by David Guymer
‘Toss it here,’ said Gustav. Felix hurled it overarm and Gustav snatched it neatly out of the air with his uninjured hand.
‘Where is Max?’ asked Kolya as Gustav inspected the pistol’s barrel and powder chamber.
A good question, thought Felix. Max had almost single-handedly blasted them all out of Praag in the most incredible display of one being’s power that Felix had ever seen, but he hadn’t been the same man since. He peered again over his wagon’s ruined side, watching the Chaos warrior and his retinue slide ever further out of range. Max would have taken this sorcerer apart plate by plate and then blasted whatever was left inside into whatever hell he most feared.
‘Here!’
Felix glanced back just as Gustav lobbed the pistol his way. The throw was long, forcing Felix out of hiding in order to catch it. He let out a relieved breath when it didn’t detonate or otherwise go off in his hands. Powerful these new weapons may have been, but temperamental they certainly were. He brought the weapon up in a two-handed grip, careful to retain some looseness in his joints to adjust for recoil, and swiftly moved after the Chaos warrior. He needed to get closer.
He sighted down the barrel. His heart pounded. He had always had a good eye.
But he would only get one shot.
Corporal Herschel Mann, last officer of Hergig, brought the arrowhead base of his kite shield chopping into a wounded beastman’s skull and expelled his barely contained terror in a roar. His throat was sore from breathing smoke and shouting orders. He drew up his battered shield and pounded a beat into it with the hilt of his sword. Even he could barely hear it. Gunpowder smoke clogged his nose and his ears. Inside the ring of wagons it was sulphurous and hot and packed with bodies, most of them wounded, all of them screaming.
Herschel assured himself that it was surely preferable to what lay outside.
He was a simple man, a woodcutter’s son with little ambition beyond a home in the officers’ district, a modest stipend for his retirement and a crop of grandchildren to see him to a fair old age. He was also, he knew, a man of limited imagination. His nobler-born superiors had often commented on it favourably, and it had served him well as city after city fell to the relentless push of Chaos. But even he couldn’t help but wonder.
How could Sigmar allow this?
One of the wagons lurched as though struck by a giant’s club, sending Hochland soldiers and the beastmen they fought flying from its back. Bits of wood and splinters flew in all directions and it finally dawned on Herschel that those on the other side had tired of trying to fight their way over and were going to simply tear their way through. The wagon split in half, shedding wood like horsehair from a ripped pillowcase and driving men choking to their knees.
Coughing, Herschel levelled his sword and shield. He never had started that family that he had thought so important to him, but he would lay down his life to defend his men’s. Whatever was coming for them, it could not be worse than what failure would mean.
The end.
A pair of beastmen charged screaming through the cloud of splinters, wide-eyed and frothing at the mouth. Before Herschel could react, a monstrous axe flashed. The first beastman toppled as its legs were carved from under it, then the second bleated in panic before that axe chopped into its back. Herschel Mann lowered his shield and stood open-mouthed as a horrific-looking dwarf stepped onto the beastman’s corpse with a grisly crunch of popping vertebrae and then ruthlessly put down its disabled fellow as it struggled to crawl away. The dwarf was a lean, heaving mass of muscle, scored by scars and barbarous tattoos and hunched over the impossible weight of his axe. A frightening crest of dyed hair rose to greater than the height of a man from his shaved head.
Herschel met the dwarf’s one good eye, intending to offer his heartfelt thanks and those of his men, but something caught his tongue. The dwarf’s other eye was a knot of scar tissue, as though his sight had been clawed out by some unspeakable terror. It was like looking down a gun barrel, but the good eye was worse. Herschel had buried men with more human feeling in their eyes.
The dwarf hefted his axe as he surveyed the group of survivors. His bruised lips pursed in what could only be called disappointment, and then he grunted and turned back to the fight.
Felix narrowed his eyes and tried to concentrate on his aim, but the more he tried to focus, the more his mind seemed to wander.
