“Tell the humie he can die fast or slow,” Uhrghul said. “That always scares the soft-skins. Tell him if he talks, you’ll make sure he’s dead before the lads start cooking their supper.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Passage through the canyon had been slow and perilous. Kessler doubted they would have survived more than a mile without Skanir’s sharp eyes. Not a single foot of wall, it seemed, had been spared the vandalising attention of the goblins. The filthy monsters had been no less industrious, leaving more lethal evidence of their intrusion behind. Covered pits, wolf-traps, rock-falls, even several devices of such complexity that Kessler found it hard to believe goblins could have conceived them, such were the relics the spiteful greenskins had added to the haunted atmosphere of Drung-a-Uzkhul. Skanir had spotted them all, warning his companions of their danger. After the hideous fate of the first casualty, none of them needed much reminder to watch their step.
Gradually, the canyon began to widen. The men found themselves standing in a large valley, the broken remains of a pair of dwarf statues lying sprawled across much of the ground. The spot had an air of desolation that was positively overwhelming, a clammy clutch that oozed into Kessler’s pores. A huge section of one canyon wall had broken away, collapsing into rubble, exposing a yawning cave that stretched into the darkness. He didn’t need Skanir to tell him that the dwarfs had entombed the carcasses of Zahaak and his legion here, long ago. Now, the secret tomb was open and its unholy occupants once again stalked the land.
“Grobi work,” Skanir decided, examining the heaped pile of stones. “It would have been concealed to look like part of the mountain, but somehow they must have stumbled onto it recently.” The dwarf reached down and lifted the severed arm of a goblin, the flesh shrivelled against the bone. “Probably thought they’d find some treasure to loot. I don’t have to tell you what kind of surprise they found instead.” The dwarf let the sinister statement linger, and then turned around, scanning the heights that loomed over the canyon. “The war-crypts will be up high, above the stink of the battlefield,” he said, almost to himself. Skanir studied the walls intently. With a sharp gasp, he pointed. The dwarf architects had blended the narrow twisting trail up the sheer face of the cliff so well into its natural setting, that Kessler had difficulty picking it out, even with Skanir’s help.
Kessler started towards the base of the cliff, carefully picking his way through the rubble of broken statuary. Suddenly, he felt a tremendous force slam into him, bowling him to the ground. Kessler struggled beneath a powerful grip, trying to pull free. From the corner of his eye, he could see Raban’s bearded face pressed close to him, the Nordlander’s arms pinning him to the earth.
The mercenary cursed venomously as Kessler strove to push the man off him, only faintly hearing the cries and shouts from the rest of his small company. Finally, Kessler managed to drive an elbow into the axeman’s gut, momentarily stunning Raban. He pulled free of the mercenary’s slackened grip. Before he could pick himself back up, however, Raban’s hand closed around his ankle, spilling him back onto the ground with a savage tug. This time he landed on his back. As he started to kick at the man who had felled him, Kessler saw a flash of steel cut through the air above him. A moment later, the scything blade flashed again, its lethal edge only a few feet above his face.
Kessler carefully began to crawl back the way he had come. Raban spat blood from a lip bruised by Kessler’s boot and followed after the man, writhing along on his belly like some hairy lizard. When he was clear of the scythe, Kessler was able to see more clearly what had happened. A moon-shaped edge of rusty metal had exploded from the side of one of the statues, its tremendous momentum causing it to swing back and forth like some butchering pendulum. The blade was poised at a height designed to behead a dwarf, but would have worked nearly as much havoc slicing through a man’s chest. While Kessler watched, Ghrum lumbered over behind the trap, the ogre’s immense hand closing around the iron stalk that supported the blade. With a brutal tug, Ghrum snapped the corroded metal, ending forever the whirring threat of the pendulum. His dull eyes considered the lethal implement for an instant, and then, with a dismissive shrug, he tossed it aside.
Kessler quickly took stock of the situation. If Raban hadn’t struck him, he would have fallen prey to the goblin device, that much was immediately clear. The swordsman stepped forward and helped the battered mercenary to his feet. Raban sullenly shook aside the assistance.
“You have my thanks,” Kessler said, trying to apologise for the way he had struggled against his benefactor. Raban leered at him resentfully.
