Beastslayer, p.1
Beastslayer, page 1
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 isa land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forestsand vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reignsthe Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of thefounder 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 Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands ofthe 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 nearer, the Empire needs heroes like never before.
‘Our battle with the dragon Skjalandir left me incapacitated for many days. The events of the particular few weeks that follow it are mercifully vague. I know we brought word of the arrival of the Chaos horde to the Tzarina of Kislev. I know we flew on to the city of Praag where my companion and his dwarf compatriots thought they would meet their dooms. I know we were welcomed in the City of Heroes by the duke himself, who turned out to be a distant cousin of my fair companion, Ulrika. Of the detail of these matters, however, I remember very little, possibly because they are overwhelmed in my memory by the apocalyptic events that were to follow them.
‘What happened in those following weeks caused me to plumb new depths of horror and despair. In my entire long and sorry career as the Trollslayer’s amanuensis, I have found myself in few more desperate places. Even today, I shudder when I recall the madness and turmoil of those dreadful days…’
— From My Travels With Gotrek, Vol IV.
ONE
Felix Jaeger looked northwards from the gate tower high above the outer wall of Praag. As if for reassurance, his hands rested atop the carved head of one of the huge sculptures that gave the Gate of Gargoyles its name. From his high vantage point, he had a perfectly clear view for leagues. Only the long snaky curve of the river looping off to the west broke the monotony of the endless plains surrounding the city.
In the distance he could see the smoke of burning villages. It was war coming closer and it would reach the city in less than a day. He shivered and drew his tattered red cloak around his tall, lean form although it was not cold yet. If truth be told it was unnaturally hot. These last days of autumn had been warmer in Kislev than many a summer in his homeland, the Empire.
It was the first time in his life he had ever prayed for the onset of snow. Winter was deadly here, an untiring ally who slaughtered the foes of Kislev, or so the locals claimed. Lord Winter was their greatest general, worth a legion of armed men. He wondered whether he would live to see winter’s arrival. Even Lord Winter might prove powerless against the Chaos warriors and their evil magic.
The warriors of the advancing army out there were not mere mortals, but worshippers of Chaos fresh from the Northern Wastes. Of all the foolish things he had done in his career as Gotrek Gurnisson’s henchman, putting himself in the way of the armies of the Dark Powers was conceivably the most foolish.
Felix had barely recovered from wounds taken in the battle with the dragon Skjalandir, and the orcish armies that had tried to take the dragon’s treasure. The wizard Max Schreiber had healed him and had done the work well, but still Felix was not sure that he felt as strong as he had before. He hoped he could wield his sword with his customary skill when the Chaos warriors came. He would need to. If he could not, he would die. Most likely he would die anyway. The black-armoured riders and their brutal followers were not famous for their mercy. They were unrelentingly savage and lived only to kill and conquer in the name of the daemonic powers they worshipped. Even the massively thick walls of Praag would not hold them back for long. If those wicked warriors failed, then the dark magic of their sorcerous allies would surely succeed.
Not for the first time, Felix wondered exactly what he was doing here, standing on the chilly walls of a fortified city, hundreds of leagues from home. He could be in Altdorf right now, sitting in the offices of the family business, haggling with wool traders and counting gold. Instead he was readying himself to face the greatest invasion the world had seen in two hundred years, since the time when Magnus the Pious had driven back the legions of the damned, and reunited the Empire. He glanced over at his companion.
As ever it was impossible to tell what the Slayer was thinking. The dwarf looked even more brutish and sullen than usual. He was short, the tip of the crest of red-dyed hair that rose above his tattooed and shaven head barely reached Felix’s chest, but he was more than twice as broad as the man. In one hand he held an axe that Felix would have struggled to lift with both his hands, and Felix was a strong man. The Slayer shook his head, and the gold chain that ran from ear to nostril jingled. He knuckled the patch that covered his empty eye socket, and spat over the wall.
‘They will be here by nightfall, manling,’ said Gotrek. ‘Or my father was an orc.’
‘You think so? The scouts say they are burning the villages as they come. Surely so great a horde could not move so quickly?’
Felix had a better idea of the size of the horde than almost any man in Kislev. He had flown over it in the airship, Spirit of Grungni, when he and the Slayer and their dwarf companions had returned from the lost city of Karag Dum. It seemed half a lifetime ago but was scant months in the past. Felix shook his head, amazed at how much his life had changed in that month, more than at any time since he had sworn his oath to follow the Slayer and record his doom in an epic poem.
In that time, he had ridden in a flying ship, visited a buried dwarf city in the blighted wastes of Chaos, fought with daemons, and dragons and orcs and beastmen. He had fallen in love and pursued a troubled affair with the Kislevite noblewoman Ulrika Magdova. He had almost died of wounds. He had journeyed to the court of the Ice Queen, the Tzarina Katarin, bringing word of the enemy army to that fearsome ruler, and then he had come here with Gotrek and the others to help resist the invasion. It seemed as if he had barely time to catch his breath, and now he was caught up in a full-scale war with the assembled powers of Darkness.
