by David Guymer
The smell of smouldering timbers filled Felix’s nose as the dragon glided lazily around the manor’s onion dome roof and unleashed another jet of blood-tinged flame onto the streets. Felix waved his sword above his head and shouted abuse. The blade seemed to glow as if it had been plated with gold as the monster swelled in Felix’s vision. He felt excitement rise, but retained just enough good sense to dismount and shove his horse back on its way.
He was one man, but the Chaos dragon seemed to regard him as something more. It was probably just the sword, he thought. With a crunch of masonry, the dragon landed on the roof of one of the fortified buildings at the edge of the village. Its massive wings beat to steady itself, the power behind them snatching at Felix’s cloak and threatening to throw him over. From somewhere he found the strength to stand up to it, angled his glowing sword into what must have seemed a pointless guard, and continued to yell challenges and threats that would have turned his stomach had he been thinking clearly. Its neck snaked high above its beating wings. Felix could see the blue tint in the dragon’s eyes and smell the sulphur of its breath. Liquid fire dribbled from its jaw.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Felix shouted. ‘I’ve slain bigger than you.’
The dragon’s neck rippled and it emitted a barrage of breathy barks. Felix strongly suspected it was laughing at him. He tightened his grip on his sword, willing it to come, but then the monster’s head swung back towards the village as if startled. Felix glanced that way too, just in time to see the sturdy oak doors of the attaman’s manor explode outwards in a blast of timber before the battering ram shape of a monstrously-armoured minotaur.
A handful of broken Empire swordsmen were flung out onto the street before it. The creature lowered its head and bellowed, scraping its cloven feet through the road and smashing the butt-end of a monstrous warhammer into the ground. A mass of beastmen spilled after it. Their coarse fur was thick with mud as if they’d been travelling underground. Embers caught burning reflections in their dull cow eyes as their senses adjusted to the fire and cries of the outside world. Where in damnation had they come from? Felix watched them clutch axes and wicked-looking glaives and charge into the smoke that was filling Kurzycko’s streets.
A lot of them were running towards Felix.
Perfect, he thought, turning his body and angling Karaghul to receive the charge. He kept one eye on the dragon, which watched from its perch as though amused.
Absolutely perfect.
‘Where did Snorri’s one go?’ bellowed Snorri Nosebiter, searching about for the armour-plated juggernaut that had been looming over the horned heads of the beastmen packing the tunnel with their braying and dung stink just seconds before.
‘Damn it, Snorri. Just hold the gate, will you?’
An arc of lightning jagged around the runesmith’s staff and blasted a ram-headed gor into sizzling meat that painted the ceiling and made Snorri hungry. Gorlin pointed his still-crackling staff down the tunnel to a stone dolmen engraved with runes that surrounded what had once been a rune-sealed entrance to a set of stairs to an old watchtower or a mine. Snorri grinned.
‘That’s where it went.’
‘Get in line, Snorri.’
Krakki punched his foot-long fistspike down a beastman’s throat, then hoisted the creature off its feet, bludgeoned it against the ceiling and tossed it like a set of caltrops under the hooves of its brethren. His paunch was splattered with gore and he was sweating hard under the torch he held in one hand.
Smoke at the end of the valley.
Snorri shook off the unwelcome memory, took off a beastman’s snout with his hatchet and then shattered its chest with his hammer. The bull-headed thing went down with a piteous mewl and Snorri gleefully kicked it in the head with his mace-leg until its shoulders were glued to the floor by the sticky paste that had been its neck.
Dead dwarfs with arrows in them floated face-down in the river.
Torchlight flickered across the tunnel, alighting on beastmen and Slayers seemingly at random.
The beastmen filled the tunnel, horns and herd totems scraping the ceiling and crushed six abreast between the walls. Brock Baldursson bellowed the names of the lost Kislevite clans as he went down under a mass of spears. Lucky. Drogun and Durin led the majority of the dwarfs in a more measured but no less resolute advance, shielding the runesmith and forcing the beastmen onto a wall of death-hungry Slayers. Gorlin shouted a command that caused the bound magic in one of his staff’s many runes to flare and send a chain of lighting searing through the cramped beastmen.
