The Fyreslayers drove deeper into the enemy, wedging the foul mass apart. The plaguebearers responded by closing around the Krelstrag army and trying to crush the lines. Axes smashed their bodies to festering slime.
Dorvurn and the runesons ripped through the diseased ranks, tossing daemons left and right, burning their way toward Distensiath. Seven lines of destruction converged on the greater daemon. It was the defiler of the Weld, and it would feel the greatest wrath of the Fyreslayers. The magmadroths sprayed flaming bile, turning left and right to consume the ravening daemons. The abominations howled and melted, but more rushed forth as Distensiath advanced, footstep by slow footstep, crushing its own followers in its eagerness to meet the Krelstrag.
‘Worship with us!’ Distensiath bellowed. It swung its massive sword and cut deep into the Fyreslayer lines, killing five warriors at a stroke. It swung again, and Krelstrag blood rained from the blade. The duardin roared their defiance. They charged forward to avenge the deaths of their brothers, and surrounded the bulk of the huge daemon. It laughed, delighted, and struck again. The lords of the lodge attacked Distensiath’s flanks. The hearthguard held the plaguebearers and nurglings back while the berzerkers brought their weapons to bear against the rubbery flesh of the behemoth.
Thrumnor stopped before Distensiath. He raised his runic iron high. Here and now he would reclaim the Weld for Grimnir and deny the daemon whatever purpose it believed drove its presence.
‘This is the anvil of Grimnir!’ Thrumnor shouted. ‘This is the work of his hands, of his hammer, and of his forge. You have no place here! Burn in the fire of Grimnir’s anger!’
The rod glowed crimson. Thrumnor slammed its tip into the ground. Now let the wrath of the Great Weld be loosed, he thought. The force of the spell transmitted itself through the surface of the plateau to the molten rock below. The magma rose. The anger was so great it threatened to escape Thrumnor’s control. He managed to contain it, and to direct the burst of its release. Rock split where the staff had hit. The crack widened as it raced toward Distensiath.
‘Grimnir’s fury!’ Thrumnor shouted, a warning to his brothers in the path of what was coming. They parted on either side of the widening gap. Then a geyser of lava shot from the ground before the Great Unclean One. It splashed against Distensiath’s belly and torso. In its first burst, it flew high enough to fall, burning, onto the daemon’s upper maw.
Distensiath screamed. The howl shook the entire Weld and knocked Thrumnor off his feet. A swarm of flies billowed out the daemon’s jaws and covered the sky. The great blade wavered, its blow arrested.
‘For Grimnir!’ Dorvurn shouted, and the latchkey grandaxe buried itself deep into Distensiaths’ bulging flesh. A hundred other weapons struck the raging daemon at the same moment.
The howl climbed higher, becoming a gurgling screech so intense, blood filled Thrumnor’s ears. Distensiath’s body began to swell. It became even more immense. The flesh of its belly bulged like a frog’s throat. The sickly green became the pallid white of tension. The scream rose higher yet.
Thrumnor saw what was coming. There would be no shelter. Nor did he wish it. He pulled himself up into a crouch and held fast to the staff. At the last moment, at the height of the scream, he saw that the mouth on Distensiath’s knee was laughing.
Then came the searing light from Thrumnor’s vision.
The daemon exploded.
The gasses in its body ignited. The blast hurled Fyreslayers and daemons back across the Great Weld like leaves in a gale. Distensiath vanished, transformed into a rain of bile-green ichor that covered the entire plateau. Stone hissed and dissolved at its touch. Flesh erupted in boils. Thrown a hundred yards by the explosion, Thrumnor staggered to his feet. He was coated with the daemonic essence, and he felt it eat into his being. His skin wept pus. Something foul sought to take him apart.
He spat in contempt. He shook his head, ridding his beard of the ichor. There were cries of agonised rage on all sides as the devouring plague gnawed the flesh of the Fyreslayers.
‘Karls of the Krelstrag!’ Thrumnor shouted. ‘The fire of Grimnir runs in your veins! Deny the pestilence. Cast its weakness down and trample it underfoot!’
