by Guy Haley
But she was a dwarf, with all that entailed. Dawi rinn, and a vala too. More the fool him for not realising. He had always been so blinkered! Look where that had got him. Look where that had got them all.
People were running, those few warriors stationed in the top floors of the tower towards the sounds of fighting coming from the stairs, the remainder away to the final refuge with as much dignity as they could muster.
Only now, at the very end, were some of the dwarfs succumbing to panic, and not very many of them at that. Most were shouted down and shamed by their more level-headed elders, and there were plenty of them up there to do the shouting.
She caught sight of a familiar figure, bent almost double by the weighty book she had chained about her neck. Magda Freyasdottir, the hold’s ancient priestess of Valaya. Even at the end she was dressed up in the lavender finery of her office, her ankle-length, silk-fine hair bound in heavy clasps of jet.
‘Magda! Magda!’
The priestess turned, her face surprised. Kemma ran right into her arms.
‘Steady, my queen,’ she said ironically, and rightly so, for Kemma’s kingdom was by now much circumscribed. ‘I am not so steady on my feet as I was. I have someone here who might better appreciate your hugs. My king!’ she called. ‘Here he comes,’ she said to Kemma. ‘The last king of Karak Eight Peaks.’
Thorgrim came through the door, fully armed and armoured, his wispy beard hidden behind a chin-skirt of gromril plates. The sight of it made Kemma’s heart swell. Next month he would have been eleven years old, nineteen years until the majority he would never attain. In his boy’s armour he looked ridiculously young. In the visor of his helmet, his soft brown eyes, so like his father’s in particular, were wide with fear but hard with duty. My son, thought Kemma. He would have been a fine king.
‘Mother!’ he shouted with undwarf-like emotion. The others looked away at the boy-king’s unseemly display. They embraced. Someone tutted.
‘I thought you were dead.’
‘I too,’ said Kemma. She looked him deep in the eyes. His return look said he knew it too, that soon they would be.
‘Where are your Valkyrinn?’ said Kemma to Magda, looking about for the priestess’s bodyguards.
‘Gone. Gone to fight, and now doubtless dead.’
‘The king is dead?’ she asked, although she knew the answer.
‘Fallen. We are the last few dawi of Karak Eight Peaks. Thorgrim is our lord now.’
‘Whatever you say, mistress Magda,’ said Thorgim.
Magda chuckled. ‘You’re the king! You don’t have to defer to me.’
‘I think I will,’ said Thorgrim gracefully. ‘If it’s all the same to you.’
The last few dwarfs were running down the hall towards the room, heavy boots banging sparks from once fine mosaics. Worryingly, this included the last few warriors. Bloodcurdling screams and a horrible squeaking pursued them.
‘We better get in, and quickly,’ said Magda. She produced from under her robes a heavy object wrapped in oilcloth and offered it to the queen. ‘You’ll be wanting this.’
‘My hammer?’ guessed Kemma.
‘Of course. No queen should stand her last without her weapon. Are we dawi, or are we umgi females to go screaming into the night?’
Kemma nodded and took the oilcloth from the priestess; there indeed was the hammer.
‘Thank you.’
‘I took it from the armoury. I had no doubt you would need it at the end. Valaya provides for her champions.’ She gave a weary sigh, and steadied herself on Kemma’s shoulder. ‘I fear she has one final task for you before the end.’
Freya beckoned her through the door. The few dwarf warriors outside nodded their heads grimly and slammed it shut. A key turned in the lock from outside, and those inside barred the door as best they could, nailing planks across the door and frame that had been left there for that purpose.
What a last stand. Here were the young and infirm, the very, very old. Those beardlings old enough to fight or who flat out refused to leave, those young unkhazali who were too young to chance the journey. Their parents’ choice, not theirs. Kemma wished Belegar had ordered them all to go.
A room mostly full of those who never would or could no longer swing an axe. But all of those strong enough to lift them held one. Cooks, merchants, beardlings and rinn. All dwarfs had warrior in them, but some were more warlike than others, and the dwarfs in that room were among the least. They were down to the very last. She and Thorgrim were the champions of the room, the last heroes of this failing land.
She looked out of the room’s small window. Snow swirled around the tower, but it could not obscure the hordes of greenskins camped outside, insolently within gunshot of the walls. It made her sick to see them. Within hours, she reckoned, they would be fighting with the skaven over her bones.
