by David Guymer
Ulrika however still retained wit enough to fight back, just; but there was something in its siren nature that appealed directly to her, to Ulrika. There was a familiar taste, a scent that carried only on the winds of the aethyr and was thus unhindered by stone and undiluted by distance. It conjured memories of a wise man, a handsome man, a man whom she had once loved and whose goodness still existed somewhere within the monster she had become.
Pulling up from the troll’s neck with a gasp of hunger despite the blood smeared across her face and chest, the beast shuddered. Chaos was rising on the tide of the End Times. The call was made in vain.
Ulrika did not live here any more.
A low growl started up in the belly of the Ice Tower, rising up its throat with such a shaking fury that the cages of its topmost level began to rattle. Their captives, already in a state of near hysteria following the sudden death of every last one of the trolls, found a second wind to wail like dying wolves and even the stub-horned ungor lamplighter whose sole purpose it was to keep the torches lit on the wizards’ work trembled as the wall brackets rattled against their fittings.
It reached the floor below; a bellow of pure disbelieving outrage that shivered through the floorboards, followed by the crunch of a wooden door yielding before something that did not know what it felt like to be stopped. The crash of hurrying steps drew closer until, with a baleful roar and a scream of iron fixtures, the last door between that wrath and its most prized prisoners flew inwards and slammed into the side of the cage opposite. The occupant, a night goblin with a sharp green chin protruding from a hooded cloak, shrieked innocence and set the entire level to clamouring.
Head swimming with the effort of re-establishing his will within just one earthly host, Max struggled to absorb what was going on.
‘I told you, man-thing,’ hissed the skaven warlock, glaring at him through the two sets of bars between them. The troll chained to the skaven’s wall was limp, a piece of mindlessly regenerating meat. The severed head that had been wired to the warlock’s wind-up shock machine was equally slack, barring a periodically induced twitch as a current directly stimulated its dead brain. With a glance over his shoulder, the ratman hunched his shoulders and retreated into the far corner of his own cage. ‘I told you the king would not be pleased.’
Max felt the floor beneath him shake and looked past the skulking ratman as the hulking figure of Throgg strode between the shuddering cages straight for Max’s cell. The Troll King bristled with rage, the crystalline mane of warpstone that ran down his neck and shoulders pulsing like angry hearts. Max had never seen him this way, his monstrous nature laid bare past the limits of all his godly gifts to set him beyond.
It was terrifying to behold.
With a bestial growl, Throgg reached out for Max’s cell and then with one throw of the shoulder tore the door clear from its housing and hurled it back across the chamber. Then the Troll King thrust mineral-spiked hands around the bars to either side of the opening and wrenched them apart sufficiently for him to enter.
‘What did you do, Max?’ he said, thrusting his huge head through the mangled door frame while the iron bars squealed in his grip like swine. ‘How many of my people did you kill?’
‘You said you did not care for one or for a hundred,’ said Max, abuzz with achievement and the residual thrill of magic. Why was the Troll King angry? Could he not see for himself what Max had accomplished for him?
‘You fool. You weak, human, broken-minded fool. There is an army outside these walls. There are ten armies. These are my walls.’ Throgg shook the bars in his grip until one bent with a lingering scream and then tore off in his hand. He beat the iron rod against the remaining bars and roared: ‘Mine!’
‘But I have done it,’ said Max, trying desperately to get his captor, his patron, to see. ‘Every being within a race resonates similarly to the touch of Ghyran, the Jade Wind. It was simply a matter of gathering enough of that life force, using the Gold to catalyse the change with a spark of the Celestial. It was… elegant.’
‘Elegant?’ The furiously intelligent eyes of the Troll King passed from Max to his subject where he was chained to the wall. The newborn mind gawped up at the world around it, stony grey eyes wide with incomprehension and nascent wonder. Earthy saliva dribbled from its gaping mouth. Its breathing was vapid and uneven. Atrophied limbs jerked feebly after every cry or flicker of light. The Troll King gave a snarl. ‘He is broken, Max. Like his father.’
