Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned

by David Guymer

  ‘What could possibly make this day worse?’

  Something hard and unkind prodded one of many bruises on his back. He shifted around, a blur of pinks, reds and dreary stone-greys swimming into slow focus.

  He wished they had not.

  The most loathsome mutant Felix had ever seen greeted his look of disgust with a scowl. He focused on the mutant’s hand and on the long metallic object with which it had summoned his attention. It was Felix’s sword. He looked up into the mutant’s face and smiled ruefully.

  ‘Of course.’

  The courtyard that adjoined the eastern side of the bridge was a charred waste, the scar of flame upon all that had not collapsed to ash. The townhouses across the cobbles were black-walled ruins. The tavern overlooking the river was a shell, its former purpose discernible only by the cellar into which the remainder had collapsed. And neither had the bridge itself been spared. The proud grey stone was scabbed black, as though recently savaged by a beast’s claws.

  It could not have been so recent. And yet…

  Flakes of black snow swirled gracefully from the charcoal sky.

  Rudi looked up. There was no sensation of cold as they flecked his face. He brushed them off, crumbling the grimy flakes between thumb and forefinger. The black was speckled with green, motes guttering like wicked stars in a night sky. Rudi cleaned his hand on his borrowed red cloak, then hauled it up over his head to shield it from the strange snow. The green was wyrdstone, the Chaos rock, and a man did not live with the legacy of the Pious in his veins without learning its power to corrupt.

  It was said that even a touch could drive a man to mutation and madness.

  Sheltering hands and face beneath his cloak, Rudi licked his lips warily. The air was furnace dry. Even the river flopped muddily downhill. Rudi’s eyes narrowed. From the other side it had been swollen.

  Voices whispered between the drifting darkness, memories at once familiar and strange. He sought out the pewter hammer that hung at his breast. He caressed it, murmured a half-remembered canticle and moved deeper into the courtyard.

  ‘Felix!’ he hissed.

  He flinched as soon as the words left his parched lips. There was something disturbing in this black snow that made him wish to go unnoticed.

  But he had seen Felix cross. The man had to be here somewhere.

  Even as that thought arose, it brought the certainty that this place was not as deserted as it seemed. Holding still, he heard breaths punctuate the murmuring wind. Soft treads caused the ashen ground to whisper. He released his talisman and slid his hand down to the bloodied sword at his belt.

  He was not alone. Something had followed him from the mists.

  Felix gave what he hoped was a cooperative-sounding grunt as a scruffy hunchback in tarnished plate pushed his face into the shingle and patted his boots and breeches for concealed weapons. Felix tried not to cringe from the mutant’s touch. He cursed himself for forgetting about there being warpstone-twisted abominations still at large in the City of the Damned. Felix had had enough first-hand experience of mutant settlements to know that there was more than a grain of truth to rumours of cannibalism and Chaos worship. But his ill-feeling was about more than that, more even than the gelid feel of the man’s fingers.

  It felt like he was being touched by a wraith.

  He risked a look up, blinking grit from his eyes. Two-score bulky mutant warriors watched him from the shingle just upriver. They were garbed in a motley assortment of coloured cloaks and partially corroded armour of copper, bronze, and tin. They were burdened with booty and appeared in good spirits. Each was heavily armed, but none had troubled themselves to bring said weapons to bear on Felix’s account.

  He could not explain it, but just looking at them was disturbing. Their eyes were shadowed, their voices tinny. As if they were not truly there at all. Felix shivered.

  The unease was the same as he had felt in the presence of the Damned.

  ‘Nothing on him.’

  The hunchback ground his face into the grit, then stepped back to collect the spear it had left just out of Felix’s reach.

  ‘Are you mindlesh, outshider?’

  The mutant that bore Felix’s sword was a sight to send hardened witch-finders early to bed. It was obscenely side-heavy, the musculature on its right side swollen out of all proportion to its left. No doubt this had something to do with the immense black crab-claw that rested its barbed tip in the shingle. But the final flourish of cruelty, as though quite literally to rub the poor horror’s face in the wreck of its human form, was a hairy foot-long spike that erupted from the base of its neck to flatten its face against that swollen right shoulder. The mutant slurped and leaned closer, prodding Felix with the tip of his sword.

