This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world’s ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.

At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.

But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering Worlds Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever near,the Empire needs heroes like never before.

Rain and thunder lashed the broken back of Karak Gatt. The old mountain fastness was hunched and sodden, its gates, its towers, and even the bulk of its glyph-covered grey walls lost behind the downpour. Spitting torches threw a red glow from the high wall and onto driving sheets of rain. The red-lit outlines of night goblins capered along the parapet, black cloaks wet and heavy, loosing and losing a storm of black-feathered arrows to the gale. Their voices whipped out after them, strangled cries circling the fortress like crows around a beggar’s back. And though in the mud of its foundations a battle was being fought, the old ruin of Karak Gatt sank deeper into its grey cloak of misery, offering nothing to either side. It had already suffered a thousand years of goblin occupation.

It would suffer no more.

In the deep mud of the scarp the torrent broke on winged helms, drumming against the buckles, studs, and long iron coats of the dwarfs. Wide wooden shields that just moments before had been turned to the walls of Karak Gatt now presented an unbroken wall to the slope below. Oaths and orders were shouted, the war cries of the charging orcs driven back into their snarling faces by the strong arm of the wind. Behind the main dwarf line quarrellers squinted into the rain and fired blind. They could hardly miss. The greenskin hordes flooded the foothills, wading through the slurry to hurl themselves onto the dwarfs’ shields. Heavy scimitars struck rings from mail. Steel axes with gold inlay carved orc flesh, the pounding rain causing their thick blood to run like stout.

The dwarfs’ position on the high ground was good, but even the brashest shortbeard could see that their prospects were grim. The throng was outnumbered ten to one, and perhaps by more even than that, for the rain hid all but the lathered tusks and heaving shoulders of the closest thousand. Even with those odds the host might have prevailed, but the orcs had proven unusually canny, waiting until the dwarfs’ attack on Karak Gatt was underway before making their own move. Luckily they were still orcs, and had launched their attack moments too soon. Had they come after the dwarf line had marched into bow-range of the fortress then things would be looking very different.

As it was it was merely grim, but not yet demanding of Thorgrim Grudgebearer’s axe.

The High King crossed his gromril-plated arms over his chest as the rain battered his unflinching brow. He was High King of the dawi and, as such, he was nothing if not patient. From his vantage behind the quarrellers, he had as full a view of the battle as it was possible to get. It was not quite equal to that afforded by the Throne of Power, but his seat had been deployed with the siege lines and the ground was too treacherous for his throne-bearers to manoeuvre it back down. Grimnir’s blessing in disguise, perhaps. The storm already made it hard enough to hear the reports that his thanes and advisors shouted into his ear without his needing to be seated ten feet above their heads.

‘The left flank is taking a beating, majesty!’ The thane who spoke did so in a pitched growl purposed to carry across the gale. Mail, tunic and thrashing black beard, the dwarf was soaked through to his undergarments. He raised an arm adorned with silver bracers and torques and pointed down. ‘I don’t see them holding much longer.’

The biggest and most heavily armoured orcs in the field were gathered on that flank and driving up the scarp as one. They were behemoths even amongst their own kind, armour splashed with a red mark that bore a crude semblance to a fang. Thorgrim took it in at a glance. The refused flank was an atypical tactic for an orc. Any tactic was atypical for an orc. His respect for their leader’s ability grew, albeit grudgingly. Had it been any but the Akrund clansdwarfs opposing them, the battle might already have been lost.

‘I see Lord Duregar commanding on the left,’ Thorgrim bellowed, rain filling his mouth the moment he opened it. ‘Where is Prince Belegar? His warriors should be supporting his cousins.’

‘He would not come,’ grumbled a second lord named Ekrin Sourback. He wore a world-weary expression whose pallor was accentuated by the rain that coursed through the lines to soak his grey beard to his mail. ‘He insisted that he could crack the grobi’s gates.’

Without turning to face either of them, Thorgrim snorted. ‘And if he had insisted that he and his clan could tunnel to the Ancestors’ Hall would you have taken him at his word? Command him to his place, Sourback, and remind him that no dawi has ever been thrice entered into the Dammaz Kron in a single day.’

The thane’s jaw clenched, then he bowed stiffly, turned around, clasped his helm to his head against a sudden surge of wind, and bent into the rain for the uphill run.

‘Rodri,’ Thorgrim shouted once the lord was gone, naming the big, black-bearded thane. ‘Has Balkinsson yet turned his cannons from the walls?’

‘He has,’ the thane yelled back, hooding his face under one mailed ham of an arm. ‘But the powder is wet and he says fifteen minutes before he can dry enough of it to take a shot.’

Thorgrim tightened his arms about his chest and glowered. The moment the rain eased sufficiently for the Dammaz Kron to be re-opened then Engineer Balkinsson would feel the wrath of the High King’s quill! Those fifteen minutes were going to prove costly. The left flank was being ground back, shedding warriors with every step. One orc carried the battle ahead of the others, massive scimitar cleaving through the Akrund shield wall with a strength that was simply staggering. He was a head and a half taller than the muscle-bound brutes that clamoured after him, and clad in as much iron as any single gateway of Karaz-a-Karak. His bare cheeks were daubed with that red fang mark. And where he fought, dawi died. Thorgrim’s fingers clenched over his bicep’s gromril casings.

He would say this for the urk: they made it easy to identify their leaders.

‘Give the word,’ said Rodri, massaging his axe blade in the palm of one mailed gauntlet. ‘I’ll lead the thunderers down, flank their flank.’ He spat rainwater from his whiskers. ‘They’ve sat out to now and I’ll bet they’re as keen as I.’

‘No,’ said Thorgrim, breaking his granite stillness at last to shake out his sodden mane and reach for his starmetal rune-axe. The Axe of Grimnir was as heavy as a weapon responsible for so many millennia of death had a right to be. It was two-bladed, veined with glowing runes, and a mightier blade did not exist anywhere in the Karaz Ankor. ‘Hold them here until the urk break.’

The thane arched one sodden brow.

‘They will break,’ said Thorgrim, ‘when they see their leader fall.’

Raising the great rune-axe high, Thorgrim turned to signal the small throng of reserves to advance just as a splintering peal of wooden thunder rolled down from Karak Gatt. He lowered his axe, squinting up into the sheeting rain. Dwarfish cries sounded from above, and then Ekrin Sourback was slipping and sliding downslope, waving his arms with uncharacteristic vigour and shouting.

‘The gates! My liege, Belegar has broken them.’

For a moment, Thorgrim felt the threat of a smile. Balkinsson’s artillery had made more of an impression on the earth into which their carriages had sunk than on the goblins’ fortifications.

‘With what?’

‘I-I’m not sure.’

‘Then we must press the firebrand for the full tale once the grobi have been routed from Karak Gatt!’ Again, Thorgrim thrust his axe into the rain, but this time started backwards up the hill, raising his off-hand to wave the throng back. ‘Withdraw! Back to the castle.’ Along the battle line, horn-blowers sounded the order and, step by deliberate step, the shield wall began to retreat.

‘What of the urk?’ said Rodri. The thane spoke of the collective, but his troubled look was for their giant warboss. ‘This one smells of trouble.’

‘First dig the hole, then pull its riches,’ said Thorgrim. ‘Karak Gatt is the first strong point on the road to Karak Eight Peaks. I swore to Belegar that I would help him retake it, and on this day nothing else matters.’

‘Do you truly believe that this quest of Belegar’s has the faintest hope?’

‘Does it matter?’

Rodri grunted. The certainty of failure was scant deterrent to a dwarf. ‘But to refound a dwarfhold so vast, and with scarce a hundred warriors to his name.’

‘His successes will bring more,’ said Thorgrim. ‘And this I do believe; Belegar Ironhammer is as persistent as he is driven. He will succeed where others fail for fear of the attempt.’

The thane nodded grudgingly.

‘But signal to the rangers just the same,’ said Thorgrim. ‘Find out where this urk dwells and see him dealt with.’ As he watched, the massive orc chieftain had shouldered through the Akrund line, taking down three dwarfs with one great sweep of his blade, then bellowing frustration as the warriors hastened their retreat. Rain beat off his dark green flesh, coursing around hard red eyes and streaming from his tusks as he howled, thumping his chestplate as though it were a drum.

‘I want this to be the last I hear of this Gorfang Rotgut.’

Fifty-six years later…

King of the Eight Peaks

Let it be recorded that upon this day Douric Grimlander, honoured reckoner of Thorgrim Grudgebearer, High King of Karaz-a-Karak, the Karaz Ankor, and all the holds therein, did return from emissary to Karak Eight Peaks. More than once was his journey blighted by grobi and urk. May the wrath of Grimnir stalk them through the very halls within which they squat! For this crime are nine urk heads (the number that Douric did dispatch) and one ounce of azril (that being thrice the worth of his expended quarrels) added to King Belegar’s tally of shame. Douric does relate Belegar’s rebuff to his just demands.

Let all again lament the fate of the Oxentongue clan.

Great was their honour in purveying the goods of Everpeak, the seventeenth such expedition to the needy of Karak Eight Peaks. Wrenching was their grief when but one returned. Grobi did he report; an ambush in the hills of the Uzkul Kadrin. May his beard one day rival Grungni’s own, for he did flee with much wealth. On his return did Bagrum Oxentongue swear Grimnir’s oath and depart to the north. A full account of that fell day is elsewhere recorded, but let all know that Belegar does renounce responsibility for this act and, on the oath of Reckoner Douric Grimlander who does swear Valaya’s truth, makes claim that the Oxentongues did fall to ambush but on that side of the pass under governorship of Karaz-a-Karak.

At this petition was the High King justly aggrieved. For such bare-faced cheek, no less is demanded than a full admittance of all wrong, written in the hand of King Belegar himself.

Until such is received, let the beggars of Karak Eight Peaks buy their own grain.

– High King Thorgrim Grudgebearer
The Dammaz Kron of the
Karaz Ankor

‘Waaagh!’

The cry bulled through the slender trees that studded the vale of Death Pass, startling off those birds too dull-witted to have already taken flight. The boar boys raised their voices and beat the air with their axes, their exhausted mounts adding ragged snorts as they crashed through the forest.

Bograt swung his choppa through a hanging branch, drew breath to issue another inspiring roar, then took a whiplash branch in the teeth. He swung back for it but his boar, Stompa, had already carried him well past and another branch thwacked him across the side of his iron skullcap. The bronze crescents that dangled from the brim jangled gaily. His bosshat impressed the runts, but by Gork it riled him right up. If Skarsnik didn’t insist… Spitting needles, he hugged close to Stompa’s back, clinging on as branches lashed across his back and snapped off his good mail. Skarsnik knew how to treat his bosses right. Not like the brute he used to work for. Stiff bristles poked him in the eye. The smell of pig filled his own pug nose, shoving out the humid fug of pine.

Bograt kicked in his heels to urge the beast even faster. What he got was an ill-tempered snort and a swing of a yellowing tusk that spattered his arm with spittle. Even under the intermittent shade of the canopy it was hot, and the long chase from the Badlands had left the beasts blowing hard. Bograt couldn’t even remember now how it had all started.

Except he’d been the one doing the chasing.

There was a cackle of high-pitched laughter away to the left and an arrow zipped overhead. Its crooked shaft sent it through a crazy flight before it thunked into a nearby trunk. Flat to Stompa’s back, Bograt looked through the flash of trees. Something dark and predatory loped through the dense brush, keeping easy pace with the boars. The sound of panting. Poorly flighted arrows spat between the leaves.

‘Gorgut!’ he roared, loud as he could manage with a mouthful of obnoxious boar as arrows winged in all directions. ‘Gorgut, you worthless zogger. You is meant to be on the soft-hand side!’

The trees’ answer came by way of an arrow that would have spit clean through Bograt’s eye had it not veered upwards at the last second to crash through the canopy. High-pitched voices jeered from the shadows. Bograt caught a glimpse of red fabric before its wearer’s mount swept ahead, deeper into the forest.

Taking a good handful of Stompa’s neck, Bograt lifted his face into the branches, bunched his massive shoulders and, with a roar, hauled the boar rightward. A derisive shower of arrows threatened his back. One sank a finger length into Stompa’s flank, but the boar didn’t seem to notice. Bograt chanced a look over his shoulder. Rustling foliage and excited yips sounded from all around. They were surrounded, but their pursuers still feared Bograt enough to not get too close. That wouldn’t last. His boar-boys were tough, but a long chase and a high sun had taxed even their brutal stamina.

He was still looking backwards when Stompa burst from the forest into punishing sunlight and almost body-slammed the red-painted chassis of a chariot that had been hidden behind the foliage until then. There was a startled bark, a snap of wolfish teeth, a thrusting spear that got snarled in Stompa’s shaggy coat, and then the chariot veered right. Two wooden wheels clattered over the dried rock of the wide dwarf road as it pulled away. A trio of goblins clutched the side of the chassis and hurled abuse. Their weight tipped the vehicle onto its left wheel leading the driver, seated and strapped, to yell at them to sit down and shut up. He whipped the two wolves that were yoked to the chariot and they raced along the ancient road, trailing curses and hopeful arrows. The banner pole at the rear of the car bent perilously back as the chariot sped away. A white flag bearing a red tooth snapped out at the rear.

Stompa snorted, thundering over the hard earth and, as they had done all day, Bograt and his boys gave chase. The sun was merciless, hot on his back and bright in his eyes. He scanned the rugged track and the pine forests that climbed away from it to the peaks on either side. The sky was clear blue. Aside from the chariot, rattling over the road ahead, there was no sign of their pursuers.

Keeping two strong hands on Stompa’s neck, he looked behind him, just as the last of his boar boys punched clear of the tree line. A grey wolf bounded after him. A pair of goblins was mounted on its back, kitted out in leather riding gear decorated with scalps, wolf-tails, feathers and sparkly bits. The first was saddled behind the wolf’s shoulders, both hands to the reins and leaning forward to egg it on. The second surfed upon the wolf’s haunches, strapped within the beast’s harness and swaying with the glide of its muscles. Wide-eyed, intoxicated, and clearly mad, the goblin screamed and laughed at the same time as he drew back on his shortbow and loosed without pausing long enough to aim and rarely even caring to reload.

Little wonder the boar boys rode on unscathed.

Dozens more wolves loped from the tree line, hot on the tail of the first. Ahead, the charioteers wheeled their car about for another pass.

‘Come and get yourself a proper hiding, you runts!’ Bograt yelled as the chariot closed, then swept past, unleashed a hail of arrows, and rumbled off. An arrow hit him between the eyes where his skullcap was open and bounced off. He gave a bark of pain, then twisted around to yell after the receding chariot. ‘Do you know whose I is? I is with Skarsnik you grot-headed zoggers. I squishes uppity runts like you.’ One of the charioteers braved the bucking car to drop his trousers and shake his bare green cheeks. His companions hooted at this rare wit, slapping the goblin’s rear and screaming lewd suggestions that in some way had to do with their thrusting spears.

Bograt didn’t get it.

He growled and urged Stompa on. This was all the stupid stunties’ fault.

It was them that thought laying siege to Black Crag would be fun. And for a few months it had been, but now Death Pass was stuffed with tribes from so far afield that the idiots didn’t know the rules. This lot probably didn’t even know who Skarsnik was. He leered, eyeing the familiar terrain ahead, black mouth filled with cracked yellow teeth.

Just a little further. Then the runts would learn.

Here and for the most part, Death Pass was wide enough to lose a tribe of ogres. Thick pine forest crowded the old dwarf road while the slopes beyond fought it out for the clear sky, the biggest coming out on top in shoulders and humps and snowy peaks. And all of that well before the proper business of mountains began further north and south. At narrow points the stunties had built forts, places where now the greenskin tribes warred with bandits and beastmen and with each other for control of the pass and the gold they could extort from travellers dumb enough or rich enough to dare the journey. Just ahead, the trees stubbled down to the scrubby heathers and moss that pocked a narrowing cleft.

Orcs called it The Tight Spot.

A sprawling pair of ruined watchtowers stood either side of the chokepoint with, the sun in his eyes, what looked like a slender black wall between them. The tower on the right was missing a roof and most of its upper levels, lost in the rockfall that had swept over in ages past and now lay in a lichen-covered jumble around it. A giant red banner flapped from the battlements of the second tower. The flag’s colour gave Bograt pause, but only for a moment. Some stupid runt had obviously put up the wrong flag by mistake. The structure had been burned, sacked, torn down and rebuilt a hundred times, most recently by hands that compensated for their lack of skill with a crude imagination and dauntless enthusiasm. Ramshackle turrets and bastions protruded from the tower like the swollen joints of an aged troll. Some of the damage was just days – perhaps hours – old.

It looked like stunty damage too. He could still see a couple of cannonballs in the rubble.

‘With me boys,’ Bograt yelled. ‘We’s gonna grab Skarsnik’s mob and then we’s gonna show these runts here what for.’ A smattering of grunts and snorts rose wearily from his boys. Bograt felt anger fill his fingers, as though his hand were a glove, and take its own grip on his choppa. Ain’t no runt was gonna kick the fight out of Bograt’s boys! Time to earn his stupid bosshat. ‘Is this all you got? Is you gonna let runts laugh at you and say you got slapped down by a gobbo? Is you?’ he bellowed, milling his choppa above his head. ‘Or is you gonna squish some runts?’ His own blood thumping if nothing else, he punched his axe towards the towers and roared.

‘Waaagh!’

The cry was picked up and the boys followed his lead. The towers were just a good sprint away now, and what he had taken to be a low wall turned out instead to be several ranks of goblin spears. They were cloaked in black and hooded, anonymous and oddly chilling for it. Only the anaemic green of the hand that gripped their spears showed. Cave runts. Hundreds of them to each long line, they blockaded the pass from tower to tower.

‘What the grot…?’

More of their hooded kin were spread out along the foothills. There were archers too, and even a bolt-thrower, waiting with drawn strings beneath that big red banner on the tower. It wasn’t solid red. There was an emblem of some sort, messily outlined in white paint. It was terribly familiar.

A red fang.

Stompa and the other boars were tearing across the road for the towers, but the spear-runts weren’t getting out of the way. A goblin in the front rank raised a hatchet and issued a sickly screech. With a rattle of shafts the front rank of three hundred spears came down.

‘What the zogging grot!’

They were moments away. The hand of Gork wasn’t stopping Stompa now. Angrily, Bograt drew back his choppa and roared. This was what came of letting a runt be king over orcs. It gave them all ideas.

Then a blow to the side of the head cracked his skullcap, hard enough to break his grip on Stompa and bowl him sideways.

Next he knew, he was sliding from Stompa’s back, black-robed runts spinning before his eyes. His shoulder plate smashed to the ground. The rock ripped up his good mail but, on instinct, he grabbed a handful of Stompa’s coarse belly hair. The stampeding boar dragged him across the ground, shredding through mail, then bear-hide shorts and jerkin and then, finally, flesh and bone. Bograt hollered and then Stompa, as if deciding he’d done all the damage he could and was now bored, slammed a trotter through Bograt’s knee. It shattered. With a howl of pain Bograt lost his grip, skidding over the road before falling into a roll and then, gritted and bloodied and finally spent, flopping to a halt. An instant later there came the splintering crunch of shields, the squeal of spit pig-flesh, goblin screams, and orcish grunts. A moment after that it was all done.

In a daze, Bograt groped about for his choppa.

‘Looking for something, Bograt?’

A massive foot crunched into the ground where he lay. Slowly it ground into the warm rock, like a steel drum sat upon a swamp. Before him, like one of the fabled iron trolls said to dwell within the cave runts’ scrap piles, stood the largest orc that Bograt had ever seen.

No, that wasn’t true.

He’d once served one that big.

The orc tossed a rock up and down. It was black with blood and Bograt winced, but it wasn’t the reminder of the gash in his temple. It was the screeching noise it made. The massive big boss was so stacked with metal plates that his fingers ground sparks from his gauntlets every time they closed around that rock. He wore a battered iron crown, and even his bad eye had been nailed shut with a metal plate. ‘Are you gonna lie there all day, or do I have to break you another kneecap? Balance you out maybe?’

Unsure why he was still alive without having to do any fighting, Bograt sat up. And then he gaped. Whether it was the smack to the head or the sheer scope of what he was looking at, he didn’t know. The giant orc grinned and turned away. Behind him, across the length and breadth of The Tight Spot, drums were beaten, squig-pipes played, and a hundred banners flown. There were Ironclaws and Broken Axes, Blue Faces and Red Sunz; there were hill tribes, forest goblins, nomadic war bands, and black orc mercenaries still bloody from campaigning alongside Chaos marauders in the north. From the piled rubbish and sporadic outbreaks of violence on the hillsides, it looked as though they’d all been camped here some time.

A sadistic-looking goblin crossed the road from the tower. He was garbed in stiff leather, dyed red and sewn through with mail rings, and gripped a furled standard that was so large his tiny hands couldn’t stretch around the pole. His teeth were maggot yellow. Red eyes glinted cruelly from a face the shape and colour of a poisoned arrowhead. The goblin came for Bograt with a long butcher’s knife and then, smiling viciously, used it to cut the ties on his standard. It plunged from the crossbar, then caught the wind and rippled out.

The Waaagh! Banna of the Red Fangs.

The big boss turned back, the big red standard crumpling under the cross-breeze like a cape behind his back. Death Pass curved away into the distance. The eight elegant peaks of the stunty house poked over the smaller intervening mountains, crystal clear under the fierce summer sky. The giant orc leaned in, obscuring the lot, Eight Peaks and all, behind his mammoth shoulders.

‘I need all my boys for this one, Bograt, even double-crossing runt-worriers like you. We’re gonna go see Mad Zarrgakk. And then we’re gonna show these stunties their place.’ Gorfang Rotgut clenched his ferrous knuckles and began to laugh. It sounded forced, like the snarl of a wounded bear.

‘There’s only one king in my valley.’

Something that was almost silence held vigil over the remains of the once great city. There was a gunshot, the ring of metal upon stone, the yap of a feral dog: the sounds that had harried her final days and tormented her nights. It was an elegy that the dwarfs who still mourned her barely now heard. They were the legacy of a long death.

For here lay Karak Eight Peaks.

Mighty had been her armies, deep had been her mines, and beautiful had been her halls. Not for naught had dawi come to know her as Vala-Azrilungol, the queen of the silver depths, for her splendour had been the jewel of the Karaz Ankor. Yet here she lay in her open grave all the same. The tumbledown stones of the dwarfs’ ancient city marked her passing, a monument to their hubris and shame.

Sweating under the summer sun, Kemma Ironhammer held tight to the sides of the wagon as it clattered across the cracked earth of an old road. She listened to the steady clop of the mule’s hooves and, trying to ignore the motion sickness that the wagon’s shaking induced, she looked out of the back and pinned her gaze to the slowly receding horizon. The great western peaks had grown no smaller, even after a full morning’s travel from the citadel. Broken-backed and bowed, the fortress slumped into the shoulder of a steep climb, as if in the spirit of a nobler age it had made for the rose-shadowed summit of Karag Nar, the sunrise mountain, only to falter halfway. Its shadow wavered across a silver lake. Even as she watched, she saw packs of scavengers tugging at bloated green carcasses. The dwarfs barely had the manpower to inter their own dead. To her mind, the greenskins were lucky to be left for the dogs.

With a sigh, she looked away, turning instead to the great mountain of Kvinn-Wyr. It was the most northerly and, in a battle-worn kind of way, the most beautiful of the Eight Peaks. The White Lady, as she was known, lay beneath a snowy shroud, a string of fortifications around her cold neck like the pearls of a dying rinn. It had been the last of the eight to fall, and that defensibility and heritage now made it the centre of the dwarfs’ efforts to reclaim this land from the dark. To the south rose Karag Nar with its crippled fortress, then Karag Lhune, the crescent mountain, and finally, at the lowest rim of the basin, Karag Rhyn, the redstone mountain, where Belegar had first made camp on his return to the lost hold of his ancestors. A monument had been erected on the site after he had reclaimed the fortress, but it was gone now. Grobi had vandalised it within a week.

The mule brayed rudely, unnerved by some nearby screech, as the driver drew the reins too short. He was nervous too and Kemma didn’t blame him. Fighting back a wave of nausea, she slid one hand between the wall of the wagon and the small of her back, then settled the other upon her belly. It had grown large. Abominably so. It seemed quite determined to grow and grow until she split her specially loosened chainmail down the middle. She stroked the cunningly wrought steel links sadly, trying to remember that there was a child underneath. Even the priestesses had acceded to the necessity. A woman with child would find no mercy from a sniper’s bullet or an assassin’s blade.

