The Curse of the Phoenix Crown

by C. L. Werner

  Brynnoth turned his eyes landwards, looking out over the scorched fields and blackened pastures where the dwarfs had grown their crops and herds. ‘Drakk did that, two of them working together. Just like Kazad Thar.’

  Standing beside his king, High Thane Onkmarr clenched his fists in impotent rage. ‘Since we brought the bolt throwers up onto the Durazon, the filthy wyrms have kept their distance. They’re eager enough to fight for the thagging elgi, but they aren’t so keen about dying for them.’

  ‘The elgi have other jobs for their monsters,’ Brynnoth growled. ‘The wyrms have already driven off armies from Karak Eight Peaks and Karak Hirn. The elgi are spread thin on the shore – if either of those armies had been able to make it through the passes, they could have pushed the vermin back into the Black Gulf.’

  ‘King Varnuf and King Valarik should have coordinated their forces,’ Onkmarr grumbled. ‘Then at least one of them might have got through. If the elgi could be driven from one side of the gulf then it would open a line of supply. As it stands, even the settlements the elgi haven’t burned can’t do anything to help us.’

  King Brynnoth shook his head. From the top of the Durazon, he’d been able to watch what had befallen those armies. The dragons waited until they were in the narrow mountain passes and then swept down upon them. Boxed into the canyons, with nowhere to escape the dragon fire, the slaughter had been terrible. Both armies had withdrawn when it became clear they couldn’t force their way past the dragons and still have enough strength to do the besieged hold any good.

  ‘If we can force the elgi out of the tunnels, we can be re­inforced through the Ungdrin Ankor,’ King Brynnoth declared, casting his eyes downwards, as though peering through the rock to the deeps far below.

  Onkmarr frowned. ‘The elgi know it too. That’s where they’ve been clever. They’re thin around the gulf, but they’ve deployed in strength down in the tunnels. So far no relief force has been able to endure the gauntlet of elgi arrows and sorcery waiting for them.’ The High Thane pulled at his beard, tugging a few strands away in his fury. ‘Worse, the scum are starting to threaten the lower deeps of Barak Varr itself. If we have to confront a simultaneous invasion outside the walls and from right beneath us…’

  ‘It will be a recipe for disaster,’ Brynnoth affirmed. The king scratched at the hollow of his missing eye, wondering if some of his detractors weren’t right. They claimed that his reckless embracing of unproved inventions had drawn the attention of the elves. If he’d never allowed Heglan Copperfist to build his deranged skryzan-harbark and send them to confront the elgi drakk, it was doubtful the asur would have shown such interest in the sea hold. They hadn’t after the destruction of Feillas and Oeragor. It was the skryzan-harbark that had brought them down about Barak Varr’s gates.

  Briefly, Brynnoth imagined how different the situation would be if he had Heglan’s airships to send against the elgi. That, of course, was impossible. The dramatic death of the engineer and the obliteration of his workshop had proven the stance Guildmaster Strombak and many of the other engineers had taken. The technology was too dangerous and unpredictable to pursue, more of a threat to those who used it than the enemy they would destroy.

  What a vision it had been though! Driving the elves back into the sea, casting them out of dwarf lands forever. Seeing their drakk brought low, their carcasses burning at the feet of the mountains. Brynnoth would have been the great hero of the Karaz Ankor, his name more revered than that of the High King himself.

  Shattered dreams now. Nothing more. His vision had ended in tragedy, and worse, it had brought the full fury of the war upon Brynnoth’s head. The king reached up with a trembling hand and pulled the crown from his head. Through his glazed eye he stared at the golden circlet. Never in his four hundred years had the weight of his crown felt so heavy upon his head.

  From the tunnels beneath one of the dwarf citadels lining the Black Gulf, Lord Caerwal’s forces rushed into the deeps beneath Barak Varr. Mopping up the handful of survivors left by the merwyrms in the citadel had been pitifully easy, but now the elves were finding themselves fighting for every twist and turn in the tunnels. Hundreds of asur lay dead in the passages behind them, the only consolation lying in the hundreds of dwarfs who’d fallen with them.

