by Warhammer
Thorgig cursed under his breath. ‘Faint but clear. This is bad.’
‘I hear nothing,’ said Felix.
Thorgig brightened. ‘That is because you are a human. Good. The hearing of orcs is as inferior as that of men, so perhaps we are safe.’
Felix grunted, annoyed once again by the offhand insult.
Thorgig looked up, colouring. ‘My apologies, Herr Jaeger. I know you don’t like to hear about human shortcomings. You saved Kagrin’s life, and mine. I owe you more respect. I will refrain from speaking of them in your presence.’
Felix tensed, choking back the urge to spit a few dwarf shortcomings in Thorgig’s face, but what was the use? He wasn’t trying to be insulting. In fact, he thought he was being polite. He didn’t know any better, and now wasn’t the time to educate him.
Felix bowed, hiding a smirk. ‘I am humbled and honoured by your sense of tact, Thorgig Helmgard,’ he said.
Thorgig nodded, pleased. ‘Thank you, Herr Jaeger. The courtesy of the dwarfs seems to be rubbing off on you. This way.’
Felix followed him down the hall, shaking his head in wonder.
They skulked silently towards the more populated area of the mine, and were able to find and take almost all the things on Hamnir’s list without arousing the attention of any orcs. The exception was beer. Every cask they found had been broached, smashed or drained. They did however find some stale dwarf flat bread that apparently hadn’t appealed to the orc palate. They dumped it into the barrow along with two large skins of water, some shovels, and a jar of lamp oil, and hurried back to the kruk.
Felix was astounded by how much rock the brothers had dug in their absence. The hole in the wall was nearly a foot and a half deep already, and though too short for Felix to stand up in, wider than a dwarf. The three brothers did not appear to have slowed, keeping up their steady, machine-like rhythm without pause. The others had cleared away the rubble of their exertions as best they could, and Felix and Thorgig got to work shovelling it up and dumping it in the barrow. Then Felix wheeled it off down the corridor and dumped it out of the way.
For the next ten hours that was all he did. While the dwarfs chipped at the wall, and the hole got incrementally deeper, Felix shovelled the scrapings into the barrow and carried them away. It was all he could contribute. Asking him to swing a pick would only have slowed them down. He’d have been lucky to dig two inches in an hour.
At the two-hour mark, the brothers had dug as deep as three dwarfs standing side by side could dig, and fell back, exhausted. Galin took over alone, stripped to the waist, swinging at a steady unwavering pace that spoke of long experience. Hamnir and Narin worked behind him, widening the hole and scraping the tailings out to the passage where Felix picked them up.
The other dwarfs rested as best they could, and Hamnir sent Leatherbeard, and then, an hour later, Narin, to the kruk door to listen for orc patrols.
After two hours, Galin stumbled out of the shallow hole, having dug a further foot and a half. He was bathed in sweat and shaking. Leatherbeard took his place, removing his mask so that he might breathe better, but only after he was hidden in the hole. Two hours later and a foot deeper, he was replaced by Gotrek, who set at the rock as if it was a horde of orcs. Stone and dust flew.
‘Easy, Slayer,’ said Galin, lifting his head from where he lay. ‘You won’t last at that pace.’
‘I know my limits,’ said Gotrek, and continued at the same furious rate.
For a time, he was faster than the others had been, cutting through a foot of rock in an hour, but as he entered his second hour, his progress slowed, his bare back running with sweat. Even then, he maintained the pace that Leatherbeard had, and looked as if he could continue at that speed indefinitely. Although the others praised him and encouraged him, he seemed dissatisfied, growling and muttering.
Finally, he stepped out of the hole, wiping his brow and scowling.
‘Ready to switch?’ asked Ragar, sitting up. He had had six hours’ rest and looked reasonably fresh.
Gotrek shook his head, picked up a second pick, and disappeared back into the hole without a word.
The other dwarfs crowded around the opening, watching gape-mouthed as Gotrek attacked the workface with the two picks, swinging them as easily and skilfully as his companions had swung one. Sparks and chunks of sandstone flew everywhere.
His eyes glowed. ‘Now we’ll make some time,’ he growled as he settled down into a rhythm. His massive muscles shone with sweat in the lamplight. The waste rock piled up around Gotrek’s feet at an amazing rate.