Not in Karak Eight Peaks.

Stiffly, she tried to banish those thoughts from her mind and shuffled into a more comfortable position. She must have groaned something, because the driver twisted around, both hands tight on the reins, and leaned back into the passenger compartment. The dwarf was drawn, heavily tanned, and garbed in pale hand-me-down leathers. His brown beard was sun-lightened and fell in a scraggly mass just past his chest.

‘You want me to pull over, my lady?’

‘Here?’ Kemma arched her brow, wincing as the cart went over a particularly cavernous pothole. Somewhere nearby a goblin screamed.

The driver cleared his throat, tugged the rim of his woollen cap, and turned back to the road.

‘Jumpy, these hill dwarfs,’ chuckled Gromvarl, the wagon’s final occupant, his back to her and feet dangling off the back of the wagon as he surveyed the patchwork veldt of overgrown pastureland and ruined towns. As he spoke, he gave off a puff of aromatic smoke that clung like cobwebs to his long grey hair. A greying bearskin cloak lay draped across his broad shoulders but both he and it were so hoary that it was difficult to discern where dwarf ended and hide began. The skin of his neck and hands was damp with sweat, but the trifling and temporary matter of high summer wasn’t about to douse his pipe or relieve him of his cloak. It was taking off one’s clothes when the sun came out, or so he would say when asked, that had left the elves in such a mess.

Privately, Kemma suspected that he just liked to complain about how hot it was here compared to Karaz-a-Karak.

‘Skarrenawi and umgdawi that’s what we’ve come to these days, and not even so many of them.’ He shimmied around, withdrew a fat, ivory-stemmed pipe from between his teeth, and winked. ‘One more soon enough though, eh, my lady?’

Of its own volition, Kemma’s arm slid around to encircle her belly. She didn’t like how everyone seemed to regard her child as theirs somehow as much as hers. The first in two thousand years to inherit the throne of the Eight Peaks. Feeling a terrible emptiness that bore no relation to the hunger they had all been suffering since the Uzkul Kadrin was cut off, Kemma looked across the ruined expanse.

What a throne it was.

‘As you were, Gromvarl.’

With great ceremony, the longbeard extracted his pipe, shifted it across to his other hand, tugged his forelock and then picked up his crossbow. He set the weapon on his lap and bit down on his pipe. Mouth stuffed with ivory, he mumbled, ‘Aye, my queen.’

With a sigh, Kemma sank back into her seat. Her eyes rolled to the sky. It was cloudless, blue as sapphire, and gave the impression that if she could touch it she would burn her fingers. The sun burned over the eastern peak directly ahead. As if she needed to get any closer. Loosening the platinum crown from her head, she shook off the pooled sweat. It felt good if only for a moment. Next she tried repositioning her long hazel braids, resorting to fanning herself with one of the ends. It didn’t help at all. For a dwarf born and raised under the cool stone of the Everpeak, the open skies of the Eight Peaks were intolerable.

The cart rattled on regardless, passing through what had once been a farmstead. Gromvarl immediately became tense. He took up his crossbow and quietly loaded a bolt into the track. Iron-rimmed wheels sounded soulful echoes from stone byres that were long deserted. Except for flies. Rubbish littered the doorways and stank in the heat. Tribal glyphs and other, less decorous, forms of graffiti had faded into the stonework with time and efforts at cleaning. The pale marks gave the appearance of scar tissue, of a wound that would fade but never truly heal. Watching the rubbled walls pass by, she knew that graffiti was the least of the dwarfhold’s woes.

The passes seethed with greenskins and the rumour of more arriving every day, and the flow of mercenaries, immigrants, and the returning diaspora on which the city depended had already slowed to a trickle long before now.

Perhaps it was for the best.

Surrounded by the karags, the soil of the Eight Peaks was so rich it had once been labeled brûnngal, or brown gold, but its staple crop now was poisonweed and thistle. No farmer could cultivate a crop or rear a herd under constant threat of poaching and sabotage. And though the pinewoods beyond the East Gate still teemed with game, hunting was a perilous pursuit when those same forests harboured plenty of monsters with a taste for dwarf flesh. The refounded Karak Eight Peaks relied more upon the generosity of its neighbours than most had realised.

Until it was gone.

Now, the vast output of her oldest and nearest ally, Karak Azul, was bent towards its war with the Black Crag while from Karaz-a-Karak there had come nothing in months. And as yet no explanation why. At least nothing that Kemma had heard. That left Barak Varr which, distant as it was and the roads the way they were, was reachable only by gyrocopter. And if Karak Eight Peaks could afford to maintain a fleet of those temperamental aircraft then it would not be in the difficulties that it was.

A scream interrupted her thoughts. It was high-pitched, definitely a goblin’s, and echoed through the shattered outbuildings. Gromvarl raised his crossbow and swept the ruins. The cart rumbled on. Heart thumping, Kemma levered herself up to see. She reached for her hammer and almost choked with relief as a troop of clan warriors burst through the fallen sidewall of a stone shed. Their heavy armour clattered, they panted heavily, and then they disappeared into one of the byres. There was a high-pitched twang, as of a shortbow, then another scream. Kemma never saw the goblin. She wondered if the warriors had caught it. Did it even matter? What was one goblin anyway to a city that harboured thousands? After a few moments, the cart rumbled out of the farmstead and back onto open road. Gromvarl settled back, hand loosening on the crossbow and pulling watchfully on his pipe once more.

She supposed it depended on the goblin.

The wagon bounced hard as it passed over a hummock. Kemma grit her teeth against the rising taste of bile and held on. Gromvarl spluttered on pipe smoke as the jolt almost threw him off the back. The driver called back his apologies and almost immediately began to slow. Silently cursing the hill dwarf’s jitters, Kemma leaned back and tilted her head until she was facing the back of the driver’s hat.

‘I need to be at the East Gate by noon. If there’s a problem with the wagon you’ll have the rest of the day to fix it once we arrive.’

‘My wagon’s fine, my lady,’ said the driver, snippily. ‘There’s someone in the road.’

‘What do they want?’

‘Don’t know, my lady, they’re just stood there. Should I keep on going? They’ll shift fast enough.’

Kemma smiled wanly. ‘That’s quite alright. Even with me here, I suspect there’s room for a couple more.’ Then, even though her back ached as if she wore an apron stuffed with her own weight in rocks and her feet were hot swollen lumps against the doeskin lining of her boots, she compelled herself to stand. A rinn had just as much pride as any dawi, and twice the need to be jealous of it.

The wagon slewed to a halt and three dwarfs came to meet it. The nearest sauntered towards Kemma’s side and offered an insouciant bow. The gesture exposed a balding scalp so red that it hurt to look at. Kemma winced in involuntary sympathy. The scuffed scales of his leather hauberk gave him the look of one well travelled, but the open skies of Vala-Azrilungol afforded no mercy to those accustomed to the dark ways of the Undgrin Ankor. His beard was long enough to warrant respect, but had been pragmatically trimmed and tidied. The red tunic that overlay his armour was grimy and patched with dark rings of sweat. His cloak was tatty and similarly begrimed. His accompanying warriors wore haggard looks that were well hidden in the shade of their wide-rimmed helmets. They were lean, almost gaunt by dwarf standards. That, and the patchiness of their sky-blue tunics, confirmed them as underwardens of the East Gate, stalwarts of the Angrund clan.

‘Might we offer you a ride somewhere, thane…?’

‘You flatter me, my lady, but I am merely an envoy.’ The dwarf spoke at the same time as he breathed, as if he’d run all the way from the Uzkul Kadrin with orcs at his back. He bowed once again. ‘Douric Grimlander of Karaz-a-Karak, my lady. It is always a pleasure to return to Karak Eight Peaks.’

Kemma found a smile, pressed it flat and threw it wide. Like old linen laid out for an unexpected and decidedly unwelcome guest. ‘The pleasure is ours, Reckoner Grimlander.’

‘Douric, my lady, please,’ said the reckoner. He smiled crookedly as he rose from his bow. ‘I hadn’t expected you to remember me. If reckoners were gold coins then Belegar would have settled his debts thrice over by now.’

Kemma chose to say nothing. Around reckoners it paid to watch one’s words. Part lorekeeper, part bounty hunter, they were far from uncommon in a hold that dealt more in promises than in gold, but this one’s name she remembered well. After his last visit, the king had screamed it like an oath to his ancestors in the wake of many a hurled trencher for almost a week before he had finally calmed. As always with Belegar however, he had confided nothing with his queen.

‘If you have business with Belegar, then you’ll be disappointed. I don’t know where he is.’

‘Then he is more the fool than others already claim that he is, for you are veritably glowing, my lady.’

Kemma regarded the reckoner frostily. Like soft clay, the reckoner’s smile widened. ‘My husband is nobody’s fool.’

‘Of course,’ the reckoner smiled, oddly pleased as though scoring this brief exchange as a victory to himself. Coming a step closer, he leaned against the wagon’s hull and sighed. It was not for the shade though. There was something lecherous in the way his fingertips caressed the wood, as though tantalised by the repayment of a longstanding debt.

Kemma again felt her hammer. It was long-handled with a small, anvil-shaped head and Gromvarl had stowed it under her seat before they had departed the citadel. It had been the threat of goblins though, rather than of insolent dawi, that had guided the provision. If all reckoners were like Douric Grimlander then it was little wonder that they were so disliked. And this amongst a people for whom the ability to hold a grudge was as honoured as the ability to see them resolved. Their existence disabused the notion that dwarfs of honour and good faith could settle their disputes themselves. And perhaps, in the iron sanctity of their own hearts, most dwarfs liked their treasured grudges exactly the way they were.

Fingers trailing across the wood, Douric rounded the back of the wagon. There he held and raised his hands, producing what, on a face less sun-ravaged, might have convinced as a winning smile. Gromvarl’s crossbow was pointed square at his chest.

‘In my day,’ said Gromvarl, lisping fiercely around his pipe, ‘you could trust a dawi to be respectful to a queen without needing telling. So consider this your telling. Mind your manners or it’s the half trouser for you right here, right now.’

‘Forgive him,’ said Kemma, her eyes alight with the amusement she so expertly dissuaded from her lips. ‘He’s irritable for want of a good meal, and the pipeweed of Barak Varr does not meet his standards.’

‘Fishy,’ the longbeard grumbled authoritatively.

‘All the more reason that I speak with Belegar,’ said Douric. ‘Trade is in everyone’s best interest and there is surely no dawi of Karaz-a-Karak that wants to see this current state of affairs stretch on.’

‘Are you implying that one of Karak Eight Peaks might?’

Douric raised an eyebrow suggestively. ‘Did Belegar not tell you why the High King commanded an embargo on trade with your hold?’

‘He did what?’ said Kemma, aghast. ‘For what possible reason? Has he read none of the letters I have written to him?’

The reckoner shrugged, causing his raised hands to yaw. If Kemma didn’t know better, she’d think he was actually enjoying himself. ‘Clearly, I’ve said too much already. My message is for the king.’ Slowly, he lowered his hands to his sides and nodded towards the seat beside Kemma. ‘No offence, my lady.’

With a grunt, Gromvarl lowered his crossbow to his lap and turned a questioning glance towards Kemma. She noticed that the bolt was still pointing very much towards the reckoner only now at his groin rather than his chest. Judging from the nervous twitch that beetled Douric’s blistered brow, it was not an improvement by his reckoning.

‘Remembrance Day is not for foreign dawi,’ said Kemma, carefully. ‘It is our shame.’

‘My lady, there are umgi that dwell in yurts upon the silk road to Far Cathay who know of the fall of Vala-Azrinlungol. I’m a reckoner, my lady, but I’m still a dwarf, I’ll not disturb your remembrance.’

‘Very well,’ Kemma sighed. ‘Gromvarl, let Reckoner Grimlander be aboard.’

‘Gromvarl, I insist,’ said Douric, clambering past the still-grumbling longbeard, then sinking into the bench to Kemma’s right.

The wagon rocked from side to side as he positioned himself, then suddenly lurched as the driver applied the reins to drive the mule lumbering forwards. The two underwardens waved them off, then turned back in the opposite direction. Like most warriors of the Eight Peaks, they were not professional soldiers. Most likely they were returning to their clan halls in Kvinn-Wyr.

With a sigh of pleasure, Douric loosened his boots and spread his legs wide. The smell of warm sweat and dank leather made Kemma feel sick. Then suddenly, Douric leaned forward, giving Kemma a wink and a conspiratorial smile as though they colluded in some fabulous escapade. She glared at him until he sat back again. ‘Belegar has a… as this is his hall, let’s be politic and say, a reputation. Caravans sent for the Eight Peaks have been lost before now, but Thorgrim understood the risks and he believed them worthy of taking.’

‘Good of him,’ Kemma murmured.

‘Don’t get me wrong, Belegar’s name has been marked for a long time now, but it was to be a reckoning for another day. Of course, that was before all of this.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Kemma.

Douric studied her, as if following every line on her face to see where it ended. Then he smiled. ‘You really don’t, do you? Then Belegar has been hiding things from his queen and his High King both. You should know though, my lady, that I’m merely the vanguard for an envoy much more prominent than I. If Belegar cannot resolve this dispute with me then be assured that it will not be the end of it.’

‘I told you,’ said Kemma, feeling a sickness that had little to do with the motion of the wagon, ‘I don’t know where Belegar is.’

‘And Karak Eight Peaks is larger than any hold barring the Everpeak herself, I know. On my last visit Belegar had me traipsing over half of it while he hunted grobi, thaggoraki, and Grimnir only knows what else.’

‘They do not hunt themselves,’ said Kemma, eliciting an unexpected grin from the reckoner.

‘Not altogether true, my lady, but let’s not argue. In any case,’ the dwarf reclined and spread his hands as if presenting Kemma as a boon to the gods of good fortune, ‘he can’t very well evade me now I’m with you, can he?’

Kemma blurted out a laugh, her smile this time quite spectacularly genuine. ‘Oh, Reckoner Grimlander, I should thank you. It’s been a long time.’ Nursing her aching sides, she caught the dwarf’s perplexed look and smiled again. ‘I thought you’d met my husband.’

Barely daring to breathe of the mine’s dank air, Belegar ducked under a low arch and deeper into the darkness of what felt like a vast cavern. He lifted his arm, holding the runic shield that hung from that shoulder as his priceless brynduraz gauntlet chased the shadows from walls. They bore ancient scars of shovel and pick. Moisture twinkled in the light beam. Silty rivulets wended from ceiling to ground to give the air a damp, metallic taste. Clamping his shield securely against his shoulder, he crouched, sank his fingers into the puddle and smelled them. They smelled clean. He stuck out his tongue and tasted the liquid. The water was a mineral cocktail, but unfouled. Perhaps the droppings the miners here had reported were from a lone skaven. Drying his fingers on his long white beard, he rose and shone his light deeper into the old mine network.

Who ever heard of a lone skaven?

Heedless of his train of thought, his stomach gurgled. It worked to its own clock now. Only last week his cousin, Duregar Hammerfist, had reduced the ale ration again. It stood at two pints now. Barely subsistence level. Belegar’s mouth felt dry just thinking about it, but he resisted the temptation to tighten his belt another notch. Between his gauntlet and his shield his hands were full, and in any case, he didn’t want it getting around that the ferocious King Belegar had been slipping Kemma the bulk of his ration for the last month. Least of all to Kemma herself since the woman was already insufferable.

Thoughts of his queen brought a guilt that he quashed with a scowl.

A king of the dwarfs had better things to be doing with his time than standing about under the baking sun, listening to his stomach growl, while other dwarfs reminisced on events he already recalled far better than they. And Kemma would forgive him.

Eventually.

His smile froze.

Glimlight glittered across a band of silver.

Belegar’s hand moved over his mouth to smother a gasp, robbing the metal of its light-given lustre and flushing his eyes with the brynduraz beam. Eyes burning, he returned the light to the rock. It shimmered like Bretonnian satin. A fat seam of silver, ripe and ready to burst right out of the wall.

‘Grungni’s britches, the prospectors weren’t exaggerating.’

‘Shhh!’

Belegar spun, his glimtorch blazing across his cousin’s chalk-white beard. The dwarf gave a pained grunt and recoiled, squinting sideways as he raised a blocking hand and backed under the arch.

‘You big wazzok,’ Belegar breathed, turning the brynduraz beam from Duregar’s face. ‘Do you know how many grobi skulk in the dark beneath my halls?’

Duregar’s lips twitched but, smile or scowl, neither made too dissimilar an impression. Like Belegar, his cousin held himself with a practised wariness. A powerful rune hammer was buckled to his waist and his shield was strapped across his backplate. The blued plate mail was moulded into angular curves and etched with silver runes. In his left hand he held a burning torch, apparently to ensure the air stayed good, where it was slowly causing the whiskers of his beard to curl. Treading with a care bred from decades of attrition, he padded past his cousin, then turned back and pressed a finger to his lips. The joints were swollen and white. It was only through stubbornness of will that the old warrior could still tighten his knuckles around the haft of a hammer.

‘Caution, cousin. It is not the same as cowardice. There is no shame in acknowledging that the might of the Eight Peaks does not penetrate this deeply into Karag Mhonar.’

Patting his cousin quietly on the shoulder, Belegar moved beside him to again take point. The pad of wary footsteps followed him, his own shadow stretching out far into the distant dark courtesy of his cousin’s torch. They made a good pair: he the restless hammer to his cousin’s stout shield.

‘You are smiling,’ Duregar whispered, close at his back, his breath bringing the scent of chewing tobacco and beer.

‘Have you eyes in the walls as in the ale-houses, cousin?’

‘You are too quiet. It is only when you are pleased with yourself that you are not plotting something foolish.’

Unwilling to prove his cousin correct as he almost always managed to be, Belegar kept his broadening smile for the silver that pricked through the dark walls in summons to his torch. They were all hungry, it was true, but could a king not smile? Kemma was in her fifteenth month. The priestesses assured him that any day now could be ‘the day’. Every so often, at moments such as this, it struck him – a flutter of anticipation and joy. It was like the sun over the Black Mountains – it could strike any time and any place, and all the more potently for its fickleness.

He was to be a father.

And if that were not enough to forgive a smile at his age, then nothing parted the lips quite like an old-fashioned rat hunt or, even better yet, precious metal fresh out of the ground.

‘Be quiet,’ he whispered, hoping his good mood wouldn’t tell in his voice. ‘You’ll frighten off all the thaggoraki.’

‘Or bring more of them,’ said Duregar ominously.

Bring them on, Belegar thought, but kept it to himself. His cousin didn’t share his hunger for combat. As they progressed, tall upright things threw shadows from his torch. They were timber props, clearly recent, and as he shone his light further down more emerged from the darkness. Clay saucers of ale had been positioned at the base of each. Every once in a while, a faint ripple passed across the surface and down the line. It wasn’t himself or Duregar. Neither dwarf made a sound. Something was digging out there within the walls. He stepped away from the wall and, not for the first time, wondered what the use of this warning system was. It didn’t tell you where a digger was, how far away they were or how numerous. It couldn’t say if they were coming right at you or just passing above or below. The hairs prickled across the nape of his neck.

It just told you they were out there.

‘Karaz-a-Karak seems like another lifetime, does it not?’ Duregar whispered. ‘The drinking, the planning, then more drinking until those plans began to sound good.’

‘I remember,’ Belegar murmured. ‘You believed the hold would be ours in six months.’

‘You accused me of pessimism, as I recall.’

Belegar scowled, though he knew his cousin meant no offence. Hunger made him irascible. Hiding from rats and grobi within his own hold didn’t help either. ‘Of course I recall.’

‘Dreng Tromm,’ said Duregar. ‘All our beards are a little longer than they were.’

‘Longer,’ Belegar agreed, tugging bitterly at his as the faltering edge of the brynduraz beam at last glanced across the backs of dwarfs working the rockface. The magnitude of his relief surprised him. What exactly had he been expecting to find down here? ‘Aye, and greyer too.’

Forsaking their trademark pick, the dwarfs hugged the walls and teased out ingots of silver with chisels. It was slow, laborious work. And it was quiet. The degree of caution to which they were reduced left a taste like thaggoraki poison in the mouth.

‘I didn’t retake my ancestors’ hall for this.’

‘There is nothing here, cousin,’ said Duregar, too kindly for Belegar’s liking. ‘Perhaps the miners mistook something else for skaven spoor. Valaya knows it is easy to fear the worst these days.’

‘How many dwarfs know about this mine?’ said Belegar, changing the subject, hoping to recapture some of his earlier good mood. The sound of chipping rock echoed softly, painfully quiet.

‘Just the miners, the prospectors and the umgdawi mercenary that unearthed it.’

‘Did you pay him?’

‘The agreed sum. He took his coin back to Black Crag.’

‘Good,’ said Belegar, sweeping the light back and forth, then turning it into the ground. Only then did he realise that he’d been pacing.

If the mercenary was headed to the Black Crag then Black Crag would be where the rumour of Eight Peaks silver would stay. Karak Azul’s siege of the orc fortress had lasted all winter and showed no sign of a breakthrough any time soon. He felt for Kazador. They had hunted grobi together through Uzkul Kadrin when they were beardlings, back when Belegar hadn’t the cares he now wore and before Kazador had been broken by his. With every sinew, he wished he possessed the force to help his old friend, but he did not. At least, for once, the greenskin hordes blocking Uzkul Kadrin were doing something for him.

News travelled slowly while the passes were overflowing with rabid urk.

‘This siege is a nasty business,’ said Duregar, his own thoughts running on similar tracks to Belegar’s own. ‘The rangers speak of tribes never before seen north of Karag Orbud, and in numbers not known since the Goblin Wars. A scout I trust even claimed that Gorfang himself has left his fortress to gather more fighters to his banner. He said that the Squatter King and his army is camped somewhere between the Crag and the Azril Vale.’

‘We bested him once during the siege of Karak Gatt, cousin, and you yourself took the defiler’s eye at the Battle of the Jaws.’

Duregar muttered, uncomfortable. ‘Luck on both counts.’

‘Are you suggesting we are lucky, cousin?’

‘You cannot eat silver, and nor will even the most talented weaponsmith make of it a weapon or armour.’ He paused, weighing his next words carefully. ‘A reckoner from Karaz-a-Karak arrived this morning.’

Belegar looked up. ‘You think Thorgrim’s come to take my silver from me?’

‘You know you owe him.’

‘No, it’s too soon. You know the saying, cousin. You can’t contest a hammer toss in Karak Eight Peaks without striking two reckoners.’

Duregar frowned and Belegar wondered what battle, siege, or hungry winter had robbed his cousin of his humour. Duregar looked to the ceiling. ‘The remembrance ceremony will be starting soon.’

‘Go if you want to. After, you can tell me how you restored glory to the Eight Peaks by recounting her fall with the ufdi and the rinn.’

‘Want…’ Duregar mumbled. The whites of his eyes widened in the torchlight. He bared his tobacco-yellowed teeth in a grimace. ‘Each and every day I am reminded of our fall. With every breath that smells of sodden rat and grobi dung I remember. With each new dawn that I must don armour and buff my hammer before opening my door I swear vengeance.’ With a staggering of breath, Duregar fell quiet. Shamed, Belegar looked away.

Just beyond the reach of his glimtorch, silver glittered like eyes in the dark.

‘I can’t just stand around. I…’

There was so much more to be said, but no words in the dwarfish tongue to speak it. With typical timing, his stomach growled. He swore at it loudly, but it gave as good a reason as any to forget what he had been trying to say. Fifteen months ago, in sight of Grimnir, Grungni, Valaya and all their children, Belegar had sworn a mighty oath.

His child would be the one and unchallenged heir to Karak Eight Peaks!

He thought of his heir, his legacy to the clan of Angrund. No child of that line was going to be raised a pauper, living in fear within a home that belonged to the night. Not while Belegar’s old muscles retained pride enough to draw breath.

‘To Gazul with secrecy. I want more miners down here. And get them some proper tools.’

Duregar shifted uncomfortably. ‘This working is secret now, and it’s not your debtors I worry about. You know as well as I that once Skarsnik gets wind of this…’

Belegar cut him short with a glare, grabbing intuitively for the haft of the Ironhammer, the ancestral Hammer of Angrund. That was a name he had forbidden be spoken aloud. Unless it was to dictate a new grudge. Amongst the human workers, the goblin warlord’s reputation was such that even his name was believed to carry a curse, that to utter it would cause strong stone to crack, iron to split and gold to tarnish.