  Yet another corridor and Liandra found herself beset by a fresh surge of dawi warriors. Her blade descended upon the first dwarf to close with her in a flash of crimson and a welter of gore. The bearded warrior collapsed, a warhammer rolling free from his now slackened grip. He clutched blindly for her, trying to drag her down, immobilise her so that his comrades might make short work of her. Grimly, she thrust the point of her sword into the dwarf’s throat and ended his struggles.

  Even as she rose from the cooling corpse, more of the dawi were rushing down the tunnel, their fierce war-cries ringing across the passage like a giant’s bellow. Hammer and axe, pick and sword, the dwarfs threw themselves into the assault. If they faltered, they would withdraw a short distance behind a screen of crossbows protected by tall shields of bronze. With the crossbows to cover them, the dawi fighters would regroup and return to the attack with the wilful stubbornness that characterised their race.

  It had become a test of endurance to force the dwarfs back. With each assault Liandra saw scores of the warriors around her brought down. Young seafarers from Eataine, hardened veterans from Chrace, a wispy swordsman who’d been born in Sith Rionnasc barely a century ago. It was all such a waste. Everything these elves might have been, all the things they might have done, all the lives they could have touched, all of it snuffed out hundreds of feet beneath the surface in the black depths of the world, their lifeblood seeping away to stain the floor of a dwarf burrow.

  Liandra could suffer no more of this. Taxed and diminished as her magic had become, she couldn’t allow this pointless carnage to go on. She had the power to end it, though it would leave her drained and wasted for hours, perhaps even days.

  The cry of an elf swordswoman as her arm was lopped off by a dawi axe removed Liandra’s last tinge of restraint. ‘Defend me a moment,’ she told a pair of mail-clad warriors. One look at the mage and they leapt to carry out her order with a ferocity that nearly surpassed that of the dwarfs themselves. Liandra saw one bearded warrior stagger back, his throat opened by a flashing sword. Another collapsed in a gory heap as blood bubbled up from beneath his rent armour.

  Then there was no time for thought or consideration of the battle raging around her. Closing her eyes fast, Liandra pulled at the aethyric harmonies, the intangible energies writhing through the air around her. Here, deep within the earth, in the very roots of Barak Varr, the vibrations had a strangely rigid quality about them, as though a wide stream had been funnelled into a narrow channel. It made it easier to latch on to the magic she sought, but at the same time rendered those energies much more difficult to shape and bind to her will. Maybe, at the height of her powers, she would have found it easier. As it was, she felt like a fisherman with some great catch fighting and straining at the end of the line. The difference was, if the catch broke her line, the aethyric discharge would probably run amok and kill every living thing in the tunnels for a league or so.

  Liandra heard her heart pounding, felt her blood flowing faster and faster through her veins. Everything inside her was trying to speed up, to find harmony with the racing aethyric current. She knew her heart would burst before it could match that tempo. No, she had to force the current itself to flow. She had to master the magic; she couldn’t let it master her.

  It was when she was nearly at the limit of her endurance, ready to cast the fish back before it could break the line, that she felt the power swell inside her. The aethyric current, or at least the strand she had drawn upon, was hers. Fixing her gaze on the line of crossbowmen and the thick bronze shields they sheltered behind, she turned those hard-won energies into the force she had envisioned. The incantation that whispered across
her lips gave the power purpose and form.

  A flare of blinding light seared across the dwarf ranks, howling through them with volcanic fury. The next instant, scores of crossbowmen were screaming, leaping out from behind their shields as the bronze plates turned red-hot and began to drip molten metal across them. Dislodged from their protection, fully illuminated by the afterglow of the magical light, the dwarfs quickly fell victim to asur arrows.

  Confusion gripped the other dwarfs. The dramatic display of magic, the sudden and brutal killing of their crossbowmen, these drained the ferocity of their attack. The dawi retreated back down the passage. It wasn’t a rout – the dwarfs maintained good order as they withdrew – but it was a retreat just the same. And this time there wasn’t a file of crossbows to keep the elves from pursuing their shaken enemy. There wasn’t a wall of shields for the dwarfs to shelter behind and regroup.

  Liandra took no part in that last, bloody stage of the battle. Drained by her magic, she leaned against the cold stone wall and tried to compose herself. Her heart and blood were still racing at incredible speed, still trying to match the magical current she had tapped into. It took her utmost concentration to force her body to calm itself and to deny the aethyric harmony that sought to draw her in.

