by David Guymer
The world is dying, but it has been so since the coming of the Chaos Gods.
For years beyond reckoning, the Ruinous Powers have coveted the mortal realm. They have made many attempts to seize it, their anointed champions leading vast hordes into the lands of men, elves and dwarfs. Each time, they have been defeated.
Until now.
In the frozen north, Archaon, a former templar of the warrior-god Sigmar, has been crowned the Everchosen of Chaos. He stands poised to march south and bring ruin to the lands he once fought to protect. Behind him amass all the forces of the Dark Gods, mortal and daemonic. When they come, they will bring with them a storm such as has never been seen. Already, the lands of men are falling into ruin. Archaon’s vanguard run riot across Kislev, the once-proud country of Bretonnia has fallen into anarchy and the southern lands have been consumed by a tide of verminous ratmen.
The men of the Empire, the elves of Ulthuan and the dwarfs of the Worlds Edge Mountains fortify their cities and prepare for the inevitable onslaught. They will fight bravely and to the last. But in their hearts, all know that their efforts will be futile. The victory of Chaos is inevitable.
These are the End Times.
‘Knowing the object of the Slayer’s quest as I do, I have never laboured under the illusion that our friendship – if you could call it that – would last forever. Indeed we might both have had cause to bemoan ill fortune that our association had lasted as long as it already had when Gotrek and I finally parted ways.
‘Many was the cold night that I had lain awake and dreamed of the day I would be free of his oath, and looking back I cannot blame myself for taking the chance of a settled life for myself and Kat when it was offered. And yet, it is only human to wonder what hurt might have been spared had we all left Karak Kadrin together that day. The truth that I cling to is that our paths have always seemed guided by unseen powers with a great destiny in mind. For how else could a dwarf so determined to seek death ever have survived so much?
‘Does this mean that I can forgive him for what we did in Kislev?
‘Though I try, I cannot. Perhaps I write this too soon after the event, but the End Times are upon us, and I fear that this grief will not fade in the short time we have left…’
– From My Travels with Gotrek, unpublished,
by Herr Felix Jaeger
Prologue
Autumn 2524
‘It can’t be done,’ said Gotrek flatly, scooping up his tankard and sitting back, challenging the longbeard to convince him he was wrong.
Borek Forkbeard took a moment to consider his reply. It was not the way of longbeards to be hurried, and particularly not over so important a matter as this. The old dwarf sat quietly, thinking, polishing the lenses of his pince-nez spectacles with one white fork of his beard while the bustle of the inn went on around him. It was rough and dirty and the patrons were no cleaner. The dwarfs here were farmers, herders, and miners of what little lead and tin there was to be found in this part of the Worlds Edge Mountains. The longest faces were worn by a party of prospectors consoling themselves with a last drink before making the short return to Karaz-a-Karak. Through the open doors and windows, the grassy foothills basked in sunshine. Goats and hogs dotted the hillside. The Skull River was a sliver of sparkling light between two hills on the western horizon. Gotrek sipped his Bugman’s – Borek was neither poor nor shy with his wealth – content to wait on the longbeard’s mind. Snorri Nosebiter, however, had never been so patient.
‘Snorri does not know what there is to think about.’
‘Snorri wouldn’t,’ said Gotrek.
‘Gotrek and Snorri will both be famous and rich, Snorri thinks.’
‘Famous maybe,’ said Gotrek. ‘The famous fools who thought they could ride into the Chaos Wastes, find a dwarfhold two centuries lost and return with her treasures. Aye, we’ll be famous all right.’ He took another mouthful of Bugman’s, then snorted and turned to Borek. ‘And may shame find you, Forkbeard, for putting such ideas into this wazzock’s head. He’s a miner not a warrior and his mother wouldn’t let him even as far as Everpeak for the ore market.’
Borek blinked at the rebuke, then cleared his throat and reset his pince-nez on his nose. ‘This expedition is not without peril, you are correct, but it can be done. Every precaution has been taken.’
‘These wagons of yours,’ said Gotrek, sounding particularly unimpressed. ‘Aye, you mentioned.’
