Gotrek and Felix: The Anthology (8 page)

‘Sigmar’s balls,’ said Henrik. ‘A troll.’

9

Agnar seemed considerably
happier than his companion. ‘I knew I would find a doom here.’ He shot a hard look at Gotrek. ‘Unless you rob me of this one too.’

‘I robbed you of nothing,’ growled Gotrek.

The troll stood to its full height as it came into the room, a looming, lumpy horror with skin the texture of lichen-blotched stone, muscles like ship’s cables, and a reek that smelled like low-tide in high summer. It held no weapon. The massive, bone-knuckled hands at the end of its ape-like arms were weapons enough. Its lugubrious long-nosed face stared stupidly as the orcs prodded it forward, pointing at the
s
layers.

‘Prepare fire, rememberer,’ said Agnar.

‘Aye, Agnar,’ said Henrik, unhooking his lantern from his belt and looking around.

Felix did the same, hunting for something to burn. He and Gotrek had fought a troll once before, in the crypts below Karak Eight Peaks, and had only defeated it by setting it aflame. Without fire, its flesh regenerated almost instantly. Even severed limbs grew back in time. But what to burn? The sundered treasure chests would provide some wood, but not enough for a big blaze. He supposed they could gather all the furniture and smashed chests, but– He stopped as he saw the solution. Hidden under a broken table was a pile of rolled up carpets, covered in dust.

‘Henrik, here!’

They ran to the table and heaved it up as Agnar charged the troll, roaring a Khazalid battle cry. Gotrek, to Felix’s surprise, charged the orcs. Was he letting Agnar have the glory? Was he avoiding the troll? Neither seemed likely, but what then?

The orcs seemed surprised as well, and stumbled back, wrong-footed, in the face of his fury. Gotrek opened up the first with a slash across its belly, then smashed the cleaver from the hands of the second and buried his axe in its spine as it turned to flee. It fell and he severed its leg at the hip, then flung it at the troll.

‘Hungry, rock head?’

The leg smacked the troll in the side of the head, and the smell of blood and fresh orc meat made it lick its lips and turn for the treat. Agnar took advantage of this distraction and stepped in, swinging for its legs. His long-hafted axe bit halfway through the monster’s left knee and it crashed down on its side, lowing like a lovesick moose.

As Felix and Henrik pulled at a heavy roll of carpet, the six remaining orcs roared to see their champion laid flat and charged in, attacking the two
s
layers. Agnar ignored them, severing the troll’s knee so the wound wouldn’t heal, and paid for it. An orc with a cleaver took a chunk from his arm, spinning him around with the weight of the blow, but Agnar whipped his axe up in mid-turn and sank it into its bare green chest, then recovered and faced two more as blood poured down his forearm. Gotrek fought three more, a fourth dead at his feet. Behind him, the troll was pushing to its knees, its stump already closing.

‘Come on!’ called Felix. ‘We’ve got to start the fire!’

Felix shouldered one carpet while Henrik grabbed another, and they ran them back. The troll was up, weaving unsteadily on its right knee and its severed left leg, and lashing around in a blind rage. It crushed the skull of Gotrek’s last opponent with its stone-hard fist, and knocked Gotrek flying. The
s
layer crashed headfirst into a sealed stone treasure chest, then slumped to the floor beside it, dazed and bleeding.

Unable to crawl after Gotrek on its mismatched legs, the troll picked up the stone statue of the dwarf maiden and threw it at him. Felix’s heart thudded in alarm, for its aim was true, but at the last second the
s
layer flung himself aside and the statue smashed into the wall, sending marble chips flying everywhere.

Gotrek staggered to his feet, off-balance, and charged the troll, roaring defiance. At the same time, Agnar finished the last of his orcs and ran at the troll from behind. The monster swiped at Gotrek, tearing tufts from his crest with its claws, but the
s
layer ducked and hacked through its elbow, severing its right arm. Agnar swung for its right thigh and chopped its leg off. It fell back, howling, three limbs lost, and clawed for Agnar with the last. He dodged back and Gotrek stomped on the thing’s wrist, pinning it, then sliced through its arm at the shoulder.

Felix had never felt sorry for a troll before, and likely never would again, but the sight of the monster lying helpless, armless and legless, like a turtle on its back, as it keened in pain and confusion, jolted him with pangs of unwanted empathy. Still, the limbs were already growing back, white spurs of bone extending from the severed tibias and fibulas, and strands of muscle beginning to form around them.

‘Burn it,’ said Gotrek.

Felix threw his carpet over the troll as Henrik did the same. Henrik then emptied the contents of his lamp’s oil reservoir over everything and took up a torch from a fallen orc.

‘Maybe next time you won’t be so foolish as to be born a troll,’ he sneered, then touched the torch to the carpets and stepped back as they started to burn.

He and Felix and the
s
layers threw broken furniture and shattered chests onto the flames, then tossed the monster’s severed limbs in the middle of it. Gotrek stepped to the troll’s head and severed it with a swift chop. Felix breathed a sigh of relief as its frightened howls ceased.

After they were sure the thing was well and truly burning, and after Henrik had helped Agnar bandage the wound in his arm, Gotrek started again for the skaven’s hole in the wall. Felix and Agnar made to follow, but Henrik held the old
s
layer back and whispered in his ear, gesturing angrily at the burning troll.

Felix looked back, suspicious. ‘Coming?’

Henrik stepped from Agnar and they started forward, the old
s
layer shooting a hard look at Gotrek’s back.

‘Aye, coming.’

The skaven’s hole
in the wall led into what seemed to be a tight drainage pipe. It was covered with a crust of dry algae and the reeking residue of the passage of many skaven, and angled down to the left and up to the right. Gotrek examined the tracks, then started up on hands and knees with Felix following. It quickly turned left and levelled out, and Felix guessed that it was running above the corridor outside the vault.

