by Guy Haley
‘From who?’ said Brunkaz. ‘Half our number are sparsely bearded hill dwarfs or umgdawi.’
‘Sadly not from them, my lord,’ said Drakki. ‘From Kolbron himself. No one knows stone better. If he says there’s something going on in the rock, you can bet your last coin there is.’
Belegar shook his head from side to side, his beard whispering against the parchment. ‘Tell them to withdraw.’
‘They won’t retreat, Belegar,’ said Drakki, a note of pleading in his voice.
‘Tell them it’s a direct command from me. I’ll write it on a bit of paper if it makes them happy. Get them back up here. I want them reporting to Durggan Stoutbelly and helping him fortify the Hall of Clan Skalfdon before sunrise or I’ll be writing grudges against the lot of them, is that clear? With their stonecraft under Stoutbelly’s direction, we’ve a fighting chance of establishing the next perimeter.’
‘It’ll be a hard task,’ said Brunkaz. ‘Not like the old days.’
‘Yes, yes, yes!’ said Belegar tersely, only just reining in his temper and maintaining the appropriate level of respect due to the living ancestor. ‘It never is like the old days, and it never will be again if we don’t give good account of ourselves here. We’re in a tough spot, aye, but we’ll all be dead if we grumble about it.’
Brunkaz’s wrinkled face paled under his beard at Belegar’s lack of deference. Belegar regretted his tone. ‘Have the messengers set out?’ he said, more softly.
‘This morning, my lord,’ said Drakki. ‘Six for each of Zhufbar, Karak Kadrin, Karaz-a-Karak and Karak Azul. No gyrocopters, as you commanded.’
‘We need them here.’ Belegar ground his broad teeth. Going cap in hand to the High King grated on his honour. What choice did he have? ‘The other kings will understand we cannot send their warriors back. They’ve not failed us yet. We’ll just have to dig in. Get Clan Zhudak to the gates of Bar-Kragaz, hold them back at the west tunnel. They’ll be coming through from the foundries that way as soon as they discover the miners have gone.’
‘Aye, my lord.’ Drakki hesitated, words that would not be spoken keen on his lips.
Brunkaz curled his lip at Drakki and made a rumble of disapproval that started deep in his gut and travelled upwards, quivering his moustaches as it came out of his mouth. ‘Drakki’s too good a dwarf to say it, but I will. We’ve got no chance. Half of us are dead already. The skaven are numberless. They’ve never attempted anything like this before. We’d be better off fighting our way out and leaving them to the greenskins.’
‘It’s a bigger attack, I’ll grant you. Nothing we can’t handle,’ said Belegar, his voice stiffening.
‘They’ve blown up Karag Nar! The sunset mountain, gone! Karag Rhyn’s a shadow of itself – half the old farmlands to the south are buried in its rubble. Can’t you see? Has pride blinded you so much? The mountains, Belegar, the mountains themselves are in pieces! If they can’t endure, what chance do we have?’ Belegar stared at his advisor, but Brunkaz had gone too far to stop. ‘There’s only one reason the Headtaker’s done that, and that’s to keep the greenskins off his back while he comes to finish us off. Or have you considered, it may not be long before they do the same to us? The thaggoraki have changed. We are not fighting against rats with sticks any more. Some of their machines make the creations of the Dawi-Zharr seem like toys! Why do you think they’ve left the surface camps alone? Why has Lord Duregar not had so much as a whiff of rat round the East Gate these last months while we’re knee deep in them? The answer’s simple – they’re coming to wipe us out! They don’t care. They’re massing for a final blow right at our heart, right into Kvinn-wyr.’
Belegar’s face grew purple, and his words when they came were quiet, the hiss of rain before the first thunder crack of a storm. ‘You will not mention the eastern kindreds in these halls again.’
‘All your life you’ve asked me for my counsel, from beardling to the king I love and serve gladly. I’ll give you the truth and aye, unvarnished,’ said Brunkaz. ‘This is my sooth, king of Karak Eight Peaks. Leave now, before we’re all dead. We tried our best. Sometimes we have to retreat a little further than we wish. Let the grobi and thaggoraki fight over the scraps. When the world’s troubles die down again, we can come back and take our lands from whoever wins. They’ll be weaker for their victory. More importantly, we’ll still be alive.’
‘Is that all, Brunkaz?’
‘Think of your son, Belegar.’
