by David Guymer
Felix flexed his fingers and rolled life into the near-dislocated joint of his shoulder. As if Snorri hadn’t already been heavy enough.
‘I like the leg,’ Gotrek grunted after a silence that humans would definitely have considered awkward. ‘Good metal-work.’
‘It’s very popular with everyone,’ said Snorri, avoiding Gotrek’s eye. ‘Except that horse. It’s not as though Snorri kicked it on purpose.’
‘What did you expect?’ said Gotrek as the Ungol rider nodded wordlessly and led the tired animal to the corral. ‘There’s only one thing I despise more than horses.’
‘Is it elves?’ said Snorri with a weak smile. ‘Snorri wagers all the vodka in Kislev that it’s elves.’
Gotrek’s glower softened marginally. ‘Do you have any?’
Snorri hung his head.
‘Typical.’
Snorri scratched negligently at one of the scabbed punctures in his scalp. If Felix didn’t know dwarfs as he did, then he might have thought that Snorri wanted to talk about something deeply personal. But he did know dwarfs as well as any man could. They could talk for days about gold and clan honour and old grudges, but a matter of the heart would go unsaid with them to wherever it was dwarfs went after death. Snorri went on tiptoes to peer around Felix’s shoulder to make sure the Ungol was gone. He glanced at Felix, picking uncertainly at the knot in his satchel. Gotrek nodded at the bag over his shoulder, showing the wonderfully dwarfish fascination in old things even over and above old friends.
‘There’s a name I’ve not seen in a long time.’
Snorri nodded. He looked awkward. He licked his lips slowly as if imagining good ale. ‘Snorri has remembered a lot of things, but there is something he wants… something he needs…’ Snorri tapped his mace-leg on the cobblestones and mumbled under his breath. Then he rubbed his hand down his beaten-up face and started again. ‘It is about Snorri’s shame.’
‘Stop there!’ Gotrek raised a hand sharply to forestall any further comment on Snorri’s part. He took a step away. ‘That is not something a Slayer ever speaks of.’
He glared at Felix, then spread the fingers of his raised hands and grinned harshly. He presented Felix his thumb. It had stopped bleeding.
‘Time’s up, manling. Come, stay, I no longer care. I’m going.’
Snorri’s shoulders slumped as Gotrek strode off into the herd of burly cattle, disappearing from view but for a snow-capped orange crest bobbing fiercely towards the opposite side of the enclosure. Felix had never seen him looking so distraught. He wished there was something he could do, but it was clearly some dwarfish issue that, despite his unusual status in their society, Felix could never hope to understand. He couldn’t even offer Snorri a drink.
Through the cloud of steam that rose from the lowing herd, Felix’s gaze crossed Kolya’s. The Kislevite sat bestride a stile conjoining their enclosure with another. In wrapped and mittened hands he worked a flat stone with a knife, carving what appeared to be a stick image of a horse. He acknowledged Felix’s look with no gesture. He did not look up as Gotrek approached. Felix sighed.
He had the distinct impression he had been cuckolded for a younger and less talkative man.
‘I didn’t think it would be this way,’ said Felix, to himself more than to anyone else. A year apart and it was as though they had all become strangers.
But he had dreamt about this. He had to believe they were all reunited for a purpose.
He watched Gotrek and Kolya make their way to the outpost’s northern approach, in two minds about whether to follow them or whether to wait with Ulrika. There, a group of Ostermarkers were busy throwing up a rough wall of blocked ice and rubble. Beyond them, spectral figures twisted the night snow into eerie shapes. It made Felix’s neck crawl just looking. ‘Do you believe in fate, Snorri?’
‘Fate believes in Snorri,’ Snorri answered with uncharacteristic glumness.
‘Is that the same thing?’
Snorri’s jaw worked as if over a rotten tooth, and then he shrugged. Idly, he lugged a frozen cow-pat into the river. It smashed a floating block of ice and then slid under with a last gasp of night air. ‘You were always the clever one, young Felix.’
