by David Guymer
Yet it was not in the nature of dwarfs to forget, and certain key structures had been diligently maintained by the guilds to whom that thankless duty had been entrusted. Or thankless it had seemed. Now craftsmasters of the Masons’ Guild puffed out their chests with pride as cannon and ballistae were installed in the towering basilica, accepting with beaming modesty the compliments of the engineers and work crews sent to bed in their engines.
A dwarf hold was impregnable. Everyone who knew anything knew that. Holds had fallen in the past, but only by the most exceptional of circumstance and the vilest of treachery. The foes of the dwarfs were legion as the dwarfs themselves were not, but prepared, fortified, the dwarfs were resolute as stone and hard as iron, and not one inch of Grungni’s earth would be surrendered this day. Miners, carvers and sappers worked in teams to construct defences, tearing up paving stones to dig trenches and piling the resultant rubble into earthworks from which long-barrelled cannon snarled like beasts of brass awoken prematurely from slumber.
The throng of Karak Azul was arrayed into a semicircular formation, concentric curtain walls of bearded steel in defence of the single stairwell to the Upper Deeps. The stair itself was a fortress, its ramparts bristling with Thunderers and weapon emplacements. A heavy iron portcullis hovered above the open gateway, ready to drop like a guillotine at a moment’s notice. More dwarfs trooped beneath the murder-holes and crossbow slits of the massive gatehouse, their heavy boots thundering on the wooden bridge that spanned the deep crevasse between the keep and the gathering throng. Some dwarfs bore with them great oathstones, carved blocks of ancient rock. The ranks parted before these relics, nodding solemnly as they passed. Eyes bulging and cheeks reddening, the honoured bearers set down their burdens with the utmost reverence. Clan leaders and thanes climbed atop the stones to the cheers of their warriors. No dwarf would abandon their oathstone. It was a symbol on which the blood of generations of enemies had been spilt, and it was a warning: the line that no foe might cross.
Surrounded by an elite company of Hammerers, Handrik stood with Kazador and Runelord Thorek in the centre of the front line, the point any invader intending to reach the keep must pass. Loremaster Logan stood with them, legs braced against the great weight of the tome in his hands. He read aloud, hard words of hate shouted from the pages for the ears of the entire Deep.
‘…on this day, the three thousand two hundred and fifty-first since the reclamation of Hirn Mingol, did the rat-king of the Eight Peaks…’
Handrik felt bitter hatred swell in his breast as the manifold crimes of the one that called himself the Headtaker were recounted from the great book. Who would have thought the achievements of so many could be undone in so short a span of years?
‘…and Argrin, may his beard forever lengthen, did fall in steadfast defiance…’
He clutched his axe to his breastplate. The gleaming gromril, hardened with runes of protection and stone, was a physical reminder of his lessened station. That the king had acceded to Handrik’s request to fight by his side might in other circumstances have been deemed an honour, but today it smacked of pity. And Handrik didn’t care to be pitied.
‘…did fall bravely while seeking vengeance on the Headtaker for his capture of Karag Durak…’
The king stood glorious in the Armour of Kings, the resplendent glory of aeons past rendered with timeless honour in gromril and a hundred varieties of gold. Heavy bracers girdled his thickset arms, straining against his taut muscles as he relived the ancestral hate bound in the pages of the dammaz kron. His arms were crossed over his neatly braided beard, ham-like fists joining around the long haft of the Hammer of Azul, a heavy anvil-shaped club of unleavened gromril capable of shattering rock and bone with equal ease.
‘… twenty-seven stout warriors of the Dourback clan did fall, the rat-king Queek, foremost in the numberless ranks of their slayers…’
The Hammerers clutched their mighty weapons in silence, their eyes hooded in fierce remembrance. All around, dwarfs stood with bowed heads, some similarly in silence, others muttering personal oaths and pledges of grudgement. The sense of hatred was palpable. The Headtaker would find no quarter here.
There was a shuffling of feet and much vehement muttering as the kron was slammed shut. ‘They will be remembered,’ Logan intoned, passing the book to an aide who bound it reverently in blue cloth. The loremaster reset his spectacles as another junior lorekeeper handed him his warhammer and attended to tightening the straps of his armour.
