by David Guymer
Hundreds of beastmen were swarming up the causeway towards the bridge, but worse even than that was the figure that strode amongst them.
Clad in a leering harness of battle-scarred black plate, his bare head towered over the tallest beastmen. Long grey hair hung across his broad shoulders and a braided grey beard lay like a tabard over his breastplate. His face was craggy and tattooed and looked to have been the focus of some insane artistry to leave it hellishly scarred. Blue light seeped under the lid of a third eye upon his forehead. In his hand he wielded a double-edged greatsword that looked to have been edged and fullered in gold. It sang a death song that was, like war itself, sickening to contemplate and behold and yet at the same time exhilarating beyond compare. The curve of its blade, the way it found the light, called to Gustav’s heart. He moaned softly. It would be an experience of surpassing wonder to see that blade closer to, to feel it enter his torso and slide through his guts as it sang that elegy for him and him alone.
Gotrek’s strong hand on his shoulder squeezed the alien feeling out of him.
‘Nothing to see there, manling.’
‘I…’ Gustav shook his head as the sudden lust that had moved him ebbed away to be replaced by the lingering taste in the mind of something foul. ‘I think you’re right. Sigmar, it’s the same warband we saw outside Wolfenburg. They’ve followed. I thought you said it was impossible.’
‘It is,’ Gotrek answered flatly.
‘Do you know what the wise woman says about things thought impossible?’ said Kolya before Gustav and Gotrek’s combined glares convinced him to shut his mouth.
‘Will they be able to find their way to Middenheim from here?’ Gustav yelled, some abiding insanity almost driving him to take the Slayer by the throat and shake an answer out of him.
‘Not if they’re all dead.’
Gustav retreated open-mouthed from the Slayer’s slack-jawed, boneheaded lunacy and turned for support to Kolya and the others just as the foreman and most of the other dwarfs in the hall were starting to run for the stairs up. A disbelieving laugh burst its way out of him.
‘So much for dwarf courage.’
The Slayer’s open palm struck him like a shovel. For a split second Gustav blacked out, coming around to see the ceiling spinning as he stumbled back into a man’s arms. His head filled with bells. A tooth dropped onto his tongue and he bent forwards to let it run out on a trickle of bloody drool.
‘If you were meant to be clever, manling, the gods would’ve made you a whiny little elf. Be thankful I owe your uncle a debt.’ Gotrek indicated the departing dwarfs with a dip of his crest and a grunt. ‘They’ve gone to evacuate what secrets they can, and sabotage that which they can’t,’ he said, not exactly inspiring Gustav with confidence in their chances. Then he pointed to a tanned Kislevite with the salted look of a seaman, an Erengrad docker perhaps, garbed in a sleeveless wool shirt and brown breeches held up by a rope belt. ‘You look like you want to see out the day. Get up those columns and start pulling that rigging down. It’ll hold up better than the cow-skin they’ve got flapping over the holes in the wall at the moment.’
The man nodded and got to work as Gotrek set about distributing tools and duties and then sent men dashing to the walls bearing wooden planks and salvaged iron plates. As each lighting rig came down the hall grew dimmer, illuminated predominantly now by the sunlight spearing through the breaches. And then even that was diminished little by little as men covered them with iron, found holes and began to hammer.
‘Are you mad?’ Gustav wailed. ‘We won’t be able to see.’
Gotrek grinned. His yellow teeth gleamed until the last big hole was covered and the glow from the dwarf’s rune-axe turned his face red.
‘You’ll see well enough when the wall comes down. Until then there’s nothing to look at.’
From the cupola of Unstoppable the assembled multitudes of Chaos looked almost like a single monstrous entity. Men were indistinguishable from beasts, and the tongue of bodies extending along the causeway put Felix in mind of the curious ant-eating creature that he had once marvelled at in the jungles of Ind. The thought that he and his friends were the ants in this scenario was not at all reassuring. The wind whistled in Felix’s ears, a thin mockery of the tumult that ensued below him. But even from this altitude, Felix could pick out the grey-haired giant in hulking Chaos armour that strode ahead of his hordes. With a crushing certainty Felix knew that this was the champion named Half-Ogre that Mann had spoken of and that Felix and Gotrek had spied in battle outside Wolfenburg.
