by David Guymer
Ska felt his musk glands try to clench but he fought down the urge with a hissed breath and a shudder. He rose to his full height, feeling almost as massive in his gromril armour. He took the axe in two paws and stared down at the oncoming orc. The orc broke into a run, leaving the lesser green-things behind and driving tiny cracks into the long-suffering stones. Ska tried to ignore the vibrations trembling through his footpaws. He was Ska Bloodtail, Queek’s mightiest champion.
He would win.
Queek held Dwarf Gouger at the beginnings of its killing stroke. A mighty crash sounded from the bottom of the steps and a shape bearing an uncanny similarity to Ska Bloodtail sailed into view and slammed off the underside of the ceiling. The skaven bounced once before falling into a clattering roll that carried him out onto the bridge, coming to rest not far from where Queek stood. The skaven didn’t rise. A great dent was beaten into its breastplate.
There was a momentary peace as the skaven backed off, in case whatever fate had befallen their fangleader prove catching. The dwarfs took the opportunity to catch their breath. A murmur passed around those standing nearest the steps. Heads turned. Queek could smell their hatred, ratcheted to a degree that even he could not evoke in their simple hearts. He stepped over the old orange-fur’s body, eager to see for himself what it was they saw.
But he heard it first.
‘Waaaaaaaggh! Gorfang!’
Chapter Seventeen
The orc advanced, immense shoulders swaying as it climbed the steps to the bridgehouse. ‘Dis is my place, ratty.’ The hugely armoured giant held its granite bludgeon in one steel fist. ‘So what yoo reckon?’ Metal clanged hollowly off metal as it whacked its breastplate. ‘Fink you’ze ’ard enough for some o’ dis?’
Queek ran his tongue down the bloody lip of Dwarf Gouger. The orc towered over him, a dark squat head squeezing free from the jaws of a metallic carnivorous plant. ‘Big-meat. You came.’
The orc broke into a laugh, or the head did, somehow disconnected from that bulbous steel chest. ‘I heard you woz cracked, ratty.’ The laughter faded from its squished-up cheeks as it drew back its club. ‘I like dat.’
The orc roared and Queek leapt back. The club crashed like a felled oak, throwing up shards from the fractured tiles where Queek had been and gouging through into the soft mortar beneath. Queek felt the tremors as a tickling in his footpaws, bloodthirsty spirits drawing him back to the fray by his claws. The orc was still yanking at its buried club, leaving itself open. Queek leapt in. His shriek of triumph tingled on his tongue with the sweet taste of orc-meat. Dwarf Gouger slammed into its groin, the ensorcelled spike cleaving through the thick metal like a knife through hot blood. His black spirit rose on euphoric wings as the spike cut deep. The maul’s rounded head rang home against punctured steel.
The orc erupted with a volcanic rumble of laughter. It let slip its club and took an unexpected step forward, sending Queek scurrying to avoid being crushed. Dwarf Gouger still swayed between its legs. ‘I got da fickest armour around, ratty.’ The orc made a crude thrusting motion, guffawing as the maul’s handle jiggled across its thighs. ‘Need a longer spike, maybe.’
‘Queek shows him spikes. His head goes on the biggest spike!’
The orc looked nonplussed ‘You wot?’
Queek sprang forward with a snarl. He grabbed hold of his swinging haft and made to pull his weapon free, only to find himself pinned by a fist that closed over his ears like an avalanche. Queek twisted and spat, pulling Dwarf Gouger from its prison and smacking it in futile fury about the brute’s midriff. The orc laughed him down, spare hand sweeping like a pendulum to deliver a backhand that sent him careening. Like a bleeding scythe of warpstone and black visions, his body cut through the press of warriors until the sheer mass of living flesh slowed him. He rolled off the broken back of a stormvermin and swayed onto his own footpaws.
He glared back across his short path of destruction. Bloodied dwarfs and skaven lined the way like supplicants to the throne of Queek. The orc lumbered down the middle of it, hefting its club with ease. Fury hazed Queek’s vision. He had never wanted to kill anything so badly. It was the arrogance of the creature that inflamed his hatred. The simple-minded savage clearly had no idea that he sought to challenge the Headtaker!
