by Warhammer
‘Grimnir forbid!’ The mask wouldn’t stay on. Leatherbeard snatched it off again, frustrated. Pain and rage burned in his eyes. ‘Last year I fought the skaven in the Undgrin with my clan brothers. They had strange weapons. One exploded in my face when I struck it. The next morning I woke up like this. I ran from my hold before any could see. The priests at the Slayer’s hall helped me fashion this mask, and now… now it’s ruined. How can I be a Slayer without a crest? How can I continue when all can see my shame?’
‘I have needle and thread in my medic kit,’ said Hamnir from behind them. ‘You are welcome to them.’
Everyone turned. The prince was sitting up unsteadily, rubbing his stomach gingerly. He motioned vaguely towards his pack.
‘Thank you, Prince Hamnir,’ said Leatherbeard, and stepped to the pack, turning his back as he opened it and dug through it. The others began to tend to their wounds.
Thorgig helped Hamnir to his feet. The prince could barely stand. He glared at Gotrek. ‘Just let me gather my strength, Gurnisson, and we will go again.’
‘You want some more?’ Gotrek shrugged.
‘No, prince,’ said Narin, looking up from patching a gash on his arm. ‘Enough is enough. This cannot continue.’
‘Aye,’ chorused the brothers Rassmusson.
‘Please, my prince,’ said Thorgig, ‘at least wait until after we win the karak.’
‘You will stop a dwarf from fighting for his honour?’ asked Hamnir, affronted.
‘Never, prince,’ said Narin, ‘but I will suggest that you stop. This is madness.’
‘When Gurnisson admits that he was wrong,’ said Hamnir, ‘I will stop.’
‘When Ranulffsson pays me what he stole from me, I’ll call it quits,’ said Gotrek.
‘If it’s a matter of gold,’ said Felix, ‘I’ll pay Gotrek what he thinks he’s owed. Only let’s move on.’
‘Don’t be a fool, manling,’ snarled Gotrek. ‘It means nothing for you to pay me. It’s him or no one.’
‘But what is it all about?’ cried Felix, losing patience. ‘What’s so difficult about a division of spoils? I don’t understand.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ said Gotrek. ‘You’re not a dwarf.’
‘The difficulty,’ said Hamnir, ‘is in the definition of spoils.’
‘The difficulty,’ Gotrek interrupted, ‘is that you and I made a blood oath that we would split all spoils evenly! All spoils! There would be nothing held back or hidden on either side. We made the oath on the first day we set out, and you broke it.’
Hamnir sighed and sat wearily on the wheel of an old mine cart. ‘Here is what happened. Gurnisson and I had hired on with the army of a Tilean nobleman who was in a war with another Tilean nobleman. The usual petty human squabbling.’
Felix snorted at this, but Hamnir didn’t see the irony. He continued.
‘We fought across the disputed country, retaking villages that our employer’s rival had plundered and occupied. In one of them, there was a dwarf tavern keep, with a comely daughter, who showed me her appreciation for our liberation of the town by…’ Hamnir coloured. ‘Well, she was a very sweet lass, and we developed a fondness for each other in the week I was there, and she gave me a goodbye gift,’ he glared at Gotrek. ‘A love gift – a small book of old dwarf love poems.’ He looked at Felix. ‘When we came to divide the spoils of the battle, Gurnisson wanted to include it in the tally. I did not. It was not taken in war, it was given in love, and therefore not plunder.’
‘It was taken in war,’ growled Gotrek. ‘She gave it to you for winning the battle and freeing the town. I got a gold coin and a new helmet from the blacksmith, because I stopped Intero’s men from burning down his forge. I put that in. There is no difference.’
‘There is, unless you kissed that blacksmith on the lips and spent the night in his arms,’ said Hamnir dryly.
Narin chuckled at that.
‘Was it valuable, this book?’ asked Felix, flatly.
Hamnir shrugged. ‘It was a copy of a copy, worth a few Empire pfennigs at most.’ He looked towards his pack. ‘If not for the sentimental value, I would have thrown it out long ago.’
‘A few pfennigs?’ Felix’s voice rose of its own volition. ‘A few pfennigs! You two lunatics haven’t spoken to each other for a hundred years because of a few pfennigs?’ He smacked his forehead and turned to Hamnir. ‘Why didn’t you just pay Gotrek half the cost of the book and have done?’ He swung his head to Gotrek. ‘And why didn’t you tell Hamnir that a few pfennigs don’t matter between friends, and forget about it?’
‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ both dwarfs said in unison.
‘He puts milk-sop sentiment before law,’ said Gotrek.
‘He puts law before common decency,’ said Hamnir.
‘You both put stubbornness before common sense,’ said Felix. He turned to the other dwarfs. ‘Do none of you find this to be madness?’
The dwarfs shrugged.
‘Haven’t spoken to my cousin Riggi for nigh on fifty years, because he didn’t ask me if I wanted a drink when it was his turn to buy,’ said Karl.
‘My clan ceased all trade with another clan over a handkerchief,’ said Leatherbeard.
Felix groaned. He’d forgotten who he was talking to, but he had to do something. They would be at this stupidity until the end of the world if he didn’t. ‘Can I see it?’ he asked Hamnir. ‘I would like to gaze upon the book that kept two friends apart for a hundred years. It must be wondrous to behold.’
Hamnir opened his pack, dug through it, and pulled out a small volume from the very bottom. ‘It isn’t much to look at,’ he said, handing it carefully to Felix. ‘Keepsakes rarely are.’
Felix looked at the little book. It was leather-bound parchment, so worn around the edges by its hundred years in the bottom of Hamnir’s pack that it was nearly oval. He flipped it open to the centre. The words were in poorly formed Khazalid runes. ‘What was her name?’ he asked. ‘The barkeep’s daughter who gave you this?’
‘Er…’ said Hamnir. ‘I… Morga? No… Margi? Drus? It will come to me…’
Felix snorted and ripped the book in two. He held out the halves to Hamnir and Gotrek. ‘There,’ he said, ‘now it is divided equally. Your grudges are at an end.’
The dwarfs gasped. Even Gotrek gaped.
Hamnir started to his feet. ‘What have you done, human?’
He grabbed for his axe. Thorgig was beside him, eyes blazing.
‘Damned interfering fool!’ shouted Gotrek, advancing on him. ‘You’ve just given him an excuse not to pay me at all!’
Felix backed away, gulping and terrified. He hadn’t considered what he would do after he destroyed the book. They were going to kill him.
Then Narin started laughing, great roaring belly laughs. After a second, Galin joined him. Gotrek and Hamnir turned on them, glaring.
‘You find this humorous?’ snapped Hamnir.
‘Will you still laugh when I knock your teeth down your throat?’ asked Gotrek, raising his fists.
Galin pointed from one half of the book to the other, trying to speak, but he was laughing too hard. Tears rolled down his cheeks and into his beard.
‘The Shield of Drutti!’ Narin gasped between spasms. He held up the charred wood in his beard and shook it at them. ‘The human has smashed your Shield of Drutti!’
He and Galin broke into fresh gales of laughter.
‘Not so funny when it happens to you is it, Slayer?’ cried Galin.
Hamnir and Gotrek snatched the halves of the book from Felix’s hands and turned on each other, eyes blazing with rage. They shook the pages at each other, stuttering and fighting for words. The ancient paper cracked and split. Bits of age-yellowed confetti fluttered to the ground like dirty snow.
Gotrek watched the falling flakes, and then glared at Hamnir. ‘When was the last time you read this book?’
Hamnir looked at the pages crumbling in his hand. ‘I…’ He snorted. ‘I…’ He e
xploded in laughter, his whole body shaking.
‘What, curse you?’ Gotrek shouted, furious. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘I never read it,’ yelped Hamnir, his eyes running. ‘It was awful!’
Gotrek stood, frozen, for a long moment, staring at Hamnir as if he was going to cut his head off. Then, with a sound like a steam engine exploding, he too began laughing, violent rasping gusts.
Narin and Galin burst into fresh laughter, but Thorgig and the brothers Rassmusson stared, unnerved and confused. Felix was just happy that they seemed to have forgotten about killing him.
‘You stubborn, little–’ Gotrek wheezed, pointing at Hamnir. ‘Never read it. Can’t remember her name. Kept it all this time just for…’
‘For the principle of the thing!’ wailed Hamnir, hysterical.
The Slayer and the prince collapsed upon each other, heads on each other’s shoulders, shaking with laughter and slapping each other’s backs.
