Hammer and Bolter Issue Eighteen

by Christian Dunn

  Gilead returned, resolutely, to the antechamber and to his corporeal form, bracing himself for what he must do to escape his bindings, once and for all. The elf concentrated on his breathing again, and every new breath that he took came longer and deeper into his chest until he no longer needed to rely on filling his lungs to expand his chest, but only had to flex his muscles. In a matter of a few minutes all of the leather ropes and thongs had torn through under the pressure of his muscles under tension, and he was moving freely. Only the oiled rags resisted stretching and breaking, but once the leather and hemp ropes had been desiccated and destroyed, it was only a matter of a few minutes and a little extra exertion before the elf was able to shrug off the stinking rags.

  Gilead got to his feet and kicked the ropes, thongs and cloth bindings that had held him so rigidly into a corner out of the way. There was no getting away from the filth and stink of the ties that had bound him from his neck down, but he took a moment to straighten his clothes and to run his fingers through his hair, which appeared to be yellowing from the miasma of grease smoke in the atmosphere.

  Gilead’s weapons had been wrested from his hands as he’d fought to breathe beneath the dozens of writhing bodies that had pinned him to the floor of the great hall. He did not know or care how many of the ratmen had died, suffocated or crushed to death in their efforts to subdue him. He did care that they had managed to take his weapons from him. But, the Rat King was clearly a scavenger, a collector of objects, and elf-made blades must surely be as prized as many another artifact. It took Gilead a matter of moments to find his sword and dagger slotted into gaps in the throne chair. He was surprised that he had not seen them there sooner among the poorly made, rusting and broken pieces of weaponry that the chair was constructed from.

  As he passed the flat of the blade against his thumb, reassured by the cool, smooth steel, he heard the whisper of gusting breath between the words that the Rat King was still mouthing.

  ‘He has come, so he has. He has come. Now he has come, for come he has, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever.’

  The Rat King held his amulet in his left paw, and sniffed and twitched at the smell of burning flesh that emanated from it. He could not stop grinning, and nor could he stop repeating, over and over again, the words that meant so much to him.

  He clipped down the short spiral staircase to his little chamber, and pushed at the door with the end of the staff that he held in his right hand. He could not wait to cast his eyes down on the elf once more. He had almost been too excited to leave him, but he had no choice but to appoint new men at every level of his horde. So very many had died for him in capturing the Fell One, so many little sparks of life force had been gathered and added to his immortality. They had died for him, but now he had to be certain that they would die for him again, and that required a hierarchy. If his captains, lieutenants and leaders were not in place then the skaven would turn on each other in a free-for-all of devastating proportions. The Rat King’s power base, painstakingly built up over years, decades, would be lost forever if he had no one to keep the troops in line.

  He had spent most of the previous day watching fierce young skaven clawing and hacking each other to death in a series of gladiatorial bouts that ended with the last ratman standing being awarded the highest military honours and the best positions in the Rat King’s bodyguard.

  He was going to live forever, and the Fell One would keep.

  Gilead did not wait for the door to open to take up a belligerent stance with a weapon in each hand. He only wondered that the Rat King did not feel the need to bring a phalanx of fighting men with him.

  The door swung open, and the hunched figure of the Rat King appeared in front of Gilead. He was not armed, except for the long staff that he used as a walking aid, and for ceremonial appearances. It was a badge of office as much as it was a useful weapon, and he was certainly not wielding it in anger, or using it as a defence as he walked into the antechamber.

  Gilead could not see what was in the Rat King’s other hand; nevertheless, he knew that it was the reason he was in the skaven stronghold. He also knew that the Rat King believed the object could control the elf, and hold him in its thrall. Gilead knew no such thing. After all, had not the amulet given him visions of the Rat King’s little collection of artifacts? Had it not opened his eyes and ears, and warned him of the Rat King’s return?

  Gilead looked hard into the Rat King’s eyes, but heard only the words tripping inexorably from the foul creature’s maw.

  ‘You have come, so you have. You have come. Now you have come, for come you have, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever,’ it said.

