by Gav Thorpe
Dwarfs flailed with dozens of rats scrabbling into their armour, biting and scratching, clawing at their faces, tangling in their beards, their claws and fangs lacerating and piercing tough dwarf skin. Though each bite was little more than a pinprick, more and more dwarfs began to fall to the sheer number of the rodents, their bites laced with vile poison.
Barundin took a step forward to join the fray but was stopped by Arbrek’s hand on his shoulder. ‘This is sorcery,’ said the runelord, his face set. ‘I shall deal with it.’
Chanting in khazalid, the runelord held his staff in front of him, its runes growing brighter and brighter. With a final roar, he thrust the tip of the staff towards the immense rat pack spilling up the steps, and white light flared out. As the magical glow spread and touched the rats, they burst into flames, ignited by the mystical energy unleashed from the runes. In a wave spreading out from Arbrek, the white fire blazed through the tide of vermin, driving them back, destroying those touched by its ghostly flames.
The counter-spell dissipated as the Grey Seer extended his own magical powers, but it was too late. The few dozen rats that remained were scurrying back into the darkness of the passageway. With a hiss and a wave of its staff, the Grey Seer urged its warriors on, and the skaven threw themselves once more against the dwarf line.
‘Come on, time to fight!’ Barundin called to his hammerers.
They marched forward as a solid block, driving into the skaven horde. Barundin led the charge, his axe chopping into furred flesh, the blades and mauls of the skaven bouncing harmlessly from his armour and shield. Around him, the hammerers gripped their mattocks tightly, crushing bones and flinging aside their foes with wide sweeping attacks. The king and his veterans pushed on through the melee, driving towards the Grey Seer.
More skaven were still emerging from the passageway in a seemingly unending stream. Barundin found himself facing a rag-tag band swathed in tattered, dirty robes, bearing wickedly spiked flails and serrated daggers. Their fur was balding in places, their skin pocked with buboes and lesions. The ratmen frothed at the mouth, their eyes rheumy yet manic, their ears twitching with frenzied energy, and launched themselves headlong at the dwarfs.
There were those amongst their number whirling large barbed censers around their heads, thick dribbles of warp-gas seeping from their weapons. As the choking cloud enveloped Barundin, he felt the poisonous vapours stinging his eyes and burning his throat. Coughing and blinking, through tear-filled eyes, he saw the rat-things leaping towards him and raised his shield barely in time to ward off a vicious blow from a flail.
Knocked sideways by the force of the jolt, Barundin only had time to steady his footing before another swipe rang against the side of his helm, stunning him for a moment. Ignoring the rushing of blood in his ears and the cloying smoke, the king struck out blindly with his axe, hewing left and right. He felt the blade bite on more than one occasion and gave a roar of satisfaction.
‘Drive the filth back to their dirty holes!’ he urged his fellow dwarfs, and could feel his hammerers pressing forward around him.
His eyes clearing slightly, Barundin continued his advance, surrounded by the swirl and cacophony of battle. He struck the head from a skaven that had launched itself at him with two daggers in its hands, its tongue lolling from its fanged mouth. Goblinbeater proved equally good at killing skaven as again and again, Barundin buried the axe’s head into chests, lopped off limbs and caved in skulls.
As he wrenched the runeaxe from the twitching corpse of yet another dirt-encrusted invader, Barundin felt a pause in the advance around him and caught a murmur of dismay spreading through the warriors close by. Battering aside another foe with the flat of his axe blade, the king caught a glimpse of the passageway ahead.
From the gloom loomed four massive shapes, each at least thrice the height of a dwarf. Their bodies were distended and bulged with unnatural muscle, in places bracketed with strips of rusted iron and pierced with metal bolts. Tails tipped with blades lashed back and forth as the creatures were driven on by the barbed whips of their handlers.