“Keep it,” the Nordlander spat. “Just be thankful you’re the one footing the bill, otherwise I’d have let that thing skewer you.”
The way he said it, Kessler knew that Raban would probably have preferred that result. The sharp glance he directed at Valdner left no doubt as to why he had acted otherwise. Brushing the dust from his leggings, Raban marched over to the advancing officer.
“You should be more careful, Herr Kessler,” Valdner reproved him. “So very much counts upon your remaining with us.”
“Don’t blame him,” Theodo cried out, sharply. The halfling was pushing his way through the mass of gawking soldiers and sell-swords. There was a malicious quality to the cook’s bruised face. “There’s the one that triggered it!” He thrust an accusing finger at Eugen. The knight was crouching beside the statue, beneath the murderous sweep of the pendulum. At the halfling’s accusation, he straightened, glaring at Theodo.
“It was an accident,” the knight returned.
“Strange how many convenient accidents seem to surround you,” Theodo spat, touching his swollen cheek. The statement caused Eugen to see red, his hand dropping to the hilt of his sword. Before he could advance on the halfling, Eugen heard the rasp of steel sliding free from leather. He turned his head and found Kessler facing him, the immense greatsword held at the ready.
“You’d take the word of this… this burrow rat over mine?” Eugen scoffed, shock in his tones. Kessler did not reply, simply keeping his sword at the ready Other weapons were now being pulled clear of their scabbards. Ottmar and Valdner both approached the knight, backing Kessler’s move.
“I don’t know what to think,” Kessler said, his voice a low growl. “I’m not very good at it. I do know that there have been too many coincidences in this camp to suit me. I also know I’ll feel better if you lowered your sword.”
The knight stared into the faces of Kessler, Valdner and Ottmar. He looked past them and saw the hardened countenances of the other mercenaries and Wissenlanders. Only the young Sollander, Gerhard, looked sympathetic. Eugen saw him start to reach for his own weapon. The move decided the veteran’s actions. Nodding his head weakly, he let his sword drop into the dirt, holding his hands to his side in an expression of defeat. Valdner came forward and retrieved the fallen weapon.
“Minhea!” the captain called. The wiry Sylvanian emerged from the ranked warriors. “Take charge of the prisoner. Don’t let him out of your sight.”
Eugen barely heard the words, his attention fixed on Gerhard, silently urging the younger knight to make no move. When the Sylvanian came to lead him away, Eugen offered no resistance. There would be a time for that, but the time was not now.
Kessler watched him go, part of him relieved that the knight had been exposed, part of him sickened that a warrior of such honour could have fallen so low as to become a traitor and spy.
The crooked path up the side of the canyon emptied onto a shallow plateau. Kessler wondered whether the space was natural or another example of the dwarfs’ amazing engineering skills. He rather suspected that it had been constructed, carved from the side of the canyon. Perhaps a hundred yards wide, nearly half as deep, the table of rock jutted out from the craggy cliff, looking out over the canyon floor hundreds of feet below. Here, as in the canyon, every inch of the wall was carved, sporting the sharp runes and elaborate bas-reliefs of ancient artisans. Here, as below, the
craftsmanship had been defaced by the clubs and axes of goblins, rude pictures and rough glyphs painted over anything too hard to be completely destroyed.
Kessler’s attention lingered on the walls only briefly, his eyes soon drawn to the great portal set into the face of the cliff. Massive columns of marble flanked the doorway, even the attentions of the goblins doing little to deface their elegance. The doors were immense panels of bronze and steel. Two bas-relief warriors stared out from the panels, their armour scratched and chipped by vandals, their faces obliterated, replaced by crude goblin paintings that leered obscenely. A huge crater defaced the join of the doors, the dented ruin left behind by a battering ram.
“Looks like we’re not the first ones to visit,” Valdner observed.
Skanir walked towards the doorway, shaking his head sadly. He placed a hand against one of the maimed relief figures, almost reverently. The dwarf’s fingers pressed against the door, finding it solidly in place. His eyes turned away from the abused dwarf craftsmanship to the rough iron plates that had been pounded into the panels, reattaching them to the stone of the doorway.
“Orcs,” Skanir spat, “broke their way inside looking for plunder.”
