by Warhammer
‘Or to the gateway in sunken Melay – that would clean his armour for him,’ said Kelmain.
‘I don’t think our last scouting team returned from testing the path we thought led into the heart of Firemount. Some lava might heat our large friend up nicely.’
‘Or to Ulthuan, to teach the elves what happens to those who defy the champions of the Blood God,’ said Lhoigor in an almost perfect copy of the Chaos champion’s booming manner. Kelmain laughed, and so eerie was the sound of his mirth that the beastmen looked up and shuddered.
‘Get on with it,’ bellowed Grume. Kelmain shrugged and gestured expansively.
‘I see you have another plan, brother,’ said Lhoigor, a look of wicked mirth upon his face.
‘As ever, you understand me perfectly. There is more than one way to doom a dwarf.’ He picked up the orb of seeing he had taken from the ruins of ancient Lahmia. It felt cold as rock in his hands. The gem in the centre of the perfect sphere glittered with magical energy. He muttered the spell, and it rose into the air and swooped down to circle the Chaos warrior. Kelmain shut his eyes and concentrated on the link. His point of view shifted to that of the gem. It was his eye and he could see through it now.
‘This will lead you to that accursed dwarf,’ said Kelmain, and the spell allowed his voice to emerge from the Eye. ‘And allow us to witness your great victory! Go kill Gotrek Gurnisson,’ said Kelmain.
A little tired from the strain of the ritual, Kelmain yawned. His brother did likewise. A small significant feeling of triumph filled Kelmain as he prepared to shift his consciousness into the Eye. One way or another, Gotrek Gurnisson was as good as dead. And so was anybody with him.
Grume and his warriors were already heading out of the antechamber into snow.
‘You do not think that Grume can overcome Gotrek Gurnisson?’
‘He is tough and his force is very numerous, but even if he does not, it will serve our purposes. If they fail to overcome the Slayer, they will lure him here – there are things within the Paths of the Old Ones which can kill even him.’
CHAPTER THREE
The servants looked at him with awe as he entered the stable. Teclis was garbed for battle, wearing the war crown of Saphery and bearing the staff of Lileath. Ignoring their stares, he inspected the griffon. It was a magnificent beast, a winged eagle-headed lion, large enough for an elf to ride. It opened its mouth and let out an ear-piercing scream that caused the courtesans to shriek nervously and then giggle. It was a warcry that down through the ages had terrified the enemies of the elves. Now that the great dragons lay mostly dormant, these mighty magical creatures were the favoured aerial steeds of the elves. Of course, they were rare. This one, a champion racer, would have cost the ransom of a human king. The great breeder Ranagor had reared it with her own hand from an egg she had taken from the highest slopes of Mount Brood.
There were times Teclis wished he had learned to properly master a griffon, but he never had. It was a skill that only the strongest of elves could learn, and it was an art that had to be learned young. In his youth he had been too sickly. He would never be able to ride one of these magnificent creatures into battle without first paralysing its fierce will with magic, which would defeat the whole point. He would need to use a spell of stupefaction to make the thing docile enough to ride.
A spasm of dizziness passed through him. They were getting worse. He counted slowly to twenty and there was no surprise when the earth shook and the building quaked. His uncanny sensitivity to fluctuations in the level of magical energy around him, a side-effect of the spells he used to give himself normal health and energy, had forewarned him of the quake. He knew that he needed to get busy, that time was running out for his land and his people and, if the binding spells failed, for himself too, most likely.
He took a deep breath of the stable air. It held the overpowering stink of animal flesh and dung, and of feathers. His aged servants hooked the great saddle to the creature’s back, all the while trying to be careful of its mighty claws and great scimitar-like beak. They checked the girth and the bridle and then looked at him. He shrugged and exerted his will, muttering the words of the charm. He felt the flow of energy round about him, warming him as it always did, and he sent tendrils of it out to touch the great beast, to calm its fierce heart and sooth its burning brain. The creature’s eyelids drooped and its posture slumped as the spell took hold. It somehow looked smaller now, far less regal.
