by Warhammer
It was obvious that even the Slayer was tiring. He bled from dozens of small cuts. His skin had been burned in many places. Almost imperceptibly he was slowing. Felix knew that it would not be long before he was overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. There was no chance of survival.
Then from the back of the goblin horde came the sound of screams. Felix’s first thought was that the dwarfs had returned in a vain attempt to save them, but a few seconds of inspection told him this was not the case. The smell of scorched flesh filled the air as the heat intensified once more. Looking back Felix could see that the rear of the packed goblin mass was being drowned beneath the oncoming lava. As their cries reached their comrades’ ears panic was beginning to spread.
Felix did not blame them. He felt no great urge to be roasted alive himself. He bellowed, ‘We have to get out of here now!’
‘I am not running away from a fight with mere goblins, manling!’ A savage sweep of the axe clove clean through one goblin and buried itself in the chest of another. There was a horrid sucking sound as Gotrek withdrew his weapon, and the goblin’s still-beating heart was revealed.
Felix ducked the stab of a goblin spear and took the greenskin through the heart with his riposte. ‘It’s not the goblins I’m worried about, it’s the lava.’
The goblins all around had begun to back away, the ones nearest cautiously, those out of axe reach less so. Gotrek and Felix crashed into them once more, driving the greenskins ahead of them like cattle. The fight had become a rout, although Felix knew it was less thanks to their efforts than the lava. Whatever the reason, he was grateful. Now all they had to do was get out of the city without being overwhelmed themselves.
Once more, the earth shook. Behind them, the pillars supporting the roof toppled, and the ceiling caved in. Hundreds of tons of rock crashed down, burying alive many of the goblins in the chamber. Any that survived would soon be covered in bubbling magma.
It was indeed time to get out of this place.
They stood on top of the valley, watching the streets below fill up with orange lava. Felix nursed his bruises and was grateful for the fact that the goblins, in their panic, had scattered to the four winds. Overhead, black clouds billowed from the mouth of the volcano as lava boiled up over the top of the crater. Soon it would reach the jungle and fire and terror would begin. Felix bent double and panted for breath. He was tired, but he could not stop the thoughts racing through his head. He felt he understood most of what had happened now. Katja had been the sorceress who had wed Redhand. She had accompanied the pirate on his last fatal adventure when they had found the jewel. No doubt Redhand had died in a futile effort to get it for her. She had made her escape and returned to civilisation and must have spent years preparing for her return to the island. Perhaps she had been captured by Goldtusk, more likely she had made a deal with him and had been betrayed. The runes on her chains had most likely been meant to contain her magic. Gotrek had proven to be an opportune means of overcoming the guardian elemental. That, or something like that, must have been the way it went.
‘There goes Redhand’s treasure,’ said Gotrek mournfully, watching as the central palace was swallowed.
‘Not all of it,’ said Felix, producing the necklace and coins he had saved.
‘There was enough to ransom a dwarf king down there, manling. That would not ransom an elf’s doxie.’
‘Some people are never happy,’ said Felix. ‘Let’s see if we can find the others and get back to the ship?’
‘I would almost rather stay on this accursed island than go out to sea again.’
‘You may well have to if we don’t get a move on.’
‘At least there will be some goblins to kill.’
As they set off on the long trek back to the ship, Felix wondered if they would ever see more of Redhand’s so-called daughter. He had a feeling somehow, that they had not heard the last of her.
ORCSLAYER
Nathan Long
‘At long last we were sailing home. After nearly two decades following the Slayer as he chased his doom east and south and east again, through Araby, Ind and Cathay, I was returning with him to the Old World and the lands of our birth. Years had I longed for this day, but when it came, it was not to bring either of us the joy or peace we hoped it would. Instead, we found terror and strife waiting for us the moment our feet touched land. My companion met an old friend, and was asked to honour an old oath; little knowing what horror and bloodshed would come of these things.
Before the nightmare came to its bitter, bloody end, I saw the Slayer happier than I had ever known him to be, but also more miserable. It was a strange time, and it is with great reluctance that I stir those sad memories in order to record them here.’
