Honourkeeper

by Nick Kyme

  ‘King Bagrik Boarbrow, I, Ithalred of Tor Eorfith, Prince of Eataine, humbly beseech your aid,’ said the elf. ‘I lay down my arms in a gesture of supplication. I cannot defeat the northmen on my own. Join me with your armies so that together we might rid this blight from our lands.’

  The room fell into abject silence.

  Bagrik smiled cruelly. Leaning forward on his throne, he said, ‘That could not have been easy.’

  The hard line of Ithalred’s mouth, the nerve twitching in his cheek, gave the dwarf king the answer he sought.

  ‘And without the honeyed words of your ambassador or the thinly-veiled slights of the black-haired noble to hide behind,’ Bagrik added, a dark glance at Malbeth, who waited in the shadows behind the prince. Lethralmir was not present. It seemed he had not accompanied his lord.

  A wise move, thought the king.

  ‘Yes, I believe that was very hard for you to do.’ Bagrik stared at Ithalred who, to the elf’s credit, returned his gaze without faltering. ‘No sovereign would wish to beg at the feet of another.’ Ithalred grit his teeth at the remark. ‘For make no mistake, that is where you find yourself.’

  Bagrik stood up, shooing Morek and his throne bearers away as he hobbled down the three broad steps that led to the throne room’s flagstoned aisle, until he was face-to-face with the elf.

  ‘You came into my hold, my kingdom, and offered only scorn and derision. You mocked our customs and besmirched our culture. For these deeds alone you are already entered into the book of grudges, and this dear elgi is severe indeed.’ The dwarf king paused, allowing the import of his words to sink in, before he went on.

  ‘Now, you are before me pleading for aid, to fight a foe that harries not my borders, but yours. And in so doing I have learned of a further misdeed. That your trade alliance was nothing but pretence for what you truly wanted, but did not care to admit even to yourself…’ Bagrik let the words hang for a moment, the calmness in his voice more unsettling than any rage he could have mustered, ‘…the might of Karak Ungor.’

  Ithalred’s expression turned to defiance, and anger. The elf had his answer. The dwarf king was merely making a point.

  ‘Through deception you have tried to garner my favour,’ Bagrik continued. ‘These northmen will not bother us. We dawi are shielded in our bastions of stone. Let them come – the mountain is our protector. They will shatter against it like twigs against the bulwark of a cliff. No, Prince Ithalred,’ Bagrik said at length, turning and hobbling back up to his throne, ‘I will not wage war for you,’ the dwarf king added once he was seated again. ‘We will honour the trade pact, should you survive this trial. Return to me with talk of that, not of war.’

  Bagrik sighed deeply, the king grown suddenly weary of talk.

  ‘Now, go,’ he said. ‘Back to your city, if it still stands.’

  Ithalred rose to his feet, still elegant and defiant in spite of it all, picking up his sword and sheathing it. Though his face was contorted with suppressed fury, he managed to bow to the dwarf king before he turned and took his leave. The rest of the elves followed in his wake, escorted by the hearth guard.

  ‘Not you, Haggar,’ intoned the king, as the elves departed.

  The banner bearer remained where he was, Kandor too.

  Only once the elves were gone did Bagrik speak again.

  ‘You saw the forces of this enemy, these north-men?’ asked the king.

  Haggar nodded sternly.

  ‘Tell us of them, now. Spare no detail. I would know what manner of foe we face should their reaving bring them to our walls. And Morek,’ added the king, turning to his hearth guard captain. ‘Send out rangers to find my son. I will not have him caught up in this war by mistake.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Casualties of War

  Far from the throne room of Karak Ungor, high in the fastness of the northern Worlds Edge Mountains, Nagrim hunted greenskins. He was not aware that the dwarfs had returned to the hold and he did not know about the pleas of the elf prince. Nagrim was oblivious to the politics of Karak Ungor. It did not interest him. Let Kandor and Tringrom deal with such matters. Thinking of them now, he was glad that the royal aide had been unable to accompany them. The ufdi only slowed them down. The loremaster would have to record his tally in the book of deeds upon their return. Though, if the current count was any measure, he would have precious little to attribute to any of the hunters on the grobkul.

