The Curse of the Phoenix Crown

by C. L. Werner

  ‘Your plan demands the pretence,’ Morek reminded him. ‘It is a good plan, sound as the halls of Karaz-a-Karak. Give it the time it needs.’

  Morgrim scowled. ‘Time isn’t our friend, and you know it well. The drakk are still licking their wounds after Kazad Mingol, but we can’t count on them staying away. Every day we gain is a gift from Valaya.’ He clenched his fist and pounded it against the table where his maps and charts were arrayed. ‘Brok Stonefist had better deliver on his promises.’

  Morek scratched at his brow, giving Morgrim a worried stare. ‘You doubt the Lord of the Tunnels?’

  ‘I think he may be a victim of his own legend,’ Morgrim said. ‘Those of my troops who have done a turn as miners say he should have excavated his tunnels a month ago. I can understand caution, trying to keep the elgi from discovering the diggings, but this…’

  ‘Have you spoken to Brok? Asked him about the delay?’

  ‘It’s always the same with him,’ Morgrim declared. ‘He assures me that his excavations will bring down the walls exactly where we need them to go down. Then he launches into a tirade about Salendor and how his personal honour demands he kill the elgi.’

  ‘You would expect any less from a dawi lord?’ Morek wondered.

  There was a grave look in Morgrim’s eyes. ‘I think Brok has become obsessed. There’s a fever in him as destructive as gold madness.’ He shook his fist at the ground, as though to express his frustration to the Lord of the Tunnels somewhere below his feet. ‘Ancestors forgive me, but I wonder if I’ve placed my whole army at the mercy of a bleeding zaki.’

  The outburst had no sooner left Morgrim’s tongue than a dirt-covered messenger was standing at the entrance of the tent. The dwarf bowed when the general looked in his direction.

  ‘Tromm, lord,’ the dwarf said. ‘I bring tidings from Brok Stonefist. He wishes to inform you that you may begin your attack at your pleasure. When you do, he will see to it that the walls are broken.’

  ‘Tell Brok he may expect my command within the next day,’ Morgrim told the runner. He waited until the messenger was gone before turning towards Morek. ‘When the artillerists get back with their rock, we’ll be ready.’

  ‘You don’t seem pleased about that,’ Morek said.

  A rumbling sigh shook Morgrim. ‘Brok says he’s ready and maybe he is, but I can’t escape the feeling that I’ve put too much trust in him.’

  From the balcony of her tower, Liandra watched as another volley of arrows rose from behind the walls, striking a regiment of armoured dwarfs trying to steer an iron-headed ram towards one of the gates. A few of the dawi fell to the barrage, but most were able to scramble into cover behind the ram’s immense frame of fresh timber. In taking shelter, however, the dwarfs left the ram itself vulnerable. Unmoving, it presented a prime target for elven magic.

  ‘Shield your eyes,’ Liandra warned Revenial. The steward hurriedly covered his face as Liandra raised her staff to the sky. She focused her mind on the swirling currents of the aethyr. It seemed more exacting and difficult to fixate upon those eldritch patterns than it once had been. All the familiar skeins seemed to unravel a little more each time. She might have laid the impression down to her imagination, or a diminishment of her powers after the death of Vranesh, but other mages had confided to her their own growing difficulties practising their craft. It was as if the violence of the war were somehow throwing echoes into the aethyr, disturbing the old harmonies.

  Fiercely, Liandra chided herself for her lack of concentration. She could fret over thaumatological theories later. At the moment she had dwarfs to kill. Drawing down the magical essences demanded of her conjuration, she focused them into the head of her staff, letting the energy build. At length, a blast of blinding light leapt from her staff, hurtling down from the tower with meteoric violence. The battering ram was engulfed in flame, the timbers crackling and popping as the bark crumbled from the wood. The dwarfs crowded around the ram shrieked, many of them stumbling away, their clothes and beards aflame. Asur sharpshooters hidden on the walls picked them off one by one, stifling their screams with arrows to breast and brain.

  ‘Magnificent,’ Revenial crowed when he looked out and saw the havoc Liandra’s spell had unleashed.