The champion had been following them. But why? For what possible reason?
‘Malakai, I’m so sorry,’ Felix began, but the engineer had already dropped his backside onto the lip of the open hatch down and had his strong hands on the metal to feed himself in.
‘Did ye gi’ ’em a map? Then it isnae yer doin’. C’mon noo.’
Makaisson set his hands and feet onto the outside of the ladder’s siderails and slid down into the gasbag. Felix ran for the hatch. The fortress was undermanned and ruined, but it was still a formidable proposition and any position held by Malakai Makaisson would not crack readily. He could still help Gustav and Gotrek if he hurried. He slid his legs into the hatch until his feet hit the rungs, then sought out Max. His throat tightened in fear.
A shadow closed about the wizard like a fist although Max, with a terrible effort that was writ into his face, held it at bay with a light that he appeared to force through the pores of his skin.
‘Go, Felix,’ said Max, clutching his staff and groaning as he dredged more and brighter light until he glowed like a lightning rod in a storm.
The shadow menaced and swirled, formless by its very nature, yet possessed of a substance of will that Felix felt in his soul that he recognised, some shared darkness in the common nature of man. He saw the hint of wings, the spectre of a horned, crowned head. Felix’s limbs felt dead. A paralysing terror filled him and made him want to do nothing more than scream and jump into the hatch after Malakai, and in the same mental breath mocked his singular failure to muster even that much courage. It was unnatural to feel such potent dread, he knew, but that knowledge made it no less debilitating. It was the same shadow that had hung on his shoulder since his first return to the Empire. It had stalked him through the Great Forest, closed over the Middle Mountains like a net, and now it was here.
‘Go!’
Max’s yell dragged Felix out of his stupor, though whether it was the work of the wizard’s voice or the purifying rays that shone through the daemonic mist that enveloped him Felix could not be sure. ‘There is a powerful sorceress down there. She is attempting to summon a daemon.’ The wizard groaned, a pulse of white light driving back the struggling daemon another inch. ‘Go and find Gotrek. Help him. Find Kazad Drengazi. You can do nothing for me here.’
For a moment, Felix still couldn’t move. Light and dark churned over one another before his eyes. He gripped the hilt of his sword and then let it go.
Max was right.
He wasn’t a wizard or a scholar – this was not a battle he was equipped to fight.
‘Don’t die, Max,’ he shouted, as he slid into the shaft, for some inexplicable reason closed the hatch after him, and then slid down after Makaisson.
The first rocket corkscrewed out from the battlements on a geyser of black smoke before exploding against the mountainside. Rubble rained down onto the causeway and the beastmen charging up it, the near miss goading them to ever greater urgency as they raced for the bridge. The dwarf gunners made minute adjustments for range, declination and speed and waited as the beastmen roared onto the final ascent. The order to fire boomed from the ramparts like a handgun volley.
Khagash-Fél watched from their rear ranks as the front of the castle went up like a powder keg stuffed with Cathayan fireworks. Rockets hissed skyward trailing multicoloured plumes of smoke. Mortar rou
nds screamed like the damned. Gatling cannons chattered. Lead bullets tore beastmen to shreds by the dozen, firing lines tracking back and forth across the narrow rank even as the explosive munitions streaking down from above pulverised the path and reduced the piled corpses to ash. Khagash-Fél strode through it, his eye on the bridge. A mortar shell detonated in midair, showering him with gobbets of fire. All around him, beastmen lowed in agony and rolled amongst the corpses of their brethren as their fur burned away to muscle and bone. Khagash-Fél’s flesh turned red and molten where the fiery substance burned. No weapon of fire or born of fire could harm him. Such was the Blood God’s gift to him. A cannon added its own deep voice. Khagash-Fél felt the thin air breathe in as the lead shot sailed past him and crashed through the packed ranks of beastmen behind him.
