by David Guymer
‘That’s bleak, even for you.’
‘Those are the times.’
Depressed now as well as chilled to his marrow, Felix turned his back on Gotrek and his almost-rememberer and looked out over the ruins of Praag’s Old Town. The city had always been haunted, this part of it in particular, but now it had been conquered too, and by something that had no intention of leaving it as a place in which men might again dwell. The path from the bridge curved past plundered shopfronts and through the rubble-strewn garrison district of the Old Town’s east quarter. The Kislevite architecture was buried under a foot or more of snow, marked by the prints of hoof and paw of every manner of beast under the northern sun. There would have been taverns here, skin houses, dice dens, food halls catering to a permanent garrison of thousands. Felix did not need witch sight or the light of Geheimnisnacht to see the ghosts here.
The road wound upwards to a hill, so striking in the centre of a thousand leagues of open steppe, where the gargoyle-encrusted citadel of Praag perched. That was where the Troll King would be. Where Max was. Where Ulrika had wanted them to go. Lights burned from its windows, throwing long, wheeling shadows of the circling harpies over the surrounding districts.
‘Do you think that Ulrika might still be alive?’
‘No.’
Felix closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He rephrased the question. ‘Do you think the Troll King staged the attack on the fort back there to get at Ulrika? He’s collecting sorcerers after all and we both saw what Ulrika can do.’
‘If so then she’s right where she belongs in this nest of Chaos.’
‘You’re forgetting Max.’
‘A dwarf forgets nothing. It simply doesn’t matter.’ The dwarf leaned forward until his whiskers were perilously close to the fire. ‘Kislev has fallen. The Empire will fall next, then all the lands of men and elves one by one. The dwarfholds will fall last.’ His face took on a black smile, as though taking this sore point of pride. ‘But fall they will and there’s nothing that you or I or anyone here can do about it.’
Felix shook his head, taken aback. He would never have believed that Gotrek Gurnisson would just give up, if that’s what you could call this nihilistic quest into the enemy’s stronghold.
‘Snorri will fight the king of the trolls with you, young Felix.’
Gotrek and Felix both looked around as Snorri Nosebiter clattered back inside, his metal mace-leg striking a hollow thunk every time it hit stone. There would be no chance of stealth with Snorri with them, but Felix doubted the old Slayer would countenance such a stratagem in any case. Gotrek scowled, glaring at Felix as though suspecting he had been deliberately out-foxed, then bent to pick up his axe. Holding Felix’s gaze throughout, he bolted the weapon’s chain to his bracer.
‘Well, Snorri can’t,’ said Gotrek.
Snorri looked about to argue but Felix shushed him with a wave. ‘There’ll be enough trolls for us all, I’m sure.’
‘Snorri thinks the Troll King counts at least twice.’
‘You can’t count, Snorri,’ said Gotrek harshly, sniffing the blood that clung to his axe’s unwashed blade. He seemed alive again, driven, and Felix felt his skin prickle in response to it. It was as if there was a connection between the pair of them that he could neither see nor taste, but at times like this could almost touch. ‘This doom is what I was promised.’
Snorri looked questioningly to Felix who could only shrug.
Gotrek started on the castle road. ‘Let’s kill some monsters.’
Ulrika awoke in darkness and pain. The dark was not an issue, not for one blessed to walk forever by night. Through every gradation of grey, she saw through the bars of her cage that she was in a large cellar. The walls were undecorated stone and curved upwards to form a ceiling. It was one of Duke Enrik’s wine cellars. She had never been down here herself of course, she was a boyar’s daughter, but the design was similar to one that had been installed at Fort Straghov by her grandfather. She could smell the sour odour of spoiled wine and a few chips of broken glass remained to attest to the chamber’s original purpose. There were scores more cages like hers bolted to the walls where once there had been wine racks. All of them were empty bar hers.
Chained to the bars of the wall-facing side opposite her was an immense dirt-brown troll.
