Gotrek & Felix: Slayer

by David Guymer

  Past the rock formation the gorge rose to an ice-blistered peak, an unnamed titan of grey stone slumped under the leaden weight of the sky. The world had become a darker place since word of Altdorf’s fall had reached them. It wasn’t just in his mind.

  The pass was tightening. The mountains crept a little nearer each day. The sense of sliding into some kind of funnel from which he could not escape was ever present. It made his muscles ache and his mind whirl and trying not to think about it only worried him more. With every ineluctable step forward the grey in the sky appeared to grow a little blacker. It was a mirror to the world for the world to see, and whenever Felix looked he saw doom closing.

  And so he endeavoured not to look.

  The company ate the day’s meal on the march.

  Black bread and nuggets of hard cheese were passed down from Lanarksson’s wagon and then from hand to hand down the long, winding column of women and men. The sun was dipping behind the western peaks when Felix, walking with the middle of the column, saw his own mean ration. He chewed it slowly, making it last, as he surveyed the line of beaten men strung out ahead and ultimately winding out of sight deeper into the pass.

  Quickly, as if to catch whoever might be watching in the act, he glanced again to the surrounding slopes.

  There was no one there, but the sense of watchfulness remained, and Felix could not help but consider how vulnerable they were to any kind of an attack. There was little that could be done about it since the path was already barely wide enough for the wagons, but Felix couldn’t help but worry. It was as if his mind had forgotten how to do anything else. He wondered if all generals felt this way, or only the reluctant ones.

  It was a wonder any battles were ever won at all.

  Following the food came a cupful of ale, carefully doled out for each fighting man by the most sober-looking veterans that Felix had been able to identify. They wore dark leather armour with steel plates sewn in, and pushed a handcart laden with a single small barrel. Stern soldiers with loaded crossbows guarded its progress. Complaints fell on ears that were neither deaf nor heartless, but which had heard every tear-jerking tale there was at least twice already today and umpteen times the days before. The black-capped sergeant saluted Felix, his measuring cup in hand as though offering a grim toast, and then poured him a generous measure. Without thinking about it, Felix drank his due and no more, passing the remainder back.

  The Slayer ignored the ale-men as he had the passage of bread and cheese. Felix wondered how long his former companion could go without food or water. At times Gotrek muttered to himself in what sounded like strains of Khazalid, the dwarfs’ well-guarded native tongue, but for most of their journey into the Middle Mountains he had been silent, glaring alternately between the valley sides and the soldiers ahead and behind. Determination alone seemed to sustain him now, but surely even the Slayer’s formidable constitution would have to fail eventually.

  Felix had no idea what he was going to do about it when it did.

  It was a rare cloudless night, the stars shining fitfully against a sky as clear as polished glass.

  A cluster of tents had been pitched against the frothing waters of the river, hugging to the scant protection afforded their flanks by a sharp curve in its course. Unfortunately, the ground further from the water was naught but solid rock and after the first unsecured tents had threatened to slide into the river the men had instead thrown down bedrolls with what amounted to a collective shrug and a thumbed nose to the harsh vagaries of fate. Felix had heard and read that generals moulded the armies they led in their own image, and he was somewhat gratified to see something of his own attitude in their response.

  A handful of soldiers hauled off their boots and braved the rapids to cleanse their aching feet. Others took advantage of the respite to refill canteens or rinse their clothes, but most simply slept where they fell. There were no fires. As the night chill set in men shivered in their dreams, while those detailed to watch paced the picket of spears around the camp’s perimeter rather than freeze.

  Felix took his own shift on the picket in the final frigid hours before dawn, huffing mist onto his gloved hands and peering up the starlit slopes. It still felt strange to look on a night sky that did not contain Morrslieb, the fell twin of the greater moon that tonight bathed the gorge in silver. He could not say that he missed the presence of the Chaos Moon, but even as the harbinger of evil that it was, it was difficult to see its destruction as a portent for good.

