The Serpent Queen Read online

  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 forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of the founder 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 of the 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.

  ‘The Southlands – the name conjures up images of sweltering jungles, miasmic mangrove swamps and scaly beasts the likes of which most had only seen in the controlled confines of the Imperial zoo. A place of screaming death, in a thousand and one forms, each of them worse than the one previous.

  Or such was Gotrek’s hope.

  Normally, the Slayer settled into taciturnity as naturally as a boulder sank into a tarn, but the thought of plunging into that green hell had him salivating as we set sail from Sartosa. It might have been the prospect of looting one of the hundreds of lost cities said to dot the Southlands like rocks scattered amongst the tall grass, or the almost-certain opportunity to match his axe against the scales of one of the monstrous saurians said to roam the jungles. For myself, I was not so enthusiastic.

  Our sojourn in Tilea had been only intermittently marked by the sort of terrors that had become depressingly commonplace during my long association with Gotrek – the hunting of the Daemon-Swine of Catrazza, for instance, or our foray into the stinking warrens of the skaven far beneath the ruins of the temple of Myrmidia in Miragliano on behalf of the Order of the Blazing Sun, or even the strange circumstances of Gotrek’s duel atop the undulating battlements of the Stalking Tower with the being calling himself Mordrek the Damned – and I had become attached to those sun-kissed lands, and their various and sundry delights.

  Gotrek, as ever, could not be swayed by my pleading. Indeed, ever since the existential horrors of our experiences in Albion, the Slayer had become more determined than ever to drown his thoughts in the red grapes of slaughter…’

  – From My Travels with Gotrek, Vol. VI

  By Herr Felix Jaeger (Altdorf Press, 2525)

  Chapter 1

  ‘Cheat!’ Gotrek’s bellow, redolent with outraged incredulity, thundered across the deck of the Orfeo. Startled by the outburst, the gulls that had been perched on the main mast of the merchantman hurled themselves into the salt-tinged air of the early evening. The birds winged their way upwards through the gathering mists, leaving behind only a scatter of feathers and the echoes of their raucous cries. The crew of the vessel, a motley assortment of scurvy rogues from a dozen ports, paused in their labours, but only for a moment. In the weeks since they’d left port at Sartosa, they’d grown used to the Slayer’s occasional outbursts.

  Felix Jaeger looked up. ‘What now?’ he muttered. His eyes narrowed, and his thin, sun-browned features tightened in momentary concern. His gaze flickered to the sheathed sword lying against the rail within arm’s reach. The gilt dragon-headed pommel of the blade called Karaghul caught the light of the setting sun, and Felix turned his attentions back to the confrontation brewing across the deck, satisfied that should it be required, he could have the blade in his hand and free of its plain leather sheath in mere moments. It wouldn’t be the first time that the Slayer’s incandescent temper had seen them fighting for their lives, and experience had taught Felix to be ready for the inevitable firestorm.

  ‘I am no cheat!’ Gotrek roared. The Slayer jabbed his accuser in the nose with a stubby finger. The force of the gesture sent the unfortunate sailor toppling onto his backside. The dwarf was a squat lump of scar tissue and muscle, and Felix had seen him kill with a casual backhand more than once. The sailors who’d made up the rest of the semi-circle began to edge back, giving Gotrek and his new playmate plenty of room. ‘Dwarfs do not cheat,’ Gotrek snarled. ‘Only men and elves and filthy Moot-scum cheat!’

  ‘I didn’t say you cheated!’ the sailor growled. ‘I said you made a lucky roll!’ His hand edged towards the dirk thrust through the brightly coloured sash he wore about his waist. Don’t do it, Felix pleaded silently, it would only aggravate him. He let loose the breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding when the sailor, obviously thinking better of it, spread his hands well away from the hilt of the blade.

  ‘Same thing,’ Gotrek rumbled. He flashed a gap-toothed grin and flexed his scarred hands. It reminded Felix of a tiger unsheathing its claws. At least the Slayer had left his axe where it sat leaning against a water barrel. Felix relaxed. Gotrek wasn’t really angry. He was bored, which was, in some ways, worse. ‘Now, apologise. Or I’ll have your scalp for a coin purse,’ Gotrek said, gesturing crudely for emphasis.

