Masters of Stone and Steel - Gav Thorpe & Nick Kyme

by Warhammer

  ‘They also have sorcerous machinery of some sort.’

  ‘Pah,’ snorted Gromrund, marching past the merchant thane. ‘Skaven engineering is cheap and unreliable. Doubtless, it will misfire before it can do any damage.’

  Hakem blocked him again.

  ‘Step aside, ufdi,’ Gromrund snapped irritably. ‘You will not soil your beard in this fight,’ he added, though after the mining shaft the entire skorong was so lathered in soot it would be hard to notice either way.

  ‘I have seen its effects with my own eyes,’ Hakem warned, his gaze unwavering. ‘And it is deadly. Armour, for one, is no proof against it. Burned to ash by the sorcerous fire of the skaven is not an honourable death.’

  Gromrund backed down, planting his hammer head into the ground so he could lean on the haft.

  ‘So then, ufdi, what are we to do? Wait here until the rat-kin die of boredom?’

  ‘Lure them and thin their numbers.’ Thalgrim’s voice broke up the building tension.

  Hakem and Gromrund turned to look at the lodefinder, who was grinning ferally. He lifted up his helmet and at once the dwarfs were assailed by a pungent, if not entirely unpleasant aroma.

  ‘Lucky chuf,’ Thalgrim explained, holding out the piece of moulding cheese in his hand.

  Ralkan’s eyes widened when he saw it, acutely aware of his groaning stomach.

  ‘The skaven have a taste for it,’ Thalgrim added, darkly, deciding not to mention his suspicions about the ambush. Plopping the remains of the chunk into his mouth, Thalgrim chewed for a moment then swallowed, savouring the taste.

  Ralkan’s shoulders sagged, his loudly rumbling belly seemingly inconsolable.

  Gromrund was agog. ‘Are you mad, lodefinder, you have just eaten our bait?’

  ‘I did not want to waste it,’ Thalgrim replied, licking his gums and teeth for any lingering traces of the ancient cheese. ‘Besides, it is not wasted,’ he added, breathing hard into the face of the hammerer, who gagged at once.

  ‘Very well,’ said Gromrund, putting up his hand to ward off any further emissions. ‘Go and do what you must. You stay back, lorekeeper,’ he said to Ralkan who was happy to oblige.

  Thalgrim nodded, creeping stealthily to the end of the curved tunnel. Once he’d reached the end, he peered around once to see that the skaven guards were still there and then blew a breath, thickly redolent of chuf, towards them, hoping that the shallow breeze would carry it. He watched silently from the shadows, acutely aware of the other dwarfs behind him with weapons readied.

  At first there was nothing. The skaven just chittered quietly to each other in their ear-wrenching tongue. But then the snout of one of the clanrats twitched and it sniffed at the air. Then another did the same, and another. There was a bout of frenetic squeaking and several of the rat-kin abandoned their posts to follow the cloying stink wafting towards them.

  Thalgrim gave them another blast for good measure and then retreated around the corner.

  ‘They come,’ he whispered, unslinging his pick-mattock.

  The dwarfs hugged the shadows, keeping to the very edge of the tunnel. The sound of padding, splashing feet carried on the cheese-tainted air towards them, getting closer with every second as their curious enemies approached.

  Thalgrim held his breath when he saw the first clanrat emerge from around the corner. Incredibly the creature’s beady eyes were closed, using smell alone for guidance as it tracked the chuf’s scent. Four of its flea-infested brethren followed, wielding a mixture of spears, blades and heavier-looking glaives.

  Once they had all passed the threshold of the tunnel, the dwarfs attacked.

  Thalgrim smashed the neck of one of the rats from behind, crushing its spine inward as it collapsed with a mewling cry. A second fell to Hakem’s borrowed axe, the blade cutting a deep wound in the clanrat’s belly through which its innards spilled. The creature looked dumbfounded at the dwarf as it tried to gather up its organs. One of the Sootbeards buried his pick in its forehead to silence it. Gromrund killed another two; one he choked with the wutroth haft of his great hammer, a second he bludgeoned with the hammer head. The last was cut high and low by the remaining Sootbeard dwarfs, its spear falling from nerveless fingers before it could retaliate.

  ‘Tidy work,’ muttered Gromrund, wiping a slick of expelled blood from his breastplate. ‘That leaves seven, plus the war engine.’