Ulrika’s reflexive jerk brought a rattle from the manacles over her own wrists. Her hands had been cuffed through a wrought iron bar that appeared to have been bent into a figure of eight shape just for her. What looked like a naval chain fed through it and over her head. She looked up. The chain was thicker than her arm but had somehow been worked through a timber-hitch knot about one of the bars on the roof of the cage. Ulrika pulled down with all her inhuman strength but neither the bar nor the chain gave any quarter. She hissed at the darkness. The front-to-back orientation of the bars on the roof of the cage meant that she could move backwards and forwards if she should for some reason wish to get any closer to that troll, but could get no more than a step to either side without the chain yanking her wrists back.
It wasn’t the subtlest dungeon she had ever been held in, nor the most deliberately torturous – that accolade surely belonged to the witch hunters of Altdorf – but it was definitely the sturdiest.
She dropped her knees so her full weight hung from the chain and pulled down until the pain of the iron bar digging through her wrists threatened to black her out. In frustration and spite, she rattled the chain and cursed in Kislevite. Her native tongue was made for such language. With a slowly spreading sense of fear, she looked at the bar around her wrists. Despite all her strength she hadn’t even been able to make it groan.
What kind of a monster could shape something like this, and with enough control to not simply crush her hands inside of it? Some kind of machine, she told herself with certainty. She had witnessed wonders enough during her adventures with Felix and his dwarf friends to know that any marvel was possible.
These thoughts were distractions though, she knew, and brief ones at that. Captivity presented unique horrors to one with eternity to contemplate and a heightened capacity for thought with which to do it. The gifts of the Arisen could at times seem like curses. Bitterly, she tried to remember how she had got here. The last thing she remembered was the ice troll bearing down on her, and then…
Nothing.
She clutched her head. It felt like the memory had been beaten out of her, but that seemed unlikely. She knew from experience that it took an implausible amount of violence to do that kind of damage to one of her kind. She shook her head. It did not matter how she had got here, only that she got out and fulfilled her master’s mission. She snarled.
She needed blood. She had almost exhausted herself trying to work so much magic during the trolls’ attack and what little she had to spare had gone towards healing wounds she had no recollection of receiving. Her ribs and backbone both ached as though they had recently been broken and one of her legs was abominably sore, though Ulrika thought it was just bruising. Possibly the worst however was her left eye, which seemed to have been crushed and was now knitting itself together with such agonising slowness that had Ulrika’s hands not been shackled she would have been tempted to tear it from her face to grow again once she had properly fed.
There were few mortals with the strength or the sadism to realise that there were degrees of pain that it took immortality to taste.
More hungrily than she liked, Ulrika eyed the troll on the other side of the cage. The mossy, worm-ridden monster regarded her placidly. Its pulse was so slow that its rhythm in her ears was almost hypnotic. Swaying in time to the beat, she licked her lips. Her fangs pricked her tongue. Was what she was contemplating even possible? The part of her that was still thinking clearly enough to be sick with herself sincerely hoped that it was not.
‘So soon.’
The voice rumbled from the darkness immediat
ely behind her. It was hard and inhuman and as deep as a grave. Ulrika did not think she had ever heard two words loaded with such derogation and loathing. Ulrika twisted through her hanging chains so that she was facing the front of the cage. On the other side of a rough floorspace was another row of empty cages. In the gloom in between, a pair of dull amber eyes glowed. A rush of sulphurous breath washed from a mouth crusted with jagged tusks as it split implausibly into a grin.
‘Others of your race resisted longer. You are weak, vampire.’
Ulrika tried to shunt aside her hunger and focus. The speaker’s heart was cold and slow, enough to make it difficult for Ulrika to make out its beat through the mountainous wall of his chest. Looking at him, it was an effort to disregard the monster before her eyes and see the speaker for what he was: a troll that spoke. He watched her, waiting for a reaction. His eyes were deep with hard cunning.
‘Throgg,’ said Ulrika. ‘The Troll King.’
‘Von Carstein sent you to my city,’ said the Troll King, leaning in until his tusks were sawing into the bars. Ulrika rattled deeper into the cage and bared her fangs. ‘Why?’