  Felix rolled his eyes and turned his attentions back to the pitiful state of his red Sudenland travelling cloak, which lay across his knees. The cloak had so many holes in it that it resembled a Wissenland cheese, and it was about as much use at keeping out the rain at the moment. He carefully threaded a needle and began to patch the largest of the holes. He’d had to pay a pretty penny for scraps of the right colour and material. It was getting harder and harder to find Sudenland wool that was dyed the right shade. He was tempted to simply buy a new cloak, rather than patching the old, but it didn’t seem right, somehow.

  The old cloak had seen him through fire, famine and flood. It had kept the rain off him in the dark forests of the Empire, and in the misty bogs of Albion. It had kept the snow off him in the Worlds Edge Mountains, and the sun, in the deserts of Araby and the hills of Tilea.

  His lean fingers traced the rents in the fabric and glided across faded stains. Each was a memory to be cherished, and a story to be told. Or so his mother had said, the day she’d bought the cloak for him. It had been old, even then. He’d taken it with him when he’d gone to university, as a way of remembering her. He caught a fold between his fingers and rubbed the coarse weave. ‘Every mark a story,’ he murmured. He examined his hand, and the fine web of scars that criss-crossed it. If every mark told a tale, he was a collection of stories. And Gotrek was a multivolume epic, at least.

  Without losing his train of thought, Felix lifted his feet as a sailor slid across the wet deck and struck the barrel he was sitting on. He used the toe of his boot to nudge the groaning man aside and set his feet back down.

  Gotrek laughed nastily and stumped towards the downed man. The Slayer’s broad, craggy face was creased in amusement, and his single eye gleamed with humour. It was a rare expression for Gotrek, who tended towards the sour when he wasn’t up to his elbows in blood, and Felix paused in his mending to study it. Like all poets, inspiration often took him unawares. There was a hint of the dwarf that Gotrek Gurnisson had been in that expression – before he’d shorn his scalp, dyed and greased his remaining hair into a towering crimson crest and taken the oath of the Slayer, setting his feet on the path of glorious, redeeming death. Even after so many years together, F
elix knew very little about Gotrek’s past, and the workings of the Slayer’s mind were as mysterious now as they had been the day he’d sworn a drunken oath to follow Gotrek and record his doom.

  ‘I think you’ve made your point, Gotrek,’ Felix said, turning his eyes back to his cloak.

  ‘I’m just getting warmed up, manling,’ Gotrek said, knuckling his eye-patch. ‘We’ve been cooped up on this scow for weeks. Weeks, manling! Weeks without as much as a bruised knuckle or the taste of blood in my mouth.’

  ‘Need I remind you that this was your idea?’ Felix said carefully. Gotrek’s temper was as volatile as it was legendary. It could turn on a guilder, and Felix didn’t want the Slayer’s ire to fall on him.

  Gotrek frowned and spat. ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said darkly.

  ‘Then I won’t,’ Felix said. The sailor, blood streaming from a nose that had gone purple and misshapen, had got to his feet, but Gotrek, glaring angrily at Felix as he was, seemed to have forgotten him. ‘You spent the last of our coin on purchasing this passage. I’m simply suggesting that you might not want to cripple the crew before we get where we’re going.’

  The Orfeo was sailing for the Mangrove Port, on the eastern coast of the Southlands. The Port was an outpost and a beacon for adventurers, criminals, pirates and treasure hunters of all stripes and backgrounds. Its foundations had been sunk centuries before by explorers from Cathay, and it had changed hands numerous times since, from Araby to Tilea to Estalia. These days, it was nominally under the jurisdiction of the Empire. Or it had been, when they’d left port. Felix knew enough about such places to know that it mattered little what flag flew over the palisade. ‘After all, we still have a few days of travel left,’ he added.

