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Gotrek & Felix: Kinslayer – Extract

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One

Lost

Snow fell across the oblast in thumb-sized flakes, white-furred reavers of the frozen north. Where exactly these raiders ravaged, Marszałek Stefan Taczak could not say for this was the time of raspotitsa, of roadlessness, when hills, rivers, and whole stanitsas sank under a flat plain of featureless white. The remnants of the Dushyka rota reined in on either side, reduced by the blizzard to little more than mounted shades.

Nine men.

That was what remained of the cavalry pulk he had led into the Battle of the Tobol Crossing. Nine men. Beaten men. They rode slumped in the saddle, swathed but for their eyes in bloodstained cloaks and captured Kurgan furs. Their animal layers were flecked with white, like a froth of exhaustion, but a numbness of heart and body meant no man shivered. It was that same fatalism that granted each man a shot of satisfaction, like koumiss still warm from the mare’s teat, at the fate that winter would soon share with the northmen. Raspotitsa returned the herdsman and the hunter to his tirsa, the merchant to his city and the warrior to his hearth, but to an army on the march it was death.

As fiercely as Stefan wished to see the closing of the year in such terms, he could not. There were no victors when Lord Winter marched to war.

‘Thirty Kurgan, marszałek. All dead.’

Stefan’s esaul, a beef and gristle man named Kolya, reined in his steed beside him. The mare, Kasztanka, responded numbly and Kolya clapped vigour into her neck and snow from her mane. He looked to Stefan. Blood flecked his blue eyes. He nodded once to the scene of butchery that had led Stefan to call a halt. In the lee of a rough horseshoe of banked snow, bodies and parts lay scattered around a doused firepit. A thin sheen of ice glimmered from the bodies where their warmth had melted the snow. Now they were cold. The snow slowly covered them, smothering the butcher’s ruin as purblindly as it did roads and tirsas and the hideous skull dolmens of the Kurgan. This had happened recently.

They were gaining.

‘The same as before,’ Stefan murmured. Not a battle but a massacre. This was not war as he understood it. ‘What did this?’

Kolya offered a no matter shrug. ‘As the wise woman would say, marszałek, when the winter is hard the wolf will eat wolf.’

In the privacy of his face-scarf, Stefan smiled. It was easy to forget the huntsman who had used to paint stick-horses on stones to scatter wherever one of the oblast spirits had spooked poor, skittish Kasztanka. They were half-brothers, a blood relation as common as widowed mothers, and it was good to remember that the oblast had not always been this way. The northmen had come many times and always were driven back.

Kislev was the land and the land was Kislev.

Stefan looked up and squinted into the icicle teeth of the blizzard. The snow-swept vista stretched to the ends of his experience and beyond. It had suffered a grievous wound, perhaps more than one, but it still looked like Kislev to him.

Kolya made a clicking sound under his tongue and brought Kasztanka around to the right. She whinnied shyly, jumping into the high snow before settling into a walk as Kolya guided her around the edge of the Kurgan camp. There were more bodies, scattered, a breadcrumb trail leading north. Some of the northmen had tried to flee from whatever it was that had caught up with them. It had not done them any good. They had been beheaded, dismembered, taken apart by a monster so far beyond the abilities of an entire marauder warband that there was no evidence of it anywhere. Stefan fixed on a severed hand half buried in the snow. A hand-axe was still gripped in the blueing fingers. He felt a kind of gratitude for that. Many of the northern tribes shared the Norse belief that a warrior’s spirit would forever roam unless he died with weapon in hand.

The north wind turned then, skirting the northmen’s horsehoe wall and blasting both their faces with snow. It carried the coppery, obscenely sweet odour of recent death. The horses snorted anxiously. Kasztanka stamped her hooves and whinnied until Biegacz, Stefan’s mount and a stablemate since birth, nuzzled his old companion and blew reassurance into her ear. Men of the southern cities liked to mock the bond between an oblast man and his horse, but few men loved an animal as Kolya loved Kasztanka. It was her, rather than his own blood brother, that was keeping the bold man Stefan had known alive.

‘Marszałek!’

The shout cut through the blizzard with little warning of the horseman who cantered through, then reared to a standstill in a flurry of snow. Boris Makosky was younger than Stefan, had been a trapper making a decent living selling meat and fur to merchants from Praag before the incursion, but defeat had aged him. There was grey in his fringe and something feral never far beneath the surface when he spoke. Even when he did not, it was there in his eyes. If a man was brave enough to look.

‘There are tracks that continue north. It is too heavy to be a man, but whatever else it may be it is a beast of two legs.’

‘Can you not tell what it is from its tracks?’ said Kolya.

‘An ogre mercenary that fled the fall of Volksgrad, perhaps? One of the trolls that the Kurgan say now occupy Praag? We have seen worse migrating south.’

‘But these tracks head north,’ said Stefan. ‘They follow the same warband as we do.’

Makosky shrugged angrily. ‘What I can tell, I have told. If you want more then speak with Bochenek.’

That stung. The rota’s scout was feeding the foxes of the last stanitsa they had found: the price paid for spotting the Kurgan ambush too late. Stefan said nothing. On the oblast, a man learned to conserve warmth any way he could and that included keeping his mouth shut when words were not welcomed. Instead, he glanced again to the ruined corpses, worrying what such a monster might do to the captives those Kurgan had taken with them. The capture of the wise woman, Marzena – who had clearly exhausted her good fortune when Kolya and Bochenek had heard her screams and rescued her from the beastman herd that had invaded her home in the Shirokij Forest – had hurt them all, but Kolya most of all. His brother had always been one to seek out omens in the shapes of clouds, to beseech the spirits before partaking of a spring, and to heed the wisdom of the Ungol hags.

Stefan shook his head grimly. Snow dropped from his brow. What kind of beast, though, would render such carnage and not even pick at the bodies it had left behind? Stefan did not like the inevitable option that that left.

Daemon.

He shuddered, reaching for the szabla scabbarded by his left stirrup.

‘A man may seem brave when fighting sheep,’ said Kolya, quoting another of Marzena’s proverbs, ‘but be a sheep when faced with brave men.’

