Gotrek & Felix: Slayer

by David Guymer

  His hands bunched into fists, arms shaking with emotion. There were tears in his eyes as he spoke. ‘How dare you? You’re talking about my life as if I was just a character in a play, in your play, but it’s my life. Those weren’t your decisions to make.’

  ‘You and I both walk in the shadow of others, beings of great destiny, and we both must do things we abhor to see those destinies realised.’

  She gestured to Snorri’s recumbent form as if to demonstrate her point and Felix gasped at the discovery that the body was no longer Snorri’s. His beard was longer and darkly red, his one eye rolled up into its socket. Blood speckled his tattoos and formed a spreading pool under his enormous chest. Felix stared at the dwarf’s face, praying – despite the visceral certainty that it was hopeless – to see breath dimple the blood in which lay his nose and his limp, hanging mouth. Felix put his hand over his mouth to keep from being sick. Without the slightest transition to alert Felix to the change, the body had become Gotrek’s.

  The Slayer was dead.

  ‘Why are you showing me this?’

  ‘It is not for me to decide what you see,’ the woman answered, seemingly perplexed that Felix would even ask. ‘It is your future, not mine.’

  ‘This is not my future,’ said Felix, unable to remove his eyes from the body. Gotrek’s chest had been torn open, savaged as if by a wild animal or a daemonic creature. It would have taken a monster of extraordinary strength and power to inflict such injuries on Gotrek. Felix felt as though that should probably alleviate his pain, but it didn’t. ‘I won’t allow it.’

  ‘You are powerless against the opponent that awaits you in Kazad Drengazi, Felix, and Gotrek’s passing will be the doom of this world.’ She crouched beside the fallen Slayer and passed her hand across his face, closing the lid of his unseeing eye. Then she looked up at Felix. ‘But it may be enough to save the next.’

  Felix shivered and closed his eyes, hoping this woman and her visions would disappear and he would wake up – it was clear now that this was a bad dream of some prophetic sort – and find himself again on the bridge of Unstoppable with Gotrek alive and well beside him.

  ‘Some are tied to their fates,’ the seeress went on. ‘Beings like Gotrek are rocks, immovable, stepping stones towards a certain future, but you…’

  She rose, turned and spread her arms, tilting her head back to gaze towards a vaulted ceiling where golden-red runes glimmered like fireflies on a hot night by the banks of the Aver. There was no sign that there had ever been a forest. The floor was tiled with slabs of white stone, each one marked in the centre by a vengeful-looking rune. It was dwarf-made, but more ancient than any dwarfhold he had ever seen. A terrible power dwelt here; even through the filter of another’s vision he could feel it in every rock and rune.

  ‘This will happen because I have seen it. What comes after is yours to claim.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means you have a choice to make, Felix Jaeger. Will you stand by the Slayer to the end, knowing that it will mean his death, or will you leave him here in the Fortress of the First Slayer–’ She pointed to Gotrek where he lay ‘–and let the slim hope of a better future die with him?’

  ‘I–’

  The woman looked up sharply and bared teeth like tiny daggers in a snarl. ‘It is time for you to go. Awaken. Warn your companions if you are able.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Felix, the fear of whatever could make an individual of this seeress’s obvious power nervous enough to penetrate the swirl of questions that filled his mind. ‘I don’t even know where the place you’re talking about is!’

  The golden runes glimmered to darkness. Shadows closed around the great pillars of stone. There was a form to them of sorts, like being captured inside a pair of gigantic black wings.

  ‘Wake up, Felix. He is coming for you.’

  Felix groaned as he opened his eyes. It had become something of a habit, a pre-emptive measure ingrained over the last few months into his subconscious, but there didn’t appear to be anything particularly untoward awaiting him on Unstoppable’s bridge.

  The first thing that struck him was the quiet.

