by David Guymer
The doorway to the Realm of Chaos parted before Gotrek’s boot, splintering up the middle like so much kindling. What was left flew apart under the attention of Gotrek’s axes. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but the Slayer seemed to enjoy it, an almost childlike glee at the power in his hands shining from his eyes. Felix dimly recalled a similar feeling when, as a boy, he had held a real steel blade for the first time. He smiled ruefully. Dimly. He followed in behind the Slayer, moving warily, his own enchanted blade held ready to fend off any ambusher that might have been drawn to such ill-advised destruction so early on in their journey.
‘I have to accustom myself to the balance, manling,’ Gotrek explained, still grinning, wood splinters in his beard.
‘Of course you do,’ Felix murmured.
A great colonnaded hall with a vaulted ceiling stretched out before them. Ceiling glimstones cast out feral shadows to lurk behind great arches that were carved into the likenesses of daemons and the Slayer that grappled them where they met. From the centre of every flagstone a red rune glowed, thousands of them together creating the unpleasant sense of the floor being covered in a carpet of fire. Felix could even smell burning too, a brimstone odour that was rising from somewhere deeper in the temple. He cast his eyes nervously over the sweeping architecture. The halls rang with the clangour of unseen axes. Daemonic screams and dwarfish cries echoed from the ceiling and walls. The columns ran with the faces of the damned.
These were not the Wastes such as they had once overflown en route to Karag Dum, nor more recently trekked through the hinterlands of on their return from Kislev.
This was an antechamber to the Realm of Chaos – the warped realm of the gods themselves.
This was where Grimnir had passed from the Old World and into the domain of the gods. This was where he had made his beachhead, fortified it with rune and stone, and by his own eternal battle and the vigilance of his followers it had stood, an island fort in an endless void of entropy, unchanged in ten thousand years.
It was astounding.
Movement from the corner of Felix’s eye drew his gaze to one of the distant columns. A one-eyed creature of pus and hanging entrails dribbled out of hiding. Another scuttled after it from behind the next pillar along, a fat eyeball from which splayed a mad array of limbs, pincers, tendrils and flesh-whips, oozing stacks stuffed with the harvested eyes of humans and other mortal races swaying above it. Felix tightened his grip on his sword. A hungry moan rasped through the echoing hall. Daemons of every insane imagining of form and substance shuffled, hopped, slithered, oozed and quite literally crawled out of the woodwork, drawn by the scent of the mortal. Gotrek contemptuously hacked a rotting sword-daemon apart, and kicked its dissolving remains clear. A rustle of wings called Felix’s attention to the ceiling.
He swallowed hard.
They were deserters, Felix realised, survivors of an eternal war. As Felix understood it, it was Grimnir’s personal struggle that held the footsoldiers of the Chaos Gods at bay. These pitiful monstrosities here were those weak and insignificant enough to have escaped Grimnir’s axe and fled into this pocket realm between their world and what Felix thought of as the real one. Weak to Grimnir, perhaps, but daemons regardless and more than enough to give Felix pause for thought. He reckoned he could take two or three – assuming he could get them one at a time – but there were already more of them in sight than that.
As a first estimate, one admittedly arrived at under duress: a lot more.
‘Behind me,’ said Gotrek, spinning his two axes before him and blending a feather-robed daemonette without breaking stride. Daemons gibbered and shrieked and Gotrek and his flashing rune-axes waded in with a roar. ‘Keep close, manling. We don’t stop until the end.’
Morzanna died here.
She had lived this moment every day of her life, had felt the heat of the fire on her skin as she had when the Pious burned her home, had heard the screams, the war-cries in a language that she had not until these last few days been able to recognise. She recognised the crumbling of the structures around her as they surrendered to the relentless shelling from above. In her mind and in her spirit she had experienced the might of the one she would call master, watched through her own future eyes as he demolished a building with a swipe of his arm and then pointed towards the final gate.
