by David Guymer
It was heading straight for Ulrika.
Felix screamed a warning. Another arrow buried itself in the hound’s flank, but it did not seem to feel it as it bunched its hindquarters and launched itself forward with a terrific snarl. Ulrika bared her fangs as she saw it, barely a second before its flying lunge punched her from the saddle.
The vampiress hit the ground in a thump of snow with the mutant hound landing on top of her a moment later, clawing at the bands of her breastpiece and sinking its fangs into the thick steel guard around her throat. Ulrika growled back, face slathered in drool, and locked one daemon grip under the pit of its foreleg and another around its neck.
For so very many reasons, the ambushers had picked the wrong target.
Ungols and Imperials that had previously been wavering suddenly cried out in wrath. Pistols sputtered inchoate fury as men drew swords and axes and charged to their general’s defence. Horses slammed together, barged each other aside, tangled tacks and stirrups and trapped their riders side-by-side to hack at each other with blades. The Kurgan had the edge in size and armament, but now they were in close they were working like slavers with the flats of their weapons and seemed taken aback by their foes’ zeal.
In the snow meanwhile, Ulrika had driven the hound’s jaw back from her throat until it snapped impotently a few inches from her face. Then, with every outward symptom of great pleasure, she squeezed down on its neck. The dog mewled, pawed at her breastpiece. Its eyes turned blood red and its hindlegs went soft and deposited its blade-tail on the ground. Freed of its weight, Ulrika rose, then clenched the final distance until the hound gave one final whine and then twitched with the sudden snap of its spine.
A shout from Snorri pulled Felix away from Ulrika’s show of force. The dwarf had managed to chivvy his horse into the right direction and get it moving. The bay gelding cantered uncertainly through the baying tangle of Kurgan marauders and their hounds while Snorri swung his weapons wildly to left and right without ever coming within a yard of striking another rider.
Dwarfs just didn’t have the reach for horseback fighting. Felix would have thought that even Snorri would have had the common sense to dismount, but clearly he was being generous with his assumptions. Could Snorri still be drunk? Was that even possible for a dwarf that had once emptied a bucket of Ivan Petrovich’s double-distilled Goromadny vodka and then trounced all of his household lancers and their wives in a drinking contest?
Felix swore as Snorri’s attempt to lean back and kick a hound with his mace-leg resulted in him windmilling for balance and hugging his horse’s neck to keep from falling off.
It was a miracle they had got the Slayer into the saddle in the first place.
Felix looked from Snorri to Ulrika. The vampiress was back on her horse now. A nimbus of energy coalesced into a gauntlet of shadow that she punched towards a charging horseman. A lance of Dark Magic powered through his chest. Ulrika hissed, widening that dark lance into a blade and yanking her hand sideways to bring it scything through the Kurgan that surrounded her.
At her side fought Damir and Gustav and a tight formation of furious-looking horsemen. A part of Felix wished he could be there too. The need to protect her came from somewhere deep inside, and it took a great effort to resist it and turn back to Snorri. The Slayer was disappearing into the night but for the sounds of dwarfish insults and the occasional clangour of an axe and a hammer being accidentally mashed together.
Ulrika had all the protection she could need, and from what he had seen of her she needed none.
‘A curse on all Slayers,’ Felix swore with feeling, spurring after the departed dwarf.
A Kurgan warrior with a thick snow-salted black beard and a snow lion pelt riddled with icons of the Dark Gods swung at Ulrika with an axe. His heart hammered in her head. His breath was sour with gorilka and the self-digestive stink of starvation. She could hear the grind of bone on ligament, muscle on bone. He was an animal, a filthy degraded animal that soiled her homeland with his gods and his smell.
The axe glimmered closer.
The man did not fear death. Ulrika snarled. That never lasted.
Sharp as a sudden chill, her hand snapped up and caught the axe blade in her palm. The Kurgan roared and pulled back against her. Even in his prime his strength would have been no match for Ulrika’s. Now, half wasted and bitten by frost, the Kurgan could do little more than roar the impeachment of his dark masters. Ulrika tightened her grip, coruscating arcs of atrophying magic causing the axe blade to brown and its wooden haft to crumble.
