Gotrek & Felix: Kinslayer

by David Guymer

  ‘I couldn’t give a rabid rat’s dribble what you think your human witch said. I’ve been here from the start. I was at the Tobol Crossing. I was in Kislev City.’ The Slayer looked hot enough to melt the Frozen Sea. His words meant nothing to Snorri, but Kolya they hit like a charge of winged lancers. He and the dwarf had shared a battlefield! The Tobol Crossing had been a rout he had been lucky to survive and, though the Dushyka rota had long fled, the sack of Kislev City was by all garbled accounts nothing short of a massacre.

  That the dwarf had survived both and more was further testament to his prowess.

  ‘I’ve been searching since the fall. I need no one’s help to fail again today.’

  ‘Snorri’s not been having a fun time either,’ Snorri protested, hobbling out of the troll’s path and then slamming a kick into the side of the troll’s knee. He looked up as Gurnisson came up behind him. ‘But you don’t want to hear about it.’

  Gurnisson moved so fast that his elbow blurred into his fist, smashing a haymaker through Snorri’s jaw. The bigger dwarf hit the ground like a slab of meat. The power behind Gurnisson’s arm sent him sliding a short way through the snow. Gurnisson shook out his knuckles and re-established his two-handed grip on his axe. He returned his attention to the troll. ‘Because I don’t care about it.’

  Gurnisson’s rune-axe hewed upwards into the troll’s midriff. The monster bellowed, swaying back and forth as the dwarf levered his axe free in a spurt of acidic bile. His friend was already forgotten. Kolya shook his head. The dwarf really was a selfish zabójka. With a bittersweet shout, Gurnisson reversed his grip and thundered his axe into the troll’s opposite hip, almost meeting his first strike in the middle and chopping the stone troll clean in two. As it was, the troll wavered back, tongues of regenerative tissue licking out from the open wounds.

  ‘There is something Snorri has to ask,’ Snorri shouted hoarsely, having rolled onto all fours. His metal leg stuck out sideways like a pissing dog, but his skull must have been similarly iron clad. ‘It is about his shame.’

  ‘Tell it to your priest.’

  ‘He blew up.’

  Gurnisson snorted. ‘Lucky for some.’

  Snorri heaved himself up. His scarred cheeks were flushed bright red as if with shame. ‘Snorri was there.’

  Kolya read Gurnisson’s lips shaping the question ‘where?’ before the dwarf grit his teeth, shook his head and muttered, ‘I still don’t care.’

  Angrily, Snorri shoved his weapons into his breeches and reached for the bag that he wore over his shoulder. ‘If you won’t listen and you won’t let Snorri have his doom then he will show you.’ He yanked at the strap, forgetting to unbuckle it in his haste, but before he could spot his oversight and do something about it, a rich voice shouted out from the direction of the river.

  ‘Snorri, stop!’

  It was the Empire man, Jaeger. He had an open palm raised, his cloak hanging from it like a scrag of red ribbons. The Norse bulls close around him snorted aggressively at the flapping strands. His mail was scratched and loose several links. He was older than Kolya’s father would have been had a goblin raider’s arrow not taken him early, but there was a steeliness about him that the grey in his hair and beard and the furrows in his brow seemed to enforce. In a strange way he reminded Kolya of Gurnisson.

  Snorri looked at the man blankly. His hand clung to his satchel buckle as if he had forgotten what it was doing there.

  ‘This isn’t the time,’ shouted Jaeger, out of breath from running. He stabbed his sword into the snow so that he could lean on it. Then he gazed pointedly at the troll. His eyes widened. ‘Oh, blood of Sigmar.’

  A yellowish plume was rising from between the troll’s striated rows of teeth. Its gut rippled and began to bloat. Its throat swelled. With the honed reflexes of a solitary hunter, Kolya drew back his bowstring, aimed right down the monster’s opening mouth and loosed.

  The shaft smacked through soft flesh and embedded in the stony tissue at the back of the troll’s neck. The troll gagged, flailed in Kolya’s direction despite his being a good hundred feet away, and then spewed a gush of steaming yellow vomit that missed the two dwarfs by the height of a Slayer’s crest. Gurnisson’s face screwed up at the smell of singed hair coming from the tip of his mohawk while, behind him, yellow vapour hissed into the air as snow and rock were dissolved.

