Honourkeeper

by Nick Kyme

  Over three months since he had left Karak Ungor. Countless weeks forced to endure bitter cold and spirit-sapping downpours. Seemingly endless nights camped in the wildernesses of the Worlds Edge Mountains, with sky and stars above his head instead of good, solid stone. Bagrik longed for the hearth of his Great Hall and closeness of his queen. All the battles against the northmen, the shed blood, the struggle to bring vengeance for Nagrim’s death had brought him to this point.

  This then would be the final reckoning, and Bagrik had chosen his shieldbearers with this very fact in mind. Morek and Haggar stood beneath him, shouldering the weight of their king as if he were naught with a feather-filled sack.

  As he stared out to the sea, the rising wind disturbing the banner of Karak Ungor mounted on the back of the war shield, the dwarf king fancied he could see the shadow of monsters writhing in its stygian depths. Perhaps they had heard the call to battle; perhaps they too hungered for blood.

  ‘This is where we’ll end it,’ he said dourly to Prince Ithalred.

  ‘I will be glad of it,’ the elf answered. ‘The constant killing is not to my taste. Let us drive these beasts into the sea at last.’

  The two generals waited in the no-man’s land, a few hundred feet from the deployment of their allied army. It was a bleak day, the platinum sky filled with the threat of more rain.

  Ithalred was mounted on a white Ellyrian stallion, the steed encased in ithilmar barding much like the armour of its master. A dark mood was upon the prince, the grave look on his face made more severe by the dragonesque battlehelm he wore, two great wings sweeping out at either temple. A long nose guard, fashioned into the dragon’s snout, went all the way down to the prince’s snarling lip.

  Bagrik sensed that something else was on his mind, besides the impending battle, but chose not to voice it.

  ‘Aye, we’ll drown them all right enough,’ the dwarf growled instead. ‘This day the beaches will be stained in north-men blood. What are you seeking, Ithalred?’ he asked, watching the elf as he surveyed the sky overhead.

  ‘Ravens,’ Ithalred replied.

  ‘Ravens?’

  ‘They bear ill-omen from the Crone, Morai-Heg,’ the elf explained, though Bagrik was none the wiser.

  ‘The skies are clear, elgi,’ the dwarf king replied. ‘Is that good?’

  ‘Without my sister to interpret their signs, yes, it is good.’

  The elf seeress had returned to Tor Eorfith after the allies had won their first victory at Broken Anvil Hill, citing illness and fatigue as the reason for her departure.

  ‘Trust in this,’ said Bagrik, patting his arm with an armoured hand, ‘not in signs and portents. Are your forces ready, Ithalred?’ asked the dwarf, his gaze returning to the horizon and the arc of coastline where the mouth of the Norscan cave was cut into the cliffs. Tendrils of smoke from doused fires drifted forlornly on the salt-tanged breeze over a broad expanse of frozen ground in front of it. Bagrik assumed the northmen were cowering inside.

  ‘I yearn for battle, if only for an ending to all this, as do you, Bagrik,’ the elf replied, facing the king. The many weeks campaigning had eclipsed their uneasy accord with solidarity, even something approaching friendship. But it had left the elf weary and with only bitter humour, as if a great burden weighed upon his mind and pulled at his soul.

  The dwarf smiled grimly.

  An ending to all of this…

  ‘And yes, my warriors are ready,’ the elf answered.

  Bagrik’s reply was gruff and curt.

  ‘Then you had best join them now,’ he said, ‘for our enemy comes…’

  From out of the mouth of the cave marched the remnants of the Norscan horde. Their warlord led them, riding in a bone chariot that was drawn by some fell creature of the ether that looked like a fleshless bird, only more grotesque and horrifically malformed. In the warlord’s wake came a pair of shaggy mammoths, the last of their breed in the war host, followed by a ragged trail of bondsmen and huscarl warriors. Slithering amongst the heavily outnumbered northmen was their enigmatic shaman, though Bagrik kept losing him from sight even when he was staring directly at him.

  ‘To victory, Bagrik,’ said the elf prince, holding up his silver long sword.

  ‘To annihilation,’ growled Bagrik, and clanged his axe against the elf’s blade in salute.

