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Gotrek & Felix: Slayer – Extract

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ONE

He Who Changes

The gods themselves had ridden to the defence of Altdorf, so it was rumoured, but not even Taal had a finger to raise for this corner of Hochland’s Great Forest.

‘Doomed!’ howled Markus Weissman until his voice cracked, one more broken note amidst the clatter of cloven hooves and screaming men.

The men of his unit pressed in more from either side. He could smell their sweat, the soil in their green and red livery, could feel the shivers passing down their spears as they recovered their schiltron formation at the top of the hill and raised shields. There was a splintering crash as a shield split apart under a blow from a beastman’s club, then screams of terror before two men could rally to drive the creature back and seal the breach in their formation.

‘Blood of Hochland!’ roared Sergeant Sierck. His doublet sleeve had been torn off up to the shoulder. His reversible red and green cloak showed the red side to hide the blood that made a circus horror mask of his face, his beard and even his teeth as he bellowed for courage.

‘Doomed,’ Markus sobbed again, blindly driving his spear into a beastman’s neck. The goat-headed beast brayed and fell back with Markus’s spear point still lodged in its throat. He let the weapon go with a cry and struggled to free his katzbalger, the short, unfamiliar blade of last resort of the Emperor’s infantry.

He studied the cheap, impurity-riddled weapon for a moment, transfixed. How appropriate.

A spear stabbed over Markus’s shoulder and took a charging beastman through the eye. The monster stumbled witlessly on and somehow fell on Markus’s sword. Hot, stinking bile washed his hand and splashed over his boots. It reminded him of the birthing fluids that he used to see puddled on his neighbours’ fields at calving time. It was like that. Except in the one important way. The gutted beast emitted a deafening bray until another man’s spear skewered it through the mouth. Sickened, Markus snatched back his sword and bossed the dying animal with his shield. The beastman bumped and rolled down the slope and for a second Markus stood unopposed.

He gasped at the close, copper-sharp air. His ribs felt like a vice around his lungs. He couldn’t breathe! The need for air was overwhelming and he pulled his dented helmet from his head. He let it drop. The alpine wind moved blissfully through his beard. Unblinkered by the cheek-guard of his battered helm, he saw the herd in its terrible entirety.

They were doomed.

The rocky clearing in which General von Baersdorf had thought to make his stand against the beastmen that had been harrying them since Hergig was close to a league in length and about a quarter of that wide, rising steadily to this low hill at its northern end. In all that, there wasn’t a scrap of bare rock that didn’t harbour a dozen braying nightmares. The archers and outriders that von Baersdorf had hastily redeployed to defend the column’s gun carriages and supply wains had been wiped out and now beastmen boiled through the wreckage. Every so often a scrap of red fluttered over the broken wagons, a remnant of the general’s banner taken by his killers as a trophy.

The screams of women and children carried weakly through the chaos. Markus looked over the column’s mutilated heart to the rearguard, ranged up under the eaves at the southern end of the clearing. A beleaguered ring of halberdiers held the beastmen at bay while terrified wagoners pulled their vehicles into a defensive circle around the soldiers’ families. Working under a pall of black smoke that obscured the wagons’ tops from view, the famed Hochland handgunners poured death and thunder over the halberdiers’ heads.

A long, bone-throbbing bass note boomed over the infernal din.

Standing like an icon to all that was unholy above the beasts that served him, came the Chaos warrior. Mounted northmen flanked him on stout, ill-tempered ponies. Their muscular bodies writhed with weird, unsettling tattoos and they bore an array of banners, gongs and other instruments, but even as a group they could not match their champion for size or sheer presence. His heavy armour was the deep blue of the northern sky and blazed with icy white runes that, though Markus could not read them, vouchsafed the ultimate understanding in death. From a sealed helm, twin discs of witchfire shone the cold contempt of the immortals onto their earthly demesne. His slow advance was the opening of a pit, a great maw, a chasm that resounded to the footsteps of doom.

He appeared to be searching for something. Or someone.

Markus moaned with dread. He was a farmer, not a fighter. When the Hergig soldiers had come through his land on their way to Wolfenburg he should have stayed behind. Better to die where his wife and baby daughter had died. Why should Ostland have fared any better than their neighbour? He looked up, tears in his eyes and an imprecation to the gods in his breast. Even the sky was damaged, the blunt banks of morning cloud scarred by comets that still fell months after Morrslieb’s destruction.

What sanctuary could there be in Wolfenburg, or even in Middenheim, when even the heavens were not safe? There was–

A strong but not unkind hand pulled Markus back from the front rank. Ernst Höller forced Markus’s useless helmet back over his ears, muffling the screams and narrowing the terrible view to that which lay immediately in front of him. Höller’s lined, red face looked at him worriedly. He had been a cobbler, the best that a farmhand’s coin could afford. Markus was still wearing one of his boots.

‘Look,’ yelled Höller, pointing towards the forest on the battlefield’s long eastern edge.

Broken in every meaningful way, Markus could do little but limply do as he was told. As he turned to watch, arrows scythed through the running beastmen from behind, carving out a thin crescent of killing ground into which a ragged mass of soldiers roared from the treeline. They wielded swords, maces, halberds and hammers. Some men had shields, though no two bore the same colour or motif, while others hacked into their foes with two axes and a berserker zeal. Their clothing, similarly, had passed under the great grinding wheels of war. Markus picked out the colours of Ostland, Talabheim and others that must have been from even further afield than that because he didn’t recognise them. And it was a jumble at that. Markus watched a wildly bearded axeman in black-and-white Ostlander trousers and a ripped burgundy doublet block a beastman’s axe with his own and then clobber it down with his shield. If there was a uniform then it was brown and red – blood, rust and the forest’s clinging mud.

One of the newcomers seemed to wear his sorry state more loosely than the others, and despite the fight that still raged around him Markus found his gaze drawn to that man.

He was tall, clad in mail that looked tough but well used and was covered by a shred of red cloak. A crown of blond hair illuminated his head, shining golden in the weak morning light that made it through the clouds. Brandishing an ornate longsword with the skill of a tournament knight, he glided through the beastmen as if their hooves were shod with lead, shouting encouragement to those around him. Amazingly, those men seemed to fight a little harder and a little better when he passed them.

‘Who says the north has no heroes?’ said Höller.

Markus looked back. His heart fluttered as he watched the swordsman in the red cloak throw himself between a beaten-looking soldier and the three beasts that assailed him. One beastman went down in short order. Then two. Watching that swordsman’s runic blade conduct its work, Markus was put immediately in mind of one of the mighty runefangs, but the Goblin-Bane of Hochland had been lost. Hochland had been lost. The third beastman fought as if its gods were watching while more of its horrifying brethren closed in. Markus couldn’t watch, but just as it looked as though the swordsman was certain to be overwhelmed, it was the beastmen that were screaming and animal parts went flying as if a bomb had just gone off underneath them. A gory crest of bright red hair emerged from the carnage and the biggest and bloodiest dwarf that Markus had ever clapped eyes on threw himself into the suddenly routed beastmen like a battle-mad minotaur with an axe.

‘Steady,’ barked Sierck, and Markus thought for a moment that it had been the glimpse of that barbaric dwarf that had led his comrades to waver.

But then he saw the true reason, and he trembled as the brief hope that had begun to fill him ebbed away. Ernst Höller clutched his shield and moaned.

This was not a time for men: these were days of legend and destiny, of gods adopting mortal flesh to renew again the great struggles of the elder days.

They were the End Times.

And the Chaos warrior had reached the hill.

A madness of shapes and sounds blurred around Felix Jaeger as he fought. Screams and butchery hemmed him in and simply breathing left the taste of uncooked offal on his tongue. The clash of blades reverberated like the hammering of a blacksmith’s forge.