The door shook. The beardlings tried their best to be brave, the younger children were openly terrified, the unkhazali cried in their mothers’ arms. There were not many children there; Karak Eight Peaks had never been a kind environment to raise beardlings. And here they all were, Karak Eight Peaks’s hopes for the future, trapped like rats and waiting to die.
The warriors in the corridor called out their battle-cries. From beyond the door a clashing of blades and the squealing of dying skaven set up. Thorgrim looked to his mother.
‘Don’t hold your axe so tightly,’ she scolded gently. ‘It will jar from your hand, and then where will you be?’
‘Sorry, mother,’ said Thorgrim.
Kemma smiled at him sadly. ‘Don’t be sorry. You have never done a wrong to dawi or umgi or anyone or anything else.’ She reached up to pat his face as she always had, a mother’s gesture for her child. But, she realised, he was not a child any more, despite his years. He was a king. She grasped his arm instead, a safe warrior’s gesture. ‘You would have been a very great king, my boy.’
The sound of arms abruptly ceased. There was a thump on the wood and a dying gurgle. Blood pooled under the door. Queekish squeaked outside. Silence. Then the door began to shake.
The door bounced in its frame. The wood splintered. The nails in the planks worked loose, and the first of them clattered to the floor.
‘They’re coming!’ screamed Kemma. ‘They’re coming!’
The fight was short and bloody. Kemma barred the way, keeping her son behind her, but he was singled out, and he was among the first to die. Kemma held back her grief and fought them as long as she could, a succession of untried warriors taking the position at her side. The skaven were stormvermin, strong and cunning warriors, but she was a queen, her hammer driven by a mother’s grief. They stood no chance. Ten she slew, then twenty. Time blurred along with her tear-streaked vision.
Kemma felt relief when the poisoned wind globe sailed into the room over the stormvermins’ heads, and shattered on the stone walls behind her. The choking gas poured with supernatural alacrity to fill every corner. The skaven in front of her died, white sputum bubbled at its lips, eyes bulging. Kemma held her breath, though her head spun and eyes stung and blurred. She ran forwards, hoping to buy time enough for the dwarfish young to die. Better a quick death by gas than the lingering torment of enslavement that would await them should they be taken alive.
‘Dreng! Dreng thaggoraki! Dreng! Dreng! Dreng!’ she shouted, swinging her hammer wildly. Her lungs burned, she could feel them filling with fluid. She was drowning in her own blood. Still she fought, sending the skaven breaching party reeling. Behind her, the cries and coughs subsided. Good, she thought. Good.
‘Za Vala-Azrilungol!’ she cried, holding her runic hammer aloft. The runes on it were losing their gleam, the magic leaching away, becoming nought but cut marks in steel. ‘Khazuk-ha! Vala-Azrilungol-ha! Valaya! Valaya! Valaya!’ She swung her hammer for one final swing, bloodying a stormvermin’s muzzle, but she was dying, her strength
fleeing her body, and they brought her down. They pinned her to the floor, and she spat bloody mouthfuls at them. She panted shallowly, but could draw no sustenance from the air. The world and all its cruelties and disappointments receded. A golden light shone behind her as the halls of her ancestors opened their doors. Before she passed through, she flung one last, panting curse at her murderers.
‘Enjoy your victory. I hope you live to regret it.’
The column of greenskins toiled up the slopes of the mountains, into the bitter chill of the unnatural winter. They were led by a toothless, wrinkled old orc clad in nothing but a pair of filthy trousers and a stunty-skin cloak with the face still attached. The head of the stunty sat on the orc’s scalp, moustaches hanging either side of the orc’s face, beard tied under his chin. Consequently the dangling arm and leg skin of the dead dwarf only came halfway down the orc’s back. He had on no shoes, no shirt, no nothing, and it was freezing cold.
‘This way, this way!’ said Zargakk the Mad, for that was who the orc was. ‘No it ain’t!’ he scolded himself. ‘Oh yes it is!’ he replied.
‘Just where have you been these last years, Zargakk?’ said Skarsnik. ‘Funny you just turning up this morning like that. We could’ve used you in da fight.’
