Hammer and Bolter Issue Eighteen Read online

  Gotrek barrelled into the man without hesitation, and with a fearsome growl he drew his axe from the pack and let his hood fall to reveal his flattened mohawk.

  The battered man whimpered and screeched, producing gold crowns and sundry trinkets from his pockets and thrusting them at the Slayer in desperation.

  ‘Be still, you fool,’ Gotrek hissed, all too aware that their scuffle might attract attention from the people on the street behind them. ‘I’m not interested in your money. Back inside.’

  He pulled the door shut behind them, and knocked the man’s legs out from under him with the flat of his axe. Although they were in a backroom which smelled suspiciously bad anyway, Gotrek realised that the man had just pissed himself in fear.

  ‘You filthy little thief! Is this how you want to meet your death? On your knees, with soggy pantaloons. What kind of an end is that, eh?’

  The man gabbled incoherently, and began to weep from his puffy black eyes.

  Gotrek made a theatrical show of lowering his weapon. ‘All right, all right. I’ll give you one last chance, thief. You can walk – or waddle – out of here alive, if you tell me more about this “Ripper” of yours.’

  Sniffing and trembling uncontrollably, the man gingerly wiped his swollen nose and nodded frantically.

  ‘The R-Ripper, yes! They c-caught him this m-morning. The watch caught him.’

  Gotrek leaned in, almost conspiratorially, and clucked his tongue.

  ‘See now, thief, I don’t think they did.’

  The man frowned. ‘I don’t know w-what you mean,’ he said.

  ‘I think they got the wrong man, see? I mean, you tell me what you know about this Ripper. You ever seen him?’

  ‘No sir, Mast’r Dwarf! F-few have. Fewer still who’ve lived long enough to–’

  ‘Anyone you know?’

  The man paused, still sobbing softly.

  ‘One fellow, maybe. He talked about the Ripper often enough. Talked about how his eyes blazed colder than a winter frost, and about how he could outrun the fastest horse on the forest roads, when he had a mind to.’

  ‘Who told you this?’ Gotrek demanded.

  ‘I don’t know his name – he sometimes comes in to try his hand at the tables though. Thin fellow, always nervous. Wears a cloth cap.’

  The scrawny manling with the fast eyes.

  ‘He was here last night, was he not?’ said Gotrek.

  ‘Aye, that he was, though he didn’t stick around long after the… trouble began, Mast’r Dwarf. With respect.’

  Slippery fellow, thought Gotrek. Too fast for me, and that’s saying something.

  ‘So, thief, where would the watchmen have taken this Ripper they’ve caught?’

  ‘Most likely to the gaol to await his execution, if any gaol will hold him. You know the town gibbet?’

  ‘I saw it. In front of the gallows in the market square.’

  ‘The cells are in the stone building at the eastern facing. You won’t miss them.’

  Gotrek shouldered his axe, and tossed a grubby rag into the man’s face.

  ‘There you go, thief. Clean yourself up.’

  Cautiously, Felix took a handful of water from the puddle and splashed it over his bare neck, never taking his eyes off the shadowy figure sat in front of him.

  ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘I saw you in the alleyway when the watch came.’

  A spread of teeth emerged into a wicked grin in the gloom.

  ‘Indeed you did, friend, though I saw you and the girl a good while before that.’

  Felix pointed at him in the most intimidatory manner he could. ‘For a start, you can stop calling me “friend”. You don’t even know me, and on balance I have to say that most of the people I call my friends don’t smell half as foul as you. Damned vagrant.’

  The vagrant laughed his thin little laugh again. Felix ignored it.

  ‘Secondly, if you saw me there with Sabine then you know that I never touched her. I’m to be executed for something I didn’t do, and if you were half the “friend” you pretend to be, you’d tell that to the watchmen and clear my name.’ He sank back onto the bench, and waved dismissively. ‘But for whatever reason, you’ve decided to incriminate me further. I’m not sure what you hope to gain from that, but I’ll thank you to leave me alone. “Friend”.’

  A tense moment passed between them, and Felix managed to match the vagrant’s unblinking stare.

  He noticed that the smile had vanished.