He emerged from the firestorm glowing hot. His armour steamed. The runes that marked it shone a fierce gold and the dead-eyed daemon faces that decorated the ancient plates appeared to come alive and writhe in torment on the fire. He saw one of the dwarf gunners point at him and yell and angle his weapon downwards. Not to Khagash-Fél, he realised, but a point further up the trail.
The bridge.
The dwarfs meant to deny him the bridge and the battle promised him in prophecy.
Anger flooded his belly. He felt his stomach bloat and the furious beat of tiny wings against the underside of his throat. His vision reddened as he fixed his gaze on the dwarf and his craven engine of death. Nurgle had filled his gut with his ravenous children and Khorne had remade him in fire, but the Dark Master had shown him something greater, the uniting power of a pariah.
Khagash-Fél retched as if he was about to be sick, flies filling his throat and swarming into his nose and mouth. As each plague-mottled insect passed his lips it ignited with the fury of a god scorned and struck towards the battlements. Thousands of tiny explosions rippled across the front of the castle, triggering secondary detonations as the maddened insects bored into powder kegs. An engineer ran the full length of the ramparts, fumbling with his ammunition belt before it exploded, throwing his remains over a cannon and igniting it, the resulting blast flipping the war machine onto its back and flaying its crew with fire. The last explosion drove a great crack through the wall of the castle from the cannon batteries on the uppermost ramparts down to the gate itself, practically splitting the old dwarfhold in two.
Injured dwarfs cried out in pain and horror. Fires crackled behind savage breaches in the wall.
Crunching on the handful of flies still trapped between his teeth and swallowing them, Khagash-Fél brandished Ildezegtei to the crippled fortress and its defenders. With the exultant roar of his beastmen filling one ear and the blessings of the Dark Master in the other, he took the last steps towards his destiny.
Gustav Jaeger coughed on the tidal wave of dust that the rupture in the ceiling brought down into the greeting hall. Columns that had been teetering since before the dawn of man came crashing down. Distant explosions resounded through the stonework, men and dwarfs armoured in rock dust adding a paltry rejoinder as they returned fire from gaping breaches with pistols and crossbows. Having experienced merely second-hand the fate of the dwarfs’ artillery, Gustav almost wished they wouldn’t bother.
At least Gotrek’s punch had dazed him enough to deaden the worst of the impacts.
He stumbled towards the gate. The damage done to the surrounding wall had buckled its frame and left it hanging on its hinges. He moved with the vague idea of bracing it with something, although he had no good idea how or with what. He certainly wasn’t strong enough to move even the smallest chunk of the debris that littered the hall and would have been unable to identify the tool for doing so if it were presented to him. He sought out Gotrek, spotting the dwarf under a cloud of dust by the damaged gate.
He had never understood his uncle’s fondness for this particular Slayer. His race was as alien as any other, and few amongst those other races that Gustav had encountered were more terrifying in their strangeness than Gotrek Gurnisson. Shrouded by the smoke of war, he looked like a barbarian of the Unberogen days, a mass of muscle girded for battle in woad. But Gustav doubted whether any warrior-king of Sigmar’s blood had been as broad of shoulder or thick of neck as Gotrek. He was inhuman. His axe highlighted the muscular distinction in blood red. Gustav had never seen it glow so brightly. The light smeared through the murk and pooled within the runic engravings in the gate.
‘Back to the airship, manling, and make sure your uncle is on it when it leaves. And tell Makaisson if I see him flying anywhere but north to Middenheim then I’ll be coming for him next.’
‘We’ll all go,’ Gustav yelled, trying not sound as relieved by the task as he felt.
‘No time,’ Gotrek returned, turning around and kicking the broken gate out onto a scene of ash and thunder. Smoke lay over the courtyard and hung above its statues like laurels. Animal screams echoed between them. The bridge was black and hazed, but Gustav saw the infernal outline of something large and hot approaching from its far side. ‘The bridge is narrower than the gate. I’ll hold them there.’
The Slayer glanced over his shoulder, silhouetted in fire as Gustav instinctively backed away from the approach of whatever daemonic being threw out that glare.
