Overlords of the Iron Dragon

by C. L. Werner

  The halls around the fleeing duardin shuddered. Dirt and stone clattered down from the roof. The Kharadron stumbled, flailing about as the tremors threatened to upset their balance. They locked arms, helping one another, knowing that to fall now would mean falling to the pursuing tide of acid.

  ‘The mountain is coming apart!’ Gotramm shouted to his crew. Larger slabs of rock came crashing from the ceiling. Pillars swayed and columns lurched. The doorways of buildings cracked, collapsing as the weight above them came smashing down. However long Finnolf’s Fortress had endured suspended far above the jungle, that endurance was spent. Whether the chemicals unleashed by Grokmund had burned their way down to some hidden machinery or the Prismatic King’s dissolution had disrupted some arcane magic, Gotramm did not know. All he did know was that the entire peak seemed to be tumbling around their ears.

  ‘To the Iron Dragon!’ he yelled, urging his exhausted duardin to a final effort. The ship was their only chance now, a last gamble to escape the crumbling outpost. Even as Gotramm made that realisation, he thought of Brokrin. If he had survived the chemical flood and escaped the refinery, what chance could he have if he were cut off from the ship?

  Chapter XV

  The heat from the chemical fire raging below made it difficult to breathe. Every gasp Brokrin took felt as though he were sucking smouldering embers into his lungs. The chimney was barely wide enough to admit his body, provoking an awful sense of claustrophobia that he had to consciously resist. He was doubled over, feet pressed against one wall while he slid his back up against the other. In such tight quarters it was not difficult to keep from slipping and falling back down to the refinery. The arduous part was making any kind of progress, of making that awkward shift of his legs to push himself upwards.

  Brokrin did not use his hands to help himself along. They were too busy setting a new charge in his volley pistol. Even over the screams and corrosive bubbling that echoed across the refinery, he could hear the grating noise of his pursuer’s armour scraping against the walls of the chimney as Tamuzz followed him upwards. By the light of the fires raging below he could see the warlord. The human could have already reached Brokrin if he had discarded the massive glaive he carried. Tamuzz kept hold of it, however, making his advance ungainly as he shifted its bulk around at every stage of his creeping pursuit. Brokrin took small solace from the retarded pace. If his own climb slackened, Tamuzz would gain on him and with the long reach of the glaive it would not need much to put the duardin in jeopardy.

  There was one thing for which Brokrin could be thankful. With the Chaos warlord below him, the worst of the toxic fumes rushing up from the chemical flood were assailing Tamuzz instead of himself. Mixed into the metallic scraping of his armour against the walls was a steady coughing and choking as the noxious vapours struck the warlord. If the air stung Brokrin’s lungs, he could not begin to imagine what it must be doing to his enemy.

  A violent shudder swept through the chimney. Brokrin could feel the walls shiver against his back and boots. The domineering presence of the Prismatic King dissipated, vanishing utterly. In that moment he knew that, no matter what else happened, the Kharadron had won. The Chaos plot to summon the great daemon had been thwarted. Besides that, whatever else happened was insignificant.

  From below, the point of the glaive came stabbing up at Brokrin, urging him to renewed effort. Tightening his grip on the reloaded pistol, he forced himself to shuffle upwards. The bucking, quivering walls threatened to send him spilling back down towards Tamuzz. The vision of striking the glaive, of impaling himself upon its murderous blade, was one that sent cold fingers closing around his heart.

  The tremor rolling through the walls intensified. To Brokrin it felt as if the outpost were tearing itself apart. Distant roars pounded at the edge of his hearing, the faint echoes of destruction muffled by the thick walls of rock all around him. His mind filled with visions of pillars cracking, columns crashing down like felled timber, the roofs of halls and chambers spilling down to pulverise whatever was beneath them. His skin crawled as he pictured broken bodies lying pinned under tons of debris, wailing futilely for help as they died alone in the dark.

  Faster. If he could only move faster Brokrin might yet reach the surface. He could escape before the quake made the sides of the chimney come smashing together, crushing him into a red smear. He could climb up from the cloying darkness, ascend onto the slope of the mountain.

