by David Guymer
‘No offence taken,’ Kolya returned. ‘Is she as beautiful as she is deadly with a bow?’
‘You know you’ve asked me this question or one like it a hundred times since we left Praag.’
‘You are the poet, Lord Jaeger. Describe her to me and maybe I will not ask again.’
Felix sighed. ‘She was smaller than most women, and slender, but she could move through the forest like a deer. And she had the most beautiful dark hair, except for here.’ He pointed to a spot above his left eye. ‘Here she had a lock of silver that shone regardless of day and night.’ He ran his finger absently down the side of his face to the corner of his lip. ‘And a scar here. It didn’t bother her, and she knew it didn’t bother me.’ He smiled despite his heartache. ‘I’m no oil painting myself these days. And the gods save the merchant she caught staring at it. I think I once saw her humble Gotrek with that stare of hers, though I might have been mistaken.’
‘She sounds a veritable atamanka,’ said Kolya approvingly. ‘The terror of beastmen and of men’s hearts in all your forests.’
‘She was.’
Kolya took his employment of the past tense without comment.
Felix blinked away what might, given time and opportunity, have budded into a tear. At times like this he missed her so much that it was impossible to believe she could be gone. How could a ghost cause his heart such pain? But she was gone. A part of him wallowed in the pain, held the knife to the self-inflicted wound and demanded he suffer it. He should have been there. His presence in Altdorf would not have swayed that battle, he knew. He doubted whether even Gotrek and his axe could have made the difference, but he should have been there. The thought of Kat frightened and alone left him feeling hollow, nothing but a cold skein of unspoken grief. He wondered if it was the same guilt that drove Gotrek.
During the denouement to their disastrous last hours in Praag, Felix had learned that the Slayer had himself been on a quest in distant lands when his family had been killed by goblin raiders, and had shared his one-time comrade’s grief as he had heard the part that Snorri Nosebiter had played in their deaths. And now Snorri was dead too. Felix hoped the murder of his best friend brought the Slayer comfort.
‘Will you stay with Gotrek when you reach Middenheim?’ Felix asked, shaking off thoughts of splitting bone and bloody snow.
‘Until he falls in glorious battle against many foes.’
‘And then?’
‘What chance for cup of kvass in your city?’
The Kislevite slung an arm around a tree trunk that was perched on a mossy tussock of gnarled roots and earth and pulled himself up. The man turned and crouched, a grin deepening the shadows on his narrow face. Felix frowned in annoyance, though whether with Kolya or with himself he wasn’t sure. Sometimes he wasn’t sure what he really wanted at all. Even after everything Gotrek had done, as far as he had sunk in Felix’s esteem, Felix couldn’t shake the sense of import that he had carried through so many adventures. It wasn’t just professional pride, the hours he had spent in swamps and deserts and corrupted ruins, scribbling by starlight with mortal danger always just around the corner. It went deeper than that.
It was a saga that needed its ending.
Reaching under his mail, Felix withdrew his oilcloth-wrapped pocketbook and held it up to the moonlight. ‘I could give you my journal. The first entry is just after Gotrek and I departed Castle Reikguard with Kat and Snorri on the road to Karak Kadrin, but I can answer any questions you might–’
Kolya waved the offer away. Felix’s grip on the book hardened.
‘Gotrek deserves better.’
‘If you think so, why did you leave him?’
Felix sighed, but said nothing as the Kislevite dropped a hand to draw him up onto the tussock.
He didn’t have an answer for him.
Gotrek was standing in a small clearing between the wrecks of two coaches, hunched wearily over the awesome weight of his axe, glaring from one to the other. The vehicles were gaudily painted in bright, primary colours, rails and trims picked out in gold paint that shimmered in the torchlight of the men picking their way through the scattered debris. The body of the one nearest to Felix was peppered with arrows and a dark splash of blood coated the ladder to the driver’s platform. The second had been turned onto its side and gutted. A lantern had been slung from its undercarriage, casting a hesitant pall that advanced a way into the forest and then retreated, over and again, like a rat around a trap. Smashed boxes littered the ground, spilling what looked like face paints and glittering costumes over the forest floor.