Ulrika glared up at the Troll King hatefully. She understood the stakes in play here, more than she had shared with Felix or even poor Damir. She was a Kislevite, after all, she had just spent the past months riding through the ashes of her country, but with every fibre of her unnatural being she wished that Count von Carstein could have found an ally in the north more stable than Throgg.
‘Why do you think? The Auric Bastion prevents him from speaking with you by magical means.’
‘Men are weak,’ Throgg replied, looking over her buckled armour with a sneer. Ulrika returned the inspection. She still could not remember how she had got here, but the sight of the mineral-spiked and mace-like fists of her captor gave her a powerful suspicion. ‘Von Carstein sends you here to speak for him? Then speak, pretty thing. Impress me with your clever words.’
The Troll King drew back from the bars, ceding the floor. He wrapped himself in a tattered red cloak, concealing the many mouths that silently opened and closed from his mutant torso. His head withdrew into the crystalline mane of warpstone that bulged from his shoulders. Ulrika licked thin blood over her dried lips.
‘The war goes poorly for the Empire.’
‘Of course it does,’ Throgg cut in, his deep voice overpowering hers. ‘You ask soft flesh to stand before the tide of Chaos.’
Ulrika bit her tongue, trying to ignore Throgg’s goading and concentrate on the message that Vlad had risked her life to deliver. It was getting harder to think, harder just to speak without a snarl. The beast was out. It basked under the glow of the Chaos moon and it hungered.
‘My master implores you to move against Archaon’s forces before it is too late. You have strength enough.’
‘Strength?’ Throgg growled, raising his hands and looking down at them. He clenched them into fists. ‘Yes, I have strength. Is that all you see here, vampire? Strength? Am I a dumb hammer waiting the guiding arm of Sylvania?’
What was the brute talking about? Ulrika tried to think, but her talents lay with swords rather than words.
‘It is the hubris of men to see their own destiny in all things. Von Carstein. The Everchosen. Dead men. Exalted men. In their skin they are all still men. This…’ Throgg’s eyes shone as he reached out to clasp the bars of Ulrika’s cage. The iron groaned under his titan’s grip. ‘…will be the Age of the Beast.’
‘You are mad if you think you can stand against Archaon alone.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Throgg, stabbing the crown on his brow with a fingernail-like shard of dark crystal. ‘Or perhaps I know more than you.’ Then he chuckled, the warning cascade of rocks down a mountainside. ‘But one day I will thank von Carstein for sending such a passable warrior to my side.’
‘I would sooner take a walk in the sun than serve you.’
‘All the beasts of Chaos are mine to rule. What are you, vampire, if not that? What do you think became of those other vampires of Praag?’
Ulrika did her utmost to stand straight, to look haughty despite the chains that lay draped across her shoulders and the fangs that burned like acid from her gums. She remembered well enough the petty, ineffectual Lahmian sisterhood of Praag, and falling under the yoke of a monster like Throgg was all that their near-sighted infighting had earned them. Ulrika was better than that. She was a warrior, a Kislevite, a Troll Country boyarina. Chaos was the source of her strength, but she was its master, not its puppet.
‘I have friends that will come for me. Friends you would do well not to cross.’
‘The poet and the…’ Throgg gripped the cage in one hand and leaned closer. His voice dropped and his eyes grew wary. Ulrika caught an odd scent on the Troll King’s breath. She knew too little of his race to be sure, but an instinctual understanding, some universal character, called it fear. ‘…the dwarf with the axe. Yes, I know them. There is not a monster in Praag that does not, in whatever way it is capable, fear the name “Gurnisson”.’
‘Then release me,’ said Ulrika, the scent of weakness drawing her forwards. So Gotrek and Felix had both survived the attack. She could not imagine how they had achieved it, but she should not have been surprised. Her chain rattled as she drew herself straight and looked up into the towering horror of the Troll King. ‘Let me go. And consider my master’s request.’
‘You overreach. I have marked your friends’ approach and my most powerful beast awaits them. It is an immortal of pre-history, a relic of the Battle for Urszebya and the Year That No One Forgets.’ The Troll King pulled away and swept his mauled old cloak over his shoulders. He banged his fist across the bars of the opposite cage and, in response, a door opened at the far end of the cellar and the heartbeats of a band of beastmen entered. He turned back with a grin. ‘There are monsters here, Ulrika, that even Gurnisson has yet to face.’
