Headtaker

by David Guymer

  A crack split the air and the king staggered back, his shieldbearers quickly tilting the shield forward to check his fall. His fingers probed the charring on his armour, looking up to see a dozen or so ratmen with long-barrelled warplock jezzails taking up position on a toppled statue that overlooked the battlefield. They unleashed a volley, two score muzzles flashing sickly green. Their aim was dire, but a warrior of the Orgrin clan fell, a wound the size of a fist in his shield and likewise its shadow in the chainmail beneath. Blood polluted with glowing shrapnel pumped from the dying dwarf’s chest. Thunderers and quarrellers shifted their aim but the distance was too great. Those few that struck true impacted harmlessly against the broad pavise shields of the jezzail teams.

  A hunched figure stalked behind the protection of his fellow rats as the jezzails settled into a continuous, but irregular, pattern of fire. The skaven was swaddled in thick leather armour, tufts of piebald fur escaping from the confines of a copper helm, a green lens hovering over one eye as he closed the other and took aim at Kazador with a grossly oversized musket.

  Handrik roared a warning but the expected impact never fell. He looked to see the warlock waving his paw through a plume of green smoke. The creature’s eyepiece had swung clear on truculent joints and the shot had fired wild. Handrik saw him turn to berate an underling, hidden behind the back of a pin-cushioned pavise.

  Handrik hissed in recognition. He’d remember those eyes until he closed his own for the last time. ‘That’s the sticky-pawed beggar who made off with the Grumbold.’ He gave Kazador a worried glance. ‘You’re a mighty tempting target up there.’

  ‘Let them aim their infernal guns on me, my friend. My skull is thick.’

  Behind them, a chorus of cannon fired. The smog shrouding the fort smudged red as the cavern shook to their furious report.

  Kazador clutched his hammer two-handed and shouted into the din. ‘Come to me, vermin. Come to the sons of Grungni!’

  The tunnel rumbled as if in the grip of an earthquake. Sharpwit threw himself aside as a monstrous rat ogre blundered past, its tiny brain uncaring of the mewling clanrats pulped into jelly beneath its paws. Its huge hunched shoulders scraped dirt from the ceiling as it forced its way through the passage towards the bloodshed for which it was bred.

  His lungs spasmed in fright, throwing him into a coughing fit as dust lodged at the back of his throat. He hobbled across the flattened, bleeding mess left in the rat ogre’s wake and into the chaos of the Ninth Deep. Smoke hung over everything. The fort defending the stairwell to the Upper Deeps was invisible behind the black shroud, evidenced only by the simultaneous smear of fiery red light as cannon crew loaded and fired almost as one. The thunder came a moment later, rumbling over the battlefield like the wrath of gods to whom mutilated skaven screamed for mercy.

  Sharpwit escaped the tunnel just in time as another seven rat ogres bounded from the passage after the first. The last to emerge, a particularly hulking brute, tore out the roof from the tunnel with his passing. It snapped, confused, with viciously oversized fangs at the spray of grit it produced. A team of Clan Moulder packmasters followed their creations, cracking barbed whips over their massive backs, drawing syrupy blood from the truculent beasts. The rat ogres roared. The big bonebreaker hammered its fists against its chest and barked a challenge, loping towards the scent of dwarf-meat that its twisted mind could not resist. Its smaller kin followed in its wake, charging into the fusillade as though it were a light rain.

  Assured by the monstrous creatures between him and his enemy, Sharpwit limped forwards.

  Blood.

  Queek raised his nose and breathed it in, a stream of life and death that made his heart palpate with ecstasy. He no longer knew where he was. All he saw was Kazador held high above his shield. He beckoned. They belonged together.

  He urged his warriors deeper into the enfilading fire. Lead shot from cannon and musket tore across the disordered skaven ranks, laying into them from somewhere in the smoke-shrouded distance, or wailing above their heads like a banshee to bring death upon those further back. He pushed himself to pull even further ahead of the front rank, braving the hail of shot with the arrogance of the insane and yelling his challenge in the vain hope that Kazador might hear.

  The king made no move, but no matter. Queek was close, so close he could smell the fear that surely matted his white fur at the nearness of the Headtaker. Just a little closer. Just one more charge.

  ‘Kill-kill,’ Queek shrieked and the stormvermin and clanrats that had kept pace and survived took up the cry.

