Gotrek & Felix: Kinslayer

by David Guymer

With a sick sense of realisation, Felix thought that in all likelihood they had.

  ‘Snorri!’ he shouted, waving to get the old Slayer’s attention. ‘We have to get back to the others. We have to warn Ulrika.’

  But Snorri wasn’t paying attention. The dwarf continued to hammer blows down onto the glowing stone troll, bellowing at it to hit back as he drove it steadily towards the river. Looking for help, he saw Gotrek pick himself out of the snow. The Slayer looked at the onrushing beastmen, knuckled gore from his one good eye, then smacked the side of his head to stop its ringing and looked again. He grinned.

  ‘Not now, Gotrek. We have to go back.’

  Before Gotrek could answer, Kolya took up his bow and pointed back in the direction of the fort. Felix swung that way and squinted into the dark. The snow rumbled as if carrying the shock of distant thunder. Felix’s heart sank.

  How could things get any worse?

  He raised his sword, then gave an exultant shout as Damir galloped into view on his tough Ungol pony. The thick-skinned Ungol captain guided his mount solely with knees and stirrups. He looked to be carrying a broken arm, but his narrow yellow eyes were drawn with determination. His fur chapka was tied under his chin so it would not slip with the wind. Rings, charms, buckles and coloured ribbons fluttered angrily as he raised an axe in greeting. Or was it warning?

  The thunder grew nearer, too loud to be down to just one rider, and the snow behind Damir’s back had taken on a wavering darkness as though it hid an avalanche or a tidal wave. Felix backed away, heart drumming a warning of its own as a wall of snorting bulls stampeded through the snow on the Ungol’s tail.

  The troll’s attack must have spooked them and now they were coming right for Felix and the others – trapped between the river and the beastman herd!

  He almost dropped his sword and gave up then. What had he done to deserve this? For a moment he considered giving up, skipping the inevitable denouement to his life. But then he thought of Max, held in some dungeon just a few miles away. He thought of his nephew and Ulrika beset by trolls at his back.

  He thought of Kat and the child she might not carry.

  Gritting his teeth fiercely he shook his head. No. Dying now would be easy all right, but it wouldn’t be right. He couldn’t speak for Gotrek and Snorri, but he for one intended to return to Altdorf the hero, to see the world emerge from its current trials as it had been before.

  Quickly, he assessed the situation. The beastmen were closing from the north and the stampede from the south. He could just now pick out the shape of the pair of trolls that were chasing the bulls down. The din of the two built like colliding stormfronts. There was no way out. One eye on both threats, Felix backed towards the river.

  Wait…

  Was that even escape or just death by another means?

  ‘Into the river,’ Felix shouted, sheathing Karaghul and turning to run.

  ‘You’re mad,’ Kolya shot back. ‘If you don’t sink, you’ll freeze.’

  ‘I like my alternatives less,’ Felix returned, still running, to which the Kislevite could only answer by joining him.

  Together, they sprinted past the stone troll. Snorri looked up at their passing, puzzled, until Gotrek came up behind him and pushed him on after them.

  ‘The Troll King is mine, Snorri Nosebiter, but mark this a lost doom repaid.’

  Felix’s awareness of his surroundings had shrunk to just the snow-covered pebbles between him and the Lynsk. He could smell the ice, could see the whorls that the snow made in the water’s sickening uphill flow, could already feel his skin clench in preparation of the coming shock. He heard Damir rein in his pony behind him and shout something he couldn’t make out over the blood pounding in his ears, just before a new and unfamiliar sound cut it off.

  It was the sound of a man being thumped from horseback by a swinging boulder.

  Felix jumped. In that split second he mourned. Damir had been a good man. He hadn’t deserved what Ulrika had made of him.

  There was an impact, a plunging darkness.

  And then he felt nothing but ice.

  The fort was coming down around Ulrika’s ears. Fist-sized lumps of masonry and decorative gargoyles shattered against the back of her head and left dents in her pauldron plates. The effort of maintaining so many spells at once felt like a pack of dire wolves tearing her mind between them. There was the ghost-maze, the portal, the reanimations, the danse macabre that kept her puppets fighting on their strings. No mortal mind with the autonomic distractions of shivering or breathing could have worked so efficiently or so fast, but even for her it was proving too much. Something had to give.

