Masters of Stone and Steel - Gav Thorpe & Nick Kyme

by Warhammer

  It was the only luminescence in the lightless chamber, that and the magical glow from the dwarfs’ ancestor weapons. Red pinpricks shimmered like living, malicious rubies in the blackness outside the lantern’s influence… hundreds and hundreds of them. The dwarfs were surrounded and would soon be overrun.

  ‘Lock shields!’ Prince Darin had to bellow above the frantic chatter of the warring skaven and greenskins. He cut a burly skaven from groin to neck, loosing its guts across the flagstones.

  ‘Defilers!’ Magnin bellowed, incensed at the creatures’ sacrilege and trespass. He slammed a goblin in the face with his shield, shattering its cheekbone and pushing its crooked nose into its brain, before slamming his hammer into a skaven behind it. The ratman crumpled under the blow as its clavicle was reduced to splinters and much of its chest cavity crushed by the fearsome dwarf.

  In his eagerness to kill everything rushing into the hold hall, Magnin had stepped out of the circle. His mattock was smashing bloody arcs through the creatures and his almost inviolable bulk could take the meagre blade cuts of the goblins and skaven, but it left a crucial gap in the dwarfs’ defences. As a gatekeeper he was well used to tackling innumerable odds but that was usually in a tunnel with a small aperture, a bottleneck that could easily be protected.

  ‘Back into the circle, ufdi!’ shouted Hegendour, hewing a goblin in half through the torso before decapitating a skaven with the reverse swing.

  Vorgil scowled in the vainglorious gatekeeper’s direction, but said nothing. He was concentrating on fighting, and living. He wrenched his pickaxe from the top of a skaven’s skull, releasing a jet of dark fluid, and roared to vent some tension.

  Trapped within the confines of the circle, Skalf could see the creatures’ numbers were waning.

  ‘They are thinning out,’ he shouted, pummelling the kneecap of a skaven and finishing it with a blow to the temple as it collapsed, squeaking in pain. Its brawny neck jagged sideways, Skalf’s forge-born strength enough to push bone through skin. More were coming, surrounding them in an ever churning, ever chittering morass. There was a strange flow to the fight, though, as if the creatures were billowing past the dwarfs rather than pitching in to fight and kill them. It allowed a small moment of respite, which the runesmith exploited.

  Skalf muttered a word of a power and a flash of lightning arced from his vambraces. It cut a ragged cleft in the hordes still spilling through the archway and the air was immediately filled with the stench of burning meat and fur.

  As the fire-bright runes on his vambraces were fading again, he realised something.

  ‘They’re not attacking us.’

  Prince Darin half-turned as he bifurcated a goblin’s skull. His armour and tunic were wretched with gore.

  ‘What?’

  Skalf smacked a skaven with his shield. The ratman couldn’t slow his momentum and ran into it. He stomped on the fallen creature’s neck to kill it.

  ‘We are just in their way. They are more concerned with fighting each other.’

  Aside from the odd opportunistic blade thrust or cudgel swipe, the goblins and skaven weren’t making a concerted effort to kill the dwarfs. Prince Darin drew his shield back.

  ‘Hold. Shields high and together,’ he said. ‘Weather the storm.’

  Magnin was still outside the ring of dwarfs, still fighting his own battle.

  Prince Darin fixed him with an imperious glare.

  ‘Gatekeeper!’ His tone brooked no argument.

  Magnin swore but began his slow retreat to the others.

  Something moved in the horde. It was revealed as the skaven ranks thinned. Shadow-swathed and sinuous, it was no ordinary ratman.

  Skalf cried out. ‘Brother!’

  Magnin was turning, lifting his weighty shield as the ring of dwarfs parted to accept him. The assassin creature had already bypassed his defences when a silver-bolt lodged in its throat, ending it. The skaven crumpled, its green-tinged dagger mere inches from the gatekeeper’s unprotected flank.

  The arrogant self-assurance on Magnin’s face faded when he saw his saviour’s ironic salute. Raglan looked pleased with his kill as he loaded another quarrel and brought a fresh target into his iron-sight.

  The dwarfish ring of iron was still breached as a second black-clad assassin slipped into the gap, obscured by the first. Prince Darin grunted and Skalf caught the grimace on his face beneath his helmet before Hegendour decapitated the skaven. Its headless body fell back as the head caromed off into the dark. It was festooned with sharp-bladed stars, daggers and other jagged knives. Every piece of its serrated arsenal glowed with an unhealthy lustre.

