‘If someone must stay, why not Forvuld?’
As the eldest, Forvuld’s hope to succeed Dorvurn as runefather was arguably the strongest.
‘Because you have much to prove,’ Dorvurn said. ‘You will perform the miraculous to protect the hearth.’
To his right, Forvuld nodded, showing his confidence in his younger brother.
Homnir bowed his head in acquiescence.
‘Your father is grateful,’ Dorvurn said. ‘And your runefather is grateful. Gather the people in the Forgecrag in our wake. The bridges will be dangerous until our return.’
‘I will, runefather.’
Homnir walked toward the edge of the plateau, so he would not be in the way of the departing army. Dorvurn went forward to where Karmanax, his magmadroth, clawed at the ground, impatient to be away. Dorvurn climbed into the saddle and stood tall.
‘Fyreslayers of the Krelstrag!’ His voice boomed over the eternal rumble and liquid roar of the Earthwound ocean. ‘To the Great Weld and beyond! On this day, we begin the fulfilment of an oath made an age ago. On this day, we march toward the manifestation of prophecy! For Grimnir!’
‘For Grimnir!’ the great host of the Krelstrag answered.
Dorvurn looked at Thrumnor and Rhulmok. ‘Runemaster,’ he said. ‘Runesmiter. Pave our way.’
Thrumnor made a fist and struck his left shoulder in salute. Rhulmok did the same, and mounted his own magmadroth, Grognax. Thrumnor moved to the magmadroth’s side. With the crunch of thousands of feet against stone, the march began.
The journey through the Earthwound archipelago was a long one. It took many days just to move beyond the Krelstrag domains. Thrumnor and Rhulmok worked in unison, creating bridge after bridge. There came a moment, seven days into the march, when the distance between the volcanic cone on which the army mustered and the next peak to rise above the ocean of lava was so great that Thrumnor wondered if he and the runesmiter could span it. Span it they did, though, and the bridge appeared as thin as spun gold as it stretched across the seething, restless inferno. The bridge was strong, and it carried the host. In the end it was the island they had left that sank first, taking the bridge down after they had already begun construction of the next one.
Days and days of crossings, a journey over the infinity of the ocean, and always the waves of molten rock heaved to the horizon. Slowly, very slowly, the Great Weld grew larger, and Thrumnor began to believe they were making progress. The unnatural lightning storm had ended, though at different points in the sky it would return for a time, like the flaring of a new war. The green bursts on the top of the Weld continued, the rhythm unending, the hammer striking the anvil ceaselessly. It was a summoning so insistent Thrumnor had to remind himself that the ascent of the Weld was but the first stage of the journey, and not the destination itself.
Finally, after many, many more days, a dark line appeared on the horizon. It was the mainland.
The Earthwound ocean had a shore.
The shore was blighted.
A forest spread over the leagues of jagged foothills and deep, narrow canyons that led towards the base of the Great Weld. It was a forest that had been buried aeons ago, but that now had been resurrected into a monstrous new life.
The forest was petrified. The trees in their millions had been killed by the violence of the land, and then turned to stone. They still stood, skeletons of rock reaching up to the cruel sky. Something new had come among them; a terrible foliage hung from their limbs, a thick, black, glistening fungus. It dripped ichor down their trunks. Where the fluid ran, it ate into the rock, dissolving and devouring. Thrumnor examined the fungus more closely as the Fyreslayers moved through the dead-yet-diseased forest. The growths resembled giant slugs. They clung to the trunks and branches as if trying to suffocate them. The surface rippled like muscles.
‘A plague to eat stone,’ Rhulmok muttered. Thrumnor nodded. He tightened his grip on his runic iron. Rhulmok sounded at least as curious as he was horrified. Thrumnor felt only holy outrage.
‘We will find our way below the surface,’ Dorvurn announced. ‘We will take the ancient ways, and if an enemy awaits, we will meet him on our terms.’
The forest writhed. Stone rotted. Insects with clattering wings swarmed from burst fungus pods. Thrumnor learned that stone could have a stench. But there was no attack, and at the end of the first day on the mainland, a scouting party of vulkite karls found a gateway underground. It was a ruin, its doors long rusted to nothing, the pillars of the entrance leaning against each other and blocked by a heap of fungus twenty feet high. The Krelstrag scoured the parasite away with fire, and then descended.
