by Warhammer
Most of the others chuckled at that, but Thorgig and Druric looked offended.
Narin chose to take no notice. He sighed, playing unconsciously with the burnt stick of wood tied into his beard. ‘I had the wanderlust when I was a shortbeard. I walked my axe from Kislev to Tilea as a mercenary and adventurer for fifty years, and loved every minute of it. Saw more of the world in that half century than most dwarfs see in five.’ He trailed off, his eyes looking far away, and a faint smile on his bearded lips. Then he shook himself reluctantly. ‘All that’s gone, now that my older brother’s dead.’
‘Called back to the hold, were you?’ asked Druric.
‘Aye,’ Narin said sadly. ‘The second son of a thane has the best of it and no mistake – just ask Prince Hamnir – gold and opportunity, and no more responsibility than a cat. Only now, I’m the first son. The old badger probably has another century in him at least, but still I must come home and learn the running of the hold, and memorise our book of grudges from cover to cover, and make a favourable marriage, and…’ He shivered. ‘Produce sons with my… wife.’
‘Every dwarf must do his duty,’ said Leatherbeard, through his mask. ‘We are a dwindling race. We must beget sons and daughters.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Narin, ‘but I’d rather have your duty. Killing trolls is a more pleasant task than bedding one, and trolls don’t talk as much.’
‘Surely she can’t be as bad as all that,’ said Thorgig.
Narin fixed him with a sharp blue eye. ‘Lad, we are all likely to die on this little jaunt, are we not? Prince Hamnir said it was a suicide mission.’
‘Aye, I suppose,’ said Thorgig.
‘Well, let me put it to you this way. I’ll be disappointed if it isn’t.’
‘And I will be disappointed if it is,’ said Druric.
‘You’re afraid to die?’ asked Thorgig sharply.
‘Not in the least,’ said Druric. He turned his cold eyes towards Gotrek, who was wolfing down his food and paying the rest not the slightest attention, ‘but if Slayer Gurnisson dies, the grudge the Stonemongers have against him will go unresolved. As long as I know he will live, I don’t mind dying.’
Gotrek snorted derisively at that, but didn’t bother to respond.
After the meal, there was much rummaging through packs and re-coiling of ropes. Each of the dwarfs hung a bandolier of ringed steel spikes over one shoulder and strapped a pair of cleats to his boots. Fortunately, though dwarfs and men were so dissimilar in size and proportion that they could rarely exchange clothes, dwarfs had big feet, so a pair of cleats had been found for Felix. Old Matrak unbuckled his wooden peg leg and replaced it with one that was a long, black-iron spike.
When all straps were tightened, the dwarfs tapped out their pipes and stood, slinging their packs over their shoulders. Kagrin was last to be ready, tucking his tools and the gold-pommelled dagger away reluctantly.
‘Come on, lad,’ said Narin. ‘There’ll be work for the other end of that elf-sticker presently.’
The dwarfs edged around the steep shores of the Cauldron, slippery with broken ice and loose shale, until they came to the cliff face, the falls booming to their right, and spraying them with a fine, freezing mist.
Right up against it, the cliff wasn’t quite as smooth and featureless as it had appeared before, but it was still daunting – a long, nearly vertical stratum of grey granite, with few cracks or protrusions. The dwarfs didn’t even slow down. They stepped to the wall, reached up to grab handholds that Felix couldn’t see, jammed their cleats into the rock and pulled themselves up without ropes or pitons, as easily as if they were ascending a ladder.
By watching closely where Gotrek put his hands and feet, Felix was able to follow him up the face, but it was hard, finger-cramping work, and he was nowhere near as steady as the dwarfs. Even old Matrak was doing better than he was, his iron leg spike biting firmly into the granite.
It struck Felix as odd that dwarfs, with their short, thick bodies, would excel at climbing mountains. One would have thought that a climber with long, spidery limbs and a thin torso – an elf, for instance – would be better suited to the work, but although the dwarfs did have occasional trouble stretching for the next hand or foot hold, they made up for their lack of reach with incredible strength of grip and their uncanny dwarfish affinity for the rock itself. They seemed to find, more by instinct than sight or touch, ridges and cracks to slip their sturdy fingers into that Felix could not have found if he had been staring directly at them.