  ‘Slim pickings,’ grumbled Brondrik, cutting the nose off the solitary grobi he’d caught defecating in some brush. The steam of the greenskins’ dung was still rising from where it’d squatted before being stuck by the pathfinder’s crossbow bolt.

  ‘Aye,’ agreed Rugnir, his own axe as of yet unbloodied. ‘You’ve killed too many grobi, Nagrim. Perhaps we should have brought that ufdi with us, his perfumed beard locks seemed to enflame their ardour and brought them running.’ The dwarf’s roaring laughter echoed across the peaks, carried on the warming winter breeze.

  Nagrim didn’t join in the banter. He had journeyed from his hold to slay goblins, not trek through the mountain passes.

  ‘We head north-east,’ he said without humour. ‘There are caves there that may yet harbour greenskin.’

  The prince noticed the other rangers in their hunting party, Thom and Harig, exchange wary glances. Even, Brondrik raised an eyebrow. Rugnir said aloud what they were all thinking.

  ‘North-east, eh lad? That is far from the hold. Are you trying to narrow my girth, Nagrim? The rinns like a dwarf with a bit of meat on him, if you get my meaning,’ he laughed thunderously.

  Nagrim cut the merriment short, the half-hearted chuckles dying in Rugnir’s throat.

  ‘North-east,’ he said, ignoring Rugnir’s disappointment as the words of his father came back to him. He had been in a strange mood ever since he’d left the Iron Deep and set out into the mountains. When he had touched the ancestral armour of his forebears, the weight of legacy had fallen upon his shoulders like an anvil. His father’s time was ending. Soon he would be king of Karak Ungor. The thought, he confessed to himself, filled Nagrim with dread.

  ‘Brondrik, mark our trail,’ ordered the prince, checking the load in his crossbow, before slinging the weapon back over his shoulder.

  The venerable pathfinder nodded, before something on the ground caught his attention.

  ‘There are other tracks besides grobi here,’ he told Nagrim, who came over and crouched beside him. ‘See…’ said Brondrik, using a gnarled finger, the nail chipped and encrusted with dirt, to describe the irregular pattern in the earth and snow, ‘…booted feet and larger than grobi.’

  ‘Urk?’ the prince suggested, thinking of the goblins’ larger and more brutish cousins.

  ‘No,’ Brondrik replied, shaking his head. ‘No, I don’t think it’s urk.’

  ‘Which way were they headed?’ Nagrim asked. ‘They may have driven the grobi in the same direction.’

  The pathfinder sighed before he looked up at the prince again. His eyes held a warning that would not be heeded.

  ‘North-east.’

  The dwarfs travelled for an hour before they caught sight of any greenskins again. Further northward than they had ever ventured, even the wildlife in the barren crags that surrounded them seemed sparse. There were no rivers, the melt waters of the mountain having bled south; just dry, dusty basins. Any trees were reduced to isolated copses of brittle pine with dead brown leaves.

  ‘This is a hollow place, my lord,’ said Brondrik from the front of the group, his crossbow low slung and at the ready, ‘We should turn back.’ The pathfinder seemed wary of his own shadow, his instincts and confidence deserting him. The mood spread to the other rangers, too. Even Rugnir was not his usual ebullient self, and had fallen into a drunken melancholy.

  ‘Come on, Nagrim,’ he said, mustering some joviality. ‘Let’s return to the hold, I’ll buy you a drink,’ he added with a weak smile.

  The prince exhaled his disappointment, and was about to a
dmit defeat when he saw the grobi, scampering through the rocks, some rangy animal carcass gripped fast in its overbite.

  ‘There!’ he cried, barrelling off down the trail after the greenskin. ‘With me!’

  The other dwarfs gave chase reluctantly, especially Rugnir who muttered beneath his breath, something concerning hruk fondling.

  For such a gangling wretch the goblin was nimble, picking its way through the crags with apparent ease. Nagrim was hard pressed to keep sight of it, let alone get close enough to catch the creature.

  He plunged after it, down a steep-sided valley and into a deep gorge. Nagrim was so intent on slaying the goblin that he slipped, and nearly fell. When he got his footing again, there was no sign of his quarry. He slowed, looking left and right in the wide, flat basin of the gorge. It was scattered with displaced rocks and fallen rubble from the steep sides.

  Brondrik was the first to catch up to him, a few moments later.

