Gotrek & Felix- the Third Omnibus - William King & Nathan Long

by Warhammer

  They slashed and hacked directly in front of it, circling slowly, as if they were gladiators, fighting for its amusement. Gods! Why wouldn’t Gotrek listen? How dare he accuse Felix of weakness and then fall under the Sleeper’s power himself? If he wouldn’t listen, Felix would just have to beat it into him. He’d cut the Slayer’s head off and shout it down his throat.

  ‘Stubborn fool! I’ll teach you!’ Felix aimed a lunge at Gotrek’s poorly bound shoulder wound.

  The Slayer’s axe blocked the strike, shivering his sword and stinging his hands.

  ‘It’s you who needs teaching, longshanks! Saying you’re better than a dwarf!’ He aimed a bash at Felix’s head that would have sheared it in half if he hadn’t leapt back. ‘I’ll gut you for insolence!’

  Felix cursed. Even one-handed and near collapse, Gotrek was stronger and faster than any opponent Felix had ever faced, but the Slayer was reeling, unsteady on his feet. If Felix could make him fall, he could finish him. He continued to circle right, trying to get on Gotrek’s weak side.

  Gotrek turned with him. ‘I’ll spit you like a rabbit!’ he roared, raising his axe over his head. He tripped on a chunk of rubble. He staggered, off balance.

  An opening! Felix darted in, stabbing for Gotrek’s bad leg. Gotrek swung down with his axe, blindingly fast, smashing his sword out of his hands, then kicked him in the stomach.

  Felix flew back, his sword bouncing away, and crashed into the Sleeper. His arms tangled in its spiny legs. The back of his head smacked it between its rows of eyes. It jerked, waking and hissing, mandibles clattering.

  ‘I’ll chop you in two!’ Gotrek bellowed, and hurled his axe straight at Felix’s head.

  Felix yelped and dived to the ground in terror. The axe spun by over his head, ruffling his hair, and severed one of the Sleeper’s antennae.

  The Sleeper screeched, its legs lashing about, its claws clacking. One clubbed Felix across the shoulder and knocked him halfway across the room. He grunted in pain as he hit the floor, but also in relief. His mind was suddenly clear. All his unreasoning rage was gone. The Sleeper’s wound had distracted it.

  Felix pushed himself up. Gotrek was diving past the chittering, thrashing thing and snatching up his axe. Felix goggled at him as he turned.

  ‘You… you…’

  ‘Not now, manling,’ Gotrek rasped, standing. ‘Kill it.’

  The Slayer limped towards the Sleeper from behind. The thing twisted and curled itself in every direction, trying to turn to face him, but it was held in place by its gargantuan abdomen. It couldn’t move to defend itself.

  Gotrek smiled savagely, prepared for the slaughter. Felix stood and recovered his sword. With its vile influence gone from his head, the Sleeper seemed no threat at all. It was pathetic, in fact, made helpless by its own mutations.

  Something long and white dropped down beside him. He flinched away from it. It looked like a wrist-thick strand of snot dripping from a giant’s nose. Another dropped in front of him. The drips curved towards him like blind snakes, their skins thickening and muddying. They were growing from the Sleeper’s bloated abdomen!

  The first split at its tip like a seedpod opening, and Felix saw teeth and a purple tongue inside the cavity. The other sprouted hooked barbs and squid-like suckers. They lunged.

  He slashed at the one with the mouth, decapitating it. Thick rank liquid exploded from it, making his eyes water. Two more strands dripped down around him. ‘Gotrek!’

  Gotrek was beset with five of the things. He slashed three in half, and four more dropped down to grapple with him. One looped around his bad leg. Another caught him around the neck. They were trying to hold him away from the Sleeper.

  ‘Chaos-cursed filth!’ Gotrek roared.

  Felix chopped through two more, but another had his waist and was lifting him off his feet. He swung his sword behind his head and crashed to the floor as he cut through it. He landed in a puddle of grey muck.

  The cut tentacles were pouring thick streams of mucus from their wounds onto the floor. It smelled impossibly foul. Felix jumped up, trying to shake it from his hands, and nearly fell again. The basalt floor was slick with the stuff.

  The circular chamber was suddenly a swaying forest of slimy white tentacles, all reaching for him and Gotrek. They weren’t hard to cut, but there were too many of them. One, with a mouth like a lamprey, bit Felix on the back of the leg. He screamed and chopped it through, but another raked his face with ridges like broken glass.

