Gotrek & Felix: Slayer

by David Guymer

  Allowing his racing heart the moment it needed, he looked around. In agreement with his earlier assessment, the eight or nine gyrocopters within the luminously marked bays looked to have been functionally if not completely disassembled. Steel plates had been removed from the vehicles’ fuselages, likely for use on Unstoppable, revealing the engines’ gleaming innards. At least half of them were missing rotors and the one nearest to Felix had even had the pilot’s seat stripped from the cockpit along with most of the controls. It seemed hopeless to expect to find anything in here that would fly, but Felix knew dwarfs too well for that. They were a pragmatic people and if there was a reason for carrying a flight of gyrocopters in the first place, then Makaisson and his engineers would want to keep at least one operational against such an eventuality.

  He grinned when he found it and would have beat the air with his fist and whooped in jubilation had he the energy. The gyrocopter was parked in the bay nearest to the aft doors and furthest from the walkway, hence the reason that Felix had not spotted it immediately. Its nose section was embossed with the snarling visage of a god that Felix presumed to be Grimnir depicted in brass. The blades of its main rotor hung limp. The flying machine was secured to the deck by a series of leather straps looped between its landing skids and the mooring rings bolted to the floor. The ground within the marked bay looked as though it had been recently swept, and the fuselage smelled freshly oiled and polished and felt smooth to the touch.

  With the growing fear that he would actually have to go through with what he had been thinking, Felix moved around the gyrocopter, unfastening the straps so that they hung slack over its skids, and then climbed into the cockpit.

  The leather seat softened around his weight as Felix scanned the controls. He had never flown one of these things himself, but he must have seen it done dozens of times. It had not looked that difficult when the earnest young scholar Varek Forkbeard had first talked him through the terrifying complexity of onboard gauges, dials, and controls, but now it felt as if they were multiplying before his very eyes. He closed his eyes and tried to relax into it. Most of them didn’t matter. If the vehicle was low on fuel then he would find out soon enough and there was very little he could do about it anyway.

  Between his awkwardly bent knees was a leather-bound stick. This controlled the angle of the main rotor to give movement either left, right, forward, or back. There was also a trigger just above the grip that controlled the gyrocopter’s main armament, the narrow-muzzled steam cannon that projected from the brass figurehead’s mouth. Felix had no idea whether it would fire if he pressed it and decided that he should probably leave it alone. With his left hand he located the other stick just outside his leg. He squeezed it as he concentrated, playing with the foot pedals that responded by pulling the tailfin left or right depending on which pedal he pushed. It was a profoundly terrifying sensation. Carefully, he let go of the left-hand stick. Yes, he remembered now, that one was responsible for lift.

  Now he just needed to figure out how to start it.

  Oddly enough, when he had flown in these machines before it had always been in some kind of a hurry.

  He ran his finger over the control panel, trying to ignore the nagging voice that demanded he start pushing likely looking buttons and instead to remember what Varek had taught him. There! His finger hovered over a blue button marked with a strange rune and positioned between two glass-fronted gauges. It looked familiar, and it felt like the right position for it.

  He hesitated a moment, then pushed it and held it pressed. A rapid string of clicks sounded from behind the control panel and the entire gyrocopter juddered into life as its fuel ignited. The assorted dials arrowed into the red and then slid back into more equitable zones. Felix’s heart reluctantly climbed down from his mouth. What maniac had designed them to do that? With a slow but rising rhythm of whumps the rotor blades began to turn. Felix hurriedly set about strapping himself in, only to glance up and realise in a moment of horror that he had neglected to open the hangar door.

  Ducking low in his seat to avoid the whirring blades despite the fact that they were a good distance above his head, he cast about for the mechanism to open the outer door. He found it – or at least what looked like it – further back against the forward bulkhead. It was a slanted metal bench inset with knobs and dials and the wall behind it was hung with netting, presumably for whoever was working at that station to hold onto if necessary.

  Abandoning the gyrocopter, he ran towards the control station.