  He considered raising the matter with Gotrek, for the Slayer never slept these days; he sat enshrouded within his axe’s ruddy aura, not so much watching as impatiently awaiting the dawn and the chance to move again. The hole in the Slayer’s un-patched eye reminded Felix of howling wolves, of goblin arrows, and ultimately of Kirsten, Felix’s first great love, who had died in the same attack that had claimed Gotrek’s eye.

  With a heart’s sigh, Felix clapped his hands and stared into the night. Had he not loved and lost enough since then? He could understand as well as anyone why Gustav wore Ulrika’s armour and why Kolya inked the same horse onto his bicep each morning. It was more comforting sometimes to hold on to the pain rather than let it go. He wondered if Gotrek felt the same way as, for all his race’s inscrutable character, Felix had come roundabout to the conclusion that dwarfs and men were really not so dissimilar as each liked to think. They were all children of the Old Ones, if that high elf antiquarian with whom they had argued in a Marienburg tavern was to be believed. Their disagreement had later been taken outside, the scholar himself subsequently dumped unconscious into the canal, but in a way Gotrek had proven the elf correct – they did all bleed the same colour.

  Felix chose not to disturb him. He felt that they had edged towards a detente of sorts, but it was still too difficult to talk to him. He didn’t even know how he would start.

  He was looking up at the sky, idly entertaining the notion of drawing his journal out from his under his shirt, when the sound of whispered voices from further along the palisade put to bed such civilised musings.

  ‘It is said that Emperor Karl Franz, imbued with the might of Sigmar, fought three daemon princes in the battle for the Imperial Palace,’ whispered one man, breath fogging around a dark silhouette sat on an upturned box behind a rank of spears. Felix recognised the rural Hochlander accent of Corporal Herschel Mann.

  ‘Felix once struck a wounding blow upon a Bloodthirster of Khorne,’ said a second, invisible man, not whispering in the conventional sense but possessed of a voice that seemed to dwell in darkness.

  Felix scowled and tried not to listen. He shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Max was responsible for the stories about him circulating through the company.

  His nephew would be so thrilled to learn that there wasn’t a well-thumbed copy of his book hiding in someone’s pack.

  ‘Truly?’ said Herschel.

  ‘Wielding a rune-hammer that none but the heroes of the dwarfs had wielded before or since, and screaming Sigmar’s name.’

  Felix snorted into his collar. At least he’d remembered to include the screaming.

  ‘I had no idea,’ Herschel murmured quietly. Felix felt the man’s eyes turn his way in the dark.

  ‘There are many more tales,’ said Max. ‘It was Felix’s own hand for instance that delivered the death blow to the corrupted dragon, Skjalandir.’

  ‘These are days of gods and heroes,’ Herschel agreed.

  ‘And men of destiny.’

  Felix rolled his eyes and tilted his head back to the stars. The stars didn’t care who he’d been or what other men thought he was. They were the same here as they were over Altdorf or Middenheim, and for some reason that thought heartened him through to the dawn.

  The morning began with a shower, raindrops pattering over sheets and bedrolls and rousing stiff men from their slumber. Aching in their bones, the company broke camp and re
sumed their march.

  The Middle Mountains dragged by, vast and empty and seemingly unchanged by the days spent travelling through them, except perhaps by their creeping nearness. The clouds deepened in pitch through the day until the sky was as black as burnt wood. The air grew cold and difficult to breathe, and several soldiers complained bitterly of headaches and of nosebleeds that would not stop. Felix had walked the Worlds Edge Mountains with Gotrek and travelled the Silk Road across the Mountains of Mourn, and he was accustomed to these conditions and did his best to help the men to adapt to them – to breathe deeply, to stop by the river often and drink – but even he was starting to feel the effects of what the dwarfs disparagingly called ‘altitude sickness’.

  ‘How much further to Middenheim, do you think?’ asked Felix, setting his foot heavily on the ground and turning to watch as a gang of strong but tired men got behind Lanarksson’s wagon to lift its back wheel from a furrow in the track. Lorin mouthed hoarse instructions from the driver’s seat.

