Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned

by David Guymer

  Flames licked at buildings long since burned. The fires were transparent. Felix could see the damaged brickwork beneath. Reason insisted this could not be real, but the blistering of his face urged otherwise. Smoky effigies of men shimmered, caged behind bars of flame. From many hidden mouths there came a scream, obscured by time and darkness, conjoined into a single everlasting plea. With both hands, Felix tried to cover both face and ears and run. Stripped of emotion, of self, the unending cry was as hollow as the vaporous forms of the Damned.

  Making a sideways dart across the street, Felix flung himself into the relative calm of an alley. It was a little cooler and the smoke was thinner, and he was able to take his sleeve from his face. He coughed and tried to get his bearings. Smoke and fog made it impossible to see, leaving only his own flawed mental map with which to work. He was as certain as he could be that he was still heading east. With a frown, he looked down at his boots.

  And found himself gazing into the face of a corpse.

  Felix swallowed the cry before it was halfway to his lips. It was another flagellant. The man sat upright against the alley wall. One side of his body was mangled and bloodied, a messy puncture beneath the arm. Fresh blood sprinkled the ground and the corner wall at his back was riddled with holes, like it had been gnawed on by rats. Felix could not look away. It was only that his eyes had never left the man that he was able to convince himself that he had not just seen the head roll around to face him. Ash trickled from its hair. Its eyes were blank and yet somehow accusing.

  No.

  It was simply the way the body was positioned. It had always been facing Felix’s way.

  Heart stamping into the roof of his stomach, he left the body and continued on. More red droplets led deeper into the alley. And the ash looked scuffed. The flagellants had come this way.

  Coughing into his sleeve, Felix followed the trail of blood.

  Stricken still with horror, Rudi watched from the small garret window as the entire city crackled into flame. The fire was silver-tinged black and partially transparent, exposing the ruined piles over which they raged.

  ‘This can’t be real,’ he whispered under his breath, clutching the arms beneath his borrowed red cloak and staring blankly into the fire.

  He could feel the heat closing in, the wind hot and laden with ash. The skin of his face drew back to the bone before the rising heat. And it was real enough to the thousands of voices that screamed from every quarter as one. Rudi wondered if one of those interwoven cries belonged to Felix, or to Nikolaus.

  In terror, he watched the flames, so reminiscent of those he saw every night in his dreams since he had been small. His anger at being left behind faded, but rather than relief it was guilt that knotted his guts around his heart.

  Again, his cowardice spared him over better men.

  ‘Get inside.’

  The wolf-cloaked mercenary set a hand on his shoulder. Rudi had been so mesmerised that he had not noticed the Middenlander’s approach. The man’s eyes were shaded, more so than simple darkness could account for. And something in his touch made Rudi shiver.

  Rudi nodded all the same. ‘Nothing but evil out here.’

  Smoke stung Felix’s eyes, burned the hairs inside his nose and brought blisters to the roof of his tongue. Crouching beneath the layer of smog, Felix gave the corpse he had found a shake. It was a futile gesture. The big flagellant looked as if he had been crushed by a giant and then tossed at the wall. The alley outside was a mess of brick, silvery flames sparkling from the rubble like weeds. The destruction was recent and Felix could see fresh blood on the bricks. There had been a fight here, but this flagellant was the only body. He gave the corpse another hopeful shake, but it gave no answer. He shuddered.

  He should probably be grateful for that fact.

  He returned to the alley, trying to get some sense of where the other flagellants might have gone. Smoke and ruin made a difficult task harder. It was possible they had triumphed and moved on, but somehow Felix doubted it. There were no abandoned rags, no alchemical burns on the bricks. If Gotrek and the others had been here when this flagellant fell then it must have all been over quickly. An ambush, perhaps? With no better options, and with the soles of his boots baking over the hot bricks, Felix headed towards the muggy red glow in the sky that he recalled as east.

  The wall he passed through looked like it had been demolished by a blast of dragonfire. To left and right, through broken partitions, the tenement crawled with flames. Shimmering simulacra wavered through the smoke, screaming with an inhuman unity of purpose and pain. They saw him. Their regard made his flesh hot and his eyes dry and, forging through the heat, Felix burst coughing onto a wide street on the other side.