The world they found filled Thrumnor’s soul with melancholy. There was much that was familiar, which made its dereliction all the worse. The tunnels had once seen much work. There were traces of engravings on the walls. Caves were recognisable as dining halls and smithies, and more than once, as the days passed, Thrumnor’s breath caught when a vast, empty tomb of a chamber revealed itself to have been a forge-temple.
‘What lodge was this?’ Forvuld wondered.
‘I have seen signs of several,’ said Dorvurn. ‘But I do not know their names.’
‘Then this was once an empire,’ Forvuld said with bitter awe.
‘Yes.’ Dorvurn was equally solemn.
Forvuld insisted, ‘It is wrong that we have forgotten who was here.’
‘Yes,’ said Thrumnor. ‘It is wrong. But we can do nothing about what has been lost. What we are doing now preserves at least one strand of the long past. We will honour it, and in so doing, safeguard the future.’
The dereliction disturbed him, though. These ruins were not an insurmountable journey away from the Forgecrag. That the Krelstrag had no memory of who had been here was a sign of how much had been taken by Chaos, even if the Krelstrag held fast in the Earthwound archipelago.
They passed under a colossal archway whose runes could still be read. It announced itself as the gateway to the Great Road of the Wyrm. The tunnel was enormous, travelling in a straight line over a long distance, as if it truly had been bored through the stone by a leviathan of myth. It had once been the lodge’s trade route. For three days, the Krelstrag grand fyrd moved long it. Thrumnor’s melancholy turned to anger as he gazed upon its forgotten majesty. So much had been taken from the Fyreslayers. The roof of the tunnel was vaulted, so high that it was a distant shadow in the torchlight. The pillars supporting it were carved in the form of titanic limbs. Their orientation alternated. First was an arm thrusting up from the floor to splay its hand against the ceiling, then another reaching down as if to pull the ore from the earth. Every few leagues, chambers opened up on one side or the other. In them stood towering statues that had been defaced. Many were missing heads, but the heroism of their stances was still apparent. They straddled crevasses so deep that they reached down to the molten depths of the mountain, and an orange light bathed their corroded features.
Glory and loss, everywhere Thrumnor looked. Glory and loss.
Towards the end of the third day, the route sloped upward, rising in increments toward the surface. As it did so, it became more and more unclean. The roots of the petrified forest reached down through the tunnel roof. They too were stone, and they too were diseased, covered in a grey, flaking mould. And they moved. Rock twisted in pain. The roots scraped at the walls. They tortured the ceiling, dropping jagged blocks to the floor of the tunnel. The more the path went upwards, the more the roots clustered and the more they tangled the space. Stone creaked in rotten agony. Leading from the front, Dorvurn smashed at the roots with his grandaxe, while the magmadroths battered them to fragments with their claws. At one juncture where the tunnel narrowed, Karmanax reared and unleashed a torrent of flaming bile into the knot of twisting corruption ahead. The stream melted the roots to nothing, clearing the way. The magmadroth snorted in unhappy contempt at the remains as h
e passed through.
Ahead, the tunnel widened. The roof was higher. Twisting, grinding roots draped the walls on all sides. Thrumnor watched the shadowy movement of the roots carefully. Rhulmok’s Grognax, just as suspicious, issued a low growl with every breath.
‘The shadows are a thicket,’ Rhulmok commented.
Thrumnor grunted his agreement. Much could hide in the dense tangle.
‘There might be more than plague-ridden stone within,’ he said. The convulsion of a blighted land concealed the artistry of the Great Road of the Wyrm.
There was so much movement. All around them, the shadows bulged and turned and rustled. An attack could come from anywhere.
The attack, when it came, was from everywhere. There was a sudden increase in the volume of the rustling. Things giggled in the dark. The shadows boiled. Down the walls and dropping from the ceiling came a swarm of distended, mewling, chattering, laughing daemons. They were squat, bulbous things, thick with tumours. Their needle-toothed jaws were parted in leering smiles. Horns in ones and twos and threes sprouted from their foreheads.
