Ungrim wanted to die so badly that he invited war to his people’s doorstep. Expeditions to the north left from Karak Kadrin, bearing his seal. They were challenges, tossed into the teeth of Chaos. Trapped here by duty, he tried to draw enemies to him, without regard for the consequences.
Somewhere, somewhen, Ungrim Ironfist had joined his Slayer brethren in madness, Thungrimsson knew. And it was a madness that could very well spell the doom of not just Ungrim, but his people as well.
Karak Kadrin,
the Underway
The dwarfs called the bridge the Deep Span. It was a narrow thing, barely wide enough for two dwarfs to cross side-by-side. Besides the massive main bridge that had extended from Baragor’s Watch to the entryway to Karak Kadrin proper, it was the only way into the section of the Underway directly beneath the ravaged outer keep that didn’t involve an arduous week-long trip through the mountains. Felix eyed it with trepidation as he squatted in the lee of the great portcullis that marked the beginning of the bridge. A similar portcullis occupied the other end.
The bridge didn’t look as big as he’d have liked, or as wide. The sheer enormity of the chasm wasn’t helping matters. It was a vast, yawning silence that seemed to swallow up all noise and light. Even worse, they were travelling across it in the dark in small groups, so as not to attract any undue attention from the forces perched on the lip of the chasm above.
Felix started as Gotrek slapped his back. ‘Just keep your hand on my shoulder, manling. We can’t have you slipping off, not so close to what may be my hour of doom.’
‘No,’ Felix said through gritted teeth. ‘What will we face up there, Gotrek?’ he said, changing the subject as they waited for their turn to cross.
‘The enemy, manling,’ Gotrek said.
‘I meant from the – ah – the dawi zharr.’ He said it hesitantly, half expecting Gotrek to explode with fury. Instead the Slayer became quiet.
‘There won’t be many of them,’ he said at last. ‘No more than a handful. They never come this far south in numbers more than a handful.’ He grunted. ‘Watch their hands, manling. They are dwarfs, and though they are debased and twisted, they still have cunning. They make terrible weapons and they use them at the least provocation. Don’t let them get close, don’t let them see you or catch you unawares.’
‘What about their weapons?’
‘We will destroy their corrupt machines. That shall be the task of the Slayers,’ Garagrim said, joining them, Biter following behind him. ‘When we emerge, we shall make for their guns, to destroy them and their masters. The dawi zharr cannot be allowed to escape.’
‘No,’ Gotrek said, in agreement, ‘They cannot.’ Garagrim looked almost surprised at Gotrek’s statement, but he refrained from commenting. Gotrek smiled sourly. ‘That is more important than any doom, War-Mourner. The safety of the hold comes first.’
Garagrim gave a curt nod. A moment later, it was their turn to cross. Felix thought about closing his eyes, reckoning that sight would do him little good in any event, but decided against it and instead kept his eyes firmly on the back of Gotrek’s head. The trip across the bridge did not go quickly, but Gotrek’s sure-footed movements kept Felix to the path without a misstep, and his hand on the Slayer’s shoulder kept him from wandering too close to the edge. He looked up only once as they moved across the span, but could see nothing save a distant slash of starry sky. The sounds of industry rattled down periodically from above, and dim sounds that might have been screams.
As they reached the other side, he said, ‘What are they building up there?’ For he knew that was what those sounds had been, and he had a dark premonition of the stunted shapes of the Chaos dwarfs crafting some new hellish engine in the ruined belly of the captured keep.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Gotrek muttered. ‘They’ll never finish it, whatever it is.’
The darkness of the Underway was even more claustrophobic the second time around, Felix felt. One hand clenched achingly tight on Karaghul’s hilt, he moved through the vast silence, one shape amongst many. Dwarf engineers carried explosives in heavily reinforced kegs. They were surrounded by ironbreakers and rangers, protected from any threat that might choose to try its luck on the small army moving through the depths.
As improbable as it sounded, Felix had been assured that there were such things. Brooding horrors unleashed into the depths by an ancient cataclysm and by more recent incursions by goblins and skaven and worse things. ‘There are worse things than grobi in the depths,’ the miner Copperback had said, with far too much enthusiasm for Felix’s taste.
