Gotrek & Felix: Kinslayer

by David Guymer

  ‘Then you’re a fool. There’s only one place you should be now.’

  Felix shook snowflakes from his brow, turning his simmering anger into a riposte that beat an axe from a northman’s grip and severed his fingers. The temptation to spin around and let the Slayer defend his own stubborn back was almost great enough for him to countenance the suicide-by-Kurgan that that would inevitably mean for him as well. Instead he snarled and parried a stinging neck-thrust.

  ‘I had a daughter once,’ Gotrek panted, speech completely almost eaten into by breath. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have left her behind but I was… talked into it by a friend.’ There was a pause, split into two by the crack of a northman’s spine. ‘Pray you don’t regret it like I did.’

  ‘I–’

  Hoofbeats rumbled through the blizzard. Damir and his riders.

  No!

  Felix knew nothing of Gotrek’s shame, and precious little about his life before becoming a Slayer. This was important, he knew. There was so much he wanted to say and ask before the opportunity was taken from them.

  ‘Gospodarinyi!’

  Swaddled in sheepskin and hemp, Damir galloped from the storm, standing high in the stirrups as he drew back on his recurved composite bow. Coloured tassels shivered from the tips as he loosed. The feathered shaft zipped through the falling snow, and smacked through the Y-shaped opening of a marauder’s bull-horned barbute with a ferocious clang as the metal head exited the back of the man’s skull and struck the inside back of his warhelm. The marauder spasmed backwards before being dashed off the breast of the careening pony.

  A second horse-archer chivvied his horse through the shank-high snowdrift, screaming ‘Yhah!’ at the top of his lungs and drawing back on his own bowstring. The arrow flew over Gotrek’s shoulder and took his assailant through the heart. Gotrek howled pure frustration and beheaded the dying northman. Another centaur-like shadow breezed in false-silence through the blizzard and charged into the disordered northmen.

  The Kurgan broke, and Damir and his men yipped and urged their steeds to give chase.

  Gotrek growled and sank to one knee. He caught himself on the haft of his axe and pushed himself back up. Felix offered no help. He could not have supported the Slayer’s weight even if he thought his aid would be welcomed. The Slayer met his look and glowered.

  ‘Itchy feet then, was it?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Marriage and children does something to human men, I’ve found. Oath and hearth just isn’t enough for you.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Gotrek–’

  Before Felix could say more he noticed the brightening glow of Gotrek’s axe. The runes were red and hot and spitting in the snow. Chaos. With a glint in his one eye, Gotrek hefted his axe once again. He regarded Felix grudgingly.

  ‘If my doom should happen while you’re here…’

  Felix sighed. If that was the warmest welcome he could expect then he’d take it. ‘It is the end of the world, I suppose.’

  Gotrek leered, running the pad of his thumb down the edge of his axe until it produced a bead of blood. It was one of the few parts of the Slayer’s body not already bleeding. ‘Good, isn’t it.’

  Both fighters readied their weapons, Gotrek’s rune-axe turning the snowflakes into ruby droplets as a snow-white destrier bore Ulrika through that crimson haze.

  She looked monstrous, and not in any way that could be explained away by the harsh glare of Gotrek’s axe. She could not have got herself any bloodier had she physically crawled inside a Kurgan warrior and torn her way out. She tilted her chin arrogantly upwards as she regarded the Slayer, exposing her sharp fangs and the blood where it was thickest under her jaw. A skein of moaning spirits swirled over the shapely contours of her armour. They darkened her eyes and mouth with a penumbral gloom, deepening the hard, immortalised lines of her face. And unlike Felix and Gotrek, swathed in steamy breath, she sat without, a transient visitor to the cold.

  Breathing like a bellows, the Slayer turned a black look on Felix.

  Felix flinched under the intensity of it, feeling again the guilt of Ulrika’s kiss. He tried to hide it from his face, but it seemed to blush from his cheeks as though written there in dwarfish runes. Gotrek gripped his axe and nodded like an executioner.

  ‘Now I see.’

