Vampireslayer, p.1
Vampireslayer, 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.
BOOK ONE
PRAAG
‘At that time, in the depths of that dreadful winter, I thought myself well acquainted with horror and pain. During the siege of Praag I had endured the loss of many trusty companions to the fiends of Chaos. But all the travails I had previously undergone shrank to insignificance compared to what was to come. For, through some strange quirk of fate or jest of the Dark Gods, the Slayer and I were destined to encounter an ancient, terrible evil and to lose several more of those who had been closest to us in the most peculiar and terrible of ways. The darkest of our days were yet to come.’
— From My Travels With Gotrek, Vol IV, by Herr Felix Jaeger (Altdorf Press, 2505)
ONE
Felix Jaeger strode through the ruins of Praag – burnt out buildings, ruins, and rubble, as far as the eye could see. The remains of a few collapsed tenements poked their scorched heads from the all-enveloping snow. Here and there men piled bodies on carts to be taken away and burned. It was a thankless and probably fruitless task. Many corpses would not now be found until the spring thaws, when the snow covering them melted. That’s if they were not excavated and eaten first, Felix thought. The effects of starvation were written on the faces of people all around him.
Felix pulled his faded red Sudenland wool cloak more tightly around him and strode on towards the White Boar – or where it had been, before the battle. He had grown bored with the triumphal banquets in the Citadel and the company of the Kislevite nobles. A man could only stand to listen to so many speeches praising the valour of the city’s defenders and the courage of the relieving army before his ears felt as if they would fall off. His tolerance for listening to nobility congratulating themselves on their heroism was not as great as it once had been. It was time to see what the Slayers were up to. They had left the banquet early the previous evening and not been seen since. Felix had a shrewd idea that he knew where he could find them.
He walked through the remains of what had been the Street of the Silk Merchants, surveying the burned out remains of the great warehouses. Pale, lean and hungry people, wrapped in ragged coats, were everywhere, trudging heads down through the snow, taking shelter in the ruins of the old storehouses. Many eyed him as if wondering whether he carried enough money to make him worth the risk of robbing. Some looked at him as if he might be their next meal, quite literally. Felix kept his hand near the hilt of his sword, and wore the fiercest expression he could muster on his face.
In the distance, the temple bells rang out in celebration. Felix wondered if he was the only one who found anything ironic in their joyous clamour. Considering their dire straits it was surprising how many of the people looked cheerful. He supposed most of them had expected to be dead by now. Nigh unbelievably the great Chaos horde of Arek Daemonclaw had been thrown back, and the mighty Chaos warlord had been defeated. The Gospodar muster and a ferocious bombing attack mounted by the airship, the Spirit of Grungni, had delivered the city from that vast army. Against all odds the heroic city of Praag had been saved from the mightiest army to attack it in two centuries.
It had been a victory bought at high cost. More than half of the Novygrad, the New City, that vast, densely populated warren of narrow streets between the outer wall and the old inner wall surrounding the Citadel, was gone, burned to the ground when the rampaging Chaos warriors had broken through into the city. Nearly a quarter of the city’s population was dead according to the quick and informal survey conducted by the duke’s censors. The same number again were expected to die of hunger, disease and exposure to the bitter chill of the northern winter. And that was assuming no more marauding armies emerged from the Northern Wastes. The outer wall was still breached in three places, and would not withstand any more assaults.
In the distance Felix could smell the sickly sweet scent of burning flesh. Somewhere out there people were warming their hands around funeral pyres for the slain. It was the only way to get rid of so many corpses quickly. There were too many now to be buried, the earth too hard to be broken by spades. There were still worries about plague. The dreadful diseases unleashed by the worshippers of Nurgle, the Lord of Disease, during the siege had made a resurgence in the aftermath of the battle. Some claimed it was the Plague Daemon’s revenge for the slaughter of his followers. The wizard Max Schreiber thought it more likely that the cold, the hunger and the depressing effects of the Kislevite winter were making the population more prone to the spore daemons that carried disease. Felix smiled sourly; a man with a theory for everything was Max Schreiber, and depressingly correct most of them had proven too.
A wailing woman tried frantically to stop two of the carters bearing off the body of a dead man, her lover, her husband or her brother perhaps. Most of the people in the city had lost at least one kinsman. Entire families had been wiped out. Felix thought about the people he had known who had died in the battle. Two of the dwarf Slayers, young Ulli and the hideously ugly Bjorni, had been burned on those huge funeral bonfires.
Why had this happened, Felix wondered? What had driven the Chaos worshippers from their remote realms in the uttermost north, and compelled them to attack the city? Why had they chosen the weeks before the onset of winter for their assault? It was an act of insanity. Even if they had taken Praag, they would have suffered quite as much from the effects of the cold and snow as the people of the city now were. More so, for such was the grim determination of the Kislevites that they would have burned their entire city to the ground rather than see it fall into the hands of their bitterest enemies. Felix supposed that the daemon forces would have had fewer qualms about devouring corpses or even each other, but even so their attack had been madness.