  He hacked at everything that came within reach, slipping and spinning in a mad frenzy. On the other side of the Sleeper, Gotrek did the same, but new tentacles grew out of the bulging ceiling every second, and more than forty truncated tentacles poured viscous goop onto the floor. The stinking mucus was ankle deep. As Felix backed away from three of the mutating pseudopods, he stepped under a shower of muck, and was drenched to the skin. He gagged as it got into his eyes and nose, and plastered his hair to his scalp.

  Felix sobbed with frustration as he wiped his eyes. It was hopeless. No matter how many tentacles he cut there would always be more. They would never reach the Sleeper to kill it. The tentacles would tear them apart. He should just throw down his sword and…

  He froze. It was back in his head, trying to reassert control. He forced it out savagely, cursing it with each slash of his sword. Then he turned and started slogging, one slippery step at a time, through the lake of snot towards it. He would not let it distract him. It would not take his mind from him again.

  Gotrek had won free as well, at least momentarily, chopping through the tentacles faster than they could form. The severed heads of three of them hung by their teeth from his arms and legs as he waded towards the thing, and his slime-drenched crest hung in his face like a wet red mop.

  The Sleeper chittered in distress and more tentacles writhed the Slayer’s way, but he was not to be stopped. He backhanded through six, and then chopped at the thing’s face. It lashed out with its glassine legs and the rune axe sheared through two of them at the joints.

  The Sleeper shrieked, a deafening insect whine, and swung a pincered foreleg at Gotrek. He made to block, but a tentacle caught his wrist and he couldn’t bring his axe in line. A crimson gash opened across his chest. The blood mixed with the slime, and painted his torso red.

  Gotrek turned to cut the tentacle, and the Sleeper’s other foreleg cracked him on the back of the head. He staggered and almost fell.

  ‘Leave them!’ cried Felix, as he finally reached the centre of the room. ‘I’ll get them!’

  Gotrek said nothing, only turned his full attention on the Sleeper as Felix hacked through the tentacle that held his arm, and slashed at all the others that were questing forwards. There seemed to be hundreds of them. All with different mutations, all visions of an unhinged mind.

  Gotrek laid into the Sleeper with all his might, but it still had six legs to his one axe, and it blocked every attack, chips and chunks of translucent chitin spinning away with each clash. He cut off another leg, and ducked as the Sleeper lashed out at his head.

  Behind him, Felix spun like a dervish as he lopped tentacle after tentacle, but never enough. He laughed bitterly to himself. It was easy to say that he would keep the tentacles off Gotrek, but who would keep them off him? He was fading fast. The mucus was up to his knees – almost to Gotrek’s hips – and it felt like he was fighting in quicksand. Worse, the bulging abdominal ceiling was drooping lower, as if it was deflating. Felix kept bumping it with his head. If they weren’t torn apart or drowned, there was a good chance the Sleeper would smother them to death. He chopped through two sucker-covered tentacles that were looping around his legs. Then he slashed at three more that were reaching towards Gotrek. His sword arm was as heavy as lead. A tentacle grabbed his left ankle, another bit his right bicep, and more were coming.

  Gotrek swung at the Sleeper’s right foreleg. It blocked with another leg, and lost it as the axe smashed through it. The Slayer surged forwards, pressing the a
ttack, but suddenly he jerked to a stop, grunting in pain. The Sleeper had him around the waist with its left pincer, lifting him off the ground and squeezing hard. Gotrek grabbed at it with his off hand, trying to keep it from scissoring him in two. He raised his axe to sever the arm, but its right pincer caught it by the haft and tried to pull it out of his hand. The Slayer bellowed in rage and pain.

  ‘Hang on!’ Felix cried.

  He struggled forwards, hacking through three tentacles. Three more held him tight, and another two were grabbing for him. The Sleeper was lifting Gotrek towards its razor-sharp mandibles as he struggled. The Slayer couldn’t let go of the Sleeper’s claw to use both hands to free his axe, or it would cut him in two, and he couldn’t let go of his axe to use both hands to force open the claw or he would lose the axe.

  Felix roared and slashed all around him, chopping through half a dozen tentacles. Still more held him. He freed his arms and dove for the Sleeper, lashing out with the last of his strength as the tentacles around his ankles tried to yank him back.

