Masters of Stone and Steel - Gav Thorpe & Nick Kyme

by Warhammer

  Slowly, the duelling warriors were afforded room to fight, neither skaven nor dwarf willing to step into the path of their whirling blades.

  Azgar swung again, releasing a little chain for additional reach and surprise. The rat-kin warlord saw it coming and weaved out of the weapon’s death arc. Rushing forward, the blurring steel flicking past its ear, the creature cut the slayer across the torso, using the momentum of the blow to carry it beyond the dwarf’s reach.

  Azgar felt wet blood between his fingers, clutching at the wound as he nearly fell to one knee. Screeching, high-pitched and sporadic, emanated from the rat-kin warlord’s mouth in what the slayer could only assume was laughter. The dwarf stood and turned, the blood from his torso was already clotting, grinning contemptuously.

  ‘Come on,’ he growled, beckoning the skaven on. ‘We’re not done yet.’

  Halgar saw the slayer dive from the anvil but quickly lost him in the melee. There were no tactics, no scheme to the battle now. It was about dying and surviving, pure and simple. The remaining dwarfs, although few and surrounded by foes, fought as if the very spirit of Grimnir were with them. Halgar’s heart swelled, belting out his deathsong with every blow and thrust of his axe. During the carnage he had lost his shield and wielded the weapon in two hands.

  Cutting down a rat-kin slave, the longbeard screwed up his eyes again – the blurring was getting worse and dark patches lingered menacingly at the periphery of his vision. When Halgar opened them he saw something advancing toward him. Whether it was his failing eyesight or some brand of foul sorcery, he could not tell but it seemed as though it were a ragged blanket of drifting blackness. Shadows, as if drawn like moths to a lantern, mustered to it until the thing resolved itself in front of the longbeard. Out of the gathered darkness came a flash of metal. Halgar, acting on instinct, parried the dagger blow and took a step back as a second blindingly fast swipe cut through the air in front of him.

  The longbeard bellowed defiantly, stomping towards his assailant and swinging his axe. Eyesight blurring badly now, Halgar missed by a foot.

  The assassin recoiled, the old dwarf knew now it could only be such a creature, dodging the blade with effortless grace. Regrouping quickly it struck out again, severing the tendons in the longbeard’s wrist. The axe clanged to the ground from Halgar’s nerveless fingers. The second dagger punched into his chest and the longbeard suddenly found he could barely breathe.

  Halgar fell onto his knees, trying in vain to staunch the blood flowing eagerly from his chest.

  Drawing near, certain of its kill, the skaven assassin hissed with gleeful, undisguised malice. Ironically, it was blind and upon opening its mouth to gloat revealed it had no tongue, either. But something else caught the longbeard’s attention, so close that even he could see it – the last thing he would ever see as his vision darkened completely. It was an ear, cut from the head of some unfortunate victim. Embedded in the lobe was a gilded earring that bore the rune of the royal clan of Karak Izor. It had once belonged to Lokki.

  Halgar roared, reaching out blindly to strangle the creature that had killed his lord. He grasped air and felt two dagger thrusts in his torso. Doubling over, one hand supporting his weight lest he collapse, the longbeard tasted copper in his mouth as he spat out blood. His nose twitched. He could smell Lokki’s killer close by. Halgar dropped his head submissively, knowing that the creature would draw in to finish him. The stench of it grew so pungent it must be upon him. Halgar reached across his body with his half hand, the other no more use than a prop with the tendons slashed, and gripped the grobi arrow embedded in his chest. The air and scent shifted around him. This was it.

  Halgar tore the arrow free, blocking the overhead strike of the skaven assassin with his other arm, and rammed it into the rat-kin’s throat. He felt it flail; slash weakly at his back and side. Strength failing, Halgar held it there, pushing the arrow tip even deeper. The thrashing stopped and the skaven assassin slumped. Halgar fell onto his back, lifeblood eking across the foundry floor. Though he couldn’t see, as the longbeard heard the onrush of flood water smashing into the chamber and the shrieking terror of the drowning rat-kin, he smiled.

  ‘Grungni’s hoard,’ Hakem gasped. ‘May its glittering peaks reach the summit of the world.’