  Before Gotrek could reply, the sailor, clutching his broken nose, struck the Slayer on the back of his tattooed skull with a belaying pin. The pin shattered, and the sailor stumbled back, gawping at the broken chunk of wood in his hand. Gotrek’s mouth closed with a snap and he turned a baleful gaze on his attacker. ‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ he said. He reached out and grabbed the sailor by the front of his shirt, hefted him with ease, and sent him flying back into his fellows with an almost gentle shove. ‘So wait your turn,’ Gotrek called after him.

  Felix sighed. Gotrek’s glare swivelled towards him. Felix kept his eyes on his cloak. Gotrek made to say something, but his words were lost beneath the shout of ‘Get him!’ and the sudden avalanche of angry sailors that buried him. Felix eased his barrel back, out of range. Gotrek bellowed happily and drove a meaty fist into a man’s belly. The latter folded up around the Slayer’s arm like a deflated wineskin, and slumped to the deck. Men went flying to land in heaps about the deck, as Gotrek waded through them with brutal élan. His initial opponent yelped in fear as Gotrek grabbed him. The Slayer cocked a fist, ready to add to the damage he’d already done to the man’s face, when a pistol shot rang out, splitting the air.

  Felix glanced over his shoulder. The hunched, bleary-eyed shape of the ship’s captain, a smoking pistol in one hand, and a half-empty bottle of Catrazza Red in the other, swayed on the upper deck. Captain Bolinas claimed to be from Nordland, but Felix had never known a Nordlander to speak with an Tilean accent.

  Bolinas took a swig from the bottle and glared down at them blearily. ‘I’ll thank you not to break my crew, Gurnisson,’ he belched. ‘We’re entering dangerous waters, and we’ll need every mother’s son of them, or I’m a Tilean.’

  ‘You are a Tilean, Bolinas,’ Gotrek said, letting his opponent fall to the deck.

  ‘Lies, by Ulric,’ the captain said, saluting the dwarf with his pistol. ‘I was born on the frosty coasts of Nordland. Stop punching my crew, thank you, Gurnisson.’

  He swayed as the ship caught a swelling wave, and for a moment, Felix feared that he would topple from the deck. Bolinas righted himself with the elaborate care of a thoroughgoing professional sot. He’d had his doubts about the man and his leaky, creaky barge of a merchantman, but Gotrek had sworn by him. There was a story there, though it was one neither the Slayer nor the captain had volunteered. It was clear that Bolinas had known Gotrek for some time, however. Gotrek grinned and extended a hand. ‘Give me that bottle, and we‘ll call it a done deal.’

  ‘What bottle?’ Bolinas said, taking another swig. He emptied the bottle and pitched it overboard. Gotrek goggled at him for a moment and then grinned broadly.

  ‘Ha! I knew there was a reason I liked you, Bolinas,’ he said, laughing.

  Felix shook his head and finished his stitch. He knotted the thread and bit the end off. Then he held the cloak up to examine it. Shaking his head, he resolved to find a qualified seamstress at the very next civilised port of call they came to.

  He looked out over the rail. In the distance, the black ribbon of the coast crawled across the horizon. He frowned. He’d heard stories about the Southlands as a boy, and he’d seen the massive, colourful saurians in their enclosure at the Imperial zoo, while he was at university. But he’d never thought he’d actually wind up trudging through the jungles, on the heels of a suicidal Slayer. Gotrek clapped him on the back and nearly knocked him to the deck. ‘There’s death there, manling,’ Gotrek said. ‘I can smell it.’

  Felix slung his cloak about his shoulders and said, ‘Your death or someone else’s?’

  Gotrek continued, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘They say there are lizards in those jungles that are the size of mountains, manling. With teeth like spears, and claws like swords,’ Gotrek sighed happily. ‘Not as good a doom as a dragon, but, well, how many of those do you get to see in this life?’ He glanced at Felix. ‘And I’ve seen mine.’