‘Protected by steel and rune, and driven by the power of steam alone.’ The longbeard nodded to Snorri. ‘We have plenty of strong arms and stout hearts, but I need good engineers in each wagon to keep the convoy together through the madness of the Wastes.’ He removed his glasses again and fixed Gotrek with a stare as if laying down a challenge. ‘Snorri tells me that you are one of the best.’
‘Snorri tells you…’ Gotrek muttered.
‘Do it,’ urged Snorri. ‘It will be just like your adventures with Hamnir. Only with Snorri.’
‘It’s different now and you know it,’ said Gotrek, though from the wistfulness in his tone it was clear that he was not at all as sure of his position as he wanted to be. ‘I have a family to consider.’
‘Will you at least promise to think about it?’ said Borek.
Snorri grinned hopefully.
Gotrek scowled into his beer and drank. ‘Fine, I’ll think about it.’
Snorri stared into his empty tankard and let the earnest talk of Khaza Drengi, the Slayer Hall of Karak Kadrin, break upon the huge bulwark of his shoulders. He kneaded his knuckles into his temple and rapped on the bar for the attention of the steward. His memory was coming back.
He was going to need another beer.
One
Lost
Snow fell across the oblast in thumb-sized flakes, white-furred reavers of the frozen north. Where exactly these raiders ravaged, Marszałek Stefan Taczak could not say for this was the time of raspotitsa, of roadlessness, when hills, rivers, and whole stanitsas sank under a flat plain of featureless white. The remnants of the Dushyka rota reined in on either side, reduced by the blizzard to little more than mounted shades.
Nine men.
That was what remained of the cavalry pulk he had led into the Battle of the Tobol Crossing. Nine men. Beaten men. They rode slumped in the saddle, swathed but for their eyes in bloodstained cloaks and captured Kurgan furs. Their animal layers were flecked with white, like a froth of exhaustion, but a numbness of heart and body meant no man shivered. It was that same fatalism that granted each man a shot of satisfaction, like koumiss still warm from the mare’s teat, at the fate that winter would soon share with the northmen. Raspotitsa returned the herdsman and the hunter to his tirsa, the merchant to his city and the warrior to his hearth, but to an army on the march it was death.
As fiercely as Stefan wished to see the closing of the year in such terms, he could not. There were no victors when Lord Winter marched to war.
‘Thirty Kurgan, marszałek. All dead.’
Stefan’s esaul, a beef and gristle man named Kolya, reined in his steed beside him. The mare, Kasztanka, responded numbly and Kolya clapped vigour into her neck and snow from her mane. He looked to Stefan. Blood flecked his blue eyes. He nodded once to the scene of butchery that had led Stefan to call a halt. In the lee of a rough horseshoe of banked snow, bodies and parts lay scattered around a doused firepit. A thin sheen of ice glimmered from the bodies where their warmth had melted the snow. Now they were cold. The snow slowly covered them, smothering the butcher’s ruin as purblindly as it did roads and tirsas and the hideous skull dolmens of the Kurgan. This had happened recently.
&
nbsp; They were gaining.
‘The same as before,’ Stefan murmured. Not a battle but a massacre. This was not war as he understood it. ‘What did this?’
Kolya offered a no matter shrug. ‘As the wise woman would say, marszałek, when the winter is hard the wolf will eat wolf.’
In the privacy of his face-scarf, Stefan smiled. It was easy to forget the huntsman who had used to paint stick-horses on stones to scatter wherever one of the oblast spirits had spooked poor, skittish Kasztanka. They were half-brothers, a blood relation as common as widowed mothers, and it was good to remember that the oblast had not always been this way. The northmen had come many times and always were driven back.
Kislev was the land and the land was Kislev.
Stefan looked up and squinted into the icicle teeth of the blizzard. The snow-swept vista stretched to the ends of his experience and beyond. It had suffered a grievous wound, perhaps more than one, but it still looked like Kislev to him.
