Gotrek and Felix: The Anthology (28 page)

The Slayer put one bloody hand over the rim of the pit, then hauled himself over the lip and got to his feet.

‘My axe,’ he said to Rumblebelly. ‘Now.’

The butcher considered Gotrek grimly. Felix sensed that Rumblebelly held some sway in the absence of the Tyrant, much as a warrior priest might issue commands in an Imperial army if the general were to be disabled. He was the key to all of this. His word would be law among the tribe.

The ogre held up both arms and turned towards the crowd. ‘The Great Maw is pleased! The dwarf is new Tyrant!’ He looked back down at Gotrek and passed him his axe, his cleaver gleaming wickedly in the cold afternoon sun. He jerked a thumb at the pit. ‘Now, eat ’im.’

Felix paled. Anya had mentioned that the winner of a pit fight ate the loser, but he’d assumed that was a formality and not a mandatory requirement. In truth, his plan had ended when the fight began. He certainly hadn’t expected Gotrek to win. There was no way the Slayer was going to devour Kineater. The last thing he’d want was to be their Tyrant.

But maybe that was the answer.

‘Your Tyrant,’ Felix called out to the surrounding ogres, ‘decrees that the ogre who eats the most Vork is the new Tyrant.’

It took a moment for the crowd to process the concept, but one especially bright ogre caught on and leapt down into the pit. Another followed, seizing the first by the back of the neck and hurling him against a wall. Soon there were enough ogres in the pit to shake the earth.

Rumblebelly’s brow furrowed. ‘No! That is not the way!’

But even those ogres closest to him had waded into the fray. The lure of power was too great for their simple minds. Disgusted, he turned back towards Gotrek and Felix, his metal cleaver in hand.

Gotrek stood his ground, daring the butcher to try something. His skin was already mottled with bruises, and he blinked away blood from his swelling eye as he glared up at Rumblebelly. The Slayer lifted his axe and, with a trembling hand, drew his thumb along the blade, drawing blood. Slowly, his bruised face cracked into a smile that showed his missing teeth.

Rumblebelly stared down at the Slayer in disbelief. His gaze darted from Gotrek to Felix, to the Nitikin sisters, and then back to Gotrek. At last, he shook his head and spat on the ground. ‘Go. You are painful meat. Not worth eating.’

Not worth eating. Felix could think of no finer compliment for an ogre butcher to bestow upon them.

Rumblebelly had greatly
disappointed Gotrek by refusing to obstruct their escape – preferring instead to watch the struggle for leadership unfold – but the dwarf did not seem to let it affect him unduly. He spent much of the hike back to the caravan talking with Talia. Normally taciturn, the Slayer didn’t seem to mind the Kislevite woman – Gotrek knew a thing or two about having a foul temper, and shared his wisdom with the younger Nitikin.

‘Do you think she’ll go back to her former ways?’ Felix asked Anya. They’d fallen a few paces behind Gotrek and Talia.

Anya looked up at her sister appraisingly. ‘I’m afraid her daemons won’t be banished so easily. However, I’m sure that being judged to be so ill-behaved that an ogre thinks you’re beautiful is an eye-opening experience indeed, for a woman of her station.’

Ahead of them, Gotrek had drawn his axe and was showing Talia how to keep the edge keen. She watched with rapt attention.

‘Of course,’ admitted Anya, ‘it could be that her temper has simply become more... focused?’

Felix chuckled. It was difficult to imagine a woman of Talia’s slender build wielding an axe like Gotrek’s, but he could certainly picture her with a rapier. That mental image provoked a thought of Ulrika and he felt his heart twinge. Maybe it was time to deal with the other matter.

‘
Boyarina
–’

‘Why the formality?’ Anya asked, lightning quick. ‘Even if we’re not old friends, we have at least shared in an adventure.’

Felix paused, unsure of how to continue. Flattery would never work on a woman like Anya, nor would deception. She already suspected he was about to ask for some favour, so he might as well spit it out. ‘I want to ask you if you would take up my duties. You proved yourself level-headed in the fight today, and of course, your literary talents are beyond question.’

Anya paused. Her gaze fell to the ground, and then back to Felix. ‘Is this because I compared your journal to a penny dreadful?’