  Gold: a shimmering, gilded sea of it stretched out in front of the dwarfs who stood agog at the threshold to the immense chamber. Illuminated by the natural light of a narrow and lofty shaft far above, piles of the lustrous metal soared into its vaulted ceiling like mountains, touching the ends of dripping stalactites. Gems and jewels glittered like stars in the shining morass, together with copper-banded chests that jutted like wooden islands between refulgent straits. Ornate weapons: swords, axes, hammers and others of more elaborate artifice protruded from vast treasure mounds. So immense was the hoard that it was impossible to take it all in with a single look. The chamber itself was cavernous and appeared to tail off into an anteroom at the back that was lost from view.

  Hakem could taste the gold on his tongue; its strong, metallic scent filled his nostrils. He had to fight the urge to run wildly into the room and immerse himself in it. But then he noticed something else amidst the hoard’s lustrous mirage, skeletons picked clean, and fire-blackened armour and snapped blades. Great pools of heat-emanating sulphur confirmed Hakem’s sudden suspicions and the creeping dread he had felt earlier returned. The chamber was inhabited.

  Thalgrim mumbled something next to him. Hakem turned to find the lodefinder glassy-eyed and slack-jawed. A thin trail of drool came off his bottom lip and stretched all the way down to the floor.

  ‘Gorl,’ he garbled drunkenly.

  ‘No,’ the merchant thane cried, reaching out to grab him. But he was too late. Thalgrim stumbled madly into the chamber, burbling ‘Gorl, gorl, gorl!’ as he went.

  Hakem went after him, despite every fibre of his being willing him not to. Ralkan followed in an entirely different delirium.

  ‘Thalgrim,’ Hakem hissed, stalling a few feet from the cavern mouth, not daring to raise his voice much above a whisper. ‘Wait!’

  The lodefinder was oblivious and, after diving amidst a mountainous pile of gold, went barrelling onward.

  An inferno of roaring, black-red flame engulfed Thalgrim from an unseen source. The wave of heat emanating from it was incredible and felled Hakem to his knees. Ralkan collapsed into a heap before it, screwing his body up into a ball and whimpering. Hakem lost sight of Thalgrim in the fearsome blaze, shielding his eyes against its terrible glare. When he looked back, there was nothing left of the lodefinder except ash – he didn’t even scream.

  Survival instinct got Hakem to his feet. He rushed over to Ralkan and dragged him up by the scruff of his neck.

  ‘On your feet,’ the merchant thane snarled beneath his breath.

  Ralkan obeyed as whatever fear seizing him drained his will.

  Tremors shook the ground, sending coins and gems cascading from their lofty summits, so violent that Hakem struggled to stay standing.

  From around the collapsing mounds of gold there emerged a beast so ancient and evil that many who lived had never seen its like.

  ‘Drakk,’ Hakem whispered, Ralkan murmuring next to him and gripping the merchant thane’s tunic for dear life. Hakem felt his courage, his resolve and his reason stripping away as he beheld the snorting behemoth.

  So massive was the dragon that its bulk pushed the mountainous treasure peaks aside, nearly filling the width of the immense chamber. Red scales that glistened like blood covered a brawny body fraught with scars. Its barrel-ribbed chest was broad and sickly yellow. Deep, black pools of hate served for eyes and regarded the dwarfs hungrily. Claws the length of swords three times over and half again as thick, scraped the ground as the creature sharpened them raucously. Raising its long, almost elegant, neck the dragon stretched its mighty, tattered wings and roared.

  Mind-numbing terror gripped the dwarfs as they fought the backwash of dragon breath, rancid with the s
tink of sulphur and rotting meat. The beast made no attempt to advance. It merely snorted and hissed, tongue lathing the air as it tried to taste the fear of its prey.

  Hakem gritted his teeth and forced his arm to move, prising Ralkan’s fingers off his tunic one-by-one. Released from the lorekeeper’s grasp the merchant thane felt a sudden epiphany come over him, a surety of knowledge that let him bury his fear beneath something raw and primal.

  ‘Go,’ Hakem said calmly.

  Rigid with fear, Ralkan responded with a murmur.

  ‘Go,’ he said again, more fiercely this time.

  Eyes locked on the beast, the lorekeeper took a half step back.

  ‘I have lost my honour,’ Hakem uttered with absolutely certainty and took off his tunic. ‘There is nothing left,’ he continued, throwing down his belt. ‘Perhaps if I die here, there will be some honour in that.’ He tore off the hook that was strapped to his arm and unravelled the bandage – the wound was still bloody and seeped through it.

