by Warhammer
‘Hold here until the guard is fully engaged and the signal is given,’ said Odgin. ‘When you leave the barn, march straight ahead. The west gate of the old pasture wall is only a hundred yards beyond, and once through it, your force will be shielded from the eyes of the orcs.’
Gotrek spat, a disgusted sneer twisting his face. Felix smirked. Even when it made tactical sense, Gotrek didn’t care to hide from an enemy.
There was a short wait. Then, from across the fortress came the clatter of chains and gears, and Felix could see the huge doors of the main gate swinging out and the portcullis rising. With a fierce shout, the Barak Varr guard marched forwards into the mouth of the gate, helms and axe blades flashing in the morning sun.
A rising roar from beyond the wall echoed their shout. It grew louder and more savage with each second.
‘They’ve seen the bait,’ said Thorgig, chewing his lip. It looked to Felix as if the young dwarf would rather be at the main gate than here.
Soon after came the unmistakable sound of two armies slamming together shield to shield and axe to axe. Thorgig’s eyes glowed, and the other dwarfs shifted restlessly, gripping their weapons and muttering to themselves.
Gotrek groaned and massaged his temples. ‘Don’t suppose they could fight quietly?’ he grumbled.
The sound of battle intensified. Felix could see violent movement in the open arch of the main gate – flashes of steel, falling bodies, surging lines of green and grey.
Finally, a flutter of red came from the wall above the gate – a banner waving back and forth.
‘That’s it,’ said Odgin. ‘The whole horde’s coming now. Off you go.’
Hamnir saluted Odgin, fist over his heart. ‘You have my thanks, Odgin Stormwall. Karak Hirn will not forget this.’
Odgin returned the salute, grinning. ‘Remember it next time we come to trade sea pearls for sword steel, prince.’
Hamnir motioned his troops forward and marched down the ramp into the tunnel. It was a cramped space compared to the Rising Road, with only room enough for four dwarfs to march abreast. After less than two hundred paces it ended in another ramp, rising, it seemed, to a blank ceiling.
Hamnir called a halt as Thorgig stepped to a lever in the left wall.
‘Companies ready!’ called Hamnir.
The dwarfs drew their axes and hammers. Quarrellers set bolts on strings. Gotrek took a drink from his canteen. Felix hefted his sword, nervous.
‘Open!’ called Hamnir.
Thorgig pulled the lever. With a rumble of hidden gears, the ceiling rose and split, and bright morning sunlight poured into the darkness.
Hamnir raised his axe. ‘Forward, sons of Grungni! March!’
The column started up the ramp, Hamnir in the lead, Gotrek and Felix in the first rank with Thorgig and Kagrin. They came up in a ruined barn. The building was roofless – the walls mere heaps of rubble. Skeletons of sheep and cattle were littered everywhere, bits of rotting meat still stuck to them.
As the dwarfs stepped from the barn and began marching towards the pasture gate directly ahead of them, Felix looked around at the orc camp to their right – an endless clutter of ragged skin tents, gutted and toppled outbuildings, make-shift boar pens and refuse, that spread out in all directions from the front gate of the dwarf fortress. Crude, leering faces were painted on the tents in blood and dung. Flies buzzed over heaps of rotting garbage on which human bodies and bones had been tossed. Primitive totems hung above the bigger tents, proclaiming the dominance of this or that chieftain.
From all over this shambles, orcs ran towards the main gate. The entire camp seethed with movement. Warbosses and their lieutenants chivvied their fractious troops towards the open gate with curses, kicks and slaps. Hulking green warriors snatched up their weapons and beat their chests. Tiny goblins unleashed fang-toothed, four-legged beasts that looked like deformed pigs. Blood-daubed war banners, decorated with severed human and dwarf heads, waved above swarms of enraged orcs, all roaring challenges.
There was a mob mustering directly behind a stand of tents just to the right of the dwarf column – so close that Felix could have seen the yellows of their eyes if they had been facing towards them.
The bulk of the fort was between Hamnir’s force and the main gate, so it was impossible to see how well the Barak Varr guards were faring, but the sound of steel on steel still rang in Felix’s ears, so he knew they weren’t dead yet.
Thorgig ground his teeth. ‘Not fair,’ he said, under his breath.
