by David Guymer
‘Felix Jaeger. Ah wouldnae believe it if ah hidnae seen it with ma ain eyes. Whit in the world are ye daein here?’
NINE
Makaisson
Malakai Makaisson flung back the bleak iron doors of the mountaintop citadel and strode into the greeting hall of the ancient dwarfs. Felix imagined that it had been rather more welcoming in the past. Columnar stumps marked out what looked to have been a runic design, possibly with some kind of cultural or even magical significance to the ancient architects of this place, but now left Felix minding the remaining ceiling supports with an unease he was unaccustomed to in dwarf-built structures.
The walls had been constructed with defence foremost in mind and thus had been built without windows of any kind. Now, however, breaks in the stonework allowed in the night and the patch jobs courtesy of canvas and nails did a poor job of blocking out the breeze. Thick black cabling lay everywhere, running through heaps of rubble and scrambling up columns to what looked like iron gantries from which an intermittent light flickered and hummed. It was neither torchlight nor the precious glowstones that Malakai had innovatively employed in his handgun, but a cold, soulless kind of glow. The smell of oil lingered on the stones and Felix could see it on the faces of the dwarfs he saw working on the walls’ repair as they turned to him with expressions of wonder. They probably hadn’t been expecting company.
‘It isnae any belter tae keek, but she’s oors.’
Felix assumed that meant it was good. Makaisson, he had once been told, hailed from an isolated far-northern community of dwarfs in the Dwimmerdim Vale, and his unusual manner of speech took some re-acclimating to. Gotrek regarded the ceiling sourly. Felix could still see lead where the bullet had punched into the bone of Gotrek’s shoulder but it had stopped bleeding and that, it seemed, was enough for him.
‘Not too bad. If you like the feel of rain on your face.’
Felix thought it was the nearest thing he had seen to paradise in a long time.
Malakai Makaisson, he thought with something approaching wonder. He still couldn’t believe it. What were the chances? Felix hadn’t seen the Slayer-Engineer since he and Gotrek had last passed through Nuln. Malakai had been teaching at the Gunnery School at the time, although Felix had heard through his various military contacts in Altdorf, and later from Snorri, that the dwarf had returned to Karak Kadrin to play his part in the debacle that was the Sylvanian campaign. Felix had assumed him dead. Snorri had thought so. At that moment Felix was almost inclined to give in to Max’s urgings and put it all down to destiny.
‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ said Gotrek, eyeing the lighting rigs suspiciously. ‘Never in all my years. If the Guild ever saw this your great-great-grandchildren would be swearing the Slayer Oath.’
‘Aye, mibbe ye’re right,’ said Malakai, an air of melancholy settling over him as he looked over the hall that he had rebuilt. ‘Ah suppose ah willnae tell ’em if ye dain’t.’
Gotrek grumbled darkly, glaring at the cables as if they were snakes.
‘How did you come to be in this out of the way place?’ asked Max, softly insistent, gliding under the strange artificial light that could find no purchase on his skin. The wizard had been attacking Malakai with questions almost from the moment the engineer had first presented himself in the township.
Felix found his persistence unnerving, but if Malakai felt the same way then he didn’t show it.
‘It’s a lang tale, young Schreiber, but if ye’re o’ a mind tae hear it…’
Felix held under the threshold as Gotrek, Max, and Malakai walked deeper into the greeting hall. He smiled. For a moment it was just like old times. Malakai Makaisson had that kind of effect, as if the end of everything was something one just had to look at in the right kind of way. But then his mind filled in for him the shades of those who were missing: one tall, blonde and achingly beautiful, the other stocky and broad with an idiot grin and a crest of multi-coloured nails.
With a sigh so deep that the thin air left him dizzy, he turned to look back the way they had come.
A scattering of torches marked the line of men, dwarfs and field guns on rickety wooden wagons as it crawled up the mountainside, throwing random pockets of illumination onto the barren rock and ruin of its surrounds. Both his men and Makaisson’s appeared too tired for bitterness, just another near-tragedy to mark the passing of another day. He tried to follow the snaking trail of men back down to the township, only to be thwarted by whatever cunning design or enchantment protected the dwarfs’ old paths through the Middle Mountains. The township was a black steepling in the mountains’ cleft far below, visible more by the faint twinkle of the stream under the stars than by the buildings themselves. He frowned.