  ‘Ungrateful,’ the vagrant hissed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m giving you the gift of infamy. Your name will live on for generations – Max Schreiber, the legendary Ripper of Oberwald. You never even had to kill a single one of those… immoral citizens, and yet you will take all of the glory.’

  ‘But how–’

  ‘Oh, she did squirm so, your little lady. She was quite taken with you. Even after you passed out, I don’t think she even noticed me until I was already upon her.’

  Felix’s stomach lurched. He tried to mask his horror.

  ‘And I must say, Herr Schreiber–’ the Ripper grinned again, ‘–your name is most apt for a poet. Is it a pen name, perchance?’ He chuckled, before snapping back to a humourless deadpan. ‘What, then, would your real name be, I wonder…’

  Felix sprang to his feet, holding his manacled fists out before him, but the Ripper was lightning-fast and already stooped in a low crouch in the silty puddle. For what seemed an eternity, they stood facing one another in that dark gaol cell.

  ‘You stay away from me, do you hear?’ Felix gasped, his hair hanging limply in his bloodied face. He looked to the heavy door, and raised his voice. ‘Guard! Guard! He’s the Ripper! The filthy, stinking–’

  Two heavy thuds on the wood. The milky-eyed watchman’s voice echoed in the passageway beyond.

  ‘Quiet in there, you murderin’ wretch.’

  Now that he stood in the half-light from the small window, Felix could see the Ripper’s features more clearly: a gaunt, thin face with a straggly beard, cap pulled low over his brow. His gaze was just as intense as it had been, almost hypnotic, like that of an adder or viper. When he spoke again, his words sent chills down Felix’s spine.

  ‘Have you any idea how pitiful your gallows accusations will seem? How mad they will make you sound?’

  ‘Do not speak to me of madness,’ Felix spat. ‘You’ve stalked this provincial little town for months, and for what? You are deluded if you think anyone outside of Oberwald will ever hear of your exploits.’

  The Ripper started forwards suddenly, his hands outstretched like grasping claws, but he held back. Nonetheless, Felix flinched and stumbled in his leg-irons – his opponent had the advantage of complete mobility, and he clearly intended to make the most of it.

  ‘Months?’ the Ripper sneered, his eyes narrow. ‘Try years. And what makes you think Oberwald is the only town to have enjoyed my particular attentions?’ He gestured widely. ‘In my time, I travelled throughout the Empire and the Border Princes, and further still. You have the air of the traveller about you too, “Herr Schreiber”. I wonder if you have also seen the things that I have seen.’

  Felix shrugged, hoping to stall him. ‘Pray tell, what would that be?’

  ‘I have seen the worst in mankind. I have seen men rut like the beasts of the Drakwald, or wage war like the greenskins and dwarfs up in the mountains.’ He raised a hand, and closed it slowly into a fist. ‘But worst of all, I have seen the slow eradication of our innocence, even out here in the rural provinces. Take this town – no more than a crossroads between the local villages, and then later a market settlement. Traders, farmers; honest folk living by the toil of their own hand.

  ‘But then it grows. Money to be made, you see. The landowners and innkeepers creep in, start to make a killing by renting out their yards and frontages to the travelling vendors. How do you think these fine roads and buildings are maintained?’

  The Ripper’s eyes had glazed somewhat
, and he stared into the middle distance, no doubt imagining some apocalyptic end to his ranting monologue.

  ‘But the population is transient – market is only a few days each week, so they begin to specialise in their offer. Aside from food and lodging, the more wealthy visitor might even find himself with amenable female company for an evening… and suddenly there are whores and disease on every corner!

  ‘And all the while, there are still those who cannot afford even the most basic comforts. They are forced to huddle in the streets by night, bedding down in muddy straw bales or sleeping beneath their empty market wagons and shivering in the bitter wind. They die out there, while the rich continue to grow fat by their roaring hearths.’

  Absently, he adjusted his coat against some dimly remembered chill.

  ‘It speaks of a base inequality. It is the soulless values of the big cities like Altdorf and Talabheim cast in microcosm. Without something to fear, without a beast at their door, men become greedy. I will give them all something to fear.’

  Felix merely laughed. ‘I tell you what – you are mad.’

