by David Guymer
Felix didn’t need to hear the words spoken to know that the daemon had been calling out Gotrek and no one else.
‘He’s gawn for the aft hangar,’ said Makaisson, craning his neck awkwardly to peer under the cracks in the view screen to the simple setup of mirrors that granted a partial view around the top and sides of the gondola. Then he turned to Felix. ‘Tha’s where maist o’ yer lot are stayin’. Ah think young Gustav is doon there.’
The life drained from Felix’s face. ‘Gotrek–’
‘Clear the birds from the roof, manling. If the big one wants a taste of my axe then he’ll get it.’
Felix nodded reluctantly. ‘No finding a doom now.’
‘I’m no longer seeking a doom, manling, as you should well know.’
‘You know how these things creep up on you when you stop looking.’
A slow grin spread across the Slayer’s brutal features. He spat on his hand and thrust it out. ‘No enemy shall have my shame before we both stand upon the pinnacle of Middenheim. You already have my oath, but I will swear on it again.’
Felix hesitated. That oath had been the cause of almost as much trouble and grief as the one that Felix had made long ago, but for some reason, with their long-sought goal perhaps hours away, the past didn’t seem to matter.
At least not that part of it.
He took the Slayer’s ham-sized fist in his own calloused hand. ‘I remember a good tavern from our last visit there. You and Snorri were sleeping off a hangover at the time, and I always wanted to go back.’
For the first time Gotrek showed no anger at the mention of that name. He shook Felix’s hand solemnly. The oath was made.
Now all they had to do was keep it.
THIRTEEN
Be’lakor
Felix and Gotrek parted ways at the mid-section maintenance hatch without so much as a best-of-luck. Gotrek bombed on down the hallway, axe held firmly in both hands. Felix rolled his eyes, reached up to spin open the hatch to the gasbag, and then took a rung of the ladder in his left hand. As he did so, a terrific scraping sound passed through the body of the ship. Felix grimaced, more than half expecting to see a murderous black sword perforating the hull or some winged horror scratching through the bulkhead. His ring finger rattled against the iron rung. It was a similar mix of apprehension and dread to when he had been caught below decks of the Bretonnian merchantman Cecilie when storms had driven the Aarvik-bound vessel over the rocks that lurked beneath the Manannspoort Sea. It was the same kind of helplessness, the knowledge that there was likely very little that he could do to influence his fate.
It seemed to be a recurrent theme of late.
The ever-present rumble of Unstoppable’s powerful engines dropped in register. The low drone made Felix’s teeth hum. The sense of strain was palpable, every surface shuddering with effort as though the airship had somehow become snared on something. What they could possibly have struck up here Felix didn’t want to imagine. He thought of the rift, the one thing he had been trying not to think about since leaving the bridge.
Were they too late? Could they have hit it already?
Felix couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would feel like to crash an airship through a vortex to the Realm of Chaos and if he was completely honest then he was hoping to live a little longer without having to find out. Just as it had been aboard that ill-fated Norscan adventure however, Felix could see no better alternative than simply getting on with things and trying not to think about it.
No sooner had he come to that decision than the disarming sensation of gravity altering its angle of attack tipped him off balance and almost pitched him down the aft hallway. He rolled on his ankles. The whole ship lurched backwards. In panic, Felix clanged his sword-hand against the ladder’s siderail and held on tight to the rung as his feet were suddenly pulled from under him and his stomach dropped through them down the now steeply-angled hall. The engines strained mightily.
The daemon prince was dragging down the airship. It was actually pulling down the entire airship!
Felix walked himself hand-over-hand towards the safer confines of the maintenance shaft as the deck continued to tilt and his legs swung loosely beneath him.
He hoped that Gotrek had closed some hatches behind him.
It was a long way down to the hangar deck otherwise.