After hearing that, Felix couldn’t help but see monstrous shapes in every shadow and nightmares crouching in every forgotten archway. Even worse, from above, he could hear the sounds of cannon-fire picking up once more where it had left off. Every boom from above echoed and re-echoed until it was a thunderclap below.
‘The ground is weak,’ Gotrek said as dust drifted down in a choking cloud.
‘It’ll be weaker after we blow a chunk of it into the sky,’ one of the Slayers murmured, his voice echoing oddly in the suffocating quiet.
‘If you have a problem with it, you should have stayed behind,’ another rasped. ‘It’s not like we’d miss your axe, Berengar.’
The Slayer called Berengar let loose a punch that connected audibly with the other Slayer’s shoulder. Garagrim, not far ahead, turned. ‘Quiet, the pair of you,’ he growled.
‘Quiet yourself, beardling,’ an older Slayer, with one milky white eye and a short, stiff crest that looked like a white stripe painted across the top of his sun-browned scalp, said, glaring at the War-Mourner. Garagrim blustered, unused to his authority being questioned. Gotrek grinned mirthlessly, watching the exchange.
Felix let himself fall back from the main bulk of the Slayers. He dropped into a trot beside Biter. The latter was the most open-mouthed dwarf he’d ever met. Biter was watching one of the younger Slayers, who walked beside Garagrim. ‘Why does Garagrim keep him so close?’ Felix asked.
‘That’s the War-Mourner’s duty,’ Biter said, the head of his mace bouncing on his shoulder. ‘He chooses who’s to die. Then he makes sure that it happens.’ He chuckled. ‘Most of us don’t need his help, which annoys the beardling no end. Princes are worse than kings for royal commands.’
‘You could probably use his help,’ Koertig said.
Biter laughed. Felix looked from the sour-faced Nordlander to the Slayer.
‘Forgive me for asking, but–’ he began.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Koertig growled.
‘I got him drunk,’ Biter said, leering suggestively. ‘You manlings swear your strongest oaths with a bit of ale in your belly.’
‘Why?’ Felix said.
Biter shrugged. ‘I needed a new Remembrancer.’
‘What happened to your old one?’ Felix said, though he didn’t think he really wanted to know the answer.
Biter’s smile faded. ‘He got old,’ he said. He looked at Felix. ‘You humans grow old so quickly. One day he was by my side and then, he was gone. He went in his sleep.’
‘That doesn’t sound so bad–’
‘A giant stepped on him while he was sleeping. We probably shouldn’t have drunk so much,’ Biter said mournfully. ‘My fault, I suppose.’ He grinned. ‘Still, I feel lucky this time.’
‘You said that the last two times,’ Koertig said. ‘And the dozen times before that.’ He looked at Felix. ‘At least yours tries. Mine thinks it’s a joke.’
‘It is a joke,’ Biter said. He looked at Felix. ‘Grimnir had no sense of humour, they say. Not a smile to be had when he was around. So we do the same. We cut it out, the way we cut our beards. Not me, though. If I’m already dead, I intend to enjoy the afterlife. Wine, women and song, isn’t that what you humans say?’
Felix couldn’t help smiling. ‘Yes, something like that.’
‘I can do what I want now, Jaeger,’ Biter said. His eyes were bright with a peculiar so
rt of madness. ‘For the first time in my life, I can do what I want. No clan, no king, no rules. That’s the joke, that’s why Grimnir went north, you know. Not for shame or duty or honour, but because he was just so damned tired of being told what to do by his peers, by his king, of being crushed by the mountains we dwarfs carry on our backs,’ he continued. Then, ‘That’s the joke,’ he said, more softly.
Felix looked away, feeling faintly ashamed though he couldn’t say why. Koertig merely grunted. The Nordlander was used to his Slayer’s mercurial shifts of mood, obviously. Biter fell silent, his eyes locked on that middle distance that Felix knew well enough.
The dwarfs moved mostly in silence. If they felt any nervousness, no bearded face showed it. The ironbreakers walked on the outskirts of the throng, alert gazes sweeping the darkness. The rangers stayed close to the engineers, and most of the miners moved far ahead, the lights of their candle-helmets piercing the gloom. The rest walked with the throng, holding long poles topped by enclosed lanterns that enveloped the other dwarfs in a warm, protective glow. The Slayers, of course, strode through the darkness, their voices loud. Some shouted challenges into collapsed tunnels, while others occasionally wandered off, only to return looking disappointed. Only Gotrek, Garagrim and Biter stayed with the throng the entire trek. Was it a sign of patience, Felix wondered, or was it simply that once they had a doom in their sights, they were determined not to waver from it?