  The Ripper’s eyes snapped back to him, fixing him with their cold, predatory glare once more. Still, he let Felix continue.

  ‘You say you’ve travelled the Old World, and yet you say that men have nothing to fear, out here in the provinces? You guess rightly – I’ve wandered these lands long enough to find nothing but bloodthirsty beasts and unspeakable horrors under every mountain and upon every plain.’

  He pointed at the Ripper, who twitched nervously.

  ‘You’re not some saviour of men. You’re just a murderous lunatic.’

  ‘Wrong,’ he replied in a heartbeat. ‘You’re the murderer, remember? You’ll swing from the gibbet before the day is out, and I’ll be set free.’ He laughed again. ‘I’m just the vagrant caught skulking at the scene of your latest murder. Aside from offending the sensibilities of the townsfolk with my morbid curiosity, I am apparently innocent.’

  Felix could stand it no longer. He bellowed and lunged at the Ripper, but the sinister figure flashed out of his path and sent him careening into the opposite bench. As Felix fell, his leg-irons yanked free from their rusted mounting on the wall and the chains splashed loosely into the pool of silty water.

  The Ripper stood over him, partially silhouetted against the light from the window and yet with his pale eyes still noticeably visible beneath the brim of his cap. As Felix rolled onto his back and tried to stand, with a flick of the wrist his tormentor produced a long, serrated knife from beneath his coat.

  ‘Stay down, friend. You don’t want to taste this steel.’

  Before Felix could formulate a suitably witty riposte, an unmistakable voice came down through the bars of the high window.

  ‘Manling? What’s going on in there?’

  He let out an involuntary gasp of joy. The Ripper turned to look up at the tiny opening, but Felix yelled past him.

  ‘Gotrek? Gotrek! It’s the Ripper! He’s in here with me!’

  As Felix began to tug the rusted remains of the leg-irons from his ankles, the Ripper looked slowly back towards him, confusion clear in his eyes.

  ‘Gotrek… the dwarfen Slayer…?’ he whispered.

  Finally free, Felix leapt back to his feet, though his wrists were still manacled. The Ripper drew back into a vicious stance, his knife held out between them.

  ‘Felix Jaeger.’

  Famous for all the wrong reasons, Felix lamented. He wound the chains of his manacles around his fists in readiness for combat.

  Much to his surprise, the Ripper lunged for the heavy wooden door and began to beat upon it with the hilt of his knife.

  ‘Guard, raise the alarm! Send for the State Troops! He’s a wanted man!’

  In an effort to silence him, Felix dived onto his back and the two of them crashed to the slick stone floor. With the wind knocked from his lungs, Felix couldn’t quite summon the strength to force his manacles over the Ripper’s head and around his neck, and so he grasped at his throat instead.

  The flesh felt clammy and cold.

  Letting his cap fall to the floor, the Ripper threw Felix aside as though he were a child, and stabbed down cruelly with his knife. The blade sliced through Felix’s sodden undershirt and grazed his ribs.

  Felix let out a cry of pain, and punched the Ripper squarely in the jaw with a chain-wrapped fist. The blow knocked the fiend insensible, and the knife skittered from his grasp and into the murky puddle, out of sight. Felix hauled him up by the front of his coat, and sent him crashing into the nearest bench.

  The frame gave way and shattered into damp kindling, but the Ripper was on his feet before Felix could recover. His eyes burned pale in the gloom as he grabbed Felix by the hair and plunged him face-first into the pool.

  Felix gasped a lungful of the cold, brackish water, but his already bruised forehead struck the submerged flagstones and knocked the fight clean out of him. Icy hands on the back of his neck ground his face into the gritty stone, pinning his manacled arms beneath him. He tasted his own blood, fresh in the water.

  Darkness began to creep in at the edges of his vision. He felt his heartbeat slowing, in the cold clutches of death. Somewhere in the distance he heard the whistles of the watchmen…

  Too late. The Ripper had him now.

  It was a strangely calming realisation. Soon, he thought. It will all be over soon.

  Deep cold, like the bleakest Kislev winter.

