Masters of Stone and Steel - Gav Thorpe & Nick Kyme

by Warhammer

  Rubble lay about where parts of the ceiling had caved in or at the site of a collapsed column or statue. Underfoot, the mosaic slabs were chipped and cracked. A great fissure ran across the ground, cutting the dwarf helm icon that had been painstakingly rendered in the stone in two, like a jagged axe wound.

  The dwarfs kept to the fire. They encircled the small flame, muttering quietly, lost in their thoughts. It was a vast chamber but they kept to one side; the other sloped downwards badly, the foundation stones having given way and the floor sunken.

  Vorgil had said it must be on account of undermining, for no dwarf foundations would ever capitulate due to age. Such things were made to last, to outlast. Except Azgal hadn’t outlasted them: it was a ruin and one overrun with the creatures dwarfs once thought of as vermin.

  ‘No troll could have done this,’ said the miner, moribund and forlorn. He had Fendril’s boots in his hands and was turning them over and over as if trying to find some meaning in the pattern of the leather. ‘Fendril was nought but ash. Nought but ash…’

  ‘I have heard some trolls can spit fire, others that are made of stone,’ offered Raglan, unhelpfully.

  ‘It’s likely a wyvern we are hunting,’ said Magnin, scowling at the hill dwarf. ‘No troll I ever fought could breathe fire,’ he scoffed.

  Raglan got to his feet, weapons clanking together as he rose. ‘And you have fought all the trolls of the underdeeps have you, Magnin, son of Thord, bloody thane-king of all the wazzocking gatekeepers, eh?’

  ‘Down, elf-friend,’ the other dwarf replied, paying him no mind. ‘Seems imminent and certain death suits you. At least you are bolder.’

  ‘Nought but ash…’ muttered Vorgil.

  ‘Daled Stormbreaker ventured into these deeps to kill a drakk,’ said Skalf, shivering despite his furs and cloak. All eyes turned to regard him, glittering like dead jewels in the lambent firelight.

  ‘Speak up then, lad,’ said Raglan, sitting down again. ‘Tell us of this hero. What became of him?’

  Magnin nodded, eager to have his mind occupied by something other than guilt and fatalism. He gestured for Skalf to go on.

  The runesmith cleared his throat. ‘My master told me of him once. He was a great warrior-thane and treasure hunter, an orphan of sundered Karak Drazh, the Black Crag. He wore a gilded helm of griffon feathers. His axe carried runes of sharpness and beast-slaying from before the War of Vengeance, when our race was at its peak. His shield, fashioned from drake scale and banded gromril, could turn aside any flame and endure any blow. It was Daled that slew the urk chief, Gargut, and mounted its head on the spiked wall of the greenskin’s fastness; he who banished the blood-fiend of Hel’s Talon and destroyed the Crooked Tooth grobi tribe of Death Pass; he who vanquished the serpent-wyrm of Black Water.’

  Skalf’s face darkened as he recounted the next part of the saga. ‘But these deeds did not prepare him for what he faced in the cold dark of Karak Azgal. When the southern holds fell, Daled led an expedition into the mountains. He hoped to make his fortune and restore some of the lost heirlooms of the hold but he did not return from the journey. There are… rumours of the beast he encountered in the long blackness, of the drakk that finally ended his legacy.’

  ‘I had hoped for something cheerier, beardling,’ said Magnin. ‘Perhaps with a song or bawdy ditty.’

  ‘Graug…’ whispered Raglan, daring not to speak the name aloud, as if doing so would somehow summon the creature from the depths.

  ‘A wyvern or troll could not do this,’ said Vorgil, offering up the boots as evidence of his words, ‘they could not burn my cousin down to his boots like kindling!’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ hissed the hill dwarf, his nervous gaze alighting on Hegendour. The hearthguard was sat apart from the rest, eschewing the warmth of the fire on self-punitive grounds. Skalf noticed that despite his lack of cloak or armour he did not tremble in the cold, not even slightly. He was as still and unfeeling as the dead rock surrounding them. Poor, dead Prince Darin was laid next to him in repose atop a bier of shields the dwarfs were using to carry him with.

  Despite the impracticality, Hegendour had insisted upon it.

  Vorgil would not be silenced. He got to his feet, brandishing the last of Fendril’s trappings like an accusation.

  ‘Burned,’ he cried, ‘to his boots!’ Spit and phlegm speckled his quivering beard. ‘It was a drakk, it could be nothing other.’

