Honourkeeper

by Nick Kyme

  Closer at hand was the fluttering standard of Karak Ungor, the dragon rampant still upraised proudly and defiantly by Haggar as he fought with fury alongside his warriors further down the steadily thinning line.

  Keep it aloft, lad, thought Morek during a brief lull in the fighting. Keep it where we can see it.

  As the relentless minutes ground on, even the stoic endurance of the dwarfs was being sorely tested.

  Bagrik watched impotently from the ridge as his warriors, both kith and kin, were slain. As he surveyed the faltering battle-line and the swirling melee into which the fight had devolved, his gaze went immediately to the raised slope and the plight of the war machines and quarrellers deployed there. But a few hundred feet away from his position, there was a deadly struggle being fought to reclaim it from the Norscan riders butchering there at will. The toll exacted in blood on that small hill had been heavy indeed.

  By the time the cohorts of hearth guard had arrived, most of the elf archers were dead or had fled the field. Even now, they were being marshalled back by reserve forces and rallied for a second push. Ithalred’s face had been grave as he’d seen them run. Of the two hundred elves, shimmering brilliant in silver and white at the outset of battle, a mere handful of bloodied souls, with robes dirt-encrusted and armour tarnished, remained.

  Several of the war engines were damaged, though mercifully the Norscans lacked the skill or ingenuity to destroy them. But many crews were slain, journeymen and engineers that could not be easily replaced. A regiment of clan quarrellers lay cold on the field, having fought to the last, their defiance a bitter prelude to their inevitable demise.

  With a roar of anger, Bagrik had ordered his bodyguard to enter the fray with the diverted hearth guard. Thus combined, the dwarfs had now almost cleared the ridge, saving what quarrellers and machinery crews still lived. Those few Norscan horsemen not dead or having fled into the rocks, were slowly being corralled and put to the axe.

  Bagrik maintained his angry demeanour.

  It was but a pyrrhic victory on what was fast becoming a field of withering defeat.

  In the centre of the plains, now blotted from view by the blood and bodies, the boiling mass of the battle was reaching its height. Lines of bronze and iron were dwindling as the ranks thinned rapidly. Dwarfs and elves lay head to foot in thickening pools of their own blood, face down in dirt: dead, dying and dismembered in the swelling quagmire of viscera.

  For a fleeting moment, Bagrik felt his heart emboldened to see such defiance in the face of an implacable foe. Even the elves, he conceded, were unflinching in the face of death.

  Even the bastard Lethralmir had distinguished himself, slaying the mammoth with his arcane elven blade and sending the ragged beast thundering to the ground. Its death throes had shaken the horde, but such numbers could not be denied and even now they pressed the elven knights hard, trying to surround them as they fell back. The chariots were utterly destroyed, now so much broken white timber, shattered wheels and twisted elven bodies. Norscan hounds, let slip by their whelpmasters, gorged themselves on the flesh of their slain and stricken steeds greedily.

  Though their torn and bloodied banner was still aloft, the pride of Ulthuan was slowly dying in the desperate and protracted battle.

  ‘We cannot win this fight,’ said Ithalred through clenched teeth, as if the admission pained him greatly. ‘There is no honour to be gained on these killing fields.’

  Another agonising minute was allowed to lapse before Bagrik spoke again. His eyes were hard and cold as he observed the battle. For a fleeting second he thought of Nagrim and his stone heart softened.

  ‘I know…’ he whispered.

  With clenched fists, the dwarf king turned to one of his military aides alongside him. Even as he had the other dwarf under his inscrutable gaze, he still hesitated.

  ‘Sound the retreat,’ he snarled at last. ‘Withdraw all troops!’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Bloodied and Bowed

  Rugnir stirred out of unconsciousness. The pounding in his head had lessened to a dull throb and the hurt in his chest was easing. As he woke, reality washed over him like ice water. He tried to rise but found he was still too weak. After several painful efforts, Rugnir relented and stayed down. He was still in the cave. It was dark inside, perhaps it was night. The smell of Craggen’s broth was heavy on the dank breeze. The old dwarf hermit was nowhere to be seen, though. Rugnir assumed he must be hunting. Rumbling stomach complaining loudly, he hoped that Craggen would bring back something tasty to fill it.