Kolya made a clicking sound under his tongue and brought Kasztanka around to the right. She whinnied shyly, jumping into the high snow before settling into a walk as Kolya guided her around the edge of the Kurgan camp. There were more bodies, scattered, a breadcrumb trail leading north. Some of the northmen had tried to flee from whatever it was that had caught up with them. It had not done them any good. They had been beheaded, dismembered, taken apart by a monster so far beyond the abilities of an entire marauder warband that there was no evidence of it anywhere. Stefan fixed on a severed hand half buried in the snow. A hand-axe was still gripped in the blueing fingers. He felt a kind of gratitude for that. Many of the northern tribes shared the Norse belief that a warrior’s spirit would forever roam unless he died with weapon in hand.
The north wind turned then, skirting the northmen’s horsehoe wall and blasting both their faces with snow. It carried the coppery, obscenely sweet odour of recent death. The horses snorted anxiously. Kasztanka stamped her hooves and whinnied until Biegacz, Stefan’s mount and a stablemate since birth, nuzzled his old companion and blew reassurance into her ear. Men of the southern cities liked to mock the bond between an oblast man and his horse, but few men loved an animal as Kolya loved Kasztanka. It was her, rather than his own blood brother, that was keeping the bold man Stefan had known alive.
‘Marszałek!’
The shout cut through the blizzard with little warning of the horseman who cantered through, then reared to a standstill in a flurry of snow. Boris Makosky was younger than Stefan, had been a trapper making a decent living selling meat and fur to merchants from Praag before the incursion, but defeat had aged him. There was grey in his fringe and something feral never far beneath the surface when he spoke. Even when he did not, it was there in his eyes. If a man was brave enough to look.
‘There are tracks that continue north. It is too heavy to be a man, but whatever else it may be it is a beast of two legs.’
‘Can you not tell what it is from its tracks?’ said Kolya.
‘An ogre mercenary that fled the fall of Volksgrad, perhaps? One of the trolls that the Kurgan say now occupy Praag? We have seen worse migrating south.’
‘But these tracks head north,’ said Stefan. ‘They follow the same warband as we do.’
Makosky shrugged angrily. ‘What I can tell, I have told. If you want more then speak with Bochenek.’
That stung. The rota’s scout was feeding the foxes of the last stanitsa they had found: the price paid for spotting the Kurgan ambush too late. Stefan said nothing. On the oblast, a man learned to conserve warmth any way he could and that included keeping his mouth shut when words were not welcomed. Instead, he glanced again to the ruined corpses, worrying what such a monster might do to the captives those Kurgan had taken with them. The capture of the wise woman, Marzena – who had clearly exhausted her good fortune when Kolya and Bochenek had heard her screams and rescued her from the beastman herd that had invaded her home in the Shirokij Forest – had hurt them all, but Kolya most of all. His brother had always been one to seek out omens in the shapes of clouds, to beseech the spirits before partaking of a spring, and to heed the wisdom of the Ungol hags.
Stefan shook his head grimly. Snow dropped from his brow. What kind of beast, though, would render such carnage and not even pick at the bodies it had left behind? Stefan did not like the inevitable option that that left.
Daemon.
He shuddered, reaching for the szabla scabbarded by his left stirrup.
‘A man may seem brave when fighting sheep,’ said Kolya, quoting another of Marzena’s proverbs, ‘but be a sheep when faced with brave men.’
Stefan drew himself upright in the saddle to regard his brother fully.
‘I speak of the monster, not you,’ said Kolya, the memory of a smile haunting his thin lips. ‘These men were frost-bitten and half-starved. Their war leader left them behind while the bulk of his host continued north.’ He indicated that direction with a nod. ‘We ride on?’
‘For our lost brothers,’ said Stefan, spurring his mount around to face north. ‘I would not leave any man in the hands of the Kurgan, and I certainly won’t abandon an old woman.’
Kolya nodded, but Makosky’s scowl merely darkened. The man seemed to come alive only in the heat of the hunt. The land was wide, with too few beastmen to be found roaming lost and starving on the steppe. Usually they were ridden down with relish.
