Twilight of the Dragons

by Andy Remic

  Skalg did not want to ask the question. But he did anyway.

  Why?

  You must come with us.

  Where?

  No more questions. Do you agree?

  Skalg wanted to say no. He wanted to scream no. He wanted to climb to his feet and hobble as fast as his broken body would allow, up the stairs, out of the Cathedral of Hate, away, away from the dwarves, away from everything because this, this was a moment of reckoning, a moment he knew would ultimately lead to his downfall. He felt it, in his very bones. After everything he’d done, after all the shit he’d been through, after all the murders and the back-stabbing, after all the whispering and assassins and violence, here, now, he was being called upon by the fucking gods to do the right fucking thing. And he could not bear it.

  Do you agree?

  There was an urgency there. But something more. An impatience. The Great Dwarf Lords were not used to being fucked around. Not even by the First Cardinal of the Church of Hate, and after the death of King Irlax, now the mostly singly powerful individual in the realm of the Harborym Dwarves.

  What happens if I do not? I don’t mean to sound rude, I’m sorry, truly I am, but I’m very frightened. Running the Church is one thing, but being asked to… what, recapture the dragons? Save the world? That’s best left for heroes – dwarves with stout hearts and strong axe arms. Me, I’m a broken waste of space… I would be no good for you, O Great Dwarf Lords.

  There came a pause. A very long pause.

  Do you agree?

  “What happens if I don’t?” he squeaked.

  The Dragon Heads will bathe you in Holy Fire and your death will take a thousand years.

  Skalg considered this. He tilted his head. As if obeying some unspoken command, the Dragon Heads grew warm before him. Heat bathed him. It felt like a gentle warning. Skalg swallowed.

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  The Dragon Heads grew even warmer, and brightness spilled from their faceted interiors. It flickered around the chamber, shooting beams of light and heat that spun, and danced and coalesced. Skalg cringed in terror, cowering down on that cold stone floor, cowering in upon himself, making himself as small a target as possible – as if that would matter. He was like some bearded, distorted embryo. And still the Dragon Heads spun, and light fell from them, like light from a million stars. And the heat became hot, too hot to bear, and Skalg started to scream curses and obscenities, howling at the Great Dwarf Lords for they were going to kill him, murder him like the backstabbing bastards they were. Heat washed over Skalg, and he wailed like a newborn baby, and covered his eyes, and sniffed in his own shit-stink, and he was a bastard, he was a wretch, and he hoped that death would be quick…

  The jewels spun on their velvet cushions, and a noise came, a high-pitched shrilling like a million insects trying to break free. Skalg covered his ears and soiled himself again, feeling the shame as warmth spread across his buttocks and down one leg.

  “Do it!” he screamed. “Fucking do it! End it! Kill me now!”

  The light and the heat grew, until the chamber was nothing but a vision of pure bright white.

  And then it was done. The light died. A cool breeze drifted through the chamber.

  Darkness crept back in.

  The Dragon Heads spun to a stop. They were no longer bright and beautiful. They were dark, and filled with an oozing, evil oil.

  A scent of hot metal hung in the air.

  There was a tiny scratching sound, like a nail dragged across slate.

  And Skalg vanished.

  * * *

  Skalg floated through a million dreams, like a swimmer through a lake of black oil. Voices called to him, some he recognised, like his mother, and a lover he had murdered, but many he did not know. And then the words became clearer, and he realised they were shouting at him, screaming at him, accusing him…

  Fucking dirty bastard cripple…

  Abuser, abuser of women, abuser of children…

  You raped me, I will see you burn in the pit, I will see your eyes torn out by crows, I will see your cock chewed off by rabid hounds…

  How could you do this to me, Skalg? Your own mother? How could you leave me to die, not visit me when I suffered on my deathbed; how could you let me die alone, my son? How could you let me die alone and unloved?

  “I didn’t!” he screamed. “I didn’t do those things!”

  And yet he knew that he had, and shame burned him, not just his face, but deep down to his core.

  You took my money and had me beaten to death, spoke a different voice. An old man, this time.