  Grungni, I need a drink, Rugnir thought at the aching in his back, the dwarf taking little comfort from the worn furs beneath him. Drifting back into a fitful sleep, he was haunted by the dead faces of old friends.

  ‘May Valaya guide you to the Gate,’ Morek uttered softly. Closing the dying hearth guard’s eyes, he snapped the dwarf’s neck.

  Mercy was all he could offer the warrior. His wounds were mortal. Though hardy enough to recover from most injuries, there were some that even dwarfs could not live through.

  The withdrawal from the field had been a bitter blow. The armoured line had retreated by degrees, those warriors in more advanced positions helping isolated units like the elven knights break free of the enemy. It had been ordered but messy. At first the Norscans had pressed the advantage but with the upper slope cleared of the foe and the quarrellers and war machines rescued, the deadly missile volleys began again in earnest. Withering fire dampened much of the northmen’s bloodthirsty ambition. Bands of slayers, still eager to find an honourable doom amidst the carnage, swept forward in a red-orange wave, axes flashing. Two more mammoths fell to their sharpened blades, now gore-slicked and notched.

  In the end, the Norscans too had been dealt a blow of sorts, their dead and dying numbering in the thousands. Though Morek had not seen the warlord again, he’d heard the roar of his commands then echoed by crude Norscan warhorns. Both armies, bloodied and bowed, had quit the field leaving it to the carrion, the mewling wounded and the ghosts of the slain.

  The decisive blow that had meant to crush the spine of the northmen and avenge the slaying of Nagrim had finished a bitter and blood-soaked draw. In truth, it was no better than a defeat.

  Morek tried not to dwell on it and give in to his anger. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, and he wiped a lather of sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. Thunder rumbled overhead in the aftermath of the battle, but it was a dry storm that heated the air and made it thick and stifling. Certainly it did nothing to assist him in the grave task ahead.

  Across the bloodied field of churned earth and broken blades Morek and a small group of rangers, together with the Valakryn, moved swiftly and quietly in the doom-drenched night. Dispersed widely, but always in eyeshot of each other, they silenced the enemy wounded or dispensed mercy to those dwarfs and elves that would not recover from their injuries. The few that might survive were taken away by stretcher bearers to the gore-splattered and bone-weary chirurgeons that awaited them in the makeshift infirmary tents.

  Besides the throaty thunder, the night was quiet but punctuated horribly by the screams of the injured and the fatalistic moans of the dying. Trekking through the mud and destruction, Morek saw the hafts of weapons jutting from the ground like broken teeth. He heard the guttural curse of a stricken northman silenced by the wet thud of an axe. Morek turned to regard the severe countenance of one of the Valakryn. The robes of the warrior priestess were flecked with blood as she went about her business stoically. Elsewhere, crews of stretcher bearers were ferrying the wounded away. They trailed solemnly from the field, the devotees of Valaya holding onto the grasping hands of the injured reassuringly or whispering benedictions in the name of the goddess.

  Mercifully, the northmen had not returned. Though the rangers ensured that if any did they would be heralded and then dealt with swiftly. The barbarian hordes had no time or compassion for the dying. To Morek it seemed a brutal culture. The dwarfs dragged the Norscan corps
es together, piling them up so that they could be burned and some of their taint scoured from the earth. In part it was to ward off disease, but it was also because they’d retake the plains come the morrow and no one amongst the allies desired to march across the foetid carcasses of the slain.

  As his gaze lingered briefly on one of the smouldering pyres, it struck the hearth guard captain that this army was a mere taste of their numbers. The dwarf shuddered to imagine the actual scale of the foe that they were facing.

  The ‘mercy parties’ were well advanced into the battlefield now, the fires of the Norscan encampment not so distant or abstract anymore.

  Tromping through the carnage, Morek saw a ranger approach him swiftly with his crossbow low-slung and ready.

  ‘Ragenfel,’ said Morek as the ranger reached him.

  ‘Captain,’ the ranger’s face was ashen, his reply breathless, ‘we’ve found him.’