Suddenly pulling on nothing, the northman seesawed back in the saddle. Ulrika caught him by the collar of his cloak before he fell.
His pulse quickened under her grip. Horses and men battled all around her, but this was all she cared now to hear. She had fed just hours before, but like a raw neophyte she ached for a taste. It was Praag, she knew. It was Chaos. She didn’t care.
‘Fool,’ she lisped, tongue engorged by desire. With a snarl, she surrendered to the beast’s bellow of approval and dragged the marauder off his horse until he lay across her lap like a human sacrifice upon an altar. She licked her fangs. ‘Do you even realise what you face?’
The rhythm of his heartbeat fell out of time. She laughed. There was the fear.
The Kurgan screamed and beat ineffectually at her breastplate. Ulrika held him nonchalantly down. Dark power flickered into a gauntlet around her hand as she raised a fist and then punched through the man’s chest. Ribs parted with a crunch. The man jerked, spat blood. Then Ulrika tore out his heart. Mouth open wide, she held the still-beating organ above her face and drank. Blood ran across her cheeks and down her throat.
The beast wrapped its talons around the bars of its cage and strained.
With an effort of will over instinct, she blinked blood from her eyes and looked up. This should not be happening. Not so soon.
That was why she had brought Felix.
A pistol shot shattered her thoughts and she glared up hungrily, scanning the melee of mounted men and snarling hounds. She wanted to bleed them all. With the helpless terror of madness, Ulrika realised that Felix had abandoned her.
Her tether to humanity had been broken.
Then she bared her fangs and turned back to the Kurgan.
They would learn what it meant to defy one of the Arisen.
The snowfall thickened as Felix turned a hard canter into a gallop. He’d never ridden so fast in his life. The rapid pound of the horse’s hooves seemed to set a pace for his heart to match. The impact on hard snow rang through his bones and made his mail shake. Even flying hadn’t been this terrifying. There was something about seeing the ground flashing beneath him and seeing the animal’s legs blur that granted a considerable immediacy to his peril.
‘Snorri!’ he shouted, mouth filling with snow at speed the moment he opened it.
Flakes of bristly cold piled into his eyes faster than he could blink them away. He dared not take his one hand off the reins to wipe them.
Ragged-looking northmen on starving steeds flashed by in the dark. A scattering of moonlight on a chainmail shirt. A glint of lantern light from a silver ring. There were thousands of them out there, he knew. He could hear the howls of their dogs, but more than that he could feel their existence in his gut. It was as if their presence alone was a knot that weighed down the air around him.
Winding his hand once more through frost-stiffened leather reins, Felix shook his face clear and tried to focus on where he was going. Ahead came the sound of ice water slushing against rocks, guiding him through the numbing howl in his ears.
The Lynsk.
Mentally, he oriented himself. Assuming Praag was nearby then the Gate of Gargoyles would be somewhere there to the north-east. It was useful to know, but it wasn’t going to help Snorri.
A warning shout in a harsh barbarian tongue snapped his eyes back to hi
s path. A Kurgan marauder on foot rose out of the darkness before him. The man’s fur cloak swiped out behind him as he turned, leather plate armour so stiffly frozen that ice shavings drizzled from the joints. His eyes were bloodshot. His greased face was gaunt from malnourishment and cracked by frostbite.
Felix cast about once more for Snorri, then swore his surrender to the snow and darkness. He drew in the reins and swung from the saddle, bringing Karaghul into a guard just as the northman barrelled through the snow with a harsh yell.
Felix could just about ride a horse, but the day he tried to fight from one was the day the electors nominated him their Emperor.
A tickling déjà vu came over him as the marauder stumbled through the shin-high snow and slush that banked the partially frozen Lynsk.
The snow, the river, the Kurgan: it was the scene from his dream.
He had seen this. He knew exactly what was going to happen.
Shifting his stance appropriately to the attack he knew the northman was about to make, Felix sidestepped the marauder’s lunge and slid Karaghul between the sinewy lacings that connected backplate to breastplate as if it belonged there. Blood lanced across the snow and up Felix’s arm.
