Trollslayer

by William King

  There were three dead servants in the kitchen. They too had their throats torn out. It looked like the man-wolf intended to slay everyone in the mansion. Felix did not doubt that he would be included in that reckoning.

  Looking at the dead bodies was almost enough to put Felix off his food. Almost. He had found fresh made bread on the table and cheese and beef in the larder. He gulped them down hungrily. They seemed like the best food he had ever tasted.

  The door opened and two wild-eyed men-at-arms entered. They looked at the corpses and then looked at him. Fear filled their eyes. Felix reached for the naked sword on the table.

  ‘You killed them,’ one of the men said, pointing an accusing finger.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Felix said, his words muffled by the bread and cheese filling his mouth. He swallowed. ‘Their throats were ripped out. It was the beast.’

  The men paused, undecided. They seemed too afraid to attack and yet filled with fear-fuelled rage.

  ‘You’ve seen it?’ one asked eventually. Felix nodded.

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Big! Head like a wolf. Body of a man.’

  An eerie howl echoed through the halls. It sounded close. The men turned and bolted for the door into the courtyard. As they did so, lean grey shapes sprang on them and pulled them down. Wolves had been waiting silently outside.

  Felix raced forward but was too late to help the men. Looking out, he saw that the main gate was once again open. What looked like the girl stood near it. Her head was thrown back. She appeared to be laughing.

  Hastily Felix closed the door shut and threw the bolts. He was trapped, but at least whatever had howled had not come any closer. He sat back down at the table, determined to finish what might be his last meal.

  Felix crept through the corridors once more, sword in one hand, glittering dagger in the other. He had sat in the kitchen as long as he dared while fear made a home in his gut. Eventually it seemed like a better idea to go meet his doom head on than to sit there like a frightened rabbit.

  He entered a great hall. The ceiling was high. Banners with the crest of Count Hrothgar hung from the ceilings. The heads of many animals, taken as hunting trophies, covered the walls. Two figures were present. One was the sorcerer, Voorman. The other was the man-wolf. It was monstrous, half again as tall as Felix, its chest rounder than a barrel. Great claws flexed at the end of its long arms. Undying hatred glittered in its red-wolf eyes.

  ‘You came, as I knew you would,’ the wizard said. At first Felix wondered how the sorcerer had known he was there, but then he realised that Voorman was talking to the man-wolf.

  ‘And now you will die.’ Lips never meant for human speech mangled the words. The sorcerer stepped back. His cloak billowed and light flared around his staff. The wolf stood frozen to the spot for a moment, then reached out and tore Voorman’s head off with one massive claw. The sorcerer’s body stumbled forward. Blood gouted from his severed neck and sprayed the beast-thing.

  From outside came the sound of wolves howling, and combat. Doubtless, the last survivors were being mown down, Felix thought. He eyed the beast warily.

  The sorcerer’s blood steamed. A cloud of vapour rose over his corpse, taking on the outline of the mage. It stretched its arms triumphantly and flowed towards the Child of Ulric. The mist entered the creature’s mouth and nostrils and it stood there for a moment, clutching its throat and seemingly unable to breath. The light vanished from its eyes and then a hellish green glow flickered there.

  When the creature spoke again, its voice was Voorman’s.

  ‘At last,’ it said. ‘The spell of Transmutation is a success. Immortality and power are mine. The beast’s strength is mine. I will live until Lord Tzeentch comes to claim this world. All things are indeed mutable.’

  Felix stood aghast. A horrified understanding of what he had witnessed filled his brain. Voorman’s plan had come to fruition. The trap was sprung. The corrupt soul of the wizard had taken possession of the man-wolf’s body. His malign intelligence and sorcerous power would live on in its monstrous shape. Voorman now possessed the strength and invulnerability of the Children of Ulric as well as his own evil powers.

