by C. L. Werner
‘Fight da ’umies, ya poncy grot-fondlin’ sunz-a-swine!’ the black orc bellowed. He bent to the ground and retrieved his axe, his blood boiling as he watched the riders push his warriors back into the wadi. He watched the humans stab down at the orcs with their lances, then start to gallop back towards the snow bank. It didn’t take a tactical genius to figure out their plan. Dozens of orcs surged up out of the draw, blinking the blinding lights from their eyes, intent on exercising their rage on the carcasses of their persecutors. The knights widened the gap between themselves and the orcs, then the archers began to fire again, raining shafts into the onrushing horde.
This time Gorgut saw the enemy wizard. Standing behind the archers on a little rise, the wizard was taller and thinner than the other humans, dressed in diaphanous robes of white and wearing a conical helm of gold. The sharp features and intense eyes more than anything impressed upon Gorgut that the magician was an elf. His knuckles tightened around his axe. If there was one thing he did before he met Gork in the eternal war, it would be to shove his fist down that cheating mongrel’s throat.
The black orc roared a warning to his warriors and clenched his eyes closed. He waited for three breaths, then cautiously opened one eye. The wizard’s arms were flung wide apart and there was a crackle of energy about him, but it was a fading energy. Gorgut looked over at his mob, groaning when he saw that none of them had listened. The wizard had unleashed his sneaky magic again, blinding them and sending them slinking back to the wadi. He spat into the bloodstained pebbles at his feet. It was up to him then, one black orc against a few hundred humans and their elf sorcerer.
Gorgut considered it fair odds.
Gorgut also had a hard time understanding numbers bigger than twenty.
Sardiss watched the human cavalry smash into the orcs. A cruel smile spread across the Black Guard’s face. The greenskins had performed their role admirably, luring out the Grey Lancers. By springing an ambush against the orcs, the humans had walked right into the trap. Beblieth had eliminated the sentinels who might have warned them, just as Pyra’s magic warded off any prying sorcery the archmage Dolchir might have employed as a last ring of protection.
The Black Guard scowled as he thought about his mistress. She had lingered behind, concentrating on her magic, leaving the destruction of the humans entirely to Sardiss. This he could understand; he was less understanding about Prince Inhin’s decision to keep out of the fight. The druchii noble had displayed a yellow streak during the first engagement with the asur and their human allies. His arrogant refusal to ‘lower himself’ to fighting animals did not deceive Sardiss. The fool was unworthy of all the honours and powers his position afforded him, but this latest abuse of that position would spell his undoing. Sardiss had been working on the resentments and misgivings of Inhin’s warriors since before the Bloodshark landed in Norsca. Now all of his sedition was bearing a most bitter fruit. He would have another discussion with Pyra about the noble’s continued usefulness. Then, with or without her blessing, he would skewer the preening traitor like an eel and leave his carcass for the vultures.
From his perch atop the snowy knoll, Sardiss watched as the knights became further enmeshed with the orcs. He could see their leader, a huge black-skinned brute, bellowing and raging, trying to form his savage rabble into some sort of organised defence. It was an almost laughable effort. Blinded and blood-crazed, the orc warriors were chopping into anything near them, be it man, horse, or greenskin.
Sardiss dismissed the melee from his mind. He had other concerns at the moment. Lifting his hand, he motioned to the warriors behind him. With cold precision, the dark elves marched to the top of the knoll, lifting their cumbersome crossbows to their shoulders. Sardiss glared at the backs of the human archers supporting the knights.
‘Loose,’ the Black Guard snarled.
Steel strings snapped, bolts thudded into flesh, punching through leather and chain with grisly ease. Screams, howls of pain and shock. The close-ranked files of the human archers disintegrated as the ambushers found themselves ambushed. Officers roared at their men, stemming what threatened to become a rout. Bowmen hastily nocked arrows to strings.
Sardiss brought his armoured fist chopping down again. ‘Loose.’
The repeater crossbows of the dark elves took their murderous toll on the rallying archers. Men crumpled around the bolts that slammed into them, thrown back by the murderous impact. There was no answering volley, human determination was no equal to elvish speed and the hideous engineering of the druchii. Again and again the crossbows fired, reaping their bloody harvest.
