Felix peered at the Slayer in the gloom of the merchant ship's cramped forward cabin. The thick-muscled dwarf sat on a bench, his flame-bearded chin sunk to his chest, an immense stein of ale in one massive fist, and a broached half-keg at his side. The only illumination came from a small porthole — a rippling, sea-sick-green reflection from the waves outside.

"But they've blockaded Barak Van," said Felix. "We won't be able to dock. You want to get to Barak Varr, don't you? You want to walk on dry land again?" Felix wanted to dock, that was for certain. Two months in this seagoing coffin where even the dwarf had to duck his head below decks had driven him stir-crazy.

"I don't know what I want," rumbled Gotrek, "except another drink."

He took another drink.

Felix scowled. "Fair enough. If I live, I will write in the grand epic poem of your death that you drowned heroically below decks, drunk as a halfling on harvest day, while your comrades fought and died above you."

Gotrek slowly raised his head and fixed Felix with his single glittering eye. After a long moment where Felix thought the Slayer might leap across the cabin and rip his throat out with his bare hands, Gotrek grunted. "You've a way with words, manling."

He put down his stein and picked up his axe.

Barak Varr was a dwarf port built inside a towering cliff at the easternmost end of the Black Gulf, a curving talon of water that cut deeply into the lawless badlands south of the Black Mountains and the Empire. Both the harbour and the city were tucked into a cave so high that the tallest warship could sail under its roof and dock at its teeming wharves. The entrance was flanked by fifty-foot statues of dwarf warriors standing in massive stone ship prows. A squat, sturdy lighthouse sat at the end of a stone spit to their right, the flame of which, it was said, could be seen for twenty leagues.

Felix could see almost none of this architectural wonder, however, for a boat-borne horde of orcs floated between him and Barak Varr's wide, shadowed entrance, and a thicket of patched sails, masts, crude banners and strung-up corpses blocked his view. The line looked impenetrable, a floating barricade of captured and lashed-together warships, merchantmen, rafts, barges and galleys that stretched for nearly a mile in a curving arc before the port. Smoke from cooking fires rose from many of the decks, and the water around them bobbed with bloated corpses and floating garbage.

"You see?" said Captain Doucette, an extravagantly moustachioed Bretonnian trader from whom Gotrek and Felix had caught a ride in Tilea. "Look like they build from every prize and warship that try to pass; and I must land. I have to sell a hold full of Ind spices here, and pick up dwarf steel for Bretonnia. If no, the trip will make a loss."

"Is there some place you can break through?" asked Felix, his long blond hair and his red Sudenland cloak whipping about in the blustery summer wind. "Will the ship take it?"

"Oh, oui," said Doucette. "She is strong, the Reine Celeste. We fight off many pirates, smash little boats in our way. Trading is not easy life, no? But... orcs?"

"Don't worry about the orcs," said Gotrek.

Doucette turned and looked Gotrek from bristling crimson crest, to leather eye-patch, to sturdy boots and back again. "Forgive me, my friend. I do not doubt you are very formidable. The arms like trunks of the trees, yes? The chest like the bull, but you are only one man — er, dwarf."

"One Slayer," growled Gotrek. "Now fill your sails and get on. I've a keg to finish."

Doucette cast a pleading look at Felix.

Felix shrugged. "I've followed him through worse."

"Captain!" a lookout called from the crow's-nest. "More ships behind us!"

Doucette, Gotrek and Felix turned and looked over the stern rail. Two small cutters and a Tilean warship were angling out of a small cove and racing towards them, sails fat with wind. All the fancy woodwork had been stripped from them, replaced with rams, catapults and trebuchets. The head of the beautiful, bare-breasted figurehead on the warship's prow had been replaced with a troll's skull, and rotting corpses dangled by their necks from its bowsprit. Orcs stood along the rail, bellowing guttural war cries. Goblins capered and screeched all around them.

Doucette hissed through his teeth. "They make the trap, no? Pinch like the crayfish. Now we have no choice." He turned and scanned the floating barrier, and then pointed, shouting to his pilot. "Two points starboard, Luque. At the rafts! Feruzzi! Clap on all sail!"

Felix followed Doucette's gaze as the steersman turned the wheel and the mate sent the waisters up the shrouds to unfurl more canvas. Four ramshackle rafts, piled with looted barrels and crates, were lashed loosely together between a battered Empire man-o'-war and a half-charred Estalian galley. Both of the ships were alive with orcs and goblins, hooting and waving their weapons at Doucette's trader.