He wondered again at his reasons for being here. Certainly he still held to his oath to Gotrek. And Ulrika was here, waiting to see if her father and his men would make it to Praag before the Chaos horde. Felix knew she was going to be disappointed there.
He brushed a lock of long blond hair from his eyes, then shielded them with his hand. In the distance he thought he could make out flashes of eerie red and gold light. Sorcery, he thought. The daemon worshippers are using their forbidden magic. He shivered again, thinking that perhaps it would be better to be in the counting house back in Altdorf.
He could not quite bring himself to believe it though. He knew he had become accustomed to a life of adventure. Even before his travels with Gotrek, life in the capital had seemed unbearably dull. He knew that no matter how often he thought a little dullness might improve his life, he could not go back to being what he had once been. Not that there was much chance of that anyway. He was in disgrace for killing a fellow student at the university in a duel. And he and Gotrek were wanted by the law for their part in the window tax riots.
‘Do you think that the Kislevites are the only ones who have scouts, manling?’ Gotrek asked. ‘The Chaos warriors will have outriders too. Not even they are mad enough to ride without them. They will be here soon.’
Felix did not like to speculate on what the followers of the Dark Powers were mad enough to do. To him it seemed madness enough to want to worship daemons anyway. Who could tell what else they were capable of? On the other hand, when it came to making war, it did not matter how crazed they were. They were as deadly as any other army, far more so than most. In this, the Slayer was most likely right. He said so. Gotrek sucked his blackened teeth.
‘Tis late in the year for an army to be marching,’ he said. ‘The warlords must be confident they can take Praag before winter sets in. Either that or they don’t care.’
‘Thanks,’ said Felix sourly. ‘Always look at the bright side, don’t you?’
Gotrek cocked his head to one side, and spat over the wall. ‘They must be planning some trick.’
‘Maybe they have magic. Maybe the prophets of doom back there in the city are right. Maybe winter will not come this year. It is unseasonably warm.’
The words came out quickly and with less calm than he would have liked. He knew he was half hoping the Slayer would contradict him. After all, the dwarf had more experience of this than he did.
Gotrek grinned, showing the blackened stumps of most of his teeth. ‘Now who is looking on the bright side, manling?’
Sombre silence fell between them. Felix scanned the horizon. Dust and smoke clouds continued to rise. Way off in the distance, he could swear he heard the sound of horns, the clash of weapons, the screams of dying men. Only your imagination, he told himself.
Down below them, workers slaved away driving more sharpened sta kes into the great pit that now lined the base of the walls. Behind them, more labourers reinforced the outer wall of the city with buttresses. Gotrek had done more than his share of supervising them. Under normal circumstances, Felix would have been hard put to believe these massive fortifications needed any augmenting. The walls of Praag were ten times as high as a man and so wide you could drive a wagon along the top. Towers bristling with siege engines spiked the walls every hundred paces or so. Felix could smell the acrid reek of alchemical fire coming from some of the towers. He shivered to think there was a weapon nearly as dangerous to its user as any enemy, but so desperate were the Kislevites that their alchemists guild had been producing it night and day since news of the invasion arrived. They were preparing containers of it for the siege engines.
To their credit, Felix thought, the Praagers and their duke had taken the news seriously. They had done everything in their power to reinforce the strength of a fortress city many thought impregnable. These monstrous outer walls were but the first line of defence. Within the city was another wall, higher and even more formidable, and above that, on a massive spike of rock jutting out of the endless plains, loomed the titanic fortress that was at once the citadel and the duke’s palace.
Felix glanced back over his shoulder. That citadel was a thing to give anyone nightmares and did as much as anything to maintain the reputation of Praag as a haunted city. Its walls were as strong as those of any Imperial fortress but they had been carved with many strange figures. Leering monstrous heads emerged from the stone. Massive tormented figures supported buttresses. Titanic dragon heads tipped tower tops. It was a work of art created by an insane sculptor. What sort of mind could have conceived and executed such a design, Felix wondered?
After the citadel, the whitewashed walls and red-tiled roofs of the rest of the city came as a relief. Even they looked strange and foreboding to Felix. The roofs were higher and steeply sloped, doubtless to let the snows of Lord Winter slide more easily off them. The temple spires were topped by minarets and onion domes. This was not the architecture of the Empire. The sight as much as the guttural accents of the soldiers around them told Felix that he was a long way from home. He felt like an outsider here. The strangeness of the city allowed his mind to give credence to the tales of horror about the place.
It was said that ever since the last siege of Praag, when the city had been sacked by the forces of Chaos, that the place had been haunted, that all manner of eerie things happened here. It was said that on certain nights when Morrslieb was full that the spirits of the dead walked the streets and that sometimes the stones of the buildings could become animated. New statues could emerge from the stone. New gargoyles appeared where none had been before. Under normal circumstances, Felix would have found this hard to believe, but there was something about the atmosphere here that told him that there was at least some truth in these old tales. Swiftly he looked away from the city.