Felix followed Snorri’s stare across the river. A swirl in the snow became the gothic frontage of the Hergigbank on Otto’s street. The dimples in the water where the flakes landed reminded him, inevitably, of Kat. A gust of wind turned the shapes into that of a running child.
‘Did you know that Gotrek had a child?’ he asked quietly.
‘A little girl,’ Snorri replied without looking up, voice coming from some distant place. ‘She wanted to be an engineer.’ Snorri shook his head, chuckling though Felix had the distinct impression the dwarf wanted to be crying. ‘Snorri told her she was silly. Snorri would be an engineer before the guild let a woman learn their secrets.’
‘You knew Gotrek that long ago?’
Snorri nodded.
‘So what happened to her?’
‘Goblins happened, young Felix. It was all done by the time Gotrek came home, so he took his grudge to the lord who should have protected them.’
Felix glanced over his shoulder as if expecting to see Gotrek glaring with disapproval. He and Kolya were traipsing over slushed ground towards the rising north barricade. He had a good idea how this story was going to end. ‘Is this something you should be telling me? If Gotrek wanted me to know…’
‘Gotrek is a kinslayer,’ said Snorri, as simply as if he were explaining that Gotrek had once had brown hair. ‘A dwarf lord and his house died that day. Secrets like that are harder to bury than… than…’ Snorri scrunched up his face as though remembering something he had once heard. ‘Than gold.’
Snorri’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. His fingers ground into the leather satchel in his hands. ‘If only someone had been sent to warn our home. If only someone had been there to fight when the goblins came.’ Unclenching his fists, Snorri smoothed down the leather pack until the golden rune glittered in the false, eerie spiritlight that streamed under the sky. ‘Snorri thinks… Snorri wasn’t…’
Felix waited as Snorri struggled. He couldn’t say he was surprised by the nature of Gotrek’s supposed wrongdoing. Felix had little enough respect for the nobles of his own race and had the shortcomings of one of them led to the deaths of Kat and his own child then Felix would probably have done exactly the same thing. He smiled ruefully. He would have tried to.
Snorri appeared to have wrestled himself into a mental stalemate. Patiently, Felix prodded the bag. ‘What’s in the bag, Snorri?’
Blank-eyed, Snorri passed it over. The damp leather was rough in Felix’s hand. The rune stitched in gold into the side glittered. It was heavier than it looked, and when he gave it an experimental shake something inside answered with a metallic rustle. His fingers hovered over the buckle.
‘May I?’
Snorri nodded once. Felix offered a smile and opened it. He didn’t know why, but he was excited to see what was inside. The rune on the front had clearly meant something to Gotrek so, he reasoned, it surely had to be something important. He coughed at the aroma of stale dwarf sweat that drifted up from inside. It was full of old clothes. Felix tried to hide his disappointment. Trust Snorri Nosebiter to carry a bag of soot-caked rags halfway across the Old World. He was about to hand the bag back when a bloodstained shirt slipped aside to reveal a heavy golden chain. Felix took it out for closer inspection and gave the bag back to Snorri.
‘It’s beautiful. Dwarf made?’ Snorri shrugged so Felix returned his attention to the artefact.
Around the thick links dwarf runes had been engraved in an exquisite hand. Felix ran his finger around one of the links. He was no jeweller, but he recognised quality when he saw it. In fact the only time he’d seen gold this pure and well fashioned had been in Karak Kadrin when Gotrek had presented him and Kat with
their rings. Slowly, his scrolling finger paused. The runes looked familiar. He held his breath. His heart seemed to grow heavy as he spread his fingers. His wedding band glinted in the light.
The runes were the same. This chain had belonged to Gotrek.
No.
It had been a gift from Gotrek.
Cold spreading through his chest, Felix tightened his grip on the chain. ‘Who did this belong to, Snorri?’
‘Snorri… doesn’t remember.’
‘Was it Gotrek’s wife? It was, wasn’t it? How did you get this? You said nobody was there when the goblins attacked.’
