by Warhammer
‘Its children?’ growled Gotrek.
‘Did you not see them as you came?’ asked Hamnir. ‘Even now the grobi ready them for travel. Soon the steam carts will carry them along the Undgrin to every hold in the world.’ He held out the torque again. ‘Take it, Gotrek. All your doubt, your black moods, your fear, will dissipate like a cloud, to be replaced with blissful peace. You will never be angry again. Take it. Join us.’
Gotrek slapped it out of his hand. It jangled across the floor. ‘No.’
Hamnir looked genuinely sad. ‘Then, old friend,’ he said, sighing, ‘I’m afraid you must die.’ He licked out with his axe as quickly and casually as a man swats a fly, and nearly caught Gotrek in the throat.
The Slayer jumped back, cursing, wisps of beard fluttering to the floor. Felix dodged back too. Even after Hamnir’s words the attack was unexpected. Attacks usually had a preamble – raised voices, threatening gestures, the glint of anger in the attacker’s eye. Hamnir’s swipe had had none of these.
The prince swung again, as blank as before, and Gotrek blocked the blow with the rune axe, backing up. ‘Don’t do this, Ranulfsson,’ he said, brow furrowed. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘And I don’t want to hurt you,’ said Hamnir calmly, slashing again, ‘but if you will not take the torque, I have no choice. Those who are not with us are against us.’
Gotrek continued to back away, parrying every blow, but never returning one. Felix had never seen the Slayer so unhappy to be in a fight. It was a battle he couldn’t win. Killing Hamnir was a tragedy, not a victory, and being killed by him was no grand doom, and would indeed very likely doom the dwarfs, and perhaps the whole world, to mindless slavery.
But if Gotrek didn’t strike soon, he might never be able to. He was weakening with every step. The axe wound in his shoulder had lost him a lot of blood, and it was still bleeding. Felix saw him stagger as he parried a chop to the head. Hamnir wasn’t tiring in the least.
Felix edged around Hamnir, angling for the torque.
‘No!’ snapped Gotrek. ‘This is my fight!’ He glared at Hamnir. ‘And his. Stay back.’
So Felix stood by while Gotrek back-pedalled around the pit with Hamnir in calm, implacable pursuit.
‘Fight it, scholar,’ hissed Gotrek. ‘Fight it! You’re the smartest dwarf I know. Can’t you see what it’s doing? Can’t you smell the reek of Chaos on it?’
Hamnir slashed at his belly. Gotrek barely blocked it in time.
‘Don’t you remember what it made of Ferga?’ Gotrek asked. ‘Do you want to be like that?’
Hamnir’s brow creased momentarily, but then smoothed again. ‘Had I known then what I know now, I would have joined her.’
‘This god of yours took your hold by force, killing innocent dwarfs and using grobi to do it – the ancient enemies of our people. How can you side with it?’
‘We refused to listen,’ said Hamnir placidly. ‘It did what it had to do. For those who listen there is only joy.’
Gotrek gritted his teeth as he slipped and jarred his leg. ‘How long have we been friends, scholar? How many times have we fought side by side, and drunk ourselves blind, and split up a treasure, and argued over everything and nothing?’ His voice was hoarse with emotion. Felix had never heard him like this. ‘Is that less to you than the joys of being a slave?’
Hamnir was silent, his face troubled. His attacks faltered.
‘Good, scholar,’ called Gotrek. ‘Fight it!’
Hamnir stopped, axe frozen and hands trembling, a war waging within him. ‘Fighting it is useless,’ he said, his voice strangled. ‘We are but two, when it is thousands. We are children, when it is ageless. If I take off the torque a hundred others will pick it up. What I do doesn’t matter. We have already lost.’
‘We haven’t!’ roared Gotrek. ‘Take off the torque and we’ll kill it together.’
Hamnir shook his head sadly. ‘Nothing can kill it. It is too strong. Too old.’
Gotrek snarled. ‘What kind of dwarf are you? Will you doom your race because you gave up without a fight?’
It was the wrong thing to say.
Hamnir’s face became calm again. He raised his axe. ‘It is to save my race that I obey it, for if we oppose it we will be destroyed. Only by joining it will we live.’
