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

by Warhammer

  ‘Well then, Mast’r Dwarf – it’s your bid,’ said the dealer, eyeing Gotrek over the top of his thin eyeglasses. ‘The sun’ll be up, ere we finish. And I don’t know about you two, but I’d rather spend my winnings and be bedded down afore dawn.’ He grinned and patted the small pile of coins on the table in front of him, a pile that Gotrek noted contained a fair contribution from his own pocket.

  The third player, a scrawny, bearded manling with fast eyes, twitched nervously and sipped from a small tin cup at his elbow before impatiently drumming his fingers on the edge of the table.

  Gotrek returned his attention to his cards. He could feel every pair of eyes in the room upon him, and in all honesty he had no idea what he was doing. He was familiar with most of the games played in taverns and inns across the Empire, but this one – Gleek? Gleich? – was new to him, and it seemed to be infuriatingly complicated. Felix was the one with a head for things like that: trivial, calculating affairs that were as much to do with posturing as they were to do with adding up numbers and such.

  Well then, he thought, may as well forget the rules and play the players instead.

  He sniffed productively, and slid all nine of his remaining crowns across the table, fixing the dealer with his one good eye. ‘It’s to you, then. I’m cleaned out.’

  The bid was high, much higher than the ante. High enough, he hoped, to make them all think twice before proceeding.

  The man let out a short laugh, but withered under the dwarf’s iron glare after only a moment. His own gaze flickered to the other player, and then off to somewhere behind Gotrek. He shifted in his seat. Ran his fingers over the edges of his cards. Coughed once, then cleared his throat rather more affectedly.

  There it was.

  Gotrek narrowed his eye. The dealer had glanced back to the same point, just behind him. His demeanour then seemed to change noticeably.

  ‘In that case, Mast’r Dwarf,’ he grinned slyly, ‘I’m afraid that’s that. I’ll see your bid and let’s name those pairs, though I reckon you can’t beat this hand. With respect.’

  Gotrek didn’t even wait for him to count out the coins. He simply laid his cards down and planted a meaty fist into the man’s nose.

  Bone cracked, and blood splattered onto the pile of gold. The man made a shocked sound – not quite a yelp and yet more than a gasp – as he sprawled backwards with the force of the blow, his boots whacking up into the underside of the table, sending the cards and coins flying as it flipped over.

  Before this had truly registered with the other patrons of the den, Gotrek whirled around from his stool and grabbed the nearest one by the collar of his rough tunic. There was a chance that it might not have been the dealer’s unseen card-reading accomplice, but that didn’t really matter – with a throaty, wordless shout, Gotrek heaved and laid him out cold with a solid headbutt.

  Pandemonium erupted. Other brawls broke out at the tables and shadowed booths where other games had been going on, and accusations of cheating were bandied back and forth between the punches. Although Oberwald was home to several dubiously regulated gambling dens such as this, the watch would only turn a blind eye for as long as the activity remained quiet, and a fracas which spilled onto the streets or got too out of hand would likely bring them running. Felix had been going on about keeping a low profile for weeks, since the recent unpleasantness that had forced the pair of them onto the road north; Gotrek knew that he should probably teach these cheating swine a lesson and recover his gold quickly, before heading off into the night.

  He shot his hand out to seize the third player from their game – the scrawny manling with the fast eyes – but his fingers closed on empty air. He turned his head to see that, indeed, the man was gone. His seat was empty.

  Gotrek’s confusion lasted only a single heartbeat before someone broke a cheap wooden cudgel over the back of his head. He let out another wordless roar and launched himself at the new assailant in a whirl of fists, tattoos and fiery orange hair.

  Off to his left, he saw a knife flash in the gloom and an agonised shriek cut through the din. As was to be expected in a room full of cut-throats, things had turned nasty very quickly. Already, many of the more savvy brawlers were scuttling for the low arched doorway which led back up to the street, leaving only a few bewildered out-of-towners and those locals who looked like they could afford to buy their way out of trouble regardless.

