by Warhammer
Felix clawed and elbowed his way to the surface. He could see nothing. A cloud of choking dust obscured everything.
Ulrika sat up out of the mound, shoving a body aside. She was covered in dust, making her black clothes match her white skin. She spat. ‘Well done, Slayer. Well done.’
‘Get them!’ the sorcerer’s voice rang out from above. ‘Kill them!’ He began chanting another spell. Felix cursed and tried to stiffen his mind.
All around, men were pushing themselves to their knees and groping for their weapons, their cloaks of dust making them look like some strange snow tribe on the warpath. They turned haltingly towards Gotrek, Felix and Ulrika, groaning as they attacked. The vampire slashed around her, killing all within reach, then helped Felix to his feet. He chopped to his left and right. Every inch of his body felt battered and bruised. His sword weighed as much as a cannon. Sigmar! It was heavy! He could barely lift it off the ground, let alone block with it. Beside him, Ulrika was having the same difficulty, losing her balance with every swing of her rapier. Their opponents were not having the same trouble.
‘Sorcery!’ Ulrika cursed, and tried to scramble back up the slanting floor towards the sorcerer. A thrusting spear tripped her and she slid back.
A man split in two in front of Felix, and Gotrek stepped through the pieces, glaring up at the masked sorcerer.
‘Enough of your noise!’ he barked, then plucked a cannonball the size of a cantaloupe from the debris at their feet and hurled it at the magician.
The magician squawked and ducked, but not fast enough. The cannonball crushed the side of his head like an eggshell and he fell into the hole, as limp as a sawdust doll.
Immediately Felix’s sword was lighter again, and he attacked their foes with renewed energy. Ulrika did the same.
The dust in the air settled as they fought, and the outlines of the chamber they had landed in slowly emerged into clarity. The mound under their feet was a grisly, treacherous jumble. Bloody limbs and crushed heads stuck up out of the mess of shattered timber, spilled long guns, cannonballs and bags of shot. The deck cannon had pinned half a dozen men. They squirmed under it like squashed bugs. The screams were unbearable.
More figures were creeping out of shadowed arches at the edges of the chamber, and at the far end…
Felix froze, and almost took an axe in the knee because of it. He stumbled back as the air cleared and the thing at the far end of the chamber was revealed. ‘Sigmar save us,’ he choked.
Gotrek and Ulrika glanced up from their fights. Gotrek grunted. Ulrika snarled.
At first it seemed to be a twisted tree, growing from a stone altar and hung with bodies, but then Felix saw that the tree was a sculpture – at least he hoped it was a sculpture – made entirely of bones, of a giant, bird-headed deity, four bodies hanging from its four outstretched hands by hooks that pierced their flesh. The bones of the sculpture were human – leg bones, arm bones, hip bones, skulls and ribcages – all fused together as if they had melted in a furnace. There was no order to the construction. Each of the sculpture’s arms and legs was made of hundreds of random bones – skulls and ribs, fibia and tibia – every one of them decorated with swirls of beaten gold. The thing’s head was long and narrow and came to a beak-like point. Two gold-sheathed skulls served it for eyes. Dozens of finger bones – still attached to skeletal hands – were its teeth. From the eyeholes of the skull-eyes glowed a sickly greenish light.
The same light shone down into its torso, a lacy, ovoid cage of bones. There was something within the cage, something that writhed and twisted. The bodies that hung from its hands swayed like heavy fruit.
Felix shivered with dread. It appeared that the Brothers of the Cleansing Flame were not mere agitators.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘Fools,’ growled Gotrek, cutting down two men.
‘Dupes of Chaos,’ agreed Ulrika, impaling another.
‘They must not leave here!’ said a new voice from above. ‘Slay them, changed ones! Slay the unbelievers!’
Felix looked around. Changed ones?
The figures emerging from the temple doors roared and surged forward, clambering up the mountain of debris and clawing at the companions. Felix flinched as he fought them. It was as if he were looking at them through warped glass. Their limbs were stretched and bent, their heads lopsided and bobbing on elongated necks. Hideous goitres and lumps grew from their skin. Some had new limbs – stumpy arms or tentacles or claws growing from their torsos. Some had eyes or mouths where they shouldn’t.
