It flared into sudden life in his hand, and the entire mountain shook.
With a great tearing and spitting of rock, the runesmiter began to rise. The ground where his axe touched was a turgid, molten orange, and the glow spread until all but the ring of stone around the chanting duardin’s feet had been swallowed by it. Shouting now over the roar, he pointed his forge key to the realmgate and the spur grew at his command.
The rock behind him cooled quickly in the snow, hardening into a bridge that could bear the weight of an army.
‘Haaaaaggh!’ roared Horgan-Grimnir, thrusting his grandaxe high and kicking Caldernorn forward. The beast responded with a low, lingering roar of its own. The cadaverous magmadroth of Nosda-Grimnir, severe with skull-helm and grandaxe, followed. The bridge crunched under the combined weight, but held. Killim and the Angfyrd hearthguard ran fearlessly after the two monsters and then – at last! – went Dunnegar.
The snow took its free hit with a sadistic flurry. Knuckles dusted by metal and ice, the wind pummelled him from every direction. His beard and hair, driven into a crest through the tall flutes of his helm, pulled him sideways and dragged him down. Emptiness swelled to fill the world but for the spit of still-smouldering rock beneath his feet. He clenched his teeth, narrowed his eyes, and held them firmly ahead as he ran.
The impact, when it came, would forever settle any doubt as to the primacy of stone over wind.
The Griever’s mountain trembled under the strike of the molten rock-bridge and the world seemed to suffer with it. Men were shed by the thousand as their footing shook or simply slid away from under them. Others were dashed from their feet, tumbling down the unforgiving monument to godlike hubris, or flattened under the avalanches that came crashing down from the horned peaks.
The Sepuzkul runesmiter dropped into a braced position, knees bent, fists hard and white around the haft of his axe, as duardin sure-footedness and strength kept him standing. The magma glow receded from the rock beneath his feet and fed back into his axe. For a moment, the fyresteel glowed like the soul of a volcano, then blasted forth a cone of seismic wrath that immolated the shaken few still standing.
The death toll in those opening minutes was astounding. That there was a single Bloodbound still on the mountain was miraculous. The advantage of numbers was still theirs, however, as was the formidably contrived terrain of the mountain itself.
Before they could think to exploit either, Horgan-Grimnir and Caldernorn crashed through.
Under the runefather’s stern direction, the magmadroth slammed sideways into a band of muscle-bound barbarians that came rushing in to assault the duardin’s beachhead, flattening most before they had time to swing their axes and goring the rest on its horns. Into the ensuing carnage rode the Sepuzkul runefather, Nosda-Grimnir, on his cadaverous grey mount. The magmadroth swung its wizened, shovel head from side to side, flaming bile streaming from its maw in a ribboning inferno. With a triumphant yell, Killim hammered his rune standard home as the hearthguard ran past to secure their lords’ bridgehead.
On an explosion of rune-propelled acceleration, Dunnegar burst through their formation and straight towards a sweeping rock face.
It was a wall of ice, almost vertical, rising a hundred feet to near the orbit of the mountain’s accursed eye. The Bloodbound hurled rocks and curses. The sky hurled snow. The hearthguard split into two to go around. Dunnegar charged straight at it. His bare feet drew sparks from the frozen rock.
Blistering speed and a confidence that even he could see might be blind bore him up the incline and in amongst the bewildered Bloodbound.
The mountain disappeared. The battle was gone. There was no duardin with him but Grimnir.
He hacked and he killed, surrounded by screams he only half-heard as wounded Bloodbound were pitched over the cliff behind him to their deaths. A blood warrior in full plate dripping red ran at him under the drone of a swinging chain. Dunnegar held up his forearm and in a roared entreaty called on Grimnir’s strength. The chain wrapped around an arm that was suddenly golden-red, and blistering under the heat. A yank brought the god-touched warrior staggering into range of the headbutt that split his visor and threw him to the ground.
Dunnegar felt another rune awaken, then another.
It was glorious. It was divine.
‘Dunnegar!’
He parried a bloodreaver axe, spun his greataxe so it was horizontal to his chest and punched it forward. The long haft took out half a dozen charging warriors, buying him a second that he spent to look back the way he had come.