‘With torques around our necks,’ Gotrek spat.
‘But we will live.’ Hamnir swung at Gotrek again.
Gotrek parried and backed away, his face working grief and rage.
‘Gotrek,’ said Felix, distraught. ‘Let me take it off him. Perhaps he’ll come to himself.’
‘He has to do it,’ said Gotrek, glaring at Hamnir. ‘He has to be strong and take it off himself.’
‘Maybe no one is strong enough.’
‘A dwarf should be strong enough!’
The pain in Gotrek’s voice was almost too much for Felix to bear. ‘There’s a whole clanhold above that says otherwise,’ he said.
Gotrek cursed.
Hamnir hacked again, but this time Gotrek returned the attack, battering at Hamnir’s axe and trying to disarm him. Hamnir blocked and countered with blistering speed. He was twice the fighter he had been without the torque. They circled near Galin’s corpse.
‘You’re running out of chances, scholar,’ grated Gotrek. ‘Take it off or die!’
But it wasn’t clear who would die first. Gotrek was fighting one-handed now, his wounded arm useless. He was barely stopping Hamnir’s blows from reaching him.
The Slayer backed up, stepping around Galin’s body. Hamnir pressed forwards, swinging savagely, and slipped on Galin’s blood.
Quicker than blinking, Gotrek caught Hamnir’s axe in a bind, and ripped it from his grip with a savage twist of his wrist. It bounced into the hole.
Hamnir stepped back. Gotrek leapt at him like a wrestler, slammed him to the ground, and straddled his chest. He ripped the torque from Hamnir’s neck and flung it away, staring into his face, his axe raised.
Hamnir blinked up at him, calmly. ‘Will you kill me then, Gotrek? You swore to protect me until one of us should die.’
Gotrek’s face collapsed. ‘And I failed,’ he choked. ‘You’re already dead.’ He buried the axe in Hamnir’s chest. Hamnir bucked and contorted, choking, and then lay still, eyes staring at nothing.
Felix gaped, stunned, as Gotrek slumped over his dead friend. Sigmar, he thought, what had the Slayer done?
‘Don’t look at me, manling,’ Gotrek growled, his voice thick. He hid his face in one massive, blood-stained hand, ‘or I will kill you where you stand!’
Felix stepped back, shaking, and turned away. He dug his field kit out of his pack, allowing Gotrek his grief while he patched his wounds and tried to make sense of what had happened. Gotrek had killed a dwarf! Hamnir! His friend: without waiting, without giving him time to recover. Felix couldn’t stop replaying the scene over in his mind.
How could Gotrek have known if Hamnir had recovered or not? What Hamnir had said hadn’t sounded ‘wrong’. Had he made a mistake?
After a long interval, Gotrek stood, unsteady. His left arm was red from shoulder to wrist. ‘Right,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘Let’s finish this.’
He pulled a length of bandages from Galin’s pack and started winding them around his sliced-open shoulder as he crossed to the doorway from whence Hamnir had come. The edges of the door were carved all over with the same ancient warding symbols that had marked the outer door. Felix was certain now that they had been placed to keep something in, and he was beginning to understand what that something was.
The Slayer’s face was as dead and cold as Felix had ever seen it. He wanted to ask him about Hamnir, but he was afraid he would kill him if he did. He held his tongue and followed him.
As they reached the door, the oppressive dread and despair welled up in Felix again, stronger than before. If the Sleeper could turn the mind of a dwarf like Hamnir, what chance did a human like himself have? Worse, what if it turned Gotre
k’s mind? What if it already had! What if it had decided that Gotrek was a better pawn than Hamnir? Was that why the Slayer had killed his friend? Or perhaps Gotrek had gone entirely mad at last, and couldn’t distinguish between friend or foe. Felix felt like running for his life, but he was more afraid of being separated from Gotrek than of being killed by him.
They walked down a short corridor, then ascended a shallow ramp to a wider hallway that curved away to the left and right. The sickly corpse-flesh glow grew brighter with every step, and the thick, sour-milk reek clogged their nostrils. A series of open arches on the inner wall of the curving corridor shone faintly from within. Felix looked in the nearest one, gagged and stepped back. Gotrek scowled into it behind him.
