by David Guymer
‘I hate this place,’ Razzel complained. ‘Can we not meet-treat with this man-thing elsewhere?’
‘And where would the chosen one suggest?’ Sharpwit asked sarcastically. He tittered softly when the grey seer did not answer. He surveyed the dim and dusty chamber, a fitting gaol for Kazador’s secret shame. ‘A secret room in the heart of Azul-Place. It is easy for the man-thing to find, it keeps us far-distant from mad-thing eyes, and dwarf-thing guards keep wandering footpaws from disturbing us. This place could be no more perfect.’
Razzel crossed his arms and settled into a huff.
‘Queek will soon have us leave, so we cannot keep eyes on this man-thing until we return.’
‘Why should this matter?’
Sharpwit stifled the impulse to throttle the sorcerer. That would teach him to be an idiot. ‘Would Grey Seer Razzel like to enter the Throne-Burrow of Azul-Place, present himself the recovered dwarf-things to Kazador, and claim the reward for Skavendom?’
Razzel flicked his chimes angrily. The sorcerer’s white-fanged snarl was all the answer he needed.
‘Then it will be on you to keep him safe-well.’
‘Why me? I will be on Queek’s mad errand too.’
‘With your possession magic, you can watch him, and we leave warriors behind just in case they are needed. Deadclaw will not be emptied and there will be enough coward-meat deserters that a pawful on our orders will not be missed.’
‘It seems you think of everything.’
‘This is why I am still alive.’
Razzel snickered.
‘Be quiet-still,’ Sharpwit hissed, concerned that an observant dwarf-thing might pick up the errant tinkling of the grey seer’s horn chimes. ‘We would not want to frighten-scare the man-thing.’
The sorcerer settled, and Sharpwit wished he could do the same. It was the curse of an intellect as keen as his that there could never be any respite from plots and schemes, his overactive brain continually plaguing him with every worst case scenario it could conjure, each successively more disastrous than the last. What if the man-thing had failed in his most simple of tasks and even now Kazador and a legion of dwarf-things marched on this place? What if Queek suspected his double-dealing and crept stealthily through the secret passageways? What if…?
Razzel brought him back. The grey seer’s eyes were eager as he lifted his snout to test the musty air.
‘Something comes.’
Handrik pressed his back to the wall and peered around the corner. The hall ahead was empty, but the human could not have gone far. Humans were an untrustworthy lot, and Thordun hadn’t painted the prettiest picture of those he’d brought with him. And that big one, Bernard, had looked the worst of the bunch. So he had followed him. The old instincts kicked in almost at once. It took more than a gromril coat to make an Ironbreaker and it could not be set aside as easily.
He peered down the corridor, picking out the scuffs the man’s boots had made on the tiles. He wondered what business could bring a human so far from the taverns and stores to the royal quarter. He waited a moment until it became evident that the human had definitely gone before pushing his leaden legs from the wall and dragging himself down the hall. He stomped his feet aggressively, giving his thighs a vigorous thumping as he did so. They were fine as long as he stayed active, but they sank swiftly into deadening pins and needles if he tarried overlong at a bench or even simply stood idle.
He walked some way down the corridor before pausing and doubling back. The signs of passage had ceased at an ornate doorway inset into the right-hand wall: the gold and gromril portal to Kazrik’s chambers. He felt a sickness in his gut as he reached out to grasp the solid gold handle. His heart sank as it twisted under the pressure of his wrist. It was improbable that the Hammerers had been negligent enough to leave this door unlocked after Thordun’s entry the previous night and even in the highly unlikely event that a human could match a dwarf at picking locks, Bernard had not had the time to do so.
The door swung open in his hand. It had been unlocked from the inside.
A gust of dry and musk-scented air greeted the open doorway, speaking of some other opening somewhere within. That in itself was disturbing. There were no other passages within this wing as far as Handrik knew, and for over three centuries it had been his duty to know them all. He stared into the deepest intensity of darkness. The human had definitely come this way, but why would he remove the torches from their brackets? Likely it had been the work of another, one who hoped to shield their meeting from prying eyes. Like all dwarfs, Handrik’s night vision was excellent, but even he could not see in total blackness. But there were other races that could, as well as those that deemed sight secondary to other senses, such as the thaggoraki.