And Grimnir be damned if Belegar didn’t half believe it himself.

‘He’s a grobi, by Grimnir’s axe, just one scrawny little grobi. He’d not survive a single hammerblow if I could only get him in reach.’

To that Duregar said nothing, but Belegar knew what thoughts were passing behind his careful grey eyes. ‘I know, I know, but even a king can dream. Whatever else the grobi touches, he’ll not steal my son’s silver.’

‘Kemma may yet bless you with a daughter,’ said Duregar, mildly.

‘Hah! Wouldn’t that be just my luck.’

‘Cousin–’

‘The same stands for Kazador, Thorgrim, and any other who cares to make claim on my wealth. Get me smiths down here. And woodsmen. Anyone who has ever swung a tool in anger.’

Belegar knelt, putting off the moment he’d have to cave and return to the remembrance ceremony as Duregar so clearly wished him to do. This was not why he’d sought the crown of his ancestors. Truth be told, he’d never believed that he would actually succeed. Just as when he and Kazador had gone hunting as youths, all he’d really wanted to do was kill grobi. Reaching down, he picked up a hunk of rock from the miners’ spoil pile. It was speckled with crystals of silver. His voice lowered to a whisper.

‘I’ll settle my debts in good time, but my oaths of kingship must come first. Until the Eight Peaks can afford to part with it I’ll not hand over a single ingot. Not even if Thorgrim Grudgebearer were to demand it of me himself.’

The wagon passed from open countryside and into the outskirts of a town. Grass gave way to lichens. The dull, earthen rumble became a clatter as the iron-shod wheels turned onto stone pavings. Kemma looked out onto the crumbling streets of the old garrison town of Karin Vard. Grey, partial ruins baked in the sun. Weeds sprang from the cracks in a parody of the window boxes that would once have garnished those walls. Even those hardy plants were beginning to wilt. Rattling over the uneven slabs, the wagon rolled further into the ghost town.

She felt a prickling on her neck and looked up. Karag Yar and Karag Mhonar were ominous, awe-inspiring presences to right and left. The silent stone giants should have been reassuring. They were not. Gromvarl watched the passing ruins, tense. Even Douric was quiet.

At a defensive wall, the single sentry recognised her on sight and waved the wagon through his gate unchallenged. A half dozen quarrellers patrolled more distant sections. Kemma thought that even she could have made it across that wall unseen had she wanted to. On the other side, rubble lay in undulating roadside mounds covered in green moss. They resembled barrows. Occasionally, a building still stood amongst the green, braced in scaffolding and banked with piles of masonry that had been covered in mould-blackened canvas sheeting. There was a loneliness to this place that even the sight of dwarfs on the scaffolding and the sounds of their labour could not relieve. It was the loneliness of stone. On and on the sea of rubble stretched, wedged into the narrows between the foothills of Karags Yar and Mhonar all the way towards a cluster of standing buildings and the distant mass of the East Gate itself.

That famous and much-scarred fortification spanned the narrow point of the Azril Vale, that winding gorge between Karak Eight Peaks and Uzkul Kadrin. She could see the pine trees and wild moorland of the vale where the great wall had crumbled. Time had taken its inevitable toll but warfare too. Belegar himself had blown the largest breach during the Battle of the East Gate. Duregar had led a mighty host from Karaz-a-Karak to reinforce his cousin’s throne, and after already fighting its way through Gorfang Rotgut’s forces at the Battle of the Jaws, it was then ambushed by Skarsnik right there in the Azril Vale. Belegar’s actions that day had demolished a swathe of the old wall, but he had spared Duregar and a thousand clan warriors from certain death or – worse – capture. Kemma wasn’t sure that even that pyrrhic victory had been worth the cost.

Hindsight could be a torturous thing.

A mournful sound groaned from that direction. Kemma recognised a tuba, a trumpet, the deep bass of a horn. For a moment, pride managed to edge nausea aside. No hold in the Karaz Ankor could boast a miner’s choir with the heritage of Grimgar’s renowned troupe. Like most who hailed from Karak Eight Peaks however, they were sounding a little thin of late. The story from Grimgar had been of a grobi break-in to the instrument room, leaving them short, but Kemma wasn’t buying it. According to Gromvarl, the beer halls were quietly abuzz with rumours of a new mine being reopened somewhere in the hold. It was said that half of the living ancestor’s chorus were now working there in secret.

She looked across to Reckoner Grimlander. The dwarf was still facing away, ahead down the old East Gate Road. She thought about what the reckoner had said, about Belegar keeping secrets. If half of what was rumoured had substance then that would certainly qualify. Given how heavily they leaned upon the wealth and might of Karaz-a-Karak it was unsurprising that even a rumour could have the High King’s reckoners flocking to her halls. At this precise moment however, she didn’t want to think about it. Today was the day of remembrance and it saddened her to the marrow that on this one day Karak Eight Peaks could not assemble a full choir.

The notes drifted nearer, but she was so intent upon her own thoughts, and on the foul-smelling cocktail of lye soap and urine that seemed to pervade the route, that she didn’t notice the wagon slow until her stomach lurched. The wagon veered sharply to the right, then came to a stop. She felt it rock slightly as the driver jumped down and whistled for a groom to tend his mule. Kemma clasped her hands to the wagon’s sides and took a look around.

She had been brought to a small courtyard. The stage of abandonment was less advanced here than it had been on the way. Painted wooden frontages shored up the derelicts that enclosed the square, expressing a gaiety that was not the least bit convincing. She could see the East Gate over the rooftops. Just being near to its vast shadow, she felt a little cooler. Dwarfs conversed in small groups, mostly around the handful of parked carriages. Their ironclad bodywork was inscribed with the runic heraldry of the thanes that owned them, the same markings repeated on the steel wool caparisons worn by the mules. At least half of the carriages were sealed, but even those open-topped bristled with sufficient firepower in their pintle-mounted blunderbusses to ward off a wyvern. Kemma looked over her own wooden cart, feeling slightly hard done by.

Ducking into his crossbow’s shoulder strap, Gromvarl bit down firmly on his pipe and slid off the back of the wagon. He threw Douric a ‘shift’ gesture. The reckoner took a moment to scan the gathered dwarfs before finally relenting and jumping down. Gromvarl looked next to Kemma, one hand on his shoulder strap, the other extended to her. Slowly, Kemma pushed herself up. From the corner of her eye, she saw a groom look up from brushing down one of the mules. He fell mute for a moment and stared, then suddenly shouted out her name. The other dwarfs turned to look and, suddenly shouting all at once, came for her in a rush.

‘… any word on–’

‘… what Belegar is doing about–’

‘… is this skarren-burned wanaz–’

A riot of faces jostled for prominence at the rear of the wagon and shouted each other down to the distant strains of the brass chorus. A dwarf in the garb of an apprentice carpenter waved an empty tankard in Gromvarl’s face and got shoved onto his backside for his troubles. Kemma looked anxiously over the crush of pinched, sweaty faces. Perhaps it had been a mistake to agree to this. Belegar was certainly going to hear about it when – if – she saw him again.

‘Forgive them,’ spoke a familiar voice from the crowd. ‘With urk in the passes, skaven beneath, and grobi all around, it is too easy for them to hear their bellies growl.’

Like fresh water from solid granite, Kemma’s lips sprang a smile at the sight of Magda Freyadotter. She wore the lavender robes of the Valayan sisterhood, cinched at the waist and the wrists with gold wire. Her long hair was pale as mist, and thin as spider silk. In parts it reached down to her ankles, but was largely held in intricate shoulder-length braids by weighty clasps of Barak Varr jet. About her neck, the sacred Book of Remembering hung on a locked chain. Bound in iron, it was heavier than it looked, and was doubtless the reason the old woman walked with a bent back and a shuffle.

She was helped on her way by two warrioresses of the Valkyrinn, the templars of the Valayan faith. They wore winged helms of silvered steel inlaid with mother of pearl. Golden plaits spilled from their open helms and down their exquisitely lacquered chest plates. Strapped within a harness upon their backs, cloaked under a purple sash and out of sight, were the warrioresses’ weapons. The great battleaxes were copies of Valaya’s own mythical weapon, Kradskonti, the Peacebringer, and powerful rune-weapons in their own right. Even without their weapons, they made for a fearsome sight as they scanned the increasingly fractious crowd. Though neither as broad nor as rugged as Gromvarl, they had about them a quiet fierceness that had the throng lining six deep to be rebuffed by the longbeard rather than the warrior women.

Kemma took the old woman’s hand gratefully and, with the help of her driver who had at some point clambered back in to the wagon from the front, managed to lower herself off the back of the wagon and into Magda’s arms.

‘Easy does it,’ Magda soothed, straightening the arms of Kemma’s tunic as the dwarfs behind her continued to call out questions and imprecations over her shoulder. ‘What then can Belegar find so important that he permits the very soon-to-be mother of his heir to cross dangerous lands in his stead?’

‘Magda,’ Kemma chided. ‘You’re talking about our home.’

The priestess’s disapproval said all that she did not.

‘He didn’t tell me himself,’ Kemma sighed, prising a snort from Magda’s pursed lips. ‘Poor Duregar said something about skaven in the old workings of Karag Mhonar, but my husband’s cousin is the worst liar I’ve known.’ She cast a look beyond the Valkyrinn, glad to see Douric Grimlander’s crossed arms and burnt face on the other side of them. From the smug look on Gromvarl’s face, she suspected the longbeard’s handiwork. She would find him some Karaz-a-Karak pipeweed if she had to broach the fell portal of Barak Khatûl to get it. ‘I think Belegar is hiding from the reckoners.’

‘I am told the priesthood of Grungni can divine for gold and iron, and all know the talents of Grimnir’s cult, but I’ve always felt Valaya’s gift to sift truth from lies of greater value.’ There was a twinkle of mischief in the priestess’s eyes as she slid her arm through Kemma’s elbow and gave her wrist an indulgent pat. ‘Leave Belegar to me. I’ll get the truth out of him.’

Chuckling as she had not done in many days, Kemma allowed Magda to lead her away. Gromvarl stepped in behind to keep the petitioners off her back while the Valkyrinn forged them a path through the throng. They emerged onto the East Gate Road and the hubbub died down behind them. Kemma let out a relieved breath as the dwarfs grudgingly returned to their grumbling bellies and their own business.

The doors of the buildings were flung wide, filling the street with the scent of hot meat pies and beers. The scaffolding that criss-crossed their windows like bars was draped with banners and heraldic shields. Decoratively coloured mining lanterns zig-zagged the length of the road. The intent was festive, she knew, but the arrayed paraphernalia of war put Kemma in mind of a battlefield camp. The billowing smoke of communal outdoor fires and the scent of roasting hog merely reinforced the impression. The dour faces lining the road certainly brought nothing festive to the occasion. They bore the ruddy cheeks and wistful eyes of the not quite drunk. All wore armour and all held their weapons close.

‘Are you alright?’ The voice was Magda’s, and it was only on hearing it that Kemma realised her thoughts had drifted.

‘I think I’m just ready for this child to be born.’

‘The child is to be a king,’ Magda answered with a complicit smile. ‘He will move only when the rest of us grow sick of his inaction.’

A warm flush entered Kemma’s cheeks. ‘He?’

‘You know that I cannot tell a lie, my lady,’ Magda replied, her lined face shaping to one of impish good humour.

For a moment, Kemma no longer saw the hustle around her. The grey stone looked a little whiter. The cloudless blue sky didn’t seem nearly so bad.

A boy.

With a nudge from Magda she came around, still smiling, to see that the priestess and the Valkyrinn had brought her to another courtyard. Packed with noisy and drunken dwarfs, in its aesthetic of arrested decline it resembled the previous one where they had left the wagon except that it was much, much larger.

Once the meeting space for the mighty East Gate garrison – which in bygone days had numbered almost twenty times what the entire Eight Peaks could now muster – it was known as Veldi Vor, the square of the well, for the eight-sided stone well in its centre. An assemblage of wire pulleys and iron stanchions had recently been erected around it. Its polished and beaten edges shone like treasure in the sun. The ancient well, however, seemed to sulk within its shade. Beer tents had been erected all around the square and dwarfs formed noisy, impatient lines for their turn at the tap. Hot food sellers moved between the queues, metal trays hanging on leather straps from their necks. They were doing a brisk trade. It had been the right decision to suspend the rationing just for today, and Kemma felt a momentary pride at having convinced Belegar that it would be worth the later hardship.

A large wooden stage overlooked the bustle. For those dwarfs already fed and watered, it became the centre of their attention. There, Grimgar’s Miners’ Choir made ready. Their faces were scrubbed and they wore their finest; tunics steamed and pulled taut, brass buttons buffed to a high shine. Tuneless blasts escaped the bronze muzzles of serpentine horns. Orc-skin drums were tightened and set onto pedestals. Towards the back, past seated rows of capped and trimmed choristers bearing cymbals, triangles and musical exotica that Kemma had no name for, a miner struggled with an original Dwimmerdin Vale bagpipe. It rippled through its would-be tuner’s arms like jelly, emitting strange wheezes that were somehow audible over the cacophony. The ancient clan patriarch, Grimgar, sat with his back to the courtyard, slumped and apparently snoozing in the conductor’s chair. Every so often in response to a bum note he would stir, flail around with his pick-axe and swear some dire oath against tin-eared younglings, then take a calming sip of his beer and sink back into slumber.

‘When this is finished,’ said Magda, sliding her arm from Kemma as she stepped between her and the bandstand and cupped the queen’s belly in her hands, ‘You’ll return with the Valkyrinn and I to Valaya’s hearth. I’ll see you put to bed and you’ll not rise again until Vala-Azrilungol has herself a prince.’

‘Be quick then,’ said Kemma. ‘I’d challenge Gorfang himself if it meant I could take these boots off.’

Magda studied her strangely, as though sifting through her words to find the truth beneath. Abruptly, the priestess drew back and gestured to the Valkyrinn. ‘I can leave one with you, if you’d like. Just in case.’

‘Thank you, but I have Gromvarl to watch out for me. I’ll be fine.’

‘As you will, my lady.’ The priestess produced a thin smile and patted Kemma’s hand as if in farewell. ‘At least, in this year, the remembrance day can be one of celebration.’

‘Celebration,’ Kemma echoed, trying to make herself believe it as the priestess and her bodyguard moved through the crowd towards the well. They had all earned a little celebration after the year they had had. She glanced back towards Gromvarl, but the longbeard wasn’t even watching, instead leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. She wondered what he made of all this. To listen to him speak was to believe that no one had it tougher than in his day.

Passing into the corrugated shade of the well assembly, Magda took position between the Valkyrinn. She squinted into the sun, spread her hands around the ancient stone of the well and leaned forward. Without any command to do so, the dwarfs that filled the courtyard had fallen silent. The pie sellers closed their trays. The choristers set down their instruments. Even old Grimgar himself pivoted his chair around to watch. Their eyes were fixed not upon the priestess, but upon the Book of Remembering. It hung there from her neck, like an offering to the well’s gaping maw.

And it was a long way down to the Undkar River.

Along with dozens of others, Kemma found herself mouthing the words of that book, envisioning them as clearly as if the pages lay open before her.

In this year was the source of the Undkar befouled with warpstone poison…

As if recalling events from her own memory, she remembered through the ancient grudges the day that the wells were sealed, then the armouries, then the vaults, then the clan halls one by one. It was two and a half thousand years past. In her heart, it felt like yesterday. With an effort, she reminded herself that this year was different.

In this year, the Book of Remembering would read, was the Undkar again declared clean.

Magda gestured the Valkyrinn to her left. The warrioress gave a slight bow, then again to those watching, and pulled a cloth-bound package from a leather satchel at her hip. Just as the woman started to unwrap the cloth, a sharp crack split through the clear sky. Kemma looked up, confused. It sounded like a gunshot, but too loud for a dwarf handgun and too high-pitched for a cannon from the East Gate battery. A few of the dwarfs looked around, but most hadn’t bothered. This was Karak Eight Peaks, and such sounds were as common as dirt and reckoners. It was followed by a whistle that got steadily louder, like a kettle come to the boil. The Valkyrinn dropped her hands and the package they held to her waist and looked up. She squinted south, the direction of Karag Mhonar and, on ingrained impulse, stepped in front of her mistress.

She would be remembered.

The single bullet punched through her breastplate, then again through the back. Blood painted the iron stanchion. She spluttered something incomprehensible, struggling for some reason to remove her helm as her legs went weak and she collapsed to her knees. The Valkyrinn crashed face down onto the flagstones and only then did the dwarfs start to yell. Her back plate was shattered as if she’d been gored. The still-pumping wound was flecked a toxic green.

Only one race was callous enough to use warpstone weaponry.

Kemma watched, stunned. It had been mere seconds and the gunshot sounded again, followed by another, a crackle like corn kernels popping in a fire. The window of a hanging lantern exploded in a shower of coloured glass and burning oil. Dwarfs ducked and ran, slapping at the flames that caught light in their beards. One was thrashing a lit sleeve through the air when his shoulder disappeared in a sudden eruption of flesh and bone. The white tent behind him was spattered a visceral purple and the unconscious dwarf dropped without a sound. Bullets pranged noisily off the iron roof of the well assembly. A wet cry came from the bandstand. One of the choristers was thrown from his stool and into the brass section. He didn’t rise. Blood trickled from the stage.

Mouth hanging open and panting in shock, Kemma watched the square empty. Those dwarfs that had shields raised them, sheltering the others that streamed for the main street. How? Why? She watched as a bullet thumped through a clansdwarf’s shield and dropped him. From the impacts and the fact that nothing was landing near her where she stood against the wall, it was clear the shots were being fired from the south. Uncaring of the danger, she moved away from the sheltering building and into the square, then looked back over the flat roofs in the direction of Karag Mhonar.

A dirty green plume was rising over the slopes. It hung there like a pall, obscuring the figures within.

A second later she was dragged back, a strong arm wrapped over her and pinning her to a steel-drum chest as another volley tore through the awnings and decorations. Bodies and broken shields littered the square. A beer tent folded in over itself and collapsed.

At that moment, Kemma could recall nothing more heartbreaking.

‘Gromvarl,’ she murmured. ‘Why is no one returning fire?’

The longbeard warily eased her from his grip. She noticed that his crossbow still hung on its strap from his shoulder. It wasn’t loaded. ‘At this range, my lady? It’d just be throwing good money after bad.’

‘Did the rangers not check the peaks were clear before the ceremony?’

‘Aye, my lady. I’ll wager we’ll have fewer rangers and more Slayers come the evening.’

Another volley and Kemma flinched, but the snipers’ aim had shifted westward, following the bulk of the fleeing dwarfs into the outskirts of Karin Vard. She gave the square a quick look, not wanting to linger on the dead, but ashamedly grateful that she could not see Magda amongst them. Just beyond the outstretched hand of the fallen Valkyrinn, partially wrapped in a bloodied cloth, lay a silver chalice. It was dented where it had been trodden on and, in lieu of a toast to the cleansing of the Undkar, its cup now filled with ale, water, and tainted blood.

Perhaps in her son’s lifetime, that toast would be made, but it would not be today.

Kemma started from something touching her hands. She looked down at them. It was her hammer. Then she looked up. Douric Grimlander’s worried face was pressed into hers.

‘My lady, are you able to walk? We should get to the East Gate. It’s away from their fire and there’ll be warriors to protect you there.’

Dazed, Kemma looked back to her hammer. How could this happen on remembrance day?

‘The reckoner has a point,’ said Gromvarl, stepping over a body and into a wary hunch, leading with his crossbow. When no one shot at him, he gestured for Kemma to follow. ‘If this is prelude to a larger raid, then we’ve got to get you somewhere safe.’

‘Safe?’ Kemma murmured, then started to laugh. Was she the only one who saw the absurdity?

From the East Gate, lightly armoured dwarfs with crossbows and handaxes stormed across the ramparts towards Karag Mhonar. Frantic flag signals snapped between the battlements and other, smaller fortifications throughout the Eight Peaks. A long peal of thunder rolled across the blue sky.

What now?

The thunder built to an unbearable din. It seemed to be passing right above her head. She tilted her head back, her braids suddenly swept upwards and sent thrashing as the gyrocopter powered overhead. It was painted blue, main and tail rotors a whirring blur of metal. It disappeared behind the roofs of Karin Vard, only to reappear again as it followed the rise of Karag Mhonar. A bullet winged its undercarriage, but it kept on climbing. Still watching it fly, Gromvarl and Douric ushered her forwards. She moved like an automaton, barely registering the horn that sounded from the Azril Vale.

It seemed that Gromvarl had been right to worry about a second attack. How typical of the longbeard.

Kemma was still laughing, but she couldn’t remember why. It didn’t seem appropriate. Not that she would know, she couldn’t remember the last time she had really laughed. It must have been in Karaz-a-Karak, before she had been married into the Angrund clan. Kemma blinked back a tear. One hand loose on the haft of her hammer, the other she placed protectively over her belly. Kemma allowed that solitary tear to run and, in sorrowful song, found herself whispering the opening remembrance day refrain.

‘On this day, did the Eight Peaks fall.’

The glow of a pipe was the sole glimmer of light and warmth on the icy summit of Karag Yar. The smoker sat cross-legged upon the frost-dusted shelf, a purplish cloud of fungalweed smoke hanging under his hood like an evil veil. The hood was a dirty yellow and pointy, bent slightly at the tip, and almost as tall as its wearer. It was adorned with poorly sewn badges of the Crooked Moon. Duffskul took a deep draw on the hallucinogenic fumes, felt it prickle his nostrils and throat and then, as smoke filled his lungs, he held his breath and swallowed. A hiccup of spent air erupted from his throat and drifted through the haze trapped beneath his impressive bosshat.

He opened his eyes and produced a crooked grin as the mountain beneath him swayed. It was pretty rough, so he held on with both hands. The sky had turned purple. The wind drew odd, portentous shapes in it. Trusting to the one hand to hold him down, the shaman withdrew the pipe and blew away the cloud, revealing again the stunties as they capered about on the valley floor. No one ever saw anything good looking for omens in stars and cloudshapes. It was for idiots.

Naturally, orcs went in for it.

Like ripples in a rock pool, the dwarfs spread from the central courtyard and out into the town. Their cries distant and inseparable, like the scratching of rats behind a wall. Duffskul probed their flight for patterns and then, seeing none, closed his eyes. He watched the veins of his eyelids flutter and his brain spin, listening for a message from Mork in the stunties’ cries. The draconic belly rumble of a flying machine beat at the squishy bits of his sensitised brain and snapped open his eyes. He grimaced as it flew past his perch. To his expanded senses, the blades spun in teasing slow motion. Its long tail wobbled in the crosswinds. The machine swept on towards Karag Mhonar on the opposite side of the town.

The ratties on the mountainside he could see clearly despite the smoke that shrouded them, for fungalweed opened the mind and all its senses to the vastness of Mork. There were twenty of them, dressed up in dirty red rags and wielding jezzails as long as themselves from nose to tail. As he watched, one of them pointed to the in-swooping flying machine. It squeaked a warning in the ratties’ inscrutable tongue. With a chittering of alarm, the snipers dropped their weapons and bolted, slaloming downhill in a spray of scree as the flying machine’s steam cannon strafed the position they’d just fled.

Listening to their screams, Duffskul pondered the ratties, wondering if they could be where his prophesying had led him. He hoped not. They were a curious, irritating breed; too erratic even for the fungalweed to predict. Their efforts were almost entertainingly disjointed; too much so for their warlord, the Headtaker, to be a serious player for the Eight Peaks’ throne. Yet they were too numerous, even by the arithmetic of Skarsnik’s night goblin hordes, to discount altogether. As the shaman watched, the ratties fought each other to be first through a cleft in the rock. The result being that none of them made it through and half their arsenal was left strewn across the mountain behind them. The flying machine flew overhead and the pilot leaned out of the cockpit to drop something round and metallic. With fungalweed clarity, Duffskul watched the short fuse taper down. It dropped through a ratty’s legs and into the cleft. They squealed alarm and suddenly fought to get out of their hole, but it was too late.

The pothole detonated an instant later, bits of rock and body parts raining down.

It hardly mattered though really. Every time a rat poked its snout from a hole, the stunties whacked their hammers down, but there were always more holes. And the ratties cheated. They dug more holes.

