Honourkeeper

by Nick Kyme

  ‘Yes, but I do not think that the shaman is a “he”,’ said Ithalred, his face as stern as iron. ‘I do not think he is mortal at all.’

  ‘A daemon?’ hissed Morek, scowling at the use of the word.

  Ithalred looked at the hearth guard captain.

  ‘Exactly that,’ said the elf, ‘Allied to Slaanesh, the lord of pleasures. My kin are familiar with its caress. The goddess Atharti bears much in common with it. We can all sense it. Those creatures that came from the mist are its hand maidens,’ he added darkly, before returning to the king.

  ‘I have been a fool, King Bagrik,’ Ithalred admitted, ‘encouraging the wilfulness of my commanders, even resenting your aid in the face of a common foe. It ends now,’ Ithalred promised, a side glance at Lethralmir making it clear that this message was for him, too. ‘The heathen northmen worship the Dark Gods of Chaos, but here one of their heralds walks abroad with them in human form. What’s more he has chosen a champion, a vessel for their power. Make no mistake, we face annihilation. It was the same in the elder days when mighty Aenarion the Defender fought the daemon hosts of ruin and cast them back into the Realm of Chaos. You dwarfs, shut up in your mountain fastness, did not see it as we elves did.’

  There was a ripple of annoyance in Bagrik and his captain’s at Ithalred’s last remark, but the elf prince ignored it and went on.

  ‘It was only through our sacrifice that the world was kept safe. Is still kept safe,’ he said, his voice impassioned. ‘We can ill afford another defeat. I fear if we do, it will be our last.’

  A snarl of displeasure had crept upon Bagrik’s face after Ithalred had finished, and he spoke with his lip upcurled.

  ‘Then we’ll fight together this time. All of us!’ His gaze surveyed the room. ‘Daemon or no, we will crush these Norscans, we will crush them! So says Bagrik, King of Ungor! In Nagrim’s name I make this pledge.’

  ‘Then we will need a plan, my king,’ said Haggar suddenly, the young thane clearly fired by Bagrik’s rhetoric.

  Ithalred smiled.

  ‘Leave that to me,’ he said.

  ‘They are moving!’

  The cry came from the dwarf rangers who had sat in silent vigil throughout the night and most of the early morning, watching the Norscan camp. The sounding of horns and rap of drums followed the announcement as all upon Broken Anvil Hill were made aware of it.

  ‘Are you sure this is wise, my king?’ Morek asked as he tightened the leather wrist strap of Bagrik’s vambrace.

  ‘Am I so old and infirm that I need the captain of my hearth guard to fight all of my battles for me?’ the king replied.

  Morek could find no response.

  ‘Aye, it is wise,’ said Bagrik, for him. ‘Not so tight!’ he added, wincing as Morek pulled hard on the king’s gromril cuirass. ‘Too much roast boar, eh lad?’ he said with a half-hearted chuckle.

  ‘Aye,’ Morek agreed. Bagrik hadn’t called him ‘lad’ since he was a beardling. The gesture was not lost on the hearth guard captain, who could not keep the sadness from his eyes, so he lowered them instead, pretending to check the king’s weapons belt.

  Bagrik had deliberately dismissed his armourers prior to battle, insisting that Morek be the one to help him don his ancestral plate and mail. It seemed fitting somehow, and Morek was only too glad to do his duty to the king.

  ‘Then I will be by your side, my liege,’ said the hearth guard captain, gruffly.

  ‘You will not,’ was Bagrik’s curt reply. ‘I need you out in the battlefield, driving our flank, not beardling-sitting an old longbeard like me.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘It is decided, Morek,’ Bagrik told him, cutting the other dwarf off. The king clenched and unclenched his fists, rolled his shoulders as he got used to the weight and heft of his armour. Lastly, once his crown and helm were in place, Morek draped the boar pelt across Bagrik’s shoulders, completing his panoply of war. The king clapped him on the arm when Morek was done, gripping it in his age-old fingers.

  ‘You are my best warrior, Morek. You have served me well all these years, but I crave one last duty of you.’

  ‘Please, my king, don’t speak like this–’ Morek began.

  ‘One last duty,’ Bagrik repeated, loud and insistent before his voice softened and the stone in his eyes that had been there since Nagrim’s death lifted for a moment. ‘Just one. Look after Brunvilda.’

