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

by Warhammer

  ‘It isn’t,’ said Gotrek under his breath.

  ‘What?’ asked Gorril, turning to him with a frown. ‘What do you mean? You killed it. We are free.’

  Gotrek sighed and pushed through the crowd of solemn dwarfs to the doors of the gemcutters’ guildhall. ‘Open it,’ he said.

  A dwarf brought a key and turned the locks as Gorril and Felix and the other dwarfs filled in behind him. The door swung open.

  The dwarfs of the Diamondsmith clan turned towards the door as the light from the hall fell upon them. They stared empty-eyed at the dwarfs who looked in on them, and then slowly started shuffling towards them, their weapons raised, their hands clutching.

  Gotrek drew his axe from his belt. ‘The worst is still before us.’

  Gorril and the other dwarfs moaned in despair, and Felix’s last faint hope died.

  After a long, stunned moment, Gorril sighed and wiped his eyes. He straightened his shoulders, gripped his axe, and turned to the others.

  ‘Fall in, sons of Karak Hirn,’ he said. ‘There is sad work to be done.’

  EPILOGUE

  ‘Plenty meat on norther man,’ said the ogre. ‘Taste funny though.’

  The men gagged and edged away from him.

  The dwarf grimaced. ‘Grungni! Is there anything you ogres won’t eat?’

  The ogre ruminated for a moment, rubbing his several chins. ‘Don’t think so,’ he said at last.

  Felix listened with only half an ear. He and Gotrek were marching with a group of mercenaries who had banded together for safety while traversing the Black Fire Pass. All were heading north to sell their swords and axes to the Empire in its fight against the invasion of the Chaos hordes. Ahead of them was a company of Tilean Pike, outfitted in gaudy red and gold, and behind, thirty Estalian crossbowmen in brown leather. The dashing son of a border prince trotted past with twenty lances at his back, all on massive chargers, brave pennants fluttering from their lance tips. Ten dwarfs marched slowly beside two pony-drawn cannon, making sure the wheels didn’t get stuck in the muddy, snow sprinkled ruts of the rough road.

  Gotrek listened not at all. His one eye was turned inwards. He stomped along with his head down, taking no notice of the men, dwarfs or ogres around them. The Slayer had been in the blackest of moods since they had left Karak Hirn ten days before, and Felix didn’t blame him. The events of the past weeks had been enough to depress even the most cheerful, and Gotrek was not known for his sunny disposition even in the best of times.

  In a way, the fact that the Diamondsmith dwarfs had not come back to themselves had been a blessing, at least for Gotrek’s sanity. It meant that he had been right to slay Hamnir – that the prince would not have returned to his right mind. And yet, what a bleak comfort that was. Cutting down the lost dwarfs had been the saddest battle of Felix’s life. They had hardly fought back. They had blinked at the oncoming axes like cattle waiting for the maul. It had taken moments, and not a dwarf of Gorril’s force had got a scratch, but Felix wondered if they would ever recover.

  The thought of losing family made Felix think again about his own. Were they still alive? He had thought a lot recently about going home and settling down. Would he still have a home to return to? Was his brother Otto still running the family business? What of his old friends and companions? Did Max still live? Heinz, the innkeeper who had employed them in Nuln? Snorri? Ulrika?

  A pang went through his heart as Felix thought of her. If she lived, what side did she fight for?

  The news that came from the north was a hotchpotch of rumour, fear and hope. There were some who said the war was over, and the Chaos-crazed northmen driven back to the Wastes. Others said that Altdorf was aflame and Karl Franz dead. No two stories were alike. None could be trusted.

  ‘Yer wasting your time if ye think ye’ll get in on the fighting,’ said a swaggering gunner with a Nuln accent and the notched ear of a convicted thief. ‘It’ll all be over in a month. Archaon’s smashing his head against the walls of Middenheim as we speak. Pretty soon his brains will fall out. No one’s ever cracked the Fauschlag, no one.’

  ‘So why you march?’ asked the ogre.

  The gunner shrugged. ‘Lot of open positions after a war,’ he said. ‘Lot of crimes forgotten when the ranks get thin.’