Now Dolchir turned, the archmage’s attention drawn away from the conflict with the orcs. He stared in dismay at the gory wreckage of the bowmen, then his face contorted with awful fury. He waved his palm through the air before his eyes. There was a brilliant flash. In its wake, the archmage fixed his wrathful stare on Sardiss and his warriors, as though only now able to see them. Sardiss knew whatever spell Pyra had worked to protect them had been broken. The humans were beneath the Black Guard’s contempt, but he had a respect bordering on fear for the powers the archmage might bring to the battle.
‘Front rank!’ Sardiss snarled. ‘Spear and sword. Second rank. Concentrate fire on the asur!’
The Black Guard saw the look of disbelief on the faces of the druchii closest to him. They had heard Pyra’s command that Dolchir be taken alive. Sardiss smiled at their anxiety. ‘Just kill him,’ he growled. ‘I will make apologies to the sorceress.’
The high elf archmage was gesturing again, weaving another spell. The hurried volley from the druchii crossbows glanced away as they shot towards him as though striking an unseen shell. Sardiss growled again at his warriors. So long as they kept up the volley, the archmage would be too busy protecting himself to cast any of his spells against them. He was counting on the time that would allow him. Time to close with the fool and twist his head from his shoulders.
Sardiss rushed down the snowy bank, his armoured boots gouging toeholds in the frosty rock, Inhin’s warriors all around him. The druchii raised their voices in a terrible warcry. Not the mindless rage of orcs, but the hiss of ancient hate and spite that only a race founded upon betrayal and exile could nurture. The surviving archers broke before the charge of the dark elves, but other men rushed to take their place, men with swords and halberds and spears. They were clumsy, ungainly as toddlers beside the ethereal grace of the dark elves. Limbs were cut from shoulders, heads danced from necks as the druchii almost effortlessly carved a gory path through the humans.
The Black Guard delivered a mutilating swing of his greatsword, chopping the grey-armoured halberdier before him into separate halves that toppled and bled in the snow at his feet. Sardiss smashed his boot into the dying thing’s face, then glared once more at the little rise where the archmage stood. His eyes narrowed with hate. The white-robed wizard was beset on all sides, trying to defend himself from the fusillade of the crossbows while at the same time trying to steel the strength and courage of the knights fighting the orcs. To fail in either enterprise would mean doom. Sardiss chuckled darkly, ripping through the throat of a swordsman stupid enough to charge him. He barely heard the bloody gargle as the wretch crumpled to the ground.
The archmage would soon have bigger problems than either crossbows or greenskins.
Shouting commands to the warriors closest to him, Sardiss rushed the rise, eager to spill asur blood. He sensed rather than saw the dark elves curtly ending their uneven contest with the humans, rallying around him as they charged the archmage. He savoured the look of terror in Dolchir’s eyes as the wizard saw death reaching up for him on the edge of Naggaroth steel.
The Black Guard’s blow never landed. Like a flash of silver lightning, an axe intercepted his sword, nearly ripping it from his hands. Sardiss glowered at this new foe, this last defender of Dolchir the Fool. No human, this enemy, but another of the treacherous high elves. More powerfully built than Dolchir, his pantherish body was
covered in scale armour fashioned from ithilmar, his narrow helm edged in gold and adorned with rubies and sapphires. A huge cloak was wrapped about his shoulders, the pristine pelt and paws of a white lion. There was an ancient disdain in the high elf’s sharp features every bit as pitiless and unforgiving as that locked behind the helm of Sardiss.
‘White Lion, you will never see the shores of Ulthuan again,’ Sardiss snarled. Dark elf warriors circled the lone fighter, closing upon him from three sides. ‘We are ten to your one. Pray for a quick death.’
The White Lion’s eyes narrowed with loathing as his slinking adversaries came towards him. ‘I looked forward to a fair contest. I should have expected no duel of honour from a druchii,’ he spun as he spoke, ripping the jabbing spear from the clutch of one dark elf, then slashing the fingers from the hand of a second who dove in to exploit the momentary opening. ‘It is only fair to tell you: I am not one, but two.’