— From My Travels With Gotrek, Vol VII, by Herr Felix Jaeger
(Altdorf Press, 2527)
CHAPTER ONE
‘Orcs?’ Gotrek shrugged. ‘I’ve fought enough orcs.’
Felix peered at the Slayer in the gloom of the merchant ship’s cramped forward cabin. The thick-muscled dwarf sat on a bench, his flame-bearded chin sunk to his chest, an immense stein of ale in one massive fist, and a broached half-keg at his side. The only illumination came from a small porthole – a rippling, sea-sick-green reflection from the waves outside.
‘But they’ve blockaded Barak Varr,’ said Felix. ‘We won’t be able to dock. You want to get to Barak Varr, don’t you? You want to walk on dry land again?’ Felix wanted to dock, that was for certain. Two months in this seagoing coffin where even the dwarf had to duck his head below decks had driven him stir-crazy.
‘I don’t know what I want,’ rumbled Gotrek, ‘except another drink.’
He took another drink.
Felix scowled. ‘Fair enough. If I live, I will write in the grand epic poem of your death that you drowned heroically below decks, drunk as a halfling on harvest day, while your comrades fought and died above you.’
Gotrek slowly raised his head and fixed Felix with his single glittering eye. After a long moment where Felix thought the Slayer might leap across the cabin and rip his throat out with his bare hands, Gotrek grunted. ‘You’ve a way with words, manling.’
He put down his stein and picked up his axe.
Barak Varr was a dwarf port built inside a towering cliff at the easternmost end of the Black Gulf, a curving talon of water that cut deeply into the lawless badlands south of the Black Mountains and the Empire. Both the harbour and the city were tucked into a cave so high that the tallest warship could sail under its roof and dock at its teeming wharves. The entrance was flanked by fifty-foot statues of dwarf warriors standing in massive stone ship prows. A squat, sturdy lighthouse sat at the end of a stone spit to their right, the flame of which, it was said, could be seen for twenty leagues.
Felix could see almost none of this architectural wonder, however, for a boat-borne horde of orcs floated between him and Barak Varr’s wide, shadowed entrance, and a thicket of patched sails, masts, crude banners and strung-up corpses blocked his view. The line looked impenetrable, a floating barricade of captured and lashed-together warships, merchant-men, rafts, barges and galleys that stretched for nearly a mile in a curving arc before the port. Smoke from cooking fires rose from many of the decks, and the water around them bobbed with bloated corpses and floating garbage.
‘You see?’ said Captain Doucette, an extravagantly moustachioed Bretonnian trader from whom Gotrek and Felix had caught a ride in Tilea. ‘Look like they build from every prize and warship that try to pass; and I must land. I have to sell a hold full of Ind spices here, and pick up dwarf steel for Bretonnia. If no, the trip will make a loss.’
‘Is there some place you can break through?’ asked Felix, his long blond hair and his red Sudenland cloak whipping about in the blustery summer wind. ‘Will the ship take it?’
‘Oh, oui,’ said Doucette. ‘She is strong, the Reine Celeste. We fight off many pirates, smash little boats in our way. Trading is not easy life, no? But… or
cs?’
‘Don’t worry about the orcs,’ said Gotrek.
Doucette turned and looked Gotrek from bristling crimson crest, to leather eyepatch, to sturdy boots and back again. ‘Forgive me, my friend. I do not doubt you are very formidable. The arms like trunks of the trees, yes? The chest like the bull, but you are only one man – er, dwarf.’
‘One Slayer,’ growled Gotrek. ‘Now fill your sails and get on. I’ve a keg to finish.’
Doucette cast a pleading look at Felix.
Felix shrugged. ‘I’ve followed him through worse.’
‘Captain!’ a lookout called from the crow’s-nest. ‘More ships behind us!’
Doucette, Gotrek and Felix turned and looked over the stern rail. Two small cutters and a Tilean warship were angling out of a small cove and racing towards them, sails fat with wind. All the fancy woodwork had been stripped from them, replaced with rams, catapults and trebuchets. The head of the beautiful, bare-breasted figurehead on the warship’s prow had been replaced with a troll’s skull, and rotting corpses dangled by their necks from its bowsprit. Orcs stood along the rail, bellowing guttural war cries. Goblins capered and screeched all around them.