He was visualising shoving a sword through that ludicrously confident smirk when he felt the touch of a hand on his shoulders. He spun around, ready to unleash a foaming tirade on the rodent idiotic enough to lower their neck to the Headtaker. His muzzle dropped in shock at the sight of a dwarf. It just stood there and looked at him, hand on his shoulder as though they were old friends. The hood of a black cloak had been thrown back to reveal a dark-furred specimen with no neck and a scarred face set deep into its broad shoulders. Its face was oddly devoid of fur but for scraps of stubble between a set of ugly, uneven scars.
For a blinding moment he felt that blood was about to boil from his eyes. The dwarf regarded him blankly, as though it didn’t see him or, Queek suspected, thought him beneath notice. Queek snarled and shoved back against the dwarf’s arm. The dwarf didn’t move, shoulders rolling with the clumsy strike. Its lips twitched at one corner and, in an explosion of motion, its body lunged into his.
Queek cried out in shock as he was hurled aside, slammed into the bridge wall with force enough to blow the wind from his chest. He struggled upright as the dead-eyed dwarf pulled a pair of gleaming axes from a hidden belt beneath his cloak. Something flickered in the orc’s eyes, something that, if Queek were to credit it with intelligence, he might have called recognition.
Queek’s temper raged, soon outpacing his wrathfully racing heart. His grip tightened around the handle of Dwarf Gouger as he cast about for a fresh sword to replace the one he seemed to have lost.
He’d show these over-muscled, mouse-brained, stupid-furred fools the price of turning their backs on the Headtaker.
Handrik pushed himself from his belly. He turned and tried to catch a glimpse of the Headtaker, but the rat-king had disappeared into the shifting forest of tensed, struggling legs. A hand descended from that violently swaying canopy to grab his in a firm grip. He let it haul him up and practically fell into Narfi’s arms. He swallowed down a wave of nausea and shook warpstone dust from his beard.
Narfi took him by both shoulders, studying his face for any sign of addlement. The young dwarf’s own face was a mess of skaven blood and grief. ‘Are you injured, longbeard?’ the lad asked, voice strained, as though desirous of nothing other than to rail against the old fool that had led his elder brother to this doom.
‘More than you could ever know. But I’m not dead.’
The miners had retreated into a semicircle around him and Narfi, backs to the abyss, only just fending off the huge orcs that came laughing and killing in the wake of their leader. The miners fought back with stout hearts, their heavy picks a wall of death that smote blood from orc and skaven with indiscriminate relish.
Handrik threw down his own ruined weapon with a curse. It seemed the nature of the Headtaker to ruin that which was ancient and fine. In so doing, he caught the shine of gold against the grey wall and he made for it. He traced the sign of Grungni’s hammer as the glimmer resolved into the rune of Karak Azul. A long-handled axe bearing the hammers, anvil and crown of his home lay clutched in the unconscious paws of a giant thaggoraki. He grasped it by the handle and pulled.
The skaven’s paws suddenly tightened, as though Handrik’s presence had lent them life. Its eyes snapped open, responding with a full-fanged snarl. Handrik’s fist smashed against its snout. ‘It doesn’t belong to you.’ He tore the axe from its paws and stood. ‘It belongs to Karak Azul.’
Narfi wiped blood from his brow and looked on a scene from the imaginings of laughing gods. Some of the greenskins had driven the dwarfs from the bridgehouse. Others had found space around the periphery of their living wall to tear into the confused press of skaven. It was impossible to imagine prising anything of worth from such an immiscible inter
face of mayhem and death.
‘It’s over,’ said Narfi, voicing those same thoughts. ‘What can we do against so many?’
‘What we came for, that’s what.’ He pointed out into the melee. ‘Our kinsdwarfs are out there somewhere. Take this lot and find them. Get them all home if you can.’
Narfi offered a breathless nod. ‘What about you?’
Handrik turned the other way, looking back across the bridge. ‘What I came for.’ He pointed across the swamp of battling figures, eyes focusing on an unexpected face as its wearer duelled with the hated Gorfang. The orc bellowed, as if in greeting, tearing its club through a crushing arc that swept the full width of the bridge and beyond. The dwarf ducked. A pair of ratkin trying to sneak past caught its full force and were thrown squealing into the abyss. The dwarf hurled himself onto the laughing brute with a furious shout, his twin axes beating deep scars into his enemy’s armour. His was a face that Handrik had not seen in fifteen years, a face carved from the same stone as his father’s. For a moment he was too stunned to talk, then came a flush of warmth, the resurgent spring of an emotion he recalled only dimly. He might have called it… hope.
