by William King
When she opened her eyes she looked into the face of death. Over her loomed a huge creature. It was man-shaped but goat-headed, its horns twisted to resemble a strange X-shaped rune. Ruddy fur covered its mighty body; Ulf’s brains covered its massive club.
The beastman had looked down on her and she saw that it had no eyes, only a blank expanse of flesh where the sockets should have been. Even so, she somehow knew that it could see her as well as any sighted thing. Perhaps the circlet of desiccated eyeballs dangling from its neck gave it sight. It had inspected her with a puzzled expression, then reached down and touched her long black hair, running its finger through the white streak that ran from her forehead to the back of her neck. It shook its head and backed away almost fearfully.
Nearby Karl bled to death, whimpering piteously as he failed to staunch the blood pumping from the stump where his left hand had been. Kat couldn’t see what was happening behind the tumbled table where two beasts had Heide pinned but she could hear the old woman’s screams. She had fled out into the night.
And there she had met the beautiful white-faced woman who was mistress of the beasts. She was sitting astride a great red-eyed steed whose flesh was as black as her ornate armour. The woman looked at the destruction, her smile revealing fanged incisors drawn back over ruby-red lips. Her hair was long and black with a white strip running down the middle. Kat wondered whether it was the mark of Chaos – and whether that was the reason the beastman had spared her.
The woman held a black sword in one hand, runes glowed the colour of blood along its length. She noticed Kat and looked down at her. For the second time that night, the girl thought she was dead. The woman had raised her blade as if to smite her. Numbed with terror, Kat had just stood there looking up at her, her gaze had locked with the warrior’s.
The woman paused as their eyes met. Kat thought she detected a faint glimmer of sympathy there. The woman mouthed the word ‘No’, and nudged her mount into motion with a touch of her spurs. She rode off down the street, not looking back. Kat noticed the bonfire and the beaten villagers being pushed towards it and scurried into hiding.
Soon the sound of bestial chanting rose over the village. The burnt meat smell of roasting flesh, both tantalising and sickening, filled the air. The hideous screams of the dying villagers filled the night.
Kat had hidden until morning, praying for the souls of her friends, praying she wouldn’t be found. When the sun came up, the beasts were gone as if they had never been there. But the smoking ruins of the village, and the piles of charred skulls and cracked bones in the still-smouldering embers of the bonfire showed it had not been a nightmare.
Suddenly it was all too much for Kat. She started to cry with great choking sobs. Tears ran down her soot-blackened face.
‘What was that, manling?’ the deep voice said nearby.
Kat stifled her sobs as stealthy footfalls approached. Something blocked the sunlight in the entrance to her hiding place. She stared up at a man’s face, framed by long golden hair. The eyes that looked at her were scared and tired and world-weary. A long scar marred the man’s cheek. She found herself looking at the sharp point of a longsword. Faint markings were etched into the blade.
‘Come out slowly,’ he said. His soft, cultured voice was cold now and held no hint of mercy. Kat crawled slowly out into the daylight. She could tell she was near to death at this moment. Fear of the unknown had made the man desperate.
She stood up. The man was much taller than she was and dressed like a bandit. A shabby cloak of faded red wool was thrown back over his right shoulder, leaving his sword arm free. His clothes were stained and patched and very travel-worn. His high leather boots were cracked and scuffed.
He glanced around with an edgy wariness that seemed habitual.
‘It’s only a little girl,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Maybe a survivor.’
The figure that stomped into view past the tumble-down remains of Frau Hof’s bakery was just as terrifying in its own way as the beasts had been. It was a dwarf – but one which bore little resemblance to the travelling merchants Kat had known.
He stood halfway between Kat and the bandit in height but he was heavy, maybe as heavy as Jan the blacksmith had been and certainly more muscular. A patchwork of intricate tattoos covered his whole body. A huge crest of red-dyed hair rose over his shaven skull. A crude leather patch obscured his left eye and a gold chain ran from his nose to his left ear. In one ham-sized fist he carried the largest axe Kat had ever seen.
