Gotrek & Felix: Kinslayer

by David Guymer

  She did not know which was worse.

  Blood roared through her brain like the Goromadny Falls after the summer melt. Someone was speaking to her. Was it Felix? The braying of the herd and the howls of the beast within its cage blocked it out. She focused on the feel of Felix’s arm beneath her hand and tried to concentrate on the words. They were distant, an urgent shout for a comrade lost in a storm.

  ‘Get out of there, Ulrika. Get out now.’

  Aekold Helbrass strode through the embattled ranks of the Chaos horde. He was one in a vast shoal but where he walked, men and beasts were healed and the risen dead reduced to rose-choked cairns of composted earth. A mighty phalanx of zombies and their immortal puppet lords, tall warriors in archaic plate and chill blades, blocked his path. Kurgan berserkers hacked at rotting flesh. Chaos warriors crackling with the accumulated blessing of their gods fought toe to toe with kings long departed when Sigmar had walked the Empire.

  Helbrass flourished the Windblade, and the broadsword was life’s scythe. Skeletons collapsed rather than near its edge. Zombies dissolved into glorious bounties of maggots and flies at a glance.

  A wight lord proclaiming himself Ætheltan of the Teutogens cut down the Chaos warrior that opposed him and, voice as the gasp of air from a tomb unsealed, challenged Helbrass to single combat. The shade was old and angry, and strong enough in his own will to raise his sword before decay and rebirth caused his body to shrivel, his armour to corrode, and his blade to bleed iron dust. Helbrass trod on the ancient’s funerary shroud and strode on, white flowers bursting from the wight’s remains to complete the cycle of life.

  There was nothing special about death. The simplest primordial slime that eked an existence from the ocean’s bottom could die. A rock or a gust of wind could take a life. That event most beautiful to the Changer was thus the transition from dead matter into life.

  Already Helbrass could picture the Troll King’s wrath, and his laughter was a hammer that smote zombies and ghouls into ash to line his path.

  He fixed his gaze on the sorcerers upon the Three Sisters. Only the Kislevite village stood in his path, but that would not hold him for long.

  He would bring life to a dead land.

  There was nothing here that could stop him.

  The clouds above Wilhelmshügel turned black, a creeping grave rot spreading north through the sky. On the darkening ground beneath, messengers rushed from banner to banner with news, hearsay, and orders from a dozen generals. None of it made good listening but then, with a sweeping view of the entire plain from Rackspire to Fortenhaf in the west to Kurzycko in the north, General von Karlsdorf could see that for himself.

  Roch’s regiments were being ground down. The enemy’s monsters had done for most of the forward artillery batteries. Chaos warriors were on the walls of Kurzycko. Beastmen were slaughtering men in their trenches. Everywhere the general looked he saw men running.

  Even as he listened to the gabbled report of a mud-smeared rider, the Chaos dragon that had almost single-handedly dismantled a year’s worth of preparations banked to follow the course of a drystone wall. Von Karlsdorf looked away, a sick feeling in his gut, as the dragon overflew an earth and timber redoubt and introduced the arquebusiers garrisoned there prematurely to the fires of hell.

  Damn it! He wanted to tear off his hat and rip it up with his teeth. How in Sigmar’s name was a man supposed to fight something like that? He interrupted the messenger’s stream of gibberish with a snarl.

  ‘Ride to General Szardenings and ask… no, tell him to send out his demigryph knights against that thing. And the rest of you!’ He raised his voice to carry over the ceaseless bombardment to the gunnery crews. ‘Keep firing. One hit would be something.’

  The rider bowed and then ran off.

  Alone amongst the chaos, General von Karlsdorf did up the buttons of his greatcoat and shivered. He shot a glance towards the wizards still upon the Three Sisters. Despite the havoc being wrought around them, there was no change in their ritual that he could discern. Was this strange darkness their doing, some magic to confound the enemy? Impossible to guess. It was so dark as to be almost night, and filled him with a chill the way a good fire might spread warmth. Feigning a desire for a better view of the battlefield, he stamped to the low drystone barricade at the lip of the hill and saw what some visceral intuition of the kind he had always dismissed told him was the source of his disquiet.