A moment later, he was proved right, for he came to a tiny hole bored through the floor of the pipe that looked down into the corridor.

‘Skaven spy holes,’ he murmured. ‘Have we been watched all along?’

As the party moved on, the pounding of drums began to echo loudly down the pipe ahead of them, and they heard the guttural grunting of arguing orcs. A few more yards and the pipe split left and right, and the drums boomed up from a wide hole in the floor of the left-hand pipe. Gotrek stuck his head through it, then lowered himself down. Felix, Agnar and Henrik followed, dropping one after the other into what appeared to be a pump room. A smaller pipe ran down one wall into a fat brass reservoir, and there were valves and levers sticking from it, and more pipes running from it. A narrow door, held open by a pile of garbage, led back into the corridor, and noise and light spilled in through the gap. It sounded as if the orc argument were reaching a crescendo.

Gotrek eased through the half-open door with the others following behind. To the east, the passage vanished into darkness, but just ten paces to the west, it opened onto a wide, pillared balcony that looked out over a vast dwarf-built chamber with a soaring cross-vaulted roof. The walls were pierced with balconies and galleries that rose in overhanging tiers above the smoky light of the fires that burned below, and echoed with the deafening howls of hundreds of orc warriors.

Gotrek, Felix, Agnar and Henrik crouched on the balcony and peered through the balustrade to the savage horde below.

Gotrek’s single eye kindled eagerly at the sight. ‘This is a worthy doom.’

10

The floor of
the enormous chamber was crammed with a seething ocean of orcs, above which rose banners marked with dozens of crude symbols – glaring suns, red fists, grinning moons, cracked skulls and bloody axes. The green monsters were all shouting and shaking weapons and torches over their heads and looking towards the middle of the room where four big bonfires blazed.

There crowded the biggest mob of all, over three hundred orcs rallying around dirty green banners with the crude symbol of a stinking foot painted on them in white. Inside the area marked off by the four bonfires was a square of open floor, and two orcs lay dead within it, while two more circled each other.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Henrik.

‘A challenge,’ said Gotrek.

One of the orcs was as big as any Felix had ever seen, head, shoulders and chest above the rest, and muscled like a mutated ape. He was dressed in heavy rusted armour, studded all over with spikes, and had a helm with an even bigger spike sticking straight up from the top of his head.

His opponent was shorter, and, though well-muscled and encased in crude plate, was not nearly as massive as Spike Helm. He also walked with a limp, his right foot bound up in dirty bandages. But there was a confidence to his stance, and a cunning in the turn of his head.

‘The little one is Stinkfoot?’ asked Henrik. ‘He doesn’t stand a chance.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Felix. ‘With him dead, the orc alliance falls apart, and we can all go back to the tavern.’

‘Let’s hope
not
, then,’ said Agnar, shooting a sour glance at Gotrek. ‘I still haven’t been able to claim my doom.’

Spike Helm took a few exploratory swipes at Stinkfoot, all the while howling and gargling orcish insults, but Stinkfoot did not fight back. He just stared at the bigger orc and turned to keep him in front of him. Enraged by this behaviour, Spike Helm charged. Stinkfoot side-slipped and Spike Helm stumbled past, his spiked mace crushing only air, then turned again to face the warboss.

Across the circle, Stinkfoot raised his bandaged foot and thrust it at Spike Helm as if he was trying to kick him in the privates. He didn’t come close. His opponent was six paces away from him, and yet, astoundingly, the huge orc went down anyway, toppling like a side of beef cut from a hook to sprawl on the floor, unmoving.

Felix stared as all the orcs in the room quieted in fear and awe. Had it been magic? Had it been a trick? Was the stink of Stinkfoot’s foot so vile that it could kill an orc at six paces?

‘That wasn’t right,’ said Agnar. ‘How did he do that?’

Stinkfoot stepped up onto the huge barrel chest of his fallen rival and raised his bulging arms, roaring his dominance to the others. The orcs echoed his roar, shaking their weapons and headbutting each other in excitement. The chamber shuddered with the sound of it.

Over this clamour, Stinkfoot roared again, and pointed with his axe to a great archway on the north side of the chamber. The orcs howled in response, then gathered up and started forward.

‘It begins,’ said Agnar. ‘They go to war.’

‘And we’re too late to warn Thorgrin,’ said Henrik.

‘But not too late to do what that dead orc couldn’t,’ said Gotrek. He nodded towards a balcony over the great arch through which Stinkfoot’s army was flowing, and towards which Stinkfoot himself was slowly moving. It was connected to the one they were on by a columned gallery. ‘If we run, we can jump down on the greenskin before he passes under that arch.’

Agnar’s eyes glittered eagerly. ‘Aye. Aye!’

The two Slayers hurried north into the gallery.

As Felix and Henrik started after them, Henrik cleared his throat. ‘Slayer Gurnisson, ah, perhaps you should let Agnar jump first when we get there.’

‘Why?’ asked Gotrek without slowing.

‘Er, well, you have robbed Agnar of two dooms already on this trek. To make up for it–’

Gotrek ground his teeth. ‘I’ve robbed no one. If he wants to jump first, let him try.’

‘You interfered. Twice,’ insisted Henrik, raising his voice.

Felix cringed. ‘Quiet! The orcs are right below us.’

Henrik ignored him. ‘You blocked blows meant for Agnar during the minehead fight! And just now you distracted the troll when it was sure to have killed him! A
s
layer’s honour demands–’

Gotrek snorted. ‘No manling can lecture me about a
s
layer’s honour. I warned you I would–’