Teclis muttered an apology and limped forward, dragging himself wearily into the saddle and buckling himself in. Not for him the bravado of some young elves who rode bareback and unharnessed, and performed tricks on the backs of their steeds. He made sure all the buckles were in place, feeling slightly embarrassed as he did so. This was the way a child would ride, but he was taking no chances of falling from the saddle. Certainly, he knew spells of levitation, but were he to be stunned for a moment or distracted, or should the winds of magic simply not blow strong enough, a fall might prove fatal nonetheless.
His brother strode forward to look at him, ignoring the griffon’s enormous beak and huge claws with a calm that Teclis envied. Even the bravest usually showed signs of nervousness around the beasts, but not Tyrion. He seemed as comfortable and at ease as he had done over the dinner table, and it was no false bravado either.
‘Are you sure you do not wish me to accompany you?’ he said.
‘Your duties lie here, brother, with our fleet, and this is a task best accomplished by sorcery alone.’
‘I bow to your superior knowledge, then, but it’s been my experience that a well-honed blade can prove useful at the most unexpected of moments.’
Teclis tapped the blade that hung at his side with his left hand. ‘I have a well-honed blade, and I was taught to use it by a master,’ he said.
Tyrion grinned and shrugged. ‘I hope you learned my lessons well, little brother.’
The affection and condescension in his tone irritated Teclis no end, but he hid them behind a sour smile. ‘May you live a thousand years, brother.’
‘And thee, Teclis of the White Tower.’ With his usual impeccable timing, Tyrion stepped back out of the griffon’s way and executed a perfect courtly bow.
He waved to the women and to his servants, drew back on the reins and waited. The griffon’s haunches bunched beneath him as its muscles tensed for the spring. He felt a momentary dizzy lurch in his stomach as the creature bounded forward and launched itself into space through the opening in the balcony. For a brief giddy moment he saw the entire city spread out beneath him, from the palace-temple of the Phoenix King to the great statue of Aenarion that greeted the returning sailors in the harbour, all illuminated by the golden sunlight of Ulthuan.
His stomach lurched further as the griffon dropped earthward. He felt a momentary panic. The restraining harness that had seemed like such a good idea a few moments ago now felt like a death-trap. In the moments it would take to release it and cast a spell of levitation, he and his mount would be spattered on the hard marble below. He fought down the urge to close his eyes, and watched as the purple-tiled rooftops of the villas of the lesser nobles came closer.
Then, the griffon spread its enormous pinions with a crack. They beat the air with the force of thunderbolts. For a moment, the heart-stopping descent was arrested and the creature seemed to float on the very air, caught for a heartbeat between the power of gravity and the force of its own upward motion. For a second Teclis felt weightless, caught between horror and exhilaration, then the griffon increased the force of its wingbeats, and its gigantic, magical strength triumphed over the earth’s pull.
Beneath him, Teclis could feel its chest expand and contract as it breathed in time with its wing movements. He could feel the metronome of its heart, driving blood to muscles, powering sinews like some mighty engine. The griffon let out an ear-piercing shriek of pure triumph and Teclis knew exactly how it felt. Looking down at the city stretched beneath him like the model town in some elvish infan
t’s playroom, he was exultant. Perhaps this was how the gods felt, he thought, when they looked down from the heavens to see how their mortal pawns were behaving.
He saw the people in the street – the Tiranoci in their chariots, proud dragonlords on their horses, scholar-slaves from far Cathay, merchants from a dozen lands of men – all look up at him. Did they recognise him, the premier wizard of this land, going about his business? It did not really matter. They looked up in awe and wonder at the sight of an elven lord passing overhead and they shouted and waved in greeting. He waved back, letting the steed skim over the rooftops out towards the harbour, to the thousands of towering masts that marked the position of the ships.
