by David Guymer
Kolya, however, had the fearful look of a man watching prophecy unfold.
Instinct caused Felix’s fingers to tighten around his sword’s grip. With a conscious effort he forced them to relax. What exactly did he plan on doing with it? Would he fight Snorri? For that matter, would he fight Gotrek?
‘It’s not your fault that you couldn’t save Gotrek’s family,’ said Felix more firmly. However stubborn the two dwarfs wanted to be, this foolishness was not going to end in violence if Felix had any sway at all over either of them.
‘Helga was still alive,’ said Snorri.
There was a faint rattling sound that Felix realised was Gotrek’s axe chain. The dwarf held his weapon so tightly that it shook. ‘And the little one?’ One of the pieces of Felix’s heart broke a little more. Little one. That was what Gotrek called Kat. Shallya’s tears, that had been what Gotrek called his daughter. ‘What of Gurna, Snorri?’
Snorri shook his head. His eyes were wet, his cheeks red, and it looked like opening his mouth now would be the breaking of the dam.
‘Tell me what happened to my wife, you clod-witted zaki.’
Tears streaking unchecked down his face, Snorri held out his hammer. ‘It wasn’t…’ He paused, corrected himself. ‘It was Snorri’s fault. She was burned. It was smoky. Snorri thought it was a goblin. But it was Snorri’s fault.’
Felix felt the death knell in his heart as Snorri uttered his next words.
‘It is Snorri’s fault you are a Slayer now. Snorri killed Helga.’
One muscle at a time, Gotrek’s face tightened into an image of such primal fury that Felix found himself backing out of the way of it lest he unintentionally make himself a target. Gotrek glared at the hammer that Snorri held before him. ‘I’d take that back if I were you.’
Nodding acceptance of what he had to have known must come next, Snorri did as he was bid, settling into what passed as a ready stance. Gotrek bared his teeth and brandished his rune-axe.
‘It was an accident,’ Felix screamed at the top of his lungs. ‘Tell him it was an accident, Snorri. And Gotrek, I can’t believe you have a better friend in this world.’
‘I’ve killed better friends than Snorri Nosebiter,’ said Gotrek.
Felix watched in anguish as the two old friends circled each other.
There were no more words to be spoken.
Gotrek feinted left, then struck a short blow for Snorri’s right shoulder. Half blind with tears, Snorri saw it late, parrying on his hammer with a sombre clang and replying with a punch across Gotrek’s jaw. Gotrek took a step back to steady himself, then thumped out with the butt of his axe and cracked something under Snorri’s armpit. The old Slayer took it with barely a grunt, swinging out with hammer and mace while Gotrek parried with a cold-simmering wrath.
‘Stop this,’ Felix croaked, realising that it was no longer just Snorri with tears in his eyes.
This could not be happening! Felix pinched the skin of his wrists between glove and sleeve. Surely this must be another dream.
The two dwarfs fought through the raging snow in bitter silence, barely even moving from the spot in which they’d started, their efforts punctuated only by the crunch of muscle and bone and Snorri’s wracking sobs. It appeared even. Snorri had the clear advantage in brawn and the benefits of Max’s healing, but Gotrek’s axe balanced those odds considerably. Felix gave his head a violent shake. He couldn’t believe he was even thinking about this, but nor did he dare to intervene. Snorri swung his hammer for Gotrek’s temple with a shuddering sob only to see it blocked, then followed through with a kick of his mace that Gotrek turned aside by a deft interception with his knee. Snorri’s metal leg was pushed behind him and landed in the snow amidst a loose pile of coins. He flung out his arms for balance, presenting Gotrek with as clear an opportunity for a killing blow as he was ever likely to see, but it was as if the Slayer didn’t even see the opening, instead knocking Snorri back onto his feet with a jab from his axe butt.
Gotrek was holding back, Felix realised. Kolya and the others might not even have noticed, but Felix had known the Slayer too long. Had it been otherwise then Snorri Nosebiter would never had stood a chance.
‘Fight Snorri properly,’ said Snorri. ‘Let him die like a Slayer. Let him walk in the Ancestors’ Hall. Let him do something right.’
Felix watched with his hand over his mouth. He must have misheard. Surely even Snorri could not think of this as some act of kindness.
With his one eye scrunched tight, Gotrek unleashed a strangled roar and struck low. Snorri parried it, but Gotrek came again. Again Snorri blocked but there was no chance for him to counter now before Gotrek’s axe came for him again and he was forced to give ground under a torrent of blows. Snorri fought furiously with tears running down his cheeks and blocking his squashed nose. Gotrek pressed him back with his eye still closed. Both wanted to die although neither wanted to kill, but they were both still Slayers.
To the end.