  ‘My lord…’ Hegendour reached for his liege.

  ‘Hold together,’ snapped the prince, though his voice was ragged and breathy. A greyish pallor was affecting his skin already. ‘It’s a scratch, nothing more.’

  Magnin reached the other dwarfs a few seconds later and the circle of iron closed again. Heads down, the dwarfs huddled together and became as one. Each of the warriors crouched down and put their shoulders behind the insides of their shields, weathering the barrage of goblin and skaven slamming against them.

  Peering through a crack in his shield, Skalf caught glimpses of the creatures partly illuminated by Vorgil’s lantern. It was frenetic, bodies blurring by in a cacophony of screaming and clashing iron. A jet of blood and saliva lashed against his peep hole and he turned his cheek at the stink.

  One thing was certain, the greenskins and ratmen had no interest in the party of dwarfs. They were almost beneath their notice. This was a war for territory, and it was one in which the sons of Grungni had no stake.

  Behind the wall of locked shields, Skalf met face-to-face with Prince Darin.

  His eyes told the runesmith everything he needed to know about the prince’s inevitable fate. The heir of Azgal knew it too and slowly shook his head at Skalf. He was faltering, a crucial link in the dwarfs’ collective armour about to buckle. Prince Darin’s skin had turned from grey to alabaster white and was veneered in feverish, lustrous sweat.

  ‘Keep me… on my feet, lad.’

  Skalf shored up the prince’s failing body with his shoulder, supporting him. With some difficulty, he took a stoppered flask from within the confines of his robes and pressed the uncorked lip to the prince’s mouth.

  ‘Drink, my liege,’ said Skalf, as he muttered an incantation. The rune engraved on the side of the flask, hidden until that moment, blazed for a few seconds and was lost again. The short flare of power indicated the salve’s lack of healing potency. It would keep the prince on his feet, but not for much longer.

  ‘Hold!’ he croaked, and there was some defiance in the heir of Azgal’s voice.

  Gradually, the battering against the dwarfs’ locked shields lessened and the chittering diminished. Magnin was first to stick his head up and found a few stragglers left to kill that Raglan hadn’t already shot with his crossbow. The hill dwarf had come down from his perch and was commencing the grisly work of retrieving his bolts, finishing off any creatures that still lived with his hand axe. He was ripping the blade from a goblin’s skull when he caught Skalf’s gaze.

  ‘We’ll need every one before this is done,’ he said. ‘We should have gone back, brought more warriors.’

  For once Magnin didn’t chide him.

  He cast around at the corpses of ratmen and greenskins, frozen in death, their blades jutting out of one another.

  ‘Barely knew we were here,’ he muttered in a half-whisper. ‘Since when did we dawi become the vermin?’

  He grew quiet and sullen, taking no pleasure in dispatching the injured creatures that were left in the hold hall. The hill dwarf had saved his life, and that was one thing – to be rescued from death by an elf-friend was cause for dismay enough – but he knew he had also allowed the prince to be injured, possibly gravely. It was plain on the gatekeeper’s grizzled face that he was ashamed.

  Hegendour was tending to his lord when Skalf approached them.

/>   ‘Can anything be done?’ asked the hearthguard, without looking up from the pallid, gaunt visage of Prince Darin.

  There was a lump in Skalf’s throat as he replied, ‘I’ve done it, brother. There’s no greater craft I possess that can heal him,’ and in a quieter voice added, ‘the legacy of Azgal has ended.’

  ‘Dreng tromm…’ Hegendour’s lament was heartfelt. ‘I did not protect you well enough, lord.’

  Prince Darin smiled, though it was more of a grimace by the end. He slipped, fell to one armoured knee. The metal clang was doleful and echoing. Skalf and Hegendour reached out to catch him before he collapsed.

  ‘Lay me down,’ said the prince. Green-black veins ran across his almost skeletal face and neck as the skaven’s poison taint entered its final stages of virulence.

  The dwarfs did as ordered, slowly setting the heir of Azgal on the cold ground even as Raglan and Magnin gathered around to witness his passing.