  Gargling its own stomach acids, the troll lumbered now towards Kolya, falling straight into the Kurgan-dug trench that Kolya had spotted by the darker coloured snow and used to position his own foxhole. Trolls were ruggedly built and powerful, but without a man’s intellect they were just another animal to be hunted. He nocked another arrow to his bowstring.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ Gurnisson bellowed angrily, yellow-red steam rising from his crest as though his head were on fire.

  Kolya shrugged, holding his aim as the monster struggled to dig its way out of the snow-filled ditch. ‘You can die, zabójka, that is good. But I made no promise to these others.’

  Gurnisson glowered at the other dwarf. Kolya had no idea what past lay between them, but it wasn’t going to end well.

  ‘You cheat me again, Snorri Nosebiter.’

  Equally angry, Snorri brandished his two weapons. Held side to side, the stance could have been intended to emphasise the older Slayer’s greater bulk. ‘Last to get killed by a troll buys the beer.’

  Ulrika blotted the riot of gunshots and screams from her mind. It felt as if she were being lifted up on a rising swell of blood magic. It was an incredible out-of-body sensation, one that she could only wish she had more time to explore. A crash like a collapsing rockface impelled her to open one eye and divert a portion of her attention towards what was going on in the real world. Such compartmentalisation of thought and action was yet another of the gifts of the Arisen.

  A brutally unequal melee raged in the doorway. Her loyal guard of Ungol warriors screamed as they battled to keep formation, warding off a glittering ice troll with their spears. As Ulrika watched, a spear shattered and the fierce nomad that wielded it broke under a punch from a crystalline fist. At a word from Ulrika, the man creaked upright on broken bones and continued to stab dumbly with the stub of his shaft. Behind them, arquebusiers in the mismatched colours of Gustav’s free company knelt in ranks, primed matchcords and rattled into a firing line. The staccato bark of gunfire within the enclosed space was deafening and filled the chamber with smoke. The first rank knelt to reload while the second took aim and fired. Chips of stone-like flesh sprayed from bullet wounds, but the trolls kept on coming, crunching through the Ungols faster than Ulrika could reanimate them.

  Soldiers in piecemeal plate mail assembled into formation with longswords and pikes. Their faces were wan, their eyes glassy. They were petrified, but they would die for their immortal mistress. Leading them, Gustav played weakly with his pistols.

  ‘Hold by me,’ Ulrika murmured. ‘I will still need loyal men on the other side.’ She would rather have retained her own Ungols, but Gustav’s free company were too weak to fight at the moment and, in any case, it did not matter.

  The bodies of Damir and his men would all still be here waiting for her when she returned with Max and her master’s boon.

  Distancing herself from the immediate danger, she opened her expanded senses to the black depths of the oblast’s magic. Successive incursions by Chaos had made this a cursed place, cursed but powerful. As she drew that magic in, exploited it to mould before herself the outline of a shimmering portal, she became aware of the fact that she could no longer sense the beast she had been struggling with so long.

  After a second’s panic, she found it. It was calm, as if its own power and rage were placated as hers grew. In fact, she was no longer entirely sure where Ulrika ended and the monster began. It was this place. Not for the first time she wondered what had become of the Arisen of Praag.

  ‘Dami
r,’ she called. The Ungol chieftain pulled out from the fighting. He was still alive, but he was badly hurt. His patchwork coat was bloodied and ripped and he looked to be carrying a broken arm. Despite his injuries there was nothing in his face but love unconditional and the desire to serve. Ulrika could no longer imagine the time when she had found that displeasing. ‘Bring me Felix.’

  The man nodded and then, after a moment’s thought, she added: ‘Only Felix.’

  An impulse flashed across the aethyr, a stab of will that originated in the dark citadel of Praag.

