Gotrek and Felix: The Anthology (30 page)

‘Look, my lord. Let the Changer reveal all things.’

And reveal, he did.

A dwarf at
the forge.

The blow of a hammer against heated starmetal throws up a flare of eye-aching sparks.

The anvil is a work of ancient genius. Dwarf artisanry cages and tames the winds of magic, imbuing it with the qualities that the runesmith requires. An axe takes shape on the iron surface, the metal hammered into a lethal smile.

The weight of ancient prehistory is a musky scent in the air, mingling with the dwarf’s sour sweat. He hammers, and hammers, and hammers, until...

A battle.

A dwarf ripples with spiralling tattoos, the play of ink over iron-hard muscles giving them motion of their own. The blood that spatters him is foul and black, the stink of it overpowering every other sense.

He bears an axe.
The
axe, alongside its twin, gripped in clenched fists. He wields them like he was born for this. As if this is his very purpose.

The first great incursion,
the warlord hears Kelmain’s whispered voice.

At the very beginning,
Lhoigor affirms. There is awe in their voices. Longing.

The dwarf is a leader of armies. The numbers... the scale... The warlord has seen nothing like this before. Soldiers without end. Violence without restraint. The sky roils in apocalyptic motion, and a million souls wage war for a world that is already doomed.

The warlord sees the dwarf’s insane decision. He sees him marching off into the heaving north, to deny the hordes their prize of his beloved mountains.

He sees the axe, cast away, before he strides into his final battle.

The axe is
found.

Karag Dum. The lost northern hold. The vision shows walls unblackened by time’s ravages, and towers manned by bearded warriors. They fight for their souls.

The Wastes are young here, but the malignant energies expand their cancerous influence. Daemons walk the earth freely, and hurl themselves at the stone fortifications. The defenders are beleaguered. Flagging. Morale is nothing more than a grim need for survival.

The axe’s new wielder performs a single act of stunning bravery. A bloodthirster, the very avatar of the Blood God’s wrathful purpose, perishes, defenceless against the baneful runes hammered onto the weapon’s surface. Its demise is a shower of boiling blood. The wielder dies in scalding agony, never having the chance to savour his victory.

Another scoops the weapon from the ground. An oath forms on his lips, to bring vengeance to the great enemy that threatens to swallow up the world.

He leaves Karag Dum in glory, and dies in failure.

A convoy.

Wagons. Armoured in steel plates.

An expedition,
Lhoigor breathes.
To find lost Karag Dum.

Futile, of course.

Over weeks, the procession trails through the Wastes, each wagon gradually falling to misfortune and destruction. One remains, set upon by braying monstrosities, and the passengers emerge to defend the stricken vehicle.

Decades into the future, a warlord in a tent outside a burning city takes a sharp breath.

It’s him,
Kelmain observes. The humour in his tone is malicious, serrated like a blade.

The Slayer,
Lhoigor says.
Gotrek Gurnisson.

The dwarfs abandon their ruined wagon, the expedition a failure. The Wastes does its vile work. The three survivors are separated, and Gurnisson trudges on alone. To see him in this way, as this diminished warrior bereft of the trappings of a Slayer is astounding. He looks so unremarkable, so... tame.

And then, he finds the axe.

The cave is inhabited by a creature. It lairs here, dragging back its kills, smearing the walls with its filth. Gurnisson needs the shelter. He starts a fight he can’t win.

The axe is hoarded at the back of the cave, amid a pile of bones and a handful of rusting trinkets the creature considers precious. In desperation, Gurnisson takes up the blade.

The moment his fingers brush against the weapon’s handle, the warlord feels the brothers spasm. It’s a moment that’s so rare that it feels as if the stars are in some unheard of, auspicious alignment. Fate’s threads stretch taut. Some even snap.

Gurnisson lived through that night. He even made it...

…home.

A valley. Picturesque. Serene.

Gurnisson is already changed. Dwarfs are thick, compact creatures. His musculature is swollen beyond what passes for normality. And his nature, too, is not the same. The dwarf’s soul has become a darker thing.

The axe changes the wielder, brother. He has grown.

Home, however, is not as he left it. He walks among a village of blackened structures and ravaged bodies. He pauses over a female with an infant clutched in her bloodied hands.

Gurnisson bows his head. In the ashes of his broken life, he weeps.

Vengeance.

Gurnisson snarls a violent promise in the hall of a dwarf lord.

The enthroned noble watches with a highborn’s sneering dispassion. The words they exchange are heated, laced with a mutual dislike. There is some unresolved history here, a past slight that stokes anger’s flame.

With a lazy gesture of one broad hand, the noble orders Gurnisson’s death, and thus secures his own.

It’s a charnel scene. The lord’s chamber, richly appointed in rare gold and the elaborate tapestries of a ruling clan, becomes a gory mess of broken bodies and spattered blood.

When Gurnisson shaves his head, he takes his time. With a blade taken from the slain lord’s belt, he cuts away his hair, leaving the stubbly crest that signifies a dwarf undertaking the Slayer Oath.

He leaves that chamber in the throes of shame, and begins a ceaseless hunt for his own doom.

