Gotrek & Felix: Slayer Read Free Page A

of his blade. Felix recovered his stance as the beastman fell, cracking its flat boar-like snout on the upside-down barrel of a cannon.
    This part of the battlefield was littered with the detritus of what looked like an artillery train. Bronze and steel barrels lay on the ground like caskets waiting to be buried. Felix felt a stab of regret that these mighty weapons had not even had a chance to be fired before they were destroyed. If they had then this battle might have gone very differently.
    Felix still couldn’t see the Chaos warrior for the broken wagons that dotted the intervening space as though dropped from the sky to their destruction, but then he didn’t need to. He had enough experience of sorcerers to recognise the unease gurgling mockingly in his gut. It was just like his luck to run into a Chaos warrior blessed with perhaps the one gift against which Felix had no means of defence. Felix kissed Kat’s ring and prayed for a miracle.
    Where was Max when Felix needed him?
    Markus’s guts coiled in his belly like a serpent. The hairs on the back of his hands stood on end as if it was suddenly as cold as night, and a shiver ran him through from head to toe. The Chaos warrior had become a beacon, a pillar of black flame that touched the tormented sky and washed the beastman herds below with broken shadow. Markus had never been particularly observant with his prayers, but right then, despite his gods’ failure to defend his home, he didn’t see any other alternatives. Hopelessly, he cast about for the hero in the red cloak. He felt an arm slot through his.
    ‘Sigmar preserve us,’ said Ernst Höller.
    ‘Spare us,’ Markus stammered.
    ‘Stand!’ yelled Sierck, sweeping his sword high through the misted breath that wreathed his torso. The temperature continued to plummet. The professional soldier’s voice was taut with worry. That troubled Markus almost as much as the sorcerer himself. ‘Show them Empire st–’
    He never finished.
    His raised sword ignited with black fire as though it had been struck by lightning. In that sudden flash, Markus saw the man’s bones silhouetted against the writhing grey of muscle and flesh. The men to Sierck’s immediate left and right were screaming as searing ash fell on bare flesh and set light to their clothes. One of them was clubbed down by a triumphant beastman, but all Markus could do was stare in dumb horror. A disgusting wave rippled across Sierck’s charred remains. His chest began to bloat.
    Markus broke from his fugue, some instinct pulling his friend, Höller, behind him as he turned his shield from the beastmen and onto his former sergeant instead. An anaemic tentacle lined with suckers and barbs punched through his wooden shield and his cured leather vest and burst from his back.
    ‘Doomed!’ Markus croaked, before an eruption of prehensile limbs tore his company apart.
    An explosion tore out the top of the hill. Distance and the proximate sounds of combat rendered it hauntingly silent, and Felix watched in what felt like slow motion as the tentacled monster was sucked back into the Realm of Chaos and body parts began to fall. Felix cursed, raising an arm to shield himself from what looked like a man’s lung. It splattered against his forearm. Felix felt ill. The beastman nearest to him was neither as concerned nor as lucky and what looked like a horse’s head in a horned helm crashed through the roof of its skull like a mortar shell. With a pattering of splats and bangs, the downpour intensified.
    Felix screamed for the men around him to take cover and then dived between the wheels of a hobbled gun-carriage. He flinched as something heavy and best left unidentified crunched onto the boards above his head, followed by a bony skirling reminiscent of beads cut from a necklace. An unfortunate image of vertebrae crossed his mind and the urge to vomit returned in force.
    What had happened to the world, he thought? After so many years of wandering, Felix had