The sweet smell of well roasted meat filled the air. It disturbed the ale sloshing in his otherwise empty belly and he threw up over the bloodstained flagstones.
Snorri blinked away the strobing after-images of skeletons contorted by a weird dance of agony, ducked a beastman’s swing then tackled it to the ground and hammered the butts of both his weapons into its eyes. Krakki gutted another that Snorri finished off with an axe across the throat. The fat Slayer cursed Snorri’s selfishness with every oath he knew and then some, but Snorri was already moving on. The smell of ozone and burned hair clung to them all. His mace-leg tripped a beastman twice his height. His hammer shattered the kneecap of another. Snorri’s axe then splintered the haft of its halberd as it attempted to brain him, and he finished it off with a headbutt to its dog-like snout.
‘That one almost had me,’ Krakki roared indignantly, but Snorri was no longer listening.
He wanted to laugh, but couldn’t. It wasn’t fun any more. He beat at his bare skull and howled in the goat face of the beastman that was swinging a hammer for his face. Before it could hit, a crossbow bolt zipped by Snorri’s ear and took the beastman through the heart. It grunted in surprise and dropped its hammer, then fell itself.
Skalf Hammertoes calmly slotted another quarrel into the track and manually heaved back the draw as Snorri glared at him. His fists clenched around his weapons until the wooden hafts groaned. That could have been it done.
No more memories.
‘No doom for you yet, Snorri,’ said the black-robed priest. ‘There are other oaths yet to be fulfilled today.’
‘Where is Snorri’s rememberer?’ Snorri growled.
‘I am not your damned rememberer,’ Durin shot back angrily. Snorri realised he had never seen the Daemonslayer angry before, or anything but blank, as if he came alive only when he fought. A tuft of bloody fur was stuck to the eye of his axe and his fell tattoos were wet with blood. He pointed to the dolmen. ‘Just take the gate and we can all die in peace.’
Krakki let out a great huff of breath and wearily beat his bulk another foot in that direction.
Die in peace.
That sounded nice.
With a full-throated battle cry, Snorri charged after the other Slayer.
The first beastman out of the village was foaming at the mouth and on fire, and easy prey for Felix’s fiercely glowing runesword. It practically impaled itself with its own head-down charge. Felix withdrew the blade, turning outside the dead beastman’s collapse and lashing behind it to open the chest of the horse-headed beast following. The beastman stumbled, pressing on its exposed ribs, but the hulking bestigor behind it drove its ram horns into the beastman’s back and hurled it bodily through Felix’s guard.
Felix cried out, dipping his sword out of the way as the beastman hit him like a side of beef in the ribs and twice Felix had the air driven from his lungs; first as his back hit the frozen earth, and then again as the beastman landed on top of him. Wheezing, he took a grotty handful of its chest hair in a bid to hold it off him while with the other he maintained his grip on Karaghul. The longsword was not exactly of much use when one’s horse-headed foe was snorting its foul breath into your face, but he could still feel the strength it was pushing into him. Felix was still even-headed enough to realise that, pound-for-pound, he had no earthly right to be wrestling with
a beastman without it. He almost smiled.
The Chaos dragon was still enjoying the show.
Praise Sigmar for small mercies.
The beastman that straddled him squirted blood from its gashed chest and Felix felt his grip loosen. With a gasp of desperation, Felix whacked it in the side of the head with the flat of his blade. Karaghul took a chip from its curling horns and startled it enough for Felix to get strength behind the knee he stabbed into its groin. It brayed in sudden paroxysms and Felix was able to free a foot to shove the beastman back.
The massive bestigor loomed into his vision in its place. It was swinging a morningstar and, insofar as was possible with its warped goat features, looked to be smiling. Felix drew up onto one knee and raised his sword to parry as the spiked ball swung down on its chain. He had time for one wild thought before his brains were smashed out of his skull.
He really wished Gotrek could have been here for this.