‘He is one mind from many. He is simplicity, a refutation of the inevitability of Chaos.’ Max stumbled towards Throgg, hands pleading, voice rising as passion took over from good sense. The Troll King regarded him contemptuously. ‘He is your child. I merely delivered him into the world. See him for what he is.’
The Troll King’s mineralised brow furrowed, indecision cocking his golden crown: thinking – always, always thinking. His gaze lingered on the newborn, longing, and yet, faced now with the equal he had thought he craved, jealous of his own uniqueness. ‘What I see is the end state of man – gaping and helpless as their doom closes.’
‘No! He simply doesn’t yet know how to control his thoughts. Your kind is adaptable. He will adapt.’
‘No, Max, you were right before. A Teclis or a Nagash you are not, and thanks to your worthless efforts my city is lost.’ With a dangerous growl he summoned the quivering ungor lamplighter.
‘Fetch me the vampire and spread the word that we are soon to march south. Tell her I have reconsidered her alliance with the Empire.’
‘I remember this place,’ said Felix as the group padded into the castle’s entrance hall, voice hushed by the high domed ceiling as if they had just entered a tomb. ‘This is where Duke Enrik received Max and Ulrika and Ivan Petrovich and I for a victory feast. He pointed across the desolate hall to an empty pedestal that backed onto an alcove. ‘There was a suit of armour there. A winged lancer of the Magnus Legion if I recall. It was large enough for Ulrika and I to sneak off during some of the longer speeches and–’
‘Please uncle, spare us the sordid details.’
Gustav clutched his halberd as though he intended to throttle it and affected interest in the empty hooks that were spaced across the bare stone walls. Ulrika had drawn of him too deeply for him to blush, but Gustav wasn’t nearly wily enough to hide the subtle cues from a man of Felix’s experience.
There was fear for her, perhaps. Jealousy, almost certainly.
‘It’s not men doing the feasting now anyway,’ said Gotrek with what might equally have been a deliberate attempt to further darken the mood as a reminder of where they all still were. A low murmur of activity reverberated through the castle’s stones and, though the cold numbed Felix’s nose effectively, the sweaty scent of beastman laced the air. The Slayer further stamped out the solemn air with the snow from his boots.
Felix looked up, past the overlooking galleries and the decorative bandings by which friezes of monsters such as wyverns and trolls being ridden down by Kislev’s lancers separated the levels to the frescoed ceiling high above.
‘It is the last ride of the Ungol,’ said Kolya. ‘When the Gospodar crushed them and took Praag for a united Kislev.’ He gave an appreciative sigh. ‘I never thought I would see it.’
‘You’ve not been here before?’
‘You have feasted with the krug of the duke. I would not even know him to see him.’ His gaze lingered on the fresco and Felix saw not a laconic and slightly irritating northerner, but a man who would draw horses on stones between battles, a man who had lost it all but for some reason carried on. ‘But I always thought… one day.’
Pushing deeper into the hall, it wasn’t difficult to tell that the ducal palace was first and foremost a fortress. The galleries provided both cover and excellent angles for crossbowmen posted there and the staircase up ahead, though wide enough for a rank of ten to fight across, presented an open target to arc
hers firing down from the flanks while the height between steps was unusually steep to confer a significant advantage to any defender fighting from above. There were no windows whatsoever. Felix glanced again to the ceiling, wondering how much more castle there was beyond that dome. Where did it sit in relation to the battlements? Where were the towers with the barred windows and lights inside?
‘I think Max is being held up there somewhere,’ he said, while Gotrek wandered further into the hall and looked intently around with his one good eye.
‘Don’t forget Ulrika,’ said Gustav. A murmur of assent sounded from his men. ‘We’ve given oaths of service and we’re not leaving without her.’
