Headtaker

by David Guymer

  So this was the infamous Headtaker. His reputation served him well.

  The surviving gun crew abandoned their machine, turning to flee for the safety of the dwarfish line. The Headtaker pounced on the back of the slowest. The claws of one paw burrowed into the screaming dwarf’s scalp as the other sank into the unguarded flesh of his armpit. The skaven warlord heaved the struggling dwarf from his feet before clamping its fangs around his neck.

  ‘Valaya shield her children,’ Logan breathed as the dwarf’s spine snapped, blood running in rivulets down the warlord’s muzzle. Still, the Headtaker thrashed his head from side to side with the dead dwarf in his bloodied jaws like the prize of a hunt. Handrik was compelled to look away as the Headtaker’s efforts finally ripped the dwarf’s head from his shoulders. Blood fountained, dappling the abandoned organ guns with its dark blessing as the warlord opened his jaws to lap at the sticky rain.

  ‘Attack,’ Handrik shouted. ‘Attack now, before he profanes the body of a dawi any further!’

  ‘We hold,’ Kazador growled. ‘Look.’

  Beyond the Headtaker’s back, scarlet-armoured stormvermin picked their way over the piled rocks. They clutched fearfully at their halberds, forming up into ranks at the warlord’s back as he let the brutalised remnants of his victim fall.

  ‘Hold the line!’ Kazador yelled. ‘Iron hearts, sons of Grungni!’

  ‘Majesty, wait.’

  Kazador started at Handrik’s voice, his face darkening as he followed the longbeard’s gaze. Hrathgar and the host of Karak Eight Peaks had broken formation and already skaven streamed into the gap they had left in the lines. A clansdwarf went down with a spear in his throat before he had time to raise his shield. The frayed ends of the shield wall turned to meet this new threat but in so doing, loosened their pressure on the hordes to their front. Scenting victory, the skaven surged forward anew.

  ‘Get back, Hammerhand. Hold the line!’

  Handrik knew that the Eight Peaks thane heard. He saw the tightening of the dwarf’s jaw at the king’s words, but he pressed on regardless, his eyes only for the rat-king of the Eight Peaks.

  ‘Curse you, Hrathgar,’ Kazador screamed, red-faced with fury. ‘May your ancestors turn their faces from you in shame! Loremaster!’ This last was a roar directed to Logan. ‘Fetch me the kron. There is a grudge I would see inscribed.’

  Logan clutched his hammer, eyeing the tide of vermin spilling between the dwarfish lines. ‘Is this really the time, majesty?’

  Handrik followed the loremaster’s horrified expression. Only Thordun and his band of hirelings stood before the skaven charge. They looked like pale islets in a sea of dusky brown fur. He saw a large black-bearded man swing a flail twice about his shoulders before messily beheading a spear-rat in a spray of teeth and brain. A war-cry thundered over the din of struck metal and screams and Hrathgar charged, his great hammer held high, bounding ahead of his throng to smash into the disordered ranks of the Headtaker. One of the stormvermin went down with a sound like a thunderclap as the thane’s runehammer blasted its breastplate into smithereens. A moment later, his clansdwarfs were at his side and the whole area around the earthworks descended into a turbulent melee of pained cries and flashing blades.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘This is the perfect time.’

  Chapter Seven

  Thordun squeezed the trigger of his handgun. He roared as the spinning barrel of the repeater sprayed indiscriminate death into the verminous hordes. The mechanism clicked empty, the overheated metal of the barrel glowing hot in the smoky pall. It was so thick he could no longer see anything else. The illumination from the stalled weapon conjured horrors of memory and shadow, transient flashes of filthy rags, the reflected gleam of sinister red eyes. Screaming, he rammed the burning barrel like a spear into the next shape to streak past. It screamed as though gelded. Thordun nearly choked on the waft of burned fur.

  He had been a thief, not a killer. There had been times, of course, times when fate had forced his hand, when dark gods laughed at the mockery of dwarfish kind they had made of him.

  Throwing down his handgun, he drew his brace of pistols. He spun at a noise and aimed into the smog but the shape was gone. He checked his breathing. This was not Nuln, it was the Ninth Deep of Karak Azul, but the swirling shadows of ratkin shapes haunted him like shades of his past. He spun again at a fresh noise and fired, propelling a lead bullet through the cheek of a charging clanrat. It fell with a whimper and Thordun finished it off, smashing the ivory butt of his emptied pistol into the back of its skull.