  ‘It’s a start,’ she replied. Liandra could still feel some sense of satisfaction watching dwarfs die. It was easy to remember the first attack on Kor Vanaeth and the fall of Oeragor, even the early sieges against Tor Alessi. The dwarfs had given her ample reason to hate them. Why, then, did she feel a sense of guilt that she did hate them so?

  ‘Khazuk! Khazuk! Khazuk!’ The fierce war-cry of the dwarfs rose from the besiegers in a great roar. It was more than simple belligerence. There was a note of jubilation and triumph in the cry. Revenial and Liandra exchanged a confused look.

  ‘What do they have to be so happy about?’ Revenial wondered.

  Liandra looked towards the Diamond Tower where Salendor was coordinating his defence of the city, wondering if one of the boulders the attackers were lobbing into the city had somehow struck the crystal-roofed tower.

  It wasn’t the tower that had roused the dwarfs. The cause of their shouting was much closer. The first Liandra and Revenial were aware of it was the tremor they felt pass through the tower. Some instinct drew their gaze away from their own surroundings and out towards the walls. They both gasped in amazement at what they saw.

  The walls of Athel Maraya, those grand, colossal fortifications, were swaying and sagging, creaking from side to side like a ship at sea. Dust and rubble trickled down their sides, great clumps of mortar crackling down onto the regiments of archers posted behind them. Some of the sentries on the walls clung to the crenellations, casting aside their weapons in their desperate efforts to retain their footing. Others were thrown, cast off the walls like horsemen from the back of an unbroken stallion. Screaming, they crashed amongst their own comrades, flung at them like an armoured bludgeon and leaving little clumps of broken soldiery all along the perimeter.

  Soon a deafening rumble and crash rocked Athel Maraya. The swaying walls came toppling inwards, their immense bulk pulverising soldiers, reducing them to gory smears in the squares and streets. The collapsing walls obliterated the buildings behind them, burying hundreds of elves beneath tonnes of rubble.

  Liandra’s eyes blazed with outrage. ‘Sappers!’ she shouted. ‘The filthy burrowers set part of their army to excavate beneath the walls and bring them down. That was why there weren’t any dawi mages among the besiegers – their runesmiths were focused entirely on hiding the diggers from our divinations and scrying.’

  Revenial turned a terrified face towards Liandra. ‘What can we do? The dwarfs are in the city. They’re through the walls!’ He pointed a trembling hand towards the nearest breach.

  Looking at the broken walls, Liandra could appreciate the enormity of the attack and the precision with which the dwarfs had wrought such havoc. The walls had been brought down not in one or two places, but six. They’d been sent crashing inwards in each instance, spilling across those structures closest to the breaches and burying whatever defenders might have been able to immediately reach the gaps. Never did the falling walls topple in such a way that they choked any of the wide thoroughfares that stretched across the city. The streets had been left clear for the invaders.

  Hidden trenches leading up to the broken walls suddenly disgorged filthy, dirt-coated mobs of dwarfs armed with massive hammers and sharp-headed picks. The very miners who had brought down the walls were now the first to rush into the gaps, defending the dust-choked heaps of rubble until the regular dawi warriors could exploit the breaches and pour into the vulnerable city.

  ‘What can we do?’ Liandra threw Revenial’s question back at him. ‘We can fight and show these brutes that we won’t be cowed by their tricks.’

  Liandra loosed her magic against the nearest of the breaches. She immolated a burly
miner just as he started to pull his pick from the skull of an unfortunate elf swordsman. The screaming dwarf pitched forwards onto his face, blazing away like some obscene candle. The horror-struck dwarfs around him backed away, but Liandra was of no mind to be merciful. Again and again she set her magic against the dawi, sending their burning bodies tumbling down the jumbled debris. A few elf militia scrambled up the rubble, intending to hold the breach until regular troops could be brought up. Quickly they learned how hopeless the effort would be. Dwarf crossbows dropped two of them and wounded a third. Reluctantly, they fell back, conceding the breach to the invaders.

  ‘There! One of the animals is firing the houses.’ Revenial was jumping up and down, trying to draw his mistress’s attention to the scene unfolding a hundred yards away. Liandra could see a red-bearded dwarf wearing a horned helm playing a lit torch across the wood carvings adorning the doorway of an elven home. The brute chuckled as the carvings began to smoulder and catch fire. Pointing her staff at the vandal, she turned her hate and disgust for the dwarf into a flaming spear of energy that seared through his armour and left him a charred mess strewn across the doorstep of the home he’d set aflame.