Replacing his pipe in his mouth, Duffskul turned his gaze eastward, across the vast East Gate fortifications and towards Death Pass. The stunties had just about managed to keep their holes covered until now, but things were changing. An end was coming.

At once, the strength of his epiphany struck him. He knew that this was the answer to the portents that he’d come up here to put together. An end was coming, but the end of what? Whose end? He saw a throne, a crown. He saw…

‘What do you see, boss?’

Startled from his meditations, but far too wily to let on, Duffskul archly withdrew his pipe and lowered his gaze to the gaggle of servants, acolytes and hangers on that always hung around a shaman of his reputation and power. The fungalweed made them waver and blur, turned their black robes purple and their green skin the colour of mud.

‘Shut yer gobs, boys, oh yus. We’s got a king comin’, innit.’

One of the goblins scratched his head under his hood, peering eastwards and trying, failing, to see for himself what Duffskul had seen. ‘Skarsnik, boss? Up here?’

The shaman nodded sagely, then burped a mushroom-shaped cloud of fungalweed smoke. He watched it disperse as though in its motion lay the secrets of the ages. The other goblins aped him intently, not noticing as Duffskul quietly cleared his throat and wiped purple juices from his chin.

‘Yeah,’ he suddenly declared, making them all jump. An end was coming. A king was going to die. But did that mean Skarsnik? He considered, taking a serious draw of his pipe.

‘Mebbe.’

King of Black Crag

… few whose deeds weigh as heavily upon the pages of the Dammaz Kron as the Squatter King of Black Crag. May his bones one day ornament the throne hall of Karak Drazh! Old and fat as weed encrusted stone has he grown, fed on the rich diet of dawi gold and the foolishness of the umgi that would tithe an urk for safe useage of the Uzkul Kadrin.

Know then that Karaz-a-Karak and all dawi do beseech Grimnir for your lord’s success in reclaiming the Black Crag. May his hammer grow weightier with every urk so smitten! Too many years has it been since Kazador’s path has crossed mine. Seldom does he attend the Rinkkaz and never once since that most heinous of acts of the Squatter King against the dawi of Karak Azul. May her halls only grow in splendour and may her lost kinsdwarfs be one day returned from their captivity in the Black Crag unharmed. Let it be known that this war is yours to wage, as grudgement demands, but that my axe is ever-ready to shed the blood of the urk. I fear that it will demand a weapon mightier even than the Hammer of Azul to finally smite down a beast so foul as Gorfang Rotgut.

– Thorgrim Grudgebearer,
Letter to Boric Bulgarsson, Loremaster of Karak Azul
Excerpt transcribed for posterity in the
Dammaz Kron of the Karaz Ankor

The greenskin tribes that crowded the slopes of The Tight Spot hollered and cheered, clapped their hands and pounded tunelessly on man-skin drums. And in the circle they had cleared, the big orcs brawled. For some the excitement was too much and small scraps spotted the sea of green. A handful of the nearest were jumping up and down and smacking each other about, working themselves up to charging in and having a go themselves. Bograt and a bunch of Gorfang’s big’uns patrolled the edge of the clearing doing their best to put them off. Bograt flexed his hard green muscles, pumped his fists, bared his fangs and roared in their faces. Any runt getting too wound up, he punched them out. He just hoped no one noticed how he limped.

The smack of metal upon metal and the rain of teeth on hard ground sounded behind him. He spun and shuffled quickly aside as a bloody-mouthed black orc stumbled towards him and plunged headlong into the vicious arms of the crowd. At the centre of the cleared ring, surrounded by the screaming mob, Gorfang thrust his bloodied fist into the air and bellowed. The tribes screamed back. Bograt felt his skin tingle. To be in the middle of all this aggression was electrifying. Gorfang shook gore from his knuckles, then swung out the arm to clothesline a second of the black orcs as it charged his blind side. The blow stripped the black orc’s feet from under him and his skull met the rock with a resounding crack and a barrage of drumming and cheers from the valley sides.

The remaining black orcs – and there were nine or ten of them in the clearing – stood in a semi-circle before a tall boar-skin tipi. Flayed hides and animal bones decorated its sides. A well-chewed beastman skull sat on the summit and rocked in the warm breeze. A fluorescent fungus glowed balefully from the eye sockets. Its regard made Bograt shiver. Knowing it was the home of the shaman, Mad Zarrgakk, didn’t help. The black orcs didn’t look too bothered by it. Judging by the mounds of animal bones and rubbish, they’d had been camped here for a while. Black skinned, thick with muscle, and clad in exotic-looking spiky armour, the warriors took the vitriol of the tribes with all the cocky disdain for which their guts were rightly hated.

‘Zarrgakk is my shaman,’ Gorfang shouted. His voice was as rough as a fistful of gravel. The tusk-like fangs he bared boasted centuries of growth. They were crusted and vicious. The skin of his face was dark green and tough as an old tree that should have been cut down years ago. His shoulders were stooped under the weight of his plate mail. That and his impressive burden of years. ‘He eats my food and lives on my zoggin’ mountain.’

One of the black orcs planted a sly elbow in his chieftain’s ribs and grunted something in the weird language of the eastern steppes. The others clearly found it amusing. ‘Yeah,’ the leader agreed. ‘I hear you don’t have a mountain anymore.’

‘The Crag stands,’ Gorfang returned. ‘I left ‘coz I wanted to.’

‘They say Kazador whooped you good.’

‘I’m gonna whoop you good,’ Gorfang returned amid hoots of derision from the tribes, rightly impressed by their king’s rapier, almost gobbo-like, wit. ‘You talk big for a Chaos-stunty’s gubbinz-lifter,’ Gorfang went on, clenching one fist until the gauntlet groaned. ‘Show me you ain’t just another grot with a mouth.’

‘I heard you got beat by a ratty too.’

Gorfang’s hand closed around the hilt of his blade, then drew it. The serrated edge of Red Fang bit at its scabbard until the enormous blade came free. The black orc chieftain laughed and bared his own fangs, short like nails and mushroom white, and swept his sword through a series of brutal practice strokes. Arrogant, thought Bograt, but he wouldn’t choose to mess with him. Not even with a couple of the big’uns to back him up.

‘I am Bardok Blackspike of the Grim Tooth tribe and I don’t like your face.’

The black orc roared as he ripped back his sword, dropped his shoulder and charged. Gorfang dropped into a ready crouch, sidestepping the downward lunge and smashing the hilt of Red Fang into the black orc’s mouth. The crowd jeered, lapping it up as Bardok swayed back, spat blood, and countered with a neck-high swipe. Gorfang parried, catching the black orc’s blade in the teeth of his own. Bardok pulled on his weapon but it was trapped. With a grunt, he thrust his free arm between Gorfang and his weapon, elbowing the big boss in the chest and clapping his hand over the one that gripped his sword. Then he hugged the two blades to his chest to wrench them both from Gorfang’s grip. Gorfang slammed his forehead between the black orc’s eyes. Blood dribbled down Bardok’s nose. The chieftain returned the gift, daubing a bloody, face-shaped tattoo over Gorfang’s jaw.

Weapons forgotten, the two orcs pitted their bodies against one another. A thick vein bulged out from the side of Bardok’s head. His feet began to slide. Over the music and the cheering that was being trumpeted right into Bograt’s ear, he could hear sinews creak.

‘Old am I?’ said Gorfang.

‘You what?’ Bardok hissed through gritted teeth.

‘Beaten am I?’ Gorfang roared. ‘I’m the biggest orc in the world. And I’m still the king!’

Gorfang’s one eye glowered with hatred as his muscles bunched and then, with a roar, he hauled the black orc chieftain high into the air. His captive kicked and punched, but Gorfang flipped him onto his back as though the black orc was drugged and bound and shook him over his head like the spoils of war. The watching mob went wild and Gorfang bellowed louder still, slamming the struggling chieftain down and raising his knee to meet him. The snap of the black orc’s spine reverberated through the valley. The warrior screamed and Gorfang let him fold over his thigh, dead legs dragging the rest of him down to the ground.

This wasn’t just putting down a rival. This was sending out a message. The few thousand wildly screaming greenskins certainly got it too, which – Bograt figured – wasn’t a bad afternoon’s work. Gorfang thumped his fist into the air, then rounded on the black orc that was still scrabbling for his sword and stuck the boot in. The wind rushed out of the black orc’s lungs and he went rolling downhill, away from the tipi.

‘Anyone else fancy a go?’ Gorfang shouted. The now leaderless Grim Tooths backed away and, when none answered, Gorfang turned instead to the crowd. ‘What, no one? I can do this all day.’

A horn that was louder and clearer than most sounded from further west along Death Pass. Eight Peaks way. The drums pounded madly, but the tribes deflated a little when it became clear that there would be no more challenges. At least not just now. Bograt watched his boss as his one good eye glared over his green hordes.

Gorfang was a lot touchier than he remembered.

‘Oi, Bograt, do I pay you to limp about like a little runt? Get over here.’

‘Yeah boss.’

‘And stop walkin’ all wonky. You’re a disgrace.’

Trying to put more weight onto his busted knee, Bograt pulled a face and gave Gorfang a hateful glare. The gnarled old zogger surely couldn’t keep his strength up forever. And when it failed he’d find Bograt first in line to challenge him for his crown.

‘What’re you thinkin’?’ Gorfang grunted.

‘Dunno,’ Bograt answered truthfully.

‘Good. I’m not keepin’ you around for your brains.’

Bograt grunted. Sounded fair. Except for one thing that had been nagging. ‘Why are you keepin’ me around? You killed all my boys.’

Gorfang leered horribly. It involved a great deal of musculature that Bograt wasn’t sure that he even had. ‘Why did you go and throw in your axe with Skarsnik?’

Bograt didn’t even think about lying. It was a gobbo trait that he’d never grasped. ‘Coz he was the toughest.’

‘Hah! And that’s why I want you back, isn’t it? It’s about layin’ down a marker, about showin’ everyone who knows your ugly mug that Gorfang is the toughest.’

‘It is a lot of boys,’ Bograt agreed, taking in the chanting, drumming, squabbling masses that covered the hillsides to either side.

‘The biggest Waaagh you’ll see in this day and age,’ said Gorfang, oddly defensive. ‘Now come on. I want you to hear what Mad Zarrgakk’s been sayin’.’

Zarrgakk.

Just the name made Bograt’s insides turn cold. Shivering one step forward, he felt something sharp stab him in the rump. He growled and turned around to see a mob of excited greenskins at his back. In amongst them, watched over by a big’un made to look surly by a monstrous underbite, stood Gorfang’s command mob. They were a mix of orcs and runts carrying instruments and standards, but only one of them was holding a knife.

‘Woops,’ said the goblin banner-bearer, blood dribbling down his blade.

Bograt clutched his choppa. The day he started taking lip from runts – except for Skarsnik who had an orc name and didn’t count – was the day he’d eat his own axe. He’d seen a savage orc from a Southlands tribe do that once. It wasn’t pretty. The wind caught suddenly behind the gobbo’s big red flag and ruffled it in Bograt’s face. Taken aback, he shook his head from the banner’s folds and limped back. It rippled and snapped. It was unnerving because there was no wind that Bograt could feel. He stared at it. Waves of red, oddly hypnotic.

Something coolly metallic touched his shoulder.

Bograt flinched and spun, choppa rising on reflex. There was nobody there. Gorfang was a few feet away, back turned, already halfway to the tipi. Bograt felt his eyes cross.

‘What the zog–’

He felt the tap on his other shoulder and Bograt spun again, reflexes honed by thirty years trying to sleep with cave runts for company, and was immediately assailed by that banner. He flailed, but the mysterious wind – whatever it was – died back. The flag subsided to reveal itself not a flag after all, but a tatty old stunty hide cloak. It was draped over the shoulders of an orc more ancient even than Gorfang and tied by the beard around his wizened neck like an old woman’s shawl. Otherwise, he was naked but for a pair of shorts. On his production of a toothless grin, Bograt almost choked on the bitter smell of fungus tea.

‘Zarrgakk!’ Bograt barked. He backed away, a healthy superstition of anything he couldn’t hit overriding the urge to brandish his choppa and ward the shamanic apparition off.

‘I isn’t Zarrgakk,’ said Zarrgakk, pointing over Bograt’s shoulder. ‘He is.’

Bograt started to turn, hesitated just a moment while he fixed the shaman in his eye, then turned all the way. And bellowed in shock.

Standing in front of him, the shaman jiggled his finger in his ear. Bograt checked behind himself – no one there but the blasted banna-runt, then back again. Zarrgakk leaned against his copper staff and spread his gums. They were cracked and dry and mushrooms sprouted from them.

‘All this fighting over us, Zarrgakk,’ said the shaman. ‘I see it, Zarrgakk,’ he murmured, dropping his voice and rolling his eyes shiftily side to side. ‘People will start to ask questions.’

‘Mad Zarrgakk!’ Gorfang’s no-nonsense bellow cleared Bograt’s head like a slap across the chops. ‘Would you stop muckin’ about? Can’t you see there’s a zoggin’ Waaagh on?’

The shaman pouted. ‘Who calls me mad?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘He’s talking to you, Zarrgakk, you wittering grot-stain.’ A thoughtful look slackened his features. He shrugged and sagged against his staff. ‘Well he is a king, I suppose.’

‘Breathe, Zarrgakk’ said Gorfang, clanking over and then, for no reason Bograt could think of, cuffed Bograt about the ear. Bograt grunted, rubbing the side of his head. Gorfang turned to the shaman. ‘I don’t want you blacking out like when Gabble got eaten by that juggling troll.’

The shaman’s face appeared to widen and brighten and he chuckled. Then he bowed, turning the face of the skinned stunty that was stretched over his head like a cap to Gorfang and his boys. Its mouth gaped, its button eyes were pink and empty. ‘At your service, King Gorfang Rotgut of Black Crag.’

‘Tell me what you did before,’ said Gorfang. ‘Tell me about the Eight Peaks.’

Still bent, Zarrgakk looked up, a sudden intensity in his eyes. ‘The end of times is comin’, Troll-Eater. Is you ready for it? Mork tells me of the cities destroyed. Gork shows me the fightin’.’

‘I don’t care about none of that. The Eight Peaks, I said.’

Zarrgakk looked as though he was going to sulk for a moment, but then he noisily cleared his throat and closed his eyes. His staff staying fixed in both hands, his body started to sway. He began to mumble. ‘Eight Peaks I sees, and for each two I sees a king.’

‘Four kings,’ said Gorfang, interrupting Bograt’s flapping lips as he tried to work it through.

‘The cave runt, I know. The rat-king and the stunty. So who’s the fourth, Bograt?’

Bograt shrugged and tried to think. Skarsnik would never let another greenskin near his patch. Black Crag was as close as he’d permit a rival, and then only because Gorfang was simply too big to shift. He said as much.

‘The Headtaker neither,’ said Gorfang. ‘Fought him once. Vicious as a wild squig and madder than Zarrgakk.’ The shaman suddenly opened his eyes, looked quizzically over his shoulder, then settled back down. ‘Must be a stunty then,’ Gorfang went on, slowly, thoughtfully. He was awfully clever for an orc. Too clever, to Bograt’s mind. ‘I knew it. The stunties are musterin’ there for a march on the Crag. I knew it. And I bet that slippery runt Skarsnik’s in on it too.’

The king was looking at Bograt for confirmation. He just shrugged and grunted: ‘Boss.’

It covered pretty much all his options. And it seemed to satisfy Gorfang. He looked west along Death Pass. A horn sounded over the clamour of the greenskins’ instruments, crying over the spindly trees that filled the valley’s bottom. Gorfang crunched his teeth together as though someone had driven a spike into his ear. ‘I know a stuntie horn when I hear one. I told you it was stunties, Zarrgakk.’ He turned to Bograt. ‘What tribes are furthest up that way?’

Bograt thought quickly or, more accurately, he intuited as though his life depended on it. He’d been in Gorfang’s camp only a couple of hours, but decades keeping order amongst Skarsnik’s surface dominion had given him a good knowledge of the local tribes, their glyphs, and their favoured haunts.

‘The Black Skinz, I reckon.’

‘Well grab yourself another boar and gather yourself some boys to ride ahead. If those tree runts have got stuck in without me then heads are gonna roll.’

‘Yeah,’ said Bograt smiling, limbering up in anticipation.

‘I want the kings of Eight Peaks to know that Gorfang is comin’ for ‘em.’ The king’s look was faraway as he rubbed at his iron eye patch. It was clear he was talking to himself now. ‘I’m the biggest there is. Soon everyone’s gonna regret forgettin’ that.’

Sunlight blazed across the concealed runes inscribed on the entrance to the silver mines of Karag Mhonar. Belegar stepped into the glare of it, then grunted and covered his eyes. Coming so suddenly after the cool of the mine, Belegar already felt sweat running down his sides. The hum of a gyrocopter hovered at the edge of hearing. Short snaps of gunfire split the hot air of the scarp.

‘Thaggi long-gunners,’ observed a heavy voice.

It was Lanarak, one of Belegar’s hammerers. He wore an ornate steel breastplate over a blue tunic which had the collar buttons undone and the cuffs loosened. The old dwarf’s copious body hair tangled with the long brown strands of his beard. The dwarf handed Belegar an ale skin which he quickly downed while his eyes recovered. Then he slapped the empty skin back into the dwarf’s chest.

‘Show me.’

The hammerer nodded, stowing the skin, and led him down a cunningly concealed flight of stone steps to a ledge that thrust out of the mountainside like a natural viewing point. Clumps of flowering grasses poked from cracks in the rocks. Just to the right, a naked larch tree struck out at almost ninety degrees to the mountainside. What foliage it had nevertheless cast a welcome shade. Belegar beaked his eyes with a downturned hand and looked down onto the grey vista of Karin Vard. It was as still as abandoned stone. From within, it was easy to overlook how much of the town had been left to ruin. Dwarf architects and civic planners were as subtle as they were skilled.

But nothing could hide from the mountain.

‘Where?’ said Belegar.

Lanarak joined him at the ledge and peered down. His weapon was strapped across his shoulders, freeing his hands for the black, leather-bound binoculars that he now used to scan the slope, his lips wedging open in a grimace. A solitary shot rang. He shifted view quickly, but clearly saw nothing as he lowered the binoculars with a curse. ‘They must have moved.’

‘You should’ve stayed here and tracked them. I may be a king but I can still find my own way out of a mine.’

Belegar held out an open hand and the dwarf obediently handed him the binoculars. He lifted his gaze towards the East Gate. It made a tragic, if still majestic, sight. Its squat walls grew out of the bedrock of the karags themselves, colour-coded flag signals snapping along the stretch of ramparts and towers. From those blockish towers, spotters stood by their grudge throwers and cannon. The steel heads of ballistae gleamed in the sun. Runes of resilience circled its fortifications like the tattoos on a Slayer’s arms. It was that fallen beauty that struck him.

It had been bowed, it had suffered, but it still stood and stood strong.

Looking beyond the gate, he counted along the painted yardposts that marked distances for the gunnery crews along the wild brown grasses of the Azril Vale. One hundred yards. Two hundred yards. More. All the way to the needly mass of brooding pines that filled the valley past fallen Karak Gatt keep and the Uzkul Kadrin.

His lips pursed.

Had he just seen one of those trees shake? He lifted the leathern oculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus. The forest border blurred in and out of clarity. There was the hint of something passing, but it was too small, too quick.

‘Did you hear that?’ whispered Lanarak, ears lifted to the feeble easterly breezing in off the vale.

Belegar slid his shield from his shoulder, down his arm, and took a firm grip on the leather strapping. It gave a familiar creak. The master rune of defiance glowed a dim blue, almost invisible by the day’s brightness. Then he nodded.

‘A dwarf horn!’

The two dwarfs turned at Duregar’s approach. The old lord and the remaining hammerers, all seven of them, ducked from the mine entrance and into the sun. His blued armour shone like clear water. And he was right. No other race could produce a note so strident and true. It soared from the forest like a mountain kite, filling the vale with the echoes of its song. Belegar tightened his grip on his shield.

It was a call to arms.

He swore as he handed Lanarak his binoculars. In Karak Eight Peaks it could never be just one thing at a time.

The horn blast lingered on the sultry air. Kemma didn’t recognise the signal, though she knew that it was relaying a message of some kind, but it sounded almost plaintive. Like a mountain bear, lost and wounded, but too proud to slink back to the mountains and hide. Or perhaps she was putting too much of her own thoughts into what was, after all, little more than a soulless echo of wood, ivory, and wind.

Spreading her elbows along the high rampart, she leaned as far through the crenel as her bulk allowed and looked across the still brown grasses below. By eye, she followed the old dwarf road as it wended through grass and wildflower, past the small, crumbling fort, and into the forest. The rustle of something golden disturbed the densely hoarded trees. She tried to focus on it, but dwarf eyes that excelled in dark and detail failed her when matched with the forested vastness of the vale. The trees pressed each other close, like hags with a secret, and whatever she had seen was swiftly hidden.

‘You said you were expecting company, Reckoner Grimlander?’ she said, pressing her belly to the baked stone and staring at the forest as if willing it to disgorge a mighty throng of dwarfs. Her nerves had yet to recover from the ambush at the well. The desultory crackle of gunfire carved through the stillness from the slopes of Karag Mhonar and didn’t help one bit. With that in the background it became all too easy to ascribe the cries she could hear from the forest to shouts, and the whispering of those oaken crones to the muted clash of steel. She found herself praying for another shout of that horn.

‘I did,’ said Douric. ‘But I’m bound by oath to speak of it only to Belegar.’ The reckoner leaned under the shaded lintel of an iron-bound oak door. The wall it was set into cut across the ramparts like the stone glaive of some primitive deity, thrusting the East Gate fortifications right out into the vale and back to the muster yards of Karin Vard. The gate bristled with weaponry, but for all that, she could see just a single quarreller on patrol. Like her, his gaze was fixed on the tree line, a hand raised to keep the sun from his eyes.

‘It’ll be more reckoners, mark my words,’ said Gromvarl, back to the rampart, grumbling around the stem of his unlit pipe as he padded through his pockets for a tinderbox. ‘They’re like wasps to a feast.’

Douric snorted from the shade. ‘Perhaps if you could feed yourselves and pay for that which you “borrow” then they would not come.’

‘Maybe if beardlings showed the patience of their elders then they’d get what they were owed.’

Douric tugged his beard, as though assuring himself it was as long as he remembered it. Gromvarl could have that effect on even the proudest. He raised a finger and was set to argue further when the cry ‘Look!’ arose from further down the rampart.

A baker’s dozen of tanned and scruffy-looking clansdwarfs stood raised on tiptoes against the battlements. To a dwarf, those that Kemma had passed on their flight from the remembrance ceremony had insisted on accompanying their queen to safety. Kemma found their protectiveness a little embarrassing, but their presence kept Gromvarl and Douric largely civil. It was the eldest of the group that had spoken. A sleeveless leather jacket flapped open around his barrel chest, the collar shoved wide by a tangled beard. Kemma tried to remember his name. Skuffur, she thought, a master logger from the Azril Vale. The dwarf pointed towards the old roadside fort. His arm was the thickness and colour of a baked loaf.

‘Over there, my lady. You can see the trees moving.’

Kemma looked, but couldn’t see anything that she hadn’t already. She didn’t doubt the logger’s eye though, or his feel for the forest.

‘There!’ Douric yelled, stabbing a hand through a crenel and towards the tree line. His tone was anguished. It showed in his face. And Kemma saw why.

A unit of dwarf warriors in red tunics and heavy armour shot from the tree line at a dead run. Their faces were as red as their livery, axes and shields clattering as they pounded down the road and past the fort. They cleared the forest under a hail of what it took Kemma a moment to realise were arrows. She saw a scrawny, black-painted bowman at one of the fort’s windows and her next breath turned her chest cold. How did grobi get inside the fort? Where were Belegar’s rangers? She cursed as one of the dwarfs fell with an arrow through the collarbone. More of the tattooed savages lay on the roof of the building and shot straight down onto the dwarfs’ heads, hung from branches and fired at their backs, jumped down from the bowers with shrieks and stabbing spears. The canopy shook with grobi viciousness, as if the forest itself desired the destruction of the dwarfs. For a moment the thought chilled her. All dawi had heard rumours of what befell dwarf expeditions through the haunted woods of Athel Loren.

