by David Guymer
Sigmar’s blood, it was Snorri Nosebiter!
The Slayer looked older without his crest of nails. The hair coming through on his head was thin and grey. Felix brushed his hand through his own hair and smiled ruefully. Snorri wasn’t the only one.
‘Damir,’ he yelled. ‘Bring back that gorilka. We’re going to need it.’
Snorri winced, as if Felix had just trodden on something bruised and painful, but almost as soon as the expression appeared it lapsed into something more like the dwarf’s well-worn idiot grin.
‘Thank you, young Felix. Snorri thinks he could use a drink about now.’
Eleven
Where the Beasts Dwell
‘How much has he had to drink?’ Gustav Jaeger whispered in Felix’s ear.
The two men sat side-by-side in the saddle, watching as a fine if slightly neglected bay gelding of Ostermark stock ploughed a bemused circle into the snow with Snorri Nosebiter hanging one-armed from the bridle. In the other hand he clutched a clay mug that he held above his head. The Slayer’s mace-leg waved threateningly and more of the gorilka sloshed from the cup and down his arm. The free company mercenary who had foolishly tried to help the dwarf up lay in a heap in the snow, trying to staunch the flow from his broken nose. His comrades, meanwhile, were content to tend their own horses and laugh at this uncommon display of dwarfish horsemanship.
‘Not nearly this much,’ Felix replied. Snorri had only had two cups. Full cups mind, enough to put Felix in the ground, but this was Snorri Nosebiter, a dwarf who would sooner outdrink a horse than saddle one. Watching Snorri throw his arm over the horse’s neck and dry heave into its mane, it was difficult to believe him the same dwarf.
‘Give him a hand, would you?’
Gustav cocked an eyebrow. ‘I like my hand, uncle. It’s one of my favourites.’ He waved towards the struggling Trollslayer. ‘Besides, he is another of your idiot friends.’
Cursing under his breath, Felix guided his mount alongside Snorri’s to block its movement. Then he claimed Snorri’s reins and coiled them up with his own.
‘Snorri has it now,’ said Snorri, dragging himself inelegantly onto the horse’s back. The bay whickered its discomfiture. Its forelegs bent as if about to buckle, but just about managed to adjust to the dwarf’s incredible mass. Snorri grinned proudly. ‘Now, how does Snorri make it go?’
‘And some people wonder how the dwarfs managed to lose their empire,’ said Gustav with a sneer. Clicking his tongue, the former merchant wheeled his horse about to rejoin his men.
The circus now over, shelters were being disassembled, bedrolls and cookpots stowed in saddlebags, and torches lit in firepits before the fires were doused with snow and buried. Accustomed to travelling light and moving fast, Damir’s riders were already mounted and ready. Their growing impatience came out in occasional catcalls and ‘helpful’ suggestions regarding where in the stirrups a man should put his feet and how it might all be done faster if it were just left to the horses. Luckily for everyone, Felix was not the only one who found Kislevarin a swine of a language, and Gustav had just enough authority amongst his own men to keep the otherwise obvious mockery from fraying tempers too far.
Despite himself, Felix was actually rather impressed. A little more uncharitably, he wondered how much of it his nephew was putting on for Ulrika’s benefit.
The vampiress rode amongst her men, reassuring them with her presence. They knew she was worth twenty fighting men and even the Ostermarkers had been quick to accept what she brought to their chances of getting home. Felix couldn’t help but wonder what Sigmar or Magnus would have done, and what their earthly representatives in Altdorf would make of this conversion to pragmatism. As Felix watched, Ulrika drew her mount alongside Gustav’s. The two conferred in hurried whispers with Damir joining soon after.
‘He looks familiar,’ said Snorri, also with an eye on Gustav.
‘Doesn’t he just,’ said Felix with a sigh that he felt in his bones.
‘Oh,’ said Snorri slowly, then took another swallow of gorilka and grinned. ‘Snorri sees. Felix is jealous.’
‘Jealous? Of what?’
Snorri pointed towards Ulrika.