Unfortunately, this skill, and their vicelike grip, gave the dwarfs the ability to use, as handholds, tiny irregularities in the surface of the cliff that Felix couldn’t get a grip on at all. Consequently, by the time the dwarfs were halfway up the cliff, Felix was far below them, his forearms on fire with cramp and sweat running into his eyes. He could no longer hear the others because of the sound of the waterfall roaring past thirty feet to his right.
He paused for a moment to flex his hands and try to shake the ache from his limbs, and made the mistake of looking down between his legs. He froze. He was so high up. One slip – one slip and… Suddenly, he wasn’t sure he could hold on any more. A mad urge to just let go and relieve the tension as he fell to his death nearly overcame him.
He fought it off with difficulty, but found he still couldn’t move. He groaned as he realised he was going to have to ask for help. Dwarfs hated weakness and incompetence. They had no respect for someone who couldn’t fend for himself. Even when they were alone, Felix always felt a fool when he had to ask Gotrek for help. It would be worse here, with a pack of other dwarfs looking on. He would be mocked. On the other hand, better to live and be mocked than literally die of embarrassment, wasn’t it?
‘Your rememberer is lagging behind, Slayer,’ came Narin’s voice from above him.
Felix heard a grunt and a dwarf curse, and then, ‘Hang on, manling.’
The echoes of dwarf chuckling reached his ears and turned them crimson. Then came a sound of hammering. Felix looked up, but it was difficult to see who was who, let alone what was going on. All he could see were the soles of dwarf boots and broad dwarf rumps.
‘Take this,’ called Gotrek.
A coil of rope dropped towards him, rushing at Felix’s face like a striking snake. He ducked. A small iron hook cracked him on the top of his head. He yelped and nearly lost his grip.
‘Mind your head,’ laughed Thorgig.
The hook slithered down the cliff face between Felix’s legs and stopped with a bounce below his feet at the end of the rope it was attached to.
‘Can you get a hand free?’ asked Gotrek.
‘Aye,’ said Felix. He was rubbing his head with it as he spoke.
‘Then hook the rope to your belt.’
‘Right.’ Felix drew the rope up one-handed until he had the hook, then passed it under and around his belt twice and hooked it to the rope again. ‘It’s done,’ he called.
The rope began to slide back up the cliff until it was taut.
‘Come ahead,’ said Gotrek.
Felix started up again. The rope slackened as he climbed, but then retightened every few feet. Felix looked up and saw Gotrek pulling it through the eyelet of a piton and holding it tight.
The other dwarfs were all watching him as he rose, amused smiles on their bearded faces.
‘What’s this fish you’ve caught, Slayer?’ asked Sketti.
‘Not much meat on it, is there?’ said Narin.
‘Aye,’ said Thorgig. ‘Throw it back.’
As he came level with them, Felix saw that Gotrek had tapped two pitons into the cliff, one about five feet above the other.
‘Bide a bit, manling,’ he said. ‘Put your foot on this one, and hold onto this one.’
Felix stepped gratefully onto the lower piton and held onto the other. It wasn’t much, but after clinging on with his fingertips for the last hour, it was a blessed relief.
‘When you’ve got some strength back, follow
on. We’ll leave lines and pegs for you.’
‘Lines and pegs,’ snorted Sketti. ‘Like a baby. No wonder men steal everything from the dwarfs. They can’t do a thing for themselves.’
‘That’s enough, Hammerhand,’ growled Gotrek.
‘Pardon, Slayer,’ Sketti sneered. ‘I forgot. He is your “Dwarf Friend”. He must be very friendly indeed to be worth the trouble.’
Gotrek fixed the Ironbreaker with his one glittering eye and the mirth died on the old dwarf’s lips. His white beard moved as he swallowed.
‘Right,’ said Gotrek as he turned back to the rock face. ‘Upward.’
The dwarfs started up the cliff again while Felix stood on the piton and flexed and stretched each of his arms in turn. When Gotrek had climbed another fifty feet or so, he jabbed another piton into the granite, making it stick with just the force of his hand, then seating it securely with a small hammer. He tied Felix’s rope to it, and moved on. From then on, this was how they proceeded. Felix’s humiliation at having to use a rope was tempered by the relative safety and ease of the arrangement. He was no longer falling behind, and he didn’t freeze when he looked down.