Rhulmok had climbed back onto the throne atop Grognax, and had resumed the beat on the war altar with a vengeance. Ur-gold flared, and it burned the corruption of the flesh. The purging was torture, but it was a needful pain, true and clean, and Thrumnor exulted in it.
Not all the berzerkers found salvation. The surface of the plateau was littered with bubbling, dissolving bodies. But the Krelstrag were still strong, and they rallied round Yuhvir’s standard and the runefather’s raised grandaxe. They formed a circle of iron at the centre of the plateau.
As Thrumnor ran forward to join the fyrds, he heard something that chilled his blood. It came as the last of the ichor fell from the sky and settled into the Great Weld. He heard a sigh, and he heard a whisper. The voice was Distensiath’s voice, a phantom echo, a single word.
‘Fulfilled.’
In the vision, the anvil had shattered. Now the Great Weld heaved. It rocked to and fro, but the movement was wrong. This was no earthquake. This was no eruption. This was transformation. Standing beside Grognax, Thrumnor looked toward the distant edges of the plateau, and saw them rise up and down. Like flesh. Like muscle.
And now Thrumnor understood the pattern he had partly seen at the base of the Great Weld. The shapes embedded in the rock were not just those of fused volcanoes. They were also limbs. Revelation flooded in. Thrumnor gasped.
‘Runemaster,’ Dorvurn shouted. ‘What is happening?’
‘Grimnir’s feat was greater than we imagined,’ Thrumnor called back. ‘It was not volcanoes he fused together. He battered a great beast into submission. He turned his opponent into the anvil of stone. It became volcanoes.’ He paused. ‘And now that defeat is being undone. The beast is awakening.’
We have done this thing, he thought bitterly.
The heaving became more pronounced. The cracks in the surface of the plateau began to assume a different cast. They were the outline of scales.
The beast came closer and closer to waking. Then it would walk. A monster of plague the size of a mountain chain would be loose upon the realm.
The plaguebearers and the nurglings closed in once more, but gradually, as if waiting for a signal. It came now. Across the entire plateau, the scales of the beast rose, and from beneath each one came another plaguebearer. Thousands upon thousands of them dragged themselves up from the beneath the skin of the Great Weld.
Tens of thousands.
Hundreds of thousands, covering all the leagues of the Great Weld.
There was a sudden, terrible, immense lurch, as of a single step.
The daemons in their uncountable legions raised their voices in solemn praise to the Plaguefather, and they advanced.
The Fyreslayers were surrounded.
‘The defilers of the Great Weld come to meet their doom!’ Dorvurn thundered. ‘Be the fire of Grimnir, and burn them from the realm!’
The air shook with the defiant clash of blade on shield, but there was a different quality to the sound this time. Thrumnor knew it. This was the last stand of the Krelstrag.
From atop Grognax, Rhulmok called to Thrumnor, making peace. ‘At least it will be a fight worthy of song.’
Thrumnor shook his head. ‘This is wrong,’ he said. ‘This is not my vision.’ He could not have been so tragically mistaken. He filled his lungs and howled his wrath at the fates. ‘This was not foretold!’
The Krelstrag lodge decimated. The Great Weld transformed into a leviathan of plague. This was not what he had seen. This was not what the great light in his vision had produced.
Ahead, the front lines of the Fyreslayers hurled themselves against the ocean of daemons. The sound of the battle was immense, as of a great hammer coming down on ir
on. At that sound, Thrumnor thought of his vision, and of the forging. Of the shattered anvil, and of the lava that came after.
And he felt a surge of hope.
The transformation was not yet complete. Thrumnor called to the wrath inside the Weld, and found it was still there. Grimnir’s work was not undone. The fury of volcanoes had not turned into corrupted blood.
‘Rhulmok!’ Thrumnor cried. ‘We may yet honour Grimnir! With me, brother! Let this be not an anvil, but a crucible. Let us unleash its full wrath!’
Dorvurn looked down at him from Karmanax. ‘Can you do this?’
The image before Thrumnor’s mind’s eye was one of shattering and lava. ‘It is foretold that we will,’ he said.
Rhulmok laughed, and drummed the anvil of war with renewed energy.
‘I see it now!’ he said to Thrumnor. ‘I see it at last! What a grand transformation we shall forge!’
‘We will be the prophesied fire,’ said Thrumnor.