  ‘Go, lorekeeper,’ Hakem said, reaching down and taking up a hammer from amongst the scattered treasure. ‘Recount my deeds that my name at least might live on.’

  Ralkan took another fearful step.

  ‘Flee you fool – now!’ Hakem raged, shouting in the lorekeeper’s face.

  Ralkan found his will at last and fled.

  ‘Now we are alone, you and I,’ said the thane of Barak Varr, the frantic footfalls of the lorekeeper diminishing behind him as he allowed his bloodsoaked bandage to fall to the ground. He bit into the stump of his wrist, reopening the wound and bringing fresh blood to the surface. Daubing it ritualistically over his bare chest in the arcane sigils of old, he muttered an oath to Grimnir.

  The dragon sloped forward, baring its long and deadly fangs – its gaping maw could snap an ogre in two.

  Hakem gripped the hammer.

  ‘Come,’ he said with grim finality. ‘Face me and forge my legend.’

  Rearing up on its haunches, the dragon snarled. There was the faintest trace of amusement in its eyes as it dove towards Hakem with bone-crushing force.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Uthor had descended into a ravine of fire. Here in the very bowels of the underdeep the blood of the mountain itself ran in thick channels of lava. Blistering heat haze emanated from the syrupy magma rivers, gouts of liquid flame spitting sporadically to the surface. Igneous rock clusters swam the lava tributaries, shifting like miniature archipelagos, and ran as far as the eye could pierce dust and flame down a long and craggy catacomb.

  Columns, carved from the rock in the earliest days of the world, supported a ridged and spiked roof that rose high into a billowing pall of grey-black smoke.

  ‘I do not like the look of this path,’ said Rorek, sweating profusely.

  Stretching out in front of them was a long and wide road, wretched with cracks venting intermittent plumes of steam and sharp, jutting rocks.

  ‘It is the only road we have left,’ Uthor told him, exhaustedly. The thane of Kadrin was finding it hard to speak. Vapours of thick, repressive heat made legs and arms leaden and lungs burn. Carried on an arid, air-choked breeze that robbed breath and will, the effect was stifling.

  ‘Then it is the way we must go.’ Emelda mustered her resolve, swallowing back the taste of soot and ash on her tongue.

  After the Barduraz Varn and the shallow bridge, the trio had rested for but a moment on the stone plateau, none of them wanting, or willing, to talk about the sudden appearance of Gromrund or what it meant for the hammerer. Gathering up their strength, they’d pressed on down shallow corridors bereft of light, going deeper and deeper into the hold aware that the flood waters might be just behind them.

  At one point, Rorek had noticed a marker stone etched in runic script. ‘The Lonely Road’ it read – it was aptly named. They’d ploughed on in silence, finding no further signs, no indication of where they might be headed. Thunder roared above them constantly and small rock chips fell from the ceiling and scattered down the walls as the Black Water did its work. Then, at last, it caught them, a crushing wave of such fury that they’d fled before it. An ancient door of the underdeep had impeded their escape but together they’d released the elder portal and sealed it shut behind them with the last of Rorek’s door spikes, descending into the magma caves at the very nadir of the karak.

  Emelda took the first steps across the plateau, treading the most solid route through a cracking path rimmed with piles of hot, burning ash and cooling cinder. Uthor and Rorek followed tentatively behind her.

  ‘Stay away from the edges,’ she called from the front.

  Uthor peered over the crumbling plateau periphery into deep pits of boiling lava, bubbling with submerged eruptions and gaseous emissions. When a section of rock broke off and fell away into it, only to be devoured instantly, he shrank back and stepped a little faster. All the while, the earth shook and the ceiling rattled, the sound of muted thunder emanating loudly through it.

  ‘Watch out!’ Uthor cried.

  Emelda looked up and leapt aside as a dislodged spike of rock came crashing down and impaled into the hot earth where she had been standing. The clan daughter got to her feet, just as Uthor arrived, quickly dusting off a thin patina of scorching ash.

  ‘Tromm,’ she breathed, her face red and sweaty.

  ‘Tromm,’ Uthor returned.

  ‘We had best not linger,’ Emelda added, noting more errant chunks of stone impacting against the ground and shattering.

  Uthor nodded and the three of them moved on hurriedly.