Felix grimaced as he shifted his grip, and kicked the man behind the kneecap to drop him into position for Felix to plant his boot on the warrior’s shoulder and wrench the glittering runeblade clear. Not exactly as he had dreamt it, but surely too similar to be a coincidence.
Felix recalled how he had always dismissed Max’s speculations that he and Gotrek were in some way guided by a greater power than themselves. Perhaps the wizard had been onto something after all.
The northman tumbled away towards the river and its collective of wrecked cottages and Felix backed off warily, sword raised into a guard. The snow swept around him like a weapon of the Great Powers to blind and to frustrate.
‘Snorri! Where are you, can you hear me?’
Felix tightened his two-handed grip around the dragonhead hilt of Karaghul. His eyes were starting to throb, so hard had he been staring into the blizzard, but he dared not blink. The sound of battle was coming from all around and who knew how many Kurgan the dead man’s alarum had stirred up. Felix watched the thick flakes fall. He could not keep his eyes trained any longer. He blinked.
‘Manling! To your left.’
At the sound of that familiar, guttural shout, Felix almost failed to react as he knew he had to. His heart soared like a caged bird set free. He wanted to turn right, to see with his own eyes, but at the last instant he jerked left and swept Karaghul across his body to parry the hefty berdish axe that hacked for him through the snow.
Just as he remembered.
The two weapons clashed apart heavily and then, inspired by foreknowledge, his fighter’s reflex took over. He dodged back, spinning away from the overarm slash that he saw in his mind’s eye even before the Kurgan had committed himself to deliver it. Felix turned his evasive spin into a slash across the northman’s hamstrings, then kicked the screaming man face-down into the snow.
Felix shook his head dizzily. Useful as it was proving, there was something deeply unsettling about knowing what was going to happen before the event.
With a nervous laugh Felix wondered whether, if he were to find himself hungover on his desk at some stage in the next five minutes, he would be relieved or disappointed. In the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a dozen more fur-clad marauders advancing through the ruins by the river. More were battling out of sight, iron chirping like winter birdsong. He brought his sword again into a tried and true guard, bringing the glint of gold from his finger to his face.
He wondered what Kat was doing at this moment.
The thought was sudden and unwelcome, coming in the middle of a battle and just hours after he had had his lips on another woman’s. The mental rebuke hurt as it probably should. He shook his head to clear it of snow. Why did the romanticists always end their works once the hero had rescued his damsel and the difficult bit began? His thoughts of Kat shaped themselves into the scene of his deathbed as shown to him by Aekold Helbrass’s prophetic fires. The very real likelihood that she would not, in fact, be with him at the end hurt him more than he would have thought.
Then he recalled something that he had not thought of at the time.
Kat had had a child in that vision.
He smiled, oddly elated despite his situation. Ulrika must have been mistaken.
Life went on after all.
He had a child.
A brute howl pulled his gaze outwards. There in the snow, a sanguinary blur of starmetal silver and ink-strapped muscle hacked through a score of barbarian northmen. Felix’s heart beat with superstitious dread. The foreknowledge of who he was going to find here on the anonymous snowfield hadn’t even begun to ready Felix for how hard in the chest the sight would hit him. He wanted to punch the air.
It was Gotrek.
Gotrek Gurnisson had found his own way to Praag!
The Slayer fought in a ring of bodies and human debris. Despite wearing nothing above his tattered trews but piercings and spiralling blue tattoos Gotrek gave no care to the cold as, with a roar like a collapsing cliff, he swung his axe and severed a northman’s leg below the knee. The marauder, meeting the bone-hammer of Gotrek’s knuckles, was dead with a snapped neck before his knees were fully bent.
Even having seen it twice, even with the charnel reek to give it the pungency of reality, Felix feared he was about to be woken up and have all of this taken away. He could almost have laughed at how sorry he suddenly was at the thought of having a pointless skirmish at the edge of the known world whisked out from under his feet.
And then he did laugh. He had to.