  Amongst the assorted gauges there was one large lever with a pair of angry-looking red runes displayed beneath it. Felix looked at the hangar door and then back to the lever. It had to be it. It had to be. With a prayer to whatever god looked after men this far above the ground, he took it in both hands and pulled it.

  There was a meaty clank, then another, the sound of a chain being paid out somewhere beneath the deck, and the door began to open.

  Black smoke boiled in and with it came screams. At the same time, Unstoppable groaned like an old soldier in pain, the drone of her engines blasting through the open doors.

  The unpiloted gyrocopter had risen to almost head height, and Felix huffed back aft, grabbed a hold of its teasingly swaying landing skids with a running jump and hauled himself back into the cockpit. He took one of the seat straps, then cast it aside in favour of the control sticks, pushing down the left-hand stick to arrest the gyrocopter’s climb. His stomach leapt and then bottomed out and Felix feared for a moment that he was definitely going to be sick, but then the craft appeared to stabilise itself.

  The gyrocopter hovered, yawing truculently in every direction despite his ashen-faced intent to keep it still. He took a deep breath. He could do this. It really wasn’t so hard.

  Easing the main stick down caused the gyrocopter to tilt forward and shoot through the hangar doors like a crossbow bolt.

  Acrid smoke whipped across Felix’s face and he looked down to see the dwarfhold broken up and lit by hellish fires. Dwarfs in armour emerged onto the top battlement of the castle bearing crates full of scorched equipment, jostling with the scores already waiting for the elevator at the foot of the metal tower. True to Makaisson’s word the elevator was steaming down from the airship with a complement of engineers crammed inside. More waited at the top. A handful of dwarfs with bulging backpacks scaled the tower’s ladders like ants climbing up a tree. Felix picked out the taller figure of Gustav amidst their number and felt a surge of relief that his nephew was far from the fierce fighting at the castle’s gates. The feeling didn’t last long.

  Screaming, Felix grappled the gyrocopter over a raised corner turret and then plunged into a stomach-lurching turn that sent the flying machine chopping into the thick smoke that pumped out of the front of the castle.

  The gyrocopter rattled under the pressures of conflicting air currents and his own inexpert handling as he struggled to bring it down. Part of him desperately wanted to slow down, but the louder and terrifyingly cogent part told him that the one thing he wanted to be inside even less than this gyrocopter was a stalled gyrocopter plummeting towards the ground. He held steady on the stick and in fewer heartbeats than Felix dared to count he was through the smoke cloud and soaring over the causeway.

  Rabid beastmen swarmed up the trail and behind them came northmen in unusual conical helms and eastern-style armour. They advanced with a discipline that an Imperial force of half the size would have been proud to achieve: armoured infantry pushing up behind the beastman screen, followed by what looked even from Felix’s rare vantage to be a numberless horde of mounted bowmen.

  An arrow thumped against the underside of the fuselage and another whistled past his eyes to be carved into splinters by the gyrocopter’s rotor blades. The gyrocopter’s armour was thickest on its underside – that being the conventional direction of attack – but the mere fact that the northmen’s weapons were able to strike him at all
at this range and speed disinclined him towards taking chances with their capabilities.

  Felix brought the nose around to the left and then swung back to the right to double back and descend.

  He was getting the hang of this now. It was simply a matter of looking far enough ahead that he could ease the flying machine along its course without needing to resort to rash tugs on the stick. The dusty smog rising from the causeway below him made that difficult, but with a little concentration not impossible.

  After a few seconds he realised that he must have passed within range of the citadel’s guns. The cloud he was struggling to see through was rising from what was left of the road. The mountain face it wound through had been blasted away and the rubble piled onto the road. Bits of beastman poked through the rocks, serving as handholds to their monstrous kin as they clambered over, determined as ever to close with their enemy.

  The gyrocopter whirred over the scree pile and into view of the castle. Its gate was wide open and the wall breached in numerous places, but Felix could still see men and dwarfs firing from within. The courtyard however was empty except for statues and Felix soon saw why.