‘Is that all, Brunkaz?’ Belegar’s shout cut through the quiet muttering of dwarfs at council, so loud the candles and torches lighting the hall wavered before its fury. Only the glimlight of the glowstones was unperturbed.
Brunkaz could not meet his king’s eyes. He worked his cheeks, causing his beard and moustache to move around like a live thing. ‘Aye. That should just about cover it.’
‘Thank you. I suppose you’ll be wanting to leave, then? If you do, I’ll release you from your oaths, but the others’ll not thank you for it.’
Brunkaz went bright red. ‘I’ll not abandon my oaths! Course I’m staying. Why, if you were a few decades younger I’d put you over my knee and–’
‘Very well,’ interrupted Belegar. ‘If you’re staying, I’d appreciate you keeping your words tucked up behind your beard unless they’re something to do with defending the hold. Do you have anything useful to add in that regard?’
Brunkaz buried his chin in his chest, considering his next words. ‘There are ogres in the pass, my lord,’ he said slowly.
‘There are always ogres in the pass,’ said Drakki dismissively.
‘More than usual, Drakki Throngton. Golgfag Maneater leads a great host of them,’ said Brunkaz, still not looking at his king.
‘The Maneater is in the Uzkul Kadrin?’ said Belegar, brightening. He reached his hand, richly gloved, up to his mouth, as if he would hide the smile spreading under his beard.
‘You can’t be thinking on hiring him, my king? Ungrim nearly killed him. He’s a thug, a pirate, a… a… mercenary,’ said Drakki, taking his turn to be outraged.
‘That’s exactly what he is,’ said Belegar. ‘A mighty one.’
‘I beg you, my king, recall Duregar from the East Gate,’ said Drakki.
‘What, and let Skarsnik have it? And how do we get out then, if it should come to that?’ The king shot Brunkaz a warning look not to take up his cause again. ‘The East Gate garrison stays where it is, for now. Golgfag is what we need. He’s fought many times for the dawi.’
‘And just as often against us. And he doesn’t come cheap,’ said Brunkaz.
‘You’d beggar the kingdom for an ogre’s sword?’ Drakki shook his head so vigorously that he dislodged his spectacles. He pushed them back into place with an ink-stained finger, and squinted expectantly at his king.
‘Better a beggared kingdom than a fallen one. I’ll promise him the pick of the treasury.’
‘There’s precious little in the treasury,’ grumbled Drakki.
‘He doesn’t know that, does he?’ said Belegar. ‘Get a messenger out to him.’
‘There’s a blizzard rising.’
‘Then no one will be able to see him, will they?’ said Belegar. ‘Do it now, Grungni scowl at you!’
Now both longbeards were taken aback by Belegar’s attitude. Belegar supposed he should feel guilty, snapping at these honoured elders like they were callow beardlings, but he didn’t. They knew his temper well enough.
The longbeards walked away from the table, chins wagging like fishwives. Belegar ignored the pointed looks they gave him. To keep others from approaching him, he affected an air of bristling bad temper. He didn’t have to try very hard. Those dwarfs waiting to petition him – priests, merchants, umgdawi and hill dwarfs – were discouraged, if not by his manner then by his hammerers, who ushered them out of the hall. He heard their complaints well enough; the hall wasn�
��t that big. Fair enough, some of them had been waiting a day or so, but he wasn’t in the mood to dispense the king’s justice. He feigned deafness and returned to his maps, staring hard at them until his eyes swam. As if that would be enough to turn the red and green parts of the map blue again.
If only it were so simple.
One dwarf, somehow, got through.
‘Perhaps now your majesty might consider our request?’
The smell of rancid pig fat and lime was unmistakeable. Belegar looked up from his maps into the magnificently crested face of Unfer, nominally the leader of the Cult of Grimnir in the hold. When the Slayers wanted something, it was Unfer who asked. Belegar assumed he must be their leader, but in truth he did not know. Their ways were closed and mysterious to all who had not taken the oath.
The king tried to look away, but was arrested by the Slayer’s eyes. Beautiful eyes, set into a face scarred by cuts and inner pain. They were out of place, clear blue as ice, and as devoid of emotion.
Belegar tugged at his beard and cleared his throat. He waved his hand over his maps.
‘I’m loath to let such fine warriors go out. I need every axe we have here.’
