Gotrek & Felix: Slayer Read Free Page B

thought himself inured to horror, but this was too much. He was sick and he was tired and he just wanted it all to stop. Not for the first time he wondered if he had done the right thing by coming to these strangers’ aid when they could so easily have continued on unmolested. But that wasn’t the Empire he remembered and it wasn’t the one he still hoped to return to. That absence had given him a romanticised view of his homeland, Felix would not argue, but he had only done what any decent human being would have done, whether they were men of Ind or the Empire.
    Slowly, the drumming on the chassis above his head eased to a desultory sputter and Felix took a deep breath and crawled out from under the far side.
    The apocalyptic scene that awaited would not have looked out of place on the warped plains of the Chaos Wastes.
    The wreckage of wagons and Imperial war machines lay everywhere, strewn with bodies and pulverised by falling gore. Everything, even the air itself, carried a pink glaze, thickening to crimson over the hilltop itself where a faint mushroom-shaped cloud was rising. A hollow clangour of fighting still rang out sporadically between the wrecks, but it was disarmingly calm, stunned into near silence.
    Flat on his belly, Felix wriggled across the blood-slicked rocks and then pushed himself to his knees. He was surrounded by bodies, most of them men, garbed in workmanlike leather and dark tabards that marked them as engineers from one of the provincial gunnery schools. Felix wasn’t familiar enough with the Empire’s various institutions of engineering to tell exactly which. He supposed it didn’t matter. It was one dead place or another dead place.
    The body immediately in front of him already looked to have been half-eaten. Entrails spilled around the man’s sides from a messy wound in his gut. There was a long-barrelled pistol tucked under his belt. The man had clearly been killed before he had had a chance to draw it. Felix supposed that that was a mercy of sorts. Without thinking, he took the firearm. A year surviving in the Chaos-occupied wildernesses of Kislev and the Empire had taught him to waste not. Taken by a sudden melancholy he closed his grip around the walnut stock, felt over the rough etching on the barrel with his thumb, A maker’s mark, perhaps. Felix wondered where it was. Did their city still stand? Was this gunsmith still alive? Pushing the sudden wash of hopelessness aside, he pushed the barrel under his trousers against the opposite hip to his scabbard. There was no shot or powder that Felix could see and he had neither the time nor the inclination to go rooting through the engineer’s blood-drenched pockets. He rose.
    His determination to kill the Chaos warrior had become all-consuming. It heated his blood like a fever. Had he had the time to consider it then that might have troubled him more than it did, but right now he needed to punish the man – the fiend  – that could unleash devastation like this. Quelling his protesting stomach, Felix turned again to the wagon, stuck his hand over the tailboard’s sticky coating, and climbed aboard.
    The squat, wasted power of a mortar barrel sat over the axle, lashed down with ropes and partially covered with a canvas. Felix moved towards it, ignoring the sticky squelching noise from underfoot as he took advantage of the high ground to get his first decent look at the battlefield.
    The area around the hill had been bloodily pacified. Beastmen lay around the summit in rings like trees felled by a meteor. In Felix’s immediate vicinity, men that looked as bloody as corpses themselves were only just beginning to pull themselves up and blink in horror at the scene around them. Felix planted his boot on the gun barrel and swept his cloak over his shoulder. He probably cut quite the inspiring figure, but there was little else for it if he wanted to be seen.
    ‘Find your captains and regroup by the forest,’ Felix shouted, pitching his