Masters of Stone and Steel - Gav Thorpe & Nick Kyme

by Warhammer

  ‘Oi!’ squeaked the goblin warlord, remembering something.

  Fangrak was already trudging away and turned to face Skartooth.

  ‘Oose clearin’ that rubble?’

  ‘Gozrag’s doin’ it; must be almost finished,’ Fangrak replied. Realisation dawned as he looked back down at the dwarfs encamped below.

  ‘Aw zog…’

  Thundin stepped before the great gates of Karak Varn, morning sun cresting the pinnacle of the mountain, and pulled a thick iron key attached to a chain around his neck from beneath his gromril armour. The ironbeard, and emissary to the High King himself, was standing at the head of the assembled dwarfs who had mustered in their clans, fully armoured and bearing weapons ready.

  With the other dwarfs looking on, Thundin placed the key into a hitherto concealed depression in the stone surface of one of the gates and it glowed dully. The dwarf muttered his gratitude to Grungni and with a broad, gauntleted hand turned the rune-key three times counter-clockwise. Beyond the gate from inside the hold, there came a dull metallic thunk as the locking teeth barring the door were released. Thundin turned the key again, this time clockwise but only once, and the scraping, clanking retort of the chains gathering on their reels could be heard faintly. Thundin stepped back and the great gates began to open.

  ‘We could have used one of those earlier,’ griped Rorek, standing at Uthor’s side a few feet behind Thundin. The other dwarfs from the initial expedition into the hold were nearby. ‘My back still aches from the climb.’

  ‘Or from when the war machine collapsed on top of you,’ Uthor replied, smirking beneath his beard.

  Rorek looked crestfallen as he remembered back to the collection of timber, screws and shredded rope that was Alfdreng. He was still trying to devise a way that he could break the news of its destruction to his engineer guildmasters back at the hold. They would not be pleased.

  ‘I’m sorry my friend,’ said Uthor, with a broad smile. ‘’Tis a key from the High King, forged by his rhunki. Only his gatekeeper or a trusted emissary may bear one. Your efforts were just as effective though, engineer,’ he added, ‘but far more entertaining.’ He laughed, slapping Rorek heartily on the back.

  The thane of Karak Kadrin was clearly in ebullient mood after his dark turn towards the end of the war council. Ever since the battle in the ravine, Uthor’s demeanour had been changeable. The engineer was baffled by it. With the loss of his war machine, shouldn’t he be the one in the doldrums? He had little time to ponder on it as with the way laid open, the dwarf throng started to muster inside. It was a sombre ceremony, punctuated by the din of clanking armour and scraping boots. A grim resolve welled up in the throng as they followed Thundin, a charged silence that was filled with determination and a desire for vengeance against the despoilers of Karak Varn.

  ‘Urk!’ shouted one of the Grim Brotherhood. The slayers were the first to enter the hold and, once through the great gate, barrelled past their comrades to set about a band of around thirty orcs labouring in the outer gateway hall. The greenskins looked dumbfounded as the slayers charged, midway through hauling rocks away to the sides of the chamber in crude-looking wooden carts and bearing picks and shovels.

  An orc overseer, uncoiling a barbed whip, could only gurgle a warning as Dunrik’s throwing axe thudded into its neck. A second spinning blade struck the greenskin’s body as it clutched ineffectually at its violently haemorrhaging jugular vein.

  A troll, whom the overseer had been goading to lift a large boulder out of their path when the dwarfs attacked, stared stupidly at its dead keeper then roared at the oncoming slayers. It tried to crush Azgar beneath a chunk of fallen masonry from the cave-in but he dodged the blow and weaved around behind the beast. Looking under the rock, the troll was dismayed to discover no sticky stain where the dwarf had been and was dimly wondering what had become of its next meal when Azgar leapt onto its back, wrapping his axe-chain around the creature’s neck. The troll flapped around, trying to dislodge the clinging slayer, crushing several orcs in its anguished throes. Azgar’s muscles bunched and thick veins bulged on his neck and forehead as he strained against the creature. Eventually though, as the rest of the Grim Brotherhood butchered what was left of the orcs, the troll sank to its knees and a fat, purpling tongue lolled from its sagging mouth.

  ‘You’re mine,’ the slayer snarled between clenched teeth.

  With a final, violent twist of the chain, the beast fell prostrate into the dirt and was still. Quickly on his feet, Azgar caught a flaming torch thrown to him by Dunrik and set the troll ablaze.