Unfer glanced at the maps like they were a carpet he had no interest in buying, and Belegar an overeager merchant. ‘That is not the nature of our oath, my lord. We have no desire to retreat until there is nowhere left to retreat to, to find our doom backed into some corner, or worse, to be taken alive. There is no hope in this defence. Let us go, and kill as many of them as we can for you. It is a service we gladly offer you.’
Unfer’s glacial gaze bored into Belegar’s eyes. The insult to the king’s ability as a general was implicit.
‘There is always hope,’ said Belegar. ‘Help might come yet.’ He heard the desperation in his own voice; he was afraid that the Slayer was right.
‘There is no hope left in all the Karaz Ankor. No one is coming. The Eternal Realm is finished. Best we all shave our heads and take the oath so that we might die with a song on our lips and our shame washed away in blood.’
‘Shame?’ said Belegar. Unfer shrugged shoulders craggy with muscle. Blue tattoos writhed over them. In hands like boulders, he carried paired rune axes – royal weapons. Belegar often wondered who he’d been. Unfer would never tell.
‘The shame of all our kind,’ said Unfer. ‘That we have failed to restore the glory of our ancestors. Better to fight. Better to wish for a good death than a ragged hope.’
Belegar was tempted. To sally out with his remaining few folk, and kill the thaggoraki until they themselves were killed. Let them taste dawi steel and remember them forever!
He blinked visions of a glorious end away. He could not. He was a king. He had responsibilities. He had a son, the first heir born to the king of Karak Eight Peaks since its fall two thousand years ago. He would not retreat. He would not abandon the legacy of his ancestors, so much dearer now it was the heritage of another.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We wait here. We will defend, and retreat, and defend. And we shall prevail.’
Disappointment flickered over Unfer’s face. ‘As you wish. It is your kingdom.’ The Slayer put one axe over each shoulder and turned away.
‘I have not finished,’ said Belegar sternly. ‘You have my permission to go,’ he added with understanding. ‘I cannot keep you from your oaths. What manner of king would I be if I did? I wish you would reconsider, but if you must, you have my leave. Fight well, and find the doom you deserve, Unfer.’
Unfer nodded once. ‘It is all any of us can hope for any more. Grimnir go with you, King Belegar. If we meet again, may it be in happier times for all dawi.’
‘You’ll not go yet,’ said Belegar. Unfer cast a weary look over his shoulder. The Slayer moved in the way those with deep depression do: slowly, as if through a treacle of despair. ‘I may be a poor king, but I’m still a king. You’ll get a proper send off. I’ll open my cellars to you, we’ll say the right words, drink to your deaths.’ He smiled awkwardly. ‘The old way.’
Unfer gave an appreciative bow. ‘Let no dawi say that King Belegar is ungenerous. It is good to hold to the old ways while we still can.’
‘Aye,’ said Belegar. ‘Aye, it is.’ He meant it as a good thing, but his troubled face said otherwise. All they had was the past, he thought, and even that was running away from them.
He didn’t notice Unfer leave. A commotion at the gates drew his tired eyes. One of the Iron Brotherhood, Skallguz the Short, was pushing his way through. He jogged up to his lord, red faced and out of breath.
‘My king!’ he said, and dropped to his knees.
‘What is it?’ said Belegar.
‘It is the queen, my lord. The prince…’ The dwarf stammered to a halt.
‘Spit it out!’ Belegar’s face went pale with terrible presentiment.
‘My lord,’ the dwarf said. ‘I don’t know how to say it… They’ve both gone!’
NINE
Kemma’s Way
Wind sang sadly through the teeth of the broken window, set in the dairy, high up in the side of Kvinn-wyr. A sheer drop of four thousand feet fell away down the mountain outside, ending in broad fans of scree covered by snow. Gromvarl pulled his head back in through mullions worn edgeless by the wind and rain, and leaned against a cracked milk trough. He shook the snow from his shaggy mane of hair and filled his pipe.
He winced at the taste of the tobacco. Once the dwarfs had produced the world’s finest smoking weed in the Great Vale, along with much else. The soil of the bowl cupped between the eight mountains was so rich they called it Brungal – brown gold. In Belegar’s pocket kingdom there had been plans, and much talk in ale cups, of how the dwarfs were going to clear the farmlands and raise great crops to end Vala-Azrilungol’s reliance on the other holds. Of course, like so much Belegar said, it remained an unattainable dream.
