Tales of the Old World

by Marc Gascoigne

  “The grobi set upon the royal household,” continued Grimli. “Hard fought was the battle, and bodyguard and miners clashed with a countless horde of greenskins. But there were too many of them, and their wicked knives caught Frammi and Gorgnir and slew them. One of the bodyguards, left for dead by the grobi, survived to recount the tale to the High King and much was the woe of all the dwarf realm. Yet greater still was the hardship for as the survivor told the High King with his dying breath, Okrinok Skrundigor, upon seeing the princess and prince to be slain, had fled the fight and his body was never found. Righteous and furious was the High King’s anger and we have been cursed since.”

  “Told as it has been to each generation of Skrundigor since that day,” Dammaz nodded thoughtfully. “And was the High King just in his anger?”

  “I have thought of it quite a lot, and I reckon he was,” admitted Grimli, poking at the fire as it began to die down. “Many a king would have had us cast out or even slain for such oathbreaking and so I think he was merciful.”

  “We will speak of this again soon,” Dammaz said as he stood up. “I go to Kargun Skalfson now, to seek permission to enter Karak Azgal come tomorrow.”

  With that the Slayer was gone into the gloom once more, leaving Grimli to his dour thoughts.

  The stench of the troll sickened Grimli’s stomach as it lurched through the doorway towards him. It gave a guttural bellow as it broke into a loping run. Grimli was rooted to the spot. In his mind’s eye he could see himself casually stepping to one side, blocking its claw with his shield as Dammaz had taught him; in reality his muscles were bunched and tense and his arm shook. Then the Slayer was there, between him and the approaching monster. In the darkness, Grimli could clearly see the blazing axe head as it swung towards the troll, cleaving through its midriff, spraying foul blood across the flagged floor as the blade continued on its course and shattered its backbone before swinging clear. Grimli stood in dumbfounded amazement. One blow had sheared the troll cleanly in two. Dammaz stood over the rank corpse and beheaded it with another strike before spitting on the body.

  “Can never be too sure with trolls. Always cut the head off, lad,” Dammaz told him matter-of-factly as he strolled back to stand in front of Grimli.

  “I’m sorry,” Grimli lowered his head in shame. “I wanted to fight it, but I couldn’t.”

  “Calm yourself, lad,” Dammaz laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Next time you’ll try harder, won’t you?”

  “Yes, I will,” Grimli replied, meeting the Slayer’s gaze.

  For two days and two nights they had been in Karak Azgal. The night before, Grimli had slain his first troll, crushing its head with his hammer after breaking one of its legs. He had already lost count of the number of goblins whose last vision had been his hammer swinging towards them. Over twenty at least, possibly nearer thirty, he realised. Of course, Dammaz had slain twice, even thrice that number, but Grimli felt comfortable that he was holding his own.

  Dammaz had been right, it did get easier. Trolls still scared Grimli, but he had worked out how to turn that fear into anger, imbuing his limbs with extra strength and honing his reflexes. And most of all, it had taught Grimli that it felt good to kill grobi. It was in his blood, by race and by clan, and he now relished each fight, every battle a chance to exact a small measure of revenge on the foul creatures whose kind had ruined his clan so many centuries before.

  They were just breaking camp in what used to be the forges, so Dammaz informed him. Everything had been stripped bare by the evacuating dwarfs and centuries of bestial looters and other treasure hunters. But the firepits could still clearly be seen, twenty of them in all, spread evenly across the large hall. Grungni, God of Smithing, was represented by a great anvil carved into the floor, his stern but kindly face embossed at its centre. Dammaz told him that the lines of the anvil used to run with molten metal so that its light illuminated the whole chamber with fiery beauty.

  Grimli would have liked to have seen that, like so many other things from the days when the dwarf realms stretched unbroken from one end of the World’s Edge Mountains to the other. Such a great past, so many treasures and wonders, now all lost, perhaps never to be regained and certainly never to be surpassed. Centuries of treachery, volcanoes, earthquakes and the attacks of grobi and skaven had almost brought the dwarfs to their knees. They had survived though; the dwarfs were at their fiercest when hardest pressed. The southern holds may have fallen, but the northern holds still stood strong. In his heart, Grimli knew that the day would come when once more the mountains would resound along their length to the clatter of dwarf boots marching to war and the pound of hammers on dwarfish anvils. Already Karak Eight Peaks was being reclaimed, and others would follow.