He sighed. ‘Partly. It has been years since I’ve been published, and the life of a vagabond leaves little time to polish my prose–’

Anya cut him off, her tone harsh and impatient. ‘I said nothing about your prose. Your prose is beautiful. It is obvious that you are a poet, and a fine one at that. My complaint was not with the quality of your journal, but with its content.’ Here, she blushed and lowered her gaze, then brushed an intruding lock of hair from her eyes. ‘I thought you’d made your stories up. Now, having seen what I’ve seen, I... I feel quite foolish. Who would have thought a dwarf would be named an ogre Tyrant?’

Felix gaped. Anya Nitikin, one of the Empire’s foremost authors, thought his prose was beautiful? It was the finest compliment he’d received in years, and from an author of her calibre no less. ‘I-I…’ he stuttered, unable to find the words. ‘Thank you,’ he said at last.

‘And as for handing me your duties, there is no one quite as suited to them as you are. No one else could follow the Slayer for all these years, enduring his insults by day and fighting at his side by night.’ She smiled and put her hand on his arm sympathetically. ‘I’m afraid, Herr Jaeger, that the gods have already chosen your destiny for you, and it is to pen one of the world’s great epics.’

Felix held his head up high. He’d thought himself cursed to live as a wanderer, chasing after a doomed warrior on a futile quest. But Anya saw him as a warrior-poet, an artist who had deliberately chosen the bohemian life for his art. Perhaps he had at last found in prose something he’d been searching for in poetry. Perhaps now he had found his purpose.

‘Have you thought of a title for your epic?’ she asked curiously.

‘Years ago I had a vision of a book labelled
My Travels with Gotrek
in gold print,’ Felix confessed. ‘But I have been struggling to find names for each volume.’

Anya chuckled to herself. ‘The dwarf is a Trollslayer, is he not?’

Felix nodded.

‘It seems that might make a good title for your first volume,’ she said.

Felix tapped his chin with a fingertip. ‘Of course. In our second adventure we fought the ratmen in Nuln. I could take a minor liberty with Gotrek’s moniker and call that volume
Skavenslayer
, in their strange tongue.’

Anya’s eyes danced with barely suppressed mirth. ‘You realise that one day you may run out of new monsters to slay?’

An ironic smile graced Felix’s face. ‘I do indeed. In fact, I look forward to it.’

Ben McCallum

I

Thunder was a
god’s spoken wrath.

The sound had the shape of a snarled curse. The heavens’ anger was rich with spite. It rumbled into the physical realm as a literal thunderclap, the aftershock of a god’s volcanic contempt, a deity’s ill-temper translated into the world of natural laws and physical constants.

It was a command that left nothing unchanged. The land yielded like clay to the god’s primordial brutality. Mountains fell flat in storms of tectonic agony, throwing up enough dust and ash to obscure the horizon. A filthy ocean of oil and blood boiled away in a blink-fast instant of hissing vapour. A toxic bank of fog formed in its sudden absence, vast enough to choke a nation.

The god-thunder lengthened into a predator-growl, like the roar of some great hunting cat from antiquity. It opened a snaking trail of fissures in the parched earth, reminiscent of the earthquake-ravaged islands of the far south.

Finally, with a snorted boom of disinterest, the riot of change fell silent and the god glanced elsewhere.

It was the nature of the Chaos Wastes to warp and heave in such a way. It was a land slaved to malignant energies, doomed to conform to the whims of the aethyr. This cursed state owed every one of its torments to the ugly rent in reality at the world’s northern pole. It was here that the breath of the gods was at its foulest.

It infected every principle of nature, every foundation of existence. Distance was a quaint notion, here. A league could be travelled in a matter of footsteps, or it could stretch out into endlessness at any given moment. In the ever-changing landscape, mountains could crawl across the horizon, becoming meaningless and confusing points of reference.

Time, too, became a fickle thing. Anyone foolish enough to lie down and sleep upon the Wastes might wake to find that either mere moments had passed or themselves aged by half a century.

Even roving warbands from the Hung and Kurgan territories turned their noses up at this region. It was merely the first step of damnation’s long road. The destruction wrought by the tyrannical god was a diluted echo of something fiercer further north. Ambitious warlords struck deeper into the heart of the Wastes to fight for the gods’ favour, where the suspension of order became stranger still, and far more dangerous.

But of the death of mountains and oceans, two souls paid no heed. They didn’t hear the god-thunder, even as it drowned out their screams.

Twins. Brothers, identical in all but minor ways. Their albino-pale skin showed an unhealthy grey under the weak light of the blighted skies. Their eyes marked them as souls with a god’s favour – in the magic-rich air of the Wastes, they were flickers of crimson fire.