  ‘Kill-kill!’

  ‘We charge,’ Queek yelled. ‘We kill.’

  Ahead lay a patch of rough ground. Piles of rock had been mounded around a low wall of sandbags and jutting spears, all surrounded by a shallow ditch. They hoped to slow the Headtaker, but even weighed down by armour, he and his warriors were swift and nimble and it would take more than that simple bulwark to slow his charge. Queek pointed his sword at Kazador and charged after it with a yell. His warriors, demented by terror into blood frenzy, flowed as a crimson wave in his wake.

  As the charge closed with the earthworks, the air behind it shimmered. Light bent, broke and re-annealed, disappearing like blood into the vortex of a whirlpool as a pair of squat four-barrelled shapes materialised from behind runes of cloaking. In unison, the crew of the two guns lit fuses and the eight barrels bloomed in deadly, concussive sequence.

  A stormvermin squealed, knocking the warlord aside as he threw himself to the ground. A bouncing cannon shot took him in the chest, smashing breastplate and ribcage into one pulped mess. Queek had no time to move before the force of his underling’s death threw the ruined body into his own. He felt bone shatter and the pair of them were flung back, ploughing into the following ranks of vermin, sowing death and destruction as thoroughly as any cannonball.

  As the last barrel released its load there was a sudden calm. The squeals of the maimed and the dying filled it before a hard voice overshadowed them all.

  ‘Reload!’

  Darkness had descended on the Ninth Deep, a smothering blanket of bloody ash and gunpowder that choked the eyes and burned the hairs of delicate skaven noses. Sheet lightning flared within the storm as the blasted runemaker continued to wreak havoc, granting visions like daemon-sent portents of the world’s end. The giant shapes of rat ogres jerked between the strobing pulses of electric light, their twisted skeletons, suddenly as luminous as moon-rock in a papyrus wrap, writhing in unimaginable torment. All the while muted cannon-fire rumbled sporadically like distant thunder.

  Sharpwit held a scrap of scarlet fabric torn from a fallen battle standard to his snout. His ribs still hurt and he drew slow, cautious breaths through the cloth.

  A brown-furred sword-rat in tatty rags, the red dye slowly giving way to the green beneath, fidgeted anxiously as he waited for Sharpwit to recover.

  Sharpwit withdrew the cloth from his muzzle long enough to speak. ‘You saw Queek fall?’

  ‘Tragic end, wiliest and most cunning of skaven. He shot-hit and fall-dead fast-quick.’ A staccato sequence of booms rippled through the storm and the sword-rat ducked, covering his paws over his ears.

  Sharpwit replaced the cloth over his snout and considered. So Queek was dead? Good. It couldn’t have happened to a madder warlord. Of those that remained, Fizqwik was a fool promoted far beyond his skills, while Razzel had disappeared faster than a slave tossed into a Clan Moulder breeding pit the moment the fighting had started. The sorcerer’s cowardice was truly of epic proportions. Even for a skaven. That left him. He straightened, back clicking as he savoured a taste he had long ago forsaken.

  Power.

  He closed his eye and pictured the battlefield, summoning a mental image from the scraps of scent and sound that filtered through the murk. The charge in the centre had stalled before the organ guns, while the flanks suffered under a withering barrage from the emplacements within the fortress stair. Sharpwit got no sense of a rout, despi
te Queek’s death, but the guns continued to pound and there was little to be gained from throwing yet more bodies onto the problem.

  And bodies he had to spare. Clanrats milled about him, wide-eyed with confusion and terror. Some, Sharpwit suspected, were deliberately hanging back, while others appeared genuinely to have no idea what they were supposed to be doing.

  ‘Clawleaders!’ he squeaked, clamping the cloth over his nose for a deep breath before shouting again. ‘Clawleaders come-scurry to me.’

  The clawleaders clustered round him to take their orders as though he handed out favours. Not one of the ruthless back-stabbers questioned his right to command. Sharpwit’s paws tingled, a latent memory of the power of youth. He had forgotten how it felt to be feared. It felt good. The clawleaders scurried to their assigned tasks, each eager to appear the bravest and most zealous in their persecution of the new warlord’s enemies. Shrill commands cut through the din as the rabble amalgamated into an approximation of order as only a skaven army could.