Other times, they were made to pay for what they had wrought on Kislev.
Nothing that Stefan could think of short of a victory, however small, or the remote possibility of reuniting with the Ice Queen’s pulk would rally his men’s hopes.
‘We are gaining,’ said Kolya, then raised a hand to sweep over the dead. His manner was grim, barren of hope and glad for it. ‘These men will not miss their furs now. When the horses are rested, we will bring the vengeance of Dushyka onto the Kurgan and their pursuer both.’
‘Tell me of your adventures in Praag,’ said the black-robed priest of Grimnir, walking barefoot through the soot and steam of Grimnir’s foundry, deep within the halls of Karak Kadrin. The air was thick and black. It tickled the throat with the honest taste of coal and cushioned the clangour of hammers upon anvils and the hiss of bellows. Shrouded to their bare arms in the murk, visions of Grimnir himself at his fabled forge, a score of dwarfs worked their anvils with a single-mindedness that bordered on brutal. Their straining muscles crawled with tattoos and coursed with sweat. Not one of them spoke. It was just them, the iron, and the sanctity of the forge.
Snorri Nosebiter said nothing, for it was an old question, and merely watched as the priest padded in a circle behind his back, Snorri twisting in his chair to follow his progress as far as he could. The snap of taut leather arrested him and pulled him back into the chair.
Oh yes. Snorri kept on forgetting that.
He was secured into a high-backed wooden chair and, though it took a lot of leather to strap in a chest as massive as Snorri’s, this priest was taking no chances. The stump of his right leg was laid out upon the anvil in front of him. He remembered that his old friend Gotrek Gurnisson had cut it off for him. He grinned in success at having remembered, but then almost immediately frowned.
Was he happy about that? Clearly he was still missing something.
‘Snorri,’ the priest prodded, circling back round to the front. He wore his black hair long and his beard forked, and walked with his hands clasped behind his back as he spoke. He wielded his voice with an authority as unsubtle as Snorri’s hammer. His bare feet slapped the hot floor. ‘I asked you a question.’
Snorri maintained his frown. He was here to remember, that much he remembered. Deep thought scrunched up his face. It was unique, even as faces went. It had taken so many beatings that bony regrowths knobbled his jawline and brow and his nose was flattened between his cheeks. One ear was a cauliflowered mess while the other had been torn clean away to l
eave a pinhole in the side of his head. Sometimes, when things got boring, Snorri could hear air whistle through it.
‘What kind of name is Skalf Hammertoes anyway?’ said Snorri.
‘I was a ranger, and not a very good one. I do not hide from my shame as some might.’ He looked askance towards Snorri. ‘Praag.’
‘Snorri does not remember.’
‘I think that you do.’
Snorri watched the priest circle behind him once again. It was making him dizzy. He closed his eyes to think. Praag. He had travelled there with Gotrek and with young Felix on the airship, Spirit of Grungni, to fight Chaos. The fighting had been all right but he hadn’t enjoyed the journey much. There had been too much time with nothing to do but think.
Snorri did not like thinking. It did not agree with him. It gave him memories.
As he thought now, back past that point, his mind flinched like a dog from an old master who had once been cruel. There was an old wound that was still buried there despite the years he had spent trying to forget. And now he was supposed to remember. Why?
Because he had promised, that was why.
He saw a dwarf woman and her child. He did not remember if the child was his but the regret, the anguish, that knotted in his chest at the memory told him that he had loved these two as if it were. The knot tightened. His heart was a lead weight on his lungs. He had killed them both. Or had he? But their deaths had been his fault. Yes, that was right. He could not remember.
‘Interesting,’ said Skalf, checking his stride. Snorri opened his eyes, blinking as if he had just had his head submerged in a barrel. The priest’s lips twisted in amusement. ‘You talk when you think, Snorri Nosebiter. I can only assume it is that thick skull of yours that has seen you through so many of our age’s great battles.’ Snorri beamed. ‘I want you to tell me about the second time you visited that city, when you returned there without Gurnisson and the human. It was around then that your memory began to fail.’
