by David Guymer
‘I want one special man-thing, blind-fool. He is big-tall, black-furred, do you see him?’
The assassin edged further along the rooftop, never a good indicator of positive news. ‘Is too far, most understanding one. All man-things look alike-same from distance.’
Ska Bloodtail nodded as though this were some well-established fact.
Fools. They were both of them fools.
‘It must be him,’ Sharpwit spoke to himself. ‘This is far-distant from man-thing places.’
‘What use is this man-thing?’ asked Ska.
‘He is crucial,’ Sharpwit spat, his voice a level hiss, careful even in anger not to attract any goblin attention. ‘Only he can claim the reward of Kazador. Without him we have nothing! Does that pass your thick skull?’
Fang Dao looked dubiously over the green-thing hordes that separated them from the bridge. His gaze settled on the bridge itself and the chasm it spanned, his sinking features fully anticipating the command that was coming. Perhaps Dao, at least, was not such an imbecile.
‘Follow those man-things to our prize, Dao. See no harm comes to the big black-fur.’
Dao snarled as though he’d just swallowed a bee, leaning over the low wall to size up the drop before vaulting over and skidding nimbly down.
‘What do we do here, Old-thing?’ Ska asked.
Sharpwit watched as Dao landed in a crouch, muzzle sweeping the alley left and right before scampering off in the direction of the bridge, his lithe figure fading into the darkness. ‘Queek wants the dwarf-things captured and that is what we do,’ said Sharpwit. He sat down, back to the wall, eye closed as he followed the battle, told to him in the crunch of bone and the shrieks of the maimed. He wasn’t accustomed to being lost, but he was lost now. There may have been a thousand and one ways over that bridge, but he knew none of them. He bared his fangs in agitation, his tail lashing as it was wont to do when he was anxious.
But he was a patient rat. He would wait until every last green-thing was dead. That should give him time to come up with something better.
The men sprinted full pelt for the far side of the bridge. Thordun struggled after, pounding up the rising arch, Bernard occasionally pausing to check he wasn’t lagging too far behind. Arrows fell in ones and twos, skittering off the stonework like the last hailstones of a storm or plummeting soundlessly into the chasm. He bared his teeth as Bernard looked his way again: he was a dwarf, he could run all day if he had to. But then he saw the man stagger, saw the black feathers sticking from his shoulder and the curse turned to dust in his mouth.
Bernard tried to keep on as if nothing had happened, face slack, legs going through the motions before giving way beneath him. His head smacked the stone, eliciting a howl of agony as the protruding arrowhead pulled against the muscle. Thordun’s legs found a level of speed they’d not previously been sharing, skidding to his knees by Bernard’s side. He dragged the man to the cover of the low parapet. His fingertips pincered the exit wound above his breast, sizing up the possibility of yanking the thing out. Bernard hissed.
‘Not on your… your bloody life.’
‘You’re not moving like this.’
Bernard offered a shrug that turned out more like a grimace and shuffled upright against the wall. ‘Then I guess I’m not moving.’
‘Don’t give me that,’ said Thordun, casting desperately around for someone to help carry him, but the other men hadn’t stopped running. ‘You’ve had worse.’
Bernard smirked, gums bloody. ‘You’re thinking of that mademoiselle in the Blind Pig?’ He started to chuckle, only to cease with a dull moan.
‘She never did like you,’ Thordun whispered, wrenching back a tear.
‘She was using you to get to me, Splitter. I’ll claim that to my… my…’ he broke into a chuckle again, this time gasping his way through the pain. ‘To my grave.’
Thordun looked back towards the bridgehouse. The Slayers battled shoulder to shoulder, refusing to yield a grudging inch, but they were overwhelmed. The enthusiastic living crowded out the dead, tipping them into the abyss for their own stab at the dwarfs. Still more crawled over the outer walls, spears needling through the windows, squabbling for the best handholds only to be dragged screaming down by the ankles so another could claim their place.
So much blood.