At a shouted command, the column split from their double filed marching order. They leapt from the road, blunt sun-bronzed blades trampled under their boots and startling the goblins from the tall grass. Captains yelled breathless orders and the two lines formed into a single rank separated by the road. Shields were lifted and locked, presenting a shield wall to the forest with the road running in between. While rocks, nuts, arrows and the abusive language of the forest grobi banged off their shields, more dwarfs in marching order emerged from the forest road and pressed for the gap between the two lines. Some split off from the road as they passed, thunderers priming their firearms on the run as they huffed behind the shield wall, hastily checked their ranks, and unleashed a fusillade of lead shot through the branches. The goblins cackled from their hiding place and Kemma watched as a flung javelin impaled a running clansdwarf through the chest.

The column cleared the shield wall, cohesion lost, running bodies spraying from the road onto the moorland like beer from a shaken barrel. Kemma saw them pass the red yardstone. Two thousand yards. Well out of crossbow range. It would take time to bring artillery to bear too, and Kemma wasn’t even sure what they would shoot at once they were ready. Would they just throw ordnance at the forest with hope and a prayer to Grimnir?

She pressed her bulk to the rampart and leaned over, looking down and to the left where the enormous gateway remained closed and locked. Any dwarf pursued this far would find himself under the full enfilade of the East Gate’s quarrellers, but the idea of dwarfs being run down against the walls of Karak Eight Peaks was appalling.

‘They’ll not open them for you, my lady,’ said Gromvarl, apparently reading her thoughts.

The longbeard still leaned with his back to the ramparts but, at some point, he had located his tinderbox for he now supped on a smoking pipe. His obdurate calm helped ground her nerves and she cast about for some other way to help. Her gaze settled on the nearest of the wall’s many breaches. It was about two hundred yards to the right, a solid enough assemblage of moss-bearded rubble and stakes, but sloped and not an impossible climb. She smiled, then winced at what felt like a muscular spasm in her belly. Her child kicked, to warn her off such foolishness or – knowing that Belegar’s blood was in there too – to egg her on.

Focused on his pipe, Gromvarl went on. ‘The gates will open for Belegar or Lord Duregar only. You remember how that mob of grobi got dressed up as dawi and rode on a wagon-full of the Everpeak’s dead right into Karin Vard.’

‘I remember,’ Douric suddenly shouted, voice shaking with emotion. ‘And how you can speak of it while more of my kinsdwarfs fall before your walls and not sicken yourselves with shame is beyond me. Look longbeard! Your Azril Vale swarms with grobi.’

‘And we will throw them back,’ said Kemma, still planning how she intended to climb the breach.

‘How?’ Douric sneered. ‘With them?’ He gave Skuffur and the other clanners a dismissive wave, then turned to the wall and clung to it as though he was about to be sick over it into the ditch below. ‘Too little too late,’ he laughed. ‘The Eight Peaks way. The damage is done and the High King will demand reparation for his losses, be assured of that.’

‘What are you looking at, my lady?’ said Gromvarl, when she didn’t look up or answer. He caught her smile, followed her gaze, then took his pipe from his mouth and swore.

‘Dongliz.’

Belegar pushed through the vengeful throng that was already assembling in the muster yards of the East Gate. The old barracks of Karin Vard hosted scores of permanent warriors whilst its taverns harboured many a longbeard with nostalgia for week-long grobkuls and arduous, character-building mountain campaigns. Those dwarfs gathered around the proud emblems of ancestor, family, and clan, hurriedly buckling on armour, sniping to each other about how breastplates had fit better in their day, while the spokesdwarfs of a dozen clans yelled up at the walls until everyone was hoarse.

A thane in moulded black armour threw Belegar a thumbs-up just before one of the clansdwarfs forced a helmet over his ears and stole his eager grin. Belegar returned the clanners’ cheers, oaths and slapped backs with a nod as he, Duregar and their retinue of hammerers crossed the yard towards the innermost gate. His boots were scuffed from sliding through half the topsoil of Karag Mhonar, and his armour was so full of sweat that if he removed his boot he could shower under it. He was too old for this, truth be told, but then some had argued him too old for it thirty years ago. Belegar gestured to one of his hammerers, pointing him towards the stone stairway to the gatehouse just as a tremendous cannon blast sent hot ash raining over them both.

Belegar shook the ringing from his ears and shared his wry smile with Duregar. His cousin didn’t return it. He sighed and turned back to the hammerer. ‘I want that gate open right now. Tell them that both Belegar and Lord Duregar demand it.’

The dwarf saluted and hurried off.

Belegar unhitched the Hammer of Angrund, swung his arm through a practice strike, then whacked the flat against his shield. The runes on both flared as if in anger. Beside him, Duregar was going through his own, similarly ingrained, ritual preparations.

‘Ready, cousin?’

Duregar arched his eyebow, then turned towards the gate as he donned his own blue-steel helm. ‘Not nearly as ready as you, I fear.’

The cannon shot caused the ancient wall to tremble. Kemma lay flat to the rubble slope that infilled the breach and held her breath as pebbles shook loose and rattled downslope over her fingers. She glanced left. Smoke leeched from one of the gate towers as from the jaws of a drakk. The vale still echoed to its roar. Silently, she cursed. It had taken the gunners this long to get a first shot away. Could they not have waited a minute more? While she waited for the rubble beneath her to settle, she saw that half of the clanners were already down, hacking through the brambles that clogged the ditch and scrambling up the embankment. The logger, Skuffur, waited in the ditch, arms spread ready to catch her in case she should tumble. Blessing him and cursing him in the same unworthy thought, Kemma inched herself down along her back, skidding the last few feet into Skuffur’s waiting arms.

The logger took her arm, leaving the other for the next dwarf down, Douric, and together they drew her up out of the ditch and into the grass.

A sudden sense of vulnerability swept in from the unwalled spaces of the valley. The mountains of the Azril Vale loomed high and distant on either side. To the left, rusted pylons and flaps of scrap iron waved like the banners of desolation above old exploratory delvings. Even the forest seemed farther from the ground than it had from the walls, a dark green mass arriving after miles of wild, cratered, moorland.

Perhaps this idea had not been so good after all.

The road passed about two hundred yards to the left. Dwarf warriors in full armour and wargear were running down it from the tree line, between the embattled shield walls, and on towards Kemma’s position. They were breathless and red faced, packs clattering, running alongside a procession of laden carts. The mules in the traces wore heavy leather caparisons. The rear compartments were covered in thick sheeting and most of them were riddled with black-fletched arrows. The shield walls were doing a good job of covering their escape, but even Kemma could see the problem waiting to be exploited.

There simply weren’t enough dwarfs.

Already, two huge mobs of forest goblins were charging down the thunderers that anchored the formation’s flanks and spilling around to flood the grasses behind the line. Shrieking like drunks and running in zany, zigzaggy lines, the goblins bounded through the tall stems, their small bodies almost entirely hidden were it not for the tips of their spears and their leafy headdresses. The most hideous rode on enormous, brightly coloured spiders, screaming excitedly from howdahs made of sticks and bone and guiding their mounts by studded leather reins lashed to their mandibles. The arachnoid cavalry pulled away from the enthusiastically chasing infantry, scuttling easily over the felled trees and blasted crater formations that blighted the grassland.

Just watching them made Kemma feel sick. If those creatures got in amongst the wagons it would surely be a slaughter. But what could she do about it with so few warriors of her own? As she tried to think, both Douric and Gromvarl fired their crossbows. The reckoner’s stuck a bolt into the vivid yellow carapace of one, while Gromvarl’s pitched the rider screaming from its howdah. Caught unprepared and from an unexpected side, the charge stalled and a volley of crossbow bolts from the wagons sent the creatures scurrying back.

The greenskins scattered around their broken cavalry, going to ground in skirmishing groups without an order spoken unless it was hidden somewhere in the shrill gibberish of their screams. Watching them loose missiles, then belly down and wriggle through the long grasses was like watching creatures for whom ambush and hit-and-run was as instinctive as web-spinning was to a spider. Heavy armour and sturdily built wagons protected the convoy to a point, but dwarfs were falling, arrows sticking from under their armpits, darts spiking envenomed tips through knee joints.

‘I’m sure you have a plan of some sort, my lady?’ said Gromvarl with the effortlessly patronising manner of the very old. His crossbow was aimed using one hand only, supported still by its shoulder strap and freeing his right hand to wield a small hammer. His pipe, stubbornly aglow, puffed out loose little rings like smoke signals.

Kemma bit her lip. She had hoped that the distraction alone would be sufficient, but she had clearly underestimated just how well the goblins had been allowed to prosper in the forests of the Azril Vale. ‘We advance,’ she yelled, as loud as she could. Let the grobi hear. With fourteen dawi and a pregnant rinn, a distraction still seemed the best plan available. ‘Gromvarl, call it.’

‘Aye?’

‘Let them know the dwarfs are coming.’

‘Aye,’ Gromvarl grinned, spitting his pipe into his hand and sucking in a deep breath. ‘Khazukan Kazakit-ha!’

‘Khazuk!’ the clansdwarfs cried, matching Kemma’s walking pace as she started forwards.

She wanted to charge, to get to grips with the grobi, to sluice the sudden terror from her mind with their blood. But she felt as heavy as a troll and couldn’t have run if she tried. So she walked, the clanners cheering her show of courage and contempt whilst silently she prayed that none of the missiles falling her way struck. A dwarf could endure pain and poison that would cripple a weaker race, but what of her child? Suddenly every dart and arrowhead came freighted with a black crush of fear. A dart hit Gromvarl’s bearskin cloak just above the collarbone and got tangled there. He looked down at it and snorted.

‘To the wagons,’ Kemma yelled and, conscious of the dwarfish proclivity to sit back and soak up pressure until it broke on dawi stubbornness, she led the way herself. Gromvarl followed and the others were not far behind.

The train had stalled, the lead wagon boxed in by the melee. The driver beat down at the swarming goblins with a hand-axe while the crewman beside him, a scar-faced visage in ringmail vest and red woollen shirt, kept up an unstinting rate of fire from a brace of pistols. Gromvarl’s crossbow hissed and plugged a goblin that had clambered onto the canvas covering the rear and was about to leap onto the driver’s back. The driver let out a relieved whistle and sat back down.

His guardian simply loosed another pistol round into a fleeing greenskin’s back. ‘Don’t think me ungrateful, my lady,’ he said, speaking as he loaded powder and shot into the steaming muzzle of his right-hand pistol, then squeezed off a shot with the left. ‘But I’d ask you to keep back. By order of the High King, no one is to approach these wagons.’

Kemma pursed her lips. The High King was certainly making his authority felt today. ‘Then we’ll not approach,’ she shouted over the roar of steel and death. ‘Just go. We’ll help clear you a path to the gate.’

‘Do it,’ said Douric, axe loose and leather scale bloodied. ‘I’ll vouch for the rinn.’

‘No need,’ said the guard. ‘Look.’

The East Gate was open!

Dwarf soldiery was pouring through and Kemma almost fainted with the rush of relief. These were not scantily armoured loggers swept from the streets of Karin Vard. This was the East Gate garrison itself. Their close-fitting helms left only eyes, nose, and long greying beards exposed. Their tall shields were rimmed with steel, bossed with the ancient heraldry of the Eight Peaks and spattered with blood where they brained the witlessly charging grobi. Axes rose and fell like steam pistons to the thunderous beat of cannon. Dwarfs yelled oaths and goblins screamed as they died.

One powerfully built old gromthi charged ahead of the rest. His plate mail carried as many dents as protective runes. The horned helm that enclosed his face was fiercely functional. His rune hammer he wielded one-handed and struck swifter than the eye could follow; swifter even – it almost seemed – than the arm that wielded it. No sooner could a goblin come within reach than its skull was crushed into its spine and its broken corpse thrown back off the dwarf’s shield. The lord thrust hammer and shield above his head and roared, exalting in the ring of carnage around him and challenging the following warriors to match him. With a grin, he turned back to the wagons. His fierce brown eyes met Kemma’s. She saw a flash of doubt.

The grin faded. His weapons lowered.

It was fortunate that the helm revealed enough of the face, else Kemma might have feared an imposter had donned that battered armour and taken up the Hammer of Angrund. She would never have recognised the fear in Belegar’s eyes.

‘Kemma!’ Belegar roared.

A blurred swipe of his hammer sent two goblin swordsmen reeling, then he lowered the brass-tipped horns of his helm, roared like a bull and charged. Goblins flung themselves from the road to escape his path. He next lifted his face when he neared the lead wagon. A crosswise swing of his hammer smashed a goblin against the wheel. ‘What on Grungni’s hairy arse do you think you’re doing?’

‘I’m unhurt, thank you for asking.’

Belegar pulled off his helmet. Fury deepened the lines of his face, but there was no hiding for the fear for her his eyes betrayed. ‘Why did I ever let myself be betrothed to you?’

‘Was it that my father was the richest dwarf that would give you a daughter, or was it Gromvarl and the two hundred warriors that came with him as my dowry?’

Belegar grunted, sticking out his jaw while still managing to look somewhat abashed. ‘The warriors. And in return I promised the grumbaki that his grandson would be the king of Karak Eight Peaks so–’ his hammer flashed, felled a goblin as it crawled from the wagon’s undercarriage ‘–don’t make an oathbreaker of me, woman.’

A deafening whistle shrieked low overhead. Kemma glanced up, the instant that a mortar shell blasted into the ground behind the wagons and fired filth and bodies twenty feet into the air. The dwarfs hunched as clods of earth and the occasional body part rattled off upraised shields and the wagons’ covered backs. Belegar straightened, smearing mud from his white hair.

‘I’ll pay you if you’ll go back inside.’

The goblins were running for the trees. It had not been that last mortar shell that had sparked the rout and nor – though Belegar had believed it for a moment – had it been his imperious display with the Ironhammer.

A mighty front of hammerers was advancing from the cover of the pines. Their armour was brilliantly ornate, moulded into emblems of defiance and picked out in gold. Their red cloaks were so prickled with arrows that they resembled pine cones, but the grobi archery had not managed to slow them down, much less actually fell one of the heavily armoured veterans. Long mail skirts furrowed the road as, with the precision of a steam-driven woodsaw and the murderous beauty of a golden drakk, the formation wheeled into the grass, turning over the greenskin flank as if they were dummies ranked up on stakes. This was not the escort for a reckoner. Nor a supply train. This was more warriors than Belegar could muster if he called on every dwarf of able body to fight. The blunt reminder of his diminished circumstances was a painful one. And more dwarfs followed.

Rich banners fluttered over magnificent helms. They were red, blue and gold, displaying the crowned mountain rune of Karaz-a-Karak, hung from iron crossbars that swatted the under-canopy of the forest with the disdain that dwarf iron held for the wild wood. If anything, the wargear of these warriors was even more impressive than that of the hammerers. With jewelled axes and gold-inlaid hammers they cut through the grobi wounded and stragglers, forming then into ranks once they cleared the forest with naught but road and dead ahead. The musician that Belegar had heard since the heights of Karag Mhonar marched amongst this group. His helm was winged, set with ruby and sapphire. He raised his instrument to his lips and sounded the advance. The horn was made of spruce and ivory and banded with gold-etched steel.

This was the most fabulous host Belegar had witnessed since his departure from Karaz-a-Karak. It was an honour guard fit for a king.

No.

For a High King.

And then Belegar saw why the goblins ran. Behind him, he heard Duregar make a choking noise.

Armour clanked and feet beat the road in time. Belegar fought the urge to raise his shield, but it was impossible to dislodge the idea that this host intended to march right over him and onto the walls of his hold. A great throne rode upon that sea of steel helms and golden crests. Crafted of granite, clad in gromril and gold and studded with jewels, it was the invincible flagship of the dawi nation. Beasts of lore emerged from the golden latticework of the high back, as if summoned from the metal whilst it had still been molten. Their mouths were done in rose gold, their teeth in silver, eyes picked out in agate, lapis lazuli, and brilliant sapphire. Pennons fluttered from the top, alternating red and blue.

‘The Throne of Power,’ murmured Kemma, eyes wide with reverence and sparkling with a gold-fever that Belegar found almost as alluring as the golden throne itself. Her cheeks were flushed with exertion, her matronly chest rising and falling with each breath. Blood spattered the bump of her mail shirt, stirring a protectiveness that Belegar hadn’t, until that moment, realised he possessed.

‘Perhaps you should go inside.’

‘What?’ said Kemma, prickly as ever. ‘I want to know what brings the High King to our corner of the Uzkul Kadrin.’

Nothing good, Belegar thought, but didn’t say. He considered commanding Kemma back to the East Gate, but abandoned the idea as a waste of breath. The woman was stubborn as any dawi. Uncomfortably by her side, he watched as the Throne of Power and its glittering vanguard bore towards him, borne across the shoulders of four broad, bare-chested dawi. The bearers’ shoulders bulged like hessian sacks, their tunics knotted around anvil-hard waists that were shiny with sweat. With a grunt, the bearers set the throne down on the road and stepped aside, rolling out their shoulders and cracking their necks.

‘Duregar,’ Belegar hissed, grabbing his cousin’s arm and twisting him from his state of shock. ‘Go back inside. See the place put in order.’

Duregar looked to the throne, then to his cousin and king. He bowed, spun on his heel and, calling the warriors of the Eight Peaks to him, ran for the gate.

‘Ironhammer,’ commanded a voice from above, deep and ancient as the glittering viaducts of the Undkar River. ‘There are urk on your lands.’

It was not difficult to resist his immediate impulse to grin. In any other voice, from any other mouth, it would have sounded like a comradely joke after a battle. But Thorgrim Grudgebearer, King of Karaz-a-Karak and High King of all the Karaz Ankor, did not joke.

The High King sat straight-backed and stern upon the throne. His appearance was distorted slightly, as if the throne’s already formidable mass was merely the overt facet of a fuller presence. Belegar’s skin tingled, a faint charge bushing his eyebrows. The power on display was awe-inspiring. The ever-rune, Azamar, engraved upon the Throne of Power by Grungni himself, was so potent that there was not magic enough in the world for more than one to exist. So mighty was it that, according to legend, its destruction would portend the end of the dwarfs themselves. Belegar shivered. It was an ill thought.

Slowly, Thorgrim finished what he had been reading from the great tome spread across the two sinuous, drakk-like idols that served him as a lectern, and closed the book. It was bound in iron and engraved with deep runes of grudgement. He tucked the Dammaz Kron beneath his arm, then pushed himself up from his seat.

Belegar stared like a beardling admitted to Bugman’s brewery.

It was difficult to believe that any dwarf could stand surrounded by such wealth and history and still appear resplendent, but Thorgrim did. His girth was kingly, clad in armour of coal-black gromril against which the gold embossings of dragons and Khazalid spirals shone doubly bright. His beard was the grey of sanded stone, knotted into a single plait about which the remainder fell as it would. Bitterness and rancour had carved his brow as a gully was cut by ice and made a rocky shelf for the magnificent Dragon Crown of Karaz. He passed between the necks of the drakk lectern and started down the steep flight of stone steps to the ground. His eyes found Belegar’s. They were like chipped ice, and carried bags so heavy they looked like bruises.

Belegar wasn’t sure where the bowing of heads started, but as he stood there before the High King, he noticed first his hammerers, then Kemma’s company, then all the dwarfs in the vale shifting onto one knee and bowing their foreheads to the eyes of their axes in respect. Only Kemma did not bow, but he suspected it was only because she was physically incapable of doing so. Like Duregar’s Akrund clan, Kemma’s blood-ties to the capital ran deeper than bedrock. Belegar noticed then that one of Kemma’s followers was not on his knee. The dwarf moved to the foot of the throne where Thorgrim welcomed him with a stern clap on the shoulder, then bowed his head to hear what the dwarf had to whisper in his ear. With the blood on his leather armour and the flesh peeling from his face, Belegar almost didn’t recognise him.

Reckoner Grimlander! When had that thaggi returned?

Squaring his shoulders and thrusting out his white beard, Belegar stepped in front of Kemma – lest it appear he hid behind his rinn – and thumped his hammer head down to the ground. Was he not a king? He would be cowed by no one, and certainly not under the shadow of his own gatehouse.

‘On behalf of my hold and my clan, I bid you welcome.’ He pitched his voice deep, crossed his hands over the upturned butt of his hammer haft and nodded welcome. Douric Grimlander glanced his way, then pulled respectfully back. ‘What business brings so many of the Everpeak’s warriors to my gate?’

‘There are urk on your lands,’ Thorgrim said again, irritated by Belegar’s interruption. ‘My throng was abroad on your business, Ironhammer, cleansing the kadrin of urk as we always must.’

Belegar felt himself turn the royal hue of the house of Everpeak. ‘The siege, it–’

‘Excuses, Ironhammer? They are for queens and princes and those thanes who will never wear a crown.’ Thorgrim offered Kemma an apologetic bow, then returned his full, sour glare to Belegar. ‘You have a duty to maintain the passes. Now I am here to do it for you.’

Belegar clenched his fists around his hammer’s steel butt. He drew a breath, counting gold in his head. ‘I welcome your assistance, my liege.’

Thorgrim’s lips ground together into a frown, but he nodded, as though placated by the fine performance of a middling son. His eyes glittered like quartz crystals in granite. ‘Do I look like I come to offer assistance, Ironhammer? I have come to wage your war for you. The Squatter King of Black Crag is abroad, so my rangers say, ready to be crushed in open field.’ His eyes turned misty, imagining the bittersweet taste of final grudgement. ‘I will accept what assistance you can give.’ Thorgrim looked him over. A cough that sounded almost derisory rumbled from his throat as he turned to the wagons. ‘You may begin by offering your hold for the storage of my baggage train, and the services of your rangers for the escort of my supply lines.’

A murmur passed through the dwarfs of the Eight Peaks.

‘I’m not a quartermaster, Thorgrim. I am the king of Karak Eight Peaks.’

‘A title that these days lacks for rarity.’

‘I’m the greatest fighter in the south! If there’s a war to be fought in these mountains then my place is in the heart of it.’

‘Hear hear!’ shouted one of the Eight Peaks dawi.

Thorgrim silenced the ensuing cheers with a glare. ‘The storytellers say that your prowess is bettered only by Ungrim Ironfist.’ Thorgrim snorted, his expression settling into one, if that were possible, of even greater disapproval. ‘I find that insulting.’

Belegar grunted, pride appeased but not nearly enough. Thorgrim could take his umbrage with him to the end times. Belegar knew he could take him in a straight fight. Just as that same pride yearned one day to show the Slayer King of Karak Kadrin who was second best.

‘One hammer does not an army make,’ said Thorgrim as though lecturing a hall full of beardlings. ‘It takes more than Az un Klad to craft a king. After thirty years you are yet to claim a fraction of your ancestors’ holdings.’

‘I have patience. So should you.’

‘Do you imply that I do not?’ Thorgrim patted the iron binding of the kron tucked beneath his arm. ‘Can you afford another mark against your name, Ironhammer?’

Belegar clenched his jaw and struggled for calm. His stomach chose that moment to growl.

‘It is not patience you practise. It is reaction. You flail after first one foe, then another, and you achieve nothing.’ The High King subjected Belegar to the full weight of his opprobrium. Belegar couldn’t match his stare. His eyes slid to his hammer. ‘Now escort my wagons into Karak Eight Peaks. Karaz-a-Karak provides food enough to share with all who aid in the ousting of the Squatter King.’

Belegar folded his arms across his chest and stuck out his chin.

‘Oh, Valaya’s mercy,’ said Kemma. She looked Belegar up and down and rolled her eyes. ‘You’d rather go hungry than help the High King reconquer Karak Drazh?’

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Belegar grumbled.

‘Let us lay out our claims, Ironhammer,’ said Thorgrim. ‘I know about your silver. Even had I not intercepted the mercenary band that found it for you as they passed through the Uzkul Kadrin, did you think I would not be suspicious when you demanded the cessation of trade?’

‘You did what?’ Kemma screamed, and would have thrown a punch had Gromvarl not restrained her arms in his.

Thorgrim continued, ignoring the queen’s struggles. ‘If you will not do duty by your High King, then I shall claim commensurate compensation from the mine. I am owed it in any case, and then some.’

‘Owed?’ Belegar spluttered, storming forwards until he and Thorgrim were beard-to-beard, gypsum white to granite grey.

There was a rattling of armour as hammers were hefted on both sides, but the High King was unmoved down to the wiry grey of his brow. He waved the warriors down. ‘Do you forget my gold, my grain, my arms? Where would Karak Eight Peaks be now without the might of Karaz-a-Karak?’