  She dispelled the ghost-maze. It was an irrelevancy now that her enemy was at the gates. Then she withdrew the necromantic vigour from her zombie thralls. The Ungols’ motions grew torpid until their efforts at attack became slower even than the trolls that soon stamped the zombies into jelly. Ulrika did not bother attempting to reconstruct the mess. A terrific impact shook the entire fort from towers to foundations and the front wall caved in around the charging mass of an ice troll. The ceiling groaned as more of the wall crumbled. Masonry shattered against the troll’s diamond-hard hide.

  Her warriors were dropping like dolls. She could hear Gustav shouting for order. The young cocksure had discovered a knack for command just too late.

  Ulrika focused only on the portal.

  She could wait no longer. Damir had failed her and Felix was gone. Had she the time or energy to utter a word she would have cursed him on the names of Nagash and Neferata and every lord and lady of undeath she could recount. She should have made Felix a thrall as she had his nephew and forced her gift through Katerina’s unwilling lips. Kin and lover between them would have kept the wayward mortal in line. It was only on Vlad von Carstein’s advice that she had not.

  A curse on them all!

  The troll expanded to fill her view. To her enlightened perceptions it came on as slowly as a glacier, but with the same terrible aura of inevitability.

  It came to this.

  ‘Warriors, to me!’ she shouted, drawing her sabre and stepping into the shimmering portal.

  It was time the Troll King learned what he was dealing with.

  Fourteen

  City of Lost Souls

  The Empty Bridge of Praag had been named with typical Kislevite irony. In times not that far removed, it had been the road by which the young poor of Praag had left behind the whitewashed walls and red-tiled manors of the Old Town to become soldiers. And the bridge was never empty. The city had seen too much horror for that, and it was a very brave or very drunk man who would cross it alone at night, for fear of dead warriors with a grudge against those who had not fought in their wars.

  The End Times had changed many things. It had not changed that.

  With a bleating scream that echoed between the struts of the bridge’s frozen grey underbelly, a beastman flew over the side barrier. The fur of its chest was matted with blood as if it had just been hit by a mace. It flailed its arms and legs, wailing in the wish that its gods might suddenly mutate them into wings, until it punched through the ice in a column of black water.

  The sounds of an ongoing fight spread thinly downriver – or up, as it might well be – as Felix sank numb fingers into the shingle that banked the river and dragged himself painfully ashore. His shivering sent pebbles skittering away but he didn’t even feel it. The fashionable theory amongst the doctors of Altdorf was that a man’s bones grew porous with age, explaining thus the fragility and sensitivity to cold airs of older men. Felix would like to have seen some of them try a winter’s dip in the Lynsk at any side of forty. The breath in his mouth felt like dragonfire. His body felt as though it had been mummified in bandages that had first been dunked in ice water and frozen. With arms he could neither feel nor properly direct, he managed to flop himself onto his side and curl up int
o a ball.

  Soft flecks of snow tickled his bearded face.

  What a glorious way to die, Felix thought miserably. After everything he had been through to make it to Praag it would be just typical for it all to finally end in such ignominious fashion. Unsure why he even bothered, he blinked up into the driving snow.

  Lightning sheeted across the black sky. Flashes of purple and green backlit the skyline of Praag’s Old Town, the breaks in crumbling minarets and onion domes poorly infilled with snow. Felix’s own rapid breathing slowed, enough to hear the river mock him with its susurrant uphill run. Hoots, barks and ululating shrieks echoed from the surrounding buildings.

  Felix shuddered and fumbled for his sword, using one shaking hand to force the fingers of the other around its dragonhead hilt. He felt horribly like a prime piece of thawed meat tossed into the Imperial Zoo at feeding time. As he struggled to his feet, a monstrosity of fur and feather with the hindquarters of a mountain lion screeched overhead on eagle wings. Felix gawped up at it as it sailed past, turning to watch the griffon climb the steep spike of rock towards the monstrous citadel of Praag. There, it disappeared amongst the cloud of dark specks that flitted around the formidable-looking towers. Harpies or something worse, Felix thought, in no mind to sugar coat what he was seeing.