Was that another glint of light down there in the ruins? And another over there, further back in the pass where the mountains surrounded the river as it fled for better lands. It was probably just a few mutants that Malakai’s force hadn’t accounted for, but part of him wished that it was something worse. That worried him. Would this hunger for vengeance pass with the war’s end or their arrival in Middenheim, or had he been irrevocably tainted by the encroachment of Chaos into the Old World? Or did the fact that his bloodlust bothered him prove that was not the case? He clung to that thought. It was comforting.
‘We were being followed by a force of northmen,’ said Gustav to the dwarf clansman wedged under his shoulder. His voice was breathy with altitude and his nose was bleeding again, a scarlet trickle running around his mouth, down his chin and steadily drip-dripping onto his armour. A ripening black eye already dominated one half of his face. His armour scales had been loosened out to ease the pressure on bruised ribs and he walked with a wince.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said the dwarf. He glanced up at Gustav and then looked away in embarrassment and mumbled: ‘Those mutants have been trying to find their way up here for months, and the goblins before them for who knows how long. Aeons. The Wastes will freeze over before they get to the top of this mountain.’
‘Dain’t touch that!’
Felix turned to see Malakai Makaisson swat Gotrek’s hand away from one of the cables that coiled up the nearest column.
‘They’re carryin’ power frae the black water generators in the auld deeps. Mah ain design. Thaur waur mair important uses fur the insulation though, sae yer in fur a shock if ye tooch it.’
Gotrek scowled, but pulled his hand back just the same. It was probably only Malakai that could get away with talking to Gotrek like that.
Felix remained in the doorway just long enough to determine that Gustav, Kolya, Mann and the dwarfs’ leaders had everything in hand, before hurrying on after the others. With Malakai’s warning in mind he paid extra heed to where he stepped, taking care to avoid the over-floor cables where they ran through the rubble. He had had enough shocks for one day. It didn’t seem very sensible to leave something so dangerous just lying around on the floor, but Felix supposed that the dwarfs were accustomed to it.
‘What do you mean by more important uses?’
‘Ach, ye’ll see. But where wiz ah?’ The thrum of some industrial process taking place in a distant quarter of the citadel began to make itself felt through the stones. They approached a stairwell leading up, and Malakai moved towards it with Max in step. ‘Aye noo, and tha’ was hoo auld Ironfist and ah got separated efter tha wee beasties chased us oot of Sylvania. Ah saw hoo bad things were gonnae get efter tha, sae ah and those stuck wi’ me cam tae this wheesht place for a special project.’
‘You should’ve gone back to Karak Kadrin,’ said Gotrek.
‘Ah hear the Slayer Hold went doon no lang after tha’.’
‘Aye,’ Gotrek grumbled, deadly serious. ‘What of it?’
Felix walked through the crumbling innards of the castle and was overcome with awe. Steam filled the corridors and walkways that Malakai led them through, hissing between th
e bolted sections of great rusted pipes. Every few dozen steps they passed a room filled with unusual machinery. In some pistons rose and fell as if the mountain was sucking in steam. In others, internal walls had been knocked down to create space for rank upon rank of huge, gleaming engines that put Felix in mind of some infernal printing press. A juddering conveyor carried complicated metallic components from press to press, all attended by a single dwarf who made notes in a small book. Every stone shook as if the castle was being bombarded from above and everywhere dwarfs moved about with a purpose. Felix had to remind himself that it was the middle of the night outside.
Malakai Makaisson had constructed something astounding out here in the middle of nowhere, and Felix felt an urgent need to know why. Knowing the Slayer-Engineer as Felix did, he expected it to be both wondrous and destructive.
With a warrior’s eye, Felix looked about for signs of the weapons that the dwarfs were undoubtedly fashioning here to turn the tide against the hordes of Chaos, but could find nothing obvious. In what looked like finishing rooms, dwarfs in long-sleeved white overclothes blasted steel sheets with steam hoses while others buffed and polished. Machines that looked like iron-toothed mouths attached to conveyors spat nails into buckets that were then loaded onto carts for distribution.
