Gotrek & Felix: Slayer

by David Guymer

  He took a deep breath, resolved still to at least resemble the hero that these frightened men needed him to be, and glanced up. Corporal Mann and his men were dropping their halberds to draw their katzbalger swords and follow him over the handrail. Felix felt the netting quiver against him. He found a wan smile, a warm feeling prickling into the edges of his nerves. As if being seen to be fearless and actually being it were not so dissimilar after all.

  The gasbag was too large to defend in its entirety, but then they didn’t have to protect it all.

  Malakai had once explained that even with half the liftgas cells destroyed the airship would still fly, and that were she to lose any more then she would simply sink gradually to the ground. Unless they were all to burst at once, of course, an event that the engineer had repeatedly assured him was impossible. All they needed to win was time, enough for Max to seal the rift.

  And preferably before they sank deep enough, gradually or otherwise, to crash into the Middle Mountains.

  Kolya had been four years old when he had first taken a life. The trap he had stolen from his father’s gear had broken the marmot’s back and sprayed its blood over the frost that clung to the young grass. In the years since, he had almost convinced himself of the lie that he had not known it was bad luck to hunt the animals in spring when mothers foraged for the hungry young in their burrows, but he had known. Of course he had known. Since he had been old enough to tell a polecat from a plover he had understood the rhythm of the seasons. His father had taught him and his half-brother that. But he had been hungry, for acclaim and for the experience.

  He had wanted to know what it felt like to kill.

  The Bloodthirster of Khorne brought all those feelings back to him as if he were shivering on the oblast again: the exhilaration, the thrill, the power, the enduring, simple pleasure of watching the frost turn red. Kolya recognised the greater daemon on an instinctual level. There had been a bond of sorts between them since that late spring day when he had first taken a life and found that he enjoyed it.

  The daemon thrashed its bestial face, appearing to strain against its own crimson musculature, then let loose a savage bellow and launched itself at the Slayer.

  What followed was too quick for Kolya’s eye to keep track of. Gotrek and the daemon collided in a storm of blows that, for the brief fiery moment that it lasted, filled the empty hangar with the ring of steel. The combatants rebounded from one another. Gotrek staggered aside, bleeding from fresh claw marks all over his arms and chest as well as a deep gash across his forehead. He held his head at an angle to direct the trickle of blood towards his gaping eye socket. Kolya was astonished that the dwarf was even still standing after such a punishing experience. However, the Bloodthirster too carried a mean dent in its bronze breastplate. Several grazes in its ruddy flesh sputtered with hellfire, granting fleeting glimpses of something black and inviolate beneath.

  ‘You’re not the same daemon I fought,’ Gotrek rasped. ‘You smell as bad but that one at least gave me a decent fight.’

  ‘But it is, Slayer. Be’lakor calls and we, the banished and the abandoned, heed the Dark Master’s summons. After my destruction I might have been condemned for another thousand years, but now I am free. The power of your own Slayer Fortress is what freed me. Think on that. And when Be’lakor possesses it then I will be the mightiest general in his army.’

  ‘If I hear one more word about that place…’

  ‘You cannot escape your doom, Slayer.’

  ‘I certainly can’t escape hearing about it,’ Gotrek growled.

  Silently, Kolya worked his way behind the greater daemon’s back, readying his hatchet and marking a target in an unarmoured slit between the base of the monster’s enormous bat-like wings. He didn’t doubt that its flesh would prove as tough or tougher than whatever metallic Chaos-substance it wore for armour, but he would take what advantage he could. Having witnessed its opening sally, he doubted he would get another opportunity.

  He pounced, but at the last second before his axe struck the daemon beat its wings, buffeting him with a glancing blow that knocked the axe from his hand and sent him sprawling across the deck. He made to push himself up with his now free hand, only for his wrist to erupt in pain. Screaming, he flopped back to the deck. He rolled onto his back and sat, cosseting his broken arm to his chest with a grimace.

  Ursun’s teeth, the daemon was as strong as it was fast. He had underestimated Gotrek’s toughness, though he suspected that the great bear himself walked lightly around that one.