For the briefest instant he hesitated. He was in defiance of the king simply by opening that door. By rights he should fetch the Hammerers and go no further, but even as he thought it he knew he would not. Whatever treachery this human was engaged in might be done by the time help arrived and, despite the previous night’s despair, Handrik Hallgakrin was not ready to put up his feet and spend his days lecturing beardlings on the proper way to stew thaggoraki.
Drawing a fortifying pull on his ale-skin, he crept deeper in. Whispered sounds brushed the grey hairs of his ears, muffled voices. One was the gruff voice of the human, Bernard, but the other was different, high-pitched and rapid.
Hugging close to the wall, he paused to listen, straining his ears in painful futility to catch their words. He scraped further along the passage before stopping again. The voices were clearer now. They conversed in heavily accented Reikspiel and he could just about make them out.
‘…we leave-go with Queek to Black Crag,’ said the chittering voice, the voice of a ratman.
‘That wasn’t the plan,’ Bernard returned. He sounded angry.
‘Is what is happening. We take precautions to keep you safe, man-thing. Just keep from sight until we return with the missing dwarf-things.’
Handrik’s mouth worked in silent horror. The man had thrown in his lot with the thaggoraki! A race renowned for backstabbing and treachery, even among their own. Even a man couldn’t be fool enough to expect a skaven to honour any deal they had made. Despite his already low opinions of humans, the idea of one acting as a skaven proxy to steal dwarfish gold still managed to enrage him. He trembled to think of what evil such a fortune might be turned to by those devious hands.
Well no matter, it would end right here.
Light flickered from an opening ahead. There was a door where his memory insisted there should be a wall. It was from there that the voices came. His hand closed instinctively about his belt, but his axe was not there. It hung on a wall in his quarters. He cursed in silent fury. The first time in three hundred years that he wasn’t carrying an axe and look what happens. He made up his mind.
It ended here.
Chapter Eleven
Handrik burst into the antechamber, bellowing a war-cry at the top of his lungs. The secret room was small, with a pair of old and dusty chairs stacked against the near wall and a large table set slightly off centre. What scant space remained was occupied by three figures standing beneath a tapestry on the far side of the table. The traitorous human, Bernard, stood between two of the vile skaven creatures, and hunched under a ceiling too low for his stature. One of the skaven was a wizened and balding creature in a glittering blue jerkin and looked older than any skaven he had ever seen, while the other was one of their horn-headed sorcerer-priests, white furred and immaculately robed.
All three looked up in shock. Bernard and the balding one shrank against the far wall but the grey seer retained its wits marginally better. The sorcerer slammed its staff against the ground and extended a claw towards him. The outstretched paw crackled with black-tinted lightning from the depths of the ratman’s dark hell. Aetheric winds jangled like the heralds of capricious gods.
Acting on impulse, Handrik grabbed an old high-backed chair in one fist a
nd hurled it across the room. It sailed over the squat oak table, eliciting a squeal of shock from the grey seer as it shattered to splinters across his face. The seer shrieked and buried his snout in his robe, the dark magic he had summoned dissipating into the nothingness from which it had arisen.
Handrik turned his attention to Bernard. The sight of him made his blood boil. His heart thumped its fury, energising his shambling legs with a wrathful vigour. The human looked ashen at the realisation of his discovery, but the terrified guilt lasted only a moment before he realised that Handrik was both unarmed and outnumbered. Bernard chuckled as he drew his short stabbing sword, evidently judging his flail ill-suited to the cramped chamber.
‘Stop-back, man-thing,’ the old skaven ordered. ‘If you are hurt-killed then all is for nothing.’
The human did as he was told. His sword held ready, he dropped back behind the old skaven’s back.
‘Aye, hide behind your true master, human. My heart weeps for poor Thordun. Kazador will see him shorn for this betrayal.’
‘Splitter promised to make us rich,’ Bernard spat. ‘And now I will be, no thanks to him.’