Felix stepped to one side to allow a burly dwarf with a sweat-sodden grey beard to barrel down the narrow corridor behind a wheelbarrow filled with thick metal plates. Some quixotic type of armour perhaps? Felix could not for the life of him imagine what sort of monster Malakai intended to clad with it.
Gotrek watched the barrow rattle down the corridor, jaw clenched. Felix knew the Slayer was as curious about what Malakai was up to here as he was. He also knew that Gotrek was far too stubborn to ever ask.
‘All right,’ said Felix, ‘we give up. What are you doing here?’
‘We’ve all got oor ain weapons tae brin’ tae these times, young Felix, and these are mine.’
‘Forgive me, but they don’t look much like weapons.’
‘Nae the noo, laddie,’ Malakai grinned, stubbing his nose with a finger as thick and browned with grease as a sausage.
Gotrek snorted, though over what, Felix wasn’t minded to ask.
‘It’s destiny,’ said Max. The steam billowed through his robes as though he had just been summoned from some black dimension. He leaned into his staff and gazed about himself with bleak-eyed wonder. ‘It has to be. What else could reunite us all at such a pivotal moment in time?’
Malakai rested the muzzle of his gun on his shoulder and shrugged. ‘Mibbe it is and mibbe it isnae. It disnae seem tae make a difference either way ye keek it though diz it?’
Felix shook his head ruefully. Why hadn’t he thought of telling Max that?
‘And anyway,’ Malakai went on. ‘Ah can see a few who arenae here. Did poor Snorri Nosebiter get his memory back?’ He turned to Felix with a half-cocked grin. ‘And how aboot yer wee lass, Ulrika?’
Felix’s heart skipped a beat when he heard the question. He turned to Gotrek. Gotrek glared back. Felix’s tongue felt as though it was stuck to the roof of his mouth.
‘They both fell in Kislev,’ said Gotrek, his one eye fixed on Felix.
‘Well ahm sure it wiz a guid death. We’ll drink tae Snorri’s honour when this is all ower.’ Malakai reached out and took Felix’s shoulder in a consoling grip. It felt like being crushed under a rock, but Felix barely felt it. ‘And ahm sorry aboot Ulrika, she were a braw lass wi’ a guid heart.’
Felix felt Gotrek’s eye on him, and looked away just as a dwarf with a screaming circular saw sheared through the neck of a silvery-white sheet of metal. ‘Yes,’ he answered hoarsely. ‘Yes, she was.’
They passed through dozens more corridors and several further sets of stairs, always rising, until Felix was well and truly lost and desperate for a window if only to assure himself of where he was in relation to the outside. They passed taprooms in which dwarfs drank and smoked with the same dour determination with which they worked. A steam whistle wailed through the halls, making Felix jump when it first went off behind his ear.
The sound hung in the air for several seconds after the initial blast. Felix counted them, cringing a little with every added number at the thought of what dark thing might lurk in the valley and be drawn to such a din. To the dwarfs, however, it appeared to represent nothing more terrible than a shift change, workers in leather overalls covered in soot and oil and with protective gloves hanging from their wrists staggering into bunkrooms to rouse bleary-eyed comrades and slump into their still-warm beds. Watching them made Felix’s eyelids feel heavy and he tried and failed to suppress a yawn.
In rooms lined with armour dummies and weapon racks dwarfs shed work gear and strapped on mail and shields, no doubt for a shift patrolling the township below or manning the citadel’s walls. The dwarfs were a dying race, Felix knew, and had been for millennia. As such they had few professional soldiers, their armies comprised largely of dwarfs like these who set aside their trades in favour of axes in times of war. Even knowing that, Felix was impressed by their fortitude.
On the door of one such barracks room a large circular target had been mounted and as Felix walked by a dwarf in half-tied mail aimed a bulky crossbow towards him. Felix’s heart leapt into his mouth. The dwarf was clearly blurry-eyed from over-work, or else maddened by Chaos! The dwarf pulled on the trigger and a second later the yellow ring in the centre of the target bristled with iron bolts. Steam hissed from the strange mechanism riveted to the basic crossbow chassis in place of the conventional drawstring and crank as the dwarf lowered his weapon and moved to tug his bolts out of the door. He grunted a greeting to Makaisson as they marched past.
Felix turned to glance back before they turned onto another corridor.
‘What kind of weapon was that?’
