[Warhammer] - Oathbreaker

by Nick Kyme - (ebook by Undead)

  Chilling heat blazed up his arm and back. Gromrund shut his eyes against the pain, it taking all of the hammerer’s effort just to hold on. When he opened them again, he tried to gauge the distance to the ground — thirty, fifty feet, perhaps. If he dropped now he could survive. The decision was made for the hammerer when a great slab of stone sheared away from the shaft wall. Its jagged edge rammed the rope into the opposite side, cutting it loose. Gromrund fell and the hunk of rock fell after him.

  Pain seared up his right leg and something cracked as Gromrund struck the ground, spluttering as the gushing Black Water engulfed him. Underwater, his heavy armour anchoring him, the hammerer’s world grew dim and quiet. Sound, light and feeling seemed to lose all meaning as the icy deluge robbed him of his sense and bearings. Memory reached out to Gromrund from the past, the day when he had taken the warhelm of his clan to continue the Tallhelm legacy. Father…

  Krotnrund Tallhelm lay before him in a gilded sarcophagus carved from stone by the master masons of Karak Hirn. Ashen-faced and in repose, his lord and father was no more. Upon his breast there sat the mighty horned warhelm of the clan, a prestigious symbol of their lineage and the oaths they had made to serve King Kurgaz, founder of the Hornhold, as his bodyguards.

  As Gromrund reached out for the warhelm he felt himself being pulled away and the sound of distant voices rushing closer.

  Spitting and cursing, Gromrund emerged above the flood water, cascading readily into the underdeep.

  “Pull him clear!” he heard Thalgrim bellow and his body was heaved away again.

  Blinking back rivulets of water eking into his warhelm and down his face, he recoiled, landing hard on his rump, as a massive chunk of rock and debris crashed down onto the confluence of the crossroads. A few moments ago, he had been floundering in that very spot. Looking around, Gromrund noticed his companions were with him. Thalgrim and Hakem helped the armoured hammerer to his feet. Getting up, he saw that the flood water reached his lower torso.

  “We cannot stay here,” Thalgrim cried above the crashing din of the waterfall, wading frantically in the only direction left to them, the rock fall having demolished and blocked off the other three.

  Breathing heavily Ralkan slogged after the lodefinder, struggling in his drenched robes and dragging the book of remembering after him as if leading a lode pony. “Farther ahead,” he gasped, “I am sure there is a way upward.”

  With no time to question or verify it, the dwarfs drove on.

  Hakem and Gromrund laboured at the back — the two warriors wore the heaviest armour and were finding it hard going.

  “Can you walk?” Hakem asked of the hammerer, supporting him beneath the shoulder.

  “Aye,” Gromrund replied, but didn’t refuse the merchant thane’s help.

  “You are limping badly,” Hakem told him, feeling the hammerer’s laboured gait as the merchant thane bore his weight.

  “Aye,” was Gromrund’s reply.

  “If we survive, you may need a stick.”

  “There’ll be no stick. The hammerers of the Tallhelm clan walk on two legs, not three!” Gromrund raged as the pair struggled on.

  Wading through the rapidly rising swell, the dwarfs made pitiful progress. Barely fifty feet from the crossroads and the water was already up to their shoulders.

  Thalgrim gazed up at the lofty arches of the vaulted tunnel ceiling and realised they wouldn’t make it like this.

  “Remove your armour,” he cried to the others as a column behind them cracked and fell into the flood water, scattering debris. “We will have to swim for it.” The lodefinder unbuckled his mail vest and let it plummet into the river surrounding them.

  The other dwarfs followed suit, shrugging off chain-mail, unclasping breastplates and greaves, divesting themselves of leather hauberks and vambraces. They shed the armour clumsily but quickly. Each piece was an heirloom, the loss of which was felt profoundly, and discarded with an oath to one of the Ancestor Gods that reparations would be made.

  By the time it was done, the water had reached their chins.

  “Your warhelm,” said Thalgrim, “you must leave it behind — it will weigh you down.” Gromrund folded his arms.