The runefather nodded, and then he spoke to the entire lodge, his voice strong with pride and drowning out the chanting of the daemons and the rumble of war. ‘Fyrds of the Krelstrag, what comes is no sacrifice! This shall be the greatest victory, and the greatest tale, of our lodge!’
The Fyreslayers roared their approval, and with joyous fury they threw themselves at the sea of daemons, holding them back as Thrumnor and Rhulmok did what they must.
Rhulmok increased the beat on the altar. Thrumnor felt his ur-gold sigils ignite with a fire greater than ever before.
‘One more Binding, then,’ Rhulmok said.
‘One more,’ Thrumnor called back. ‘It will be our greatest work, youngflame.’
‘A fine song it will make.’
‘So it will.’ For a few moments more, Thrumnor watched the fyrds fight a war they could not win, and there too was the making of a fine song. The Krelstrag cut the daemons down by the score, by the hundreds. The hundreds of thousands pressed closer, but now, right now, the fury of the Fyreslayers was unstoppable, as the voice of Yuhvir shouted the litany of victories.
Let this be how I last see my brothers, Thrumnor thought.
Then, with both hands wrapped around the staff, its power crackling a deep violet and plunging deep into the transforming ground, he reached for the magma.
The strain threatened to tear him apart. The rage of the Great Weld was enormous, but the change was coming to it too, and molten rock would soon become diseased blood.
But not yet.
Thrumnor called to the magma. He called to the fury of the Weld. Eager, it rose towards him. He felt the deep vibrations as Rhulmok spoke to stone that had not yet become flesh. It raged against the transformation of the Great Weld. At the runesmiter’s command, it parted before the rising magma.
One last Binding, Rhulmok had said. It was true. This was their grandest enactment of the ritual. Though they sought a perfect destruction, in the coming annihilation they would return the Great Weld to its volcanic being. All the bridges linking the islands of the Earthwound archipelago found their culmination here, as they fused wrath with its fullest, most holy expression.
The magma rose. The full strength of the Weld, all of its contained rage, rushed upward to the peak. The surface of the plateau had become flesh, but the interior of the Great Weld was still stone. Walls parted. Tunnels opened up. Molten magma climbed. Thrumnor’s temper joined with Rhulmok’s shaping.
The wrath came. The entire plateau bulged upward, swelling as Distensiath’s bulk had, only this time with the fires of purification.
Thrumnor smiled as the ground rose, and he felt the heat through his feet.
‘For Grimnir,’ he said.
And the world erupted in a terrible blaze.
V
Dorvurn strode down the far side of the Great Weld.
His body shielded from the blast and fire by Karmanax and the will of Grimnir, he had lived through the initial moments of the destruction. He had flown through fire and smoke and incandescent gas, through lightning and ash and still more fire. Burned, his weapons gone, he had landed beyond the new, immense caldera, on a ledge partway down the mountainside.
There was purpose in his survival. Chance had no part in it.
He descended the sloping ledge, so much like the one the Krelstrag had climbed on the other side. It was stone again, not a beast. The ground was still a long way off, and Dorvurn knew he would never reach it. His moments were numbered. Lava was everywhere, flowing down the Great Weld and spreading over the land. Dorvurn was walking between streams, and soon enough another would come to swallow him.
But he was content.
Below, the blighted land was purged by the ocean of lava.
‘Runemaster,’ Dorvurn said, ‘I have lived to see the truth of your vision.’ The Krelstrag had truly become what Thrumnor had foreseen. The Fyreslayers had brought the purifying fire. Dorvurn’s lodge had, in every sense that mattered, become the lava flood. And the Krelstrag would be strong yet. Homnir would see to that.
Dorvurn looked off into the distance, toward the other lodge, its name still forgotten, its location unknown. It was unreachable. But perhaps their actions here today would aid those Fyreslayers. Perhaps the vast scouring of the land would be enough to weaken the hold of Chaos on the entire region.
Dorvurn was still marching in the direction of the lodge, still holding fast to the oath, and to the knowledge the Krelstrag had humbled a vast army of Chaos.
So as the heat came for the runefather, he did not mourn.
i
They always came for the Hardgate.