The dwarf glared at her belligerently. There was a sense of barely restrained wrath about him that was desperately frightening. He showed none of the obvious fear his companion did.
‘What happened here, child?’ he demanded brusquely in a voice like scraping stones.
Staring into that one mad, inhuman eye, Kat could think of no response. The man touched her gently on the shoulder.
‘Tell us your name,’ he said softly.
‘Kat. Katerina. It was the beasts. They came from the forest, killed everybody. I hid. They left me alone.’
Kat found herself babbling the story of her encounter with the beastmen and the woman in the black armour to the astonishment of the two adventurers. By the time she had finished the dwarf looked at her wearily. His ferocious expression had softened a little.
‘Don’t worry, child. You’re safe now.’
‘I hate trees. They’re like elves, manling,’ Gotrek said. ‘They make me want to take an axe to them.’
Felix Jaeger peered into the shadowy forest nervously. All around, the great trees brooded, ominous presences whose branches met over the trail, intertwined like the fingers of a giant at prayer, blocking out the sun until only a few solitary shafts of light illuminated the way forward. Moss covered the branches and the scaly bark of the trunks reminded him of the withered hides of dead serpents. A stillness as old as the vast primeval forest surrounded them, broken only by occasional stirrings in the undergrowth. The sound spread across the silence until it vanished as mysteriously as ripples from the surface of a pool. Here in the forest’s ancient, evil heart no birds dared to sing.
He was forced to agree with Gotrek. He had never really liked woods, not even as a child. He had never shared his brother’s passion for hunting. He had always preferred to be left at home with his books. Forests for him were scary places, the haunt of beastmen and trolls and nightmare creatures from darkest legend. They were the places to which those who showed the stigmata of Chaos were banished to. In their depths he had always pictured werewolves and witches, and ferocious struggles between mutants and other exiled followers of the Ruinous Powers.
Up ahead Gotrek vaulted the log which had fallen across the path, then turned and helped Kat to climb over it, easily lifting the child one-handed. Felix stopped in front of the obstruction, seeing that the bole was rotten and blotched with some strange fungus. Segmented insects scuttled along it, blindly burrowing into the reeking mould. Felix shuddered as he felt the damp wood under his hand, bracing himself for his jump. His boots almost slipped on the wet moss of the other side. He was forced to spread his arms to keep his balance. As he did so his fingers touched a cobweb stretched from the lower branches. He swiftly pulled his hand away and tried to brush off the sticky substance.
No, Felix had never liked forests. He had hated the summer retreats to his father’s manor in the wood. He had detested the pine-walled house surrounded by the timberlands which provided the raw materials for Gustav Jaeger’s drayage and shipping interests. By day it hadn’t been too bad if he didn’t stray far from the buildings, but by night his overactive mind peopled even the open, managed woodlands with a host of monstrous inhabitants. The goblins and daemons of his imagination found a ready home beneath the swaying trees.
He had at once envied and pitied the fur-clad woodsmen who kept his father’s estate. He had envied them their bravery, seeing them almost as
heroes facing the terrors of the untamed land. He had pitied them for having to live constantly on their guard. It had always seemed to him that anyone who lived in a settlement in the woods lived in the most precarious environments imaginable.
He could remember standing at his window and looking out into the green, and picturing it stretching away to the very end of the world, to those wastes where the foul minions of Chaos roamed. The strange noises and the clouds of fluttering moths attracted to the building’s lights did nothing to diminish his unease. He was a child of the city, of Altdorf’s urban sprawl. Getting lost in the woods was a nightmare, one that had recurred often in those long summer nights.
Of course it had been a joke: the Jaeger estate was ten leagues from Altdorf in the most cleared area of the Empire. The wood was thinned by ceaseless logging. It was tamed, cultivated land that bore no resemblance to the dense, tangled Drakwald in which he found himself now.