Blizzard aside, the clifftop vantage granted him an unimpeded view of the battle. A column of Fyreslayers four across and two-thousand long was still trouping across the rock bridge. Frothing Bloodbound launched themselves into the fray in a suicidal push to hold them there. It might have worked, but to their evident dismay the Fyreslayers were more than their equal in savagery. In that quick glance, Dunnegar saw the flashes as the Sepuzkul runesmiter turned his attentions to awakening individual Fyreslayers’ runes, mushrooming beacons of auric brilliance followed by the cannonball-like devastation wrought by empowered duardin steaming ahead of their kin. It made him ache for more of the same.
Teeth bared in punishing self-restraint, he cut down a spear-wielding barbarian that jumped in from his left. The warriors closed, sensing his weakening, his reluctance to exploit the few runes he had left. He hacked open another, kicked one to the floor with a shattered ribcage, then fell to grappling with a hugely muscled skullreaper that bulled into him from the right. Their arms knotting about one another’s, they ploughed across the ridgeline, knocking men screaming from their path.
‘Ho there, Dunnegar! Here!’
Killim. Through the tangle of limbs and snow, Dunnegar saw the smith at the foot of the bridge. He was waving furiously for Dunnegar’s attention and, seeing that he had it, immediately directed it back uphill.
Caldernorn was tackling the mountain, bounding from ledge to ledge, claws driving into sheer rock while its tail lashed bloodreavers to their deaths. This was the ur-salamander’s environment, more than all the blessings of Khorne could ever make it man’s.
And then, in an avalanche of hellishly animated brass, the Griever joined the battle.
Caldernorn was gigantic even by the standards of its kind, but the juggernaut ridden by the Griever was a daemon of solid brass, and was charged with a power far in excess of its size. The daemon rammed the hard flat of its head into the bulbous armour of the magmadroth’s shoulder. The reptile was pushed back across the mountainside, and then, with a shriek of claws across stone, it was shoved clean off the ridge.
For a moment it seemed to hang. Horgan-Grimnir’s latchkey grandaxe lunged into space. The Griever’s lance spat towards it. The blades missed each other by a metal shaving. Then Caldernorn’s claws found rock again, throwing Horgan-Grimnir back into his seat, and it tore away up the mountain’s flank. The magmadroth scrabbled for higher ground, drawing itself above the Chaos lord, and then swung its head back to loose a torrent of flame. The Chaos juggernaut glowed like an anvil as the Griever turned into the current with his arm held protectively over his grinning skull helm, his lance kindling yellow-red with corposant.
Dunnegar gave voice to a trembling yell that was Grimnir’s battle wrath alloyed to ur-gold no longer, and wrestled the skullreaper from his arms. He broke him across his knee and swung the limp body into the horde, clearing a yard or so for him to run into. Close to the stone and powerful, he bowled Bloodbound aside as if the ground were still shaking.
Behind them was a rock shelf about twelve feet high.
He ran at it, stuck out a foot and kicked off, gaining another few feet of air beneath him, and then swung his greataxe for the ledge. It bit. He hit the cold rock face, thumping the air from his chest. With a wheezing inhalation, he dropped a kick on the blue-veined Bloodbound that came grasping for his legs, and th
en heaved himself up.
He had time for a breath and he took it. It lanced his lungs with cold, but was welcome there in spite of it.
He was on the very top of the mountain’s cheek, just as it began to slope upwards to the eye. The snow was coming down even more thickly with the altitude, and the realmgate was little more than a fell glimmer. The Griever’s monstrous last line of defence were grotesqueries of looming musculature. The berzerker did not enjoy the runefather’s advantage of a mountain beast, but his wild charge had carried him almost as far.
Wrapped in a scarf of steamy breath, he pushed into the waist-deep drift towards the gate.
Shouts filtered through the blizzard. A grunt. A clash. A daemonic howl. Dunnegar ignored them, eyes staying true to their goal. Horgan was the greatest warrior to carry the name Grimnir in many years. He had once felled Dunnegar with a single punch. The runefather could win his battles without help.
