by David Guymer
The scent of metal solder and immolated flesh filled Felix’s nostrils. He ducked, several of those magical bullets shooting alarmingly close to him, but remarkably none of them struck. He watched from a crouch as the last mutant warrior scrambling over the bodies piled on the stairs took a white bolt in the back, spasmed, and then collapsed.
Felix looked over the burnt carpet of dead in shock and no little horror.
Max Schreiber faded slowly back into the afterglow of the carnage he had wrought. He pulled his hood back over his head, concealing the misting of his face and the inexorable eclipse of his eyes. Shadowy tendrils arced between his fingers and the darkening folds of his hood. He took his once again plain yew staff and leaned on it wearily.
‘I wanted to tell you about a dream I had,’ he said, blankly.
‘You… I’m sorry, what?’
‘I dreamed of a hunter,’ Max went on, as if unaware of his surroundings or the lightstorm he had just unleashed on the mutants that still sizzled around him. ‘He was beset by beasts of land and air and sea. Hunter, Felix, don’t you see? Hunter. Jaeger. That is the meaning of your name.’
Felix stood up slowly and took a deep breath. He reaffirmed his grip on his sword. The belfry had been cleared but he could still hear the sounds of battle outside and even Gotrek, particularly in his exhausted state, couldn’t fight alone forever. He waved a hand in front of the wizard’s face.
‘Listen to me, Max. Do you know where you are?’
‘On the path of destiny,’ Max answered with a faint, chilling smile, looking through Felix’s hand and deep into his eyes. ‘I dreamt that I flew again, you and I seeking the ancient power of the dwarfs, but this time it was I that died. I think that maybe I have some role to play in your destiny after all.’
Felix withdrew his hand and repositioned it around his sword for a two-handed grip. When Max was like this it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to talk him. ‘Gotrek has a destiny, Max. I’m just me, the same old Felix. And the “hunter” thing is pretty tenuous. Kolya’s a hunter.’
Max shrugged. ‘Who?’
Shaking his head, Felix squelched through the charred gristle towards the doorway.
‘Wait,’ said Max, dreamily, and then with a shout: ‘Felix, get back!’
Felix saw the flash of a struck match from the opposite side of the street. Not enough warning on its own, but thanks to Max’s prescient shout he was already diving across the doorframe and into cover. He hit the ground flat as a torrent of shells from what must have been a larger-calibre variant of a repeater handgun blistered the ground where he had just been and chewed the stonework surrounding the doorway into an unrecognisable shape.
He breathlessly kissed his wedding ring in thanks for his life as he dragged his feet in from the doorway.
With a whine like an exhaling dragon, the storm of fire ceased. A thin drizzle of rock fell from what was left of the doorframe. Felix felt himself tense as he waited for the next barrage. He had encountered weapons like this before, but rarely, the sort of experimental ordnance that would normally be deployed only to the largest battlefields and even then under the careful stewardship of the most competent master-engineers. Felix had never faced followers of Chaos with this kind of weaponry before. It was something new.
Felix wasn’t at all sure he liked it.
‘Move away from the wall,’ said Max, crouching down and laying a hand onto a patch of weeds that stood up between a pair of burnt, misshapen corpses. A pulse of jade light passed down the wizard’s arm and into the ground.
Felix held his breath, but nothing happened. An accelerating whir from outside told him that the volleygun was about to fire again. He rolled his head back to examine the ruined stonework. It wouldn’t take another salvo.
‘I said move away,’ said Max.
Felix could feel the ground beneath his elbows shudder as though it were being slowly wrenched apart. The stonework groaned. From the corner of his eye he saw one of the mutants rising. Felix gasped, but it wasn’t the mutant: it was the weeds underneath it swelling. The same macabre scene was being enacted throughout the room, mutated corpses giving way to vigorous green growth.
Max mouthed an oaken creak of an incantation and the plants responded. The front wall turned green. Mosses and vines knotted together like green steel ringlets in a mail coat. Felix shuffled around and wriggled back, cringing from a questing root that squirmed across his thigh. Before Felix’s disbelieving eyes the wall turned thicker and greener until there was not a single stone visible at all.
