by David Guymer
‘Welcome aboord,’ Malakai yelled as Felix stepped reverently onto the iron deck and looked around at the small boarding chamber.
A single white light shone from a fixed point in the ceiling, illuminating metal rivets and the edges of plates. It was all so well polished that Felix could see his blurred reflection in them. He scratched his greying beard ruefully, turning a full circle before coming to the circular door-hatch that led into the interior of the gondola. It was solid steel and, unlike an ordinary door, was opened by rotating a wheel mechanism in the centre and then waiting for the locks to release. Felix didn’t understand the logic behind the design but the dwarfs had similar systems aboard their submersibles as well, so he assumed it served some purpose for dwarfs were nothing if not pragmatic.
With a glance at Malakai for permission, Felix took the wheel in his hands. His heart was hammering. He ran his hands around the smooth curve of the metal. For a moment, he felt as if he could turn this wheel, stand back, and find Ulrika and Snorri and everyone else waiting for him on the other side. He smiled. And then he, Gotrek and Snorri would escape below for a good hard drinking session before the ship got under way. He sighed, a lump in his throat. He would never have thought, living through those terrible adventures, that those would be the best days of his life. What he would give now for one more argument with Ulrika, or a hung-over Snorri Nosebiter as the greatest of his problems. He was surprised to find himself even missing Gotrek. The Slayer was still around, of course, but what Felix found himself yearning for was his friend.
Malakai reached around him, and gave the wheel a gentle downwards tug to set it spinning. ‘A wee bit stiff for human hands,’ he said, with an understanding squeeze of Felix’s shoulder. Malakai was remarkably empathetic for a Slayer.
‘Yes. A little. No doubt I’ll get used to it.’
‘Sae, whit dae ye both want tae see first?’
The dwarfs’ infirmary was the busiest part of the castle, playing host to a steady stream of minor injuries from the battle as well as the cuts, scalds, and bruises that seemed an everyday part of life for the workers here. Behind a partially screened off corner, a craggy-faced elder with his long grey beard held in a net chewed on the stem of an unlit pipe and concentrated on sewing shut a nasty-looking cut on a warrior’s arm. A younger dwarf watched over his shoulder, on hand with a damp cloth and a half-empty jug of ale and prepared to deploy either one. Elsewhere, dwarfs in bloodstained leather aprons and gloves hurried about bearing trays of what looked like instruments of torture. One particularly grim-looking dwarf threw a bucket of sickly red water over a drain in the floor. Men moaned. Some lay unconscious on tables. Dwarfs sat stoically upright on benches or else stood, suffering their injuries as only dwarfs could.
Allowing the cruel alchemy by which crippled men were transformed back into soldiers to proceed around the table at which he sat, Gustav slowly unwound the foetid bandage from his hand. It felt like grinding one’s fist into a bruise. A sour milk smell emerged as it unravelled. He probably should have changed the bandage sooner, but what did he know, he wasn’t a healer, and it wasn’t as if clean cloth had been spilling from their empty grain sacks. He reassured himself that nothing dead ever smelled that bad.
‘The Dushyka wise woman said always to do it quickly,’ said Kolya, leaning onto the low table over a plate of something indescribable in gravy and a mug of something worse.
‘I bet that’s what all the ladies told you,’ Gustav replied, forcing a smirk.
Kolya grinned, massaging his ribs – bruised, but luckily not broken following a battering by a dwarf’s shield – then shuffled uncomfortably on his bench. It had been made to seat a body half his height and with a backside twice the girth of his. ‘I know seven languages, friend Gustav. There are many peoples beyond the northern face of the Goromadny, and I have almost as many wives there.’ He settled and shrugged. ‘Winters are long on the frozen sea, no?’
‘You married more than once?’ said Gustav, not in the least bit shocked by anything this northern savage might do. The man spoke Kurgan and, insofar as Gustav cared to differentiate, was practically Kurgan himself. He remembered that the Kislevite had been a winged lancer in his old life, as well as a hunter. He thought of the pictures of proud riders in gorgeous mail accoutred with amber and jet, cloaked in animal skins with coloured pennants flying from their lances amidst the famous feathered wings on their backs. It was difficult to reconcile that image with the hemp-clad ruffian that Gustav had grudgingly come to know.