  With a renewed sense of urgency, Gotrek sent another manling reeling to the floor with a blow to the temple, and then rounded on the injured dealer who was still thrashing about on his back amidst the debris from their upended table.

  Clutching his shattered nose, the man was choking back blood and half-blind with pain, scrabbling about for his broken eyeglass frames. Gotrek noted that no one seemed to have come to his aid.

  He pulled the manling up by the front of his leather jerkin and, ignoring his pitiful protestations, gave him a gentle slap on the forehead to get his full attention.

  ‘So you want to cheat me, eh?’ he growled. ‘Want to steal my hard-earned gold, you misbegotten little thief?’ He hauled him up close and stared hard into his eyes. ‘You’re lucky – I’m supposed to be behaving myself tonight.’

  He let his words sink in for a moment before dropping the weakly struggling man to the floor once more, and scooping up as many of the fallen gold pieces as he could stuff into his belt. It was more than he’d had when he entered the den, but he considered that to be the price this daft human would pay for a lesson in honesty.

  ‘You just watch yourself, thief,’ he continued, yanking his pack and bedroll from under the bench against the wall. ‘I may come back for another game.’

  Chuckling to himself, Gotrek hopped up the stone steps to street level and into the first paling light of dawn. It was still a good few hours until sunrise, and there would be plenty of time yet to seek out Felix at the inn.

  A small group of stragglers from the gambling den darted away into the night as the unmistakable whistles of the watch echoed in the distance, and Gotrek ducked through the arch of a nearby building to avoid them all.

  Aye, a good few hours still.

  For the most part, the buildings in this part of town were in the half-timbered style, with high gabled roofs of grey and red shingles, and ornamental finials that spoke of a quiet, self-congratulatory smugness among the more permanent residents. It was shoddy human worksmanship, true enough, but it suggested that this was where the money was.

  If he could find another den, he might indeed have enough time to try his hand at a new game, and maybe win a few more crowns for the pot.

  It was the cold that Felix noticed first.

  He was shivering, and lying on damp cobblestones – they pressed painfully into his hip and shoulder, and his face felt bruised. He had slept rough under the stars plenty of times before, but something here was strangely amiss.

  Only when he attempted to pull his cloak tighter did the nausea hit him.

  Felix gagged. His head was pounding.

  He let out a long moan, full of all the remorse of the inebriate who cannot yet recall the night before but who knows that even merely in its telling it would most likely break him all over again.

  Rolling slowly and delicately onto his front, he tried to take deep, cleansing breaths of the chill morning air as the world spun unforgivingly around him.

  Who was making all that commotion? Blowing whistles and shouting, at this damned hour! Oh sweet, merciful Shallya! Deliver me from this wretchedness!

  He drew his knees up and buried his face in his hands, almost sobbing at the pain behind his eyes. His hair hung wet and sticky against his clammy forehead, and he had the taste of bile and rancid ale in his throat. He gagged again.

  Angry voices echoed in the alleyway around him. An alarming number of angry voices. Felix wanted to open his eyes, but he was certain that the effort would cause his brain to explode inside his skull.

  When he finally did open them, the outcome was
far worse.

  Sabine lay before him on the cobblestones, in a wide pool of rain-watered blood. Her face was contorted, and her innards hung through a wide slash across her belly, which seemed to have almost cleaved her in two. Felix’s sword lay nearby.

  As the watchmen came for him, their pitiless hands yanking him up from the ground, he was suddenly, horribly aware that his own hands and face were also smeared with Sabine’s blood.

  He vomited copiously over the man who restrained his left arm, earning Felix a blow to the stomach that felled him instantly. Gasping and choking in the gutter, he saw that a horrified mob was being held back by the local watch commander at the entrance to the alley, and that they were crying out for vengeance.

  It’s the Ripper! They’ve caught the Ripper!

  Felix’s head hung at a maddening angle, and his vision swam. He needed time to think, just a few moments to–

  Gotrek.