  Would this happen every day until the end of days, he wondered? Were these damned souls condemned to burn for eternity? How did the gods allow it?

  Felix drew in a ragged breath and stayed flat.

  Down the street to his left, black cloaks almost invisible in the smoke, a pack of shadow-creatures clustered over a rooftop. The building on which they roosted had been spared the flames, shaded from the rising sun in the lee of the nearby bell tower. The creatures gabbled nervously, twitching back from the fires that licked the edges of their sanctuary. Felix looked past them. Smoke made even the bell tower ethereal, but he could see what looked like a market, squared by high-sided buildings of bruised stone.

  And beyond that, the bridge.

  He saw figures running through the murk towards it, thought he heard avian shrieks above the undying cries of the Damned. That was where the Beast was headed.

  Where he would find Gotrek.

  The monster had stationed the creatures on this rooftop as a rearguard. Felix lay still, weighing his options and finding them all heavier than he cared for. The abilities of these creatures were inhuman in almost every way that Felix had yet had cause to judge. He doubted he could sneak by them undetected. He questioned even more his chances in a straight fight.

  As Felix considered, the sun slid infinitesimally through the thick sky, alighting on the corner of the creatures’ rooftop. The tiling burst into sudden flame as though doused in pitch and lit. The creatures shrieked and scuttled back. Something had them terrified more than mere flame, for there was a human figure staked within the blaze. Felix covered his mouth to stifle a moan, cold dread dousing the hot blisters in his palms. The form was that of a woman, but indistinct, wavering with a silvery halo within the smoke. Hands tied behind her back, her sepulchral gown twisted as she writhed. Her silken hair blazed like tapers, crowned by a crackling laurel of mistletoe. The woman turned her smoky, faceless gaze up the slope of the roof. The creatures clutched each other and screamed, packing themselves into the shadow of the bell tower.

  The rope binding the apparition to the stake burned through and she fell forward.

  Out of the fire.

  The bone-white brooch of a dove upon the woman’s robes was scratched and dark. Felix’s belly filled with ice. A sister from the sanatorium.

  She had followed him.

  ‘Shallya have mercy…’

  Nils’s footfalls brought a nervous creak from the floorboards. They were merely old. There was no sign of the fire damage that ruined most of the city. Rudi turned from the window and slid down the plaster wall. Hopefully that meant the ghost-fire would spare them too.

  The four Middenlanders – Nils and the cloaked man, Marten, included – that had survived the attack on the sanatorium sat around or, in the case of Nils, paced. The garret was just barely sufficient to accommodate them all. There was one narrow window just within arm’s reach of a now burning rooftop below, one door onto a broken staircase. In other words, no clear way out. The ceiling was low and sloped down towards the window. The walls leaned in close to the musk of surrender. The men watched him, and they watched each other. And they watched the walls. Shadows trickled down the plaster, crack to peeling crack.

  Rudi gave a start as Marten swept out his cloak and sa
t down beside him. The man did not say anything. With the dreamlike motions of a sleepwalker he picked up his crossbow, inserted a bolt into the track, and slowly started to wind it. The rhythmic crank then strain sounded loudly above the whispered prayers.

  ‘Put it down,’ Nils snarled. If Marten heard, he ignored him. Nils just kept on pacing.

  ‘Now what do we do?’ one of the mercenaries whispered through clenched teeth. He was sweating in the heat. It was as if they sat above a stove.

  ‘We’re damned,’ Marten murmured, all his attention on his crossbow.

  ‘Shut up, Marten,’ Nils growled. ‘And I told you to put that thing down. Think you’re going to shoot the dead?’

  ‘What else?’ said Marten without looking up.

  With a click like a Bretonnian guillotine, Marten’s crossbow cranked to its limit. A shadow flickered across his eyes, a faint silver halo playing through the hairs of his white-wolf cloak.

  ‘Captain.’