Felix shook his head. Imagine wanting to be in the way of that savage green avalanche. He, for one, was happy to be slipping out of the back door. He looked around. They were almost halfway to the pasture wall gate, but the tail of the column had not yet emerged from the tunnel in the barn.
Suddenly, from the right, came a belligerent shriek, very close. The entire dwarf column looked right. A goblin that had been trying to corral one of its unruly pets had seen them. It turned tail and ran, bug-eyed. The dwarf quarrellers fired, and a score of crossbow bolts flashed after it. They were too late. The little greenskin dodged around a tent and ran towards the mustering orcs, screaming at the top of his lungs.
‘That’s done it,’ said a dwarf behind Felix.
‘Good,’ said Thorgig.
Orcs were turning and pointing and calling to their mates. Warbosses were screaming orders.
Hamnir cursed. ‘Double time!’ he shouted. ‘Double time! Hurry it up!’
‘You running, shopkeep?’ asked Gotrek as the dwarf column picked up its pace. ‘Can’t stomach a good set-to any more?’
‘If I lose half my troops here for the sake of “a good set-to”,’ snarled Hamnir, his face tight, ‘what am I to do at Karak Hirn, when the battle means something?’
Gotrek glared at Hamnir’s logic, but continued trotting along with the others, much to Felix’s relief.
The orcs were coming. A mob of massive green-skinned warriors poured around the shattered houses, roaring for dwarf blood, bone and skin totems bobbing like grisly marionettes overhead. Goblins scampered in their wake, long knifes glinting.
Hamnir’s head swivelled from them to the gate and back. ‘We’re not going to make it,’ he muttered. ‘We’re not going to make it.’
‘Then turn and fight, Grimnir curse you!’ said Gotrek.
Thorgig looked uneasily at Hamnir. ‘Your orders, prince?’
‘Orders,’ said Hamnir, as if he didn’t know what the word meant. ‘Yes, of course. I…’ He looked around again, eyes showing white. The orcs were fifty feet away and closing fast. ‘Grungni take it. Quarrellers, right! Fire! Fire! Column, dress right!’ His voice was thin with tension.
The quarrellers fired, and twenty greenskins went down. There was no time for a second volley. The orcs were on them, slamming into the right side of the column in a piecemeal charge as the dwarfs belatedly turned out to face them.
Axe and cleaver met blade-to-blade and haft-to-haft in an impact that Felix could feel through his feet. Notched black iron smashed through shining dwarf mail and sturdy dwarf shields, biting deep into dwarf flesh. Gleaming dwarf axes chopped through leather and scrap armour, cleaving green orc-flesh and shattering white orc-bone.
Gotrek pushed to the front line and laid about him like a thresher, separating orcs from their sinewy limbs and their ugly, thick-skulled heads. Felix drew his dragon sword, Karaghul, and joined him, keeping just out of the sweep of the Slayer’s great axe. He stabbed a goblin in the mouth and ducked a club like a tree stump, swung by an orc with brass hoops piercing his up-jutting tusks.
Dwarfs fell right and left under the orc onslaught, but the line never wavered. They took the orcs’ savage blows on their shields with stoic determination, and fought back with grim, glowering calm. There were no wild attacks, no desperate lunges, only a steady, relentless butchery that dropped orcs one after another. Even Hamnir was calming, as if the physical work of swinging his axe was steadying him.
A mob of orcs broke an
d ran, pin-cushioned with bolts and driven back by the dwarfs’ implacable attack. The gang beside them caught their panic and retreated as well, bellowing savage curses.
‘We’re turning them,’ said Hamnir, dodging back from a cleaver swipe and cutting its owner’s wrist to the bone. ‘We just might–’
A thunderous roar came from the cluster of tents. Felix kicked a goblin in the face and looked up. An enormous orc warboss was stomping towards the battle with a crowd of black orc lieutenants surrounding him. He bellowed at the fleeing orcs and pointed an angry finger at the dwarf column.
The orcs cringed from his displeasure and reluctantly turned back towards the dwarfs.
‘Luck of the dwarfs,’ growled Hamnir, bashing an orc in the knee with his shield.
‘The big one’s put the fear of Gork in them,’ said Gotrek. He seemed almost pleased.