Belegar looked to Kemma and scowled. It had been her letter that convinced the High King to subsidise trade and even to offer outright aid. The memory of every caravan was a needle to his pride. ‘It is written in our Book of Remembering that you vowed to redress every grudge in the Dammaz Kron, to restore every lost dwarfhold to glory. To what end then, if you can stand in the shadow of the ancient empire’s finest jewel and demand this of me? Will you fill the vaults of Everpeak with my silver and leave this hold to ruin?’

‘Is that how you want this, Ironhammer? A trial of grudges? The dammazuk?’

‘No,’ said Kemma, still fighting against Gromvarl’s grip. ‘By all Valaya’s children, no. You came to fight urk, not to quarrel like them.’

‘It is,’ said Belegar, ignoring his queen but speaking just as firmly. She was right, but she was also wrong. Some matters were more important than urk. ‘This is my hold. You’ll not have me minding your wagons for you and you’ll not walk away from here with an ounce of my silver.’

‘Will you at least settle for conducting this within your–’ Thorgrim grimaced as he looked past Belegar’s shoulder, but had the grace to keep his opinions to himself, ‘–your walls?’

For a moment Belegar considered refusing out of pure stubbornness, but the Azril Vale still crawled with tree grobi. He did not want to add the names of all present to the roll call of those slain by a dawi’s pride. And besides, Duregar should at least have made Karin Vard partway respectable by now. He stepped from the road and swung his arm towards the open gate.

Thorgrim nodded once, turned to ascend his throne, then twisted back. His grim façade cracked just a little as he proffered another low bow to Kemma who was only just beginning to calm down. ‘You are radiant as brynduraz, my lady. The prayers of all dawi are with you. And with the future king of Karak Eight Peaks.’

The sun was just beginning to dip behind the western peaks as the last of the stunties passed through the gate and into their city. There had been a lot of them and it had taken a long time.

Surrounded by the muffled grunts of the boars, Bograt and his boys watched them go. From the forest road at the valley’s bottom, the walls of the stunty house looked unbreakable, but he’d travelled the Silver Valley a hundred times on Skarsnik’s business. He knew where the wall had been patched rather than rebuilt. He knew where it was weak.

He knew where it was broken.

Zarrgakk had been interested in that, and unnervingly lucid too, before Bograt had ridden ahead with his new boys. He didn’t know why, but he assumed he’d soon find out. Studying the wall from north to south, reaching forward to pull his mount’s snout from whatever foulness it had found to eat amongst the weeds, his corded neck tilted back to take in the enormity of the East Gate. He gave a gruff chuckle. This wasn’t going to be easy. However many warriors Gorfang brought. Whatever mad plots cooked in his shaman’s fever-pot skull. Just ask the Black Skinz.

The forest runts’ nervous eyes twinkled from the trees. Bograt grunted and flexed his muscles, startling the watchers deeper into the trees. He grinned. Even by gobbo standards, forest runts were viciously territorial little grots, but he and his boys had ridden through with little more than a potshot. The Black Skinz were quiet as gnoblars in an ogre’s kitchen. It was obvious that this stunty army had given them a proper going over.

With a stab of the knees, Bograt urged his boar forward. The animal gave an uncooperative snort and went back to its meal. Bograt leaned out and peered down into the weeds and blue-black wildflowers that riddled the roadside. Two skinny little green arms and two equally weedy legs twitched as though still alive as the boar sank its snout into the corpse’s belly. The animal’s snout was reddened with blood, up to its eyeballs in entrails. Gork, he hated this stupid creature. Maybe that’s what he’d call it. Stoopid. Giving it some heel bone, he jabbed the dumb beast’s sides until it finally agreed to move. Bograt winced as the boar’s massive shoulder muscle rubbed under his broken knee, but held one-handed to its neck hair, bared his tusks, and bore it as the animal carried him from the tree line.

Bodies choked the moorland grasses. A base instinct kept him from advancing any further, even under cover of dusk. The coppery scent of blood excited his nostrils, tempered only by the tickle of grass seed on the wind. His boar snuffled hungrily through the swaying blades, its tongue looping out to lick the specks of gore from a stem of grass. Shifting around, Bograt grunted his new boys their orders.

To a bare chested orc with a red fang tattoo: ‘Round up them tree runts.’

To a dark-skinned warrior with a stunty helm squished over his square face: ‘Go get that big hill Zarrgakk wanted.’

And to the last two: ‘Ride back. Tell Gorfang the stunties are here for ‘im alright.’

The orcs grunted understanding and wheeled their surly mounts away. Listening to them crash through the undergrowth, Bograt returned his attention to the wall. He ground up his face and squinted at one of the fiery dots that were strung out along the battlements. Was it held by a stunty or just meant to look that way? It was too dark to tell, and too far away. Right then he’d have taken ten kicks in the zogs for a couple of gobbo wolf-scouts to check out the wall before Gorfang arrived. Thirty years with the Crooked Moons had taught him that pitch darkness was no hiding place from a gobbo. And they’d stick you with an arrow long before you saw them too. He grunted, stomach growling, and glared hatefully at Stoopid’s red snout. They did taste good though.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d sat there, staring into the layering blackness, thinking about his stomach, when an iron clatter sounded behind him. He shuffled about as an enormous, boar-drawn chariot rumbled down the forest road. The boars were the biggest, blackest brutes that Bograt had ever clapped eyes on. They snorted furiously as they hauled the ramshackle contraption along behind them on four not-quite-circular iron wheels. The car itself was wood – mostly – hammered together with heavy iron plates and daubed in red paint. At the back, surrounded by his big’uns and the flags and squig pipers of his command mob, was Gorfang Rotgut himself. His one eye glared into the trees that passed to either side. He looked ready to jump off at any moment, but of course Gorfang didn’t use his chariot for fighting. He just used it to get about.

A thought passed. Bograt leered at it.

Maybe the king of Black Crag was getting on after all.

He turned from the rising tide, cracked his knuckles, then drew his choppa for a practice swing. It felt good. The real thing would feel better.

‘Ere we go.’

King of Kings

On this day am I reminded of my meeting with Leoncoeur, king of that human province they call ‘Bretonnia’. My throng was in the Grey Mountains to burn out some bandit lord based within the lands of Karak Norn. The umgi king had, I presume, mustered to similar purpose. Suffice to say that the thaggi stronghold was crushed, the thief-lord slain by my own axe. This then left the issue of captives. The manling king did plead with me on their behalf. ‘They were without choice,’ he did say, for they were but starving peasants, and did proceed to speak at length upon a code he referred to as ‘chivalry’.

Perhaps such philosophy is the consequence of harbouring elgi within one’s borders.

‘They had a choice,’ I did patiently remind this young king, and they had chosen not to starve. The soil of Karak Norn was well nourished that day. There can be no tolerance for oathbreakers, even amongst the younger races. How else are they to learn, if not by relentless example?

– The remembrances of Thorgrim Grudgebearer,
Recorded following the razing of Schwarzheim
from the foothills of Cragmere

Under the jaded hue of torches and celebration lanterns, dwarfs in a mix of clan colours jostled over the flagstones of Veldi Vor. Darkness was just beginning to creep into the sky. The air held the day’s mugginess though, and the added heat of the lanterns was enough to bring the tempers of dwarfs still stoked by battle right back to the boil. Thorgrim did not think he could ever comprehend what had possessed a dawi to construct a hold so slaved to the elements and the cycles of the heavens. By the harsh glare of naked flame grudges were traded, like skarrenawi over a goat. Whispers of wrongdoing passed from ear to ear, growing more egregious with each retelling until the chain was broken with young clansdwarfs rendered speechless with wrath.

‘Beggars and cheats,’ went the accusations of the Everpeak clans.

‘Arrogant misers,’ came the embittered return of the Eight Peaks.

From the magisterial height of the Throne of Power, Thorgrim observed it play out. As he watched, a chisel-jawed Eight Peaks stonemason squared up to a warrior of Karaz-a-Karak and it looked like their disagreement would be settled in a runk before a pair of hammerers dragged them apart. This was as the dammazuk should be; an arena for grudges that had been given too much time and space in which to fester.

A group of warriors waited on the East Gate Road, holding just outside the square well away from the arguments brewing within. The Akrund clanners that had joined the throng from Karaz-a-Karak had the same dour temperament as their lord. Leading them for the first time in decades, Duregar bore himself with a certain grim-faced pride. The longbeard was still filthy from the battle. Thorgrim afforded him a brief nod. Duregar returned it, then he and his clan about turned and marched back in the direction of the East Gate.

A proper dawi, Thorgrim thought, and a good influence on his feral cousin.

Recalling the storied history of Karak Eight Peaks and its lords, he allowed himself the brief diversion of wondering what might have been had Duregar’s ancestor, King Lhune, had a son rather than pass the crown to his cousin, the several times removed great grandsire of the Angrund clan. He shook his head. Duregar would have made a fine king, but it had taken two thousand years and a dwarf like Belegar Ironhammer to finally wrest the hold from the grobi and strike two millennia of grudges from the Dammaz Kron. Thorgrim placed a hand reverently upon the iron cover of the ledger on his lap.

That had been a good day.

‘How is this to be done then, Thorgrim?’ said Belegar, snapping Thorgrim from his revery. ‘The sooner we begin, the sooner we march on the Uzkul Kadrin.’

Belegar stood on the opposite side of the old well from Thorgrim, flanked on one side by Douric Grimlander and on the other by the Valayan priestess, Magda Freyadotter. Impatience was writ into the bulging biceps of his crossed arms. Thorgrim fixed him with an iron-rod stare that Belegar struggled and ultimately failed to meet. The dwarf’s gaze slipped sideways.

‘Come on,’ Belegar grumbled. ‘Before my beard rivals that of fabled Grombrindal.’

Thorgrim leaned forwards, elbows on the arms of his throne, hands forming a V for his chin. ‘Listen to the dawi around you, Ironhammer. The dammazuk has already begun. If there is a grudge you wish to air, then do so.’

Belegar crushed his fingers over the lip of the well, as if he would tear it from the earth. His voice, when it came, was in the snarl of a beast. ‘This is my kingdom, Thorgrim. Mine. The aid you gave in reclaiming her does not entitle you to command me here.’

There was a muted cheer from the Eight Peaks’ contingent amongst the crowd.

‘Is that so?’ said Thorgrim, turning to Magda Freyadotter. The priestess’s robes were splattered with blood that was yet to fully dry. There was even a little on the underside of her chin that the exhausted rinn did not appear to have noticed. Thorgrim was not unsympathetic, but the dawi had not endured these dark centuries by resting when they were weary. The woman clutched the sides of the well and nodded weakly.

‘He doesn’t lie.’

‘No, I do not believe that he does. But he is still wrong. Belegar is as beholden to my authority, to my armies and to my gold, as any clansdwarf of Karaz-a-Karak.’

This time it was the greater number of Everpeak dwarfs who cheered, drowning out the grumbles of their poorer cousins.

‘And yet a king I am,’ said Belegar.

‘Do not boast to me of bloodlines, Ironhammer. I trace my lineage to Grimnir himself.’

Thorgrim felt the priestess’s tired eyes probe him and faced it like a stone wall to the dawn. Magda nodded, but said nothing. No one present doubted the High King’s heritage. Possession of Grimnir’s own mighty axe would have been proof enough for any that did. The ancestor god had bequeathed it to Morgrim, his son, before marching north to do battle with the Great Powers. It had passed through his heirs ever since.

‘Speak your grudge and have done,’ Belegar growled.

For a long moment Thorgrim just watched Belegar pace. Thorgrim frowned, recalling the time that he and King Byrrnoth Grundadrakk had sat upon their respective thrones and stared at one another for nearly two full days until the sea king had finally broken and asked what had brought Thorgrim to Barak Varr. He sighed.

Now there was a king.

Still pacing, Belegar muttered and cursed until Magda, one eye on the High King, muttered some soothing platitude that calmed him to something approximating dignity. He took a deep breath and returned his hands to the well, grasping it as if to anchor himself down.

‘Are you quite done?’ said Thorgrim.

Belegar looked as though he was about to erupt again. His knuckles whitened, but before he could speak again, his jaw dropped. His head tilted back. His eyes widened.

Thorgrim’s brow arched. Then he noticed that others were looking to the sky as well. The contentious murmuring died back. A dwarf in the colours of Everpeak put his arm around the shoulder of his Eight Peaks cousin and pointed in the direction of the East Gate. This is what came of open skies. Doubtless this was why the elgi had lost the War of Vengeance and the umgi continued to offer one disappointment after another. Grumbling, Thorgrim pushed himself from his seat and turned to look for himself.

It was a pinprick of light, moving across the darkening sky like a shooting star. It was growing larger though, and as it did it became clear that it was not a star at all but a huge flaming boulder, likely flung from the old hill mines of the Azril Vale. It fell towards the East Gate, halo flickering. It was going to be a perfect shot.

‘Dreng Tromm!’

The boulder hit the outermost wall of the East Gate and exploded, swallowing the fortress in a great ball of fire. Like thunder after lightning, the earth shook, causing shields to rattle against scaffolds around the square and fall. Lanterns swayed, muddying the shadows over rapt expressions of incomprehension and horror. In the stunned silence Thorgrim watched the pieces of rubble and glowing embers rain over the rooftops of Karin Vard.

‘Khazuk!’ Belegar roared as another flaming missile crashed into the wall and drove a rupture deep into the stone. The smell of burning char rode on the Eight Peaks basin from the east. Screams followed hot on its trail. The Eight Peaks clanners, ever primed for catastrophe, were already running for muster points and Belegar rounded on the dwarfs left behind. ‘What are you waiting for? Dawi to arms!’

‘Where are you going, Ironhammer?’

‘Where do you think?’

‘I think that your guess is as good as mine. Your walls are indefensible and it is pointless to try. Had it been I taking this hold, I would have focused my strength on deepening my bridgehead into Kvinn-Wyr.’

‘The East Gate is not mine to surrender,’ said Belegar, an inch from outright berserker fury. ‘It is the property of my ancestors and my heirs.’

‘The grobi held it for two thousand years. What is a century more?’

‘Why are you arguing over this now?’ said Magda. ‘What’s done is done. Defend the hold and settle this later.’

‘What’s done is…?’ Thorgrim shook his head and grumbled under his breath. What had happened to the world when even the wise could spout such nonsense? ‘The wall is vast, my lady, too vast to defend in its…’ he glanced at Belegar before continuing, ‘…state. Add to that that we have no idea where the Squatter King will direct his strength.’

‘What?’ said Belegar, suddenly alert. ‘What makes you so certain that Gorfang is behind this?’

‘Of course it is Gorfang. His forces fill the Uzkul Kadrin from the Dark Lands to Black Crag. Or do you think mere forest grobi would dare assault stone walls?’

‘I’ll not be idle while my people fight,’ said Belegar, thumping the well in frustration.

‘Then fight,’ calmed Thorgrim. ‘Where you will be useful and when.’ He nodded to the ruined town. ‘Lord Duregar is able and commands warriors of Karaz-a-Karak. Let them fight the urk on the streets of Karin Vard, destroy them one by one as they clear the walls and descend into the plundering savages that they are without leaders to push them.’

‘You knew this was coming?’ said Belegar, glaring at Thorgrim across the well as though the king blamed him for leading this host onto his walls.

Thorgrim grunted and crossed his arms. ‘I anticipated. You have not seen the host assembled in Uzkul Kadrin. I have.’

Belegar crossed his arms and clutched his biceps, staring down the straight road to the East Gate. Everyone left behind in the square felt the same frustration, even Thorgrim, but only Belegar hid it quite so poorly. At least he was capable of mastering it.

‘Wait for your cousin to send word, Ironhammer. The Squatter King will lead his attack, have no doubt, and then we will hit the urk where it hurts.’

Burning shrapnel scathed the ramparts of the East Gate, hammering off upturned shields like hail against a hide tent. Sharing a moment of terrified intimacy with a dwarf she had never even spoken to until their bodies were crushed together beneath his shield, Kemma tried to make sense of what was happening. One minute she and Gromvarl had been walking the wall.

The next, chaos had fallen from the sky.

Cannon and ballistae returned fire from casemates across the length of the wall but to no great effect that Kemma could discern. She could see nothing with the orcs’ flaming missiles messing with her night vision and she assumed that the engineers were firing blind as well. There was a whoosh of noise, of heat, and another glowing rock roared overhead to smash into the wall about two hundred yards to the right. Exactly where the wall was weak. The whole stretch shook, rubble blasting back into the street and stippling the buildings beyond with shrapnel.

Just cursed luck, Kemma told herself.

There was no way the orcs could have known where the walls were at their most fragile, and even less chance that the savages could have made so accurate a shot if they had. But the volley that walked the length of the wall, meting out punishment on every old breach and weakness in eruptions of stone dust and green-tinged fire said otherwise. Like flies caught in a spider’s web, the impacts shook right along the wall. Kemma felt it shake the tissue of her body and she clutched her belly, moaning softly as it responded with a pain all of its own. The muscles tightened, then suddenly relaxed. She let out her breath, holding her stomach as the unknown clanner lifted his shield, gave an embarrassed cough and returned to the parapet. Gromvarl leaned over, presenting a crooked forearm for her to hook her elbow around his and be hauled up.

‘Remind me again why we’re here, my lady?’

‘Magda was going to take me back to Kvinn-Wyr. Belegar’s driver left already before it got dark.’ She rolled her eyes and brushed stone dust from her sleeves. ‘Valaya knows we can’t travel by night in our own blasted city.’

‘You could’ve attended the dammazuk.’

‘And watch my husband and the High King puff out their chests and see whose beard is longest?’ She snorted, about to say more when another spasm girdled her waist. Moaning softly, she sank back against the ramparts. Gromvarl was immediately beside her. He made to feel her stomach, but then pulled back as though she nursed a hot coal within her mail. ‘My lady! My lady, are you hit?’

‘Urk!’ shouted one of the quarrellers before either could speak again. Even above the bombardment Kemma could hear the savage war cry of their charge. Heavy feet beat into the long grass. Getting closer. By Valaya, this was it. They were charging straight for the breaches!

With a loose clatter of strings and sprung lathes, a volley of bolts hissed down into the valley. There were grunts, barks of pain, the sound of heavy bodies falling. The quarrellers reloaded.

‘Fire at will,’ shouted their captain. ‘Quickly now, quickly…’

Another staggered salvo of hisses and whines and more cries sounded from the dark. It wasn’t going to be enough. She didn’t need to be on her feet and looking into the vale to tell that this wasn’t going to be settled from three hundred yards with a crossbow. Perhaps two-score quarrellers warded a wall a mile across and the hundreds of orcs she heard barrelling across the grassland was probably just the first wave.

‘Gromvarl, let’s go.’

Even in the dark the longbeard’s relief was palpable. ‘Praise Grungni, my lady.’

She pointed to the nearest breach in the wall where she could see three ranks of dwarfs building a shield wall to plug the damage. ‘Take me there.’

‘My lady, but you’re…’ Gromvarl caught himself, clenched his teeth, and tugged his beard in anguish. Then, realising how deep into unfamiliar territory he already was, he lowered his voice and hissed. ‘You’re pregnant, my lady.’

Kemma just glared. Gromvarl’s mouth opened to respond, but nothing came out of it.

‘Now, help me down there before all of Karin Vard is overrun.’

Bograt leaned into the back of his boar, the beast utterly ambivalent to the orc boys getting scythed down by crossbow bolts front, back, and centre. Orc and gobbo archers hopped over the bodies, getting about halfway to the wall then dropping to one knee. More eager fighters blundered into their backs in the dark and swore as the archers drew back strings and aimed up. Thick cords whacked their pointy ears and sent a storm of arrows flying. Most fell short. The rest rattled off the battlements. A cannon returned fire. One of the big towers belched smoke and tossed an iron ball into the midst of the charge. It tore through the top layer of turf, fanning muck, then bounced, pulping dozens and leaving a bleeding trail of cripples. It didn’t dent their enthusiasm. Orcs with one arm mocked mates with none and ploughed on through the crossbow-fire for the breach.

Checking his own boys were properly lined up ready, Bograt caught a glimpse of the rock-lobbers and runtapults that had been set up just where Mad Zarrgakk wanted on top of the old stunty digging holes. Even over the screaming and the dying, the lobbers made a terrible racket of unnatural noises. There were wooden creaks, the crank of metal teeth, Mad Zarrgakk’s insane cackling as power burned along his staff and ignited the munitions, then a sudden rush of wind as though the sky breathed in as arms loosed and burning rocks were lobbed into the sky. The aim was uncanny. The shaman danced a wild jig, flesh cloak flapping, staff whirling, pawing at the boulders as they arced across the sky. Obviously there was no way he could touch them, but Bograt saw one shift course even as it flew, could almost see the huge yellowish claws that closed around it to pull it down and smash it through the stunties’ tower. The structure crashed to the ground in a blizzard of glowing debris. It was awesome to behold.

For if there was anything better than fighting then it was surely explosions.

Those parts of the wall that got hit just kept on burning. It wasn’t a proper fire. It didn’t spread and it wasn’t even that hot. It just glowed bright red like a cave runt’s eyes. It was brilliant. Even the dumbest zogger couldn’t fail to find a stunty to smash now.

Without realising in his excitement, Bograt drew so hard on Stoopid’s neck hair that the beast took it as the command to go. Its walk became a trot and Bograt held it all the tighter, kicking until it ran. The ground tore from under him unseen. Metal blades and leering fangs flashed by in the dark. He was aware of his boys chasing after him. Bograt leaned forwards, slapping the boar’s rear with the flat of his choppa. The rising energy of the Waaagh! prickled his flesh, made his senses sharp, and filled his muscles with the violent urge to kill.

He was an orc, and he was the boss.

Bograt was going in first.

The dwarfs roared defiance as the first wave crashed through the smouldering breach. Aggression met discipline, ferocity found resolve and one by one, fastest first, the hulking green slabs of bone and muscle met dawi shields. Blades flashed from both sides. Orcs hollered. Dwarfs strained against their terrible strength to grind them back. Blood and sweat slicked the breach, causing the glowing rocks to spit. By sheer stubbornness and grit, the line somehow held. The second rank threw their shoulders into the scrum. More orcs piled in.

With a guttural shout, an orc with arms like beer kegs struck down with a heavy scimitar that clove a shield in two. Its elbow then downed the shocked clansdwarf and, before any could react, it bulled its way into the dwarf formation. An axe sank deep into the meat of its bicep, but the wound didn’t phase it. The orc backhanded the dwarf across the jaw, losing a gout of blood as the axe came loose, then buried its own blade into the beard of the next in line. It took a crossbow bolt through the back of the neck to finally put it down.

Kemma looked on from the torn edge of the rampart above as Gromvarl swore and manually winched back his crossbow to reload. The ferocity of the orcs was a horror to behold. Their strength was astounding and their resilience to injury impressive even to a dwarf. But it was the joy they took in it all that was the most terrifying thing, the way they shouted, laughed, and tripped each other up even as their blades locked with those of the dwarfs. The defenders were making a valiant effort, but against such savagery they could only hold so long. The shieldwall was creaking, descending into furious whirls of hand to hand combat. The dwarfs were determined fighters, but they were never going to triumph on the greenskins’ terms.

‘Elgraz-ha!’

The dwarfs responded to Kemma’s shout without thought. The dwarf reputation for relentless deliberacy on the battlefield belied a capacity for devasting mobility at the unit level. Squat, powerful builds allied to masterful armour allowed a dwarf to take a hit and break melee, while a tenacity of character impelled them to drill and drill and drill until clan brothers were so in tune they would eat and piss as one. And the collapsible wall, the Elgraz, was a manoeuvre they could – and likely had a hundred times – perform in their sleep.

The rear rank took one step back, locked shields and braced. Then, one by one, the ranks in front broke off and ran behind them. Last of all went the old front rank, each judging the moment to turn and break. Some were cut down but by astute timing and fine armour, the majority made it to take their place in the rear rank. The pursuing orcs crashed into the fresh shieldwall and the struggle commenced anew.

Kemma bit her lip. It wasn’t going to be enough. Just as the first shield wall had crumbled, so now did this one, and pushed two ranks back from the wall they now faced the added threat of the orcs battling around their flanks. No one suffered like a clansdwarf of the Eight Peaks, but even they had limits and she could see that they were nearing theirs. They were going to break unless they were given a good reason to hold. It did not need to be for long. Just until Thorgrim Grudgebearer and Belegar marched their throngs down the East Gate Road.

Clutching her stomach in one hand, she hefted her hammer. The pains that rippled outwards from her girdle muscles into her hips and thighs were coming increasingly regularly now and becoming harder to ignore. It made it difficult even to walk.