Too close and too dog-tired for the elegant swordplay he had swooned over as a youth, he kicked, bit and clubbed out with his blade using every instinct and dirty trick that he had accrued like scars over two decades chained to the Slayer’s shadow. A rusted sword slid through the flailing scraps of his Sudenland wool cloak and banged his shoulder blade. His armour absorbed the worst of it, but the recent bruise underneath left him in no doubt that he’d been hit. Gritting his teeth through the pain, he got his sword up to meet an in-swinging glaive with a numbing parry, then massaged the blow across his body and kneed the bull-headed gor in the kidney. An arrow whistled inches past Felix’s face as he ignored the snap of pain in his back to shoulder the beastman aside. The braying creature fell straight into the path of an axe meant for the struggling swordsman to Felix’s right.

Blood sprayed Felix’s overgrown beard and painted the right side of his face with a warm mask.

The soldier, all damaged ringmail vest and muddied burgundy and gold doublet, looked at Felix with awe as though Sigmar himself had just arrived to smite his foes. Felix would have gladly introduced the soldier’s skull to the heavily ornate dragonhead hilt of Karaghul had another beastman not immediately burst from the melee with a halberd. Felix turned it on the flat of his blade and struck open the beastman’s ribcage with his return. When Felix glanced over his shoulder the man was gone, the fight having already dragged them apart. Trapping his scrappy red cloak between his cheek and his shoulder Felix mopped sweat and blood from his face.

Felix was too old for this; too, too old. He had an old warhorse’s joints and they still ached from the last battle – with a Kurgan warband over the ruins of a forester’s winter station, after which they had decided that even the forest’s back roads were too dangerous to move an army on. He let his stiff muscles guide him, parrying faster than he could think. He thought it quite probable that he would be dead in the next ten minutes; fifteen, perhaps, if the men around him could remember what he had tried to drill into them.

Mentally applauding his keen view of any situation’s bright side, Felix quickly scanned the melee for a sign of the Chaos warrior. In Felix’s experience – and how he hated that he had become an authority on such matters – Chaos armies were second only to those of greenskins for their reliance on the strength and personality of their leaders.

If the Chaos warrior could be taken down…

Listing wagons rose from the ferment where Felix had last spotted the champion’s dark blue armour, like beached wrecks. There was no sign of him, or his coterie of icon-bearers and musicians, but Felix was certain that he was in amongst that wreckage somewhere. He looked past it to where a paltry group of spearmen or pikemen – it was too far away to tell – in Hochland colours defended the hill from what looked like a nearly endless surge of rabid beastmen. It was destined to be a last stand unless someone did something about it.

That that someone would again have to be Felix Jaeger, poet, propagandist and unlikely wanderer, struck him as sorely unfunny.

A resounding clang clawed Felix’s full attention back to the immediate fight. A grizzly Kislevite axeman had blocked the stroke of his beastman counterpart and now tested his biceps against the beast’s. Elsewhere, Felix saw another man gored by a charging beastman’s horns and trampled under its hooves. A ululating goat-like cry warbled from somewhere within the crush of bodies. It was less a battle than a bar brawl, a form of close-quarters, no-holds-barred violence in which the semi-feral beasts of Chaos were eminently equipped to excel.

‘Keep together,’ Felix shouted, charging to the aid of the Kislevite and hacking his unsuspecting opponent down from behind. ‘Don’t try to take them one-on-one. Don’t try to match them for strength. Stick to your friends and trust them to fight for you.’

‘Jaeger!’ someone nearby belted out with the patriotic fervour of a battle cry. The Kislevite took it up in his heavily accented tongue and suddenly Felix was surrounded by a coming together of men shouting his name.

A mix of anger and embarrassment gave Felix the strength to plunge Karaghul clean through a beastman’s neck. The Chaos blitzkrieg through Kislev and the Empire had ground cities to rubble and brought both nations to collapse, and the men left behind were hard and coarse, dark stones sieved from the more civilised flour. For some reason they looked to Felix to be a leader, but he was just like them: a man trying to get home to his family. He hadn’t saved a single one of them from Chaos. He had just brought them together and given them a direction.

Altdorf.

The painful memories associated with home, and his decision to leave it in the first place, were forced out of his mind as a powerfully built beastman in a red leather jack and a visored helmet bulled through the herd from Felix’s blind side. It swept back an enormous war-axe. Felix reckoned that that had been about five minutes. He had always fancied himself an optimist. The axe-beast made it to within arm’s reach when it crunched to a sudden standstill and coughed blood over the side of Felix’s face.

‘The manling’s with me,’ came a voice like an iron boot on beastman gristle.

The beastman clawed feebly at the air as it was hoisted from the ground, Gotrek’s starmetal axe still buried in the base of its spine. As if raising a fully-grown and armoured bull gor over his head was a feat he could gladly repeat all day, the Slayer spread his cut and blistered lips into a spiteful grin. Blood spotted his scalp, increasing to a patter every time the beastman flailed a hoof for his huge crest of orange hair.

‘Must we stop for every mewling stray that falls into our laps?’ said Gotrek. The runes of his blade glowed redly through the suspended beastman’s flesh, casting a bruise-like pall of discolouration over his swollen, tattooed bulk. Purple shadows gathered within the knot of scar tissue that filled his hollow eye socket. ‘I vowed to return you to the little one, manling, not every man and dwarf between Praag and Talabheim.’

Felix ground his teeth, pulled his sword back up into a guard and turned his back on the murderous dwarf. Just looking at his one-time friend made him feel sick inside. Felix could see blood on the dwarf’s hands and no amount of beastmen deaths were going to wash it away. An oath tethered the Slayer to him, and this time it wasn’t even his. It was dwarf stubbornness and a grossly misplaced sense of obligation rather than his own drunken stupidity that plagued him now.

‘Did you see where that Chaos warrior went?’ Felix replied finally, voice wire-tight.

‘You are infuriating, manling. How am I to keep you safe when you charge headlong into a herd of beasts after a champion of the Dark Powers?’

‘Frustrating, isn’t it?’

From behind Felix’s back, there was the sound of something wet being wrenched from a blade followed by a thump. ‘What was that?’

‘Never mind.’

Taking advantage of the death that inevitably surrounded Gotrek Gurnisson in a battle, Felix again wiped blood from his eyes and studied the knot of Hochland spears on the hill. He was convinced that the Chaos warrior had been heading for them. He was about to share his thinking with Gotrek when he heard what sounded like a child’s scream from the opposite direction. He snapped around, thoughts of Kat and a diffuse paternal longing swirling through his mind before his eyes settled on a dim haze of pike shafts and powder smoke in the distance. His fingers tightened around the hilt of his sword, squeezing the golden ring he wore on his fourth finger.

He turned to Gotrek. It punched him in the gut to have to ask.

‘What?’

‘I think there are families back there.’

Gotrek snorted; amusement, derision, Felix could never tell and neither reflected terribly well on the dwarf.

‘If you don’t then I will.’

The dwarf’s expression hardened. ‘And let you chase after a Chaos warrior while my back is turned? On my oath, manling, I will not.’

‘You know what Chaos warriors are like. He’ll be onto you the moment he – Gotrek, am I boring you?’

Gotrek smothered his yawn with a hand the size of a cured ham. He shook his head blearily. If Felix didn’t know better, he’d say the dwarf looked tired. The golden chain running between his nose and his ear clinked. He ran his thumb around the rim of his axe blade until a bead of blood formed against the meteoric steel. ‘I know the drill, manling. Just point me at him.’

‘Push,’ roared Sergeant Sierck. ‘Push as your bloody mothers pushed.’