They howled like dogs. It was not a dignified sight. They stumbled over their long robes, barking at phantoms, drooling at nightmares only they could see. Pain was plastered over their gaunt features. And fear. Fear was a tangy spice in the chill air.

Around them, ghosts blinked in and out of existence, either through their own uncontrolled talents, or as quirks of the haunted land. Colourless figures flickered as indistinct insights into whatever madness ran amok inside their skulls.

It was not such a rare sight in the northern reaches of the world. For here, this was how men dreamed.

Most men dream
in silent repose.

It was never their way. As children, the twins would howl into the late hours, screaming at the scenes that played behind their eyes. The tribe’s elders would gather in cautious silence, straining to steal any meaning from the youths’ anguished cries. Old men would lean over their cots, thin, gnarled hands outstretched as if to snatch their secrets from the air. The pair were blessed; they all knew that from the moment the children had left the womb. Ordinary infants aren’t born with a carnivore’s needle teeth.

That practice soon ceased as the twins matured, and the howling became violence. Whatever secrets Tchar whispered to them, it turned the silent youths into snarling animals. Night after night, they bled under each other’s ferocity.

Sharpened teeth weren’t the only sign of the Changer’s favour. Kelmain – Goldenrod, as he would soon come to be known – possessed fingernails that were blade-sharp claws on his right hand, the fierce gold of a cold steppe sunrise. Lhoigor – Blackstaff, true to his slightly quieter, more introverted nature – was much the same, save that his were dark silver on the opposite hand.

Emerging unscathed each morning, they kept their secrets to themselves. No one enquired too deeply about what these children, so obviously born with Tchar’s blessing, saw. It was foolish to pry. When the mood took them, they offered whispered warnings of trouble down the road, of rival tribes waiting in ambush.

No one realised that even in their hushed seclusion away from the rest of the tribe, they rarely spoke with their actual voices. It was their first expression of sorcerous talent, an ability to communicate with each other through thought alone. They shared the same dreams, experienced the same hungers and passions, and through the harsh years of their nomadic upbringing, they plotted the route their lives would take, like the charted course of a raiding vessel.

With this power, with these gifts, they set off into the world, dreaming their dreams of what was to be, beholden to no one except the Changer.

Consciousness returned with
a strangled gasp.

Kelmain’s vision swam, painting the world in bleary smears. The ragged inhalation awakened his physical senses. He tasted blood’s copper tang on his tongue, and spat it into the foul wind.

Worrying. Something inside him must have ruptured. Visions always took their toll, but this was severe.

He closed his eyes as his pulse began to quicken in the claws of a panic attack. The helplessness of disorientation was rare to a man like him, but the landscape had changed again. When the vision had taken him, there had been mountains on the horizon. Now there was just a distant dust storm, a smudge of black off to the... north. Or perhaps east.

He grappled the momentary weakness. Throttled it before it could taint him further.

He sat up delicately. The ash beneath him held his imprint, his robes leaving a confused outline on the ground. He bit back a groan, his every muscle offering him a thousand different pains. It was an effort to still the trembling.

Lhoigor came awake opposite him. Where Kelmain would rouse slowly and carefully, his brother all but fled the visions. The seizures could be staved off, and willpower could force their muscles to obey, but Lhoigor always floundered, always let his fear master him. His screams were a confession of weakness.

Stop it
,
he scolded. There was nothing of kindness in the voiceless communication.

‘I am sorry, brother,’ came Lhoigor’s breathless reply. His voice was scratchy and hoarse at being so rarely used. ‘It always makes me so disorientated.’

They sat in silence for several long moments, gathering their wits, cataloguing their pains. One brother scowled at the barren earth, grim and silent, where the other turned his crimson eyes skywards, as if entreating heaven to relieve him.

‘Brother.’ Lhoigor’s voice still shook, uncertainty creeping into his tone.

Lhoigor.

‘What did we see?’

You saw. We both saw.

‘Nevertheless,’ Lhoigor pressed. Minor convulsions wracked his spindly frame. ‘I would hear you speak it aloud.’

Kelmain sighed, composed where his brother was honest with his weakness.

‘We saw him,’ he said, using his actual voice for the first time in days. ‘We saw the Slayer.’

II

The dragon opened
its eyes.