‘You’re a fool, umgi, even by the standards of your kind. The day this vermin keeps its word is the day an elf gets down on his effeminate knees and begs the secret behind a well-made shelf.’
‘Enough talk-talk!’ the old one hissed. ‘Razzel, destroy this dwarf-thing. I help the man-thing escape.’
Handrik saw a calculating look cross the grey seer’s wounded muzzle. It eyed him hatefully, cruel splinters jutting from its sensitive nose. Then its red eyes turned on its companion. ‘That is one plan. Here is one other.’ The sorcerer flung both arms wide. Black light throbbed from the warpstone-headed staff in its right paw with frantically increasing frequency until the lull between light and dark was so brief that the strobing pained the eyes. Handrik was forced to raise a hand to shield his sight just as the grey seer shrilled a distended syllable in its own garbled tongue and vanished in a clap of warp lightning and a cloud of noxious green-black smoke.
Handrik coughed and waved a hand through the billowing fog. With a stab of rage he noticed that Bernard had vanished too. A hacking cough that was not his own summoned his attention. Despite having skill enough to take the human with him, the grey seer had obviously opted to leave the old one behind. It clasped a satin sleeve to its jaw, its chest heaving with uncontrollable spasms and its ghostly white eye filming with tears as it struggled to catch its breath.
‘Double crossed, eh?’ Handrik observed with a faint smile. ‘Would you ever credit it?’
The old skaven backed off, glaring at Handrik as though its current plight was entirely his fault.
Handrik advanced on the skaven. He was a longbeard: dense muscles strained against the weave of his goat wool vest, his skin was as hard as the stone beneath his boots. Even unarmed he’d have fancied his chances. But against one similarly without weapon, and as feeble as this decrepit creature, it would be only too easy. Maybe he’d even be able to capture it and return it to Kazador for answers.
The skaven retreated before him, its crutches clattering on the stone flags, but the room was painfully small and soon it had nowhere left to go. It lowered its head and spread its arms, a gesture he recognised as one of submission among its kind.
‘Do not kill-kill dwarf-thing. I help-help if you let-allow to live. I can give you mad-thing Queek.’
For a heartbeat, Handrik was stunned. The skaven had spoken Khazalid, a language supposedly known only to the dwarfs themselves and a select handful of dwarf-friends. But the skaven had spoken it perfectly. Better than Thordun even. Were it not for its rat-ish manner, it could easily have passed for a dwarf itself.
‘Where did you learn to speak like that?’
The ratman didn’t answer. It cowered low into the corner, its paws gripping its crutches for support, its blotched and wrinkled tail coiled protectively about its waist as though to soothe the tremors that still rippled between its ribs. It beckoned Handrik nearer. Realising that the creature was having too much difficulty breathing to answer his questions, he did as it bade him. The old skaven grinned, startling Handrik with a gaping maw broken by glowing fangs of warpstone.
‘I learn in Karak Azul.’
Too late Handrik realised his foolishness. The skaven suddenly did not seem so breathless after all, the desperate glaze in its milky orb taking on a deeply malicious glint.
‘Fool-fool, dwarf-thing!’
The skaven lunged, swifter than Handrik had thought possible. Maleficent fangs tore through the precious braids that threaded his beard and sank into his collar. The teeth pierced his thin shirt and tough flesh with ease, crunching through to the bone, where they splintered. Shards of evil, the very essence of mutation and madness, broke off into the hard muscle of his chest.
Vision faded. Awareness became a black-hazed swirl of colour and leering skaven faces sublimated under the stubborn pounding of his dwarfish heart. He heard shouting. He wondered if it was his ancestors welcoming him to the threshold of Gazul’s Gate. If it was, they must have been greatly distant as their efforts faded to insignificance beneath the power of that steadily slowing beat. Unnoticed, the skaven released its hold and he fell.
Handrik knew he was already as good as dead.
The only question was how bad it was going to be.