Stefan drew himself upright in the saddle to regard his brother fully.

‘I speak of the monster, not you,’ said Kolya, the memory of a smile haunting his thin lips. ‘These men were frost-bitten and half-starved. Their war leader left them behind while the bulk of his host continued north.’ He indicated that direction with a nod. ‘We ride on?’

‘For our lost brothers,’ said Stefan, spurring his mount around to face north. ‘I would not leave any man in the hands of the Kurgan, and I certainly won’t abandon an old woman.’

Kolya nodded, but Makosky’s scowl merely darkened. The man seemed to come alive only in the heat of the hunt. The land was wide, with too few beastmen to be found roaming lost and starving on the steppe. Usually they were ridden down with relish.

Other times, they were made to pay for what they had wrought on Kislev.

Nothing that Stefan could think of short of a victory, however small, or the remote possibility of reuniting with the Ice Queen’s pulk would rally his men’s hopes.

‘We are gaining,’ said Kolya, then raised a hand to sweep over the dead. His manner was grim, barren of hope and glad for it. ‘These men will not miss their furs now. When the horses are rested, we will bring the vengeance of Dushyka onto the Kurgan and their pursuer both.’

‘Tell me of your adventures in Praag,’ said the black-robed priest of Grimnir, walking barefoot through the soot and steam of Grimnir’s foundry, deep within the halls of Karak Kadrin. The air was thick and black. It tickled the throat with the honest taste of coal and cushioned the clangour of hammers upon anvils and the hiss of bellows. Shrouded to their bare arms in the murk, visions of Grimnir himself at his fabled forge, a score of dwarfs worked their anvils with a single-mindedness that bordered on brutal. Their straining muscles crawled with tattoos and coursed with sweat. Not one of them spoke. It was just them, the iron, and the sanctity of the forge.

Snorri Nosebiter said nothing, for it was an old question, and merely watched as the priest padded in a circle behind his back, Snorri twisting in his chair to follow his progress as far as he could. The snap of taut leather arrested him and pulled him back into the chair.

Oh yes. Snorri kept on forgetting that.

He was secured into a high-backed wooden chair and, though it took a lot of leather to strap in a chest as massive as Snorri’s, this priest was taking no chances. The stump of his right leg was laid out upon the anvil in front of him. He remembered that his old friend Gotrek Gurnisson had cut it off for him. He grinned in success at having remembered, but then almost immediately frowned.

Was he happy about that? Clearly he was still missing something.

‘Snorri,’ the priest prodded, circling back round to the front. He wore his black hair long and his beard forked, and walked with his hands clasped behind his back as he spoke. He wielded his voice with an authority as unsubtle as Snorri’s hammer. His bare feet slapped the hot floor. ‘I asked you a question.’

Snorri maintained his frown. He was here to remember, that much he remembered. Deep thought scrunched up his face. It was unique, even as faces went. It had taken so many beatings that bony regrowths knobbled his jawline and brow and his nose was flattened between his cheeks. One ear was a cauliflowered mess while the other had been torn clean away to leave a pinhole in the side of his head. Sometimes, when things got boring, Snorri could hear air whistle through it.

‘What kind of name is Skalf Hammertoes anyway?’ said Snorri.

‘I was a ranger, and not a very good one. I do not hide from my shame as some might.’ He looked askance towards Snorri. ‘Praag.’

‘Snorri does not remember.’

‘I think that you do.’

Snorri watched the priest circle behind him once again. It was making him dizzy. He closed his eyes to think. Praag. He had travelled there with Gotrek and with young Felix on the airship, Spirit of Grungni, to fight Chaos. The fighting had been all right but he hadn’t enjoyed the journey much. There had been too much time with nothing to do but think.

Snorri did not like thinking. It did not agree with him. It gave him memories.

As he thought now, back past that point, his mind flinched like a dog from an old master who had once been cruel. There was an old wound that was still buried there despite the years he had spent trying to forget. And now he was supposed to remember. Why?

Because he had promised, that was why.

He saw a dwarf woman and her child. He did not remember if the child was his but the regret, the anguish, that knotted in his chest at the memory told him that he had loved these two as if it were. The knot tightened. His heart was a lead weight on his lungs. He had killed them both. Or had he? But their deaths had been his fault. Yes, that was right. He could not remember.

‘Interesting,’ said Skalf, checking his stride. Snorri opened his eyes, blinking as if he had just had his head submerged in a barrel. The priest’s lips twisted in amusement. ‘You talk when you think, Snorri Nosebiter. I can only assume it is that thick skull of yours that has seen you through so many of our age’s great battles.’ Snorri beamed. ‘I want you to tell me about the second time you visited that city, when you returned there without Gurnisson and the human. It was around then that your memory began to fail.’

The priest snorted at some private joke and Snorri bristled. This beardling priest was mocking him. By what Grimnir-given right? Something about being asked the question, though, made his mind go there. His skull ached. The three brightly coloured nails that had been hammered into his head in place of the traditional Slayer’s crest throbbed. Pain threatened to flush his mind of hard memories, but he grunted and willed himself past it. He had made a promise. He owed Gotrek that much.

‘Gotrek and young Felix disappeared into a magic door. When Max could not find them he and Snorri went back to Praag to fight Chaos some more.’

‘This is Maximilian Schreiber? Your wizard friend?’

‘Max is the wisest human Snorri knows. One time Snorri fell asleep in a bucket of vodka and when he woke up Max made his sore head go away.’

‘Then perhaps he is not so wise,’ Skalf snapped, ‘for a hangover is Grimnir’s way of making the last night’s fools suffer.’ The priest took a deep breath and went on. ‘What did you and Max do in Praag?’

‘Er…’

Snorri vaguely recalled the following summer as a sequence of disappointing skirmishes with beastmen and marauders with just the one halfway memorable battle with a champion’s warband somewhere upriver. But he could not really remember that either. Then there had been that incident with the daemon-possessed violin that, even after he had sobered up, Snorri had thought sounded rather unlikely. Max was not the sort to make that kind of thing up, though. Not at all like that young rascal, Felix. He remembered being sad to have missed it. Then he remembered something that he had not before.

