by David Guymer
With a shiver, Kolya rolled the troll’s severed head under his boot until it was face down in the snow. Even before the Battle of the Tobol Crossing there had been rumours amongst the Kurgan: talk of trolls that waged war like men, of an army of beasts that had made its stronghold in Praag. The barracks of the city’s kossars now lowed with beastmen. Trolls and giants defended its great walls. Hydra and gorgons guarded its gates. The legion wings of harpies shrouded its towers and blacked the warp storms that raged across its skies.
Or so rumour claimed.
Throwing the slowly regenerating troll one final look, Kolya crunched after his sullen companion. As hard as he tried to think of other things, of how he would witness the dwarf’s death and then follow him on Kasztanka’s back to the next world, he kept thinking of one of Marzena’s many sayings.
A man afraid of spiders should stay out of the forest.
And Kolya was surprised to discover that, for all his resignation to his fate, the thought of facing the monstrous legions of the Troll King had left him very afraid indeed.
Crisped and blackened bodies littered the forest floor, lying where the explosion from the old dwarf shaft had thrown them. They hung in the branches of trees, spines broken over exposed roots, furry bodies steaming slightly under a light covering of snow. A fox picked through the cooked meat as if disbelieving its nose. With a ruffle of wings and a drizzle of snow from the canopy, another coal black carrion crow jostled for space on an already crowded branch. Their harsh calls sounded over the broken rune-gate.
Then one of the bodies coughed.
For an instant the forest fell silent, then an explosion of wings and panicked caws brought more shaken snow down to the forest floor and onto Snorri Nosebiter’s head. Coughing up burned fur and blackpowder smoke, Snorri dug his way out of the snow pile and gasped for air. The snow burned his blackened flesh like vinegar. His beard was singed down to the roots, filling his squashed nose with the reek of roasted hair.
Every part of his body stung, all except for one little patch between his shoulders. His chest creaked and cracked as he reached around to try and feel it. He winced, but couldn’t lay a finger on it. It was in that annoying spot that was always just out of reach of both hands.
The shape of it felt like a hand print.
The last thing he remembered was Durin pushing him away from the blast and into the mass of beastmen. Why had the Daemonslayer done that? That could have been a great doom. It would have been good enough for Snorri anyway.
Snorri shook his head to silence the organ guns going off inside. When that failed, he smacked his good ear until it stopped, then shovelled up a fistful of snow and stuffed it into his mouth.
‘Hhhnnngg.’
Oath of Grimnir, Snorri wanted a beer!
Using a fresh clump of snow, Snorri wiped the char from around his eyes. It was only his back that had been truly burned. His face and chest were just coated with ash and whatever it was that beastmen gave off when they caught fire. Black water running from his face like a clown’s smudged make-up, Snorri looked over the forest where he now found himself.
It looked strangely familiar.
Woods. Giant spiders in the trees.
Snorri shut out the emerging memory and turned his head back to take in the rune gate, an angular dolmen of limestone blocks carved with runes. It angled down into the earth. Snorri was no expert, but Underway gates were generally better hidden than that. The entrance still stood, but the tunnel more than a few feet in had collapsed, burying Durin Drakkvarr, Krakki Ironhame, and a few hundred lucky beastmen. Smoke hazed lazily through gaps in the rubble, like pipe-smoke through a longbeard’s grin. Snorri sighed.
They had been good deaths. But Snorri was cursed to need a great one.
He looked to the bodies of the beastmen and lowered his axe and hammer.
The bodies of spiders lay amongst the boles of the trees, upturned with their legs curled over their bellies. Snorri swayed on his feet and chuckled. He felt drunker than if he had downed two whole buckets of vodka. The trees were jigging back and forth. Snorri threw his hammer at one, but somehow he wound up on his backside. The hammer went somewhere behind him. He looked at his hammer hand and giggled. It was covered in great red bite marks. Strange. He didn’t feel a thing.
Dizzily, he became aware of a hunchbacked old human lady coming towards him. Her hair was scruffy white like a ball of spiders’ webs. She wore long, layered skirts of black silk decorated with coloured shards of chitin and faceted beads that looked like the eyes of giant spiders.