He started laughing. ‘Now I see why you didn’t want to go back and face Kazador.’
His vision blurred and with a start he realised tears were streaming down his face. Holding his axe aloft, he charged through the screaming vermin for the squatter king. A name rushed from his lips at the same moment as it did from every other dwarf who saw. ‘Kazrik!’
Thordun woke with a toe in his belly.
‘Ungh. Bernard, what the–’
Memory forced its way in with the riot assaulting his ears. Instinctively, he tried to curl into a ball, bringing an angry rattle from the chains binding his wrists to his ankles. He wriggled nearer to Bernard.
‘How are you feeling?’
Bernard grinned feebly, blood smearing his teeth and gums. ‘How do I look?’
Thordun’s head flopped into the big man’s lap. He looked around, head craning as far as his bonds allowed. The weapon-rat he’d seen before lay crushed, as though it had been trodden on by a warhorse. A foul-smelling chemical leaked from the burst vessel on its shoulders, Thordun’s chains flattened under one still-twitching paw. ‘I’ve seen worse.’
‘Don’t ask, Splitter.’ Thordun felt the man shudder, and not with pain. ‘You’ll be happier for it.’
Thordun fidgeted, trying to work his fingers through the amateurishly bolted chains. He exhaled in an effort to loosen his bonds and his muscles, gazing absently upwards as he wriggled against the constraints. He almost failed to notice the night-black shape that clung from the rafter’s shadow like a bat. His mouth formed a ring of surprise. The cloaked skaven pressed a claw to its muzzle as if bidding a co-conspirator be silent. The gesture was so incongruous he actually shut his mouth again.
The skaven grinned and released its pawholds, cloak snapping like black wings as it fell.
Sharpwit almost bit his tongue clean through as a shadow shot across his line of vision. The assassin landed on the human’s shoulders, eliciting a scream as his weight bent the man over onto the shaft that spitted his chest. Sharpwit hunched reflexively, but nobody here was about to notice one scream out of place. He huddled under the lee of the arches that curved against the ceiling of the bridgehouse, blade wrapped in cloth lest its dull light draw notice.
Dao’s long snout sought his hidden corner and he beamed. ‘A dwarf-thing and a man-thing. As the warlord demands.’
Sharpwit’s nose darted over the swirling combatants. He tried to work himself deeper into the wall, as if he could burrow inside and wrap himself in shadow. It was all too much. Skaven, dwarfs and hulking orcs all grunted and fought, weapons flashing where space allowed, otherwise resorting to choking, biting, scratching. Somewhere in that variegated carnage Gorfang bellowed his battle-lust, and all the while that cry. As if all the horrors of that long ago night had been distilled into a single heartbeat of madness.
‘Kazrik!’
Who could have suspected that the simple act of releasing a few orcs into Karak Azul so he could steal dwarfish treasure could have had such consequences? Likely nobody had cared. And why should they? Of all the skaven involved that day, only he was still alive. And he hoped to stay that way.
Dao hopped down from the moaning human and knelt beside the dwarf.
‘Fast-quick,’ Sharpwit hissed, detaching himself with some effort from the safety of his alcove. ‘Get them to their feet. Faster if we not have to carry.’ Dao shook his muzzle, paws spooling through the thick chain between the dwarf’s ankles and wrists.
‘Can you free it?’
‘No time!’ said Dao, ducking in as a dwarf blundered by.
‘Damnable Queek,’ he snarled bitterly. ‘We will have to carry. Back to the stream, the way we came and away. Get the man-thing up, quick-quick!’
Sharpwit crouched over the prone dwarf. ‘Be quiet-still, dwarf-thing,’ he whispered in Khazalid. For an instant he thought he recognised this dwarf’s scent. It was difficult to be sure when surrounded by such a dazzling horror show of smells. He hadn’t the time to dwell on it either way. It was only a matter of time before they attracted notice.
The dwarf fought against his touch, barking something in the human tongue.
‘I have just two paws, wise warlord,’ the assassin snarled. ‘I cannot help-move both. Pick one.’
