by William King
THE MARK OF SLAANESH
‘As money was in short supply, we decided to return to the Empire and seek gainful employment of some sort. Our return from Karak Eight Peaks was in no sense an easy one. The weather was atrocious, the land bleak and empty, and my companion’s mood even more savagely unreasonable than usual. Where we had come south in relative comfort and safety as part as a large, escorted caravan, our journey northwards was accomplished with no aid from anyone, and no means of transport other than our own legs. The people of the few villages we entered were understandably wary of two armed strangers, and the provisions they sold us were expensive and not of the best quality.
‘It was perhaps unreasonable of me to expect any sort of respite from this seemingly unending chain of terrible adventures when we returned to my homeland, for it seems the Trollslayer and I were destined to forever be encountering minions of the Dark Powers. Even so, I would scarcely have credited the extent of their sinister influence, had I not witnessed it with my own eyes. Furthermore, I was destined to wrestle with the forces of darkness alone for a period, for an odd fate befell the Slayer…’
— From My Travels with Gotrek, Vol. II,
by Herr Felix Jaeger (Altdorf Press, 2505)
‘By Grungni! What was that?’ Gotrek Gurnisson bellowed, turning and raising his enormous axe defiantly.
As the second slingstone whizzed by his ear, Felix Jaeger ducked reflexively. The sharp stone splintered against the flat face of the nearest boulder, leaving a scar in its grey-green lichen covering. Felix threw himself behind the rock and glanced back with scared blue eyes, looking for the source of the attack.
The valley at the foot of Blackfire Pass was quiet. He could see only rolling tree-girt hills rising to the towering mountains beyond. He silently cursed the great rocks that filled the valley, blocking his line of sight.
Suddenly movement caught Felix’s eye. From high on his right, a tide of misshapen bodies teemed down the slope, dislodging a small avalanche of gravel and scree as they came. Shouting like maniacs, bestial figures leapt downhill towards him with the agility of mountain goats. The long, deep note of a hunting horn cut the air.
‘No, not now,’ Felix heard a voice whimper, and to his surprise, recognised it as his own. He was so close to civilisation. The long hard trail from Karak Eight Peaks to the southern borders of the Empire was nearly complete. He had fought goblins in the hills near the old dwarf city and skirmished with bandits prowling the ruins of Fort von Diehl. He had endured the cold heights of Blackfire Pass, shivered in the snow-covered trails leading to the old dwarfish routes under the peaks. He shuddered when he recalled the shadowy things that had lurked there and scuttled on many legs through the darkness. He had come so far and endured so much – and now he was within the borders of his homeland and still he was being attacked. It just wasn’t fair.
‘Stop cringing, manling,’ boomed Gotrek’s deep coarse voice. ‘It’s only a bunch of gods-forsaken mutants!’
Felix threw the dwarf a nervous glance, wishing he shared the Slayer’s confidence. Gotrek stood boldly on the open valley floor, disdaining the cover of the rocks, his great axe balanced negligently in one mighty fist. He seemed completely unworried by the hail of slingstones raising plumes of dust around his feet. An insane grin twisted his brutal features: unholy joy burned in his one good eye. Gotrek looked as if he was enjoying himself.
It was typical of the dwarf. The only time he seemed happy was in the thick of the fray. He had smiled when the goblins ambushed them, relishing the prospect of violence. He had actually laughed when the bat-winged monstrosities with a thirst for human blood and the faces of beautiful children had descended on them at the ford on Thunder River. The worse things looked, the happier the Slayer became. He welcomed the prospect of his own death.
Gotrek thumped his chest with his fist and roared: ‘Come on! My axe thirsts. She has not drunk blood in weeks.’ A slingstone whistled past his head. The Slayer did not even blink.
Felix thought Gotrek’s squat, massive frame presented much less of a target than his own tall, spare form. He shook his head; his berserker comrade probably didn’t take such things into consideration. Felix gave his attention back to their assailants.