With one voice, the Hochlanders echoed the defiant roar of the newcomers from the woods and pushed. Beastmen bellowed and battered at the men’s shields. The animals pushed back, but slowly the discipline of the men of Hochland ground them down the hill.

Though Markus Weissman was so overwrought with terror that his arms shook, he pushed until he wept. He would have run if he could, but they were surrounded. Now there was hope, a champion, and all they had to do was fight a little harder to reach him. Even that slim hope was almost too much to bear.

Vision spotting, Markus snatched glimpses over the top of his shield. He saw the dwarf with the axe and the red-cloaked swordsman part company, almost felt the impact as the dwarf hit the mass of beastmen like a catapult stone. He was going the wrong way! Why was the dwarf heading away from them? Then Markus saw that the swordsman was still coming towards him and that the dread warrior at the base of the hill had paused to turn towards the commotion on his flank. The armoured fiend looked from Markus and the others to the dwarf. It felt as though a lead weight had been removed from his chest.

The man and the dwarf would save them after all!

Then the Chaos warrior turned back, negligently raised one night-blue gauntlet and held it high as it erupted into incandescent black flame.

Felix felt a tingle run down the nape of his neck and he shivered, almost missing a parry that allowed a beastman in clanking mail skirts to graze his arm with its sword. Felix was familiar with the uncanny blessings that the Ruinous Powers could bestow upon their favourites but such gifts tended to run towards the prosaic – tentacles, horns, bigger muscles, deadlier blades. Disquiet running through him like icemelt, Felix sold the sword-beast a feint and then opened its gut with a deft downward flick of his blade. Felix recovered his stance as the beastman fell, cracking its flat boar-like snout on the upside-down barrel of a cannon.

This part of the battlefield was littered with the detritus of what looked like an artillery train. Bronze and steel barrels lay on the ground like caskets waiting to be buried. Felix felt a stab of regret that these mighty weapons had not even had a chance to be fired before they were destroyed. If they had then this battle might have gone very differently.

Felix still couldn’t see the Chaos warrior for the broken wagons that dotted the intervening space as though dropped from the sky to their destruction, but then he didn’t need to. He had enough experience of sorcerers to recognise the unease gurgling mockingly in his gut. It was just like his luck to run into a Chaos warrior blessed with perhaps the one gift against which Felix had no means of defence. Felix kissed Kat’s ring and prayed for a miracle.

Where was Max when Felix needed him?

Markus’s guts coiled in his belly like a serpent. The hairs on the back of his hands stood on end as if it was suddenly as cold as night, and a shiver ran him through from head to toe. The Chaos warrior had become a beacon, a pillar of black flame that touched the tormented sky and washed the beastman herds below with broken shadow. Markus had never been particularly observant with his prayers, but right then, despite his gods’ failure to defend his home, he didn’t see any other alternatives. Hopelessly, he cast about for the hero in the red cloak. He felt an arm slot through his.

‘Sigmar preserve us,’ said Ernst Höller.

‘Spare us,’ Markus stammered.

‘Stand!’ yelled Sierck, sweeping his sword high through the misted breath that wreathed his torso. The temperature continued to plummet. The professional soldier’s voice was taut with worry. That troubled Markus almost as much as the sorcerer himself. ‘Show them Empire st–’

He never finished.

His raised sword ignited with black fire as though it had been struck by lightning. In that sudden flash, Markus saw the man’s bones silhouetted against the writhing grey of muscle and flesh. The men to Sierck’s immediate left and right were screaming as searing ash fell on bare flesh and set light to their clothes. One of them was clubbed down by a triumphant beastman, but all Markus could do was stare in dumb horror. A disgusting wave rippled across Sierck’s charred remains. His chest began to bloat.

Markus broke from his fugue, some instinct pulling his friend, Höller, behind him as he turned his shield from the beastmen and onto his former sergeant instead. An anaemic tentacle lined with suckers and barbs punched through his wooden shield and his cured leather vest and burst from his back.

‘Doomed!’ Markus croaked, before an eruption of prehensile limbs tore his company apart.

An explosion tore out the top of the hill. Distance and the proximate sounds of combat rendered it hauntingly silent, and Felix watched in what felt like slow motion as the tentacled monster was sucked back into the Realm of Chaos and body parts began to fall. Felix cursed, raising an arm to shield himself from what looked like a man’s lung. It splattered against his forearm. Felix felt ill. The beastman nearest to him was neither as concerned nor as lucky and what looked like a horse’s head in a horned helm crashed through the roof of its skull like a mortar shell. With a pattering of splats and bangs, the downpour intensified.

Felix screamed for the men around him to take cover and then dived between the wheels of a hobbled gun-carriage. He flinched as something heavy and best left unidentified crunched onto the boards above his head, followed by a bony skirling reminiscent of beads cut from a necklace. An unfortunate image of vertebrae crossed his mind and the urge to vomit returned in force.

What had happened to the world, he thought? After so many years of wandering, Felix had thought himself inured to horror, but this was too much. He was sick and he was tired and he just wanted it all to stop. Not for the first time he wondered if he had done the right thing by coming to these strangers’ aid when they could so easily have continued on unmolested. But that wasn’t the Empire he remembered and it wasn’t the one he still hoped to return to. That absence had given him a romanticised view of his homeland, Felix would not argue, but he had only done what any decent human being would have done, whether they were men of Ind or the Empire.

Slowly, the drumming on the chassis above his head eased to a desultory sputter and Felix took a deep breath and crawled out from under the far side.

The apocalyptic scene that awaited would not have looked out of place on the warped plains of the Chaos Wastes.

The wreckage of wagons and Imperial war machines lay everywhere, strewn with bodies and pulverised by falling gore. Everything, even the air itself, carried a pink glaze, thickening to crimson over the hilltop itself where a faint mushroom-shaped cloud was rising. A hollow clangour of fighting still rang out sporadically between the wrecks, but it was disarmingly calm, stunned into near silence.

Flat on his belly, Felix wriggled across the blood-slicked rocks and then pushed himself to his knees. He was surrounded by bodies, most of them men, garbed in workmanlike leather and dark tabards that marked them as engineers from one of the provincial gunnery schools. Felix wasn’t familiar enough with the Empire’s various institutions of engineering to tell exactly which. He supposed it didn’t matter. It was one dead place or another dead place.

The body immediately in front of him already looked to have been half-eaten. Entrails spilled around the man’s sides from a messy wound in his gut. There was a long-barrelled pistol tucked under his belt. The man had clearly been killed before he had had a chance to draw it. Felix supposed that that was a mercy of sorts. Without thinking, he took the firearm. A year surviving in the Chaos-occupied wildernesses of Kislev and the Empire had taught him to waste not. Taken by a sudden melancholy he closed his grip around the walnut stock, felt over the rough etching on the barrel with his thumb, A maker’s mark, perhaps. Felix wondered where it was. Did their city still stand? Was this gunsmith still alive? Pushing the sudden wash of hopelessness aside, he pushed the barrel under his trousers against the opposite hip to his scabbard. There was no shot or powder that Felix could see and he had neither the time nor the inclination to go rooting through the engineer’s blood-drenched pockets. He rose.

His determination to kill the Chaos warrior had become all-consuming. It heated his blood like a fever. Had he had the time to consider it then that might have troubled him more than it did, but right now he needed to punish the man – the fiend – that could unleash devastation like this. Quelling his protesting stomach, Felix turned again to the wagon, stuck his hand over the tailboard’s sticky coating, and climbed aboard.

The squat, wasted power of a mortar barrel sat over the axle, lashed down with ropes and partially covered with a canvas. Felix moved towards it, ignoring the sticky squelching noise from underfoot as he took advantage of the high ground to get his first decent look at the battlefield.

