Gotrek & Felix: Slayer

by David Guymer

  For a moment, Khagash-Fél was too lost to rage to answer. His logical mind watched his heart and soul hurtle down into some unknowable abyss. His head felt light, his vision blurry. The shadow that sheathed his son stretched into a triumphant smile. The rage guttered and all that was left was the emptiness. This was a god, he realised, with a deep and thorough coring of his convictions. All his life, both mortal and beyond, he had auctioned his sword to the Great Powers as though they were nothing more august than distant paymasters with pockets full of silver. But the being that deigned to address him directly now did so from a position of power as inconceivable to him as his own favour was to the likes of Darhyk or Nergüi.

  With an effort of will, he controlled himself. There was no trait more celebrated amongst the tribes than self-discipline. A man could be born to be swift or strong, but the conviction to face down pain, privation, or fear itself with nothing but force of will and the hard face came only from within. He was the Eagle of Mourn, the Colossus of Zhar, the greatest ever hero of the wide eastern steppe.

  It would take more than a god to cow him, and this god had come to him.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘You know my name. Go deep into your soul. You will find it there, etched in shadow upon the cruel heart of man.’

  Khagash-Fél did as he was bade and turned his mind’s eye inwards. He sensed malignance, ambition, a shadow cast even across the ultimate darkness of time. There was a name, one he seemed intuitively to know. It was a name so ancient as to have become legend, a king amongst daemons, the first mortal ever to ascend to the second tier of godhood and become a daemon prince.

  ‘Be’lakor.’

  ‘I am power, I am corruption, I am the Dark Master of Chaos and the time has come for me to arise and take form again. This land shall be the cradle of a new dominion, the place and time where four will at last become five. Many of the warlords between here and the Fortress of the First Slayer are mine and will be yours to command. Others must be brought to heel.’

  Khagash-Fél took what felt like the least certain breath of his life. The shadows were beginning to retreat to the corners of the room. Nergüi’s somnolent chant again played at the corners of his mind. Then he smiled.

  The gods had answered his plea.

  He had his sign.

  FIVE

  No Way Back

  Felix awoke from a nightmare in which something formless and dark hunted him through the forest, and though he had sought every avenue to escape, branches like claws had pulled at his hair and cloak and roots had reached out from the ground to make him stumble. With every step the forest darkened and his pursuer, though formless and unseen, drew palpably closer. For some reason, the notion of drawing his sword and facing this hidden foe had filled him with terror. So he had run, pushing through the lashing branches and into a clearing much like the one in which he had just fought. The rocky ground was littered with bodies and though he could not see their faces, he had known absolutely that here lay every man and woman he had ever known or loved. Large parts of the dream remained a frantic blur of branches, of shadows and fear, but he recalled turning up to the sky, watching as darkness rolled across it with the inevitability of a rising tide. The forest around him had sunk into blackness and from it a voice had rumbled. It had sounded like a voice, and Felix felt that it was speaking to him, but it was too vast to comprehend, too alien in its intent, and all he could grasp was the horror.

  He came to bolt upright, heart pounding. He was in the back of Lanarksson’s wagon. A bed had been made out in the front corner with a roll of soft fleece and partitioned from the rest of the wagon by piles of crates. An oil lantern, set to its tightest aperture, cast a mean and uncertain glow over the rough wooden surfaces. He had his sword in his hand, but the nightmare residue creeping through his chest warned him that it was already too late.

  A meagre pile of his possessions had been assembled in front of an upturned box beside his bed. A sepulchral figure sat silently on the box. Felix’s already frantic heart jumped. He covered his mouth to smother a cry of shock.

  Unperturbed, Max Schreiber licked the tip of his finger and peeled back a page in the small leather-bound pocket book in his hand.

  Felix’s hand moved unconsciously to his heart where he generally kept his journal, wrapped in an oilskin between his mail shirt and his chest. The oilskin lay in the pile on the floor, on top of his neatly folded mail and cloak.

  ‘How long have you been here, Max?’ he asked, fiery lines of pain tracing along the bones of his jaw as he spoke.