  Gotrek raised his head, glowering. ‘Better not be over,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘I must wash the dwarf blood from my axe in a bath of Kurgan gore.’ He held up the axe and gazed mournfully at its shining steel edge. ‘Though it will never be enough.’

  He and Felix trudged on in silence as, ahead, the setting sun painted the northern sky red as blood.

  MANSLAYER

  Nathan Long

  ‘On we pressed, north through the Black Fire Pass, to tread at last on Empire soil for the first time in twenty years. And though my heart sang to be home, it was a grim time in the land of my birth, and it grieved me to see it so wracked with panic and privation.

  ‘Gotrek was eager to reach Middenheim and find his doom in battle against the great hordes of Chaos that had again swept south to threaten the lands of men. In this desire, however, he was to be frustrated, for, passing through Nuln, we stumbled upon a vile and far-reaching conspiracy intended to destroy the beating heart of the Empire from within at the very hour when its greatest enemy attacked it from without.

  ‘While in pursuit of these foul villains, it chanced that Gotrek met an old friend, and I an old love – and never could two reunions have been more different; for Gotrek’s was fond and fortuitous, while mine was both sweet, and more painful than I can express.’

  – From My Travels with Gotrek, Vol VII, by Herr Felix Jaeger

  (Altdorf Press, 2528)

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘By Sigmar’s golden beard, brother!’ cried Otto. ‘You haven’t aged a day!’

  ‘Er…’ said Felix, as Otto’s butler took his sword and his old red cloak and closed the front door behind him, shutting out the warm rays of a late summer morning.

  Felix would have liked to return his brother’s compliment, but looking him over top to bottom, the words stuck in his throat. Otto’s once blond hair had retreated from his head and turned to silver on his chin – chins, rather. And though he was exquisitely dressed in perfectly tailored velvets and brocades, the best tailor in the world couldn’t have hidden the prodigious swelling of his belly.

  Otto limped forward, gripping a gold-topped walking stick, and brushed some of the road dust off Felix’s shoulders. Gods, he walks with a cane now, Felix thought.

  ‘And you haven’t matured a day either, I see.’ Otto chuckled. ‘Same ragged cloak. Same patched breeches. Same cracked boots. You vagabond, I thought you were going to find your fortune.’

  ‘I have found it,’ said Felix. ‘Several times.’

  Otto wasn’t listening. He waved a hand at the butler, who was wrinkling his nose with distaste as he hung Felix’s cloak in a closet at one side of the entrance hall.

  ‘Fritz!’ Otto called. ‘Wine and cold cuts in the study!’ He motioned to Felix with a pudgy hand as he stumped down a cherry-panelled corridor towards the back of the townhouse. ‘Come, brother. This calls for a celebration. Will you stay to lunch? Annabella – you remember my wife? She will be most interested to see you again.’

  Felix followed, stomach growling at the mention of food. ‘Lunch? Thank you, brother. You are most generous.’

  It had been a lean journey from Karak Hirn, up from the wild lands of the Border Princes through Black Fire Pass then down the Old Dwarf Road into Averland and on. In this time of war even the breadbasket of the Empire had been stripped bare – all its wheat, wool and wine sent north to supply the army fighting to stop Archaon’s encroaching hordes. Its men too had gone north, sometimes unwillingly. As he and Gotrek had boarded the riverboat Leopold at the Loningbruck docks for the long meander down the Upper Reik to Nuln, Felix had seen companies of miserable, pinch-faced farm boys sitting on their packs, all kitted out with spears and bows and ch
eaply made uniforms in the colours of their lords. Burly sergeants in well-worn breastplates had watched over them like prison guards, making sure none of them slipped off home before the barges came to ship them north. Felix had shaken his head at the sight. How was it possible that these untrained boys, most of whom had never been away from their villages, could turn back the supernatural might of the numberless armies of the Wastes? And yet, for centuries, they had.

  ‘Now then, brother,’ said Otto, settling noisily into a high-backed leather chair by the open window of his opulent study. Sunshine and the droning of contented bees filtered in from the garden. ‘How long has it been?’

  Felix sighed as he sat in the opposite chair. He felt as if he was sinking into a leather cloud. Sigmar! He had forgotten such luxury existed. He smiled wryly to himself. There might be a war on, and privation all around, but one could always trust Otto to do well for himself. In that regard he was just like their father. ‘I haven’t been keeping track,’ he said. ‘How long has it been since the ratmen attacked Nuln?’