  He connected! The very tip of his blade caught the wrist of the pincer that held Gotrek’s axe.

  He splashed down face first into the slime and went under. Had he done it? Was it enough? Had the Sleeper let go?

  He pushed desperately to the surface, coughing and shaking the muck from his eyes, just in time to see Gotrek, with a guttural howl of triumph, bury the rune axe between the Sleeper’s two largest eyes.

  The Sleeper shrieked and spasmed, its remaining legs flailing. Every tentacle in the room lashed and writhed like a pinned snake. Gotrek was thrown across the room and crashed into the wall. A dozen frenzied tentacles bludgeoned Felix. His brain was filled with a mad insectile chittering, a thousand crickets sawing violently inside his head, as horrific, shattered-mirror images of blood and dismemberment, and black chambers seething with a million haycart-sized insects crawling over one another, flashed behind his eyes. He thrashed and kicked in the swamp of mucus, screaming, hands clapped over his ears, heart pounding, gorge rising. Gotrek was staggering to his feet, his arms over his head, grimacing and roaring.

  The whole world seemed to be shaking. Was it all in his head? A chunk of basalt splashed down beside him, raising a thick fountain of muck. It was not in his head.

  ‘Out, manling!’ called Gotrek.

  Felix struggled to his feet and sloshed drunkenly through the chaos of waving tentacles after Gotrek, as huge blocks of stone crashed down all around them, and the Sleeper’s mental storm continued to batter his mind. Image piled on top of image, each more chaotic and confused than the last: cave-coffered insect cities; towering black basalt pyramids; slave armies – hairy, heavy browed troglodyte humans, digging and building and cleaning up after their chitinous masters; earthquakes; slave rebellions; cave-ins; assassinations; an insect emperor making a pact with entities more ancient even than itself, a pact that gives it new powers, brings it victories, treasure, godhood; then come jealousies; betrayals; invasion by pale overdwellers; battles; defeats; hiding itself in the temple where once the others had come to worship it; the overdwellers locking it in with spells and wards; waiting, growing, waiting.

  Gotrek and Felix ran up the ramp and into the circular corridor, which was already half buried in falling rubble. White tentacles flailed from the open doorways as they sprinted and dodged around the ring. Walls crumbled as the vast gelatinous bulk juddered and shook. The Sleeper’s psychic scream rose in pitch and volume, losing any semblance of cohesion until it was only a deafening, mind-blasting rush of rage, agony and ancient hate.

  A huge slab of black stone crashed down in front of them, missing them by inches. Felix vaulted it. Gotrek dodged around it, and they dived into the ramp, bouncing and rolling down to the hall below as, with a roar like an earthquake, the Sleeper’s chambers collapsed altogether.

  The Sleeper’s presence winked out as the rocks fell, leaving only gibbering echoes. Felix was too scared to care. He lay huddled at the base of the ramp, his head covered with his arms, expecting at any moment that the roof would cave in.

  After a while, the rumbling and shaking subsided and all grew still. Felix slowly uncurled, blinking and shaking his head. Gotrek was sitting up too, clutching his temples and groaning.

  After a few moments spent leaning against the wall and catching his breath, Felix looked dully over at the Slayer. ‘You tried to kill me,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said Gotrek. ‘Never. You tried to kill me.’

  ‘Only because you wouldn’t stop trying to kill me!’ said Felix. ‘Couldn’t you understand? It was the Sleeper. It was forcing you to fight me.’

  ‘Oh, I knew.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you stop?’

  Gotrek frowned, and looked down, his fists clenching, chagrined. ‘I couldn’t. The thing was damned strong.’ He rubbed his mucus-covered face with his hands and sighed. ‘Guess I don’t blame Hamnir so much now. Only broke its hold by giving in.’

  ‘Broke its hold? You didn’t break its hold.’

  ‘It got out of our heads when I hit it, didn’t it?’

  ‘You hit it by accident.’

  Gotrek shook his head and stood up on wobbly legs. ‘Couldn’t stop attacking you, much as I tried. Or turn my axe on it, either. It was too strong for that. But I could put you between me and it.’ He shrugged. ‘I knew you’d duck.’

  Felix blinked, and surged unsteadily to his feet. His blood boiled. ‘You knew I’d… You… But… but what if I hadn’t?’