The warboss smashed into the centre of the dwarf column, his black orcs and the backsliders beside him. His huge cleaver cut a bloody trench through a company of Ironbreakers. It seemed to glow with a greenish light. Dead dwarfs flew back, severed limbs spinning away as the boss chopped and hewed. His black orc lieutenants ploughed in after him. Bolstered by his presence, the orcs attacked with renewed fury all along the dwarf line.
Hamnir cursed under his breath. ‘You wanted a good set-to, Gurnisson,’ he snapped over his shoulder. ‘On your way, then.’
Gotrek was already out of earshot, charging down the column towards the rampaging orc chieftain. Felix hurried after him, as did Thorgig and Kagrin.
‘Want to see the crested coward in action,’ Thorgig grunted. ‘Maybe he’ll punch the orc in the nose when he isn’t ready.’
Kagrin smirked, but said nothing.
The warboss was huge – twice the height of a dwarf, and nearly as wide as it was tall. Its armour was a patchwork of scrap metal and looted plate. Dwarf breastplates served it for shoulder pieces. A necklace of staring human heads hung around its tree-trunk neck, woven together by their hair. As Gotrek and Felix got closer, Felix heard an angry, high-pitched screaming, and realised it was the boss’s green-glowing cleaver, keening for blood. The runes on Gotrek’s axe glowed red as it neared the fell weapon.
All around the brute was chaos – dwarf warriors pushing forwards to get into the fight, quarrellers angling to get a clear shot, the warboss’s hulking lieutenants hacking and chopping right and left, trying to win favour with feats of mad savagery.
The warboss cut a dwarf in two, the cleaver slicing through the warrior’s heavy ringmail as if it were butter. The metal literally melted and flowed at its touch.
Gotrek leapt up on a pile of dwarf bodies and swung his axe, its runes trailing red. The orc threw up his cleaver and the weapons came together in a shivering clash. Sparks flew. The cleaver shrieked like a wounded daemon. The warboss roared and lashed out, furious at being thwarted. Gotrek blocked and bashed back, and the axe and cleaver began weaving a whirling cage of steel and iron as he and the orc hacked and countered.
The boss’s black orc lieutenants surged forwards, howling for blood. Felix, Thorgig and Kagrin closed with them to protect Gotrek’s flanks. Felix dodged a serrated axe swung by a one-eyed orc, then stepped in and stabbed the monster in its remaining eye. It bellowed in rage and pain, striking out blindly in all directions. A wild swing gutted one of its comrades. Two more killed it and thrust it behind them.
Felix jumped back as the orcs slashed at him. There was no sense parrying. The massive axes would only shatter his blade and numb his arm. On Gotrek’s left, Thorgig bashed an orc’s club aside with his shield and chopped through its knee. It toppled like a tree. A cleaver caught the wings of Thorgig’s helmet and knocked it flying. He blocked another attack with his axe. The force of the blow nearly flattened him. Kagrin, who had been hanging back, darted in and gashed the orc in the side with a beautifully made hand axe. Thorgig finished it off.
Gotrek parried another swing of the warboss’s cleaver, then turned his axe so it screeched down the cleaver’s haft and severed the orc’s fingers. They dropped away like fat green grubs, and the glowing cleaver fell. The warboss roared and fumbled uselessly for it with its bloody stumps. Gotrek jumped up onto its knee and split its bony skull down to its sternum.
The black orcs stared as Gotrek rode the huge orc’s collapsing body to the ground, and two died from dwarf axes before they recovered themselves. Three leapt at Gotrek, all trying to reach him first. He fanned them back with his axe and snatched up the warboss’s cleaver. It crackled with angry green energy where it touched his skin. Gotrek didn’t flinch.
‘Who’s the next boss?’ he called. ‘Who wants it?’
As the three black orcs advanced again, Gotrek tossed the humming cleaver behind them. They lifted their eyes, following its arc, then turned and dived, elbowing and punching each other to get at it. The other lieutenants looked back at the commotion and saw the first three fighting for the cleaver. They roared and joined the scuffle, their dwarf opponents forgotten.
The dwarfs pressed forwards, swinging for the orcs’ backs, but Gotrek threw out a hand.
‘Don’t engage!’ he shouted. ‘Let them fight.’
