Masters of Stone and Steel - Gav Thorpe & Nick Kyme

by Warhammer

  Rasping wind emanated from a distant patch of thickening shadow at the back of the grand chamber. No, it wasn’t wind… It was something moving slowly, gradually uncoiling, hidden in the dense shadows where the aura of light seemed too afraid to venture.

  Running into the chamber was a mistake.

  Ralkan’s gold lust, which lay in the heart of every dwarf, bled away to nothing. The sound of heavy snorting echoed off the walls. Ralkan would have fled, had his dwarf legs allowed it. Instead he was like a statue, staring at the dark. The sulphur stink came at him again, so strong it made his eyes water, and he was certain he felt warm, wet breath against the back of his head. Whatever lay in those shadows had slipped past the dwarf somehow and was now behind him. The snorting abated, replaced by a deep, resonant sucking.

  The eyes to the desiccated head sprang open, defying all laws of nature.

  ‘Flee!’ it hissed with decaying breath.

  Ralkan turned…

  White, blazing heat blinded him. Intense pain surged over the dwarf’s body as fire ravaged it, hungrily devouring leather, metal and cloth. It flooded his senses, the nerve endings searing shut until he felt nothing; saw nothing but an empty, beckoning void. Ralkan opened his mouth to scream but fire scorched his throat, sealing it, and stripped the flesh from his bones…

  Ralkan awoke with his gnarled hand covering his mouth to stop from shouting out. He was drenched in sweat despite the cold stone chamber surrounding him. He blinked back tears, a sense memory of the vision, as his eyes adjusted to the dark. He waited a moment, listening intently to the silence… Nothing stirred. Ralkan exhaled his relief but his heart still pounded at the nightmare – no, not a nightmare. It was a portent – a portent of his doom.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The vast expanse of the Black Water stretched out in the valley below like some infinite obsidian ocean. Dense fog, cooling in the early chill, sat over it like a vaporous white skin. Even at its craggy banks, it did not stir but sat like stygian glass: vast, powerful and forbidding. In truth it was a mighty lake, massively wide and impossibly deep, set in a huge crater that yawned like a giant maw, jutting with rocky teeth. Ribbons of glistening silver fed down through clustered stones and hidden valleys, filling the chasm-like basin of the lake with the melt waters of the surrounding mountains. Its glassy surface belied, in its apparent tranquillity, what dwelled in the Black Water’s depths. Rumours persisted of ancient things, alive long before elves and dwarfs came to the Old World, slumbering in the watery dark.

  ‘Varn Drazh,’ muttered Halgar Halfhand almost wistfully.

  A smile creased the old dwarf’s features, near smothered by his immense beard braided into ingots of gold and bronze clasps, as he surveyed the vista laid out before and beyond.

  Even standing upon a ridge overlooking the deep basin of the Black Water, rugged plateaus and dense groves of pine scattered amongst the sparse landscape were visible. Wending trails and precarious passes made their way across the rock. Halgar followed one all the way up to the zenith of the mountains. Peaks, jagged spikes of snow-capped rock, weathered by all the ages of the world, raised high like defiant sentinels. This was the spine of the Karaz Ankor, the everlasting realm of the dwarfs, the edge of the world.

  Halgar smoothed his thick greying moustache absently, with a hand that had only two fingers and a thumb; the other, replete with all of its digits, rested lightly on the stout axe cinctured at his waist.

  ‘Ever am I impressed by the majesty of the Worlds Edge Mountains,’ came the deep voice of Thane Lokki Kraggson beside him, the dwarf’s breath misting in the cold morning air.

  Halgar frowned. A wisp of brooding cloud scudded across the platinum sky filled with the threat of snow.

  ‘Winter is a time of endings,’ he said dourly.

  ‘The cold will be hard pressed to vent its wrath beneath the earth; we have little to fear from its asperity,’ Lokki returned.

  Halgar grunted in what could have been amusement.

  ‘Perhaps you are right,’ he muttered. ‘But that’s the thing about endings, lad, you never see them coming.’

  ‘We are close, my old friend,’ said Lokki, for want of something more reassuring, and rested his hand, encrusted with rings etched with the royal runes of Karak Izor, upon the longbeard’s shoulder.

  Halgar turned to his lord, released from his reverie, and clapped his hand upon Lokki’s in a gesture of brotherhood. ‘Aye, lad,’ he said, all trace of his earlier melancholy gone.