  Its struggles ceased. In the skaven’s place, he saw the weeping crown of a night watchman, blood smearing his pistol and staining the sleeves of his jerkin. The man lay face down, blood streaming into the gutter in the rain. It was dark, moonless beneath banks of cloud. Rain drenched Thordun’s beard, hiding his tears. He crouched by the body. It was a boy. He rose with a curse, wiping blood from his pistol and reholstering it. There was no time to reload. He drew his father’s hammer in its place, kissing the rune inscribed into its head as he regarded the skaven corpse.

  ‘One more to the scales, father. I will see you pass Gazul’s Gate yet.’

  ‘Speaking with the dead, Splitter? You were always an odd one.’

  Thordun spun, lowering his weapon fractionally when he saw it was not a giant black-furred ratman but the hairy bulk of Bernard Servat. The man was breathing heavily, betraying his years. The right side of his face was slick with blood and lumps of gristle stuck to the head of his flail. The Bretonnian’s eyebrow arched warily at the continuing suspicion in the dwarf’s regard.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ he asked.

  ‘Just considering my mistakes.’

  Bernard leered. Suddenly he struck, his off hand flashing for Thordun’s head. Thordun ducked aside, and Bernard’s short sword skewered a charging clanrat through the chest. The creature’s scream pierced the din as its own momentum thrust itself right down to the hilt of his blade. ‘Speaking of mistakes.’

  ‘This is not the time!’ Thordun shouted, firing his last pistol round into the murk and cursing when it failed to repay him with a scream. ‘I am a dwarf. I accepted Kazador’s coin and gave my oath. This is where Thordun Locksplitter makes his stand.’

  ‘I don’t see your beloved king risking his royal derriere down here and I’ll not give my neck for the sake of one measly coin.’

  ‘Then away with you, Bernard. Flee. Keep your life, and I will keep my honour.’

  ‘You’ve changed, Splitter,’ the man spat. ‘It’s your grave, and I’ll not lie in it with you.’

  Thordun turned away, his swinging hammer smashing the teeth from a scarlet-garbed skaven warrior. He had no oathstone, but he felt its weight on his heart. The same compulsion that drove him to his ancestral home was what bade him stand, to fight, and never yield.

  He hadn’t lived as a dwarf, but by Grungni he would die as one.

  This was where the last of the Locksplitters would reclaim his honour.

  With a low swing of his axe, Handrik took the legs from a clanrat warrior, pivoting on the ball of his foot to slam the heavy iron head onto the struggling creature’s ribcage. He had the barest of moments to register his triumph before three more stinking, dirt-caked warriors jumped him. He roared, smashing one aside mid-leap before the other two were on him. A spear point shattered on the rune-hard gromril of his breastplate and, acting on pure instinct, he twisted his waist to swat aside the other’s sword on his elbow. The off-balance warrior stumbled, and Handrik encouraged him on his way to the ground with a thrust between the shoulder blades with the haft of his axe.

  A lance of pain seared up his spine as he turned. He cried out and dropped to one knee. His lower back burned like a furnace, and he realised he could no longer move it. Stubbornly, he attempted to stand, but the intensity of pain blacked his vision and he fell.

  ‘Handrik has fallen!’ he heard one of the Hammerers cry, and he redoubled his efforts to stand. He would not
permit the king to see him so.

  He felt hands grip under his arms and drag him back. Trunk-legged figures stepped into the breach, laying into the skaven horde with immense hammers flying.

  ‘I’m fine. Just winded is all.’

  A face appeared beside him. It was Loremaster Logan. He was missing a lens from his glasses and his face was messed with skaven blood.

  ‘If you aren’t the stubbornest wattock I ever met. No wonder Kazador had to force you from your duties.’

  ‘Damn you. No Valayan priestess will tell me whether I can fight. I’ll not be left at home with pipe and slippers when there’s killing to be done.’

  ‘Rest, Handrik. None will think less of you for it.’

  ‘Bah,’ Handrik grumbled. Forcing through the pain until his face turned red, he managed to get up onto his elbows. He glared at the old loremaster, chest heaving. ‘A quick sup of ale and I’ll be on my feet again. Pass my skin, old friend.’ He gestured with his eyes to a bulging ale-skin tied at his waist.