‘Ulrika was there too, Snorri thinks.’

‘The zanguzaz?’

‘Oh, she wasn’t a vampire then,’ said Snorri, then paused to think. ‘At least… er…’

‘Doubt,’ said Skalf with a grim half-smile. He unclasped his hands from behind his back, then laid them flat on the anvil by the stump of Snorri’s leg. He leaned forward. His eyes were a hawkish amber. ‘Doubt is progress, and progress is good. I think you have always wanted to forget.’

‘Snorri thinks this priest is stupider than Snorri.’

‘Gotrek and his rememberer were unique individuals,’ Skalf pressed. ‘They were possessed of a destiny I cannot pretend to understand. Their quests swept you along, Snorri, allowed you to forget your pain. But then one day they were gone, and you were left alone.’ Snorri tried to pull away. There was a leathern moan and the strap buckle bit into his massive forearm. Of course, Snorri thought miserably, Snorri forgot. ‘Pain is like gold. However deep you try to bury it, someone will always dig it up again.’

‘Snorri thinks… Snorri thinks he would like a beer now. Or ten.’

‘Of course you would,’ said Skalf. He gestured towards someone that Snorri could not see. Snorri smacked his lips. They would probably be bringing beer.

Another Slayer strode through the smoke. He wore his hair in two crests, sharp red horns at the front but shaved down to the scalp at the back. His bare, muscular torso was a web of red and black tattoos. It looked like the musculature of a flayed body. But not a dwarf’s though, Snorri realised, as the Slayer’s face emerged from the smoke, painted into the snarling visage of a daemon. Snorri grasped instinctively for a weapon, causing his chair to rattle.

Acknowledging neither Snorri nor Skalf, the Daemonslayer dropped a large leather bag onto the anvil. It hit with an iron clank. The bag was open and Snorri glanced inside. In amongst the common hammers and tongs of the smith’s craft, there rested an oddly proportioned spiked mace. There were no spikes at the very head of the weapon and there was no grip at all. The end of the handle where it should have been was flat and smooth and skirted with triangular iron flaps that were each punched through with eyelets. But nowhere in amongst it did Snorri see his beer.

‘Snorri wants to know what you two are up to.’

The Daemonslayer laid his palm on Snorri’s shoulder. Burning, bleeding ligaments and sinews crawled across the well-muscled arm, but the touch was not unkind. ‘I owe you a debt, Snorri Nosebiter.’

‘Snorri will take your word for it.’

‘As you should, for my word is iron,’ spoke the Daemonslayer, retrieving his hand so that he could devote both to removing the mace from his bag and laying it reverently upon the anvil. Hammer and nails followed and the Daemonslayer then positioned the smoothed-flat haft of the mace up against the stump of Snorri’s leg. It was surprisingly warm and was a suspiciously good fit.

Snorri had a very bad feeling about this. He hoped he was going to get his beer sooner rather than later.

‘That worm-eaten peg that the humans gave you to replace your leg is hardly fit for a son of Grungni,’ said Skalf, but Snorri was having difficulty focusing on him. His gaze slid to where the Daemonslayer was making a ring of measured little guide nicks around his leg by scoring an iron nail through the meat. ‘Surely the shame of it was the reason you refused your old companion, Makaisson, and remained here while he joined King Ironfist’s throng for the march to Sylvania. Or could there be some other reason?’

‘Snorri… cannot remember.’

Skalf snarled; the wrong answer. ‘The von Carsteins rise again, Snorri. All of the blood-suckers. The king aligned himself with elves, elves, to fight them.’ He looked to the ceiling and presented his open palms in dismay. ‘Many Slayers found their dooms there in that mighty defeat. Even Makaisson did not return.’

Skalf nodded to the Daemonslayer, who then picked up a nail and threaded it through one of the eyelets at the junction of the mace-leg. It dug into Snorri’s thigh. The Daemonslayer lined up his hammer.

‘My name is Durin Drakkvarr,’ he muttered. ‘I owe you my life, and my death. On the lost halls of home I will see that you find yours.’

‘This is going to hurt,’ said Skalf.

‘Can Snorri not have his beer first?’

Skalf stuffed a rolled up leather belt into Snorri’s mouth. ‘You have already had too much. That is the problem.’

From the corner of his eye, Snorri saw Durin swing his hammer. He tightened his eyes, bit down on the belt, and grunted as the Daemonslayer took his time striking nails through the eyelets of the mace-leg and into his thigh. The hammering from the nearby Slayers proceeded unabated. As if they did not hear.

When it was done, Durin laid a hand briefly on Snorri’s shuddering shoulder, then diligently wiped up the few splatters of blood and put away his tools.

‘Tell me of your “Spider Lady” , ’ said Skalf, quietly, pulling the belt from Snorri’s mouth as though nothing had just happened.

‘Snorri is going to kill you when he gets out of this chair.’

‘There is nothing darker than a kinslayer,’ said Skalf calmly. ‘Even threatening it is enough to earn your name in blood in a clan’s book of grudges.’ The priest shrugged. ‘Lucky for you I have no family. Now answer my question.’

Snorri tried to think of something else, but couldn’t stop his mind going where it was bidden.

Woods. Giant spiders in the trees. An old lady screaming.

‘Snorri… saved an old lady in the woods. Big spiders… attacking her… Snorri… killed them all.’

‘Slow down,’ said Skalf. ‘Take a breath.’

Snorri did as he was told and found it helped. ‘They stung Snorri a lot and when he woke up, the old lady told him that he would not die yet. She said Snorri would have a great doom. Like Gotrek’s.’

‘And this destiny, is it to be found here within the temple of Grimnir?’

‘Maybe,’ said Snorri, disfigured brow knotting in concentration.

The old lady in the woods had said more, been more specific than he remembered, but it was gone now. An old lady standing over him. She is sad. You will have the mightiest doom. Even though it made his head hurt he tried to remember. He had made a promise. The harder he tried to remember though, the harder it seemed to be, like swatting a fly with a hammer. Thoughts of his supposed destiny always carried him nearer to memories of his shame, as if they were connected somehow. He wondered what Gotrek would do. They had been friends since before either of them had taken the Slayer oath. Perhaps he and Gotrek would both meet their ends together. That would be nice. It would make up for… for… He winced, his crest of nails throbbing in the roof of his brain.

