by David Guymer
It was as if they feared that the sky-titan would sweep down to crush them into bloody paste beneath its swollen many-headed hide. Queek stared into its churning body. He wondered what it would be like to slay such a beast. No doubt its great size and the fact he would have to fight it so high above the ground would disadvantage him greatly, but that could only increase the adulation that would come with his inevitable victory. Idly he wondered which of those shapeless heads he would keep as a trophy and where he would find a spike large enough to display it.
It is a cloud. You cannot kill it.
As if on cue, the dark sky was suddenly rent apart by searing light. It was followed an instant later by the bellow of the sky-beast, a challenge voiced in thunder that shook the ground beneath Queek’s feet. Queek threw back his head in defiance. He exulted in the tremors the storm evoked beneath his fur. Queek could kill anything.
As terrified by the raging storm as they were by the open sky, the massed hordes huddled ever closer together. The sheer number of them cloaked every shallow defile and rainswept promontory with mangy fur and ragged hoods from which cheap scarlet dye had already begun to leach away to reveal a jumbled assortment of greys and browns and sodden, threadbare cloaks. They were pathetic. He wondered which scheming rival he could blame for bestowing on him such insipid troops.
Mighty-great Queek has no rival, Ikit assured him.
That much was certainly undeniable. These blunt-fanged lowlifes were fortunate to have as renowned a leader as Queek to inspire them by example to the greatness that was required.
It is down to Queek, said Ikit. He must destroy the orc-things himself and leave these others to eat-feed on the corpses he leaves.
Queek grunted silent acknowledgement. He would tear apart every orc-thing that crossed his path and hunt down every other that dared not. He would amass a pile of skulls to contest the mountains themselves for their dominion of the clouds, and from its pinnacle he would face down a world and make it concede the might of Queek. But still, more warriors were always desirable. Useful for digging holes and carrying things and for doing all those other menial things that were too far beneath Queek’s notice to even bother himself becoming aware of. With that in mind, he had ordered Ska to send scurriers with written instructions to the City of Pillars. The ratskins were sealed with Queek’s own claw-scratch seal, scratched in the blood of dwarf-thing slaves. He knew it wouldn’t stop a furtive reading of its contents by every paw it passed through, but he consoled himself that the dread of the Headtaker would cross their craven hearts as they did so. The orders were for the reinforcements he had cunningly left in the City of Pillars.
He would see the lair emptied before he would personally admit defeat. The Eight Peaks, Azul-Place, they were just places. Why could none but Queek see that? He was glad that Old-thing had been keeping out of sight. The half-dead half-wit would have thrown a fit, not that Queek cared a single mouse dropping for what he thought.
He carved a path through the quivering masses, clambering on all fours towards a high ridge. As he ascended the rise, the wind struck with even greater force. His trophies moaned in the wind, scraping and shuffling as they clung grimly to their stanchion. They had grown so annoying since Blacktooth had left them. The sooner Big-meat joined their number, the happier he would be. Queek hissed a warning in their direction and pawed water from his eyes, turning his gaze back to the subterranean passages that still gushed clanrat warriors like brackish water from a broken pipe. The skaven emerged blinking from the shafts and into the downpour with a lamentable surfeit of indifference. Ska Bloodtail and a retinue of his stormvermin elite, paw-picked for their cruelty, patrolled the tunnel mouth, rewarding malingerers with broken snouts.
Ska himself stood a head taller than even his mightiest litter-brothers, rain pattering from his paw-beaten pauldrons and coursing in dark spirals along the chains that held the massive armoured suit around his barrel chest. The imposing fangleader sped the horde on its way, hoisting unwary laggards by the scruff of their necks and tossing them out into the rain. The skaven missiles shrieked after the tails of their hurrying kin, landing in crashing tumbles of rusted gear on rain-slickened rock. Some found their footpaws and hurried after their clanmates, others did not. Either way, Queek did not care.
A scrap of white fur emerged from the tunnels. Ska raised his axe to hustle the grey seer on his way as he had every other worthless rat before him. The sorcerer’s indignant squeal as he was dragged through the mud and into the rain was music to Queek’s ears. He squealed down at the drenched and seething horde, waving to indicate that the grey seer should join him.
