by Warhammer
‘Retreat?’ said Gotrek, frowning.
He and Hamnir looked at each other, and grinned. As one, they stooped and picked up heavy rocks.
‘There is no retreat,’ said Hamnir.
‘For Chamnelac!’ they cried, as they hurled their rocks back at the stretch of broken tunnel. ‘Burn the boat!’
Both rocks bounced noisily off the top of the massive teetering block that Thorgig had nearly toppled with a touch.
The other dwarfs stared.
‘You madmen!’ breathed Felix as the block began to dip.
‘Mad dwarfs,’ corrected Gotrek.
The block’s movement slowed and it looked as if it was going to rock back to its resting position like it had before, but just then the edge of the bottom rock crumbled under its enormous weight, and the top rock slipped forwards a foot, overbalanced and slammed to the floor with a booming crash that shook the whole tunnel.
A long ripping sound echoed from above, like the tearing of some enormous starched canvas, and a whole section of the ceiling tore away, breaking up as it fell towards the floor.
‘Run!’ shouted Galin.
The first blocks smashed into the rubble like cannonballs. The dwarfs were knocked off their feet. They bounced up again and sprinted away from the collapse in a mad scramble as the tunnel shook and boomed. Felix glanced back as he ran. More and more blocks fell, pulverising those that had fallen before. The walls were folding in and toppling. He was hit in the cheek by a pebble that stung like a bullet. A rock the size of a Marienburg cheese bounced past him, narrowly missing Ragar before rolling to a stop.
Another glance. A rising cloud of dust was obscuring the wreckage and billowing after the dwarfs faster than they could run. Felix choked as it enveloped him, silting his tongue, eyes and nostrils with powdered granite. The dwarfs’ lamps were dull orange glows that bobbed around him in the grey murk, while the roar of falling rock continued to batter his ears.
Fifty paces on, they reached the edge of the dust cloud and slowed. The constant thunder was tapering off to individual smashes and booms. The dwarfs stopped.
Gotrek and Hamnir were cackling like naughty schoolboys, choking and laughing in equal measure as tears cut pink channels down their dust-caked cheeks. They and the rest of the dwarfs looked as if they had been dipped in a flour barrel. Felix was the same. They sneezed and hacked and spat, bent double from their sprint.
‘Bit close there,’ said Hamnir, giggling.
‘Aye, a bit,’ agreed Gotrek.
‘You might have given us some warning!’ said Narin.
‘Not exactly tactically sound,’ huffed Galin. ‘It’s all very well to say “no retreat”, but…’
Gotrek looked up at him, glaring. ‘There never was any retreat. This just makes it clear. The only way out is forwards.’
Hamnir sobered too. ‘There is no other way into the hold. I will make it in this way or die trying. The same as you swore to do when you volunteered for this mission. If you are having second thoughts, well,’ he laughed evilly, ‘you’re having them seconds too late.’ He glared around at them all. ‘Now, are you ready to go?’
The dwarfs nodded. They brushed the dust from themselves, squared their weapons and packs, and the party resumed its march. Felix put his red cloak on again. It was cold in the endless tunnel.
Hamnir looked back as they went, though the collapsed section was invisible in the dust and darkness behind them. He smiled grimly. ‘Birrisson will be happy – if he still lives. Hasn’t had a really big rebuilding project in centuries.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The party reached the under entrance to the mines of Karak Hirn late in the afternoon of what the dwarfs assured Felix was the second day they had spent on the deep road. Felix had entirely lost track. It felt to him as if he had spent a month without seeing the sun. He was beginning to wonder if the overworld was only a dream he had once had. There were dwarfs who lived most of their lives without seeing the sun. It gave him the chills just thinking about it.
His companions hooded their lanterns and crept cautiously towards the entrance. They weren’t about to underestimate the orcs again. A train of titanic ore carts, built to the scale of the Undgrin, sat on the tracks near the entrance, and they padded along them, using them as cover. At the end of the train, they squatted down and peered under the last cart. In keeping with the rest of the Undgrin, the opening that led into Karak Hirn was immense – a three storey high archway in the wall of the tunnel, so wide that the eight side-by-side rail lines that emerged from it, bending right and left to connect to the Undgrin lines, fitted in its mouth with room to spare. Giant stone figures of dwarfs stood guard on either side of it, thick stone hands resting on twenty-foot tall battleaxes.