  ‘We almost died fighting that thing,’ Felix said, shivering slightly. His hand instinctively sought the grip of his blade. Karaghul had a doom of its own. The blade hungered for the blood of the ancient beasts, and he had felt that dreadful, fiery hunger first-hand when he and the Slayer had made the acquaintance of the monstrous Skjalandir. It had been quiescent ever since, but sometimes, in quiet moments, he recalled how the sword’s inhuman will had bolstered, or perhaps supplanted, his own, driving him to what he’d thought at the time was certain death. He hoped never to experience that again. He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, I thought we were looking for treasure, not giant lizards.’

  Gotrek’s expression brightened. ‘Aye,’ he said softly. ‘They say the dawi of Karak Zorn lined the avenues of their hold with precious gems, carved and faceted by the greatest jewellers of all dwarf kind, and placed so that a single torch could be used to light the entirety of the hold. The shields of their clans were plated in gold, and their axes were edged in silver. Their thanes wore cloaks of saurian hide and armour made from the strange red iron found in the deep quarries of the jungles. It was said that they had even tamed the great beasts, and built mighty citadels upon the backs of the largest of the saurians, in order to ride them to war. Aye, they were wealthy and mighty, in their time.’ Gotrek set his hands on the ship’s rail as he spoke. ‘We lost contact with them long before the War of Vengeance, and many claimed that the stinking elgi had used their vile magic to destroy the hold and all who dwelt within it.’ Gotrek spat the words. He had all of his race’s prejudices against their ancient rivals, the elves, though Felix thought that the Slayer had mellowed somewhat, after their adventures on the mist-haunted isle of Albion. Gotrek grunted and spat over the side. ‘But no one knows for sure. No one knows where Karak Zorn is, or was.’

  ‘I would have thought it would have been on a map, at least,’ Felix said. He’d wanted to bring up the absence of such since they’d left port, but Gotrek had never afforded him the opportunity until now. Even so, Felix hesitated.

  Gotrek craned his head to fix Felix with his good eye. ‘A map,’ he said. His tone was withering. ‘Why did I not think of that?’ The rail creaked in his grip. ‘My people are the greatest mapmakers in the world, manling. If there were a map to Karak Zorn, if there had ev
er been a map to the Great Southern Hold, do you not think that I would know of it?’ Wood splintered as his grip tightened.

  Felix looked away. ‘So how do you intend to find it, then?’ he said.

  Gotrek sucked on his teeth and stared out over the waves at the distant coastline. ‘I’ll know it when I see it,’ he said finally, grudgingly.

  ‘You’ll know it when you see it?’ Felix said. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘The jungle isn’t that big,’ Gotrek said simply.

  ‘Gotrek, the Southlands are not just “a jungle”. We’re not talking the Drakwald here,’ Felix protested. Gotrek didn’t look at him. He stared at the Slayer, and comprehension settled on him like an evening chill. ‘Gotrek, we can’t search every inch of the Southlands! It’d take us decades!’

  ‘We don’t have to search every inch of it, manling. Just the interior, close to where the Worlds Edge Mountains cut through the jungles,’ Gotrek said. ‘It’ll only take a few years, at most.’ He hesitated. ‘Or maybe ten.’ Then added, somewhat defensively, ‘It’s not my fault you humans have such short years.’

  Felix stared at the dwarf. Then he looked back at the coastline, now mostly obscured by the thick mist rising from the dark waters as evening drew on, with a sinking sensation in his gut. Ten years of sweltering jungle and insect-infested swamp. Ten years of dodging hungry not-quite dragons and whatever other horrors lurked in that deadly land. He dropped his face into his hands and groaned softly.

  ‘I should have just let the Emperor’s cavalry run me down,’ he muttered.

  Gotrek grunted. ‘This cursed mist is getting thicker,’ he said, ‘I’d swear it was elf trickery, if we weren’t already well past that blasted fortress of theirs.’

  Felix twitched. They’d only seen the Island of the Sun at a distance, through a curtain of fog and enchantments, but the sleek shapes of elven warships had been all too close, cutting across the mist-topped waves with a speed and grace that made even the greatest galleons of Marienburg look like bobbing corks. They had passed through elven waters unmolested, however. ‘If it weren’t for that blasted fortress, we’d likely have already been attacked by dark elf corsairs or pirates of some description,’ Felix said.