Three-quarters of the large room was filled, floor to ceiling, with what looked, to Felix’s unsettled mind, like translucent white custard – custard that had been left out far too long. It was from this bulging, gelatinous substance that the pale phosphorescence emanated, and the smell too. Flickers like green heat lightning flashed deep within its milky depths. Ropy white tentacles protruded from it and lay, long and flaccid, across the floor. They pulsed with sluggish life. Cancerous goiters and weird growths blossomed from it like blackcurrants in a pudding, and thick white cilia stood out like hairs on its surface.
Through the cloudy substance, Felix could just see a doorway on the far side of the chamber. The shattered remains of a stone door lay in front of it, entirely buried under the gelid flesh. It looked like the horrid mass had burst the door and grown to fill the room.
Felix covered his mouth at the smell. ‘What is it?’ He asked through his fingers, fighting the urge to vomit.
Gotrek stepped up to the bulging white mass. He prodded it with a booted toe. It shivered like jelly. The cilia around the point where Gotrek had touched waved like a field of weeds in a wind.
They moved on. The next room too was overfilled with the translucent stuff, pressed against the walls of the chamber like a mattress full of snot shoved into a too small closet. The white tentacles trailed across the floor like dead snakes, and there was another burst door on the far side of the room.
Gotrek and Felix continued along the curving corridor, passing room after room, each filled with more of the horrible tentacled jelly. Felix began to realise that the corridor was a vast ring. Halfway around its circumference, they came to a second ramp, this one angling down under the centre of the circle.
The corpse glow was stronger here, and Gotrek turned down the ramp immediately. Felix hesitated, the irrational fear filling his veins with ice, then forced himself to go on. If he stopped, he would never be able to start forwards again.
There was another massive trapezoidal arch at the bottom of the ramp, its edges limned with the rancid green light. Gotrek and Felix stepped to it, and then stopped, retching. Felix covered his mouth again and forced his stomach to be still. The smell was overwhelming, but the smell was the least of it.
They looked into a low circular chamber. The floor was littered with black basalt rubble. The ceiling – Felix flinched away from it. It made him want to vomit, to run. The ceiling was of the same gelatinous grub-flesh that had filled the rooms above. The weight of it had caved in the original ceiling, and it bellied down from above like the underside of some filthy bed canopy, making the low room even lower.
And hanging limply from the centre of the mass, like the desiccated shell of some impossibly large praying mantis, was the Sleeper.
There was no question in Felix’s mind that this was the thing they had come to kill. It could be nothing else. It was absolutely motionless, head slumped, limbs dangling – asleep. Felix might have thought it already dead, except for the aura of fear and madness that emanated from it like cold from a glacier.
It had once been some sort of insect, but time, imprisonment and some dark pact with the Ruinous Powers had warped it into something infinitely more foul. Its translucent shell was white and waxy, like tallow, and through it Felix could see white, striated muscle and the flow of viscous liquid through glassine veins. Eight long, sharp legs like glass sabres hung below a spined, carapaced head with ten black faceted eyes and a thicket of cruel mandibles. Thick, whip-like antennae curved up from its ridged brow.
Its thin thorax was attached somehow to the gelatinous ceiling, and at first Felix couldn’t make out how. Did it cling to it like a bat? Was it somehow trapped in it? Then, with a fresh wave of revulsion, he understood. The jelly was the rest of it! The great fleshy mass, that had grown into every room along the circular corridor, and that had become so heavy that it had broken through the stone ceiling, was the thing’s bloated abdomen! Gotrek and Felix had not explored every corner of the crypt. The gods only knew how many other rooms it had filled with its bulk. Felix swallowed convulsively as he realised that he might be looking at the largest living thing in the world.
Other things hung from the bulging ceiling as well – glistening translucent sacs, bulging at the end of twisted umbilical ropes. Felix recognised them as the chrysalises they had earlier seen the orcs putting into crates. There were pale, angular forms inside them, with long forelegs and ten faceted eyes. The Sleeper’s children: the end of the world.
The Sleeper did not turn its head, or in any way acknowledge their presence as they stepped into the round room. And yet, Felix was more afraid to approach it than any thing of flesh and blood he had ever faced. Crippling terror paralysed him. He couldn’t take another step.