  Morek felt like his heart was clutched in an iron fist, so hard that he was unable to speak. Instead he nodded. The movement was barely discernable.

  ‘Good,’ said Bagrik. ‘Now go and marshal my army and let us write this last bloody saga together.’

  The Norscan horde took to the field amidst jeering and yelled obscenities. The few prisoners they had captured, dead and alive, were paraded on their banners naked, their skins a patchwork of welts, cuts and bruises. The dwarfs had their beards shorn, the elves their hair shaven as all symbols of respect and nobility were cut away like chaff. The thump of the massive Norscan war drums beat like a raging heart as they strode across the plain in a mob.

  Morek’s suspicions as to their numbers had been proved correct, as the horde seemed even larger than it was before.

  The warlord, on the back of his feral steed, rode between two enormous flanks of bearded and slope-browed warriors from a dozen or more tribes. Surrounded by his armoured huscarl retinue, the warlord paraded like a barbarian king amongst the brutish subjects of his court. Guttural warhorns heralded him as the sabre-tusk pawed hungrily across the plain. The surviving mammoths trumpeted in unison, stomping wildly with their massive hooves before they were goaded into obedience.

  Despite its size, it was much the same host as they had faced before, though the riders who had outflanked them yesterday were moving with the main army now. Morek had sent parties of rangers out into the scattered rock debris on the extreme edges of the plain to lay traps and erect barricades. It seemed to have persuaded the flankers into joining their debased brethren, the Norscan warlord favouring a full frontal assault.

  The allies had changed tactics too, though, and it was a different battle-line that greeted the Norscans this time. The dwarfs and elves had drawn their forces back, all the way to Broken Anvil Hill, a good two miles from where they had deployed previously. Here, the valley widened, and the mountains fell away as the lowland became hilly and scattered with gorse and pine.

  During the night, the mercy parties had buried broken blades in the half mile of earth leading up to Broken Anvil Hill and dug shallow pits festooned with spikes to hinder the northmen’s approach. Morek saw one of the mammoths founder as its heavy footfall broke through one of the pit tarps, concealed with a light covering of earth, and fell, crushing several screaming warriors beneath its shaggy bulk. In the end, despite their efforts to raise it, they had killed the beast and left its cooling carcass behind.

  Morek smiled.

  Already, the fragile order of the heathen army was wearing down.

  On the crest of Broken Anvil Hill, at the eastern-most promontory, the archers, quarrellers and war machines were arrayed. Just below, a ring of silver and bronze surrounded them as elf spearmen and dwarf clan warriors and hearth guard stood shoulder-to-shoulder. There were no cavalry this time, and none of the vainglorious eagerness to close with the foe. The face the mustering of dwarfs and elves presented now was one of stoic resilience.

  Bagrik held the apex of the half-ring of armour, together with most of the hearth guard and the longbeards. Seated upon his throne, he was afforded an excellent view of the battlefield. Haggar stood alongside the king, next to the throne bearers, with the banner of Ungor unfurled proudly, the fabric still stained black with the previous day’s warring.

  Elf spearmen regiments were interspaced evenly with those of the dwarfs, the proud warriors of Ulthuan facing the coming horde with unshakeable resolve. They towered above their dwarf allies but together presented a unified wall of shields and blades.

  Casting his eye acros
s the battle-line, Bagrik saw Ithalred looking back at him far away on the left flank. The dwarf king thought he saw the elf prince nod, so he returned the gesture. He was on foot, the hunter, Korhvale, at his lord’s side amongst a thicket of upraised spears held by the elf warriors around them.

  To the right flank there was Morek, the dwarf’s armoured faceplate masking his expression. Bagrik knew it would be one of determination. Morek had never failed him. He led two hundred clan warriors, the hearth guard captain’s presence amongst them designed to embolden them.

  There atop their grassy hill, the crest of war machines and archers their tower, the locked shields below their walls and Bagrik himself the mighty gate, the allies stood in fortified unity.

  ‘You will find the way is shut,’ Bagrik muttered under his breath, as he willed the northmen to come. He would not have long to wait.

  As if possessed, the Norscan horde charged across the last few hundred feet of open ground separating them from their foes with alarming speed. As the barbarians closed, a dwarf warhorn echoed across the field. It was quickly taken up by the clarion of further horns, and as one the dwarf regiments in the half-ring marched forward. Twenty feet ahead of the elves, the dwarfs jutted out like an armoured reef before a sheer metal-faced cliff.