Doucette hissed through his teeth. ‘They make the trap, no? Pinch like the crayfish. Now we have no choice.’ He turned and scanned the floating barrier, and then pointed, shouting to his pilot. ‘Two points starboard, Luque. At the rafts! Feruzzi! Clap on all sail!’
Felix followed Doucette’s gaze as the steersman turned the wheel and the mate sent the waisters up the shrouds to unfurl more canvas. Four ramshackle rafts, piled with looted barrels and crates, were lashed loosely together between a battered Empire man-o’-war and a half-charred Estalian galley. Both of the ships were alive with orcs and goblins, hooting and waving their weapons at Doucette’s trader.
The merchantman’s sails cracked like pistols as they filled with wind, and it picked up speed.
‘Battle stations!’ called Doucette. ‘Prepare to receive boarders! ‘Ware the grapnels!’
Greenskins large and small were pouring over the sides of the man-o’-war and the galley, and running across the rafts towards the point where the merchantman meant to break through. True to the captain’s warning, half of them swung hooks and grapnels above their heads.
Felix looked back. The cutters and the warship were gaining. If the merchantman made it through the blockade it might outrun the pursuers, but if it were caught…
‘By the Lady, no!’ gasped Doucette suddenly.
Felix turned. All along the raft-bound man-o’-war, black cannon muzzles were pushing out of square-cut ports.
‘We will be blown to pieces,’ said Doucette.
‘But… but they’re orcs,’ said Felix. ‘Orcs can’t aim to save their lives.’
Doucette shrugged. ‘At such a range, do they need to aim?’
Felix looked around, desperate. ‘Well, can you blow them up? Shoot them before they shoot us?’
‘You joke, mon ami,’ laughed Doucette. He pointed to the few catapults that were the merchantman’s only artillery. ‘These will do little against Empire oak.’
They were rapidly approaching the blockade. It was too late to attempt to turn aside. Felix could smell the greenskins, a filthy animal smell, mixed with the stink of garbage, offal and death. He could see the earrings glinting in their tattered ears and make out the crude insignia painted on their shields and ragged armour.
‘Throw me at it,’ said Gotrek.
Felix and Doucette looked at him. The dwarf had a mad gleam in his eye.
‘What?’ asked Doucette. ‘Throw you?’
‘Put me in one of your rock lobbers and cut the cord. I’ll deal with these floating filth.’
‘You… you want me to catapult you?’ asked Doucette, incredulous. ‘Like the bomb?’
‘The grobi do it. Anything a goblin can do, a dwarf can do, better.’
‘But, Gotrek, you might…’ said Felix.
Gotrek raised an eyebrow. ‘What?’
‘Er, nothing, never mind.’ Felix had been about to say that Gotrek might get himself killed, but that was, after all, the point, wasn’t it?
Gotrek crossed to one of the catapults and climbed onto the bucket. He looked like a particularly ugly bulldog sitting on a serving ladle. ‘Just make sure you put me over the rail, not into the side.’
‘We will try, master dwarf,’ said the chief of the catapult’s crew. ‘Er, you will not kill us if you die?’
‘I’ll kill you if you don’t start shooting!’ growled Gotrek. ‘Fire!’
‘Oui, oui.’
The crew angled the gun around, huffing at Gotrek’s extra weight, until it faced the man-o’-war, and then cranked the firing arm a little tighter.
‘Hold onto your axe, master dwarf,’ said the crew chief.
‘Perhaps a helmet,’ said Felix. ‘Or a… ’
The crew chief dropped his hand. ‘Fire!’
A crewman pulled a lever and the catapult’s arm shot up and out. Gotrek flew through the air in a long high arc, straight for the man-o’-war, bellowing a bull-throated battle cry.
Felix stared blankly as Gotrek flattened against the patched canvas of the man-o’-war’s mainsail and slid down to the deck into a seething swarm of orcs. ‘The real question,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘is how I’m going to make it all rhyme.’