He thrust up his sword, closed his eyes, and felt blood rain over his arm and face. It was his own, it surely had to be his own, but there was no pain except from where his back had hit the ground and his grip on Karaghul had lost none of its preternatural power as might be expected if his forearm had just been pulped by a morningstar. He opened his eyes and glanced over his rock steady guard to see the bestigor choking on a cavalry sabre that had been rammed so far down its throat that the hilt had cracked its back teeth.
Stupidly, his first thought was that Gotrek had saved him. It had become an instinctual response to having his bacon hauled out of the fire, and the strength required to drive the heavy, slashing blade two feet through a beastman’s neck was staggering.
But of course, it wasn’t the Slayer.
Ulrika ripped her sword free, taking most of the bestigor’s face with it, spun for power and split a beastman from shoulder to sternum with a two-handed slash. Blood sprayed her pearl-white plate armour. She was an angel of the steppe, an avatar of cold-handed destruction.
Another charged in, horns down. Ulrika sidestepped behind it as though the beast was weighed down by chains and neatly severed its spinal cord with a slash of her own claws. As it toppled, she reclaimed her sword from the bisected beastman with a crack like a butcher splitting spare ribs.
In a numb kind of horror, Felix watched the vampiress blur from point to point. He never saw her move. It was like watching static images that were projected onto one place and then shifted when a beastman fell apart into an eviscerated ruin. At one point he was certain he saw two of her. Felix tried to tell himself he was foolish to be so shocked. It was still Ulrika; but that line of rationalisation was starting to stretch a little thin even for him, so he tried another.
Gotrek too had been terrifying at times. Was this really so different?
One of the beastmen swung a cleaver for where Ulrika stood, but the apparition was merely an illusion of her speed. Its cleaver hacked through snow and air and a split second later Ulrika fell on it from behind, lifting it from the ground and sinking her fangs into its neck. Its panicked heart fired a spurt of blood that ricocheted from the inside of Ulrika’s cheek and painted her inhuman beauty with crimson splatters. She took one mouthful and then snapped the beastman’s neck with such force that its body spun three times before impacting on the ground with a snap of bone. Another charged in, swinging an axe before it like a drunkard trying to strike a wasp. Ulrika twisted like a snake, landing a rib-shattering kick that threw the mewling creature through the smouldering drystone wall of the nearest building. The breach coughed flame and the beastman screamed as it burned.
The surviving beastmen bleated in disbelief.
And something else gave its volcanic rumble of disapproval.
Felix turned as the Chaos dragon opened its mouth. A fire hot enough to burn damned souls rose from its throat. Some undeniable imperative threw Felix in front of Ulrika just as the dragon exhaled. Felix swallowed the desire to scream as a ball of fire struck down towards him and he brought Karaghul up as if to parry a blow.
The runes on the weapon blazed brighter than the blade itself and the dragonbreath struck a shell of energy. Fire raged across an invisible barrier as a blast of pressure drove him down onto one knee. Felix felt the downward force intensify, could almost visualise the dragon dredging every last scrap of breath from its monstrous lungs. With a roar of effort, he pushed back. There was no way he should have been able to stand, much less take a forward step, but somehow he managed both and more. He felt like a champion. Karaghul pulsed in anticipation of blood. He struck, piercing his own sphere of protection and slicing through the meat of the dragon’s forelimb.
The dragon roared in unexpected pain, smoke roiling from its throat in bursts as it retreated from the pathetic human that had somehow managed to hurt it. With an exultant laugh that was all Karaghul, Felix ran after it, only for the beat of the dragon’s wings to force him back. The flesh of his cheeks rippled under the downwash as the dragon turned its awesome strength into lift. The dragon climbed and Felix set himself for another attack. The monster’s blue eyes glittered with a madness and hate beyond human reckoning. The foul smoke issuing from its mouth again became fire. Felix met its stare and willed it to bring it on.
Then the dragon hissed, threw down another blast of copper-tainted wind to climb higher still and then turned away towards the standing stones that Ulrika had called Trzy Siostry. Felix hurled insults after it, but there was absolutely nothing he could do to bring it down from here. As if to taunt him, the dragon sent a fiery wave searing across a line of bowmen. The drystone wall they were cowering behind flew apart as though it had been detonated from underneath to leave a blackened crater strewn with bodies.