  ‘Ratmen?’ said Otto, looking up as the butler set wine and meat and fancy pastries on a table between them. ‘Beastmen, you mean. That was twenty years ago.’

  Felix frowned. ‘The ones who came up from the sewers and destroyed the College of Engineering and spread plague and ruin? Those were ratmen.’

  Otto chuckled. ‘Yes, yes. I read your book when it came back from the printers. Very entertaining. But really, there was no need to embellish the truth. The beastmen were bad enough.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘It sold very well for a time, by the way. As have the others.’

  Felix gaped, Otto’s absurd insistence that the ratmen were beastmen forgotten. ‘You… you published my journals? But…’

  Otto smiled, his eyes almost disappearing behind his round cheeks. ‘Well, you wouldn’t accept my money, and I had some foolish notion that you wouldn’t make any yourself.’ He gave another amused glance at Felix’s threadbare clothes. ‘So I took it upon myself to provide for your old age. Annabella read them as you sent them to us, and thought they were quite good. Absolute rubbish of course, daemons and dragons and vampires and whatnot, but just the sort of tall tavern tales that sell these days. Certainly went over better than your poetry ever did.’ He helped himself to a pastry. ‘I put aside the profits, just in case you ever returned. Of course I had to deduct the printing costs and what not.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ muttered Felix.

  ‘But I believe there’s still a tidy sum, enough for a man of your, ah, frugal nature to live on for a bit, I should think.’

  Felix could feel the blood rising in his cheeks. Part of him wanted to leap out of the chair and strangle Otto for his presumption and condescension. How dare he? Felix had often thought about publishing his journals – about turning them into books – but he had meant it for a time when he was settled, when he would have time to edit them properly, to check his facts, to compare notes with other learned men. He had thought to make them scholarly treatises on the lands and cultures and monsters he and the Slayer had encountered, not a series of penny dreadful melodramas. People would think he was a hack! On the other hand – a tidy sum? There was certainly something to be said for that. He rolled up a slice of ham and stuffed it into his mouth. Sigmar, that was good! He sipped his wine. Heaven!

  ‘How much exactly, is a “tidy sum”?’

  Otto waved a hand. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t looked at those ledgers in years. Come by the office later this week and we’ll–’

  ‘Father?’ said a voice from the corridor.

  Felix looked around. A tall, blond youth with a thin, serious face stood in the study door. He had a stack of books under one arm, and wore the robes and skullcap of a university student.

  ‘Yes, Gustav?’ said Otto.

  ‘I am going to the Verenan debating society meeting tonight. It may run late.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll send Manni with the coach to wait for you.’

  Gustav made a face. He looked about seventeen, perhaps eighteen. ‘I don’t need the coach. I can make it home very well on my own.’

  Otto’s face went red. He opened his mouth to speak, then shot a look at Felix and thought better of it. ‘Very well, very well. Just don’t walk alone until you get to the Kaufman Gate.’

  ‘I know, father,’ said Gustav, with infinite disdain.

  Otto forced a smile. ‘Come and meet your uncle Felix.’

  The boy’s eyes widened. ‘The… the dead one?’

  ‘Only a long away from home,’ said Felix, standing and extending a hand. ‘A pleasure to meet you, nephew.’

  The boy advanced hesitantly and gave Felix a limp hand.

  ‘Gustav studies theology and law at the University of Nuln,’ said Otto. ‘And he has published poetry.’

  ‘Really?’ said Felix. He coughed modestly. ‘I once published some poetry. In Altdorf. Perhaps you’ve…?’

  ‘I don’t write old-fashioned stuff like that,’ said Gustav airily.

  ‘Old… old fashioned?’ stuttered Felix, trying to keep his voice level. ‘What do you mean by…’

  ‘I am of the new school, the School of the True Voice,’ said Gustav. ‘We eschew sentiment, and speak only of what is real.’

  ‘Sounds highly entertaining,’ said Felix dryly.

  Gustav sniffed. ‘Entertainment is for plebeians. We edify. Our philosophy–’

  ‘Gustav,’ said Otto. ‘You’ll be late for your lecture.’