  There was a strength and wisdom in Halgar’s eyes. The old dwarf had seen much, fought many foes and endured more hardships than any other Lokki knew. He was the thane’s teacher, instructing him in the ways of his clan and of his hold. It was Halgar that first showed him how to wield axe and hammer, how to form a shield wall and become a link in the impregnable mail of a dwarfen throng. Halgar still wore the same armour of those days; a thick mail coat and metal shoulder guard that displayed his clan-rune, together with a bronze helm banded by silver. The ancient armour was an heirloom, fraught with the attentions of battle. Though it was routinely polished and cleaned, it still bore dark stains of blood – ages old – that would not be removed.

  ‘I for one will be glad of the hospitality of Karak Varn’s halls,’ said Lokki, walking back from the ridge and through the long grasses, pregnant with dew, to the Old Dwarf Road. They had travelled far, a journey of some several months. First, north from Karak Izor in the Vaults – the Copper Mountain – then they’d taken a barge across the River Sol in the shadow of Karak Hirn, the Horn Hold. Crossing the spiny crags of the Black Mountains had been hard but the narrow, seldom trodden roads had led them to Black Fire Pass. They’d ventured through the wide gorge stealthily, keen not to attract its denizens, until at last they’d reached the edge of the mammoth lake. Now, just the undulating, boulder strewn foothills of roiling highland stood between them and the hold of Karak Varn.

  ‘The soles of my boots grow thin, as does my appetite for stone bread and kuri,’ Lokki complained.

  ‘Bah! This is nothing,’ snapped Halgar, his mood darkening abruptly. ‘When I was a beardling and Karak Izor in its youth, I trekked from the Copper Mountain all the way to Karak Ungor, curse the grobi swine that infest its halls.’ He spat and winced sharply as he got back onto the road, clutching at his chest.

  Lokki moved to the longbeard’s aid, but Halgar waved him away, snarling.

  ‘Don’t fret, ’tis just an itch,’ he grumbled, biting back the pain. ‘Wretched damp,’ he added, muttering, shading his eyes against the slowly rising morning sun.

  ‘Why have you never removed it?’ Lokki asked.

  Piercing his armour, and embedded deep into Halgar’s barrel-like chest, was the tip of a goblin arrow. Its feathered shaft had long since been snapped off, but a short stub of it still remained.

  ‘As a reminder,’ returned the longbeard, eyes filling with remembered enmity, ‘of the blight of the grobi filth and of the treachery of elves.’ With that the longbeard tramped off down the road, leaving his lord in his wake.

  ‘I meant no disrespect, Halgar,’ Lokki assured him as they crested another rise.

  ‘When you are as old as me, lad, you’ll understand,’ said Halgar, softening again. ‘It is my final lesson to you,’ he added, holding Lokki’s gaze. ‘Never forget, never forgive.’

  Lokki nodded. He knew the tenets of his race all too well, but Halgar drove them home with the conviction of experience.

  ‘Now, let us–’ Halgar stopped and pointed towards a shallow ravine below them, where the road went down into the basin and to the edge of the Black Water. Lokki followed his gaze and saw the wreckage of several ore chests. They were old, the wood warped and overgrown with moss and intertwined by wild gorse, but there could be no mistaking it. It was what lay next to the chests, though, that gave the thane greater pause – skeletons; bones and skulls that could only belong to dwarfs.

  Halgar descended down into the ravine, picking his way through rocky ou
tcrops and stout tufts of wild grass, Lokki close behind him. They reached the site of the wreckage in short order.

  Grimacing, Halgar crouched down amongst the skeletons. Many still wore their armour, though it was ravaged by time and tarnished beyond repair.

  ‘Picked clean by the creatures of the wild,’ said Halgar, inspecting one of the bones. ‘They have been gnawed upon,’ he added with distaste and sorrow.

  ‘There are more…’ Lokki uttered.

  Beyond where the two dwarfs were crouched there stretched a windswept highland plain, the fringes edged by shale and shingle from the lake’s shore, scattered with more bones.

  ‘Grobi, too,’ spat Lokki, throwing down a manky piece of leather as he ranged across the rugged flatland. Skeletons were everywhere, together with more broken ore chests. Preyed on by wild beasts, the battle that had unfolded there ranged far and wide, making it impossible to discern its scale or significance.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ said Lokki, going to another chest – this one empty, too.