Over the engorged groan of growing plant life, spinning gun barrels screamed.
Felix dropped himself back to the ground and covered his face under both arms, flinching with every sap-soft thump that struck the living wall. After a few seconds, he uncovered his face.
A wide-leafed creeper whipped before his eyes like a lion’s tail. Something thorny scratched his chin. Pale fluids dribbled down the vegetative barrier, but new growth was already healing the punctures and thickening the wall further still. He slapped at the wide leaf, staring open-mouthed around him. He had some knowledge of the nature of the aethyr, and he knew that it was divided, as the particular talents of the eight Colleges of Magic were similarly divided.
And Felix had never seen Max work magic like this.
Max rose silently, cracking the knuckles of the hand he had just used in his spell and sending what looked like bark chips sprinkling from his fingers. The grey flesh still carried a faint jade glow. ‘You see now why I was loath to aid you before. Everything about this is wrong. I am a mage of the Light. Teclis himself taught the first magisters of the Colleges that man cannot master all the winds of magic. To attempt to do so is to expose one’s soul to the evils of Chaos.’
Felix didn’t know what to say, and right then they had greater concerns. Gotrek’s battle cry filtered thickly through the pulsing vines. Metal sang. And what of Gustav and the camp, were they under attack as well? No, as harsh as it might have sounded, he would take this newly empowered Max Schreiber over the old one any day.
‘Can you get us out?’ he said instead, cutting to the only thing that mattered.
‘Of course,’ said Max, as though it were so obvious he hadn’t thought to raise the matter himself.
The wizard clasped his hands tightly around his staff, his robes sinking into the surrounding shadow. Felix noticed his own fingers appearing to unravel and become one with the darkness. He could no longer feel the floor beneath him and it melted into nothing even as he watched. The putrid, nectar stink of magically invigorated plant life disappeared. If he could have filled his lungs with shadow then he would have screamed.
‘Gird yourself,’ said Max. ‘Grey magic takes some adapting to.’
The first thing Felix became aware of again was sound. He could hear Gotrek’s shouts interspersed with others, cries of anger and of pain, the clangour of weapons and the crunch of mail and meat and bone.
Then images came, seldom in alignment with what he was seeing and all the more jarring for it.
To the metallic chatter of chain guns he saw Kolya, thigh deep in rushing white water, engaged in fierce hand-to-hand combat with a pair of stout axemen in long mail shirts, round shields, and winged helms, before the darkness swept through them and they were gone.
He saw Herschel Mann marshalling a firing line of Hochland longrifles, but the voice he heard yelling was someone else’s. Fire fizzed back and forth between the opposing banks of the river, a trickle versus a raging torrent.
Disembodied, Felix was helpless but to watch as a volleygun carved open Lanarksson’s wagon from front axle to tailboard. Big Lyndun tumbled down the steps from the buckboard, leaking blood like a colander. Lorin emerged from beneath the canvas roof, mouthing a cry that was lost somewhere in the aethyr shade and sporting a crossbow before a bullet tore out his throat. Two more punched through his c
hest, and then Felix heard a snatch of the dwarf’s voice before the shadows rolled in.
There was Gustav, leading a charge over the splintered remnants of a picket line and into the tight shieldwall of heavy infantry that was advancing against them over the bridge. Pistols blossomed from the front rank. He heard and saw men roar and then there was a clashing together. Gustav’s Gospodar sabre flashed and then the vision was gone.
‘No!’ Felix shouted, though with what and to whom he was uncertain. ‘Take me back to that last one. Gustav needs my help.’
Disconnected visual elements came and went. He saw a stab of orange crest, like the sail of a storm-tossed ship on a swell of armoured mutant warriors. There were ruined buildings webbed with shadow.