  It was a fruitless gesture. Liandra could see more and more dwarfs pouring into the city now, many of them bearing torches and pots of pitch. Trees were soon transformed into grisly pillars of flame, flowerbeds became fiery fields. Homes spilled smoke into the sky as their inhabitants burned and screamed. The dwarfs weren’t interested in plunder or captives now. This attack had only one purpose in mind: complete destruction. She thought of Kor Vanaeth and what the city had been reduced to when the dwarfs were finished with it.

  ‘Khaine’s blood, there are so many of them,’ Revenial cursed. ‘Even your magic can’t kill them all.’

  ‘I won’t know until I try,’ Liandra growled, raising her staff once more, straining to draw more of the elusive aethyr to her spell.

  As the magic swelled within her, Liandra felt the echo of a familiar sensation rush through her. Automatically, she turned her face skywards. There, soaring down upon the stricken city were two of Lord Teranion’s precious dragons. The great beasts bellowed in rage as they flew above the burning streets, the primordial roar causing windows to shake in their frames. The dragons made one pass, allowing their riders a view of the overall condition of the battle.

  ‘The dragons have come,’ Revenial cheered, giving voice to the exultation racing through Liandra’s mind. The dragons had come and now it was the dwarfs’ turn to burn.

  The huge monsters were diving down, dragon fire billowing from their fanged maws. They struck the dwarfs with almost elemental fury, boiling hundreds of them, melting the armour from their bodies and reducing their flesh to ash.

  ‘There’s little more we can do here,’ Liandra told Revenial. ‘Now that the dwarfs are inside the walls, our place is with Lord Salendor.’ As she followed the steward down the steps of her tower, Liandra wondered about Salendor. She wondered if he was still clinging to the prophecy now that Athel Maraya was on fire and Arhain-tosaith was nowhere to be seen.

  The air within the tunnel was foul with dust and the smoke of lanterns. Forek found it nearly impossible to breathe, the temptation to remove his masked helm mounting with each gasp he tried to draw into his lungs. The memory of his humiliation when the elgi rinn knocked him down and exposed his shame was too painful to submit to the temptation. He’d choke before he allowed himself to be disgraced like that again.

  A cruel smile formed beneath his mask as the steelbeard recalled how he’d turned elgi pity against them. When he returned to Brok Stonefist, he told the thane what he’d heard. The captives taken by Salendor were to be put to work strengthening and expanding the walls around his city. That had set a cunning plan in Brok’s brain, one that had taken years to bring to fruition.

  Each time he fought Salendor, a few more of Brok’s warriors were taken captive. But some of those who became prisoners did so by design. In ones and twos, Brok had let a few of his miners fall into Salendor’s hands. As they worked on the walls, the miners left signs and marks only other members of the miners’ guild could read. Signs that told exactly where sappers should dig to exploit the minute weaknesses the dwarfs had connived to engineer and bring the great walls of Athel Maraya crashing down.

  Forek had felt the tremors as the walls fell. Indeed, for several ghastly moments it had seemed the tunnel he was in would collapse, such was the violence of the quake. But the tremor had passed and the tunnel remained stable. Brok’s miners knew their business and they’d had a long time to turn their profession into a weapon of war.

  The Lord of the Tunnels had only disclosed some of his plan to Morgrim Elgidum. While he provided his sappers to undermine the walls, Brok neglected to tell his commander about the other part of his strategy. Forek suspected that Brok was worried about what would happen if Morgrim were to learn that the thane was using the whole dawi army as a cover for his own, private, attack.

  The tunnel Brok had his best miners digging was far longer than those that brought down the walls. From the edge of the surrounding forest, he’d ordered it dug clear into the heart of Athel Maraya. While the rest of the army fought for the outskirts of the city, Brok intended to seize its heart. It was there, he knew, he would find Lord Salendor.