  ‘I thought you’d been a little deeper into your tankard than usual these past weeks. Is this how you’ve kept on your feet, Handrik? Neck deep in ale?’

  ‘Grimnir take your beard! Can’t an old longbeard savour a fortifying brew without being spied on by so-called friends?’

  ‘I’ll pretend you’re insensible with agony and didn’t say that. We should get you away and get that armour off you. The weight must be killing you.’

  ‘This old thing?’ said Handrik, shrugging his inch-thick gromril pauldrons. ‘I scarcely feel it. And when did you become a priestess anyway?’

  ‘Handrik!’

  ‘Enough! Fine!’ Handrik sagged. Suddenly he felt very tired. ‘But I’ll make my own way back. You should be at the king’s side, who else will record his deeds in battle?’

  The loremaster looked as though he might weep, such was the depth of sadness in his eyes as he regarded his old friend, as if he had in some way applied the crippling blow himself. ‘You should see him. He fights with the strength of Grimnir. Iron in his heart and in his veins. No thaggoraki can stand before the Hammer of Azul when wielded with such fury.’

  Handrik grimaced. ‘You read like a tale of the Ancestor Ages. Too many inkspots and too few bloodstains. Get yourself to Kazador before I carve your own bloody name into the history books.’

  Logan stood and bowed.

  Handrik saw the old dwarf smile just as heavy feet crunched into the hard earth, transmitting its tremors through Handrik’s prone back. A nightmarish creature of pale flesh and brawn shouldered its way through the dwarfish line. Shrieking a twisted amalgam of brute power and self-loathing, a sweep of its ape-like arms tossed aside a pair of Hammerers as if they weighed nothing. The rat ogre stood fully twelve feet tall at its hunched, monstrously powerful shoulders. Pus wept freely from open sores, its thick hide puckered with quarrels and blackened by electric burns. Its verminous head was almost swallowed by musculature, its tiny red eyes glowing with a simple hatred that left no room for pain. It loped forward on mismatched legs, charging blindly at the elderly dwarf in his path.

  The loremaster turned, eyes widening as the giant rat ogre bore down on him. Too slowly he hefted his hammer as the rat ogre reared up on its hind legs, bunching one boulder-like fist and bringing it crashing down like a mace.

  ‘No!’ Handrik screamed.

  Logan’s hammer fell hard, like a stone.

  Grief-stricken, Handrik tried to rise, almost choking on pain. Instead, he took up his axe in both hands and hacked blindly at the mutant obscenity’s scabrous foot. A misshapen toe flew off at the knuckle, pustulent blood oozing from the stump. The beast howled, instinctively clobbering Handrik with its tail as it leapt back. He turned his face away as it came in, the cable-like lash cutting across his cheek and slicking his beard with blood.

  The rat ogre towered above the stricken dwarf like a mountain. It lowered its head to Handrik and roared, beating its great fists against its chest. Handrik gripped his axe in both hands and roared back.

  ‘Come on then! What are you waiting for?’

  Bunching its muscles to spring, the rat ogre was suddenly distracted as one of the king’s Hammerers burst through the cloying smoke over the bodies of his kin. Blood stained the azure of Karak Azul as he came, swinging his massive hammer in both hands. The weapon crunched under the beast’s ribs, the sounds of splintering bone audible even over the thunder of cannon-fire. The rat ogre skittered back, rat-like, the injury giving it pause but little more.

  Again, Handrik tried to draw himself up, managing, through sheer stubborn force of will, to drag himself to his knees. His head swayed. ‘Leave the beardling be, rat-beast. You’re not done with me yet!’

  The rat ogre ignored him as it prepared to charge the tiny creature that had caused it pain.

  ‘Ahead!’ commanded a royal voice. ‘May your blood feed the roots of Karak Azul, monster.’

  Kazador emerged from the smog. His anvil-headed hammer held aloft like the prow of a warship, his bearers cut through the squall of battle towards their prey. The brilliance of the Armour of Kings was undimmed by the spatters of skaven blood. Even to Kazador, borne aloft and with his great winged helm sweeping proud like a battle standard, the rat ogre loomed gigantic. It roared, sweeping its blade-like claws at his face. Drilled beyond excellence over the centuries, Kazador’s shieldbearers stepped back, carrying their king from the blow before charging back in at the unbalanced beast. The Hammer of Azul descended like punishment from the heavens, first crushing the rat ogre’s shoulder before drawing back and smashing the teeth from its jaw with a well-placed blow to the snout.