He shook his head. What was the point of trying to understand them anyway? You would have to be mad to willingly follow the daemon gods of Chaos, and that was all he needed to know. It was pointless for any sane man to try and understand the motives of such lost souls. Of course, Felix had heard many theories. Max Schreiber claimed that a huge tide of dark magical energy was flowing south out of the Chaos Wastes, and that it was goading the daemon worshippers to new heights of insane fury.
‘Repent! Repent!’ shouted a lean man with burning eyes. He stood on the pedestal once occupied by a statue of Tsar Alexander and ranted at the crowd. Foam gathered at the corners of his mouth. His long hair was lank. He looked like he had lost touch with sanity a long time ago. ‘The gods are punishing you for your sins.’
It seemed the zealots who preached in the burned out squares of the city had their own theories. They claimed that the end of the world had arrived, and that the Chaos horde had merely been a harbinger of worse things to come. That theory only lost plausibility slightly when you considered that these were the same people who claimed that the end of the world had arrived with the Chaos horde. They had been forced to change their story a little when the horde had been defeated. Felix fought down the urge to shout at the man. People had enough troubles without being harangued by a furious lunatic. A quick glance told him it was pointless. Nobody was paying the zealot any heed despite the way he had bared his breast and pummelled his own chest in fury. Most folk walked swiftly by, trying to finish whatever business they had and get back to whatever meagre shelter they might possess. The man might as well have been shouting his anger at the wind.
A few stalls had been set up at the corners of the Square of the Simoners. Men in the winged lion tabard of the duke’s household doled out a ration of grain to a queue of hungry folk. The measure was now down to half a cup. Of course, the duke was now also feeding the assembled force of the Gospodar muster, nearly five thousand warriors and their mounts. They were camped out in the remains of the city and the burned out farms that surrounded it. Felix pushed his way quickly round the edge of the square, doing his best to avoid being caught up in the teeming mass of hacking, coughing, scratching flesh. He kept one hand on his sword hilt and one on his purse. Where crowds gathered you could never be too careful.
Felix had heard people say that the Ice Queen, the Tsarina of Kislev, had power over the winter weather. If that was so, he thought, why did she not loosen winter’s grip on the throat of her people? Perhaps such magic was beyond her power. It looked as if not even the Lords of Chaos had the power to do so, and surely they, most of all, had
As he exited the square huge, thick flakes of snow began to fall, brushing coldly against his cheek. It frosted the hair of the folk about him. Felix was sick of the sight of it. He thought he was used to snow. Winters in the Empire were long and harsh but they were a summer picnic compared to what winter brought here. He had never seen so much snow fall, so quickly, and never known it to be quite this cold. He had heard rumours of huge, white dire wolves stalking the city’s outskirts and making off with children and the weak. He had heard tales of other worse things too. It seemed the Kislevites had horror stories for everything concerned with winter. Hardly surprising, he supposed, and he had seen enough of the world to know that there was most likely a grain of truth behind all of them.
Felix told himself not to be so dour. After all, he was alive when he had fully expected to meet his death during the Chaos horde’s attack. He could even leave the city on the mighty airship, the Spirit of Grungni, when Malakai Makaisson departed. True, that would mean returning to Karak Kadrin, the squat savage home of the Slayer cult, but surely even that would be preferable to spending the winter in Praag. Only a fool or a madman would want to do that.
Felix knew that really he had no choice in the matter. He was sworn to follow Gotrek and record his doom. Wherever the Slayer chose to go, he was bound to follow. Surely not even Gotrek would choose to remain in Kislev? Felix shook his head. The Slayer would most likely do it out of sheer pig-headedness. He seemed happiest when things were most uncomfortable, and Felix could imagine few places more guaranteed to provide a healthy measure of discomfort than this snowbound, burned out shell of a city.
Now that he and Ulrika Magdova had finally separated, there was no real reason for him to stay. Briefly he wondered where the Kislevite noblewoman was. Most likely she was still with Max Schreiber, back at the banquet; the two of them were thick as thieves these days.
Ulrika claimed it was because of the honour debt she owed the wizard for saving her life during the plague. Felix was not quite so sure. It was hard for him not to feel jealous of the mage, even though, theoretically, he and Ulrika were not a couple any more.
Yes, he told himself, moving on was for the best.
The snow crunched under his boots. He walked towards a charcoal brazier where a vendor was selling skewered rats. He did so more because he wanted heat than any of the four-legged chicken the man was selling.