  Ignoring the dwarf, Ulrika closed her eyes and looked away, transacting some steep personal cost of willpower in exchange for concealing her fangs and retracting her claws. She shook her head and then pointed to the collection of cottages sited beside the dark, ice-floed body of creaking slush ahead of them. The shapes of the riverside outpost were just about visible as humps in the ground. If Felix concentrated on it, he could still hear the rumble of hoofbeats, the wild yells of the Ungol horsemen, the occasional crack of an arquebus or a pistol, and what might have been a drunken dwarf’s war cry.

  ‘Come, Felix. We can pick up Snorri and hold out there while I work us a way into the city.’

  Gotrek arched a blood-bristled eyebrow at the name of his old friend, but was too stubborn to ask. Felix decided that if he wanted to be that way, then Felix could be too stubborn to volunteer. The Slayer grunted and crossed his arms over his chest.

  ‘We’re here to get Max,’ Felix muttered, feeling that the most pertinent – the most innocent – fact. He waved vaguely northward. ‘He’s in there.’

  Again, a grunt.

  Before Felix’s temper could fray any further, there was a disturbing underfoot crunch of snow and human gristle from behind them.

  A bowman with arrow nocked and drawn advanced over the bodies that Gotrek had left strewn. He was hard and thin, like a twist of salted meat, and garbed in a motley assortment of weather-beaten furs and hanging armour plates. The bow was a darkwood Kurgan recurve, the arrows fletched black like cousins of those in Gotrek’s chest.

  ‘Are you going to fight them then, zabójka?’ asked the bowman, his Kislevite accent muffled by the layers wrapped over his mouth. ‘Or must you live another day?’

  Slowly, Felix eased his grip off his sword and glanced a question at Gotrek.

  ‘No one told you to leave, manling,’ was Gotrek’s terse reply.

  ‘What does zabójka mean?’

  Ulrika smiled coldly. ‘It is not affectionate.’

  The bowman lowered his weapon, and nodded a curt greeting to the mounted boyarina. ‘Kolya, my lady. Of what was once Dushyka.’

  ‘Do not speak in haste,’ said Ulrika. ‘We are not beaten yet.’

  Kolya shrugged as if he couldn’t care and perhaps never truly had. ‘No matter.’

  That neat summation of Kislevite philosophy brought a rare smile to Ulrika’s lips. She extended a hand to the north as if commanding the storm to part or the polar gates to open.

  ‘Come,’ said Ulrika again, her voice this time echoed by what sounded like hundreds of others.

  Felix heard weeping, indistinct, as though he’d just entered a castle in which someone in a distant wing was crying. The spirits that swam over her began to accelerate and blur. Faces gnashed their teeth and blended with others that cursed or wept or raved, summoning a wind that moaned and smelled of the dankness within a forgotten crypt. Ulrika’s eyes pulsed red in their sepia pools.

  Felix backed away.

  ‘There are too many of the northmen here,’ said Ulrika, her voice echoing as though she called to him from across a gorge. Felix didn’t think she had ever looked so beautiful. Or feral. This was Ulrika the vampire without the mask. She was an eagle glorying in flight, a lioness exulting in the power of her bite. ‘Chaos warriors and daemons and monsters from beyond the mountains. Too many to fight. I can confound them long enough for respite.’

  She spread her hands, a spider spinning her web with aethyric silk, threads of torment and pain spooling from her fingertips. Where the spirits she summoned flew, northmen gave shou
ts of confusion and horror and turned unwittingly back. As Felix watched, a fearful tightness compressing his chest, the spirit maze expanded around them, visible against the background night as an empyreal mesh of half-felt taps on shoulders, whispered fears, and childhood nightmares.

  ‘The leech does magic now?’ Gotrek observed, drawing his axe so close it opened a cut across his cheek. Blood trickled into his beard. One eye and a vacant orb glared at the vampiress in the throes of her necromancy.

  ‘We should have killed her back in Drakenhof.’

  Twelve

  Cruel Surprises

  Nothing buried a corpse like snow.

  A chilling northerly wind worked its shovel with the callousness of a serial killer, covering the northmen left by the Kislevites’ charge under shallow mounds of white powder. The remnants of the riverside outpost they had sought to defend rose from the snow like the fingers of the unquiet dead. Spirits whispered though the dark. The cold smell of impermanence clung to every broken stone.