Bernard flopped to the floor and dry heaved. The cool stones were a wonder against his face. The ceiling turned like the night sky in nauseatingly accelerated motion. It was his room. He recognised the hangings as they swam on the wall and from the other side of the door came a babble of half-familiar voices. He struggled to lift himself, but it was as though his bones had been stuffed with cotton. His head sank back into delicious coolness. It felt twice as large as it should be, and impossibly heavy.
‘Easy, man-thing. The skitterleap is hard on us all the first time, hmmm?’
A nightmarish shape appeared before him, white fur and black horns swirling like oil colours around bleeding red eyes.
‘I must be away with Queek. You will rest-stay until my return.’
Bernard’s mouth lolled open. His tongue felt fat. It still tasted of the foul green gas that had swept him up and thrown him across black, daemon-haunted space before dropping him here.
‘Le… le… nain.’
The rat sorcerer tittered.
The dwarf, he wanted to scream, but his addled mind couldn’t find the words even if his tongue could form them.
‘Shhh,’ the horned rodent soothed over a somnolent chittering of its own alien speech. Bernard felt his hyper-sensitive skin tingle, then fall flaccid. His eyes fluttered closed. ‘Sleep, man-thing, and worry-fear no more. The Great Horned Rat, he takes care of all things.’
If it was true what they said, about life being pain, then Handrik was very much alive. Heat and unbearable pressure flared within his breast and he screamed. He gagged on vomit and bile bitterness and struggled to rise. Firm hands pinned him down.
‘Grungni’s gold! He lives.’
‘I see that, Narfi. Hold him still.’
‘I’m doing my best. Hurry up and get those fragments out before he goes under again.’
Again, pain exploded within him like a mining charge. Even in the unconscious grip of agony, his broken body clung to its pride as if it were a shield in the shield wall. To lose control would shame not only himself but all who held him in respect and trust. Through stubbornly clenched teeth, he screamed. He retched but his guts were empty, responding instead with agonised spasms. And all the while strong arms pinned him against the stone like a living dissection on the mortician’s slab.
‘All right Narfi, I think that’s most of it.’
Arms wrapped his shoulders and pulled him up, shuffling him back to rest against a wall. A bare hand slapped him none too gently across the jaw and his eyes flickered open. At first everything was a gummy blur. Two shadowed forms filled his vision. He ignored them. Something more pressi
ng drew his attention and he looked down at his chest.
Breath shuddered through him, pain coming in pulsing waves in time to the beating of his heart as if to remind him with each stroke of life of the grim and painful realities of death. With fingers that felt wrapped in wool, he picked clumsily through his beard, removing the dried chunks of vomit that had stuck between the glittering braids. Even with one foot through Gazul’s Gate – especially then – there were standards.
His fingers settled on the shattered gold links above his collar. They burrowed between the cracked metal, questing beneath the silver hair. Calloused fingertips brushed his torn shirt. He gasped, only pride preventing him from crying out anew. The skin of his breast felt hard and dead, and strangely numb despite the agony his touch induced. His withdrawn hand came away bloody, but that was the least of it; his bloodied fingertips were speckled with tiny motes of glowing warpstone.
He gritted his teeth stubbornly against a shuddering wave of pain. He could feel the warpstone within him, the touch of its dark influence, its mutating power corrupting even his hardy dwarfish heart. There were worse fates than death in this world. He forced a smile. At least his legs didn’t hurt.
‘How do you feel?’ Keldur asked. The Hammerer looked sick with worry. The knife, still in his hand, was dark with Handrik’s blood. His brother, Narfi, released Handrik’s shoulders. The absence of a joke from the young soldier told him all he needed to know.
Handrik opened his mouth. It was dry and tasted foul, crusts of vomit stuck between his teeth. When finally he felt able to speak, he barely recognised his own voice. It was feeble and hoarse. ‘I look that bad, do I lad?’
‘Not at all,’ Keldur assured him. ‘I’d wager on you in a pony lift against anyone in Karak Azul.’
‘Don’t insult me, lad. You’re poorer than a snotling and barred from every gambling den in the Karaz Ankor.’ He managed a chuckle that soon broke off into a grimace as a fresh wave of dark magic emanating from his wound broke agonisingly on his chest. ‘I feel like death just choked on me.’