  ‘Ah.’ Gustav nodded. ‘Of course. Good day, uncle. Father.’ He inclined his head solemnly and left.

  Otto rolled his eyes at Felix and shrugged.

  ‘I didn’t know you had a son,’ said Felix, resuming his seat.

  ‘No? He was born… Oh yes, that’s right. He was born a year after you left Nuln. Very grave, isn’t he?’ Otto chuckled. ‘Reminds me of you at that age, actually.’

  ‘Me?’ said Felix. ‘I was never such a…’

  ‘You were worse.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  Otto raised an eyebrow. ‘Have you read those poems lately?’

  Felix snorted and took another sip of wine.

  ‘So, what brings you back to Nuln?’ asked Otto. ‘Are you still playing valet to that surly dwarf?’

  ‘I am his Rememberer,’ said Felix stiffly. ‘And we’re on our way to Middenheim, to help turn back the Chaos invasion.’

  Otto made a face. ‘Bit old for that now, surely. Why don’t you stay here and work for me? You can help the soldiers up north and add to your nest egg at the same time.’

  Felix sighed, amused. It seemed every time he came to Nuln, his brother offered him a job. Poor Otto. He didn’t give a damn about helping Felix ‘add to his nest egg.’ He just wanted him to get a respectable job and stop being an embarrassment to the family. ‘You’re helping with the war effort?’ he asked, avoiding the question.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Otto. ‘Jaeger’s of Altdorf won the contract to ship raw iron from the Black Mountains down the Reik to Nuln. We are sole suppliers to the Imperial Gunnery School.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Neat bit of negotiating, that. There were three shipping companies with lower bids, but I footed the bill for the Countess’s annual Weaver’s Guild Ball and buttered her up something shocking and, hey presto, I got the nod.’

  Felix scowled. ‘So you’re not helping the war effort. You’re gouging the cannon makers for everything you can get.’

  Otto shook his head impatiently. ‘Not a bit of it. Our bid may have been higher, but our service is better. Jaeger’s is the best in the Empire. Everyone knows that. It just took a little oil to get the Countess to award the contract on merit rather than price. That’s the way it is with business.’

  ‘And that’s why I’m not in business,’ said Felix, a bit more snootily than he had intended. ‘I’ll pass, thanks. Why don’t you ask your son?’

  ‘Him?’ Otto snorted. ‘He’s too much like you. Too high-minded and honourable to get his hands dirty in t
he real world. Father always did want us to become nobles. Looks like he succeeded, at least with you, and his grandson. Well, I wouldn’t want to compromise your ideals, m’lord.’

  Felix gripped the arms of the chair. The veins pulsed in his neck. He was no noble. He had nothing but contempt for the nobility. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. If he didn’t stop he would say something he regretted, and there was that tidy sum from the sale of his books to consider. He eased back in the chair, forcing himself to relax. Twenty years gone, and he and his brother still couldn’t carry on a polite conversation for more than five minutes.

  ‘These books of mine,’ he said at last. ‘Can I see them?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Otto. ‘I think we still have a few copies lying around somewhere.’ He lifted a delicate silver bell on the table and shook it.

  Lunch was vast, and would have been a grim affair, had it been just the brothers at table, for despite his attempts to be civil, Felix had found himself boiling at his brother’s every other word. He was such a pompous ass, so ignorant and incurious of the true state of the world, so sure that life was ordered for his pleasure and that he deserved every luxury he had.

  Fortunately, they had been joined by Annabella, Otto’s Bretonnian wife – as plump and silver as Otto these days, though still a handsome woman – and she had kept up a constant stream of questions about Felix and his adventures, giggling and gasping at all the appropriate moments. This sweet and flattering babble had done a marvellous job of hiding that he and Otto hardly spoke to each other once during the meal.

  The only awkward moment had come when, overwhelmed with the spirit of hospitality, Annabella had asked Felix if he wanted to stay with them while he was in Nuln. Otto’s head had snapped up at that, and he had glared across the table.

  He needn’t have worried. Felix felt the same. If this was how he and his brother got along after only a few hours together, a few days under the same roof and they would be at each others’ throats. He politely declined Annabella’s offer, saying that he and Gotrek were very comfortably lodged in an inn and wouldn’t think of imposing.