  Gotrek and the huge Chaos warrior blocked the bridge with a battle of such ferocious intensity that it made the spinning blades of his flying machine appear sluggish by comparison. The Slayer’s axe left ruddy streaks in the air behind it, its runes glowing hot enough to burn, only for the long, undulating blade of the Chaos warrior to sashay across every blow and beneath every guard. Felix couldn’t say how the warrior was doing it, but every time it looked as though Gotrek was about to land a telling blow the Chaos warrior would inexplicably alter his approach, closing the opening and sending another stroke carving across the Slayer’s arms, wrists, and chest. Gotrek bled like a gutted sow. And with the regularity of a beating heart a pulse of blue light washed out from the startling eye on the champion’s forehead to cleanse the air of its rune-cut scars.

  Gotrek angrily waved Felix off as the gyrocopter swept over the dwarf’s head and around.

  Felix could see that the beastmen too were standing off, unwilling to interfere in their champion’s battle or simply too afraid to do so, and for that Felix didn’t blame them. The defenders on the other side of the bridge were not nearly so shy, firing from the cover of the castle with pistols and bows and pitching dozens of beastmen into the chasm to their distant dooms. Bullets rattled off the Chaos warrior’s broad shoulders like coins flung at a steam tank. Felix even saw one mark a direct hit on the champion’s fiery red cheek only to ricochet off in a welter of sparks and shave the side of Gotrek’s scalp. Gotrek roared, blisters popping up across his head, and struck a wild, upward-arcing blow with his axe.

  A pulse of sapphire bathed the Half-Ogre’s face and time seemed to hold its breath.

  Felix watched as the Half-Ogre managed to twist, pull himself out of the way, and then slam his elbow joint into the back of Gotrek’s neck as the Slayer stumbled across his body. The Chaos warrior then avoided Gotrek’s backswing as if he had read the dwarf’s mind, and in the same fluid motion hauled Gotrek back across him by the roots of his crest and punched the hilt of his sword into the Slayer’s nose. Blood spattered the warrior’s bare fist, where it boiled. Gotrek staggered and yelled like a drunk, the Chaos warrior shoving him back and hitting him again, hard enough this time to snap the Slayer’s face around and lump him to the ground.

  Could Max have been wrong after all? Was Felix witnessing Gotrek’s long overdue doom at last? The Half-Ogre looked up and smirked as Felix bore down. Felix saw something in his eyes: a kind of recognition, anticipation even.

  Without thinking about what he was doing, Felix pushed down the stick to accelerate and squeezed on the trigger as though he meant to crush the stick in his bare hands and tear it from the gyrocopter’s cockpit. His concerns over the weapon’s functionality were erased in a jet of superheated steam that hissed above Gotrek’s recumbent form and struck the Chaos champion’s armoured torso. The warrior and the bridge behind him disappeared under a wave of steam, the beastmen on the far side screaming in agony as the blast from the steam cannon boiled them alive. Felix held the trigger down until the gyrocopter had swept over the bridge again and was banking back around.

  Steam lifted from the iron bridge to reveal several blistered bodies. The Chaos warrior stood amongst them with cracked armour and furnace-red skin, turning towards Felix and raising a hand as if to beckon him down. Behind him, Gotrek sat up unsteadily, brushed a hand through his scorched crest and spat a gobbet of blood off the side of the bridge. Felix swore. It looked like he was going to have to land. He would have to…

  The bewildering array of controls before him expanded to fill his view. He regarded it with a sinking feeling.

  Ah, spoke the dry voice of his subconscious, we appear to have uncovered a fundamental gap in our knowledge of gyrocopter operation.

  Teeth gritted, he angled the gyrocopter’s nose down until the muzzle of the steam cannon was centred on the Half-Ogre’s chest. The Chaos warrior spread his arms as if inviting another try. The champion had been able to predict and counter Gotrek’s every move, but now he just stood there as Felix’s flying machine powered towards him. Gotrek roared for Felix to turn aside and then, when it dawned on the Slayer what Felix was planning, grabbed his axe off the ground and ran for the courtyard. He threw himself to the ground and covered his head under his arms. The Chaos warrior merely grinned.