‘Snorri can’t remember.’

The priest stroked his beard thoughtfully, took a considered breath, then directed a nod to Durin Drakkvarr. Snorri watched as the Daemonslayer produced a massive pair of tongs. Durin studied the straps holding Snorri down.

‘These will not hold him for this.’

With a nod, the priest turned and whistled into the smoke. The two nearest Slayers looked up from their anvils, then downed tools and started towards them. Each took one of Snorri’s arms and, at a hand gesture from Skalf, one of them put a hand over Snorri’s brow to hold steady his head. The iron bite of Durin’s tongs approached from behind, followed by a yawning silence, and then a pressure on his skull as the tongs clamped onto the first of Snorri’s nails.

‘Not those,’ Snorri moaned. He strained against the two massive dwarfs, but they had him pinned. All he could move was his eyes. They rolled up to fix the Daemonslayer with a pleading gaze. ‘Please.’

‘Forgive me,’ Durin whispered. ‘But I owe you too steep a debt.’

‘Grimnir takes sacrifice in the blood of his Slayers,’ whispered Skalf. ‘Malakai has gone. Gotrek has gone. It has been over a year now, Snorri, and still you cannot or will not recall.’

The priest nodded to the other Slayers to begin.

‘And now Grimnir demands his due.’

‘It was for your own good,’ Durin growled over the low murmur of grim talk that permeated the pipe smoke of the Khaza Drengi. He glared straight down into the iron jug of ale that he circled with his hands. Red ink picked out the tendons and black emphasised the shadow. It was as though a daemon of blood and bone sought to crush that tankard with its bare hands.

The Daemonslayer did not drink and Snorri regarded both him and the dwarf’s ale with equal glumness. Tentatively, he ran a hand across his head. His fingers brushed piggish grey bristle, and he winced as they passed over the scabbed-up punctures where his crest had been ripped out. It hurt as though he had jumped prematurely from a gyrocopter and been scalped by the spinning blades. He glared at Durin, dunking his little finger into the mug of water in front of him and withdrawing it for inspection. His expression soured.

Snorri was not feeling especially forgiving just now.

At low-slung tables all around the hall, Slayers sat hunched, locked in conversation over the great battles being fought all over the Old World and drinking with the determination of those for whom tomorrow was an unasked-for concern. The tables were packed and half a dozen dwarfs stood with beers resting on the bar, trading boasts with the bar-dwarf for the day, a leather-faced old Slayer named Drogun in an ill-fitting white apron. At the other end of the bar, a sullen slab of dwarf called Brock Baldursson dished up meat paste and potatoes from a steaming pot. The hall was busier than Snorri had seen it all year and was filled with unfamiliar faces.

It was a sign of the times that Khaza Drengi was the last hall in Karak Kadrin to house more dwarfs than it had been designed to accommodate.

Two tables over, a pair of dwarfs built like battlements wrestled arms across the table. Snorri recognised one of them. Krakki Ironhame roared merrily, a large pie in one hand, as he nonchalantly inched his opponent’s fist towards the tabletop. The Slayer’s girth was mammoth, even for a dwarf, and his hair, a natural fiery red, produced a fat, undyed crest. The day the dwarf arrived from Karak Hirn on his way north, Snorri had broken his knuckles on that same ‘lucky’ table. They seemed to be better now, but Krakki did not appear to have got any nearer to Kislev.

Snorri turned back to Durin. The dwarf had still to touch his drink. It made Snorri angry just thinking about it going to waste.

‘If you choose to dislike me, Snorri, I will understand. But I am trying to help you.’

Snorri scowled into his mug. ‘Tell Snorri again why he can’t have a beer too.’

‘Because Skalf would not untie you until you vowed to renounce it, remember?’

Every word from the Daemonslayer’s mouth sounded blank, emptiness coloured only by the dimmest grey of regret. It was impossible to hate a dwarf that sounded like that. It would be like trying to hate the dark. Snorri rubbed his head ruefully, and then his throat. He could not remember the last time he had been completely sober, but then that had always been the point. Some dwarfs got philosophical when they drank, others belligerent, but not Snorri. It made him numb and that was how he liked it. He shook his head, scratched the grey boar-bristles across his scalp as if he could scour his thoughts from his mind. Then, into that induced emptiness, popped an unrelated thought. He brightened immediately.

‘Snorri remembers a human tavern called the Emperor’s Griffon. Human beer doesn’t count, does it?’

‘It is still beer.’

‘So they say,’ Snorri grumbled.

The idea of never having another beer made his throat ache like the Arabyan desert, but forever was too big for him to deal with then and there. He wanted a drink now. He glared sulkily over the hard-drinking Slayers. If he could not drink then there was always the possibility of getting hit. The world was an ugly and unjust mistress and always looked better after it had knocked Snorri about the head a few times. Cheered by the prospect, he appraised the Khaza Drengi with a fresh eye. Brock Baldursson had the hard look of an old fighter, and Snorri had once seen Krakki punch out a priest of Grimnir with a set of freshly broken knuckles, but the rest were a disappointing bunch of scrawny-looking shortbeards that Snorri would not bet on in a fight with a goblin. He sighed.

‘Snorri hopes he finds his doom very soon.’

Durin lowered himself to the table until he dropped into Snorri’s eye line. ‘I hope that for us both. I have sworn before the Shrine of Grimnir that you will find a worthy end.’

Snorri stared acidly at the other Slayer. He was not getting off that easily, not after he had stolen Snorri’s nails and would not even let him have one beer to make up for it. ‘Does that make you Snorri’s rememberer then? Because Snorri doesn’t need a rememberer.’

The Daemonslayer sat back and picked up his tankard as if considering his words with the care of a gemcutter over a rare stone. He took a sip, swallowing as if it might be his last. Snorri watched every twitch as it went down his throat.

