by Warhammer
The goblin leader chittered an order as he fought Thorgig, and two goblins peeled away from the fight to scamper up the rise. Leatherbeard sent one of his axes spinning after the runners, dropping one, but the other was nearing the opening at the top of the snowy slope.
‘After him, manling!’ called Gotrek. ‘Make those long legs useful!’
Felix sprinted up the incline, his feet smashing holes in the hard crust of snow. The goblin darted through the dark gap and down into a dropping, rocky cleft. Felix charged in after him, gaining with every step. The goblin looked back once, emotionless as a fish, and then ran on.
The floor of the cleft was filled with rocks and loose gravel. Felix slipped and slid as he ran down it, twice nearly twisting his ankle. He came within a yard of the goblin and swiped at it with his sword, but it leapt ahead, ducking around a big boulder and out of sight. Felix swung wide around the boulder, and found himself suddenly on the lip of a wide crevasse that dropped away into blackness. He lurched left, heart thudding, his scrabbling feet kicking pebbles into the abyss, and twisted away from the edge barely in time.
The goblin scampered up a rocky rise before him. Felix surged after it, skin prickling at the closeness of his narrow escape. No one would ever have found him had he fallen into that chasm. No one would know what had become of him: a horrible end for a memoirist.
The goblin slipped on loose scree and fell on its face as it reached the crest of the rise. Felix closed on it rapidly. It picked itself up again and dived over the ridge. Felix leapt after it and tackled it to the ground. They rolled down the far side of the ridge in a tangle of limbs, and jarred to a stop at the base of the slope, the goblin on top. It raised its saw-bladed short sword to stab him, but Felix clubbed it off his chest with his free arm and rolled on top of it, slashing down with his sword. The steel bit through the goblin’s skull. The little green monster spasmed and lay still.
Felix collapsed to the side and lay with his cheek on the cold rock, panting and wheezing, glaring at the dead goblin beside him. ‘Got you at last, you filthy–’
An enormous fur-booted foot stepped into his circle of vision. He looked up. A huge orc in scrap armour loomed over him, staring down. Twenty more stood at its back.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The orc slashed down at Felix with a huge double-bladed axe. Felix yelped and rolled. He was deafened as the axe bit deep into the ground, an inch from his shoulder, pinning his cloak. Felix surged up, the cloak nearly strangling him before it ripped free. Another orc swung at him. He jerked aside and ran, stumbling and unsteady, back up the ridge.
The orcs raced after him, unnervingly silent. Felix pounded down the slope towards the black chasm, skidding within inches of the drop as he turned into the narrow confines of the rocky pass. He heard the orcs thundering behind him, and then a fading bellow as one of them missed its footing and tumbled into the depths. The rest came on, not sparing their lost comrade a backwards glance.
A stitch stabbed at Felix’s side as he scrabbled up the tight, rising path, and his breath came in ragged gasps. He’d already been winded when he caught the goblin. Now he felt as if he was going to die. He wanted to stop and vomit, but the orcs were so close at his heels that he could hear their breathing and smell their rank animal odour. The ground shook with their footsteps.
The light from the snowfield glowed at the top of the shadowed pass like a beacon of hope. It looked a hundred leagues away. He slipped on a loose rock and this time he did twist his ankle. It flared with sudden agony. He cried out, and nearly fell. Swift steel whistled behind him and an axe rang off the rock wall beside his head.
He scrabbled on, ankle screaming with each step. He didn’t have the luxury of favouring it – just jammed his foot down and took the pain as best he could. At last, nearly fainting with agony, he gained the top of the pass, inches ahead of the orcs, and burst out onto the snowfield. A slashing cleaver grazed his scale-covered shoulder and sent him sprawling. He slid face-first down the snowy incline towards the cliff.
The dwarfs were marching up the slope with the dead goblins behind them. They readied their weapons as he sped toward them, looking beyond him with eager anticipation on their faces. Gotrek stepped out and Felix crashed into his knees. The Slayer hauled him up
‘Er,’ said Felix, probing his throbbing shoulder. The orc had cut through the leather and torn off some of his scales, but he was unbloodied. ‘I got the goblin.’
‘Good,’ grunted Gotrek, and stepped past him, hefting his axe.