The area around the hill had been bloodily pacified. Beastmen lay around the summit in rings like trees felled by a meteor. In Felix’s immediate vicinity, men that looked as bloody as corpses themselves were only just beginning to pull themselves up and blink in horror at the scene around them. Felix planted his boot on the gun barrel and swept his cloak over his shoulder. He probably cut quite the inspiring figure, but there was little else for it if he wanted to be seen.

‘Find your captains and regroup by the forest,’ Felix shouted, pitching his voice low to make it carry as he had learned – in another life, it sometimes felt – as a student of the dramatic arts. ‘And don’t forget to keep together.’

As the shell-shocked soldiers withdrew from the weapon train, Felix turned his gaze south to where the battle continued to rage.

It looked like the Hochlanders’ rearguard had pulled their wagons into a defensive ring. The vehicles’ high wooden sides were hung with shields and bristled with spears. Arrows and bolts hummed through the air and, intermittently, the crack of handgun fire rolled over the carnage like thunder. The tip of Gotrek’s crest shook violently within the churn. Felix saw a unit of kossars in long open-fronted coats running in to support him with hand-axes and javelins. Felix suspected that it was an act less of courage than of self-preservation. Felix had only followed Gotrek into half of the improbable situations that he had because the alternative – the slight chance of having to face them without the Slayer beside him – was somehow even worse.

After a moment’s searching he found his target. Even amongst this level of anarchy a Chaos warrior could not hide, and nor did he seem to want to. His mounted honour guard made a discordant racket of drums and gongs and booming horns. The dark champion was marching straight towards where Gotrek was fighting and Felix was tempted to let nature take its course. He gladly would have, if not for the people trapped inside that ring of wagons. The devastation that the Chaos warrior could wreak on them was too terrible to imagine and Felix couldn’t trust Gotrek to care enough about their wellbeing to help them.

The same impulse that had once driven him into a zombie-infested castle on the slim possibility that Kat had still been alive within sent him leaping for the next wagon. It had lost its left rear wheel and was pitched at a sharp angle, but this time the gloopy surface worked to Felix’s advantage and he kept his balance with only a token wave of his arms. He jumped down.

Immediately a beastman ran at him, intending to skewer him on its bull-like horns. Felix wrong-footed it with a deft feint and it brained itself unconscious on the wagon’s tough wooden chassis. Then he sprinted for the next wagon.

This one was little more than a twisted undercarriage on wheels and Felix slid into it, slamming his mailed shoulder into its front wheel. He winced at the flowering pain from his bruised back and then, holding his sword close to his chest, peered around and over his cover’s mangled iron frame.

The Chaos warrior was about twenty paces distant and moving further away. He was as tall at the shoulder as his cavalry. The fell nightshade glow of his armour gleamed between their tattooed bodies like a solitary candle being borne away into the deep wood. There was no more cover, but Felix still didn’t think much of his chances against so many formidable-looking fighters and a champion of the Dark Powers. If he could get in fast, if he could take the warrior by surprise…

Felix forced himself to stop thinking. Nothing good lay along those lines. He had faced the scions of ruin more than once and, but for one instance of blind luck when he and Ulrika had together defeated Aekold Helbrass, he had never come out on top.

A warrior did not rise above the competition of all his peers and survive decades or more of strife to become a champion of Chaos unless they were far more potent a force in the world than Felix Jaeger. Felix swore, nevertheless loosening his hold on his sword to something more practical than the current death grip.

He had come this far.

‘Uncle!’

Felix turned towards the direction of the shout and, as always when he saw his nephew in Ulrika’s ivory-white scale armour and wielding her heavy Gospodar-style cavalry sabre, he thought for a moment that he had seen a ghost. He willed his heart to steady. That was one spirit he did not wish to see again.

Gustav Jaeger crabbed alongside a wagon some way back from Felix’s position and a little to the right. It was angled such that Felix could see the heavily armed and armoured former free company men filing in behind his nephew. At the front wheel, Gustav peered around before emitting a curse and yanking himself back.

‘Tell me you’re not thinking it.’

Felix chose not to answer. A thousand leagues of dirt had accumulated under the scales of Gustav’s armour like dust under a gravedigger’s nails. The black wolfskin draped over his shoulders had an arrow stuck in it that, by Felix’s assessment of the enemy’s armament, could only have been a stray from their own side. His long blond hair was tied in a ponytail with a black cloth. One of his hands was roughly bandaged, but he clutched his awkward weapon in a determined grip. He wasn’t the same arrogant merchant’s boy who had left Badenhof.

He’d earned his arrogance.

‘Shouldn’t you and your men be anchoring the right?’ said Felix.

‘It may have escaped your notice, but we don’t have a right. Anyway, I assumed you’d be about to do something borderline heroic.’

Felix shook his head. Why did Gustav have to turn everything into a melodrama?

As Felix considered his options, a Kislevite man in a much-patched hemp coat adorned with ribbons and brightly-coloured buttons ran hunched along the line of soldiers with his bow held out before him. Tassels flew from both of the recurved ends. Gustav and the others shuffled back and Kolya took his place, conjuring an arrow seemingly from thin air and drawing it back on his string. His coat was unsleeved – the Empire’s spring being too warm for ‘civilised’ men – and the rangy muscles of his bare arms pulled as taut as his bowstring. He drew a mark on the Chaos warrior’s back, then relaxed and lowered his aim.

‘Just shoot,’ said Gustav. ‘Don’t milk it.’

Kolya sucked in through the gaping holes between his teeth. ‘Chaos plate? At this range? If you must hunt bear with stick then stick should be very long and very sharp, yes?’

‘You think all of that makes you sound clever, don’t you?’ said Gustav.

‘Is wisdom of oblast, friend Gustav.’

‘Well, I think you make them up as you go.’

‘That would be more clever even, no?’

‘Shouldn’t you be with Gotrek?’ Felix asked, interrupting their bickering, one eye on the Chaos warrior.

‘It take more than few beasts to finish Zabójka, Empire. And if they do,’ the former lancer produced a nonchalant shrug, ‘then maybe he prefer I not see.’

Felix scowled. The Kislevite’s professional deficiencies as a rememberer were thankfully none of his concern. He told himself that, but he couldn’t help being annoyed by it on some level. Without thinking, he drew his pistol. Very long and very sharp. He knew from experience that Imperial science was a long way from rivalling the destructive wonders of the dwarfs, but he would still bet on a well-made pistol against even Chaos plate any day. A crying shame then that it wasn’t loaded.

‘Does anyone know how to use one of these things?’

‘Toss it here,’ said Gustav. Felix hurled it overarm and Gustav snatched it neatly out of the air with his uninjured hand.

‘Where is Max?’ asked Kolya as Gustav inspected the pistol’s barrel and powder chamber.

A good question, thought Felix. Max had almost single-handedly blasted them all out of Praag in the most incredible display of one being’s power that Felix had ever seen, but he hadn’t been the same man since. He peered again over his wagon’s ruined side, watching the Chaos warrior and his retinue slide ever further out of range. Max would have taken this sorcerer apart plate by plate and then blasted whatever was left inside into whatever hell he most feared.

‘Here!’

Felix glanced back just as Gustav lobbed the pistol his way. The throw was long, forcing Felix out of hiding in order to catch it. He let out a relieved breath when it didn’t detonate or otherwise go off in his hands. Powerful these new weapons may have been, but temperamental they certainly were. He brought the weapon up in a two-handed grip, careful to retain some looseness in his joints to adjust for recoil, and swiftly moved after the Chaos warrior. He needed to get closer.

He sighted down the barrel. His heart pounded. He had always had a good eye.

But he would only get one shot.

