The Great Betrayal

by Nick Kyme

  ‘But do this one thing for me,’ said Nadri, releasing Heglan’s shoulders to make his point clear with an outstretched finger.

  ‘Name it, Nadri.’

  ‘Heed Strombak, do not go against your master’s will and risk expulsion from the guild. Do that for me, Heg.’

  Heglan went to protest, but the look in his brother’s eyes warned him to do so would earn further reproach. Reluctantly, he nodded.

  Nadri nodded too, satisfied he’d been heard. ‘Good,’ he said, and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I’m bound for Karaz-a-Karak. Krondi will meet me there and we’ll be on our way.’ He glanced at the ruined airship, squatting in a forlorn heap inside the workshop. ‘I wish I could stay and help you with this, but I am already late.’

  They clasped forearms, and Heglan embraced him.

  ‘What would I do without you, Nadri?’

  ‘Likely go mad,’ he laughed as they parted.

  After that, Heglan had bidden him farewell. Dismissing the journeymen dwarfs who had helped retrieve the broken ship, he had been left alone. There he had stayed in seclusion for two days, pondering Nadri’s words and those of Master Strombak.

  Almost on the last of his smoking root, he chewed the end of his pipe and regarded the broken ship through a veil of grey. Three days and he had not lifted a finger to break the ship apart. This part of the workshop was sealed, a vault where Heglan could craft in secret and not be disturbed. Other machineries could be fashioned to demonstrate his commitment to his master. This, the plan forming in Heglan’s mind inspired by the drawings on his workshop walls, he need never know about.

  For the first time in three days, he gripped the worn haft of his hammer. Ever since his grandfather Dammin had shown him the proper way to use one, Heglan had regarded it as a tool to create, not destroy.

  Purposefully, he strode towards the wrecked skryzan-harbark.

  ‘I am sorry, brother.’

  A dwarf would fly and Heglan was determined to be the first.

  Sweat lathered the flanks of the mules. The beasts were gasping, shrieking with fear as Krondi drove the head of the wagon train like all the daemons of hellfire were at their heels.

  For all he knew, they actually were.

  Of course, daemons did not clad themselves in midnight black, nor did they carry bows, nor did they wear the countenances of elves…

  ‘Curse the thagging elgi and all their foetid spawn!’ Krondi shrank into his driver’s seat, hunched as tight as he could be and still lash the mules.

  Arrows whickered overhead. On the road behind them, three guards lay dead with shafts in their backs. More protruded from the sides of the wagons, jutting like the spines of some forest creature.

  Dwarfs armed with crossbows tried to reply in kind but the bouncing wagons, now driven into a frantic charge through the ever-narrowing gorge, made aiming difficult. Even on foot, at full sprint, the elves not only kept pace but were also more accurate.

  Durgi took one in the eye. He spun, a rivulet of blood streaking his face like a long tear, before he fell.

  Another guard – it looked like Lugni but he died so fast it was hard to tell for sure – gurgled his last breath and also slumped off the wagon. Glancing over his shoulder, Krondi watched their bodies smack off the road like dead cattle and swore an oath to Grimnir towards their vengeance.

  Several of the surviving guards were wounded. Some had arrows in their shoulders, others cuts or grazes from near misses. At least all four of the wagons were still intact but the road through the gorge was hard, better suited to travellers on foot than mules and iron-banded wheels.

  Krondi cursed himself for a fool again. Then he cursed the elves.

  ‘This road joins the dawangi pass to Kundrin hold,’ he said to the hooded dwarf, pointing at a fork in the gorge. ‘It’s little more than a track but we can lose them in there and make for Thane Durglik’s halls. Once we have sanctuary behind his walls, we can go back out and hunt these cowards down.’

  The hooded dwarf nodded, but didn’t stir beyond that. His head was bowed and he was muttering beneath his breath. Krondi did not recognise the words, for they had the arcane cadence of magic.

  From the brief glances he’d had and the shouted reports of the guards farther back on the wagon train, Krondi reckoned on six raiders. Twenty dwarfs against six raiders was an uneven contest but the elves had them at range, at the disadvantage of terrain and could pick them off. There was also no guarantee that there weren’t more raiders lying in wait. No, to stand and fight was foolish. Better to run and find safe haven. Though all evidence pointed to it, they did not seem like mere bandits either and this was what disquieted Krondi the most.