‘Wife is not horse,’ said Kolya with a shrug.
‘Does that mean something?’
‘If you are Kislevite.’
The final layer of bandaging came away stickily, flesh clinging to the final strip of cloth as Gustav peeled it back. His nose wrinkled in protest and he grimaced as he attempted to flex his fingers. His hand was still red raw, the skin mottled with partially healed blisters. After everything he had gone through in Kislev, outliving even the accursed vampiric beauty who still haunted the beating of his heart, to be laid low by a misfiring pistol was a cruel fate.
Kolya pushed his bowl across the table towards Gustav. ‘The dwarf who gave it me said it was fortifying.’ He mimed a spoon-to-the-mouth motion. ‘Eat.’
Gustav examined the thick stew, trying to identify the misshapen lumps that floated in it like dead bodies in the Aver. He turned to the dwarf beside him who, with his arm in a sling, had his bowl to his lips and was slurping with gusto. Seeing Gustav’s regard, the dwarf set down his bowl and clapped his lips.
‘Tastes like chicken.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Gustav said, pushing the bowl back towards Kolya.
The Kislevite stuck his finger in it for a taste, then shrugged and picked up his spoon. ‘Makes man wish for cup of kvass to sear taste buds, no?’
Ignoring him, Gustav again tried to force his fingers to clench. Blisters popped and dead skin pulled as far as it would stretch until the pain became too great and he had to relax. He wondered if he would ever wield a sword properly again.
‘My uncle used the exact same gunpowder as I did. Why am I the one with the ruined hand?’
‘Do you wish you had both been hurt?’ said Kolya.
‘Of course not.’
The Kislevite shrugged and thumbed something gristly from the corner of his lip. ‘Is of no matter. Do you think I do not wish ill on that axe-wielding zabójka of a dwarf?’
‘That’s different. Following Gotrek’s like being chained to a hippogriff.’
‘You are on a fast horse to nowhere, friend Gustav. Some men ride with reins and stirrups, but us?’ He raised his spoon in a toast. ‘We hold on and pray to Ursun we do not fall, and hope our destiny follows in the path of others more gifted.’
‘I’m not following anyone,’ Gustav muttered, willing his fingers to curl as if that alone would prove him correct. ‘Unlike you, I can leave whenever I want.’
‘Then leave.’
Gustav opened his mouth, but then hesitated. He could abandon his uncle’s path, of course he could, but what would he do then if he did? He had discussed the idea of making for Averheim with several of the company sergeants – it made sense to have a contingency – but that had been before they’d marched several days in the wrong direction with a Chaos warband on their tail. It still made sense to him as a destination, the largest city of the south and presumably well away from the Chaos forces that marched from the north and the east. He knew that a lot of the men thought in private as he did, but they were too wedded to the growing heroic legend of Felix Jaeger to leave him, and Gustav didn’t fancy braving the Empire’s wilds alone. But he told himself that he could leave if he chose to.
Kolya’s grin was more insulting than anything he could possibly say.
Gustav was facing the door behind the Kislevite’s back as Gotrek stomped into the infirmary. The Slayer grunted somet
hing in Dwarfish to an orderly who checked him at the doorway, then pushed the dwarf gently but very firmly to one side so he could scan the room with his one bulldog eye. Gustav found himself sitting a little straighter as the Slayer started towards them.
‘Is not so bad,’ Kolya went on, oblivious. ‘At least your hippogriff does not talk tiresomely of doom, then kill his best friend as he killed mine and decide that what he really wanted all along is to walk all the way to Altdorf.’
Gustav’s eyes widened as the Slayer loomed over Kolya’s back. His bullet-drilled shoulders were almost three times as broad as the Kislevite’s. His frayed crest brushed the ceiling. His good eye, bloodshot and bleary as it was, bored into the back of Kolya’s head.
Kolya swivelled nonchalantly around. Something with the fur still on bobbed in his spoon. He directed a wink at Gustav and grinned. ‘Not that I am ungrateful, of course. For all of those years that I spent with the freedom of the plains did I wish to see the endless forests of our eternal ally.’
Gustav was astounded that the Slayer did not simply plough his fist into Kolya’s face right there. He hadn’t known the dwarf as long as either Felix or Kolya had, but he’d read his uncle’s books. He’d kept that fact to himself, but he had.
