Gotrek & Felix: Kinslayer

by David Guymer

  ‘You shouldn’t have been the one to do it,’ said Felix, pinching tears from his eyes and wiping his nose on his cloak. ‘I think you loved her more than I ever really did. And you always were more deserving of her.’

  ‘Maybe that was true once. Now?’ The mage looked down at his shaded hands. ‘Nagash’s rise affected everyone with a close bond to the aethyr. Perhaps that is why Ulrika fell so far so fast.’

  ‘No, she was always this way. She was always too in love with strength.’ He took a settling breath and turned to Max, reaching out to take the wizard’s arm. He had expected it to be cold but aside from being far too thin it felt more ordinary than it looked. ‘Are you well enough to go?’

  Max smiled. ‘As opposed to being well enough to stay? Just give me a few minutes. It will take that long to heal these men in any case and doing something good with my magic will undoubtedly be a restorative for me as well.’ He glanced back through the bars of the nearest cage, past the hissing ratman, to something beyond. ‘Strange how being on this side of the bars changes one’s perspective.’ He sighed. ‘At the time it all seemed so right, but I fear there is also a terrible mistake I need to rectify.’

  Felix nodded and turned to Kolya. The rangy Kislevite was re-sheathing his knife in his boot.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I swore to see the zabójka die,’ said Kolya, tapping the concealed blade. ‘So I will not need this.’

  Eighteen

  The Honesty of Death

  Snow drove in through the high windows. It swirled and it cut and it froze the eyes if they stared too long into the churning white. Wherever there was an object large enough to stand against it the snow piled up in drifts, half buried treasure glittering on the surface like crystals in white stone.

  The pinnacle of the Ice Tower was a trove, and one that had been collected by a most unfussy magpie. Rare books in filigreed leather bindings lay in stacks or in snow-covered heaps beside jewelled weapons, artefacts of Scythian silver or Ropsmenn amber and items of a scientific or magical nature so arcane in their value that only a handful of men left in the world would recognise them as precious. Against one wall, raised on a plinth of shields and chests and other artefacts all buried in snow, rested the ducal throne of Praag. It was a grim, imposing affair, as befitted the cursed city, carved from a single piece of rare Shirokij oak and embellished with cold stone. The strength or guile required to manoeuvre it to this high place was astounding. Incalculable wealth, troves of knowledge, and cultural beauty lay scattered like seed for the snow. Standing against one arm of the throne was a portrait of a raven-haired beauty with the eyes and cheekbones of the Sylvanian aristocracy before the coming of the vampire counts and garbed in the attire of that era. It looked to be a signature piece of the great portraitist, Kantor, one of the most influential to emerge from a city that had in his time been as famed for its culture as for its high walls and its kossars. It was worth a fortune.

  And then Gotrek put his foot through it.

  The backing board cracked under the Slayer’s ironshod boot, ripping the canvas, while the frame, itself a minor work of art, snapped like a twig as the dwarf kicked the encumbrance off his ankle and ducked. The Troll King’s massive stone hammer smashed the ducal throne to flying splinters. Gotrek covered his face with a massive arm and dived for the cover of a Gospodar tapestry, but too slow to prevent his arm and back from being stippled with slender wooden daggers. Throgg bellowed in horror at the irreplaceable beauty he had destroyed, goading himself to ever greater fury as he brought his hammer crashing down on that tapestry mere moments after Gotrek had got clear and hacked his axe across the monster’s shins.

  Felix wondered at the contradiction of a monster who would collect and treasure such things, when he was reminded of something he had read – it might have been a play by Tarradasch – which described a great work of art as ‘loneliness’s window’.

  Then he thought he understood.

  Throgg lifted his bleeding leg, the wound already clenching shut, and stamped the foot down where Gotrek had been. Snow flew back into the air to add to the swirl. Coins and jewels scattered like marbles. Felix debated whether or not to intervene, but this was Gotrek’s fight as much as Ulrika had been his. It was Troll King against Trollslayer, but more than that it was about vengeance for fallen kin and the rememberers had no part in it.