He passed over the decaying mansions, and the empty houses, noticed the half-empty streets built to accommodate ten times the current number of inhabitants and some of the feeling of triumph drained out of him. The realisation struck him with the force of a hammer blow, as it always did, that his people were a dying race. No amount of pomp and circumstance could conceal that. The endless parades and ceremonies could not hide it. The towering genius that had lined every avenue with mighty statues and soaring columns was fading from this world. Slaves and outsiders inhabited many of the buildings round the harbour, filling them with buzzing life that counterfeited the ancient glories of Lothern. But it was not elvish life. It was the life of outsiders, of people who had come to this island continent but recently, and who had never set foot outside the foreigners’ quarter of this one city.
As it often did, a vision took form in his mind, of the inevitable death of all he held dear. One day, he knew, these streets, this city, this whole continent would be empty of elves. His people would be gone, leaving not even ghosts, and only the footsteps of those strangers would echo through the ruins of what had once been their homes.
He tried to dismiss the image but he could not. Like all elves he was prone to melancholy, but unlike his kindred, he did not revel in it. He despised it as a weakness, but now, leaving this ancient glorious city for what might prove to be the last time, he could not resist giving in to the impulse. Already, he could see that the number of human ships in the harbour near outnumbered the elvish ones.
True, there were many mighty Eagles, Falcons and Bloodhawks, their long lean lines designed to penetrate the waves like a spear. Driven by magical winds they were the fastest, most manoeuvrable craft on the sea, but even here in their home city, in the greatest of all elf ports they were hemmed in by the craft of others. Here were mighty galleons from Bretonnia and Marienburg. Below him he could see dhows from Araby, their sails like the fins of sharks, and junks from Far Cathay, with towering stern-castles and lateen rigs designed to catch the winds of distant seas. They had all come here to trade, to purchase the magical wares, and powerful drugs and medicines for which the elves were famous, and in return they had brought silk, exotic woods, perfumes, spices, and trained pleasure slaves; all the things required to make comfortable the twilight years of his people.
The salt tang of the sea caught his nostrils. He caught sight of a human gazing up at him with a spyglass from the crow’s nest of one of the ships. He fought down the catlike malign urge to send his griffon flying close to the man’s head to terrify him and pulled on the reins turning his mount upwards and northwards, towards the clouds and the distant mountains wreathed in the powerful aura of ancient and mighty spells. He realised for a moment he had been tempted by the old cruelty of his people, who saw the lives of other lesser races as nothing more than playthings, and he felt a surge of the sickness and self-hatred that made him so unlike the rest of his people.
There were times when he felt that the elves, in their arrogance, deserved to be replaced, to be superceded by the younger races. At least they still strove to build things, to learn, to make things anew, and in many ways they were succeeding. Instead his people lived in the past, in dreams of long-gone glories. To them all knowledge worth possessing was already known, all sorceries perfected to their highest level by elvish adepts. Teclis had studied the mysteries of magic long and hard, and he knew how deeply his people deceived themselves. In his youth, he had dreamed of uncovering new spells and recovering lost arts, and he had done so; but in recent years even that had lost its savour, and there were things he sometimes wished he had not learned.
He thought of the letter he had left with his brother to give to the Phoenix King explaining what was happening. He thought of the messages already dispatched by sorcerous means to the adepts of the White Tower. He had done what he could to forewarn those he was sworn to protect, and now he had to do his duty or die in the attempt. Considering the magnitude of the task that faced him, the latter eventuality seemed not unlikely.
He tugged the reins of the docile griffon and sent it arcing towards the distant mountains.
Beneath him he could see the carved peaks of Carillion. Ancient magic had reformed them into gigantic statues, a testimony to the power of the elves. Teclis shuddered to think how much magical energy, how many years of wizardly labour, had gone into carving those stones into the shapes of great beasts. Here two mighty pegasi flanked the valley, each a hundred times the height of an elf. Clouds gathered beneath their wings. Each was poised to take flight or strike with a massive hoof. It seemed like at any moment they might come to life and crush him like a small and pathetic insect.