Axeson walked amongst the throng, whispering softly to the younger warriors at times. In other instances, he walked out into the darkness and returned with a shamefaced Slayer trotting dejectedly in his wake. Felix joined him. Axeson gripped a heavy axe, its blade dripping with strange runes.
‘Why did you come with us?’ Felix said. Axeson glanced at him, but didn’t reply. Felix frowned, irritated by the priest’s sudden taciturnity. ‘What does it have to do with Gotrek?’
‘Who says it has anything to do with Gurnisson?’
‘You told me to keep him alive. Then, later, you said that if he died, Karak Kadrin would fall. What did you mean?’
‘I merely passed on what the ancestor-gods told me,’ Axeson said.
‘I was given to understand that Grimnir was not the most talkative of gods,’ Felix said.
‘He’s not. Which is why dwarfs listen when he chooses to speak,’ Axeson said. They walked in silence for a while. Then, ‘The ghost of civilization,’ the priest murmured. ‘What do you think of it, Jaeger?’ He waved a hand at the arching, vaulted roof of the Underway, stretching high into the shadowed recesses above them.
‘Gotrek said it once stretched the length of the Worlds Edge Mountains,’ Felix said. Immense archways lined this section of the ancient road. Without exception, all of them had been sealed with massive blocks of cut stone. Felix shivered, briefly imagining what might be scratching at the other side.
‘Farther,’ Axeson said. ‘My–’ He hesitated. ‘My father used to tell me that it was the spine of the world, connecting the far northern holds to those in the distant south. Thousands of dwarfs – merchants, peddlers, adventurers – would travel these deep roads, spreading out in a vast wave, taking our artisanry, our civilization, to every corner of this world. Some say that we even had roads that travelled beneath the sea,’ he said wistfully. He coughed in embarrassment.
‘What happened?’
‘What always happens, manling,’ Gotrek said, appearing suddenly at Felix’s elbow, causing him to jump. ‘Chaos came, and brought the Golden Age to an end. Then the elves turned on us.’
‘And your people superseded both of ours in the aftermath,’ Axeson said.
‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ Gotrek said. ‘And it’s a debate for another time.’ He pointed. ‘We’re here.’ The road had widened into what resembled a large antechamber, and great statues stood silent sentry over shadowed corners. Grime-shrouded mosaics covered the circular walls and despite the detritus of years, the sheer artisanry of the edifices that lined the space was impossible to deny. Ancient aqueducts stretched along the ceiling, and, impossibly, water still sloshed softly through them.
‘It was a marketplace once,’ Axeson said. ‘We’re beneath the section of the keep where Ungrim’s outer palace was built. This was once the central hub of the Karak Kadrin markets.’
Felix could believe it. He imagined that stalls had once filled the shadowy berths that lined the chamber and the corridors that spread out from it. What had it been like, in those long-gone days? How many dwarfs had packed into this place to dicker and bargain over goods?
‘The markets were famed throughout the Empire,’ Garagrim said, picking up where Axeson had left off. The War-Mourner’s hand stroked the stone wall reverentially. ‘We were the centre of the world then: Karak Kadrin, where all roads met and gold from a thousand holds traded hands.’ He turned and gestured. ‘That road led to Barak Varr, and far below, at the bottom of the Hundred Thousand Steps sits the Market-Dock, where the traders who once plied the deep rivers and oceans upon which the good stone of the earth rests would set sail for the sea-fortress and Zhufbar on the Black Water. And there, the pathway into the Badlands that once led to the Silver Pinnacle, aye and long lost Karak Eight Peaks. We were the centre of the empire; not its heart, perhaps, but mighty in our own way. Mighty…’
Garagrim trailed off and shook his head. The dwarfs had paused in reverential silence, even the Slayers. For them, this was their history, rendered in stone and inviolate despite all that their people had undergone. It was as much a part of them as their beards or their songs. And now, they had come to destroy it, in order to destroy an enemy, and Felix was struck by the sad necessity of what was to come.