A snarling lump of purplish blubber thumped onto the bridge. The shock of landing rippled through its flesh. It snuffled at the mortar beneath its stubby feet, a creature seemingly all fangs and intense almond eyes. Its goblin rider twisted in its leather harness, jabbing its heels into the creature’s flanks to coax it round onto the dwarfs. The goblin plucked a javelin from a quiver on its back and hurled it hopefully into the fight. The missile whistled well clear, but one of the Slayers turned from his clansdwarfs and hefted his hammer, his hate-twisted visage a challenge made flesh. Thordun looked on, aghast, as the creature’s jaw distended, its rider yipping gleefully as it was lifted higher. The Slayer charged with a howl, the creature responded with a quiver of flesh and in a sudden rush of motion its fangs slammed together. Thordun blinked as though he’d just witnessed a trick. The dwarf was gone. His hammer struck ground, sliding onward alone until it finally came to rest some feet behind its intended target. The creature shuffled around to look at it. It released a self-satisfied belch, a rubbery pink tongue sweeping out to smear saliva from its fangs.
So much death.
Thordun took aim, his arm shaking so hard it was a miracle he could even pull the trigger. The bullet slammed through the creature’s flank and the monster shuddered as it deflated like a ruptured bladder. The goblin gagged on the foulness that whined from its mount.
What was it all for?
He looked down at Bernard. The man watched the squig’s death throes with a horrified fascination, wide eyes seemingly drinking in every last experience while they still could.
He’d not abandon his oldest friend to this.
He dropped to one knee and rolled the big man over his shoulders, grunting as he took the weight.
Bernard groaned. ‘Let go, you idiot. You can’t carry me.’
‘Don’t tempt me.’
Thighs burning, he drove himself upward, staggering a pace before setting himself. He tried to ignore the screams from the bridgehouse, the arrows spitting down, the growls of the hoppers and their riders’ ecstatic cries, dozens more fleshy impacts shuddering through the stones beneath his feet. He kept on running, Bernard gasping with every footfall.
He crested the rise of the bridge. Halfway.
Almost there.
Chapter Sixteen
Thordun took the steps of the Mordrekk as fast as he dared. Blood dribbled worryingly down his shoulder. He mouthed a prayer to Valaya and Shallya both – ladies of healing of dwarfs and men – in thanks for the periodic moans that told him his friend still lived.
Space, it seemed, was precious on this side of the bridge. The steps led down onto a tiny courtyard, closed in by grandiose manors of granite and black basalt that butted directly onto the rock face of the cavern and blocked out much of the ceiling’s glimlight. In their panic, the men held there, shaking firearms trained onto the horde that screamed over the bridge after them. They ignored the twin boulevards at the far corners of the square that angled deeper into the stronghold, the approaches guarded by headless torsos of cracked stone.
‘Fire, you dullards,’ Bernard groaned, managing to sound caustic despite being draped over a dwarf’s shoulders. ‘Those weapons work, you know.’
‘No,’ Thordun yelled as he huffed past them, through the courtyard, then on between the vandalised figures to the leftward alleyway. ‘Keep running.’
One of the men discharged his weapon anyway, bathing them all in choking fumes and the smell of saltpetre, before breaking off with the others. They caught up with Thordun easily, but this time kept pace. A shred of loyalty in their mercenary hearts? The maturing cynic in him considered it more likely that they merely tired as his d
warfish muscles would not. They flew by more broken statues. Some were little more than a stump of calf. They lined their way like a moribund guard of honour. A wake for the undying realm.
Jibbers and howls shrieked down every branch in the street. Thordun ground his teeth and prayed that they were nothing but echoes. If it turned out they were surrounded…
‘There!’ he cried. The street led to a gaping mouth in the cavern wall that looked to be straining to swallow the entire district whole. ‘That way! Go!’
The last man made the passage into the rock face just as the first of the greenskins surged around the corner and onto the street they had just cleared. Slingshots whirred like cicadas, bullets ricocheting off the stone walls several paces short. The echoes sounded after them, as though plummeting together into some bottomless well. Thordun felt a burn start up in his belly and kept on running. Doorways stretched into the far distance to left and right, some wood, some iron, painted in bloody fluids with the red fang, others hanging on their hinges like entrails from a gutted sow
‘Which of these doors is it?’ he wheezed to himself.