  Gotrek stood in knee-deep snow, his chest rising and falling like a bellows. The rune-light of his axe on the snow and his steaming breath gave him a red aura, deepening the dwarf’s empty eye socket until it resembled a pool of blood and throwing short and lancing shadows from the arrow in his bare chest. His crest was singed by acid and fire but somehow, like the Slayer himself, it still stood.

  The Troll King came in with his huge sledgehammer in a short grip, wielding the stone hammerhead almost as an extension of his own fists. Gotrek met the Troll King blow for blow, fighting with jaw clenched and teeth bared. Besides the rasp of his breath and the occasional grunt as his axe struck rock armour from Throgg’s hide, the Slayer fought in bitter silence. After one brutal exchange that had Gotrek furiously ducking and parrying, the Troll King gave a bottomless howl of frustration and flung his hammer out to its full length. He caught it at the base of the haft and swung it over his head, a dipping and cresting figure-of-eight that ploughed through antique cabinets and projecting columns alike and filled the chamber with a withering haze of debris.

  Felix swore.

  The chamber was surprisingly large when devoid of cages, but not nearly big enough for his comfort just then. He flung himself back to the wall and pressed himself flat as the hammerhead shot around at head height with a whump. Displaced air thumped his face. The bellows of the Troll King filled the chamber. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Kolya stumble into a dresser and then drop into a foetal crouch as Throgg’s hammer ripped through and buried him in kindling. Felix had a moment to think while the hammerhead shot around the room in an arc of destruction before whirring back at floor level.

  At the last second, Felix clambered onto a gold-banded pinewood chest, took a breath, then screamed as it was smashed apart from under him.

  The hammer’s impetus threw him a short way and he landed on his feet in the snow by one of the gaping windows. The ground beneath him wobbled and he realised he must have landed on a buried plate or shield. His heart lurched as it pitched him towards the window. He flailed but there was nothing to grab that hadn’t already been reduced to firewood and, for a second in which time slowed to a heartless crawl, it felt that the only thing holding him aloft was the icy wind pushing against his back. His fingers clawed through snow and air until a rag-bound hand caught them and pulled him back from the edge.

  Kolya flinched and dragged Felix low as the Troll King’s hammer whirred not far overhead. Felix nodded thanks and drew himself up against the wall beside the window, spreading his arms across it to reassure himself that it was not about to be taken away. Unable to help himself, he looked down. His stomach turned.

  It was a long way down to the Square of Heroes.

  The snow blinded what should have been a view across the entire city and beyond. Felix could see ghost glimmers of light within the snow. Occasionally another would flare brightly into existence before burning back. It could have been fires spreading through the city, some kind of artillery bombardment from the besiegers without or perhaps even some kind of magical assault. It was impossible to say for sure. The wind rushing through his hair brought thin and distant cries, like the sound of the sea heard through a shell.

  ‘I do not recall the troll having that weapon before,’ said Kolya.

  Tearing his eyes from the view, Felix clasped his hands around his sword. It seemed likely that Throgg had stored a weapon here for this eventuality, planning the necessities of an escape that he had foreseen might one day be required. Felix found himself looking around the devastated chambe
r, wondering what treasure the Troll King could not leave Praag without. The thought saddened him. Here was Kislev and he was watching its destruction.

  ‘Enough of this!’ Felix yelled, long hair whipping about his face as he brought up his sword. ‘I didn’t come all this way to watch at the end.’

  ‘Wait,’ Kolya shouted back. ‘Give the zabójka his chance.’

  ‘Fulfil your oath your way. I’ll do so in mine.’

  A throaty roar pulled the men’s attention back from the precipice in time to see Gotrek’s axe slice through Snorri’s embedded weapon and cut deep into the Troll King’s abdomen. Thick blood spurted through the Slayer’s crest and Throgg’s bellows turned from anger and frustration to pain. Scything his hammer back across his path, Throgg stumbled back. Almost immediately the wound began to regenerate, but Gotrek’s axe struck faster even than the Troll King’s metabolism, carving up fresh wounds faster than the old ones could be healed. The Slayer was tearing the troll apart piece by piece.