Felix wavered, returning the power he had been loaned as the distance between Karaghul and the dragon increased, then slumped back down to one knee.
Strong hands hoisted him back onto his feet. Cold hands. Felix shivered. Ulrika’s face was slick with gore, the horror of the familiar juxtaposed with something from a nightmare. He couldn’t shake the image of the moment she had torn that beastman’s throat out from his mind. She wasn’t even breathing hard. But then of course she wouldn’t: she didn’t breathe.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Ulrika, swaying a little, no doubt in shock. A well-intentioned smile made her look only more macabre. ‘You’ve fought a dragon before.’
Breathless, Felix nodded towards the dead beastmen. ‘It’s a lot for just one day.’
Ulrika rubbed her chin as though just realising there might be something there, then shook her head angrily as if to clear it. She pointed east.
The roof of a two-storey building collapsed in flames. Felix wondered why nobody was trying to put the fires out, but then realised that they were probably too busy on the walls. On reasoned reflection, the only thing to wonder was why nobody was running away. The sound of a hymn rose over the flames, its vocals interweaving with the hellish instruments of handgun fire and screams. Smoke was beginning to sting his eyes, but Felix looked where Ulrika directed. The undead regiments fighting on the open veldt were being ground down under wave after wave of berserker assaults.
‘My master waits for us on the other side of the line, beyond the Ostermarkers’ positions.’ She nodded to the zombies as she wiped her sabre clean and sheathed it. ‘His soldiers can buy us time, but nothing more. When they fall this entire plain is going to be overrun. My master has planned accordingly, but we have to take this one chance to get through into Kislev.’
Felix shook his head fiercely, and pulled away from her. The heat on his back was intense. For the defenders still in Kurzycko it must’ve been appalling. But they were going to die for the Empire.
‘These people are going to die,’ said Felix. ‘There must be something we can do to help them.’
‘There isn’t,’ said Ulrika, so cold. ‘Even Gotrek would see that and take his doom where it could do some good.’ She
grasped him by the shoulder, crushing any thoughts of escape. Felix realised that she could pick him up and drag him any time she chose, or dazzle him as she had in Altdorf, and yet she opted to try reason. Felix wasn’t sure whether that reassured him or not. ‘You just saved my life, Felix. Now let me save yours. For Max’s sake if not your own. We’ll take my horse.’
Putting her fingers in her mouth, she emitted a high-pitched whistle that made Felix wince.
A sense of foreboding turned Felix back towards the village. Whatever it was, it knotted in his gut. The ground appeared to be trembling, not in fear, but more in anticipation, as if it was possessed of something miraculous in potentia.
His gaze fixed on Kurzycko’s north wall, a well-engineered construct of limestone blocks reinforced with iron rods and thick oak beams. Specks of blackpowder jigged along the parapet. Banners jerked an odd dance as their poles were shaken from beneath. The Ostermarkers themselves noticed the instability of the battlement but had precious little enough time between reloading and firing to give it any notice. None of them were able to see the hungry white mould spreading through the stonework beneath their feet, mortar crumbling into excremental dust wherever it touched.
Felix watched on, aghast, as the strange plague spread.
The beastman’s blood fizzed like some euphoric poison through Ulrika’s veins. The village of Kurzycko was a jumble of heat and sounds, but she could not dissociate one from the other. It was not unlike the feeling of being drunk. There was a queasiness deep within her chest, but with it a licence to do and be exactly as her body craved. The beast that dwelled within all Arisen licked its fangs, tested at the bars of its cage. The blood in her mouth was beginning to harden. She was parched. She felt hungry.
Her grip on Felix’s shoulder tightened until he gasped. She needed him now. He was a reminder of how it felt to live without a beast. With a growl, she tried to retract her fangs, but couldn’t.
How had she been so stupid as to feed off a creature of Chaos? In the moment it had just seemed so right, so natural. Almost worse than the desire to do so was the fact that she had been able to sate it. In the early nights of her unlife she had tried to feed off a northman only for the taint in his blood to force her to throw it back up. Something had changed, either with the world itself as the End Times approached or with her.