The merchantman's sails cracked like pistols as they filled with wind, and it picked up speed.

"Battle stations!" called Doucette. "Prepare to receive boarders! `Ware the grapnels!"

Greenskins large and small were pouring over the sides of the man-o'-war and the galley, and running across the rafts towards the point where the merchantman meant to break through. True to the captain's warning half of them swung hooks and grapnels above their heads.

Felix looked back. The cutters and the warship were gaining. If the merchantman made it through the blockade it might outrun the pursuers, but if it were caught...

"By the Lady, no!" gasped Doucette suddenly.

Felix turned. All along the raft-bound man-o'-war, black cannon muzzles were pushing out of square-cut ports.

"We will be blown to pieces," said Doucette.

"But... but they're orcs," said Felix. "Orcs can't aim to save their lives."

Doucette shrugged. "At such a range, do they need to aim?"

Felix looked around, desperate. "Well, can you blow them up? Shoot them before they shoot us?"

"You joke, mon ami," laughed Doucette. He pointed to the few catapults that were the merchantman's only artillery. "These will do little against Empire oak."

They were rapidly approaching the blockade. It was too late to attempt to turn aside. Felix could smell the greenskins, a filthy animal smell, mixed with the stink of garbage, offal and death. He could see the earrings glinting in their tattered ears and make out the crude insignia painted on their shields and ragged armour.

"Throw me at it," said Gotrek.

Felix and Doucette looked at him. The dwarf had a mad gleam in his eye.

"What?" asked Doucette. "Throw you?"

"Put me in one of your rock lobbers and cut the cord. I'll deal with these floating filth."

"You... you want me to catapult you?" asked Doucette, incredulous. "Like the bomb?"

"The grobi do it. Anything a goblin can do, a dwarf can do, better."

"But, Gotrek, you might..." said Felix.

Gotrek raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Er, nothing, never mind." Felix had been about to say that Gotrek might get himself killed, but that was, after all, the point, wasn't it?

Gotrek crossed to one of the catapults and climbed onto the bucket. He looked like a particularly ugly bulldog sitting on a serving ladle. "Just make sure you put me over the rail, not into the side."

"We will try, master dwarf," said the chief of the catapult's crew. "Er, you will not kill us if you die?"

"I'll kill you if you don't start shooting!" growled Gotrek. "Fire!"

"Oui, oui."

The crew angled the gun around, huffing at Gotrek's extra weight, until it faced the man-o'-war, and then cranked the firing arm a little tighter.

"Hold onto your axe, master dwarf," said the crew chief.

"Perhaps a helmet," said Felix. "Or a..."

The crew chief dropped his hand. "Fire!"

A crewman pulled a lever and the catapult's arm shot up and out. Gotrek flew through the air in a long high arc, straight for the man-o'-war, bellowing a bull-throated battle cry.

Felix stared blankly as Gotrek flattened against the patched canvas of the man-o'-war's mainsail and slid down to the deck into a seething swarm of orcs. "The real question," he said to no one in particular, "is how I'm going to make it all rhyme."

He and the catapult's crew craned their necks, trying to find Gotrek in the chaos, but all they could see was a swirl of hulking green bodies and the rise and fall of enormous black-iron cleavers. At least they're not stopping, Felix thought. If they were still fighting, then Gotrek was still alive.

Then the orcs stopped fighting, and instead began running to and fro.

"Is he...?" asked Doucette.

"I don't know," said Felix, biting his lip. After all the dragons, daemons and trolls Gotrek had fought, would he really die facing mere orcs?

The lookout's voice boomed down from above. "Impact coming!"

With a jarring crunch, the merchantman crashed into the line of rafts, smashing timber, snapping cord, and sending barrels and crates and over-enthusiastic orcs flying into the cold, choppy water. The side of the man-o'-war rose like a castle wall directly to their right, her cannon ports level with Doucette's deck.

Grapnels whistled through the air to the left and right, and Felix ducked just in time to miss getting hooked through the shoulder. They bit into the rail and the deck and the sails, their ropes thrumming tight as the ship continued forwards. The Reine Celeste's crew chopped at them with hatchets and cutlasses, but two more caught for each one they cut.

A thunderous boom went off in Felix's right ear, and one of the man-o'-war's cannon, not fifteen feet away, was obscured in white smoke. A cannonball whooshed by at head level and parted a ratline.

