Gotrek and Felix: The Anthology (14 page)

He yelped and ducked away, cutting down skaven as he went, before a deafening boom shook the balcony and smoke and fire blinded him. The shot was followed immediately by an even louder crack, like thunder directly overhead, and yet more shaking and booming.

Coughing and blinking, Felix looked through the smoke to see the arch of the door collapsing. Gotrek’s shot had shattered the keystone, and with its removal, the door could not support itself. Huge blocks of masonry caved in on top of shrieking skaven, and the roof of the passage beyond the door followed suit like dominoes. In seconds it was filled to the ceiling with rubble and the shrill agony of dying ratmen. The skaven sneak attack was stopped.

But as he and Gotrek clambered over the rubble to finish off the ratmen who had escaped the collapse, Felix saw that, as he had predicted, it wasn’t going to matter. The thin line of Hammerers and Ironbreakers was dead, trampled underfoot by five times their number of orcs, and now the rest of the dwarfs and men were pressed front and back by slavering greenskins.

Stinkfoot, either frustrated by his foot’s poor showing as a weapon, or emboldened by the dwarfs’ desperate situation, finally limped through his black orc bodyguards and closed with Thorgrin, swinging an axe that looked like it had been crusted with the grot from between his toes.

As he and Gotrek killed the last of the skaven, Felix looked down to see the warboss’s vile weapon flash down like a grimy lightning bolt. Thorgrin flinched back, covering his nose with his free hand, and the axe only nicked his vambrace, but it didn’t stop there. The greasy blade swept on to chop through the shield the thane stood on, splitting it in two and sending Thorgrin crashing to the ground as Stinkfoot slashed at his shieldbearers.

‘Thorgrin’s down, Gotrek,’ said Felix. ‘We better–’

With a Khazalid war cry, the
s
layer vaulted the balustrade and leapt down at Stinkfoot, his axe high over his head. The warboss looked up just in time to take the keen blade of the rune axe right between his beady yellow eyes. Gotrek split his head like a melon, all the way down to his underbite, then hit him high in the chest with his knees and rode his body down to the ground to roll to his feet right in the middle of his retinue of black orcs.

‘Come on, you snot heaps!’ roared Gotrek. ‘Avenge your leader!’

Felix’s heart thudded, expecting the end as all the towering orc champions turned towards the
s
layer, but they were looking as much at Stinkfoot’s corpse as they were at Gotrek, and when one began to advance on the
s
layer, raising its club, another shoved it and tried to get ahead of it. Within seconds, they were all fighting each other, fist and cleaver and headbutt, with Gotrek standing forgotten in their middle.

The
s
layer roared, enraged, and hacked Stinkfoot’s stinking foot off at the knee, then dug his fingers into the oozing meat of the cut to wrap them around the severed shinbone and raised it up like a club. With this foul instrument in one hand and his rune axe in the other, he laid into the brawling black orcs like a whirlwind, swatting them in the teeth with the rotting appendage, then hacking them to bits as they fell back, choking and retching.

The dwarfs and humans were not slow to take advantage of this turn of events, and rallied all along their lines, driving the orcs back and reforming into squares.

‘Sigmar,’ Felix breathed. ‘Has he done it? Has he turned the battle–?’

Before he could complete the thought, the room shook from a great impact. The orcs and dwarfs were too engaged in their battle, and didn’t seem to notice, but Felix had felt it and looked around, trying to see the source. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, and was about to start down the stairs to join Gotrek when it came again. This time he was able to pinpoint the source of the sound. It was coming from the far left end of the room. He stared into the dim distance and saw grey dust hovering near the sealed-up entrance to the lift chamber.

Another heavy boom and Felix saw the dust shiver from the arch as it shook from an impact. A fracture line appeared between the blocks of the barricade. Something was trying to smash through!

‘Gotrek!’ Felix shouted, but the clamour of battle was too loud. The
s
layer didn’t hear him.

‘Gotrek!’

With a final thunderous impact, the wall that sealed up the entrance exploded outward in a jumble of heavy blocks, and a shape like a glowing white hand smashed through to stagger into the room.

The White Widow had returned from its rubble grave, and both the warpstone bomb that was strapped to its back and the wrinkled skaven who rode it appeared mostly intact.

16

As the White
Widow made its unsteady way towards the battle on its seven good legs and one broken one, the ancient skaven leapt from its back and scuttled away to hunch in the shattered archway, where it began waving its scrawny arms and shaking its orb-topped brass staff. A dim green light glowed to life within the orb, and Felix saw a similar light begin to glow within the matching globe on the rod that sprouted from the bomb on the spider’s back.

Felix’s insides fluttered with moths of dread as he realised that the skaven sorcerer meant to use a spell to detonate the bomb from afar!

Felix hopped over the balustrade and jumped down on the pile of black orc corpses that Gotrek had left heaped there. It wasn’t a pleasant landing, and he ended up covered in black blood and orc smell, but it was softer than the floor and quicker than the stairs. He rolled off the putrid bodies and ran through the battle, setting his sights on the White Widow and the skaven.

Two orcs slashed at him as he ran past. He ducked their blows and tried to run on, but they blocked the way. He snarled with frustration. He had to stop the sorcerer!

A rotting, bandage-covered foot hit the left orc in the face as Felix ducked its axe, and it stumbled back, gagging. Felix chopped it in the ribs, then flinched aside, his eyes watering, as the foetid foot bounced his way. Gotrek appeared next to him and finished the orc off with an axe to the chest, then turned on the second. It snarled as it swung at the Slayer, and Felix thrust Karaghul through its neck.

‘Gotrek!’ he gasped as he ran on. ‘The White Widow! The bomb! The skaven–’

‘Get the rat, manling,’ said Gotrek, shoving the dying orc out of his way as he started forward again. ‘I’ll get the spider.’

