Gotrek & Felix: Slayer Read Online Free PDF

gurgling in its own degradation and pleasure. It appeared for a minute and then it was gone, and the house returned to the darkness that had possessed it before.
    His mother embraced him warmly and despite his unease Felix returned the gesture as though he had not seen her in decades rather than the few short months it must have been. She kissed him on the cheek, then pulled back and rubbed the mark her lips had made on his skin with her thumb. She regarded him with a sad smile, deepening the crows’ feet around her eyes. Her blonde hair had been largely banished to lie amongst the grey and tied behind her head in a bun. Felix recognised in her his own blue eyes, his strong jaw. It was odd that he hadn’t noticed it before she… before what? He couldn’t remember. He was struck by how frail she looked.
    ‘ Renata ,’ intoned a voice from the house that Felix both did and did not recognise. It reminded him somewhat of his father’s, but it terrified him in a way that the old man never had. It was as deep as black and solemn as death. ‘ Leave the boy alone and return to me. You should not be out there alone .’
    ‘Is… everything all right?’ Felix asked. He heard a thump as of a footstep from the driveway. The maples had drawn closer. Their branches swayed in the breeze, or at least Felix thought they were branches; every so often they appeared to be writhing human limbs, blistered with boils and wet with blood and pus. The shadows pulled tighter. He backed away. ‘You do look unwell, mother. Perhaps I should take you to the–’ a vision of a too-young woman lying still on a bed beneath symbols of doves and bleeding hearts filled his mind ‘–Shallyan temple.’
    His mother sighed. ‘It is too late for that, Felix. The master still has need of me, and it is best not to defy him when he is in so dark a mood.’
    Now what was it about that particular choice of words that troubled him?
    As Felix backed away, the iron gateposts appeared to grow, bending in at the tips to seal his mother under a huge black arch. Shadows flowed in from the driveway to fill in the outline of the arch. A likeness shivered across its form, recognisably human yet hideously vague. The trees reached their branches over the walls of his father’s estate, twisting around the shadow-figure to form curving horns that extended from its daemonic head and what appeared to be wings that opened out from its back.
    His mother was still visible within the moulded darkness, but contact with this figure seemed to have affected her for her appearance stuttered. At times she appeared as a tall man, garbed in flowing white robes and standing with the aid of a snake-headed staff. At others, and sometimes in the same glance, she was an Ungol wise woman, shrouded in glittering black silk with moonlight-white hair spilling from her raised hood.
    ‘You’re… not my mother,’ Felix replied. ‘She died.’
    ‘Everybody dies, Felix,’ the apparition answered. ‘Even me. And I suspect you as well, although your fate lies shrouded in a place where even my eyes cannot see.’
    Felix held out his hand for her, glancing over his shoulder for the companion that he knew should be there but wasn’t. The darkness echoed his terror with laughter.
    ‘ Everybody dies… ’
    Rain splotched Felix’s eyelids. He grunted, his familiar old body welcoming him back to a world of pain. The hum of flies filled his ears. The monotonous chop of broken wagons being reduced to portable chunks reverberated between bare rock and the encircling trees. The taste of fresh rain lay between his lips. The ground under his back was uneven and disturbingly human in its contours. Under a fusillade of cracks, pops, and coloured stars on the backs of his eyelids he shifted position. A leather-encased arm rolled out from beneath him. Felix felt queasy. It was some way from being his preferred course of action, but he opened his eyes. Gustav gummed into focus. The rain made a faint halo