Fire rippled through the gloaming snowfall, opening it up like a fissure.
Dunnegar turned then. Through the steam, he saw a scene of struggle that could have rivalled the gold-brought visions at his Trial.
Caldernorn had its jaws locked around the juggernaut’s throat, but the daemon, in turn, had the ur-salamander on its side and was in the process of mounting its heaving chest. Horgan-Grimnir held firm in the saddle with a titanic grip, stubbornly resolved to his oath that he and the beast would never be parted.
One handed, he parried the Griever’s increasingly frenzied lunges. Flesh banners snapped and ruffled in the heat rising from Caldernorn’s body. The Lord of Khorne chattered like a rolling skull as the juggernaut crunched forward, raising a shriek from Caldernorn as the daemon walked its crushing weight up its neck. In a panic, the beast began to thrash. Horgan-Grimnir raged and swore, but one hand and the grip of his thighs was no longer enough to remain mounted. Sacrificing his guard, he redoubled his oathsworn grip.
The runefather smiled briefly, as though he’d won some kind of victory.
A moment later, Dunnegar watched the Griever’s lance explode from his chest.
Loss hit with the weight of an avalanche. Not grief. Horgan-Grimnir had never been so dear to him. But loss: a challenge to which he would never rise, a trial that there would be no chance to pass.
The runefather arched his back in pain. Caldernorn was still, sinew and scale crunching under the juggernaut’s tread.
‘Rolk Langudsson!’ Horgan howled through bloodied lips, erupting in a column of searing runelight ‘Your oaths are fulfilled!’
The Griever was on top of him, too intent on twisting the lance and claiming another skull for his armour to care how his victim chose to meet his end. He was close enough that he likely never saw the latchkey grandaxe arcing towards his neck.
Howls of an inhuman rage permeated the snow as, as if in tableau, Horgan-Grimnir and the Chaos lord slid from their mounts one after the other.
Dunnegar heard rather than saw the warped spawn tramping down from the realmgate to belatedly aid their master. He knew he should have taken the gate then while it was unguarded, but to his shame he couldn’t bring himself to do so. The battle was won with the death of the Griever, he knew, and others could claim the prize and see the runefather’s quest continued.
He turned aside.
Already partially buried, Horgan-Grimnir nevertheless glittered with precious ur-gold runes, singing to his soul like the forest to a sylvaneth. Dunnegar hefted his axe, quite prepared to defend the runefather’s remains with his own life.
An oath was an oath, but gold was gold.
‘On the three thousand, three hundred and thirty-first day, there was fire…’
The Angfyrd Odyssey
It was a commonly held belief that Fyreslayers did not feel the heat. Dunnegar knew it was untrue. Rather they endured it, like duardin. However, in this unending land where fire fell as rain and rivers boiled whilst somehow remaining liquid, endurance alone could carry them no further.
‘See that mountain over there.’
Killim’s voice was a dry growl. He lowered his flame-discoloured book tiredly and pointed into the distant haze.
The landscape was one of interconnected lakes stretching out towards a promissory red shimmer. Fire swirled across the surface of the water, reminiscent of the pattern of currents, but elementally subverted. That air was still and heavy. Cinders drifted. To describe the combined effect as a heat haze was inadequate. This place was heat. The very land was hazed.
And as far as Dunnegar could see, there was no mountain.
He shuffled back around on his metal stool. It was squat, of Angfyrd make, and hotter than all the hells. He endured it. His left arm roasted similarly on a portable anvil, his bicep bound tightly. He grunted, distracted.
‘No.’
‘There. No. No, wait a moment…’
The battlesmith scratched his dried brow and turned back to his book. It lay open on the back of a wooden cart containing the lodges’ treasures and that the Fyreslayers took it in shifts to pull. It was a straightforward, two-wheeled contraption with a low base built for low country. The wood came from trees that grew natively here, and as such was remarkably tolerant to the heat. The lodges had acquired it and two others like it several years before from a nomadic human tribe in trade for fyresteel weapons. There had certainly been plenty of those to go around since the battle against the Griever, too many to be carried by the few still walking. Hence the need for carts. Now, only this one remained.