‘My thanks, loremaster,’ said Kazador, his wrath barely constrained. ‘All those wrongs will be righted this day.’
‘Agreed,’ Thorek added. The two dwarfs had set aside their feud of the previous night. Thorek was iron-willed, as unyielding as an anvil, and their confrontation at the Feast of Grungni was far from the first of their clashes. It was not forgiven, and certainly not forgotten, but it was studiously ignored for now.
‘Will the earthworks slow them?’
At the king’s question, Thorek and Handrik looked at the steeply sloping bulwark of granite blocks bristling with spear points that lay at the confluence of the hurriedly excavated trenches directly in front of their own position.
‘I imagine they will,’ said Thorek
‘I don’t like them,’ Handrik grumbled.
‘I’m sure neither will the thaggoraki,’ Thorek said stiffly.
‘We never needed such contraptions in the past.’
‘They’ve been proven many times,’ said Thorek. ‘Before the time of Grungni, our most distant ancestors tilled the earth like men without knowledge of delving or smelting. What’s new is not always to be shunned, if its worth is proven.’
Handrik grumbled, but offered no contradiction.
‘I oversaw every step of their assembly and smote the runes myself. Have no doubt, Handrik, they will function as they should. Today, the thaggoraki will suffer a taste of their own trickery, and our ancestors who had not such weapons will weep at the justness of it.’
‘Do I see men in my line?’ Kazador asked.
Handrik glanced up, his heart still roiling with the bound wrath of the kron. ‘They are with Thordun Locksplitter. His father is an ancestor of Karak Azul.’ Handrik pointed out the cloaked dwarf in his wide-brimmed hat, standing behind the ranks of the Hammerhand clansdwarfs.
Kazador followed the longbeard’s gesture. ‘What’s that thing in his hand?’
‘I believe it one of the new repeater handguns the humans have devised,’ said Thorek
‘Will wonders never cease,’ Handrik grunted with a sour laugh.
Thorek levelled a withering glare at the old longbeard. He turned to Kazador, with the slightest of bows. ‘It’s time I was about my own duties. Fight well, Kazador.’
‘And die hard, Runelord,’ Kazador returned as the pair clasped wrists.
Thorek departed for his own place in the battle-line. Flanked by quarrellers, Karak Azul’s Anvil of Doom had been wheeled into position between the infantry and wooden blocks were being hammered under its wheels. His apprentice, Kraggi, stood overseeing the work, and Thorek immediately set about the ritual preparations to awaken its potent runes of destruction for battle.
‘They’re late,’ Kazador growled.
‘Maybe,’ said Handrik. ‘The note said “at first bell”. According to Hrathgar, skaven split their days by thirteen bells, but he doesn’t know exactly when they start. We measured from dawn and hoped for the best, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the thaggoraki make it up as they go along.’
The king spat, venom still poisoning his veins at the mere mention of the verminous ratmen. ‘If they come at all.’
Handrik nodded. The host assembled on the Ninth Deep was not the full throng of Karak Azul. The possibility of a trap could not be ignored, and clansdwarfs, grumbling bitterly, had been garrisoned to key points throughout the hold. The strength of the Ironbreakers had been split between the tunnel-ways of the Upper Deeps and the cramped battlegrounds of the stairwells
where the veteran tunnel fighters would excel. Only a handpicked detachment of Ironbreakers had been deployed to the Ninth Deep. A dozen of their oldest and most experienced warriors stood guard before the gatehouse, an extension of the fort’s unyielding rock. Their new captain, Lothgrim, stood with them in his first duty since assuming Handrik’s command. He looked nervous.
‘You’d better not mess this up,’ Handrik muttered.
‘What was that?’ Kazador asked.
‘Just thinking aloud,’ said Handrik, embarrassed. He nodded, relieved, to a pair of blue-cloaked dwarfs as they appeared by the king’s side. The Hammerers parted before them with nods and murmured greetings. They bore between them a massive shield, wrought of iron and swirling with runes and angular heraldic motifs that blended together into a single elaborate design. ‘Your shieldbearers, your majesty.’
Kazador did not turn. ‘I have no need. No dawi is so lowly that they should suffer the weight of the accursed king of Karak Azul.’ The king scoffed. ‘Perhaps it is I who bring such misfortune upon my hold, I who cannot avenge even my own kin.’