  And what then? Trapped on the snowy slopes, alone and with no hope of rescue? To die a lingering death of deprivation and starvation? Or if the mountain did indeed come apart would he be plunged headlong into the jungle far below? A bitter laugh rasped across Brokrin’s tongue. Such a fate would be in keeping with the pattern of his luck. Ghazul’s curse paying out to the very last.

  The despair that held him caused Brokrin to tarry. The glaive jabbed up at him, its hot edge pressing against his armour. More by instinct than thought, he started to climb again. He felt the Chaos lord’s weapon jab at him a second time, the fiery tip singeing his leggings.

  Climb. It was all he could do. Climb and climb and climb. Brokrin could not stop, could not let himself fall within reach of that evil blade. He had to keep going, to reach the top. To stand there in the light, to feel the wind whipping through his beard, to draw breath into his lungs that was clean and not a searing vapour of chemicals. Up, if he just kept going up, he could die in the open skies he had journeyed across for so many years. He could see the grand vista of the world at his feet and the glorious sweep of the heavens.

  Who could say? He might yet survive. Some miracle might see Brok­rin rescued from the peak. Stranger things had certainly happened.

  New hope coursed into Brokrin’s limbs. He shuffled his feet and back along the walls with increased determination. Even as he did, he felt the glaive dig at him once more. The burning stab of the tip brought with it a grim suspicion. Where had that fresh surge of hope come from? It was not anything that drew itself up from his own thoughts. What had provoked such a sudden and commanding ambition?

  He looked down at the warlord pursuing him. The enemy who came near enough to poke and prod him with his weapon, but not close enough to overtake him. Brokrin scowled, banging his head against the wall as he tried to exorcise the alien presence from his brain. He was being used, just as Drumark and Grokmund had been. Chaos had latched on like a parasite to his own urges.

  So certain was Brokrin of his conviction that he stopped climbing. He exposed himself to the butchering sweep of the glaive. Instead all he felt was the same goading jab, the same light stab to push him on. With the walls still shivering around him, Brokrin used his feet to firm his position. He brought his volley pistol around, aiming it downwards.

  ‘I am not going to lead you out,’ Brokrin snarled as he fired the weapon down at Tamuzz. The chimney was filled with a blinding flash as the aetheric weapon discharged. The clamour of all barrels going off at once was almost deafening, smothering the distant rumble of falling pillars and collapsing rooms.

  From below there came a brilliant flash of sapphire light. When its glow ebbed away, Brokrin could see Tamuzz staring up at him, unharmed by the shots fired into him at such close range. Instead, in a ring all around the warlord, the walls of the chimney were pitted with bullet holes. Brokrin could see the ebbing blue glow that flickered around the sigils etched into the warlord’s armour.

  ‘You should have learned your lesson before,’ Tamuzz jeered. ‘I am not fated to die by your hand. The magic I have learned from the Changer is less ostentatious than that of Khoram, but no less powerful in its ways. It preserves me for my destined fate. It brings me the things I deem necessary to my ambition.’

  Brokrin hurled the spent volley pistol down at the warlord in a fit of rage. Even this crude missile failed to strike Tamuzz, glancing off the wall and clattering past his head through the only spot that was open.

  ‘I will not be yo
ur puppet!’ Brokrin snarled. ‘Find your own way out!’

  A dry, sinister laugh rose from the warlord. ‘You think I need you to lead me out of this place? I could leave whenever I wished. Just as I can destroy you whenever I wish. A thrust, like so!’ Tamuzz brought the glaive stabbing upwards. Brokrin felt it pressing against him, the sharp stab of its hot point against his armour. Before it could break his skin, the weapon was withdrawn.

  ‘Or I could simply withdraw the magic protections around us,’ Tamuzz stated. Immediately Brokrin felt the trembling walls around him sway with still greater violence. It was all he could do to keep from slipping, an effort made worse by the sweltering air he was forced to breathe and the acidic sting of the chemicals within it. After a moment, the heat and violence became more subdued. Brokrin did not know if Tamuzz had used his magic to heighten the hazards around him or if indeed he was using his spells to suppress them. Either way, the message was the same. He was in the warlord’s power.