  “Dreaming of the golden age, lad?” Dammaz asked, and Grimli realised he had been stood staring at the carving of Grungni for several minutes.

  “And the glory days to come,” replied Grimli which brought forth a rare smile from the Slayer.

  “Aye, that’s the spirit, Grimli, that’s the spirit,” Dammaz agreed. “When we’re done here, you’ll be a new dwarf, I reckon.”

  “I’m already…” started Grimli but Dammaz silenced him with a finger raised to his lips. The Slayer tapped his nose and Grimli sniffed deeply. At first he could smell nothing, but as he concentrated, his nostrils detected a whiff of something unclean, something rotten and oily.

  “That’s the stink of skaven,” whispered Dammaz, his eyes peering into the darkness. Grimli closed his eyes and focused his thoughts on his senses of smell and hearing. There was breeze coming from behind him, where the odour of rats was strongest, and he thought he could hear the odd scratch, as of clawed feet on bare stone, to his right. Opening his eyes he looked in that direction, noting that Dammaz was looking the same way. The Slayer glanced at him and gave a single nod of agreement, and Grimli stepped up beside him, slipping his hammer from his belt and unslinging his shield from his back.

  Without warning, the skaven attacked. Humanoid rats, no taller than Grimli, scuttled and ran out of the gloom, their red eyes intent on the two dwarfs. Dammaz did not wait a moment longer, launching himself at the ratmen with a wordless bellow. The first went down with its head lopped from its shoulders; the second was carved from groin to chest by the return blow. One of the skaven managed to dodge aside from Dammaz’s attack and ran hissing at Grimli. He felt no fear now; had he not slain a troll single-handedly? He suddenly realised the peril of overconfidence as the skaven lashed out with a crudely sharpened blade, the speed of the attack taking him by surprise so that he had to step back to block the blow with his shield. The skaven were not as strong as trolls, but they were a lot faster.

  Grimli batted away the second attack, his shield ringing dully with the clang of metal on metal, and swung his hammer upwards to connect with the skaven’s head, but the creature jumped back before the blow landed. Its breath was foetid and its matted fur was balding around open sores in places. Grimli knew that if he was cut, the infection that surrounded the pestilential scavengers might kill him even if the wound did not. He desperately parried another blow, realising that other skaven were circling quickly behind him. He took another step back and then launched himself forward as his foe advanced after him, smashing the ratman to the ground with his shield. He stomped on its chest with his heavy boot, pinning it to the ground as he brought his hammer smashing into its face. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Dammaz was still fighting, as he’d expected, a growing pile of furry bodies at his feet.

  Two skaven then attacked Grimli at once, one thrusting at him with a poorly constructed spear, the other slashing with a wide-bladed knife. He let his shield drop slightly and the skaven with the spear lunged at the opportunity. Prepared for the attack, Grimli deflected the spearhead to his right, stepped forward and smashed his hammer into the skaven’s chest, audibly splintering ribs and crushing its internal organs. He spun on the other skaven but not fast enough, its knife thankfully scraping witho
ut harm along the links of his chainmail. He slammed the edge of the shield up into the skaven’s long jaw, dazing it, and then smashed its legs from underneath it with a wide swing of his hammer. The creature gave a keening, agonised cry as it lay there on the ground and he stoved its head in with a casual backswing.

  The air was filled with a musky scent, which stuck in Grimli’s nostrils, distracting him, and it was a moment before he realised that the rest of the skaven had fled. Joining Dammaz he counted thirteen skaven corpses on the ground around the Slayer, many of them dismembered or beheaded.

  “Skaven are all cowards,” Dammaz told him. He pointed at a darker-furred corpse, both its legs missing. “Once I killed their leader they had no stomach for the fight.”

  “Kill the leader, I’ll remember that,” Grimli said as he swung his shield back over his shoulder.