  He was reining the lead mule in, turning the bit so its head faced towards the fork he wanted to take, when a shadow loomed overhead, crouched down at the summit of the high-sided gorge.

  A dwarf yelled ‘Archers!’ before he was cut off by an arrow in his heart. It punched straight through the breastplate, came out of his back and impaled him.

  ‘Ghuzakk! Ghuzakk!’ Krondi urged the mules that gaped and panted with the last of their failing strength.

  The fork that would take them out of the gorge and to the winding trail that led to Kundrin hold was closing.

  From above, steel-fanged death came down like rain. Though the dwarfs raised shields, several of the guards were struck in the leg or shoulder. One screamed as he was pinned to the wagon deck by his ankle. When he lowered his shield, a second shaft pierced his eye and the screaming stopped.

  A terrible, ear-piercing shriek was wrenched from the mouth of one of the mules on the leading wagon. Moments later the poor beast collapsed and died, unable to go any further. Its companion slumped down with it, similarly exhausted. Krondi was pitched forwards and clung to a hand rail to stay in his seat. Abandoning the reins, for they were no use to him now, he instead concentrated on keeping his shield aloft to ward off the relentless arrow storm. It was studded with shafts in seconds, several of the barbed tips punching straight through the wood mere inches from his nose.

  ‘Thagging bastards!’ Krondi leapt off the wagon as it slewed to a halt and nosed into the dirt road with only the collapsed bodies of the mules to slow it. The hooded dwarf beside him made the jump at the same time. Miraculously, the arrows had yet to hit or even graze him.

  ‘Old one,’ Krondi called to him, ‘here!’ Sheltering beneath a rocky overhang, he gestured to the hooded dwarf, who followed.

  Despite the furious attack, several of the guards yet lived and were making their way from the wreckage of the other three wagons to join up with Krondi. Two tried to raise crossbows against the archers but were struck down before a bolt was even nocked to string. Of the rest, three out of the original twenty-strong band made it into cover.

  An injured dwarf, Killi, was crawling on his belly towards them just a few feet from the safety of the overhang. One of the other guards went to drag him the rest of the way but Krondi hauled him back.

  ‘No, they’ll kill you too,’ he snapped.

  A moment later, three arrows thudded into Killi’s back.

  Then it stopped.

  There was no sight of the elves above or those on the road behind. As if an eldritch wind had billowed through it to carry their enemies away, the gorge was deserted.

  Krondi knew they were still there watching. Either they had run short of arrows or they were waiting to see if the dwarfs would venture from safety.

  ‘No one moves,’ he told the survivors.

  Dwarfs can stay still for hours, even days. During his service in the armies of Gotrek Starbreaker, there was a dwarf Krondi knew, a real mule of a warrior. Lodden Strongarm was his name, a veteran of the Gatekeepers who had stood guard on the same portal into the Ungdrin Ankor for many years. Krondi knew him because he had been the warrior sent to relieve him from his post when the previous inc
umbent of that duty had died in battle. Three weeks Lodden had waited, unmoving by the gate. He only stirred to sip from a tankard of strong beer or to nibble from a chunk of stonebread, the only victuals he had to sustain him. Like the mountain, Lodden had stood guard and would not shirk or grumble for he had no one to grumble to. Finally, when Krondi had come to take Lodden’s place, the old Gatekeeper had grown long in beard, his skin dusted with fallen debris from the mountain to such an extent he looked almost part of it. He didn’t voice complaint when Krondi arrived, but merely nodded and returned to the hold.

  Waiting was easy for dwarfs. They were mostly patient creatures. This was back when Krondi was young and full of fire. Times had moved on since then. Lodden was laid in silent repose in his tomb, whilst Krondi lived on to lament his loss of youth; but he was not as venerable as the hooded dwarf, whose voice broke through his maudlin reverie.

  ‘Draw your blades,’ he rasped, the sound of old oak carrying to every dwarf beneath the overhang. ‘They are coming for us.’

