Gotrek & Felix: Slayer Read Online Free PDF Page B

around the ivory-white scales of his armour. His face was smeared with blood and bore an expression of concern that swiftly disappeared when he noticed that Felix was awake.
    ‘What happened?’ said Felix.
    ‘We returned to Altdorf, don’t you remember?’ said Gustav. ‘Cheering crowds lined the Konigplatz waving flags and shouting your name. Castle Reikguard fired a twenty-one gun salute to honour its hero’s return and a company of Bretonnian pegasus knights performed an aerial display in your honour. Emperor Karl Franz of course named you Elector of Ostermark then and there which was met with rapturous approval by all, and then we retired to the Rose and Thorn for ale and pastries. Unfortunately that was when your dwarf challenged the Emperor and Ludwig Schwarzhelm to a head-butting contest, after which things got messy. That’s probably why your head hurts.’
    He wished it was just his head. ‘This isn’t funny.’
    ‘No, I suppose not.’ Gustav took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. He looked down at Felix’s still-recumbent form. ‘But duelling with a Chaos champion and his entire retinue for a good half a minute before Kolya and I pulled you out didn’t do your reputation any harm. Personally, I think you have as good a call on the Ostermark runefang as anybody else right now.’
    Felix growled inwardly. If he’d had it up to his neck with men who should know better referring to him as ‘my lord’, then he was fed up to the eyeballs of the outlandish stories of his personal heroism in the face of evil.
    Yes, he had helped Gotrek hold the ford at Choika against that beastman herd while the army had crossed, but the Slayer had done the bulk of the fighting. What Felix most recalled of that day was the chill he had come down with afterwards. And yes, granted, he had personally defeated and slain the mutant ogre that had rampaged into their camp from the oblast, but the creature had been half mad from drinking the warpstone-contaminated waterways of Kislev and had been practically dead already, not that anyone seemed to want to hear that.
    In response to Felix’s early enquiries into the source of those tales, Gustav had impishly suggested that they might all have read Felix’s book.
    ‘Are you getting up, then, or not?’ said Gustav, fingering the businesslike grip of his long Gospodar sabre and giving the twin puncture-scars on the side of his neck a habitual scratch. ‘More than enough beastmen got away to cause us trouble if they decide to come back, and their champion wasn’t in as bad a shape as you’d think, considering.’
    Felix stiffened and tried to rise, only for a lance of molten agony to shoot up through his legs. He bit down on the urge to scream. Muscle cramp, that was all, although all seemed a little trite given the pain it was causing him just now. What had become of the days when he could get through a fight like the one just gone and be ready for more by the afternoon? Now it felt as though his tendons had been stiffened with steel pins and he doubted whether he could lift his sword if a dragon were to burst from the forest. He let his efforts out in a gasp of breath and slapped his thigh.
    ‘Help me.’
    Uttering some choice phrases from the lexicon of Altdorf’s docks, Gustav dropped to his haunches to scoop up one of Felix’s feet and then, holding the leg straight, pushed it back over Felix’s body and leaned his weight against it. Felix gasped at the sudden spike of pain, but it subsided almost immediately. He felt stiff ligaments stretch and loosen and almost moaned aloud with relief.
    ‘Do you seriously still intend to try and re-enlist when we get back to Altdorf?’ said Gustav.
    ‘They’d have to throw me into the Reiksfang to stop me.’
    Then Gustav switched legs, pushing down until Felix’s vision broke out in spots. Nightmare visions of his home aflame and presided over by pustulent daemons shattered in his mind as some cartilaginous blockage in his