‘I am not your rememberer, Snorri, though clearly you need one more than most. I am just a dwarf with a debt.’

Intrigued now despite a stubborn will not to be, Snorri waded into the murky stew of his memory. He had journeyed with many fellow Slayers in his time, but most had already beaten him to their ends. Rodi Balkisson, although the details of it were hazy, had been slain by Krell at Castle Reikguard while his other recent companion Agrin Crownforger had fallen in battle with an entire beastman herd. Grudi Halfhand had taken the orc that had shamed him to a worthy end at the bottom of an ale barrel. Further back, memories became sharper and came quicker. Bjorni Bjornisson, the selfish bastard, had been cut down by that Chaos warlord during the siege of Praag, cheating both Gotrek and Snorri of mighty dooms while he was at it. Ulli Ullisson had fallen earlier that day. He thought back further. Grimme had been as sour as this Slayer, but the red tattoos and air of horror that clung to this one were wholly different. In any case, Snorri distinctly recalled Grimme being incinerated by a dragon, just moments before that dragon had gone on to crush another Slayer, Steg. Snorri chuckled. That one had made Snorri laugh.

It had been a good death. They all had. He sighed.

But not for Snorri.

‘I am not surprised you do not remember me,’ said Durin. ‘And not just because of your problem.’ For a moment, the dwarf’s gaze was distant. His eyes seemed to widen, sinking into the black-inked pits of their sockets. He swirled his ale. ‘There were many of us that you and your companions rescued from Karag Dum that day.’

Durin looked up to find Snorri staring intently at his face. The daemon’s face he wore twisted into the first smile Snorri had seen on it. It was not, he decided, something he wanted to see again sober.

‘The face of the Destroyer,’ said Durin. ‘Like you, it is difficult for me to remember. Like you, I must make myself if I am to follow my true path. How long before that which befell Karag Dum is the fate of all? The Chaos Wastes expand. Already daemons walk freely across the Troll Country.’ Durin’s words were growing louder and his face hotter as he continued. Behind him, there was a crashing of bone into oak and a thunderous eruption of laughter. Durin ignored it. ‘I am leaving for Kislev, with you or without you. I will not be here when Karak Kadrin is caught by the Wastes. And be assured that it will be. I have lived through that once, and daemons will not hunt me through my own halls a second time!’

Durin was on his feet and panting with emotion. Snorri did not know what to say. He should probably want to punch him for suggesting Karak Kadrin might fall, but even Snorri knew that greater holds than her had fallen before and would fall again. Durin Drakkvarr came from one of them. He shook his head. Tempting as it sounded, he wanted to remember his shame first. He had promised.

Except he did not want that at all. He wanted–

He hung his head.

Valaya’s sweet breath, he wanted a beer.

‘Snorri!’ The shout from the arm-wrestlers’ table startled Snorri from his thoughts. Krakki Ironhame thumped on trunk-legs towards them. ‘Grimnir’s britches!’ he laughed. ‘Did you lose a wager or did you just walk underneath Malakai’s Magnetic Rune? Hah! You look old without your crest. I barely recognised you.’ The fat dwarf gave Snorri a mighty smack across the back. Snorri’s nose wrinkled. Even at the best of times, Krakki smelled like sweaty pork that had been left the week to marinate in ale. These were not the best of times. ‘But I like the leg.’

Snorri’s mace-leg thunked into the flagstones as he remembered it was there. ‘Snorri is getting used to it.’

Krakki’s grin slowly faded as he took in the contents of Snorri’s mug. ‘What in Gazul’s damnation is this?’

Snorri sagged miserably into the table. Whoever said that thing about misery and company had definitely not been a Slayer. ‘Snorri made an oath.’

‘Then maybe I can piss in that mug for you, Nosebiter,’ Krakki laughed, belly rippling with coloured tattoos. ‘My water’s richer than anything drawn from the wells of Karak Kadrin.’

‘An oath is an oath,’ said Durin, softly spoken yet deathly serious as though arguing in his sleep. ‘It is not to be mocked.’

Krakki jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Daemonslayer. ‘Friend of yours?’

Snorri pulled a face. ‘Snorri would not go that far.’

With a shrug that suggested he had not really cared either way, Krakki helped himself to a chair and deposited his bulk into it. There, he leaned in, as though sharing a secret for Snorri and Durin alone. ‘You speak of Kislev,’ Krakki boomed and Snorri winced, wondering if the dwarf thought Snorri could not hear properly with one ear. With horror, Snorri wondered how Krakki would sound through two. ‘And you are not alone, but first you have to worry about getting there. The Underway north of here is overrun with beastmen. They even drove the goblins out, bless their evil green hearts.’

‘We will clear them,’ said Durin.

‘Good for you,’ said Krakki, then mimed a wazzock gesture with a finger looping over his temple and returned to Snorri. ‘The manlings kindly allowed the Chaos hosts to march right over them and now they’ve nothing better to do than find and break all the Underway gates they find. A runesmith led an expedition of Ironbreakers and Slayers under the humans’ fort at Rackspire to reseal the ways, but he was captured by beastmen and carted off to Praag. Or so the survivors of his throng say.’ He glanced at Drogun, fiercely polishing tankards behind the bar.

‘Wait,’ said Snorri. What Krakki was saying chimed with something that Durin had been trying to tell him before. What was it? He scratched the pinhole where his ear had once been, slowly coming to a conclusion so stupid it could only have come from Snorri’s own head. ‘Kislev can’t have fallen,’ he said slowly. ‘Kislev men fight almost as well as they drink. Snorri likes them.’

Krakki smacked the table and barked with laughter. ‘You have been buried in Khaza Drengi too long! Here, give me that trough-water they’re feeding you.’ The Slayer took Snorri’s mug, and then Durin’s too, spreading them apart on the table. With a frown, he bellowed to the bar. ‘Drogun! Bring me that old clay tankard, the ghoul-ugly one.’ Krakki waited, drumming his sausage-fingers on the table while the leathery old Slayer came grumbling over and stamped the requested vessel onto the table. It was indeed ugly. Gargoyles leered from every side of it and the handle had been shaped to look like bone. Why anyone had ever made such a thing, Snorri could not guess.