  Slowly the terrible green gaze came to rest on Felix. He felt the strength leech off him under that baleful glare. Outside he heard the wolves whimper in fear and the bellow of a warcry that sounded strangely familiar. The man-wolf gestured and, hypnotised, Felix stepped closer until he was within striking distance of its massive blood-spattered claws. Voorman reached out, his massive talons closing…

  Throwing off his fear, Felix ducked and lashed out with his sword. He might as well have struck a stone statue. The keen edge of the blade bounced. The man-wolf’s return slash tore Felix’s jerkin. Pain seared his side where the razor-edged claws bit deep. Felix sprang away. Only the fact that his reflexes were on a knife-edge had saved him from being gutted.

  Things seemed to happen in slow motion. The man-wolf wheeled to face him. Felix circled. The beast sprang. Its rush was as irresistible as a thunderbolt. It bore Felix over, its enormous arms encircling him in a hug that threatened to snap his ribs like twigs. Frantically Felix stabbed downwards with the dagger in his left hand. To his surprise it pierced fur. There was a smell like rotting meat and the man-wolf threw back its head and howled.

  Felix kept stabbing. Where he stabbed, the flesh became soft. The wolf’s grip was weak now. Felix pulled himself clear and kept stabbing. Pockets of blackness appeared in the man-wolf’s fur like spots of rot in overripe fruit. He kept stabbing. The man-wolf fell and the rot spread across its body, consuming it completely. The mighty form simply withered, overcome by the baneful runes on the dagger. Then the hellish glow left the weapon. It felt inert in Felix’s grasp. He opened numb fingers and let it fall to the floor.

  It was a long time before he pulled himself to his feet to look around the hall. The girl stood sullenly in the doorway. Gotrek stood behind her like an executioner. The blade of his massive axe lay against her neck.

  ‘Thought I’d never get to the end of those damn tracks. Had to kill about fifty wolves to get in, too,’ the Trollslayer said, inspecting the scene of carnage with a professional air.

  ‘Well, manling, it looks like you’ve had a busy night. I hope you’ve left me something to kill.’

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  William King was born in Stranraer, Scotland, in 1959. He is the author of the Tyrion & Teclis trilogy and the Macharian Crusade, as well as the much-loved Gotrek & Felix series and the Space Wolf novels. His short stories have appeared in many magazines and compilations, including White Dwarf and Inferno! Bill currently lives in Prague.

  An extract from Skavenslayer.

  ‘Stuck in a sewer, hunting goblins. What a life,’ Felix Jaeger muttered with feeling. He cursed all the gods roundly. In his time he had come to consider himself something of an expert on unprepossessing surroundings but this must surely take the prize. Twenty feet overhead, the population of the city of Nuln went about its lawful daily business. And here he was, in the dark, creeping along narrow walkways where a single slip could put him over his head in reeking foulness. His back ached from stooping for hours on end. Truly, in all of his long association with the Trollslayer, Gotrek Gurnisson, he had never before plumbed such depths.

  ‘Stop moaning, manling. It’s a job, isn’t it?’ Gotrek said cheerfully, paying not the slightest heed to the smell or the narrowness of the ledge or the closeness of the bubbling broth of excrement the sewerjacks called ‘the stew’.

  The Slayer looked right at home in the endless maze of brickwork and channels. Gotrek’s squat muscular form was far better adapted to the work than Felix’s own. The dwarf picked his way along the ledges as sure-footed as a cat. In the two weeks they had been part of the sewer watch, Gotrek had become far more adroit at the job than ten-year veterans of the service. But then he was a dwarf; his peo
ple were reared in the lightless places far beneath the Old World.

  It probably helped that he could see in the dark, Felix thought, and did not have to depend on the flickering light of the watchmen’s lanterns. That still did not explain how he endured the stink, though. Felix doubted whether even the dwarfholds smelled quite so bad. The stench down here was exquisitely vile. His head swam from the fumes.

  The Trollslayer looked peculiar without his usual weapon. Felix had come to think of the battle-axe as being grafted to his hand. Now the dwarf had his huge starmetal axe strapped across his back. There was not enough space to swing it in most areas of the sewer. Felix had tried to get Gotrek to leave the weapon in the watch armoury alongside his own magical sword but had failed. Not even the prospect of its weight dragging him below the sewage if he fell in could cause the Slayer to part with his beloved heirloom. So Gotrek carried a throwing hatchet in his right hand and a huge military pick in the other. Felix shuddered when he imagined the latter being used. It resembled a large hammer with a cruel hooked spike on one side. Driven by the dwarf’s awesome strength he did not doubt that it could shatter bone and tear through muscle with ease.

