Taker Of Skulls (Book 5)

by William King

Kormak heard the fear in her voice. Karnea believed she was already as good as dead. She had no hope of ever seeing the surface again. Yet that did not keep her from looking around and drinking in the sights. It was something Kormak understood. He never felt so alive and alert as when he was on the brink of death.

  “At least we are out of that cell,” said Boreas. “I never liked those.”

  “You’ve spent time in the cells?” Sasha asked. Her tone was teasing.

  “What mercenary has not?” Boreas replied. “You hit town with a purse full of silver and you spend it on booze and song and women till it’s gone. Mishaps occur and the local law-makers are rarely amused or forgiving. What about you, Guardian, have you ever spent time in a cell?”

  “More than I care to remember,” said Kormak. “I liked it no more than you.”

  They walked on, talking of inconsequential things, deliberately not speaking about what was really on their minds.

  The corridors had taken on a rough look and Kormak could see that iron rails had been set in the floor. He assumed they had been put there for ore-carts. Ahead of them was a large area where dozens of such tracks met. There were metal wheeled-carts there and signs that goblins had passed this way. The air smelled of goblin piss and wolf excrement. Somewhere overhead Kormak thought he heard great batwings flutter.

  “The mines go a long way down from here,” said Ferik.

  “Guards?” Kormak asked.

  “Not yet. There are too many shafts and galleries and not even the goblins have sufficient numbers to watch them all. We killed a great many of them. Graghur must regret ordering an assault on our hold.”

  “But you’ve still sent Mankri ahead to make sure.”

  “There is no sense in taking undue risks,” said Ferik. “And he is a very stealthy dwarf.”

  They pushed on into the mines. These did not look much like any mine Kormak had ever been in. The floors were paved and the walls and ceilings were as regular as those of the city up above. If it had not been for the metal rails in the floor and the absence of building fronts, Kormak would not have known they were in a mine at all.

  They pushed on down. Galleries, long worked-out, ran away from the corridors. They were much lower than the ceilings in the Underhalls. They looked as if they were intended for the use of people the height of dwarves. Goblins would have no problem living here but Kormak felt the urge to constantly duck his head.

  He could hear strange sounds in the distance now; clattering, banging, high-pitched screaming and once, an odd roaring noise that reminded him of Yellow Eye and the Slitherer.

  Ferik saw him pause and said, “Yes, this is where Graghur breeds his monsters. They say he keeps the tame ones and drives the most savage and rebellious out into the corridors of the city.”

  “So we can look forward to meeting more like the Slitherer,” said Kormak.

  “Are you worried about meeting one without your sword?” Ferik asked.

  “I would be worried about meeting one even with it.”

  “Then you seem more sensible than my son made you sound, may the Ancestors welcome his soul.” There was a weight of sadness and anger in the dwarf’s voice when he talked about Verlek.

  Mankri appeared in front of them, emerging from a side corridor.

  “It is as it always was,” he said. “They do not watch the shafts in the eightieth gallery. We can enter the Deeps there.”

  “You have been this way before?” Kormak asked.

  Mankri nodded. “I once went all the way to the Chamber of Monsters just to see if I could.”

  “How do you avoid being spotted?” Mankri tapped one of the runes on his arm. Kormak had not seen its like before.

  “That confuses the goblins noses and I am very quiet when I want to be. Patient, too.”

  “You have done well,” said Ferik. “If we can use the shafts we will reach the heart of the goblins realm.”

  “Unless Graghur and his court have moved,” said Mankri.

  “Perhaps it would be best to look at the bright side,” said Ferik.

  “For me, that is the bright side.” Mankri gave them a cheery grin. It seemed the worse things looked, the more cheerful he became.

  Ahead of them lay a long, steeply sloping shaft, even more constricted than the previous ones. Moving on all fours the dwarves had a lot less problems negotiating it than Kormak and his fellow humans. He had to crawl and twist and scuttle. The hilt of the axe he had hung over his shoulder ground along against the ceiling, slowing him down and making a grinding noise until he managed to adjust its position. Eventually he had to turn and clamber down as the shaft went near vertical.