  ‘Enough!’ Brok’s voice echoed through the tunnel. He pushed his way down the line until he was at the front. Around his arm was a coil of thin cord that he had played out ever since the miners had started to dig. Knots in the cord measured the distance. Unless something had gone wrong, the tunnel should have reached the spot he wanted. To be sure, Brok took a long spike of steel and stabbed it up through the roof of the tunnel, piercing the surface above. Hastily, he drew the spike back and thrust a curved tube of bronze into the hole. It was an ingenious device crafted by the engineers’ guild, two mirrors set into the angles of the tube reflecting the image of whatever the opposite end was trained upon.

  Brok stroked his long beard and gave a satisfied hiss. ‘I can see the Diamond Tower,’ he said. Withdrawing the bronze pipe, he turned to the expectant miners all around him. ‘We’re as near as we need to be, lads. Open her up!’

  The miners set to the task with an almost bestial fury. Their picks and hammers tore at the roof of the tunnel, tearing a wide fissure. Dirt and the broken tiles from a plaza spilled down on them, but the dwarfs didn’t pause in their labour. Inch by inch, the hole they’d made widened.

  As light poured down into the tunnel, the warriors who had followed behind the miners came hurrying forwards. Rundin, the fierce Dragonslayer, was the first to leap onto the pick handles the miners held crosswise and be flung up onto the surface. Forek was right behind him, as eager to be out of the stifling tunnel as he was to confront the elgi.

  The steelbeard found himself standing in a plaza, the intersection of two tree-lined streets. Great towers rose in every direction, thin and dainty constructions as dwarfs reckoned things, but with a gravity-defying liquidity to their broad arches and engorged spires. Bridges stretched between many of the towers, twisting and flowing above the streets. Forek saw elf bowmen on some of those bridges and hurriedly unslung the shield strapped across his back. He had no fear of fighting the elgi, but he didn’t think an arrow in his gizzard would make for a momentous death either.

  Rundin seemed to have no such concerns. With a roar, the half-naked skarrenawi charged at a group of elven spearmen who had the misfortune to be marching past the plaza when the dwarfs broke through. They were still in shock at the incredible trespass. Before they could recover, Rundin was among them. One elf fell with his belly opened from hip to rib. A second collapsed in a mire of his own entrails. The third was able to bring up his spear in a futile effort to block Rundin’s axe only to have the blade chop through the haft of his weapon and split his breastbone. The murderous carnage broke the discipline of the others. Shouting in alarm, they fled down one
of the streets, Rundin and his axe hot on their heels.

  The commotion drew the notice of the nearest archers. The bowmen hurriedly nocked arrows and began to shoot at the dwarfs emerging from the tunnel. One arrow glanced off Forek’s shield, while another came so near to striking Brok that it became caught in the loose folds of mail hanging from his arm.

  ‘Zonzharr!’ Brok cried out as he ducked and tried to make himself less of a target for the archers on the bridges. At his call, the flow of warriors being sent up from the tunnel stopped. Instead, the next dwarfs raised up from the hole were miners. Unlike their comrades, these didn’t have candles spitted onto their spiked helms or lanterns fastened to their belts. They didn’t bear pick or hammer. Instead, what they carried were crooked metal rods with a strip of leather stretched between the bifurcated end. Into this loop of leather the miners hurriedly set fist-sized globes of iron. A short length of fuse fizzled at the top of each sphere. Hastily, the miners whirled their rods above their heads, swinging them faster and faster. One of them collapsed as an elf arrow struck him, the globe rolling away from his fallen weapon until one of the warriors rushed over and hastily snuffed out the fuse.

  The other miners brought the rods to a sudden stop. The momentum they’d built up sent the iron globes hurtling away, up towards the bridges. It was only a moment before the bombs detonated. Filled with zonzharr, a devastating blasting powder, the iron globes wrought brutal havoc among the archers. When a bomb struck one of the bridges, the span was ripped from its moorings and sent crashing to the street below. When one detonated above the bridge, it sent a shower of sparks and flame streaming onto the elves. A few went wide of the mark, crashing instead into the towers themselves, setting fire to the woodwork and nearby trees. Only seldom did they stray, however, for the miners were old hands at slinging zonzharr in this fashion to blast rock from the upper reaches of Angaz Baragdum’s open-pit mines.