Travelling players, Felix thought with a familiar wrench, probably hoping for sanctuary in the mountains.
‘Mutants, I think,’ said Gustav, moving out from behind the upturned wagon, flanked by a pair of heavily armoured soldiers with wary eyes and hands on their weapons’ pommels. He carried a second battered lantern that lit his face eerily from below.
Felix’s relief at finding his nephew alive and well threatened him with a smile, a twinge to his injured jaw bringing it out as a grimace.
‘Nice to see you too, uncle.’
‘What makes you think it was mutants? There’s a Chaos warband hunting us, apparently.’
‘Their tracks are… strange, and seem to be heading north into the mountains.’
‘You found tracks?’ said Kolya. ‘Show me.’
Gustav nodded, spared Felix a furtive smile, and led the Kislevite back around the wagons.
Mutants ahead, a Chaos warband behind, and who knew what awaiting them in the Middle Mountains. The forces of darkness enclosed them on every side. With a glance to the solemn rank of trees, Felix loosened the collar of his cloak. For a moment he had almost felt the shadow around his neck.
‘Over here, manling,’ grunted Gotrek, a little less of the usual flint in his voice, and gestured behind him with a jerk of the head.
Felix pulled his fingers from his collar and straightened his back before stamping over to join him. The Slayer lowered his axe and glanced aside as he approached. If Felix didn’t know better, he’d think the dwarf was actually sorry. His single eye was bloodshot, as if the pupil had been struck from behind with a spear. His enormous muscles trembled with the effort of keeping him upright. Sigmar, what would it take to make the dwarf sleep?
‘You just decided to punch me out, then,’ said Felix. ‘The old dwarf ways not as secret as you thought they were?’
‘There’s a lot of ground between us and the mountain road yet,’ Gotrek growled back, then shook his head with a clink of gold. ‘I didn’t wake you to argue. I have a new rememberer for that. I wanted you to see something before we head further from the Wolfenburg road.’
‘About that–’
‘This way, manling,’ said Gotrek, lumping his axe once more to his shoulder and trudging away between the two wagons. ‘Just a little further.’
Even from the overgrown outcropping that jutted from the forest to overlook the Wolfen Vale, Felix could smell the blood. A sprawling city that could only have been Wolfenburg, the capital of Ostland, blistered the earth like burnt and puckered flesh. Banners of tattered skin flew from its battlements, lit from beneath by candles of human tallow. Like a pumpkin carved into a nightmarish mask and then set around a candle, the shattered walls gleamed with thousands of individual points of light. The breaches in the city’s walls had been packed with polished skulls, and her lights now shone through the eye sockets and fracture wounds of her people. The alpine wind blowing through those walls returned the dead their voice, a haunting moan that filled the sparsely forested bowl of the river valley.
The great stone bastion of the Elector’s Palace stood within an inner ring of fortifications, all now half-demolished, a moat of rubble around a gutted citadel from which the fell symbols of Chaos glared out over the city. Nearby, the granite keep of the Knights of the Bull stood in a s
imilar state of ruin. Rising between them like a judge from its promontory atop a rugged scarp was the remnants of the chapter house of the Order of the Silver Hammer. The ancestral home of the Knights of Wolfgart – the Witch Hunters, as most men knew to fear them – had been subjected to a more comprehensive pogrom of desecration. Even from afar, the deep warpstone glare emanating from the crater made Felix’s stomach turn.
He had seen Kislevite stanitsas ransacked and burned. He had seen the gruesome tribune poles that had dotted the oblast and that even the crows dared not overfly. Every man in his company brought talk of destruction, of smashed armies and broken cities, and Felix had believed every word. But this was the first time he had seen first-hand for himself one of the great cities of the Empire in ruins.
And it wasn’t over yet.
