The Great Betrayal

by Nick Kyme

  Out in the deep ocean he had seen… shadows lurking just beneath the waves, too vast and grotesque to be some mundane predator. Issuing from miles below, he had heard the call of beasts, abyssal deep and full of malice.

  One moonless night, many years ago in the waters of the far north, he had witnessed the hide of some gargantuan beast slowly disappearing beneath the waves. Returning from Kraka Drak and the snow-clad fastness of the Norse dwarfs, the holds of their three grubarks brimming with the gold of the northern huscarl-king, Nugdrinn had glimpsed the monster from a distance. By the time he had the telescope to his eye, the beast had sunk beneath the water but several sundered ships were left in its wake.

  It was a chill night. Frost clung to the deck, resolved as a ghostly pale mist in the captain’s breath. Ice cracked as the dwarfs’ ships ploughed through it. Nugdrinn’s teeth chattered and not just from the abominable cold. It took several minutes to find the courage to sail close enough to the scene of devastation to look for survivors. It took less time for them to discover there were no crewmen amongst the broken hulks. Only blood remained, and carnage.

  Stooping to hook a broken piece of debris that carried the clan’s sigil so he might bring word of their demise to their kin, Nugdrinn saw a great blackness through the gaps in the floating remains of the ship. Too late, he recoiled but by then the beast had scented his fear. It came crashing out of the waves stinking of old blood and the cold dank of death. With its single gelatinous eye, the beast fixed on Nugdrinn. Its first bite took apart the grubark, tore a great cleft from the hull and doomed it. Under such incredible pressure, the deck violently split apart and sent a dagger-sized splinter into the dwarf’s eye. Nugdrinn screamed but had enough about him still to try and scramble back up what was left of his ship before a second bite claimed his foot.

  Half blind, Nugdrinn roared. He bit his lip, used the pain to stop himself from passing out. Blood gushing from the ruined stump of his left leg was already freezing, sealing up the wound. A deeper cold was spreading through Nugdrinn’s body when the other dwarfs attacked. Crossbow bolts, some with their tips drenched in oil and then lit, hailed the beast. Thick-bladed throwing axes gouged its flanks. Piercing its blubbery hide, the barbed quarrels drew a bleat of pain from the beast’s puckered maw, which was champing up and down on the rapidly disintegrating hull. A noisome stench rolled from its gullet, redolent of putrefaction and the slow rot of the half-frozen dead.

  A second barrage of axes and quarrels forced the beast under but it had claimed Nugdrinn’s foot and his eye.

  Anger and a desire for retribution kept him alive until the dwarfs reached Barak Varr some months later. A mattock head was forged by Guildmaster Strombak to replace the piece of his limb he had lost and so Nugdrinn became ‘Hammerfoot’ to ever remind him of what he owed the beast.

  The memory of that night still brought a tremor to his hand that made the view through his telescope quiver, if only slightly. Nudgrinn took a stronger grip of the rope, glad his rune axe was looped to the belt around his waist.

  ‘Is it you, daemon?’ he asked the water. ‘Has the gulf spewed up a monster from the watery hells of Triton’s cage?’

  The water didn’t answer.

  Instead, the amber glow of the lantern crept across the waves until it found something to alight on.

  Nugdrinn snapped shut the telescope and pulled out his axe. He’d fight the beast one-handed, lashed to the prow.

  ‘Come forth then,’ he bellowed, vying against the roar of the water that was in a foaming frenzy with the wind peeling off the northern peaks. ‘And I’ll take from you what you took from me in recompense.’

  His ghazan-harbark pitched and yawed but Nugdrinn barely noticed. Adrift on rough water was akin to walking to the experienced captain. His face was slick with spray, little diamonds of seawater clinging to his beard. A rime of salt layered his upper lip and he licked it.

  ‘I taste blood on the water, fiend,’ he promised. ‘I’ll open up yer belly and release those poor lost souls you devoured. I’ll cut yer until your entrails spill into the black and are swallowed whole by the briny deep. Come forth!’

  For such a monster to be found so close to Barak Varr was unheard of, but Nugdrinn wasn’t about to shame the ancestors by doubting it.

