Gotrek and Felix: The Anthology (12 page)

Felix frowned as he slotted a second ladder into the shaft about five feet below the first. ‘What gold is this?’

‘All I have collected over my years of slaying, I put in a dwarf bank in Talabheim. It is to go to my family, who I shamed before becoming a Slayer, but I granted Henrik a part of it.’

‘And he will take all of it,’ growled Gotrek.

With a final swipe of his axe, he finished the hole in the lattice, then squeezed through and crossed the ladder to the cables. Each was as thick as his leg and made of wound steel. He tapped them with the heel of his axe, listening to the tone, then nodded and scored one with the blade.

‘Bring the rope, manling.’

Felix stooped through the hole, then edged out onto the ladder and crossed to the cables, clinging to the walls of the shaft for support. He handed Gotrek a coil of rope recovered from the collapsed scaffolding, and the
s
layer proceeded to tie him tightly to the cable at the waist and under the arms so that he was facing out. The ropes were so constricting that Felix could hardly breathe, and he began to panic again about slamming into the walls when the cable was loosed, but there was nothing for it now.

When Gotrek finished tying him, he beckoned Agnar ahead. The old
s
layer squeezed into the shaft with his own coil of rope over one shoulder, and let Gotrek tie him to the cable too, back to back with Felix. When that was done, Gotrek lowered himself down to the second ladder and took his axe from his back, then started hacking at the woven steel.

Felix closed his eyes in helpless terror as he felt the shuddering of it through his spine. The rune axe bit into the softer metal with ease, and the smaller strands parted with deep, heartstopping twangs.

After a moment, the chopping stopped, and Felix pried open his eyes and looked down. Gotrek was tying himself to the cable at the waist, leaving his torso free. Just below him, a few thin strands of the cable remained uncut, twanging and singing with the stress of holding so much weight. Once he had bound himself to his satisfaction, Gotrek used the leftover rope to tie his axe to his wrist so that even if he lost his grip it would not fall.

Finally he was ready, and raised the axe over his head. Felix wanted to close his eyes, but couldn’t. If he was going to die, he wanted to see it coming.

Gotrek swung down between his legs, chopping into the remaining strands below his feet. One snapped and the rest groaned. He swung again.

Felix heard a bright twang and, with a jolting rush, his stomach dropped into his boots. The filigreed lattice blurred past at an alarming rate, inches from his eyes, and the upward force was so strong that he could not raise his arms against it or take a breath. At least the thing he had feared the most did not happen. Though the cable bowed out towards the side of the shaft and the struts flashed by less than an arm’s length from his chest, he was not crushed against it.

A look below showed him why. The frayed end of the cable, less than a yard below Gotrek, was pressed against the side of the shaft, scraping off a cascading shower of sparks and making a deafening shriek as it rose, holding its passengers away from death with its rigidity. Gotrek, closer to the end than Felix, was even closer to the wall, and was sucking in his gut and holding down his beard to keep it from being ripped off at the roots. Over the screaming of metal on metal and the rattle of the shaking shaft, Felix heard a wild whooping. It took him a moment to realise it was the
s
layers, howling with savage glee.

Chambers and rooms flicked by as they whipped past, separated by short intervals of black, and a few seconds later the plummeting cage shot by inches behind them, dropping so fast that Felix hadn’t time to fear it crushing them before it was gone.

An eyeblink after that, Felix saw a flash of movement outside the cage, and caught a frozen picture of a gaping ratty face staring at him amongst a swarm of others. They had shot past the skaven troops, still labouring up the stairs that wound around the shaft one step at a time. Gotrek had been right. They were going to beat them to the first level – if they lived.

Only seconds later, the ride came to an end, and what Felix had earlier feared finally happened. As the boom of a huge impact echoed up from below, the cable jerked to a stop, snapping Felix’s teeth shut, then slapped back and forth like a pendulum in a wind storm. Felix was crushed against the side of the shaft, and only great good fortune let his heavily bound chest take the blow and not his head. Even so, all the air was knocked out of him and his ribs felt like they had been hit with a sledgehammer. His knees too cracked against the steel, and he hissed in agony.

‘All… alive?’ he asked as the swaying stopped.

Behind him and below, the
s
layers grunted in the affirmative, and he saw that they had taken some damage too. Agnar had blood streaming from his scalp where the front few inches of his
s
layer’s crest had been ripped away by some passing snag, and it looked like his nose had been broken. Gotrek had deep scrapes and bruises on his shoulders and forearms, and a great welt over one eye.

As he looked around, however, Felix feared that they had a greater problem than their wounds. They were dangling over a bottomless pit in the centre of the shaft, tied securely to the cable, and the door they had hoped to reach was more than thirty feet above their heads.

‘Are you certain you thought this through, Gotrek?’ Felix asked.

‘Swing, manling,’ said Gotrek. ‘With me. You too, Arvastsson.’

Gotrek began to swing his arms, legs and rune axe back and forth in a slow, strong rhythm. Felix and Agnar did the same, moving as he moved. At first the effect of their motion on the heavy cable was negligible, and Felix feared it was all for naught, but after a while their feeble wiggle became a slight sway, and then, as the movement of the cable added itself to their momentum, their swings got longer and longer, until, finally, Gotrek was able to reach out and grab the lattice of the shaft.

The first time, it ripped from his hand, but the second time he was able to catch a crossbar with the hook of his axe and they stopped in mid-swing. Gotrek pulled himself hand over hand up the haft of the axe, then grabbed onto the lattice and clung there as he untied the rope that bound his waist to the cable. One end of this he retied to the lattice, then unwound the other.