  Nils exploded, rounding on the seated man. ‘I said shut u–’

  Point blank, the bolt opened Nils’s ribs like a crowbar through a wooden chest, smacking his body back and skewering it to the wall. He was dead in a second. The mercenary’s body slumped forward against the iron bolt. Too numb to do anything but watch, Rudi watched the man’s eyes go cloudy. As if the smoke had taken his face.

  ‘Ulric’s teeth!’ roared one of the mercenaries, ripping his sword from its scabbard as he rose.

  The garret was too tight to swing a punch, much less a sword, and the blade lashed across the face of his still-seated comrade. Flesh and muscle split from nose to ear tip and the man fell, screaming, blood gushing from his jaw to pool with that spreading from Nils’s feet.

  ‘It was a gift, captain,’ Marten murmured in a voice that was clearly not his own. ‘You brought me here to be damned.’

  The swordsman fell on him with a howl, hacking into his haunted friend as if the man were just meat. Marten made no effort to defend himself, the hewing longsword scattering blood to the walls like holy water. He did not scream. It was as if he were mindless.

  It was as if he was already dead.

  The final Middenlander was still yowling, pawing at the bloody flap hanging across his jaw as he ran stooped across the garret, chasing his errant blade across the floorboards before coming up to tackle the swordsman from behind. The two men slammed into the wall by the window in a shower of plaster, then slapped into the ruin of Marten’s remains and rolled. Bloody as newborn babes they grappled for the sword. More voices than just their own screamed for murder.

  Rudi screamed, drawing his weapons, and retreated into a corner. Whispers in his mind urged him to join in, to finish them both and flee, to escape this city with his soul. Beneath the window beside him, a shadowy figure was beginning to pull itself from Marten’s body. A wolf cloak billowed like smoke. Unconscious of the mewling sound that escaped his lips, Rudi pressed himself into the wall and away from the window. It brought him closer to the door.

  His hands tightened around his weapons as he stared at the wrestling Middenlanders. And he relented to the voices’ urgings.

  The Damned could take them.

  They would not have him.

  Cinders sparkled black and not at all as they tacked to the wind, like burning cutters sailing from the city and across the river’s black calm into the shiftless fog. In places the motes swirled, like cannibal fireflies circling the weakest of their own. Occasionally one fell, plummeting like a stone to sizzle in the water or to burn, lost, alone and undying upon the algal weave that matted the river wall. Hurrlk sniffed at the changing air, heat gnawing through his strata of bandages and grime. Somewhere on the water, a bell tolled, its voice muffled by fog. Hurrlk shuffled, lips drawing muscle by uncertain muscle into a mad grin.

  Bells for the dead.

  In the street behind him, two-score of his scavengers cowered from the veiled glare of sunrise. They buried their heads in the hoods, hunching their shoulders beneath the grisly weight of plunder. The scent of panic they exuded excited something he had long forgotten. It was a thrill of danger, the knowledge that even the Damned could be afraid. He rounded on his minions, whip licking the air with a doubled crack to give voice to his command.

  Move.

  Those to the fore flinched, then broke cover. The rest were sharp on their tail. Hurrlk offered another lash to encourage them towards the bridge. The dead were rising, and even he would not choose to linger.

  There were fates worse than death, and countless degrees of damnation.

  The last from the alley herded a coffle of sinewy mortals onto the quay ahead of them. They were bound together through wrists and ankles by a single, oily length of cord. Some were mindless, others drugged, and they stumbled witlessly regardless of the desperation with which their herders applied the rod. Hurrlk was tempted to leave them behind, but the commandments of the Dark Master were clear.

  He would have fresh souls. And somehow, that struck Hurrlk as good.

  One of the captives was beginning to stir. Its axe, bolted to its bracer by a length of chain, trailed noisily over the flagstones. A herder lay into the muscular animal with a smooth-headed mace until it subsided. Reeling in his whip, Hurrlk stuck out his tongue for a taste of its barbed end. His accursed physiognomy was as resilient as a corpse, but he recalled the taste of poison, and the effect those flavours induced in softer flesh. His taste buds sang out the sapor of burned caster and lemon peel. He growled. The flame-fur was a fragile mortal, but he had the metabolism of a river troll.