The orcs were spreading out in an even semi-circle and marching down in a dressed rank, weapons at the ready. Felix shivered at the sight.
‘They aren’t orcs,’ said Sketti, uneasily, echoing Felix’s unspoken thought. ‘They can’t be. They’re something else, dressed up in green skin.’
‘Elves, maybe?’ said Narin, smirking.
Druric looked over his shoulder, down the slope. ‘They mean to keep us in front of them. They want to push us off the cliff.’
‘Let them try,’ said Leatherbeard.
The orc leader jabbered an order and the orcs charged, uttering not a word. The dwarfs braced and met the attack with an unmoving wall of sharp steel. Gotrek blocked the leader’s first strike, shattered its war axe with his return blow, and then cut its legs out from under it. Two more leapt in to take its place.
Narin and Druric fought back to back in a ring of three orcs. Leatherbeard was stepping over one dead orc to get to another, two dripping double-bladed axes in his massive hands. Sketti Hammerhand and old Matrak fought an orc that wielded an iron mace the size and shape of a butter churn. Thorgig and Kagrin butchered another with their axes and turned to face two more.
Felix fought a short, barrel-gutted brute with a head like a green pumpkin. Strange, he thought, as he slipped an axe stroke and missed with an attack of his own. Though their tactics were vastly improved, and though their fury seemed to be contained, the strange orcs still fought like orcs, slashing with great, clumsy swings that could flatten a building if they connected, but more often than not missed. Why had one aspect changed and not the other? And what had changed them in the first place? Then he stepped awkwardly on his twisted ankle and all thoughts went out of his head in a rush of pain.
The orc saw him stumble. It swung. Felix lurched aside and ran it through the ribs, jolting his ankle again. The orc collapsed. Felix nearly joined it. The world was fading in and out around him. Another orc attacked, this one stringy and tall. Felix groaned. He wasn’t ready. He blocked and retreated, limping badly.
Half the orcs were dead, and not a single dwarf had yet fallen, but by sheer weight and numbers, the greenskins had forced the stout warriors back almost to the black ice that glazed the edge of the cliff. Gotrek killed another and it slid past him as it fell, spinning noiselessly into the void.
Felix stepped back again. His bad foot shot back on the ice. His knee hit the slick surface with a smack. His vision went black and red. He was sliding backwards. The tall orc pushed in, eager to finish him off, and instead sat down abruptly as its feet flew out from under it. Felix grabbed at the greenskin’s belt, more to stop himself sliding than as an attack, and pulled the orc towards the edge. It scrabbled uselessly with thick yellow fingernails at the hard ice, then it was gone.
Felix shuddered, terrified, then crawled delicately back up onto the snow, hissing and groaning, as the battle raged around him.
To his right, Narin kicked an orc’s leg out and it slammed down on its chin before sailing off the cliff. To his left, Thorgig jumped back from a cleaver slash and tripped over the corpse of a dead orc behind him. He fell flat on his back on the ice and started sliding headfirst for the precipice.
‘Thorgig!’ roared Kagrin, and stepped forwards, only to slip himself. He clutched at a boulder as he watched his friend spin towards the void.
Thorgig recovered at the last second, and slashed down with his long-axe. The hooked heel of the head bit into the ice and held. He swung to
a stop, holding one-handed onto the very end of his axe-haft with his feet dangling off the edge.
Thorgig’s orc swung at Kagrin, still clinging to the boulder. It swung. The young goldsmith pushed away, and the orc’s axe struck sparks off the rock. Kagrin gashed it behind the knee with his handaxe and its leg buckled. It fell on its side, grunting, and slid, twisting and flailing, across the ice, coming perilously close to dislodging Thorgig as it flew off the edge.
‘Hold fast, Thorgig!’ called Kagrin, tearing into his pack and pulling out his climbing rope. He began lashing one end around the boulder, but another orc had noticed him and was coming around the fight towards him. Kagrin dropped the rope and stood.
Felix pulled himself to his feet and started for Kagrin, but his ankle gave out and he nearly fell again. He would never reach him in time. He looked around him desperately. Kagrin blocked a brutal blow with his hand-axe and was smashed to the ground, dazed.