  Gotrek took advantage of the momentary distraction to sink his axe into the back of the daemon’s leg. The Bloodthirster bellowed in agony. Starmetal runes sizzled like branding irons, illuminating in deep crimson a look of grim satisfaction as the Slayer wrenched his axe back and swung again with a blow intended to sever the monster’s spine.

  This time the Bloodthirster’s axe was there to meet it, the mighty weapons clashing together in a peal of blood and thunder.

  Flame dribbling from the tear in its thigh, the daemon unleashed a barrage of frenzied blows that would have demolished a building, sending the dwarf reeling. The Bloodthirster mercilessly pressed its attack. The stamp of its brazen hooves sent tremors through the deckplates. Its wrathful roar shook the uppermost gantries as its axe and whip made a ruin of everything within reach. The damage those two weapons wrought was incredible and yet implausibly Gotrek remained on his feet, just about, knocking aside the daemon’s axe with his own and stumbling back under a crack of the Bloodthirster’s whip. The whip snapped around the siderail of one of the metal ladders to the next deck and with a savage howl of rage the daemon yanked back. The ladder gave a squeal of resistance before it tore away from its fastenings and crashed over the Slayer’s back.

  The dwarf went under with a grunt that was as much sheer exhaustion as pain, and in a blink of motion the Bloodthirster was there beside him. It cupped the Slayer’s scalp in one mighty hand and bent the dwarf’s neck back to lift his face off the deck. Kolya did not think that anything would prevent the daemon from doing exactly as it had promised it would – cracking Gotrek’s skull like an egg and consuming his brain.

  Then an odd shadow passed across the daemon’s face and it let the Slayer drop, gnashing its teeth like a dog denied a bone. It withdrew to wrap itself up in its wings and snarl in frustration.

  ‘No,’ it said, its voice growing measured to once again become that of Be’lakor the daemon prince. ‘Your doom is to be at the hands of one mightier even than I.’

  ‘I will accept no doom,’ Gotrek grunted, levering the huge ladder aside and pushing himself back up to his feet. He hefted his axe, almost unbalancing himself with the weight of it, and stuck out his jaw. ‘Not until I feel the stones of Middenheim beneath my feet.’

  Be’lakor chuckled blackly. Bands of darkness swirled out from his folded wings to enshroud his body, reducing the daemon prince to a shadow and a breeze. A cyclopean golden eye pulsed from the cloud. The laughter turned hateful and dispersed, but the voice purred from all around.

  ‘It will be exquisite.’

  Gotrek slashed his axe through the cloying gloam. ‘You’re not the first to make such an empty promise.’

  ‘Empty?’

  Gotrek spun around and raised his axe with a snarl.

  From the shadows behind him emerged a new figure, taller than either Be’lakor or the Bloodthirster but supple as a willow sapling. A slender loincloth hung between its long, cream thighs. It wound a lock of dazzlingly multi-coloured hair around one finger as it gazed in hunger and adoration at the Slayer. In two more hands it held a long, undulating blade that put Kolya in mind of a woman’s tongue. The fourth ended in an elegant pincer claw that clicked with an aching melody. Its beauty resisted definition of male or female, man or beast. It was at once everything Kolya could imagine or yearn for in his darkest fantasies. From the divine to the infernal, it
whispered of ripeness, readiness, of promises awaiting fulfilment.

  ‘Nothing in this world of delights is empty, precious Slayer. It was not my fate to fight you when last we met and it is still not. That is to be the pleasure of another, he who stands above us all.’

  ‘Swill-spitting hell-spawn,’ Gotrek roared, swinging back his axe and barrelling towards the daemonic beauty.

  The daemon yawned as though bored, covering its mouth with one delicately-fingered hand before waving it dismissively towards the Slayer. A thunderclap went off under the dwarf’s chest, blasting him from his feet and sending him careening into the last of the ladders. The iron frame buckled around him and then rolled him out onto the deckplate like kneaded bread onto a board.

  He showed no immediate inclination to rise.

  Ignored for now, Kolya hurried to the dwarf’s side. He crouched amidst the metallic debris and offered his uninjured hand. Gotrek stared at it as if mentally fixing its position relative to his nose, but then the haze cleared from his eye and he glanced up at Kolya.