  You murdered my husband, then forced me into your bed before having me killed for my inheritance. You bastard. You fucking bastard’s bastard. Have you no soul? Have you no pity? Is the only thing you care about – money, and power, and ejaculation? I will see you hang, you dirty little scabby cunt.

  You went to the Ministers. You told them lies about me. I was summoned to their offices, like some cur, some criminal, tried and convicted without any investigation. They believed honest do-good Skalg, for his track record was clean, but really he was snake in the grass, a dirty back-stabbing poisoner, a dwarf with his finger on the trigger of an evil, loaded crossbow just waiting to stab me in the back, take the right shot, the killing shot… well, I will get my revenge, Skalg, you hypocritical little shit, you twisted and corrupt piece of fucking rancid offal, I will get my revenge on you… I will see your lovers burn, see your children turned to dust… now, or in the next life, or in the next…

  “Stop, please, I beseech you!” Skalg tore at his hair. Tore at his purple robes. His mind felt fractured. As if he was going to implode. He could take no more. And just at the moment of his greatest madness, when the pain and the confusion climaxed, a calming voice touched his mind.

  “Shhh,” soothed the voice. “You have to learn to zone out the zyigs.”

  “Zyigs?”

  “Lost and broken spirits from your past. They may exist, they may not. They may be figments of your imagination, or lost souls looking for retribution. One thing is for sure – you must zone out the voices, or they will certainly turn you insane.”

  “But… but they know things!” wailed Skalg.

  “That only you know? Yes. Which is why they may be a manifestation of your guilt.”

  You took my daughter. Took her from my home. You promised her power and wealth and respect. You took her to your bed, you fucking whore bastard, and you raped her, for she was enamoured of your power. Then when she turned on you, you dropped her from your monstrous tower. I will hunt you down, hunchback, and I will use a saw to cut through your hump and your spine. I will cut you in half, you fucking evil little cunt.

  My father came to pray at the Cathedral of Hate. But he was not important enough to kiss your arse, O mighty Skalg. So you had him removed, and your Church Wardens beat him on the steps of the cathedral. And he died there from a fractured skull. I hope the Great Dwarf Lords burn you in a Chaos Hall of their own devising…

  I loved you. You were my best friend. You were like a brother. And yet you turned on me. You reported me to the authorities. You stabbed me in the back, you evil shit-sucking motherfucking maggot. I trusted you. I thought you were my friend. And yet you spilled your diarrheic filth like sewer shit from your filthy lips. One day I will find you, and I will kill you for betraying me like you did. One day I will find you, First Cardinal Skalg.

  Skalg.

  Yes?

  I am Kokar. Remember that name.

  Why? Why should I remember your name? You’re just like all the other cunts…

  No. I am Kokar. I am special. You murdered my daughter. You dropped her from your fucking tower. And I will never, ever stop hunting you, you pointless, worthless, useless fucking cripple…

  “No more, no more, no more,” he whimpered, hands over his ears, no longer swimming through the oil of dreams, but sinking, sinking, deeper and into darkness. Then hands grasped him, and lifted him, and the zyigs seem
ed to drift away, their complaints and rants and hate and loathing drifting like a stray leaf on an ocean current.

  Skalg went limp, like a dead fish…

  And then everything faded to black.

  * * *

  Skalg awoke, face down against black hard rock. He stared at the rock for a long time. It was jagged, like it had been quarried, and was lined with tiny lodes of precious metal. He was cold, and realised his body was shivering. The pain through his humped back, his twisted spine, was considerable, and he gritted his teeth for a long time, trying to will the pain away. But as usual, as always happened in these situations, the pain remained. Got worse, in fact. As if the God of Pain was mocking him. As usual.

  “Bastard,” he muttered. “Son of a fucking mule.” He wondered what had happened, and remembered bad dreams, first about the Great Dwarf Lords insulting him, then about ghosts of his past inflicting insults and threats. He shivered. “You’ve done a lot of bad things, Skalg,” he murmured to himself, and shame burned his cheeks beneath his beard. “You’ve hurt a lot of good people. You done a lot of… evil things on your way to becoming First Cardinal of the Church of Hate.” He shuddered, remembering the accusing voices – feeling their hate, a force so real and painful that it stabbed him like a silver blade right down to his core.