He saw Kat and the house in Altdorf that they had shared with his brother. Felix had not been happy there, but looking back on it now he thought that perhaps he should have been. His child would be almost a year old now. He tried to imagine what she – and somehow he had decided that it was a she – would look like, but found that he could not. In his heart, he knew that Kat, Otto, Annabella, and everyone else he had left behind in Altdorf were, if not dead, then gone from his life forever. This particular Chaos warrior had nothing to do with that personally but from where Felix was standing, ankle-deep in gore and with a pistol trained on the warrior’s backplate, he seemed as fitting a recipient of a little retribution as any.
A northman struck his gong with a mallet. The sound reverberated over the clash of arms, the screams. The northman’s horse snorted as he yelled something that Felix was too focused to make out.
He forced his mind to clear, letting out his breath as he had watched trained handgunners, and even Kat with her bow, do before taking an important shot. Sweat pooled between the palm of his hand and the pistol’s carved walnut stock. One shot. It all came down to this. Afterwards, it seemed likely that the Chaos warrior’s vengeful retinue would mob him, unless Gustav’s men could get to him first. He pushed the thought aside. What would come next no longer seemed to matter.
As his vision centred, the warrior’s deep nightshade armour blurred to become bruised muscle. Star-bright runes and metal spines twisted to resemble crawling tattoos.
Felix hated what these times had made of him. What was worse was the certainty that it didn’t have to be this way.
‘Curse you, Gotrek Gurnisson.’
And then he fired.
TWO
Shadows
‘Fighting again, Felix? If you’re not careful someone will get hurt one of these days.’
‘I’m always careful, mother,’ said Felix brightly, troubled only for a brief moment by the nagging doubt that he had no earthly business here in Altdorf on this grey spring day, tossing a silver coin to the driver and then disembarking from the open-topped carriage.
He winced and held his ribs as his feet touched the cobbles. That last fight had hurt, however much he sought to pass it off as horseplay.
Strange then that he could not remember very much about it.
He seemed to recall the loud bang of a pistol, and then being mobbed by half a dozen men twice his size. He forced a smile onto his face. Whoever his latest opponent had been, he was clearly an unconscionable knave of the worst sort. Felix hoped he had given a good account for honourable conduct, but the fragmentary nature of his recollections on the subject did not fill him with confidence.
The coachman dipped his cap to Felix’s generosity and with a crack of his whip sent his vehicle rolling down the – now he noticed it – oddly deserted cobbles of Befehlshaber Avenue. At any time of day it would ordinarily be filled with hawkers and merchants, its old stone frontages competing for extravagance and the attention of the well-heeled foot-traffic that passed by. But not now. Shaking off the ambiguous sense of disquiet, he turned to where his mother waited.
She stood alone at the end of the driveway, dwarfed by the looming black iron gates that stood open either side of her. Felix had the terrible suspicion that she intended to greet him thusly every time his studies at the university were suspended for the Sigmarzeit holiday. The drive behind her was dark. Felix could barely see the house at all, just a black silhouette against the sky hidden behind rank after rank of bare-clawed maples. They rustled softly, as if aggrieved by Fe
lix’s regard, jarring yet at the same recent and familiar.
They aren’t here any more, spoke a voice from his subconscious that sounded remarkably familiar. It was older, authoritative in a jaded sort of way, but unmistakably his own.
The house flickered, a degraded aspect superimposing over that silhouette as the trees became bloated and heavy with fly-infested fruits. To each one, a diseased figure had been crucified and writhed in pain. The sky crackled and broke. The visage of a corpulent, pus-ridden daemon rose over the skyline, gurgling in its own degradation and pleasure. It appeared for a minute and then it was gone, and the house returned to the darkness that had possessed it before.
His mother embraced him warmly and despite his unease Felix returned the gesture as though he had not seen her in decades rather than the few short months it must have been. She kissed him on the cheek, then pulled back and rubbed the mark her lips had made on his skin with her thumb. She regarded him with a sad smile, deepening the crows’ feet around her eyes. Her blonde hair had been largely banished to lie amongst the grey and tied behind her head in a bun. Felix recognised in her his own blue eyes, his strong jaw. It was odd that he hadn’t noticed it before she… before what? He couldn’t remember. He was struck by how frail she looked.