Power lensed down to a sharp black point at the tip of the daemon prince’s claw. Morzanna felt malice rise up out of the earth at his beckoning, ripping around his form like black lace in a whirlwind. Lancing through it came a beam of darkness, laced with purples and blues and shooting towards the gate. Screaming men and dwarfs flung themselves clear moments before the bastion erupted in a geyser of glassed stone and warped metal.
Frantic shouts rang down from the walls, a desultory volley of gunfire from the handful of defenders that weren’t abandoning it for a last stand within the courtyard. Bullets beat against Be’lakor’s god-like frame, ricochets crunching through corner walls or punching horsemen from the saddle. The tribesmen galloped around the hulking daemon prince, loosing a storm of arrows on the run as they raced for the ruined gate.
The foreknowledge of her own passing did not trouble her.
In a way it was comforting. Hers was a borrowed life, one that should have ended two centuries ago but for the intervention of Felix Jaeger. It was destiny, she supposed, fully conscious of the irony in that, and at least in living it she had guided Be’lakor towards his own great work.
The death of this world at the hands of the Everchosen, Be’lakor’s child-in-darkness.
And its rebirth.
A future unseen but felt lay before them all. What it held, what form it would take, she could not say, but it was there and the simple fact of not knowing thrilled her.
Summoning her own power to her fingertips she moved into a burning street – shadows rushed to envelop her – and stepped out onto a tower that had lost its roof to an aerial blast.
Fires blazed all around her, ravaged buildings poking through like islands in a sunset sea. Screams rose around her like smoke. A persistent drone passed overhead and she looked up at the sleek belly of the dwarf airship. Gun-barrels fixed within rotating metal bubbles swivelled and boomed. From the corner of her eye she watched as one of the gunners noticed the mutant sorceress overlooking the battlefield and pivoted his battery towards her. With a sigh she clapped her hands sharply, the impact foreshadowing the small explosion that blew the gun turret and a spurt of shrapnel from the side of the airship.
Sometimes she wondered why she still bothered to fight, but it was not yet her time. One minute away or a hundred years, what was the difference? She had seen this moment coming all her life. If she was going to give up now, then she would have done so decades ago. She had even felt the change that came next, but even without forewarning it would have been impossible to miss.
For a moment the magic that swirled down from the polar warp gate in the far Northern Wastes was overwhelmed by another source. It came from deep below ground, spearing through a fissure in the rock of reality as though the world had been cracked and molten light beamed from its core. It was the polar gate that Grimnir had long ago vowed to close, and a doorway onto his road lay here.
And it had just been opened.
Be’lakor threw back his head and roared in triumph, vanishing mid-cry with an implosive clap that sucked in the surrounding flames to the abruptly voided space.
Morzanna felt herself relax. She had played her part, but the future lay in the hands of others now. She looked to the inner walls of the fortress, noting with an almost maternal pride that the tribesmen continued to pour forward despite the departure of their infernal lord. Several swung grapnels like lariats above their heads and launched them over the parapet, jumping from the backs of their galloping horses and slapping into the walls before grinning and starting to climb. The handful of missile troops left on the walls loosed thei
r last panicked shots before jumping down. As far as she could see, only one man and a huge, strangely-outfitted dwarf Slayer remained to defend the wall.
She had often heard it said that dying was like falling asleep.
The dwarf raised his long firearm. A flash of red light shone in her eyes and blinded her for one crucial second as an explosive shot raced ahead of its accompanying bullet.
Morzanna smiled.
It was time to dream her own dreams.
She had always wondered how it would feel to sleep.
‘Retreat! Everybody back to the temple!’
Gustav waved men back as he retreated up the wide steps to the temple of Grimnir, yelling until the thin air and the smoke turned his voice into a rasp. The smoke was so thick he could no longer make out Unstoppable. The sharp points of light that cut through the murk might have been the vessel’s guide lights or could just as easily have been stars. Only the relentless rolls of thunder assured him that the airship was still there at all. While the mighty craft remained aloft and firing he had hope, but he would gladly have traded a handful of its cannons for half as many good men on the ground.