For a moment, Felix just watched her, enjoying again the memory of her lips against his. Then he scowled and brushed the thought aside, thrusting his ring finger under Snorri’s flat red nose. ‘I’m a married man,’ he said angrily, though at whom that anger was directed he wasn’t sure. ‘To Kat, remember?’
With a suggestive elbow in the ribs, Snorri chuckled. ‘Snorri remembers.’
In an attempt at changing the subject, Felix turned his mount so he could no longer watch Ulrika and the two men. He looked at Snorri. The dwarf had cheered up no end since getting a drink inside him, but there was still a sadness in his eyes that Felix couldn’t remember seeing before. He fidgeted in the saddle. A satchel with a strange rune and a knot in the strap hung over his left shoulder. His axe and hammer were stuffed down his breeches.
‘Do you remember the rest, Snorri?’
‘The rest of what?’
Felix froze. Had Snorri somehow escaped Karak Kadrin without remembering his shame? But then Snorri’s face split into an old pugilist’s grin.
‘Snorri told a joke.’ The old dwarf chuckled and took another drink. Then he looked around before focusing on Felix. His smile wavered. ‘Why is no one laughing but Snorri?’
Felix shook his head and tried to mask a grin. ‘It’s good to see you yourself again. Like old times.’
With a shrug, Snorri upended his cup over his mouth. Nothing came out. He stared at it glumly. ‘Snorri said he wanted a bucket.’
‘It’s probably the last cup in all of Kislev,’ said Felix with genuine sadness.
Snorri stuck his thumb in to chase down the dregs and then licked it clean.
Before Felix could say anything more, the haunting whine of an Ungol horn brought him around. He saw Gustav and Damir riding to rejoin their respective companies. Ulrika regarded them all haughtily from atop her snow-white charger. Slowly, the assorted men fell silent.
‘Tonight we will ride on Praag. For some of you,’ she nodded to the Ungols, ‘this was home. It is not home. Perhaps you feel the same emptiness when you look on her as do I.’ Lightly, she rapped the steel band above her heart. ‘An army the size of which you cannot conceive lies between us and the city.’ Ulrika shook her head disdainfully. ‘Do not concern yourself with them. They are cold and hungry. They do not know we are coming and would not care enough to stop us if they did.
‘Praag is the fortress of the Troll King. A greater and more cunning foe you have not faced and at his command is an army of monsters that would darken a daemon’s nightmares.’ She fell silent, snow falling soundlessly around her, watching to gauge the men’s reactions.
Damir was inscrutable. Gustav was anxious but strangely eager, as though he had something to prove. Snorri belched loudly, earning a glare before the vampiress continued. Felix didn’t know what Ulrika could possibly have against Snorri, but she had been cold ever since his return.
‘But you have me to lead you. I am General Ulrika Magdova Straghov. I bring to you the best of the Troll Country and of ancient Lahmia. We will attack at night when my own powers will be at their peak.’ With a squeeze of her thighs that brought a knot to Felix’s throat, she wheeled her horse northward. ‘You do not know the purpose of our quest here, but know that the fate of the world will ride home with us on our success.’
Felix wondered what she meant by that. The free company gave a muted cheer and a rattle of weapons. The Ungols merely nodded, clapped each other’s shoulders in mute farewells, and brought their own horses about.
‘Snorri feels like he’s missed something,’ said Snorri, a stage hiss directed towards Felix’s ear. ‘What is a troll king?’
Felix however was watching Ulrika depart. Then he looked a
cross to Gustav who was doing the same thing. He recognised the same longing in his young doppelganger’s eyes and felt a stab of possessiveness for his own former life.
Really, Felix thought, trying to get a hold of himself. You’re going to do this now?
‘We’d be better off with me leading that free company,’ said Felix.
‘Snorri would be better off on a bigger horse,’ Snorri returned, eyeing Felix’s mare hopefully.
‘I’m serious. I’ve led men before. A company of Greatswords too, not some band of drunks, ex-mercenaries, and draft dodgers.’
‘Snorri doesn’t think that sounds very likely.’
