by David Guymer
Thordun’s lungs burned, legs pumping through the dark like pistons in a steam engine. Bernard and the other men raced ahead with the torchlight, shadow stick figures in the distance of the hall. It sounded like they ran to a fight, dwarfish war-cries and high-pitched screams reaching down the hall on a hot, sulphurous breeze. Compared to the howls from behind that had grown louder and louder until they practically snapped at his heels, it sounded almost welcoming. He huffed in a mouthful of rotten-egg air, trying to coax more speed from his legs.
The hall widened with painful slowness until, without warning, the walls fell away. Thordun’s eyes struggled to take in the awesome vista that opened out before him. An immense cavern soared up towards the mountain’s peak where fading glimstones glittered almost like true stars. High arched windows and balconies studded the rock face all the way up to the First Deep. They resembled the windows of noble houses in Nuln, but on a scale that left such residences resembling play castles on the sands of Barak Varr. Buttresses like giants hewn in the likeness of guardian ancestors strove against the walls.
Emerging from the hallway, Thordun puffed through ruined streets. Stone buildings had been broken open and remade as greenskin squats, wide boulevards strewn with litter. The street ahead widened towards a white-paved plaza. Bernard and his men sprinted over the exposed square for its far side and the sweeping immensity of the Mordrekk Bridge.
The Mordrekk was a colossus of white stone half a mile across, its sides stamped every few hundred yards with ancestor icons and runes of endurance. It glittered silver, arcing over the yawning river of emptiness, defiant as no product of mortal hands had any right to be in the face of such an abyss. Viewed against such wonders, whether carved by nature’s might or by ancient masters, the two Slayers swinging their bloodied hammers beneath the arched ceiling of its bridgehouse looked minuscule. Their hammers left a dark legacy of shattered skulls among the goblins that scrambled to reach them. Black-robed corpses piled themselves into a makeshift barricade, almost as if the dwarfs had willed it so.
A shot rang out over the clamour of steel on steel, and a goblin pitched over the chasm’s edge, a hole smoking in its chest. Smoke rose from a discharged handgun, cloaking the sprinting men like an exorcised spirit. The men charged, each with his own cry, Rorrick’s frustrated shouts fading into their tail as his shorter stride lagged behind. The goblins squawked in fright, dashing back to the ruins of their city, and, for the moment at least, the bridge remained theirs.
Thordun steeled himself for the last few hundred yards. Black-feathered arrows zipped down from the balconies. Rorrick turned his way and urged him on. Bernard bellowed an order and three of the four men with guns got down on one knee and fired a volley into the ruins. Smoke shrouded the bridge obscuring the fourth man, still running while struggling to empty his barrel to reload. Thordun didn’t see anything hit, but the smoke at least made life harder for the archers.
He risked a backward glance, cracking his toe on a rock and stumbling as a mob of black-hooded shapes poured from the hallway. Most had short stabbing swords, waving them above their heads and screaming as they surged forward, but some had bows. The archers scrambled over walls onto broken rooftops, drawing back their strings and taking aim.
Thordun dived into a gaping doorway as shafts peppered the stonework. One spun inwards, ripping a tear in his trousers. He hissed and pressed a palm to his thigh. He dabbed it with his cloak. The blue wool came away clean and he released a relieved wheeze.
‘Rapide, Splitter!’
Grinding his teeth in frustration, he freed his second pistol and drew back against the door frame. ‘Easy for you to say,’ he muttered between breaths, sheltering under the eaves as arrows dropped like hellish rain. To his surprise, he found himself wishing for Handrik. A seemingly invincible longbeard, whatever his opinions on the fallibility of young beardlings, would have been a most welcome sight right now.
He’d go on three. ‘One. Two.’
A crackling volley of shots rang over the screaming goblins, punctuated by squawks of pain. An arm like a bear’s lunged through the doorway and dragged him out by the collar. ‘Dépêchez-vous, Splitter.’ Ducking as an arrow zipped overhead, Bernard ran almost bent double for the bridgehouse. Thordun sped after, turning briefly to fire a lead slug through the brain of a goblin with longer legs than most.
‘Thank you, beardling,’ Rorrick roared in greeting, cheeks flushed as if from too much ale. ‘It’s everything I’d hoped it would be.’