That’s not all you’ve given, Felix thought but chose not to say. He didn’t know if Gotrek had noticed the marks on the men’s necks or what the Slayer would do if he knew. Perhaps nothing. These men were innocent victims after all, but it never paid to assume that dwarfs – and Gotrek in particular – perceived innocence in the same frame as did humans.
‘We should go that way,’ Gotrek cut in with a nod towards the left-hand sweep of the staircase and the corridor it led to.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘The ground is wet where snow has been traipsed in from outside, and see those marks?’ Felix and the others looked to the staircase where Gotrek pointed. There were indeed an array of tiny indents in the stone. Felix hadn’t noticed them, and if he had he would have assumed them porous imperfections in the rock or simple wear and tear – this castle was hundreds of years old and had been overrun by Chaos on two separate occasions. Or three if one counted the Troll King’s usurpation of Aekold Helbrass. ‘That’s from Snorri’s leg. You can tell by the pattern.’
‘When this is over you should hunt with me, zabójka,’ said Kolya.
‘He can’t have got far on that leg,’ said Felix, striding towards the staircase, determined to find the old Slayer before Gotrek did. ‘We can catch him before he does something stupid.’
Gotrek’s grunt said everything that a dwarf never would.
Snorri upped his pace, running with one hand scouring along the outside wall of the stairwell, bashing the lip of every step with his mace-leg in his haste. He burst through a splintered doorway and into a circular chamber filled with iron cages and wailing. He blinked against the harsh glare that came from braziers spaced regularly all around the room and tottered through the screaming voices and grasping hands and through the door onto the next flight of stairs up.
Every few turns of the stairwell, a broken door opened onto the same scene. The only difference was that the cages became slightly larger, probably so as to fit the increasingly impressive array of what Snorri unthinkingly characterised as ‘stuff’ that the better fed and less battered prisoners all seemed to have inside with them. Goblins and beastmen and orcs gave way to men and skaven and even an elf. The Troll King had been thorough. On one floor, Snorri spotted a greybeard dwarf in runesmith’s robes, but he didn’t pause, almost running down a skinny beastman that clattered through the opposite door and completely forgetting to try and hit it until it had skidded past him and sprinted off down the stairs.
Even after that near miss Snorri only slowed down a little. The constant spinning was starting to make him dizzy, threatening to dislodge a jumble of loosely stored memories, but the Troll King was so close he could almost smell his destiny.
Innate dwarf intuition told him that the next level would be the second from last. The air smelled like the alchemist’s shop that Bjorni Bjornisson had made him go to after a hard night in the Red Rose. A cacophony of screams returned him to the present and he looked up to see a rectangle of bright light against the dark stone. Snorri gave an excited yip and spilled through into a brightly lit scene of destruction.
Snorri took it all in as quickly as he could. The layout of cages was similar to what had come before, but following the pattern, with larger and fewer cages. Another door, presumably the last, faced him through a pair of cluttered cages. It was intact but ajar and he could see more steps beyond it. The door he had just stumbled in through was in a bad way on the floor a few feet ahead of him where it had struck the most immediate cage. Snorri could see where the brass fixtures had chipped the iron. The hooded goblin within had its long strangler’s fingers wrapped around the bars and was staring at some commotion that Snorri couldn’t see for intervening cages, off towards the rear of the tower that overlooked the Square of Heroes.
‘Snorri’s looking for a Troll King,’ said Snorri loudly. ‘He’s got a destiny.’ The night goblin turned to stare at him agog. ‘Snorri, that is. The Troll King can get his own destiny.’
As Snorri watched, a shudder passed through the bars and the goblin pulled away as if shocked, then turned back to where it had previously been looking and squealed. A low growl rumbled through the chamber and something detached itself from the far wall behind the blocking cages – Snorri had thought that it had been the wall – and stamped around into full view of the door.
A ratman in a tin hat whimpered as the Troll King set his hand upon the top corner of its eight-foot-tall cage. The monster’s crown shone on all sides against the braziers that encircled it. His stony bulk glittered under a mantle of frost. Scores of tiny mouths over the Troll King’s belly yammered breathlessly until he cut them off with a sweep of his tattered red cloak. Snorri clutched his axe excitedly and drew his hammer.