  Prince Darin clasped Hegendour’s hand in a firm but desperate grip. It was the last of his strength. The hearthguard placed the prince’s axe in the other hand, bent his fingers around the haft for him. He then leaned down as the prince motioned to speak but all that escaped his lips was an agonised rasp.

  ‘And on this day so passes Prince Darin, son of Durik, last heir of Karak Azgal,’ uttered Skalf, standing and bowing his head. ‘Let it be known that this deed was wrought by the rat-kin and a heavy toll shall be exacted upon their race in grudgement of it.’

  ‘There are not enough tails and snouts in all of the Hoard Hold,’ snapped Hegendour, rising. ‘Not enough to atone for my shame…’ He removed the straps holding his cuirass together then the greaves and vambraces, the chainmail vest beneath and his tunic. The others watched in silence as the hearthguard divested his body of its armour and stood before them naked from the waist up. He cast down his helmet and though he had no lime to fashion a crest, cut a wound across his arm and used the blood to paint a rune of Grimnir upon his torso. Then he walked into the dark to make his Slayer’s Oath.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Raglan kept his voice down and one eye on the distraught Hegendour just a few feet away.

  Even Magnin, ordinarily so pugnacious, was uncertain.

  In the end, Skalf answered. ‘We go on, find the beast and kill it as the king bade us.’

  ‘His son is dead, the prince…’ Magnin’s guilt was obvious as his voice faded to silence.

  ‘We should go back,’ Raglan said again, ‘and return with more warriors.’

  Magnin bristled, finding his resolve. ‘There is no back! There is only forwards into the deeps or there is death here, in this place.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘A beardling shames you, elf-friend!’ the gatekeeper snapped, though Skalf suspected some of his anger was directed inwards.

  Realisation crept onto Raglan’s face. His shoulders sagged. There was no other choice. They were, all of them, bound to this fate now. They would find the beast, be it troll or wyvern or whatever dark monster had taken up in the ruins of Azgal, and kill it or die in the attempt. Suddenly, his prosperous mine holdings seemed very far away and the gold he had come here to claim cheap and sullied by comparison.

  ‘Into the darkness then,’ he said. ‘At least we have our guide.’

  Magnin frowned, looking around. ‘Where is that chuff-eater?’

  Skalf found him. Vorgil was kneeling just outside the hold hall in a long, wide gallery that had seen much better days. Tattered strips of cloth that might once have been banners draped the walls, fluttering like ghostly fingers as a draft from the upper levels disturbed them. Of the skaven and goblins that must have passed through it there was no sign. There was some natural light here. It came from the small chips of brynduraz, or brightstone, that the verminous creatures had had either missed or were unable to prise loose, and flickered weakly in the gloom.

  Vorgil’s face was bathed in its pearlescent glow. It made him appear cold and desolate, his humours melancholic. The lantern, now sat beside him, had faded to a dulled ember much like the lode warden’s mood.

  ‘I was wrong,’ he said, turning something over in his hands that Skalf couldn’t see with the miner’s back to him.

  ‘About what, brother?’

  Skalf reached the miner’s side and saw that Vorgil was cradling a pair of battered, slightly scorched boots. A small chain of runes was engraved in the leather and the gromril toecaps still shone when they caught the gleam of brightstone.

  ‘It was the right fork,’ he said, holding out the boots so that Skalf could see them. ‘Fendril’s zharr-klod, his fire-boots…’ Vorgil tipped them and ash poured from within to make a pile in front of him. ‘My cousin is dead.’

  The heat of the fire hadn’t lessened. It had intensified. Skalf’s arms were burning too, but from exertion and not the heady atmosphere of the forge. He had pumped the bellows, fuelling the heart flame with as much fury as he dare. Sweat lathered his body, coiling off his skin in upwardly rising motes of steam. His fingers were grimed with soot, his hammer scorched black. He struck the ever-stone again.

  It didn’t yield. There was no visible mark against it at all. Nothing.

  The hammer head was broken, split down the middle with a gaping fissure that exposed the weakness of his craft rather than the fuller’s construction. Wiping his bone-sore hands on his apron, he went to the rack to grab another.

  ‘Kruti-eating, wazzock pissing…’ he swore, seizing a particularly large and broad-headed mattock. ‘Grungni’s hairy arse…’ he went on muttering, gauging the heft of the heavier hammer.