  For the rest of the day Grimli felt the presence of the skaven shadowing him and the Slayer, but no further attack came. They passed out of the forges and strong rooms down into the mines. The wondrously carved hallways and corridors led them into lower and more basically hewn tunnels, the ceiling supported now by pit props and not pillars engraved with ancient runes. The stench of skaven became stronger for a while, their spoor was littered across the floor or of the mineshafts, but after another hour’s travel it faded quickly.

  “This is grobi territory, lad. The skaven don’t come down these ways,” Dammaz informed Grimli when he commented on this phenomenon.

  As they continued their journey Grimli noticed even rougher, smaller tunnels branching off the workings of the dwarfs, and guessed them to be goblin tunnels, dug out after the hold fell. There was a shoddiness about the chips and cuts of the goblin holes that set them apart from the unadorned but neatly hewn walls of dwarf workmanship, even to Grimli’s untrained eye. As he absorbed this knowledge, Dammaz led him down a side-tunnel into what was obviously once a chamber of some kind. It was wide, though not high, and seemed similar to the dorm-chambers of Karaz-a-Karak.

  “This is where it happened,” Grimli said. It was a statement, not a question. He realised this was where Dammaz had been leading him.

  “Aye, that it is, lad,” the Slayer confirmed with a nod that shook his bright crest from side to side. “This is where Okrinok Skrundigor was ambushed. Here it was that Frammi and Gorgnir were slain by the grobi. How did you know?”

  “I’m not sure as I know,” Grimli replied with a frown. “I can feel what happened here, in my blood, I reckon. It’s like it’s written in the stone somehow.”

  “Aye, the mountain remembers, you can be sure of that,” Dammaz agreed solemnly. “You can rest here tonight. Tomorrow will be a hard day.”

  “What happens tomorrow?” asked Grimli, unburdening himself of his shield and pack.

  “Nothing comes to those who hurry, lad, you should know that,” Dammaz warned him with a stern but almost fatherly wag of his finger.

  That night, Grimli’s dreams were troubled, and he tossed and turned beneath his blanket. In his mind he was there, at the betrayal so many centuries before. He could see Frammi and Gorgnir clearly, inspecting the bunks of the wide dormitory, protected by ten bodyguards. Gorgnir was wide of girth, even for a dwarf, and his beard was as black as coal and shone with a deep lustre. His dark eyes were intelligent and keen, but he was quick to laugh at some jest made by Frammi. The princess, to Grimli’s sleeping eye at least, was beautiful; her blonde hair tied up in two tresses that flowed down her back to her knees. Her pallor was ruddy and healthy, her hips wide. Clad in a russet gown, a small circlet of gold holding her hair back, she was unmistakably the daughter of a High King.

  In his dream-state, Grimli sighed. The lineage of those two would have been fine and strong, he thought glumly, had they but been given the chance to wed. At the thought, the deadly attack happened.

  It seemed as if the goblins sprang from nowhere, rushing through the door with wicked cackles and grinning, yellowed teeth. Their pale green skin was tinged yellow in the lamplight, their robes and hoods crudely woven from dark material that seemed to absorb the light. The bodyguards reacted instantly, drawing their hammers and shields, forming a circle around the royal couple. The goblins crashed against the shieldwall like a wave against a cliff, and momentarily they were smashed back by the swings of the bodyguard’s hammers, like the tide receding. But the press of goblins was too much and those at the front were forced forward into the determined dwarfs, crushed and battered mercilessly as they fought to get at the prince and princess. Soon they were climbing over their own dead, howling with glee as one then another and another of the bodyguard fell beneath the endless onslaught. The shield wall broke for a moment, but that was all that was needed. The goblins rushed the gap, pushing the breach wider with their weight of numbers.

  This was it, the dark moment of the Skrundigor clan. It was Gorgnir who fell first, bellowing a curse on the grobi even as his axe lodged in one of their skulls and he was swarmed over by the small greenskins. Frammi wrenched the axe free and gutted three of the goblins before she too was overwhelmed; one of her tresses flew through the air as a sword blade slashed across her neck.