  When she was composed, the first thing she saw was Lord Caerwal staring at her. His face bore an impatient, arrogant kind of displeasure, but he knew enough about the ways of magic to wait until Liandra was somewhat recovered before voicing that displeasure.

  ‘Do you think that was wise?’ Caerwal asked, clearly already aware of what he considered the right answer. Among the asur of Elthin Arvan there was no lord or lady more committed to the war than Caerwal. His every breath was devoted to avenging the destruction of Athel Numiel, the city he’d built and the dwarfs had razed. Anything that obstructed that grim purpose he took as a personal affront.

  ‘No,’ Liandra said. ‘But it was necessary. Something had to be done to break the dawi formation. Otherwise we might have been days fighting for this miserable stretch of burrow.’

  Somehow Caerwal’s gaze managed to become even more hostile. ‘What use is capturing the tunnel?’ he snapped. ‘I don’t want the tunnel, I want the mud-digger’s reservoir! I was depending on your magic to find it, remember? The magic that brought us this far.’

  Liandra pushed herself away from the wall, forcing herself to stand steady on her own two feet when she answered the outraged lord. The last thing she wanted was to appear weak before Caerwal, to let him think he owned her the way he felt he owned those who served him. She wasn’t one of his servants or stooges. She’d been ordered by Lord Draikyll to attend him – a temporary relationship that would end with the siege.

  ‘What good is knowing where the reservoir is if we can’t reach it?’ she retorted. She waved her hand at the carnage around them, at the bodies heaped on the floor. ‘This is the worst opposition we’ve encountered since the citadel on the shore was captured. What do you think they’re trying to protect so fiercely?’

  Caerwal tapped a finger against the blade he held, a sword that Liandra noticed was as clean and polished as the day he’d disembarked on the beach. ‘You could be right,’ he conceded. He nodded, more to himself than to her. ‘Yes, by Hoeth, you may be right.’

  Liandra turned from Caerwal, looking instead at the ten bodyguards the lord had brought with him into the tunnels. Like their master, their mail was unblemished by the stains of battle. ‘You might join your warriors and see for yourself,’ she suggested.

  ‘They have their job and I have mine,’ Caerwal said. He patted the golden coffer that was chained to his belt. ‘My purpose is more important than killing a few dwarfs.’ His face took on a feral, nearly animalistic expression of hate. ‘I intend to kill them all.’ The expression faded and when he looked back at Liandra there was a smile on his face. ‘We’ll bide here a time until you are recovered.’

  There was no sun or moons to reckon the passage of time by down in the dwarfish deeps, but Caerwal managed with an hourglass fashioned from diamond and powdered manticore heart. There was some measure of enchantment in it – no matter which way it was turned, the sands would flow in the same direction until they had all passed from one sphere to the other. By Caerwal’s reckoning then, it was three hours before a messenger came back to them and reported that the way ahead was clear. The dwarfs had been vanquished.

  The reservoir was a great chamber carved from the living rock of the mountain. Immense stone faces, the effigies of the dawi’s cheerless ancestor gods, scowled down at the elves as they entered the room. A wide shelf of stone ran along the edges of the room, an array of bronze, copper and iron pipes snaking across them to dive into the great basin that dominated the chamber. By torchlight, the water in the reservoir looked almost black, splashing against the sides of the basin in little eddies.

  All around the room, dwarf bodies were strewn. They’d put up a fierce fight for this place, doing their best to keep the invaders from capturing the hall. Many had been pierced over and over by asur arrows. Slicks of blood along the floor told where wounded warriors had tried to drag themselves back into the fray.

  ‘It should be easy enough to destroy these pipes,’ Liandra said as she studied the vault. ‘The dawi must be using them to pump water from the reservoir into the hold.’

  ‘Destroy them?’ Caerwal’s laugh was the nastiest thing Liandra had heard drop from the tongue of another elf. Even the druchii witch Drutheira hadn’t made her skin crawl the way Caerwal’s laugh now did.