  His hands scraped against rough stone and his shoulders began to ache from the strain. His palms were slippery with sweat. The walls pressed in all around him. His breathing became forced. He wondered what would happen if he let go. He imagined slithering down a very long, steep slope, banging against the walls as he went until eventually he smashed to a halt a long way below.

  He kept climbing down. He told himself that the dwarves had been this way before and must know what they were doing. A small niggling part of his mind pointed out that they had never done this with humans before and it was quite possible they had made a miscalculation.

  Finally his feet touched flat ground and he realised that he was on the level again. It was dark and his sense of being enclosed did not let up. All the weight of the mountains seemed to be pressing down on him.

  A powerful hand landed on his shoulder, and he felt the faint, tickling touch of a dwarf’s beard as it rippled over him in the dark. The image of a cockroach’s feelers flickered through his mind and he fought it down.

  “Stand clear,” said Ferik’s voice, out of the utter blackness. “The others are coming down.”

  Kormak let himself be pulled out of the way. He heard something scraping above him and then a muted curse. Sasha was down. “Kormak, are you there?” Her voice sounded almost panicked.

  “Yes,” he said as calmly as he could. Displaced air warned him and then a hand quested out of the darkness and touched his face.

  “It doesn’t have a beard so I am guessing it’s you,” she said. Her giggle was on the verge of hysteria.

  Boreas and Karnea emerged. Shortly thereafter something bumped down the shaft. Boreas muttered thanks and he realised that the dwarves must have lowered his hammer on a rope and then given it to him. He wished they had thought about that before his axe had almost gotten him stuck in the shaft. It was too late to bring it up now. He would remember such a thing in the future, if he had one.

  Once again the everglow lantern was revealed and Kormak saw that he was standing in a low rough-hewn corridor. He could see water gurgling away near his feet. It was brownish and foul-smelling and he wondered where it came from and where it was going to.

  Ferik said, “We must go slowly and quietly now. We are coming to the heart of Graghur’s realm.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THEY FOLLOWED THE evil-smelling stream along the tunnel. With every step the foul stench grew increasingly strong, a stomach-churning mix of sour milk, sulphur and strange alchemicals. Karnea raised her hand to her mouth. Sasha covered the lower part of her face with a scarf. Boreas contented himself with wrinkling his nose and narrowing his eyes.

  Kormak’s heart beat faster. They were within the core of their enemy’s realm now. He had no idea where his blade was to be found. He was going to have to trust to the dwarves’ senses and his own wits. It seemed only logical that either Utti or Graghur would now have the blade. Of course, they were both likely to be surrounded by goblin guards.

  And if that were not bad enough, the Old One would be invincible if Kormak could not get his hands on his blade. He told himself that was not true—Graghur could still be hurt by normal weapons, possibly even temporarily stopped if his head were chopped off or a dagger driven into his heart. He just could not be killed. He would just have to do what he could, with the weapons that he had. If
the Old One had his blade and could be overcome even temporarily, Kormak could finish the fight.

  “Why are you grinning, Guardian?” Karnea asked him.

  “I was thinking about Graghur.”

  “I hope you never think about me that way. You look like a man contemplating murder.”

  “I am contemplating killing.”

  “You enjoy it, don’t you?” Karnea said. Kormak considered her words. He wanted Graghur dead and he wanted his blade back. Would he take pleasure in slaying Graghur? If he was honest with himself, the answer was yes. “I do,” he said.

  “You are a born killer.”

  Kormak shook his head. “No more than any other man. I was trained to it and I am good at it. Over the years I have acquired a taste for it. You would too if you lived my life.”

  “I doubt it,” she said. She sounded quite certain of that.