Three-quarters of the way up the scarp, even the dwarfs had to use ‘lines and pegs’. The cliff bulged out at the top, like melted wax at the top of a candle, and they had to climb up the underside of the bulge. Gotrek went first, reaching as high as he could to tap in a piton, and then hanging a loop of rope from it in which to sit so that he could tap in the next. Felix shivered at the sight. The Slayer was so heavy, his muscles as dense as oak wood, and the pitons so tiny, that he expected them to pull out of the rock and Gotrek to plummet earthward at any second.
The dwarfs talked, unconcerned, while they waited, as easy clinging to their ropes and resting on their pitons with the wind whistling around them as if they had been bellied up to a bar in a cosy tavern.
‘Look there,’ said Sketti Hammerhand, pointing and raising his voice to be heard over the falls. ‘You can just see Karaz Izor from here: third mountain in, behind the split peak of Karaz Varnrik. You won’t have grobi taking our hold. My line has been Ironbreakers and deep wardens since my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather’s time, and no greenskin has ever slipped past us. We’ve an unbroken record.’
‘Do you imply that we lost Karak Hirn out of laxness?’ asked Thorgig with a dangerous edge in his voice. ‘Do you say we didn’t fight hard enough?’
‘No no, lad,’ said Sketti, holding up his free hand. ‘I meant no insult to the bravery of your hold or clan. I’m sure you all fought as true dwarfs should.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, if any of your king’s line had been there, things might have been different.’
‘Now you insult King Alrik,’ said Thorgig, his voice rising.
‘I do not,’ Sketti protested. ‘He isn’t the only dwarf to fall prey to this elf-birthed Chaos invasion. His heart was in the right place, I’m sure, wanting to help the men of the Empire in their time of need, but a dwarf’s first duty is to his own. So–’
‘If you dig yourself any deeper, Hammerhand,’ said Thorgig, his fists balling, ‘You’ll strike fire.’
‘Quiet!’ came Gotrek’s voice from above.
The dwarfs ceased their argument and looked up. Gotrek hung above them, craning his neck to see over the curve of the bulge. He had one hand on the haft of his axe.
A sound of movement came to them faintly from the top of the cliff, barely discernible over the roar of the falls. A spill of pebbles rattled past Gotrek to drop towards the lake.
Felix thought he heard a command given in a high, harsh voice, but couldn’t make out the word. Whatever it was, the speaker hadn’t sounded human or dwarfish.
The dwarfs stayed as motionless as statues, listening. The sounds of movement came again, fainter and to the west, and then were gone. After a moment, Gotrek resumed tapping in the next piton.
‘Goblin patrol,’ said Druric.
Narin nodded.
‘Do they know we’re here?’ asked Sketti, looking up anxiously.
‘We’d be dodging boulders if they knew we were here,’ said Thorgig.
Leatherbeard grunted. ‘Not a Slayer’s death.’
‘They know,’ said old Matrak in a faraway voice. ‘They know everything. They know where the keys are. They know where the doors are.’
The others looked at him. He was staring into the distance, his eyes seeing nothing.
‘Poor old fellow,’ said Narin under his breath.
Gotrek reached the top shortly thereafter, and threw down a rope. Old Matrak went up first, the line hooked to his belt for safety. As troubled as he was in his mind, he was still sure in his movements. He let go of his piton and swung out on the dangling rope without a qualm. Then he climbed up hand over hand until he reached the bulge and could gain purchase with his foot and iron leg-spike again.
Felix went up fourth, after Druric. He had shinned up many a rope in his travels with Gotrek, and faced many a danger, but swinging out over that drop was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. Only the sceptical scowls of the dwarfs waiting their turn kept him from hemming and hesitating endlessly before letting go. He would be damned if he would let them think him more of a buffoon than they already did.
Of course, this hope was dashed when one of his cleats slipped as he began climbing up the underside of the bulge. He lost his footing and slammed face first into the cliff, bloodying his nose. He caught himself and recovered almost instantly, but he could hear the guffaws of the dwarfs below and above him. His face burned with embarrassment as he topped the bulge and Gotrek held out a hand to haul him up.
‘Well done, manling. You’re the first to shed blood in the recovery of Karak Hirn,’ said the Slayer, grinning.
‘The first to shed his own,’ said Thorgig, chuckling behind him.