  The citadel of Praag had always made for grim viewing. Its towers were topped with dragon heads and daemon horns. Grotesques in armour buttressed its walls. Its subjugation by Chaos and occupation by the legions of the Troll King had done little to diminish its mien of misery and neglect.

  A shout from the top of the bridge pulled his attention back to the thing that had claimed it.

  ‘Come to Snorri, you skinny beggars. He only has two hands!’

  If Felix could feel his legs he could have kicked himself. In his selfish misery, he had completely forgotten about Snorri and the others. Raising a hand to shield his eyes from the snow, he followed the iron clamour of weapons and the bray of beasts to a knot of fighting on the near side. A crude timber and iron shelter had been erected there. Snow mounded high on its roof. A strange banner depicting the eight-pointed star of Chaos Undivided slashed by what looked like the claws of a beast clapped on a sagging pole. The light of a fire brought battling beastmen in and out of shadow.

  It was the prospect of a fire more than any thought of running to the Slayers’ rescue that coaxed enough strength out of Felix’s muscles to move.

  By the time Felix and his ice-stiffened limbs had made it onto the bridge it was all over bar the shouting.

  ‘That was Snorri’s doom,’ said Snorri, standing possessively over the body of a wiry beastman with stubby brown horns and a face that was almost human but for a too-wide mouth filled with cow-like teeth. The near resemblance turned Felix’s stomach more than any bull-headed horror ever could. It was as if the Dark Powers were showing just how far into what Felix considered humanity their powers of corruption could reach. To complete the picture it was clad in scrappy Praag wool, with gloves and a chapka hat. There was a hammer in its hand. Felix wished he could say for certain whether this beastman had simply raided the city’s dead for its raiment or whether it had once been a man.

  The axe wound splitting its chest in two didn’t make it any prettier.

  ‘You’re mistaken,’ Gotrek growled.

  ‘Snorri doesn’t think so. It was his head on the end of that hammer.’

  ‘It was my doom,’ said Gotrek. The firelight painted a threatening growl. ‘It is naught but my luck that you should stick your thick skull in the way of it.’

  The Slayer clapped blood deeper into his palms and then baked them dismissively over the beastman’s hearth. The fire blazed from inside one half of a tin bath that would once have belonged to one of the wealthy lords and ladies of Praag. Felix saw curled scraps of book bindings and animal dung amongst the crackling wisps of wood shavings that had been built up inside. The unsteady blaze was sheltered from the worst of the snow under a wooden pallet that had been covered with a shopfront awning. The weight of snow caused it to sag in through the spacings between the pallet’s slats.

  Snorri scratched his head, then firmed the already tense grip on his axe and hammer. Veins popped up from his bald head and thickly muscled shoulders.

  ‘You both followed,’ said Felix, a shade too sharply and loud to be natural and he kicked himself for his great subtlety, but neither Snorri nor Gotrek appeared to notice the urgency in his tone. Snorri bit his lip, but didn’t speak. So he hadn’t yet told Gotrek what he’d told Felix. Good.

  ‘Against my better judgement,’ said Gotrek.

  Snorri simply held Felix with an uncertain gaze, then shook his head and turned away. The dwarf stepped out of the shelter and into the blizzard and, for a moment, Felix thought he was going to carry on going right over to the other side of the bridge. He stopped about two paces out, turned his face into the wind and just stared into it. His eyes were red. Felix let out a relieved breath.

  ‘What’s that about?’ said Gotrek.

  Felix’s heart lurched. ‘What’s what about?’

  Gotrek shrugged as if he didn’t care, which, on current form, he probably didn’t. Felix sidled into the hearth’s radius of warmth, a shiver running through his knotted muscles.

  ‘Winters were colder over Karaz-a-Karak,’ Gotrek grumbled, cracking his knuckles over the fire. Felix couldn’t help but note that even they were criss-crossed with recent scar tissue. ‘Would freeze the breath in a man’s lungs.’