‘You are the best of kings,’ said Handrik stiffly. But this was neither the time nor the place to convince his king of that statement’s truth. ‘You will have your vengeance, if vengeance is what your kin need.’
Kazador might have wept, had his pride allowed, his sorrow suddenly rekindling into anger. ‘This Headtaker will pay, Handrik. On the line of all my ancestors, I swear to you that he will pay. I will exact full vengeance and demand tenfold again for every hour he keeps my boots from the halls of Karak Drazh.’
Handrik bowed his head. It had been too long since he had heard the Black Crag referred to by its true, dawi-given, name.
‘Shieldbearers!’ Kazador bellowed. ‘Shieldbearers to me!’
The two dwarfs moved forward, dropping to their knees as one. Kazador swept his long blue cloak over one shoulder and accepted Handrik’s offered hand as he clambered atop his shield.
Handrik winced, suppressing the agony that erupted in his back as the king let go, enduring in silence as only a dwarf could.
Kazador reached to his belt and unhooked the clasp of the Thunderhorn. The instrument was as old as time. It had been carved by masters of long-forgotten holds from the ivory tusks of the beasts of the southern plains and its golden ancestor runes were unblemished by the passing millennia. He pursed his lips to the mouthpiece and blasted a note of such clarity and purpose that it cast back the shadows, rendering insubstantial the din of the Ninth Deep. It was a sound to uplift the spirit, like the sight of dawn rays on the icy crown of the karak, a vision to true-hearted dawi of all that was everlasting. Always, the enemies of the dwarfs harried and probed. Always they dreamt of the day when the last dwarf faltered and permitted them to feast on the carcass of the Karaz Ankor. But it would not be this day. And not for ten thousand years hereafter.
Kazador lowered the Thunderhorn from his lips. The throng regarded him attentively.
‘Hear me, children of Grungni,’ he roared, his deep voice pitched to stir the distant corners of the Deep. ‘How many times have the ratkin come here? Or urk, grobi and drakk? How many times has our strength thrown them back?’ He turned slowly on his shield to meet every pair of eyes. ‘Every time!
‘And yet back they always come, like a tide of evil that cannot know when it is beaten. And always they will come back. Because this is Karak Azul, and there is no mightier prize. Grungni dwelt here. By the skill of his craft and the sweat of his toil were these halls carved. I see his work in every stone. I feel his blood in my veins. It boils at the presence of trespassers, and by that same blood I swear that not one inch of Grungni’s soil will be forsaken unto thaggoraki paws this day.
‘Here we stand, rock and earth. Here we fight and spill vermin blood. This is the line we hold to our final breath, until the Iron Peak falls to rust and ruin!’
The Deep erupted with angry yells, but Kazador shouted them down. ‘What say you then, descendants of Grungni? When will Karak Azul fall?’
‘Never!’
‘Tell me when!’
‘Never!’
‘Let your defiance echo through the ages!’
‘Never!’
The king tightened his grip on his hammer. ‘Let the ratkin gnaw on this!’ He thrust the Hammer of Azul upwards amidst a rapturous chorus of oaths and pledges of undying resolve that made the very roots of the Deep tremble with shared purpose.
Handrik, no tender beardling, felt the goose bumps rising on his skin.
This was his king, the Kazador he had thought forever lost. He roared his approval with the others.
Karak Azul would never fall.
The thunder of dwarf-thing voices thrilled through his heart. He felt it pump harder, louder. The hatred in their cries was palpable, a wave of near-solid fury. It crashed against his own in a bitter spray of bile and rage. His pulse quickened. He was stronger, he was mightier, his hatred more intense, his claws tingled at its heat.
Queek quivered with barely restrained desire, dancing an effervescent jig under the shelter of a half-collapsed mineshaft, twitching with impatient hunger. Compulsively, he examined the smooth brass contraption in his paw, sniffing it suspiciously as it continued its persistent ticking. Some mechanism beneath its tarnished surface clicked, and the warlord flinched involuntarily before the brass horn that curled along the outside of the disc-shaped device sprang inward, chiming the first bell.
Time to kill-slay, whispered the bone-dry voice of Ikit Slash, his fleshless torso draped across his trophy rack where he belonged. His fellows nodded, the movement almost imperceptible except to eyes as attuned as Queek’s. Dwarf-things die-die!