  Ithalred gave a snapped command, turning his horse away and galloping to where his kinsmen waited for him. There he would join Lethralmir at the head of the dragon knights, Ellyrian reavers and silver helms alongside them in three deep lines of elven steel. Serried ranks of spearmen and archers, stretching half the length of the ice plain, stood silently in support of the nobles, clutching spears and bows with determination.

  ‘For Nagrim…’ Bagrik muttered, once the elf was gone.

  Tramping across the frozen shore, its fringes still rimed with ice, the Norscan chief called a halt and the horde stopped.

  ‘They’re using the sea to protect their flank,’ Morek observed from beneath the war shield, once they too had returned to their lines.

  ‘Why don’t they come at us?’ asked Haggar alongside him, a hint of wariness in his voice.

  ‘Because they are outnumbered and realise that their doom is upon them,’ snarled Bagrik, answering for the hearth guard captain.

  ‘It is madness,’ said Morek, taking in the paltry army that opposed them, a mere fraction of its previous size.

  By contrast, the dwarf regiments were immense and stretched back into many ranks and across numerous files. There was to be no subtlety, no grand tactics to this battle. The dwarfs would march until they reached the enemy, moving as an implacable wall of bronze and not stopping until the northmen were dead or had been driven into the water and drowned. ‘No survivors’ Morek had promised his king; it was an oath he fully intended keeping.

  ‘Theirs is a lost hope,’ he added. ‘They would be better off casting themselves into the sea right now and save us the bother of slaying them.’

  ‘Enough talk. We march,’ Bagrik snapped. ‘Khazuk!’

  ‘Khazuk!’ cried Morek and Haggar.

  The war cry was taken up by the dwarf throng and echoed across the ice-bound shore like thunder.

  The dwarfs and elves moved slowly at first as they advanced to within a few hundred feet of the Norscans and came to a halt. Still the enemy did not move. By now the chariot riding warlord was lost from view. His huscarl retinue, mounted on their brutish steeds, concealed him behind their shields. Banners were raised aloft throughout the allied army and the armoured front ranks of dwarf warriors and elf spearmen parted to allow a long line of archers and quarrellers through.

  ‘At your order, my king,’ said Morek, from beneath the war shield.

  Bagrik’s gaze was unwavering as he regarded the enemy. No battle cries, no curses or threats. It was as if the northmen knew they were finished and had merely come to play out the final act of this bloody saga.

  ‘Make them run the gauntlet,’ the king replied.

  Morek took a breath and yelled, ‘Loose!’

  A flurry of red-fletched quarrels filled the air, pitching up and then down in a razor-sharp arc. The elf archers let fly too, in perfect harmony with the dwarfs.

  Faced with the oncoming arrow storm, the Norscans raised shields as one in an act of uncharacteristic discipline. Bondsmen came forward to protect the horses from harm. Such was the sheer number of missiles permeating the air that casualties were inevitable, but the northmen weathered the attack well and once it was over lowered their pin-cushioned shields and roared in defiance.

  Bagrik knew then that this was a different breed to that which he had already fought. These were the last of them, the warlord’s warrior-brothers. He smiled to himself at a sudden thought – they would be much harder to break.

  ‘Another volley,’ said the king.

  Morek responded with the order and the sky darkened again.

  And again the northmen raised shields and did not falter in the fa
ce of whickering death from above. Instead, once the deadly rain was done, they charged, parting like a ragged wave as they ran and allowing the mammoths through their ranks. The earth shook as the beasts of the northern wastes tromped forward. Snapping hounds, let loose by their whelp masters, bounded in front of them. Swarms of hirsute and tattooed bondsmen marauders followed in their wake whirling axes and hammers, the masked berserkers amongst them. After that there came the armoured huscarls on foot, skull-faced death masks grinning madly as they ran in perfect formation. The mounted warriors were content to canter slowly behind the horde alongside their chieftain, and allow the foot-sloggers to bear the brunt of their enemy’s initial wrath.

  The allies responded with steel-fanged death, the elves loosing with such swiftness that the dwarfs could scarcely see, let alone try to match.

  Peppered by a swathe of bolts and arrows, one of the mammoths rocked unsteadily. Its fore-feet collapsed in front of it and it fell hard onto the frozen ground, driving a furrow into the earth with its bloodied snout until at last the beast came to a dead stop and expired.