On the road before its walls, two vast armies collided. Ten thousand banners danced like daemons on hot coals. Hundreds of mounted northmen with coloured pennants streaming from their short lances ploughed through endless blocks of heavily armoured and hideously mutated infantry. Beastmen battled each other in churning whirlpools of froth and fur. Bursts of dark magic charred the air. Ogres in blasted plate mail bellowed, islands of brute power in a sea of foes. Huge, muzzled beasts sent gouts of flame rolling through the melee, immolating fighting men by the score. It was a cauldron of noise.
There wasn’t an Imperial banner in sight. This was a battle between the gods of Chaos, rival champions feuding over scraps and favour. Felix turned away, sick.
‘I wanted you to see this,’ said Gotrek. Scrawled with tattoos of doom and dishonour and worn haggard by many months of bloodshed, the Slayer looked as much at one with his time as Felix had ever seen him. ‘This is what your Empire has become now, manling. Wherever you go this is what you will find. As sure as the stones of Everpeak, Middenheim is the last city of man. That is where the little one will be waiting for you. There is nowhere else to go.’
Felix simply stared over the opposing hordes in numb horror. There was no end to the Chaos Gods’ appetite for carnage. When the Empire and her allies were broken and the world was theirs, would they then fall on each other like this until only one champion remained standing? And then what? What kind of world would one ruled by Chaos be? Felix couldn’t imagine. He didn’t want to.
‘I think that Chaos warrior you let go has followed us here,’ Gotrek muttered softly, as if sorry to intrude on Felix’s thoughts.
‘I didn’t let him go,’ Felix spat, still staring at the unbelievable act of violence being staged in the valley below. ‘I put a bullet between his shoulders.’
‘Same thing,’ said Gotrek with a shrug, then nodded down. ‘I recognise some of the markings on those beasts down there. If I had one I’d wager a Bugman’s that they’re from the same herd we fought back in the forest.’
Felix didn’t bother to look for himself. Although dwarf eyes were generally not as sharp as a human’s – an adaptation to low-light vision, or so Max had once explained – they had a remarkable capacity for picking out intricate detail. Felix supposed that when one got down to the mechanics of it, the inner workings of a fine dwarf-made clock or the tribal war paint on a beastman’s hide were all very much the same.
‘And what if they follow us onto the mountain road? They could use it to attack Middenheim.’
‘Dwarfs don’t build a thing for others to use, manling. Archaon himself could walk those mountains for ten thousand years and never get near those roads.’
‘Fine,’ Felix sighed, sickened as much by the tug of inevitability as by the rivers of blood being spilled. Watching it brought Max’s words ringing between his ears: your final adventure. ‘Fine. I’ll not fight you. We’ll take the dwarfs’ mountain road and we’ll go to Middenheim together.’
But no further, Felix thought, as the Slayer nodded wearily and turned his back on the slaughter below.
‘Where are the man and the dwarf?’ demanded Khagash-Fél, his voice a barely human growl, focusing the bested champion’s mind with a tightening of his grip over the kneeling man’s bald head. The warrior’s skull creaked and he groaned in pleasure.
The champion was naked but for a pair of electrum bracers that clasped his forearms like entwined lovers and a belt to which a quartet of dazzling – now thoroughly dismembered – daemon women were chained. His superb muscular definition glistened with an oil that his pale skin seemed to exude, shining like buffed iron as mounted tribesmen thundered by with flaming arrows nocked to their bowstrings. Arrows and blades alike had glanced off the warrior’s smoothly lacquered flesh. Shafts lay unbroken on the ground where he knelt, teased from the air and prostrate before his beauty. Even Khagash-Fél’s own exalted daemon-blade, Ildezegtei, had caressed the champion’s musculature like a doe-eyed doxy swooning over a legendary hero on the eve of battle.
The gods adored a stalemate above all other outcomes in war. What better to please an uncaring immortal than strife without end? But these were the End Times, and Khagash-Fél found his patience for such trivialities waning.
He squeezed until the champion’s amaranthine eyes fluttered.
‘The gods grant you great power. What do you think that they gifted to me?’
‘Warlord!’
