Gotrek & Felix: Kinslayer

by David Guymer

  Shooting a glance back and around in a hopeless bid to track the harpies circling in and out of the snow, Felix hurried around the bonfire to the foot of Tzar Alexis’s statue where the men of Gustav’s regiment had been left to hang. Just looking at their naked bodies, blue and goose-bumped in the snow, made his own skin want to shiver. The echoing shriek of a harpy watching from somewhere amidst the encircling statues came as a stark reminder of the fate that these men had been intended for. He felt sick just thinking about it and tried hard not to, his hatred of the Troll King and the beasts that served him growing with every scream, crunch and tear he could not quench with happier thoughts. From a different direction came a staccato screech. It was only a matter of time before hunger and short memories triumphed over their fear of Gotrek’s axe.

  Whatever respite they’d earned was going to be brief.

  He made a line for Gustav. His nephew hung upside down from an arm of living marble that, even during the course of the fight, seemed to have clenched into a fist around the rope that noosed his ankles. Caught from the corner of Felix’s eye, the look of hunger on the great Tzar’s face was sufficiently lifelike to make Felix’s guts clench. It was an effort to turn his back on it and wrap his arms around Gustav’s naked chest.

  Damn it, his nephew felt like ice! Setting himself to bear Gustav’s weight, Felix tried to raise the young man up and tease his feet back through the noose. The young man groaned as Felix’s arms tightened over ribs that were, at best, horribly bruised. The rope danced back and forth on the end of his foot. Felix felt his thighs begin to burn. Tzar Alexis seemed to be licking his lips.

  ‘Gotrek. Help me.’

  The Slayer stomped over.

  ‘I’ve got him,’ said Felix. ‘Cut the rope.’

  Felix tightened his hold as Gotrek’s axe flashed past his face and Gustav’s unsupported weight dropped onto him. It took a few seconds for a combination of Felix’s embrace and the bonfire to warm Gustav enough for him to start shivering and when it came it came as hard and sudden as a fit. Felix held onto him, fearful that if he let go now his nephew was going to tear something.

  Gotrek tossed over the clothes and – trust Gotrek to think of it – the halberd of a dead beastman before heading off to cut down the rest of Gustav’s men. Felix called thanks after him and quickly tried to get Gustav dressed. Tending Kat through some of her worse days had given him experience enough in how to clothe another, but holding his shivering nephew down at the same time wasn’t making it easy. After what felt like an unbearable length of time with the volume of the harpy cries increasing by the second, Felix managed to pull a patchwork jerkin of colourful Ungol wool over Gustav’s arms.

  It was then that Felix noticed the bite on his nephew’s neck. Two marks, a sore-looking red with recent scabs puncturing partially healed scars.

  Felix thought the Lynsk had left him cold. What he felt now turned the blood in his veins to ice water and sent shivers through the back of his head.

  What had Ulrika done?

  He was being irrational, he told himself. He had known full well what Ulrika was and what she was forced to do to sustain her unlife, but seeing the evidence on Gustav’s skin was something else. Felix’s own kin. Felix’s blood! Doubtless Ulrika would argue he had been a willing vessel for a noble cause and Felix had certainly fantasised about such surrender often enough over the past weeks to sympathise with that point of view, but how could any man or woman consent with their free will corroded by pleasure? Ulrika had herself told him that those from whom a vampire drank were little better than slaves. After the battle of Kurzycko and their conversation on the oblast he had assumed that meant she would feed only on the enemy. He’d been stupid and blind.

  Gotrek was right. Ulrika was a monster.

  But there wasn’t time for an ‘I told you so.’

  ‘Come on, Gustav, get up.’

  His nephew’s teeth gave an urgent chatter as, leaning into Felix’s chest, he managed to get himself upright and stay there. He was appallingly pale, anaemic even, cosseting his bruised ribs with a hunchback stance and leaning a large proportion of his weight onto his newfound halberd. Even the hang of long hair over his shoulders looked tired.