  A deep, echoing voice came from the darkness outside of the fire’s glow.

  ‘It is no drakk,’ said Hegendour. ‘It cannot be.’ The thick muscles in his back bunched as he got up. He rotated his shoulder blades, stretched the stiffness from his neck and arms. ‘We’ve rested enough. It’s time to move on and find this monster.’

  ‘Why cannot it be a drakk, brother?’ asked Vorgil, unafraid of the slayer’s distemper.

  Hegendour turned and his granite face was creased with repressed anger.

  ‘Because our king told us it was not! Are you saying he’s a liar? Graug is slain. Its pelt adorns my liege-lord’s back. It is a troll or wyvern, and we shall kill it.’

  ‘What if it was spawn?’ asked Skalf. He was the last of the dwarfs to stand, and maintained eye contact with Hegendour as he did so. The former hearthguard had changed over the last few hours, become mercurial and unpredictable. Many who took the Slayer Oath were affected in the same way. It made them dangerous.

  Skalf took a moment to slow his racing heart.

  ‘The king is no liar,’ he said carefully, ‘he did indeed kill a drakk but what if it was not Graug? What if the hide he had fashioned into his cloak was actually kin to the beast, its young?’

  The chamber was filled with a sudden, tense silence as Hegendour considered the runesmith’s proposal.

  ‘It would explain much of what we’ve seen,’ Skalf added.

  Hegendour’s face was almost unmoving.

  ‘It is a troll, nothing more.’

  Hefting his axes, the Slayer kneeled to speak a few words to Prince Darin and then moved on.

  Spirits low, the dwarfs followed him, Magnin and Raglan taking up the bier of shields and their regal burden strapped to it.

  ‘Nought but ash,’ muttered Vorgil. There were tears in his eyes for Fendril as he stoked up the lantern. Its wan glow described the gauntness in his features.

  ‘I know, brother,’ said Skalf, patting the distraught miner’s arm. He hoped that Hegendour was right, that it was just a troll grown large and terrible over the years spent in the darkness, but he doubted it.

  As the dwarfs picked their way down the slope, careful to avoid the deepest pitfalls, a sense of doom settled upon them. It was one they could not shake.

  The master was still, his broken breastplate unmoving, his beard matted with blood. Even in death he wore a scowl. Now lying upon the anvil, he had been brought down to the forge in order for Skalf to see him and make any final peace or oath he needed to.

  A pair of hefty looking anvil guards stood to either side, ready to bear the rune lord to his final rest in the tombs of the hold.

  Though no one had told him one way or the other, Skalf assumed the battle at the southern gate had gone badly. From what little he had heard, the urk and grobi were much more numerous than the dwarfs had thought. What had begun as a fight to cleanse the outer slopes of greenskins had turned into a desperate retreat and the sealing of the southern gate indefinitely. As the thane’s own clan warriors, the Stonefists, had kept the armoured urk at bay, Skalf’s master had wrought the runic locks upon the gate. Alas, he had failed to close them before an urk chieftain stove in his chest with an axe blade.

  The wound was mortal, and the priests of Valaya were summoned shortly after the master shut the gate with the last of his strength and collapsed.

  ‘You are Skalf?’ asked a hammerer, one of the king’s retainers. He and four other warriors had arrived shortly after the dead master. All were thickly armoured with full-faced ancestor helms and double-headed matt
ocks. ‘Of the Blackhammer?’

  Skalf looked down at his soot-stained hands and the blackened head of the forging mallet he was still dumbly carrying. He nodded mutely, one eye still on his master’s recumbent body.

  ‘The king has summoned you, or rather he had summoned your master but since he has passed to Grungni’s halls…’

  ‘It falls to me to honour his oaths,’ Skalf said for him.

  The hammerer nodded, approving of the beardling’s outward courage and sense of duty. ‘Are you skilled, young Skalf?’ He appraised the thickness of the runesmith’s arms and the length of his beard. ‘Did your master impart enough of his knowledge before he was slain by urk and grobi filth?’

  Skalf’s ire rose at the mention of the greenskins, but he kept his anger checked.

  ‘He taught me the craft and I have forged a master rune under his tutelage.’

  ‘Good, you will have need of such arcane knowledge in the deeps of Azgal.’

  With a clanking refrain from his armour, the hammerer was turning and beckoning the runesmith to follow when Skalf spoke up.