They were not simply for show either. His mage sight showed him that they were wrapped around with spells of fantastic complexity, lattices of pure mystical energy that pulsed and crackled with power. They were part of the huge web of spells that covered the continent of Ulthuan and kept it stable. Without it to bleed off power and shape it to other uses, the entire land would become unstable and sink once more beneath the waves or be torn apart in immense volcanic convulsions. These huge statues were far from the mightiest works of his people. In the northlands entire mountains had been carved into the semblance of ever more fantastic and grotesque beasts.
There is a mad strain in us, he thought, it burns stronger in the hearts of our dark kindred of Naggaroth but it lurks in the heart of every elf. Pride, madness and a warped genius for art showed in those statues, just as it showed in every elf city. Perhaps the dwarfs are right about us, he thought. Perhaps we are indeed cursed. He dismissed the thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.
He circled the griffon over the valley, seeking the thing he knew he would find in the shadow of those mighty wings. It blazed in his mage sight now, even more brightly than the flows of magic through the waypaths. This was new. It had not been so before, when last he had passed this way. Something was interfering with the work of the ancients here.
He dropped the griffon closer. An enormous standing stone stood there, and it was this which the pegasi had been set to guard. It was monolithic, eroded by millennia of strange weather, and yet it still stood.
In the side of the hill, in the shadow of the stone, was an entranceway. It led down into an antechamber that had been sealed for millennia, and with good reason. Behind it lay the work of those capable of challenging all the power and wisdom of the elves, artefacts of a people who had left these lands while his ancestors were still barbarians. This was the accursed place Tasirion had mentioned in his book, one of several to be found in ancient Ulthuan.
He dragged on the top rein giving the griffon the signal to land. He could see nothing threatening, but he was cautious. Many strange monsters were to be found in these lands, and sometimes, war parties of dark elves made it even this close to Lothern. It would not do to take every precaution against sorcery and find himself chopped down by some poisoned arrow.
Even as the beast descended, a wave of weakness passed through him again, and the earth shook. The stone danced. The mighty winged horses shivered as if afraid. In the distance, burning mountains spouted strange multi-coloured clouds into the sky. Teclis cursed. Whatever it was, it was getting stronger, either that or he was nearer the epicentre.
The griffon’s claws touched earth.
He felt the beast’s muscles contract beneath him as it absorbed the force of impact. It paused there, uncertain as to what to do as the earth quivered beneath it. A moment later things had settled once more. Teclis descended from the saddle, struggling with the illusion that the earth would begin to shake once more or that he would somehow sink into it as if it were water. An earthquake was something that unsettled the senses in many ways, and made the brain doubt many things. He was almost surprised when the ground did not give way.
He strode closer to the entrance now, studying it. There was a stone arch and stone gates blocking the way forward. On the gate was inscribed the ancient edict forbidding any elf to proceed further. Teclis knew he was breaking laws made in the time of making itself by opening them. It was a crime punishable by death. This was one reason he had not wanted his brother with him.
Not that such things would have mattered to most elves. The spells to unlock these forbidden vaults were known to very few: the Everqueen, a few of the masters of the White Tower, and himself. Tasirion had read them and used them to his eternal regret centuries ago. His fate had been a warning to others who might disturb what lay here. Teclis considered this for a moment, and then spoke the spell. The wards laid by his forebears opened and the huge door slid silently inwards, leading down into a massive darkened antechamber. On the far side of the chamber was an archway, and through it he could see a road that led down into darkness.
The great arch was many times his height. It was carved in ancient-looking runes and the toad-like heads of an ancient race were carved in it. He could see the flow of powerful magic within it. It emanated a sense of evil that was almost palpable. Teclis shuddered and muttered a charm against Chaos even as he strode out of the balmy sunlight and into the cool shadows. The doorway slid shut behind him. He proceeded downwards under several more archways. The walls were huge blocks of dressed stone carved with odd linear runes. He sensed evil within them too.