‘Maybe…’ choked Gotrek, ‘maybe you are a dwarf after all.’
‘And maybe there’s… more to you than an axe,’ hiccupped Hamnir.
Their laughter continued for a long time while the others stood around awkwardly, but at last subsided.
Hamnir stepped back, wiping his eyes. ‘It has been a quiet hundred years not having you to argue with, Gurnisson.’
‘Aye,’ said Gotrek, ruffling his crest and snorting noisily. ‘And it’s been a relief not having you yammering on about everything under the sun night and day. I forgot there was such a thing as silence when I travelled with you.’ He shrugged. ‘Even the best things have to end.’
They began to collect their packs and pull themselves together.
Thorgig frowned. ‘So… so your grudges are cancelled?’ he asked. ‘You are no longer enemies.’ He didn’t seem to like this idea at all.
‘Aye,’ said Hamnir. ‘The human ended it, and very neatly too.’ He swung around to glare at Felix. ‘Though you owe me a book of very bad poetry, man. Or I will have a new grudge.’
‘And you owe me some very good poetry,’ growled Gotrek. ‘For this mischief, the epic of my death had better be the greatest poem ever written.’
Felix bowed, hiding a smile. That had gone better than expected. He had thought they would continue to hate each other, but they had put aside their grudge in favour of hating him more. ‘I will do my best to oblige both of you.’
Hamnir nodded, and turned to the brothers Rassmusson. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘we’ve wasted enough time here. Lead us to the Undgrin, miners.’
‘Aye, prince,’ said Ragar.
‘It’s just over there,’ said Karl, pointing across the room.
‘Nearly there,’ said Arn.
The dwarfs finished binding their wounds and shouldered their packs, picks and axes, as the trolls continued to turn to black bones in the roaring fire. Leatherbeard pulled on his repaired mask. It was crudely sewn, and didn’t fit as snugly as before, but it covered his shame, and he seemed content. When all were ready, they followed the Rassmussons across the vast room, in a more comradely mood than before. Even Galin and Narin seemed to have forgotten their grudges against Gotrek and each other’s clans, and talked of this and that. Only Thorgig remained sullen, glaring at Gotrek’s back with undisguised contempt.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They came to the Undgrin at the base of a long descending ramp, down the centre of which two large-gauge sets of cart rails were laid. The system of winches and pulleys that had lifted and lowered the carts up and down the slope still stood, dusty and rusted, but the carts themselves were gone.
When they stepped through the wide curved arch at the bottom of the ramp, Felix stared, gape-mouthed. The scale of the thing was staggering – a gargantuan tunnel at least forty feet wide and sixty high, its granite walls so polished that the dwarfs’ lamps reflected in them as if they were mirrors. A double road of rails ran down the middle of the tunnel, glinting like sword blades until they disappeared in the darkness. On either side of these were raised walkways down which ten dwarfs could have walked side by side. The floor was covered in a thick layer of undisturbed dust. No one had travelled the underground road in decades.
The Rassmusson brothers grinned at Felix.
‘Told you you’d know it when you saw it,’ said Ragar.
‘Not bad, eh?’ said Arn.
The idea that a tunnel this large had been built, not just between Duk Grung and Karak Hirn, but between almost every dwarf hold from the Worlds Edge Mountains to the Black Mountains was difficult for Felix to comprehend. ‘It’s… it’s astounding,’ he said at last.
‘This is only a tributary road,’ said Galin. ‘The real Undgrin is twice as big.’
‘Too bad Duk Grung isn’t running any more,’ said Karl. ‘The steam train ran then, taking ore up to the smelting room at Karak Hirn. We could have hopped it and been at the karak in a day.’
Ragar sighed. ‘Those were the days. Ten days at the workface, a day up to Karak Hirn for a good bath and two days of slap and tickle with Iylda, a day down again on the Undgrin and back to work.’
‘Aye,’ said Arn. ‘Two days with a lass is about the right amount.’
‘With a twelve day break in between,’ agreed Karl.
‘Mining at the karak, we see them every night,’ said Ragar, glum.
‘See them every night and they start talking about things,’ said Arn.
‘Weddings, for instance,’ said Karl.
‘And babies,’ said Ragar, swallowing.
‘Hope the chief finds a new mine soon,’ said Arn.