  Most of the engineers who had been bustling between the stations had since departed, to leave the handful who now operated the various ancillary bridge functions that Felix had never quite managed to understand. They stood at their posts in silence, moving only occasionally to adjust a dial or flick a switch. The engines hummed on a low, resonant register. Max stood by the entrance hatch, leaning against the circular frame with his arms loosely crossed and staring into space. Gotrek sat in another of the swivelling command chairs on the opposite side of the bridge to Felix, tending to his wounds and trying to pull what looked like glass splinters from his knuckles with his teeth. Malakai Makaisson stood in brooding silence at the helm, goggles hanging around his neck, staring determinedly forward and making minute adjustments to their heading with slight turns of the wheel.

  That was when Felix noticed how dark it had become, the bridge lit by a cool unnatural light that gleamed from pinprick sources that ran in tracks along the bulkheads, deck, and ceiling. At first Felix thought that he had slept away the entire day and that Unstoppable now flew through the night, thus explaining the absence of the other engineers to some well-earned rest, but then he noticed the real cause. The clouds they were flying under were as black as pitched oak, tendrilous strands whipping past the view screen as the airship ploughed through.

  A feeling of unease sat in Felix’s belly. He peered through the window. The peaks of the mountains were jagged, uneven teeth in the darkened landscape, like a great maw opening up to snatch them from the sky.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

  Malakai turned around at his question and gave him a serious look, as if to make sure he wasn’t joking. Felix noticed that the goggles resting on his chest were smashed, owing to an incident that was probably not wholly unrelated to that responsible for the thick black eye he now wore instead, underscored by a half-moon gash that roughly traced the original position of his goggles. From across the room came a slurping sound as Gotrek sucked in and spat out a piece of glass. The engineer glared at Felix sulkily. ‘We’re gaun to Middenheim.’

  Felix glanced to where Max stood, but the wizard appeared to have no complaints over the course or destination. Felix wished he could be reassured by the wizard’s ambivalence.

  ‘Just a spot of rain, manling. It rains a lot up here in the north, if I remember.’ Gotrek heaved himself up out of his chair and came stomping across to where Felix sat, nervously twitching his swivel chair from side to side. Suddenly conscious of it, he stopped. Gotrek grunted and wrapped his arms about his chest. Dark clouds and a palpable sense of chill whistled past the glass behind him. ‘You sleep like a halfling. Middenheim can’t be more than a few hours from here and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to wake you when we arrived.’

  ‘It’s good to see you alive,’ said Felix without thinking.

  Gotrek’s eye narrowed. ‘Why? Should I not be?’

  A vision of the Slayer dead – no, ripped apart – at Felix’s feet returned to him and his mouth suddenly felt too dry for him to speak. He thought about what the seeress had told him about Gotrek’s doom, about how it would be the doom of the world itself. She hadn’t been the first to prophesy that the Slayer’s demise would be the downfall of others, but this had been the most forthright and forbidding such warning he had yet been given. Perhaps it was the times. It was too easy to give credence to portents of doom when the world was already in flames.

  He managed to pull his thoughts from those images, watching them run like panicked horses for the familiar ground of Kat and his daughter. In his mind now, they stood not in Otto’s Altdorf townhouse but on the walls of the Fauschlag, waiting if not for him then for some other kind of end. He liked to think that the ease with which he saw them ther
e, this infant he had never seen in a city they had never visited, meant that there could be some truth to it.

  That was all he wanted. With all his heart, that was all he had ever wanted. Part of him would let the Slayer find his doom, and even join him in it, if it meant that his daughter might have a future free of war.

  Realising that he had been silent too long, Felix masked his disquiet behind an unconvincing smile. ‘Alive and well, I meant. After a fight like that.’

  Gotrek’s lips pursed in thought, but he said nothing. Felix noticed the tired red glaze in the dwarf’s eye. The Slayer’s stamina was extraordinary, but his continuing refusal to rest was madness even by his standards.

  ‘Is there something you want to talk about?’ Max asked softly from his position by the hatch.

  Felix shivered as if a cold beam had just been shone on his back, looking up and then quickly drawing his gaze back without meeting the wizard’s eye.