  Felix caught sight of his dwarf companion’s grizzled face in the crowd, and his heart leapt. The Slayer was cowled in a dark hood, his single eye wide and his jaw set in a stern manner; most surprisingly to Felix, the dwarf’s expression was somewhere between anger and bitter disappointment. The sight was unnerving.

  They had been so careful, tried so hard to remain inconspicuous…

  Gotrek met his gaze, but said nothing. Solemnly he shook his head and slipped away into the baying throng.

  Felix cried out in horror and anguish. One of the watchmen gripped him by his bloody hair, and bashed his face into the pavement.

  As consciousness deserted him, away in the shadows Felix fancied he saw a lone figure: a skulking wraith of a man with piercing eyes.

  Watching.

  Gotrek stomped his way through the oncoming rabble; word was spreading fast, and in response more and more of the people of Oberwald were heading out onto the streets from their early morning duties. They were clearly agitated, although it seemed to be more fear than excitement that was gripping them.

  Stupid manling. Stupid, stupid manling.

  There had been a good deal of talk about a ‘ripper’ while they had been in the town, but Gotrek had simply assumed it was a harmless local legend or just another name that the humans had given to some wandering beast of Chaos. Who knows, he thought. It didn’t really matter now, anyway.

  Felix had been stupid. Careless. You don’t cavort with taproom floozies when the whole district is on edge and looking for a scapegoat.

  Always thinking with his tallywhacker, that one.

  Up ahead, a young lad in a grocer’s apron had hauled himself up onto the low roof of a stone outbuilding and was pointing down to the corner where the cobbled alleyway met the main thoroughfare.

  ‘He’s there! They’ve caught him! They’re going to string him up!’

  Gotrek sagged at the words. Hysterical shouts echoed from the half-timbered frontages which lined the street, and some of the bolder citizens began to jostle and run towards the apparent spectacle. He noted with grim inevitability that some of them were armed – an assortment of hand tools, pitchforks and kitchen knives gripped in trembling, white-knuckled hands.

  There was a strange feeling in the air, an unusual dynamic to this crowd. This was not the usual lynch-mob, thirsty for blood; it was almost as if they were more afraid of this local terror now that they thought him cornered, more so than when he had supposedly stalked among them…

  Fear was unfamiliar to Gotrek, and even humans themselves were a puzzle at times. He cast his gaze about as the people hurried by. A watchman with a hand firmly on the hilt of his sword. A housemaid, her face streaked with tears. Two youths in fine clothing. A blacksmith with a forge hammer and a curiously haunted expression, followed by his gloved apprentice.

  The dwarf slowed, and turned back to see the burgeoning crowd at the mouth of the alley. Most of these people didn’t have vengeance on their minds, nor likely did they mean Felix any harm. Not directly, anyway.

  They simply couldn’t believe that their Ripper had been caught.

  They just had to see it with their own eyes, to witness him being dragged away in chains. They needed to finally banish the horror that had haunted them for so long, to restore their faith in the men who were supposedly employed to keep them safe at night. They needed to know that it was all over.

  Somewhere further up the street, someone – most likely one of the watch trying to maintain order – fired a pistol skywards. The report rang down the street, and unfortunately had quite the opposite effect on the crowd. Screams filled the air, and then panicked cries as the thoroughfare was suddenly turned into a stampede.

  ‘It’s the Ripper! The daemon is loose again! Run for your lives!’

  Gotrek groaned and shouldered the blacksmith aside as the lumbering brute almost ran him down, but even the doughty Slayer couldn’t weather the press of frantic bodies that surged around him. Being sure to keep a tight grip on his pack and the familiar weight of his axe strapped beneath it, he allowed himself to be swept along with the crowd.

  Though he could barely think over the bleating and yammering and breathless prayers of the fleeing townspeople, Gotrek knew that he couldn’t just abandon his lanky companion to the hangman’s noose. First and foremost, young Felix had been locked up for a crime that – Gotrek hoped – he hadn’t committed. Secondly, if the watch held Felix for long enough, they might realise just who he actually was… and then, of course, they’d soon come looking for the mohawked Slayer too. There were plenty of things that the pair of them had done which would land them both in any gaol in the Empire, no question.

