The form of the stain was a flow, as if it were lava pouring from the peak of the Great Weld. It widened as it approached the base. Thrumnor traced the descent with his eyes, and saw new meaning in the plague on the land.
Rhulmok spoke the words Thrumnor could not bring himself to articulate. ‘The Weld is the core of the blight,’ he said.
‘No,’ Thrumnor said, as if denial could banish the obscenity. Ground so sacred could not truly be the origin of the corruption. The Great Weld had been attacked. It too was a victim of the Chaos Gods.
Dorvurn said, ‘We must pass beyond the Weld.’
‘No!’ Thrumnor cried. ‘Grimnir’s hammer awaits us on the peak. A great forging is to be ours.’
The doubt in Rhulmok’s face was now present in Dorvurn’s. The distance Thrumnor had felt growing between himself and the runesmiter now became a schism. He would not permit Rhulmok’s lack of belief in his vision to divert the Krelstrag from their destined path.
‘The Weld is under attack,’ Thrumnor said. ‘But its heart is still pure.’ He spoke from faith rather than knowledge. He approached the wall now. ‘Bear witness with me,’ he commanded Rhulmok.
The runesmiter hesitated. The concern Thrumnor saw in his eyes was beyond bearing. With a great effort, Thrumnor prevented himself from laying his hands on Rhulmok and dragging him to the wall. After a moment, Rhulmok joined him.
‘And if you are wrong, what then?’ he asked.
‘I am not wrong,’ Thrumnor growled.
Rhulmok used his latch-axe to scrape away the devouring mould, exposing the rock of the Weld. He and Thrumnor placed their hands and foreheads against the stone. Rhulmok, Thrumnor knew, would be reaching out to the tunnels in the Weld, reading the veins and passages, seeking to know whether the stone would consent to part before his will. Thrumnor listened for the beat and rush of the magma. He needed to gauge the extent of its rage.
Thrumnor had barely begun to chant a prayer of kinship to the Weld when he recoiled. So did Rhulmok, and at the same instant.
Thrumnor’s head and palms burned as if the rock face had turned molten. ‘The Great Weld rages,’ he said to Dorvurn. ‘It feels the plague attacking it, and all inside is wrath. Holy wrath.’
Rhulmok nodded, gazing at his own hands in alarm. ‘There is so much pain,’ he added.
‘But the heart of the Great Weld is not corrupt,’ Thrumnor insisted.
Rhulmok hesitated, then nodded.
‘Then we climb,’ Dorvurn declared. He looked up.
The clouds flashed green, reflected from what thundered on the peak of the Weld.
IV
At first glance, the walls of the Great Weld appeared vertical. Though they were very steep, a path could be made out. The Fyreslayers marched up a long, inclining ledge that had once been a mountain’s slope. Sometimes it was wide enough for the duardin to march three abreast. Elsewhere, it narrowed to the point that the magmadroths were barely able to navigate it, even with their claws digging deep through the tainting mould and into the stone.
The rock blight became thicker as they climbed, and more active. It pulsed and scraped. The endless whispering of dissolving stone sounded in Thrumnor’s ears like a daemon’s mockery. That this great wonder, this holy monument, should be so desecrated made his fists tighten in fury. He longed to strike out at the bearers of this plague.
Nurglings cavorted along the cliffs, scrabbling over each other, sometimes falling like overfed ticks to burst on the ground below. In small groups they attempted to harry the Krelstrag, and they were dealt with savagely. They could not summon the numbers to attack in the concentrated manner they had in the tunnels, so they taunted and laughed.
Thrumnor vented his rage on those who dared come within reach of his staff, but it brought no satisfaction to smash the lowliest of daemonkind. They were not the ones who had created the blight. He might as well be striking at the mould.
He did once, snarling, then caught himself, even more angry that he had succumbed to his frustration. As he turned back to the path, he heard a low, deep buzzing. He looked up to see a swarm of huge insects descend from the heights of the Weld. Ragged wings supported drooping sacks of bodies. Serpentine trunks hung from their heads. The sound of the rotflies’ wings crawled into Thrumnor’s ears and into his mind. His spine ached. The swarm flew down the path as if to knock the Fyreslayers off the side of the slope. The host of the Krelstrag responded before the first rotfly struck. Vulkite berzerkers hurled throwing axes at the daemon insects. A single blow from a fyresteel blade would have done little against the flies, but the axes arced upwards in the hundreds.