  To Gotrek alone he might have been moved to confess the seeress’s prophecy, but not Max. The wizard thought of little but the Slayer’s destiny. Had Felix told him what he had been shown then Max would no doubt have insisted again on seeking out the mythical power of Kazad Drengazi and facing whatever fell guardian awaited Gotrek there, regardless of what the fallout for the rest of the world might be.

  Well, Felix planned to prove the seeress wrong.

  She could have told him that Grimnir’s legendary fortress was home to a thousand doughty warriors and the Ancestor God himself, and Felix would still not like the price. Middenheim was hours away, and for the first time in an age Felix and Gotrek were of one mind.

  ‘Whit on Grimnir’s axe is tha’?’ Malakai shouted, taking the wheel in his immensely strong grip and staring dead ahead through the forward window.

  A frisson of dread jerked Felix out of his chair like an electric shock and he moved to stand beside the engineer. Gotrek joined him. Max bowed his head to his staff and muttered a string of words under his breath that made Felix’s skin tingle.

  Felix looked through the thick glass of the window, his eyes widening as if forcing him to behold the monstrous black tear that seemed to be ripping open the sky in their path. In its dark core, Felix could feel the cold depths of eternity. Shreds of cloud streamed around its borders, taking on a protean show of colour reminiscent of those that the winds of magic could, when in full force, create in the northern skies. The effects it was producing on the surrounding sky were already causing the deck of the bridge to tremble. And it was getting wider.

  ‘What is it?’ Felix yelled back, countering the sudden weakness in his knees with a steadying hand on the engineer’s broad shoulders.

  ‘Damned if ah ken.’

  ‘It’s an opening to the Realm of Chaos,’ said Gotrek. ‘I’ve seen it before. Once.’

  ‘Can we avoid it if we turn around?’ said Felix.

  ‘There’s nae enough fuel, laddie. If we dae tha’ we may as well joost land right here.’

  Felix felt the hand of destiny tightening its grip. Which was the right course and which was wrong? How was he to know? He turned to Max, but the wizard had yet to re-open his eyes, the occasional turbulence shaking him against his staff.

  ‘Hawd on!’ Malakai roared, pushing forward the first of the row of levers by his right hand and then gripping the wheel as though he never intended to release it again. The drone of the engines ramped to a higher pitch and Felix felt a force driving him back towards the aft bulkhead. The clouds hit the window with greater speed and power and the vortex swelled before them like a pit of despair.

  Felix was convinced that Malakai Makaisson had decided to fulfil his own Slayer Oath right then in a blaze of pointless glory after all.

  ‘Huv ye ever ridden ower a tidal wave in a steam ship?’

  Felix’s expression of horror indicated that he had not and prayed never to.

  ‘Turn awa’ and it’ll keel ye ower. Ye huv tae gae at it full ahead and hope tae all yer gods ye punch oot the other side.’ The engineer wrenched his hand from the wheel to grab the chain that swayed in the turbulence above him and haul down on it.

  Steam screamed from whistles on every deck, billowing from vents and portholes like smoke from the jaws of a dragon as Unstoppable surged full steam ahead into the heart of darkness.

  As Felix watched, utterly helpless to affect his fate, a school of dark shapes began to arrow from the rift. They appeared tiny, but as they flew closer Felix realised that to be an illusion peddled to him by distance and the awesome scale of the vortex itself. They were flat-bodied, glassine flesh of boundless black, ray-like wings rippling on unseen currents as they swept en masse towards the airship. As the forerunners angled past the nose of the vessel they revealed hideous arrow-shaped mouths filled with sharp teeth and flanked by flat, dark eyes.

  Malakai leaned forward to catch a glimpse of the daemons clawing over the gasbag above them and scowled, his guttural curse drowned out by a burst of cannon fire as the first engineers finally reached the organ gun turrets and opened up on the swarm.

  Explosive bursts painted the dark skies with devastation, shredding the screaming rays to a daemonic essence that dispersed into the clouds like vapour. Unstoppable’s firepower was immense, it was a fortress in the skies, but the enemy were too numerous and more just kept on pouring out of the rift however many the gunners could banish back to the Realm of Chaos.