  Turning to check on Gotrek and Snorri, Felix saw that all of Gustav’s men were down now. Some were in an even worse way than their captain, but a few of the toughest looking were in amongst the beastmen with the two dwarfs gathering gear and weapons and – Felix couldn’t help but notice – a few valuables for themselves and their mates. The men were gathering themselves into a block, for warmth as much as mutual protection, but even as Felix watched a harpy dived for the centre of the formation in a snap of clawed feet only to be warded off at the very last second by an upward-thrusting spear. One man lost an untied chapka hat rather than a head, and the harpy wheeled about for another pass with a frustrated shriek.

  More of them were drawing in. Those still in the air were circling ever closer. The free company were dead men walking and the beasts could smell it.

  ‘Everybody stay close. Keep your spears high.’

  ‘Here comes the real thing!’ Gotrek roared.

  Emerging from the blizzard between the rank of statues like daemons from a portal came the beastmen, ominous black shapes with curling horns and spiked shields. They clutched their spears and snorted, fierce in numbers and with their castle at their back. The clap of their cloven feet on the flagstones became a dirge. With a curse, Felix made ready. Beastman armies, once broken, did not generally rally this quickly. He had thought they would have more time.

  ‘Snorri thinks we should meet them halfway,’ said Snorri.

  ‘I think we’re good enough where we are,’ said Felix, with what felt like a glorious overstatement even to one accustomed to composing propaganda for the Reiksmarshal.

  ‘I agree with the manling,’ said Gotrek. Felix lowered his sword a fraction and turned to his former companion. Clearly certain death had affected his hearing in some way. Gotrek shrugged and jerked a finger back over his shoulder. ‘Why move now that that lot are starting to pull themselves together?’

  Before he could stop himself, Felix glanced in that direction, a trapdoor swinging open under his gut.

  Sniffing heavily at cold air into which the reek of burned troll flesh had been effectively frozen in, a mammoth troll mantled in thick brown fur gave a tremorous sigh and opened eyes like agates. Felix backed away, a reflexive instinct, as the troll unfurled ape-like arms and then smashed its knuckles through the cobbles in front of where it was sitting with a sound like a brace of cannon misfiring in unison. Then, with frightening speed for something so massive and, mere moments ago, sedentary, the troll lurched upright. Felix swept his sword around with a cry, a sound weakly parroted by the free company as they too saw the unfolding monsters around the light of the bonfire.

  Those gains that he had been so proud of – all they had achieved was to get himself surrounded!

  Feeling a tug on his cloak, Felix glanced back over his shoulder. Gustav let go the tattered wool strip and added the second hand to that which already leaned heavily into his halberd. He shivered in his coloured rags, pried open chattering teeth.

  ‘Is General Straghov with you? We… failed her.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Ulrika,’ said Felix with conviction, angling his sword to guard both Gustav and himself from the advancing beastmen as Gotrek and Snorri’s arguments over the trolls grew increasingly ill-tempered. ‘She’s doing better than we are.’

  Hunger cramped Ulrika’s belly, hunched her double until the chains that shackled her wrists to the ceiling pulled taut. Snapping at the loop of naval chain that lay across her shoulder, she closed her mouth over the thick iron ring and sucked. Her fangs rooted uselessly over the surface, but the bitter iron taste and the sensation of feeding seemed to fool her stomach. Her pangs calmed, enough for her to realise what she was doing a
nd pull away, spitting rust from her lips and pitching up against the bars of her cage with a clangour of metal.

  Was this what she had been reduced to? She refused to give Throgg the satisfaction.

  Dimly, she became conscious of the violence being done on the surface. Stone and starvation could not block out the terror of so many beating hearts. In fact the hunger only made her senses more acute, sharpened the huntress’s instincts and heightened the already formidable vampiric drive to endure. It was Felix, she was certain. He had tried to save her before and, lost cause though he must have known it was, had been trying ever since. He would try again. He had always been a hopeless romantic.