But there was worse to be seen beyond them. The bodies hanging from the bone god stirred and pulled themselves free of the hooks to drop, cat-like to the ground. The thing in the bone cage uncoiled and slithered out through a hole near the pelvis. It was pink and blind and foetal, but had stilt-like spider legs that carried it swiftly towards the fight, and the coiled, flexing proboscis of a butterfly.
These new troops swarmed in behind their twisted brethren. Felix’s stomach churned as he buried his blade in the spongy head of a man with scaly, seven-jointed fingers. He hated fighting mutants. It was hard to fight something you felt pity for. It was like killing someone with the plague – a necessary, but soul-crushing, task. Not all mutants had dabbled in the black arts. With some, the mutations just came, and there was nothing they could do about it. And once they came, the revulsion of their family and friends, and the persecution of the witch hunters, drove them underground to seek out their own kind. Small wonder that they gravitated to the cults of the Ruinous Powers. They were the only ones who would welcome such creatures with open arms, the only ones who would shelter them and promise them a future.
That was the trouble. It was hard to kill a man when, in the same circumstances, you might have followed the same path. Of course, it became much easier when that man was trying to rip your guts out with a mouth full of shark teeth, but it still didn’t make Felix happy to do it.
Neither Gotrek nor Ulrika seemed to have any second thoughts. Gotrek stood on the butt of the fallen cannon, butchering any that came within reach and roaring for the thing from the bone cage to come and taste his axe. He split a mutant with skin like a lobster from head to crotch. The four men who had dangled from the statue leapt to take its place. They appeared to have been skinned. Their exposed muscles were glistening crimson. They bled endlessly.
Ulrika was a blur of black and grey, out of which shot the silver lightning of her blade. Mutants died all around her. A man leapt on her from the warehouse above, stabbing at her chest. She caught his wrist and pulled him off her back, then sank her jutting fangs into his neck, ripping out meat and veins in a spray of blood.
Felix whirled madly, hacking off a clawed hand, ducking a horned fist, then gutting a man with translucent flesh. A tentacle curled around his left ankle. He slashed down at it, but too late. It jerked his legs out from under him, and he fell hard on a bag of shot, hissing with pain. A thing with praying mantis arms and a face of melted wax leapt on his chest. He knocked it off with his arms, then lashed at it with his sword, but the tentacle was still pulling him down the mound, and he missed.
He looked down. The tentacle belonged to a woman dressed like a Shantytown harlot. It came out from under her short skirt. Felix shuddered at the implication. The woman raised dagger-like hands, licking her lips as she dragged him closer.
Suddenly there was a flash of steel and the harlot’s head rolled from her shoulders in a spout of blood. It thudded to the floor and her tentacle went slack. Felix looked up. Ulrika was smirking down at him.
‘In case you have any compunction about killing a lady,’ she said.
The praying mantis thing lashed out at her from behind. She stumbled forward, grunting, and it sprang at her like a flea. Still on his back, Felix thrust up with his sword and gutted it in mid-leap. It landed on him, dead.
Ulrika kicked it off him, then grasped his hand and hauled him to his feet while fending off three others. Her strength was frightening.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘The same to you,’ said Felix. He returned to the fray. His hand tingled where they had touched. His thoughts flashed unbidden back to other times they had touched. He fought the memories off as desperately as he fought the mutants.
The skinned things were dead, but Gotrek was soaked in their sticky blood. It seemed to be clotting as Felix watched, slowing the Slayer’s movements.
The foetal spider clicked forward and lunged at Gotrek. Faster than the eye could see its curled tongue straightened and jabbed. The Slayer blocked with his axe and missed, slowed by the swiftly drying blood, then staggered back, a hole like a gun wound in his right arm. He roared in pain.
Felix beckoned to Ulrika. ‘Come on.’