  Painfully, his hand felt over a wild bed of bruises towards a split lip and, above it, what felt like a roughly reset nose. Gotrek. Then he remembered the rest and a salty warmth stung his eyes.

  It was gone. Altdorf was really gone. Kat. Otto. All of it.

  He was alone.

  The wagon bumped, rattling the crates and forcing a fresh groan out of Felix. They were still moving. He could see through the rope ties between the wagon’s wooden sides and its tarp roof that it was dark outside. And it had stopped raining. He could hear the slushing sound as the wheels rolled through puddles and soft mud.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘You have not recorded an entry since the day you rescued me from the Troll King’s gaol,’ said Max absently, finger running backwards across the page, grey lips moving silently. The lantern light seemed to bend around him, leaving him grey and ill-defined, dominated by the shadow that the book cast upon his chest. It was a thing of wings, of horns, of darkness. Felix shivered and almost missed what the wizard said next.

  ‘Why?’

  Felix tenderly drew his fingers from his jaw. ‘And what exactly would you have me write?’

  ‘This is your final adventure. It should be recorded.’

  ‘Final…?’ asked Felix, chilled, though he could not say why. He knew that this would be his and Gotrek’s last journey together. When they arrived in Middenheim – he could only assume that to be where the Slayer was now taking them – he doubted that either one of them would be sorry to see the back of the other. But there was something about the way Max said it. Something… terminal. ‘And who would read it, Max? If Altdorf Press is still running then they’re doing better than the rest of the city by all accounts.’

  The wagon bumped over another rut. Water splashed.

  ‘Where are we?’ Felix asked bitterly, enunciating carefully to try and protect his jaw. ‘Where did Gotrek take us? And what happened to Gustav and the others?’

  It took Felix a moment to realise that Max wasn’t really listening. The wizard turned another page.

  ‘I too have trouble sleeping.’

  The tangential shift had Felix blinking to keep up.

  ‘Often in my dreams I am flying,’ Max went on, insistent as a night breeze. ‘I am high, riding above the clouds. The peaks of mountains rise through them like islands. I can feel the wind on my…’ his hand rose hesitantly from the page to feel the edges of his hood, ‘…my face. Where the cloud breaks I see the world beneath me turn dark. Roads shrivel. Forests mutate before my eyes. The cities of Chaos sink into the earth. I am alone, but I hear a voice whisper to me. It is a woman’s voice, and she calls to me by name, though I do not know her. She tells me that it does not have to end this way.’

  ‘Enough, Max,’ said Felix, reaching across to touch the wizard’s arm. Despite his ashen, ghostly appearance, the man felt entirely normal to the touch. His once ivory-coloured robes were stiff, tailored for battle. His arm was warm.

  Felix and Max had never been the closest of friends. The wizard’s lecturing manner had often grated, his empiricism starkly at odds with Felix’s hopelessly romantic outlook, but their philosophical differences would undoubtedly have proven fodder for endless debates in taprooms the world over had it not been for Ulrika. Even now, with hindsight and perhaps even a little wisdom, Felix found it diff
icult to unpick the tangle of hurt feelings, petty arguments, and jealousy that had ultimately defined his relationship with her and, as a consequence, with Max.

  There was an element of masochism in dwelling on such things – such times – with the world the way it was, but though he lived through an age of gods and monsters Felix was, whatever that now meant, still only human.

  ‘Always my journey ends in the same place, deep inside the ancient heart of a mountain. There is power there, power that I cannot describe, but I feel good to be there. The magic is calm, bound within rocks that have not seen change in ten thousand years. I know that I am where I am meant to be. You are there too, Felix. And the Slayer.’

  ‘Me?’

  A nod of the hood, a cold breeze that gave Felix shivers.

  ‘I had always suspected that your steps were guided by a higher power and now I am convinced of it. They have brought you here, together, to these mountains and at this time. It is through the two of you that they will show their hand in this war.’

  Felix shook his head sadly. Max was mad. He saw it now.