  Volleys from the war machines, quarrellers and archer remnants punished the edges of the loose Norscan formations, corralling them into long deep ranks. No shimmering fire burned down the arrows and bolts this time, the heathen forces were too close.

  With shouted curses on their lips, the Norscans crashed against the dwarf bulwarks like pounding surf striking the rocks.

  ‘Hold them!’ cried Morek, ramming his shoulder behind his shield as the heathen men pushed. Somewhere above, resonating through his helmet, he heard a clamour of angry voices as the Norscans found themselves locked in a meatgrinder, and there were no better exponents of a battle of attrition than the sons of Grungni.

  The Norscans hammered against them, but the dwarfs weathered the storm, paying for the held ground in blood and sweat. But hold them they did. Even with their rampaging mammoths and suicidal berserkers, the Norscans were pinned. Such an irresistible weight of pressing bodies could not be withstood for long, though, and soon a second cry split the air, this time from the shrilling horns of the elves.

  With the enemy engaged to the front, the warriors of Ulthuan swept forward in a silver wave, filling the gaps left deliberately in the dwarf breakers, before crashing into the exposed flanks of the northmen.

  Morek felt the weight lifted almost at once and was quick to lower his shield so he could cut down his foes with his rune axe. The hot, copper tang of blood filled his nostrils and he revelled in it. Severing heads, ignoring the battering against his armour as the northmen landed desperate blows, the captain of the hearth guard was like a whirlwind of death.

  ‘Uzkul!’ he roared furiously, ‘Uzkul a umgal!’

  The battle had slumped once more into a bitter grind, but now it was one of the allies’ devising, fought on their terms. But despite the battering the Norscans were taking they showed no sign of breaking.

  Bagrik winced as a green flash of sorcery erupted in the darkening sky, filling the air with a sulphurous stench. A counter spell seemed to ignite the breeze as Ithalred’s mages on the crest of Broken Anvil Hill cast their own magicks. Scouring the battlefield, the king could see no sign of the shaman’s whereabouts. Instead, his gaze rested upon another foe.

  The Norscan warlord was carving his way through the dwarf and elf ranks with reckless ease, cleaved limbs flung from every swipe of his fell axe. While this chosen one of whatever daemon that favoured the horde lived, Bagrik knew the northmen would not falter. The warlord was only a few feet away and as their eyes locked across the sprawling carnage, Bagrik knew what he must now do.

  Tightening the grip on his axe, he roared to his throne bearers.

  ‘Forward! Bring my axe within reach of the heathen’s neck!’

  The hearth guard shield wall in front of the king broke up instantly, the dwarf warriors laying into the bondsmen and huscarls with brutal determination as they forged a bloody path for their king. Any that broke through were cut down by the throne bearers or crushed by the following longbeards.

  ‘Stay with me, Haggar Anvilfist,’ roared Bagrik to his banner bearer who stomped alongside him, cutting left and right through the swell of barbarians with his axe, the noble standard of Karak Ungor clutched firmly in his rune hand.

  ‘Nagrim!’ cried Haggar, ‘Nagrim!’ And the dwarfs around him shouted the dead prince’s name.

  Bagrik used it, allowed his memory to focus his anger in a burning sharp point at the end of his rune-encrusted axe.

  ‘You and me, north-man!’ the king snarled aloud, lowering the faceplate of his helmet and pointing his weapon at the onrushing warlord slaying a path towards him.

  Seconds dragged into minutes but at last the two titans clashed, dwarf king versus heathen warlord, the sea of bodies parting around them as if at some unseen command.

  One of Bagrik’s throne bearers was torn down before it had really begun, the sabre-tusk biting off his startled head after smashing the dwarf down with its brawny body. Bagrik felt the throne wobble as one corner was suddenly left without support. A black blur raced across the eye-slits of his helmet and he parried the warlord’s blow just in time.

  Grungni’s teeth, he is strong, thought Bagrik as the force of it rippled down his forearm, jarring his shoulder. A second blow pranged against his pauldron and he felt the blade bite his flesh. Blood started welling in Bagrik’s armpit. Never had the king’s armour of Karak Ungor been breached so easily. This blade the warlord wielded was like none Bagrik had ever seen. Black, but shiny like polished glass, its curvature seemed to follow his forearm, veins of darkness visible like adders writhing beneath his skin, the weapon nigh-on melded into his very flesh. It rose to a wicked curve, flawless and terrible as if death at that stygian blade would go on for eternity.

