Gotrek & Felix: Slayer Read Free

obligation rather than his own drunken stupidity that plagued him now.
    ‘Did you see where that Chaos warrior went?’ Felix replied finally, voice wire-tight.
    ‘You are infuriating, manling. How am I to keep you safe when you charge headlong into a herd of beasts after a champion of the Dark Powers?’
    ‘Frustrating, isn’t it?’
    From behind Felix’s back, there was the sound of something wet being wrenched from a blade followed by a thump. ‘What was that?’
    ‘Never mind.’
    Taking advantage of the death that inevitably surrounded Gotrek Gurnisson in a battle, Felix again wiped blood from his eyes and studied the knot of Hochland spears on the hill. He was convinced that the Chaos warrior had been heading for them. He was about to share his thinking with Gotrek when he heard what sounded like a child’s scream from the opposite direction. He snapped around, thoughts of Kat and a diffuse paternal longing swirling through his mind before his eyes settled on a dim haze of pike shafts and powder smoke in the distance. His fingers tightened around the hilt of his sword, squeezing the golden ring he wore on his fourth finger.
    He turned to Gotrek. It punched him in the gut to have to ask.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I think there are families back there.’
    Gotrek snorted; amusement, derision, Felix could never tell and neither reflected terribly well on the dwarf.
    ‘If you don’t then I will.’
    The dwarf’s expression hardened. ‘And let you chase after a Chaos warrior while my back is turned? On my oath, manling, I will not.’
    ‘You know what Chaos warriors are like. He’ll be onto you the moment he – Gotrek, am I boring you?’
    Gotrek smothered his yawn with a hand the size of a cured ham. He shook his head blearily. If Felix didn’t know better, he’d say the dwarf looked tired. The golden chain running between his nose and his ear clinked. He ran his thumb around the rim of his axe blade until a bead of blood formed against the meteoric steel. ‘I know the drill, manling. Just point me at him.’
    ‘Push,’ roared Sergeant Sierck. ‘Push as your bloody mothers pushed.’
    With one voice, the Hochlanders echoed the defiant roar of the newcomers from the woods and pushed. Beastmen bellowed and battered at the men’s shields. The animals pushed back, but slowly the discipline of the men of Hochland ground them down the hill.
    Though Markus Weissman was so overwrought with terror that his arms shook, he pushed until he wept. He would have run if he could, but they were surrounded. Now there was hope, a champion, and all they had to do was fight a little harder to reach him. Even that slim hope was almost too much to bear.
    Vision spotting, Markus snatched glimpses over the top of his shield. He saw the dwarf with the axe and the red-cloaked swordsman part company, almost felt the impact as the dwarf hit the mass of beastmen like a catapult stone. He was going the wrong way! Why was the dwarf heading away from them? Then Markus saw that the swordsman was still coming towards him and that the dread warrior at the base of the hill had paused to turn towards the commotion on his flank. The armoured fiend looked from Markus and the others to the dwarf. It felt as though a lead weight had been removed from his chest.
    The man and the dwarf would save them after all!
    Then the Chaos warrior turned back, negligently raised one night-blue gauntlet and held it high as it erupted into incandescent black flame.
    Felix felt a tingle run down the nape of his neck and he shivered, almost missing a parry that allowed a beastman in clanking mail skirts to graze his arm with its sword. Felix was familiar with the uncanny blessings that the Ruinous Powers could bestow upon their favourites but such gifts tended to run towards the prosaic – tentacles, horns, bigger muscles, deadlier blades. Disquiet running through him like icemelt, Felix sold the sword-beast a feint and then opened its gut with a deft downward flick