‘This is Praag,’ said Krakki, positioning the gargoyle mug in front of him ‘Obviously. It was sacked months ago by a warlord named Aekold Helbrass, only he got pushed out of Praag by some other warlord, leading a horde of trolls so they say, and continued south.’ Here, he placed his huge palm over Snorri’s mug. ‘This one, being piss-weak, can be Kislev city. Their queen tried to catch the Chaos horde as they forded the Lower Tobol.’ He shook his head grimly and took his hand back. ‘Helbrass crushed them. Their city fell soon after.’

‘Sounds bad,’ said Snorri. He liked Kislev. He had had some good fights there and liked their vodka. He did not want to think that it could have been destroyed without him even realising the fight had started. And also, he was almost certain that Kislev city had been where Gotrek had been headed. ‘Does anyone still fight?’

Krakki sat back, big eyes rolling to indicate the sullen potman behind the bar. The dwarf noticed the attention, but merely grunted and continued to stir his stew. ‘Brock Baldursson was on the Tobol Crossing that day with a throng of the Kislevite clans. It takes something to drive a dwarf from his home and Brock won’t say much, but it sounds like Helbrass unleashed a special kind of hell that day.’ Krakki’s eyes lowered, voice dropping to a rumble. ‘Of course, he wasn’t a Slayer then.’

‘And Helbrass?’ murmured Durin. ‘What became of him?’

‘It’s not as if he’s anywhere to go but south, but there’s no one left to tell of it.’ Krakki pointed then to Durin’s mug. ‘Erengrad. She still stands, but has been essentially annexed by the Empire. And she’s on the other side of the Auric Bastion.’

‘The what?’ said Snorri.

‘That’d take some explaining,’ Krakki laughed. ‘What matters is it’s keeping the enemy good and hot. They’ve nowhere to go so there’ll be plenty waiting for us once we’ve cleared the Underway.’

‘What is… here,’ said Snorri, jabbing his finger into a knot in the table. It fell just to the left between ‘Kislev’ and ‘Praag’ and just looking at it made Snorri’s head feel funny.

‘There’s nothing there,’ said Krakki, gently. ‘That’s just the table. Try to pay attention, Snorri.’

Snorri stared at it anyway. You will have the mightiest doom. Spindly brown legs split out into the oak from a dark core. Spiders in the trees.

‘But Helbrass?’ Durin pressed again.

‘Better question,’ said Krakki, leaning back against his chair and grinning like a half moon. ‘What threw the conqueror of Kislev out of Praag?’

Praag, thought Snorri, letting the Slayers’ talk fade into the whistle through his torn ear. It always seemed to come back to Praag. It was a city full of memories, and despite the certainty of battle and death he found that he was not at all eager to return there.

‘Snorri,’ Krakki’s voice dragged him up by his working, cauliflower ear. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you looked scared.’

With a sad grin, Snorri went back to staring at the knot in the table. An old lady standing over him. She is sad. She is… angry. Snorri shook his head. Scared? He was outright terrified and the fact he was not certain why did not help at all. The image of that dwarf woman and child rose in his thoughts. He could smell burning, feel blood on his hands. He scrunched his eyes and tried to think of something else. There were too many memories and the priest had been right. Snorri did not want any of them.

The thought of those ghosts following him from Khaza Drengi and catching him alone on the wastes of Kislev petrified him far more than dying in shame.

Slowly, Snorri unclasped his fingers from around his mug and dragged them to the lip of the table. There, his fingernails crunched into the ancient wood and he pushed himself until he stood eyeball-to-eyeball with Krakki Ironhame. His new mace-leg thunked against the stone floor. Krakki met Snorri’s eyes, his ginger brows lifting questioningly. Snorri wanted a drink. His head ached for the need of it. Without breaking eye contact, Snorri reached for his mug, brought it to his lips and tossed it back. A shock of mountain water struck the back of his throat. Snorri’s eyes widened. His throat tightened in protest, but it was too late. Snorri gave a gargling sound as the dregs drained into his belly.

And just like that, Krakki began to laugh.

That’s it, thought Snorri. Snorri has had enough.

Muscles bunched through his neck and shoulders, then exploded forward, sending his forehead crashing through Krakki’s nose. Blood spattered from the fat Slayer’s face and he tipped back, spinning on nerveless toes before smashing full-on through the end of a table of feasting Slayers. The other end of the table swung up, swiping the bowls from under the dwarfs’ noses and catapulting gravy and ale across the hall. Leaving the shouting dwarfs and Krakki’s poleaxed body to their own devices, Snorri slumped back down into his chair. He wiped a piece of beef gristle from his head.

That had not been nearly as satisfying as he had hoped it would be.

It seemed that there was nothing for it but to go to Praag and die as quickly and as gloriously as was still possible. It was what the old lady had promised, what everyone seemed to want. Everyone except Snorri, of course, but when had that ever mattered? He had always followed others, ever since that first trip into the Chaos Wastes. That had been before he and Gotrek had both become Slayers, before he–

His jaw clenched.

No. He would not remember that.

A proper fight was what he needed. The priest was right about that too. And at least Kislev was where Gotrek and Felix must be. They had a marvellous knack of being where the fighting was fiercest. They were both just lucky that way. He looked up over the wreckage of the table, heart sinking at the sight of Durin picking his way through it to fetch him another mug of water. He let out a long, resigned breath.

The End Times could not come soon enough.

Two

Jaeger and Sons

The Kurgan marauder stumbled through the shin-high snow and slush that banked the partially frozen river. A white skeleton of frost filled the lines between his armour’s leather plates, the pieces haloed in turn by snow-sodden furs. His eyes were bloodshot. His greased face bore the scars of a torturous journey, over the Frozen Sea and across the Worlds Edge Mountains, all for this one chance at the soft lands of the south. The man fell to his knees. His voice raised a bitter scream as Felix Jaeger planted his boot into the Kurgan’s chest and wrenched the glittering runesword from his belly.