  Those who still had axes showed them to the failing light.

  Krondi drew his hammer, the weapon he had carried since he had been a Gatekeeper. Never in all the years he’d spent campaigning had the haft ever broken.

  Darkness filled the gorge as the sun faded, drowning the dwarfs taking shelter at its edges in a black sea. Like shadows detaching themselves from the darkness of falling night, the elves emerged six abreast and filled the narrow road.

  From the other side came four more, only this quartet still had arrows nocked and bows unslung. To Krondi’s eyes the slender necks and white pine shafts of the bows looked incongruous in the hands of the black-garbed killers.

  ‘There is more to this than mere thievery and murder,’ he murmured.

  The hooded dwarf answered, a staff of iron appearing suddenly in his gnarled hands. ‘They cannot allow us to leave this place,’ he said. ‘A great doom is coming…’

  From the group of six an elf came forwards, evidently their leader. He said something in a tongue unfamiliar to Krondi, though he could speak some elvish, and the four archers fell back.

  So they wish to cut us then.

  At least it was a better end than dying at the tip of an arrow.

  When the six drew long serrated knives from their belts, Krondi knew his earlier assumption was true.

  One of the other dwarfs piped up, ‘If we fight them, the others will shoot us in the back!’

  ‘Thagging elgi scum!’ spat another.

  Krondi knew them both. They were brothers, Bokk and Threk. He briefly wondered if their father had any more sons to continue his name.

  ‘Make a circle,’ said Krondi. For the old veteran campaigner, memories came back in a red-hazed flood of similar last stands. On each of those previous occasions, fighting beasts or greenskins, dwarf tenacity had won out and he had survived. Somehow this time, it felt different.

  The dwarfs obeyed Krondi’s command, coming together and raising shields. Only the hooded dwarf stood apart, and Krondi was content to let him. He hadn’t asked who the dwarf was and why he needed to be ferried to Karaz-a-Karak, but he’d seen enough, felt enough to realise he was not just some mere warrior.

  ‘Like links in a shirt of mail,’ he told the other dwarfs, ‘we do not part, we do not break. Stone and steel.’

  ‘Stone and steel,’ echoed all three in unison.

  Seemingly amused by their antics, the leader of the elves bade some of his cohort forwards. Four night-clad warriors advanced with slow but deliberate purpose.

  Krondi saw the glint of stone-cold killers in their eyes, and knew the last stand had been a mistake. It was far too late to do anything about that now. Closing his eyes for a moment, he made an oath to Valaya and then Grungni.

  Let me die well, he beseeched them. Finally, he added a remark to Grimnir too, and let me take some of these whore-sons with me.

  Four elves attacked as one, shrieking war cries.

  Ugdrik stepped from the circle, breaking the wall, for the fall from his wagon had damaged his ear drum and he hadn’t heard Krondi’s command. Sparks flew for a few moments between his axe and an elven blade but poor Ugdrik was quickly gutted on a long knife, his guts spilling all over the road.

  The others fared better. Under Krondi’s anvil-hard leadership, they repelled the first proper elven attack against their wall. Krondi buried the head of his hammer in the skull of one, which made it three apiece.

  Frustrated, the elven leader sent his other warrior into the fight. In the warrior’s eyes, Krondi beheld a fathomless abyss of darkness and suppressed a tremor running through his body at the sight. The leader of the elves then hailed his archers to return and waded in himself, a sickle blade held low and by his side.

  Seemed the elves did not fight fairly after all, which was no more than Krondi expected.

  In a few seconds, what was a short skirmish became a dense melee through which it was tough to discern anything except flashing steel and the reek of copper. Bokk died swiftly, two jagged knives in his back and neck. His fountaining blood bathed Threk in a ruddy mire. He roared, threw himself at one elf, cut him down and wounded another, but a third slit open the grief-maddened dwarf’s neck.

  It left only Krondi, the leader and the hollow-eyed warrior.

  One of the elf archers went for the hooded dwarf. Embattled himself, Krondi heard a low whoomf! of crackling, snapping air, followed by a sudden burst of heat that pricked his bare skin. Screaming came swiftly on its heels. Burning flesh filled his nostrils with a noisome stench.