Content in the conviction that a skaven would rather eat its own liver than disobey Queek’s orders, he turned his back and scrambled up the slippery rock to the very edge of the bluff. A sudden gust grabbed his shoulders, as if the elements sought to wrestle him from the precipice. He gripped more tightly to the ridge and snickered at their puny efforts, gazing out over the gloomy titans of the Worlds Edge Mountains.
Seldom in his short life had Queek had occasion to feel small, but being surrounded by such potent embodiments of nature’s might gave him the tiniest inkling of how that might feel. Nothing he had ever witnessed had prepared him for such a vista, and he was struck by a sudden appreciation of scale. The world was larger than he had given it credit for. A lesser skaven might have been humbled.
‘You summoned me, great warlord?’ The grey seer was forced to shout to contend with the gale that blasted across the peaks. He spoke words of flattery, but their blatant insincerity grated on Queek’s nerves.
Queek tore his gaze from the dominion that would be his and turned it grudgingly towards the sorcerer. Razzel’s white robes were splattered with mud and his accursed chimes clanked flat sodden notes in spiritual harmony with the seer’s general misery. The rain had mottled his white fur to grey and even the crooked three-barred brand of the Horned One on his cheek seemed lacking in fervour. Looking at his annoying lackey and then back out across the whispering gulf that opened out before him, Queek was struck by a sudden, near overwhelming temptation to grab hold of the grey seer and hurl him off the edge. The voices in the rain called to him, they begged for the white-furred soul. His paws twitched.
‘Do you serve faithfully the mighty Queek, White-fur?’
‘Always,’ asserted Razzel. ‘Who is this humble vessel to question the Horned One’s will?’
Queek snickered cruelly, the immediate impulse to slay subsiding into whatever shallow lair it had burrowed within his black heart. ‘It takes a great leader to squeak such flagrant lies. And White-fur is no great leader.’
Razzel bristled but the downpour had dampened even his zealous fire and the gesture was half-hearted at best. Thunder pealed and the grey seer squeaked fright, glancing fearfully into the blinding rain. ‘Why must we scurry under open skies?’ The sorcerer trembled, icy chills and cold dread permeating his skinny hide.
‘White-fur is troubled?’ Queek murmured, enjoying the irritant’s discomfort.
The grey seer didn’t even attempt a riposte. He crouched low, as if to tremble as far as feasible from that troubled sky. ‘I trust-gift my life into the Horned Rat’s keeping,’ he whimpered. Queek wondered if the seer convinced himself. ‘I merely fear-worry for the morale of Queek’s unworthy soldiers.’
There was something about the seer’s abject meekness that Queek found deeply trying. If he ceased to be entertaining, what was the point in keeping him around?
‘Queek can see that White-fur shivers only for warmth, but is faster this way. Faster is better.’
‘If Queek desires faster then there is another way, most open-minded of warlords. There are tunnels. Secret ways that the dwarf-things hid and sealed long ago. Tunnels that run all the way from Azul-Place into Black Crag. Quick and dry, hmmm?’
In a sudden flash of insight, Queek imagined tunnels, the deceptive comfort of their darkness. Dwarf-things did not simply leave such ways abandoned. He saw orc
-thing corpses, sunken and decayed. They jutted from cold stone walls, hanging by their ribcages from great iron spikes. Others still living rotted within deep pits, their animalistic wails unheeded by any creature with life or mind to care as their green flesh became food for giant rats that grew ever more hungry and ever more bold. Their red eyes twinkled, murderous in the dark. He saw Old-thing and White-fur looking down from the lip of a pit, revelling in his mouldering corpse.
Traps, Krug hissed urgently. The tunnels were secret once. But dwarfs will not be stung twice.
This grey seer creep-sneak always, Ikit concurred.
‘Tunnels…’ Queek mused. ‘They rhyme with… treachery.’
Queek could feel the heat that radiated from the grey seer’s frightened body, waves of dread and awe and unwilling supplication that struck him as most appeasing. Razzel flicked his claws at his horn chimes. It was a nervous tic that Queek was becoming increasingly familiar with – and irritated by. The seer seemed oblivious to the lifeless notes his efforts produced.