They were indeed mutants; humans tainted and changed by the strange magic of Chaos. Some said this was because they had a trace of warpstone in their blood. Others said that they had been secret followers of the Dark, their appearance altered over time to reflect their inner corruption. A few sages maintained that they were innocent victims of a process of change overtaking all humanity. At that exact moment Felix did not care. He had a secret horror of the foul creatures which grew greater each time he encountered them. Fear filled him and provided fuel for murderous rage.
They were close enough now for Felix to distinguish individual members of the pack. The leader was a grossly fat giant with a belt of daggers stretched across his bulging belly. He was so obese that his body appeared to be made from dough. Great rippling folds of flesh bobbed up and down with each lumbering step. Felix was surprised that the earth did not shake under his monstrous tread. The leader’s babyish grin revealed a multitude of chins and almost as many missing teeth as Gotrek’s answering snarl. In one chubby hand he brandished a massive stone-headed mace.
Flanking the leader was a lanky creature taller than Felix. Its ear was notched from a vicious bite taken in some internecine squabble. A long thin strip of hair drooped like rotting lichen from atop its narrow, near-shaven skull. It howled a challenge as it raised its rusty scimitar high above its pointed head. Felix could see its incisors were fanged like a wolf’s.
An elk-headed giant paused and raised a great curling horn to its lips. Another thunderous blast rang out across the blasted landscape, then the mutant let the instrument swing once more from the chain round its neck and continued to charge, head forward, antlers down.
Behind them came a ragged horde of surly-faced followers. Each bore some stigmata of Chaos. Many were marked with weeping sores. Some had the faces of wolves, goats or rams. Some had claws or tentacles or great bludgeons of bone instead of hands. One had its head protruding from its belly, its neck a mere stump. Another had a hump on its back in which a great mouth glistened. The mutants brandished a motley assortment of crude weapons; spears and clubs and notched scimitars scavenged from forgotten battlefields. Felix estimated the number of attackers as somewhere above ten and below twenty. They were not odds that he relished, even though he knew the Slayer’s awesome physical prowess.
Felix cursed silently. They had been so close to escaping from the Black Mountains to the lowlands of the Empire’s southernmost province. From the brow of the pass the previous evening Felix had made out the lights of a town of men. He had been looking forward that very evening to a warm bed and a cold jack of ale. Now fear coursed through his veins like ice-water; he must fight for his life again. Involuntarily he let out a little moan.
‘Get up, manling. Time for some bloodletting,’ Gotrek said. He spat a huge gob of phlegm onto the rocks at his feet and ran his left hand through the massive red crest of hair that rose above his shaven tattooed skull. His nose chain tinkled gently; a strange counterpoint to his mad rumbling laughter.
With a sigh of resignation Felix threw his faded red cloak back over his broad right shoulder, freeing his sword arm for action, then he drew his longsword from its ornate scabbard. Reddened dwarfish glyphs blazed along the length of the blade.
The mutants were close enough now for him to hear the soft slap of their unshod feet and individual words in their harsh guttural voices. He could see greenish veins in yellowish, jaundiced-looking eyes and count individual studs on the rims of leather shields. Reluctantly he raised himself from behind his cover and prepared to fight.
He glanced at Gotrek, and to his horror saw a slingstone impact on the dwarf’s massive skull. He heard the crack and saw the Slayer sway. Fear fille
d the man; if the dwarf went down he knew he had no chance of survival against the swarm of assailants. Gotrek reeled but remained upright, then reached up and felt the wound that the shot had left. A look of surprise passed over his face when he saw the blood on his fingertips. It was replaced in an instant by an expression of terrible wrath. The Trollslayer let out a mighty roar and charged towards the cackling mutants.
His ferocious attack took them off guard. The fat leader only just managed to duck back as the Slayer’s axe whistled past his head. His agility surprised Felix. With a terrible crunch the axe tore through the chest of the thin lieutenant and then lopped off the head of a second attacker. The backstroke tore through a leather shield and sliced away an attached tentacle.
Without giving them time to recover, Gotrek tore among them like a deadly whirlwind. The fat leader scuttled well out of the reach of the lethal axe as he gibbered orders to his followers. The mutants began to surround the dwarf, kept at bay only by the great figure of eight described by Gotrek’s battleaxe.