The daemons flew into a scything wall. Axes cut wings to shreds and burst swollen bodies. A score of the creatures tumbled into the dark below. Screeching hatred, the rest of the swarm spread over the Krelstrag line. The abominations fell on the duardin warriors, tearing their bodies apart with the jagged points of their chitinous limbs. Fyreslayers avenged their kin before the insects could fly away with their victims, attacking each monster with wrath and steel. The magmadroths smashed them from the air.
Thrumnor struck at the daemons that flew near him, but his blows with the runic iron were not enough. He longed to punish the rotflies with a burst of lava from within the Weld. Their presence was still another grievous insult to the sacred anvil. His anger grew, but before he lost himself, Rhulmok called his name and drew him back.
He raged, swinging his staff with all the more force because Rhulmok was right. The rage in the Weld was far beyond his own, far beyond his control. He would unleash disaster if he called it to the surface.
Four score of the Krelstrag lay dead before the last of the rotflies was exterminated.
‘Mourn our brothers,’ said Dorvurn, ‘and celebrate their victory. The foe has not stopped our advance.’
‘But they could not have,’ Rhulmok said, thoughtful.
‘What do you mean?’ Thrumnor asked.
‘How could they have hoped to, with those numbers?’
True. The swarm had been no more than another harrying raid.
‘What does it mean?’ Rhulmok asked. The question felt like a challenge.
‘It changes nothing,’ Thrumnor said. He knew he wasn’t answering, but whatever the attacks meant, his faith in the truth of his vision held. He could imagine no other interpretation. He swallowed his anger at Rhulmok and said, ‘We are being tested. We will be tested again at the peak. And from these tests we will emerge stronger yet.’
‘What test?’ said Rhulmok. ‘What waits above? Nothing but foulness has come down to us.’
‘We will cleanse it.’ Thrumnor thought again of his vision, of the great hammer and its transformative blow. Such light, such fire. The memory renewed his faith. They would cleanse the Great Weld of its plague.
On they climbed. The Great Weld shook and rumbled. Its convulsions were not those of an anvil resonating from hammer blows, but agonised wrath struggling to find expression. The heat of the Weld’s interior pushed outward. Cracks webbed along the ledge and stone fragments fell from the cliff face. The walls of the mountains were solid, and they contained their anger, trembling with the effort while their flesh was gnawed by the blight.
The Krelstrag marched day and night without rest. The nurglings gave them no respite. Further swarms of rotflies eroded their ranks. But the summit called to them with its thunder and its beating glow. They would answer. At the end of the fourth day, with the fall of night, they arrived at the peak. What Thrumnor saw there almost paralysed him with rage and horror.
The summits of the many volcanoes had been fused into a giant plateau. There was no sign of the calderas that had once been. Instead, the surface of the plateau was slightly rounded, as if bulging upward. At the centre, half a league away, was the origin of the green light.
It was a celebration.
Daemons of Nurgle in the
thousands cavorted and sang. Drums, bells and horns sounded, creating music as dissonant as it was joyful. The noise was enough to make Thrumnor’s chest contract as if he were breathing foul air. The daemons danced. The lumbering, uneven movement of so many abominations was that of maggots heaving under flesh.
At the heart of the ritual stood a titan of plague.
What waits above? Rhulmok had asked.
Here was the answer.
And Thrumnor felt the first true wounds of doubt.
During the most terrible of the sieges that the lodge had withstood, when it had been necessary to withdraw all the Krelstrag to within the redoubt of the Forgecrag, they had fought a Great Unclean One, one of the most powerful daemons of Nurgle. The story of that battle was one that the lodge never tired of hearing Battlesmith Yuhvir recite. It was one Thrumnor recalled in perfect, vivid detail. He recognised the daemon here as kin to the other. It too was a Great Unclean One, though many times larger. It was a mountain in its own right. It was over a hundred feet high. Its mass was swollen, the diseased skin taut and shining with the weight of tumours and the pressure of gas. Its head was sunken in its shoulders, if it could be said to have a head. But there was a maw, a huge one, gaping between the shoulder blades, where a tongue longer than a magmadroth hung pendulously past the fangs, dripping ichor and slime. There were other mouths too. They were on its arms, and on its knees, and they jabbered and slobbered and sang and laughed. It laughed most delightedly when the multitudes of lesser daemons at its feet raised their arms in praise and shouted a word.