  ‘Then end it now,’ Brokrin spat. ‘End it, rot your bones.’

  Tamuzz laughed once more, but now there was a seething hate woven into the sound. ‘It would be too easy to simply kill you. Have you any concept of what you have done? The dream you have destroyed by your meddling? The Prismatic King has waited long to return to the Mortal Realms and avenge himself upon his enemies. I was chosen to fulfil that mighty purpose. But you, a miserable little sky-thief, have undone my plans. You have brought ruin upon me. Where sorcerers and warlords, the legions of the thunder-knights and the hordes of the orruks have all failed to defeat me, you have succeeded. There is nothing I can do to atone for this failure, no penance I can perform to redeem myself in the eyes of the Changer. There is no hope left to me.’ He brought the glaive stabbing up, pressing into Brokrin’s side, forcing him to scramble upwards out of its reach.

  ‘You have cost me everything,’ Tamuzz declared. ‘In the moment of my triumph, everything was taken away even as I reached out to claim it.’ His eyes glared up at Brokrin’s. ‘No, it is not enough to simply kill you. Not enough by half. I will see you reach out to claim the fruit of hope only to have it snatched away from you. When you die, let the bitter­ness of failure, the loss of so near a victory be the taste that colours your fleeing soul. I am only sorry that you are too simple to aspire to anything of more consequence than leaving these catacombs and seeing the open sky one more time. Yet that dream, that ambition will have to be enough. It will hurt, sky-thief, when even so small a hope is ripped from your grasping fingers.’

  The glaive jabbed at Brokrin again. He ground his teeth together and started climbing. As Tamuzz said, the will to live was strong, too strong to be forsaken even when he understood his survival was naught but at his enemy’s whim. The siren call of hope drew him on. Feeble and impossible as it seemed, it still beckoned to him.

  Tremors shook the chimney. Dust and debris clattered down the shaft now. The dull, muffled sounds of destruction swelled, rising in volume to become a steady roar. The peak was tearing itself apart. Whatever Tamuzz thought to do with him, he wondered if it could be worse than having the walls of the chimney crush him between them.

  Morbid despair started to close its talons around Brokrin’s mind. Then he raised his gaze and noted a faint light far above him. Daylight! The top of the shaft at last! Freedom was up there, escape from the claustro­phobic tomb of the chimney. He quickened his pace for a moment, hurrying upwards in a spurt of effort.

  The moment passed. Brokrin’s excitement evaporated in a morass of dejection. What good would it do to climb any higher? Tamuzz would kill him before he could reach the top. He felt the point of the glaive jabbing at his back, trying to goad him on.

  The sting of pain conjured up a desperate gambit in Brokrin’s mind. There was one advantage he had over Tamuzz. The Chaos lord was filled with a lust for revenge, savouring every moment of suffering he could inflict on him. That meant Tamuzz wanted to keep him alive, at least until his hate was satisfied. That might be enough to make the warlord hesitate at the crucial moment.

  ‘You see the sun,’ Tamuzz taunted from below. ‘Climb to it! Perhaps I will let you stand under it. Perhaps you will look across the sky one more time. Climb!’ He jabbed Brokrin again with the glaive. When he refused to budge, Tamuzz thrust at him once more.

  In a heartbeat, Brokrin acted. As Tamuzz thrust up at him, he leaned away from the wall, moving his back from the chimney. For a second he was slipping down, then he pushed out with his legs and pressed his back against the wall again. The difference was the hot sting of the Chaos lord’s weapon. It was caught between Brokrin’s body and the wall.

  Instinctively, Tamuzz tried to wrench the weapon free. As he did, Brokrin reacted. He drew back his legs and let himself fall down the shaft. With the glaive now above him, there was no chance of being impaled on the weapon. Instead his full weight came smashing down into Tamuzz. Protective sigils flickered on his armour, but their enchantment was not enough to fend off a projectile as big as the Kharadron’s plummeting weight. There was nowhere to deflect Brokrin within the narrow expanse of the chimney.