  ‘I’ve lost it,’ Nagrim hissed to the pathfinder, training his crossbow over the craggy rocks where the shadows were thickest.

  ‘The wretched beast could have slipped out of the gorge unnoticed,’ Brondrik suggested, surveying the uppermost ridges of the chasm as an ill-feeling spread over the entire party. ‘Do you hear that?’ he added.

  ‘I hear nothing,’ whispered Nagrim.

  Eerie silence persisted in the nadir of the gorge. There were no bird cries; even the wind had died abruptly.

  ‘Exactly,’ Brondrik replied.

  Rugnir swallowed. The loud noise made the hunters start suddenly. Four stern-faced dwarfs regarded him as one.

  Rugnir smiled apologetically, before one of the rangers pointed towards a cluster of rocks at the foot of one of the steep sides of the ravine.

  They had found their goblin. He was slumped against one of the rocks, a thick dark arrow with bloodied feathers protruding from his chest.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Nagrim noticed Brondrik look up, smelling something on the breeze as the wind changed suddenly. He followed his gaze…

  Shadows gathered at the ridge of the gorge on either side, too large to be goblins.

  ‘Defend yourselves, we are under–’ the warning died on Brondrik’s lips, the arrow in his neck severing his vocal cords and killing the old dwarf a few blood-gurgling seconds later.

  ‘Take cover in the rocks,’ cried Nagrim as an arrow thunked in his chest and spun him off his feet.

  ‘Nagrim!’ shouted Rugnir, as the other rangers sighted down their crossbows to retaliate. Thom was struck through the eye, then in the arm and neck as he loosed harmlessly into the side of the gorge. Harig made it to the rocks before three arrows thudded into his back, and he slumped forward.

  Nagrim was on his feet again. He tasted blood in his mouth, and was finding it hard to breathe. The barbed arrow head had nicked his lung. He fired his crossbow at one of the ambushers and a cry echoed in the mountains as he found a killing shot. Rugnir, having lost his crossbow in the confusion, flung a hand axe, slaying a second. It was never going to be enough. Three arrows put him down: two in the body, one in the leg. Another struck Nagrim in the arm, and he dropped his weapon.

  Unable to shoot back and down to one, the dwarf was easy prey. The ambushers knew this and were emboldened, emerging from their hiding places in the crags at the top of the gorge. Moving down the steep slope, spilling scree and with arrows knocked, Nagrim saw the ambushers clearly for the first and last time. The dwarf’s vision was fading. His tunic and chainmail was slick with his own blood.

  ‘Grungni…’ he breathed, eyes widening.

  The creak of bow strings split the air and then the arrow storm began.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Death of Legacy

  By the time Morek and the Clan Cragfoot rangers had arrived at the gorge, the ambushers were gone. Blood was splattered everywhere in the dry canyon, thick and black. Arrow shafts stuck out of the ground where they had missed their targets, like feathered grave markers. Dwarf weapons lay strewn about, dropped or abandoned in the chaos.

  ‘This was a massacre,’ Morek muttered under his breath as he crouched by the body of a dead ranger. He didn’t know the dwarf, but closed his eyes for him as they stared glassily at the clouds scudding across the sky above.

  Back at the hold, as he gathered the rangers, the hearth guard captain had been approached by Queen Brunvilda. She had asked him to lead the search party for her son, knowing this is what the king would want. Secretly she feared for Nagrim, but Bagrik would never allow his pride to admit that. Morek had gladly obeyed, amassing the dwarfs with haste and leaving Karak Ungor as soon as they were ready.

  Though not as accomplished as Brondrik, the hearth guard captain had spent many summers with the clan rangers and was an excellent tracker. He had found the hunting party’s trail quickly. Though, it seemed, it had not been nearly quick enough.

  ‘Another dead, here,’ one of the Cragfoots, a dwarf by the name of Lodri, called out. He was standing by the twisted body of a ranger with an arrow embedded through his eye. ‘Grungni’s oath…’ he breathed, when he saw the barbed tip sticking out of the back of the dead dwarf’s helmet.

  ‘A grobi, too,’ said another, having found a goblin slumped against a rock.

  Morek’s face only darkened further. He got to his feet and tried to survey the scene. His gaze rose to the ridge line, where another group of rangers patrolled.