Felix backed off, sword raised into a guard as the northman tumbled away to the river. The sound of ice water slushing against the rocks drove under the howl of the wind. A collection of burned-out cottages poked out of the snow where the land abutted the water. The snow fell thick and heavy and he blinked around in confusion. He could not seem to recall how he had got here. His confusion faded with the intrusion of battle. It was coming from all around. Felix tightened his two-handed grip around the dragonhead hilt of Karaghul. The Templar blade had never fit so perfectly into his hands.

There was meaning here, even if it did not extend beyond the reach of his blade or the next second of his life.

His eyes were starting to throb, so hard had he been staring into the blizzard, but he dared not blink. Who knew how many northmen were out there? Felix watched the thick flakes fall. He could not keep his eyes trained any longer. He blinked.

‘Manling! To your left.’

Felix jerked, shot his gaze left, and swept Karaghul across his body to parry the heavy berdish axe that hacked for him through the snow. The two weapons clashed apart, but Felix had been on the receiving end and his knuckles took the worst of the impact. He spun aside as the axeman came on in a storm of white fur and seal-blubber breath. Felix parried, danced back, set his feet and angled his blade for a flawless nebenhut guard to catch the overarm slash that the Kurgan’s posture screamed was coming next.

But the steppe barbarian was no student of fencing and in truth Felix’s own body was no longer as quick as he remembered it being. The northman gave a berserker howl and, rather than slash his axe back, turned his great strength to control the weapon, swing it up and stab the spear-like point on the eye of the blade at Felix’s breastbone. Felix cried out in surprise and flung his sword across the path of the blow. It hit flat into the haft of the axe, deflecting it instead onto Felix’s face. He ducked and turned aside, then watched the heathen weapon stroke an inch past his eye and impale the flapping red Sudenland wool of his cloak.

Felix dug his heel into the bigger man’s foot, then punched him in the throat as he doubled over. The Kurgan staggered back, but held onto his axe and dragged Felix by the cloak along with him. With a guttural curse, the warrior yanked on the haft, throwing Felix sideways before beating at him with the flat of the blade. A tavern brawler’s instinct hunched Felix into a foetal position and the blade passed overhead. He gave a muffled cry as the move swept his own cloak over his head and the world turned red.

For an instant, all Felix could feel was panic. His heat pounded, his muscles falling slack as if to ease the passage of the Kurgan’s axe, but it could not have lasted more than a second. He could feel the presence of the northman’s body tangled up with his, the warrior refusing to let go of his weapon even though it was still caught in Felix’s cloak. His side was pressed into Felix’s chest. Felix needed no second invitation.

He knifed his knee into the proximate area of the northman’s kidneys. The muffled grunt of pain that elicited was sweeter than a harp’s strings. The grip on the axe loosened, enough for Felix to bring up his sword and thrust it straight through the taut red wool and into the northman’s chest. There was a wet cry and the opposing weight fell away.

Felix shook his cloak back over his shoulders. A fresh blast of freezing air welcomed him back with an icy slap in the face as Felix kicked aside the berdish axe and silenced the northman’s gurgling with a swift stab through the throat.

Clearly the Kurgan had never worked Nuln’s seedier taverns.

A dozen fur-clad marauders were advancing through the ruins by the river. Felix could hear more battling out of sight, but he tried not to worry too much about those. Chances were he was not going to live to have to deal with them. To his surprise, the thought left him oddly elated, as if there could be nothing finer than dying on this nameless snowfield today.

A brute howl pulled his gaze back from the ruins. There in the snow, a sanguinary blur of starmetal silver and ink-strapped muscle hacked through a score of barbarian northmen. Gotrek Gurnisson fought in a ring of bodies and human debris. Despite wearing nothing above his tattered trews but piercings and spiralling blue tattoos the dwarf gave no care to the cold as, with a roar like a collapsing cliff, he swung an axe that a man would struggle even to lift and severed a northman’s leg below the knee. The marauder, meeting the bone-hammer of Gotrek’s knuckles, was dead with a snapped neck before his knees were fully bent. Gotrek roared for more and more came. At their head strode a warrior in a ringmail hauberk with a white bear cloak and an antlered helm. The northman’s bare arms were heavy with trophy rings. He spun his twinned axes in anticipation as he chanted some guttural gibberish about his deeds and his gods. One blade left a crimson trail of power through the air it cut.

A champion.

Felix had seen Gotrek dismantle such arrogance a hundred times, but as the two warriors joined it became clear that Gotrek was struggling. The dwarf looked as though he had been fighting without relent for days. Somewhere along the road he had lost his eye patch and gore bled from the gaping socket. Cuts and bruises coloured his skin as if they and his tattoos fought a contest to see which could take the greater portion of the Slayer’s flesh. A pair of arrows stuck out of his chest. The shafts were thick, garishly fletched in the Kurgan style, and had been fired from their powerful recurved composite bows. Had Felix taken a shot to the heart like that he would have been dead before he knew what hit him, but Gotrek’s slab-like chest was tough as tempered steel and sterner protection than Felix’s mail vest any day. But still, they slowed him.

Slipping the Slayer’s guard, the champion dragged his blade across Gotrek’s chest, adding a deep score to the tally and bringing a spurt of blood. The Slayer howled, throwing the Kurgan champion off and driving him back with a storm of blows. His starmetal blade slammed deep into the northman’s gut. The not-so-favoured of the Chaos Gods regurgitated blood, choking on that last mouthful as Gotrek flung him from his axe and into those that came roaring in behind.

With a yell, Felix cut down the last Kurgan between him and the Slayer, hurdled the northman’s corpse and, turning mid-leap, slammed into Gotrek’s back to beat down a northman axe that had been destined for his unguarded shoulders. There was a strange thrill, the feeling like that of wielding one’s first practice blade and finding it achingly familiar but not quite as remembered. He parried another attack, feeling Gotrek’s massive shoulders grind over his as the dwarf carried on doing what no one did better. Felix ducked a swinging adze, parried a sabre. The northmen were coming thick and fast from the river, drawn to the ring of steel and the Slayer’s howls.