But she did not have to go far.

The walls and towers of the eastern skyline glowed an urgent red. It could have been mistaken for sunrise, had the sun not still been forging a path beyond the western peaks. Anxiously, Belegar paced, at every turn throwing a look to the East Gate. Somehow it managed to look a little worse each time. The thought of his kinsdwarfs shedding blood to defend the outermost inches of Karak Eight Peaks while he held back for word of the Squatter King struck him like a fist in the gut every time he looked in that direction. But still he looked.

At least Kemma would be back in Kvinn-Wyr by now. His son was safe. Rather than comfort him, the thought only brought guilt. There would be plenty of families watching on from the viewing ledges of the White Lady who could not be so secure in the wellbeing of their loved ones. He grumbled into his beard.

Damn that woman! She managed to confound him even from afar.

He looked up as a squadron of gyrocopters roared overhead. One of them was venting black smoke from its tail rotor, clearly unfit to fly but pressed into service all the same. Belegar wished that he could be. He felt for his hammer.

Still there.

But strapped to his thigh as it was, the comfort it gave was cold.

‘Patience, Ironhammer,’ said Thorgrim. The High King had barely moved a muscle since the assault had begun except to speak. And he had hardly done that. He was like a rock in his black armour, in more ways than one.

‘Patience,’ Belegar grumbled as though it were the rankest insult. He continued his pacing, clenching his fist around the lump of rock he had found in his pocket. ‘You don’t know Duregar like I do. Even if nothing was happening, he’d send word of it.’

‘Perhaps here in Karak Eight Peaks you let the grobi force your every hand. A true king knows his own mind and will not be veered from it.’

‘And if your own damned inflexibility leads you on the path to ruin?’

Thorgrim just watched his pacing. Something about his regard made Belegar begin to feel foolish, so he stopped with an effort, clamming both fists around the rock. It was jagged and bit into his palms.

‘You sound like the elgi when they petition for the return of the Phoenix Crown. Perhaps you think I should just give it back as well.’

‘My kings!’

The messenger sprinted from the East Gate Road, through the corridor of hammerers and into the square, mercifully arriving before Belegar could offer the High King his own suggested destination for the Phoenix Crown of Ulthuan. The runner was wearing knee-length chainmail and Everpeak’s colours. The face and beard within his open helm were sooted and, though he carried no shield, the stripe of raw flesh down the left arm of his red tunic suggested he had once had one. He stumbled to the well, then grasped his knees and wheezed.

‘What news?’ said Belegar impatiently.

After a couple of lung-crackling heaves, the dwarf collected himself and bowed, first to Thorgrim, then to Douric and Magda and then again finally to Belegar. ‘Urk magic my lieges. It has breached the walls in several places.’

‘Are there no runesmiths in your hold?’ said Thorgrim.

‘A few,’ said Belegar, not caring for another argument. ‘What of my walls,’ he pressed the messenger. ‘What of the urk?’

‘Some have broken through, but not many and Lord Duregar has them contained.’

‘But the walls,’ Belegar insisted. ‘If they are hit as badly as you claim and my cousin has encountered so few of the urk, then clearly they still fight. Who commands there?’

The runner turned grim. His eyes rolled to Thorgrim, but there was comfort for no dwarf there. Uncertain why he did, Belegar backed away. The fire in his chest burned him still, but it was an icy burn. The runner hung his head. ‘Can you not hear what they cry, my liege?’

Belegar held his breath and listened. There was a cry but it was distant, harried on all sides by the steel clangour of combat, a whisper of order from the mouth of chaos. One word.

‘Vala.’

Queen.

Thorgrim Grudgebearer turned over the rock in his hand. Belegar had thrown it at him just before he had ripped his rune hammer from his thigh and charged from the square. Cubic crystals of galena protruded from the lumpen piece of skarn. It glittered under the torchlight, and by the shamanic glare of the East Gate. There was tin there, a little lead and…

He couldn’t help a smile.

…silver.

As if it were yesterday, Thorgrim remembered the young royal he had upbraided for killing all the grobi in his own reserve. How many centuries ago had that been? He recalled demanding an explanation, and being surprised by it. Surprised but impressed. The beardling had shrugged: ‘I want to kill grobi.’ Thorgrim gripped the rock and sighed.

Belegar had not changed at all.

‘My liege,’ said the runner, confused now as well as breathless. ‘Should we go with him?’

‘This is Belegar’s hall,’ said Thorgrim, extending an open palm, and as if by providence, a dwarf thrust his axe into it. His fingers closed around the magnificent haft. In seven thousand years of steadfast innovation, a more potent weapon than the Axe of Grimnir was yet unforged. It was heavy with history, but he hefted it easily in one strong hand. ‘Grant him five minutes. Then ready my throne for battle.’

‘Out of my way, you flat-sacked grot-suckers. Bograt’s boys are goin’ in.’

Orcs swore, lugged obscene gestures and rocks, but to the last dived clear as Bograt and the boar boys thundered through. The wind whistled through his ears. He could smell blood and fire. It gave him goosebumps. Bograt gloried in the mad blood rush as the boars stormed the ditch and climbed for the broken walls. The detritus glowed red, scattering like marbles as the boars charged through and into a blended crush of orcs and stunties.

Bograt brandished his axe and roared, urging Stoopid into the fight. With a sweep of its snout the boar gored an orc through the back, shattering its spine and hurling it aside. Brute power and momentum drove it on, crashing through orc and stunty alike, barging aside useless shields and throwing bodies to the ground. The boar stamped over still-living bodies to get at the rear ranks, thrashing and goring in a red frenzy that Bograt with his choppa battled fiercely to outdo. He could hear the stunties’ mail split under Stoopid’s trotters, felt it in his bones as theirs cracked under the animal’s weight. And suddenly he was in amongst it, the perfect centre that every fight had. With a bellow of joy, he sank his choppa into a stunty’s tall helm, planted his foot in its face, and dragged his weapon clear. A ballista bolt lanced over his head and impaled the orc to his right. He laughed.

This was what it was about!

A stunty with a horned helm and a beard dressed in steel scales rushed him. Bograt kicked out, forcing the fighter to duck when he should have swung, then hauled Stoopid round by the neck hair to smack its rump through the stunty’s chest. The fighter flailed for a moment, then went down, curses turning to screams as Stoopid put its back leg through the dwarf’s knee. Bograt felt his own shattered joint flare in something like sympathy as Stoopid completed the turn.

In the unwelcome lull, he took stock of how the fight was going.

The boar charge had split the stunty ranks like an axe through a shield. The handful of front rankers they’d missed were now surrounded by a mad scrum of boys on foot. As for what was going on back outside, he couldn’t give a snotling’s zogs. More boys were still pouring in though, which probably meant Bograt was doing something right. He took a deep breath, grinning, letting the ash and blood settle in his nostrils. Right then, he couldn’t for the life of him think why he’d given the last decades of his life to knocking heads for Skarsnik.

His heart punched and kicked at his ribs like a petulant child demanding killing but, brawler though he was, battle was an instinct. He could see the stunties regrouping, packing their ranks tighter to counter the cavalry charge. The boars had done their damage but now were in danger of getting bogged down. Without bothering to understand why, he gave Stoopid another kick and hauled him back to where his boys formed a new line. All four of them were still alive, breathless, blood up. The boars snorted, irritated by such closeness, and swiped bloodied tusks for each other’s snouts.

The stunties were rallying around a large figure. In a moment of superstitious horror, he was convinced that it was nothing less than the reincarnation of Grom the Paunch! It certainly looked like old Grom. It was short and fat, huge belly covered in mail so shiny that it looked bloody by the glowing rocks. That made no sense though. Grom was a gobbo’s gobbo and wouldn’t be fighting with stunties, even if he was dead, and on a proper look it was clear that this one was nothing scarier than a fat stunty. In fact… Bograt scrunched up his eyes.

It was a girl stunty.

Long braids of brown hair flew around her crowned head as she fought. She wasn’t moving much from the spot, but she spun a long-handled hammer overhead, whipping the thing outward to leave heads crushed and limbs broken. The stunties around her held solid, like she was something precious. And they were shouting something.

‘Vala!’

‘What’s that they’re yellin’, boss?’ grunted one of the boar boys.

With a brutal kick, Bograt urged Stoopid forwards.

‘That they want some more.’

The ground trembled beneath Kemma’s feet and she moaned with horror as the enormous silhouettes of orc heavy cavalry formed from the wall’s glare. The huge boars were heavier than a warhorse and as vicious as any orc that could be convinced to try and mount one. Their heavily armoured riders brandished axes and spears and bellowed for blood.

‘Defend your queen,’ Gromvarl roared, a hurried shield wall clattering closed around him and Kemma. It was two ranks of exhausted bodies and battered shields, but for sheer discipline and courage it was faultless. ‘Any dwarf to outlive her lives forever in the Book of Grudges.’

The longbeard squeezed a shot away. The bolt took a boar through the mouth but, maddeningly, it just snorted and came on all the faster. Kemma had time to pick out its rider. It was bigger than the others, a leader, kitted out in faded yellow plate mail and wearing a skullcap decorated with crescent moons. And then there was no more time. In an instant, shields were smashed on boars’ tusks, warriors trampled as the creatures barged through to the second rank. The orcs hacked down, wild butcher’s cuts to left and right from a height and position of strength that rendered the shield wall near useless.

‘Keep it tight,’ Gromvarl yelled, grabbing a boar-rider by the articulations of its knee joint and hauling it to the ground to be bludgeoned once, twice, then a third time until it finally stopped fighting. Unlike goblins, orcs rode without saddle or harness. A small weakness, but one that Kemma would give thanks for if she survived to see the inside of another temple. The dwarfs struggled to regroup, to close ranks, but they were too few now to effectively bog the riders down. Hammer whirring above her head, Kemma sought out the leader. She spotted him just as he spotted her, the second that a great swing of his axe beheaded a struggling clansdwarf. Blood showered him and he roared like a daemon, brandishing his gore-slicked axe and goading his mount around. Its long, bristly snout was red with blood. In its eyes shone a hunger for dwarf flesh. The orc was still kicking his heels madly into the creature’s gut when he noticed the hammer streaking for his head. He had a second to react.

And orcs were not renowned for their reflexes.

The orc’s skullcap folded around the hammerhead and she beat him from the back of his boar and onto the road. The orc growled and started to rise, only to crumple with a howl of agony over what appeared to be a broken knee. Surely, Kemma’s ancestors were with her today. Hammer spinning, she stepped forwards and turned, hammer driving through an upward arc, then turned again, facing the prone orc boss, hammerhead streaking down. She cried out as the hammerblow crashed through the orc’s shoulderblade, drove cracks through the paving stones, then rebounded so hard that the weapon sprung from her fingers.

But the orc didn’t rise. She spat on its back. One less to poison the lands of her children.

Around her the battle raged. The cavalry was running, but there were plenty more orcs still piling through the breach. It was over, she thought, as with a terrible weariness the dwarfs mustered two ranks, shields front.

Where was Thorgrim? Where in Gazul’s Gate was Belegar?

She could fight well enough, but she knew she had no hope of running and that these dwarfs would die to the last to defend her. That made her angry rather than guilty. In fact it made her stomach boil with fury. Panting hard, she tried to recover her hammer but could not bend. Pain tightened across her belly and thighs and she ground her teeth to keep from screaming. Holding her belly in one hand, she waited for it to subside. Fury became bitterness, then suddenly sorrow. She felt tears run as another contraction encircled her waist.

‘Valaya,’ she breathed. ‘Don’t let it come now.’

At a shout from Gromvarl she turned. The longbeard hurled his hammer and it spun end over end, passing her by inches, and thumped through the face of the orc that had been about to plunge its sword through Kemma’s chest.

‘I saw straighter lines from the grobi at Iron Gate,’ Gromvarl shouted as he collected both his own hammer and Kemma’s from the ground. ‘Form up. Stay alert, stay strong. By Grimnir, we’re dawi!’

‘Gromvarl,’ Kemma groaned through the pains, holding on to the longbeard’s mangy cloak as he returned her hammer. ‘I think we should leave.’

The longbeard grunted, possibly in amusement. At first she didn’t understand, but then she followed his gaze to the breach. And then she did. Coming through at the head of a band of the biggest orcs she had ever seen was an orc that was, impossibly, even bigger again. It looked broad enough to carry a boar under each arm, and made the rider she had just killed look like a goblin. Its armour was so thick that it forced its body into an ape-like hunch, its gnarled, leathery head engaged in a continuing battle to resist the crushing iron mass of backplate and pauldrons. Deep lines and numerous scars etched its face. An iron plate nailed one eye shut. The crown of Karak Drazh, of the Black Crag, rested on his pointed head.

Kemma had never seen Gorfang Rotgut, but she recognised him with the certainty that she would her own child. They were going nowhere.

Not with a chance to end the reign of the king of Black Crag.

Belegar charged from the street into the fulminating glare that the urks’ arcane munitions had made of the East Gate walls. Hugely muscled and heavily armoured warriors clambered through the wreckage, shinning aside glowing rubble and battling with the surviving dwarfs across a wide front and all the way back to the houses that sheltered behind the wall. Dwarfs retreated right back into the buildings. Their shields were broken and their quivers dry, yet still they fought over every inch they surrendered. Blood slickened the flagstones. Brutalised remains outnumbered bodies still fighting. Everywhere there was bare ground, debris great and small glowered like souls awaiting Gazul’s final judgement. But where was Kemma?

He cast around, leaving his arms to intuit for themselves as the Ironhammer smote a path of ruin into the maelstrom. There! He spotted the hazel grindal that spilled from her crown as she fought amongst a desperately small knot of dwarf warriors. Grimnir, but they were beset from all sides!

Even as he found her, the blood turned stiff in his heart.

Gorfang!

With a warning cry that no one heard, Belegar battled his way through but he was too far and already too late. Gorfang hit the dwarf line like a boulder. Shields broke, teeth flew. One dwarf went flying. Another fell apart as a sweep of Red Fang cut the upper half of him from the lower. The urk opened his mouth, stuck out his tongue to the crimson geyser, then ran through another. Belegar saw Gromvarl. The longbeard charged across the urk’s path and smote his hammer upon the monster’s knee. Gorfang gave a brutish laugh, then batted the dwarf aside and advanced. Another flung himself in Gorfang’s way. The urk kicked him in the chest, cracking his ribs and knocking him back three feet to land broken at Kemma’s feet.

She stood alone.

Belegar felt fury swell within him. His muscles hardened, his blood turning hot until his skin blistered. A long wordless roar of a challenge rushed through his ears, and without realising it he was charging. It was as if a crimson wave had crashed over his shoulders and flung him through the fool urk standing in the path of the Ironhammer. Through the red mist he saw Gorfang turn, leer, lower his sword and raise one massively gauntleted fist to gesture: ‘come on.’

Summoning the wrath of all his ancestors, Belegar leapt for the giant urk, unleashing a frenzy of blows too savage for any creature of flesh to counter. The Ironhammer left a string of craters across Gorfang’s breastplate. The brute himself was left staggered but unhurt and swinging an arm that Belegar ducked, then sprung up behind to attack again. The Ironhammer glowed brighter and hotter, the rune weapon dragging his arm to strike ever faster. It was like fighting with a lightning bolt rather than a hammer. Gorfang fell back, the grin well and truly beaten from his face, and Belegar exploited every inch he took. A diagonal swipe crushed a pauldron, a thrust stamped the rune of Angrund into Gorfang’s breastplate, and then a blistering uppercut forced the orc into a parry, taking the blow on his fist, flinging the urk’s arm back and spinning the two fighters apart in a hail of sparks.

Belegar shook his head and stood in time to meet the fist coming the other way. Instinctively he raised his shield, the blow cracking the steel rim against his cheekbone and throwing him back. It was like being hit by a tree. He hit the stones and rolled, coming up swinging, the Ironhammer dashing aside Red Fang’s thrust. But the urk was quicker than he looked, taking another dent to his thick plate as he spun and whacked his sword across the side of Belegar’s helm.

The gromrilcraft of the ancients spared Belegar the worst, but his head rang like the barrel of a fired cannon. He stumbled back, head filled with deep laughter until he could fumble out the straps and tear the helm from his face. Fresh air bit his bare cheeks as he blinked to clear his vision of stars. And the urk was still chuckling. Belegar felt the ancestral rage that had driven him seep away. He had felt as though he was revenge incarnate, but now he was just one dwarf, alone, faced with an urk who took his hammer’s bruises as though they were rapped knuckles.

‘This is the last time you cross the heirs of the Eight Peaks, Gorfang. And I am not my cousin. I will not settle merely for an eye!’

Gorfang laughed, jumping through another hammerblow with a downward sweep of his sword that ripped through a layer of chain to send iron ringlets raining before Belegar could get out of the way. He came on. A dead boar lay in his path. He kicked it, lifting the huge body off the ground and towards Belegar. Gorfang thumped his dented breastplate and guffawed as Belegar stumbled clear of the rolling corpse. He rubbed his iron eye patch.

‘I remember that zoggin’ cheat. It took him and all his boys to get this off me. What’ve you got stunty?’

Belegar felt wall at his back. He had been driven right back to the homes of Karin Vard. He gripped his hammer with fresh resolve. There could be no more retreating. And then, like a force of nature, Gorfang dropped his shoulder and charged.

The impact was like being caught in an avalanche. Belegar was ripped from the ground and driven through the wall with the great urk following right behind. Winded, Belegar mouthed an oath, threw a punch at Gorfang’s iron eye patch in one last act of defiance before he was flung to the ground and booted across the room. He was weightless for a moment, then he crashed into an interior wall and fell flat on his face onto a bed of rubble. There was blood in his mouth. With the last of his stamina, Belegar rolled onto his back. At least he’d see death coming and that was something.

More at least than Skarsnik or the Headtaker had ever offered.

‘A king is gonna die today, stuntie. And I think you’ve got it comin’.’

Belegar set his jaw and met Gorfang’s one eye. He didn’t know who was the more surprised when a hammer swung from nowhere and near decapitated the urk with a blow to the side of the head that threw him sideways and face first into the wall. Had his neck not been as thick as an iron stanchion, the strength of the blow would have almost certainly torn his head off. Belegar prayed to Grimnir that Gorfang felt it enough to stay down for at least a few minutes. Kemma stood where the urk had been, her weapon squashed beyond repair following its encounter with Gorfang’s skull.

‘Valaya’s arse, woman. When will you stay where you’re put?’

‘I’m unhurt,’ said Kemma as a pair of clansdwarfs and a decidedly concussed-looking Gromvarl hurried to drag Belegar to his feet. ‘Thank you for asking.’

Belegar looked over his rescuers. Kemma and three warriors. Try as he might, he could not envisage any scenario whereby the five of them would fight their way back to Thorgrim Grudgebearer’s throng. For some reason though, he smiled anyway. ‘Me neither. Thank you for asking.’

Kemma gave a brief smile, then winced and clutched her stomach.

‘Are you sure you’re unhurt?’ said Belegar.

‘Don’t even bother,’ mumbled Gromvarl, eyes woozy, blood from a broken nose plastered across his beard. ‘Let’s just…’ He pointed to the door in the wall to the left. Through gaps in the boarded windows Belegar could see urk and grobi running down the East Gate Road. He suddenly felt very tired, but Gromvarl gave him a shake. ‘Let’s just be away before he–’

‘Before who, stunty?’

In a drizzle of dust, Gorfang levered himself onto his knees, then punched a fist into the wall in front of him, using his arm as a ranger would a climbing piton to pull himself to his feet. On shaking legs, Belegar stepped in front of Kemma. The Ironhammer felt ten times heavier than it should, but he somehow managed to hold it up as Gorfang turned, rolling out that thick neck, until his immensity was framed by the tear he had made in the building’s outer wall in that initial rush. Outside was smoke and screams, but something glinted, something that for some reason demanded Belegar’s attention. When he recognised it for what it was, he smiled.

‘Don’t look so zoggin’ pleased. It’s gonna take more than that to stop Gorfa–’

There was a cry of torn air, a terrific thump as of a poker hurled against a giant cauldron, and then a shearing of metal as an iron spike slammed through Gorfang’s back and burst from his chest. Gorfang stared for a moment at the bevelled head of the dwarf ballista bolt that jutted from his breastplate. He made a gargling noise that sounded almost like a laugh.

And then dropped liked a cannonball.

The arrival of the Throne of Power on the East Gate Road was greeted with a resounding cheer. Runners stopped what they were doing to pump fists from doorways. Shopkeepers hastened to lock up their properties and then ran to join Thorgrim’s host, even whilst apprentices fussed with their weapons and armour. Marshals in the colours of Karaz-a-Karak stood at every intersection with small but eager throngs of Eight Peaks’ citizenry. As Thorgrim was borne past, they gave their troops the thumbs up and waved them into the rear ranks.

The Throne of Power rocking beneath him, Thorgrim stared grimly ahead. The walls of the East Gate burned. The Dammaz Kron lay open before him across its drakk lectern, its pages heavy and untroubled by the breeze. Thorgrim reached out, fingertips brushing the coarse parchment. He shivered and laid his full palm flat. This was what wrath felt like; collected, codified, bound in iron and held for every generation still to come.

A thumping whir passed overhead. It was the gyrocopter squadron returning from their run. They cut through the pall of smoke that rose from the ramparts, then angled their noses forwards as the pilots throttled ahead full. As they passed over Thorgrim’s throng a resounding twang quivered through the sky. The strange sound was followed by an even stranger sight. With a piercing wail of delirium a goblin wearing a spiked crash helmet and a set of red cloth wings stitched into the arms of its jacket was catapulted over the walls. The creature corkscrewed through the air, chattering excitedly as it flapped its arms.

Thorgrim gripped the arms of his throne. It was an effort not to stand, but it would have been a weakness. There was nothing he could do. He made himself watch as the creature controlled its fall just enough to crash through the gyrocopter’s lightweight hull and rupture its fuel tank. The gyrocopter detonated in a brief, brilliant explosion. Burning aluminium scraps and droplets of black stuff rained down onto the town, setting fires over a swathe of the ruined town as the machine’s velocity flung the wreckage on.

Thorgrim watched without expression, hatred simmering as the pieces rained down. Then he took up a quill and leaned over the pages of the kron.

One further wrong that the death of the Squatter King would set right.

‘I can have one of me boys yank that out if yer likes?’ said a voice from somewhere behind Gorfang’s back.

‘Flesh wound,’ Gorfang growled, pushing himself off the ground and to his knees. He grunted for breath. It looked as if he’d bashed his way into an armoury. It smelled of iron and polish. Shields and suits of mail hung from the walls. Armour dummies stood scattered around like curious runts. He looked down, poking at the iron tip that was sticking out of his chest. It pulled on the muscle, ripples of agony making his vision black and fade. ‘Does it make me look hard?’

‘You betcha, big fella. Never seen an orc wiv a big rod like that.’

Gorfang clutched his head as, with a colossal effort, he drew himself up. It had to be a gobbo, didn’t it. ‘Runts always gives me headaches.’

‘Yous is lucky to be feelin’ at all, oh yus indeedy,’ the mystery voice countered, unbothered by the thumping rage growing inside Gorfang’s skull. ‘I thought that shot had yer done for.’

‘Not Gorfang,’ he said. Feet spread, he swayed, his one eye narrowing as he looked over the dummies and the armour hung from the walls. Hidden in the shadows of the fireplace, a single prick of light glowed. A purple cloud of fungalweed smoke drifted from the hearth, followed by an amused snigger.

‘One time, mebbe, you woz as tough as that,’ said the voice. There was a pause while the speaker drew on its pipe. The flame brightened. ‘Now you is just an old zogger with pig iron in ‘is chest.’ The figure shrugged emphatically and Gorfang was certain that it was a cave runt now. It wore grubby yellow robes and a pointy hat and was sitting cross-legged on the scrubbed stone floor of the hearth. It smelled mouldy, like all cave runts. But there was something else too, the weird, treacly taste of gobbo magic. ‘Pity Bograt din’t make it though, always liked ‘im.’ The goblin shaman took a philosophical draw and waved his long-stemmed pipe. ‘Them’s the way the bones fall, init?’