  A shadow, half-revealed in the lamplight, became more distinct as its identity was unmasked at last.

  Nugdrinn lowered his axe, and let his ire cool.

  ‘Douse the lamp,’ he said. His heart thundered, and his breath quickened in his chest.

  It was wood floating on the gulf. Just a piece of hull, a chunk of stern or prow, some vessel broken out in the deep ocean and washed up on the shores of Barak Varr.

  It was nothing. Yet, as the urgency and fervour fled his veins and left him cold and trembling, Nugdrinn could not shake the feeling that there had been something out in the gulf.

  But the bell tolled on and no horn was heard on the rough black waters.

  ‘Douse the lamps,’ Nugdrinn said again, retreating back to the deck and wondering what they had missed.

  Blood magic was never predictable. It was a roiling mass of archaic forces drawn together through murder and slaughter, a hound brought to the leash but never fully at heel. Dhar, the Dark Wind, was capricious but the deeds that could be wrought through its manipulation were great and terrible. Drutheira knew her art well, however, and had practised much. She knew, as all sorcerers must, that dark magic always required sacrifice. The dead druchii warrior with her throat cut, spilling arterial crimson all over the deck, was testament to that.

  Most of the blood from the corpse had been wasted, but there was enough to fill a ritual bowl in the middle of the deck. From it tendrils of ruddy smoke quested like the tentacles of some abyssal horror. They enveloped the raiding ship, occluded it from sight. Thus clouded could the dark elves pass by the watchtowers of the dwarfs and gain passage through the Black Gulf into the rivers of the Old World proper.

  Two other witches, Malchior and Ashniel, completed the coven. Lesser sorcerers both than Drutheira, they channelled their mastery into her and she became a conduit that articulated the power of the whole. Sweat dappled her brow, intense concentration written upon her face as she maintained the casting all the way through the gate markers that led them north. As one the triumvirate muttered their incantations through taut, bloodless lips as the other warriors looked to the sea wall and hoped the enchantment would hold long enough for them to pass by.

  At the stern of the raider ship, a dark elf stood ready behind the vessel’s reaper. The single bolt thrower would find itself quickly outmatched by the battalion of ballistae arrayed against it, so too the twenty or so warriors armed with spear and shield at the ship’s flanks. Their fate was in the hands of Drutheira and her witches.

  Slowly, agonisingly so, the sea wall faded from sight and the dark elves left the Sea Hold behind them with the dwarfs unaware of them ever having been present in their waters.

  Drutheira let out a pained breath, the evidence of her body’s trauma revealed in the dark flecks on the hand that she used to cover her mouth.

  The others sagged, visibly drained. Ashniel wiped a trickle of crimson from her mouth, whilst Malchior staunched his bleeding left nostril with a black cloth he then secreted back into his robes.

  ‘Dhar is a hard mistress,’ he remarked, coughing into his hand. When he wiped it away quickly with his sleeve there was blood on his palm.

  ‘Does the sight of blood on your own skin upset you, Malchior?’ Ashniel was young and impetuous, but possessed rare magical talent. She also delighted in taunting Malchior.

  ‘I am perfectly sanguine, my little dear,’ he replied in a sibilant voice, a savage and murderous glint in his eyes. ‘But I would much rather it was your blood.’

  Bristling at the obvious threat, she spoke through a dagger-

  curved grin. ‘I could flay th
e flesh from your bones, here in this very ship.’

  Malchior did his best to appear unmoved. ‘Ah, the boldness of youth. Such overconfidence for a whelp…’

  ‘Whore-killing dog!’ she hissed, summoning a nimbus of dark magic and shaping it in her talon-like fingers.

  ‘Cease your bickering,’ snapped Drutheira, dispelling the casting with a curt slash of her hand, ‘and know that I am a harder mistress than the Wind of Dhar.’ Her wrath faded as quickly as it had appeared, and she narrowed her eyes like a predator to its unwitting prey. ‘Save your strength. Both of you. We are not finished, not yet.’

  That revelation brought a sneer to Ashniel’s blade-thin lips. Malchior tried to hide his dismay behind a viper’s charm but failed.