  ‘Do you undershtand what I shay, outshider?’

  The mutant’s face was squashed against its shoulder, like a rotten potato from the bottom of a sack. Feature’s converged on the opposite side such that both eyes were stacked upon one side of its nose and white lips ran like scar tissue behind the left ear.

  Felix stared dumbly.

  ‘Mindlesh all right. Take him.’

  Two more warriors with far too much muscle to be borne of nature downed weapons and split from the watching group. One of them was wearing a black cloak that had an arrow hole through the collar and alchemical burns on the inner lining. The mutant smelled like a pickled rat. Each hooked one of Felix’s arms in theirs and hauled him off the sand. Felix groaned. His flesh crawled from where the mutants gripped. His head span from Shallya knew what.

  His next thought came to him with such unexpectedness that it made him start. The heavies tightened their grip, fearing he was about to make a fight of it. There had been a battle, he remembered. The skaven had been ambushed as they had crossed the mists.

  Did that mean that while their slayers made off with burned rags and rusted knives, their precious bones were lying untended?

  Felix struggled against the heavies’ grip, but their arms were like beef hocks.

  ‘I have to go back.’

  The mutant’s vertical slit of a mouth widened with surprise.

  ‘Please,’ said Felix, pulling on the mutants’ arms. ‘It’s more important than you can imagine.’

  ‘You are hasty, Ologul. As always.’

  The large mutant spared Felix a glare, then ground aside to admit a slender, white-haired man. The heavies did not release their grip, and Felix felt rather like a market fowl as the newcomer looked him over. Felix studied him in kind.

  Neither the patchiness of his black Sudenland wool cloak nor the way that brocade splayed from cuffs and collar like straw from a scarecrow’s sleeves could hide the richness of his attire. The former province of Sudenland produced the finest droves, and that brocade was pure silver. He looked like one of the down-at-heel noblemen that frequented the quayside taverns of Nuln, but the tarnished brooches and amulets about his neck gave a conflicting impression, like something between a burgher and a witch doctor.

  ‘His wits are his own, I believe.’

  ‘Then he playsh the mindlesh to trick ush. The time hash come, Morschurle.’

  Felix could not think of a word to say. Both mutants spoke in heavily accented Sylvanian, but their diction was archaically clipped. They reminded Felix of the more eccentric players who immersed themselves a little too heavily in Detlef Sierck melodramas of misted moors and haunted castles. And both bore a shadow that haunted their brows. Even the squat power of the big brute, Ologul, was chillingly hollow.

  ‘Shpeak then, outshider,’ said Ologul. ‘When doesh Albrecht von Kuber march?’

  Albrecht von Kuber?

  Felix’s experiences had left him dazed, but he was certain the baron was named Götz. He vaguely recalled the first von Kuber being named Albrecht.

  Eyes locked on Felix’s, the man named Morschurle opened his palm flat. He held it a moment until Ologul grunted and placed Felix’s sword in his master’s hand. Morschurle gave an empty smile, and pass
ed the sword across his stare.

  ‘A fine blade,’ he conceded, turning it over in his hands. The rune-sharp steel reflected the sky’s aurora as though it were doused in pink fire. ‘These symbols now.’ Morschurle’s pale finger traced a series of runes, then nodded to Ologul whose pincer clipped the ground like the beak of a starving bird. ‘We are devout men, though He tests us, but have few friends amongst those bearing weapons of the Templar orders.’

  Drool snarled from Ologul’s lips and down his neck. Felix tried to lift his hands in a gesture of peace, but both arms were still held tight. Sigmar was going to get him killed without even trying.

  ‘Yes, the sword once belonged to a holy order, but I came upon it in the ruins of the Worlds Edge Mountains. I assure you that Sigmar and I are not on speaking terms.’

  Ologul thumped his pincer to the sand. ‘If not to deshtroy ush then why are you here?’

  ‘I came with a friend.’ Felix hesitated before choosing to omit the part about the search for von Kuber. He doubted that anyone dubbed Kreuzfahrer by the men of Ostermark would find favour with the denizens of the City of the Damned. ‘We were hunting a beast. A giant skaven that loots from the dead.’

