Gotrek and Felix - City of the Damned by David Guymer

Author:David Guymer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2013-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The Claws of the Beast

With a disinterested growl, the Beast flung Felix from its claws. He sailed through smoke-filled air, then hit the ground with a metallic clank. He rolled over the broken flags like a felled log, cloaked skaven hurdling his body as he rolled, finally fetching up against what felt like an array of legs. There was a rusted jangling of chain. For a moment he lay still, appreciating the full depth and favour of his pain.

Burned, bloodied, dizzy, he sat up.

Between the low limestone barrier of the river wall and the buttressed stone of the riverside warehouses, the dense fog seethed with cloaked rats. Felix watched as one of them smacked a steel bludgeon into the skull of a mindless, bone-plated abomination. The dark exoskeleton splintered under the blow, but the mutant expressed no pain, no shock. It came on, its bulk bearing itself and its attacker both to the flagstones. The skaven savaged the mutant’s throat, then shrieked as the thing fumbled over its face and, with a hideous absence of mind, gouged its eyes from their sockets.

Ignoring their kin-rat’s wails, more of the cloaked scavengers were tearing into the fray to lay into the dead-eyed shells of misshapen men with cudgels and nets.

The mutants advanced through the smog from the direction of the bridge, relentless in their indifference. And more were coming. Dripping wet, cloaked in rust-coloured algae, hair and clothing struck with splinters, they flopped over the lip of the river wall and fell ashore. They acted like zombies but for the breaths that made their chests rise and fall, and the way that they so freely bled and died. Dozens lay dead but twice as many more lay trussed and bound.

Wading into the fray, the Beast unspooled a whip, testing its bite with a doubled whip-crack. It was doubly barbed with bone, what looked like the incisors of some monstrous rat, and glistened with a black lacquer that made Felix think immediately of poison. The great whip snapped over the shrieking ranks of his minions, drawing strips of flesh from the misshapen multitudes that pressed them. Where the whip drew blood, mutants spasmed, went slack and fell.

Something stuck a toe in his kidney.

‘Wake up, manling. Get up and give me a hand.’

Felix coughed, thinking smoke must have gotten into his ears, and looked over his shoulder. Hurriedly, he stood. The Beast had thrown him deliberately to where two abject files of almost-humans had been lashed together, bundled against the river wall, and abandoned. They moaned to themselves, pulling limply in all directions. And in the middle of the foremost file, as belligerent amongst them as the strains of a Nordland drinking ballad in an Estalian cantata, orange crest quivering with fury, was Gotrek. The Slayer glared at the mutants that flanked him, their conflicting efforts dragging him from side to side. He spat onto the back of the gelid-fleshed abomination to his left.

‘Don’t just stand there and gawp. I refuse to meet my doom lashed to some daemon-spawned wretch and without an axe in my hand.

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