Gotrek paused suddenly and sniffed the air. He turned and looked back at Felix. Felix cocked his head to one side enquiringly. Gotrek made the sign for silence, frowning as if he were concentrating on hearing some distant sound. Felix knew that the dwarf’s hearing and sense of smell were better than his. He waited expectantly. Gotrek shook his head and then turned to move on. Was the malign presence of the forest getting on even the Slayer’s iron nerves?
What he had seen this morning was justification for anyone’s fears. These woods did indeed shelter forces inimical to humankind; Kat’s story confirmed it. He looked down at his hands and saw that they were trembling. Felix Jaeger thought himself a hard man but what he had seen in the ruined village would make even the hardest shudder.
Something had rampaged through Kleinsdorf like an irate giant through an anthill. The little village had been levelled with appalling malevolence and thoroughness. The attackers had not left a single building untouched, and no inhabitant save Kat had survived. The sheer senseless brutality of it astonished him.
He had seen things there that he knew he would see again in nightmares. A bonfire in the village square piled high with skulls. Fused ribs sticking out of the smouldering ash like unconsumed wood. Some had come from the skeletons of children. A disgusting scorched meat smell had filled his nostrils and he had tried to keep from licking his dry lips for fear of what the windblown ash might contain.
He had stood stunned in the silence and desolation of the ruined village. Everything about him was ash-grey or soot-black, save for the few fires which still flickered here and there. He had flinched in alarm as the roof collapsed on the devastated town hall. It had seemed like a dark omen. He had felt like a tiny atom of life in an endless empty desert. Slowly, a bit at a time, memory of that moment had etched itself into his brain.
High on the hill, the scorched walled castle stood, a stone spider clutching the hilltop with blasted stone feet. Before the gaping maw of its broken gate, hanged men dangled on gibbets, flies caught in its single-strand web. The village below was the playground of daemon children, idiot giants who had grown bored with their toy town and kicked it to flinders.
Little things filled the street. A broken pitchfork, its prongs crusted with dried blood. A temple bell lying half-melted in the rubble of the toppled church. A child’s wooden rattle and a shattered cradle. The printed pages of the Unfinished Book, the Sigmarite testament, floating on the breeze. Trails in the dirty street where bodies had been dragged, all leading to the central fire. A beautiful dyed dress, never worn, lying incongruously untouched in the street. A human femur, cracked for marrow.
He had seen violence before but never on such a scale and never so wantonly mindless. Even the carnage at Fort von Diehl had been a battle, fought by opposing sides for their own reasons. This had been a massacre. He had heard of such slaughters but to confront the hard, tangible evidence was altogether different. The reality, the implication that such things could and did happen, had always happened, scared him. How could Sigmar, how could any of the Gods, permit such things?
He was disturbed too that Kat had survived. Looking at the little girl walking in front of him, her shoulders slumped, her hair grimy and her clothing soot-stained, he wondered how she could have been allowed to live. That too made no sense – why had she, alone out of all the inhabitants of that sleepy community, been spared?
Was she a changeling, some slave of Darkness, luring them to their doom? Did he and the Slayer escort something evil towards its next set of victims? Normally he would have dismissed such a thought as utterly ridiculous; obviously she was just a frightened young child who had the good fortune to live where others had died. Yet here in the gloom of the deep forest such suspicion came easily. The stillness and silence of their surroundings worked on the nerves, and bred watchfulness and mistrust of strangers.
Only the Slayer seemed undisturbed by their predicament. He marched along boldly, avoiding the clutching tree roots that threatened to trip him, his easy pace eating up the miles. The dwarf moved with uncanny quietness for one so squat and heavy. In the shadows of the forest he seemed at home, somehow; he stood taller and looked more alert. His habitual slouch vanished, perhaps because his under-mountain dwelling people were adapted to darkness and the feeling of being enclosed. He never stopped, as Felix did, to survey the undergrowth whenever he heard rustling. He seemed quite confident in his ability to discern any threat.