They were nurglings, and Thrumnor had fought their kind before during some of the many failed sieges of the Krelstrag lodge. Now the daemons attacked as if the Great Road was their land, and the Fyreslayers were the invaders. They came in a tide of uncounted thousands. In moments, the floor of the tunnel was hip-deep in the mire of the beasts. With tooth and claw and crude, rusted blade, the daemons swept against the Krelstrag duardin, seeking to overwhelm them with the sheer weight of their numbers.
The Fyreslayers responded to the attack with fury. These things had made the very veins of the earth unclean, and extermination was almost too good for them. Atop Grognax, Rhulmok let loose a roar of outrage. The magmadroth echoed him. Rhulmok began to hammer a rhythm. He chanted the Krelstrag war song. The ur-gold in Thrumnor’s flesh responded, filling him with the heat of rage and strength to shatter mountains. Down the ranks of the Fyreslayers, the essence of Grimnir came to wrathful life. The sigils and runes beaten into hardy duardin flesh glowed with fury. The uncountable nurglings were the plague-tide, rising up to drown its victims. The Fyreslayers were lava, scouring all before them.
Thrumnor swept his runic iron in wide blows. He smashed swaths of nurglings with every strike. They burst apart with wet cries of distress.
The magmadroths lashed out with tails and claws, destroying scores of the abominations. They crushed the daemons beneath their paws, smearing green bodies to bubbling liquid. They spewed their bile, burning the nurglings to ash.
The warriors of the Krelstrag fyrds hurled themselves into the destruction of the unclean enemy. With axes, they cut the grey tide down. Their voices joined Rhulmok’s, and they sang their fierce joy of battle – a pure, honourable joy that drowned out the burbling, gurgling, nonsensical clamouring of the daemons.
The nurglings rushed forward again with greater force. From behind their first ranks came their leaders. Blightkings waded into the battle, each one commanding hundreds of nurglings. They were bloated, deformed. Suppurating tentacles reached out from gaping maws where stomachs should have been. Some had one eye, others three. Arms were transformed into huge pincers. As they attacked, tocsins rang. The solemn tolling reverberated against the walls of the Great Road, claiming the tunnels in the name of the Plaguefather.
‘Unholy trespassers!’ Thrumnor shouted. ‘This is Fyreslayer land. You come here only to perish!’ He ran forward at the nearest blightking. He struck with his runic iron, plunging it into a torso maw. The jaws bit down, seizing the rod, and the blightking swung a pitted axe at Thrumnor’s head. The runemaster ducked and pressed harder. The sacred metal of the iron burned through the pestilential flesh. It shattered its spine and burst through its back. Thrumnor pulled it free as the heavy corpse fell.
A double-flail struck him from the side, and he staggered. Nurglings swarmed against him, trying to smother him with their biting mass. The blightking who had hit him, a corpulent, one-eyed giant, raised its flails again. Nurglings clamped their jaws onto Thrumnor’s arms to hold them back. He was slow to raise his staff to block the coming blow.
A stream of bile fell on the blightking. Its flesh melted and the flail dropped without striking. Grognax’s huge jaws snapped the plague warrior in half. Rhulmok had led the magmadroth away from the main formation of the Fyreslayers, cutting through the nurglings to ease the pressure on Thrumnor. The runemaster smashed the daemons from his person and took his stance at Grognax’s flank.
‘That was foolish,’ Rhulmok shouted in between his drum beats.
‘You cannot accept this sacrilege!’
‘I do not accept useless rage,’ the runesmiter said. ‘This ground is lost, corrupted beyond hope. We must pass through it, not sacrifice ourselves pointlessly. Is this battle the one of your vision?’
It was not. Thrumnor wished he could refute Rhulmok’s logic.
Still the nurglings and blightkings charged. Still they were thrown back. But their numbers told. Thrumnor saw the karl Gabir, one of the elite of the vulkite berzerkers, swarmed by the creatures. He fought them hard and well, killing many, but they clambered over him and bore him down before any of his brothers could reach him. When the other Fyreslayers cleared the mound of nurglings away, Gabir was a half-eaten carcass swelling with boils.