  Morek shared a glance with one of the nearby Valakryn, Hetga their matriarch. Her face was as grave as he imagined his own to be.

  ‘Take me there, lad,’ he rasped, gripping the haft of his rune axe for support.

  Hegbrak lay across his Anvil of Doom, his back clearly broken. Shards of gromril plates lay scattered around him, stained dark with the runesmith’s blood. His once proud beard was matted with gore and a deep and bloody gouge ran all the way up his open chest and scarred his noble face. Hegbrak’s eyes were wide, his expression frozen in a rictus of agonised defiance. The bodies of his Anvil Guard and several of the longbeards lay strewn around him in various states of dismemberment.

  ‘Dreng tromm…’ the Valakryn whispered, and went immediately to her knees and wept for Hegbrak’s passing, and the senseless deaths surrounding him.

  Morek could see the horror in the ranger’s eyes too. His wide-eyed expression suggested disbelief and the ending of something deep in his heart.

  To many in the hold, much like Agrin his former master, Hegbrak had seemed immortal. Not so anymore.

  ‘Ragenfel,’ said Morek softly.

  The ranger just kept staring.

  ‘Ragenfel,’ Morek repeated more forcefully, and the dwarf snapped out of it and turned to face his captain. ‘Get the stretcher bearers, lad,’ he added quietly. Ragenfel nodded curtly and went off to do as bidden.

  When Morek turned back to the runesmith, lying broken at his feet, a tear ran down his dirty face. He wiped it away with his gauntlet. Already tired from the battle, the hearth guard captain felt his weariness deepen. Though this was not bodily, no; this was a weakening of the soul.

  The Anvil of Doom was still hot. Morek could feel it as he extended a hand in the runic artefact’s direction. The heat did not sear Hegbrak. It had actually kept the other Norscans at bay who might have attempted to mutilate him further. A veritable pyre of the heathens lay stacked around the runesmith and his slain guardians. It gave Morek scant comfort to learn that they had gone down fighting and exacted a heavy toll upon the enemy. The warlord, though, was not amongst them. Morek imagined the brute crowing at his victory, and felt a sudden rush for vengeance seize him. He and Hegbrak had grown up together as beardlings. Together with Kraggin Goldmaster, the three dwarfs had been firm friends since they’d each first held an axe. Now all of that was gone, condemned to bitter remembrance.

  The arrival of the stretcher bearers interrupted Morek’s reverie.

  ‘Be careful, the anvil is still hot,’ Morek warned the trio of Valakryn that came forward to lift Hegbrak onto the stretcher and carry him from the field.

  ‘It burns with the anger of its master’s passing,’ said one of the priestesses as she stooped down, together with her sisters, to raise Hegbrak up. They bore him reverently. With a pang of painful remembrance, Morek suddenly thought of Nagrim and the slain heir of Ungor’s arrival in the hall of his father.

  So many dead… all in the name of retribution.

  Morek pledged a thousand more until the debt of blood was fulfilled and the grudge against the northmen satisfied. He knew it would never be so, and that fact gave the dwarf captain grim comfort.

  ‘Ragenfel,’ Morek intoned. The ranger had returned with the Valakryn stretcher bearers. ‘Round up six stout mules and bind the anvil with rope. I want it recovered from the field,’ Morek ordered, waiting for the ranger to nod before following the departing Valakryn, Hegbrak carried between them.

  Morek barged into the command tent unannounced, stalking past the line of captains awaiting an audience with the king and then standing before Bagrik, his face set like stone.

  ‘Hegbrak Thunderhand is dead,’ he said, ‘slain by the Norscan chief. His Anvil Guard, too.’

  Bagrik paused in the scratching of his quill, the assembled thanes and clan leaders naming the dead so that their fates could be recorded in the book of grudges, and one day avenged. The list before Bagrik went to several pages, each name almost carved into the parchment with the vehemence of a vengeful king writing in his own blood.