  The hooded dwarf was chanting again, though this time he was much louder. It sounded like an invocation. Between his words, the yelled orders of the elven leader grew more frantic.

  Then Krondi realised who he had in his midst and that they would not die after all.

  Arrows were loosed by the three remaining archers, but the shafts broke as if they struck a mountainside.

  In a momentary respite as the elves’ resolve began to fail them and they retreated, Krondi saw the hooded dwarf had one gnarled hand outstretched in front of him, clenched into a claw. Rings upon his fingers glowed brightly in the night gloom and as he brought them into a fist another flight of arrows snapped as if he had been holding them.

  Out of shafts, the archers drew blades too and rushed the dwarfs.

  Casting aside his cloak, the once hooded dwarf revealed his true identity.

  Agrin Fireheart, Runelord of Barak Varr, stood in his armour of meteoric iron. His incantation reached a crescendo as he threw off his disguise and, as he bellowed the last arcane syllable, he brought his iron staff down hard upon the ground. Runes igniting upon the stave which filled with inner fire, a massive tremor erupted from the point where Agrin had struck.

  The elves were flattened, their murderous charge violently arrested by the runelord’s magic.

  A shout split the dark like a peal of thunder. It took a moment for Krondi, lying on his back like the elves, to realise it had come from Agrin’s mouth.

  Like a dagger blade bent by the smith’s hammer, a jag of lightning pierced the sky and fed into the runelord’s staff, so bright that the arcing bolt lit up the gorge in azure monochrome. With sheer strength of will, he held it there, coruscating up and down the haft in agitated ripples of power like he was wrestling a serpent.

  One of the elves was trying to rise, take up a fallen arrow and nock it to his bowstring.

  Agrin immolated him like a cerulean candle. The elf burned, grew white hot… There was a flare of intense magnesium white and then he was gone, with only ash remaining.

  Thrusting his staff skywards again, thunderheads growling above him, Agrin was about to unleash a greater storm when a spear of darkling power impaled him.

  Slowly he lowered his staff and the clouds began to part, losing their belligerence. A smoking hole, burned around the edges, cut t
hrough the runelord’s meteoric armour.

  It was just above his heart.

  Agrin staggered as another dark bolt speared from the shadows at him. Krondi cried out, railing at the imminent death of the beloved runelord of his hold, but Agrin was equal to it and dispelled the bolt with a muttered counter.

  His enemies revealed themselves soon after, three robed figures walking nonchalantly through the gorge. A female led the sorcerous coven, sculpting a nimbus of baleful energy in her hands. Krondi was no mageling, but he had fought them before and even he could tell that the female was the mistress. The other two were merely there to augment her powers.

  She unleashed the magicks she had crafted and a vast serpent fashioned from bloody light painted the gorge in a visceral glow before it snapped hungrily at the runelord.

  Once more Agrin foiled her sorcery, a rune of warding extinguishing on his staff as he brandished it towards the elemental. She shrieked as the enchantment failed, recoiling as if burned, and pressed a trembling hand to her forehead before snarling at the male sorcerer in the coven as he went to help her.

  Despite the fresh tipping of the scales against then, Krondi felt renewed hope. He didn’t have long to appreciate it as the leader of the elves came at him with a pair of sickle blades. The other was still grounded and watched eagerly from his prone position.

  From the corner of his eye, Krondi saw Agrin assailed by dark magic as the three sorcerers vented their power as one. Runes flared and died on his staff as the iron was slowly denuded of its magical defences. Outnumbered, the runelord was finding it hard to retaliate, just as Krondi could only fend off the silvered blades of the elf leader intent on his death.

  ‘Submit,’ the elf snarled in crude Khazalid through clenched teeth, ‘and I’ll kill you quickly.’

  Krondi was shocked at the use of his native tongue but knew that some elves had learned it, or tried to.

  ‘Unbaraki!’ he bit back, invoking the dwarf word for ‘oathbreaker’, for these bandits or whatever they were had broken the treaty between their races and sealed the deed with blood.