Horsemen in iron and leather scales galloped in and out of view, cheek flaps and leather skirts slapping their sides, shod hooves clattering on stone. Gustav flinched from the whine of arrows. A man in soiled burgundy and gold and a breastplate slowly turning to rust caught an arrow through the leather padding between armour and shoulder and went down with a scream. Another took an arrow in the back of the leg, dropping to his knees and making a wild shot with his blunderbuss only to be beheaded by an adze-wielding rider charging in from the side.
Everywhere he looked his men were dropping, men he had led since Badenhof, people he had come to consider as something more than mere friends.
Smoke clinging to his enormous armoured frame, the Slayer-Abbot barrelled towards a group of marauder horsemen. The riders flowed away, teasingly out of reach, calling out to the enraged dwarf as they riddled him with arrows. White and brown feathers bristled like a hedgehog’s quills from every part of his body when he took one last despairing lunge and crashed over.
‘Laddie, catch.’
Gustav snatched up his hand instinctively as a blocky dwarf-made pistol flew through the air towards him. From the weight of it, it was already loaded so Gustav swung it round immediately and fired, winging the pauldron of a Chaos knight who had been thundering across his line of sight towards the last pocket of Slayer-Monks battling with the marble statues at their backs.
Malakai Makaisson was a few steps below him and backing up, shrugging off the shoulder strap of his longrifle and muscling up his big handcannon. With calm proficiency the engineer ignored the incoming marauders, slotting a crank handle into the right hand of the stock and feeding a belt of what looked like ammunition into a hopper on the left. He began to turn the crank and, slowly at first but with his hugely muscled right arm quickly building speed and power, the cylindrical gun-barrel chugged and span, spitting out a torrent of shells. Laughing maniacally, the engineer swept his gun from left to right, mowing down the first rank of the cavalry charge before they made the bottom step. Horses screamed as they fell. Men jerked as the relentless stream of missiles pumped bloody craters into their bodies, many somehow remaining in the saddle only to be crushed by their falling mounts. The cannon flashed with every shot, spent casings raining from the hopper and tumbling down the steps. Makaisson’s single goggle lens shone like the eye of a daemon. And then he raked his fire back the other way, cutting through the second rank with even greater glee than he had gleaned from the first.
Gustav held up the pistol and shouted over the onslaught: ‘You have any more shot for this?’
‘There’s five mair already in the chamber.’
Gustav took another step back, aimed at a de-horsed marauder and took out half of the man’s face and the back of his head with a well-placed shot.
A six-shot pistol. Remarkable. A pity the Empire would never get to see them in service.
‘Ma ain invention,’ Makaisson yelled up.
Gustav aimed again and fired again. And again. And again. Until the pistol returned his pulls on the trigger with empty clicks and he stood at the top of the steps with his back to the colonnaded frontage of the temple itself. He threw the gun away and hefted his sabre two-handed. Malakai’s weapon stalled. The engineer shook it with a curse, then took a bomb from his backpack, pulled the pin in a fountain of sparks and let it bounce down the steps as he ran to rejoin Gustav at the top.
The explosion was small but fierce, sending bodies flying left and right. The damage to the stairway itself was minimal however and before the smoke had cleared, mounted warriors were already clattering up. Makaisson threw Gustav a wink, cleared the jam from his handcannon with brute force, unused ammunition drizzling through his fingers, and then re-attached the munitions belt to the hopper.
‘Ye’re nae the oath-swearin’ kind are ye, young Gustav?’
Perhaps it was the imminence of death that tickled him. Or perhaps it was the preposterous pointlessness of it that made him chuckle.
Him a rememberer to a Slayer – in what mad world?
‘How do you say “go to hell” in Dwarfish?’
‘Ach, laddie,’ Makaisson grinned, bringing his weapon to bear once more and setting his tattooed hand to the crank. ‘We dinnae huv all day.’