One of the rat ogres, as they had been named in the old journals, charged straight at Barundin. The skin and flesh of its face hung off in places, revealing the bone beneath, and its left hand had been sawn away and replaced with a heavy blade nailed into the stump. In its other hand the creature held a length of chain attached to a manacle around its wrist, scything left and right with the heavy links and scattering dwarfs all around.
Barundin raised his shield and broke into a run, countering the beast’s impetus with his own charge. The chain glanced off the king’s shield in a shower of sparks, and he ducked beneath a vicious swipe of the rat ogre’s blade. With a grunt, Barundin brought Goblinbeater up, the blade biting into the inner thigh of the creature’s leg.
It gave a howl and lashed out, its swipe crashing into Barundin’s shield with the force of a forge hammer, hurling him backwards and forcing him to lose his grip on Goblinbeater. Pulling himself to his feet, Barundin ducked behind his shield once more as the chain whirled around the head of the rat ogre and crashed down, splintering the stone floor.
His short legs driving him forward, Barundin launched himself at the rat ogre and smashed the rim of his shield into its midriff, wincing as the impact jarred his shoulder. With the brief moments this desperate act bought him, Barundin snatched at the handle of Goblinbeater and ripped it free, dark blood spouting from the wound in the mutated monstrosity’s leg.
With a backward slash, Barundin brought the blade of the runeaxe down and through the knee of the rat ogre, slicing through flesh and shattering bone. With a mournful yelp the rat ogre collapsed to the floor, lashing out with its blade-hand and scoring a groove across the chest plate of Barundin’s armour. Using his shield to bat aside the return blow, the king stepped forward and hewed into the creature’s chest with Goblinbeater, the blade slicing through wooden splints and pallid, fur-patched flesh.
Again and again, Barundin pulled the axe free and swung it home, until the rat ogre’s thrashing subsided. Panting with the effort, Barundin glanced up to see the other beasts fighting against the embattled hammerers. More skaven were pouring from the tunnel and the dwarf line was buckling under the weight of the attack, being driven back simply by the numbers of the horde.
The crackle of gunfire and the boom of the occasional cannon shot echoed around the Fourth Deeping Hall. Flares of warp-lightning and the glow of runes highlighted bearded faces shouting battle oaths and ratmen features twisted in snarls. A horn blast joined the tumult and a silvery knot of dwarf warriors pushed through the tumult, their weapons cutting a swathe through the skaven mass.
Tharonin’s Ironbreakers surged forward to the king, their rune-carved gromril armour glowing in the light of lanterns and magical energies. Virtually impervious to the attacks of their foes, the veteran tunnel-fighters tore into the skaven army like a pickaxe through stone, smashing aside their enemies and marching over their hewn corpses.
Heartened by this counter-attack, the dwarfs, Barundin amongst them, surged forward once more, ignoring their casualties, shrugging off their wounds to drive the skaven back into the tunnel. As he fought, Barundin saw that the Grey Seer was no longer in view, and could sense that victory was close. In growing numbers, the skaven began to break from the bloody combat, their nerve shattered. In their dozens and then their hundreds they bolted and fled, hacking at each other in their attempts to escape and reach the passageway.
GRUDGE FOUR
THE BEER GRUDGE
Unlike the neat, geometric construction and straight lines of the dwarf mines, the skaven tunnels were little more than animal holes dug through dirt and laboriously clawed through hard rock. Linking together natural caves, underground rivers and dark fissures, they extended down into the depths of the mountain in every direction.
The subterranean warren had no planning, no sense or reason behind its layout. Some tunnels would simply end, others double-backed frequently a
s they sought easier routes through the rock of the World’s Edge Mountains. Some were broad and straight, others so small that even a dwarf was forced down to his hands and knees to navigate them.
The walls were slicked with the passing of the creatures, their oily, furry bodies wearing the rock smooth in places over many years. The stench of their musk was like a cloud that constantly hung over the hunting parties of Zhufbar as they tried to track down the skaven and map their lair. The task was all but impossible, made more difficult by the fear of ambush and the sporadic fighting that still broke out.