‘Yep, yep,’ yipped Zargakk. ‘Could have, could have. But I’s been busy. Yep, very busy. Part of it I was, er, dead. Yeah. I forget, um, the rest. But you got me Idol of Gork, dincha? That was a help! And I’m here now. Whoop!’ His eyes blazed green. Smoke puffed from his ears. Duffskul had been nutty, but Zargakk was totally crazy.
‘Funny, ain’t it,’ said Skarsnik, half to himself, ‘in an ironical kind of way, that we is using the same little hidden ways to gets out that them stunties used to get in.’
‘Suppose,’ said Zargakk. The goblin and orc chiefs marching with them shared perplexed looks.
‘But there’s no stunties there now, boss, none at all. They’s all gone!’ said one, who was either braver or even thicker than the rest.
Skarsnik shut his eyes tight and shuddered.
They had marched out in the morning, after a nervous-looking skaven had delivered the king’s head. Zargakk had been sitting on a toppled stunty statue in front of the Howlpeak, the citadel burning behind him. All across the skies were clouds of blackest black, so black the night goblins didn’t really notice it was day at all. In the east, south and north they were lit red by the fires of the earth. Only to the west was there a hint of blue, and that was pale and scalloped by roils of ash.
Up, up onto the slopes they went, chancing the high passes. The main road out of the Eight Peaks to the west was buried in rubble from the skaven’s detonation of the mountains. Although large numbers of skaven had departed to the north, some remained, and the East Gate was most likely in the hands of the ratmen by now. Skarsnik wasn’t banking on them keeping their word, so up into the cold they went.
From high above the Great Vale, Skarsnik turned to take one last look at his former domain. His entire army stopped with him. Most of it did, anyway, those elements that did not tripping over the ones that had, and no small number of them slipping to their deaths as a result.
‘Garn! Get on! Get on!’ yelled Skarsnik, planting his boot in the breeches of a mountain goblin. ‘Blow the zogging horns, you halfwits. Do it! Get ’em moving! Just cos I is stopping don’t mean everyone should!’
Horns blared, the mountains answering sorrowfully. Drums rolled like distant thunder in the forgotten summers of the world. Skarsnik thought there might never be a summer again.
‘Look at that. Would you look at that,’ said Kruggler, peering out from under his dirty bandages. He’d been wounded across the forehead during the battle, but his skull was particularly dense and he seemed unharmed. ‘Seems such a waste, leaving it all behind.’
‘Yeah,’ said Skarsnik. ‘Don’t it just? All them zogging rats just upped and left an’ all. Ridiculous. It’s empty. Empty after all this time.’
‘The greatest stunty-house in all the world!’
‘Second greatest,’ corrected Skarsnik, holding up a grubby finger. ‘Second greatest. And it was all mine.’
‘Why they going?’ said Kruggler.
‘Search me,’ shrugged Skarsnik. ‘Don’t make no sense.’
‘Why don’t we just go back then?’ said someone.
‘Nah,’ said Skarsnik. ‘We do that, they’ll come back. Besides, new vistas, new worlds to conquer. All that.’
‘Stupid rats,’ grumbled Dork the orc, current boss of Skarsnik’s bigger greenies. Skarsnik had lost so many of his chieftains he wasn’t sure who was who any more, and he couldn’t exactly stop to check his lists.
‘Mark my words, it’ll be full of trolls soon enough,’ said Tolly Grin Cheek the Fourth.
‘Maybe,’ said Skarsnik, raising his eyebrows. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time, except, it won’t happen.’
‘How you know that, boss?’ said Dork.
Skarsnik plucked a human-made watch from his pocket and screwed up his eyes to peer at it. ‘I just do. Should be about now.’
‘What, boss?’ said Tolly Grin Cheek.
‘You don’t think I’d let those ratboys have the place, did you? You don’t think I’m beat do you? Eh? Eh?’
The goblins and orcs looked at each other searchingly. No one wanted to hazard a guess at the right answer to that one.
‘Course not!’ said Skarsnik. ‘Y’see, those ratboys are too zogging clever by half.’
‘Not like us, eh, boss!’ said Dork. The others laughed at their own cleverness.