‘Distensiath!’
They were calling its name.
The foul colossus led the dance. It created the beat of the song with the ground-shaking impact of its trunk-like legs. It could barely shift its great bulk, and its gut dragged against the surface of the plateau as it lifted and stamped its feet. It waved its arms, conducting the celebrants, and brandished a pitted, twisted sword twenty feet long. The voices of its mouths formed a choir, which summoned a rain of phlegm from the air that hissed when it fell on stone.
The panorama of corruption was intolerable. But the worst of it for Thrumnor was that the beats of the song were the blows of the hammer. Every time Distensiath stamped, the repellent green light flashed, smearing the falling night with its disease. This was what he had seen from the Forgecrag. He had said that Grimnir’s hammer was again striking the anvil. Instead, the truth was the unspeakable amusement of a daemon. It was from this dance that the rockblight flowed. Thrumnor could see it now, see the mould spring into existence around Distensiath’s feet. It piled up, then spread outwards in ripples. It covered the plateau. It poured itself down all sides of the Weld, and from there it reached out to blight all the land.
‘Runemaster,’ said Dorvurn, ‘is this what your vision foretold?’
Thrumnor fought past the horror at what had become of the sacred ground.
‘It must be. Our cleansing fire begins here, runefather.’ The terrible explosion he had seen – that was the coming clash. Fiery glory would follow.
This is the truth, he thought. There is no other possibility.
He kept his doubts secret. He stamped them down.
‘This is our path,’ he said.
Dorvurn turned to address the Krelstrag host.
‘Fyreslayers,’ he said, ‘you see Grimnir’s great work desecrated by daemonkind. I will not stand for it! Will you?’
A collective roar of denial. Hammers slammed against shields. Every warrior present burned with the need to punish the daemons and cleanse the sacred ground.
‘Our oath calls us beyond the Great Weld,’ Dorvurn continued. ‘It calls us through that unclean horde. To fulfil our duty, we must pass through the daemons.’ He grinned. ‘We must destroy the daemons!’
Another roar, louder still, and the greater thunder of clashing weapons.
‘Krelstrag lodge!’ Dorvurn shouted, his voice filling the night with righteous anger and eager fury. ‘March with me to war!’
Dorvurn, Thrumnor and Rhulmok led the advance. Behind them came the runesons, and with them Komgan, the grimwrath berzerker. Then came the fyrds of vulkite berzerkers, Battlesmith Yuhvir striding at their centre. He held high the standard of the Krelstrag, and he began to recite the battles of the lodge, the centuries of sieges withstood and broken, the glories accrued to the warriors of Grimnir. His huge voice reached the ears of every Fyreslayer present. They grinned to think of honours past, and of the saga that would be told of the battle now upon them.
Rhulmok was hard at work, igniting the fire of the ur-gold. The sound of his labours punctuated the chanting of Yuhvir and the berzerkers’ shouts of praise to Grimnir, and so the Fyreslayers countered the foul music of the daemons with a song of their own. Pure and hard and unforgiving, it rumbled over the plateau. It was a challenge, and it was a reclamation. The sons of Grimnir had come to his holy place, and they would take it back, beginning by returning the true sounds of the anvil.
As the Fyreslayers advanced, they built up speed. The magmadroths began to lope. The berzerkers broke into a run. Every second they were not lopping off the heads of daemons was a second wasted. The ground shook beneath the pounding of their feet.
When the Fyreslayers were halfway to the enemy, the sound and the vibrations of their challenge broke through the daemons’ celebration. The daemons hesitated in their dance. They stopped. They turned to see who had interrupted them, and who it was who did not fear them.
Distensiath’s grotesque smiles grew even wider.
Hills of struggling nurglings giggled in delight.