‘Back!’ yelled Bernard, as a hail of arrows fell through the choking cloud. The big man took the steps to the bridgehouse four at a time. One of his company, a sandy-haired lad barely out of his teens, grabbed his musket and ran, halting as he realised he’d forgotten his powder bag, and took an arrow through the throat. He gurgled something Thordun feared must be deeply profound and let the musket fall, grasping the air with clawed hands as though he drowned.
‘Now! Move!’
Thordun realised he hadn’t moved an inch, that he was just stood there like a scarecrow on a granite field beneath the deadliest of storms. He made a grab for the boy’s gun. Remembering the powder and leaving a hurried prayer in trade, he dashed for the steps. A stocky man in dark cloak and polished mail shoved past as he made the top, sighted down the barrel of his handgun, one eye tight, and squeezed off a speculative shot. The aftershock boomed through the captive space under the arches and Thordun closed his eyes, the sheer volume threatening to pop them from his face.
Rorrick merely laughed all the harder.
Bernard tore the musket from his hands, thrusting it into the surprised arms of a raven-haired woman. A long face partitioned by an infected scar made a cratered no-man’s-land by a battle with pox. What was her name, Thordun thought? What had that boy’s name been? Who were these people, these umgi that Bernard had gathered to die on his account? He cursed himself for never bothering to ask. He vowed to track down every one. Their families would know they fell as heroes.
‘You can’t hit a damn thing anyway,’ Bernard explained, misinterpreting his expression.
‘You-you saved my life,’ Thordun said. The sentiment fell woefully short. Head desperately trying to speed up, heart direfully needing to slow down, tongue all caught up in the middle.
Bernard stood with one hand on the upward curve of a decorative arch, hunching underneath to keep an eye on the goblins that their gunfire was only barely forcing behind their walls. ‘Yes, well,’ he shouted above the continuing barrage. ‘For a bit, maybe.’
‘Thank you, anyway.’
Bernard grunted and kept his lookout. Beside them, Rorrick bounced behind the line of sweating men like a child trapped indoors, forbidden to play in the rain.
‘We can make it, Rorrick. We can do this.’
‘I think not, beardling. It’s a long way over the bridge, and a fair run to the squatter king’s dungeons after that. If we try and move now, this lot’ll be over our backs like a rash.’
At that moment, the bridge shook to a tremendous force, stone screaming as something crashed against the bridgehouse roof. Thordun cried out as the bridgehouse bucked beneath them, the dark-haired woman thrown from the top step just as she was setting her aim. Screaming, she spilled back onto the plaza in a shower of rock splinters, set upon by a screeching mob before she could rise.
Thordun looked away, flinching as the shot fired from her musket like a departing soul. He’d thought the city dead, but dormant was perhaps more apt, and it was awake now, alive with pale green shapes. On one of the upper galleries, a pair of hunched figures cranked back the arm of a catapult for a fresh load. He wondered how much more punishment the bridge could withstand. The Mordrekk was a marvel, but the Karaz Ankor abounded with the ruins of fallen marvels.
‘Go,’ Rorrick bellowed, elbowing Thordun aside, as if to face down the greenskin hordes with passion and hatred alone. ‘Bring back Kazador’s kin. We’ll hold your way out.’ He shrugged and grinned wildly. ‘It’s only gr
obi, after all.’
Thordun offered a quick bow. ‘Don’t die too soon.’
‘Chance’d be a fine thing, youngling!’
A terrible screech rent the vast cavern, dark-robed greenskins flooding from the ruins like a black river. Shots fired. A handful of wiry bodies danced their last, but the charge didn’t waver. Thordun palmed sweat onto his cloak and took aim.
‘Forget it, Splitter. Time to move!’
Moisture dripped from the cracked surfaces like fluids leeching from a corpse. Queek stood amid the destruction, one thought alone holding together the ruin of his fractured mind. Retribution.
Somehow Old-thing had survived. Somehow he thought to flee Queek’s battle and claim his glory. He believed he could take White-fur and Ska with him and get away with it. The fleshless one was so painfully wrong that even Queek was struggling to devise a fitting punishment. He would make Black Crag a tomb, a monument in dead flesh to the cruelty of Queek and blessed by the blood of thousands. Every creature to be found in these worthless mountains would bleed until the valley was a lake of blood upon which he would walk and lesser vermin drown. Then he would tear his own monument to the ground and see it burn, a claw in the eye to all that built to outlast the coming of Queek.
One vile betrayer at least would not live to suffer that day.