A poor trade then, and one bemoaned constantly by the runefather, Nosda-Grimnir.
Running his finger along the map, Killim squinted towards the distant range, then did a double-take between the hellish topography in front of him and the ancient map on the page.
‘I’m sure of it,’ he muttered. ‘The river we followed had to be the Infernum. It had to be. And these are the first mountains we’ve seen.’
‘If you can call them mountains,’ said Solldun, runesmiter of the Sepuzkul lodge, absently.
He was runemaster now in all but name, but the honorific was as yet unearned, and he resisted it. Killim grumbled under his breath and returned to his maps as Solldun made some tightening adjustments to Dunnegar’s restraints. With roughened fingers, the runesmiter felt the muscles of his arm. Exposure to so much ur-gold had built them up hard and massive, but at the same time twitchy. Dunnegar’s muscles flexed painfully as the runesmiter’s fingers walked down to the wrist. Solldun closed his eyes and muttered half-remembered instruction, nodding as his fingers turned back to press down on a spot a thumb’s width up the berzerker’s forearm. Holding it there, he reached across the anvil for hammer and tongs.
‘Are you ready?’
‘Give it to me,’ said Dunnegar. His efforts not to growl made his words sound all the more forced. Deep breaths. He forced his heart to slow. ‘Yes. Yes, I’m ready.’
Puffing out his cheeks to steady himself, the runesmiter applied the rune to the proscribed patch of forearm. It hissed. Hot air blasted through Dunnegar’s gritted teeth. Then came Solldun’s hammer, smiting the rune through surface skin and deep into the muscle.
Dunnegar shivered as new strength suffused him. He felt it restore him to something nearer to normal. Or to a level of power that his body had come to demand as its normal.
‘Better?’ asked Killim.
‘Much,’ said Dunnegar, sagging back.
Breathing hard and feeling somewhat dizzy, he unfastened his bindings and flexed his bicep. It swelled to a pleasing degree. The rune in his wrist was hard and firm amidst the sliding muscle, like scar tissue. It shone dully under the sky’s pervasive amber glow.
So many of his runes had been used up in battle that even recovering the ur-gold from the dead couldn’t replenish them at the same rate. Rationing of the precious substance was beginning to fray sturdier tempers than his and it was only goi
ng to get worse. Even those runes that were newly forged, like the one now in his arm, were small and lacking in purity. Solldun had proven himself a force in battle, but he lacked the skills of a true runemaster. Rolk, he was not.
So why then did he feel so much better with the runesmiter’s weak work in his arm?
‘Perhaps now you’re of a mood to help,’ Killim said waspishly as Solldun packed up his tools and departed.
‘Show me a horde of orruks, old friend, and I’ll help.’
‘Old friend…’ Killim snorted, crossing his arms over his chest, but only for a moment. They were all too hot for that. ‘My old friend would be here with me making some sense out of this map.’
Dunnegar shook his head, ignoring him, levering his forearm backwards and forwards against the anvil and feeling the rune pull. Killim puffed out his chest angrily and made to remonstrate further when an even-tempered hail from the lakeside distracted him.
‘Another day, another argument,’ said Aethnir, striding up from the water’s edge with a band of loosely armoured Sepuzkul hearthguard sweating behind him. His bleak smile, like the Fyreslayers themselves, was diminished, but clung on with a stubbornness that was at odds inspiring or infuriating, depending on the swing of Dunnegar’s moods. ‘You must indeed be strong friends, else one of you would be dead by now.’
Killim and Dunnegar eyed each other. They both knew which one.
Remembering himself, Killim bowed stiffly. His attitude to their reversal in status was ironic given that it had been by his own scholarly concession, ‘not unheard of’, that had finally overcome the resistance to the decimated Angfyrd lodge being absorbed into their cousins’ ranks. It was Aethnir now that commanded the auric hearthguard, with Killim relegated merely to carrying the standard.
‘Perhaps in a few hundred years,’ Nosda-Grimnir had said by way of consolation, time enough for the old smith to memorise the chronicle of the new lodge he was now a reluctant part of.
‘Shouldn’t you be foraging ahead?’ Killim grumbled.
Fyreslayers Page 3