  Hakem was dead. Ralkan knew it in his heart, even if he didn’t see him fall. Galdrakk the Red was a legend, a dark tale to scare beardlings to sleep or taunt a wazzock. The lorekeeper did not think for a moment that such a beast still existed. Yet he had seen it with his own eyes, even envisioned his own doom at its claws. Hakem had changed that doom and made it his own.

  Ralkan cursed aloud, tripping and smashing his knee as he scrabbled in the darkened corridors, stumbling blindly, not knowing where he was but desperate for a way out. Honour was of little consequence to the lorekeeper now. He had to try and live or Hakem’s noble sacrifice, his great deed would be for nought. That thought drove him and the certainty that once it was finished with Hakem, Galdrakk’s appetite would not be sated and the beast would be coming for more…

  Thratch’s head was spinning. He smelled damp fur and realised he was wet. Cold stone was hard and sharp against his back. Blurring memories filled his mind as he struggled to wake fully, of the battle with the dwarf-things, of the terrible thunder…

  The painted dwarf-thing was fast, maybe faster than Thratch. No – that wasn’t possible. No warrior, dwarf-thing, green-thing or skaven had ever bested him – even the assassins of Clan Eshin had failed in all their clumsy attempts to slay him. No, Thratch was king of his domain and no half-naked, furless dwarf-thing was going to change that.

  Ducking instinctively, Thratch was forced to the task at hand and the raging dwarf-thing with his chain-cutter. More out of defensive self-preservation than any measure of sword skill the warlord swatted the shiny blade away, though he took pains to snarl his indifference at his enemy.

  Thratch lunged, trying to gut the fat dwarf-thing like a stuck pig. The painted creature was fast but not fast enough and the warlord squealed inwardly with delight as he cut it, licking the shed dwarf blood from his blade. Frenzy filled his mind at the taste of it, the imminence of the kill intoxicating. Thratch would wear the dwarf-thing’s head like a hat when he slew it.

  The warlord drew down a wicked swipe to finish it but the painted dwarf-thing disappeared at the moment of victory. Searing pain flared in Thratch’s back, dispelling his blood frenzy. Keen, skaven ears heard the split sections of plate hitting the ground as they were torn free. Silver flashed as the painted dwarf-thing came on.

  Thratch blocked madly as the blows rained down – such fury! The glaive haft snapped under the barrage. Thratch threw the bladed end at his assailant des
perately, fighting the urge to squirt the musk of fear and flee blindly. The skaven took a step back and came close to flight. No – he was master of this realm. Thratch had never fled; his strength was what marked him for greatness, it was the very thing that would get him noticed by the Council of Thirteen and cement a vaunted position in the highest echelons of Skavenblight.

  Thratch drew his sword. Rushing forward, he cut the dwarf-thing across the stomach. The skaven licked his muzzle – how succulent its entrails must taste. Another swipe, savage and unrelenting now – the dwarf-thing was tiring and Thratch could feel it. He shaped for another pass, the final blow, when the ground started shaking. Using his tail as a third leg, Thratch kept his feet.

  Something didn’t smell right. Thunder was rising; he could hear it distinctly getting closer. Thunder? Beneath the earth? Thratch turned. A mighty wave rose up before him, edged with white, frothing foam, thick with skaven and dwarf-thing bodies swept up in its watery maw. Thratch’s fur stood on end, eyes widening in abject terror as he faced the pounding inundation. He pumped the musk of fear into the air around him as the remorseless wave crashed down…

  Pain flared in Thratch’s back from where the painted dwarf-thing had struck him. The skaven warlord winced as he got shakily to his feet and wiped the blood from his muzzle, trying to remember what had happened after the wave hit. Memory was sparse, like scratchings of meaning at the back of his mind. Darkness came first and then sound had fallen away as he was carried off into the gloom.

  Trying to piece together the time between then and now, Thratch wandered wildly through the dwarfen deeps, too dazed and incoherent to do anything else. Scent, faint but distinct wafted over him on a hot breeze. Thratch’s nose twitched; the stinking aroma of soot and iron was familiar. It was like acrid bile in his throat – the hated stink of dwarf-things.

  Thratch was angry as he followed the stench. His lair was flooded, his engine was likely destroyed and his army decimated. He still had his sword, though it was chipped and a little bent, that was good. He’d need it to exact his vengeance.