  ‘Let’s take them now,’ Thalgrim hissed urgently. ‘They will only have time for one shot.’

  The rat-kin had caught the scent of blood on the breeze and were squeaking at each other agitatedly, pointing towards the tunnel with clawed fingers.

  ‘For Grimnir!’ Gromrund bellowed, overwhelmed by battle-fever, and raced around the corner to meet his foes. The others followed – all except Ralkan, who awaited the outcome of the skirmish pensively – making their oaths as they went.

  Screeching skaven levelled spears and blades as the dwarfs charged, before parting to allow the fire cannon through. A mighty whoosh of flame swallowed the cackling retort of the Clan Skryre engineers as they unleashed their war engine gleefully and lit up the tunnel in a blinding flare of angry green light. Thalgrim threw himself aside, flooring Gromrund in the process, but two of the Sootbeards were engulfed in the deadly conflagration and died screaming.

  Rising from the floodwater, the hammerer parried a spear thrust with his hammer haft before stamping down on his assailant’s shin, breaking it. He finished the clanrat with an overhead blow to the skull. Red ooze flowed thickly from the rat-kin’s ruined head as it languished in the water.

  Up close, Hakem launched his shield like a discus at the fire cannon. The spinning weapon severed the first engineer’s head and embedded in the chest of the second. So mauled, the pair fell back and splashed into the water in a rapidly spreading pool of their own fluids.

  There was a gurgled cry as the last Sootbeard was impaled by a spear to the neck. A burly skaven shrugged the dwarf’s corpse off the blade contemptuously before rounding on Thalgrim. The lodefinder ducked a savage swipe and came under the blow to ram the head of his mattock into the creature’s chin. Dazed, the rat-kin staggered back but, blowing out a billowing line of blood and snot, recovered its composure and came at Thalgrim again. A blur of steel arrested its charge, as the creature was smashed against the wall, a thrown axe thunking into its torso. The lodefinder turned to see Hakem snarl as the rat-kin slumped down and was still, and nodded his thanks. The merchant thane nodded back, grimly.

  The skaven were all dead. Gromrund finished the last, crushing its skull with his boot as it tried to crawl away through the floodwater. He spat on the corpse afterward and then turned to the others.

  ‘They were still good deaths,’ he remarked, regarding the charred corpses of the two Sootbeards and the floating, impaled body of the other.

  ‘We must find a way to break the mechanism,’ said Hakem coldly, straight back to business. ‘And I think I know of such a way,’ he added.

  The other two dwarfs followed his gaze to the still twitching Clan Skryre engineers and the volatile fire cannon still strapped to their bodies.

  ‘Steady…’ warned Thalgrim as he carefully lifted the broad barrel of the skaven cannon where its volatile mixture was held. ‘Easy does it.’

  ‘Filthy rat-kin, I doubt I will ever get the stink from my beard and clothes,’ moaned Hakem, carrying one of the dead Clan Skryre engineers and having subsequently wrenched his shield free of its wretched corpse.

  ‘Consider yourself lucky, merchant,’ Gromrund countered, lugging the other corpse as he tried to arch his neck away from the vile burden. ‘Mine has no head!’

  Between them, the three dwarfs heaved the bulky skaven war engine and its mouldering crew to the network of cogs and pistons that were the mechanism for the overflow. Ralkan – having been summoned once the fight was over – was with them, sat on a chunk of fallen rock as he held a burning brand aloft. The lorekeeper stayed back from the heavy lifting work, instead recording
the names of the slain Sootbeards in the book of remembering that he rested on his lap.

  ‘You are certain this will work,’ grumbled Gromrund, on the verge of wedging the entire foul assembly into the grinding and massive cog teeth.

  ‘Aye, I’m certain,’ growled Thalgrim, a little put out by the hammerer’s obvious lack of confidence. ‘We Sootbeards have a close affinity with rock and stone, that much is true, but I also know something of engineering works, master hammerer,’ the lodefinder added indignantly, before lumping the barrel and its various attached pipes and paraphernalia into the mechanism.

  ‘Quickly, now,’ Thalgrim said, edging backwards urgently. The cogs stalled for a moment, an ugly screeching noise emanating from the mechanism as it tried to chew flesh, bone and wood. ‘It won’t hold long,’ he added, reaching out for Ralkan’s torch as the other two dwarfs disappeared from beyond his eye-line. The lorekeeper had since packed away the book of remembering and he too was backing off.