Cavernous hallways echoed to the shriek of daemons. The stone walls of bottomless stairwells rang with the impact of rune-axe and claw, bodies tumbling endlessly down or piling high before those that fought to follow. Slender marble bridges arced over rivers of abyssal darkness, fiends and horrors raining from them as Gotrek and his axes ploughed remorselessly across. Felix stuck close, stabbing out at anything that encroached on the Slayer’s back. His arms were numb and his chest burned, and he could barely see for the sweat pouring from his brow. When he did get the chance to mop his arm across his eyes all he could see was a wave of dark, distorted creatures scrambling down walls or surging up corridors from adjoining chambers. Gibbering cries screeched from every stone.
Gotrek savaged a hole and punched though.
With an axe of Grimnir in each hand, the Slayer had become an unstoppable force, an avatar of bloody-minded vengeance as the Ancestor had predicted he would be. Felix was fighting as hard as he could just to keep up. Part of him wanted to remind the Slayer that they hadn’t all had the good fortune to be imbued with godly power, but he was too occupied by his own concerns to spare even that much effort.
There wouldn’t be much left of him if he fell behind now.
At the end of another long hallway there was something different – a door – and Gotrek cut them a path towards it. It was high enough for a giant to pass through untroubled and sufficiently wide to accommodate a rank of Reiksguard Knights. Its carved, red wood panelling depicted images of struggle, encompassing oceans and nations and the void above, and was banded with brass. Finials in the form of vanquished daemons appeared to gnash their teeth and rage, surrounded by runic inscriptions like warding circles. Felix darted around the Slayer to try the handle. It gave an iron rattle, latched and bolted from the other side.
He shook the handle, then kicked it and cried out in frustration.
‘Of all the useless…’
‘Let me have a try, manling.’
Felix ducked around again, raising his sword to the slavering hordes as Gotrek at the same time spun the opposite way, like clockwork dancers on a dwarfish music box, to face the door. Felix parried a rust-edged knife, a three-bladed pincer, an axe crusted with blisters, his sword moving faster than he could control. He gave ground, keeping his back square to Gotrek’s as the Slayer advanced, axes whirring.
The pair of them roared with one voice as the air around them dissolved into brass shards and splinters. Max had given his life for this. Snorri and Ulrika and Kolya and Ka
t had died for this. But despite the best efforts of daemons and demi-gods, they had made it.
Their last adventure.
They were going to save the world.
And they would do it together.
NINETEEN
The Doom of Gotrek Gurnisson
A silver radiance bathed the inner sanctum of Grimnir’s temple with a spectral shimmer. The air resonated with a limpid hum that hinted at forces only barely held in check and that thrummed against Felix’s inner ear. Looking around was disorientating, like trying to locate a silver schilling at the bottom of a wishing well while a flautist played a single out-of-tune note beside him.
The chamber was of a similar size to the courtyard above it and with the same circular design. There were no weight-bearing columns here, nothing to divide the temple into more discrete spaces, nor to provide any hiding place from that light. The high ceiling was vaulted with ribs of iron and stone that crossed each other in a pattern that resembled a field of stars, a single ruby glittering in the centre of each one. There was a mezzanine level at the opposite end of the chamber, supported by nothing more obvious than dwarfish ingenuity and the two marble staircases that swept around the curve of the temple’s walls towards it. A chandelier hung over each staircase. Each was an iron latticework of geometric forms, squares coming together to form stars, which assembled in turn into pyramids that lay atop one another in the confines of the final, square shape of the chandelier. Precious glowstones, rather than candles, shone from them, but the ambient light around them washed out their colours and brightness.
Felix looked up to the mezzanine itself. There was the origin of the light and the fluting hum. An enormous silver portal rippled and swirled. It was identical to that shown to him by Grimnir during his trials, but rather than standing free in the air the distortions that it put out were mitigated by the huge stone dolmen that had been constructed to contain it. The marble uprights were carved into the stylised semblances of dwarf gods. They were not of Grimnir, Felix realised, but of the other two members of the dwarfs’ holy triumvirate: Grungni the smith and Valaya the hearth-maker.