‘He’s mad,’ said Galin.
‘He’ll wear himself to a thread,’ said Narin.
Hamnir stared hard at Gotrek’s back, as if he meant to order the Slayer to pace himself, but instead, he backed into the tunnel and turned away.
Gotrek went three more hours and dug four more feet, an unheard-of feat that had the others, the Rassmusson brothers particularly, stiff with jealousy.
‘Isn’t proper form,’ sniffed Karl, as he approached the workface for his second shift and swung his pick.
‘Would never do for real mining,’ agreed Arn, holding a lantern behind him.
‘Real mining’s for the long haul,’ nodded Karl.
Felix was becoming unutterably weary, and felt guilty for it. While the dwarfs had laboured heroically, he hadn’t done more than stoop and shovel and cart, but after twelve hours of it, he couldn’t keep his head up, and shortly after Karl began his second turn, he handed off the barrow to Thorgig and lay down on his bedroll in the darkness beyond the lanterns, pillowing his head with his old cloak.
He fell asleep almost instantly, but it was a troubled slumber. The feelings of malignant dread that he had felt upon entering the mine, and which had never entirely gone away no matter how much he had tried to force them down, bloomed in his dreams like night flowers, pale and putrid. Amorphous fears loomed in his unconscious, pressing in on him from all sides and threatening to smother him. Insectile whispering, like the vibration of glassine wings, buzzed vile urgings in his ears. He felt as if he was being chased down the mine’s cramped passages by an intangible evil that was everywhere and nowhere at once, but getting closer with every step. Whatever it was, it was going to kill him. He was going to die here. He would never leave these cursed tunnels. He would never see the sun again. Hands that were not hands were reaching out of the darkness to clutch at his throat. He could feel hard, cold claws slipping around his throat.
Felix snapped awake, panting. Sweat like ice prickled his brow. He sucked in a few deep breaths and looked around, his heart pounding. Flickering lamplight and the monotonous sound of pick striking rock came from the ragged hole in the wall. Around him, the dwarfs were asleep in their bedrolls, snoring like so many bullfrogs croaking.
He looked on them with a sudden loathing. Humans who had never met dwarfs often thought of them as just some breed of short men, but having spent so many years with Gotrek, Felix knew different. They were not men. They weren’t even cousins to men. They were another species – a strange race of insular burrowing animals, with the hoarding instincts of pack-rats, and the stubborn intransigence of mules. He stared at Thorgig, snoring next to him. How had he ever thought of these monsters as people? Look at them, with their flat, furred faces, their blunt paws, their coarse, clay-textured hides, their fat, bulbous noses – more like pig snouts, really.
Strange how he had never noticed it before, but all at once he couldn’t stand the sight of them – any of them. They repulsed him. Every aspect of them was revolting – and made all the worse by the fact that, unlike skaven or orcs or other monsters, they had somehow tricked men into accepting them as equals, superiors even! No! It was not to be countenanced. They were vile, stunted moles, grubbing in the earth, eating dirt and excreting gold, sacrificing his people to their rock-daemon gods, smashing the cities of his kind when they found them, and forcing him into his long hibernation.
He shuddered. He could no longer s
tomach their presence. Their stench made him gag. He could not allow them to live. If their wills could not be bent, then they must be destroyed. They stood in the way of his rightful domination of the world. He drew his dagger and stood, looking down at Thorgig. The foolish animal didn’t know his doom was upon him. Felix bent and covered the dwarf’s mouth as he plunged his blade into the artery under his jaw – hard to find through the beast’s cursed fur.
The dwarf struggled briefly, but then sank back. Felix looked around. None of the others had awakened. Good. He stepped to Narin, curled on his side. Felix covered his mouth too, and drove his dagger under the blond dwarf’s ear. He twitched and fought, but only for a second.