  Felix tightened his grip on his own short stabbing sword and wished that he still carried the Templar Aldred’s dragon-hilted mageblade. The prospect of facing goblins in the dark made him long for the reassurance of using his familiar weapon. Perhaps Gotrek was right to keep his axe so close.

  In the gloom of the lantern light, his fellow sewerjacks were ominous shadowy figures. They wore no uniform save the ubiquitous scarves wrapped round their heads like Araby turbans, with a long fold obscuring their mouths. Over the last two weeks, though, Felix had become familiar enough with them to recognise their silhouettes.

  There was tall, spare Gant whose scarf concealed a face turned into a moonscape by pockmarks and whose neck was a volcanic archipelago of erupting boils. If ever there was a good advertisement for not staying a sewerjack for twenty years Gant was it. The thought of his toothless smile, bad breath and worse jokes made Felix want to cringe. Not that he had ever pointed this out to Gant’s face. The sergeant had hinted that he had killed many a man for it.

  There was the squat, ape-like giant Rudi, with his massive barrel chest and hands almost as big as Gotrek’s. He and the Trollslayer often arm-wrestled in the tavern after work. Despite straining until the sweat ran down his bald pate, Rudi had never beaten the dwarf, although he had come closer than any man Felix had ever seen.

  Then there were Hef and Spider, the new boys as Gant liked to call them, because they had only been with the sewer watch for seven years. They were identical twins who lived with the same woman on the surface and who had the habit of finishing each other’s sentences. So strange were their long, lantern-jawed faces and their fish-like staring eyes, that Felix suspected that in-breeding or mutation was part of their heritage. He did not doubt their deadliness in hand-to-hand combat, though, or their dedication to each other and their girl, Gilda. He had seen them do terrible things with their long hook-bladed knives to a pimp who had insulted her one night.

  Along with the burly, one-eyed dwarf, these were the men he worked with, as desperate a crew as he had ever known. They were vicious men who couldn’t find work that suited them anywhere else and who had finally found an employer who asked no questions.

  There were times when Felix felt like going along to the office of his father’s company and begging for money so he could leave this place. He knew they would give it to him. He was still the son of Gustav Jaeger, one of the Empire’s wealthiest merchants. But he also knew that word of his capitulation would get back to his family. They would know that he had come crawling back to them, after all his fine boasts. They would know he had taken the money he had affected to so despise. Of course, it had been easy to despise money on the day he had stormed from their house, because he had never known the lack of it. His father’s threat to disown him was meaningless because he simply had not understood it. He had grown up rich. The poor were a different species: sad, sickly things that begged on street corners and obstructed the path of one’s coach. He had learned since that day. He had endured hardship and he thought he could take it.

  But this was very nearly the last straw: being forced to become a sewerjack, the lowest of the low amongst the hired bravoes of Nuln. But there had simply been nothing else for it. Since their arrival no one else would hire two such down-at-heel rogues as himself and Gotrek. It pained Felix to think of how he must have looked, seeking work in his tattered britches and patched cloak. He had always been such a fine dresser.

  Now they needed the money, any money. Their long trek through the land of the Border Princes had yielded no reward. They had found the lost treasure of Karak Eight Peaks but they had left it to the ghosts of its owners. It had been a case of find work, steal or starve – and both he and the Trollslayer were too proud to steal or beg. So here they were in the sewers below the Empire’s second greatest city, crawling beneath a seat of learning that Felix had once dreamed of attending, haunting slimy tunnels below the home of the Elector Countess Emmanuelle, the most famous beauty of the nation.

  It was not to be borne. Felix wondered constantly what ill-omened star had marked his birth. He consoled himself with the thought that at least things were quiet. It might be dirty work but so far it had not proved dangerous.

  ‘Tracks!’ he heard Gant shout. ‘Ha! Ha! We’ve found some of the little buggers. Prepare for action, lads.’

