Hammer and Bolter Issue Eighteen Read online

  Only when he attempted to pull his cloak tighter did the nausea hit him.

  Felix gagged. His head was pounding.

  He let out a long moan, full of all the remorse of the inebriate who cannot yet recall the night before but who knows that even merely in its telling it would most likely break him all over again.

  Rolling slowly and delicately onto his front, he tried to take deep, cleansing breaths of the chill morning air as the world spun unforgivingly around him.

  Who was making all that commotion? Blowing whistles and shouting, at this damned hour! Oh sweet, merciful Shallya! Deliver me from this wretchedness!

  He drew his knees up and buried his face in his hands, almost sobbing at the pain behind his eyes. His hair hung wet and sticky against his clammy forehead, and he had the taste of bile and rancid ale in his throat. He gagged again.

  Angry voices echoed in the alleyway around him. An alarming number of angry voices. Felix wanted to open his eyes, but he was certain that the effort would cause his brain to explode inside his skull.

  When he finally did open them, the outcome was far worse.

  Sabine lay before him on the cobblestones, in a wide pool of rain-watered blood. Her face was contorted, and her innards hung through a wide slash across her belly, which seemed to have almost cleaved her in two. Felix’s sword lay nearby.

  As the watchmen came for him, their pitiless hands yanking him up from the ground, he was suddenly, horribly aware that his own hands and face were also smeared with Sabine’s blood.

  He vomited copiously over the man who restrained his left arm, earning Felix a blow to the stomach that felled him instantly. Gasping and choking in the gutter, he saw that a horrified mob was being held back by the local watch commander at the entrance to the alley, and that they were crying out for vengeance.

  It’s the Ripper! They’ve caught the Ripper!

  Felix’s head hung at a maddening angle, and his vision swam. He needed time to think, just a few moments to–

  Gotrek.

  Felix caught sight of his dwarf companion’s grizzled face in the crowd, and his heart leapt. The Slayer was cowled in a dark hood, his single eye wide and his jaw set in a stern manner; most surprisingly to Felix, the dwarf’s expression was somewhere between anger and bitter disappointment. The sight was unnerving.

  They had been so careful, tried so hard to remain inconspicuous…

  Gotrek met his gaze, but said nothing. Solemnly he shook his head and slipped away into the baying throng.

  Felix cried out in horror and anguish. One of the watchmen gripped him by his bloody hair, and bashed his face into the pavement.

  As consciousness deserted him, away in the shadows Felix fancied he saw a lone figure: a skulking wraith of a man with piercing eyes.

  Watching.

  Gotrek stomped his way through the oncoming rabble; word was spreading fast, and in response more and more of the people of Oberwald were heading out onto the streets from their early morning duties. They were clearly agitated, although it seemed to be more fear than excitement that was gripping them.

  Stupid manling. Stupid, stupid manling.

  There had been a good deal of talk about a ‘ripper’ while they had been in the town, but Gotrek had simply assumed it was a harmless local legend or just another name that the humans had given to some wandering beast of Chaos. Who knows, he thought. It didn’t really matter now, anyway.

  Felix had been stupid. Careless. You don’t cavort with taproom floozies when the whole district is on edge and looking for a scapegoat.

  Always thinking with his tallywhacker, that one.

  Up ahead, a young lad in a grocer’s apron had hauled himself up onto the low roof of a stone outbuilding and was pointing down to the corner where the cobbled alleyway met the main thoroughfare.

  ‘He’s there! They’ve caught him! They’re going to string him up!’

  Gotrek sagged at the words. Hysterical shouts echoed from the half-timbered frontages which lined the street, and some of the bolder citizens began to jostle and run towards the apparent spectacle. He noted with grim inevitability that some of them were armed – an assortment of hand tools, pitchforks and kitchen knives gripped in trembling, white-knuckled hands.