The other brothers nodded fervently as the dwarfs started to the right at a brisk pace, lanterns swinging from their belts. The brothers began singing an old dwarf marching song, and the others soon joined in. After the sixteenth verse, Felix started to get a headache.
‘Aren’t they worried about drawing attention any more?’ He asked Gotrek out of the side of his mouth.
‘Nothing lives down here,’ Gotrek said. ‘Too deep, no water, and nothing to eat. Not even insects.’
Felix’s wonder at the Undgrin faded quickly as the party marched along its unchanging, unending length for mile upon mile. It was the safest, least difficult leg of their journey by far – a flat, dry, smooth roadway without bends or junctions – and consequently, the most boring, at least for Felix.
Gotrek and Hamnir had no difficulty passing the time. The walls of their century of silence having tumbled down at last, reminiscences and friendly insults poured out of them in a low rumbling flood. They walked side by side, heads together, with only the occasional ‘remember…’ or ‘whatever happened to…’ audible to the rest of the company, and now and then erupting in laughter that boomed down the tunnel and back again.
Felix found himself jealous of Hamnir’s friendship with Gotrek. Gotrek and Felix had survived adventures a hundred times more desperate than those that Gotrek had shared with Hamnir, but had they ever laughed about them like this? Had they ever truly shared them? It seemed that, as much as they had argued and fought, Gotrek and Hamnir had been true friends. They had fought through the dangers they had faced side by side, not with Hamnir one step behind and to the right, as Felix did. They had caroused together, joked together and devised mad schemes together.
What had Gotrek and Felix done together? Travelled, yes, but had they conversed as they travelled? As little as Gotrek could get away with: ‘This way, manling’, ‘Come on, manling’, ‘Leave it behind, manling’, and more of the same. They had often drunk side by side, but there had hardly been more conversation there – no comradely sharing of troubles, no boisterous joking, no bantering insults. Even at his most inebriated, Gotrek kept himself at one remove from Felix. They were not friends. They were not equals. They were Slayer and rememberer, that was all.
Was it because they were of different races? Gotrek had little respect for men, it was true, but over the years he had come to count on Felix’s resilience and prowess with a sword, as well as h
is opinion. No matter how grudgingly he listened, in the end he did listen – usually. Perhaps it was being Gotrek’s rememberer that was the trouble? The Slayer was, in a way, his employer and one was rarely a true friend to one’s employee.
But when he thought about it, Felix could think of no one in all their travels that Gotrek had ever treated as a true friend – no one until Hamnir. Not even the other Slayers they had known, Snorri Nosebiter and Bjorni and Ulli. Oh, they had drunk and roared in every tavern and every town they had ever visited, but Felix could not remember Gotrek ever once pouring out his troubles to any of them, or laughing with them over old times, or even hating them as much as he had hated Hamnir before they had buried their grudge.
Then Felix knew what it was. Gotrek had known Hamnir before he was a Slayer. Whatever had driven Gotrek to take the crest had not happened yet during the years he had travelled with Hamnir. Gotrek had been a different dwarf then, a dwarf who had yet to experience the tragedy that would cause him to turn his back on his family, his hold, and whatever plans he might have made for his life, and wander the world seeking a good death.
This was why Gotrek could joke and fight with Hamnir so freely. Hamnir brought him back to a time before his doom, whatever it may have been, and made him feel like the dwarf he had been then, the young adventurer who had fought his way up and down the coast of the Old World. Those were the years when Gotrek’s heart had been open enough to allow him friends. Those days were past. Now the Slayer’s heart was locked behind walls thicker than those around the vault of a dwarf king.
Felix suddenly felt sad for Gotrek. Perhaps he even understood a little of why the Slayer sought death. To be alone, even when surrounded by your closest companions, for the rest of a dwarf’s long life, would be a misery hard to bear. If Hamnir was bringing back to Gotrek some of his lost happiness, why should Felix begrudge him? They were all likely to die at the end of this tunnel as it was. Let the Slayer live first.
The dwarfs made camp for the night around a fire of the same shiny lumps of coal that Galin had used to ignite the rail ties. Only a few of these tossed on the ground burned with the brightness and warmth of a normal wood fire, and for nearly as long. The dwarfs’ shadows moved like giants across the soaring walls of the Undgrin in the firelight, but as Felix looked left and right, down the endless underground road, he felt very small.