  The giant beast screamed and cowered away. Unmoved, Kazador beat relentlessly at the mewling creature’s hunched back, bone crumbling under every blow, while his bearers set to work with hand-axes on the rat ogre’s thick hide.

  At last, the beast’s cries ceased and it lay still.

  Kazador lowered his hammer and turned to face Handrik. His gaze swept over Logan’s body without hint of emotion. His eyes were cold, his heart so swollen by sorrow he could physically feel no more. ‘Can you still fight?’

  Handrik took in the fallen Hammerers, the shattered armour of his oldest friend. They had died because of him, because of his weakness. ‘Until I can no longer hold an axe, majesty.’

  ‘Good. There’s plenty more to kill.’ The king looked across the melee. The Hammerers were a knot of order amidst a swirling sea of chaos. He squinted into the murk where, just visible within the ashen shroud, a rack of severed heads danced above the battle like vengeful spirits. ‘Headtaker,’ he cursed. ‘Thaggoraki hordes are all the same. We cut off its head and stamp down hard on its plague-ridden body until the tail stops twitching.’

  ‘Go on without me, majesty. I will not allow the ratkin to feast on Logan’s body. Let me die at his–’

  He paused, unnerved by something he could not place.

  ‘What is it, Handrik?’

  Something was wrong. Finally it struck him. Something that had so overwhelmed his senses that its absence was like suddenly noticing the sky was green or the mountains inverted.

  ‘The guns have stopped.’

  Sharpwit crouched at an intersection, where his smaller tunnel joined another, much larger one. The walls were smoothly carved granite. Angular faces stared gravely from the stone. They seemed to grumble and curse with the echoes of distant cannon-fire. He poked his muzzle out of his hiding place, drawing a careful sniff of the tepid air and finding it barren of dwarf scent.

  ‘This way,’ he whispered.

  Fang Dao hissed acknowledgement, turning to his gutter runners and forming his paw through a sequence of shapes. They bobbed silently in understanding. Sharpwit hobbling in the lead, the skaven swept down the tunnel. The booming maledictions of the stone-carved figures grew louder as they drew closer to their goal. The floor of the passage vibrated under foot with every rumble.

  The dwarfs had been clever, as dwarfs were wont
to be. There was no easy access to the Ninth Deep fortifications. Not from the Ninth Deep, anyway. They could only be reached by a network of passages connecting to stairwells from the Upper Deeps, thus forcing any attacker either to submit to a barrage of death they could not answer, or to assault the hold from many points at once. Even then, total victory would be far from certain, as the dwarfs had left many blind tunnels and traps for the uninvited and the entrances to their most important passageways were barred by the most adroit of dwarfish runecraft. They were an ingenious race, cunning when they chose to be, and skilled in the arts of obfuscation. It had taken ten generations and peerless skaven guile to finally wrest Karak Eight Peaks from their grasp. Its ruins were testament to what the skaven could accomplish when selfishness was set aside for the greater interests of Skavendom. Karak Azul was no less formidable than the Eight Peaks of old, but the Council of Thirteen was too divided to bend their full will to its capture. That was why Gnawdwell had put his trust in Sharpwit – wisest and cleverest of all the skaven.

  They must be almost directly above the dwarfish fortifications now, somewhere between the Eighth and Ninth Deeps.

  ‘Ahh,’ he breathed. ‘Here it is.’

  The passage opened out into a huge black maw, too wide for even skaven night vision to perceive the far wall. The sounds of battle rang from its depths like echoes from a well. Clutching the stone wall, Sharpwit leant over the yawning gulf and peered up into what his lurching gut insisted was infinity. His head calmly told him that the shaft ran to the foundries and workshops of the Fifth Deep, running an elevator platform for weapons and munitions down to the endless battlegrounds of the Lower Deeps.

  He got down stiffly onto all fours and sniffed over the edge. A brisk breeze played at the soft hairs of his throat, carrying on it the sharp scent of fire and gunpowder. Their destination was not far. Dao and his nimble-footed adepts would likely not balk at such a climb, but Sharpwit’s joints ached at the mere prospect. Fortunately, there was always another way.