‘Renata,’ intoned a voice from the house that Felix both did and did not recognise. It reminded him somewhat of his father’s, but it terrified him in a way that the old man never had. It was as deep as black and solemn as death. ‘Leave the boy alone and return to me. You should not be out there alone.’
‘Is… everything all right?’ Felix asked. He heard a thump as of a footstep from the driveway. The maples had drawn closer. Their branches swayed in the breeze, or at least Felix thought they were branches; every so often they appeared to be writhing human limbs, blistered with boils and wet with blood and pus. The shadows pulled tighter. He backed away. ‘You do look unwell, mother. Perhaps I should take you to the–’ a vision of a too-young woman lying still on a bed beneath symbols of doves and bleeding hearts filled his mind ‘–Shallyan temple.’
His mother sighed. ‘It is too late for that, Felix. The master still has need of me, and it is best not to defy him when he is in so dark a mood.’
Now what was it about that particular choice of words that troubled him?
As Felix backed away, the iron gateposts appeared to grow, bending in at the tips to seal his mother under a huge black arch. Shadows flowed in from the driveway to fill in the outline of the arch. A likeness shivered across its form, recognisably human yet hideously vague. The trees reached their branches over the walls of his father’s estate, twisting around the shadow-figure to form curving horns that extended from its daemonic head and what appeared to be wings that opened out from its back.
His mother was still visible within the moulded darkness, but contact with this figure seemed to have affected her for her appearance stuttered. At times she appeared as a tall man, garbed in flowing white robes and standing with the aid of a snake-headed staff. At others, and sometimes in the same glance, she was an Ungol wise woman, shrouded in glittering black silk with moonlight-white hair spilling from her raised hood.
‘You’re… not my mother,’ Felix replied. ‘She died.’
‘Everybody dies, Felix,’ the apparition answered. ‘Even me. And I suspect you as well, although your fate lies shrouded in a place where even my eyes cannot see.’
Felix held out his hand for her, glancing over his shoulder for the companion that he knew should be there but wasn’t. The darkness echoed his terror with laughter.
‘Everybody dies…’
Rain splotched Felix’s eyelids. He grunted, his familiar old body welcoming him back to a world of pain. The hum of flies filled his ears. The monotonous chop of broken wagons being reduced to portable chunks reverberated between bare rock and the encircling trees. The taste of fresh rain lay between his lips. The ground under his back was uneven and disturbingly human in its contours. Under a fusillade of cracks, pops, and coloured stars on the backs of his eyelids he shifted position. A leather-encased arm rolled out from beneath him. Felix felt queasy. It was some way from being his preferred course of action, but he opened his eyes. Gustav gummed into focus. The rain made a faint halo around the ivory-white scales of his armour. His face was smeared with blood and bore an expression of concern that swiftly disappeared when he noticed that Felix was awake.
‘What happened?’ said Felix.
‘We returned to Altdorf, don’t you remember?’ said Gustav. ‘Cheering crowds lined the Konigplatz waving flags and shouting your name. Castle Reikguard fired a twenty-one gun salute to honour its hero’s return and a company of Bretonnian pegasus knights performed an aerial display in your honour. Emperor Karl Franz of course named you Elector of Ostermark then and there which was met with rapturous approval by all, and then we retired to the Rose and Thorn for ale and pastries. Unfortunately that was when your dwarf challenged the Emperor and Ludwig Schwarzhelm to a head-butting contest, after which things got messy. That’s probably why your head hurts.’
He wished it was just his head. ‘This isn’t funny.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Gustav took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. He looked down at Felix’s still-recumbent form. ‘But duelling with a Chaos champion and his entire retinue for a good half a minute before Kolya and I pulled you out didn’t do your reputation any harm. Personally, I think you have as good a call on the Ostermark runefang as anybody else right now.’