The young man sighed, remembering the arguments he had had to use to prevent the dwarf from investigating the village further. The girl had at least proved a useful excuse for moving on and seeking a place of safety, where they might find her refuge. It had been that and the possibility that the creatures might be marching on the next village that had convinced the Slayer to take the road to Flensburg.
Felix paused, bidden by some buried instinct. He stood quite still and strained to hear anything out of the ordinary. Perhaps it was just his imagination, but it seemed to him that the very stillness of the woods had a quality of menace about it. It hinted at the presence of old evils, biding their time, waiting for victims.
Anything could lurk in those long shadows and now he knew that something did.
It was getting colder. A slight deepening of the gloom hinted that night was falling above the shroud of leaves. Felix glanced back over his shoulder, dreading the silence but dreading the sound of pursuit more. When he looked round again, Kat and Gotrek had vanished, disappearing round a curve in the path. Somewhere in the distance a wolf howled. Felix hurried to catch up.
Felix looked across the campfire at the Slayer. Gotrek sat propped up against the fallen tree trunk, gazing into the depths of the fire, watching the flickering flames as if he could divine some mysterious truth in their depth. His hands toyed idly with the flints of his firemaker. Lit from below, the stark angles of his face looked as rough-hewn as the face of a granite cliff. The flickering of their fire made shadows chase each other across the planes of his cheeks. His tattoos were shadowy blotches, like the signs of the last stage of some terminal disease. Light caught the pupil of his one good eye. It glittered inhumanly in its socket, a star reflected in the depths of a shadowy pool. Close to him Kat lay still, her breathing regular, apparently asleep. Gotrek sensed Felix watching him and looked up.
‘What ails you, manling?’
Felix looked away from the fire. The bright after-image of the flame ruined his night vision. Still, he scanned the shadows under the trees, looking for signs of hidden watchers. The image of the villagers of Kleindorf going to sleep with the forces of Chaos creeping up on them unawares came unbidden to his mind. He cast around for something to say, decided upon the truth.
‘Actually I’m… I’m a little worried, Gotrek. For some strange reason what we saw in that village back there frightened me. The gods alone know why.’
‘Fear is for elves and children, manling.’
‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’
Gotrek smiled. His few r
emaining teeth looked even yellower in the firelight. ‘Yes.’
‘You don’t seriously expect me to believe that dwarfs are never afraid, do you? Or is it Slayers who never know fear?’
‘Believe what you like, manling. That’s not what I said, though. Only a fool or a maniac is never afraid; only a child or a coward lets his fear master him. It is the mark of a warrior that he masters his fears.’
‘Didn’t the destruction of that village frighten you? Aren’t you afraid now? Something’s out there, Gotrek. Something evil.’
The Slayer laughed. ‘No. I am a Slayer, manling. Born to die in battle. Fear has no place in my life.’
Felix shook his head, unsure of whether Gotrek was mocking him. He was used to the dwarf’s erratic mood swings and starting to suspect that there were times when the Slayer possessed something close to a sense of humour. Gotrek put his flints back into his pouch and grasped the handle of his axe.
‘Rest easy, manling. There’s nothing you can do for the dead, and if whatever killed them is fated to find us there’s nothing you can do about that either.’
‘Is that supposed to reassure me?’
Suddenly the atmosphere of camaraderie evaporated as swiftly as it had formed. Anger blazed in the dwarf’s voice. ‘No, manling, it is not. But believe this: if I find the killers, there will be a reckoning in blood. Such evil as we witnessed this day will not go unpunished.’
There was no trace of human feeling in Gotrek’s voice now. Looking into the dwarf’s alien eye, Felix saw the madness there, the inhuman molten violence waiting to erupt. Just for a second he believed the dwarf, shared his mad conviction that he could stand against the dark power that destroyed the village. Then he recalled the sheer scale of the havoc that had been wrought and the moment passed. No warrior, not even one as mighty as Gotrek, could withstand that. He shuddered and drew his cloak tighter about him.