‘King Byrrnoth Grundadrakk of Barak Varr tasked me tae gie him a crossbow faster and better tha’ them the dark elf scallies wur usin’ agin his shipping. New bolts get fed intae the track frae a hopper and forced oot wi’ a wee burst o’ steam for a mair powerful shot.’ Malakai shrugged as if he were describing the operation of hammer and nail. ‘But auld Grundadrakk in his wisdom didnae like whit they cost tae build sae ah kept the few ah made for maself. Ah wonder what’s left of the auld place noo?’
‘Barak Varr?’ said Felix and shrugged. He thought of Kolya’s map, the great empty swathe south of the Talabec and west of the Middle Mountains.
‘She is beset, but stands, the last stone on the path to the Everpeak,’ said Max quietly, eyes averted. ‘Vermin rule in her deep places, and like rotten grain from a breached drum they spill from their conquests in Hirn, Izor, Eight Peaks and Azul.’
For a minute everyone walked in silence.
Felix turned to Gotrek. He had learned from Snorri that the two dwarfs had used to live in a hill town – much like the ancient township they had just passed through – under the protection of Karaz-a-Karak, the Everpeak as men knew the capital of the ancient dwarf realm. In a sense Gotrek was learning of the plight of his home much as Felix had just days before. The Slayer stared grimly ahead as if it meant nothing. And perhaps it didn’t, Felix thought with a sigh. Then Malakai sucked in through his teeth and spat on the ground.
‘Well tha doesnae sound tae guid, diz it?’
‘No,’ Felix agreed, meaning to say something more but unable to find the words for it.
‘If you go in for that sort of talk,’ Gotrek muttered.
The corridor came to an end in what looked like a vast feasting hall. Great ceiling arches soared above them, carved into the likeness of longbeard dwarfs striking together tankards of ale over the centre of the hall where they met. Each was a work of art and that they had endured the millennia in such a recognisable state did credit to the dwarfs that had poured such loving labour into their artifice. Scores of low slung tables filled the tiniest portio
n of the room, leaving the rest to cracked tiles and more of that black cabling that seemed as pernicious in this castle as weeds. A handful of dwarfs in armour sat at just one of them, picking at the thin-looking vegetables that wallowed in gravy in their trenchers. Felix felt his mouth water and heard his stomach growl. He thought of the empty crates and sacks in his company’s wagons and looked about himself with fresh wonder and – almost – hope.
There must be hundreds of dwarfs here. Far from enough to win the war, but enough to make a difference if used wisely; enough to hurt the enemy, to let the Dark Gods know that there were still those that fought them. Whatever Gotrek’s misgivings about Malakai Makaisson’s intentions, Felix felt sure that the ancients who had once lived here would have approved. It had to be something truly remarkable to warrant such an expenditure of resources and the dedication of so many.
Malakai’s footsteps echoed from the grandiose beams as the Slayer-Engineer strode towards a large set of double doors at the far end of the hall and flung them wide.
Cold mountain air rushed through. It carried the scent of engine grease and oil and the barely discernible hum of some kind of idling engine. Felix stepped out into the night. The wind, reminded of its strength so high above the world, tore between the castle’s battlements and riffled through Felix’s hair and cloak. With one hand positioned for safety on the pitted basalt of the rampart beside him, he restrained his hair with the other. Gotrek peered over the side and spat down. He watched it fall for a long time, and then grunted with what sounded like approval.
The castle’s uppermost fortifications had been filled with a forest of metal girders, made into a towering scaffold by horizontal and diagonal beams and ringed with walkways and ladders and dangling ropes. Steel-wound hawsers the thickness of Felix’s arm fed through massive brass rings that had been unceremoniously bolted into the ramparts and swept up to some mysterious point in the sky. They bobbed up and down, as though attached to a ship that rolled with the waves. Beside Felix, Max however was looking up, his dark eyes alive with visions of destiny. Felix joined him, feeling his excitement rise as the blinking spots overhead that he had initially mistaken for stars turned out to be a string of guide lights employing the same arcane technology with which Makaisson had illuminated his castle. A shape emerged from the darkness as Felix’s eyes adapted to it – a huge, gleaming curve like the underbelly of a whale. Cold light glinted from the riveted metal hanging beneath it.
