Free Gotrek & Felix: Slayer by David Guymer Page B

cut onto the cobbles. The howls from beyond the fire-line grew more rabid with each libation.
    The Eye of Katchar could not reveal every possible outcome, but he had become adept at sifting the improbable from the most likely; particularly with a battering ram such as Buhruk Doombull.
    The minotaur’s torso bulged as if being squeezed from below, his mace coming down like a meteor. Khagash-Fél made to move aside, then snarled. It was time for the Doombull and his supporters to see what they challenged. His hand swung up to shield his head, the minotaur’s mace hammering into his open palm and driving him down to one knee. The cobblestones beneath him shattered, blasted rock ricocheting between the two warriors’ armour.
    Buhruk’s bellow of victory turned into a disbelieving snort as the dust settled to reveal Khagash-Fél alive and unscratched with the minotaur’s mace firmly in his hand. Khagash-Fél twisted the mace-head aside and shoved Buhruk back with a kick in the gut as he rose. Khagash-Fél’s heart thumped powerfully within his chest. He could almost hear the erratic boom-boom echoing from the underside of his breastplate. With a discipline forged over centuries into a mask of hellsteel, he maintained the hard face as he flexed his ringing fingers. Inside, he grimaced; that one he had felt.
    ‘Your own god favours me more than he does you, Doombull. No weapon of fire or fire-born can harm me.’
    The torches danced on the tumultuous roar of acclaim.
    ‘Another!’ Buhruk howled, throwing out his arm to his supporters for a weapon, any weapon.
    Quicker-thinking than the beasts beside him, the black-armoured Chaos warrior snapped the steel head off his lance and threw the weapon into the ring. Buhruk caught it out of the air in his massive fist as though it were a short spear, raising it overhead for a stabbing thrust and bringing up his mace to wield both like some monstrous daemon-possessed war machine. The beastmen in the shadows bayed like starving wolves, shouting down the hiss of the tribesmen at this breach to the ancestral tradition of the challenge.
    Wary now, Khagash-Fél stepped back. The Eye of Katchar had not shown him this. Tossing his axe out of the ring, he turned and yelled back to his own supporters for his more favoured weapon: ‘Sönögch, a sword.’
    A tall warrior in armour of metal scales and a conical leather helm with a horsehair plume moved to obey. As the sword flew from the man’s hand Khagash-Fél saw that a fifth figure now stood amongst his supporters.
    Everything seemed to slow down, as if the Eye of Katchar showed him his future once again.
    The sword hung in midair as though trapped in crystal.
    The shaman, Nergüi, was a flourish of colour beside Sönögch in his long, feather-like blue robes. Eagle feathers, animal teeth and gemstones glittered in the firelight. Dozens of bead necklaces made a frill around his throat and across his narrow shoulders. An elaborate feather headdress screened his weather-scoured features from the rain and torches. Only his piercing amber eyes shone amidst the umbral shade. For a brief moment they met Khagash-Fél’s one. With a movement so subtle it failed to disturb the chimes sewn into the streaming silk ‘feathers’ of his robes, Nergüi shook his head.
    The sword sailed with celestial slowness into the ring.
    Khamgiin .
    A hammering filled Khagash-Fél’s head. The groan from his left gardbrace announced the swelling of his bicep as his fists clenched; fists that were turning a deep magma-red. Steam hissed from the joins in his armour where the rain struck his bare skin.
    His last born was dead.
    Khagash-Fél opened his mouth wide as if to cry out, but no sound issued forth but a strange, hollow buzz, that of a swarm of maddened wasps sealed within a jar. There was a rising pressure in his gut, like the urge to vomit only much more intense and with an irresistible will of its own behind it. Steam poured off him as, with a resounding