His legs were longer.”

“Where’s Gant?” Felix asked.

“Look for yourself, manling.”

Felix squeezed past and went to do so. The gas had vanished as quickly as it appeared. But it had done its work on Sergeant Gant. He lay in a pool of blood. His eyes were wide and staring. Trickles of red emerged from his nostrils and mouth.

Felix checked the body. It was already cooling and there was no pulse. There was no wound on the corpse.

“How did he die, Gotrek?” Felix knew about magic but the fact that a man could be killed and have no mark left on him made his mind reel.

“He drowned, manling. He drowned in his own blood.” The Slayer’s voice was cold and furious.

Was that how he dealt with fear, Felix wondered? By turning it into anger. Only after the dwarf went over and started kicking the corpse did he notice the dead skaven. Its skull had been split by the thrown hatchet.


Wearily Felix lay on his pallet of straw and stared at the cracked ceiling, too tired even to sleep. From below came the sound of shouting as Lisabette argued with one of her seemingly interminable stream of customers.

Felix felt like banging on the floor and telling them to either shut up or get out, but he knew that it would only cause more trouble than it would solve. As he did every night, he resolved that he would begin looking for another rooming house tomorrow. He knew that tomorrow night he would be too tired to start.

Ideas chased each other like frolicking rats inside the cavern of his brain. He was at that stage where weariness made his thoughts strange even to himself. Odd conjunctions of images and maze-like chains of reasoning came from nowhere and went nowhere in his mind. He was too tired even to be angry about the fate of Sergeant Gant, killed in the line of duty and destined for a pauper’s grave on the fringes of the Gardens of Morr. A watch captain too bored to pay much attention to reports of monsters in the sewers. No family to mourn him, no friends save his fellow sewerjacks, who were even now toasting his memory in the Drunken Guardsman.

Gant was a cold corpse now. And the same thing could so easily have happened to me, Felix thought. If he had been in the wrong place when the globe exploded. If Gotrek had not told us to hold our breath. If the Slayer had not pushed him away from the gas. If. If. If. So many ifs.

What was he doing, anyway? Was this how he intended to spend the rest of his days; chasing monsters in the dark? His life seemed to have no reason to it any more. It merely moved from one violent episode to the next.

He thought of the alternatives. Where would he have been now if he had not killed Wolfgang Krassner in that duel, if he had not been expelled from university, if he had not been disinherited by his father? Would he be, like his brothers, working in the family business: married, secure, settled? Or would something else have gone wrong? Who could tell?

A small black rat scuttled across the rafters of the room. When he had first viewed this attic with its one small window, he had imagined that it would at least be free from the rats which infested all of the buildings in the New Quarter.