Gotrek seemed to know what he was thinking, and he grunted. ‘It has always been thus, manling. We sacrifice of ourselves to kill our foe. Stone or flesh, it makes little difference. When the time comes to pay the price, we pay it gladly.’
‘Some of us more gladly than others,’ Garagrim said. He slapped the rock wall and the sound echoed throughout the chamber. ‘We were mighty once. We could be mighty again!’
‘Those days are gone,’ Gotrek said, and his words settled like a shroud over them all. ‘These caverns are tombs now, fit only for memory and death.’
No one spoke for a time. After a long silence, the engineers set to work. While half began to oversee the construction of bulwarks against the force of the explosion from tumbled stone and debris, the others set about placing the explosives. They placed their explosives more carefully than the Chaos marauders had. Felix thought that they were perhaps almost hesitant, and that this might almost be a taboo of some sort. Would the dwarf gods look kindly on their people unmaking that which they had made aeons past? For that matter, would their fellow dwarfs? Or would there be a particular sort of unacknowledged shame attached to the names of those who had taken part in this mission, that they had committed some crime; a necessary one, but inescapably wrong for all of that?
Gotrek alone seemed unbothered by that fact, though Felix thought that he simply hid it better than the rest. ‘The roof was made with escape in mind,’ Gotrek said approvingly, turning in a short circle. ‘Flat braces of rock that will tip and crash if the supports are blown. It was supposed to give our people a way to get above-ground in the event of a collapse. Blowing down just one is enough for our purposes.’ He rubbed his patch with the heel of his palm. ‘Which is good, because the rest of them will shatter, if I judge their condition right,’ he added. ‘Time cripples even our work.’
Puzzled, Felix watched them work. There was an art to it, it seemed, and it was one that Gotrek seemed proficient in. He oversaw the placement, ordering changes with brusque directness when something didn’t match up to the calculations in his head. The other Slayers, and not a few of the other dwarfs besides, watched him with a mixture of wariness, hostility and admiration.
When they had finished, Felix felt a sudden nervousness. There was no guarantee that the dwarfs’ explosives would serve them any better th
an theirs had the Chaos marauders. He’d heard tell of accidents at the Nuln Gunnery School that had resulted in even experienced gunners and sappers being blown sky high by their own weapons, and he didn’t want to experience that first hand. The dwarfs, on the other hand, seemed eager for the fireworks to begin as they moved back into the tunnels and behind the makeshift bulwarks. An engineer poured a trail of black, sulphur-smelling powder from and to each keg and then away, towards the group. When he’d finished, Garagrim lit a torch and held it aloft. ‘Well, who wants it?’
A dozen Slayers raised their hands. Garagrim snorted and handed the torch to the Slayer Berengar, who looked at it as if it were an adder about to bite him.
‘Time to stand back, manling,’ Gotrek said, laying one ham-sized hand against Felix’s chest as Berengar stepped towards the trail of powder and let the torch dip. Around them, dwarfs crouched and placed their hands over their ears and let their mouths open the way Imperial gunners did before a cannon fired. ‘It’s about to get very, very loud in here.’
And then, very abruptly, it did.
Karak Kadrin,
Baragor’s Watch
Standing before the broken remains of the bridge leading to Karak Kadrin, Canto watched the Chaos dwarfs work with a mixture of disgust and admiration. The stunted ones had set up a makeshift workshop in the lee of the final wall of the outer fortress and were busy at work.
On the precipice, the siege-giant howled in agony as it was forced to kneel, its abused ligaments popping like cannon-fire. Even stretched out, the beast wouldn’t reach across the chasm, but that wasn’t Khorreg’s intent. Instead, he and his assistants had overseen their ogre-slaves in extracting certain materials from the gutted ruins of the keep. Iron struts and ironwood supports from the fallen walls were dragged towards the chasm by the ogres as well as the remnants of Hrolf’s warband, now pressed into service by Canto’s order. The lengths of solid wood and stone were held by the giant as the ogres, under the cold gaze of one of the Chaos dwarfs, began to drive immense lengths of twisted metal through the wood and into the stone below, anchoring it in place.
Gotrek and Felix - Road of Skulls Page 18