  ‘Go,’ he squeaked. ‘Go now, for glory and dwarf-meat!’

  The horde surged forward. Spears rattled and rusted mail shook, the senses maddeningly overwhelmed by the excited chittering of a thousand clanrats intent on murder and the pounding of their fleet-footed paws. In the midst of such numbers, defeat suddenly did not seem such a foregone conclusion after all.

  As the vast host of ratkin swept by, he caught a glimpse of black-cloaked gutter runners loitering between the charging clanrats. Their leader, garbed like the rest of his number in black, had his claws and teeth discoloured and the pale flesh of his paws and snout bound in dark silk. Only the red of his eyes gave the assassin’s presence away. The night-clad killers of Clan Eshin had their musk glands removed in some quasi-ceremonial rite of passage, and the assassin’s scent predictably betrayed nothing, but his posture radiated a confusion that was obvious even to Sharpwit’s dim eye. Where once feckless clanrats would have trampled him without a care, now they avoided him like a leprous plague monk. His crutches bore him unhurriedly through his hordes. He recognised the Clan Eshin hireling and struggled to recall his name as he limped through the crush.

  ‘Fang Dao,’ he said, remembering just as he arrived at the skaven’s side.

  The assassin responded with a faintly submissive display of unguarded throat. He glared at the stampeding clanrats with thinly veiled loathing. ‘Bloodtail hires me to stalk-slay dwarf-thing leaders. But Queek forgets, I think.’

  ‘Fool-Queek not warlord any more.’

  ‘So I hear, but Bloodtail’s warptokens aren’t enough to throw Eshin onto dwarf-thing shields. Sharpwit-Warlord has lots-many clanrats for that, I think.’

  Sharpwit grinned. He did like the ring of Sharpwit-Warlord. ‘You squeak correct-true.’ He brushed past the assassin, gesturing that he and his gutter runners should follow.

  The Clan Eshin adept hissed to his underlings in their clandestine dialect. Dark-garbed shapes bled from the seething body of the clanrat horde in answer, streaming in the wake of their master and the old skaven that led them from the carnage and back towards the burrows.

  ‘Where do we go-sneak?’

  ‘Azul-Place is sick with hidden passages and secret stairs. Sharpwit knows them better than any, better even than dwarf-things. Follow me, Fang Dao. Queek was too stupid. But I will win this war.’

  Warlord Queek disentangled his limbs from the pile of shattered bodies. The air was clouded with smoke and the reek of death. He groaned, the world spinning, as he tried to sit. He felt broken bones. He opened his paws, bone fragments spilling between the fingers of his gauntlets like withered petals.

  Frantically, his gaze shot to where his trophies swayed on their poles. Krug was there. Ikit was unhurt. But there was an empty pole, an epitaph to the lost. Its quiet poignancy broke his black heart. He screamed. Pain and loss unimagined howled from the depths of his soul as he clutched the bone fragments in his paws. He struggled upright, rattling the few pieces he still held. A vicious black incisor bounced between palm and fingers amidst the bleached yellow shards.

  ‘Blacktooth,’ he whimpered, snuffling at the bony mess, pressing his ear to his paws and praying to gods he held in scant regard for an answer. ‘Speak-squeak to Queek, orc-thing.’

  His only answer was the pounding of guns hidden behind black smoke and the wails of the injured. They cried like the dispossessed spirits of the battlefield slain. Queek let the pieces fall, scattering them like ashes. They had silenced him as death alone could not. Blacktooth was gone.

  Shaking off the clinging paws that lay draped across his lap, Queek staggered to his feet. Bodies in varying states of brutal dismemberment lay strewn. He ignored their silent pleas, the despairing looks in their blank eyes.

  He glared into the smoke. It coiled into beckoning shapes. Dwarf-things are here, it seemed to insinuate, the killers of Blacktooth.

  Queek ground his fangs, a fierce snarl ripping from his throat. He flung his arms above his head, crashing Dwarf Gouger against the blade of his sword as he bayed a challenge into the smog.

  The Headtaker had a spike to fill.

  The dwarfish left bore the brunt of the skaven charge.

  Suddenly organised, the massed hordes of clanrat warriors came at them like a wave. The front rank stepped forward to meet the charge, each warrior overlapping his shield with that of the dwarf to his left to form an unbroken wall of oak and steel on which the ratmen broke. The foremost skaven rank thrashed and screamed as the surge crushed them against dwarfish shields. Axes slashed over the shield wall, hewing into already dead flesh held upright by the sheer volume of ratkin behind.