“But they sealed it up again when they left,” observed Ottmar, pointing at one of the iron plates. “Seems an odd thing for an orc to do.”
“Not if you understand greenskins,” Skanir said. “They never build anything that they can’t steal from somebody else. They broke in here to steal the treasure and armour that was buried with the dead, but they came back later to do even worse.” He lowered his head, glaring at the grainy white sand that littered the plateau. Skanir turned over what looked like a bit of rock, with his foot. Slowly it dawned on the men watching him that the rock was a tiny fragment of bone. The white sand was actually pulverised bone, the crushed remains of ancient skeletons. “The orcs dragged our dead from the crypt, smashing them to powder. Then they planted their own dead inside.”
Kessler nodded his head, appreciating the outrage Skanir was feeling, but unable to contain the excitement the dwarf’s words provoked. “You said the runefang would be in such a place, a dwarf crypt that had been violated by orcs, used to bury one of their own.”
Skanir looked dubious. “These mountains are full of war-crypts that the greenskin vermin have defiled. It’s asking too much of the gods that this is the one they planted old Gordreg in.”
The swordsman stepped closer to the doorway. A sense of belonging and purpose filled him. He could not shake the impression, the feeling that this was where he needed to be. A thrill swept through his body, a cold sensation that raced along his spine. For an instant, he imagined the smell of Carlinda’s cool, pale body. The instant passed, and Kessler reached forward to touch the bronze doors.
“Who did your people bury here?” Kessler asked. His eyes were riveted to a parade of small bas-reliefs that ran along the arch above the door. Somehow they had escaped the vandalism of the goblins, standing as stark and clear as the day they had been carved. The armoured figures of dwarfs, the horns of their helmets reaching out from the arch, clashed with a horde of thin, spectral shapes. At the fore of the ghostly legion was a figure that caused Kessler to shudder. Tall and skeletal, cloaked and hooded, Kessler could not help but be reminded of the wraith that had manifested during the battle with the bandits, the awful sending that had devoured Carlinda with the terrible hunger of an icy flame. Opposing the figure was a dwarf, his armour more elaborate and clearly defined than those of his army, his horned helm sporting a tiered crown around its rim. The dwarf held a massive axe in his hands, brandishing it against the undead monstrosity.
Skanir ran his fingers along the door, trying to discern by touch the runes that the goblin graffiti had made indistinguishable to the eye. The dwarf almost seemed pale as he turned away from the door and looked up at Kessler. Skanir chewed his beard for a moment as he tried to convince himself that what he had read was true. He looked up at the carvings Kessler had been inspecting, shaking his head in disbelief.
“It’s his tomb,” Skanir said, “the crypt of Isen Fallowbeard, the King of Karag Dar, who used Zonbinzahn to defeat Zahaak!”
The exclamation brought the others forwards, all except Minhea and his charge. After travelling so far and enduring so much, all wanted to see what had been found, the proof that might mean an end to their journey. As they clustered around the doorway, a dozen voices raised in excited confusion, Theodo found something to dampen the spirits of his comrades.
“Excuse me,” the halfling shouted over the murmur of the men above him. He had to repeat himself several times before he caught anyone’s attention. When he saw Kessler look his way, Theodo pointed up at the bas-relief. “Aren’t we looking for the Runefang of Solland, the ‘Sun-Tooth’ this dwarf is supposed to have used to kill Zahaak?” Kessler felt a numb horror grip him as he looked back at the carving. He didn’t need Theodo to point out what was wrong, but the halfling did so anyway.
“If we’re hunting for a sword, why is he using an axe?”
The jubilation of a moment before sickened into a black despair, one that even Kessler’s stubborn spirit could not escape. Every eye seemed to glare at the carving, as though it had betrayed them. The bolstered hopes of an instant crashed into pits of dejection. They had risked much and come far, with nothing but a legend and a prophecy to guide them. Now the prophetess was dead and the legend had been proved wrong.