  They emerged into a vast chamber and it became obvious what the source of the smell was. Huge pits had been dug from the ground, and they were filled to overflowing with the brownish fluid. Looking into the nearest, Kormak could see a massive shape writhing and twitching as though in troubled sleep. It resembled a goblin grown to four times its normal size with a lower body something like that of a horse.

  “This is where Graghur breeds his hybrids,” Karnea said.

  “This is where the Slitherer and Yellow Eye and those other monsters were birthed. Some of these creatures will be soldiers in Graghur’s army. Others will be unleashed into the Underhalls,” said Ferik.

  Boreas looked at the monster and said, “Ugly beast. This Graghur must be a dark and terrible wizard.”

  “He is a Shaper,” said Karnea. “Many of the Old Ones were. They could bend the stuff of life to their will, father new races, create monsters, change living things into new forms.”

  Ferik asked her to translate and then nodded. “They say that, in ancient times, he and the Mother were rivals in the art. This was one of the reasons for the bitterness of their hatred. Some say they were lovers and that their love turned sour.”

  “I do not think the Old Ones know love as we do,” said Kormak.

  “They certainly understand hatred,” said Ferik.

  “I am not sure they feel any emotions we would understand,” said Kormak.

  “The same could be said of man and dwarf.”

  “There are words for love and hate and fear in both our languages,” said Karnea.

  “The Eldrim have those words too.”

  “Can we be sure they mean the same things to each of us? Your eyes are different from ours. You may have no words for certain colours we can see. How can I be certain those words describe the same thing?”

  “This is all very fascinating,” said Kormak, “but it takes us no closer to reclaiming my blade.”

  The dwarf and the sorceress looked at each other and then at him. The dwarf shrugged. Karnea smiled.

  They passed cables of living flesh that ran from huge bladders of some leathery material. When Kormak looked closely he could see that the bladders had vestigial eyes and were living creatures themselves, some form of grossly mutated goblin. Clutching the walls were other goblin-like creatures, with massive bloated stomachs and breasts. They looked like certain ants he had seen in a broken hill, whose bodies had been turned into great receptacles to hold food for their kindred.

  As had happened so often in the past, when he was confronted by the work of the Old Ones, he felt an oppressive sense of the vast, alien strangeness of their knowledge. They had forgotten more than men had learned in all their history, and they had bent that knowledge to many awful purposes.

  Graghur looked like the meanest of monsters but it was a shape he had chosen for himself when he could look like anything he wanted. Here was proof of the depth of his knowledge and the power of his magic. He had created these pits in which monsters were being born and Kormak had no idea why. He might have been creating an army or simply probing the secrets of life, the way some alchemists did. When Graghur died all this knowledge would be removed from the world. So much had been lost already and Kormak had been responsible for some of the destruction. If he lived he would be responsible for more.

  Even if he won, he would not change the fact that compared to Graghur he was an insect. To the Old Ones, he was like one of those biting flies that spread the plague. He felt very small. That was one of the reasons he enjoyed slaying the Eldrim.

  Somehow he did not feel like telling Karnea that.

  They made their way across the huge chamber, moving slowly, treading quietly. Kormak saw the distant shadowy figures of several great goblins hauling barrels to the pools and dumping their contents into the murky fluid.

  He wished they had half a dozen good bowmen. He could have killed all the goblins swiftly, but ranged weapons were not something dwarves were good with. They seemed to rely on war engines and explosives. Explosives they had but those would only give away their position to the sharp-eared goblins.

  They passed another pit. This one held a less well-developed inhabitant. It did not have any skin as yet, merely muscle and vein. It looked as if it had been flayed alive. It did not move. Perhaps it was dead or dormant. They moved beyond one of the huge bladder creatures. Its stomach expanded and distended. Something pulsed through the flesh cable leading from it to the nearest pool.

  Ferik wrinkled his nose. His beard twitched, tendrils writhing. “I smell Utti,” he said.

  Kormak looked at him astonished. The dwarf must have a nose like a bloodhound. “How can you smell anything over this stink?”

  “How can you not?”

  “You can lead us to him?”

