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

by Warhammer

  He stuck the funnel in the tank, then leaned out to the limit of his ropes and inched the canister forward, resting it on the fuselage. Any sudden moves and he would lose his grip. He tipped it down and black liquid poured from the spout and gurgled into the funnel.

  ‘Ha!’ said Gotrek.

  Felix jerked and almost dropped the canister. The stream of black water splashed everywhere. ‘What!’ he said, looking around. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘The Spirit of Grungni,’ said Gotrek.

  Felix raised his head and scanned ahead. Far in front of them and a little to their north, a long black oblong shape hung in the air, just below the clouds.

  ‘At last,’ said Felix. He let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. They had found it after all. He returned to filling the reservoir.

  It took an agonisingly long time to close with the Spirit of Grungni, and the frustration was made worse because it was right there, directly ahead of them, and yet never seemed to get any closer. The sun climbed to its noon apex and sank an hour past it and they were still miles away. He kept hoping to see it turn about, or to see some other signal that the crew had spotted them, but it didn’t happen.

  Felix realized that he had been thinking of the Spirit of Grungni as their journey’s end, but it wasn’t, was it? What did they do then? Did they return the cannons to Nuln? Did they fly due west and drop them in the sea? How did one safely dispose of a warpstone tainted cannon anyway? Did they go on to Middenheim and try to discover who this ‘master’ was that Wissen had mentioned?

  Felix wondered who the master could be. He would have to be a fairly powerful wizard to bring the guns to life the way Wissen had described. Someone already in Middenheim? A sudden thought made Felix’s heart lurch. Max Schreiber! Malakai had said their old companion was there, helping with the defences. Could it be him? Felix had always been slightly suspicious of him. Certainly he had always seemed to fight on the side of the Empire and humanity, but there was also no denying he enjoyed his power, and had seemed at times tempted to use it for personal goals, rather than for the good of all. Had the years and his constant contact with the winds of magic twisted him in some way? Had he succumbed to the lure of Chaos at last? Felix shivered. Max must be a Wizard Lord by now. He did not look forward to facing him in a fight, and if he had turned traitor, Felix had no doubt that he would indeed be fighting him, because Gotrek would not suffer him to live.

  At last, with the sun halfway down the sky and glaring in Felix’s eyes, the Spirit of Grungni loomed ahead and above them like a great black cloud.

  Felix gazed up at it in wonder as Gotrek tilted the rudder stick back and they rose slowly towards it. He had never seen it like this before. He had been in it, looking out, and seen it flying from the ground, but there was something beautiful and wonderful about seeing it as a bird would, passing under the riveted brass gondola, rising up beside it, like a salmon pacing a whale, hearing the thrumming of the cables that fixed the gondola to the rigid balloon above it. Who could have imagined that so incredible a thing existed in the world?

  Gotrek angled the gyrocopter to cross in front of the Grungni’s gondola, then held it steady as best he could before it. Felix waved at the large viewing ports that looked into the command deck. He saw young men shouting and pointing at them, and then the broad, squat figure of Malakai stepped to the port and stared out, a look of confusion and concern on his usually cheerful face. Magus Lichtmann joined him at the glass. He gaped, his eyes agog behind his spectacles.

  Malakai turned and barked some order to his human crew, then waved at Gotrek and Felix and motioned for them to circle behind the airship. Gotrek saluted, then turned the gyrocopter and angled off to buzz down the airship’s side.

  In the stern of the Spirit of Grungni, a brass door like a drawbridge was lowered on chains, revealing a narrow hangar constructed of bare metal bulkheads. Another gyrocopter was parked on the metal deck at the far end. Felix didn’t understand how it had got in there, for the door looked barely big enough to admit two men walking abreast, let alone a contraption almost as tall as two men, with a wing span considerably wider than that. None the less, Petr, the wild-haired young engineering student, was waving them on as if he had every confidence that they would fit though the gap.

  Gotrek tipped the rudder stick forward and they approached it rapidly, too rapidly!

  ‘Slow! Slow down!’ cried Felix. ‘You’ll wreck us!’

  ‘I know what I’m doing,’ Gotrek muttered, but he eased back on the stick a little just the same.