  A company of knights in armour as black as smoke were galloping across the veldt, charging under the wake of the dark skies towards Kurzycko. The crimson swallowtails of Commandant Roch’s personal colours tore from the vexillary’s standard. Von Karlsdorf prided himself on being a reasonable man, but something about the sight made him shudder. It was surely just a trick of low light and powder smoke that made it look as if the entire formation had just charged through a defensive wall.

  He summoned one of his aides.

  ‘Round up what cavalry we have and dispatch them to help Roch.’

  ‘It’s only free companies left, general. Some of them have already tried to run away once.’

  ‘Give the order,’ said von Karlsdorf, lifting his eyeglass to study the flame-lit walls of Kurzycko. ‘Before it’s too late.’

  In a thunderous shriek of hooves and steel and bone, the wedge of black Templars with Commandant Roch at their tip smashed open the anarchic Chaos formation like a nut under a hammer. Men and their allied beasts went down under hooves at once ethereal and iron hard. A gratifying number broke, and Roch paid them no further mind. He did not chance his own unlife for a few hundred marauders from the enemy’s vanguard. He bared his fangs as he surveyed the effacing flood of Change between him and Kurzycko.

  This is why we fight, he thought. As if the reminder were required.

  Roch had drained ten strong men in preparation for this encounter. His most learned necromancers had warded his armour with magicks of binding and unlife. There would not be enough left of Aekold Helbrass to burn on the plague pyres of Bechafen.

  Ulrika covered her ears against the sudden tumult of screams as the battlements of Kurzycko ceased to be a wall and became instead an unsupported collation of stone blocks and tendrilous fungal growths. It was a futile effort for one who could measure the pulse of the harpies gliding high overhead. The mycelial tendrils lashed out from the stonework, tossing men aside in convulsions of hunger before shrinking back and then, in the grossly accelerated culmination of their life cycle, exploding in a mushroom cloud of puffy white spores. Soldiers wailed, clinging on suddenly to nothing at all as the entire length of wall came apart underneath them and dropped them into the choking cloud.

  Felix covered his nose and mouth with his cloak, the spores irritating his throat even from the other side of the village. Ulrika was glad that she no longer needed to breathe. It seemed strange and a little grotesque that she had once been so wedded to it. Skin tingling, claws extruded, she watched as a single armoured man stepped through the cloud.

  She would have known him had she been staked through the heart and left for the sunrise with a silver blindfold. Aekold Helbrass, the conqueror of Kislev and Praag. Apart from his hands and feet that were as green as new shoots, he was clad in a suit of plate armour that shifted constantly in colour like oil on water. Nothing in his physical stature shouted ‘Champion’. He was neither especially tall, nor powerful in appearance, but looking at him was like staring too long at the sun. Feeling her cheeks beginning to moisten, Ulrika blinked, looked away, and wiped red tears from her eyes.

  Helbrass was life: violent, explosive, untempered life, and just looking upon him made her eyes bleed.

  Blind to the fires burning all around, she started towards him. She wanted to rend him apart for what he had done to her homeland, and she wished to test just how far Felix would go to protect her, but really her need surpassed and transcended all logical considerations.

&nb
sp; She was a moth to the flame.

  She had pulled away from Felix and drawn her sabre when she heard a rumble of hoofbeats and an armoured knight on a ghostly white charger burst through the cloud. He wore heavy black armour, moulded plates accoutred with rubies and bronze-fretted embossings of snarling bats. A jewelled broadsword was in his beringed hand and it had clearly tasted blood in getting its bearer here. His skin carried an unearthly pallor and a white stream of hair ran out in his wake. Blood called to blood.

  It was her master!

  Aekold Helbrass turned and readied his blade, but made no move to step out of the way. There was something mocking in the shift of patterns across his helm. Roch shouted at Ulrika to run.