  Ulrika wondered whether it might be best to wait for him to rescue her – he could still save her – but dismissed it with a snarl that shook her entire frame with its fury. She was not some Bretonnian maiden who had to await her questing knight. She was a warrior queen of the undying oblast and she would not put herself at another’s mercy: not Throgg, and not Gotrek or Felix either.

  Her gut beginning to clench once again, she glanced up through the curtain of chains to the troll bound to the opposite wall of the cage. Her eyes shone in the pitch dark. She shuffled forward, chains shadowing her like crows over a seer of Morr. Its somnolent heartbeat seemed to draw her in. Her gaze locked onto its neck and she licked fangs so sensitive that it hurt.

  She was hungry.

  ‘Gustav, behind me!’

  Felix backed into his nephew, pushing him bodily out of the path of a beastman spear and batting the weapon’s shaft aside on the flat of his sword. He wove under a questing knife, kicked the wielder in the shins, and then rose up on Gustav’s other side in time to block a strike intended for his nephew’s back. The impact rang up Felix’s arms. His shoulders felt like he’d just come off shift from a dwarf mine. His lungs burned. Had he really spent the past twenty years doing this? With a weary grunt, he flicked aside the beastman’s blade and ran the creature through.

  Beastmen flooded the square, filling it with breathy, braying cries, stamping hooves, and a smell whose only earthly analogue Felix could conjure was wet horse. Gustav’s free company was already outnumbered at least five to one and more of the beastmen were charging in between the statues that stood between them and the castle.

  The men were as weak and slow as Gustav himself and most had been left to defend themselves using weapons with which they had received little or no training. Only their discipline had prevented them being overrun in the first seconds, tightly blocked ranks serving them in lieu of shields and armour. They probably now wished they had spent as much time in Badenhof drilling as they had spent drinking Gustav’s wine, but no free company in the world could have expected to end up in a situation like this. Arrows zipped through the fray from somewhere behind them, taking out beastmen and harpies faster than Felix would have thought possible for a single archer. Felix had forgotten about Kolya amidst the action. Clearly the Kislevite was still ensconced somewhere amidst the outer ring of statues. Still, men were dropping like an ice troll’s winter scales, and the harpies, against whom the men had no defence with the beastmen at their front, were picking them off at will.

  Felix parried another blow meant for one of him or Gustav, he had ceased trying to distinguish, and then ducked as a harpy dropped straight down out of the sky a few feet away before flinging out its wings and shooting towards his head like a bullet. The creature swept overhead, the clawed tip of its wing missing Gustav by the length of a close shave, and tore a free company man from his feet. His savaged corpse dropped to the ground a few seconds later on the opposite side of the company’s formation. Licking gore from its stretched and fang-lined snout, the harpy glided higher and then swooped back around.

  Desperately, Felix cast around for a glimpse of Gotrek or Snorri amidst the chaos. If any of them were to have even the slimmest chance of getting out of this then it undoubtedly lay with the two Trollslayers. He couldn’t see them amongst the brutish beast shapes that surrounded them, but he could hear them somewhere off to the right where Felix had last seen them both charging towards the big woolly troll. From that direction came the shrill, overlapping tone of beastman screams, accompanied by the percussive basso of the troll, visible as shaggy head and shoulders above the horns and speartips that bristled from the surrounding combatants. It made the ground tremble and Felix’s bowels with it.

  ‘Come to my axe!’

  ‘Come to Snorri’s!’

  Felix made out the chomp of starmetal on flesh and saw a beastman physically lifted into the air by a rising blow, but before he could consider a means to reach them he was again forced to defend himself. Gustav summoned a cry and struck his halberd into the leather gardbrace of a thick-necked bruiser of a beastman. Sapped of any strength behind it, the blade sucked into the cured leather and caught there. The boar-headed beastman snorted, driving a hot dragon-like breath of rancid steam into Gustav’s face as it shrugged the halberd from its shoulder armour and brought up its own top-heavy falchion for the kill.

  With a gargling yell, Felix shoulder-barged the beastman underneath its swinging weapon. The creature was heavy enough to keep its feet, but was too big to react before Karaghul slid under its ribcage and speared its heart. Gustav sagged into his halberd.