  ‘This was a party headed from Karak Varn,’ Halgar muttered, having followed Lokki, running his fingers across old tracks.

  ‘How many?’ asked the thane.

  ‘Difficult to say,’ murmured Halgar, examining one of the wooden chests more closely. ‘Wutroth,’ he said to himself, remarking on the rare wood the chest was made from.

  Above Lokki, a thick tongue of rock hung over the grassy plain, blotting out the harsh winter sun. A narrow path, little more than a thin scattering of scree, wound up to it from the ancient battlefield.

  ‘I’m going to try and get a better vantage point,’ he said, forging up the pathway, beard buffeting as the wind swept across him.

  There upon the rise, Lokki saw the full extent of the battle that had taken place. There were at least a hundred dwarf bodies, twice that number in goblins and orcs, though Grungni knew how many others had been dragged away by the beasts of the foothills to be gnawed upon in caves. There was a large concentration of bones at the edge of the Black Water where Lokki saw Halgar crouched – dwarfs and greenskin. The dwarfs seemed to be arranged in a tight circle, as if they had fallen whilst defending fiercely. Orc skeletons spiralled out from this macabre nexus, likely the remains of those repulsed. The shattered remnants of maybe thirty chests were in evidence, too. Old tracks, made with heavy, booted feet moved away from the site, too large and brutish to be dwarfs. It had not ended well for the warriors of Karak Varn and Lokki muttered an oath.

  Returning from the overhanging rock spur, Lokki found Halgar tracing a flame seared rune on one of the chests.

  ‘Gromril,’ said the longbeard without looking up, indicating the chest’s contents. ‘Most likely headed for the High King in Karaz-a-Karak,’ he surmised, based upon the direction of what tracks still remained.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Lokki, his keen eyes picking out something amidst the carnage in the centre of the formation he had espied from above. Around one dwarf skeleton’s neck was a talisman. Its chain was tarnished, but the talisman itself remained pristine as the day it was forged. There was a rune marking upon it. Lokki showed it to Halgar. The old dwarf squinted at first then took it from Lokki for a better look.

  ‘It bears the personal rhun of Kadrin Redmane,’ he said, looking up at his lord, grim recognition on his face.

  ‘The lord of Karak Varn?’ Lokki’s tone was similarly dark.

  ‘None other,’ said Halgar. ‘Doubtless he fell guarding the gromril shipment to Karaz-a-Karak.’

  ‘He must have been dead some time,’ said Lokki, ‘and yet no word of it has come from Karak Varn.’

  Halgar’s expression grew very dark.

  ‘Perhaps they were unable to get word to the other holds,’ the longbeard suggested. ‘I saw no dawi tracks leading from this runk,’ he added, indicating the bone-strewn battlefield. ‘It is likely the fate of Kadrin Redmane is unknown to his kin.’

  Lokki looked down at the dwarf skeleton that had worn the talisman, the remains, it seemed, of Lord Redmane. Its skull had been nearly cleft in twain. A split metal helm lay nearby. He ran his finger, the skin brown and thick like leather, across the wound. ‘The blow is jagged and crude,’ he said, ‘but delivered with force.’

  ‘Urk,’ Halgar said, showing his teeth as he ground them.

  ‘I saw their tracks, trailing away from the fight. There was a mighty battle here,’ Lokki told him. ‘How old do you think these skeletons are?’ the thane asked, accepting the talisman of Kadrin Redmane back from Halgar.

  The longbeard was about to respond when he sniffed at the air suddenly. ‘Do you smell that?’ he asked, getting to his feet and unslinging his axe.

  A bestial roar echoed from the surrounding rocks. Lokki looked up and felt hot bile rise in his throat. Charging down the east side of the ravine, following the route taken by the two dwarfs, there was a group of five orcs brandishing bloodstained cleavers and crude spears. Seven more emerged from behind a cluster of boulders in the opposite direction, armed with brutish clubs. At least three more came from a second path, across the overhang of the grassy rise, bisecting the route of the other two groups, wielding wooden shields and crude, fat-bladed swords. Decked in filth-stained leather, studded with rusted iron and rings punched through their thick, dark skin, the orcs yelled and bawled as they piled across the flatland.

  ‘They have been watching us,’ Lokki realised, on his feet and moving back-to-back with Halgar as he drew his hammer and lifted his shield.

  ‘Aye, lad,’ Halgar growled, sniffing contemptuously.

