Gotrek and Felix: The Anthology (9 page)

‘Then I will lecture you!’ barked Agnar, and stopped to face him. ‘Gotrek Gurnisson, you have left the way of the
s
layer. A true
s
layer could not follow the true path for ten years and still live.’

Gotrek stopped and stared at him with his single baleful eye for a moment, then turned and continued down the passage. ‘There’s no time for this. We must reach the arch.’

‘Do you deny it, then?’ asked Henrik. ‘Do you call Agnar a liar?’

‘What are you doing?’ whispered Felix. ‘Why stir trouble when they’ll both find their dooms in that jump? Leave it be!’

Henrik carried on as if Felix hadn’t spoken. ‘Will you let him call you a liar, Agnar?’

‘I will not!’ Agnar stumped after Gotrek and spun him around with a hand on his shoulder. Gotrek shoved him back, sending him into the wall.

‘Do not lay hands on me, Agnar Arvastsson.’

Agnar pushed off the wall and stepped again in front of Gotrek, blocking the way to the balcony. ‘Why did you attack the orcs just now, when there was a troll before you?’ He asked. ‘A true
s
layer should attack the most dangerous foe.’

‘I killed the orcs to distract the troll with their meat,’ said Gotrek, with surprising restraint. ‘It made it easier to kill. Now let me by.’

‘Easier to kill?’ Agnar shook with rage. ‘Easier to kill? A
s
layer does not make his enemies
easier to kill
!’

‘For Sigmar’s sake, lower your voice!’ said Felix.

Nobody paid him any attention.

‘Does he not?’ asked Gotrek. ‘Why do you carry that axe?’

Agnar blinked, confused.

‘If you wanted to make your enemies harder to kill,’ said Gotrek. ‘You would attack them unarmed, yet you don’t.’

‘An axe is a Slayer’s weapon!’ said Agnar. ‘It is tradition. That’s not the same as–’

‘Grimnir asks of us that we fight our enemies with all our skill and strength,’ said Gotrek. ‘Anything less is suicide, which he disdains. Do you think he means us not to use our strength of mind? I fight with all the strength I possess.’ He gave Agnar a withering look and stepped past him. ‘It seems you do too.’

‘I do!’ shouted Agnar, thumping his chest. ‘I fight with all my strength. Who says I do not?’

‘Quiet!’ whispered Felix again, but fortunately, the orcs were making too much noise and didn’t hear.

‘He’s insulted you, Agnar,’ called Henrik. ‘He says you have no strength of mind!’

Felix shoved him, hissing. ‘Do you
want
them to fight? You are keeping them from their doom!’

Henrik shoved him back. ‘I am defending my friend’s honour, which you and your friend seem determined to take from him!’

‘Is that what you say, Gurnisson?’ asked Agnar, getting in front of Gotrek again. ‘Do you think me a fool?’

‘You’re both fools!’ cried Felix, pointing over the balcony. ‘Stinkfoot is getting away.’

Agnar looked up from glaring at Gotrek and blinked as if waking. ‘Curse you. You’ve slowed me down!’

He raced down the galley again with Gotrek pounding after.

‘
I’ve
slowed
you
down?’

‘Agnar!’ called Henrik, but this time the old
s
layer was deaf to his words and continued on. Felix was glad of it. It meant he wouldn’t have to shut Henrik’s mouth for him.

Unfortunately, Agnar’s belated hurry was too little too late. By the time they reached the balcony, the very tail of the orc army was filing through the arch below it, and Gutgob Stinkfoot was long gone.

Agnar punched the balustrade in frustration and glared at Gotrek. ‘We might have made it if not for your arguing!’

‘Aye,’ said Gotrek. ‘I shouldn’t have argued. I should have knocked you out and been done with it.’

‘Well, there’s no time to argue now,’ said Felix, trying to change the subject. ‘We must find a way back to the first level and warn Thorgrin of their coming.’

Gotrek shook his head and turned away from Agnar, who was looking murder at him. ‘First I want to see what killed the greenskin’s challenger.’

Gotrek stumped to a broad stair that descended from the balcony to the floor of the chamber. Agnar glared after him, looking as if he might bury his axe in Gotrek’s back, but then cursed under his breath and followed. Felix did the same, watching Henrik like a hawk. He still didn’t know what the rememberer was up to, but whatever it was, he wasn’t going to let him do it.

At the bottom of the stairs, Gotrek stepped onto the broad floor and started towards the four bonfires. As Felix followed his spine itched between his shoulder blades. He felt as exposed as a cockroach in the middle of a bare floor. Anybody could see them, but they could see nothing outside the fires’ square of light.

As he reached the challenge ground, Gotrek knelt by the enormous, spike-helmed orc, examining his legs and torso, but found no mark or sign of sorcery. Neither was there any wound on his arms or face, but when he heaved the great brute over onto his front, Felix noticed something sticking from the back of its neck.

‘A dart.’

He plucked it out carefully and showed it to Gotrek, who examined it. It was small and crudely made, and fletched with what looked like beetle wings. The rusty iron tip was crusted with some tarry greenish black substance.

‘A ratkin dart.’

Henrik and Agnar examined the other two challengers. They had died in the same fashion.

‘Stinkfoot’s foot did not win the day after all,’ said Felix.

‘Does he know that?’ asked Gotrek, then cocked his ear.

There was a whizzing sound, and the
s
layer snapped out his hand and clamped it shut. When he opened it again there was another dart in it, poisoned like the others.