Most of the expeditions were led by detachments of Ironbreakers, whose skill and armour were invaluable in such close confines. As they descended into the dank maze of burrows, they took with them signalling lanterns, and left small sentry groups at junctions and corners. By keeping track of the beacon lights in this way, the various parties could communicate with each other, albeit over relatively short distances. The tunnels themselves made navigating by noise all but impossible, with odd echoes and breaks in the walls through unseen crevasses making any sound seem closer or further away than it was, or coming from a different direction.
The lantern-lines at least allowed the dwarfs to signal for help, to send warnings and sometimes simply to find their way back to the outer workings of the north Zhufbar mines.
Barundin was accompanying one of the delving bands, as they had come to be called, searching through the rat-infested caverns north-east of Zhufbar, several miles from the hold. There had been quite a lot of fighting in the area over the previous days, and the opinion of several of the team leaders was that they had broken a considerable concentration of the skaven in the region.
It was cold, depressing work: clambering over piles of scree, scraping through narrow bolt-holes, kicking the vermin from underfoot. These were the evil places of the mountainscape, crawling with beetles and maggots, writhing with rat swarms, and made all the more awful by the stench of the skaven and pockets of choking gas.
As far as Barundin could judge this far underground, it was the middle of the afternoon. They had laboured through the tunnels since an early breakfast that morning, and his back was almost bent from frequent stooping and crawling. They tried to move as quietly as possible so as not to alert any ratmen that might be nearby, but it was a vain effort. Dwarf mail chinked against every stone, their hobnailed boots and steel-shod toecaps clumping on rock and crunching through dirt and gravel.
‘We’re getting close to something,’ whispered Grundin Stoutlegs, the leader of the group.
Grundin pointed to the ground and Barundin saw bones in the dirt and spoil of digging – bones picked clean of flesh. There were scraps of cloth and tufts of fur, as well as skaven droppings littering the floor. Grundin waved the group to a stop and they settled. Silence descended.
A strange mewling sound could be heard from ahead, distorted by the winding, uneven walls of the tunnel. There were other noises: scratching, chittering and a wet sucking sound. Now that they were still, Barundin could feel the ground throbbing gently through the thick soles of his boots, and he pulled off a gauntlet and touched his hand to the slimy wall, ignoring the wetness on his finger tips. He could definitely feel a pulsing vibration, and as they adjusted, his ears picked up a humming noise from ahead. Wiping the filth from his hand as best he could, he pulled his gauntlet back on with a grimace.
Grundin slipped his shield from his back and pulled his axe from his belt, and the other Ironbreakers followed his example and readied themselves. Barundin was carrying a single-handed hammer, stocky and heavy, ideal for tunnel-work, and he pulled his shield onto his left arm and nodded his readiness to Grundin.
They set off even more cautiously than before. Barundin could feel the bones and filth slipping and shifting underfoot, and he cursed silently to himself every time there was a scrape or clatter. Ahead, in a growing glow from some distant light, he could see the tunnel branching off through several low openings.
Reaching the junction, it was clear that the tunnels all led by different paths to some larger chamber ahead; the flickering light that could be seen in each of them was the same quality. Grundin split the group into three smaller bands, each about a dozen strong, sending one to the left, one to the right, and taking the centre group himself. Barundin found himself directed to the right by a nod from Grundin. The king took the order without a word. In the halls of Zhufbar he was beyond command, but in these grim environs he would not dare to question the grizzled tunnel fighter.
One of the Ironbreakers, recognisable as Lokrin Rammelsson only by the dragon-head crest moulded from the brow of his full face helm, gave Barundin a thumbs up and waved the king into the tunnel, following behind with several more of the Ironbreakers. Rats shrieked and fled down the passageway as the dwarfs advanced, following the tunnel as first it wound to the right and then banked back of itself, dropping down to the left. It widened rapidly and Barundin saw the group ahead gathering at the edge of whatever lay beyond. He pushed his way between two of them to see what had halted their advance, and then stopped.