As he spoke, a huge shape launched itself from the rise. Crouched upon the shelf of rock, it had been almost invisible. Some unspoken gesture from the White Lion had called it, commanded it to abandon its stony vigil. Now it came smashing down with force and speed that was awesome even to the elves. A druchii warrior vanished beneath the furry bulk, bones cracking as the four-hundred-pound weight crushed him. A huge paw lashed out and the face of another warrior vanished in a welter of blood and ragged flesh. The survivors staggered away from the beast. Three feet at the shoulder, broader than a bull, the brute had the same colour pelt as that which its master wore. Golden barding protected its belly and neck, while steel sheaths added to the lethality of its paws. Few druchii had experienced the horror of facing a war lion of Chrace. Fewer still had returned living and whole from such an encounter.
With a roar, the war lion was among the dark elves, ripping at them with its claws, tearing at them with its powerful fangs. Sardiss had only a moment to consider the battle before he was again beset by the beast’s master. The White Lion wove a blinding curtain of steel between the two elves, his ithilmar axe sometimes licking out to scrape against the Black Guard’s armour. Sardiss was unable to penetrate the blur of the high elf’s defending steel, his own sword incapable of breaking through the parrying axe to stab the warrior behind it. Frustration and rage boiled within the Black Guard with each passing breath, goading him into brutal recklessness. Sardiss restrained himself only with supreme effort. Rashness was the last thing he could afford against a foe so deadly.
Sardiss’s world disintegrated into a swirl of steel, only the motion of his enemy filling his existence. Only dimly did he hear the bestial, triumphant roar rising from the wadi as the knights finally broke before the mindless butchery of the orcs. Only faintly did he see armoured humans converge upon Dolchir, helping the exhausted archmage down from his perch, lowering him into the saddle of a courser and galloping off across the frosty horizon. His world boiled down to the crash of steel on ithilmar, the smell of blood and sweat, the creak of armour and the rasp of fatigued breath.
The death cry of the war lion smashed into the narrow world of Sardiss with elemental fury. It was a sound at once fierce, defiant, and pitiful, the last gasp of a titan dragged down by lesser foes. The high elf fighting him faltered, clutching at his breast as though sharing the death-agony of his beast. Sardiss lunged at the reeling White Lion, driving his blade into the gap between breast and loin. The flexible links of armour between the two sheets of scale splintered beneath the fury of his strike, blood and bile oozing over his sword as he shoved it deep into the White Lion’s belly. There was a look of outrage on the high elf’s face as he slumped to the ground and his axe fell from lifeless fingers.
‘You and your kitten died like sheep,’ Sardiss growled, pushing the blade still deeper. He enjoyed the flicker of hate that swept up into the elf’s eyes and froze there as life deserted his body. Callously, he pushed the body off his sword and let it flop to the ground.
Sardiss froze as he saw the huge monster leering at him from above the mangled carcass of the war lion. He had assumed the superior numbers of his warriors had finished the beast, instead he found a gruesome orc standing over it, the brute’s claws still buried in the monster’s arm. The orc’s arm, in turn, was wrapped around the lion’s neck. In an impossible display of raw strength, the greenskinned beast had grappled with the lion and snapped its spine.
Of his own warriors, Sardiss could find no trace. The orc snarled something at him, then dropped the war lion. It took a lumbering step towards the dark elf, dragging the lion’s carcass after it. The weight must have registered at last to the orc’s dim wit and it paused to carefully pull out the claws still sunk in its arm.
The Black Guard was ready to face the ugly beast, it was the closing circle of other orcs that gave him pause. Where were his warriors? Why had they abandoned him? Sardiss bit his lip in disgust. He had been betrayed and abandoned. The hand of Inhin was behind this, the hand of the preening noble who dared believe Pyra was his and his alone. The maggot who had the madness to plot against the Witch King. There would be no question this time. Sardiss would cleave the noble’s skull in half for this treachery!
There was no question of the lumbering orcs catching him. They might as well have been standing still for all their clumsy antics meant to the lithe druchii. Sardiss easily dodged their clumsy attempts to confront him, sometimes lingering long enough to cut fingers from a groping hand or shatter the rusty sword clenched in a leathery fist. Feeble goblin arrows whistled through the air, but the archery of the creeping goblins was too distant to allow them any real chance of striking so quick a target. Sardiss might have laughed at their efforts, but his mind was too filled with thoughts of vengeance to entertain any humour.