  Shivering in his high tower as he enacted the final preparations for his own great ritual, Max Schreiber perceived it as a tremor in the all-connecting web of Chaos that lay over the city. Drowning in borrowed power and as raw to it as an open wound, Ulrika felt it pulse across her mind. Hacking at the stone troll’s grasping arm as it floundered in the snow-filled trench, Felix saw it more immediately as a red glow condensing out of the air.

  Of them all, it was only Max who recognised the signature for what it was. He gave it no further attention. He had been expecting no less.

  Throgg, the Troll King, had entered the fray.

  The troll began to glow, red light blazing from its eyes and bleeding from the fissures in its rocky flesh. Already on the backswing after hewing into the monster’s elbow, Felix fell back before the explosive intensity of its gaze. He squinted into the glare. The troll’s eyes seemed to be following him, studying him, a pair of burning rubies painting him red against the night dark. Heart in his mouth, he angled his sword unconsciously into a guard, firming a fighting stance into the snow. Watching him with what Felix could only call interest, the troll’s ridgeline lips cracked upwards. Was it smiling? Could trolls smile? In the corner of his vision he saw Kolya draw back his bow but hold. On the other side of the ditch, even the two Slayers seemed momentarily taken aback by the change.

  The troll’s lips parted further, crunching experimentally through a range of motion like an orator preparing for the stage. Where previously the troll had been distracted by so many assailants on all sides, now its big hands dug into the snow at the lip of the trench and it hauled itself slowly up. Its eyes were fixed on Felix. A rush of noxious air came up from its gut, shaped by a fluke conformation of lips and tongue into what almost sounded like a word.

  ‘Hayger?’

  ‘Did it just… say my name?’ said Felix, tightening his grip on Karaghul just a little more.

  ‘Trolls don’t talk,’ said Gotrek.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kolya cautiously. ‘It seems brighter than the average troll.’

  Gotrek gave a derisive snort. ‘Snorri’s brighter than the average troll.’

  ‘And Snorri can talk,’ Snorri stated proudly, then hobbled towards the edge of the trench and cracked his hammer against the back of the troll’s skull.

  More of that red light shone through the cracks that spidered out from the point of impact, but the troll didn’t flinch. It wasn’t just that the monster didn’t feel it. Felix could see the thought behind the action. It knew that Snorri couldn’t seriously hurt it with the weapons he had. Already those cracks were beginning to close over, and rather than waste effort retaliating against an assailant it did not seriously consider a threat, it was hauling itself out of its hole and coming after Felix.

  Felix glanced at Karaghul. The magical blade shone dully against the snow that fell around it. He supposed he should probably feel honoured that a troll thought so highly of him.

  Abandoning his stance, Felix hurriedly backed up. He tried to tell himself that this was nothing he had not faced before, but he wasn’t terribly convincing about it. Before, this had been another troll but now it was something far worse. It was the eyes. There was something downright terrifying about the intelligent way the monster was looking at him. It knew who he was, what he could do, and was looking forward to the meagre test of putting an end to him.

  It bellied out of the ditch, then drew its knees underneath it. A Kislevite expletive and a snap shot from a composite bow pulled Felix’s glance right. Kolya’s arrow snapped off the troll’s lumpen shoulder. With a curse, Kolya crawled out of his foxhole, a fresh arrow already nocked and aimed, and sidestepped around to the monster’s front. Wise to the threat, the troll kept its face and the soft parts it contained turned away from the frustrated archer. Snorri was hobbling hurriedly around the far side of the trench, yelling at Felix to leave his troll alone and scuffing snow and sending rubble flying in his haste, while Gotrek snarled across from the far side.

  Felix swallowed and brought up his sword as the troll stretched itself out of its muscular hunch and to its full, appalling height. A sprinkling of frost cascaded from crevasses between muscles that had never previously been fully flexed. The troll tensed them all now, clenched its arms, its chest, its thighs, and balled its savage claws into fists. Its sheer bulk and power temporarily shadowed Felix against the wind and snow.

  I’m being taunted by a troll, Felix thought. It might just have been the warmth that came from being out of the wind, but the idea left him feeling strangely hot. He had not journeyed all the way from his new life in Altdorf for this. He had not left Kat behind and brought Gustav to almost certain death for this.