Beyond Narin was Gotrek. Felix’s heart raced. He stood over the sleeping Slayer, glaring at him. He was even more alien than the others – a muscle-bound freak with skin like pink granite, a stiff strip of hair like the coxcomb of a rooster and, as he knew from experience, the strength of ten of his kind. He reached down slowly and quietly. The Slayer was too dangerous. He would have to kill him with the first blow, or he would be ripped to pieces. He cupped his free hand to cover Gotrek’s mouth, and angled the tip of his blade towards the hinge of the jaw, as he had with the other two. One quick thrust and…
Gotrek’s one eye snapped open and his hand clamped around Felix’s wrist with blinding speed. Felix pulled back, trying to break free, but the dwarf’s grip was like iron. He fought to get away, punching and kicking, but the dwarf held on, taking the blows as if they were snowflakes falling. Gotrek caught his other wrist.
‘Manling,’ he said. ‘Manling, wake up.’
Felix tried to headbutt the dwarf. He couldn’t reach him. He thrashed in Gotrek’s unshakeable grip. He…
Woke up.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Felix blinked, confused. Gotrek was still in front of him, holding his wrists, but disorientingly, it was Felix who lay on his back and the dwarf who stood over him, scowling. Felix’s head spun with vertigo.
‘Waving a dagger about in your sleep, manling,’ Gotrek said as he let go. ‘You’ll do yourself an injury.’
Do himself an injury? He’d done more than that! He’d… Felix sat up, heart pounding, mind racing. By Sigmar, he’d murdered two of…
Thorgig and Narin were glaring at him from their bedrolls, cross and bleary with sleep. The other dwarfs were glaring at him from the shadows.
‘Don’t suppose you’d mind keeping your nightmares to yourself?’ said Narin sourly.
‘We’ve little enough time for sleep as it is,’ said Thorgig, and lay back down.
A dream! Felix’s heart flooded with relief. It had only been a dream!
‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I… I was fighting, er… daemons. I’ll try to be quieter about it in the future.’
He lay back as Gotrek returned to his bedroll. He didn’t want to try to explain to them what he had really been doing in his dream. He couldn’t explain it to himself. Where had those thoughts come from? He had never had a dream so strange, or so real, in all his life. He certainly had plenty of reasons to be annoyed with dwarfs – a surly, unsympathetic lot if ever there was one, so convinced of their superiority over men that they insulted him unthinkingly every time they opened their mouths. But annoyed enough to try to kill them? No.
He tried to remember what it was that had fuelled his murderous anger, but already the dream was fading, becoming unclear. All that remained in focus – vivid focus – as he closed his eyes was the feeling of all-consuming fury, and the image of the tip of his dagger sinking to the hilt under Thorgig’s ear.
He shivered and opened his eyes, then sat up and tied off his sword and dagger so it would be difficult to draw them in his sleep. Even with this precaution, he found it difficult to return to slumber, for fear of what he might do.
When next he woke, his mind clouded and heart heavy from unremembered dreams, Karl was just finishing his second two hours at the rock face, having followed Arn and Ragar before him. Between the three of them, they had dug four feet while Felix had slept, and now there was an argument going on amongst the dwarfs about who should follow him.
‘We’re not going fast enough,’ Hamnir was saying. ‘It is now the middle of the afternoon of the seventh day. Gorril’s army will have left Rodenheim two hours ago, and if all has gone as planned, they are almost halfway here. In three hours they will be waiting at the advance position to hear the blowing of the war horn, and if Galin reckons right, we still have four feet of rock to dig through. Another six hours of digging.’
‘Let me dig again,’ said Gotrek. ‘I’m fastest.’
‘Even you won’t be fast enough,’ said Galin. He sighed. ‘I knew it was impossible when we started it, but…’
‘Even if you do cut through in time,’ said Hamnir to Gotrek. ‘We need you fighting fit on the other side, not worn to a fare-thee-well.’
‘Getting into the hold is more important,’ said the Slayer. ‘I’ll do it.’
He took up two picks and stalked into the tunnel. The sharp clash of steel on stone started up immediately, sounding at an unheard-of pace. Gotrek was out-doing even his earlier stint at the workface.
Narin shook his head. ‘He won’t keep it up. It’s impossible.’
Hamnir chuckled. ‘He’ll keep it up just to spite you for saying so.’