Corporal Herschel Mann, last officer of Hergig, brought the arrowhead base of his kite shield chopping into a wounded beastman’s skull and expelled his barely contained terror in a roar. His throat was sore from breathing smoke and shouting orders. He drew up his battered shield and pounded a beat into it with the hilt of his sword. Even he could barely hear it. Gunpowder smoke clogged his nose and his ears. Inside the ring of wagons it was sulphurous and hot and packed with bodies, most of them wounded, all of them screaming.

Herschel assured himself that it was surely preferable to what lay outside.

He was a simple man, a woodcutter’s son with little ambition beyond a home in the officers’ district, a modest stipend for his retirement and a crop of grandchildren to see him to a fair old age. He was also, he knew, a man of limited imagination. His nobler-born superiors had often commented on it favourably, and it had served him well as city after city fell to the relentless push of Chaos. But even he couldn’t help but wonder.

How could Sigmar allow this?

One of the wagons lurched as though struck by a giant’s club, sending Hochland soldiers and the beastmen they fought flying from its back. Bits of wood and splinters flew in all directions and it finally dawned on Herschel that those on the other side had tired of trying to fight their way over and were going to simply tear their way through. The wagon split in half, shedding wood like horsehair from a ripped pillowcase and driving men choking to their knees.

Coughing, Herschel levelled his sword and shield. He never had started that family that he had thought so important to him, but he would lay down his life to defend his men’s. Whatever was coming for them, it could not be worse than what failure would mean.

The end.

A pair of beastmen charged screaming through the cloud of splinters, wide-eyed and frothing at the mouth. Before Herschel could react, a monstrous axe flashed. The first beastman toppled as its legs were carved from under it, then the second bleated in panic before that axe chopped into its back. Herschel Mann lowered his shield and stood open-mouthed as a horrific-looking dwarf stepped onto the beastman’s corpse with a grisly crunch of popping vertebrae and then ruthlessly put down its disabled fellow as it struggled to crawl away. The dwarf was a lean, heaving mass of muscle, scored by scars and barbarous tattoos and hunched over the impossible weight of his axe. A frightening crest of dyed hair rose to greater than the height of a man from his shaved head.

Herschel met the dwarf’s one good eye, intending to offer his heartfelt thanks and those of his men, but something caught his tongue. The dwarf’s other eye was a knot of scar tissue, as though his sight had been clawed out by some unspeakable terror. It was like looking down a gun barrel, but the good eye was worse. Herschel had buried men with more human feeling in their eyes.

The dwarf hefted his axe as he surveyed the group of survivors. His bruised lips pursed in what could only be called disappointment, and then he grunted and turned back to the fight.

Felix narrowed his eyes and tried to concentrate on his aim, but the more he tried to focus, the more his mind seemed to wander.

He saw Kat and the house in Altdorf that they had shared with his brother. Felix had not been happy there, but looking back on it now he thought that perhaps he should have been. His child would be almost a year old now. He tried to imagine what she – and somehow he had decided that it was a she – would look like, but found that he could not. In his heart, he knew that Kat, Otto, Annabella, and everyone else he had left behind in Altdorf were, if not dead, then gone from his life forever. This particular Chaos warrior had nothing to do with that personally but from where Felix was standing, ankle-deep in gore and with a pistol trained on the warrior’s backplate, he seemed as fitting a recipient of a little retribution as any.

A northman struck his gong with a mallet. The sound reverberated over the clash of arms, the screams. The northman’s horse snorted as he yelled something that Felix was too focused to make out.

He forced his mind to clear, letting out his breath as he had watched trained handgunners, and even Kat with her bow, do before taking an important shot. Sweat pooled between the palm of his hand and the pistol’s carved walnut stock. One shot. It all came down to this. Afterwards, it seemed likely that the Chaos warrior’s vengeful retinue would mob him, unless Gustav’s men could get to him first. He pushed the thought aside. What would come next no longer seemed to matter.

As his vision centred, the warrior’s deep nightshade armour blurred to become bruised muscle. Star-bright runes and metal spines twisted to resemble crawling tattoos.

Felix hated what these times had made of him. What was worse was the certainty that it didn’t have to be this way.

‘Curse you, Gotrek Gurnisson.’

And then he fired.

TWO

Shadows

‘Fighting again, Felix? If you’re not careful someone will get hurt one of these days.’

‘I’m always careful, mother,’ said Felix brightly, troubled only for a brief moment by the nagging doubt that he had no earthly business here in Altdorf on this grey spring day, tossing a silver coin to the driver and then disembarking from the open-topped carriage.

He winced and held his ribs as his feet touched the cobbles. That last fight had hurt, however much he sought to pass it off as horseplay.

Strange then that he could not remember very much about it.

He seemed to recall the loud bang of a pistol, and then being mobbed by half a dozen men twice his size. He forced a smile onto his face. Whoever his latest opponent had been, he was clearly an unconscionable knave of the worst sort. Felix hoped he had given a good account for honourable conduct, but the fragmentary nature of his recollections on the subject did not fill him with confidence.

The coachman dipped his cap to Felix’s generosity and with a crack of his whip sent his vehicle rolling down the – now he noticed it – oddly deserted cobbles of Befehlshaber Avenue. At any time of day it would ordinarily be filled with hawkers and merchants, its old stone frontages competing for extravagance and the attention of the well-heeled foot-traffic that passed by. But not now. Shaking off the ambiguous sense of disquiet, he turned to where his mother waited.

She stood alone at the end of the driveway, dwarfed by the looming black iron gates that stood open either side of her. Felix had the terrible suspicion that she intended to greet him thusly every time his studies at the university were suspended for the Sigmarzeit holiday. The drive behind her was dark. Felix could barely see the house at all, just a black silhouette against the sky hidden behind rank after rank of bare-clawed maples. They rustled softly, as if aggrieved by Felix’s regard, jarring yet at the same recent and familiar.

They aren’t here any more, spoke a voice from his subconscious that sounded remarkably familiar. It was older, authoritative in a jaded sort of way, but unmistakably his own.

The house flickered, a degraded aspect superimposing over that silhouette as the trees became bloated and heavy with fly-infested fruits. To each one, a diseased figure had been crucified and writhed in pain. The sky crackled and broke. The visage of a corpulent, pus-ridden daemon rose over the skyline, gurgling in its own degradation and pleasure. It appeared for a minute and then it was gone, and the house returned to the darkness that had possessed it before.

His mother embraced him warmly and despite his unease Felix returned the gesture as though he had not seen her in decades rather than the few short months it must have been. She kissed him on the cheek, then pulled back and rubbed the mark her lips had made on his skin with her thumb. She regarded him with a sad smile, deepening the crows’ feet around her eyes. Her blonde hair had been largely banished to lie amongst the grey and tied behind her head in a bun. Felix recognised in her his own blue eyes, his strong jaw. It was odd that he hadn’t noticed it before she… before what? He couldn’t remember. He was struck by how frail she looked.

‘Renata,’ intoned a voice from the house that Felix both did and did not recognise. It reminded him somewhat of his father’s, but it terrified him in a way that the old man never had. It was as deep as black and solemn as death. ‘Leave the boy alone and return to me. You should not be out there alone.’

‘Is… everything all right?’ Felix asked. He heard a thump as of a footstep from the driveway. The maples had drawn closer. Their branches swayed in the breeze, or at least Felix thought they were branches; every so often they appeared to be writhing human limbs, blistered with boils and wet with blood and pus. The shadows pulled tighter. He backed away. ‘You do look unwell, mother. Perhaps I should take you to the–’ a vision of a too-young woman lying still on a bed beneath symbols of doves and bleeding hearts filled his mind ‘–Shallyan temple.’

His mother sighed. ‘It is too late for that, Felix. The master still has need of me, and it is best not to defy him when he is in so dark a mood.’