Gotrek roared for more and more came. At their head strode a champion in a ringmail hauberk with a white bear cloak and an antlered helm. The northman’s bare arms were heavy with trophy rings. He spun his twinned axes in anticipation as he chanted some guttural gibberish about his deeds and his gods. One blade left a crimson trail of power through the air it cut.
Felix’s first impulse was to charge to the Slayer’s aid, but he had already seen how this fight panned out and didn’t want to do anything that might interfere and unintentionally get Gotrek hurt or killed. The dwarf already looked close enough to death. He had lost his eye patch and gore bled from the gaping socket. Cuts and bruises coloured his tattooed flesh. Strips of it hung off the muscle in places. A pair of arrows stuck out of his breast.
Slipping the Slayer’s guard, the champion dragged his blade across Gotrek’s chest, adding a deep score to the tally and bringing a spurt of blood. The Slayer howled, throwing the Kurgan champion off and driving him back with a storm of blows. His starmetal blade slammed deep into the northman’s gut. The not-so-favoured of the Chaos gods regurgitated blood, choking on that last mouthful as Gotrek flung him from his axe and into those that came roaring in behind.
Now!
With a yell, Felix cut down the last Kurgan between him and the Slayer, hurdled the northman’s corpse and, turning mid-leap, slammed into Gotrek’s back to beat down a northman axe that had been destined for his unguarded shoulders.
That thumping contact sent an electric thrill down Felix’s spine. In that moment his whole body seemed to fizz, as if a fire warmed his blood and filled his muscles with new strength. It was not unlike what he had felt when he had kissed Ulrika, but ten times more intense. It felt meaningful. It felt right. He might have laughed again, he wasn’t sure any more, but he felt almost reborn, parrying another attack as Gotrek’s massive shoulders ground over his. Felix ducked a swinging adze, parried a sabre.
The northmen were coming thick and fast from the river, drawn to the ring of steel and the Slayer’s bellowed challenges. Felix sliced through a Kurgan’s jack, then reversed his grip and sliced his blade back across the northman’s throat in a red slash of arterial blood.<
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‘I can’t believe I actually missed this madness.’
‘What do you… want?’ Gotrek wheezed, parrying the stab of a knife, then punching the eye of his axe into its wielder’s gut. The man doubled over, head parting company with his shoulders a moment later. ‘Another… gold ring?’ A hand-axe decorated with evil glyphs clanged off the flat of his blade. Gotrek elbowed the Kurgan in the face, kneecapped another, and sliced his axe through the belly of a third. ‘Was Altdorf not exciting enough, manling?’
Felix blinked in confusion, feeling his earlier surge of energy fade into his muscles and almost missing the sword that thrust for his belly. He twisted sharply, parried, then sliced through the offending hand with an incisive counter.
That hadn’t been what he’d expected to hear.
‘Is that all you want to say to me after a year?’
‘A year?’ Gotrek grunted. ‘Is that all?’
‘Damn it, Gotrek!’
The Slayer hacked a northman in half, painting his gasping mouth with arterial spray. ‘You went your own way, manling. And I went… mine.’
‘That was the promise you made.’ Felix blocked a flurry of blows and retreated back against Gotrek’s broad shoulders. ‘Keep Snorri alive until Karak Kadrin and you’d release me from my oath.’
‘Release?’ Gotrek growled. His expression somehow darkened still further. He pulled his axe from a Kurgan’s shoulder and broke a man’s elbow with the flat. Then he grunted, as if words were harder than bones. ‘Aye. And I honoured it.’
Felix parried hard, dumbfounded and numb. Did Gotrek resent him for not choosing to stay with him once he’d had a say in the matter? Could he really hold that kind of a grudge for this long?
Stupid question.
‘Kat is safe in Altdorf,’ he yelled over his shoulder. He wasn’t sure why he said that, except perhaps to extract some reaction from the Slayer besides that passive, incomprehensible rage. Gotrek had always been fond of Kat whom, right up to their wedding day, he’d persisted in calling ‘little one’. ‘She might be pregnant.’