The old Trollslayer looked on the verge of tears. Frost prickled his squashed nose. ‘Snorri… can’t…’
With hands numbed by more than cold, Felix pushed the chain back into Snorri’s keeping. He thought he understood. No wonder Snorri had tried so hard all these years to forget his shame. Snorri had been there that day.
‘Oh Snorri,’ he breathed. ‘What did you do?’
The thick red stone muted the cries of the oblast dead. The air within the ruined despatch-fort was dank, musty and stale, and cold too if one felt it, but buffered against the wind it was a gelid kind of chill like the handshake of a ghoul. Arrow slits and ceiling tears let in light enough to glance off iron wall brackets where in less hopeless times there might once have been torches. The only illumination of note in fact derived from Ulrika herself.
In her charred, enamel-white plate, she stood in the centre of the chamber with legs braced and hands balled into fists by her side. Amethyst-coloured tracers of energy arced from her hands, probing up her vambraces and over her belly. Occasionally, the arcs crossed to produce a crackling burst of nightshade and the tang of ozone. She faced the door. Her eyes glittered like diamonds and her jaw was set. Concentration gleamed from fang and claw. It was etched into every supernatural sinew.
‘Is there anything more I can do, general?’
Gustav Jaeger slumped back into one of the bowman’s nooks, disturbing the snow that had blown in through the narrow embrasure and been allowed to build up there. Breathing shakily he began fumbling with the collar ties of his cloak, hiding the still-seeping punctures in his neck.
Ulrika permitted herself a smile of pleasure. So handsome. More men lay scattered across the floor with expressions of bliss on pale faces and blood staining the slashed shoulders of their doublets. They were not Kislevites. Their blood was hers to expend as she saw fit. She wondered if she had always thought in such terms, but then reasoned that she probably had. It was only pragmatic, and as the only child of a March Boyar Ulrika had never been anything but that.
‘Thank you, Gustav. That is sufficient for now. If I require more power then I will summon more of your men.’
With a faint look of disappointment, Gustav lapsed into semi-consciousness. Ulrika watched his fluttering eyelids and silently moving lips in the same way that she had once watched her father’s hunting dogs as they slept – she wondered what such a simple animal might dream of.
‘And I, boyarina?’
Speaking his native Kislevarin, Damir stood amongst the splayed bodies of the southerners as though this was an utterly natural state of affairs. His hands were on his hips where they could be close to his hatchets. A man of the Troll Country, through and through. His yellow eyes flashed with amethyst discharge.
‘I will be weakened while I perform the ritual. I will be relying on you to defend me from whatever may come.’
Damir nodded and turned back to the door. He would know what to do. The man had served her since the outbreak of the war. She had been in the Troll Country then, on Lahmian business, and had been overjoyed by the opportunity to spread her claws. She had seen more fighting then than at any other time in her new life, but the sheer number and power of the arch enemy had been too much. Even then she had been loathe to leave, and Damir and his people had objected bitterly to abandoning their tribal lands. Fortunately, her kiss had opened his mind to reason and to a whole new world of possibilities. To servitude. Perhaps one day to immortality.
She just couldn’t understand why mortals were always so intransigent. Could they not see that she only wanted what was best for them? She knew that she should not blame them. They could not perceive the world as sharply as she could. Their minds could not process it with the same clarity and speed as one of the Arisen.
Felix, for instance, would undoubtedly object to her using his nephew this way. It was more than just jealousy. He honestly seemed to think it wrong. She pitied him that as she pitied poor Katerina, trapped in a frail and failing mortal shell because of her lover’s weakness of imagination. Trying to see things in the limited fashion of her companions, she reasoned that they would probably not appreciate what she was trying to achieve now either.
She was going to open a door.
Invasion after invasion had steeped Praag’s bedrock with the stuff of Chaos. The means to ritually tap it was similar to the magic with which the Auric Bastion was erected. Deep in concentration, Ulrika bared her fangs. The very ritual that one of her own kind had delivered into the hands of Balthasar Gelt. Not that any man of the Empire now alive was going to offer their thanks to the sacrifices of the Arisen that had allowed their Supreme Patriarch to save them. Nor would they mourn the destruction of the nation that he had not seen fit to spare.