Now what was it about that particular choice of words that troubled him?

As Felix backed away, the iron gateposts appeared to grow, bending in at the tips to seal his mother under a huge black arch. Shadows flowed in from the driveway to fill in the outline of the arch. A likeness shivered across its form, recognisably human yet hideously vague. The trees reached their branches over the walls of his father’s estate, twisting around the shadow-figure to form curving horns that extended from its daemonic head and what appeared to be wings that opened out from its back.

His mother was still visible within the moulded darkness, but contact with this figure seemed to have affected her for her appearance stuttered. At times she appeared as a tall man, garbed in flowing white robes and standing with the aid of a snake-headed staff. At others, and sometimes in the same glance, she was an Ungol wise woman, shrouded in glittering black silk with moonlight-white hair spilling from her raised hood.

‘You’re… not my mother,’ Felix replied. ‘She died.’

‘Everybody dies, Felix,’ the apparition answered. ‘Even me. And I suspect you as well, although your fate lies shrouded in a place where even my eyes cannot see.’

Felix held out his hand for her, glancing over his shoulder for the companion that he knew should be there but wasn’t. The darkness echoed his terror with laughter.

‘Everybody dies…’

Rain splotched Felix’s eyelids. He grunted, his familiar old body welcoming him back to a world of pain. The hum of flies filled his ears. The monotonous chop of broken wagons being reduced to portable chunks reverberated between bare rock and the encircling trees. The taste of fresh rain lay between his lips. The ground under his back was uneven and disturbingly human in its contours. Under a fusillade of cracks, pops, and coloured stars on the backs of his eyelids he shifted position. A leather-encased arm rolled out from beneath him. Felix felt queasy. It was some way from being his preferred course of action, but he opened his eyes. Gustav gummed into focus. The rain made a faint halo around the ivory-white scales of his armour. His face was smeared with blood and bore an expression of concern that swiftly disappeared when he noticed that Felix was awake.

‘What happened?’ said Felix.

‘We returned to Altdorf, don’t you remember?’ said Gustav. ‘Cheering crowds lined the Konigplatz waving flags and shouting your name. Castle Reikguard fired a twenty-one gun salute to honour its hero’s return and a company of Bretonnian pegasus knights performed an aerial display in your honour. Emperor Karl Franz of course named you Elector of Ostermark then and there which was met with rapturous approval by all, and then we retired to the Rose and Thorn for ale and pastries. Unfortunately that was when your dwarf challenged the Emperor and Ludwig Schwarzhelm to a head-butting contest, after which things got messy. That’s probably why your head hurts.’

He wished it was just his head. ‘This isn’t funny.’

‘No, I suppose not.’ Gustav took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. He looked down at Felix’s still-recumbent form. ‘But duelling with a Chaos champion and his entire retinue for a good half a minute before Kolya and I pulled you out didn’t do your reputation any harm. Personally, I think you have as good a call on the Ostermark runefang as anybody else right now.’

Felix growled inwardly. If he’d had it up to his neck with men who should know better referring to him as ‘my lord’, then he was fed up to the eyeballs of the outlandish stories of his personal heroism in the face of evil.

Yes, he had helped Gotrek hold the ford at Choika against that beastman herd while the army had crossed, but the Slayer had done the bulk of the fighting. What Felix most recalled of that day was the chill he had come down with afterwards. And yes, granted, he had personally defeated and slain the mutant ogre that had rampaged into their camp from the oblast, but the creature had been half mad from drinking the warpstone-contaminated waterways of Kislev and had been practically dead already, not that anyone seemed to want to hear that.

In response to Felix’s early enquiries into the source of those tales, Gustav had impishly suggested that they might all have read Felix’s book.

‘Are you getting up, then, or not?’ said Gustav, fingering the businesslike grip of his long Gospodar sabre and giving the twin puncture-scars on the side of his neck a habitual scratch. ‘More than enough beastmen got away to cause us trouble if they decide to come back, and their champion wasn’t in as bad a shape as you’d think, considering.’

Felix stiffened and tried to rise, only for a lance of molten agony to shoot up through his legs. He bit down on the urge to scream. Muscle cramp, that was all, although all seemed a little trite given the pain it was causing him just now. What had become of the days when he could get through a fight like the one just gone and be ready for more by the afternoon? Now it felt as though his tendons had been stiffened with steel pins and he doubted whether he could lift his sword if a dragon were to burst from the forest. He let his efforts out in a gasp of breath and slapped his thigh.

‘Help me.’

Uttering some choice phrases from the lexicon of Altdorf’s docks, Gustav dropped to his haunches to scoop up one of Felix’s feet and then, holding the leg straight, pushed it back over Felix’s body and leaned his weight against it. Felix gasped at the sudden spike of pain, but it subsided almost immediately. He felt stiff ligaments stretch and loosen and almost moaned aloud with relief.

‘Do you seriously still intend to try and re-enlist when we get back to Altdorf?’ said Gustav.

‘They’d have to throw me into the Reiksfang to stop me.’

Then Gustav switched legs, pushing down until Felix’s vision broke out in spots. Nightmare visions of his home aflame and presided over by pustulent daemons shattered in his mind as some cartilaginous blockage in his calf went snap.

It would be a hard journey. Every provincial back road was a highway for a Chaos army these days, and the woods were rife with beastmen and worse. Felix had led his company of survivors this far into Talabecland by avoiding even game trails where possible, but chance encounters like this one would only grow more difficult to elude now that they finally neared the Empire’s heartlands. To his surprise that didn’t trouble him. In truth, he was more than a little afraid at the prospect of what might be waiting for them at Altdorf. Felix had not seen a single town or village still standing since his departure from Badenhof for Kislev two years ago.

But if vengeance was what Altdorf needed then she would find Felix Jaeger able and willing.

Gustav let go of Felix’s leg and stepped back. Felix sat and extended his hand for a little help and the younger man duly obliged, clasping his hand a little more firmly than was strictly necessary and pulling him up.

His nephew was all he had left now.

Whatever happened to the Empire, Felix had reached the age where it was impossible to ignore the fact that there were fewer days ahead for him than there were behind. It was Gustav’s fate he worried for rather than his own these days, the sort of world that Felix could leave for him. And for Kat and their child. If they were still alive. It was all that kept him going.

Gustav supported his uncle with a loose grip at the elbow, then stepped aside, granting Felix a view of the clearing behind him.

Felix covered his mouth with his hand and almost gagged on the stench.

A freshly tilled field of death stretched out to the treeline. Pale, lean men in muddy cloaks picked through the corpses of man and beast like serfs harvesting a crop of beans. The wind sent chills rustling through the ocean of trees, bearing the rumour of thunder from the charcoal sky to the north. The cool breeze tightened the blood on Felix’s face, prickling his skin like goose bumps. He drew his cloak around his chest and shivered. There was something out there: a shadow, always behind him whichever way he turned.

A faint cry from the treeline startled him from his reverie.

His sword was half-drawn from its scabbard when he spotted the kossar in loose-fitting trousers and an open-fronted coat running into the clearing. He moved with an odd, high-kneed gait, bounding from body to body, stomping through puddles and laughing with his comrades in fierce pursuit. The man held what appeared to be a beastman’s beer skin high above his head as he ran. Only a Kislevite, Felix thought, relaxing his grip on his sword.

The posse ran close to where Gotrek was overseeing the dismantlement of the Hochlanders’ vehicles, the Slayer rubbing his eye tiredly with his fist and bawling at each of them in turn as they passed him. With a growl of impatience, the dwarf turned his glare towards a band of Ostland woodsmen who had had the gall to look up from their work and smile as the kossars’ boisterous laughter passed by. Gotrek grumbled his way between two of the woodsmen and took over, his ancient rune-axe blitzing the wagon to matchwood in the time it took the Ostlanders to whip their black cloaks up over their faces.

