Masters of Stone and Steel - Gav Thorpe & Nick Kyme

by Warhammer

  ‘Gas!’ cried the ironbeard. The acrid taste of the noxious fumes was upon his tongue before he could clamp his mouth shut. He watched as three more filth-stained globes soared out of the darkness and into the packed ranks of the dwarfs. He was powerless to intervene as they shattered on raised shields and unsuspecting helmets, disgorging their foul contents amongst the throng.

  The dwarfs retreated instinctively, and those that remained on the near side of the door were herded back into the bottleneck .

  Thundin caught a snatched view of the Great Hall through the small portal and massing bodies. He could only guess at its immensity as the others, seemingly so far away and oblivious to the attack, gathered inside.

  ‘Back into the Wide Western Way,’ he bellowed, risking another mouthful of the gas, his voice croaking as the virulent poison wracked his throat and insides. Head reeling, he felt the press of warriors at his back moving steadily out of the bottleneck. He vaguely saw the opening through his blurring vision when two concealed alcoves opened up on either side of him. Ratmen wearing strange, sacking hoods tied at the neck with a filtered muzzle and dirt-smeared goggles, poured out brandishing knives.

  One came at him with vicious abandon, cackling with malevolent glee as all around Thundin his ironbreakers died, their armour no defence against the invasive poison.

  Choking on his own blood, Thundin smashed aside the skaven’s dagger thrust with his shield and hacked off its head with his axe. A loud crack echoed inside his helmet as he caught a flash of fire in the darkness and the whiff of burning. Another ironbreaker fell, a smoking wound in his chest plate.

  Thundin was slowing now. He couldn’t breathe, tasted blood in his mouth and felt it trickle from his nose and ears. He clutched at his throat, dropping his shield to claw at the metal gorget around his neck. An immense flare of green and incandescent flame surged from an alcove further up the bottleneck to his left. Thundin was blinded for a moment. In his disorientation he thought he heard screams, as if he were listening to them from the bottom of a deep, dark well. Through the mucus and blood in his nostrils, he caught the stench of burning flesh. The ironbeard wanted to retch but couldn’t. He slumped to his knees, his armour heavy, and removed his helmet. The effort to hold his breath with it on was suffocating. As he gazed bleary-eyed at the carnage of dead dwarfs all around, something large loomed over him. Thundin’s nerveless fingers let the axe slip from his grasp.

  ‘Valaya,’ he croaked with his final breath as the beast crushed him.

  Dunrik rolled; the lumbering rat beast tore into the ground with its claws in the dwarf’s wake as he desperately tried to reach Thundin who lay prone in a rapidly expanding miasma of sulphurous fog. Trapped in the bottleneck , the fighting was fierce and close. All around him his brothers fought hammer and axe against a seemingly endless tide of skaven. The creature before him had come with the rat-kin, lumbering out of the shadows like some cruel experiment. It was huge and grotesquely muscled; a horrific fusion of ogre and skaven. Its body was wrapped in thick, pus-soaked bandages and ravaged by sores and overly distended muscle growth. Dagger-like claws extended from fingers encrusted with dirt and dwarf blood. Blinded, the beast tracked the dwarf by smell alone and with lethal efficiency. The rat ogre sniffed for his prey and came at the Everpeak dwarf again, its savage backswing sending a hooded skaven screaming backwards into the melee.

  Dunrik ducked the swiping arm of the rat ogre, its claws digging four deep furrows into the bottleneck wall. The dwarf came forward quickly, beneath the creature’s guard and rammed the spike of his axe into its frothing jaw, so hard that it punched straight through and came out of the rat ogre’s skull. Dunrik ripped the axe free with a roar of defiance, gore and brain matter showering from the gaping wound. In its death throes the beast came on still. It was about to lunge for Dunrik with the last of its fading strength when Hakem, who was also trapped with the skaven attackers, shattered its wrist with a blow from the Honakinn Hammer. The weapon’s runes glowed dully as the merchant thane fought, a second blow crumpling what was left of the rat ogre’s skull.

  Dunrik nodded a hasty thanks and then pointed to the door to the Great Hall. Nearly half the throng had already filed through, but the tail end was being ravaged by poison gas as they struggled to turn and fight the skaven massing behind them, realising slowly they were under attack.