The vendor seemed to read his thoughts and gave him a glare. Felix met the man’s look evenly until he glanced down and away. Despite his scholarly appearance he felt there were few men in the city who would give him trouble at times like this. Over the long period of his association with the Slayer, he had learned how to intimidate all but the most confident when he wanted to.
From over by the entrance to the Alleyway of Loose Women, above which a red lantern still burned even in this gloomy daylight, he heard the sound of weeping. The more cautious part of his mind told him to move on, to avoid any trouble. The curious part egged him on to investigate. The battle was over in heartbeats, and he marched over to the mouth of the alley. He saw an old woman weeping. She was bent over something and then leaned back and let out a terrible wail of anguish. No one else seemed to be paying much heed. Misery was abundant in Praag this season, and no one had much reason to go looking to share someone else’s.
‘What is it, mother?’ Felix asked.
‘Who you calling “mother”, priest boy?’ the old woman responded. There was anger in her voice now, as well as grief. She was looking for someone to focus it on, to distract herself. Felix guessed he had just made himself the target.
‘Did I offend you?’ he asked, still polite, studying the woman more closely. He could see that she was not really all that old. She just looked that way. Her face was covered in rouge to hide the pockmarks. Her tears had smudged her makeup horribly. Black rivulets ran down her powdered cheeks. A streetgirl, he decided, one of those who sold herself for a penny a tumble. Then he looked at her feet and a faint thrill of shock passed through him as he saw why she was crying. ‘Was she a friend of yours?’
It was the pale corpse of another girl. At first he thought she had died of the cold, then he noticed how utterly unnatural her pallor was. He bent down and saw that her throat was bruised. Some instinct told him to run his fingers over it. The flesh was torn, as if a beast had gnawed at it.
‘You a watchman?’ the woman asked aggressively. She reached out and grabbed his cloak, thrusting her face close to his. ‘You secret police?’
Felix shook his head and gently removed her hand. It would be a very bad thing to be marked out as one of the duke’s spies and agent provocateurs in this rough quarter. A crowd might gather and lynch him. Felix had seen such things happen before.
‘Then you’re just a ghoul and I don’t have to tell you nuthin’. The woman coughed and he heard the phlegm rasping through her lungs. Whatever she had, he hoped it was not contagious. She did not look like a well woman. Felix looked at her coldly. He was chilled to the bone, he was tired and he was not really in the mood to be the focus of this sick madwoman’s anger. He stood up straight and said, ‘You’re right. Deal with this yourself!’
He turned to go, and noticed that a small crowd had gathered. To his surprise he felt a tug at his wrist, and turned to see the streetgirl looking up at him and crying once more. ‘I told her not to go with him,’ she said after another hacking cough. ‘I told her, I told Maria, but she wouldn’t listen. I told her he was a bad ’un, and there have been all these killin’s recent, but she wouldn’t listen. Needed the money for medicine for the little ’un she said. Now who’ll look after him?’
Felix wondered what the woman was babbling about. He felt the urge to walk away as quickly as possible. He had seen many corpses in his life but there was something about this one that sickened him. He was not sure why, but he just knew that he wanted nothing further to do with this. And yet…
And yet he could not just walk away. The meaning of the woman’s words passed into his numbed brain, just as he heard a commotion at the back of the crowd and the sound of marching feet crunching snow underfoot. He turned to see a squad of halberdiers in winged lion tabards had forced their way through the gathering crowd, hard-faced veterans of the city watch, led by a grey-haired sergeant. He looked at Felix and said, ‘You find her?’
Felix shook his head. ‘Just passing by,’ he said.
‘Then keep on passing,’ said the sergeant. Felix stepped to one side. He wanted no arguments with the duke’s guards. The sergeant bent down over the corpse and muttered a low curse. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Another one.’
‘That’s Red Maria, sarge,’ said one of the troopers. ‘From Flint Street.’
‘Have you seen something like this before?’ Felix asked.
The sergeant looked up at him. Something about his expression made it clear that he was not in the mood to give answers to any passing civilians. Felix wasn’t sure why he had asked. This was surely no business of his. But something about the man’s tone rankled him, and something about this killing niggled at the back of his mind. He knew it would most likely go unsolved anyway. He had been a watchman himself in his time, back in Nuln, what seemed a lifetime ago, and he knew the watchmen were not likely to expend any more effort on a murdered streetgirl than to carry her to the funeral pyres. Looking down at the corpse he began to see her as a person finally.
Who were you, he wondered? What was your life like? Why did you die? Who killed you? Your friend said you had a child. Did you love him? Must have or you would not have gone out with a deadly stranger on a winter night and walked off to your death.
He felt a faint familiar surge of anger at the sheer injustice of it. Somewhere out there a monster was free and a child was most likely going to die for want of food, and there was not much he could do about it. He reached down to his waist and fingered his purse. It was a bit flat, but there was gold in it. He turned so his body covered the action, and pushed it into the woman’s palm.