The Black Guard scrambled back up the icy face of the knoll behind which his crossbowmen had been positioned. He was not surprised to find them gone. What did surprise him was the red-robed priest waiting for him. Even more surprising was the poisoned dagger Naagan deftly stabbed into Sardiss’s armpit, driving it down into the dark elf’s heart.
Disbelief was in the warrior’s eyes as he slumped at the feet of Naagan. The disciple of Khaine stared down at him, eyes filled with disapproving contempt. ‘I bring word from your mistress, Sardiss of the Black Guard. She says you have outlived your usefulness.’ Naagan slowly replaced his dagger in its sheath. His lean frame bent and he recovered the Black Guard’s sword from the snow. Idly, his corpse-like hands brushed ice and blood from the blade.
‘Prince Inhin will, of course, want proof you will trouble him no more,’ Naagan said, kicking the paralyzed Sardiss onto his back and lifting the heavy sword over his head.
The last thing Sardiss felt before the darkness claimed him was the bite of his own blade as it sank into his neck.
Chapter Eleven
‘Another one,’ Kormak growled, letting the corpse slip slowly from his grip. The body slopped into the frozen puddle of its own entrails. Before a southling lance had opened its belly, the carrion had been a warrior of the Raven Host, its arm bearing the scar that marked it as one of Jodis Wolfscar’s men. It was the third the small warband had discovered since entering the winding, snow-swept valleys beyond the plain of clay.
A green membrane slid closed over the eyes of Vakaan Daemontongue as the magus concentrated upon his conjurations. The vile monkey-like familiar gibbered and scrabbled about the sorcerer’s shoulders. Abruptly the membrane slid back, revealing the magus’s distant gaze.
‘The dark elves mirror our steps,’ Vakaan said. ‘I can sense them. They are not so far now.’
Steel creaked as Urbaal tightened his fist. ‘Then they should make peace with their stinking gods,’ the Chosen spat. ‘Nothing mortal defies Urbaal the Corruptor twice.’
Vakaan held out his staff, blocking the armoured champion as he turned to stalk off. ‘There will be time enough for vengeance later,’ he promised. ‘It is more important that we find Jodis Wolfscar and the Bastion Stair. Even if the dark elves are seeking the
relic, even if they capture it from the southlings, it will be useless to them unless they journey to the Bastion Stair and the Portal of Rage.’
Anger smouldered in the Chosen’s eyes, but gradually he relented to the wisdom of the magus. ‘First we run Tchar’zanek’s errand, then we kill elves,’ he agreed.
Kormak watched the exchange carefully. At Urbaal’s promise of revenge, the Norscan stepped away from the gutted body of Wolfscar’s warrior. His right arm shifted into the semblance of a fanged claw. The mutant limb clacked open with a meaty slobber. ‘Just remember, the naked wench with the daggers is mine,’ he snarled. The marauder’s claw snapped shut with bone-snapping force.
‘Now the slave makes threats?’
Kormak rounded on the tattooed Tolkku, fangs lengthening in his face as he growled at the zealot. ‘More than threats, she-ling!’ The marauder swung his claw at the Kurgan, but found the blow arrested before it could land. He twisted his head to find Urbaal’s hand gripping his claw, the Chosen’s sword at his throat.
‘The Kurgan’s words are wind,’ Urbaal’s deep voice stated. ‘It is a fool who wastes his energy fighting wind. A fool is of no use to me, or the Raven Host.’
Kormak glared into the skull-face helm of the Chosen, locking his eyes with the fiery glow behind the visor. It was the Norscan who at last relented. The claw Urbaal held shifted and shortened, becoming a brawny arm once more.
‘If you kill me, slave, who will see to your hurts?’ the zealot’s scornful voice jibed. Tolkku held another of his skulls in his hands now, a strange yellow thing with a thin coating of papery skin stretched tight about it and lips that were tightly sewn shut. The Kurgan had his dagger poised to cut the stitching. Kormak could only wonder at the kind of magic Tolkku was ready to unleash.