The men did not have long to contemplate the horrible twist fate had thrown their way. Standing away from the gang gathered around the doorway, Eugen and Minhea were the only ones placed far enough away from the cliff wall to see danger rear its head. Or rather, heads, since a dozen or more sharp-beaked, serpent-like faces protruded from the rock. At first, the men thought the faces were simply more carvings, strange gargoyles placed by the dwarfs to watch over the tomb. They dismissed the imagined motion that had drawn their eyes upwards. Then the motion repeated, and they gasped as terror gripped their hearts. The serpentine faces had moved, shifting in loathsome unison to stare down at the men below. Two immense legs appeared beneath the heads, great leonine limbs covered in plates of black scale and tipped with axe-like claws.
Eugen found voice before the mercenary, screaming a warning to the men at the doorway, his lungs burning with the fury of his exertions. It was a single word, that warning, the name of a thing so fabulous and rare that only one in a hundred scholars would call it more than myth, yet of such dreadful reputation that even as a myth its image had been burned into the minds of men.
“Hydra!”
The strange cry caused those at the doorway to spin around, staring at the men they had left behind. Some wondered if this were some trick on the part of the traitor. Others, noting the pallor that had overwhelmed Minhea’s dark Sylvanian complexion, wondered if both men had gone mad. Then a trickle of pebbles and dust fell about them. Eyes turned upwards, and voices rose in screams of horror and shouts of disbelief. Men scattered in every direction, dragging weapons from scabbards.
Pale tongues flickering from fifteen beaks, the monster watched the men flee below it. The reptile lurched forwards again, exposing its huge scaly body. Bigger than a pair of oxen, its slinky body tapered into a long barbed tail. Yellow stripes interrupted the pattern of scaly black plates that encased it. Its heads were supported by a nest of writhing, snake-like necks, each as thick as a man’s arm and ten feet in length. The hydra’s four powerful legs stabbed into the face of the cliff, pounding their talons deeper than a mountaineer’s piton. Heads facing down, the hydra scrambled lizardlike down the face of the cliff, abandoning the fissure in which it had lurked. The beast nearly reached the level of the bronze door before it coiled its body close to the rock. With a great lunge, the hydra launched off the rock, landing with a shuddering impact on the surface of the plateau. The incredible speed of the reptile caught Kessler’s men by complete surprise. Several were still gaping in awe as the hydra landed among them, its heads snapping
among them in a blur of violence and savagery.
One soldier fell, an arm sliced off at the shoulder by the monster’s blade-like beak. A mercenary’s shriek terminated in an obscene gurgle as his head was plucked from his shoulders. Another’s screams of torment rose shrill and loud as three of the hydra’s heads lifted him into the air, struggling to tear him apart.
Those not slaughtered or mutilated by the monster’s attack broke, scurrying for cover. In his terror, one of Valdner’s men pitched over the edge of the plateau, his scream rising up from the canyon as he plummeted to his death. One of the Wissenlanders sprang at the far wall of the cliff, trying to climb the defaced dwarf carvings. His groping fingers found a cunningly concealed tripwire. An instant later, the man was crushed beneath tons of stone as the goblin trap performed its murderous purpose.
Valdner struggled to rally the rest of his men, hoping to muster some manner of united defence against the rampaging beast. Kessler, separated from the others by the monster’s bulk, tightened his grip on his zweihander, and prepared to sell his life dearly should the hydra turn his way. The few archers among the mercenaries peppered the beast with arrows, but the missiles merely glanced off the reptile’s scaly hide. A crack and boom signalled that Skanir had fired his pistol into the brute. Fire flashed from the hydra’s side, reptilian treacle spurting from the injury. The hydra’s primitive nervous system did not seem to register the wound, not even a single of its writhing heads turning from its gory feast of dead and dismembered men. Skanir threw the weapon down in frustration, roaring about the uselessness of the “mouse-croaker”.
Eugen was more determined. The disgraced knight had broken free from the distracted Minhea, and Kessler could see the Sylvanian lying sprawled on the ground. The traitor brandished the mercenary’s mace, swinging the spiked implement full into one of the hydra’s feasting heads. The blow struck something more keenly sensitive than the spot Skanir had shot, for the entire creature lurched backwards, a scalding hiss rasping in ghastly chorus from its heads. Even the veteran knight froze in fear as he felt the malignity of the hydra’s evil eyes focus on him. Like a coiling serpent, the hydra’s necks retreated into themselves.
Runefang Page 24