  “Yes. Given time.”

  “And the fact we will have to find our way through an army of goblins.”

  Ferik let his beard touch the floor. “There are several hundred. They took a lot of casualties at the gates of the Dwarfhold. Graghur has not had time to breed more.”

  “That’s all right then. The ten of us should be more than enough to see off a mere few hundred,” Kormak said.

  “I like your attitude, man,” Ferik said. Kormak wondered whether the dwarves had any word for irony in their language. “But we will need to be cunning and strike by stealth. I catch a whiff of the Eldrim now. He is ahead of us, I am guessing in the great central chamber. It is the heart of the mine. I used to play there when I was a lad.”

  They passed another pit. In this one was a monstrous goblin centaur, a hybrid of Yellow Eye and a great dire wolf. It looked awake. Its eyes glared back at him ferociously and it began to reach out. A huge hand emerged from the fluid. Kormak stepped back, readying his axe.

  The monster dragged itself up and out and gave a great gurgling cough, spraying fluid through the air, splattering everything nearby. It snarled revealing shark-like teeth and reached for him with long sharp claws.

  “So much for being stealthy,” Ferik said. He lashed out at the monster with his axe. Boreas leapt forward, hitting it with his hammer and over-balancing it back into the pit. Kormak could see some of the great goblins looking around, attracted by the noise.

  Sasha cursed, raised her stonethrower and fired a runestone at them. The explosion hurled the goblins through the air, garments alight, flesh torn. One of them tumbled into a pool. The fluid bubbled and another massive figure erupted from it, something that looked like a monstrous goblin body with the head of an octopus. It grabbed a goblin and dragged the screaming creature towards its maw.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Ferik. They raced through the archway and found themselves in a huge central chamber. It was at the bottom of an enormous pit, with makeshift elevators, running up and down the sides. Around the edges were scores of archways just like the one they had come through. Kormak guessed they represented other galleries running off into the depths. Metal railings for carts, and enormous slag piles rearing beside them reinforced that conclusion.

  In the centre of the chamber, on a monstrous throne, lolled the gigantic for
m of Graghur. In front of him, dressed in a motley, with a ball and chain on his leg was Utti. As they entered Graghur looked up and smiled.

  “What is this?” he asked in a booming voice that echoed through the caverns. “Visitors? And we have not prepared a feast to welcome them! Well, no matter, they shall provide the feast themselves.”

  He laughed and then threw back his head and howled. Hundreds of chittering, squeaking calls answered him. From a dozen of the entrances goblins poured. Half a dozen wolves, including the giant one that Graghur had used as a steed erupted as if from a pit at his feet. More goblin voices sounded from above them.

  If they waited, they would simply be overwhelmed. There was nothing to do but attack now. Kormak raised the axe and charged. The others were right behind him.

  A few missiles arced down from galleries above them. The goblins had not yet had time to realise that only a few intruders were attacking them. Darts clattered to the ground near Kormak but most of them fell behind him.

  Laughing Graghur bounded towards him, brandishing a weapon in each of his four hands. Kormak recognised one of them as his own blade. He was surprised the Old One had the nerve to carry it. The wolves and their giant pack leader were right behind Graghur. Squads of goblins raced to join the fray.

  Kormak and Graghur crossed blades. The Old One was fast and incredibly strong and Kormak was far less used to wielding an axe than a sword. It was all he could do to parry Graghur’s blows.

  Boreas leapt into the fray, dwarf maul smashing down, taking advantage of the Old One’s concentration on Kormak. The force of the blow sent Graghur reeling back. The links on his chainmail coat were broken.

  Graghur laughed madly as if the pain only amused him. Perhaps it did. Kormak had met Old Ones who chose to feel pain as pleasure and pleasure as pain. Graghur bounced back, slashing at Boreas with his scimitar. Boreas parried it, but a blow from Kormak’s own runeblade cut through the big man’s armour and sliced his flesh. Blood poured from the open wound and Boreas fell to the ground.