A severed orc head lay behind Gotrek. Felix snatched it by its topknot and turned in a circle. The gruesome thing was amazingly heavy – all skull, no brain, no doubt. His ankle and knee blazed with pain as he spun.
‘Hoy!’ he shouted, letting go. ‘Ugly!’
The orc looked up just in time to take the head of its comrade full in the face. It wasn’t a hard blow, but it distracted it long enough for Kagrin to stagger up and bury his axe blade in the thing’s gut. The orc stepped back, surprised, and its paunch ripped open, its entrails spilling out of the wound and slapping wetly on the ice. It slipped on them and crashed down into the snow. Kagrin stood and chopped it through the neck. It spasmed and died. Kagrin threw down the axe and turned back to his rope.
Felix limped forwards to defend Kagrin while he uncoiled the rope, but as he looked around he saw there was no need. The battle was over. The other dwarfs stood panting over their kills, the snow all around them stained with blood, both red and black. Gotrek climbed out of a circle of dead orcs and rubbed the blade of his axe with a handful of snow. Leatherbeard had a long gash across his bare chest, but his was the gravest wound. The rest had only nicks and bruises.
Kagrin tossed the end of his rope towards Thorgig.
The other dwarfs turned.
‘Careful, lad,’ said Narin. ‘No sudden moves.’
‘That’s why a dwarf always carries an axe, not a sword,’ said Sketti, looking disapprovingly at Felix’s longsword. ‘A sword wouldn’t have stopped you.’
Thorgig reached out gingerly with his free hand and felt for the rope beside him. He found it at last and gripped it tight.
‘Don’t try to climb,’ said Gotrek. ‘Just hold on.’
He took the rope from Kagrin and pulled it in gently, hand over hand. Thorgig slid up the ice in little jerks and starts, his axe dragging behind him, until Gotrek had pulled him to the snowline. Kagrin took his friend’s hand and helped him to his feet. Thorgig’s face was set and emotionless, but he was white, and his hands shook.
‘Thank you Slayer,’ he said. ‘Thank you, cousin.’ He turned to Felix and inclined his head, ‘And thank you, human. I saw what you did. You saved my life and the life of my friend. I owe you a great debt.’
Felix shrugged, embarrassed. ‘Forget it.’
‘You can be sure that I will not.’
‘Slayer,’ said Druric. ‘We should throw the bodies over the edge, and all the bloody snow with them. There may be another patrol, and it would be best if they didn’t learn what became of the first.’
‘Aye,’ said Gotrek, nodding. ‘Carry on.’
While the others pushed and rolled the orcs off the edge, and scooped the stained snow after them, Druric, who carried a field kit, dressed and bound Leatherbeard’s wound, and wrapped Felix’s swollen ankle in bandages.
‘Not broken, I think,’ he said.
‘It may still kill me,’ said Felix, thinking of the descent back down the mountain.
Sketti laughed as Felix forced his foot painfully back into his boot. ‘Now maybe you’ll slow down and walk at a proper dwarfish pace.’
‘And maybe if I hung you by the neck you’d grow to a proper human height,’ returned Felix.
Sketti blustered and reached for his axe.
Gotrek gave him a look. ‘Never get into a war of words with a poet, Ironbreaker. You can’t win.’
When all the evidence had been pitched off the cliff and the dwarfs had bandaged their wounds, they set off once again up the saddle-shaped slope of snow and down through the rocky pass.
‘There,’ said Matrak, after another half hour of winding around the crags and cliffs of Karaz Hirn. ‘There is Birrisson’s door, that once led to the gyrocopter landing further up.’ He pointed to an unremarkable stretch of black granite that looked to Felix no different from the rest of the mountainside.
Druric studied the ground as they paused before it. He shook his head, frustrated. ‘The ground is too hard, and there is no snow here. I cannot tell if the grobi have used this door.’ He sniffed. ‘They have left no spoor nearby.’
‘Where else would they have been going?’ asked Narin.
‘Circling back all the way to the entrance?’ suggested Sketti.
‘There isn’t much of a path that way,’ said old Matrak. ‘No path at all.’
‘If they do use this door,’ said Thorgig, ‘does it change our course? We must go in even if it is defended. Prince Hamnir depends on us.’
‘It is likely not well defended even if it is used,’ said Narin. ‘They can’t expect an attack from this quarter.’