  Then he struck Helbrass’s life-giving aura, the power of an ancient bloodline meeting the vigorous, carefree exuberance of Change. The wards upon the commandant’s armour blazed aethyric black, smoke venting from the joins as his skin sizzled. Calling on the restorative power of his blood, he howled fresh agony as burned flesh was healed and then incinerated anew. With willpower alone, he lifted his sword and urged his horse on, but the magic that bound the undead beast did not have the power of the ancient curse that bestowed unlife upon its rider. Like vapour from a blacksmith’s cooling bucket, the horse evaporated, hurling Roch’s armoured bulk to the ground.

  ‘You would challenge me?’

  It was the first time Ulrika had heard Helbrass speak, and his voice was like the light that lanced through a cloudy sky. She reeled from it, but stronger, older, Roch rose and smashed his sword against Helbrass’s. The champion parried, countered. Roch received and returned. The champion was quick, but the vampire lord was quicker, unleashing a storm of blows that even Ulrika did not believe she could match for speed or steel-rending power. Helbrass defended himself with almost equal speed and no little skill, but Roch left no opening for an attack.

  Until he started to slow down.

  The effect was so slight at first that Ulrika did not even notice, but then Roch coughed, splattering blood over Helbrass’s visor and dropping to his knees with his hand upon his heart. Ulrika watched with mounting fury as her master’s pectoral plate buckled and gave before his swelling chest. The Arisen crossed his arms over his breast and roared defiance. A nauseating ripple passed out from his brow as Helbrass placed a hand upon his head. Flames flicked across his gums, his chest continued to heave, and just as it looked as though his body could stretch no further, he emitted a scream and burst apart into a screeching cloud of bats.

  Chuckling, the champion of Chaos strode through their flapping wings and levelled his sword.

  Ulrika unconsciously took a backward step, but then checked herself and brought up her own blade to match. She felt the roar of her beast as the bars of its cage grew brittle. There was no escape from here even if she wished it.

  And she did not.

  This was something that she and Felix would have to face together.

  Eight

  Lifebringer

  ‘Ulrika, what are you doing? Get back!’

  Acting without thought and purely on instinct, Felix put himself between Ulrika and the Chaos champion. He had seen for himself what this warrior had done to that vampiric knight and, for all Ulrika’s strength, Felix knew this was not a foe that she could confront and survive. He shook his head ruefully and raised his sword.

  And did he think that he could?

  ‘I am life,’ said the champion, without break in his stride, his voice the roar of the fire that would scorch away the forest so that life might flourish anew. ‘She is death. Is this the side you choose?’

  A flash of silvered blue was all that Felix saw of the champion’s blade as it clove towards him. In that brief second, Felix acknowledged that he was probably as good as dead, but an impulse sent his sword darting into the path of the stroke. The clash of steel threw the two blades apart. Felix winced at the pain in his fingers. Against the dragon he had felt invincible, but now he felt as stiff as a tree with one too many rings under its trunk. Muscle memory spun him away from the champion’s counterstroke, then shaped him to slash back-handed under the champion’s throat just as a hissing black shape bombed into his peripheral vision.

  He swung around to parry, but the winged ferocity of a bat flew into his face and flapped madly around his head. It was one of those that had been birthed in the other vampire’s demise. Felix turned his face to try and shrug the creature off, but it stuck with him. A mad laugh sounded over the leathery snap of wings and the growl of burning thatch and Felix parried a groin thrust that he caught a fraction too late. He swore as it nicked his thigh, and stumbled back.

  The heat pouring from the burning buildings was intense. The flames conjured a strange tableau whereby the horned silhouettes of beastmen fought a deadly game with zombies and other, stranger, creatures of crazed if undeniably intelligent design. Blue-finned daemons shrieked overhead while from all around reverberated the muffled thunder of distant cannon. It was as if Felix had been swallowed by some hellish daemon and was listening to its heartbeat. Even the smell of burned meat seemed apt to the scenario.