  ‘Do something then,’ Felix shouted up, dipping his guard in a foolhardy moment of bravado. ‘You’re not the biggest thing I’ve ever killed.’

  With a growl that sounded almost like it came from two beasts, the troll jabbed for the shoulder of Felix’s sword hand. Felix drew in the arm and rolled his shoulder out of the way. It would have been enough, but the attack was a feint, the true attack coming with a backhand swipe to blindside Felix while his back was turned in the other direction.

  It was Felix’s hard-earned alley brawler’s instincts that saved him, that and a shout from Kolya, and he managed to contort his shoulders enough for the massive, gnarled forearm to lunge over his head. Felix didn’t even try to stay on his feet. Bent completely off-balance, he hit the ground and rolled, coming up again half a dozen feet back. He shook snow from his hair and brought up his sword. Another arrow cracked against the troll’s ear.

  Felix kicked himself for failing to recognise the feint. He was not some callow college duellist; he had matched swords with the best. In fairness however, he had never yet fenced with a troll. He had no idea how to pick up the cues in their body language. He doubted there was a man alive that could.

  ‘Hold on, manling!’

  A guttural howl roared across the trench as Gotrek took the gap at a run. The dwarf’s steaming crest ruffled in the wind. The arrows still stuck in his chest quivered as if excited by the flight. Gotrek’s strength continued to amaze. Even Felix with his longer legs would have thought twice about making that leap. The Slayer’s axe was already a blur of motion as he thumped into the troll’s deep footprint on the trench’s near side and sent the blade cleaving through the monster’s hamstrings with a sound like a snapping cable.

  The troll gave a mangled cry and swung back, catching the Slayer a glancing blow to the temple that nevertheless flipped him head over heels and planted him on his back under a cloud of snow. Felix pressed the advantage his former companion had bought him, hewing madly into the troll’s belly and sides. Stone chips and gruelish grey blood flying in all directions, the troll retreated. A stub of wall turned to dust under its feet. It was heading for the river. Another arrow ricocheted off the troll’s chest.

  In a crazed blur of weapons, Snorri appeared beside Felix. Felix was taken aback by the old dwarf’s fury. Of course Snorri was a Slayer too, but Felix had never seen him quite so determined to die.

  Its wounds healing apace, the troll continued to back off regardless. Felix followed it every step of the way with Snorri never more than a mad lunge behind.

  Felix felt something brush his cheek and he quickly brought up his sword to guard as he glanced across to see what it was. Th
ere was nothing there, just a residual shape in the falling snow that might have hinted at a person. A whisper in the opposite ear snapped him back the other way. A cold hand knotted his guts. It was a voice he recognised. But he had fallen here in Praag a long time ago.

  ‘Ulli?’ Felix whispered.

  He looked up, noticing the waspish shapes streaking through the snow overhead. Every so often, one swept down to tug back on Felix’s cloak or whisper something of such dread import that Felix just could not make out the words. Behind him, Kolya had lowered his bow. The Kislevite kissed his carved stone and muttered a prayer. Snorri didn’t seem to have noticed.

  Tricked! The troll wasn’t wounded at all; it had just lured them away from the fighting at the despatch-fort and out into Ulrika’s ghost-maze. The realisation came too late as, a moment later, Felix looked north into the falling snow and the spirits cavorting through it to see a dark mass driving towards them.

  It was men. Beastmen to be more precise.

  It was lots and lots of beastmen.

  The scattered Kurgan still camped out on the floodplain were being swept aside by the advance of a vast herd. Felix couldn’t count their numbers in the dark, but he could hear the braying of what sounded like far too many. The ground trembled beneath their cloven hooves. The trumpeting cries and bloated silhouettes of larger beasts broke up the mass of what might otherwise have been boring. There were more trolls, at least one fearsomely mutated, four-armed minotaur with boneswords for hands and glowing tattoos crawling over its hairless flesh, and a bloated, toad-like behemoth that Felix could not even begin to describe and did not want to see any closer.

  It was as if all the beasts of Chaos had rallied to the Troll King’s call.