  Some of the mutants exchanged glances. Ologul slurped knowingly.

  ‘Thish monshter, we know. We watched the animal crossh, but it did not return.’

  ‘It… It fell,’ Felix mumbled. ‘And my friend fell with it.’

  There was a murmuring at that.

  ‘The Beasht is a vile animal,’ said Ologul. ‘We have thought it dead many timesh.’

  ‘Trust me, I saw it fall; an axe through its heart and then sunk to the river’s bottom.’

  ‘Trust,’ said Morschurle. He handed the sword back to Ologul, and drew one of the muddy-brown talismans from his neck. He pressed it into his palm, binding it loosely into his fist with the cord. ‘Darkness consumes our home from within, while the Pious comes from without to burn the taint back. We caught between are short on trust.’

  Felix blinked. The Pious?

  Surely he misheard.

  ‘You say you are not a scout of Sigmarshafen,’ Morschurle continued. A dark glow was beginning to seep through the fingers clenched around his talisman. His amethyst eyes did not waver from Felix. ‘Tell me something else that is true. Tell me your name, outsider.’

  Felix regarded the man with suspicion. He was clearly some manner of sorcerer. It was likely the dark power constrained within those amulets that was the source of Felix’s disquiet. Felix scanned the man’s robes and the sigils hung from his neck to identify the school of magic to which he belonged. He saw none, which only deepened his apprehension. Since Emperor Magnus established the Colleges of Magic, it had been law for their members to be identifiable, to the laity and to each other.

  A firm pressure from the mutant with his left arm came as a ready reminder that he had little choice but to cooperate.

  ‘My name is Felix Jaeger,’ he replied and, for reasons he did not understand, except perhaps his oathsworn duty that his companion be remembered, he added. ‘And the hero that slew the Beast was named Gotrek Gurnisson.’

  ‘A dwarf?’ said Morschurle, eyebrow arching yet higher.

  ‘Alwaysh do right by dwarfsh,’ Ologul rumbled.

  The mutant warriors nodded pious accord. Felix stared at them in astonishment. He had always been sympathetic to the plight of the cursed degenerates that the witch-finders forced into the shadows. Despite the pronouncements of the priests, mutation struck the pious and the perfidious equally. But he was amazed that, after all they had suffered, these men would still pay heed to the commandments of Sigmar.

  Morschurle opened his fist to let the bound talisman spool down. It was slick with blood, rivulets streaming down the cord from his cut palm.

  ‘Dhar always requires sacrifice,’ the man explained, eyes rolling to the boiling sky. ‘Lies are the get of darkness and the dark wind is powerful here.’ The man snatched the hanging pendant from the air and, shaking his head, nodded towards Ologul. ‘There are no lies in him. Give him his sword.’

  ‘My lord reeve–’

  ‘He is not our enemy. Return him his weapon.’

  Chastened but still grumbling, Ologul angled himself to his slimmer human side to present Felix his weapon. He held it out, blade down. The heavies let go of Felix’s arms. He teased some life into his fingers, taking his sword with a nod of thanks. He took pains to sheathe it as unthreateningly as he could, then turned to Morschurle.

  ‘The ratmen took something from the other side,’ he said. ‘I have to go back for it. I’ll not let my companions have fallen for nothing.’

  Morschurle grinned broadly, a disturbing gesture that caused shadow to stream from the corners of his eyes to his lips. Felix shuddered as Morschurle looked away, to the knot of warriors upriver.

  ‘You can come out, Mori. It’s safe.’

  A young girl, no more than ten years old, shyly edged out between the warriors legs. They stuck protectively to her, and she to them. Her skin was inhumanly pale, almost translucent, and he did not think he had ever seen hair that cold a silver, nor eyes so starkly purple. What struck Felix most unsettling was the absence of the smoky second skin these others wore. She shone like a lantern’s glow in deep fog.

  With a fearful look at Felix, she ran to Morschurle’s side, bent backwards against the bulging black sack in her hands. She dropped it at his feet, then hid beneath the man’s arm. She watched Felix from hiding. Morschurle ruffled the young girl’s hair, smiling as she wriggled free and ran down the shingles to splash into the shallows.