The darkness swirled through one and bore Felix’s flailing consciousness with it. An incredibly muscular figure was crouched by a window. He had a red scarf tied around his forehead and wore a pair of bug-eyed lenses marked with cross-hairs, through which he looked down onto the scene below him. Felix couldn’t say what the figure was watching. There seemed to be no spatial connection between the images he was passing through and he didn’t know the layout of the township well enough to stitch them together. The marksman raised what looked like a longrifle. It had a long cylindrical barrel attached to the top of the stock and some kind of scarlet glowstone within it that sent a beam of light in the direction he aimed.
And then the darkness pulled them apart again.
There was a crack like a thunderbolt and a mutant warrior in thick steel plate in parti-coloured black and white went down with a steaming crater where his visor had been.
Who was attacking who?
None of this made sense.
The confusion of images and sounds and gunpowder smells arranged themselves into ordered focus. The shadows slunk back to the aethyr where as far as Felix was concerned they were henceforth invited to remain.
With one hand, Felix felt over the side of his body to ensure it was all where he had left it. A wave of dizziness passed through him as his body delivered two contradictory senses of where he was supposed to be standing right now. Despite what a large, increasingly queasy, part of him insisted, he was no longer in the belfry. In fact he could see the belfry at the far end of the street, the ruin rising out of the tangle of weeds like a memorial stone on the site of a forgotten battlefield. The street between him and it was a grinding churn of armoured warriors, twenty or so Chaos knights and half again as many corpses, converging on Gotrek and his axe.
The Slayer issued a bloodthirsty peal of thunder and drove his axe through a warrior’s raised shield and deep into his groin. Blood spurted across the dwarf’s beard. Slivers of splintered steel peppered his snarling face with a metallic finish. A back-slung elbow cracked the side of a warrior’s helmet like an egg. A warhammer smacked against the Slayer’s shoulder blade and drove him to his knees. The hammer came down to crack his skull open. Gotrek caught the haft of the descending weapon and, in a bulging display of strength, yanked the hammer from the warrior’s grip and split it in half across his knee. A bare-knuckle punch as he rose sent a knight with four arms and a droning morning star in each hand crashing through two of his companions with a dented breastplate. A mutant with spines running down his ears and along the outside edges of his hands went down screaming with a shattered shin. Gotrek withdrew his boot and stamped on the knight’s thigh as he decapitated him with a single blow of his axe. More came in, smothering the Slayer with sheer weight of numbers.
Gotrek was formidable, but he was only one Slayer.
Felix cursed under his breath, looking back over his shoulder to where the river was lit up with gunfire like a firework display. Breathing hard, he turned back. For better or worse Max had brought him here. Gustav and the others would have to look after themselves.
‘Wait,’ said Max, seizing Felix’s shoulder at the most disconcerting moment possible, just before he had finalised the decision to charge and directed his muscles to see it done.
‘For what?
‘Do you remember poor Claudia?’ said Max conversationally, his special brand of madness impervious to the grunts and the cries and the wrench of torn metal. ‘I feel I understand her a little better now. The power of the Celestial is a blight that no man is equipped to bear.’
Felix shook his head as the wizard spoke, noticing as he did so that the multi-barrelled chain gun embedded in the ruins opposite the belfry was being pivoted about by its broad-shouldered crew and onto the street. They were going to gun down their own just to take out Gotrek.
‘Gotrek, look out!’ Felix yelled as the powerful weapon opened up, spraying the combatants with fire.
By virtue of numbers alone the mutants took the brunt, forced into an electric dance by the hail of bullets driven through them. Their thick armour offered scant protection and blood seeped through coin-sized holes front and back. Gotrek took a ding to his rune-axe that ricocheted off, leaving a black smudge on the starmetal. He roared furiously, then took a shot to the shoulder that punched him down.
Felix cried out, breaking free of Max’s grip to charge forward.
The cannon wound down, but before the dazed survivors could so much as pick themselves up a roar went up from both sides of the street and dozens of stocky warriors poured out from hiding amidst the ruins. Once on the open road they formed grimly into ranks and closed on the surviving mutants – and Felix! – like the walls of some mechanical dungeon trap.