‘No. No. Definitely not,’ replied Skarsnik flatly. ‘Anyways, that big ratfing promised me two things. Old Belegar here.’ Skarsnik patted his dwarf-hide pouch, wherein languished the severed head of the king. ‘And one of them fancy machines the ratties are always meddling with. I had a mob put it down there, set it off to go, then run away.’
‘What was it, boss? What was it?’ they shouted excitedly.
Skarsnik pulled a pained expression and shuddered. ‘Can’t one of you zogging morons have a guess, just one guess?’
‘A super trap!’ said one.
‘A big axe?’ said Dork hopefully.
‘A troll!’
‘A dragon!’
‘Two dragons!’
‘Lots of dragons!’ someone else shouted, getting carried away with the whole dragon idea.
‘It’s a bomb, you snotlings-for-brains. Our boss here got a big bomb off them, didn’t he?’ Zargakk the Mad said. ‘He did, he did!’ he added, nodding in enthusiastic agreement with himself.
‘That’s the truth, right there,’ said Skarsnik. ‘A bomb. Apparently, they was going to blow up the big dwarf mountain up north where the king of all stunties live. Well, not now they ain’t!’
They all shared a good laugh at that.
‘This big rat god fing showed up, and offered it to me. Tried to talk me into blowing up Zhufbar with it! So I said yes.’
‘But we ain’t at Zhufbar, boss!’
‘Yeah, Zhufbar’s, like, miles away.’
‘It’s at least three.’
‘More like loads.’
‘Will you just let me finish?’ shouted Skarsnik. ‘Zhufbar’s one thousand and eighty-four miles away, if you must know. So I thoughts to meself,’ he continued at normal volume again, ‘I ain’t walking all that way on the say-so of a ratboy! Then I finks, well, if I ain’t going to have the Eight Peaks, and the stunties aren’t going to have the Eight Peaks, then the zogging ratboys certainly aren’t going to have it. I’m going to be the last king of the Eight Peaks. Me,’ he said, low and growly. ‘Not some mange-furred rat git with cheesy breath! I tells you, it’s the biggest bomb what ever there was. Huge! All brass and iron and wyrdstone.’ He had to exaggerate its size. The goblins would never have believed something small as a troll’s head could do so much
damage.
‘Weeds toe what?’
‘He means the glowy green rock what the ratties likes so much,’ said Dork, glowing almost as much as said rock himself with self-satisfaction.
‘Yeah, that’s right. The green glowy. About a ton of it, I’d say, all packed about with black powder.’
‘What’s an “aton”?’
‘Lots! A ton is lots! Very heavy! It’s lots, all right?’ said Skarsnik, his hood vibrating with irritation. ‘So lots it’ll make them little bangs what the ratties brought down Red Sun Mountain with look like squigs popping on a fire. And I made ’em give it to me! Me!’
A tinny chime sounded from out of the watch, strange music to play out the destruction of their home, accompanied by the slap-tramp of goblin feet as the tribes wound their way upwards.
‘And that’s the timer,’ said Skarsnik. He chuckled evilly.
They all stared expectantly at the city. Big ’uns and bosses had to lash the lads to stop them from gawping at what their betters were looking at.
Nothing happened. Nothing at all.
‘Was that it? Has it gone?’ asked a particularly thick underling, who was staring right at Karak Eight Peaks’s desolate ruins.
‘No. No. No! That wasn’t it, you zogging git!’ Skarsnik roared. He spun round and blasted the gobbo with a bright green zap of Waaagh! energy. The goblin exploded all over everybody else.
An uncomfortable silence fell, punctuated by the drip of goblin blood. Karak Eight Peaks remained resolutely, undemolishedly there.
‘Er,’ said Kruggler, tentatively tapping Skarsnik’s shoulder. ‘You know them skaven gizmos, they don’t always work, do they, boss?’
‘Mork’s ’urty bits,’ said Skarsnik. He sniffed. He spat. He shuffled about a bit. The chain that Gobbla used to be attached to clanked sadly. He couldn’t bring himself to take it off. ‘Not with a bang, but with a whimper,’ he muttered to himself.
‘Sorry, boss?’
‘Nothing, Krugs,’ said Skarsnik with forced bonhomie. ‘Nothing. Just something I read in a humie book once.’ Skarsnik shook his head and waved his sorry band onwards. ‘Come on, boys. Nothing left to see here. Nothing left at all.’