‘One is useless without the other. We may as well leave both.’ Sharpwit struggled with the mechanics. It would be cruelty unparalleled to be thwarted at the very last, simply for the lack of an underling of sufficient wit to see a dwarf from danger. Like a gift from the aether, inspiration struck. ‘Wait-wait,’ he snapped at Dao before limping into the melee.
He looked around, struggling to get his bearings. Bodies packed so tightly he could hardly breathe for their stench. A dwarf came charging through the press, a huge hammer held high in two strong hands. Sharpwit squealed and ducked behind a stormvermin that was looking the other way as he fought to wrest his halberd from the grip of an orc twice his size. Sharpwit scampered between them, stabbing the orc through the foot with his crutch just as the stormvermin’s eyes rolled back, as if pulled magnetically towards the warhammer freshly embedded in his skull. The orc barked in surprise as the dwarf blundered into it. The two enemies fell together. Sharpwit left them to it, springing clear without a second glance and emerging breathlessly on the other side of the bridgehouse.
He dropped down beside the body of Ska Bloodtail. He gave his armour a shake. ‘Ska. Wake up Ska. Queek needs you.’
He was rewarded with a slight shift of the head and a murmur of half-dreamt words.
‘Ska,’ he said again, sparing a nervous glance over his shoulder.
‘No,’ the giant murmured. ‘Is rubbish-poor axe. Ska not want.’
‘Come-come, brave Ska,’ Sharpwit soothed, heaving his wiry frame against the fangleader’s uncooperative bulk. He cast about for any sign of Queek, but found none. Perhaps the warlord was dead. He shook his head anxiously. Even he couldn’t get that lucky. ‘Come-come. Is time clever skaven flee to plot another day.’
Sing, sing, sing. Dwarf-things do so like to sing.
Queek’s lips curled over his glistening fangs as he shoved his way through the frightened crowd of his finest. The air smelt rich with their musk, lining the back of his throat like honeyed liquor. The dwarf-things chanted a name, over and over, like the forgetful, vacant-headed simpletons they were.
‘Kazrik,’ he hissed in time, eyes burning onto the dwarf-thing that was the subject of such attention. It swept around the big orc’s legs, hammering down blows with what might have been mushroom stalks for all the damage they caused. The orc, for its part, wielded its gigantic club in both hands, trying and failing to smash it through its tiny foe’s head.
‘Kazrik,’ he growled. The strength of the chant made his belly shake. Dwarf Gouger felt light in his paw. He would show this dwarf-thing who was be
st. Then they would chant his name.
Queek! Queek! Queek!
He soaked in the adulation.
The orc caught the dwarf with its shin, then reared up and brought its club crashing down. The dwarf rolled clear, but Queek felt the bridge shudder. Tiny fissures crept through the stonework. The orc howled, stamping after the wriggling dwarf one massively armoured boot after another. Queek could almost hear the slender stone isthmus suffer. He scurried aside as the dwarf rolled his way, titanic tormentor in hot pursuit. Both continued on, ignoring him completely. For once, it didn’t bother him. His heart lurched, paws grabbing for the wall as he felt the bridge shudder, stomach spinning upside down at his brief glimpse of the bottomless void below.
He threw a brief, longing look at the passage back to the stream and the way out. He was the mighty and unbeatable Queek. He knew that. He had nothing to prove. He glared at the nearest warrior, a scrappy black-furred creature, and dared him to disagree, but the stormvermin had the infuriatingly good sense to look away.
‘That’s right!’ he squeaked for everyone to hear. ‘Queek can beat anyone!’
A handful of dwarfs were heading his way, led by an orange-fur that bore a remarkable semblance to one he had just killed. But then all dwarf-things did look alike. He took a last look back. The dwarf had regained his feet and the fight continued. Maybe he’d come back for them. Yes. That was what he would do. He would–
The thought never fully emerged. His throat rumbled with newborn fury as he caught wind of a familiar scent. His nose tracked it to its source. That’s where he had smelt it, fleeing for the passage back to the stream and the way out. The craven, weasel-spleened cowards! Ska. And Old-thing.
Not even strong enough to run away with dignity, they helped keep each other upright, scampering from the bridge and into the city like a three-legged, two headed coward-worm of some weakling god’s craven hell. His eyes narrowed at the golden-furred body slung over Ska’s shoulders. They helped themselves to Queek’s prize too. Fresh outrage burned through already white-hot veins.