  Gilead saw the little skip in the Rat King’s step as if it was attempting to dance a jig, and detected a greedy glint in its eyes as it looked down at its paw where it held the single perfect curl from the girl’s innocent head. The lock of hair bounced and jiggled as the ratman’s body jostled up and down to some spastic rhythm, all its own. He saw the wracked, battered and bruised corpse of the girl-child at the Rat King’s feet, and he saw the group of skaven fighting to be the first to taste her sweet flesh.

  His sword still drawn, Gilead held his stance, but could not move to attack the wretched creature that stood before him. The curl was gone from the Rat King’s paw, and in its place was a great handful of brilliant red and orange leaves, spilling over and falling to the ground. As they fell, they blackened and smoked with a noxious, greasy gas. The Rat King rubbed the leaves in his paw, and a rope of drool dripped from his canines and landed in the vegetation, the acidic spittle igniting the foliage in a flaring blue flame that made the leaves fizz and wither.

  Gilead wanted to save the leaves, rescue the magical plant, but he knew that it was long gone. He wanted to kill the Rat King, too, the monster who had wrought such evil madness upon the noble, the innocent and the magical. His vision shifted and rippled in front of him, and he stared deep into the Rat King’s eyes once more. The beast appeared to be laughing at him, its eyes wide and glistening, its teeth bared and its tongue dancing around in its maw.

  The Rat King let something drop from his paw. The object was suspended from a length of ribbon, apparently made from intricately plaited hair, and it swung and twisted slightly.

  Gilead could not tear his gaze from the Rat King’s eyes, but in those eyes he began to see flashes of bright light, sparks bobbing and dancing in the onyx orbs. The sparks coalesced into soft, white lights that seemed to fall on a complex tableau, a fully formed picture of some moment far in the future, appearing simultaneously in the Rat King’s marble-like eyeballs, in stereo.

  Gilead wanted nothing more than to kill the Rat King and to destroy the sparkling amulet that was sending shafts of light into the creature’s eyes. The elf did not know whether the amulet was in thrall to the rat or the rat was in thrall to the amulet, it mattered not, for both must perish.

  He thought to raise his sword, to lunge, to attack the Rat King, to best him before his loyal horde stormed the antechamber, for he knew, now, that the ratmen had gathered in vast numbers, beyond, in the great hall. He did not know how the knowledge of their gathering had eluded him, only that it had.

  The warrior elf knew that if he killed the Rat King and destroyed the amulet, the spell would be broken and the rat hordes would fall into desperate disarray. He would not have to fight his way out of the warrens and burrows below ground, for the ratmen would not choose to fight him and die if they could fight one another and live.

  Gilead had to kill but one creature. He looked deeper into the Rat King’s eyes, searching for the motivation to seize the moment and end whatever new tragedy was to come before it had begun.

  Gilead beheld the image of a vast, ancient ratman with sleek white fur, glistening teeth and gleaming eyes. The ratman was standing on a mountain of corpses of mesmerising proportions. This was the future if Gilead did not act to end the Rat King here a
nd now.

  ‘You have come, so you have. You have come. Now you have come, for come you have, I’ll live forever. I won’t live for now, not just for now. I’ll live forever,’ said the Rat King.

  SLAYER OF THE STORM GOD

  Nathan Long

  ‘Knock again, manling,’ said Gotrek Gurnisson.

  Felix Jaeger raised his fist and rapped on the door of Hans Euler’s Marienburg town house, louder this time.

  A window opened in the house next door and a maid in a winged cap leaned out.

  ‘Herr Euler is away, mein herren,’ she said. ‘You won’t find him home.’

  Felix would have been very surprised if he had, for he had stabbed Euler through the heart on the dark elves’ black ark more than a week ago, and the treacherous pirate was hopefully rotting at the bottom of the sea at the moment.

  He was about to tell the girl some lie about leaving a card, or delivering a letter, but then Gotrek turned towards her and her eyes went wide. She disappeared into the house with a squeak of fright.

