[Gotrek & Felix 02] - Skavenslayer

  A WARHAMMER NOVEL

  SKAVENSLAYER

  Gotrek & Felix - 02

  William King

  This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons

  and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the

  world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury

  it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds

  and great courage.

  At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the

  largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for

  its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is

  a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests

  and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns

  the Emperor Karl-Franz, sacred descendant of the

  founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder

  of his magical warhammer.

  But these are far from civilised times. Across the length

  and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces

  of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come

  rumblings of war. In the towering World’s Edge Mountains,

  the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and

  renegades harry the wild southern lands of

  the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the

  skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the

  land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the

  ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen

  corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods.

  As the time of battle draws ever near.

  the Empire needs heroes

  like never before.

  SKAVEN’S CLAW

  “I would like to forget the long, hard trudge through the winter woods which followed our encounter with the children of Ulric. And it pains me to this day to think of the punishment we meted out to the girl, Magdalena, but my companion was unrelenting, and no evil we encountered was ever spared if that could be avoided. In this case it could not be. With a heavy hearts, we entered the forest once more and set off northwards.

  “At long last we found ourselves in the great Elector city of Nuln, a place of refinement, sophistication, wealth and great learning—and a city in which my family had long had business dealings. At that time, the Countess Emmanuelle was at the height of her fame, power and beauty and her city attracted the wealthy, the aristocratic and the famous like a candle flame attracts moths. Nuln was one of the most beautiful cities in all the Empire.

  “Of course, our own entry into the life of the city was made at a level far lower on the social scale. Short of cash, hungry and weary from our long journey, we were forced to take employment in what was possibly the very worst occupation we were to pursue in our long wanderings. And during that period we encountered a fiend who was to bedevil our paths for long years to come.”

  —From My Travels With Gotrek, Vol. III,

  by Herr Felix Jaeger (Altdorf Press, 2505)

  “Stuck in a sewer, hunting goblins. What a life,” Felix Jaeger muttered with feeling. He cursed all the gods roundly. In his time he had come to consider himself something of an expert on unprepossessing surroundings but this must surely take the prize. Twenty feet overhead, the population of the city of Nuln went about its lawful daily business. And here he was, in the dark, creeping along narrow walkways where a single slip could put him over his head in reeking foulness. His back ached from stooping for hours on end. Truly, in all of his long association with the Trollslayer, Gotrek Gurnisson, he had never before plumbed such depths.

  “Stop moaning, manling. It’s a job, isn’t it?” Gotrek said cheerfully, paying not the slightest heed to the smell or the narrowness of the ledge or the closeness of the bubbling broth of excrement the sewerjacks called “the stew”.

  The Slayer looked right at home in the endless maze of brickwork and channels. Gotrek’s squat muscular form was far better adapted to the work than Felix’s own. The dwarf picked his way along the ledges as sure-footed as a cat. In the two weeks they had been part of the sewer watch, Gotrek had become far more adroit at the job than ten-year veterans of the service. But then he was a dwarf; his people were reared in the lightless places far beneath the Old World.

  It probably helped that he could see in the dark, Felix thought, and did not have to depend on the flickering light of the watchmen’s lanterns. That still did not explain how he endured the stink, though. Felix doubted whether even the dwarfholds smelled quite so bad. The stench down here was exquisitely vile. His head swam from the fumes.

  The Trollslayer looked peculiar without his usual weapon. Felix had come to think of the battle-axe as being grafted to his hand. Now the dwarf had his huge starmetal axe strapped across his back. There was not enough space to swing it in most areas of the sewer. Felix had tried to get Gotrek to leave the weapon in the watch armoury alongside his own magical sword but had failed. Not even the prospect of its weight dragging him below the sewage if he fell in could cause the Slayer to part with his beloved heirloom. So Gotrek carried a throwing hatchet in his right hand and a huge military pick in the other. Felix shuddered when he imagined the latter being used. It resembled a large hammer with a cruel hooked spike on one side. Driven by the dwarf’s awesome strength he did not doubt that it could shatter bone and tear through muscle with ease.

  Felix tightened his grip on his own short stabbing sword and wished that he still carried the Templar Aldred’s dragon-hilted mageblade. The prospect of facing goblins in the dark made him long for the reassurance of using his familiar weapon. Perhaps Gotrek was right to keep his axe so close.

  In the gloom of the lantern light, his fellow sewerjacks were ominous shadowy figures. They wore no uniform save the ubiquitous scarves wrapped round their heads like Araby turbans, with a long fold obscuring their mouths. Over the last two weeks, though, Felix had become familiar enough with them to recognise their silhouettes.

  There was tall, spare Gant whose scarf concealed a face turned into a moonscape by pockmarks and whose neck was a volcanic archipelago of erupting boils. If ever there was a good advertisement for not staying a sewerjack for twenty years Gant was it. The thought of his toothless smile, bad breath and worse jokes made Felix want to cringe. Not that he had ever pointed this out to Gant’s face. The sergeant had hinted that he had killed many a man for it.