  Almost as one the three remaining bodyguards howled with grief and rage, hurling themselves at the goblins with renewed ferocity. One in particular, a massive ruby inset into his hammer’s head, smashed a bloody path into the grobi, every blow sweeping one of the tunnel-dwellers off its scampering feet. His helm was chased with swirling designs in bronze and gold and he had the faceplate drawn down, showing a fierce snarling visage of Grimnir in battle. The knives and short swords of the goblins rang harmlessly off his mail and plate armour with a relentless dull chiming, but they could not stop him and he burst clear through the door.

  The other two bodyguards fell swiftly, and the goblins descended upon the dead like a pack of wild dogs, stripping them of every item of armour, weapon, jewellery and clothing. They bickered and fought with one another over the spoils, but soon the pillaging was complete and the goblins deserted the room in search of fresh prey. For what seemed an eternity, the looted bodies lay where they had been left, but eventually a low groan resounded across the room and one of the bodies sat up, blood streaming from a dozen wounds across his body. Groggily he stood up, leaning on one of the bunks, and shook his head, causing fresh blood to ooze from a gash across his forehead. He staggered for a moment and then seemed to steady.

  “Skrundigorrrr!” his voice reverberated from the walls and floor in a low growl.

  The dream was still vivid when Grimli was woken by a chill draught, and he saw that the fire was all but dead embers. He added more sticks from the bundle strapped to his travelling pack and stoked the ashes until the fire caught once again. As it grew it size, its light fell upon the face of Dammaz who was sitting against the far wall, wide awake, his eyes staring intently at Grimli.

  “Did you see it, lad?” he asked softly, his low whisper barely carrying across the room.

  “I did,” Grimli replied, his voice as muted, his heart in his throat from what he had witnessed.

  “So, lad, speak your mind, you look troubled,” Dammaz insisted.

  “I saw them slain, and I saw Okrinok fight his way free instead of defending their bodies,” Grimli told the Slayer, turning his gaze from Dammaz to the heart of the fire. The deep red reminded Grimli of the ruby set upon Okrinok’s hammer.

  “Aye, that was a terrible mistake, you can be sure of that,” Dammaz grimaced as he spoke. The two fell into a sullen silence.

  “There is no honour to be found here,” Grimli declared suddenly. “The curse cannot be lifted from these enduring stones, not while mighty Karaz-a-Karak endures. I shall return there, swear the Slayer oath and come back to Karak Azgal to meet my death fighting in the caverns that witnessed my ancestor’s treachery.”

  “Is that so?” Dammaz asked quietly, his expression a mixture of surprise and admiration.

  “It is so,” Grimli assured the Slayer.

  “I told yo
u not to be hasty, beardling,” scowled Dammaz. “Stay with me one more day before you leave this place. You promised you would come with me, and I haven’t shown you everything you need to see yet.”

  “One more day then, as I promised,” Grimli agreed, picking up his pack.

  They entered the goblin tunnels not far from the chamber where Grimli had slept, following the sloping corridor deeper and deeper beneath the World’s Edge Mountains. They had perhaps travelled for half a day when they ran into their first goblins. There were no more than a handful, and the fight was bloody and quick, two of the grobi falling to Grimli’s hammer, the other three carved apart by the baleful blade of Dammaz’s axe.

  “The goblins don’t live down here much. They prefer to live in the better-crafted halls of Karak Azgal itself,” Dammaz told Grimli when he mentioned the lack of greenskins. “But there are still plenty enough to kill,” the Slayer added with a fierce grin.

  True enough, they had not travelled more than another half mile before they ran into a small crowd of greenskins moving up the tunnel in the opposite direction. The goblins shrieked their shrill war cries and charged, only to be met head-on by the vengeful dwarfs. In the confines of the goblin-mined cavern, the grobi’s weight of numbers counted for little, and one-on-one they were no match for even Grimli. As he smashed apart the skull of the tenth goblin, the others turned and ran, disappearing into the darkness with the patter of bare feet. Grimli was all for going after them, but Dammaz laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Our way lies down a different path, but there will be more to fight soon enough,” he told Grimli. “They will head up into Karak Azgal and fetch more of their kind, and perhaps lie in wait for us somewhere in one of the wider spaces where they can overwhelm us.”