  ‘Are we to venture beyond the upper halls then?’

  ‘You are leaving this settlement behind, lad, and the upper halls of the hold proper too.’

  Skalf quickly gathered his trappings and knelt to make a final imprecation to his dead master, nodding to the anvil guards that he was finished, before hurrying after the retinue of hammerers.

  ‘To what purpose… er…’

  ‘Belgrad,’ said the hammerer, giving his name, ‘and your purpose is with the Prince of Karak Azgal no less. A beast, lad, the king has a mind that it should be vanquished.’

  Skalf swallowed, trying to mask the sound of his fear behind a faked cough.

  Belgrad looked over his shoulder, not fooled. ‘Don’t worry, beardling, it’s only a troll I am sure. Nothing to a seasoned runesmith like yourself.’

  Nodding, hoping, Skalf gave one last look to the forge and his master before it was lost to sight. The anvil guards were lifting him reverently. In his wake, Skalf could see the other anvil and the ever-stone gleaming dully. It was untouched, unbroken.

  ‘Yes, nothing,’ Skalf answered, leaving the forge and his master behind.

  There was dirt and grit in his mouth. It clogged his beard, made him want to choke. Darkness engulfed him and there was blood on his forehead, a long, warm trail of it that ran down his cheek and welled around his eye. He’d lost a boot and felt the scrape of rock against his stockinged foot like knife blades.

  ‘Here!’ The shout came from overhead. It sounded muffled, indistinct, but he could hear the words well enough. ‘It’s the beardling… he’s alive.’

  A pinprick of light resolved somewhere above him. The aperture grew larger and Skalf realised he was partially buried alive under a mound of fallen earth and rock. He also remembered what had happened and the tunnel collapsing in on them.

  Magnin’s smiling face regarded him as he hauled Skalf to his feet again. The gatekeeper had lost his helmet and his armour was battered, but otherwise he looked little the worse for wear. Raglan was nearby and cast one of the rocks he’d been heaving loose to one side as he went over to them. Unlike the gatekeeper, the hill dwarf was solemn.

  ‘Vorgil is dead,’ he told them, ‘crushed, along with Prince Darin’s body. At least it is interment of a sort.’ Raglan held up the zharr-klod, Fendril’s boots, in one hand and the runic lantern in the other. ‘I found these flung just beyond the rubble.’

  ‘He was trying to save them,’ said Skalf, taking the boots as Raglan offered them. The runesmith’s own, at least the one that remained, was battered. ‘By Valaya’s golden cups, they fit,’ he added as he changed out of the old pair and into the new. There were warm and made him feel lighter, bolder.

  ‘Looks like the lode warden’s lantern did not escape as intact,’ said Raglan. It flickered and faded in his other hand, its magical embers weakening. After each stuttering flare the surrounding darkness closed a little tighter, like a noose. ‘Can you reinvigorate it, lad?’

  Skalf examined the artefact carefully. His skull was thumping and he gingerly touched a bulbous contusion just above his brow, wincing. After a few moments, he shook his head.

  ‘Without the specific Khazalid used to invoke its light, there’s little I can do.’ He muttered a few words of power he did know, tracing the runes with his dirt-encrusted fingers and igniting them with a dimming flame. The embers grew brighter but not by much.

  Raglan nodded and went to find a way out of the half-collapsed chamber. Even with the lantern light it was hard to see much of anything. The air was choked with dust, slow to disperse in the close confines of the underdeep. Collapsed stone made footing treacherous and there were a great many cracks and crags.

  ‘Be wary,’ Magnin called after him, ‘there is a chasm not far. I almost fell into it.’

  ‘Is it deep?’ asked Raglan.

  ‘Deep enough. I couldn’t see the bottom but there was a stench emanating from its bowels, sulphurous and acerbic.’

  They exchanged a dark glance between them but said nothing further.

  The mood between the two grudge-holding dwarfs had improved as their overall situation worsened. It was the dwarf way, to find solidarity through adversity. Skalf was heartened by it but he was also acutely aware their party was now down to three and they had yet to find the beast. He wondered about the chasm.

  ‘It is a drakk then?’ asked Magnin as Skalf was dusting off his tunic and adjusting his belts.

  ‘Yes,’ Skalf replied. ‘It is Graug, I am certain of that now. It meant to kill us in that cave-in. Perhaps it even thinks we are dead and will return later for its feed.’