  Felix didn’t blame her. Gotrek was a fearsome sight. He was a dwarf trollslayer, and ugly even for that ugly breed. Short, broad, and muscled like a jungle ape, his scarred, sun-browned flesh was covered in swirling blue tattoos, and a crest of flame-orange hair rose from his shaved head. Add to this an eye-patch, a face like a weathered boulder, and a rune-inscribed battle-axe in a fist the size of a baked ham, and one had a vision to make a hardened veteran blanch, let alone a Marienburg housemaid.

  Felix knocked again. Again there was no answer, but this time he thought he heard faint shufflings and thumpings inside.

  ‘Someone’s after your safe,’ said Gotrek. ‘Stand aside.’

  Felix stepped back and the slayer gripped the doorknob, twisting it with slow, inexorable strength. His biceps bulged. The lock mechanism squealed for a moment in pain, then, with a sharp snap, the knob spun loose and the door creaked open.

  There were more thumpings and rustlings from within. Felix drew his sword as Gotrek pushed the door wide and stepped into the dim interior. All was as he remembered it – or nearly all. The wood-paneled entry hall was still dark and stuffy, with a spiral staircase to the left and a door that opened into a richly furnished parlour at the back. The parlour’s bay window still had a big hole – now partially boarded up – where Gotrek and Felix had been shoved out of it during their last visit, and the small safe that Gotrek had thrown down the stairs was still half-sunk into the wooden floor where it had smashed through the polished planks.

  The dead butler sprawled on the floor was new, however, as were the chisels and hammers and files that were scattered in a puddle of water surrounding the safe. Felix turned away from the butler, whose brains were spilling out of the hole in his head. The thieves must have been hard men indeed to murder the man and then leave him where he fell as they went about their work.

  Gotrek snorted as he looked at the safe-cracking tools. ‘Cheap human chisels. No match for dwarf workmanship.’

  Felix rolled his eyes at this typical dwarfen bias, but had to admit that the safe showed hardly a mark. Beyond it, a trail of wet footprints led from the broken parlour window to the puddle and back again.

  ‘They’ve gone out the back,’ he said.

  He and Gotrek strode to the back window and looked out. Euler’s back wall dropped straight down to the canal they had plunged into when his bodyguards had thrown them out. If the housebreakers had gone out the window, they’d have had to have gone into the water, but Felix saw no swimmers, only circular ripples spreading out across the calm water.

  ‘Strange,’ said Felix.

  Gotrek shrugged. ‘At least they didn’t get into the safe,’ he said, and turned away, pulling a ring of keys from his belt pouch.

  Felix followed the slayer to the safe. They had stolen the keys from Euler on their previous visit, but their abrupt exit had prevented them from using them.

  The whole business had been distasteful. Not the sort of thing Felix normally cared to do. Euler had been in possession of some incriminating letter with which he’d attempted to blackmail Felix’s father, and the old man had asked Felix to get it back. If he hadn’t been on his death bed when he’d made the request, Felix would never have done it, but as it was he’d felt obliged, and had come reluctantly to Euler’s house to try to intimidate him into giving it up.

  Needless to say, it hadn’t gone well, and then the business with the dark elves had intervened, with Euler chasing them across the Sea of Chaos, thinking that they were on the trail of great treasure, and Felix had been forced to kill the pirate when he had turned on them in the bowels of the black ark.

  That nightmare was over, thankfully, and now he and Gotrek were back in Marienburg until the following morning, when they and their old friend Max Schreiber, a magister of the College of Light, and Claudia Pallenberger, a seeress from the Celestial College, would board a riverboat to Altdorf for the last leg of their journey home.

  Max and Claudia were staying the night at the house of an acquaintance of Max’s, and Gotrek would have been content to bide his time drinking at their inn, the Pelican’s Perch, but Felix still felt an obligation to recover the letter, even though Euler was dead and there was a distinct possibility that his father was as well. So he had asked the slayer to accompany him back to the smuggler’s house for one last try.

  The key turned in its lock with a satisfying click, and Felix knelt as Gotrek hauled on the handle and opened the safe’s heavy steel door. The walls of it were inches thick, and the space inside hardly big enough to hold a loaf of bread, but what lay within glittered in a way that made Felix’s heart race and Gotrek’s ugly face split in a terrifying smile.