  Within bow range themselves, the Norscans retaliated, small groups of bondsmen archers checking their runs and loosing off arrows into the dwarf and elf ranks. A scattering of warriors fell to their attacks, their death screams raking the air, but it was as nothing. Sling stones and javelins followed, and the unprotected allied missile troops took further casualties.

  Bagrik was about to order the quarrellers back when an ululating cry ripped from the northmen ranks, and there was his nemesis – the Norscan warlord atop his chariot of bone, armoured riders trailing behind their chieftain towards the dwarf left flank.

  ‘Take him down!’ Bagrik cried, suddenly impotent in the thickly serried dwarf centre. Somehow, the Norscan warlord had manoeuvred behind his horde’s advance and slipped from sight to strike at a weaker point in the dwarf king’s wall of bronze.

  The quarrellers aimed and shot but the few bolts that struck spun away from the hardened frame of the macabre war machine. The daemon beast driving it, charging like a flightless bird, carried the Norscan with unearthly swiftness.

  Fast, thought Bagrik with sudden concern as he watched the chariot eat up the ground between him and the dwarf line like it was nothing; too fast!

  ‘Quarrellers, fall back!’ thundered the king, ‘Armour… For-ward!’

  Too late, the dwarf crossbows started their retreat. The chariot struck, scythed wheels churning a bloody path into the quarrellers and punching right through to the slow-moving hearth guard and clan warriors behind. The sudden assault shook the front ranks of the dwarf flank as they were spun and cleaved and crushed.

  Laying about him, the warlord severed heads and limbs with enraged abandon. There was no time for the dwarfs to regroup as the mounted huscarls charged in after their warlord, exploiting the sudden gap in the shield wall, slaying the battered and exposed warriors in a blur of bloodshed and pitted metal blades.

  From the far opposite flank, an elven battle cry tore into the building maelstrom. Ithalred and his knights were on the move. Bagrik saw them canter at first, then peel away and charge towards the approaching mass of northmen foot-sloggers, pennants snapping gloriously in the rising wind from their raised lances.

  It was a call to arms, and slowly at first, but with gathering momentum, the allies not already engaged advanced forward. Though laboured, the dwarf warriors kept a steady pace, their armour clanking loudly as they picked up speed.

  Closer and closer they came to the jeering northmen who barrelled at them from the opposite direction, war cries building to a crescendo.

  The dwarfs roared in anger, while the elves gave voice to their own fury.

  The din of clashing metal rose up like a thunderhead of sound as the armies met in a cauldron of blood and death.

  Blades flashed by in a frenzy of motion. Screams filled the air that was redolent with sweat and breathless anger. Rage came like a wave, tempered by fear. The noise of war and the cries of furious desperation fuelled by a desire to kill, to live, gathered to a tumult. Death, endless death, reigned on the blood-soaked ice.

  ‘Onward!’ raged Bagrik, hacking down either side of his war shield as he and his hearth guard carved up a horde of bondsmen. Beneath the king, Morek and Haggar slew with all the fury of Grimnir reborn.

  ‘None survive!’ snarled the king as he buried his axe in the skull of a passing northman.

  ‘Slay them all!’ A second blow sent a severed bondsman head spinning off into the throbbing mass, a gory fountain erupting from his cleaved neck. Hate took Bagrik over as he spat diatribes against the Norscans and butchered the host.

  From the corner of his eye, an arterial spray impeding his vision for a moment, Bagrik saw the chariot-riding warlord shredding the left flank. Such was the speed and ferocity of his daemon-driven war machine, the dwarfs arrayed against him could scarcely land a blow. They were dwindling slowly, yet the warlord’s murderous vigour showed no sign of ebbing.

  ‘Take me there,’ said Bagrik, pointing his axe at the chariot as it scythed through the thinning throng of dwarfs. ‘Morek, Haggar… for Grungni!’ he thundered.

  The dwarf thanes turned in their advance, the small cohort of hearth guard turning with them, and headed for the distant flank cutting a gore-soaked swathe through the horde. Bondsmen and huscarls were everywhere. Morek and Haggar parried, and hewed, and roared, driving through the Norscan mass like a battering ram. None that came before their blades, or the blade of their king, lived.