  There was a strange feeling in the air, an unusual dynamic to this crowd. This was not the usual lynch-mob, thirsty for blood; it was almost as if they were more afraid of this local terror now that they thought him cornered, more so than when he had supposedly stalked among them…

  Fear was unfamiliar to Gotrek, and even humans themselves were a puzzle at times. He cast his gaze about as the people hurried by. A watchman with a hand firmly on the hilt of his sword. A housemaid, her face streaked with tears. Two youths in fine clothing. A blacksmith with a forge hammer and a curiously haunted expression, followed by his gloved apprentice.

  The dwarf slowed, and turned back to see the burgeoning crowd at the mouth of the alley. Most of these people didn’t have vengeance on their minds, nor likely did they mean Felix any harm. Not directly, anyway.

  They simply couldn’t believe that their Ripper had been caught.

  They just had to see it with their own eyes, to witness him being dragged away in chains. They needed to finally banish the horror that had haunted them for so long, to restore their faith in the men who were supposedly employed to keep them safe at night. They needed to know that it was all over.

  Somewhere further up the street, someone – most likely one of the watch trying to maintain order – fired a pistol skywards. The report rang down the street, and unfortunately had quite the opposite effect on the crowd. Screams filled the air, and then panicked cries as the thoroughfare was suddenly turned into a stampede.

  ‘It’s the Ripper! The daemon is loose again! Run for your lives!’

  Gotrek groaned and shouldered the blacksmith aside as the lumbering brute almost ran him down, but even the doughty Slayer couldn’t weather the press of frantic bodies that surged around him. Being sure to keep a tight grip on his pack and the familiar weight of his axe strapped beneath it, he allowed himself to be swept along with the crowd.

  Though he could barely think over the bleating and yammering and breathless prayers of the fleeing townspeople, Gotrek knew that he couldn’t just abandon his lanky companion to the hangman’s noose. First and foremost, young Felix had been locked up for a crime that – Gotrek hoped – he hadn’t committed. Secondly, if the watch held Felix for long enough, they might realise just who he actually was… and then, of course, they’d soon come looking for the mohawked Slayer too. There were plenty of things that the pair of them had done which would land them both in any gaol in the Empire, no question.

  Finally, Gotrek realised, since Felix wasn’t this notorious murderer that the people had figured him to be, it meant that someone – or something – else was.

  The Oberwald Ripper was still at large.

  Time passed for Felix in a roiling, nauseous haze. He was unsure where the throbbing pain of his injuries ended, and the dull ache of his hangover began. He found that he couldn’t turn his head without the sensation that he was whirling down some hellish chasm to an unspecified but particularly unpleasant end.

  It was like those things. You know. The dwarf machines. With the spinning blade things on top…

  He whimpered before retching onto the floor.

  Gyrocopters. That was it. It was like being attacked by gyrocopters every time he closed his eyes. Gyrocopters flying in a gale. With drunken pilots.

  The watchmen had taken his cloak, taken his mail shirt and his sword. They had even taken his boots and his belt and clapped him in rusty manacles and leg-irons, although it was a mystery as to what kind of escape they thought he might attempt in his current condition.

  Misery. He coughed and heaved again, and snorted out a clot of black blood.

  He lay curled on a bare wooden bench, his face towards a rough-hewn stone wall that was slick with moisture and covered in blooms of lichen
. The sound of dripping water in the cell was constant, like the ticking of some bizarre timepiece. Faintly, he was aware of thunder rumbling in the distance, and when he managed to turn his head far enough, he saw rain beating down upon the sill of the small, barred window set high up in the wall.

  The only mercy that he felt was the cold draught that blew in through that opening. Though it might normally have wracked his body with chills, for now it was refreshing and he drew in long, deep breaths of it to steady himself before daring to move again.

  ‘You look unwell, friend.’

  Felix started at the sound of the voice, started so hard that he almost fell off the bench and into the various puddles of his own making. His eyes slid in and out of focus as he peered into the shadows for the anonymous speaker, though the effort sent new jabs of pain lancing through his skull. His stomach tightened with the effort, but he managed to stifle another dry retch.

  ‘Who… who’s there?’ he managed at length, only to be met with a thin trickle of laughter.