  Hakem nodded his understanding and the two dwarfs ran to the stone door, covering the short distance quickly. They held their breath in unison as they plunged into the cloud of poison gas eking through it. A few dwarfs of the Firehand clan were battling furiously against a horde of hooded skaven at the threshold to the room. Borri, having been pushed further down the bottleneck in the press of the fighting, was amongst them just beyond the door arch and inside the Great Hall itself.

  He met the gaze of Dunrik across the open doorway, hacking down one of the ratmen with his axe. Borri’s eyes were pleading when he realised what Dunrik was about to do.

  Anguish crushing him, Dunrik heaved against the stone door with Hakem at his side and a few of the Firehand dwarfs, the rest of the clan warriors forming a hastily arranged shield wall to protect them. The door yielded quickly this time and scraped shut with a thudding echo of stone on stone, the thick bolts sliding into hidden recesses automatically. Dunrik looked down at the locking mechanism and smashed it. There would be no opening it.

  ‘Magnificent…’ Uthor gazed in wonderment at the Great Hall of Karak Varn. As leader of the throng, he was the first through and was vaguely aware of the others amassing in his wake.

  By far the biggest chamber they had been in yet, the Great Hall was supported by a veritable forest of symmetrically arranged columns that stretched down its full length. At one end of the mighty room there was an immense hearth fashioned to resemble the ancestor god, Grungni, his wide open mouth giving life to the flames that must have once blazed in it. Statues lined the walls, interposed with bronze brazier pans made into the image of the engineers who had fashioned them, immortalising the dwarfs for all time, their outstretched hands cupping the dormant coals within. Shadows hugged the walls and pooled thickly around each of the columns. The Great Hall was gloomy, despite the firelight. There were stone tables throughout. The king’s resided at the top of a rectangular plateau – broad stairs leading up to it – and overlooked the rest.

  ‘Here, it begins,’ Uthor murmured beneath his breath, privately congratulating himself. ‘Here, we take it all back.’

  ‘Dunrik!’

  Uthor heard Borri’s cry from the front of the throng before the thunderous, booming retort of the stone door to the Great Hall slamming shut, and was arrested from his brief moment of vainglory.

  Skaven infested the doorway behind him, cut off from the rest of the horde, and tendrils of gas evaporated around it. Several dwarfs littered the floor of the Great Hall, spitting blood and snot.

  ‘Turn!’ he bellowed. ‘Turn, we are under attack!’

  Azgar throttled the skaven warrior with one hand, right in the thick of the fighting at the edge of the bottleneck and the broader section of the Wide Western Way, trying to battle a way out for his kin. The ratman’s eyes burst with the sheer pressure exerted by the muscle-bound slayer, coating the inside of its goggles in sticky crimson. Discarding the creature like an unwanted rag, Azgar freed up his hand to disembowel a second onrushing skaven with a brutal upswing of his chained axe.

  The fighting was close; so close he smelled the sweat of his brothers around him, tasted blood on the air, and heard their deathsongs in his ears. The sound of killing became a macabre chorus to the doleful dirge as ratmen funnelled into the churning blades of the Grim Brotherhood, held in the bottleneck and unable to get out. From the Wide Western Way the skaven came at them in their droves, hemming the dwarfs in.

  Azgar cursed loudly as one of his tattooed kinsdwarfs was dragged silently to his doom by a vicious swarm of rats. No way for a slayer to meet his end, he thought bitterly, hoping that his own death would
be more glorious.

  A muted scream and a wash of hot fluid splashing against the side of Azgar’s face got his attention – the stink of copper filled his nostrils and the slayer realised it was blood. He turned and looked up as a gargantuan rat ogre loomed over him, the beast casting aside two wet hunks of armoured flesh that had once been a dwarf warrior.

  Metal plates, ravaged by rust, were fused to the monster’s body like scales and it wore a cone-like helmet with a perforated grille at the muzzle – but hinged so that it could still bite – and two holes for its malevolent, red eyes. It swung a gore-splattered ball and chain that had been bolted to its wrist; a serrated boar spear was grafted to the other in place of a hand.

  Azgar’s flesh burned. He noticed the tattoos of Grimnir blazing brightly on his body and then the glowing, black-green rock studding the rat ogre’s torso from between the cracks in its scale-armour.