‘Tell me you joke, Splitter,’ said Bernard, lips almost touching his ear.
‘Because I’m renowned throughout Nuln for my jokes. Rorrick was the one with the map.’
Thordun looked left and right, biting his lip with worry as they ran past one door after another. ‘It’s all right. I think I remember.’ He twisted around, running backwards without breaking stride. Howling greenskins bounded after them. It was as if they sprouted from the walls like fungus.
‘And then what?’ asked Bernard, unavoidably looking the same way.
Thordun started to laugh. Right then, the question was so absurd, it seemed the only logical response to it. Still laughing, he turned back around to keep running.
And then he saw the door.
He pointed it out and shouted. The men chased after him as he ran for it. The door was of panelled oak with a grille at a dwarf’s face height, otherwise unadorned but for an iron plate just beneath the grille inscribed with angular runes. They glittered in the light of their torch. He recognised the lettering from the map. It was the Third Deep gaol. This had been where Yorri Borkodin had thought to find Kazador’s kinsdwarfs, where Rorrick Hammerhand had died trying to lead them now. They had made it at least as far as any before them. Surely it could not all end in failure now.
Thordun tried the handle and the door swung open easily. He dashed under the lintel, depositing Bernard as gently as haste allowed while the surviving men ducked their heads and streamed in after him. The last slammed the door closed, hand fisting over a bolt that was no longer there. He gave vent to something between a gargle and a scream.
This was not how Thordun had imagined it would be. Kazador’s grateful kin rescued, the rapturous welcome on his return, perhaps catching the eye of some attractive young rinn handily distracted from his chequered past by spectacular wealth and valour. In some of his mind’s more fanciful wanderings he had slain the fearsome Gorfang in personal combat, sundering his thick skull with a single blow of his father’s hammer. And that would be the moment, he had thought, the instant when everything he had yearned for would come to be, when Gazul’s scales tipped his way. After such daydreams he would awake with a fluttering heart and a tingling in his fingertips, and had come to imagine that that would be how it would feel, the sensation a message from the beyond that betokened his ancestors finally crossing Gazul’s threshold. But he didn’t even have the hammer. He felt like tearing out his beard in despair.
‘Brace that door with something.’ Bernard’s voice. The big man slouched against the wall. He looked ashen.
The man with the torch stabbed it down into an empty sconce and, for the first time, Thordun got a good look at the room that would mark their ends. It looked like a guard room. The floor and walls were of simple, rugged stone and, above an empty fireplace on the wall to the right of the door, a collection of axes and hammers still hung from a rack. Against the wall directly opposite the door, wooden crates had been stacked almost up to the ceiling.
The former torch-bearer hurried to aid his companion in dragging one of those crates to the door. Each hugged an opposing corner and strained, as if the pair were engaged in a bizarre drinking game that had taken an unexpectedly deadly turn. Thordun looked past the men, past the loose stacks of boxes and barrels. Something wasn’t right here. The runes had promised a cell of some kind, and if this room was for the gaoler’s watch, then where was the gaol itself? Where were the inmates? He shivered, as though a wight had just reached through his hauberk and touched his heart. Hidden behind that pile was a second door. There had to be.
‘Help me,’ he shouted, shoving aside the first chest without waiting to see who answered.
‘Whoah…’ Bernard breathed. ‘I think I might’ve just died.’ The men had all stopped what they were doing and were staring rapaciously at the ground by Thordun’s feet.
He looked down. The chest had broken open, its glittering contents cascading across the limestone flags.
Gold.
Thordun’s eyes widened as he drank in the sight, feeling his heart pound the first rush of gold fever through his veins. In that moment he couldn’t have cared less for the goblins at the door, or the men that stood to die at his side. All he wanted was to scoop that gold into his hands and rub the metal into his cheeks, to inhale it into his blood. He shook his head with a wry smile, the urge fading if not disappearing altogether. He always had been an odd dwarf. Too much imagination, for one thing. The reward had always proven less satisfying than the earning or – more often – the stealing of it.