  ‘Whatever our mistress requires,’ he purred with a small bow.

  Ashniel showed her acquiescence by turning the sneer into a mirthless smile. Drutheira had seen harpies with more humour and resolved to kill the little witch once this was done.

  She glanced down at the brass bowl around which the coven was sitting. Together they formed a triangle with Drutheira at its apex. Crimson steam rolled off the sloped interior of the bowl and once it cleared only a residue of the vital fluid remained.

  ‘Vaulkhar,’ she called, as if summoning something as mundane as wine or meat, ‘I need more.’

  The vaulkhar nodded and gestured to two of his crew. A third, who paled when the captain’s cold gaze fell upon him, drew his sword but was subdued before he could put up much of a fight. Disarmed, forced to kneel over the bowl, he screamed as Drutheira drew her ritual knife and cut his throat.

  Blood, hot and fresh, spilled into the sacrificial vessel.

  ‘Communion…’ uttered Drutheira, her voice laced with power, and the three began to chant.

  Bubbles rose on the surface of the dark pool as if it were boiling, but no heat emanated from within. Instead an image began to resolve as the fluid thickened. Scarred as if by fire and contorted into a rictus of pure agony, a face appeared in the morass. It had been noble once, now it was ravaged and hellish. Opening its mouth in a silent scream, the face arched back and was consumed.

  The bubbling subsided, replaced by ripples, slight at first but growing with intensity as the seconds passed. A pair of tiny nubs, like the peaks of two mountains surrounded by a lake, protruded from the pool. Nubs became horns and the horns crested an ornate helm of jagged edges and bladed ornamentation. It was a barbed piece of armour, sharp and cold. Dripping with blood, its entire surface drowned in viscous gore, a head emerged from the deep red mire.

  Unlike before, furnace heat radiated off this manifestation that pricked the skin and brought a grimace of pain to Drutheira’s face.

  ‘Dark lord,’ she uttered, bowing her head in deference.

  Though fashioned magically from congealed blood, her master was no less terrifying. He glowered at the coven, his malice as palpable as the gore-slicked deck beneath them.

  At first his words were too thick to understand, spoken in an ancient and evil tongue Drutheira could not translate. Slowly, inexorably, it began to make sense.

  ‘Tell me of your progress,’ commanded the bloody effigy.

  ‘We cross the borders of the Sea Hold, lord and are even now headed northwards.’

  ‘And the dwarfs are unaware of your presence?’

  ‘We passed their defences undetected. The stunted swine could not tell us from the ugly noses on their faces,’ she added, allowing a pang of hubris to colour her reply.

  ‘Don’t underestimate them,’ the face snarled, and Drutheira recoiled from its hate and power as if struck. ‘Snorri Whitebeard was no fool, and had power. His descendants are worthy of you, sorceress.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ she whispered, abruptly cowed. ‘All is as you bid it, lord.’

  ‘An alliance must not be made between elf and dwarf. They must destroy one another utterly.’

  ‘It will be as you will it.’

  ‘See that it is.’

  Rivulets were streaking down the effigy as the magical communion lost potency. Like wax before a strong flame, the blood was slowly melting back into the pool from whence it emerged.

  ‘What is your command, lord?’ asked Drutheira, concealing her relief at the spell’s ending.

  ‘Our allies are already abroad. The shade Sevekai and his band await my orders through you. Together, enact my plans I have given to you. See the asur undone by their own nature.’ As the face sloughed away, its words became slurred and indistinct. The horns had already gone, collapsed into the pool along with much of the jagged helm. Even the eyes had bled away to nothing, the head caving in shortly after until only the mouth remained. ‘Yours is but a piece of a much greater plan. Sevekai is to be your scout, your herald. Use him. Fail me and you need not return to Naggaroth…’

  Like the final exhalation of breath from a corpse, the voice gurgled into nothing but the threat remained as real and immediate as a knife perpetually at her throat.

  Drutheira swallowed, imagining the caress of that steel, and drew on hidden reserves of strength to speak.

  I am drained, she said into the minds of her coven. Her eyes were closed. To the warriors aboard the raider ship it would appear as if she were meditating.