They fought forward to guard Gotrek’s flanks, holding off mutants to his right and left as he launched a barrage of attacks at the foetal thing with his axe, crusted blood exploding from his body like brick dust. None struck home. The creature’s spider legs seemed to have the ability to jerk its torso out of harm’s way in the blink of an eye. Gotrek lashed at a leg, but the thing whipped it away, backing down the mound.
The Slayer cursed, frustrated, then threw his arms wide, cracking off more blood. ‘Right then. Have a go.’
The thing lunged in again, snapping out its needle-like snout straight for Gotrek’s heart. The Slayer’s free hand blurred and he caught the spike at its fleshy root. The spider foetus keened like a newborn and tried to jerk away. Gotrek held it fast, laughing, then brought his axe down in the centre of the creature’s unformed body. It disintegrated in an explosion of gelid pink flesh.
Felix heard a ripple of dismay go through the mutants. ‘The blessed one is dead,’ they whispered, falling back. ‘He killed the favoured of the Changer.’
Above them a voice called out. ‘Brothers, escape! This place is lost! You will be contacted in the usual ways! The plans proceed!’
Gotrek spun, glaring up towards the voice. ‘Get him! He knows what’s what!’
Gotrek, Felix and Ulrika tried to run up the broken slanted floor as the mutants scattered for the exits, but just then a black powder barrel toppled into the hole and bounced down the planks, a length of match cord fizzing and sparking from its top. Felix threw himself right. Gotrek and Ulrika went left. Another barrel rolled by. They careened across the floor of the unholy temple and smashed into the statue of the Changer of Ways, toppling it.
‘Down!’ shouted Gotrek. ‘Behind the pile.’
Felix scrabbled over the mound of crates and guns and dived for the ground on the other side.
A thunderclap punched him in both ears, and a wave of blistering air lifted him up and slammed him into the wall behind the mound. A boiling cloud of fire roiled above him as a rain of bricks, boards and body parts battered him. Something struck him on the head, and for an instant all went black. His whole world was noise, heat and pain.
After a moment the noise and blackness receded, though the heat and pain remained. He looked up. Through the hole above him he could see that the warehouse room was on fire. Another explosion rocked it as he watched. Smoke obscured the vaulted brick roof. The temple was ablaze too. Fire licked up the plaster wall beside him, waking new pain in the burns he had taken on the bridge. On the other side of the rubble heap, mutants howled in agony. The hideous statue was gone, blown to pieces, and that end of the chamber was engulfed in flame.
Gotrek staggered to his feet and brushed dust and glowing cinders off his shoulders. He looked like he’d lost a fight with a dragon. ‘Time to go, manling.’
‘Go where?’ asked Felix. They were surrounded by fire.
‘The sewers,’ said Gotrek.
Ulrika pushed up to her hands and knees, dislodging a long plank. Her beautiful doublet was ruined. The hair on the left side of her head was singed and black. ‘A wise plan, Slayer. You surprise me.’
Gotrek grunted, apparently disappointed that she had survived.
‘We go through that?’ asked Felix, pointing up at the warehouse inferno.
Gotrek shrugged. ‘Better than staying here.’
Felix nodded and stood wearily. He didn’t feel like he could walk a step, let alone run through a burning cellar, but staying here was death. The sense of where he was and what lay between him and fresh air suddenly pressed down on him like a cart sitting on his chest. His limbs went weak. He was five floors below ground in a burning building, the walls of which were a jumble of old, rotting timber, poorly mortared stone, brick and cheap, dry plaster. He had been far deeper in dwarf mines, but there he had had some confidence that they had been shaped by master masons. This place had been built by a succession of slum lords and criminals. Suddenly he wanted to see the sky more than anything in his life.
He scrambled up the slanted floor behind Gotrek and Ulrika into the burning warehouse, forcing his trembling, exhausted limbs to move. Flames were everywhere. The heat beat on Felix like a hammer. Every breath was like inhaling glass. The sewers were only ten paces away, and the path clear. Only a few steps and they would be safe.
Gotrek started forward, then stopped at a sound from above and looked up. ‘Back!’ he said, throwing his arms out. ‘Back!’