Gotrek hadn’t stopped, but he had slowed, leaning forwards and struggling to put one foot in front of the other like a man pushing into the teeth of a gale.
‘Fight it, manling,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘It’s out of servants. It’s using the only weapon it’s got left.’
Felix couldn’t move. If he got any closer, it would eat his brain. He knew this. It was already eating it. If he didn’t run, he would end up like the others, a mindless slave, doing the bidding of some Chaos-corrupted insect. It would all be Gotrek’s fault – dragging him into certain death time and time again. ‘You fight it,’ he spat. ‘You’re the Slayer! Must I always fight your battles?’
Gotrek glared back at him. ‘You fight my battles? Ha! That’s a joke. Half the battles I fight are to save your worthless hide! Grimnir, what a weakling! Why did I choose a human for a rememberer? A dwarf would have taken care of himself!’
Felix choked, outrage flaring in his heart. ‘Weakling? You call me that after all I’ve been through with you – and all on the strength of a drunken vow I should never have made!’
Gotrek turned on him, the Sleeper forgotten. ‘And I should never have held you to it. By my ancestors! Twenty-five years travelling with a snivelling wet blanket too weak to pull his own weight, having to turn back every second step to pull your scrawny arse out of the fire, having to listen to, “That isn’t wise, Gotrek”, and “Maybe we shouldn’t do that, Gotrek”, in my ear like a damned mosquito. Why I haven’t cut your throat before now, just to shut you up, is beyond me!’
‘You think it’s been a joy travelling with you?’ shouted Felix, his neck pulsing with rage, ‘Insulted and ignored every day for a quarter century by a stunted, taciturn bully without a kind word for anybody. I can’t think of a single instance when you thanked me or praised me for a job well done. It’s always “Shut up, manling”, and “Out of the way, manling”, and “Get the bags, manling”.’ He clenched his fists. ‘When I think of the life I could have had if I hadn’t sworn to follow your ugly posterior around the world until you finally killed yourself! You haven’t even had the decency to die quickly like most Slayers.’
‘You’ve seen more of the world than any hundred men of the Empire, thanks to me,’ bellowed Gotrek, ‘and you complain about it? Grungni’s axe! Why didn’t I make my peace with Hamnir and ask him to be my rememberer? He at least was a dwarf, not a spindle-shanked weakling!’
‘Weakling, again.’ Felix put his hand on his hilt. ‘You call me weak when I’m still here and y
our oh-so-sturdy dwarf friend Hamnir is dead? Who’s the weakling?’
Gotrek’s face went white. His one eye glittered with cold fury. ‘You insult the dead? You’ll die for that.’
‘I insulted him,’ Felix sneered. ‘You killed him.’
With an outraged roar, Gotrek lurched unsteadily towards Felix, slashing one-handed with his axe. Felix leapt back, gasping and drawing his sword. He felt the wind of the axe’s passing on his cheek.
Terror stabbed through his heart like an icicle. Sigmar, what had he done? Gotrek was attacking him! The axe that had killed daemons and giants was swinging for his neck!
He scrambled backwards, parrying desperately. Gotrek limped after him, the rune axe a blur. Each strike nearly knocked the sword from Felix’s hands. He was still alive only because Gotrek fought one-handed, and was weak from his wounds and loss of blood.
Felix cursed himself as the rune axe flashed past, an inch from his chin. What madness had inspired him to goad the Slayer like that? Had he been out of his mind? Then it came to him that the inspiration had indeed been from outside of his mind. It had come from the Sleeper. It was stirring them up like pit dogs. It was defending itself by making them fight each other instead of it.
‘Gotrek!’ he cried as they circled. ‘Stop! It’s the Sleeper. It’s forcing us to fight! It’s in our minds!’
‘Trying to trick me into letting down my guard? Ha!’ Gotrek hacked unrelentingly at Felix, pushing him further into the room.
Felix could feel the Sleeper’s presence behind his left shoulder as he backed closer to it. His skin crawled. ‘Gotrek, curse you, fight it!’ he shouted. ‘What’s become of your unbendable dwarf will. Fight it!’