In the fields covering the vast plain around the city, peasants still worked, gathering their crops from the long strips of cultivated land, driving their beasts towards the city. There was a sense of feverish industry down there, of folk frantically gathering the last meagre scraps of the harvest. They worked as if their efforts might make the difference between life and death. Felix supposed it was true. If a siege came – no, when a siege came – every last bite of food would be precious. These Kislevites knew that. They had spent their entire lives here on the borderlands between the lands of men, and the lands occupied by the powers of Darkness.
Felix wondered if any peasants in the Empire could have remained so calmly at work. He doubted it. Most likely they would be long gone, their fields abandoned, their crops left to rot. Parts of the Empire were a long way from the war against Chaos, and Kislev stood as a bulwark between the nearest provinces and the eternal enemy. Some in the Empire doubted the very existence of the Chaos warriors. It was a luxury that was not available here.
Another glance around reassured him a little. Huge cauldrons for the burning oil were already in position along the walkways. Massive ballistae bristled from towers along the walls. Felix doubted that any army the Empire had ever mustered could take the city but the horde approaching was far from an ordinary mortal army. He knew it contained monsters and beastmen and evil magicians as well as crazed warriors gifted by the Dark Powers. Where the armies of Chaos rode, evil magic, plague and festering corruption were ever their allies.
Worse yet, Felix knew that within the city itself the approaching enemy most likely had powerful allies. The worshippers of Chaos were numerous and not all of them were mutants or wore the ornate black armour of the Chaos warrior. Some of those workmen there might be plotting to open the gates one dark night. One of those noble captains might well be plotting to poison his own men or lead them into an ambush. From his own experience, Felix knew that such things were far from uncommon. He pushed the gloomy thoughts aside. Now was not a good time to be thinking them.
He looked down at his hand and was surprised to see how steady it was. He had changed since he and the Slayer had started their wanderings. There was a time when simply knowing what was out there on the plain burning those little towns would have turned his bowels to water. Now he was capable of standing here and discussing it calmly with the dwarf. Maybe it’s not the Chaos worshippers who are mad. Maybe it’s me.
His keen blue eyes picked up a disturbance on the horizon. Dust clouds, he thought. Men riding fast and coming closer. He glanced up at the guard tower overlooking the gate. Up there were hawk-eyed men with telescopes. One of them lifted a horn to his lips and blew a long blast. It was echoed by calls from other towers.
As soon as the call sounded, bells began to ring deeper in the city. The workmen down below calmly picked up their tools and made their way to the gates. Out in the fields, the peasants gathered the last turnips into their baskets, hoisted them and turned towards the gates. The speed of the people driving their flocks into the city increased perceptibly. From behind him, Felix could hear the sound of armed men racing for the walls.
‘This duke might be mad, but there’s nothing wrong with the efficiency of his guard,’ Felix said, and then wished he hadn’t. Questioning the sanity of the ruler of a city at war was not a sensible thing, even if he was only repeating what most people said. What was acceptable in war and what was acceptable in peace were two different things.
‘If you say so, manling,’ said Gotrek. He did not sound very impressed, but then he never was by anything human. The elder race were like that. They would never admit that there was anything today that was not worse than it had been two thousand years ago. A very insular, backward-looking proud people, thought Felix.
Soldiers swarmed past them onto the walls. Most of them carried bows, a few of the higher ranks brandished swords as they shouted orders. All of them were garbed in the winged lion tabards that were the symbol of Praag. The same sign blazed on a hundred banners about them. An officer came rushing up to them, looking as if he was about to order them to leave. One look at Gotrek convinced him otherwise. No one knew who the Slayer really was, but it was well known that he and his companion had come to Praag on that mighty flying ship bringing word of the invasion and orders from the Ice Queen herself. Felix had heard rumours that Gotrek and the other Slayers were emissaries from Karak Kadrin, the vanguard of a mighty horde of dwarfs come to aid Kislev in its hour of need. Felix fervently hoped it was true. From what he had seen of their enemies, the northerners were going to need all the help they could get.
He wondered when the Spirit of Grungni would return, and what aid it would bring with it. Malakai Makaisson’s airship was a mighty weapon but he was not sure what it could do against the army that was coming against them. Malakai had promised to return bearing soldiers but it was not really up to him. He was a Slayer and an engineer, not a king. Help would only come from the dwarfs if their rulers sent it. Or maybe not, Felix thought. In Karak Kadrin there were hundreds of Slayers. The members of that death-seeking cult would most likely come whether ordered to or not. After all, where else were they more likely to find a heroic death than here in Kislev? If anything could atone for whatever sins had turned them into Slayers, surely falling in battle with the hordes of Chaos could.