With a rumbling and snapping, the brick ceiling above the hole to the sewers caved in, followed by timbers from the floors above it, all on fire. The debris blocked the hole to the sewers, and the ceiling kept coming down, a rain of bricks, timber and fire, that advanced on Gotrek, Felix and Ulrika like the leading edge of a storm. Dust billowed out towards them in a flaming cloud.
‘The hidden stair!’ cried Ulrika.
Gotrek made no argument, only turned and ran with Ulrika for the office with the secret door.
In his years with Gotrek, Felix had become used to shortening his stride to match the Slayer’s. Not here. Fear lent him wings, and he nearly beat Ulrika to the office, and bested Gotrek by ten paces.
The office was filled with smoke, but was only just beginning to catch fire. Ulrika tore down the banner that hid the door and felt up and down the wall.
‘Yebat!’ she cursed, scrabbling desperately. ‘Where is it?’
‘Stand aside, parasite,’ said Gotrek. He jabbed a finger at a nail head in a support beam and the door swung open. Ulrika pushed in first, her face rigid with panic. Gotrek and Felix filed in after her and Gotrek closed the door.
The stairs were dark, but at least free of smoke and fire. They hurried up them as the building roared and moaned and creaked all around them.
Felix heard Ulrika mumbling something that sounded like some Kislevite prayer.
‘Scared, bloodsucker?’ asked Gotrek.
Ulrika laughed, high and tight. ‘Swords, daggers, pistol balls; they cannot kill me. But fire, fire means the true death.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ Gotrek growled.
As they raced up, Felix saw firelight glinting through cracks in the walls. Sometimes smoke trickled through and the walls radiated heat like an oven, and more and more smoke was filtering up the stairwell from below. Felix coughed, his eyes watering and his throat raw.
Five flights up, an orange light flickered from above them, and Felix could hear the crackling of flames.
Gotrek stopped. ‘Blocked,’ he said.
‘Back down, then?’ asked Felix. They looked over the railing. The smoke below them glowed from within with a hellish red, and the light seemed to be getting closer by the second. The stairs groaned and shifted under their feet, then suddenly dropped several inches and lurched to one side.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Gotrek.
‘We’re trapped!’ whimpered Ulrika.
Gotrek snorted and turned to feel the building’s exterior wall, an unplastered mess of thinly mortared brick. Felix copied him. It was cool to the touch.
Gotrek flipped his axe around so that the square end faced out. He smashed it into the wall. Bricks flew. He swung again.
‘Ha!’ said Ulrika, grinning with relief. She stepped back and kicked a
t the wall with her boot heel. Mortar crumbled.
Felix joined her, kicking and stabbing at the bricks with his runesword. Sacrilege, no doubt, to use so grand a weapon for so pedestrian a purpose, but if Gotrek was using his sacred rune axe, and if it saved his life…
A hole opened up in seconds, Gotrek smashing through the two layers of brick with ease. Felix and Ulrika’s kicks helped him widen it as the flames from below and above crept closer. Felix sucked in great breaths of the cool, clear air that blew in from the hole. He had never tasted sweeter.
At last the opening was wide enough for Gotrek’s broad shoulders and they clambered though into another cellar; this one blissfully free of fire.
But as they reached the ground floor it became clear that the building had not escaped the blaze. The narrow corridor that led to the street was filled with weeping, wailing people, all trying to get out at once. Felix could hear crackling and screaming from the upper floors.
The alley, as Felix, Gotrek and Ulrika pushed out into it, was just as crowded. The nearby tenements had emptied and people milled around in panicked circles. Others ran away. Men in the masks of the Cleansing Flame were dotted through the crowd, shouting orders that no one listened to. The cult’s meeting house was a roaring hell of flame and blackened beams, half its original height. The buildings to its left and right were burning too, and the wooden shingles of the building that housed the Broken Crown were smouldering.
People in further tenements were spreading wet blankets on their roofs, trying to protect them from the flurries of fiery sparks that whirled up and away over the gables. Others were forming bucket lines that trailed to a small well where two men were hauling up a single bucket and lowering it over and over again. The meagre splashes of water that the men at the front of the line threw on the fire were doing little.