Felix frowned. His feelings towards his former companion were confused. They had often argued, and too much time with only their own disparate personalities for company had bred its share of conflict. And yet somehow they had always managed to avoid coming to blows or finding themselves in someone’s Book of Grudges. Despite that, there had never been a time when Felix was not a little bit afraid of the Slayer. Now, Felix could barely look at the dwarf without seeing the lives he had taken and feeling more than just a little fearful. Did Gotrek hold him in higher regard than he had Hamnir, or Snorri? Felix knew he would never dare ask, but he suspected not. He was only human – a manling – after all.

He would sleep easier when the Slayer’s oath was fulfilled and they could again go their separate ways. Felix shook his head as he watched Gotrek stomp determinedly towards another wagon. If he had thought being oathsworn to Gotrek’s quest was bad enough, then it was because he’d never thought to consider the implications of actually being the object of one of the Slayer’s damned oaths.

‘Lord Jaeger!’

A soldier in a piecemeal harness of rain-softened leather and steel covered by an earthy-coloured cloak made a beeline through the bodies towards Felix. From the off-white and black of his livery and the dully golden epaulet on his shoulder he’d been a sergeant in an Ostland regiment. The man removed his helmet to reveal short, weed-snaggled hair and threw a salute.

‘He’s not talking to me,’ Gustav whispered, somewhat sharply, in Felix’s ear.

‘Kolya sends word that he’s called off the chase on the warband,’ said the Ostlander. ‘He’s set sentries in the woods, but he didn’t want to venture too far from the main force.’

‘Very good, sergeant,’ said Felix, remembering to return his best imitation salute. It appeared to satisfy the Ostlander, who saluted again, even more briskly than before, and quick-marched through the puddles in the rocks to where a short column of horse- and hand-drawn wagons was just beginning to trickle into the clearing. Peasant families clung grimly to the sides or trudged alongside.

Felix gave his nephew’s hand one last squeeze, then cupped the man’s pearl-wet gardbrace in his hand and eased him gently away. Whatever his feelings about it, these people – desperate as they clearly were – looked up to him. They needed their hero, and for as long as the body remained willing then Felix would play that role.

‘Where are you going?’ said Gustav.

‘To see if I can see where we are,’ Felix replied, nodding towards the high hill that the poor, doomed Hochlanders had fought to the last man to hold. Unidentifiable bits of meat glistened in the rain. It looked like a butcher’s cart had been struck by a mortar.

The hilltop was deserted, understandably so, but for a moment Felix thought he glimpsed a dark figure outlined in black against the grey clouds above the summit. A frisson of dread passed through him, utterly convinced for one irrational moment that the figure spied on him on behalf of the darkness he sensed from the forest. In the space of a shiver, the feeling was gone, as was the figure, and Felix wished he could say that the two had been unrelated.

But the figure had been Max Schreiber.

Cartilage crunched beneath him as Felix pushed himself to the top of the hill. Blood oozed up from underfoot. Further from the epicentre of the carnage, men and beastmen more-or-less intact lay across each other, appearing to fight each other even in dismemberment and death. Felix covered his mouth, not so much against the smell as the taste. Flies droned around him, perhaps mistaking him for a corpse – and in spirit, surrounded by so much death, he felt like one. He swatted at the buzzing pests, more out of form than the belief that anything Felix Jaeger could do here would make the slightest difference to anything.

‘Are you up here, Max?’ he said, uncertain why he whispered or why his heart beat so hard.

He crunched to the summit with a grimace and turned full circle. Meat glistened. The rain made dimples in puddles of blood. Trees extended out from the clearing in every direction, whispering and downcast under the rain. The Empire was rather like a dwarfhold, Felix thought. Those men fortunate enough to visit the dwarfs’ ancient fastnesses would see only the glittering audience halls beyond the mountain gates, but their deeps plumbed further into the darkness than that. The Empire was the same, its deeps hidden by tangled bowers rather than by stone. It was a sprawling country and perhaps, in days before these, even a great one, but take away its roads, its boats, and the Empire became a far darker and vaster land than even Felix could have believed.

It made the deeds of Sigmar and his descendants even more inspiring. Those were heroes, living in a time of legends. Felix’s own deeds felt trifling by comparison.

He peered through the falling grey sheets in the direction he thought was north. It looked like mountains on the horizon, but that couldn’t be right. They were shadowing the Bechafen to Talabheim road. There were no mountains in Talabecland.

‘Max?’

Relief crept guiltily into his thoughts at the realisation that the wizard was not here. He turned to leave. In the clearing below, a few hundred men and half a dozen wagons assembled. He looked to the endless tracts of forest, and then to the mist-shrouded mountains in the north. He prayed that they weren’t lost.

‘The End Times near, Felix.’

Felix flinched at the voice from behind him. The warmth leached from his veins and there was very little he wanted more in this world than to never have to turn around and face the man that spoke. He unclenched his fists, took a moment to steel his courage, and then turned.

The rain flattened the old wizard’s hood against his face and brought a glisten to his ashen hands, exposed to the wrist where they held the simple yew staff upon which he leaned. Once of proud ivory and gold, his long magister’s robes were now bleached grey like his skin. More by memory than by their faded thread Felix picked out the elaborately embroidered geomantic symbols and coiling, self-cannibalising snakes.

‘I noticed,’ Felix replied, intending to sound light and failing miserably. The wizard’s captivity at the pleasure of the Troll King had damaged him, but his strange condition had only worsened since Praag. It troubled Felix to see the last of his old friends in such a sorry way, but Max was far beyond his – or anyone’s – ability to help.

Max stared through Felix. The whites of his wide eyes were dark and their gaze clove to something distant, a realm of horror that he and he alone could see.

‘The Chaos Moon cracks asunder and falls from the heavens in a firestorm of corruption and death. The Isle of the Dead unravels and mighty Ulthuan sinks to the ocean’s bottom while her chill twin falters before the Handmaiden of Khorne. Old certainties fade as new gods arise and the greatest host of daemonkind since the last days of Aenarion musters in the corners of my mind. Your eyes are closed and you notice little, Felix. Oh, so little. If you saw but a fraction of what I must…’

‘Neither of us are children, Max. I’ve walked the Great Bastion of Cathay. I’ve seen the old ziggurats in the Southlands jungle. I know that Chaos is everywhere. But that’s why we have to fight.’

Max bowed his head. ‘You do not understand at all.’

‘You could have stopped this,’ Felix replied after a time, looking down as he slid his foot back and forth through the gory leftovers of men and beasts. ‘That sorcerer was no match for the Max I remember.’

‘I thought about it.’

To Felix’s own surprise, he started laughing. It was a black laugh, the sort that only a man who had administered the ultimate mercy to friends in want of a healer as skilled as Max Schreiber could give. ‘I hope for all our sakes you found some answers?’

‘Yes. Some. And I knew that this was too petty an engagement to account for you or for Gotrek. You have a destiny, Felix,’ said Max urgently as Felix began to turn away. ‘Since we first set out together to slay the dragon Skjalandir, I have believed it, and with all that remains of me I know it now. It was not chance that brought us together then and it is not hubris to turn to fate for an explanation of what brings us all together again now.’

Felix tried to hold Max’s eyes but couldn’t. Their gazes slid across one another, the spaces they inhabited immiscible as oil and water. Felix shivered and wiped rain from the back of his neck, chilled to the marrow by the wizard’s talk and angered by how powerfully it had affected him. His destiny, such as it was, was his own and no other’s. The thought that some unknowable being might have done this to him infuriated him more than the fundamental loss of control over his own fate that such interference implied.

‘We’re not all together, though, are we? Some of us aren’t here.’