Lhoigor faltered in his chanting. It was something few mortals had ever witnessed, and it startled him, despite the fact that he had already foreseen this moment. To see such a beast in the flesh, to actually feel its breath gust past him...

Focus.
His brother’s rebuttal was hard. Impatient. This moment was crucial.

It was easy for Kelmain to say. To one attuned in such a way, the dragon’s ancient intelligence was a palpable presence. It was not just a powerful creature. Its consciousness was a transcendent thing, an order of magnitude above humanity’s frail perceptions. Even the Slight Ones, who claimed companionship with these draconic gods, were like children in comparison.

Lhoigor, focus.

It was an effort to shrug off his fascination, but he took up the intonations where he left off, his thin lips framing impossible syllables. They rose and fell in time with the ancient creature’s slow, pounding heartbeat. Its lids began to drop again, closing over unfocused, reptilian eyes.

Despite its elevated perceptions, the sleeping god’s senses were shut off to the world. Its centuries-long slumber, thus far undisturbed, was a deep, abyssal state of rest.

At the periphery of his focus, Lhoigor sensed his brother’s movements. Kelmain was stalking around the cave, his feet shuffling in the darkness. His pulse quickened as he felt
what his twin gripped in his golden-clawed hand.

With fearless bare-skin contact, Kelmain hefted a shard of heaven.

Wyrdstone, the scholars of the Empire named it. It was the stuff of the aethyr, condensed by the mortal world’s laws into a shard of luminous rock. To the men of the civilised south, it was pure corruption, a hazard to be purged and avoided at all costs. To merely be in the presence of the volatile substance invited mutation and madness. From their pulpits, priests and holy men representing a pantheon of southern gods urged their flocks to spurn the afflicted, to scorn those blackened by the Shadow’s touch.

It was the cause of a thousand stillbirths and deformities across humanity’s various kingdoms and nations. A mere flake tossed into a well would doom a whole community. Beastmen and verminkin hoarded it as a rare and precious treasure, the former worshipping it as a gift from the Ruinous Ones, the latter prizing it as currency and a valued food supply.

Kelmain plunged it into the dragon’s scaly flesh.

The sleeping god groaned. It was a sound like the precursor to a volcanic eruption, a rumble of deep tectonic unrest. Lhoigor saw movement beneath its eyelids. Its dreams – whatever gods dreamed – darkened. He smiled as he chanted.

The spell was a simple one, made easier by the presence of wyrdstone. The substance was flaky, and its potency persisted even when it was burned or dissolved in liquid. It mingled with the dragon’s potent blood, and with a soft exertion of his will, Lhoigor began to guide it through the creature’s veins. It invaded arteries like a disease, carrying naturally into the chambers of the beast’s ancient heart.

The effect was unnerving in its immediacy. Mucus began to drool from the dragon’s slitted nostrils, its constitution already beginning to unravel as the taint thrived. The pitch of its heartbeat changed; instinct readied the dragon to fight an enemy that had already won.

Lhoigor’s smile widened, his unnatural teeth showing bright in the cave’s dank gloom.

‘It is working,’ he whispered breathlessly. He turned to his brother, seeing his expression mirrored: two vultures grinning over a carcass. ‘Another. Our work will be done before dusk falls. Skjalandir wakens today.’

Another shard of heaven appeared in Kelmain’s clawed hands, and the sleeping god’s dreams grew darker still.

It was fated
to die. This, they realised only after their work was done.

Swollen, corrupted, the dragon thundered from its lair for the first time in an age, no longer the exalted creature it had once been. Its mind was in a clawed grip, squeezed until all that was left was the overriding impulse to defend itself against threats that didn’t exist.

It was a fallen god.

It met the night sky with the promise of annihilation. Its ability to breathe gouts of flame from its fanged maw had been fouled: now acid and bile drooled from between its teeth every time it opened its mouth to scream.

It heaved its bloated bulk into the skies on tattered wings, but it was too heavy to fly. Its form had been warped too much for the fallen god to achieve natural flight for very long. With every beat of its wings, it ravaged its own draconic musculature to stay aloft.

Everything within a mile of the fallen god’s screams cowered. Birds broke their formations, scattering in the frantic need to flee. Nocturnal hunters howled and yelped, gnawing at their own bodies in confusion and fear. A community of humans and dwarfs eking out a grim existence in this relatively secure stretch of the Worlds Edge Mountains awoke to the roaring of a god soon to vent its wrath upon their homes.