‘Yes-yes, they all die-die. Kazador-King die-die. Yes. Yes!’
Queek bounced and hissed, working himself into a frenzy.
Somehow, within the tunnel’s confines, the two score of Queek’s hand-trained stormvermin found room to edge away.
‘Please think,’ Sharpwit begged, entreating to reason, against all reason, one last time. ‘Dwarf-things cannot be beaten by frontal assault alone. Look-see. They are ready and wait for us. I blame stupid-fool Fizqwik and his thieving. I warned him–’
‘Enough,’ Queek hissed. ‘Enough chatter from this voice. It bores me.’
‘Let us flank them. I know tunnels that dwarf-things never use. I take out their guns and attack from inside the fort-thing. Then Queek charge.’
Queek grinned. Let the voice twitter away. There were other voices. The stone and metal banners of the dwarfs bobbed and swayed over their short, bearded heads. They taunted like fleas.
Queek yearned to scratch. And claw. And make bleed.
His breath caught. Raised above the throng on an iron shield stood a single dwarf-thing, white of fur, a thin crown welded to a winged helm, a lumpen cudgel wielded high above his head in foul disregard for the might of Queek.
Queek charge. Queek kill-kill. Show dwarf-king Queek is strongest!
‘Queek is strongest!’ he shrieked. ‘None laugh-mock Queek!’ Screaming a battle-cry, Queek sprinted from the cover of the shaft and into the open killing ground of the Ninth Deep. A moment later, the stormvermin followed, issuing shrill cries of their own as they gripped halberds and pounded after the warlord they feared more than the guns and axes of the dwarfs.
Sharpwit punched the wall in frustration. The Horned Rat take this blasted warlord!
Clanrats poured forth from other shafts, a sputtering flow where there should have been a deluge. Sharpwit picked out pockets of order as snarling chieftains marshalled their warriors into ranks and sent them through the tunnels with promises of death and pain to whoever was the last one through. He memorised their scents. They would make useful warlords if Queek should suffer an ‘accident’ in the wake of this debacle.
A horde of clanrats lingered, confused, at Sharpwit’s back.
‘Go,’ he snarled. ‘Go, go, go!’ He waved them past, speeding them on their way with a sweeping flash
of claws.
Drawing confidence from his authority and finding assurance in the thousands of blood-hungry ratkin pressed into the tunnels at their sides, skaven without number surged ahead as a mass.
Sharpwit shrugged with resignation.
In for one, in for thirteen.
Thordun placed his hand over his heart. It beat hard enough for two, and even under layers of steel, leather and flesh it seemed improbable that Hrathgar and the others would not hear and judge. In numbers beyond imagination, the vermin boiled up through the rents in the floor and spilled from previously unnoticed splits in the distant walls, the disparate masses seething into one that came surging forward like a maddened swarm. He snapped up his handgun in readiness. The range was still too great, but they were closing fast. So, so fast. How could anything so numerous move so fast?
He forced himself to take a breath, then swept the coming storm with the barrel of his weapon. His throat clamped down over that prized breath, his gaze landing on the ratkin that charged well ahead of its pursuing hoard. It was tall, armoured red, the bones swaying from its trophy rack rattling with every step so swiftly stolen into the Karak Azul.
Hrathgar had seen it too. The dwarf muttered some dark oath, as did his icon bearer, Rorrick, beside him. Soon all the Eight Peaks dwarfs had taken up the lament. A single word: ‘Headtaker.’
Musket-fire crackled into life across the dwarf line, the sharp reports soon joined by the crump of cannon, flaring briefly red within their emplacements like the maws of devils, belching black smoke that hung in ashen clouds as well-drilled crews scrambled to reload. Skaven jerked back by the hundred, falling under the paws of ten thousand more of their onrushing brethren. Chain-shot from one of the fort’s smaller cannon scythed into the front rank of the skaven horde. The two half-balls spun in a vicious arc of death on a length of chain, severing arms and heads and even armoured torsos in an eruption of pulped flesh and liberated fluids.
But still the Headtaker came, his eyes only for the thin line of dwarfs.
‘Hold fast,’ bawled Kazador. ‘Let the ratmen break upon our shields!’