A pair of sodden white-furred bodies lay partially interred beneath a tumble of masonry. Lumps of granite rolled aside for Queek’s passing, gravel crunching beneath his bare footpaws. His lip curled at the appearance of the grey seer. His legs had been shredded, as though by wild dogs, but otherwise he appeared almost serene, blanketed in a funeral shroud of grey dust, white robes stiffened with ruby smears. Queek crouched at his side, taking his powdery muzzle in one gauntlet. The seer’s eyes were lifeless, tongue hanging slack to his palate. Queek let the head drop with a sneer.
Gravel crunched. Queek swung his muzzle back towards the tunnel and hissed. The stormvermin, long fur sopping wet and smeared over its eyes, cringed back into the passage with a submissive mewl. Queek held his glare until the skaven was out of sight.
‘Where is Ska?’ he hissed to himself ‘Is this him? Does he kill-kill for Queek? Or does he stab-slay to take-steal Queek’s prize himself?’
He started at the sound of a cough. The grey seer’s head had rolled to one side and was staring directly at him.
‘You are… a mad-thing fool.’
‘That is not what Queek asks.’
He cocked his head to one side, intrigued by a glimmer of water between the rubble, a footprint, a jarring order within the madness. It was pebbled with dust and relatively fresh and not the work of a skaven. He followed the pattern of prints, occasionally lost under larger skaven paw scratches or buried under a sheet of rock, but leading inexorably towards a cupboard fitted beneath the granite surface. There were fingerprints partially concealed by dust, one of them set into the grain in blood.
A predatory grin emerged unbidden as he threw back the doors.
‘What has Queek found here?’
A lone goblin shivered, wrapped up in its own arms and legs as though it might shield itself from the Headtaker.
‘This is a lucky green-thing, Queek thinks. Queek leaves so many with sad faces in mud, what is one more let to run, if it helps?’
At the word ‘Queek’, the goblin noticeably paled. One arm jerkily detached from the knot of limbs to wipe blood from its forehead. It made a flat squeaking sound, the free hand whipping over its mouth to suppress the useless stream of white noise. It stared wide-eyed at the gnawed skulls at his shoulder.
Queek’s claw drifted lazily into the goblin’s line of vision, reeling it in like a baited fish and down towards his skirt of bruised and waxen goblin heads. He ran a soothing claw along their brows. ‘Do not look-hope to poor Ikit, green-thing. The Headtaker has his tongue.’
‘Wh-what d’you want?’ it stammered through its fingers.
‘Do you see what happens here?’
The goblin nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah I saw. A big black rattie, I mean… er… rat?’ It cringed, waiting to see if it had caused offence before babbling on. ‘A big black one, yeah. He puts ’em both down.’
Queek felt relief. He had always known Ska was loyal. But the goblin continued.
‘He does it at this old’un’s say-so.’
‘Old-thing?’ Queek hissed, snatching for his sword hilt. The sudden movement made the goblin squeal until a second set of fingers over its mouth killed the noise.
‘Yeah,’ the goblin said, voice muffled. ‘He finishes the job ’isself and takes the big-un to find the boss’s stuntie prisoners.’
Queek slowly rose. So Ska had been Old-thing’s puppet all along. That was why Old-thing had always been so interested in his underling, why the traitorous toad had allowed him to believe White-fur the true villain, even when Queek had always suspected him of being a mere smokescreen for Old-thing’s twisted plans. In fact, it would be boringly predictable to discern Gnawdwell’s jealous paw at work. Old-thing had always been slavishly loyal to the clanlord’s whims, even at the expense of Queek’s inevitable triumph. Azul-Place would be a pyre five miles high, fuelled by the copious fats of dwarf-things, were it not for Gnawdwell’s meddling. It was shameful, particularly from a rat like Old-thing who did so love to eulogise on the mutual profit of collusion. Well, Old-thing was about to collude with his own liver, and he’d toss in Ska’s for good measure. And Gnawdwell’s too? Why not? There were none mightier than Queek!
He looked up at Krug and snarled. ‘Did you know of this, dwarf-thing? Or you?’ He snapped round at Ikit Slash, the skeletal warlord spinning infuriatingly behind his back every time he tried to turn and face him.
‘You are nothing but a mad-thing.’ A wittering of laughter. ‘Bested by an old rat.’