  Several dwarfs muttered appreciatively at the display of incredible prowess. Even Halgar nodded his approval of the way Azgar had slain the beast.

  By the end, it was a massacre. Dismembered orc corpses lay everywhere, splayed in their own pooling blood.

  Dunrik approached the dead overseer and wrenched his axes free in turn, spitting on the carcass as he did it. He gave a last hateful look at the barbed whip half-uncoiled at the orc’s waist and turned to find Uthor in front of him.

  ‘Well fought,’ he said. The other dwarfs barely had time to draw their axes before it was over. Only Dunrik had shed orc blood with the slayers.

  ‘It was a runk,’ he replied bitterly, as if dissatisfied with the carnage and walked away to stand by his younger cousin.

  Uthor’s gaze met that of Azgar but he said nothing.

  One of the Zhufbar miners, a lodefinder by the name of Thalgrim, if Uthor’s memory served, broke the charged silence.

  ‘Shoddy work,’ he muttered, observing the crude braces the orcs had rammed in place to support the roof, though much of the rubble had been shifted and a gap made that was wide enough for the dwarf throng to traverse, ‘shoddy work indeed.’ Thalgrim smoothed the walls, feeling for the subtle gradations in the rock face. ‘Ah yes,’ he muttered again. ‘I see.’

  A bemused glance passed between Uthor and Rorek before the miner turned.

  ‘We should move swiftly, the walls are bearing much of the weight and in their dilapidated condition are unlikely to hold for long.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Rorek, appraising the braces himself. ‘Umgak.’

  ‘That,’ added Thalgrim, ‘and the rocks told me so.’

  Rorek flashed a worried glance at Uthor, mouthing the word ‘Bozdok’ and tapping his temple.

  Mercy of Valaya, the dwarf thought to himself, as if one zaki wasn’t already enough.

  Thratch was pleased. Before him stood his pumping engine, a ramshackle edifice wrought by the science and sorcery of Clan Skryre, that even in its latter stages of construction was easily worth the meagre price he had paid for it.

  The vast device was located in one of the lowest deeps of the dwarf hold, where the worst of the flooding was, held together by a raft of crudely welded scaffolding and thick bolts. Three immense wheels, driven by giant rats and skaven slaves, provided energy to the four large pistons that worked the pump itself. Even now, as the Clan Skryre warlocks urged the wheel runners to greater efforts with sparking blasts from their arcane staves, green lightning crackled between two coiled conductor-prongs that spiked from the top of the infernal machine like some twisted tuning fork.

  As the warlord watched, standing upon a metal viewing platform, nervously eyeing the vast body of water below him and taking an involuntary step back, a streak of errant lightning wracked one of the wheels, immolating the slaves within and setting the wheel on fire. Clan Skryre acolytes wearing hooded goggles and bizarre, protruding muzzle-bags over their faces, scurried in and pumped a billowing cloud of gas over the fire. A few slaves from the adjacent wheel were caught in the dense yellow fug and fell, choking, to their knees. Syrupy blood bubbled from their mouths as their lifeless bodies smashed around the impetus-driven spinning wheel, but the fire was quickly extinguished.

  Thratch scowled, wrinkling his nose against the stink of singed fur.

  ‘Ready-ready very soon,’ a representative of Clan Skryre squeaked, cowering befo
re the warlord. ‘Humble Flikrit will make fix-fix,’ it blathered.

  Thratch turned his venomous gaze on him and was about to mete out some form of humiliating punishment when a shudder ran up the viewing platform. The skaven warlord thrashed about as he lost his balance and fell. The skaven’s eyes were wide as he landed just a few inches from the platform’s edge near what would have been a deep plunge into the water below had he fallen any further. Thratch squealed and hauled himself quickly to his feet, scampering backwards. He almost collided with a skaven warrior, whose bounding approach had very nearly pitched Thratch off the side of the platform. The ratman was lightly armoured and slight – one of Thratch’s scurries, a message-bearer.

  ‘Speak. Quick, quick,’ the warlord snarled, recovering his composure.

  As the scurrier whispered into Thratch’s ear, the warlord’s scowl grew deeper. ‘You have done well, yes-yes,’ said Thratch when the skaven was finished. The scurrier nodded vigorously and risked a nervous smile.