Felix ran on, pounding across the endless marble floor as the green glow in the matching orbs grew brighter and brighter. If the warpstone bomb detonated here it would not only kill everyone in the Great Hall of the Jewellers’ Guild, it would make all of the upper levels unlivable for anyone except for the skaven, who thrived on the vile stuff. For decades – perhaps centuries – to come, anything that descended into Karak Azgal would die from its eldritch emanations.

His heart thudded at the implications. Was that what the skaven had intended all along? Had they helped Stinkfoot unite the orcs and lead them against the dwarfs just so both sides would be all together in one place – an easy target for their bomb? It sounded like just the sort of thing the ratmen would do. Felix almost laughed to think of Lanquin and Henrik helping the skaven in the belief that they would share the depths with them. What had Henrik called it? A mutually beneficial relationship? The cracked and leaking bomb strapped to the back of the White Widow was proof that the ratmen wanted Karak Azgal all to themselves. Lanquin and Henrik were betrayed along with everyone else.

The skaven sorcerer backed under the broken arch as Felix sprinted at him, pulling a long bronze knife that buzzed with strange black energy. Just the drawing of it made the hair stand up on Felix’s arms, and the hum it emitted drilled into his brain.

Felix slashed at the ratmage without slowing, trying to bear it down by sheer momentum, but it slipped left with jittery speed and he missed, while its buzzing blade flicked past less than an inch from his ear.

He flinched and spun to face the sorcerer, and the blade was again in his face. He parried desperately and felt a sick trembling as the blades touched and the knife’s power crackled down Karaghul’s length. In all this, the skaven had not stopped his chant, and his staff continued to glow brighter.

Over the ratmage’s shoulder, Felix saw Gotrek hacking madly at the White Widow. The eight-legged monster slashed back just as furiously, stabbing down with its sabre-sharp forelegs and striking sparks from the marble floor. The
s
layer dodged past the blows and tried to close with it, aiming for the soft underbelly of its abdomen, but it skittered in a nimble circle and kept him before it.

Beyond that fight, Felix could see the battle raging on, with the dwarfs now firmly back in command, while the orc army disintegrated into a dozen squabbling warbands. The various bosses who had bowed to the power of Stinkfoot’s stinking foot, now realising that there was no leader, had all decided that
they
could be the leader, and all over the field, the bosses were ignoring their common enemy and turning on each other. The dwarfs were now sure to win.

It would not matter, however. It wouldn’t even matter whether Gotrek killed the White Widow. If Felix didn’t kill the skaven mage, the bomb would still blow, and all would be for naught. They would die from the blast, or worse, become twisted, mutated parodies of themselves. He had to finish it.

In desperation, he barged forward, slashing wildly, and deliberately left himself open. The skaven could not resist the bait. It stabbed at his chest.

Felix caught its stringy wrist and stopped the blade a half-inch from his chest. Hissing angrily, the mage swiped its only available weapon at him – its staff. This was what Felix had wanted. He parried the swipe with Karaghul, putting all the strength he could muster into the block, and bit deep into the brass shaft. A bright flash blinded him and leaping arcs of energy sizzled down Karaghul to paralyze his arm with stabbing shocks, but the glowing orb dimmed and fizzled.

The skaven sorcerer shrieked with rage and clubbed Felix’s head with the staff, making suns explode behind his eyes and sending him reeling into the arch. With limp arms, he raised Karaghul to defend himself, but the ratmage was turning away from him, chanting and shaking the staff at the spider, which continued to battle Gotrek.

The globe on the staff flared bright for a moment, then died completely and fell off to bounce across the floor. Chittering with fury, the skaven hurled the rest of the staff away and scampered for the White Widow, its robes flapping like dirty wings. For a second, Felix thought the mage was racing to attack Gotrek, but instead it danced between the spider’s legs and clambered onto its back.

In his stunned state, this seemed to Felix a bizarre and foolhardy thing to do. Gotrek was backing the White Widow up with every slash of his axe. He had sheared off the first yard of its left foreleg and caved in three of its eight eyes, and its thicket of mandibles was a splintered, oozing mess. But then Felix saw the skaven reaching for the lever beside the fading orb, and he realised its intent. It was going to trigger the bomb manually. It was going to blow itself up, and the rest of them with it.

Heart thumping in his chest, Felix pushed himself up and ran for the fight. ‘Gotrek! The skaven! Kill the skaven!’

The
s
layer was too focused to hear him, and it was too late anyway. The ratmage had grabbed the lever and was pulling on it. They were all going to die.

The lever didn’t move.

While Gotrek laid into the White Widow, meeting its every leg-slash with a hack from his axe, the skaven hauled repeatedly upon the bomb’s brass-handled switch, but nothing happened. Felix laughed with relief. The contraption must have been damaged when the roof fell in on it.

Squealing with frustration, the skaven bent closer to the mechanism, trying to find some way to unstick it and being jounced around like a flea on a hot skillet as Gotrek drove the White Widow into the lift room. Felix added his sword to the
s
layer’s axe, hope rising in his chest. If they could kill the spider before the skaven freed the switch, they might just have a chance.

Gotrek was bruised and running with gore from head to foot, and the little finger of his left hand was bent backwards at an alarming angle. Nevertheless, he attacked the beast in a wild fury, his one eye ablaze with savage joy, and his teeth bared in a bloody grimace.

‘The bomb, Gotrek,’ said Felix. ‘We have to stop the skaven from setting it off.’

‘Just as soon as I’m done with this spider, manling.’

‘But–’

But what other course was there? It would be impossible to reach the skaven until the White Widow was dead. Unless….