Felix and Henrik hit the floor, covering their heads, but the
s
layers stood and drew their weapons, looking in the direction the dart had come from – the gallery on the south wall of the chamber. Four strange missiles arced out of the darkness after the dart, and Gotrek and Agnar braced to knock them out of the air, but they didn’t fall upon the
s
layers, but instead landed in the fires.

In the brief second before they struck, Felix saw they were little burlap bags, each trailing a tail of dust, and he feared they were blackpowder, but when they touched the fire they burst into clouds of blackness that put out the flames and left them in darkness but for the lamps at their belts.

In the dim light that remained, Gotrek hauled up one of the smaller dead orcs and held it up before him. Agnar followed his example, and not a moment too soon. Another dart thudded into his orc a second later. A third whizzed by Felix’s ear.

Gotrek turned to him and Henrik. ‘Darken your lanterns. They’re shooting at the light.’

Felix and Henrik gulped and closed the slots of their lanterns, then crouched in the lee of the huge green corpse-shields as the
s
layers started towards the south gallery. Henrik started his singing again, but this time Felix had had enough.

‘Stop that,’ he whispered. ‘They’ll hear you!’

‘They already know we’re here,’ said Henrik. ‘And it calms my nerves.’

‘So does poison.’

The skitter of clawed feet in the darkness made Felix freeze. They were coming from all directions. Henrik fumbled for his lamp.

‘Wait,’ said Gotrek. ‘Wait for my word.’

Felix put his finger on the lever that opened the slots, and held his breath. The skittering was closing in all around. It sounded like they were right on top of them. It took all his willpower not to open the lantern.

‘Now!’ said Gotrek.

Felix slapped open the slots, and the light streamed out, revealing a black-clad skaven in mid-leap. It squealed and shielded its eyes at the fire-glow, and Felix slashed with Karaghul, biting deep into its hip. It rolled off into the darkness, yelping, but there were more behind it.

Gotrek heaved his orc at two, flattening them, then shattered the legs of a third with his rune axe as it leapt the green corpse. Agnar shrugged his orc off his shoulders and swung his long axe at two that charged in at him, curved knives glistening green in the flickering light. The dead orc’s back was pincushioned with throwing stars.

Henrik ducked another skaven as it leapt over his head, then slashed after it, but missed by a mile. Two more appeared at the edge of Felix’s vision, hurling more throwing stars. He grabbed the edge of his red Sudenland cape and swept it in front of him, and felt them thud into the heavy wool.

The assassins sprung in after their stars, hooked steel claws strapped to their wrists. They were blindingly fast. Felix parried the claws of the first an inch from his neck, and only his chainmail saved him from those of the second. They cracked across his forearm like hammers, but did not break the rings.

He swept Karaghul in a backhand as they flitted past him, and caught one in the back, sending him sprawling and thrashing, but the second eluded the blow and tossed a glass globe over its shoulder.

‘Oh, bollocks!’

Felix dove for the thing and caught it just before it shattered on the floor, then rolled up and hurled it into the darkness after the skaven who had thrown it. A tinkle of glass and a horrible retching told him he had found his mark.

Gotrek snatched another dart out of the air and threw it at a skaven that fought Henrik, then hurled his axe in the direction the dart had come from. There was a terrible squeal and then a thud, and all the other skaven suddenly froze, then turned and fled, leaving a stinking cloud of animal musk behind.

Felix coughed and spat and squeezed his burning eyes, then followed Gotrek as he strode into the darkness to retrieve his axe. On the floor lay a skaven with a blowgun in one hand and a long-barrelled gun strapped across its back.

‘The one who shot you,’ said Agnar, coming up behind them.

‘Aye,’ said Gotrek, pulling his axe from its chest. It had buried itself in its solar plexus. ‘The one who knew we would be in the minehead chamber. The one who led the greenskins and the troll to us.’

Gotrek wiped his axe blade off on the skaven’s black head-wrap, then noticed a roll of parchment sticking from a pouch on its belt. He pulled the parchment free.

‘You shouldn’t touch them,’ said Henrik. ‘They cover themselves in poison.’

Gotrek ignored him and unrolled the parchment.

‘What is it?’ asked Agnar.

Gotrek looked at it, then handed it to Felix. At first what was drawn upon it just looked like a jumble of squares and lines and arrows, but then he realized it was a map of the depths – part of them anyway – with portions marked in the claw-scratch script of skaven writing, but the ratmen weren’t the only ones to have written upon the map. Notes had been scribbled upon it in a human hand, in Bretonnian. A cold chill went down Felix’s spine as he saw them.

‘Lanquin wrote this.’

‘You can’t know that,’ said Henrik. ‘He’s not the only Bretonnian in the world. There’s a whole nation of them.’

‘What does it say?’ asked Agnar.

Calling upon the meagre Bretonnian he had learned while studying poetry at the University of Altdorf, Felix struggled to decipher the words. ‘
Apportez votre rongeurs ici.
Uh, transport… no, bring, your rats… to here.
Nous allons laisser cette voie accessible.
We will allow… passage to… No, that’s not right. We will let the path to be… unguarded!’

Felix looked at the map again and saw an arrow pointing to a small passage that led into what he recognised must be the Great Hall of the Jewellers’ Guild. It opened up behind where the dwarfs intended to set their battle line. ‘Blood of Sigmar! Whoever wrote this says he will let the skaven come in and attack the dwarfs from the rear!’

‘Let me see that,’ said Henrik, and snatched the map from Felix’s fingers.

‘It
must
be Lanquin,’ said Felix as Henrik pored over the parchment. ‘Who else would be in a position to promise them such an advantage? How does a man stoop so low!’