  Morek sang, loud and strong, the sagas of the old heroes; of Skanir Helgenfell as he fought the Bloodtooth Tribe on the slopes of Ungor; of Duganar Umbrikson, slayer of the Green Wyrm; and of Thengaz Stonespike, saviour of the underway, who fought a horde of rampaging trolls single-handed. Haggar joined him, and the mournful dirge punctuated every blow, every axe fall.

  Though impossible in the clamour, it was as if the Norscan warlord heard the war song, turning as he did in his bloody rampage. His swollen eye staring wildly through the gap in his black iron helmet found Bagrik and his thanes. Now he came for them.

  The Norscan warlord drove headlong at the dwarf king, even cutting through his own warriors to reach him. His first charge rushed by like caged lightning, scythed wheels pranging violently against the axes of Bagrik and his thanes. Several of the hearth guard were crushed or eviscerated by the whirling blades. A severed dwarf head bounced off the bloody war shield.

  Unwilling to be mown down by the irresistible chariot, the bondsmen and huscarls clamouring around Bagrik and his hearth guard withdrew. In their zeal to close with the Norscan warlord, the dwarfs had ventured deep into the enemy ranks and the small knot of warriors, shields facing in every direction, was like a bronze island surrounded by foes.

  Reaching the end of the open ground that had suddenly appeared around him, the Norscan warlord turned his chariot and charged again. The attack came swiftly, and more dwarf warriors fell to the chariot blades without even striking back. Bagrik and his thanes were staggered by the brutal assault and the dwarf king nearly fell.

  ‘While he rides that machine, we cannot touch the heathen,’ said Morek, breathing hard from below the war shield. ‘We need to upend him.’

  Bagrik scowled as the foe rode out his momentum, gathering speed for another deadly pass. He quickly regarded the handful of hearth guard warriors that remained. From the edge of his vision, he saw the distant lancehead of elven knights falter, Prince Ithalred clutching his throat suddenly as if being strangled. The elf fell from his steed and was lost from view. He was in peril and the elf lay prone. This final reckoning was not unfolding as Bagrik had envisioned.

  ‘Set me down,’ he snarled at his thanes, returning to his own battle.

  ‘My king, you can barely walk,’ said Morek.

  ‘Do it!’ snapped Bagrik, ignoring the hearth guard captain’s protests.

  The thanes obeyed and put the war shield on the ground, the hearth guard that were left locking t
heir shields together in a feeble wall of bronze and iron in front of them. Quickly, they unclasped the manacles around Bagrik’s boots and the king hobbled off the shield to stand with his thanes. Looking over the shield wall, Bagrik saw that the Norscan warlord had whirled around and was coming again.

  ‘Crouch down,’ he said, stowing his axe and gripping the lip of the massive war shield with both hands. ‘Here and here,’ he added, nodding to either side for the thanes to follow his lead.

  Stowing their blades, Haggar first yanking the banner of Ungor free and ramming it hard into the earth beside him, both dwarfs gripped the war shield like their king.

  ‘When he tears through the hearth guard, lift the war shield up and get behind it,’ Bagrik told them. ‘Stay strong and don’t give any ground, not even an inch!’

  ‘We are unyielding…’ said Morek.

  ‘…strong as stone and steel,’ Haggar concluded.

  As Bagrik had predicted, the Norscan warlord smashed through the hearth guard wall, killing those unlucky enough to be in his path in a chorus of screams and showered blood. Beyond the slain warriors, he found a stern-faced dwarf king and his thanes waiting.

  ‘Heave!’ Bagrik yelled.

  The three dwarfs lifted the war shield as one, thrusting it up at a high angle.

  Carried by the momentum of his charge, the Norscan warlord didn’t have time to slow and the chariot crashed against the gromril bulwark. Bagrik and his thanes roared together, ramming their shoulders against the underside of the shield, boots gouging into the frozen ground as they were pushed back. The crack of wrenching bone echoed dully through the metal, as the war machine lurched madly to its side, frame splintering when it struck the ground.

  Gasping for breath, Bagrik staggered backwards and together with Morek and Haggar, let the war shield drop. It fell with a clatter of resounding gromril and was still. The three dwarfs turned on their heels.