  The elf lord reached to his belt. With a vicious tug he snapped the chain holding the golden coffer in place. An awful light gleamed in Caerwal’s eyes as he drew from within it a lead flask. ‘I want dead dwarfs, not thirsty ones,’ he said.

  Liandra shook her head. ‘You’re going to poison the reservoir,’ she said, feeling her stomach clench at the thought.

  ‘This one and all the others I can find,’ Caerwal said. He held the flask higher, tapping his finger against it. ‘This is powdered basilisk venom. One drop is enough to eat through the bellies of a hundred dwarfs. I’ll send thousands to their filthy gods.’ Savagely, he upended the flask. A foul-smelling, luminous green sludge dripped out, slithering with syrupy coldness from the bottle to the reservoir. As it struck the water, a luminous sparkle crackled about the slime, wisps of malignant magic that crawled away into the depths. When it was all gone, Caerwal tossed the emptied flask into the basin, watching as it sank from view.

  ‘I have more of the poison for the other reservoirs,’ Caerwal said, misjudging the cause for Liandra’s disgusted look. ‘Without a city to maintain or colonists to support, I have nothing better to spend my fortune on.’

  ‘We call them savages,’ Liandra marvelled. She could see a few of the warriors gathered in the reservoir shared her revulsion, but many – too many – had a hateful satisfaction on their faces. That was the real horror of war. Not those killed in the fighting, but those who were made dead while they were still alive.

  First Ilendril’s ghastly magic that enslaved the minds and spirits of other creatures, now Caerwal’s despicable poisons. Liandra turned from the reservoir, making her way back into the battle-scarred tunnel. She had to get away from the smell of blood, the stink of hate. She had to get back to the surface and the clean, open air.

  Behind her, she could hear Lord Caerwal calling. ‘You’ll see, Liandra. I’ll poison every mud-eater in this place. I’ll turn Barak Varr into the greatest sepulchre in Elthin Arvan!’

  High King Gotrek watched as his warriors mustered in the great hall of Karaz-a-Karak. With the mammoth statues of their ancestor gods looking down upon them, ten thousand dwarf warriors bent their knee to the king. There were warriors from Ekrund and Zhufbar, Kraka Drak in the far north and Karak Drazh in the far south. Norse dwarfs and even skarrenawi. All had come to swear allegiance to the High King’s banner, to march with him to war. />
  It was something Gotrek had long desired, a muster not of Karaz-a-Karak or Karak Eight Peaks. Not the drawing together of warriors to fight for a single hold. Not separate armies grudgingly accepting a unified command, yet still pursuing their own individual ambitions and hunt for glory.

  The grisly example of Brok Stonefist was a lesson. Most dwarfs couldn’t see it that way, but Gotrek did. Brok’s stubborn pursuit for his own glory and his own prestige had brought him to ruin. How close a thing it could have been. What if Brok’s warriors had been needed elsewhere, needed to be where the army’s supposed general, Morgrim, needed them to be? The entire campaign could have become a disaster because of one dwarf’s selfish ambition.

  The Lord of the Tunnels was revered as a hero now, cheered throughout the Karaz Ankor for his duel with Lord Salendor. He’d earned himself a place in history. Gotrek wasn’t so sure he deserved it.

  Of course, pride and ambition weren’t qualities rare among the dwarfs and certainly not among their lords. The kings of Karak Hirn and Karak Eight Peaks, rather than wait for armies from the other holds to help them break the siege at Barak Varr had instead set out all on their own. The disastrous results had more to do with personal ambition than marauding dragons, though he despaired of ever making the kings see it that way.

  Now a third army had been repulsed. King Hrallson’s warriors from Karak Azul had tried to reach Barak Varr through the Ungdrin Ankor only to be driven back by elgi magic. And still the lesson wasn’t learned. The elves weren’t a disorganised rabble like urk and grobi. They were an enemy united in purpose and command. If the dwarfs refused to acknowledge that and adjust to it, then they were doomed to an endless succession of hollow victories and bitter defeats.

  The key to changing all of that was arrayed before him in the great hall. From a balcony set between the arms of Grungni and Grimnir, Gotrek gazed across the heterogeneous force that had travelled so far and so long to follow him into war. Over the years and decades, what had started as a trickle had grown into an avalanche.