Pieces of junk machinery rolled across the tilting deck of the hangar, piling into the aft bulkhead as a force strong enough to buckle its thick iron doors tightened its grip on the outer hull and heaved. Men and women were dragged from their nightmares to claw at the deck and scream. Gustav Jaeger’s heart muscles resonated with sympathetic horror. He inserted his fingers deeper into the holes in the metal deck and snatched at the scarred hand of a bald man in an unbuckled red and green tabard as he tumbled past. The sudden, fierce grip on his burnt hand caused his vision to waver and he almost passed out from the pain, but from somewhere he found the grit to clench his teeth and hold on.
One minute he’d been laying bedrolls and distributing what blankets they’d managed to salvage from the dwarfhold amongst the soldiers and families camped here in the hangar, and the next his world had been turned literally on its side.
The doors gave a wrenching sound of steel being forcibly separated from steel, and a huge serrated black blade split the inch-thick bulkhead like old wood. A shriek of ice-cold black wind raced through the breach.
The Hochlander in Gustav’s grip screamed a garble of panicked gibberish and began to struggle. Gustav’s face turned purple with agony. He couldn’t hold on much longer. Pain caused his own grip on the deckplate to slip, and with a despairing cry Gustav threw the man off. The soldier tumbled away, thumping bodily over the nose of a gyrocopter and then rolling limply towards the doors.
There, the infernal sword proceeded to carve through the bulkhead like a butcher’s knife through ribs, opening a long horizontal incision through which streamed a dark, misted chill and a primal dread. Metal screeched as the blade was twisted ninety degrees, carving upwards as easily as it had cut across. After cutting a track almost twelve feet long the sword squealed around again to make a third cut, parallel to the first. Gustav clung to the deck, numbed by a combination of cold and horror, almost grateful to the throbbing in his injured hand for the affirmation that despite what he was witnessing he remained a living, feeling, human man. The blade carved down to meet its original incision, completing a perfect rectangle.
Gustav felt the temperature drop by several degrees. The back of his skull throbbed as though the bone were being pried open from within. His wounds ached as if the stitching on all of them had simultaneously come undone. Dark magic. He had gone his entire life without needing to learn what it felt like, but after his experiences in occupied Kislev it felt as horribly familiar as a recurring nightmare.
An explosion of onyx flame blasted in the bulkhead’s eviscerated section.
It thumped to the deck and more frigid air washed in after it to reveal a shape that someone without conception of scale or the ability to feel the grip of fear might describe as man-like. The air froze in Gustav’s chest and for what felt like a fatal span of time he couldn’t breathe. In that moment, Gustav understood that everything he had experienced in Kislev and before was nothing. He could fight well enough to get by, the sense of entitlement that came with his upbringing seemed to translate well into a knack for leadership, and he knew how to carry through a plan.
But he was not his uncle.
He did not have what it took to fight a greater daemon – the might of the Chaos Gods made flesh.
Its clawed feet tolled on the deck like the call of midnight. Shadows scrapped around its ankles, benighted children squalling for the approval of their dark master. The daemon drew itself to its full height, lifting back its horned head and beating out its leathery black wings. The daemon was as lithe as a panther, and though its muscula
ture was harder than stone it had a smooth, ephemeral quality akin to smoked glass. An eight-pointed star, the symbol of Undivided Chaos, shone like a crack in the void from its broad chest. It clenched its fists, muscle gliding across muscle, glorying in its own dark skin. Gustav quailed, enraptured, as the gaze of the demi-god passed briefly over him. Its eyes were a bottomless black, an eternal shadow into which a man might fall, forever fall, and never, ever reach their darkest point.
He had barely even noticed that the deck had levelled out and he was lying flat once again.
‘Away. Back from doors. Zbiec!’
Kolya ran against the flow of bodies with his bow unslung and in hand, the deck levelling out beneath him now that the airship’s engines were no longer fighting against the might of a daemon prince. He nocked an arrow to his string and in the same unbroken action fired. The shaft disintegrated before it came within six inches of the daemon’s chest.
‘Świnia.’