  The door appeared to get slightly bigger as they approached, but not by much. Felix held his breath as Gotrek nosed the gyrocopter ahead in little fits and starts, raising it and lowering it, then raising it again, as he judged the height of the door and Petr waved his hands this way and that. Finally the Slayer pushed in decisively, and almost precisely.

  There was a great clanging racket and the gyrocopter slammed to the deck hard enough to snap Felix’s teeth together. He covered his head and looked up. One of the rotor blades was bent, and the whole rotor assembly wobbled in a slow off kilter circle. He looked back at the door. There was a bright gouge in the metal of the frame on the right side.

  ‘Welcome, sirs!’ cried Petr, hurrying forward with a wooden step ladder. He tripped over a riveted seam in the deck and the ladder flew out of his hands as he tried to regain his balance. He fetched up face first against the gyrocopter’s flank. ‘Sorry. Sorry. No harm done.’

  He scrabbled under the fuselage, found the ladder and set it up next to the cockpit. ‘Welcome to the Spirit of Grungni, sirs.’ His forehead was bleeding.

  ‘Ah, thank you, Petr,’ said Felix. It was a wonder the airship hadn’t gone down with all hands, with this walking disaster on board.

  Malakai slid down a ladder into the hangar, then turned, scowling as he crossed towards Gotrek. ‘What in Grimnir’s name is this? Did ye come all this way just tae wreck yin of my flyin’…?’ He choked when he got a close look at the Slayer’s face. ‘By my ancestor’s ancestors, what’s happened to ye, Gurnisson? Ye don’t look well.’

  ‘Mutants,’ said Gotrek, as he climbed stiffly down from the cockpit. ‘Now, turn about,’ he said. ‘The guns are sabotaged.’

  ‘Whit?’ said Malakai, raising a shaggy eyebrow. ‘Sabotaged? What dae ye mean? They were tested. Passed by the school.’

  Magus Lichtmann came carefully down the ladder behind him, his one hand letting go of one rung, then quickly catching hold of the next before he fell.

  ‘Tainted,’ said Felix, untying himself from the spindle pillar and sliding down the fuselage to the deck. His stiff muscles screamed as he landed, stabbing pain shooting through them and almost dropping him to his knees. He clutched the side of the gyrocopter for support. ‘Warpstone, mixed into the molten iron. We saw it happen, though we didn’t know it.’ He stood straight, wincing and grimacing. ‘The initiate who poured the ashes of the gun captain into the crucible was a secret cultist, a member of the Brotherhood of the Cleansing Flame. There was powdered warpstone mixed into the ashes.’

  Petr and the other crewmembers who were lashing Gotrek and Felix’s gyrocopter to the deck gaped, horrified.

  Malakai looked aghast. ‘Can it be true? But why would they dae it? To whit purpose?’

  Felix shook his head wearily. ‘I don’t know many details. Wissen died too quickly to tell us, but…’

  ‘Captain Wissen is dead?’ asked Magus Lichtmann, stepping forward alarmed.

  Felix nodded. ‘Aye. Another cultist. One of the leaders of the cult. We stopped him and his minions from blowing up the Gunnery School.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Lichtmann, all agog. ‘By the gods!’

  ‘Wissen was a cultist?’ said Malakai. He made a face. ‘Ah, weel, never did like the wee stuck-up numpty, anyhow.’

  ‘He said that some “master” was to wake the guns once they were in place on the walls of Middenheim,’ continued Felix. ‘And that the guns would driv
e their crews mad and cause them to turn them on the defenders.’

  ‘Wake the guns?’ Malakai gaped again and turned to Gotrek, as if for assurance. The Slayer nodded.

  The engineer opened his mouth and closed it a few times, momentarily unable to put his horror and outrage into words. ‘It’s no’ right!’ he said at last. ‘Befouling cannon wi’ black sorcery! Makin’ instruments o’ Chaos out o’ the purr wee things! The villains! I’ll no hae it! It’s as bad as the Dawi Zharr and yon daemon gun!’ He turned and started for the ladder, his jaw thrust forward. ‘Right. We’re turnin’ about. Make all fast.’

  ‘Professor Makaisson,’ called Magus Lichtmann after him.

  Malakai stopped and looked back. ‘Aye, what is it, magus? Make it quick.’