  ‘You can have the letter, manling,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the rest.’

  He pulled out a sheaf of papers and handed them to Felix, then began scooping out the treasure and dumping it on the floor – a small spill of jewelry, loose gems, and gold coins of strange foreign design.

  Felix sorted through the papers. There were contracts, promissory notes, articles of incorporation, and, at last, an envelope scrawled upon in his father’s scratchy hand. His heart thumping with relief, Felix opened it and made sure there was a letter within, then stuffed it in his belt pouch.

  ‘I have it,’ he said.

  Gotrek just grunted and kept sorting the treasure, entirely engrossed. He held a thick gold circlet up to his single appraising eye. ‘Dwarf gold, human work,’ he said. ‘Not bad for all that.’

  Felix looked at the coil as the slayer slipped it on his wrist. He thought it might have once been a necklace, but it barely fit around Gotrek’s meaty arm. It was made of heavy gold wire – eight braided strands branching from a central bezel set with a sea-green gem the size of a walnut. Though it was undeniably beautiful, Felix found he didn’t like the look of the thing. Perhaps he was just sick of anything that reminded him of the sea.

  ‘Are you sure it’s not elven?’ he asked, hoping to make Gotrek take it off.

  Gotrek snorted. ‘Not flimsy enough.’ He tossed a delicate gold necklace into the puddle. ‘That’s elven,’ he said with a sneer, then began picking through the rest and putting the choicer bits in his belt pouch.

  Felix thought the elven necklace was beautiful, but he wasn’t going to argue the point with a dwarf. He’d just take it. But as he picked it up, voices reached them from the street.

  ‘Aye, sergeant,’ came the housemaid’s voice. ‘I saw ‘em. They broke down Herr Euler’s door.’

  A man’s voice answered her. ‘Back inside, miss. We’ll take care of this. Swords out, boys.’

  ‘The watch,’ whispered Felix.

  Gotrek grunted angrily, and for a moment Felix was afraid he meant to stay and fight, but instead he just swept up the treasure in his big hands, stuffed it down his breeches, then stumped towards the spiral staircase, jingling with each step.

  ‘To the roof, manling,’ he said. ‘While they follow the footprints to the canal.’
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  Felix followed, surprised and relieved. Apparently Gotrek’s lust for gold had momentarily won out over his lust for battle.

  As they started up the stairs, Felix paused and looked back at the wet footprints, suddenly wondering why they seemed so wide and splayed. Had the housebreakers used some sort of special shoes to swim the canal?

  There was a crash as the front door burst in. Felix hurried after the slayer.

  Gotrek shook another ruby out of his trouser leg and put it on the table with the rest. ‘I think that’s the last of them.’

  Felix looked up from reading his father’s letter and glanced askance at the little pile of now-pungent treasure the slayer had amassed. Showing so much wealth in a tavern like the Pelican’s Perch would bring nothing but trouble, but perhaps that was what the slayer wanted, or perhaps he just didn’t care.

  Even with the sun still up, the taproom was crowded with rowdy revellers. In fact all Marienburg was crowded with rowdy revellers, piling into town for the Storm Festival, a local holiday that culminated with the priests of the sea god Manann leading their congregations in a prayer to spare their fishing and trading fleets from harsh winter storms. Despite the freezing winter winds that whipped spray off the canals and blew it in their faces, the merry celebrants were singing songs in the streets and carousing from inn to inn, red-cheeked and rubber-legged and praising Manann with every bend of their elbows.

  A squad of Black Caps pushed into the tavern. Felix hid his face behind his father’s letter, but the watchmen only spoke with the barman, scanned the place cursorily, and headed back out to the street. The watchmen looked on edge – understandable, what with the town full of drunks, and also rumours that some of those drunks were going missing – pulled into the canals by strange assailants, never to be seen again. The Storm Festival Curse, the locals called it, for apparently it happened every year. Felix thought it much more likely that the missing revellers had fallen into the canals after one too many toasts to Manann.