Felix launched himself into the fray. The magical blade he had taken from the dead Templar Aldred felt as light as a willow wand in his hand. It almost seemed to sing as he clove a mutant’s skull from behind. The runes glowed bright as it cut away the top of the head as easily as a butcher’s cleaver cutting a joint of beef. The mutant’s brains fountained messily forth. Felix grimaced as the jelly splattered his face. He forced himself to ignore his disgust and keep on hacking at another mutant. A shock passed up his arm as he rammed his blade underneath a mottled ribcage into the creature’s rotten heart. He saw the mutant’s eyes go wide with fear and pain. Its wart-covered face wore a look of horror and it whimpered what might have been a prayer or a curse to its dark god as it died.
Felix’s hand felt wet and sticky now, and he adjusted his grip on the sword to keep it from slipping as he was attacked simultaneously from either side. He ducked the swing of a spike-headed mace and lashed to the right. His blade cut the cheek of a barrel-like mutant, severing the earflap of its leather cap. The helm slid forward on the creature’s face, covering its eyes and momentarily obscuring its vision. Felix kicked it in the stomach with the toe of his heavy Reikland leather boot and it doubled over, foolishly presenting its neck for the stroke that beheaded it.
Pain flashed through Felix’s shoulder as the mace caught him a glancing blow. He snarled and turned, driven to frenzy by the agony. The accursed one caught the look on his face and froze for a heartbeat. It raised its weapon in what might have been a gesture of surrender. Felix shook his head and chopped the creature’s wrist. Blood sprayed all over him. The mutant screamed and writhed, clutching at the stump of its arm, trying to staunch the flow of blood.
Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion now. Felix turned and saw Gotrek swaying like a drunk man. At his feet lay a pile of mangled bodies. Felix followed the slow sweep of the immense axe as it caught another victim, driving the ruined body back into two cringing foes. They fell in a tangled mass. His axe rose and fell in a bloody arc as Gotrek proceeded to hack them to pieces.
All vestiges of humanity and restraint fell away in a wave of bloodlust and fear and hatred. Felix leapt among the survivors. Swift as an adder’s tongue the enchanted blade flickered, the runes growing brighter as it drank more blood. Felix barely felt the jar of impact or heard the howls of pain and anguish. Now he was a machine, intended only to kill. He gave no more thought to preserving his own life. Only to the slaughter of his foes.
As swiftly as it had begun it was over. The mutants were in retreat, fleeing as fast as their legs would carry them, their fat leader fleetest of all. Felix watched them go. As the last of them was beyond reach, he turned howling with frustrated murder-lust and began to hack up the bodies.
After a while, he began to shake. Noticing, as if for the first time, the terrible ruin which he and the Slayer had wrought, he bent double and proceeded to be sick.
The clear cold water of the stream ran red with blood. Felix watched it swirl away and wondered at how numb he felt. It was as if the chill of the water had seeped into his veins. He realised how much he had changed since he had fallen into Gotrek’s company and he was not sure he liked it.
He remembered how he had felt after he had killed the student, Krassner, the very first to fall to his sword. That had been an accident during what had been supposed to be a boyish duel on the field behind Altdorf University. The blade had slipped and the man had died. Felix could remember the look of disbelief on his face and his own feeling of horror and tearful remorse. He had ended a life and he had felt guilty.
But that had happened to someone else, a long lifetime ago. Since then, since he had sworn to follow the Slayer on his doomed quest for a heroic death, he had killed and killed again. With each death, he had felt a little less remorse; with each death, contemplating the next one had become a little easier. The nightmares that had once afflicted him came no more to trouble him. The sense of waste and revulsion had left him. It was as if Gotrek’s madness had infected him and he no longer cared.
Once, as a student, he had studied the works of the great philosopher, Neustadt. He had argued in his great opus De Re Munde that all living creatures had souls. That even mutants were sentient beings capable of love and worthy of life. But Felix knew he had obliterated them without a second thought. They had been enemies, trying to kill him, and he could feel no real remorse at their deaths, only a wonder at his own lack of feeling. He asked himself where the change had occurred and could find no answer.