A stealthy tread sounded in the old goat way outside. Gromvarl brought his crossbow up one-handed, wincing as he rested the stock in the crook of his broken arm.
He narrowed his eyes, finger on the trigger lever, then relaxed. No skaven or grobi whistled like that.
A deeply tanned dwarf with an expression so cheerful it belonged on the face of no real dawi came in through the door. He doffed his wide-brimmed hat, showing the scarf tied tightly over his ears and under his chin. His name was Douric Grimlander, a dwarf reckoner, a calculator of debts and grudges. Little better than a mercenary, to Gromvarl’s eyes.
‘Gromvarl! What happened to you?’ Douric said, his eyes lighting on Gromvarl’s splinted arm.
‘An urk happened to it. And then I happened to the urk.’
Douric peered about the small dairy. ‘You alone then?’
‘What does it look like?’ said Gromvarl through teeth gripping his pipe. He had always found Douric insufferable, even at the best of times.
‘I told you he’d say no,’ said Douric breezily. ‘I suppose it’s all off then. Belegar’s a fool to turn your offer down, but that’s that.’
‘Listen to me, you scraggle-bearded wazzok,’ said Gromvarl. ‘Why do you think he said no? This is his hold. Thorgrim is his son and heir.’ Gromvarl fixed the shorter dwarf with a beady eye and poked him in the chest with his pipe stem. ‘I wonder if you’re a real dwarf at all. You’ve no honour.’
Douric took the insult as a compliment, or so his broad smile suggested. ‘I like money. You like money. Who doesn’t like money? I have honour, but like my money, I’m just a little more careful than you where I spend it, that’s all.’
Gromvarl grunted, wiped the mouthpiece of his pipe on his bearskin, which was no cleaner than Douric’s jerkin, and replaced it in his mouth with the clack of ivory on teeth. ‘Oaths are worth more than gold, reckoner.’
‘I keep mine, unlike your king,’ said the reckoner mildly. ‘If I combine honour with payment, does it make me all that b
ad? Besides,’ he said, hitching his hands into his wide belt. ‘You’re the one who suggested to the king we should steal the queen out of the city against all tradition. So where’s your honour?’
Gromvarl adjusted the sling holding his broken arm, sliding thick fingers between the fabric and his neck. ‘My oath has always been to protect the queen, ever since she was a child. I’m doing that now.’
‘Doing that…?’ Douric’s eyes widened. ‘Oh ho ho! Gromvarl! I didn’t think you had it in you. She is here isn’t she?’
‘Not yet,’ said Gromvarl grudgingly. ‘Soon.’
‘Handing her over to me! A mere mercenary. Tut tut, Gromvarl. You’ll be coming with us now, I’ll warrant. It’ll be a mite uncomfortable down there once Belegar finds you’ve kidnapped his son.’ Douric jerked his thumb over his shoulder, back down the passageway in the exact direction of the citadel. Douric always had had a fine sense of direction, even for a dwarf.
Gromvarl grumbled, levered himself up from the tub and took a heavy step forwards, until he was nose to nose with Douric. ‘I’ve other oaths, oaths of service to the king. I’ll not break either. I need a dwarf of your… moral flexibility.’ He looked the reckoner up and down, his grubby clothes, his odd umgak gear garnered from who knew where. He was right, this was no true dwarf.
‘So you’re in a bind, then? Who’s the more fortunate here – you, all thick with responsibility, or me, who tends to the more cautious side–’
‘Self-serving more like,’ interjected Gromvarl.
‘–of things?’ continued Douric, undeterred. ‘A philosophy that enables me to help you out now. Who else would, Gromvarl? Who’s the better?’ He waggled his eyebrows in almost lewd fashion.
‘You little krutwanaz…’
‘Will you two stop arguing? The pair of you, thicker-headed than trolls!’ A sharp female voice speared out of the corridor. Queen Kemma of Karak Eight Peaks emerged into the dairy. She was followed by a very young dwarf, no older than ten or twelve, whose chin was covered in the straggly hairs of first bearding, and a hammerer, who nervously glanced behind them. Both the queen and youngster wore travelling cloaks and the rough clothes favoured by the kruti and foresters who worked overground. When the queen pushed past Gromvarl, her fastenings parted slightly, revealing rich gromril mail beneath. Both of them too had a royal bearing. Gromvarl sighed. No matter how they dressed up, there was no hiding who they were. He just hoped they had not been seen sneaking away.