Then there was nothing to do but wait, while the ceaseless rapid-fire hammering of Gotrek’s picks battered their ears. And waiting was something that the dwarfs, for all their talk of dwarf patience, didn’t do very well. Perhaps the strange oppressive atmosphere, which was clouding Felix’s mind, was also having an effect on the dwarfs’ tempers. They were snappish and out of sorts, alternately slumping against the walls of the corridor or fidgeting restlessly. Narin and Galin paced moodily up and down the hall, snarling at each other as they bumped shoulders. Leatherbeard tried to sleep, but only tossed and turned. Even the brothers Rassmusson were arguing amongst themselves, fighting over the sharing out of the last of the flat bread.
Then, slightly more than an hour later, Galin jumped up, eyes wide.
‘Did you hear?’ he cried, pointing to the tunnel.
The others looked up at him listlessly.
‘Hear what?’ asked Hamnir.
‘The boom!’ said Galin, excitedly. ‘The Slayer’s picks are booming as they strike the rock. We are close. Very close. Within two feet.’ He stepped into the tunnel.
Hamnir sprang up and followed him in. Felix and the dwarfs crowded around the entrance.
Galin was measuring the distance that Gotrek had cut in the last hour. ‘A little more than a foot,’ he muttered, scratching his head.
‘You said there were six more feet, at least.’
‘I, er, it appears I erred on the side of caution,’ said Galin.
‘Out,’ said Gotrek. ‘Give me room.’
The dwarfs stepped back. The Slayer was running with sweat. His one eye seemed glazed and unseeing, and the perfect control he usually had was slipping. His swings were wild and he was weaving on his feet, but his pace never slowed. It looked as if, were he to stop, he would fall, so he dared not stop.
‘If he keeps up this pace,’ said Galin, ‘we’ll be through in an hour.’
‘Excellent news!’ said Hamnir. ‘We will have half an hour to make our way through the hold and reach the gate. Hardly enough time, but better than four hours late.’
After that, the waiting was even more difficult, for the dwarfs couldn’t relax, knowing their goal was so close. They paced and fretted, drawing and then sheathing their weapons over and over again. They cursed each other for being impatient, and cursed Gotrek for being too slow.
Then, slightly less than an hour later, there was a clunk, and a pleased snort, and Gotrek called down the tunnel. ‘I’ve holed it.’
The dwarfs pushed into the tunnel as Gotrek’s hacking resumed. There was a fist-sized black hole halfway up the workface, which Gotrek was widening with every strike of his axe. The dwarfs
cheered, and nothing Gotrek could say could keep them out of the tunnel, watching over his shoulder.
Fifteen minutes later, the hole was a more than a foot wide and they could see things shining in the darkness through it. Galin stepped forwards. ‘Wait. The man will fit through that. Let him go through and work it from the other side.’
Gotrek nodded and stepped back. Galin waved Felix forwards and held up a lantern. Felix leaned through the hole and looked around. A clutter of half-seen golden treasures winked at him in the light of the flickering flame. The vault was a square shaft, about twelve feet to a side, which rose into darkness above as if it was the bottom of a well. With Galin and Hamnir’s help, Felix wormed through the hole and lowered himself down until his feet touched. Then he took the lantern and pick that Hamnir passed through the hole and got to work.
With each swing, he had new respect for the strength and endurance of the dwarfs. He was weary after ten minutes, and they had gone for hours. But even Felix’s inexpert hacking sped the work, and at last, after another fifteen minutes, the hole was wide enough for a dwarf to pass through. They cheered and then climbed one by one into the vault, Felix helping them to the floor.
Gotrek came through last and sat down wearily on a tapestry-covered casket, mopping his brow and staring blankly in front of him. Felix didn’t know if he had ever seen the Slayer look so exhausted. His huge arms were shaking with fatigue.
The other dwarfs held up their lanterns and looked around in wonder at the treasures in the rough-hewn vault. Beautiful suits of gold and gromril armour were displayed on wooden stands, with horned helmets above them, making it appear that ghostly dwarf warriors guarded the vault. Intricately worked caskets of gold and silver were piled on top of each other, nearly as valuable as the treasures they contained. A chalice of gold and polished stone sat on a black marble shrine. A great stone-headed maul, inscribed with runes on its every face, was mounted on the wall. An ancient green battle standard, the horn of Karak Hirn stitched into it in gold thread, was propped against a Cathay vase twice the height of a dwarf. Dwarf books were stacked in the corners, and rolled vellum maps were tucked into gold and silver tubes.