  “The Tallhelm has never been removed in five generations of my clan, since before the Hornhold was founded. I will not break that tradition now.”

  “You will drown,” Hakem reasoned, now wearing only his tunic and breeches. “Leave it and come back to reclaim your honour.”

  “Upon my death you may prize it from my head,” the hammerer snarled, still fully armoured.

  The water rose again, up to the dwarfs’ shoulders and getting deeper with each moment.

  “Help me,” Hakem burbled, spitting mouthfuls of the Black Water as he tried to lift Gromrund. Thalgrim and Ralkan swam over to him, and hoisted the hammerer up from beneath his armpits.

  “Leave me,” he roared, his head popping above the turbulent waterline with their combined efforts.

  “Remove the warhelm!” Hakem begged him, staring the hammerer in the face as he said it.

  “Never!” Gromrund raged back before his snarling visage softened. “Go. Find your dooms and, if you’re able, tell my king that I fought and died with honour.”

  They could hold him no longer. The hammerer was like an anchor and dragged them all down with him.

  Hakem felt his fingers slipping and watched as Gromrund — the hammerer had his arms folded still — fell away into the gloomy water, bubbles trailing from beneath his warhelm. The merchant thane, swimming hard, broke the surface of the now swelling river and drew great gulps of air into his lungs.

  The current that surged through the underdeep was strong and carried the three dwarfs along by its will alone, smashing them into columns, plunging them beneath the water only for them to resurface desperately a moment later. Hakem was lost in it, lost in a maelstrom of spitting foam and churning water.

  “Here!” he heard Thalgrim cry. Seeing something in the water, he reached out and grabbed it.

  The lodefinder hauled him around the corner of a massive column, he and Ralkan crushed against it by the pressure of the flood. In his other hand he had his pick-mattock, lodged in the wall for grip. A brutal-looking gash was etched upon his forehead where it had been struck by a jutting stone.

  “The rock is weak, here,” Thalgrim shouted over the thrashing surf. “I can break through it.”

  “Where will it lead us?” Hakem replied, looking to Ralkan.

  The lorekeeper shook his head, just trying to hold on.

  Though they had only been carried by the water for a few minutes, they could have travelled a great distance. There was no way of knowing where they were now.

  “Does it matter?” cried the lodefinder. “This path will end in our deaths.”

  The water was getting steadily higher. There was only a few feet left before it engulfed the tunnel completely.

  Hakem nodded.

  “Hold on,” Thalgrim said and ripped his pick free. Using the column for support, he smashed the weapon, two-handed, into the bare rock. The wall crumbled and an opening was made wide enough for the dwarfs to pass through. Thalgrim went first, diving into the unknown, then Ralkan and finally Hakem.

  First there was darkness then the sense of falling as the merchant thane struck the ground hard. He was rolling and skidding on his backside down a long and narrow tunnel, an undercurrent of rapidly rushing water beneath carrying him. So black were Hakem’s surroundings and so disorientated was he, that all he could discern was that he was going down; down into the darkest depths of the hold.

  “Is there no other way,” Uthor cried, over the din of the thunderous skaven pumping engine.

  “Rhun-seals are wrought by rhunki using rhun magic, as are the keys that unlock them. It is far beyond my skill. Without such a key we cannot release the bar and as long as the bar is engaged the Barduraz Varn will not open.”

  As if to mock them, the echoing report of the wyvern-horn rang loudly thr
ough the chamber.

  “We must release the Black Water now,” Uthor raged. “In this deed at least, I will succeed.”

  “We cannot,” Rorek told him. “Besides the rhun-key, there is no other way.”

  “Grimnir’s hairy arse!” Uthor slumped down on his backside, Ulfgan’s axe in his lap. “The lorekeeper mentioned nothing of this. If we survive, I will personally see to it that his beard is shorn.” He gripped the haft of his axe as he thought about the retribution he would visit upon Ralkan. Regarding the glinting blade, the runes glowing faintly as he held the weapon in his grasp, something dawned on him.

  “These rhun-keys,” said Uthor suddenly, getting to his feet. “Who would bear such a thing?”