A tribesman jumped down from his horse and dropped smoothly to one knee. His bare chest was knotted with muscle, an artwork of scar lines and tribal tattoos. Concentric rings of scar tissue made a maze of one side of his face, with one lidless pearly white eye the prize at its centre, much like the slavers’ brand on Khagash-Fél’s own face. The warrior’s head was smooth but for a long topknot, the olive-dark skin slick with blood and sweat. ‘The Doombull’s scouts speak of a small group of men striking north on foot into the forest.’
‘And a dwarf?’ Blood trickled around Khagash-Fél’s cracked and yellow fingernails. Bone began to creak.
The tribesman sneered. ‘No man can make sense of those beasts. I sent our own scouts ahead to see for themselves.’
‘You did well…?’ The champion of depravity moaned once more and with a sickening crunch of bone went slack. Khagash-Fél shook pinkish matter from his fingers and turned to the tribesman with a question in his voice.
‘D-Darhyk, warlord. I have ridden with you for years.’
‘Of course,’ Khagash-Fél murmured, dismissing the already forgotten warrior from his gaze and turning to the city that its champion had called Wolfenburg.
Tribesmen galloped around the skull-studded curtain wall, waiting for the perfect moment when all four of their horse’s legs were off the ground and man and mount together seemed to glide before sending shafts wrapped with burning rags arcing over the city. Speed, power, courage; the horse-archers of the tribes were without peer, as devastating as a rampaging thundertusk or a charge of the metal-shelled knights of the west. It was without surprise that Khagash-Fél watched the Chaos warriors and their Kurgan brethren retreating to their stronghold, warmed by an ember of pride in the twists of smoke that rose over its grey slate rooftops.
There had been a time when such a faultless dismantlement of a rival champion’s war machine would have filled his heart with pleasure, but no longer. The Dark Master of Chaos had elevated him above such trifling affairs and he saw the conquest of this insignificant bastion of apostates and pariahs as the gods themselves must see it – a burning point on a map, one drawn on black canvas to depict an empire in shadow, a remount waiting for him on his road. He had pledged his soul to one god and there was no way back now. The dark smoke coiled like horns, reaching skyward against a backdrop of mountains.
‘It is as Khamgiin Lastborn revealed to me before his final ride,’ said Nergüi. The shaman sat astride his eggshell-grey mount, the frayed blue feather-strips of his robe fluttering down to its shanks. His narrow eyes peered into the smoke as though searching for a message left for them by the departed spirits of fire.
This was not desti
ny’s fulfilment, but its opening sally. Nergüi and his old ways had taken Khagash-Fél as far as he could. Ahead there waited a new guide, one who heard the commands of the Dark Master as Nergüi had once relayed the wishes of the old steppe spirits. He felt it in his blood, saw it reflected by the Eye of Katchar into his dreams.
‘Mountains,’ said Khagash-Fél, the single word that his son had related through the cast of Nergüi’s black feathers rumbling from his cavernous chest. That was where the Dark Master’s prophet awaited him, the one who would guide him to the red-cloaked man and the Slayer. Those mountains would be where they fell. It was fated.
The champions of Be’lakor came for them.
SIX
Into the Middle Mountains
A trickle of stones rattled down the steep sides of the gorge. Felix retraced their descent to a formation of bare and weathered rocks, a grim knuckle of sedimentary earth slowly grinding its way through the mountainside. The surface bore a dark sheen from the previous night’s rain. As Felix watched, a last desultory pebble bumped downhill. He strained his eyes. The relentless rush of the river beside them filled his head with white noise. For a second, he would have sworn there had been a human figure up there amongst the rocks.
Imagination could be a cruel thing.
With a nod of reassurance for the benefit of the soldiers around him, he forced himself to look away and trudge on with the long column of men and carts. The soldiers smiled, apparently content to take their safety at his word. Felix wished he could convince himself so easily. It felt as though he had been walking with a noose around his neck and a trapdoor beneath his feet ever since Gotrek had first led them into the pass. Not a minute went by when Felix didn’t squirm with the sensation of being watched, and every watch he awoke with eyes already sore in anticipation of another day’s straining on rugged-jawed ridgelines and distant shapes in the rock.
Unable to help himself, he glanced back up.