‘How long before reaching Black Crag?’ Queek asked.
‘That… um… that depends.’
‘Tell Queek that White-fur at least knows the way.’
‘He does!’ Razzel squeaked. ‘I mean, I do. More or less. Is just… I just…’
‘For certain, Old-thing will know. Where is he?’
‘I do not know, greatest of great of warlords. He never did wish-want to leave Azul-Place. Maybe he abandons his rightful leader to claim Deadclaw for himself. He always smelt ill-favoured to this humble servant. Traitorous.’
Queek snarled, the explicit threat not lost on his jabbering underling who swiftly clamped his running jaw shut. The seer’s lies had grown no more accomplished during the course of their conversation. ‘Do not try Queek. Go fetch-find, or Queek shows him up close the face of his god.’
Razzel nodded weakly, fully and rightfully anticipating his imperious warlord’s wrath. He glanced up, his eyes affixing on something just over Queek’s shoulder.
Queek shook his muzzle disappointedly. That was the oldest trick in the book.
‘Master,’ Ska shouted from below, ‘look-see.’
Queek considered for a moment that this might all be an elaborate ploy Ska and White-fur had cooked up to stab him in the back and toss him off a mountain, but swiftly rejected it. His faithful fangleader held him in sufficient awe to prefer a knife in the chest to the risk of his disfavour. Conspiring with the likes of White-fur was the last thing he would do. He turned and flung up his paws impatiently. ‘Look-see what? Can idiot-Ska fool-meat not see Queek is busy?’
Ska cringed and pointed, across the bowed heads of the chittering hordes and over the ridgeline to the pinnacle of another, even higher peak beyond. Silhouetted against the black sky in the clouded light of the moon was a feral shape, four-legged and powerful with a long snout that Queek’s imagination unhurriedly peopled with long razor-sharp fangs. The shadow shortened its stance, raised its muzzle to the sky and howled. It had a power, that otherworldly wail, a potency that had Razzel quivering at his footpaws like a newly bonded slave in the front rank of a skaven horde. It lingered overlong, echoing between ground and sky as though the clouds themselves held it in the grip of primordial dread. The beast shifted position to look his way. He saw a smaller shape seated upon it, skinny with what looked like a spear or possibly a bow in its spindly arms.
‘Wolf-riders,’ hissed Razzel from his position on the ground, head buried beneath his paws.
‘Queek wants one.’
‘They are scouts for green-thing armies. Very-very fast-quick. We never catch it, even if we knew this land as well as it must. It may be prudent to return to Deadclaw. Gorfang will know we come before our full army is on the surface.’
Queek snickered cruelly. He was beginning to like the surface world. It was filled with so many exciting new things. He watched as the beast turned and loped from view to bear word of Queek’s glorious coming.
‘Good-good. See it followed.’
Sharpwit hobbled through the eerily quiet lair of Burnstash. It made Deadclaw look like the slave markets of Skavenblight. All but the most destitute still shunned the fierce womb of fire that the great dragon had once called home. It struck him as poignant that even skaven society could have something even lower: escaped slaves, the maimed and the diseased, the heretical and the mad, the dregs that gnawed on its roots, subsisting off its cast-off things.
Mouldering lean-tos were scattered across the cavern floor, little more than scraps of rag clinging to stakes, fluttering silently in the hellish breeze that emanated from the deep earth like flakes of char from a fire. Encircling them like some noisome moat, semi-solid skaven waste gurgled turgidly through ancient gouged channels, piling into stinking mounds as the heat gradually dried it out. He hurried on, dizzy in the heat, disoriented by the silence, the imprint of the god-lizard’s scales on the close ceiling sneering down on the passage of lesser beings. He hunched closer. Quiet was one thing, but the place was deserted.
The dragon had not nested here by accident. There was no stronghold of skaven, dwarf, orc or – such as they were in this part of the world – men, within fifty leagues that could not be breached from these tunnels. Intolerable as they were, in the right paws these tunnels were a more formidable tool than any weapon fashioned in a Clan Skryre workshop, or any pox bred in the vats of Clan Pestilens. If a skaven knew how to use it, of course.