  ‘Good,’ Gotrek rumbled.

  ‘Damn!’ Felix muttered. Even as inexperienced a sewerjack as Felix could spot these tracks.

  ‘Skaven,’ Gotrek hawked and spat a huge gob of phlegm out into the main channel of the sewer. It glistened atop a patch of phosphorescent algae. ‘Rat-men, spawn of Chaos.’

  Felix cursed. On the job only two weeks and already he was about to meet some of the creatures of the depths. He had almost been able to dismiss Gant’s stories as simply the imaginings of a man who had nothing better with which to fill his long tedious hours.

  Felix had long wondered if there really could be a whole demented subworld beneath the city as Gant had hinted. Were there colonies of outcast mutants who sought refuge in the warm darkness and crept out at night to raid the market for scraps? Could there actually be cellars where forbidden cults held ghastly rituals and offered up human sacrifices to the Ruinous Powers? Was it possible that immense rats which mocked the form of man really scuttled through the depths? Looking at those tracks it suddenly seemed all too possible.

  Felix stood frozen in thought, remembering Gotrek’s tales of the skaven and their continent-spanning webwork of tunnels. Gant tugged his sleeve.

  ‘Well, let’s get on with it,’ the sergeant said. ‘We ain’t got all day.’

  ‘Never been here before,’ Hef whispered, his voice echoing away down the long stretch of corridor.

  ‘Never want to come here again,’ Spider added, rubbing the blue arachnid tattoo on his cheek. For once Felix was forced to agree with them. Even by the standards of Nuln sewers, this was a dismal place. The walls had a crumbled, rotten look to them. The little gargoyles on the support arches had been blurred by age until their features were no longer visible. The stew bubbled and tiny wisps of vapour rose when the bubbles burst. The air was close, foetid and hot.

  And there was something else – the place had an even more oppressive atmosphere than usual. The hair on the back of Felix’s neck prickled, as it sometimes did when he sensed the undercurrents of sorcery nearby.

  ‘Doesn’t look safe,’ Rudi said, looking at a support arch dubiously. Gotrek’s face twisted as if this were a personal insult.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘These tunnels were dwarf-built a thousand years ago. This is Khazalid workmanship. It’ll last an eternity.’

  To prove his point he banged the arch with his fist. Perhaps it was just bad luck, but the gargoyle ch
ose that moment to fall forward from its perch. The Slayer had to leap to one side to avoid being hit on the head and narrowly avoided skidding into the stew.

  ‘Of course,’ Gotrek added, ‘Some of the labour was done by human artisans. That gargoyle, for instance – typical shoddy manling workmanship.’

  No one laughed. Only Felix dared even smile. Gant stared up at the ceiling. The lamp set down at his feet underlit his face, making him look eerie and daemonic.

  ‘We must be below the Old Quarter,’ he said wistfully. Felix could see he was contemplating the district of palaces. A strange melancholy expression transfigured his gaunt, bony features. Felix wondered whether he was pondering the difference between his life and the gilded existence of those above, contemplating the splendours he would never know and the opportunities he would never have. Momentarily he felt a certain sympathy for the man.

  ‘There must be a fortune up there,’ Gant said. ‘Wish I could climb up and get it. Well, no sense in wasting time. Let’s get on with it.’

  ‘What was that?’ Gotrek asked suddenly. The others looked around, startled.

  ‘What was what?’ Hef asked.

  ‘And where was what?’ added Spider.

  ‘I heard something. Down that way.’ All their gazes followed the direction indicated by the Trollslayer’s pointing finger.

  ‘You’re imagining things,’ Rudi said.

  ‘Dwarfs don’t imagine things.’

  ‘Aw sarge, do we have to look into this?’ Rudi whined. ‘I want to get home.’

  Gant rubbed his left eye with the knuckles of his right fist. He seemed to be concentrating. Felix could see he was wavering. He wanted to leave and be off to the tavern just as quickly as the rest of them, but this was his responsibility. If something was wrong beneath the palaces and anyone found out they had been there and done nothing about it, then it was his neck for the block.