He and the catapult’s crew craned their necks, trying to find Gotrek in the chaos, but all they could see was a swirl of hulking green bodies and the rise and fall of enormous black-iron cleavers. At least they’re not stopping, Felix thought. If they were still fighting, then Gotrek was still alive.
Then the orcs stopped fighting, and instead began running to and fro.
‘Is he…?’ asked Doucette.
‘I don’t know,’ said Felix, biting his lip. After all the dragons, daemons and trolls Gotrek had fought, would he really die facing mere orcs?
The lookout’s voice boomed down from above. ‘Impact coming!’
With a jarring crunch, the merchantman crashed into the line of rafts, smashing timber, snapping cord, and sending barrels and crates and over-enthusiastic orcs flying into the cold, choppy water. The side of the man-o’-war rose like a castle wall directly to their right, her cannon ports level with Doucette’s deck.
Grapnels whistled through the air to the left and right, and Felix ducked just in time to miss getting hooked through the shoulder. They bit into the rail and the deck and the sails, their ropes thrumming tight as the ship continued forwards. The Reine Celeste’s crew chopped at them with hatchets and cutlasses, but two more caught for each one they cut.
A thunderous boom went off in Felix’s right ear, and one of the man-o’-war’s cannon, not fifteen feet away, was obscured in white smoke. A cannonball whooshed by at head level and parted a ratline.
Felix swallowed. It looked like Gotrek had failed.
‘Boarders!’ came Doucette’s voice.
The merchant ship had broken through the orc line and was inside the blockade, but was slowing sharply, towing the grapnel-hooked rafts and the rest of the ships with it. The man-o’-war was turning as it was pulled, and its guns remained trained on Doucette’s ship as waves of roaring green monsters climbed up the lines and the sides and clambered over the rail. Felix drew his dragon-hilted sword and joined the others as they raced to hold them off – men of every colour and land stabbing, hacking and shooting at the age-old enemy of humanity – Tileans in stocking caps and baggy trousers, Bretonnians in striped pantaloons, men of Araby, Ind and further places, all fighting with the crazed desperation of fear.
There was no retreat, and surrender meant an orc stew-pot. Felix sidestepped a cleaver-blow that would have halved him had it connected, and ran his towering opponent through the neck. Two goblins attacked his flanks. He killed one and kicked the other back. Another orc surged up in front of him.
Felix was no longer the willowy young poet he had been when, during a night of drunken camar
aderie, he had pledged to record Gotrek’s doom in an epic poem. Decades of fighting at the Slayer’s side had hardened him and filled him out, and made a seasoned swordsman of him. Even so, he was no match – physically at least – for the seven-foot monster he faced. The beast was more than twice his weight, with arms thicker than Felix’s legs, and an underslung jaw from which jutted up cracked tusks. It stank like the back end of a pig.
Its mad red eyes blazed with fury as it roared and swung a black iron cleaver. Felix ducked and slashed back, but the orc was quick, and knocked his sword aside. There was another boom and a cannonball punched through the rail ten feet to Felix’s left, cutting a swath through the melee that killed both merchants and orcs alike. Red blood and black mixed on the slippery deck. Felix deflected a swipe from the orc that shivered his arm to the shoulder. The catapult’s crew chief fell back in two pieces beside him.
Another series of booms rocked the ship, and Felix thought the orcs had somehow got off a disciplined salvo. He glanced past his orc to the man-o’-war. Smoke poured from the cannon ports but, strangely, no cannonballs. The orc slashed at him. Felix hopped back and tripped over the crew chief’s torso. He landed flat on his back in a puddle of blood.
The orc guffawed and raised his cleaver over his head.
With a massive ka-rump the man-o’-war exploded into a billowing ball of flame, bits of timber and rope and orc parts spinning past. The fighters on the deck of the merchantman were blown off their feet by a hammer of air. Felix felt as if his eardrums had been stabbed with spikes. The orc above him staggered and looked down at his chest, surprised. A cannon’s cleaning rod was sticking out from between his ribs, the bristly head dripping with gore. It toppled forwards.
Felix rolled out of the way and sprang to his feet, looking towards the flame-enveloped man-o’-war. So Gotrek had done it after all. But at what cost? Surely there was no way the dwarf could have survived?