  ‘Assuming this goes to Middenheim at all,’ muttered Gustav.

  Felix thumbed his wedding ring slowly around his finger. He did not want to consider that possibility, but Gotrek’s sense of direction had not proven itself to be especially reliable lately. He wondered if it could be connected in any way to what was happening to the world at large. Could the dwarf’s loss of bearings be another symptom of the same malaise that afflicted Max? He couldn’t answer that; these were questions beyond him and he knew it.

  An apathetic cheer sounded over the roar of the water as Lorin’s back wheel crashed onto solid ground and the wagon again got moving. Felix looked over it to the jagged line of peaks. He shivered.

  ‘I can’t shake the feeling we’re being watched.’

  ‘It’s not just you,’ said Gustav. His eyes were bloodshot and his left nostril scabbed from a recent bleed. He scratched his bandaged right hand incessantly at the puncture scars on his neck, eyes constantly on the move from peak to peak. ‘I’ve not seen so much as a bird, but you can feel it, can’t you?’

  ‘We probably are being watched,’ Gotrek’s voice rumbled from up ahead. The dwarf neither turned around nor slowed his pace, but the handful of soldiers between him and Felix clutched their weapons a little more tightly and pinned their gazes to the mountainside. Felix silently cursed his callousness.

  ‘I thought that none but a dwarf could find these roads.’

  Gotrek chuckled mirthlessly. ‘We are following the river, manling. A blindfolded troll could make it this far. I would have thought it obvious that we are not yet on the old dwarf roads.’

  ‘How long until we are?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Gotrek shrugged, glaring at the shadows over the too-near horizon. ‘I’ve never been this way before.’

  ‘We should make a plan for if we can’t find this supposed road,’ Gustav murmured, eyes ahead, fingers scratching. ‘I don’t want to be walking through these mountains until we arrive out the other side in Nordland or starve to death. I say give him two more days to find his way, then we turn back, make for the south.’

  ‘We’ll find it,’ said Felix, mustering a confidence that he did not the least bit feel and fortifying it with a smile.

  Gustav scoffed but hadn’t the energy to add anything further.

  Felix walked on, thinking about what Gotrek had said, the nape of his neck prickling with imagined arrows.

  ‘Beastmen!’

  The cry rang out from the head of the marching column. Men and women scattered screaming in all directions, covered by the staccato crack of handgun fire. Puffs of powder smoke rose over the column, dispersing into the thin air as the volley echoed through the gorge.

  Felix huffed a dozen strides up the side of the valley, and then spun around, waving his arms in a cutting motion across his chest. ‘Stop. Cease fire.’

  The spindly pair of goats that some oxygen-deprived mind had mistaken for beastmen lying in ambush loped between the rocks and bounded away. Despite two-dozen bullets being fired in their direction it didn’t look as though either one of them had been hit.

  ‘Pity,’ said Gotrek, and at first Felix thought it was the lack of a herd of beastmen that was troubling him, but then the Slayer turned on Gustav and grinned nastily. ‘Looks like we may starve to death yet.’

  Felix pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath of air that felt more watered down than the ale in a Mootland tavern. Worries burned up what little air his brain was receiving. How much ammunition did they have left? Were they being tracked by the besiegers of Wolfenburg, and if so, had they heard those shots? He forced himself to breathe. He didn’t think he could take much more of this. His heart was going to give out long before Gustav’s deadline to cut their losses and turn back.

  Looking on the bright side, the journey had at least given him the time he needed to recover from the battle in the forest. A tension headache pulsed through his skull and the tendons in his hands were as stiff as hawsers from hovering over the hilt of his sword, but he walked like a man with joints again, which was progress of sorts. His face no longer felt sore from Gotrek’s punch, though his ego was still a little bruised and, though he was a thousand leagues from a mirror, he doubted that a broken nose and a couple of cracked teeth would add anything to his looks. Not that there had been much interest in those lately. He sighed, suddenly miserable again.