  In the far corner of the gaol was an empty bench, and heaped against the wall was a bundle of rags and detritus. Where the floor dipped in the middle, a pool of silty water had collected from the dripping ceiling, and looked to be at least a few inches deep. The heavy wooden door to the cell was bound with great iron hinges and bolts, and a battered little tin bowl containing a few mouldy crusts lay beside it.

  But of the phantom speaker, there was no sign.

  Felix gripped the edge of his bench tightly and tried to muster the strength to rise, but footsteps and angry words echoed in the space outside the cell, and underneath the heavy door he saw the suggestion of candlelight moving beyond.

  With an iron rumble to rival the thunder outside, the bolts were pulled back and the door swung outwards to reveal several watchmen armed with spears, and the swarthy old watch commander in his brocaded coat, holding a lantern aloft. They entered cautiously, almost like a battlefield phalanx approaching him as they would a dragon or greater daemon, spears levelled.

  ‘This is him,’ spat the commander. ‘This is the cold-blooded bastard we found in the alley.’ He gestured at Felix, before spitefully kicking up a spray of the silty water in his direction. One of the spearmen jabbed at Felix, driving him from the bench and onto the filthy floor with a piteous cry.

  Felix covered his eyes against the light of the lantern, and tried to ward off the spears of his captors and plead his innocence, the chains of his heavy manacles trailing on the stone flags.

  ‘N-no, you’ve got the wrong man! I didn’t do anything…’

  The closest spearman, a potato-faced thug with one milky eye, leered in closer. ‘Shut yer mouth, devil, or I’ll cut out yer filthy tongue!’

  Recoiling into the corner, Felix tried to think quickly. It was clear that they thought him to be this fiendish Ripper who had apparently plagued the town for so long. Of course, he could hardly blame them – here was an unknown outsider who could not have given a good account of himself even if he had been telling the truth.

  The watch commander turned and spoke to someone standing in the passageway beyond the cell. ‘Is this the one, Herr Lieferen? Is this the man you saw?’

  Felix almost didn’t dare to look.

  Dishevelled, grief-stricken, with his eyes reddened and his hands trembling, Sabine’s father stooped in through the doorway and let his gaze fall upon Felix. It was a mournful gaze stung with tears and rage.

  ‘That’s him, that’s the poet! He’s to blame!’ he shrieked, wiping his eyes with the cuff of his fine shirt. ‘He killed my Sabine!’

  The watch commander laid a hand on the sobbing merchant’s shoulder, causing him to flinch slightly, and ushered him back into the passageway.

  ‘Thank you, mein herr. We’ll see to him from here. This Ripper’s a crafty one, eluded us for a long time. We even thought of calling on the Witch Hunters – there were many as said he weren’t a man, but a ghoul or a daemon, or a vampire…’

  Felix’s heart missed a beat.

  The commander turned back and looked down at him with a sneer. ‘But he bleeds good enough, and I don’t see him flying up out of that little window any time soon. He’ll swing from the gallows before nightfall, you have my word.’

  The watchmen began to back out of the cell, leaving Felix cowering and shivering in the corner. The commander swung his boot at the pile of rags near the far bench, eliciting a yelp of pain from it.

  ‘And you, how are you liking it in here? This must be a dream come true for you, eh? You simple-minded little pervert.’

  To Felix’s surprise, the bundle unfurled into the form of a man – an emaciated, grimy vagrant in a tattered coat and cap. The man trembled and pawed beseechingly at the commander as he withdrew.

  ‘Please, your honour, I beg you,’ he bawled, ‘don’t leave me alone in here with him! He’s dangerous, he’ll kill me and take my soul for a plaything!’ He prostrated himself before the commander, splashing at the edge of the silty puddle and fawning over his grimy boots. ‘I saw him – when you were outside and couldn’t have known – he was licking the blood off his hands, and laughing! Oh, Sigmar preserve me, you can’t leave me in here with the Ripper!’

  One of the other watchmen hauled him up by the scruff of his neck and sent him tumbling back into the corner. The commander blew out his lantern and reached for the ring of keys at his belt.

  ‘I ought to hang you alongside him. Be thankful you didn’t do nothing wrong, other than upset the common, decent folk.’

