hell awaited Slayers and their Rememberers, then that was the way of it. The banshee flew past him, her screams clawing at his ears and her ghost-lights stinging his eyes.
‘Fine then,’ Felix hissed, turning. ‘Fine!’ He chopped into a zombie that was reaching for him, felling the corpse with one blow. ‘You want death? I’ll give you death!’ He jerked the blade free and sent it hammering into another dead man, splitting his skull lips to spine. ‘Form an orderly queue and wait your turn.’ He struck a zombie with his shoulder and sent the corpse stumbling. He beheaded it with a two-handed blow. ‘One sword, no waiting!’ he snarled. He drove his fist into a cadaver’s ruined face, and as it reeled, he swept off the top of its head with his sword. ‘If you want it so badly, come and take it,’ he shouted.
The banshee rose and turned, angling back towards him with all of the lethal grace of a shark. Her mouth sagged open, impossibly wide, and she raised her scimitar. Felix raised his blade to meet her, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to fend her off for much longer. Hands seized him. He struggled, until he heard Antar’s voice. ‘You are brave, fleshy one, and Antar commends you your dedication. But this is not your place.’
Felix looked over his shoulder at the tomb-prince. Antar’s finery and armour was torn and ragged from battle, and his khopesh was broken. His face mask had been lost and the bare, grinning skull beneath exposed, its eye sockets glowing. The tomb-prince had fought his way across the plaza to reach Felix’s side. ‘Some of them made it out,’ Antar said, hefting Felix by his chain shirt. ‘You bought them time, and now Antar shall return the favour in his own inimitable fashion, for the death of an honourable man is not pleasing to the Favoured Son of Heaven.’
‘What are you–’ Felix began, as Antar hoisted him up one-handed and then flung him into the air like a rock from a catapult. Felix screamed in surprise as he tumbled upwards. His ascent was halted by the talons of the carrion, which closed about him as it swooped past, and arced upwards over the city.
‘Ha, there you are, manling! Who told you that you could get out of your oath that easily, eh?’ Gotrek’s voice echoed down from above.
‘Are you coming, O Yapping Dog of Mahrak?’ Zabbai called out, from the bird’s back.
‘What? Leave? When there are enemies yet standing?’ Antar shouted up at her, slapping aside a zombie with his broken khopesh. ‘Go! Antar, Majestic Warrior of the Eternal Court, has met his obligation to the queen of Lybaras, and it is his pleasure to hold back the enemy until his mighty heart beats its last or he becomes otherwise bored!’ Antar jabbed his blade up at them in a gesture of farewell. Then, with a croak of laughter, he spun to face his enemies as they encircled him.
Felix’s last glimpse of the tomb-prince was of the banshee and the remaining vampires closing in on him, and Antar awaiting them with regal disdain, his broken sword extended. Then the carrion was winging its way over the city, back towards Lybaras. As Felix hung in the undead bird’s talons, he caught sight of men and women hurrying through the outer tangle of the ruin, making their way to freedom. Antar had been right. Some of them had escaped. Felix sagged, the tension draining from him.
Maybe it wasn’t all for nothing after all. Despite this thought, the images the banshee had forced into his mind clung to the underside of his thoughts tenaciously. Death and damnation – was that really what awaited him and Gotrek?
From overhead, he heard Gotrek’s voice. ‘Get this buzzard moving, woman – I have a doom to claim!’
Chapter 20
‘Your buzzard is coming apart at the pinfeathers, woman,’ Gotrek said, some time later. He lifted up a hand to let the loose sand and rotting feathers be caught by the wind. ‘Typical shoddy human craftsmanship,’ the dwarf grunted.
‘It’s a magic zombie bird, Gotrek,’ Felix said. The Slayer had been even more curt than usual since he’d hauled Felix up onto the bird’s back out of its talons. Whether he was angry because Felix had nearly got himself killed, or because Zabbai had prevented him from joining Felix in his suicidal attempt to save the slaves, Felix couldn’t tell.
‘Typical shoddy human sorcery, then,’ Gotrek said.
‘The spell only lasts so long – enough to get us close, but not to the city itself. When Ptra’s sun-barge sets sail the spell will unravel, and we had best have landed by then,’ Zabbai said. The carrion’s powerful wings beat against the air, and the undead vulture squawked in what Felix suspected was either agreement or frustration, perhaps both. The night was fast fading, and the bird was losing altitude. He could feel its bones grind an
d shift beneath him, and a trail of dust and sand marked the air behind it. It was coming apart, and he felt a queasy tingle in the pit of his stomach as he considered what might happen should it continue before they could land.
They’d ridden the bird for almost a day and a night, and covered more ground than Felix thought possible. The dead truly did travel fast. They’d left the jungle behind swiftly enough, but there was a trackless expanse of desert between them and Lybaras. The thought was a gloomy one, especially given how their numbers had shrunk since they’d set out. Felix thought of Antar, wielding his khopesh against the numberless dead. Antar had made a rapid transition from enemy to ally over their short journey. Then, for a being that regarded war as a game, perhaps it wasn’t as strange as all that. He almost missed the bellicose tomb-prince.
‘These birds used to descend in flocks of such size that they would blot out the sun, and provide us shade to fight beneath,’ Zabbai said. ‘It was said that they served Ualatp, god of scavengers, and took the souls of newly slain warriors into the sky to fight endless battles against the daemons that prowled there.’
‘This Ualatp sounds quite practical, for a human god,’ Gotrek said.
‘That’s not quite the word I’d use,’ Felix said. He felt slightly sick, and not just from the bird’s charnel stink. He’d never been the best with heights, though he found himself forced to deal with them often enough. But riding on the back of an overgrown zombie buzzard was a far cry from a dwarf gyrocopter or an airship.
He flexed his hand. The serpent bracelet felt heavy on his wrist and forearm. He hoped it was only his imagination, but he thought he felt the golden coils drawing tight about his wrist. There was only a day left before its fangs sank into his flesh. He rubbed it, and wondered what it would feel like, if worse came to worst. He’d been poisoned before. More than once, in fact; one of the hazards of being Gotrek’s constant companion was that the inevitable attempts to murder the Slayer sometimes spilled over onto him. The incident in Tobaro with the swarm of blow-gun wielding, black-clad skaven came to mind. Felix shuddered. That night had been unpleasant all round. He pushed aside his most persistent memory of that night – Gotrek battling that lanky skaven that had called itself ‘Deathmaster’ on the roof of the temple of Handrich in the pouring rain – and tried to concentrate on more immediate matters.
The Serpent Queen Page 28