  Letting the girl run, confident in the watchful guardianship of two-score warriors, Morschurle crouched beside the sack and untied it. It fell open to reveal hundreds of fragments of human bone. He was not smiling now. His face was long and serious, almost dangerously smooth.

  ‘There were more,’ Felix mumbled. ‘A lot more.’

  ‘None of consequence. Let the vermin recover them.’ His fingertips ran the top layer of fragments. He glanced up to watch the girl play, a fleeting smile, then snapped his fingers for the attention of Ologul. ‘Bring the man with us to Die Körnung. Put him with the other.’

  Felix’s mouth framed a question, only for a shove in the back from the spear-armed hunchback to make him stumble forwards and lose his words.

  Other?

  Was it possible they had found Gotrek, stricken witless as Felix had been?

  Morschurle had not stirred. He stood with open hands before the bone sack, as a winter traveller would extend his palms to a fire.

  ‘The skaven will return for these,’ Felix warned. ‘I’ve crossed them more than once now, and they aren’t going to give up lightly.’

  Morschurle’s open hands clenched into fists and, stiffly, he rose, turning to the waterside where the girl, Mori, waded up to her ankles in sparkling pink water. ‘Come daughter, the wardens will worry if we are much later.’

  The girl kicked her foot through the water as though she had not heard.

  ‘Morzanna!’ the man barked. ‘Now.’

  The toil of daemon engines shook the City of the Damned to its pearlescent heart. Caged by ribs of striated stone, the rumbles passed through solid rock to bring a trickling of dust from the pristine walls of Sigmar’s great temple. Morzanna eyed the silver likeness of Ghal-maraz that was suspended from the ceiling. It rattled at its tarnished fittings, like a bloodhound at its chain.

  Unlike the rest of the city, permitted to linger on in dejection and decay, the temple had received the care due a royal hostage. The roundel windows had been painstakingly pieced together and reset, the floors swept, the marble altar wiped clean after every bloody sacrilege. Banners bearing the twin-tailed comet hung between the windows. The breeze from the imperfectly restored stained glass ruffled the weighted fabric.

  Morzanna advanced down the central aisle, footsteps summoning a forlorn echo, the fluting banners bringing a smirk to her dark lips. Sigmar had not been the fir
st man to ascend the road to godhood. Nor had he been the first to appropriate that most ancient and destructive of portents, the comet, as his herald.

  Shaking her head as she rounded the altar, Morzanna opened the darkwood portal to the crypts. Warplight and pink witchfire glowed in the depths of the spiral stair, stalking flighty shadows across the rough stone walls. One hand to the outer curve, she began her descent. The roar and thunder of fevered excavations built to a din as Morzanna emerged from the stair and into the crypts. Sharp hoots and strange growls echoed through the hallways. Dust streamed from the walls.

  Deep into the roots of the acropolis, this complex had been sunk. None, living or Damned, knew how deep they plumbed, nor how extensively they spread. And none but a soulless few could say with confidence what ancient devilry remained imprisoned there. But Morzanna was one, and the Dark Master was close enough to freedom for her to taste his power in the air. Pink fire washed across the ceiling, spontaneous and incandescent, burning like lit spirits in a crystal glass. Her platinum hair took on a bluish shine as it absorbed the static charge.

  The forces of change were potent here, and only where the physical plane bled so freely into the Realm of Chaos could abominations of the kind she now passed exist.

  Hellish fusions of daemon and machine howled, attacking the walls with the immortal fury bound within their iron frames. Dark runes pulsed from their riveted cores. The massive weight of chain slaving them to their workface looked barely sufficient. Effervescent creatures burst cackling into the material, then vanished but for the echo of their laughter, somehow audible over the noise. A ratman overseer lashed his whip across a gang of miserable grotesques. They had been men once. Their bones were stretched by warpstone-sorcery, skin pulled taut. Third, fourth and then fifth arms had been formed from their torsos, grafted to hammers, shovels, picks and to revving drills that glowed dark with warplight and vented a choking smog as they shrieked into the rock face. The overseer spun about with a snarl, chittering curses in its verminous tongue as it felt for some tool that had just disappeared from its belt. Giggling through the folds of the immaterium, the childish horrors scattered, revelling in the entropic rapture of Chaos.