‘Bograt went like an orc,’ said Gorfang, looking over the room a second time. With runts, and cave runts in particular, it always paid to be doubly sure. Indeed, it looked like a lot of the dummies had more shadow than they had a right to. From their size and position he guessed gobbos, waiting on the shaman’s call most likely. It was so funny he’d have laughed if his sides weren’t painfully split already. He glared at the bolt sticking from his chest. He could down more runts than this in one sitting. He turned back to the shaman. ‘You with Skarsnik then?’

‘Duffskul’s my name. And we’s all with Skarsnik, one way or the other.’

Gorfang’s one eye blinked. Was that a joke? He knew what a joke was. They usually involved gobbos falling over stuff, or getting accidentally eaten, but this still sounded a bit like a joke. When the runt just sat there and watched him back rather than choke on purple fumes and laughter, Gorfang felt the laugh bubbling up from his own belly. He barked suddenly, chest shaking like a boar that’d just eaten a stunty mail and all, laughing until it really zoggin’ hurt. One hand clutching his sides, the other wound about the massive shaft in his breast, Gorfang swallowed a breath, gave one last chuckle – Skarsnik, good one – and managed to stop laughing.

The goblin just sat cross-legged in the fireplace, smoking away as though they were both best mates. If he was at all afraid he didn’t show it.

Cocky zogger.

‘If you’re done tellin’ jokes, then I’ve got more kings to mash. Including yours.’

‘Skarsnik’s bin a good mate to you,’ said Duffskul. ‘You wants to kill stunties. He wants to kill stunties. You could be ‘appy ever after.’ He looked up into the chimney above his head and shook a tiny clenched fist as though railing against the injustice. ‘Jus’ thinkin’ o’ you twos fightin’ brings a tear to me eye.’

Gorfang snorted, then gripped his chest. ‘Stop tellin’ jokes. It hurts.’

Duffskul leaned out from the fireplace. With a wriggle of his fingers he conjured a second wooden pipe and then with an uttered word caused it to splutter and smoke. ‘Take a puff, mate.’ He grinned and jiggled the freshly conjured pipe under Gorfang’s nose. It smelled like mushrooms left to go soggy. ‘You is so tense. Like you ‘as a spike up yer–’

‘Shut your zoggin’ gob before I smash it out the back of your skull,’ said Gorfang, knuckling his temples. It could’ve been where that stunty smashed his head in, but he was ready to believe that this cave runt had pitched his voice specifically to piss him off. ‘What does Skarsnik want?’

‘Just a little time,’ said Duffskul, sitting back and smoking from one pipe after the other. The fireplace wallowed in weird fungalweed fumes. ‘When you gavvered up all them boys, well, Skarsnik thought you woz gonna rock down on Kazador’s lot, din’t he. Take yerself anover stunty crown and mebbe a new cloak for poor Mad Zarrgakk, one wot don’t smell. But instead you comes to Skarsnik’s house. And that’s all roses, coz we’s such fine mates and that, but there’s bigger things than you in this world, Gorfang, and Skarsnik ain’t ready for a war just yet.’ Duffskul leant his elbows onto his crossed legs, laced his fingers and let the two pipes droop from beneath the knuckles. He set his chin onto his steepled figures and bared his pointed teeth. ‘And you is gonna want Skarsnik’s help, init, if you wants to kick out the stunties fer good, and keep wotsit the Headtaker buried where he belongs.’

Gorfang hefted Red Fang and bowed his head to it, turning his back on the gabbling runt. Fighting was about more than winning. That sort of thing took care of itself. He didn’t expect a gobbo to get it. It was about laying down a marker, climbing over the bodies of kings and shouting.

‘See this! Gorfang Rotgut did this!’

Duffskul went on. ‘You do this alone, today, then you is gonna die.’

Gorfang clanked on for the doorway and the sounds of fighting outside. He didn’t bother to try and guess whether the runt was lying. Runts were always lying.

‘Nah,’ he said, prodding the bolt in his chest. ‘I’ve had mine.’

The East Gate Road seethed with grobi, pouring up from basement hatches and down side streets like sewage from a cracked pipe. They were cloaked, bodies hidden in black but for the tips of crooked noses and the spindly, stranglers’ hands that choked their spears. These weren’t the hill grobi and ill-fed nomads that haunted the old mountain roads. These were Skarsnik’s Crooked Moons.

From the commanding vantage of the Throne of Power, Thorgrim watched sourly and turned the page of the Dammaz Kron. It sat across its lectern, its very presence in battle an act of inspiration and defiance. Looking across the runic script that filled both sides of the page, he watched as a maniac with a huge ball and chain whirred across the street, taking out a dwarf and about a dozen urk before crashing into the opposite wall and collapsing in a frothing heap.

Belegar had been lax.

Thorgrim stood, finger pressed firmly to the page, the grudge written beneath as recent as it was vile. ‘On this day did the grobi king, Skarsnik, engage in most craven sabotage at the cost of five brave dawi.’ His voice almost became a snarl as he belted out the remainder of the record. ‘Ten-score grobi heads for this affront!’

The dwarfs roared, a rearguard hacking into the enemy with an ancestral fury as the black wave of grobi crashed over the flanks and rear of the throng. Steel rang upon steel, oaths were sworn, orders bellowed. Arrows hailed from rubbish heaps and from behind carts, and volleys of handgun-fire splintered the scaffolding that fronted the road as thunderers returned fire. Warriors parted from the main throng in pairs to plug the alleys. The side streets were a spitting, raging, torrent of Crooked Moon banners and stabbing spears, but two on two Thorgrim would take a dwarf over any vile creature this world could offer.

The flanks would hold.

The larger urk filled the road ahead, shaking their axes above their flat green skulls, drool lathering their bestial tusks. A ragged brigade of broken dwarf warriors fled before them. The throng parted to let them through. A few of the longbeards grumbled at this display of Eight Peaks courage, her warriors as enduring, to be sure, as her umgak walls. Thorgrim did not countermand them. He cast about for Belegar or Duregar but could see no sign of either. He saw Douric, the reckoner in command of the quarrellers, turn from the grobi to call to the survivors for news. Some he even called to by name but they could offer little, just garbled reports of fierce battle at the walls.

The king is dead! The king has slain Gorfang Rotgut!

The survivors were still running through when the urk charged into crossbow range. Douric and the others howled a dire lament as the urk began butchering them from behind. Thorgrim said nothing, his wrath as cold as the mountain’s heart. The hatred he felt for the urk was as ancient as the written word. Millennia before the towns of men had risen from the forests, the High King of the dwarfs had battled urk through the Worlds Edge Mountains. The oldest grudge ever written, inscribed in the blood of the first king of Karaz-a-Karak, Snorri Whitebeard himself, had been to condemn urk pirates on the Skull River.

Drawing the Dammaz Kron from its lectern to stand with it crooked in one arm, Thorgrim called out to each dwarf still upon the road. He demanded their names and upon crying them out, and those of their family, their clan, they stood a little stouter. And died a little prouder. Thorgrim recorded each in the kron, shouting down to his throng for all to hear and know.

They would be remembered.

A dozen urk went down under a shiver of crossbow bolts. Thorgrim closed the kron and hugged it to his breast as he thrust out his great axe one-handed.

‘Charge!’

With the roar of an erupting karag the dwarfs surged forwards, the Throne of Power carried to the front like the iron boss of a thrusting shield. The urk were drunk on wanton slaughter and the charge smashed their disordered lines apart. The elite hammerers of Karaz-a-Karak fell upon the oldest of enemies with a will and a vengeance. The throne-bearers made precise cuts with their hand-axes, kicking their way through the melee to bear Thorgrim deeper into the fray.

‘First blood to the dawi!’ Thorgrim bellowed. The guttural cheer of his warriors strengthed his arm as the Axe of Grimnir clove into the spitting green sea below. Standing braced upon the eternal throne of Grungni, the Axe of Grimnir ending a life with every stroke, adding to a litany of death stretching back seven thousand years, Thorgrim felt only one step removed from the power of the Ancestor Gods themselves. The blood that roared through his veins was the same that Grimnir himself had spilled upon the twisted earth of the Great Powers. At times like this, his oath to restore the lost kingdoms of the dwarfs did not seem so impossible.

At times like this, he could almost find a smile in the struggle.

As he fought, a bare-skinned and tattooed savage wearing naught but a man-skin loincloth and a pair of bone bracers that were each lashed to an axe evaded the attention of his bearers to clamber onto the throne. Thorgrim fended its swing on the flat of his axe, levered backwards as the second axe lashed past his nose, then brained the savage with the iron-bound wrath of the Dammaz Kron. The urk staggered and blinked, then grunted as an upswing drove the Axe of Grimnir between the urk’s legs, splitting its guts up to the ribcage. The urk howled, eyes aglow with animal panic as viscera slopped from its opened groin and roped down the steps of his throne. It beat at Thorgrim’s wrist, but his grip was like granite. Holding the screaming urk one-handed he turned, and, with great ceremony, set the Dammaz Kron upon the throne. He turned back, teeth bared, bicep swelling as he put the full indomitable strength of the one hand beneath his axe.

And tore it free.

Gromvarl burst through the open door of the streetside baker’s shop, sweeping the empty shelves with his crossbow as the two clansdwarfs followed in with Belegar and Kemma between them. Kemma moaned with every step.

The pain was coming with a clockwork regularity, a clenching precision that the most frustratingly dwarfish part of her couldn’t help but appreciate, but which was roundly screamed down by the rest. Once they were all inside Gromvarl slammed the door and leaned against it.

The panicked clansdwarf eased Kemma onto the shop floor. As soon as she was flat, he sprang back up, rubbing his hands and looking around for something to do. Kemma groaned, biting through an irresistible compulsion to push.

‘There must be some cloths, oven mitts, something. Find some.’

‘My lady,’ said the dwarf gratefully and hurried off into the back.

Kemma gripped at the cold floor as another round of pain gripped her. Her fingers slid across the stone. She whimpered, might almost have wept had her pride allowed it. A hand slid under hers and grasped it tight. It was hard and wet, like rain-cut sandstone, and on reflex she returned the pressure, taking some of its strength. She looked up into Belegar’s eyes. His face was cut and bruised, but his eyes were clear now, filled with a mix of emotions that Kemma couldn’t begin to unravel. It helped though. Gods blast him, somehow it helped. A hard thump beat at the door and she turned from Belegar to see Gromvarl straining against the door as something rattled the handle from the outside.

‘How does it look?’ Kemma panted.

Gromvarl twisted his crossbow behind his back, angling it one-handed to the keyhole. He fired. There was a strangled cry from the other side and the pressure eased. The longbeard shrugged, braced his legs and sank to his backside as he reloaded. The door shook again.

‘Pretty nasty, my lady.’

‘Are there that many?’

Gromvarl cocked an eyebrow, clutching his crossbow as though it had belonged to Grungni himself. ‘Ahh. You’re talking about the urk.’

Gorfang Rotgut emerged onto the wide stunty road to find it filled with black smoke. Bits of stunty machinery stuck out of the roofs and the wooden frontages of the houses were ablaze. Cannons rumbled and huge boulders crashed through the walls. Fire and blood. It was what every orc looked forward to each day and what, though they might not understand it as Gorfang had come to, they yearned to die with. Everywhere he looked, orcs and stunties were fighting running battles. The boys battled down the main road, occasionally breaking off to chase a stunty down a side alley while shrugging off the arrows and spears of the cave runts that lurked in their shadows. Gorfang didn’t begrudge Skarsnik’s mob getting stuck in.

It was a good fight.

He waded into the fray, kicking out the knees from under an orc that couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, then beheading the dwarf he’d been fighting with a sweep of Red Fang. Muscles pulled around the embedded bolt and he grunted. But it was already getting easier. It’d take more than a bolt through the chest to put down King Gorfang Rotgut One-Eye Troll-Eater!

He had two lungs… didn’t he?

The boys were already falling in behind him, drawn as orcs always were to the biggest and the loudest. And Gorfang was the biggest there was. They laughed, boasting of the stunties they’d killed and the hits they’d taken, goading their mates into punching still-gushing axe-wounds to prove that they didn’t even hurt at all. Gorfang grunted. He wanted nothing more than to join in, to show off in front of all his boys whose wound was nastiest, but he clanked on ahead.

The sound of fighting was growing intense. He caught the salted meat smell of stunty flesh and the shiny little mob of them appeared through the gunpowder smoke and the hulking brawn of the boys they were fighting. The stunties were holding their own, fighting in the dull, joyless way that they did. At their head, held up on a massive, glittering throne, was a king.

Gorfang’s boys were already barrelling forwards to get at the stunties as Gorfang stared, transfixed. He’d never seen a king of dwarfs, or of anything else, like this one. The stunty’s armour was magnificent, his winged crown imperious, while his axe, even in the brief moments that it was still, beat the air with power. It was the throne though that had drool running from his mouth. It was made up of more gold than he’d ever seen in one place, and he had heaps of the stuff back in Black Crag. His heart seemed to swell until his chest felt massive. A prickling sense of awe, of destiny, was shouldered over by lust.

He wanted it!

Who did this fat stunty think he was, lording it up on a throne like that in Gorfang’s mountains?

‘Waaagh!’ he roared, drowning the war cries of his boys. He’d use the old stunty’s fancy armour to smash his bones in and then he’d take that throne. And then he’d be high up, surrounded by gold. Then everyone’d know who the king was. He thrust his sword into the air and bellowed until his throat bled. ‘Gor! Fang!’

On another day, Thorgrim Grudgebearer might have found pleasure in the prowess with which the hammerers around his throne eviscerated the urk charge. The surprise on the brutes’ faces at the speed and power with which the veterans could bring such massive weapons crashing through armour and bone never grew old. But on this day, he had eyes for one urk alone.

And there was plenty of Gorfang Rotgut to see.

He was the largest urk that Thorgrim had encountered in many a hard-fought year, taller even than the bulky honour guard that surrounded him and almost half as broad again. His armour looked like it had been nailed together from the thickest, heaviest and spikiest bits of scrap metal that whatever passed amongst the urk for smiths could lay their hands on. Any but Gorfang would have been immobilised by the weight of it, Thorgrim was certain. Even the bolt through his breast barely caused him concern. On his gnarled, dark brow was a crown.

At the sight of that tarnished circlet, a hatred welled up inside him. It was the bittermost fury of the grudge, prickling his veins like acid with every rattle of mail and calamitous hammerblow from the hammerers that fought beneath. Few were the individuals that had left so dark a mark on the annals of the Dammaz Kron as Gorfang Rotgut, and fewer still that did so within a mortal span of years. But Gorfang was mortal, and by Grimnir’s blood Thorgrim would strike the record clean this day.

‘I call you out, Gorfang!’ Thorgrim roared, standing high upon the Throne of Power, the Dammaz Kron knocked into his elbow as though he pronounced sentence. ‘Face me unless you fear to.’

The leathery hide of Gorfang’s face split into a crusted-tusked leer, his foul red eye alight with an animal lust. He started forwards, titanic shoulders rolling, serrated red blade wielded in both gauntleted hands. His bodyguard made to follow, but he beat them back, laying a seven-foot brute in full plate out cold with a backswing across the face.

‘What, there aren’t enough stunties that you’ve got to pinch mine? Get lost. This one belongs to Gorfang.’ He turned back to Thorgrim, rolled his shoulders loose, then stuck his tongue between his tusks in a bawdy grin. ‘I’ve smashed one stunty-king today. You’re gonna make… urr… two.’

Thorgrim slammed shut the kron and tossed it back onto his seat. In its place, he hefted the Axe of Grimnir two-handed. Could Belegar have truly fallen? A foul act to aright this day if true. For a moment, Gorfang held Thorgrim’s stare. One eye was gone, but the intensity that he recalled from that rain-swept day beneath the walls of Karak Gatt had not been dimmed by the decades. Thorgrim had looked a thousand dying urk in the eye and seen nothing but the hatred of an animal for its destroyer, but there had always been something more to Gorfang Rotgut. He sensed a need that went beyond the immediate: for acclaim, for a legacy – for immortality.

Thorgrim clenched his fingers around his axe and the moment was broken.

That need would go unsated.

Gorfang unleashed an earth shaking bellow, summoning noise enough for an entire army as he charged through the melee. The road cracked where his feet stamped. His armour rattled like a trunk of naked blades. By rights that armour should have shaken itself apart under such punishment, but it did not, and the urk bore down. The forward throne-bearers lashed out, cursing as hand-axes rebounded from Gorfang’s armour like hammers from an anvil. The urk countered with a diagonal swipe that the left-hand bearer only just parried, losing his axe but driving the monstrous broadsword onto the body of the throne. The eternity rune erupted in golden light that washed over the surrounding warriors and flung both urk and sword their separate ways.

‘The Throne of Power endures as the dawi spirit endures,’ Thorgrim bellowed, as Gorfang slammed weaponless into the road. He descended the throne’s stone steps and, from the lowest, jumped to the road, landing with a heavy thud of armour. There he held, hand sliding the haft of his axe until his knuckles met the lug of the blade. ‘On your feet, Gorfang. My axe thirsts.’

Gripping the bolt sticking from his chest to keep it from pulling, Gorfang reached for his blade. With a pained grimace he pulled himself, staggering forwards as though wounded only to suddenly explode into a downward slash that would have split even the magnificent Armour of Skaldor had Thorgrim not seen through a thousand such ruses and ducked back at the last. Gorfang controlled his massive sword with contemptuous ease, turning the downward blow into a rising slash across Thorgrim’s chest. The High King hoisted the Axe of Grimnir like a shield.

Red Fang struck the starmetal runeblade and turned, sending the stroke high and wide. Thorgrim took the short step underneath and landed the urk a kick in the shin. Gorfang grunted and dropped to one knee. Thorgrim stepped back to his initial position, frowning with grave approval. Thorgrim would take an eighth of an inch of a dawi-forged gromril boot arch over six of urk steel every day of a hundred. Gorfang rose, lashing out with an elbow that Thorgrim caught on his haft and deflected. The urk followed through with a roar, smashing his shoulder into the side of Thorgrim’s face. He felt his jaw break. He fell hard onto his back, lashing the Axe of Grimnir across his body to drive Gorfang back while he stood. He touched his cheek and grimaced at the pain. Gorfang guffawed.

‘Come get it, stunty. That axe still looks thirsty.’

Crunching his bloodied fingertips into a fist around his axe, Thorgrim held his ground. ‘Come to me, urk. I am king of the dawi. I do not move on the say so of the grobal.’

‘Hah!’ hooted Gorfang, drawing back his sword. ‘Makes no difference to me.’

The urk strode forwards, delivering a rising, crosswise slash whose parry almost lifted Thorgrim from the ground. He rooted himself, countered, then ducked a lightning stab. Gorfang was good, Thorgrim conceded, but then to have lived so long and accrued so many grudges he would have to be. Thorgrim parried a red flash of serrated steel, matching the urk’s overbearing strength with the granite face of resolve. It would have been easy to give ground before such power, but he placed not one foot behind the other. He clenched his broken jaw, never minding that the bone felt molten in his mouth. When a dawi swore to hold then by Grimnir he held. Sparks flared from the urk’s reddened steel as time and again Red Fang clashed against the inviolate craft of Grimnir. The scimitar screamed as though fully aware that it was in contest with a weapon of the gods. Thorgrim deflected a strike meant for his neck, then shifted his balance around his blade to turn Red Fang into the ground. Gorfang bellowed, even as Thorgrim swung the axe back through an overhead arc, and smote it down across the back of Red Fang.

The killing runes burned red as the Axe of Grimnir clove the sword in two. The blade flew off, while the stub in Gorfang’s hand fell back in the king’s disbelieving grasp. The urk glared at the hilt as though commanding it to produce him another blade, lost in a cholic stupor as Thorgrim reversed his swing and swept the axe of his ancestors through Gorfang Rotgut’s wrist. Blood splurted from the severance in the moment it took for the blood-sodden thing to slide off. It took one more for Gorfang to clap his left hand over the stump and howl.

‘Whaaa–?’

Thorgrim passed under the crimson shower, the spray not even partly stemmed by Gorfang’s blood-slobbered fingers. He stepped beneath the urk’s arms and reached up, as high as he could, to grab the bolt in Gorfang’s chest. Then he yanked down. Urk took pain even better than a dawi, if that was possible, but Gorfang jabbered in agony as Thorgrim dragged him by the bolt down to his knees. There, Thorgrim twisted. Blood spat and the big urk sagged through his thighs to the ground. His gnarled chin came level with the tip of the Dragon Crown of Karaz. Gorfang’s one eye was unfocused and filled with pain, but he made a bite for Thorgrim’s thumb as the High King removed one hand from his axe to pull the crown of Karak Drazh from the urk’s head.

‘You have worn this too long, urk.’

‘Take it, stunty! I’m Gorfang. I’ll always be king here.’

‘Tell it to your gods,’ said Thorgrim, voice striking like a gavel as he stepped back. Gorfang sat a little straighter, tilting his head back defiantly, exposing his thick neck as Thorgrim drew his axe for the executioner’s stroke. Thorgrim nodded once, impressed despite himself by the urk’s stoicism. Today would see a hundred grudges unwritten, including one that was personal, for a High King that had once let this urk go. He held Gorfang’s eye as he swung, their eyes meeting for the final time as the blade bit. And in that brief moment, each understood the other’s thought.

This had been a good day.

Kemma screamed, crushing Belegar’s hand in hers as what felt like a ring of molten iron tightened around her stomach and pushed down. The pressure passed and she gasped for breath, deep and rhythmic. It was getting a little easier now. The pain was terrible, like something inside her was rearranging her bones; it was the contractions that really hurt, but they came and went, giving her the chance to catch her breath and steel herself for the next. She eased her grip on Belegar’s hand, sweaty fingers gliding apart, and looked up into his worried, excited, open face. There were no words. She gasped, clutching his hand in readiness. No one suffered like a dwarf.

The next contraction came and she forced a blast of air through gritted teeth.

‘Almost there,’ said Belegar.

How in the molten hells of Hashut would you know? The blasphemous words almost stole from Kemma’s mouth, but she ground her lips tighter.

Gromvarl was still braced against the door while the two clanners, the second fresh returned from pillowing Kemma’s head with a bundle of rags, guarded the windows. A chink of light emerged around an axeblade that bit into the door’s timbers. Gromvarl grumbled at the shoddy carpentry, gripping the doorframe until his fingertips turned white, even as his hammer went to work on the arms, legs and heads that the greenskins tried to stick through the boarded windows.

That too seemed to be getting a little easier.

The twisted faces forced into the hoardings were limned with panic, the fists hammering against the door ringing of desperation. Kemma turned to Gromvarl just as a goblin fixed its long-fingered and famously potent grip on the sill and squeezed its big ears underneath the boards. It popped out on the inside, eyes large and daemon bright, the wildfire reflection in a rodent’s eyes. The longbeard crushed the bones of its right hand with an unhurried strike of his hammer and then, when the creature somehow managed to hold on and stick a foot in at the other end of the window, cracked its skull on his elbow.

‘Is it over?’ said Kemma.

Gromvarl turned, lips pursed, and gave her an appraising look. He grimaced, as though he’d just licked a grobi. ‘A ways to go yet, my lady, though I’m nobody’s expert.’

Kemma closed her eyes, clenched Belegar’s fist and screamed exasperation as the imperative to push caused her muscles to contract and she pushed.

‘The battle, you fool!’

The Dammaz Kron does feel light in my hand this day.

The night has been long, but I would not have shirked this duty for any rest or repast that any king could provide. My hand is weary but – at last! – the final vile deed of the Squatter King of Black Crag has been struck. Let it be known on this day that the urk did fall in battle and most ignobly. May the animal’s gods accord him the welcome he is due! With the king’s fall did his army splinter and the cave grobi retreat to their holes. May Grimnir smite the grobi their cowardice for therein lies tomorrow’s battle.

Thoughts of tomorrow come coloured by a most unusual sense – hope – for Douric Grimlander did in the night bring news of the birth of a prince. May Thorgrim Ironhammer grow as old and as strong as his father. May he rule the halls of Karak Eight Peaks with a heart of iron. For this day at least, let all dawi rejoice. Karak Eight Peaks has herself a new king and her future is assured.

… Until tomorrow’s battle.

– Thorgrim Grudgebearer,
The Book of Remembering

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Guymer is the author of the Warhammer novels Headtaker and Gotrek & Felix: City of the Damned, along with a plethora of short stories set in both the Warhammer World and the 41st millennium, and much more on the way. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding. When not writing, David can be found exorcising his disappointment at the gaming table and preparing for the ascension of the children of the Horned Rat.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Cheol Joo Lee

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ISBN 978-1-78251-393-3

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