‘Open it and we will see,’ said Gotrek.
Matrak stepped forwards, but then hesitated, staring blankly at the wall.
‘Don’t tell me we’ve come all this way to have you tell us you’ve forgotten how to get in,’ said Narin. He took tinder from his pack and lit his tin lamp. The others followed his example.
‘They know we come. They wait for us,’ said Matrak. He was shivering. ‘We will all die.’
‘Enough of that, you old doomsayer,’ said Sketti angrily. ‘Open the door!’
As the dwarfs lit their lamps, Matrak nodded and did something at the cliff face that Felix couldn’t see. He stepped back. The dwarfs went on guard. Felix drew his sword. At first it seemed that nothing happened. Then Felix frowned and shook his head, assaulted by vertigo. His eyes fought to focus. He felt as if he was sliding backwards, though his feet weren’t moving. No, it was the cliff-face getting further away! A tall, square section of it was sinking into the surface of the mountain. Felix strained his ears, but could hear no sound of gears or grinding.
After a moment, the square of rock stopped, about fifteen paces into the mountain, revealing the edges of a dark, cut-stone chamber. When a horde of orcs didn’t charge out of the door and attack them, the dwarfs started forwards.
‘Hold!’ said Matrak. ‘There is a trap.’ He squatted at the groove in the floor, which the sliding door travelled in, and reached down into it. After a moment of fumbling, there was a clunk that Felix felt more than heard, and Matrak stood.
‘Now it is safe,’ he said.
It didn’t feel safe. Though Felix saw nothing particularly alarming, as he and Gotrek and the others stepped warily through the door, he could not shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. His back tingled, and he kept looking over his shoulder, thinking he would find evil eyes glowing in the darkness, but there was nothing there.
Matrak closed the door behind them. On this side, a simple lever operated it. The chamber within was only of a moderate size, by the usual standards of dwarf architecture, with a low arched ceiling, criss-crossed with wooden beams that supported iron pulleys and winches hung with heavy chains. Workbenches, forges and writing desks cluttered the space, and old, half-built machines and contraptions were everywhere. Their shadows moved across the walls of the workshop like the skeletons of strange mechanical beasts as the dwarfs passed among them with their lanterns. A gyrocopter lay dismantled in a corner.
Sketti shook his head as he
looked around. ‘Engineers are mad,’ he whispered. ‘All of them.’
Matrak led them to a shadowed archway on the far side of the room. Beyond it was a short, narrow corridor that rose, in a series of long, shallow, slightly slanting steps, to a stone door at the far end.
‘Be careful,’ said Matrak, holding up his hand as he stopped before it. ‘Here is where Birri set all his traps and–’ He froze suddenly, and then whimpered softly.
‘What is it, now?’ asked Thorgig, annoyed.
Matrak stepped back, trembling. ‘It isn’t right. It isn’t right,’ said Matrak. ‘Smells wrong. All wrong.’
The dwarfs lifted their bulbous noses and inhaled. Felix sniffed too, expecting the familiar animal reek of orcs, but could smell nothing. The dwarfs however were frowning.
‘Fresh-cut stone,’ said Kagrin.
‘Aye, said Druric. ‘Not more than a week old.’
‘The orcs have taken up masonry now?’ asked Thorgig.
Kagrin thrust his lantern through the arch, illuminating the corridor, and examined it with a critical eye. ‘Can’t be,’ he murmured. ‘It’s all straight and true.’
Felix scowled. ‘You can tell how long ago stone has been cut by the smell?’
‘Of course,’ said Sketti. ‘Men can’t?’
Felix shook his head. ‘None that I know of.’
‘Yours is a sad, weak race, man,’ said Sketti, pityingly.
‘That rules the world,’ Felix retorted.
‘Only by theft and trickery,’ said Sketti, his voice rising.
‘Quiet!’ barked Gotrek. He turned back to Matrak, who was staring into the corridor with wet, frightened eyes. ‘What does it mean, engineer?’
‘They’ve cut stone. Grobi who cut stone? It…’ He moaned. ‘It can only mean they’ve changed the traps.’ He turned to Gotrek. ‘Valaya protect us all. They knew we were coming! They set new traps!’