  Brokrin smashed into the shocked Tamuzz, three hundred pounds of armoured duardin breaking the Chaos lord’s grip on the walls and the glaive. With a shriek, the warlord was sent hurtling down the shaft. True to his smug claims of arcane protection and eldritch destiny, it was not a mortal’s hand that brought him to his fate. It was the boiling lake of acidic chemicals that smouldered at the bottom of the chimney.

  Brokrin would have followed Tamuzz to his doom but for the warlord’s glaive. Catching hold of it as he fell, Brokrin twisted it to one side with a vicious motion. Stone screeched as the burning glaive raked across it. How many dozens of feet he continued to plunge before the glaive finally caught he could not say. All he knew was that it did arrest his fall at last. Wedged between the walls, the glaive acted as a brace for Brokrin, a platform from which he could resume his arduous climb.

  The walls quaked and shivered around him, the air was a stinging smog, but Brokrin continued his ascent with greater energy than before.

  When he finally emerged from the chimney, exhaustion swept over Brokrin. He fell in a heap beside the opening of the shaft. It was all he could do to drag himself away from the steady plume of toxic fumes billowing up from the vent. The ground under him was trembling, the slopes around him were fracturing and sending great boulders plunging away to the jungles below.

  Brokrin looked around, trying to gauge his position on the mountain. There were snowy slopes and a couple of massive stone towers, a field of grated chimneys that disgorged a steady stream of smoke. He could see no trace of the port or the great watchtowers, much less the dock where the Iron Dragon had been tied. Grimly he considered that he might be on the other side of the peak. Well away from his comrades and any chance of rescue.

  It was just as well, Brokrin reflected. The mountain’s turmoil was becoming worse, making the very possibility of escape doubtful. If Gotramm had got back to the ship, he hoped they had cast off and sailed away. The belief that his ship and his crew would survive was a great comfort to him.

  One of the huge towers nearby suddenly fractured and came crashing down in a jumble of massive blocks. Brokrin watched the collapse with a sense of fatalism.

  It couldn’t be long now.

  ‘Up! Up! Up!’ Gotramm shouted the command as he led the survivors from the refinery rushing down the dock towards the Iron Dragon’s waiting deck. All around them the outpost was coming down. Sculptures sloughed away from the face of the mountain, crashing down in great heaps of rubble. Towers lost their moorings and went spinning away as they fell to the jungle far below. One entire pier split and went raining earthwards.

  Gas-carbines barked as the Kharadron still aboard the ironclad opened up on the beastmen and cultists that came charging out from the outpost’s entrance. Men and beastkin alike were cut down before they could retaliate. A
few turned back towards the tunnel but sight of the caustic cloud rolling behind them caused them to charge the ship instead. Preferable by far were the guns of the duardin and the ironclad’s crew were only too happy to oblige their enemies. The toxic cloud rolled across the dead and the dying, smothering them as it went spilling over the edge of the dock.

  Gotramm leaned wearily against the gunwale as he boarded the ship. He drew a few ragged breaths, then hurried onwards, still shouting commands to the crew. ‘Away! The whole place is coming down!’ He brought himself to the wheelhouse, snapping orders to Vorki to get the ship in motion.

  The crew could see for themselves the peril around them. They had already made most of the preparations to leave when the tremors started. All that remained was to cast off, and this was accomplished by Mortrimm and Lodri. Hefting a heavy axe, the old navigator sheared through the mooring chains at the stern while Lodri attended to the one at the bow. The moment it was free, the Iron Dragon shot upwards, rapidly climbing away from the doomed outpost. Below them, the Kharadron watched as the dock they had been tethered to started crumbling away. A massive slab of rock broke away from the summit above, careening downwards to sweep straight through the spot they had been in only a short time before.

  ‘Pull away,’ Gotramm gave the order.

  Mortrimm gave him a pained look, colour draining from his face. ‘What about the others?’ he asked, almost in a whisper.

  Gotramm shook his head. ‘There are no others,’ he stated. He gazed across the rest of the duardin on deck. ‘There are no others,’ he repeated. ‘We are it. Nobody else is coming.’ He turned back towards the wheelhouse. ‘Vorki! Get us away from here before we are crushed!’