  There was the squat, ape-like giant Rudi, with his massive barrel chest and hands almost as big as Gotrek’s. He and the Trollslayer often arm-wrestled in the tavern after work. Despite straining until the sweat ran down his bald pate, Rudi had never beaten the dwarf, although he had come closer than any man Felix had ever seen.

  Then there were Hef and Spider, the new boys as Gant liked to call them, because they had only been with the sewer watch for seven years. They were identical twins who lived with the same woman on the surface and who had the habit of finishing each other’s sentences. So strange were their long, lantern-jawed faces and their fish-like staring eyes, that Felix suspected that in-breeding or mutation was part of their heritage. He did not doubt their deadliness in hand-to-hand combat, though, or their dedication to each other and their girl, Gilda. He had seen them do terrible things with their long hook-bladed knives to a pimp who had insulted her one night.

  Along with the burly, one-eyed dwarf, these were the men he worked with, as desperate a crew as he had ever known. They were vicious men who couldn’t find work that suited them anywhere else and who had finally found an employer who asked no questions.

  There were times when Felix felt like going along to the office of his father’s company and begging for money so he could leave this place. He knew they would give it to him. He was still the son of Gustav Jaeger, one of the Empire’s wealthiest merchants. But he also knew that word of his capitulation would get back to his family. They would know that he had come crawling back to them, after all his fine boasts. They would know he had taken the money he had affected to so despise. Of course, it had been easy to despise money on the day he had stormed from their house, because he had never known the lack of it. His father’s threat to disown him was meaningless because he simply had not understood it. He had grown up rich. The poor were a different species: sad, sickly things that begged on street corners and obstructed the path of one’s coach. He had learned since that day. He had endured hardship and he thought he could take it.

  But this was very nearly the last straw: being forced to become a sewerjack, the lowest of the low amongst the hired bravoes of Nuln. But there had simply been nothing else for it. Since their arrival no one else would hire two such down-at-heel rogues as himself and Gotrek. It pained Felix to think of how he must have looked, seeking work in his tattered britches and patched cloak. He had always been such a fine dresser.

  Now they needed the money, any money. Their long trek through the land of the Border Princes had yielded no reward. They had found the lost treasure of Karak Eight Peaks but they had left it to the ghosts of its owners. It had been a case of find work, steal or starve—and both he and the Trollslayer were too proud to steal or beg. So here they were in the sewers below the Empire’s second greatest city, crawling beneath a seat of learning that Felix had once dreamed of attending, haunting slimy tunnels below the home of the Elector Countess Emmanuelle, the most famous beauty of the nation.

  It was not to be borne. Felix wondered constantly
what ill-omened star had marked his birth. He consoled himself with the thought that at least things were quiet. It might be dirty work but so far it had not proved dangerous.

  “Tracks!” he heard Gant shout. “Ha! Ha! We’ve found some of the little buggers. Prepare for action, lads.”

  “Good,” Gotrek rumbled.

  “Damn!” Felix muttered. Even as inexperienced a sewerjack as Felix could spot these tracks.

  “Skaven,” Gotrek hawked and spat a huge gob of phlegm out into the main channel of the sewer. It glistened atop a patch of phosphorescent algae. “Rat-men, spawn of Chaos.”

  Felix cursed. On the job only two weeks and already he was about to meet some of the creatures of the depths. He had almost been able to dismiss Gant’s stories as simply the imaginings of a man who had nothing better with which to fill his long tedious hours.

  Felix had long wondered if there really could be a whole demented subworld beneath the city as Gant had hinted. Were there colonies of outcast mutants who sought refuge in the warm darkness and crept out at night to raid the market for scraps? Could there actually be cellars where forbidden cults held ghastly rituals and offered up human sacrifices to the Ruinous Powers?

  Was it possible that immense rats which mocked the form of man really scuttled through the depths? Looking at those tracks it suddenly seemed all too possible.

  Felix stood frozen in thought, remembering Gotrek’s tales of the skaven and their continent-spanning webwork of tunnels. Gant tugged his sleeve.

  “Well, let’s get on with it,” the sergeant said. “We ain’t got all day.”

  “Never been here before,” Hef whispered, his voice echoing away down the long stretch of corridor.

  “Never want to come here again,” Spider added, rubbing the blue arachnid tattoo on his cheek. For once Felix was forced to agree with them. Even by the standards of Nuln sewers, this was a dismal place. The walls had a crumbled, rotten look to them. The little gargoyles on the support arches had been blurred by age until their features were no longer visible. The stew bubbled and tiny wisps of vapour rose when the bubbles burst. The air was close, foetid and hot.

  And there was something else—the place had an even more oppressive atmosphere than usual. The hair on the back of Felix’s neck prickled, as it sometimes did when he sensed the undercurrents of sorcery nearby.

  “Doesn’t look safe,” Rudi said, looking at a support arch dubiously. Gotrek’s face twisted as if this were a personal insult.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “These tunnels were dwarf-built a thousand years ago. This is Khazalid workmanship. It’ll last an eternity.”