The Kislevite pulled another arrow from his quiver, then threw it aside with a fresh curse and unhitched a hatchet from his belt. He tossed it into the air and caught its haft as it spun, casting aside his bow and drawing a short, curving sabre from the fur-lined scabbard at his hip. His freshly drawn hennaed forearm glittered with a faintly metallic tint as he carved a blinding sigil of practice strokes into the air. Gustav would always think of Kolya as a bowman, but he had heard his uncle describe the one-time winged lancer as something of a gourmand with weapons.
Felix may not have realised it, but coming from him that was high praise indeed.
The gaunt-faced northman’s courage was infectious, and from it Gustav managed to draw the strength to stand and draw his own, longer, cavalryman’s sabre. Despite everything she had put him through, he longed to have Ulrika at his side again to wield that weapon now.
‘Does the oblast have a clever saying for this?’ Gustav shouted, praying by volume alone to erase the quaver that the daemon had set in his voice.
‘It does not,’ said Kolya with a faint smile and a shrug. ‘For my life I cannot think why.’
The daemon ignored the two men utterly, looking over their heads and past those screaming for the hatchway into the corridor. It grinned like a shark and unfurled its wings, shadows bunching beneath them like extensions of its own awesome muscles, and then launched itself into the air. Gustav gasped and lowered his sword, tilted his neck back and turned to follow its short arc to where it pounded into the metal deck like a warpstone meteor. Nearby men and women were tossed from their feet by the shock that rattled through the walls and floor. The daemon ignored them, insects too small and harmless to be worth the tiny effort of being swatted.
‘You ever have feeling we are not important, friend Gustav?’
‘Only every day.’
An angry red glow bathed the far wall, a stark relief to outline the daemon’s limpid black.
The daemon prince laughed coldly, ominous as black ice on a frozen lake. ‘You defeated a worthy pawn in Khagash-Fél, son of Gurni, but now you stand before a king.’
Gotrek stood framed by the hatchway that led out of the hangar into the hall, bruised and battered, but a rock in the stream of panicked men and women running past him for the hallway. He thrust his jaw belligerently towards the towering daemon prince. His axe glowed painfully bright in one massive hand, enough to force the dwarf’s eyelid down to a sliver; the other he held in a back gesture towards Gustav and Kolya.
‘Yes,’ said the daemon prince. ‘There will be no human to save your skin this time.’
Gotrek growled and brought up his axe.
‘Run, Gustav,’ Kolya murmured, pointing with his axe to the pair of metal ladders leading up to the walkways above.
Escape by the main hatchway meant braving the daemon prince, but there were doors onto other decks up there. Gustav had explored them thoroughly when the dwarf crewman assigned to the human survivors had brought them down here. He didn’t like to go anywhere with his eyes closed. Not again.
‘Aren’t you coming too?’
The gaunt-faced man shrugged and turned towards the main hatchway. ‘Man owes you horse, what do you do?’
‘I don’t know!’ Gustav shouted after him. ‘I never know what the hell you’re saying!’
Kolya turned his face half around and grinned. Gustav felt a terrible wrenching in his heart, as though it yearned to stay. As if it knew that this would be the last time it would beat in this intolerable man’s company.
‘You and the dwarf deserve each other,’ said Gustav.
‘Terrible thing to say,’ Kolya tutted. ‘Do I ever say you deserve your uncle?’
With a low growl, the daemon prince rose to his full height. He exuded a nimbus of shadow. The iron bulkheads began to creak as if being drawn inwards by an invisible force. Gotrek’s axe brightened sharply, enough to force the Slayer himself to look away from it with a grunt.
‘Your enemies in the Realm of Chaos are legion, Slayer. Did you believe that an immortal would forgive?’
The daemon prince brought up his huge black blade, except that it was no longer the same sword. In a sense it was, but at the same time it was also quite clearly a vicious-looking brass axe with a jagged edge. In the other hand, the daemon prince cracked a whip that had definitely not been there before. In a subtle realignment of muscle and flesh, the daemon prince began to change. His face elongated into a bestial snout. A fiery red liquid that looked something like blood drooled between his teeth. His dark skin reddened, thickening muscle crunching his once-regal stance into a savage hunch that threatened awesome violence. The foot that stepped out from the caul of shadows was hoofed and shod in brass.