A little ball of light bobbed slowly between the grim granite sentinels as a patrol of six orcs marched back and forth across the door’s breadth, carrying torches.
Hamnir was staring beyond them. Inside the door, a broad ramp rose into the interior of the mine, the eight rail lines rising with it. The top of the ramp was illuminated by a flickering orange fire glow, and roaring and rushing came faintly to their ears.
‘It appears they occupy the lower foundry,’ said the prince. ‘We will get past these six easily enough, but if the foundry hall is well lit…’
‘No need for that, prince,’ said Arn.
‘Aye,’ said Ragar. ‘There’s a stair just inside the door on the left, goes up direct to the eighth deep guard room.’
‘So the lads at the door don’t have to trek all the way around to the main shaft when they go off shift.’
‘Excellent,’ said Hamnir. ‘Then that is how we will go. The old kruk is only five deeps above that.’
The dwarfs waited until the orc patrol was approaching the right side of the vast doorway, and then tip-toed from behind the train and hurried quietly across the tunnel to hide in the shadow of the left-hand statue. They waited again as the patrol marched slowly back towards them, made their turn, and started away again. Again, Felix and the others noted the orcs’ strange behaviour – their blank, quiet demeanour, punctuated by short, howling outbursts that stopped almost as soon as they began. They reminded Felix of pitdogs being bitten by fleas.
As the orcs approached the far side of the door, Hamnir waved the others ahead. They slipped around the statue and through the archway. The Rassmusson brothers pointed to a small, black opening in the left wall. The dwarfs filed through it and up the stairs behind it, then waited once all were in, to hear if an alarm had been raised. All was quiet.
‘Well done,’ whispered Hamnir. ‘On we go. To the east end of the third deep.’
The dwarfs carried on up the pitch-black stair, walking quietly and listening intently. Felix could hear nothing except their own breathing and footsteps, but a few flights up he began to notice a faint red light travelling with them.
‘Gotrek,’ he said. ‘Your axe.’
The Slayer brought the axe up and looked at it. The runes on the head were glowing faintly. He frowned. ‘Never shone for grobi before,’ he grunted. ‘Trolls, daemons, sorcery, aye. Not grobi.’
Hamnir’s brow furrowed. ‘Could it be the dark powers behind all this? They are strong in the north now.’
Gotrek shrugged. ‘Whatever it is, we’ll kill it when we come to it.’
But the glow of the rune grew fainter the higher they climbed, and when at last they reached the eighth deep it was entirely dark again.
Orange light shone through the bars of the gate at the top of the stair. Gotrek crept up to investigate while the others waited in the shadows, weapons at the ready. He flattened himself against the wall, peered through the opening, and then tried the gate. It was locked. He cursed under his breath and grabbed the bars, pulling with inexorable strength.
‘Gotrek, leave off!’ hissed Hamnir, starting up the stairs and pulling a silver key from his belt pouch. ‘I am a prince of this hold, if you recall. I have a master key.’
Gotrek
grunted and stepped back, letting Hamnir open the door, as Felix and the dwarfs came up behind them. The guardroom was still a guardroom. Orc weapons and bits of crude armour were strewn about, and the rancid remains of an orc meal sat on the table. Dwarf lanterns flickered on the walls.
‘Filthy beasts,’ said Thorgig, ‘defiling our home.’
‘Easy, lad,’ said Hamnir.
Gotrek crossed the room and looked out into the passage beyond. ‘All clear.’
Hamnir led the party into the passage and they crept through the halls and chambers of the vast mine. The sounds of the orc occupation echoed all around them: heavy marching feet, the roar of furnaces, the battering of hammers and picks. The dwarfs were horrified by these sounds, and when they came to a gallery that looked down into a deep excavation ringed with scaffolding, where hundreds of orcs and goblins dug at the walls in dreary silence, they stared, caught between wonder and fury.
‘This is madness,’ said Narin. ‘Orcs don’t mine. They don’t smelt.’