‘I see you’re keeping yourself idle,’ Gotrek growled with the faintest slur of either mild drunkenness or the most extraordinary tiredness.
Kolya shuffled along a few inches and pushed his ale cup back across the table for the Slayer, but Gotrek remained standing, like some chipped and pitted statue.
‘What do you know about machines, manling?’
‘Little,’ said Kolya, smile fading into seriousness. ‘Some men of the rota bore harquebuses, but I not like to depend on thing I cannot fix myself or rebuild if I must.’
Gustav recoiled as the dwarf’s stare turned on him. ‘Me? Nothing.’
With a grunt of expected disappointment, Gotrek looked down the table. ‘Who’s the senior engineer here?’
The dwarf sitting next to Gustav set down his bowl and dabbed his beard on the edge of his sling. ‘And who are you, son of Grimnir?’
‘A good pair of hands, that’s who. I’ll spend a day or a week in this castle if it means shortening our journey to Middenheim by as much, but Makaisson’s soft and this lot look lazy.’ He stared the broken-armed dwarf down. ‘They’ll not idle an hour longer than they must if I can help it.’
‘Were you an engineer, then?’ mumbled the dwarf.
‘What do you mean, were?’ said Gotrek, threateningly.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ said the dwarf, appealing with his eyes for help from Gustav and Kolya and finding nothing going. ‘I’m sure we could put you to work somewhere.’
‘Now,’ Gotrek growled, menacing the injured dwarf to his feet. Then Gotrek took Kolya by the scruff of the neck and hoisted him up from under the table as easily as a large man would lift a puppy. ‘To work, manling. If you can pick up a spoon you can pick up a paint brush. Do you want to see Middenheim or not?’
Gustav hurriedly drew himself up.
His hand suddenly felt a whole lot better.
Over the next few hours, Felix walked the steel hallways of his youth, a journey as dizzying in its way as the wildest elevator ride ever could be. Everything was as he remembered it. He could have followed the layout of the corridors in his sleep. Every bolt and rivet had a memory attached. Each room that they passed brought a flood of long forgotten images and feelings. That wasn’t to say that the interior of the airship was exactly the same as it had been. Huge sections of it were clearly unfinished. Some corridors were little more than swamps of loose cabling that spilled from unplated walls. Others lay in darkness with copper fronds splaying from holes in the ceiling. But his mind seemed more than willing to skip over such minor discrepancies.
Malakai took them first to the bridge. Felix brushed his fingers over the dials, gauges and brass-knobbed levers that lined the walls, threw himself into the leather embrace of the command chair and swivelled it around, then bounced to his feet again to grasp the huge nautical steering wheel and gaze through the view screen at the rugged peaks visible in outline against the black sky. Max merely looked, taking in everything at a glance, lost in some inscrutable reverie of his own.
They toured the engine deck. Black-faced engineers moved around as if Malakai and the others were not there at all, communicating with each other by sign under the din of huge horizontal pistons sliding in and out of thick metal jackets, the chug of steam boilers and the relentless thrum of the engines. The decking trembled underfoot and Felix could almost see the air vibrating between the walls. Jabbing his thumb back the way they had come, Malakai took them onwards.
A sweep of the lower decks took in the airship’s observation turrets. While Max waited in the hallway, Felix pushed his head into the bubble of each one and inhaled deeply the scent of metal polish and grease. Within each of them was an organ gun set up on a gimbal-mounted platform that allowed the weapon to swivel a short distance in any direction by the use of foot pedals. He smiled sadly, hearing in his mind the rapid-fire boom of dozens of these turrets as a vast red dragon swooped alongside to rake its claws through the steel and hawsers of the gondola. He held the walls and eyed the ceiling as Malakai took them aft, half expecting to feel the hull judder.
The rear of the gondola was given over to a hangar spanning several decks in height and filled with partially dismantled gyrocopters in bays marked out with strips of a strange glow-in-the-dark metal. Felix shook his head, marvelling as he never ceased to do at the ingenuity and cunning of the dwarfs. With the bays so marked, the dwarf pilots would be able to find their vehicles instantly, even in total darkness. These gyrocopters however had a distinctly cannibalised look, and Felix assumed they had given of themselves for the greater good of the airship. He patted the cool fuselage of one as they left, appreciating its sacrifice.