‘You may reward Snorri with beer,’ Snorri tried to say, lips smacking open and shut while a trickle of drool ran down his chin.
The old lady crouched beside him in a rustle of skirts, like a winged insect coming in to land, and put her hand around Snorri’s throat. Snorri gave a protesting dribble. This was human gratitude right enough! Snorri grunted furiously as the lady felt out his pulse. She stared at Snorri with a strange intensity as she counted under her breath. Her expression, far too furious for someone whose life Snorri had just saved from all of these spiders that infested her home, grew a sneer. She removed her hand from his neck and took his hand instead. Snorri tried to pull it away from her, but the message got drunk and passed out somewhere on the way.
The lady turned his big, calloused hand palm-up and ran claw-like nails along the lines.
Snorri giggled stupidly. That tickled.
‘Snorri Nosebiter,’ she murmured. Her voice was sing-song, trancelike, and Snorri found himself drifting into a stupor. ‘You should have died today, Snorri, but I will not allow it. You slaughtered my guardians, you intruded on my seclusion. You imperil my very soul should my master find what you have done.’ She hissed, a strange kind of smile on her lips as a nail dug into a branching line on his palm and drew a bead of blood. An arc of something magical flared from the droplet and crackled over her knuckles. ‘The doom you seek shall elude you until the day that I decree. It will not come for many years, long enough for you to suffer. And when you are whole again, when those you most love surround you again, then you shall have a death that brings you nothing but pain. This is your curse,’ she sneered. ‘A gift worthy of a Slayer.’
The crone cackled as the aura of energy scalded Snorri’s hand, redrawing the palm lines in blood. Snorri moaned softly.
‘You will have the mightiest doom.’
Snorri smoothed a dollop of snow into his forehead. He moaned softly at the sudden, wonderful rush of cold. Still dizzy, he grabbed his leather bag where it lay rune-side up in the snow. Then he swayed to his feet and made his first tottering steps into the Shirokij Forest.
He wasn’t sure how he remembered the place’s name, but it was all starting to come back. Snorri had long suspected that the old lady in the forest had cursed him and now he knew why.
The old lady had cursed him!
She had done far more than prophesy a great destiny for him; she had twisted his fate with her own hands to make it so. Snorri felt poisoned. This was worse than Skalf tricking him into giving up drinking or Durin taking his nails.
Could anyone pull a meaner trick on a Slayer than this?
Snorri’s mace-leg sank into the snow as he limped miserably on into the trees. The old lady had made it so he couldn’t die until the time and place she’d set.
He had to find that place, that time, and then he could find his doom.
When you are whole again, when those you most love surround you again.
Snorri shrugged, paying no thought to the direction in which he trudged. What did it matter anyway? He had a destiny.
Snorri Nosebiter would find the mightiest doom.
Nine
The Crossroads of the World
A chimera circled the haunted citadel of Praag.
Its leonine fur writhed like penitent souls in the crosswinds that cut through t
he mountain passes to north and east. The beast swooped low over the Square of Heroes, startling the cloud of harpies that picked at the fresh bones hung from the statue of Tzar Alexis in the middle of the square. The hero of the Great War and contemporary of Magnus the Pious had been twisted by the touch of Chaos. Each day, the horns that now protruded from his forehead grew a little longer and whenever the skies blackened and the air crackled with a building warp storm, the graven statue wept tears of blood. It did so now.
With a sonorous wingbeat, the chimera regained altitude, scattering the screeching harpies as it sailed over the old town wall.
Max Schreiber pressed his face to the barred window of his cell.
The backwash of its passing ruffled his tangled beard and he moaned for the brief bliss of the sensation of wind on his face. The rolling bellow of a lion echoed across the snow-troubled rooftops of the Starograd. The chimera dipped its right wing, dropping into a turn that carried it over the Mountain Gate and the besieging hordes that froze out there on the oblast. Max angled himself to watch. There were thin screams, a torrent of flame, and then one more contemptuous wingbeat as the updraft of the chimera’s own fiery breath lifted it into a glide once again.