He stretched out for the thing that had quickened his pulse more than gold ever could. Moving the chest had revealed a second door, this one of dark iron. It gave a dull rattle as he tried to open it. Locked. He closed his eyes, teetering on the cusp of ecstasy. It would have been irresistible at the least of times. But this was it. He knew it in his heart.
He heaved over a second crate to reveal a grille on this door too. It was covered by a sliding hatch. He was able to push it back a couple of inches before it struck the angle of another box. He pressed his left eye to the opening he had fashioned. It was pitch dark, but he was almost certain that he could see pale shapes lying on the ground inside. His dark vision was just beginning to acclimatise when something determined smashed into the outer door. He pulled away from the hatch and shoved aside another box to clear the lock.
Behind him, Bernard rasped instructions. Men nervously readied swords and pressed their backs to the wall either side of the shuddering door. Musketeers crouched behind a zig-zagged second line of boxes just behind Thordun’s back.
‘How’s it going?’ Bernard asked.
‘Hmm?’ Thordun murmured, so lost in sizing up the door’s lock that he’d barely heard the question. ‘What?’
‘You think you can bust those dwarfs out?’
A sword clove between the outer door’s oak panels before he could answer. It wiggled up and down for a moment before evidently becoming stuck. A harsh voice cursed in a barbaric tongue and the door shuddered anew as though thumped by a troll. Thordun rolled his eyes. Grungni’s tears, he hoped not.
‘Well, can you?’
Thordun just shrugged. There was really nothing more to say. Because it had become less about getting anyone out than getting themselves in some time ago.
‘Quiet, fool-fool,’ Sharpwit hissed. ‘And sit down.’
He slapped at the giant stormvermin’s elbow until the oaf sank his head back below the rooftop wall. Sharpwit twisted about, snout poking over the low granite parapet. He rose a little higher, eye focusing on a pawful of blurred shapes as they scythed into the rear of the greenskin horde. Queek stood proud in his misty vision, as if he had wished to be allowed to perceive just one thing with clarity and the smirking djinn had chosen for that thing to be Queek. The warlord’s trophies swayed as though struggling to keep up, two score, perhaps three,
of armoured warriors sprinting after him. He doubted that the ragtag rabble of goblins, too cowardly or too lazy to pursue the humans with the rest of their kind, were going to stop Queek reaching the bridge.
Wary of being spotted, he sank back down beside Ska. He gave Ska one last slap. The big rat probably didn’t feel it under all that armour, but it made him feel better. He should be thankful that the gnat-brained moron hadn’t simply cried out for his mad-thing master from the off. Very thankful indeed.
‘Queek crosses the bridge,’ Ska rumbled. If that was his best effort at keeping quiet, then Sharpwit took note to leave him behind next time. ‘We should help-help his capturing the dwarf-things.’
He rested a calming paw on Ska’s knee. He’d gone for the shoulder, but that was too high up to achieve while still looking dignified. ‘Brave-bold Ska, Queek knows you as his most loyal of servants. This is why he trusts only you to watch his rear.’
Ska visibly puffed out, even in his armour. Idiot.
‘We watch-wait. This is what Queek sends us to do. Make sure none other comes to surprise him while he find-claims the prize.’
Sharpwit gnawed on the handle of his remaining crutch, plotting how exactly he was going to extract the dwarf-things from Queek if he returned, worrying whether Dao could protect the man-thing, wondering how it was that Queek was able to ruin everything. He glanced over at the great lunk of muscle and metal that sat chuffed as cheese beside him. If only Ska could be convinced to do the sensible thing. It shouldn’t be too hard. Stabbing a superior in the back should come as naturally to skaven as cowering in dark holes. And Queek trusted Ska like no skaven should ever trust another.
He grinned, hiding the telltale warplight behind his paws.