  We all are, Ashniel replied, as precocious as ever.

  Drutheira kept her annoyance at the interruption from her face.

  That is why when we reach the shore we will kill every elf aboard this ship and steal the vigour from their blood.

  Storm clouds billowed across the mainland, presaging the chaos to come.

  At the prow of the ship, the vaulkhar snarled orders to the crew. Unbeknownst to him and his warriors, the coven shared a conspirators’ smile.

  Malekith had spoken and they would enact his will or they would die.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Master of Dragons

  A great roar echoed across the peaks. It split the storm in two like a jag of lightning cuts the sky in half and leaves a ragged tear behind it.

  Sheltered beneath an overhanging spur of rock, the dwarfs kept their eyes on the heavens. Morgrim’s ached from not blinking.

  ‘I still don’t see anything.’ He had to shout against the wind, which had grown into a tumultuous gale. Drifts peeling off the mountains skirled through the pass and swathed the rocky clearing where they hid in grubby grey-white.

  Flecks of snow clung to Snorri’s beard like ugly, malformed pearls. He spat through clenched teeth. ‘If it is a drakk, I will spill its heartblood and paint the ground red with it.’

  Angular runes on his axe blade began to glow as he summoned their power with a muttered oath.

  ‘Two dwarfs with fate on our side against a beast that can raze entire towns with its breath and lay siege to a hold single-handed,’ said Morgrim. ‘I’d say the odds are with us, cousin.’

  Snorri did not reply. His gaze was fixed, the grip around the haft of his axe like stone.

  The whip of battered air drew nearer, a low and steady thwomp of vast, membranous wings driving against the gale. To maintain such a rhythm, the dragon must be incredibly strong.

  Morgrim cried out as a shadow seen through cloud darkened the sky.

  ‘It comes!’

  A crack of lighting flared behind it and framed the beast in silhouette.

  ‘Gods of earth and stone…’

  The dragon was massive.

  Snorri edged from beneath the craggy overhang, squinting against the snow hitting his face. He spat out a lump of frozen mulch and snarled, ‘I’ll turn its skin into a scale cloak…’

  The dragon breached the clouds, tendrils of mist rolling off its muscled silver torso. A long, serpentine neck ended in a snout like a blade, fanged and drooling iridescent smoke. Unfurling its wings, the beast’s shadow eclipsed the dwarfs and the entire clearing where they were
standing. Like two metal sails, its mighty pinions shimmered as star-fire. Talons like sword blades extended from its feet, and eyes akin to flawless onyx glittered hungrily as it saw the morsel before it.

  ‘Make a tankard of its hollowed out skull…’

  No dwarf, however skilled, could hope to defeat such a monster.

  Morgrim grabbed for Snorri to haul him back but missed. ‘Cousin, wait!’

  ‘Destiny calls!’ shouted Snorri and roared as he lifted his axe.

  It was the single bravest and most foolish thing Morgrim had ever seen.

  Thinking of all the things he had wanted to achieve and that would now be denied him, he sighed, ‘Bugrit…’ and then charged after Snorri.

  Pressing against the rock, Sevekai prayed to all the dark gods that would listen.

  The beast had speared through the storm like a streak of ithilmar, bellowing with such intensity it put the elf’s teeth on edge. Heart thundering in his chest, he dared a glance around the edge of the rocks where he and his warriors had gone to ground as soon as they had seen the dragon.

  Killing the dwarfs now would be impossible, but then also hardly necessary given what they faced.

  Kaitar was crouched beside him but seemed unmoved by the terrifying monster in their midst.

  ‘Was the fear siphoned out of you as an infant, Kaitar?’ asked Sevekai. ‘Or are you simply too dull-witted to realise how imminent all of our deaths are?’ He was about to withdraw, the dwarfs were good as dead anyway, when Kaitar put a hand on his chest.

  Sevekai glared daggers at the elf but didn’t raise a hand against him.

  ‘A little hasty, I think,’ he hissed, nodding towards the dragon.

  As the beast landed, its claws pulverising rock, it lowered its head, revealing an elven warrior mounted on its back.