  At a chink of metal touching metal, Skalf looked up from the blacksmith’s rack and saw the master was watching, brooding. A thick plume of pipe smoke gusted from his mouth, occluding his disapproving face from view for a moment before he spoke through clenched teeth.

  ‘It is not the tools, lad,’ he rumbled, chewing at the end of his pipe. ‘It’s you.’

  ‘We shall see,’ muttered Skalf, tightening his belt and fixing his enemy, the defiant chunk of ever-stone in his sights.

  ‘Speak the words… strike… split the karadurak if you are worthy.’

  Skalf ignored the master’s gibes directed at his back. He was breathing hard, trying to channel his wrath into a pure blow, one that would shatter the ever-stone.

  The incantation tumbled over his lips like the first fledging rocks presaging a landslide and, taking the forging mattock in a two-handed grip, slammed into the chunk of ever-stone with every ounce of strength he could muster.

  A flash of fat sparks spilled from the hammer’s head, followed by a loud crack that foreshadowed the haft splitting in half. As the mattock hung broken and useless in Skalf’s clenched fist, he looked on at the inviolable ever-stone, still untouched, taunting, mocking him…

  Skalf roared.

  He ripped a stout mallet from the rack and smacked it into the rock, then another and another. By the end of his rampage, two heavy mallets, one sledge hammer and a mattock lay ruined and shattered around the anvil where the seemingly indestructible ever-stone still sat.

  Heaving breath back into his body, near choking on the smoke and heat, his eyes watering with the effort and his muscles ablaze, he glared at the master.

  ‘It… will not… break.’

  The master glowered, his old eyes like chips of napped flint.

  ‘Either it will or you will, lad.’ He unfolded his arms, revealing the brawn in his muscles and the clanking panoply of his torques and bronze knot-bands. A gromril breastplate encased his barrel chest and there was a weapons belt attached to his waist. The scabbard of the master’s rune axe was strapped to his back, the leather-bound haft and dragon’s head pommel jutting above his armoured shoulder. ‘I am summoned to battle, beardling.’

  Skalf’s face brightened but the master’s dour expression quickly dashed his nascent hopes.

  ‘Urk and grobi amass at our southern gate, doubtless come from Azgal’s ruins. The Hoard Hold overflows wi
th their stink,’ he spat. ‘You will remain here, but upon my return I expect the karadurak to be broken.’

  Skalf’s protests were cut off before he could voice them.

  ‘You are no use to me as an apprentice if you cannot do this. You are no use to your hold as a runesmith if you fail.’ The master paused, appraising the young dwarf with a hard, unforgiving expression. It was not so dissimilar from the ever-stone, that look. ‘Wrath leads to ruin, lad.’ He gestured to the broken tools that Skalf had sundered in his rage. ‘You cannot break it that way.’

  ‘It is unbreakable, lord.’

  The master’s eyes were pitiless as he turned. He had a heavy cloak upon his shoulders, attached to his pauldrons and furs beneath his chainmail undershirt. It must be winter. Skalf had been a prisoner in the forge for months, sustained on stonebread and dregs-ale. It was a foul, brackish brew, more tar than beer, but it was fortifying.

  ‘Hammer the rock, use your craft. Split the rock,’ said the master as he was leaving. ‘You have until I return from the southern gate, Blackhammer.’ He sneered the last word, using the honorific derogatorily. It was Skalf’s namesake. He looked down at his blackened hands, the scorched and broken hammers strewn around the anvil and recognised it for what it was – a slur.

  He would restore its honour. Determined not to be found wanting, he picked up a mallet and struck again.

  It had once been a feast hall. The smell of roasting boar and cured meats, the tangy aroma of slow-cooking mountain goat and the redolence of ale should have filled this place. Only the stink of death, the slow decay of flesh and the reek of mouldering cloth lingered now. It had become a tomb, populated by revenants and the rancorous whispers of the long dead.

  A vast hearth dominated one wall, still discernible through the dust and grime. Murky shadows lurked in the ancestor faces carved in its sweeping arches and stout buttresses. Voids in the dirt in the shape of weapons suggested where ancestral heirlooms had once lived above the mantle. Stripped in the name of desperate defence, of a final stand against impossible odds, these blades and hammers were lost to vagaries of fate and the capriciousness of nature.