‘Gotrek!’ Felix cried. ‘You’ll–’

The last few coils whipped off Gotrek like a chain going through a pulley and the cable sprang free again.

‘All part of the plan, manling,’ said Gotrek, as Felix and Agnar swung again to a stop in the middle of the shaft.

‘I’m relieved to hear there
is
a plan,’ said Felix.

Gotrek coiled up the loose rope and made to throw it at him. ‘Catch it and pass it around you, then throw it back.’

Felix caught it with a wild grab, then passed it behind him to Agnar, who handed it back to him on the other side.

‘Now lift it so it is above your heads,’ said Gotrek as Felix heaved the remaining length back to him.

Agnar and Felix took the rope, which was at their waists, and edged it up over their shoulders and heads until it was wrapped around nothing but the cable.

Gotrek nodded approvingly, then threaded the loose end of the rope through the lattice and started hauling at it, winching them closer and closer to the side with every pull.

Finally, Felix was able to grab the lattice and pull himself closer. Gotrek swiftly tied off the rope, then used his rune axe to cut through Felix and Agnar’s bonds, and they were all clinging like flies to the side of the shaft.

‘To the door,’ said Gotrek.

Though Felix’s knees ached and his arms shook, and his head spun with vertigo, he climbed with the
s
layers to the folding gate. It was closed, and locked with a geared hook, but one swing of Gotrek’s axe and the lock fell away in pieces. Felix crawled gratefully out onto an iron bridge as the
s
layers pushed the doors open, and into a room very similar to the one in which they had entered the shaft, except that this one was in better repair. He sighed with relief as he reached the floor. It felt good to have solid stone under his feet again.

The room had a large arch on its north wall, but it had been sealed up with granite blocks, and recently, if the footprints and blobs of dried mortar around its base were any indication. The sounds of a big battle came from behind it – the roar of orcs, the battle chants of the dwarfs, the clash of weapons and the thunder of cannons – all muffled, but still loud.

Gotrek grunted. ‘They’ve already begun. Come on.’

He and Agnar started for a smaller open door in the west wall. Felix followed, confused. It looked hardly large enough for him to fit through, let alone a rat-ogre.

‘The skaven are coming here?’ he asked. ‘I thought Lanquin had kept a passage open for them.’

‘You didn’t look at the map,’ said Gotrek. ‘They are exiting the stair one level down and coming up from the north, behind the thane.’

‘Ah,’ said Felix, chagrined. He had looked at the map, but he didn’t have a dwarf’s perfect recall of such things. ‘I must have misread it.’

Gotrek stepped into the narrow passage. ‘This funnels into the path Thorgrin left open for the greenskins. Part of the plan to make sure they could approach the battlefield from only one direction.’

Felix swallowed. ‘So we’ll be entering the great hall on the orc side of the battle?’

Agnar smiled, an evil glint in his eye. ‘Aye. Right at their backs.’

14

After a few
twists and turns in the dark, the passage opened into a grand promenade, fully thirty paces wide, and five times Felix’s height. It was decorated in high dwarf style, with towering ancestor figures holding massive braziers in outstretched hands, and great battle scenes laid out in mosaic on the wall panels between them – and it reeked of orcs.

The signs of their passage were hard to miss – grimy footprints in the dust, greasy smears where their hands and shoulders had rubbed against the walls, discarded bones where they had eaten on the march – and the sounds of their advent came loud from the north.

Gotrek and Agnar started towards the noise at a trot and Felix followed, drawing Karaghul. Ahead, an arch as wide and tall as the promenade flickered with fire and movement, and as they jogged through it into the Great Hall of the Jewellers’ Guild, it resolved into a scene of furious battle.

The dwarfs had set huge bonfires around the great hall to illuminate it for the battle, and in their hot orange light, Felix could see Stinkfoot’s orc army swarming the tight dwarf front. As Engineer Migrunssun had pointed out to him before, Thorgrin had chosen his position carefully, lining up his dwarf and human infantry four-deep across the narrow end of the great hall with the walls at either end protecting his flanks. This limited the number of orcs that could face his dwarfs at one time, and left a lot of the greenskins crowded together behind their comrades, all scrabbling and shoving at each other to get to the front.

All in all it was as neat and tidy a battle line as Felix had ever seen, but unfortunately, he and the
s
layers were on the wrong side of it, and there was no way to reach it except through the orcs. The closing off passages that had forced the greenskins to attack from the front had brought Gotrek, Agnar and himself to the same place – and there were more dangers than just rabid orcs in the way.

On the east side of the room, the cannons and gunners that Migrunsson had placed in the minehead firing platform had perfect position to rake these frustrated tag-alongs in the flank, and mangled orc bodies splashed up like green spray every time a cannon fired and the huge iron balls skipped through them. Felix looked at them askance as the
s
layers advanced. He didn’t fancy being blown to bits by cannons he had helped to place.

More cannons and muskets boomed behind Thorgrin’s line, firing over the dwarfs’ heads from a balcony above the archway that led to the stairs to the surface, while Lanquin’s mercenaries – those he hadn’t sent to the depths to die – held the west end of the line, keeping the orcs at bay with spears and swords.

As Felix scanned the mercenaries, he saw Henrik behind them, gesturing feverishly as he talked in Lanquin’s ear. Agnar saw him too, and changed course towards their position.

‘There you are, rememberer,’ he growled and picked up his pace.

‘Manling,’ said Gotrek as they followed. ‘When we’re through the line, go to the thane. Tell him the ratkin will attack from behind his guns, from the balcony.’