The more solemn plaguebearers clustered together and took up their weapons.
Distensiath spoke. The words came first from one mouth, then another. They overlapped in their speech, so that some words were spoken by two maws at once. The voice of the Great Unclean One was the sound of a mountain coughing up its lungs. The syllables were moist. The mockery was acid.
‘You are welcome, children of Grimnir. We have been waiting for you to join us. What has taken you so long? We have been calling you and calling you and calling you. Were you deaf and blind to our invitation?’
Do not answer, Thrumnor thought. Do not exchange words with the abomination. There is nothing to be gained in doing so.
But he could not remain silent.
‘Your taunts mean nothing!’ he shouted. ‘Your revels are over!’
‘Over?’ Distensiath repeated. All the mouths of the daemon laughed. Its corpulence trembled with mirth. ‘But they have only just begun! Your coming was foretold! Let the prophecy be fulfilled!’
Thrumnor felt the touch of an icy claw in his chest. Had he been wrong? He had seen the storm, and he had seen the light on the Great Weld, and he had believed a Fyreslayer prophecy was coming to pass. That had been the reason to urge action to keep the oath. But Grimnir’s hammer was not striking the anvil once more.
Did the daemon speak the truth?
The possibility was ghastly. Worse than the Krelstrag prophecy not being fulfilled was a daemonic one reaching fruition instead.
Are we the tools of that realisation?
No. Thrumnor would not permit such a thing. No Krelstrag would. The daemons had infested ground sacred to Grimnir, and for this crime they would suffer.
The daemons waited until the Fyreslayers had almost reached their position before they moved. Then they advanced, howling joyfully. The nurglings spilled around the legs of the plaguebearers, rushing to be the first to greet the newcomers to the revel. Distensiath’s maws unleashed a cacophony of laughter, and the Great Unclean One began to walk. Each step was ponderous, dragging and thunderous, shaking the ground and spreading new webs of cracks over the surface. The daemon could barely move, yet as it rocked forwards it spread its arms as if to gather new worshippers to its flock.
Rhulmok pounded the war altar with mounting fur
y. Thrumnor’s ur-gold sigils blazed in response, and he was consumed with the ferocity of battle. No enemy could stand before the rage he embodied. He roared. The entire host of the Krelstrag lodge roared. The Fyreslayers fell upon the daemons.
A battering ram in red and gold slammed into the abominations. Nurglings burst apart upon impact. The Krelstrag wasted no blows on them. Their charge was enough to part the stream of lesser daemons and hurl them back the way they had come. The plaguebearers were the more worthy opponents. Things of swollen bellies and rotten limbs, they sprouted long horns on their heads and wielded foul blades. They waded into combat with the Fyreslayers with mutters and nods. They appeared to be counting, and they attacked with purpose. The purifying rage of the Krelstrag clashed with the essence of disease.
Dorvurn and the runesons led from the front. They attacked in seven powerful kinbands. At their sides were the auric hearthguard and the berzerkers. Many of the hearthguard had been tasked to remain at the Forgecrag with Homnir, but even so, there were more than enough present to march with the lords of the lodge and burn the ranks of the daemons. The hearthguard’s magmapikes launched fiery death into the enemy, setting the plaguebearers ablaze. As the daemons’ chants turned to cries of pain and rage, they burned again as the berzerkers waded in with their flamestrike poleaxes. Braziers on the ends of chains crashed against the abominations. Into the spreading wall of burning daemonflesh, Dorvurn and his sons laid waste to the foe with sweeps of their axes and the monstrous predation of the magmadroths. Then came the vulkite berzerkers, a brutal wave of blades and anger. The Fyreslayers punched deep, breaking the coherence of the daemons’ advance, pushing the daemons back towards the centre of the plateau.
Thrumnor brought his staff down on the head of a plaguebearer, shattering it utterly. The daemon’s ichor spewed out, and the body sank to its knees. Thrumnor followed through with a sideways strike, crushing the bodies of the daemons who tried to close with him. There was rapid movement in the corner of his left eye. He turned, seizing a throwing axe from his belt and hurling it at another plaguebearer. The axe buried itself in the daemon’s face, splitting it in two.
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