  ‘I can make you a rich dwarf, Trollslayer,’ Throgg roared, making a desperate parry and losing a thick wedge of his hammerhead to Gotrek’s starmetal blade. Gotrek’s axe answered for him, turning the Troll King’s hammer and slicing its blade through the mouths in the mutant troll’s side, and tearing off a scrap of red cloak. Throgg clasped his hand to his bleeding hip and howled so loudly that the snow whipping around him was momentarily shaken to a standstill. ‘There is wealth here beyond your imagining. A copy of the Karak Ungor Book of Grudges, perhaps, brought to Praag by its people after the hold’s fall. Now it is here. There is more. It is yours.’

  Gotrek ground his teeth and pressed the Troll King into full retreat with a storm of blows. He was being pushed towards the window, Felix realised, sliding out of the way and circling around the chamber wall with his sword raised in a guard.

  Throgg caught the bright flutter of his shredded cloak and turned to face him. His huge body was framed within the opening by a rippling white canvas of snow. ‘An alliance between my Troll Country and the counts of Sylvania, Felix – think of it. Max was wise enough to understand that I can save your Empire.’

  Felix shook his head. He didn’t consider himself especially wise, but he understood the Troll King’s argument well enough. Maybe it was even true that alliances with acceptable monsters like Throgg were the only way that the Empire would survive the current strife. Ulrika had certainly thought that way, but she had been cozened by easy power, and all Felix saw when he tried to see things her way were the bodies of those he loved.

  Snorri.

  Ulrika.

  Even poor Damir had deserved better than he’d got.

  A cold fury simmered in his chest. How did this beast even dare look him in the eye and request a boon of him? He took a deep breath and returned the Troll King’s gaze.

  Felix lowered his sword tip to the ground and gave the Troll King nothing.

  ‘I am surrounded by fools,’ Throgg growled, sweeping up his hammer and sending Felix and Kolya scrambling for cover. Gotrek simply stood with a faint leer of condescension on his brutal features. Throgg held his hammer poised above his head with the Slayer in his sights, and roared with confounded intellect. ‘There is not one here whose race deserves to survive more than mine.’

  Gotrek stepped negligently to one side as Throgg’s overarm stroke crashed through snow and flagstones alike with a force that shook the floor and had Felix hugging the wall for fear that it would collapse. Gotrek stamped his boot on the hammerhead as if to pin it down, then stepped fully onto it and brandished his axe above his head.

  ‘My father fought the bloodsuckers at Hel Fenn. I’d sooner spend the rest of my days digging dwarfs’ graves than lend my axe to them or you.’

  A look of malignant cunning entered Throgg’s eyes and in that second Felix saw what the troll meant to do. If the Slayer didn’t move when Throgg pulled back on his hammer then Gotrek was going to be going right over the troll’s shoulder and out the window for good measure.

  ‘Fools all!’ Throgg roared, drowning out Felix’s warning shout as huge muscles bunched under the Troll King’s arms and he pulled.

  Gotrek swayed for balance as he rose off the ground, spreading his feet across the stone and bringing his axe streaking down to shear through the hammer’s wooden haft. The Slayer rode his blockish stone mount for another few feet before it ran out of momentum and crashed back to the ground. The Troll King, however, found himself suddenly pulling against nothing. His arms flew back over his head and the mammoth beast stumbled. A foot trod in emptiness and Felix saw the comprehension in Throgg’s bitterly intelligent eyes as the distant earth secured its grip.

  The Troll King screamed as he fell.

  Felix tried to track his fall, but the blizzard had swallowed him whole and soon blew over even his cries. It was as though the Troll King had fallen into a pit with no bottom. Shaking his head, Felix withdrew from the edge. He felt like he hadn’t taken a breath in days.

  It was done. They were probably all dead men, but it was done. Not for the first time, he found cause to pick fault with whatever so-called destiny had brought him to this sorry place and time.

  ‘Troll thought it was cleverer than everyone,’ said Gotrek, peering down with his one good eye before spitting after Throgg to add a salty dose of insult to his injuries, and then stabbed a reversed thumb into his chest beside the arrow that was still stuck there. ‘Well, this dwarf was an engineer.’