  The skaven pressed forward and the dwarfs braced and pushed back. The clanrats were numberless, but these were dwarfs of the Iron Peak. If so tasked they would hold back the march of glaciers, and they did not yield.

  Bulky shapes moved among the skaven horde. Ratmen in tatty leather overalls with faces hidden beneath long-snouted copper rebreathers stuffed with charcoal filters. They reached begloved paws into bulging knapsacks, withdrawing small glass spheres filled with writhing green gas.

  ‘Gas!’ The alarm raced down the line to the blaring of warning horns. Along the front ranks dwarfs hawked spit down their chins, cupping beards with shield-hands and pressing them to their faces. The tinkling of shattered glass rose above the riot of melee. The green-black fumes of the dreaded poisoned wind coiled about struggling legs and crawled ever upwards with corrosive intent towards waists, beards, and breathing lips.

  Handrik swore and tore his gaze from the scene. It was a death he had seen too often. An excruciating torment of poison-flayed lungs and raving blindness as acrid gas burned the fluid from one’s eyes.

  ‘It’s time we got stuck in, majesty.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘They are dying!’

  ‘They will be remembered.’

  The air cracked, a warpstone shell zipping overhead. He ducked on impulse. That was close. And he didn’t care to think just how close, nor how the damned sniper could still draw a bead through such choking blackness.

  Kazador’s deep baritone rose steadily above the encroaching slaughter. Astonished, Handrik realised the king was singing. It was a paean to the lost and the dishonoured; a tragedy of a dwarf without wealth or kin, with nothing to lose but his ancestors’ pride. It had no place on the battlefield, but it felt right, and Loremaster Logan, on Kazador’s opposite flank took up the tune while the Hammerers themselves soon joined in, stamping their feet in time to the dirge.

  Handrik maintained his stoic silence. In his many years he had seen plenty of villains like this Headtaker, and they seldom fell with easiness of grace or timeliness of virtue.

  The regiment to his immediate left was the Hammerhand clansdwarfs of Karak Eight Peaks. He offered Thane Hrathgar a thumbs-up, but the dwarf did not heed the gesture. The thane stared darkly towards the battle that raged mere feet to his left, his bespittled beard pressed tight to his mouth. The young lad, T
hordun, consigned to the rear ranks where he could do least harm, hid his frustrations less well. The beardling fiddled with the stock of his handgun, scratching in anguish at his golden beard.

  He winced at a keening wail, audible over the chaos like feral claws to the ears.

  Kazador broke from his lament, the dreadful howl growing ever louder as the Hammerers’ mournful voices trailed away.

  ‘What in the Gates of Gazul!’ Handrik bellowed as the scream grew louder.

  ‘The earthworks!’ Logan cried. ‘It’s coming from the earthworks.’

  The engineer attached to the organ gun crews looked up from his work, the inhuman sound pervading the ash like a shrieking cloud of bats. To the dwarf’s enduring credit, it did not distract him or the crews under his charge, as the gunners brought torch to fuses. The stubby muzzles of the organ guns flared. Thunder and fire rent the night, birthing its own terror, Queek Headtaker, scarlet armour ablaze as he fell through the conflagration of its conception.

  The creature was abominably fast.

  A blow from a spiked maul came down on a loader’s head even as the thing’s feet found solid ground. The spike erupted through the back of the dwarf’s spine, the skaven ducking beneath his own buried weapon to impale the engineer on a sword held in the other paw. The engineer was still working a pistol from his belt as the blade ripped though his mail, entering through the collar and tunnelling deep into his belly.

  The engineer still lived, still fumbling at the buckle of his holster as the skaven pulled and jerked on his blade to free it. The dwarf screamed, puking blood as serrated teeth chewed at his guts before the skaven lost patience, leaving the blade in place and putting the dwarf down with a fierce backhand.

  Handrik gawped as the skaven continued his lone rampage. For the first time, he noted the swaying trophy rack like half of a morbidly spoked wheel above the skaven’s shoulders. He saw the trophies that nestled atop it like vultures – a dawi skull among them. His heart turned to stone at such a violation of an honoured ancestor.