Felix growled inwardly. If he’d had it up to his neck with men who should know better referring to him as ‘my lord’, then he was fed up to the eyeballs of the outlandish stories of his personal heroism in the face of evil.
Yes, he had helped Gotrek hold the ford at Choika against that beastman herd while the army had crossed, but the Slayer had done the bulk of the fighting. What Felix most recalled of that day was the chill he had come down with afterwards. And yes, granted, he had personally defeated and slain the mutant ogre that had rampaged into their camp from the oblast, but the creature had been half mad from drinking the warpstone-contaminated waterways of Kislev and had been practically dead already, not that anyone seemed to want to hear that.
In response to Felix’s early enquiries into the source of those tales, Gustav had impishly suggested that they might all have read Felix’s book.
‘Are you getting up, then, or not?’ said Gustav, fingering the businesslike grip of his long Gospodar sabre and giving the twin puncture-scars on the side of his neck a habitual scratch. ‘More than enough beastmen got away to cause us trouble if they decide to come back, and their champion wasn’t in as bad a shape as you’d think, considering.’
Felix stiffened and tried to rise, only for a lance of molten agony to shoot up through his legs. He bit down on the urge to scream. Muscle cramp, that was all, although all seemed a little trite given the pain it was causing him just now. What had become of the days when he could get through a fight like the one just gone and be ready for more by the afternoon? Now it felt as though his tendons had been stiffened with steel pins and he doubted whether he could lift his sword if a dragon were to burst from the forest. He let his efforts out in a gasp of breath and slapped his thigh.
‘Help me.’
Uttering some choice phrases from the lexicon of Altdorf’s docks, Gustav dropped to his haunches to scoop up one of Felix’s feet and then, holding the leg straight, pushed it back over Felix’s body and leaned his weight against it. Felix gasped at the sudden spike of pain, but it subsided almost immediately. He felt stiff ligaments stretch and loosen and almost moaned aloud with relief.
‘Do you seriously still intend to try and re-enlist when we get back to Altdorf?’ said Gustav.
‘They’d have to throw me into the Reiksfang to stop me.’
Then Gustav switched legs, pushing down until Felix’s vision broke out in spots. Nightmare
visions of his home aflame and presided over by pustulent daemons shattered in his mind as some cartilaginous blockage in his calf went snap.
It would be a hard journey. Every provincial back road was a highway for a Chaos army these days, and the woods were rife with beastmen and worse. Felix had led his company of survivors this far into Talabecland by avoiding even game trails where possible, but chance encounters like this one would only grow more difficult to elude now that they finally neared the Empire’s heartlands. To his surprise that didn’t trouble him. In truth, he was more than a little afraid at the prospect of what might be waiting for them at Altdorf. Felix had not seen a single town or village still standing since his departure from Badenhof for Kislev two years ago.
But if vengeance was what Altdorf needed then she would find Felix Jaeger able and willing.
Gustav let go of Felix’s leg and stepped back. Felix sat and extended his hand for a little help and the younger man duly obliged, clasping his hand a little more firmly than was strictly necessary and pulling him up.
His nephew was all he had left now.
Whatever happened to the Empire, Felix had reached the age where it was impossible to ignore the fact that there were fewer days ahead for him than there were behind. It was Gustav’s fate he worried for rather than his own these days, the sort of world that Felix could leave for him. And for Kat and their child. If they were still alive. It was all that kept him going.
Gustav supported his uncle with a loose grip at the elbow, then stepped aside, granting Felix a view of the clearing behind him.
Felix covered his mouth with his hand and almost gagged on the stench.
A freshly tilled field of death stretched out to the treeline. Pale, lean men in muddy cloaks picked through the corpses of man and beast like serfs harvesting a crop of beans. The wind sent chills rustling through the ocean of trees, bearing the rumour of thunder from the charcoal sky to the north. The cool breeze tightened the blood on Felix’s face, prickling his skin like goose bumps. He drew his cloak around his chest and shivered. There was something out there: a shadow, always behind him whichever way he turned.