  Thalgrim grasped the brand and flung it, end over end, into the wrecked skaven cannon, which was even now haemorrhaging flammable liquid. As he threw the torch, Thalgrim turned and ran before diving into the shallow water. The others rapidly followed suit. The flame caught, igniting the chemicals in the barrel immediately, devouring the crude artifice and its crew hungrily.

  Thunder cracked as the force of the massive explosion tore into the tunnel, amplified as it resonated off the stout walls, so powerful that it vibrated armour and teeth. Chunks of dislocated rock plummeted into the water in the aftermath, fire blossomed briefly and dust motes fell like a veil of shedding skin.

  Thalgrim was the first to poke his head above the water and check that it was over.

  ‘Clear,’ he said, coughing back a cloud of dust and thick smoke.

  ‘It is fortunate we are not dead!’ barked Gromrund, after spitting out several mouthfuls of rank floodwater. ‘My ears still ring from the blast,’ he added, waggling a finger in one.

  ‘At least it worked,’ said Hakem, without joy. The merchant thane was on his feet and surveying the carnage wrought upon the overflow mechanism.

  ‘Dreng tromm,’ Gromrund muttered breathlessly as he went to stand beside him.

  The stout dwarfen mechanism, that which had been built in the reign of Hraddi Ironhand, that which had withstood the wrath of the ages and even endured the Time of Woes, was ruined. A blackened scar overlaid a twisted mess of metal and broken stone. It was all that remained of the once great artifice of the engineers of Karak Varn.

  Ralkan was beside himself and could not speak through tears of profound remorse. All of the dwarfs felt it; another small part of the Karaz Ankor meeting with ruination.

  Is this how it is all to end, thought Gromrund? We dawi forced to lay waste to our own domains?

  ‘It is sealed,’ stated Hakem flatly, breaking the hammerer’s solemn pondering. ‘We had best move on,’ he added, turning away from the gut-wrenching vista.

  ‘Cold is the wind that blows through your house,’ uttered Gromrund as the merchant thane walked away.

  Hakem did not respond.

  ‘How will we know when we have reached our destination?’ Uthor’s voice was tinny and resonant within the close confines of the giant ‘diving’ helm Rorek had constructed.

  ‘It is simple,’ the engineer remarked, even the muscles in his face straining as, together with his companions, he half lugged, half pushed the immense hollow helmet of bronze. ‘We either reach the trapdoor at the south wall or we don’t. The air will not last in here indefinitely,’ he said.

  At that Uthor looked down briefly at the water that had now reached his upper torso. It had been rising ever since the helm had crashed on top of them; its descent arrested by the numerous barrels that Rorek had assured them provided flotation. Despite that, though, the three dwarfs still needed to heave and push the helm forward, occasionally grinding its severed base against the flagstones beneath when the massive chunk of statue dipped.

  Thanks to the Zhufbar dwarf’s ingenuity, the dwarfs were able to traverse the murky depths of the lagoon through Brondold’s Hall in what the engineer termed a ‘submersible’. The thane of Kadrin had no clue to the word’s meaning, nor had he any desire to discover it. All he knew was that a pocket of air was trapped in the upper reaches of the hollowed helm that allowed them to breath, whilst submerged far below the waterline.

  ‘Your assurances provide much comfort, engineer,’ Uthor growled.

  ‘Speak less,’ Rorek snapped abruptly. ‘There is only a finite amount of air and the more we use, the less we will have,’ he added, indicating the steadily rising waterline.

  ‘Bah,’ Uthor muttered. ‘Dawi were not meant to be submerged in a tomb of bronze and iron.’

  Emelda kept her mouth clamped shut throughout the exchange. Sweat peeled off her forehead in streaking lines that ran down her face. Not from exertion; she too was a warrior born and the equal of any male. No, it was from wide-eyed fear of being trapped here in the watery gloom, of her last breath being a mouthful of rank and foul-tasting water. There was no honour in it. As she worked, just that little bit harder than Uthor and Rorek, to get them to their destination, she surveyed the inner hollows of the diving helm nervously. Tiny fissures had already begun to appear in the ageing bronze, and tiny rivulets of water ran weakly through the smallest of cracks. One of those cracks grew wider, even as she maintained her fearful vigil, so wide the water was nigh-on gushing. She opened her mouth to shout a warning but no sound came out at first. Desperately, and through a supreme effort of will, she found her voice.