  Felix could only assume that this course was too mad even for one touched by the Dark Powers to imagine.

  Counting his luck that he’d been too distracted with steering to properly strap himself in, Felix waited until the last moment and then leapt from the cockpit.

  Felix’s flying body barrelled over the warrior’s head. The champion roared in disbelief for the second before the gyrocopter crashed through him, driving him down into the bridge like a nail struck by a hammer. The gyrocopter’s fuselage crumpled as it ground into the iron edifice, rotor blades shearing off one by one. The ancient structure squealed under the punishment. Felix hit the ground, intending to roll, but instead landing on his back and bouncing clear as the vehicle’s fuel tank exploded, swallowing the bridge in a massive fireball.

  Felix kept his head buried as bits of metal peppered his mail, uncovering his face only as the fireball roared itself out to reveal a mangled ruin of blasted iron in its wake. Its final scream ringing in his ears, Felix staggered up and moved towards the torn mess that projected from the near side of the chasm. Beastmen raged impotently on the opposite side, a kaleidoscope of animal faces and whining noise. Felix blinked and covered his ears but neither seemed to help. He swayed on his feet. That calm, forever helpful inner voice advised him that he had probably taken a blow to the head and should sit down.

  He groaned. Slim chance of that.

  A tattooed hand clung to a spear of metal. The flesh looked ancient, splotched with liver spots and faded ink, but a gnarled old oak had never held the earth between its roots more tightly. The warrior was still alive! Where did the Chaos Gods find these champions? The man’s feet kicked over an abyss. The strands of his long grey mane tapered and burned.

  The bridge creaked alarmingly as Felix stepped onto it and drew his sword.

  ‘Your doom is foretold,’ the warrior snarled, swinging his free hand for a better hold that wasn’t there. His face was one of cold contempt, but his accent was familiar, similar to those of the barbarous horse tribes that plagued the steppe between the Worlds Edge and the Mountains of Mourn. Felix had been given cause to rue their horsemanship and suicidal bravery more than once during his near-fatal journey to the lands of the Far East. ‘The Dark Master will allow only one victor here.’

  ‘If I had a penny for every doom I’d been promised then I’d be High King of the dwarfs by now.’ Gotrek stomped carelessly onto the bridge stump. There was a juddering squeal and the Chaos warrior’s handhold pitched
him ever further towards oblivion. Gotrek raised his axe two-handed over the warrior’s wrist.

  ‘I am a favourite of the gods, painted one. No weapon touched by fire in its making can harm me.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Gotrek brought his enormous axe to his one good eye as though considering testing the champion’s words, then stamped his heel onto the warrior’s fingers.

  Bones crunched, but no pain showed on the warrior’s face, just a flicker of defiance in his human, seeing eye as Gotrek ground his foot forward and kicked out, pushing the Chaos warrior’s broken hand out into empty air. The man flailed in hard-faced silence, a fierce lament going up from the beastmen as they rushed like stampeding cattle for the ledge to watch their champion fall, but not once did the warrior scream. Felix held the man’s gaze, then watched him disappear.

  Several seconds later, a final bang from the bottom of the gorge startled him from his vigil.

  Gotrek put a heavy hand on his shoulder. Felix suspected it was less about offering comfort than it was borrowing a little support. The Slayer’s jaw was blue, his face was bleeding, and Felix didn’t like to think how close his former companion had just been to death. If he had been a minute slower in coming to Gotrek’s aid, if he had acted differently in just the slightest way, then it would probably be the both of them down there at the foot of the mountain now. The very idea offended him in a way he could not adequately explain even to himself.

  It was a feeling.

  The Slayer’s doom was coming, of that Felix had never been more certain, but whenever and however it came he was convinced that it would be an act that shaped the outcome of the End Times.

  For good or ill.

  Gotrek found strength to hawk up a gobbet of phlegm and send it arcing across the chasm towards the beastmen stranded on the far side. It fell well short, but it seemed to give the dwarf some pleasure.