Kislev, Felix realised, with the sudden clarity of ice-cold Kurgan steel, and that river was the Lynsk. He had seen it often enough from Praag’s Gate of Gargoyles and could not count the times that his dreams had returned him to this spot since. It was as though his subconscious would not believe he had survived that battle, as if he was living on borrowed time. Felix laughed.

He did not know why exactly, but this whole situation was surreal. If he was in Kislev then he must also be behind the Auric Bastion, the magical barrier that had been erected to hold back the Chaos hordes.

And trapped in Kislev with those very same hordes!

No wonder Gotrek looked so awful. The Slayer regarded Felix, laughing as he parried and fought, as if he had gone mad. Talk about pots calling kettles black. His laughter turned melancholy as he sliced through a Kurgan’s hide jack, then reversed his grip and sliced his blade back across the northman’s throat in a red slash of arterial blood. Well, thought Felix, spitting Kurgan blood from his gums, you have to laugh don’t you.

‘I can’t believe I actually missed this madness.’

‘Less… talk,’ Gotrek wheezed, parrying the stab of a knife, then punching the eye of his axe into its wielder’s gut. The man doubled over, his head parting company with his shoulders a moment later. ‘Don’t fall for want of a breath and miss my…’ A hand-axe decorated with evil glyphs clanged off the flat of his blade. Gotrek elbowed the Kurgan in the face, kneecapped another, and sliced his axe through the belly of a third. ‘…my doom.’

‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ Felix said. And by Sigmar he really meant it.

‘The world’s ending, manling. Or hadn’t you noticed?’

Felix ceded the point, parrying a sword thrust then offering a counter that left a northman one hand the poorer. The next time someone suggested he spend a winter campaign in the north of Kislev he would know exactly what to tell them. Assuming of course there was going to be a next time for anything. He glanced up at a rumble from within the blizzard. Hoof beats.

‘Gospodarinyi!’

A single horseman swaddled in sheepskin and hemp galloped from the blizzard, guiding a shaggy Ungol pony by the stirrups as he drew back on a recurved bow. Coloured tassels shivered from the bow’s tips as the rider loosed. The feathered shaft zipped through the falling snow, and smacked through the Y-shaped opening of a marauder’s bull-horned barbute with a ferocious clang as the metal head exited the back of the man’s skull and struck the inside back of his warhelm. The marauder spasmed backwards as though his corpse was trying to work out how to run before he was dashed against the breast of the careening pony. A second Kislevite horse-archer chivvied his horse through the shank-high snowdrift, screaming ‘Yhah!’ at the top of his lungs and drawing back on his own bowstring.

The arrow flew over Gotrek’s shoulder and took his assailant through the heart. Gotrek howled pure frustration and beheaded the dying northman. Another centaur-like shadow breezed in false-silence through the blizzard and charged into the disordered northmen. What had seemed a certain massacre became a rout. The Kurgan were running and the Kislevites yipped and urged their steeds on to give chase.

Gotrek growled and sank to one knee. He caught himself on the haft of his axe and pushed himself back up. Felix offered no help. He could not have supported the Slayer’s weight even if he thought his aid would be welcomed. The Slayer met his look and nodded grimly, lowering his own axe at last.

‘Aye, manling. I thought I had it for a moment there.’

Felix smiled. He doubted there were many men who could understand why a dwarf might be less than thrilled at surviving such a battle, but Felix and Gotrek had shared much that was unusual. They were as near to friends as it was possible for members of two such different races to be. And strangely enough, he had come to share his companion’s disappointment. ‘There’ll be more out there.’

Gotrek’s grim look passed and he chuckled, running the pad of his thumb down the edge of his axe until it produced a bead of blood. It was one of the few parts of the Slayer’s body that was not already bleeding. ‘It is the end of the world, after all.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said Felix.

Man and dwarf both turned towards the Lynsk as the tramp of hooves and the jingle of tack turned from the pursuit and galloped towards them. Just from the sound of it, Felix could tell that it was a larger beast than the rugged steppes ponies ridden by the horse-archers. The runes of Gotrek’s axe painted the falling snow a baleful red as he watched a snow-white Reikland destrier trot into view. It carried the nobility of its breeding with the force and assuredness of an emperor. It deserved a satin caparison, a harness of pure silver, and a knight in shining full plate, but somehow the warrior austerity of its leather saddle and tack was appropriate. And the woman who reined it in and turned towards them was as striking in her own way as any knight of the Reiksguard.

She was almost as tall as Felix and, though unhelmed, garbed in a gleaming haubergeon crafted from lamellar plates of white steel. Knee-high leather riding boots encased her legs. Despite the cold she wore neither hat nor gloves and her pale skin was laced with blue veins. He looked up, already knowing whose face he would see.

This was a dream.

The realisation was as sudden as it was obvious. It hurt like a blow to the ribs.

Of course it was a dream.

The woman looked down from the saddle, chin tilted proudly upwards. Her short hair was blonde as ash and railed against the wintry conditions of her homeland. She had not aged a day. The Slayer hefted his axe warningly.

‘What’s she doing here?’

Felix had no answer. Assuming that this was a dream, then her presence was obviously his doing. Unfortunately it was one thing to recognise that one was dreaming and quite another to act on that knowledge or make sense of it. He had loved her, would always love her, but she had been lost. The pain struck him like new. He had lost so many good friends while he and Gotrek ploughed on, but none still hurt him in the same way that she could.

The woman bared sharp, inhuman teeth. Her smile was colder than the oblast and more feral than any Kurgan. Dream or no dream, Felix felt sure that she, if no one else, still knew how to hurt him.

His surroundings began to slip away. Gotrek’s scowl sank into blackness. The horse-archers and the ongoing battle grew distant and dim and even the cold was blunted before it reached his skin. He tried to cling onto it, even the cold, but it was as if there were cracks in his very soul, like some ancient Nehekharan urn that would leak empty as fast as it could be filled.

No, he thought, sensing wakefulness like a remembered dream. No, there is nothing for me there.

‘Ulrika!’

‘It is all right, Felix,’ the vampire smiled. ‘I will wait for you.’

Click here to buy Gotrek & Felix: Kinslayer

For Rose

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover by Slawomir Maniak.
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