  Thratch turned to the warlock still cowering behind him. ‘Strap him to the wheel, yes…’

  The scurrier’s face fell and he turned to flee, but two burly stormvermin, Thratch’s personal guard when Kill-Klaw was not around, blocked his escape.

  ‘And no more mistakes,’ snarled the warlord, ‘or Thratch will have you fix-fix.’

  ‘Dibna the Inscrutable,’ Rorek said to the throng as they paused at the threshold to a mighty guild hall. Like much of the hold, it was illuminated by eternally blazing braziers. They were filled with a special fuel created in collaboration by the Engineers’ and Runesmiths’ Guilds that could last for centuries. Uthor had heard such things spoken of only in whispers by the guilders of Karak Kadrin, and knew the precise ingredients of the fuel, as well as the rituals that took place to invoke its flame, were closely guarded secrets.

  An immense stone statue stood before the dwarfs, venerating one such guildmaster, though Dibna was an engineer of Karak Varn. It was erected, column-like in the centre of the vast chamber, carved to represent Dibna holding up the walls and roof with his back and arms, dour-faced as he bore the tremendous burden stoically.

  ‘This has been added recently,’ Thalgrim added, noting the hue and coarseness of the rock from which Dibna was wrought. He approached the statue cautiously, bidding the others to wait. Once he’d reached it, the miner carefully ran his hand across the stone, sniffing it and tasting a patch of dust and grit picked up by his thumb.

  ‘Fifty years, no more,’ he said, wandering off into the shadows.

  ‘Where are you going, lodefinder?’ Uthor, waiting at the head of the throng behind Rorek, hissed loudly as Thalgrim disappeared briefly behind the statue before reappearing through the gloom several minutes later in the glow of a brazier. He was standing at the back of the room, something else obviously having caught his eye.

  ‘There’s a lift shaft here too,’ said the lodefinder. He was looking through a small portal made in the rock, delineated by gilt runic carvings that flashed in the brazier flame. ‘It goes deep.’ His voice carried over to the dwarfs as it echoed.

  ‘Perhaps we could use it to get to the Great Hall,’ muttered Uthor.

  Halgar stood next to him.

  ‘With no way of knowing where it leads, I wouldn’t risk it, lad,’ the longbeard replied.

  Uthor acceded to Halgar’s wisdom with a silent nod.

  Rorek was surveying the roof. He eyed it suspiciously, noting the dark streaks running down the walls. ‘The statue shores up the chamber,’ said the engineer, ‘Lord Redmane must have commissioned it as a temporary measure to prevent the Black Water flooding the upper deeps.’ He turned to Uthor, several ranks of dwarf warriors standing patiently behind him. ‘We can pass through, but must tread with the utmost caution,’ he warned them.

  ‘This was here before even Ulfgan’s reign,’ Halgar muttered, tracing his gnarled fingers across the mosaic reverently.

  The dwarfs had been travelling for over a day, traversing Dibna’s guild hall without incident, through long vaulted tunnels and numerous halls and were already at the second deep with still no sign of opposition.

  Uthor had planned it that way, instructing Ralkan to take them down seldom trodden paths least likely to be infested by skaven and to the Great Hall in the third deep. On no less than three occasions though, the lorekeeper had led them to dead ends or cave-ins, his recollection of the hold growing increasingly unreliable the farther the dwarfs delved. Often Ralkan would stop completely, and peer around, perplexity etched on his face as if he had never been in the tunnel or chamber in which the throng was standing. Strangely, a word from Drimbold in the lorekeeper’s ear and they were on their way again. The Grey dwarf merely said he was ‘urging the lorekeeper to concentrate’ when asked what he’d said to Ralkan.

  Another day from their goal, according to Ralkan, and Uthor had decided to make camp in a huge hall of deeds – the entire throng, almost two hundred dwarfs strong, barely took up a quarter of it such was the immensity of the room. Mosaics, like those upon the long stairway to the King’s Chamber, were etched onto the walls and he and Halgar regarded one as most of the other dwarfs were setting up camp.

  ‘From before the War of Vengeance then?’ Uthor asked.

  The image was that of a huge dragon, a beast of the elder ages. Red scales like incandescent flame covered its massive body and a yellow, barrel-ribbed chest bulged as it spewed a plume of black fire from its flaring nostrils.

  ‘Galdrakk,’ Halgar murmured beneath his breath.

  Uthor’s look was questioning.

  ‘Galdrakk the Red. It was a creature of the ancient world, old beyond reckoning,’ the longbeard said, deigning to elucidate no further.