These were not at all like the mutants Felix had just been fighting. Their tough, practical mail was unembellished but for the occasional spiked iron vambrace for added brutality at close quarters. Each bore a shield carrying a uniform runic device, tightly locked with their comrade on either side. Felix could see their faces within their open helms. Their cheeks were leathery, noses squashed and red, eyes hard behind their full unkempt beards.
Dwarfs, Felix realised, dismayed. Both he and the mutants had been ambushed by dwarfs. Had they taken one look at Felix’s tattered appearance and mistaken him for a mutant himself? Sigmar, he couldn’t blame them.
And as for Max…
A handful of the mutant warriors rallied themselves for a counter-charge, throwing themselves onto the advancing shieldwall which seemed to essentially grind over them. The remainder, clearly brighter than the rest, broke and ran, only to be picked off one by one with well-placed shots from marksmen positioned in the neighbouring buildings.
The dwarfs held every advantage. They had numbers, enviable discipline, and their superlative night vision had enabled them to ambush the mutants at their most vulnerable moment and take them out at range as they fled piecemeal.
The last mutant went down at a sprint with a crossbow bolt protruding from his throat. He collapsed just a few yards from where Felix stood.
Gotrek’s fate and what Max’s magic had shown him of their camp left him under no illusion that these dwarfs were rescuers. He was the last man standing simply by virtue of the fact that he was yet to be overtly aggressive or run away. Perhaps they thought him craven enough to be questioned? There was no more to it than that.
Could these dwarfs themselves be aligned with the gods of Chaos?
Stranger things had happened in these dark times, and they would not be the first Chaos warband to fall on that of a rival.
As he watched, the dwarf formations began to break up, axemen dropping down to deliver mercy kills to the fallen knights. Felix’s heart froze. Gotrek! Would these dwarfs recognise what they were doing before it was too late? Would they care?
‘Wait,’ he shouted, throwing down his sword and stepping over it with arms raised, halting only when a quarreller raised his crossbow to aim at Felix’s chest. His skin itched as though it could already feel the bolt whizzing towards it. ‘My name is Felix Jaeger,’ he proclaimed in his loudest and most confident oratorical tone, uncertain what that was supposed to mean to th
ese dwarfs, but for some reason determined to let them know it anyway.
Daring the sharpshooters’ iron nerves, he brought his raised hands together over his head to tease off his left glove. Then he lifted that hand, all fingers tucked in bar the fourth to display the rune-inscribed dwarf gold that banded it.
‘I swore an oath before the Slayer shrine of Karak Kadrin. I am the hammer-bearer and a daemonslayer, and on the word of a dwarf-friend, stop!’
The dwarfs slowly lowered their axes, apparently impressed enough to not kill him. They muttered to each other in Khazalid. Felix saw more than a few shrugs amongst the throng.
‘Who’s in charge here?’ said Felix. ‘Someone get him a message to stop the attack on our camp.’
More urgent muttering. The quarreller finally shouldered his weapon and Felix slowly lowered his hands, noticing as he did so the red spot that had appeared on his chest. Felix froze. The dot played over his armour for a second and then vanished.
Felix released a relieved breath, catching movement from the corner of his eye as a muscular dwarf with a bright red crest of hair rose up from behind the rough parapet of the rooftop across the street and laid his large, powerful-looking longrifle down against the stonework. The dwarf was short and immensely broad. He wore a thick leather coat with a high, fur-edged collar, which, contrary to spring cold and common sense, he wore open at the front to reveal amazingly defined muscles. Twin bandoliers containing an unusual cylindrical type of ammunition were looped over his shoulders and crossed his chest. His white beard was, most unusually for a dwarf, shaved almost to the jaw.
Felix gaped, his open mouth struggling unwittingly into a smile.
The dwarf pulled his goggles from his face, leaving them to hang by a rubber strap from his neck, and then pinched his eyes.