Altdorf.

Accursed Imperial capital. Birthplace of the pretender-god Sigmar Heldenhammer.

The tavern is the usual squalid dive so common in all Imperial cities. Whoring and drinking, pissing and retching, the sweating mass of humanity squanders what few copper coins they have to forget about the harshness of their lives.

Gurnisson is here. And another. A human.

That... fool... slew Skjalandir. It was him.

They are drunk, and locked in intense conversation. The bonds formed during heavy drinking often endure the longest, but the human utters perhaps the stupidest words he will ever speak.

He slurs an oath. To a dwarf.

An oath.

The warlord dies.

Praag burns. Flame consumes the outer districts, and the raucous chanting of the conquering invaders is a deep chorus in the ruined streets and alleys.

The sky is red. Literally, the very clouds are the deep crimson of arterial blood. Sorcery charges the air as the enchantments woven into the city’s broken walls bleed freely into the blighted skies. Everything smells of smoke and fire, blood and dying, looting and murder.

Creatures that should not be wander the streets, feasting on the dead. They behold the world with beady scavenger eyes, avoiding anyone who comes close, and tearing out the throats of the mortally wounded.

Praag burns, and yet the warlord dies.

His life ends in a flurry of violence, surrounded by the heaving press of his own warriors. Gurnisson – the Slayer, the axe wielder – roars like a Lustrian carnosaur. The blade he fears, the weapon that is fated to end his life, is a blazing beacon of hatred for the warlord’s kind. It exults in the pain it is about to inflict. It howls its contempt for the Great Powers.

His armour is breached, the enchantments of his slave-sorcerers burned out and useless. He feels his own blood snaking down the inside of the damaged plate in hot trickles.

It flashes down in a blur of hot starmetal –
gromril
, the dwarfs name the rare and precious metal – and severs the warlord’s head from his shoulders.

A hush falls over the–

–
stop this end this Kelmain Lhoigor I have seen en–

–warlord’s forces. They pause in their destruction, uncertainty replacing the buzz of malicious celebration. Gurnisson’s human companion stoops to collect the warlord’s head, and holds it aloft so that they can all see.

‘Your warlord is dead!’ he shouts, his teeth bared in angry triumph. ‘
Your warlord is dead!’

He nearly lost
his balance.

Stunned, he held out a plated hand to steady his bulky form. His breathing came in ragged gasps, his warped throat turning the sound into a panted growl.

‘Your visions,’ he said, when his pulse had slowed, ‘have done nothing to reassure me.’

The brothers watched with the warmth of a glacier. Their smiles were hungry. They scented the warlord’s weakness.

He will tell us to kill the dwarf, brother. He will think that he can stop this.

That he will, Lhoigor.

How best to handle it?

The way we always handle him. Humour him. Let him believe he is in control. He has scented his own demise. He will only grow more fearful as the hour draws closer.

This war, this city... It was all for naught?

No. Think of what will transpire. We have engineered the slaughter of thousands. This blow is not grievous enough to lay Kislev low entirely, but Praag will take years to rebuild. This army will scatter, but we will endure. And there are other, worthier warlords.

True enough, brother. True enough.

They gave Daemonclaw their assurances that such a fate could be avoided, and that death was just a mere possibility. They wove their lies with guiltless ease, and he calmed.

‘See to it the dwarf and his human henchman die. See that the axe is lost and not found again soon.’

‘We shall do our best,’ Kelmain lied with a smile.

‘If the vision truly came from Tchar, it would be blasphemy to try and interfere with the destiny he plans for you.’ Lhoigor couldn’t help himself.

‘Nonetheless, do it.’

‘As you wish.’

They glanced at each other as he left, the black and white pieces of the chessboard sliding back into their starting positions.

Delicious.

IV

The vision had
not shown the actual truth. Not entirely.

After all, Arek’s decapitation was not as clean as he had been shown. Not at all as clean.

Dwarfs are often compared to their human allies and neighbours. Popular Imperial literature describes them as ‘short but stout’, always measuring them by human standards. The frowning, bearded little lords of the Worlds Edge Mountains; useful to have at your side in a fight, valuing a promise, and taking their quaint oaths very seriously.

Humans could be very stupid, sometimes.

To accuse a dwarf of having a dour nature is to misunderstand dawi psychology completely. It disregards an ancient culture’s pathological obsession with every slight, every injustice, every loss it has ever endured. Every month, another hold has to be scourged of verminkin. Every week, a new greenskin warleader trumpets his dominance by lining the mountain roads with fresh trophy pikes.

To mock the importance they place in keeping oaths and fulfilling promises is to devalue a society that has endured since civilisation’s bloody dawn. To break a promise, to spit on an oath, is to throw brotherhood in their faces. It’s the fulcrum upon which their society spins. It is all they have.

Every dwarf knows this. And they also know that the limits of their anger far exceed what humans have the capacity to comprehend.

He put every remembered grudge into the blow. He summoned every shred of frothing, black rage into the strike that felled Daemonclaw and ended the razing of Praag. And yet, despite all these things, the axe forged in antiquity by an ancestor-god only partially severed his head.