‘I’ll be happy to shed somebody else’s,’ said Felix, glaring at Thorgig. The young dwarf was beginning to get on his nerves. He had reason to hate Gotrek, Felix supposed. The Slayer had been more than insulting, to him and to Hamnir, but Felix had given Thorgig no cause to be angry. No cause but his mere presence, he thought. Thorgig was no Sketti, but he had the dwarfish disdain for all things non-dwarf.
Felix looked around. The cliff top was a broad flat ledge, like a landing halfway up the mountain. The rest of the peak still loomed above him, its white snowcap silhouetted against the blinding sun. A deep black pool – a mirror-calm twin to the roiling cauldron below – was cut into the ledge by ages of erosion. To his right, the pool spilled over the edge of cliff to become the narrow silver thread of the falls. There wasn’t much room twixt water and cliff edge. It felt as if he and the dwarfs stood on the rim of a giant stone pitcher that forever poured water into a stone cup far below. The top of the falls was thin enough to jump, but the prospect of slipping made Felix’s skin crawl.
Druric was studying the ground at the cliff edge. ‘It was goblins,’ he said.
‘So, they’re looking for us?’ asked Sketti, glancing around warily.
‘Not necessarily,’ Druric answered. ‘There are regular patrols through here.’ He pointed. ‘New prints over the old.’
Gotrek turned to Matrak as he helped Leatherbeard up. ‘Which way to the door?’
Matrak waved to the east, beyond the stream, where the cliff-top ledge rose gradually to a split between the main body of the mountain and a rugged smaller peak – a broad shoulder to the karaz’s proud head. ‘Up. Through there.’
‘The grobi went that way,’ Gotrek said. ‘Get your armour on.’
The dwarfs took off their cleats and pulled mail shirts, pauldrons and gauntlets from their packs, replacing them with their climbing gear. Felix buckled on a scale-sewn leather jack, and fixed his old red cloak around his shoulders. None of them carried shields, which would have been too heavy and cumbersome while climbing.
Gotrek left the rope over the bulge in place and hopped the roaring falls. The dwarfs followed him across, apparently without a secon
d thought. Felix held his breath as he took a running jump and tried not to imagine falling in the water and being dragged over the edge by the rushing current.
Safely on the other side, the company followed the ledge as it rose to the split between the mountain’s head and shoulder. This was a narrow, shadowed cleft that wound crazily between the two peaks, and then opened out onto a sway-backed saddle of hard-packed snow that sloped up to the black flank of Karaz Hirn to their left, and down to a sheer cliff on their right. The last few yards before the cliff were black ice – frozen run-off from the slanting plain of snow, as glossy and smooth as the lip of a wine bottle.
As they were about to step out of the cleft onto the snow, a patch of red and green on the far side drew Felix’s eye. A dozen goblins were hacking apart the carcass of a mountain goat, and its blood stained the snow all around them. Like the orcs they had seen before, the goblins were maintaining a very un-greenskin-like silence. They weren’t fighting over the choice bits, or devouring their portions immediately, but instead stuffed the bloody legs and flank steaks into their packs for later.
‘They’re in the way,’ quavered Matrak, pointing to a dark gap in the rock face on the far side of the slope of snow. ‘The door’s beyond that pass.’
‘We’ll have to take them, then,’ said Narin.
‘Thank Grimnir for that,’ said Sketti. ‘The day I hide from goblins is the day I shave my beard.’
Leatherbeard growled in his throat.
‘Shut up and attack,’ said Gotrek. He started forwards at a run.
The dwarfs charged after him as fast as they could, which, by Felix’s standards wasn’t very fast. He had to keep to a trot, so as not to get too far ahead.
The goblins saw them coming, but didn’t shriek in alarm, or scatter in blind panic as goblins were wont to. Instead, they just dropped the bits of hacked-up goat they held and turned to face the dwarfs, as silent as monks.
Druric loosed a crossbow bolt that took one goblin high in the chest, then threw the crossbow aside and drew a hand axe. He and Felix and the dwarfs crashed into the runty greenskins like a battering ram, mowing them down with their sheer mass. Four goblins died immediately, axes buried deep in their scrawny chests and pointy skulls. Three more were bowled off their feet. Gotrek split one in two. Felix hacked at a second, a tiny, snaggle-toothed horror that rolled away from his blade. Old Matrak stomped on another with his iron leg-spike, impaling it.