  ‘Are you sure he is dead?’ said Kolya. ‘It is a big fall, but he is a troll.’

  With a grunt, Gotrek turned his back on the ledge and leant his axe against his shoulder. ‘I’m not walking all the way down there to find out.’ The Slayer deflated and shook his head glumly. He turned to Kolya. ‘That old woman promised me a doom.’

  ‘And one for your companion,’ added Kolya with a pointed nod towards Felix.

  Felix looked at them both blankly. This was, unsurprisingly enough, news to him. No one explained themselves, but he found he couldn’t rid his mind of the image of a headless body in bloody white plate.

  Ulrika.

  ‘She also promised one for Snorri.’

  Snorri Nosebiter stood under the doorway at the top of the stairs and Felix doubted he had looked as hale on the day he departed Karak Kadrin for the north. The injuries he had suffered in the battles leading up to the citadel had been closed. Even the ugly and infected wounds that the removal of his crest of nails had left in his head had shrunk to pinpricks of scar tissue. If not for the blood that no one had yet found time to clean from his massive torso and the rips in his breeches, Felix would have assumed he was looking at a ghost.

  Felix would have kicked himself if he wasn’t laughing so hard.

  Snorri wasn’t dead at all!

  Max Schrieber followed the old dwarf up looking tired and drawn, but his efforts healing Snorri and the others seemed to have proven the purgative to the system that the wizard had thought it would be. That eerie shadow still clung to him, but he seemed more himself, even finding the spirit to express dismay at the ruined treasures around him. Looking troubled and confused as though just woken from an unsettling dream, Gustav and his men filled the stairwell behind the old Slayer’s broad shoulders.

  They might all have been just portraits of men borne on Snorri’s back for all the attention they received from Gotrek. Even Max, with all the strangeness of his appearance, garnered little more than a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Snorri has to talk to you,’ said Snorri, staring fixedly at Gotrek. Felix had never seen the simple-minded dwarf so focused, so intense.

  ‘If it’s about your shame then I still don’t want to hear it,’ said Gotrek.

  Felix shook his head. For a race so infamously resistant to altered circumstances, Gotrek had taken his friend’s near-resurrection in his stride.

  ‘Snorri,’ said Felix in his most conciliat
ory tone, sliding between the old Slayer and Gotrek. ‘Perhaps this isn’t the best t–’

  ‘No!’ Snorri roared, striding forward and pointing an angry finger past Felix at Gotrek. ‘No. You will listen to Snorri now.’

  Felix held up his hands in an appeal for calm but he might as well have been invisible. Gotrek stuck out his chin and squared his shoulders.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  That seemed to take Snorri aback and his upper lip started to tremble. Felix noticed that he was carrying something golden in his hand.

  Sigmar, no, Felix prayed. He had already lost Snorri once.

  As if Felix were a child, Snorri pushed him out of the way and tossed the golden chain towards Gotrek who snatched it out of the air without looking. His one-eyed gaze held Snorri’s for a moment before lowering to his open palm. His breath caught and for a moment Felix thought that both dwarfs were going to weep, but then Gotrek’s expression darkened as if the sun had just passed away.

  ‘The Spider Lady told Snorri that when all his friends were together again he would have his doom. She told him it would bring nothing but pain.’

  Gotrek held out the hanging chain. ‘You tell me where you found this, Snorri Nosebiter, and pray that it’s a good tale.’

  Snorri’s eyes were puffed red as he shook his head but, though there was a tremor in his voice, his words were clear, as if recited from rote. ‘Snorri was there that day. He went home after he and old Borek lost you in the Wastes. It is his fault nobody warned them of the goblins. It is his fault–’ The threatened crack appeared at last, but Snorri managed to pass it and continue. ‘That you murdered that thane and had to become a Trollslayer. It is all Snorri’s fault!’

  Gotrek hadn’t moved a muscle, but his eye glittered.

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ said Felix. A tension hung over the chamber as if the wind no longer blew and the temperature of the snow had dropped to somewhere far below the point at which human marrow froze. Gustav looked between the dwarfs as if they had to be mad and Felix didn’t blame him. Max simply wore the stunned look of one too wearied by horror to reasonably process any more.