Felix swallowed. It looked like Gotrek had failed.

"Boarders!" came Doucette's voice.

The merchant ship had broken through the orc line and was inside the blockade, but was slowing sharply, towing the grapnel-hooked rafts and the rest of the ships with it. The man-o'-war was turning as it was pulled, and its guns remained trained on Doucette's ship as waves of roaring green monsters climbed up the lines and the sides and clambered over the rail. Felix drew his dragon-hilted sword and joined the others as they raced to hold them off — men of every colour and land stabbing, hacking and shooting at the age-old enemy of humanity — Tileans in stocking caps and baggy trousers, Bretonnians in striped pantaloons, men of Araby, Ind and further places, all fighting with the crazed desperation of fear.

There was no retreat, and surrender meant an orc stew-pot. Felix sidestepped a cleaver-blow that would have halved him had it connected, and ran his towering opponent through the neck. Two goblins attacked his flanks. He killed one and kicked the other back. Another orc surged up in front of him.

Felix was no longer the willowy young poet he had been when, during a night of drunken camaraderie, he had pledged to record Gotrek's doom in an epic poem. Decades of fighting at the Slayer's side had hardened him and filled him out, and made a seasoned swordsman of him. Even so, he was no match — physically at least — for the seven-foot monster he faced. The beast was more than twice his weight, with arms thicker than Felix's legs, and an underslung jaw from which jutted up cracked tusks. It stank like the back end of a Pig-Its mad red eyes blazed with fury as it roared and swung a black iron cleaver. Felix ducked and slashed back, but the orc was quick, and knocked his sword aside. There was another boom and a cannonball punched through the rail ten feet to Felix's left, cutting a swath through the melee that killed both merchants and orcs alike. Red blood and black mixed on the slippery deck. Felix deflected a swipe from the orc that shivered his arm to the shoulder. The catapult's crew chief fell back in two pieces beside him.

Another series of booms rocked the ship, and Felix thought the orcs had somehow got off a disciplined salvo. He glanced past his orc to the man-o'-war. Smoke poured from the cannon ports but, strangely, no cannonballs. The orc slashed at him. Felix hopped back and tripped over the crew chiefs torso. He landed flat on his back in a puddle of blood.

The orc guffawed and raised his cleaver over his head.

With a massive ka-rump the man-o'-war exploded into a billowing ball of flame, bits of timber and rope and orc parts spinning past. The fighters on the deck of the merchantman were blown off their feet by a hammer of air. Felix felt as if his eardrums had been stabbed with spikes. The orc above him staggered and looked down at his chest, surprised. A cannon's cleaning rod was sticking out from between his ribs, the bristly head dripping with gore. It toppled forwards.

Felix rolled out of the way and sprang to his feet, looking towards the flame-enveloped man-o'-war. So Gotrek had done it after all. But at what cost? Surely there was no way the dwarf could have survived?

Out of the boiling fireball toppled the man-o'-war's mainmast, crashing towards the merchantman's deck like a felled tree — and racing out across it, half climbing, half running, was a broad, compact figure, face and skin as black as iron, red crest and beard smouldering and singed. The top of the mast smashed down through the merchantman's rail and pulverised a knot of goblins that was just climbing over. With a wild roar, Gotrek leapt from this makeshift bridge into the merchantman's waist, right in the middle of the crowd of orcs that was pushing Doucette's crew back towards the sterncastle with heavy losses.

The Slayer spun as he landed, axe outstretched, and a dozen orcs and goblins went down at once, spines and legs and necks severed. Their companions turned to face him, and seven more went down. Heartened, the merchant crew pressed forwards, attacking the confused orcs. Unfortunately, more were running across the rafts, and the merchantman was still caught in a net of grapnels, and pinned in place by the fallen mast.

Felix leapt the forecastle rail, yelling to Doucette as he plunged into the circle of orcs and goblins towards Gotrek. "Cut the lines and clear the mast! Forget the orcs!"

Doucette hesitated, then nodded. He screamed at his crew in four languages and they fell back, chopping at the remaining ropes and heaving together to push the man-o'-war's mast off their starboard rail, while the greenskins pressed in to take down the crazed Slayer.

Felix took up his accustomed position, behind, and slightly to the left of Gotrek, just far enough away to be clear of the sweep of his axe, but close enough to protect his back and flanks.

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