  The largest structure was a burned, ice-blistered headstone with one side sunk into the icy waters of the Lynsk. Its walls were of thick red brick, its windows suspicious slits. Crenellations ran the perimeter of its roof that climbed into a tiered onion dome tiled with frosted lead. A customs house, Felix reasoned, likely doubling as a relay post for southbound riders and as a fort to guard against smugglers and poachers.

  An iron chain clenched across the river. The passing ice caused it to clink and rustle. The stripped-down ribcage of an ice-breaker barque lay upturned on the bank beside it. The wood had been peeled away for fuel and for repairs to the surrounding structures and only the iron cladding remained. A Kurgan warrior hung from it, pinned by a pair of arrows through the chest.

  The fortification’s highest point was a circular bartizan with its foundations in the river itself. The circle was a prominent symbol in Kislevite philosophy as well as their architecture. It was the curve of the world, of the wide oblast sky. It was death and rebirth. A tattered banner fluttered from the bartizan’s flagpole, a sore on the eye that seemed to rot even as Felix looked at it. A rhythmic bang echoed from the ramparts as a trio of Gustav’s men, loaded with gorilka and dry tinder to burn the foul icon down, sought to break into the locked tower.

  The Troll King might have denied the Kurgan and their allies Praag, but something had succeeded in making this place their home.

  The surrounding buildings were a mix of semi-intact structures. They had been loosely repaired and refortified with scavengeable scraps and were filled with bedding furs and gear, all left behind when the Ungols had ridden through.

  Rubble lay everywhere a man could put his foot. It made the snow cover lumpen. Here and there, red leached into those snowy lumps to mark a Kurgan grave. The uneven ground between ruins was taken by a haphazard maze of pickets and stockades that housed shaggy, broad-shouldered cattle. They were not cows such as an Averland farmer would recognise. They resembled the Norscan breed that his brother had at times grudgingly traded in with landowners of Nordland and the Middle Mountains. Adapted to cold and misery and the weird aspects of the Chaos-tainted north, they were gruff, lean, and permanently on the knife-edge of goring a warily passing soldier.

  Gotrek studied the thumb he had sliced on his axe blade with a scowl. Some poison in the air stopped wounds from closing and kept the blood flowing. Even the Slayer wasn’t impervious to the taint. He glanced sideways as a disoriented whisper echoed from the deep snow, one of Ulrika’s unleashed spirits. He launched a gob of spit after it. Felix had no way of knowing if or what it hit.

  ‘Your girlfriend has until this stops running.’ He stuck the thumb between his lips and leered, sucking it dry as he then withdrew it. ‘Then I’m off.’

  ‘Ulrika asked us to wait,’ said Felix.

  ‘I’m here for the Troll King and the doom that was promised me,’ said Gotrek. ‘I’m not here for the wizard, and as sure as the treachery of elves I’m not here for her.’ He jabbed his thumb, just again sheening with red, back towards the despatch-fort.

  Ulrika stood there under the old fort’s shattered main gate, wearing a cloak of aethyric shadow and a halo of weeping spirits. To look on her was to share the horror all prey feel for their predator. The blood of men painted her beautiful white armour. Gobbets of it matted her hair. Her face was more crimson now than white.

  Around her, men worked to clear a section of the stockade of cattle to make space for a corral. Left pats of dung steamed. Ungol ponies and Ostermark horses shivered together under wool blankets and snorted vapour. Other men were prying wood from the pickets to erect what looked like a pentagram around the gatehouse under direction from Damir. The Ungol chieftain stood with his hands on his hips and his cheeks sucked in and shouted instructions from Ulrika’s right hand. Wearing a beatific grin, Gustav stood behind her and to the left with his thumbs tucked into his belt. Occasionally a man looked up from his task as one of the warding spirits of Ulrika’s ghost-maze moaned overhead and mouthed a prayer.

  The tension was garrotte tight.

  Felix felt it in the rising hairs on the back of his neck. He leant his crossed arms over the waist-high fence that separated him and about thirty head of cattle from the river and rapped his ring nervously upon the upright. With a perversion so subtle that Felix hadn’t even consciously noticed it at first, the water was pushing ice upriver. He wondered how that was even possible. Was the Lynsk somehow sucking in seawater from Altwasser Bay and bearing it north to the Goromadny Mountains? He shuddered again.

  So simple a thing, and yet so wrong.