‘How–’
‘Do I know your name? Even for a human, you exceed yourself with your sense of self-worth.’
The Troll King waited as the beastmen came to him. They were the scrawny, slightly more intelligent breed that called themselves ungors, the retinue of a larger beastman with the look of a shaman. His eyes were flat onyx disks in a hoary, tattooed face. Sweeping stag antlers bore eldritch runes made out in woad, scattered amongst symbols that looked like little more than cave art. The shaman and the Troll King held a whispered conference. Ulrika supposed it logical that Throgg would require lieutenants. It was not as if a troll could follow instructions.
Throgg returned his attention to Ulrika, a glimmer of amusement in his dull eyes. ‘I have a riddle for you, Ulrika: king without a kingdom, general without an army, lover without a swain, warrior without a soul.’ His expression became hard, the stone that it was. ‘Do you not care to ask after those you brought with you into my city?’
Ulrika yanked at her chains, achieving nothing more than a metallic rattle and a smirk on the face of the Troll King.
‘It has been a long time since my army has tasted untainted meat. You are with me now, Ulrika, and soon you and I will conquer an entire world that our future slaves will call Troll Country.’
‘Release me,’ Ulrika hissed, feeling her dark soul floating without an anchor on a rising sea of Chaos. She wrapped her chains around her wrists and glared at Throgg. ‘And release Max to me.’
‘He still speaks of you. He must have loved you greatly.’
‘Bring him to me,’ Ulrika demanded, to a rumble of laughter.
‘He is mine, Ulrika, as you are,’ said Throgg, turning at last to leave. ‘Now feel a monster’s true loneliness.’
The harpies that flocked the Square of Heroes were agitated. Hundreds of them gathered on the citadel’s battlements to battle for roosts with the resident gargoyles. Excrement dashed the gothic stonework. The scrape of clawed feet on stone and the cries of their shrill
proto-human voices echoed around the statue-lined square. From the window at the back of his cage, Max Schreiber counted a distorted face or a flap of fleshy wings every few seconds. It was as if every last one of the beasts in Praag had come here.
‘Man-thing,’ came the hiss from the cage opposite. Max tried to ignore it. ‘Man-thing!’
‘I do not converse with monsters like you.’
A nervous titter cut through the space between them. ‘This that comes from you. You are the worst of us all.’
Wincing at the bruises that coloured his entire back and shoulders, Max pulled his gaze from the window. The skaven warlock stood pressed to the bars of its cage, the floor strewn with leftovers from the various mechanical apparatus hoarded away in the far corner. The headless torso of its ‘specimen’ lay slack in its chains. The head sat on a copper plate with a pair of tines connecting its cranium to a humming, wind-up device that delivered irregular electrical shocks. Watching its mouth chomp and its brow flicker with every pulse was far from the most disturbing thing that Max had been forced to witness of his neighbour’s efforts.
‘What do you mean by that?’
The warlock clapped its paws in a human parody of delight, but chose to ignore the question or perhaps save it for later use on its own twisted terms. It pointed towards the window. ‘What happens out there, man-thing?’
‘Nothing that concerns you, I’m sure.’
‘Matters. Matters.’ The ratman jittered sideways, looked over both shoulders, then clasped the bars of his cage in trembling paws. ‘I smell more man-things. Yes-yes. Man-things being fed to the bird-beasts.’
Max closed his eyes. How many men had died when Praag fell, or Kislev city? How could Max be expected to grieve for a handful more?
Blowing hot air onto chapped and swollen fingers, Max returned his attention to his own subject. The hulking stone troll bolted to the wall of his cell returned his regard with dead eyes and the hollow murmur of a sigh. Trolls might have been slow but they were not impossible to train and this one had long ago learned that movement was impossible. With the remarkable adaptability of its race, its limbs were already beginning to atrophy. Its breathing was slow and rhythmic. It had no concept of what was about to happen to it.