  An impact to the side of the gondola flung Felix sideways and would have surely sent him rolling across the deck had he not had a firm grip of Makaisson’s shoulder. A painful squeal ground through the bulkhead and Felix’s mind kindly bequeathed him images of foul daemonic things raking across the bows of the gondola. He swallowed hard and tightened his grip, uncomfortably reminded that the armoured vehicle in which they travelled was kept airborne by little more than the few dozen cables that connected them to the gasbag.

  Felix clutched the hilt of his sword in horror.

  That was what they intended to do. The daemons meant to destroy the gasbag and drop them all to break on the mountain! A section of armour plate spun down from above and cracked against the view screen.

  ‘Malakai!’

  ‘Aye, ah see ’em, the sleekit divils.’

  Felix drew his sword a thumb’s width from his scabbard. He wasn’t nearly as helpless as being on this airship made him feel. He could still fight, and he would rather fall under a tide of claws than plummet to his doom trapped inside this iron box. He turned to Gotrek. The Slayer nodded grimly.

  ‘We’ll make it, manling. Just one last fight.’

  Then Max’s eyes snapped open. The wizard emitted a strange sound that seemed to come from the very base of his throat and placed his hand on the bulkhead. A flash of pure white light passed from his palm and into the metal, and a moment later discharged from the outer hull in a crackling arc that purged the vicinity of the daemonic and blackened the view screen with the vaporous effluvium of their annihilation.

  Felix almost smiled. If Max could keep them off the body of the airship then they might just be able to ride out whatever it was that had been opened in their path.

  ‘They will keep on coming until I am too exhausted to stop them,’ said Max, a mild tremor of exertion in his voice. ‘Gotrek is correct. Within that rift lies the Realm of Chaos. These are not greenskins or skaven. There will be no end to them until it is closed.’

  ‘Close it, then,’ Gotrek growled.

  ‘Believe it or not, that is actually what I had in mind.’

  ‘What’s it doing in the middle of the Empire?’ said Felix.

  ‘The encroachment of the Chaos Wastes makes such things possible,’ said Max, one hand stuck to the wall and one on his staff as the turbulence shook him. ‘Even so it would demand a sorcerer of tremendous power to open something like this, several sorcerers most likely.’

  Felix thought of the seere
ss who had come to him in his dream. Did she possess the sort of power Max was talking about? It was frightening to imagine but after what he had seen of her it was impossible to consider anything else. He wished he could decide which side she was on.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To keep us from Kazad Drengazi.’

  Gotrek growled angrily. ‘How many times and in how many different ways do I have to tell people we’re going to Middenheim? Manling!’

  Felix drew his sword the rest of the way.

  ‘Let’s go draw them a map.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Max. ‘Sealing the rift will require all of my concentration. I won’t be able to aid you–’ The wizard hissed and scrunched up his face as though he had just tasted something sour. ‘Something comes. Something… dark.’

  ‘They’re all dark!’ Gotrek roared, as Felix turned to the shattered view screen and gave a small moan of horror.

  Something vast had emerged from the rift, surrounded by a billowing school of lesser daemons, and sending out a bow wave of abyssal dread that rocked Felix to the deepest and most securely held quarters of his soul. It was the same terror that he had felt before on the cupola before Max had distracted its attention from him, but exponentially worse. Its sleek, powerful black form was a nightmare cut in volcanic glass. Its horns were an endless curve of damnation and despair. The daemon prince dipped and soared, bat-wings beating, revelling in the power of flight and the dark delight of simply being.

  The cannonade faltered as the dread prince flew nearer, and there was some slim satisfaction in knowing that the dwarf crew suffered the creature’s aura as sorely as Felix did himself. With a pitted, obsidian-black sword the length of a Reiksguard’s lance the daemon levelled its challenge to those watching from the bridge, then tucked in its wings and barrel-rolled under the steaming airship.