  Beside him, sat in the snow like a rock that had just dropped there out of the sky, Gotrek silently watched his thumb bleed by the rune-light of his axe.

  ‘Kat is well,’ Felix said, haltingly. He worked his lips. His mouth felt imponderably dry. He waited, but the dwarf said nothing. ‘She is getting stronger.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say? Is there nothing you want to ask?’

  The dwarf’s one eye was as hollow as the empty socket beside it and fixed on his thumb.

  ‘We travelled together for twenty years, Gotrek. Have you forgotten all that?’

  Gotrek glowered dangerously, the insult to his long dwarfish memory implicit.

  Felix hung his head, gave it a sorry shake. He had always felt guilty about the decision he had made to leave the Slayer and return with Kat to the Empire. It had seemed like the right one at the time though and there was no more a man could do than that. Even now he wasn’t sure that it was necessarily wrong. If he’d opted for friendship over family then Kat would have followed him for certain. And how long would Kat have survived in Kislev in her condition?

  The speculation gave him a shiver. Again, he resolved to return home to her in one piece, something that having Gotrek and his axe alongside of him could only improve the chances of.

  Felix glanced over his shoulder as Ulrika took Gustav, Damir and a handful of free company soldiers with her into the fort. He frowned. For some reason, Ulrika did not appear nearly as alluring as she had just hours before. It was more than just the blood on her. His feelings towards her were confused. She was unquestionably beautiful, had even become more so as he had aged and she had not, but it was beauty of an untouchable kind. She was a ritual blade, something to be admired but not without a shiver of something other at the forces locked within. Unexpectedly his thoughts turned to the jaded old poet who would drink himself to nostalgia in his office in Altdorf.

  He wondered whether it was Ulrika or himself who had changed the least.

  ‘Riders!’

  The cry came from the sentries to the north-east. On a nervous flex, Felix’s grip tensed around Karaghul.

  A shattered bay gelding crunched over the loose ground on the river bank, led by one of Damir’s colourfully garbed scouts. The poor animal made it almost as far as the fort, t
hen whinnied in quiet distress and pitched its rider into the water. Snorri Nosebiter flailed drunkenly, then punched through the ice in a spume of water and sank like an anvil but for a train of bubbles.

  Felix swore, pushing his sword back into its scabbard and ducking under the fence. He ran over the wharf’s cracked flagstones for that perversely whispering river, half diving and half skidding onto heels and backside to plunge his arm in. The cold shocked him senseless. He grit his teeth to keep from screaming but, after hardly any time at all, the pain was replaced by a tingling numbness. That wasn’t at all reassuring. He waved his arm under the water, pushing it as deep as he dared. Could Snorri swim? It seemed unlikely with that metal leg, and with the amount of vodka he must have put away. Then Felix felt a brush around his wrist, less a sensation than an awareness of pressure, and tried to impel his fingers to close. He cursed loudly as his body began to slide in.

  ‘Hand him over, manling.’

  Squatting down beside him, Gotrek plunged his own arm into the water.

  ‘On the count of th–’ Felix began as Gotrek heaved one-handed, dragging Snorri from the water and onto a bed of black ice.

  ‘Snorri hates water,’ Snorri managed between gasps that made his throat and chest judder, coughing up a pint of ice water onto his short red beard. ‘It tastes like…’ His eyes fluttered open and he rubbed a bicep over his lips. ‘Well, it tastes like water.’

  Gotrek crossed his arms sourly. ‘Snorri Nosebiter, you are the greatest wattock I ever did know.’

  Snorri gave a smile that grew increasingly watery as his eyes focused on the dwarf stood over him. Gotrek uncrossed his arms and extended one hand – low enough to be an offer, high enough so as not to make a big elven fuss about it. Snorri hesitated only long enough for one more sodden cough before clasping it and letting Gotrek haul him up.

  Felix didn’t know what passing madness had assumed that the ancient companions might reunite with a bear-hug embrace, or at least some physical intimation of mutual respect with an emotionally chiselled kind word. All Snorri got was an appraising grunt as he dripped off on his own two feet. Snorri didn’t even go so far as to meet Gotrek’s eye, applying all his – admittedly limited – faculties to shake off the punished old leather satchel that he had clutched under one arm and stamp residual water from his mace-leg.