Gotrek’s starmetal blade clove through Snorri’s metal leg just below the attachment to his thigh. Snorri wobbled, an idiot smile on his tear-stricken face as Gotrek then cracked the flat across his mouth and knocked him down. The old dwarf looked up with a full face, wet eyes meeting Gotrek’s one and seeing peace.
No, thought Felix. No, no, no–
He looked away.
There was a wet crack. Then a thump.
Felix buried his eyes in his hand and wept. Tears blurred the gaps between his fingers, but beneath him he saw blood seeping through the snow around his feet.
There was a moment’s silence and then a voice at his side.
‘We’re done here, manling. I should never have let him talk me into that journey to Karag Dum. I knew I would regret it.’
Pulling his hand from his face and wiping tears into his beard in the process, Felix looked up. The Slayer’s one eye was dead, his face a funerary mask of someone Felix no longer recognised. His voice, however, was rune-hard and deadly clear.
And it brooked no argument.
‘On my oath, you’re going back to the little one where you belong.’
Epilogue
Early Spring 2525
Talisznia burned. The tirsa’s stubborn earth huts glowed a fitful bronze, choking in smoke whilst yielding the barest flicker of flame. These were the last weeks of winter: the snow over the Eastern Oblast had become heavy as it turned slowly to ice and the tirsa’s wood stores were all but exhausted. Tables and chairs had been used for cooking or whittled into arrow shafts. Even the precious stocks of dried grass and animal feed had been consumed weeks ago while the animals’ dung, normally reserved over the deep winter as a fuel in case raspotitsa did not relinquish the roads before the wood stores ran low, had been turned to shoring up the stockade. There was not a single drop of kvass.
In short, there remained precious little in Talisznia of fit state to burn, but the Kurgan were determined to make a pyre of it just the same.
The wise woman did not know why, but the smoke billowed up into the endless blue expanse of the Ledevremya sky. It would have been visible for hundreds of miles, a tribute pole two miles high erected in blood and ash by the destroyers of Talisznia. Perhaps that was the reason, but she suspected that gave too much credit to their intelligence.
Watching from horseback half a mile out from the sputtering south stockade, she saw marauder horsemen race circuits of the conquered tirsa, brandishing the severed heads of its people and yelling at the top of their lungs. In a temporary encampment of rippling skin tents just out of bow range of the stockade, large bearded men with arms decked in silver rings fought over what meagre loot the vanquished of Talisznia had not already eaten or burned.
It was all precisely as she had foreseen it. The wise woman had shown these events and others to the dreams of so many. That was her gift, to cast dreams of portent into the aethyr that they
might find a home in the unconscious of one to whom her prophecies bore special resonance. Through dreams had she foretold the Troll King’s fall, the Auric Bastion’s collapse, the sack of Rackspire and Badenhof and Bechafen and scores of other towns and forts that she knew only by the image of them aflame.
Sometimes she wondered how it would feel to have a dream of her own.
‘You share your dreams with all, Morzanna, or whatever name you now go by, visions that could make an empire – or break one.’
The wise woman pursed her lips, studying the black eddies in the rising smoke. For a passing moment they formed sweeping black wings, a crown.
‘Perhaps,’ she answered, although she was alone but for the horse and the cutting oblast wind. ‘No one I have forewarned has cheated my fate yet.’
‘Is that regret I hear?’
‘This is not the first time I have watched my home burn.’ An ululating cry carried from the Kurgan encampment and she watched the zar and his chosen champions parade out from the slow-collapsing stockade in the glittering wargear of Stefan Taczak and the Dushyka rota. ‘These were brave men. I gave you my soul but I still have a heart.’
‘Your pain soothes me in my oblivion, my daughter. I will taste of it more in the coming days.’
Morzanna bared her sharp teeth in a reluctant smile. She knew. She had seen it. Why else would she be here?
‘The daemon-slayer and his companion will try to stop you.’
The wind passed cold laughter over her ears. ‘They will try, but they are destined to fail.’
‘How many times have I watched others make such a claim about those two?’
‘This time is different. The world is different. You have foreseen their demise and through you have I willed it so.’
Morzanna shivered as the air around her cooled. A darkness bled into the sheer blue sky and the smoke of Talisznia rose like a horned black head to regard her – small in her evil, insignificant in her power, and but transient in her immortality. She nodded obediently and turned her horse around. It was a long way to the Empire.
‘Yes, Dark Master.’
The saga of Gotrek and Felix will conclude in Slayer
Spring 2015
About The Author
David Guymer is the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Kinslayer and City of the Damned, along with the novel Headtaker and novella Thorgrim, and a plethora of short stories set in both the Warhammer World and the 41st millennium. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding.
The Lord of the Undead rises to claim the land of the living and usher in an age of darkness.
A Warhammer End Times novel
For Rose
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Cover by Slawomir Maniak.
Map artwork by Nuala Kinrade.
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