‘Snorri was there,’ Felix returned, more harshly than he’d intended.
The Slayer shrugged, the sudden shift in weight causing his gelding to skitter sideways in protest. ‘Snorri still doesn’t think that sounds very likely.’
‘Are you sure you have your memory back?’
Snorri blew a raspberry. ‘Are you a priest of Grimnir now?’
Felix shrugged, then shook his head.
Looking pleased, Snorri tried to jig his horse into moving forward. ‘Snorri thought not.’
Ulrika led the column of horsemen – and one horsedwarf, she reminded herself through gritted teeth – inexorably northward. The snow fell thickly enough to blind even her to anything more than a few feet beyond the nose of her horse, but she had other senses that more than compensated. She had told Felix that she was a creature of Chaos and that was not untrue. Its power made up the very bindings of her being and she could orient herself towards the great polar vortex purely by the extent to which the animal that all Arisen kept locked within strained at its cage. She could no longer blame its rage on the beastmen she had drained in Kurzycko, for she had drunk heavily from Gustav’s men to cleanse herself of that particular taint. With a concentration of will, she shackled the monster.
It growled and retreated.
For now.
It grew stronger as she grew stronger, and would only test her more savagely the nearer they got to Praag.
Curse that idiot dwarf. She had been this close!
Felix had been right to marvel at the chances of Snorri finding them in the time of raspotitsa and she wondered which power exactly she had to thank for this confluence of fates. What next? Was Malakai Makaisson about to show up in a shiny new airship to deposit Gotrek, Katerina, and everyone else Felix had ever met onto their heads? She snorted derisively, but nevertheless found herself glancing upwards as though she had just hexed herself by thinking it.
Snowflakes landed in her eyes and she had to physically brush them off. There was no longer warmth in her body to melt them.
She didn’t think she could cope with the volume of former lovers that Felix had accrued. And they could not all be as insipid as Katerina.
‘General Straghov, might I ride with you a moment?’
Ulrika glanced up, irked that she could be so caught up in herself as to be taken by surprise as Gustav Jaeger rode alongside at a hard canter, then matched his horse’s gait to hers. He had supplemented his royal blue cloak and riding leathers with Ungol furs and bore a lantern in one hand. The glass was charred, and wet on the outside from snow melt. He rode surrounded in a cloud of mist from the breath of himself and his horse.
‘You are on the oblast now, Gustav. A man rides where he has earned the right to.’
The young Jaeger smiled tightly, uncertain if that was a welcome or a rebuttal, but when she did not demand he take himself and his horse elsewhere, his expression lightened. She could read the thoughts in his face as clearly as the lust song of his blood whenever he looked at her, perhaps picturing himself as some romantic lord of the steppe in the manner of the robber barons of ‘North Ostermark’, so quick to stab their flagpole into Kislev’s grave. His cheeks were flushed with near-surface blood. The hand that held the lantern rattled with nervous energy.
‘Yes, general,’ he murmured. ‘Damir’s scouts say that something has been this way before us. Two men on foot, one of them heavy like a…’ He swallowed and peered into the blizzard. ‘Perhaps like a Chaos warrior.’
‘That is not surprising,’ said Ulrika. ‘Even beastmen fear Kislev’s winter. Praag would mean shelter, if the Troll King will share it.’
Gustav nodded, gaze shooting sideways and hand going to his pistol holster as a long lingering cry like that of a wolf shivered through the falling snow. The young man shuddered. Ulrika watched him, captivated by the change in blood flow that caused his eyes to dilate and his cheeks to redden.
A warp storm was brewing. Ulrika could feel it in the ache of her hunger.
Gustav relaxed slightly, his shivers owing more to cold than to fear. Ulrika smiled coyly. He was the same age as Felix had been when they had first met and the resemblance was uncanny. Like his uncle, he was intelligent, handsome, and often unwittingly condescending. He lacked a certain edge, however, and seemed to compensate with a corresponding dose of arrogance.
‘If there is something more you wish to say, I would do it now. That is something else a Kislevite learns at a young age.’