  ‘It is splitting!’

  Rorek saw the danger instantly and redoubled his efforts. ‘Heave,’ he bellowed, the timbre of his voice thunderous and urgent inside the helm. ‘The south wall cannot be far.’

  Uthor grunted, shouldering as much of the burden as he could. A dull screeching sound, muffled by fathoms of floodwater, came to the surface as the dwarfs leant their weight to one side of the helm and pitched it at an angle against the flagstones underfoot.

  They panted and gasped with the intense effort. The water level rose, hitting their shoulders. In a few more seconds of frantic endeavour it had reached their necks.

  ‘For all your worth!’ Uthor cried, smashing his body into the side of the giant helm, spluttering as the water came over his mouth and nose.

  Muffled silence filled the statue helm as the last of the dwarfs’ air was expended. Not only was it their lifeline, but it had also provided additional buoyancy. Without it, the three dwarfs took the full weight of the massive bronze helm.

  Uthor felt as if leaden anchors had been attached to his ankles as he dragged one heavy foot in front of the other, his urgency suddenly blighted with agonising slowness. His lungs burned; there was little air left in his body. Then he felt the ground beneath his feet change subtly. Stamping down, something bent and yielded beneath him. He tried to peer through the gloomy water but all he saw was a cloud-filled murk. He raised Ulfgan’s axe; it was like lifting a tree. The runes etched on the blade shone diffusely, like a submerged beacon, as he struck down towards his feet.

  The ground broke away, broad spikes of it funnelled upward into the water-filled helm, and Uthor fell. Rorek and Emelda were lost to him in the clinging, green-tinged darkness. Something pulled at him, a forceful current propelling the dwarf to Valaya knew where. He barrelled and spun at first, smacking into unseen obstacles. Pain flared in his side as something sharp and jagged bit into him.

  Fighting hard, Uthor got his bearings and started to swim, pumping legs and arms determinedly as the last of his air was used up. He was in a tunnel. So narrow and tight it could only be the one that Ralkan had spoken off. The way seemed long, black spots beginning to form in Uthor’s hazy vision. Soon he too would be lost. His legs felt heavy, his arms seemed to hang limply at his sides and the sense of falling, falling deep into the abyssal gloom overwhelmed him…

  Light flared, dim and washed out. Air rushed, unabated
, into his body as Uthor was suddenly lifted free of oblivion, coughing and spluttering into renewed existence.

  A figure stood over him, serene and benevolent, her arms outstretched and welcoming. Long, golden hair cascaded down her shoulders and a halo rimmed her head, her countenance refulgent in its reflected glory.

  ‘Valaya…’ Uthor breathed, bleary-eyed and slightly incoherent.

  ‘Uthor,’ said the figure. Strong arms shook the thane of Kadrin.

  ‘Uthor.’ The tone was urgent but low.

  Emelda crouched over him, her face creased with concern.

  Uthor came to his senses, abruptly aware that Rorek supported his back. He’d lost his helmet somewhere along the way, his shield too – thank Grimnir he still had his axe. Together, his two companions held him up, above the shallow water of a vast and expansive reservoir. Hraddi’s reservoir, just as the lorekeeper had described. They had reached the site of the Barduraz Varn.

  Uthor got to his feet and found the low-lying water came up to his knees.

  ‘Keep down,’ Emelda hissed, Rorek moving silently to her side, so low only the tips of his shoulders pierced the waterline.

  Uthor did as he was told and crouched next to the clan daughter on the opposite side.

  ‘We are not alone,’ she hissed, pointing across the massive, flat reservoir.

  Uthor followed her gesture. There, just beyond the edge of where the water ended in a rat-kin made platform of shovelled rock and earth, slaves toiled and hooded Clan Skryre overseers chattered. Thickly-armoured, black-furred skaven carrying curved swords and a number of their smaller brethren equipped with spears milled around in rough cohorts. Two other Skryre agents stood close by the bulkier skaven guards, drenched in filthy robes and carrying bizarre-looking staffs seemingly fashioned from a riot of crude skaven technology. Crackling energy played across spinning diodes and jutting forks. Uthor was reminded of the skaven sorcerer they had faced during their flight from Karak Varn all those months ago. He bit back the memory of Lokki’s death during that dark retreat and refocussed his attention.