  Stern of face, the iron he placed there masking his deep lament, Bagrik added Hegbrak’s name to the hundreds of others. A great many of the dead could not be accounted for. The slayers, cut down to a dwarf, were left unnamed. None in the war party knew them. Like so many of their ill-fated kind, the slayers were loners and had simply arrived unbidden as if Grimnir himself had growled in their ear that war was afoot. Their demise mattered not, it was a form of victory to the dwarfs’ minds and in any case there were already more joining the cult, those who had fled the field to return in ignominy or had failed in their battle oaths. Beyond the king’s tent, small groups of dwarfs were shaving their heads and dying their beards red. Stripping out of their armour and daubing their bodies with tattoos, they took up axes and swore their death oaths before the surviving priests of Grimnir.

  Others, those besides the dead and the dying, licked their wounds and took stock of their losses. By all accounts it was a large tally, and a fell mood had descended upon Broken Anvil Hill as a result.

  The elves, too, had lost a great many warriors. An entire cohort of chariots was no more. Morek had later learned that they had hailed from a realm known as Tiranoc, one of those that had suffered grievously during the elven war of strife. The land had been lost, engulfed by a great sundering. It struck the dwarf that these ill-fated chariot riders had been put asunder in much the same way. It was a harsh echo of a painful reality.

  Lethralmir, much to Morek’s bitter chagrin, had survived. Precious few of his silver knights and dragon armoured nobles joined him though, along with countless archers and spearmen. The elves had their own warriors prowling the battlefield, searching for the wounded, too. Their faces were cold and haunted, their dark hair fluttering in the languid breeze as they’d moved soundless and deadly amongst the fallen. The lines of their stretcher bearers had been just as long as those of the dwarfs, maybe even longer.

  ‘Let it be known,’ thundered King Bagrik once he’d finished scribing Hegbrak’s name, ‘that on this day was Hegbrak Thunderhand, Runemaster of Karak Ungor, slain by north-men. Ten thousand of their dead and the head of their chieftain shall atone for his passing,’ he said, scowling, adding solemnly, ‘Hegbrak will be remembered.’

  The dwarf captains repeated their king’s words with heads bowed, Morek amongst them. Every slain dwarf, regardless of his station was afforded the same reverence. All were to be honoured by their kin.

  It would be a long night. Long and dark.

  There was a palpable air of tension and barely suppressed anger about Bagrik’s command tent early the next morning.

  The king had wasted no time, once the Giving of Names was done and all the dead had been accounted for, in gathering together his finest captains and also summoning those of the elves.

  It was to be a much smaller assembly than that which had met previously. For the dwarfs, only Morek and Haggar were present. As for the elves, Ithalred had preferred just Korhvale and Lethralmir, the latter captain present in spite of his injuries – the gash upon his for
ehead spoiling his aesthetically good looks.

  ‘Abject failure,’ growled the king to the warriors of both races. ‘It is the only way I can think of to describe our ignominious defeat.’ The words came through clenched teeth. There were no maps, no coins and no councils this time; just warriors, elves and dwarfs both.

  ‘Had the elgi restrained themselves and not gone off like grobi chasing swine, the outcome may have been different,’ said Morek, levelling his gaze at Lethralmir in particular. ‘We had a plan, my king–’

  ‘Yes, Morek,’ snapped the king, before the hearth guard captain could finish, ‘and it was found wanting in the face of the enemy. No single warrior can be made to shoulder the blame here,’ he added, now regarding Prince Ithalred closely as he spoke. ‘We were all culpable… All of us!’ Bagrik breathed deep, the sound wheezing through his nostrils as he fought to stay calm. He then shifted in his seat at the discomfort in his leg.

  ‘The bickering must end,’ he told them, as his gaze drifted away to a different place, one where he’d rather not be. ‘Nagrim’s revenge demands it,’ he rasped darkly.

  ‘This horde is bent towards one aim, and one aim alone.’ It was Ithalred who spoke, his deep and sonorous voice commanding attention. ‘To destroy us,’ he added simply. ‘I saw it outside the borders of Tor Eorfith when we first fought these curs and I see it again now. There is a malign will guiding these beasts, and I do not speak of the heathen warlord, either.’

  ‘The shaman…’ said Bagrik. ‘It is him of whom you speak.’

  Ithalred met his gaze and perhaps for the first time since they’d met in the Great Hall of Karak Ungor, there was mutual understanding.