  Gotrek grimaced and cleaned the mucus off his axe as best he could. ‘What choice did I have?’

  Felix opened his mouth to argue, but he didn’t know what to say.

  Gotrek slid the rune axe through his belt, and turned away. ‘Come on.’

  They walked down the corridor to the room with the pit in the centre and stopped at Hamnir’s body.

  Felix swallowed as he looked at Hamnir’s face, calm in death, and then down at the ruin of his chest. ‘How… how did you know?’ he asked. ‘How did you know he hadn’t recovered? That he wouldn’t recover?’

  ‘I knew,’ said Gotrek. ‘It was in his eyes. He had spent too long with it. He wasn’t coming back.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘He wasn’t coming back!’ Gotrek squatted abruptly, slid his arms under Hamnir’s body, and lifted him. He stumped towards the exit.

  Felix stared after him. Perhaps the Sleeper’s death would have ended its dominion over him, he wanted to say. Its corrupting influence might have died with it. Perhaps Hamnir would have returned to himself once it was dead. He couldn’t force himself to speak. He followed after Gotrek, his heart at war with itself.

  Halfway up the tunnel that led to the mines, Gotrek cleared his throat. ‘You will tell Gorril that Hamnir died well, fighting the torqued greenskins. It is best.’

  ‘You don’t want him to know you killed him?’

  ‘I don’t want him to know that he… lost himself.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell him?’ asked Felix.

  ‘I don’t lie.’

  ‘And I do?’ Felix was insulted.

  ‘You write plays, don’t you?’

  A sharp retort rose up in Felix’s throat, but he let it die unspoken. He didn’t like it, but perhaps it was for the best. The last thing the beleaguered dwarfs of Karak Hirn needed to learn was that their prince had betrayed his own race, and it had always been the job of poets and playwrights to put the best face on the deaths of heroes.

  ‘All right, I’ll tell him.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Gotrek put his axe through each of the chrysalises in the room where the orcs had been packing them up, and set fire to the crates just to be sure. Once smoke began to fill the room, they turned and continued on up through the mine.

  Felix looked with growing despair on the few orcs they passed. He had been afraid their return to the hold would be a nightmare – dodging rampaging orcs newly returned to their ferocity now that the yoke of the Sleeper’s evil influen
ce had been lifted from their necks. The reality was worse. The orcs they passed stood blank and lost, staring into space with their weapons and tools hanging limply from their hands. Even when Gotrek and Felix came upon four in a narrow corridor – walked right into them around a corner – the orcs did nothing, only pawed at them lazily, like sleepy bears. Gotrek pushed through them as if they were so much furniture, growling low in his throat. They didn’t follow.

  Finally, after retracing their steps up the winding stair of King Alrik’s vault and through the empty halls of Karak Hirn, they came to the Diamondsmith clanhold. Gorril was just outside its doors, supervising details of dwarfs who were piling the beheaded bodies of the undead orcs onto carts and wheeling them away.

  ‘Gurnisson!’ he cried when he saw then. ‘We had hope of your success. The last of the walking corpses dropped dead all at once about half an hour–’ He stopped when he saw what Gotrek carried. ‘Prince Hamnir!’ He rushed to Gotrek. ‘Is he… Did he…’

  ‘He is dead,’ said Gotrek.

  ‘He died well,’ said Felix, remembering his part. ‘There were more torqued greenskins below, defending the Sleeper. He slew two. Another slew him. He died to stop Chaos and corruption from spreading to other holds.’ Which was true enough after all.

  ‘And did you slay the Sleeper?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Gotrek. ‘It’s dead.’

  ‘Then he did not die in vain.’ Gorril took Hamnir from Gotrek’s arms, his face working, as the other dwarfs gathered around, baring their heads for their fallen prince. As he carried Hamnir into the clanhold, the dwarfs followed him, and more came out into the central chamber to watch in mournful silence as Gorril laid him upon the base of a statue of some ancient dwarf patriarch.

  Gorril turned to the assembled dwarfs, tears in his eyes. ‘Friends, our prince is dead. We will mourn him as befits a fallen hero, but in this tragedy is triumph, for with his death, he has freed us from the horror that held us in its clutches. The Sleeper is dead. The hold is ours. The worst is behind us.’