‘Aye, agreed Galin, ‘the shiftless beasts haven’t done an honest day’s work in their whole history. They steal the iron they have from dwarfs.’
Hamnir nodded. ‘I was afraid I was going to find shackled dwarfs under the whip of orc overseers, but this is…’
‘Bizarre, is what it is,’ said Leatherbeard in wonder.
‘It isn’t right,’ said Thorgig, staring. ‘The whole business is unnatural.’
‘To think I’d live to see orcs walking around our mine like they owned the place,’ said Karl.
‘Aye,’ said Ragar, ‘a black day.’
‘We’ll chop them to pieces, brothers,’ said Arn. ‘Don’t you worry. Once we open the front door we’ll set all to rights.’
They moved on, avoiding lumbering orc patrols as they came to them, and keeping out of sight of the orc work parties that were busy digging and hauling ore and rock on every level. The dwarfs were sunk in a gloomy silence by the strangeness of the orcs and their mere presence in their ancestral mines.
Felix too was infected with gloom. Ever since they had entered the mine, a mood of dread and despair had come over him, and seemed to grow stronger with every step. His heart felt as if it were pumping ice water into his veins. He couldn’t pinpoint the source of the anxiety. The party’s infiltration had so far gone smoothly. Their mission was no more dangerous than it had always been, and yet he could hardly keep himself from sobbing. He had a sense that they were fated to fail: that some ancient doom had come upon them that there would be no avoiding. They hadn’t a hope of succeeding. He should just give up and run straight into the first orc patrol he saw and end it all.
He shook himself. What was he thinking? He had never been prone to death wishes before. That was Gotrek’s burden, not his. What was the matter with him? Was the dwarfs’ unease about the orcs’ un-orcish behaviour rubbing off on him? Was it that Gotrek’s axe had glowed? Whatever it was, he shoved the feeling away and forced himself to be calm. The last thing he needed was the dwarfs laughing at him for jumping at shadows. There were plenty of tangible dangers to worry about.
On the fourth level, they had to climb an airshaft to rise above an area crowded with orc work parties. Grated vents along its length glowed red from the rooms beyond, casting the dwarfs’ features in grisly crimson. The dwarfs peered through these grates, cursing under their breath. One looked down upon a great forge room, where a hundred bellows roared, and a hundred anvils rang under the hammers of orc smiths.
‘They are using our hammers! Our sacred anvils!’ said Thorgig, his voice rising. ‘We must slay them. They can’t be allowed to–’
‘Easy,’ said Hamnir. But he was trembling too, hardly able to tear his eyes away from the sights beyond the grate.
Galin shook his head as he stared through. ‘Axes, spears, armour, and of excusable quality too. Never seen orcs work like that.’
‘And what designs are these?’ asked Narin. ‘Never seen the like. Look like spider parts.’
The red light glittered off Gotrek’s one eye as he glared into the forge room. ‘What do they make it for? That’s the question. Looks like they’re getting ready to make war on the whole world.’
The dwarfs looked at him, eyes wide.
‘By Grimnir’s beard,’ said Thorgig. ‘What do they mean to do? Is Karak Hirn the first hold of many that they mean to take?’
‘No,’ said Hamnir, grimly, ‘it is their last.’
‘It is their grave,’ said Gotrek.
Felix shivered, the feeling of dread suddenly stronger. He shook it off with difficulty.
The dwarfs moved on, climbing the airshaft to exit into a dark chamber on the third level. Hamnir led them east, through a maze of sorting and smelting halls, forges and supply pantries. The further away from the main shaft they went the fewer orc patrols they passed, and the less populated the corridors and rooms became, until soon they seemed entirely alone. This was an old section of the mine, dug out when the hold was young, and long ago turned into storage rooms and workshops, all of which had been ransacked by the orcs and then abandoned.
Hamnir finally stopped at a large stone door in a dusty and disused corridor. ‘The door to the kruk,’ he said.
There were orc footprints in the dust before it.
Gotrek peered at the keyhole, holding a torch close. ‘Been opened recently,’ he said, ‘with a key.’
Hamnir groaned. He took a key from his ring and inserted it in the lock. The dwarfs readied their weapons. The lock turned easily and Hamnir pulled it open. The dwarfs looked in. Orc footprints ran off into darkness down a dark old tunnel, smaller and rougher than the rest of the mine.