A shiver entered into Gustav’s bones, bringing a tingle to his muscles and to his sword arm in particular, a strange amalgam of supernatural terror and the urge to quench that terror in the blood of friend and foe alike.
‘Eternity is mine and I will feast upon your brain yet, Daemonslayer,’ said the transformed daemon, its voice a brazen battle horn, the vengefulness and hate it bellowed tempered by the cool original that still wove through it. ‘All hail Be’lakor for granting me the gift of vengeance.’
Without waiting on an explanation, Gustav spun for the ladders and ran as though the pits of damnation were opening up beneath him.
Felix poked his head through the already open hatch onto the dorsal spine. Mayhem on an otherworldly scale flooded his senses from above, below and all around. Daemon-rays knifed through streaking cloud, wails peeling from their hideous arrowhead mouths. Soldiers in Hochland colours were spread out along the walkway, stabbing wildly up with their halberds as rays swept in, wings rippling and whip tails lashing. The wind tore up snatches of shouted commands from an officer, lost somewhere amongst the unit of bowmen at the handrail. The archers fought against the fearsome wind to steady their bows long enough to aim and fire. A pool of blood spread from the corpse of a dwarf engineer, slumped headless in the throne of the nearest organ gun turret.
The sense of altitude and of velocity was incredible. The wind was a cold black hand pushing Felix back into the shaft. He fought against it, golden-grey hair thrashing about him as he planted his sword flat onto the walkway and drew himself out. The force of the wind on his cloak almost pulled him over the side, and Felix put his hand to the clasp at his collar, his first instinct to unfasten it and let it go to oblivion without him. He dropped his hand, instead wrapping the hem once about his waist and tucking the loose end into his trews. Sentiment would allow no less.
This tatty scrap of Sudenland wool had kept him warm on his very first adventure, years before he had had cause to rue the name Gotrek Gurnisson. And Sudenland didn’t even exist any more, a small fact that always made him marvel at and bemoan his age, depending on his mood. Right now, he did the latter, but there was fight in this sentimental old fool yet.
Keeping low, he ran to join the Hochl
and halberdiers fighting beside the handrail.
‘Praise the gods,’ yelled Corporal Mann. His voice was hoarse from shouting, grey eyes wide with a terror his mind couldn’t fully process. Behind him, the rift had widened to consume all but a blazing corona of sky. Felix tried not to look directly at it. There was horror enough for any man with the dark-bodied daemons continuing to stream from its black horizon. ‘We’re holding them off,’ Mann went on, ‘but there are more underneath out of sight of our bows.’
‘They’re attacking the gasbag, and the hawsers that hold it to the gondola,’ Felix shouted back.
‘What does that mean?’
For a moment, Felix was about to describe to the corporal in some detail exactly what that meant, but on this occasion his mind moved quicker than his tongue. What benefit would that knowledge bring either of them?
‘Try not to think about it.’
Weaving through the halberdiers and between a pair of archers in mid-draw, Felix gripped the handrail and looked over the side. A sickening vertigo rushed up to greet him and he swiftly removed his eyes from the bottomless whirlpool of cloud and focused on the gasbag. Thick nets hung down from the handrail. Felix had seen dwarf engineers clamber over them like goats over a mountain trail to conduct field repairs on battle damage – after the dragon incident for instance – and remembered being rather impressed by the dexterity and balance of so rugged a race. He also recalled being quite happy to remain up here with his hands just where they were on the handrail, thank you very much.
He swallowed the knot of fear, reaching over for a handful of the coarse black rope and giving it an experimental tug. It was strong. He’d been afraid of that.
‘We have to go down.’
Mann laughed nervously. Then stopped and looked down. The wheels turned. ‘No…’
‘We’re finished if we don’t,’ said Felix, knotting his arm up to the elbow in netting and bellying backwards over the handrail. The whole thing had a perilous amount of give, swaying alarmingly both as he slid his feet into the net and in reaction to the wind.