Was this why he loathed the altered ones so? Was it because he could see the changes happening in himself and feared that they might have an external manifestation? He found his new coldness sufficiently monstrous to justify it. How could it have happened and when?
Was it after Kirsten, the first great love of his life, died at the hands of Manfred von Diehl? He did not think so. The process was more subtle; a strange alchemy had transmuted him down all the long leagues of his wandering. A new Felix had been born here in these harsh lands by the world’s edge, a product of the bleakness of the place and the hardness of his life and too many deaths seen from too close.
He looked across at Gotrek. The Slayer sat hunched on a flat plate of rock that jutted out into the stream. A piece torn from Felix’s cloak was wrapped round his head, the red wool blotched a deep black by the dwarf’s dried blood.
Will I become like that eventually, Felix wondered, hopeless and mad and doomed, dying slowly from a hundred small wounds, seeking only a magnificent death to redeem myself? The thought did not disturb him – and that in itself was disturbing.
What had he lost and where had he lost it, Felix wondered, listening to the rush of the water as if it carried some coded answer. Gotrek raised his head and slowly surveyed the scene. Felix noticed that the patch had come away from his ruined left eye, revealing the scarred and empty socket.
Felix himself looked at the tangle of leafless trees and thorny scrub that surrounded them and the cold grey of the rock. He felt dwarfed by the dismal titanic shadow of the great snow-capped mountains and asked himself how they had come to this gods-forsaken spot so many miles from his home. For a second it seemed he was lost in the endless immensity of the Old World, that he had no point of reference in time or space, that he and the Slayer were alone in a dead world, ghosts drifting in eternity bound by a chain of circumstance forged in Hell.
Gotrek glanced over at him. Felix returned his gaze with a feeling almost of hatred. He waited silently for the dwarf to start gloating about his pointless futile victory.
‘What happened here?’ the Slayer asked.
Felix looked at him open-mouthed.
The land was greener now that they had left the mountains. The warm gold sun cast a mellow late afternoon light over the long coarse grass of the plains. Here and there patches of purple heather bloomed. Red flowers blossomed among the grass. Ahead of them, perh
aps a league away, a great grey castle loomed above the flatlands, perched on the craggy hilltop. Beneath it Felix could see the walls of a town. Smoke drifted lazily skyward from its many chimneys.
He felt more relaxed. He estimated that they would reach the town before nightfall. Saliva filled his mouth at the thought of some cooked beef and fresh-baked bread. He was heartily sick of the dwarfish field rations they had picked up in the Border Princes; hard biscuits and strips of dried meat. Tonight, for the first time in weeks, he could lie safe beneath a real roof and enjoy the company of his fellow men. He might even sup some ale before retiring to bed. Tension began to ease out of him. He felt his shoulders relax and became aware of just how keyed up he had been during the journey, straining constantly to spot any hidden threat the dangerous mountains might conceal.
He glanced worriedly back at Gotrek. The dwarf’s face was pale and he often stopped to look around them with a look of blank confusion, as if he could not recall quite why they were there, or what they were doing. The blow to the head had apparently taken a lot out of the Slayer. Felix could not tell why. In his time, he had seen Gotrek take a lot worse punishment.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked, half expecting the dwarf to snarl at him.
‘Yes. Yes, I am,’ Gotrek said, but his voice was soft and reminded Felix of an old man’s.
After the cool, clear air of the mountains and the scented freshness of the plains, the town of Fredericksburg came as a shock to the senses. From a distance the high narrow houses with their red-tiled roofs and white-washed walls had seemed clean and orderly. But even the dim light of the setting sun could not conceal the cracks in the brickwork and the holes in the slate roofs.
The narrow, maze-like streets were piled high with garbage. Starving dogs wandered from pile of rotting vegetation to heap of ordure, defecating liberally as they went. The cobbled streets smelled of urine and mould and fat dripping into cooking fires. Felix covered his mouth with his hand and gagged. He noticed the red blotch of a fresh flea-bite just above his knuckles. Civilisation at last, he thought ironically.