To one side of the volcano, its flanks sloped more gently, allowing the Slaaneshi to gather in larger numbers than elsewhere. After one hundred years of siege, the ground was a mess of bones and old armour, the remains of men and titanic monsters tangled with the broken remnants of great siege engines. Time after time, the forces of the daemon prince Qualar Vo threw themselves at the gates with ecstatic abandon. They laughed as they died, revelling in the sensation of death. Time after time, the Fyreslayers of the Ulgaen lodges cast them back.
Today was different. When the Slaaneshi assailed the gate, they broke into the hold from below.
‘Stop them!’ roared Ulgathern, twelfth runeson of the lord of Ulgaen-ar. ‘Kill the breaching worms!’
Hideous, pallid things thrashed as vulkite berzerkers buried their axes in rubbery flesh. Petal mouths gaped and snapped, but the duardin were too swift. Their ur-gold runes lent them speed and strength, and the worms could not land a blow. Other Fyreslayers battled with the human tribesmen coming up the tunnels that had been chewed through the rock by their monsters. The south passage was a disorienting racket of clashing arms and screams.
Ulgathern sliced through the body of a worm behind its head. The creatures were massively thick, and it took several blows to sever its head completely. The body did not cease thrashing, but yanked back into the tunnel keening shrilly, leaving a slick of clear blood on the floor.
The sounds of battle receded. All around the tunnel were heaped the bodies of Slaaneshi marauders. Their gaudily coloured skins were smeared with blood. The last fell with a defiant yell.
‘Ha! Chaos filth!’ roared Mangulnar, third and oldest surviving runeson of Karadrakk-Grimnir. He slapped Ulgathern hard on the shoulder and flicked the gore from his moustaches with a grin. Both of them were covered in the stinking fluids of the worms. ‘When I’m Runefather, little brother, we’ll run out after them and kill the lot, not skulk in these caverns waiting to die.’
Ulgathern looked sidelong at his elder sibling. Sometimes, Mangulnar enjoyed fighting a little too much.
‘That would be the best way to lose the war,’ he said.
‘You sound like Father. Where’s your hunger for the fight? There’s pleasure in war, and we should embrace it. Fear brings no ur-gold to our lodge.’<
br />
‘Be careful what you wish for. The thirst for pleasure is what drives our enemies at us.’
Mangulnar spat. ‘Their pleasure makes them weak. Battle joy makes us strong, it’s completely different.’
‘These are not their best warriors. I sense a ruse. Their attacks are getting bolder, more inventive. The worms are new. It is nearly one hundred and one years since the siege began. Storms fill the skies, and we should be wary.’
‘Are you talking about that bloody prophecy of Drokki’s again?’ said Mangulnar harshly. ‘You should be careful whose words you heed. As withered in mind as he is in arm, that friend of yours. Listening to the likes of him is why you’ll never be a Runefather, but if you’re fortunate, I might let you serve me when I am lord of Ulgaen-ar.’ Mangulnar stalked away, looking for something else to kill.
Ulgathern stared after his brother. Mangulnar and he rarely saw eye to eye.
‘You there!’ shouted Ulgathern to one of his warriors. ‘Report back to my father that the third deeping is clear.’ The warrior nodded and ran off. Ulgathern looked to the holes. The walls of the burrows were slick with the worms’ secretions. ‘And get a building team here, plug these up. I don’t want anything else coming through.’
‘Are you to join your father, my lord?’ asked Grokkenkir, Ulgathern’s favoured karl and leader of his vulkite berzerkers.
‘The runefather ordered me to the Hardgate once done. My brothers and father will stop the other breaches soon enough without my help, you can be sure of that.’
Ulgathern took the steps up to the gate parapet three at a time, his muscles hot with Grimnir’s power. Well before the thin daylight penetrated the gloom of the stairwell, he heard the enemy: a frenzied roaring as repetitive as the booming of the sea. On the wallwalk over the gate stood the auric hearthguard, firing their magmapikes into the packed hordes a hundred feet below. Ulgavost, thirteenth runeson of Karadrakk-Grimnir, watched the enemy die from a step behind the battlement. Ulgathern went to join his brother, and looked out over the mountain slope.
Fyreslayers Page 11