The dwarfs stepped back. The orc brawl was turning deadly. One of the lieutenants buried his axe in the chest of another. Others were bellowing for their followers to come to their aid. Orcs began peeling away from their fights all along the dwarf column to rally to their leaders. Felix saw the glowing cleaver cut an orc’s head off, but its wielder was stabbed in the back and another took it up.
Gotrek wiped his axe on the trampled grass. ‘That’s done it,’ he said, satisfied, and started to the front of the column again. Felix joined him.
Thorgig glared at Gotrek’s back as he retrieved his dented helmet and followed with Kagrin. He seemed disappointed that the Slayer had prevailed.
More and more orcs were deserting the dwarf line to join the scrum over the cleaver. Others were fighting amongst themselves. By the time Gotrek and Felix rejoined Hamnir, the dwarfs’ line of march was clear.
Hamnir grunted, reluctantly impressed. ‘Thought you’d take the Slayer’s way, and try to fight them all while we died behind you.’
‘I swore to protect you,’ Gotrek said, coldly. ‘I don’t break my oaths.’
The column started forwards as the orcs fought on.
CHAPTER FOUR
The dwarfs’ mood, already grim because of the casualties the orcs had inflicted upon them during their exit from Barak Varr, grew grimmer still the deeper they travelled into the Badlands. Though they saw few orcs, signs of their rampage were everywhere.
The land had been plagued by the orc hordes for as long as dwarfs and men had settled there. Their invasions were as common as spring floods, and almost as predictable, and the hardy folk of the plains protected themselves from them as if from a storm. The few settlements huddled tightly around strong keeps, into which the farmers and their livestock could retreat when the greenskins came. There they would wait out the ravaging of their farms until the savage tide receded, then return to their land and rebuild.
This time, because so many men and dwarfs had gone north to fight, it had been much worse. There had been no one to stop them, and the orcs had followed their lust for slaughter wherever it took them. The devastation was entirely random. Hamnir’s army came upon villages burned to the ground, everyone slain, and then, not five miles on, others absolutely untouched, the farmers harvesting their fields with nervous eyes straying to the horizon and look-outs posted on every hill.
They passed castles with banners waving, and others that were nothing but charred ruins. The farms and houses around these were razed to the ground, the picked bones of the peasants and their families strewn about the blackened circles of cooking fires. Nothing edible was left where the orcs had been. Livestock had been eaten, fruit trees and grain bins stripped, hogsheads of ale and wine drained and smashed.
The only men who hadn’t been thrown into the stew pot were those
who had been used for sport. Rotting corpses in ruined armour had been nailed, spread-eagled, to trees, crude targets painted on their chests. Dozens of black arrows stuck out of them. Most had missed the bulls-eye. Other corpses hung from the battlements of castles as warnings, savagely mutilated.
It was a grim march, and Gotrek was grim company, even more taciturn and dour than usual. He kept as far from Hamnir as he could, walking at the back near the baggage train, while Hamnir marched at the head. Only when the scouts reported orcs or other dangers in the vicinity did Gotrek return to the front and take up a guard position near his old companion.
The Slayer spoke to Felix hardly more than to Hamnir. He seemed entirely withdrawn, staring at the ground ahead of him as he marched, and muttering under his breath, ignoring Felix entirely. The other dwarfs ignored him too, eyeing him warily if they looked at him at all. Felix couldn’t remember any other time in his travels with Gotrek when he felt more of an outsider, more alone. On all their other adventures, there had been at least a few other humans with them – Max, Ulrika – though she wasn’t human any more, was she? Here, he seemed the only member of his species for a hundred leagues. It was a strange, lonely feeling.
At every stop, while the other dwarfs smoked pipes or cooked up sausages and mushrooms, or took their ease, and Felix penned the day’s events in his journal, Thorgig’s silent friend Kagrin took out a gold-trimmed dagger and a set of tiny files, chisels and gouges, and worked impossibly intricate designs into the pommel and crosspiece. He did these entirely freehand, and yet the work was perfectly symmetrical and precise, the epitome of the angular geometric style the dwarfs favoured. Even the other dwarfs were impressed, stopping in the middle of setting up their tents to watch him work and give him praise or advice. He took both without a word, only nodding curtly and bending even more intently over his work.