Max watched from his high tower as northmen and beasts charged through the flames like ants whose nest had been set ablaze. Drums beat furiously. Horns called by the thousand. Ladders rose out of the smoke and steam and clattered against the walls. On the ramparts, trolls smashed the siege ladders to kindling, beating down the assaulting forces or eating them. It was slaughter unparalleled and this battle had been raging for days. Around one such monster there glowered a faint red nimbus of power. Max recognised the ritual magic by which his captor’s bray-shamans imposed their king’s will on his minions. Strong as he was however, the Troll King was but one. Amongst the trolls, scrawny, half-beast ungor overseers stabbed down with spears and prodded the trolls to life whenever one became confused or threatened to fall into a stupor.
More beastmen were running through streets that had already been reduced to rubble by the passage of monsters. By the golden onion dome of a temple of Dazh, a red-bearded giant tore a gargoyle from the roof and hurled it over the wall. Max saw it roll through a crush of Chaos warriors carrying a battering ram. Harpies cackled overhead, picking off the pieces.
Max knew that the same scenes were being played out each day and night at the East Gate and the Gate of Gargoyles. He could hear it even when he tried to sleep.
Praag was the crossroads of the world.
To the north, Black Blood Pass and the legions of Archaon.
To the east, High Pass: the Kurgan and the Chaos Dwarfs
To the south, the Auric Bastion, and every warrior that had returned in frustration only to find the city held against them by one of their own.
Max watched magic flash erratically from the walls. Such eruptions were, Max noted, always directed outwards. It had been a long time since a wizard had dared stand openly before the walls of Praag.
At last the cold metal bars became too much to bear and Max pulled back. Just far enough that they were no longer touching his face: he still wanted the feel of the cold, of the snow that drifted in through the bars with the light. It numbed the bruises and dulled even the hairline fracture in his jaw. His bones ached. He felt lightheaded with hunger. Broken sleep made his vision bleary. It was a miracle of endurance that he still stood.
‘You have the power to heal yourself,’ came a growl from behind, less a voice than an expulsion of words, like gas from a fissure. ‘Why do you not?’
Max shut his eyes, a conditioned response to the certain onset of pain, and lowered his forehead to the bars. The cold burned. He no longer cared. ‘You would only break them again.’
That brought laughter, the low groan of earth before a quake. ‘There are two hundred and six bones in the human body, Max. How many do you think I have already broken?’
‘I don’t know,’ Max whispered.
‘Tell me how many and perhaps I will not break another today.’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I-I–’ Max’s fingers tightened over the cold stone of the window slit. A dull pain throbbed in his hand. His fractured elbow ground mercilessly. And his hip… ‘Nine. You have broken nine.’
A chuckle, the escape of pressure before an eruption, a volcanic pledge.
‘I have another riddle for you, Max.’ Something heavy shifted behind him. The bars of his cell groaned and bent under the weight being applied to them. When Max did not reply, the voice went on. ‘I am your best friend and your worst enemy, I am privy to your darkest secrets and yet still they surprise me, I know every man you know, but not one of them knows me.’ A pause, a weighted challenge. ‘Who am I?’
‘You are me,’ said Max softly and without thinking.
Silence for a moment but for the tinny wail of distant armies, and then the laugh returned, dissonant and deliberate.
‘You are the prize pigeon in my coop, Max. It will grieve me to scatter your bones for the harpies.’
There it was, the threat. His bowels tightened. Even after all he had suffered, all he had witnessed from his eyrie here, Max did not welcome an end to it. And he was close, so very close. ‘I have been trying,’ said Max, breath steaming through the open bars. ‘What you want will take time. There will be trial and error involved. Some of your followers will die.’
‘Look out of the window,’ came the voice. ‘Witness the ignorant legions of the Four. See how they crawl out of the north like worms to the rain. Do you know how I captured Aekold Helbrass?’
‘No, I was…’ Max hesitated. He wanted to say, was not here, but couldn’t. It was easier to forget his old life than to hope.