Borrowed blood boiled within her veins. And Gabriella had wondered why Ulrika had left her for Vlad von Carstein.
The Empire had let Kislev fall, had made a puppet of Boyar Syrgei Tannarov of Erengrad and claimed the stolen territory of ‘North Ostermark’ for its own. Even in the End Times, men were still men.
They needed the shepherding hand of the Arisen.
And with that hand she was going to drive a stake through the heart of Chaos and watch the rest of the world drown in its blood.
Max Schreiber’s mind perused the corrupted aethyr of Praag. It was a web of life and of death that touched every creature currently contesting the city’s walls. In an abstract sense, every natural scholar knew about the interconnectedness of life. Every creature had its place in that web, surrounded and connected by those it killed and those that killed it. What fewer scholars knew however was that what was true for life was also true for Chaos, only more so.
A portion of Max’s mind stood now with the beastmen on the city’s ramparts. He felt their near-human soup of hatreds and fears as daemon-possessed munitions set the sky ablaze and the walls atremble. They bleated their battle cries as Chaos warriors stormed their position by the thousand. Max moved on.
A wyvern with two heads and poisonous spines roosted upon the hanging shell of the old wizard’s tower. What had it been called? The memory rose up from another time and place. There it was. Fire Spire. The power of Chaos had twisted it into its current, misshapen form during the last Great War. Its history was irrelevant now. He saw it in flat monochrome through the wyvern’s eyes, felt the latent magic beneath its claws as it peered through the blizzard for prey in the streets below. Again, Max’s thoughts shifted.
A band of trolls lumbered against the thrust of the wind and snow down the Grand Parade towards the Gate of Gargoyles. Max shared the glacial quiet of their minds. They had a destination. The gate. They had a purpose. A vague imprint of a white-haired sorceress. Nothing Max would consider true thought, but there was seductiveness in simplicity. Calling on the same rote exercises that had served him as an acolyte of the Light order, Max differentiated his mind from theirs.
Warp lightning stabbed from the tormented sky, exploding with a thunderclap against the highest point of the city – the north-facing watchtower of its hilltop citadel. A flurry of wild magic rippled out from its pinnacle, obliterating the falling snow and haloing the dark presence within. For a moment Max felt their minds touch. It was a servant of the Troll King, an immortal monster so ancient and terrible that Max could not even begin to
comprehend the nature of its thoughts. Its long extinct race had trod the earth with the Old Ones before even the coming of the Chaos Gods. Their own name for their kind was long forgotten. Now, men had a different name for those few that remained. There came a low growl that transcended both the physical and the aethyric realms and Max’s spirit took flight.
He forced himself to focus.
It did not require the hyper-surreality of mage-sense to perceive the fan-like conductor array being assembled by the warlock in the cell opposite, or the mind-opening trance of the goblin shaman in the next one after that. Secrets were difficult to keep in confinement and one man’s hunch could easily become another being’s race to the finish. And no doubt that had been Throgg’s intent. Nothing incentivised success like competition with a hated rival and the very visceral consequences of failure.
The Troll King was brutal, but he was smart. Max felt that his continuing survival was owed in large part to his willingness to concede that fact. That, however, was to do his captor’s intelligence a disservice. It was neither hubris nor Chaos taint to acknowledge that he was a more adept wizard and a better researcher than any goblin, skaven, liche or ice witch that Throgg could acquire. It was just a fact.
And the research he had conducted under the patronage of the Troll King had led him to the inalienable conclusion that there was something wrong with the world.
The minds of men were not capable of controlling more than one of the eight derivations of High Magic. The lessons of Teclis to the first magisters on this subject could not have been clearer. To even attempt to circumvent this inviolate law of nature was to open one’s mind to Chaos. And yet in his experimentations with eliciting higher thought in the troll in his cell, he had accidentally touched upon Azyr, the Celestial, the magic of abstract thinking and narrative order amongst seeming Chaos.