  “But… where am I now?”

  He rolled onto his back with a grunt, and looked up at a black sky. He was outside. Outside. And with a shudder, and emitting a tiny whimper, he realised there were no stars. Like all dwarves, Skalg hated the outside, despised the concept of being “overground”, as much as a fish hated being stranded on a beach. Dwarves were born to be underground. It was in their bones, like it was in the bedrock of the mountain. But he knew about the night sky, he knew about stars. He’d seen pictures in books. Here, there were none.

  “What kind of place is this?” he wondered out loud, and exhaled, watching his cold breath stream like smoke. “Where am I?”

  “You are in a special place,” said a small child dwarf, who stood near him. The child had silver skin and was naked. He looked… unreal. Not a thing of flesh and blood, but a being, something created by something which had only heard about flesh and blood. An organic construction.

  The child stood, staring at Skalg. “You were brought here. By the Great Dwarf Lords. I am their servant, Mokasta. I am here to help you, and to administer the challenges. Now get up.”

  “Challenges? What challenges?”

  Grunting, Skalg managed to get to one knee, then wobbled slightly, pain coursing through him. He cursed in a variety of languages, and tried to rise, grunting, sweat standing out on his brow, his lips puffing, until he placed both hands on one knee and tried to lever himself up. He failed.

  Mokasta stepped forward, and looked down with eyes like small black pebbles. His skin shone silver, as if under moonlight. His face held a perfect serenity, and his head tilted to one side.

  “You struggle?”

  “Of course I bloody struggle!”

  “Would you like me to help you?”

  “What do you think, genius?” growled Skalg.

  “There is no need for animosity here. Soon, you will be begging me for help.”

  “You reckon?”

  Mokasta held out his small hand, and the fingernails were black. Not the black of injury or dried blood, but gloss black, like the beady eyes of a carrion crow on a battlefield, unwinding entrails from a rancid corpse.

  Skalg took the hand. The grip was incredibly strong, and Mokasta lifted Skalg easily to his feet. The hunchback stood there, glaring at the little boy, who simply turned and started walking across the undulating black rock. Skalg followed, limping, one arm hanging slightly lower than the other, and only now did he look around himself properly.

  The landscape of rock stretched off in all directions, a relatively flat plain, and they were surrounded by savage, saw-toothed mountains. They towered high into the obsidian heavens, impossibly big, but strangely without snow at their summits.

  Skalg suddenly realised there was no breeze, no circulation of air whatsoever. The air was cool, however, and his breath steamed as he struggled after the small boy, his panting accelerating as his heart rate increased. Unused to any physical activity, and with a lifestyle filled with unwilling women, rich red meat and Ushgak Red, Skalg’s stamina was far from being anywhere near adequate.

  “Where are we going?” wheezed the First Cardinal, as Mokasta started to pull away. Followed by, “Slow down, will you? Can’t you see that walking is difficult for me?”

  “We are going to that mountain, there.” Mokasta pointed towards an evil-looking vast tower of rock, a shearing upthrust mountain like a giant, inverted tooth, sheer and terrifying to observe. “They call it the Demon’s Cradle.”

  Skalg eyed the huge mountain warily, and continued to hobble after Mokasta.

  “Oy, lad. What will we do when we reach the foot?” He stumbled suddenly, and cursed loudly as a narrow streak of pain like molten lava shot down through his twisted back, and speared him through the pelvis. Urine leaked out as he lost some bladder control for a few moments. He coughed and spat.

  “We are not going to the foot of the Demon’s Cradle.”

  “Eh?”

  “We are climbing to the summit.”

  Skalg stopped dead, and it took a few moments for Mokasta to also halt, when he became gradually aware of Skalg’s lack of perambulation.

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  Those dark eyes surveyed him. “You called upon the Great Dwarf Lords. They answered your call, Skalg. Being First Cardinal of the Church of Hate required some considerable effort on your part, but now the Great Dwarf Lords have answered you – the first in a thousand years – and you must further prove yourself worthy of their patronage.”

  “By climbing a mountain?” scowled Skalg.