  Uthor was reminded of the dire words in the dammaz kron, ‘A beast is awoke in the underdeep…’

  A dwarf hero, wearing archaic armour, was depicted warding off the conflagration with an upraised shield. A host of dwarf dead lay around him, rendered as charred skeletons.

  ‘…it is our doom.’

  A second image showed the hero and a group of his kinsdwarfs sealing the dragon in the bowels of the earth, a great rock fall entrapping it for all time.

  ‘It stirs the blood to think of such deeds,’ said Uthor proudly.

  ‘And yet it reminds me of our faded glories,’ muttered Halgar with resignation. ‘I will take the first watch,’ he added after a momentary silence.

  ‘As you wish, old–’ Uthor began after a moment, but stopped when he realised the longbeard was already walking slowly away.

  ‘You’d think he would remove that grobi arrow,’ said Drimbold to Thalgrim.

  The two dwarfs were taking second watch, sat outside one of the two grand doorways into the hall of deeds, and to pass the time were observing their comrades.

  ‘Perhaps he cannot,’ Thalgrim replied, ‘if the tip is close to his heart.’

  Halgar was laid on his back, the snapped black arrow shaft protruding upwards. Apparently the longbeard was asleep, but his eyes were wide open.

  ‘How does he do that?’ Drimbold asked.

  ‘My uncle Bolgrim used to walk in his sleep,’ offered Thalgrim. ‘Once he excavated an entire mine shaft whilst slumbering.’

  Drimbold looked back at his companion incredulously. The lodefinder shrugged in response. His face was illuminated in the blue-grey glow of a brightstone; a fabled piece of brynduraz hewn from the mines of Gunbad. Several chunks of it were set throughout the hall; though the dwarfs could see quite well in the dark, a little additional light never hurt.

  Uthor had forbidden the lighting of fires, and ordered the few torches set in sconces around the chamber to be doused as they slept. They would impair the dwarfs’ otherwise excellent night vision and they needed every advantage they could get against the rat-kin. The stink of smoke or cooking food might also attract the skaven and he wanted to fight them on his terms only, once they had reached the Great Hall. No cooking also meant the dwarfs were reduced to eating only st
one bread and dried rations. Thalgrim fed a hunk of the granite-based victual into his mouth and crunched it loudly.

  Drimbold had no taste for it – he’d been on stone bread for the last two days having consumed all of his other rations – and made a face. Then he watched as Thalgrim reached underneath his miner’s pot helmet, a clump of stubbed out candles affixed to it by their waxy emissions, and produced what looked like a piece of moulding fungus.

  ‘What is that?’ The pungent aroma made the Grey dwarf’s beard bristle, but it wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  ‘Lucky chuf,’ Thalgrim explained. The ancient piece of cheese in the lodefinder’s hand looked half-eaten.

  ‘I’ve only needed to use it once,’ he said, taking a long, deep whiff. ‘I was trapped for three weeks in a shaft made by the Tinderback miners… Weak-willed and thin-boned that lot, much like their tunnels.’

  Drimbold licked his lips.

  Thalgrim saw the gesture and put the chuf back under his helmet, eyeing the Grey dwarf warily.

  ‘Perhaps you should get some sleep,’ he said. ‘I can manage here.’

  It wasn’t a request.

  Drimbold was about to protest when he noticed the stout miner’s mattock, one end fashioned into a pick, at Thalgrim’s side. He nodded instead, and dragging his pack with him – now burgeoning with loot once more – went off to find a suitable alcove out of the lodefinder’s eyeshot.

  Drimbold sat down against one of the massive columns that lined the edge of the hall of deeds. So massive was it that he was shielded from Thalgrim’s view. Satisfied, he went back to surveying the slumbering throng.

  Almost everyone was asleep. Dwarfs were lined top to toe, despite the fact they had the room to spread out – gregariousness and brotherhood amongst their own kin was ingrained since the time of the ancestors. One or two were still awake, smoking, supping or talking quietly. The majority of the Grim Brotherhood looked comatose, having swigged enough beer to kill several mountain oxen. It seemed the slayers had a nose for alcohol and had discovered another hidden ale store in the deep. ‘Brew stops’, as they were sometimes known, were not uncommon – the holds were vast and should a dwarf be forced to undertake a long journey, he would have need of such libations. Of course some were merely secret stores left by forgetful and ageing brewmasters.