  ‘They were lured here, their murderers lying in wait at the ridgeline. They had high ground, surprise and likely outnumbered them,’ the captain said, more to himself than any of the other dwarfs present. ‘Nagrim,’ he hissed, ‘how could you have let yourself be goaded?’

  Morek had been one of Nagrim’s mentors, teaching him the ways of axe-craft and battle tactics when he was but a beardling. The prince was a gifted student, and had excelled in his studies. To see him outwitted and drawn into a death trap like the gorge was galling in the extreme.

  ‘I can find no sign of the prince,’ said Lodri as he approached the hearth guard captain. ‘He could still be alive.’

  Morek surveyed the grim vista again, took in the spilt blood and the disturbed rock and brush as the beleaguered dwarfs had fought desperately but to no avail.

  ‘No,’ he uttered sadly. It was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to admit to himself. ‘See, there are no tracks leading from the battle, just some rough furrows. Likely the ambushers fled when they were finished, filthy thagi, covering up their tracks as they went. This trail here,’ he said, indicating the furrows, ‘looks like drag marks, possibly from some wild beast…’ He stopped, seeing the logical conclusion to his words realised in the ranger’s eyes, and decided not to articulate it. Morek did not wish to imagine the prince of Karak Ungor being gnawed upon by some cave-dwelling creature of the mountain. He made an oath to Grungni that none were alive if that was their fate.

  ‘Could he have been captured, then?’ Lodri offered. ‘For ransom, perhaps?’

  ‘Hmm, it’s possible,’ Morek’s tone gave away that he thought this was a slim hope at best. ‘I have heard that northmen covet gold and relish plunder, but taking hostages seems out of character for these beasts.’

  As they continued to survey the scene and rationalise the possibility of Nagrim’s survival, however remote, another ranger cried out.

  Morek’s heart caught in his mouth.

  It was another body.

  The hearth guard captain hurried over, though his haste was utterly unnecessary – all the dwarfs in the gorge were beyond help now. Not even Valaya could save them. The third corpse was face down, and peppered with arrows. Judging by the trail he had left and the position of the body so far from the main battlesite, the dead dwarf had obviously crawled along the ground in spite of heinous injuries. Morek noted with a deepening sense of sadness and outrage that the dwarf’s hand, his fingers outstretched and reaching, was just inches from his bloodied crossbow. The hearth guard captain nodded to two rangers standing by th
e body to turn it over. Morek’s heart sank and he felt something die within him in that moment. Perhaps it was hope. The dead dwarf was Nagrim.

  Despite what he’d said to Lodri, Morek had still held on to the slight chance that the prince was still alive, that he’d fallen down a chasm and broken his leg, or become lost on an unfamiliar trail – anything but this. Now the irrefutable evidence of Nagrim’s demise was before him, it struck like a hammer blow.

  ‘Get them up,’ he breathed, finding his voice choked with emotion. Lodri reached out and Morek grasped his arm just before he was about to touch the prince. ‘Like the most venerated and fragile heirloom of your clan,’ he said, ‘Carry him like that.’

  Nagrim was raised aloft on the shoulders of four rangers, another four, together with Morek, providing an honour guard as they carried him back up the trail and out of the defile to where a mule-drawn cart was waiting.

  Reaching the ridgeline, the path widened out and there was the cart with a cohort of dauntless hearth guard stood at the ready to receive him. Morek had taken no chances with the search party, especially given the possibility of foreign invaders in the mountains, and had brought over thirty dwarfs with him.

  As Nagrim was lowered gently onto the cart, the two other slain rangers set down after him, Morek wiped a tangle of dark brown hair that was matted with blood from the prince’s face.

  ‘I’m sorry, lad,’ he whispered. ‘Rest now, soon be home.’

  ‘Dreng tromm, this is a dark day,’ said Lodri, as they were leading off the mule.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Morek. ‘I must find a way to tell the king that his son is dead.’

  A solemn procession of hearth guard carried Nagrim up the central aisle of the throne room upon a bier of shields. They bore him at shoulder height, the prince’s hands clasped across his chest as he lay in quiet repose. The ashen complexion, his bloodied face, gave away the illusion that he was merely sleeping. Arrows were embedded in his body, the fatal one piercing his heart through his battered armour.