‘Only those that needed to be.’

Felix’s lips flared in sudden rage and his hand moved of its own volition to the hilt of his sword.

Snorri.

Ulrika.

How dare he!

The rain pummelled Max’s hood as the wizard beheld the middle distance. With a sigh, Felix let go of his sword. It wasn’t the wizard’s fault. He was sick, a man with an infected wound. He had not chosen to be this way.

‘You should go,’ Max murmured, nodding downhill.

On the nearest patch of flat ground between the hill and the treeline, a gang of unarmoured men, women, and even children were busily erecting an impromptu command tent over the back of an open-topped wagon. As Felix watched, Gotrek and a handful of others gravitated towards it.

‘The Hochlanders’ commander is the bearer of bad tidings. Your nephew has just heard, and convenes a council of war-captains.’

A prickle of unease stitched down Felix’s spine. ‘How can you know that?’

Max sighed. It looked as though he closed his eyes, but with grey eyes and grey skin, both concealed under a hood, it was difficult to be certain of anything. ‘Some powers I abjure by choice, others force their visions through my shuttered eyes and invade my dreams.’

Felix spun around, his heart turning loops, and tried to pick out Gustav amidst the mismatched uniforms and mud paraded under the rain below. He could see a pocket of Hochlanders in their red and green, but there was no sign of his nephew.

‘I would advise you to hurry,’ said Max, serene as a passing breeze. ‘Gotrek Gurnisson is about to be the recipient of bad news.’

Rain tapped on the leaves above the solemn bier as it traipsed southwards in unexpected defeat. Khamgiin Lastborn, the ever-changing spear of the Silver Road, tried to ignore it and lapse back into unconsciousness. The pain from the wound in his back was terrible, worse even than the ritual scarifications his father had inflicted upon him in his trials of manhood. Pain was just a feeling, a weakness like pity or affection. He told himself that, but the rain’s insistent rap on his armour demanded he pay notice and take heed.

By the Dark Master of Chaos, it hurt.

He opened his eyes and blinked away the dreams of torture and sadistic, androgynous daemon-fiends. Were they dreams or were they memories? It was difficult to know; he had lived long and suffered much, both before he had donned Tzeentch’s armour and after. Casting the past to the past, he took in his surroundings. Tall trees rose above him, carving up the grey light into meagre portions of light and shadow. The rain rustled lightly through their high leaves. Watching the weaving bowers shift slowly by, Khamgiin came to the realisation that he was laid out on some kind of litter, and that he was moving.

On either side of him walked his men. They marched slowly, eyes low and shoulders hunched. The tribesmen were smeared with blood, their armour scored. Four of their strongest carried him on a shield across their shoulders. Despite his size and weight and their evident weariness, they bore their burden without sufferance. Men of the tribes were not like other men. Though it was many decades since Khamgiin had ridden the steppe, battled hobgoblin and ogre and worse every day simply to live for one more day of struggle, the pride he took in his people’s prowess was as strong as it had ever been.

‘Temay,’ he mouthed, addressing the tall warrior to his right. The man wore a coat of iron and leather scales, woven together with a backing layer of silk and worn over a sleeveless silk vest. His head was shaved but for a topknot. An elaborate tattoo of an eagle spread its wings over one cheek.

The warrior did not answer. Weakly, Khamgiin rolled his head around to the left.

‘Khidu. What struck me? Was it him?’

Still no answer. The men marched on like dead men to the underworld. Khamgiin tried to remember the end of the battle, but it was a blur of screams and fire. It had been as one-sided a rout as any he had come to expect from this soft land. Except for the dwarf. Yes, he remembered something now. The dwarf had been a foe worthy of Khamgiin’s gifts. Then there had been a loud bang and then… He winced as the memory brought with it an unpleasant throbbing pain in between his shoulder blades. He worked his mouth. It was as dry as the Great Steppe, but he managed to separate his lips and move his tongue.

‘Was the warrior slain? Did the Dark Master make a martyr of his enemy?’

‘No, Lastborn, he was not. You failed, as I foresaw that you must.’

A woman walked behind the bier, dressed and hooded in black with face downcast like a widow. From the stoop of her back and the strands of white that strayed from her hood, Khamgiin judged her to be old, but immortality tempered such assessments and her voice rang as clear as the warning call of an eagle. Something about her presence put a sepulchral chill into Khamgiin. He turned to his men, but they walked on as if they were unaware of her or of him, ghosts in each other’s worlds. He clenched his eyes tight and felt for the spark of power within him. This was a dream, or perhaps a vision such as those in which Nergüi purported to see the future, brought on by blood loss and pain.

‘I bested Gorgoth the Gargantuan in mortal combat that lasted eight days and nights. I broke the numberless hordes of Hobgobla Khan and brought to heel the beasts of the Shirokij. I am the Lastborn of Khagash-Fél. I do not fail.’

‘The Dark Master cares not for your sacrifice. He is not appeased with oaths or with deeds. He does not desire your devotion.’

The woman nodded imperceptibly to one side.

A ghostly figure ran through the trees there. The dwarf! Khamgiin could see his bright orange crest through the moist bark. The tattoos that covered his monstrously muscular frame were a translucent blue, at times indistinguishable from the whorls and branches behind him. In silence the spectre of the dwarf ran, battling his way through enemies that Khamgiin could not see. The dwarf ran behind a tree, and for the brief duration of his passage it ceased to be a tree and was a pillar, square-sided and mighty, soaring towards a vaulted ceiling where fiery golden runes glimmered like bleeding stars. Something about them reminded Khamgiin of the histories his father had told, of when the tribes had lived under the yoke of the Chaos dwarfs of Zharr. Before he could think on it further, the pillar was a tree again and the dwarf emerged from behind it with a man in tow. It was an Empire man in a red cloak, wielding what appeared to be a powerful magical sword. Khamgiin did not recognise him, but a tingling in his wounded spine told him that he should.

‘What am I seeing?’

‘What I see,’ the woman replied.

A chill entering his bones, Khamgiin pushed himself up onto his elbows. ‘I have seen you in my dreams before. It was you who showed me the tribes riding westward to make war on the Empire. Who are you?’

The woman bowed her head slightly, bringing up her hands in the same motion to draw back her hood. Despite his own godly favour, Khamgiin gasped. Her skin was a strange mix of light and dark, like rubbed chalk. Her lips however were jet black, as were the small horns that rose through her frost-white hair. The most unnerving thing about her, however, was her eyes. Their colouration constantly shifted and changed, like a candle behind stained glass, and Khamgiin felt certain that there were prophecies reflected there that could raise a man to the heights of the gods if he could interpret them without succumbing to madness.

‘A servant. I observe and follow. History will not record my name.’

Khamgiin struggled to meet her shifting gaze. With a spurt of panic he noticed that everything around her was darkening. He was still moving, but his men were gone, as was the forest. He blinked into the nothingness that surrounded him. It wasn’t just a void left by the retreat of the mortal world, it was a thing with a cruel will and a terrible purpose of its own. He saw the silver outline of the witch before she vanished. She was haloed by something horned and dark, something vast and incalculably ancient with a capacity for hate that left the Chaos warrior quailing and small.

‘A darkness closes on me,’ he hissed.

The woman’s voice echoed from the shadow.

‘Not only on you.’

Click here to buy Gotrek & Felix: Slayer.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2015.
This eBook edition published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS UK.

Cover illustration by Slawomir Maniak.
Map artwork by Nuala Kindrade.
Additional artwork by Winona Nelson.

© Games Workshop Limited 2015. All rights reserved.

Gotrek and Felix: Slayer © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. Gotrek and Felix: Slayer, Gotrek and Felix, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, Warhammer, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78251-775-7

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