  ‘Never forgive, never forget,’ Lokki snarled as the orcs met them.

  Uthor Algrimson filled his lungs with a mighty breath of icy air as he regarded the mist wreathed peaks of the distant Worlds Edge Mountains. Standing in a patch of lowland in the foothills of the mighty range, he worked out the cricks in his back and neck. The sun was just breaking the horizon as he appreciated the view, his home of Karak Kadrin to the far north a distant memory now as the shadow of Zhufbar loomed close to the west, and beyond that Karak Varn.

  The wings on the helm the dwarf wore fluttered in a highland breeze, his short cloak disturbed into small fits of movement. The errant wind cleansed him of an otherwise dark mood and committed the desperate plight of his liege-lord and father to the back of his mind.

  Below him, down a steep escarpment, the wide, dark shadow of Black Water glistened. He had emerged at its western edge, about halfway down.

  ‘A wondrous sight, is it not?’ a voice said from above Uthor. The dwarf, momentarily startled, looked up and saw a balding dwarf with a thick, ruddy beard. He was sat upon a rocky outcrop, overlooking the gargantuan lake. Smoke rings spiralled from the cup of a bone pipe pinched between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and a strange-looking crossbow rested on his lap. Perched in profile, he wore a stout leather apron over a tunic that bore the rune of Zhufbar.

  ‘Legend tells that the crater was formed by the impact of a meteorite in ages past. Nowadays, the rushing lake waters wash the ore extracted from the mines and turn great water wheels that drive the forge hammers of Zhufbar and Karak Varn,’ said the dwarf, and looking over to Uthor added, ‘Rorek Flinteye of Zhufbar.’

  ‘Uthor Algrimson of Karak Kadrin,’ Uthor responded with a nod, noticing as the dwarf faced him that he wore an eye patch.

  Rorek got to his feet and came down from the rocky outcrop. The two dwarfs shook hands heartily. Uthor noticed a ring upon his brethren’s finger was inscribed with the crest of a dwarfish craft guild.

  ‘An engineer and a tour guide,’ he said when he recognised the crest.

  ‘Indeed,’ Rorek answered, chewing on the end of his pipe throughout the exchange, seemingly unfazed by Uthor’s mild derision directed at his encyclopaedic utterance.

  Smiling thinly, Uthor released his grip. Judging by his hands, Rorek could only have been a craftsdwarf, for they were coarse, ingrained with oil and metal shavings, and he smelled like iron.

 
; ‘You are far from home, Uthor Algrimson,’ Rorek said.

  ‘I have been summoned to a council of war by a distant member of my clan, Kadrin Redmane of Karak Varn,’ Uthor replied, straightening up. ‘There are greenskins around Black Water that seek the taste of my axe,’ he added, grinning.

  ‘Then we are brothers in this deed,’ said Rorek, ‘for I too am headed to Karak Varn.’

  ‘Your crossbow is impressive, brother,’ said Uthor, who had never seen its like.

  Rorek looked down at the weapon, and cradled it in both hands so that Uthor might see it better. ‘It is of my own design,’ he boasted proudly.

  The crossbow was larger than those wielded by the quarrellers of Karak Kadrin. Uthor was well acquainted with the missile weapon, having used one during the many goblin hunting expeditions he had accompanied his father on. A dark memory sprang unbidden into Uthor’s mind as he thought of his liege-lord. He crushed it, instead focusing his attention on the engineer’s creation.

  It was well made, as was to be expected from the dwarfs of Zhufbar. A small metal crank attached to a circular base was bolted to the stock and its large wooden frame accommodated a heavy-looking metal box filled with bolts. Uthor couldn’t help but notice a similar looking box attached to the engineer’s thick tool belt, but this one contained bound up rope with a stout metal hook at one end.

  ‘It is… unusual,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve yet to declare it to the guild,’ Rorek admitted.

  Uthor was no engineer, but he knew of the traditions established by the Engineers’ Guild and of their reluctance to embrace invention. To impress such a device upon the guild could place Rorek’s tenure in jeopardy and would likely be met with scorn and disgruntlement.

  Before Uthor could say anything of this to the engineer, the sound of clashing steel and the cries of battle carried on the breeze. Words of Khazalid were discernible through the clamour of the distant melee. Rorek’s good eye grew wide as he turned towards the source of the commotion. ‘Not far,’ he said. ‘South, just beyond this side of Black Water.’