He crossed a creaking length of clapboard that had been laid across the stinking moat like a bridge. It took his weight with an ominous groan, his crutches clattering loudly in the silence. The sticky flow beneath his footpaws slurped with unnerving gaiety, like the runtish survivor of a cave-in, able to squeak to his heart’s content. He looked around nervously. Wood too rotten even for Deadclaw lay in uneven stacks steaming with their absent owners’ scent markings, bones picked bare and left for the malnourished rats that regarded him with idle hunger, rags strewn between the lazily wafting door-flaps, scattered as though by footpaws in a hurry. And not a single skaven in sight. Nor a single weapon.
Anxiously, he moistened his lips. He had the dreadful feeling that his long-treasured luck was about to run out.
Grimnir’s shrine was dark and quiet, a place where the prayers of the dishonoured might be heard. In burnished copper and bronze, the ancestor god of battle stood slightly greater than life size, glaring balefully down upon his spartan shrine. Or perhaps Grimnir truly had been that large. Muscles mounded from his naked torso like the heights of the Karaz Ankor, every square inch rippling testament to martial pride. Here stood Grimnir the peerless warrior who had marched alone into the madness of Chaos to do battle with the Great Powers themselves and whose deeds, seven thousand years past, remained unmatched for glory and for sheer dwarfish bloody-mindedness. His beard was full and proud. Tattoos scored his godlike frame in glittering tracks of powdered zinc. His expression was judgemental, aggrieved by the fall of the dwarfs, angered by their squandering of his sacrifice.
Handrik found it impossible to meet his eyes. He’d become an Ironbreaker to defend his home, but aside from a handful of skirmishes with half-starved thaggoraki in the pitch dark of the Underdeep what had he achieved? It seemed he was doomed to sit out the greatest battles, one way or another to let others suffer in his stead. Well, not this time.
The sprightly splash of water filtered through the oak doors from the fountain in the outer courtyard, twinned like life and death to the hypnotic crack and slide rhythm of a whetstone dragged across the blade of an axe. Handrik turned through the lingering trace of incense. An ugly and horrifically scarred dwarf sat with whetstone in hand and a battleaxe across his lap, according it the same doting attention a spendthrift longbeard might bestow upon his last gold coin. The Slayer sat on a stone bench, a mural depicting Grimnir on his legendary quest prominent behind his broad shoulders. His powerful chest was bare but for spidery knots of scar-white tissue and a pair of spiked leather braces. Blue tatt
oos crawled up the Slayer’s arms to his waxed head. His scalp gleamed in the chequered light of incense burners. His dishonour was further consecrated with the mutilation of his beard, rendered into a sharp orange wedge that thrust down between his knees. He offered a curt nod to Handrik before returning at once to his blade, the scrape of stone on metal an angels’ chorus to the warrior Grimnir.
‘Is Gunngeir still about?’ Handrik asked.
If the Slayer heard or understood, he gave no clear indication, continuing to work with a steady unbroken pace on his already keen blade. Handrik wondered if the dwarf was damaged in more ways than the physical. Everyone had heard tales of dwarfs whose dishonour was so great as to leave them broken in mind.
‘Where are you from, Slayer? What’s your name?’ He waited a moment, but the dwarf still offered nothing. ‘You don’t say much, do you?’
The whetstone paused partway around the rim of the blade. The Slayer cracked a smirk and tilted his chin to better display his savaged throat.
‘Aye, I understand. Here’s hoping the next blow strikes harder.’
The anonymous Slayer nodded his thanks, crossing his arms over the butt of his axe blade and leaning on its haft. He jabbed a thumb back at his scarred visage before uncurling a finger to point at Handrik.
And you as well.
Handrik answered with a stiff nod, his hand reaching without thinking to the poisonous wound over his heart. To think that it must come to this, to become like this, to defy his oaths of fealty and render himself unto dishonour. But it was necessary. Kazador had practically handed the keys of Karak Azul to a skaven flunkey. What would the truth do to a dwarf who many, the king himself most of all, already considered the accursed king of Azul? Instead of Handrik, it might be Kazador on his knees pledging his life to Grimnir. What price did he set on his own honour in comparison? What would he not give to spare his beloved king that shame? He took a deep breath and marshalled his pride. He would do anything. Even betray him.