  ‘This is the day you’ve been waiting for, rememberer. Why would you help me now?’

  Kolya met the dwarf’s gaze. It was all he dreamed about, that gaze, coming for him through a crowd of Kurgan, even as Kolya feathered the dwarf’s breast with arrow after arrow, loosing faster than any man could outside of a dream but never fast enough. He would see the blood of Boris Makosky, of his beloved Kasztanka, and some nights would bring him further slaughter as his doomed effort to flee that gaze moved him to the tirsa of Talicznia where Marzena, the wise woman, and his half-brother Stefan burned.

  Zabójka he had named him, and he had vowed to watch the murderer die.

  He sucked in his gaunt cheeks, feeling on them the gaps in his mouth where the dwarf had kicked out half of the teeth on the right-hand side of his face, and shrugged. Call it a feeling. Humanity, maybe.

  ‘Some things more important than promises made in blood, more important even than horses.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Gotrek, his one eye appearing to turn inward. ‘Aye, some things maybe.’

  ‘Beautiful sentiments,’ said Be’lakor, himself once again, darkness falling from his muscular forearm like the folds of a cloak as he raised a claw to point at the man and the dwarf. ‘Ten millennia hence, I will bid the daemon-spawn that rule this world in my stead to recite them in your memory.’

  A sizzling bolt of dark magic leapt from the daemon prince’s claw-tip and struck Kolya in the chest. His limbs spasmed as he was plucked from the ground and flung back. Steam rose from his hemp coat, the smell of burnt fur and feathers. Arcs of charge washed across him. He moaned in pain, tried to get up, but found he was incapable of doing anything more than twitch.

  Gotrek rose and turned, thumping his chest with a vengeful roar. ‘Fight me, lurker. I promise you’ll not get a better chance to finish me, in Kazad Drengazi or anywhere else.’

  ‘I have seen Morzanna’s prophecy, Slayer, and I know that you have witnessed it as well. She does not sleep, but through her do the doomed dream of prophecy and death. That has always been her special gift.’

  Gotrek cast his gaze down, fingers tightening around the haft of his axe. A growl started deep within his chest. ‘You followed me all this way. And for what? This play fight?’

  ‘You?’ Be’lakor crossed his arms across the whispering silver sigil on his chest and chuckled deeply. ‘Whatever made you believe that I cared about you?’

  The daemon prince gestured towards the forward bulkhead. The temperature plunged. Breath turned to mist inside Kolya’s throat. Frost stitched across the metal as, with a calamitous groan, the hatchway onto the corridor crunched slowly closed. Together with the broken ladders, Kolya realised that Be’lakor had effectively cut the hangar deck off from the rest of the airship. The daemon prince himself was already beginning to fade, extremities shining off into the aethyr, but not so much that he could not raise an incorporeal hand, summoning a discus of angry black energy that buzzed above his open palm like a steam-driven wood-saw.

  ‘But I would hate to leave without a parting gift, so please, accept this with my compliments.’

  The daemon prince dropped his arm and threw the moment before he disappeared.

  Kolya watched the discus come for him with a detached sense of sorrow. He had always believed that he would outlive the Slayer’s mad quest, maybe return to what was left of Dushyka and search for his brother, but he still could not move a finger. He grimaced. No matter. His ears filled with a furious roar that might have been Gotrek’s, and then Kolya heard and saw no more. There was a sudden heat, a crashing cold, a singular moment of incandescent pain that lasted an eternity before it was spent.

  Then silence.

  And Kolya’s war was over.

  ‘Dae ye almost huv it?’ bellowed Malakai Makaisson. His immense biceps strained at the wheel. All the colours of the aethyr flickered across the single lens of his goggles, now strapped determinedly over his face, flat reflections of the High magic that throbbed from Max Schreiber’s staff.

  ‘Just a little longer,’ Max replied tightly.

  ‘Ah know ye dain’t tell me how tae fly mah airship, but it’s lookin’ joost a wee bit hairy oot there.’