  Roaring a challenge, spittle frothing from beneath its helmet, the beast loped forward, with ball and chain swinging.

  Azgar smiled, gripping his axe as he fixed the hulking mutant in his sights.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come to me.’

  ‘Open the door,’ Uthor demanded. ‘I will not leave them to be massacred.’

  The half of the throng inside the Great Hall of Karak Varn had slain the meagre few skaven that had got through before Dunrik and Hakem had shut out the rest.

  The throng waited in pensive silence behind the thane of Karak Kadrin, listening to the muted sounds of battle, dulled by thick stone, through the closed entry door.

  ‘The locking mechanism is ruined, I cannot release it,’ said Rorek, one of those to have made it through, crouching by the doorway and replacing his tools in his belt.

  ‘Can it be broken down?’ Uthor asked desperately, switching his attention to the lodefinder, Thalgrim, all of the Sootbeard miners having made it into the Great Hall.

  ‘Given several days…’ said Thalgrim, rubbing his chin. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘We must get through,’ urged Borri, a slightly high-pitched, hysterical tone to his voice. ‘My cousin is on the other side. I saw the rat-kin hordes through the fog, they couldn’t possible prevail against such numbers. We must get to them.’

  ‘We cannot!’ Uthor snapped, enraged at himself more than the beardling. His face softened abruptly at the pain on Borri’s face.

  ‘I’m sorry, lad,’ he said, placing his hand upon the young dwarf’s shoulder and looking him in the eyes. ‘Their names will be remembered.’

  It was not supposed to be this way: desperate, divided… defeated. The thane felt his shoulders sagging as the burden of his oath exerted itself upon him. Had he been wrong? Was Gromrund right? Had he led them to folly? Aware of all eyes upon him, Uthor found inner steel and straightened up to address the throng.

  ‘Secure the Great Hall, make barricades and set guards on every exit,’ he ordered the clan leaders. ‘We are but a hundred dwarfs,’ he added, ‘let them come in their thousands. They are but the rancid surf that breaks upon our rocks; each of us is a link in a suit of mail. Stay together, remain strong, and their blades will blunt and break against us.’

  Chittering, squeaking laughter filled the massive room, coming from everywhere at once.

  Uthor had heard it before.

  Like miniature balefires, hundreds of eyes flashed in the outer darkness ringing the room – No, not hundreds… thousands.

  Uthor gaped at the sheer size of the skaven horde closing in on them, rusted blades held ready in a vast sea of wretched, stinking fur. He had been wrong; this was folly.

  ‘Valaya preserve us,’ he breathed.

  Stone splintered as the ball and chain smashed against the ground. Azgar leapt back to avoid its deadly path and then ducked swiftly as the rat ogre swiped at him, the boar spear spitting sparks as it raked the wall. The beast swung again with the spiked ball. Azgar cut the chain in two with a blow from his axe and, stepping past the fierce swipe, reversed his cut to lop off the rat ogre’s arm at the shoulder despite the armour plate. The creature howled in pain, the sound muffled and tinny through his cone-helm, and drove at Azgar with the boar spear, blood fountaining from its ruined stump. The slayer avoided the strike, which embedded deep into the flanking wall and held fast. The monstrosity heaved at the weapon impaled in the stone but couldn’t free it.

  Azgar regarded the rat ogre darkly as it struggled… and cleaved off the other arm. The beast fell back with the impetus of its own exertions. The slayer went to finish it but the rat ogre lashed out with its tail, taking Azgar’s legs from under him. He hit the ground with bone jarring force and the slayer barely had time to get his bearings when a rust-brown blur came at him. Azgar reacted instinctively, holding onto the beast’s jaws, one in each hand, a hair’s-breadth from biting off his face.

  He shook with effort, every muscle straining as he fought to keep the rat ogre back. Saliva flicked his face and neck as the rat ogre’s rotten meat breath washed over him. Digging deep, he summoned all the reserves of his strength and roared as he snapped the creature’s jaws back, twisting metal and breaking bone. A howl of pain tore from the rat ogre’s broken mouth. Azgar crawled out from under it, as the beast thrashed in fits of agony, gathering up the chain that was attached to his wrist and reaching for his axe.

  ‘Chew on this,’ he said and buried the blade in its tiny cranium.