  ‘Have you seen any sign of Gustav or Ulrika? Or anyone?’

  With a brief tilt of the head, Gotrek indicated behind him. Kolya sat there on a three-legged stool, soaked through and shivering uncontrollably. Someone, though Felix could picture neither Gotrek nor Snorri ever doing such a thing, had draped a thick, bloodstained fleece over his shoulders. ‘Snorri put that on him,’ said Gotrek, as though discussing the mental descent of an elderly relative. ‘He’s got soft. And not just in the head.’

  ‘Just you three?’

  Gotrek grinned unpleasantly. ‘You make four.’

  Felix pinched his eyes shut. So that was it, then. Ulrika was gone, dead or captured, Gustav was gone, the mission here was as good as over: he had managed to fail everyone that still mattered. Even if he did survive this, how could he go home and look Otto and Annabella in the eye and tell them what happened to Gustav?

  When he opened his eyes again Gotrek was still looking at him with that strangely animal detachment. The Slayer had become grimmer over the past year. He was not like Ulrika, but a mirror of her perhaps, one where both sides were in darkness. He scratched his knotted beard with a sigh. Perhaps there was still one person he could try to make amends with, if his former companion would let him.

  ‘I’ll not apologise for my decision to take Kat back to Altdorf.’

  ‘Do you think I’d respect you if you tried?’

  ‘Probably not.’ Felix had never been particularly good at apologies. If he had been then perhaps he and Ulrika would not have become estranged in the manner that they had. It was too easy to look back on one’s own younger self and judge their actions with the benefit of hindsight and regret. ‘We both know it was my choice to make, and the right one for Kat.’

  ‘Aye, maybe.’

  ‘And I would have stayed with her,’ Felix hastened to add. ‘Sigmar knows I thought about taking it all up again and trying to track you down. I missed this, would you believe?’ He sighed. ‘I would have stayed. It was only because of Max that I came.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Gotrek, as short and ruthless with his words as he could be with an axe. ‘You did it on the honeyed word of a fiend dressed up as a woman you once loved.’

  ‘Ulrika has as much reason to want Max back as anyone.’

  ‘You call her by that name, but that’s not who she is any more. If she wants the wizard back at all then it’s for her o
wn reasons and I’d wager they differ from yours.’ Gotrek grunted. His eyes glittered with malice. ‘She drinks the blood of men and draws the dead from their graves before your eyes. What more will it take for you to open them and see?’

  Felix took a deep breath, but couldn’t argue. Ulrika had played his feelings for her like the strings of a lute. On a logical level he had accepted that from the very outset, but to be told it in no uncertain terms by another made him believe it in a way that he had not allowed himself to do before. Through everything, he had wanted to believe that it was still Ulrika underneath.

  With one hand he massaged the ache in his heart. He had missed this, not the adventure, certainly not the peril, but this; the camaraderie around the fire, even in the limited, oft-brutally succinct manner in which Gotrek understood it. Just then, a part of him yearned to ask Gotrek about his wife, his daughter, and his shame, but he knew that he never could. Gotrek was still a dwarf and would not take lightly the knowledge of what Snorri had already told him.

  ‘Ulrika was right about one thing, though.’

  ‘She was, was she?’

  Felix shrugged. ‘It’s better to be out here than not. What’s the point staying at home, hunting rats and fighting the small battles when the ones that matter are out here?’

  ‘Don’t feed me the line, manling.’

  ‘The line?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Gotrek, a sigh inflating his barrel chest. ‘There’s a greater doom around the corner, a bigger monster over the hill. Well I’ve climbed the hill, and I’ve killed the monster. The End Times are here and everyone wants me to be some kind of a hero.’ The dwarf scowled, thumped his arrowed chest. ‘All I want is to find my doom and be left alone.’

  ‘A pity,’ said Felix and meant it. Gotrek was worth a thousand men. More.

  ‘Isn’t it just,’ said Gotrek sourly, then gestured out towards Snorri. He hadn’t moved and snow was beginning to pile up around the old dwarf’s ankles. ‘Let him play the hero. It’s what the idiot always wanted, after all. I’d say he’s the hero this sorry world deserves.’