  The voices had been wrong. He could not be stopped.

  The bells he had thought imagined grew louder as he pounded the circuit of the river wall towards the bridge. Their mournful song carried across the water. Slowly accreting a critical mass of interest, Hurrlk diverted his attention to the river. An outline of claws, spines and ridges rippled in shadow. It was growing larger and more defined as it cleared the fog and, as he watched, a low-sided river smack clove through the hanging cloud, yawing sprits trailing mist as it came. A single white sail billowed in the burning wind, dragging its course leeward and its starboard hull across his vision. Hurrlk made out the emblem outlined in silver on its prow. A black hand, fingers crowned with silver claws. The ship’s bell clanged as the boat rocked. Mutant men, slack-jawed and blank-eyed, packed the decking. Occasionally, one would slip over the rails and plummet, nothing but the resistance of thin air inducing limbs to flail before they punched the river surface in a great spume of dark water.

  The craft veered inexorably towards the bridge. It was not slowing down. It was crewed by the mindless. With a tremendous howl of splintering wood, it crashed into the bridge’s wing wall, the aft piling over its stricken stern as though a daemonic hand drove it to its destruction. The shell crumpled, showering the quay with wedges of planking, scraps of white flax and bloodied, twisted bodies.

  Not all of the bodies were still.

  A low moan drifted up from the wreckage. A blubbery hand, unguided by conscious will, emerged from beneath a pile of wood. With a groan the mutant began to dig itself free. Others followed, mindless as the living damned.

  Hurrlk regarded the train of captives, then hammered his whip-bound fist towards the wreckage in their path.

  Take them.

  Stowing blades and slings in favour of cudgels, his minions gave an angry squeal and charged forward to obey. The mindless were not dead, but misplaced. The Master would have the bones of his gloried champion and the Damned, living or dead, would heed his will. The Master would rise.

  And then Hurrlk could finally be at peace.

  The guttering along the rooftop rippled with flame, the fires eating inch by inch into the tiling as the sun’s gaze burned through fog and shadow. Silvery gown haloed in fire, the dread sister stepped free of the flames and into the shadows. The tiles cracked beneath her charred feet. She extended a hand as if to tender mercy. Black smoke leeched from her sleeve.

  Shrieking t
error, the huddling scavengers scattered, biting at each other’s arms in their haste to flee. Cloaks flapping in the fiery updraft, they leapt for the street. One took an elbow to the jaw and staggered back. Only its wavering tail and preternatural balance kept it from falling. The apparition stepped in behind it and wrapped both arms about its chest. The creature screamed as though branded, wriggling around to gnash its fangs through the smoky gauze of the woman’s face. Smoke billowed through its jaws, achieving nothing. It howled, the shade offering a soothing whisper as both bodies ignited into silver-black flame.

  Felix found his hand across his mouth, fearful that he was going to be sick. The scavenger’s wail of torment persisted even as the fire took on a greenish tinge and the body dispersed to smoke in the phantom’s arms. The dread sister met his eyes, smoke twisting across her face into the grim semblance of a smile. And then she was gone. Only the greenish plume of smoke rising above the flames suggested that his mind had not conjured the whole episode. Another shriek sounded from deeper down the street. There was a flash of silver within the smoke that burned down to green, a scattering of screams that swiftly grew distant. Felix could not believe his luck – if that was what he dared to call it.

  The shade had just cleared his path to the bridge.

  Without stopping to think why, or if the spirit had simply been drawn to the scavengers greater numbers, Felix firmed his grip on his sword, pressed the sleeve of his left hand to his face, and ran.

  The street opened onto the market square and he paused for a frantic look around. The bell tower that cast its shade to the west was part of a square block of stone buildings. They were stout, angular affairs that aped a dwarfish style which had not been fashionable for centuries. But dwarfish style did not imply dwarfish make and columned frontages had crumbled amidst the rubble of roofs they had singularly failed to support. The flagstones burned sporadically, smoke rising from the cracks as though some hubristic baron had paved a caldera. On all sides, creatures screamed and scrambled for the rooftops. Others simply bolted across the burning square as fast their inhuman grace could take them.