  ‘Then we can use that to our advantage, sneak up on the monster in its lair. It cannot be far, such beasts do not often roam.’

  Skalf was rebinding the leather strap around the haft of his hammer, about to agree with the gatekeeper when an awful hollering resolved on the dust-thick air.

  ‘Grobi,’ hissed Magnin, his mattock in hand. ‘Elf-friend, you’re needed.’

  Raglan returned swiftly as the hollering grew to a shrieking roar.

  ‘Urk, too, by the sounds of it.’

  The hill dwarf had lost his crossbow when climbing out of the rubble; the wooden stock, even though it was fashioned from stoutest wutroth, had broken. It was part of the reason he still lived. On Raglan’s back, it had acted as a brace when the rocks fell. He made do with his hand axes instead, one gripped in each fist as he eyed the dark.

  The lantern’s light was waning.

  Fissures and crevices, unseen by the dwarfs at first, came alive with those same malignant rubies as before. Glittering and blinking in anticipation of the kill, the blood-red gems grew larger until they finally became eyes and the greenskins emerged into the half-light cast by Vorgil’s lantern.

  Diminutive but cruel-faced goblins presaged a horde of much larger orcs, draped in skaven pelts. Many had fangs strung around their brawny necks on threads of sinew. One particularly massive and thickly armoured brute wore a skaven thrall-leader’s head on either hulking shoulder. Despite their earlier gains, it looked as though the ratmen had lost the war for territory.

  ‘Get behind us, lad,’ said Magnin, backing off.

  Skalf had never seen the gatekeeper retreat, it was almost anathema to one of his conviction, but the greenskins were many.

  A hand axe buried in the wretch’s face arrested the charge of the first goblin. It was smacked off its rag-swaddled feet by the force of the blow and trampled into the dirt as others followed.

  They swarmed, spilling over the crags and upon the dwarfs in cackling droves.

  Mattock swinging, Magnin carved a swathe into the creatures and sent broken bodies tumbling. Down to his last axe, Raglan chopped at skulls and necks with the perfunctory ease of a woodcutter. Lopping heads, he growled at the runesmith.

  ‘Find the beast, lad. Into the chasm. There’s nothing left here but death.’
>
  Skalf’s reply was cut short by a grunt from Magnin. The gatekeeper snapped the end off the spear lodged between his greave plates and pummelled its wielder with a gauntleted fist.

  ‘Back!’ he snarled, biting back the pain through clenched teeth.

  Raglan hacked down another goblin, cleaving open its torso and exposing bone.

  ‘There is no back,’ he replied, cutting into another.

  Greenskin corpses encircled them, noisome and rank, in an ever-increasing mire.

  ‘Then hold,’ said Magnin, ‘back-to-back and make your stand with me.’ He turned and spat at Skalf. ‘Go now, lad, into the chasm.’

  Skalf nodded, and stumbled towards the back of the benighted corridor, feeling his way in the gloom so far from the lantern. The end of the tunnel was sealed shut by fallen debris but he found the jag of split stone Magnin had urged him towards. It was wide enough for a dwarf, but barely. And it was abyssal deep, almost bottomless.

  As he delved into the darkling chasm Skalf’s last image was of Magnin and Raglan, their backs together, cutting down goblins as the orcs came on. The lantern’s light was dying, soon it would be black. Skalf descended below the lip of the crevice, finding hand and footholds through touch and blind experimentation.

  He didn’t hear the screams, or at least he chose not to acknowledge them.

  It was hot in the narrow darkness of that cleft, jagged too. He swore as a jutting crag cut open his tunic and drew blood. And the stench. It was potent, enough to make his eyes water. Reaching for a fresh stub of rock, he slipped. Blood-red stars flashed before his eyes and he felt a deeper blackness claim him, all sound slipping into its endless, well-like depths, as he fell.

  Pain brought him back around briefly, a stab like a dagger thrust in his back then one in his arm as his formless attacker turned frenzied. Then all was silence again and feeling fled from Skalf’s body…

  He heard dwarf song, the deep lament of the brewmasters, the sound of pipes and the beating of drums. He smelled rock and earth, roasting meat and the waft of ale. Warmth spread across his body and he felt the presence of others nearby. A place was made for him at the table, though it was not yet earned. The aromas changed just as the slowly resolving impression of the feast hall faded. They became acerbic, biting and unpleasant but there was something else too, something that had awakened him, something that was calling…