  To prove his point he banged the arch with his fist. Perhaps it was just bad luck, but the gargoyle chose that moment to fall forward from its perch. The Slayer had to leap to one side to avoid being hit on the head and narrowly avoided skidding into the stew.

  “Of course,” Gotrek added, “Some of the labour was done by human artisans. That gargoyle, for instance—typical shoddy manling workmanship.”

  No one laughed. Only Felix dared even smile. Gant stared up at the ceiling. The lamp set down at his feet underlit his face, making him look eerie and daemonic.

  “We must be below the Old Quarter,” he said wistfully. Felix could see he was contemplating the district of palaces. A strange melancholy expression transfigured his gaunt, bony features. Felix wondered whether he was pondering the difference between his life and the gilded existence of those above, contemplating the splendours he would never know and the opportunities he would never have. Momentarily he felt a certain sympathy for the man.

  “There must be a fortune up there,” Gant said. “Wish I could climb up and get it. Well, no sense in wasting time. Let’s get on with it.”

  “What was that?” Gotrek asked suddenly. The others looked around, startled.

  “What was what?” Hef asked.

  “And where was what?” added Spider.

  “I heard something. Down that way.” All their gazes followed the direction indicated by the Trollslayer’s pointing finger.

  “You’re imagining things,” Rudi said.

  “Dwarfs don’t imagine things.”

  “Aw sarge, do we have to look into this?” Rudi whined. “I want to get home.”

  Gant rubbed his left eye with the knuckles of his right fist. He seemed to be concentrating. Felix could see he was wavering. He wanted to leave and be off to the tavern just as quickly as the rest of them, but this was his responsibility. If something was wrong beneath the palaces and anyone found out they had been there and done nothing about it, then it was his neck for the block.

  “We’d better look into it.” he said eventually, ignoring the groans of his fellow sewerjacks.

  “It shouldn’t take long. I’ll lay odds it’s nothing anyway.”

  Knowing his luck, Felix decided, that was a bet he wouldn’t take.

  Water dripped down from the arch of the tunnel. Gant had narrowed the aperture of his lantern so that only the faintest glimmering of light was visible. From ahead came the sound of voices. Even Felix could hear them now.

  One of the voices was human, with an aristocratic accent. It was impossible to believe the other belonged to a man. It was high-pitched, eerie and chittering. If a rat had been given the voice of a human being it would have sounded like this.

  Gant stopped and turned to look back at his men, his face pale and worried. He obviously didn’t want to go on. Glancing round the faces of his fellow sewerjacks, Felix knew they all felt the same. It was the end of the day. They were all tired and scared and up ahead was something they didn’t want to meet. But they were sewerjacks; men whose only virtue was courage and the willingness to face what others would not, in a place where others would not go. They had a certain pride.

  Gotrek tossed the hatchet into the air. It spun upward, blade catching a little of the light. With no apparent effort the Trollslayer caught it by the haft as it fell. Spider pulled his long-bladed knife from its sheath and shrugged. Hef gave a feral smile. Rudi looked down at his shortsword and nodded. Gant grinned. The Trollslayer looked pleased. He was in the company of the sort of maniacs he could understand.

  Gant gestured softly and they shuffled forward, picking their way carefully and quietly along the slimy ledge. As they turned the bend he opened up his lantern to illuminate their prey.

  “Your payment a token of my esteem. Something for your own personal use,” Felix heard the aristocratic voice say. Two figures stood frozen like trolls in a fairy tale, petrified by the sudden bright light. One was a tall man, garbed in a long black robe like a monk’s. His face was patrician: fine-boned, cold and aloof. His black hair was cut short, ending in a widow’s peak above his forehead. He was reaching forward to hand the other figure something that glowed eerily.

  Felix recognised it. He had seen the substance before, in the abandoned dwarf fortress of Karak Eight Peaks. It was a ball of warpstone. The recipient was short and inhuman. Its fur was grey, its eyes pink; its long hairless tail reminded Felix of a great worm. As the thing turned to squint at the light, the tail lashed. It reached inside its long, patchwork robes and clutched something in its taloned paws. From its belt hung an unscabbarded rusty, saw-toothed blade.

  “Skaven!” Gotrek roared. “Prepare to die!”

  “Fool-fool, you said you were not followed,” the thing chittered at its human companion. “You said no one knew.”

  “Stay where you are!” Gant said. “Whoever you are, you’re under arrest on suspicion of witchcraft, treason and unnatural practices with animals.”

  The sergeant’s confidence had been restored by the fact there were only two of them. Even the fact that one of the perpetrators was a monster seemed to leave him undaunted.

  “Hef, Spider, take them and bind them.” The rat-thing suddenly threw the sphere it had withdrawn from its clothing.

  “Die-die, foolish man-things.”

  “Hold your breath!” Gotrek shouted. His hatchet hurtled forward simultaneously.

  The skaven’s sphere tinkled and shattered like glass and an unhealthy looking green cloud billowed outward. As he shoved Felix back down the corridor, Gotrek grabbed Rudi and pulled him with them. From inside the gas-cloud came the sound of gurgling and choking. Felix felt his eyes begin to water.