  From out of the shadows of a thousand haunted nights, he recalled her face. She was beckoning Felix into the embrace of whatever lay beyond this life, and he longed to go to her…

  A pinprick of pain pierced the numbness of his hands in the water. His fingers closed around a blade.

  Not yet. Not dead yet.

  With every last ounce of strength he could summon, he kicked and pushed himself clear of the pool, and rolled around with the knife thrust out in both hands. The Ripper gasped as Felix plunged it between his ribs, into his heart.

  Felix choked and spluttered and heaved the silty water from his lungs, even as the Ripper convulsed and fell forwards on top of him. The dead weight pinned Felix on his back in the puddle with the spreading warmth of his foe’s lifeblood soaking into his shirt, and he let his head sink to the stone flags in exhaustion.

  Seconds later, the door to the cell burst inwards, torn from its hinges by the lifeless body of the milky-eyed watchman. Gotrek appeared in the vacant doorway, his tattooed muscles rippling as he dusted off his hands.

  ‘Oh, by my ancestors, manling,’ he barked. ‘You look terrible. Let’s get out of here.’

  As they fled towards the low stone walls which marked the edge of Oberwald and the beginnings of the pine-wooded wilderness beyond, Gotrek steadied Felix as he wheezed and limped through the mud. In the fading light of early evening, the town’s alarum bell was ringing, although exactly whom the terrified citizens hoped to summon was a mystery.

  ‘You know… what they’ll say… don’t you?’ Felix panted, refastening his sword belt. ‘They’ll tell their grandchildren… that the Ripper… escaped from the gallows.’

  Gotrek frowned.

  The Oberwald Ripper – a folk-devil in the making, Felix thought. He hoped against hope that his old friend Max Schreiber, the real Max Schreiber, would never stray this far into the provinces, or at least that he would have the good sense not to go by that particular name.

  ‘So what was he?’ Gotrek asked. ‘Chaos cultist? A sorcerer collecting souls for his daemon-magic?’

  Felix laughed. They clambered over a fence and into a field of dead grass.

  ‘What’s funny?’ said the dwarf. ‘Was he a degenerate mutant, then? A beastman sympathiser? No, wait – a druchii agent, masquerading as a human!’

  ‘No, sadly not,’ replied Felix, shaking his head. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it seems that he was just a man.’

  ‘But what about all this stuff he’s supposed to have done? He can jump forty feet over
a house, and shoot lightning from his fingertips, from what I heard…’

  Felix thought of Sabine for a moment. Poor, poor Sabine.

  ‘People need monsters,’ he shrugged, ‘and even when they’re lucky enough not to have any, they create their own... or they become them.’

  Gotrek sneered.

  ‘Ha! Your kind are a strange bunch, manling.’

  THE LION

  Part Two

  V

  While his seneschal organised the forces of the Dark Angels, the Lion made his way to his personal arming chamber. Five Legion serfs were awaiting him inside the stone-clad room, dressed in dark green surplices, with heavy boots and gloves. Each wore a pistol at his belt too, though the Lion had encountered no enemy on his way there and they appeared unmolested.

  The reports of attacks were growing in frequency as the nephilla – or whatever their immaterial assailants were – seemed to be widening the breach from warp space to allow more of their kind to manifest.

  The walls of the chamber were covered with weapons of dazzling variety, either made for the primarch or seized as spoils of conquest from the hundreds of cultures he had encountered during the Great Crusade. It had begun with his first Calibanite short sword, presented to him by Luther on acceptance into the knightly order; that simple blade held pride of place at the centre of the display.

  It was the one affectation he allowed himself, this collection of weaponry. He had spent long times here contemplating the many ways mankind had devised to kill an enemy, though of late his throne chamber had been a more regular haunt. He paused for a moment of thought, moving along the walls, touching a hand to favourite pieces, running a gauntleted finger along blades and spikes in appreciation of their craftsmanship. In war, just as in other pursuits, mankind was creative, showing insight and genius even with the most barbaric level of technology.

  Many of the weapons were too small for his fist and were mounted for ornamentation only, while others served a different purpose in his hands: swords for normal men wielded as knives by the Lion. Some were traditional, ancient designs, while others had monomolecular edges, power field generators, electro-fields and other technological improvements.