  Through the fluttering lashes of beating bat-wings, Felix caught a glimpse of Ulrika. Her eyes were red as those plucked from a dead man, crimson tears streaming down her cheeks. With one clawed hand shielding her face as if just looking at the champion was painful, she and her sabre cut in. She looked almost bestial as with raw strength alone she beat aside the champion’s sword and lunged for the join between helm and gorget.

  The champion parried and Ulrika came again with a growl and a flurry of blows, the Chaos warrior cackling as each came a little slower and lighter than the last. The sickly smell of sizzling fat rose from her armour.

  She threw one more attack before she could endure no more and fell back with a shriek and smoke streaming from her hands. ‘A curse on you, Helbrass!’

  The patterning of the champion’s armour implied amusement, if not outright mockery. ‘That is not within your power to bestow, stagnant one.’

  Taking the opportunity, Felix swatted aside the blasted bat and hauled Ulrika to her feet.

  She recoiled from his touch as though his mortal warmth was enough to burn her. The smell of her alone was enough to make him want to be sick, but her appearance was worse. Her flesh had liquefied and run, congealing as it cooled into malformed shapes that didn’t always fully sheathe cracked and blackened bone. The white scales of her armour were charred at the edges. She wouldn’t lower her hands from her face.

  ‘Run. You can’t fight this.’

  ‘And you can?’ Ulrika snarled through still-smoking fingers.

  Felix angled his sword into a guard, turned his attention to Helbrass and backed slowly away. The vague idea of falling back to the attaman’s fortified manor was somewhere in there amongst his thoughts. He gave a wry smile, surprised to find he was actually enjoying himself a little bit. Change was overrated.

  ‘I said I could fight. I didn’t say I could win.’

  ‘I will enjoy this,’ said Helbrass. ‘It is always a precious gift to face a man with a destiny.’ The champion threw a decapitating stroke. Felix watched its edge come.

  Some destiny.

  Parrying for his life, Felix retreated with Ulrika behind him. Attacks fell thick and fast, and Felix’s sword danced without any conscious input from him, but he could only wish that the gulf between him and his foe was a simple matter of swordsmanship. Vines burst from the ground to turn defensive stances into stumbling retreats. The earth hatched sinuous insects that crawled up his legs and into his armour. The very sleet falling from the sky became buzzing, stinging things, a droning mob of fat yellow-back flies that for all Felix’s efforts clung to his head as though it had been basted in honey. And through it all came the changeling armour of Aekold Helbrass.

  It dawned on him fully then that Helbrass was not an opponent against whom an ordin
ary man should fight. He had routed the Ice Queen from her own land, sacked a city that had never been conquered, one where Gotrek Gurnisson was said to have faced his final doom.

  The utter certainty that he had no chance at all was strangely liberating.

  He risked a sideways glance. Ulrika was black and hunched, but somehow with her sword in hand. Steam rose off her where snow fell.

  ‘What are you still doing here? Go. I’ll hold him here.’

  Ulrika lowered her hand from her face. It was burned almost beyond recognition. Even her eyes were shot through with crimson, suspended by some blood curse within an unblinkered socket. A string of white teeth including two unmistakable vampiric fangs gaped where lips and gums had been burned down to the enamel. ‘You would do that for me?’

  Felix parried a numbing blow and spat out a wasp. Somewhere on the outskirts of his vision a skeletal knight galloped through the flames. He’d almost forgotten there was still a battle raging out there. ‘Of course I would. Go!’

  Ulrika’s skin cracked as she smiled. It was horrifying, but she seemed to stand a little straighter and her eyes became marginally less wild, as if drawing conviction from the – frankly shocking – revelation that he still cared.

  ‘I am not leaving. This is Kislev whatever Empire men try to call it. It is mine.’

  In other circumstances, Felix might have laughed. He did know how to pick them. Gotrek had craved death more than anything, and Ulrika couldn’t die, at least not with any kind of finality. For all their differences they were as bad as each other.

  ‘Stop arguing,’ he spat, his ears beginning to go numb from the relentless clangour of beaten steel. He had lost sensation in his fingers some minutes ago. ‘You can’t even stand within reach of him.’