‘Have they found everything?’ asked Hamnir, angrily.
The dwarfs entered and Hamnir locked the door behind them. They moved quietly through the old mine, glaring into the shadows as they followed the orc trail. It wasn’t too long, however, before the footprints stopped and doubled back, and the dwarfs could find no more further on.
Hamnir breathed a sigh of relief. ‘It appears that they decided there was nothing to take. Good. Now, this way.’
He led them swiftly, and with a dwarf’s unerring knowledge of where he was underground, through the maze of crossing corridors, until he stopped at a section of wall indistinguishable from any other in the kruk.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘My father’s vault is ten feet behind this wall.’
Galin stepped up and rapped on the wall with his knuckles. ‘May I take a sounding, prince?’
‘By all means,’ said Hamnir.
Galin turned to Narin, who carried a warhammer. ‘Will you strike the wall, Ironskin?’
Narin nodded and readied his weapon. ‘At your command.’
Galin took off his helmet and pressed his ear to the wall. ‘Strike.’
Narin swung, and the hammer rang off the wall.
Galin listened to the rock intently, and then moved a few yards down the wall and again pressed against it. ‘Once more.’
Narin smacked the wall again as Galin concentrated. As the echoes died, the engineer frowned and stepped back, stroking his beard and shaking his head. ‘Afraid you’ve miscalculated, prince. There’s a cavity here right enough, but it’s closer to twenty feet in.’
Hamnir groaned. ‘Twenty feet? Can we dig through that in time?’ he asked, chewing his lip.
Galin rubbed a rough palm over the wall. ‘Hmmm, sandstone, but there’s a fold of gneiss that angles through it and we’ll have to get through that first: denser stuff.’ He shrugged. ‘A seasoned miner should be able to clear a foot deep hole his own height and width through sandstone in an hour and a half, going all out, but he can’t do it for more than three hours at the most without slowing considerably.’
He looked around at the dwarfs. ‘I’ve done my share of digging, and I know these lads have,’ he said, nodding at the Rassmusson brothers, ‘but the thunderers and Slayers and hammerers might not have swung a pick in a century or so. If it’s just the four of
us, working in shifts…’ He paused, doing calculations in his head. ‘Thirty hours, probably more, to account for fatigue.’
‘I can dig,’ said Gotrek.
‘As can I,’ said Leatherbeard. ‘It was as a miner that I fought the skaven.’
‘It will still be thirty hours,’ said Galin. ‘Though, with six digging, we will be less weary when we break through.’
‘We must be faster,’ said Hamnir, his brow furrowed. ‘It is the night of the fifth day, and we told Gorril that we would open the Horn Gate at sunset tomorrow. No more than twenty hours. His force cannot wait for ten hours. The grobi will pick them to pieces as they did before.’
‘He will wait, prince,’ said Thorgig. ‘He would never abandon your cause.’
‘I know,’ said Hamnir. ‘I know.’
‘Then stop talking,’ said Gotrek, ‘and start digging.’
The Rassmusson brothers nodded, doffed their packs and their armour, took up their picks, and without any further preamble, began swinging at the wall with a practiced rhythm. It was deafening. Chunks of sandstone began to litter the floor.
‘The first foot or two will go quicker,’ said Galin to Hamnir, ‘while three can work at once, but when the hole is deeper, only one dwarf will be able to reach the face.’
Hamnir nodded and turned to Thorgig, giving him his ring of keys. ‘Cousin, go to the door and see if the digging can be heard from there.’ He looked up at Felix. ‘Go with him, Herr Jaeger. If we cannot be heard, go into the mine. We will need a barrow and beer or drinkable water, as much as you can carry.’
‘And food,’ said Galin. ‘Digging is hungry work, and we’ve eaten nearly all we brought.’
‘No food,’ said Hamnir grimly, ‘at least no meat. What grobi eat may be dwarf.’
Felix and the young dwarf set out as the others began setting up camp around the workface, laying out their bedrolls and knocking spikes in the walls from which to hang their lanterns.
When they had reached the door and closed it behind them, they stood still, listening for the clash of pick on rock.