  Most of the Firehands were dead, either suffocated or impaled by rat-kin spears, though the gas was all but dissipated. Dunrik risked a breath as he briefly surveyed the carnage.

  The skaven assault had split the dwarfs still holed up in the bottleneck into two. The ironbreakers were all dead. Of the advanced part of the force on Dunrik’s side of the door only him, Hakem and a handful of clan warriors remained. If they could rejoin with the other forces further back down the Wide Western Way, they might be able to fight their way free.

  Dunrik, his left eye bloodshot from ingesting some of the skaven gas, took an involuntary step back as two rat ogres lumbered into view, filling up the passageway. They demolished the feeble shield wall easily, one of the beasts biting off the head of a Firehand dwarf as he fled from it. All thoughts of escape disappeared from Dunrik’s mind. He felt the stone door at his back, the closeness of the walls at either side, Hakem’s tension as he raised his shield. There would be no escape.

  Halgar gasped for breath through clenched teeth, making the most of a brief respite in the furious melee unfolding in the bottleneck around him. He’d watched as the stone door was sealed, effectively trapping them with their enemies and was glad of it. At least he would go down fighting. The longbeard’s arms and shoulders burned, the weight of his axe like a fallen tree in his gnarled hands. Blood – both rat-kin and dawi – splattered clothes, armour and skin. Halgar’s vision blurred sporadically in time with a persistent throbbing in his skull; he put it down to when a skaven warrior had struck a lucky blow against his helmet – he would have to work out the dent later.

  The longbeard tramped slowly through the carnage, past his battling kinsdwarfs as he tried to reach Drimbold. Having been near the back of the group, the Grey dwarf would never have reached the Great Hall, even if he’d tried. Instead, he had fought. Drimbold was a vague outline at times when Halgar’s eyesight worsened, but he knew it was him – he could smell him. Ralkan was behind the Grey dwarf, clutching a borrowed hammer like his life depended on it. It did.

  Out of the gloom, a hooded skaven came hurtling at the longbeard. Halgar sidestepped its attack, upending it with a smack of his axe haft against its ankles and then hacking the blade into the ratman’s back to finish it. He shouldered a second rat-kin in the gut, using his armoured plate-mail like a battering ram and was rewarded with the crunch of bone. An elbow smash broke the skaven’s skull wide open, blood and matter spilling freely. He felled a third with a hefty kick to the shins and then decapitated it with the edge of his shield to reach Drimbold’s side.

  ‘Stand firm!’ he bellowed, cutting a s
avage diagonal blow against an onrushing skaven. More ratmen were pressing, their numbers seemingly endless. Even Azgar and his slayers were being slowly herded towards them.

  ‘Fight until you’ve no breath–’

  A massive ball of green and incandescent flame lit up the passageway, burning shadows into the walls and illuminating the conflict like some gruesome animation. Dwarfs fell screaming to the terrible conflagration – cloth, metal and hair melting before it.

  ‘There!’ cried Drimbold, fending off a rusty dagger with his hand axe. He pointed to a pair of hooded skaven lugging some kind of infernal weapon between them. One carried a bulbous cannon rigged with coiling pipes and a pull chain affixed to the fat copper nozzle. The other bore a large wooden barrel with bolted on plates that fed the cannon, bent-backed against the weight of whatever liquid was stored within.

  A small band of dwarfs from the Stonebreaker clan charged toward the deadly arcane device, bellowing war cries.

  The skaven gunner squeaked gleefully as he tugged at the pull chain, opening the nozzle. The Stonebreakers were immolated in a blazing inferno, their charred remains still smoking long after the flame had abated.

  Halgar blinked back the afterimage of the fiery destruction wrought by the skaven cannon.

  ‘We must destroy it,’ he snarled, as the nozzle swung in their direction.

  The longbeard flung a throwing axe towards the weapon but missed, the blade thunking harmlessly against the wall, before clattering to the ground. He stared down the gaping maw of the cannon, an indistinct circle of fathomless black, and closed his eyes.

  The searing heat, the wash of flame didn’t come. Skaven screaming filled his ears and Halgar opened his eyes to witness the bent-backed fuel carrier flapping at the barrel he carried. A hand axe was buried in its side and a volatile chemical mixture sprayed out eagerly. Patches of the ratman’s fur burned and smoked where the fluid touched it – the stink of cooking skaven flesh was redolent on the breeze.