  “It is not merely the climbing of a mountain,” said Mokasta, and gave a sly smile, an image that looked wrong on the small boy’s face; it was too advanced, too adult, too knowledgeable. “It is an honour to be challenged by the Great Dwarf Lords themselves. Is this not so?”

  “But… but I’m a physical wreck!” wailed Skalg. “I am crippled! I’m in constant agony! I suffer so much I spend many nights on the verge of passing out, or insanity, or both. Can you not see what a fucking physical disgrace I am to the dwarves?”

  Mokasta trotted a little closer. He placed his hands behind his back. And that round silver moon face peered up at Skalg. Softly, he said, “And that is why this challenge will make you so much more worthy than your able-bodied peers.”

  Mokasta moved to a small mound of boulders, which led to a slope of scree, and then a jagged, ascending ridge like the spikes on the spine of a great wyrm. “I will meet you at the top,” he said, then turned and leapt from boulder to boulder, scrambling up the slope.

  Skalg stared for a long minute, then limped forward, cursing. He climbed onto the first boulder, breaking a fingernail and frothing in anger. Then he stepped gingerly from rock to rock, aware that a single slip, a misplaced step, could break an ankle or pop a knee joint. For several minutes Skalg trod gingerly across the boulders, then stood at the foot of the scree slope. He looked up, and sweat stung his eyes. Pain crawled down his hump and spine something horrid.

  Taking a deep breath, and with tears in his eyes, Skalg began the impossible ascent.

  The Deeper Halls

  Beetrax groaned. Shit. Fuck. Cold. Stone tunnels. The flickering edges of a candle burning low.

  And he realised. He was sleeping on guard duty.

  Sergeant Kalka. That evil old crippled bastard. “Any of you fucks sleep on guard duty, I’ll have you whipped a hundred fucking times! It’s cunts like that who get their best mates killed.” And yet – and yet exhaustion was not something you could control. It wasn’t an on/off switch. You didn’t decide it. It fucking infected you. It decided you.

  Fuck, he said again, internally, lifting his axe and staring at
his dulled, muted, distorted reflection in the chipped and battered blades. We’re here. In the dwarf mines. And I wish I was somewhere else. Anywhere else. Preferably with brandy and a pork slab sandwich. Maybe a bit of apple sauce on the side.

  Maudlin, and filled with a sudden desolation that blew through his soul like a demon wind through a desecrated tomb, Beetrax wondered when this horse shit would ever, ever be over…

  His eyes stared into the dull metal reflections of his axe blades. They were hazy. In those axe-blade reflections he could determine no detail, no definition, just blurred representations of what he was in reality. The thought saddened him. Is this what my life has become? Trapped in a fucking dwarf mine with no hope of survival, of getting out alive? Of ever breathing fresh air again?

  The sound came to him. A tiny skitter of stone on stone. A minute pebble kicked. A shard of gravel raking over rough-stone tunnel floor.

  Beetrax did not move, did not flinch, did not tense. He continued to stare into his dulled, lifeless, blurred-eye reflection as his senses suddenly screamed and the hackles rose on the back of his neck. He heard the sword hissing towards his head, oh how did those fucking bastards get so close without him realising? and threw himself sideways, axe lashing out in a sudden sideways movement that half cut the dwarf’s leg mid-thigh. The dwarf collapsed like a battered sack of donkey shit, suddenly screaming, sword dropped with a clang, clutching at his half-severed leg as blood pumped out, and flooded that tiny compartment of hewn stone corridor.

  Beetrax’s head came up, eyes narrowing at the five remaining dwarves in the tunnel, and lifting his axe, he whacked it down through the screaming dwarf’s head, silencing his cries and cutting the head almost in half like a ripe melon, sliced from eyeball to opposite jawline.

  “Any other cunt want to die?” he growled, as he felt the rage swelling within him, a rage so raw and basic and primeval he knew he had no control, no sanity, but did not fucking care anyway. It washed over him like a tidal wave of blood from an extinct race, and the dwarves spread out as much as they could, which was only two wide in the tunnel, as Beetrax simply growled, baring his teeth in a snarl, and attacked.