  Magus Lichtmann unpinned his empty right sleeve and pulled it up to his shoulder, revealing a stump tightly bound in linen bandages. ‘We will not turn back,’ he said calmly. ‘We will continue on to Middenheim, and deliver the guns as we have been contracted to do.’

  ‘Whit?’ said Malakai. ‘Are ye saft in the heid, laddie? Have ye no’ heard what’s jist been said? Why would ye wannae dae that?’

  ‘Because,’ said Lichtmann, tugging at the bandages, ‘I am the master.’ There was a ripping sound, and the bandages loosened, then uncoiled and dropped to the floor. Beneath them was, not a stump, but something black and dry and crusted. It unfolded with sinewy grace, revealing itself to be a skinny black arm, which crawled with lines of glowing red, like an embered log. Flame yellow claws tipped each of the long, skeletal fingers.

  Felix stared at the unnatural appendage, as did Malakai and his crew.

  Gotrek cursed, and started forward, head lowered, drawing his axe off his back. ‘Warlock,’ he spat. ‘You die here.’ With his face blistered and his body burned and covered in scabbing wounds and filth, the Slayer looked like something escaped from hell.

  ‘I think not.’ Magus Lichtmann stepped back through the door that led to the cargo hold and thrust his claw forward. The air before it rippled like waves of heat rising from a tar roof. The fuel reservoirs of the two gyrocopters exploded in billowing balls of flame.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Felix flew heels over head and slammed into the bulkhead as fire blossomed above him. His head rang like a gong. Burning shrapnel rattled against the metal walls and rained down on him, starting his clothes on fire. He was too stunned to beat out the flames – too stunned to move. He felt like he had been slapped by a giant. His whole body throbbed. Gotrek lay on his back beside him, his one eye blinking up at the roof, his beard and crest smouldering.

  The boiling fire dissipated as quickly as it had come, but the ruin it had caused remained. Three of Malakai’s crew, who had been standing next to the Spirit of Grungni’s gyrocopter, were dead, blasted into chunks of meat that were strewn across half the hangar deck. Had Felix and Gotrek not expended almost all of their machine’s fuel chasing the airship, they would have been dead too. As it was, the explosion of their gyrocopter was miniscule compared to the fully fuelled one.

  Felix raised his head and looked around. Petr lay in a heap beside him, struggling to get up, a deep laceration opening his left forearm to the bone. In the ceiling above, crewmen on the upper deck were gaping down through the ladder hatch at the carnage and calling out to Malakai. The stunned Slayer engineer was in the clutches of Lichtmann, who stood in the cargo hold door, hauling him to his feet with surprising strength. He put a long flame-shaped golden dagger to Makaisson’s neck. The edges of it shimmered like heat waves over a hot roof.

  ‘I regret the destruction of such fine machines,’ said the magus. ‘But no one must be allowed to bring word before we reach our goal. Now, Makaisson, have these two heroes thrown out of the door and maintain course to Middenheim, or I shall be forced to kill you.’

  Malakai laughed up at him, eyes wild. ‘Ye eejit! I’m a Slayer! D’ye think ah care if ah die?’

  He lashed out with a booted foot and kicked Lichtmann between the legs. The magus squeaked and staggered back against the railing of the landing that looked over the cargo hold, gasping and holding himself as more of Malakai’s crew slid down the ladder from above, armed with swords, hammers and huge spanners.

  Felix saw Malakai stride through the cargo hold door and punch Lichtmann in the jaw with his massive fist. Lichtmann flipped backward over the rail and dropped out of Felix’s sight, hitting the floor of the cargo hold with a satisfying clang. Malakai’s crewmen pushed through into the hold to stand at their captain’s side. Gotrek staggered up and started after them. The runes on the head of his axe glowed cherry red.

  Felix groaned and levered himself up to follow. Lichtmann. Why hadn’t he thought of Lichtmann? Perhaps because the man had hardly seemed a sorcerer – more a scholarly engineer. The hangar spun sickeningly around Felix, and he had to steady himself against the bulkhead as he limped forward to the cargo hold door. Beside him, Petr picked himself up, moaning, and started after him, clutching his wounded arm.

  The cargo hold was as wide as the airship, almost as long, and two decks deep. The door from the hangar opened onto a metal landing with stairs on the right that led down to the deck below. Just below the landing the cannons and mortars were chained to the deck in neat rows, and with their wheels securely blocked. Beyond them were crates of cannonballs, grape shot and other supplies, and beyond those, stacked against the far wall and roped in place, were the barrels of black powder. A pair of crewmen stood among the cargo, looking with wide eyes towards the action at the door.