  ‘I saw your death,’ Max hissed.

  Felix’s scepticism vanished under an existential chill. ‘You saw what?’

  ‘Sometimes it is yours, sometimes Gotrek’s, as if fate itself remains undecided. But for some reason I do not grieve when I see it, for I know that this is how the world will be saved.’

  For what felt like a long time, Felix merely stared at his old friend. The wagon rumbled beneath them. The wizard swayed on his bench like a lonely tree in a mountain wind. Felix wanted nothing more than to tell Max that he was being ridiculous, perhaps shake some sense into the man, but for some reason he dared not. He was still a dangerously powerful wizard after all, and a broken one at that. The silence between them stretched. Felix’s thoughts returned him to a prophetic dream that he himself had once had. He had been asleep at his desk in his brother’s Altdorf townhouse when he had dreamt of fighting alongside Gotrek and Ulrika on the floodplains of Praag. As it ultimately turned out, it had been accurate almost blow for blow in his dreams. He had not had the time to devote much thought to it since, but now he wondered.

  Had it been destiny guiding his steps as Max suggested, perhaps towards some ignoble end in the lonely heights of the Middle Mountains?

  With a creak of creased leather, Max eased the pocketbook shut and held it out to Felix. No Grail Knight of Bretonnia had ever been presented with a relic invested with such portent.

  ‘You have been through too much together for it to count for nothing now,’ said Max. ‘Do not leave him to face this trial alone.’

  ‘What trial?’ said Felix.

  A knock startled him.

  Kolya’s saw-edged face appeared from behind the partitioning crates. His gaunt cheeks were drawn as though he had been up all night, and his dark hair was wet. The Kislevite took in Felix’s drawn sword with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘They say man who fights monsters in dreams need not wake up.’

  ‘What do you want?’ said Felix irritably, lowering his sword to the bedding.

  ‘Zabójka asks for you.’

  ‘And Gotrek always gets what he wants.’

  Kolya shrugged. ‘I do not care to know him as you do, but I think he is… ashamed for what happened.’

  Felix snorted, then winced as pain flared in his jaw. He suspected a broken bone, but he was no expert. Max could wile away the entire day at his bedside, but a little healing magic was clearly too much to expect. He turned to the wizard but the box on which he had been sitting was empty, Felix’s belongings piled neatly around it. The lantern stuttered and Felix suppressed a shudder as he dropped his gaze to the journal that had somehow found its way into his hand.

  He wondered if he had woken from his nightmare at all.

  Felix lowered himself from the back of the wagon, the rain-softened game trail on which they had stopped oozing sludgily underfoot. A handful of smaller wagons were strung out behind them, soldiers and camp followers clustered around for warmth and mutual protection. A thin mist wove between the dark boles of the forest, split fitfully by shafts of moonlight. Tattered shreds of cloud streamed across the face of the moon, and even though Felix could not feel the wind here amongst the trees he pulled his cloak close against it. There was a chill in the air. The treetops moaned quietly and their lower leaves shivered. Nightjars and robins cried out from the depths. Moonlight glinted back from watching eyes.

  Felix took a deep breath, tasting the air. It was decidedly colder, holding to a trace of winter, and unless he was imagining things it was also a little bit thinner.

  ‘Are we close to the Middle Mountains?’

  ‘It always looks the same in your country. Everywhere, it is more trees.’

  ‘You sound like Gotrek.’

  The Kislevite pulled a face.

  Stars blinked through breaks in the canopy. Felix tried to guess what time of night it was. He would hazard ‘late’ and there was something in the feel of the air, a latency, that made him think early morning. Felix’s gaze lingered on the treeline. He could just walk away from this, just walk into the forest and go. His heart pulled on him to do it. He could leave Gotrek’s oath and Max’s prophecy right here and make his way to Middenheim alone.

  ‘Go if you want,’ said Kolya, reading his thoughts or perhaps just sharing them. ‘I tell Zabójka you hit me.’