  ‘You heroic… idiot.’

  Felix grinned tiredly. This was what happened when young men didn’t read the classics. Lazy language. The End Times themselves.

  He withdrew his blade from the beastman’s chest, an awkward procedure due to the angle of penetration and the way the big gor had fallen against him, and was exposed and off-guard when a shriek went off behind him like a matchlock round.

  Felix twisted quickly, making it just halfway when a black shape hissing with fangs and tearing claws barrelled into his side and flung him through the air. Felix felt the breath slammed from him and the bruise sink between his ribs and spread. Claws designed for slicing bone and opening the scaled underbellies of dragons raked down his mail, sending metal ringlets flying. Felix’s armour had held up as well as Felix himself, but they had both seen their share of wear and parts had weathered the years better than others. Some of the links held while those around them scattered, denting, twisting, edges daggering into Felix’s sides in a dozen distinct sources of pain. Felix screamed as the harpy tried to pull away and lift off, only to find its claws snagged between two deformed mail links just above Felix’s hip. The creature shrieked and beat its wings harder. Its breath struck Felix with its rotten meat foulness. The body-reek, pillowed over his face with every beat of its black-flesh wings, made him nauseous enough to black out for a second, long enough to miss the moment when his feet left the ground.

  And left his stomach behind.

  He swung for the harpy with his sword, but the creature had snared him just under his left arm and however well he timed his strokes he couldn’t lay so much as a nick on the harpy’s wing. He fought back with knees and elbows even as the creature stuttered higher and itself struggled to kick him off. The blizzard battered him fiercely as he rose over the heads of the trolls. Felix’s sword licked out as one passed briefly within reach, taking off its ear and distracting it enough for Snorri Nosebiter to batter it back into the fire.

  The eruption of heat under its wings shoved the keening harpy higher. Felix screamed as it yawed and rolled, seemingly out of its own control, over the inner ring of statues.

  They could have been headed towards the castle, but Felix was so disoriented by now that he could no longer tell up and down from left or right. He could see Gustav flailing about with his halberd as arrows punched down the beastmen closing from all around. Gotrek’s orange crest and blazing rune-axe were spinning across his vision, growing ever paler and more ethereal until with the cold finality of ice sealing a frozen lake, the snow swept it all aside. Snorri’s despondent curses sank into the storm. All he could hear now was the wind and the numb ringing
it left behind in his ears. The castle rolled into view.

  Felix thought he was going to be sick.

  Little squares of light wheeled across his vision as he spun, like stars accelerated across a night sky. A voice of calm reason somewhere inside his head told him that they were windows in the castle’s higher towers and indeed in some of the nearest he could make out iron bars, and faces pressed against them. He tried to spot whether Max was amongst them but his own speed of approach made it like picking a single image from a running flipbook.

  A pressing force of wind caused the harpy’s wings to ripple. Even Felix felt it in his belly, a sense of pressure closing from above. The harpy gave a keening cry as Felix looked up.

  A monster with the body of a giant lion and wings like a dragon’s arrowed through the obscuring snow. It had three heads. A proud lion’s mane and long ram’s beard were wizened by snow and fullered by the wind. A third, reptilian head gazed frostily down, ignoring Felix and the harpy as entirely and literally beneath its notice as it shot past. The chimera levelled out just at the liminal of Felix’s ability to see and then ploughed the flagstones with fire.

  That he did see. He felt the heat rise on the screams of friend and foe alike.

  ‘Gustav!’ Felix screamed, as a second downblast of air pummelled his cheeks.

  The griffon that he had earlier seen from the river powered overhead with an almost negligent beat of its vast feathered wings. Felix could not believe his eyes. It had to demand an iron will to hold such powerful and independent-minded beasts in step. The death of the Troll King then would surely herald the break-up of his army. Whether that was necessarily a good thing and would not simply entail more griffons and chimerae flying south to attack the Empire was a question he was not even going to try and answer while he was spinning towards a granite wall.