The stench of the daemons was foul. Gaseous, thick, suffocating, it conjured images in Thrumnor’s mind of stone turned as soft as flesh, falling apart like stringy, fly-blown meat.
The nurglings ate into the Krelstrag lines, but they could not stop the march. They brought down individual Fyreslayers, but the fallen warriors’ brothers responded with renewed fury, destroying the daemons in ever greater numbers. Step by step, the Fyreslayers burned and smashed their way forward, grinding the enemy down. This much was true to Thrumnor’s vision. The Krelstrag were the lava flood, and would not be stopped. Certainly not by this enemy.
I saw what must happen, Thrumnor thought, grasping that triumph. We are on our destined path. The sweep of his staff destroyed another cluster of nurglings.
At last, the flood of foes ended. Their numbers were not infinite. The Fyreslayers trampled the last underfoot and watched as the bodies burst into clouds of dusty spores. The air was filled with disease, but the fire of Grimnir burned brightly in the ur-gold of the Fyreslayers, and they would not be brought down by so lowly a foe.
Less than an hour later, the tunnel split. The left-hand branch continued to climb toward the surface. On the right, it plunged deeper into the earth. Dorvurn raised an arm to call a halt. Thrumnor and Rhulmok rode up beside him. They were joined by the runesons. Together, they stared in horror at the full extent of the blighted underworld.
The route up was relatively clear, but the roots of the petrified forest created a thick, malodorous tangle on the path that descended into the lodge. The mould there had reached a critical stage, achieving an unholy union, and the roots now spread the pestilence to the rock around them. What Thrumnor had only imagined earlier was a reality here. The tunnel walls and ceiling pressed in on each other, as soft as a sponge, a fleshy collapse. There was no passage to be had here. There was barely room for a single Fyreslayer at a time to try the tunnel, and it narrowed further at the edge of torchlight.
‘How can such rot be?’ Forvuld asked.
‘It has had all the time it needs to settle deep into the marrow of the earth,’ said Dorvurn. He turned to the left-hand path. ‘We will travel overland.’
It took another day’s journey, beset by smaller nurgling assaults, before the Krelstrag reached the outer gates. They emerged on a steep slope, less than a league from the base of the Great Weld. The petrified forest with its agonised forms was now at their back, but the route to the Weld was strewn with boulders, fuzzy with mould, and the ground was a carpet of rock-devouring lichen. If there were daemons nearby, they did not attack. The Fyreslayers moved on
.
As dusk fell, the army reached its destination.
Thrumnor gazed up its height. The size of the Weld was overwhelming. A force beyond reckoning had brought multiple volcanoes together, fusing them into a single giant, standing alone.
‘And Grimnir desired an anvil for his work,’ Thrumnor intoned. ‘And he essayed first one mountain, and then another, and they were all too weak, shattering to dust at the first blow of his hammer.’ His voice echoed against the cliff face. He faced the Krelstrag, his back to the Weld, and recited the tale they all knew, but had never felt so visceral until this moment. ‘And because the mountains on their own were too weak, Grimnir gathered a great number together, and he welded them into one with the fury of his making. From that great forging, he had his anvil.’
Thrumnor stopped. He turned around again to regard Grimnir’s anvil with a mingling of awe and horror. Seen from the Forgecrag, the Great Weld was a distant silhouette, and its proportions did indeed resemble an anvil. Now he could see the evidence of Grimnir’s work. The outlines of the individual volcanoes were still visible. Clefts running from peak to base, their gaps filled with basalt, marked the shapes of the mountains that had been.
There was something else, though, about the configuration of the lines. Their slopes, their angles and their parallels were suggestive of something else. But the pattern extended beyond Thrumnor’s sight, and he dismissed it.
What he saw was a wonder, and Thrumnor gloried at the power of Grimnir.
But there was horror too. Even in the dim light, he could clearly see the extent of the blight on the towering walls of the Great Weld. It was a stain, one that appeared to move and spread if Thrumnor stared at it long enough. The shape of the stain was even worse.
‘No,’ he said. ‘This cannot be.’
‘You see it too,’ said Rhulmok.
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