  Felix shook his head. He could not leave without Gustav, who in turn would probably not leave without his men. And these soldiers needed Felix. They believed in him, for better or worse, and Felix felt that he owed them something for that. No, like it or not, he and Gotrek were stuck with one another for a little while longer yet. Max could call it fate if he liked, but Felix preferred to think of it as a painful inconvenience that could not be cast aside soon enough.

  As Felix watched, sergeants sent detachments of men fanning out into the forest.

  ‘But maybe you keep head down,’ Kolya continued in the same off-hand tone. ‘I shoot two beastmen scouts earlier today, and that man there?’ The Kislevite pointed to a Hochland forester in green and umber as he strung his bow and disappeared into the forest. ‘He claims he sees northern rider. Me? I think it is a strange horse that tries to run in a forest.’

  ‘Take me to Gotrek,’ Felix said with a sigh.

  Ever since he had been a child, forced to endure weeks of darkness and strange noises at his father’s lumber camps in the Drakwald, Felix had hated forests. He could not imagine what Gotrek had found in this one that was so important.

  ‘Am I right?’ said Kolya, ducking under a dripping branch and spreading his arms to encompass the tangled mass of dark, mist-wreathed trunks. ‘Here, even mountains have trees.’

  ‘The Middle Mountains were at least a week away,’ said Felix, palming aside the same branch and following in the Kislevite’s steps. He peered into the cloying mist, searching for the telltale glimpse of a peak. There was nothing. Damp mosses glistened silver against the north face of the trees. Grasses conferred darkly. Nascent bluebells filled the air with their scent, their flowers closed within tiny helmets, withholding their full colour against the final encroachment of spring. Life, on some level, was going on. It was actually rather dispiriting. His attention veering from the trail, Felix stamped his foot in a deep puddle, splashing freezing water into his boots and startling a small brown frog that hopped out of his path and into the undergrowth.

  Kolya chuckled.

  ‘Through all these trees? A week at least. But Zabójka took us onto Wolfenburg road, and returned to forest only when he say his secret path is near. Oh yes,’ Kolya added with a tight little smile, ‘the army of marauders and beasts marching north behind us on same road maybe also have something to do with it.’

  Felix stopped, stunned, a wet branch swinging back to slap him in the chest.

  A herd of beas
tmen their company could just – and he meant just – about handle, but a Chaos army on the march was a vastly different prospect. Felix had seen plenty of them on the roads of Ostermark when he had first crossed back into the Empire: whole regiments of Chaos warriors marching in step, the hellish banners, the bray of horns, the reek of char where daemons walked, the way the ground itself seemed to shake underfoot as broken and branded Ostermark men pushed the Chaos legions’ infernal engines of war west towards Talabecland. They were memories that would stay with Felix as long as he lived. And Gotrek had seen them too.

  ‘Did no one try to stop him?’

  The Kislevite paused under the moon shadow of a wide beech tree. Were it not for his colourful patchwork coat then Felix doubted he would have been able to see the man. ‘Is up to you of course, but I suggest keeping down your voice.’ He nodded towards the surrounding forest. ‘Not all of Chaos army stayed on road.’

  Felix was uncomfortably reminded of his nightmare of being hunted through a forest that had itself been somehow complicit with his doom. Looking around him now, he could see where some of that imagery had come from. I see your death. He shuddered. It wasn’t a pleasant comparison to draw.

  ‘Are they following us?’

  ‘Look at this,’ said Kolya, taking a frond of something leafy and green and producing an expansive shrug. ‘How is anyone to follow anything in this?’

  ‘Kat could,’ said Felix wistfully. His wife had been a true daughter of the Drakwald, and what had filled him with night terrors had been as unthreatening and common to her as a stroll down Befehlshaber Avenue, a gauntlet of hawkers, vendors and beggars that had in turn filled Kat with dread. Reminiscence hardened into a lump in his throat. He swallowed it with difficulty. ‘She could track a single beastman several days ahead. And I once saw her shoot down a running beastman at three hundred yards by nothing but moonlight.’ He shook his head, disbelieving still. ‘The best shot I ever saw.’