  Rorek stared back at him, slightly dumbfounded. “What does it matter?”

  “Who would bear it? Answer me!”

  “The rhunki that made it, of course,” Rorek blathered, unsure as to the reason for Uthor’s sudden, urgent behaviour.

  “Who else?” The thane of Kadrin was delving beneath his chainmail shirt.

  “The king,” Rorek finished. “The king of the hold.”

  “Do you remember the King’s Chamber?” Uthor asked the engineer.

  “Of course, you bear noble Lord Ulfgan’s axe to this day.”

  “Yes, I do. But the axe was not all we salvaged from his private rooms.”

  Realisation dawned on Rorek’s face.

  Emelda stood watching the entire display nonplussed.

  “The talisman,” said the engineer.

  Uthor found it beneath his armour, where he’d put it for safe keeping after fleeing the hold, and held it aloft.

  Ulfgan’s talisman — it bore the rune marking of the royal clan etched around the edge and in the centre was the badge of his ancestor, Hraddi. Flickering brazier light shone through two square holes in the eyes and a third in the mouth. Without looking, Uthor knew they would fit the mechanism perfectly. They had their key.

  Uthor placed the arcane device into the recess in the wall, fixing the three holes in position over the iron studs. It clamped into place with a dull, metallic “thunk”.

  “Turn it,” said Rorek, standing just behind him and looking over the thane of Kadrin’s shoulder. Emelda waited next to the engineer, silently apprehensive.

  Uthor did as Rorek told him and turned the rune key once. Beyond the wall, he heard the sonorous retort of a hidden mechanism at work. Screeching metal filled the chamber, smothering even the sound of the chugging engine, as the mighty locking bar disengaged spitting out dust and stone chips. Hinged at one end, the huge bar split into two from a previously imperceptible join and fell away to clang thunderously into a thick bronze clamp on either side of the Barduraz Varn.

  Moving away from the alcove, Uthor took his place at the huge wheel crank in the centre of the stone platform. His companions followed him, and together they turned the massive device that set yet more hidden feats of engineering in motion.

  From below, a sudden onrush of water could be heard as the Barduraz Varn rose magnificently. Hauled up by a raft of iron chains, the great gate ascended vertically in slow and juddering increments, feeding gradually into a long and deep recess set into the chamber roof way above where the dwarfs stood on the stairway. Pushed past the point of no return, the gate would keep opening, its momentum as inexorable as the flood waters crashing through it, until it was fully released.

  From their vantage point on the stone platform, Uthor gazed across the gradually deepening reservoir to another set of stone steps on the opposite side of the vast chamber. They led up to a thick, wooden door. With the destruction of Rorek’s diving helm the way back was shut; this might be their only possible escape route.

  “Head for that portal,” he cried, starting down the stone steps. “Make haste,” he called back, “the chamber will soon be flooded.”

  The dwarfs negotiated the stairs quickly, slowing only slightly when they edged past the still whirring wheel. When they reached the bottom, the crude struts of the pumping engine were beginning to buckle under the sustained battering of the emerging Black Water. Several of the observation platforms had already been felled and swirled in the growing reservoir amongst the rotting debris of rat-kin corpses.

  Slogging back across the carcass-ridden lagoon, making the most of the few islands of rock that had yet to be submerged, the dwarfs finally reached the second stairway, plunging waist deep into the water to get to it. Tramping up the stone steps was a great relief and once they had gained the upper platform and the threshold to the portal, they looked back.

  The Barduraz Varn was a third of the way open and with smashing force the inundation unleashed by it crushed the pumping engine utterly. Rat-kin slaves mouthed silent screams as they were pummelled into the thrashing depths, together with their wheeled prisons that collapsed and split against the swelling water. Like a fallen standard conceding defeat, the metal prongs at the zenith of the engine were the last to crumble. Arcs of lightning flared defiantly as a massive wave engulfed the tower and it was dragged into the depths. Flashes, stark and diffuse, raged for a moment and were still as if the infernal engine had never existed.

  Having seen enough, Uthor turned away and made for the wooden door.