  Magus Lichtmann was just picking himself up behind a row of chained-down cannons as Felix limped into the hold behind Gotrek. The warlock’s spectacles were smashed, and his gold-flecked green eyes, behind them, flashed with fury.

  ‘You will come to regret that, engineer,’ he said.

  Gotrek made to launch himself over the rail, but Malakai threw out a hand.

  ‘No! This yin’s mine.’ he said, taking a hammer from one of his crew. ‘I want this two-faced gowk’s head on a platter.’ He tsked angrily and started for the stairs. ‘Callin’ me friend. Takin’ an interest in my designs…’

  Lichtmann opened his mouth and spat out a stream of harsh foreign syllables, his black hand twisting and thrusting at Malakai and Gotrek. Felix and the students cringed away as a blast of pink fire shot at the Slayers. Felix felt the edges of the spell, flames of fury and madness that boiled up in his head and made him want to kill everyone around him, but Gotrek and Malakai didn’t even flinch. The Slayer laughed.

  ‘Ye fool,’ sneered Malakai. ‘Will a dwarf succumb to magic? Bah!’

  Lichtmann backed away, squeezing through the next rank of cannon. ‘Then I must try more pedestrian means. Grieg!’

  Malakai frowned and looked around. One of the engineering students cracked him between the eyes with a heavy spanner as long as a sword. The engineer staggered and the student caught him again hard over the ear. Malakai hit the floor in a loose flop.

  ‘No!’ cried Petr, and leapt at Grieg. The other students followed.

  Gotrek roared and launched himself over the rail at Lichtmann, axe held high. The magus fell back, crying out a vile word, and a shimmer of purple snapped into existence between him and the Slayer. Gotrek strode towards him.

  On the landing, Petr tripped, knocking the traitorous student into the railing as the murderous spanner swished over his head. The other crewmen swarmed Grieg, and it seemed that the effects of Lichtmann’s spell still lingered, for they hacked at him unmercifully with their hatchets and tools.

  Gotrek’s axe smashed into the warlock’s magical barrier and it exploded in pink sparks. Lichtmann flew back a dozen paces at the impact, as if hit by a wave, and crashed to the deck behind another rank of cannon. Gotrek started after him. The crewmen who had been crouching amidst the crates moved towards the sorcerer too, drawing hand axes. Felix crept down the stairs and started edging along the right bulkhead.

  Lichtmann lurched up beyond the
second line of cannons, glaring at Gotrek, his spectacles gone and his eyes glowing with a hellish inner light. ‘That is indeed a mighty axe,’ he said. ‘It deserves a mighty opponent.’

  He spread his arms and raised his voice in an ear-gouging screech of arcane verse. The flame-shaped dagger glinted and rippled in his left hand. His blackened right hand glowed red from within. Flickers of purple and gold light flashed in the air around him.

  Gotrek clambered over the line of cannon as the two brave crewmen leapt at Lichtmann’s back, hatchets high.

  Lichtmann spun like a dancer, dodging their attacks, then lashed out at their throats with two graceful flicks of his golden dagger, all the while screaming his vile incantation. The men staggered past him and, as Felix stared in horror, their heads toppled from their necks and great jets of blood sprayed from the stumps in all directions, showering the nearby cannons and mortars in a red rain before their bodies collapsed to the deck. How could so slight a blade and so thin a man have made such horrible wounds? It seemed impossible.

  Gotrek charged, roaring and swinging his axe. Lichtmann dodged nimbly back around a mortar and the Slayer’s blow glanced off iron. He continued after the warlock, slow but implacable.

  Felix started forward too, but as he moved closer, he heard a strange hissing and bubbling. His eyes followed the sound to the guns, and he stared at what he saw, the hairs rising on the back of his neck. The blood of Lichtmann’s victims was sinking into the iron. The cannons and mortars were absorbing it like sponges, and a green glow began to shimmer from them. The chains that held them rattled and shook.

  ‘Gotrek?’ Felix called, uneasily.

  Gotrek ignored him. He was too busy stalking Lichtmann through the maze of guns.