‘I crushed him because he was stupid. He had neither the will nor the wit to change his stars. Now look again.’ Max gazed pliantly from the window as a griffon plunged down into the Square of Heroes and crushed one of the injured harpies under its talons. It was huge, with the mangy hindquarters of a snow cat and the fierce beak and mottled plumage of a bald eagle. It shrieked at the scattered harpies, then tore into the creature pinned beneath it. Max looked away. They were creatures of Chaos, but they felt pain like any other. ‘I do not care for the loss of one or of a hundred. I do not need an army. I have the mightiest ever assembled. I need a general. I need an equal.’
‘What was done to you was the work of the gods,’ said Max. ‘It is a… fascinating problem, but I am not a Teclis or a Nagash.’
‘This is an age of marvels, Max, and you are the most powerful mage I have crossed who has not had that power gifted to him. If Nagash can rip the Wind of Shyish from the aethyr and confront the ancestor goddess of the dwarfs and triumph, then you can do this thing for me. And if not–’
The voice paused, time enough for Max’s gaze to take in the citadel’s other towers, the other windows. How many wizards had the king of Praag brought here? Hundreds. Each one was a shortening fuse that promised death to every other. If Max chose not to cooperate then he knew that there was a night goblin or a necromancer who would. His host was clearly no friend to Archaon, so why should Max be the one to die?
And he could not say that his curiosity was not intrigued by the conundrum he had been set.
Max half turned from the window slit to regard the huge, granite-like troll that had been bolted to the wall. It was twice Max’s height, but it was the sheer mass of it that was most arresting, as if its scale was such that it drew substance off of everything around it, making itself loom ever heavier while all around it grew small. On an intellectual level Max understood that its rocky physiognomy was an adaptation to this troll’s particular habitat, but the mountainous bulk of it still left him feeling the frailty of his bruised flesh and aching bones. It smelled of bare rock. Its chest heaved up and down with a slow regularity. The stare it gave him was utterly v
acant. It was more the vague awareness of a plant for the position of the sun than a predator for its next meal.
And there was the conundrum: how to bestow intelligence upon a troll?
Despite himself, Max was gripped. Could it even be done? He knew that it could. Could he do it? He knew that he could! A part of him, the part that still remembered Ulrika and Felix and Claudia and a life without bars, posed the question as to whether this was the same hubris that had brought the downfall of men like Helsnicht and van Horstmann. A hunger for power could masquerade in the quest for betterment, he knew. But who was to say an intelligent troll was inherently an evil thing? Was evil in their nature, or were they brutal only because they did not understand? No serious scholar would agree that ogres were evil, and perhaps a troll with a mind would prove that evil was not innate except in the Dark Gods’ own creations. It would be the proof that the world was not doomed, that it was worth saving. This was good work he did.
Yes, he could do it.
Max glanced up from his specimen and through the bars that separated his cage from the dozens of others on this level of the tower. It had been called the Ice Tower, for the late Duke Enrik had sponsored the work of ice witches here and magical apparatus and tomes were scattered between the cells. Within each a troll was bound, dull yellow eyes gazing listlessly through the most horrific of tortures. In the cell nearest, a ratman warlock hunched over the body of a troll that had its brainpan sliced open. As Max watched, the warlock took previously biopsied and regenerated tissue and methodically grafted it back onto the troll’s brain. Beyond, mages of every race Max could name muttered and raved, working on trolls without arms, without eyes, or with carcinoid second heads, trolls branded with arcane sigils that steamed in the cold air. And beyond it, through the forest of bars and bodies and the mist of breath and pain, was the door.
The door.
Max shuddered. He had never seen it opened, it was just there, locked, varnished red wood panelling with a brass strip top and bottom. Mysterious. What had started as curiosity had grown and grown into a nagging need to know what lay behind it. What was a door for, after all, if not for partitioning one set of things from another set of things? Max had watched men drive themselves slowly insane just staring at it trying to glean its meaning, gibbering and screaming and pushing gaunt faces to the bars as if just one inch nearer would put them in position to stare into the warped mind of god.