Gustav coughed nervously, trying to look unafraid. Amongst his own kind he might have succeeded, but there was no masking the fluttering of his heart from an Arisen.
‘You say Praag is besieged by an army to make Helbrass’s look small. That it’s defended by all the beasts of Chaos. How are we to make it inside?’
‘You are going to help me,’ Ulrika smiled.
Gustav blushed into his collar. ‘Free companies haven’t the most heroic reputation, general, but whatever you ask of us we won’t let you down.’
As though this were news to her, Ulrika glanced down the line of horses to where the diversely armed freemen in their patched greatcoats, ill-fitting iron cuirasses, and criminally distempered horses took up the rear.
Her feeding from them had been about more than mere healing, more even than the power to punch a hole into the aethyr and transport an army across the walls of Praag.
Gustav turned to follow her gaze, showing the partially healed puncture marks on the side of his neck. The memory of his pulse in her mouth inflamed her, poked a sharp goad through the bars that contained the beast. Again she forced the animal into submission. But each time it pushed, each time the bars were bent a little further, it became that much harder to force back. Gustav was not the touchstone to her humanity that she needed if she was to win this battle, but he was not without uses.
If she remembered correctly, a little jealousy had never hurt Felix’s affections.
Seeking out the elder Jaeger amongst the rabble at the column’s rear, she heard the wolf howl again. It was similar but different, this time from the other side of the column. With a frown, she scanned the steppe, snow-washed and black with the emptiness of the oblast night. She thought she saw movement and focused on it, but for all her preternatural abilities it was one of Damir’s outriders that saw the flying shape first and screamed.
‘Ambush!’
Felix heard the cry at the same moment he saw the arrow split the scout’s face cheek to cheek and spin him from his mount. The Ungol’s foot snagged in the stirrup and his skull cracked on the ground as his pony reared and the steppe erupted with whoops and barks. Big hunting hounds bounded from the darkness, lantern light glinting from teeth and eyes, and were followed in by horsemen in white furs; so intangible against the snow that even as they drew on bows and hefted spears, they resembled horses ridden by the dead.
Arrows punched riders from the saddle and horses, particularly those of the Ostermarkers, whinnied in panic. Felix felt one shaft whistle past his ear and strike the rider behind. The arrow pierced his leather hauberk under the collar and the man dropped the pistol he’d been trying to put a match to with a scream. Another shaft droned across the opposite cheek and over Snorri’s head.
The S
layer bellowed, propelling his weapons overhead as if the horse’s motion worked on the same principle as a jittery gyrocopter. The poor gelding merely circled in confusion, causing Snorri to shout even louder as his back was turned to the fighting.
All around, men were struggling with matchlocks and screaming. More than anything he wanted to be able to tell the men around him what to do, but although he had led men in a pinch he didn’t consider himself a commander and he certainly didn’t know the first thing about cavalry tactics.
Was it best to form up or to stay loose? When on the defensive should they hold a position or keep mobile? And what was the best way for one unit of light cavalry to balance its advantages and overcome another?
Cursing his ill-informed educational choices, Felix drew his sword and sought desperately to remain calm enough to remember the correct application of reins and stirrups to wheel his horse into the face of the attack.
‘Hold and fire!’ Felix yelled.
Any command was probably better than none at all, and to his surprise the nearest men appeared to lose a measure of their panic as soon as the words left his mouth. Matchcords were lit and pistols aimed and blackpowder flashes crackled across the rear of the column. A hound went down with a whimper. An iron ball punched through a marauder’s chest and blasted his shoulder blade from his back.
By the light of the muzzle flashes that were spreading through the column like a flame along a taper, Felix saw the enemy charge in. They had already got too close in the dark. The pistoliers’ weapons were too complicated to reload and fire again. Damir’s horse-archers each got two or three more shots away, but it was still too little too late.
Felix saw an emaciated wolf-beast take an arrow in the hip and keep running. It had spines running along its back and a tail as sharp and metallic as the tip of an elven spear. The Chaos hound loped through the snow, ropes of drool hanging between its teeth and the spikes of its collar like a spider’s web.