They stood on on the edge of a wide, oval-shaped cave, which sloped down away from them and arched high overhead. It was at least fifty feet high, the walls dotted with crude torches, bathing the scene in a fiery red glow. Other openings all around the chamber led off in every direction, some of them almost impossibly high up the walls, which could have only been reached by the most nimble of creatures were it not for the rickety gantries and scaffolds that ran haphazardly around the chamber, connected by bridges, ladders and swaying walkways. Here and there Barundin recognised scavenged pieces of dwarf-hewn timber or metalwork, bastardised into new purpose by the skaven.
The floor of the chamber was a writhing mass of life, filled with small bodies in constant motion, some pink and bald, others with patches of fur growing on them. Like a living carpet, the skavenspawn spread from one end of the cavern to the other, crawling over each other, fighting and gnawing, biting and clawing in heaving piles. Mewing and crying, they blindly slithered and scuttled to and fro, littering the floor with droppings and the corpses of the weakest runts.
Amongst them hurried naked slaves, their fur marked with burns from branding irons and the scores of whips. They pushed their way through the morass of wriggling flesh, picking out the largest offspring and taking them away. Several dozen guards dressed in crude armour stood watch with rusted blades, while pack masters cracked their whips on slaves and skavenspawn alike, chittering orders in their harsh language.
At the centre of the nightmarish heap were three pale, bloated shapes, many times larger than any of the other skaven. They lay on their sides, their tiny heads barely visible amongst the fleshy mass of their offspring and the arcane machineries they were connected to. The skavenspawn were all the more vicious here, biting and tearing in a frenzy to get at the food, the older ones feeding upon the dead runt corpses instead of the greenish-grey spew coursing from the distended, pulsating udders of the skaven females.
Barundin felt the contents of his stomach lurch and swallowed heavily to avoid vomiting. The stench was unbelievable: a mix of acrid urine, rotting flesh and sour milk. One of the Ironbreakers lifted his gold-chased mask, revealing the scarred face of Fengrim Dourscowl, one of Barundin’s distant nephews.
‘We’ve not found one of these for quite a while,’ Fengrim said to Barundin.
‘There must be hundreds of them,’ said Barundin after a moment, still staring in disbelief. He had heard stories of these brood chambers, but nothing could have prepared him for this awful vision of sprawling, noxious life.
‘Thousands,’ spat Fengrim. ‘We have to kill them all and seal the chamber.’
A sound from behind caused them to turn quickly, weapons raised, but it was another ironbreaker.
‘Grundin has sent a signal to bring up the miners and engineers,’ the Ironbreaker told them, his voice metallic from inside his helm. ‘We have to secure the chamber for their arrival.’
‘Come on then, let’s be about it!’ said Barundin, hefting his hammer and marching out of the tunnel mouth.
His footing was unsure as he waded through the carpet of skaven offspring, his heavy boots snapping bones and squashing flesh. He could not feel anything through the heavy armour he was wearing, but as he looked down at his feet he saw the skavenspawn squirming and clawing, scraping ineffectually at the gromril plates or pulling themselves sluggishly away. With a snarl, he brought his foot down onto the back of one particularly loathsome specimen, its beady eyes flecked with bloodspots, snapping its spine.
Advanced upon from three directions, and realising they were outnumbered, the guards quickly fled without a fight, stampeding over the bodies of their own children in an effort to escape the advancing, vengeful dwarfs.
Barundin kicked and battered his way through the filth, sometimes thigh-deep in writhing skavenspawn, caving in heads with the edge of his shield, smashing small bodies against the rock with his hammer. Eventually he stood a short way from one of the broodmothers. Its eyes were almost lifeless with no flicker of intelligence or recognition and its artificially fattened bulk several times his height. Its entire body was riddled with blue veins and coarse with spots and blisters. The feeding spawn did not even react to his presence, so intent was it on its unwholesome nourishment.