  The heavy door slammed shut, and the bolts were racked back into place. The muffled sound of grim laughter and of spear hafts on the stone floor faded into the distance, leaving only Felix’s ragged breathing and the rainstorm outside the tiny window, and the endless drip-drip-drip of the vaulted ceiling.

  Felix blinked in the sudden darkness, trying to locate the vagrant again. The man had fallen curiously silent, in spite of his desperate outburst in front of the watchmen.

  With a sudden sharp intake of breath, Felix saw him.

  He was sat slightly closer than Felix had expected, calm and cross-legged on the edge of the pool which still rippled from his little display moments earlier. He seemed bigger, somehow rangier than before – Felix supposed this was because he had initially mistaken him for a pile of gaol-cell rubbish. In the gloom, he saw the man’s shoulders rise and fall in slow, measured breaths, but not a sound did he make compared to Felix’s own laboured gasps.

  Most unsettling of all were his eyes. His face was cloaked in shadow, but his beady little eyes peered out quite visibly.

  Unblinking.

  Felix pulled his manacled limbs up, edging back onto his bench in spite of his pounding head and the dizziness which threatened to pitch him to the floor without warning. The man’s eyes never left him all the while.

  ‘Well then, friend,’ came his cold voice once more. ‘This is quite a turn-up, is it not?’

  A new sickness spread in Felix’s gut – it was not the ongoing legacy of his ale binge, nor was it at the prospect of his impending execution. It was not because Gotrek had abandoned him to the watch, nor because that poor girl lay dead or because he couldn’t even remember rightly how or when it had happened.

  This new sickness was at the thought of having to spend his last hours locked up with this sinister figure whose predatory gaze never faltered, and whose breath did not seem to fog in the cold air of their gaol.

  And no matter how sick Felix felt, he knew that he did not want to turn his back upon this monster for even a moment.

  As thick as thieves, so the saying went. It was true throughout all the cities of men, in the Empire and beyond; in Gotrek’s experience, criminals tended to prefer the company of their own kind. Professional assassins, hired thugs, rogues, smugglers and footpads – they were all cut from the same cloth, and whatever twisted code of honour they followed, you could always count on them to cover for their fellows. At least until their interests conflicted.


  And once you had a hold over one, you could find out more about another. Like this Ripper character, perhaps?

  The problem was that Gotrek was never sure where the trail began, in these sorts of situations. That had always been Felix’s strong suit. The dwarf himself just wasn’t cut out for sleuthing.

  Too much faffing around, like in those card games.

  That, of course, had given Gotrek his flash of inspiration. There was a criminal type that he knew he could lean on, without fear of reprisal from the watch or whatever limited seedy underworld there was in this backwoods burg.

  He cast a quick look about him, and then rapped hard on the door at the bottom of the stone steps just off the market square. Rain beat down upon his woollen hood.

  No response. He kicked the bottom of the door three times with his boot, rocking it in its frame.

  There came a scuffling from within, and the peephole set into the wood flipped open to reveal a bloodshot eye. After a moment, the eye settled on the diminutive Slayer, and widened in alarm. The peephole snapped shut again.

  ‘Go away!’ came a hoarse voice. ‘We’re closed, by order of the watch.’

  Gotrek laughed pointedly. ‘Ha! I find that hard to believe.’

  Hushed voices spoke quickly behind the door, followed by the faint creak of floorboards further in.

  ‘Believe what you like. You ain’t coming in. You just ’bout wrecked the place last night, with your shenanigans. New house policy – no dwarfs allowed.’

  ‘You’ve not to worry, manling. I’m not looking for another game.’ Gotrek dropped his voice to a stage whisper as a market cart trundled past on the muddy street above, and opened his pack to reveal the blade of his axe. ‘Now you let me in, quick as you like, or I’ll smash this door to splinters and–’

  His words were cut short by a crash in the alleyway at the side of the den, and he lumbered up the steps to block the obvious escape route. Sure enough, he found the bruised and battered dealer from the previous night, picking himself up from a heap of tumbled crates just outside the building’s side door.