  Max grunted, nodding his understanding of the situation, bending every last ounce of will that he possessed to the task of sealing the rift. He was a magister of the Light College; he had memorised by rote a hundred banishments and counter-spells long before he had been allowed to glimpse the second level of the great – now lost – pyramid of Light. The principal underlying each of them was the same; some manner of repetitive cant that freed and focused the mind on that which disturbed the natural order. Daemonic possession, restless shades, portals into strange dimensions both natural and fabricated, Max had faced them all, but this was different.

  The power pouring out of the rift was breathtaking. The scale of it went beyond human comprehension. The tear filled the sky as if it meant to encircle the airship whole to swallow it in one calamitous bite. The colours that had streamed from its periphery were no longer visible. All that remained was blackness. It was not empty, though, far from it. Max could feel the malice seeping from that opening. There was something in there, a mind that Max could feel in the same way as he could feel fire on his skin as he burned or water in his lungs as he drowned, but whose reasoning was just as impossible for a mortal man to discern. It was the complexity of the universe, and its simplicity. It hated Max both as a representative of the mortal races but also as the man and individual that it recognised as Max Schreiber. That the Chaos Gods should reserve even a miniscule fraction of their enmity for him alone was at once chilling and strangely exhilarating.

  Max shook his head. His thoughts were wandering, driven apart like sheep harried by wolves. There was too much random magic coming out of the rift. It was impossible to focus, and that made his mind easy prey. Had he a circle of acolytes to fortify his mind it might have been different, but he was the only wizard of any kind on board, and several successive attempts to make do alone had left his mind reeling and the taste of burnt copper in his mouth.

  That left the brute force approach.

  Reluctantly, he rallied his mind within the walls of his own head and concentrated upon his own power. Without needing to explore its limits, he knew that it was greater than it had ever been. The discoveries he had made in Praag, the… things he had done, had changed him and he could not say that it was all for the better. That alone was reason enough to doubt whether he should use these powers to their fullest, but it was not the only one. The End Times had upended many established truths, but there were many that still held. There were still dark things lurking beyond the veil of the aethyr, and it remained unwise to announce oneself to that realm with a reckless show of power.

  Yet he could not escape the conclusion that he had the power that he needed, precisely where he
needed it. He had had dreams of prophecy, and he knew that Felix and Gotrek had greater destinies than being swallowed by the Realm of Chaos.

  Malakai grunted as the light from Max’s staff redoubled in intensity.

  ‘Dae ye huv tae dae it sae brightly? Ahm tryin’ to see where ahm gawn.’

  Max’s mind wrinkled from the sour note in the aethyr like parchment from a candle flame. It was the daemon prince that he had felt before, but his presence was much more powerful now that he had returned to his native plane. A vile name curdled the substance of the aethyr. It was one Max was horribly familiar with from his long studies into the nature of Chaos. The deeds attached to it were legendary, and in truth he had considered it no more than a story, a heroic epic told amongst the champions of the Dark Powers.

  And yet here he was. The first. The Dark Master of Chaos.

  Be’lakor.

  The daemon had not returned to the aethyr. He was passing through it, hunting for something. For someone. For…

  Max’s grip tightened around his staff.

  ‘Oh no.’

  A ripple of unease passed through Felix. It felt as though the clouds had parted to reveal a glimpse of his own tombstone. It had come from nowhere, and was not a helpful feeling to harbour when one was hanging by a rope miles above the ground. Felix slashed Karaghul behind him, opening a diving ray from mouth to tailfin. It veered off with a shriek, but the clouds boiled with more. Schools of the daemonic creatures strafed the soldiers spread out through the netting. Others fixed their horrible flat bodies to the gasbag, squirming like hellish leeches to work at the metal with their teeth. The airship alternately rumbled and groaned.

  He and Corporal Mann had fought for every rung and hold to reach the midline of the gasbag, where the outward slope steepened into a short vertical drop that then swept back in towards the gasbag’s belly. The trick, Felix knew, was never to look down, but that bridge had been crossed and burned behind him some time ago and it was with a rather blithesome refusal to obey his own good sense that he looked down.