  Finally, Gotrek realised, since Felix wasn’t this notorious murderer that the people had figured him to be, it meant that someone – or something – else was.

  The Oberwald Ripper was still at large.

  Time passed for Felix in a roiling, nauseous haze. He was unsure where the throbbing pain of his injuries ended, and the dull ache of his hangover began. He found that he couldn’t turn his head without the sensation that he was whirling down some hellish chasm to an unspecified but particularly unpleasant end.

  It was like those things. You know. The dwarf machines. With the spinning blade things on top…

  He whimpered before retching onto the floor.

  Gyrocopters. That was it. It was like being attacked by gyrocopters every time he closed his eyes. Gyrocopters flying in a gale. With drunken pilots.

  The watchmen had taken his cloak, taken his mail shirt and his sword. They had even taken his boots and his belt and clapped him in rusty manacles and leg-irons, although it was a mystery as to what kind of escape they thought he might attempt in his current condition.

  Misery. He coughed and heaved again, and snorted out a clot of black blood.

  He lay curled on a bare wooden bench, his face towards a rough-hewn stone wall that was slick with moisture and covered in blooms of lichen. The sound of dripping water in the cell was constant, like the ticking of some bizarre timepiece. Faintly, he was aware of thunder rumbling in the distance, and when he managed to turn his head far enough, he saw rain beating down upon the sill of the small, barred window set high up in the wall.

  The only mercy that he felt was the cold draught that blew in through that opening. Though it might normally have wracked his body with chills, for now it was refreshing and he drew in long, deep breaths of it to steady himself before daring to move again.

  ‘You look unwell, friend.’

  Felix started at the sound of the voice, started so hard that he almost fell off the bench and into the various puddles of his own making. His eyes slid in and out of focus as he peered into the shadows for the anonymous speaker, though the effort sent new jabs of pain lancing through his skull. His stomach tightened with the effort, but he managed to stifle another dry retch.

  ‘Who… who’s there?’ he managed at length, only to be met with a thin trickle of laughter.

  In the far corner of the gaol was an empty bench, and heaped against the wall was a bu
ndle of rags and detritus. Where the floor dipped in the middle, a pool of silty water had collected from the dripping ceiling, and looked to be at least a few inches deep. The heavy wooden door to the cell was bound with great iron hinges and bolts, and a battered little tin bowl containing a few mouldy crusts lay beside it.

  But of the phantom speaker, there was no sign.

  Felix gripped the edge of his bench tightly and tried to muster the strength to rise, but footsteps and angry words echoed in the space outside the cell, and underneath the heavy door he saw the suggestion of candlelight moving beyond.

  With an iron rumble to rival the thunder outside, the bolts were pulled back and the door swung outwards to reveal several watchmen armed with spears, and the swarthy old watch commander in his brocaded coat, holding a lantern aloft. They entered cautiously, almost like a battlefield phalanx approaching him as they would a dragon or greater daemon, spears levelled.

  ‘This is him,’ spat the commander. ‘This is the cold-blooded bastard we found in the alley.’ He gestured at Felix, before spitefully kicking up a spray of the silty water in his direction. One of the spearmen jabbed at Felix, driving him from the bench and onto the filthy floor with a piteous cry.

  Felix covered his eyes against the light of the lantern, and tried to ward off the spears of his captors and plead his innocence, the chains of his heavy manacles trailing on the stone flags.

  ‘N-no, you’ve got the wrong man! I didn’t do anything…’

  The closest spearman, a potato-faced thug with one milky eye, leered in closer. ‘Shut yer mouth, devil, or I’ll cut out yer filthy tongue!’

  Recoiling into the corner, Felix tried to think quickly. It was clear that they thought him to be this fiendish Ripper who had apparently plagued the town for so long. Of course, he could hardly blame them – here was an unknown outsider who could not have given a good account of himself even if he had been telling the truth.