‘Tell the little one that this was for her this time, not for me. Promise on your oath that you’ll tell her that.’
Felix landed in the metal hallway to find Malakai Makaisson halfway down the corridor waiting for him. The thrum of the engines had increased to a level that Felix could feel vibrating through the iron rungs of the ladder in his hands, the rattling of bulkheads only serving to heighten the engineer’s agitation.
‘What kept ye?’ Makaisson barked, then snapped up a hand. ‘Ne’er mind. There isnae time tae hear it. Ah huv tae to git tae the engine room tae coax this bucket o’ spare parts tae fly without comin’ apart from under oor feet. Ye ah need on the brig. Ye dae remember how tae fly this thing, ah hope?’
‘Fly? Fly where? We have to get down there.’
‘Ah’d expect nae less o’ ye, but ah heard there wiz nae oath between ye noo.’
Felix gripped the ladder’s siderail. Perhaps he had allowed Max to get inside his head, but his relationship with Gotrek had become less and less about that decades-old oath. Perhaps for Gotrek that was what still mattered, but if Felix was honest with himself then that was not the reason he had followed the Slayer for as long as he had. It had been an adventure at first and that had been reason enough, but somewhere along the way he had come to remain because he had felt that he should.
He knew exactly when he had come to that belief, too – he had been here aboard the old Spirit of Grungni, coming circuitously but inevitably to the decision to join Gotrek’s quest into the Chaos Wastes, easily the most dangerous realm in this world. And why? He had been told it was his own decision, that no oath bound him to follow, and yet he had done so, because he had felt the hand of destiny on the Slayer’s path. He still felt that he had earned his own chance at happiness, and Kat certainly had, but if he was offered the opportunity to leave the Slayer and this life again he was not sure what he would do. The world seemed to have other plans for them all.
Max was right. Felix didn’t like to believe it, but he was right.
‘Come on,’ said Malakai, glancing over his shoulder and then starting back towards Felix as though intending to drag him to the bridge. ‘There’s nae way back, laddie. The tower will be filled wi’ parts coomin’ up and engineers gaun doon. Ah willnae let some Chaos beastie get a hold o’ ma airship. I’d destroy her first. Gotrek wiz an engineer, he’d agree wi’ me.’
Felix groaned. No way down. The bridge. Why did that niggle at something in Felix’s mind?
Like a bolt to the back of the head it came to him. He opened his mouth to say something, then decided there was no time for it, and was spinning on his heel before his lips clamped shut and runni
ng down the corridor, with his scabbard whipping at his heels and Makaisson yelling after him.
‘Where are ye gaun? The brig’s the other way. Felix!’
The engineer’s cries disappeared around a bend as Felix pushed his old legs for one last sprint, taking turns without needing to think about them as though he had lived aboard the Unstoppable all his life. The engines chuntered and groaned. The decking rattled like the armour of a charging horse.
Every so often after running past dozens of empty doorways, he passed a room where dwarf engineers worked frantically, sometimes with only their feet exposed beneath huge pieces of machinery. Felix saw shock on their faces at seeing a human running about on their airship in the instant before they flashed out of view and he ran on. Any moment, he half expected to hear a challenge or feel a crossbow bolt in the back. None came. Either the dwarfs were simply too busy, or bad news like Felix Jaeger moved as quickly through a dwarf host as it did amongst men.
At the end of a short corridor, he hurtled through an open doorway and onto a gantry overlooking a large hangar.
The gyrocopter hangar.
He slammed into the handrail, causing the whole structure to shake alarmingly, then pulled himself left for one more short run to the ladder. He staggered up to it, wheezing, and folded over the handrail. It was the air. He couldn’t seem to catch enough of it. Oh yes, and he had skipped a night’s sleep, hadn’t eaten since Shallya alone remembered when, and should have had enough of this sort of thing twenty years ago. But apart from that…
He took a deep breath and swung himself over the ladder. As Malakai had done before him, he positioned his hands against the outside of the siderails as though they were the wheels of a mine cart on their track, then took his feet off the rung and slid to the bottom level of the hangar.