They passed the mess hall, bolted-down tables and chairs peopled by carousing ghosts. Felix thought he saw his old quarters. It was difficult to be certain, as spartan and unfinished as it looked, but he recalled that there had been only three single quarters on the airship and he convinced himself that this one had been his. He lingered at the doorway, remembering the times that he and Ulrika had shared within those walls, before Malakai called him away.
Max stood hunched against his staff under the low ceiling of the corridor beside a metal ladder as Malakai reached up to wheel open the ceiling hatch above it. It was one of several that led through the labyrinth of crawlways between the gas-filled cells that filled the gasbag and allowed the airship to fly. At the very top would be the cupola, a metal dorsal spine that ran the length of the gasbag and was flanked by a – as Felix recalled – wholly inadequate handrail.
‘How long before it’s ready to fly?’ Max asked as Malakai spun the wheel and threw open the hatch. A marshy smell drifted down into the corridor. Felix knew that liftgas was, of course, lighter than air and so presumed it to be some impurity that the hard-pressed dwarfs had been unable to fully remove. Felix hoped it wouldn’t affect how she flew.
‘Difficult tae say,’ said Malakai, clapping grease from his palms and then sticking his thumbs under his belt. His brutish features furrowed, as if giving the question its full due. ‘Therr’s a few kinks that still need tae be worked oot.’
‘Kinks?’ said Felix.
‘Aye. Ah may have bin exaggeratin’ joost a wee bit when ah said we had fuel enough tae reach Karaz-a-Karak.’
‘And what about Middenheim?’
Malakai shrugged his enormous shoulders. ‘Joost a wee hop ower the mountain. But ah think ah can squeeze a wee bit moor oot o’ these engines, joost a matter o’ flyin’ high enough. Ye can gan faster fur less at higher altitood where the air is thinner. It’s ower ye’re heads ahm sure, but the problem then is ye cannae see where ye’re gaun and ye’re flyin’ on instruments.’
‘And why is that a problem?’ said Felix.
‘Another kink. Ah cannae get the blasted compass to work, and if the compass willnae tell ye where ye’re gaun then ye huv to descend tae take bearings and ye’re back tae where ye started.’
‘Is it a problem with the compass? Have you tried another one?’
‘Aye, Master Jaeger,’ said Malakai with an exasperated sigh. ‘Ah tried another yin.’
‘It’s the polar vortex,’ said Max softly, barely audible above the hum of the deckplates resonating with the engines. ‘It’s unstable, throwing out far more raw magic into the world than it should as the Chaos Wastes expand and great sorcerers pull it every which way. I can see it all around me, and I suspect that’s what underlies your problem as well.’
Felix considered the implications of that and found that they were too large for him even to fully comprehend. Ocean-going trade would undoubtedly become next to impossible, with devastating implications for cities like Altdorf and Marienburg. It took him a moment to remember that both of those places had already been destroyed. It was pointless to try and guess what would happen after the war was won. First it had to be won and that had never looked less likely. He wondered if this strange magical dysfunction of the airship’s navigational instruments could in some way be responsible for the difficulties that Gotrek had had finding his way through the Empire. He voiced his question out loud.
‘Aye, mibbe. Put a dwarf’s feet on the ground and he’ll almost always ken where he is. We donae think aboot it tae be honest.’
‘Several races possess seemingly innate abilities that are supranatural in origin,’ said Max. ‘Greenskins would be a case in point.’
‘We’ll finish our tour oop top shall we?’ said Malakai, grabbing a rung and hauling his bulk up the ladder before Max could run on into any further detail.
Felix had remembered correctly – the handrail that encircled the dorsal spine was a heavy-duty iron bar that looked like it could stand up to the charge of an Imperial steam tank, but had unfortunately been positioned at a height only halfway up his thighs. Felix couldn’t help but imagine how easy it would be to tip over and fall a long, long, long way to the ground. The wind didn’t help matters. It was incredibly strong at this altitude and Felix had to spread his feet along the corrugated metal walkway and bend into it to avoid being blown over. He imagined there was nothing but the wind between him and the Realm of Chaos and the thought of that left him queasier than any amount of vertigo.