  A violent shudder ran down the throne again as Bagrik fought the black spots at the edge of his vision. Another of his bearers was ripped apart by a claw-thrust of the Norscan’s monster. Unable to bear the king’s weight, the remaining warriors collapsed, and Bagrik was dumped unceremoniously to the ground. The Norscan warlord sought to pounce on the stricken dwarf king, have his beast rip out his leathery throat and end the fight, but Bagrik’s throne bearers were on their feet swiftly and rushed forward to intercede. They were cut down in moments, their blood-gurgled screams short-lived and lost in the battle din.

  Their sacrifice had not been in vain. Bagrik was back on his feet, though he favoured his good leg and used it to support his armoured weight.

  ‘Not done yet, you ugly bastard,’ he snarled, beckoning the warlord on with his outstretched finger. ‘Come then, let us finish this…’

  Roaring as its master urged it, the sabre-tusk lunged for Bagrik’s throat, ragged meat strips hanging off its fangs from its kills. The dwarf king ducked and shifted his body at the last possible moment as he went down on his good knee. He carved his rune axe up the beast’s stomach, opening it and spilling hot entrails as it leapt over him. Though buffeted to the ground, his head ringing inside his helmet, Bagrik had killed the sabre-tusk. The Norscan warlord was wallowing in its pooling viscera. Shrugging free of the beast’s corpse, the northman emerged swathed in gore. If he had a face beneath that helmet of black iron, Bagrik fancied it might look displeased.

  ‘Like I said,’ the dwarf taunted, ‘just you and me.’

  The warlord roared in anger, the sound erupting from his skull-encasing warhelm tinny and strange.

  Bagrik matched it with a challenge of his own, struggling to his feet just as the Norscan began to charge. The warlord’s muscled gait spanned the distance between them quickly and he leapt into the air as he brought his black blade crashing against the dwarf king’s upraised shield. Bagrik reeled from the sheer ferocity of the attack, staggered back as the Norscan follo
wed through and used his shoulder like a battering ram.

  Bagrik felt every ounce of the brute’s bulk as he was spun like a weather vane struck by a fearsome gale. The dwarf almost fell, crying out in pain as he shifted too much weight onto his wounded leg. The white hot lance of agony brought him to his senses and he realised, readying himself to receive another charge, that his shield was broken. He shrugged the shattered pieces of wood and iron from his arm, and took his rune axe in a two-handed grip.

  Bagrik felt his heart thundering in his head, resounding like a rock fall, and his breathing came in laboured gasps.

  ‘For Nagrim…’ he rasped, as he marshalled his failing strength.

  The warlord came again, but this time Bagrik stepped aside, or rather almost fell, and hammered the spiked pommel of his rune axe into the meat of the Norscan’s exposed leg. Without waiting, the dwarf wrenched the weapon free in a bloody spray and hammered a blow against the warlord’s head that should have decapitated him. Instead, there was a cascade of sparks as dwarf-forged rune metal met Chaos black iron and the two combatants were flung apart in a backwash of power.

  Smoke rose from Bagrik’s body in tiny grey tendrils and his armour felt warm to the touch. But it was the dwarf king that was triumphant as he got to his feet and saw he’d chipped away a piece of the Norscan’s helmet.

  An eye, shot through with ugly pink and violet veins, the flesh around it white and smooth, stared malignly through the jagged hole in the warlord’s helmet. At first Bagrik saw incomprehension there, even fear, but it was soon crushed by rage.

  ‘Now we’re even,’ muttered Bagrik and spat a gobbet of blood against the inside of his faceplate, afraid that if he let down his weapon to lift it he might not be strong enough to wield his rune blade again. Even as the black spots tried to engulf his vision, he held his axe as steady as he could. He bit his lip hard, tasting blood, and the pain kept him going.

  The Norscan made to rush at Bagrik, swinging the dark blade melded to his flesh around his head in a wicked arc, when the clarion of warhorns sounded. The duelling warriors faltered at the unexpected noise. The ground was shaking. Cries of panic came from the Norscan ranks, growing steadily louder and more urgent every second. A ripple of discord passed through the horde, palpable to all. The northmen had begun to flee. Fear rushed through the army like a cold wave. As they ran in their droves, like ants deserting a burning nest, the vengeful dwarfs and elves cut them down without mercy.