Queek reached for his sword, upper lip rippling. ‘Queek tells you be quiet, White-fur. He not say again.’
Razzel coughed, bells clanking like the manacled paws of the damned, muzzle split by a death’s head grin.
Queek’s eyes narrowed. Something here was not right. ‘Do not think-think I not kill a dead-thing. You talk less with a fist in your mouth.’
To his surprise, the dead seer struggled into a sitting position, leaning against one of the waist-height oak cabinets and pulling a broken staff from the rubble. ‘You are madder than I think-dream. The Horned Rat, he tests me.’ The seer’s bells went quiet. ‘Stay back. I show you dead-dead, mad-thing.’
Queek grinned as though he’d been offered a gift. He spread his paws and took a slow step forward. Razzel waved the broken-off top of his staff as another paw slid through the rubble. Razzel squealed, digging under his robes as if an army were concealed there. Queek took another step.
‘White-fur want-wish to show Queek a thing?’
With a triumphant cry, the sorcerer pulled a thumb-sized nugget of warpstone from his robes. He took it between claw and forefinger, holding it threateningly over his open maw, staff outthrust like a torch to the dark.
‘No closer,’ he hissed. ‘One bite and Queek dead-gone. Not so arrogant when pasted to the walls, hmmm?
Queek dropped to his knees, the sorcerer’s warpstone-capped staff ringing off the underside of his helmet. ‘Do it,’ Queek grinned. ‘We see who is the big rat.’
Razzel’s paw twitched, jaw flexing, eyes rolling down as if willing his fingers to unclench and drop the glowing rock onto his tongue.
‘Queek always wonders why grey ones eat-chew the black-rock for magic. Is risky.’ His eyes drank in the stone’s throbbing warplight, offering nothing back. His voice lowered to a whisper. ‘Is White-fur not scared?’
Razzel pushed his staff harder into Queek’s throat, tongue snaking out as if making its own play for the prize but coming up short. ‘I’ll do it,’ he lisped.
‘Queek hears stories. Of grey-furs that eat too much. Yes-yes! Maybe black-rock instead eats White-fur from inside and makes him squishy-thing.’ His gauntlet closed around the s
eer’s paw, forcing it towards his mouth. The sorcerer resisted, but his arm was weak. Not like Queek. ‘Queek wants to see that. How much does god-thing love-favour, you think?’
‘Stop!’ Razzel squealed, twisting his head away. Queek grasped him by the cheeks and held firm. ‘Please! No! I do anything!’
‘Then open big-wide. And tell god-thing that Queek still waits!’
Razzel screamed, loud enough to announce his coming to the Underworld, as Queek sank his claws into the sorcerer’s palm and dug out the warpstone for himself. He shoved the seer onto his back and held up the warpstone between thumb and foreclaw, admiring its processed edges, the way light vanished into it as it struck.
‘Old-thing should have killed you,’ he murmured. ‘He ruins your legs but not your hands. He leaves your staff and precious black-rock.’ He tittered softly. ‘Always plots with that one, yes-yes. Always schemes. And thoughts, they fly from his mind and make nests.’
Razzel didn’t answer. He looked as though he might already have died again.
‘He knows Queek not like the grey ones and their whispering. He thinks Razzel maybe can kill-kill Queek, yes-yes?’ He looked down on the weakly gasping seer and tutted. ‘Silly Old-thing.’
He made a fist around the nugget of warpstone and shrieked back into the tunnel. ‘Why do you wait-hide? There are enemies of Queek to kill-slay.’ He spun on the open cupboard. The goblin squealed and buried its head between its knees. ‘Tell Queek where dwarf-things are kept and he promises not to eat-kill.’
‘What about… about me?’ Razzel asked. He flinched as soon as he spoke, as if he suspected the answer might yet be worse than the uncertainty.
Queek rapped the warpstone thoughtfully against his snout-piece. He knelt down. ‘Queek must be in a good mood. He lets you live too.’ He snickered, setting the pulsing rock back into the sorcerer’s palm. ‘If you escape-crawl from here, then maybe you are the chosen one.’
‘I see man-things.’
Sharpwit leant over the low rooftop wall and stared across the ruined city. There was a black smudge between two grey smudges. If he focused hard enough, he could almost imagine a slender wisp of grey running across the black smudge, perhaps even interpret the occasional darting shape as a figure involved in the battle he could hear all too well. He gave Fang Dao a prod with his crutch.