  Hakem was flat on his back, his clothes sodden and torn. Dazed, he got to his feet absently feeling a fat bruise bulging on his head. Darkness surrounded the merchant thane and an old, stagnant stench wafted over to him on a warm and shallow breeze.

  “Thalgrim,” he hissed, crouching down and scrambling around for his borrowed axe. It was nowhere to be found. Patting down his body, he realised he still had his beard-irons. Hakem looked at them for a long moment then unhitched the irons from his belt and dropped them to the ground.

  “Here,” came the whispered reply of the lodefinder, close by.

  “Lorekeeper,” Hakem called quietly again, detecting Thalgrim’s vague outline just ahead.

  “Am I dead, yet?” Ralkan answered.

  Eyes adjusting to the gloom, Hakem made out the prone form of the lorekeeper, flat on his back and languishing beneath a faintly trickling waterfall that fed into a thin, downward wending stream. It seemed the rushing waters had been diverted at some point during their descent. Hakem wasn’t about to question it.

  “You’re not dead,” he said, standing next to the exhausted lorekeeper. “Now, get up,” he added, helping Ralkan to his feet.

  Thalgrim joined them. Incredibly he still carried his pick though, try as he might, he couldn’t light the clutch of candles gripped in his meaty fist.

  “Water-logged,” the lodefinder explained unnecessarily.

  Hakem ignored him. These were the lowest deeps, that much he was certain, and as a thane and bearer of the longest beard it was his duty to get them through it and somehow out of Karak Varn.

  “What is this place?” he asked Ralkan.

  The lorekeeper rubbed the water from his eyes and wrung out his beard, before peering intently at the surrounding gloom.

  “We are at the lowest part of the underdeep,” he murmured, picking out age-worn runes and sigils carved into keystones.

  The tunnel was wide but low. The three dwarfs were gathered where it flattened out to a level plain. Just beyond it the tunnel fell downward in a gradual slope. Other than that, the only other way was back up, over the lip of stone from which the dwarfs had been disgorged and a long, hard climb through the rapids.

  “Is there a way out from here?”

  Ralkan scratched his head and fell silent. It wasn’t a good sign.

  “I don’t remember this place,” he admitted. “I do not think I have ever been here… Yet…”

  “Yet?”

  “There is something familiar,” he said. “This way,” the lorekeeper decided finally as he headed down the slope.

  It felt like they’d been wandering the tunnels for an hour, though Ralkan could not be sure — his judgement of the passage of time had been irrevocably damaged during his period of hidd
en isolation in the hold.

  With each step that carried him further into the lower reaches of the underdeep a strange disquiet gnawed at him. Smothering it to the back of his mind for now, the lorekeeper led them on until they reached another crossroads.

  The Barak Varr dwarf said something — Hakem, that was his name — Ralkan didn’t hear what it was. His head was hurting. Nothing looked right.

  East, he thought suddenly. East — that feels right, and took the left fork.

  About halfway down the tunnel, the lorekeeper thought he heard something— faint, but it was definitely there. Vile squeaking drifted over to Ralkan on the weak breeze. Fifty years in the dark. Squeaking and scratching. Squeaking and scratching.

  No — it wasn’t right. Something boiled up inside the lorekeeper, something he’d buried. It slid, leaden in his gut, and icily up his spine until it dried his tongue to sand. Ralkan turned on his heel and fled.

  “Skaven,” Ralkan hissed as he rushed passed Hakem.

  The Barak Varr dwarf looked ahead down the tunnel. His heart caught in his mouth when he saw the skulking shadows against the wall, stretching towards him.

  Then came the squeaking, chittering sound of the rat-kin as the horde grew ever closer. Judging by the terrible cacophony, there must have been hundreds. Hakem’s first thought was the flood waters might not reach them here; his second was he couldn’t fight them and live. He gave chase after the lorekeeper with all haste, urging Thalgrim, who was dawdling in the tunnel, to follow him. The lodefinder was not far behind as Hakem fled by the crossroads and went after Ralkan, straight down the western fork.