  So much for the bright side.

  Gotrek issued a grunt and directed Felix’s attention through the spreading powder plumes to the head of the column. A handful of the scouts had returned. Kolya ran ahead of them, whistling through his fingers before waving his hand above his head and then shouting enthusiastically as he gestured towards something further on. It was far too far for Felix to hear what the man said, river or no river, too far even to pick out the expression on his face; but he had neglected Gotrek’s powers of hearing.

  ‘A dwarf township,’ said Gotrek, running his thumb around the rim of his blade and eyeing Gustav’s back with his tongue out. ‘Where we join our road.’

  Lorin Lanarksson parked his wagon in what looked like a courtyard, the longbeard craning his neck around and whistling in awe as he pulled up on the reins. Petrified grass fell apart like talc as the iron-rimmed wheels rolled to a standstill on the ancient flagstones. The generally stoic mountain-bred mules snorted nervously in their traces. Lyndun jumped down and tried in vain to soothe them. There was something in the air. Men filed under the weather-smoothed stonework of what a few thousand years and some imagination could render back into a gatehouse. The strains of animal distress echoed back on them from the crumbling blocks of wall that surrounded them.

  Felix closed one hand over the hilt of his sword and the other around the neck of its scabbard as he looked around.

  The township was little more than a few hundred ancient structures huddled under the vastness of the mountain. The river ran through the edge of it, separating the courtyard and the remnants of a wall from the rest of the town, presumably as a defensive measure. Several bridges, only one of which was even close to being intact, made possible the crossing. The courtyard itself was slowly filling up with men, moving with superstitious care around fountains that had been weathered down to pitted grey stone to which only the occasional dwarfish form could be ascribed from the corner of the eye. It was unnerving, the likenesses vanishing into the stone when looked upon directly.

  The mountain itself was dotted with old mine heads and fortifications, all now ruined, connected by a winding causeway that ran towards a broken citadel. The fortress was embedded into the rock at the summit where it caught the last of the light as the sun dipped under the western peaks. Something metallic glinted from its battlements, but it was too far away to make it out. Felix assumed it was some defunct feature of the ancient dwarfhold and returned his attention to the causeway. He assumed that this would be the path they would be following come t
he morning in order to get onto the dwarf roads to Middenheim.

  For some reason he found it difficult to follow the path all the way from top to bottom. There was clearly a start and clearly an end, but his eye simply couldn’t seem to get from one to the other without getting lost. He wondered whether there was some manner of obfuscating runecraft at work, or merely clever design coupled with the effect of diminishing sunlight on tired eyes.

  As Felix watched and worried about what the next day would bring, the men set up camp under Corporal Mann’s direction. Tents were erected within the square and fires lit. A picket of spears was established, both on the sole bridge and under the jagged, mouth-like opening through which they had passed the crumbling defensive wall. A pair of men hauled a sack of oats from Lorin’s wagon between them and bore it towards the river to make gruel for the camp’s supper.

  The clap of struck steel resounded between the maudlin stones and Felix drew a sharp breath, spinning back around and drawing Karaghul a thumb’s width from its sheath.

  ‘Doskonale, friend Gustav, your skills improve.’

  Felix let the breath hiss out between his teeth and slid his blade back into its scabbard. He didn’t know where these young men found their energy.

  A ring of cheering and laughing soldiers surrounded the two men as they traded blows. Kolya danced behind a curved ordynka shortsword held in his weaker left hand, his right held behind his back, his colourful hemp coat jangling as he ducked and rolled. A slow altitude bleed trickled down Gustav’s nose, accentuating the grim focus on his face. His longer sabre slashed purposefully through the air, excepting the odd occasion when the Kislevite fancied a cheer and raised a ringing clang with a parry.

  ‘Keep your distance, Empire man. You have reach on me, use it…’

  The duel continued without Felix to watch it. There was no need. Kolya was the better swordsman by a distance, perhaps better even than himself, although he liked to think that he could have taken the former lancer in a fair contest in his prime.