A mighty doom. When those he loved most surrounded him again.
‘The half-wit,’ growled the Troll King, pointing a massive claw to the door behind Snorri. ‘I do not care enough to wish you harm. Take this one chance to leave. I have no patience left for fools.’
Snorri scowled. Sometimes he didn’t realise that he’d been insulted until well after the event, but that one he got. Fortunately, Snorri wasn’t in the habit of listening to trolls, even if they could talk, and instead strode under the Troll King’s hands while he was still talking and cracked the teeth from a dozen gnashing mouths with a blow from his hammer. Snorri grinned at the Troll King’s indignant roar and drew back his arm for another blow. Who was stupid now?
The Troll King’s fist hit like a cannonball.
‘We will return to Karak Kadrin,’ said Borek firmly. ‘I expect there is an oath there that you will wish to make.’
‘After,’ said Snorri, sadly. ‘After Snorri tells Gotrek’s family what he did.’
Snorri came to with arms and legs flapping, just a second before he slammed into the cage behind. The bars caved around him as though a big, clawed hand had just risen out of the floor and caught him. Snorri’s mouth worked in pain he couldn’t find the breath for. Bent metal trapped his limbs. Something screamed that wasn’t him and Snorri shifted his head around to see a gaunt human in threadbare black robes holding out clasped hands and yammering while he backed further into his cage.
‘My thoughts are gifts from the gods, you moronic, dirt-chewing oaf. They will not be broken by the likes of you.’
The Troll King readied a fist and this time Snorri saw it coming in good time. It was a club of overlapping crystal edges and was almost as large as Snorri was. He heaved on his mace-leg but couldn’t free it in time, then turned his face aside as the blow landed.
Snorri let the body drop, then slumped down onto his backside beside it. Injured dwarfs groaning and whimpering all around, he took a sip from his liberated ale skin. What had that ranger been trying to say about towns and goblins?
Sharp, glittering debris tinkled from Snorri’s shoulders as he wobbled upright. For a second his jumbled memories couldn’t place where he was, but then the swirling in front of his eyes slotted together. It looked as though he’d been punched right through the bars and into the pale human’s cage. The human lay unconscious amidst a pile of glass and metallic debris that lay between Snorri and the mangled remnants of the cage’s front wall. The Troll King glared at him from the other side.
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‘Why are you smiling?’
‘Was Snorri smiling?’
With a roar of fury, the Troll King wrenched the breach in the cage wider and pushed through a rugged shoulder. ‘You are infuriating, dwarf. An insult to every beast that stares in stupidity at the stars and cannot wish to comprehend.’
Blinking away the last of his daze, Snorri kicked aside a sheet of corrugated metal and threw himself forward with axe and hammer held high. The Troll King blocked Snorri’s hammer on the craggy crystalline stuff that covered its wrist in the same way an adult would fend off a child. Breathing hard, Snorri ducked under the return blow, bashing his mace-leg into the Troll King’s shin in a hail of dark green shards, and then hammered his axe into the troll’s waist where it stuck with an unsatisfactory flat thump. With a rumble of laughter, the Troll King brought his elbow crashing down on Snorri’s bald head.
Smoke hung over the western hills and Snorri nearly choked with worry as he fumbled drunkenly for his hammer and ran the last miles home. The village burned. Dwarfs floated face up in the Skull River with goblin arrows in them. Their livestock lay butchered on hillsides that had since been torched.
Who? How?
Snorri tottered back minus his axe, metal leg stepping awkwardly on the uneven carpet of detritus. He looked up to see a knee the size of a black orc’s spike-bossed shield driving towards his face. Oh yes, Snorri thought with a grin that hurt his neck, Snorri had forgotten.
Dwarfs floated face up in the Skull River with goblin arrows in them. Their livestock lay butchered on hillsides that had since been torched.